Free Dragon Age: Last Flight by Liane Merciel Page B

grimy little knot of string between her fingers. She flicked it away, watching it vanish into a crack between two sand-colored paving stones. “Will you protect us if we’re not Wardens? Really?”
    “ I will,” Caronel said with a slight smile. Seeing that she wasn’t about to return it, though, he relented. “Yes. You’re safe here, as safe as anyone can be in this world. You don’t need to go through the Joining for that. As to your other question, though, I doubt the First Warden knows himself. Most likely he’ll wait to see what the Chantry says, and then what it does. He’ll want to assess any possible schisms between the Chantry and the templars, and within the templars. And he’ll want to wait and see how the mages’ rebellion plays out. Only then, I suspect, will the First Warden take any definite stand. He’s a cautious man.”
    “A cowardly man, more like,” Valya said bitterly.
    Caronel shrugged. “Politics is a game to be played cautiously or not at all, and the First Warden doesn’t seem to be able to keep his hands off the board. Best he’s careful with them, in that case.” He stood, picking up his book and sword. “We’ve dawdled long enough here. You have work awaiting you in the library, if I’m not mistaken. Work that you need to be alive to finish.”
    *   *   *
    A week later the templars came.
    The dust of their arrival preceded them by hours. The Wardens first caught sight of it around noon, and from then on they could track the templars’ progress toward Broken Tooth throughout the long hot day. Little glints of sunlit steel occasionally escaped the cloud of brick-red dust moving slowly across the Anderfels, but no one in Weisshaupt would have known them for templars if they hadn’t had spyglasses in the towers.
    There weren’t many. Only five templars and a single pack mule, the sentries said, trekking stubbornly across forbidding terrain in a wagon’s weight of steel.
    Valya felt an unwilling twinge of empathy as she, along with the other Hossberg mages, watched them from an arrow slit high in the fortress. Lacking a spyglass herself, she was unable to see the individual templars through the faraway haze, but she didn’t want to. If it came to fighting, she preferred not to have to think of them as people.
    But she remembered how arduous the journey through the Anderfels had been, even without being encased in a portable oven the entire time. And she felt a pang of pity for the templars, even as she wished they’d never come.
    One by one her companions drifted away, but Valya stayed by the archer’s slit for hours, watching the templars cross the cracked red earth. When they reached the base of Broken Tooth and began the ascent up the path to Weisshaupt’s gates, she lost sight of them for long stretches. She tried to read to fill the time, leafing through Isseya’s diary halfheartedly, but it was impossible to focus on the words. Worry blurred the ink before her eyes, and she found herself reaching for the reassuring solidity of her staff more often than she did the next page.
    Finally, after a creeping eternity, she heard Weisshaupt’s gate thud open. A blur of voices reached her ears: questions, answers, no distinct words. An unfamiliar rumbling baritone echoed through the halls.
    That must be the templars’ leader, Valya thought. Impelled by equal parts curiosity and dread, she picked up her staff and made her way to the gate.
    The day was dying over Broken Tooth, but it wasn’t the sunset that made the templars red. A thick patina of dust dulled their armor and stuck to their sweaty skin. Their donkey, blinking wearily through its coat of dust, looked like a strawberry roan.
    They didn’t look imposing, exhausted as they were, but Valya shrank back into the shadows of the hall anyway. Fear of templars was too deeply ingrained in her; she couldn’t look at the flaming sword on their breastplates without remembering years of watchful hostility. She was glad