Archive of Our Own

Garrett Hawke spent more than a year serving the templars in Kirkwall before he was assigned a mage of his own.

The blight refugees were almost all cleared out of the Gallows’ holding docks by then; Garrett was one such refugee who would never be able to follow them into the city proper. However, things could have been worse—since Bethany wasn’t allowed to visit Mother and Gamlen in Lowtown, or even leave the Gallows for any personal reasons at all.

Garrett and Carver dutifully ferried her letters to Mother, when they could get the time off to pay social calls. Bethany always wrote cheerfully, with hope for the future and joy to quell Mother’s fears, while Carver always nearly destroyed her hard work by being a terrible liar. Mother’s insistent questioning, ‘How is your sister really; how is my Bethany?’ was generally met by silence, while Carver struggled to find the right words to put her mind at ease.

‘At least sister can edit what she writes first,’ Carver muttered, outside what Garrett had come to think of as the new Amell family estate, in the popular ghetto just next to Kirkwall’s alienage. ‘It’s not as though I have the leisure. What am I supposed to tell her? That it’s all sunshine and daisies? She can see that blighted tower for herself.’

‘It’s not as though she’ll believe it coming from me,’ Garrett replied. ‘You’re the one who really knows her.’

Carver kicked a rock toward a far sandstone wall. It bounced up, ricocheted off a rusty iron spike, and skittered to a halt right back in front of his feet again. His heavy plate armor clanked, templar skirts falling heavily over his boots. ‘Am I? Sometimes, I wonder.’

One would have thought Carver’s moods would improve—bound as he was to a much pleasanter sister; if anything, Bethany’s more generous outlook on life should have shed some light on Carver’s darker one—but he remained as stormy as ever, perhaps even more so.

‘I liked it better,’ he confided in Garrett, one drunken night with the others at the Blooming Rose, ‘when I didn’t have to feel everything a mage was feeling, when I didn’t have to hate everything a mage hates.’

The next morning, they both pretended that conversation had never happened.

When Garrett wasn’t attempting to bolster the spirits of the other members of his family—Gamlen not included—and when he wasn’t hunting blood mages and apostates through the streets of Kirkwall, he spent most of his time with the other new recruits, Ser Keran and Ser Ruvena and the rest. Technically, they were younger than he was, and lower in rank, but they also weren’t Fereldan, and that pesky detail evened them out a little in terms of their social standings. Garrett had them in his thrall with tales of danger and sacrifice from his time at Ostagar, and wisely chose not to ruin Carver’s reputation by letting everyone know he’d once been the sort of man who actually aided an apostate.

But all that had been left back in Ferelden, back in a time before Father had died, before Garrett was conscripted, before circumstance and bad luck found Bethany in the Circle by Lake Calenhad, Carver joining the templars a day later. He never said as much to anyone, but they all knew—in their own way—that he’d done it to stay with her, to protect her.

And now they were here, in Kirkwall, along with a good many others from the Fereldan Circle—in order to help test Knight-Commander Meredith’s latest plan to keep magic from ruling man: templars and mages, partnered together, ritual-bound to one another in mind, heart, and soul.

When Garrett first left Lothering to find his errant family in Kirkwall, the plan had been nothing more than a distant rumor, too unbelievable to be anything beyond barroom hearsay and old wives’ tales.

‘It isn’t really all that different from being a twin in the first place, is it, Carver?’ Garrett had once asked, some few days after he’d learned the rumor was all too true, that it was a reality his own brother and sister were living.

‘You’ll know for yourself soon enough, I’d wager,’ Carver had replied, reveling in the first opportunity he’d ever had to know more about something than Garrett did. ‘But brother… You have no idea.’

All the templars who hadn’t yet been assigned mages of their own did like to gossip about it; Garrett sometimes wondered if they were templars in the Gallows at all, or if they were all better suited to a Lowtown taproom, a game of Diamondback with cutpurses and Coterie thugs.

‘I’ve heard you share your dreams after that,’ Ser Keran said. ‘No matter where you go, no matter what you do, you’re never alone again.’

‘Keran, really,’ Garrett replied. ‘Don’t you think you sound a bit…too excited?’

Keran colored, all the way from his cheeks to his ears, a weakness of his already ruddy complexion. ‘Easy for you to say. You already know what it’s like—your brother’s told you everything.’

Garrett laughed, reaching across the table for another roll to go with that night’s dinner. ‘Hardly. You clearly don’t know my brother,’ he said.

*

Knight-Commander Meredith and Knight-Captain Cullen were waiting for him in Meredith’s office. Across the hall, First Enchanter Orsino’s door was shut, and the Knight-Commander had Garrett do the same for her door. Then, they all remained standing, which was how Garrett knew things were serious.

Either that, or they’d replaced the templar ceremonial armor with something even more difficult to sit in.

‘Ser Garrett,’ Knight-Commander Meredith said, in the tone she reserved for making the new recruits void their bowels. ‘Take a seat.’

‘Thank you,’ Garrett said. He remained standing. It didn’t seem wise to give up the high ground just yet; the most powerful trio in the Gallows didn’t need any more tactical advantages than they already possessed. Just a little strategy he’d picked up at Ostagar.

‘I trust we can rely on your discretion in this matter,’ Knight-Captain Cullen said.

‘Absolutely,’ Garrett agreed. ‘Though it would help to know what it is I’m being discreet about. If only so I don’t say the wrong thing and disappoint the Knight-Commander.’

‘Indeed,’ Meredith said, drily.

‘If I may, Knight-Commander,’ First Enchanter Orsino said, stepping nimbly between them. ‘Ser Garrett: we have a rather…unique situation on our hands. I admit, it’s something I’ve never encountered before. Then again, so much of what I have done of late—’

The Knight-Commander cleared her throat. ‘First Enchanter.’

Putting the awkward silence that followed aside, something like that was never what you wanted to hear from a man who dealt with abominations and blood mages and Knight-Commander Meredith on a daily basis. Garrett wisely chose to hold his tongue.

‘I’m told you haven’t yet undergone the ritual, yourself,’ First Enchanter Orsino continued. ‘It is the consensus amongst my colleagues that we have at last found you the perfect candidate.’

*

Garrett had managed to give his peers the slip easily enough, but he wasn’t so foolishly optimistic that he thought Carver would allow his disappearance to pass without question. Sure enough, he cornered Garrett in the mess hall, trailed by his new friends—or were they lost Mabari pups?—Wilmod and Hugh.

‘What did you do now, brother?’ Carver asked. ‘And don’t even try playing innocent with me—Ser Thrask said you’d been called into Meredith’s office.’

‘I don’t think I’d survive a one-on-one encounter with the Knight-Commander,’ Hugh confessed. ‘She makes me feel like I’m wearing my insides outside my armor.’

‘You both should come with me and Keran to the Rose tonight,’ Wilmod said. ‘All that worrying can’t possibly be good for your health.’

‘Because whoring is so much better?’ Hugh asked. ‘Remind me: when was your last visit to the clinic?’

‘Will the two of you shut your yaps?’ Carver asked.

‘You’re only going to be disappointed, Carver,’ Garrett said. ‘It isn’t anything life-threatening, and I haven’t received any demerits.’

Carver’s face twitched, lips drawn together like he’d just licked a raw lemon. ‘Why don’t you tell me what did happen, then? Instead of just what didn’t?’

‘Well,’ Garrett began, lowering his voice so the others would lean closer instinctively, ‘I have it on good authority that a Grey Warden is coming to Kirkwall.’

‘Because of how many darkspawn we’ve got roaming the streets in Hightown?’ Carver asked, incredulous.

‘Now, that’s hardly fair, Carver,’ Hugh interjected. ‘Even if you don’t like the Comtesse de Launcet, it’s a bit much to call her an ogre.’

‘He isn’t coming as a Warden,’ Garrett said, interrupting before the conversation unraveled like a ball of yarn. ‘He’s coming in chains—like any other apostate.’

*

Gossip spread like a rolling boil throughout the Gallows—which made sense considering they were packed together like armored lobsters in the same stone pot. When templars sheathed their swords, they invariably wagged their tongues. It was an unavoidable equation.

‘Once again, you’ve managed to become the center of everything,’ Carver said, leaning against a stanchion and out the bright heat of Kirkwall’s midsummer sunlight. Rolling boil was an accurate description of their lives even when gossip wasn’t running rampant through their ranks, since whoever had designed their templar plate mail hadn’t yet perfected a functioning system of ventilation. Even in the winter, it was easy to work up a sweat, and Kirkwall summers were far more brutal than any they’d spent in Ferelden. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of all that attention?’

‘Would you?’ Garrett asked, arching a brow. As Ser Thrask passed them by, they both nodded, and murmured their greetings.

‘Fair point,’ Carver admitted under his breath. ‘But I’m not going to be the one to tell Mother about it.’

Garrett resisted the urge to ask him if Bethany knew anything about this Fereldan apostate from the Wardens—no doubt she did, even more than Garrett, which wasn’t that much to begin with—because he could sense that Carver was feeling touchy, or at least, touchier than usual. When they were younger, Garrett had always taken every opportunity to push him to the point of tantrum-throwing, but Father had been there to mediate, and Mother, too, and presumably—somewhere between Ostagar and the Gallows courtyard—Garrett had matured, at least somewhat.

Besides, Carver did have a fair point—that this really wasn’t easy—and the last thing Garrett could do was let him realize it.

It wasn’t fair when your younger brother had the chance to experience a life-changing event before you. In Carver’s case, it made him even more insufferable than ever, and he already had a positively enormous head.

Likewise, Garrett resisted the urge to ask Carver what he could reasonably expect from the ritual, and all the information he was given on the matter remained—predictably—vague. The weeks leading up to his Vigil were rather similar in that respect, full of hazy directions and unhelpful metaphors that told him absolutely nothing about how to prepare himself. At least ‘darkspawn army’ had been straightforward—in a terrifying sort of way. Ostensibly, at Ostagar, Garrett had known what to expect.

Right up until the army was betrayed, but that wasn’t a detail he liked to think about.

Garrett had heard fifteen different variations on the theme of the Warden and his exploits in the following days, all of which were more implausible than the last. Some said he’d actually destroyed the city of Amaranthine, which was rather ridiculous; others said he’d helped the Hero of Ferelden fight the Archdemon, which Garrett dismissed outright as a blatant lie.

‘If he fought the Archdemon, Keran,’ Garrett said, patrolling the Gallows docks, ‘then do you really believe the Hero of Ferelden would allow him to come to Kirkwall and be taken into this little experiment of Meredith’s?’

Keran looked positively heartbroken. ‘Oh. No. I hadn’t thought of it that way, really.’

‘Well, chin-up,’ Garrett replied. ‘Maybe he did kill an Archdemon—anything’s possible, isn’t it?’

Garrett’s life, after all, was proof-positive of that.

*

It was a few days before Garrett was able to speak directly with Bethany, instead of through her surlier mouthpiece, Carver. The library in the tower was one of the few places templars and mages could mingle freely without drawing attention to themselves. Dry treatises on magical theory and the properties of dragon’s blood weren’t Garrett’s cup of tea, but he’d tolerate the smell of mildew-stained pages for a chance at time alone with Bethany.

They stood on either side of the same bookcase, buried far enough back in the stacks that there’d be less chance of being overheard.

‘Brother,’ Bethany said, brown eyes inscrutable over a row of dusty tomes. ‘I’ve been hearing some very interesting things about you.’

Garrett found himself rather glad that there was a large shelf of books between him and his sister. For a mage, she packed a mean right hook—and she wasn’t at all shy about expressing her opinions when she thought her brothers had done something especially pig-headed.

This time, Garrett could at least take comfort in the knowledge that this hadn’t been his decision. He was only following orders. It was one of the few skills he’d retained from his time as a soldier, and he liked to think Meredith appreciated him for it.

Then again, if this uncertainty, this burden, was the Knight-Commander’s idea of a reward, Garrett supposed being on her good side wasn’t what he wanted, after all.

‘Have you?’ Garrett asked. ‘Well, I suppose I can’t help that, Bethany. I am an incredibly interesting individual. My affairs are positively scintillating. I can’t imagine what anyone here did without me to entertain them.’

‘They say there’s a Fereldan Grey Warden coming here,’ Bethany said, refusing to play along.

‘I guess that solves the answer of what happened to at least one of them at Ostagar,’ Garrett replied.

Bethany’s eyebrows drew together sharply, her expression darkening like a bruise on an apple. ‘You know they weren’t the ones who betrayed King Cailan. You’re going to have to let that go eventually.’

‘Eventually,’ Garrett agreed.

‘I think he sounds fascinating,’ Bethany confided. She drew down one of the books, pretending to flip through its stiff pages. ‘Some of the other mages who came from Fereldan say that he was a part of the Circle at Lake Calenhad. He escaped the tower there seven times!’

‘And yet he let his guard down when it counted most,’ Garrett pointed out. ‘It’s not exactly a stellar commendation, Bethany. What do you suppose happened?’

‘I’m sure you’ll be able to ask him for yourself soon enough,’ Bethany said.

*

Infuriatingly—and thereby maintaining her flawless record of always being right about everything—Bethany’s prediction came true not more than two days after their little meeting.

Garrett had spent so much time building the mysterious ritual up in his mind and listening to the swirling rumors—never believing them completely, but nonetheless affected by them—that the set-up for the rites themselves seemed rather dull by comparison. There were no Fade-beasts for him to battle, no Desire demons for him to prove his worth against, no harrowing questions from noble spirits testing his mettle.

Instead, there was a sandy-haired man in a feathered coat, his cheekbones gaunt, his nose sharp and beaky. He wasn’t exactly the man Garrett had been expecting—someone larger, perhaps, with broader shoulders, and mage robes, and not quite so unshaven.

‘The Grey Warden, I presume,’ Garrett said.

‘So I’m told,’ the Warden replied. ‘Autographs later, hm? I’m a bit handcuffed at the moment.’

With the Knight-Commander and the Knight-Captain presiding—accompanied by First Enchanter Orsino, and a few other unfamiliar mages, and all the troublesome, esoteric apparatus necessary to undergo the ritual—it was hardly an atmosphere conducive to small-talk and comfortable introductions. Obviously, everyone just assumed they could get to know one another later, after their lives were inextricably bound one to the other; if they didn’t, it was really no one else’s fault other than their own. Garrett was kept on the far end of the room, flanked by his higher-ups, able to feel the pulse and crackle of arcane energy in the air, able to understand that all this was very dangerous—but all the while he was never quite a part of it, not in the same way a mage would be. Not in the same way the Warden was, if the occasional flinch and twitch of his lips, betraying his otherwise stoic demeanor, was anything to go by.

It bothered him—Garrett couldn’t blame him for that; already, they had so much in common—but on a level Garrett, no matter how many years he served the templars, no matter how many mages he watched over, no matter how many spells he observed, would never be able to fully grasp.

At one point, the Warden lifted his eyes, watching Garrett from across the altar, all of the dark magic roiling beneath Kirkwall present suddenly in their lone ceremonial chamber—and it was the expression he wore, bitter and accusatory, dry, resigned, weary but wretchedly angry beneath, that Garrett would always remember. Not the ceremony itself, but the burden of blame, which rested far heavier than templar armor on his shoulders.

*

After it was all done, and First Enchanter Orsino retired with a shake of his head to his private office, attending mages in tow, Knight-Captain Cullen undid the manacles that bound the Warden’s arms behind his back.

‘Now that’s a relief,’ the Warden said, rubbing at his chafed wrists. ‘And here I thought you’d keep me chained up until the end of days. Kinky sort, these Kirkwall templars, but I’d bet a sovereign the Fereldan templars could give you lot a run for your money. That is, if I had a sovereign.’

His voice was as ragged as the coat he wore, just as threadbare; his humor and good cheer was a lie, with just as many holes.

Knight-Commander Meredith’s expression remained as tightly unimpressed as always. ‘You have your work cut out for you, Ser Garrett. Knight-Captain.’ She nodded, once, and then Garrett nodded, and the Knight-Captain nodded, a secret templar code Garrett had discovered some time ago, but still hadn’t entirely cracked. It was professional, and it seemed meaningful, but mostly it just left him with a crick in his neck. ‘Keep an eye on him. If you notice anything out of the ordinary, report it at once. Do you understand?’

‘Naturally,’ Garrett assured her.

‘Well,’ the Warden said, turning to him as the others clanked down the hall. ‘And here I thought she’d never leave. Do you know—that was the second Joining I’ve undergone in my lifetime? I can’t really say which one was worse, though.’

Garrett wondered, faintly, where his stores of energy came from—he pitied the poor bastards who’d first captured him, who’d been forced to travel with him, on the open road. Maybe it was a Warden thing. What was it Garrett had heard about Warden stamina?

Dimly, in the back of his skull, he could feel the faintest whisper of something black and pitiless and cold, a quiet sort of throbbing. It felt eternal.

‘Ser Garrett, was it?’ the Warden continued, undaunted by Garrett’s silence. ‘How very…Fereldan of you. Next thing I know you’ll tell me you have a Mabari of your own, and I’ll feel right at home.’

‘I do have a Mabari, actually,’ Garrett said. ‘I wasn’t allowed to bring him to the Gallows.’

‘I see.’ The Warden looked him up and down, allowing his pause to linger. ‘Well—at least one of us has experience in nurturing a bond with a mindless animal.’

‘Speaking for myself, you get less slobber with a templar,’ Garrett assured him.

‘That much remains to be seen,’ the Warden said.

*

Perhaps as punishment for believing he’d made it through the ritual relatively unscathed, Garrett endured the worst sleep of his life after he and the Warden separated for the evening.

It wasn’t the first night that Garrett’s dreams had been plagued by darkspawn, but it was the first night he’d ever truly seen the grotesquery of roiling, fetid flesh and thrashing tentacles, churning monstrous in the deep. Instinctively, he knew the word for it—broodmother—and she wasn’t the only nightmare to visit his restless slumber, either. He saw hurlocks lumbering across the ravaged carcass of Amaranthine’s countryside, each bloated face split into a rictus of rotten-toothed grins. Shrieks slithered toward him through tendrils of dark, indigo smoke, and ogres shook the ground with their uneven footfalls.

All of them whispered to him, chittering in a language that sounded like laughter; he didn’t understand their words.

Garrett woke with a sick swoop of terror that he hadn’t felt since surviving the massacre at Ostagar, the mornings that followed when he was still on the run.

It took him a long time to drift off again, counting the hours by the passage of moonlight across his floor.

*

The next morning found him in reasonably good health. Bright sunlight was always the best remedy for a man’s ills, making him feel like the night’s horrors were safely behind him. In fact, Garrett rose with an uncharacteristically strong appetite alongside his improved mood. His stomach was growling before he’d even thrown back his woolen covers, and the acute sense of hunger only increased as he strapped on the interlocking pieces of his heavy suit of plate.

Maybe the ritual had taken more out of him than he’d thought.

Carver supported this conclusion by staring at Garrett across the breakfast table like he was a genlock who’d crawled out of the sewers.

‘So?’ Carver asked, having watched Garrett polish off two men’s servings of bacon already and apparently not willing to witness a third.

‘Yesh?’ Garrett asked. He picked a particularly chewy bit of fat out from between his teeth, then swallowed. ‘Is there something you’d like to ask me, Carver?’

‘You know Garrett isn’t going to tell you what happened,’ Keran said, showing a rare moment of mature intuition. ‘And I should think you’d already know.’

Poor Keran hadn’t yet undergone his ritual. Along with Paxley and Wilmod, he was one of the few recruits for whom Meredith’s new procedure remained a mystery.

‘Are you eating that roll?’ Garrett asked. He speared it off Keran’s plate, not waiting for a proper response.

Carver let out a sigh of disgust. ‘Pardon me for thinking the ritual might be different with a Grey Warden. They’re certainly different enough, although you won’t catch them telling anyone why.’

‘Just think,’ Garrett said. ‘You could be the man to put that mystery to rest once and for all.’ He washed his mouthful of bread down with Carver’s glass of milk, and Carver’s yelp of protest. ‘You’ll have to beat me to it, though.’

*

After breakfast, the Knight-Captain conducted combat training. Garrett no longer had time to think about darkspawn or apostate Grey Wardens, because he was too busy fighting for his life. Knight-Captain Cullen was incredibly serious about his templars knowing how to defend themselves—and his sincerity lent a rather frightening enthusiasm to the proceedings.

But of all the new recruits, Garrett was the best-suited to the task. There’d been no room for false senses of modesty at Ostagar, and he wasn’t being conceited when he admitted to himself—looking at the others as though they were his comrades-in-arm, sizing up his allies with the same brutal realism as he would his enemies—that he was the only seasoned warrior of the bunch. There were some who showed promise, but they were still young, and they all fell before him in single combat, necks bare against the flat-edge of his blade.

‘You fight dirty,’ Keran muttered, tossing Garrett a towel.

Garrett swiped it across his brow and against the sun-burnt back of his neck. ‘And so will your enemies. It’s not all parry, thrust, parry out there in the rest of the world, Keran, and certainly not in Kirkwall.’

‘Less talking, if you please,’ the Knight-Captain instructed, marching by with a magnificently legitimate clank.

Garrett spent the rest of the late morning and early afternoon defeating the other recruits one by one, and some of the older templars, as well, when they offered themselves as sparring partners. Carver called him an abominable show-off while Garrett caught his breath in the shadows, sword-callused hands pressed against his thighs, feeling his cheeks and the tip of his nose throb red with the day’s heat.

It was rare he was able to work up a good sweat—not the same way he had back in Lothering, running from township to township, from farmland to farmland, always with templars on their heels—and he relished the opportunity whenever it presented itself. Eventually, solid effort and natural skill would win him the grudging respect of his peers, even if they simultaneously resented him every time they landed squarely on their arse in front of so many witnesses.

Some of the mages had gathered in the windows above; Garrett felt them watching from various staircases and balconies. But the one thing, his lieutenant at Ostagar had told him, that set him apart from the other soldiers was that he never performed for anyone, never lost his footing the moment he became aware of someone watching. He lacked that instinct for reflexive self-consciousness—a good thing for a fighter, perhaps less so for a man—but it served him well, and won him Knight-Captain Cullen’s approval, if nothing else.

‘Dismissed for the rest of the day, recruit,’ the Knight-Captain in question said. ‘Rest up. You’ve earned it.’

‘Have I said abominable show-off yet?’ Carver asked.

Garrett again wiped the sweat from the back of his neck, hair damp, skin hot. ‘Only five or six times. Care to go for lucky number seven?’

‘Maker, I hate you sometimes,’ Carver told him.

It was the ‘sometimes’ that gave Garrett hope, but he pointedly ignored the feeling, instead tossing Carver a cheeky grin, leaving him behind in the courtyard.

He was looking forward to stripping down, to plunging his entire, aching body into a tub of cool water, and to washing the stink of exercise clean off his skin. But Garrett so rarely got what he wanted when he wanted it; instead, on his way through the halls, he passed by the Warden—his mage, though he hated to think of him in such specific terms—one hand against the wall, head bowed low, bracing himself against supportive stone. He looked a little green around the mouth, though it might just have been the shadows, and definitely leaner than ever.

‘Really,’ he said, breathless, practically wheezing, ‘must all templars be so active, or is it just you?’

‘Proper training breeds vigilance,’ Garrett said—borrowing Knight-Captain Cullen’s favorite phrase.

The Warden chuckled, but Garrett had the distinct impression he was being laughed at, not with. This was only reinforced by the thoroughly unimpressed look on the Warden’s face. ‘The Knight-Commander must be so proud. I had no idea she’d found a way to sever templar minds completely. Or do you simply choose not to think for yourself? I can’t decide which is worse.’

‘Was that a crack about the Tranquil?’ Garrett asked. ‘Most mages I’ve known don’t have a sense of humor about that.’

‘I have a sense of humor about templars,’ the Warden said. ‘If I didn’t, you would all seem very sad. You know, this business of morning training is a new form of torture, but in the end you’re all the same.’

‘I thought Grey Wardens were supposed to have legendary stamina,’ Garrett observed. The Warden’s face and neck were damp with fresh sweat—it was eerie to see the results of his exertion on another man’s brow. ‘I know you’re a mage, but this can’t come as a complete surprise. You don’t have to be so dramatic.’

‘I’m not dramatic,’ the Warden said. ‘I’m charming. There’s a difference. And you have terrible manners. Were you ever going to ask my name, Ser Garrett? Or did you just assume it didn’t matter, since I already knew yours?’

Garrett’s shoulder was beginning to ache from the force he’d put into each of his sword-blows earlier, and he could feel his skin growing sticky beneath his armor. As fun as lingering in the corridor trading barbs with a mage was, bathing was far more relaxing. Clearly, the Warden could sense that—that is, if he could feel anything through the apparently debilitating strain of Garrett’s hard work—and he was doing it on purpose.

‘Actually, I was planning on amusing you with a variety of nicknames,’ Garrett said. ‘But then I couldn’t think of anything past ‘Scruffy,’ or ‘Feathers,’ and it all went downhill from there.’

The Warden sniffed. ‘Templars have no imagination. No imagination, and very big swords. It’s absolutely the two worst qualities to have.’

Garrett waited. If the sneaky, restless feeling that had worked its way under his skin since that morning was any indication, his patience would far outlast the Warden’s.

‘It’s Anders,’ the Warden said finally, proving him right only moments later. ‘And if you think you’ve got nothing but inexhaustible stamina to look forward to in this prison sentence—oh, I’m sorry, I meant partnership—think again. There’s a lot more than that to being a Warden. But I’m sure you’ll figure it all out for yourself soon enough.’

*

Wilmod and Keran didn’t show up for dinner, which was fine by Garrett, since it freed up more food for him to consume without restraint. Also, it meant there were fewer people around to watch him do it.

‘I don’t like this,’ Paxley muttered, heavy mustache wagging over his chicken and gravy. ‘It isn’t like Keran to miss mealtimes. Or evening mass.’

‘Who cares?’ Garrett asked. An unexpectedly foul mood had descended on him somewhere between the afternoon and the evening, which made no sense, because he’d gotten plenty of sunlight and physical exercise. So it had to be Anders’s influence. Tearing into a greasy drumstick was a mild consolation, but it still wasn’t the balm he’d hoped for; no matter how much he consumed, the deep hunger lingered, insatiable. ‘They’re both adults. It isn’t any of our business what they do with their time.’

‘Yes, but haven’t you heard the rumors?’ Paxley asked.

Garrett didn’t even wait to finish chewing his current mouthful in order to make Paxley feel like a fool. Never a man’s best instinct—to make himself feel better by undercutting another man’s impression of himself—but it did work. And how. ‘Which rumor would that be? That the Warden I was meant to meet was actually ten feet tall and kept a collection of shrunken ogre heads on a chain around his neck? Or that the Knight-Commander is actually a blood mage who feasts nightly upon the flesh of the Tranquil? Or that Knight-Captain Cullen and First Enchanter Orsino are currently involved in a steamy love affair? You see, I’ve heard so many rumors lately, Paxley; how will I ever know which ones to believe? Or perhaps I should simply…believe them all?’

‘…I think this Warden’s made you meaner,’ Paxley mumbled, and was silent the rest of the night, save for the sound of his cloth napkin rubbing against the bristles of his gravy-stained mustache, the scrape of his fork against his metal plate.

The urge to apologize right away was strong, but stronger than that was Garrett’s foul mood, and he went to bed that night still unburdened and still hungry, dreaming of starving things creeping in the unspeakable dark.

*

Garrett planned on making amends with Paxley the next morning, but the Knight-Captain called an emergency meeting before breakfast. Instead of eating half his weight in rashers of bacon, as Garrett had been planning, he stood uncomfortably armored with Anders and an assortment of templars and their mages, Carver and Bethany included, a little farther down the line.

The Maker was clearly punishing him for his ungentle actions, and also possibly for that time he hadn’t offered his last copper to a beggar-woman outside of Lothering.

Anders looked as tired as Garrett felt, and Carver’s hair was still sticking up the way it did when he’d only just rolled out of bed. Knight-Captain Cullen, on the other hand, had the audacity to look as fresh as a daisy.

‘It has come to our attention that some of our comrades have gone missing,’ the Knight-Captain informed them. ‘We cannot afford to do them any injury by wasting time in our investigation.’

Garrett paid half his attention to the information given by Knight-Captain Cullen during the briefing; the other half was dedicated to dreaming of bacon. Keran and Wilmod were indeed missing; it was all very straightforward—and proof that Garrett really did owe Paxley an apology—just another day in the infamous Gallows, where recruits were kidnapped only as often as they fled to greener pastures.

