For the Dragon Age Big Bang, May 2014. ENORMOUS thanks to LadyofFellan for the art, called The Call of the Blood, which is simply gorgeous. Of course I can't link it from here but if you look for her on DeviantArt under that username, or quilleth on Tumblr, you'll find all her excellent work. And thanks to the mods of DABB for organising it all, on tumblr at dragonagebb, and the other participants for all the delicious fic and art! This was my first Big Bang and I am really proud to have been a part of such a wonderful thing.
1. Escape
Anders
Blood.
Blood everywhere, the smell of it so thick in the air that you can taste the coppery tang of it in the back of your throat.
Burning flesh, tearing flesh, rotting flesh.
Grey skin, hard and hot — hotter than any healthy creature's flesh. Hot the way that someone who is burned by fever is hot. There are tumours underneath the skin, and worse. Unnatural strength. Endless hunger.
Its hands — my hands. A twisted piece of metal held tight in those hands. A tall stone statue made beautiful with the wings and the face of the Old Ones.
The screams. No language. Just the hunger, this longing, poured out in a long wailing note: where are you?
I am disoriented. I don't know this place, and yet I do. I thought it was underground, but now I see the shadows of trees. I see smoke and sand. I smell blood and soil and the skin of a thousand brothers. I see a roof of stone, and then it is gone. I see a sky filled with stars and terrible burning lights. Behind me, that wail — and the answer from far away, that beauty that sings from deep in the earth, and I know I must follow, I must—
And now I recognise it for what it is.
It's a call.
A calling.
My calling.
The worst part is that after the realisation hits me, I don't wake up right away.
Three months it's been. Three long months now, though perhaps a little longer. I have been remiss in keeping a record, with nothing to write with. I think about the journals I used to keep, all nestled alongside each other on that little makeshift shelf back in my little clinic. Surely they are all ash now.
I once overheard an elven trader in the main square of a market town, telling her merchant friend that the templars of Kirkwall were barely able to maintain order after what happened.
No, not happened. After what I did. I can say this, at least, to myself.
I waited, with my breath as thick as lead in my throat, for her to start describing me.
But… nothing. News of fighting, and a closure of the docks, and of a shortage of some of the goods she wanted to trade. Roads, she said, were somewhat lawless. Apostates, as usual, to be detained. A search, yes, but she seemed to have no details on the man they sought.
Other news, other people, other places, and I stitch their words into a patchwork of rumour and story.
The templars' Knight-Commander dead, killed in some terrifying battle. The First Enchanter turning into a blood-soaked demon. Floods of refugees, their homes destroyed by fire, all huddling in taverns or dancing-halls or anywhere that a bedroll and a blanket can fit. Some trickling out, ready to bid farewell to that city at last. Some stories about a mage gone mad — and perhaps these ones are not so far from the truth.
The Viscount is no more, and the Champion seeks blood, they say — the Champion, and when I hear that name my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth and guilt turns my bowels to water.
The Champion.
I had been resolved to choose my own fate
our fate, our joint fate, we both needed that
and to walk into the fires, or to await the sword of the templars, open-armed and ready to meet their fury.
I was ready, but she was there.
Oh, Marian, you were never supposed to be there to see it, to see me.
And yet I should have known she would be there. That city and she are tied up in one another.
I'd written her a letter, a dozen letters, all the same thing said in a dozen different ways. I wrote them on pages I'd torn from her books, my own inked words running across the printed ones. I wrote them on scraps of paper I took from the back of my grimoire and on the cheap, thin parchment I used to wrap powders and salves for my patients. I wrote about why, and I wrote that I was sorry, and I wrote about why we did this thing without saying goodbye. Every word I scrawled out was an apology and a manifesto, an explanation, because I know how desperately frustrated she is when she doesn't understand why, and if there was nothing else I could give her then at least there could be an answer to that. I left them all folded up in a neat pile in my clinic. I expected her to come looking among my things, once she figured it out. Maybe for the templars to turn it over, to read every word for some hidden meaning.
No, she was not supposed to see me there, because for all that resolve, for all that I knew we were right — well, I am a weak man.
But she was there to see it all. To watch, the way that Orsino and Meredith watched. And once it was all done, when I thought it would be well and truly over, for a moment I believed she might even wield the knife herself
yes, she is not so different to you… that same fire burns in her, the same sense of justice
and yet, when I turned away to await her blade, it did not come.
"Just go," she ground out through her smoke-filled throat, her tears.
