Muirnara woke to subdued firelight that seemed completely wrong, to aches all over the body as if every muscle had been pounded, and to a profound sense of confusion. "What time is it?" she managed, and then coughed and spat, trying to clear a foul taste in her dry mouth. Wynne was immediately at her side, offering a cold drink. "It's just weak tea, child, water would probably make you vomit again. Try small sips." She supported Muirnara's shoulders as the Warden drank, her hands still shaking. "It is late evening, you've slept for about twelve hours."

"Late evening?" Muirnara tried to make sense of this, taking tiny sips of the tea to attempt to quell her rebellious stomach. "I remember..."she put one hand to her face, where a pounding headache appeared to have taken up permanent residence behind her right eyebrow. "I remember, the battle, the talking Darkspawn, Flemeth, then nothing...if you say I've slept twelve hours then I must have lost the better part of a day. How is that possible?"

"You were poisoned, cherie." Leliana came over to join Wynne. "You had an arrowhead in your arm from one of the Darkspawn that had a poison on it that left you first unconscious and then out of your mind for many hours. Once it ran its course, Wynne healed you as best she could, but she has already taken as much lyrium in a day and a night, as she would normally use in a week. A bad week."

Some things were becoming clearer - nightmare memories of agony, fighting to move, to breathe, bound limbs, heat that rivalled her worst memories of fever. Strong hands holding her, a body against her back, a voice repeating simple words of comfort over and over." She looked around. "Loghain? Where is he?"

"Asleep." Wynne indicated the other tent. "He sat up with you all night, to stop you injuring yourself when the fits came on you. When you were finally sleeping normally I sent him off to get some sleep himself."

"And that was the first time, Wynne, that you have ever said anything to him that he didn't argue with." Leliana took Muirnara's empty teacup away. "If you can keep that down without vomiting for a few hours, cherie, then you can have a little soup."

So I lay all of last night, bound hand and foot, slipping in and out of unconsciousness, and restrained by the strong arms of Loghain Mac Tir. Forget the bad Antivan adventure stories, we are firmly into the bad Orlesian romances here.

"Loghain said something very like that too."

Muirnara blinked. "Did I just say that out loud?"

"More or less, cherie. I wouldn't worry about it. Take this medicine that Wynne has made for you, and lie down again. Wolf is keeping watch, we will have plenty of warning if anything happens."

Muirnara choked down the bitter tasting draught of boiled herbs, and lay back on her furs, trying to make sense of the lost hours. Her bruised wrists and ankles made sense now, her exploring fingers touched healed cuts on her shoulder where she remembered the arrow striking her. But it was getting harder and harder to think, a pleasant woolly feeling was insinuating itself into the back of her mind. Whatever Wynne had put into that medicine was sending her to sleep again as well as dulling the pain. She gave up fighting and drifted away into dreamless oblivion.

When she woke again, it was full dark, but paler streaks were infiltrating the eastern skyline. Leliana had vanished, the shape in front of the fire was clearly that of Loghain, Wolf at his side. He had an awl and some cord in his hands and was carefully piercing holes in the sleeve of the leather shirt he was working on. Wolf was pretending to be asleep - she knew that Mabari well, and the half pricked left ear was a giveaway.

Carefully, her muscles still protesting, she eased herself out of the furs and moved towards the fire. He glanced over his shoulder and shifted across to make space for her. "There's soup in the pot, and the last of the bread beside it. Wynne said you could have it if you were no longer feeling queasy."

Her stomach was actually clamouring at her that failing to feed a Grey Warden for over a day constituted cruel and unusual punishment. She reached for the bread - stale and hard but she did not care, and took a small bite, testing to see if it was going to stay down. It appeared to be. She poured herself a bowl of the lukewarm soup and dipped the stale bread in it. "What time is it?"

"About two hours to dawn, Warden." He looked at her. "I said to Wynne and Leliana that if you were fit to travel today then we ought to get out of here. We have discovered about all we reasonably can, and we are likely to be travelling slower on the way back than we were coming here. Unless you are going to be heroically stupid and inform me that you feel up to a forced march."

She shook her head. "No, you're right. But what have we really discovered here?"

"Mostly negatives, but they are as important as the positives in information gathering. We know that the Archdemon is not here, and has not emerged from the same place that the Darkspawn assaulted the tower from. We have no way of knowing if this is going to change, only that this is how things appear to be for now. And we know," he added grimly, "that there is a Darkspawn here of a type not seen before, and he is in league with the most powerful sorceress in the Korcari Wilds, who may or may not be human, and who apparently has risen from the dead. There is nothing we can do about any of this at present, except take the information back, and hand it on to anyone who might be able to make sense of it."

She stared into the fire, intently chewing on a particularly tough piece of bread. "The information about the Archdemon - or the absence of the Archdemon - can go to Arl Eamon and Queen Anora. But this talking Darkspawn, and Flemeth... I don't even know who we should be telling that to."

"How about that Orlesian Warden?"

She allowed that to pass - as usual he was ignoring the fact that Riordan was actually born and bred in Highever. "I will certainly tell him - if he is even around to tell. He was going to scout south east towards the Brecilian Forest, to make contact with the Dalish and get reports of Darkspawn movement that way."

