Chapter Seven: Many Bad Men
Fergus Cousland took one look at that state of affairs in Lothering and then immediately set off at a brisk pace in the direction of the tavern. He followed the familiar stench of drunkenness and desperation, intent on following through with the impulse that had been nagging at him ever since he had encountered these Maker-forsaken "Wardens" and heard their account of Ostagar's outcome: Find himself a strong drink.
That plan was delayed if not altogether thwarted when he reached the bridge at the hamlet's heart and what awaited him there.
"Have you seen my mother?" asked the young boy, swinging his legs once, twice, before sliding down from the bridge's low wall, putting himself directly in Fergus's path.
Weary blue-gray eyes conducted a survey, unable to help themselves, trying to be dispassionate and detached: the child's hair was a coppery red that had never been seen on a Cousland head in recent memory, not even in the oldest portraits in the gallery at Highever House in Denerim. That helped, especially since the boy was already too similar in height and age, his wan little face smudged with dirt and sweat like his son's had been, that afternoon when Oren had first been let loose to explore and/or "pillage" the pantry, following in his father's and aunt's footsteps in the hunt for dire bunnies.
"I don't know," Fergus said and then, partly to distract himself, partly to punish himself, asked, "What does your mother look like?"
"She's really tall…"
Oriana had always claimed so much, despite the fact that she was lucky to be described as middling height. But Fergus was no giant amongst men and she suited him.
"…with really red hair…"
Again, the uncommon hair color was a welcome illusion-breaker, but it was not to last.
"…and really, really pretty."
He had had her portrait and nothing more when he had pledged himself to wed Oriana Carrillo de Rialto in the Highever chapel, standing opposite an empty place: a painted miniature no larger than the palm of his hand. He had often studied it, cynically doubting that the girlish prettiness was anything more than false flattery to the sitter and a deceptive enticement for himself. But then she had come off of the ship in Denerim some months later and even through the heavy lace of her mantilla, he could see she was truly exquisite. "Lucky," his friends and former fellow bachelors had called him. Even Nathaniel Howe, their parents conspiring a betrothal between the Howe eldest and Fergus's little sister, had clapped him on the back and smirked. Vaughan Kendells had positively leered after Fergus's betrothed (although he had done that to Eliante and Habren and the latter wasn't even much of a prize) at the queen's state dinner the following evening. They had called him lucky. They had all called him lucky.
Fergus Cousland. The lucky bastard.
"Where's your father?" he asked the boy, shaking himself back into the present.
"Gone to the neighbor's," was the prompt reply. "Mother had we were supposed to wait for him but it's been four whole days. And then these men showed up at the farm and I didn't know them. Mother didn't either and she pushed me out the other door and told me to run to town. She said that she would follow but I've been waiting and waiting and I haven't seen her."
Fergus was quiet. Here was another lost soul, standing right in front of him, and yet he found himself as powerless to help the child as he had been to protect his men from the assassins. As powerless as he seemed to be to protect his family from their supposed sins. But if he had not protected them, his own, what made this random worthy of misplaced guardianship anyway?
"Here," he said with a sigh, reaching into his pocket and withdrawing a handful of silver. The assassins had strangely not seen fit to go through his pockets. Killers with moral stances. "Take this. Go to the chantry. Find a priest to put you on a caravan north. Can you do that for me?"
"I will, sir!" the boy chirped, gazing down at the shine of coin in his hand. "But I think I'd best wait a little while longer, in case she comes here."
"But on the second day, you'll go," said Fergus, looking intently at the child. "Promise me."
The boy hesitated. "I… I promise," he answered uncertainly. "On the second day, I'll go."
Fergus nodded. "Off you go then. Don't let anyone know you're on your own or you've got coin until you've found the priest. Go, then."
There was an audible sniff from somewhere behind him as the boy scampered off. He turned about to find Morrigan at his left elbow, unsettlingly close and silent in step. "I'll give it until noon," she commented idly.
"Noon?"
"I'll give it until noon before all that silver has been magically winked away. 'Twas a useless gesture. One would think that such a high and mighty noble would have learned that the weak remain weak unless they make themselves otherwise, not if someone does that for them."
He ignored her and, with another sniff, she disappeared from the space near his elbow. But even with her absence, he could not shake the feeling of being observed. His eyes scanned the hordes of refugees and deserters passing through Lothering until he espied a young woman watching him. He nearly called out to her upon registering her red hair –she did not look perhaps too young to have had a child –but he reconsidered at the sight of her Chantry robes. Catching his gaze with her own, she smiled a sibylline smile at him before turning her attention to the prayer book in her hands and fading into the crowd around the tavern.
