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“You sure about this, Paol?”
He grunted. He was sure he should be cleaning his axe right now, especially as that little flicker in his mind that meant ‘trouble’ hadn’t gone away. But his hands kept the needle moving, sliding in and out of flesh just as easily as his axe had. Different flesh. Less corrupted flesh.
Still corrupted, though. Foolish decision.
“Sure as anything,” he answered, focusing on not damaging the muscles of whoever was trying to die on him.
They’ll die anyway, with that much tainted blood in them. Unless…
Just another death sentence, some people said. Given less than half of the recruits he Joined with made it past, he couldn’t blame them. But on the other hand, he was a dead man sewing up someone’s skin. It’s not like death was a certainty, and there was something about snatching just one life from darkspawn claws that he appreciated right now. Poetic.
Over his shoulder, he heard a hiss. “Hessarian’s scrotum, why are you even trying? Her-”
“Shut up or help,” he snapped. “We don’t leave a Warden behind.” Not unless they had to, and it had been a long time since they’d had to. “Besides,” he added, “she’s doing her damnedest. Got grit, this one does.”
Jenna sighed before she knelt next to him, her hands already shimmering. “I don’t have the power to get everything. The eye…”
“Take it, then,” Paol answered. “What matters is we give her a choice, whoever she is.” Dwarf, that much was clear - but not a warrior. The woman had almost no armor, and lacked the hard muscles of someone who lived by the blade. Poor thing, though Weisshaupt needed archivists, too.
“Softie.”
No one else could call him that, and no one else
would,
given the number of corpses around them - and that wasn’t counting the random shreds and bits left over from Jenna’s magic. She was messier than he was, by a fair bit. But there wasn’t anyone else out here but the two of them, and that meant he only had to worry about sewing up this woman and giving her long enough to make her choice. To the Wardens, or a clean cremation out here.
Dwarf.
Or burial, he amended, hoping he wouldn’t have to learn which she’d prefer. May not be much to look at, all covered in blood, but she’d impressed him by breathing despite all of it. “She’ll do us all proud, you watch.”
Jenna didn’t bother to answer, but that was fine. They didn’t need any of that, not any longer.
**
She should be dead. Anya
knew
that, down to the bone. Not just dead to everyone back in Orzammar,
dead
dead. Instead, she hurt too much to be dead, and yet not enough, either. Her bones ached and she was running hotter than lava, but she remembered the darkspawn and the slashing rents… that she didn’t feel. Much, at least - some of them hurt, like her side or her right forearm, but others didn’t hurt at all.
“There’s soup,” a soft voice said. It wouldn’t have woken her up, Anya decided.
Her next breath was bigger, testing out whether her lungs were still hers. “Thank you.”
No one should have been there. She’d shouted, but no one answered. Tried to run, until she realized they were faster than her, and all the hills and loose soil kept tripping her up. So she’d turned to fight, even as passages from the Memories ran through her mind.
‘...not like there was anything else to do…’ ‘...was it. If I was going to die, I was going to make sure my House didn’t.’ ‘... so I call them Warriors…’
Oh,
that
passage had been a nightmare for the Shaperate, but what else was there to do but accept that one way allowed the casteless to be the second-highest Caste?
Time for the next step, then. Anya pushed her eyes open so she could look around. Or tried, at least. Her left showed off a bit of fire, darkness hiding the sky, and a figure next to it with a pot. Wait, maybe more. But her right wasn’t doing anything. There’d been… it didn’t hurt the way her one black eye had, but who knew. Right now, anything in her stomach came first.
Another person snorted. “Told you she’d wake up. Jenna hoped, but I knew you wouldn’t do anything less.”
Male. Deep, rough voice, but there was an ease to it. Almost warm, even if he’d forgotten exactly how to show it. Sitting was unpleasant, but not as hard as it should have been. Anya refused to look at her body. Food first. “Thank you both, then. I’m…”
All the names and titles she’d held, her family, the Shaperate… those were all gone.
“I’m Anya,” she said after a pause that felt too long.
“Well, I’m Jenna,” the woman at the pot said. “And yon grump is Paol. He’s a teddy bear.”
Another snort answered her, enough for Anya to look over and catch sight of a true monster of a man. Taller than any two dwarves, he seemed, and as wide as last Proving’s Champion. His beard… wasn’t. Hair all over his head and down his cheeks, but his chin and lips were clean-shaven. The woman was a woman - pointed ears, so an elf. Hair cut shorter than Paol’s, and pointed every which way. She held out a bowl, and Anya took it along with the spoon that followed.
