Rebels in the North

by Marianne Bennet

Eliante Cousland walks into the Great Hall and finds that Nathaniel Howe, onetime love interest, has arrived with his father in the brief days before Ostagar. Her brother Fergus wakes up in the Kocari Wilds when a couple of Grey Wardens trip over his presumed dead body. Multiple origins, multiple narrators: Cousland, Fergus, Nathaniel, Delilah, Amell, Caron

85. Ties that Break

Chapter Eighty-Five: Ties that Break

"This court clearly knows what it wants," Rendon Howe called out over the chorus of support for Loghain and himself. The Arl of Amaranthine in little more than name let his closed fist fall fast and hard to knock against the balcony railing like a judge's gavel. "Or rather who it wants. So why delay a moment longer? Let us vote and be done with these political games!"

Emilia's ears hurt. They longed for the barbed good manners of Halamshiral and the Grand Game, where even murder was at least executed quietly. But she suspected that even the Imperial Court's contrived conventions would have bowed and broken beneath the stress and terror of both civil war and Blight.

Across the hall, Howe was smiling from one ear to the other. He might have suited those gilded halls, much as he claimed to despise all things Orlesian. However, Loghain appeared, or at least affected, jaded boredom for these proceedings. But Emilia's side, such as it was, was scattered and struggling to regroup. Eliante Cousland and Teagan Guerrin exchanged urgent whispers and cast furtive glances at Eamon's back. Alistair vented his anger into Mordred's ear, although the warden-commander's gaze was distant and detached and his voice offered only the most minimal of replies. And down on the main floor, Riordan cast his gaze upward and caught Emilia's eye. His mouth twisted into a wry grimace that seemed to ask her, Was this what you expected? Did you really think there would be sides that would win or lose? Was this what you wanted? Is this what you left me for?

I didn't leave you, she tried to tell him with a furrowed forehead and narrowed eyes. I did what Grey Wardens are supposed to do. Victory against the Blight at any and all costs. And I plan to come back. She broke their locked gaze and swept the room with her own to punctuate her own thoughts. Once we've won.

But victory, the real victory, seemed further and further away. How could any Grey Warden slay the Archdemon from a dungeon?

"And how do you plan to vote, Father?" Nathaniel called out from the main floor. As the crowd quieted their voices and turned their eyes toward his voice, the heir to Amaranthine ascended two of the stone steps to the throne's raised platform. "What lands do you claim to speak for?" he questioned, now standing a head taller than the rest of the court. "You stole Denerim from the Kendalls. You butchered your path to Highever's title."

There was a string of pearls looped around Eliante Cousland's throat. As Emilia turned to watch Nathaniel, she caught sight of the necklace's filigree pendant trembling in time with the young rebel teyrna's accelerating heartbeat. But Alistair's betrothed did little more than glance at her former flame and then catch herself and look away again. And Nathaniel wasn't looking at Eliante at all, even as he spoke of her murdered family.

"You question my authority to govern territories seized from dead men and traitors?" Rendon Howe responded, his tone making it less of a question and more of an appalled statement. He looked at one noble in the crowd and then another, as if inviting them to be appalled with him.

"Of course I question it," Nathaniel retorted. "How can I not question it, when you and Loghain constantly redefine the term 'traitor' to whatever interpretation suits your goals? Next," he paused, catching his breath then launching forward, "you'll try telling us all that people are only dead when you decide they are."

A young woman who had previously seemed more interested in the way the light refracted off of her rings and bracelets than in the political proceedings suddenly snickered. "Habren…" Emilia heard the woman's exhausted father sigh in quiet exasperation, but the damage had been done. Another noble youth echoed the half-smothered laughter, and then another, until half of the court was entertained by the thought of Loghain and Howe trying to dictate over the dead. Even Riordan glanced up at Emilia with a wry half-smile, and she couldn't help but wrinkle her nose back at him.

"And," Nathaniel added, the only person other than his father and Loghain whose face was untouched with humor, "I question your right to vote for Amaranthine."

The uneasy laughter quieted into murmurs of surprise and whispers of scandal. Rendon Howe stared back at his son, for once without words, but Arl Eamon was ready to pounce. "What kind of father has his own son raise his voice against him?"

"Your son rose dead bodies from a graveyard," Emilia heard Mordred mutter, but the observation went unnoticed or altogether ignored. And a cruel observation it was: how could a child be held to blame for such a tragic mistake?

"Perhaps the question should instead be," Howe posed over the swell of opinions, his focus on Nathaniel and not Eamon, "what kind of son raises his voice against his father?"

And Nathaniel knew that his father's words were not meant to answer the Arl of Redcliffe's. "The kind of son who cannot stomach his father's crimes," he answered. "The kind of son who has no choice but to raise his voice in objection to them. The kind of son," he rose his voice louder still, "who means to claim his birthright and title from a father who no longer deserves the title of Arl or the right to govern or speak for the people of Amaranthine."

A wizened dowager slammed her cane upon the wooden floor and cried out, "For shame!" A noblewoman who had chosen to wear pleated leather armor rather than silk or velvet regarded Nathaniel with newfound interest. At her throat, Eliante's necklace continued to tremor, although she appeared extremely fascinated by the prominent muscles and bones in Alistair's right hand, which was fastened tightly around the banister. Howe regarded his son with the oddest look: not anger, and not fear. Something more like impatience tempered with war-weariness, as if what seemed to shocking and new to the Landsmeet was but an old familiar battle.

"You never could wait, Nathaniel," Howe observed, sharp tones dulled by battle fatigue. Perhaps that was it, Emilia considered. "You never could keep your place, or take your turn. Line up your shot. For all of your skill with a bow," now he smiled faintly, as if at a private joke or a fond memory, "you aren't much of a hunter. Not when it matters most."

"Unlike you," his son countered, "I don't turn my aim on my friends."

"This is what I mean," insisted Howe while Emilia watched Eliante scratch her thumbnail against the banister once, twice, again. "Wait. Wait and listen to what I am saying before you reply. You cannot properly defend yourself unless you know what you are defending against. But you cannot wait." He leaned back from the railing, folded his arms. "You cannot bide your time, take your turn. Not even in this."

He extended one hand and with outstretched fingers gestured from the chamber's doors across the floor to the throne itself. "It is not your turn. It is not your time. This," he punctuated the word with an emphatic wave toward the throne, "is not your world to govern. Not yet. It's mine." Howe folded his hand back into his arms and looked at his eldest son with wry amusement. "It's my turn, Nathaniel; mine and Teyrn Loghain's and even Arl Eamon's," he offered with an indulgent smile in Eamon's direction. "Yet…"

The crowd's faces turned upward like flowers toward the sun as the arl leaned forward over the banister to command their attention. "Yet young upstarts like my wayward son would claim that this world belongs to them now. Because they turned their cloaks on their elders and their country and called it justice."

It was not Nathaniel he looked at now, Emilia noted, but instead Eliante. The rebel teyrna closed her fingers around the banister and braced herself for another storm. In that gesture, Emilia could see Eliante's prepared points and counterpoints lock and load like bolts in a trebuchet, ready to be launched. Nathaniel followed his father's gaze from one balcony to the other, then opened his mouth — to object or to defend, Emilia didn't know. But it was Loghain who ran a hand across his face and spoke first.

"This is clearly a family affair," the teyrn announced, his gaze on the vaulted ceiling. "This court is no place to air the Howes' dirty laundry. Arl How, tell your son to sit down and be silent."

But Howe did no such thing. Instead, he simply watched Nathaniel and waited for his son's next play. There was, Emilia realized, some measure of pride in his face, as Nathaniel retorted, "Our families' affairs have become the country's affairs, Teyrn Loghain. Or do you plan to tell Queen Anora to sit down and be silent?"

Again, that same noblewoman snickered. Loghain bristled. And Arl Eamon, once again, seized the opportunity. "Is that what you told my nephew, Teyrn Loghain?" he demanded. "Is that why you left King Cailan in the field to die, because he would not sit down and be silent?"

"One could possibly make that argument," was what Mordred muttered this time, "if you'd been at Ostagar's war table."

Teagan glanced at Mordred with alarm, but whatever eye witness account the warden-commander offered was lost to the rising cacophony of the court's differing convictions and opinions. Emilia's ears hurt now more than ever before. Riordan looked up at her again with that same resigned look, and she felt her own face settle into its mirror image. And Alistair leaned away from his betrothed and toward Emilia and Mordred, saying, "You know, King Cailan isn't the only good man Loghain abandoned to his death."

"No," replied Mordred with detached interest. "He's just the one whose blood these people decided counts the most."

Emilia thought of the too familiar vial of dark, coagulated, ancient blood and its ominous promises. The taste of the Joining potion, bitter on her tongue and sticking to the roof of her mouth. Her last conscious thought had been that she would never get the stain out of her teeth, before the nightmares, before that horrible song began to sing in her veins. She could hear it still. She knew that she always would.

