iv.
Duty
ALISTAIR
As our party crested the last hill, the morning sun reflected off the red cliffs and waterfalls and back on Gwyn's face—the stubborn chin, that nose that was just a tad longer than was the fashion for gentle ladies. Her eyes, green or brown in other lights, looked like gold this morning.
When she cocked her eyebrow at me, I realized I'd been staring. I waved awkwardly, and she smiled, and my stomach twisted, like someone had tied it all up in knots.
I had to tell her. People knew me here. I couldn't stand it if she heard from anyone else. I'd been so careful not to lie to her; I didn't want to lie to her, but I knew if I kept silent any longer, it'd be the same thing as a lie. "Look, can we talk for a moment?" I asked. "I need to tell you something I, ah, should probably have told you earlier."
Gwyn slowed. Her shoulders drooped and her mouth turned down, like she already knew she wasn't going to like what I had to say, but she raised her hand, gesturing for the others to hold position and wait on the road. "Wynne, Sten, give us a moment, would you?" she called. She nodded at me to follow her. Right away she'd known I didn't want to talk to the others about this, just her, and she was stopping to allow it. Maker, she was fantastic. I probably didn't deserve that kind of consideration.
Once we'd passed beyond the point the others could hear—unless Sten had eldritch qunari hearing abilities, which I admitted might not be out of the question—Gwyn stopped. She folded her arms and bowed her head. She looked . . . resigned. Or like she was bracing herself. I suppose it was obvious I hadn't stopped her to give her good news. "What's on your mind?" she asked.
Now that it came to it, I was really nervous. It occurred to me that I'd never actually had to tell anyone before. Before today, everyone who had needed to know about me had always just . . . known. Actually admitting it was harder than I'd thought it would be. "I told you before how Arl Eamon raised me, right?" I began. "That my mother was a serving girl at the castle before he took me in?"
Her eyes darted up to meet mine, then away just as fast. I couldn't tell what she was thinking. "I remember," she said.
I swear, my stomach felt like a hard stone. Or a cold, slimy fish, flopping around down there. I don't know which, but it wasn't nice. I swallowed and gathered all my courage. "The reason he did that was because . . . well, because my father was King Maric. Which made Cailan my . . . half-brother, I suppose."
She let out a breath I hadn't realized she'd been holding, and as the air went out of her she sort of collapsed in on herself. Her face changed, and suddenly I thought she looked ten years older. "It's as I feared, then," she murmured.
That caught me completely by surprise. I really, actually yelped. I sounded like Cavall might have sounded as a puppy, that time she'd told me about when he'd run into a skunk. "What? You knew?"
She shifted, and wouldn't meet my eyes, and I realized she was just as uneasy about this conversation as I was! She was every bit as uncomfortable as me, not because she hadn't known about me, but because she had! Oh, I didn't like that. I didn't like that at all, but before I could scare myself too badly with all the implications of Gwyn's discomfort about my being Maric's bastard, she'd answered. "I didn't know, per se," she said carefully. "It's risky, claiming a bastard for a king without confirmation from another source, even in one's head. But I suspected, yes."
I stared at her. "You suspected." Maker, I sounded like an idiot, repeating her like that, but it was baffling. The biggest secret of my life, and she'd just guessed! Was it really that obvious, or did Gwyn just know everything? "May I ask how?" I finally managed.
She blinked, and frowned. She looked up at me, searching my face, and for a second I saw something like pity in her eyes. "You never met Cailan in person, did you?"
It wasn't really a question, the way she asked it. Now I blinked. "Uh . . . I never had that pleasure, no. I think he knew about me, but it's a bit awkward, isn't it? Acknowledging a bastard half-brother." But the way she said it made it fairly clear how she'd known. I looked down at my hands—looked at Gwyn. "Is it really that obvious?"
She gave me this sad little smile. "It's quite a distinctive resemblance," she confirmed, nodding. "Uncanny, really. It was nagging at me from the moment we met—that you reminded me of someone, but I didn't realize it was the king until you told me you were a bastard, raised by the arl of Redcliffe. Eamon was Maric's brother-in-law, and well known as a confidant of His Majesty. Once I knew that, I wondered how I could have missed it. I wasn't sure, exactly. I didn't want to assume . . . but it didn't seem like a ridiculous assumption."
Strange, to hear her talk about kings and arls like well-known friends and neighbors. Made me remember who I was talking to. In her battle leathers, she was just my friend, my fellow Grey Warden, but Gwyn had been a lady, hadn't she? Gwyn Cousland. The Couslands—they were almost royalty. Oldest family in Ferelden. I wondered how many times she'd been to Denerim. She'd certainly been on speaking terms with Cailan at Ostagar, anyway. They'd talked—twice! When she'd first come to Ostagar, then later—he'd actually demanded an audience. Duncan had been present both times, of course, but the king had definitely wanted to talk to Gwyn, too.
