Dragon Age: Last Flight by Liane Merciel

Author:Liane Merciel [Merciel, Liane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781466831346
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2014-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

15

9:41 DRAGON

“Have you ever known a blood mage?” Valya asked. She didn’t intend for the question to sound timorous, but it came out that way anyhow. Even after she’d spent months learning to accept the presence of the templars in Weisshaupt, the habits she’d learned in Hossberg remained.

Despite her occasional hesitations, however, she had genuinely come to like Reimas. Under her melancholy exterior, the woman had a core of humility and profound kindness. If all the templars in Hossberg had been like that, Valya often thought, her formative years in the Circle wouldn’t have been stunted by such fear.

She felt no such connection with the other templars. They mostly kept to themselves, anyway. Knight-Lieutenant Diguier had died a few weeks earlier while attempting the Joining, and since then Valya had seen even less of the remaining templars.

But Reimas continued to meet her for morning tea and walks around the parts of Weisshaupt that they were permitted to visit, and gradually, to Valya’s quiet surprise, the two had become something like friends.

Close enough, at least, that she felt comfortable asking the other woman about some of the things that had been troubling her.

Reimas didn’t answer immediately. She watched a little brown bird hopping along the rough stone of the low courtyard wall, looking for insects under one of the fortress’s small, stunted apple trees. Black speckles dotted the bird’s wings and the sides of its neck, and its belly was a creamy white.

It was one of a family of such birds that lived around Weisshaupt, drinking the rainwater from its cistern catchments and building their nests in the crags of its high towers. Valya, too, had spent days watching the little birds and daydreaming that she shared their freedom, even as she recognized that in truth the birds had no more freedom than she did. They, too, were tethered to the fortress.

The bird, startled by something out of sight, flittered away. Reimas turned slowly back to Valya. The sunlight caught her hair, which had grown longer since the templars’ arrival and was beginning to show wider streaks of gray. “Yes, of course.”

“What were they like?”

“Frightened, mostly.” Reimas stroked a callused thumb around the rim of her empty teacup. Her long face always seemed set in lines of sadness, but the melancholy felt somehow deeper as she spoke. “But what can you expect from a blood mage who’s been discovered by the templars? Of course they were frightened.”

“Were they evil? I mean … were they all evil?”

The human woman shrugged. “I’d have to know what evil is to answer that, and I don’t believe I do anymore. The cleaner answer, the clearer one, is that they all broke the prohibition against maleficarum.”

“But why?” Valya pressed. “Doesn’t the why matter?”

“It should,” Reimas agreed, “but sometimes it can’t. Everyone has reasons for what they do. Some are persuasive, some are absurd. A few might be things I’d be tempted to believe. But how can you know? Whatever anyone tells you is only a tiny fragment of what is, and it’s colored by their perceptions and hopes and fears.

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