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  The Antivans gave the griffons a wide berth as they brought bread and wine to the Wardens, and Isseya couldn’t blame them. She’d been working closely with the animals for months, grooming them and feeding them and learning to read their ever-changing moods, and she was still routinely intimidated by the winged predators.

  An adult griffon could grow to be more than twelve feet from beak to tail, with a wingspan even greater. The males weighed more than a thousand pounds, the females only slightly less. Their beaks were powerful enough to snap an elk’s thighbone effortlessly; their claws could shred plate mail like damp paper. Although the Grey Wardens tended to select their smaller and lighter members as griffon riders, enabling the beasts to serve as steeds longer and under harsher conditions, a healthy griffon was fully capable of fighting with two men in full armor on its back. They were fierce, fearless predators, full of wild beauty and quicksilver rage.

  Isseya loved them. She loved their power and their grace and their musky leonine smell. She loved the way their bright gold eyes would close halfway when they were pleased with her grooming, and the earthshaking rumble that passed for their purrs. And she loved the sheer unfettered freedom they had in the air, and the extraordinary gift of flight that they could share with their riders when they chose.

  Because a griffon always chose. One could not compel the great beasts to carry riders they did not want. A griffon would sooner hurl itself into a mountainside than it would accept servitude to a master it disliked. They were never servants, never slaves. A griffon was a partner and equal, or else it was a foe.

  That was why training a new griffon rider took so long, and why Isseya didn’t fault the Antivans for being wary of their huge feathered guests. A griffon was nothing like a dog or a horse, or even one of the spotted hunting cats that some Orlesian nobles were said to keep on jeweled leashes. They were proud and jealous and wild, and a wise man never forgot that.

  The Wardens certainly hadn’t. They helped the servants set out washtubs of water for the griffons, tasked one of the senior Wardens to watch over the beasts, and filed into the castle. The griffons would be fed later, separately. Offering them meat while they were crowded together was too likely to start fights.

  Isseya hoped no well-meaning servant tempted them, but it wasn’t her duty to watch the griffons this evening. She followed the others into the palace’s shade, falling in alongside her brother.

  Garahel shook dust out of his golden hair as he walked. He’d already washed his face, probably sneaking a few handfuls of the griffons’ drinking water to do it. Isseya hid a smile. Her brother could be unutterably vain … but, she had to admit, not without reason. Elves were widely accounted to be more beautiful than humans, but even by that measure, Garahel was exceptional. High cheekbones, brilliant green eyes, and a smile that made ladies—and not a few men—go weak in the knees. He was far better-looking than she was, and frankly Isseya was glad. Beauty was a poisoned blessing for an elven woman in Thedas.

  Her brother wasn’t smiling today, though. No one was. If the mood in Antiva City had been grim, the mood in the Royal Palace was positively sepulchral.

  Huble led them through the palace’s defensive outer walls and its ornamental inner ones. The servants pressed against the walls as the Grey Wardens went past, watching them go with flickering, fearful hope in their eyes. The palace guards, all dressed in ceremonial mail with Antiva’s golden drake standing proud on their surcoats, gave them brisk nods and stood aside respectfully at each door.

  Although Huble set a quick pace, it seemed to take forever to reach their audience. Isseya had always thought that Weisshaupt Fortress must be the largest building in the world, but Antiva’s Royal Palace came close.

  Finally, after crossing an interior garden filled with climbing roses in a dozen perfumed shades of red and yellow, they came to the small hall where the king and queen awaited. Warden-Commander Turab, the stout red-bearded dwarf who served as leader of the Grey Wardens in Antiva, was with them, as were twenty Antivan Wardens and a small knot of richly dressed men and women whom Isseya took to be high-ranking nobles.

  “Huble,” the Warden-Commander said, inclining his head in gruff greeting. “No trouble getting here, I hope?”

