This is when Alistair should thaw, or feel unsettled, or otherwise discover some crack in the impenetrable wall of loathing. From somewhere outside himself, he knows that an onlooker would think he's being childish.

But the wall is made of a wall made of Duncan, Duncan, Duncan, and twenty other names he doubts Loghain ever learned, all dead, and Eamon poisoned, and whole fields of corpses, and somewhere down that long list there's Cailan as an afterthought, and—

And that imaginary onlooker can get fucked.

Alistair doesn't crack, and doesn't move except to cross his arms and raise one of his eyebrows.

"We can hope."