Slightly unnerved and generally put on edge by the terrified people around him, he turned back to find Mordred in Morrigan's place. He nearly jumped at the shock –nearly. He could not forget the initial instinctual impulse to run when he had first encountered Mordred and, intentionally or otherwise, it colored Fergus's opinion on the young mage.
And he was young. Fergus would mark his unasked-for companion at the age of twenty; nearly a decade the noble's junior. Not that youth alone belied a threat; his sister's sharp tongue was proof enough of that. Mordred was different. The adopted name, which he would have found in anyone else to be presumptuous beyond belief, seemed to suit the understated yet calculating young man. There was something off-putting about his manner, as disconcerting as the streaks of gray in the mage's dark hair before his time, and Fergus could not point to any particular characteristic or habit and say to himself, "Ah. There it is. There is a reason for it all. You're not being paranoid."
No. There was nothing. The mage was polite, courteous, and honest by evidence. Or so the floods of refugees and deserters from Ostagar accounted for.
"Do you believe us now?" Mordred asked quietly as though he had followed the noble's train of thought and the back of Fergus's neck prickled at the question.
And there was that. Although that could have been just coincidence, just sheer damn luck. Even so, it rattled Fergus Cousland from head to toe.
"I believe you were speaking the truth when you all claimed that Cailan lost his head at Ostagar," he replied curtly and then swallowed, "and in more ways than one."
The corners of Mordred's mouth turned upward but his smile remained close-lipped. "I've discovered that it's rather difficult to inform a king that he's being arrogant," he commented affably, "or even to suggest that fact to another. Duncan didn't take it kindly when I suggested that Cailan was overconfident –although I might have stated the matter a little bluntly. Loghain, not so shockingly in retrospect, was somewhat more open to the idea of the king being stupid. He told me to pray that Cailan would be 'amenable to reason.'"
"Clearly Cailan was not 'amenable' enough," remarked Fergus dryly.
"Or I didn't pray enough."
Fergus permitted himself a sharp bark of a laugh. "Piety wasn't the issue. Politics was, as it usually is. Duncan was as interwoven in it all as anybody else important at Ostagar, regardless of whether he was playing at being above it all."
"Warden-Commander is a rather important position to be in when there's a Blight in your country. Duncan, for all Alistair gripes about his good qualities, didn't do so good a job. I can only hope to do better."
"You, Warden-Commander of Ferelden?" Fergus didn't bother to conceal his skepticism. Mordred was young and a mage above all else. "Not Alistair?"
The younger man shot him a sliver of a glance. "Not Alistair," he repeated, his straightforward tone turning Fergus's query into a statement of fact.
"And you two are the only Wardens left in the whole of Ferelden? Weren't there other recruits back at the camp?"
Mordred hesitated before answering. "They… never left Ostagar," he finally said. "And the one that was recruited with me at the Circle, he jumped ship along the way south. We were Conscripted about the same time; Duncan had just found him in the Tower's dungeons and I was being led there myself when we ran into the man. Greagoir had a fit."
"Conscripted? So you weren't jumping at the chance to become a Warden." He snorted. "If you and Alistair even are Wardens."
"You have doubts?"
Yes and no. He did and he did not. If Alistair was indeed the royal bastard Bryce Cousland had spoken of, playing at Warden wasn't a bad way to slither into a place of power in Ferelden, especially since the rest of the Wardens were seemingly dead and Cailan the same and, being dead, neither could dispute either the claim at Wardenship or Theirin bloodlines. But upon spending any significant portion of time with the maybe-usurper, it had become somewhat clear to Fergus that Alistair had just about no leadership qualities or ambitions beyond the Grey Wardens to speak of. It hardly surprised him to hear Mordred already calling himself Warden-Commander.
But he looked at Mordred with the discerning eye his parents' had installed in him at a young age. He saw that the young mage's eyes were bright beneath the façade of easy cordiality, that the reluctance and apprehension he had seen in Alistair were absent in this other so-called Warden. No, he would not be surprised at all to discover that Mordred was playing at Grey Warden and had pulled Alistair along with him somehow.
That left the mystery of Morrigan. At first, he had thought it a toss-up as to whether she was bedding down with Alistair or Mordred; why else would they tolerate her attitude? Now, it was rather clear it was the latter if it was either.