  “Not much,” Huble said. He bowed formally to the king and queen. The Antivan royals responded with measured nods. King Elaudio was in his mid-forties, Isseya guessed. He was a kind-looking but timid man who hesitated visibly before every movement. His queen, Giuvana, looked slightly older. Broad bands of gray streaked the rich chestnut of her hair, and smile lines softened the hard planes of her face.

  Theirs was said to be the rare royal marriage that was founded on love, Isseya recalled. The queen had been born to a wealthy and honorable merchant house, but her blood was scandalously low by the standards of Antiva’s court. Nonetheless, King Elaudio had chosen her as his bride, and over the decades, their union had won the approval of their people. It helped, no doubt, that Queen Giuvana was a devoted patron of the arts, and had invested much of her considerable fortune into the beautification of the capital city. Her influence had made Antiva a center for art and culture in Thedas, rivaling the greatest cities of Orlais and the waning Tevinter Imperium.

  “You have come to help us defend our city?” Queen Giuvana asked. She did not speak loudly, but so hushed was the hall that her words reverberated through the audience. “To save Antiva in her hour of need?”

  It was hard to turn down that quiet, dignified plea. But clearly, the Grey Wardens meant to do just that. Huble and Turab exchanged looks, and then the human Warden shook his head. “No, Your Highness.”

  A frown shadowed the queen’s brow. “No? So much will be lost if this city falls. Sculpture, music, art. Our libraries. Our mosaics. Not only the works themselves, but the knowledge that created them. You cannot mean for us to abandon the legacies of so many lifetimes.”

  “Antiva City cannot be defended,” Huble said evenly, dividing his attention between the two royals. “Not for any real length of time. A few days, a few weeks, if we’re lucky. No more. You didn’t have enough warning to prepare. The darkspawn tore through Antiva too quickly. The city doesn’t have enough food stored, enough soldiers trained, or enough weapons and armor to equip them. The sea will help, some, but the darkspawn will come over the walls long before they try to starve us all out.”

  “Our walls are very strong,” King Elaudio offered tentatively.

  “Yes, Your Highness,” Turab agreed, with as much gentleness as the brusque dwarf could muster. Isseya could see that he’d grown fond of these people, and did not relish shattering their hopes. “That is what might give us those weeks.”

  “Then there is nothing you can do?” the queen asked. Disbelief crept into her melodious voice, making it thin and brittle. “How can the Grey Wardens accept defeat so casually? The singers make you out to be such legends, but you want us to surrender our entire city—our entire country—before the first blow has been struck?”

  “A city pinned against the sea with all its hinterlands seized by darkspawn,” Huble said. Impatience and anger had crept into his voice, although his face remained frozen in a respectful mask. “Have you looked at Antiva City on a map? You’ll get no reinforcements and no resupply. The rest of the country will already be overrun by the time the horde comes to your walls. The darkspawn don’t have siege engines, it’s true, but they don’t need them. The ogres will hurl genlocks over your walls to crash down on your people. Whether the genlocks survive their impact hardly matters. Once enough of them have come down, they’ll spread the Blight disease, and that’ll be the end of Antiva City. And that presumes the Archdemon doesn’t come. If it does, you won’t even have days.”

  The royals had gone pale. Isseya sneaked a glance back at the knot of Antivan nobles. They, too, looked deathly frightened. She felt more than a little of that fear herself. It had been two hundred years since the last Blight had touched Thedas, long enough for tales of Toth and Hunter Fell to fa
de into children’s stories.

  Now the monsters had come out from under their beds, and their claws were sharp indeed.

  “I asked Huble to bring a force of Wardens so that we’d have a chance to evacuate the city,” Turab said with the same dogged patience. “You still have enough ships to take your people into Rialto Bay. They can find refuge on some of the larger islands. Darkspawn can’t swim and don’t have ships, so you and your people will be safe there.”

  King Elaudio closed his eyes for a minute as he tried to run through the numbers. “We’ll be lucky to save a third of them.”

