Author's Note – This fic is a multi-chaptered sequel to Desertion, which you'll probably have to read in order for this to make sense. I like Desertion as a stand-alone, and while I want to explore it (and possibly a few other of my one-shots) in a longer continuation, I'm also nervous about my ability to do so. But hey, here goes. Thanks to everyone who's reviewed my other stories, and anyone who reviews this after they read it!
(Also, this fic is AU for Awakening - as in the events there didn't happen in this story's timeframe - but it still incorporates elements from it. Mostly, I used characters from it as the new warden recruits, because why not?)
When he wakes up, the first thing he becomes aware of is moving.
It wouldn't be the first time he's woken up in some unfamiliar place in the past year, so that doesn't alarm him too much. He's not moving under his own power, and he's relatively comfortable, so he guesses 'ox cart' as the rest of him wakes up. He also doesn't feel hung-over, which is surprising, even though his skull is pounding and when he tries to move he realizes there's something restrictive around his wrists and legs.
Then it all comes rushing back to him. His eyes fly open, filling up with the sight of a slightly overcast sky, and he flails a little bit. His boots hit the side of the cart.
"Good evening," an infuriating voice says from behind his head. He struggles around, combating the movement of the cart and his own impeded limbs until he can look and see the figure driving a lumbering white ox down the road.
"It's evening, then?" he grumbles in reply, thinking that he would be very inclined to punch the back of that obnoxious head if he wasn't all tied up and everything. "Same day?"
"Yes," the Warden confirms.
There is an awkward silence immediately afterwards, during which all he can hear is the rumble of the cart's wheels and the dull plod of hooves against the road. As he glares at the back of his ex-friend's head, he can feel the anger steadily building back up. Bastard. If he wants to get piss-drunk and killed by other wardens, or throw himself into the Deep Roads, or put on a damn dress and dance the damn Remigold, that's his business. Who does he think he is, taking his choices away from him?
With a scowl, Alistair glances around himself. The back of the cart is closed, but it looks cheaply made and rather flimsy. He shifts around, planting his feet against it and giving it a few good, solid kicks. The job would be easier if he had boots, but he sold those long ago for drinking money, and the Warden has only given him soft-soled shoes to replace the scraps he was wearing.
The cart shakes a little from his efforts.
"Stop that."
"Make me," Alistair petulantly replies.
"I will tie your wrists to your ankles," the Warden warns, and on that note the rear flap of the cart finally snaps loose and crashes down. He hits the dirt, managing to narrowly avoid collision with a pile of ox dung before he staggers up to his feet, and starts hopping.
At which point it occurs to him that he hasn't thought this plan through. Entirely.
The wheels creak to a halt behind him, and he keeps hopping, because there isn't much else he can do at this point.
"Alistair."
Hop, hop, hop.
The Warden doesn't even need to hurry. He hears the dull thud of boots hitting the road, followed by steady footsteps that catch him up soon enough, as the muscles in his legs protest his jumping up and down, ropes chafing against his legs and wrists.
A shadow falls next to him, pulling up beside him. It keeps step with his hops for a short time, and he steadfastly ignores him, more out of a kind of stubborn desperation than anything else.
"And where are we headed?" the Warden asks.
Alistair grits his teeth. "Back to town, of course," he replies.
"I see."
He's expecting a hand to close over his arm, or a blow to the back of his head, or… something, really. But it doesn't come. He hops until his ankles feel like they're going to burst, and all the while the Warden just keeps step with him, quietly walking along as he struggles down the road. As if there isn't anything at all strange or objectionable or easily over-powered about what Alistair is doing.
It isn't until he's worn himself down enough to start sweating, and then finally trips and stumbles over his own exhaustion that he figures it out.
He had no real chance to escape, of course, so all he's managed to do is completely wear himself out.
A pair of arms close around his waist, hauling him up and dragging him back towards the cart. He goes slack – dead weight, not making it any easier – and the Warden sighs.
"You're acting like a child."
"You're kidnapping me!" he tosses back.
"It's for your own good." His feet leave trails in the ground, and it's a little painful through his shoes, but he's still not going to give in. "Although I suppose that if you were sensible enough to avoid doing things like this then we wouldn't be here in the first place."
He tries to scowl at the man doing an annoyingly successful job of recapturing him, but the angles are all wrong, and he frankly doesn't have the stamina to keep twisting around. He's tossed none-too-gently into the back of the cart again, the blankets he was laid on before crumpling awkwardly and one of the packs of supplies knocking against his head. Then his wrists are being grabbed, another coil of rope looped over the knot between them, and his comfort level drops significantly as the Warden makes good on his threat and connects them to his ankles.
Becoming a human triangle is very far from the most comfortable position in the world, and he feels a sense of dread coil in his gut as the back of the wagon is closed again, and he's left lying like that.
Pride keeps his mouth shut.
For about half an hour. Then his nose starts to itch, and his back feels like it's on fire, and his shoulders are aching in rough tempo with his leg muscles.
"…Please untie me," he finally says, over the trundle of the wheels.
There's a pause, but it's the full kind of pause that lets him know he's been heard.
"Look, it feels like my arms are going tear off, alright? Just… please." Having to ask him for anything tastes like bile on his tongue.
The cart stops again, and he listens to the heavy footsteps that walk back to where he is. He lets out a breath of relief as he's untied, and then feels a brief surge of surprise as it's not just the rope connecting his wrists to his ankles – as he expected – but all of them. He rubs at his joints, wincing as his blood gets to places it hadn't before, and his nerves protest their mistreatment.
"What, really?" he can't help but ask, turning to look as the Warden coils up the rope and stows it at the side of the cart.
The question earns him a rather negligible shrug. "You won't be going anywhere," the other man points out.
He almost flinches as he realizes the accuracy of that statement. Even if he climbed out of the wagon while it was moving and made a run for it, he wouldn't get far before his body quit on him. He's had more exercise today than in the past three months combined, and he feels almost as awful as he did right after they were rescued from Ostagar.
