Alistair (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bringspeopletogether) wrote2016-09-14 10:43 pm
bringspeopletogether) wrote2016-09-14 10:43 pm
[oom] ferelden
[Previously.]
Alistair's awake the earliest of everyone in the party, to the surprise of the stablehands who arrive to begin preparing the horses. Typically, the king isn't quite so early a riser. To see him dressed in full regalia before sunrise, waiting patiently for everyone else to show up, generates only slightly less gossip than you'd get if a high dragon landed on the turrets.
Joke's on them. Alistair didn't sleep at all.
By his request, the departure doesn't garner much fanfare. A crowd's gathered outside the palace gates, but the actual sending-off is just him, a few advisors, and Anora. She's as impeccable as always; when she approaches, smiling with her usual practiced formality, Alistair struggles to find a smile of his own.
"Are you well, my king?" she murmurs, low enough for only him to hear.
"Yes." Quickly. "Yes. I'm fine. It's -- " Damn it, he can't get the smile to hold. "Nerves, is all. First big journey as king and all that."
He's getting better at reading the nuances to Anora's face: her smile turns a bit indulgent, but her eyes keep searching, taking in the circles beneath his eyes, the missed spot of stubble along his jaw. "Of course," she says.
Coward, he hears.
Alistair reaches for her hands, and she meets them willingly, easily. Anora presses his fingers and lifts her voice. "Safe travels, my king."
"You too. -- I mean," he stammers. It figures that his smile should finally find its footing in embarrassed self-deprecation. "Yes. Safe travels, er, back up the steps. Those dastardly staircases. Never know when they're going to leap up and bite your feet off."
And...she laughs. It's brief, and light, and still has that indulgent shape to it, but Anora's laughing. He made Anora laugh. So small a thing, but such a relief; his smile wobbles, and he makes himself squeeze her hands to steady himself.
"Andraste watch over you," she says, her voice still warm, and lets go.
His fingers feel too cold without her hands covering them. To think: his throat actually tightens when she pulls away. Come with me, he wants to say. I don't want to go alone.
(Ferelden deserves better than him.)
But all Alistair does is incline his head -- if it hides his eyes for a moment, so much the better -- and turn for the carriage.
It's a long and lonely ride to South Reach. Alistair doesn't have much but his thoughts to keep him distracted, and even Morrigan would be better company than that. The Trollian device sits in a pouch on his belt. A few times, he considers writing to someone, but who would he talk to? Ysa, who'd just try to offer well-meaning advice -- or, worse, join the chorus Cullen started? RR, who hardly knows anything about how and why Alistair became king? He had so few people to start, he realizes; now he has even fewer.
He signs on in brief spates anyway. Fifteen seconds, just to see who's around, and then he signs off and pockets the device again. He never glimpses jackbootJudex on the list of names. It's probably for the best.
The vegetation shifts well before the outskirts of South Reach; it's not blighted, but it is patchy and overgrown, unable to be as carefully tended as it might have been before the darkspawn arrived. Alistair tries to prepare himself. He peeks through the windows of the carriage as they begin to roll past stables, then houses cracked and dusty as the land, then clusters of people emerging from their doorways. There's a uniformly tired, bedraggled look about them, like half-wilted flowers arranged in hopes of brightening a room.
Near the front of the crowd, a woman stands with a towheaded, curly-haired boy in her arms. She's flanked on either side by two more people -- one man, one woman -- who must be family.
They look...familiar, a bit. So does the child.
(It's the shape of their eyes, he realizes: Cullen's look very similar.)
He almost reaches for the Trollian device then, just to see; just to send a brief message, if Cullen's around. They're safe. Nothing more.
His hand falls back to the door of the carriage.
"All right," he mutters to himself, "can't be worse than the archdemon," and pushes it open.
Scouting reports deal in figures and little else: this much land blighted, these many homes ruined, these many people dead. The pictures they conjure are vivid enough, but can't compare to the actual sight. Twenty-five percent casualty rate: every family's lost someone, even if only a cousin. Fifteen percent blighted land: families are going hungry. Thirty percent of the homes destroyed: beggars sit on every street, hunkering in doorways when the rain blows in.
Cullen's older sister, Mia, has oiled cloth strung over most of her missing roof, plus a buckling wall on the north side. If Alistair spends a little extra time ensuring she and the rest of the Rutherfords will have solid homes by month's end...well, he's spending extra time on other families with small children, too. By the time they leave several days later, all his clothes are covered in mudstains from kneeling down to say hello to so many children -- and to get tackled by them, occasionally, when they're in need of a distraction and want to play games with the fancy-dressed man who's visiting for a bit.
