Dragon Age: Last Flight (20 page)

It was one of a family of such birds that lived around Weisshaupt, drinking the rainwater from its cistern catchments and building their nests in the crags of its high towers. Valya, too, had spent days watching the little birds and daydreaming that she shared their freedom, even as she recognized that in truth the birds had no more freedom than she did. They, too, were tethered to the fortress.

The bird, startled by something out of sight, flittered away. Reimas turned slowly back to Valya. The sunlight caught her hair, which had grown longer since the templars’ arrival and was beginning to show wider streaks of gray. “Yes, of course.”

“What were they like?”

“Frightened, mostly.” Reimas stroked a callused thumb around the rim of her empty teacup. Her long face always seemed set in lines of sadness, but the melancholy felt somehow deeper as she spoke. “But what can you expect from a blood mage who’s been discovered by the templars? Of course they were frightened.”

“Were they evil? I mean … were they
all
evil?”

The human woman shrugged. “I’d have to know what evil is to answer that, and I don’t believe I do anymore. The cleaner answer, the clearer one, is that they all broke the prohibition against maleficarum.”

“But why?” Valya pressed. “Doesn’t the why matter?”

“It should,” Reimas agreed, “but sometimes it can’t. Everyone has reasons for what they do. Some are persuasive, some are absurd. A few might be things I’d be tempted to believe. But how can you know? Whatever anyone tells you is only a tiny fragment of what
is
, and it’s colored by their perceptions and hopes and fears. Even if they’re honest—and what blood mage is, with either you or themselves?—their story is no more ‘real’ than a vision in the Fade. The one and only thing you can be sure of is that they have committed, and become, maleficarum. As a templar, that ends it. It has to.”

“The Grey Wardens have used blood magic,” Valya said. She dropped her voice as she spoke, but in truth there was little risk of a Warden overhearing them. Weisshaupt was much diminished from what it had been centuries ago. Most of its halls and courtyards—including this one—were given over to relics of the past and emptiness in the present. “What about them?”

Again Reimas was quiet for a time. The gnarled branches of the apple trees shook under a short-lived breeze, shedding the last of their dry brown leaves. The templar’s hair blew across her face in a gray-streaked curtain. She sighed, closing her eyes and touching one temple as if to push away some unwanted memory.

“The Chantry teaches us that human pride and human ambition created the darkspawn,” she said, brushing her hair back into place when the breeze died out. “The magisters used blood magic to enter the Fade and despoil the Golden City, and in so doing, doomed all of Thedas to pay the price for their folly. Blood magic
created
the evil that the Grey Wardens devote their lives to stopping. I can’t help but feel that it is wrong to use that same cursed weapon to fight them.”

“They use the taint, too, though,” Valya pointed out. “They take in the darkspawn corruption so that they can fight it. It’s a tool.”

“A tool that destroys its user,” Reimas said grimly. “Whether blood magic or darkspawn taint, it’s all a bargain with destruction.”

“Do you think that’s why Diguier failed?” Valya asked. She had never discussed the Knight-Lieutenant’s death with Reimas, except to offer polite condolences when it had happened, and it felt awkward to mention him now. But she wanted to know.

“Maybe. I think the ritual is unforgiving of weakness, and although Diguier was not a weak man ordinarily, he was full of doubt since making the decision to leave the templars. I suspect that doubt left him fatally vulnerable to the taint. It takes a hard soul to survive corrosion.”

“Do you think you’ll survive?” Valya tilted her head curiously. It was probably rude to ask, she thought, but surely the question must have crossed Reimas’s mind. How could it not? Fearful speculations on that subject often kept the younger mages awake, whispering across their beds late into the night.

“I’m not sure they’ll ask me.” Reimas’s thin, colorless lips turned in a pensive frown. “I predict the First Warden won’t let any of us attempt the Joining until he thinks he knows what the consequences will be of Diguier’s failure. That is well enough by me; if I were given the cup today, I believe I would end as the Knight-Lieutenant did.”

“Why?”

“Because I have my own doubts,” Reimas said. “This is an old and heroic order. But the evil it was created to fight … I do not know that I want to dedicate my life to the Grey Wardens’ cause. I know why I became a templar. I understood what I needed to do to protect people on both sides of the Circle’s walls, and I was proud to serve my duty. I have no such understanding, and no such pride, here.” She shrugged, a gesture heavy with fatalistic defeat. “And because I am not pure or certain in my purpose, I’ll likely fall when I drink from the poisoned cup, just as Diguier did.”