The thought doesn't help his mood much. In fact it's rather like dropping his emotions into a blender, as his mind seems set on recalling both the first surge of misery and rage at Loghain's betrayal, and the wash of relief he'd felt when he realized he wouldn't be alone to face it. That there was at least oneother warden left alive with him.
He doesn't know what to do with it. He can't drink it away like he ordinarily would, so instead he settles for rummaging through the supply packs as the Warden moves back to the front of the cart and, once again, gets them moving.
There isn't a lot. A pouch full of coins, some cured meat and traveler's bread, a little bit of dried fruit, some spare changes of clothes, and a few scraps of parchment. He leafs through these, and quickly realizes that they're letters. One is in Leliana's writing. Another is in a sharp scrawl he doesn't quite recognize, until he glances at the signature on the bottom and realizes it's Zevran's. The last few are from people he doesn't know.
He skims over them, catching enough to gather that Zevran is taking care of something or other in Antiva, and Leliana still has a preoccupation with shoes. He doesn't know why he should be so surprised to find them, or if he's more surprised that other members of their rag-tag band have branched off on their own (and apparently not become Grey Wardens) or that they're still writing the Warden letters even after a year.
A sentence catches his attention, and he blurts out a question before he can stop himself.
"What's Leliana doing in the Anderfels?"
There's a pause, and it occurs to him that maybe revealing the fact that he's reading his kidnapper's mail is a bad idea.
"Several favours for me at Weisshaupt," the Warden replies, sounding neither terribly pleased nor upset. Just sort of resigned. "It's order business."
Maybe he'd assumed incorrectly. "So she joined the wardens?" he asks.
Another pause. Then, "no."
Somehow that one syllable manages to imply that he's an idiot for even thinking so.
Alistair shoves the letters away again after that. It doesn't matter to him very much anyway. They all took his side after the landsmeet – none of them stood with him, or left with him, or even offered so much as a word of support or agreement. Not that he would expect them to. They weren't at Ostagar, so he can more easily forgive them for not understanding.
Unlike some people.
And most of them aren't even from names he recognizes, anyway, talking about Blight Scarring and the Deep Roads and things he left behind when Loghain tainted the order. For a while he just sort of stubbornly sits there after that, until the rumpled blankets start to dig in against him oddly, and then he straightens them out instead.
"Where are you taking me?" he finally asks. His body's tired enough to sleep, but his mind's telling him that he's been unconscious for at least two days – more or less – and it's had enough of that. Which somehow contrives to just make the whole experience oddly dull.
"Back to Ferelden," the Warden replies. "We're heading for the keep."
That catches him up. "The keep?" he asks. "What keep? Where?" So far as he knows, the Grey Wardens are operating out of their base in Denerim. Aren't they?
"You weren't exactly keeping abreast of news this past year, were you?"
"I heard about that statue Anora's having made of her darling father, if that's what you mean," Alistair spits back.
The vitriol only gets him a sigh. "You have remarkably selective hearing, then. Aside from anything to do with Loghain, Anora also awarded the order Arl Howe's old territory. The keep is in Amaranthine." After a beat, the Warden adds to that, tone lightening a little. "We should get there in about two weeks, if the weather holds and the roads are good."
"Wonderful," he sarcastically sends back. "I can hardly wait."
He knows he's acting obnoxious – he can tell, because he keeps having flashbacks to when Arl Eamon first sent him to the chantry as a boy – but that doesn't make him any more inclined to stop. Still. He's run out of things to ask about, and the Warden doesn't seem inclined to talk much, so instead he just gives up (for now) and lays back down. His muscles are throbbing in that awful, over-extended way which lets him know that if he doesn't get a near-scalding soak in a hot bath in the near future, or something comparable, he's in for a world of ache.
From an evil, evil tactical genius sort of standpoint, it's brilliant. He's going to be out-of-commission for at least another day – maybe more, depending on how badly his body cramps up.
Which is why he's surprised when, a few hours later, they trundle into another little whisper of a town (one he's fairly sure he passed through before) and the Warden gets them a room at the only inn-slash-tavern, and orders him another bath.
"I can't possibly still smell," he says, unthinkingly.
"Thankfully," the Warden replies, arching an eyebrow before leaving the room. "I'll be downstairs if you need me."
Alistair blinks at this. But there's only one stairwell up and down from the second floor – where the inn's rooms are – and the lone window is far too small for him to fit through. Just the same, he slips past the rather grim-faced elves who carry in a worn, ancient-looking tub, and heads towards the stairs.
The Warden is sitting at the table nearest to them. He waves a little bit when he sees him, which Alistair returns with another, less polite gesture. The Reverend Mother would have made him recite a week's worth of chants for it.
He takes the bath, though. Purely because it's an obvious miscalculation on his kidnapper's part, and if he can avoid feeling like death done over (without the benefit of alcohol, even) then he will. If only so that he has a better chance of escaping at a later date.
He soaks until the biting pain in his muscles has been reduced to a distant echo, and the water in the tub has lost its heat. The room they have is much smaller and shabbier than the last, with no beds and only a pair of pallets on the floor. They seem far less inviting than the warm water, so he's reluctant when he climbs out into the cold air again, almost slipping on the edge as his muscles remind him that they're still not impressed.
When he's more or less dried and struggled back into his clothes again, he goes to get the tub taken away, and finds himself lingering in the small little 'tavern' section of the inn. He wants a drink. He very desperately wants a drink, if only so that he won't dream when he sleeps, or feel these jumbled thoughts that keep dancing around in his head like evil little manic pixies. But he doesn't have any money, and he isn't about to ask the Warden for some, or sit at the same scuffed round table as him, so in the end he finds himself in his predicament of just sort of hovering nearby.
The locals give him some odd looks. The proprietor, too.
"Alistair," the Warden finally says. "Come and sit and eat."
He glares, and considers reiterating his stance on dining with Loghain-allied bastards, but everyone's sort of looking at him and he doesn't actually have the energy to fight. So instead he just turns and stomps back up the stairs.
