Dragon Age

She shook her head in disbelief. Loghain was all ice and sharp corners now, staring at her like a man whom she didn’t even know. She tried to imagine what must have happened, what Maric must have done. She couldn’t picture it. “Loghain,” she could barely get the words out, “what if she really loved him? All this time we thought she was just using him, we thought she could hurt him—what if we were wrong?”

“We weren’t wrong.” Loghain’s look was intense, and he set his jaw stubbornly. “She did hurt him. We thought she was a spy and we were right. We thought that she had been responsible for West Hill and we were right.”

Rowan took a step back from him, horrified. “She saved his life! She saved our lives! Maric loved her! How could you do this to him?” Then she realized the part she had played in this. It was her scouts who had spotted Katriel sneaking away. She had conspired with Loghain to have her followed, had kept the information from Maric to prove that her suspicions were correct, and they had been. But Katriel had surprised her, too. Even so, she had let Loghain go to confront Maric alone. Despite everything that had happened, the thought that Maric might forgive her, that Maric might choose her . . .

“How could I do this to him?” she breathed, sickened.

Loghain strode toward her and grabbed her by the shoulders, his fingers digging in. “It is done,” he snapped. He stared down at her, his face steel, and for a moment she was reminded of the moment at West Hill. She had rushed to him to make the decision she could not, and he had made it. They had abandoned their men and run to do what they felt they had to.

“Rowan,” he began, his voice filled with anguish, but then he banished it completely. “It is done, and it can go one of two ways now,” he stated. “Either Maric wallows in self-pity and is no use to anybody or he realizes that being a king and being a man are not always the same thing.”

“And why do you come to me, then? It’s done, as you said.”

“I cannot reach him now,” he said evenly.

It took a moment for her to realize what he was suggesting. “But I can,” she finished for him. She stepped away from Loghain, her eyes narrowing at him, and he let her go.

“You are still his Queen.” His voice could not hide the ache when he said the words, try though he might to hide it.

Tears came unbidden to her eyes. Grimacing, she folded her arms and stared challengingly at Loghain. “And if I do not wish to be his Queen?”

“Then be Ferelden’s Queen.

She hated those eyes that bored into her relentlessly. She hated his arrogance, that he assumed he knew what it meant to be a king and what it meant to be a man, as if he knew anything of either. She hated his strength, the strength in those hands that had held her in utter darkness beneath the earth.

And most of all she hated the fact that he was right.

Rowan rushed at Loghain to pound her fist angrily into his chest, but he grabbed her wrist. She tried to punch him with her other hand and he grabbed that, too, and then she struggled with him and burst into furious tears. He just held her wrists, stoic and unmoving.

She never cried. She hated crying. She had cried once when her mother had died. She had cried a second time when her two younger brothers had been shipped off to the Free Marches to be kept safe from the war. Both times her father had stared at her, so mortified by her tears and so clearly incapable of assuaging her grief, she had sworn that she would never cry again. She would be strong for her father, instead.

She had also cried once in the shadows of the Deep Roads, she remembered. And it had been Loghain who had comforted her. Rowan stopped struggling and she rested her forehead on Loghain’s chest, her body racked with sobs. Then she looked up at him and saw that he was crying, too. They drew together, about to kiss . . .

. . . and she pulled away from him. He regretfully let her hands go, his gaze searching for hers, but she remained resolved. It was done. Rowan turned away from Loghain and felt the chill wind blowing in through the window keenly. She waited for the thunder, but it didn’t come. Somehow it seemed as if the storm should wash everything away. Wash it all away and start over.

“He’s waiting for you,” Loghain said behind her.

Rowan nodded. “Yes.”

She found Maric in his bedchambers, seated on the edge of his bed. Neither the room nor the bed was truly his, all appropriated from its former Orlesian owner, and thus Maric had never been quite comfortable occupying it. He seemed even less comfortable now, as if shrinking in on himself could somehow remove him further from his surroundings.

The window was shuttered and closed up tight, leaving the air still. A lone lantern sat by the bed and threatened to extinguish as it used up the very last of its oil. Maric slouched and stared off into space, barely acknowledging Rowan when she sat down on the edge of the bed beside him. The silence in the room was deafening.

It took a while for Maric to realize that she was there. When he turned to her, his eyes were sunken with grief. “It’s just as the witch said it would be,” he blurted out. “I thought she was just making no sense, but . . .”

“What witch?” Rowan asked, confused.

He barely heard her, looking off into the shadows again. “You will hurt the ones you love the most,” he quoted, “and become what you hate in order to save what you love.”

Rowan reached up with a hand and brushed his cheek, and he looked back at her again without really seeing her. “Those are just words, Maric,” she said gently.

“There’s more. Much more.”

“It doesn’t matter. Katriel loved you. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

He seemed pained. He closed his eyes, reaching up to cover her hand on his cheek with his own, and it appeared to bring him comfort. There was a time she would have dreamed of this