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The carriage that arrived at Castle Fhirdiad on that day bore the Fraldarius Crest and banner but carried no Fraldarius within it. News spread fast, and a king’s ears were among the first to hear.

So when she walked into the castle’s reception hall, Dimitri was already waiting, expression even but wondering, his hands restless at his sides but never crossed over his chest where the Blaiddyd coat-of-arms stood as a shadow on silver armor.

The heels of her boots announced her arrival before any knight could, and she came into Dimitri’s limited field of vision as effortlessly as flowers arrived in spring. That was to say—clumsily and slowly, one step at a time.

The dim Faerghus light all seemed to gather in her hair, in the tight braid she had tossed over her shoulder in a faintly familiar manner, though Dimitri could not explain the familiarity. Her dress fought against her every step on her way, until she stopped and cursed at the long train of fabric that trailed behind her. She finally gathered the fabric in her hands and speed-walked toward the king, her pale cheeks as flushed as roses on their glory days.

Dimitri, in awe, watched her shove her hand out to him just before a realization hit her and her cheeks grew redder still. She hurried into a mixture of a curtsy and a bow for him, with a mumbled Your Majesty on her lips. Whispers erupted around Dimitri, among his companions, among the knights and guards present in the hall, until Dimitri raised his hand to silence them. A faint smile pulled at his lips.

“I welcome you to Castle Fhirdiad,” he said, lips searching for a name they did not know. His brows furrowed, and he found no name he could ascribe to the face that looked at him – not from below, but at an even level with Dimitri’s. Her face was familiar, but not one Dimitri recalled seeing among the noble affairs in the distant or recent past.

“Your Majesty,” she said and half-curtsied half-bowed again, keeping her eyes on Dimitri the entire time instead of demurely looking down as noble ladies were raised to do. Her eyes, Dimitri finally saw, were crystal blue, clear and unflinching as glaciers. When she spoke, she stood to her full length, arms crossed over her stomach. “I am Helena. Betrothed to Duke Fraldarius.”

That was how it began.

Felix rubbed at his eyes and stifled a yawn as his thighs screamed at him. The rushed return to Fhirdiad after an equally rushed leave for the fringes of Fraldarius territory had left its marks. So rushed were both these things that Felix had to resort to horseback travel despite his now infamous dislike of it.

The bandit problem persisted. Felix couldn’t say he didn’t understand why it did: poverty and Faerghus lands put together made people desperate creatures. But it was annoying as all hell to have to keep turning back to help his uncle to ward off bandits in the fringes of Fraldarius, where Uncle Theo’s influence didn’t quite reach from Castle Fraldarius.

Felix could have dispatched knights, surely; most had worked under his father, and his father had at least had the sense to weed out the unreliable ones a long time ago. We need knights we can trust not only our lives but other people’s lives to, the old man had often said, and while Felix loathed the man’s thoughts on many things, he could not disagree with that.

But Felix hadn’t used his father’s knights, opting to go himself and join the few knights that already were at the scene, and he was close to regretting it now as he rode through Castle Fhirdiad’s gates and toward the stables.

Soon Felix handed the reins to a stable boy, who – despite the term – was a man at least twice Felix’s age. The sun had begun to set behind the castle, the sky a bleeding collage of colour that reminded Felix unmistakably of Enbarr and its bloodied streets.

Felix kept his gaze firmly on the ground, on the stone path that led him up to the sturdy stairs to the entrance hall. If he hurried, he could change into a different set of clothes and join Dimitri and Dedue for dinner.

Felix did not hurry.

His thighs burned from the long ride, and each stop over the stone-carved chairs sent an agonizing jolt through his muscles. It was nowhere near as pleasurable a pain as the aches Felix had after sword training or a good spar.

This part of the castle was empty, save for the knights. Some of them raised their hands in greeting; Felix waved them off. The nobles must be at dinner with their king, sucking up to the boa—Dimitri, who had always been at his most uncomfortable when people focused on him without really seeing him.

He met Ingrid halfway up to the floor his chambers were. She was in armor, breast plate fully clasped, but she was without a weapon, her hair a disaster that would never be permitted to happen to married women. But she was neither a noble lady nor a married woman.

She stopped at the sight of him, eyes widening and a breath squeezing out of her. “Felix,” she said, ominously. “There you are.”

“Here I am,” Felix said flatly, eyebrows rising. “Are Seteth and Flayn here for my vegetable-cutting skills again?”

The corners of Ingrid’s mouth lifted at that, but they fell right back into a thin line as the wrinkle between her brows deepened. “No, nothing like that.” She shifted on her feet and opened her mouth. And closed it. Opened it again. “Did His Majesty write to you recently?”

“No. I told him not to—a waste of parchment when I was going to come back soon anyway.” Felix raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

Ingrid smiled thinly, glanced around, and leaned in to speak lowly into the space between them.

The more words she spoke, the narrower Felix’s eyes got.

A handmaid had just helped her put down her hair and begun to undo the thin strings that kept her dress tight on her, when the double doors to the chamber slammed open with enough force to startle one of the blackbirds outside that her eyes had been following from the window.

Helena watched it fly away sorrowfully. She didn’t often have enough time to waste on birdwatching, but at Castle Fhirdiad she had found plenty for it as she waited for…

Well. Him, who now glared at her from the oaken double doors with a look that was the furthest thing from a besotted fiancé. Eyes, brown instead of graying blue, narrow and angry, glued onto her, and they made her more uncomfortable than even the dress she had forced herself to wear.

“Who are you and what are you doing in my chamber?” he asked, quite calmly for someone that had unsheathed a sword and held it up toward her. The handmaid paid no mind to him as she stood and left, past the aggrieved Duke Fraldarius and out the door. This must be a common occurrence, then.

Helena’s hands twitched at the face of the admittedly expected aggression, but she managed a smile and rose to give a clumsy curtsy. Goddess, she had never been good at this. Nuns hadn’t taught her curtsying. “I’m Helena—”

A family name was supposed to follow.

She didn’t have one. Her lips couldn’t form what she would have said in better circumstances.

So, she said, “Your fiancée.”

Against the side of her thigh rested a dagger, but she would not reach it through the skirts in time should the Duke’s temperament prove to be violent. Helena wasn’t too bothered by this. She had seen war, had seen fire: both things that made the new Duke Fraldarius pale in comparison.

“I have no fiancée,” Duke Felix Hugo Fraldarius stated, voice winter cold. “I have no idea how you convinced the knights and the king that you are.”

“Set down that sword, at least,” she said in her best noble lady voice—not very convincing, as it wasn’t the life she had led, and the duke’s brows furrowed as he too caught it. Helena’s face burned, but she held her chin high, the tips of her fingers pressed together, ready to snap at any threat. “Is this any way to treat a lady, my lord?”

“I’ve been told I have zero delicate bone in my body when it comes to women,” the duke said, his posture firm and unflinching as he raised the sword higher, “or people in general.”

I can tell.

Helena decided a change of tactics was in order, and so she folded her hands over her stomach and met the duke’s eyes. The dagger poked at her thigh. “His Majesty said I could rest in your chambers while we waited for your arrival.”

“That sounds like him.” The duke’s voice remained sharp as a newly forged blade, but his hand fell as he sheathed the sword. “Didn’t he invite you to dine with him? It’s dinner time.”

“He has honorary guests from the imperial lands, and I prefer my meals on a smaller scale.”

Duke Fraldarius’ lips twitched, as if to smile. “Some noble lady you are.”

She curtsied again, a harsh down-bend of knees. “Why, thank you.”

Duke Fraldarius granted her no more of his attention; instead, he swiveled around on his heels and stomped right out the room, leaving her behind to narrow her eyes at his cloaked back.

Oh dear. I fear this might more difficult than I expected.

Helena of House [--] sighed dreadfully. Oh, the things she did for the sake of family.

The nobles trickled out of the dining hall, each looking fuller of themselves than the last. The sole exception might have been Count Galatea, who looked pale and sickly, who had always been a little less confident than most of the nobles Felix had (physically, not emotionally) looked up to as a kid. He had a deep voice – deeper than Felix’s father’s had been, pleasant to listen to for some – but it contrasted his general behavior terribly.

Like Dimitri’s good and bad sides, Felix thought.

He still struggled reconciling with those two sides of Dimitri. Like he struggled – still – to reconcile with his own half of things that had soured his relationship with his father.