He claims the pallet furthest from the door and lies down on it. Even with the blankets beneath him can still feel the hard floor against his shoulder blades, and he knows that hot bath or not, he isn't going to be great in the morning. By the time he hears heavy footsteps outside of the door the sky outside of the window is pitch black and starless, and he's trying not to think about what might happen in the future. Like usual.
The Warden clomps in – in the dark, just like that, as if he doesn't even need a candle to see by. Alistair listens mutely as he drags the other pallet across the room, until it's in front of the door.
"Are you hungry?" his former friend asks.
He stays quiet, going the 'pretend-to-sleep' route, even though his eyes are wide open and he hasn't relaxed his breathing or anything.
After a moment he hears the sound of a heavy form lowering itself down, a low exhalation filling up the room. Then stillness.
He has no dreams that night – thankfully – and when he wakes the next morning, the Warden is quiet. Even more quiet than usual. Breakfast is thrust at him, with no attempts at conversation or offers of dining downstairs, and even when he has to ask to use the outhouse all he gets in return is a vaguely affirmative grunt, and then an escort.
It's only once he's sitting in the back of the cart, staring at the back of the Warden's head, that he realizes that he's not tied up and somewhat less exhausted than he was yesterday… and he hasn't thought once about trying to escape.
Instead he's sort of wondering what's wrong, and noticing for the second time how the Warden looks paler and thinner and less 'I am the mighty person who can do anything at all!' than he should.
When he catches this, of course, his immediate reaction is to jump over the back of the cart and make a run for it down the road. Or it would have been, but as soon as he jumps the cart stops, and he doesn't get far at all that time before he's caught and tied up again.
They stop twice to water the ox and once to use the bush – and Alistair tries the old 'I can't go while someone's watching' line, but the Warden just scowls at him.
Evening comes without them reaching another town or settlement, and when they settle down for the night it's by the side of the road. Alistair gets to discover the joys of sleeping in an oxcart with a lot more rope than he would generally employ, even if the blankets are warm and the Warden gets a fairly decent fire going. They eat some of the packed rations, and the quiet starts to get to him, but all of the questions he can think to ask either die on his throat or else get one-word answers.
Halfway through the next day, the silence is just reminding him how angry he is.
"So tell me," he prods, shifting a little as the ropes chafe against the skin of his wrists. "What was it like fighting with Loghain?"
The Warden glances back at him, and Alistair blinks, because it could be his imagination but he thinks he sees the faintest sheen of sweat across the top of his brow. But the weather's cool, and the ox has been plodding along obediently, doing nothing that would merit exertion on his part.
"Horrifying," he replies, bringing his thoughts back to his question.
"What?"
A sigh. "There wasn't exactly a lot of time to pay attention to the specifics," the Warden elaborates, which is the most he's said since yesterday. "He killed darkspawn, and he did a fair job of it. We didn't chat or make nice or share witty quips between fights."
"Then what was so horrifying about him?" he asks, although he can think of a few things. Easily.
The Warden doesn't answer him for awhile. He's starting to think that he's back to the silent treatment when, finally, he does. "Loghain wasn't what was horrifying. The fight was."
His voice is low and edged with something sharp and dark. It makes Alistair feel like someone's lit a torch underneath him and filled all of his body with smoke, blackened and charring as it melts away his insides and suffocates him, because he would have followed him into that fight. Gladly. If not for Loghain, he would have never left, and it wasn't the fear of the darkspawn or the archdemon that chased him away.
He wants to say that. There's a loud, vicious voice inside of him that rails that he would have followed him anywhere, into any darkspawn filled, tainted pit of the world, faced against any foe, and that he spoiled it all when he betrayed his trust. When he sided with Loghain and Anora.
The words die in his throat. Another, quieter voice is whispering something else, and he hates that it makes him feel angry at himself instead. Because he isn't perfect, he isn't a spotless picture of virtue, but he has his principals and he knows he's the one who's right about this.
But he doesn't know what to do about it anymore. So instead he just sort of sits there, and goes along, and the when they stop at the next town a few days later, the Warden doesn't retie his hands and legs, and he doesn't give him a reason to. And when they make camp again the day after that, while the Warden does his combat exercises, Alistair finds himself going through the familiar motions of his old training routine.
He knew he was out of practice, but he hadn't realized how badly that was until he winds himself after the first few minutes. Still. He keeps with it. Mostly because he hasn't got anything better to do, he tells himself – not because he's actually going along with this mad plan. Also, if he's going to escape, then he'll need the energy.
After their first week on the road, he's really, really glad that he didn't just decide to sit on his hands.
The Warden senses them first, and initially Alistair is confused when the cart abruptly rolls to a halt, and with a whirl of his cloak and the thunk of his boots in the road, his kidnapper is out of the driver's seat and standing alongside it, weapon drawn and battle-ready.
Then he feels it, and his blood runs cold.
Sensing darkspawn is one of the most terrifying, most useful things about being a Grey Warden. Terrifying because the sense of the taint isn't like a danger alarm, like spotting a tripwire or seeing an arrow aimed at your throat, but rather it feels compelling. The sense of recognition is the same thread which draws inexplicable bonds between wardens, and it's like kin, like self and home and belonging, only just-so-slightly wrong, because Grey Wardens are different enough to have dissonance. The nearest he's been able to like it to is hearing a familiar dog's bark – and then you follow it, and the dog is a snarling wolf who tries to bite your face off. Even when you know what the bark is, hearing it still triggers the sense of 'familiar' and not 'face-eating monster'.
Useful, of course, because it makes sneak attacks and ambushes rather more difficult to manage.
"There's a sword and shield under the cart," the Warden tells him, and Alistair reflexively focuses on his instincts, his eyes turning east towards the tree line. Some wardens, Duncan once told him, can sense darkspawn well enough when they get used to it that they know them down to the last number. It's like the dreams, or how long it takes the taint to run its course – different between individuals. But he's never had that skill, and so far as he knows neither has the Warden, so the best he can manage is a rather vague 'more than a handful' but 'not an army'.
Which is still plenty. He clambers out of the cart, peering under and seeing that, yes, there's a bundle there. He pulls it loose, hastily unwrapping the weapons, not bothering to wonder why there's a sword and shield under the cart until he pulls out the shield.
