"There are forty-three Wardens of Ferelden right now," Theron said. "And a good number of potential recruits who are still training in preparation for the Joining. I think we can spare some of the more experienced ones- Voshai, I think. And I'd like Sigrun. I saw dwarves around, and we can't spare Oghren from his command. It's too new."

It was dinner at the Harimann estate, but there wasn't any welcome feasting- understandable, given the day's events- so the Wardens and Kallian and Zevran were all eating in one of the smaller dining rooms, strategizing.

"This place is crawling with demons," Alistair said.

"And these are Warden mages," Theron reminded him. "They survived their Joining. I don't think demons would be as much of a worry after that. If you're worried, would you object to my specifically telling Sigrun that the Templars here will be taking too much lyrium and that there are lots of demons around to guard against in the letter?"

"Sounds fair enough," Alistair said.

"An excellent idea," Zevran agreed. "Though I would ask… one thing."

"What?" Theron asked.

"The Warden armor," Zevran said. "My Warden armor. It seems that we will be here for a time, and while I was not particularly concerned when this was to be a stay of only two or three days, now that I have seen Kirkwall it is clear to me that it is exactly the place an assassin dreams of working- weakly led and with coin to lose on intrigue. The perfect situation for contracts to arise, and for steady work on retainer. I would not be surprised if there are Crows in the city at this very moment. Certainly, there will be people who have had intimate dealings with them."

Alistair squinted suspiciously at him across the table, clearly trying to decide if that had been a double entendre or not. Zevran just smiled slyly at him.

"Some days, 'ma vhenan," he told Theron, tone laden with wistfully-irreverent dramatics. "I think that things would be so much simpler if I were just to take the Joining, no? Then I would not force you to lie every time it is expedient for me to wrap myself in your colors."

Zevran was teasing him a little, Theron knew that. But still, the thought of Zevran taking the Joining sparked a small flare of fear in his heart. There was always the danger that there was a small grain of real desire there.

"We can have it brought," Theron agreed.

"It won't be enough," Nathaniel said. "In Ferelden everyone thinks 'Arainai' is a family name, but anyone who knows anything about the Crows will recognize it as a House name. And I think a lot of people in Kirkwall could make that connection."

"Then I shall simply not use it," Zevran declared. The roll of his shrug looked off-handed, and probably fooled everyone else, but Theron knew him better. "In Kirkwall, I shall be Warden Rivasina. Personal aid to the Warden-Commander, so that there is a reason for my usual position?"

Theron found his hand under the table and squeeed it. No one else in the room knew that that name was significant, but they did. Zevran had found a way to both hide from the Crows and reclaim something taken from him, all in the same gesture.

Courier ships were light and fast and sometimes took risks they really shouldn't, and Theron's letter asking for help and explaining the situation got to the Vigil quite quickly. It was delivered to Leonie, who was unsurprised to be told that things had gotten complicated, and she sent orders on to Sigrun to go up to Soldier's Peak and get some of the Voshai and the mages.

She only arrived with one mage- the newest of the three, Leonie recalled. Viktory Arend.

"What do you do?" Leonie asked her. With only three mage Wardens, if Viktory couldn't handle herself, Leonie would send Sigrun and the Voshai on to Kirkwall without any in spite of the Arl-Commander's orders.

"I never specialized," Viktory said. "I can call some lightning, some ice, some fire. I can cast some shield spells and mind blast people. I can dispel magic and turn bodies into walking bombs."

"Really," Leonie said faintly. She didn't like the sound of that last one. Sometimes she forgot why mages were feared, but and every time the Maker made sure she was suddenly reminded.

Viktory glared at her.

"I haven't had the chance to try it yet," she said. "But I can't think of a better place than Kirkwall!"

There was a worrying flare of anger in her eyes at the word.

"Warden Arend?"

"I was recruited from the Jainen Circle," Viktory said, chin held high. "But I had been there for less than a year. I grew up in the Gallows. Kirkwall's Circle. I know the sort of things that happen there."

