Alistair listlessly stirred at his bowl of porridge, feeling exhausted even though he'd actually slept the night before, the mage having put him to sleep after he'd finished his dinner the night before; so much for any hope of sneaking away in the night.

"Eat it," Oghren growled. "It's a good few hours to the Keep yet, and you'll need the energy."

Alistair grimaced, but obediently spooned up and ate more of it, not even really tasting it. At least his stomach seemed marginally less queasy this morning, which gave him hope that it wouldn't make an abrupt re-appearance as most of his recent meals had. Everyone else had finished eating and were striking camp before he was finally done. The mage snatched the bowl from his hands and rushed off to wash it the moment he was finished, and was back and packing it away by the time Alistair had managed to get to his feet.

"You look terrible," the mage said, coming to a stop in front of him and frowning slightly.

He had a soft, slightly nasal and oddly familiar voice. And an oddly familiar face, too, Alistair found himself thinking, wondering if he'd met the man before. And if so, where.

"Here, let me," the mage said, stepping closer, his hands rising toward Alistair's head.

Alistair flinched away a step, dropping automatically into a defensive crouch and almost tripping over his own feet in the process. The mage stopped and gave him a mildly inquisitive look, waiting patiently with hands still partially raised. He flushed, embarrassed at his overreaction, and straightened up again, forcing himself to stand still as the man touched his temples, a brief flare of magic lighting his hands. His headache faded, not disappearing entirely but at least becoming much less overwhelming, and with it went most of his remaining nausea and exhaustion as well.

"You are a mess," the mage said softly. "I can't do much more than that until we're at the keep though," he added, then turned away, scooping up the pack and carrying it off to where the largest warden was busy loading the folded up tents on one of the pack mules. Alistair watched him leave, puzzled still by the sense of familiarity, then turned to find Oghren walking over to him.

"You want to take another try at riding today, or just walk? We've another two to three hours of travel to reach the keep; longer if you're walking."

Alistair grimaced, remembering how sore and ill he'd felt by the time he'd dismounted yesterday. But walking was little better; too much time spent sitting on a tavern bench and drinking had largely destroyed the endurance he'd previously had, when he could walk all day without anything worse than mild soreness. "I'll ride," he said.

"Good. Come on and lets get you mounted up," Oghren said, and led the way over to where Loghain and the other warden were saddling their horses.

That was at least something Alistair also knew how to do properly, from his days as a stable-boy in Redcliffe, and he quickly gathered up the saddle for his own mount – an elderly mare, well past her prime – and soon had her tacked up and ready. The mage and the big warden had come over and were saddling their mounts as well by then, the slightly smaller warden busily saddling the small horse – barely more than a pony – that was Oghren's, the dwarf being too short to manage that himself. Within a few minutes they were all in the saddle and moving on.

Alistair rode near the back, just behind Oghren and with the two large wardens in back of him. The mage was riding up at the front with Loghain, fragments of their conversation sometimes drifting back to where he was; something about herbs, and the area of slightly wilder land they were currently passing through.

It surprised him how good it felt to be back in Ferelden. No other place looked or sounded or smelled quite the same. The trees and weeds and hills here looked right; like home. He remembered passing though here – or at least, somewhere near here – with Solona and the rest on one of their myriad journeys across Ferelden, hurrying west along the confusingly named North Road, on their way from Denerim to Ostagar. Maker, but he missed her. Her smile, her laughter, even the rather scarily intent expression she'd get when they were in a fight. The feel of her magic buzzing against his senses as she rained destruction on their enemies. His hands tightened on the reins, and he swallowed thickly, then abruptly urged his horse forward a few steps, to walk alongside Oghren.

"So how'd you end up in the Grey Wardens, anyway?" he asked.

