The Scroll of Beginnings

[Fire Emblem 10] Blameless

2009-12-10T08:54:59Z

Blameless
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 819

Comment!fic Prompt:
Fire Emblem, Lehran, the point when he decided that the world could not be redeemed and that destruction would be the most merciful option

..........................................................................

When she asked him why, afterward, careful to specify the most obvious of his crimes - encouraging war, awakening the goddess - Sephiran could only answer with a cliche: the world had passed beyond redemption. And how did he come to such a conclusion, exactly? What qualified Sephiran - excuse me, Lehran, if you expect me to believe that - to determine where the line between good and evil was drawn, and judge every man, woman, and child had passed beyond? Sanaki looked away as soon as she asked; the day was clear, sunny, full of birdsong and as yet unburdened by the haze of woodsmoke that always blanketed Sienne. She'd removed the red band from her hair and the heavy robe of her office.

Even without them she was imperial, shoulders back, spine straight but for the slight arch that pushed her chest out. When did Sanaki start sitting that way, with her legs crossed, her toes pointed--? Her hands folded over her knee. The nails were bitten and torn to the quick. His fault.

A long time ago, he told her - how many years, now? Seven. No, eight--

Are you trying to tell me another story? Try the truth, for once.

They sat at a table in her living quarters, at opposite sides of the round top, and the curtains were pulled back to shine on the empty teapot and her silver spoons. Sephiran watched their reflections flicker when a fleet of birds stormed past her window with loud cooing noises. Do you remember the night we met? It was during the new moon, and every candle, lamp, and torch in the manor had been doused with water, broken, snuffed out, and the servants and guards likewise. Even the dogs turned up with slit throats-- remember?

Sanaki was quiet a long moment, until he thought she wouldn't respond at all. How should I remember something I never saw?

He remembered the glint of her wide eyes in the starlight when they left the grounds; Sephiran had carried her in both arms while Zelgius led them out of the courtyard, past the ruined fence, into a forest still damp and muddy from an earlier rain, where pine needles scented the air and scratched their cheeks. Sanaki woke at one such offense, and many nights thereafter, screaming that 'they' were stabbing her with pine needles. Who, she never specified. Not Sephiran; not Zelgius. They had no faces, she said, only long, black, sharp-- pine needles.

Don't you dare blame this on me--

You are blameless, Sephiran said immediately. As always. She watched him, her mouth turned slightly down, her lower lip swelling out. Her eyes narrowed, lashes dark, thick, and clumped together by tears that had dried in the hours since his brush with death. It was obvious, what she thought, so he added: I mean exactly what I said.

If she was mollified, it didn't show in her expression. All Sanaki did was spare him of her gaze, turning it instead to the window and the bare branches of the maples. Blue jays screeched somewhere beyond the scope of her window. He heard her heart beat, every breath and hitch in her throat when she wanted to say something but stopped herself, and every minute shift of her dress, the cushion. You should have left me there. Her finger traced the knit of her lace tablecloth. With my mother.

If I wanted you dead, Sephiran said, you would make a lovely statue.

Sanaki's chin jerked. She didn't face him. Liar. All you've done is lie, since the very beginning. 'I'm not here to hurt you, princess,' 'let us help you, princess' - to my grave. I didn't need an extra senator for that favor.

In the old days they would have laughed. Instead Sephiran watched her lip tremble until she pulled it in with her teeth and bit down. He saw the color drain out, the tautness of her skin. I didn't teach you to base your arguments on baseless assumptions, he said, looking at the sky beyond the glass and wishing there were leaves to mottle the blue and flutter on the air currents, showing their sides, light and dark. I'm the one tired of living. My mistake was in assuming everyone else felt the same way.

Her hands shifted, her fingers moving like the slats of a fan in his peripheral vision. So you admit it. Sanaki turned back. The most glorious of suicides. It could be a play, it's so dramatic.

A comedy, Sephiran said, and thought he might actually laugh to release the tension in his throat. But the play is over. He had lost.

.

[30 Breathtakes][Fire Emblem 9/10] Fragment

2009-12-06T23:25:21Z

Fragment
Author: Amber Michelle
Fandom: Fire Emblem 9/10
Pairing: Sephiran/Zelgius
30 Breathtakes Theme: 6 - handwriting; letter
Gauntlet Theme: 16 - a faint quiver in the air
Rating: K
Word count: 637

Notes: not the best fic to come out of this challenge.

......................................................................

It was a short, polite letter Zelgius turned over in his hands, unfolded, spread upon the folding table in his tent while the walls flapped and bowed beneath a cold wind with a sound like muffled drums. Do this, do that, aid the Crimean general, secure credit for Begnion as the senate wanted. Only one remark hinted at the attitude behind the slanted loops of the 'i' and 'l's: if their tactician is any good at all you'll be asked to remain behind in Daein; this will cause you some trouble at home, but please, do not argue - and, more irritating, after all, her majesty placed you under Ike's command. Your reputation should not be permanently harmed.

As if it mattered. Begnion was a corpse that did not know it was dead. There were tales about such beings in the northern reaches of Daein, where the people had nothing to do most of the year but sit inside beneath their fur blankets and repeat stories - stumbling skeletons in the reaches north of Marado; faceless, worm-eaten corpses from the mountains to the east, half-frozen, dropping bits of clothing or frostbitten flesh when they attacked mountaineers. Zelgius hadn't met either when he swept those areas many years ago. They were figments of collective imagination, he and his men maintained, inspired by eight months a year of snow and darkness.

Then he met his duke on the slope of the western-most mountain, where Daein mined stone for ink - there, veiled by flurries of snow, Lord Sephiran had appeared, white, grey, blue lips, so slight many mistook him for a ghost.

Zelgius fingered the red seal at the bottom of the letter and the ribbons affixed beneath the wax. The olive branch of Persis made a shallow impression, filled in with watercolor shadows by the flicker of the oil lamp. Another long sigh of wind pressed the tent walls inward and blew dried, broken leaves in beneath the flap to gather at his feet on the burlap floor. The wind smelled just as he remembered it: wet dust, the stink of a particular type of tree that dropped long brown seed pods to crunch beneath his boots. He could taste it on the wind. When the air calmed and the tent flap stilled, he lifted the glass shield held the edge of Sephiran's letter to the flame until it took and watched the parchment curl and blacken.

Everything his master did was lovely - his handwriting was a breath of fresh air, the slender loops and precise curls of his letters reminiscent of flower petals and new spring leaves. Zelgius let it burn and wished he'd waited.

When victory is assured, I will travel to my villa in Melior.

Sephiran had such faith in Gawain's son. What if Ike fell to Ashnard? He was still a child - not even worth fighting, though Zelgius would have no choice but to give him that honor as the Black Knight.

Don't kill him yet--

The paper crumbled between his fingers, the flame snuffed against the pitted finish of his camp table. Only a few marks remained - the beginning of when and a fragment of her majesty. Zelgius got up, grabbed his fur-lined cloak from the foot of his cot, pulled it over his shoulders as he pushed through the flap and out into the evening. Torches were set in a wide circle around his tent, the command tent across the way, and the empty infirmary. The man guarding his tent saluted.

He would be there-- he would meet his master in Melior. And before that, he would defeat Gawain's idiot son.

Let Sephiran find another sacrifice. Anyone but him.

.

[Saiunkoku] Beauty on a Winter Morning

2009-12-01T06:15:31Z

Beauty on a Winter Morning
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K+
Genre: gen
Warnings: n/a
AU/Canon: slightly AU.
Pairing/Characters: Juusanhime, Shuurei
Words: 3013

Prompt: November 2009 - Thank You (free word count)

Notes: inspired by my vague memory of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, and not a very good imitation. Will be edited when my brain isn't fried. Also, inspired by imanewme's prompt over at the warm up list for Nano - "Jyuusan-hime's diary entry from her days as a consort."

...............................................

Things pleasant on a winter morning:
one: the tang of plum paste and cinnamon incense on the air when one wakes
two: rain pattering on the roof tiles
three: ginger tea in Shuurei's thin porcelain cup to warm one's hands
four: steaming white rice with greens and a bright yellow roll of sweet omelet
.

"Much better," Juusanhime's instructor said, though it was accompanied by the soft puff of a sigh. "I know you hate practice grids, but--"

"Out of the question!" She put her brush down and frowned, pushing her lip out as much as she could and propping her fists on her hips. Doing that while sitting at tea didn't feel so impressive, but it did make her look broader, and taller. "This is silly. No one will care what I think of our breakfast, anyway, you know?"

Shuurei's mouth twisted behind her tea cup; it looked kind of like a smile. "If someone hears we have sake and roasted duck for breakfast, their wives will start doing the same." She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling while she sipped, her nails dyed red like the camellia blossoms painted on the porcelain. Jewels clicked when she shifted position, hanging from hairpins, earrings, her bracelets. "The first time I entered the Inner Court, I wandered around the palace with a box of steamed buns and sesame rolls, looking for Ryuuki so I could hit him with it." Her brown eyes looked red when lit from the side. "Soon, officials in every ministry were arriving with treats from their wives. Kouyuu said some of them were just awful."

"Compared to yours? Of course they were." Juusanhime relaxed her posture and looked down at her paper, holding her teacup with one hand. Her rice bowl was empty aside from a few grains stuck to the sides, and Shuurei's was half-full, but the omelets and greens were all gone - the plates were empty, smeared with black sauce. "Then, I should challenge Shuuei to a public contest. Maybe bladework will become popular."

Shuurei's mouth flattened, and Juusanhime laughed. Her tea was still too hot when she lifted the cup for a sip; it burned her tongue, and she set it down quickly, sloshed some on her hand, and yelped. Shuurei sighed again, making a big show of it, and put her cup down slowly. It clinked on its saucer. "Helpless," she said.

At least she didn't say 'hopeless.' "I can juggle teacups without looking - that was a fluke," Juusanhime said, tilting her chin up and shifting on her cushion. The table was on a platform by a wide, rectangular window with a dark ebony frame imported from the south, unbreakable; the door was the same, heavy wood that could take a sword, an axe, a hammer. She preferred lighter decor in her pavilion, but she was also better at defending herself. "So?"

Shuurei pointed to the last line of her list, now dry. The white ruffle of her sleeve glowed in the slant of sunlight. "At the very least, practice your vertical hooks, or you might confuse someone about the letter you want to write."

"Aw, Shuurei--"

"Do it! Now! Write!"

Juusanhime hunched over her paper, swirled her brush over the inkstone, and started writing.

*

Rumor has it that Li Kouyuu was marked as the next successor to the Kou clan, but he insists the formality is only a stop-gap measure - if Lord Shouka, dies, he says, before Shuurei can produce a son. But that isn't true according to her-- and of course any children she bears will belong to his majesty, not the Kou Clan.

Even so, as soon as 'Shuurei' and 'children' were mentioned in the same sentence, Lord Reishin visited from the province to ask after her condition. What a silly man - I don't see why my brothers dislike him. What could be more amusing than finding the former head of the Kou clan clinging to the window frame like a monkey to snatch a glimpse of his 'adorable niece' before she noticed him?

Lord Shouka says Mount Kou is infested with a cute variety of monkies that will mock his brother at every opportunity. No wonder Setsuna called Lord Reishin 'the general of monkey mountain,' ha!

*

Juusanhime sat heavily on Shuurei's bed and leaned against the pillows. A sweep of pink curtain hid her face. "It finally happened, just like Shuuei said it would." She threw herself back, bounced on the mattress. "I'm out of breath just from walking over here. I'm fat!"

"You're pregnant," Shuurei said. Drawers opened, silver rattled - her needles, or her tea utensils. Incense burned in a maze on a table in the far corner, reminiscent of lilies, or rose; Juusanhime never could tell the difference. The day was cloudy and cool, too cold for the hour just after noon, but one of Shuurei's lamps was lit to lend its yellow glow and a bit of warmth. "Maybe with more than one - didn't you say some of the Ran sisters are twins?"

"Two sets," Juusanhime said. The sheets smelled like lavender, and a hint of musk lingered, a trace of the resin incense they'd made for the emperor together. It was a nice scent - not as nice or familiar as Jin, but pleasant. He dropped by to see her every day, but of course he came to see his other wife directly after. "And then Gyokukan-- ugh, the last thing we need is more identical faces. Setsuna is bad enough."

Shuurei sounded just like Kouyuu when she snorted and muttered about not understanding why her father liked the triplets; they sounded arrogant and offensive, and all they were good for was taking her uncle - your monkey uncle, Juusanhime said - down a rung or five. I don't care if he deserves it. I'll take care of my no-good relative, and I don't need their help. Shuurei sounded almost like a normal aristocrat, scorning the interference of other clans, but then she said and anyway, he could be worse. Maybe he's a little childish, but he's courteous.

Yeah, Lord Reishin would be courteous if one were Shuurei or Shouka, and everyone else had better be armed to deflect his sharp tongue. Not as cute as Shuurei, was she? Only a Ran girl, was she?

Shuurei came back with their embroidery hoops in one hand and a sable box with their thread and needles that she held by a gold-chased handle. The latches and hinges were gold too, the sides inlaid with white jade plates carved to show blooming cherry trees. It was gaudy, but useful-- she wouldn't accept useless gifts. Even Juusanhime had to be careful when it was time to choose a present for the new year, though the knife she'd offered last winter - a good balanced blade, the handle only a little ridiculous with its carved dragons - was useful and necessary, no matter what its intended receipient said.

Two attempts had been made on her life since the announcement of her pregnancy. Shuurei had been forgotten by the palace gossips until the botched rumor about her potential child made its rounds. And now--? Now they were yammering about Juusanhime again; would her child be a boy? A girl? Boys sat lower in the abdomen, some maid might say, but another would remind everyone the Ran clan had a reputation for producing entire litters of children just like cats, and what if his majesty was saddled with two or three 'firstborn' children? How would that affect the succession?

For that matter, what if she bore only girls?

Would the Ran clan take an interest in her children-- or would they not?

Silly question. It wasn't going to be a Ran child; it was a Shi child, and it would be born with its father's gold eyes - she already knew that.

They made their way to the table, mostly at Shuurei's urging; a taller set, one with chairs, had been moved in near the cupboards so Juusanhime could sit comfortably when visiting. The low table and cushions next to the window looked lonely. "So." She narrowed her eyes at the blob shape of her iris on her silk handkerchief and hoped it looked like she was trying to decide how to fix it. "About your cycle not starting..."

Shuurei shrugged, her expression blurry in Juusanhime's peripheral vision. "It's only one month, and what you're thinking is unlikely."

Nobody else thought it was unlikely. Hiding the laundry from their servants was impossible; word that Shuurei wasn't bleeding had reached Juusanhime before noon, and speculation must have spread across the palace like a raging fire. "Still. I was thinking we should share rooms for a while."

Her so-called rival looked up, mouth turned slightly downward. "You can't fight in this condition, Hime. If someone does come after me--"

"We'll both have Seiran hanging around outside to protect us," Juusanhime said, tilting her head toward the window. Shuurei looked, but the shine of his purple hair had already disappeared behind a bright green juniper bush. Juusanhime leaned back, stretching her folded legs straight outward. Her back twinged, and her stomach stuck out almost far enough to write on when she sat that way.

"Hmm." Shuurei lifted her handkerchief to squint at something and said: "I'll think about it."

Juusanhime picked at her lopsided iris with a silver needle and purple thread, her fingers clenched around the embroidery hoop and aching at the joints from being in the same position for so long. At her elbow waited a sheet of paper on which Shuurei had drawn a grid for kanji practice, the brush and inkstone right there at the top for when she got tired of poking her fingers and bleeding on her own handkerchief.

That day she survived an hour of embroidery - then tossed it onto the floor, where it clattered and caught her needle when she threw it - point down, just like a knife. Writing was better. At least her characters were legible.

.
Irritating things:
one: needlework, especially when Shuurei is so much better at it
two: a round stomach
three: maids who offer to remove my 'rival'
four: blood stains

*

The servants say Lord Reishin took up residence at the far side of the inner court as soon as he had confirmation of his niece's condition, and the emperor is afraid to throw him out. I haven't seen him personally, and Shuurei only rolls her eyes when asked.

Well. As for his majesty being frightened of the monkey general, that's no surprise. As long as that man is here, his majesty is bound to come into Shuurei's room for a visit one day and find Lord Reishin peeking through the window - maybe at the worst possible time. What a creepy uncle.

*

Unpleasant circumstances:
one: pregancy - have I mentioned it yet?
two: pregnancy
three: labor

Shuuei is still waiting outside with Ryuuren and his majesty, even though I told them all to go away. Maybe I should call dear brother in - it doesn't matter which one - and try to break his ha--

*

"You'll want to do the same thing when your monkey uncle is hanging around your birthing room," Juusanhime said-- softly, because if they raised their voices, they'd never get any peace. "If you want to blame someone for waking the baby, by the way, guess who I saw sneaking across the verandah before Antoku started crying?"

Shuurei's head moved, and her golden hair pins jangled, but her forehead remained firmly connected with the tabletop. "I should have stayed in my own rooms," she mumbled to the wood. Her arms muffled it, folded around her head and the fans of her hair, and her magenta sleeves spread out in triangles with wide, ruffled edges. They'd chosen the same pavilion his majesty had placed them in when Juusanhime first arrived, so the gold and jade hairpins glittered in light reflected from the water outside, onto the glass, and all the way across the floor to where they were sitting. "I would be sleeping every night, I'd be able to read--"

Plum petals floated in their tea, bright white against the roasted orange color of oolong and honey, a perfect contrast to the frosty morning, the snow, the puffs of air her breath made when she went outside to pull water up from the well. Juusanhime leaned over her cup, nudged the foot encroaching on her space beneath the table. "Read what, reports on the granaries?" She grinned, showed all her teeth. "Or another collection of women's tales on having babies?"

Dangling quartz cherry blossoms swung when Shuurei lifted her head high enough to show the flat line of her mouth. "I don't know why he gave that to me," she said, and let her head drop again, this time onto her arms. "It's full of superstition."

"He's your father. He's trying to help." Juusanhime's smile faded slightly, and she picked her cup up, sipped, and turned her face toward the window. Her unadorned reflection stared back. She couldn't remember her own father, though her mother never spoke badly of him. They'd had loyal retainers at home; Jin's father was like her own, and her mother had died so early-- "Maybe I can have someone sent from the province. Setsuna will know who can be trusted, and then we'll--"

"No, it's okay." Shuurei sat up. Her hair had frizzed around her forehead, mussed by her sleeves; the silk had left faint creases on her face. She rubbed her eyes. "Why don't we look at your calligraphy again, since we have the chance? Did you get to Lu Yuurei's poem?"

The sun traveled at least an hour's worth while they looked at Juusanhime's transcription of the song. Along with literature on child-birthing, Lord Shouka had left them with volumes of poetry that had been stored in the auxillary archive building, where books and scrolls were left when they were no longer used, but considered too important to sell. These were passed around the Inner Court when the last emperor reigned, he told them, and pointed out Lu Yuurei's poetry anthology as the best - the one even men acknowledged, though it was written by a woman. That's rare, Shuurei had said. Kouki had this on his shelf - I always thought that was strange.

The calligraphy earned a shake of Shuurei's head, and a smile that almost trembled. I told you I'm no good at it, Juusanhime said, pouring her fourth cup of tea. It was turning bitter; the leaves had steeped too long, and the taste was acidic. She dumped it out and got up to boil more water, then chose a pot of genmai instead of oolong, which should compliment the last of the morning's steamed buns. Shuurei's writing box was out when she returned to the table; the pearl dangles of her hairsticks were long enough to touch the table, almost, while she was bent over it to write, arm propped hard on the table so red marks could be seen beneath her sleeve.

"Is that your pillow book?" Juusanhime shoved her papers onto the floor and saw them skitter and flap halfway across the room. "I can't be the only consort to keep one. That would look pathetic."

Three full breaths passed before Shuurei ended her sentence and lifted her head. "Of course I'm writing one. I have to, if you are."

Juusanhime planted her fist on her hip. "Not really..."

The Kou consort ignored her. "Want to read today's?" She offered her paper with both hands. The entry was only three sentences long:

Things to look forward to:
first: presenting Gyokuran to Ryuuki
second: teaching Antoku his letters (because it would be shameful for the crown prince to write as messily as his mother)
third:

The paper trembled in Juusanhime's hand, and she laughed, feeling pressure build behind her eyes. Stupid pregnancy. It was over, but it still made her cry. "You're so sure it'll be a girl." She lowered the paper, let it fall to her side. "You haven't even started filling out yet."

Shuurei cinched her belt tight around her slender waist, smiling, and pushed her empty cup across the table. She had rounded out since joining the court as a consort, just a little - it showed where the ruffled collar of her day dress met in a 'V' between her breasts. Her smile quirked and twisted. "I'll finally have a figure when I do," she said, holding her hands up to her chest.

"You're fine. He doesn't seem to care, anyway." Juusanhime smoothed the paper on the table, let her sleeve cover the letters. Her eyes felt hot, but she blinked quickly, and it seemed to do the trick. Her eyes stayed dry. "I'll-- I'll get the tea."

The cupboard with their tea utensils and the stove for the kettle were all the way on the other side of the room - a whole ten steps that felt like a league, and Juusanhime thought she might trip on the hem of her robe like she used to when she was little. It was warmer there, tinged slightly orange, slightly gold, the flame peeking through the iron plate heating the kettle. By the sound the water wasn't at a rolling boil, but that was perfect for green tea. Any hotter and the genmai would be just as bitter as the leftover oolong.

Shuurei's voice carried across the room, over the noise, yet it was still soft. She knew how to modulate her voice around children. Maybe it came from being a teacher - or a government official. "My mother knew I would be a girl."

Juusanhime spooned genmai tea into the pot, then poured water from the kettle over it and breathed in the steam. "Your mom was an exception." The tray was heavier than before; Juusanhime held it with both hands and walked it over, staring at the pot, where water sloshed out from the top, just a bit - at the bits of green tea scattered on the lacquered bed of the tray. "Stop showing off, Rose Princess, or I'll let Lord Reishin sneak in tonight to rub your tummy."

Shuurei's eyes went round, and her mouth with them. "Hime--!"

Juusanhime laughed and wiped her eyes. In the other room, Antoku's thin, fussy voice rose. She covered her mouth with both hands, but-- too late. He was crying, and Shuurei was already standing up. Her writing instruments had been put away. Here we go again.

.

[Saiunkoku] Desert of Letters

2009-11-30T00:11:40Z

Desert of Letters
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 982

Gauntlet Theme: 24 - promises almost kept
Prompt: young!Reishin, a moment that determined his decision to take Kouyuu in

Notes: Gaiden #3 actually addresses why Reishin decided to save Kouyuu, so this is an extrapolation on that confession, which went something like, "his eyes watched the distance as if waiting for someone, just like mine used to when I waited for Shouka to come home." The title comes from an Utena chorus that has nothing to do with this topic at all.

................................................................

Winter never truly touched Kou Province, so far as Reishin had seen in the eight he remembered, but they always moved to the mansion in the provincial capitol before the first frost - away from the orange groves, the vineyard, the bony plum tree that sheltered him every summer while he played the biwa. His secret clearing had looked bare and open with all the leaves gone and the grass open to the gray sky. He sat at a window on the second story of the public building, the one his great aunt opened for holidays, feasts, visits from the governor, tried to think of the tree as it would look at the turn of the new year: a snowy dome of white and pale pink blossoms, the ground below littered with petals like snow and the wind heavy with their syrupy perfume. The courtyard outside was stubborn, and wouldn't transform itself for him no matter how long he stared. The walk was patched with snow - but it was melting. Soon it would be mud. Kou winters were always wet and muddy.

"Brother?"

Reishin shifted his gaze to his own reflection, and the round face at his elbow. "I don't know."

Kurou frowned like an opera mask, his mouth a dark, painted line on his white face, and his brows drawn down sharply enough to crease his skin. "You don't know what I'm going to ask." They'd just tied his hair up this winter - it was finally long enough to wrap in a knot atop is head. He'd grinned for most of the capping ceremony. "Brother Shouka--"

"I told you - I don't know. Go away." Reishin shifted on the bench so his back faced Kurou and tried to ignore his sticky mochi scent.

"But you said--"

Shouka said he would be back before winter. Before snow covers the capitol was what he'd actually said, but Reishin wasn't picky, nor did he know when, exactly, snow would fall over that place. It was north, but not so far as the Haku or Koku provinces. He knew the map; he knew how many leagues stretched between his manor and Kiyou, and how long it would take a man to walk the distance - how many leagues could be covered in a day, a week. He could tell Kurou if Brother leaves while the trees shed their colors, he'll arrive before the first rains.

But he didn't arrive with the rain, nor was he there before the snow. The trees outside were bare and the knobs of their branches adorned with droplets of water that glittered in the sun. Pines bordered the outer wall, dim gray triangles. Glass rattled in the big square window frame; a breath of chill air tickled the back of Reishin's neck and left his nose and fingertips cold. Kurou dug a fist into his long sleeve and climbed up to sit on his feet beside Reishin, a paper charm dangling from his other hand on a string.

Was it hard to travel during the winter months? Not in a carriage, where one could bundle up in cloaks and blankets, and maybe even warm one's feet with a hot brick. But Shouka wouldn't travel by carriage, would he? No. He was stubborn. He would walk.

"Yuri said Brother was going to stay in Kiyou."

"Yuzuriha," Reishin corrected him; she was supposed to be a boy, not a girl. "What does he know? Nothing." Shouka said it was imperative to keep Yuri's secret, so Reishin would do so and pretend he didn't know why, though he remembered standing behind the screen to Aunt Gyokuka's room and listening. He remembered the hammer of the imperial army hovering above Kou Province, only a ghost and a story to him, but real to his older brother, real enough to--

"I wish Aunt Gyokuka were here," Kurou said in his small voice, twirling the paper charm with both hands. He wasn't looking out the window, but at Reishin's reflection. Their eyes met. "She would make him come back..."

She would; Aunt Gyokuka could do anything. She could have taken the throne. "We can make Shouka come back." The window frosted when he breathed out a sigh. "I'll write another letter." Reishin curled his fingers together under the hems of his sleeves. "Go fetch the paper, Kurou."

His brother yipped - Reishin scolded him immediately, accused him of being the son of monkeys - and Kurou ran out into the hallway. The door drifted closed, but did not quite shut, and his footsteps thumped down the hallway and faded.

Reishin's fingers felt stiff and frozen. It would be smarter to move back or meet his brother in another room with a brazier or a stove that was actually lit, but he shifted on his legs again, felt his toes tingle, and turned his gaze back to the yard outside, the high stone wall with its tiled shelter, and the flashes of red and white umbrellas that showed past that line, between the jostling shoulders of the pines. He shouldn't write without a desk. The cold would make his calligraphy messy. If Shouka read his letters at all he would be ashamed of his little brother's sloppy handwriting. And if he didn't?