So she looked from Alistair to Mordred and said grimly, "We know that's not the truth."

Down on the main floor, Riordan watched Nathaniel with a look of specific interest. Emilia knew that look all too well, and wondered briefly how Riordan thought that might work in their favor. But now she stopped looking at Riordan and instead looked at Alistair and Mordred. One after the other, they returned her gaze and then met each other's eyes without flinching. Why wouldn't they they? They all had tasted the same potion, suffered the same nightmares, and heard the same song in their veins. They all foresaw the same fates: darkness and madness and eventual death in the Deep Roads. And, if not that, then a blade plunged into a dragon's throat and their own soul splintered in two by sheer power and volume. She saw now that they were resigned to be allies, if only in their eventual demises.

"But we can't tell people the truth," Alistair pointed out almost hopefully, as if dreaming that Emilia would suddenly revoke all Grey Warden oaths of secrecy.

Mordred didn't look hopeful. He simply rose one eyebrow and then sighed as if raising that one eyebrow was all he had the strength to manage. Emilia noted with some puzzlement that these little expressions and quick comments seemed to be all that Mordred cared to manage. What had become of all of his grand schemes and master plans for power, as he had once accused her? Why wasn't he enjoying this, as she had asked him?

"No one here is telling the truth," Mordred declared instead. "Why start now?"

---

Start now, his houseguest whispered to him. Start now, it —he —hissed. Some of the scholars at Kinloch Hold had claimed that spirits were without any mortal confines, beyond any limitations of the body or society. But Mordred had once told Fergus that his houseguest was a 'he'. Yet Mordred had also told Fergus that might have been because the houseguest no longer saw itself as separate from its host. And Mordred had told him that he did see them as separate, that he had to do so to maintain any increment of control.

Ever since Uldred's violent mockery of an experiment at the Circle Tower, since Fergus had flung a handful of allegedly sacred ashes into his face, since Flemeth had left him facedown in the mud, maintaining control had become increasingly difficult. It was even more challenging when the damn thing was winding itself around Mordred's throat, whispering in his ear, tightening its coils with each, Start now. Start now. Start now.

Why? Because revealing Grey Warden secrets to a royal court would grant Mordred some fleeting glimpse of power? Or because the thing just wanted to see what would happen if he did? That was what the thing originally wanted, wasn't it? The thing had just wanted to watch.

I am not a thing. You are not a thing. We are not a thing. We start now. I start now.

But then, to their surprise and likely just about everyone else's, Alistair started first.

"I suppose I should hurry up and say something," the bastard heir declared to the chamber after clearing his throat, "before someone tells me to sit down and be silent."

From the look on Eamon Guerrin's face, Mordred could infer that the arl would like nothing better. Meanwhile, Loghain folded his arms and leaned back from the bannister, mouth twitching. "I have no objections with Eamon's alleged royal bastard opening his mouth," the teyrn declared. "Go on. Prove to this court that it takes more than a passing resemblance to a dead king to rule this country."

As expected, Loghain and Howe's sycophants tittered and laughed at the slight. Alistair's ears turned pink, but he kept his chin stubbornly raised. "Alright, fine," he said defiantly. "Have your laugh at my expense. No," he continued when a few of the gigglers glanced up at him with confusion, "go on. Get it all out now, so we can all just… move along."

Alistair folded his arms and waited impatiently while the laughter built, then died. Then, as if because he had had to wait for them, Alistair was now going to make them wait for him, the templar-turned-Grey Warden took his time before speaking. Mordred was almost impressed.

"So," Alistair finally declared, "much as I hate, hate, hate to admit it, Loghain is not all wrong. Not about me. It's undeniably true that I didn't grow up in a palace with tutors to instruct me and advisors to advise me and tailors to custom fit all of my clothes… although you're all probably more interested in the first two. Or maybe not," he amended, eyeing the fine silks and jewels on display, "looking at you lot."

Then, so soon after the laughter had died, it began again. Yet this time, the nobles did not laugh at Alistair, but with him and at themselves. It was as if Alistair's nerves, his candor, and his humor were actually charming the crowd. Mordred almost admired that. He was in possession, and was possessed, of many things, but candor and humor were not among them. Although he had always been told that he had plenty of nerve.

"But what I do have," continued Alistair, "is years and years of templar training. And the Templar Order, whatever else they do, doesn't shirk their recruits. So, don't worry," he said with a half-grin, "I know how to fight and I know how to talk about the things I know, but I also know how to listen to people who know what they're talking about better than I do. And, if I'm not mistaken, I don't think Loghain's been listening to you all about the things you know better than he does."

The murmurs seemed to indicate that was the case. Alistair's expression lightened with that confirmation. "So," he said again, "I might just have more than a passing resemblance to a dead king. Unless someone wants to tell the chantry that they're doing something wrong."

The Grand Cleric frowned, and everyone in the court knew better than to accept Alistair's challenge in her presence. Mordred remembered his first meeting with Alistair, how he had claimed that revered mothers knew how to wield guilt like a weapon. It seemed that Alistair had decided to wield her ominous presence like a weapon of its own. It was more than Mordred had expected from the man. More than Eamon had expected, if the flash of pleasant surprise across his face said anything. Alistair, right here and right now, was more than any of them had expected.

And he had the enemy off-balance, and sinking to petty insults. Clearly uneasy by this turn of events, Rendon Howe said, "One might have assumed you already knew how to talk before you were assigned to the templars at, what, age ten?"

Yet months of traveling with Morrigan and her cutting comments had not amounted to nothing. "Yes, very funny," Alistair responded. "But, if I were you, Howe, I'd be less concerned about my public speaking abilities, and a little more concerned about your neck. Considering who's been publicly speaking about you, and what they've been saying."

"I didn't realize that cheek was a requirement of kings," Loghain stated loudly over a chorus of shocked laughter at Howe's expense.

Apparently, Eamon agreed. "Alistair," the arl said: three quiet syllables of warning that Alistair promptly ignored.

"You'd probably tell us all that commanding armies is the requirement of kings," the younger contender for the throne retorted. "And it's also undeniably true that I don't have years and years of doing that under my belt. But I understand something that you obviously don't, Loghain. Something that's even more important to Ferelden right now."

"I suppose you're going to tell me that would be darkspawn," dismissed Loghain. "That's all you Grey Wardens can ever say in your defense."

"Right now, that's the only thing that should matter!" Alistair snapped. "And Duncan should be the man whose death you all mourn!"

Giggles turned to gasps. Eamon turned faintly crimson: from anger or embarrassment, Mordred couldn't say. Howe struggled not to grin with political pleasure at Alistair's outburst. Standing beside his brother, Teagan reached over and rested a hand on Alistair's forearm, but the younger man shook him aside.

"Gregor!" Alistair shouted out the names of the fallen over the court's buzz of activity. "Ambrose! Markos! Loghain would have never left every single Grey Warden in Ferelden to die at Ostagar if he knew anything about them, anything about the darkspawn, about the Archdemon, about the Blight! He would have never left me, or Mordred, or Duncan. If you lot knew the truth, never in a thousand ages would have any of you left Duncan, our warden-commander and a good man, the best of us, to die!"

At the mention of the telltale truth, Mordred saw Emilia and Riordan exchange desperate looks. But the court was less interested in the suggestion of Grey Warden secrets than they were in Alistair's reddening face, raised voice, and the fist he slammed against the banister to punctuate his final point. The transparency that had charmed the court only moments before was beginning to backfire. Mordred was not the only one who noticed.

A hand decked with rings darted forward to cover Alistair's fist. Mordred's gaze traced the length of a red velvet-sleeved arm to where matching earrings swung at Eliante Cousland's ears. "The point is made," she told Alistair as well as the court, "and made well." Slowly, Eliante released Alistair's hand and turned her attention to the room at large. "And I see no reason to applaud the military skills of a commander who called a retreat from what could be the single most important battle in Ferelden's history."

"In your history," Loghain countered. "Arl Howe is right. You have short memories." His gaze swept from Eliante to Alistair and finally back to Nathaniel. "You all think that the important battles, the ones that matter most, could have only happened within your very brief lifetimes."

Alistair opened his mouth, but Eliante spoke first. "I don't waste time in looking back at history," she said quickly, but it seemed to Mordred that her counterpoint was little more than a distraction or a means to buy time. "It is too late for retrospection. That is a luxury we cannot afford. We can only look forward."

"Quite the hypocrisy," observed Howe, thus proving that Mordred had not been the only one to take notice, "wouldn't you say? Since you spend quite a bit of time convincing anyone who will listen to look back at my 'history.'"

"You didn't commit your crimes thirty years ago," she shot back. "You acted now, on the precipice of a Blight, to seize a place in this country that you don't deserve."

