The Blight takes too much from us.
But it was impossible to refuse. How could she? This was the very purpose of their lives. Every time they went out to the field, the griffons and their riders willingly courted death. They fought the darkspawn with all their hearts, and risked oblivion freely, so that others might survive the horrors of the Blight. The Grey Wardens had already made the same sacrifice that she was asking of the griffons. Was this really so different?
Yes.
Intelligent as they were, the griffons were animals. They couldn’t speak, they couldn’t understand her explanations, and they could not possibly comprehend the repercussions of what she was about to do to them. The notion that they would have consented was a comforting illusion—but there was no truth to it, and Isseya would not lie to herself about that.
It didn’t matter. She’d force them through the ritual anyway. If it meant the Free Marches’ survival, and the Grey Wardens’ chances of ending the Blight, then ten griffons from Fortress Haine were a very small price to pay.
The roosting tower was quiet and airy. Lord de la Haine had never finished the construction of this tower; it remained unfurnished and largely open to the sky, so the Wardens had given it over to the griffons. Despite its openness, the beasts’ leonine smell was strong in the tower, along with the odors of the ointments and poultices used to treat the wounded animals. It mingled with a whiff of blood and old meat from their meals, and, more pungent, the catlike rankness of the urine that the males sprayed along the highest point of the stone wall. Left unattended, griffons were messy creatures.
She wondered if they would still be after she was done.
The magic came to her easily. Isseya had almost hoped it would fail—that the gift of magic would be gone from her, somehow, and lift this terrible choice from her conscience—but the Fade was waiting when she reached for it, and ethereal power filled her grasp. She spun a web of blood and lyrium and darkspawn corruption, and she tried not to look into the griffons’ eyes as she dropped it over each of their minds, one by one.
None of them resisted until it was too late. They knew and trusted her, and although every griffon reacted with the shock and revulsion that Shrike had, they only did so after she’d already trapped them in skeins of blood magic. And as she had before, Isseya ignored their struggles, finishing her spells with implacable precision. Inwardly, she quailed at her own work and wept and raged along with the griffons … but no trace of grief or anger marred her spells.
Finally it was over. Her head ached, her legs ached, and her heart ached worst of all. Standing unsteadily, the elf leaned a hand against a rough stone wall and waited for her vision to clear enough for her to leave the tower.
She’d used only a fraction of the lyrium and Archdemon’s blood that Garahel had provided, but she didn’t want to think about what that might mean. Better to assume that the First Warden had simply chosen to err on the side of overgenerosity, not knowing how much Isseya actually needed.
Ten of the griffons had undergone the modified ritual. She hadn’t put Revas through it—that would have been a betrayal too far—and she had passed over Lisme’s Hunter as well.
As Isseya finally turned to climb down the tower stairs, though, she realized that the androgynous mage was standing there, observing her from the shadows. She had no idea how long Lisme had been watching.
“You’ve Joined the griffons,” the taller mage said. She had shed the male guise she’d worn when Isseya saw her last. Today she was dressed and made up as a woman, her eyes so thickly lined in kohl that she seemed to be wearing a bandit’s mask.
“Yes,” Isseya said.
“Yet you passed over Hunter. Why?”
“For the same reason I passed over Revas,” the elf said. “What the griffons go through is not like our Joining. It affects them differently, and much worse. You were at Hossberg; you saw Shrike.”
Lisme inclined her head slowly. She wore no wig today; instead she had painted her bare scalp with curlicues of metallic copper, dark in the shadows and brilliant in the sun. “I did.”
“Then you already know why I wouldn’t do it to Hunter.”
“No. I understand why you would make this choice for your own griffon. But why exempt mine?”
“Because you’re my friend,” Isseya answered, “and I thought you’d want Hunter to stay as he is. The transformation will kill him. Even if he survives this run to the Marcher cities—and he might not—the darkspawn taint moves much faster in griffons than it does in us.”
“Will it make him stronger?”
“Yes. Temporarily. But yes.”
