“Archers!” Gaspard yelled. “Fire arrows. Lienne!”
“Out of fire, my lord!” the lead archer yelled back, and Gaspard swore.
“Then shoot, then, for whatever damned good it will do!”
Lienne inscribed her glyph before her, and it flared and shone, and the sylvan roared and stumbled backward again, but the arrows that thudded into its trunk seemed to do little.
“More coming in from the flank, my lord!”
“Chevaliers, to arms!” Remache called, drawing his own sword. The sylvan flung back by Lienne’s magic was coming forward again, ignoring the arrows and swinging its branches like massive clubs.
Gaspard joined his chevaliers on the line as the archers fell back, hacking and hewing. Great branches crashed off his shield, driving him to his knees with each strike. He felt the man beside him go down and lunged over, slamming his shield up to batter aside a blow that would have finished off the chevalier. He chopped down and hacked the branch, sending a spray of black sap flying everywhere.
Then, even as he raised his blade, he felt energy coursing through him, a strength and vitality he hadn’t felt since the heady days of youth. The men on either side of him shouted a battle cry, and Gaspard glanced over and saw the glow of magic around them.
It was Lienne, then. Gaspard took whatever gift she was offering, lunged back to his feet, and swung his longsword as though it were a training wand, scything through bark and chopping deep into the sylvan with each strike. Beside him, his men yelled and swung great blows of their own, and the sylvan roared, fell back, and then collapsed with a flare of smoke into so much dead wood.
Still feeling the rush of Lienne’s magic, Gaspard turned. Off to one side, Remache guarded a chevalier who had fallen, heroically taking blow after blow from a great beast that dwarfed the ones they had seen so far.
The sylvan was huge, its trunk knotted and gnarled with age, and it held its branches not like grasping claws but like a great wooden cudgel. Remache barely came up to the thing’s thigh, and as another blow came down, he fell to one knee, still guarding the man who had fallen.
“Lienne!” Gaspard looked over his shoulder and saw her behind him, sweating. Her skin crackled with the same glow that hummed through his bones. “I need you!”
She took a breath. “It will not touch you, my lord.”
Gaspard nodded. “With me!” he yelled, and charged the great sylvan.
It saw him coming, and unlike the simple beasts they had killed earlier, this one had some measure of wits about it. Gaspard saw it shift to meet him, raise its great cudgel, and gesture with its other arm as though giving a challenge.
Then sickly black energy played across it, and the great sylvan shuddered and reeled back.
“You are old, tree, and once, in centuries past, you burned,” Lienne said from behind Gaspard. Her words were not loud, but magic lived inside them, and they cut through the air and struck the beast like flaming arrows. “Remember.”
The great sylvan screamed, shuddering, and Gaspard dashed forward and hacked at it. Magic crackled around him, and he felt his blade shift in his gauntlet, a tiny slip that changed the angle just slightly. When his blade sank into the sylvan, that tiny shift let the blade catch a seam Gaspard hadn’t even seen, sending black sap oozing. Around him, his men swung furiously, and every blow struck true, biting in deep and finding hidden weaknesses as the tree screamed and roared.
The great sylvan swung then, but it was weak and halting, and Gaspard sidestepped the blow that crashed to the ground beside him, and swung back with a great scything blow that cut bark away and revealed pale wood that bled black sap underneath. Without pausing, he reversed his grip and plunged his blade in.
The great sylvan went still, and Gaspard felt a sudden cold wind rush through the forest, cutting through armor and sending a chill spiking through the marrow of his bones. The sylvan seemed to sigh and relax, and then it was just a tree again, the black sap hissing into smoke and whipping away in a wind Gaspard could no longer feel.
“It is done,” Lienne said weakly from behind him, and he turned in time to see her fall.
Gaspard stumbled back, the strength fleeing his limbs as suddenly as it had come. Around him, men fell to their knees and shook their heads. “Tend to her,” he ordered, and the archers lifted her gently and carried her back to safety.
