She awoke nude on a rough cot, with her head throbbing mercilessly and her shoulder aching from some deep wound she could find no evidence of when she glanced at it.
Healing magic? The Circle mage, perhaps, from the Tower of Ishal? Rìona shook her head in confusion, trying to recall what had happened after they had killed the ogre and lit the signal beacon. Had there been another wave of darkspawn, trapping them in the open atop the tower? And then—
"Ah, your eyes finally open. Mother shall be pleased."
That elegant, disdainful voice was familiar. Rìona blinked bleary eyes and the form of a beautiful, dark-haired woman swam into view. "I remember you," she croaked, and a gourd of water was thrust into her hands. Rìona drank deeply, struggling to make some sense of her situation. She did not recognize the room she was in, with its rough-hewn wooden walls dabbed with mud to fill the cracks and chinks. The fire on the hearth failed to drive out the chill entirely, but something fragrant simmered in a large pot over it and Rìona found that she was ravenous, a sensation ridiculously at odds with the nausea the horrid aching in her head was causing.
"I am Morrigan, if you don't recall," the woman finally said, and Rìona nodded carefully in deference to her tender head.
"I do," she said again. "But where are we? The last thing I remember was being overwhelmed by darkspawn."
"Mother saved you. She rescued you from atop the tower and brought you here to heal your wounds," Morrigan explained.
"What about—" Rìona paused, swallowing hard against a wave of sickening dizziness. "What about the king, the other Grey Wardens?"
"All dead," Morrigan answered impassively, turning away to stir whatever was cooking over the fire.
"Maker's blood, no!" Rìona gasped. "What happened?"
"The man who was to respond to your signal quit the field, leaving those fighting the darkspawn in the valley to be massacred. Your... friend is not taking it well."
"Alistair is alive?"
"Your fellow Grey Warden, the childish, blubbering one?" Morrigan asked. "Yes, he lives. Mother saved you both, though I do not understand her reasons. Your king would have fetched a much better ransom."
Rìona cast a baleful eye at the witch, taking in her scant garb, barely worthy of being called a shirt or robe. "Have an overdue account with your seamstress, do you?"
"A ransom need not be paid in coin," Morrigan bristled. "Power is much more useful."
Rìona shook her head, her anger abandoning her as she struggled to push herself up from the cot and gather her clothing and armor. "Why would Loghain do such a thing?"
The witch stared at her blankly. "I do not know who this Loghain is."
"And yet you know so much else," Rìona challenged.
"I had an excellent view of the valley during the battle, and for what followed afterward. I saw enough to understand what had transpired, if not to become familiar with the people involved or their motivations."
"Were there any survivors?"
"A few stragglers here and there, though I will be greatly surprised if they manage to make it out of the Wilds before the darkspawn overtake them. As for the rest, well, you don't want to know their fate."
Recalling the monstrous appearance of the creatures she had battled, Rìona knew the witch was correct, though she despised herself for her cowardice for not demanding more information. Morrigan turned her back to Rìona, allowing her the privacy to dress.
As she pulled on her clothing and armor, Rìona recalled Loghain's hate-filled eyes, his mad rage at Cailan's decision to summon aid from the Orlesians, the loathing he'd demonstrated when the king's preferential treatment of Rìona had all but confirmed his suspicions about her having seduced Loghain's own daughter's husband. She sat down abruptly upon the cot.
"This is my doing," she whispered.
Morrigan arched a brow at her. "Are you going to begin blubbering, as well?" she asked scathingly. "Those who died may have been your friends, but I hardly think they would approve of the way your fellow Grey Warden has been carrying on. 'Tis certainly not the way of the Grey Wardens of legend."
Her friends? Fergus, her beloved older brother, whom she could not dare hope had survived when an entire army had perished. Cailan, vainglorious and insipid, whose passionate caresses had moved her nonetheless. Duncan, cold, pragmatic, unknowable, who had used her so ruthlessly. To say nothing of the hundreds of soldiers from Highever, many of whom she had trained beside.
"They were not friends," she muttered. Friends was far too anemic a word to describe the complex, tangled interweave of associations that were now a shattered ruin.