The copper scrollwork on Lisme’s clean-shaved head glinted as she moved into the light, crossing the tower to study the last griffon Isseya had altered. The griffon was an older female, her wings scarred and bent from many battles, her muzzle white with age. She’d been sent to Fortress Haine because time and injury had made it impossible for her to continue on the battlefield.
Isseya’s spell had removed those pains from her, though, and as the griffon recovered from the disorienting effects of the blood magic, she moved like a youngling again. She was not as she had been in her own youth. Like Shrike, and all the others who had undergone the modified Joining, her movements were hectic and jerky, too fast sometimes and, at other times, seized by strange stuttering delays. She shook her head and coughed, then pawed at her beak, trying to rid herself of the discomfiting taint that she’d been spellbound to believe was just a cold.
But the griffon was strong again. Despite her white fur and cough, that much was clear. She was strong, and she was losing control.
Lisme’s mouth hardened as she looked upon the struggling beast. “Do we need this strength?”
Isseya couldn’t lie. “Yes. Even with it, we may fail. Without it, we have no chance.”
The woman nodded, her painted curlicues glimmering. “Then do it to Hunter. Whatever you need, we will give. We’re Grey Wardens, both of us, and I won’t let my sentimentality be the reason that this mission fails.”
* * *
They left Fortress Haine under the misty gray moonlight. Dawn was the merest suggestion of sapphire on the eastern horizon, daylight at least two hours away.
Isseya wanted to reach and leave Kirkwall under the sun’s full brightness, and that meant a departure in the dark. While the Blight’s perpetual storm clouds provided some shelter for the sun-fearing darkspawn, they were still weaker and more timid by daylight than they were at night, and she meant to exploit every advantage she could.
They had few others. Even with the griffons bolstered by blood magic and rage, Isseya didn’t like their odds. The Grey Wardens would have to fight to get into the besieged city, then fight their way back out again, this time burdened by the unwieldy caravans full of civilians. Not only did they have to keep their passengers safe, but they couldn’t afford much damage to the aravels—not if they wanted to use the vessels again.
Isseya had arranged the aravels into four sets of three, each pulled by a griffon and escorted by two more. Revas and Hunter were in harness; Isseya was gambling that the gray griffon’s bond with Lisme would allow the mage to control her steed even through the fog of tension and anger created by the Joining’s magic.
The other two she controlled herself. Unbonded to any particular rider, and unwilling to accept any ordinary rein, the blood-raged griffons would have been completely wild if left to their own devices. They snarled and bristled in their harnesses, snapping at anyone who came near. Already, the griffons’ persistent coughing had irritated their sensitive nasal linings so that each snort was accompanied by a fine mist of crimson—the first sign of many that their bodies were self-destructing under the irresolvable tension of the taint.
Reason had no hold on the creatures, so instead Isseya possessed them.
It pained her to steal even this last sliver of independence from them, but there was no alternative. She wrapped her mind around the two griffons, trying to ignore t
he red-tinged chaos of their thoughts. A muted sense of rage seeped through, prickling at her like a brush of poison ivy across her soul, but she fought to stay focused on the task ahead. People need us.
Calien sat behind her, maintaining the forcespell that held their own line of floating vehicles aloft. Guiding Revas while possessing two of the other griffons was all that Isseya could handle; she needed a second mage to manage the caravan. She trusted Calien—and she knew that if disaster struck them outside Kirkwall, the blood mage would be able to seize control of the altered griffons and get them back to Fortress Haine.
“Ready?” Isseya asked.
The terseness of her tone brought a raised eyebrow from Calien, but he knew what she was doing, and after a beat he simply nodded. “Yes.”
“Revas, lift!” At the same moment she called the command, Isseya urged the possessed griffons skyward. Lisme’s Hunter rose with them, and in a wavering line, the griffons departed Fortress Haine.
Their descent from the mountain was a jolting, jouncing mess. Although the Wardens followed the most direct path available to them, the broad bases of their force cones smashed pines into kindling and dipped precipitously whenever the griffons flew over a cleft in the mountainside. Several times they had to slalom frantically to one side or another to keep the caravans upright. By the time the reached the gentler slopes of the foothills, Isseya’s entire skull ached from the clattering of her teeth. The whispers of demons circled around her thoughts, importuning her through the Veil: Let us in, let us take the weight of these griffons from you. You need not possess them. Open them to us, and free yourself from their weight.
