Amalia regained consciousness very slowly.
In her earliest years, among the Qunari, she had been trained to caution and good judgement in all things. Her tasks were never those that the more direct warriors of the Antaam would take on. They required guile and care and a ruthless willingness to take advantage of anything and everything that presented itself. Pain could be an asset. Injury could be an asset, too—particularly if her enemies underestimated her because of it. The thing to do first was allow herself to awake naturally, and to assess her surroundings as her senses returned to her.
But all she could make herself do was force it. A nameless urgency willed her to wakefulness faster, immediately, now. Something was wrong, and she didn't remember what, but it was the kind of wrong for which patience and judgement were no panacea. The kind of wrong that could not be made an asset. Panic, foreign and bitter in the back of her throat, gripped her, and she pulled in a breath much too quickly, her eyes snapping open even as she struggled to get her arms beneath her. Something was wrong. She had to—
The room spun, vertigo knocking her horizontal again the moment her body registered that she'd tried to lift herself. Her throat felt raw, cracked; every breath hurt to take. Dull, throbbing pains in her side, just above her hip, shot through her like lightning, rattling against her frame. She gritted her teeth until they felt like they'd crack to contain the pathetic sound that clawed its way up her savaged windpipe. Pain. Everything was pain, for a white-hot moment, and she almost thought it would kill her right then.
Pushing a shaky exhalation from her nose, she waited until it passed, then tried again, still thrumming with the unidentifiable sense of urgency. This time, her vision cleared when she blinked, and though her arms trembled, she tried again to find a sitting position, clenching her hands into fists in the blanket beneath her. One of those throbbed, too, but it was a duller pain, ricocheting up to her elbow before dissipating.
A hand found her shoulder, grasping gently, but steadily keeping her down all the same. A smaller hand, likely a woman's. The voice that spoke a moment later confirmed it. "Be still," she commanded, and Amalia eventually recognized it as the Magister, the one that had come to Skyhold. Chryseis. "If you tear yourself open again struggling, it would displease me greatly. I have worked very hard to keep you and your friend alive."
The room was softly lit by either morning or dusk light, but by the sounds of the birds and the city outside, it was probably early morning. It looked to be one of the guest rooms of Magister Bastian's house, where they'd stayed. By the smell in the room, a great deal of blood and other fluids had been shed inside. Empty potion bottles and medical supplies were littered on end tables. Chryseis herself looked worn thin, with bandages wrapped around her own midsection, and the little movements she made were pained, struggling. Evidence of recent magical recovery from broken bones that hadn't yet entirely healed.
Suppressing the instinct to use more force, Amalia raised one arm and pushed Chryseis's away with her wrist, shrugging aside the touch. The woman's words had brought with them the realization of why she felt such urgency. Next to that, she had little concern for anything else. "Kadan," she rasped, getting her arms back underneath her and pushing herself upright with all the strength she could summon. "Where is—" Her eyes fell on the room's other bed.
"He's right here, you mad woman." Chryseis's tone was exasperated, and she stepped aside to reveal that Ithilian was, in fact, on the other side of the room, sleeping or perhaps comatose, it was hard to tell. His upper body was bare and riddled with scars, some fresh and bandaged, others decades old. He was deathly pale, but plainly still breathing, judging by the shallow rise and fall of his chest. Most alarming was the bandaged stump of his left arm, severed at the elbow.
"Despite the loss of the arm, he fared better than you," Chryseis explained. "He somehow managed to cauterize it himself, which likely saved his life. His stab wounds were severe, but not as bad as yours. He was actually awake briefly yesterday, or so I'm told. The Qunari girl was watching over the two of you then." She seemed to realize that what she said might be disorienting. "You've been out for several days. Three... no, maybe four now? I'm not sure." By the looks of it, she hadn't slept much during that period, and potions had probably sustained her. It was a look Amalia had seen before, that of the overworked healer.
Amalia scarcely heard anything Chryseis was saying. Only dimly did she register the information, and she could not say much of it mattered to her. Only that he was alive.
Her eyes lingered on the empty space where his left forearm had once been, then traveled up to what remained, the bandages wrapped around the truncated limb and then his bare shoulder. It was gone. Cauterized... she remembered that now, vaguely. Remembered seeing Parshaara pressed to the stump as her vision flickered in and out. She wasn't sure if she remembered the hissing sound of the bone-knife against his flesh, the smell of it burning, acrid and horrific, or if she was only imagining them now, her experience filling in the gaps until she was forced to understand exactly what had transpired.
