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Water. The warmth of the sun on his skin. The cackling song of the gulls.
A six year old boy sits on the pier and dangles his legs in the sea. His mother sings to him, sometimes, when she’s weaving – a Rivaini folk ballad with a version for each family that knows it. This is the tune that Lilit Surana is humming, pausing only to stuff his face with bread. It’s warm and fresh. It slides easy down his throat.
He remembers it, but not like this. He is outside himself; he watches the boy from above. The sun is too bright and too pale. The light is everywhere he looks – like nausea, like bleach. It sucks the colour from the world, makes it smooth and clean.
The boy is still humming, but the song is not the same.
A hand rests on his face. A finger lifts first one eyelid, then the other. A Templar, blurred and upside-down.
There is an odd feeling on Lilit’s forehead. He would touch it, but his wrists are restrained.
“You idiot,” the Templar says, turning to someone Lilit cannot see. “Why’s he still conscious?”
“The brand slipped, ser. Hit him at an angle.” A second voice – he has not heard it before. It must be a new recruit. She sounds nervous.
Nervous. Lilit turns the word around in his mind.
The older Templar sighs. “Well, shit. You’ve made a proper pig’s ear of it.” He removes his hands from Lilit’s face, and exits his field of vision. “How many rites have you done, not counting this one?”
The sound of shuffling feet. “None, ser. I’ve observed, but -”
“Right. Not to worry, recruit, this one’s on me.” A pause. The sound of metal. The hum of lyrium, fainter than Lilit remembers. “I shouldn’t’ve let you do it on your own.”
“Yes, ser. I mean, sorry, ser. I mean – will you have to do it again?”
“’Fraid so. Shouldn’t be a bother, though. We’ll just -”
Metal against his forehead. Burning. Light. The song runs rampant in his mind.
They give him new robes. The texture is not unpleasant.
There is a piece of food stuck to the recruit’s front teeth. He informs her of this, because he thinks that she should know.
He goes to the apprentices’ dorm to throw away his things. The stone of the tower is sturdy beneath his feet. On the way, he stops to look in a mirror and sees the sunburst peeking out from beneath his hairline. The skin around it is blistered and peeling. The outline is unsteady; he can tell from looking that they had to do it twice.
Lilit blinks and turns away.
Halfway through his bedside table, he knows that he is being watched. He turns; Jowan is there. Reddened eyes, dishevelled hair.
“Hello, Jowan,” Lilit says. His voice is different now. “Have you been crying?”
In response to this, Jowan makes a strange wailing noise. He buries his face in Lilit’s chest, arms clutching. Several seconds pass. Jowan’s body shakes. Lilit starts to feel a little damp.
“You are getting bodily fluids on my robes,” he says. Jowan sobs harder in response.
“Did it hurt? When they – you know.” They are sitting cross-legged and face to face on Lilit’s bed. They have done this many times before; the mattress sags from their familiar weight.
“Yes,” Lilit says. Jowan sniffles.
They sit in silence for several minutes.
“...What did it feel like?”
Lilit does not think that Jowan would like the answer to this question. He does not want Jowan to start crying again. They are expecting him in the Tranquils’ quarters, and he is already delayed.
“I do not remember,” he says.
Jowan looks at him with wide, wet eyes.
“They are expecting me,” Lilit says.
“Right,” Jowan says. “You should go.”
Neither of them move.
Once, when they were still allowed outside for exercise, Jowan and Lilit found a rat half-drowned in the lake. It swam in weak little circles, tiny legs kicking. The shore was too steep for it to climb.
Lilit didn’t want to, but Jowan insisted. They fished it from the water when Ser Hadley wasn’t looking. It trembled and shook in Lilit’s hands, tiny heart thrumming against his skin.
They brought it inside, curled in the pocket of Jowan’s robes. He carried it around for the next two months, feigning a lack of appetite and slipping it his leftovers.
Lilit hated it, kept telling Jowan it would bite him and give him a disease. That wasn’t the real reason, of course. The Templars were starting to notice Jowan talking to it when he thought nobody was watching. They were getting suspicious. Jumpy.
It hadn’t taken Lilit long to learn that things here didn’t work the same way they did in Dairsmuid. You couldn’t act erratic around the Templars without consequence. And Jowan getting in trouble was bad enough – but the two of them were inseparable. Suspicion falling on Jowan inevitably meant that suspicion would fall on him.