"I thought a local guide would be useful," Sigrun said. "And her lightning is great! I've seen her practice at the Peak, and she can bounce it around off practice dummies in armor like you wouldn't believe."

"Well," Leonie said, trying not to let her doubts show, and failing. "The Arl-Commander did put you in charge of the reinforcements. Which Voshai are you taking?"

"Andreas and Rhannur," Sigrun told her promptly. "They had a vote, keeping in mind that the Commander doesn't want to be really obvious. They know they can't hide being foreign but with Lockhard around Rhannur can pass for Ander. And apparently Andreas does a mean Tevinter impression."

The Wardens in Kirkwall now that three objectives- find Delilah Howe, find and eradicate the source of the Taint, and see if they could help the Fereldan refugees.

The day after they arrived, they started working on the first two. Nathaniel and Alistair went to ask around Lowtown for Delilah. Mhequi, Kallian, and Fen stayed at Lord Harimann's estate to do a thorough sweep of the ruins. Theron, Zevran, and Lockhard went up to the Viscount's Keep to introduce themselves. Lord Harimann had sent a note up the afternoon before, after they'd finished speaking, to inform the man that there were important Fereldan guests who wanted to keep their presence in Kirkwall quiet, but needed to see him.

So the next morning the three of them came early in the morning, and not by the front doors, and were ushering up to see the Viscount immediately.

The seneschal was very good at imitating a stone wall, but the man he worked for was less accomplished. The Viscount did an obvious double-take upon seeing them.

And they made quite a sight, Theron knew, two elves and a human in Warden armor. Lockhard was tall for a human and classical Ander with his gray-blue eyes, in sharp contrast to him and Zevran. Theron had learned that many humans found the full-face Dalish tattoos distracting, but the Viscount seemed more hung up on Zevran's smaller, less impressive ones. He looked a little… scared.

Theron felt Zevran sigh silently beside him. Mhequi had suggested exchanging armor for the day, since they were of a size, but if you took a good look you could see where her armor didn't fit him.

"I assure you, Viscount Dumar," Zevran said. "If the Crows had taken a contract on you, they would not try under so unbelievable a disguise."

Ah, so that was why the Viscount had been staring. It had been brought up, but Theron hadn't thought that it would happen so soon.

"Viscount Dumar," Theron said. "This is Warden Rivasina, my personal aide and one of my advisors. Also with me is Warden Brant."

"This is not what I expected when Arland told me he had important Fereldan visitors," the Viscount told them, after another moment to process the shock. "I wouldn't usually assume, Ser, but I can hardly think that you're anyone but the Arl of Amaranthine."

Theron smiled at him, because that was polite and the man still seemed nervous.

"Commander of the Grey Theron Mahariel Sabrae," he introduced himself. "We'd hoped to avoid this."

"Avoid what?"

"Having to speak with you," Theron said. "We were only supposed to be here long enough to invite the former arl's daughter back to Amaranthine, but when we docked we detected a hint of the Taint."

The Viscount went sheet-white and had to sit down.

"We don't where it's coming from, and it's not very strong," Theron continued. "But as Wardens, it is our duty to take care of it. We don't want to cause a panic and we're hoping to resolve it quickly and quietly, but someone else needed to know. I've sent for more Wardens from Ferelden, and also sent a letter to the Warden-Commander in Ansburg."

"How-" the Viscount was trying to rally in the face of the news. "How many Wardens?"

"There are six of us currently, in addition to a Sergeant from the arling's forces, Kallian Tabris. We're expecting three of five more from Amaranthine. I don't know what Ansburg will send."

Or if they'd send anything, but he wasn't going to mention anything about that. This was enough bad new already.

"I appreciate your concern for the visibility of your search," the Viscount said. "There are tensions enough in Kirkwall about the number of Fereldans we've taken in without everyone yelling about being invaded by Fereldan Wardens as well. And I know there are factions who would, if they learned of the Taint, blame it on the refugees and begin taking their grievances out on them immediately."

"Once the Taint problem is solved, I'd actually like to talk about that," Theron said. "Ferelden could really use her people back. Perhaps if you wrote to Queen Anora-?"

