Dragon Age: Last Flight (10 page)

That was as clear a dismissal as Isseya had ever heard. She bowed her head helplessly and retreated from the office.

Outside, the sun was bright in a clear blue sky. Lacy ribbons of white cloud streaked across its shining glory, undisturbed by any hint of wind. The perpetual storm of the Blight was a bruised purple thumbprint in the distance, barely visible from there.

Its presence hung heavily over the town, though. The smell of boiling pitch permeated the air, along with the smoke from dozens of cook fires. The people of Wycome had slaughtered their livestock and were salting or smoking all the meat they could in preparation for siege. Rows of whole fish lay on wicker racks next to sliced strips of beef and goat. Long after sunset, they’d continue their preparations, smoking meat over the fires laid to illumine the barricade-builders’ work.

It was a brave, doomed effort. Isseya couldn’t stand watching.

She made her way to the city’s lone market gate. Wycome had four gates, but only one was big enough to admit two-horse wagons. A small commercial district had grown up around it, and it was there that Isseya headed. Any local alehouse would be crowded with citizens trying to talk themselves into hope, and she couldn’t bear listening to any more of that just now.

The nearest tavern had a sign over the door proclaiming it to be the Glass Apple. Like all the others, it was crowded to the point of bursting, but Isseya pushed inside anyway.

A momentary hush greeted her entry. When the patrons saw that she was wearing the insignia of a Grey Warden, however, they turned back to their drinks and conversations.

Elves are no trouble as long as they can be categorized,
Isseya thought sourly. Warden or servant, it didn’t matter which, as long as they didn’t challenge anyone’s preconceptions.

Even as the thought crossed her mind, though, she was ashamed of it. Maybe it
was
only because she was a Warden, but the Free Marchers had been kinder to her than most humans. She only wanted to think badly of them to lessen her own guilt at being unable to help.

Wrestling with that unwanted pang of self-awareness, Isseya made her way to the bar. The crowd parted before her, muttering respectfully about the Grey Wardens and gratitude and Wycome’s salvation. She tried to close her ears to their chatter.

“Wine,” she told the barkeep.

“Not much of that left, and what little remains is piss-poor swill. I wouldn’t serve that to a Warden,” the man replied, simultaneously proud and apologetic. He was a tall man, skinny except for a prodigious potbelly, with a face burned red by the sun, and carrot-orange hair. It was hard to say which was brighter, his ruddy face or the shock of hair above it. “Got standards to maintain.”

“What
do
you have?” Isseya asked.

“Dwarven ale, if you’ve a taste for that. Blackwater rum. Some winter cider, though we’re running low on that, too. The way people are drinking, in another few days we’ll be selling beer brewed from spit and moldy bootstraps.”

“I’ll take the cider,” Isseya said. The barkeep poured it efficiently, waving aside her attempts to pay him.

Across the room, her brother’s voice rose above the din. “Isseya!”

She scanned the room. It didn’t take long to find Garahel in the crowd. He’d claimed, or had been ushered to, the best table in the house. Kaiya and Taiya were with him, as was Amadis, her nose scrunched as she tried to will herself to choke down a mug of pitch-black dwarven ale. Calien sat in a corner of the room, a dark blue cowl pulled low to hide his face. He hadn’t tried to replace the feathered hood lost during the Archdemon’s attack, which Isseya considered a significant improvement; the mage looked much more dignified without those feathers bobbing over his head.

Isseya worked her way through the press of other patrons, cradling her cider glass close to her chest. “How long have you been here?”

“Since Warden-Commander Senaste gave us our orders,” Garahel replied grandly, sloshing his glass in a broad salute. From the smell of it, he was drinking cider too, and had been for a while. “Long enough to get royally inebriated. Come, join us.”

“I might as well,” Isseya agreed. Taiya moved to share a seat with her twin, offering her own chair to the elf as she approached. “Have you spoken to Senaste?”

Garahel shrugged with expansive resignation. “I have. Didn’t much care for the orders I got. You?”

“Same as yours. Starkhaven, then the Anderfels.”

Garahel finished his cider and pushed the glass across the table with a thrust of two fingertips, where it joined a small forest of other empty vessels. “Well, at least we’ll all get to stay together.”

“As will I,” Amadis interjected.