"And what about you, Eliante Cousland?" called out a noblewoman whom Mordred had seen darken the Redcliffe estate's doorway at least once; Bann Alfstanna Eremon of Waking Sea, he remembered now, with the missing templar brother. Perhaps he had found Eliante's own apparently truant brother, in whatever place mysteriously absent brothers went. Perhaps they could find Mordred's. Even he'd had some once, allegedly.

You have no brothers. We have no brothers. I have no brothers. Not anymore.

"You seem to care quite a bit about your place in this county," Alfstanna continued, eyes on Eliante. "Why should we have you as our queen? You have no claim to the throne, not in your own right."

Slowly, Eliante's hand lifted from Alistair's knuckles and rested back against the bannister. "I'm no legitimate Theirin, it's true," she began slowly, calmly. "But all of the legitimate Theirins we know of are at the Maker's side." All across the floor, the listeners bowed their heads in remembrance, but Eliante pressed forward, just as she had so recently advised the court.

"No matter who wins the day, who carries the vote," Eliante declared, voice ringing out strong and clear, "no one can make that claim. Why would you discount a strong contender, a leader, someone who loves Ferelden so much that they throw themselves into danger in her name, when they can easily be united to another contender who does have a claim in their own right?"

There was something about her words, something that made Mordred furrow his brow and think. It wasn't what she was saying; it seemed to him that she was just making a general, rather expected argument that wasn't all that different from the one Loghain made for himself. It was the way she was saying it.

"The Couslands were meant to die," she said, and Mordred considered that there was more than one Cousland in Thedas. "Every one of us. But we didn't. We could have fled, to Orlais or to the Free Marches," she went on, now pacing the length of the banister. "But we didn't. We stayed. We fought. Against the usurpers who designed our downfall," she said, and Mordred recalled the rebels at Soldier's Peak. "Against the Blight that would consume us all," she said, and Mordred frowned, unable to remember a time Eliante had faced down the darkspawn herself. That had been a different Cousland, who had descended into the Deep Roads in Mordred's absence, who had returned to Ostagar while Mordred had waded through the swamps to find Flemeth. But Eliante was not talking about Fergus, not when she returned to her original place beside Alistair, locked her gaze upon Loghain, and said, "Couslands do not look upon impossible odds, turn around, and run."

Couslands. Couslands. That was it, Mordred realized. The plural; she used the plural when she should have used the singular, she spoke for her family when she should have spoke for herself. Eliante wasn't just advocating for herself, like Eamon had wanted, but she wasn't just advocating for Fergus, like Mordred had bartered his aid at Fort Drakon to keep her from doing. She was campaigning for both of them.

"Like you did, Loghain!" Alistair proclaimed. "Mordred and I climbed the tower! Mordred and I felled a Maker-damned ogre! Mordred and I lit the beacon! And you ran!"

Mordred remembered the rain falling cold against his face. He remembered the guards stumbling down the steps from the Tower of Ishal, hands pressed against their wounds to keep their guts where they belonged. He remembered a hurlock held at bay by a stream of fire from his outstretched hand. He remembered the stairs and the stairs and the stairs, climbing and climbing, the stitches in his sides and the aches in his legs. He remembered the ogre's steps shaking the tower's roof. He remembered the beacon glowing in the brazier. And he remembered the sound of the retreat: the echo of the horn and the response of countless boots marching away from the battle.

It hadn't been just Alistair and Mordred who climbed the tower, felled the ogre, and lit the beacon. There had been one more with them. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it had only been two of them. Because—

You remember. We remember. I remember.

"But you can't run now," Alistair told the teyrn. "Not from this court, and not from me. I'll face you down, in single combat if I must—"

Single combat. Those two words reverberated throughout the chamber, were repeated by countless voices in countless tones: shock, scandal, excitement, agreement. Spectacle: that was what these nobles had really come here to see, Mordred thought scathingly, and what better spectacle than one man's death at the hands of another?

Eamon Guerrin's face flashed with panic. His fingers wrapped around Alistair's arm and yanked him back from the balcony's edge. Alistair facing Loghain in single combat, Mordred knew, was the last thing the arl wanted. Teagan, Eamon's preferred combatant, glanced from his brother to Alistair to Eliante. She stepped forward and looped her arm through Alistair's as Eamon whispered to her. Mordred was not consulted, but Mordred did not care. The arl had once humored Mordred as a potential power in this court, but this, this scheming and whispering and posturing was no true power.

Mordred had seen true power. He had seen the live lightning crackling between Uldred's fingers at the pinnacle of Kinloch Hold. He had heard the call of command in Flemeth's cackling laughter, in the roaring in his ears and the wet press of mud against his face and hair. He had felt the rush of potential during every lesson at the Circle Tower, every time an instructor had encouraged him to light a candle and Mordred had felt the impulse to set the room ablaze. The templars had been fools, sending Mordred into the Fade to be tempted by a pathetic mouse of a demon when something darker already resided comfortably within him. And these, these bickering, coddled, spoiled fools: they were all just more mice.

Mordred had seen true power. And this was not it. He was not sure what he —what we —what they had expected, what they had wanted. But this was not it.

---

"I should have expected this," the arl of Redcliffe hissed to his brother. "This… this unfettered thirst for vengeance. We shouldn't have allowed him to go on like that."

Teagan didn't flinch away from Eamon's ire. "Or perhaps we should pay attention to what he went on about," he contested quietly, earning a look of consternation from his elder brother. "Alistair didn't say anything that's completely unfair, much as you might not like some of the things he said."

But Eamon had apparently heard enough dissent within his own allies for one morning, and turned his attention elsewhere. "Take him away," he hissed to Eliante. "Take Alistair away from here. Calm him down. I will turn the court's attention to other matters, and hopefully they will forget this outburst."

Heart still thudding with adrenaline, Eliante nodded and tightened her elbow's lock on her betrothed's arm. For a moment, she thought she could feel Alistair's pulse throb against her elbow: just as rapid as her own. In this, at least, they could find common ground.

When they stepped back from the railing, there were all too many nobles who were all too happy to swell forward and take their place in the public eye. Haggard faces that bemoaned the darkspawn's progress, indignant faces that accused their neighbors of seizing land in the name of the civil war; Eliante pulled Alistair through their ranks until she spotted the balcony's back-wall and the benches that lined it. In their absence, the court commenced an inventory of deceased nobles' holdings and properties seized from named traitors and debated their rightful lords, while Arl Eamon and Teyrn Loghain contested each other at every turn.

Alistair collapsed onto an empty bench, and Eliante sunk down into a puddle of red velvet beside him. The bastard prince braced his elbows against his knees and let his head drop down to stare at the floor. Eliante, less willing to bare her neck to this crowd, straightened her spine and ignored any curious glances in their direction.

"How much longer?" Alistair's words were so quiet that she had to lean forward to listen. Noticing, he incrementally lifted his head and glanced sideways at her with an expression that was jaded beyond his years yet surprisingly familiar. Eliante just couldn't place where she knew it from. "How much longer until this is over?"

She looked up at the windows as if expecting them to answer. The sun had risen early that morning; the days were longer and longer by the week. She remembered a time earlier that same year, when she had thought that she would be locked into one long, cold, miserable winter: grief, anger, and desperation until the darkest night of Satinalia, retaliation and rebellion until the snow finally dripped from the tree branches. Now, each summer day seared a reminder that time had passed, was passing, and she still didn't have what she had decided she wanted the summer before. What she needed. And the sun gave away no clues as to how much longer this Landsmeet would last. It could be a season unto itself.

Finally, she admitted, "I don't know."

"You know more than me," said Alistair. He straightened his spine and tipped his head back against the stone wall behind him. "About politics," he clarified. "You were taught."

"I was taught the useless things about politics," replied Eliante with a wince. "How late is fashionably late. How to trade information at a salon without sounding like a gossip. How to sound promising while actually promising nothing." She paused, listening briefly as some noble accused another of expanding borders under the pretense of defending against the darkspawn, and sighed softly. "Sometimes I wonder if we all should have been taught instead how to make promises, good promises, and keep them."

Alistair snorted. "Maybe, but then what would this lot do with all of their free time? They'd have to learn how to knit."

She looked at him for a long moment, trying to fathom his ability to find any humor in this mess. But then the mental image of Loghain, Eamon, and the lot of them getting together to knit scarves and darn socks around a flickering fire, forced into friendship by the lack of a pretense for contention, filled her mind. A giggle escaped from the corner of her mouth, and Alistair's teeth flashed in an answering grin. For an irresistible moment, the two of them sat snickering on the bench in the midst of the turmoil. More than one noble shot a disapproving look in their direction, but Eliante didn't care. It was all so absurd. Horrible, she remembered, her smile fading, but also absurd.

"So, yes," she said to Alistair, rapidly sinking back to sobriety. "A year ago, I could have told you everything you might have wanted to know, and some things you probably didn't, about the useless things. Everything else, I had to pick up as I went along."

