Loghain frowned as he read through the latest message from Nathaniel. Thankfully Nate had been intelligent enough to assume that his commander was unlikely to just sit around waiting for further word from the south, and had accordingly sent copies of his next missive to both the keep and the palace in Denerim, judging it Loghain's most likely destination shy of Gwaren itself.
"He reports clear sign of several small groups of darkspawn venturing around in the area of the sinkhole," Loghain told Anora, who was waiting patiently while he read. "He's taken the married pair of hunters into his own group, and put Podge in charge of Wilf and the third hunter – Lem, he says his name is – and given him Brann as well. Which gives him two patrols to try and keep a lid on things with until additional help arrives. Assuming the weather held, Oghren's group should have reached him by now, so we can assume he now has three patrols doing mop-up work."
"Should we send any of the army south to help?" Cauthrien asked, face creased slightly in a worried frown.
"I don't believe they'll be needed, but it might be best to send some Blight-experienced men south anyway. So far it sounds like just a minor incursion, but Maker only knows how large a break-out this may turn out to be before all is said and done. At least it doesn't appear to be another Blight, just remnants left over from the one just past."
"Can you really be sure of that?" Cauthrien asked.
"Fairly sure, yes. There are... signs, that Grey Wardens tend to become aware of, when it's a real Blight," he explained, and glanced at Anora. He'd told her about such things as the nightmares wardens experienced when an Archdemon was active, not wanting her to be as abysmally ignorant as he and Cailan had been. Perhaps if they'd known that Duncan had more than just a random sighting of a handful of darkspawn to go on, things might have turned out differently... different decisions made, at least, with some different outcome. Maybe even a better one.
"I'll send the 3rd south then; they have the most Blight experienced veterans, and know what to do to keep exposure down. If that is acceptable?" she added, looking enquiringly at Anora.
Anora nodded. "Entirely. Better we send in the army and not have them be needed, then fail to send them in and have cause to regret it later."
Loghain hid a smile, hearing his own words crossing his daughter's lips. Something he'd said to Maric once, during what had looked like just a minor problem with the Chasind barbarians in the south and had turned out to be an infiltration attempt by Orlais, their secret encampments in the southern mountains having caused the Chasind to move away northwards and thereby encroach on more settled territory. Instead of Orlais springing a surprise invasion from the south, Loghain and his men had turned the tables on them, attacking and wiping out the camps instead. Only a comparative handful of the Orlesian chevaliers had survived to escape back over the Frostbacks to Orlais, their tails rather firmly between their legs. One of his pleasanter memories, all told. Still...
"We need more wardens," he said abruptly, setting aside the letter and rising to go look at the large map of Ferelden spread out on a nearby table. "I barely have enough people to cover the north, and that only poorly. It was only by sheer chance that I'd sent a patrol south in time to catch this outbreak before it became something far worse than it is," he said, brooding over the map.
Anora and Cauthrien joined him at the table. Cauthrien reached out and touched the little drawing on the map that represented Vigil's Keep. "It's not a very central location," she agreed.
"No. Not even within the north, being placed so close to the eastern coastline as it is. A more central location, somewhere near Lake Calenhad perhaps, would have been better suited for the Grey Warden headquarters," he said, reaching out to touch several towns and keeps marked along the eastern shoreline of the lake. All, unfortunately, already occupied. He moved his finger eastwards to Lothering. There would have been a good location, actually, quite central and on the main roads, even if it had been reduced to ghoul-haunted ruins in the Blight year. Too late now, however, the latest heir having been confirmed in his holding of it following the end of the war, his father having died of apoplexy upon recieving the news of what had become of his bannorn.
"Ideally I suppose you should have several establishments, like the army does," Anora spoke up.
"Yes. If I had enough wardens to man them. There's the old compound still here in Denerim, though with Vigil's Keep only a day's hard ride away one or the other of them is rather redundant. Failing having a decent central location, I suppose a pair of establishments might do. We have a northern one, so a southern one would seem the intelligent choice," he pointed out, and ran his finger south from Lothering, stopping with his finger at the most obvious southern location on the map. He swallowed, unable to bring himself to say its name.
"Ostagar," Anora said, and frowned again.
"There is at least the old fortification there, parts of which are still habitable," Cauthrien said slowly. "Though I'm not sure how habitable they'd still be since we were last there."
"I know someone who can tell us," Loghain said, and glanced across the room to where a pair of pages waited quietly on a bench, to run any errands or carry any messages that might be necessary. "Galway, go fetch my squire please. Corey will know where he is if he's not in my rooms."
"Yes, ser," the page responded promptly, rising and hurrying off.
Anora looked annoyed. Whether at him unthinkingly ordering her pages around himself rather than asking her permission first, or because she disliked Alistair and had no desire for his presence here, something she'd made no real effort to hide since their arrival a few days ago, he didn't know. "My apologies," he said, dipping her a slight bow. "Old habits die hard."
She sniffed, but smiled slightly, and made a dismissive gesture with her fingers. "Forgiven," she said, and sent the other page off to the kitchen with a request for refreshments to be brought up to them.