"If we had known this earlier, I might have suggested that we asked him to consult with the Dalish, because they seemed to know about The Woman Of Many Years...of course, we can ask the swamp witch when we get back to the camp, but she does not appear to have been a fountain of useful information so far. But as to who to consult about a talking darkspawn..." He paused, looked thoughtful, then shook his head. "Maric told me something once about a Darkspawn that spoke, a long time ago. But he never went into details and I came to the conclusion that the Grey Wardens had sworn him to some sort of secrecy over it." One side of his mouth quirked up. "Your order as a whole seems to be suicidally obsessed with keeping secrets, and ridiculously inept at actually doing so. The Joining for example - even my daughter knew that it was frequently fatal, but the Grey Wardens insist that the potential for death must never be mentioned because of the difficulty of getting recruits...the whole thing does smack of an organisation not exactly rooted in the real world."

She shook her head. "The worst kept secret on Thedas it seems, and yet men die so that the secret may be protected." Her mind went back to the night of her Joining - poor Ser Jory, with his pregnant wife, and his inability to face something that he could not deal with by striking at it with his blade. And Duncan, who she had always seen as her father's friend, kind, level headed and a last point of sanity in a world gone mad, striking Ser Jory down with a brutal efficiency that suggested it had not been the first time for him to preside over a Joining where something similar had happened. Then the chalice had been offered to her, standing alone with the bodies of Daveth and Ser Jory at her feet, proof of the price of a refusal, and the price of a failure. But it had never crossed her mind to refuse to drink from it, now she wondered whether she had been hoping for the bitter mercy of oblivion to take her. If so, the mercy had been withheld. She found herself looking up towards the far end of Ostagar, to the area where the three of them had been offered death in a cup, and only one had walked away.

"What are you thinking of?" Loghain's voice was quiet as he tied off the last knot in the cord and tucked the awl away in his pack.

"The last day but one here in Ostagar, when we were here before. We were out all night hunting Darkspawn in the Korcari WIlds for blood that Duncan needed for the Joining ritual, and came back near dawn. And at dawn we gathered up there, on the battlements that look to the north." Her voice trailed off and she stared at the northern walkway."

He shook out the leather shirt and handed it to her. "There you are, that's the undershirt for your mail. We had to slit the sleeve to get it off you and get the arrow out. Do you want to walk up there and look? It was the only bit of the ruins we did not clear out on the first day here."

She nodded, shrugging the shirt over her shoulders. "Thank you." He helped her to her feet.

They passed Wynne on the way, standing near the remains of the Magi encampment and looking deep in thought. She nodded to them both, casting a professional eye over Muirnara. "How are you now?"

"Much better, thank you." Her muscles still were sore, but the headache was gone.

"Good." Wynne's eyes raked over Loghain, then she gave a small smile and a nod. "Don't be too long. I will go back and start breakfast."

Muirnara stumbled a couple of times as they climbed the ruined steps. Loghain's hand was under her elbow each time. "It is just as well that we are not facing constant Darkspawn attacks here. I feel as weak as Sten's kitten this morning."

He raised an eyebrow. "Sten's kitten?"

"Oh, didn't you know? I thought it was Sten's own worst kept secret. He found this scrawny ginger kitten somewhere outside the Circle Tower, sheltering in a bucket. When he put a hand in to get it out, it ripped his hand to the bone. He said he had never seen such fighting spirit in something so small. So it has travelled with the Feddicks ever since. If you spy on him when he thinks you aren't watching him, you'll find him playing with it, and a toy mouse on a string. He claims he's improving its hunting skills."

Loghain seemed very amused by that. "It seems our quiet Qunari has hidden depths."

They had reached the top of the steps. Muirnara walked forward a few paces alone and looked around. "We stood here. Alistair stood by that pillar. Duncan took the chalice from that stone table and brought it to us." Her voice trailed off as she looked around her, then she walked towards the table and stopped. "It's still here." Her voice was now little more than a whisper.

He came to join her. She was looking down at the empty cup, half rolled under the table. Then she stooped and picked it up, balancing in in the fingertips of both hands, as she had done before drinking the lyrium laced poison from it. Duncan's words echoed in her mind. "You are called upon to submit yourself to the Taint, for the greater good." She had forced the burning foulness into her throat, and had faintly heard him say "From this moment forward, you are a Grey Warden." Then she had fallen, and the dream-racked darkness had claimed her.

Loghain was also looking at the chalice, then he gently lifted it from her fingers. "What did you hope to find here, Warden?"

"I do not know." She looked up from the blackened heart of the cup to meet his eyes. "All that there is here is memories. Two men died at my Joining, it feels like their ghosts never left this place. I did not expect to find the cup here." She looked at it again. "I suppose I ought to take it with me."

"Why?"

"Honestly? I don't know. I used to keep odd things I found that were to do with the Grey Wardens or their history, and give them to Alistair later. Now...I suppose habit made me think of it. I would not want to keep it for myself. The memories in this place are bitter enough, I do not need to carry the bitterness away with me."

"Then don't." Before she realised what he was about to do, he had taken the cup and thrown it, overarm, far out over the battlements and down into the snow covered land. She watched it fall, there was a flash of light on the tarnished silver, and then it was gone, landed somewhere in the soft snow.

Then he took hold of her chin, tilted her face up to his, and kissed her. There was little tenderness in the kiss, his lips were hard and bruising on hers, already sore from where she had bitten them in her ravings the last night. For a moment she was startled into immobility, and then her lips parted and she returned the kiss with passion and some despair, her hands coming up to touch his face, then curve around his neck. He held her for a brief moment, then broke the embrace and stepped back away from her, it was hard to read his face, but there was grief and anger in his eyes, and something far more subtle. Then his mouth curved into a mirthless smile.

"Just be sure, when you haul the memories out to torment yourself with later, as you generally do, that you remember that too." he said. Then he turned away from her, leaving her staring after him.