Dragon Age: Last Flight (33 page)

Isseya shrugged. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

“You have another?”

“I fear that the Grey Wardens killed them. More exactly, that I did, under the First Warden’s orders. It was the Joining ritual, I think. Its repercussions. None of us knew this would be the result when we started down this road, but our lack of intention changes nothing. This is what we did, and this is what it’s done. We’ve killed them.”

Amadis’s fingers had gone white and stiff around the stem of her wineglass. Very deliberately, she unbent them and set the glass aside. She walked to one of the room’s small windows, drew aside the heavy velvet drapes that masked it, and opened the wooden shutters to the winter chill. The wind blew her long black hair back over her shoulders and dusted her face with a suggestion of snowflakes. “You said you can correct it?”

“I don’t know, truly. But I want to make the attempt. If you’ll allow me.”

“How?”

“I can’t save Smoke.” It was best to snuff that small hope at the outset. She knew Amadis would have been thinking it, and indeed the other woman’s mouth tightened in a way that told Isseya she’d guessed correctly. “But I might be able to save the hatchlings that she’s bearing.”

“How?”

“Blood magic made this. I am guessing—
hoping
—that it is possible for blood magic to unmake it, at least in the unfinished minds of the unborn. I can’t change what’s taken hold in the adults. Their thoughts are too complicated, and their blood runs too fast. I don’t have the strength left in me to pull the taint apart and braid their minds back cleanly, if I ever did. Any hope they have will have to come from … quarantine of the sick birds, separation of the healthy flocks, something like that. Something that doesn’t rely on magic, at least not mine. All I can do, I think, is take it from the young ones still in their shells. Maybe.”

Amadis hesitated, ticking her nails against the wooden shutters as she thought it over. Then she frowned. “What will become of them after that? Even if you succeed … won’t they just succumb to the same sickness once they hatch? What’s to prevent them from catching the plague like so many others have?”

“Nothing,” Isseya admitted. “Nothing but time. I fear that we’ve doomed the griffons. I hope I am wrong, and that it will be possible to quarantine the sick from the healthy. But if I’m not, the griffons will go extinct. None of them are immune. Some fall faster than others, but once they’re exposed … I’ve felt it in every one I’ve touched, even Revas. She’s strong, and she hides it … but it’s in her, as it is in all of them, and someday it will kill her.

“But when they die, the sickness will die with them. And if those hatchlings don’t break their shells until the tainted griffons are no more, I think they may be safe.”

“
May
be. You
think
.” Amadis moved restlessly away from the window. The drapes rustled back into place, held up in part by the open shutters, and framed a sliver of the night-shrouded city. Under a pale moon, the tiny lights of Starkhaven’s bakers and mages and other nocturnal workers twinkled like a handful of small and scattered stars. In peacetime, the city was much darker than it had been during the endless vigil of siege. “If you’re wrong?”

“I’ll never know. I’ll be dead. Probably no one alive today will know. If I succeed, I do not intend for the Grey Wardens to know it. The Wardens killed the griffons; they don’t deserve to be stewards of the species. Not now, anyway. Not in this generation. Maybe fifty or a hundred or two hundred years hence, when the griffons have become creatures of legend. Maybe then they’ll be more careful about safeguarding what they so nearly lost.”

She looked steadily at the human woman. Her brother’s lover, one of her oldest friends. The only other person who could know what had been done. “I’m asking you to keep this a secret. From the Wardens, from the Free Marchers, from everyone. There’s no one alive today that I would trust with the last griffons in the world.”

“What happens when they hatch?” Amadis asked.

Isseya shifted her grip on her staff. Its crystalline head glimmered faintly in response, swirling with the misty, muted colors of the Fade. “They won’t. Not until someone finds them.”

“How do you know it’ll be the
right
person?”

“I don’t. But if you keep my secret, I can try to ensure that they will at least pass to someone who understands how fleeting and precious freedom can be, and who will honor the true spirit of the griffons.”

“She was his last gift to me,” Amadis said. The words seemed to choke her. “She’s my most beautiful friend. My strength. My freedom. The power to ride the wind—that’s what Garahel gave me. And you say she’s dying because of something
you
did—”

Isseya bowed her head wordlessly. She’d thought herself beyond feeling any further guilt, but every one of Amadis’s words hit like a stone hurled at her soul.