She tasted bile in the back of her mouth; her stomach turned. Swallowing the gorge down again was a momentous effort, but she somehow managed it, expelling a quivering breath when it was gone. Amalia clenched her right hand into a fist, welcoming the sharp sting where her fingernails dug into the bandages there. This pain was clarity. An asset. But that...
"You can go." Amalia almost didn't recognize the sound of her own voice, hollowed out by the rawness of her throat, the emptiness of it filled back in by a different kind of pain. "You need sleep. I will remain awake." Watch after kadan. She didn't need to say it—that part was simply implied.
"As you wish," she answered. No doubt sleep would do nothing to improve her mood. It seemed permanently sour. "There is a potion on your end table there." She pointed to it. "Drink it when you are able. Not all at once, or you'll never keep it down." With that, she turned on her heel and slipped out of the door, closing it behind her.
Slowly, Amalia was able to shift herself around until her bare feet touched the rug underfoot. The potion was there, as Chryseis indicated, but for the moment, she didn't reach for it, instead leaning forward and catching her breath, closing her eyes and attempting to recover the effort it had taken her to make it even this far in the process of moving. Reaching her feet was an even greater challenge, and for half a minute, she had to brace herself on the rail at the head of the bed to support her weight, shaking legs unable to manage the task on their own.
Gradually, though, Amalia felt herself stabilize, and only then did she allow herself to release her hold on the wood and pick up the potion, taking a small sip and swallowing before attempting her first steps under her own power. Her muscles ached down to the bone—she could not recall the last time she'd felt so weak. Bypassing the chair Chryseis had been using, she instead sat herself on the edge of kadan's mattress near his hip, leaning forward until she'd braced her forearms on her knees. She stared unseeingly at the wall in front of her, forcing her mind carefully blank in the same way she'd done years ago, beneath Marcus's knife.
The ability to think of nothing at all was not an easy one to learn, but she hadn't forgotten it, either. She didn't let herself pay attention to how much time passed, either, instead taking small, slow sips of the potion until it was gone, her vigil passing in silence.
Eventually, he stirred, a soft, barely audible groan accompanying it. Ithilian's eyes opened very slowly, like the rising of the sun, slowly but steadily taking in the light of the room. He looked... it was difficult to say. Since the day Amalia met Ithilian he'd looked like a man worn down by his life, an old blade used to the breaking point. At times as their years in Kirkwall went on he looked profoundly tired, dragged down by weights he carried, weights of responsibility and weights of memory. He'd never looked like a young man, but this was truly the first time he'd appeared as an old one.
His eye settled on her, his right hand reaching out slightly, setting down two fingers on the skin of her forearm. He shifted his other arm, the one lost at the elbow. The lack of weight seemed to take him by surprise, and his eye was drawn to it. Phantom pains, ghostly feelings of what was now lost to him. Magic could bring them back from a great deal, as Amalia knew very well, but it could not restore a loss like this. He would never be the same again.
"I thought we were dead," he said, his voice a hoarse rasp. "Maybe we were."
How many times did this make? How many times had they nearly died, paid the toll for their pursuit of Marcus in blood and pain and all the things they could have been doing with their lives instead? How much longer would they have to fight, and could they last long enough?
Amalia was not as old as Ithilian was, but like him, she had been fighting for most of her life, in one form or another. She had fought for the Qunari, and then for the Alienage, and now perhaps she fought for herself, for the sake of regaining the things Marcus had taken from her. For the sake of freeing herself. But the truth was, fighting for herself—and asking him to fight for her—was the hardest thing she'd ever done, by leagues.
She moved her arm slightly, just enough to solidify the touch where they were in contact. "This is my fault," she whispered, voice hoarse and thin. "You've lost too much for my sake, kadan." It wasn't just the arm, though that was an obvious visual reminder of the fact, the last push she needed to finally put to breath what had lingered long in the back of her mind. Guilt.
She should have said it as soon as their hunt became a matter of months instead of weeks. Should have said it louder when it became a matter of years. Years they both deserved to spend in some other way. Amalia didn't have a choice, but Ithilian did. Or he had. Perhaps she'd taken that freedom from him as surely as Marcus had taken hers from her. Drawn him into this despicable trap, where an enemy they could not seem to kill would not let them live in peace.
He tried to say something, but it caught in his throat, and he coughed softly, even that seeming to cause him immense pain. He grimaced, taking his hand from her and clutching at his chest until it passed. When it did, the hand fell back to his side, and he regarded the lost arm again. No doubt it would take him many years to grow accustomed to it, if he ever did at all.