I'm Alistair, he always says to them; never King Alistair. It's so much easier to deal with people so young that they have no sense of ceremony, and whose propriety only comes in the form of aghast parents trying to keep them from smearing dirt on the king's face.
The advisors tolerate it at first. Then they start making noises about strength and dignity and model of leadership, and everything Cullen said crashes back. In the next town, he meets with the mayor, speaks with several Chantry leaders, and goes to bed with his back aching from standing so stiff and solemn the whole time. Two weeks later, they're close enough to Ostagar that -- though they won't enter the ruins properly -- Alistair's expected to give a small speech and lay flowers at a makeshift memorial to all those who perished. Too worried about making a poor impression, he cobbles something together that, when he actually speaks it aloud, falls like stones clunking to the ground.
If he squints, he can see the tower where he and Lyna struggled to light the beacon. A little further, and there's the bridge where they found Cailan's body, months later.
He sleeps poorly that night, too, for a wholly different reason.
By Alistair's calculations, they should have reached Redcliffe two days ago. He spends half the day's ride frowning down at a map and jotting notes in its margins. When they stop to give the horses a break, he approaches the commander of the guard. "Ser Jorden, may we speak a moment?"
"Of course, Your Majesty."
They retreat to the carriage, where Alistair unfurls the map. "I trust your expertise," he begins, "so please correct me if I've missed something somewhere. But -- " He traces his finger along the path from Southmere to Redcliffe. "This isn't a five-day journey. It ought to be three, at most. I'm all for leisurely strolls, they're very relaxing, but is there a reason we're moving so slowly?"
He can think of a couple, most of them involving things like assassin's arrows. What he's not expecting is for Jorden to shake his head, say, "We've changed the route, Your Majesty," and trace a wide arc around an ostensibly clear patch of land.
All right. Well. Maybe the assassins live there. Maybe that's the new Stabbing and Murder Territories someone established to keep them all in one place. "Why?"
"The land's blighted."
"...What, all of it?" He stares at the large patch Jorden's circled with a forefinger. "That can't be right. Why wasn't it in the reports?"
"It's a more recent discovery, Your Majesty. Scouts are still trying to narrow down the specific borders of the blighted land; they've run up against darkspawn stragglers more than once. Until then we thought it safest to cross elsewhere."
Alistair chews his lip. He taps his finger against the spot a few times, thinking. "How long until we have an exact measure of the area?"
"It could be weeks, Your Majesty."
That's too long. Three small dots mark the interior of the land: three villages that haven't been assessed by anyone yet, that Alistair won't get to see, and that -- if they're in the middle of a severely blighted area -- will need even more help than towns in the clear path ahead.
"I want to take a closer look," he says, and Jorden's armor clanks as he sits straight up in shock.
"Your Majesty, I have to strongly advise against -- "
"Why?" Alistair looks over. "Because it's blighted? Because of darkspawn? I can't contract the taint, Ser Jorden. I may not serve the Grey Wardens anymore, but I still have every quality they have. I'm immune."
He's not expecting the surprise on the man's face; it's not as if anyone's ignorant of him being a former Warden. But all at once, Alistair hears the words as fresh-eared as Jorden might. A wash of calm settles over him. It's the first time in the whole journey he's felt so calm.
I still have every quality a Warden has.
"Who better to take a look?" He finds he's starting to smile. "I spent a year and more fighting darkspawn. I can handle stragglers."
Anora couldn't do this. Any number of nobles couldn't. Who better to do any of this -- to lead a country out of the shadow of the Blight -- than someone who knows the Blight so intimately?
Jorden still looks doubtful. "Your Majesty, I must at least insist you take along several guardsmen."
"Of course." He looks back to the map. "But volunteers only. I know it's your duty to protect me, but I won't force anyone to heighten their odds of catching blight sickness on my behalf."
This is something I can do, he thinks, nearly dizzy with the possibilities.
Soon after, the convoy resumes its journey, and turns north toward the swath of land on the map.
This is what Alistair can do:
He can travel where others can't. He can press his feet to blighted land and know it cannot harm him. When darkspawn are near, he knows long before anyone else, and can hail the guard to divert their path; if they can't divert, he can put himself in front and know he'll emerge unscathed.
He can see echoes of his travels during the Blight. One town, another, helping, healing, moving on to the next.
He can trust the king's guard, little by little, to have his back.
Every time they rest, he can pause and speak things into being. These people need food, he can say, and food will appear. Place a new roof on that home: within two days, rain no longer pours into the house. He thinks of mages reaching for the Fade to alter the shape of the world; he wonders if any of them feel like this sometimes, limitless, joyous, before the fear of becoming an abomination stops them from drawing too much.
Alistair could become a different sort of abomination, if the fear didn't pull him away. Tyrants form too easily; he's seen it often. But fear doesn't have to be the wall that holds him back.