His mouth goes dry.
"This is…"
"Yes."
He'd left it behind in Starkhaven. It hadn't seemed right to carry Duncan's shield when he wasn't part of the order anymore, but he would have been damned if he left it for Loghain to use. His thoughts jumble, and there isn't even time to have them. At the front of the cart the ox starts to shift, snorting as it moves anxiously from one foot and then the other.
The sense of the taint spreads out, and that's it. That's as much as he's going to get from it – unless the darkspawn get further away, no matter how much closer they move, or how many there are, he won't feel it any differently. Advantage – darkspawn. He hefts the shield and grips the sword, which he shockingly thinks is actually his sword, too, that he'd pawned off months ago when he hadn't had enough coin to drink himself stupid, except that both feel far too heavy for him now.
"Don't fight if you can help it," the Warden says. "Just defend yourself and let me handle most of them."
I could always go out in a blaze of glory right now, he thinks, contrarily, but when the bushes along the roadside shift and catch his eye, he knows he's not really – actually – quite that suicidal. Yet.
Or maybe it's 'anymore'.
The first sign of the fight isn't a darkspawn – it's an arrow, which thuds into the cart shockingly close to where Alistair is standing. The Warden curses. "Shield up. Keep low, with your back to the cart," he instructs, and Alistair finds himself falling into battlefield compliance before he can consider more rebellious alternatives, his kidnapper moving alongside him, at the ready.
There are a few more arrows. Two ping off of Alistair's shield. Another impacts off to the side with a soft thud, and even though he doesn't see it he guesses that it hit the cart even though the sound's a little… wrong. But the ox doesn't charge and the Warden is silent, so that removes those options. Still, it makes him profoundly aware of how exposed he is without so much as a scrap of armour on him.
He stops thinking about it when the hurlocks clear the tree line, and he spots the archer when the movement gives their general position away. There's seven of them. He keeps his shield. The first two go down as the Warden darts forward, crumpling to the ground in messy wrecks of spilt blood and shuddering flesh that happens shockingly fast.
Maker, Alistair had almost forgotten what it was like. It hits him again in a rush, the sheer, monstrous ferocity of it, the reason why their enemies tended to topple before them like puppets with their strings cut. Three more charge the Warden at once, the archer hanging back and nearly hitting Alistair in the calf, the fourth coming straight at him.
Habit, survival, adrenaline, instinct and what-have-you all kick in, and he blocks the sweep of the hurlock's sword. The blow nearly jars the shield from his arm, but he forces it up all the same, taking another hit. If he didn't know better he'd swear the shield straps had snapped his forearm off at the elbow. But then he brings the sword up, carving a line towards the creature's neck. It moves back, tries to parry, and he slams his shield against it instead.
The move is one he used to use quite often. Back then, it didn't tend to lance up his wrist, through his muscles, and into his shoulder in a rippling fire of agony. But back then he'd been fit and healthy and prone to doing it rather frequently. It still comes as a nasty shock, and he almost doesn't recover quickly enough to remember to slice the damn hurlock's neck before it can recover.
That isn't as easy on his other arm as it used to be, either. Forcing the blade through flesh leaves him sweating and exhausted. Duncan's shield is streaked with blood, and it falls rather bonelessly from his grip as he looks up, and sees that all the other darkspawn are dead. Archer included. He can't feel the taint anymore either, except for the calmer sense of the Warden nearby.
Who is facing him now, and has a black-fletched arrow protruding from his right shoulder. Alistair blinks. The ox is alarmed, not running but still edging pointedly away from the darkspawn corpses, sweating and snorting into the air.
"You're injured," he says, dumbly.
The Warden glances at him.
"So I am," he says, speaking through teeth gritted in pain before glaring at the offending arrow. Then he turns back to Alistair, who is drawing something of a blank right then. "You could probably escape now. If you like," he points out.
Blinking, he absorbs that comment and glances around. There aren't any more darkspawn that he can sense, the ox will take some settling before it's manageable again, and the Warden isn't in any shape to chase after him.
He's right.
But his arms also feel like he lit them on fire, and just because there aren't anymore darkspawn within sensing range doesn't mean that won't change in the near future. If his recent fight has shown him anything, it's just how out of practice he is.
"Well. This is going to be awful," Alistair says, because he's looking at all of the darkspawn corpses that need to be burned. Somebody's going to have to build that pyre, or else they'll taint the ground, and he isn't the one with the arrow sticking out of his shoulder.
Somebody's going to have to take care of that, too.
The Warden snorts, moving towards the cart, and one corner of his mouth actually twitches up a little bit. In the end they decide to take care of his shoulder last – "It's not as bad as it looks," he says, and Alistair can tell he's lying but he doesn't say anything – and the Warden cleans up their weapons and calms down the ox while he busily drags the darkspawn into a heap off the roadside. When he's done it feels like his arms are going to declare active warfare on his torso and separate, right before they beat him to death in a fit of ignominious revenge.
"How are we going to light this?" he wonders.
"I don't think we can," the Warden admits. Corpses – even darkspawn corpses – are hard to burn, and neither of them have the energy to go hunting for all the wood they'd need, or enough oil to get something that big going hot enough. "The next town we reach, we'll have them send someone out," he decides. Then he coaxes the ox back into trundling down the road, further from the carnage, and they keep on until they reach a spot that's far enough away to make a decent campsite.
Alistair feels prickly and tense. He follows the cart on foot, because it would be weird to ride while an injured man walks, even if it's an injured man he hates, and his blood thunders through his skull. It's all coming back now, like waking up from a dream and only then realizing that you've been sleeping. The scent of the blood, the feel of a blade in his hand, the cold, crisp, undeniable focus of reality unimpeded by the fuzzy layer of drunkenness.
When they stop again, the Warden rummages in the packs until he finds the kit of bandages and poultices, looking strained. Alistair watches him, and realizes that he means to treat his injury himself.
It's on the tip of his tongue to offer to help. But then he remembers that he's been kidnapped, and so instead he curls up into the cart and rubs at the muscles of his arms, staring at Duncan's shield. He doesn't even look over when he hears a barely-suppressed hiss of pain.