Ithilian let his head fall back against the pillow, which was damp and stained with sweat and the odd drop of blood. He breathed and let the silence sit until he was willing to risk speaking again. "There is no fault, lethallan." A tear slipped from his eye, but it was unclear whether it was from the pain, or something else. "If the choice was to sacrifice this or let you fight alone, then there was never any choice at all. You have always helped me fight my battles, and I do the same for you, because when a bond like ours is made, we cannot choose to break it."
His fingers found her hand instead when next they touched her skin, but his grip was incredibly weak. "I've always known the risk, the possible price. I just always thought I was fast enough, strong enough not to pay it. A fool to the last." That seemed to bother him more than anything. Not the injury itself, but what it meant for their future. A future where he couldn't fight at her side, no matter how much he wanted to. Needed to.
Amalia closed her hand over his, her grip hardly any stronger. Still, she squeezed with what strength was left to her, feeling a half-remembered hot sting building behind her eyes. His face blurred in her field of vision; when she blinked, warmth slid down either side of her face.
It had been fifteen years since she wept. She'd thought tears were simply one more thing Marcus had wrung from her. One more thing she'd spent a lifetime's worth of back then. But like so many other things, she'd found them again because of this. Because of him. Even now, even in the middle of all this, that thought made her smile. A thin thing, tremulous and small, but persistent.
"My kadan is an utter fool," she murmured, recalling a situation not so unlike this one, but many, many years ago. In a time when the cause had been his and she had risked herself for it without even the slightest hesitation. Even when he hadn't wanted her to. Leaning over and down, Amalia gently pressed her brow to his, smoothing the tear's track away from his face with the callused tips of her fingers. "But he is still kadan." She swallowed thickly. "And so I am never alone."
His breathing became irregular, pulled in through his nose, and it almost sounded like he was choking. By the lack of any panic, however, it was safe to say he was simply feeling a multitude of things, many of which he just wasn't prepared for in the slightest. His grip on her hand tightened. The half of the left arm that remained to him shifted up slightly, as though to wrap around her, but of course he was no longer capable of those things. He could no longer embrace anyone like he had with Lia in the Emerald Graves, scooping her up and holding her weight in his arms.
He waited until the moment had passed, and he was capable of speaking again. "What will we do now?" he asked, the grief coming through. Fear of the future. "When he comes again, when he recovers." It was wishful thinking to believe he would succumb to the wounds they'd dealt him. He'd survived as much as they had. "We couldn't kill him before. And I'm of little use to you now. I can be with you in spirit when you fight, but that won't protect you from blades or magic."
"I don't know," she confessed, rising slightly but shifting closer so that it was easier to maintain their grip on each other. "I suspect that now... we rely on them. This Inquisition. No doubt they've combed through Marcus's belongings by now—perhaps there is some clue in them as to what he aims for. If we can find out what that is, perhaps we can gain the upper hand for once." Amalia pursed her lips, expelling a shaky breath and dragging her thumb back and forth across Ithilian's knuckles. "If that's not enough, then... I'll lay a trap for his apprentice and discover it that way."
She was not alone capable of striking decisively outright, not without him. But now they were capable of something that had not been available to them before: discovering what Marcus was after. He was not one to bow to another for long, and what he was doing among these Venatori was something that still mystified her. But for all it had cost them, this was still an opportunity to find out, to arm themselves with something other than blades and the strength of their bodies.
"This has not been for nothing," she said, her tone firmer. With her free hand, Amalia wiped at her own cheeks, finding the skin of her face too warm beneath the moisture. "I won't let it be for nothing."
They had friends and allies, it was true. But somehow Marcus always knew the way to nullify them, to isolate them so it was they alone who fought against him. Now she alone. And Ithilian obviously dreaded the thought of what that conflict might result in, now that he could not fight alongside her as he always had.
He looked up, and saw Parshaara in its scabbard on the end table, alongside the rest of his weapons and bloodied, scorched gear. His longbow and quiver, useless to him. He could still carry one blade, but the writing was etched on his face: this had been the last battle he would fight.
"Then we aren't finished yet," he declared, though it was uncertain if he believed it. "And I'll hold onto these dreams of what's on the other side of this a little longer."
"When we're done," she replied, the words coming out like a promise, "I'll ask you whether it's everything you hoped it would be."
The next time, she resolved.
The next time she faced Marcus, she was going to end him.