"You're a fast learner," he noted with bitter admiration.

"So are you," she returned sincerely, and watched as crimson began to rise in his throat and jaw at the compliment. "You don't give yourself enough credit. You had them." He shook his head, waved her off, so she persisted, "You really had them, Alistair."

"Alright, so I had them," Alistair conceded with an affable shrug. Then he let his shoulders drop back down as he exhaled his disappointment in a sharp gust. "And then I lost them. And I know why. I didn't keep my head," he stated with a bitter laugh. "Which means I'll probably lose my head. Funny how that works."

Somehow, Eliante didn't find that quite as funny as Alistair's last quip. While he let his head fall back against the wall once more and closed his eyes, she listened as Alfstanna Eremon raised her voice above the din.

"Why are we wasting our time squabbling about land and who controls it?" she demanded of the court. "The land isn't going anywhere. There will be time to sort out its rightful lords later."

"Hear, hear," declared Arl Wulff, his voice booming over the endless chatter. "I don't give a damn if someone's pretending to own any part of the West Hills. All of southern Ferelden is covered by black clouds. The ground rots beneath your feet. Plagues and darkspawn raids carry on until even the crows get sick of the smell of carrion. The only lords reigning over the destruction are the damned darkspawn!"

Alistair opened his eyes hopefully. But Alfstanna, whose holdings in Waking Sea were safely to the far north, aimed for another argument. "I am not the only one of us with a missing family member," she told the court. "Many of us have brothers, sisters, cousins, who have vanished. Perhaps because they dared to speak out against our regent, or were simply caught in an inconvenient place at an inconvenient time. My brother's final letter told me that he was hunting an escaped Circle mage. Teyrn Loghain," she bit out, "Arl Eamon claims that you know what became of the mage all too well. Tell us what became of my brother while he was on official templar business."

"What's this about a templar?" called out the grand cleric, likely thrilled at the return to topics under the chantry's jurisdiction.

All of Wulff's good sense was overwhelmed by Elemena's focus on all things regarding mages and templars. With a sigh, Alistair closed his eyes again. "It's just that they all keep forgetting what really happened at Ostagar," he told Eliante, or the darkness behind his eyelids, or maybe both. "Or ignoring. Or pretending. It wasn't just Cailan who died there. Maybe they're all thinking he was the best hope for Ferelden, but it's the Grey Wardens that are the best hope for Thedas. And Loghain left them to die. Left us to die. Not just the Grey Wardens, but all of those people: loyal soldiers, who trusted in him, believed in him. Unnamed corpses in the snow. We'll never know who all of them were, who any of them could have been. What they could have done, and what they can't do now. And I can't forget, or ignore, or pretend. You can't even imagine."

It seemed as if Alistair had closed his eyes to momentarily escape from the Landsmeet, but now it seemed as if whatever lurked on the inside of his eyelids was worse. With a shudder, he opened his eyes again and looked at Eliante. Then he realized—

"Oh, sweet Maker," he stumbled over the words like the first few missteps before tumbling down a flight of stairs, "I forgot." He squeezed his eyes shut again —apparently, looking at her was worse than whatever was there —then forced himself to open them and look at her: really look at her. "I am so sorry."

"It's alright," replied Eliante quickly, but that didn't quiet her betrothed's embarrassed regret.

"No, it's really not," Alistair insisted, all of the blood draining from his face with his mortification. "You have more right to grieve, to be angry, to do anything, than me, than any of them, than anyone. And here I was, bemoaning the death of one man, not even my father, not even my family, with you, right here, listening to me—"

He waved his hands in the air, then let them fall back into his lap. Impulsively, Eliante caught Alistair's shoulder, and adamantly turned him to face her directly. "No," she insisted, "it really is. If everyone around me remembers, they'll make me remember it too. And it's too much," she found herself suddenly confessing, "to remember, all of the time, all at once. I'll drown in remembering, and then everything else that comes with it…"

And then there it was. All of it, all of the time, all at once. Everything that came with it. Everything that had been lost. Dresses piled in the corner of her bedroom. The tarnished family heirlooms on her dresser. The ring her mother had given her on her sixteenth birthday. The horse her father had presented her on her eighteenth. The dough kneaded beneath Nan's callused hands. The candles Mother Mallol trimmed in the chapel. The best whetstone that Gilmore hid buried beneath all of its worn down counterparts. The tapestries Oriana had brought from Antiva and hung upon every wall Eleanor Cousland's taste had not already claimed. The gilded spyglass that Fergus had lent Oren to learn the night sky's stories. Her mother's glass cabinet of shells from her seafaring days. Her father's favorite books left open on the breakfast table, the stamped leather covers worn down and the pages dogeared. All of those meaningless, meaningless items made significant by the memories of the people tied to them, and the inescapable truth that Eliante was never going to get any of them back. Not the things, and not the people. All she had was a castle scorched by fire to create a hollow shell of what had once been there, and a mind too full of the memories of what had now been lost.

It was safer to think of the things and scorn herself as a silly, vapid, shallow creature for it, then it was to—

"I can't let it get the better of me," Eliante said firmly. "Not here, not now."

"Not like I just did," agreed Alistair glumly.

They might have been sitting in their own private silence on that bench, but nothing in the Landsmeet's chamber was silent. There were a dozen things in the natural world Eliante could liken the court's overlapping voices to: the constant buzz of a bee hive, the echoing caws of a murder of crows, or the pounding of waves upon a rugged shoreline. Eliante missed the ocean: the endless expanse of empty space above the waves and the vast unknown darkness that rested beneath. Years ago, she and Delilah Howe had once commandeered an Amaranthine fisherman's rowboat and cast themselves out to sea. They had bobbed in the harbor like a cork, lost in the void of salt and sun, rendered insignificant when compared to the waves stretching as far as the eye could see. At least until the fisherman had fetched their parents, and Eleanor Cousland and Rendon Howe had drawn their respective daughters back to shore by the tether Eliante and Delilah had forgotten to cut loose.

If she closed her eyes, Eliante thought she could feel the sun on her skin, taste the saltwater on her tongue, smell the fish guts in the belly of the boat, hear the gulls cry out over the waves. She imagined the line tying the rowboat to the dock snapping in two, letting the boat spiral out to sea, lost in its own insignificance. Of how terrifying and yet freeing that might feel. Of how much she might give to feel insignificant now, how much she might long to be able to stand up and walk out of this echo chamber and have no one notice her absence.

Bryce had stood on the dock and laughed. Rendon had simmered with anger and insisted that nothing about this was funny. And Eleanor had just drawn the rowboat back to the shore, one hand placed after the other upon the rope.

"But I want to remember," said Alistair suddenly. "I want them all to remember."

Eliante looked at Alistair and, for the first time since they had been hastily introduced all of those months ago at Redcliffe Castle, saw him, all of him: his earnestness, his determination, his need to be heard, to be seen, for people to tell him what they really meant, to confirm what he already knew was right. But it seemed that Alistair already knew what was right, for the most part. His moral compass pointed true, generally. Once, Eliante would have said that couldn't be said of most people in the world. Now, she wondered if it was true of more people than she had allowed. Even if they weren't all perfect, there was a long moral distance between Andraste and the Archdemon. Alistair was naive, but good: a goodness that may have even sprung from that guilelessness. He saw the good in others, regardless of thrones or crowns or kingdoms. His love for the Grey Wardens that had fallen at Ostagar was unselfish, particularly when voicing his grief could cost him a throne. A throne, a crown, a kingdom that he might even, that, together, he and Eliante might even—

"Then tell me," she said to him. "Tell me what you want to tell them."

He glanced toward her, suddenly silent as if the words were caught at the back of his throat like a frayed scarf upon a doorway's splintered frame. And then they jerked free, unraveling like loose threads that Eliante could only gather in her hands and hope to hold the weave together. "It's funny," Alistair stated abruptly. "They keep talking about my father. My real one. It's all 'Maric said this' and 'Maric promised that.' Arl Eamon tells me what Maric would have wanted, and it seems like he apparently wanted a lot of things. A lot of things that Eamon happens to also want. And when I ask Teagan if any of it's true, Teagan just gives me this helpless kind of shrug. Like this."

Alistair raised both hands not much higher than his waist, turned his palms toward the ceiling, and lifted his shoulders a barely perceptible half-inch. His mouth twisted into a good-natured grimace as he shifted his to his right. Eliante recognized it as the most subtle gesture of dissent, perfect to be expressed from behind an older brother's back. It was so undeniably Teagan that she smothered her laughter and chanced a look in the younger Guerrin brother's direction just to make sure he wasn't looking at them.