The smack across his father’s face Felix still remembered vividly; each time he thought of it, his fingers curled and his palm burned from phantom pain. But there was nothing to be done about it anymore. His father was dead, buried in Garreg Mach along with other casualties. Their relationship just as dead and gone.

His and Dimitri’s could still be mended.

Right now Felix wasn’t so sure of that. Because – what the fuck, Dimitri?

He had left his own chambers in such a hurry to yell his thoughts at Dimitri’s (possibly) tired face, but now that he was nearing the dining hall, he wasn’t so sure about it.

Count Galatea nodded to him in greeting, parting his lips to say something, but his gaze slid to Ingrid. The count’s jaw clenched at the sight of his only daughter, and he passed by without a single word to Felix or Ingrid, hands folded over famine-carved stomach.

He no longer spoke to Ingrid, and Ingrid in turn never seemed to know how to react to it. Now, her face twisted with guilt before the mask of contentment slid back on it. She had made her choices. They all had. Felix looked at Count Galatea once more, caught the mock martyrdom on his posture.

The war had been hard for all of Fódlan, but Galatea in particular had suffered: old diseases and pains sprung to life from the lack of commerce. Count Galatea looked like a man that had been on the sea without food for two weeks.

It was the kind of long-suffering face and posture Felix remembered Dimitri wearing during the war, the face that still haunted Felix’s dreams despite his lack of will to admit to such a thing.

That renewed Felix’s anger, and he burst into the dining hall the same way a hound might leap upon its unexpecting victim. The effect was diminished by the fact that the heavy oaken doors refused to be slammed to the walls in the way thinner, more normal doors were wont to.

Dimitri, the king of Faerghus and the (currently) unified Fódlan, had finished his meal a long time ago by the looks of it, but for a king no meal was ever just a meal but an entire social event. Nobles had left the room, most likely at the king’s dismissal, but others remained: Dedue, of course, who Dimitri would not allow to remain outside the room where things happened; Sylvain, whose father had also come with him to Fhirdiad for once; and Annette, who had recently started teaching at Fhirdiad’s School of Sorcery.

“Boar!” Felix declared his arrival with a spiteful nickname he and Dimitri had agreed in slowly filtering out from their interactions. Felix still slipped when he was exceptionally upset. Many would say that meant very little, Felix was always upset for one reason or another in their opinion, but in truth Felix was much harder to upset deeply than people thought.

Hell, Sylvain was still his friend. And Ingrid, despite everything.

Felix’s loud announcement of his arrival sparked two things at once. First, Dimitri cut himself off mid-sentence, turning his attention to Felix, with what must have been a heart-stopping expression of surprise and grief at the old name; secondly, a hand clasped his shoulder from behind, firm and chastising, an old man’s hand.

“Duke Fraldarius,” Gilbert—Gustave—Dominic said grimly. “It is unbecoming of you to disturb His Majesty’s meal like this.”

Old relics of the past might have died—Felix’s father, for one—but some clung to life like goddess-damned leeches. Felix was cautiously glad for Annette, since they were amending their relationship, but for himself, he’d rather it had been this decrepit knight that had taken the blow on the damned boar’s behalf.

…Ugh. He was doing it again. Felix inhaled sharply, barely resisting the urge to smack himself as he shook himself off from Gustave’s touch.

“Do I seem like I care for your concept of decorum?” Felix hissed and pushed toward the end of the long table at the end of which Dimitri and others stood frozen still. Sylvain raised his hand in a lazy greeting, a punchable grin on his face. Felix bypassed him but nodded at Annette and Dedue, and then he was by Dimitri’s chair.

“Explain yourself,” Felix said, voice thin and low, arms crossed and jaw clenched tight like a bear trap. Ingrid stayed behind him, but he could feel the roll of her eyes. She was much better outside her father’s field of vision.

You keep calling Sylvain and I dramatic, she’d told him once, but you really ought to look in the mirror every now and then, Felix.

She wasn’t… wrong. Felix’s emotions had always been particularly intense, set off by the smallest things.

Dimitri, his king, his friend, his worst enemy and everything in between, pursed his lips. “Whatever for this time, Felix? I’ll admit I’m at a loss as to what I have done to perturb you so.”

“The woman in my chambers,” Felix said.

Dimitri’s eye lit up with recognition, but his shoulders hunched forward as if bracing himself. His face took on the distant, people-pleasing smile that Felix absolutely loathed. “Your fiancée. I was not aware of your betrothal, but I did not wish to be discourteous to her. So, I showed her to your chambers.”

“And here I thought you weren’t so naïve as to trust every person that walks in with a pleasant smile and trustworthy eyes,” Felix scoffed, his expression twisting into a scowl. Anger came to him like tidal waves even now; at the very least, he managed it better now than he did at seventeen.

“She really is quite the looker, though,” Sylvain piped in with a low whistle, only cut off when Ingrid pulled at his ear. “Owch, Ingrid! So harsh.”

Felix and Dimitri ignored them, Felix’s eyes trained on the still sitting king. Dimitri’s expression changed again, brows knitting together with irritation. “Felix, I had every reason to trust in what she told me. It was not her word alone that I weighed in my choice to allow her in.”

Felix snorted.

Dimitri went on, “After all, the letter she gave as a proof of identification… the person who wrote it…”

His eye dimmed with grief, lips parting and pursing again, hands clasped over the table.

Felix’s heart sank.

“Felix, your father wrote her letter of introduction.”

She remembered very little of her early life, not that it mattered: Even if she had a normal human’s memory, she couldn’t have possibly remembered how her mother abandoned her child on the steps of a stone church before rushing into the night, shame burning like a flame in her chest.

What she remembered were the nuns and monks, living together but in separate dorms at the remote monastery in Fraldarius territory. The farmland they used was meager and mean, barely producing anything, and she used to help with the other abandoned children with the harvest when the adults were copying published works of Saint Seiros and her heroics.

Her first weapon had been the scythe she cut grass down with.

Her second was her faith: not in the Goddess, despite the nuns’ best attempts, but in herself. Strange it was, her faith in herself. A daughter abandoned by her mother, with no father to speak of, and yet she had confidence in that she would find her place in the world? Incredible, some nuns said but their tones indicated that this was not a compliment.

She grew up and reached her peak teenage sorrows behind the monastery’s thick stone walls. There was a girl she fell in love with; that girl moved away, as she was the daughter of a noble, sent to the monastery only for the sake of correcting his misbehavior. She cried for days after her departure, lovesick as only teenagers could be.

She got over it.

The day which changed her life was a day like any other.  For Faerghus, it meant rain, a lot of it. Springtime Faerghus was nothing but drizzle and fog. She had been assisting the head nun with the chickens – two had died in the winter, ten remained – when the ensemble of knights arrived at the monastery, hooves clapping against the muddy ground and echoing even to the far reaches of the monastery grounds.

It wasn’t the first time this particular noble had come, of course. He scoured his territory dutifully, especially as of late with bandits attacking villages and hamlets, orphaning kids left and right for their own pitiful reasons. She hadn’t met him before now, or she didn’t think she had.

And yet, when the head nun and she later entered the church, where the noble was looking up at the great stone statue of the Goddess Sothis… Just as she had entered after the head nun, the noble turned around, his soaked cloak—she caught the Crest of Fraldarius strewn on it—moving with him.

“—Ah,” he said, a lukewarm smile on his face. “I was just looking for you.”

That was how she met Duke Rodrigue A. Fraldarius.

Dimitri took Felix to his study, where he had stored the letter. Felix watched him dig through the several piles of papers and letters pushed into the drawers, or perhaps he watched the easy shift of Dimitri’s wide shoulders as he hunched over the table. Dimitri had shed his cloak for the dinner, and he was still without it, but the silver-decorated tunic didn’t leave him any less kingly.

Felix sniffed, waiting with crossed arms and the heel of his boot tapping at the floor.

Dedue stood outside the study with Annette, and the latter’s chipper voice trickled into the room through the shut door. Felix found it hard to dislike it, but his attention still rested on Dimitri and his unhurried searching. And then he found it, his back straightening with an audible crick from his joints, reaching out over his shoulder toward Felix. His hand held a crinkled envelope.

Felix took it, lowering his eyes when Dimitri peeked at him over his shoulder. He pulled the parchment out of the envelope and unfolded it.

He had seen two anniversaries of his father’s death. It hadn’t been as long since he had rested his eyes on the well-practiced script of his father’s hand, but long enough for him to forget—but there it was now on the pale parchment, the inky letters seeping through unevenly but not muddling the impeccable writing.