“Thank you,” she repeated. What else was there to say?
Paol sighed. The man spoke as much with bodily noises as words. “Your call if we’re rescuers. Those were darkspawn. Not usually that much of a problem, with the Blight done so recently, but there’s stragglers and you’re in the Anderfels. You’re tainted. Nothing we can do about that. Or your right eye. Sorry.”
Her first spoon of soup fell down her throat with a thud, landing in her stomach like hot lead. No wonder she felt so warm. So
wrong.
And was there something at the edge of her hearing, or was that just her studying tales and Memories of the Wardens who came from - or to - Orzammar?
Tainted. And half-blind?
“I need to get to the Wardens, then. If they’ll take me. I’m not much of a fighter.”
“I think you’re more of one than you give yourself credit for,” Jenna answered her. “My bear was right about that. Someone who wasn’t a fighter wouldn’t be sitting here right now. We’re two days out of Weisshaupt. Three, maybe, depending on how well you can travel. The Blight can take people’s energy, or their patience. Usually one of those goes first, but it’s fresh in you. Then all we have to do is convince the First Warden.”
Anya opened her mouth, only to close it again. She was a nameless Shaper, without access to the Memories and hated by Orzammar’s Shaperate no less. A merchant who’d never sold a single pot. A surfacer, now, who couldn’t look up without getting sick.
“He’ll do it,” Paol answered, confident as raw granite. “You’ll see. He’s not going to turn away anyone who can fight like Anya can. Not big and showy, maybe, but it’s the people who won’t quit that are a thorn in the side of any archdemon.”
…
She’d never thought of herself like that. Maybe she wasn’t a warrior, but a fighter? Her next breath came a little easier, despite everything. Anya ate her soup quietly, letting a different sort of warmth settle inside her.
**
Three high-volume ‘discussions’ (between Jenna and the First Warden, not him), and Anya was included in the rescheduled-to-today Joining group. Paol was there - almost half the Wardens in Weisshaupt were there. Which made it forty watchers for the dozen or so recruits. Whispers followed him - he wasn’t known for joining on Joinings. Some things, it was easier to wait and get to know who survived. Hurt less. But this one, he wasn’t about to miss.
Nor Jenna, for that matter. She was one of the mages who knew the rituals and spells, and Maker knew they’d come back with enough darkspawn blood for fifty recruits, all nice and fresh and accidentally provident. She stood just in front of his left shoulder, relying on his bulk to keep anyone from shoving her out of her chosen viewpoint.
Big warriors, slender rogues, the usual hodge-podge from the Circles - and Anya. They’d found her something her size to wear that wasn’t torn to shreds, but she looked like a dwarven variant of the mages they got. Soft on the outside.
“Those two on the right, the one hiding in the back, the elven mage, and that weird one,” one of his fellows whispered to their companions.
Paol shook his head.
“What, you want in? Who’s gonna be smoke by supper?”
“Bet however you want, but that dwarf’s going to be eating with us, sure as the next Blight.” He didn’t bother to look and see which of his fellows were in this particular macabre book - there were always several, every time there was a new batch. Who would make it, who wouldn’t… it was one way to deal with the reality of it all.
He didn’t care about any of it.
The ritual, the words of the senior Warden as she held out the cup… ‘Join us, brothers and sisters…’ It hadn’t hit like this since he’d gone through his own.
Each recruit gave their name, when asked. Anya’d asked him what to do.
Him. ‘I don’t have a family to send word to.’
So casteless by blood or by circumstance - or carta or coterie or criminal of her own making, though he doubted any of those three. Her eye had gone distant when he told her to say whatever she wanted, because that’s what would go onto the Warden rolls - whether or not she survived the Joining. Every recruit who tried was a Warden, and
they
remembered each other.
It had been half and half by the time Anya stepped forward, a little grey from the corpses that had been taken to one side, to go on the pyre together. Brothers and sisters in blood, brothers and sisters in death, as they were sent to the Maker.
“Your name?” The Senior Warden’s voice was cool and collected, while the scribe next to her had his quill poised and ready.
“Anya,” she answered. One-eyed, scarred, and worth three of the recruits next to her. She glanced towards him. Them.
“She’ll make it,” Jenna prayed in a whisper in front of him.
After a moment, the dwarf continued. “Anya Thorne.”
Paol grinned. And when she woke up after, he was the one sitting next to her. “Told you,” he said.
She was going to make them proud. All of them.