A vision from a story, of letters and papers abandoned to the wind and sweeping across dusty floors, made Reishin close his eyes against the possibility. It would not be like his brother, in any case; Shouka was the one sacrificing himself for their sake, not the other way around. He would read Reishin's letter.

He would come - with the new year, maybe, since he hadn't made it before winter began.

Maybe.

...

[Fire Emblem 7] The Land of Legends

2009-11-23T19:39:46Z

Title: The Land of Legends
Author: Myaru
Rating: T
Warnings: n/a
Word count: 6103
Characters/Pairing: Pent/Louise
Gauntlet Theme: 29 - why not flirt with the moon by day

Note: this is the first time I've written these characters, and I don't write for FE7 that often either. Hopefully that doesn't show too much. :D I have no idea what to write for a summary, so I'll have to think about that. >_>

......................................................................................

"A story-- now, Lord Pent?"

"Why not?" He relaxed against two feather pillows set up against the headboard. Their silk cases creased audibly. His new wife glittered like a diamond on the edge of the canopied bed with one shapely thigh drawn onto the mattress so she could face him, though Louise appeared determined to keep her gaze averted. Tradition demanded Pent allow her time after the wedding party to prepare herself, and he recognized her mother's touch in the metaphorical weight of gold in the red jewels dangling from her ears, and the teardrop diamond that dangled between her breasts and tried to catch his eye with its glitter. Her lacy white gown must have required a dozen needles and as many years to produce. The shadows cast by their single lamp sheathed her curves. "All decent tales are told at bedtime." He curled his fingers into the quilted coverlet so they wouldn't touch her without his permission. "My nurse lied to me so many times about dragons and evil druids I spent years trying to unravel her stories from reality."

Louise started to laugh, then cleared her throat and covered her mouth with her hand. His ring gleamed on the third finger. "Oh? When did you stop believing in them?"

He turned his eyes up to the white canopy. Spared his gaze, she might let her shoulders relax finally, might even look at him. Stupid traditions - she'd never shown fear to him before. She was a better horseman than he, she beat him soundly at target practice, she had the unfair advantage of a smile that made him lose his train of thought whenever she thought he was being an idiot-- if propriety had allowed him a little more freedom she would already be used to his touch and challenging him for control of the whole affair. "Rather, she led me to believe they were only tales, and now I know a different story."

She was looking down at her hands when he snuck a glance at her; they'd folded on her knee, and curls of golden blond twisted over her shoulder, peeked around her arm, swirled onto the coverlet behind her, loose for the first time. "You've mentioned that before." Louise tilted her head, looked at him sideways. "That you found something you hadn't believed was real - then you ran off and deserted us for most of the yule season."

Pent laughed and reached for her hand. "The desert is a brutal place in the summertime, my lady."

Her fingers jerked, but she didn't pull away. "Why on earth would you make a journey like that?"

"Come," he said, pulling, wrapping his fingers around her wrist. Red crept from her throat to her face, blushing her breasts, and he smiled. "Lie down. It's a long story."

It seemed all she needed was the order; Louise was well-bred, knew her duty, but Pent was glad she hesitated. He watched her hair spin and swirl over the blankets when she twisted around to bring her legs onto the mattress, the scent of violets and honey powder curling like those strands and drawing his hand to stroke the length. She let him pull it out of her way, put his arm around her waist, and hesitated only a second before settling beside him with her head perched on his shoulder.

He might have ended up with her cousin instead, had circumstances been slightly different. Helene wouldn't have been as soft or sweet - nor as shy. Marisa, Stella, Maria, Amelia - they would already be making love to his title. That--

Pent watched his fingers trace a seam over her hip. That approach had its merits.

"Lord Pent?"

"The Desert," he said, ripping his eyes away. His fingers didn't want to listen. They traced shapes on her silky nightgown, and he didn't try to stop them. "It must be two years ago now that I found the first fragment..."

*

Three days passed before they had any time to themselves despite the demands of tradition, which their families were perfectly willing to ignore as long as Pent was the only man inconvenienced. Louise smiled over her morning cup of tea when he muttered about the last of them finally leaving us alone, her long legs crossed and peeking through the gap in her dressing robe. It wasn't fair; this was the first time she'd allowed him the luxury of waking to find her there, still nestled beneath the sheet and decorated by streaks of hair gilded by the early sunlight, bare and warm and tempting.

Why had he gotten married, again? His books were waiting. His master's discourse on the structure of incantation magic was marked on the second chapter, and there was an essay to read, a book to write.

"I noticed most of your friends left early," Louise said. The rich scent of her tea colored the air, a mix of black and green with rose petals. Her slender fingers hid the mulberry decoration on her cup. She held it at her chin, breathed in, her gaze on the window and the grassy hills beyond the hedge barrier. "The Knight General seemed especially rushed. I thought he simply didn't like parties at first, but..."

"Douglas? He can't stand them." Pent looked down at the cup on his saucer. A silver spoon waited on the painted edge of the plate. "He had a message to carry. I doubt the king would let him out of the capitol otherwise."

To her credit, Louise didn't ask, though he'd told her long ago she didn't have to suppress her curiosity in matters of importance - that as his wife, knowing matters pertaining to his employment or household was her right. Instead, she leaned forward, put her cup down with a quiet clink of porcelain, and asked if she should order breakfast in. She frowned a little when Pent told her he almost never took breakfast, and he decided to leave the explanation of his personal habits to the housekeeper, whom she would have to get to know anyway. Why make her look unhappy? He did eat lunch - when he remembered - and supper, when occasions demanded it.

Pent stayed to watch her dress and brush her hair. Books and essays would wait an hour or two without complaint, but his wife was an anomaly among the nobility - a woman who rose before the sun traveled past the ten o'clock mark and insisted on being dressed within the hour, which meant he did not have much time to indulge himself.

She was sitting at the small dressing table braiding her hair when he decided to tell her. "It seems I've been promoted."

Louise lifted her pale eyebrows in the mirror, looking lovely in its oval frame. "How fortunate." She pulled the plait over her shoulder to tie a pink ribbon at the end, her lips turning just slightly. "So I married a general." Her expression tightened. "Mother will be ecstatic."

"We'll let her enjoy it awhile before we allow her into the house again," Pent said, leaning back and folding his hands over his middle. "This will require me to make frequent and lengthy trips to the capitol, military maneuvers notwithstanding. I can take you along, or you may stay here, as you prefer."

Whatever she thought about that, it wasn't reflected in her expression. Daylight glinted on the weave of her braid when she threw it back over her shoulder. How long would it take, he wondered, before she grew dissatisfied with her lot - or angry, and justified in her complaints? Lord Douglas had a wife he never saw; rumor had it they did not get along, and the gossips were likely correct in their speculation on the conspicuous lack of children. Pent's younger brother was married and ruled by his wife. His sister had married, and confessed in a letter she was glad to see her husband leave to attend court, as it allowed her the freedom to run the household as she saw fit and observe her own schedules and pastimes. With luck, Louise would be the same. While visiting for their wedding, Pent's sister had assured him he was a difficult man to live with. His wife would be throwing him out of the house in short order.

They parted at the bottom of the front staircase, Louise to gather the household staff, and he to rejoin the company of his books. Weeks had passed since his last night in the study. Though he'd grown to love the delicacy of her perfume, opening the door to the dusty, dry smell of books, shelf upon shelf of them, reaching to the high ceiling, was like a homecoming after a long sojourn in the wilderness.

*

Since the Knight General had not been specific on the matter of when Pent was to travel to the capitol for his formal promotion, he added 'travel preparations' to the scribbled list he left for Miss Ada on the little table by the door and promptly forgot about it. He owned a warp staff for the worst case, and knew he could make Aquleia in seven jumps, even retain the ability to walk afterward if he timed them carefully, though he'd be unable to eat for a day or so. Louise would be against such a reckless trip; Douglas would likely scold him - then force him to stand tall for the ceremony and remind Pent why he was miserable at every opportunity.

Outside, past the curtain of ivy dangling over the library windows, the sky grew dusky, then dark. He lit the lamps around his desk with four flicks of his finger and a little magic. Someone left a plate of thin grain crackers and mild white cheese atop a stack of books he'd already finished. The green-bound volumes belonged at the top of the east wall ladder, and the black to his master; what he read now was penned in tight, bold lettering that strained his eyes after a few hours, forced him to move onto the leather folio sent from the capitol. Cold tea kept him awake, and then cold light fingering in past the ivy to make the candlelight seem stale and dim. The cushioned arm of his chair was worn flat in exactly the spot he wanted to lean, the oak table slightly too high to comfortably prop his feet on the edge; he suspected it was built with that in mind - there were no convenient grooves or carvings either.

Some time after the angle of the light moved from dawn to mid-morning, a knock Pent didn't recognize sounded on the heavy door, and it swung open to admit his new wife. He looked up at her greeting and sighed when he saw she was already dressed. Her lips thinned.

Hm. That didn't look good--

"I'm sorry to interrupt your study, Lord Pent," Louise said. She crossed the rug to his table with hands clasped behind her back like a girl. "I spoke to Miss Ada about upkeep, and there is some misunderstanding regarding your most recent instructions."

"The staves." He shifted the folio, the books, looking for another piece of paper. "I forgot--"

"Yes..."

Pent ripped the corner from a page in his journal and fished for a bit of graphite. Her sigh made his bookmarks flutter. Mend, to replace the old one; restore, because thieves on the southerly road were fond of coating their knives with low-grade poison, and he wouldn't have time to muck around for an antidote. "Will you be staying here when I go to Aquleia?"

"This time." Louise took the note, looked down at his list. She pulled her lip in slightly, and then: "Have you eaten, Lord Pent?"

He blinked, watching the glint of her violet eyes move slightly when she tilted her head, tucked a stray lock behind her ear. That morning she'd chosen a sweet magenta dress, the skirt cut to flutter around her thighs over slim pants, appropriate for shooting or riding, running, everything a lady shouldn't do. Likewise, it was folly to invite her to the capitol while he worked, when her place was right here, handling the administration of his property, but-- he thought he would like the idea of going to Aquleia better if she were part of the bargain.

"Lord Pent?"

He looked up again. She crossed an arm over her waist, the paper between her fingers. "Yes, I had something." The plate was gone, of course, when he searched for it. "Don't worry. Ada always makes sure I'm fed and watered. How is your day - have you arranged everything to your liking? Has the help been cooperative?"

Louise smiled, thin-lipped, not because she was irritated, but - it seemed - because she didn't want to let him know she was amused. She covered her mouth with her other hand, cleared her throat. Her answer was succinct - she'd met with the staff, she had the account books. Ada was very helpful - of course she is, else I wouldn't employ her! - and motherly, and speaking of her brought dimples to his wife's cheeks. Pent watched them appear and disappear, missed the next thing she said.

Once she left and he leaned back to prop the essay on his lap, page sixty five on the matter of the elder runes looked dull and cramped. He hated this particular author, anyway; the man went on tangents while developing formulae, for god's sake - and Ada wondered why he sat so long with these manuscripts.

The sun passed over the manor and left the afternoon light to diffuse and turn soft again, so Pent had to turn his chair in order to catch the light to best effect on the page. Supper was placed at his elbow when he was in the middle of deciphering a set of pictographs, and it wasn't until a strain of sweet, fresh florals tickled his nose, completely unsuited to a dinner plate, that he raised his head and realized it was Louise who brought it, not Ada-- that she was still there, her hip propped against the edge of the table. Her body faced him, but her eyes were turned to the window and the bright streaks of orange and purple clouds he saw reflected in the glass chambers of his lamps.

Dusk lit her pale skin, tinted it pink in all the right places. She was like a painting, a sculpture. "You've studied almost two days now," Louise said when she realized he was paying attention. "Ada described your research habits, but I must insist, Lord Pent..."

"I will eat, Louise." He straightened his posture - as if she were another of his tutors, a nanny, scolding him. "Is there something you need?"

She smiled. "I will stay until you've finished so I can move the plate out of your way. I would not want to soil a book unnecessarily."

So, it was going to be that way? Pent slid his dictionary onto the folio and stood, so they could speak eye to eye. "That really isn't necessary." He took her hand. "I'm not--"

"Ignoring the needs of your body?"

Her lofted eyebrow dared him to challenge her. It was more that he didn't notice; now that Pent could smell venison on his plate, new potatoes, fresh greens, of course he would apply himself to eating. But-- "You misunderstand." Or perhaps he did. Louise had sworn to take care of him, and it seemed she meant to hold herself to that oath. "I've no intention of denying my needs." He pulled her by the wrist, slid his arm around her waist when she stepped forward obediently, held her tightly to his body. "As a matter of fact, there are a few things I would like to see to before enjoying this meal."

Pink flooded her cheeks and spread down to her throat, and her pulse pattered like a nervous bird when he leaned to kiss it. "T-that isn't what I-- you-- here?" Her voice notched up a pitch. "The books--"

She was soft in all the right places, her hips widening at just the right angle for his hands to take hold and keep her still. "It wouldn't be the first time they've witnessed something like this," he said against her throat.

"Pent!"

Louise would hit him later for laughing, but he couldn't help it.

*

Though she forgave Pent for his oversight - her words - Louise remained unsympathetic to his study habits and appeared every night with a platter of food, which she watched him eat, nibbling on a slice of bread or a wedge of apple, until he consumed enough to satisfy her. Sometimes she smelled like roses and cream, at others violet, or lily, even gardenia. Once she delivered his supper smelling like a yule confection - like cinnamon, cocoa, as if someone had taken a cup of spiced drinking chocolate and rubbed it all over her skin. To this day he couldn't be certain it was done on purpose; he remembered carrying her upstairs while she kicked and swatted at him, commanding that they not be disturbed on pain of termination, and then--

Pent squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed them with thumb and forefinger, breathing out slowly. Why was he married? Why did he do it? Shapes that were supposed to be words blotted the pages of the book he held open on his lap. Supposedly they completed an old, unfinished dissertation on elder magic by an anonymous author, something he'd been eager to read, as books on the topic were rare. Yet, three pages in, he couldn't have said whether it was true or not. No, Archsage, I do not believe my upcoming nuptials will affect my study--

Bah.

He marked his place with a strip of leather and got up. The shelves stretched up almost two stories and three heavy pine ladders allowed access to the very top. Since inheriting the manor Pent had arranged the books to suit him - magic and natural science on the lower, more accessible shelves, while history, literature, and language texts packed the top, and he grouped them according to the color of their binding as he was more likely to remember a book by sight than by author. Ivy crawled across the window panes where the shelves were split asunder to illuminate the room. Their spidery shadows crawled across the floor, the domed shape of the windows casting light far enough to reach the opposite wall. Louise sometimes stood between the bookcases and looked outside while she waited for him to eat, her golden hair a pretty contrast to the dark wooden furniture.

She was altogether too lovely for this big, dark place. One could shoot arrows anywhere, at anything - a tree, a fence post - but nothing would make it more lively. No-- children might do the trick, but that took time.

But it wasn't just that. Louise-- she was no ordinary girl. She brightened every room she entered. Gold, silver, porcelain, all paled in her presence, because she didn't belong among such a mundane lot - she was unearthly. She deserved an equally beautiful and interesting world in which to live.

Sunset looked to be a while off yet, so Pent went to find her. A lone window lit the corridor from the east end and the ceiling was low, paneled in dark wood like the walls, two, maybe three hand-spans above his head, so his footsteps left a close echo, sharp and loud on the polished floor, over runners worn gray and brown by dust and dirt. A harpsichord sat unused in one of these rooms, kept company by shelves of music folios and books on tone, composition, scales, and even maintenance. A drawing room would be next to it, unopened since his mother's death, the furniture draped in white. Another, smaller parlor was used to receive guests now, since Pent didn't often invite anyone. He walked in that direction, crossed the foyer, thinking Louise might take care of inventories and supplies there because Ada spent most of her time in that area of the house, but the housekeep said his wife had finished that and gone outside in the most scandalous getup she'd ever seen, the skirt up to there, no sleeves, nothing left to the imagination.

That meant the east lawn - or what was a lawn, until Pent came of age and proved himself destructive enough with magic that his father had the grass ripped out and the trees transplanted to allow space for practice. Both metal and wooden targets were stored there in a shed, and straw, and a suit of rusted armor. Louise had pulled a straw man out for her drills, and while he watched, standing at the edge of the yard with arms folded behind his back, she pinned it with arrows to the heart, liver, ribs, both shoulders, thunk-thunk-thunking in quick succession. Sunlight gleamed along the shafts, blinding silver. A wooden target lay on the ground several paces behind her, the colored bands riddled with holes. His shadow stretched and nearly touched it.

She went to collect her arrows and noticed him on her way back to the line she'd drawn into the soil. "Lord Pent," she called, approaching him with the bow slung over her shoulder - not her silver bow, but a plain wooden one that looked heavy; good enough for practice. "I'm sorry, I didn't notice you were there. Am I needed for anything?"

"Just your company," Pent said, holding his hand out. "Someone else can clean this place up."

Louise took his hand without hesitation, but looked back when he pulled her from the dirt, onto the grass. "Are you sure? The house is so short-staffed..."

"That will change now that you've moved in." She followed after a gentle tug; Pent pulled her arm around his, held it close. Arrows clacked around in her quiver. Since that was an easy topic to discuss, he told Louise of his plans to revive the gardens north of the manor, which had lain dormant since his childhood, and fill out the general staff so the kitchen girls could focus their attentions on their training, and even promised her a clerk - female, of course - for harvest season, when the orchards buried them in apples and pears. He knew she liked apples, and preferred cider to wine, plain country cobbler to fudge, and described every dessert, stew, and roast he could remember sitting down to during autumn.

Northeast Etruria subsisted on game and fruit for the autumn and winter months, much different, he said, from what she was used to farther south: pork mostly, or so her descriptions indicated, and citrus, and grain, grapes, peaches. They talked about cheese, another of specialty of his estate - and how fortunate, when one trade product complimented the others. Pent kept her at the table up in their chambers, asking her what she'd learned since acquainting herself with the servants, what she wanted, what she expected - he remembered she wanted to stay home when he went to the capitol, perhaps to take care of these things, but did that mean she was wary of moving? Any good country family made a pilgrimage to the capitol for the winter to keep up with society, and powerful landlords like her father had to visit their holdings; they usually took their families along, so Louise would have traveled.

So-- he said it. "I would like to introduce you to my mentor, Louise, when you have time."

Louise blinked slowly. Her hands curled in her lap, tinted orange by the sky. "If that is your wish, Lord Pent. Is he very far?"

Pent scratched his ear, looked outside. 'Far' would be an understatement. "Somewhat." He wanted to leave it at that, but she tilted her head, and one eyebrow lifted slightly, unconsciously, prompting him to add more. "I told you of my trip to the Nabata desert - do you remember?"

"Y--" Her hands flew to her braid, twisting it. "Yes. I... don't suppose you mean to mislead me with that question?"

He smiled, leaning on the arm of his chair to watch her. "I'm afraid not."

Sunset spread across the sky outside like fire, cooling in a long, purple line along a horizon of trees that matched the cool floral of his wife's perfume. Her eyes reflected the flaming sky, orange flecks upon violet, shifting slightly while she thought. Pent watched her fingers trace the weave of her braid. Short but perfectly shaped nails decorated her hand, undyed; her lips shimmered, smoothed with cranberry butter he would taste if he kissed her. Who said perfection came painted and chanting poetry? Her hair gleamed brightly as the golden band around her finger; his eyes traced her legs up from her ankles to her knees to the widening curve of her thighs, her skirt bunched up around her legs the way she sat, with her feet propped on the carved base of the table-- hiding nothing, just as Ada said.

Granted the Archsage had given up all human attachments save one - that of teacher and student - but once he saw Louise, he would understand. No man would begrudge Pent the presence of his lovely partner who, in any case, would be extremely useful should they run into bandits on the way to Arcadia. Why, one taste of her roasted potatoes - the ones with rosemary and thyme and big flakes of salt - and all would be settled.

"Well," Louise said, taking a deep breath, "I always did want to see the great whirlwind. Lead the way."

*

Their journey south took the better part of a month, and might have taken longer if they were not still newly married and alone; courtesy would have required Pent stop with his escort at each of the provincial capitols to greet his peers and allow them to delay his journey a day, or two, or perhaps a week. Passing the Etrurian capitol by would have been inexcusable. Louise expressed her concern over their rudeness twice, watching the distant white towers with her reigns held loosely in one hand to allow her mare what license she wanted on the straight roadway. There, at the center of Etruria's power, the highway was paved with white stone and lit at intervals of a hundred paces when night fell, secured by guard houses and the local military patrol. In Reglay the stones had been buried by mud long ago, and the road was hard-packed dirt; down south, where Nabata waited, it disappeared into the wild grasses, which ran themselves ragged into the sand.

Louise and her bow fed them for most of the trip, though Pent was perfectly willing to climb trees for almost-ripe peaches or plums, and he came back with a cape-full of berries and his hands scratched pink and red one evening, which made his wife smile-- but roll her eyes, and scold him, while she washed the berries in river water and stewed them with the rabbit on a whim. He told her she should have been his cook, and Louise heaved a put-upon sigh.

It was lovely how her hair glinted and shined in the firelight - prettier, more delicate than gold. No artisan on Elibe could spin golden thread as fine as her hair. He fell asleep stroking the length of her moonlit braid while she folded her arms to her chest and curled close to him beneath their blankets and cloaks.

Three years earlier, just before they met for the first time, Pent thought he would end with a marriage to reflect that of the knight general - lukewarm if he was lucky, but most likely cold, for he couldn't think of a woman at court who would consent to being ignored. Even Louise had her own way of drawing his attention and she was relentless, if always pleasant.

He would eat anything she made; roast venison, bread and water-- poison. Anything, if it came from her hand.

Once they left the capitol behind, the winds grew warmer, scented with baking grass and pine, and the countryside yellower, less populated. Dust puffed along the roadside more often, kicked up by their mounts and short breaths of air. He speculated aloud about it while they rode - the inconsistency of the wind must be a result of the enchanted vortex around the desert, which he'd studied and still couldn't quite figure out. You say the Archsage created it? Louise said, and then, after a pause: no wonder you can't reproduce it. She ignored his protest that she have more faith in him, musing on how the winds would affect her arrows.

Good question.

They found out two days later, when she shot a stolen purse out of a brigand's hands and threatened to do the same to his head next if he came one step closer. Pent didn't even have to pull out a tome. The owner of the purse, a rotund woman wearing a bland yellow dress and a smudged apron, offered them shelter for the night and a crude map outlining the safest course through the grasslands to reach the desert. It was the last town before the sands started to eat away at the soil so only grass and weeds would grow, yellow, dry and burned under the sun. They were warned about wild fires, but saw nothing but dust and dead fields the farther they rode.

"I thought you knew this place," Louise said once they left, the route memorized. She nudged her mare closer to him and leaned over.

Pent spread the map on his thigh so she could see. "Normally I take a different route." The roads of magic, for instance - on which she couldn't accompany him at his present level. "The Archsage sees to my progress once I enter the desert. It's his domain - signed and sealed, if you will."

Louise lifted her gaze to the dull sand horizon and the hazy sky before them, blurred gray and brown even from a distance. "We have three days of water, four of food."

"It'll be enough," he said.

The wind lost its peaceful voice the next morning when they were halfway across the plain and started to bite, bits of dirt, rock, dead grass and shrubbery scraping his face and hands. Sand crunched between their teeth when they ate and made water bitter. Louise veiled her face with a scarf, all but her eyes covered, and--

"I apologize, Lord Pent," she said when the sand scrunched beneath their feet and hung in the air swirling, like eddies of fog or morning mist, whining and howling so she had to shout. The sky was gray and sandy, and the ground constantly shifting beneath their feet, soft as snow until it scattered on the wind and came around to pelt one's face. They led their mounts by the reigns, there being no use in riding and weighing the beasts down. "My presence requires riding, and our progress..."

He waited for her to finish - she might turn the apology into something sensible, though Pent couldn't imagine how. Sand ground between his teeth. His hair whipped around, the ends of his ponytail snapping into his face. "I'm the one who invited you," he said when it became clear she didn't know how to finish. "Leave the matter of our transportation to my teacher. He'll notice us - eventually."

Her eyebrows drew together beneath her scarf, but he couldn't tell if she smiled or frowned. Pent reached for her hand and pulled her along. They couldn't move freely while tethered to the horses, but he wanted to feel her there - warm fingers beneath their silk wrapping, long and slender, callused at the tips and along the sides from the handling of arrows. She rubbed them with lotion every day until the scent of violets followed her like the light reflected from her golden hair; even on this journey she'd not given up until one morning when she'd opened her pot of scented butter and saw the top speckled with sand. That's two applications lost, she'd said with a sharp sigh, reaching for a knife to scrape the pitted surface off, but instead she only closed it and muttered she'd do it later, when they went home-- what a waste, she should have been more careful. Waste not, want not - Pent knew the saying, but had never lived it. If she wanted a replacement, she would have it. If she wanted chocolate-scented cocoa butter imported from the tropics the expense wouldn't make a dent in his assets, yet she rolled her eyes when he suggested it.

Would she do that at home-- roll her eyes, get exasperated with him? Lecture him on how one didn't waste money - as if her family was any better about their finances - until the flush of pink in her cheeks made him say something stupid to embarrass her? That wouldn't be half bad. Ada should love her to death. He is a hard man to live with, missus - why, you should hear him yelling come harvest when he can't shove the paperwork onto the help--

Oh yes, she'd love it.

And he would be glad to leave the ledgers to Louise.

Darkness fell before Pent sensed the invisible eye of his master's spell sweeping the dunes ahead of the wind. He grabbed Louise by the waist, held her to his chest and let the horses bump up against them. Warp spells left him dizzy, but Louise stumbled when it dropped them, and his horse jerked at the reigns, shaking its head and showering them with sand. Pent held her steady and blinked dust from his eyes.

A crumbling wall and the remains of its gate loomed before them, several men tall and worn down at the edges. Date palms swayed on their thin trunks, black against a sky scribbled with orange and magenta, streaks of dark violet, and yellow gold past the far wall and behind the temple. Pent looked down and saw Louise had pulled her scarf down. Tendrils of her hair had escaped it and curled around her chin. "Arcadia," he said, pointing to the green shadows of trees and faint, yellow glitters of water. Between the leaning lines of the southern date grove was a shadow shape she wouldn't have seen outside of tapestries and paintings. "Dragons have lived here with people like us for centuries. You'll want to meet the young ones, especially."

