Castle Redcliffe sat atop a high bluff on a rocky island a short distance off the shore of Lake Calenhad. A long bridge connected it to the mainland, and a steep road descended the cliff-face into the village. It was at the bottom of that road that Bann Teagan Guerrin and his knights gathered, prepared to approach the castle with Rìona and her company and gain entrance.
Or that had been the plan, until a lone figure came running down the rocky road toward them.
Arlessa Isolde Guerrin was beautiful and young. Though Rìona had willingly kept away from court in order to preserve her mystique for the day she began her seduction of the king, she had made it her business to know everything she could about the Fereldan nobility with whom she would one day be interacting. What she hadn't learned from her parents, she'd gathered from Alistair.
Before he stopped talking to her entirely, that was.
Lady Isolde was unreasonably pious, according to Rìona's mother. She'd been very young when Arl Eamon had married her; a mere fifteen years old. Seeing the woman for the first time, Rìona felt she finally understood what had happened. The aging arl had clearly been enraptured with the young girl's beauty, enough so that he proved willing to annoy his brother-in-law, King Maric, by wedding an Orlesian. Rìona was willing to guarantee that Eamon's encountering Isolde had been no accident. No doubt her noble parents had established lucrative investments in Ferelden during the Orlesian occupation and did not wish for them to languish. So they had thrown their young daughter in Eamon's path, and convinced her of her duty to wed a man nearly thrice her age in order to keep the connection to their Fereldan interests active.
Such marriages were far from uncommon. In other circumstances, Rìona might have been inclined to pity the woman, wed so young to a man on the verge of old age and decline. After all, not all men were equal to her father, or Duncan, in their passion and vigor at such an age. But reports had it that Eamon doted on his pretty young wife and acquiesced to her every whim. Of course, some of that intelligence was from Alistair, who had his own reasons to be bitter toward the arlessa. He blamed her for his having been sent off to the monastery, claiming that she had been insecure over the rumors that Eamon was his father. While Rìona didn't doubt that might very well have been a part of the decision to send Alistair off to train as a templar, now that she knew the truth about Alistair's parentage, she was also certain that politics had played a larger role in the matter than Alistair, in his naïveté, suspected.
Rìona would have imagined the woman to be feeling the absence of passion keenly, married to so old a man, were it not for her purported piety. If Eamon failed to do his duty frequently in her bed—which could very well explain why it took them so long to have a child—it was possible the arlessa did not take it much amiss.
But then, it was also possible Lady Isolde found other indulgences for her passions, Rìona thought, with a cynical quirk of her eyebrow. Behind her she heard Morrigan make a softly derisive sound and Leliana was struggling to keep a straight face. According to Owen the blacksmith, whose daughter was one of the arlessa's maids, Isolde might have been having an affair with a tutor she had hired for her son, Connor. Judging from the scene before her, however, Rìona suspected the Orlesian woman had her sights set closer within the family. The arlessa was playing Bann Teagan as skillfully as ever Leliana had strummed her lute.
Perhaps it took being a woman familiar with the art of seduction to recognize what Isolde was doing, for Sten gave no indication of seeing anything amiss with Lady Isolde's blatant manipulation of her brother-in-law, and while Alistair eyeballed the woman with thinly-veiled resentment, he did not speak out against her pleas that Teagan accompany her back to the castle alone.
Teagan at least had the grace to look embarrassed, casting furtive glances out of the corner of his eye at Rìona. Truthfully, it had not occurred to her to be possessive or jealous. She had no claim on the bann nor did she want any such thing. Her particular brand of diplomacy, after all, was intended to win allies and generate goodwill, and therefore she knew to steer carefully clear of any man or woman whose affections—or honor—were engaged. Cailan had clearly been an exception to that ironclad rule, but Teagan was not. Had she any idea that there was a pre-existing entanglement, she would never have consented to his advances in the chantry the previous night.
But then, Teagan did not strike her as a dishonorable man. Certainly not the sort who would carry on with his brother's wife. What, then, was Isolde's hold upon him, that he was willing to even consider her supplications?
"This could be a trap," Rìona pointed out, and won the arlessa's antipathy for her efforts. But there was something wrong in her responses. If Lady Isolde's manipulation of Teagan was amorous, then it would have been merely vain rivalry that fueled her hostility toward Rìona. But there something furtive in the way the woman's eyes darted restlessly about. Rìona did not know the nature of the arlessa's claim upon Teagan, or her purpose in requesting he come back to the castle with her, but she knew beyond any question that Lady Isolde was lying.
The problem, Isolde attested, was that a mage had infiltrated her household and poisoned her husband. She swore she did not know how or why, but somehow the mage was responsible for the creatures which had attacked the village and killed most of the occupants of the castle, sparing only the arl, his wife and son, and a few of their knights.
