Dragon Age: Last Flight (12 page)

The woman’s mouth hung open in shock. She stammered something indecipherable and turned on her heel, fleeing back into the crowd of townspeople who were unpacking their belongings from the aravels. Within seconds, she was gone.

Garahel unbuckled the last of Crookytail’s harness straps and, with a final slap on the griffon’s flanks to signal that he was free, walked over to Isseya. “That was a … unique way of rallying the troops.”

“
You
rally them,” Isseya growled at her brother. “You’re the charismatic war leader. I’ll get them here for you, but after that I don’t care.”

“That is not even close to true,” Garahel said airily, “but that’s all right. I know you’re tired. Come, let us enjoy Prince Vael’s hospitality for a night. We have only the one, you know.”

“Tomorrow we’re going back to Wycome, I know,” Isseya said wearily. They’d already planned to make as many runs as they could until the darkspawn came to Wycome’s gates. It had seemed a more reasonable prospect before she’d actually experienced the exhaustion that came with guiding and supporting the caravan for a full day.

“No. Kavaros and three of the Starkhaven Wardens will be taking the aravels back to Wycome. Warden-Commander Senaste will replace them upon arrival, and we’ll continue to have teams relay the aravels for as long as we can. But you and I are neither returning to Wycome nor staying in Starkhaven. We have work to do in the Anderfels, if you’d forgotten. So drink their wine and enjoy their cheers. Let yourself be a hero for a night. In the morning we’ll just be Grey Wardens again.”

9

9:41 D
RAGON

“What happened to the griffons?” Valya asked.

It took the Chamberlain of the Grey some time to answer. He was not an old man, precisely, but he could easily be mistaken for one. Gentle and dreamy, he often seemed lost inside his own wispy-haired head. Caronel had told her that visitors sometimes mistook the chamberlain for one of the Tranquil, and while Valya wasn’t entirely sure he’d been serious, she could imagine that the story was true. The Chamberlain of the Grey
did
have something of their foggy air.

He turned and blinked owlishly at her. “The griffons?”

“After the Fourth Blight. They all vanished, didn’t they?”

“Yes.” The chamberlain shuffled down the library rows, passing from pools of gray light into shadow and back again. Valya trotted alongside him, adjusting the satchel that carried the chamberlain’s letters for the day. Most of the correspondence was really meant for the First Warden’s attention, but for the past few years, if not longer, it had been the chamberlain who’d handled Weisshaupt’s mundane letters. The First Warden’s mind was on grander things.

Each of the new recruits took a turn at serving as the chamberlain’s assistant for a day. Ordinarily, the duty was reserved for new Grey Wardens who had passed their Joinings, but the Hossberg mages had been instructed to share that task.

Valya didn’t mind. It meant a quiet day, light work, and an opportunity to ask all the questions that had been buzzing around her head. The chamberlain was such a mild-tempered man that his rank didn’t seem to matter; she felt that she could talk to him almost as an equal. “So what happened to them?”

“They died.”

“But how?”

The chamberlain raised a graying eyebrow. He had extraordinarily long eyebrow hairs; they drooped until they almost touched his eyelashes. “You’ve been studying the Fourth Blight.”

Valya wasn’t sure if that was a question. It didn’t
sound
like one, and she presumed the Chamberlain of the Grey knew very well that she was one of the interlopers who’d been poking around his library for the past month, since it was his project they were working on, but she couldn’t imagine it was meant just to be a declarative statement. “Yes, of course.”

He nodded, sweeping his sparse yet shaggy gray mane across the shoulders of his robe. “And so you wonder what became of the beasts who bore us to such glory in those battles. You wonder why we no longer have the marvels of magic they made possible.”

“Yes.”

The chamberlain sighed. His face creased into a wistful smile. “Everyone wonders that. I did too once. But the griffons are gone, child. They died in the Blight. So many died in the fighting that the survivors could not sustain the population. They grew weak. Eventually the young were stillborn inside their eggs, and that was the end of them. A great sacrifice. A great sadness.”

A great lie,
Valya thought.