Your Majesty, the letter began, or at least I should wish that I may call you that by the point you read this. His father’s dry laugh echoed in Felix’s ears. He blinked away the beginnings of a burn from his eyes. Dimitri’s gaze rested on him, heavy like a curtain, but Felix refused to let him see him weak.

For all their grief over his father, they had never shared it with each other outside of that one conversation near the end of the war, when Felix had told him he still wondered why he had been forced to live on when his father and brother were—

He read on.  

His father explained the woman and the betrothal that Felix had not known had been thrust upon him years ago. During the war, but before Dimitri had been found. Felix almost laughed out loud.

His father had never given up on his sightless faith in Dimitri’s survival. Felix at the very least had harbored doubts, as much as he had despaired the mere concept of the boar—Dimitri—dying, following Glenn just like everyone else in his life tried to. Felix’s neck itched at the memory of those long months following the announcement of Dimitri’s execution. The haircut he had given himself then had been hideous, and it hadn’t made him feel better.

Apparently, behind his back, his father had gotten him engaged. A spark of light in the dark times, the previous Duke wrote in the letter. My son will not look for a companion himself, so I have taken to choosing one for him. I ask of you, Your Majesty, to show her every kindness you can. I write this letter with the grave assumption that I will not be able to present her to you myself. She will be a part of House Fraldarius, and thus, on behalf of my house, I ask you not to turn her away.

“Of course, your bleeding heart could not refuse my father, could you?” Felix muttered, eyes lifting from the letter to glare at Dimitri.

But he wasn’t angry anymore. The feeling bursting his lungs was more complicated than anger.

The anger was for his father, but then—dead men worthless objects for one’s hatred.

Dimitri returned his stare. Eventually, he said, slowly and unsurely, as though he did not quite believe himself: “I am not a monster, Felix.”

Of course he wasn’t. Not fully, anyhow—this Felix had come to accept.

Felix’s frown eased off on his face.

“That’s more like it,” he said.

Dimitri’s one visible eye blinked at him. “More like what?”

“Less self-pity from you, the better,” Felix said. “That’s all.”

Dimitri smiled as he turned on his chair. A warm but cautious little thing. “Careful, Felix. You’re awfully close to complimenting me.”

Felix scoffed. “You’ll have to work harder for a compliment. Besides—” Hesitation. Felix cleared his throat and looked away. The study walls were much more interesting than Dimitri’s face, he told himself. “I’m sorry for the slip-up in there just now.”

Dimitri didn’t ask what he meant.

They both knew, and their history stood between them like a brick wall once more. It was up to them to scale that wall and reach a new tomorrow, but—at times—it felt worthless to try.

Felix wasn’t one to surrender, though. Not after spending too much time having given up on people that mattered. (His father, Dimitri, even himself.)

“You will arrange a new chamber for her,” Felix said before Dimitri could.

Dimitri agreed, but his voice was solemn, almost sad. “Her stay in there was only temporary. You are not married yet, after all.”

Oh, fucking hell—

“And we will not be,” Felix said through his teeth, stomping out of the study and right past Annette and Dedue. Annette’s exclamation of surprise followed him down the hall, but Felix never stopped until he was out again.

It was a cold night beneath the gleaming stars.

Felix cursed again.

Damn you, old man.

Helena’s few possessions were quickly transferred into the adjacent chamber, which appeared to put Duke Fraldarius in an even worse mood. She found the little lordling’s temperament rather amusing: so quick it was to flare, yet so slow to die! He would make a fascinating case study for scholars of human mind everywhere, she thought.

He had changed little since she had last seen him years ago. But – and this she knew not to say out loud – he seemed a little lighter, a little less burdened despite the business the dukedom and kingdom both tossed his way.

She curtsied him goodnight, and he waved his hand dismissively, never the one to bow.

It made her bite back a snort.

Lord Rodrigue had so grieved over that boy’s manners.           

In the adjacent chamber, she was finally helped out of her dress—what a relief! The tightness of the bodice was something she would never get used to, she feared. The chest plate of her armor was one thing, at least it didn’t object to the very existence of breasts, unlike the clothes that, allegedly, were made to fit women.

Fire crackled in the hearth when she climbed into the bed only in her underwear, and it was to that sound that she fell asleep.

She dreamed of family that night.

He taught her faith. Not the emotion, not the devotion aspect of it, but the magic. The nuns had given her a little tutoring on the topic: she knew basic healing well, often helped the monastery healers at their jobs. But it was Duke Fraldarius that helped her cultivate it, in drawing out more of her magic.

It surprised her.

“Aren’t bigshot nobles too proud to get their hands dirty with healing?” she’d asked him. Common folk appreciated healers—they had no other option in a land that was once so plague-ridden—but she had seen high nobles wrinkle their noses at it. Commoner magic was what healing was, despite the archbishop herself excelling at it.

Magic wasn’t physical enough of a weapon for Faerghus nobles. Faith was well and good, but in battle men only relied on their bodies and their mounts. Even those who practiced magic, reason or faith, ended up with lances and swords attached to themselves.

Duke Fraldarius had chuckled at her question. “You are not far off with your assumption… but you did not hear this from me.”

He did not explain why he did what he did, though.

She knew theory, of course. Nuns would smack her fingers with a ruler if she did not listen. Drawing out magic to her fingertips and palms wasn’t difficult, but controlling that magic was a different thing altogether. With simple healing spells it did not matter so much, the nuns told her, but her lack of control would make her useless for more complex spells, like Fortify and Aura.

Which didn’t really matter to nuns, anyway. None of them were going into battles that required such spells.

Duke Fraldarius asked her if she wanted to be a knight.

She said yes.

And so he taught her: both lances and faith whenever he could, whenever no one’s eyes were on them. She didn’t know why then—but she was a secret he tried to hide.

Later she would realize he was trying to protect her.

But for a while, he said nothing of it to her.

Dimitri watched the fire crackling in the hearth of his bed chamber. If he stared hard enough, he could see faces among the flickering flames: his father, of course, and Glenn, always these two, but also his stepmother and the rest of the knights that had died on that horrible day over a decade ago.

If he stared even harder, the screams from that day would echo in his ears; memories that he was no longer sure were memories. It had taken him long to understand the uncertainty of his own mind. Too long, he thought now, but as Felix would say, it was useless to regret things that could no longer be changed.

The only thing he could affect was the present, and through the present, the future.

But Dimitri’s present was perturbed now from how angry Felix had been with him. The old wound of a nickname still hung between them, and Felix had tossed it at him so easily, spat it out as though Dimitri had soaked his hands in blood yet again.

Not that he didn’t understand. Arranged marriage didn’t sit well with Dimitri himself either; but, as he told himself, such had been the way and such would be the way of the land for some time still, until people dared to cut off old customs from the way of people supporting each other. Claude—Khalid, now—had said so much in his letters, as well.  

And then there was the matter of Dimitri’s own heart.

A knock at the door.

“Come in, Dedue,” Dimitri called, smiling faintly. It could be a myriad of other people as well—Annette, with a tale from the castle library; Ingrid, with her straightlaced reports; or Sylvain, coming to tease him about Felix—but over the years Dimitri had learned to distinguish Dedue’s knocks from other people’s.

Dedue came in. He was dressed down, but not really: Duscur-style clothes covered him from head to toe, just one layer less. He sat down on the cushioned seat beside Dimitri without waiting for an invitation from the king.

This was progress, and it still delighted Dimitri.

“Dimitri,” Dedue said, and Dimitri’s heartache eased with that alone. It was never gone, as he alternated between longing and simple but unfulfilled love, but Dedue’s company soothed him, calmed his nerves.

Dedue was still alive. Even now it was a thing to be cherished. It ought to always be cherished. Not just Dedue, but everyone else Dimitri still had.

“My friend,” Dimitri said, still smiling. “Have you come to discuss your trip?”

“If you have the time,” Dedue said, “yes.” He studied Dimitri, patient as he always was. “But I have come to listen to you as well, should you wish to talk.”

“Talk about what?” Dimitri’s smile turned strained, and Dedue leveled him with the most deadpan stare the man had yet given him thus far. Dimitri’s mouth twitched again, this time from a dry laugh. “…Felix and I, then?”

“…If you have a desire to speak about it,” Dedue said and reached out to pat Dimitri’s knee in quiet, companionable affection. “I will not force it.”