“I don’t know that I want to be a Grey Warden either,” Valya said softly. “I don’t know that I have the strength for it. I think … I think heroism takes a harder heart than what I have.”

Now it was Reimas who gave her a curious look. “What do you mean?”

Haltingly, Valya said: “I found a diary.” She folded her hands over each other in her lap, looking down at them uneasily. Although she’d finished it weeks before, she had never mentioned Isseya’s diary to anyone. At first she hadn’t been sure it was anything important enough to warrant the Wardens’ attention—although obviously of historical value as a Fourth Blight relic, there hadn’t been anything in it that seemed relevant to the subjects that the Chamberlain of the Grey had asked them to research—and then, when she read Isseya’s confession to blood magic and what she’d done with it, she’d been shocked into silence.

Garahel, the hero of the Fourth Blight, had had a
sister
who was a blood mage. Isseya had been a Grey Warden, and a blood mage.

And an elf, which shouldn’t have mattered, but did.

Garahel was the one glorious legend they had across Thedas, the hero whose greatness
nobody
could deny. Whatever people thought or said about the elves, whatever slurs and indignities they hurled at the “knife ears,” they still had to acknowledge that they owed their nations’ survival and the existence of their lineages to his selfless slaying of the Archdemon Andoral.

Revealing Isseya’s confession would tarnish that shining image. It was the right thing to do, but … as she stood on the precipice, the admission bitter as lye on her tongue, Valya felt like a traitor to her people.

“Whose diary?” Reimas prompted. The gentleness of her tone, and the caution in her eyes, told Valya that she’d noticed the elf’s reticence.

“A Warden’s,” Valya answered numbly. She couldn’t bring herself to say the name. “A Warden from the Fourth Blight. She was a blood mage, and she did terrible things … but she did one great one too. That’s why I asked you about the blood magic—whether it was possible to do anything good with it. I thought, if a templar agreed that it could be done, then maybe I wasn’t just lying to myself. Maybe it was true, and this … her legacy … might be worth recovering.”

A silence stretched between them. The little brown bird came back to the apple tree and hopped along its knotted limbs. Or maybe it was a different bird; Valya couldn’t tell. For all the time she’d spent watching them, she had never learned to distinguish one from another.

“I’m not a templar anymore,” Reimas said. She spoke so quietly that it was almost a whisper, but the sound of her voice, after such a long hush, startled Valya. “It’s no longer my duty to stamp out maleficarum wherever it exists.” There was something in her dark, perpetually weary eyes that Valya didn’t know how to read. Hope, maybe, or resignation … or a little bit of fear?

“What does that mean?” the elf asked.

“It means I’m allowed to see shades of gray,” Reimas answered. “So maybe it
is
possible to do something good with blood magic. Maybe. What was this Warden’s legacy?”

16

5:20 E
XALTED

Three days after the battle at Hossberg, when the griffon riders failed to see any sign that the darkspawn horde was returning, Queen Mariwen announced that she would hold a feast to celebrate the Grey Wardens’ breaking of the seven-year siege.

Privately, Isseya doubted that they’d accomplished anything of lasting import. It just didn’t seem possible that anything could halt the long, awful march of the Blight. They’d been fighting for almost a decade, and every time the Wardens seemed to have reclaimed territory, the Blight came back and swallowed it. Time and again, they had laid down their lives for victories that lasted no longer than smoke in the wind.

Her brother and Amadis thought otherwise, though, and when the first messages began coming in from griffon riders on other fronts, they learned that Garahel was right. The Archdemon, the Grey Wardens of Orlais and the Free Marches said, was showing itself more often. The darkspawn were more aggressive, and more agitated, on the field. The Wardens
had
struck a telling blow, the messengers said, and it had heartened their allies tremendously—but it had also provoked the darkspawn into new furies.

That cast a shadow over the joy of Hossberg’s freedom, as did the knowledge that one broken siege wouldn’t end the war. Even if Queen Mariwen was acting as though they’d already slain the Archdemon, the rest of them knew that victory was far from assured. If anything, the challenges that faced them had become starker, the stakes higher.