"I--" Louise covered her mouth, fingers curling, and leaned closer to him. "I'm sorry, Lord Pent, I thought you were making it up."

He felt a grin split his face. "I do like to tell stories," he said, letting the reigns drop. The horses would follow of their own accord - they'd want water and food. Pent brushed sand from her hair and led her forward, an arm draped over her hips, inhaled deeply the scent of roses and oleander and let it out in a rush. "But this one is more amazing than fiction, isn't it my dear?" She nodded slowly, silently, perhaps overcome, and they passed between the gates. "Welcome to the land of legends."

.

[Fire Emblem 10] Cymbeline

2009-11-23T04:02:50Z

Cymbeline
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 1480
Gauntlet Theme: 12 - The kinks and the fibers of our hearts

Comment!fic Prompt:
Fire Emblem 9, Sephiran, Sanaki, teaching her magic and giving her a special tome

................................................................

Domes and canopies of cherry blossoms stretched over the garden path, still several inches over Sanaki's head, though she was tall enough to stretch her arm and pluck a blossom if she wanted to. Sephiran had to duck his head to walk under some of the branches. White and pink blotted out the vivid blue sky, and a dusting of petals settled on his black hair like snowflakes, catching between the strands, sliding down, fluttering free again to litter the flagstone walk. He let her hold his hand as they walked so she wouldn't trip or wander off the path while she looked up, and every few minutes he would murmur that she should watch where she was walking-- it may be their day off, but who knew which senator would have the gall to interrupt her vacation today? Someone always did. Last week it was Seliora with a complaint about the resources she'd steered away from Daein - as if the country's output wasn't unusually high for a post-war economy - and the last week had been spent deciding who would go to Crimea for the anniversary of Queen Elincia's coronation, which they were obligated to acknowledge. She sent Lekain, but he would no doubt be by within the day to whine about the impossibility of leaving.

"Can I order them not to talk?" Sanaki asked when they left the cover of the cherry trees and walked under the clear sky. Their perfume followed her, curling around her arms and under the hem of her skirt to tickle her ankles. "For-- a week?"

Sephiran tried to sigh, but she knew he smiled even without looking up. He had a dozen different sighs - annoyed, put-upon, unhappy with her choice in suitor, amused - and this one sounded like a laugh. "You can try," he said. His fingers curled slightly around hers. "It wouldn't be the strangest thing you've demanded of them."

She lengthened her stride because he was a step ahead of her, and the way he inclined his head to look at her-- "You're making fun of me."

"Not at all." He didn't bother to hide his smile. "You've always been a good child, but you had your moments."

Child. She wasn't a child. Not anymore. He even said so on her birthday. Had he forgotten in only two days? "Funny, I hear the others accuse me of being a spoiled brat when they think I can't hear."

Sephiran turned his attention back to the path and pulled her down a branch that would lead back to the palace. Maples shaded them, then stone overhangs spilling ivy over their rails, and the scent of lamp oil and polish replaced the sweetness of cherry blossoms. He didn't really give her an answer - only asked if she'd heard the common saying it takes one to know one, which Sanaki hadn't heard in quite those terms. There should be a more elegant way to put it - at the very least a philosophical phrasing, like one always hates that which is like oneself, or somesuch. They went up three flights of stairs and far into the west wing until they reached his quarters and went inside. Sigrun and another of the holy guard abandoned an errand on the second floor to follow Sanaki and station themselves outside the door.

"I have another gift for you," he said when she asked why they'd come, and he told her to sit at the breakfast table while he went to fetch it. Sanaki watched him disappear past his bedroom door and heard something rustle. The chocolates he brought back from Persis for her birthday were now arranged in a fan on a crystal platter with a clear, domed lid she lifted to reach for one. It chimed when she put it back down, and she let the blossom-shaped chocolate melt on her tongue while she watched the maples sway outside, scattering sunlight and shadows on the sheer curtains.

Was she spoiled? Sephiran didn't always give her what she wanted. He wouldn't be a gentleman and kiss her; he wouldn't buy her trinkets, or flowers, or dresses; he insisted she study even after a long day in the council chamber, when she'd rather throw herself onto the divan and make him read something to her; he never sang for her - never, not anymore, even when she reminded him of the times he'd done so when she was small. You're imagining things, he would tell her. It must have been a pleasant dream - I never sing. My voice is terrible. You'd throw me into the dungeon for assaulting your ears.

As if she would believe such a lie when heads turned every time he so much as opened his mouth - even to cough or sneeze.

Ugh. Sanaki let herself frown at the window. Sycophants. They weren't even women, some of them. Would the laguz start next?

A creak of the hinges drew her attention back to the bedroom door and Sephiran's entrance, one arm bent to hold something behind his back. She tilted her head. "A book."

His lips turned up at the corners. "You know me too well. What is the topic?"

Sanaki lifted her eyebrows. How should she know that? He didn't relent, though, didn't show her the book, though it looked heavy the way his arm sagged, then tensed up again. "Something relevant to my studies, am I right? Maybe... Abel's philosophy on impermanence. No?" Another smile, a real one, the kind where his eyes crinkled and glittered, like he was holding in a laugh. "Crimean statecraft? Something on the rise of the heretics we call our senate?"

Sephiran did laugh then-- and his arm dropped to his side, showing the deep, sanguine binding of a fire tome - one belonging to the greater art, for the basic tomes she'd always worked with were brighter, slimmer, and certainly not embossed with such fine calligraphy. He crossed the room and set it before her - the cover was beautiful, almost velvety, and still smelled of fresh leather. When he opened it and turned to the title page, the parchment was thick, cream, smooth as silk, and that was his handwriting--

"You've done so well in your studies I thought it was time to introduce you to the real thing." His fingers pressed the bow of the page down, slid along the spine, bent the parchment slightly so it would stay open. "The magic in this book has not been a part of normative study since the Elder days, but collections like this are still passed down along the older bloodlines."

The strength had gone out of her hands, but Sanaki managed to flatten the paper and sound the title out while her heart pattered in her throat - it was an odd word, not the sort of vocabulary she'd learned to study magic. "Cymbeline--?" She looked up.

"A king in the days before the flood - a patron of work just like this." A slight line creased the skin between Sephiran's brows, little more than a shadow. His fingertips lingered on the page. "We'll read dramas written during his era someday."

Sanaki pushed her chair back and stood up to hug him around the waist, her face hidden on his shoulder to conceal the hot, pricking sensation in her eyes that would probably turn into tears. She could keep it from her voice, but he read her expression as easily as a book at the worst times. "Thank you." Her arms tightened without her permission, trembling when he stroked her hair with one hand and returned the embrace.

"Better than chocolate?" he asked, and she nodded, even though it was a silly question. Sephiran sifted her hair with his fingers, pulling slightly. "I'm glad." More softly, he said, "I've always wanted to give you something eternal."

If he kept talking, she was going to cry. "You always say such odd things." He made a contemplative sound, the tone of his voice loud in his chest, louder than his heartbeat for just a minute - almost like a song. "Read it to me, Sephiran." His hand slowed, but he didn't stiffen up like he did when she asked him to sing. "Let me hear the magic in your voice."

His hold tightened, the pressure of his arm so tight Sanaki could hardly draw a breath - but the moment passed, and Sephiran rubbed her back, perhaps in apology, his lashes swept low. "As you command."

...

[Fire Emblem 6] Fate is the Enemy

2009-11-22T23:12:13Z

Fate is the Enemy
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 966
Gauntlet Theme: 5 - As it is with ghosts

Comment!fic Prompt:
Fire Emblem 6, Percival/Elphin, the lost prince and his bard companion.

................................................................

It was chance that brought about their meeting - not fate or fortune, though Percival's position would be strengthened by the latter and Elphin probably sought fame as well as gold. Fate is my enemy, he said once to Percival after finishing a ballad and lowering his harp, glinting like gold beside green velvet curtains. Imagine the adventures I would not see, and the heroes I would not meet, if someone else were fated to follow them. He was but a simple bard, dependent on the favors of men like Percival for the opportunity to refine his art, as practiced in handling the commons as the aristocracy by his own claim. Reconciling the bard's pale face and the dark setting of the tavern they'd chosen for their conversation, however, strained his imagination - a faculty his family and enemies at court had often assured him was limited already.

"After your disappearance I was expelled from court. I believe Lady Cecilia suspected me of collusion with your enemies." His 'simple bard' spoke softly over a wooden goblet of mulled wine, a pale reflection of his former golden glory - his golden curls were pale in the tavern's tallow light, pulled back tight against his head, their length covered by his brown cloak. His face was pale, and his lips looked dry. A veil of steam twisted between them, smoke from the candles and fireplaces, shadow. The noise of the tavern nearly drowned his explanation out. "Lord Caerleon fed the story to her - he is the prime suspect in my opinion, but the word of an entertainer means little to a queen, yes? A shame - she never did like me."

Percival glanced away for a moment, watched a barmaid pass by their table with her tray held high. The place was well-mannered as far as taverns went, though hands reached for the tankards she carried and her bottom in equal numbers. She slapped the backs of their heads and called insults. No one was looking in their direction. They'd taken one of the darker tables with chairs instead of benches, near the corner by the stage where Elphin had performed, but not so far into the corner they'd make the local authority suspicous. "Queen?"

Elphin lifted his cup slightly, looked into the garnet depth of it. "You have been out of the country, I take it, pri-- Percival?"

He had nothing to hold; his plate, which came to the table crowded with a chunk of cheese, another of bread, and greasy links of sausage, was clear, scattered with crumbs. In this tavern he was a mercenary, nameless, at the moment jobless; the swill they called ale would likely come to him untainted, and yet, Percival hadn't taken a drink from any hand but his own since he fled the palace. Perhaps his chambers still smelled of arsenic, or the fireplace of rank wormwood. "News is slow on the Isles, master bard. The oppressed don't care for the names of their overlords - only the number of whips and arrows."

"Hmm." Elphin had said something about meeting a ghost when he saw Percival at the town gate, but the bard fit that tale better: tarnished, thin, his hands bony when they were once smooth, the skin beneath his eyes shadowed and depressed, as if bruised by someone's fingers. "Only 'bard,' my lord, unless you prefer your own titles to 'scum' or 'mercenary.'"

"I've heard worse since joining the resistance." Percival leaned back in his chair and heard it creak and crack. It held, but he thought the weight of his armor, if he'd worn it, would have done the frame in. "Now tell me about Cecilia."

Elphin's sigh was sharp through his nose, lost beneath an upswell of laughter on the other side of the common room, where a dice game was in progress across a wide, round table. His blue eyes shifted that way. "Your father was assassinated two nights after you disappeared. Cecilia took the throne in your place." He sipped his wine and looked down at it, pursed his lips. "Keeping it warm for her beloved, I suppose."

Percival took the goblet and held it to his nose. Nutmeg, clove, anise, lemon-- it smelled safe. He tossed half if it back in one gulp and felt his mouth pucker when he put it down on the table between them. It was warm, though. His fingertips, his toes, his ears, were all frozen, though he hadn't noticed a draft. As a matter of fact, it was rather warm. "No wonder she got rid of you. There would have been questions about the warming of other properties of mine, otherwise." The ruckus at the dice table died to a murmur, and he lowered his voice. "Do you think she was involved?"

"No." Elphin stared at his drink, hands hidden by the table, perhaps folded in his lap to rest. His harp sat in a case on the chair beside him, Percival's cloak draped over to hide it. "She is gullible, but honorable. As I said, Caerleon, perhaps the count of Remi... I heard tales of a certain family meeting with Bernese officials just past the border with Lycia, but I could scarcely believe them - until now."

Percival curled his fingers under the frame of the table and felt a splinter catch beneath one nail. "War?"

He watched Elphin's gaze slide away, settle on the yellow wooden grain of the table. "Etruria will fall without you, my lord."

"Hm." Indeed. Maybe it would be better that way.

...

[Fire Emblem 10] Below the Waters

2009-11-19T15:24:17Z

Below the Waters
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 623
Gauntlet Theme: 12 - a reed cut from its roots

Comment!fic Prompt:
Fire Emblem 10, Sephiran is the goddess/a fragment of her consciousness

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She told Sephiran later that he'd gone mad - the ocean submerged the fields on which that great war was fought, where his children used the songs and spells he'd taught them to destroy their enemies; storms broke the mountains and the forest he called home wilted and crumbled to dust. His servants, her friends, her family, were dead. Below the waters, she said, pointing to a broken spire jutting from the blue and green surface. We were in the temple when you lashed out. From where he stood, on the flat top of a ruined building that once rose above the trees of the forest - another one, not his - he could lean over the fragments of a wall to see tree branches wave and undulate beneath the water, still verdant for the moment.

We'll bring them out, he said, looking only at her hand - until it dropped to her side, and then Sephiran could only watch the blurry shine of her violet hair from the corner of his eye, because he didn't want to see what expression had settled on her face. His body felt heavy as stone and as unmovable, despite his promise. Waves slapped against the sides of their stone island, scattered bits of masonry. He wasn't mortal; he shouldn't feel sick, there shouldn't be pressure building behind his eyes, demanding to express itself in tears, his knuckles shouldn't hurt from being clenched so tightly, ever since he came to himself and saw her face above him, blocking the sun. I'm sorry.

How inadequate, he thought a breath later, when she didn't say anything. She was still a child; little Sanaki served Sephiran because her parents did, running at his side to keep up, carrying his books when he used such things, and memorizing each of his songs, all of his spells. She'd learned them best. He thought she might be an adult now, or nearly - not simply a child, but the only one, now. Perhaps the only one to survive the disaster he created simply because he was angry.

Her dark wings cramped to her back. Sephiran took a deep breath and faced her, laid his hand atop her head. Sanaki didn't look at him, but that was fine; no apology would be enough. You must help me, child. More-- he would ask for more, when he should be the one giving. This cannot happen again. If there are any survivors, you must help me care for them, and remind me of this sight whenever they incite my anger.

Promise, she said. Promise it will never happen again. Each word fell like stones between them, toneless. Her eyes were still red, her lips pale, dry, her fingers bloody where she clawed her way to the top of the broken tower to escape the flood.

I promise. His throat tried to close around the words - another mortal tendency. She nodded. A god should not break his promises; Sephiran wasn't sure he had the ability to do so, and Sanaki clearly had faith he could not.

Wind lifted her dark hair and brought the smell of salt to his nose - salt, mud, wet leaves. The wolves made their home in the mountains, didn't they? she said, squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin. I remember someone telling me so. Sanaki looked at him, for once without a smile. Let us search for them first.

Sephiran bowed his head in acquiescence. It would be as she wished. Everything, from then onward, if he could manage it.

.................................................................................

Lame-tastic! Too bad, I thought it could be cool, but-- it isn't.

.

[Fire Emblem 10] Halfway to Darkness

2009-11-18T16:12:12Z

Halfway to Darkness
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 1340
Gauntlet Theme: 31 - so monochrome and so lukewarm

Comment!fic Prompt:
Fire Emblem 10, Sephiran/author's choice, "...Must I?"

................................................................

After the light of Judgment faded, once night fell upon silent Tellius and Zelgius slept deeply, each breath heavy, long, deep, Sephiran rose from the oval bed and parted the curtains to find his robes and get dressed. He didn't want companionship when he saw this goddess; she was darker than he remembered, too quiet, too stiff, as if she still slept and this Ashera was a dream - a sleepwalker. Keeping his expression and posture neutral for the sake of his escort would strain his ability to keep his thoughts secret from the goddess. Eventually it would all come out - his part in the creation of these wars she punished Tellius for, his desertion of the duty she charged him with before beginning her long sleep - and the sharp, bitter jolt Sephiran experienced when she awakened and first spoke to him.

If Ashera had changed after Yune's imprisonment in the medallion, that shift was negligible when compared to the emptiness he saw in her now. Even divided she'd shown emotion - dimmed, faint like a dying candle, but there, influencing her tone and expressions, the motion of her body, and now-- nothing. That sour taste that crawled down his throat at her awakening remained. Zelgius had thought him unwell when he refused to eat, but Sephiran didn't think he could swallow anything but water - and even that, sparingly.

How Zelgius slept so deeply, Sephiran could not fathom. He listened to the even rhythm of the general's breathing while putting on yesterday's clothing in the dark, nothing but memory and his hands guiding him around the room, to the door, out into the hallway. Everything was the same - the position of the furniture, the shade of the light globes illuminating the corridor, brighter now that the windows, up near the ceiling where the wall curved inward like a buttress, shed no moonlight. His bare feet were silent. Ornaments on his robe chimed and clinked, silenced themselves, began again. Golden embroidery spelled out his rank, belts of gold links and long, brass, oval plates the size of his finger expressed Ashera's favor, for they were from her own collection of offerings gathered since ancient days, before such a thing as calendars and years were introduced to her children. Her other gifts to him waited in storage; they would have to be brought out.

Long minutes stretched between his chambers on the fourth floor and Ashera's resting place on the fifth, all of them quiet and cold. Sephiran didn't notice the chill of the floor, but felt it on the air when his fingers got stiff and cold, and the tips of his nose and ears. Her receiving room was warmer; the shimmer of her aura, like sunlight, heated the stone floor and his black robes. He started to kneel and stopped at the sound of her voice.

"Come here, Lehran, and keep your feet." Ashera sat at the edge of a wide, blue stone bench that might generously be called a throne, though it had no back, nor was it adorned. Only shielded, if she so wished, by gossamer curtains. "I want you to explain the rebels marching southward from the place you call Daein."

Her hands rested on the bench on each side, partly concealed by the feathered decoration on her sleeves. Sephiran looked at her left and hoped Ashera would not take it amiss if he refused to look her in the eye. Ashunera would have; this goddess, however, often demanded obeisance fit for a mortal ruler. "They would be the exceptions to my judgment on the fitness of humanity. If they maintain their balance of power as I last knew it, the party should be led by three: the beorc Ike, Micaiah, and my Empress."

Herons marched with them. Ashera probably already knew, but--

She motioned for him to continue, and Sephiran told her what he knew of each individual in brief - the important parts, their deeds and allegiances, their natures when it came to fighting. Of Sanaki he stressed her stubborn will and sense of duty; she would be unable to accept the death of her nation passively. Any good leader would protest - Altina would have. She would have argued to the end, despite the danger to her person or traitorous implications of questioning her goddess. Micaiah he did not know as well, but thought she must be similar. The personal sacrifices she made in defending Daein spoke well of her sense of justice. She might have been a good ruler, if not in Begnion; the senate would've discovered her soft spots and sank their claws in so deep she, like her ancestors, would never escape.

If Altina's daughters were spared, and perhaps Ike, and the remainder of the heron tribe, the world might yet be salvageable. Starting from scratch would be difficult for Ashera, Sephiran realized now. She had nothing to give. Wind, water, and blossoms once laced her aura, which now felt stagnant, like air trapped too long in a stone chamber. It was like the desert, only dust and heat. Standing close to her made breathing a battle, each breath heavy and humid.

Silence fell once Sephiran finished his explanation. The goddess did not breathe or fidget. He was accustomed to standing for long periods of time at his empress's left hand, and to keeping his mouth closed during situations when any decent human being would want to flare up and attack the senior senate's proposals. How long had he contented himself to stand there on the dais and allow them to twist the law whichever way pleased them, forcing Sanaki to sign their papers and remove rights little by little as it benefited them? How long since he had stopped defending laguz because his proposals were always defeated before making it to the floor?

He'd tried-- hadn't he? He raised Sanaki well, he treated his subjects well, he tried to help others; wasn't that enough to vindicate him? Sephiran wasn't at fault for the dissolute nature of the senate. Even if he'd stayed after losing his birthright--

"You always used to sing while I thought," Ashera said softly. Her voice, for once, didn't echo.

Sephiran met her gaze, resisted the urge to clench his hands in the fabric of his robe, where cold curled and clenched in his stomach. "Please accept my apology."

The tilt of her head indicated she would not. "I have forgotten much," Ashera said. Her lips thinned a moment, the first change in expression he could recall since their reunion. "But I know you are a creature of song, Lehran. Sing while I contemplate our next course of action."

"I--" His throat tried to seize. "It is unfortunate, but I-- I have lost--"

"Nonsense." She closed her eyes, perhaps to avoid his expression, whatever it might be. "You've a voice to speak. Nothing is lost."

If only she knew how long Sephiran had tried to convince himself that was true. Change was difficult after so long; he knew his own voice and the undertones of magic it always carried-- knew it for so long this new voice sounded like it belonged to someone else, still, after almost eight hundred years. Eight centuries amounted to little in the course of his life.

Must I? he wanted to ask, again, and again, until she tired of his game and sent him away. Could she be exhausted? Exasperated, maybe, but that would only result in an order to do as he was told.

A mourning dirge was what Sephrian gave voice to - for himself, or his goddess, or Tellius, he couldn't be sure. Perhaps all three. And like his goddess, the sound was empty, stale, and lost halfway to the darkness.

...

[Fire Emblem 10] Call it Politics

2009-11-17T21:52:11Z

Call it Politics
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: T
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 1140

Comment!fic Prompt:
Fire Emblem 10, Lehran/older!Sanaki, Sanaki demands to know how many people he’s bedded

................................................................

"You've managed to get out of this every time I've asked, Lehran." His empress reclined against a wall of pillows atop her bed covers, a leg bent, picking at a painted nail. She crossed the other leg over her knee with no consideration for the fact he was standing there, watching the fluttery hem of her sleeping gown slide down and pool around her thighs. He started to look away, but Sanaki caught his eye and lifted a brow. "So, I'm ordering you to stand right there until you answer. If you must sleep standing up, I'll send Sigrun for a blanket-- if I feel like it."

Lehran swallowed hard, trying not to let his mouth purse or turn down. Her little bedside clock said it was half past three, and the sun slanted in through her lace curtains at a steep angle to glare on the floor and leave the rest of the room seemingly in shadow, though the back of her legs glared white enough against the cream and gold colors of her duvet and the dark pink of her gown. He hadn't wanted to find out what sort of underclothes she wore - lacy, and white - but he couldn't stop looking. It wasn't his fault - the bend of her leg obscured part of her face. Heat crept into his face. "It's a long list, my lady. I tried to be as thorough as possible in convincing your supporters to turn their backs on the senate."

Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Well then, I'll help you. Tigana," she said, abandoning her nail to spread one hand and press her fingers backward with each name. "Amelia, Helene, Juno, Louisa, we can't forget Oliver, and that's in addition to Zelgius, Catalena, Naesala--"

"T-that's absolutely incorrect!" His face flushed hot, the room cold and dark aside from the silk texture of her skin. Tightness in his back forced Lehran to shift his wings, the feathers ruffling slightly, a reaction he couldn't smooth without reaching back and drawing her attention to it. "Where did you--"

"He told me ages ago."

She was looking at him sideways, her lips hidden, so Lehran couldn't tell if she smiled or frowned. "You should know better than to listen to Kilvas," he said. "Especially when he offers the information for free."

Sanaki laughed, soft, then tried to swallow it, looking upward at the underside of her canopy. Her foot kept time with the tick of the clock. "So that's the only one you protest?"

His gaze drifted to her legs. "You're exaggerating." He ripped his eyes away and focused on the dull gleam of her brass clock.

"Hm."

Lehran heard her foot slide on the covers, heard the fabric crease each time she moved, and the sound of the second hand pursuing its relentless task. Nothing he said would budge her; she'd called him in while still reclining in the bath behind a veil of rose-scented steam, and refused to dress while he was in the room - as if it would be more compromising than receiving him while in her bare skin, or-- or reclining on the bed, putting herself on display, testing him. He didn't know what the aim of this trial was - Sanaki knew how to make him uncomfortable, how to try his patience, how to make him bow beneath the weight of his sins with just a look at the right time, in the right place. What else was there?

Rose and powdery sweetness still lingered on the air. Sanaki sat forward to pull her hair clear of her back and flung it aside so it draped over the edge of the bed, long, purple, perfectly straight. Bluntly cut at the ends, too, just like he used to insist it be done.

She sighed. "So--"

"You forgot Altina," he said. "And Dheginsea." Her foot stopped moving. A frown turned her lips down slightly. Lehran folded his hands behind his back and used his eyes to trace a lacy curve around one of her thighs. "Before them, my first wife, whose name you wouldn't recognize. Oh, and Tibarn."

Her foot thumped onto the covers. "Tibarn--!"

"And this is not mentioning the ones whose names I've forgotten--"

Sanaki kicked the covers and made a throaty noise he took for disgust. "I can't believe you!"

It was Lehran's turn to roll his eyes, and he waited until she looked at him to be sure he made an impression. "Sanaki, I'm-- old." As a matter of fact he didn't know what to call it; 'old' was an understatement, and 'ancient' was an odd attribute to assign to oneself. "It isn't as if I had all of these lovers at the same time. I--" Got bored? No, he had better rephrase that. "It's rather lonely to pass the years without companionship, even if it is only temporary."

She blew a stray hair from her face. "It isn't that." Sanaki bent her legs again, held them to her chest. "Tibarn? Really?"

Lehran shrugged. "Call it politics." He caught her frowning again and lifted his hand. "Something laguz handle much differently than you would, my lady. I don't understand why it's so objectionable to you."

"You're mine." Low, serious, her tone made his heart jump and try to suffocate him. "Not Tibarn's. Mine."

In the dimming light of the afternoon, her eyes glinted like gold coins. He held his wings in close, felt their warmth against his shoulders, and wondered if perhaps Tibarn's methods weren't beyond her after all. Sanaki had the nerve and - when compared to his own prowess - the strength. But she cajoled more often these days, charmed, whether her target was Lehran, or Oliver, or Fredric, friend or rival. Maybe she liked the game of capturing someone's attention, twisting acquaintances into admirers. Maybe it was his own doing, inadvertent. Who else would she look up to, learn from?

"That wasn't the point he--"

"Come here, Lehran." His muscles seized - but she only looked at him, her face blank, head tilted, either to beckon or simply to watch. Her tone softened. "Here." She lifted a pale hand.

Lehran took it and let himself be pulled down to the bed. "He doesn't want me."

"Good, because he isn't going to have you." Sanaki stroked his cheek with her fingers, smoothed his hair. She pulled on the front of his robe. Lehran gave in and leaned closer, bend over her, and she smiled. "That," she said, "is my privilege."

...