Dedue had always been his saving grace. Dimitri felt rather guilty about leaning on him when Dedue had so much pain of his own to sort through.

And yet he opened his mouth and words streamed out for Dedue to bear witness. Both to the words themselves and Dimitri’s inherent weakness, which hadn’t waned since childhood.

First loves—why must they be so painful and difficult to grow out of?

For many years Dimitri had believed himself too dead to bear love for the living. During the war and before it, even during the academy year, when he had half-heartedly tried to play the part of a gentle prince. Even now, he struggled to have faith in himself deserving love, but the warm feeling of loving someone could not be quelled by his horrid thoughts.

To think there was something the bearer of a Blaiddyd Crest could not take down… the thought was so absurd many court nobles would have snickered at it. 

Dedue did not laugh when Dimitri expressed the thought.

“Dimitri,” he said, thoughtful and considering of his words as always. “You keep forgetting to treat yourself as a human.”

“I am meant to be a king first, a man second,” Dimitri said, but the words were only half-hearted as these were not what he believed in. They were something he could imagine Edelgard saying, not himself. She put her own ambition, her sense of her own justice, above all else. Herself and other people included.

He used to admire her singlemindedness in the past.

Now he grieved it.

But it was all in the past, and so he had no choice but to move on from her, like so many other ghosts of his life.

Dedue said, breaking through Dimitri’s contemplation: “You know well I follow you because you do nor separate the man from the king. Your soft-hearted ideals are mine as well, Dimitri.”

“Hmm.” Dimitri’s face softened at his friend’s kind, soothing words. He had always admired Dedue for that—for that deep-buried kindness that Faerghus had failed to appreciate. “What am I to do without you?”

“…If you need me to, I will—”

“No, no,” Dimitri hurried to say, waving his hand to dismiss his previous words. “I was joking, Dedue. I would never keep you from joining your countrymen in rebuilding Duscur.”

Dedue nodded but kept studying Dimitri nevertheless. Moments passed in silence until he cleared his throat and spoke again, in a lower tone of voice. “Perhaps you and the duke should have an honest conversation with one another.”

Dimitri chuckled and turned his eyes away from Dedue to hide at least some of his feelings. His face had always shown too much. “Perhaps you are right.”

Nothing perhaps about it, but heart-to-heart communication was harder to practice than war. Which spoke for the absurd state of their homeland’s culture.

He had his work cut out for him, both with Felix and with Faerghus.

Her name was Helena, she told him last night when he rushed into his chamber and held a sword to her face.

Felix remembered this as he arrived at the training grounds and saw her. Her golden hair, similar shade as Dimitri and Ingrid’s, was bound in a tight ponytail, and it swayed surprisingly little as she sidestepped Ingrid’s lunge at her.

Felix had come to train himself, but he stopped and watched instead. Observing people training was a quick, efficient way to get a glimpse of them as a person. It had certainly worked with Jeritza back at Garreg Mach, though his suspicions rose a little too late back then.

So he held his tongue and watched the women quietly from the shadows.

Helena’s dress sleeves had hidden it previously, but Felix now saw her toned arms clearly as she pulled her practice lance back and moved to parry Ingrid’s next thrust. Both were dressed lightly, without armor, in loose shirts and tighter pants, as their boots danced across the rough sand of the arena.

Helena parried well, but her thrusts rang shallow, lacking force despite her apparent strength. All technique with average at best force, despite how she towered over Ingrid. Felix furrowed his brows as Helena swung her lance again.

It was familiar. A bizarre thing to say, considering lancers didn’t have as much distinction in their styles as swordsmen did. Dimitri’s swing of a lance was distinct for the sheer (stupid) force behind it, and Sylvain’s for the suicidal intensity he carried the same way he carried bouquets to women.

Helena wielded her lance like neither. All technique, from hours and hours of dedicated practice, tight self-control that reminded Felix of his father, really—

Ah.

Felix’s thoughts halted there—shit—just as the training lances clashed against each other in the middle of the training arena, the two women pressing against the other’s wooden weapon and glaring at each other. Helena pulled away first, her practice lance falling with her arm to her side. A smile flashed across her face, a lightning strike of brightness. Capricious.

Felix’s eyes narrowed.

That didn’t make any sense. She didn’t make any sense.

By the time the two women set their practice lances back into the weapons rack, he was gone.

“She’s not just some noblewoman, you know,” Felix said over late breakfast in the private dining room Dimitri invited only his childhood friends and classmates into. Across the table, Dimitri was picking at his porridge with mild disinterest.

As usual.

Dimitri looked up, face terse with a look of this again? “What makes you say that?”

“She trains like a soldier, not a noble.” In Faerghus, the difference was minimal—but it still existed. “I’m not disputing my father’s handwriting in the letter. But there is something more to this than what’s been laid out to us thus far, Dimitri. You would be a fool to ignore that.”

Dimitri tilted his head, considering Felix’s words. “Perhaps your uncle would know something. As I recall, Rodrigue and he were very close.”

They were Fraldariuses and brothers. Of course they were. Uncle Theo didn’t care for the Kingdom’s politics, but he had never denied Felix’s father anything he had asked of him.

“Summon him to the capital, then,” Felix said. “We shouldn’t take eyes off of her in the meantime.”

The fact that nothing had yet happened to Dimitri didn’t mean nothing ever would. Felix’s stomach twisted, but he forced more of the tasteless porridge into his mouth. The irony that someone his father vouched for should be dangerous to Dimitri—Felix didn’t care for it, but he imagined one Hubert von Vestra would get a chuckle out of it along with his lady.

Both were dead and would stay that way.

Dimitri looked at him from across the table, a spoon hovering in the air before he put it down again. There it was again, that annoyingly unreadable expression that Felix couldn’t decipher. He used to know everything about Dimitri. Why didn’t he anymore?

(The answer was obvious, of course.)

“Are you concerned, Felix?” Dimitri asked, face melting into a smile. “It is very endearing of you.”

Felix’s face was quick to flush. “Shut up, I wasn’t—am not.”

They were closer now than they had been in years, and so these conversations came and went. Dimitri teased him, Felix scowled and got flustered, and then they would return to navigating around each other like two ships led by sea-awkward captains. Things weren’t fine, but they could be worse.

“Someone has to watch out for your bleeding heart, that’s all,” Felix muttered before spooning up more food into his mouth.

Honesty was one of life’s biggest struggles. It was funny in a way: that someone as brutally honest as Felix found it so painfully difficult.

(He used it as a weapon to push others away, not pull them closer.)

If there was a goddess among the stars, she must be laughing at him.

“Will you not teach me the sword?” she asked Duke Fraldarius one day on their way back from one of the bandit raids that had begun to reach into Fraldarius territory. It had been three years since the king’s assassination, and politics were not improving. Before she didn’t know anything. Now she knew too much. In a matter of months, she had learned much simply from following the duke along.

For some reason, he was loath to keep her out of his sight, always taking her along with his knights and their squires when he ventured out. First-hand experience is how everyone learns, he said but kept her out of actual battle, only letting her practice the Physic spell she had recently begun studying.

Maybe it was better that way. That spell exhausted her greatly, draining her from energy and making her slip from her horse.

Even that day, as she rode by his side, she had to concentrate on not slipping from her saddle, on tensing her thighs and calves around her mount’s sides. A short spear was strapped to her back, for the sake of appearances than anything else.

Duke Fraldarius sighed, his mare shaking her head as if responding on his behalf. “Would that I could,” he said. “Unfortunately, I make a very poor Fraldarius in that regard.”

His voice was warm with suppressed laughter, but the smile she caught from the side looked sad. Her gaze dipped to the sword sheathed at his hip, dangling and shifting with every movement. She looked back up again, and this time the duke chuckled.

“That is a different matter,” he told her.

In time, she would learn about the Sword of Moralta and its healing properties.

Castle Fhirdiad’s walls were filled with paintings of the old kings and queens from the beginning of the Kingdom. The history before the Kingdom didn’t matter, save for the War that led to Loog declaring independency and many nobles to follow suit and proclaim fealty to him.

Many of those paintings included not only royalty but other high-ranking nobility—many of which, Felix had come to discover, Cornelia had gotten rid of her during her forceful reign over the capital and the castle.

Most of those burned paintings were of King Lambert and his companions, but that didn’t mean she had managed to rid the castle of them all. Some, Felix suspected, she just forgot about as she lounged and relished in her newfound position of power, not unlike the Regent that preceded her.

