Place

Emma traveled with Warden-Commander Duncan for two weeks, mostly in silence. But not always. And not once did his grave formality falter. He had no reason to lie, that she knew. She doubted anyone could sustain that tone honestly.

She had asked him whether it was hard to kill them. She hadn’t said why. She had never killed anything, not really, and wanted to know if it mattered. Not morally. Practically.

“They are challenging. I will not lie. But they do die, just as any other creature,” said the Warden-Commander. His mouth tightened, the closest he came to distaste.

“Then why must Grey Wardens fight them? Why not regular armies?”

“Armies are instruments of politics. They cannot outmaneuver a darkspawn horde. It is up to us to do what armies cannot.”

“How do Grey Wardens outmaneuver the Horde, specifically?”

“The details you will learn, in time. For now, it will suffice to say the darkspawn are less like an army than a force of nature.”

“You mean Grey Wardens don’t humanize them. Other men do.”

“Yes.”

“Does killing the darkspawn,” she said carefully, “does it feel like killing a man?”

“The darkspawn are cunning, but they are mindless creatures. Killing one is superficially similar to killing a man, at best. In battle with them, there are tactics in common, as with battling men. But truly, no. It does not feel the same.”

She considered asking him what killing a man felt like. If she asked, he would answer.

She didn’t.

That wasn’t why they’d come here. It wasn’t what she’d been conscripted for.

Darkspawn aren’t people.

That, at least, was something.

In the Wilds, the first time she fought them, they looked like deformed men. Limbs in the right places. Heads where they ought to be. The details failed on inspection. They were dark and oozing, with skin stretched over crackling bone. Movement too fast for the shape that carried it. Milky eyes that didn’t land on what they saw.

‘Like men’ was hardly the description, only the closest comparison. They were wrong in ways that accumulated the longer you looked.

It frightened her. Not the danger. The resemblance. That had not lasted. By the time of her Joining, the shape stopped registering.

She worked from elevation when she could. Stone, embankment, anything that let her see the field as a pattern instead of bodies. She disrupted where the line thinned, reinforced where it bowed. The soldiers finished the work.

At Ostagar, she disabled flanks while Alistair pushed through the gap, strengthened the soldiers before the line buckled so they could drive their blades through whatever presented itself.

The highwaymen were not like that.

They found them on the Imperial Highway outside Lothering, pleasantly implying a bureaucratic legitimacy he’d had the nerve to invent.

“It’s for the upkeep of the Imperial Highway.”

A body lay under a tarp, hidden badly. Boots protruded into the road. Worn boots.

Emma looked at him, then at the others. Four. Loosely spaced. Ready. Practiced without being disciplined.

“One does not upkeep the Imperial Highway,” she said. “It’s magical. It’s stood for centuries.”

This was supposed to be the point of her opposing side conceding. The other party forced to admit they had been wrong.

“Nothing gets past you.”

He dropped it immediately. No embarrassment. No rhetorical defense, no attempt to recover. No small satisfaction of being correct in front of witnesses. Just violent men prepared to use whatever they had that put those boots under a tarp.

Combat compressed everything. She’d learned that in the Wilds, in the reeds. It was a particular clarity arguments lack.

Morrigan cut the left flank off. Emma locked the other long enough for Alistair to turn.

The memory she retained from the murders were fragmentary: Alistair’s sword driving through the leader’s shoulder, the man dropping with a wet, surprised sound. The moment he tried to surrender.

Injury did something predictable to them. It reduced them. Whatever bravado they brought thinned out under pain. They became simpler. More compliant.

It brought them down. They were on the ground. Alive. Unable to continue the fight.

They hesitated.

Emma glanced at the boots under the tarp. Alistair nodded.

She held the first man still. He was already dying. She told him to lie quiet. He tried to rise; she pushed him back. He obeyed. Shock, likely.

She stopped his heart.

It was how they disposed of mice. It ended quickly, and required more mana than she liked. She considered whether it would have been more efficient to have their throats cut.

Then she moved to the others.

One by one. Morrigan assisted her. Impatiently.

They were the first men Emma killed. It was easier than killing darkspawn.

She wouldn’t always be willing to spare the mana. Or even the thought.

Lothering overrun itself with refugees and commerce disaster makes possible. Too many people, too few resources, and opportunism filled the gap.

The merchant did not pretend otherwise. Morrigan saw no angle to argue. Alistair found that worse than greed.

Emma argued anyway. He conceded. Then refused to sell to her, personally.

They bought elsewhere, from villagers they’d already helped twice that week. The people were grateful and still overcharged. She paid from the highwaymen’s coin to those who were owed the money she happened to have.

There were no rooms at the inn.

She spent two copper on a tent that sagged and would not stake level into the earth.

Morrigan refused it. She turned her back and constructed her own from lashed branches and spite, and it was more structurally sound than anything Emma had paid for.

Emma stared at it for a while. She revised her assessment of Flemeith’s hut, which had seemed rickety and impoverished. but was now, in retrospect, probably standing just fine without them.

They agreed, she and Alistair, to alternate the watch. They did not trust Morrigan enough to sleep through her. This was not said aloud; it didn’t need to be.

Emma offered first watch with more insistence than the situation required, and Alistair, who was exhausted and trying to be gracious about it, eventually stopped arguing and crawled into his bedroll.

He faced away from her.

She watched the road. She categorized the sounds of the dark: animal, wind, settlement, nothing, nothing, and kept watching anyway.

Since Ostagar she had found herself, frequently, with a thought she did not follow to its conclusion. Emma was aware of the option as she was aware of her bruises. Not always, but reliably when something touched it.

Emma had been conscripted. This was not a metaphor or an embellishment. Duncan was legally entitled to choose and she couldn’t refuse.

I could leave. I was not given a choice.

But then Alistair fell asleep and turned away from her.

That, more than anything, made it real. They had debated. But he had decided, with his whole body, that she was safe enough to sleep beside. As if the question of whether she would remain at her post had already been answered. She watched him and felt something she was not prepared for: shame.

Not for the killings. Nor bullying the merchant, or the innocents she couldn’t help. This.

The shame arrived here, sitting awake in the dark while someone slept with his back to her.

At the battle, it became apparent he survived things others did not. They were the last of their order. But if she left now, he’d die.

She thought about the first man on the road. The way he had gone still when she told him to. The way compliance had come so easily once the decision had been taken out of his hands. She would keep thinking, I could leave, and of how often it surfaced without being resolved.

The night passed. Nothing approached. Nothing tested the perimeter she maintained. She had not decided to stay. She had simply not left yet.

The camp settled further.