Loghain lay on his cot, listening to the sounds of the camp stirring to life outside. He should rise and begin his own morning preparations, but for once he was satisfied to just lie back and think for a while, rather then getting up and getting on with things.
The week since they'd arrived at Ostagar had been a busy time for him; organizing the camp, overseeing the location and construction or repair of fortifications, integrating all the different units as various and sundry lords both minor and major arrived with their men-at-arms in tow. It was like herding cats. Herding cats with entirely too many intact toms in the mix, at that. Some days he wished he could bang the heads of certain lords together and remind them that their miner squabbles were not what they were gathered here to resolve.
At least that was one area in which Cailan seemed to have talent, though Loghain did wish the boy would intervene before Loghain was feeling ready to commence mayhem. He had a nasty suspicion that seeing him get angered amused his son-in-law. It would certainly explain – at least in part – his tendency towards rash decisions. There wasn't a day that had gone by yet when Cailan hadn't, at one point or another, engaged in actions that were anything but calculated to soothe Loghain's qualms over Cailan's putative leadership of the army.
Cailan had disappeared entirely their second day here, resulting in a considerable uproar when he couldn't be located, only to reappear late that afternoon, having apparently gone out on patrol with a group of scouts. Loghain had giving him a stern dressing-down about that little escapade in the privacy of the king's tent, then made sure to assign him guards who wouldn't be foolish enough to let him slip away unnoticed after that. Which Cailan had, naturally, complained bitterly about and spent most of the third and fourth day trying to lose, with no success, when he wasn't off plaguing the wardens, carousing – with slightly more decorum then previously – with his noble friends, or exploring the ruins and the prospective battlefield down below.
There had been several minor skirmishes with small groups of darkspawn over the first few days, but no sign of the larger groups that the wardens claimed were building up in the wilds south of Ostagar. As patrol after patrol went out and returned with stories of nothing worse then sucking bogs, patches of fog, and hungry wildlife, Loghain had suspected more and more that this entire venture was a wild goose chase.
And then yesterday they'd had their first encounter with a sizable force of darkspawn, a band close to a hundred strong that had somehow escaped notice until they were almost within sight of Ostagar. It had been one of the Grey Wardens who'd given warning of their approach, rather then one of the patrols or outer pickets as it should have been, which had only further aggravated Loghain's temper. And then, to make it even worse, Cailan had rushed down to the battlefield to engage in the fight, wanting a chance at glory. Wanting a chance at an early death was more like it; the boy had never been in a real battle before. If he had been, things like "glory" would no longer consume so much of his mind. Things like "survival" might.
Thankfully the Grey Wardens had already killed a sizable chunk of the darkspawn before Cailan even made it down the ramps to ground level – Loghain did have to admit they were superbly skilled fighters, if nothing else – and equally thankfully he'd been spotted and surrounded by a unit of Loghain's own soldiers before he could get anywhere near the darkspawn himself. Which he'd later complained bitterly about to Loghain, of course. But better an irate king then a blight-poisoned one. Loghain had insisted on taking him by the infirmary after that – not the main one where simple wounds and fractures were treated, but the other one, where those who'd come in overly intimate contact with darkspawn blood and offal were carefully watched for any sign of being blighted and... helped... if they needed to die.
At least that had shut the boy up for a while. Unfortunately Cailan was nothing if not convinced of his own immortality, and Loghain little doubted that he'd soon be plotting a return to the battlefield regardless of possible consequences. He could never be sure if he was more proud of or aggravated by the lad's independence. On the one hand it was very like his parents, and a good kingly quality, that he let no one tell him his mind. On the other hand he could be such a stubborn ass at times, ignoring advice he'd be far better off following, and was even less careful about his own personal safety then Maric had ever been. In some ways he was the best of Maric and Rowan writ large, in others... well, for all he was twenty-five, he more often acted fifteen, and still regularly put Loghain in mind of a rambunctious puppy that was still growing into the size of its teeth and paws. Maker allow that he would have the time to grow into them before he allowed those self-same paws to carry him into real trouble. And until then it was Loghain's sorry task to do his best to keep the king's sudden enthusiasms on a leash.
It would help, too, if Cailan would settle down to the serious task of making lots of little Theirin babies. At this point Loghain would feel relieved if he even threw a bastard, much less fathered a legitimate heir on Anora. Five years of marriage for the pair and not even a false alarm. People were starting to talk. There'd been far too many generations of the Theirin bloodline now with only a single heir – or at least, only a single recognized one – and it would be a great relief to everyone if Cailan would father a few children and remove the fear that his death would end the Theirin line.
At least Maric had fathered bastards. Well, a bastard, certainly, though there had been a couple of other children that may well have sprung from Theirin rootstock. Maric had never been particularly adept at keeping it in his pants when a pretty girl was willing.
Maric had told him about the bastard one night while they were drinking – he'd always had a tendency to blurt things out to Loghain when they were in their cups. Thankfully not a tendency he ever indulged in when any others were around, but he'd always trusted Loghain with his secrets. Loghain had, naturally, started keeping a discrete watch on the child after that. He didn't think much of the way Arl Eamon had treated the boy, but then he'd never thought much of Arl Eamon. Whatever had possessed Maric to entrust him with the secret of the boy's fathering and with his raising! Some misplaced loyalty to Rowan's family, seemingly. It would have been far better to either foster him out to some unconnected family of minor nobles with his parentage kept entirely secret, or to have openly recognized him and seen him properly raised as befitted a king's bastard. This muddled neither-one-nor-the-other decision of Maric's had done neither of them any benefit, and in Loghain's admittedly biased opinion had ruined the boy.
Unfortunately it had already been years too late by the time Maric confessed his indiscretion for anything productive to be done to change it, so Loghain had supported the idea of continued secrecy about the bastard. The secret had eventually become the worst-kept secret in Ferelden, after Eamon shuffled the boy off to the Denerim chantry, of all places, and he grew up looking the spitting image of Maric and Cailan in a city where pretty much everyone was intimately familiar with how the royal father and son looked.
Something really should have been done about the lad at that point, but then Maric had left on that ill-fated voyage and things had gone to hell for all too many years, Loghain far too busy keeping Cailan secure on his tottering throne to worry about the bastard. He'd more then half-forgotten the boy until Duncan had shown up half a year ago, a shockingly familiar-looking youth trailing in his wake. The damned man had conscripted Maric's son! Finding out it had been done at pretty much the eleventh hour of him being forced into templar vows had only slightly ameliorated Loghain's disgust with the man, and greatly increased his disgust with both Arl Eamon and the Revered Mother. Maric's son becoming a Grey Warden was disgusting enough, Maric's son becoming a chantry-controlled lyrium-addled templar was... a perversion.
And here they were, six months later, one big happy family crammed into close proximity in Ostagar, all three of them carefully pretending that Alistair's parentage was still a secret. It would have almost been funny, seeing the two young men eyeing each other whenever they thought the other wasn't looking, if it hadn't been so painfully sad. Sad for them, and painful for Loghain, haunted by not one but two spectres of young Maric. They looked so much like him, and were at the same time so entirely unlike him. It was like being carved on with knives every time he spotted one of them unexpectedly, that familiar rise in his heart at spotting Maric, followed immediately by the crashing disappointment of recognition. Maric was dead, long years dead. He would never see Maric again, not in this life. But the heart never stopped hoping for one last glimpse of that familiar shining smile, to hear once again that approving voice.
He could understand why mabari sickened and died when their person died.
Blast. More then past time to get up and get dressed. He was getting maudlin.