Author's Note: As pointed out by Flaminea, the previous chapter had issues of one person considering taking his intoxicated friend to bed, connoting that he wants to have sex with her while she's drunk. This is NOT what I intended, and is the product of very poor choice of words. I do NOT APPROVE of anyone having sex or making out with someone who's drunk and can't properly consent.

Once, Davina's return was due to the murder of her beloved cousin Shianni, recently named Bann of the Alienage. Shianni was pushing for reforms so that elves could practice a trade and be accorded as true equals, but she was knifed for her efforts. Davina had been in the Marches at the time, but she sped back to Denerim to hold accountable the abominable human wretches responsible. They were ne'er-do-well merchants who thought that elves were nothing but thieving scum—how dare those lazy knife-ears bargain for better wages! They'll kill our businesses! Down with the elf-lover King and his elf whores!

Davina felt the rough wind against her face as it tried to undo her hair. She stood at the prow of the fastest ship she could find, but still, it was not fast enough. She wished that she were a mage, with the power to control the wind and the sea, so she could arrive in Denerim sooner. She wanted to strike the louts dead, to make them feel a thousand times the pain they inflicted in Shianni. No, it was not just Shianni. It was a crime against the elves. Davina would avenge it.

She took another look at the crumpled parchment in her hand. It was so informal, it almost insulted her.

My dearest Dav,

I'm so sorry it came to this. I assure you, justice will be swift and deadly for those criminals. Bann Shianni is not without allies and she, like you, is beloved by the Crown and its allies. Please believe that.

I've taken your father and your cousin Soris to the palace to protect them, from the obvious dangers in the alienage, and because I think it's best that they are prevented from taking the law into their hands.

Come home soon, Dav, you're sorely missed at home.

A.

She bitterly thought about what Alistair would do. Hold a trial and imprison them? Where was the justice in that, she thought bitterly. No, those louts deserve the cruelest of deaths, like the one she gave Vaughan Kendalls. She would spill their shemlen guts to the cold earth.

But Davina's vengeance arrived too late: King Alistair had the louts publicly hanged even before her ship entered the Denerim harbor. When she arrived in the square, the undertakers—three elves and a human—were already removing the bodies and preparing for their unceremonious cremation.

"Who are they?" she coldly asked one of them.

"Murdering bastards, m'lady," the first elf answered. "They were seen, and they confessed soon enough."

"The King's justice is swift and true," the human said. "It's a shame, though. We loved Bann Shianni."

Not even the elves recognized her. Without her signature ornate armor and helmet, she was just another elf. An elf in a decent, respectable dress was no longer exotic or unwelcome, as Shianni wrote, and today was the first time she experienced that.

Oh, Shianni, if only we had the chance to walk in Denerim in our finery, she silently lamented.

So Davina went home, taking the side-streets and alleys instead of the main roads towards her house. The main roads from the Palace District and the Marketplace to the Alienage were Shianni's project, she knew. It caused her so much pain to walk in them.

She also expected to be ambushed, and quite frankly, she wanted to stab someone. But her walk was uneventful.

She arrived in her house. Out of fear and maybe respect, nobody dared to desecrate the house of the Hero of Ferelden. With a sigh, she entered her house. She saw that were it not for the layers of dust, her house was immaculate: the modest furniture were in place. The royal trophies were in the shelves where she left them.

With a cold fury, Davina took the dagger from her sleeve and threw it at the plaque commemorating her as the Hero of Ferelden. The dagger hit the space between her first name and her last name.

It felt cathartic, to finally hit something. So she opened her china cabinet, and threw all her precious plates and crystal glasses on the floor. She reminded herself that she had ended an Archdemon, an old god, and the Fifth Blight. But she could not even defend her people; from the very start, she could never defend her people. Nola was murdered on Davina's wedding day. Shianni was raped, Soris almost imprisoned. Later, the alienage was purged and many elves sold into slavery before she could stop it. Hahren Valendrian and so many others were gone forever.

And now, Shianni was gone forever, brutally murdered by thugs, and where was Davina? Out adventuring, when it should have been she who was appointed bann, she who should have faced those thugs. And she would have survived.

When all her plates and china were shattered, she calmly lit her fire and sat before it, embracing her legs. Her rage had left her, guilt replacing it. She was so enmeshed in her feelings that she did not hear her door open, and a tall human enter.