It wasn’t as though Garrett had chosen Kirkwall of his own volition, either. He didn’t blame them for taking the latter course of action, and only wished they others could be clever enough to avoid the former.

‘Ser Carver, Bethany,’ Knight-Captain Cullen concluded, ‘you are young and able; we have…sources that seem to have put Ser Wilmod near Sundermount. The way is dangerous; I will attend with you, acting as superior and chaperone. As for you, Ser Emeric, Mharen—it seems prudent to check for news of the missing recruits with their families, does it not?’

‘Yes, Ser,’ Emeric replied, with an unfortunately loud bow.

‘Ser Garrett, Anders, there are also sources that place at least one of the two at…’ The Knight-Captain hesitated. Garrett thought he could see the man’s cheeks flush rosy pink. ‘…the establishment known as the Blooming Rose. As you can imagine, this is a topic of some…sensitivity, and I trust the two of you will treat it with the, ah, subtlety it deserves?’

Somewhere down the line, Garrett thought he could hear Carver snort, but he quickly turned it into a cough, clapping himself on the chest to clear it.

‘Yes, Ser,’ Garrett confirmed.

‘Lucky assignment, brother,’ Carver murmured slyly to him as they filed out of the Knight-Captain’s office. ‘And here I’m given the real job of going all the way to Sundermount, while they’ve got you conducting interviews at the brothel.’

‘I wonder if it’s anything like the Pearl in Denerim?’ Anders added, from just behind them. He pursed his lips, tapping his chin—the uncanny expression reminded Garrett of Father, trying his best not to laugh at something the Mabari had done in front of company. ‘Oh, please, don’t look so shocked on my account. You don’t imagine that mages are any more celibate than templars, do you? The only thing both groups have in common is the shared itch they get from being imprisoned in a tower for life. At least with the lucky ones, that itch remains metaphorical—desperation makes for the strangest bedfellows sometimes, doesn’t it?’

Anders slipped ahead of them in the hall before Garrett or Carver had the chance to reply, disappearing around the corner in a flash of drab green and dark gold.

‘…You’re sure he was a Grey Warden?’ Carver asked. ‘Not…something else? Street performer or village idiot or something?’

‘I have the nightmares to prove it,’ Garrett replied.

*

The Blooming Rose was only a few hours away from the Gallows, but Knight-Captain Cullen seemed particularly keen that they leave as soon as possible. Garrett suspected he didn’t want his templar investigators to be mistaken for nighttime customers, a distinction that was coming far too late for it to be of any real use.

But what the Knight-Captain didn’t know about his recruits could fill the entire guest lodger—and often did. Even Thrask took a night off at the Rose every now and then, and he was positively ancient. It was good for morale, cleaner than other establishments, and there was no chance of anyone turning into an abomination afterward. All in all, you couldn’t ask for a better deal. It was the one staple of templar life that Meredith hadn’t figured out how to compensate for yet—and all the recruits were grateful for it.

On the boat to the mainland, Anders unwrapped his lunch, revealing a feast that rivaled even Garrett’s most indulgent dreams: there were cured meats and hard cheeses, an assortment of round shiny grapes, and what looked like one of the crusty rolls from last night’s dinner. Garrett’s belly rumbled like a bereskarn.

Anders smiled at the sound, as though it reminded him of better times, knee-deep in darkspawn entrails and spattered in black broodmother blood.

‘Did you want to formulate a few questions to ask at the Rose beforehand?’ Anders wondered. ‘Or were you planning on letting your stomach do all the talking for you?’

‘Share some of that sausage,’ Garrett coaxed, ‘and I’ll see if I can’t get it to quiet down some.’

*

Fortunately for them both, Anders displayed some sense of charity at last, and allowed Garrett a few links and half the roll. He insisted it was only because he didn’t want the madam to think Garrett was concealing a ravening wolf beneath his chestplate, and Garrett was more than willing to accept the excuse.

‘Besides,’ Anders continued as they made their way into the Red Lantern District, ‘you’re incredibly distracting when you’re hungry. It’s one thing not to be able to concentrate when my stomach’s empty, but having to take yours into account is just…well, it’s insulting, really.’

‘Isn’t it your fault in the first place?’ Garrett asked.

‘Is it?’ Anders tapped his chin again. ‘Because judging by the noises coming from your gut, you were dangerously close to triggering some sort of seismic event. How would you explain that one to the Knight-Commander? Good little soldiers don’t tear cities down; they hold them up on their noble backs. Why, with my thoughtful snack, I’ve probably saved your career.’

‘And all because of a little meat,’ Garrett replied. ‘If only everything were so easy.’

‘I’d be careful of letting that theory out in the open, once we’re inside,’ Anders said with a garish wink. He opened the door to lead Garrett in, taking a deep breath of perfume and body heat, and sighing in pleasure. ‘Praising the wonders of meat inside a brothel won’t do much for the reputation of the stalwart templars.’

‘Welcome to the Rose, Messere,’ a pretty thing with an Orlesian sort of boa said, flicking a few feathers in Garrett’s direction. ‘Your kind are always welcome here. I just love a man in armor.’

‘So do I,’ said her companion, bare-chested, sultry and freckled and pale, and reached out with a curl of his fingers. ‘I’ve been a very naughty mage.’

‘…But I see now that reputation precedes us,’ Anders said, slipping past them both. ‘How silly of me. Of course.’

‘And yet you’ve been to the Pearl in Denerim,’ Garrett muttered. ‘I hardly think you’re one to judge.’

There was some trouble at the front, as Garrett accidentally insulted the sensitive woman in charge of the Blooming Rose’s books, and Garrett did his best to placate her while keeping half his focus at all times on Anders, who was wandering around the room, peering at bottoms and lifting up tassels.

‘—and you’re going to have to tell your friend over there if he touches, he pays,’ Garrett’s new acquaintance Viveka added, gesturing for two of her bouncers to take care of the Anders problem.

‘This is nowhere near as fun as I thought it would be,’ Anders said, dragged back to Garrett’s side and smoothing his ruffled feathers—literally. Garrett’s stomach growled. Viveka raised an eyebrow.

Eventually, Garrett managed to convince her that it was better to assist the templars on this one—not only mages feared the scope of Knight-Commander Meredith’s reach—and wrestled some useful information about Wilmod from her tight grasp. Apparently he was a frequent customer, with a favorite girl, whom Garrett planned on consulting next.

‘If you’d flirted just a little with that tender morsel,’ Anders said, following Garrett up the stairs and toward the private rooms on the second floor, ‘we could have done that a lot faster. I’m just saying.’

‘You have an interesting idea of what templar business actually constitutes,’ Garrett replied.

Anders sighed tragically. ‘If only. No, Ser Garrett, I know all too well that you never do anything remotely so fun, ever, on pain of death from the Knight-Commander. Would you look at this?’

Garrett turned to find Anders holding up what appeared to be a traditional Tevinter robe set, only the tailor had apparently run out of fabric around the midsection and the backdoor area. Anders draped it over his chest, wiggling about like a nightmare, and the costume’s rightful owner came screeching into the room; Garrett did flirt with her in order to get better directions to the personal chambers of Idunna, Wonder of the East, and also so that she wouldn’t call the bouncers on Anders again.

‘I’d like to be referred to as a Wonder of the East,’ Anders mused. ‘Or perhaps Wonder of the Anderfels… No, that doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? Ultimately, I just like to make people wonder.’

Garrett imagined Carver, up on Sundermount, stepping in something sticky and brown on his way, scraping his boot off on a nearby rock. It made him feel slightly better about his own predicament, but not much.

*

Idunna was waiting for them in her room, applying some kind of rouge to her pouty lips. She glanced at them through her wardrobe mirror, but she didn’t turn around.

‘Charge extra for two,’ she said, shifting in place, reaching up to curl a finger through her dark hair. She gave the lock a little tug, then leaned back on one plump palm. ‘But for you boys… I could make an exception.’

‘Don’t you just love it how they always pretend you’re someone special?’ Anders asked. ‘I mean, you know it’s a blatant lie all the while, but it makes you feel so good about yourself you’re content just to go along with it. Now, in the Pearl, someone would clobber you over the head, take your purse, and leave you bootless in a back alley—but at least you’d know they were being honest about things.’

Garrett didn’t answer. It was obvious Anders was only talking to fill the room with sound of his own voice. He didn’t expect a conversation—he wanted an audience.

Luckily for Anders, Idunna seemed all too willing to oblige him. She smiled and stretched, rising from the vanity to slink seductively across the room. She tossed both of them a coquettish look before draping herself across the silken bedspread, in what Garrett could only assume was meant to be an attractive pose. Her demeanor was like that of a spoiled Orlesian housecat: well-groomed and self satisfied.

‘I love it when the nervous ones get all chatty,’ Idunna purred; her voice was as dark and thick as good rum. ‘Why don’t the pair of you make yourselves comfortable? I’m sure we could find something to set your minds at ease.’

‘Do we have to pay extra for that?’ Anders asked. ‘I can’t imagine servicing our minds would be a part of the whole…package.’

‘I’m versatile, darling,’ Idunna said.

Garrett cleared his throat. ‘We’re here about Wilmod and Keran,’ he began, diverting the conversation with a well-placed parry, just like in the training yard. ‘Two templar recruits have gone missing—you are in the very fortunate position of being the last person to see them.’

‘That we know of,’ Anders added helpfully.

Idunna pushed her lips into a scarlet pout. Her eyes were as pale as the underbelly of a deep ocean fish. If Garrett watched closely, he could almost see scales glittering in their depths.

‘Are you sure you’re that interested in a pair of silly boys?’ Idunna asked. ‘There are so many more engaging uses for a tongue than playing inquisitor.’

Garrett opened his mouth to say that he found the game of inquisitor plenty interesting, but the words caught like stale bread in his throat. He tried to swallow, but produced only a cough.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Anders gave him an odd look. ‘It’s the incense, isn’t it? I always prefer a woodsier aroma…something like santalum. All this jasmine makes my stomach turn—and that’s coming from someone who’s been in the Deep Roads. With broodmothers.’

Garrett clenched his jaw. His limbs were locked in place, as if the joints in his armor had soldered over with thick rust, and there was a curious pressure in his chest below the breastplate, like a lidded pot with no room for the steam to escape. Unlike the other feelings that had bled over from Anders in recent days, this was more like an armed invasion, not an unwanted move-in.

Garrett had only been a templar for a little over a year in Kirkwall, but that was more than enough to hear accounts of what it was like to become a blood mage thrall. No other magic got inside a man’s body—inside his very head—in quite the same way. Garrett would gladly take a straightforward blast of lightning or a searing fireball any day, if the other option was facing down blood magic.

‘I’ll entertain your questions if you answer one of mine,’ Idunna said, her eyes boring into him like a templar hunter’s twin blades. ‘Who told you about little old me…?’

‘Ser Garrett?’ Anders asked. Garrett didn’t know whether the connection between them was strong enough for him to have picked up on what was happening, or whether it was Idunna’s sudden change in demeanor that had raised the alarm.

Whatever the case, Garrett found himself grateful for the first time that there was a mage in the room who was on his side—even if he was a chattering Warden who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.

‘Help me.’ Garrett managed to force the words between his clenched teeth. It wasn’t just the thrall of blood magic that made them difficult to speak, out loud, where people could actually hear them.

‘And here I thought you’d never ask,’ Anders said.

There were no searing fireballs up his thread-worn sleeves, no blast of lightning, either, but instead a wave of arcane power that threw Idunna back against the wall. With her gasp of surprise, Garrett felt the pressure lift from his chest, his heart beating its own rhythm once again; he also felt an unfamiliar prickle at his fingertips, a fresh heat in his blood, a strange, muddied swirl of emotions that left him breathless. Magic; Anders’s magic. Garrett could feel him casting, a distant rush, heady and sweet and also dangerous. Behind that was the cool thrill of the Fade, singing in the distance.

Fortunately, Garrett wasn’t dealing with a trained assassin or competent soldier, just an exotic wonder who happened to dabble in blood magic on the side. Garrett had the blade of his sword at her throat with time to spare, her pulse fluttering against the notched metal.

‘Now,’ Garrett said. ‘Where were we? Oh, yes: playing inquisitor.’

*

As it turned out, Idunna was merely one small part of a larger plot that involved the missing recruits; cold, hard steel was inspiration enough for her to give up the name of the ringleader—Tarohne—and her location. Garrett wasn’t the only templar in the Rose that night—though he was the only one there on templar business, rather than Rose business—and with their aid, he apprehended Idunna without further incident.

‘She’ll find the Gallows are quite different from the Red Lantern district,’ Anders murmured, with an uneven twist of his mouth.

‘It could be worse,’ Garrett reasoned.

Anders picked idly at a feather on his shoulder, then flicked an invisible speck of dust into the air. ‘Could it?’

Garrett hated that argument—not because he disagreed with it, but rather because he didn’t disagree. That made it nearly impossible for a man of his disposition to refute the claim, and all too soon his position would be made all too clear. Father would never have approved, but Garrett shrugged one heavy shoulder and said, ‘I can think of at least ten things.’

‘Shall we list them?’ Anders asked. ‘I do so enjoy discussing the grisly fates of others. It makes me feel better about myself, albeit only sometimes.’

*

They wasted little time returning to the Gallows with the information they’d gathered—as well as the prisoner. Knight-Captain Cullen looked somewhat sunburned, and Garrett relaxed marginally when he imagined Carver after his long day, face streaked red from the glare of sunlight off one of Sundermount’s many sharp peaks.

Then, once the proper paperwork was rushed through—in order to make the business of saving lives really official—Garrett and Anders were sent out into the field once more, to Tarohne’s hideout in the sewers of Darktown.

‘Excellent,’ Anders said. ‘This sounds like so much fun already. They couldn’t make camp in, I don’t know, the Blooming Rose again, in someone’s perfumed lap—or maybe in a comfy sitting room full of velvet couches, now could they? No; it’s always deep in the festering sewers of Darktown or trapped in the Shrieking Hall of Horrors somewhere along the oh-so-vividly named Wounded Coast. If it were up to me, I’d take all my demented lackeys to Fluffy Bunny Cove and we’d be that much happier for it.’

Garrett toed at the damp wooden planking of the latch at their feet. Hot, dank smell wafted up to him from the depths.

‘Not worse than the Deep Roads,’ Anders added, ‘but not better, really.’

‘Do you ever stop talking?’ Garrett asked.

Anders paused to scratch the stubble on his cheek. ‘Only when I’ve been gagged. And don’t go getting any ideas, either. You devious templar, you.’

‘I’ll try to control myself,’ Garrett replied.

*

Garrett headed down into the tunnels first; Anders stepped on his knuckles when his foot slipped, nearly causing both of them to plunge into the murky wet darkness below.

‘Thanks for that,’ Garrett muttered.

‘Just keeping you on your toes,’ Anders said. ‘Or keeping my toes on your hand, I suppose, to be perfectly accurate. I wouldn’t want there to be any discrepancies in our report for the Knight-Commander.’

‘I’ll take care to note how helpful you were,’ Garrett said. ‘It’s sure to make the grind of paperwork more bearable.’

‘Paperwork.’ Anders sighed heavily. ‘Do the miseries of templar life never end? You really ought to do some humanitarian work—further your cause among the common man. I’ll bet there are hundreds of people in Kirkwall right now who have no concept of your plight.’

‘Shh,’ Garrett said, holding up a hand.

‘You’ll never silence me,’ Anders began.

But the shades burst forth like raw sewage from the ground a moment later.

*

Despite the many added inconveniences of being bound to a mage, Garrett could at least be grateful that it meant he no longer needed lyrium to be an effective templar. He’d passed the burned-out husk of the ex-templar named Samson in Lowtown only once, but only once had been more than enough to leave a lasting impression. The templars didn’t yoke their recruits with vows, but something far more subtle and powerful. Of all the things he’d wanted to avoid, ‘lifelong addiction to lyrium’ was high on the list.

‘Suck on a fireball!’ Anders shouted, barely giving Garrett the required time to pivot clear of the blast. He was sweating from the proximity of the flames, his breastplate conducting the heat a little too well.

Garrett thought fast, swung hard, and buried his blade into the body of an encroaching shade. It was the consistency of thick blackberry jelly, and his sword pierced it clean through with an embarrassing squelch.

‘I’ll show you why mages are feared!’ Anders added, raising a crescent of murderous icicles with a practiced sweep of his staff. Garrett kicked another shade back with the flat of his heel, then brought his sword down vertically with a mighty blow.

There was no way in Thedas he was getting paid enough for this. He was going to have a talk with Knight-Captain Cullen once their investigation had been concluded, though he had to wonder if any foreign templar recruit had ever successfully negotiated a raise in Kirkwall.

‘I think you’re seeing the evidence of why mages are feared firsthand,’ Garrett called back. ‘Let’s not do anything to encourage them, shall we?’

He put his boot down in something sticky, and didn’t know whether it was the melted remnants of a shade or Darktown shit. They were moving forward, but at what cost?

*

Tarohne and her lackeys had hidden themselves away at the farthest reach of the tunnels, and Garrett’s heartbeat was pounding strong in his ears by the time they reached the blood mages. Beneath his pulse, he could feel another flutter, distant and unsteady—Anders’s dread coloring his own. For whatever reason, it came to him more swiftly here, both of them breathing ragged with exertion.

Shades could do that to a man.

The first thing they saw was a figure suspended in what looked like the crest of a white-capped wave—frozen in a tall, half-translucent pillar, and curled into the fetal position. He couldn’t see them, but when he cried out for his mother, Garrett recognized the voice as Keran’s.

‘Would you take a look at this?’ asked a voice from behind him, before he could get Anders’s opinion on whether he’d ever seen a crushing prison quite like this one. ‘Someone’s gone to the trouble of providing us with more fuel for our experiments.’

When Garrett turned, it was to face a woman who had—for whatever reason—gone to evident trouble to make herself up like a shambling corpse. There was a distinctly cadaverous pallor to her skin, and her lips had been painted a shade of purple one often associated with the recently buried.

‘Sometimes my life feels like the punch-line of a rather infelicitous joke,’ Anders murmured. ‘And certainly not a subtle one. I mean, really, isn’t being a blood mage quite enough for you people? Do you honestly have to make it so obvious to everyone?’

‘Forgive my companion,’ Garrett said. ‘He’s new to the city. What do you say to cutting out the banter and getting straight to the fighting, then?’

*

It felt good to take down obvious enemies; it felt even better to experience the crush and crunch of bone against his pommel-hand, to know he didn’t really have to hold back. The only thing that would have made it better was if Garrett had been fighting actual soldiers—not that he afforded blood mages any mercy because they were wielding staffs rather than blades, but he did miss the clang of metal on metal, the blunt impact of his blade against another man’s shield. The air was thick with the coppery stench of blood, heightened by magic, but Anders kept them both adequately shielded while Garrett took care of the opposition, one by one.

Bludgeoning mages with his shield was rather like knocking down ninepins, but a few well-timed spells from Tarohne’s forces eradicated any lingering sense of mercy Garrett might still have been harboring. Blood mages weren’t Father and they weren’t Bethany; they might have been someone’s family once, but the moment they surrendered to the temptation of demons they belonged to no one but the demons, and it was Garrett’s duty to eliminate them.

Duty itself wasn’t always a concept he’d given so much credence to, but now that he lived without his family, without his bloody dog, in a converted slave prison, there wasn’t much else that remained his and his alone. To say duty was all he had would be a gross exaggeration—he had three meals a day, a decently comfortable bed, a roof over his head when it rained, a steady salary, and an expensive suit of armor, not to mention his very own mage—but there was something to be said for having at least one principle that was a choice he’d made for himself, not one someone else had made for him.

‘Suck on a fireball!’ Anders shouted again, which Garrett was coming to realize was his fancy way of saying duck, and Garrett obliged him, only just in time. Heat seared past his face, singing his beard, clipping the shell of his ear, and catching Tarohne herself right in the chest. Predictably, she went flying backward, the stench of charred flesh and burnt silk overriding the other aromas this particular area of the sewers had to offer.

Garrett felt the pop and tingle of latent arcane energy as it coursed through the air, a twinge of remorse, the flush of regret. Tarohne’s blood mages were scattered about—much like ninepins—over the dirt-packed floor, torn robes and broken staffs and bloody faces.

Garrett flicked the blood off his sword and onto the ground, wondering briefly if they should have kept any of the mages alive for questioning. But Tarohne and her people had been all too eager to attack; there was no guarantee they wouldn’t have taken the first chance, if spared, to turn on their captors again.

At least they’d probably managed to save Keran—a young man whose only crime was bouts of errant foolishness, or so Garrett sincerely hoped.

He turned to Keran’s prison, reluctant to get too close, when he felt another burst of guilt, and the hum of shame beneath it.

‘Is there something you’d like to say, Anders?’ Garrett asked, feeling a little twitchy, himself. Not being able to differentiate between his own impulses and someone else’s was wearing him thin, since instinct itself was a warrior’s first—and best—weapon. Muddy those instincts, and the warrior was as good as dead.

Knight-Commander Meredith’s plan was innovative—some called it clever; some called it a great many other things—but it certainly didn’t take these details into account.

‘It really is a good trick, isn’t it?’ Anders’s voice sounded distant. Garrett contemplated facing him, then decided against it, uncertain of what raw expression he’d be forced to confront. ‘That Meredith—what a bloody genius.’

‘You don’t sound as though you really mean that, Anders,’ Garrett said, stony face turned to the wall, illumined by the golden sheen of Keran’s prison.

‘Maybe it’s because I don’t,’ Anders said. A sickly, prickling heat inched over Garrett’s skin at the sound of Anders’s voice. He thumped his staff on the ground and Garrett did sneak a glance over his shoulder then, just to make sure he wasn’t about to be attacked.

But Anders wasn’t even looking at him. Judging by the slack grip he had on his weapon—fingers looped loosely around the smooth, worn wood—an act of aggression was the last thing on his mind.

‘These poor people,’ Anders murmured, so softly that Garrett knew it wasn’t for his benefit.

That didn’t mean he could let the comment pass unnoted. Yet, unfortunately, knowing what Anders was feeling didn’t give Garrett any useful insight into what he was thinking. He still needed to determine that the old-fashioned way—through stilted conversation, awkward words fumbled and misinterpreted, questions that so widely missed the mark. ‘Blood mages, you mean? These poor blood mages?’

‘They were still human beings.’ Anders rounded on him; his face was exactly how Carver’s had looked last winter when he’d contracted a rash from all the mold in the Gallows cellars. ‘People get desperate when they’re backed into a corner, Ser Garrett. It makes them choose dangerous paths—foolish paths.’

‘You mean like dogpaddling across Lake Calenhad?’ Garrett asked. After Bethany had told him the Fereldan mages were gossiping, he’d done some research of his own. The stories he’d gathered about Anders’s previous Circle experience didn’t necessarily corroborate, but all of them were fascinating. ‘Or were you referring to something more general, like orchestrating seven botched escapes in a row?’

Anders recoiled as though Garrett had caught him across the chest with the flat-edge of his sword. It wasn’t something that had happened yet in battle, because Garrett had more control of his weapon than Anders did his fireballs. All the more reason for him to feel surprise now.

‘You can’t possibly compare anything I’ve done to blood magic,’ Anders said. Garrett felt his sudden anger like the lash of a low-hanging tree branch. Fresh blooms of guilt were blossoming along the limb—the longer Anders stayed down here with Tarohne and her followers, the more he doubted his own actions. ‘Do you really think that these mages would have been driven to such lengths if the templar regime wasn’t so strict here? I don’t expect you to understand what it’s like to have all of Thedas hate you simply for being born different—you’re not one of us, and I don’t believe in miracles—but you could at least try to see reason.’

‘They attacked us,’ Garrett pointed out. ‘I don’t just mean here in this tunnel, either. They struck the first blow, by going into our ranks and stealing good people. If you want to rant and rave like a lunatic, at least pick a pitiable cause—instead of something that no sane person would rally behind. You heard Tarohne’s plan just as well as I did. Providing a host of unwilling vessels for demons is a far cry from a suffering mage who only desires his own freedom.’

‘I’ve heard some mages desire more than their own freedom,’ Anders said, with an edge of flinted steel to his voice. He raised his eyes and Garrett felt a rush of cold wash over him, like he was a new blade being tempered. ‘They seek to change the system—so that no mage will have to suffer the indignity of being caged simply for what they are. Maybe that’s how this began.’

‘Speaking of which,’ Garrett said. Keran’s prison loomed tall in the corner of his eye. ‘What do you say we free our friend Keran? I’ll bet he has a few thoughts on being locked up for no good reason.’

‘Dramatic irony at its finest,’ Anders muttered. ‘The poor, caged templar, so unaccustomed to the injustice of being locked up. Why not let him experience it a little while longer? Just so he’ll finally know how the other half lives?’

‘Because that would be cruel,’ Garrett replied.

Anders looked away. ‘And necessary.’

Garrett wasn’t sure of how to inform him that this kind of vocal dissent had been the downfall of far too many mages in the past. Not everyone could be as well-behaved and clever at avoiding trouble as Bethany; not every mage knew how to hold his or her tongue. There was plenty Garrett didn’t talk about for that very reason: because it wasn’t diplomatic, because it wasn’t smart, because it would land him in a nest of trouble the rest of his family didn’t need to worry about on top of everything else, and because it wouldn’t even net him the desired results. He might have felt better for all of a few bare moments, in the flush of adrenaline directly after unburdening himself, but then what? He didn’t have much faith that his opinions would really matter to anyone else once they were set free.

‘Yes,’ Garrett agreed. ‘Cruel and necessary. How familiar that all sounds. When was the last time I heard someone make that argument? In Knight-Commander Meredith’s private office, I believe.’

‘Then she’s already succeeded in one respect,’ Anders said. ‘Making everyone as desperate and wretched as she is.’

Garrett’s hand was cramping. His shoulder ached. The burn on his ear was also pulsing, hot with the rush of blood to the wound. ‘I’ll be sure to write it down on my report. Plan to cause people of Kirkwall misery and grief coming along swimmingly, if Anders and I can be considered prime examples.’

‘Are you really so heartbroken that you’ve been asked to endure even a fraction of the scrutiny mages have been forced to suffer for centuries?’ Anders asked.

‘Because templars have it so much easier,’ Garrett replied. ‘Lyrium addiction, a Vigil just as unpleasant as a Harrowing—tasked with looking after demons all day and all night, and only a sword and shield, no magic at all, to protect them.’

Anders’s fingers tightened around his staff. Garrett could see the base digging into the soft loam below as he ground it into the dirt. ‘Mages are conscripted. You had a choice to sign up.’

‘No, actually,’ Garrett said, ‘I didn’t.’

Silence followed—silence almost immediately broken by neither of them, but rather by Keran’s soft, dreamlike moaning, muted through the rippling shield around his vulnerable body. Garrett faced him once more, ignoring years of instinct that told him never to turn his back on an angry mage. ‘You’re quite the bitter little bastard.’

Anders huffed raggedly. ‘And you’re incredibly self-righteous.’

‘And this man is suffering,’ Garrett concluded. ‘It’s our duty to set him free.’

‘As long as we don’t liberate him the same way we did Tarohne and the others, right?’ Anders asked.

It wasn’t really a question, so Garrett chose not to answer it, instead catching Keran in his arms as the lad stumbled free at last, blinking his eyes in the darkness like a newborn babe.

*

After they made their reports and their part in the objective was finally concluded, Garrett and Anders avoided one another—easier to do, now that they both knew how deep their mutual resentment ran. It remained to be seen whether or not they’d be able to work together again—though Garrett knew there was no real choice there, and that they’d merely have to, when given their next assignment—but with the return of Ser Keran, and the conspicuous, continued absence of Ser Wilmod, the Gallows remained relatively uneventful, at least for a time.

‘Life of the party, your magey,’ Carver said over breakfast, while Garrett did his best to eat slowly and chew even more slowly, just to trick his stomach into believing it was full when it wasn’t. ‘Can’t get Bethany to stop talking about the blighted fool. Warden this, Warden that—you’d think he was Cousland himself at this rate, slayer of ogres and Archdemons.’

‘Jealous?’ Garrett asked.

Carver snorted. ‘Not likely. I wouldn’t trade not being a mage for all the heroic ballads in Thedas.’

‘What would you do with all the heroic ballads in Thedas?’ Garrett asked. ‘Not sing them, I hope.’

From the end of the table, Keran chuckled. The sound bolstered Garrett’s spirits; since their return, Keran had been noticeably paler than usual, and more unsure of himself. Ser Hugh even claimed he was suffering from night terrors.

Garrett would have told him to join the club, but that would have also meant owning up to his bad dreams—which really belonged to Anders, if they belonged to anyone. It was all far too complicated for a simple conversation designed solely to comfort someone else. In fact, it sounded closer to unburdening himself than comforting at all, and that would never do.