One such painting was the one Felix was gazing up at right this moment, in the peaceful moment preceding the afternoon’s grueling schedule.

No Blaiddyd was depicted on it—really, the painting should have been hanging on the walls of Castle Fraldarius instead.

On it was a man and his son. Felix’s grandfather and father, the first a man in his thirties, the other a child that looked about seven. The child, who then grew into a man whose ideals Felix despised even now, had no smile on his face. His hair was dark and wavy, familiarly so, but the look the painter had captured on the little Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius was nothing like the man Felix remembered.

Serious, unsmiling eyes; hunched shoulders even as his father kept a hand on one; thin line of lips curling downwards. Eyelines so typical of a Fraldarius already present on the little child. Or perhaps little Rodrigue Fraldarius had been crying and sleepless before the portrait’s painting.

Felix had no way of knowing, and he hated how it frustrated him.

He barely even knew the stories his father had tried to share with him, since Felix had long since stopped listening by that point. Felix wasn’t in the wrong with his anger, he believed this, but. But.

He could have met him halfway before the end, but that bridge had burned with the old man.

Beside that painting was another Blaiddyd portrait, not of Lambert and certainly not of Dimitri. Blond hair was unmistakably similar to theirs, though it fell neatly over one shoulder in an elegant ponytail, longer than the two kings’. Grey eyes looked at Felix from the painting, cold as glaciers despite the smile painted on his lips.

Rufus Algernon Blaiddyd, the portrait’s title proclaimed.

“The eyes ruin his whole face, don’t they?”

Felix pursed his lips and fought hard with himself to not turn and glare at Helena.

Eventually, he said, “Yes.”

Always so eloquent, Fe, Sylvain’s voice taunted him from the back of his mind.

She wasn’t wrong, though. Rufus Blaiddyd’s facial features were mostly pleasant, strong jaw and trimmed eyebrows, hair that flowed like silk. But the cold eyes and the crooked nose ruined the appearance of an honest man. Which, as Felix knew from the rumors, Rufus Blaiddyd hadn’t been, not as a regent and not as a man.

Felix glanced to his side. Helena had changed back into one of her dresses, looking much more uncomfortable in it than in her sparring attire. Her blond hair was back up in delicate braids instead of a ponytail. Her sharp jaw jutted out in her profile. She had a strong face in general. If Felix were not the man he was, he might be inclined to say he liked it.

“When did my father train you?” he asked, because there was no better opportunity to let her know that he knew. As an afterthought, he added, “Your spear-handling is decent.”

Every spy in the continent would have cringed at his lack of subtlety.

“Decent,” she echoed, and from the corner of his eye Felix saw her biting at her lips, which tried to twitch into a smile. “You have always had a funny way of complimenting people, Duke Fraldarius.”

Always, she said.

She continued distantly, “He trained me a little bit during your year at the Academy.”

Her eyes remained on the portrait of Rufus Blaiddyd from his handsomer, less dead days. Her clasped hands shook over her stomach.

There could be some truth to her words, Felix supposed, but that didn’t explain her certainty regarding his nature and behavior.

“I only call it decent, because my father was decent at most with spears,” Felix said. Still better than the man had ever been with swords, though. But none of it removed the fact that as far as physical combat went, Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius had been an unremarkable general. Carrying his weight, certainly, but not one people would praise for his might under normal circumstances.

Sreng had changed that.

Helena, whose family name he still did not know, laughed at that, but there was understanding buried somewhere deep in the sound. “Speaking ill of the dead really ought to get you in trouble, Duke.”

“The dead don’t care, why should I?”

Helena dipped her head, finally, strands of hair slipping over her face. “The living should care because the dead can’t.”

 

Children were dying.

It wasn’t an unheard-of thing in Fódlan and definitely not in Faerghus. And yet, this was something Duke Fraldarius was trying to keep from her ears for the longest time.

But a time came when he no longer couldn’t, and so he pulled her aside after one of her training sessions that he watched over with his brother. He took her to his private study and locked the door behind them, which was the first event that alarmed her to his grim mood.

Children were dying, he said, but they were not just any children.

Ages between as young as thirteen and as old as twenty, girls and boys, stable boys and mercenaries.

The body count was at five, he said to her. One on the year of the king’s assassination, one on the following year, one on the next, and two in the current year.

None of the children had been ill or suicidal despite the circumstances of their lives.

Someone was killing them.

“Why?” she asked, sweat-dirty palms pressed over her knees as she adjusted herself on her chair. The heat from the training session had yet to vanish, and cold sweat was rapidly gathering on the back of her neck.

Duke Fraldarius sighed—Lord Rodrigue, as most of his knights and others called him—and clasped his gloved hands together. The topic seemed unpleasant to him, but still he opened his mouth.

“It’s about your father, Helena.”

Duke Felix H. Fraldarius and His Majesty, Dimitri A. Blaiddyd, avoided each other’s gazes at dinner that night. Helena noticed this in the same way she had noticed the previous duke’s shaking hands and bloodshot eyes—discreetly, without commenting on it because she knew she could not aid the situation any.

Helena was in one of her finest dresses, one of the few she had. None of them let her breathe as deeply as she liked. That wasn’t to say she was in pain: merely in discomfort, and that she had experienced many times before.

She sat beside her reluctant fiancé, the king on his left side. Across them, the last living son of the still reigning Margrave Gautier waved his fingers at her. Helena smiled at him. He wasn’t bad to look at, but definitely not her type.

Her fiancé and the king were the interesting ones—or rather, their relationship was now that she got to study it up close. The king himself, too. Helena’s eyes kept returning to him time and time again, even though she had already met him and spoken with him.

Blond hair just like hers, with more tendency for tangles and ragged appearance. Face that had lost its youthful roundness and become an adult’s when compared to one of the last times she saw it years ago. One eye lost to life; what remained of it hidden beneath the fabric of an eyepatch. Helena didn’t stare at the eyepatch but the visible eye, and only when the king’s attention was elsewhere.

“Enjoying yourself, are you?”

The duke beside her had turned to look at her—look up at her, really—with eyes slanted into a glare, and Helena might have flushed if she hadn’t been so used to getting caught red-handed already thanks to the nuns at the monastery. It was hard to live with nuns without picking up a streak for shamelessness, for rebelling if nothing else.

So, she smiled at him, wishing that she didn’t need this fiancée scam to be at this table. “How couldn’t I, in your company?”

Was that too dry and snippy? Probably. Did the duke’s exasperated twitch of brows amuse her regardless? Immensely.

Oh, the nuns would chastise her for this, too. The thought pulled her lips higher.

“That would be a first,” the duke said, and the steep wrinkle between his brows really was quite endearing. She had seen him make that face at his father before, her body covered under armor and hair tucked under a helmet as she stood guard at one of the important doors.

Helena’s heart ached. She missed Lord Rodrigue, still. He would have made all this much easier. There wouldn’t be any need for this.

“Your Majesty, I believe Duke Fraldarius needs a reminder on how fascinating his company actually is,” Helena called out softly, gaining the king’s attention as easily as some people caught fish.

The conversation across the table died down, and King Dimitri’s eye shifted over to them. Controlled calm, Helena supposed, glancing at the careful manner the royal held his cutlery.

“Is that so?” he said, looking briefly at the duke but looking just as quickly away to her instead. A slow smile emerged onto his face. “Felix—erm, Duke Fraldarius often underestimates his value as an entertainment, it’s true.”

The duke’s—Felix, she allowed herself to call him that in her head—voice turned icy: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She watched on the ensuing argument with a wide smile on her face and a want so fierce it made her heart ache.

It would be cruel of the Goddess to let her get this far but then push her back into the dirt she came from.

 

He told her about her father through gritted teeth and distant eyes, all of which spoke of grief and repressed anger. The stories he told were hardly fun; even the childhood stories of the man Duke Fraldarius knew since his youth turned bitter.

She wished things weren’t so. But from a young age, like all children of Faerghus, she had come to realize some things simply weren’t undoable.

“I am sorry,” he told her when she said she wanted to meet her father. He had looked genuinely heartbroken for her when he went on, “He is not the type of man that cares for the consequences of his actions, children included.”

He doesn’t care about you at all was the more straightforward translation of that. Helena wasn’t as upset as she probably should have been.

Nobles were mostly all the same, after all.

