Chapter Text
For all that I had doubted I’d ever be able to sleep again after waking with talons at my throat, I drifted off not long after our talk, with my head tucked against Zevran’s bare shoulder and his fingers combing through my hair.
I woke screaming. The sound broke off as my throat locked around a ball of pain.
Somewhere in the distance, Griffon’s howl cut through the thin walls.
The room lit, candles springing to life all around us as Zevran plucked at the little alarm system he’d reset before we laid down. He crouched beside the bed with a dagger in his hand. For all that there were pillow creases on his face, his eyes were alert and wary. “What—”
I shook my head, both to answer his unspoken question and to try to shake loose the images from the dream. No…not a dream. Not a nightmare. A vision. The difference could not have been more stark. My hands went to my face, to my aching throat.
My head was swimming from lack of oxygen by the time I remembered to drag in another breath. I met Zevran’s eyes and the worry there. “Get Alistair.”
He jerked into motion, jammed his feet into his boots, and launched himself toward the door, still half-dressed. He’d gotten no more than a step away from the bed when a fist pounded on the wood hard enough to rattle the frame.
Zevran dropped into a fighting crouch with his dagger in guard position.
“It’s him,” I croaked. The taint sang in my veins, echoed in Alistair's on the other side of the door, a murmur of the Calling that drove the darkspawn. The pain in my throat felt like a spike, as if the vision had impaled me.
The tension in Zevran’s body eased only a little, but he lowered the dagger. He pulled the door open and stepped back to clear the path.
Alistair stumbled inside, barefoot and sleep rumpled. The harsh sound of his breathing filled the quiet. Tears streaked his pale face. “Did you—”
I scrambled up and out of the tangled covers to fling myself into his arms.
He crushed me to his chest with an embrace no less fierce than my own. His whole body shook with emotion. “We have to go. We have to—”
“It’s too late.” It was far, far too late.
Faces flashed against the dark inside my eyelids, remembrances of the dream. The daft old coot who’d asked us for poison to coat the traps he’d laid in his field. The revered mother. The dozens of others who’d been too stubborn or stupid or just plain unable to move on despite the desperate state of the village. All of them screaming and dying or being dragged away to worse fates. Their bodies were even now roasting over open fires. Their screams were being muffled by snow that drifted down from an uncaring sky. Nausea surged through me, but I swallowed it down.
“Maker, I know,” he said. “I know. But if they move north to Redcliffe—“
“They won’t.” Dread made the words drag against my aching throat. “Not until the spring. We have until the spring.”
“How can you know that?” he asked, drawing back and looking down at me.
My voice was nothing but a choked whisper, when I found it. “I looked it in the eye.”
That baleful, malevolent eye. Five feet from lid to lid and filled with corruption, with a taint that promised to consume me, too, some day. The nausea washed through me again, and I shoved Alistair back. Scrambled for the chamber pot in the corner and dropped to my knees to claw open the lid. Bile and acid scorched a path up my throat.
When it was over, when nothing remained in me but the pain, Zevran handed me a cup.
I rinsed and spat and rinsed again. If only the images were as easy to purge as my dinner.
“Alistair,” he said, sounding peevish. “Sit before you fall over. No, not there. On the bed. Move over. Scoot.”
Zevran knelt beside me and tipped my face back with a gentle hand. He passed a cool cloth over my eyes, my cheeks and chin. “Think of something else, cariña. Give it some distance, yes?”
He tossed the cloth away and drew me against his chest.
My arms wrapped around his bare shoulders. Too tight, I knew, but I couldn’t bring myself to let go.
Zevran made no complaint.
A moment later, I found myself cradled in his arms as he rose to his feet, lifting me as if I weighed nothing. He settled me on the center of the mattress, right up against Alistair’s side, then followed me in. Alistair and I were both still shaking from the aftereffects of the dream, but Zevran was rock solid, a bulwark against anything that tried to get to either of us. Crowded there between the two of them felt like the safest place in the world, despite the bloody ends I’d seen for all of us in that towering eye.
A far gentler knock sounded on the door, followed by Griffon’s sharp whine. Zevran sighed, but he rose to answer it anyway.
The moment the door cracked open, Griffon shouldered his way inside and leaped up onto the bed. He sprawled across our laps and shoved his face between us as if to hide, whimpering all the while.
Leliana stepped inside at Zevran’s gesture. She wore a long nightgown and had a blanket wrapped about her shoulders. The hilt of a dagger was visible beneath the edge where she held the cover closed over her chest. “He woke howling and wouldn’t settle. I thought he would break down the door if I didn’t let him out. He came straight to you.”
“Archdemon dreams,” Alistair said, digging his fingers into Griffon’s fur alongside my own. His other arm tightened around my back. “He must have them, too.”
“Oh, you poor dears.” Her brows drew together in sympathy. “That must be terrible.”
“Leliana,” I said, as softly as my shredded voice allowed. I wasn’t sure how long she had spent in the cloister at Lothering, but she had friends amongst the people there. Her care for the revered mother had been plain enough when they had spoken. “Lothering.”