"You hardly seem educated about your own Order," Fergus settled upon. "It just seems odd is all."
Mordred's face was unreadable. "A fair point," he conceded. "But there is more evidence for our story than there is against," he added with a nod to the refugees.
"I still don't know what to make of you telling me that neither Arl Howe nor my father was at the meeting table with the king and Loghain," he pointed out. "It's not a matter of evidence against you; it's a matter of holes. I woke up in the Wilds after assassins took down my scouting party to a world that doesn't make sense; you see why I'm skeptical."
"No one is denying you your right to question," Mordred stated mildly
"I'm just doubting the lack of answers to my questions," Fergus replied quietly. "And I mean answers that make bloody sense."
"Still fair," said Mordred with a shrug. "I take it you were going to the tavern; I was as well. Do you mind the company?"
Fergus bit back his immediate impulse. "My father had a captain when I was a boy who said that he couldn't trust a man until he'd shared a drink with him," he said instead.
"He sounds like a good man," he commented as they started across the bridge.
"Oh, he made a ritual of drinking every new recruit under the table. The boy he made his squire woke up in the chicken coop after a night's drinking with the men."
"I meant your father," Mordred clarified after a pause.
Something sharp caught in Fergus's throat. He realized that for all of the minutes and hours he had spent laboring over the memory of his son and wife and what could have become of them, he had barely spared a thought to his own parents. But now was hardly the time to dwell on such things. "Yeah," he finally replied. "He was a good man. And a good father. The best I could have hoped for."
Just then, something in Mordred's mask of politeness snapped. For just a moment, barely perceptible, his green-gray eyes hardened and the skin around his mouth tightened. His eyes flashed a more vibrant hue of green that almost immediately faded away; Fergus would not have caught it had he not been looking for it. But he did not linger on the unnaturalness of it; childish, he was only pleased that he had said something to provoke a reaction in this most level-headed of mages.
"Mages don't know their parents, do they?" the noble asked after a moment, watching to see if his words inspired another reaction.
He was to be disappointed. Mordred's face revealed nothing this time. "Some of us do," he said in reply before falling silent.
With that cryptic response, Mordred walked a few steps ahead and pushed open the wooden door to the tavern. The sigh above the entrance called it "Dane's Refuge." Fergus found himself doubting if any of the patrons within were doing anything to actively seek refuge from the encroaching threat other than drink themselves into forgetting about the monsters in the south.
It was soon made very clear that at least three soldiers in the bar were present for other purposes.
At Fergus and Mordred's entrance, the clamor in the room began to die down as eyes turned on the newcomers. Fergus looked from patron to patron, realizing that something was once again off about the situation at hand. The women in the room were few and far between and most seemed to be of the typical camp-follower brand, although he spotted the Chantry sister alone at a corner table, her copper haired head bent to her prayer book, seemingly not to mark their entrance. She was unfortunately in the minority.
"Well, well, well," said the man in mud-encrusted grey iron chainmail, standing at the forefront of the crowd as two others came up to flank him. Fergus was beginning to hate that word, especially repeated thrice. Nothing good ever seemed to follow that particular phrase. "Looks like we just got lucky, boys." Again, nothing good came from hearing that. "We spend a week scouring the countryside for this sod and he just happens to stroll into this dump."
Fergus reached for his blade, slightly surprised that whoever had gone to all of the trouble of the assassins would descend to hiring these louts. But when he tried to stare them down, make them back off, he found that he was not the target of their attention. It was Mordred.
The very air in the tavern was tight with tension. Mordred stared down the man who had spoken. It was like the strain when Arl Howe and Bryce Cousland would play chess together; long-standing friendship suspended in the moment of competition before one or the other made a move. Mordred stared at the man and Fergus stared at Mordred. Whose move would it be first?
"Gentlemen," the voice that spoke was light and feminine, a voice that seemed more like to laugh than to shout, "there is hardly any need for drama, is there?"
"Step back, sister," said the leader of the soldiers. Fergus followed the path of his address and found the Chantry sister who had been watching him in the village square, her prayer book closed and pocketed, and a dagger prominent on her belt, smiling charmingly at the man. "We have a mandate to take any Grey Wardens we find into custody and, barring that, remove them altogether."
"By whose order?" Fergus interjected. Mordred said nothing.
"By the order of Teyrn Loghain," was the answer. "Don't you know that the Grey Wardens killed the king, man?"