She heard a bark outside the door and realized that Conall had survived. She was not entirely alone! She hastened in struggling lace on her pauldrons and buckle her vambraces only to be stopped by Morrigan, who approached her with a steaming clay cup.
"'Tis a healing tea," she explained, offering it. "Mother bade you drink it, 'twill help with the lingering aches."
The witch quickly turned her back to Rìona and left the hut. Rìona carefully sniffed the contents of the cup, puzzled by Morrigan's sudden unwillingness to meet her eyes when she had offered it. She wasn't entirely certain she wanted to sample a potion from the strange witch and her clearly insane mother. The brew smelled bitter, and she rather thought she would prefer to take her chances with the monstrous headache throbbing in her temples than test the Maker's forbearance drinking it on an empty and still-queasy stomach.
With Morrigan absent, it was a simple matter to empty the contents of the cup onto the fire, where they sizzled and steamed briefly with a pungent odor, and quickly leave the hut before she returned. Conall barked joyously as she stepped into the overcast daylight outside the hut and Alistair spun to greet her, relief writ plain on his face.
"You're alive!" he gasped and for a moment Rìona feared he might try to hug her. With his features so strangely similar to Cailan's, she didn't think she could bear that. It was strange to think that the king was gone. He'd been a fool, and in the end she'd realized she did not wish to find herself wed to him, but what had happened between them had left its mark on her, somehow. She couldn't consider his death and feel nothing. "Thank the Maker. I thought for certain you were—"
"I'm fine," she said gently. "Though I understand we have Morrigan's mother to thank for that."
"She saved us," Alistair confirmed.
"'She' is standing right here," the old woman bristled.
Rìona looked at the strange old mage, frowning. "May we know to whom we should address our thanks?"
"The Chasind folk call me Flemeth. You may do the same, if you like."
Alistair gawked at her. "The Flemeth from the legends? The Witch of the Wilds?"
Rìona blinked, stunned. The legends of the great mage Flemeth had originated in Highever, where supposedly she had once been married to a great lord, long before Ferelden was even a country. The tales had all dealt with a seductive beauty, however, not the crone she saw before her now.
"If you are the Flemeth of legend, you must be very... powerful," she said carefully, though the first word that had spring to mind was old. She would have to be diplomatic, for it would not do to give offense in case any portion of the tales turned out to be true.
"Certainly, compared to you," the deceptively decrepit-looking mage smirked.
"Why did you save us?" Alistair demanded. "If you're so powerful, why not save Duncan? He was the one who knew how to stop the Blight."
Flemeth shook her head, but declined to answer. "I'm sorry for your Duncan, but you haven't the time to grieve. It must come later."
"But they're all dead!" Alistair shouted. "Duncan. The Grey Wardens. Even the king!"
Sweet Andraste, why did it hurt so much to hear those words spoken aloud?
Rìona bit her cheek, blinking against the burning in her eyes. "This isn't the time, Alistair," she said, her voice rough.
"No, it's not," Flemeth agreed. "Now is the time to do your duty. For you, as Grey Wardens, that means uniting the lands against the Blight."
Rìona scoffed, her mind treading easily along the familiar and well-worn path of Fereldan politics. "I suspect that's going to be a great deal more difficult that it sounds. If Loghain has done what you've told us he did, Ferelden is going to fall into chaos. The king had no heir, and the queen is the daughter of the man who abandoned him to death."
Alistair growled. "I hate politics," he muttered. "Just tell me we're going to find Loghain and bring him to judgment."
"That, too, may have to wait," Flemeth advised him and Alistair glared at her. "Or is it your intention to forsake your duty to combat the Blight in the interest of vengeance?"
"But why would Loghain do this?" he demanded, and Rìona looked at her feet. How could she ever tell him that it was she who drove Loghain to this madness by her actions with the king?
"That is a good question," the old witch nodded. "Perhaps he thinks the Blight is merely another army, another war. Perhaps he has no appreciation for the true evil behind it."
"The archdemon."
Flemeth nodded again. "An Old God, tainted by the darkspawn, if you believe your legends. Regardless, it is a fearsome and immortal thing."
"Alistair is the real Grey Warden here. I'm just..." Rìona let her voice trail off, unable to complete the sentence. Duncan's pet whore, she thought bitterly. Recruited not for her skill in combat, but for her ability to seduce. Little had Duncan known what devastation setting her loose upon the king would wreak.