And then they would both be free.
In her earliest years, among the Qunari, she had been trained to caution and good judgement in all things. Her tasks were never those that the more direct warriors of the Antaam would take on. They required guile and care and a ruthless willingness to take advantage of anything and everything that presented itself. Pain could be an asset. Injury could be an asset, too—particularly if her enemies underestimated her because of it. The thing to do first was allow herself to awake naturally, and to assess her surroundings as her senses returned to her.
But all she could make herself do was force it. A nameless urgency willed her to wakefulness faster, immediately, now. Something was wrong, and she didn't remember what, but it was the kind of wrong for which patience and judgement were no panacea. The kind of wrong that could not be made an asset. Panic, foreign and bitter in the back of her throat, gripped her, and she pulled in a breath much too quickly, her eyes snapping open even as she struggled to get her arms beneath her. Something was wrong. She had to—
The room spun, vertigo knocking her horizontal again the moment her body registered that she'd tried to lift herself. Her throat felt raw, cracked; every breath hurt to take. Dull, throbbing pains in her side, just above her hip, shot through her like lightning, rattling against her frame. She gritted her teeth until they felt like they'd crack to contain the pathetic sound that clawed its way up her savaged windpipe. Pain. Everything was pain, for a white-hot moment, and she almost thought it would kill her right then.
Pushing a shaky exhalation from her nose, she waited until it passed, then tried again, still thrumming with the unidentifiable sense of urgency. This time, her vision cleared when she blinked, and though her arms trembled, she tried again to find a sitting position, clenching her hands into fists in the blanket beneath her. One of those throbbed, too, but it was a duller pain, ricocheting up to her elbow before dissipating.
A hand found her shoulder, grasping gently, but steadily keeping her down all the same. A smaller hand, likely a woman's. The voice that spoke a moment later confirmed it. "Be still," she commanded, and Amalia eventually recognized it as the Magister, the one that had come to Skyhold. Chryseis. "If you tear yourself open again struggling, it would displease me greatly. I have worked very hard to keep you and your friend alive."
The room was softly lit by either morning or dusk light, but by the sounds of the birds and the city outside, it was probably early morning. It looked to be one of the guest rooms of Magister Bastian's house, where they'd stayed. By the smell in the room, a great deal of blood and other fluids had been shed inside. Empty potion bottles and medical supplies were littered on end tables. Chryseis herself looked worn thin, with bandages wrapped around her own midsection, and the little movements she made were pained, struggling. Evidence of recent magical recovery from broken bones that hadn't yet entirely healed.
Suppressing the instinct to use more force, Amalia raised one arm and pushed Chryseis's away with her wrist, shrugging aside the touch. The woman's words had brought with them the realization of why she felt such urgency. Next to that, she had little concern for anything else. "Kadan," she rasped, getting her arms back underneath her and pushing herself upright with all the strength she could summon. "Where is—" Her eyes fell on the room's other bed.
"He's right here, you mad woman." Chryseis's tone was exasperated, and she stepped aside to reveal that Ithilian was, in fact, on the other side of the room, sleeping or perhaps comatose, it was hard to tell. His upper body was bare and riddled with scars, some fresh and bandaged, others decades old. He was deathly pale, but plainly still breathing, judging by the shallow rise and fall of his chest. Most alarming was the bandaged stump of his left arm, severed at the elbow.
"Despite the loss of the arm, he fared better than you," Chryseis explained. "He somehow managed to cauterize it himself, which likely saved his life. His stab wounds were severe, but not as bad as yours. He was actually awake briefly yesterday, or so I'm told. The Qunari girl was watching over the two of you then." She seemed to realize that what she said might be disorienting. "You've been out for several days. Three... no, maybe four now? I'm not sure." By the looks of it, she hadn't slept much during that period, and potions had probably sustained her. It was a look Amalia had seen before, that of the overworked healer.
Amalia scarcely heard anything Chryseis was saying. Only dimly did she register the information, and she could not say much of it mattered to her. Only that he was alive.
Her eyes lingered on the empty space where his left forearm had once been, then traveled up to what remained, the bandages wrapped around the truncated limb and then his bare shoulder. It was gone. Cauterized... she remembered that now, vaguely. Remembered seeing Parshaara pressed to the stump as her vision flickered in and out. She wasn't sure if she remembered the hissing sound of the bone-knife against his flesh, the smell of it burning, acrid and horrific, or if she was only imagining them now, her experience filling in the gaps until she was forced to understand exactly what had transpired.