[VP: Silmeria] A Matter of Time

2009-11-15T15:37:11Z

A Matter of Time
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 961

Prompt: VP Silmeria: Alicia and Silmeria, fairy tales

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Warmth greeted Alicia when she opened her eyes to the sunbeams slanting into her bedroom window, bright fingers that lit her mahogany bedposts red and made her ruffled quilt glow white like a ghost - a second sun for her birthday, though she would rather have her mother, even her father, instead. the maid had already laid her clothes out on the bench before her dressing table - a pleated skirt, a white blouse, a new leather vest to wear over it, tooled in gold, and new, tall boots to match. She tried to sneak looks at herself in mirrors and glass lamps all the way downstairs, where a servant presented her with a cup of drinking chocolate wide enough to be a bowl, fresh, sticky honey rolls, and-- a letter. A letter sealed with the only crest she recognized: the royal arms of the palace of Dipan. She snapped it open.

Wait until after you've eaten.

Alicia frowned at her chocolate. A skin was forming on top. It looked shiny. "What does it matter when I read it?"

Do you want to blubber into your chocolate with the maids watching?

Well she was talking to herself while the maids watched - which was worse?

You'll waste a good breakfast, Silmeria said. Alicia could imagine her rolling her eyes and tilting her head to look away, maybe flinging her hair - but she didn't know what the valkyrie looked like, aside from a grudging admission one night that their appearances were similar. You're no good at fighting when you're hungry, Alicia. A warrior always sees to her physical needs when preparing for battle.

Or practice. Alicia's arm still ached because of their new routine, but if she wanted to go home, Silmeria said, then she had better be able to protect herself - from thieves, bandits, her father's soldiers--

Alicia slid the letter beneath her plate and divided a sweet bun to spread butter on the bottom half. You just want to know what it tastes like.

If the valkyrie could snort, she would have. Odin's feasts aren't anything like this. He eats like a man, even if he refuses to acknowledge the similarity. My sisters and I feasted on Idun's apples when we could, but even the most pleasant preparations will grow tiring after a while.

"I thought that was just a story," Alicia said under her breath, forgetting herself, the honeyed top of the bun at her lips. She bit into it, licked the crumbs from her lips. Silmeria rarely talked about the others; she had reams of criticism for Odin, but who cared about him? It was the lesser gods who executed his will - the servants that would be after her, if they were found. Supposedly, it was only a matter of time.

Stories are often built upon a grain of reality. Silmeria's voice sounded distant, as if she'd turned to look at something else. The apples do not maintain our existence, only a certain measure of vitality. Destroying the orchard certainly would be a vicious blow to Asgard.

The apples were gold, the trees ever green; the sun, always shining, would glint from the leaves like gold, every tree in a neat row ten paces from its neighbors. What Alicia saw was different from the stories she'd read, and yet vivid, almost real - she could smell the dry, crumbly darkness of the soil, hear the water splash down the channels between each row and the leaves clipping and rustling together. She smelled the delicate blossoms, reached out with imaginary arms to catch their petals in her hands.

Silmeria saw it too - or perhaps it was Alicia spying on the vision without knowing it. Quietly, in her version of a whisper, Silmeria said, I think she might cry if I did that.

Who-- Idun? Or one of these sisters she spoke of?

The valkyrie didn't answer, and Alicia didn't want to ask. She finished her bun, wiped her fingers on a linen napkin, and started sipping at her chocolate, breaking the skin on its surface with her spoon. It was dark, rich, just barely sweet, and slid down her throat like velvet. The letter, when she unfolded it with one hand, was written in her mother's hand.

She looked away from it and blinked rapidly at the window. The chocolate helped, gave her something to think about while she waited for the light to resolve itself into panes of glass from the blurry spot on her vision it became when she read the first few lines. Dearest Alicia, my lovely child; you are sixteen today. I find myself wondering what you look like now - who you take after more strongly, myself, or your father. Agnes is a wonderful artist, but she cannot capture the softness of your hair or your voice--

There were no portraits of her family in this fortress. Her caretakers could not risk revealing her identity, after all. Alicia tried to remember her mother - what she looked like, what she smelled like, whether she had a pleasant singing voice or a croak like a frog and what the sunlight looked like glinting on her hair. Did gray streak the blonde now? White? Was her face creased with age? The queen of Dipan was like Odin, like Hrist - a story and a stolen image, one Alicia never could quite remember, no matter how long she sat in the dark with her eyes closed.

But that would change. She'd go home soon. It was only a matter of time.

...

[Fire Emblem 10] Libation

2009-11-11T17:05:30Z

Title: Libation
Author: Amber Michelle // myaru
Rating: T
Warnings: n/a
Word count: 1772
Prompt: Fire Emblem 10, Sephiran/Zelgius: atonement - drench your soul in the water / cleanse your heart of the stain

Summary: n/a
A/N: it's a bit literal.

....................................................................

If the light of judgment had frozen the world, everything in the Tower of Guidance seared itself into Zelgius's retinas - the goddess in her glory with a halo of hair like the dawn, and Sephiran shedding his illusion layer by layer: first his skin became luminous, as if the goddess's light brought it to life. He robed himself in black, wore it like mourning. Food and drink were brought for Zelgius, and Levail when he made his appearance; his master didn't eat or sleep, and the arrowhead shape of his ears implied perhaps he didn't have to, either because he was Ashera's favored, or because a life stretched across millenia found little need for such crude forms of nourishment.

I wonder if he'll reveal his wings, Levail murmured while they sat at a stone table in a room that might have been a mess hall for the priests, if the goddess had never employed any; tall, narrow windows with diamond glass panes broke the wall at exact intervals and let light in to gild their plain glass plates. I never thought I would lay eyes on one of his kind.

He didn't say the word heron, and Zelgius kept his lips tightly closed after his neutral response, layering bread, sharp yellow cheese, a dry slice of turkey. Sephiran never alluded to his past or his heritage. Levail made his assumption based on stories, paintings, songs, not knowing the man he gazed at with lips parted refused to sing and denied what he called an accident of birth. Both were affirmation in their own way.

After the noonday meal Zelgius left the hidden corridors and crossed the wide public chamber to a smaller gallery, lit by windows similar to the room he just left. No part of the fourth floor was left in darkness as long as the sun hadn't set. A long, shallow pool was cut into the floor, ten steps wide, twenty steps long, a precise rectangle outlined by white tiles and decorated at the bottom with a mosaic depicting the rood sacred to Ashera. It looked deeper because the tiles were so dark - gray, dark blue, brown. She favored those colors for some reason. His master only shrugged when asked why and answered with another question: did it matter?

Sephiran waited for him at the far end of the room in black, though his robe lacked the gold stitching and ornamentation of the others, and flashes of his pale skin could be seen when he turned his back to reach for something on a black table, where blue towels were folded, white linen, a line of silver vessels arrayed against the wall; this robe of his, like the others, was cut for wings.

What color were they? Black like his hair? Perhaps gray, the next natural choice. Or brown, like trees, reminiscent of birds in the wild whose plumage changed according to season and necessity, sometimes a practical brown, sometimes bright yellow or blue or green. Zelgius wanted to reach and touch the parting of fabric, slide his finger in to feel warm skin, and ask. His master had never denied him. Nor had Zelgius thought to ask until Levail did it for him quietly, gaze drifting.

Sephiran turned back to him with a precise square of folded white fabric in his arms. "You'll have to take that off." Less than two paces stretched between them. His fingers curled around his offering to belie the steadiness of his gaze. "Practically speaking, entering the pool in everyday clothing will contaminate the water, and she hates refilling it."

Zelgius wanted to snort. Instead he loosened the laces at his throat, on his sleeves, pulled his leather belt from its loops. That, he thought to himself, would be an affront to a goddess of peace, if one believed the teachings of the priests. Ashera didn't appear to fit the description. "Why did you call me in to do this?"

His master looked at the water, still hugging the robe to his chest. "You said you wanted purification."

He paused, one arm free of its sleeve. From his vantage, the pool reflected the windows like a mirror, so still it seemed he could walk over it like glass. When did he say that? Before he realized what he was asking for, surely. The brand wouldn't disappear, no matter how many baptisms he completed or how many times he tried to cut it out of his skin. The path to the goddess's awakening drenched them both in blood. Would water blessed by the goddess cleanse him of that stain?

"It was a long time ago," Sephiran said. His voice was soft enough it didn't echo. "However, as you will be entering her presence tomorrow, I decided we should do it today."

We. That was the first time he'd said it since the judgment, but the context was not quite right. "I didn't think Lady Ashera would want to see me," Zelgius said. He shed his shirt, his weapons, his trousers and boots, wrapped himself in the robe his master offered and tied the sash too tightly. It was meant for someone larger; his fingertips barely peeked out of the sleeves and the hem dragged when he twisted and turned around to make sure everything was straight. She was a goddess of order; if she decided to pay attention, she'd probably be fussy about the angle of his seams. "If she wants an oath..."

Sephiran watched him, his head tilted. His hands folded Zelgius's shirt independently. "Serving me is the same thing." The black shirt almost disappeared when placed on the table, discernible only by its matte texture. He took a silver vessel in hand and let it hang at his side. "Don't lie."

Of course he wouldn't lie. He only ever did so on his master's order. In the gallery of faces and characters Zelgius had deceived, as the black knight or as himself, only one made him regret his actions. She never left his mind, perhaps because she was never far from Sephiran's, or because, when his master led him down the shallow steps, into the bitingly cold water, she waited in the shadow of the pool when he looked past the writhing, sunlit surface: a child, not even waist-height, face soft and round and peaceful in sleep.

Zelgius didn't attack children. He didn't befriend them only to betray, as he was himself betrayed - until now. He'd never told Sephiran about that. It was a common story among children with brands, and the past wasn't supposed to matter.

The water smelled sharp and slightly bitter like myrrh while they sloshed to the center of the pool. His feet numbed, his toes stiff with cold, and the bottom was slippery tile, not the rough, slightly pitted terracotta he was used to walking on in the baths at Persis, in the palace. Sephiran helped him keep his balance until they stopped, where the water was knee-high. He stood with his back to the light and his dark robes pulled down, heavy at the hem with golden ornaments that kept them hanging straight even while they moved, giving the illusion he wasn't touched by the water at all.

Lately, very little touched him. He didn't even smile. The chimes on his belt jingled and glinted when he leaned down with the silver, long-handled vessel to gather water. Droplets glittered like gems on the mirror surface of the slender pitcher, around the lip meant for pouring. "I'll empty this over your head three times. Endure it."

Sephiran raised his arms, and water splashed onto Zelgius's head. Freezing, tingling, it splattered onto his shoulders and crept beneath his thin linen collar to trickle down the ridges of his spine. It ran over his face in cold fingers and forced him to squeeze his eyes shut. It curled around his body and seeped inward to make his blood sluggish and cold-- then it paused while his master bent to collect more water, and started anew. The second libation ripped shivers out of him, left his skin numb, and the third made Zelgius so cold he couldn't tell where the water ended and he began.

His master's hands, when they pressed to his cheeks, blazed like fire. His eyes flew open. Water plastered the robe to Zelgius's skin and tried to drag it down, off, rip his last shield away.

"That weight," Sephiran said softly, features coming into focus, "is every drop of blood shed in the pursuit of my ideals."

Zelgius took a deep breath. It seemed his skin crackled with the movement of his chest like a thin layer of frost over a puddle. His master's prompting led him out of the pool, but he didn't feel his legs move or the water slapping against his knees as they sloshed toward the stairs. Would the cold ever go away? Even Sephiran's hands were beginning to feel cooler.

Perhaps that was the point - the reason he insisted Zelgius do this. The goddess wouldn't care which pool he bathed in before he went in to meet her, as long as none of his attributes stood out as unpleasant. When they met for the first time in Daein, while snow fluttered and swirled from the slate gray sky and he bared his mark to a stranger for the first time, he asked if anything could be done to remove it - if a way existed to cleanse him of the taint. Sephiran answered in the negative. You are not a child of blasphemy.

That was then; this was now. Zelgius chose to bear the weight of blood and guilt so his master wouldn't have to.

"Come now." His master's voice, still soft, but thawing. His hand stroked Zelgius's arm before helping him up the steps. "There is nothing more to be done here."

No? Then - there was no redemption. None but death pursuing Sephiran's goal. Zelgius let him strip the drenched linen from his body and watched him reach for a towel. Sensation returned to his limbs in tingles and needle pricks.

That was a fine goal, all he needed. Zelgius would fight for him until the world ended-- or he himself did.

..................................................................

CHOTTO LITERAL AND OBVIOUS DESU NE. Hahaha, oh well, I'm at the end of my rope today. XD

[Fire Emblem 6] A Rare Smile

2009-11-11T07:37:33Z

A Rare Smile
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 825

Prompt: FE6: Percival/Elphin: "There's rumors about us, you know. I find it quite amusing." "...That's the first time I've seen you smile in some time."

God, I'm sucking at titles with these warm-ups. I know that's not the point, BUT STILL.

................................................................

"Why do you insist on sleeping on the floor, Percival?"

Feathery softness tickled his cheek. He folded his hands behind his head and lay still, keeping his eyes closed so he wouldn't see his prince leaning over the edge of the cot with his arms folded on the edge, his hair dangling down to catch the dim moonlight-- he'd be tempted to stare, and granted, they had the privacy of his tent, but tent walls did not hide much. "You keep telling me I'm stubborn," he said, blowing the dangling hair out of his face. It fell to tickle his ear instead. "I suppose that would explain the anomaly."

A heavy, somewhat sharp sigh sounded above him. The cot's wooden frame creaked. "I'm cold."

Percival shifted on his blanket, felt the edge of a rock under his hip. Better than a tree root, but not ideal. "It's spring, and Sacae is about as temperate as the mainland gets this time of year." Cold. His prince had both of the extra blankets. Percival had a cloak. "You're always cold."

He heard a rustle-- then a pillow came down on his face and he heard a muffled insolent, I didn't train you to say no-- Percival pulled the pillow away and opened his eyes. The prince smelled of tea these days instead of roses, often the sweet, grassy chamomile the merchants collected as they traveled. Now his linens would remind him of Elphin even if he wasn't there to make demands.

Elphin frowned down at him. "Get up here."

Percival folded his cloak aside and sat up. He couldn't let Elphin make a face like that. "It'll be cramped--" But his prince grabbed him by the shirt laces and ignored the warning, pulling him up with a murmured command to bring the blanket and the cloak with him - and not to forget the pillow. Percival shook dust and bits of grass from the covers and draped them over the cot before he rose and sat down, his back to the prince for the moment. "It would be more convincing if we were already in Ilia."

"There have been rumors about our association since the Western Isles," Elphin said. His slim hand waved in Percival's peripheral vision. "And none of them come close to the truth, I'll have you know. Any bard worth his salt would seek patronage with a rich Etrurian house. Even better if the lord is well-known and prone to having adventures."

"Hmm." Percival often forgot he had a family, much less a name; he had little enough to do with them - his mother, his cousins, Klein being the exception. None of that would matter to the common soldier, of course. What did they know of House politics? Percival wedged himself under the blankets, the edge of the cot pressing into his back. It was warm, despite what his prince claimed. "Let me guess, these rumors have me wrapped around your dexterous finger like a pretty ribbon?"

This close, Elphin's chuckle vibrated on his ear, against his arm where it sounded deep in his chest. His prince urged him to take more space, shushed his protests, and squirmed his way onto Percival's chest. "There, see? There's plenty of space." Elphin's smile was narrow-eyed and curled at the corners, satisfied. "It's quite the opposite, according to our allies. They say you make me sing for favors, strip for your pleasure, and-- and the rest is rather vulgar. I'll let your imagination fill the gaps."

His imagination didn't have to work very hard to fill in those gaps when the prince covered him like a blanket, heavy, warm, thinner than he should be, tangling their legs together and locking their ankles. "You're smiling," Percival said, stretching his hands over Elphin's back, running them down the slender sides. He felt ribs, could have counted them; the bones of his hips jutted out into the skin where they should have been softened by flesh. A year hadn't been enough to heal him completely. It felt like his prince would break if Percival squeezed too hard. "I haven't seen you smile since..."

Elphin's fingers stroked his face, rested on his lips to silence him. When they met again on the bridge at Misul, when they first laid eyes on each other-- his prince had smiled, and it said everything: I've missed you. I'm so glad to see you. Perhaps those meanings didn't really exist, and they were just a fantasy Percival constructed for himself; Elphin - Mildain bent his head down to kiss the corner of his mouth, his lips soft and his breath hot on Percival's throat. It didn't matter. Only the present mattered, and he wouldn't neglect it.

...

[Suikoden III] Not Without Strategic Value

2009-11-09T08:01:31Z

Not Without Strategic Value
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 798

Prompt: Suikoden 3, Chris and Percival

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Chris wasn't one to drink, either with her subordinates or alone, but Percival promised the ramshackle place had amusement to offer besides ale, wine, and noise-- all unfortunately prominent characteristics of the place as far as she could see, having been a patron for less than ten minutes. A Grasslander ran the bar; her blonde hair brought Chief Lucia to mind, though this woman grew hers in long, loose curls. Chris watched her from a table in a dark corner by a window, offset from the rows arranged to encourage a view of the stage, and watched Percival's unarmored back as he leaned on the bar and made their order. A group of children sat cross-legged on the empty stage playing a dice game, five of the seven bar stools were occupied by people she didn't recognize; a lizard reclined on a stool with a book that shouldn't fit in his thick, scaly hand, a tall spear leaning on the wall at his side.

She tried not to look at the other tables and waited for Percival's shadow to darken her corner. He arrived with a tankard in one hand, a goblet of mulled cider in the other, which he placed on the table in front of her with an exaggerated bow. "Boris will have a fit when I tell him you refused to try the Redrum vintage."

"He should know better." Chris sipped her cider. It lanced her tongue, hotter than apple and cinnamon. Her eyes watered. "Percival--"

"Pepper," he said quickly, and his hand covered hers, helped her put the goblet down without spilling. "The Grasslanders put red pepper in theirs, or so I heard. Nearly killed me on my first gulp."

Chris coughed, rubbed her eyes dry. He averted his eyes while he drank, making it look as if the child's game on the stage had his attention, but the slight turn to his lips confirmed her suspicion. "Troublemaker."

"I live to serve," Percival said, mocking Boris's officious intonation. The way his brown eyes slanted back to glitter at her made her face warm. "But I brought you here for the play. Seems it's been canceled."

She stared at the golden cider in her goblet. The cup was plain, ceramic, brown on the outside and decorated with grooves, white on the inside to show off the depth of color and the swirl of spices, bits of seeds and leaves, gathering at the bottom. Their alliance with Karaya and the security force was still new, their residence at the manner called Budehuc Castle still tense, unstable, but in the week since her arrival, Chris had heard this barkeep took pride in the quality of her service. She looked like a common barmaid, but-- "What was it you wanted me to see?"

Steam curled from her cup. Wait for it to cool, she thought; Chris was no stranger to pepper, but one layer of heat was enough to bear. She watched Percival through the spiral of mist. His face softened around the edges and his expression lost its customary cynicism.

"It was part of an epic about the Dunan Unification war." Percival toyed with a bit of hemp tied around the handle of his tankard, holding it halfway to his mouth as if he'd forgotten he wanted to drink. "The confrontation with Harmonian forces. It's terrible, but popular, and relevant since the bishops we're facing now were involved."

Chris glanced at the stage. Light drifted in from a skylight in the slanted roof, illuminating dust, backdrops, furniture that looked unreliable, crates covered in white. If any light glimmered in the back beyond the curtains, she couldn't see it past the dancing motes of the sunbeams. "Just as well. It's only a dramatic retelling, and probably without strategic value."

Percival put his tankard down with a thump and hooked his ankle around a chair at the neighboring table, pulled it over, propped his feet up on it. "Maybe." He flicked a stray hair out of his face. "It's how they were defeated I thought would be interesting, not the tactics. Some wind mage--"

Her chin snapped up, and her cheeks only heated a little when she saw him watching her with a slight smile. "You could have said that before," Chris said, lips pressing together when she realized how snappish her tone was. "Since you've seen it already-- just tell me."

He laughed, ran a hand back through his hair and made a mess of it. "I have a better idea," Percival said, chair scraping back so he could stand. "I'll get the script and we can read it ourselves."

.........................................................

I had to end it - it was getting too sucktastic. I haven't written these characters in years. ;_;

[Fire Emblem 6] A Higher Calling

2009-11-07T10:15:49Z

A Higher Calling
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 1164

Gauntlet Theme: 1 - Gone at dusk through narrow streets
Prompt: FE6: Guinevere/Miledy, choosing Guinevere over country and lover

................................................................

Guinevere thought Misul a desolate place when General Cecilia took residence there for her last stand against the forces of the usurpers, and it got no better after the battle, after Roy took the fortress. The soil was sandy and infertile, the grasses yellow and broken, the water tepid. Her room overlooked a garden populated with drought-hardy plants: jasmine vines about the lintels, aloe, pomegranate, lemon, and not a rose in sight. Sharp mountains rose so high she could see their points above the fortress walls when she opened her window and parted the veil of jasmine, and she wondered again if Zephiel had lingered after the battle, though it wasn't like him, to watch-- see what she did, how she betrayed him.

It wasn't like him to threaten her. Truly, Guinevere was hard-pressed to remember a time he'd been anything but kind. Roses of every color decorated her table at his command; her favorite red dye was made in quantity for her - only her, only the princess may wear that shade. He commissioned tiny glass foxes to adorn her rooms, one curled to sleep for the winter, another frozen mid-lope for the summer, another with its nose buried in flowers. They looked like dewdrops of glass in his big hands.

Every night she tried to figure out what changed, and every night she remembered their last meal together, a brief break for tea, during which he gave the cloak she wore to run away, the ruff lined with fur - to keep her warm while he was gone.

Nothing had changed. Not then. But now--

Miledy's knock was three staccato taps, and enough time to catch her breath before she entered, still armed and armored, to report on the situation. She caught Guinevere on the window seat, her legs pulled up on the pink cushion, with a curl of jasmine twined between her fingers. The tiny white blossoms were half-open to great the moonrise and perfume the dusty air. It wasn't visible yet, but it should be full; pale silver lit the battlements, where the disk hid behind the fortress.

"Bern has been routed," Miledy said after saluting, posed at military rest with one fist behind her back. Her eyes averted. "Every scout has returned with a negative report, but Roy ordered the guard to maintain double strength through the night."

Guinevere let the tendril go, watching it drift back to its companions. Then she let her feet slide to the floor and turned to face her guardian directly. "And-- Nabata?"

Torchlight from outside and the brightening of the moon lit her room, but nothing else, and in the dimness it was hard to be sure of Miledy's expression. Her lips thinned, it looked like, or maybe it was a grimace. "General Cecilia's troops will remain here. Roy's people are assembling gear for desert travel, and it seems only a small unit will follow him into the whirlwind." A pause. "He requested my presence, but wants you to stay here."

"That won't do."

"I said as much, your highness. I must stay--"

"No," Guinevere said, wishing she'd lit a lamp. "We should both go."

Silence met her declaration, broken by footsteps outside on the garden walks, faint murmurs of conversation, and the scree scree of crickets, so much louder than she remembered from home. Desert life was hardier by nature, she was told, as if sand were a harsher master than snow. The mountaintops must still be frozen at home; what lived there, pray tell, but the hardiest of plants and animals?

Her brother knew snow. He survived an avalanche once. Nothing was colder, he said, than a knife in the back.

"My lady, you know marching into the desert is unwise."

Guinevere could barely see her hands in her lap. She heard Miledy breathing, shallow but even, and the creak of leather beneath her armor. "If I disappear, he will not assume..."

Miledy's armor glinted and took shape as she approached, one step, two, three, then knelt on the plain stone floor to bow her head. "We have spies in this army, my lady. His Majesty will know of our defection as soon as they can fly to report, and the revelation of our location, here or in Nabata, will follow."

'We?' Guinevere curled her fingers together on her knees and looked down at the halo of moonlight on her knight's hair. "Then he will follow us to Nabata, and leave these people alone."

She couldn't see Miledy's expression - only how still she was, how softly her breath came suddenly. "Are you afraid of King Zephiel, your highness?" Cool, calm, expressionless.

A chill tingled at the base of Guinevere's spine. "Aren't you?"

Miledy lifted her gaze. Her mouth made a dark line in her pale, moonlit face, her brows arching sharply down. "No." She had to clear her throat, and her leather gloves creased when her fist clenched. "My spear and my life are yours. If you wish it, I will fight the king - or a dragon, or a demon, or god himself." Her voice trembled. "But if a fight with the gods is what you desire, we'll need better weapons. For the others, we'll manage."

It was so ridiculous Guinevere wanted to laugh-- or let herself cry to release the pressure behind her eyes, in her throat, where it seemed her heart leapt when Miledy made her declaration. "Your brother--"

"He'll understand." Miledy's expression softened, and she averted her gaze again. Their shadows stretched across the floor, cast by the moon. "To betray you would be a greater disgrace."

Guinevere let it pass, though she wondered if that was true - she didn't know what stories were told about her disappearance, but Miledy's defection wouldn't be concealed, and the penalties for betraying the crown often reached beyond the offender to punish the family as well. She always said her brother could take care of himself, and Guinevere hoped it was true. She hoped he would find a way to prove himself to his commanders.

Miledy carried the scent of the wind with her, grass, sunlight, scales, metal. Sometimes it seemed she never removed her armor, but Guinevere remembered one occasion, on the range where the wyverns made their homes, when she'd met Miledy's brother - when they shed their duty for one day to observe a ceremony for the birth of a new generation of wyverns. It took two of them to wrestle one wyrm. Guinevere remembered laughing at the spectacle until her sides hurt.

"So, it seems my next opponent is to be a sandstorm."

She tried to smile. It was the least she owed Miledy, for giving up memories like that-- and without even saying good-bye. "I'm sure you'll manage."

...

[Fire Emblem 8] Unadorned

2009-11-06T15:38:33Z

Unadorned
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 823

Prompt: FE8: Seth/Eirika, fabric and/or textures

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Renais was so different after the war there were times Seth didn't recognize it. The fields beyond the capitol city, once a patchwork of vivid green velvets, lay brown and dark, some scorched, others abandoned to weeds. At the end of every week Eirika and the king consulted with the royal chamberlain on the matter of what could be sold to sustain the country a little longer - so an ancient bow went to Frelia, as it was relevant to their interests, and two priceless paintings found a new home in Rausten. The princess parted with her favorite silk ballgown.

"It belonged to my mother," she said the afternoon it was to be sent away. They sat at the dining table in the drawing room between her chambers and Ephraim's, an intimacy usually reserved for the family, and she poured tea into small cups with scalloped lips, painted with pink lines. "Did you ever see her wear it?"

"Unfortunately, no." Seth offered to do the pouring, and had to be satisfied with her succinct no - though even Eirika should know she couldn't ignore every convention of her rank or gender. "I would have been unranked at the time."

