Dragon Age

up what remained of the purple cloak. “I, ah, also ruined your mother’s cloak.”

Maric laughed, and Rowan joined in. “You’re being modest,” she teased.

“Indeed.” The Arl limped up to Loghain and shook his hand as well. “I misjudged you. You clearly have excellent instincts, and we could use your assistance.”

Loghain’s blue eyes shifted among the Arl and Maric and Rowan, and for a moment Maric thought he looked almost trapped. He glanced down at the fire and stared at it for a time before reluctantly nodding. “I . . . very well. I’ll stay. For now.”

Pleased, Maric turned at last to Rowan. Even bruised and battered, she looked radiant: it was just her way. She brightened as he took her hands in his. “When you hadn’t charged, I thought perhaps we’d lost you,” he said seriously. “Don’t scare me like that again.”

Her eyes teared, though she grinned and laughed. “You don’t get out of it that easily, Maric.”

“Funny,” he answered wryly.

Loghain looked up from the fire, nonplussed. “Get out of what?” he asked the Arl.

“Maric and Rowan are betrothed.” Arl Rendorn smiled. “She was promised to him when she was born.”

“Ah,” Loghain said simply, and returned his gaze to the fire.

Not much later, Maric slipped away from the fire and walked alone under the night sky. The moon shone down, and glowing moths fluttered in a great swarm nearby. It was strangely peaceful, he thought. The campfires that dotted the riverbank were far too few, and the faint groans of wounded men were the only sounds that punctuated the silence.

He walked nearer to one of those fires, wincing as he saw the huddle of bandaged and exhausted soldiers around it. Some tents had been hastily erected, but there were a great number of soldiers who were sleeping on the ground, some without even blankets. The men around the fire stared into it blankly, trying very hard not to hear the anguished cries of those who would not survive the night coming from farther upriver.

Maric watched, hovering just out of sight and yet feeling strangely drawn. He tried to tell himself they might all be dead now had he not insisted on the battle.

“Your Highness?” he heard from nearby.

Maric started and turned toward the sound. A soldier was there in the shadows, lying against a tree. As Maric approached, he noticed that the man was older, probably too old to still be fighting. Then he saw that the man’s right leg stopped at the knee, a mass of bloody bandages showing a recent amputation. The fellow was pale and shaking, drinking liberally from a wineskin.

“I’m . . . so sorry about your leg,” Maric offered, feeling inadequate.

The man grinned, glancing at his new stump and patting it almost affectionately. “It doesn’t hurt so much now,” he chuckled. “The mage even said he might come by and do what he could.”

Maric didn’t know what to say. He stood there a moment until the man offered up his wineskin as a toast. “I saw you on the field today, Your Highness. Fought not twenty feet from you at one point.”

“You did?”

“I’m going to tell my grandchildren one day: I fought beside the Prince,” he said proudly. “You were quite the sight, my lord. I watched you take down three men in a row, like it was nothing.”

“I’m sure you were distracted.” Maric grinned. “I was scared.”

“I knew we were going to win,” the soldier insisted. He looked at Maric with shining eyes. “When you came back to us this morning, we all knew it. The Maker sent you to us. To protect you.”

“Maybe He did.”

The man grinned at him and drank deeply from the wineskin. “To the Queen!” he toasted drunkenly to the moon. “You rest in peace now, Your Majesty. You did your part.”

Maric felt tears well up in his eyes but ignored them. Quietly he took the skin and drank deeply from it. “To the Queen,” he toasted to the moon.

And suddenly it all didn’t seem quite as daunting as before.

6

“To the King!”

Severan heard the toasts to the King even before he entered the throne room. The chamber would be near bursting by now, filled with nobles from throughout Ferelden who had arrived to honor the day of His Majesty’s birth.

Honor, of course, might not be quite the word for it. The native Fereldans were terrified the King would strip them of their land as he had done to so many of their fellows in punishment for some crime, real or imagined. The Orlesians, those members of the aristocracy who had chosen to seek out their fortunes away from the Empire and had been given those stripped lands, feared much the same. The King, after all, was a bored and capricious member of an ancient aristocracy, who had been sent to assume the Fereldan throne only after angering the Emperor—his first cousin and, so the scandalous rumor claimed, onetime lover— and now took out his own displeasure on subjects who had little choice but to bow to his whims.

Severan had tactfully informed the King that the rebels might have been curbed by now if he just took a lighter hand with the locals. Despite his hatred of the rebels and the embarrassment they represented, the King refused to heed the advice. He would do as he wished, and no one could tell him otherwise.

Just as he did with his court, Severan thought, recalling how the King had tried to bring the Orlesian tradition of wearing masks to the Fereldens. He had declared that all members of the nobility would be required to wear as fancy and as beautifully adorned a mask as they could acquire, and that at the end of each court, the wearer of the mask that pleased him the least would be punished. Needless to say, the frantic run on masks and the demand for those who could make them almost resulted in riots in the streets. Finally, when a would-be assassin managed