Darkspawn poison their arrowheads. Not in a nice, 'venomous plant matter' kind of a way, either, but in a 'spit blood and bile onto them' kind of way, which isn't generally fatal but does make injuries highly prone to infection. When he'd first joined the wardens, Duncan had warned him about that – always clean your wounds, and make sure your brothers and sisters do the same. He hadn't remembered to tell the Warden about it after Ostagar, but by the time he realized that, he'd also realized that he didn't need to. The Warden had figured it out on his own.
He always figured things out, things that Alistair would need to have explained to him. Like in Orzammar, when they'd emerged from the Deep Roads, silent and grim, and the Warden had said "I imagine that's why there aren't as many female members of the order" to him – and even though Alistair sort of knew about Brood Mothers, he'd never put two and two together and gotten four like that. So after a while he hadn't felt like there was anything he knew about being a Grey Warden that his friend didn't, that even if he didn't want to lead, he was still the senior warden between the two of them.
He sighs, resisting the urge to bang his head against the side of the cart. It's not like it had been difficult. Maker, everyone called him 'the Warden', after all. Himself included. When he thinks of it, he's not even sure that he can remember his actual name.
What that means, though, he doesn't know. He's too tired to try and prod at his thoughts anymore.
"Do you think that was all of them?" he asks instead, letting his mind turn back to the hurlocks lying in a heap further down the road.
He doesn't look towards the Warden, but he hears the slight rustle of shifting clothes. "No," he replies. "There's a nest not too far from here. After Denerim we didn't have the resources to catch or stop the fleeing darkspawn, so there are still leftover bands roaming all over the place. But we're coming from something of a reverse direction. When I passed through here the first time I was attacked by hurlocks."
"And that means there's a nest?" Alistair asks, feeling like he's missing something.
The Warden hisses again, and he hears a light thunk, as of something being dropped onto the ground. "Bands have more than one type of darkspawn, made-up like their units leftover from the battles – hurlocks, genlocks, and shrieks. Nests are made up of darkspawn from a single broodmother, and so only come in a single type."
In this case, Alistair's mind finishes for him, some poor human woman dragged off into the darkened wilderness. He looks over at that. The Warden is binding his shoulder, the firelight casting his features into sharp relief, making him look gaunt and haunted. "If there's something like that here, we shouldn't just leave it," he says.
"I won't." With his shirt off, it's easy to see the scars that riddle his chest and arms – slits from swords and knives, a bite-mark from that horrifying time they were ambushed in the night, and some Alistair has no clue about, like the long series of puncture-wound type dots running in parallel lines across his torso. Front and back, from the look of it. He has his own scars, but… not that many.
"So what? We're just going to hunt them down as we are?" he asks a little skeptically.
The Warden finishes binding his injury, shrugging his shirt back on and giving him a look. "Fortunately, no. When we get to town I'll send word ahead of us. Regnault will organize a group to come and look after it."
"Regnault?"
"One of the wardens from Orlais," he answers, even as Alistair guesses himself.
"Is he the one who used to kill little girls?" he wonders before he can stop himself.
The comment earns him a rather arch look. "Why? Thinking of purging the order of anyone who doesn't meet your high recruitment standards?"
"What? No," he protests, already regretting his decision to start talking in the first place. "And my recruitment standards are not 'high'. Drawing the line at people who have made a really solid effort to kill us all is just good, old-fashioned sanity."
The Warden snorts. "If there was anything remotely enviable about being a Grey Warden, I might agree."
Alistair comes up short, scowling at him for that. "How is it that I can be the one everyone thinks has wronged the order, when you sit there and say things like that?"
"It is a mystery for the ages," is the rather sardonic reply he gets.
Thinking of a suitable response to that is nearly impossible, so instead Alistair turns away, curling up into the cart and thinking unflattering thoughts about his kidnapper until he falls asleep.
It takes them another day and a half to reach the next settlement, and when they do, it's not so much a 'settlement' as a fairly large and bustling town. It might make a good stop for another escape attempt, except that everyone and their dog seems to recognize the Warden – and think he hung the moon – and they all give Alistair decidedly suspicious, unfriendly looks.
"What did you tell them about me?" he finally cracks and asks. He isn't even tied up, so it's not like it's the natural suspicion anyone would have for an obvious prisoner.
The Warden considers it, then shrugs. "Nothing. But people do know that I'm looking for you, and you fit your own description fairly well."
He supposes the implication is meant to be that he has earned a bad reputation all on his own. Well. That fits with the whole 'other Grey Wardens want to kill you' story, anyway. It's enough to make him want to get uproariously drunk (as per usual) but when they get to their inn the Warden locks him inside the room before he can work out what's going on.
When they leave the next morning it's by boat, instead of oxcart, and he's quietly seething and still much, much too sober to deal with half of what's going on, so he tries to give his kidnapper the silent treatment. Which would work better if the Warden didn't take to quiet like a fish to water, leaving Alistair as the one going slowly insane while he listens to gulls screaming at one another and tries not to wonder what this 'keep' is going to be like.
Two days from it, he cracks and starts an actual conversation again. "Where's the dog, anyway?" he blurts, having gotten tired of looking at the marks on Duncan's shield and trying not to pitch his stomach over the side of the boat.
"At the keep," the Warden tells him. "I left him behind with very specific instructions."
"…Specific instructions?"
"Yes. Very."
"The dog."
"Yes."
He scowls, because a year ago he would have assumed that the Warden is messing with him, but now he can't tell anymore. "I would have thought, if you were looking for me, that you'd bring him along."
"If you'd stayed in Ferelden, I would have," he agrees. "But I don't travel with him outside of our borders. Orlesians and Rivaini have a bad habit of killing dogs that stand taller than small ponies."
"…Oh."
He knew that before, actually, but he hadn't thought of it. The idea that someone would try to kill the dog – outside of combat, anyway – is bizarre. He's a dog. You don't kill dogs, that's just a waste of perfectly good canine stock. You feed dogs scraps and scratch behind their ears and let them help you slay darkspawn in exchange for telling them what good puppies they are.