She tasted bile in the back of her mouth; her stomach turned. Swallowing the gorge down again was a momentous effort, but she somehow managed it, expelling a quivering breath when it was gone. Amalia clenched her right hand into a fist, welcoming the sharp sting where her fingernails dug into the bandages there. This pain was clarity. An asset. But that...
"You can go." Amalia almost didn't recognize the sound of her own voice, hollowed out by the rawness of her throat, the emptiness of it filled back in by a different kind of pain. "You need sleep. I will remain awake." Watch after kadan. She didn't need to say it—that part was simply implied.
"As you wish," she answered. No doubt sleep would do nothing to improve her mood. It seemed permanently sour. "There is a potion on your end table there." She pointed to it. "Drink it when you are able. Not all at once, or you'll never keep it down." With that, she turned on her heel and slipped out of the door, closing it behind her.
Slowly, Amalia was able to shift herself around until her bare feet touched the rug underfoot. The potion was there, as Chryseis indicated, but for the moment, she didn't reach for it, instead leaning forward and catching her breath, closing her eyes and attempting to recover the effort it had taken her to make it even this far in the process of moving. Reaching her feet was an even greater challenge, and for half a minute, she had to brace herself on the rail at the head of the bed to support her weight, shaking legs unable to manage the task on their own.
Gradually, though, Amalia felt herself stabilize, and only then did she allow herself to release her hold on the wood and pick up the potion, taking a small sip and swallowing before attempting her first steps under her own power. Her muscles ached down to the bone—she could not recall the last time she'd felt so weak. Bypassing the chair Chryseis had been using, she instead sat herself on the edge of kadan's mattress near his hip, leaning forward until she'd braced her forearms on her knees. She stared unseeingly at the wall in front of her, forcing her mind carefully blank in the same way she'd done years ago, beneath Marcus's knife.
The ability to think of nothing at all was not an easy one to learn, but she hadn't forgotten it, either. She didn't let herself pay attention to how much time passed, either, instead taking small, slow sips of the potion until it was gone, her vigil passing in silence.
Eventually, he stirred, a soft, barely audible groan accompanying it. Ithilian's eyes opened very slowly, like the rising of the sun, slowly but steadily taking in the light of the room. He looked... it was difficult to say. Since the day Amalia met Ithilian he'd looked like a man worn down by his life, an old blade used to the breaking point. At times as their years in Kirkwall went on he looked profoundly tired, dragged down by weights he carried, weights of responsibility and weights of memory. He'd never looked like a young man, but this was truly the first time he'd appeared as an old one.
His eye settled on her, his right hand reaching out slightly, setting down two fingers on the skin of her forearm. He shifted his other arm, the one lost at the elbow. The lack of weight seemed to take him by surprise, and his eye was drawn to it. Phantom pains, ghostly feelings of what was now lost to him. Magic could bring them back from a great deal, as Amalia knew very well, but it could not restore a loss like this. He would never be the same again.
"I thought we were dead," he said, his voice a hoarse rasp. "Maybe we were."
How many times did this make? How many times had they nearly died, paid the toll for their pursuit of Marcus in blood and pain and all the things they could have been doing with their lives instead? How much longer would they have to fight, and could they last long enough?
Amalia was not as old as Ithilian was, but like him, she had been fighting for most of her life, in one form or another. She had fought for the Qunari, and then for the Alienage, and now perhaps she fought for herself, for the sake of regaining the things Marcus had taken from her. For the sake of freeing herself. But the truth was, fighting for herself—and asking him to fight for her—was the hardest thing she'd ever done, by leagues.
She moved her arm slightly, just enough to solidify the touch where they were in contact. "This is my fault," she whispered, voice hoarse and thin. "You've lost too much for my sake, kadan." It wasn't just the arm, though that was an obvious visual reminder of the fact, the last push she needed to finally put to breath what had lingered long in the back of her mind. Guilt.
She should have said it as soon as their hunt became a matter of months instead of weeks. Should have said it louder when it became a matter of years. Years they both deserved to spend in some other way. Amalia didn't have a choice, but Ithilian did. Or he had. Perhaps she'd taken that freedom from him as surely as Marcus had taken hers from her. Drawn him into this despicable trap, where an enemy they could not seem to kill would not let them live in peace.
He tried to say something, but it caught in his throat, and he coughed softly, even that seeming to cause him immense pain. He grimaced, taking his hand from her and clutching at his chest until it passed. When it did, the hand fell back to his side, and he regarded the lost arm again. No doubt it would take him many years to grow accustomed to it, if he ever did at all.