I had been ready to die that day.
But when she said this, I knew that I had to run.
No Warden ever stops feeling the call of the taint, not completely. The further away from the Joining I got, the less vivid and frequent were the dreams. The first ones were enough to have me turning over the contents of my stomach before I had even fully untangled myself from my bedroll — so detailed, so visceral. To think that I believed I knew what violence was.
Léonie would be beside us every time, just to be there and to reassure us. It gets easier, she promised. Nathaniel had borne it with his typical grace, which was to say none at all. Velanna suffered in silence. Oghren, Sigrun — they cannot dream, and yet they'd still wake with a cry on their lips.
Even after my deal with Justice they came, just occasionally. Whispers, mostly. Worse when we entered the Deep Roads. The darkspawn never go away, you know, even at the end of any Blight — they just turn their attention elsewhere, drawn to the dark and deep parts in their ceaseless searching for the Old Gods. They are not thinking of us, and after a time we're no longer really thinking of them, either.
But they never really stop. They just… lessen. Any sane man would have nightmares about unstoppable creatures from the deepest parts of the earth. For Wardens, this is more like a memory of something you are. Not a dream, but a prophecy, except the kind that you know will always come true.
Marian gave me my life. Against every expectation she did this. So, no, I could not squander this, and instead, I ran.
I had nothing, just my staff and the clothes on my back, because I had never planned to leave Kirkwall at all, much less survive this long in the Free Marches. In the confusion and panic all over Kirkwall I went into the nearest open house — only good homes in Hightown, by the Chantry, of course — and took whatever I could see that seemed like it could be of use. A knife and pan, some vegetables in a small, worn market-day bag, a little folding razor, a thick woollen coat that yielded a few forgotten coppers left in one of its pockets. The wash basket yielded some thick breeches, and a shirt that fit loosely around my chest and skimmed too close to my knuckles; the man who lived there must have been only a little taller than me, a little broader. If only I had thought to take more of his clothing. I have tried to steal from many a laundry line but have had such poor luck since.
There are things you learn when you're on the run. Gather the hulls of a few fresh walnuts and boil them and you have enough dye to stain anything; use it to stain your hair and skin in different shades of brown, the kind of ground-in brown that tells of months spent on the road or in fields, the kind that people don't look too closely at. Push your jaw forward and try not to open your mouth too much, and you can disguise your voice and your accent enough to sound like a different man entirely. Do something with your hair — I took that razor and sheared off my hair until it stuck up all over my head in thick uneven clumps. I let my beard grow in, the rough inch-long style of a field labourer.
And as for coin, there are some things that a man can do for those who have no need to ask so much. I have helped farmers harvest their summer crops, cut their grass to make hay, slaughter their animals. I have hauled fishermen's catches from their ships and I have gutted each of the fish, every single stinking one. One week I laboured with a gang of men to build a new wall along the edge of a field, back-breaking work in the height of summer
we are an instrument of something greater, we are meant for more than this
to make mud-bricks from grass and dirt and the foul-smelling water from a nearby sulphuric spring. I have gone into taverns at roadsides and sung bawdy songs, the ones that are the same almost everywhere you go. Some are the songs that I learned in the Hanged Man and the Blooming Rose; some are Fereldan — there is no shortage of down-on-his-luck men of Ferelden on the Marches' roads. It isn't paying work, but it gets you a hot meal and an ale sometimes from a good-natured patron, and that means that a handful of coppers that I can keep in my pocket for another day. On the worst days I go into villages and beg.
I sleep in barns if I'm lucky, under trees if I'm not. Sometimes I sleep during the day, knowing that it means I can avoid the hungry wolves and other night-time creatures. I have no staff now — it would be suicide to carry one these days, to even hint at the possibility that this dirty, careworn man who's visiting the village might be a dangerous apostate on the run. I'm not even sure if I have the proper command of magic any more. Even in the Fade I stay silent and ask no one or nothing for counsel, and I am left mostly alone
but not for long — never for long
with my dreams in return.
Oh, all that resolve, all that confidence — it was enough to see me all the way to the gates of the Chantry, and a little further. But all that has abandoned me now.
This was always going to happen. Thirty years, they said. Maybe some more, maybe fewer. But everyone knows that's part of the deal — that any Warden who manages to avoid being killed by the sword will eventually hear the Calling one day. You settle your affairs and then you go into the earth, there to have one last journey into the Deep Roads and meet the darkspawn for the last time.