"Loghain killed the king," said Mordred quietly. "He sounded the retreat and left Cailan to die on the battlefield with our commander."
"He had no choice. Your beacon was too late and I doubt that was a mistake on your part!"
"Oi!" interrupted Fergus again. "You're speaking to Fergus Cousland, son of the Teyrn of Highever. I want the full story of what happened at Ostagar and I want it now."
Loghain's soldier's eyes widened. "Cousland? Wardens and an Orlesian traitor together? Men!"
"Traitor?!" Fergus sputtered in outrage and the chantry sister protested, "Surely there is no need for violence!" But the soldiers in the bar had already risen to arms and could not be dissuaded from attacking.
He parried the captain's quickly descending blade with his own sword and, muscles screaming complaint at the effort, forced both blades upward as his knee drove hard into the attacker's gut. On his left Mordred rapidly chanted an incantation, power unleashed from his bare hands, coursing through the tavern as people scattered, screaming. One of the lackeys yelled out in terror as he found himself yanked up into the air, thrown against the low ceiling, dust scattering at the impact, and then dropped harshly to the wooden floor.
The third flunky didn't bother after that; hastily, he lowered his crossbow (knowing that he would be unable to load and fire before either the mage or the warrior turned on him) and scuttled towards the back way out of Dane's Refuge. His progress was halted; the red-haired Chantry sister was quick to pull the blade from her belt and another one free from her boot through a convenient slit in her skirt's hem. With a grace that would not seem out of place in a ballroom, she lithely danced around rickety tables and chairs and latched onto the soldier's back, delicately resting the flat of her dagger against his throat.
Casually, she glanced over her shoulder to see Fergus and Mordred standing over the crumpled yet living bodies of the two other assailants. "Ah good," she commented, still disarmingly blithe in manner. "Now we can stop this nonsense."
Fergus kicked the leader in the side; his throat emitted a strangled gasp of pain. The noble then roughly nudged the disabled man over onto his back with the toe of his boot and promptly extended the point of his sword to tickle his enemy's throat. "This man called my family traitors," he growled. "He had better admit to that being nonsense."
The man squirmed, trying in vain to avoid a cut throat. "It's just what I was told!" he sputtered. "That's all!"
"Who is calling my family traitors?!" Fergus snarled, the blade's point digging in ever so slightly. "Loghain? Who? I want names now! Who is it?"
"Everyone."
It was not the man on the floor that spoke. It was the Chantry sister. Fergus tore his furious gaze away from the man at his feet and turned it on her. She met his eyes levelly and with a sympathy that cut him down at the knees. "You're Fergus Cousland?"
"Did I stutter when I said so?"
"Then everyone," she said again. "Everyone. The Grey Wardens killed the king and the Couslands were going to hand the country over to Orlais."
"Lies," said Mordred and Fergus almost simultaneously, one flat in tone, the other fuming. They glanced at each other, glaring, before turning their attention back on the woman. "Loghain left the king to his death," said Mordred, "not the Wardens."
"And Teyrn Loghain says it is the other way around."
"And what do you believe?" asked Mordred, as Fergus continued to absorb the news.
"I believe that darkness is coming," said the Chantry sister, "and that Ferelden and the world need its Grey Wardens."
"Who," said Fergus between clenched teeth, "is calling my family traitors?"
With those words, his grip on his sword tightened and the blade inadvertently pressed deeper against the captain's neck. He gasped out, "Rendon Howe, Arl of Amaranthine. He went to the Teyrn with letters he intercepted. I heard it from the Arl's bodyguard himself. The Queen was to be removed and Cailan free to wed."
Gasps and murmurs sounded amongst the watching crowd at this revelation. Fergus focused on the man at his feet. "What happened?" he breathed. "What has happened to my family? What did that lying bastard do while I was gone?"
"He killed them," was the choked answer.
Fergus turned white and then red. "All of them?"
"All," said one of the other soldiers, the one whose throat the sister has her knife against. "And in their own house. Maker rest their souls."
"Do not," said Fergus between his teeth, "seek my sympathy with your false piety."
He turned his gaze back on the captain, squirming beneath his sword. A long moment passed. Finally, he lifted the blade, turned, and walked slowly out of the tavern, blind to Mordred, the Chantry sister, and the crowd.
The door slammed shut behind him. Mordred exhaled softly and looked down at the spared captain. "I think you're more cut out for the job of messenger boy than soldier," the mage commented casually. "I take it you're on speaking terms with the Teyrn of Gwaren?"