She'd seen him, and the resemblance between us was so strong that all she'd needed was to hear I was a bastard before she'd known whose son I was, and whose brother. "I look like him?" I couldn't help asking. "Like Cailan, I mean. Really?" I traced the lines of the face I saw every morning when I pulled out the small, cheap mirror I had in my kit to shave. I'd never imagined someone could just look at me and tell. That if Maric hadn't given me anything else, he'd given me his face—a face I shared with my half-brother. Thinking of it made them more real somehow.
Gwyn seemed to know now, how I regretted I'd never known them, because her hand closed around my elbow in gentle reassurance. "Very much," she murmured.
I shook my head. "What do you know?" I managed, laughing a little at my sudden sadness. "I never thought I might look like him," I explained. "Never really thought of King Cailan as my brother. It never really meant anything to me." Maric's bastard. It had always been more of a concept than a reality to me somehow. The reason I slept in a stable and the children at Redcliffe jeered. The reason Arl Eamon had felt it was his duty to raise me. Why becoming a Templar, a Grey Warden, had been the highest honors I could imagine for someone like me. Sometimes I'd imagined what it would have been like to be the queen's son, too, to live in a palace instead of a stable—of course I had. Idle fancies.
Gwyn listened, face sympathetic. "I was inconvenient, you see," I told her. "Just a possible threat to his rule. It's why they kept me secret. Why I've never really talked about it to anyone, why I didn't tell you." I hesitated, feeling again how wrong I'd been to keep this from her. She'd been nothing but a friend and companion to me, my partner against the Blight since the day we'd been saved from the slaughter at Ostagar. I tried to justify my silence. Of course it was no good. There was no excuse. "Everyone who knew either resented me for it, or they coddled me . . . even Duncan kept me out of the fighting because of it."
She frowned, and her hand tightened on my arm reflexively. The sudden squeeze hurt, and I stopped talking, looking at her expectantly. She looked worried, apprehensive again. "Duncan didn't keep you out of the fighting," she corrected me. "Remember? It was the king who ordered you back from the battle at Ostagar. That was the other thing that made me think maybe . . . it was like your appearance: it didn't really register until after you told me how the arl had raised you; it was just something that had been bothering me. But afterward, it made me almost certain."
I met her earnest, hazel gaze, and all of a sudden I knew why she was looking so worried, why she'd been as uncomfortable hearing I was Maric's son as I'd been telling her, and it was like the world had turned upside down and all the stars had shifted. All at once, I was hard pressed not to be physically sick.
I'd been so angry that day—I had felt like a child, ordered back from the fight, I had hardly heard Duncan's explanation. Now it was as if he'd only just said it, and his words echoed in my ears with a new, terrible significance. This is by the king's direct order, Alistair.
I knew what Gwyn was getting at. I'd been deaf that day, and now I knew what Duncan had meant. But worse, worst of all, was the horrible suspicion that both of them were right, and at Ostagar, the king of Ferelden himself had ordered me back, not because I was the son of my father, but because I was his half-brother, and it hadn't been about coddling me at all.
Cailan didn't have an heir.
I staggered back from Gwyn's pressing gaze, her hand, which all at once felt like red-hot tongs. "No," I breathed.
But Gwyn refused to let it go. "I wondered that day why the king asked for you specifically, by name. I understood why he wanted Grey Wardens to see to the beacon, of course. Even why he wanted me to go. I'd just completed the Joining that day, after all. But why not send me alone? Or with any other random Grey Warden? Why send you specifically? But if the king knew you were his half-brother, the last of the Theirin line—"
Andraste, I was suffocating. I couldn't breathe. "Impossible," I insisted, trying not to hear how my voice had gone tight, how my skin had broken out in gooseflesh, how sure I was she was right. "I have no illusions about my status, Gwyn. It's always been made very clear that I'm a commoner and now a Grey Warden and in no way in line for the throne."
I didn't want this. I did not want this. Leave aside the question of bastardry for a moment, who in their right mind would put me in charge of anything, let alone a great country? I was more than halfway convinced Ferelden was doomed just counting on me and Gwyn to do our jobs as Grey Wardens.
I took another step back, then another. I started to turn, to head back to the safety of the others.
Gwyn stopped me with a single word. "Alistair."
Just that. Just my name, and she'd stopped me just like she had pierced a tendon with one of her enchanted ice arrows. I groaned, but turned around to face her, jaw tight.
At least she didn't look happy about telling me I was going to have to be king. I could give her that much. She looked about as tortured as I felt. She swallowed, eyes bright. "You 'were a possible threat to Cailan's rule,'" she said quietly, using my own words against me, but at least having the decency to look like she hated herself for it. "You can't be that and be a commoner, too. It doesn't work like that."
Curse it. Why did she have to make sense? I tried one more time. "No, if there's an heir to be found, it's probably Arl Eamon himself," I said. "He's Cailan's uncle, and more importantly, very popular with the people. Maybe Cailan was trying to keep me safe at Ostagar," I conceded. "From everything I've heard of him, he was a good man, but let's not read more into this than there is. I'm a bastard. Bastards can't inherit."
She sighed, but I knew already it wasn't any good. "They're not supposed to inherit," Gwyn replied. "They usually don't. If Cailan had had a child, or even named Arl Eamon his successor in the event of his death—Andraste's teeth, if he'd named Anora his successor, the question probably wouldn't even come up for discussion. But he died without an heir, and you're the last of the bloodline.
