Emma’s eyes snapped open. She was on her back, staring at vaulted ceiling segments and pine branches. Her mouth tasted like blood and ash. The sky beyond them had gone dark while she was gone.
Her head spun. The desperate calls were still echoing, simmering down to whispers edging out of awareness. She pressed a hand to the floor to steady herself.
“Easy. Don’t try to sit up yet,” she heard Alistair’s voice.
“It is finished,” said Duncan. “Welcome.”
“Oh,” Emma blinked. “Fuck,” she had the worst headache, in addition to being changed beyond comprehension. Every nerve ending felt raw.
Duncan’s face appeared above her. Then Alistair’s. Emma overlooked them and rolled her head to the side. Daveth, face down and still. Jory, his blood a spreading pool she couldn’t do anything about.
Only a few hours ago, she’d sealed their insides back together in the swamp like rethreading a torn sleeve. The wound was still open. But she’d be stopped if she tried.
Alistair crouched beside her, elbows on knees, following her gaze. “Two more deaths.”
“How do you feel?” Duncan asked.
Emma exhaled slowly, taking personal inventory.
“I can’t believe you shanked Ser Jory,” she said.
She thought about his wife. The child. And Daveth– with no one. Different means, the same end.
“In mine, only one of us died. But it was…” Alistair trailed off, then: “…horrible,” a sure understatement.
“It brought me no pleasure,” Duncan said, with the patience of a man who had said this many times. “The Blight demands sacrifices from us all. Thankfully, you stand here as proof they are not all made in vain.”
“Did you have dreams?” Alistair asked. “I had terrible dreams. After mine.”
“Something with fangs,” she said. “Something old.”
He nodded, like he understood exactly.
“Such things come when you begin to sense the darkspawn,” Duncan said. “As we all do. That, and many other things, can be explained in the months ahead.”
Proof. Months. She was still lying on the floor. The stone’s cold was soothing.
“Before I forget.” Alistair pulled a pendant from somewhere and held it out to her—plain metal, strung onto cord. In the firelight she could see it was dark inside. “Last part of the Joining. We take some of the blood and put it in a pendant. Something to remember…” He paused. “Those who didn’t make it this far.”
Emma looked at it for a moment. She sat up slowly, ignoring the way the room realigned itself around her with a nauseating tilt, and took it from his hand.
The metal was warm from him. She pressed it to her palm and felt wrong, memorializing death in a thing the size of a thimble. Then again, for memory of the dead, she had less of those who’d meant more to her.
Duncan placed a hand on her shoulder. His grip was steady and certain, that of a man who had sent people into this and watched them come out the other side, who had stood over people who hadn’t. He smelled of old leather and iron, and beneath that… something faintly bitter, something familiar, that she’d never noticed before.
“I know this is difficult,” he said. “But you are a Grey Warden now. The world needs you.”
Through the gap in the broken arch above them, one winter star burned cold and white.
“Yeah,” she said. “I can tell.”
Somewhere outside the ruins, soldiers were moving, someone shouting orders, the ordinary machinery of war rolling onward.
“Take some time,” Duncan said, pulling his hand back. “When you are ready, I’d like you to accompany me to a meeting with the king.”
She turned her head and looked at him.
“A meeting,” she repeated.
“With the king, yes. He is discussing strategy for the upcoming battle.” Duncan anticipated her next question. “I am not entirely certain why he has specifically requested your presence.”
That was a remarkable sentence.
A king she’d barely spoken to, organizing a war she’d been conscripted into, had specifically asked for her at a strategy meeting approximately one hour after she’d been poisoned.
She looked at Alistair, who was already looking elsewhere.
“All right,” she said, because there wasn’t anything else to say.
Emma stood and grabbed her staff. Her angle to the ground wobbled, then settled into something she could traverse. She crossed to Alistair, who was still watching the floor somewhere to the left of Jory’s body, in his own private aftermath. Her head still throbbed, heart pounding in her ears.
He looked up at her approach.
“Don’t keep him waiting,” Alistair said. “He might get mad. Start crying. You’ll feel bad, and—” He waved a hand. “Well. It won’t be pretty.”
She stood in shocked silence, barely processing this. The impulse to smirk was there, but didn’t quite make it to the surface.
She’d planned on never leaving the Circle. Instead she was dragged out of it by a Grey Warden. Who just happened to be there, when she just happened to make a very uncharacteristic mistake. A mistake she couldn’t possibly regret more. And then she incidentally bumped into the King on her way to being inducted into a secret bloody ritual.
And now that King wanted to see her again for what purpose she could not fathom.
Alistair watched her, then nodded toward the exit. “Meeting’s not far, down the ramp. You shouldn’t need me for this part.”
So she turned without comment and went to find the actual, goddamned King of Ferelden.
The meeting was held on the opposite end of the gutted cathedral. The apse she came from had a better view of the ravine below, where the battle was soon to take place. She recalled it now, as the recruits assembled, all of them still alive, how she looked down into it and couldn’t see the bottom.
The crawling vibration she’d woken with, low like a note played just below hearing, faded but hadn’t gone. She’d assumed it would.