He can learn to be brave as he cradles this power in his hands.
Alistair's awake the earliest of everyone in the party, to the surprise of the stablehands who arrive to begin preparing the horses. Typically, the king isn't quite so early a riser. To see him dressed in full regalia before sunrise, waiting patiently for everyone else to show up, generates only slightly less gossip than you'd get if a high dragon landed on the turrets.
Joke's on them. Alistair didn't sleep at all.
By his request, the departure doesn't garner much fanfare. A crowd's gathered outside the palace gates, but the actual sending-off is just him, a few advisors, and Anora. She's as impeccable as always; when she approaches, smiling with her usual practiced formality, Alistair struggles to find a smile of his own.
"Are you well, my king?" she murmurs, low enough for only him to hear.
"Yes." Quickly. "Yes. I'm fine. It's -- " Damn it, he can't get the smile to hold. "Nerves, is all. First big journey as king and all that."
He's getting better at reading the nuances to Anora's face: her smile turns a bit indulgent, but her eyes keep searching, taking in the circles beneath his eyes, the missed spot of stubble along his jaw. "Of course," she says.
Coward, he hears.
Alistair reaches for her hands, and she meets them willingly, easily. Anora presses his fingers and lifts her voice. "Safe travels, my king."
"You too. -- I mean," he stammers. It figures that his smile should finally find its footing in embarrassed self-deprecation. "Yes. Safe travels, er, back up the steps. Those dastardly staircases. Never know when they're going to leap up and bite your feet off."
And...she laughs. It's brief, and light, and still has that indulgent shape to it, but Anora's laughing. He made Anora laugh. So small a thing, but such a relief; his smile wobbles, and he makes himself squeeze her hands to steady himself.
"Andraste watch over you," she says, her voice still warm, and lets go.
His fingers feel too cold without her hands covering them. To think: his throat actually tightens when she pulls away. Come with me, he wants to say. I don't want to go alone.
(Ferelden deserves better than him.)
But all Alistair does is incline his head -- if it hides his eyes for a moment, so much the better -- and turn for the carriage.
It's a long and lonely ride to South Reach. Alistair doesn't have much but his thoughts to keep him distracted, and even Morrigan would be better company than that. The Trollian device sits in a pouch on his belt. A few times, he considers writing to someone, but who would he talk to? Ysa, who'd just try to offer well-meaning advice -- or, worse, join the chorus Cullen started? RR, who hardly knows anything about how and why Alistair became king? He had so few people to start, he realizes; now he has even fewer.
He signs on in brief spates anyway. Fifteen seconds, just to see who's around, and then he signs off and pockets the device again. He never glimpses jackbootJudex on the list of names. It's probably for the best.
The vegetation shifts well before the outskirts of South Reach; it's not blighted, but it is patchy and overgrown, unable to be as carefully tended as it might have been before the darkspawn arrived. Alistair tries to prepare himself. He peeks through the windows of the carriage as they begin to roll past stables, then houses cracked and dusty as the land, then clusters of people emerging from their doorways. There's a uniformly tired, bedraggled look about them, like half-wilted flowers arranged in hopes of brightening a room.
Near the front of the crowd, a woman stands with a towheaded, curly-haired boy in her arms. She's flanked on either side by two more people -- one man, one woman -- who must be family.
They look...familiar, a bit. So does the child.
(It's the shape of their eyes, he realizes: Cullen's look very similar.)
He almost reaches for the Trollian device then, just to see; just to send a brief message, if Cullen's around. They're safe. Nothing more.
His hand falls back to the door of the carriage.
"All right," he mutters to himself, "can't be worse than the archdemon," and pushes it open.
Scouting reports deal in figures and little else: this much land blighted, these many homes ruined, these many people dead. The pictures they conjure are vivid enough, but can't compare to the actual sight. Twenty-five percent casualty rate: every family's lost someone, even if only a cousin. Fifteen percent blighted land: families are going hungry. Thirty percent of the homes destroyed: beggars sit on every street, hunkering in doorways when the rain blows in.
Cullen's older sister, Mia, has oiled cloth strung over most of her missing roof, plus a buckling wall on the north side. If Alistair spends a little extra time ensuring she and the rest of the Rutherfords will have solid homes by month's end...well, he's spending extra time on other families with small children, too. By the time they leave several days later, all his clothes are covered in mudstains from kneeling down to say hello to so many children -- and to get tackled by them, occasionally, when they're in need of a distraction and want to play games with the fancy-dressed man who's visiting for a bit.
I'm Alistair, he always says to them; never King Alistair. It's so much easier to deal with people so young that they have no sense of ceremony, and whose propriety only comes in the form of aghast parents trying to keep them from smearing dirt on the king's face.
