"My lady?"
The voice pierces your sleep, and you wake with a start, expecting to feel the rough wool of a bed roll, and the damp, hard ground beneath you. When instead you encounter nothing but soft, clean sheets and fluffy down pillows, your disorientation rises to panic, and you search frantically for your dagger.
Which of course is nowhere to be found.
Your mind comes around as you shake off both the drowsiness of sleep and the disorientation of waking in an unfamiliar place. Of course your dagger is not beneath your pillow. It's likely locked safely away in some armory, somewhere, in this sprawling palace…which is now your home.
You blink the sleep from your eyes and find yourself facing your Lady Chamberlaine, whose name escapes you for the moment, but the well-dressed noblewoman in front of you could be no one else besides your highest-ranking lady-in-waiting. At this ungodly hour, no one else would dare wake the future queen.
"My lady, I'm sorry to wake you in this manner, but…His Majesty is awake, and is rather…insistent on seeing you."
"Of course," you stammer, rousing yourself from bed, gathering your nightgown around you, "where is His Majesty?"
"In the royal antechamber, with the Lord Chancellor, my lady."
"Ah, I suppose I must get dressed then," realizing that, aside from various and sundry armors you've acquired on your travels, you don't really have any clothes to speak of.
"Yes, my lady," the Chamberlaine replies, clapping her hands crisply. Almost instantaneously, a veritable fleet of maids swoops through the door bearing toiletries, towels, jewels, shoes, and armfuls upon armfuls of clothes. You are vividly reminded of something Alistair once said: "Swooping is…bad."
**********
You enter the royal antechamber, a room you have not set foot in since you were a small child, and a memory comes flooding back to you, unwelcome and unbidden, of yourself at age seven or eight, being introduced to King Maric for the first, and last, time. You delight him with your precocity as your father looks on proudly, and the mighty warrior king of Ferelden lets you sit on his lap and wield his scepter like a mace, to the uproarious laughter of the courtiers. He chuckles heartily, and makes an offhand joke to your mother about you marrying his son and becoming queen. You wrinkled your nose and pouted then, thinking about the ruddy and boisterous Prince Cailan, seven years older than you and friends with your brother Fergus, and how distasteful the idea of marriage and queendom seemed then.
And yet here you are now, about to marry Maric's son, although not the one he was thinking of at the time. And when your eyes finally rest on your betrothed across the room, you feel a pang of guilt that you, and not he, had this chance to be praised and coddled by his father, a man who, for all his virtues, sired a bastard and left him to sleep in a stable.
But Alistair's eyes on you are much different, and his look when he turns startles you; he stares as if he's not quite sure who you are, and it's unsettling to say the least. Then you realize, belatedly, that this may be the first time he has ever seen you wearing anything but armor (or, of course, nothing at all). He's not quite sure what he's looking at, this woman draped in blue silk, her dark hair piled in bejeweled plaits on top of her head. A sparkling necklace of diamonds and pearls (an engagement present from Lady Isolde) sits around your neck, your face and arms are powdered to an almost unearthly white; with horror you realize how much you must resemble Anora at this moment.
But he smiles at you, genuinely relieved that it is, in fact, you, under all the frippery. You smile back, reassuringly, and he seems to start towards you, until the Lord Chancellor, Arl Eamon, puts his hand upon the King's shoulder, bidding him to wait. And he's right, of course. The King does not go to anyone; people come to the King, even his future wife, especially with a room full of courtiers watching. As you approach, he almost reaches out his arms to embrace you, but before he can, you startle him by sinking into a low courtesy.
"Your Majesty," you say, and take his hand, still looking at the ground. An uncomfortable beat passes before he realizes he is supposed to bid you to rise. When he does, you look him flush in the face and see his discomfort. It is only then that you can give him your genuine smile, the one that only Arl Eamon can see at the moment, reassuring him that everything is alright. He is still Alistair and you are still Elissa, and it's just like it was by the fire at camp, when you all smelled of dried darkspawn blood and Maker-knows what else. Your warm smile and laughing eyes reassure him of all of this.
Except that deep down inside, you know it for the lie that it is.
You can only barely imagine how he feels. Yes, it was a bit unsettling the first time you addressed Fergus as "Your Grace," and realized that soon he would bow before you, and address you as "Your Royal Highness." It seems like just yesterday the two of you were thwacking wooden swords together in the courtyard at Highever, covered in dirt, calling each other Maker-knows what horrible names. Still, the both of you were raised since birth in the intricacies of rank, title, and precedence, and once the footing was found, the formalities rolled off your tongues as easily as the names you'd teased each other with as children.
For Alistair, you know, it must be different. From hay at the stables to a cot at the Chantry to the ranks of the Grey Wardens, he'd likely rather navigate a battlefield strewn with Tevinter cavalry than a royal antechamber filled with courtiers.
What's more, you agree with him. Standing there, powdered and bejeweled, surrounded by strangers pretending to be your friends, you long for the chilly, damp nights at camp, lying in his arms in a cramped tent, with your dog barking outside, and your companions undoubtedly gossiping about the both of you by the fire.
Those days are gone, and in any number of ways these days are far better. But that is one thing you miss.