"Hmmm. I didn't get the chance to see it either." Eirika poured cream into her tea, just a spoonful, and stirred it in. It faded, dark red to milky orange. She watched it for the space of several breaths, while faint voices echoed from the other room, rustling, talking, gossiping, and a long sigh that might have been wistful before a loud, jarring friction made Eirika jump - hemp rope being pulled around the box to secure it. She smiled, not quite looking at him. "It's just a dress, though. We won't be hosting any balls for a while."

Seth left his tea plain and breathed in the steam, the burnt-leaf smell. He didn't know how many yards of peach silk composed that dress, but in good hands it would make two new dresses, or three, and the petticoats and chemise, whatever else women wore beneath that particular style - those would make other, less elaborate clothing. "We may be able to buy it back in the future," he said.

Eirika smiled again to acknowledge his lie and sipped her tea. The sunny afternoon shined through her window, her hair blue as the sky and glinting, dark as the oceans where it was caught in shadow. Plain, serviceable linen sheathed her body, and leather, and soft, snowy cotton, the only bow to rank she made in her wardrobe. Her skirt wrinkled where she sat on it. Her hands were bare of rings. He could have said it was a shame - she wasn't scarred anywhere visible, didn't possess any traits to belie the lady-like image she might cultivate if times were better.

But that wasn't Eirika - not anymore. There was strength hiding beneath her pale skin, muscles that would cord and tense and allow her to challenge him at running or fencing if she insisted. A solid kick from his princess would shatter kneecaps. Seth wanted to smile whenever the thought occurred to him.

"Seth." Eirika met his eyes now, her cup in both hands, halfway to her lips. A lock of hair curled over her shoulder, around a breast. "Are you going to drink? You said you liked this variety."

He liked the company and knew nothing of tea, but Seth did know when to keep his mouth shut. "Of course, princess. I was waiting for it to cool." Steam still curled from the ruby tea. It might scald his tongue - but she would burn his fingers, though he remembered how soft her hair was, how cool when it slipped between his fingers late at night.

She turned her face to the window, but her blue eyes slid to keep track of him. "You can drop the formalities when we're alone. Ephraim won't care."

Seth leaned back and sipped his tea. It was good - strong, the flavor roasted, nutty. "I will."

Eirika's gusty sigh stirred her bangs, but her lips quirked up just slightly, visible only because of the shadows cast by the sun. "You're so stubborn." She watched blue jays sweep past the window, breaking the silence with their off-key screeching. "You'd persist in calling me 'princess' and 'your highness' even if we were married."

If they were married, Seth wouldn't have to be grateful the table separated them - kept his hands from her hair, her soft cheeks. He would never touch her without her express consent, but--

"--why are you blushing?"

Seth made himself look out the window and watch the linden branches sway. "The tea is--"

But they both knew he was a terrible liar.

...

[Fire Emblem 9/10] The Truth Can't Be Burned

2009-11-05T06:02:43Z

The Truth Can't Be Burned
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 883

Prompt:
Fire Emblem 10, Sephiran, history is written by the victors

................................................................

Until making his home in Begnion for the second time, Sephiran had never understood the desire to burn books. They carried history on the wings of their pages, thoughts born from great minds that would otherwise be lost to the ether when their thinkers died. Without the invention of alphabets, tablets, scrolls, codices, mortals would be condemned to repeat the discoveries of their ancestors over and over again, never to advance, never to learn.

"But if the Zunanma were human," his little Sanaki said, nibbling the scalloped edge of a cracker, "And you say they were the ancestors to both beorc and laguz, why..."

Fate had given him a chance to peruse the new libraries on Tellius, those in Begnion, the archive at Melior, the private collections in each of the provinces. He'd enjoyed the chronicles of magic advancement and exploration narratives-- and then he picked up a history book, and thought he might bend his interpretation of material that deserved to be burned.

Sephiran watched his empress frown at the page and score the corner of the leather cover with her thumbnail. He knew what she was about to ask; her down-turned lips said she didn't like it - a small comfort, but preferable to despair. He shifted to his other foot, clasped his hands at his back. Rings of overlapping crackers and cheese decorated the plate at his place, broken now by her snacking, but mostly full and bearing the brunt of her gaze. "Your majesty?"

Her mouth worked, puckered slightly. Maybe the cracker was bland. "He must mean 'beorc' when he says that, but--" Sanaki snapped the book shut and shoved it away. It thumped on the table and made her red juice slosh in its glass, frothing slightly pink. "That's a terrible use of the term. It's inconsistent."

"Indeed. The author was an ignorant man - but ignorant men often learn to project the illusion of power and knowledge," Sephiran said. Her hair swayed around her chin when she nodded. They need not reach very far for examples of such men. "It has been taught for hundreds of years that laguz are a mutation of the true race. Note Della has not cited any research on the matter in his footnotes. He relies on common belief to furnish evidence."

Again Sanaki nodded, though she didn't open the book again. She would have noticed that; he'd given up trying to hide things from her and abandoned the assumptions he'd approached her with, based on her age. The empress was nine now, and sharper with her questions than the holy guard was with their forest of swords. "You said you've studied Goldoa's histories. What do they say?"

Sephiran had written a portion of the histories decorating the shelves in Goldoa, but she was too young - and yet, too old, too intelligent - to believe a claim like that. "Zunanma resembled neither race. They did not possess humanoid forms. As a matter of fact, there are sketches of their latter generations in some of the personal accounts Goldoa's librarian preserved. They're somewhat advanced from the ancients this history is referring to, but still fitting examples. Maybe I'll request a copy for you, my lady, if that would please you."

His empress took another cracker and broke it in half. "I'd like that." She chewed the corner of one half-moon shape, staring at the red leather cover of her history volume. "But someone might try to--" Sanaki shrugged, pushed the rest of the wafer into her mouth. Somehow she managed not to sprinkle the front of her dress with crumbs.

"Burn it?" Sephiran supplied with a smile. If any of the senior senators put their hands on such a volume, they most certainly would try - and send him to the stake along with his book. But they were unobservant. Lekain told Sephiran when to take the empress out, when to smile and wave and assure her citizens all was well, but he didn't ask what Lady Sanaki studied. The library's records said certain books were borrowed; nothing more was said. "The truth can't be burned. Such primitive responses are inspired by a willingness to believe anything so long as it is written down."

Sanaki pulled her legs onto the chair and crossed them under. "You told me I should always question," she said, and waited for his nod. "So--" He lifted his eyebrows, and she leaned forward. "Did you really study in Goldoa, or are you making this up?"

Sephiran laughed before he could stop himself. Her frown was immediate, so he cleared his throat and forced his face to smoothness. "Yes, your majesty, I did. I can provide references if you like."

She stuck her tongue out. "You're the one who said I shouldn't believe everything I hear." Sanaki reached for cheese next, a small, thin square slice with holes. "Fine. You tell me the history of the world - and be sure to cite all of your sources."

Sephiran bowed. Another victory to add to the tally.

.

[Fire Emblem 7] Top of the Morning

2009-11-04T11:17:07Z

Top of the Morning
Author: Amber Michelle
Rating: K
Warnings: oh god why
Word Count: 661

Prompt: warm up #7 - Kent, Lyn, pastry

................................................................

Wind and the patter of rain against her windows woke Lyn to begin her second morning in Caelin, the sun only a blurry yellow line to the east when she parted the curtains. Her clothes sat washed and folded on a trunk - her mother's trunk, the chamberlain told her, which used to sit in the attic, hiding an unused wedding dress, a half-embroidered veil, needlework, a quilt sewn by her mother's own hand, all crimson rectangles and large white squares with flowerpots bursting to life in complimentary pastel colors. She'd pulled it out to use, and even after all this time, it smelled like the woman who made it - lavender and soap.

Lyn dressed and ignored the call rope by her little table, where she was told a lady should eat breakfast. It was tiny - there was only one chair, barely room for the massive tea tray they tried to serve her with the day before, and knowing Kent - if she asked him to come in and talk with her over breakfast he would object. I apologize Lady Lyndis, but for a knight to intrude in your personal rooms--

Lyndis. Always Lyndis. Even Florina did it. One shouldn't refer to one's lady by a familiar name.

There was a commotion when she went downstairs to the kitchen - she should have rung for breakfast, she should have sent someone, should have warned them, should have - and even though Lyn was sure a cook shouldn't shoo her lady away like a child, Caelin's kitchen mistress managed to make it sound like a courtesy. Lunch was already cooking, and maybe dinner too, leaving the air heavy with the scent of roasting venison, potatoes, sweet peppers, rice and chicken, and something honeyed and tart. An assistant followed her to the drawing room with a plate of pastries, because Lady Caelin shouldn't exert herself by carrying her own breakfast. Kent was there as the girl promised, not yet armed, a book held flat open in one hand and a stick of graphite in the other.

A small fire burned in the grate opposite the window, which displayed the same vista she'd enjoyed from her own room, all rolling hills, misty mountains, straggling ivy over the glass. Lyn waved the assistant away when asked where her pastries should go. "Kent--"

Kent looked up and jumped like he'd been struck by lightning. "Lady Lyndis!" He shot up, almost lost his book, scrambled to catch it and hold it behind his back. His fingers were smeared gray. "I apologize-- it's a lovely morning, what brings you here?"

Rain struck the windows, driven by a gust of wind. It might have been her imagination, but his cheeks looked ruddy - on both sides, it wasn't just the fire. "I was going to ask if you'd eaten." Lyn reached back to tighten her ponytail. The cook's assistant squeaked when she was spotted by the table, staring, and hurried out. "Um..."

His shoulders relaxed slightly. "I'm not worthy of such an honor," Kent said, not quite looking her in the eyes.

No? After traveling together for months, eating at the same tables in the same inns--? Lyn clasped her hands back and looked at the gray sky. The window panes rattled in the wind.

"If-- ah, there is anything I can do, Lady Lyndis..."

"There is." She glanced at the table by the hearth. It was big enough for three or four, draped with a white tablecloth. The fire blushed her plate red and gilded the edge, made the sugar-dusted treats shimmer. "Florina used to bring treats to the plains, but I don't know what any of those are," Lyn said. "Why don't you explain them to me?" His gaze whipped to the table, and she grinned. "That's an order."

...

[Fire Emblem] Haunted

2009-11-03T09:18:03Z

Title: Haunted
Author: Amber Michelle // myaru
Rating: T
Warnings: n/a
Word count: 4702
Summary: after the Mad King's War, Sephiran and Zelgius make a pilgrimage to Serenes.

A/N: as I haven't technically completed PoR, my references to the battle between Ike and the Black Knight are based on what I recall from RD and reading the PoR script ages ago. Or, in other words, probably wrong.

Also for 30 Breathtakes #26, "clear blue skies." It was inspired partly by Gauntlet #19, "Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow," which doesn't fit as well anymore. But then, when does anything turn out the way you think it will by the end?

...............................................................

When Zelgius returned to his master after Daein lost the Mad King's war, he remembered most the softness of Sephiran's hands removing his armor and the clamor of its steel on the white tiles of the imperial villa in Melior, the faint, fluttering brushes of delicate fingertips on his face, his arms, everywhere he later learned was bruised purple and bloody. A staff was procured, a spell murmured in the old tongue, one Zelgius had never heard a priest of any persuasion use, and with such fluency-- but it only dulled the pain. Depriving the body of its chance to heal naturally would mean weakening its ability to face injury next time, his master said. It was one of many factors contributing to the difference in strength and healing ability between beorc and laguz.

So it seemed his curse, the mark upon his back, had served him well - he never sought the services of healers when he was younger. Sephiran only sighed when Zelgius said so. The neutral line of his lips curved slightly downward. His eyes glinted in the lamp light, followed his hands, their tasks, their feather-like touches. Rents had split the blessed armor, which was then piled in a corner, some pieces unsalvagable: a slash through the shoulder guard, through a side plate where the sword Ragnell flayed his skin open to reveal his ribs, another across his left thigh that still burned, but not as much as the wound in his side, where Sephiran had paused. Zelgius tried to remain still against his pillows when the wound was prodded, but flinched and heard the silk crease with the shift of his weight.

Maybe a little more, his master murmured, reaching for one of his staves, laid across the corner of the bed. Zelgius stopped him, hand on his pale wrist, the metaphorical black and white. "No. Not--"

"You can't travel like this." Sephiran pulled away. His ring clinked against the golden handle of the healing staff; the decorative jewels jangled, swinging from tiny gold chains, a goddess's wealth. "If you are to be of use to me, you must be well."

Zelgius closed his eyes against the radiance of his master's healing words. The curtains were drawn, the servants had been dismissed. Such brilliance must creep around the scarlet drapery to light the window, but this was Lord Sephiran, her majesty's right hand, the purest of Ashera's servants on the council-- light clothed him as leaves clothed trees, or clouds the sky.

Ashera was a cold goddess, Sephiran once told him - but she was fair. Just. Stable. So must be her servant. Sometimes, Zelgius thought he understood why. And sometimes--

Sephiran's hand rested on his cheek, warm, his arm heavy, and Zelgius found the light dim again when he opened his eyes, yellow and white, red in his peripheral vision where the drapes hung from iron rods and pooled, folded on the floor like the empress's mantle of state. His master's hair twisted and fanned on a sheet drawn up to cover Zelgius and folded, precise and sharp, a hand below his shoulders. "Do you know you're all I have?" Sephiran's fingers tickled behind his ear, shifting the short hair, nails biting crescents into his scalp. "The empire might dance when I say the right thing, but you are the only one standing beside me. You can't be so careless--"

Zelgius wanted to lift his arm, but his master sat atop the sheet, still dressed, still pale, a red line across his bottom lip to match his teeth. The light was behind him now, the gleam of life in his gaze faint.

He wasn't careless; he wasn't even undefeated. His mouth was dry paper when he opened it to say something, his lips cracked, and then sealed by Sephiran's thumb. "No excuses." His voice trembled. "Go to sleep, Zelgius."

Again Sephiran disappeared into the light, the mattress shifting. Zelgius tried not to close his eyes, but he was asleep before his master came back.

*

His master was warm again when Zelgius woke, and kneeling beside the bed, still in his white sleeping robe with a loose, messy braid. When he leaned and folded the sheet back to look at the wound, feel it with slight roughness of his fingertips, it slid over his shoulder to swing like a pendulum and offer a momentary breath of some herbal scent. The curtains were still drawn and only one lamp lit right beside him on a small, round table. Sunlight lingered at the edges of the red drapes like silver trim. Sephiran's eyes flicked up to watch him, but Zelgius didn't flinch when he pressed harder, rubbed the skin, helped him sit up. A muscle twinged, as if he'd twisted or sprained something.

His master sat down heavily beside him, sank into the feather-bed. A bare leg showed through the part in his robe. "I'll tell them you arrived last night with a summons from the empress." Sephiran sat straight, but tilted his head, rested his temple for a moment on Zelgius's shoulder. His flyaway hair tickled. "The farther we are from this place the better."

Zelgius traced the folds of the sheet across his legs. He was days late, perhaps a fortnight; that was a quick coronation, even for a country on the verge of desperation. "Then you've finished all of our official business?"

"The queen has been crowned." It looked, from the angle of his head and the long shadow of his lashes that Sephiran was staring at the armor abandoned in the far corner, behind the armoire. "One of the others will be in Daein now to take control of the occupation. Our business lies south."

But not home, or his master would have mentioned the capitol and a reunion with their fiery little empress; the line of his shoulders would have eased instead of staying taut, pulling his fingers into a curl like talons. Zelgius looked at the tapestry decorating the wall past the foot of Sephiran's bed, depicting a knight and his steed, a silver lance, and a cloud shaped like a charging lion. "I'm sorry," Zelgius said. "If I hadn't underestimated him..."

He heard the slide of Sephiran's braid and knew his master turned his head, probably stared at him, but kept his own face forward. With a blessed sword, even a fool could get lucky and strike him, and Zelgius had forgotten that the child who answered his challenge was no fool, nor dependent on luck to guide his sword - only young and inexperienced. In a few years Ike would outgrow both circumstances. Perhaps he would lead the opposing force again when Sephiran turned this disaster around, turned it into another war, another opportunity. Ashera wouldn't awaken for another two hundred years, but if submerging Tellius in war took only twenty more years, or fifty, judgment would be swift, harsh, unquestionable. I've no doubt she will agree with my assessment of the situation, his master said, more than once, but let us not leave it to chance.

"If this war is a failure," his master said, tilting his head aside, "the fault lies with both of us."

Zelgius pushed his fingers into his hair. Rusty red blood flaked onto the sheets, made him stop, but now his scalp prickled and itched. "You played your part to perfection."

"The empress was adamant about sending help." Sephiran rose and waited, made a gesture, though he was too slender to be of much help if Zelgius couldn't stand under his own power. "I didn't want to say no. The senate will no doubt lay the groundwork for another war without our help, in any case. They'll squeeze Daein dry if they can."

Zelgius tested the strength of both legs, levered himself up with both arms, felt the skin pull over his ribs and burn. He clenched his teeth and tossed the sheet back to stand bare and accept the robe his master offered: soft, cotton, surprisingly large, almost too big for him, and luxurious enough. I'll help you to the bath, Sephiran murmured, taking his arm and watching Zelgius while they walked. Did he suffer any more pain? Was the night's sleep enough, did he feel this, that, would he be able to bend, to sit and rise again, or should his master stay--?

He should have been ashamed when he answered yes to the last, though he was perfectly capable of bending down to reach a towel, to scrub blood from his knee, though it made him wince and clench his teeth. He wasn't dizzy anymore, nor nauseated, and those were what prevented earlier use of the warping powder to return when he was ordered. If crawling made his head swim, teleporting would have ripped him apart from the inside. But he said nothing; Sephiran made him sit on a heavy wooden stool and did everything - sponged blood and dust from his skin, long since turned to mud by sweat and heat, washed it from his hair, first apologizing for the perfume, as it was what the staff left for his own use, and then speculating on the results of their failure. One of the northern dukes would take charge of the occupation army, surely. It was more convenient that way. They were thick as thieves, it likely didn't matter which hand clenched around Daein's heart - but practically speaking, it would be Gaddos, Seliora, or Numida.

Zelgius predicted Seliora. Lekain wouldn't waste his resources on foreign soil when he could pour them into ship-bound business to Crimea, who would most definitely be in the market for basic goods such as food surplus and textiles. There was money to be made. The man would replace all his teeth with gold if it wouldn't compromise his ability to eat - perhaps every bone in his body, too.

He saw Sephiran smile in a mirror on the far side of the room, above a table where more towels were folded, and baskets of soap, oils, and sponges sat in a neat row, the straw painted in pastel colors: blue, lavender, green. Melior liked its luxuries almost as much as their own capitol, Zelgius thought, looking at the metalwork framing the oval mirror, its silver plating. His master's reflection would have made an appropriate painting for the setting, an oil perhaps, beautiful but stiff, down to the way his smile didn't crease the skin around his eyes like it should.

A change of his own clothing waited at the bottom of Sephiran's trunk. He wrote a letter to the second-in-command in Daein to explain their strange circumstances while Zelgius dressed. Open, the curtains revealed tall windows reaching from floor to ceiling, and the sway of branches outside in an invisible wind. Their shadow lay faintly on the tile floor, blue sunlight shifting between smears of gray.

"Before you worry - you won't need armor at our destination," Sephiran said, folding the missive and sharpening the creases with his nails. He left the room for several minutes, and sound indicated his location - two chambers away, maybe three if they were small, all the doors open. He crossed several rugs and opened a drawer. Then, a thump. When his master returned, the paper was sealed with purple wax, the impression indicating his rank - duke of Persis. "Are you hungry?" He knelt beside his trunk, opened it, pulled his own affects out, his robe parting again to reveal pale leg. "You mentioned feeling sick last night."

Zelgius found his boots and sat on the bed, watching. He didn't remember saying such a thing - but he didn't recall arriving, either, nor making it all the way up the stairs to these rooms. "Whatever it is seems to have gone."

Sephiran looked up. A line marred the smoothness between his raven brows, but he didn't say anything, only stood up and closed the chest, slipping the robe from his shoulders to dress. Back turned, his long hair let loose, it swayed and hid the details, long brushstrokes of ink over the back to curve inward, graceful, to brush the back of his master's thighs, where the light traced the muscle in pale lavender tones. What would it look like if the hair were parted by dark wings? How would the shadows change, the musculature of his back? Zelgius wanted to reach and touch one of those shoulder blades, where the skin was clean and unmarked, and instead ripped his eyes away, pulled his boots on, and laced them as tightly as possible. Let them cut the circulation. If he tripped, he'd blame it on vertigo.

Since meeting Sephiran he'd become a despicable man - for different reasons, however, than Zelgius suspected his master would enumerate. A warrior's duty was to kill, no matter the ethics one constructed. He would spill the blood of Daein or Begnion, or Crimea, all as his master dictated, serve as he was meant to serve. That should have been all he wanted. It wasn't in his duty to possess, to desire, but he transgressed - in thought, if not in deed.

They didn't speak again until they took their morning meal downstairs, but Sephiran's hand remained warm on his arm all the way down.

*

Once they left the white gates of Melior, their journey proceeded in steps via warping spells, short at first to account for lingering symptoms of Zelgius's injuries. They passed the first night at a remote hostel a dozen leagues from the border with Begnion, and the second in a more pleasant inn somewhere in the southern reach of Seliora province, where the land flattened and slanted down toward the fork of the Ribahn. The third jump took them to a small rural town, no more than fifteen public buildings and a general store, an inn, a smithy and a storage area which, from the look of the platform at the back and the boarded-up cubbies, used to be a slave market. Ivy climbed over the sides, clogged the gaps between planks. Rotting wood bestowed its scent upon the area and the street in front.

To the west, where gray fog should have obscured the grassland a few leagues out, was the forest - Serenes, bright green treetops like emerald facets under the late afternoon sun. His master paused for long minutes on the porch of the inn to look at it with a face too smooth. Shadows smeared below his eyes, a bright green glint from the forest making them shine until he turned his back on the trees and went inside. Zelgius followed him. The inn housed the only tavern in town, and men too old to work sat around a wide round table to whisper about the miracle they were looking at a moment ago. The curse is lifted. Should we go? You think there's herons under that green like afore?

Should we go? Should we?

Sephiran's shoulders remained stiff until they reached their room - facing east, a pity, though Zelgius now knew their destination lay somewhere beneath the treetops.

"Where would they go?" Sephiran's voice strained to be light, wavering when the door closed, trembling somewhere between laughter and irritation. "What do they expect to do with themselves there? Why?"

Zelgius watched him yank the tie to his plain cloak, let it slip on to the floor. He smelled straw and thought the double bed there in the corner would be flat and uncomfortable, though the linens, quilted, white, and folded just right, made it look soft enough to be a feather mattress. Dusty, diffuse light illuminated Sephiran's white coat, the line of his pants. His hair pressed flat between his shoulder blades, as if by wings.

"What do they think--" A sharp sigh. He stood before the window, a shade.

"Perhaps they want to pay their respects," Zelgius said. To apologize, he thought, but didn't say it.

Sephiran's voice pitched low, flat and steady again. "Too late."

Supper came to their room late: two bowls of meat stew Zelgius was obliged to eat himself, and half a loaf of bread that went to his master. They didn't talk; Sephiran averted his eyes for the rest of the night, always toward the window, or the lamp, or the unlit brazier in the corner by the door, until he finally shucked the coat across his chair and went to bed early. He didn't relent and speak until the lamp was extinguished and Zelgius stretched beside him on the hard straw mattress. Closer, his master said, a hot whisper on his shoulder - only that. His hands said the rest, and the tavern downstairs was loud enough to keep their secrets.

Sephiran shook him awake the next morning when the sky was still gray, already washed, dressed, his hair combed to a shine. Then he left Zelgius to get ready, eat, settle the bill, and went to the morning market for food he deemed edible: fruit, it turned out when they met on the outskirts of town, the sun two spans over the horizon. Mandarin oranges, soft, ripe persimmons he sliced one-handed with a knife hardly bigger than the fruit, dried strawberries, and a wedge of cheese in a hard rind. Sephiran had trouble cutting it while they walked, and gave up after scratching his hand with the tip of his knife. He insisted on maintaining their pace when Zelgius asked if they should stop. It's three hours from here, his master said. If we're lucky, we can be out of the forest before sunset and find a better place to sleep.

Local legend claimed Serenes was haunted; the forest's refusal to heal lent credence to the rumor, though Zelgius felt nothing once they passed between the first of the branches. Aspens stretched to the sky, mixed with fir, pine, maple, oaks surrounded by rings of grass and wildflowers. Winter was only just letting go of Tellius, but the plum trees were in full bloom and raining blossoms, and the cherry branches knobbed with buds and tiny green spots. He followed his master's back, as there was no path - not to his eyes. Sephiran stopped at intervals to stroke a low branch here, to pick a blossom there, to unwind tangles. The trees didn't clutch at him like they did Zelgius, always catching the corner of his cloak, hanging their branches just low enough to scratch him if he didn't watch himself. He heard himself ask where they were going. The sound fell flat.

Sephiran paused midstep, looked briefly over his shoulder. "An altar stands at the center of the forest, and behind that, the lake at the center of the world." Again he turned his back and started walking. "That is our destination."

Until now, Zelgius had never met a forest that actively tried to trip him up. Vines hid beneath dead leaves and damp earth; at times the forest floor dipped suddenly and jarred his teeth when his foot fell too hard. Sweat gathered at his hairline. A pine-scented breeze cooled his temples, a faint breath that disappeared and left his skin prickling, both hot and cold.

"You'll want to stay out of the water, however." An afterthought, faint, carried away by the arms of the trees. "Nothing that falls into that lake will come out again."

Wonderful. Zelgius stepped over a root, nearly tripped on the next. Another tree broke his fall before he could embarrass himself, the only convenient one of the lot.

His shirt stuck to his sweaty skin by the time they reached the altar. Wide steps circled upward two stories to the top, which glowed with the sun's radiance but remained a mystery from Zelgius's vantage point on the ground. Sephiran sat on one of the stairs and allowed him to rest a few minutes, catch his breath, before getting up again and leading Zelgius around the altar and its carved, vine-curtained columns to a narrow path through the trees on the other side. Round gray rocks inlaid the dirt trail, implying a road, well-worn and all shades of gray and brown, like sparrow wings. Beyond lay a clearing carpeted with tall yellow grass bent and broken by rain and winter, stained by mud, and-- water spreading from the meadow to the hills, a roughly elliptical mirror that must be a league across, its color a deep green that echoed the trees and flung the light of the sun back up to the sky in a shimmer.