‘You think that’s funny, do you?’ Carver asked, sensitive as ever to the subtle moods of other people.

‘I think it’s hilarious,’ Garrett said, although no one had asked him. ‘When the elusive Wilmod returns, the pair of you should form an order of troubadours—he’s already got the wandering part down. You could even ask Paxley to join you—doesn’t Paxley have the face of a man with an instinctive gift for rhythm, Keran?’

‘Well…’ Keran began. He was pushing a limp floret of overcooked vegetable around with the tines of his fork. It wasn’t at all the sort of meal that inspired a man to recover from his traumatizing kidnapping. If only Mother had been cooking for them.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Carver said. The words came out in a rush—uncharacteristic for a man like Carver, who liked to take his time crafting the perfect tone of righteous self-pity before he spoke. ‘Don’t get me wrong; my brother’s always been a little—’ Carver tapped two fingers to the side of his temple, indicating some form of mental illness, ‘—but I think being joined with that mage scrambled his eggs once and for all.’

‘I don’t think he’s that bad,’ Keran said. He rubbed his hand against the back of his neck, bare fingers threading through his golden hair. ‘I don’t know where I’d be right now, if it hadn’t been for… I owe you two my life.’

It seemed that Keran hadn’t been privy to Anders and Garrett’s little conversation in Tarohne’s hideout. That was probably for the best, embarrassingly emotional as it had all become; Garrett simply wished Anders could have been at the table with them now—if only for confirmation that, sometimes, mages who’d lost their way did have to die.

Even Father had believed that, on the very rare occasion that it was truly necessary.

‘Wonderful,’ Carver said. He stood, even though Garrett could see he’d barely touched his poached egg. And poached eggs were Carver’s favorite. ‘That’s just what my brother needs—more of his very own life-debts. Why not just add adoring templar throngs and city-wide parades and have done with it?’

‘You know, Carver,’ Garrett began, attempting to draw him out. There was some reason for his brother’s sudden impression of a squirrel—all twitch and raw nerves—and Garrett was naturally interested in learning everything he could about it. ‘Just because you’re taller than me now doesn’t mean you can afford to go skipping all those lovely proteins. What if you shrink?’

‘Lost my appetite,’ Carver replied shortly. He turned on his well-polished heel, marching stiffly from the hall. The back of his neck was red as raw meat—Sundermount had been unkind to them after all.

‘What was that all about?’ Garrett asked.

Across the table, Keran shrugged. ‘I should be heading off myself, soon. I’m meeting my sister Macha—I’ve heard she’s been asking after me. I’m sure she’d be honored to make your acquaintance, Ser Garrett, if you can spare the time.’

Garrett thought about it. Now that things had quieted down in the Gallows once more, perhaps it was time to visit the one mage who didn’t give him curdling indigestion. Something told him Bethany might just be able to shed some light on what had happened up on Sundermount. ‘Tempting, Ser Keran. And I can always make time in my schedule for a sister or two.’

*

After brief introductions were made all around, Garrett left Keran to the loving mercies of his sister Macha; family reunions always made him feel uncomfortable, especially when they weren’t his family, and an expert retreat became necessary all too quickly, in order for Garrett to remain at ease.

Besides which, he had very important templar business to attend to, and that business was: snooping.

Bethany was where she could usually be found, looking after the younger members of the Gallows Circle in one of the research libraries, exhibiting a patience that certainly hadn’t come from Father. Possibly it was Mother’s influence, although Garrett had seen even her lose her temper far more often than Bethany ever did. If she hadn’t been a twin—and if Carver hadn’t looked so terribly like Garrett himself when Garrett was clean-shaven—then the changeling theory might have been a more prevalent one.

Sadly, Bethany didn’t seem to have the same amount of patience for Garrett as she did for complete strangers.

‘If you’re here for help with your mage,’ she said, voice clipped, face disappearing somewhere behind a stack of dusty tomes, ‘then I’m afraid I’m not the one to ask, brother.’

Garrett pressed a steel-plated hand to his steel-plated chest. ‘Why, Bethany—I’m insulted. You haven’t taken sides already, have you?’

Bethany’s eyes appeared through the space left by a missing codex. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But I do think there are times you can be even more beastly than Carver.’

‘Lies,’ Garrett said, plucking down a heavy volume and flipping through the worn vellum pages idly. ‘All of them. Whatever he’s told you. Anders is a compulsive liar, you know—not just a compulsive talker. And I find it very wounding that my own sister would believe the falsehoods of someone she’s only just met over the protests of her own brother.’

Bethany let out a noise of frustration; Garrett could just see her, throwing her hands into the air just behind the bookshelf, looking so much like Mother that it was, in all the most agonizing ways, painful to consider the resemblance. At least Garrett knew she wasn’t a saint after all, another Andraste in the making.

‘I have things on my mind brother,’ Bethany said, leading Garrett deeper into a more abandoned area of the stacks. Garrett returned his current light reading to its proper place, and followed her in. ‘You…rescued Keran, didn’t you?’

‘A little worse for wear, and not exactly a fan of blood magic, and possibly scarred for life,’ Garrett confirmed, ‘but yes. We did. He’s still in one piece, if that’s what you mean.’

Bethany’s face was hidden in a troubled slant of shadow, and—like she had so many times when she was younger—she was biting at her lower lip. ‘That’s good. Not everyone that day was so lucky.’

‘You mean the blood mages?’ Garrett had to wonder where all this sudden sympathy for demons was coming from. At the very least, he’d assumed Bethany was cleverer than all that.

‘No,’ Bethany replied. ‘I mean Wilmod.’

*

It wasn’t something she was supposed to talk to him about, but as Garrett suspected, Carver hadn’t proven the best confidante for this—or any other—important matter. He kept to himself; he bottled and stoppered his emotions like he thought they were a fine vintage from 5:34 Exalted. But, Bethany insisted, she could feel it troubling him too, something Garrett wouldn’t have been able to believe so readily if he hadn’t experienced it already, first-hand.

Wilmod, Bethany explained, had been an abomination, and though she and Carver had both been sworn to secrecy on the matter by the Knight-Captain himself—in order to prevent mass templar panic, Garrett suspected—she was warning her brother because he was her brother.

‘And,’ Bethany added, with that stubborn set of her jaw, ‘because everyone deserves to know.’

‘All in good time, I’m sure,’ Garrett replied. ‘Once chaos hits. Chaos always hits.’

‘Cheerful,’ Bethany said.

‘Honest,’ Garrett answered.

Bethany sighed, and frowned, and stuck her nose into the pages of a book. Garrett noted it was upside-down. ‘To a bloody fault.’

He left her with her books and her children, having provided the same strong shoulder and willing ear for her as she sometimes needed. He didn’t let on to how troubled he was by the news that mages weren’t the only ones who could turn into abominations these days.

Honestly, Garrett hated Kirkwall.

These sorts of things just didn’t happen other places. Ferelden had its fair share of Blights and then some, but at least that was a relatively predictable sort of catastrophe. Templar Abominations were not, and Garrett threw himself into training with a little too much vigor, unable to think of his sparring partners as anything other than whatever Ser Wilmod had become.

Right before, according to Bethany, she and Carver and Knight-Captain Cullen had been forced to exterminate him.

A cold bath and a hot meal later, and Garrett was capable of rationalizing the situation once more. He wasn’t the sort of soldier who panicked at the first unexpected pitfall in the terrain, and he was better than superstition and paranoia. Not everyone was an enemy, certainly not his very un-abominable friends.

‘You’d better get your mind out of the clouds if you want Ruvena to be your partner for the Summerday festival,’ Hugh said, elbowing Paxley in his stiff metal side.

‘How anyone can be in a mood for celebration after all that’s happened is beyond me,’ Keran said. ‘I’m going to stay with my sister until it’s all over.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Keran,’ Garrett said. ‘I was hoping we might festoon the maypole together.’

*

Ready or not, the usual Summerday festivities came to the Gallows just as they did to Hightown, and Lowtown, and everywhere else in between. Bright banners of gold and purple decorated the square, and Orsino had arranged for a few of the senior enchanters to put together a spell that would have pale petals raining down over the city in varying shades of white, pink and red.

It was a bold explosion of color, the perfect marriage of man-made decorations and natural ones to welcome the coming season.

The petals collected in the angled bevor of Garrett’s armor, immediately filling up the space between the metal and his neck. His throat tickled for hours, and the resulting mulch that was created when he crushed the blooms under his armored fingers sent up a faint, sweet fragrance. Truly, if the spirit of the festival was meant to be experiencing hopeless frustration and smelling like a bower of blossoms, then Garrett was fulfilling Summerday to the letter.

‘You look like a molting duck,’ Anders commented, pulling away from a crowd of lingering mages like a rotten apple floating to the top of the barrel. ‘Or maybe a pillow that’s run afoul of some dreadfully violent act—and now you’re losing all your goose-down.’

So that was how they were going to play it—as though no progress had been made, no emotion unveiled. Honestly, Garrett preferred it that way.

‘Charming little trick, this,’ he muttered.

‘Isn’t it?’ Anders replied. Petals clung to his hair, and the feathered pauldrons on his shoulders—he looked like a cake in a store window that had been dusted with powdered sugar, or perhaps more like the molting duck he’d just described—but he didn’t appear to be suffering from the same pollen-related discomfort that had been plaguing Garrett for days. That figured. Anders took a step closer, brushing a stray petal from his own fringe. Overhead, the smart purple banners snapped in the wind. ‘If you wanted, I could always help you with that. At the rate you’re going, you’ll be the only templar with a suit full of potpourri by Summereve.’

‘No, thank you,’ Garrett said. The last thing he needed was for Anders’s ‘help’ to be a breeze so strong that it lifted him clean out of the Gallows and dropped him in the Waking Sea.

Considering the tenor of their last interaction, Garrett was honestly expecting it.

‘Suit yourself,’ Anders said. He shrugged his shoulders, rapidly growing more voluminous with the floral additions to his feathers. He opened his mouth to speak, and a red petal landed on the tip of his tongue. ‘Eugh—!’

Garrett stepped out of the line of fire as Anders spat, feeling amused and placated in the part of him that was mean and selfish—by coincidence, it was the same part currently suffering from the blooming onslaught.

‘Don’t you just love a good festival?’ he asked, once Anders had finished.

‘I spoke to Keran,’ Anders said—in the exact tone Father had always used to say, the dog’s gotten into the larder again. Amusement, regret, and idle contemplation, not a lick of apology for anything.

‘Did you?’ Garrett asked. ‘I’m glad. He’s a good lad, that Keran. A little shaky after everything that happened, you know. Listen to me, of course you know. You were there, so I recall.’

‘Yes,’ Anders said. ‘He wanted to express his gratitude.’ His eyes narrowed, like a stray cat staking out its territory in the darkest corner of an alleyway. ‘Did you put him up to that?’

‘Put him up to what?’ Garrett asked. ‘To talking? I hear some templars do know how to do that on their own, without the Knight-Commander’s hand up their arse.’

Anders snorted. It might have been a laugh; it might also have been him choking on another petal. ‘Eugh,’ he said again, pausing just long enough to press his knees together. ‘How…unpleasant. And with those gloves! Far too many spiky bits.’

‘We’ll just pretend I never said it,’ Garrett suggested.

A few of the templar recruits waved to Garrett as he passed by, and Knight-Captain Cullen nodded, and Ser Thrask was actually wearing a string of daisies around his neck, which Anders apparently found hilarious in an unbearable way. ‘It’s just that the flowers don’t really go with all that armor,’ he explained, snickering all the way across the courtyard.

Garrett remembered Summerday festivals in Lothering—with Father asking Mother to dance, and Carver tripping over his own feet trying to impress some nameless girl, Garrett fending off Bethany’s many unworthy suitors while attempting, foolishly, to attract a few unworthy suitors of his own. He recalled thick, frothy Ferelden beer in crude tankards, the stink of wet dog and human sweat, of songs and laughter late into the cooling night, all the freshly-hewn grass and sun-burnished wheat. He also recalled creeping past the others, past Mother with her head resting against Father’s shoulder, and Father’s hand in Mother’s hair, to sneak out with a few accidental friends, or a midnight lover—people he’d never see again, once they moved on to the next town.

Now, he saw Hugh dancing stiffly with Ruvena, Paxley glowering in the background, a few mages in cowls tassled like coxcombs, and the vigilant figure of Knight-Commander Meredith on a distant balcony, overlooking the entire scene. Garrett couldn’t shake the tickle in his throat—not just from the pollen of the petals—and some deeper discomfort, the knowledge that he was part of a plan that would’ve made Father’s skin crawl at the very thought.

But if this wasn’t meant to be a sign of the Knight-Commander’s great success, Garrett didn’t know what was. It wasn’t just Summerday they were celebrating, but the security this new plan afforded them, the sense that—if only the hold tightened just a little more—no one would ever have to fear magic’s rule over man again. Because templars, at present, had finally found the way to rule of magic, instead.

Except that they hadn’t, not completely; Garrett had to wonder, privately, if they ever would.

‘Well, it’s not a Fereldan party, I’m sorry to say,’ Anders said, leaning against a festooned column, banner unfurling in the quick shiver of wind above his head. ‘What do you say to getting a bit drunk and embarrassing, shall we? Making an intoxicated fool of myself is really the only pleasure I have left.’

*

It was as obvious a sign of peace as any, tentative but no less real for that. Garrett chose not to belabor the point or even draw attention to it, instead accepting the wisdom in Anders’s suggestion. With tankards full of dark Kirkwall whiskey, dwarves manning the barrel taps, they didn’t bother cheering to anything—what would they have chosen, since there was practically nothing they agreed on?—and instead drank, and drank deep.

And, soon enough, Garrett discovered something quite distressing: Anders had an embarrassingly low tolerance, barely halfway through his first cup before he was clearly inebriated.

‘It’s the whiskey,’ he slurred, leaning against Garrett’s side as they stood on the outskirts of the courtyard, watching the others dance. ‘I mean, everything else is fine, and I’m like a dwarf, really, just—bottomless, a great mountainous heap of ale and belches to make room for more ale. You’ve met dwarves, haven’t you? A dwarf once taught me how to drink.’ To prove his point, he did belch, then covered his mouth with one hand. ‘Beg pardon. How rude of me.’

Garrett could feel the creeping, murky twist of it all just at the back of his mind, reaching out for his thoughts, unraveling them one by one. Only their edges were frayed, but it was enough for Garrett to feel wary, tense, as he chased them down and reordered them, and Anders thumped him in the shoulder with the wooden curve of his tankard.

‘No, no, Ser Garrett, you’re being drunk all wrong,’ he said.

Garrett stiffened further; in case Anders was about to lose his balance, someone needed to hold them up. ‘I wasn’t aware there was a right way to be drunk.’

‘Yes—there is, and only one,’ Anders informed him. ‘It’s to have a good time. So many people think it’s to cry on someone or do unspeakable things with a few alienage elves and an experimental qunari and possibly a nug, but it isn’t. No. It’s just…freedom. Do you see? Freedom from thoughts, freedom from having to understand. Freedom,’ he repeated, and his expression soured. ‘I need something more to drink.’

‘No,’ Garrett said. ‘I really don’t think you do.’

Anders pursed his lips and shook his head at the same time—he looked like one of the mummers who’d come into the city for the festival day, presumably to entertain the masses, yet entertaining no one so much as himself.

‘If you think that I am going to take advice from a templar who doesn’t even know how to be drunk,’ Anders said, ‘then it’s you who’s had too much to drink. Never you mind, Ser Garrett; I have just the cure for that. It’s an old Warden secret. Or perhaps an old dwarven secret. I do get those two turned around sometimes—although they do sound awfully alike, don’t they? Warden…dwarven…warden—dwarven warden.’ Anders smacked his lips, tasting the words and the whiskey lingering on his tongue. ‘Also, I knew a dwarven warden once! …Dreadful mess of smells, he was. Fought darkspawn just by belching at them.’

‘Fascinating,’ Garrett said. He could only hope that once Anders’s inebriation turned inevitably to the next stage—illness—he wouldn’t also be privy to every twist and gurgle of his stomach.

‘I’ll be back,’ Anders promised, holding up a finger. ‘I need—something more to drink, and then I need to lie down somewhere dark and quiet for a spell. It looks rather comfortable underneath that table doesn’t it?’

‘I’ve never known a man to have such high aspirations for his Summereve,’ Garrett.

He knew just how far gone Anders was when he didn’t even offer up a pithy rejoinder.

*

Nearly a half hour later, Anders hadn’t returned with his drink, and the warm evening was starting to fade into true, cool night. The dwarves had hung vibrant streamers of red, green, gold and purple around their makeshift taproom; they drifted lazily now in the nighttime breeze, bright strips of color against the darkening backdrop of the sky. Garrett hadn’t been troubled by any abrupt feelings of queasiness or danger since Anders had left, so he knew at least that his mage wasn’t being sick or murdered in a darkened alcove.

He wasn’t sleeping under any tables, either. Garrett had checked a few, just to be on the safe side.

Now, Garrett leaned back against the cooling stone of a broad courtyard stanchion, eyeing the dregs of whiskey at the bottom of his cup. The petals that had slipped in beneath his armor had dried into little, scented crisps. They itched at the bare skin of his throat and collar bone, and every time he scratched, he released a fragrant cloud of summer-blossoms.

Combined with the whiskey, it made for an indescribably…unique perfume. Not one the ladies of Hightown would popularize any time soon.

Another Summerday was winding to its close—Garrett’s second in Kirkwall, and his second as a templar. He wondered whether his mother was celebrating somewhere in Lowtown, or if Uncle Gamlen had managed to squeeze the pleasure from that, as well. The man had a certain skill for netting company in his misery. The only thing that kept Garrett’s trips to see Leandra regular was the knowledge of how bleak her life would be with only Gamlen to keep her company.

Otherwise—if she’d been happy, with new friends of her own, perhaps even a new lover—Garrett might have allowed himself to miss a visit or two. It was difficult to sit in a house that wasn’t actually theirs while Gamlen went out of his way to make them all feel explicitly unwelcome.

As long as Garrett was a templar, he told himself, the Gallows was his real home. He couldn’t leave it any more than the mages he was sworn to protect. At the end of every day, the end of every job, successful or no, this was where he returned. All the rest was merely visiting, and nothing else would last.

Garrett was so caught up in his thoughts—not drunk, himself, but well into the uncharacteristically contemplative stages of his whiskey—he almost didn’t notice Keran approach, his cheeks flushed with the day’s celebrations. For whatever reason, he was clad in simple leather armor that revealed the sunburnt curve of his shoulders and the strong muscles in his thighs. In fact, it was nearly the most Garrett had ever seen of him, if one didn’t count the incident with Tarohne in the tunnels, during which he was very naked by templar standards.

‘Ser Garrett,’ Keran said. His eyes were glazed like a fresh nut pastry, shining and brown. He attempted to nod, and stumbled instead.

‘Ser Keran,’ Garrett said. ‘You’re all dressed up.’

‘Am I?’ Keran glanced down at his feet, pitched woozily, and braced himself on the stone by Garrett’s side, his palm down, his blunt-nailed fingers splayed. Garrett recognized the calluses on his hand, the bruises on his shield arm whether the leather straps dug into clenched muscle, absorbing every blow. ‘Oh—yes. Macha… I was with my sister. Celebrating.’

‘Hard to celebrate in templar armor,’ Garrett agreed. ‘I understand completely.’

Keran blinked. Garrett could see his focus wandering, could feel the immense effort Keran was putting into simply seeing straight. ‘But you…’

‘When they fitted my for all this armor,’ Garrett explained, ‘I asked them to do me just one more favor, and seal me into it right then and there. Called in a blacksmith and everything just to fuse the plates together. Don’t look so surprised—I’d realized then that the moment I managed to get it off at the end of my first day, I’d understand what a damn fool job it all was, how heavy the blighted uniform is, and never want to put it on again. But if I can’t take it off… Well, that’s one problem solved before you ever have it. I like thinking ahead.’

Keran laughed, a sound not entirely happy, his fingers twitching against the crevasses of moss-covered limestone. ‘It does get harder every time.’

‘But then you remember the stipend,’ Garrett added. ‘How much money you can make. The comfortable beds. Knight-Commander Meredith’s sunny disposition, and all the friends you’ve picked up along the way. Not to mention your pleasantly befuddled future, in which you’re paid a great deal of money simply to become invisible.’ But that was far too maudlin, Garrett realized, not to mention inappropriate. Though there were few revelers remaining in that area, the air cold now—almost everyone retired already to their proper places or unconscious beneath quick-hewn tables and benches, with fallen streamers for blankets—the Knight-Commander had ears everywhere, a magic all her own. One she used to rule man, Garrett added, and picked at a splinter of wood along the lip of his tankard, shaking his head. ‘But it’s all worth it, isn’t it?’

‘You miss Ferelden?’ Keran asked. ‘Or do you miss…something else?’

‘I miss my future, actually,’ Garrett replied, in a moment of whiskey-related honesty. ‘Not Ferelden so much as the people I knew there. And it’s funny, because almost all those people are here; it should be the same, shouldn’t it? Also,’ he added quickly, to avoid becoming too serious, ‘I miss getting in and out of my armor. Have you any idea how uncomfortable it is to sleep in this blighted thing?’

Garrett banged his fist against his chest to prove the point. The sound clanged awkwardly through the deserted courtyard, a little too loud, making them both wince.

Keran took a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m no blacksmith, obviously,’ he said. ‘But…I could help you with that.’

*

Garrett was no stranger to clandestine meetings in darkened corners, to quick physical comfort taken when the option presented itself. He still remembered the night before the battle of Ostagar: the smoke-heavy air, the bright lights of the campfires, the sweating dogs, the tar and the dirt and cured leather and freshly-tempered metal, the way he’d fucked desperate and hard and raw just to remember what it was he was fighting for. Not ideals, not a country, not even the commanding officer he admired so much or the men beside him, men he also admired.

A fight like that—or any fight, really—was never much nobler than the purest rush of adrenaline, hot blood and the racing of his pulse at his temples, a man alive and proving it. As though, somehow, that would make a difference, a vitality capable of keeping death at bay.

And also, there was not wanting to be killed by ravening darkspawn, but that was something Garrett’s mind provided afterward, part of the bevy of excuses made by man to understand his own, baser instincts.

This wasn’t the same as all that; there wasn’t the added desperation of fear as Keran tore at Garrett’s templar skirts, raised the cloth over his thighs, and licked his lips until the moonlight caught against them, bruised and wet. He unhooked the chestplate from its hinges, drawing one shaking hand down over Garrett’s chest, dried petals falling out against the ground.

Not for the first time, Garrett found himself with his back against a wall, hidden in quiet shadow, his cock twitching as a sword-roughened hand palmed him just so. Garrett stared at Keran’s tongue, pink and quick.

It had been over a year since he’d done something like this without paying for it first. The Rose’s workers were efficient and discreet, and fifty silver was enough to get someone to pretend to like you for an hour. Being liked without some sort of payment was currently above and beyond Garrett’s expectations. He’d had his dick sucked by people who couldn’t even tolerate him, let alone harbored any secret, deeper feelings. Sometimes it was even better that way.

Keran didn’t seem like the type to enjoy that sort of thing. He was hopelessly without guile, a young man who almost certainly would’ve been chewed up and spat out if he’d joined any organization but the templars. Kirkwall was even more unforgiving in that respect than Ferelden had ever been. In the Gallows, Keran could get away with blue-eyed naiveté; his elders mistook it for piety, and respected him for it.

He was a strange one, rare as fresh fruit in the Lowtown market.

Keran didn’t need to know that Garrett was making an exception for him tonight. He would only read too much into it—or worse, he’d want to talk about it later. Garrett already had plans for that mouth, and none of them involved forming words.

‘Maker,’ Garrett gasped.

‘Oh,’ Keran said, breathless as a dog in summer and panting almost as hard. ‘We don’t have to talk about that here, do we?’

He parted his lips and ran the warm tip of his tongue over Garrett’s cock, teasing him. So the boy wasn’t quite as pure as spun sugar, at least not the way he seemed. Even better. Garrett was no demon of desire, but he preferred his conquests not to be actual conquests in the most literal sense of the word. There was something to be said for the flair of experience over the blushing wonder of youth.

Keran opened his mouth wide, as though he was preparing to take a bite out of a festival apple, dipped in caramel and left to harden.

‘Teeth,’ Garrett murmured, and Keran startled.

‘Sorry,’ he murmured, licking his lips. His tongue lingered against the sharpness of his left incisor. His lips parted with more care this time; Garrett felt the slick slide of them pass over the head of his dick, and he groaned low in his throat. His head made a hollow sound when it hit the back of the wall. Dimly, he hoped it wouldn’t bruise—but that was hardly his primary concern. It was hard for him to care about anything with another man’s mouth on his cock.

Keran made a soft, keening noise in the back of his throat, muffled by his full mouth. Garrett felt his tongue start to move in slow, maddening circles down the sensitive shaft of his dick. He stared in awe at the golden crown of Keran’s head, the stretch of his lips and the delicate flutter of his dark eyelashes as he focused on his duties with the same serious focus as he afforded all his templar work.

Dizzy warmth filled Garrett’s head like thick smoke in a closed room. His heart was pounding, adrenaline rushing through his body with no viable outlet, but instead of shifting tactics; his mind was softer than Orlesian cheese. Pleasure flickered in his stomach with the same spark as flint being struck against rock. His cock twitched, the muscles in his thighs growing tight.

Dimly, from some other place, he thought he could hear footsteps pounding down the corridor in their direction—but muted, distant. It might have been important, but then Keran scraped Garrett’s dick with the edge of his teeth, hands tightening in the thick fabric of Garrett’s skirts. Garrett tipped his head back against the wall, throat bare and vulnerable, just as the door opened.

‘Oh, Ser Garrett,’ said a voice, so familiar to him now, ragged and breathless and trying too hard to sound scandalized.

Garrett’s eyes widened in the dark. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be asleep under a table somewhere?’ he asked, tone as harsh as the situation demanded. It wasn’t one of his finer moments.

Keran had fallen still; Garrett supposed he was lucky the lad hadn’t panicked and bitten anything off in surprise. The muscles in Garrett’s thighs clenched, and for some incomprehensible reason, he acted upon a nobler instinct, lifting the fall of his templar skirts to obscure Keran’s face from view.

Anders was frozen in the doorway, backlit, but Garrett didn’t have to see him to know what expression he was wearing. Instead, he could feel every wince and grimace in a flood of misty emotion, flecked with glimpses of precision: guilt, embarrassment, amusement, and fear. An odd combination, one that did nothing to ease the rapid pounding of Garrett’s heart. Nor did it do anything to soften his dick, either. More was the pity. It was the one part of Garrett’s body that didn’t obey his every command.

Garrett drew in a frayed breath, feeling Keran’s warm lips against the inside of his thigh, soft hair on even softer skin, the faintest peach-fuzz against his upper lip and dusted over his strong jaw. By contrast, he was holding his breath, and likely turning blue down there for his efforts.

‘It just felt…’ Anders shifted, rubbing manically at the back of his head, a flurry of shadowed motion. The faintest scritch of his fingers on his scalp filtered through the haze of heat and pounding of blood in Garrett’s temples, slowly, slowly winding down the more his precious time was spent. ‘…like you were being attacked,’ Anders finished lamely. ‘Sounds—demented, actually, doesn’t it? Yes, well; I’m still rather drunk from before.’

Garrett had to wonder why he hadn’t left yet, why he was still lingering, still clutching the frame of the door. This little alcove could have maintained the illusion of privacy—if only Anders had chosen to be decent about it. But, not surprisingly, he hadn’t.

Keran let out a low, wretched whimper; Garrett didn’t need ritual binding and mental control over him to know what that noise was for: it was equal parts shame, distress and the desire to flee. Garrett kept his face covered, cupping the back of his head, palm against his soft, golden hair.

‘As you can see, I’m not being attacked,’ Garrett said.

Anders cleared his throat. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking, really, he does have you below the belt. It could have been serious—very serious. I should…’

‘Go?’ Garrett suggested.

At that, Anders swayed; Garrett himself accepted the flush of dizziness, the pitch and swoop in his belly, before all was right again, balance restored.

‘But you see I can still feel it—’ Anders began, then cleared his throat, and attempted a laugh, and Garrett wished he was more the sort of person who enjoyed getting it on in the stacks while the First Enchanter was doing research in the very next row. But he’d had enough of keen danger and close living quarters at Ostagar, and even more of that here in the Gallows, and at last he felt the untimely death of his arousal, while Anders continued to chuckle, almost compulsively. Almost hysterical.