The man nodded emphatically, still too terrified to lift his body from the floor.
Mordred smiled at him. "Then tell the teyrn," he said, "that he's going to have to do better than this."
There was blood on his hands and a hunting knife in his grip as he methodically cut an incision across the neck of a wolf. He dropped the blade to begin peeling back the skin and the fur with it. It might get a decent price in town, but that wasn't why he was doing it.
There were footsteps behind him. When they stopped some distance from his back, he said roughly, "Away."
"I know how you're feeling," said the voice of the still unnamed Chantry sister, "and I wanted to see if you were alright."
He grunted, disbelieving, and started skinning the dead wolf's front left leg, using a knife to work away at the paw. If his silence would not dissuade her and her obnoxiously charming accent, perhaps the gore would.
She was not to be dissuaded. "I am Leliana." He did not respond. "It was a noble thing you did, back in the tavern. You could have ended that man's life but you chose not to."
"Enough pointless blood has been spilled," he muttered, dropping the skinned leg back against the grass. "The only people I want dead right now are Rendon Howe and that blighter of a son he has. Blood for blood."
"Revenge will not bring them back."
"It will make me feel better."
"Do you really believe that?"
It was only then that he turned to face her with the scarlet staining his hands and the crimson smudged across his forehead. "Yes," he said and there was nothing unwavering or uncertain in that word.
The wind ruffled her red-hair; the short locks were choppy and uneven, as though they had been cut with a rusty pair of scissors and never been properly trimmed since. "I once thought revenge would be the answer," she commented as she dusted off a rock and sat down, as elegant in manner as though it had been the king's own dinner table. "But then when I had it in my hands, I found that I was much mistaken."
"Then we are very different people," he told her and returned to the physical task before him.
"Your companions are somewhere behind us," she said, not to be deterred it seemed.
"They are not my companions. My companions were killed by assassins in the Kocari Wilds some time ago."
"The Grey Wardens you are traveling with, then. Is the woman a Warden as well? She is quite lovely, although her clothing choices could be improved upon."
He laughed sharply. "Don't let her hear you say that. She'll turn into a rat or a spider or a snake and you'll scream."
"There are many more frightening things in this world," said Leliana, "than rats, spiders, or snakes."
"And she may just be one of them."
"Regardless, they encountered a man, a Qunari –I think," she added that bit a moment too late and Fergus knew that she had known quite certainly. "He's in a cage and they seem to be quite fascinated with him. He is considerably less captivated with them, I should think," she said with a tinkle of laughter.
Fergus was less amused. "What's he doing in a cage? And in Ferelden, for that matter. I thought they stuck to the north and I mean north-north, not Ferelden north."
Leliana shrugged prettily but the effect was lost on his turned back. "Who can say? Perhaps he is a simple traveler, as are we all. As for the cage, well," her tone lost quite a bit of its joviality, "they say that he has done terrible things."
"As they have 'said' my family committed treason?"
"Oh, no," she shook her head. "He confessed and over his own accord, under no duress whatsoever. He killed some number of farmers and their families, I heard."
"Did the farmers kill his wife, son, and parents?" Indelicately, he stabbed his carving knife under the skin and worked the flesh beneath away from the fur.
"I hope you're not planning to murder children in your quest for revenge," she said sharply in response.
"Howe's children are all adults," he said roughly, "and one son was certainly grown-up enough it seems to watch his father betray mine and slaughter innocents, if not participate in it himself. I never liked Nathaniel; he was never good enough for my sister and then he up and left."
"Left?"
"Broke off the betrothal," Fergus yanked the blade free, "broke her heart, and then ran to the Free Marches like a coward. I'm shocked he even managed to drag his sorry behind back to Ferelden, much less Highever, with his tail between his legs. Never thought he'd have the stones to come back."
"You don't like him."
"I don't like people who do wrong by my family. Although his sins are considerably less severe than his bastard of a father's."
Think on your family's sins.
He dropped the half-skinned animal to the ground and stood up. He heard Leliana rise as well as he shoved the knife into his belt. Glancing back at her, he asked, "What are you really doing here?"
"I want to travel with the Grey Wardens," she replied.
Fergus snorted. "That makes one of us. What makes you so eager to throw your lot in with the likes of them?"
She hesitated. "You cannot laugh."
"I think I'm about as far from a laughing mood as I can get. Go on."
"You must promise."
"Fine!" He threw his hands up, unsure of why he was even wasting his time with this. "Out with it now."