But then she thought she saw someone else out of the corner of her eye. Someone she hadn't looked for. Someone she knew better than to look for. But suddenly there was grey hair and the curved marks of too familiar laugh-lines, the flash of blue eyes, and—

"But Duncan," said Alistair, settling back into himself. Eliante snapped her attention back to focus on him. "Duncan had so much to worry about. He had to be so many places at once. In the Deep Roads to strategize with the Legion of the Dead." At Vigil's Keep to map border patrols with his neighbors. "In the Wilds to track the darkspawn's activity." At sea all along the Storm Coast to watch for pirates. "At the Orlesian border to find out whatever Weishaupt wants this age." Voyages to Starkhaven, Ostwick, Kirkwall, to remind the Marchers that only a strip of sea separated them from us. "In every city's jail, tavern, or alienage to find new recruits." In the training yard outside the gatehouse, just as happy to spar a new squire as the guard-captain. "In this palace to convince all of these people that the Wardens weren't plotting another coup." In this same palace to jockey with Eamon and Loghain for influence. "Sure," admitted Alistair, "he delegated. But he also did it himself. He did it all himself. And yet he still had time for me."

"Time," Eliante echoed that one word because it felt like it meant everything. All of those hours before her home had been sacked, when minutes were there to waste with sparring and studying, with waiting for what she imagined as the next grand monumental moment that would change everything and make her life exciting. And then all of those hours after that terrible, catastrophic moment that did change everything and made her life a nightmare, when minutes suddenly slipped away between her fingers too quickly and every action could cost everything. She wanted to go back to those dull days when she wanted everything to be over, and never leave them behind. Eliante had once thought her parents boring. Now she wanted to know everything about them.

"Time to see me," Alistair replied. "To talk to me. To find out what I wanted, what I actually wanted. He never told me what I should want, and he never just shrugged at me. And Duncan knew Maric too. No one ever talks about that, but he knew Maric. Maybe even better than Eamon or Teagan did. And I want to ask Duncan what Maric wanted. I want to ask him so many things, Eliante. About Maric, about the Grey Wardens, about myself, about himself. And I can't. I'm never going to be able to ask him anything ever again."

He shook his head, just as helpless when faced with the permanence of death as Eliante felt she was. "It's not fair," he declared, and yet that childhood complaint resonated deeply within her too. "If everyone else gets to tell me what Maric would have wanted me to do, Duncan should have gotten his say."

Somewhere in the cacophony, Loghain was shouting about false accusations and upstarts taking advantage of the chaos, and Eamon was combatting his obvious anger by trying to sound more and more reasonable and measured. Unfortunately for him, Eamon's efforts made him sound only more and more smug and self-assured. What would you have done? Eliante silently asked Bryce Cousland. But she didn't expect an answer, and perhaps that was why she didn't hear one. And she had her own answers now.

"I didn't know Duncan," Eliante admitted, "and I didn't know Maric. Sometimes I wonder if I know, really know, anyone. But from all of what you've said about him," she said, reaching across the space between them to take his hand in both of hers, "I think that if you had asked Duncan what Maric would have wanted you to do, he would have asked you, 'What do you, Alistair, not Eamon, not Teagan, not Maric, not Duncan, want to do?'"

Alistair looked down at her fingers closed around his, and then back up at her face. "What do you want to do, Eliante?" he asked her as if genuinely curious. Perhaps he was. "Have any of them even asked you?"

"No," said Eliante before she thought about whether that should be what she said to him. She shook her head and shrugged, tried to look nonchalant about it all, tried to convince him that it was: "Because I told them what I wanted before they could ask."

"Did you tell them the truth?"

Eliante closed her eyes. Of course, she hadn't. She couldn't, not when she wanted so many things, and so many of them were in direct conflict with one another. So Eliante decided to choose things that she could make do with, and let the future unfold as it would. In the aftermath of whatever came next, she could pick up the shattered pieces of things she once wanted and ask herself then if they still held that same meaning to her. Until then, Alistair's fingers were warm around hers. He was upfront about the shape of the world around them, tried to articulate what he wanted, and in return asked her what she wanted. She could make do with this.

She opened her eyes and saw Nathaniel Howe staring at her. And then she couldn't make do with anything. Even nothing seemed better than the guilt that burned in her throat like the fires she had fled at Castle Cousland, in Highever, in Denerim, yet one fire after another, refusing to flicker out. Not when he stood there staring at her when she was caught with another man's hand in hers and she had never even warned him what she was going to do.

---

He knew he was staring at her. He knew she was staring back at him. But he cannot make himself stop. Not when her hands are folded neatly around someone else's fingers. Not when her knees are brushed up against someone else's shins. Not when that someone else isn't just a 'someone else', but is instead a bastard prince, a son of Maric, a Grey Warden, a heroic figure from a song likely soon to be written, come to save them all from the Blight. Not 'someone else' at all. The hero of the story. The once and future king. The handsome, affable, selfless man she had promised to marry. Who could compare?

Nathaniel felt his teeth ache under the strain of clenching them together. He felt something throb just below his jaw. And he saw her sitting there, silent and serene, calm and collected, clearly feeling none of the things he was feeling, and he made himself turn around, go back through the stone archway, and descend down the stairs to the main floor. But even in the empty corridor, within the stone walls and their insulated cool air, the Landsmeet echoed after him.

"Would someone remove these meddlesome Grey Wardens from these proceedings?" Loghain implored the chamber. "One would merrily defy all of his order's sacred traditions and usurp our throne, no doubt to hand it over to Orlais at his first opportunity. And another would have us all turn our backs on Ferelden to blindly march south to die, while his Orlais sweeps over the Frostbacks to seize our country."

"Only then," Nathaniel's father added smugly, "will these precious Grey Wardens bestir themselves against the Archdemon, once Ferelden can be delivered to their empire on a platter!"

A gasp echoed into the corridor, followed by scuffling feet and a hard thump as someone fell to the floor. Nathaniel lunged toward the archway into the main floor, mind racing to keep up with the sounds of a struggle, running to the conclusion that some fool had taken Loghain's words literally and had made to remove Riordan from the chamber by force. But Nathaniel's path was blocked by a wall of bodies pressed back into the corridor, deaf to his requests to make room and immune to his attempts to shove his way past them anyway. But then a voice echoed from the main floor into the corridor, calm and collected, its message and Orlesian accent just insulting enough to stall the chaos:

"Orlais doesn't care about you."

He felt his chest convulse with shocked laughter at the sound of Emilia Caron, a woman he had always considered to live every hour of her life with the height of diplomacy, making such a flat and decidedly undiplomatic statement. Apparently, Nathaniel wasn't the only one taken by surprise, as all Loghain seemed able to only muster in response was, "What?"

"You really think that you are all the Empress thinks of at every waking moment?" Nathaniel heard Emilia respond, her accent dripping from every syllable. He took the steps back up to the balcony two at a time. "Do you truly believe," she continued as Nathaniel noted with relief that Eliante and Alistair had disappeared from the bench, "that the Council of Heralds plots, day and night, to reclaim a comparably small territory that was lost in battle by a foolish predecessor?" He finally caught sight of Emilia herself, leaning one elbow leisurely upon the railing, smile glimmering across the floor at Loghain and Howe. "You have seen a map, yes?"

As the crowd shifted in alternating laughter or scandal, Nathaniel claimed a decent vantage point. Over a noblewoman's shoulder, he caught sight of Loghain's annoyed expression and wondered if Emilia knew that the teyrn collected maps himself. But, more importantly, Nathaniel saw that there was a man, some crony of Loghain's no doubt, down on the main floor with his grip locked around Riordan's sword arm. He knew now what had caused Emilia to speak out, to play a part that the Fereldan nobles would not be able to ignore.

"Then you know that Orlais is vast," she went on, resting her chin in the crook of her palm. "That Ferelden's border cannot compare to those shared with Nevarra and Tevinter. If there is territory to be claimed, they would look north before they look east."

Riordan may have been rescued from an immediate and potentially violent exit from the chamber, but he didn't look particularly grateful for the means of his rescue. Loghain had made the claim that the Grey Wardens were far from politically neutral, a point that Riordan had always readily refuted, and yet here was Emilia, acting as if she were confiding Orlesian national secrets. Nathaniel was thoroughly on her side. Riordan couldn't refute anything if he was removed from the room.

"Nevarra and Tevinter are not facing a Blight and the trials that come after one," Loghain thundered out in response.

"Orlais wouldn't want to annex a Ferelden that has been decimated by a Blight," Emilia countered, almost laughing at the apparent absurdity of such a claim. "I have seen the Western Approach. The Hissing Wastes. The Second Blight left nothing there but sand and rock and poisonous air. If that is what became of Ferelden, Orlais wouldn't want you."

Sand and rock and poisonous air. Unable to stop himself, Nathaniel thought of his favorite places in Ferelden, towering forests, wave-struck beaches, cold-water streams, and green hillsides, reduced to the toxic desert she described. He was not the only one thinking of such things. Emilia had successfully returned the court's attention to the dangers that Riordan had first described to them. He had spoken of the Blight, and she of its aftermath.