"You can't back out on me now!" Alistair protested, a desperate note of panic in his voice. "We're the only Grey Wardens left in all of Ferelden, and I'm not—I can't—I won't let Duncan's death be in vain!"
"And what should I do?" Rìona snapped back at him. "I've lost everyone as well, even my brother now. I don't want it to all have been for nothing, but—I'm not the fighter you are, Alistair."
"Duncan wouldn't recruit someone whose skills he wasn't certain of," Alistair argued.
"My skills—!" Rìona began heatedly, but Flemeth interrupted.
"Skill at arms, or even with magic, is not the only strength a person may possess," the old witch interjected. "To turn these stupid humans who ignore the Blight's evil from their petty politics and inspire them to face the archdemon, well... that may take some persuading, don't you think? Flemeth may be old, but she once knew a thing or two about how to turn men's minds to her way of thinking."
Rìona shook her head, seeking to deny their words, but Alistair took her by the upper arms, looking at her with fearful, earnest eyes. "Please. I can't do anything on my own."
She stared at him helplessly, at his face so like Cailan's, whose death she had brought about. In the wake of all the destruction she had set loose, what could she possibly contribute to fight the Blight?
And yet... Alistair was right. Duncan had seen something in her, had seen a need that she could fill.
She found herself nodding, looking away from Alistair's pleading eyes. "All right," she sighed. "I'll... do what I can."
"Thank you," he breathed, releasing her arms and stepping back.
Rìona closed her eyes, considering for a moment. "We need to find and kill the archdemon then, correct? That's the driving force behind the Blight?"
"Yes, but... I don't know how. In previous Blights, it's taken the armies of a half-dozen nations to bring it to an end. There's just the two of us."
"All right," she said, taking a strange comfort in looking at the problem analytically. "The other Grey Wardens, then. What do we know about them? Can we contact them?"
"Duncan said the Grey Wardens of Orlais had been called, and the king was sending for them when we were preparing to pull back, but who knows what Loghain is going to do if they try to cross the pass through the Frostback Mountains and enter Ferelden," Alistair answered thoughtfully. "Besides, it's nearly winter. The mountains may be impassible until spring. They might have to come by boat and the Waking Sea is nearly as bad in the middle of winter or so I hear. We... we have to assume they won't arrive in time."
"In time for what?" Rìona asked. "Do we know how fast a Blight spreads?"
Alistair shook his head in puzzlement. "The darkspawn move fast as a horde, as we saw when they arrived before expected at Ostagar. The longer we wait, the worse it's going to get, but I can't really give you a time frame on how long it's going to take to spread all across Ferelden. Months, perhaps. Maybe a year? I don't know."
"Then our job is to convince Loghain to take the Blight seriously."
Alistair shook his head again, this time in denial. "He's too power-hungry. He just betrayed his own king. Do you really think it will matter to him?"
Loghain's mad eyes glared at her in her memory. "Power-hungry, or simply insane?" she asked with a thoughtful frown.
"Maybe both, I don't know," he shrugged. "If Arl Eamon knew what he had done, he'd never stand for it. He'd call for Loghain's execution. There would be civil war."
"The king's uncle?" Rìona stared at him in surprise. "You know the Arl of Redcliffe?"
"Um. In a way, I guess," Alistair said evasively. "My mother was a serving girl in his castle, and he took me in after she died. He raised me, after a fashion."
Rìona hummed thoughtfully. "I've never met the arl, but my father said he was a decent man, respected in the Landsmeet. As the late Queen Rowan's brother, he's as close to the pinnacle of political influence as one can be, at least now that my father is dead."
Alistair's expression brightened with excitement as he suddenly seized upon a plan. "Of course! The arl wasn't at Ostagar, so he still has all his troops. We can go to him for aid!"
Maker help her, she wanted to seize the bright, gleaming thread of hope running through his words, lending eagerness to his tone, but she simply felt tired and confused. It felt as though her sorrow and regrets were weighing down her limbs, making even the words she spoke come with an unaccustomed effort. Nonetheless, somehow she found herself agreeing to attempt to gather an army. The treaties they had been sent into the Wilds to claim before her joining gave the Grey Wardens the right to call for aid in the event of a Blight from the mages of the Circle of Magi, from the dwarves of Orzammar, even from the elusive Dalish elves.