Sephiran's path cut straight from the trees to the pebbly shore. The grass shifted and parted as if moving of its own accord to make way, nothing breaking under his soft steps, nothing snapping - there was only the soft crush of gravel while his master walked, and then the tap of his boots on a flat rock wide enough to sleep on, and more gravel. The air there smelled like wet leaves and moss, freshly broken hay and grass from Zelgius's own trail, which wasn't nearly as graceful. He waited on the granite slab and watched Sephiran remove his sandals, fold his cloak.

"You're not thinking of wading?" Zelgius reached, stopped his master half-turn with a brush to his arm. "You said--"

"The rocks here continue for thirty strides after slanting into the water," Sephiran said without looking. He pulled his arm free. "Stay here."

He didn't roll his pants up or remove his coat, but waded into the green water and let it plaster the white to his legs, distort their shape, so it seemed Zelgius looked at his master's feet through wavy glass, perhaps a bottle. Sephiran made waves with his confident stride, kicked up glittering droplets to drench his knees and dampen the skirt of his coat. The ends of his hair dripped jewels of water. Zelgius counted twenty six steps before he saw his master stop and gaze down, the water up to his knees, and he wondered if thirty had been an estimate - if he stood at the ledge of the shelf now, looking into the abyss.

That thought squeezed Zelgius's throat. The lake looked normal enough; it moved like water, smelled like it, reminding him of a smaller pool he'd splashed in with his friends as a child, years before the mark of blasphemy appeared on his back. But Sephiran didn't play with him by telling wild stories; he didn't tell outright lies. Goddess only knew how he'd skipped around the nature of these sabbaticals with the empress, but he wouldn't have told an untruth.

Objects did not float on this lake; they didn't swim, they didn't drift. He leaned down, picked a stalk of grass, laid it on the surface.

It sank-- like a rock.

He looked up, and Sephiran held something half out of the water in a loose-fingered grip, and he stood several steps beyond the place he paused earlier - again looking downward, as if he expected to see something. Another object, perhaps? The one he was holding threw the light back at Zelgius like a mirror, refusing to be identified.

A full minute passed with a long sigh of wind that rattled the grass behind him and played with Sephiran's hair, tossing the wet ends up and sending water flying. The surface of the lake didn't move. What kind of enchantment made that possible? Something divine - or maybe galdr, if one made a distinction. Zelgius didn't dare walk in. If everything sunk to the bottom, even living, breathing bodies, how could he assume it would be possible to lift his feet out again once they dipped into the water? Or maybe one could walk, even wade, but to submerge oneself was death. In that case, his master--

"Sephiran." He thought the shock of hearing the name might draw the attention he sought, but Zelgius had to repeat himself, louder, clearing his throat of tension before he saw the dark head move. And when it did, he had no idea what to say while cowering on the shore. "Can-- I be of assistance?"

Silence.

He left the granite slab. Pebbles crunched. "What is it--"

Sephiran turned around abruptly and sent his hair flying. "No, stay there," he said. It was a staff he carried, reminiscent of the elaborate decorations the senior senators carried for formal occasions, dangling with red tassels that managed to look completely dry despite its storage in the lake. Flat like a medallion, the decoration at the top from which they swirled wasn't identifiable.

Zelgius waited where he was ordered and offered his hand once his master had waded to the shore. The charms on his staff clinked against the golden base. Sephiran remained light, but the water dragged the hem of his trousers when Zelgius pulled him out, wanted to drag his master down with it. "I'm sorry," he said once Sephiran stood beside him on dry ground. "After what you said..." He looked out at the lake. "I thought something had gone wrong."

Sephiran's clothes clung to his skin, soaked through, showing flesh beneath. "It's good that you called me," he said after a breath, flinching away from a meeting of gazes. "I... forgot something." He pulled Zelgius by the sleeve.

It looked so innocent, the lake, when he looked back. The waves caused by Sephiran's movement had already stilled. Now that Zelgius knew what to watch for, there were numerous signs the water wasn't normal - signs in what there wasn't: insects didn't buzz past his ears to land on the surface, birds didn't sweep down capture them, neither leaves nor grass littered the surface. The water stayed clear, the silt unmoved, even when walked upon. He listened as Sephiran sat down, tied his sandals, hearing the quiet, the distance between himself and the birdsong that accompanied them on their trek through the trees.

Zelgius turned his back on the water and helped his master up. "Is this place sacred?"

Sephiran shook his head. "That would be the altar. This is..." His eyes narrowed, the skin crinkling slightly. He didn't let go of Zelgius's arm. "If there is a place anywhere in this world that has not been touched by the goddess..."

Then he was glad he hadn't set foot in it, and wished he knew why Sephiran would. "The staff?"

"A gift from the goddess. It will be useful later." Sephiran turned back to the forest. "And in the meantime it will charm Sanaki to no end."

Zelgius held him back, though his hold on his master's arm was loose. "You said you forgot something."

Sephiran turned the staff in his hand, made the ornaments spin and jingle. They weren't gold as they first appeared, but bronze, still smooth and shiny, more than they had any right to be. "Sometimes," he said, leaning it against his shoulder, looking straight ahead, "I forget that I want to live to see this through."

Zelgius let him go when he pulled away, a chill or a fist clenching the pit of his stomach. But he followed - he would always follow, no matter where Sephiran's footsteps led him. Still, he was glad to leave the lake behind, and hoped they would never go back.

.

Cross-posted to springkink.

[Fire Emblem] The Greatest Truth

2009-10-31T12:28:32Z

The Greatest Truth
Author: Amber Michelle
Series: Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Characters: Lehran (Altina, Zelgius, Sanaki)
Rating: K
Words: 828

Prompt:
Fire Emblem 10, Lehran, remembering those he has loved

................................................................

Memory had never served Lehran well. Voices, faces, the texture of hair or wing, the scent lingering in his wife's hair or at the throat of a favorite servant, they all bled together a little more each year, softening, fading, like a rock on a beach washed over and over again with sand until its surface was smooth, gray, and uniform - until it shrank and broke apart into more sand, and buried other memories. He sat on a flat rock reaching over the aqua surface of his lake, at the center of his forest, under a sky dusky, purple, orange and blue, glittering with stars far to the east. He saw the arch of his wings in the reflection but not his face. If he leaned over the edge he'd only finish the job, sink to the bottom, and forget everything.

On nights like this he recalled kissing Altina - her lips, her cheeks, her chin. The tip of her nose was a favorite spot, one she always swatted him away from. It's ugly, she said. Slightly crooked. Broken during a sparring match in her youth. Her voice always clipped the explanation, her hand always waved his attention elsewhere, and Lehran felt it his duty to protest. It wasn't ugly - nothing about her was ugly, only strong, and smooth, and warm. He remembered telling her there was no shame in a majestic beak, and laughing until he cried while she attacked him with a pillow, scattering goose-down across the bed-- threatening to use his own feathers to re-stuff the thing if he didn't keep his mouth shut.

Sanaki often echoed Altina when he tried to remember loving her: her voice, her hair, her shape. He summoned her silvery scent to mind, the mix of metal and leather and lily perfume, and remembered--

Too much. Metal, salt. Hair prickled on his fingers, sharper than the sensation of the rock beneath his hands, dark blue and cropped close, and a hawk spreading its wings in brushstrokes on skin that should have been bronzed by the sun: majesty, strength coiled beneath his fingertips. If he closed his eyes he could still feel it, and that-- that was too much, and a memory too little.

Tell me the truth, Sanaki had demanded, years ago. Tell me why.

Truth. One's experiences were the greatest truth - yet his own were degraded, blank, the farther back he reached.

Why did you save me? Wouldn't civil war in Begnion hurry Tellius to the fate you wanted?

That, Lehran remembered. He didn't recall what he told the empress, because something in his chest had flinched at the thought of speaking the truth, and evasion was a matter of course with Sanaki. A clean break between them was better. Exile was better. Contempt was bearable. He didn't tell her she survived to sit on the throne because he couldn't stand back and let Begnion implode, couldn't let the war take the last of his children. She looked nothing like him or his wife; there was no trace of his scent on her, no thrill of blood. Only the violet hair brought to mind her ancestor, and her eyes-- and the way she squared her shoulders to snap orders, flung her arm out to punctuate an accusation, the way she leapt up and made it seem she flew into the saddle when she was in a hurry, and the tiny frown she wore while contemplating an error, a puzzle, a slippery bit of evasion he might feed her to hide his intentions.

Some day you'll have to tell her what we're doing, Zelgius had said once. Or kill her.

He didn't even look at his weapon, but Lehran recognized the offer and felt it dig cold fingers between his ribs. Zelgius said things like that sometimes, warned him - you've grown too attached, you're too distracted, that opening nearly slipped past us. His arm supported Lehran when he stumbled, strong and unmovable as rock, and pulled him back to the correct path when he wandered off, wondering if there was another way, if they'd been found out-- but they were never caught, because Zelgius was a perfect knight, a perfect agent. His only mistakes were wounds, and dying.

His flesh was already gray and cold when Lehran was able to descend and say good-bye to him, with the empress, Ike, everyone crowding at his back, watching. Zelgius's eyes didn't flutter open as they often did when Lehran came in late, his fingers didn't twitch or reach. His eyes, once, were the same green as the depth of the Serenes lake. Every time he saw the emerald mirror of the water he remembered that he didn't reach to touch that hand. He would always know that, even if he forgot everything else.

.

[Fire Emblem] One Little Slip

2009-10-29T10:26:05Z

One Little Slip
Author: Amber Michelle
Gauntlet Theme: 26 - this is why we can't have nice things
Series: Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
Characters: Micaiah, Sanaki
Rating: T
Words: 898

Notes: actually inspired by a comment!fic prompt, but it doesn't really fit the request. No real redeeming quality here - just an attempt to get myself into a writing mood so I can finish my Spring Kink stuff for the day.

................................................................

Micaiah made herself stand still while the empress stared at her, locking her knees and digging her heels into the double-layered rugs in Sanaki's office, where the morning light was still dim and blue through the west-facing window. A large oak desk sat between them on legs appearing squat for how thick they were, how intricately carved with vines, the polished surface wide enough for both of them to sleep side-by-side with room to spare. The chair looked heavy and monolithic too, carved with flowers, upholstered in dark red, the back two heads taller than the empress herself. Micaiah let her hands clasp in front of her, hoped the knuckles didn't whiten - they cracked, and she twisted her fingers.

"Um." Having Sothe at her back would have made this easier. Micaiah cleared her throat. "You must have heard I made plans to stay a little longer." The empress nodded with a sway of her indigo bangs, and she wondered why it didn't turn into a frown. Everything was carefully blank - the desktop, the tea table, the other girl's expression. "I'm not sure I was thinking straight when I made the promise, but I can't back out of it now. Pelleas said he would return to Daein ahead of me."

Sanaki's fingers drummed once on the desktop, a second of sound, then fell still. Even so, the sound of her voice made Micaiah jump. "It was a battle, right?" Sanaki turned her eyes to the ceiling, almost - but not quite - a roll. Her mouth tightened, puckered, as if she'd bitten into a wedge of lemon. "Sigrun confessed to making a few-- slips while fighting beside Duke Tanas, and honestly, I'd have thought both of you had better sense."

Now Micaiah did shift, right to left, on her heels, left to right. "He isn't that bad--"

"He tries to get his sticky fingers on everything!" the empress snapped. She kicked her chair, the wooden sole of her sandal cracking loudly. "Just look at Sephiran. One day in the man's service, and he has already been asked to pose for a nude figure. Does he have no shame?"

Micaiah opened her mouth to ask which one she meant--

"I'd tell him to do it." Sanaki looked away. Her fingers tapped again, rapidly, loudly. "That would be good medicine for the lying snake."

She was too good at keeping her emotions in check, aside from the occasional fidget and her tapping fingers; Micaiah couldn't tell if the empress needed sympathy or sarcasm, though Sothe would have been better if cynicism were called for. "Why didn't you? Tell him to go along with it, I mean." She watched Sanaki pull her bottom lip with her teeth, saw her cheeks pinken faintly. "I'm sure he'd make a lovely--"

"No!"

He's my lying snake--

Micaiah bit her lip hard and hoped she wouldn't snicker. The empress reddened until it looked like her face wanted to match the crimson of her formal cloak. She wouldn't bring her gaze front. "Well, he must have asked you, too." Sanaki's lips turned slightly down, her fingers tapping faster, and Micaiah decided to let that go. "I'm sure he's just trying to beat the popular artists to the punch, you know? The first newsletter that hits the streets always suckers more people into buying-- that sort of thing, only with art. I think he's honestly excited about it. Even Ike got a letter from him."

Sanaki's fingers froze a moment, her hand a claw, and then she withdrew her hand, folded her arms. Her nose turned up, her eyes squeezed shut. "Ew."

She didn't want to know what the empress was thinking. "Anyway, he promised I get to keep my clothes if I pose for his sculpture, so..."

The empress sighed loudly. "Don't complain to me if he puts those fingers anywhere important."

Micaiah's throat constricted. Ew was right. "He's an artist--"

"He's a pervert."

"But he does have an impressive grasp of aesthetics--"

"So he's a perverted aesthete."

"Look, it's really--"

Sanaki waved her away. "Never mind. I have an idea." She tucked her hair over her ears, kicking the chair again - this time without force, as if counting time to an internal rhythm. "If he starts looking greedy," she said, sitting back, steepling her fingers, smiling wide, "tell Sephiran I want him to sit on Oliver's lap."

"Of... course," Micaiah said, staring at the empress, blinking like she'd been struck between the eyes. They'd argued some, over Sanaki's insistence in keeping Lehran's punishment in her own hands, despite her inarguable position - it was Begnion he betrayed, after all-- technically. The others had agreed after a few arguments, but Pelleas had muttered about him getting off too easily. It was clear he had no idea what Micaiah's little sister was capable of. When she went back to Daein, she'd make sure he wasn't eligible for marriage in this country-- just in case. "If you say so."

"Good. Have fun, Micaiah." Sanaki smiled. The blue light made her eyes glint like gold. "Give Sephiran my regards."

No, Lehran wasn't getting off easily - not at all.

.

[30 Kisses][Fire Emblem] Path of Repentance

2009-10-21T00:12:37Z

Path of Repentance
Author: Amber Michelle
Pairing: Lehran/Sanaki (main)
Fandom: Fire Emblem 9-10
Theme: 4 - our distance and that person
Gauntlet theme: 3 - Down the passage which we did not take
Words: 9055
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Fire Emblem is copyrighted by Intelligent Systems and Nintendo. I'm not getting any money out of this, just satisfaction~

Notes: there's also Naesala/Sanaki, but it's Lehran/Sanaki in spirit (also: Naesala/Leanne), and yet another take on the potential plot turns after Radiant Dawn.

I fully intend to edit, but waiting would mean spamming the journal at the end of the month, and I hate doing that. So.

......................................................

The crimson drapes closed Sanaki's sitting room against the sunset so the large rectangle space was lit by the glow of a dying fire on the hearth, set into the center of the back wall near her bedroom door, and one crystal lamp on her dining table by the window. Her guest cast a large shadow with his black wings, darkening the front corner, the sepia shape of their arch projected onto the pale ceiling and moving slightly with the lamp flame. She fingered the lip of her wine glass and looked at the pattern of light it cast on her tablecloth. "I'm sure this won't be the last time I tell you laguz tradition is completely incomprehensible."

Naesala shrugged, and the bottom of his wings flared a moment, then slatted back together. "If I hadn't made a business out of understanding yours, I'd say the same."

His knees bunched the lace covering against the surface. Sanaki kicked his feet off the table base; they thumped to the floor, muffled on the carpet, and their place settings rattled - just the glasses, small plates adorned with uneaten berry tarts, and a decanter of muscat wine. "Let me guess - pressing the issue is tantamount to rebellion?" She didn't wait for his answer before going on, though it was a nod as she suspected. "I'd think, honestly, the father of this hypothetical heron child wouldn't matter. Between the king of Phoenicis, the king of Kilvas--"

"Not anymore, thank the--" His mouth twisted and the last word hung between them. Three years later, going on four, and nobody present with her in the tower liked to say the word 'goddess.'

"Nevertheless."

Again, he shrugged, and the table trembled when he again placed his feet on the ornate carving of the base underneath, the feet in the likeness of gnarled roots. "Anyway, as long as she's having him, I'd rather be somewhere else. Like the Desert of Death."

She let one corner of her mouth curve up. "Thank you, Kil-- Naesala. I'm flattered."

"You said it first," he said, showing teeth with his smile. "'I'd rather sup in the deepest pit of the desert of death than share a table with Lekain,' right? I agree, by the way. It took a week to wash the taste of his blood out of my mouth."

Sanaki sipped from her glass on that note, and reached for the plate laid between them to lift a thin chocolate wafer the shape of a cherry blossom and lay it on her tongue. Straight from Melior, or so he said, and there was a milky smoothness to the taste unlike the deep, sweet flavor she was accustomed to tasting in chocolate made in Begnion. There's more where this came from, he told her when he arrived: cooking chocolate of the same variety, another flavored with spearmint, and a block of white chocolate just like the slivers she'd tasted on that dessert at Elincia's table years ago.

He watched her take another piece, refilled his glass, and she held hers out. "I'm surprised they didn't try to convince Lehran to marry her," he said over the slide of garnet oblivion into her glass. "Since he's the only heron not directly related to her."

"If you ever say that again," she said, pulling it back to swallow a mouthful, "I'll cut your wings off and stuff my mattress with the feathers."

"Whatever you say, empress."

*

The trees shed their blossoms in favor of heavier green cloaks, and those turned yellow and some red before the former raven king, now diplomat, returned to Begnion. Sanaki decided not to ask where he obtained the ruby pendant he bestowed upon her - for the hospitality, he said, as if she'd already invited him to stay - but the ring around the scroll he delivered next was clearly of Serenes make. The entwined cords of gold, hair-thin, were too delicate to be anything else.

"I heard about your announcement," he said, pulling a chair out from the table with a scrape, turning it, sitting on it backwards. "Over in Daein. Micaiah asked me if I knew anything about it." Naesala folded his arms on the filigree carving shaping the back, and his wings bent at an angle she didn't recognize before they folded in again, curled to rest against his arms. The longest of his feathers whispered across the rug. "Don't you need kids? At least one."

"I don't need to marry for that," Sanaki said. She dropped the ring onto the table, let it clatter and settle, and unrolled the scroll. It smelled fresh and green, like clover and a babbling creek. The message was short and to the point, penned in a hand she wished she didn't recognize - so they're employing him as secretary, she muttered. What a wonderful use of his talents - and Sanaki let the bottom curl up again with a dry, folding sound. "This... is cause for celebration."

Naesala wasn't looking at her, but at the verandah beyond her glass doors, and the wisteria curling down from the overhead trellis, swaying in a movement of the air they couldn't feel. The vines were mostly bare, but not quite brown, the flagstone tiles outside littered with seed pods of the same color. He looked relaxed, but his hands gripped the top of his chair tightly.

It was no stretch of the imagination to picture her own feelings if the situation were slightly different. Sanaki took her seat across from him and stared at the back of his chair, remembering when it belonged to someone else by custom. The scroll she tucked behind the flower vase on her side. "I'll send my congratulations by courier."

He nodded.

She leaned back and wished their refreshments would arrive. The ends of her hair tickled the back of her neck, slowly escaping the hold of her gold clips to curl and spiral over her shoulders, kinked by a long day twisted up against the back of her head. If he'd come later, she would have met him in something less formal - a plain dress instead of her stiff layers of red and imperial purple, and her hair released from the contraptions of rank. But it was always like that between them. First they were two monarchs allied for the sake of their respective interests, all business, and now rank separated them again, literally and philosophically, she an empress, he an ambassador, sometimes messanger, but no longer king. No longer suitable, according to the rules of society, to sit in her company and share a pot of tea.

Perhaps it didn't matter. Begnion's traditional ranking system was in shambles. In any case, he was better company than Oliver when the topic of herons came up. "When can I expect news of the birth?"

"In about ten years."

Sanaki watched his face for a sign he was joking, but his forehead was smooth, and none of the telltale lines around his mouth or eyes indicated a secret smile. "Should I send my sympathies instead?"

For the first time in three years, she watched Naesala laugh.

*

Sometimes a letter reached her from Serenes by other hands, and when she unfolded the paper to see handwriting still familiar to her, even after five years, or six, the rich cream of the parchment and precise, unblotted forms of ink were accompanied by a scent Sanaki knew only in Sephiran's presence - sandalwood, something sweet like fragrant amber, and a note of spice. His hair smelled like it, his clothes, his skin when freshly washed and oiled. She'd had a dream once of applying it herself, just to his arms and hands, as she'd never seen anything else hidden beneath his coat and clothing, and wouldn't have considered looking until he was too far away, too long gone to ask.

Today, it might say, after a formal greeting, I discharge another duty to Begnion owed for my freedom. The agents involved in Daein's reconstruction under our rule were as follows...

He hated her so much she'd not received one personal missive from him. When he replied to her question about the passing down of her heritage, Lehran directed her to Micaiah. When she asked him to return and face his so-called duty, he directed her to Tibarn. When, irritated and ready to burn his letters in the first of autumn's fires - all of them, everything she'd saved - Sanaki wrote a note demanding his presence to stand in for a consort she would never have, come floods or divine judgment, he wrote his first and only personalized reply.

You know that is impossible. I won't repeat those mistakes even for you, my Sanaki.

It lay atop the others in a flat cedar box the size of her two hands spread out side by side, crumpled because she'd crushed it in her hands and then had to straighten it out to read the rest.

No man could ask for a more lovely child. I have always cherished you, but I cannot - will not - ignore the needs of my clan.

Child, he called her. Child. She would be an old woman, half a century down the road, and he would still call her a child, wouldn't he?

Someday, he wrote. Some day, when you've borne your children and I have produced mine - but not today.

Yes, someday-- when she was ancient like him. Would he want an old woman? It was an excuse - a sop for her wounded feelings, another pretty lie like every other he'd told for as long as she could remember. Sanaki didn't bother to reply to it, or to any letter after. The tone of his writing seemed relieved from then onward, though nothing had changed that she could point out. In her dreams, she stroked his feathers, and breathed hints of sandalwood and sweetness stirred by her fingers.

"You want to what?" Naesala stared at her when she greeted him at the beginning of his next visit, slightly hunched.

Sanaki planted her hands on her hips, looked him up and down. "Is it that unusual? You flirt shamelessly. It must have happened--"

"It's pretty common to ask when you want to sleep with someone," he said. His gifts were being delivered by caravan this time; all he brought to her sitting room was a blue bottle of wine - the first vintage ready from Serenes, and a treat of unparalleled sweetness, or so everyone said. He sat it on the table, pulled his chair out.

She waited for him to seat himself and remained where she was, standing beside the table, the drapes half-closed against the dark of night and the rope still in her hands. "Well then." Sanaki pulled them closed, fiddled with the parting so it remained sealed, and said again, "May I touch your wings?"

His black eyebrows lifted, twin arches. "How old are you again?"

"Nineteen winters," she said, leaving the crimson velvet to stretch her fingers for the arch of his wing. For once he let her touch it instead of drawing away.

"A child."

His feathers were smooth and cool, and smelled like dust and wind - icy wind and wispy clouds, the sort she saw when flying on a pegasus. "I'm sure some of these bones are delicate enough to break if I squeeze hard enough," Sanaki said, stepping closer. They were soft and downy on the inside under the bone, warmer there on her fingertips, tickling. She felt the black shape curve around her and glanced at Naesala without turning her head.

He met her gaze at the corners of his eyes. They glinted, lit by a room-full of lamps and candles. "Do you believe anything I say?"

Sanaki felt the feathers shift, fluff when the pads of her fingers slid past. "My experience has proven no one with black wings can be trusted."

His arm curled around her waist and she stumbled sideways, lost her balance when the back of her knee hit his chair, and sat hard on his lap. It wasn't as comfortable as it should have been. She felt the muscles tense and cord beneath her thighs, and he smelled like leather, wind, pine, nothing at all like Lehran. Her fingers had curled into his feathers and pulled. She smoothed them out quickly and tried to ignore the tickle against the side of her throat, the moist warmth on her ear, when he said, "Mine aren't the wings you want to touch."

"And I'm not the woman you want to bed." Sanaki tried not to breathe too deeply or quickly, and trying only made her do both. "Since when has that mattered in politics?"

His chuckle reverberated when she was so close, made her want to shiver or shift off his lap. "Politics."

Sanaki felt her arms prickle with goosebumps when his lips warmed the lobe of her ear and his teeth made it sting. "What would you call it?" She cleared her throat and tried to strengthen her voice. Beneath her fingers, his wings shifted and stretched, feathers revealing more feathers, soft and warm, and the other hand wrinkled warm, fragrant leather over the contour of his arm. "Or should I ask?"

Naesala turned Sanaki's face toward his and claimed her lips. She supposed the answer was 'no.'

*

Perhaps it wasn't a raven's wings Sanaki wanted to touch, but they were no less interesting to feel in the dark than she imagined Lehran's were; their shape blocked the tiny lights peeking through her sheer bedroom curtains, long, sharp crescents of black with serrated edges, soft to the touch, warm blankets to doze beneath while he stroked her thigh, her calves, the outer curves of her breasts. Naesala let his hair loose and it felt longer tangled around her fingers even though he said it hadn't changed since the last time she saw it. In the morning it tickled her ribs when he leaned over to wake her, streaked over his back, shoulders, arms, in wavy dark blue lines.

He was most definitely attractive sitting on his legs and staring over at the pale gossamer light of the curtains, his hair gathered in one hand at the nape of his neck. Strong, solid, the pale light caressing his arms, chest, legs, sculpting out the shape of his muscle-- heavy, so he sank into the mattress, and he moved his wings slowly to avoid hitting the hard wood posts, which he said would hurt like hell and maybe crack a bone. He'd done it before in someone else's bed and nearly been caught when he couldn't fly away.

"You should stay in today," he said, turning back to her. His eyes had a peculiar gold glint she would've attributed to lamp light, only the wick had burned out hours ago, before the first time she woke in the dark, his hands demanding more. "Take a long soak in that pool you call a bath, and try not to walk a whole lot. You'll regret it."

Sanaki pursed her lips, let him take hold of her ankles and pull her legs straight. She saw where his eyes went when her legs were bent. "I suppose you would know all about hiding the results of a deflowering. How many angry parents set the bounty hunters on you?"

"Only one," Naesala said, chuckling. "They seemed to think their son was ruined."

She tried not to laugh, rolling her eyes to the underside of her blue canopy and the reverse embroidery stitches depicting, of all things, lilies, in sky blue thread. He'd piled her pillows up behind her, so she sat up against the headboard, her hair spread out across to the other side. The blunt ends reached her knees when she let it flow loose. All the covering you really need he said when he undressed her. The rest is just in the way, especially when you wear that ugly court costume.