“And you couldn’t be more wrong. It
was
the Blight’s doing, Isseya. If the darkspawn hadn’t awakened their Old God, if the Archdemon hadn’t come upon us, none of us would ever have had to make the terrible choices that were forced on us in those dark days. Garahel always used to say that
heroism
was just another word for
horror
, and maybe a worse one. A hero always feels that he has to do what’s right. Sometimes that leads to tormenting himself with doubt long after the deed is done. Or herself,” the former mercenary added, pointedly. “Your brother told me from the beginning that you were too cruel to yourself. I think he was right.”

There was nothing Isseya could, or wanted to, say to that. Instead she focused on the immediate concern, the only one simple enough for her to grasp. “What is your will?”

“What happens to Smoke when you take her eggs?”

“She might die,” the elf admitted. “I might be able to save her, but—”

“No.” The word came vehemently, and Amadis blinked as if startled by her own force. She shook her head and continued in more measured tones. “Don’t. You can make it a peaceful passing, can’t you? With magic? Something as gentle as … sleep.”

“I can,” Isseya said. The Fade’s powers of entropy had never been her primary focus, but she could manage that much. She could put Smoke into a sleep from which there would be no waking.

“Then that’s what I want. Make it look like she passed naturally, and peacefully, and without any visible wounds. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Amadis rubbed her eyes one last time and put on a determined air that Isseya knew well. She’d seen it first in the Antivan palace on the day they’d met, and although they were all older and wearier now, and in no way the same people they’d been then, that particular mannerism was unchanged. “If there is no cure for Smoke, I can give her that much kindness. I owe it to her.”

And it removes your political dilemma. Starkhaven need not worry about the symbolic implications of executing the Grey Wardens’ gift.
There was no kindness in saying so, though. Instead Isseya nodded, and made to the door. “I’ll do it tonight.”

“Wait. Please.”

The elf turned.

Amadis’s face was deep in shadow, but the firelight caught her hands and made it seem that she wore gloves of gold. She raised them to her cheeks, mimicking the lifting of a mask. “Take off the wrappings before you go. I want to see you one last time, as you really are.”

Slowly, Isseya complied. She pushed back her hood, letting it settle over her shoulders before she began unwinding the scarves that covered her disfigured face. Dove gray was the one around her brow; muted blue, the one around her mouth and chin. They both fell away soundlessly, baring her skin to the cold breath of the night’s breeze. When they were gone, and Isseya’s ravaged face was fully revealed, Amadis inhaled a soft, shocked breath.

Lifting her hood again, Isseya stepped through the door. She didn’t bother with the scarves. Behind her, as the heavy iron-chased wood swung shut, she heard Amadis whisper: “Good-bye, my friend. Thank you.”

*   *   *

The Marchers had caged Smoke in a hastily built gaol in the shadow of the castle, where deserters and mutineers had been imprisoned during the war.

Isseya made her way there cautiously, slipping from shadow to shadow. A canvas bag muffled the glow of her staff’s head. Her dark cloak blended into the night, and there were few abroad to see her, but still her heart hammered in her throat with every step.

It wasn’t discovery that she feared. It was failure. She had only one chance at this.

A single lonely guard sat in a wooden chair leaned against the lee side of the gaol, smoking a pipe stuffed with the acrid-smelling weeds that the Free Marchers had taken to smoking for lack of anything better during the Blight. Its bowl glowed cherry-red in the gloom.

He couldn’t see the door from there, but Isseya supposed he didn’t need to; if Smoke broke free, he’d know it wherever he sat.

The guard couldn’t see Isseya approach either, but she had no intention of risking discovery. He might hear her inside, or change position while she worked and catch her as she came out, and all would be ruined.

Cautiously, she reached for the Fade, keeping an eye on the pipe smoker while watching her staff’s radiance in the periphery. The tear-shaped stone on the staff’s head vibrated silently as magic began to flow through the conduit, but the bag she’d tied over it sufficed to muffle its light. There was no telltale shimmer as Isseya drew the shapes of her spell into being, and there was no sound as she released it, entwining the solitary guard in sleep.

