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Katrina hears her ribs crack before she feels the pain.
She’s on the ground before she registers more than shock, and then the heat of the blow opens up from her shoulder to her hip, a staggering bruise that deepens with every pained heartbeat. She can’t tighten the fingers of her left hand around her staff. A shadow falls over her, and she looks up at the Freeman, silhouetted against the sun, mace raised—
Bull charges past her, bellowing, and bowls her attacker over. She can’t catch her breath, but she staggers to her feet, leaning on her staff. The crack in her ribs stabs, reaching deeper, but she reaches for what remains of her magic, planning to drop lightning on the Freemen swarming Sera.
She hears the sickening thud of a weapon connecting with flesh, and when she turns back, Bull is on the ground.
She waits—one heartbeat, two, three—but he doesn’t get up.
He always gets up. She’s seen him thrown around a lot for someone as big as he is—she can hardly believe anything short of a pride demon could knock him down if not for how often she’s seen it happen—but he always gets up, shaking the blood from his blade, usually grinning, sometimes taunting.
The Freeman steps over his body, and he doesn’t get up.
She casts without thinking about it, her anger and fear reaching deep into her magic and dredging it up through the ragged ache in her ribs. The stonefist hits the Freeman so hard that when he at last hits the cracked earth, he doesn’t move.
She runs. Every other step sends a bolt of pain through her ribs, but she does her best to ignore it. Bull is face-up on the ground, his head tipped as far sideways as his horns allow, and she can see the blood beneath him, draining into the dirt, as she drops to her knees.
“I’ll hold him up.” The battle is over; Cassandra kneels at Bull’s other side. She’s bloody, too, but she seems not to notice the gash in her sword arm. “A potion, Inquisitor—”
Katrina digs through her pack while Cassandra heaves Bull upright, and she thanks the Maker that Cassandra is here because she knows she couldn’t move him. It’s bad. She knows it’s bad, and she can see why the blow knocked him out—right to the back of the head, deep gouges from the Freeman’s mace, bleeding freely. Her hands are shaking and the vials all clatter against one another, but she finds the right one and presses it between his lips. Sera hovers, bow strung in her hands.
He sputters and swallows, and she breathes again. His eye struggles open.
“Boss,” he says, his voice a little sluggish, gaze swiveling to her.
When they finally make it back to camp—when he has been bandaged, and fed, and is asleep beside her—she lays awake, listening to him breathe, and decides that she will never let this happen again.
With a spiteful glance at her guttering candle, Katrina reached for her tea. The tower was quieting around her—others leaving the library to go to their rest—but she had a few more moments, if only she could make sense of this passage. Perhaps she needed to take a step back. She swallowed, replaced her tea, and laid her head on her folded arms. If she could just rest her eyes a minute…
“Kat.” A voice, warm with laughter, pulled her back from the Fade. A hand ruffled her braid. “You fell asleep, Katrina.”
Squinting, Katrina lifted her head. Her candle had burned out, but Lydia held another; she slid onto the bench across from Katrina, casting their shadows long across the library. The tower was utterly silent, save the cough of a templar from inside his helm.
“Maker,” Katrina muttered. “Sorry.”
Lydia put her candle down. Her brown eyes crinkled at the corners with her grin. “I see Eleanor is assigning a lot of reading.”
Katrina glanced at the stack of books still piled beside her and let out a low groan, but she did it with a smile. “She does love books.”
Her eyes twinkled. “It’s not too late to pursue spirit magic instead, you know. Not nearly as much reading.”
Mirth gone, Katrina looked down at her open book and tugged it a little closer to her. “I know,” she said, but in truth, it was too late. It had always been too late. All thought of demons turned her stomach. Her Harrowing had been hardship enough; she would not go willingly to one of those creatures ever again. She would not ask one for help.
Lydia’s brow had furrowed, as though sensing her unease. There was silver in her dark hair, Katrina realized, and the laugh lines around her mouth had deepened, her soft brown skin scored with age. Katrina still remembered her from the day she’d come to the Circle, wide-eyed and fearful, Lydia’s smile unmarked by age.