Tea and nibblements and Alistair all arrived at roughly the same time. Alistair, as much a bottomless pit as any warden, looked longingly at the food before even thinking to acknowledge his Commander or salute his Queen. Though he at least bowed with credibly respectful style once he did remember himself. Anora took a seat to one side, and gestured for them all to join her. The pages brought cups of tea and small plates filled with snacks to all of them. Loghain was faintly amused at how ill-at-ease Alistair looked holding a cup of tea and balancing a plate of pastries on one knee in their company. He was rather odd man out compared to the three of them, of course, so his obvious unease was completely understandable.
"Solona mentioned to me that you and she had visited Ostagar some months after it fell," Loghain explained. "We were just discussing the ruins there, and wondering what shape they were in after the battles."
"Oh," Alistair said, his expression looking haunted for a moment, before it hardened, a wary look replacing it. "Yes, we were there," he said. "It was winter by then; the ruins looked much the same as they had beforehand, except for being covered in snow and ice. I don't know that I can say much more than that; we were rather busy fighting darkspawn most of the time we were there, not sight-seeing. Was there anything in particular you wanted to know about?"
"We were talking of the possibility of establishing a Grey Warden outpost there, to make covering the southern and western parts of Ferelden easier," Loghain explained to him.
"Did you venture into the Tower of Ishal at all?" Cauthrien asked. "If it's still reasonably whole it would make an excellent location."
"Oh," Alistair said, blinking and looking both mildly surprised and more than a little relieved. Loghain wondered why. He knew from what the Amell woman had told him that they'd recovered Cailan's body and seen it properly burnt; perhaps it was just that which had the boy seeming so tense about the subject. He put aside the question to consider and perhaps pry into later.
"Yes, the Tower was still standing," Alistair said, and then plunged into an explanation of what he and Solona had seen of it, both on the night they'd climbed it to light the beacon, and later, when they'd returned and descended through the tunnels underneath it, clearing out a nest of darkspawn infesting the place. He told it well, in proper order and with all the most important and pertinent details covered; someone at some point in the past had taught him how to deliver reports concisely, at least. It was an ugly story, especially the detail of them finding bits and pieces of Cailan's armour shared out among the darkspawn they'd killed that day, which Loghain hadn't heard before.
Anora turned pale during Alistair's recitation, her tea sitting untouched and going cold as she listened, her face a mask. It was little easier for Loghain to listen to Alistair's recitation either. It made it... too real, somehow. Too immediate and fresh, instead of a pain he'd had years to become accustomed to.
"Excuse me for a moment," Anora said when Alistair had finished, and rose and left the room, the three of them hastily rising as well, only resuming their seats once she was gone.
Alistair looked a little worried, as if fearing he'd done something wrong. "Thank you," Loghain said gravely, his own voice a little rough with emotion. "That was very informative."
Loghain sent one of the pages off to request a fresh pot of tea, then walked back over to the map and stood looking down at it for a while. Not seeing the map, but Cailan, as he had looked on that last day. So like his father, on one of Maric's more blindingly self-confident days. But then Cailan had never suffered from the occasional bouts of self-doubt that Maric had. Perhaps they'd protected him too well, growing up; he'd never gone through any of the sort of hard experiences that Maric and Loghain had. Cailan had had so little happen during his life to ever crush his self-confidence, or make him question his decisions. And maybe in cushioning him so well against failure, they'd failed him instead. Though Loghain couldn't in good conscience wish the sorts of experiences Maric and he had undergone on anyone; not when for both Maric and himself it had included being witness to their mothers' brutal murders, nor the long hard years that had followed.
Anora returned, the rims of her eyes slightly reddened but otherwise looking composed. Tea arrived, too, and the pages refreshed their cups.
"All right," Anora said. "It sounds like Ostagar may be a feasible location for a second Grey Warden establishment. There's still the problem of you not having enough wardens to fully man even your current keep, much less a second one."
Loghain nodded, frowning. "I must admit I've recruited far less rapidly than I might have, since the Blight. Apart from when I first set up in Amaranthine we've had little problem with darkspawn, and I felt at the time that your nobles would be less likely to fear I was building a power base of some kind for myself if I didn't push things along too quickly. Besides, with just a handful of wardens Solona had defeated the Blight, and I'd handled the northern attacks. It didn't seem like we necessarily needed any great number of wardens. Plus with the Blight already over with, I also didn't want to make too much use of the right of conscription; too likely to breed ill-will, I thought."
His frown deepened. "But patrolling all of Ferelden to watch out for sign of darkspawn, and supporting the dwarven initiatives in the Deep Roads, as I'm committed to do, takes bodies. More bodies than I have. The only good thing to likely come out of this breakout in the south is that it's given me a few more of them. But..." He paused, and sighed. "I need to begin recruiting more aggressively. I wish I could say that I could limit myself to just conscripting the dregs of the prison populations, but I'll need more than that. I'll also need trusty-worthy people; trained soldiers by preference, not just people who happen to have been too good with a knife or a bar-stool in a tavern fight."