“Just because my father has vouched for her doesn’t mean we should trust her,” Felix said to Dimitri again later that night in the north-wing parlor. It was the closest to Dimitri’s bed chambers, thus also closest to Felix’s. Dimitri never took guests there, only his closest companions.

Dimitri sighed, twirling a cup of tea in his hands. “I do not think Rodrigue would have vouched for someone whose background he doesn’t know, Felix.”

“My father also trusted Cornelia.”

“Suspecting old friends is… painful,” Dimitri said, face twisting at the mention of Cornelia. For one moment, Dimitri looked the same as he did at the threshold of Fhirdiad the day they came to liberate the city. One visible eye glassy and hard as it refused to meet Felix’s. “I don’t blame him for not catching onto her plans.”

Felix sighed. “He supposedly trained Helena when I was off in Garreg Mach.”

Dimitris gaze turned to him. “He did?”

“Yes, if what she says is true. The point, though, is that he knew her for a far shorter time than Cornelia or, hell, us. Who’s to say he was not mistaken in placing his faith in her? We do not even know what family she hails from—if she is from any noble family to begin with.” Felix had to strain his patience to keep his words even and reasonable, but in reality he felt like tearing at his hair from the frustration that Dimitri hadn’t gotten any of these points through his thick skull yet.

“Perhaps that’s the point, Felix.”

“What is?”

Felix scowled, and Dimitri offered an apologetic smile before saying, thoughtfully, “Perhaps she doesn’t have any to begin with.”

“You’re saying that a woman without any name to herself managed to trick my father into setting up a betrothal.”

“You know well that noble names mean little when it comes to intelligence.”

And, all right, Dimitri got a point there. Felix tilted his head in acknowledgment of it, but still he could not stop arguing. “The old man was not forward-thinking enough to set up a betrothal with a commoner, Dimitri, no matter how hard you want to believe otherwise.”

Dimitri sighed. “I—know, Felix. But you’re blindsided by your own suspicion towards her. Has it occurred to you that Rodrigue might not have intended you to marry, but to get her into Castle Fhirdiad with as small a scandal as possible?”

“For a woman he might not even have known that well?” Felix furrowed his brows. “You have too much faith in his naivety.” It felt odd to call his father naïve—Rodrigue Fraldarius had never been naïve outside his familial relationships and reckless faith in King Lambert—but Felix stuck with it.

“And you are much too stubborn in your belief that everything is out to get us,” Dimitri said sharply, voice tense like a fiddle string before it relaxed in the next moment. A note that fell flat at the height of an opera. Dimitri sighed and rubbed at his face. “Felix, why—”

“Because you’re too damn careless!”

Because you dying is the worst thing that could ever happen to me; the worst thing that already happened to me.

For someone that found pride in wasting no time on bullshit, he was awfully dishonest. The closest thing to an honest conversation he had had with Dimitri was the one about gravestones tucked around Dimitri’s neck—years ago now.

“Felix,” Dimitri said again, softly, and it was that way of calling out his name that Felix had missed over the years the most. Many things had changed—many would still change—but that specific way Dimitri uttered his name had yet to. At seventeen, Felix had hated it. In his mid-twenties, Felix cherished it.

Dimitri’s hand, very carefully, slipped over his. Testing waters. When Felix stayed still, Dimitri allowed himself to smile again. “I used to wonder why you hated me so. Now I see it could only be because you cared for me, more than anyone else.”

More than anyone else.

“Took your sweet time, didn’t you,” Felix muttered. He was less prone to denying it, now, but he had his work cut out for him before he could let Dimitri see everything.

“Still,” Dimitri said, softer, pleading him as a friend might instead of a king, “let us do this my way and wait for your uncle. If anyone, he is certain to know.”

“I wasn’t going to suggest executing or exiling her, fool.” Felix’s knuckles twitched under Dimitri’s hand. The fire crackled in the hearth, steady yet fierce. “Just—be fucking careful for once in your life, Dimitri.”

Dimitri’s other hand set down the tea cup, the clink echoing in the parlor.

“I promise,” he said solemnly, but with a twinkle in his eyes. “For your sleep’s sake, Felix.”

Felix inhaled. “Stop testing my patience.”

Dimitri’s smile broke into a grin, childish yet endearing. “Never.”                                                                                                                

Felix tried hard to kill his own smile, but for once, he failed. Maybe he wasn’t so good at killing things as he had come to expect from himself.

The war. She learned quickly how unpleasant it was, even though she could not call the two years preceding it pleasant either. She fought with the Fraldarius knights—after all, by now, she had cleared her holy knight examinations, had all the requirements and temperaments for a battlefield.

Not that Faerghus gave much choice for those that knew how to wield weapon of any kind, be it physical or magical.

Cornelia Arnim, whose forces they fought against, had adopted this mentality well. She ruled in Fhirdiad, never once setting to the frontlines herself, but she sent every kind of man and woman capable of fighting to do just that.

Helena killed for the first time. It seemed incredibly unlikely that she hadn’t before then, but until now she had always stuck close to Lord Rodrigue who had done everything he could to keep her safe.

“It is important that you do not die,” he always told her, eyes glazed over as though he was thinking of someone else entirely. It was her eyes, she knew. They were not her father’s eyes, probably not even her mother’s; they were her grandfather and uncle’s.

She knew which similarity brought him grief.

Lord Rodrigue’s son fought by their side in the beginning, still as unaware of her existence as he had been the year before. Gustave Dominic as well, but he looked at her and saw the truth before shaking his head at Lord Rodrigue and telling him his overthinking sometimes came through, after all.

Gustave Dominic left when the fighting got dire and required Lord Rodrigue at the frontlines more and more often. Felix Fraldarius had already gone, to search for a ghost of a prince.

And she followed her lord to war.

Not frontlines, but war was inescapable no matter where you stood in battle—or outside it.  She knew how to handle a spear, but she was there to heal. Lord Rodrigue insisted.

We need every healer we can get, but we cannot lose you.

Just in case.

Yet, she killed as much as she healed. War was like that.

Lord Rodrigue always returned from battle soaked in blood. It wasn’t that his knights didn’t do their jobs and protect him—oh no, these knights would have gladly died, and some did, for him.

She asked him once why he led the knights into battle, shouldn’t he as the head general—and a healer!—stay behind? He didn’t even have the Shield anymore; donated to his son, who was off traveling the country in an impossible search.

Lord Rodrigue smiled ruefully at her.

His Majesty set an example I cannot help but follow.

Felix had noticed it before, of course, but watching Dimitri and her spar reminded him of just how stupidly tall she was. Nearly at Dimitri’s height, probably not too far from Sylvain’s. She was easy to pick out among crowds.

She was no match against Dimitri, really. She was much too defensive in her approach, her footwork too shy; revealing how little she had fought on foot before. She had matched with Ingrid before, but she’d had her height advantage. Against Dimitri she had no such advantage—no Crest as far as Felix could tell.

She thrust her practice lance at Dimitri, who knocked it aside easily. His own wooden lance slammed against her side, enough force to knock her back, but when she didn’t do anything other than grunt, Felix knew he wasn’t trying his hardest against her.

It was Dimitri’s fatal flaw: assuming he had to step down to match his partner’s level in sparring. If it was Felix on the training arena with him, he would be furious with Dimitri, definitely spiteful enough to knock the king on his ass to teach him a lesson in arrogance.

—Thinking about the king’s ass was taking Felix’s thoughts off to an entirely wrong direction, though.

The two moved across the training arena in a dance far more interesting than those in ballroom. Helena’s breaths came out in heaves, and Dimitri was panting too. From the distance, Felix got the impression he was smiling.

His sword hand itched.

Not today, he told himself. He wouldn’t lose himself into a spar with Dimitri until the mess that was this woman got solved, one way or another.

“Felix,” Sylvain whispered loudly from his side. “You might want to try and make your ogling a little less obvious.”

Felix stepped on his foot. With the heel of his boot.

Smiling when Sylvain stiffened and groaned, “That was the toe I stubbed yesterday!”

“Yeah? Not my problem.”

And yet he would still drop off a vulnerary at Sylvain’s door later.

It took a few days for the messenger to reach Fraldarius and a few more for the substitute Duke—Theo Fraldarius resented this title, which Felix knew—to travel to Fhirdiad. The castle and the knights would be watched over by his wife in the meantime.

Felix had never understood how their arranged union could work so well, considering his grandfather had been behind it.