He decides to distract himself by thinking about how weird Orlesians and Rivaini are for as long as he can, and not looking at the Warden or wondering about the near-future, which is looming like the blade of an executioner's axe, even though he's not altogether certain what specifically alarms him so much about it. Maybe if he thought about it he'd figure it out, but he's not even going there.
Instead he just changes the mental subject to how much he hates boats, which works right up until they dock, and then for a little while afterwards, too.
When Vigil's Keep is in distant sight – big, walled, and sprawling towards the mountains – he makes his first decent escape attempt.
Upon consideration, Amaranthine might not have been the best place for it.
The plan's a pretty good one. He waits until they're at another inn, the moon high in the sky and the Warden sleeping – as usual – in front of the door. The window isn't too small for him, but it's high enough that climbing out of it would be a noisy, difficult affair involving a lot of moved furniture and then a painful two-story landing straight into an alleyway.
Just opening the shutters, however, is much easier, and he does it by standing on top of his bed, reaching the frame with one hand and keeping an eye on the Warden. He's only certain that he's asleep because of the twitching. When he dreams, his muscles twitch, and he moves. When he's awake or pretending to sleep, or sleeping without dreams, he's always still as stone.
Once the shutters are open, Alistair climbs off of the bed as quietly as he can, and steals away underneath it. Then he lets the cold air do its job.
He has to wait for quite a few minutes before he hears the Warden stop moving. The silence that descends is heavy and tense. Then there are footsteps, and he knows the plan will be ruined if his kidnapper thinks to look under the bed before jumping to the obvious conclusion.
The boots move over towards the window, turn, and then after a moment – to Alistair's great internal triumph – hurry from the room. He forces himself to listen and wait as they move down the hall, then the stairs, until he can't hear them anymore. Once that happens he crawls out from his hiding place, and quietly as he can checks the hall outside the door.
Empty.
He takes a moment to lament that he doesn't know where the Warden stowed Duncan's shield or his sword, and then creeps his way out. The tavern downstairs is quiet. Sneaking around isn't his specialty, not by a long shot, but he moves as swiftly and silently as he can manage, intent on getting out before the Warden gives up on finding him himself and starts rousing others. His heart is in his throat when he reaches the front door – and then stops.
No. That would be stupid. There's no way he'd fall for the trick so completely as to go far enough to leave the front of the inn unwatched.
So instead he backtracks, moving to the rear part of the tavern, behind the narrow bar and out through the kitchen. He hasn't got any coin, but if he can get far enough away, maybe he can trade his shoes for a cheaper pair and the difference can get him started. He's been in more dire straights.
The streets are still and quiet with sleep. On the one hand it means it's less likely for him to be noticed, but on the other hand, it also makes his passage itself more notable. He's never been in Amaranthine before, and apart from trying to remember the route they took in from the docks, he's at something of a loss as to how to navigate the place. He knows there's a road between it and Denerim – that might be somewhere to start.
He feels like a rogue or a bandit or a criminal as he slinks down the back streets, lost in the dark shadows of buildings and getting utterly turned around more than once. Over the past year he's felt like he was running away from something, but never like he was being hunted. It's not a great change of pace. The streets are muddy and the air is heavy with that awful late-autumn murk, carrying the scent of dogs and garbage and things that have gotten wet enough to grow mould. Even at night it isn't pleasant.
There's the city watch about, of course, and he avoids the glow of their lanterns whenever he spots them. By the time he manages to find one of the gates it's early morning, and still locked up for the night. He watches and waits until the gate guards change shifts, opening up the city again and yawning into their gloves. It reminds him, briefly, of when Ser Cauthrien had locked them up in Fort Drakon.
It had been terrifying. He'd been the first to get knocked unconscious, and when he'd come to they'd both been tossed into the same prison cell, his then-friend still and quiet and looking every inch like a corpse. A visceral relief had washed over him when he'd realized he was still breathing, and he'd been able to momentarily abandon the fear that he was going to be left alone to deal with everything.
Then the Warden had woken up, dusted himself off, and punched out the guard. The world righted itself on that note, Alistair following him as he enacted his elaborate escape plan involving disguises and balls made out of solid steel, and Alistair not having to decide anything or control anything or contribute beyond wielding his sword and shield and making snippety comments.
He throws the memory aside like the poison it is, and instead slips past the guards when they open the gate and then distract one another with conversations about who's had the worse morning so far. It's not that hard – most guards are trained more for keeping shady people out of cities than trapping them inside.
He's got his eyes peeled for any sign of the Warden, and he feels like he's waiting to be swooped upon as he hurries from the start of the road, b-lining for the copse of trees not far off of it. At least he'll have some cover there.
When he actually makes it, he feels a sudden surge of triumph. He's not out of the woods yet – actually he just walked into them, in a non-metaphorical sense – but it's hard not to feel just a little pleased with himself. So much for the great and renowned Hero of Ferelden, then.
Still, he keeps his eyes peeled for any signs of shady figures. Either following him, or waiting for him. He's not going to put anything past him just yet.
Which is probably why he completely neglects to notice the tree.
He hears the great, creaking groan first, which alarms him, but not quickly enough for him to see the large wooden claws until they've closed over his arms and pinned them to his sides. He feels like he's trapped in a horrible, living-tree vice as he's lifted off of the ground and – presumably for reasons of general spite – turned upside-down, so that his legs are flailing above him and all the blood goes thundering into his skull.
With an increasing sense of panic, he reminds himself that fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on one's world view) this isn't the first time he's had to deal with unusually murderous vegetation, and tries to remember how he fought them before. Except he thinks that might have had something to do with Morrigan setting them on fire, which obviously isn't an option right then. It definitely involved him having a sword and shield and his arms free, too.
I can't believe I'm going to die like this, he thinks, as his face is dragged within view of a craggy, bark-covered visage, and a few stray branches dig into his back. My grave is going to read 'Alistair, Grey Warden Deserter Who Got Eaten By a Tree'.
The world lurches as the tree groans again, and guessing by the thundering, jerking motions he has to endure, starts to walk.