‘Go,’ Garrett repeated, and this time, it wasn’t a question.

*

Needless to say, the night didn’t end the way Garrett had hoped, instead capped with Keran’s apologies and excuses and quickly receding form. After doing his best to reassure him—a task akin to rolling a boulder up the steepest side of Sundermount, undertaken more for his own benefit than Keran’s—Garrett made his way alone and frustrated to his private room, pitching face forward into the hard mattress and groaning against his unwelcoming, narrow bed. What Father used to say about making those and then having to lie in them seemed particularly apt at the moment: Garrett, currently living in what was arguably the least fun place in all of Kirkwall, a templar against his better judgment, and also alone on Summereve.

Never was there a sadder picture of a Fereldan.

A tentative rap against the door made him twitch in place. Then, he rolled over, hoisting himself up onto one elbow, the bed creaking with the weight of his full armor.

‘A bit late for social visits, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘I wanted to send my condolences,’ Anders said from just outside. ‘May I come in now? It’s very cold out here.’

Garrett sat up again, dug the heels of his palms into his eyes, and fought back a groan. ‘What if I have someone with me?’

‘Well, you don’t,’ Anders reasoned. ‘So. There’s that. And also, you’ve revealed that you are in there, which was your first mistake. Now you have to let me in, otherwise it’s just embarrassing for everyone.’

This time, Garrett did groan. It was late, moonlight slanting across the bare stone floor, and his head ached, and his muscles were wearier than ever from carrying around twice his weight in hammered steel during what was supposed to be a festival.

But it wasn’t as though he dared let things get awkward. As though they weren’t awkward already.

He flipped the latch and let Anders determine from the sound that it was all right to come in. Then he removed his vambraces, setting them on the table by the bed. He heard the hinges of the door squeak, followed by the gentle click of the latch. The room itself was filled with Anders—a rustle of feathers, clearing his throat twice, smelling of whiskey and sweat.

‘My,’ Anders said, reaching out to touch the back of Garrett’s lone wooden chair. Standard templar issue; all of them had been built with one leg very slightly shorter than the other three. ‘What an uncomfortable looking piece of furniture.’

‘It’s not so bad if you sit on it with all your armor and lean your weight primarily to the left,’ Garrett said. He popped his neck, and unhooked the left buckle holding his breastplate in place. ‘For future reference. You aren’t here because you were curious about the furniture in my room, are you?’

‘Maker, no,’ Anders said. He pulled his fingers away as though the chair was made of red-hot iron. ‘Do I look like a carpenter to you? Never mind—don’t answer that.’

‘No; ‘carpenter’ isn’t the first word that leaps to mind,’ Garrett admitted. He waited, breathing evenly; Anders seemed calm, his words crisp and precise. As drunk as he’d been before, it was evident that he’d had time to sober up sometime between ruining Garrett’s night and coming back to ruin it for a second time.

Typical. He wouldn’t be able to escape this with his usual conversational sleight of hand. Anders was right—revealing his presence in the room had been a mistake.

Being a templar had dulled his instinct for hiding—if only because it was impossible to do so while being that shiny.

‘I do actually have a reason for being here,’ Anders said, as Garrett unstrapped his chestpiece. He bent to put it on the floor; a few of the vertebrae in his back cracked when he straightened up. Anders grimaced. ‘That sounded healthy.’

‘You were offering your condolences,’ Garrett reminded him.

‘Right.’ Anders tapped his fingers against the rough-worn wood, like he was plucking his words from the very air. ‘Well, on my way over here I believed I’d made up my mind to apologize. But then I really started thinking—’

‘Never a good sign,’ Garrett interrupted.

‘Tell me about it,’ Anders agreed, sounding almost gleeful, which wasn’t at all the reaction Garrett had been expecting. ‘You have no idea—but stop trying to distract me. I told you before, I won’t be silenced.’

‘This is called conversation,’ Garrett said. ‘When you say something, and I say something, and the conversation isn’t dominated by only one of us—‘

Anders shook his head. ‘Hm. No, I don’t believe I’ve heard of anything like that. Strange practice. Must be from the Free Marches. Anyway, I started thinking, never a good sign, about all this, and what happened before, and where we are now, and what we can and can’t do, and also how Meredith has effectively ruined our lives by ensuring neither of us has sex again.’

‘Oh,’ Garrett said. He wondered if he was still a little drunk—only on the weather, on the festivities, on the sudden rush of blood to his head and his thwarted tryst. Anders stared at him, waiting. ‘…How do you figure that?’

‘Well, unless you want every intimate encounter you ever have in the future to become some sort of unwilling threesome…’ Anders said. He squinted his eyes in concentration, as though trying to decide whether Garrett was a perverted voyeur.

‘No,’ Garrett said quickly. ‘No, no—no.’

Anders was right. Garrett had never thought about it before, because it hadn’t really been a concern. At least, it hadn’t been his first concern, or anywhere close. The nights he’d spent at the Rose had been one of his few indulgences, selfish and gratuitous as they were; they were also expensive, and therefore rare. Ultimately, they were just a representation of something else beyond the act—proof that he still existed outside the Gallows, proof that Garrett Hawke was still a man, someone real and not the hollow tin soldier they trotted out to hunt down mages.

Maker help him—and Garrett had his doubts about the likelihood of that—but it seemed the Knight-Commander had thought of one more way to chain her templars to their cause. Remove the impulse, remove the need, remove the humanity, and create the perfect soldier.

‘Probably for the best,’ Anders mused. He was still looking at Garrett, his eyes keen. ‘That lad you were with—handsome, yes, but I don’t think he could take the pressure of performing for an audience.’

*

The next morning, both Hugh and Ser Thrask were absent from the mess hall. Hugh was understandable—he’d undergone his own Vigil the night before, and both Ruvena and Paxley were dying to ask him about it—but Thrask’s red hair and beard had become a staple of Garrett’s breakfast scenery, and he actually found himself missing it.

‘Maybe he’s exploring his Faith at the Rose,’ Carver said, winking so that Garrett would know exactly how clever he thought he was being.

‘Good one, Carver,’ Garrett replied, with a smile wide enough that Carver’s immediately disappeared.

‘It was funny,’ Carver insisted.

‘Was it?’ Garrett asked. ‘I wonder.’

Having expertly crushed Carver’s spirits—in the name of helping him grow as a person, or at least learn to be a little less embarrassing—Garrett finished breakfast and went through his day with the usual, familiar motions. First was his morning training, which now also consisted of assisting Knight-Captain Cullen in practical demonstrations for the younger recruits; sparring always got his blood up, a welcome distraction from everything else that required not enough doing and far too much thinking. And, halfway through shield-work, when he saw Ser Keran crossing the courtyard, in the time-honored tradition of adult parties during the morning after, neither of them met each other’s eyes.

Just as it should be, all things considered.

Garrett ate an enormous lunch, saw Bethany afterward, and offered her all the expected, older brother statements about how dangerous Summerday—and especially Summereve—could be. He also went into how she wasn’t yet old enough for dancing partners, and if he heard any rumors he’d quit being a templar and become a Berserker instead. Bethany took it with the same good grace as always, no longer able to elbow him in the stomach to get him to shut up. So at least the chestpiece was good for something.

Bethany could, however, kick him right in the shins, and Garrett limped down the hall on his way to pick up his afternoon assignment. Every day since he’d first donned the uniform, he found new reasons to curse the design of standard templar armor—literally every day. That was a lot of reasons. The newest—that there was no shin coverage system—was merely one in a vast collection of valid complaints.

His intended shift was meant to pick up where Ser Thrask’s ended, but since Thrask was currently elsewhere, that was going to prove somewhat more difficult.

‘Ah, but he’s the spectacularly ginger one, isn’t he?’ Anders said, shouldering his staff and heading briskly for the portcullis. ‘That should make him easy to spot, shouldn’t it?’

They, too, made no mention or acknowledgment of anything that had transpired the night before. Garrett felt like a Mabari, covering up a favored bone, except he never planned to uncover it again. Better not to relive these precious moments. While Father had led them to believe embarrassment helped to prove a man’s constitution—and certainly helped to improve it—Garrett knew now there were other ways, ways that involved satisfaction and success and being able to look at himself in the mirror at least sometimes without cringing.

People like Carver could take embarrassment as the fires that forged them, while Garrett did his best to have other plans.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Anders asked, nudging him in the bruised shin with the toe of his boot.

Garrett hid his grimace. ‘Funny, isn’t it? That you aren’t able to guess.’

Anders heaved a much-beleaguered sigh. ‘Now, Ser Garrett, you know as well as I do that it doesn’t work that way. And,’ he added, eyes sparkling, ‘maybe it’s for the best, right? I mean, I have an unspeakably dirty mind, and I wouldn’t want all your templar thoughts poisoning my fun with any seriousness. Dangerous thing, seriousness. Once you catch it, you can never go back to the way things were before. Like an incurable disease.’

‘I’m sure that was Knight-Commander Meredith’s reasoning when she decided against such an addition,’ Garrett said. No matter how often he experienced it, he still wasn’t completely used to—or comfortable with—just how much other passengers on the ferries to and from the Gallows tended to stare at him, whenever he was traveling in Anders’s company.

‘You’re avoiding the question,’ Anders said.

Garrett pretended to be very busy inspecting the metal joints on his left glove. ‘Just thinking about the task at hand,’ he replied lightly. ‘Or my uninterrupted plans for next Summereve. Or perhaps what will happen—if anything—were I to push someone off this boat.’

That shut Anders up, if only for a brief moment.

*

They found Ser Thrask no less than an hour later, in the alienage, of all places, embroiled in deep conversation with one of the people.

‘Well I never pegged him for one of those,’ Anders said. ‘Still, he has the look of a man who could use a good woman. So long as she isn’t Dalish, he should be safe from harm. By which I mean: Dalish women are crazy. And not in the good way. In the dangerous, might lose your favorite bits of anatomy way. You know what I’m saying.’

‘What about Fereldan mages?’ Garrett asked.

‘Oh, they’re even worse,’ Anders said, heading straight for Thrask to eavesdrop on his conversation. ‘The stories I could tell you about them—it’d melt your armor straight off your body.’

If only, Garrett thought, and ignored the rest to the best of his abilities.

‘…do what I can,’ Ser Thrask was in the midst of promising his unexpected companion. He was a kind man, Thrask, and better than most people deserved, at least in Garrett’s opinion. Thedas—and especially Kirkwall—needed more with his constitution, with his instincts for doing good, but at the same time men of his caliber were never rewarded for their decency, certainly not in Garrett’s experience with them.

Only a few rare men were willing to do what Thrask did on a daily basis. Garrett respected him for it, but he didn’t envy the man one bit. He waited for his comrade-in-arms to finish up, and in the meantime, did his best to look intimidating—so that no one would mistake him for someone helpful and think they could start asking questions.

Being a templar in the alienage was always a mixed bag of favors. Elves could never seem to make up their minds how they felt about Andraste—they loved her one minute, and the next they were rumbling about the sensibilities of the Qun. Their opinions on the templars vacillated like ocean waves, traveling back and forth, lapping at the shore but never making any true progress. Personally, Garrett wondered whether there was any pleasing them at all.

Then again, no one in Kirkwall was particularly easy to satisfy. It was a thankless job, trying to keep the balance.

‘Deep thoughts again?’ Anders asked. ‘Or were you contemplating losing me around the bend of one of these infamous Kirkwall hexes?’

Garrett ignored him, focusing very obviously on Thrask instead.

‘You rogue,’ he said as Thrask finally approached, to cover up the fact that he had been thinking. True thoughtfulness was never a good look for a man like Garrett; alongside the beard, it made him seem altogether too grave. ‘I’ll say this, Thrask: you aren’t doing a very good job of hiding your love affair.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Thrask asked, already puffing up like a robin. His plumage was just as bright.

‘You and that woman,’ Garrett clarified. ‘Dalish, isn’t she? I can tell by the tattoos. They’re meant to be absolutely wild, those Dalish. My associate here,’ he gestured to Anders, in all his feathered glory, ‘told me so.’

‘I don’t recall using that exact phrase, actually,’ Anders corrected. ‘There was a great deal more fire and brimstone in my warning.’

‘Maker, no. Is that what passes for templar gossip these days?’ Thrask’s voice held a practiced steel, unlike his normally gentler tones. ‘That was Arianni, and I’ll have you know I was speaking to her with regards to her runaway son Feynriel. And since you asked, Ser Garrett, I’ll assume the best of your character and take it as an indication of your desire to help the poor woman.’

‘Oh yes,’ Anders said, once more too quick on the draw for Garrett to beat him. His words were swifter even than his fireballs, which Garrett had already been given more than enough practice in trying to avoid. ‘That’s Garrett for you. He’s incredibly helpful. Just the other day I was thinking to myself how absurdly lucky I am to have to be chained to—excuse me, paired with—a man who so innately understands his civic duties. Why, on Summerday I found him helping Ser Keran with what looked to be a most unfortunate case of lockjaw—’

Garrett’s boot came down hard on Anders’s foot. Like a true champion—or someone well-used to being given harsh conversational cues—Anders didn’t make a sound in protest.

‘Mages,’ Garrett said. ‘You can lock them up in a tower, but you can’t cut out their tongues—am I right, Ser Thrask?’

Thrask teetered on the brink of rolling his eyes before his innate good nature pulled him back. ‘In lieu of taking over my responsibilities here, I’d like to ask you for a favor, if I might?’

Garrett supposed he had no choice but to allow it.

*

There were two men that Thrask intended to speak to next in order to determine the lad Feynriel’s whereabouts. The first was an Antivan merchant in Lowtown by the name of Vincento—presumably the boy’s father—and the second was an ex-templar Garrett already knew of, a man undone by the thirst and the dust. Garrett offered to see to the former, an unknown variable, since he had no desire to speak with a lyrium addict turned mage smuggler.

‘Are we hunting innocent mage children now?’ Anders asked, his voice dry as burnt bread—and nearly as black. ‘I’m so excited.’

‘Just another day in Kirkwall,’ Garrett replied.

They found Vincento peddling his wares in the Lowtown bazaar, and after Anders spent a dedicated half-hour chasing away any potentially interested customers by monopolizing the conversation and simply being his unadulterated self, the merchant soon saw the wisdom in giving them the information they wanted in order to get them out of his hair. Apparently selling out his stock was more important to him than not selling out his own son.

‘No honor among Antivans,’ Anders said cheerfully. ‘And he’s the boy’s father, too. Who can we trust, these days? It’s a good thing I don’t have any family.’

‘Have you met my brother?’ Garrett asked. ‘Because he wouldn’t be the one to make you rethink that philosophy.’

‘No,’ Anders admitted, ‘I haven’t. But I have met your sister, and she’s quite love…ly… Ah—what a frightening expression you’re suddenly making. Tell me more about this brother instead, Garrett.’

Garrett already knew Bethany’s opinion of Anders was high—and only an idiot wouldn’t have a high opinion of Bethany in return—but he felt his jaw clench as his molars ground together nonetheless. Focusing on familiar territory, doing his weather best to ruin Carver’s reputation, was small consolation for the distress he always encountered whenever rogues, scoundrels and other eligible bachelors so much as glanced Bethany’s way. ‘Well, for starters, they’re twins,’ Garrett said, ‘but Bethany got all the looks. And the intelligence. And Carver got all the bad moods and funny hair.’

‘Hard to follow up an act like yours, I’d imagine,’ Anders replied.

*

They met up again with Thrask down near the water, sunlight glittering amidst opaque threads of dark sewage and even darker algae; Garrett pointedly averted his eyes when he saw Samson in the distance, shifting from side to side, endless desire for lyrium rendering him incapable of ever standing still.

‘I don’t like any of this,’ Thrask said, after explaining the situation—that Samson had pawned Feynriel off to a captain named Reiner, who may or may not have run afoul of slavers. Or perhaps the slavers were a part of the real bargain, an intentional step in the process all along.

‘And this is why we try to find mages,’ Garrett said casually. He didn’t particularly believe in the templar cause as much as a man like the Knight-Captain, but suddenly it seemed important to make the distinction. ‘Not because we’ve very mean people with nothing better to do, but because we don’t believe in letting slavers take children to Tevinter.’

‘You mean where they’d be raised as Magisters amidst a society that reveres them?’ Anders asked. ‘Oh, yes, what a terrible fate.’

‘Unless they fall prey to the wrong influences, and wind up bound as slaves in Minrathous,’ Garrett pointed out, ‘peeling grapes and fighting one another for blood sport and washing their masters’ dirty feet.’

Anders scratched his cheek again, where a patch of hair was growing a bit long and, Garrett suspected, might have been flecked with premature gray. ‘Well, it could be worse. They could be stuck in the Gallows. But that was rather imaginative of you—are you sure you’re really a templar?’

Garrett shot him a private look, just behind Thrask’s glimmering back. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s not as though I was born in full templar armor.’

‘Sometimes, I do wonder,’ Anders said with a grin.

*

They had to wait for special dispensation from the Knight-Commander herself in order to proceed, but Thrask’s seniority and good record coupled with Arianni’s own testimony about her son’s abilities certainly helped the paperwork move along quickly.

‘By now he could be on a slaving boat already,’ Anders pointed out as they accompanied Thrask and his mage Jamos on the trip from the Gallows. Garrett felt as though he’d never stop the endless back and forth, back and forth, over the narrow stretch of water separating his life from the rest of Kirkwall, the rest of the Free Marches, the rest of Thedas. No matter how many times he left, the trouble was that he always came back again, usually sooner rather than later. It was all very disheartening. ‘There goes your little theory about helping mages.’

They split up with Thrask in their search for Reiner, which was for the best, really, since Garrett found Anders’s antics embarrassing in front of his peers, even though his job hadn’t ever been to train the man—just keep a close watch on him, and make sure he didn’t sacrifice anyone in an illegal blood ritual.

A slaver named Danzig finally pointed them in the direction of the Wounded Coast—after a bit of creative negotiating, with the point of Garrett’s sword pressed to his jugular. It saved them a great deal of tramping around the countryside, since according to hearsay there were holding caverns for slavers built all over the hilly valleys and dales surrounding the city, and Feynriel could have been in any one of them.

‘So—just so I’m not mistaken about any of the details here—we’re taking the word of a ruthless, self-interested slaver,’ Anders said, the wet sand crunching beneath his boots as he followed Garrett into the dank cave. ‘One of the same Tevinter slavers whose machinations we’re ultimately planning to foil. Yes—I’m sure this will end well. We’re probably not walking into any life-threatening traps at this very minute.’

‘Is that you trying to be optimistic?’ Garrett asked. He put his hand down onto something slimy and his gauntlet skittered across the wet rock with a screech. Silence followed in the dark. If the slavers were here, then they were further back in the caverns, since no one had unleashed a volley of sharp arrows and sharper ice spells at the sudden noise.

Templars and soldiers had one thing in common—they so rarely bothered with being discreet.

‘Maybe,’ Anders said, his voice echoing off the stone walls. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Stick to pessimism,’ Garrett said. ‘It suits you better. Cheerfulness in a Gallows mage is downright eerie.’

‘I could say the very same thing of a Gallows templar,’ Anders pointed out, but he had the decency to fall silent after that, listening to the rats and the cavern bugs chittering in the dark.

*

Predictably—since it was an Imperium presence they were tracking down—the first wave of defense they ran across were a few scattered mages. Garrett cut them down without hesitation, even as he felt the sick clutch of Anders’s reproach and guilt in his belly. But it was the qunari presence that really took him by surprise; whether they were here to settle an old feud with the Tevinter, or whether they’d just been staking out the caves to claim for Tal-Vashoth living quarters, it was impossible to tell. Anders had no such hesitation about fighting for his life when there were bloody enormous qunari warriors charging him down, and that made things simpler.

Garrett even saw him send a merciless chain of lightning rippling through two sten to a sarebaas. Apparently, rights for mages didn’t count if they struck the first blow.

‘This had better be worth it,’ Garrett muttered, wiping wine-dark qunari blood off onto his skirts. The liquid smeared viscous over the brightly-embroidered emblem of the chantry. It looked like a sunset—the kind sailors foretold and anticipated.

‘It’s always worth it,’ Anders said. He tensed like a cornered hare when Garrett turned to look at him, as though he hadn’t meant for that comment to be heard aloud. ‘…I mean, this is what you templars do for a living, isn’t it? Great acts of heroics, rescuing poor innocent mages from a fate worse than freedom.’

‘Something like that,’ Garrett agreed. ‘Although I think you’ll find it’s Grey Wardens who are given to reckless acts of heroism, not templars, at least in the stories I’ve heard.’

*

Whether or not it really was worth it would be up to history to determine, since the boy—Feynriel—was scrawny and pale; he’d inherited his mother’s Dalish complexion, his father’s human appearance, and a high, whiny voice that Garrett could only assume had come from a lesser-liked relative.

‘You would have let him kill me,’ Feynriel said. His face was streaked with dirt and there were two clean tracks down either of his cheeks—he’d been crying at some point.

‘He could have tried,’ Garrett said. The floor of the cavern was littered with slaver corpses. Anders himself was surrounded by a ring of men who’d mistakenly assumed a mage who wasn’t a magister would be easy prey. Their bodies were scarred and raw with burns, their clothing little more than charred scraps of fabric. It wasn’t a pretty job, by any means, but then successful ones so often weren’t.

Once more, Garrett found himself feeling relieved that Ser Thrask wasn’t here to see his more brutal handiwork. He could be proud of Garrett and Anders’s results, without ever having to share the burden of their methods.

Garrett cleaned his sword for what had to be the hundredth time that day, his arm long past the point of tiring, a dull cramp pulsing between his thumb and forefinger. He cracked his knuckles as best he could underneath his gauntlets, then sheathed his sword and shifted the weight of his shield to give his other arm, bruised and numb, some minor relief.

‘Did my mother ask for your…assistance?’ Feynriel demanded, wary, cautious. He was watching Anders, too—in such close quarters, it was hard not to see what Anders could do, who he was—and Garrett suspected he detected hope and awe in Feynriel’s eyes, positive qualities that disappeared whenever they darted Garrett’s way. Templars inspired those feelings in some people, certainly, but mages were rarely amongst them; apostates never were.

‘I believe she had something to do with all this, yes,’ Garrett said. ‘Funny—she had the audacity to be worried about you. But since you were doing so well without her interference, I can see now why you’d feel betrayed by all this.’

‘My own mother sent templars after me.’ Feynriel shook his head, retreating to the shadows. When the heel of his boot came up against a mossy cave-wall, and he realized he’d backed himself into this corner, Garrett saw him press his hands to the uneven rock, dirt underneath his fingernails, scrabbling for purchase, seeking to turn his disadvantage into something that could hold him up, and maybe even make him stronger. ‘You have no idea what that means.’

‘Some idea, probably,’ Anders murmured, checking his own nails. One was broken below the quick; as he bit it, Garrett felt a far-off pinprick of annoyance and pain. ‘But I do think, in her own way, your mother was trying to do what’s best for you. She might not understand what that is; you might not understand what that is; the templars certainly don’t understand what that is; I’d never try to understand, since it’s different for all of us, and one cowl doesn’t fit all—but honestly, this couldn’t possibly have been it, could it?’

Feynriel was only momentarily cowed, while Garrett did his best not to look impressed. It wasn’t just the most rational Anders had been all day, it was the most rational Anders had ever been, speaking with the same gentle cadence Father used whenever they came across injured refugees on the roads between Lothering and Denerim, during the distant years of Garrett’s youth.

‘I won’t go there,’ Feynriel said finally. ‘I had a plan.’

‘A plan that involved slavers?’ Garrett asked. ‘Good plan.’

Anders shot him a look.

‘…Not that,’ Feynriel admitted, having the decency to appear at least somewhat embarrassed. ‘I was going to let them take me closer to Sundermount, then give them the slip.’

‘Ambitious,’ Garrett said. ‘Why Sundermount? Because of the view?’

‘Because the Dalish are there,’ Feynriel replied. ‘And I’m half-Dalish. They’d take me in—the Dalish don’t have templars, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Garrett said, resisting the urge to rub at the knotted muscle at the very base of his skull, right where it clenched into his aching neck. The Knight-Commander never appreciated it when a member of her army showed any visible signs of weakness. ‘The Dalish also don’t have shoes. Which as you might imagine is very impractical all the way up on the peaks of Sundermount.’

‘Also, Dalish women…’ Anders began, then cleared his throat. ‘I mean—no offense to your mother—but they’re really not…normal.’

Feynriel looked baffled, and still tired, and still determined, and somehow even more petulant. ‘They would teach me. I know it.’

‘Is there some reason your mother didn’t raise you amongst them?’ Garrett asked casually. Feynriel had no reply for that, and Garrett turned on his heel with all the pomp and finality his dreadful armor lent him. ‘That’s what I thought. Come on. We’re going.’

‘But you can’t just—’ Feynriel protested.

‘Show up here, rescue you, and do what it takes to keep you out of slaver hands in the future?’ Garrett asked. He could feel Feynriel staring daggers at the back of his head; could feel Anders’s rush frustration, of regret, and beneath all that, his weariness; and he could also feel himself doubt the necessity of his actions, which was always a sign he was too tired to be allowed to make his own decisions. Better to let someone else who actually wanted that distinction have it, for all the good it would do them. Either way, there was no chance of Feynriel being left to the Dalish when they’d already made it clear enough to his mother how little they belonged amongst the clan. ‘I believe, Feynriel, that’s exactly what I’ve already done.’

*

Moral dilemmas and unquiet conscience aside, Garrett was still able to eat twice his body weight at dinner, so heartily that Carver and Paxley scooted away from him along the benches, apparently afraid he’d eat them, too.

That was all right—Garrett was used to people shooting him eternally reproachful looks by now. Why, just on the boat ride over, Anders and Feynriel had formed an unspoken alliance wherein they took turns condemning Garrett with their eyes. He wouldn’t have said there were many physical similarities between the two mages—Feynriel was young, Anders less so; Anders was possessed of a biting sense of humor, whereas Feynriel seemed to take everything far too seriously; Anders wore feathers, Feynriel wore dirt—but that was before seeing an identical contempt warp their faces. They did have one thing in common: hatred for templars, and one templar in particular was the focus for all their frustrations now.

Both regarded Garrett like he was a shambling corpse every step of their journey back from the Wounded Coast. After a few hours of this treatment—they alternated at first, then ganged up on him for maximum effect—even Garrett’s armor couldn’t protect him from each fresh condemnation.

He’d never set out to be an enemy of the mages; he’d never wanted to be anything but a man who acted on instincts, not on conscription, not as a symbol. The realization was sobering, not to mention extremely hard on his back.

Both the heavy plate and the weight of Garrett’s thoughts had something to do with his appetite. Garrett couldn’t afford to let Feynriel’s youthful resentment get under his skin. If he let every mage who had a problem with the templars put him off his meals, then he’d never eat. Judging by the way his appetite had been going lately, even one missed meal would feel like setting one foot in the grave.

‘You’re looking awfully thoughtful, brother,’ Carver said, not concerned enough to move any closer.

‘It’s the meat pies,’ Garrett lied, washing his last bite down with a swish of water. He burped loudly, for dramatic effect. ‘I think they’re giving me indigestion.’

‘I wouldn’t touch those with a ten foot pole,’ Paxley informed them both sagely. ‘The meat’s chopped so fine that it’s impossible to tell what you’re really eating.’

‘I hear it’s the templar recruits who don’t pass Meredith’s Vigil,’ Garrett said, pulling his tray away with a wink. It was cruel of him to fuel Paxley’s fear of the rumor mill, but in his defense, it had been a long day.

A man had to make his own fun at the Gallows. Otherwise, his time there was bound to feel more like a life sentence.

*

After dinner, Garrett made his way through the long, empty corridors back to his room. It was the end of the week, which meant most of the younger templars were out enjoying the vices of Hightown after embodying its virtues for so very long. The tower was largely silent, so dark Garrett couldn’t help but be reminded of the caves where they’d found Feynriel. Garrett dutifully blocked out the image of his sharp, indignant face and his bruised disapproval at being locked away. They didn’t know each other. Garrett had saved his life not because he had to, but because it was the right thing to do. So of course Feynriel blamed him, and his own mother, instead of the people who really deserved to be held responsible.

Whoever they were. Slavers were among their number, that much was certain.

Somewhere below Garrett’s feet, deep in the Gallows, Feynriel would be getting settled in for his first night in custody, his first night not spent as an apostate. He was, quite literally, out of Garrett’s hands for now. There was no sense in dwelling on what he couldn’t change.

