Archive of Our Own ^beta

When it rains, it pours.

She's heard that surface saying. It permeates the literature she had devoured, seeps into the vernacular of some of the more learned in the upper castes.

She had always imagined…well.

She had never quite imagined the sky was so far away. But pouring was a word to describe ale from a cask, wine from a decanter, the flow of molten rock bubbling into a roaring, heated fall.

It's raining here in these swamps Duncan had called the Wilds, but it isn’t anything like a pour. It drips like the stone sweats, hovers in the air and clings to her skin. Dampens her dented armor and soaks into the padding until she feels the rise of blisters in places where a dry fit doesn't match the wet.

And…

There's water in her boots.

Tamar Aeducan has never minded wet, but she has never experienced it like this. Where the air itself is heavy and the dampness in her socks is more than her own sweat.

A muscle in her jaw jumps when her foot slips. The earth beneath her is wet, too, less reliable than stone. It yields to every fall of her foot, as if trying to escape from beneath her, and though she knows–she knows--the impulse is silly, she cannot shake the feeling that if she were to fall, she would fall up.

Daveth laughs a little when he catches her elbow. It isn't funny the way her heart leaps, the way real fear chokes her before she can set her feet back where they belong.

“Careful,” he tells her. “The ground here likes to swallow things.”

“Does it?”

She would almost welcome that. It would be better than falling up and into nothing.

But she hadn't fought her way here, hadn't bloodied bare feet on sharp stones or driven a chipped blade through genlock throats to let something as meaningless as mud decide her end.

“Only in some places,” Alistair, the only real Warden in their little troupe, calls over his shoulder. “Mostly it's just slick. Don't worry, I won't lead us into any muskegs.”

“Muskeg…” That surface word is new to her.

“It's like…a little mud trap. But it looks like a field. Just…don't trust the grass to tell you it's safe to step places.”

“I still don't understand why Wardens need to be out in these woods.” Jory's complaint mirrors her own, but she keeps her lips tight. “This isn't Warden's work.”

“Recruits are recruits are recruits, Ser Jory.” Daveth's cheer is untouched by the heavy clouds above or the slick earth below, as though every day of his life has been spent just a little too cold and a little too wet and it hardly matters where he stands. “You are back to the bottom, my friend.”

Jory grumbles something that Tamar cannot hear, though she has spent enough time among self-important soldiers to guess at the intention if not the words themselves.

“Ignore him,” Daveth tells her, leaning down and to the side to offer a falsely conspiratorial whisper. “He is very busy being important.”

It occurs to her that she had been important, once, too. She considers saying that being important needn't make one into a bronto's backside, but then…for so many people, it does.

Her lip quirks as she accepts the advice. “It does seem to keep him quite occupied,” she agrees, “though he isn't so busy that he cannot spare time to tell us of his lonely burden.”

“Imagine!” Daveth latches on to her lead, face splitting with the force of his smile, “Being cold and wet and wandering through the woods, dodging mud pits and witches and….ohhhh, wait. I can imagine that really clearly, actually.”

Alistair, several paces ahead of them, tries to swallow his laughter, but it chokes him instead, the sound evolving into a cough that has him driving his fist into his splintmail.

Tamar slips again, and while Daveth does reach, she is too far in her fall to save. He topples with her, the pair of them crashing into soggy ground. Mud on her face, in her hair.

He grimaces, the metal of her elbow hard against his stomach as they peel themself from the earth. Falling down, not up. Up is harder than it should be, with all that emptiness above.

Dragging his palms over his leathers doesn't free him of the mud, but his smile returns sooner than he finds his feet.

“Look!” He tells her, one hand extended in offering, the other gesturing ahead. She lifts herself with his aid, squints through the falling water to see what he has seen. “A silver lining!”

Jory reaches the flower first, but he doesn't pluck it. Alistair, second, reaches almost delicately to pull at the bright stem.

“Here,” he says, pressing it into her hand with a flourish.

She considers telling him that flowers are one of the most expensive gifts she has ever received. That suitors upon suitors had tried to impress her with the beautiful surface blooms. That watching them wilt was never worth what their lives had cost.

She doesn't say any of that. She accepts the flower, twists the stem between her fingers so that the soft petals dance.

“Silver lining?” Tamar wonders aloud. The bloom is white, not silver. A muted tone, flat rather than polished. Red at the center, though, and she wonders if it was named for the smear of blood on steel.

“Oh, that's not its name.” Daveth is the first to identify her mistake, but he is kind about it. “That's just a wild's flower. The sort the kennel master was asking for. Might help. That's the silver lining, not the flower.”

She is still confused, brow furrowed, until he continues.

“Every raincloud has a silver lining,” he tells her, clapping his hand on her shoulder as Alistair turns back towards the trees. “It's a saying. Like…nobody enjoys being rained on, but in the middle of every misery is something shining, if you look. Something to be grateful for.”

Tamar lifts her face, battling the ever-present urge to keep her eyes away from the sky that seeks to steal her from the safety of the stone. The clouds above are dark, twenty different tones of grey, and no silver to be seen.

“If you say so,” she concedes.

She tucks the flower into her satchel, folds its petals neatly between the pages of her journal.

“I might settle for less rain, I think.”

Daveth laughs. “We all would, but that's not how it works. It will always rain. We just have to look for something that makes it worth getting wet.”

When it rains, it pours.

