It was still overcast the next morning, but the rain had stopped overnight and the ground, while still slick with mud and the occasional standing puddle, was passable. They had to walk the first hour, until they were well out of the lowlands, the ground underfoot better-drained and far less of a danger to the horses' footing.
Loghain mounted his stallion without too much difficulty, glad to be properly mobile again even if he wasn't looking forward to a day of riding with a sprained ankle. Or dismounting, which it would be necessary to do several times. To distract himself he spent some time talking with Alistair, telling him about the history and geography of the area they were passing through. Which mostly meant talking about the Dalish, since this was one of the areas in the Brecilian forest favoured by them. "Probably because there's so many easily defensible areas in it. Though it's important to remember that there's a second way to describe most such places; dead-ends and traps. It's like that keep of Oswyn's – it may never have been taken by force, but it's fallen to siege several times. A fastness is only as good as its supplies, unless you can count on outside relief, and if there's no way to get out of it, it's as much a trap as anything else."
Alistair looked thoughtful. "What would you say is the hardest keep to take in all of Ferelden, then?"
"Oh, that's easy. Redcliffe. Perched atop that island like it is, it's damned near impossible to bring any siege engines to bear on it, apart from catapults from shore, and it's a long shot even for them. Its wells will never run dry, and unless you can deny the inhabitants access to the lake, there's fish and the possibility of outside resupply, not to mention enough room within the walls for sizable gardens. That's why it was the last foothold the Orlesians maintained on Ferelden soil; well, that and Eamon's mismanagement of the fight against them. Wanted to prove himself, so he insisted on leading the resistance against them himself rather then getting assistance from more experienced fighters. He tried all sorts of foolish minor attacks on their men outside the castle before finally settling down and setting up a proper siege. Even with all the locals helping to keep the Orlesians from getting anything useful out of the lake, it still took him close to three years to obtain their surrender."
Alistair gave him a surprised look. "I always thought Arl Eamon was a good fighter. Arlessa Isolde always talked about..."
Loghain couldn't help it, he laughed. "Arlessa Isolde! She was an impressionable young girl who looked at Eamon's grossly incompetent attacks against her own father's forces and saw a romantic rebel instead of the equally foolish young man that he was at the time. Neither of them have gained overmuch in wisdom since then either, or at least if they have they're doing a damned fine job of hiding it. It's a pity Teagan was the younger of the brothers; he's at least a reasonably intelligent man. Knows his limits. Doubtless it helps that he served in King Maric's court; he was a page there when he was first brought back from the Free Marches, and then a squire. Would have made knight eventually, too, but then Eamon named him a Bann and he had to go off to Rainesfere instead of finishing his training. But he's at least competent with a sword, and knows enough of things like strategy and tactics to know how much he doesn't know, which is far more than I can say about Eamon."
"Oh," Alistair said, and frowned in thought. "You don't think much of him, do you."
"No, but then he's never given me any reason to. From where I sit, Arl Eamon is a prime example of one of the worst faults of our system of nobility. A man will be raised to it for some great act of competency, but the only way one tends to lose a title and land is through an act of such gross incompetence that an entire line is wiped out. As has more-or-less happened with the Howe's – Rendon and the youngest dead, Delia Howe married to a commoner, and Nathaniel unlikely to ever father an heir, not that there's anything left to inherit now but the name and infamy."
"And the Mac Tirs?" Alistair asked, chin lifting.
Loghain grinned, more amused than offended. "Cheeky bastard! Yes, and the Mac Tirs. At my age I'm unlikely to father another heir myself, and while Anora might yet surprise us all and remarry, so far she's against the idea. I suppose I can understand that; she loved Cailan. Nothing can ever replace him." He fell silent for a few seconds, then glanced over at Alistair. "Not that your line is any more secure. It's possible there's another Theirin bastard floating around somewhere; neither Maric nor Cailan were always particularly good at keeping it in their pants, but if so I've missed hearing of it. So unless you have children – and if you don't already know how unlikely that is for a Grey Warden, I have some news for you – then you're also the last of the Theirin's. Or did you sneak out a chantry window during templar training and sow some wild oats somewhere already?"
Alistair flushed, looking embarrassed. "No, I didn't," he said, voice tight. "I usually followed the rules. Solona was..." He broke off.