“Foolish girl.” Remache leaned on his sword, breathing hard.
“Still want me to run her through?” Gaspard asked, and Remache laughed, then sobered as he checked on the fallen chevalier he’d been defending. “Is he alive?”
“I sincerely hope so,” Remache said, feeling for a pulse. “I would be greatly disheartened to have risked my life so foolishly for a dead man.”
Gaspard clapped him on the shoulder. “I have wronged you, Remache.”
“You have not, my lord.” Remache lifted his head and called to the others, “We’ll need someone to tend this man’s wounds!”
“I have. There is honor outside the chevaliers, and I am slow to recognize it. You have my apology.”
“An apology from the Grand Duke of Orlais.” Remache seemed to consider this as an archer trained with herbs came over to tend the fallen chevalier. “Impressive … though not as impressive as one from the emperor.”
“I hope to improve your fortunes, then.” Gaspard grinned and pulled his sword free from the great sylvan’s body with a grunt, and the two went to see how Lienne fared.
They met no more sylvans for the remainder of the day, though all the men looked apprehensively to the trees. Lienne, riding behind Gaspard and Remache ably if carefully, explained that the great sylvan they had slain had likely kept the other spirits under its control, and with it gone, the rest would flee back to wherever they came from.
Gaspard had lit pyres for four men, and another ten were too injured to fight. He sent them back with a few able-bodied men to guard them. It felt wasteful, but his scouts insisted that Celene had no more than three or four men with her, and he was reasonably certain that twenty men, half of them chevaliers, could handle the empress.
And though he did not say it aloud, he found himself feeling the unexpected and wholly unwelcome sensation of guilt. Asking soldiers to march into battle against men was one thing. Leading them into battle against unnatural magic was another thing entirely.
But Celene needed to be caught, for the safety of Orlais.
Late in the afternoon, they forded a river swollen from the rain. Not long after, the scouts found the bodies.
Gaspard heard the cry, and his first thought was that more trees were attacking. Then his mind, tired from battle and a long ride, realized that the cry had been for a discovery, not an alarm. He rode up along the animal track that had steadily grown larger and better maintained, until it was more a road than a path. Ahead, in a clearing, one of his scouts knelt by the body.
“What is it?”
“Elven, my lord. Dalish, going by the ironbark.” The scout turned the body over, and Gaspard sucked in a breath. The elf looked to have been burned from the inside out, leaving only a charred husk behind.
“Lienne?” Gaspard called back. “Up front, please.”
She rode up slowly, her staff out, and looked down. “Burned.”
“Yes, dear. We gathered that. What would do such a thing?”
She shrugged. “I imagine we will find out.”
Gaspard sighed and reminded himself that she had saved all their lives not long ago. To his scout, he said, “I’ll take the lead now. Watch our flanks and pass word to keep your distance if you see anything moving.” He’d be damned if he’d lose more of his men to magic today.
Gaspard rode forward with Lienne and, to his surprise, Remache. A few minutes later, they found another dead elf in the middle of the path, this one torn in half. A third hung from a tree, pinned to the trunk by a full score of arrows. Gaspard’s scouts moved with arrows nocked, and the chevaliers had drawn their swords. Gaspard hadn’t given the
order, but he could hardly fault the men.
Finally, they rode into the Dalish camp.
The elves had been living in this part of the forest for years, long enough to carve out clearings and roads and likely set up surreptitious trade with the closest village.
They lived here no longer.
The clearing in the center of the camp was strewn with bodies. Old and young, man and woman, warrior and cook, all lay slaughtered like broken toys. Gaspard had seen battlefields in his time, and he had seen a few villages the morning after the chevaliers had celebrated. This put his experiences to shame.
“Maker, Remache,” Gaspard said quietly, hauling on the reins as his charger, trained to ride unflinchingly into battle, snorted and pawed at the ground. “What happened here?”
To a warrior and a strategist, the aftermath of a normal battle told a story. Here one group had come, taking fire from enemy archers. There a defensive line had collapsed, splitting a force in two. But this scene spoke only of chaos.
