Written for a Cheeky Monkeys challenge to write a Dragon Age piece in ten minutes. This drabble took eight minutes, forty five seconds. I timed it. :)


She had waited. She had waited and hoped for so long.

And now the whisperers called her the barren one. They muttered behind their hands about her age, about her common blood, about almost everything...except the one thing that might make a difference.

Cailan

But if he came to her bed more often, would it indeed make a difference? She had kept a watch over his mistresses for many years - not exactly hard, he was not the most discreet of men. Not one of them ever claimed to have borne a royal bastard. Not one had even claimed to conceive one.

And yet the blame always came back to her.

Had she not been her father's daughter, there might have been remedies. That bastard of Maric's being trained as aTemplar. That other young man, the mage, whose resemblance to the late king had drawn comment before. Men are not so different, and desire can be awoken, and she was still a beautiful woman. Circumstances can be engineered.

But she was her father's daughter, and that father had told her so often that a man or woman who does not keep their word is worth less than the filth in Denerim's gutters. And she had given her word to cleave only to Cailan, to love and honour him. No matter that he had no intent even then of fidelity, he was bedding one of his mistresses two nights after the wedding. In her grief and fury that night, alone in a royal bed, she might have considered anything. But Loghain's words were the ghost in the room, the hand on her wrist, the lock on her mind. She could not do it. That night she hugged a pillow to her and wept for her lost mother. For the first, and the last time.

And so began the days of counting, counting, hope, grief, and counting again. And the smile that is her shield against all they believe she does not hear they have said.