"It may not be a half-dozen nations, but it certainly sounds like an army to me," Flemeth said smugly.
Alistair's golden eyes positively glowed. "Then we can do this?"
Rìona shrugged helplessly, unable to deny the appeal in his avid gaze. "We're the last Grey Wardens, are we not? Maker help us."
He looked hurt and confused by her lack of enthusiasm, and she immediately felt contrite. "I'm sorry, Alistair. This just— never mind. We'll do it. It's going to take me some time. But we'll do it," she promised with a halfhearted smile of encouragement.
The smile did not linger long as Flemeth announced her intention to send Morrigan to accompany them. The dark-haired mage argued adamantly against going, and Rìona was scarcely more pleased with the idea, even if her magic would prove useful in their endeavors. Alistair's strained expression spoke of his own displeasure at the thought, but she found her position changing when he introduced his argument.
"We have enough problems without inviting trouble from the Chantry for keeping company with an apostate!" he declared.
How had she let herself forget her fellow Grey Warden was once a templar? She wondered how much of the Chantry's doctrine he still clung to. Bad enough to introduce a unsanctioned mage into their efforts when her only other companion was trained to hunt and subdue such mages, but what would he think of Rìona's own... unique set of skills and perspective, if he should happen to find out about it?
Maker's breath, but this was a mad endeavor. She ought to scurry as fast as she could for the Coastlands and book passage to Rivain or someplace someplace well beyond the reach of the Blight. And yet...
Do your duty, daughter. Make us proud.
"It was illegal magic which saved us," she reminded Alistair, frowning at him when he would have continued to protest. "Sanctioned by the Chantry or not, Morrigan's magic may turn out to be useful. We haven't so many allies that we can afford to turn down help when it is offered."
"Thank you ever so much," Morrigan muttered resentfully. "I suppose I'll go gather my things."
After a bit more discussion, it was decided they would travel north to a village called Lothering, which was something of a crossroads along the Imperial highway. There they could hear the latest news and replenish their scant supplies. Rìona had not possessed much to lose as a result of their inability to return to the encampment at Ostagar, but Alistair had lost all but the armor and weapons he wore. They hadn't even bedrolls to sleep upon, nor changes for the clothing they wore under their armor.
Gratefully she touched the hilt of the Cousland family sword where it rode upon her back. She didn't know what prescience had convinced her to bear its unnecessary weight when they went into the Tower of Ishal, but had she not done so it, too, would have been lost.
Money was also going to be a problem, but there was little help for that now. Perhaps they might find some odd jobs in Lothering to help purchase supplies.
Alistair was distracted bundling together what little Flemeth could send along with them when the old witch took Rìona aside.
"Do not undervalue what skills you have," she said, piercing Rìona with her strange reptilian eyes. "For you wield more power than you know."
Rìona frowned, uncomfortable with the witch's presumption. "And what do you know of my skills?"
The mage of legend, crone that she appeared to be, laughed in her half-mad way. "She may not look it now, but Flemeth was once young and beautiful. Men died for her. They even killed for her."
"Men enough have already died and killed by my actions," Rìona muttered bitterly.
Flemeth shook her head. "You cannot know what shadows linger in the hearts of men, or what drives their actions. It is a dangerous art you practice, true, but a powerful one as well. And you will need every weapon you can wield to defeat this Blight."
The old mage left her then to bid Morrigan farewell, and then they were on their way. She had not realized it, but they had been days at Flemeth's hut deep in the Korcari Wilds, recovering from their wounds. Due to their need to progress with caution to avoid the parties of darkspawn roaming the Wilds, it would be many more days until they reached Lothering.
Alistair was quiet as they set out upon their journey under a dismally leaden sky, which even upon such short acquaintance Rìona realized was uncharacteristic for him. He'd been positively chatty on their excursion into the Wilds prior to her Joining. She considered what he had said outside Flemeth's hut about Duncan having been like a father to him. To have lost his mentor and all his comrades... certainly he must be hurting badly. She, of all people, could understand that loss, and yet she found herself unable to reach out to him and offer a sympathetic ear.