"Hmm," he hears a female voice say, just about the same time he notices a familiar, not-quite-darkspawn pull on his senses.
Whirling around to try and see the owner of the voice doesn't do much except hurt his ribs. "H-hello? Is someone there?"
"I'm trying to figure out what an unfamiliar Grey Warden is doing running around out here without so much as a dagger to his belt," the voice informs him, in a tone which manages to imply that this is the most offensive, pathetic thing imaginable, and that he's wasting its owner's time by making her contemplate it.
"I… uh… is this… you do see the giant walking tree, right?" he eventually settles for trying.
A scoff. "Of course I do, shem. I'm the one who made it walk." The gigantic wooden hand that is holding him twists a little, and he finds himself looking at a rather hard-faced elven woman. She has blonde hair and Dalish tattoos, and when she tilts her head a little bit, he somehow doesn't think his odds of not dying have improved much. "Wait. You look like the one from the posters."
"Posters?"
This isn't going well. He's starting to see spots, too.
"Yes. The Grey Warden who turned coward and fled before the battle with the archdemon." She looks him up and down, as if perhaps the poster included measurements. Which, maybe it did, it's not as if he knows. "That would explain a lot. What are you doing, trying to run away again?"
"…If I said no, is there any chance you would believe me?"
Going off of her expression, he thinks not. After a few minutes of staring at him she just shrugs, and his stomach lurches as the tree-hand holding him lifts him up a little higher. "I'm trying to remember if I'm supposed to kill you on sight, or take you back to the keep so they can kill you on sight. But the second one just seems like a waste of time."
For one horrifyingly unwelcome moment, Alistair thinks he knows what it would be like if Sten and Morrigan had a daughter. Then he waves his arms, trying to forestall what the obvious conclusion to her mental dilemma is going to be. Past experiences say 'kill first, worry about it later'. "Wait! If you kill me and I'm not who you think I am, that's murder, isn't it?" he reasonably points out.
"But you are who I think you are," the frightening elf woman points out.
"But how do you know for sure?" he wheedles. "I could just be some unfortunate fellow who keeps getting attacked because everyone mistakes him for this other person."
She scowls, folding her arms. "Except that you're a Grey Warden. That's a very distinctive trait."
This is worse than just getting killed by the tree, he thinks, because at least that had involved less in the way of awkward conversation.
"Velanna!"
His immediate reaction is to feel incredibly relieved at the sound of that voice. Which is then followed by him feeling angry that he should feel relieved, and resentful of the fact that he's in this situation in the first place – which is all his fault anyway – and ruthlessly stamping down on said relief.
"Velanna, do not kill him!"
She turns away from Alistair, and he hears her let out a rather sharp sound of disapproval. "He's always saying that," she mutters to herself, before raising the gnarled mage's staff in her hand. The air goes whistling around his ears as, suddenly, the wooden claws retreat from around his torso, and he finds himself rushing head-first to meet the ground.
Sounds like him, Alistair thinks, before it all goes black.
When he wakes up there's a lot of loud, angry conversation going on around him, and he's tied up again. After a few seconds he decides to keep his eyes closed and listen. Largely because it's the first idea that occurs to him.
"I vote we kill him. He sounds like the mage and we do not need another Anders. We do not even need Anders."
That's the charming Dalish warden – Velanna? – he met outside the gates, he notes.
"He sounds like me? Really? He doesn't look like me. I'm much handsomer. Not to mention better at escape attempts."
I do not sound like that person, Alistair thinks, upon hearing the whiny, self-involved tones.
"The orders from Weisshaupt are fairly clear, Commander," someone with an Orlesian accent decides to point out. "We should do it now, while he is sleeping. The point isn't to be cruel or vengeful, it is simply to handle the problem."
"I will handle it, Regnault, and I will do it as I see fit," the Warden replies. "We need every Grey Warden we can find. Alistair will be given a chance to redeem himself."
Not that I should have to redeem myself, he thinks rather viciously, and then his 'still asleep' act runs into a very distinctive snag as he hears clacking, big footsteps, and smells the familiar smell of dog breath. The air over his face gets noticeably warmer, and he only has a second to think oh, no, before there is a large, wet tongue dragging directly across his cheek.
"Ugh, oh," he protests, eyes flying open in time to see a wet, black nose, and then get sloppily licked again. "Oh no, get away from me you slobbery monster," he protests, even as a paw pins him down by the chest and the dog's hindquarters start vibrating furiously while he wags his tail.
"Oh look, it's awake," Velanna dryly announces.
There's a sharp whistle, and Alistair is blessedly freed from his benign dog attack as the mabari's ears perk and he races over to the Warden's side instead. He blinks past the film of saliva, noting the circle of interested parties all just sort of standing around. They look to be in something of a long, wide hall, and someone has – in addition to tying him up – placed a cushion under his head.
At first he thinks the only person in the room he knows is the Warden, until he spots Oghren standing a fair ways behind him. The dwarf gives him a distinctly drunken scowl.
Everyone else seems either curious, disdainful, or in one case, firmly authoritative.
"Where am I?" he asks, because it's generally a good idea to start with the basics.
"You're in the Fade. We're all demons, and this is a nightmare," a blond fellow with the obnoxious definitely-nothing-like-his-own voice informs him. He's dressed like a mage, with a single golden loop through one of his ears and that Grey Warden-ish feeling about him. In fact, everyone has that. Even Oghren.
"Anders," the Warden says, in the same tone of voice which Alistair has generally heard him say Zevran or Oghren or bad dog. "We're in Vigil's Keep, Alistair. Nate, can you stick your head out of the door and tell Wynne he's awake?"
A dark-haired fellow – who looks suspiciously familiar, for some reason – rolls his eyes, but goes and does it all the same. He passes by a small, rather stern-looking dwarf woman on the way.
"Why do we want him, if he's just going to run away from all of the important fights?" she asks, tilting her head at him like he's a particularly bizarre puzzle, and she knows there's an answer, but damned if it's obvious.
"I do not run away from all of the important fights!" he protests. "I would have fought the archdemon! Happily!"