"Yes, yes I think I will. Thank you."

Zevran coughed quietly to get their attention.

"Viscount Dumar," he said. "Some of the Wardens coming will be mages."

The man's shoulders slumped.

"The Knight-Commander won't approve of that," he warned them.

"Every disrespect to your Knight-Commander Stannard," Lockhard spoke up. "But the Gallows stinks of lyrium abuse and your city of demons. She's not doing her job, so she doesn't get to complain when we do ours."

"Are you nervous enough, or should I let you continue to brood until you're ready to let me carry you out of here?"

"What if we don't find her?" Nathaniel worried ignoring Alistair's commentary to grab his quiver and bow holster. The weight of the full quiver was comforting on the side of his belt, counterbalanced by his paired knives, even though he didn't think he'd have any use for shooting people today. If it made him feel better, he was going to do it.

"Hey, look," Alistair said. He was going out armed as well, with his sword and the silverite shield Theron had commissioned for him, the same as Nathaniel's new quiver and knives. Nathaniel wouldn't have much use for a shield, but he appreciated the craftsmanship Wade had put into it with the engraving of Soldier's Peak. His own equipment had amaranthine flowers tooled onto the leather, and sometimes he just sat in his rooms and admired the realism. "It can't possibly go as wrong as when I went looking for my sister."

"Wait, you have a sister?"

"Half-sister on my mother's side," Alistair told him as they left the estate. "She lives in Denerim. I found out about her after I joined the Wardens, and Theron came with me for support when I went to see her right before the Landsmeet."

"And?"

"She gave me a bunch of shit for being born a royal bastard- like that helped me any- and having Templar training and joining the Wardens while she had to be a laundress. And then she tried to get money out of me and Theron. I never talked to her again."

Delilah wouldn't do that. Well, she might ask for money, but he'd be happy to give it to her. And she wouldn't be rude about it.

Kirkwall was laid out like a loose curl, though you couldn't see it from the water. Hightown stood at the top of the cliff, and the seawards gate led directly down to the docks, a leftover from the days when the Magisters of the Imperium had lived here and hadn't wanted to be forced to mingle with the lesser beings of the rest of the city. It was the landwards exits from Hightown that curved down the natural slope of the rock towards the harbor and the docks, passing through Midtown- also not visible from the water- and then Lowtown.

The docks-to-Hightown road was steep, but it cut a lot of time off when you wanted to get to Lowtown, so that was the route Nathaniel and Alistair took, keeping a casual eye out for anything that might indicate a source of Taint. It was unlikely that it would be found here, but they did have to look.

"Tell me about her," Alistair said.

"Well," Nathaniel said. "She has dark hair like mine, but the Bryland eyes. Honey brown. She was the middle sibling out of the three of us. Father like Thomas best. Sometimes I resented it, but I think Delilah did too, just all the time. He spent whatever time he could spare with Thomas and only cared about her when she was old enough to get married, and then she refused everyone he found out of spite. The one he tried the hardest with was the younger Cousland boy- Aedan, I think his name was. He was the last one she refused, and after that Father gave up on her completely. From her letters it sounded like she just stayed in the Vigil and only left for supply trips to Amaranthine. I guess that's how she met this Albert."

"She sounds like a fun woman."

"They both wrote me when I was first sent to Starkhaven," Nathaniel continued. "But Delilah stopped after not too long. I didn't know her as well as Thomas. And I didn't even really know him. They were both still young when I left."

They reached the docks and spent a moment in the sea air as Alistair braced himself for the walk through an area downwind of the Gallows. They hurried through that section and ended up taking a wrong turn because of it, then had to wander back until Alistair spotted something he remembered.

"That's the Harbormaster's," he said. "I think we get out up here."

He proved right, and they passed some sort of compound guarded by large… people, with horns, who must have been the Qunari, directly across from the Harbormaster's. At the top of the stairs just past that was what looked like slums.

Neither of them had a lot to fear here, between Alistair's sword and shield and Nathaniel's eye for pickpockets, but that didn't really help them. They had to check down every side street for the Lowtown Bazaar, because now that they were down here the directions they'd been given didn't make any sense.