She shut them out, as she always had, but their voices could not be silenced completely—not while she was touching the Fade—and there was a long day ahead.
Once in the foothills, however, her mood improved considerably. Dawn was breaking through the eastern clouds, its rosy golden hues all the brighter for the contrast of the Blight’s storm behind it. Silvery mist drifted through the valleys ahead and wreathed the white peaks of the mountains behind them. The verdant greenery of the forests stretched beneath them, rolling out in a pastoral beauty lost to the rest of the Free Marches. Even with the tainted griffons’ rage simmering at the back of her mind, Isseya was soothed by the peace of the early morning.
It didn’t last long.
Past the hills, the land withered rapidly. Within the span of a few miles, the trees turned to dead standing sticks, while the grass and brambles around them thinned to scabby patches like tufts of hair on a Blight-manged bereskarn. Sullen gray clouds closed overhead, dimming the purity of the sun. The only animals they encountered were a cluster of tumor-raddled deer, who looked up with bloody mouths from the corpse of a cow they’d been devouring and hissed through hollow fangs at the passing Wardens.
The sight of the ruined deer spurred a surge of fury from the tainted griffons. Isseya, struggling to hold them back, bit her tongue until she tasted blood. It felt wrong in her mouth: thicker than it should have been, colder, a viscous poisoned jelly of corruption.
She spat.
It was blood, only blood. Isseya saw it go red into the wind. But the taste and the feel and the wrongness of it lingered, long after the deer had vanished behind them and the griffons’ anger had subsided back to dull embers. The demons chattered in her thoughts, frightened or gleeful, she couldn’t tell and didn’t care.
The darkspawn taint was growing stronger in her. She felt it with fatalistic sureness. It was widely rumored among the Grey Wardens that the corruption in their blood advanced more quickly during a Blight. No one knew for certain, because the taint affected them all differently and few dared to speak openly of what it did to them … but Isseya felt the truth of the rumor in her bones, and every spell of blood magic she worked on the tainted griffons seemed to accelerate its spread.
She tried, with limited success, to put the thought out of her mind. Kirkwall was coming rapidly into view, and they could not afford to be distracted.
As the griffons flew closer, Isseya could see fires burning in low black braziers around Kirkwall’s sweeping stone fortifications. They shone like a crown of red spinels in iron. Tiny mages shuffled around the walls, identifiable from this distance only by the tall outlines of their staffs and the occasional cascades of magically amplified flame that they rained down on the darkspawn from those black braziers.
Those roaring torrents of fire drove the darkspawn back, and incinerated those too foolish or unlucky to flee, but Isseya saw at a glance that they’d never break Kirkwall’s siege. They didn’t have the reach to push the darkspawn back more than a few hundred yards from the walls, and there must have been thousands of genlocks and hurlocks massed outside the city. No refugee shacks dotted the blackened earth around Kirkwall; if there had ever been any, they’d been burned to the ground long ago.
Still, the sight of the braziers heartened her. Garahel had said they might clear a path for her caravans to enter, and give them a chance to leave. Now she understood what he’d meant.
Calien had seen the same thing. “The darkspawn will surge forward when they see us. If we can pull them toward the walls quickly enough—”
“Those braziers will burn them to ashes in seconds,” Isseya finished. “But we’ll have to come in fast and straight. Garahel said the mages could control the fire plumes to some extent, but those sweeps don’t look accurate enough for me to feel safe that they’ll avoid us if we come in dodging.”
“Then don’t. You’re the one controlling them,” the older mage said.
“Yes, because it’s that easy.” Isseya snorted. “Just be ready to clear us a path.” She stood in her saddle, waving her flight forward. “Wardens! To Kirkwall! Riders, clear the way. Lisme, be ready to go in fast and straight. Fast and straight!”