He glanced at Cauthrien. "I'd prefer volunteers, but I'll conscript if there's no other way."
Cauthrien nodded slowly. "I can draft orders asking for volunteers," she said, not without some reluctance; it would mean losing some of her own well-trained people. "And I've got at least three men I'd be quite happy to see the back of, if you're willing to conscript them out of the stockade. Though I'll tell you plainly that one of them I'll be hanging if you don't; you might not get any more use out of him than the army has."
"That would be true in any case," Loghain said, making a face, then glanced at Alistair before continuing. "Not all recruits survive joining the Grey Wardens," he said bluntly. Something he'd already told Anora but had never told Cauthrien. Yet he could not ask her to give him some of her soldiers without making her aware that some of them would likely die as a result. "It's yet another reason why I've been reluctant to recruit widely. I would prefer that you limit the volunteers to those who are as... unattached, as possible. The fewer chances of spouses or children being bereaved or aged parents left without support, the better."
Cauthrien looked unhappy, but nodded. Alistair was looking unhappy as well, Loghain noticed, doubtless as have Grey Warden so-called "secrets" spread about. Well, he could just remain unhappy about it; as far as Loghain was concerned, much of what the Grey Wardens considered secrets were things that more people should be aware of.
Alistair cleared his throat, a look on his face now as if he had something to say or ask, but was hesitant to do so.
"Yes, Alistair?"
"Um. I was just wondering... couldn't you also try to get some wardens in from elsewhere, instead of having to recruit them all yourself? I remember Duncan mentioning that some of the establishments elsewhere have literally hundreds of Grey Wardens."
Loghain grimaced. "Unfortunately I doubt the First Warden would approve any such transfers, not after I so pointedly turned down his kind offer to transfer me to Montsimmard for proper training, my position here to be taken over by a fully trained warden of his choosing. And even if he did agree, the most likely source of any such additional wardens would be Orlais. Who are still convinced that I had their complement of wardens slain, and then made up a story about talking darkspawn in a transparent effort to cover my tracks," he added dryly. "Never mind that Orlesian so-called merchants witnessed at least some of the fighting up around Amaranthine, and doubtless also saw the condition of Vigil's Keep after the fighting there. We've had quite an astonishing number of Orlesian merchants passing through Amaranthine over the last two years, you know."
"Oh," Alistair said, looking abashed.
"It was a good thought," Loghain assured him. "Just unlikely to be workable, I'm afraid."
Alistair nodded, looking relieved, and subsided back in his chair.
"Assuming that you can recruit up your numbers enough to support a second establishment... who would you wish to put in charge of it?" Anora asked thoughtfully.
"That's a good question. I'm tempted to say Nathaniel Howe, but I think your nobles will be up in arms enough over my increased recruiting and gaining a second foothold in Ferelden – at least, from their point of view – that they'd likely balk, and balk hard, at the idea of my giving any additional authority to Rendon Howe's son, no matter how unlike his father Nathaniel is."
"They'd see it as a plot," Cauthrien agreed flatly.
"Exactly. Which means either Oghren or Sigrun. Oghren is... not primary leadership material. He does best with someone in command over him, in which circumstances he performs excellently I might add. Therefore most likely Sigrun."
Anora nodded slowly. "Her attitude is rather irreverent, as I recall, but she seems quite dedicated."
"She is. She literally has nothing else to live for, but the slaying of darkspawn; she is dead to her people, and considers herself to be such as well." Loghain explained. "Which reminds me, I should talk to her and see what she thinks of the idea of us recruiting among the Legion of the Dead. She seems to have found the two positions quite compatible herself. Such dwarves would mostly have to remain within the Deep Roads, of course, but a permanent Grey Warden presence down there instead of the current cumbersome system of rotating patrols is not necessarily a bad thing. Though I'd also need to clear it with King Bhelen before undertaking any such recruiting."
He paused in thought for a moment, and then grimaced. "Maker. I'm going to have a lot of running around to do in the near future, between the outbreak in the south and needing to recruit. And I'll want to go to Ostagar and evaluate the Tower for myself, before making any firm decision about it." Not that he really minded travelling; if anything he usually quite enjoyed being able to be out and about in Ferelden instead of cooped up in his office, and apart from the trip north to fetch Alistair it had, in fact, been an almost depressingly long time since he'd last made it out into the field for any length of time. Too busy with training and paperwork and politicking, between being responsible for both the Grey Wardens and the entire Arling of Amaranthine, which included having to manage the volatile Bannorn. Not to mention having to oversee the rebuilding of both the city of Amaranthine and Vigil's Keep itself.
He was looking forward to getting away from all of that for a while, he realized, even if the root cause was a darkspawn incursion. "I'd better write Varel," he said, and caught a look of amusement on Anora's face and a studiously blank look on Cauthrien's. They knew him far too well, he found himself thinking, and allowed himself a small smile as he sipped at his tea.