She didn’t say it. She had no real reason to believe that the Chamberlain of the Grey was lying. There were no obvious tells in his manner, and it was true that the griffons had vanished at the end of the Blight. The war had worn on for year after grinding year, and for much of that time it had burned across the Anderfels, where the griffons were said to have hunted and courted and made their nests. Perhaps they
had
all died in the Blight.

But she couldn’t squelch the little twist of doubt deep in her soul.

The chamberlain seemed to take her silence for agreement. He sighed again and opened the door to his private office. It was a perpetual clutter of papers heaped into disorganized piles, many of them covered with a thick fuzz of dust. At some point there had been a second chair for visitors to use, but it was buried in an even higher drift of papers than his desk. Only the carved wooden crest of its back stood out amid the heaps.

Slowly, with a little creaking grunt, the chamberlain settled himself into the study’s lone functional chair. The leather was old and cracked along both sides of the seat, and permanent indentations in the bottom and back cushions were already fitted to the senior Warden’s form. Leaning back in his chair, the chamberlain beckoned to Valya. “What letters have come today?”

“Ah…” Valya set the satchel down hurriedly and fumbled through the scrolls and packets. “This one’s from Vigil’s Keep. Another from Denerim, but I don’t recognize the arl’s sigil, I’m sorry. Orzammar, Starkhaven…”

“Anything from the south? Orlais?”

“No, I don’t think.…” She looked at the remaining seals and sigils. “Nothing that says so on the outside, or that I recognize by its sign. But of course I could easily be overlooking something.”

“Mm.” The chamberlain tipped his head back, sank lower into his chair, and waved at her again while closing his eyes. “No, no, I’m sure you’re right. The foolish fancies of an old man, wondering why Warden-Commander Clarel never writes anymore … when it’s likely just that she doesn’t want anything from us at the moment. People always write when they have demands, and never when they’re content. Or making mischief. Either way, no matter. What word from Vigil’s Keep?”

Valya cracked the wax seal with her thumbnail and opened the folded packet. She scanned the first few lines, then shook her head with a rueful smile. The chamberlain had been right. “The new Warden-Commander respectfully requests a supply of lyrium, arms, and armor to replace some lost during an encounter with … ah, demon-possessed trees. On fire. There’s a list here of specific requests.”

“I don’t doubt it,” the chamberlain said with a snort. He didn’t open his eyes. “And the mystery arl from Denerim?”

That was another request for aid: the arl’s wife thought she’d seen a genlock in the cellar when she went down to fetch a bottle, and therefore the arl demanded a company of Grey Wardens to come and hunt down the darkspawn who had, undoubtedly, broken in from the Deep Roads through his personal wine cellar. The letter made no mention of how drunk either the arl or his wife had been at the time of the purported sighting.

The other letters were less frivolous, but most of them
were
demands of one sort or another. Both mages and templars demanded aid in fighting their enemies, and both templars and mages wrote seeking refuge. Scouts in the Anderfels sent word of darkspawn sightings and apparent patterns to their activities. The dwarves sent similar word of darkspawn activity in the Deep Roads, as well as notes on the arrival, departure, and deaths—presumed or confirmed—of Wardens who had lately gone to their Callings.

It was after Valya had finished reading the names sent from Orzammar that the chamberlain finally sat up and opened his eyes. “Enough,” he said, waving her out of the study. “Enough. Go. You have other work to attend to. Leave the rest of the letters.”

Bowing her head, the young elf retreated.

She went to the alcove with Garahel’s memorial, intending to resume her research with the rest of the Hossberg mages, but it was later than she’d realized, and the others had already left for their midday meal. The only other person still in the library was the female templar, Reimas, who sat alone at a table with a single book lying closed in front of her.

Valya would have been just as happy to leave the woman to whatever she was doing with that closed book, but Reimas called across the library’s hush: “You. Valya.”

The elf froze. She couldn’t help it. The response was ingrained after years of living in Hossberg’s Circle. With a conscious effort, she relaxed, smoothed all expression from her face, and turned to the older woman. “Yes?”

“Will you come and sit with me a while?”

Valya stiffened again. She didn’t have to obey, she reminded herself. This wasn’t the Circle. Templars didn’t have any authority in Weisshaupt. But it was still so hard to let go of the old habit of fear. “Why?”