Oghren snorted. "Same way I seem to have ended up doing most things in my life; by getting blind-drunk first of all, and then listening to the booze instead of to sense. You know, they gave me a commission in the Army of Ferelden after it was all over? Not that that lasted long; I'm just not really cut out to be a leader. Having a thousand men looking to me for orders scared the piss out of me. So I deserted. Was planning to leave the country entirely, maybe go join a mercenary company in Nevarra or something. Didn't want to risk going back into Denerim to take ship, so I headed north toward Amaranthine instead. Never made it; by the time me and my good buddy the keg of beer reached Vigil's Keep, I decided it would be a great idea to join the Grey Wardens instead."

"And they took you? Even drunk?" Alistair asked, surprised.

Oghren laughed. "Hah! No, they turned me down cold. Bunch of Orlesian pike-twirlers! But I was too damned drunk to move on by then, and bought another couple of kegs from a passing merchant and decided to just squat in the guest room they'd given me and wait for the Warden-Commander to arrive and appeal directly to him."

Alistair blinked, then stared at Oghren. "You wanted to appeal to Loghain!?" he asked in tones of disbelief.

"Said I was was drunk, didn't I? Anyway, a few days later I'm woken from a sound sleep by a hurlock kicking in my door. Thankfully I sleep with my axe at hand, so he didn't get more then a couple steps into the room before I started whittling him down to size, starting by cutting him off at the knees and working my way up to more vital bits and pieces. Killed a couple genlocks trying to crowd in after him, then slammed and barred the door, got into my armour, and went out the window while they were still trying to break it down. It was pretty crazy after that; the keep was swarming with darkspawn. I was in the middle of what I thought was going to be my final battle a couple hours later when suddenly in walks the Commander with a raw recruit and a fancy-pants mage he'd picked up on the way into the place. So the four of us cleared the rest of the place ourselves."

"And after that you joined up?"

"Yeah, of course. He could hardly tell me no after that. Besides, he was fresh out of wardens by then, the darkspawn having killed them all. Mage and I survived the joining; the recruit didn't. Too bad, she was a fine woman – knew just exactly what to do with a sword in her hand."

"If you now make a joke about her strokes, I'll have to hit you," Alistair muttered, winning a loud laugh from Oghren. Loghain and the mage glanced briefly back at them, then resumed their own talk.

"Is that the mage there? He doesn't look too impressive," Alistair pointed out.

"Him? No! Entirely different mage. Anders was... he was... okay, well, imagine a male version of Solona, as far as enthusiastic destructiveness goes, but with Zevran's libido, and you'll be getting close."

"That's... a rather frightening combination."

Oghren snorted, looking amused. "He was that."

"Was?"

"He's gone now; we think he's dead. A year or so back Loghain got called on to attend some big warden do up in Navarra. To make sure he couldn't turn down attending on the grounds of having no other warden senior enough and knowledgeable enough to hold down the fort while he was away, they sent some warden of their own to deliver the invitation – command, really – and take his place while he was gone. So he went away for a couple months, and a whole bunch of stuff happened, at the end of which Loghain came back from the north pretty seriously pissed off; they'd tried to force him to give up his command here and go join a Grey Warden establishment in Orlais of all places instead. Anyway, Anders had disappeared by then, along with a recently recruited warden – an ex-templar, kind of like yourself except this one had actually been a serving templar for a good six or seven years before joining up. We tracked the pair of them to a clearing with a bunch of dismembered and partially burnt bodies in templar armour; there was the shreds of a couple suits of Grey Warden armour mixed in with it all too. Whatever happened there, Anders must have gone down fighting hard. Poor bastard."

Alistair shifted uneasily. He'd come to trust that some mages could use their destructive potential for good – like Solona had – but the thought of what horrifying things mage powers could do was still unsettling to the templar-trained part of himself. "Him up there, is he like that too? All about the lightning and the explosions?"

"Jowan? Nah, he's nothing like Solona or Anders were, except for being a pretty damn fine healer. More like Wynne, except without the mother-henning and self-confidence."

"Jowan... I know that name, I'm sure I do."

Oghren laughed again, a real belly-laugh this time, which drew longer stares from Loghain and Jowan. Finally he sputtered to a stop. "Think back a couple of years, subtract the tan and give him a prison pallor instead, unwashed hair, imagine him in a certain prison cell in the basements of Redcliffe Castle..."