(Grandfather Fraldarius had been… a contentious figure. A good grandfather; less than stellar father, if what Uncle Theo said was correct. Felix’s father had never spoken of him after the man died. Considering he never shut up about Glenn after Glenn died—there was something there.)

Either way, he wanted out of his own arranged betrothal, so waiting for his uncle’s arrival kept him on the edge, eyes narrow and hostile whenever he caught sight of Helena, who was either a commoner trying to social climb through the use of his father and Dimitri or something much more vicious.

Felix didn’t think it was the first, but as the days progressed on, he didn’t catch Helena doing anything suspicious outside of staring Dimitri with a little too complicated emotion on her face.

Hands off, that’s my part, Felix would have said if he were less rational being. To her credit, she seemed to read him like an open book. Her eyes laughed at him whenever their gazes met.

Yet, when she thought no one was watching, her expression crumbled, something more familiar than happiness seeping into her face.

Grief, or longing, or both. Felix wasn’t the best at analyzing expressions, only the way she gripped her practice lance whenever she sparred with someone.

She fought like someone that had lost everything but wasn’t good enough to adapt a different fighting style than the one she had been taught—that much Felix learned over the days spent waiting on his uncle.

The last thing Helena remembered of Lord Rodrigue were his hands as they accepted the message Gustave Dominic had sent. Ungloved, because he had yet to change into new ones; the last pair lay in the tent’s corner, bloody and ruined.

She stood still with the messenger as Lord Rodrigue read the brief message, and so they had a good view of the slow changes on his face. The widening of his eyes as he first read the words. The relieved uprise of his lips, the slight easing between his usually wrinkled brows.

But what she would remember were his trembling hands. Aura-burned hands, frailer than anyone would believe of the highest-ranking noble among the Kingdom nobility, the Shield of Faerghus.

She once asked him why he was called that. Because as far as she could tell, he was only slightly above average as far as lance cavaliers and commanders went.

He had laughed and said she wasn’t wrong.

People are wont to exaggerate, he told her. I did my duty as a healer, and the soldiers all turned me into the kind of a hero I am not. He didn’t tell her about the numerous scars he had received in Sreng, but which she knew of anyway as she was his healer.

Even if he played at modesty, he was a leader his soldiers liked to follow and he expected his orders to be followed.

Perhaps that was why he hadn’t expected her to raise hell when he told her she was staying behind while he joined the newly discovered crown prince and his companions in Ailell.

That was one of the few mistakes he ever made with her.

“Lord Rodrigue,” she had said on her arrival, the heels of her boots spreading mud and snow inside his tent. He was packing up already, but his brother hadn’t arrived from Castle Fraldarius yet. She raised her voice. It was hoarse from the day’s skirmishes at the border, but still she raised it. “This must be some awful joke.”

“What is, Helena?” he asked, distracted and so tired but much more alive than he had been the last two weeks. The Gautier “reinforcements” had been taking their toll on him, she supposed.

“You’re joining His Highness, right? Why are you not taking me with you?” The questions flooded right out of her before she could reconsider. Her hands clenched into fists at her side, and the burn in her palms made her cringe. Ow.

Lord Rodrigue looked over his shoulder then, face carefully blank as he focused on her. “Helena,” he said, as if she ought to understand from her name alone. The exhaustion gave way to sharp awareness, sternness that only a father could have. Even if he wasn’t hers. “There is little I won’t do for you. Taking you to Ailell with me is one of those matters.”

“But why—”

“Ailell is hell enough on its own,” Lord Rodrigue said, “and warring with Empire is on another scale than the silly skirmishes here at our borders. Helena, you—you must not come.”

“But—His Highness—I cannot just stay here doing nothing while he—you—” She could hardly breathe in her upset state.

She remembered Dimitri, though she doubted he remembered her. It had been during that cursed Academy year, when young master Fraldarius and others had gone off to study. She had met them with other Fraldarius soldiers to test the mettle of the new professor. But she wanted to meet someone else entirely—and the crown prince of Faerghus hadn’t disappointed her, although they never crossed steel of any kind.

It was the little master of Fraldarius that knocked her off her feet, rather embarrassingly, and his scoff of worthless still rang in her ears whenever she gripped her spear. He wouldn’t remember her if they met now. She was only a faceless soldier among his father’s knights.

That was the point. To keep her incognito so long as possible. Lord Rodrigue had said these things so many times she could recite his litany of reasoning from memory.

But still.

She wanted to see—

“Helena,” Lord Rodrigue repeated, gentler but no less firm. “You should not meet Dimitri yet. First meetings during wartime are hardly worth the time or remembering.”

He reached out to pat her hair, slowly, carefully like a man that hadn’t gotten to touch another person in years. His eyes searched her face, and now she knew it was because he was drinking in the familiarity he saw in her. Whatever of her uncle she had in her.

“You two should have a first meeting you’ll never forget.”

Those weren’t his last words to her, but they were the ones she remembered afterwards. She remembered some other things: his hand squeezing her shoulder as he made her swear she would watch over his brother—Theo, six years younger than Lord Rodrigue, with a stubborn nature that might get him killed without interference—and, later, his fluttering cape as he rode off with a third of his forces.

And she, abandoned, near the western border of muddy and equally snowy Fraldarius territory, tears in her eyes and burns in her hands.

She would never see him again.

 

The day Felix’s uncle arrived in the capital was the usual mess of cloudy and foggy, the cold seeping into every corner of the castle if they didn’t set fire to their hearths. Felix had finished going through reports sent from the old Alliance territories when a squire knocked on his door and let him know Theo Fraldarius was waiting for him in one of the parlors.

His uncle was a different man from his father—and so, when Felix entered the room, Theo stood up and spread his arms open as if Felix was still a kid that jumped into his arms at any chance he got.

Felix walked into that hug—well, no one else was around to claim that it meant something, so it didn’t. Felix wasn’t as touchy-feely as he used to be as a kid, but his uncle’s hug felt good and comforting after the last two weeks of keeping an eye on someone he wasn’t sure was a threat or just a plain old moron.

Of the Fraldariuses of the previous generation, Theo had always been a better swordsman than his older brother. Felix learned this early on—his uncle taught him and Glenn the way of the sword, despite his myopia—but he never thought to ask his father about it.

It was only after his father’s death that Felix began to feel any curiosity about the life the man had had, a contradiction that Felix hated in himself. Past was the past, there was no changing or taking it back.

In the present, his uncle released him from the hug, studied him and nodded at Felix’s general state of being. “You look miserable, nephew. Paperwork got your butt hurting?”

He never said his uncle wasn’t a little juvenile. Was it the curse of being the little brother?

Felix scowled. “It won’t be the only one hurting if you don’t get to the point, uncle.”

Theo didn’t start talking. Instead, he pulled out a thick envelope from the inner pocket of his long, loose jacket. Felix knew somewhere in there hung a hunter’s knife. Everyone in Faerghus carried those around even now.

The envelope, which Felix took from his uncle’s expectant hand, had been closed with the Fraldarius seal—but also his father’s personal one. There were always two, for personal and business use.

To Felix, my son, the front of the envelope declared in his father’s neat writing. The envelope’s edges had started to yellow out.

“What’s this?” Felix asked.

“The truth,” Theo said, squinting just as always when he tried to study Felix. “I imagine you would prefer to hear—read it in his own words.”

Felix ripped the envelope open. Inside was a relatively thick stack of parchments, which Felix pulled out and grimaced. “Couldn’t have written the truth in a more direct way, could he?”

Not an honest question he was asking. Sometimes clarity was more important than brevity—another lesson that was slowly sinking into Felix’s head after all these years. Just because you said something shortly didn’t mean the other party would understand the meaning of your words.

“You know well he couldn’t,” Theo said, a skewed smile on his lips even as his eyes looked sad. He didn’t remind Felix of how his father used to spend hours locked in his study just penning responses to King Lambert’s letters.

The only person Rodrigue Fraldarius had ever been short with was Felix, and even that was only after everything had already been ruined between them.

Felix plopped down onto one of the parlor’s couches, looking up at his uncle.

“Read with me, uncle,” he said, because he knew the only person taking his father’s death harder than Dimitri and he was his uncle. Even after these long months that had shifted into two years.

Theo smiled. “You’re a real sweetheart, little Fefe.”

Felix’s scowl returned. “Don’t make me change my mind.”

It was the first time in a while he heard his uncle’s deep laughter and saw the familiar eyes squint from a smile.

