The Secret Garden

"My lady? Hello! Please do not hide from me any longer. This has gotten… tiring." The boy was frankly exhausted. He approached a gate leading out of the hall and into an outer courtyard, where he heard sobbing. "Oh, my poor lady…" he murmured as he turned a corner at an overgrown hedge. She was there, having thrown herself onto a stone bench. He walked up to her and all but threw himself down so that his face was on level with her own.

"Stay away. Just go away…" she whimpered between sobs. Elissa hated that he saw her like this. She was not some weak flower to wilt with a bit of rain. She really didn't mean her words and was only saying them because that was what she thought she wanted. But he seemed to know just what she needed. He was right.

"I'm going to hold you now, okay? Please don't hit me." He reached out to her, pulling her close, his cheek resting against her wild mane. She didn't hit him, didn't fight him. The scent of sweet wood, herbs and spice assailed his nostrils. It was a pleasing combination of scents and mingled with her fear and sweat, he felt the sudden need to protect her. So he did. Eventually, she even turned her body so that he could embrace more of her. He carefully avoided her tender shoulder, for which she was thankful. Her tears felt like a hot flood against his skin where they saturated the shirt. "Why are you being so kind after I treated you so horribly?" Elissa sobbed against him. She did not feel she deserved his kindness after she had been so cruel.

He touched her cheek with his fingertips and forced her eyes to meet his. He almost fell into the twin lagoons of blue-green that spilled over with tears. How lovely they were! He wiped away those tears with his thumbs. "You were hurt. You were angry. I will not hold it against you. I… Think I can understand."

She hugged him tightly and only then felt the fabric shirt he wore. His shoulders were strong and his arms held her in a protective circle of tight cords and knots of muscle she could feel through the linen. "You took off your armor!" she choked. A rumble of laughter escaped him as he nodded against her. "The cathedral I have borrowed the stuff from would not take kindly if I ruined it in a futile attempt to wiggle through a crawl space barely the width of my chest. So there the armor waits! Speaking of which… You banged up your shoulder in the fight with that bastard. I have a salve that may help. May I?" He pulled the jar from a pouch at his hip and showed it to her.

She smiled weakly and presented the injury to him with the barest hesitation. He opened the jar, scooped a bit of the strong-smelling stuff into his fingers and tentatively worked it into the muscle and bone under her soft skin. His young patient winced painfully but soon the magic potion did its work, easing away the pain; even removing the traces of the ugly bruise. As he worked, he noted the strength in her muscles, the power of her lean, lithe form. She had a youthful body built with the strength of a finesse fighter's and the grace of a dancer's. It was a challenge to keep his fingers on the injury and to not graze the swell of her firm breasts as they rose and fell just above her sparkling bodice. She stretched her neck, a low moan escaping her throat. The curve of her neck was inviting him and he felt like he was going to snap if he didn't quit. The young Templar trainee pulled his fingers away abruptly, his face almost the color of her hair.

"Ahem… Where are we, do you think? What do you make of this place?" he asked, tilting his head up to look around.

Curious about why he had ended the wonderful massage, and not just a bit disappointed by the abruptness, her eyes followed his gaze. Elissa sat up taller on the bench though she kept her hands on his shoulders and looked around. "It's a… garden perhaps? Maybe it's a lady's garden, by the look of the statues. It has a distinctly feminine feel to it. The bushes form some kind of hedge-maze, I think, and the trellises support vines of some kind. Most of them dead it seems. How sad. Roses, perhaps? And… wisteria?" She sniffed. Yes, Wisteria definitely grew here as well. Their eyes met again and the boy nodded.

"Agreed. I'll bet this place looked amazing in its heyday. I wonder how long ago that was. My… father… Is an important man in Redcliff and as a child I used to run the many abandoned halls and corridors of Castle Denerim when he had business with the king. I always got caught up at that overgrown tree. I never got around it. Guess I never tried to go THROUGH it."

"Wait… Your father? You never mentioned you were a noble."

'Damn! Damn and damn again.' "I'm… Not. But he is. I was sort of adopted."

"But still, doesn't that make you nobility?" she pressed.

'ARGH! Stop already!' "It's… Complicated. Don't make me tell you. Please."

"Oh. Okay. I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it. Look, do you want to walk the maze and see what we can of the garden? From what I can tell, I bet it's huge." He straightened and offered her his hand. She took it without hesitation, rising gracefully to her feet.

"I look a mess, don't I?" she said apologetically, her hand tangling in her hair in a sweet act of vanity. He thought she looked cute.