“To talk. Just to talk.” Reimas’s smile looked awkward on the woman’s long, thin face, which habitually settled into lines of contemplative gloom.

But the request seemed earnest, if a little awkward, so Valya hesitantly approached a chair on the table’s other side. Not directly opposite the templar; she wanted more distance than that. Across from her and one chair over was where Valya chose to sit. “About what?”

“You don’t trust us.” Reimas put her hands on the table in front of her, clasping them over the unread book’s cover. She had big, mannish hands, with broad fingers and callused palms. Old scars left a lattice of marks, some pale and some purplish, on the backs of each one. They were soldier’s hands. Templar’s hands. “None of you mages really trusts us, I can see that … but you’re the most suspicious of them all.”

“That’s what you wanted to talk about?”

“Yes. You don’t need to be suspicious.” Something twisted behind Reimas’s eyes, some old and long-buried pain. “We aren’t here to hunt you. Not everyone joins the templar order because they enjoy grinding mages under their heels.”

“Why else would you possibly do it?” Valya said, letting her irritation show. She pushed her chair back with a deliberately loud scrape against the library’s flagstones. “Are people so eager to spend their days walled up in a tower of frightened and frustrated mages for better reasons?”

“Some are. I was.” The templar pushed her lanky brown-black hair behind her ears and dropped her gaze to the book she hadn’t been reading. It was a prayer book, Valya noted:
Homilies and Hymns to the Maker
. Judging by the stiffness of its spine, it didn’t seem like many other people had read it either. “I joined the order to
protect
you.”

“How noble. Am I supposed to ask why?”

“If you like. My father was a mage. Not a powerful one. He never had any training, and he did his best to hide his gifts. He never mentioned it to any of us children. I’m not sure he even told my mother. She might have known, though. Strange things happened around our house sometimes. Eggs would freeze under our chickens overnight. Torches would burn with blue flames, or green, and every once in a while you’d see little faces in the fire, or hear tiny voices. We knew not to mention these things to outsiders. If anyone else in the village knew—and some of them must have, I’m sure—they kept our secret too.”

“And then what?” Valya’s irritation had drained away; in its place, a leaden certainty had settled over her. She knew where this story was going, and it wasn’t anything she wanted to hear again. Every mage in the Circle had heard the same tired cautionary tales about how untrained mages succumbed to demons and became abominations. That it had actually happened to Reimas’s father was sad, no doubt, but it didn’t make the lecture any more welcome.

But that wasn’t the story after all.

“Then someone
did
talk, and the templars came,” Reimas said. “We never found out who it was, or how they knew. It doesn’t matter anyway. My father wasn’t a strong man. There was never much courage in him. When he got word that the templars were coming, he filled his pockets with stones and he walked into the lake.” She was silent for a while. Her thumbs twisted around each other, the knuckles white with suppressed emotion.

Then she exhaled a long breath and laid her hands flat on the book’s cover, staring at the title framed between her fingers. “I was angry after that. For a while. I hated the templars. I hated how they questioned my mother with such cold arrogance, how they questioned us children about our own magical potential, as if we were trying to hide being plague carriers. For years I carried that anger, that hate. I grew up fighting anyone who’d face me, just to have somewhere for that anger to go.

“I can’t tell you when it began to change, or why. But one day I realized that if I really wanted to prevent others from ending the way my father did, my best chance would be to do so from within. I didn’t have the piety to join the clergy honestly. I didn’t care a fig about the Maker. But it’s the templars who are trusted with protecting mages. It’s templars who guard them, and keep them safe—if they’re doing the job right. And I meant to.”

“That’s why you left?” Valya asked quietly.

“That’s why I left.” Reimas looked at her, finally. The older woman’s eyes were bright and glassy. Maybe with tears, maybe not; Valya couldn’t be sure. The library’s weak gray light made it hard to tell. “Because the order had stopped being what it should.”

“Why are you telling me this? What do you
want
? Absolution for your order? For your father?”

Reimas smiled tightly. She touched her eyes with the corner of a sleeve, brushing away whatever might or might not have been there, and seemed to retreat back behind her usual walls of melancholy self-possession. “I won’t say no if you’re offering, but it wasn’t my intention to ask for that.”