There was just one Calling I saw in Amaranthine before I ran away. He was a gnawed-upon old Nevarran man who was long past his sword-bearing years. He'd come with a party of five or so young Orlesian wardens, bringing correspondence and supplies from the Warden Commander in Val Royeaux. Léonie greeted him with delight when he arrived and took a particular pride in showing him the beginnings of our rebuilt Order there in poor Ferelden. He liked a cup of wine, maybe two. He took a liking to Amaranthine, Maker alone knew why. A nice old fellow — Henri, his name was.
And then one day, out of nowhere: the far-off stare, the confusion. For Henri it came on quickly, where all he could do was to sit oddly by a window and stare out into nothingness, alone with some waking vision. By nightfall of the second day his skin had grown tacky with perspiration and his voice ragged with suffering, and the only healing magic I could bring to him was a sedative spell that gave him, if he was lucky, a half-hour's sleep at a time.
We sat with him that night — Léonie, two or three of his young Wardens, and I — as he turned and thrashed in twilight.
And sometime just before dawn Henri woke up, looked at us all with clear eyes, and said he would need to leave in the morning.
And that was that. A simple farewell, and then the march to the Deep Roads. His young Orlesian friends returned with empty resignation.
That's the 'good' death, the noble one. A quick one for Henri. He was lucky.
The bad one, they say, is what happens if you can't put an end to it before the Blight takes you.
I was never sure if the joining with Justice was supposed to shorten my lifespan, or if his presence in my body would lengthen it beyond the Calling, just as Kristoff's poor corpse struggled on. No, neither of us were sure. We had such world-changing plans, the kind that more lent themselves to a noble death at the sword, long before the natural — or unnatural — causes could take hold. I had been young and healthy that day and determined to burn out brightly. I never expected to feel so unspeakably old
eternal, now
and worn-out.
What will happen to that part of me (oh — us, really) that was not born of mortals? We are so tightly woven now.
Will he (we?) occupy this body even after that human part of me is gone?
Will there even be anything left for that spirit to hold onto, once I take that last long walk into the dark?
And how, how do I get there? There are entrances to the Deep Roads near Kirkwall, though the old maps I had for them long ago are well and truly gone now. If I were there, would I remember the way to go? It feels so very very long ago.
But if it's true that there are men of the Chantry out on the roads, then the risk of being seen… no, that can't happen. Not even at the end of this strange and miserable journey. I will not allow myself to fall to one of them.
Kirkwall is one of the Free Marches' main ports of trade. But there are the little villages that run along that coast in a long, thin line, all the way west into the Planasene Forests and even further westwards, down towards Orlais — a ragged little trail that's mostly home to fisheries and minor smuggling operations. Sea passages to anywhere, if you know who to ask and how to ask, and you don't mind if you're not travelling like a nobleman.
I am a terrible seaman, but the alternative is worse.
A woman with a small cottage by the entrance to the village — she's smart, this one, seeing travellers on the road and she knows when there's the opportunity to show a little hospitality to the weary. I ask only for a small moment to use the washroom in exchange for a few coppers, and she comes back momentarily with a sliver of hard white Hercinian soap and a rough piece of cloth. Winter is not so far from here and the coastal wind has a bite to it, but I won't risk trying to warm the water with magic, not even for a second.
I try to clean myself up somewhat in an attempt to look more like a hardworking man of the trades, and less like a ragged and increasingly worn-out itinerant, and judging by the expression on the woman's face as I emerge from her washroom, I guess that I've made a reasonable job of it.
I ask her where a man can find work on the Waking Sea, and she tells me to make my way to the little hovel that passes for a public house, down by the waterfront. Four ships are in, she tells me with confidence. They all drink at the same place. More ships all through the week, if none of them are hiring.
Thank the Maker, I am nothing if not a lucky man, or at least the beneficiary of a great many favourable coincidences.
I spin a story to one of the captains about wanting to see my old mum in Ferelden before she dies; I'd been there long enough to do a passable imitation of the high country accent, or at least a pastiche that's good enough to fool a Marcher into thinking that it sounds about right. I tell him I can work for my passage — labour, cleaning, cooking, whatever it is that needs to be done — and I can see that I'm in luck, as his face lights up. His ship's cook has quit, he says, gone with his wages to drink himself into a stupor — can I cook for thirty men for a week, maybe two, maybe more, if the coin suits? He can offer me a journeyman's wage only, he says apologetically; if I were to stick around, perhaps he could offer a more equitable share of the pay if I were interested…
I nod, and smile, and make some easy talk about perhaps thinking on it after paying a visit to poor Mother. I tell him that I'll stay as far as Highever. He is so far in his own cups, and so eager to have anyone take on this thankless task, that even my unconvincing assurances must sound like a brilliant idea to him.
