Dancing In Rainfall

The rain started not long after they stopped for the night. The campfire hissed and sputtered, water rebounded from the rock walls ringing the camp, and their comrades bolted for the dry safety of their tents. Alistair snatched up his stew, Wynne her books, Oghren his mead, and all of them vanished behind the hide flaps so swiftly that a watcher might have thought a mage had somehow erased them from existence. Leliana was about to follow – even stood to do so – when she saw Maddie.

Eyes upon the clouds, feet firmly planted on a rock, the leader of their party stood with her head tilted back and her arms held away from her sides, as if embracing the sky. As the drops quickened and thickened, slamming down against her pale face, Leliana saw a grin drag the corners of her mouth outwards.

Bliss is not a word Leliana associates frequently with Magda Brosca. And seeing Maddie like this – taking joy in something so simple – moved Leliana to stay outside as the heavens opened, to stand on the rocks at Maddie’s side, to tip back her head and let the rain crash down on her cheeks.

‘I bloody love the surface,’ Maddie whispered. ‘Water. From the sky. This place is mad.’ 

Leliana laughed.

The sky is clear now, the deluge moving northwards, and they have relit the campfire and nestled themselves close to it to hasten the drying of their clothes and hair. Maddie has tucked herself under Leliana’s arm, her warmth welcome in the evening chill, and just her very presence – her there-ness – making a drowsy kind of joy thrum in Leliana’s chest.

They’ve been talking for some time, about Maddie’s love of rain and snow and ‘every crazy piece of weirdness else’ that proves that there’s no longer a stone roof above her head, and about a few of the stories Leliana knows about the shapes of the stars above them, and about their journey and their pasts and their thoughts about what tomorrow might bring. But now, they’ve settled into that kind of contented silence that can only exist between best friends and lovers, the silence that asks for no filling, that’s filled simply by the closeness of the other person. It’s so deep – even the owls have fallen silent – that when Maddie suddenly breaks it, Leliana blinks in surprise.

‘Do bards learn to dance?’

Maddie mumbles the question, as if she’s thought better of speaking it aloud even as it leaves her mouth. She looks away, picking at the grass and pursing her lips, and Leliana frowns before nodding.

‘But of course we learn to dance. A bard must be able to entrance by every possible method - with song, with tales, and with our bodies. And we could hardly expect to be welcome at the balls and masquerades thrown by Orlesian nobles if we were tripping over our feet all the time.’

With a nod, Maddie snatches up a waterlogged stick and pokes the end into the fire. A coil of steam rises with a hiss from where the flames touch the wetness clinging to the wood. ‘I guess it was all… stately stuff. Gowns and slow twirling. That kind of thing.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Leliana tells her. ‘Some Orlesian dances can be very energetic. Aggressive, even. There are a great many stories I could tell you of catastrophes that have happened when someone put a foot out of place in a particularly lively dance, and tripped up the entire ballroom.’

Maddie lets out an explosive snort. ‘A whole room full of snobs in fancy dress flopping to the ground? I’d pay to see that.’

Leliana waits for her to go on, but she stays silent, prodding at the fire with her stick. So Leliana says, ‘Why do you ask?’

For a moment, she thinks Maddie isn’t going to answer; she feels the small body pressed against hers go still, and sees Maddie’s face freeze. Then, with a huff, Maddie throws the stick into the fire – sending up another cough of smoke – and shakes her head. ‘It’s just… back in Orzammar, I always kind of wanted to learn how. To dance, I mean.’

Leliana stares for a moment, then smiles. These were not words she ever expected to hear Maddie utter. ‘Was there no one who could teach you?’

‘Teach?’ Maddie turns the word into a bark of laughter. ‘No one teaches Casteless anything, ‘cept how to sweep a street, pick a pocket and take a punch. Sometimes I tried to see if I could pick it up the way I learned to fight – telling my body what to do until it started working. I thought maybe if I watched the right people…’ She shakes herself suddenly. ‘But it never worked, so I stopped trying. Just made me look like a prat.’

Now Leliana thinks about it, she realises she has no idea what kind of place dancing might have in the culture of dwarves. ‘What sort of people would you watch? I suppose the nobility dance, no?’

Again, Maddie takes a few seconds to answer. And when she does, she speaks with unusual slowness, as if she’s measuring every word, picking them out with utmost care. It’s a strange thing to hear from her, from Magda Brosca who throws out her words as carelessly as she throws out punches, who holds back her real thoughts for no one.

‘There was this one time,’ she says at last, ‘this job I was doing for Beraht. I must’ve been… somewhere ‘bout fifteen. Got sent into the Diamond Quarter – first time I’d ever been in there – to steal some kind of… document thing from some snotty noble or other. Didn’t know what it was about. Didn’t ask. Almost killed me getting into the Quarter without being seen, but I managed it, found the estate.’ She spits out the word estate, as if it contains poison. ‘There was a party going on – that was my cover to get in unseen and sneak about while everyone was distracted – and I looked into a room through the keyhole to see whether it was the right one, and… and there was this girl. 'Round the same age as me. Dancing.’

She closes her eyes.

‘I’d never seen anyone dance before. Not like there’s anything to dance about in Dust Town, and twirling your body around’s not gonna put food on the table, is it? Dancing – and music, and art, and I dunno, poetry and whatever – it’s about as useful as mud, when there’s a brand on your face. Less useful, at least mud’s good for chucking at people or putting on a burn. I always thought dancing was just this... this stupid thing nobles did because they could, just one more way for them to show off that they had the time and coin to spend on doing things with no point to them – and then I saw her. I saw the way she moved.’