  “You won’t save any if you stand and fight,” Turab said. “Your Highness, these Wardens came here willing to lay down their lives to save your people. But they need you to lead them to safety.”

  “I’ll think on it,” the king said quietly. He raised his hands and put the palms together in a soundless clap, signifying that their audience was at an end.

  Warden-Commander Turab and Huble bowed to the royals. Along with the rest of the Wardens, Isseya mimicked the gesture, then followed their leaders out of the hall.

  “They really wanted us to defend their city?” Garahel murmured to her as they were passing through the rose garden again. “For the sake of some paintings and fountains?”

  The flowers’ sweetness was lost to Isseya, and the sun on her skin left her cold. She couldn’t stop thinking about all those people huddled outside the city gates, hoping desperately for a salvation that would be closed to them, and the people inside the gates, equally desperate, who might lose theirs if the king and queen clung too long to their impossible hopes of beating back a siege.

  “Of course they did,” she whispered back to her brother. “They’re people. They want hope.”

  “We gave them hope,” Garahel replied. “We gave them all the hope the world is going to allow. And they won’t take it because they want more?”

  Isseya shook her head unhappily, unable to articulate her sorrow. As they left the garden and passed back into the relative cool of the palace’s interior halls, she shivered. The sun hadn’t warmed her in the slightest, but the shadows seemed unbearable.

  Turab took them down to one of the guard barracks. It had been cleared for the Wardens’ arrival. Even with the Blight on the city’s doorstep, the palace servants had taken the time to lay out clean blankets on the cots and hang bundles of dried lavender from the walls.

  The peppery-sweet fragrance of those tiny purple flowers was painful to Isseya. The darkspawn had no concept of beauty, no use for the small, civilized gestures that made the world a more pleasant place. They just … killed and destroyed and poisoned, and where they passed, no lavender would ever grow again.

  She sat heavily on the side of a cot, fingering the rough woolen blanket that some servant had washed and folded for her. Probably they’d chosen their best blankets, out of gratitude for the Wardens coming to rescue Antiva.

  “We have to save them,” she mumbled.

  But she said it very quietly, and to no one in particular, and if anyone heard, they did not answer.

  3

  5:12 EXALTED

  The next morning, Warden-Commander Turab split them into pairs and sent the Wardens ranging into the air to scout for any possible escape routes over land, points at which Antiva City might conceivably be defended, or information about the darkspawn horde. The Antivans had already provided the best maps they had, along with local goatherds and hunters who knew the hidden tracks around the city, but Turab wanted eyes in the air to match their information with current news of the darkspawn’s movements.

  It was, Isseya understood, strictly a last resort. They’d be lucky to get a hundred Antivans out along the goat paths, and that only if the entire darkspawn horde could be diverted long enough to make good their escape. But if the king and queen did not act swiftly, it might be all they had.

  That thought loomed large in her mind as she clasped her hands around Huble’s waist and braced herself for the lurch of the griffon beneath them. The ground heaved like a rough sea as Blacktalon coiled his muscles and leaped, his wings beating a blizzard of dust around them. Isseya held her breath, partly to keep from choking on the dust and partly out of instinctive reflex. It was impossible, utterly impossible, not to be wonderstruck by the magic of a griffon’s flight.

  And then they were airborne, spiraling higher and higher over the Royal Palace, until the interior gardens were laid out like tiny tiles of gold-flecked green below and the guards on the walls seemed so many crawling bronze ants. The refugee tents were a blur of dun and gray outside the city walls, the docks a spiky white fringe along the cool green sea.

  There seemed to be even fewer ships than there’d been the day before. “Are they evacuating?” Isseya asked.

  Huble shook his head, waiting to answer until Blacktalon turned to coast on a current of wind. “The king has said nothing. But many of the captains aren’t waiting. Their warships started slipping out as soon as our audience was ended and they heard the Wardens weren’t going to be saving their city. Nearly a dozen of them escaped under cover of night. The royal guard caught one of the captains and hanged him this morning, but I doubt it’ll stem the tide. Hanging’s still better than dying to darkspawn.”