The scrape of leather boots on stone and a sudden leap of anticipation in Garrett’s chest were the only forewarning he had of someone lurking just outside his door, waiting in the shadows for him to arrive.

‘Hello, Anders,’ Garrett said wearily. ‘Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s not polite to hound a man like a mabari?’

‘But I do so like treats,’ Anders replied.

Garrett moved past him, shouldering the door open and letting fate decide whether Anders followed him inside or not. He certainly wasn’t going to bow and invite him in of his own accord.

Not surprisingly, Anders did follow, with a swish of feathers and a click of the latch. ‘Anyway, I just dropped by to let you know that I am angry. Because it’s no fun if you don’t know it, and I wanted to make you feel bad, since in my opinion you deserve it.’

‘You’re angry at me?’ Garrett took off his gloves and dug his left thumb into the ball-joint of the right, fending off a fresh cramp. ‘No. I couldn’t tell with all the glowering.’

‘It’s better to be thorough,’ Anders agreed. ‘Your templar ways are rubbing off on me. First I’m helping apprehend innocent mages for a life of paranoid loneliness and institutionalized self-loathing, and the next thing you know I’m dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s and being scrupulous. The Gallows are even more dangerous to a man’s natural constitution than I was led to believe.’

‘And that speech you gave Feynriel back in the caves?’ Garrett asked. He sat on the edge of his bed, fully aware there was nothing quite so awkward as a templar wearing only part of his armor—like stripping down in the Rose to nothing but your socks, caught midway by your company for the evening. There was something vulnerable about it, and Garrett was simply lucky he had so much practice pretending to be unselfconscious that he could feel comfortably successful now. ‘That was just to make him feel better, out of the goodness of your heart?’

Anders shrugged. ‘Sometimes I speak without thinking.’

‘Once again, if you hadn’t told me, I would never have known,’ Garrett said.

Anders crossed the room to Garrett’s little window, peering out, then making a face at the pathetic view. Garrett hated it, too—just a narrow glimpse of the courtyard below, and a few high Gallows walls, windows across the way with bars over them, to keep their inhabitants in as much as to keep trouble out. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ Anders continued. ‘I wish I’d had someone to tell me it isn’t quite so dire as it seems when I…you know. Then again, at present, it actually is as dire as it seems, so obviously I’ve been all caught up in the propaganda. Trying to convince the boy things won’t be as bad as he’s imagining when I know it’s probably a lie makes me feel dirty. Doesn’t it make you feel dirty?’

Garrett scratched behind his ear. Something stiff and flaky—probably dry blood—peeled off beneath his nail. ‘The Wounded Coast makes me feel dirty. Tal Vashoth blood makes me feel dirty. Giant spiders, slavers, stepping in drake shit, narrow caverns, dangling roots, assorted bugs—’

‘This glimpse into your inner processes is disturbing,’ Anders said.

‘Templars have to pass the time somehow,’ Garrett replied. ‘When they’re not lying to innocent mages, of course.’

Anders snorted, soft and low under his breath. ‘This isn’t really going the way I’d wanted it to. You could have the decency to act guilty for my sake. Also,’ he added, leaning against the far wall, ‘you’re really going to have to see a healer for your back. If not for yourself, then do it for me, because it’s been keeping me up all night for the past week.’

‘My back?’ Garrett asked.

‘The very one,’ Anders confirmed.

Garrett reached up to rub his shoulder; his palm met with cool steel, a hard ridge of hammered metal instead of tight-knit muscle. He still had his chest-piece on. ‘That makes us even,’ Garrett said. ‘I’ve got your nightmares, and you’ve got my sore back.’

‘I don’t know why you’d insist on being stubborn about it.’ Anders wiggled his fingers. ‘In the right hands, you’d feel much better, whereas no healer I know can cure a Warden of being a Warden. Big difference. You can punish yourself for your cause all you want, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t involve me.’

‘The healers here are busy enough looking after real injuries,’ Garrett said. ‘If they dealt with every sore muscle in the Gallows, they’d never have time to salve wounds and cure fevers.’

‘Well,’ Anders said, inspecting the nail he’d broken earlier, ‘I do happen to know a healer, myself. Normally he doesn’t feel charitably inclined toward templars, but perhaps he’d make an exception for an exceptional case, in this particular situation.’

‘Are you offering me a massage?’ Garrett asked, feeling as though he’d passed through a tear in the veil somewhere between the door and the bed and dropped into the Fade. ‘Is this practice for the second career you’ve taken on at the Rose?’

‘I was offering to perform medical services,’ Anders said, with a scandalized look. He ruined things moments later by grinning in delight. ‘It’s not my fault your mind immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion. You’re always thinking in the gutter, Ser Garrett. You hardly embody all the virtues a templar should.’

‘I’m more than just a templar,’ Garrett pointed out. Somewhere along the way, the conversation had taken a detour into unfamiliar territory. It wasn’t like taking a wrong turn on the Wounded Coast, warm sand changing to murky silt beneath his boots, the ground becoming noticeably more treacherous. Here, Garrett had only his instincts to follow, and they didn’t serve him well with Anders, even despite the emotional cues and warnings he was given.

Still, they’d gotten here somehow. Even if Garrett didn’t understand the means, he could still experience the rewards. Knight-Commander Meredith was fond of saying that no one had to understand the Maker’s plan in order to continue living by it—and while most of the time Garrett thought that was a load of nug dung, every now and then there were times when he didn’t.

‘Why do you think I suggested something like this in the first place?’ Anders asked. He regarded Garrett with a level gaze, fingers twitching together as he did away with a loose hangnail. This time, although Garrett waited for it, there was no quirk of mirth to his mouth, nothing to give away the joke.

‘I’ll have to think about it,’ Garrett said. He meant the massage, of course, but it was also a literal answer to Anders’s latest question. He would have to think about the reasons why, if only because understanding the mage you were meant to work with, and manage, and protect, was probably the most important element of the process.

Anders shrugged one of his gray-feathered shoulders, turning to rest his fingers on the handle of Garrett’s door. ‘Well, don’t let it keep you up all night.’ He glanced toward Garrett sitting on the bed, his bare arms stark against the heavy skeleton of his armor. ‘And remember—I’ll know if it does.’

*

Despite Garrett’s lingering, curious misgivings, the next few nights passed without incident, and although Garrett’s back continued to trouble him, Anders didn’t bother him about it again. Days became weeks, nights became more nights, and nothing of note happened in the Gallows. Ser Keran disappeared in a flush of good humor to finally undertake his own ritualistic joining with a mage; Paxley spread a few rumors about a dwarf-run expedition to the Deep Roads that was, as most of Paxley’s rumors were, thoroughly ludicrous; Garrett trained until his muscles ached and soothed their protests in a steaming bath later.

If Anders noticed the sudden uptick in his zeal for physical exercise, he didn’t say anything. There was no reason for them to spend time together outside of an assignment, but Garrett found himself lurking nearer and nearer to the mage libraries in his off-hours. He told himself that he was only seeking out Bethany—maybe looking to get an insider’s opinion on Feynriel, since he hadn’t crossed paths with the lad after bringing him in—but that wasn’t strictly accurate.

The truth of the matter was, for all the conversations he shared with Hugh, Paxley, Ruvena and Carver over their sparse templar meals, none of them could replicate the cadence of sparring wits he’d settled into with Anders.

‘Developed a sudden interest in mages, have you, brother?’ Carver asked as he headed out of the library himself.

Garrett fell into step with him; it was always a sobering experience when Carver was able to see through his actions and understand his motives. At least Carver was easier than some to distract from the truth, just long enough for Garrett to make his escape before being forced to answer his question. ‘And you were just catching up on some light reading in the stacks, I’m sure. What was it this time—magical history or something more theoretically intense? Magical philosophy, perhaps—that seems just up your alley.’

‘I was meeting with Bethany,’ Carver replied. ‘You remember her. Our sister.’

Garrett paused for effect. ‘Oh, yes. Of course. Charming young woman. Nothing at all like her twin.’

‘Ha,’ Carver said. ‘Bethany was right. You are off your game.’

Garrett did his best to ignore the implications—at least Carver hadn’t come to that conclusion on his own; Bethany had always been better versed in subtleties—refusing to ask himself the deeper questions of why, and how did Bethany know, and also was it that obvious? These things happened; he had a lot to think about, and thoughts were so often the natural enemy of action. The quiet periods in the Gallows were somehow worse than the periods of crisis, because at least the latter gave everyone something to do, whereas the former gave them nothing more than time and speculation. And Paxley’s rumors, which did the opposite of help.

‘Anyway,’ Carver said, heading off down another pathway, their separate busy-work always placing them on opposite ends of the Gallows, ‘we’re visiting Mother soon. All of us. Bethany’s been granted the request for good behavior, and we have to make sure Gamlen hasn’t sold your dog off to make some seedy taproom’s meat pies.’

‘Or Mother, for that matter,’ Garrett replied. ‘Well, it’s true. Widows have more tender meat than Mabari; Gamlen of all people would know that.’

‘Your sense of humor grows more disgusting by the hour,’ Carver said.

‘At least it’s growing,’ Garrett pointed out.

With Carver gone, Garrett was free to go about his business with a renewed zeal that further impressed Knight-Captain Cullen, already the only man in Kirkwall who truly respected Garrett at all. Whether his respect was totally or only somewhat misplaced remained to be seen.

‘There are times, Ser Garrett, when I wonder if you aren’t the ideal templar sent to Kirkwall to show the rest how it’s supposed to be done,’ the Knight-Captain said.

Garrett shook his head, feeling the sweat drip down the back of his neck, rolling over his shoulder-blades, each twitch and twist of the sore muscle strung tight beneath. ‘If anyone deserves that honor, it’s you, Knight-Captain,’ Garrett said, while the other recruits rolled their eyes at his flattery in the background—not realizing it wasn’t a compliment, just a deflection of a wrong impression, and ultimately, the truth.

*

It had been a long time since Ser Keran joined the old table for any meal; he’d been dutifully ignoring Garrett since Summerday, which was understandable, and also something of a relief. But that evening, after Garrett’s second scalding bath of the day, he found Paxley and Hugh and Ruvena gathered around Keran in the mess hall, hanging on his every word as he did his best to eat and not be sick all over his friends’ boots.

Garrett knew the expression well; he also knew the feeling beneath it. He remembered his first night after meeting Anders, after being changed by Anders; while his own situation was a little more specific, more darkspawn dreams than usual, he couldn’t imagine it ever being pleasant, with or without Warden involvement.

‘I’ll take that,’ Garrett said, sliding Keran’s bowl of pungent stew out from under his nose, replacing it with a handful of less offensive rolls. ‘Fair trade, isn’t it?’

‘He’s just undergone his ritual,’ Paxley protested, sounding positively horrified at Garrett’s casual behavior, his callow assumptions, his refusal to behave as though this meant anything.

Garrett dug into his new bowl stew. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Keran pick at the roll gratefully, gaining speed and zeal as his stomach visibly settled. ‘Happens all the time. And Keran hates this stew, Paxley. Are you trying to kill the man?’

‘Just asking questions,’ Paxley muttered.

‘Ah,’ Garrett said. ‘The most dangerous weapons.’

Gossip continued over the sound of Keran chewing and Garrett scraping every last drop of stew off the side of his bowl; gossip, and at last some news of Feynriel, proving to Garrett once and for all that Knight-Commander Meredith was right about the Maker and his plan—she just hadn’t fully represented the blighted coincidence of it all, the humor, the madness.

‘They must really be running out of options,’ Ruvena said, tracing the rim of her mug thoughtfully. ‘Doesn’t it seem a little cruel to bind one of us to a veritable boy?’

‘That’ll put an end to your trips to the Rose,’ Hugh added. He shook his head in sympathy, his face a mask of ill-concealed amusement, patting Keran’s shoulder repeatedly despite each answering wince. ‘Sabina’s brat regardless, I’m sure they’ve got rules about letting children run loose in the brothel.’

‘He isn’t a child,’ Keran said quietly. The soft, white bread had lent him strength, but he still bore the evidence of the trauma he’d been through—evidence only Garrett seemed to notice. Garrett wondered whether Feynriel had bad dreams, too, not of the deep, but of the alienage, of the Fade, of slavers and the Dalish. ‘He’s just…younger, that’s all. And from what I’m given to understand, he’s immensely powerful, so the responsibility really couldn’t be trusted to anyone his age.’

‘You’re probably the closest they’ve got anyway, Keran.’ Paxley picked something green and stringy out of his stew, cringed, and let it drop back into the bowl. ‘What?’ He scowled, mouth twisting below his moustache. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Ruvena. He is the youngest.’

‘Garrett brought that mage in, didn’t he?’ Hugh asked. Garrett felt Hugh’s gaze bore into his forehead, but he didn’t look up. He was keeping his head down, his focus on the hearty meal in front of him. Now that he had two bowls to finish, there was no reason to concern himself with the petty conversations all around. ‘And I heard he’s half-Dalish. Does that mean you’re going to stop wearing your boots and start eating berries and communing with the forests, Keran?’

‘If it worked like that, I’d be out slaying darkspawn right now, wouldn’t I?’ Garrett said. Even when he was trying to keep a low profile, it was impossible for him to keep his mouth shut.

If he hadn’t inherited that trait from his father, then he might just have picked it up from Anders.

‘I think I’ll turn in early,’ Keran said. He stood with the half-eaten roll clenched in his hand. There was a moment when he swayed and looked almost as though he’d fall face-first onto the long dinner table, but he managed to catch himself. No one reached out to help. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night… I’m sure you all know how it is.’

‘We do,’ Ruvena assured him. ‘…Take care of yourself, Keran.’

There was a moment of silence which Garrett knew would have been the best time to look up. He didn’t take it.

He may have been an exemplary templar by Knight-Captain Cullen’s standards, but there were certain foes that Garrett didn’t have the mental acuity to fight. He listened instead to the precise steps of Keran’s boots against the stone as he left the mess hall, each one fainter than the last. Gradually, the clatter of hundreds of forks and more than a dozen separate conversations rose over the sound, and Garrett’s ears were filled with the same noise he heard every night.

It was almost as if nothing had changed. Except that once again, for someone other than himself, everything had. And it wasn’t Garrett’s place to have any hand in it, no more than he had already.

*

This time, when Garrett climbed the steps to the libraries, he didn’t linger in the hall. The image of Keran’s usual rosy complexion diminished to a sea-sick gray was stark in his mind—Garrett didn’t want to risk running into anyone who might want to talk about it. Worse, he didn’t want to risk running into Keran. Just having a man’s mouth on your cock once didn’t make his business your business, but there were some expectations, awkward as they were to acknowledge, that never faded, no matter how many weeks or months or even years had passed.

This late in the day, it wasn’t crowded in the stacks. A few of the mages sitting together at a round table looked up when Garrett came in—no doubt wondering whether he’d come to haul one of them off to prison for the night. One of them—a woman with dark feathered hair and a nose like a bird of prey—seemed to recognize something in his face.

‘Oy, Fereldan,’ she said, leaning back in her chair to peer around a bookcase. ‘You’ve got a visitor.’

‘How many times do I have to tell you—it’s Anders,’ Anders said. ‘Which means I’m from the Anderfels. Honorary Fereldan I might be, but only because I had to live there for so long, and fight so many darkspawn. That practically makes me one of them, but…’ His eyes lifted, over an uneven pile of vellum scrolls, tucking a small volume Garrett didn’t recognize against his chest and beneath his feathers. ‘Oh. It’s you. How…unexpected. Still, pretending I don’t know you would be so uncomfortable—will you join me in my office, Ser Garrett?’

Anders’s ‘office’ was no more than a darkened corner of the stacks he shared with Bethany—Garrett couldn’t count on the gloved fingers of one hand how many times he’d met her there, where the air was musty and cool, and only the dimmest light filtered in through the shelves, from a high, distant, narrow tower window.

Garrett leaned against the wall, watching dust motes descend along a pale shaft of light. It all felt too familiar, too different at the same time.

‘Fancy meeting you here,’ Anders said, voice sounding cheerful enough, but only superficially so. Garrett searched for some indication of his moods, if he was mad or happy or annoyed or hungry, but there was nothing, not even the dimmest echo of emotion. Everything was too far-off, barely more than surface level, leaving it too quiet for Garrett to eavesdrop.

Fighting blind was something Garrett did best, but he had no instincts for a man like Anders, no predictions, nothing in his gut telling him which move would be a feint and which would be the killing blow.

‘So,’ Anders continued, ‘what brings you to this place of learning, Garrett? Looking for naughty books? There are some in the stacks, where the histories of Maferath are supposed to be, but I couldn’t tell you how they got there. Andraste’s revenge, maybe?’

‘I wasn’t looking for you,’ Garrett admitted.

Anders sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘No. Of course not. Your sister, then?’

Garrett folded his arms across his chest. The question ran deeper than Anders knew; the answer came less easily than it should have. ‘No. The boy—Feynriel.’

‘Checking up on him?’ Anders’s eyes were bright in the dark. ‘…Curious, to show such sympathy for a prisoner, one you chose to apprehend. More templar guilt in the very flesh? Or was it—oh, yes. Of course. Keran.’

‘Mages gossip just as much as templars, I see,’ Garrett said.

‘Not at all,’ Anders replied. ‘They gossip far more than that. In fact, I can’t believe it took you this long to find out. I’ve known for ages. At least, it feels like ages. But things are very boring here, so it might have been a little shorter than that.’

‘What’s shorter than ages?’ Garrett asked.

‘Decades, I believe.’ Anders turned, sneaking the book he’d been hiding somewhere into a cluttered shelf, pretending to be nonchalant. Garrett felt that: a flicker of adrenaline, a pulse of excitement, wickedness, self-congratulation and even amusement. Then Anders cleared his throat, leaning casually against the tomes at his back. ‘You’re concerned for your…friend. Is he a friend? Acquaintance. Part-time lover. It’s all very sweet, really, if unexpectedly so—for a templar. Not to mention torrid. And here I thought you lot were supposed to care for no one at all.’

‘What were you reading?’ Garrett asked.

Anders’s face lost some color, but in the shadows, it was difficult to tell how much. ‘Nothing. Just a very boring magical…thing. You wouldn’t understand it, not having magic, being a Fereldan, probably not knowing how to read—’

‘You’re a terrible liar,’ Garrett said.

‘I am a magnificent liar.’ Anders sniffed. ‘…When it counts. If you must know—but only because I am in no way embarrassed by it—it’s part three of a recently popularized series called Hard in Hightown.’

‘Well,’ Garrett said.

‘Exactly,’ Anders replied. ‘My greatest dream is to someday meet the brilliant mind behind the literature. I do think we’d get along. It’s as though, right there on the page, is every most secret, scandalous thought I’ve ever entertained—hello there, person eavesdropping on us. Care to step out and join the conversation, or are you more of a listener?’

Garrett heard it—the creak of a floorboard behind them, a hand steadied against a book, a scuffle of bound spines and loose pages. Anders shot him a look, and Garrett shrugged, and they both waited, until a tousled head peeked around the corner. Familiar, sullen gray eyes, dogged by deeper intelligence and incurable curiosity and some new shade of fear. It was Feynriel in the flesh, and Garrett stiffened, immediately uncomfortable, though it really shouldn’t have mattered to him what history they had, whether or not his choices were merited.

Some people seemed to think they were, but that, as always, was neither here nor there.

‘This place is too small,’ Anders sighed. ‘Whenever you talk about someone, they invariably show up. It’s spectacularly inconsiderate. Hello, Feynriel.’

‘I was told I’d find you here,’ Feynriel said, hesitant. He wasn’t talking to Garrett, but he was watching Garrett, with a newfound wariness. ‘But not…’

‘Just pretend I’m not here,’ Garrett suggested. ‘Anders does it all the time.’

‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ Anders agreed. ‘It may seem difficult at first, since he’s so large and sturdy, but I often find it helps to think of him as a rather ugly piece of furniture—because of the armor, of course. Not Ser Garrett himself. He isn’t quite so ugly as all that.’

Feynriel’s full lower lip twitched, almost like he was about to smile—but Garrett had never seen that expression on his face before, so he couldn’t be sure. What he did know was that, for some reason, Anders’s particular abrasive charm, the sheer audacity of his speech, did something to soothe the torment of emotions in Feynriel’s adolescent soul.

After all, Anders was a healer.

*

It took some time, but as Anders kept talking—giving voice to whatever thoughts drifted like flotsam through the ocean of his mind—Feynriel began to relax. The tight set of his jaw softened—it was only then that Garrett realized Keran had been making nearly an identically tense expression over his dinner—and his eyes warmed from cold steel to warm mahogany.

Garrett couldn’t help but feel like an unseen intruder on the conversation between the two mages; his presence was tolerated, a rare enough gift, but ultimately ignored. Feynriel had apparently taken Anders’s advice about Garrett to heart—as though it was easy for him to pretend that the templar standing next to them was nothing more than a stone gargoyle or a statue of Andraste, a landmark for men and women to meet next to and share their secrets in front of, but no more than furniture, as Anders already explained.

Garrett didn’t know if it was a mark of trust, or something designed to make him feel invisible.

‘This is everything I ever feared,’ Feynriel said, urgent and hushed. ‘The First Enchanter has no idea how to help me with my nightmares—and the Knight-Commander says if they continue, they’ll have to make me Tranquil. I thought perhaps I might be able to hide my dreams—at least for a little while—but now...’

‘Now that you’ve been bound to a templar, you can’t hide anything at all,’ Anders finished for him.

Feynriel nodded. He was looking pale in the darkness that surrounded him, and the skin around his lips had turned a faint green. ‘Ser Keran knows—he’s already asked me about them. There’s no reason for him not to go to the Knight-Captain if they don’t stop. They’ll probably say I’m putting his mind at risk, too, and you know they won’t want to lose one of their precious templars to a damaged mage.’

‘First of all, best to calm down,’ Anders said, realizing what Garrett had—that Feynriel’s voice was rising with every word. By contrast, Anders’s tone was soft as the velvet that lined the pews in the chantry; Garrett had never heard him take such care with anyone before. ‘Not that you have much reason to be calm right now, I’ll grant you that. If it were me I’d be running about screaming like a Shriek. Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t believe in platitudes when the truth is often the more potent poultice. But there are solutions beyond Tranquility.’ He paused, shooting a sideways look in Garrett’s direction. The intensity of it hit Garrett like a lightning spell in the chest, threading electricity through his skin, his veins. ‘In fact… I’ve heard that there are ways to get out of the Gallows, if you know the right people.’

‘That sounds remarkably like—’ Garrett began.

‘—the worst possible thing I could mention in front of a templar?’ Anders asked.

Garrett resettled his weight, folding his arms more comfortably over his chest. ‘Quite.’

‘I can be so thoughtless sometimes,’ Anders admitted. He fussed at the tie holding back his hair, then lifted his shoulders in a feathery shrug. ‘Just something the people who love me have all learned to live with over time. As you can see, I’m trying to help someone who needs it—that’s thoughtless enough already, isn’t it? One of the stupidest things a man can do, mage or templar. What’s one more log on the fire?’

‘Point taken,’ Garrett said, while Feynriel looked perplexed.

‘There’s something I can do?’ he asked. ‘So you mean—it isn’t hopeless?’

‘Not even all templars are hopeless,’ Anders replied. ‘Just most of them. But it isn’t as though you can leave without a plan. A good plan, I mean; a plan that doesn’t involve running away to the Dalish. It’s rather embarrassing when you help free a mage only to learn he became an abomination the very same evening. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Feynriel clearly didn’t, but Garrett did, and it was going to force him to look at Anders in a brand new light, he just knew it. If only impractical people could remain always impractical; if only the good were always good, the incorrigible always incorrigible, the cruel always cruel. But even Carver had his moments of tenderness and caring, quiet and unnoticed as the subtle light just before dawn, just as Bethany could be stubborn, and Father selfish, and Mother afraid.

‘Oh well,’ Anders said. ‘It’s not as though I’ve anything better to do, so I suppose I don’t mind explaining it.’

*

Feynriel was the sort of person, Garrett had at last come to understand, who took every little thing that happened to him to its ultimate extreme. It was a symptom of his youth, a symptom of his loneliness, part of a recent and overwhelming realization it was him against the rest of the world. Now, that world had narrowed its focus, and he wasn’t alone anymore, and everything was far too much for him, far less simple than it had been before. He’d done what any sensible lad would do under the circumstances.

He’d panicked.

Anders did his best to talk the boy down, to ease his troubled mind, and Garrett could feel little flickers of healing light throbbing in the air around them as Anders worked his magic. Literally.

But with Feynriel bound to Keran, and the details of the ritual so shrouded in mystery, so specific to Kirkwall, so beyond any mage’s current ken, there was little Anders could do other than counsel Feynriel toward patience.

‘I hate patience,’ Anders said, when they were alone at last. It was long past Feynriel’s bedtime, Garrett suspected, and long past the library’s open hours, and they snuck by a slumbering archivist as quietly as they could, Garrett’s armor a faint rumble in the dark.

Outside, in the hall, Anders’s stomach grumbled, and he scratched it with one hand as he stretched with the other, fingers curling and uncurling in the air above his head.

‘But that was fun, wasn’t it?’ he added, shooting another one of those meaningful glances in Garrett’s direction. ‘Very bracing to see your handiwork with your own two eyes—Feynriel thriving in this place, afraid even the slightest misstep will lead to his greatest fear—’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t catapult him out the window right then and there,’ Garrett replied.

Anders covered a large yawn with his palm. Garrett harbored intense weariness for a brief moment; then, just as quickly, it was gone. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He would never have fit. Besides, you heard his mother. The boy’s a dreamwalker, I think, and he knows our faces, our names. I have enough trouble with my dreams without an adolescent prodigy infiltrating them—although, come to think of it, that sounds like an excellent plot for the next installment of Hard in Hightown.’

‘Along with Idunna, Exotic Wonder of the East,’ Garrett agreed.

Anders looked positively dreamy. ‘My life should be chronicled,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought as much.’

He turned a corner, then another, and Garrett began to recognize the direction, at first a vague sense of continuity followed by sudden realization. ‘Are you walking me back to my room?’

‘And how,’ Anders agreed. ‘Now that you know too much about the, ah, topic from before, I have to make sure you don’t run straight to the Knight-Commander with your information.’ He paused, eyes bright. ‘But you don’t plan to do that—do you, Garrett?’

There was only one explanation for why he was suddenly so insightful, so keen. ‘Whatever Bethany’s told you about me, she’s a dreadful liar,’ Garrett said.

‘That seems to be a family trait,’ Anders said. ‘You should really see someone about that—you Hawkes need to reform yourselves before it’s too late.’

‘If I had a sovereign for every time someone’s said that to me,’ Garrett replied, shaking his head.

‘Then you’d be rich enough to buy one of those fancy mansions in Hightown, and I might have wound up bound to a far less malleable templar.’

‘I wouldn’t exactly call myself malleable,’ Garrett said.

‘Trust me,’ Anders told him. ‘By the time I’m finished, you will be.’

*

Despite being good with words, Garrett found himself ill-equipped to argue Anders out of a course he’d already set himself on. He moved full speed ahead like a ship with bursting sails, and Garrett could only be swept up like a gull in his wake.

He locked the door to Garrett’s room behind them; having been waiting for this moment of relief all day, Garrett refused to be daunted by unexpected company, and began to strip off his armor. It was difficult to feel self-conscious in front of someone whose dreams and feelings you’d shared in the dead of night, but Garrett still felt a twinge of something hot and fitful in his gut after he tugged off his gloves and moved to pull at the clasps that held his chest-piece in place. The big muscle in his shoulder spasmed—even his own body was betraying him to prove Anders right—but he managed to remove both the heavy breastplate and the piece that covered his back without too much difficulty.

The simple cotton shirt he wore beneath the armor was damp with sweat. He hesitated a moment before tugging that off too.

‘Well,’ Anders said. He cleared his throat, pointedly averting his eyes—which only drew attention to the fact that he’d been looking in the first place. ‘On the bed, then.’

‘And this is all meant to convince me that you aren’t practicing for a career at the Rose,’ Garrett said, clicking his tongue against his teeth. He no longer had the energy to resist Anders’s energy, nor his determined commands. In fact, falling face-first onto his bed seemed like an incredibly appealing suggestion at the minute. Anders was cleverer than he looked.

After the barest of gestures at indecision, Garrett allowed his legs to collapse underneath him, the rest of his body carried forward by the momentum of his own weight.

On impact, he let out a groan of relief into his pillow.

‘If I was—’ Anders began; Garrett heard him moving across the room, ‘then I would be utilizing all the powers of my magnificent imagination right now in order to pretend that I find a pile of limp, sweaty, templar muscle impossibly attractive.’