"Him! That's... that is Solona's blood mage friend!?"

"Yeah, that's the one. Except he doesn't actually do blood magic, ever. Says it's 'too great a temptation and far too great a danger'. Mostly he just heals people. He's pretty damn good with glyphs and runes, too. Not so much at making things explode, freeze into a corpsicle, or burst into flames, he's less showy than that. Damn good man to have at your back in a fight though. One of mine," h added with a note of pride in his voice.

"One of yours? I'm not sure what you mean," Alistair said, puzzled.

"Hah! One of my men! You're talking to Senior Warden Oghren, I'll have you know, one of the three patrol-leaders at the Keep. Jowan over there, and these two slabs of meat behind us are all mine," he said, and twisted around in his saddle to gesture at the two wardens riding patiently behind them. "The ogre disguised as a Grey Warden is Cale. The smaller one is Edrick. They already know who you are."

Alistair turned enough to meet their eyes and exchange brief nods of greeting with them before turning his attention back ahead of them. "Is that the keep there?" he asked, pointing toward a distant, barely visible smudge of grey stone on a hillside overlooking a river.

"Yeah, that's her – Vigil's Keep. A damned fine fortress; the Howe's had let it go to pot, but Loghain hired some dwarven masons to knock her back into shape. Good thing he did, or the darkspawn would have overrun it when they attacked again. It needed a lot of repairs afterwards, even so – they're still rebuilding her."

"The darkspawn attacked twice?"

"You mean you didn't hear about that wherever it was you'd vanished off to? Yeah, a few months after the first attack we had a big war up in these parts against two different forces of darkspawn, one army of them attacking the city of Amaranthine, and a second headed for the Keep. The Commander was up in Amaranthine when it happened, so he stayed and defended the city. Those of us left at the fort had to defend it; me and the mage and a spirit we'd picked up from the Fade, plus a bunch of guardsmen and whatever villagers and servants and so on were on hand."

Alistair turned and stared at Oghren, sure the dwarf must be pulling his leg. "A... spirit?"

"Yeah. Claimed to be a spirit of Justice; I'll tell you the long version of the story some time if you remind me, the short of it that he got forced out of the Fade and ended up in the body of a dead Grey Warden. Helped out the wardens for a while, then lost his head during the second darkspawn battle at the keep; literally, it was cut clean off. We figure he ended up back in the Fade after that. Anyway, since no one was going to follow orders from a walking corpse or a skirt-wearing mage, I ended up in charge. We held out for a few days while waiting for relief. I don't recall too much of the last day of fighting myself, I took a bad blow to the head near the end of it, but I'm told I held the gate against two ogres at once and pretty much saved the day."

"Really?" Alistair asked, unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

"He's telling the truth," Cale spoke up from behind them. "I was there during the fight; the ogres broke down the gates, and the darkspawn were about to charge into the courtyard. Those of us on the walls and in the courtyard would have had to fall back, maybe attempt a fighting retreat into the Keep proper, and more likely would have died. But Oghren charged forward and engaged the two ogres within the gate, among the rubble and timbers, and the smaller darkspawn couldn't get by with those two big brutes blocking the way. Oghren took down one ogre, then fell to the other, but by then we'd had enough time to rally, and were able to kill the second ogre as well and use their corpses as part of a bulwark while we held the gate opening against the darkspawn. And then a little while later the army finally arrived from Denerim, and that ended the battle pretty fast. Those of us who survived that day owe our lives to Oghren."

"Bah! It was nothing," Oghren said, sounding embarrassed but looking pleased, his cheeks flushing pink as he smiled. "Just doing my job."

"So you joined the wardens after that?" Alistair asked, twisting in his saddle to look back at Cale.

"Yes. Didn't have much choice about it; I was tainted. It was join or die. There were a lot of us in that position by then," Cale explained.

"What were you before you joined?" Alistair asked, looking over the large man's impressive muscles.

