Island of the Holy Rose
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
A tale of Artemis and Anri in the time of Liberation.
493
high summer
Instead of locking her within a fortress, her parents sent her off to hide in a vast garden. Artemis felt lost among the rows of Altea plants; the pink-and-white cups of the blossoms were at her eye level, and the broad leaves made it difficult to see between the plants. She wandered through the Altea patch, stepping carefully through the spongy ground lest water soak into her shoes. Small butterflies with speckled wings of orange and brown darted through plants around her, and she stopped now and again to simply watch them, to feel the sunlight on her hair and the wet breeze coming off the river.
At last, she saw a glimpse of bright blue through the green.
"Anri?"
A few steps more, and she could fully see Sister Irene's eldest son, making his own way through the field with two sacks of Altea leaves for the market. Small twigs and pieces of leaf were caught in the long strands of his hair.
"Miss Artemis?"
"I..."
She did not know why she felt so hesitant about speaking to him. Artemis glanced down at her shoes, which were now quite dirtied from the marsh. When she looked up again, Anri was waiting on her, silent and expressionless. His eyes showed curiosity, though, and perhaps that was what bothered her- when he looked at her, she had the sense that Anri was wondering what this being called a princess might actually be.
"Sister Irene says it's time to come in. She has a list of tasks for you in town, and you mustn't go down there too late."
He nodded, then waited on her to lead him back to the farmhouse. He should have led; he knew the way far better than she. But he followed her, because he couldn't walk before his princess unless he carried a weapon for her protection. Two sacks of Altea leaves weren't a weapon by anyone's reckoning.
The sun felt heavy on the back of her head as she walked. Perhaps it was the sun, perhaps it was Anri's curious gaze burning behind her. She did not look back to find the answer.
harvest
The Altea plants gave them a harvest for long months in the year- first the tender leaves, then the mature leaves and the flowers, and then in autumn the roots were collected. Anri spent the whole of each day uprooting the plants, collecting the seeds and stripping the stems, peeling the stems and cleaning the roots for market. Sister Irene was busy likewise, preparing the best of the roots for various medicinal compounds that would fetch them far more gold than the raw roots alone.
Sister Irene explained some of the compounds to Artemis.
"This will be mixed with Blessed Thistle and Alfafa to make a tea to keep a new mother's milk flowing," she said as she shaved the Altea roots into thin flakes to be dried in the sun. Artemis helped her, grinding roots into a paste to be mixed with other healing herbs to treat burns and gangrene. Artemis had learned from her teachers about the marvelous properties of the plant known commonly as the healing rose and the holy rose, but to see how each part of the plant had a myriad of uses made her consider anew how fortunate they all were that such a plant did exist.
Though not all of the uses for Altea were medicinal. Sister Irene set out a plate of sweets named "bull's eyes" for the twins, a reward for assisting their elder brother with his chores... to the extent that two four-year-olds might assist with anything. The center of each sweet was made from the same miraculous root that sustained them all and gave its name to their town.
The twins fell upon the sweets; Marcellus ate them one at a time, holding each in his mouth for so long that Artemis was afraid he might swallow one whole and so choke. Azriel ate them by the handful, leaving his face and hands a sticky mess.
"Leave some for our visitor," Sister Irene chided them, and Artemis was surprised that the boys obeyed, stepping away from the plate with their hands behind their backs. "You should have offered them to her first. A good man never takes the first sweetmeat from a plate when a lady is present."
The boys looked at one another, then Marcellus stepped forward, seized the tray with both hands... and offered it to Artemis. Again, it surprised her; her brother at that age might have pitched the tray upon the floor if so lectured.
Bull's eyes. They looked a little like targets, soft white centers surrounded with a bright paste made from fruit pulp. Green plum and rosy quince. Artemis took one of each and thanked Marcellus with a smile. The bull's eyes were firm and chewy and stuck to her teeth, but the taste was not as sweet as she expected. Artemis thought of the mallow sweets the palace cooks prepared for her, light puffs whipped up with egg white and flavored with rosewater, so sugary she often sickened herself on them. It would be hard to eat so many of these bull's eyes, for they were heavy and filling.
Targets made her think of the bow upstairs, the one wrapped in plain linen and hidden away in a chest in Sister Irene's room. Artemis excused herself after eating the sweets and was on the stairs before Sister Irene straightened up from her curtsey. She thought of visiting the chest in which her bow was hidden, but instead sat in the recessed window at the top of the stairs, looking out across the remains of the Altea field. She could just see the top of Anri's head as he worked, stripping down cut stalks to reach the soft mallow-pith in the center of the stem.
She ached to unwrap the bow, to run her fingers across it and have some solid, reassuring reminder of home, more substantial than the memory of last year's mallow sweets. But it would do no good, no good at all- any more than her bow could be used in the fight against Dolhr now that she was in hiding. She'd been told from her earliest memories that Archanea's security was bound to three sacred weapons: Father's sword. Her brother's lance. Her own bow, Parthia. Two of the three must be enough, she told herself. It wasn't as though she was a very good shot anyway.
Perhaps she should ask Sister Irene to get her an inexpensive bow, that she might practice and become worthy of Parthia.
frost
News from home came on a morning when the fields were barren, and the first frost arrived to blight the plants still standing. Sister Irene did not waste any words in explaining the catastrophe.
