Aemilia slipped out from underneath her blanket and left the tent, pulling a cloak around her against the drizzle and the chill of the night air. ‘Aemilia, are you really hoping that Nehel might be thinking about what happened next with Camven in Qarinus? Are you really that invasive?’ There was no Cairenn here – from what she could tell – but perhaps there would be something else? Sleepless as she was, Aemilia was sorely tempted to go find them, see if there were any other memories clinging to Nehel. Clearly Camven and Nehel were placed somewhere near. Aemilia heard two sets of footsteps pad closer to the mages’ tent and then branch off to somewhere close by. Outside, Marc said something else and footsteps trailed away. Usually she was so good at falling asleep (training as a mage had taught her to fall asleep in a matter of seconds) but today her own body seemed to be betraying her.

“Just go to sleep, Aemilia,” she told herself, but she didn’t seem to be able to do as she was told. “Marc’s here?” She sat up in bed, and for a moment was going to race out to throw her arms around him and catch up – it had been far too long – but then she didn’t, and she lay back down again, her heart hammering in her chest. Somewhere outside the tent, she heard Nehel’s voice, but faintly, such that she couldn’t make out the words. It just continued to patter with the rain, but Aemilia imagined that it was laughing at her. “Am I a bad person?” she asked the canvas roof. She was a Grey Warden, and she had her duty to end the Blight just as much as every other Warden that had been made since the first. She reflected, though, that perhaps Andri had been too soft on her. Aemilia was extremely used to her own bedroom, in her own suite, at the top of a tower which was essentially hers, allowed to do her own research and manage her days however she pleased. It had been bad enough sleeping on the hard ground on the way here with Camven and Nehel only a few feet away, but here she was on a lumpy bed with the sleeping breaths of a mage on either side of her, in a tent where there were dozens and dozens of them under one thin canvas roof, which rain happened to be pattering against as if to mock the fact that everything was already way too loud. Aemilia couldn’t sleep, which was extraordinarily unusual and extraordinarily irritating.

A blight upon the land