‘Mmurfh,’ Garrett said, which was about as useful a contribution to the conversation as he was capable of making.

Anders tsked. The bed creaked as he lowered himself onto it, the fabric of his robes falling over the backs of Garrett’s thighs. ‘Poor Ser Garrett. There are escape avenues for templars too, I’d imagine. Ones beyond working yourself into an early grave.’

‘Is this a healing session or a lecture?’ Garrett wondered.

‘Hush now,’ Anders murmured. ‘You just lie back and let your insubordinate mage take care of all your ills. Or at least, the physical ones.’

Garrett wanted to point out that he was lying forward and not back, but that was one of what Father used to call his less charitable impulses, and so he fell silent instead, huffing with anticipation.

Anders’s hands settled over Garrett’s bare shoulders, able thumbs digging into the tight knot of muscle at the center of his back, on either side of his spine. Garrett wriggled comfortably, stretching his arms out at his sides. No one had ever indulged him like this before—perhaps because there’d never been a need.

Need itself was the staple of templar life, and had been the staple of soldier life before that. Even life as an accomplice to two apostates had need as its primary condition, with only the occasional acceptance of its more callow relative want. Whether or not that was the source of Garrett’s current bitterness remained to be seen. He preferred to blame the templar armor, since the templar armor wasn’t his own father’s fault.

‘You’re tense,’ Anders said.

‘You’re crushing me,’ Garrett replied.

Anders re-allocated his weight to somewhere between Garrett’s legs and not atop his right calf; Garrett’s toes dug into the slim mattress beneath as he ignored the body heat at the insides of his thighs. Anders traced two parallel lines up and down the length of Garrett’s spine, feather-light against each vertebrae, with a purpose Garrett couldn’t understand and didn’t want to divine. It was like Anders was indulging in a mysterious ritual all his own, complete with self-contained pomp and ceremony, and Garrett almost enjoyed being kept in the dark about it, an unwitting participant, perhaps even an unwitting sacrifice.

With his face buried against the pillow, surrounded by the scent of his own warmth and sweat, the darkness itself consumed him.

‘Not possible,’ Anders murmured, bowing his head low against the back of Garrett’s neck, where his hair was growing long, and currently damp. ‘Compared to you, I’m a delicate rose. A petal floating atop the waters. …More fodder for Hard in Hightown,’ he added, and Garrett’s eyes didn’t have to be opened for him to see the mischievous, quick quirk of his mouth, an uneven, wicked flash of teeth. ‘Does this hurt?’

Pain lanced through Garrett’s muscle, all the way between his limbs, and he clenched his fingers into fists before he could stop himself. Against his skin, Anders gasped. Garrett felt the ticklish fall of his hair against one shoulder, where, someone at the Pearl once told him, he had a fascinating patch of freckles all clustered together like the burst of a firework.

‘…I’ll take that as a yes,’ Anders said, sounding breathless. He eased the push and press of his knuckles, moving more slowly, upward, upward, always upward again. Garrett allowed himself to relax—as much as he could with each fresh flicker of refusal from protesting muscles, the even rhythm of Anders’s hands not quite soothing because of the ache they brought.

Wounds always got worse before they got better; Garrett recalled Father’s old words along with his healing hands, injuries long since scarred over, and the childhood belief that all hurt was permanent and unshakeable, that—once in pain—he’d stay that way forever, always in pain’s thrall.

‘Stop fighting me,’ Anders muttered. Garrett realized he was digging his nails into his palms; that his arms were locked into place like they were made of ceremonial armor; that the small of his back was arched away from Anders’s touch in an attempt to escape relief. The human body engaged in such contradictory behavior all the time, as far as Garrett knew, but he’d never expected his own to be so foolish. According to his standards, he was supposed to be better than that.

Slowly, determined not to let Anders feel smug about it all, Garrett let himself relax a second time, unclenching his jaw, uncurling his fingers, unflexing his toes. Anders’s knuckles dug into another knotted muscle, this time with a burst of arcane heat; raw energy prickled at Garrett’s skin, the now-familiar flush he caught whenever Anders cast a spell.

And still the magic worked on him, even though he knew it was coming, even though he could sense bare glimpses of how it unfurled, straight from Anders’s fingertips to roll across his flesh.

Garrett’s breath caught in his throat; a deep moan answered the touch. New heat swelled just beneath his muscles, working its way down into his bones. The place where his ribs met his spine on the right side—which had been bothering him for months—quieted, then fell silent all together, and Garrett was too busy feeling genuinely relieved to hear or feel each staccato burst of air as Anders gasped in time to match his own ragged sounds of sheer, physical bliss.

‘Mmh,’ Garrett rumbled, repositioning himself against the bed. He heard it creak again, the mattress sinking as Anders pressed one palm against it at Garrett’s side, and leaned all the way over him. Then, his free hand encircled the taut muscle between Garrett’s shoulder and the back of his neck, where the weight of everything he wore strapped to his back gathered during the long day. ‘Maker—’

Anders laughed and rubbed harder, his touch like a poultice for healing, his fingertips smooth and warm. Hands without calluses could only belong to a healer; Garrett pushed his face deeper into the pillow and arched his back upward, long past the point of caring whether or not he let Anders know his blatant ploy had actually worked.

‘I suppose I don’t need to ask you how that feels,’ Anders murmured, turning his knuckles against a particularly difficult stretch. His voice came out winded; Garrett felt it warm against the nape of his neck.

He shifted against the bed, legs spread to accommodate Anders between them, but the added friction against rather sensitive areas of his body turned out to be a mistake. It wasn’t anyone’s fault per se; it was just that Anders had gone and ruined Garrett’s sex life, and now he was lying between Garrett’s thighs doing all manner of delicious things to his body. And there was no time to think about how unfair it all was, since his cock was throbbing between his legs, demanding he continue to rub up against the pallet, wanting to finish what Keran had started so long ago on Summerday.

Already it felt like another lifetime.

Garrett bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. He thought about the smell of Darktown, his last night at Ostagar, Carver, broodmothers from Anders’s most excruciating dreams; Anders’s hands traveled down, fingers digging in at the fleshy curve of his lower back. He was patently not helping. In fact, he was doing the exact opposite of helping, which shouldn’t have surprised Garrett at all, considering how contrary he knew Anders could be.

The silence in the room was punctuated only by Anders’s uneven breaths, and the shift of fabric against his body as he squirmed further down to focus his attentions on the area just above the swell of Garrett’s ass. Warmth spread flush through Garrett’s body; he hitched his hips up, angling for more attention while at the same time trying to keep from grinding his cock against the mattress.

Anders gasped, and his fingers faltered against Garrett’s back.

‘Everything all right up there?’ Garrett asked, turning his face to one side. The cool surface of his pillow was soothing against his cheek. His voice didn’t sound as nonchalant as he’d hoped.

‘Mm,’ Anders said. Garrett couldn’t see him, but he could imagine his lips pressed together, the firm set of his stubbled jaw.

Carefully, Anders began again, his fingers grazing the hem of Garrett’s soft gray trousers. They were too thin for anything but to be worn beneath his armor, beneath his templar skirts. Heat pulsed through Garrett’s limbs, straight from the center of his gut; he was all too aware of where Anders’s body was rubbing up against the insides of his thighs, and no amount of picturing broodmothers was going to do away with it. Instead, when Garrett closed his eyes, all he could picture was Anders between his legs, blond hair loose, pupils blown with Garrett’s desire. He imagined what it might have been like to have Anders between his legs on Summerday instead of Keran, and another moan escaped his lips; Anders ground his fingers into a hard knot of muscle to the left of his hip, and the moan turned into something else, a deeper growl, trapped in Garrett’s chest.

Distantly, he registered Anders’s warm breath against his shoulder. Moments later, soft lips were pressed to the ridge of his spine. And still Anders’s hands never stilled, while his mouth drew ever downward, tongue dipping in at Garrett’s back dimples where his skin was dotted damp with sweat.

Garrett twitched. Surprise and pleasure coursed through him, each traveling after the other in quick succession. Anders made a soft noise of approval; Garrett felt it thrum against his skin.

‘I’m beginning to think…’ Garrett said. His words came out muffled by the pillow.

‘Don’t think,’ Anders replied, and those words were muffled by Garrett’s flesh. ‘Thinking and templars never go well together.’

‘…that you did this on purpose,’ Garrett concluded. ‘That this was all—’

‘—my evil plan to begin with?’ Anders teeth scraped along the base of Garrett’s spine, in the dip and the hollow of his back, just above the swell of his ass. He could only hope the answering burst of need hit Anders below the belt with the same keen sense of immediacy and despair; if his gasp was anything to go by, they were both equally affected. Whose pleasure it was in the first place didn’t matter. It was theirs now, shared, together. ‘That I didn’t do this out of the kindness of my heart? Garrett, I’m— I’m wounded— I’m a healer, after all—’

The plain-spun fabric of Garrett’s trousers shifted; he felt Anders’s knuckles hook under the waistband, tugging sharp and unexpected. Garrett lifted his hips in answer, a tacit agreement that didn’t need to be spoken to be made clear. Anders drew his trousers down, all the way to his knees, a hiss and a slip and a shiver of fabric somewhere close in the dark.

‘—and, I was curious,’ Anders continued, mouth moving across the back of Garrett’s thigh. Garrett could barely hear him, could barely register the words as real; they became nothing more beyond the rhythm of his lips and the skirting of his breath, Garrett’s hairs standing on end, shiver after shiver twitching at his skin. ‘I mean, really, the opportunity was there, and how could we live with ourselves if we didn’t try it?’

Garrett’s fist bunched in a handful of bedclothes. Anders’s fingertips were pressed against the inside of his thigh, up close to the place where soft skin met even softer skin, a vulnerability Garrett wasn’t accustomed to. It wasn’t as though he was baring his throat to another man’s blade, but he couldn’t see, couldn’t direct, could only feel and react while Anders’s fingers tripped into long-buried secrets. It went against every sensible rule he had—not to mention every templar rule, never turn your back to a mage and all that—but it was the first new experience he’d had in a while that didn’t involve the distressing side effects of blood magic.

It was obvious by now how eager he was to take it.

‘Meredith’s mistake, really,’ Anders whispered, a faint darkness to his voice that made Garrett shiver again. ‘Emotions are one thing, but thoughts... They’re how you see things coming.’ Then, he swiped his tongue along the tight ring of muscle secreted deep in a place Garrett rarely thought about, palm braced somewhere near Garrett’s elbow.

Finally, blissfully, Anders was silent.

There was nothing precise about it, nothing to indicate his tongue could move faster than most men could think. But Garrett suspected—dimly, in the part of his brain that still worked—that it had something to do with how hard he was, dick trapped against the mattress, searching out friction like darkspawn sought an Archdemon, with the same mindless, ceaseless need. They both lacked rhythm; Anders’s tongue moved as unsteadily as Garrett’s hips jerked, impulsive and rash and unpredictable. Garrett scrabbled at the pillow, elbows bent, legs splayed, and spent himself early, messily, half into his smallclothes, half against the sheets.

Echoes of that pleasure lasted long after he went limp, while Anders pressed his face into the small of Garrett’s back to stifle three short, brittle cries. As it happened, as Garrett let another man’s climax pulse through him wave after wave, he understood at last why Anders had done it, what impious inspiration had compelled him, what brilliant stroke of genius brought him to this conclusion before anyone else.

*

They didn’t sleep, but Garrett was too boneless to roll Anders over, and Anders as heavy as a lap cat, draped half-over Garrett’s back, half-crushed against the wall. It couldn’t have been comfortable, but he was quiet for the first time since they’d been introduced; even his emotions were settled, becalmed as the steady rise and fall of his chest.

Garrett let his mind wander, let himself slip in and out of rational thought. The rest was pure satisfaction, which Anders mirrored. At last, he shifted, fingertips dancing along the inside of Garrett’s arm.

‘So,’ he said, voice sleepy, slurred, but also unbearably self-satisfied. ‘How’s the back?’

‘You tell me,’ Garrett replied.

Anders bowed his head; Garrett felt him pout. ‘That’s no fun at all. I can praise myself any day of the week, but getting someone else to do it? So much better.’

‘Sounds dangerous,’ Garrett said.

‘I’m dangerous,’ Anders pointed out. He was right about that, and not in the way the Knight-Commander probably thought, and Garrett smiled into the pillow where no one could see him, a little self-satisfied, himself.

*

Sometime in the early morning—to avoid being seen—Anders returned to his room; it was all so terribly adolescent of them, save for the fact that Garrett was looking to avoid something a little more serious than a reprimand from Mother, these days.

It was against the rules for templars and mages to fraternize, for all the obvious reasons. The last initiates caught in the act had been sent to Aeonar, and Garrett had no intention of landing himself in yet another imprisonment facility—not when he already got quite enough of that from the Gallows on a daily basis. But, while avoiding discovery, there was a certain joy to be found in the act of rebellion. It wasn’t even simply the sex—although that aspect was incredible, made all the more delightful as it became all the more illicit.

And if one man’s sexual frustration made for a potent climax, then the combined forces of two men’s sexual frustration was nearly enough to bring the aged stone walls crumbling down around them.

Anders returned after the first night, then again the next night after that. Without ever really discussing it, they fell into a pattern of what could only be called a mutually beneficial arrangement. Garrett didn’t always get his backrubs—sometimes they were too impatient for that—but he wasn’t complaining. That would have been far too ungrateful.

Secretly, Garrett knew exactly what they were really getting off on, and Anders’s mindblowing stamina and talented fingers were only a part of the equation. The reality was that there was an explicit appeal in taking Meredith’s ritual and twisting it to suit their purposes instead; it was the closest Garrett would get to flipping off the Maker himself along with Andraste, and all those types who seemed incapable of finding contentment unless they were impinging on the freedoms of others.

‘Maker…’ Anders moaned one night, his face hidden in the damp crook of Garrett’s warm shoulder. ‘Garrett.’

‘’Maker Garrett’ is a step up from Ser Garrett,’ Garrett observed, nose pressed to the pillow.

‘You’ve just confirmed every one of my worst fears about templars,’ Anders said. He was breathless, but rapidly approaching his second wind. ‘You’ve all got secret aspirations of deification. Shall we save time now and skip straight to Saint Garrett? I wouldn’t want to slow you down during your ascension to the Maker’s golden kingdom.’

‘I think I’ll hold off on that, if you don’t mind,’ Garrett said. He yawned, and one of his ankles popped as he stretched his legs. ‘There’s no way a saint can do all those things with his tongue—and I’ve no interest in retiring just yet.’

‘Not when you’ve so much left to learn,’ Anders agreed, limp and cheerful in his own way.

*

Unfortunately, not everything about templar life could be clandestine meetings in Garrett’s quarters, titillating orgasms that shuddered through two eager bodies, Anders’s beginning just as Garrett’s ended, or sometimes, indescribably, the other way round. If that had been part of templar life, Garrett would have signed up years ago—during adolescence, when all this activity would have been far more appropriate. But the truth was, they were both prisoners of the same curse, one that had come from too much cleverness, from paranoia, from Meredith and First Enchanter Orsino. The only difference now was: neither Garrett nor Anders was actively suffering for it, at least not all the time.

Sometimes, Garrett did suffer—when practicing with a few new recruits, for example, same as always, only to feel an unexpected burst and shiver of pleasure tear through his belly and pulse through his limbs. He found out soon enough what that was: Anders catching a moment alone in the bath or curled up in his bed, hand wrapped around a growing erection. ‘Just to see if it would work,’ Anders explained the very first time, delighted, laughing when Garrett cornered him in his room, one hand splayed on the wall behind him, teeth scraping along the stubble at his jaw. ‘You bother me with your exercise so often—and I thought to myself, why shouldn’t I bother you with mine?’

It was distracting, but that kind of distraction wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, despite how often Garrett pretended to complain about it.

Eventually, it was going to get him killed—enjoyment of any kind was like a death sentence to a templar, whose vigilance ultimately depended on wary misery—but at least Garrett knew he’d die with a smile on his face, and that was more than he used to say.

But other people’s problems had a way of casting a dark pall over everything good; communal living would do that to a man, since other people’s business became exponentially more unavoidable in such close quarters. And Garrett had only to look across his dinner table to see how Keran was suffering—it was no great leap of the imagination to think of Feynriel and his nightmares, the dreams he feared would one day claim him.

If Meredith’s zeal for tranquility didn’t get there first.

‘I know that look, brother,’ Carver said, suspicious, tearing a roll in two and dipping it in his gravy. ‘I know it, and I don’t like it.’

‘Maybe it’s just my face you don’t like,’ Garrett suggested. ‘Did you ever think about that as a distinct possibility?’

In the distance—on the mage’s side of the mess—he thought he saw gold embroidery catching the light, tarnished, well-worn, a hint of equally golden hair doing the same. But it all faded amidst a flurry of other robes and unfamiliar cowls, and Garrett pretended he was choking on a fishbone in order to distract Carver from experiencing any sudden epiphanies.

‘That goes without saying,’ Carver said. ‘You’re not getting out of our next visit with Mother, if that’s what you’re thinking. You’ve always made her worry, and if you don’t go, she’ll be convinced you’re lying injured in a ditch somewhere. If only.’

That was ridiculous, Garrett thought, not simply because it had always been obvious to everyone but Carver that he was actually Mother’s favorite—but he heard Anders’s laughter in the distance, saw Keran nearly pitch forward into his stew bowl, and was too caught up in wondering how this was what his life had become to think about age-old grievances that no longer mattered, anyway.

*

Garrett’s attempts to catch Keran alone all failed spectacularly; if there wasn’t some menial task to complete, there was always someone else, blithely unaware of the changes that plagued them all, of the dark circles beneath Keran’s eyes and the way he twitched just after the sun went down, always during suppertime. Paxley was the only one who had an excuse, since all his physical, emotional, and mental acuity seemed to have gone toward the massive task of growing his even more massive mustache, but perhaps the others simply hoped that by ignoring the obvious problem it would cease to plague them. And it did—cease to plague them, that is—while Keran himself was another story.

Garrett bested him three times one afternoon before the Knight-Captain had Keran retire his sword for the day. There was some sympathy in Knight-Captain Cullen’s expression as he relieved him of his afternoon’s duties, but it faded beneath all those other things that comprised Knight-Captain Cullen’s character: dignity and focus and duty, and the inability to speak the word prostitute, or even think the word, without blushing.

‘Your mind is elsewhere,’ Anders said that night, dry against Garrett’s shoulder. ‘And I, for one, am incredibly offended.’

Garrett ran his fingers through Anders’s hair, carelessly undoing the tie that held it back from his face. He looked particularly wanton at the moment, swathed in moonlight, one brow lifted, eyes sparkling as he attempted to sulk. With his knees on either side of Garrett’s thighs, it wasn’t very effective.

‘I know I’m going to regret this,’ Anders continued, rolling to one side with a puff of hot air, ‘but I always do what I’ll regret the most. So: copper for your thoughts?’

Garrett sighed, and looked quickly away from him, staring up at the ceiling—a much safer view. ‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘Oh, good,’ Anders said. He traced a meandering pattern across Garrett’s chest, from freckle to freckle. ‘I was hoping you’d start doing that if we did this enough.’

‘Usually it’s the other way around, isn’t it?’ Garrett said. ‘You want to fuck the thoughts out of a man’s head—not into them.’

‘Hmm.’ Anders dug his scratchy chin into Garrett’s shoulder with enough force that it almost seemed like a method of torture. ‘Possibly; by the same token, it could just all be a part of my master plan. You aren’t choosing now to start complaining about my methods, are you? Because I’ll have you know that’s the quickest way to offend me.’

‘I was thinking about Feynriel,’ Garrett admitted. Mostly because, as far as he could tell, there was absolutely no way of continuing his current conversation without running aground.

Anders lifted an eyebrow. Garrett could feel the motion tickle against his chest. ‘Well… I suppose that’s slightly better than saying you were thinking about Keran, what with all our…history. But it is absolutely terrible etiquette to be thinking about another man while you’re in bed with the first one. Even if that other man is really another boy. A half-Dalish boy with an all too Dalish mother. You’ve no idea what madness he might have inherited.’

‘Anders,’ Garrett warned.

‘Maker Garrett,’ Anders replied. He heaved an appreciative sigh over his own joke, then rubbed his rough cheek against Garrett’s bare arm. ‘All right, I’ll bite: why were you thinking about Feynriel? And can it please not be something boring?’

The sheets whispered as Anders levered himself onto his elbow, and Garrett didn’t know how to say he was thinking about the boy because it was obvious that Feynriel was coming to the end of his rope, dragging Keran along for the ride. It wasn’t any of his business, but he had been the one to bring Feynriel in.

Even if the Dalish couldn’t have helped him, Garrett was the one to bring Feynriel here. Maybe in doing so, he’d made Feynriel his problem. Some of the blame rested with Ser Thrask, obviously. But not enough of it.

That was why he hated being a templar most of all. It was involvement, responsibility, the cost of a duty that didn’t allow him to move on.

In some ways, Father had been lucky—and all of them, back then—because they never stayed in one place long enough to see what effect their actions had on it. It was lonely, yes, and probably not ideal, either. However, it did allow them to cling to some ironic semblance of freedom; whether they were right about the feeling or not, it lingered still.

‘Oh,’ Anders murmured softly. His chin pressed against Garrett’s muscle again, so Garrett knew he was staring. ‘You really are thinking, aren’t you? I should have known by the look. The one I’ve…never really seen before.’

‘There’s a lot you haven’t seen before,’ Garrett said.

Anders almost laughed. ‘Not that much, actually. You’d be surprised.’

Garrett licked his lips and lowered his voice. It was a comical and ultimately pointless effort, since he already knew no one was eavesdropping. Anything worth hearing had ended with Anders’s third loud orgasm of the night—and that alone was enough rebellion to get them both in serious trouble. The rest would merely compound the sentence. ‘The other night, I believe you mentioned there was a way of getting Feynriel out of here.’

‘I’ve no idea what it is you’re referring to,’ Anders said. He squirmed, pushing himself up in bed so that Garrett could meet his eyes. ‘But if you did want certain answers to certain questions you certainly may or may not have posed—all purely hypothetical, of course—then I’d suggest speaking to that lovely Ser Thrask of yours. He seems like the sort who might have the pertinent information to educate a curious young templar, doesn’t he?’

Garrett swallowed, allowing his gaze to drift to the ceiling again, the water stain from above, wrinkled like a distant continent drawn on an ancient map.

‘Must you make all your metaphors sound so sexual?’ Garrett asked.

Anders grinned. ‘It’s a gift,’ he said. ‘Better not to question it.’

*

Ser Thrask no longer trained with the younger recruits; he was older now, he said, and prone to aching joints, and the armor did him no favors, either. But, Garrett was beginning to notice, he was a remarkably difficult man to pin down, always off with Jamos on mysterious trips to the Wounded Coast, sometimes even going as far as Sundermount. When he wasn’t traipsing about elsewhere in the Free Marches, he was hidden in the various unexpected hexes of Kirkwall, and whenever Garrett asked a fellow templar if they’d seen Thrask at all, the answer was usually the same: a shrug, followed by a thoughtful tilt of the head, an attempt to place when they had seen him last.

‘You know, I haven’t seen Ser Thrask all day,’ Ruvena murmured. ‘Usually I think of him as just standing over there, by the steps, but he isn’t there now, is he?’

‘Probably having an early lunch,’ Garrett said. ‘Or perhaps taking a rest in the shade. It wasn’t anything important, anyway.’

Carver watched him a little too closely when they sparred later that afternoon, and though Garrett eventually had him on his back in a thunderous crash of heavy armor, Carver’s face red with mottled exertion, rage, and embarrassment, it still took him longer than it should have to hand his little brother his own ass on his own sun-shield.

‘You’d better watch out, brother,’ Carver warned. ‘You’re getting old, and one day—’

‘One day I’ll be all gray like Father and still trouncing you,’ Garrett concluded, ‘thus humiliating you in front of all your friends. Better not to think about that sad, sad fate, eh, Carver?’

Carver had no idea his glimpse of possible victory was less an inevitable evening out of skill and more exigent circumstances, but the latter was just as valid as the former when it came to being soundly defeated. And Garrett could never let Carver win, because that would ruin everything.

*

Garrett was eating an early supper himself when he felt it, a slim lance of electricity from his gut to his cock. He wondered—stuffing his arms full of the more portable items on the long mess table—if Anders really cared about the concerns he hinted at as much as he did immediate satisfaction, since there was no way Garrett could concentrate on the real issues when he was searching for a quiet corner, a slim nook, somewhere dark and private and safe to drop his fresh warm rolls wrapped in their cloth napkin, and clutch himself beneath his templar skirts.

It was the first time he had anything good to say about the design for his armor at all. But since it would have worked better at the Rose, he knew those compliments were also, ultimately, misplaced.

Garrett bent his forehead against cool stone, his breath trapped between his mouth and the wall, the bridge of his nose bruised by the time he was done with each sharp thrust into his own palm. Then he sat on a narrow bench, next to a keyhole window overlooking the Gallows courtyard, munching fresh rolls like it was a picnic, like he hadn’t just gotten off to the hands of a mage who was countless rooms and hallway-twists away.

His life was rapidly spiraling out of his own control—he knew that—but he wondered if this wasn’t better than it had been, events, trepidation, desire, action, all these elements thrilling instead of stagnating somewhere high above the water each lonely night.

*

The next morning, Thrask was in place, standing guard by the steps across from the main portcullis entrance into the Gallows proper. And, what was more, he seemed to be expecting the company.

‘Ser Garrett,’ he said, with a nod of his head as Garrett fell in beside him.

‘…Ser Thrask,’ Garrett replied, after a moment’s pause. He glanced around the courtyard, but there was no one looking their way; he didn’t feel the creep of anxiety he always did when he was being watched, but that didn’t mean he could relax his posture, either. Instead, he resisted the urge to rock on his bootheels like Carver, and stared up at the unforgiving sun, squinting through the eye-slats in his helmet.

‘Fancy a trip to the Wounded Coast later?’ Thrask asked, so casual Garrett wondered if the sun hadn’t finally addled his mind, if he wasn’t hallucinating some other question over a comment on the weather.

‘Do I ever,’ Garrett finally replied.

Not that he knew what he was getting himself into. But it was, instinct told him, better than the alternative of knowing he wasn’t getting into anything at all.

*

‘So,’ Anders said, meeting him by the shops at the gate, poking through an armory’s scanty wares. ‘This is adventurous, isn’t it?’

‘Following a commanding officer’s instructions is part of a templar’s duty,’ Garrett reminded him.

‘You get all Fereldan soldier on me sometimes,’ Anders said. He nudged at the wrapped leather pommel of an old broadsword, then made a face. ‘But you never tell me the good stories. Why is that, Garrett?’

Garrett shrugged. ‘Probably because there’s not much to tell that you don’t already know. There’ve been countless ballads composed about Ostagar, with what happened there and what happened afterward, all of them about the Hero of Ferelden. I can’t beat that.’

‘No,’ Anders mused. He prodded a dry branch of herbs, twitching his hand away when a few leaves fell loose. ‘But I imagine it would be so much fun to hear you try.’

‘I’m no bard,’ Garrett said. He caught the staff Anders had just knocked over moments before it could fall to the ground. To their left, the stall’s Tranquil merchant stared straight ahead. It was impossible to tell whether he hadn’t noticed their antics, or just didn’t care.

The Tranquil were eerie like that. That and Bethany’s childhood nightmares were the main reasons the process had never sat right with Garrett.

‘No,’ Anders agreed. His fingers traveled to grip the fallen weapon, smooth palm brushing against the rough skin at Garrett’s knuckles. ‘But there are certain sounds you make that might be considered positively musical, given the right acoustics.’

Garrett rolled his eyes. His skin felt warm, but he told himself it was only the sun on his face.

*

They met Ser Thrask at the appointed Wounded Coast approach. He was alone; Jamos had wisely stayed behind to avert suspicion. Templars and their mages rarely went anywhere that wasn’t official business—and this assignment was strictly off the records, at least as far as Garrett could tell.

He still wasn’t entirely certain what the assignment was, or what he was doing getting involved. His life had begun to seem like one very long dream brought on by delirium. He felt the hot midday sun beating down on him, heat conducted through his thick metal breastplate; over the cliff-side came the gentle song of the sea, foam-capped waves crashing against jagged rock; and, above it all, he heard Anders’s footsteps in the sand, quiet huffs of air as he tried to catch his breath from climbing the winding passageways. It was a sound Garrett had grown unexpectedly intimate with of late, to the point where it was nearly impossible not to think about Anders’s sweat-dampened skin, the clench of his thighs clamped hard around Garrett’s waist as he gasped narrowly for air.