"Your brother the prince rode out from Pales with a small company of men in hopes of lifting the siege upon the citadel. It was not a success, Your Highness. Your brother fell, though a few of his men did escape with his weapons and other personal effects. They did not retrieve his body."
"Is there a chance... that my brother yet lives?"
"No, Your Highness." Sister Irene's eyes were the same blue as Anri's, so solemn that they often seemed cold. "Your brother's remains were taken by the enemy."
Artemis rocked back and forth on her heels, trying not to imagine what the dragon's had done to her brother. She'd heard... oh, she had heard what was done to the corpses of innocents when the dragons would take them. Defilement.
She looked around, hoping to focus on something, anything- the lace pattern of the curtains, the small panes of colored glass set above the door, the woven cane seat of a tall-backed chair.
"Thank you for telling me the truth and not giving me false hope, Sister." It didn't really sound like her own voice. "I think I would like some time outside, alone."
She stood on the banks of the river, watching the current sweep branches and other debris out to the seas. Thoughts of her brother invaded her mind, and she could not keep them out for all that she wished that her mind were a blank, as spotless as a polished mirror. Phoebus, fair as she was dark, so handsome and bold atop his white-maned destrier. Phoebus riding as though he'd been born on horseback, riding as skillfully as the savages of the northern plains. Riding out with his men, the companions chosen for him before he could walk, men he was leading out to oblivion. Brave, bold, handsome. Reckless, desperate and dead.
Defilement.
A barge floated past, unmanned. Artemis stared at its cargo, a small body bound in a white winding-cloth, heaped with the orange and yellow flowers of autumn.
"Miss Artemis?"
"Anri." She did not look at him, did not want to look at anyone. She looked only at the funeral barge, the stark whiteness and gaudy colors.
"Mother told me of your brother's death. I am sorry, Miss Artemis."
"It's all right, Anri. If it were not so very dangerous at home, I would not be here."
"My sisters died," he offered after a while, and the pitch of his voice wavered to show how young he was- fourteen, three years behind Phoebus. "One from putrid throat, and one drowned in the river when the old footbridge gave way. Mother said that the water-spirits took Alais so that she could be a guide for them and help lead the dead out to the ocean."
"I'm sorry to hear that." She hadn't known about any daughters of the house until then. Sister Irene had never spoken of it. The funeral barge was slipping now around a curve in the river, out of sight.
"The gods gave back all they took from us, though. The year after Alais died, the twins were born."
"Is that fair, though?" Something in her heart screamed that it wasn't, but she really didn't have words to express any of it. Perhaps the words didn't exist. "My brother is dead. I still live. Is that fair?"
"I don't know, Miss Artemis."
The boys never called her "Your Highness," lest their tongues slip in public and give her hiding-place away. She was glad of it; she didn't want to hear a reminder of what her brother died defending. A reminder of something that might no longer matter, if the dragons kept their siege upon Pales.
The river was empty now, as though the barge with its small sad burden never had come their way. When Artemis spoke, it was more to herself than to Sister Irene's boy.
"But he was dead already this morning, and last night, and the day before... and I kept on living, not knowing. He's dead, yet the sun rises and the river doesn't stop in its course."
"Come on back to the house, Miss Artemis," Anri said after a moment. "It's too brisk to be out without a wrap on."
It was such a sensible thing to say that she smiled for a moment, and they went back across the muddy fields, his footsteps falling ten paces behind hers.
midwinter
On Midwinter's Eve, the five of them went into town for the festivities. A traveling bard had come, and he entertained them with songs of the ancient wars, of the dark days when all men had banded together to fight and defeat unspeakable evils. These were not the traditional songs for the holidays, in the town of Altea nor anywhere else, but these were the songs people needed to hear, songs of encouragement, of hope... of victory after the long bleak struggle. These were, in the truest sense, the songs to sing on the day the old sun died.
The dragons would kill that bard if they heard him, Artemis thought as she watched the man perform. They'd string him up by the green locks of his hair, would cut out his tongue, would break his fingers before they dispatched him. It took courage to sing, when any town might be the one harboring traitors or dragon-worshippers like the terrible Lopts in the bard's song.
But he raised their spirits; the twins were quite merry on the walk back to the farm, and Anri was singing a few verses that he'd managed to memorize during the performance. His voice wasn't developed yet, and it cracked a few times, but Artemis thought she liked the sound of it.
Three days after the festival, news reached Altea that Pales had fallen to the dragons. Artemis sat in her window, fingers against the cold pane as she looked out on the snowbound fields and the frozen curve of the river, and she decided that there were not, in fact, words to describe what it was to be safe and warm and alive when everything she knew was gone.
To Be Continued...
Author's Notes: Okay. This is an attempt to lay out what I think is a plausible explanation for the love between Anri and Artemis, their survival during the most dire days of the Wars of Liberation, and his emergence as Archanea's hero. The basic framework is drawn from the canon accounts of FE3 and the "Perfect Ending" timeline; everything else is invented.
One of the fan-theories as to the origin of the name "Altea" is that it derives from the genus Althea, the mallow-plant. Said plant has some genuinely remarkable properties, and will serve well for this story.
PS: Note the bard. Note the content of his songs and the color of his hair.