Ithilian let his head fall back against the pillow, which was damp and stained with sweat and the odd drop of blood. He breathed and let the silence sit until he was willing to risk speaking again. "There is no fault, lethallan." A tear slipped from his eye, but it was unclear whether it was from the pain, or something else. "If the choice was to sacrifice this or let you fight alone, then there was never any choice at all. You have always helped me fight my battles, and I do the same for you, because when a bond like ours is made, we cannot choose to break it."
His fingers found her hand instead when next they touched her skin, but his grip was incredibly weak. "I've always known the risk, the possible price. I just always thought I was fast enough, strong enough not to pay it. A fool to the last." That seemed to bother him more than anything. Not the injury itself, but what it meant for their future. A future where he couldn't fight at her side, no matter how much he wanted to. Needed to.
Amalia closed her hand over his, her grip hardly any stronger. Still, she squeezed with what strength was left to her, feeling a half-remembered hot sting building behind her eyes. His face blurred in her field of vision; when she blinked, warmth slid down either side of her face.
It had been fifteen years since she wept. She'd thought tears were simply one more thing Marcus had wrung from her. One more thing she'd spent a lifetime's worth of back then. But like so many other things, she'd found them again because of this. Because of him. Even now, even in the middle of all this, that thought made her smile. A thin thing, tremulous and small, but persistent.
"My kadan is an utter fool," she murmured, recalling a situation not so unlike this one, but many, many years ago. In a time when the cause had been his and she had risked herself for it without even the slightest hesitation. Even when he hadn't wanted her to. Leaning over and down, Amalia gently pressed her brow to his, smoothing the tear's track away from his face with the callused tips of her fingers. "But he is still kadan." She swallowed thickly. "And so I am never alone."
His breathing became irregular, pulled in through his nose, and it almost sounded like he was choking. By the lack of any panic, however, it was safe to say he was simply feeling a multitude of things, many of which he just wasn't prepared for in the slightest. His grip on her hand tightened. The half of the left arm that remained to him shifted up slightly, as though to wrap around her, but of course he was no longer capable of those things. He could no longer embrace anyone like he had with Lia in the Emerald Graves, scooping her up and holding her weight in his arms.
He waited until the moment had passed, and he was capable of speaking again. "What will we do now?" he asked, the grief coming through. Fear of the future. "When he comes again, when he recovers." It was wishful thinking to believe he would succumb to the wounds they'd dealt him. He'd survived as much as they had. "We couldn't kill him before. And I'm of little use to you now. I can be with you in spirit when you fight, but that won't protect you from blades or magic."
"I don't know," she confessed, rising slightly but shifting closer so that it was easier to maintain their grip on each other. "I suspect that now... we rely on them. This Inquisition. No doubt they've combed through Marcus's belongings by now—perhaps there is some clue in them as to what he aims for. If we can find out what that is, perhaps we can gain the upper hand for once." Amalia pursed her lips, expelling a shaky breath and dragging her thumb back and forth across Ithilian's knuckles. "If that's not enough, then... I'll lay a trap for his apprentice and discover it that way."
She was not alone capable of striking decisively outright, not without him. But now they were capable of something that had not been available to them before: discovering what Marcus was after. He was not one to bow to another for long, and what he was doing among these Venatori was something that still mystified her. But for all it had cost them, this was still an opportunity to find out, to arm themselves with something other than blades and the strength of their bodies.
"This has not been for nothing," she said, her tone firmer. With her free hand, Amalia wiped at her own cheeks, finding the skin of her face too warm beneath the moisture. "I won't let it be for nothing."
They had friends and allies, it was true. But somehow Marcus always knew the way to nullify them, to isolate them so it was they alone who fought against him. Now she alone. And Ithilian obviously dreaded the thought of what that conflict might result in, now that he could not fight alongside her as he always had.
He looked up, and saw Parshaara in its scabbard on the end table, alongside the rest of his weapons and bloodied, scorched gear. His longbow and quiver, useless to him. He could still carry one blade, but the writing was etched on his face: this had been the last battle he would fight.
"Then we aren't finished yet," he declared, though it was uncertain if he believed it. "And I'll hold onto these dreams of what's on the other side of this a little longer."
"When we're done," she replied, the words coming out like a promise, "I'll ask you whether it's everything you hoped it would be."
The next time, she resolved.
The next time she faced Marcus, she was going to end him.
And then they would both be free.