Somehow, they ended up in the alienage, hopelessly lost and disoriented.

The elves of Kirkwall seemed particularly cowed to Nathaniel, or maybe that was just because he was used to Theron and Zevran and Velanna and the elves of Amaranthine. Officially, there were plans for an alienage in the rebuilding city; but realistically, it wasn't going to happen anytime soon, if at all. At least half of the new inhabitants were elves, and it would have been silly to wall off that much space, even without the neighborly feelings everyone had built during the time in the tent city and then working on the same construction crews.

"Uh, hey!" Alistair called suddenly. "Excuse me! Savhalla!"

A woman with a large basket full of lines froze, and then turned towards them. She was Dalish, but the ink of her tattoos was oddly faded and blotchy. Nathaniel only knew enough to recognize that they were the same designs as Theron's, for Falon'din; but he was still pretty sure that vallas'lin weren't supposed to do that.

"Ahnas vi'dirth'elvhen, shem'len?" she asked.

"Uh… not really, sorry," Alistair told her. "I only learned a little bit. Um- nuvenan na son, we've gotten lost trying to get to the Lowtown Bazaar?"

The rest of the alienage was watching them, and Nathaniel tried not to look at anyone directly so no one was scared off. People were peeking out windows and from behind the shelter of doorframes or the corners of their eyes to do their best at being discreet.

"Nuvenan na tas son, Ser," the woman replied. "Nathaniel wasn't sure if she was amused or surprised. Maybe both. "If you go back up the steps and out the alienage, and take your first left, the bazaar is up the stairs you'll come to on your right so long as you stay on the main road."

"Oh! That's easy! Thanks- serannas. Falon'din ama na, Mistress."

The Dalish woman was shocked absolutely speechless, and could only stare after them as they left.

"What did you tell her?" Nathaniel asked once they'd found the main road again.

"Uh- 'hello', 'I hope you're well', 'thanks', and 'Falon'din protect you'. But I think maybe I used the last one wrong. I'll have to ask Theron. I just didn't know what to say when she didn't say anything back."

"I think you just surprised her," Nathaniel said. "Being able to read her tattoos."

"I hope so. I wasn't trying to be rude."

"You just thanked a Dalish woman in her own language in an alienage, Alistair, I'm pretty sure she understood that."

"I just saw her and remembered what Theron says," Alistair told him, looking around for the stairs to the bazaar. "'It's polite to talk to people in their own language'. I knew enough Elvhen to small talk, and it was easier to get her attention like that, anyway. Everyone else looked like they'd faint if I tried to talk to them directly."

The buildings were getting slightly nicer, which was really all that told them that they were still going in the right direction. Kirkwall didn't seem to believe in street signs or public markers. Eventually, they came to the stairs. The noise of the market was spilling down to them.

"Alistair," Nathaniel said, staring at the tops of the few stalls visible from this angle.

"It's going to be all right," Alistair reassured him. "If it helps, I can, as the most senior Senior Warden of Ferelden, order you to walk up those steps."

"You forget that I have a higher position than you."

"Technicalities, technicalities," Alistair dismissed airily, and staring climbing the stairs. Nathaniel followed, hanging back when Alistair walked right up to the first stall they passed.

"We're looking for Albert?" he said. "He's Fereldan, and just got a place in the Bazaar recently. His wife's name is Delilah."

The stall keeper was giving them a really strange look.

"I don't know what you want with Albert, Sirrahs, but whatever he owes-"

"We're not thugs," Nathaniel broke in. "Delilah's my sister, I thought she was dead but then I heard she was here."

The stall keeper didn't look totally convinced, but gave them directions to Albert's stall anyway, probably to avoid trouble.

When they reached the right row, Alistair clapped him on the shoulder.

"You can do this," he said. "Seventh one down on the left, used clothing and stitching, right where he said it was."

He could see it from here.

