In All But Name - Chapter 1
The Beginning & the Ball
The Kingdom of Ferelden did not have a queen.
It was often a topic of much discussion across the country, in everything from the seediest brothel to the most elite tea salons.
The kingdom did have a king.
One who was handsome, and dashing, and who had heroically saved them all from the blight. True, he was technically a bastard; but he was the last survivor of Calenhad’s line and that was deemed, for the most part, good enough.
Besides, he was a really good king.
What he was not, though, was married and so, the kingdom did not have a queen.
Instead, it had a woman. One who was young, and beautiful, and of noble birth. One who had also saved them all from the blight and who was, unequivocally, in love with the King.
By all accounts – not to mention numerous witnesses at specific occasions over the last nine years – the King was hopelessly in love with her too.
Which begged the question: why didn’t the kingdom have an actual queen? When, in reality, it had one in all but name?
It was a topic currently being discussed by four farmers in the tavern that Elissa had chosen. It was a small, out of the way place where she wasn’t likely to be recognised, but, just in case, she had pulled the hood of her cloak over her distinctive red hair and chosen a table in the darkest corner.
He’d find her. He always did.
But it left her in the perfect position to overhear the farmers’ conversation, and that was proving, at least to her, to be a riveting discussion.
“It don’t make no sense,” one of them was saying. “If they was togevver during the blight, then why didn’t he marry her right after?”
“I dunno,” another piped up. “Maybe they wasn’t togevver back then.”
“Nah. They was,” the third added. “Remember what they said about the ball?”
Ah yes, the ball.
It had been held after the blight, but before she had left for Amaranthine. Ostensibly, the ball was to celebrate their new king. In reality, it was little more than a mechanism to prove to the world that the Kingdom was now back to normal.
They hadn’t had an awful lot of time to talk between her recovering from whatever killing the archdemon had done to her, and him learning, rather rapidly, how to be king. In fact, between her injuries and his exhaustion, the instances of them both being conscious and in the same room had been few and far between. She had awoken more than once to find him asleep in a chair placed next to her bed.
When they had talked, they had agreed that they loved each other, that they could not be married if Ferelden and the Calenhad line were to survive, that the idea of having her as his mistress was out, and that they wanted more than anything to be able to keep their promise of staying together no matter what.
It had left them in somewhat of a grey area. One that hadn’t been made any clearer by the time of the ball.
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