She's looking at him, hurt and confusion in her eyes. "Why didn't you tell me that you had a son?" she asks.
He grimaces, his eyes dark with pain and confusion. "I didn't know until twenty minutes ago. Stone, I had no idea."
She's not done.
"And this Mardy, what is she to you?" He's at a loss for words. Nothing, is what he wants to say, but the words won't come. Whatever he thinks of her, she's borne him a son. It would be dishonorable not to treat her with the appropriate regard.
She interprets his silence as evidence of the worst.
"Oh my... But... Why, I didn't... I mean..." She starts and stops, trails off, then suddenly rallies, eyes wide with hurt and shock. "Duran, are you married?" her voice cracks like broken bell on the last syllable. His head snaps up, eyes wide.
"Paragons, no! I told you, she's a noble-hunter!" He's almost pleading. How can he make her understand the caste system, explain the complex intricacies of the working out of a thousand years of dwarven tradition and noble privilege in a few sentences?
"That doesn't help me to understand what that means, Duran." Her deep blue eyes are narrowed slightly in frustration.
Oghren pipes up, unhelpfully.
"He means she's some low-caste bint with a taste for the good life who doesn't mind making her fortune on her back. Noble-hunters get themselves plowed by every aristocrat they can on the off chance that they can whelp him a son and spend the rest of their lives mooching off of his relatives. Nobles like it because it keeps them knee-deep in prime tail. Everyone else puts up with it because it's a stairway into the noble caste." He grunts. "Everybody wins! Mostly. Unless they have daughters. Then they're down the midden without a bucket."
Leliana recoils in shock, and Duran shoots a panicked, horrified glare at Oghren, having spent enough time among humans and their ideas about family and propriety to know that that was exactly the wrong way to put it. He's got to try to make her understand.
"It's not... it isn't like that..." he begins, weakly, but she's already walking away, restrained fury and disappointment evident in every line of her body.