“No spirit could twist your will, Kat, unless you let it,” she said gently.
Katrina sighed, frustrated now. “Lydia…”
Lydia reached for her hand. “I know you’re afraid. I only wanted to reassure you. If you wanted to pursue that path, I have every confidence that you would do it admirably. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
Katrina looked down at the book on the table between them. “I like Storm magic. It’s uncomplicated. As soon as spirits get involved, I can’t even think straight. It’s not safe. Not for me.” She hesitated. “I hope you aren’t disappointed.”
“Sweetling, no.” Lydia squeezed her hand. “You will make a fine Storm mage. If you ever wish to learn, though, my door is open.”
Katrina nodded. “Thank you.”
Lydia smiled, leaning back. “I can hardly believe you’re an Enchanter already. I still remember you in pigtails.”
“I try not to,” Katrina groaned, and laughing, Lydia led the way from the library.
He leans on his elbows, frowning up at her. The book spread open beneath him is in a language she doesn’t understand.
“You wish to learn spirit magic,” he repeats, as though he believes he might have misheard her.
“Yes,” she confirms. She doesn’t twist her hands together. She stands before his table and meets his perplexed gaze as bravely as she can.
“You have been reluctant to use spirit magic in the past,” he says. She hears the hint of an edge in his voice.
“I’ve been afraid,” she corrects. “But I can’t be any longer. I’m not doing my part if…” She can’t finish the thought, but he seems to understand.
“True spirit healers are rare, and I could not teach you to be one,” he says. “Your own magic is much better suited to combat.”
She laughs. The sound bubbles up without her permission, and it sounds exactly as bitter as she feels. She remembers, at the start of all this, how much she loathed using her magic in battle to kill, to wound—how she fell back on stunning until there was no other choice.
“What can I do, then?” she asks.
“The kind of spirit magic that would play to your strengths is much less intensive than spirit healing,” he says. “You’ll not call on powerful spirits to lend you strength. They will be wisps, more or less. Their cunning is limited. You should have little trouble directing them.”
Her stomach turns. “Unless my fear twists them.”
Solas’s mouth twitches. She can see how hard he is trying to be understanding—to not scare her from this course of action—but his mirth is not reassuring. “It is important, then, that you learn to not be afraid,” he tells her.
She ducks her head, hiding the irritation that will be plain as day in the furrow of her brow. “Is it so easy to unlearn? Everything I’ve known my whole life has taught me that demons—spirits—are dangerous.”
“Everything you’ve known your whole life has been upended since becoming the Herald,” he says. “Why not this, as well?”
He has…a point.
Worse: not because the life of another depended upon it.
“Elise,” Lydia said—her hands raised, palms open, placating. “I beg you to see reason.” Her voice was as calm as ever, utterly unruffled, though Katrina couldn’t see how. Her own heart raced. Her own hands shook.
“There’s no reason left in the world.” Elise was too shrill, her face too red; Katrina had never seen the apprentice in such a state. There was a bloody scratch down one cheek. There’d been fighting outside, then, before she’d burst in. “You know what they’re doing to us outside these walls,” she went on. “We can’t go on pretending like it’s not happening!”
“No one’s pretending, Elise,” Lydia insisted. “We’re only trying to get through without bloodshed.”
“That’s not possible any longer,” she snapped. “Are you with us, or not?”
She brandished her staff again, and Katrina, panicked, reached for the Fade. The barrier slid into place around her and Lydia, cool like water on her skin, but Elise’s face contorted and she threw fire and—
When Katrina woke, Lydia was cold.
“Why do they come at all?” she asks Solas, considering the wisps surrounding them. Lights, a soft green like her Rift magic, dance over the mountainside. If little pops of light could be described as playful, she might assign them that characteristic. “What do they get out of this?”
He seems pleased that she asked. They have not always seen eye to eye, especially on this. “Purpose, however brief—that is what I believe,” he says. “They hear a cry for help and seek to assist, and when they’ve fulfilled that duty, they return to the Fade.”
One of the wisps drifts nearer to her, and she stands very still. It feels nothing like the demons she’s encountered, no hot rage or freezing terror: it alights on her palm, where the mark is hidden by her glove, and it feels like soft winter sunlight, soaking slow into her bones.