"Oh, only like isomething a cat tried to shred and succeeded…"

She made a silent "O" with her lips and bumped him with her hip. They both laughed. He stopped her and smoothed the hair from her eyes and pushed it back from her face with both hands. The gesture was tender, endearing him to her all the more. He held her face, his long fingers stroking her cheeks absently as he tried to see her in dark. "How old are you?" she asked.

He smiled and walked with his arm around her shoulders. "Seventeen going on twelve, or so I am told. I like to do something expressly forbidden by the Chant of Light, apparently."

Elissa hugged him while they walked. "Oh? What's that?"

He smirked. "I like to have fun. Evil thing that it is. I am apparently doomed. I'm sort of the black sheep of the temple."

"Ah! You poor baby!" she chuckled. "But I thought that the Templar are not forbidden to join in Feastday dances?"

"Forbidden, no. But the Chantry doesn't think they have to forbid us. They think that our own moral compass will do the forbidding for us. My compass has apparently become faulty. The Revered Mother keeps trying to fix it but I'm a hard one to fix. It seems that everything they try fails. I wonder why?" He pulled her tightly against him as if to punctuate the statement. "And now there you are. A life of flagellation and self-inflicted isolation in the Maker's Name and His Glory is no longer so appealing to me, not like it ever really was. But now it's really unappealing. I think I like the idea of wooing a pretty girl, you know?"

Elissa giggled and escaped his embrace to cover her shyness. His words touched something within her deeply. She darted behind a fragrant tree and peered up at him from behind the smooth bark. "Can't you just leave? Forget about the whole Templar thing and live like a normal person?" 'Like I someday will, soon as I am old enough!'

His eyes grew somber as he came at her from the other side of the tree. His hands pressed into the wood as he leaned against it. He sighed and closed his eyes. "Normal? I don't even know what normal is, having never lived it. Besides, I just… can't. The Templar hold onto their trainees because of the knowledge we've gained and they don't like their secrets getting out. And even if I could just simply leave, where would I go? What would I do? I am not a noble. I'm just a commoner."

"That's Silly! You are more noble, more understanding, more- EVERYTHING, than those preening peacocks on the floor tonight. But as for my being nobility, it's okay. I have a plan, you see. I plan on becoming a Gray Warden someday so if you left…"

"Whoa, whoa! A Gray Warden? You?"

She nodded and picked up her skirts, swirling them about as she playfully danced around the tree, avoiding his attempts to take her hand. "Uh huh! Why not? Some girls dream of being queen while I dream of just being useful. Funny, hm?"

He caught her and held her hands behind her back. With his cheek pressed against hers, he danced with her slowly under the light of the rising moon. "I like the idea but you can't just join the Wardens. The Warden Commander has to want you to join. He has to choose you one way or another. I've met Duncan. He's a good man and he's smart. You'd have to impress him indeed to be asked to join and then there's the problem of being needed. It's true there will always be Darkspawn to fight but…" He spun her about and dipped her low, grinning in the dark. He really did enjoy dancing.

She drew her face away to lock eyes with his. Their faces were so close, their noses almost touched. She was desperate to kiss him. "You sound like you've researched this… Wouldn't it be fantastic if we both were chosen?" He pulled her up and experimented with some more elaborate movements that would have shown off her dress had they been in public.

"Serendipitous to say the least, My Lady. But unlikely. I am good but not good enough to spark Duncan's interest. You might though. You're hard to catch!"

"Mmmm! But you can dance, that's for sure…" she said, smiling sweetly and he pulled her back into his arms for an unscripted dance that required no music and only the swaying of their young bodies under the moonlit sky.

They danced for a time in silence to the music of night-loving creatures. It was nice. The silence was not to last, however, as Elissa broke it with a question. "So, why are Templar trainees here at the Feastday ball? If they want to sequester you, it seems that being in the presence of the temptation of so many things would be a poor place to maintain dedicated piety."

"Ah! An excellent question, my dear. And you answered it yourself, by the way. This is part of our training. Can we resist such temptations? We are not forbidden, exactly, and those that do indulge are told to pray and engage in a bit of self-mutilation before they can return to regular training. But indulging is generally part of the fun of these events. We like to see who actually gets caught! On the flipside, we are here in numbers just in case a blood-mage or Malificarum makes an attempt on the large number of nobles here. One evil mage can cause huge amounts of damage. You get several and it takes a fair number of Templar to apprehend them. We are backup, well-trained and prepared to stop any rogue mages who may cause trouble for the gathered nobility.

"Does that answer your question, my dear?"

"Perfectly."

To be continued.

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