The walk to the meeting table felt longer than it was. As she neared them, Emma placed the voices of the men immediately, and in the wrong order.
“The darkspawn horde is too dangerous for you to be playing hero on the front lines,” he said, rumbling with a patronizing tone of one watching their belongings get handled by someone else.
Loghain Mac Tir, in the chevalier’s armor from the battle of River Dane, stripped of Orleisian heraldry.
Cailan Theirin, son of Maric, beloved of legend, gestured with a great deal of feeling at a map unrolled over a long table. “My father did not win this kingdom by shrinking from danger. But if that’s the case, perhaps we should wait for the Orleisian forces, after all.”
Teyrn Loghain stood opposite. He did not gesture. “I must repeat my protest at your fool notion that we need the Orleisians to defend ourselves.”
“It is not a fool notion,” Cailan’s voice carried easily. “Our arguments with the Orleisians are a thing of the past, and you will remember who is King.”
“Loghain.” That gold-plated royal armor gleamed in the dark. “My decision is final. I will stand with the Grey Wardens in this assault.” He’d been mid-sentence and his eyes had moved across the tent until they landed on her.
“And here she is — Emelyn, correct?” She nodded. “The recruit I met earlier on the road. Congratulations are in order, I think.”
Emma had not expected to be in the sentence that ended the argument. Cailan studied her — briefly, openly, friendly. But no less an assessment.
She had been evaluated often. By templars with clipboards. By senior enchanters looking for weakness. She knew how to hold herself for an audit. The difference being she’d always known what they wanted.
For the first time she could recall, she could not begin to imagine her purpose when called. This was unsettling, because the King seemed to want something quite urgently at all times.
“Thank you,” she said, then added hastily, “your majesty.”
Loghain, looked over her only briefly, with disdain. As if she were a distraction, or arrived late and unprepared. This she better understood.
“She looks half dead,” said Loghain.
“I’m not half as dead as I look.” She borrowed Alistair’s line. Was that really just half a day ago?
Emma stood behind Duncan and tried to look like someone who had not, just minutes ago, been unconscious on a temple floor with darkspawn corruption metabolizing through her bloodstream.
“Every Grey Warden is needed now, more than ever,” said Cailan. His voice carried obvious pride in her retort.
What could this King possibly want from her, that he couldn’t get from Duncan? Or Alistair? Or any of the handful of Grey Wardens who were supposedly here, who she’d never seen?
“Your fascination with glory and legends will be your undoing, Cailan.” Loghain had not moved. His voice was flat and final as a dropped stone. “We must attend to reality.”
“This is reality,” said Cailan, and he didn’t sound petulant. He sounded completely sincere, which was somehow worse. “The Blight is reality. This is what the songs prepare us for.”
“The songs,” said Loghain, “have killed more men than the darkspawn.”
They discussed the maneuver. Maps came to mind, similar to what sprawled over the table, different places, different dates. The Wardens draw the horde forward, Loghain flanks from cover.
“You will alert the tower to light the beacon, signaling my men to charge from cover.”
“To flank the darkspawn, I remember. This is the Tower of Ishal in the ruins, yes? Who will light this beacon?”
“I have a few men stationed there. It’s not a dangerous task, but it is vital.”
“Then we should send our best,” the glow returned to the King’s voice. As he said it, she could feel him inflating the moment, tilting it toward legend in real time, “send Alistair and the new Grey Warden, Emelyn, to make sure it’s done.”
“It is a beacon, not a battlefield,” Loghain grumbled.
Our best. She swallowed. She felt no false modesty, and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. They were a good team. Better than the recruits, by the obvious metric of survival. But best?
“I won’t be fighting in the battle?” she asked, genuinely relieved, but confused. She may have come off as disappointed.
“We need the beacon. Without it, Loghain’s men won’t know when to charge,” said Duncan.
“You see? Glory for everyone!” said Cailan. A king assigning his best rookies to flip a switch in a tower that was, by Loghain’s own word, already staffed.
“You rely on these Grey Wardens for too much. Is that truly wise?” Loghain was not impressed, which was actually reassuring. They argued again.
“My father trusted the Grey Wardens.”
“Your father trusted Ferelden.”
“Your Majesty, you should consider the possibility of the archdemon appearing,” interrupted Duncan. This she wanted to hear.
Loghain: “There have been no signs of any dragons in the wilds.”
Cailan: “Isn’t that what your men are here for, Duncan?”
“I…” He hesitated. The same man who killed Jory without hesitation, then commanded her to drink, now chose his words carefully. “Yes, your majesty.”
A senior enchanter she’d passed by countless times but never spoke to offered to light the beacon at range. A Chantry Mother bickered with him, insisting the mages save their spells for the darkspawn, looking at Emma pointedly as she said so. It all felt very remote.
Loghain called an end to the meeting.
“I cannot wait for that glorious moment,” Cailan was sparkling with anticipation as she left.
“Yes, a glorious moment for us all,” Loghain mumbled tersely. He did not sound like a man describing a glorious moment. He sounded like a man who has already done the accounting and put it away.