"Clearly, that is a future for Ferelden that we must prevent," Eamon called out over the crowd. "Alistair acknowledges the traditions of his order, yes. But Grey Wardens are dedicated to defeating the Blight at whatever cost. If the cost are those very traditions that stand in the way of him becoming king and leading us to victory, then Alistair is willing to pay that cost."

Disgusted, Nathaniel pushed his way back toward the corridor and its steps downward, but not before catching a glimpse of Alistair's stoic nod of agreement… and Eliante's answering smile. Of course Alistair was willing to pay that terrible, terrible cost, Nathaniel considered savagely as he descended the steps once again. Alistair was the good man, he noted bitterly, turning to brace one hand against the stone wall. Alistair would get the crown, get the glory, get the girl. Alistair's father was a legend and wasn't loathed from the Frostbacks to the Amaranthine Ocean. She would never look at Alistair's face and hate it just because it couldn't be helped that he looked like—

"While I'd understand if you wanted to punch a wall," drawled a too familiar voice from a step behind him, "I can't in good conscience recommend punching that particular one."

Nathaniel tensed, recognized his own fist suspended in midair, and then exhaled slowly. At least there was no confusion in the rules of engagement here. Malcolm Dryden wasn't Eliante Cousland, Alistair Theirin, or Rendon Howe. There were no conflicting or confusing loyalties, only comfortable rivalry.

"I don't know what stops you," Nathaniel retorted, lowering his arm and turning around. "You never do anything 'in good conscience'."

With a shrug, Malcolm folded his arms and let his weight fall mostly onto one leg. Deliberately nonchalant, Nathaniel noted, and dressed for the occasion. No doubt that likely stolen noble's doublet hid the worst of the bloodstains on Malcolm's shirt. "You might later find that you'd like the bones in your sword hand not-broken."

"Speaking from experience?" Nathaniel asked, deliberately baiting him.

The thief lifted both shoulders in another shrug. "What've I got to punch a wall about?"

"You never struck me as the sharing type."

Malcolm just looked back at him, expression unreadable. With a sigh, Nathaniel looked over Malcolm's shoulder meaningfully: back toward where Eliante and Alistair likely stood with hands clasped beside their political matchmakers, Eamon and Mordred. With exaggerated movement, Malcolm turned around in the direction Nathaniel looked and then back around. "Oh," he observed and then smirked. "That."

"That," Nathaniel repeated flatly.

"You're worried about that?" Malcolm sounded as if he were on the verge of laughter.

"Not anymore," he muttered, turning around and continuing his descent. "Why worry about something that's obviously over?"

"You're an idiot," stated the thief decisively, his steps echoing in Nathaniel's wake.

"So are you," returned Nathaniel. "Why are you still hanging around her when she's clearly all over him? It's pathetic."

"You're pathetic," was the immediate retort, because apparently that's where they were now: repeating petty insults back at each other. "You think this is about him? What she's doing is about him?"

"I think Anders is right," he said under his breath, more to himself than to Malcolm. "She's just another trap."

"She's trapped." Malcolm's words stopped Nathaniel at the threshold. "She trapped herself," he paused, then launched the rest of his sentence like a direct attack, "for you. You know that. You can't be that stubborn that you haven't put the pieces together."

Nathaniel didn't reply. Deep down, he knew that he had. Mordred's constant reminder for Eliante to remember her promise, Eliante's evasion when Nathaniel tried to discuss the price for his escape from Fort Drakon, Alistair's hand clasped in both of hers. The pieces were put together. Nathaniel just didn't like the shape that they made.

"It's just easier for you to be mad at her," stated Malcolm with a bitter shrug. "To blame her."

That was a piece that Nathaniel rejected completely. "What did you say?" he demanded, turning back and ascending the stairs toward Malcolm.

"What you heard me say," he stated, refusing to back down. "You're not the only one putting pieces together. You ran after her because you didn't trust where she'd gone. Then she ran after you because she'd heard where you'd gone. You think your piss-poor timing didn't have a price? But then," his eyes flashed with something like pity, a look that Nathaniel had learned to hate in the last year, "it's always easier to blame somebody else."

"You think I don't blame myself?" Nathaniel snapped before he could stop himself from revealing too much to this completely untrustworthy man. "I blame myself," he told Malcolm like a secret he had kept for too long. "All. The. Time. From the very beginning, I've blamed myself for ruining everything."

"Then maybe it's time to stop."

Shocked, Nathaniel stared at him. Of all of the people in Thedas to expect any kind of absolution from, Malcolm Dryden was not high on his list. Not even close. But of course that wasn't what this order to 'stop' was about at all, or so Nathaniel discovered when Malcolm seized his arm and dragged him back up onto the chamber's upper floor.

"The two of you go about like you've got this grand romance," Malcolm stated as if he didn't care much about any of it at all. "Meant to be. Soulmates. Whatever you want to dress it up as. Maybe it's time for you to stop 'blaming yourself' and figure out that there's more important things than who's going with who. Things like peace and quiet. Things like getting this waste of time," his hands indicated the entirety of the Landsmeet, "over with so we can all go home. Things like us all not getting slaughtered by a horde of darkspawn. Because no one's going with no one if we're all dead."

Malcolm stopped flat and released Nathaniel's arm. He stared in one direction until Nathaniel followed his gaze to see Eliante and Alistair, standing with their backs to the both of them. The thief tilted his chin in Eliante's direction, his tone still mocking but his expression grim. "She's figured it out."

In the back of his mind, Nathaniel listened as other nobles made arguments on behalf of Alistair or Loghain's claims. One voice called out for Queen Anora's whereabouts, but the question was drowned out by other opinions who wanted this Landsmeet won and over with. That corner of Nathaniel's head that was paying attention couldn't shake the feeling that such hopes were in vain, but the rest of his focus was elsewhere. He didn't look at Eliante; there were no answers stitched into her dress or pinned into her hair. So why was Malcolm looking at her as if searching for them?

It was then that he saw the divot in Malcolm's chin as if the man were biting down on his cheek from the inside. He saw the thief's eyes narrowed as if against the sun's glare. Nathaniel realized that he was seeing all of the things that he had looked for in Eliante's carefully composed expression: all of the things that Nathaniel himself felt when he looked at her now. And then he saw the knuckles on Malcolm's right hand: bruised blue and purple as if they had been slammed into an unforgiving surface.

"Then why haven't you?" Nathaniel asked the thief, his bitter rival, his wayward rescuer, the man who had once shot an arrow into a tree in an effort to get Nathaniel killed. Once again, the world had changed and left Nathaniel twisting in a constant wind of confusion.

"You think I'm not trying?" Slowly, he deliberately flexed his bruised hand, but didn't take his gaze off of Eliante and Alistair. "Trying harder and harder all the time."

On this side of the chamber, some noble muttered a snide comment about the Couslands and the Orlesians being all but in bed together, that Bryce would have set aside his beloved wife for a chance at an emperor's crown. Nathaniel saw Eliante's spine go straight as she heard the malicious whisper and had to resist every impulse to charge forward to her side. But Alistair was already there, standing in the place Nathaniel had occupied for the majority of the year. He already had his hand on her back; she was already leaning in to listen as he murmured something for her ears alone. She was already smiling back at him, and Nathaniel was out of earshot, out of eyesight, out of reach, and apparently completely out of the running.

They had both lost their fathers, Eliante and Alistair, Nathaniel reflected, and meanwhile Nathaniel's father was alive and well, standing there across the chamber, spitting venom at them both, further cementing their alliance with every attack.

"And you're right," said Malcolm, finally looking away from the probable future king and queen of Ferelden. "I'm not the sharing type."

---

Apparently, Leliana wasn't the sharing type. Not even in the name of king and country.

That wasn't fair of him. Fergus knew that. He told himself that over and over again, every time his smarting feelings circulated back to his mind's surface. But there Leliana was, walking beside him, within arm's reach for what felt like the longest time since they had come to Denerim, with a bit of the straw roof caught in one of her copper braids, and he couldn't reach over and pluck it out of her hair. Because she was not a future for him to choose. Perhaps because she had decided that he was not a future that she would choose.

He couldn't blame her for that. Fergus didn't think he would choose himself as a future either, given the choice, or rather a choice that he didn't have. Whatever future he chose, Fergus knew that he himself would be his one true constant in a sea of variables. He would always have to live with himself, even if Leliana didn't want to live with him.

"I'd know the bitter scent of witherstalk anywhere," Zevran told him as they wound their path through Denerim's streets toward the royal palace. The assassin pinched a narrow vial between two callused fingers and lifted it so that the sun twinkled through its crystal, tinged violet by the dregs of whatever potion it had once contained. "Essential for a most potent cocktail of a sleeping draught. Someone was quite invested in assuring that you woke late this morning."

