They propped the old man in a chair in the garden and forgot about him, but at least he had the wind on his face. It eased the blue dreams, eased the pain in his joints. At some point he slept, then woke to voices. The sisters were coming to take him in again. Some of them were kind and some got angry, though often he didn't understand why and never knew which he would get. Today the sister sounded gentle.
"…visitor… a great honor, Ser Galen…" There was a woman in fine clothing next to the sister. An elf, he saw, as she pulled up a chair next to him and leaned in. He looked at her through bleary eyes. She was saying something. So soft a voice, so pretty. He tried to smile. He was never sure if that worked, either, but regardless, she smiled back.
When they came later to take him inside, the elf woman was still there. She spent the whole day in his room, and in the afternoon when the blue dreams eased, she read to him. Towards evening the sisters came with his meal and to wash him. The elf woman watched them feed him, but turned away to the window when they changed his wraps. Lucid enough at that point to feel shame, he was glad for this. He thought he must know her from somewhere and did not like her to see him so helpless. When the sisters were done washing him, they gave him his blue. Lyrium, that was its name. He was pleased to remember the name. When he had taken the blue, the pain wracking him eased a little and he didn't know anything for sure any longer.
Two days the elven woman stayed, coming in after breakfast, reading to him, holding his hand. In the afternoons when the blue lost its grip a little, he realized she was reading from the Chant, and then something about dragons which was preferable. Some time later he realized she was talking to him. Her eyes seemed so familiar.
"...brought me. Do you remember, Ser Galen? The Chantry in Denerim? Sometime after that…"
Denerim. He remembered Denerim, of course. He had been there many years and the memories were mostly good ones. He had been a young man, but not so young that he struggled with his vows much, and he had a comfortable post guarding the dormitories.
A memory stirred in him then, clearer than most. He was chosen to accompany some palace guard to the alienage to retrieve a child. Someone had attempted to sell her for unsavory purposes, and had offered her to a stranger, unaware that that man was King Maric. What the king had been doing prowling the alienage, the templar could not guess, but as Galen saw their small charge, anger and pity overtook curiosity. Whatever cause the king had had for visiting his alienage, the Maker was in it, of that the templar was sure.
As he and the others led the girl away, her small legs could not keep up. Galen scooped her up and carried her the rest of the way, though the others warned him he could catch vermin. That didn't matter. Looking at her, one of the Maker's children who needed his protection, reminded him of what he liked best about being a templar. It wasn't hunting apostates or guarding the Chantry, as vital as those things were. Sometimes, not very often, he found he could help the weak. It made not having a wife or children of his own bearable.
The little girl got a rough start at the dormitory. Her hair was shorn from her head because of the lice, though they allowed her to keep the tin amulet of Andraste that she held in vise grip in her small hand. She would not say a word to anyone and had to be tied to her bed at night to prevent wandering. One of the sisters said that she had likely never kept regular hours. Nor had the elf child been taught the necessaries, as became apparent when she voided herself wherever the urge hit. If Galen saw these messes first, he would quietly clean them up. The sisters were right that she needed to be taught discipline, but one beating a day was just as good for that purpose as two or three.
Some days after her arrival, a crisis presented itself. The elf girl had found a cubbyhole in between two heavy bookcases in the library, crawled in, and would not come out. She was so small that she was the only one in the building who could fit into the space. When the sisters gave up trying to coax her out, they asked Galen to try.
He sat down on the floor, leaned back against the books, and after a moment began to just talk as if they were having a pleasant chat. She was frightened, that much was certain, so he began telling her about the various people who lived there, from the cook to the orphans to the sisters, so that she might know them a little. Occasionally he would pause. Not a word came from the cubbyhole, though he could hear her raspy breathing and the occasional cough from the sickness she had brought with her. An hour passed and then another, Galen talking in between long silences.
Lunchtime passed and the templar's own stomach was growling. "Bridie is making milk pudding, can you smell it?" The scent of cinnamon and butter in the air was tantalizing and Galen was sure it would lure her out. Nothing. He had to admire the tenacity of a child who had known hunger but turned down a meal freely given.
So he kept talking. He began to tell her about the farm where he grew up, his brothers and sisters and his pets. It was something he had spoken of to no one in years. "Do you know what you remind me of? Once I had a kitten which would crawl into little spaces and not come out. That was about a year before my father had to… before I went to the monastery. I was a little older than you are now. Nine years old I was." Galen had been the tenth of twelve children, too young to work but old enough to be sent away when the farm fell on hard times. He knew what it was to feel defenseless and alone.
"It was a sweet kitten," he went on. "Black and white patches with white paws like socks. But she liked to hide. I didn't get angry. It's just that my kitten didn't know that she didn't have anything to fear."
A minute passed, then he heard a scrape of small shoes against the wood floor. The elven child crawled out and sat back on her haunches, midnight blue eyes regarding him with an even stare. The others had said there was something wrong with her eyes. Galen didn't think so. They had the odd shimmer deep within that marked her as elven, but he guessed that they had just seen too much and had found a way of not seeing.
The girl's voice was so small that he almost didn't hear her, though his heart did a small flip-flop when he realized she was speaking. Just one word. "Kitten?"
Nodding, he smiled at her. "Yes, kitten. Let's go get something to eat now."
Though such affinities were forbidden, the old man remembered that they had been friends of a sort. Then she was gone. To the Circle Tower, it was- to the magi. He had seen her there once while delivering messages from Denerim. She was in a crowd of other children, laughing in the furtive, quiet way of those under constant guard. It had eased him to see her like that, despite the small stab of jealousy. Around her neck she still wore the tin amulet of Andraste. She never saw him. Galen knew that it was just as well. Some time later, the bone fever hit him and he went to a cloister for treatment. He would never leave that place. By then the blue was taking him and he did not know much any longer.
He did know this, now. In the twilight where his pain fought with the blue, the old man remembered it all as though it had been yesterday and not years ago before he became useless to everyone. He began to cry. The sisters sometimes got angry if he cried, but he knew that she wouldn't.
"Kitten," he said between his tears.
The elf woman leaned in and took his hand. "Yes, Ser Galen. It's Kitten. I'm here."
Some weeks later when the old man began to fail, the Revered Mother wrote to notify the palace. The elven woman was beside the old man when he died. The following day, his body was carried from the monastery to his funeral pyre by a full complement of royal guard. Behind them walked the Warden King, Alistair Theirin; his new bride, Emreth of Nevarra; and the elven woman, the king's chancellor Esra Surana- Grey Warden, former mage of the Circle, and former ward of the Denerim Chantry.