I take my place among his men, early the next day.
And this is how, for the first time in what seems like a hundred long years, I will return to Ferelden's cold and mud.
The men aboard the ship ask little, and so I say little. It is four days along the coast, picking up and dropping off little shipments as far west as Cumberland, and then we're to make our way across the Waking Sea. Jader, West Hill, Highever, all familiar names from a long-ago past that seems like it belongs to someone else now, some other Anders.
I cook four square meals for each day. When I'm not cooking I'm cleaning, or I'm finding little scraps of time to sleep where I can. I rest poorly, because the dreaming comes again and again, the rolling of the ship a perfect, sickening backdrop to the lurching of my thoughts. I can hold them off sometimes; other times they spring unbidden into the middle of whatever I'm thinking about, and suddenly I've got my head over the side of the ship emptying what little is left in my stomach.
The men laugh and make jokes about land-dwelling chaps like myself having to develop sea legs. They pass me ale and old bread and tell fanciful stories, one after the other, tales of their own first days aboard ship that get louder and more spectacular with every tale. They clearly have good intentions, each stomach-turning description seemingly embellished in such a way as to make me feel more at ease with my own ill humour.
I am grateful for their brotherhood, as fleeting as it is. From somewhere in my memory I dredge up some old tricks I knew from before — spices, flavours, and different ways to combine the same old things. Feels like a thousand years
is this your memory? Kristoff's? that was Aura's favourite, do you remember?
ago that I used to cook for myself — and as for my own appetite, it's gone somewhere else since the dreams began. The galley has a surprisingly decent collection of herbs and other things, all of which seem to be in good shape, including an enormous stock of dried elf root and its leaves. I find out later from a deckhand that this is because the previous cook served the same bland old tubers for every meal, more or less. The elf root I set aside and make a tisane from. It helps keep a few things at bay — nausea, some of the thoughts.
Honest work, done well for people who appreciate your effort. So simple and satisfying, and for awhile I allow myself the small, futile fantasy that perhaps I can learn to live with this, perhaps the thoughts will die back down, perhaps they're just caused by some unseen darkspawn disturbance that will go away soon.
But one starry, choppy night I wake from a vision so intense and so real that I only come to when my I'm all the way out of my bunk, halfway to the rail of the ship, and I want so badly to fling myself into the sea just to make the cries stop…
"What are you running from, cookie?" a sailor says from behind me, his face lit only by stars and the glow of the pungent leaf that he's smoking.
I fling my head over the rail and heave a few dry, fruitless times into the blackness overboard and drag in some deep breaths, trying to replace all the blighted air in my lungs with something cleaner. Somewhere behind me I can hear him shift around on his spot, maybe craning his neck to have a better look.
"You ever going to get your sea legs, cookie?"
I offer him a weak grin. "Seems like I'm a slow learner."
"'S not normal," he says. "You've got something in your blood, perhaps."
Such a choice of words.
He offers me a mouthful of some spirit he keeps in a flask, sticky and potent, that burns a path through my sinuses and right into my brain, and he grins at the expression I make as I swallow it. "You come see me next time, I'll give you some more of this," he says, patting me fraternally on the shoulder. "Cures most things, or kills 'em."
I can only imagine what has gone into it.
Back belowdecks I stumble into the galley. More elf root, now, mashed up into a sour paste, stirred into some cold water. There'll be no more sleep for me tonight.
What a fool I am, to believe that there is anything more that can be done to escape from this fate.
We arrive at Highever on a warm afternoon with our sails proud and full, and I take my leave of the captain, and my wages, such as they are. It has been so long since I have been in Ferelden, and yet the smell of the air and the sounds are as familiar to me as the day I left Amaranthine.
Almost as soon as my feet touch land the nagging sensation in the back of my mind gets stronger and more insistent. It's as though I left some item somewhere else, or forgot to do something important, and my mind keeps wandering away, off into the night, conjuring images of old caves and stone doors and the sweet relief of finally being able to go underground.