So Lilit got up early one morning, made sure that Jowan was still asleep, and wrung its little neck. He cried as he did it. It had been his third attempt.
Jowan was devastated, of course. Lilit acted aloof and unconcerned. For a week he couldn’t go to sleep without thinking of that rat, its glossy coat and shiny little eyes. It had trusted him; it hadn’t tried to run. He had known all along that it would have been kinder to let the poor thing drown.
Now, Lilit thinks, he disagrees. It was preferable that it lived. It was preferable that it was cared for while it was still alive.
He has been Tranquil for three weeks and two days. Something is not right.
The Tranquil wake together, before dawn. Lilit rises with them, pulls the robe over his head. He washes his face at a basin of water. Their bodies jostle past him. They do not talk; there is no need to talk. He is given a list of tasks and he completes them. His body bends to the work – scrubbing, lifting, fetching, filling out forms. The instructions are simple and clear.
When a Templar looks at him, he does not flinch and look at his shoes. This means he sees more than he used to.
- An enchanter’s voice wavers mid-lecture at a sharp comment from the supervising Templar.
- She loses confidence. The quality of her instruction decreases.
- The unease ripples out into her students, who take their cue from her.
- An apprentice catches their sleeve on the edge of the desk, which causes their hands to jerk around wildly mid-spell.
- Acid sprays across two tables and half a carpet. Several books and an apprentice’s left arm are also caught in the splash.
- All of this must be cleaned and repaired and replaced. This constitutes half a day’s work for him and another of the Tranquil, not including the time required to file the injury form.
This incident causes something to stir in the back of Lilit’s mind. Later, as he lies on his bunk and waits for sleep, he thinks of the Circle in Dairsmuid.
The Templars there had allowed the enchanters to govern themselves. He had barely seen them, except when he had left the tower to visit his mother or visit the market with his friends. On the way out, the Templars had given him fruit slices and told him to take care.
He was eleven years old when his father – a Fereldan sailor – insisted on his transfer. He was a child, and could still dream. It is increasingly difficult for Lilit to understand that boy as himself.
And yet, the memory remains.
After the incident with the acid, Lilit requisitions a roll of parchment. He divides it into four columns: noting any similar accidents that occur, their date and time, and how long it took to rectify the damage. In the fourth column, he notes what else might have been done with that time.
Before the end of the month, the parchment has run out of space. He writes two copies, sending one to the First Enchanter and the other to the Knight Commander.
He waits three days. Nothing happens. Nothing is changed.
“I want to destroy my phylactery,” Jowan says, in a valiant attempt at a whisper. “I want to run away.” He looks down, picks at the sleeve of his robes. “Both of us. Together.”
Lilit blinks. “I apologise for the delay,” he says, precisely loud enough for the nearest Templar to hear, “Owain has been very busy.”
“What -” Jowan splutters. “I just said -”
Lilit interrupts him. “If you accompany me to the stockroom, I will ask him if your form has been processed.” Owain is on the third floor, giving a talk on requisition procedure to some new arrivals. The stockroom will be empty and unmonitored.
It is fortunate that Jowan understands him.
The boat is unsteady in the water; Jowan is unsteady with the oars. Lilit adjusts the angle of the sail. Moving quickly and smoothly, muscle memory guides his hands through a perfect sailor’s knot.
A particularly choppy wave strikes Jowan in the face – he starts laughing, wild and loud. Lilit looks at him and does not understand.
It is good that Jowan is here. He could not have sailed the boat on his own.
Shouts ring out from the shoreline - the ferryman must have reached the shore. This is not disastrous. They are far out enough that there is little the Templars can do. The only spare boat requires repairs, and the work was delayed by Accident 16A.
A delivery by one of the Tranquil is expected today. Provided Jowan does not draw attention, their appearance at the docks will not be out of place. By the time word arrives from the tower, they will already be gone.
Lilit’s former self looked at the Circle and saw nothing but a maze to navigate, a game that he could win.
His former self is gone.
Now, Lilit sees how things connect – his mind takes in every detail, unshackled by the small concerns of the man he was before. He sees the system tick and whir. He sees that it is wrong.
They move onto dry land. Jowan is drenched and his legs are covered in mud. Lilit tells him this.
“I don’t care!” Jowan says, grin stretched across his face. “We’re free!”
With that, he presses his lips against Lilit’s mouth.
The sensation, Lilit thinks, is not unpleasant.