"Eamon's claim is by marriage," Gwyn continued. "No stronger than Anora or Loghain's, though I'll grant you Eamon is a better option than they are. No, Alistair. You've been honest with me at last. I'll do the same for you. You have the strongest, surest claim to the throne of Ferelden, bastard or no, and even if you don't want it—"
"I don't!"
She hissed in a breath, and I realized I'd almost shouted at her. Immediately remorseful, I took a step toward her, but she held up a shaking hand. She was close to tears, I saw. Trembling. Nearly as terrified as I was, which somehow made this even scarier. She'd been a lady before. Almost royalty. She knew what this meant. She met my eyes, as serious as I'd ever seen her. "Even if you don't want it, from now on, there will always be those that wish you to sit there regardless, and will act to seat you there, for power or tradition or what have you. It's why I hoped for your sake I was wrong about this. It will get out, Alistair. Things like this always do, and you are the heir to the throne. The only legitimate one we've got.
"I'm not asking you to do anything about it right now," she said. "We've the Blight to contend with. But think about it. There will come a time when you'll either have to make a decision about this, or have the decision made for you. In any event, I promise you this: you will have my support, Alistair, and my protection. A Cousland does her duty."
That pulled me up short again. That was the other side of the Cousland thing, wasn't it? Oldest family in Ferelden. Princes and princesses, and knights as far back as anyone remembered. King and country above all else. As I looked down at her lifted chin and determined gaze, my heart sank. There it was. So much for battle leathers and facing the Blight together, equals. Now everything was out in the open, I'd always be the future king of Ferelden to Gwyn. Or a possible future king of Ferelden, anyway. Void take it, I didn't want her to be my knight! I'd hoped—it didn't matter what I'd wanted. My father's blood would follow me if I fled to the Anderfels.
"Duty," I repeated, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. "That's why I've never talked about this before with anyone that didn't already know, you know. They always treat me differently. The bastard prince, instead of just . . . Alistair. My father's blood has always cast a shadow over everything I do."
Gwyn sighed, but didn't deny it. "And always will," she answered. "You are a prince, Alistair. You can't avoid it. I can't avoid it. But it doesn't have to mean that I am any less your friend, or that I am protecting you any less for your own sake than that of who your father and brother were. On the contrary, our friendship will make me that much more the eager to do my duty."
It really might have been something of a joke, the notion of her protecting me. In close quarters, I actually was quite a bit better than Gwyn was. At range, though—well, at range she was deadly. Half the enemy went down to her poisoned and enchanted arrows before they ever got to me, usually. And she was just so serious about it.
I groaned. "If you must." I knew she was only looking out for me. And at least she was being honest with me. At any rate, she'd suspected for over a fortnight, and she hadn't let me off the chores at camp or kept me back from danger yet. She respected I knew how to take care of myself. If anyone had to treat me like a potential heir to the throne, at least it was Gwyn. "Can we just . . . not think about it now, though?" I pleaded, desperate to salvage any kind of normalcy I could here. "Between us, and in front of the others, can we just go back to pretending I'm some . . . nobody who was just too lucky to die with the rest of the Grey Wardens?"
Gwyn raised an eyebrow at me. "Nobody's a nobody," she replied quietly. "Even before I guessed, you were never such to me, Alistair. I would not wish to share this duty of stopping the Blight with any other. I would not trust it to any other. I feel I am the lucky one, to have you with me."
I gazed back at her, frankly flabbergasted. Here I was, a bastard boy that spouted foolish nonsense about dogs and cheese at her when I couldn't think of what else to say, and she thought she was the lucky one here. Aside from being far kinder than I had any right to expect, and practically a princess besides, she was just . . . amazing. Strong. Brave. Scarily clever.
And beautiful.
I halfway raised my hand. To do what, I've no idea. Touch her face? Smooth her hair? I lost my courage before I'd closed the distance. "I . . . feel very unworthy of that," I managed. And she smiled at me, laced her fingers through my hand, squeezed once, and let go.
She started back toward Wynne and Sten, and I followed her. Maker, I didn't know the first thing about being king. All my life they'd told me I never would be. I certainly didn't want to be. But . . . if I had someone like Gwyn Cousland on my side, that had to count for something, didn't it?
As we rejoined the others, Wynne and Sten looked very curious about what we had been talking about by the cliffs all on our own, and I sighed. I'd have to tell them, too. I'd have to tell all of them.
I looked over at Gwyn. Her face was grim as we started down the path toward the town, and she met my eyes with every bit as much trepidation as I felt. She was right. It would get out. Cailan was dead, and we couldn't leave Loghain in charge, and here I was—Maric's bastard son, the last Theirin alive.
The one that was never supposed to be king.
I swallowed. Later. For now, I didn't have to be king. Gwyn would be watching me now, protecting me, for Andraste's sake, but for now, the only thing my duty told me to do was walk down the hill to Redcliffe. Thank the Maker for small mercies anyway.