The town is quiet and cold, the people who live there sullen and suspicious. Highever is more than a week's travel to Orzammar, where it's said the dwarves will give their hospitality to any Grey Warden who seeks passage. But Amaranthine has the entrances I remember so well from my time there, and is only a few days, and I don't know if I have the time to spare anymore.
I keep my head down and my eyes open. The sun is not so far from setting, and I spend a little coin on some supplies — a bedroll, a little hard tack for the chance that I regain an appetite, a couple of skins of wine, a little bag of dried, powdered deep mushroom. I took a few large handfuls of elf root from the ship; they won't notice its loss, I expect. Old man from the ship slipped me a small amount of that noxious moonshine of his.
In the market I catch sight of myself in the reflection of a polished silver platter and completely fail to recognise my own face: streaky hair still dark from a rushed dye job some weeks back, my eyes shadowed, my skin dull and pale. With the part of me that can still call himself a healer, I realise that I haven't eaten properly in — what? A week, now?
And sleep?
Back in the Circle, I once saw some young mages being made to stay awake for days at a time, a punishment dreamt up by a particularly sadistic templar. Something about causing any latent possessions to emerge by keeping them away from the Fade. I know from horrible experience of my own that you can go without food for a long while, if you're healthy. But sleep — well, these mages began to hallucinate just three days into the ordeal.
Me, with my newfound connection to the tainted, I'm already starting to hear the whispers, see the little shadows from the corners of my eyes.
Even though no one should start a journey at nightfall, I can't bear the thought of waiting any longer. In a forest about three hours' walk away, I find an old poacher's lean-to and set myself up to sleep. I mix a big dose of the deep mushroom with some of the wine and hope it will suffice to help me sleep, and stave off the madness a little longer.
Anders… Anders.
They know my name now, whisper it in my mind. They are not those speaking, sentient darkspawn we met so many years ago, but the ancient, screaming creatures of nightmares. But the more the taint begins to take over, the clearer and more compelling the song…
Anders, come.
No, not even the mushroom-laced wine could truly keep them away, though they are quieter like this, their cries blunter, quieter.
Anders, brother, come and see —
I am unconscious before I find the bottom of the skin.
No dwarven highway, this — no, this passage was torn from stone by a thousand pairs of scrabbling, bleeding hands, slick with the trickle of ancient water. Sheer instinct drives it down into the belly of the world where the Old Gods still sleep.
There is one that comes with us against his will. He has given much of his blood to the stone and yet he still struggles, still cries out. His armour and weapons — all gone, torn into pieces and divided among the Alpha. He is caked in dirt and mud. His skin is grazed from where he has been dragged along the walls.
The passage is thinner here. We slow down, our mass of bodies crushing together, struggling through.
He says something in a language I no longer speak and struggles free of the brothers who hold him, his fist crushing the bones of a genlock's face. The will to survive, to escape, can lend strength to even the weakest man.
But our purpose is clear. All should join us — must join us or serve us, one way or the other. He has given up his chance to join us. We tire of his resistance, but he can still be of use. A hurlock grabs him by one shoulder and lifts him up, swinging. Once, twice into the water-slicked wall, until his screams are nothing more than a gargle
Nothing now but meat, this one. The ones who are born of a Mother have no need of it.
But the ones with corruption in their blood must eat. And I have not eaten in so long, so long, so long…
I wake, clammy with sweat, the very sight of the first rays of the sun turning my stomach. In my palms are great handfuls of grass and soil; in my mouth the taste of bile and the taste of my own blood.
What will become of Justice in the shell of a ghoul? We are fused now, but what then?
What would a ghoul do, as an abomination? What could it see the power of the Fade within it?
On the second day after leaving the ship I come across a little town, barely more than a village, really. It is the early morning, quiet and still dark. I still have no map — just my old memories of the landscape around here, and this uncanny pull in my gut towards the place that I know will bring my relief. Or my end.
The corruption inside is now a constant whisper, distracting and sweet and terrifying. If I am to go into the earth then it is time for me to find weapons. If I go unarmed I risk the . A knife, a short sword? And a staff — anything that helps provide the focus necessary to cast again.
There is a tavern on the side of the road, still quiet. The smell of baking bread would be the give-away that someone is awake, but I smell nothing but dawn air.
It doesn't take much to get the kitchen door to open. There's a cloak and a belt beside it, and some sturdy boots — just a little too large for me, but they'll do. Some cooking knives rest in a leather wrap on the bench. I can scarcely believe my fortune.
