Chapter 29: March on Orlais
The chill that swept down from the Frostbacks held none of the crisp, clean familiarity of Ferelden’s autumn. This was an Orlesian cold, perfumed with distant incense, spilled wine, and the peculiar, metallic scent of too much gilt on too many things. It clung to the black iron of the massive Gates, a monument to Orlesian excess that made Denerim’s palace look like a farmer’s hut.
Before them, the gates were shut. Archers lined the crimson stone battlements, their gilded armor gleaming dully under the overcast sky. Before them, a contingent of Chevaliers in their polished, ridiculous shells stood barred across the archway, their leader a man with a peacock-feathered helmet.
Anora sat her Fereldan hunter, back straight despite the advanced curve of her belly beneath her fur-lined riding leathers. She looked, Kerr thought, like a wolf who’d wandered into a den of songbirds and found them lacking. To her right, he loomed. The massive suit of armor, plates scavenged and reforged from the bones of an ogre he’d slain during the Blight, made him look less like a man and more like a vengeful cliff face given form. His greatsword, its point driven into the frozen mud, stood as tall as a man beside his mount.
“Open the gates,” Anora said. Her voice didn’t carry far, but it didn’t need to. The silence that had fallen with their arrival did that work for her.
The Chevalier captain puffed his chest. “The gates of Val Royeaux do not open on the command of a Fereldan queen, Your Majesty. Especially not one who arrives with an army at her back and… wild tales of missing children.”
Anora didn’t smile. She simply nudged her horse forward one slow, clopping step.Then another. The Fereldan line behind her, a mix of grim-faced veterans and hungry-looking mages, didn’t move. They just watched.
She stopped a horse-length from the captain. Close enough to see the nervous sweat on his upper lip despite the cold.
“If you want to know what happened to the children,” she said, each word falling like a dropped stone, “you will grant me an audience. Not with some perfumed functionary. With whoever is currently trying to hold this fracturing empire together. Now.”
The captain’s eyes flicked to Kerr. The silent, monstrous shape of him, the inhuman helm with its tusked visor staring blankly forward. He was an enforcer.A promise. A piece of the reality Anora spoke with.
“This is an outrage—” the captain began.
“The floors and walls of my halls are still drenched with blood,” Anora interrupted, her tone conversational, almost bored. “From some of my men. And all of yours.” She let that hang. A memory of the urgent news in the royal bedchamber, of the swift, brutal purge that had followed. “An attempt was made on the lives of me, my husband, my king, the father of my children, and the children themselves. While I am aware that not all in Orlais are complicit, I could not risk those who were avoiding punishment.”
She leaned forward slightly in the saddle. “The missing children’s locations are known by me. And so long as I will it, no harm will come to them. Should Orlais continue this ruse of independence, in spite of your emperor falling to his… embarrassing death with a full rectum, that calculation changes.”
A gasp rippled through the Chevaliers. The captain went pale.
“You thought you could bring civilization to Ferelden,” Anora continued, her gaze sweeping the gated arch, the spires, the whole gilded farce of the city beyond. “You had eighty years to try.You failed. My mission will be considerably more thorough. And unlike yours, successful. Because there is no depth of savagery you can resort to where I and my kingdom will not already be, one step lower, waiting for you.”
She straightened. Her hand rested on the swell of her stomach, a gesture both protective and starkly threatening. “I do not wish your children any harm. But should my demands not be met… for Orlais to submit to Ferelden rule, for your military to march toward Denerim to swear fealty to the Ferelden crown, and for you to be forthwith known throughout Thedas as vassals of Ferelden… then I will show the same compassion for your children that you showed for mine.”
The silence was absolute. The wind itself seemed to die.
“There is no lie in my tone,” Anora said, finally. She hadn’t raised her voice once. It was the quiet, crystalline clarity of it that carved the words into the air, made them feel etched on the very gates. “Open the gates. Or dig sixty-three graves by morning. The choice is entirely yours.”
She waited. The Chevalier captain stood frozen, his face a mask of conflicting terror and outrage. He looked at Kerr again, at the utterly motionless giant, then back at the small, pale queen with the eyes of a frostback lynx.