She thought less of herself for that inability. Whatever her ambivalence in her feelings toward Duncan at the end, surely she could set it aside enough to offer her one remaining comrade some comfort. Her bitter last words to the man who had been her father's chosen confidante haunted her. It filled her with remorse to know her final words to him had been of hatred when he had in some way become the last of her family. Still, she did not think she could tolerate Alistair eulogizing him. She did not believe the former templar truly knew exactly the sort of man his mentor had been.
But then, did she? Surely her father must have seen something in Duncan that had been worthy of his trust. Had he been mistaken, or was there more to Duncan than the ruthless pragmatism that had been left at the end? She fell asleep still pondering that thought, troubled, and woke hours later thrashing and moaning with the roars of a monstrous-looking dragon echoing in her head.
"Bad dreams?" Alistair's voice reached her from where he sat nearby, keeping his shift at watch by the fire.
"Why do I think you already know the answer to that?" Rìona asked, pushing herself upright. Her skin was chilled from sleeping on the bare ground; they would absolutely have to get blankets for bedrolls when they reached Lothering.
"You had a few in Flemeth's hut when you were unconscious the last couple days, so I've been anticipating having to have this talk with you for a while."
"What talk is that?"
"Duncan didn't really have a chance to tell you much about what to expect after your Joining." Alistair drew a deep, shaky breath, as though struggling with some profound emotion. "So, I, um, guess that job falls to me. You can expect a lot of those sorts of nightmares. It's how we sense the archdemon. We hear him... talking to the horde. That's how we know it's a Blight."
"I saw a... dragon. I think?"
"That's the archdemon," Alistair nodded. "They say the Old Gods were dragons. Big ones. Some of the older Grey Wardens say they can understand him when he speaks, but I can't. I just hear lots of roaring."
"I see. Any other changes I should know of?"
Alistair pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Recovering from a head injury, maybe you haven't noticed, but your appetite will increase."
Her stomach chose that moment to give a decidedly un-genteel gurgle. "That's... lovely," she muttered, looking at the empty pot by the fire. Though Morrigan had laid snares and Conall had gone hunting, they'd had no success in finding any game. The wildlife, Morrigan explained, was migrating out of the Wilds ahead of the Blight. Until they could put more distance between themselves and the darkspawn horde, game would be scarce.
"Don't feel bad," Alistair said encouragingly. "I thought I was starving, too. Back at the Grey Warden compound in Denerim. Took a lot of ribbing about it from the other Grey Wardens, too, though they had all gone through it at one point or another. I guess it's a bit of a rite of passage, making a fool out of yourself wolfing down your food."
"Or it would be, had we any food." Rìona gave him a small smile. Alistair grinned in reply, though it was a shadow of the warm, engaging smile he'd given her a few times before the battle.
"Sorry," he muttered. "This probably isn't what you envisioned when you imagined being a Grey Warden, is it?"
"No," Rìona murmured absently, "not what I envisioned at all." Alistair looked away and an awkward silence fell, until finally Rìona asked, "What of you? Is being a Grey Warden all you dreamed?"
"It's... an honor. A purpose. Doing something important, being a part of an order of peerless warriors. It's certainly better than life as a templar would have been," he snorted, then sobered. "Or at least, I thought it was, until all this happened. I'm sure it still is, I'm just having a hard time remembering how at the moment."
"Being a templar wasn't your heart's desire?"
Alistair shook his head emphatically. "Devotion to the Chantry is all right for some, but I was miserable at the monastery. I'm not very pious, and I didn't fit in well with any of the other templars in training for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I have no father. Compared to a lifetime of enforced chastity and the virtual slavery of lyrium addiction, the nightmares and voracious appetite really aren't that bad."
"Lyrium addiction?"
"Whoops! There I go, blurting out the Chantry's dirty little secrets." The stubborn set of his jaw said he wasn't contrite about his slip in the least. "Yes. When a templar takes his vows, they start giving him lyrium, and he becomes addicted. Supposedly it helps strengthen the talents that enable a templar to track and subdue apostate mages, but seeing as the Chantry controls the lyrium trade, it has the added benefit it putting him directly under the Chantry's thumb for the rest of his life. At least, until the constant lyrium exposure drives him mad, at which point he gets shipped off to Val Royeaux with the other 'retired' templars."