Anders swallowed, and Garrett knew that he’d sensed his quickening pulse. He didn’t know the reason for it—they weren’t quite to the point of reading each other’s minds yet, and he hoped they never would be—but Anders was clever, could wager a likely guess.

‘I’ve tracked a group of Starkhaven mages to this location,’ Thrask said. His expression was easy and placid, as though he was commenting on the quality of the previous evening’s seafood chowder. ‘It seems a number of phylacteries were burned in the recent Circle fire, and a number of their mages took the opportunity to escape.’

‘Lucky,’ Anders said, quiet enough that only Garrett could hear him. ‘Why didn’t something like that ever happen to me?’

‘Wonderful,’ Garrett said, ignoring him. ‘How do we know they didn’t set the fires themselves? I’ve always wanted to share my living space with a mob of furious arsonists. You know, now that you mention it, that’s just the missing ingredient the Gallows needs.’

Thrask’s eyes crinkled at the very corners, although he didn’t go so far as to smile. ‘There is the distinct possibility that in my…advanced years, my tracking skills have become something less than they once were. If I’ve followed the mages to the wrong location, then it would make sense for you to find nothing in this cave. If that turns out to be the case, then I would expect you to report back to me with information about the failure, and I can tell the Knight-Commander that we were effectively barking up the wrong tree.’

Garrett felt a sharp splinter of amusement lodge itself within him, just as Anders opened his mouth to speak.

‘You’re not very good at all this subterfuge, you know. Why not just tell us straight out—you want us to let them go?’

‘Lovely night, isn’t it?’ Thrask replied. He clasped his hands behind his back, glancing toward the sky. ‘Not a cloud in sight. Perfect weather for an old templar to go on a stroll.’

*

‘That devious Thrask,’ Anders said, picking delicately across a rickety bridge at Garrett’s back. ‘You just can’t trust a man of his caliber. I should know—I see myself in him, about a hundred years from now.’

Garrett reached out to steady Anders beneath the elbow a bare instant after his foot went straight through a moldy plank. Dust and splintered wood filtered down into the darkness below, as the bridge took a sharp turn and carried them onto a set of equally rickety stairs.

Anders didn’t thank him, but he did clutch his greave. ‘When do you suppose all this was built? Back during the very first Blight, when gryphons weren’t extinct and Thrask was still a strapping young lad?’

‘This was your idea,’ Garrett felt compelled to point out.

They were deep in the holding caverns now, twisting passageways leading to dead ends and worse, the lairs of giant spiders, defending their slightly less giant spider offspring. Garrett could feel spidersilk in his hair, could still sense the brush of hairy legs against him in the shadows, could hear the whisper of their bodies rubbing up against each other as they planned their next attack.

The mages from Starkhaven could consider themselves lucky if they weren’t devoured by slicing pincers, dragged back to cocoons of thick white webbing in the depths of the Wounded Coast.

‘It was not,’ Anders said, sounding indignant. ‘Where would you get a crazy idea like that?’

Garrett didn’t bother to glance back over his shoulder at him, didn’t need to see the look of horror and protest on his face, or the streak of spider blood on his jaw, just beneath his ear. ‘You put me in contact with him. You’re all for mage freedom and mage rights.’

‘Not at all,’ Anders replied. ‘I’m all for my freedom and my rights. Which are under constant, distressing assault on the best of days, but this, Garrett, this goes above and beyond.’

Garrett had to hush for a moment, something slithering beneath the toe of his boot, but nothing lashed up at him between the planks from somewhere vaguely underneath, and he took another tentative step. Every time he made some progress, he counted himself luckier than the piles of bones strewn about the place, cracked skulls covered in lichen and moss.

‘I’m a bit confused,’ Garrett admitted.

He knew Anders was smiling, a wry, crooked expression that changed his entire face. ‘Yes, well. I have that effect on people.’

Somewhere in the distance, Garrett thought he could hear voices, hushed conversation, familiar words, something more than the mindless chatter of haunted beast to haunted beast, the promise of shambling corpses or even shades beneath the loam. But it was also possible it was just the depths getting to him, memories of Anders’s nightmares and Deep Roads he’d never seen.

‘You told me to speak to Thrask,’ Garrett explained, rubbing the hilt of his sword with the palm of his hand. The hinges on his gloves creaked.

‘Yes,’ Anders agreed. ‘And why would I do that if I could have told you everything? There’s something going on in the Gallows,’ he added, ‘and I like to gossip as much as the next man, but since I’m terrible at engineering my own escapes, what makes you think I’d willingly volunteer to be a part of anyone else’s? I can understand when a thing’s wrong, and I certainly don’t enjoy seeing big brutes upholding the status quo, but I’m not quite at the point yet where I’m willing to risk my head—your head—our heads for strangers.’

Garrett allowed himself a moment of surprise, then disappointment, then something suspiciously close to betrayal. ‘You’re joking.’

‘I always laugh at the end of my own jokes,’ Anders said. ‘Because I’m helpful. Sometimes.’

‘So you’re here—’

‘Because you’re playing hero,’ Anders confirmed.

Garrett felt, rather clearly, as though he’d been tricked; the quirk of Anders’s lips that he found so pleasant when they were in bed together seemed now to be mocking him, as though all this was an elaborate prank, as though he was hardly the renegade and the revolutionary he’d pretended to be.

‘What about when you were yelling me in the sewers?’ Garrett reminded him. ‘You certainly sounded like you believed in what you were saying then.’

‘I hardly think now’s the time to be having this conversation,’ Anders said. ‘We were surrounded by dead people. Dead people always make me go a bit, you know, strange. Can’t help but let my emotions get the better of me. But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a very noble person.’

‘You’re a healer,’ Garrett said.

‘Not something I chose, really.’ Anders’s voice remained disgustingly cheerful. ‘Natural talent. I like being good at something.’

‘And a Grey Warden,’ Garrett added.

There was the rustle of feathers as Anders shrugged. ‘Not something I chose, either. Complete accident. Better than the certain punishment of the alternative. Might not do it over again if I had the chance. Next piece of evidence?’

‘You’re a hypocrite,’ Garrett concluded finally.

At last, Anders had the decency to sound a little wistful, maybe even somewhere close to sad. ‘Not something I can argue with, I suppose. It happens to the best of us; some are just…more committed to the lifestyle.’

‘Which means I’m doing this—’ Garrett began.

‘—because you wanted to.’ The sadness was gone from Anders’s voice, replaced with something else, something that was deeper than bare hints and clues could explain. ‘Funny how that happened, isn’t it? Shh,’ Anders added, reaching forward to cover Garrett’s mouth with the palm of his hand. ‘Do you hear that?’

Anders’s fingers smelled of wood and elfroot, of soap and sweat and dirt and cobwebs. Garrett contemplated biting him, then listened, to the echoes of a far-off argument, heated voices, familiar bitterness, betrayal, pain.

‘I suppose we have some mages to save.’ Anders sighed, dropping his hand to reach for his staff again. ‘Honestly, I don’t know why I let you drag me into these things.’

*

They had to put aside the question of who had dragged who into what, exactly, when it became clear that the Starkhaven mages had turned to blood magic. Their leader—named Decimus, if the woman who’d screamed for him to stop was any indication—raised the dead in a ring around them. Not for the first time in their partnership, Anders and Garrett found themselves surrounded, staring down the advance of an army of shambling corpses. And not for the first time, neither Anders nor Garrett hesitated for a second. Garrett could only exhale in relief as a flash of fire reflected off the blade of his sword; Anders might have been a hypocrite, but he wasn’t willing to give blood mages free rein.

No matter how he’d reprimanded Garrett after the incident with Tarohne, Anders still hadn’t thought of a better way to handle abominations. Neither had Garrett, and the familiarity of the situation wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it did make an inevitable sort of sense.

The battle was over quickly, Garrett’s sword cutting a silver arc through the shadowy caverns, burying itself in decaying flesh and brittle bone. Anders supported him with cover fire, blasting Decimus back when he drew closer and whirling around to bury the head of his staff into a skull with a dry crunch. Adrenaline coursed through their veins like liquid lightning, burning Garrett from the inside out as he and Anders fought in perfect tandem—Anders’s staff following the path of Garrett’s blade, each motion a mirror image of the last.

It was a different unity from what they achieved in the bedroom, but it made Garrett’s heart pound all the same.

In the end, Anders was the one to finish Decimus off, sending a bolt of electricity straight through his chest. It blackened his robes at the point of entry, and he dropped like a sack of fresh fish onto the Lowtown docks. With him, the remaining skeletons fell, too.

‘What have you done?’ The mage who’d cried Decimus’s name was a woman with a purple tattoo snaking around her right eye; she moved like a lizard, her gestures quick and smooth, her eyes dark as bottle-glass as she approached them in the caves. ‘You would help the templars to hunt down your own kind?’ Perhaps predictably, she was staring Anders down, like Garrett wasn’t even there, no more than a faceless threat as her hands trembled with helplessness. ‘I didn’t listen to Decimus when he told us this was the only way—now I wonder whether I was wrong. Would you convict us all of blood magic?’

‘Grace, don’t—’ One of the other mages huddled in the depths of the caverns came forward. He was the only one, Garrett thought, who seemed cowed by his position—lost in slaver caves far from home, swept up in events he couldn’t control or even fully understand.

‘It isn’t what you think,’ Anders finished for him.

‘What is it, then?’ Garrett asked. His eyes were on Grace’s staff, his hand still clenched tightly around the handle of his sword. If she moved against Anders, she’d be dead. Garrett’s blood was still up—he couldn’t tell whether the pulse that was racing was his own now, or Anders’s. He couldn’t believe that Thrask would have asked them to free an entire group of heretics—either something had gone wrong, or Decimus had been a rogue element, something even Thrask hadn’t seen coming.

‘Decimus turned to blood magic without our consent,’ the other mage insisted. ‘We don’t want any trouble, Ser Templar. All we’re asking for is our freedom.’

‘No small request for a mage, these days,’ Grace said, her voice sour as unripened grapes.

‘Not one that’s granted often, either.’ Anders glanced down at his thumbnail, picking at a splinter. Garrett felt it, the unexpected shock and pinch, buried deep beneath the grooves of his skin. ‘You did raise an army of shambling corpses to attack us. Not exactly friendly.’

‘Because of his shield,’ Grace said.

‘Ah,’ Anders murmured, flicking the splinter away. He didn’t look up. ‘You can’t always judge a templar by his armor, you know. Just almost always.’

*

There was no time to waste; the longer Garrett deliberated, the less chance they’d have of making it out of the tunnels without being caught. Garrett was annoyed—that Thrask would leave this up to him; that Anders would have no more insightful input; that he was once again burdened with the task of thinking for himself when matters involved a predicament far beyond his ken—but as always, there was no direction for his frustrations, no one better equipped for him to offload the responsibility onto, no proper way to vent.

He knew what he would have wanted for Father, if Father had been amongst this hapless group; he knew what he would have wanted for Bethany, or even, perhaps, for Anders. But as he searched the faces lined before him, he saw no qualities he could recognize, not in all honesty. There was nothing so specific as Father’s practicality, his dry mirth and gentle humor, none of Bethany’s hope tempered with what she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe in: her own good luck. None of Anders’s hypocrisy, either, nor his wickedness, nor the gentle memory of laughter that lined his mouth.

For a moment, a long moment, Garrett saw only their fear—a fear he knew the other side of, a fear he always thought it better to ignore. It was preferable to linger in a state of blissful ignorance than acknowledge there were things his own family could do that were terrifying. Even worse would be acknowledging how terrifying it was that he was now meant to stop them, no matter what means were deemed necessary.

And yet, there was something Garrett saw that was familiar to all of them, something even he felt, not because Anders felt it first, but because it was truly his own impulse. They wanted to live their lives unbound and unhindered, suffering nothing more restrictive than menial tasks on finicky farmland, or competing with crafty dwarven merchants to sell ordinary wares.

Duty bound them, and birthright, and fear; those were pesky details of life in the Free Marches they all shared. Garrett didn’t have to be a mage to know what it was like to hate where he was and how people looked at him, because he was a templar.

It might not have been exactly the same, but it was common ground—that, and how they were all standing in the burbling remains of shambling corpses, the next few moments about to determine their fates.

Garrett wondered what Father would have wanted, if he would have encouraged Garrett to choose his own way—with the same acceptance as when Garrett sat across from him one cool evening, both of them settled by a dying campfire, Carver and the mabari snoring together, and said, I was thinking about joining Cailan’s army, and Father replied, Then don’t let anyone stop you—not even your mother.

Grace was tensed, poised on her newest argument. Some of her companions looked like they hated Garrett already; some looked simply tired. Garrett understood both those decisions, hating himself and feeling downright weary.

Anders was staring at the far wall. He wasn’t white-hot with energy, or talking to fill the silence, or really anything other than tentatively uncomfortable, and maybe a little jealous. Just like Garrett, he had little to no idea why his life had become about so many other people, how he’d come to this point, how he was supposed to move on.

Understanding people was always so difficult—so much more difficult than not understanding them.

‘Our associate is waiting outside,’ Garrett said. A few of the mages jumped. Anders’s shoulders twitched. ‘Taking a stroll. Nice weather. And the air’s awfully close in these caverns—I plan on joining him. The fresh sea-side air’s good for your constitution—a lot better than anything you’ll find in Kirkwall. I’ve got time off, and I don’t plan on spending it all the way down here.’

Grace glanced around the caves like she half-expected more templars to appear. And there it was, Bethany’s look, the uncertainty, daring to hope and not daring to hope all at the same time. Garrett hadn’t needed it, but it was confirmation, a gentle reminder that he was capable of doing the right thing.

‘But I hate fresh sea-side air,’ Anders said, turning to follow Garrett back the way they came, leaving the shambling corpses and Decimus and the Starkhaven mages behind, the first two to what they’d already chosen, the last to what they would choose.

There was no way of knowing whether or not they’d become abominations in the caverns or some time later, in open air, beyond the Wounded Coast. But it was in their hands now, not Garrett’s, and that, he’d already decided, was far closer to right than anything else.

*

Thrask spoke only of local flora and fauna on their way back to the city, and Anders didn’t speak at all, and things were rather awkward for reasons Garrett couldn’t quite place.

On the skiff over from the docks, he stared down into the deep, dark water and thought about sharp-toothed fish that survived by eating their smaller brothers. There was nothing in nature that mimicked the relationship between templars and mages—they were hunter and hunted, but that was where the similarities ended. No animal locked up his prey to make himself safer, or debilitated their minds if he thought they’d become too great a threat. Knight-Commander Meredith would have said that was because there was nothing natural about mages, but Garrett couldn’t believe that. His sister and father were people, just like anyone else.

Anders was a person, too, albeit one possessed of a scathing wit and irritatingly large personality flaws.

Garrett thought about the men and women he’d set free. There was no way of knowing whether they’d been speaking the truth or lying to save their hides; it was everything Knight-Captain Cullen had ever beaten into their heads about the dangers of mages and their duties as templars. But Garrett had always disagreed with the Knight-Captain’s appreciation for his talents, and thought the man’s estimation of his suitability to the task far too high.

This was why.

He’d known all the dangers, and he still didn’t regret his decision. That probably said all kinds of things about his character, but he was damned if he knew what. All Garrett did know was that it was a tangled knot of morals and motivations and self-awareness he wouldn’t be unraveling tonight. Weariness had settled into his bones, and he could feel his shoulder beginning to throb again as he bid Thrask his good-nights.

‘Thank you for your company, Ser Garrett,’ Thrask said, bowing his head in a way that had always seemed subservient to Garrett—subservient, and therefore unpleasant to observe. Now, it seemed more like a tip of the hat—a recognition and appreciation of the work they’d accomplished together. Thrask was far more than he seemed, hidden beneath the sun-shield.

‘It was my pleasure, Ser Thrask,’ Garrett said. He even managed to mean it, in a roundabout sort of way.

*

The long, gray corridors of the templar hall blurred together as Garrett’s feet carried him back to his room. Anders was close behind him, lingering like the heat in a coal long after the fire itself had gone out. When Garrett opened the door, he left it that way—an unspoken invitation that he’d cultivated out of simple habit, the same muscle memory that allowed him to fight on no sleep, or find his way through the Gallows halls in the dark when he was too weary even to lift his head.

Now, Garrett did look up, unstrapping his armor without the usual coy dance behind it. Piece after heavy piece fell to the floor. He didn’t bother to pick it all up, to survey the day’s damage, each singed strip of steel, much less to arrange it.

Anders’s mouth was tight, his skin pinched, like he’d been left out to dry in the sun too long. He stepped into Garrett’s room, then closed the door after a moment’s deliberation.

Although he tried, Garrett couldn’t quite get a read on what Anders was feeling. It reminded him of the ocean on their way back, dark water that seemed to absorb instead of reflect, its surface in constant motion, never lying still. There was something of that quality in Anders tonight, a murkiness that Garrett instinctively found troubling.

Anders’s fingers twitched, his shoulders coming together with a shudder of feathers. His eyes darted around the confines of the dormitory like a mabari in a war-room cage.

Garrett let out a sigh.

The sound seemed to electrify the very air; Anders jerked as though an arcane bolt had caught him square in the spine, a mottled red like a sunburn spreading over his cheeks.

‘I can’t do this,’ Anders announced. He remembered to lower his voice midway through the sentence, although the walls were thick stone, and he’d never bothered to keep himself quiet before. There was a wild look in his eyes that Garrett recognized from Ostagar—a few of the deserters had it, right before they’d cut and run. ‘I know what you’re thinking—I mean not literally, but I can guess—and this has all been incredibly fun, but that’s all it was supposed to be. Fun. I like fun. I am fun. And I rather enjoyed thumbing my nose at Meredith and her great plan for ruining the lives of mages and templars alike by, you know, doing all this. Having fun. I thought, I’d show her, turn it right back around and make it more of a blessing than a curse. But you—’

Garrett wisely remained still. His muscles ached from the fight in the caves, not to mention the trek there and back; it was easiest not to move, since Anders seemed to want a target.

‘Me,’ Garrett agreed.

‘You’ve gone and ruined it,’ Anders said.

Garrett supposed that was the truth; he couldn’t argue with it. He might have thought it was what Anders had wanted, but that was more assumption on his part, less real understanding of a real man. He should have known they’d have the same troubles with commitment—not to one another, of course, but to ideals, to action that meant more than who they were, actions that painted a picture of who they should be.

There had been moments—few and far between—when Anders had reached out and pulled back the curtain on his true feelings, shedding light on what he knew was wrong, what he hated, what he wished he could fight. But that recognition didn’t always lead to complete revelations, or to personal revolutions, either.

Garrett scratched at the back of his neck. The muscles beneath ached, strung tight with the day’s many tensions. He’d been clenching his jaw ever since the Wounded Coast, and now he really did want a backrub, Anders’s warm hands on his skin, knuckles digging in tight and freeing him of unnecessary weight.

But it was too late to ask for it now. That happy ending didn’t seem likely tonight.

‘If I had a sovereign for every time someone said that to me,’ Garrett admitted, ‘I’d be a wealthy man. Wealthy enough I wouldn’t have had to join the templars.’

‘We’d be the wealthiest men in Kirkwall,’ Anders agreed. Guilt tugged at the corner of his mouth, guilt and regret. Garrett felt it, all the way through his belly, rising higher, creeping through his chest. It tightened in his lungs, pulled his ribcage brittle over his heart, and settled in for the night. For once, it wasn’t his guilt. If it hadn’t been for Anders, Garrett would have been able to breathe. ‘It’s just…’

Garrett waited.

Anders licked his lips, fingers lingering over the doorknob, the same delicate curiosity he showed to all tactile things, fingertips light, knuckles curved, never quite touching, never quite following through to make the connection. ‘I was given a choice like this once,’ he explained. ‘By someone much more convincing. Much more…obvious about what he planned on doing. Someone much more…just.’

‘And what happened?’ Garrett asked.

Anders slipped through the door, shadow warped and stretching over the stone floor. ‘I turned him down,’ he said, before he left, and the latch fell sharply into place.

*

That night, Garrett had no dreams of the Deep Roads, heard no whispers from darkspawn in foreign tunnels nor clangs from the forge hammer, felt no heat from the buried flames. He was in the Fade instead, a gray place, cold, and a lad he recognized was following him, trying to catch his attention: Feynriel, face distorted, eyes unclear, mouth always open, reaching out one empty hand to try and hold onto him. But whenever Garrett turned to answer, to offer aid, Feynriel disappeared, until Garrett didn’t know which one of them was giving chase, and which one of them was running away.

*

Keran found him after practice; Garrett was dripping sweat, sunburned and miserable.

The trouble with coming to understand himself—to know what it was he wanted, what it was he was supposed to do, and who he actually wanted to be—was that now he had to put all that into practice. And he had to do it alone, despite orders, despite his better judgment, despite the reality of the Gallows, where routine was just as much a part of their prison as actual chains.

Keran’s skin was sallow by contrast, a sickly yellow, without the ruddy flush Garrett remembered fondly from Summerday, and especially Summereve. ‘The dreams,’ Keran mumbled, then tripped on nothing more than air.

Garrett caught him, and led him into the shade.

It took Keran a while to catch his breath; it looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. When he spoke, he was breathless, his words like runaway carts, and he had no control over them, no direction.

‘He dreams,’ Keran explained. ‘And he doesn’t wake. And if I go there with him… I’m afraid.’

‘Understandable,’ Garrett said. He waved the Knight-Captain along with a nod and a gesture to indicate Keran had been out late the night before, drinking, then another gesture to indicate curvaceous woman which would surely conjure images of the Rose. The Knight-Captain paused, spots of sun-color high on his cheeks, then nodded, and left them alone. ‘I’d be afraid myself, Keran. All but soiling my skirts.’

‘But if they make him Tranquil,’ Keran said, ‘if they do that, what… What will I be? I’ll feel it. I’ll know. And he’s afraid, and I’m afraid for him.’

‘Aren’t we all,’ Garrett agreed.

*

He didn’t know what to do to help them, but it seemed ridiculous to set an entire group of strangers free without doing the same for the people he considered, in some ways, his friends. Not that Feynriel would have felt that way about him in return, but Keran maybe, and either way, Garrett couldn’t avoid doing something.

It was just that he wasn’t really smart enough for this kind of plan. He needed someone devious, someone clever, someone wickedly brilliant. Why people didn’t confide in someone of that caliber in the first place was beyond him, but they continued to come to him for help, continued to believe he was worthy of trust, and Garrett did so enjoy the fallacy of deception. Pulling it off would be difficult, challenging, possibly delightful.

But he couldn’t do it alone.

‘You get worse by the minute,’ Carver told him, while they both polished their swords next to the private armory. The tip of Carver’s gleamed in the sunlight, but it was fletched and notched from years of hard use, years Garrett wasn’t by his side. And yet, Garrett realized, somehow, that sword hadn’t faltered. Neither had Carver.

‘I like to believe that I’m improving with age,’ Garrett said. ‘Like a fine wine, or a pair of good boots.’

‘Your face is getting rather leathery, Brother,’ Carver said. He examined his sword meticulously, squinting at the blade in the sun. ‘If I had to guess, I’d say it was from frowning all the time. You can’t blame it on your magey, either—you’ve been like this ever since you and Mother landed in Kirkwall. Did you really think I wouldn’t be able to tell?’

‘Well, you aren’t exactly the most sensitive and observant templar in the courtyard,’ Garrett pointed out. ‘Remember that time Bethany painted a moustache on your face for Feastday? You didn’t notice it until the holiday had all but passed. It practically ruined her entire afternoon.’

‘I’m a lot older than seven now, brother,’ Carver said. ‘And Bethany is too, for that matter. Do you think it does either of us any good to watch you lumbering around the Gallows like a reanimated corpse? Not to mention it’s absolute murder on morale for the other men.’

Garrett paused, fingering his polishing cloth between his gauntleted fingers. No one had ever seen fit to complain about his general attitude before—not even Anders, who was practically inside Garrett’s head these days. The fact that the rebuke was coming from Carver only added insult to injury.

Garrett’s brother was a walking deficiency of positive personality traits. If Carver thought he was in a position to say something, then Garrett really was in trouble.

‘Just doing my duty,’ Garrett said, finally. ‘If you haven’t noticed, Carver, there isn’t much to being a templar, aside from shambling up and down the courtyard while your body cooks like stewed meat beneath the plate. It’s not a terribly glamorous life, but I can’t say that I expected it to be.’

‘It isn’t really your life though, now is it?’ Carver asked. He was still focused on his blade, testing the weight, scraping it down—the practiced, knowledgeable motions of someone who’d grown up. Not a boy playing at weapons, but a man with his sword.

The entire conversation had been a trap. And since Carver had never been an adequate rogue, Garrett knew who else was behind it.

Bethany. The two of them had orchestrated this together. Garrett ought to have suspected right away, since while Carver was possessed of many irritating qualities, it was only ever Bethany who meddled, especially when she thought she knew what was best for someone she loved. In those cases, she was a veritable juggernaut.

Garrett let his sword rest against his armored thighs. It was clear now that he was stuck, that the twins were even more dangerous than he’d thought, and curiosity meant he’d have to continue, just to see what they were up to. Otherwise he’d never be able to live with himself.

‘If you’ve got something to say, you might as well have out with it,’ Garrett said. ‘Before the sun sets, or this year’s Feastday creeps up on us. Because unlike Bethany, I know the proper way to give a man a mustache.’

Carver scowled; his eyes unfocused for a moment as he stared into the middle distance between them. Garrett didn’t know what the connection was really like between Carver and Bethany—whether it was stronger because they were twins, different because they were different people, or if it was exactly the same as what he shared with Anders—but he understood now how peculiar it was to be in the grips of it, to feel a faint, unnatural longing, the sting of foreign reprimand, the burn and cut of buried desire. To know that none of it had been yours, but it was yours now, to nourish and protect and even to defend.

Carver reached for his polish. ‘You have all these noble ideas,’ he said. ‘At least, she thinks you do, and you know there’s no arguing with Bethany once she gets into one of her moods. I don’t know whether it’s because of Ostagar or what happened with Father, but you’re only here in Kirkwall because that’s where we ended up.’

‘Troublesome of you,’ Garrett admitted. ‘Did you really have to go so far?’

Carver snorted. ‘Did you really have to follow us?’

No, Garrett thought. But he couldn’t give Carver the satisfaction of being agreed with. ‘Yes.’

‘Hardly,’ Carver said. ‘We aren’t children anymore, Brother. Just because we lost Father doesn’t mean we ever needed you to replace him.’

The words hit Garrett like one of Knight-Captain Cullen’s blows—honest and square in the chest. Carver didn’t feint; he didn’t toy with his enemies. He struck out in anger sometimes, but that anger was always truthful, born of natural instinct, sincere impulse.

It didn’t feel like a betrayal or a revelation because it was no more than fact, and somewhere deep down, Garrett had always known it.

‘Well, like Father always said,’ Garrett murmured, returning to his work, ‘if you want to be treated like something other than a child, it’s best to stop acting like one.’

‘A child lives other people’s lives.’ Carver sheathed his sword and wound its leather straps around his palm. ‘I stopped doing that years ago, brother. It’s high time you did the same.’

He left Garrett on the steps, sunlight warming pockmarked limestone, half-finished blade in his lap, contemplating the implications of freedom. Just like Father had, Garrett always imagined, years before Garrett was even born, waiting for the moment some foolhardy templar would set him loose—so his life could begin, one of his own making.

*

Thrask didn’t think it would be easy.

‘Of course not,’ Garrett agreed. ‘That’s what makes it so fun.’

‘Did I say it wouldn’t be easy?’ Thrask asked. ‘Because what I meant was something closer to impossible.’

‘Even better,’ Garrett replied.

There was little time to waste, even less time to use, and barely any time at all to plan. Garrett had decided—as straightforward and uninspired as the idea was—that Feynriel had to go to Tevinter, where his magic would be understood by those better equipped to train him than any chained Gallows mages.

‘If he goes, then I…’ Keran chewed at his lower lip, for a brief few moments more like a boy than a man. Then, the illusion was gone, and he straightened his shoulders under his brightly polished shoulder-pads. ‘…then I’m going to miss my sister.’

‘True,’ Garrett told him. ‘But trust me when I tell you that family is often more appreciated when written to, especially at this stage in your life.’

It sounded callow, but it was the truth—and besides, Keran had already made up his mind, grateful and terrified and more than eager to leave a place that had chained him forever, as a reward for all his fine services.

Garrett imagined what Knight-Captain Cullen would say if he knew his favorite Fereldan recruit was currently plotting the great escape of a dangerous mage and a desperately worried templar, but Thrask merely smiled and nodded by the sunny steps, saying that he always knew Garrett was destined for something this stubborn.

