Chapter 26: The Marionette King
The silence that settled over the great hall was broken only by the labored breaths of the conscious and the low moans of the unconscious. The grand banners hung limp, the roaring hearth an insult to the chilled dread in the room. The object of that dread was gone. Conner—or the thing wearing Conner—had vanished up the grand staircase in a blur of fear and fury, leaving ruin in his wake.
Daylen stood amidst the wreckage of loyal men, his chest heaving. Alistair was already moving, checking pulses, his face a grim mask. Ser Perth’s guards littered the polished floor, some groaning, others ominously still. They’d been toys, their wills not their own. Daylen had used the flat of his blades, swung pommels, kicked legs out from under them. His knuckles were bruised and slick with someone else’s blood.
Across the room, Bann Teagan twitched.
He’d been a marionette with tangled strings, jerking and lunging with a clown’s grotesque grace, a sad parody of a warrior. To stop him hurting himself or them, Daylen had laced the air around him with a crackle of paralytic energy. It was a gentle spell, as these things went—a net of static that froze his muscles without pain. Now, as the demon’s influence receded, the spell dissipated like morning fog.
Teagan gasped, a raw, shuddery sound, and collapsed to his knees. His fine clothes were rumpled, his face drained of all color. He looked at his hands as if they belonged to a stranger.
Lady Isolde rushed to him, her silks whispering across the blood-smeared floor. “Teagan! Oh, Maker.” She touched his shoulder, her fingers trembling.
“The boy…” Teagan rasped, his voice shredded. He looked past her, up the dark maw of the staircase. “It has him. It’s in the tower.”
“We know,” Daylen said, sheathing his swords. The final click of the pommels settling home was the only punctuation he needed. He walked over, his boots avoiding a fallen guardsman. “It’s entrenched.”
Isolde whirled on him, her fear sharpening into accusation. “You will not harm him! You will not! There must be another way!”
“There is,” Morrigan said, her voice a cold trickle of reason. She leaned on her staff, golden eyes scanning the hall with detached interest. “There always is. Often involving more blood than the direct route, but an option nonetheless.”
“We need knowledge,” Alistair said, helping a dazed guard sit up. “We’re swinging at shadows. Demonic possession… the Chantry just says ‘smite it.’ They’re a little light on the details of extraction.”
Daylen’s mind circled back to the damp cell below their feet. To the source of this poison. His jaw tightened. “There’s one person here who might know more than he’s told us.”
Jowan in the torchlight looked even smaller, even more dissolved by his own failures. He flinched when Daylen and Alistair appeared at his cell door, the heavy iron groaning open.
“You’re… not leaving me?” he asked, hope and terror warring in his voice.
“We’re using you,” Daylen corrected, his tone leaving no room for sentiment. “Get up.”
They marched him into the grand hall, where the firelight did him no favors. Isolde recoiled as if from a serpent. Teagan’s face hardened into something ancient and cold.
Jowan wilted under their stares, his gaze fixed on the floor. He told them everything he knew of the blood mage he’d met, the grimoire he’d glimpsed, the theories on arcane tethering. His voice was a thin, reedy thing. “The demon is tied to the mortal plane through the boy’s life force. Severing that tether… it would kill the host.”
“No!” Isolde cried.
“I told you,” Morrigan murmured to Daylen, not without a trace of satisfaction.
“There are… other rituals,” Jowan offered weakly, cringing as if expecting a blow. “From the old lore. A ritual of purification. It requires a massive channeling of the Fade’s raw energy, directed by a will strong enough to pry the demon loose without shredding the boy’s mind in the process.” He swallowed. “It would take… several senior mages.A coordinated effort. And lyrium. A lot of it.”
Silence hung thick. Then, from the shadowed archway leading to the kitchens, an older voice, gentle and firm, spoke. “The Circle of Magi would have both.”
Wynne stepped into the light. Her robes were smudged with soot from tending the wounded, but her bearing was unbroken. Her eyes, sharp and kind, moved from Jowan’s defeated slump to Daylen’s guarded expression.
“Irving would listen,” she continued. “He would provide the mages, the lyrium, the expertise. It is the only hope that does not end with a child’s funeral pyre.”
Teagan pushed himself to his feet, leaning on the long table for support. “The Circle? After what one of their own has done here?” He gestured vaguely at Jowan, who shrunk further.
“Because of what one of our own has done here,” Wynne replied, her tone unwavering. “The responsibility is ours. The solution may be as well.”
Daylen looked around the hall. At Isolde’s desperate, tear-streaked face. At Teagan’s exhausted resolve. At Alistair, who gave him a slight, grim nod. He thought of the boy trapped in the tower, a prisoner in his own flesh.
He thought of the Tower, its cold stone and colder stares. The place he’d fled, a wanted apostate. Returning there was asking for a collar and a brand. Or worse.
But Conner’s face, twisted with a fear that wasn’t his own, flashed behind his eyes.
“Then we go back,” Daylen said, the words final. They dropped into the quiet hall like stones in a deep well. “We go back to the Circle.”
The decision, once spoken, set everything into a terrifying, precise motion. There was no time to dwell. In the space of an hour, plans were scraped together. Ser Perth and his remaining men would hold the castle, sealing the family wing as best they could. Teagan, his spirit battered but unbroken, would organize the village’s defenses should the demon’s influence spread. Isolde was a silent, shaking statue by the fire, her world narrowed to the staircase her son had fled up.
Daylen found Morrigan on the battlements, staring out over the darkening lake. The wind off the water was cold, cutting through the sweat and gore on his skin.
“A foolish errand,” she said, not turning. “You trade one cage for another. For what? A noble brat you have never met?”
“For a boy,” Daylen said, leaning on the cold stone beside her. “And because it’s the only play that doesn’t end with me setting a child on fire.”
She glanced at him, a flicker of something unreadable in her eyes. “Sentiment is a chain. It drags you into the deep places where monsters wait.”
“You’re coming, aren’t you?”
A slow smile touched her lips, devoid of warmth but full of a predatory interest. “And miss the spectacle of you walking back into the lion’s den? Perhaps I am sentimental after all.”
Back in the hall, Alistair was checking his pack. “So. A nice boat ride, then a cheerful reunion with the Templars. You think they’ll have a ‘Welcome Back, Apostate’ feast prepared? Maybe with trifle.”
“I’m counting on you to charm them,” Daylen said, rolling his shoulders, feeling the ache of the day’s fights settling in.
“Right.My famous charm. Works every time, unless they have swords. Or helmets. Or a general aversion to sarcasm.” He threw a bedroll into his pack. “This is a really bad idea, you know.”
“I know.”
“Just making sure we’re on the same page.”
Wynne approached them, her pack ready. “I have sent a waking dream to First Enchanter Irving. He will be expecting us. It will not make the Templars… welcoming… but it may stay their hands long enough for us to state our case.”
Down in the courtyard, the ferryman awaited, his face pale in the twilight. The boat was the same that had brought them, now feeling like a relic from a simpler past.
As they pushed off from the dock, the water black and choppy beneath them, Daylen looked back at the castle. It was a jagged silhouette against a bruised purple sky, one tower window glowing with a sickly, pulsating green light.
The light throbbed once, like a heartbeat.
Then the boat turned into the current, carrying them south, towards the Tower, and whatever judgment awaited.