Alistair's twelfth birthday came and went. This time there was no package from Eamon. He told himself he wasn't disappointed, and part of him felt a quiet satisfaction that his foster father had finally given up, even though there was another part that competed for attention - a small core of hurt.
More children arrived at the orphanage, among them a small, dark haired boy who was so tiny Alistair was amazed he could walk and talk. Not that he talked much - the only words he heard out of him were his name - Yuri - and a soft enquiry as to when they would eat. Apart from that, nothing.
One evening when Alistair came in from training he found the other children teasing him for being Chasind. It was entirely possible that he was - with his dark eyes, skin and hair, but Alistair found his heart beating painfully looking at the circle of children surrounding the tiny figure - remembering times in Redcliffe where he had been the one in the middle.
"Hey," he said, striding in with a confidence he didn't feel. "What's going on?"
Alistair was one of the bigger boys and most of the others knew better than to antagonise him. But he was taking a risk, standing up to them all in a group, and he knew it.
"What's it to you, bastard?" one of the boys said - Chad - a blonde boy a few years younger than Alistair who was a sometime hanger on of Bannik and Marcus.
"Look at him, Chad," Alistair said, putting on his cheerful face. "He's less than half your size. Ewan could best him." Ewan - a boy of six who was only slightly bigger than Yuri and not part of the group surrounding the new boy, grinned up at Alistair from his bunk.
"He's a filthy Chasind," Chad said. "They live like animals."
"Does that mean you have to treat them that way too?" Alistair asked. "He hasn't done anything to you, Chad. Leave him alone."
Chad had lost face. The other boys were dispersing, losing interest in Yuri and finding other things to do. Chad wasn't willing to take on Alistair by himself - he was a skinny boy who bullied in numbers rather than on his own. Instead he spat at Yuri's feet and sneered at Alistair.
"You're a whore's get, Alistair."
"Possibly," Alistair said. "That would give us one thing in common, anyway."
A few of the other boys chuckled. The skinny boy knew he'd been bested, but he wasn't certain how to deal with it, and stormed to his bunk.
There would be more trouble, Alistair didn't doubt it. He just hoped it would come down on his head and not Yuri's.
The little boy hadn't moved from where he was standing in the middle of the room and Alistair approached him, cautiously, the way he would a nervous animal. There was a certain air of wildness about him that made it easy to believe he was Chasind, despite his regulation chantry shirt and breeches.
"Are you all right?" Alistair asked him hesitantly. The boy looked up at him and stared, solemnly for a few moments, his dark eyes totally fathomless before nodding, once, and turning to go back to his bunk.
Trouble seemed to take delight in finding Alistair in a myriad of different ways, but the one way he hadn't expected was the one he was finding the most difficulty dealing with.
He had moved on to sword and shield training. And that meant the initiates were, for the first time, grouped together with girls.
The Templar discipline that Ser Reynard had been teaching had taken only a short period of every day, but sword and shield training was grueling and arduous and consumed the entire time between breakfast and lunch. There were only a limited number of templars available to train the recruits and it was easier to train them in one lot. Also, the Templar Knight Commander - Ser Malcolm - made it very clear to the girls and the boys that maleficarum came in both sexes. It was important to have no hesitation when faced by a woman in battle.
This was far easier said than done.
Alistair hadn't seen a girl close to his own age since Redcliffe. In Redcliffe, girls were easy. You pulled their hair or stole their dolls or pushed them in the lake and ran off laughing. You avoided them. Or you tormented them.
These days the slightest hint of a thought of them was enough to totally lose control of his own body. The younger sisters would do nothing more than wander past a classroom in which he was sitting and he would be completely unable to focus on his lessons. In sermons on holy days he knew the Revered Mother could hear him thinking lewd thoughts - but worse, he knew all the sisters could as well. It was a power they had. Once they put on chantry robes the minds of boys were laid bare. Whereas he had once looked forward to talks with Sister Adela, now her merest glance was enough to leave him stuttering and desperate to get away, and the fact that she seemed to find it amusing just reinforced his conviction that the sisters could see into his brain.
Fighting girls on the practice field was easier than seeing them off it.
The older boys made it worse. At night, when the younger children were asleep, they would have whispered conversations about what women looked like naked - what they would do for a copper in a backstreet in Denerim - what they would do for a sovereign in a whorehouse...
Marcus was the worst of them. He had an agile brain, and a lively imagination. But it was worse, because sometimes the things he thought up were cruel and Alistair knew they weren't just wrong in the ways Brother Varel and Brother Weylon said they were wrong, but they were wrong in other ways as well, and it made him squirm and gave him an overwhelming urge to kick the boy hard in a place that would mean he would never be able to do any of the things he talked about to anyone.
Alistair tried to stuff his pillow into his ears when Marcus started whispering. But he couldn't stop his own thoughts from betraying him. Part of him wished he could have his private room back. He thought he might be too embarrassed to scream now.
Every now and then one of the boys would have to change their sheets on a day that was different to normal. It wasn't until Alistair had to do it himself that he realised why. The older boys (apart from Marcus and Bannik) gave him sympathetic looks the first time it happened. No one said anything, but that evening Brother Varel took him aside and explained thoroughly and painfully what was happening to him and why it was important that he not do certain things that he might want to do very much indeed from this day on.
Alistair felt like the world was playing a huge joke on him. Why would the Maker do this to boys? Did he particularly hate them? What had they done as a sex to make life so difficult?
He was sure girls didn't have the same problem. They couldn't.
In the end it was his Templar training that helped him cope. The discipline could be used to focus his willpower in different ways and he found employing it at certain key points helped him overcome the most embarrassing manifestations of his problem. He pitied the boys who didn't have the discipline at their disposal.
It was doubly unfair because Alistair was truly beginning to enjoy his training. He found he was passing fair with a sword and shield, although there were three or four other initiates who could best him he often walked from the practice field victorious, even against the girls. The lessons that took up the rest of the afternoon were usually interesting enough to keep him focused and Marcus and Bannik seemed to have let go of their plans to make Alistair's life a misery.
He didn't realise until later that it was because they had found a new target.