"Oh, yes, I'm sure. It was just a convenient fit of morality that got you out of the terrifying battle with the corrupted god," the mage says, examining his fingernails. "Gosh, isn't that a shame."
There are some snickers at that, although most of the other wardens just look humourless and disapproving. The whole thing just serves to set his temper off, and since it's much easier to be outraged than do anything else, that's what he goes with.
"I'm not a coward!" Alistair snaps. "He's the madman who inducted Loghain Mac Tir into the Grey Wardens! Loghain betrayed us! He killed the Wardens of Ferelden. He killed the king. He let Arl Howe torture and murder other nobles and tried to sell elves into slavery! What was I supposed to do? Go into battle alongside him?"
There's an echoing sort of silence that fills up the hall when he's done shouting.
One of the Orlesian wardens looks at him. He has long red hair bound away from his face, and scars that run down the left side of it – claw marks which intersect over top of a milky-white and blinded eye. When he speaks, Alistair recognizes his voice as belonging to Regnault. Probably. "It is not the way of this order to judge its members for their pasts," he says. "It is our way to fight the darkspawn, to protect others from their carnage, and to remain loyal to our brothers and sisters."
He speaks in a tone which implies that, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot conceive of any being lower or more despicable than Alistair.
The Warden steps between the two of them. "Precisely, Regnault," he says. "Killing our brother would serve less purpose than bringing him back into the fold." On that note, he glances briefly back towards him. "Insofar as remaining loyal to brothers and sisters is concerned, I have failed him in many ways as well."
He freezes, because that's as close to anything like an apology he's heard out of the other man's mouth yet, and what in the Maker's name is he supposed to do with that?
Fortunately, he doesn't have to think about it for very long, because at that moment Wynne re-enters the room, and in spite of himself he's actually happy to see her. It's a painful kind of happiness, because of all of their friends he would have most expected her to sympathize with him. But she didn't so much as say a word to him after the landsmeet, and when she looks at him now her expression is somewhat conflicted.
"Oh, Alistair," she says, as if she doesn't know what to do, either.
The Warden spares her from deciding.
"Wynne. Take him to one of the free rooms and make sure he's alright, please," he asks. Then he turns to the obnoxious mage. "Anders, lock him in when she's done."
Anders raises an eyebrow. "I assume you mean lock him in," he replies, making a gesture like fireworks with his hands. When the Warden simply nods, he whistles. "Ironic. Anders the Evil Templar Imprisoner. I think I'm going to have nightmares… or possibly a power-trip."
Alistair doesn't even ask. He just lets Wynne take him out of the room, away from the accusing and curious stares, and it's only as she shepherds him into a fairly nice room with red carpeting and broad four-poster that he starts to take note of his surroundings. Thankfully, they leave 'Anders' in the hall.
"Sit down," Wynne tells him, and he does as she asks, mostly out of habit but also because there's no point in getting stubborn with her. It would just make him feel guilty in the long run, and considering that he's got no idea what his emotions are doing right then, he doesn't need that. "You're very lucky that he was the one who found you, you know. If he hadn't stopped Velanna… Well. I don't need to tell you."
"I don't even know why he's doing this," Alistair blurts, looking at his hands. They've always been something of a wreck, those hands. Sword practice isn't easy on them, after all, and neither is darkspawn blood, or subpar, burn-yourself-all-the-time-by-accident cooking skills. The right is a lot worse than the left, covered in old scars and aching from renewed practice.
Wynne looks at him for a moment, and then he feels the familiar wash of her magic as she runs the blue-white aura over him. It leaves him a little lighter than before. "Did you ask him?" she wonders.
"Yes," he admits. "For all the good it did me. He doesn't make any sense." Once upon a time he had seemed to make more sense than anyone else, but Alistair is starting to wonder if he might have imagined that.
"Sometimes he can be inscrutable," Wynne agrees. "If you're asking me to tell you what he's thinking, I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you."
"Well, what are you thinking?" Alistair can't help but ask. She gives him a surprised look as he stares at her, honestly imploring. "You know how important it is to be a Grey Warden. The honour it carries. How can you forgive him for what he did?"
For a few seconds he almost doesn't think he'll get an answer.
Then Wynne sighs, falling, as she generally does, into the familiar role of teacher. She sinks into the chair across from him and rests her staff over her knees. "Grey Wardens offer hope," she says. "They inspire, they protect, they give up their lives for the sake of others. Those are worthy actions for anyone to take." For a moment she closes her eyes, and her voice shifts into a slightly more formal, lecturing tone. "When I came to Amaranthine I didn't think I would be here for very long. But there is something fulfilling in helping those who give up so much of themselves. Yet, no one does this without a reason. Some Grey Wardens serve because it is in their nature to do so. Others, because the order chooses them. And some serve because there is some past crime, some darkness, which they are seeking to atone for. That does not change the value of their actions."
"Loghain didn't deserve atonement," Alistair says, hands clenching reflexively. "He wouldn't have even sought it if he hadn't lost his fight."
"Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir is dead," Wynne replies firmly. "Whatever his goods and evils amounted to when added together isn't something any living person can say. You have to decide right now what you are going to do with your life."
"I can't just forget what happened," he protests.
She shakes her head a little. "A person doesn't need to forget their past to move beyond it. If you cannot condone what was done, then you should dedicate yourself to changing things for the better, so that events don't repeat themselves. But running away doesn't solve anything."
He spreads his palms out, raising his eyebrows a little incredulously. "How can these events possibly repeat themselves?" he wonders. "Unless there's another Blight coming around the corner, I think we're set for the next hundred years or so."
Wynne gives him a look, and he knows he's reached the end of her patience. "Then think on a smaller scale, Alistair. But for the Maker's sake, at least appreciate the fact that you're alive, which is more than most deserters can say no matter how compelling their reasons were." She stands up again then, and pats him on the shoulder. It isn't quite as friendly as it once would have been – more awkward, really – but he doesn't have a lot of time to dwell on it before she leaves the room.
A few minutes later the door lights up with a strange, haunting blue glow.