"Your former colleague, I presume," Fergus noted darkly.

"I don't think so," disagreed Leliana, discreetly shaking her head. "A sleeping draught is closer to a bard's trick than an assassin's method. I believe your Crow took advantage of circumstances arranged by another party."

"So more than one person wants me absent from the Landsmeet," observed Fergus with a scowl. He rested one hand upon his sword's hilt, glad that Zevran and Leliana had brought it along with their own weapons when they had noticed his absence from the Couslands' estate. "I'm thrilled to hear it."

"It's nothing you didn't already know."

"But on the brighter side," Zevran cut in smoothly, "one must consider the price of witherstalk. Plucked from far-flung foreign deserts, it is not by any means an inexpensive investment. Meanwhile, it seems that deathroot is entangled in the roots of nearly every tree in Ferelden."

Delayed then, Fergus considered as the palace's parapets became visible through the gaps between buildings. Someone wanted him delayed, but not dead. Possibly not even this delayed, he reasoned as they turned onto the main promenade to the royal residence He doubted that whoever had slipped a drug in his drink had expected an assassin to catch the door after they made their exit.

The crowds that had likely lined the streets earlier that morning to witness Eliante and Alistair's arrival with Arl Eamon and Teagan had dissipated into small pockets of people tucked into shady corners. The nobles tucked within the palace might have liked to believe that the world was waiting with bated breath for their decisions, but the majority of people in Denerim had long since returned to their shops, smithies, and taverns. Even the Redcliffe estate's staff were likely still going about their daily routines in the absence of the arl, his brother, and guests. But it only took one lazy apprentice chatting up a young woman through a window to glance in Fergus's direction to recognize his face and call everyone else's attention to him.

"He's here!" the apprentice called into the open doorway as the woman in the window waved wildly with one hand and summoned an unseen resident with her other. "Teyrn Cousland! That's him there! He did come after all!"

I'm here, Fergus thought, raising a hand in greeting to them both. Me. That's me here. I did come after all.

He was going to walk this road he wasn't sure he wanted to walk toward this palace he wasn't sure he wanted to enter. Or at least that was now it had felt a moment before. Now, with every step he took, with every person who trailed out of a storefront or their home's front steps to watch him pass by, any feelings of uncertainty or fear began to dissolve like the way Highever's coastal fog dissipated by midday. This was his road. He was going to walk it. That was going to be his palace. He was going to walk there. And inside it was all of the goals, all of the futures, he had worked toward over the past year. His little sister, the last of his family, ready to finally know she was safe and sound. His enemy, ready to be cornered and conquered. His queen, ready to be courted. His throne, ready to be claimed. Fergus remembered Annika Aeducan, the confidence with which she had walked into the deshyrs' arena, confronted a traitor, and emerged victorious. Now this was his turn to do the same.

And it seemed that Denerim expected no less of him. "Go on," the apprentice urged. "Maker's gaze upon you," called out the woman at the window. "Take back what's yours!" bellowed a blacksmith with soot down the front of his leather apron. "And then some!" rejoined a red-faced pirate of a fellow, stumbling out of a tavern to raise a too-early mug of ale in Fergus's direction. "Get on with it!"

The district's populace surged into the street itself, swelling around wagons and horses like the rising tide around rocks, until they were at his sides, at his back, simultaneously clearing the way ahead of him and pushing him forward, their voices overlapping now: "The darkspawn took the West Hills… You have to tell them… You have to make them listen… make them think of us… Ferelden's not just them who think they rule her… She's not just them."

Before he could voice his agreement, before he could promise that he would make them listen, before he could even give them any sign that he had heard them, his boots pressed against the first of the steps up to the palace and the crowd gave him little voice but to take them two at a time. For a moment, Fergus lost track of his companions in the multitude that surrounded him, but finally caught sight of Zevran's adrenalized grin, of Leliana's radiant face as she absorbed the legend-like gravity of the moment. Go on, he thought to her. Make this one of your stories. Aveline and the tournament. Flemeth and the bard. Fergus and the Landsmeet. Maybe, he continued, mood darkening as the palace's shadow passed over them, it will tell even better if I die at the end.

His concerns were not completely unfounded. As the crowd deposited him at the palace's doors, Fergus, Leliana, and Zevran faced down a line of guards, heavily armed and armored… both of which were strangely blank of heraldry or any other sign of to whom their loyalties were owed.

"The Landsmeet is in session, Fergus Cousland," their captain stated firmly. "We have strict orders not to let it be interrupted."

"And from whom do these orders come from?" Zevran inquired with sarcastic gallantry.

"We're not at liberty to say," replied the man stiffly, and Fergus turned to Leliana with an exaggerated sigh.

She knew precisely what he was asking. "The regent would have come out here to face you himself," Leliana surmised, idly studying the captain's reaction to her supposition.

"Howe would've just sent another Antivan Crow to stab me in the back," Fergus remarked with dark humor.

"Be fair now!" Zevran exclaimed with mock affront. "I orchestrated a far more professional and dramatic political assassination than a simple backstabbing. It was even on a boat!"

"Well, maybe if you'd tried just stabbing me in the back on solid ground, it might've worked."

"I shall take it under advisement," the former Antivan Crow rejoined merrily, and the captain's mouth fell open.

"You're an Antivan Crow?" he asked incredulously as if he had never expected to see one admitting his questionable career in broad daylight, much less while standing at the side of Fergus Cousland as an ally.

"And you are… a captain," returned Zevran. "We must all have our professions, no?"

"Not just a captain," Leliana stated, turning back to the man in question. "You answer to Arl Eamon, don't you?"

The silence that followed was as good as a confirmation. Eamon —or likely Teagan, given his brother's illness —hadn't promoted men who lied easily or well, Fergus reflected. And if this poor liar truly was Teagan's choice and not Eamon's, Fergus might have a means to find a way past him.

"Look," said Fergus quietly to the captain, "and I mean actually look. Behind me. At all of those people who want me inside this palace. Eamon may have ordered you to argue with me, to keep me out, which you can continue trying to do. But neither of us, not you and not me, wants you and your guards to have to argue with them."

The captain did as Fergus suggested and looked over the teyrn's shoulder. Fergus could only guess what exactly he saw, but whatever it was, it made the man's expression turn to one of distress. So Fergus kept speaking, slowly and calmly. "I would never try to incite them into doing anything," he continued steadily. "That's not who I am. But I can't stop them either. And, right now, they're scared: of the darkspawn outside of the city and of the mess that nobles are likely making inside of the palace. So. Tell Eamon you couldn't stop me, and if he dismisses you from your position?" Fergus offered a close-mouthed smile and an outstretched hand. "Come and work for me."

"That offer is rather dependent on whether or not you'll be available to orchestrate career changes," Zevran observed with dark mirth.

"Well then," replied Fergus with matching gallows humor. "Suffice to say, if I'm dead or imprisoned, Eamon won't care whether you let me in or not."

Moments later, the palace's doors fell shut behind them, and Fergus, Leliana, and Zevran's satisfied smiles were cast into shadow. The antechamber was cool and thankfully empty, although he could hear the muffled arguments from the next room over. Fergus felt his brow unfurl and his hands relax. This wasn't how he had envisioned his entrance into the Landsmeet: dressed in last night's shirt, trousers, and boots, his hands still swollen faintly purple from their bindings and cut up from his attempts to free himself from them, with an Antivan Crow and an Orlesian bard at his sides. But here he was.

And then one more obstacle stepped out from behind a brazier, and Fergus could not stop himself from exhaling aloud, "Maker, why?"

"My thoughts precisely," agreed Zevran, sharp eyes sweeping the familiar figure from head to toe. "Why cannot the way of politics ever proceed without incident? Of course, I suppose that would put my former employers out of business."

"I think you know why, Fergus Cousland," replied Ser Cauthrien grimly, her famous greatsword strapped to her shoulders. A few more steps placed her neatly between Fergus and his companions and the door to the Landsmeet itself. Fergus began to regret how he had grinned at Cauthrien when he and Loghain's favorite officer had last stood face to face in the arl of Denerim's dungeons. To be fair, he had just stumbled into rescuing Queen Anora, had caught her falling shoe in his hand as she climbed up a well, and it had all felt like some kind of absurd dream. But he doubted that Ser Cauthrien remembered those events the same way.

Still, Fergus couldn't stop himself from grinning a little bit. Defiantly grinning. Staring-death-in-the-face grinning. This-might-be-the-end-of him grinning. Couldn't-believe-yet-another-person-was-trying-to-stop-him grinning. "Let's pretend I don't."

"You're a clear threat to this court's proceedings," Cauthrien retorted as if it was obvious. "For the past year, you've done nothing but undermine a hero whose sacrifices freed your country before you were even alive."

