Expendable

Disclaimer: I do not own Dragon Age.

Note: It's really remarkable just how diversified Anora hatred can get. In addition to the usual 'oh, she sells us out the minute we do the one thing she told us could get her killed and doesn't support us when we said we'd make Alistair king and kill her father so she's evil!', I've recently come across the 'My King Cousland will get rid of Anora and rule the country alone' train of thought. And it disturbs me. Thus, this.

Queen Anora Mac Tir glanced up as her personal handmaiden slipped into the room.

"It is done," Erlina said quietly. "The King is no more."

"And you're sure that nobody saw you?" Anora demanded. It wasn't that she had any doubt that Erlina was a professional and had poisoned more than a few cups of tea before this but she could really not avoid the fallout if it were discovered that she was to blame for the oh-so-tragic death of the Hero of Ferelden.

"I'm positive," Erlina assured her. "But what shall we tell the people?"

"Oh, what indeed," Anora mused. "He's too young for 'he died in his sleep' to convince anyone and aside from the fact that we don't want to implicate ourselves, making people think that it's that easy to assassinate such an important figure in the government would not be in our best interest. Maybe an illness he'd been keep quiet? Some sort of side-effect from killing the Archdemon? The other Wardens have been hounding him since practically the minute the Blight ended to explain why he didn't die when they believed that was what happened to the slayer of an Archdemon. Unfortunately, we can't suggest anything about his death being related to being a Grey Warden beyond that as while it's certainly plausible the Wardens would not stand for that kind of story circulating about."

It wasn't surprising that her dear husband was insisting on being so difficult even in death. Anora hadn't even wanted to marry the man but he had told her frankly that if she wanted his support then she'd need to give him something in return and so she'd need to marry either him or Alistair. She really should have gone with Alistair. He was idealistic and naïve and – mostly importantly – rather uninterested in the art of ruling and wouldn't have been so foolish as to try to steal her hard-won power. The little Cousland boy (and there would be no end to her troubles if Teyrn Fergus were to realize that she'd had his brother killed), on the other hand, evidently was.

Anora had genuinely liked Eleanor Cousland. She was like a second mother to her once her own mother had died and had been a great help once she had first arrived in Denerim and had felt like a fish out of water or, more aptly, a country bumpkin suddenly thrust into high society. Anora had greatly respected Bryce Cousland as a man who knew what he wanted – which thankfully wasn't the throne – and who was an able administer of his lands and had a remarkable talent for diplomacy. Anora had held Fergus Cousland in high regard growing up for determination to be a good heir and his dedication to his people. The youngest Cousland, however…she hadn't ever seen much of him as his parents kept him in Highever and so perhaps that explained how she failed to notice such an idiotic plan for a coup.

It wasn't often that Anora felt that she had been overly optimistic (how could she with such a cynic as Teyrn Loghain as her father?) but she had honestly thought that she would never marry a man more foolish than Cailan. Cailan was a child playing at war, a neglected overgrown boy who would never stop trying to live up to his dead father. Anora had already thought him gravely unsuited for the kingship even before she had learned that he had made secret plans with Empress Celene of Orlais to marry and unite their kingdoms. There were times when Anora wondered if her father were really that unnecessarily paranoid about Orlais. How could he have not seen what a disaster that would have been for Ferelden? Elves in Ferelden had it better than in Orlais, peasants in Ferelden were not serfs, freeholders weren't taxed exorbitant rates for the sole purpose of driving them from their land, nobles weren't stripped of their lands and titles for the high crime of not being Orlesian or properly licking the boots of their new overlords…who besides Cailan and the most servile of the nobility (most of whom ended up losing quite a bit when Ferelden had been reclaimed thirty years ago) would have benefited from this? Not only would the rest of Ferelden have simply not benefited from Cailan's mad plan but they would have actively suffered under Orlesian rule just as they had before their father's had freed them. It wasn't like Anora was particularly anti-Orlais; she was just realistic enough to not want to go back to the times of a rebel queen.

Given Cailan's actions would have destroyed Ferelden, was it really too much to ask that Anora's next husband be less of a fool? Apparently it was. One week ago, one of the servants (all of them reporting directly to Erlina, of course) overheard the prince-consort – he always got annoyed by her obsession with semantics but he always seemed to need the reminder that he was not King – ordering his Antivan Crow to assassinate her so he could become a reigning king in his own right.

She had known, of course, that he had only married her to get close to the throne but to outright try to kill her for it? How very Orlesian of him. And it wasn't as if he were even all that capable. Sure he had been raised as a potential heir to a teynir but he had never had any practical experience ruling anything and his first attempt at ruling Highever was to be the day after the former Arl Howe massacred the inhabitants of Castle Cousland. From the first, it was clear that he had little more than the ideals he'd been taught to help him rule and, frankly, that wasn't enough. In time he might have become an effective ruler but it would take quite a bit longer than the little that they'd been married for before he was anywhere near ready to lead Ferelden.

"I agree," Erlina said. "In addition to the threat of Warden intervention, your late husband was a popular figure and a hero to many."

"Heroes fall," Anora said curtly, remembering her own father's fall from grace. "Then again, Ferelden has yet to fully recover from the Blight so I suppose not enough time has passed, particularly as they don't know that he's done anything wrong." Unspoken, of course, was the fear that they might not feel that he had and would have preferred a hero king to a childless queen.

"The assassin is in Fort Drakon and is being watched most closely so there won't be another breakout," Erlina informed her. "What would you like done with him?"

"For now, have him questioned," Anora ordered. "I'll decide his fate later."

"As you wish, my lady," Erlina said with a slight bow before turning and slipping back out the door, silent as any self-respecting bard.

The Bannorn would likely complain as there was still no heir but Anora didn't really think that she was going to marry again. Marrying once had been an unpleasant situation she had to put up with in order to become queen in the first place. Marrying a second time had been a mistake even if it had looked like the only way to keep her throne. If she married a third time then she would have no one to blame but herself when her new husband decided to venture to the Deep Roads, find a talking darkspawn, and convince a whole group of them to come settle in Ferelden and try to coexist. A blood heir wasn't all-important, either. She wasn't planning on dying for quite some time and she could always appoint a less-idiotic Cousland or a Guerrin (provided the child was Teagan's and not Eamon's as she did not want that man anywhere near her throne after the way he so shamelessly tried to steal it).

Really, how did one think that she was so weak and stupid as to be displaced by the first idiot to think to send an assassin after her? Not for the first time, Anora wished she had been born a boy. Cailan never had to put up with such nonsense.

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