That was a sentence Loghain could easily guess the ending to, judging by the boy's reaction. The first. Possibly even the only, considering how far down in a bottle Alistair had been ever since. Poor bastard. But not a subject he had any desire to pry on, nor to attempt offering Alistair any advice on either, so he changed the subject instead, and had Alistair review what he could remember of the terrain they'd passed through so far today. Alistair's memory of it was rather hazy – he'd been concentrating more on their conversation than on the landscape – but he did remember a reasonable amount of the route they'd followed.
They kept their talk to fairly neutral topics after that, mostly discussing additional history and related genealogy, which sometimes wandered rather far afield; as far as Fereldan nobles had married either into or out of foreign families, which covered all of the Free Marches, a good-sized chunk of Antiva and even Rivain, not to mention into Orlais.
"Of course Orlais," Loghain explained when Alistair expressed some surprise. "Isolde and Eamon were hardly the first marriage across political divides we've ever seen. Not always romances, of course, there were more than a few young heirs and heiresses forced into marriages with Orlesian nobles after the chevaliers crossed our borders. Some of them having become heirs and heiresses because the chevaliers first saw to it that the remainder of their family was no longer in any condition to inherit, of course. Some of their descendants are still nobles of Ferelden, for that matter, though only a very few have maintained any connections with the Orlesian side of their family tree now that it's no longer politic to do so."
He fell silent for a little while, then sighed. "Between the whole-sale decimation of many Ferelden lines during the occupation, the terrible number of deaths during the rebellion itself – West Hill and White River in particular – and then the Blight, many old Fereldan families are either no more, or hanging by a thread. Nobles like Arl Eamon despise new nobles such as myself, but where is the next generation of Ferelden nobility to come from, if not from the commons? Eamon's only just got an heir of his own again for Redcliffe, assuming the girl doesn't prove to be another mage, none to spare to marry into other lines or hold other places that will soon be going empty as our generation ages and dies off. Arl Wulff had several sons, all with good prospects, and now he's reduced to being thankful that he happened to have had a bastard as well. And I... well, I know that in this I too failed Ferelden. I should have remarried after Celia died, had more children. Something needs to change, or in ten, twenty years time, Orlais will be able to march in again with nothing but a handful of nobles and a lot of frightened peasantry to oppose her."
He looked up, and saw the wide-eyed way in which Alistair was staring at him, and smiled humourlessly. "Sorry. I do go on about things like this at times; it's the sort of issue your father and I would often discuss over drinks late into the night, the problem being apparent even before he disappeared, long before the Blight made it even worse. Not that discussing it made either of us marry again or father more children, or at least not legitimate ones," he added, raising an eyebrow pointedly at Alistair, then sighed. "I suppose we always thought there'd be time to fix it, or that it would fix itself. That we could leave it as a problem for our children's generation to solve instead of dealing with it ourselves, preferably by them having lots and lots of little babies of their own. And instead Maric vanished, the Blight killed off two-thirds of our children's generation, and the problem is far, far worse now than he and I ever imagined it might become. I suppose there's some obvious lesson to be learned from all that, but I'll be damned if I can think of a pithy phrase to sum it up with just at present."
Alistair smiled uncertainly, and lifted one hand from his reins to rub at one eyebrow with the knuckle of his thumb. The gesture sent a brief chill through Loghain; Cailan had sometimes done that. A gesture he'd picked up from one of his uncles, Loghain belatedly remembered, it being something Teagan had a habit of when thinking about something. He realized that was where Alistair must have acquired it too, and yet he associated it so strongly with Cailan that he couldn't help but feel disturbed to see it. He sighed, realizing that he was going to have to just get used to the fact that there'd be times when he looked at the boy and saw only his resemblance to his father and brother, his inescapable similarity to them.
"Anyway, it's Anora's problem to deal with now," Loghain continued. "We have our own problems to worry about."
"Darkspawn."
"Yes, indeed. Darkspawn. The Blight may be over, but the Deep Roads beneath Ferelden still swarm with the creatures the archdemon summoned here. Elsewhere, I have heard, they're enjoying a respite from them, the Deep Roads beneath the nearest portions of Orlais and the Free Marches being virtually emptied of darkspawn, all of them having come here instead, and few of them having filtered back northwards or westwards since. And I have all of 20-odd people to deal with it. Though at least they're damned stupid creatures and comparatively easy to deal with most of the time, now that the talking darkspawn all seem to be dead. Not like going up against a troop of well-trained chevaliers"
Alistair frowned. "You mentioned talking darkspawn once before. What do you mean by that... darkspawn don't really talk, do they?"