I reach behind the cloak and pull out the belt. There's a short, sturdy dagger, and a pouch of something soft. Maybe elfroot or spindleweed. I may as well take the whole belt at this rate.
I don't hear the landlady as she pads downstairs, but I certainly do when she sees me and screams. A man barges past her — a guest, lover, husband, does it even matter?
"Oy!"
I keep my grasp on the dagger and belt and run for it, and he crashes out of the tavern and begins to chase me down. I have only a few seconds' head start.
Behind me are the man's footfalls, the landlady's piercing screams turning into a string of colourful Nevarran curses. Ahead, the morning's birds fly up and out of the grass and trees.
I run blindly into the trees at the side of the road.
"You fuckwit!" my pursuer screams, and plunges into the forest after me.
I scramble up the hillside, the better to try and find some higher ground. My breath comes fast and burns my lungs. But he is tall, and he knows this ground, and he can outrun me so easily. His footfall is so close. There's no way I can lose him from here.
I reach for a fallen branch and clutch it, and instinct drives me to begin casting a spell that will freeze him, hold him, pushing away, anything. The grass and leaves around me begin to flutter away. The man stops short and stares.
"Apostate?" he says, and the expression on his face travels clearly from disbelief through surprise and then bloody determination. I would have been able to incinerate him where he stood, once upon a time.
But that focus won't come — can't come — and the energy dissipates pointlessly with a crackle and thump into the earth around me.
So he runs forward, that brave, stupid man, and slams his huge square fist into the side of my head.
The town's prison is some long-dead bann's old root and wine cellar, far underground, converted into six miserable cells. I can no longer see the light, no longer sleep properly to help measure the hours. There are meals of tepid gruel, pushed through the bars, that I largely ignore. I can sense, maddeningly close, the song of the earth, the call of the stone…
"Templars will be on their way," the constable assures me. "Always are, every couple days. You won't have long to wait."
Oh, anything. Anything but this. I would rather die. I would prefer to kill myself before I let them do the job for me.
But that part of my soul that is Justice now would never let me, not now that circumstance dictates one last confrontation with our most hated oppressors. If I cannot answer the call of the taint then I will allow myself one last attempt, one last moment of allowing the spirit of Vengeance to tear my skin and spill the Fade into the air.
Sometime after my fourth untouched meal a prison guard laughs and bangs his blackjack against the thick steel bars on the doors of the cells. "Get up, get up, get up," he calls. "You all got to muster outside in a moment."
I hear the other prisoners stretching and shuffling. "Maker's fucking ball sack, what is it?" one of them grumbles.
"You shut it," the guard retorts, punctuating the thought with another rattle of his weapon on the bars.
When he is ready to pull me out of my cell I make no move to struggle, though of course he shoves me anyway. I stumble up the cellar stairs and out into the hard, bright Fereldan sunlight, dazzled and disoriented. No chains, just thick rope knotted firmly around our forearms and again around our waists. It's to stop us from struggling, yes, but also stops me from being able to keep balance while I'm being pulled around like this, and I crumple down onto both knees when he lets me go.
"A mage," the guard says by way of introduction.
"This one is sick," one of the younger ones says, the disdain evident in his tone. "Look. His eyes are like piss in snow."
"You have such a way with words, Shoemaker," the leader says.
"Look at him," Shoemaker repeats.
"Yes, I see," she says testily, and walks back to the others. "Now, as I was saying. If you volunteer you will be released to our custody where you will accompany us to our Keep, there to undergo a rite of joining," the young woman finishes. "If you are successful, then you will become a full member of our order, your crimes pardoned…"
Joining?
These are Grey Wardens?
"Wait," I say softly, and Shoemaker looks around.
"Ah, not you," he says. "Look, mate, I'm sorry, but—"
"No, no. Stop. You're Wardens, aren't you? Please, I'm already one of you."
"You what?" The other young Warden stops and wheels around and I guess from the slight lilt in her voice and her bare feet that she must be an elf. "One of us?"
"What is it?" says another voice, and it tickles something in my memory, something I haven't heard in a long time…
"This prisoner reckons he's a Warden, ser," answers the prison guard.
The third Warden comes closer. I'm still on my knees, shaking and weak, cringing from the midmorning sun, and all I see is his leather boots as he stops in front of me.
"Look at me," he says, a gloved hand rough on my shoulder.
I turn my face up, as ordered, up into the painful sun.
"This one comes with us," he says.
And my vision clears just long enough to recognise the face of Nathaniel Howe.