The Free Marches were dying.

Under the withering influence of the Blight’s magic, the coastlines had become bare strips of rock flagged with the wrinkled skeletons of dead seaweeds. The ocean itself had deadened to a murky gray. Its fish had either fled or died, and the mussels and oysters that once fed the cities of Wycome, Hercinia, and Bastion had perished in the water, leaving vast beds of empty shells that clacked eerily in the tide.

Inland, the devastation was even greater, for it was not masked by the sea. Large swaths of the forests were dry and dead, the standing corpses of their trees blotched with unnatural fungi. Once-rich farmlands had turned to cracked hills of dust crowned by a few wispy stalks of headless barley. Children and livestock born under the clouds of the Blight tended to be small and weak, frequently deformed and easily lost to disease. The few wild birds and beasts that had escaped the traps and arrows of desperate Free Marchers had either starved or succumbed to corruption; after nearly a decade, even those that had survived long enough to become ghouls had died years ago.

Hunger and hardship, as much as the swords of the darkspawn, were killing the people of Thedas. That was the message from all the griffon riders, and all the kings and generals whose tidings they bore; that was the knowledge that cast such a profound pall over celebrations of Hossberg’s freedom.

“We have to go to the Free Marches,” Garahel said. “We’ll let the Queen have her feast, we’ll pay our respects to her, and we’ll take our army to the Marches.”

They were alone in his room, he and Amadis and Isseya, poring for the thousandth time over maps of Kirkwall and Cumberland. It was well after midnight, and other than the muted clanging and curses of the kitchen servants working to prepare the Queen’s feast for the morrow, the castle was quiet. Gone were the endless footsteps of soldiers on night watch against stealth attacks from the darkspawn; hushed were the horns that had cried out warnings against nocturnal threats. Peace, unsettling in its silence, reigned over Hossberg.

Amadis poured a glass of deep red wine. Queen Mariwen had opened the last of her cellar’s reserves to thank them, and she’d had some precious bottles hoarded. The carafe in Garahel’s room contained a fine Orlesian vintage, better than anything Isseya had tasted in years.

But she found no enjoyment in it. “What makes you think they’ll go?”

Garahel frowned. They’d had this argument before, going around and around in fruitless circles, and he was plainly irritated that Isseya had brought it up again. “What choice do they have? What choice do
any
of us have? The darkspawn are weak in the Anderfels. It’s the Free Marches where the Blight is strongest now. That’s where the Archdemon is. Therefore that’s where we must go to draw it out to battle.”

“The Anders are tired of fighting,” Isseya pointed out. “They want to go home and see if they still
have
homes. They want to plant crops and have babies and try to get on with their lives in the way everyone else outside the Blight’s path has been trying to ignore it. They don’t want to march to Starkhaven and risk losing everything if the darkspawn come back behind them.”

“They don’t have a choice,” Garahel repeated.

“The Ruby Drakes do,” Amadis said, sipping her wine. Her black eyes were cool and calculating. She wasn’t arguing, Isseya thought, but it was close. “My mercenaries are tired of fighting for promises on paper and someday-in-the-future gold. Darkspawn don’t pay ransoms for their captives or carry anything worth looting, so all this fighting is paying them nothing. There’s been some unhappiness about that.”

“Unhappiness that you’ve controlled,” Garahel said testily. He held out a hand for a glass of wine, but Amadis didn’t stir. With a grunt of annoyance, the elf got up to pour it himself.

“So far I’ve controlled it,” the black-haired woman said. “But the fighting’s over now. At least it is here. And you’ll have to pay them in something heavier than paper to make them fight for you again.”

“What?” Garahel asked.

Amadis smiled slightly and swirled the crimson liquid in her glass. It clung to the sides in a translucent, wavery ripple that gradually went pale. “Queen Mariwen’s price is just you, isn’t it? Your public obeisance at her feast, and your company for a night. That’s all she wants: for you to legitimize her rule and give her a little pleasure before you go.”

“Yes,” the elf said stiffly. He pushed the carafe away and stalked back to his chair, drinking the wine like water. “I’ve made no secret of that. I told you the instant I received her offer. I told you I’d refuse, too.”