Or perhaps, she did not care. Maybe she had always known that Alistair would eventually come to her. She wanted to be angry at him, because he was the King and he was powerless to stop the murder of her cousin.

Davina saw again a bloodied wedding dress, a handsome elf dying in a pool of blood. A borrowed longsword on her right hand, a blunt dagger on her left. A fat shemlen lord's guts at her feet. Shianni sobbing, and her bloodied skirts hitched at her waist.

But Alistair did not allow Davina to dwell on that macabre reverie.

"I'm so sorry, Dav," he said, sitting down beside her. "I was too late. I didn't know she was in danger until too late."

She did not hear him.

"Dav," Alistair pleaded again. He took her hand in his, and kissed it. It was probably the first overt sign of affection Alistair given Davina since the Blight, but she was too occupied to notice.

What could he do? So he just wrapped his arms around her, the only consolation he could give. She eventually leaned against him, and the two of them shared the silence together, until Alistair broke it.

"It's not much, I know," he told Davina softly as he handed her his present, a necklace of garnets set in heavy gold. "I meant to give it to you on happier times, not as weregild or a promise. Is it the wrong gesture, Dav?"

Firelight flickered in the object in Alistair's hand, distracting Davina from her reverie.

"It's the color of blood." Davina's voice was ice, and her gaze was still hard. "Her blood. The blood of elves unjustly slain."

"Maybe so," Alistair answered, and he placed the necklace at her collar. She did not resist, but she did not reject the gift either. "It is the color of blood of all who are unjustly slain, elves and humans and dwarves and mages and the poor. I hope you can believe that I'm doing what I can to protect them all."

Davina believed that Alistair meant every word he said.

"I valued Bann Shianni," he told her. "We worked to make life better for the elves. I think she'd want you to continue that work."

Davina was nonplussed. "Are you inviting me to court?"

"You've always been welcome at court, Dav," Alistair said, surprised that she felt that way towards him. "I offered you the Chancellorship, but you opted to run away and go on adventures. So I did the next-best thing: I appointed Shianni as Bann and we tried to make Ferelden better for the elves. And not just the elves."

Davina heard Alistair sigh. Now that the haze from her mind is gone, she realized that Ferelden could have no better king, not at this point. She had seen Ferelden at its worst during the reign of King Cailan, the disarray his death caused and the chaos the ex-queen could not or would not avert. No. Davina's mind was still sharp enough to realize who, and what, knelt before her.

She considered everything she had heard about his reforms: his liberal policies about the mages, his opening the army and the guard to non-humans, his standing up to the Grand Cleric and the Landsmeet for opposing his reforms. Maybe there was truth to what he was saying.

"I'm so sorry, Dav," Alistair insisted. "I never imagined someone would dare kill a Bann, to dare my wrath. Or yours."

"My wrath means nothing, except to the Darkspawn," Davina admitted. She failed Shianni. She would not fail Alistair and Ferelden now—not while Alistair protected the downtrodden. "And my wrath would not do any good now. I accept your offer, my King."

Davina stood up, embarrassed at her outburst and the sorry state of her house. She was somehow glad that Alistair did not seem to mind. He even helped her clean, picking up the broom as if he shared that modest home with her. Afterwards, he asked where she kept her tea leaves, and made some for the both of them.

Davina went to court the next day, and the nobles were convened to declare her the next Bann of the Alienage. She tried to pick up where Shianni left, pouring over her cousin's notebooks and records at night and convening with Alistair all day. Sometimes, she even rode with him on official functions.

But the life of a courtier, however active, was just never hers. She was bored with reading progress reports, or the various justifications of why some projects were delayed or cancelled. She disliked stuffy speeches and meeting boring nobles. Most of them were agreeable, but she could never shake off the feeling that she did not belong with those shemlen lords, however agreeable they might be.

Finally, after little more than a year of being one of Alistair's most trusted advisers, she felt that she could no longer ignore her wanderlust. It was the longest time she spent in the capital since childhood. She now wanted to see new sights, new people, to travel on her own terms. But fearing that seeing the king's face would only undermine her resolve to leave, she fled during the night, leaving only a letter saying she was leaving for the Free Marches.

Instead, she went to see Nevarra.