"But that's not the extent of it, is it?" Rìona asked when Lady Isolde had finished spinning her tale. She remembered the blacksmith's account of his daughter's gossip. Arlessa Isolde had been acting strangely, keeping secrets from her husband. The blacksmith thought perhaps she had been practicing blood magic, though such an account seemed at odds with her purported piety. "There's more. Something you're not disclosing."
The arlessa favored her with a resentful glare, but would not meet Rìona's eyes. "That is a very impertinent accusation!" she protested. Her Orlesian accent was heavy and grating on the ears; nothing at all like Leliana's sweet lilt. "My husband lies dying and my son is at the mercy of that... thing! There is no time for these questions. If I don't return soon, there is no saying what this thing will do!"
It was a lie, or at least not the entire truth. That knowledge was reflected upon the faces of everyone present, even Teagan. But knowing it was a lie was not enough to stop Teagan acquiescing to the arlessa's demands. In the end, there was nothing Rìona could say that would sway him; he had no choice. He realized the danger as well as she did, but if he didn't go, and harm befell the arl or his family, Teagan would always be haunted by the idea that he might have prevented it if only he had cooperated.
Men prepare themselves for death in different ways, Rìona realized as he pulled her aside to speak with her privately. Duncan had done so by moving determinedly forward, refusing to succumb until his work was done even as the measures he took to see it completed became more extreme. Cailan had done so with a final desperate, explosive indulgence in passion.
In contrast, Teagan's acceptance of the possibility of his own death was quiet and gentle.
"If only matters were different..." he said remorsefully when she made a final effort to convince him not to go. He caressed her face with light fingertips, unconcerned by the presence of his knights or her companions who watched from a distance. Rìona saw the process as he collected himself, setting his shoulders resolutely, his jaw tightening with determination.
"It is not my intention to go in quite so alone as Isolde thinks," he said after a moment. "There's a tunnel in the mill that runs under the lake into the dungeons of the castle. My signet opens the way. Perhaps I can distract whatever is inside the castle so that you can move about unnoticed. You must remember, though. Eamon is your objective; you must save him if you can. The rest of us are expendable."
"Don't be an idiot!" Rìona chided. Somewhere within, the part of her tutored to assess and calculate political advantage knew that what he said was true. Arl Eamon was her ticket to overthrowing Loghain's bid for power and commanding the remainder of Ferelden's fighting forces. But she couldn't see herself allowing Teagan or other innocents to die merely to save him.
She found herself wondering what Duncan would have had to say about that. The thought only goaded her desire to save them all, if she possibly could.
"Another conquest?" Alistair asked snidely after the bann had walked away up the steep road toward the bridge. "He's the younger brother, you know. You're not likely to get much out of him."
Rìona stopped, stunned for an instant at the venom in his tone, her muscles rigid with surprise and outrage. She made herself resume walking, made her shoulders relax, made a smile tilt her lips. She would not let his narrow-minded indoctrination force her to reactive defensively or make her feel ashamed.
She shrugged, shaking off that irritated, bristling feeling, and lifted her chin. "Hardly a conquest. The only thing I want from him is pleasure. Which he delivers quite ably, I might add."
Then it was Alistair's turn to falter in his steps, gawking at her.
Rìona offered him a sweet smile, marred only by the cruel spark in her eyes. "Don't ask, if you don't want to know," she advised calmly, and turned her back on Alistair to walk into the mill.
It took hours to fight their way through more of the undead creatures which had attacked the village, clustered in groups throughout the castle from the dungeon to courtyard. So many dead, Rìona mourned silently, looking at the trail of corpses they left in their wake. With the exception of the blood mage in the dungeons, who had been hired by Teyrn Loghain to poison the arl, it wasn't until they found the blacksmith's daughter cowering in the servants' quarters that they encountered a living soul. The girl, Valena, was traumatized and terrified, and Rìona had to speak softly and soothingly to her even to make a dent in her hysteria. Behind her, she could hear Morrigan's contemptuous sigh, but the girl was a liability to them, frightened out of her wits. Finally, Rìona managed to calm her and send her back the way their party had come, through the dungeons and under the lake to the village, and they were able to fight their way to the portcullis in front of the castle where Ser Perth and his men awaited them.
In contrast to Morrigan's disdain, she could feel Alistair's surprised gaze upon her, and once the blacksmith's daughter had fled, she turned a challenging stare upon him.
"Is there something you need?" she asked with ill humor.
"It's just—you've been in a frothing fury since we encountered the maleficar in the dungeons, but you were so... nice to her."
"Of course I'm furious!" Rìona snapped at him. "Dozens of people are dead because that simpleton Isolde hired a mage in secret to tutor her son, rather than risk him being sent to the Circle Tower once it became known that he had magical ability. But none of that is the girl's fault. Why should I take my temper out on her?"