  “Is there anything we can do?”

  “Probably not,” Huble answered, “but we’ll try.” He tightened the reins against the right side of Blacktalon’s neck, signaling the griffon to dip to the right and swoop down. “Let’s take a closer look at these darkspawn. Maybe we’ll see something that can scare some sense into the royals.”

  The griffon stayed above the clouds, using the gray sky for cover, as they crossed over the ring of verdant land around Antiva City and neared the darkspawn army. Then, cautiously, Blacktalon broke through the massed clouds and began a controlled descent.

  The darkspawn horde stretched out beneath them, a knotted carpet of corrupted flesh gathered around ragged banners. They wore patchy armor and carried jagged weapons of impossibly crude make.

  From this height, Isseya couldn’t begin to make out the faces of individual darkspawn, but she could identify the different breeds by their builds and the way they moved. Genlocks were short and squat, scuttling along low to the ground like four-legged spiders. Hurlocks stood taller and, although heavily muscled, appeared almost rangy next to the genlocks. They walked more upright, closer to the posture of men, but no one would ever have mistaken the white noseless face of a hurlock for that of a real human. Their dead eyes, corruption-blotched skin, and the blackish-red crusts that wept down their fish-belly cheeks ensured that.

  Above all the others towered the ogres: horned brutes with leathery skin the color of old bruises. Their black claws were the size of ax blades, and just as deadly. According to Isseya’s lessons in Weisshaupt, ogres were one of the few darkspawn that could threaten a griffon in flight. Their ability to hurl boulders across great distances, with formidable accuracy and bone-cracking force, enabled them to strike griffons and riders out of the sky.

  Mercifully, it didn’t look like there were many of them camped outside Antiva City. Then Isseya looked again, more carefully, and realized with a chill that the ogres only seemed few by comparison to the numbers of the other spawn in the horde. She counted at least fifty ogres amid untold thousands of darkspawn—which meant that, if it came to open battle, there would be twice as many ogres as griffons on the field. Even setting aside the hurlocks and genlocks, that was an impossible number.

  And there was no setting aside the hurlocks and genlocks. She couldn’t begin to guess how many lesser darkspawn were there. The Blight presented none of the clues she might have used to guess the size of an ordinary army. There weren’t any smiths or servants or camp followers among the darkspawn. No supply wagons, no cook fires, not even latrine pits. Only the swarming, inhuman horde, who needed none of those things.

  Shivering, the young elf looked away. “We can’t fight that.”

  “No.” Huble fli
cked Blacktalon’s reins. He leaned down to utter a command to the griffon, and they rose toward the storm clouds again. “Neither can the Antivans. I hope we’ve seen enough to convince the royals of that.”

  As the griffon began to climb through the clouds that followed the Blight, Isseya heard a faint, strange melody seep into her mind. She had no sense of it as actual sound; rather, it seemed to come from within, almost as if she were humming the tune to herself.

  She could never have imagined such a song, though. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. Aching and ethereal, it seemed to pull her toward a memory of nostalgic bliss that she had somehow lost—but that she would do anything to recover. Anything at all.

  Blacktalon’s screech snapped Isseya out of her trance. The griffon bucked its head violently against the reins, almost tearing them out of Huble’s entranced grip. The senior Warden had pulled them taut, evidently without realizing what he was doing. His posture was frozen stiff in the saddle, and although Isseya could not see his face, she guessed he was enraptured by the same music that had caught her.

  Cringing at her own temerity, she slapped him across the back of the head.

  Huble jolted upright in his saddle, cursing. He loosed the reins immediately, letting Blacktalon take the slack, and half turned apologetically back to Isseya as they dove upward through the storm clouds. “Thank you.”

  “What was it?” the elf asked, shaken.

  Huble didn’t answer until the wall of cloud separated them from the darkspawn horde. When he did, his voice was tight and strained. “The Archdemon.”