“I suspect that you wish to speak to Lienne, my lord, not me.” Remache shook his head. “No mortal men did this.”
“I don’t understand.” Lienne turned in the saddle, her knuckles white as she gripped the reins. “It must have been magic, some spirit, something, but … Look. There, an elf flayed, likely while still alive. And there, another boiled, if those burns are—”
“Your point, Lienne?” Gaspard asked. He didn’t look away. The Emperor of Orlais would not look away. But even elves did not deserve this.
“Demons are, above all, simple,” Lienne said, her voice shaking. “They will kill with fire, if that is what they enjoy. Or with claws, or blades, or magic that kills you as you sleep. But they will almost always find something they like, and they will not vary it. They lack the wit to do otherwise.”
“Then this is no demon,” Gaspard said, talking over her rather than allowing her to keep going. The men were shaken enough already, and Gaspard himself felt chills at what she suggested. “And whatever it is matters not, unless we have to kill it. What matters is Celene. Ignore this slaughter,” he called out to his scouts. “They’re dead elves. We’ve all seen our share. Find me the trail.”
The scouts dismounted slowly, looking from Gaspard to each other.
“Move!” Gaspard snapped, and they spread out, though their bows were still out, and they barely glanced at the ground as they made their way into the forest.
“You expect them to find anything in this mess?” Remache asked quietly beside him.
“Better than sitting here staring at it.”
“True,” Remache said. “I never expected to see the day that I pitied the elves for…” He trailed off. “There, my lord. Do you see it?”
Gaspard looked where Remache was pointing, to a wagon where a few dead warriors lay. “No.”
Remache dismounted, and Gaspard followed as the lord made his way over and knelt to examine the bodies. “Broken neck,” Remache said with quiet professionalism. “Slit throat. This one’s been run through.” He looked back up at Gaspard. “A bit mundane given the rest of the camp.”
“Celene’s champion.” Gaspard nodded and shot Remache a grin. “If Lydes is not to your liking, you may have the makings of a good scout.”
Remache stood, smiling as he wiped grass off his knees. “I shall bear that in mind, my lord.”
“Scouts, over here!” Gaspard waved. “Celene was here, or her champion. Start here, and find out where they’ve gone … unless Lord Remache needs to take care of that as well.”
“I can tell you where they have gone, my lord,” said a young woman’s voice.
Gaspard’s blade was out and level as he turned. Remache drew his blade as well.
It was an elven girl, still in her teens, pretty if you liked that sort of thing, with the tattoos all the Dalish wore trailing down her pale face. She held a staff that glowed a sooty red, though it was not pointed at any of them, and her robes were stained with mud and blood.
“And who are you?” Gaspard asked, keeping his voice calm and confident. Around him, the scouts all quietly circled, ready for him to give word.
“I was Mihris, the First of Clan Virnehn,” she said. Gaspard nodded as though that meant something to him. “Do you seek the woman who claimed to be empress?”
“We do,” Gaspard said. At Remache’s look, he added, “We would also know what happened to your people here.”
“The warrior who served the empress killed the guards and freed her,” Mihris said, pointing at the wagon without looking. “Then he went to one of our sacred places and freed the thing that killed my people.”
Gaspard felt a chill, and he saw his men looking around uneasily.
“But it did not kill you,” Lienne said from behind him. As everyone else looked at her, Gaspard kept his eyes on Mihris, and he saw the flash of anger and shame before the elf’s face slid back to blank neutrality.
“Not me,” Mihris said, nodding. “You see, the warrior chose not to kill me when he could have.” She raised the hand that didn’t hold the staff and pushed back her hair, showing an ugly bruise on the side of her face. “That … interested the thing that killed my people, and it said that the warrior had insulted it, so it would let me live, that I might guide you to the eluvians … and gain revenge for my people against the man who destroyed them.” She held out her hand, and Gaspard saw that a massive ruby glittered in her palm. “It even gave me a way to help you follow them.”