A touch of wonder has crept into her tone. Leliana smiles and pulls her a little closer.

‘She had dark hair, and it was all wavy from being in braids, but she’d taken it out to brush it. She was wearing a purple dress, and she… she was dancing. No music – I think she was just practising, she was gonna do it in front of the party later or something. She just… flowed. It was the first time in my life I’d ever looked at anyone – anything – and thought, beautiful.’

Leliana smiles. ‘Did you talk to her?’

This is met with another snort. ‘Thought you were supposed to be a master of sneaking around, Leli. If I’d opened that door, she’d have yelled for the guards, I’d have been chased back to Dust Town with half the nug-humping Warrior Caste after me, I’d never have finished the job, and I’d have gone to bed hungry.’ Maddie shakes her head again. ‘But I wanted to. I wanted to go and talk to her. I wanted to ask where she learned to dance like that, and if she could teach me. I wanted to know her name. I wanted to know her favourite colour, what foods she liked – I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted her to know everything about me. Screw that, I... I just wanted her to know I existed, for her to know that I knew she existed. But that couldn’t happen. So I finished the job, robbed her family, and went home.’

Her voice is charged with anger now. Most people tend to back away when confronted with Maddie when she’s angry, but Leliana just clasps her hand and gives it a squeeze, because she knows Maddie’s anger isn’t directed at her, but at Orzammar, at its Caste system and arrogant nobles, at everyone who made her live a life where she’d be arrested if she stopped to ask a pretty girl how to dance.

If it had been a story, Leliana thinks, it would have ended very differently. Some small sound would have made the dancing girl turn around and happen to see the blue eye in the keyhole. She would have opened the door and, seeing the strange, scruffy beauty of the Casteless girl in front of her, would have felt the words to call the guards die in her throat. She would have smiled and laughed at Maddie’s questions, and taught her to dance, and met with her again and again, both of them revelling in this secret they kept from their families. And eventually they would have run away to the surface to be together, giving up everything they knew for the sake of love.

But life, as Leliana knows all too painfully well, is seldom like the tales.

And besides, if that had happened… they couldn’t have this, now. Maddie would not be here today. Some other Grey Warden would have passed through Lothering, and Leliana would never have sat fireside with a dwarf tucked into the crook of her arm. That would have been a pitiable fate.

You should have turned around, she thinks, imagining the dancing girl. You should have seen her. You should have known that she existed. But… I am glad you didn’t.

‘So, yeah,’ Maddie says, her voice breaking in on Leliana’s thoughts. ‘Sometimes I tried to work out how to do it myself, but I never got anywhere. My mother found me doing it once, and gave me a hiding for doing something useless. So I told myself I was being stupid, doing something only nobles did and I was better than that, and went back to stealing. Haven’t thought about dancing in years, haven’t really thought about anything beautiful for years, ‘til… ‘til I met someone who’s got a knack of reminding me.’

She looks away sharply, gouging shapes in the ash from the fire with one finger. ‘I mean, I thought… it’s stupid, but I reckoned that if you knew how to dance, you could…’

‘Teach you?’ Leliana finishes, frowning. ‘Why... why should that be stupid?’

Maddie doesn’t reply, only pokes at the ash more fiercely. But Leliana understands. Because you’re still not used to being allowed things that you want. Because you don’t want to be like the nobles who hated you and who had everything they wanted. And because people told you for years that you didn’t deserve anything you wanted, and a part of you still believes it.

Fury pulses through her, and she struggles for a second with a powerful urge to set out to Orzammar and throw every member of the nobility off a cliff. Maddie should not have existed in such a way for so long, without anyone to tell her that she is a good person, that she matters, that she deserves to have good things in her life. But it doesn’t matter now. Maddie will never live like that again.

Because of you? It’s a cold, bitter voice in her mind that speaks the words, and Leliana’s jaw clenches. Because of someone who still thirsts for the battle, still revels in deception, still takes joy in the kill?

Leliana looks at Maddie, at the way her wet hair is turned from yellow to gold and copper in the fire-glow, and the cold voice dies.

Yes, Leliana thinks. Because of me.

She gets to her feet, and holds out a hand. ‘Let me show you.’

Maddie looks up at her, lips slightly parted. ‘Really? Right now? You’re sure?’

Leliana just raises her eyebrows and sticks her hand out a little further. And Maddie grins broadly, shrugs, and leaps to her feet. ‘Well, why the heck not? Life’s short.’

And so Leliana guides Maddie’s hands to her waist, and explains the basics in a low voice, and smiles as she does so at how strange and wonderful this is. How this girl forged by the streets, with her scabbed knuckles and Casteless brand and constantly-clenching fists can be standing here with her in the calm of the evening, brows furrowed in concentration, receiving her first dancing lesson. Leliana knows that she has been blessed enough by the Maker, to be allowed to join this quest, to stand at the front lines of the battle against the Blight - but her true blessing is in how Maddie’s small hands, the hands of a fighter and thief, hold her so gently, almost reverently. Maddie reveres nothing - no Maker, no ancestors, no leadership, no laws - but somehow, she is able to look at Leliana like this, and it feels... it feels so humbling, so wonderful, so right.

‘Ready to start?' Leliana asks, and as she does so, a single drop of water splashes onto her arm.

A pause. Maddie flicks her eyes upward. ‘S’raining,’ she points out.

Leliana laughs, leans down, and presses a kiss to Maddie’s forehead. ‘Let it.’

And so the rain falls, and they dance.