"I would have thought you would sympathize with Arlessa Isolde, with as many objections to the Chantry as you have," Alistair observed, and there was a hint of tension in his tone, as though he was daring her to contradict herself.
"I have objections to the policies of the Chantry, not to the Chant of Light itself. Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him." Rìona shook her head, stepping firmly on the deep thread of pain that threatened to weave its way to the surface of her mind. "But nothing in the Chant mentions breaking apart families and depriving mages of their freedom. I deplore the way mages are treated. Children are ripped away from their families and locked in a tower for life once their ability is known. Innocent men and women are hunted down like animals by the templars for the sole offense of wanting to be free. They're treated as criminals without ever having committed a crime. So yes, I understand why Lady Isolde did what she did."
"And yet you blame her," he pointed out.
"I do." Rìona said firmly. "Rather than have her son trained to use magic properly, she instead had him trained to attempt to conceal it. It was a situation that was bound to end in disaster. And to further compound her error, rather than confess her mistake and seek to rectify the situation, she continued to bury it under lie after lie, even as the death toll mounted. Then she tried to blame it on that mage, Jowan. And you heard what he said. It was not merely a desire not to be parted from her only child that motivated her. In her supposed piety, she is ashamed of having a mage for a son. People have died to spare her embarrassment."
Rìona snarled and kicked one of the partially decomposed corpses they had dispatched. She hadn't gotten nearly enough sleep and the full folly of that was making itself well-known to her, by means of a wicked headache and a rotten temper. This was the closest she and Alistair had come to making civil conversation since their confrontation on the shores of the lake the night before. That was, if a quasi-antagonistic conversation in which she clearly got the impression that the former templar was mentally bouncing on the balls of his feet, eagerly awaiting an opportunity to pounce and shout, "Ah-ha! I knew you were wrong!" could be deemed civil.
At least he was speaking to her, though she wasn't entirely certain she didn't want him to lapse back into silence at this precise moment. Another time his attempts to poke holes in her skepticism regarding the Chantry would have amused her. Now it was just making her temples throb.
"But doesn't this all maybe suggest to you that the Chantry has a point about mages?" he prodded as they made their way through the cellars off the kitchens toward the courtyard.
"Do you want me to say that magic can be dangerous?" she snapped impatiently. "Of course it can. Do you want me to say that mages should be trained to use it safely and responsibly? Of course they should. Do you want me to say it can be abused? Of course it may."
"But?"
"But the Chantry's means of implementing the precepts of the Chant of Light are wrong. Unless you're willing to excuse their treatment of the templars and call it justified?" When Alistair clenched his jaw and shook his head, Rìona gave a satisfied nod. "I didn't think so. Mages can be educated to use magic safely and responsibly, without being hunted down, torn away from their families and imprisoned. Is it possible that some may stray from the teachings of the Chant of Light and become maleficarum? Certainly. But the potential for criminal acts on the part of a few does not justify the enslavement of all. More to the point, Jowan was a Circle mage and he still turned to blood magic, so it seems the Chantry is perhaps not quite as effective at safeguarding against such occurrences as they like to pretend. If a mage can turn maleficar under the watchful eyes of the templars of the Circle tower, honestly, what's the point of imprisoning the mages in the first place?"
He blustered at that, starting to speak a number of times before stopping himself. Finally, Rìona hissed an irritated sigh through her teeth as they approached the door opening from the stairway into the cellars to the courtyard.
"Alistair, I realize you think that if you can prove my views on the fallibility of the Chantry with regards to magic wrong, you will have an easier time denying my views of the Chantry's doctrine regarding carnal matters."
"I'm not trying—" His mouth snapped shut over his protests at Rìona's incredulous stare.
"And as dearly as I would love to spend the afternoon allowing you to try to find some way to translate my sympathy for mages into proof that I'm the whore you've accused me of being," she continued in a sickeningly sweet tone that almost sounded lighthearted and cheerful, but for the fact that it managed to convey absolutely nothing of cheer, "perhaps this entire debate is better left for some other time. For example, when we're not making our way through a castle full of walking decomposed corpses, attempting to rescue your foster-father and his family from an unknown malevolent force."
"Right," he said with a jerky nod. "Another time, then."
It was early afternoon by the time they emerged into the courtyard at the gates of the castle, though the position of the sun and the shadows cast by the high walls surrounding the courtyard made it seem much later, as though it were dusk on a cloudy evening. No. It wasn't that, Rìona thought uneasily, glancing around. Goose-flesh lifted the hair on her arms and she looked about to see Leliana shiver and Alistair rub the back of his neck as though it prickled. Conall crouched low and a subsonic growl began to vibrate within his chest.