It pours like ale from a cask, like molten rock over a fall, like blood from a wound.

The sky above dark with clouds that, for the moment, hold back their tears.

Alistair can't seem to.

He weeps when the sky does not, face damp and breath staggered.

She has seen battle before Ostagar. She has attended the funerals of soldiers recommitted to the Stone. She had held the cold corpse of her brother, his head heavy in her lap. She had faced it all, had entered the dark of the Deep Roads with dry cheeks.

Her cheeks are dry, now, too, but she catches him when he launches toward her, sets her feet against too-soft earth. They will not fall, neither down nor up, because she has known loss and she can carry them both. She must. There is work to do.

He shakes where she holds him, and she turns her face. The witch watches from the shelter of an awning, thatched grass shading an uneven split of porch.

Above, the clouds are twenty darkening tones of grey.

“Morrigan will accompany you,” the witch says, and Tamar nods, trying to decide if that is a sliver of silver or a splash of red.

When it rains, it pours. Misfortune upon misfortune, sorrow upon sorrow, grief upon grief.

It pours like wine from a decanter, like blood from a wound, like smoke curling skyward between not-yet-distant hills.

Tamar sits, watching the horizon. Watching that line where the earth meets the sky. Studies the oily black that rises from what had once been a village, that carries all that grief and ruin to join the ever-present clouds.

The dog puts his head on her lap, and her hand moves without thought to test the soft silk of his ears.

Behind her, quiet music, the stirring of strings, as though the bard cannot stand the silence and the sorrow. As though her fingers might summon something silver, something that can shine in the middle of all this endlessly darkening grey.

When it rains, it pours, and it is genuinely pouring. Heavy drops and rumbling thunder, puddles building in the gaps between cracked cobbles.

People sprint from awning to awning, avoiding the deluge when they can and yet captive to the needs of the day. Commerce doesn't stop. Not for a thunderstorm and, seemingly, not for a Blight.

“They don't know it's real,” Alistair reminds her, tilting his head to indicate the Chantry board. In the wet, the ink runs, words lost in dripping black smears that make her shudder. No one in this city knows that Darkspawn blood drips like clotted ink. Beneath the black, the wax of Loghain's seal is visible, accusing.

Worse, she thinks, than the gaze of her father.

Innocent, then, too, but the kingdom Loghain gambles knows nothing of its doom. At least her people had always known what the Darkspawn do.

“Come on,” Alistair tells her, when her gaze feels trapped. Stuck in the wax. “There’s a weapons stall over there. Dwarven,” he adds, as if he hopes this will cheer her. As if a stall in a human city might sell genuine steel, might outfit them the way they should be to battle the creatures who have fled the depths to threaten someone else's kingdom.

“Alright,” she yields, though her soul is as heavy as her shirt, weighed down with the rain and the wet. He keeps his face bright, pours optimism like the sky sheds water, and the dog bounces off her thigh as though encouraging her to do the same.

“We do need better blades.” If she cannot find the silver, she will seek the red. If the world is to be heavy, she will bear the load.

“Direct from Orzammar!”

Her heart hears before her mind, Alistair's snort breaking through the rain and the echo of a ghost.

“The smithy is right behind him,” her companion says. “Those blades are direct from Denerim.”

That is probably true, though Tamar can't find the words to say it. The blades are not from Orzammar, but…

The man who sells them is.

There is something wrong with her chest. Something terrible and aching, hot and swollen. Something painful, something like fear.

It moves her feet, more certain in their fall than they have been since first she had stepped beneath the clouds, water lifting away from the earth with the slam of her boots as though she alone could return it to the sky.

He recognizes her.

Beneath the wet and the ill-fitting clothes and despite the peeling burn of her skin and the ugly crop to her hair, he recognizes her.

She sees it in his eyes, wide and blue beneath auburn brows. In the “o” of his mouth, still framed by his well-kept beard. His lips move in the shape of her name, the name he so rarely got to say.

No deshyrs here, to shame him. No propriety to still her feet.

He stumbles, circling the stall, but he catches her.

“You're alive!” he says, or she does, a shared impossibility, a broken and weeping wonderment.

“Tay…” His voice cracks with the endearment, with the shaking way her hands find his cheeks. “Tay,” he says again, and again, and again, until she swallows the sound with her mouth pressed to his.

There are no bars between them, nothing but the soggy cotton of her shirt and the thick leather of his apron. Neither of them as she remembers, except the way they fit, the way he tastes.

The kiss is desperate, long and lingering. He holds her like a treasure he's lost, and she clings to him as though he will vanish from her arms.

It is only when Alistair clears his throat, an awkward, uncomfortable sound, that Tamar remembers the sky above. That she feels the fall of rain.

“You're alive…” Gorim breathes. “Your…your hair…”

“You're alive,” she agrees. “We are both alive.”

To his credit, Alistair swallows the “me, too!” she is certain he longs to add. The dog does it for him, a single, cheery bark.

“I have news,” Gorim tells her. “A…message, from your father.”

She refuses to frown. Refuses the roiling grey, the crashing of the storm.

“It can wait,” she says. Her fingers at his cheeks, following the line of water that had not come from the sky. “There it is…” she whispers, a little in awe of the discovery.

Gorim kisses the tips of her fingers when they find his lips, when she traces their shape and finds him real.

“There what is, Tay?”

Bright, this moment. Bursting with light. Something shining amid the misery, the grief.

“My silver lining.”