She went pale, face filled with sorrow. “The sisters and brothers? The revered mother?”
I shook my head, unable to meet her eyes. Unable to face her grief when my own heart still pounded for the horror of it. “I’m sorry.”
She made a sound, quiet despite its intensity. Her hand rose to cup around her mouth, as if she could hold back the pain. After a long moment, she let it fall and tipped her face back. “I knew it would happen. I saw it. In my dream. My vision. I tried to convince them to flee, but the revered mother insisted.”
“Please, sit,” Zevran said, gesturing to the chair near the door. He turned to the table by the wall and pulled out last night’s bottle of rotgut whiskey and a trio of glasses. “A bit of fortification would not go amiss, yes?”
She shook her head. Tears slipped from her eyes, drawing glimmering tracks down her cheeks. “Forgive me, friends. I… think I need to be alone for a while.”
“Of course,” I said. “I am sorry.”
And I was. Sorry that we hadn’t been in time. That we never had a glimmer of a hope of being on time for those people. It still felt like my fault, my failing.
“Take my room,” Alistair said. “Sten never came back. You can be alone there. Don’t think I want to be anywhere but here, just now.”
Leliana bowed her head. “Thank you.”
Pressing my head into Alistair’s shoulder, I closed my eyes and tried to take Zevran’s advice. Think of something else. Anything else. Instead, my mind went blank. A dull hum of numbness or shock was the only thing happening between my ears. The sounds of the others murmuring to each other, of the door opening and closing, of Griffon’s softening whimpers, the weight of him on my legs… all of it barely registered.
Zevran’s warm hand on my wrist brought me around.
I blinked up at him.
He held out a tumbler half filled with whiskey that was just half a shade darker than the amber of his eyes. “Drink, amor.”
Beside me, Alistair sputtered in the wake of his own swallow.
The raw, fiery smell of it was powerful enough to water my eyes. I could too easily picture the burn of it going down and then coming back up. Already hoarse and raw-throated, I shook my head. “Best not.”
“I doubt the three of us will be getting back to sleep,” Alistair said to Zevran, over my head. “But if you want me to leave, I could find a table out—”
Zevran hummed, settling on the bed beside me. I reached for him, and he twined his fingers with mine. “Stay. It is nearly time to be up and about in any case. We have much to do today to prepare for the next leg of our journey, no?”
“We can’t still go to this Haven,” Alistair said. “Can we? I mean, the arl still needs the ashes, but…”
“We have to,” I said. “We need the armies. All of them.” And not just the armies. Every able-bodied person in Ferelden. We needed them all. The dwarves, the Dalish, the elves in the alienage who didn’t know the pointy end of a dagger from the pommel. That Loghain was risking it all by playing at mutiny galled me to the bone.
“So there’s still a chance? Can we beat this?”
I sucked in a deep breath and let it out slow to calm my racing heart. “There’s always a chance. Probabilities, not certainties. Until the final moments, anyway.”
“How slim a chance are we talking here?” For all that he tried to make it sound a joke, the humor fell flat.
My mouth twisted. “Slim enough.”
One bright path in a field of black. That’s what I’d seen at the end, in the archdemon’s great eye. One path for us, and more chances to fail than there were stars in the heavens. One misstep, and it would all be for naught. Just like my own future in Duncan’s eyes after my bloody processional. Just like Zevran’s when he’d asked about my ability. Just like Sten’s when I’d taken him from that cage. He would never have lived to see the darkspawn incursion if I hadn’t, even with a Qunari’s endurance. Small blessings, I supposed.
Alistair’s arm tightened around me. “Maker.”
Zevran brought our interlaced fingers to his mouth and pressed a kiss to my knuckles. “Then this dream changes nothing. You always knew the odds of success were slim, no? How could they not be when you are trying to assemble armies with no support while dodging assassins and darkspawn, hm? Slim chances are nothing new, and thus, nothing to fear.”
“Better, with you here,” I said, squeezing his hand.
His mouth tipped toward that lopsided smile that wasn’t a mask. “Yes. Though I cannot say I enjoy the idea of traipsing up and down mountains in the frozen hell you Fereldens call ‘winter’.”
Alistair barked a halfhearted laugh. “You haven’t seen a Ferelden winter yet, my friend. That snow storm that pinned us down in that barn was just the vanguard.”
“Wonderful,” Zevran said, sarcasm dripping from his voice.
“My mother told me there aren’t any winters in Antiva,” I said, hoping for a story. For anything but the darkspawn dream to cling to.
“Quite right. There are only two seasons in Antiva. The rainy season and the rest of the year, when every green thing blooms and the flowers riot with color and fragrance.”
I saw them, in his eyes. An explosion of purples and pinks, yellows and blues, set against a background so lush and green it could only be the jungles of my mother’s childhood. Leaning back against Alistair’s comforting bulk, I let a fragile smile catch the edges of my mouth. “Tell us about it?”
He launched into stories that had more to do with his sexual escapades than the climate, but after a while, he had Alistair in stitches and even I found my smile on firmer footing.