2
When Maric awoke, he was certain he was back at the rebel camp, the victim of some terrible nightmare brought on by bad stew. Surely his mother was about to sweep into his room, reprimanding him for sleeping so late. But even as he felt a wave of palpable relief, he knew it wasn’t true. The blanket covering him was threadbare and moldy-smelling, the room around him tiny and unfamiliar. Cuts and bruises suffered the previous night were announcing their presence. Slowly he began to remember everything.
Several times during the trek, the one called Loghain had become certain they were being followed. It vexed the big fellow, Dannon, when Loghain insisted on taking lengthy detours off their route. Maric didn’t begrudge the extra caution, but by the time they reached the foothills, his legs had been ready to give out. They had spent two hours trudging in the dark, frozen to the core, with barely a word exchanged among the three of them. He only dimly remembered reaching the camp itself and being surprised by the number of filthy tents scattered amid the rocks and bush. He had expected maybe a handful of outlaws, but here was an entire community hidden in the cliffs. He remembered a blur of suspicious eyes and whispered accusations greeting him. By then, Maric no longer cared whether they decided to lock him up or cook him for dinner. The sleep he needed desperately had at some point reached up and claimed him.
A gentle sound of splashing drew Maric into the present. He made the mistake of opening his eyes to bright afternoon sunlight shining through a small window, making him wince. His vision was blurry, and his head throbbed with an insistent and unpleasant pounding. Blinking, his eyes adjusted enough to see, but there wasn’t much to look at. He remembered one permanent structure in the camp, a tiny log hut that couldn’t have consisted of more than a single room, and he assumed this was it. The furnishings were sparse: the rickety bed he occupied, a single table, and a few piles of what looked like dirty rags. The only adornment was a wood carving hung above his bed: a blazing sun within a circle. A holy symbol.
Maric flexed his shoulders, trying to cope with the pain. In the back of his mind, he registered the surprising fact that underneath the blanket he was wearing little more than his smallclothes.
“Did I wake you?” a voice came from beside his bed. He craned his neck and realized that a woman had been kneeling next to him the entire time, soaking a rag in a bowl of water. “I apologize. I am trying to be as gentle as I can.” She sounded matronly and kind, and she wore red vestments that marked her as a priest of the Chantry. He’d had few opportunities to step into a proper house of worship since the Chantry had come down in favor of the usurper long ago, but Mother had still insisted on his education in such matters. He believed in the Maker and honored the sacrifice of His first wife and prophet, Andraste, as any other Fereldan might. Maric certainly knew a priest when he saw one. What was she doing here in a camp of outlaws?
“Your . . . Reverence?” His voice came out as a hoarse croak, and he coughed, intensifying the pounding in his head. He groaned out loud and laid his head back down to stop the spinning room from making him nauseated.
The woman chuckled ruefully. “Oh, dear me, no. Nothing so grand as that.” Maric now saw her more clearly. Age had weathered her, but gracefully. Her blond curls had given way to gray, and her weary eyes were heavily lined. It was easy enough to see the beauty she had no doubt once been, long ago. Aside from the vestments, she wore a gold medallion emblazoned with the image of Andraste’s cross and its wreath of holy flame. She noticed his gaze and smiled. “My days within the Chantry hierarchy are long behind me, I’m afraid.”
She finished wringing out the stained cloth and then returned to wiping his face. The water was cool and refreshing, and so Maric closed his eyes and allowed her to minister to him. When she finally stopped, he touched her hand. “How long have I . . . ?”
She paused, studying him with those weary gray eyes. There was compassion there, he saw, but also suspicion. “Most of the day,” she finally answered. Then she smiled reassuringly and stroked the hair from his forehead. “Not to worry, lad. Whatever you’ve done, you’re safe enough here for now.”
“And where is here, exactly?”
“Loghain didn’t tell you?” She sighed and soaked the cloth again, creating an impressive bloom of scarlet in the water. “No, he wouldn’t have, would he? It would take a dragon to pull more than two sentences in a row out of that boy. He’s his father’s son.” The amused look she gave him seemed to say that should be all the explanation required.
“These are the Southron Hills, just outside of the Wilds . . . though I expect you’ve gathered that much.” She gingerly wiped the back of his head, prompting a new jolt of pain to lance through him. The source of his throbbing headache, he assumed, and tried not to think too closely about how badly he might have hurt himself. “There’s no name for this place. It’s where we’ve settled for the moment, nothing more. The people in the camp have slowly banded together over time, out of necessity. Mostly they’re just trying to survive.”
“Sounds familiar,” Maric muttered. He wondered, however, how much his life really compared to theirs. Even on the run, he and his mother had decent accommodations wherever they hid. Remote castles, abbeys tucked away in the mountains . . . There was always some nobleman willing to take them in, or someone willing to provide a spacious tent on the march. He always complained about it bitterly, about the limits he endured, the boredom and the lack of freedom. Judging from the squalor he saw here on his arrival, these people would probably consider him privileged. He probably was.
“It’s Gareth that we follow. He keeps us safe, and with each passing year there seem to be more and more of us. There is never any shortage of desperate souls with nowhere else to turn, it seems.” She dabbed at his head again, frowning with concern. “That’s Loghain’s father, if you haven’t met him.”
“I haven’t.”
“You will.” She wrung the cloth out again; this time the swirls were dark and ominous. Maric wondered if his head looked as much of a mess as it felt. “I am Sister Ailis.”
“Hyram.”
“Yes, so I hear.” The sister nodded toward his hands. “You’ll want to wash those.”
Maric glanced at his hands and saw that they were still filthy, stained practically up to his elbows with dried blood and dirt. He accepted the wet rag without comment.
“That is a great deal of blood on your hands,” she said pointedly.
“It’s not mine. Mostly.”
Her gaze was even, calculating. “And how do you feel about that?”
He wiped his hands slowly, keeping his own eyes firmly on the task. He knew what she was asking. His first instinct back in the forest had been to keep his identity secret, and it was probably the correct one. After all, Sister Ailis had said it herself: these people were desperate. Maric had no idea what the usurper would pay for him, but it was probably more than these people had ever known. You didn’t have to be poor to know that the promise of wealth could corrupt anyone. He wondered how many gold sovereigns it had taken to put that sword through his mother’s gut.
“He attacked me. I was defending myself.” His voice sounded hollow and fake, even to himself. “They killed my mother.”
Saying it out loud didn’t make it feel any more real.
The sister watched him a moment longer, her eyes sharp. “Maker watch over her,” she intoned, relenting.
Maric hesitated. “Maker watch over her,” he repeated, his voice husky with grief. Sister Ailis placed her hands on his, a gesture of understanding. He jerked his hands away more roughly than he intended, but she said nothing. For a long, awkward pause he stared at his half-cleaned hands. She took the bloodied rag from him and soaked it again.