No! Mhairi! She Was A Female Warrior!
Disclaimer: I do not own Dragon Age.
Note: Because while I really wasn't all that attached to the character personally (she seemed like the type to disapprove of everything), I saw plenty of extremely horrified reactions to her death.
"By the Stone, what took you so long?" Oghren growled practically the moment King Alistair Theirin stepped foot inside Vigil's Keep.
Alistair held up his hands in defense. "I didn't even know that my presence was required until that new surly recruit stopped me on my way to the Bannorn. And is it just me or was he a Howe?"
"It was a Howe," Oghren confirmed, sounding rather amused.
"And…Anastasia recruited him?" Alistair couldn't quite believe it, especially considering the manner in which she had killed the elder Howe (which may or may not still give him nightmares). "Why? How?"
Oghren chuckled at the most-likely inadvertent pun. "Exactly!"
"Oghren," Alistair said firmly.
Oghren sighed. "Fine, fine…Apparently the guy was a friend of her brother's and he knows how to use a bow."
"Ah, that explains it," Alistair said, deeply relieved that he didn't have to worry about some ploy to lull the Howe into a false sense of security before up and murdering him. Honestly, sometimes he wasn't sure if he gave not enough credit or entirely too much. "Where is my wife, anyway? I was lead to believe that she was greatly upset about something and that's why I needed to come back here."
"Oh, that. Well, I survived the Joining, obviously-" Oghren began.
"You did?" Alistair looked surprised. "Well, congratulations then."
Oghren simply nodded. "As it happens, so did mage-boy but….well, maybe you'd better go see her for yourself."
"Right," Alistair agreed, taking his leave of the dwarf and hurrying up to where he'd been told she was staying and opening the door. "Anastasia? Are you alright?"
Anastasia looked up from where she was sitting on her bed clutching a pillow to her chest. She was dressed in her nightclothes even though it was the middle of the day. "Alistair? What are you doing here?"
"Apparently the people here were concerned about you and only Oghren had any idea that we were married," Alistair explained, ,stepping inside her room and shutting the door. The wedding wasn't that long ago but how had people honestly not have heard about it even if they didn't know what they looked like personally?
Anastasia shrugged. "Amaranthine is located under a rock, you know."
"So I'm beginning to see," Alistair remarked dryly. "Are you alright?"
"Of course I'm alright!" Anastasia lied. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"Oghren was worried about you," Alistair said bluntly.
"Well, that's just…" Anastasia trailed off, looking flustered. "The thing is…Fine. I am a little upset."
"What happened?" Alistair asked gently, sitting down on the bed beside her.
"Mhairi's dead!" Anastasia cried, looking near tears.
"I don't mean to be insensitive, love," Alistair said slowly, knowing that he almost certainly would come off that way and keenly wishing that he had just made Oghren tell him the tale before setting off to find the new Commander. "But who is Mhairi? Or was, I suppose?"
Anastasia glared at him and scooted a few inches away from her husband. "Who was Mhairi? How can you even ask me that?!?!"
"Because I don't know who she was?" Alistair offered sheepishly.
"I figured that," Anastasia said, rolling her eyes. "But what I meant was how could you not know who she was? She was totally awesome!"
"I'm sure she was," Alistair said soothingly, "but there are a lot of people in Ferelden and many of them are awesome. Maybe one day I will learn the names of everyone but in the meantime…"
"She was a knight in your service!" Anastasia informed him, still not quite able to believe that he didn't already have this information. "She left to join the Grey Wardens because she was horrified by Loghain's betrayal and thought the two of us were ridiculously awesome."
"She does sound awesome," Alistair conceded. "Although if you're not paraphrasing then I'd say she was spending far too much time with Zevran."
"Nonsense," Anastasia bristled. "There's no such thing as too much time with Zevran. And since she was your knight, why didn't you know her?"
"Did you know her before arriving here?" Alistair countered.
"Well, no," Anastasia admitted.
"Then why should I? You're the Queen!" Alistair declared triumphantly.
"Yeah, for the last three months," Anastasia shot back. "You had a six-month head start."
"And I was a little busy giving the Dalish the land near Ostagar, making that elven girl Shianni the bann of the Alienage, working out plan with the Chantry and the Cirlce of Magi to eventually make the Circle autonomous – which was why Rylock was with me in the first place – sending the dwarves troops to face the darkspawn while people still remember that they're a threat, and dealing with the last vestiges of the civil war," Alistair told her.
"Okay, I get it," Anastasia acknowledged. "You had things to do. Still, with the way Mhairi was treating the Grey Wardens as Paragons, I could have sworn she heard it from either you or Wynne and Wynne's in Tevinter!"
"Well, after our reimagining of the Wardens as kitten-rescuers, many people hold that view," Alistair pointed out.
Anastasia smiled fondly. "Morrigan never should have suggested that…"
"So what happened to Mhairi?" Alistair asked gently, taking her hand in his.
Anastasia's eyes clouded over. "She didn't survive the Joining."
Alistair winced and gave her hand a squeeze. "I am so sorry. Her sacrifice will not be forgotten."
Anastasia sighed. "I know. And I do know that not everyone can survive, it's just…she was so excited!"
"That's a shame," Alistair said sincerely. "Will you tell me about her?"
