Half-blind makes him exhale everything in his lungs, until his chest can't get any smaller or his shoulders less slumped, torso curling in as if to protect the knot of my fault my fault my fault in his chest—but he doesn't say it. Zevran would only feel obliged to tell him that it isn't. Maybe Alistair will make him do that later, but even he has the sense not to do it now. The only sign at all is the deep, heavy breath he pulls back in as he forces himself to move past it.

"That's not how family works, Zev," he says. Kind of. If Alistair needed rescuing Goldanna would probably let him die, if she weren't the one selling him out in the first place. Cailan might have sent some of his people, maybe, if he ever even knew. But Zevran would come. He knows that. He moves his hand to Zevran's head, to gently rub behind his exposed ear. "Not this one. It's ours, so we get to make the rules, and I'm making that one of them."