Many thanks for all your responses! I really love these characters and am glad to be sharing them with you.


They found the Dalish the following day, and after a lot of running around in the Forest, were eventually able to resolve a curse, cure the Dalish hunters who had been bitten by werewolves, and gain the promise of the new Dalish Keeper, Lanaya, that the Dalish would be ready when the Grey Wardens needed them. It was more complicated than Una had hoped it would be, but they had accomplished their first objective.

The next few days, marching toward Redcliffe, were relatively peaceful, and the whole party felt somewhat healed by the time they camped outside the town. It had been nice just traveling and talking and beginning to get to know one another. They sat around the fire that night, eating something Leliana had whipped up with berries in it.

"I don't know what we're eating, Leliana," Una said, "but is there any more?"

"Sorry," Leliana said, "but, uh, Grenli, is it? He seems to have enjoyed more than his fair portion."

"Gren!" Una looked at him sternly. The mabari burped and looked abashed, but when he caught Alistair's eye he grinned and wagged his tail happily.

"Don't drag me into this, hound! I wanted seconds, too." Grenli licked Alistair's cheek and grinned unrepentantly.

Alistair, rubbing at the slobber on his cheek, looked at Una. "Your dog needs some discipline," he said sternly.

"I've heard that before." She reached out to ruffle the dog's ears before getting up to collect the plates. Morrigan, who continued to camp separately, was staring morosely into her fire, and Leliana was quietly tuning her lyre near her tent. Alistair reached up to hand Una his plate and their fingers brushed in the handoff.

Una caught her breath. The firelight shone on his strong features and caught the highlights in his blond hair. Before she could stop herself, Una heard herself blurting out, "Has anyone ever told you how handsome you are?" Then she froze. Oh, Mother, what did I say that for? she thought.

Alistair's eyebrows shot up. He said something about those two 'girls' from Denerim that one time … and then it hit him. Was she saying what he thought she was saying? The brown eyes studied her speculatively. "Wait. Does that mean you think I'm handsome?"

Una blushed. "What if I do?" she muttered, turning her head away.

He chuckled, and she felt the timbers of his voice reach straight down into the pit of her stomach. She bit her lip. "I think I'd grin a lot and look foolish," he said. "Which wouldn't be all bad."

Their eyes met, hers filled with relief and a sudden hope, his thoughtful but wary. She clutched the plates. "I think I'll go wash these," she said, withdrawing hastily. Rolling her eyes upward as she wound her way between trees, she said, "Well, Mother, that wasn't too disastrous." She could see her mother's shake of the head and hear the tongue-click. "I know. Curb the impulsiveness. I'm working on it."

"Do you always speak to your mother as though she could hear you?" Morrigan asked casually from the darkness of the trees.

"Who's to say she can't?" Una countered.

"I suppose your Chantry would be the first."

"The Chantry doesn't know the answers any more than anyone else. I know, that would sound like blasphemy to many, but … if it helps me to think that my parents are close to me, does it matter if they are or not?"

"A bit indulgent," Morrigan mused, "but not entirely impractical. If Alistair had your philosophy we would all have had to listen to much less whining."

"Morrigan, will you please leave him alone?"

"I cannot help it if he is oversensitive!"

"You can help baiting him all the time." Una knelt by the stream and began dipping the plates in. "Or the two of you could just go at it and get it over with." She hated to admit it, but it stung that Morrigan could always get a reaction out of him.

"I do not think that is what you really want. Is it?" Morrigan's smug tone grated on Una's ears. She had a sudden appreciation for why the mage irritated Alistair so.

"I want," she said sharply, "not to have to stand between the two of you and keep you from killing each other."

"Understandable." Morrigan melted back into the trees. Left alone, Una continued ineffectually swishing plates in the water, staring off into the distance.


Alistair watched Una disappear into the trees in her awkward lope.

"Does she know that it's pitch-dark?" Leliana asked in concern.

"Presumably she does," Alistair remarked absently, moving his gaze to the rose he had removed from his pack. He'd looked at it every night since they'd left Lothering, its strangely undimmed beauty soothing him and helping him remember what they were fighting for.