The advisors tolerate it at first. Then they start making noises about strength and dignity and model of leadership, and everything Cullen said crashes back. In the next town, he meets with the mayor, speaks with several Chantry leaders, and goes to bed with his back aching from standing so stiff and solemn the whole time. Two weeks later, they're close enough to Ostagar that -- though they won't enter the ruins properly -- Alistair's expected to give a small speech and lay flowers at a makeshift memorial to all those who perished. Too worried about making a poor impression, he cobbles something together that, when he actually speaks it aloud, falls like stones clunking to the ground.
If he squints, he can see the tower where he and Lyna struggled to light the beacon. A little further, and there's the bridge where they found Cailan's body, months later.
He sleeps poorly that night, too, for a wholly different reason.
By Alistair's calculations, they should have reached Redcliffe two days ago. He spends half the day's ride frowning down at a map and jotting notes in its margins. When they stop to give the horses a break, he approaches the commander of the guard. "Ser Jorden, may we speak a moment?"
"Of course, Your Majesty."
They retreat to the carriage, where Alistair unfurls the map. "I trust your expertise," he begins, "so please correct me if I've missed something somewhere. But -- " He traces his finger along the path from Southmere to Redcliffe. "This isn't a five-day journey. It ought to be three, at most. I'm all for leisurely strolls, they're very relaxing, but is there a reason we're moving so slowly?"
He can think of a couple, most of them involving things like assassin's arrows. What he's not expecting is for Jorden to shake his head, say, "We've changed the route, Your Majesty," and trace a wide arc around an ostensibly clear patch of land.
All right. Well. Maybe the assassins live there. Maybe that's the new Stabbing and Murder Territories someone established to keep them all in one place. "Why?"
"The land's blighted."
"...What, all of it?" He stares at the large patch Jorden's circled with a forefinger. "That can't be right. Why wasn't it in the reports?"
"It's a more recent discovery, Your Majesty. Scouts are still trying to narrow down the specific borders of the blighted land; they've run up against darkspawn stragglers more than once. Until then we thought it safest to cross elsewhere."
Alistair chews his lip. He taps his finger against the spot a few times, thinking. "How long until we have an exact measure of the area?"
"It could be weeks, Your Majesty."
That's too long. Three small dots mark the interior of the land: three villages that haven't been assessed by anyone yet, that Alistair won't get to see, and that -- if they're in the middle of a severely blighted area -- will need even more help than towns in the clear path ahead.
"I want to take a closer look," he says, and Jorden's armor clanks as he sits straight up in shock.
"Your Majesty, I have to strongly advise against -- "
"Why?" Alistair looks over. "Because it's blighted? Because of darkspawn? I can't contract the taint, Ser Jorden. I may not serve the Grey Wardens anymore, but I still have every quality they have. I'm immune."
He's not expecting the surprise on the man's face; it's not as if anyone's ignorant of him being a former Warden. But all at once, Alistair hears the words as fresh-eared as Jorden might. A wash of calm settles over him. It's the first time in the whole journey he's felt so calm.
I still have every quality a Warden has.
"Who better to take a look?" He finds he's starting to smile. "I spent a year and more fighting darkspawn. I can handle stragglers."
Anora couldn't do this. Any number of nobles couldn't. Who better to do any of this -- to lead a country out of the shadow of the Blight -- than someone who knows the Blight so intimately?
Jorden still looks doubtful. "Your Majesty, I must at least insist you take along several guardsmen."
"Of course." He looks back to the map. "But volunteers only. I know it's your duty to protect me, but I won't force anyone to heighten their odds of catching blight sickness on my behalf."
This is something I can do, he thinks, nearly dizzy with the possibilities.
Soon after, the convoy resumes its journey, and turns north toward the swath of land on the map.
This is what Alistair can do:
He can travel where others can't. He can press his feet to blighted land and know it cannot harm him. When darkspawn are near, he knows long before anyone else, and can hail the guard to divert their path; if they can't divert, he can put himself in front and know he'll emerge unscathed.
He can see echoes of his travels during the Blight. One town, another, helping, healing, moving on to the next.
He can trust the king's guard, little by little, to have his back.
Every time they rest, he can pause and speak things into being. These people need food, he can say, and food will appear. Place a new roof on that home: within two days, rain no longer pours into the house. He thinks of mages reaching for the Fade to alter the shape of the world; he wonders if any of them feel like this sometimes, limitless, joyous, before the fear of becoming an abomination stops them from drawing too much.
Alistair could become a different sort of abomination, if the fear didn't pull him away. Tyrants form too easily; he's seen it often. But fear doesn't have to be the wall that holds him back.
He can learn to be brave as he cradles this power in his hands.