"Maker's blood!" Rìona breathed. "I've never approved of the way the Chantry treats mages like criminals or even dangerous beasts, but I had no idea what they were doing to the templars in the process!"
"Well, they feel perfectly justified about it," Alistair remarked with a shrug. "'Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him.' Right?"
"So to avoid the possibility of maleficarim controlling the minds and stealing the free will of innocents with blood magic, instead the Chantry controls the minds and wills of the templars with lyrium." Rìona shook her head. "The irony is staggering. Why didn't you simply refuse to take your vows?"
"It's... not that easy. Coming up on my confirmation as I was, it was certainly something I was considering, but there were... other factors," he said evasively. "I didn't really have much of a choice. Had I refused, I might have found myself thrown in prison for the rest of my life."
"The Chantry can do that?"
"Not the Chantry, though they do take a dim view of those who learn the templar secrets and don't serve, but... Look, it's a long story, and not one I feel like discussing now."
Confused, Rìona shrugged. "As you wish."
"At any rate, in the end it didn't matter. Duncan saved me from that fate. He was the first person to really care about what I wanted."
Rìona shifted uncomfortably, struggling with confusion. How could the man who had rescued Alistair from virtual enslavement by the Chantry be the same man who had betrayed her family's trust as Duncan had?
But then, Duncan's actions toward Alistair hadn't been entirely altruistic either, had they? True, he freed Alistair from a life he was dreading, but in the process, Duncan got a Grey Warden at a time during which he was desperate for more recruits. Would he have troubled himself to risk the Grand Cleric's wrath and conscript Alistair had he not been in such dire need?
And was his need truly that dire, or was Duncan simply that much of a bastard, that he could take advantage of the plight of others to see his own ends met?
"What's going to happen if we don't stop the Blight?" she heard herself asking, desperate to understand what had driven the man her father had called his friend.
Alistair looked troubled. "Ferelden will become a wasteland," he answered. "The darkspawn taint the land as they go. Grass and trees and crops all wither and fail. In the winter that might not be so bad, but come spring, it will start to matter. Those who don't succumb to the corruption will starve for lack of crops. Animals and people touched by the taint die. The ones who die quickly will be the lucky ones, but those who succumb slowly to the corruption, they're far worse. Ghouls, we call them. They're horrible. They turn cannibal, and they're slaves to the will of the archdemon, even lower than the darkspawn. Didn't your tutors teach you any of this?"
"Well, Aldous taught me what was in the Canticle of Threnodies:
Violently were they cast down, Deep into the earth they fled,
For no mortal may walk bodily
In the realm of dreams,
Bearing the mark of their Crime:
Bodies so maimed
And distorted that none should see them
And know them for men.
Away from the Light.
In Darkness eternal they searched
For those who had goaded them on,
Until at last they found their prize,
Their god, their betrayer:
The sleeping dragon Dumat. Their taint
Twisted even the false-god, and the whisperer
Awoke at last, in pain and horror, and led
Them to wreak havoc upon all the nations of the world:
The first Blight.
In the middle of her recitation, Alistair nodded and began quote along with her, matching her bored, sing-song tone.
"Those who had sought to claim
Heaven by violence destroyed it. What was
Golden and pure turned black.
Those who had once been mage-lords,
The brightest of their age,
Were no longer men, but monsters"
"And here I thought it was only in the monastery that they made us memorize that whole thing," he remarked, smirking.
"Oh, no," Rìona said with a soft laugh. "To Aldous, learning the Chant of Light was second in importance only to knowing the whole history of the Cousland family since the time before King Calenhad and the unification of Ferelden. But actual scholastic accounts of the Blights are actually quite rare. It's all been buried in Chantry lore. As such, I could never really be certain how much was actual fact and how much was merely drivel intended to justify the Chantry's treatment of mages, so I'm afraid I never really knew what to take as truth."