"I can see her," Nathaniel blurted. "Right there, in the back. She's- she's embroidering a border on those cuffs, I'd forgotten she did that. There was this one time King Maric summoned all the nobility to court, I think it was Cailan's sixteenth birthday, I had to come back from Starkhaven for it, and she was so excited to go and she embroidered amaranthine flowers on the borders of all our shirts-"

Alistair gave him a little shove.

"Don't tell me, Howe, tell her."

It seemed to take forever to get to the stall. About halfway there, Albert noticed him coming and stepped deliberately between him and Delilah. Nathaniel froze for a moment, struck with the hugely irrational fear that she didn't want to see him.

Then reminded himself what the letter had said; and that to Albert he was a strange armed man with obvious money based on the quality of his weapons and armor who had been intent on his wife, and kept walking.

Albert seemed torn between outright glaring and trying to look non-threatening and boring, so Nathaniel was greeted with a sort of terrified defiance.

"And just want do you want, Ser?"

Delilah's husband was an average man by looks. Black hair, short beard, middling height, maybe a little muscle-heavy for a man who sold goods all day.

"If there's nothing, Ser, I'd thank you kindly to move along."

"Lilah," Nathaniel managed to tell him. "I'm-"

"Nate!"

His sister rushed around the side of the stall to hug him fiercely, and he had a moment of fumbling when he realized that little Emily was resting in a sling across her chest and Thomas was still clinging to her skirt, and had to find some way to hug her around the tiny child-shaped obstructions without crushing either of them.

His niece. His nephew.

"Lilah," he said. "I didn't- I just knew that when I got to the Vigil you weren't there any longer and then there was this whole situation with darkspawn and the Burning of Amaranthine and then when we were cleaning out rooms in the Vigil I found the letters you left and they said you'd moved to Amaranthine-"

"That must have been a very thorough cleaning, Nate," Delilah told him, smiling through her happy tears. "I hid those very well. I always meant to go back for them after I heard that Father was killed, but then the Wardens-"

"They would have let you in," Nathaniel said. "I didn't- your letter came to the Vigil but Samuel's dead so it got passed to me and Theron- the Arl-Commander- we came- us Wardens I mean-"

"You joined the Grey Wardens? Nate- Father would be so mad!"

"I know!" he said, and couldn't help laughing. It was just that the little twist on her mouth as she said it was so familiar, the same twist that he remembered from her suggestions that they race around the battlements, or take the hunting horses jumping back and forth over roadside hedges to see who would fall off first, or any number of other things sure to set their father off. "I know!"

"Can't you just imagine his expression?"

"Yes, yes I can," Nathaniel told her, and then hit on something that was sure to make her laugh. "Lilah, you remember that one room in Father's suite that was always locked? Right next to the armoire?"

"Of course! Were there really demons in there?"

"No, we got it opened up, and it was where he'd stash Esmerelle when they had their trysts-"

"I knew it!" Delilah exclaimed, vindicated. "I knew it! I knew they were having an affair!"

"-well it must have been where Father put all his money, because it was the most lavish room I've ever seen- gilt and silver and fur and velvet. Silks. Tevinter brocade! I don't even know how he found it! The Arl-Commander took one look at it once I'd explained what it was for, cleaned out the gilt and silver, dumped the big furs and velvets all over the floor and hung the silks and brocade up on the walls, and gave it to his mabari! 'Fen will appreciate it more than the Bann of Amaranthine did, he's actually worked for his life', he said!"

Delilah's laughter rang out across the bazaar.

"I like her," Alistair said. "Go on, tell her."

"Tell me what, Nate?" Delilah asked.

"Lilah," Nathaniel said. "This is Warden-Captain Alistair, the man the Warden-Commander appointed 'in charge of complaining about Soldier's Peak'."

"It's a hard job," Alistair told her solemnly. "All that snow and wind and cold, unforgiving stone. I don't think I'll lack things to complain about until the next Age, but someone has to do it."

Nathaniel dropped his voice.

"We're here with the Arl-Commander, Lilah," he said. "He would be here, but he had to talk to the Viscount. We came to ask you to come home- as the Seneschal of Amaranthine."