“What will they do, exactly?” she asks, not looking away from the wisp—just in case.
“They don’t possess the strength to heal intensive injuries.” A number of the wisps have flocked to Solas, though he hardly seems to notice them: they weave around his hands, drift over his shoulders, a stream of energy that moves with him. “You will still need to rely on healing potions and poultices—and the occasional surgeon—for that. But if someone falls, this magic will pick them up again. Protect them. If you have will enough.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any testing it, unless someone volunteers to be knocked out,” she mutters.
“No,” he chuckles. The wisps seem to laugh with him, their lights ebbing and flowing with the rise and fall of his voice. “This is not the sort of spell you test. But...practice summoning them, when you can. Interact with them. It will make you more comfortable when you actually need to use the magic.” He nods to her hand, where a second wisp has landed beside the first. “They are already drawn to you—your mark, your magic. That will make it easier.”
Following his instruction, she sends the wisps back to the Fade. They blink out of existence, passing from the world she knows to the world she fears.
“Thank you, Solas,” she says.
He inclines his head. “I am glad to help.”
She can direct them, if she applies her will. She settles a little deeper in her couch, tucking her legs firmly beneath her, and asks the half-dozen of them to follow her hand. The chase the shapes she makes in the air, a string of green glimmering that’s almost pretty, if she can forget what it is.
“Uh…okay. I’ve walked in on you doing a lot of things, but this might be the weirdest.”
“If you’d knock,” Katrina replies, not taking her eyes from the wisps, “you wouldn’t have to endure it.”
She sees him in her periphery, a few steps closer, watching warily. She gathers the wisps back to her hand; they bounce gently from finger to finger, joint to joint. They have a silent song, melodious, that she can hear—like the rifts, like the Breach, but kinder, quieter.
“Spirits, huh,” Bull says.
She doesn’t blame him for his skepticism. “It was time.” Gently, she waves; the wisps disperse, slipping back into the Fade. She turns to face him; now that the spirits are gone, he joins her on the couch. “I decided I should broaden my horizons,” she explains, more bravely than she feels. “I want to do more than jam a potion down your throat the next time someone caves your skull in.”
“My skull did not get caved in,” he grumbles.
She shakes her head; leaning closer, she touches the new scars at the nape of his neck. “Looked like it,” she says. “Felt like it. If I wasn’t so damn afraid of the Fade, I could’ve done more than upend a vial in your mouth and pray. And not just you,” she adds. “I’ve seen the others fall in the middle of a fight enough. If I can help—if I can protect you all—I should.”
Bull moves quickly for someone so large, and somehow she’s always surprised when one moment he’s merely sitting beside her and the next moment he’s touching her. He heaves her into his lap until she’s straddling his thighs, her nightshirt riding up around her hips, the heat of the fire warm against her back.
“Compelling argument, then?” she asks with a smile, the sobriety of the moment ruined by their sudden proximity.
He could hide all his emotions from her if he wanted to, so the look on his face is a gift: a smile at the corner of his mouth, his admiration clear when he looks at her.
“You know I don’t like demons,” he says.
“You know I hate them,” she counters. “I could explain what makes this different if you want me to, but honestly, it didn’t reassure me as much as it should have. I doubt it’ll help.” She steadies herself, hands on his shoulders. “But I can do this. If I can control rifts and throw lightning around, a few little spirits shouldn’t be a problem.”
“I know,” he agrees. She doesn’t have to question whether or not he really means it; she can feel it in the way he touches her, his hands sure and not afraid at all, and it fills her with warmth and strips her of her fear all at once, her mind going to a safer place entirely, thoughts of demons falling away one by one.
“You’re keeping that firestorm thing, though, right?” he asks. His hands slide up her thighs while he speaks; she almost loses track of the question.
“Of course,” she says, her voice just this side of too breathless. His hands are beneath her nightshirt now, thumbs trailing over her stomach. “I know how much you like it.”
He laughs—low, a concession of agreement if she’s ever heard one. “Take the shirt off.”
She hastens to oblige.