"Well, those things you saw at Ostagar, those are the truth," Alistair told her flatly. "They'll kill, and maim, and corrupt the earth until nothing can live or grow upon it. They say there are parts of the Anderfels where the corpses from the First and Second Blights, nearly a thousand years ago, have never decomposed properly, because the insects and other creatures that feed on the dead don't exist there to devour them. If we don't stop them, Ferelden will only be the first to fall."
"And that is what Duncan feared," she murmured, almost to herself.
Alistair nodded grimly. "He knew our odds weren't good at Ostagar, but he said he'd do everything he could to give us a chance."
Including recruiting a girl raised with a whore's skills to seduce the king, even if it meant her death. "He must have been desperate."
Another nod, this one with a bitter twist of his mouth. "Wouldn't you be?"
Again, the awkward silence. Rìona swallowed hard and forced herself to speak. "I'm... sorry you lost Duncan, and all your comrades. I never had a chance to know the other Grey Wardens, but I know they were important to you."
"Thank you." She could tell by his strained expression that he was struggling against tears and it awoke her own grief. They might be strangers, but they had a common purpose, and they both knew about loss.
"He was dying, you know," Alistair said after a long moment, drawing a deep breath to compose himself.
"I beg your pardon?"
"That's, um, that's another thing about being a Grey Warden that no one tells you until after your Joining." Alistair cleared his throat. "The good news is, you won't have to worry about dying of old age. You've got thirty years, more or less. The Joining doesn't quite make us immune to the darkspawn taint, all it does is delay it for a while. Sooner or later, though, the real nightmares begin. Steadier than the ones we're having now, more constant, more vivid. If it goes on long enough, eventually you begin to transform in a ghoul, like anyone else exposed to the corruption. Or you would, except that Grey Warden tradition means that once you start to feel it happening—the Calling, is the word for it—you go to Orzammar, to the Deep Roads of the old dwarven kingdoms, to die in one last glorious battle against the darkspawn. Duncan had begun having the nightmares. He told me that, in private. Told me his time was coming. I guess he got what he wanted, in a way. He died fighting the darkspawn, rather than slowly becoming like them. I just wish it could have been the victory he'd hoped for, rather than this... betrayal and waste."
Tears burned her own eyes as she thought again about her father and mother, about Oriana and little Oren. Ser Gilmore, who hadn't deserved the way she had toyed with his affections. And Cailan, whose easy infatuation with her had burned so quickly and brightly.
"We'll stop Loghain," she heard herself vowing, her voice thick with emotion. "We'll stop this Blight, Alistair. For... all of them. I swear it."
An acerbic voice from the other side of the fire interrupted whatever response Alistair was going to make.
"If you two are quite finished with your campfire chit-chat, is it possible we might have silence for a while so those of us not interested in sniveling about lost comrades can get some sleep?" Morrigan demanded, rolling up on her side to level a glare upon them.
"It might behoove you to develop something resembling a feeling," Rìona said sharply. "Failing that, since you're awake, perhaps you ought to consider joining the campfire chit-chat, rather than deriding it, in the interest of getting to know your companions and making your travels with us more pleasant."
"I've no interest in bonding, thank you," the witch replied. "A solid night's sleep will make my travels as pleasant as I have any reasonable expectation of them being."
Rìona shook her head as Morrigan turned her back to them again, and offered Alistair another small smile. "Why don't you try to get some sleep? I'll take the next watch."
He nodded, propping himself up against a tree trunk in the absence of a proper bedroll. "Thank you," he murmured, closing his eyes. "Here's hoping I can sleep without being haunted by the idea that I should have been with Duncan, with them all, down there on that battlefield."
"He saved you, by insisting you go to the tower instead," Rìona said softly. "The best thing you can do to honor his memory now is to live."
"I know." Alistair nodded again, opening his eyes to look at her in the glow of the campfire. "I appreciate you letting me talk about him. It's helped. You know, I think he said he was from Highever, or maybe... that it was his home?"
Rìona stared at him. Duncan had called Highever his home?
"I... I didn't know that," Rìona whispered, glancing away with tears burning her eyes again as she thought of all that had been lost.
"Maybe someday I'll go there, do something to honor him."
She thought about Highever Castle, overrun by Howe's scum. "Maybe someday I'll go, too," she said softly, glancing away.
Across the fire, Morrigan huffed impatiently, and Alistair closed his eyes again with a contented smile.