Loghain was startled, and stared at him for a moment, then shook his head. "I should have realized you might not have heard. I suppose I assumed Oghren or Sigrun or someone would have told you the story," he said, and then launched into the lengthy tale of his initial arrival in Amaranthine, and having to deal with the Architect and The Mother, as well as their numerous minions, which occupied the rest of that day's travel, Alistair having many questions once he'd got past his initial shock and borderline disbelief.
It hurt every bit as much as he'd thought it would to dismount by the end of the day, and he had to go see the healer for another potion against the pain. At least they'd made good time, and should reach the area of the sinkhole the next day. Assuming one of the mages was on hand, he'd be able to get it seen to properly then.
Alistair had thought Loghain must be pulling his leg at first, when he spoke of talking darkspawn, but it quickly became clear that it had been anything but a joke. The Architect, the Mother, their disciples... he shuddered, remembering the necromancer genlock they'd fought at Ostagar; it hadn't spoken, but it sounded from Loghain's descriptions of the ones he'd had to deal with that it might have been a close cousin of the talking darkspawn. Certainly more intelligent in its direction of the lesser darkspawn within its control than most such creatures were. He tried to imagine if every group of darkspawn had such a leader, and found the idea deeply disturbing, on several levels.
He had to admit, too, that he was impressed by how well Loghain had handled it all, with only a handful of additional untrained wardens. It gave him a greater appreciation of the newer wardens as well, hearing what Sigrun had survived, how well Oghren had handled himself. Oghren had told him a bit about the mage and the spirit, but Loghain told their story in far greater detail. He understood, too, why Loghain was leery of trusting the Dalish mage, and why he was willing to place so much trust in Nathaniel despite who his father had been.
Hearing Loghain talk of it all made him wish he'd been there, wish he'd been part of their group. He was, he realized, a little jealous of them all. They'd been doing what he should have been, and coming together as a group, while he was off trying to drink himself senseless. It made him feel... ashamed. And angry with himself, because he could have been a part of that, if only he hadn't let his anger and disappointment get the better of him at the Landsmeet.
He thought about that during supper, listening with only half an ear to the conversation around the table, mostly final discussions between Dorn and Loghain of what they expected to find when they moved further south tomorrow, what they imagined the best- and worst-case scenarios might be, contingency plans for if one of the bad outcomes proved to be true.
He found himself wondering if part of his disappointment and anger had been because Solona had agreed so readily to support Anora as Queen. Sure, he'd told her he didn't want to be king, insisted he lacked any training or aptitude for it... but maybe there'd been at least a little part of him that wished that she'd have offered to support him as king anyway. Not merely because Arl Eamon wished it, but because she herself, perhaps, believed he could do it. That she had faith in him, even if he lacked it. Though he realized could hardly blame her, not when he'd shoved the responsibility for command of the pair of them and their eventual little group entirely onto her shoulders, despite the fact that it had been he with the seniority and at least some of the right training. Really, what on earth had Duncan been thinking, thinking he'd be any good as a Grey Warden? He'd failed Duncan, failed Solona, failed everything and everyone. Failed even himself.
As he curled up for bed, certain his thoughts would keep him from sleep for quite some time, he really, really wished he had a drink. Not just a drink, but enough drink to silence his thoughts and let him rest. But that would just be another failure, he admitted to himself. Drinking until he forgot his problems didn't make the problems go away, it just delayed dealing with and trying to solve them. There was no easy answer to be found in a bottle of wine or a cask of beer. Only temporary oblivion, and another failure. And he'd had enough of failures.
He had a chance now to redeem himself, thanks to Loghain's interference in his life. And maybe that interference wasn't as bad a thing as he'd first thought it would be. Loghain, at least, seemed to believe him capable of learning; capable of maybe being more than just Maric's unwanted, useless bastard of a son.
And maybe this was something that it would be good to prove someone right on, for once; to live up to someone else's better idea of himself, rather than down to his own. He smiled crookedly, aware of how closely his thoughts marched with Loghain's words the day before about Maric and Loghain's own relationship. Maric had, it seemed, approved of Loghain. Shaped him.
Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to let Loghain shape him in turn.