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Solas looks at himself in the silver mirror hung over the washbasin. He looks sickly, the faint glow of the mark shedding its green light on odd points of his face. His cheeks appear gaunt, their shadow emphasized unnaturally; there are deep lines under his eyes reddened by fatigue.
She looks worse.
Her forehead is beading with sweat. Her eyes are open, but she is not awake. Her pupils are blown wide and the tapetum lucidum makes them glow like a cat’s in the near darkness. She does not react when he sways a candle in front of them, completely blind to light and movement.
Heat comes off her body in torrid waves, yet she shivers with a bone-deep chill he has not managed to ease. No potion, no cataplasm and no healing magic touches her suffering. She trashes in pain, low moans like a wounded animal’s escaping her cracked and bloody lips. Her shoulders and her legs seize from the high fever, her head shakes from side to side.
She is completely caked in dirt from the explosion, making her skin dusty and grey except where sweat and blood have carved their own roads, spread like a river’s delta.
She has been in this state, unable to wake, drink or eat for three days, and Solas has only just been allowed to see to her wounds, despite the Seeker’s suspicion.
He cannot allow her to die.
His motives might be less noble than they appear to a stranger’s eye — she has the mark, and he cannot know if, with the death of its host, its power would be lost — but his own guilt is almost as strong a reason. How his actions take and take and take from a people that, despite their errors, is still his.
He cringes at the scream that escapes her broken throat as she seizes again, the mark sparkling through the bloodied crack in her hand, and she struggles against her bonds. She is cuffed in metal, hands and feet. “As if you could be a threat to anyone like this”, he murmurs, and he cautiously moves a hand to brush away the hair plastered to her forehead.
He sighs, rises and takes a lightly streaming pot full of cotton rags from the fire, placing it on the ground at the side of the bed. He fishes one of the pieces of fabric from the pot and wrings it with two hands. When it stops dripping, he folds it and starts swiping the dirt away from her skin. He starts with her arms, the most accessible part of her body and, apparently, the one more riddled with cuts and scrapes. They have all stopped bleeding, and they miraculously do not show any sign of infection despite having criminally been left to fester for days. No healer has dared to even enter the same building she has been kept in, and it took all of the spymaster’s considerable talents of persuasion to allow Solas, an apostate in the Seeker's eyes, to be let in the room.
He moves on to her legs, which appear to have been protected by the thick canvas wrappings that now lie discarded at the foot of the bed. He undressed her like a medic would, with methodical efficiency, taking a knife to the trickiest parts of her intricately tied garments, and putting a cover over her body to try and soothe the shivering and protect her modesty. They looked like ceremonial clothes, dyed in bright colours and composed of many layers, and he had almost felt sorry to ruin them.
He switches to her face. Two deep gashes caked in soot now adorn her lip and her brow and he cleans them softly, removing the grit from them. His hand glows faintly, and he stitches them closed with his magic. It is going to scar, a pity on such a young and seemingly delicate thing. He focuses now on her forehead, her blind eyes still not following his movements.
His stomach twists and drops when he uncovers the tree that once marked his own face reflected on hers. Fate has a way of mocking him. He wrings the cloth so furiously his knuckles turn white, and he has to take a moment to breathe in the smoky air before dipping it in clean water again and folding it on her forehead.
He moves her shoulder forward, bends her knee and pivots on her hip to lay her on her side. Her hair falls forward. It had been braided in some complicated fashion, and it looks surprisingly long. It must have been dearly cared for to reach that length — and it hurts something deep inside him to see it now completely ruined. Her braid is tightly matted, dirty with dust and blood and sweat. He tries to untie the end of it, hoping to somehow free the strands, but it appears impossible to unravel.
He lies her on her back again and, finally, moves to her marked hand. The skin is cracked, jagged like ice. There is blood on her palm, but the green light is too blinding to see if the cut marred muscle and bone as well as skin. He tries to knit her palm back together like he did her brow, but all he achieves is for the blood to evaporate and crumble in a fine rust-colored dust. The mark is still there, goading him uselessly. She is still unconscious.
Solas sighs. His power is now so weak even just tending to her wounds exhausted him. He folds one arm next to one of her bindings, puts down his head, and sleeps.
When he wakes, he is in a glade.
He raises on his feet — no, he realises, paws — and he flicks his big ears to better hear the sounds of a river — a stream? — and a sweet voice singing. He follows the sounds, and finds the girl bathing under a willow.
She is starkly naked and unblemished, the voice he has only heard in screams is now as clear as a spring's water. She is sitting in the stream cross-legged, letting the water part around her back and narrow hips, and she is raking her fingers through her long, beautiful red hair, part of it being dragged by the currents. It looks like sunset bled into the water.
He carelessly moves, enraptured by her singing, until she spots him at the edges of her field of sight. She stops fussing with her hair and puts a hand out in his direction.
“Come here pretty”, she beckons.
Solas huffs. He has never been called pretty once in his considerable lifetime. He'll stay put, thank you very much, and he looks at her.
She rises, clothed in nothing but sunlight and her own freckled skin, and her hair weighted by water drapes around her like a flaming blanket, reaching her ankles.
“Come!”, she orders kindly, and he realises that the hand she's extending towards him is free of the mark that marrs her palm now, as if her conscience had not yet caught up with the changes in her body. He moves slowly towards her, just like a skittish wild animal would, and sits a couple steps away from the water’s edge.
She tilts her head to the side “You don't trust me, do you?”.
Solas says “I cannot trust what I do not know”.
She smiles. “It's quite all right. We've got time”.
Solas wakes with his hand wrapped around hers, the mark glowing faintly where their palms are conjoined. Her eyes have finally closed.
He extricates her fingers from his. The mark is not glowing that harshly now, gone from fire to ember. He looks at her face and sees the tiniest smile curling her cracked mouth.
He touches her cheek: she feels clammy but her temperature seems normal, as if her fever had broken.
He touches his own cheek and finds it wet with tears.
He wipes his tired eyes, grabs the knife he used to cut her clothes and steps closer to her. He thumbs at the scar splitting her lip, close to the older scar of her vallaslin and sighs deeply.
He tightens his hold on the blade, tilts her head forward and saws at the thick mat of hair that had once been a braid that had once been a fiery curtain of red hair colouring a stream.
In the following weeks he witnesses her bringing her hand to the choppy hair at the nape of her neck more times than he can count. He catches her crying, just the once, crouched next to a campfire, running her fingers furiously against her scalp and pulling at the strands that are just starting to reach her eyebrows.
He hopes he’ll stay long enough to see it grow.