“And what of you, First of Clan Virnehn?” Gaspard asked. It still meant nothing to him, but he had always been good with names. “You wish us to follow Celene and kill Ser Michel. That I understand. But what of you? Am I to let an apostate elven mage run free in exchange for her service?”
He hadn’t given the signal, and his men knew not to raise their weapons. Really, he had asked the question to gauge her response. He wasn’t disappointed.
Her head came up, and she met his gaze squarely. “No,” she said. “You are to let me come with you and kill Ser Michel myself. That is my choice.”
14
Briala had no idea how long they slept, but when Felassan eventually shook her awake, it felt as though the crushing fatigue of hard fighting and little sleep might finally be leaving her. She pulled Celene close for a moment on the rough blankets Felassan had found in the room. Celene tensed as she came awake, then relaxed against her.
It was strange, Briala thought. Every time she had slept beside Celene in Val Royeaux, she had awoken to find her empress already staring out the window at her empire, worrying about everything she would have to do that day. Was it sheer exhaustion that had finally given Celene a full night’s sleep? Or was it because right here, in this ancient elven burial chamber, Celene had no empire to worry about?
Briala kissed the back of Celene’s neck, ignoring the taste of old sweat. “I wish I could make you some tea.”
“When this is over,” Celene said, rolling over to face Briala and rubbing the sleep from her eyes, “I will have a new bed that puts my old bed to shame. The sheets will be spider-silk, the blanket woven by the finest artisans in Antiva, and the mattress and pillows will be stuffed with feathers plucked from desire demons.”
Briala smiled. “I’m not certain how comfortable that would be. Do desire demons even possess feathers?”
“I will send for one that does.” Celene kissed her, and though the kiss was short and simple, it still hit Briala with a humming thrill that warmed her cheeks and made her whole body tingle.
She had Celene again. But for the tea, and the little ritual of putting on her mask as she snuck out of the room, this could have been any morning. And perhaps that made the burial chamber even better than the palace. No one would see them today, save Michel and Felassan. Briala had no need to sneak away.
What had happened at Halamshiral was a still-painful ache, but the elves had rebelled. Celene had done what she had to do. Had Briala been there, she might have been able to turn Celene to a different
course, but Briala herself was the one who had left.
It was not Celene’s fault that she had been maneuvered into doing what she had done, any more than it was Briala’s fault for leaving Celene without the guidance she had wanted. It was Gaspard’s fault. He had done this. He was to blame.
Briala silenced the unease at the back of her mind, reminding herself that hating Celene was exactly what Gaspard would have wanted her to do. She knew that she would always bear that ache, the pain of not having been able to end that rebellion cleanly, with less harm to the fools who had brought the empire’s justice down upon them. But she could forgive Celene. She could.
And she would never leave the empress again.
The elves across Orlais would be free. Briala could do that, with Celene’s help. Her empress would give her people the freedom they had so long deserved.
She buckled on her drakeskin armor, wincing at a few sore spots. “What now, hahren?”
“Now we journey to another world,” Felassan said. “If we survive, it should be very interesting.”
Michel, who was still putting on his armor, grunted. “You do little to inspire confidence.”
Felassan ignored him. “These mirrors have been dormant for centuries. It would take powerful magic to awaken one. I might be able to do so, but I’d need the rest of you to carry me for the rest of the day. But you, Empress, should have an easier time of it.”
Briala watched Celene nod and draw forth the ruby from a pouch at her waist. She walked toward the eluvian. “What do I do, Felassan?”
“No idea.”
“I don’t think you need to do anything,” Briala said, looking at the mirror. “It’s already happening.”
As Celene walked toward the eluvian, the blue-gray glass shifted. At first it seemed only to catch the light differently, a dull mirror catching a bit of Celene’s reflection, but then shapes swirled in the mirror’s surface, vague and billowy, like thunderclouds in a strong wind.
Dragon Age: The Masked Empire Page 26