It was as though the courtyard was wrapped in twilight, heavy with gloom. Tired though she was from the restless night that had passed before and the constant fighting as they made their way through the castle, that could not account for the sudden heaviness of her arms, urging her to lay down her bow. She saw Sten's sword droop, it's point angling toward the ground rather than raised in guard across his chest.
"Something's here," Alistair said, and the tone of his voice was so decisive, so certain, that it was almost as though another man were speaking. "Something with powerful dark magic."
He drew a deep breath, his eyes narrowed in intense concentration, and then a ripple spread out from him. She could not see it, but she felt it run through her, pushing away the languor that seemed to weigh down her limbs. Rìona stared at him in amazement, because for that instant he almost seemed radiant. His face was calm, composed, confident.
For a moment, she caught a glimpse of the man she had first met at Ostagar, one who had known his place and had almost been on the verge of being sure of himself. She had forgotten that man, because he'd been so different since. Losing Duncan and the Grey Wardens had stripped him of the self-assurance he'd managed to reclaim after the Chantry nearly drummed it all out of him.
In that moment of transcendence, he was so beautiful she nearly wanted to weep at it.
On the far side of the courtyard, the deep shadows resolved themselves into a large armored form. Alistair's eyes widened and beneath his helm he smiled as he charged it, sending out another invisible pulse of force at it that knocked it off its feet for a moment. A number of undead corpses swarmed him as he ran. Sten and Conall charged after him while Rìona and Leliana took aim at the corpses.
Morrigan flung a wave of frost at the large, shadowy creature and cursed when it dissipated with no effect. A moment later she cast another spell. Flames suddenly danced along the blades of Sten and Alistair's swords.
She was chanting a third spell—one Rìona hoped would neutralize the lesser undead until they could dispatch the more powerful one—when Rìona, Leliana, and Morrigan all cried out in surprise, suddenly finding themselves dragged forward by an invisible force into the melee. As they struggled to gain some distance and avoid the swinging blades and flying arrows, Morrigan paralyzed the mob of corpses and Alistair flung the revenant back with another burst of power, calling Andraste's name as he did so.
An arrow bounced off her pauldron and Rìona glanced around to see a number of bow-wielding corpses at the top of the stairs leading to the castle. "Sten!" she shouted over the din. "The archers!"
"Anaan esaam Qun!" The qunari roared, sprinting up the steep stone steps and beheading one of the archers in a single blow. The others thronged around him, but Rìona had no attention to spare as he engaged them. With his sword aflame courtesy of Morrigan's spell, Alistair's swings at the creature were clearly doing much more damage.
"Leliana!" Rìona called, grabbing an arrow from her quiver and setting the end alight with the flames still rising from one of the undead corpses Sten had struck before he turned his attention to the archers. The bard saw what Rìona was doing and quickly followed suit.
The creature roared when Rìona's flaming arrow found a chink between its breastplate and pauldron, and soon thereafter a burning arrow from Leliana's bow embedded itself in the side of the revenant's neck. Alistair knocked it back with his shield and chased after it to bury his sword in its chest. It did not rise again, but lay there as the flames from the arrows and Alistair's sword engulfed it much more quickly than they really ought to have done.
The walking corpses were beginning to break free of Morrigan's paralysis spell, and Conall howled ferociously, stunning them for an instant. Alistair, panting with exertion, whirled to take in the situation and raised his flaming sword again, charging into the fray with a battle cry.
"For the Grey Wardens!"
After the difficulty posed by the revenant, the rest of the risen corpses were almost ridiculously simple. Morrigan scoffed as the last of them fell. But it was Alistair to whom her attention returned. Even now, splattered with gore, he still radiated that aura of assurance that had come over him when he'd first used the templar abilities in which he'd been so assiduously trained. In that moment of combat, that moment of action, there had been no room for self-doubt or awkwardness. He was a brilliant fighter, perhaps the best Rìona had ever seen in action. Better, even, than Ser Gilmore had been.
It struck Rìona just how inferior her own fighting abilities were. Though she was getting better at using her bow at point-blank range, her lack of ability with blades made her a liability in a situation where a bowstring might easily be severed by an errant blade. She was not of the caliber of the normal Grey Warden recruit, that much was certain.
As though he felt her eyes upon him, Alistair looked up. When his eyes met hers, some of that confidence faded, replaced by uncertainty. He frowned and looked as though he might say something, then quickly turned away from her to clean his sword. Stung by his dismissal more deeply than she cared to contemplate, Rìona crossed to the gate and summoned Sten to help haul on the chain that would raise the portcullis to admit Ser Perth and the knights.
Reminder: I will be on vacation from Dec 19 to Jan 6. I will not be posting bi-weekly chapters during that time. I will post two chapters when I get back, on Friday, Jan 7. Happy holidays!