Garahel raised a golden eyebrow. “The Warden-Commander seems to think you’ll be more useful in Starkhaven.”

“The Warden-Commander can make sweet, passionate love to a diseased ogre,” Amadis replied in honeyed tones, fluttering her long black lashes. “She has no authority over me. And if she wants my help in Starkhaven, she’ll grit her teeth behind a smile and let me go wherever I want.”

“Why would she want your help in Starkhaven?” Isseya asked. “You’re not really a Crow, are you?”

“No.” Amadis laughed, shaking her head. She pointed to Calien, who hadn’t budged from his seat in the shadowed corner. “
He’s
the Antivan Crow. I told you the truth when we were in the air. I’m the second daughter of Fedras Vael, cousin to the Prince of Starkhaven.”

“
And
the leader of the Ruby Drakes,” Garahel said, “which might be more important.”

Isseya nodded slowly. She’d heard of the Ruby Drakes, and the rumor that the mercenaries’ new leader was a young noblewoman from the Free Marches. They were said to field a fighting force of a thousand infantry, three hundred horse, two hundred archers, and twenty battle-trained mages.… And perhaps the greatest measure of their strength was that the Chantry’s templars had never tried to seize those apostate mages.

Of
course
the Grey Wardens would want to court the Drakes as allies. An army that size would be a considerable asset against the Blight—if they could convince mercenaries to join a battle where the only payment would be their own survival.

“You’re an Antivan Crow?” Taiya said belatedly, blinking at Calien.

“Yes,” the mage replied without stirring. Nothing of his face was visible beneath his hood. The single, gravelly word sank into a silence.

“Well.” Taiya blinked and rocked back on her half of the chair, rubbing a hand across her scalp. The hair was beginning to grow back in, darkening her head with a dusting of stubbly brown. “I didn’t realize they had mages. I thought they were all … well … you know. Assassins. With knives, I mean, not spells. What do they have you do?”

“Whatever needs doing,” Calien replied. A note of dark humor had crept into his rough voice.

Isseya finished her cider. She hadn’t eaten all day, and the fizzy juice had gone straight to her head. “Whatever needs doing, eh? Can you get these people out of Wycome?”

Calien’s eyes glittered darkly in the depths of his cowl. “You know that’s not possible.”

Taiya looked from one to the other, a gesture mirrored by her twin, Kaiya, beside her. “Why not? You can’t move them with magic? With a … gate, or something?”

“No.” Calien’s answer was flat and final.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Isseya said apologetically. She’d known that before she said anything, and now she regretted making Taiya look foolish. “You can’t wave your staff and transport a person from place to place in a twinkling.”

“Can you change them into something else?” Garahel asked, perking up behind the cluster of empty glasses. He had a familiar, troublesome gleam in his eye. “Mice, maybe, or … cockroaches? Something small, so we could fit the whole town onto their fleet of fishing boats?”

Isseya shook her head. “No. That’s just a children’s story.”

Calien leaned forward slightly, breaking from the shadows. His hood tilted back, revealing the hard planes and angles of the mage’s face in the tavern’s slanted sunlight. “It’s not a story. But it’s beyond my power. The Witches of the Wilds can transform themselves into all manners of beasts. Might be able to shapechange unwilling victims, too, for all I know. But I’m no Witch of the Wilds, and neither are you.”

Garahel rocked his chair back in exasperation, knocking the wicker against the tavern wall. “Well, what
can
we do?”

“Aravels,” Isseya murmured.

Her brother raised his eyebrows. Amadis snorted. “Aravels,” the black-haired Marcher woman repeated. “You mean landships? Like the Dalish use? Great big wagons that fly through the trees? Those aren’t real.”

“They are real,” Isseya said, “and it’s magic that lets them pass through the forests. We can’t blink people through the air, and we can’t shapechange them into mice, but we can use magic—and a little bit of carpentry—to make their fishing boats into landships.”

She watched the idea sink in among the Grey Wardens and their companions around the table. Somehow, no one scoffed. Garahel looked intrigued, Amadis skeptical, the twins purely delighted by the novelty of the suggestion.

Calien pushed his hood back completely. “Do you know how to enchant an aravel?”