Her formal clothing wasn't that ugly; the dress was a normal dress, long and gauzy, with a high neck, and with the mantle of her office it simply covered every part of her body a man would consider worth seeing. She did not go to audience to be ogled. Her ball gowns made up for it by revealing skin with their exceptionally low necklines.

"I'll warn Sigrun and Tanith not to skewer you," Sanaki said, drawing her legs up and over the edge of her side of the bed, sitting up, gathering her hair with both hands to pull into reach. "But if they find you in here now it'll be worth your life - or at least your feathers and maybe an arm."

Naesala's hands pressed her shoulders down when she tried to stand, then took her hair, and she felt it pull slightly when he ran his hands down the length. "I can take a few pegasus knights, your majesty," he said, and the purr in his voice when he gave lip service to her title made her straighten her spine reflexively and shrug her shoulders. His fingers picked out tangles, smoothed, moved up from the ends, and her scalp only twinged once. Not a strand broke under his care. "We're going to do this right."

'Doing it right' meant combing her hair to a shine with his fingers, oiling it, arranging it in a looped style she assumed was significant, for it was done with ritual intensity before the mirror above her dressing table, by feel, as his gaze never left hers. He bathed her, massaged the kinks out of her lower back, and Sanaki thought she would have responded to his innuendo and flirting much sooner if she'd known he would spend so much time on her comfort. Love and leave-- that was what she'd heard of him via rumor and whispered tirades behind the remote stacks of the library. He should have the courtesy to remain until morning, she'd heard a senator's wife mutter. Being king doesn't mean he can afford to insult me-- after all, he's only laguz.

Why had they bothered to court his attention when he was only laguz?

"Where will you go after this?" Sanaki asked while he buttoned her day dress, the shadow of his wings engulfing her. "I thought Daein, but that wool you shipped is a Marado product, isn't it?"

His shadow shrugged. The fabric pulled across her shoulder blades. It was blue, the color of his hair. "I don't have any pressing appointments. Tibarn won't expect Daein's shipment for another month." He hooked the top button, stepped back. "Unless you want to get rid of me, that is."

Sanaki watched a dangling vine wave outside, a gray shadow on her curtains. "No, I think I have a new use for you now." His fingers fussed with her hair, and something clenched deep within her chest, between her ribs. She'd let her hair flow loose and unadorned since Sephiran revealed his wings and left-- without a good-bye, only a correction: not 'Sephiran,' your majesty. Not anymore.

I hate you. Her eyes stung. She closed them.

"Stay," Sanaki said.

Naesala's arms curled around her waist from behind, his nails into her silk bodice. "Your wish is my command."

*

Scars toughened the underisde of the raven's left forearm, hiding the veins, and Sanaki rubbed the pad of her thumb across the shallow ridges on the rare occasion he slept in her presence, likening them to calluses. They matched the color of his flesh, so one didn't notice them unless the muscles in his arm bunched - then they stood out bloodless and smooth, four long scratches at intervals to match his own fingers. When the pact mark appeared, he said, he tried scratching it off; when that wouldn't work, he tried cutting it out, or would have, if the old buzzard - his words - hadn't caught him with the knife and interpreted the situation incorrectly.

Or maybe it wasn't a mistake. Naesala didn't elaborate beyond a simple statement: he stopped me, and I didn't try again. Suicide wouldn't have saved Kilvas. Perhaps he didn't understand why, at the time, but the appearance of the thing on his wrist after he took kingship made the nature of the mark clear. Sanaki wondered what she would do in a similar situation and remembered meetings with the senior senate when she was younger, knowing it wasn't the same; she'd never had any power to begin with. The people suffered regardless of her cooperation.

They suffered now. Still.

"Why didn't you fight?" Sanaki asked one evening, after that discussion, while they sat on large, round rocks overlooking the glassy stillness of a circular green pond in her water garden. The sky was still light, yellow and pink, the dark purple of night still lingering far beyond the skyline of Sienne at the eastern horizon. Hints of red and orange fish caught her eye beneath the surface of the water, but the glare of the sky obscured the bottom, made their arcs difficult to follow.

Naesala's eyes tracked something below, and she supposed his eyes had no problem piercing the mirror of the pond. "It would've been stupid to fight it, empress. You know that."

"I don't mean the pact." She leaned back on both hands, felt them slide a few centimeters down the smooth curve of her rock until she curled her fingers and braced her arms to stop. "Tibarn claimed her, and you didn't fight him. Why?"

His wings, spread wide to relax, to soak up the last of the sun perhaps, drew inward slowly. His flight feathers sifted through the grass, against the ferns. They'd chosen to break from their walk in the drooping embrace of a willow's green branches, which swayed when he pulled his wings in. "The idea is to unite the bird tribes, not rip them up some more."

"Either of you could have done it." A wet, mossy scent made her want to wrinkle her nose. The lotus blossoms were closing with imperceptible movements of their petals inward. Every time she looked they were slightly different.

"Nobody would support me if I won."

Sanaki turned her face away and looked at the streaks of golden sky between the weeping branches. "Would you?" She stretched her legs out, crossed her ankles above the water, almost getting wet. "Can you defeat him?"

"Maybe."

'Maybe' wasn't good enough, was that it? She was under the impression rule among the laguz was determined by strength. Granted, strength and the training to use it correctly were normally bred within family lines-- at least among beorc. Sanaki herself, if born to a common family, might possess the potential for magic her tutors and Sephiran were so excited about, but she wouldn't have received the training to develop the skill. It would have been the same as lacking it altogether.

"It isn't just about power," Naesala said, as if he knew what she was thinking. His explanation was directed at the leafy canopy. "Tibarn is the savior of the heron clan. I'm the guy who betrayed them again and again." When Sanaki tried to watch him in her peripheral vision, his wings were already reined in tightly as they could be without bending against the dirt behind the rocks. "I'm nothing."

She was young when he slaved under the yoke of the senate; the pact was drawn up long before her birth, and Naesala was already king of Kilvas when Sanaki ascended the throne. All she knew, until Sephiran sent him to her before the Judgment, was the black shape of his shadow and the sardonic twist to all of his words, something that told her she was being teased even when he spoke to her with a straight face and observed every courtesy due her station as empress. If she had known then that he couldn't disobey her commands - that she had more power over him than even Lekain, the man who held his leash - Sanaki would have used him. Against the senate, yes, but first-- first she would have sent him on petty errands, missions to steal candy or chocolate, or some jewel that caught her eye at a party. She would have learned to like it too much. Sanaki still remembered the twinge of regret in the pit of her stomach when he tore the blood pact and let it burn.

It was good of Sephiran to hide that from her-- good for all of them. She knew her own weaknesses. She reminded Naesala of his loss now because his discontent with Serenes meant he would stay in Begnion, and Sanaki wasn't yet ready to see his back. The moment he spread his wings and left he would be gone for weeks, maybe months, and she would be alone with her box of letters and their impersonal contents.

"That isn't true." An apology was on the tip of her tongue, which she did not utter. He was no fool.

She heard the shiff of his wings. "Took you long enough to say it."

"I offered to tell them about--"

"They know."

She pressed her lips together against the obvious protest.

I'm sorry, empress. Life is not fair, even for the exalted. Sephiran, a smile she'd call smug on his face as he stared at a point just above her head, not the least bit sorry for driving off the boy she'd been talking to. It won't hurt as much if you resign yourself to that. Sanaki wanted to laugh. Sephiran-- no, Lehran, eternal servant to the goddess, keeper of all things wise! She kept her mouth firmly shut, both her apology and the dark line of Naesala's lips, turned slightly down, fading into the magenta of dusk. They went inside when night fell and Sigrun told her it was dangerous to remain in the open.

Sanaki wondered if Sephiran had been making fun of her back then-- beyond the obvious. Was that a hint? A clue dropped right into her hands and immediately ignored, because her confidence in her own suitability was absolute?

The evening meal was laid out on the round table in her sitting room when she returned: crumbly corn cakes and greens on her plate, meat seared and left bloody on his, slices of dense yellow olive oil cake on a platter between them with bowls of sweet cream and heart-shaped slices of strawberry. Naesala liked sweets, almost without discrimination as far as she could tell - he'd eat a bad bit of chocolate while cursing its maker roundly, just as he'd imbibe a thin wine and tell her how much worse it could be, or eat a charred slice of toast without wincing. She blamed the poison training for her sensitive taste, and he called her spoiled.

Sanaki threw her book at him when he said that - then her sandals, one at a time, then the sofa pillows, then more books, philosophy, etiquette, basic lightning cantrips, until he had her against the wall by both wrists and Sigrun came in to see what all the fuss was about and found them half-undressed. Sanaki's face heated just thinking about the conversation that followed.

She forked tiny bites from the cake and let him have most of it. Tea was served, a deep-bodied blend of plum syrup and black leaves, with a sharp bite of cinnamon and ginger. The chair that used to be Sephiran's had been moved to the side, replaced by a cushioned stool carved to match the rest of her dining set. Naesala said the wide, round lion paw feet reminded him of Skrimir.

She leaned on the table, propped her chin in her hand. The tea was still hot. "Why Skrimir?"

He cocked an eyebrow. "Caineghis has some dignity."

Sanaki dipped her spoon into the bowl of honey and twirled it around. "He was rather monolithic."

"Skrimir was a bratty cub." Naesala took his plain and watched the steam. "He made a good footrest if you could just tie him down."

"So you were a bully." To much honey. She sipped her tea anyway, and put it down when it scalded her tongue.

"I was always nice to Reyson and Leanne." He took a long gulp and kept a straight face, but his eyes watered. "It was just me taking care of them back then. Me and Rafiel."

Sanaki straightened, folded her hands in her lap, toyed with the fringed hem of the tablecloth. "How is Rafiel? I heard Queen Hatari had to leave."

Naesala stared at his tea, both eyebrows slightly raised. His wings shifted. His mouth worked. She was about to tell him to forget she asked when he finally said: "He already had kids, you know. They died. It's hard for him to do this."

Sanaki lowered her eyes to the ever-present glow of the crystal lamp. "That's why she left, I take it." To make it easier - easier to betray his queen for what he didn't love.

"Maybe." Naesala sipped more carefully. "Who knows."

*

A courier brought the next letter, and a request for Naesala to return to Serenes. Sanaki didn't ask how long it would take or when he'd be back, didn't even walk him to the window at the top of the cathedral which had become his unofficial entryway into her domain - but she did threaten to set the entire guard to chase him off if he even thought about skipping her birthday celebration. It had no significance in itself, but her supporters delighted in any excuse for a party to drag her into, and she wasn't going to sit there and fend off the crowd by herself if it could be helped. He stretched his wings, his arms, yawned, and said he'd try. Then she threw him out of her office. She didn't need him loafing around in her office, darkening her desk with the shadow of his wings, when more decisive individuals were demanding her time for matters that might be important.

Lehran's letter waited on her desk, tucked into a drawer, until the day's meetings were over and Sanaki had a moment to sit back and rest before she went to her rooms. She needn't have bothered waiting to open it. It wasn't important. A greeting, an overview of the politics within the bird tribes, which he accused her of demanding without cause when he'd heard she kept a certain raven at her beck and call whenever he wasn't on business, and as if his mention of her private affairs were not insulting enough, he had the nerve to ask what she'd done about securing the throne.

Nothing, she wrote on a scrap of parchment. Nothing at all, and you've no business sticking your beak into my personal affairs, unless you're offering to participate. She sent it without bothering to sign and went on with her day.

Sanaki was almost twenty, an infant in laguz eyes, and yet she felt older - sixty perhaps, or seventy. Someone told her it was the curse of living in interesting times. Some nights she lay in bed and wondered, staring at the invisible weave of her canopy in the dark, what it would be like to live longer and see lives like her own flash by like the lives of insects, or - if she wanted to be generous - small animals. When instructing her on the general management of commoners, Sephiran used a metaphor of sheep, for they were herded in much the same way. In a nobleman such opinions were merely arrogance; in Lehran, the goddess's servant, who by all appearances was eternal, she heard resignation, acceptance, belief.

Beorc. Sheep.

She considered sending another letter to criticize his metaphor. Sheep didn't have steel teeth.

His reply waited on her dining table a month later, after a senate session meant for the presentation of the new quarter's proposals which nearly ended in blows, and a sour taste lingered in Sanaki's mouth after her closing meeting with Oliver. She'd been obliged to thank him for smoothing ruffled feathers on both sides of the argument. That choice of words made her want to wince the moment it came out of her mouth; he would have liked to stroke Vika's wings, no doubt, if only he could be sure she wouldn't transform and bite his hand off. Lips pressed together, skin tight, Sanaki picked the envelope up and ripped the seal open. The wax made a loud snap. The paper ripped. Pale yellow light danced on the parchment and sent shadow pooling in the creases that folded the sheet into thirds.

If you insist, the first line read. No greeting. Sandalwood and lavender lingered on the surface with his blue ink script. Below he wrote: However, between your august person and Amelie, I may be spread a bit thin--

Sanaki was on her feet with the paper crumbled between her hands before she knew she'd risen, the chair thumping, the table shaking - or maybe she was the one trembling. Her body felt hot, her face flamed, and the muscles in her hand coiled tight in a claw around his letter. A thought would burn it to ash. But why-- why should she care who he kept company with-- who he courted, or whatever birds did when they wanted children? His life wasn't her concern. The heron tribe was diminished to almost nothing.

She didn't care. She didn't. Lehran had his obligation; Sanaki had hers. She ripped the parchment into jagged pieces and threw it into the cold fireplace before she went to lie down.

Rest eluded her for fifteen minutes until she got up, pulled out her writing box, and composed a draft of her reply, which she forced herself to put away to look at again later, perhaps in a day or two, when the urge to fly all the way to Serenes and pluck him like a chicken had subsided. Then she took a long bath, and spent the rest of her night rubbing gardenia oil into her skin, brushing her hair to a shine, reclining with a book, until she was tired enough to sleep in truth. The clock read five past eleven when she tossed back her quilt and slid between the sheets, and the moon was low in the sky, centered in the frame of her window, a crescent like a claw.

Tomorrow she would hear revised proposals and attend a masque, to which her more subtle guests would likely wear costumes politically relevant - feathers and fur trim for the laguz anti-segregation proposal, throwbacks to old plays glorifying the role of the senate in Ashera's plan to oppose the dissolution of the senior council. The snow queen from Bleak Midwinter was Sanaki's own choice, for it functioned as a warning, and the elaborate beaked mask, with its immaculate swan feathers and diamond accents, would remind her subjects of white wings. It was too bad her hair wasn't silver like Micaiah's; what a striking image that would present, when paired with the airy, silk gauze layers of Sanaki's dress and the shimmering ivory paint she planned to add to her nails.

Instead of distracting her, thoughts of white wings reminded her of black, and Sanaki slipped into dreams of chasing them, black wings she'd never seen before and therefore could only imagine based on other evidence - Reyson, Rafiel, Leanne. The longest feathers were clipped and jagged. They would cut her if she touched them; she knew with a dream's certainty, just as she knew he was teasing her, luring her into some trap with hints of long, silky hair and a throaty hum, the sort that came from deep within and made her want to press her ear to his chest and listen.

Long, long ago, Lehran sang for her. It was so long ago she remembered only the tone of his voice and not what he sang, not the melody. Only the reverberation of his voice in an empty room, and the clash of metal in the background, the scent of wood burning and heat.

She woke to the dark - no moon, but a winged shadow beside her, outlined in red and brown by dying coals in the fireplace, and she reached for an arch, stroked the feathers, felt the rough tips of the raven king's fingers pull the sheets from around her legs and run along the ridge of her bones, bunching her sleeping gown up and up and over her hips. Sanaki would always think of him as a king; his manner might cut too deeply to be graceful, his tactics too direct - when it suited him - but he made a king's sacrifices, denying himself comfort and happiness to provide for his subjects. He sustained his country when his predecessor's mistakes might have ruined Kilvas. He stepped aside and watched the woman he loved go to someone else in the name of peace.

Naesala peeled the gown away from her clammy skin like he'd already forgotten that sacrifice, heating her with his breath, the tickle of his hair, his tongue tracing her navel. Sanaki grabbed his ponytail, curling her fingers into his thick hair. His cheeks were rough between her thighs, scratched the delicate skin, his lips warm, his teeth only noticeable when they made her writhe.

He didn't kiss his way back up until she lay limp against the pillows, pliable in his hands, and he whispered his report in her ear while he took his pleasure and worked her back up to a peak: he'd uncovered enough dirt on certain families to ruin their chances at new senate seats, and he spared her the boring details, only murmuring the most interesting - lurid, dirty, ridiculous - so as not to ruin her concentration. He tickled her feet with his feathers, knowing their sensitivity, then her legs, nipped at her throat, her ears. Sanaki didn't remember one cursed thing of what he said to her once he finished, and Naesala said that was just as well, because it would involve picturing Duke Seliora in all sorts of awkward positions.

She hit him with a pillow. He laughed, and her spine tingled, her skin, all the way to her toes.

"He send you a nasty letter, didn't he."

Sanaki slanted her gaze toward his voice, but it was too dark to see more than a glint in his eyes, so dim and red with the coals burning themselves out past the foot of her bed. "This is your fault, then."

"Lehran almost sliced me in half when I told him you were--" Naesala's fingers tapped a soft rhythm on the bone of her hip. "I thought he knew. I'd have been ready to dodge otherwise."

"Now he knows." She flexed her toes and flicked a feather.

"That paper scattered all over the floor?"

"Feathers would be more satisfying."

She knew he laughed by the way his frame shook, but he didn't make a sound. Outside, the blue canvas of sky stretched across her window frame was slightly lighter, a gray blue that reminded her of river rocks in the garden behind the palace, of the Ribahn at dawn while Sigrun's pegasus glided centimeters above the surface, almost treading water, to use the fog as a shield against spies on the other side.

Sanaki turned onto her side and let him curve a wing over her back and work an arm under her waist to hold her closer. He smelled like the forest - grass, pine, white petals. It was different every time, like he carried the remnants of distant places on his wings and tangled in his hair. If she grasped at them hard enough they would come to her, either in dreams, or in a river of words. I remember when you paid me for reports with pieces of candy, he might say, and she'd make some snappish remark about the graduated value of his services over her lifetime.

"Speaking of lifetimes..."

The sky was more gray than blue when he spoke. His shadow was darker, definite, warm. "Let me guess, he's done the laguz equivalent of throwing down the gauntlet, and now you have to observe some kind of formalistic duel."

Naesala snorted. Her hair stirred under his breath, tickled her neck. "He's a heron. What could he do about that? No." His fingers stopped their tapping, started stroking her, ribs, stomach, legs-- he pushed them apart. "Why don't we find out what happens when laguz tangles with half-blood, hm?"

Sanaki had only a breath to protest before he covered her mouth with his lips and occupied her tongue-- so she didn't.

In the morning, while he slept, she went out to the sitting room and gathered her bits of soot-blackened paper.

*

Their arrangement was an open secret, the subject of many glances and conversations beyond Sanaki's hearing, though Naesala had no trouble listening and reporting on who said what. A minor official from Culbert muttered variations of it's indecent and she's been defiled, who would want her? behind his lace fan; the former duchess of Gaddos wanted to know what all the fuss was when the line of Altina had been impure from its genesis, and it was clear to her, at least, what Begnion needed: a new ruling family. New life, and new blood to the decaying body of the mother country's former glory.

When he reported that, Naesala leaned down to whisper, she'd do Lekain's corpse for Begnion, I bet, and Sanaki choked on her attempt not to laugh.

The masque celebrating her birthday was amusing but otherwise unremarkable, and the months afterward kept her busy with the new quarterly proposals and arguments with her advisers regarding her decision not to select substitutes for the seven traitors whose seats remained vacant in the council chamber. Just for the voting, they urged. Just until we create a better system. Sanaki would have liked to have Lehran there to help her formulate a replacement plan, but he refused to speak to her aside from an irritated reply to her last letter: you should know better than to listen to anything Kilvas says about herons.

Hah. So was Lehran bluffing?

Amelie is a raven, Naesala told her when she pressed him. All she does is help him with chores as far as I know. He's been stubborn. Sanaki said something to the effect that he was in top form, a little bit of Begnion in the sanctuary of Serenes, but Naesala had only a faint smile for her. She lost her last partner in the massacre - a heron. Kilvas was engaged elsewhere, kept purposely unaware, because, as Sanaki speculated, the senators didn't want the ravens permanently estranged from the other tribes. Not when they might be useful spies later. I guess she's not really trying.

Well. If she wasn't really trying--

Lehran did eventually write to her again, when the year was almost over. Fall darkened the maples on the green outside her windows, fading their leaves to yellow, darkening them to orange, flushing them scarlet. End this affair. Let him go. He doesn't realize what he stands to lose if he's wrong, don't you understand?

Sanaki did understand. She knew her life would fade long before Naesala's hair thinned into gray, that he would be left with nothing once she died, if his hypothesis was wrong and her laguz blood, wherever it hid, wasn't strong enough a balance his. She knew Lehran would face the same loss, though his birthright had already deserted him. What more could nature do to him - rob him of his wings, his mind, his life?

Naesala was still in Sienne when the first frost of autumn wilted the leaves of her wisteria vines and left them hanging in crooked brown curls above the balcony. Sanaki sipped spiced chocolate at the table, both hands around the wide, shallow cup, letting each mouthful slide down her throat to leave sweet, tingling heat in its wake. He preferred cider, and she could smell the mulling spices and tart apple, see the honeyed color of it past the lip of his heavy stoneware cup, echoing the firelight at the other side of the room. It was four past noon, and the sky was dark. The clouds carried rain, perhaps sleet. Another letter from Lehran lay tucked beneath the base of the unlit lamp.

Somewhere between the tail end of summer and the frosty mornings of true autumn, Naesala had grown quiet. She thought he knew the contents of the letter - Lehran rarely bothered to seal his anymore, and Naesala had taken to keeping score between them, teasing when something infuriated her, encouraging her when she composed her retorts. He must know.

He must realize.

"Leanne wants you to return," she said. The mantle clock chimed twice for the half hour, a crystalline tone.

Naesala sighed through his nose, a long breath, one without a reply once it was spent. He leaned on the table, chin propped in one hand, and his gold eyes remained averted - a gold like honey that gleamed even in dim light, such as the gray encroaching through the undercurtains. Sanaki flicked her gaze to the letter, to the smaller, thinner paper folded between the thick wings of Lehran's parchment. The sweeping letters were written as delicately as she imagined the hand that wrote them would move, laying the ink so lightly on its rice paper canvas every swirl was thin as hair. She liked the texture, and wondered why her own heron didn't use it.

Perhaps she shouldn't identify him that way. Only, they'd always used those terms instead of names, because the sound of Lehran squeezed around her heart, and she thought Leanne must do the same to Naesala. They'd ruined themselves with that habit.

Sanaki left her chocolate on its saucer and stood up, walked around the table. His eyes finally left the window to track her, but his posture didn't change, nor did he say anything to acknowledge her when she paused at his shoulder and picked a stray hair from his shoulder. His wing curved slightly in her direction - like that night, the first one, when she decided it was time to stop waiting, not knowing she would continue to wait, and wait, and wait, for something that would never come.

"You'll go, of course," she said, softly, mindful of her proximity. He moved when she pushed him into a more proper sitting position, and held her by the waist when she bent one leg and sat on his lap to meet him eye to eye. The table rocked behind her, the edge pressing on her spine. "Unless you want to lose your wings, first."

His grip tightened, his fingers digging into her hip. "You're--"

"Not yet." Sanaki nudged his hair over an ear. It was easier to comb it neat with her fingers and keep looking at the deep blue.

The angle of his chin meant he was looking at her. "Trying to save me from myself?"

She let a frown turn her lips down. "I'm much to selfish for that."

A snort. "No you're not."

"Go see yours," she said, staring at a corner of the green scrolled carpet over his shoulder. "And I'll talk to mine. I refuse to take such a risk just because I'm feeling sorry for myself."

His fingers stroked her thigh, and Sanaki wondered if it was too late to pull him into the other room now that she'd made the suggestion. Sitting on Naesala did that; sitting next to him was a rather dangerous enterprise when he exuded warmth like a fire, and sharing a sofa with him was as good as volunteering to strip ones clothes off. He was too distracting, too unruly. He had the court in an uproar.

She turned her face away completely. "You're too much trouble. Consider these your marching orders."

Naesala chuckled and nipped the side of her throat. She let him lift her weight, slide his hands beneath her skirt, and supposed it wasn't too late after all.

*

This time Sanaki did watch him go. Naesala liked to leap from the highest floor of the cathedral below the minarets, sliding from human to raven form in a shimmer of blue and sunlight before his wings caught an updraft and lifted him away, fanning her with cool wind. Her white skirt fluttered against her legs, the heavy red velvet of her mantle all that kept her warm when the breeze cut through her silk, her underskirt, her stockings. The garden below met the morning sun with a panorama of changing leaves against the green and its meandering stone pathways.

He remained a streak against the blue sky for some time, then grew smaller - eventually the haze above the city hid the raven from view, and Sanaki remained at the bars bolted across the lower half of her window to prevent accidents. A knight shifted across the room; her boots scuffed, her spear scraped the tiles. Footsteps approached.

"If that letter isn't genuine--"

"It is," Lehran said.

"I can never tell with you." Sanaki turned her back to the view and hoped keeping her back to the light would hide her expression, because it seemed the moment she saw him it tried to melt, to betray her. "Her timing is too convenient."

Lehran's wings were slimmer, the arches higher at his back when they remained at rest, shadows not quite black, not quite brown. His hair remained darker, like charcoal streaks or ink painted just so around his face, over his coat. He looked exactly the same, aside from the slight down turn to his lips. "I told Leanne with that in mind. He'll do anything she asks - he won't leave as long as he thinks she needs him."

Sanaki lifted her hand so it could be seen in the back, gestured; Sigrun and Eirene saluted, white blurs behind the focus of Sanaki's gaze, and left the chamber. The door clicked shut. "Underhanded."

"Necessary." She didn't like this expression on his face - the narrowed eyes, the thin, whitened lips. "It will save him a lifetime of regret over a single mistake."

It had never been so hard to keep her face smooth and her voice level - not since she was a child, facing a line of senior senators she barely knew and never liked. "A mistake," she said, spinning away from him to look for a raven's invisible shadow. "Yes, that would be an apt description--"

His hand closed around her arm so tightly it made her gasp, and he yanked, made her face him again. "So you haven't outgrown your foolishness - not completely." Lehran was still taller, and his wings made him seem moreso up close, maybe even taller than his rival. She opened her mouth to demand he let go. His other hand clapped over the lower half of her face, and she considered biting him. His brow lifted when her lips worked. "Take my words out of context if you like, but they were yours first. I only did as you asked."