"I've done a lot more than that," countered Fergus, his grin fading quickly into something much grimmer. "And I intend to finish what I started."

Cauthrien's eyes narrowed. Leliana casually shifted her stance, ready for an inevitable attack. And perhaps it would be inevitable, if the conversation continued in this vein. So Fergus exhaled and begrudgingly decided he could try to be better at talking his way past the knight. "I know that you probably think you have Ferelden's best interests at heart," he allowed. "But I've already been delayed violently once—"

"Twice," Leliana sighed.

"Three times," Zevran countered with a grin. "If you count the witherstalk. Which I do. Although I did not do it."

"—this morning," Fergus finally finished.

"You're the one who would bring violence to this palace," Cauthrien retorted. "I remember how you acted the last time you faced the regent and his allies here."

"Not well, I'll wager," he responded darkly. Now unsmiling and unamused, Fergus fixed his gaze upon hers and asked, "But how well would you have acted, when faced with the man who ordered the murders of your parents, your pregnant wife, and your child?"

From beside him, he heard Leliana's sharp gasp of horrified shock. Retrospectively, Fergus realized that it was the first time that Leliana heard that Oriana had been pregnant. It was the first time that anyone had heard that, because it was the first time that Fergus had spoken the final piece of the tragic truth aloud. To anyone. Zevran was solemnly silent, all of his clever wit vanished in that miserable moment. And Cauthrien's mouth was slightly open, her eyes were wide, and her breath rapid as she processed what Fergus had told her.

"You can't defend Rendon Howe," he said to her flatly. "Not to me. Not to anyone."

"If you want to hang Rendon Howe," Cauthrien answered him with fierce anger that seemed to surprise them both, "I'll give you a rope."

Fergus scrutinized Cauthrien's expression, her stance, her tone, searching for any of the bitter derision he used to combat her now reflected upon him. But there was nothing there but shock, distress, and shame. Even though their last confrontation all but proved that she had been complicit in keeping Queen Anora under house arrest, even if she had dragged Nathaniel Howe to Fort Drakon, there was something of Arl Eamon's captain in the openness of her face. As if she had once been a well-meaning and honest soldier, now twisted and warped by conflicting loyalties and questionable commands. And, if Fergus was to be honest himself, he knew he couldn't get the better of her in close combat: not with his hands in the state they were now. So he would have to get the better of her with words alone.

"So it's Loghain then," he deduced. "You can't defend what he's done either. My family may have died under Howe's orders, but how many families were destroyed by what he did to the alienages?"

She hesitated before responding. "You need to understand—"

Fergus didn't like to hesitate before anything. "I'm sure he's eager to justify it all to me—"

"He needs to understand," Cauthrien amended, eyes wide and desperate, imploring him to listen, to truly listen, to what she was trying to tell him.

"Understand what?" he returned. If she was going to reveal something critical, she had better reveal it soon. The Landsmeet's hours were ticking away, and he was beginning to wonder if delaying his entrance had been her true goal all along.

"He isn't himself," she told him quietly, breathlessly, as if the admission was an act of personal treason. "He hasn't been himself, not for almost a year now. Something is wrong," Cauthrien stressed the word, her voice rising with her certainty that something was indeed wrong. "He won't listen to the queen. He won't listen to me. He only listens to—"

"Howe," Fergus finished because it seemed that all of Ferelden's political troubles led back to the same responsible party.

"Yes," Cauthrien confirmed. "And who knows who that viper listens to?"

"Other than his own twisted self," he answered darkly. Fergus shook his head, sickened by what the world had come to, and then looked at Cauthrien, realizing, "You're not out here to keep me out. You're out here because he kept you out too."

Cauthrien glanced to one side. "I don't think he likes me to see what he's become," she admitted, folding her arms as if against a winter's chill. "I think seeing me reminds him of the better man he used to be. I hate the things he's done," she said fervently, meeting Fergus's eyes once more, "but I cannot bring myself to hate the man once was. The man that must be trapped inside the monster. But Eamon Guerrin and Alistair would see Teyrn Loghain dead on the Landsmeet's floor."

"No doubt," Fergus agreed, deliberately taking no position in that debate.

But Cauthrien wasn't deterred. "What about you?" she asked him, her expression, her tone, and her sword strapped to her back leaving no room for equivocation.

Fergus looked toward the doors held shut behind the knight. He looked past them at the place he needed to be in order to say what he needed to say. Politics hadn't come easily to him. He much preferred to see someone once, know they were a friend or an enemy, and not have that suddenly change. He liked to speak his mind, to be as clever or as thick as he wanted to be in the moment, and not have to think about the implications of every word spoken or unspoken. When faced with a locked door, he would rather break the hinge than guess a password. But, in this moment, he knew what words might work, what password might open this locked door.

"My sister watched my father bleed out for a crime that was never proven," Fergus said without any of the bitter sarcasm that he had lately clung to like a comforting object. "I know Queen Anora has likely found her way into that chamber." He fixed his gaze on Cauthrien's own and told her, "I won't kill a woman's father in front of her because it's expedient to have him die sooner rather than later, however undeniable his crimes may be. If the Landsmeet wants Loghain named as a traitor, I'll see that he has the trial that Bryce Cousland did not."

That probably was not the ideal answer Cauthrien had hoped for. Likely, she had wanted a promise to save the Teyrn of Gwaren from himself, or something similar. But Fergus didn't know that one could save people from themselves. Not unless they chose to be saved, to reach back to take hold of a hand stretched out in rescue.

Yet as Cauthrien unfolded her arms, her expression unreadable, Fergus wasn't sure what she was about to reach for: the key at her belt, or the sword strapped to her back.

---

"War heroes," Delilah's guest said to her, "are best beloved when there is a war. Maric was a warrior king, so it followed that the commander who had helped him claim his kingdom governed the realm at his side. Or rather," she amended, a glimmer of old admiration in her eye, "at Rowan's side. Maric was more absorbed by the perks of a crown than the responsibilities it entailed. But Cailan was a prince born into a time of relative peace. As he grew up, decisions were made for Ferelden, for Cailan's future, that were inspired by an era he didn't know. Inspired by the fear of an old enemy that Cailan had never known, had never felt in his bones, to be a threat. As we, the old guard, knew and felt."

"But Orlais didn't invade," Delilah remembered from her history lessons. "They didn't try to take Ferelden back. But why not?"

"Invasion is not the only means by which to take back a former territory," she informed the younger woman. "There are other, more seemingly civilized ways to consolidate power. Maric and Rowan could not live forever. Cailan, much to Loghain's disappointment, did not grow up to be his father. Orlais knew this, and more. So their unmarried empress began to explore those more civilized means to reclaim what her predecessor had lost."

"But Cailan was married."

"And Celene did not care," was the stark reply to Delilah's apparently naive assumption that marriage vows meant something. "That did not stop her from writing to him, nor he to her. Perhaps some would say that he was young and idealistic, that he would make peace with Ferelden's enemies to protect her from them. Perhaps others would argue that he was young and ambitious, that a king's crown could not compare to that of an emperor. Regardless, he was young, all the same."

"But he loved Anora," Delilah insisted and realized a moment too late that all of her comments had begun with the word 'but', as if the way she perceived the world during her few years in it could correct the imbalances that others who had lived far longer than she had recognized. "Everyone said that he loved her."

"Maybe he was a man who loved his wife," her guest allowed, "but he was also a king without an heir. Or so some 'trusted advisors' whispered his his ear. They told Cailan that he was a king with a duty to his country before he was a man with a duty to his wife. Meanwhile, letters bearing the imperial seal continued to arrive at the palace and weeks, months, years continued to pass by… and no heir arrived."

She looked at Delilah with sad, faraway eyes. "The Orlesian Empire was invading. They had not forgotten about us either. Only this time, their campaign was fought in ink rather than blood, under the name of alliance rather than annexation. And we decided that it needed to end before it could begin."

"How?" Delilah questioned. "How could can you stop something before it starts? Even the act of trying to stop it means that it's already happening."

"With time," was the answer. "Anora needed time to conceive an heir. Celene needed time to become distracted by another border with a more troublesome neighbor. Ferelden needed time to remember. And we thought we found a way to give it to them all."

"How?" Delilah repeated incredulously. Time, it seemed to her, was the last thing that could be given to anyone.

Her guest winced, her face contorted into a mask of remorse, grief, and lost hopes. She was silent for a long moment, staring into an empty fireplace as if divining another future in nonexistent flames. Finally, she answered heavily, "It started with a lie."

---

Arl Wulff's statement about the state of southern Ferelden is paraphrased from his in-game dialogue.

Guest: Thank you! I'm not sure about how many chapters are left. That being said, we're definitely approaching the end of the game's timeline.

As always, many thanks to my reviewers, readers, and those who have followed/added this story to their favorites. Happy New Year!