‘It’s in the way you fight, I think,’ Thrask added. ‘I couldn’t imagine anything would stop you, once you set your mind to it. See you at dinner?’

‘Wouldn’t miss it,’ Garrett replied. ‘Why do you think I signed up for this job in the first place? After Ostagar, I liked the stability offered by three free meals a day.’

‘So you say,’ Thrask said.

*

Garrett ate an impossible amount; his mouth was too full to say a word to Carver, and Paxley and Hugh gladly took the opportunity to gossip even more than usual. Garrett recognized the impulse now, how bored and petty they were, how little they wanted to be here, too. But they had no reason to flee, whereas Keran did, and Garrett had to distract himself from thinking about the pitfalls of another man’s future—not to mention the pitfalls of his own—by filling himself up on brown stew and fresh bread and greasy meat.

It wasn’t as though he was planning on leaving this awful place. It wasn’t as though he could receive letters from Keran, glimpses into the world he once appreciated far outside the so-called Free Marches. But it was something, a start for someone; Keran was still young, and might be able to make better choices, and Garrett would have to grudgingly accept the consequences of his own poor ones because, after all, he had made them.

All they had to do was let Thrask distract the night patrol at just the right moment; there was one escape from the Gallows, part of the sewer system that linked it to the rest of the city, and while it wouldn’t be the scenic route, it would provide a way out. Timing was everything, and Garrett knew he was at least a deft hand at that.

Still, it was all very straightforward, without tricks or hidden cleverness—but sometimes the simplest plans did work. And if they didn’t, Garrett would provide a new distraction, while Keran and Feynriel ran.

‘So,’ Anders said, just from the open doorway. ‘Didn’t think to confer with me before you lost your mind?’

‘I wasn’t aware that was part of the agreement,’ Garrett replied.

‘You must not have read the fine print.’ Anders fussed with his earlobe, tugging at it; he smoothed out a few cowlicky feathers on his pauldrons, then shut the door behind him, loud enough to make himself wince. ‘What will happen to me if you get caught? I mean, if you get killed? Did you ever think I might go mad or get all broken inside or have to be made Tranquil?’

‘I wasn’t thinking about you,’ Garrett admitted.

Anders sighed. ‘No one ever does. I have to do it all the time, all by myself.’

‘Ah,’ Garrett said. ‘That explains everything.’

‘It’s positively shocking that you don’t know everything about me by now,’ Anders said. ‘I’m starting to feel like you just don’t pay attention when I talk, Garrett.’

‘That’s because there’s an awful lot to listen to.’ Garrett sat down hard on the bed, deflated as an empty wineskin. Of all the nights for Anders to show up, it wasn’t surprising that his arrival came just around the same time Garrett had stopped expecting him to.

He was as contrary as a cat, and just as finicky when he wanted to be. Which, Garrett had discovered, was always.

‘So,’ Anders said. He crossed the room slowly, predictably unable to take the lingering silence. ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to all this trouble just to orchestrate someone else’s escape. We’ve had rather enough of that, haven’t we? Why should Starkhaven have all the fun? For that matter—why should Ser Keran?’

Garrett blinked. He arched his shoulders, stretching the sore muscles in his back. Anders’s suggestion was occurring rather suspiciously on the heels of another unexpected conversation Garrett had entertained earlier that same day. His brows came together quickly.

‘Have you been speaking with Bethany?’ he asked.

Anders pinned him with a look, his gaze keener than any templar’s arrow. ‘Like any mage with a brain can’t come up with: let’s escape the Gallows.’

‘I assumed you wouldn’t want to get involved,’ Garrett said. ‘You aren’t that type of person, remember? It was my mistake to assume in the first place; I already promised myself it wouldn’t happen again.’

‘Now, see, I think there’s something to be said for repeating certain errors,’ Anders told him. His voice was furtive and soft; it made Garrett think of a gray mouse scurrying across the docks to hide in a nearby hole. After a moment’s fussing, Anders sat next to Garrett on the bed, the mattress creaking beneath his added weight. He stared at the closed door; his profile was stark and nervous in the dim light of Garrett’s bedroom. ‘Certain errors with certain templars—that require a certain amount of revision, after a period of quiet contemplation.’ Anders folded his hands, slender fingers lacing through each other. ‘You know, Garrett, I’ve been thinking.’

‘I was hoping you’d start doing that,’ Garrett said.

Anders rolled his eyes, but the joke had clearly soothed him. He reached out to pluck at the worn cotton at Garrett’s wrist, touching, feather-light. The little gesture, the warmth from his fingertips, made Garrett shiver. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to look back on my life and see only accidents, regrets, and a few good laughs, Ser Garrett.’

For once, Garrett knew exactly how he felt, without even needing Meredith’s ritual.

He moved without thinking, the way Thrask had described, the way his commanding officer at Ostagar and Knight-Captain Cullen had always lauded him for. His fingers were looped around Anders’s wrist; then they were on his shoulder, and Anders was beneath him, his back pushed against the sheets. Slippery, dark feathers crushed beneath Garrett’s grip, and Anders’s eyes widened—but his hands were already moving, rising to find the hidden buckles and hinges in what remained of Garrett’s armor. He already knew where they were from countless nights of watching Garrett undress himself, but this was the first time Anders had lifted a finger to do it for him.

Garrett braced the brunt of his weight against the bed, elbows on either side of Anders’s head as he leaned in to kiss him. There was always a certain roughness to their kisses, an edge that existed whenever two men with a disdain for shaving came together. Garrett could feel his heart rattling against the bars of its ribcage prison. His throat was tight, and his chest too large to be contained by his armor. Anders’s teeth scraped at Garrett’s lower lip; Garrett licked the rough bristle at the corner of his mouth, tongue slipping in past teeth.

An abrupt clank of metal was all the warning Garrett had before Anders’s busy fingers were tugging at his breastplate, pulling it toward him and off Garrett’s shoulders. The gauntlets came next—Anders tossed them carelessly aside, barely wincing as they crashed one after another onto the heavy stone. They skittered along the floor, clanged against the far wall, and fell still, empty, palms upward, glinting in the moonlight.

*

It was different, but it always had the potential to be like this, scrabbling for purchase just beneath the immediate satisfaction of what their bodies could do when their desires were linked, when their emotions were already shared. There was a moment—swift, shining—when Garrett felt like he might drown; he heard Anders gasping for air, felt his fingers rake along shoulders and skin, no chance or impulse for teasing, nothing but the clutch and scrape of his nails, the squeeze and shudder of his thighs. Knees bent, head thrown back, hair tangled and damp with sweat, his face in profile as he worked his mouth against the rough-spun fabric of Garrett’s uncomfortable templar standard-issue pillow—Garrett had never seen anything quite so enchanting as the way Anders’s eyes wrinkled at the corners, or the shadows gathering in the furrow of his brow. They were facing each other—Anders wasn’t lurking somewhere behind him, hidden from view, wicked imagination and hints of inspiration in the dark—and neither of them looked away, a coy diversion, a part of the game.

It was different, and it was dangerous, and Anders squeezed and squeezed at Garrett’s shoulders, not trying to heal him, not trying to tease him, just trying to hold on.

Garrett wondered if they couldn’t do it—if one of them wouldn’t—but neither pulled away, and Anders shoved his face into the crook of Garrett’s neck when he came, with no words left, only raw, breathless sounds. And Garrett knew him better than he’d ever known himself, each fear and each fault, the sheen of half-buried hope, resentment replaced by simpler pleasures.

*

Garrett lay on top of his chest until, finally, Anders said, ‘Oof.’ He’d been still for a long time, while Garrett watched through bleary eyes as the moonlight stole across the floor.

‘Well put,’ Garrett replied. He didn’t sound like himself, but possibly like a better person, and also, a very tired one.

Anders carded his fingers through Garrett’s hair, knotting it up at the back, then smoothing it out again. ‘Now I know why you’re always staring at the ceiling. There’s a captivating pattern up there—it reminds me of a map of Thedas I was always fascinated by when I was younger.’

‘The Imperium,’ Garrett said. ‘It looks like the Northern coast of the Imperium.’

‘And part of Antiva,’ Anders agreed. ‘I always wanted to go there. To Antiva, not to Tevinter. Tevinter’s so obvious, and not at all me.’

‘But Antiva is?’ Garrett shook his head like an old mabari. ‘You have heard about the Crows, haven’t you?’

‘They can’t be worse than the Kirkwall templars,’ Anders said.

He was right, and Garrett chuckled, his chest rumbling against Anders’s, soft hairs tickling even softer skin. Anders touched him at the small of his lower back, where all the tension was gone now, but starting to filter back.

‘We should go there,’ Anders said. ‘I mean, if we’re going to be setting everyone else free, we might as well have the same courtesy for ourselves.’

‘All right,’ Garrett agreed, with a compliancy he suspected Anders hadn’t been expecting.

‘Are you just saying that because we had very good sex and I’ve wrapped you ‘round my little finger?’ Anders asked, curling said finger high in the air.

‘No,’ Garrett said. ‘But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t factor in.’

*

Honestly, Garrett was going to regret leaving his dog behind with Mother more than anything. Bethany apparently already understood, and so did Carver, and Mother would have the twins to look after her, not to mention Gamlen to worry over. She’d be so busy she’d barely think of him. Thrask would probably miss him, poor fellow, and the lonely Knight-Captain would, too, despite feeling terribly betrayed, but as smart as mabari hounds were, there were some betrayals you could never explain to them, and that was the only thing Garrett knew he’d really regret.

‘It’s for the best,’ Anders said, dressing in the shadows, nimbly picking his way through the pile of Garrett’s discarded armor. ‘I’m not a dog person, you know. They drool and lick and pant and not even in the way I’m partial to.’

Garrett hoisted himself up onto his elbow, cheek against his palm. He saw the curve of Anders’s pale back slope and narrow and swell again, over his ass, down to his thigh, the inside of his knee, the curve of his calf. Anders paused where he was, bent over and searching for a sock, and flexed a few lean muscles to show off before he straightened, holding Garrett’s breastplate up by its leather straps.

‘This thing is bloody heavy,’ he said.

‘Not nearly so light as a bunch of feathers,’ Garrett agreed.

Anders put it aside, making a grand show of being careful and quiet, before happening upon his smallclothes with a quick sound of triumph. ‘If you get me out of this place, I will rub your back every night for the rest of my life.’

‘Good bargain,’ Garrett said.

‘Not as good as you’d think,’ Anders admitted. ‘I am a Grey Warden. So you’ve got another nineteen years, I figure, give or take the going rate on Callings these days. Not even a solid twenty.’

Garrett shrugged. A lot could happen in nineteen years, and he couldn’t find it in himself now to start complaining.

*

Anders left right before dawn, tucking a few stray locks of hair behind one ear, looking like he wanted some assurance that this wasn’t the craziest escape plan he’d ever considered—and he’d swum across Lake Calenhad once, not to mention that time he’d rappelled down the wall of the tower using a rope made of bedsheets and senior enchanters’ undergarments.

Garrett had no assurances, however, and gave him none, and he knew for a fact neither of them slept at all after that, lying in their separate beds, turning their faces this way and that, attempting to catch the barest hints of the scent that lingered on their skin, the smell and the sweat that belonged to the other.

*

They met Keran and Feynriel the very next day, operating not in the dead of night the way Garrett had imagined, but in the dim and damp hours of the early morning. A cool mist hung in the air around them—Garrett felt it against his bare skin, moisture seeping through his homespun clothing for what felt like the first time in years. He never took the armor off in Kirkwall, not even to visit his mother.

Already, just the idea of simple freedom had left his body feeling lighter. He could only wonder at the improvements that might crop up weeks down the road—or months, if they managed to make it that far.

Garrett shared a look with Anders, fighting off his urge to fidget. The feathers on Anders’s shoulders ruffled and shook like a bird’s in a storm, never quite coming to roost.

‘You couldn’t have picked anything a little less subtle to wear?’ Garrett asked.

‘I like these clothes,’ Anders sniffed. His eyes over his pout were warm and fretful. ‘I came from Ferelden in these clothes. They suit me. And they’re very slimming.’

They were Tevinter robes, Garrett noted, even though Anders had specifically mentioned on multiple occasions Tevinter wasn’t what he was interested in. But then his brow would knit together the way it always did when he was concentrating hard on lying, and Garrett supposed he’d have to deal with the issue of the Imperium if they ever managed to get out of Kirkwall.

‘You’re actually here,’ Feynriel said. His pale eyebrows nearly disappeared into his hairline. Even in the faint light, he looked harried, his eyes shadowed and his cheeks hollow. Keran put a steadying hand against his back, either to hush or reassure him, Garrett couldn’t tell.

His onetime companion-in-arms was wearing the same leather armor Garrett remembered from Summerday. That seemed like something that had happened to another man, now—so long ago that it didn’t even feel like a part of his life.

It was something like Carver had said, another life he was bent on living, one that didn’t belong to him.

‘Ser Garrett,’ Keran began, then shook his head. ‘—Garrett, I mean.’

And that made all the difference.

*

The way through the sewers was by no means clear; it was even less safe. Garrett disliked the idea of traveling through tunnels that led under water almost as much as he disliked the idea of being discovered before they were out in the city proper, still trapped in the narrow passageways with only one clear, forward escape. Every time they fought some scrabbling creature they all ended up spattered in corpse gall, mages and swordsmen alike, from how close the battles were. Afterward, Garrett cleaned his sword while listening for the clank of armor in the distance, the sound of the troops descending upon them—with all their tactical advantages.

‘You’re really going to have to stop making me nervous,’ Anders said, hand lingering on Garrett’s shoulder.

‘Not all of us have so much experience with failed escapes,’ Garrett reminded him.

At last the sewers opened up to countless more sewers, a tangled network of tunnels belching waste into more tunnels, eroded metal grating and the city’s gurgling garbage providing the sights and smells and sounds of freedom.

‘Onward, upward, out-of-here-ward,’ Anders suggested.

They took the fork Ser Thrask had told them would lead them to a friend—who that friend was had been judiciously left out of the discussion—and so met with an attractive older woman by the name of Selby, lingering in the charming part of town where the passage finally let out, in a dank and humid corner of the docks.

Feynriel was already wearing a look on his face that said if he’d known freedom was going to smell so much like fish guts, he’d have taken his chances in the Gallows. But Garrett breathed in deep while Anders covered his mouth with his hand, and Keran shrugged, smiling, giddy with relief, even if they couldn’t celebrate just yet. ‘Kirkwall,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere else like it.’

‘Thank the Maker for that,’ Garrett replied.

‘You’re them?’ Selby asked, crossing her arms and leading them deeper into the dark. ‘Didn’t say there’d be four of you, just two. Two’s a better number. Better odds.’

‘Sudden change of plans,’ Garrett explained with a shrug. He liked that he could do that now without being so loud, so very ominous. ‘It didn’t seem right to let these two delicate creatures out into the world without some added protection. Think of us as their noble body guards.’

‘Either way, it’s not my problem,’ Selby said, ‘but you’re going to have to speak to the man in charge.’

Garrett did his best to sound charming. With so much rotting fish everywhere, the task was impossible from the start. ‘And he is?’

‘Down at the Hanged Man,’ Selby told them. ‘You’ll know him when you see him. Or he’ll know you, anyway.’

*

The man in charge wasn’t a man at all, but a dwarf, who presided over the Hanged Man’s colorful taproom with his coat blown wide open and a tankard of stinking ale on the table in front of him. ‘You lot look more obvious than a group of nugs during the mating season,’ he said, toying with a playing card. Over the back of his chair a magnificent weapon had been slung, shining golden in the unsteady firelight. ‘But I’ve only got disguises for two. Unless some of you lot want to go through my wardrobe?’

‘You know, I’ve always wanted a coat just like that one,’ Garrett said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Anders murmured. ‘You haven’t the chest hair for it.’

‘Oh,’ the Hanged Man’s dwarf said, ‘I like this one.’

‘And I like chest hair,’ Anders replied.

The dwarf didn’t bother standing, but he did affect a noble bow from his seat, slipping the card back up his sleeve. ‘Varric Tethras, at your service. That Thrask sure likes changing the plot on you mid-story, huh?’

In a far corner, two templars Garrett recognized were enjoying the ambience and ogling the dirtiest of the bar wenches, but they were too deep in their cups to recognize their own faces with a mirror held up in front of them, much less their fellow soldiers. And yet Garrett still wasn’t quite able to relax.

‘Templars thrive on being difficult,’ Anders agreed. He leaned sideways against the nearest wall, looking as relaxed as Garrett had ever seen him—like he belonged in a seedy taproom far more than he did in a tower, which many would have believed a more natural habitat. But Garrett knew better than that now. ‘I’d tell you to ask them for yourself, but these two seem to have a rather tenuous grasp on reality.’

‘I don’t suppose the pair of you would be willing to stop flirting long enough to tell us where we’re going?’ Garrett interjected. ‘Call me crazy, but I’d like to get a head start before Meredith sends her hunters after us. Unless we plan on being right here, halfway through an old dwarven drinking game, when our former colleagues show up.’

‘He’s a stiff one, isn’t he?’ Varric said, shaking his broad head, perched just above his broad shoulders. He sighed—in disappointment over the impatient templars of the world, no doubt—then clapped Garrett on the lower back. ‘Relax, Thimblehead. I might not look like much, but believe me when I say I’m your man for slipping out of town unannounced.’

‘I wouldn’t think a dwarf would be very swift when it comes to daring escapes,’ Feynriel muttered.

Being so haunted wasn’t doing much for his disposition. Garrett recognized the sullen defensiveness all too well: it reminded him of Carver, sixteen years old and at the zenith of his tortured period.

‘If I told you even half the things I’ve seen a dwarf do, Feynriel, your ears would shrivel up and fall off,’ Anders informed him.

‘You know, seeing as how my ears are made of hardier stock, I might just take you up on that offer,’ Varric said, sliding out of his chair at last. He downed the remains of his tankard in one go, chest rising and falling, then wiped the back of his mouth with a dainty flick of his wrist. ‘’Cause the way I hear it, it’s gonna be one long trip. Might as well be grateful we’ve got a couple of storytellers in our midst.’

*

Varric took the long way through the hexes, leading them in a direction that Garrett suspected might actually be back toward the docks. It wasn’t a particularly heartening feeling to be retreading familiar ground so soon, but Garrett felt Anders’s confidence within him, and it steadied his own misgivings, even when they were forced to take care of a few Carta stragglers attempting to steal their purses.

Seeing Varric’s glorious weapon in action was absolutely preposterous. But the dwarf had keen aim, and Garrett was happy enough to knock some thick skulls together without any more moral obligation than getting rid of cutthroats and thieves. Which was, everyone could agree, a good thing, and had nothing to do with templars and mages at all. No; thankfully, it was far more universal than that.

‘Now, see, that’s how you go about proving to a guy he’ll be happy to have you stick around,’ Varric said, settling his golden death-monster back on his shoulders. ‘What did you say your name was again?’

‘Hawke,’ Garrett replied.

‘Sounds catchy,’ Varric said.

Keran wiped the blood off his sword while Feynriel caught his breath, braced against a nearby wall. He went in and out of moods as quickly as he went in and out of usefulness; sometimes Garrett wondered how he was still putting one foot in front of the other. ‘I had no idea the underground movement reached so far,’ Keran murmured. He glanced in Feynriel’s direction, then quickly looked away. ‘You hear whispers of it in the Gallows, but I never imagined it might affect anyone who wasn’t directly involved.’

‘Hey, you can’t throw a stone in Kirkwall without hitting someone who knows a mage,’ Varric said. He kept a brisk, steady pace, eyes on the road ahead of them. ‘Odds are even better that you’ll hit someone who’s got family in the Gallows. Not me, mind you—dwarves aren’t well-suited for any kind of skirt-wearing profession, as I’m sure you know—but it’s a hot little issue around town right now. Anyone with his ear to the ground’s just waiting for the right match to light the powder keg and send everything sky high, once and for all.’

‘You don’t sound all that concerned about it,’ Garrett pointed out.

‘Who, me?’ Varric asked. ‘I’m just a businessman and a part-time spinner of tales. I don’t get involved in politics—or age-old conflicts, for that matter.’

‘Except for when you escort refugees to the landing of their handy escape,’ Anders said.

‘I hate to give you the wrong impression, Blondie, but I’m not doing this out of the goodness of my big old heart.’ Varric stepped into a narrow alleyway, all but disappearing from view. ‘I’ve got business of my own where we’re headed, and I could use a few able-bodied men who owe me a life debt. Who couldn’t? Always useful to have a few of those around. And before you ask—no, it isn’t slaves I’m trading in. I don’t believe in getting involved in any of that nug shit, either.’

‘Slaving?’ Feynriel asked, his voice just a hair’s breadth too high. ‘…Are we really going to Tevinter?’

‘Well now,’ Varric said, the satisfaction in his voice was nearly palpable in the air—just above the shouting of early morning dockhands and all the aggressively rancid barrels of fish. ‘You’ll just have to wait and ask the captain about that.’

*

The captain, as it turned out, was a dark Rivaini beauty, with skin the color of good brandy and buckled boots that went up to her bare thighs.

Garrett knew he was staring, but it didn’t seem to bother Anders—possibly because he was staring too. They all were, and she was the type of woman who knew it, who prowled with a jaunty satisfaction like a cat about to get a bowl of cream from every man alive standing in her cramped cabin. Maps lined her captain’s desk, some ancient, some freshly drawn, and Garrett recognized the route from Kirkwall all the way to Tevinter, the familiar stretch of coastline that reminded him of the stain on the ceiling above his bed in the Gallows.

Once, it had been the stain reminding him of the coastline. Garrett liked this perspective much better.

‘So, boys,’ the captain said, ‘I can’t help but notice there are more of you here than I was expecting.’

‘Plans change,’ Varric replied with a shrug. ‘So do crews. The big one killed a handful of Carta thugs on our way here—believe me, you’re gonna want him where we’re going.’

‘Seems like the type to want even when you’re docked in port,’ the captain murmured. Garrett straightened his shoulders and rubbed the back of his neck, feeling Anders roll his eyes at the sight of someone else preening for a change.

‘Why, Rivaini, I’m hurt,’ Varric said, one palm pressed to the tufts of golden hair over his heart. ‘And here I thought you only had eyes for me.’

The captain snorted and tossed her head; a jingle of burnished jewelry followed. ‘There’s more than one treasure out there,’ she explained, with an undaunted leer of a grin in Garrett’s direction. ‘I like to think I keep my eyes on more than one prize at all times, thank you, Varric. That, and the horizon. …When I haven’t been drinking.’

‘Are you drunk now?’ Anders asked. ‘Just wondering.’

‘Saucy,’ the captain said. ‘But… Hang on. I feel like I know you from somewhere.’

‘I just have one of those faces,’ Anders replied. ‘Happens to me all the time.’

‘Maybe if you took off those robes, I might remember,’ the captain said.

Anders rubbed at his jaw. ‘Tempting, but I think I’ll pass. It’s awfully drafty on open water, and I have a delicate, mage-like constitution.’

‘The journey’s still young,’ the captain said, with a half-pout, half-wink that was singularly enticing. ‘I’m sure you’ll grow up big and strong.’

Garrett had to look away from her, had to focus on something else—something more recognizable. Feynriel was sitting, head between his legs; Keran was by his side, one hand on his back, between his narrow shoulders, at the nape of his neck. The boat was bobbing gently in place, and Varric had somehow managed to put his feet up on the captain’s desk, on a spot unoccupied by any papers, despite having the shortest legs Garrett had ever seen.

‘So I take it I shouldn’t ask why we’re all heading to the Imperium,’ Garrett said. Everyone turned to look at him, with a different sort of scrutiny than usual—less about to ask him what came next, more about to laugh at him for suggesting anyone should know. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I just like to learn a little about the people I’m traveling with. Not to mention working for,’ he elaborated. ‘Is that so terrible?’

‘Working for,’ the captain repeated, the words sounding so much sweeter when she said them. ‘I like that. Willing and able—now just tell me you’re flexible, and this is my lucky day.’

‘Down, Rivaini,’ Varric said. ‘At least save it for when we’re all going stir-crazy, weeks out on the open water.’

‘But he wants to learn about me,’ the captain said. ‘He’s interested, I’m interested—it’s the friendly thing to do. And my ship is friendly. One of the only rules to being part of the bloody crew.’

Anders was rolling his eyes again. ‘That’s not surprising.’

‘I’ll take that as a no to my question, then,’ Garrett intervened quickly. ‘That’s all right. This way, when they torture me on pain of death, they’ll never be able to loosen my tongue.’

The captain arched a brow and licked her lips, the point of her tongue coming to rest over the full swell of the bottom one and lingering there. Now it was Varric’s turn to roll his eyes.

‘At the risk of this getting too rich even for my hot blood, I’ve got some cargo that needs checking out,’ he explained. ‘You can probably put two and two together—at least, I sure hope you can—to figure out what kind of cargo it is.’

‘Extremely illegal magical contraband?’ Anders supplied helpfully.

Varric patted his stomach in satisfaction. ‘Got it in one. Nice aim, Blondie.’

‘My fireballs never miss,’ Anders agreed.

‘And I’m the captain, so I really don’t have to tell you sods anything,’ Isabela said, sounding delighted. ‘All I’ll say is this: I’ve got a thing, more like some kind of, you know, dreadfully dusty old relic, that a little birdie tells me will fetch a pretty price in the Imperium. Adventure along the way, the promise of more ships and more handsome sailors slaving away shirtless under my command… How can I resist?’

‘It’s not gonna be easy,’ Varric added; it wasn’t the first time Garrett had heard that particular warning in recent days. ‘So, Hawke—are you in?’

Garrett looked to Anders, who shrugged. ‘I’ve done stupider things,’ he said. ‘Much stupider. Not that I can remember then at present, since I had the excuse of being properly inebriated at the time, but it could be worse.’

‘How could it possibly be worse?’ Garrett asked.

Varric cringed. ‘In my experience,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t ever say that, Hawke.’

*

Captain Isabela set both Feynriel and Keran to the task of hoisting the mainsail—something she likely knew Feynriel couldn’t hope to accomplish by himself. Garrett himself was put in charge of weighing anchor, a thankless and sweaty job that left him without much time for anything else. Isabela and Anders both did something very complicated with the knots in a few thick pieces of rope, and just like that, they were underway.

It was possible that things were far more complex than they seemed, but Garrett was a terrible sailor. That he knew which end of the boat went up was a miracle in and of itself—and that much knowledge he retained only because the top side had all the pointy mast-work sticking out of it.

Garrett found Anders some few nautical miles off the coast, leaning against one very such mast, the salty breeze stirring the loose strands of his hair against his clammy brow. He wore a look of contentment that Garrett was beginning to recognize as an expression Anders only allowed himself to have when he thought no one could see it. But he was just as bad at hiding it from Garrett as he had been at escaping the Fereldan Circle.

Hopefully the Kirkwall Gallows would be different. Because, after all, he had Garrett to help him now.

‘What are you smiling at?’ Anders asked, as though he hadn’t been staring off into the great blue yonder mere seconds earlier. The ship pitched as it bore over a particularly violent wave. Garrett stumbled, but didn’t lose his balance. Already, he could feel the early morning sun baking the skin on the back of his neck.

By noon it would be near-intolerable. Feynriel and Keran both were going to be red as rage demons by the time they reached Tevinter—and that was if they could avoid their skin peeling off like a pair of reanimated corpses.

‘Do I have to be smiling at something?’ Garrett tutted. ‘Maybe I’m just smiling at nothing.’

Anders threw him a dark look. ‘Lunatics smile at nothing.’

‘Not nothing, then,’ Garrett said. ‘Something a little more than nothing, I suppose.’

‘So you’re actually looking forward to weeks’ worth of being seasick with no sight of land for miles?’ Anders shook his head, though his eyes were gleaming wickedly. ‘And here I had no idea I’d run off with a madman.’

‘I don’t get seasick,’ Garrett informed him.

‘You do now,’ Anders said. He winced when the boat broke over its next big wave, as if to prove a point.

Somewhere in the distance, from atop the crow’s nest, Captain Isabela informed them all there were storm clouds on the horizon, then let out a whoop of pure delight. In spite of the fact that Garrett had just signed up for weeks of being trapped in a creaking hull with the same five people and a terminally upset stomach, he almost answered her call.

Freedom was freedom, after all. Even when it smelled of sun-baked sea-salt and vomit.

Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him.
Foul and corrupt are they
Who have taken His gift
And turned it against His children.
        Canticle of Transfigurations, Transfiguration 1