Sanaki pulled his hand away. "You left a mountain of mistakes waiting here in Begnion."

"Yes." Lehran's fingers curled around her arm more tightly, long and delicate. His nails didn't bite as others did. She breathed sandalwood and spice when he shifted his wings, tasted the sweet undercurrent on the air between them. "There is one in particular I would like to reverse."

The mantle slipped over her shoulder, and he righted it before she could pull away under the pretense of being cold. Once she'd likened him to ice, opposed to the raven king's fire, but he was warm and solid too, not the ghost of her dreams. He wore gray and black, not white; Sephiran's perpetual smile was gone. "You assume I'm interested in forgiving you," she said, letting him straighten her hair. Old habits. He smoothed a loose curl back and it was hard to breathe, hard to blink. Moving her lips felt like moving stone. "I'm not."

"I never asked for forgiveness," Lehran said. "Only a chance to repent."

Sanaki took a deep breath and avoided his eyes, staring over his shoulder at a bare stone wall instead. "You have a hell of a lot to repent for."

His hands brushed her hair back again and lifted her chin, his head tilted to make her look at him. "Then I will start with the most important of those tasks," he said, green eyes gleaming mirrors, and bent down to kiss her.

............................................................................................

I considered several ways to end this. On one hand, it seems only fair to give her to Naesala, with the situation I set up, and I feel bad for not doing that. On the other, this is a 30 Kisses entry, and that's not the main pairing. Also, with all those hints I dropped about her terrible unrequited love, I felt this was the middle ground - not a happy ending, but one that has potential to go several ways.

Anyway, I don't really like it, but.

Real Naesala/Sanaki will eventually make it up here.

[30 Kisses] [Fire Emblem 10] Afterword - II

2009-10-14T05:11:49Z

Afterword - II
Author: Amber Michelle
Pairing: Lehran/Sanaki
Fandom: Fire Emblem 9/10
Theme: 02 - news; letter
Gauntlet Theme: 33 - the delicious pleasure in making the first move
Words: 2863
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Fire Emblem is copyrighted by Intelligent Systems and Nintendo. I'm not getting any money out of this, just satisfaction~

Notes: I said it all in the first note, I guess. Written to make me feel better.

..........................................................................

The announcement regarding the wedding of the bird tribes with the house of Altina was met with a silence Lehran would have called reverent - or perhaps horrified - if he hadn't known Sanaki held most of them by the throat and no longer allowed dissent of any kind when decisions affecting the whole of the empire were made. Her critics would call her a tyrant, but recent history had proven the lower echelons of the government unreliable. It was clear she listened to her advisers; he stood in during the meeting she called to discuss this decision, with Reyson and Naesala, the new vice-minister, and Oliver, and of course Sigrun was at her side with a hand resting on her sword.

Was his marriage to Sanaki politically wise? Well, it depended on one's view of politics - conservative, or progressive. She only employed the latter.

Would it mend relations with Serenes and the other laguz? One could hope.

Were they courting disaster?

Most likely.

They were appraised of the possibilities: accusations of blasphemy, rebellion in the provinces - especially in the form of the old senate's supporters, slinking about with their heads down, still unfortunately in existence despite the eradication of their masters. Public disdain. Popular insurgence not just within Begnion's borders, but elsewhere, anywhere belief in the old tales still lingered. When Lehran asked Sanaki if she'd kept the truth about the events and revelations of the judgment from her subjects after all, she shook her head.

That would be the other problem, Sigrun said, seizing the opportunity. Her voice was soft, but the others stopped to listen. Your betrayal of the empress is no secret.

That became clear when the public audience adjourned and he walked out of the hall with the other Serenes representatives, and later when he escorted Sanaki to the banquet and took the place of honor at her side. The chair had remained empty when she was a child; none of her lovers were accorded the honor of sitting to her right or sharing the utensils and plates reserved for her use as a security measure, according to Naesala. They weren't important enough to poison, anyway, she said under her breath while they waited for the first course, dipping slices of bread into a shallow bowl of spiced olive oil and vinegar. Such vivid flavor bit his tongue after so many years consuming only fruit and simple prepared foods like bread or yogurt, and sometimes rice.

Mainal's banquet hall was larger than the formal audience chamber. The ceiling rose three stories high, domed at the center with colored glass, and six chandeliers hung from the ceiling on steel chains plated with gold to hide their cold gleam. Ashera's rood was inlaid on the cream-colored marble floor in gold and obsidian, stretching the length of the room from the entry to the dais where Sanaki's throne waited, draped in red velvet. The tables were in a carpeted alcove, separated from the open space by an arch and two columns, the colors warm, yellow, red, white, shades of brown and candlelight. They sat apart facing the rest of Sanaki's guests; in his peripheral vision, Lehran saw musicians take their place on the far side of the room, behind more columns.

"For once," Sanaki said, brushing crumbs from her fingers over a plate, "I think they're having trouble deciding who to stare at."

Lehran swept the three tables with his gaze, saw the flicker of eyes toward their position - not unusual in the company of his empress - and whispers exchanged while leaning and bowing heads at angles indicating they didn't want to be noticed. Also not unusual-- when the aristocrats in question were few and far between, whispering behind pockets of louder, oblivious companions. The murmur of conversation hardly echoed. "You're quite striking in any shade of red, Sanaki."

She lifted an eyebrow and tapped the bowl of her glass for more wine. A red-headed pegasus knight came to refill it. "They didn't believe me," she said, leaning against the high back of her chair. Her arm draped down, her fingers found the edge of his wing, and she flicked a feather with her nail. "I'm sure they thought you had the good of Begnion in mind when betraying us, or I wouldn't have let you live. Now they see the shape of your wings and realize their error."

He looked down at the golden glow in his glass. "I did have the good of the country in mind," he said. "As personified in you."

"Too trite." She sipped.

"At least one of your guests will be trying to read my lips tonight."

Her golden gaze slanted his direction, the corner of her mouth slightly turned up. Then she sighed and rolled her eyes just dramatically enough to make a show. "I'm the one who will have to beat people away from my escort with a stick."

Lehran told her that made no sense if her speculation were true, but Sanaki didn't let him press the issue. She stood up to make a pretty speech about the closing of the rift between races, reparation for the tragedy thirty five years ago, and her hope for greater wisdom to drive Begnion's policies in the years to come so a goddess's judgment would not be necessary to set them right. Lingering on Serenes and the right of the heron clan to demand reparation brought an appropriate hush to the room and shadows to the eyes of several at the tables he thought might be real. He supposed they must realize a heron could not be purchased and shown off to rich friends if the clan remained diminished and died out. Most of the men and women sharing the room with them had gone through the motions of education in concepts like logic and mathematics-- some of them might even remember the basics.

He closed his eyes when she sat down, bowed his head slightly, and the floor was given to others: Oliver, who dwelled on the legitimate trading opportunities in heron-made artwork, food products, et cetera, and Naesala, who said something to the effect he hoped their business relationship would be long and profitable, that the oath of revenge against Begnion was withdrawn as long as their people - Lehran, though he didn't mention it directly - were treated with respect. What smooth manner he'd taken with the gentry before the war was gone. Threat was implicit in his voice. Reyson declined the opportunity to speak, just as he declined every dish and refreshment offered to him, and watched the beorc gathering with a smooth face.

No one wanted to look at him directly. His white wings glowed, the candlelight gleamed atop his hair like a circlet. He drew effusive courtesy, deep bows, and averted gazes.

"You'll have to talk to them some time," Sanaki said after they'd finished the small bites of food served to their table - crisp pieces of flat bread and three varieties of pate, skewers of roasted peppers, eggplant marinated in pungent spices he couldn't recall the names for offhand, served over saffron-dyed rice. They left the table for the throne arm in arm, trailed by the ghosts of her guard in their formal uniforms with their silver swords. "If not today, then tomorrow, or in a week, or a month. You can only hide in our rooms with your loom for so long before you crave sunlight and wind."

Lehran helped her ascend the steps of the dais, held her hand while she seated herself, and again took his place at her side. "I don't have to avoid them tonight," he said, watching his diplomatic companions approach the dais, and noting the trickle of guests into the wider part of the room, across the rood, where they would dance once the musicians came in and took their places beyond the columns. "Prince Reyson will stave them off with the power of his glare."

The remark did not draw a smile. "If looks could kill," Naesala muttered.

"You'd be long dead." Reyson extended his hand, and Sanaki met him halfway, her wrist bent at an angle to imply it was intentional. "Empress. We'll stay a while to prove our sincerity, but this kind of gathering isn't meant for our kind."

She wasn't afraid to meet his gaze directly - she never was, or so Lehran was told, even when Reyson spat his hate into her face, among the ruins of the forest. "I apologize. I'd hoped the banquet would last longer, but they're an impatient sort of people."

Reyson smiled slightly, released her hand. "I trust you to think of things like that," he said. "You haven't disappointed me so far."

"It's the wings," Naesala said when Sanaki tilted her head. He hadn't bothered to don a formal costume; his leather sleeves creased and creaked when he crossed his arms, when his wings drew close to his back. "We don't do dances, so most of us don't learn how. It'd only turn into a brawl with everyone shoving everyone else around. I'm a rarity, and Lehran is just a liar."

Lehran sighed and looked over the raven's shoulder at the party. A dozen musicians wove into the room, instruments in hand - violins, flutes; a pale man sat at the harp. Naesala took a place at his left, and Reyson stood at the empress's other side, murmuring an apology when Sigrun had to move to see past his wings. Lehran edged closer to the throne. "You are the expert on that, of course."

Tradition obligated the empress to take the first dance, and Lehran would have banished his wings to make the dance easier if they weren't half the point of making the relationship public. Sanaki asked quietly if they should make it a short dance, but he declined; as long as he focused on how he shifted his weight when they made a turn and skipped any steps placing them back-to-back, there should be no problem. She directed him off the dance floor once the waltz ended and another piece invited their guests to join the festivity. Next time, he told her, again holding her beringed hand when she sat down, I will attend in a shape more convenient, but she only shrugged and said, I would rather have an excuse to turn everyone else down.

Several opportunities presented themselves. Sanaki smiled, let them flirt, waved them away. Lehran nodded to each and wondered if the goddess had recovered enough yet to answer a prayer for the temporary return of his birthright, so he could peck their eyes out of their sockets personally. Most were strictly proper, but he knew the men she'd bestowed her attentions upon by the way they held her hand, lips lingering over her knuckles, speech formal only in the most generous sense - all honorifics applied, all formulaic courtesies observed. One had the nerve to ask if she would go apart to speak with him, and Lehran turned his glare onto the orchestra, his feathers standing on end and pressed to the wall.

Naesala leaned closer, wings angled so they wouldn't touch him. "Five hundred gold."

Lehran turned his head slightly, sharply, the raven at the corner of his vision. "Don't be ridiculous. Three hundred would be too good for him."

"Expenses are what they are, your highness," Naesala said. "Four fifty. I'll find a way to blame it on Oliver."

"Lehran," his empress said with a smile she didn't bother to hide, directed at the retreating figure of the most recent offender, "Fredric is the only reason the Gaddos government still functions. If he disappears or resigns without good reason, I'll send you to take his place."

"That was brazen of him, all told," Reyson said. "Cultural differences, empress. You'll censure him, I hope - privately."

Sanaki said nothing, but her smile had faded.

*

Sanaki's rooms were lit by candles and small glass lamps on the tables, their domes small enough to fit in Lehran's palm. Tanith's sidelong glance followed him all the way to her bedroom door before he was allowed respite in closing it and turning the lock with a backward flick of his fingers. One lamp lit her bedroom, turned low on her bedside table, casting yellow light to dull the hue of her dress into the color of dried blood. The glow of her white chemise traced her arms, her spine between the laces, peeked from beneath her skirt.

"I'm sorry." She walked round the bed to the dressing table and pulled the hooks of her diamond earrings out. Her gaze avoided the mirror, and his reflection in it, gleaming more brightly, as if in defiance of the dulling effect the light had on her hair.

Nothing else. She removed the long double-loops of her citrine necklace, the choker, the rings of her golden bracelets, the slender, lacquered sticks decorating her hair and the matching combs. They clattered onto the wooden table, followed by her rings and the smaller pins holding her hair up. A hint of herbs and honey touched the air when it tumbled down her back, spiraled loose, clinging to the folds of her skirt and the laces of her dress.

"You should have waited for the dress," Lehran said, leaving his place by the door. Sanaki's hair slid in his hands, cool, like dark midnight water curling around his fingers. He raked his hand through it twice to loosen every strand and twisted it over her shoulder. The knot securing her laces defied him a moment, its intricacies hidden in the shadow between them. "Now." It loosened. He hooked his fingers into the first stitch and pulled, listened to the loud, sharp slither of silk. The sound prickled along his spine. "What do you think you're apologizing for?"

Her shoulder blades stood out, their shadows cast sharply, and by the way she moved it had the same effect on her. Still, she did not meet his eyes. "Reyson is right."

"Yes." He pulled her laces out quickly and freed her from the sheath of heavy brocade. Her chemise, long, shapeless, and wrinkled where it was twisted and folded against her body, swirled when she stepped out from the skirt of her dress. A shadow cast by the lamp revealed the shape of her body. "But we were prepared for that." He shook her dress out, laid it over the bench before her table. "I was ready, rather."

Sanaki smoothed the chemise over her hips, looking over her shoulder at him. Her mouth was still set in a frown.

Lehran brushed her hands away and felt his way around her waist with his fingertips. "It was offensive." He felt each rib, slight ridges beneath the silk. "Will you let me kill him now?"

"No."

He sighed, made it heavy and martyred, watched tendrils of her hair flicker and dance on the rush of air, curling around her throat. "Stubborn." Lehran pulled her back, an arm around her waist, another pinning her beneath the breasts, and worked his nose into her hair to breathe her scent. "I thought you were sorry. I deserve to see his head on a pike at the city gates, at least."

A slight smile creased Sanaki's lips, narrowing her averted eyes. "How old-fashioned. Do you know how many letters we'd get complaining about the view?"

Lehran bent to kiss the side of her pale neck. His fingers found the ribbon gathering the chemise around her shoulders so it wouldn't fall, and wanted to pull. She was warm, and soft, and smelled lovely. The way she leaned into his arms he thought she wanted to respond to him, but tension stiffened her legs, her arms, her back, so he felt it through the thin fabric. Poor Sanaki. "It wasn't your fault. Relax." He let go to turn her by the shoulders. "This will not be the first time a monarch has been caught between the conflicting interests of her suitors, and it will not be the last."

She rolled her neck. It cracked loudly. "I know."

He embraced her again, held her tightly. "It isn't even unusual to think you might neglect your consort in favor of others they consider more deserving."

Sanaki led her cheek rest on his shoulder. He felt her breath against his throat, hot through his high collar. "I won't do that."

"I know."

He thought she rolled her eyes, by the motion of her head. Her fingers tugged the tie of her chemise. "So confident."

Lehran lifted her chin, placed a chaste kiss upon her lips, and smiled.

.

[Fire Emblem 9] A Promise Almost Kept

2009-10-10T21:58:02Z

A Promise Almost Kept
Author: Amber Michelle // myaru
Game: Fire Emblem 9: Path of Radiance
Gauntlet Theme: 23 - I’ll whisper sweet words to you, and some of them may be true
Characters/Pairing: Sephiran, Sanaki (platonic)
Warnings: n/a
Words: 546
Notes: I've been dying to use this gauntlet prompt. The implication is romantic, at least to me, but every time I try it ends up fitting something else better.

Prompt:
Fire Emblem 9, Sephiran & Sanaki, appointment to chancellor

.............................................................

The senior senators promoted Sephiran with all due ceremony, almost as if they were indeed welcoming a new prime minister to lead their council, instead of a servant to be swept under the rug with their child empress, whose public appearances to this date numbered two, not counting his ascension - her coronation a year ago, and an appearance in the plaza on her sixth birthday. She didn't actually speak with any of those important people, of course, being too unruly for polite company. He wondered if they were hiring him to keep her quiet, or function as a new target for her inevitable irritation.

Poor fools. She already loved him and cooed over his pretty hair - if she threw blunt objects at anyone it would not be Sephiran, whose warm lap was her favorite napping spot. You smell like flowers, she said to him the other day. I thought only girls liked flowers.

Nonsense, he said. Flowers embody refinement. You cannot attain elegance without fluency in their language.

Sanaki liked that. Tell me, tell me everything about flowers, especially the red ones!

Red, he'd thought-- how suitable. If she lived past childhood, she would grow to love as fiercely as she raged.

Little Sanaki sat on her throne to meet him at the end of his long march across the formal audience chamber, sitting on a mantle two times too big for her that was spread across the seat of her throne and spilled over to fold and ripple on the marble steps, a shimmering silk lining and soft velvet underneath at the edges. Her short indigo hair was brushed and curled at the ends, held from her eyes by a wide headband he learned yesterday was the Apostle's equivalent of a crown or a circlet, stitched with the likeness of a stylized eye to indicate her prophetic ability. He'd buckled the brocade sandals onto her feet not even an hour ago, and the staff she was supposed to give him lay across the arms of her throne, her fingers curled around it.

"Lord Sephiran of Persis," she said when he kneeled at the wide top step below her throne. She'd wanted to deepen her thin child voice, but to no avail. Then she paused; a faint line appeared on her forehead and he whispered ask me to take the oath, which erased the line and prompted the rest of her speech. Her knuckles were white around the gold staff.

He blinked at her, waited a moment too long to utter the formalities of taking office. They must look like fools, just what the council and half the nobility took them for, but the whiteness of her lips was more interesting.

Afraid? Sanaki?

Of the senate?

His empress lifted the staff with some effort, slid from the seat of her throne-- and the cause of her fear became evident when she stumbled and almost fell.

Sephiran caught her by the hands, steadied her, bore the weight of the staff. Softly, voice pitched for her ears alone, he said, "I promise never to let you fall." It might even be a promise possible to keep.

Sanaki smiled and told him to stand. Together, they faced their adoring audience.

.....................................

Haha, maybe I shuld stop trying for a while.

[Fire Emblem 10] First Blood

2009-10-09T08:16:50Z

First Blood
Author: Amber Michelle // myaru
Game: Fire Emblem 10: Radiant Dawn
Characters/Pairing: Sephiran, Zelgius (also gen and yet not)
Warnings: spoilers?
Words: 1856

Prompt:
Fire Emblem Tellius, Sephiran/Zelgius, first meeting

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The Great Sage traveled many roads, it was said, owed his allegiance to none save the goddess, and Zelgius had in his mind's eye an image after the high clergy in Daein, those who stayed after the king's ascension: a man in white clerical robes embroidered with thread of gold, adorned by rings and chains of the same, and a cloak richer than the king's velvet or an Apostle's fine mantle-- in red, or saffron, colors the goddess was said to favor when she was awake.

What he met, when the Sage graced the small township of Sella where Zelgius was stationed, was a tall, thin man in a dusty, mud-stained brown cloak with a fraying hem, covered by long hair dark as a raven's wing and fine as silk spread over his back and curling on the dusty cobbled street while he knelt beside a beggar. Too young, he thought immediately, yet-- the staff, often remarked upon and described by storytellers for its unique design, marked him. Zelgius paused at the corner to watch as others had - a housewife, an acolyte he recognized from the chapel, an orphan - but it seemed there was not a healing to be witnessed, only the exchange of brass coins and a brown paper package stained by grease at the folds. Food.

Wisdom is embodied in the sage. His hands heal all ills. Such was also said of him. He delivered mothers and children thought impossible to save, brought the ill back from the brink of death.

Stories of that nature were always exaggerated. However--

The sage stood up, secured his staff across his back, and Zelgius went to meet him before the others dared, not quite sure what he would say. May I carry something for you? Perhaps his invisible pack or the satchel he wasn't wearing; it seemed he carried nothing but the staff, the cloak laying flat against his back when he rose.

No, perhaps the ludicrous, may I buy you a drink? as the sage was not only young, but fair of skin with narrow, vivid green eyes and delicate brows, the sort of features one did not expect to find on a man in Daein. Begnion, perhaps, where it was said the great families spent centuries perfecting their eugenics; Crimea, naturally, the current popular jest being a lewd comparison between their royal knights and fainting noblewomen. Who else was there?

"Have you business with me?"

Zelgius blinked, and found the sage returning his stare. Heat pooled in his throat, crept up to his ears, and he bowed to hide it, hoped his hair fell to cover the evidence. "Great Sage." He was slow to straighten, and the heat coloring his skin lingered to make formality difficult. The man might be young, but the slight lift of his eyebrow and unwavering nature of his gaze made Zelgius feel he was a child caught in some impropriety. "I-- admit you are not what I expected. Please accept my apology."

The eyebrow arched higher, and his mouth curved slightly. So words spreads, he murmured under his breath, and the sun conspired with the shadows of the buildings to shimmer on his hair when he came forward. His eyes strayed to the insignia on the clasp holding Zelgius's cloak, and down, perhaps to a glint of armor beneath the black wool. "You must be the garrison commander," he said. "This is fortunate. I meant to speak with you after completing my business in the city. Are you available, or shall I go to the staff officer and make an appointment?"

"That won't be necessary." Zelgius glanced aside, found their audience gone. The textile merchant watched them through his window; a tavern stretched three windows and a door down past the shop, the interior too dark to reveal who might be watching. "What do you need from Sella, my lord? Perhaps I can help."

"Yes." He angled his body to walk around Zelgius, cloak parting to reveal plain wool robes, not particularly fine, nor bleached white. "I suspect you can."

*

The office Zelgius occupied as commander of the fortress outside of Sella was less an official meeting place and more like an armory with a desk wedged into the back corner near the window. He sat on an unfinished oak stool to do his paperwork, which he surrendered to his guest when they entered. Stands of spears two deep lined the far wall, beneath the long rectangle of window, which cast sunlight onto the worn stone floor in four distinct squares, the light cut by iron bars. Their passage sent sparkling dust swirling; more was disturbed when he pulled a crate behind his desk and tossed its burlap covering into the opposite corner, and the scrape grated on his ears, his spine, drowned out the shouts from outside. The practice yard was in use. He thought of apologizing and decided not to.

"How can I help you?" he asked when his guest was seated and he'd tried the crate as a chair, only to find it wanting. His armor was too heavy. It creaked and felt like it would split beneath his thighs.

The sage pushed his hair behind an ear, and appeared less ethereal without direct sunlight to make his skin glow as it had on the way over. His cloak draped back, pooled on the floor around the stool to reveal-- nothing. No adornments, no protective articles of clothing. "The commander at Nebula insisted I register with him before making use of my talents within the city," he said, folding his hands. "I would like to have that - or any other administration we must take care of - out of the way before I make my rounds."

Zelgius wished the crate had a back to lean against. The wall was too far away. "There's no such policy as far as I know." He leaned forward instead, arms crossed on his bare desk. His parchment and writing box were still upstairs to remind him it was time to write a letter to his mother, much good it would do. "Corvus, correct?" The sage nodded. "He's an idiot."

His guest broke into a smile he immediately tried to hide by rolling his lips in and covering his mouth. "He was... trying, I will say that much."

The man had mannerisms fit for Begnion - and their priests, even the good ones, were not to be trusted. Not with what he wanted. He tried not to sigh, and felt the tension knot in his chest. "Heal who you want," Zelgius said. "As long as it doesn't bankrupt you. Maybe you can rope one of the local monks to help."

"The clergy and I do not get along." The sage looked away, or seemed to; his dark lashes covered his eyes, and his fingers picked at a thread on his robe. "My ideas regarding who deserves my services, and when, have alienated many of my colleagues." Saying so didn't appear to bother him. His lips were still curved slightly when his hand dropped to his lap again. "If there are any wounded or crippled soldiers currently under your command, I will see them before I go."

Zelgius stood up. "We'll pay you."

The great sage stood after him and twitched his cloak closed with a slender hand. "I never accept payment for my work."

Yet he'd given everything he had to that beggar-- or so it appeared. Maybe there were hidden pockets in that robe. "I understand how you feel," Zelgius said, "but I am not authorized to accept charity, especially from a Begnion agent."

The man's eyes widened and he stepped back, once, before his fingers clenched in his cloak. "I am not from Begnion." His smile disappeared. "If you insist--" His voice strained, and he turned his back on Zelgius with a swirl of brown cloak around his ankles, stirring up dust. "The proceeds will go to the poor. Precious little else does."

Zelgius's hand twitched to grab his shoulder, yet he only said, "Wait-- please," when the sage moved toward the door, and waited for the brown cloak to sway into stillness. "I apologize." Again. "Your manner-- no, it doesn't matter. The assumption didn't do me credit, and after you offered to spend your skill so generously on my men..."

"A commander who cares for his flock?" The sage's eyes slid back to him, glinting, his back to the sun, though the wall threw back a gray glow that lit his profile. His hand hung from the door knob by the fingertips. "Unusual in Daein." It fell. "You approached me first, commander--?"

"Zelgius."

"Commander Zelgius," the sage repeated. "I am Sephiran." Zelgius felt his back stiffen, as if he should bow again now they were properly introduced, but Sephiran continued past the formality. "You sought my attention with intent down there on the street. Why?"

Zelgius swallowed, felt a knot in his throat. "Is that not a normal occurrence?"

In shadow, Sephiran's expression was almost invisible. "To purchase my services, yes, quite often - as often as I am accused of being a spy, at least here in Daein."

"You are unusual here." Heat again suffused his throat, his ears, his face, made the weight of his cloak and armor drag him down to the floor. Zelgius wondered if he should obey their command and prostrate himself.

"Well." It might have been Sephiran's posture that indicated he'd removed his gaze. "I'll be--"

"They say you heal anything," Zelgius blurted, and clenched his hands into the lining of his cloak when the dark head tilted and the fringe of the sage's hair swayed. If he wasn't from Begnion-- but even if he was, maybe, maybe. "Even laguz. Even Branded."

Sephiran stood still, seemed not to breathe. Zelgius waited, his own breath suddenly loud, louder than the percussive snaps and strikes outside from sword drills, louder than the swordmaster's shouts and the booming answer from sixteen different throats. Then Sephiran let go of the door knob and pulled his hand into his cloak, against his chest. "I see." He looked over. "Who? Where? I will be discreet."

Nerves made Zelgius's stomach flutter, made him sick to the stomach and his limbs tremble at the same time. His armor was all that kept him from falling to his knees. "It's true."

"The goddess does not discriminate between races," Sephiran said, turning toward him, taking two steps away from the door, then three. "Who needs healing? And what is the problem?"

The clasp of Zelgius's cloak slipped twice from his fingers before he snapped it loose and swallowed, hard. "Me."

.