"Keep in mind, I only knew her for about an hour," Anastasia cautioned. "But what an hour it was! She introduced herself and announced how excited she was to be joining the Grey Wardens, she expressed her disgust at Oghren's heavy-handed drunken flirtations, she wasn't happy we recruited Anders because he was there and honestly had nothing better to do, and she swore vengeance on the darkspawn who killed her mentor."
"So she never got that vengeance," Alistair noted sadly, thinking back on how much he'd enjoyed his own vengeance on Loghain and how horrible it would have been had they decided to do something unthinkable like induct him into the Grey Wardens. Riordan was actually apparently going to suggest that had Alistair hesitated before killing him which furthered his belief that the Orlesian Warden was horribly impractical and a bit inept. Anastasia, at least, seemed to think his being 'pretty' and having a 'sexy accent' – which he thought was a bit strange as she normally hated Orlesian accents – made up for a good deal of that.
Anastasia shook her head. "No, she did. There was some random talking darkspawn waxing poetic about how he wanted to avoid any unnecessary violence as he kicked a helpless soldier off the roof and since he seemed to be responsible, we killed him." She paused. "And also because he really freaked us out."
"Shortest vengeance trip ever," Alistair commented, trying to decide if that was a good thing or not. On the one hand, Mhairi didn't have long to stew about the injustice of her version of Loghain having the gall to not obligingly drop dead in a corner somewhere. On the other, he doubted she was able to build up a proper fury in the minutes it took to get her vengeance.
"Well, she only lived about twenty more minutes after swearing vengeance so if she wanted to get it done, she needed to hurry it up," Anastasia pointed out, apparently thinking along the same lines he was. Of course she was; she had every detail of Howe's demise meticulously planned out since before he had even met her.
Something that she had said earlier suddenly hit Alistair full-force. "Wait, did you say that a darkspawn was talking?"
Anastasia nodded. "Yes, it was really weird," she confirmed. "Did I not mention that the first time you showed up?"
"I don't know; you might have," Alistair confessed. "If you did, I clearly didn't process it properly until now. Why are darkspawn talking?"
Anastasia shrugged. "Oh, who even knows? I imagine that I'll figure it out at some point while I'm here."
"Good because that…" Alistair stopped as he tried to think of an apt way to describe it. "That's just bizarre."
"Why did Mhairi have to die?" Anastasia asked, clearly still dwelling on the first recruit she'd ever lost.
"I don't know, Anastasia," Alistair admitted, wishing he had an answer for her. "A lot of really good people die in the Joining."
"Like Nathaniel's grandfather?" Anastasia asked.
"Nathaniel's grandfather?" Alistair was drawing a blank.
"It's the strangest thing," Anastasia whispered conspiratorially. "Nathaniel claims that bow I found in the basement that had the Howe crest on it used to belong to his grandfather who ran off to join the Grey Wardens. But if he really was a Howe that would make it his paternal grandfather and everyone knows Tarleton Howe was an Orlesian sympathizer that my family hung after seizing Harper's Ford and that was how Howe inherited the Arling. I'm not sure Nathaniel's all there, to be honest."
"Be careful around him, then," Alistair advised. "And, you know, because he's a Howe."
"Oh, I will," Anastasia vowed.
"Why are you so personally attached to Mhairi anyway?" Alistair couldn't help but wonder. "I mean, I know that you can get strangely sentimental at the slightest provocation but you only knew her for an hour."
"But she was a female warrior!" Anastasia protested. "Not only do they help fight the stereotype that women are, in general, less capable than men but the only other person we have that's trained as a warrior is Oghren and his insistence on going everywhere drunk causes problems sometimes."
Alistair winced. "I remember. Do you absolutely need a warrior?"
"Of course I do!" Anastasia insisted. "I've trained as a rogue as has Nathaniel and Anders is a mage. Warriors are more heavy-hitters so it's a good idea to keep one with you so now I have to take Oghren with me everywhere."
"You'll find someone else, don't worry," Alistair attempted to reassure her.
"What good will that do if they're just going to die in the Joining like Mhairi?" Anastasia asked rhetorically.
"Mhairi's death was a tragedy," Alistair said solemnly, "I'm not disputing that, but at least she died before her ideals did."
"Are you accusing me of planning on crushing her ideals?" Anastasia demanded, looking highly offended.
"Not intentionally," Alistair quickly backtracked. "No, it's just…I saw that she wasn't thrilled Oghren was going to become a Grey Warden and she wasn't pleased about the mage's conscription, either. How do you think she'd handle some of your decisions if she's already objecting to your recruitment practices?"
"Probably not well…" Anastasia admitted.
"And didn't it annoy whenever Leliana, Wynne, or I had moral problems with your actions?" Alistair pressed.
"It did," Anastasia nodded, looking a bit irritated at the mere memory. "Greatly."
"So even though it is tragic that Mhairi is dead, you must admit that she seemed far too straight-laced to fit in with our version of the Grey Wardens, despite the sheer number of kittens we've rescued," Alistair concluded.
"I suppose that's true," Anastasia mused. "But still! She was great at killing things AND she wasn't Orlesian!"
"I know, I know," Alistair slipped his hand out of hers to start rubbing her back.
"And if you leave without fulfilling that goodbye promise, I feel it is only fair to warn you that Nathaniel has a very nice voice and Anders looks eerily like you," Anastasia said innocently. "And chances are I won't see you after this for months-"
"Never let it be said that I don't keep my word," Alistair quickly interrupted.
Anastasia smiled. "Good boy."
Review Please!