He slumped in his chair. The pipe tumbled from his mouth, spilling its embers across the hard-packed earth in a smoldering arc that dwindled and went dark. Isseya stepped over it, plucked the guard’s key from his belt, and went to the gaol’s door.

It wasn’t locked. A stout wooden pole, thicker than her wrist, barricaded the doors shut. There were claw marks gouged deep into the doors, leaving splintered holes that Isseya could see through, yet despite the obvious marks of the griffon’s rage, Smoke herself was nowhere to be seen.

Isseya lifted the barricade pole from its hooks, leaned it against the wall, and eased open the door.

Smoke crouched on a scattering of filthy, shredded blankets inside. A heavy steel chain ran from a broad, manacle-like collar around the griffon’s neck to a post that had been hammered deep into the earth. A dark metal muzzle enclosed her beak, chafing the feathers around it. Its upper surfaces were crusted with blood from the griffon’s coughs and sneezes. Large patches of her body had been stripped of fur and feathers, and on the bare skin Isseya saw echoes of the corruption that had marred Tusk in Weisshaupt.

The griffon’s eyes, black and yellow in the darkness, burned with a rage that Isseya winced to see. The chain around her neck rattled with the intensity of her hatred. A hiss escaped from Smoke’s muzzled beak as she stared at the elf, trailing off into a series of hacking coughs and sneezes that left her muzzle and blankets spattered with a new mist of blood.

The Marchers had broken down the wooden walls between individual cells to widen the space for the griffon, but the gaol remained cramped and miserable, wholly unworthy of her presence. Even if Smoke had not been chained in place, she scarcely had room to raise her head or spread her wings. The place reeked of old urine and sickness and despair, and Isseya didn’t know which she pitied more: Smoke, for having to be here, or Amadis, for having no better place to confine her treasured friend.

But it would be over soon. There was some small consolation in that.

“You’ll be at peace,” Isseya murmured, unsure whether she was speaking to the griffon or herself. She touched the Fade again, pulling a skein of magic as ethereal as mist, and spun it out into another spell of sleep.

Smoke resisted it for a long time, fighting against the magic for the sheer sake of having something to fight, but eventually her will weakened and the enchanted slumber took hold.

And Isseya, carrying a knife and an infinity of sorrow, went to her.

*   *   *

She left before dawn. The pipe-smoking guard was still asleep on the ground outside, his lips trembling softly with snores. Inside the gaol, Smoke’s feathered body was a lifeless hulk in the gloom, drained of the anger and tension that had poisoned her last days. Isseya hoped the griffon had found peace, wherever her soul had gone.

The eggs were a warm burden nestled close against her skin. Isseya had bound them in a padded sling, much like the ones that the Dalish used to carry their babies while traveling, and covered them under her cloak. They weighed down her shoulders, but they lifted her heart.

There was no taint in them. Isseya’s greatest fear had been that the eggs would already be irrevocably corrupted by the same plague that had afflicted their mother and so many of their kin. But in those tiny, slumbering lives, that curse echoed far more faintly, and she believed that she had succeeded in pulling it out.

She had done so by drawing it into herself. There was, as far as Isseya knew, no way to destroy the darkspawn taint once it had taken hold in a living creature. It grew and spread like cancer, and she had never heard of a cure. There was only the Joining, and that was only a delay.

But in the eggs—in those unformed, embryonic creatures—there was little to anchor the taint, and she had been able to draw it out. She couldn’t destroy it, but she could transfer it from the unborn griffons to her own body. And so she had.

It hadn’t made her any sicker. Isseya had worried that it might, and that she might not be able to reach the sanctuary where she planned to hide the eggs … but she felt few ill effects from the added corruption. Only a persistent heaviness in her abdomen, as if she had swallowed something large that she couldn’t quite digest, and a blur of oily darkness in the corners of her vision when she turned her head too fast. A constant numb, tingling cold lingered in her extremities; she couldn’t seem to warm her hands or feet no matter how hard she chafed them.

But it wouldn’t slow her, and that was all that mattered.