"Blacksmith. I'd headed to the keep looking for help after wandering darkspawn killed my family," he said, a grim expression crossing his face.

"I was a dockworker in Amaranthine," Edrick spoke up. "Wasn't no taint that made me join up though."

"What was it then?" Alistair asked curiously.

"He's a murderer," Cale said. "Killed some lordling's brat in a bar fight."

"It wasn't no murder! It was just a bar brawl that ended with some fool farmboy dead. Neck snapped; I hit 'im wrong I guess," Edrick said, looking mulish. "Normally wouldn't mean anything, but his father was a Bann and had me brung up before the Arl on charges; he wanted me dead, like his boy was. But the Arl figured that was a waste of a good fighter and conscripted me instead."

"Huh," Alistair said, and turned his attention forward again, remembering what Oghren had said a few days ago about wardens and their reasons for joining; the desperate and the criminal. A tainted blacksmith and a murderer; that certainly fit both categories.

He remained largely silent the remainder of the trip, as they rode down into the river valley, over the river – the Hafter, he remembered – on an arched stone bridge, and up the hillside to where the Keep squatted. A small village and terraced fields spread outside its high walls, the fields and walls and the single dusty road alive with people of all three races, a number of whom called out greetings to the passing wardens.

Within the outer bailey of the keep were more houses, and the stables. He was relieved when they stopped there, and bit back a moan of pain as he dismounted, sore muscles protesting. It was annoying to notice that he was the only one in the party so afflicted, even Oghren clambering down from his horse without any sign of difficulty. A dwarf being a better rider than a human... something just seemed so wrong about that.

There was a loud squealing noise, and a small figure darted through the legs of men and horses alike before coming to a stop with both arms wrapped around one of Oghren's legs, a chubby little face peering up at him with a wide grin on its... her... face. A child; a dwarf child, the hair on her head the same shocking orange-red shade as Oghren's.

"Princess!" Oghren exclaimed, sounding as pleased as the child looked, and bent down to hook his hands under her arms and pry her loose, before lifting her up and giving her a tight hug that drew a delighted crowing sound from the child. "Err, Warden-Commander, is it okay if I...?"

Loghain looked around, and to Alistair's surprise an actual smile crossed his face as he caught sight of the toddler in Oghren's arms. "Yes, yes, go ahead, I'm sure Felsi will be pleased to see you back in one piece," he said agreeably before turning back to removing his gear from where it was tied on behind his saddle.

"You're a father?" Alistair asked.

"Yeah. Married Felsi – you remember her, don't you? The barmaid from the Spoiled Princess that Solona helped me hook up with?"

"Err... right. I remember her," Alistair agreed. Though what he mainly remembered of the dwarf was how much she'd seemed to dislike Oghren... then he spotted a vaguely familiar face moving up behind the dwarf. "Isn't that her?"

Oghren turned, and his face lit up with a huge grin. "Felsi! You're looking just as pretty as usual," he said, and leaned forward past her obviously pregnant belly to kiss her on the cheek.

"Took you long enough to get back," she said. "What did you do, walk the whole way?" she asked, and plucked the little girl from his arms. Despite the sourness of her words, there was a surprising fondness in her tone, and a pleased smile on her face. "Come on, I've got a list of chores as long as my arm for you to take care of now that you're home."

"Right. See you around later, Alistair," Oghren said, turning to look back at him and lift one hand briefly in farewell before hurrying after the woman, catching up to walk beside her, and then wrapping one arm behind her waist in obvious affection as they left.

Alistair looked around, and found the mage at his side.

"Come on, the Commander wants you healed, fed, bathed and changed before he sees you in formal court this afternoon," Jowan said. "We'll need to stop at the quartermaster's first of all and get you some appropriate clothing. This way," he said, and turned and walked off toward the gate into the inner bailey.

Alistair followed, figuring he didn't have much choice, especially when Cale and Edrick were still trailing along after him, clearly still under orders to see he didn't attempt escaping.

Formal court... he didn't think he much liked the sound of that.