His shoulders slumped. He turned, barking a hoarse, defeated order.
With a groan that echoed through the silent valley, the gilded black iron of the Gates of Orlais began to swing inward.
Anora didn’t look at Kerr. She didn’t smile in triumph. She just nudged her horse forward, through the growing shadow of the arch, into the perfume and the panic of Val Royeaux. Kerr followed, a mountain of scarred metal and implicit violence at her flank, his presence the only answer Orlais would get.
The dust of the road stirred around their horses’ hooves, swallowing the sight of the army at their backs, but not its promise. It was inside now. The threat was inside. And it spoke with a queen’s calm, terrible voice.
And it spoke with a queen’s calm, terrible voice.
They processed into the grand boulevard, the clatter of their horses’ hooves the only sound in a city holding its breath. The Orlesians lining the streets weren’t cheering; they were staring, their painted masks doing nothing to hide the frozen shock in their eyes. Their gazes slid from Anora’s impassive face to the thing rolling behind Kerr’s monstrous destrier.
The wagon was a simple, crude thing of Fereldan make, its wood stained dark. It bounced over the flawless white cobblestones. What it carried was not simple.
Limb stacked upon limb, a tangle of purpled flesh and slashed velvet doublets, it was a geometer’s nightmare of severed angles. Entrails, dried into leathery cords, trailed over the sides, snagging on the wheel spokes with a soft, ticking sound. Here, a hand still clutched a broken rapier; there, a head with perfectly coiffed hair lay tilted, staring at the perfect sky with empty sockets.
The smell hit the crowd a moment later—a coppery, sweet-rot stench that clashed violently with the perfumed air. A woman in an elaborate feathered mask vomited quietly into her gloved hands.
Anora drew her horse to a halt in the central square, before a fountain of some smug-looking emperor. She turned in her saddle, taking in the silent, horrified nobility who had been herded there by her soldiers.
“You sent twelve,” she said, her voice cutting the silence. It wasn’t loud. It was just there, in everyone’s ears. “Twelve of your best, to crawl into my home and stick knives in my children’s cradles.”
She gestured back at the wagon with a flick of her chin. “This is what came back. Two of mine did this. Just two.” She let her hand rest on her belly. “My husband, Kerr. And Aenerin, who cleans my children’s scraped knees and tells them stories.”
A low murmur of fear rippled through the crowd.
“My king has already pacified every estate between here and the border,” Anora continued, her tone shifting to something almost conversational. “The lands outside your walls are quiet now.Ferelden quiet. So let’s discuss the lands inside them.”
A portly lord in emerald silk stepped forward, his face flushed with outrage above his jeweled mask. “This is barbarism! You cannot simply—“
Kerr moved.
There was no grand flourish, no shouted oath. One moment he was a statue atop his warhorse; the next, his greatsword was a blur of grey steel. It didn’t whistle. It parted the air.
The lord’s protest ended in a wet, chopping sound. His body took two stumbling steps before collapsing. His head rolled to a stop at the base of the fountain, the mask cracked, its painted smile looking up at the real one on the emperor’s statue.
Kerr flicked the blood from his blade in a single, sharp motion, sheathing it before the head had stopped rolling.
The silence was absolute, profound, broken only by the drip-drip of blood from the wagon wheel.
Anora didn’t even glance at the corpse. “This is not a negotiation,” she said, as if clarifying a minor point. “You lost that privilege when your agents touched my door. This is me offering an alternative to me snapping my fingers and letting my army remind you what true barbarism looks like.”
She leaned forward, her eyes scanning the terrified masks. “Your children are alive. For now. They will be raised in Ferelden. They will squire for our knights, study in our chantries, mend bones with our healers. They will learn our histories, sing our songs, and forget your language.”
Her voice hardened, final as a tomb seal. “Within three generations, every memory of Orlais that you hold so dear will be ash. I offered you coexistence once. You chose war. Now, I am withdrawing your right to exist as you are.”
She straightened, pulling her gloves tighter. “The alternative is that wagon, multiplied by ten thousand, until your streets run red and your music is just screams echoing off empty marble. Choose.”