"You cannot expect me to tell you when you are being so… callous," she objected.
"Then don't," he replied, sighing heavily in exasperation. "It makes no difference to me."
As he started to walk away, she watched, blue eyes widening. Just as he nearly rounded the bend on the path, she said, "I had a dream. Or maybe it was a vision; I don't know. I was on a cliff… and I saw darkness. Darkness overwhelming; it seemed there was no world left. And I fell into it… or maybe I jumped. I cannot tell. But then I woke up and I went into the garden to pray and I saw a rose, a single rose. It was as though the Maker himself had stretched out his hand to show me that there were still things left worth saving, that even in the darkness there was beauty to be found. That not all was lost."
He stared at her for a few moments and she colored a faint pink. "You are not laughing," she said, tentatively hopeful.
"Only because you made me promise not to," he said dryly and watched as her face turned form rose to crimson.
"You are cruel!" she exclaimed and turned her back on him, stalking away at a brisk pace and disappearing over the small hill.
Fergus watched her go with heartless satisfaction before a slight twinge of guilt tugged at him. In eight words, he had reduced a hopeful, cheery Chantry sister into an embarrassed and probably frightened woman. She had been kind and her intentions were admirable; in some ways, her attitude was not unlike his sister's. But that thought only led to the revelation that Eliante would have been caught up in Howe's slaughter as well, and, after a moment of pure, intense fury, he comforted himself with the thought that if he had not shattered Leliana's illusions, someone else would have and that person might have been even less kind. Or not a person at all, he added, thinking of the horde encroaching on Lothering.
He found their camp along the northern side of the Imperial Highway, the tents and tarps pitched up against the crumbling stone blocks. Dropping his pack to the ground near the fire, Fergus was surprised to see Leliana across the flames, who greeted him with an audible sniff. He sighed. She and Morrigan should form a club.
Speaking of the witch, she did not appear to be present, although he might want to watch for birds in the night sky and the branches of the sparse trees that surrounded them. In her place was a giant of a man with golden-brown skin and eerie violet eyes shadowed by shockingly white hair. Fergus regarded him with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension; the man looked at the noble once and then turned away, not regarding him at all.
Mordred's grey-streaked head was bent over a map of Ferelden laid out on the dirt. Alistair stood above him, providing commentary. "Right," said Alistair, "So we are… here. And the places where we can find allies are… here, here, and here: Orzammar, the Brecilian Forest, and Redcliffe. Oh, and the Circle but you probably already know where that is."
"I do," said the mage, "and I also happen to know where Orzammar, the Brecilian Forest, and Redcliffe are. Just because I was in the Tower doesn't mean I never saw a map."
"Right. Sorry."
"Redcliffe," said Fergus. "Looking for Arl Eamon?"
"Yes," said Mordred, glancing back at Fergus, not looking too pleased about it, as Alistair replied, "He wasn't at Ostagar either; he still has all his men. And I grew up there. And he was Cailan's uncle. He has every right to be furious with Loghain for what happened at the battle at Ostagar."
"Are you trying to convince us or yourself?" asked Fergus. Mordred only half-suppressed a snicker.
Alistair flushed. "I know him. He's a good man, an honorable man."
"Just as Loghain was a good and honorable man?" said Mordred, measuring the distance between Lothering and other locations with a bit of string.
"And Rendon Howe?" Fergus added quietly. "Wasn't he considered good and honorable? My father certainly seemed to think so, even on the eve of his death."
"I'm beginning to doubt the existence of good and honorable men," Morrigan announced, appearing from behind a tree. "Your words are hardly doing wonders for my faith in the greater portion of humanity."
"It is an illness bred by the discontent of one's place in the greater scheme of things," intoned the Qunari quietly, "and I am beginning to feel pity for them."
"I'm not," said Fergus flatly, reaching for the flask of presumed alcohol amongst the provisions beside the campfire.
Oriana's maiden surname's epitaph "de Rialto" is a reference to a city on the map of Antiva on the DA Wiki. Rialto is also a bridge in Venice and one that I truly adore. I do owe a lot to the DA Wiki in general, so I figured now is as good a time to credit them as any.
I plan to start reading The Stolen Throne sometime this month as research of a sort. There are several female role models of rebellion in recent Fereldan history and I want to give Rowan what she's due (even if Eliante and others never hear the whole story).
As always, thank you so much for the feedback in your reviews. It's really a gift. Better than my favorite cheese (which is Brie, or St. Andre if I splurge).