“No,” Isseya admitted. “I’m not Dalish. I don’t have their lore. But we know that it can be done, so we should be able to find our own way. Ours don’t have to be as strong or graceful as true aravels. They only have to be good enough to get the people of Wycome over the sea or across the river plains before the Blight swallows them all.”

“That’s still a lot to ask,” Calien said dubiously. “Do you have any idea how long it takes to research new magic?”

“A week,” Isseya answered, “because that’s what we have.” She stood, pushing her empty glass aside to join the others with a clink. “As it happens, the Grey Wardens share the same rule as the Crows. We do whatever needs doing. And we’ll do it in seven days.”

8

5:12 E
XALTED

It didn’t take seven days. It only took three to build their first aravel.

Compared to the legendary Dalish crafts, it was a squat and graceless thing. It looked like a reinforced fishing boat clumsily mounted on wagon wheels, because that was exactly what it was. The Wardens had cobbled it together from pieces that the townspeople had donated, and had practiced trying to move it around an old sheep pasture overgrown with weeds.

Once Warden-Commander Senaste understood what they were trying to do, she’d brought in another pair of senior Wardens to aid Garahel’s effort. The Warden-Commander wasn’t willing to sink significant resources into such a seemingly frivolous project, but neither was she willing to pass up any chance at preventing all of Wycome from being swallowed by the Blight. Giving them two more mages was her way of splitting the difference.

With the help of those two mages, they’d succeeded, after a fashion. Their aravels would never float smoothly through the forests as the Dalish ones did, but Isseya had mastered the perilous art of modifying force blasts to hold them at a steady, sustained height in the air. Early on, she’d misjudged the intensity of her spells, with the result that she’d blown their first attempted aravel to splinters after hurling it ten feet into the air.

But the new one was built more sturdily, and Isseya’s calculations had improved, and so on the third day, they had a craft that could make a swift, if thoroughly uncomfortable, run across the Free Marches.

On her own, all she could do was hold the thing motionless in the air. She could levitate the aravel, but she could not make it fly. But with a griffon in harness to lend its forward momentum, the aravel could effectively fly twenty feet above the ground, and it went as fast as the griffon was able to pull.

“Now all we need is a hundred more of them,” Garahel said, leaning against a worn stone pillar that had once supported part of the long-gone pasture fence. He didn’t even try to hide his grin as Isseya jounced and bounced the makeshift aravel down to an agonizing landing on the hillside.

“And a hundred griffons to pull them, and a hundred mages to keep them aloft,” Amadis agreed. Idly, she picked a daisy from a clump of grass, twirled the stem between her fingers, and flicked it into the pasture. “It’s so simple, I can’t believe no one thought of it before.”

“To be fair, you
do
have to be threatened with a Blight before getting into one of those things could possibly seem like a good idea,” Garahel noted. “And even then, I’m not sure how many of the townspeople are going to want to jump in.”

“I’m so glad you two are entertained,” Isseya muttered as she raised the aravel again and brought it back down to the earth. Liftings and landings were the most dangerous parts; those were where she was likeliest to break the vehicle. She noted, with some satisfaction, that the wheels barely jolted upon landing this time. “But if you wanted to be
useful
, you could get to work making those hundred other aravels. If we had those, we might actually be able to save most of this town.”

“Senaste’s already given the order,” Amadis said. Her smile couldn’t have been more self-satisfied if she’d been a cat with a canary. “She made it official an hour ago. The Grey Wardens will begin evacuating Wycome by aerial aravel—how’s that for a tongue-twister?—as soon as twenty of the vessels are finished and loaded. The three of us, and your two griffons, will escort that first group to Starkhaven.”

Isseya stepped away from the fishing-boat “aravel,” smoothing her wind-tousled hair as she crossed the grassy pasture back to her companions. The birds in the surrounding hedges, which had been startled into silence by the vehicle’s bizarre movements, began to stir back into song. The first warbles and whistles of their renewed melodies escorted the mage out of the meadow. “She’s hedging her bets again.”

“Of course she is,” Garahel said, “but she’s still making that bet. We have our chance, Isseya. We can save this town.”

Some of it,
Isseya thought, but she didn’t say that. She didn’t want to dim the thrill of excitement that lit her brother’s eyes. Hope was Garahel’s greatest gift, and it was one the Free Marches badly needed just now.