The riders raised their right fists, acknowledging that they’d heard her orders, and dove. Even as the darkspawn became aware of their peril and turned to face the Grey Wardens with bows and slings, the Wardens hurled blasts of fire and bone-cracking ice at them, cutting an evanescent path through the gathered horde. Their archers pinned down the stragglers with deadly accuracy.
Doing her best to block out the demons’ persistent howling, Isseya tightened her grip on the possessed griffons’ minds and sent them racing down the narrow channel that her companions had cleared. The path was ephemeral, as an oar-streak sliced through a churning black sea, and so tight that the primaries of the griffons’ great gray wings brushed against the bodies of charred and frozen genlocks on either side. But the beasts flew straight and true, one chasing the other, beak-to-tail until they and their clumsy caravans had reached the shelter of Kirkwall’s fire-girded walls.
Hunter did not.
Lisme had been struggling with her griffon as soon as the darkspawn came into view, as all the tainted beasts’ riders had, but her course brought her closer to their ranks than the others’ did. The mages and archers ahead of them stayed as high as they could, trying to evade their enemies’ weapons, and dipped lower only to hurl volleys of magic or arrows along the caravans’ path. That greater distance, Isseya saw at a glance, was the only fragile reason the other Wardens’ griffons kept any semblance of sanity through the mists of rage.
Hunter, tethered to the caravan and limited to the height of Lisme’s wavering force cone, was being pushed much closer to the gibbering hurlocks and frenzied genlocks. They shrieked challenges at the Grey Warden and her steed, waving their weapons just beyond the delicate border of death that their companions had laid down—and Hunter could not refuse their call.
Screaming in fury, the griffon launched himself into a mass of darkspawn, while Lisme stood in her saddle and hauled uselessly on his reins. The chain of vehicles behind them dipped as the mage’s concentration faltered, then collapsed into the darkspawn with a thunderous crash. Twenty or more shrieks and hurlocks vanished into the wooden wreckage, but Hunter went down too, dragged out of the air by his harness. The darkspawn swa
rmed in, and Isseya lost sight of them in the chaos.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Calien said sharply behind her. “We need to get to the city.”
Isseya nodded. Her jaw was clenched tightly against the guilt that bubbled in her throat like caustic bile. There was nothing she could do, but there had been before, in the tower roost—and she’d done it, and doomed her friend.
Mutely, she sent Revas forward.
The black griffon flattened her ears and lunged through the air, steadfastly fixing her gaze on the dwindling speck of the caravan before them. It was already almost under the city walls, and the darkspawn were closing swiftly to either side, but Revas ignored the oncoming horde as she had ignored Hunter’s enraged cries and Lisme’s panicked ones. Hurlocks screamed challenges at the side. Calien swept them with a deadly fan of ice, freezing them so rapidly that their skulls cracked from their expanding brains and black icicles erupted from their eyes, but he could not silence the ranks behind them. Genlocks hammered fists against their crude shields and howled incoherent obscenities from behind the corpses of their frozen comrades.
It was enormously difficult for the griffon to set aside her raptor nature and forgo the opportunity to engage her hated enemies, Isseya knew, but Revas did it. The darkspawn horde closed behind them, but they had made it to Kirkwall, and the tongues of fire from its walls kept the frustrated hurlocks at bay.
And despite all else that had happened and was happening, Isseya felt a surge of pride at her griffon’s will and independence. The elf was too exhausted, magically and emotionally, to have guided Revas herself. In that moment, she had needed her griffon to think on her own, and Revas had done so beautifully. Even with Hunter’s shrieks echoing in her ears and the Fade’s malign spirits pulling at her concentration, she could muster gratitude for that.
She stepped out of the saddle. The other caravan leaders were doing the same, watching the darkspawn warily through the hissing whips of flame that drove them away from the walls. The Wardens who had escorted them through the horde were out of sight; they’d flown over Kirkwall’s defenses and landed in the castle, where they would gather the civilians to be let out through a small secondary gate and loaded into the caravans. Isseya wondered how they’d decide who would stay behind, since Lisme’s chain of vessels had been destroyed on the way in. As Field-Commander of Fortress Haine, it was probably her duty to make that decision, but she was far too weary to face that choice now.
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