Felix began reading out loud. Felix, if you have received this letter, I have high hopes that all has turned out fine…

The truth was far simpler than Felix could have thought—yet far more complex, at the same time.

There was a man, according to his father, that loved the sheets of his bed far too much. Naturally, he brought many women (and men, Felix read between the lines) there, if only for one night.

As fate would have—or nature, rather—some of them got pregnant with his children. Some of these ended in miscarriages, presumably. Who was to say? The man’s love affairs were impossible to keep count of.

Some children were born, and this too was an inevitable fact of life. Children were born to useless, careless men each day. Some men knew the children their lovers birthed. In this case, the man did not and neither did he care. If anyone approached him with words regarding illegitimate children and out-of-wedlock affairs, he would tilt his neck and look at the person in the eye and say I don’t think there’s an open spot for a court jester right now.

This man had sons and daughters across Faerghus whom he would never meet.

Among them was a girl with pretty, blond hair and his family’s blue eyes—not his, but his father’s and brother’s. Eyes that didn’t signify anything: blue was as normal as brown, both equally representative of Faerghus.

She grew up fatherless and Crestless, which was, in hindsight, for the best: she reached adulthood when so many of her half-siblings did not.

After the Tragedy, her half-siblings started dying. 

One by one, year by year.

Duke Rodrigue Fraldarius had seen at least one of those deaths. How he found out about her, the letter he addressed to his son did not mention, but the fact was that he knew of this girl child, abandoned by her mother, in his territory.

And he took her away—somewhere he could protect her.

It was tumultuous time in the Kingdom, after all: whether he knew it or not, the crown prince’s life was balanced on a knife’s edge, entirely dependent on the whims of the Fhirdiad court.

Duke Fraldarius had been afraid, for he could not stay with the prince in Fhirdiad forever.

And so he saved the one person he could—a girl to whom he told of her blood, the history of the family she hailed from.

The girl with Rufus Blaiddyd’s weasel-like face and Lambert Blaiddyd’s eyes.

The first time she set foot into Castle Fhirdiad was after the crown prince and his troops had taken control of it and disposed of Lady Cornelia. The castle, despite everything, had lasted Cornelia’s rule very well. She shouldn’t have been surprised. It was made of the same stone her monastery had been—and the monastery had been there since the times before the Kingdom.

Garreg Mach was an even older structure, but she had never seen it herself.

She shouldn’t have been wandering around as she did. She should have been by Theo Fraldarius’s side, as she had been since Lord Rodrigue’s departure, but knowing that she was home—what could have been her home—well, the temptation was too much to resist.

Her steps echoed off the dusty stone floors as she found the more desolate halls, where soldiers hadn’t gone to yet. Or had gone but abandoned again.

Abandoned parlors and other rooms—until she found one where art had been kept. It was more a hall than a room. Some artwork remained on the walls, but they were unevenly and unnaturally arranged, as though paintings around others had been pulled down the walls in a hurry.

Lady—that bitch, Helena corrected herself, must not have spent much time in there, otherwise the entire room would have been long since cleared of any signs of its Blaiddyd past.

Helena walked past the arched windows and searched for any familiar faces among the paintings. She glanced at their titles for confirmation, but it still took a while before she stopped before a fairly usual portrait of a fairly usual Blaiddyd man.

On this face, though, she saw more of her own features. The same narrow but strong face, the similar jawline—which the nuns had called “unusual for a woman”, not exactly kindly—but different eye color.

Rufus A. Blaiddyd, the title proclaimed, and she knew.

This was her father. Long dead, of course, because no one even slightly relevant to her life liked to stay alive. Even the monastery she grew up in had been conquered by the Imperial forces, nuns and monks slaughters. It was difficult to grieve something she hadn’t seen, and it was difficult to grieve the man that looked down on her from the painting.

He is… not without his flaws, Lord Rodrigue had said, and she could tell he was right.

On a painting beside it were her cousin and her uncle.

It was odd to think of them that way when she was used to calling them His Highness and the late king out loud.

But that was the truth. To her embarrassment, looking at a much littler crown prince Dimitri brought tears to her eyes.

In the painting he must have been no older than nine, seated on his father’s knee.

Little Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd smiled wider than he was supposed to—royal portraits were supposedly serious business—and he had a little gap between his two front teeth that the painter had captured on canvas.

The late king, her uncle, Lord Rodrigue’s closest friend in life and in death, also smiled. His smile reminder her of a smug cat, but his eyes were much more sincere.

Or perhaps she just wanted to believe that.

In that silent room, she wept for things she could no longer have.

When the king’s summons came, she did not know what to do. Did not understand why the king would wish to see her—after all, he did not know—unless the little Duke Fraldarius had managed to convince him that she was a nuisance, that he did not wish to respect the late Duke’s wishes regarding their betrothal.

Maybe she would be banished.

Panic constricted in her throat. She had played her role poorly, she knew. She should have been more demure, more—anything else. She should have teased the duke a little less, perhaps, but he made it so easy when he looked like a lovelorn yet stubborn cat in her cousin’s presence. Always so quick to anger when it came to Dimitri or his safety, and just as fast to embarrass when the king teased him.

She was let into the king’s study by the stern-faced Gustave, who had forgotten her even though he had seen her without helmet in Fraldarius. It was just her luck. To be forgotten by the living and be abandoned by the dead.

Besides the king and the duke, the study was empty.

The door creaked shut behind her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin at the noise.

Their eyes were on her—all three of them. Two brown, one blue, and Helena shifted weight between her feet as she assessed the situation. Their faces were grim, but not so grim as to expect capital punishment. The king was much too soft-hearted for that, anyhow. Capital punishment had been banned across Fódlan half a year ago.

Silly girl, Helena chastised herself as she forced on a smile. Noble women always had to smile to be good enough.

“Your Majesty,” she said, curtsying, “my lord Fraldarius. Have you need of me?”

His Majesty was quite poor at hiding his emotions, she noticed on a closer inspection. His one blue remained on her, bright and watery like he might just cry at the sight of her. Lips quivering just the slightest bit.

Felix—the little master of his house, now—gestured at a chair.

Sitting on it felt rather like placing her head on an executioner’s block.

She braced herself, her gloved hands clasped over her dress.

Under the gloves, the old burns throbbed, just as Felix Hugo Fraldarius opened his mouth.

Many hours later Felix found Dimitri on one of the ballroom balconies, back hunched over a railing as Dimitri looked down on the yard below. He was without his furred cloak, the fool.

Felix sighed and knocked at the side of the opened glass door to announce his arrival. “I’m not here to wipe your tears if you’re crying, so wipe that snot off your face yourself.”

Dimitri’s shoulders jumped up at the noise, but his voice showed none of it. He sniffed, definitely having been crying a little, “You always know what to say, Felix.”

Felix took the bait and stepped into the balcony.

“It’s my duty now, didn’t you know?” Had been for a while. Perhaps always had been, but more often than not he had failed in that.

Urgh. Duty was such an ugly word; it made it sound as if Felix didn’t want this.

Dimitri’s smile warmed his voice when he said, “I never took you one to consider duty important.”

“I don’t,” Felix said. Inhaled. Exhaled. Tried to not look away from his present and future. In this case, the back of Dimitri’s head. “But I consider you important, Dimitri.”

Dimitri looked over his shoulder, his visible eye wide as a saucer. The tears of joy he had shared with his newly discovered cousin had yet to dry, and they gave his face a pitiable look.

Felix would let him have this moment—he wasn’t a monster, and neither was Dimitri.

Also, it was a little funny for Dimitri to look at him like that.

Dimitri’s expression melted, just as easily as the sunset melted into the horizon in pinks and purples. The smile that took over his face was reminiscent of their older days—of their childhood—but at the same time it was an entirely new expression.

Felix was a little bit in love with it.

But Dimitri would have to work hard to make him admit it.

Felix reached out his hand just as he had done as a child when he led Dimitri to one of the Castle Fraldarius’s hiding spots where father or Glenn wouldn’t find them. This time, he wasn’t going to make him hide. “Helena’s waiting for a dance with her cousin.”

Dimitri’s smile remained the same as he took Felix’s hand. “We shouldn’t keep her waiting.”

They kept her waiting.

It was the first argument the two cousins would ever have, but certainly not the last. That was the reassuring thing about family and childhood friends turned lovers.

Through thick and thin, they would always be there for each other.