Leliana withdrew to her tent, leaving Alistair still sitting there, completely confused by what had happened with Una. He had never given that much thought to women—oh, who was he kidding? He thought about women all the time, especially now that he was traveling with three of them. All extraordinary in their own way, even the one who was the embodiment of all evil. But it had never occurred to Alistair that a woman might think about him. Not until just now. "Handsome"? Him? But maybe he'd misunderstood. Maybe that was some kind of noble thing, compliments as a way to raise morale? Well, they'd be heading into Redcliffe tomorrow, he could see then— He raised his head suddenly. Redcliffe! "Maker's blood!" he swore. He got up, putting the rose away carefully before heading off into the trees in the direction Una had gone.

Hearing the crashing behind her, Una quickly finished stacking the plates. Alistair clearly hadn't grown up sneaking up on people in the woods, that much was clear, she reflected. She grinned a little, thinking how often she'd caught Fergus with the elven serving maids. "Yes, Alistair?"

"How did you know it was me?"

"No one else crashes through the forest like a great bear."

"Except, you know … a bear."

She chuckled. "I think the bear would have been slightly quieter."

"Hey!"

"We should have had the elves teach you some woods lore," Una mused. "Was there something you wanted to talk about?"

"Er, yes."

Una tried not to hope that it would be something she wanted to hear. "Spill it, then." And that's when he told her that he was the illegitimate son of the king. After he'd finished explaining, he stood awkwardly for a few moments, clearly unsure what to say. He wished there was more light so he could see her expression, but then thought that if his revelation had changed anything, maybe he didn't want to know. He ducked his head and disappeared back toward the camp. "Isn't this an interesting turn of events," Una muttered. "What do you think, Father?" she asked of the sky. But the stars were silent. "Still processing, huh? Yeah, me, too. Not at all what I expected." She picked up the plates and carried them back to camp.

The next morning, Una insisted that Alistair tell the other two women about his parentage as well. She noted, watching them, that Morrigan didn't seem entirely surprised. Una filed that information away to be considered later.

As they were trudging toward Redcliffe, Una drew Alistair into conversation about his templar training. It took some pushing, as always, to get past his armor of jokes, but once she did, she got to the thoughtful bit right in the middle that was the hardest part of him to find. He covered it so thoroughly, but she liked to study it when it came out, watching and listening carefully. She did the same with the others, prodding and testing to find out what was there. It helped, in battle and decision-making, to know exactly who was behind her. In this case, Alistair wandered off-topic a bit, talking about how being with the Grey Wardens had been the first sensation of being home he'd ever felt. She was processing his thoughts so intently that she almost missed it when he turned the tables on her. "What?" she asked.

He stopped, the dark eyes serious for once as they held hers. "I said, is there anyplace you call home?"

She took a deep breath. Alistair almost felt guilty for asking the question as he saw the flash of pain in her tilted cat's eyes before she closed them. In that moment, Una said good-bye for the last time to her life at Highever Castle, and when her eyes opened they held—what? Alistair thought. Resignation, determination, maybe hope. "I guess," she said, "my home is with the Grey Wardens now." Her eyes met his, and he felt a jolt of electricity that startled him. "With you," she added hesitantly.

No mistaking it, he thought, that was a blush on her cheeks, not just a trick of the sunlight. Maybe she really was thinking about him. He was unaware that he was blushing, too. "I— I think I like the sound of that," he offered. They stared at each other for a moment, then looked quickly away as Leliana came up over the hill behind them.


A/N: Definitely if I was going to write this over again, I would not have skimmed over the entire Dalish section in a single paragraph! I was a little surprised to see that I had done that, actually. But then, for a Cousland origin, the Dalish section seems a bit disconnected from the rest of the game. Also, if I haven't explained the eye color issue yet - I started playing DA on a computer that couldn't handle the graphics. Among other things, everyone's eyes looked black. So Alistair's eyes through here are "dark", because I didn't know what color they really were.