Map the Stars
By: Amber Michelle
Written for a Sanaki claim at the 20 Wars Livejournal community. I have no respect for formatting. Warnings apply for a Lehran/Sanaki pairing, which everyone should expect from me by now, but just saying.
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I.
The war haunted Sanaki from the moment Ashera dissolved before her eyes at the top of the Tower of Guidance. It wasn't the goddess or her betrayal of the scriptures Begnion had held so dear for so long, though that too left her wondering sometimes what one could cling to. Fate? Sephiran would have been her choice, but he was also a warped reflection of what he should have been, what she thought he was.
Sanaki often thought that if he'd only told her-- if he'd told her what he wanted, explained himself, she could have helped him. She could have pushed the senate harder and pursued the Emancipation Army earlier, and told him he didn't have to hide his nature. They could have done what her grandmother couldn't and turned Begnion into a country that would accept both races. Even the senate could not refuse counsel from Lehran, Ashera's own right hand. And though Sanaki didn't have a brand--
But he wouldn't hear her out. They would have killed you, he said, sharp, and then more softly, I would have lost you.
His tone squeezed a fist around her throat until she felt that if she didn't say something, she would cease to breathe.
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II.
Was it true? she wondered later. Sanaki wanted to believe him, but the sting of his betrayal, those words: I've known you are not an Apostle for quite some time, your majesty, were hooked into her chest like talons, digging for her heart.
What if things were different? What if he'd really lost her? Would despair drive him to put an end to Tellius?
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III.
There were times Sanaki wished her sister had never been found. Without her, the illusion of Sephiran's regard wouldn't have crumbled around her feet. She might have died with her people, blissfully unaware of his part in Ashera's awakening.
He might have sent his servant to her side instead, and allowed her the chance to speak with him before the tide of battle made reconciliation impossible.
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IV.
Sanaki was a normal human, with normal frailties, unextraordinary. She couldn't stop asking herself what if, what if--
What if he'd found Micaiah in the chaos following Misaha's assassination, and Sanaki was reduced to a footnote in history, or perhaps simply a name on a list of births for the year 635, and deaths in another volume, long before her sister's face would be creased by wrinkles or age?
It was possible she wouldn't have been born at all.
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V.
Perhaps Micaiah would have been - should have been - the object of his love, and he wouldn't have had to leave her, because the voice of a true Apostle was powerful and could achieve many things. One need only glance at her recent exploits - the liberation of Daein, serving as a vessel for a goddess, destroying another, and returning to rule her country, beloved by her people.
Perhaps Micaiah's songs would have eased his troubled heart. Sanaki's own voice only brought melancholy.
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VI.
They were alone in her parlor when she pronounced his sentence, the palace reclaimed, Begnion firmly in her grasp. Exile, she said, glad her sleeves were long enough to hide her hands when they curled into fists. You are not to set foot in this country again until I lift your sentence. She didn't threaten him with death or imprisonment, because she knew Sephiran would do as he was told. He always did. He waited on his knees for her order to rise, and she stared at him, thinking he deserved to abase himself, and yet shrinking back from the way his head bent.
Before I leave, he said, gaze downcast, I would like to speak with your sister. She also deserves an explanation.
A sour taste filled Sanaki's mouth. She turned her back on him. Very well. Go. She swallowed hard, listening to the rustle of his robe when he rose, and then she said it: Get out of my sight. And don't come back.
So he passed away, yet she couldn't convince herself to consider him dead in spite of it all.
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VII.
Sanaki visited each of her provinces after the war, beginning with Asmin, then Persis, then Tanas, to offer visual proof of her victory over Lekain and his allies. Your fight was not in vain, she told the crowds. She thanked them, and for the second time in her life - then the third, forth, fifth - she sank to her knees and bowed to the citizens who spent their lives to overthrow the senate in her name. Her journey concluded in Gaddos mid-spring when she inaugurated a new family as overseer of the province and chose a representative to follow her to the capitol, but she lingered at the western border on their way back, looking northward.
Her sister didn't visit often. Daein was ravaged by the war, and Micaiah had fewer freedoms, more demands on her attention, her presence. Sanaki considered contacting her and making an informal visit before returning to the capitol, but her hand paused, pen poised to ink the appropriate note.
Sanaki had no idea where Sephiran went when he left. Was it Serenes he ran to? Goldoa? There were others waiting for him there, memories. Daein? Micaiah was a child of his blood. He owed her-- something. She was afraid to ask.
What if he had indeed gone to her sister? Was it Micaiah's laughter lighting his days, healing his heart?
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VIII.
Instead of coming to see me, Micaiah said to her that winter, when she traveled south on official business, you ran back here and let yourself dwell on that fantasy instead? I could have told you I haven't spoken to Lehran since that discussion here in the palace.
Sanaki stamped her seal a little harder than she needed to. Bits of red ink spotted the parchment around the formal characters, unnoticeable unless one looked. The ink was thin. Even Begnion felt the aftershocks of wartime in matters of trade. The form she signed would send surplus foodstuffs to Nevassa, where it would be distributed to the commoners. The harvest in Daein had been minimal. It would not feed an entire nation for the winter.
He was very kind, Micaiah said, but his thoughts always lingered on you. Did you know he's in love with your hair? I swear he didn't think of anything else when you were in the room.
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IX.
Sometimes Sanaki wondered how her ancestor reconciled herself to the knowledge that her thoughts, her feelings, were known to the man she married, and hiding from his talent was as likely as Ashera's thousand years of peace. Micaiah's visits always laid her bare. You love him, her sister said when they parted, when Sanaki was still only thirteen. But you're young yet. Coming from a face barely older than her own, that observation - or advice, was it? - should have sounded ridiculous.
How old are you? she'd asked, and Micaiah said, I don't know. Thirty? Forty? I don't remember my birth date.
Then I really am just a child. Just a girl.
Just an empress. Micaiah reached up, rubbed the symbol she painted on Sanaki's forehead the night before. A blessing, the mark of Altina's line. An empress who knows what she wants.
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X.
But why, Sanaki thought once her sister left after that talk, why say it that way?
She could have told him before she sent him away. There were many opportunities, times when she thought he might even say something other than I'm sorry, empress, but--
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XI.
Four years after the war, Sanaki had her answer: Serenes.
She never formally stripped Lehran of rank when she banished him, didn't tell her people who betrayed them. She told them their prime minister must leave for a time to mourn, and the explanation had a ring of truth that jarred her and left her feeling slightly sick. Did he grieve for Ashera? Was She really, as he said, his beginning and end?
Sometimes Sanaki thought Sephiran and Lehran were simply two names for the same person, but when he said things like that, she wondered if perhaps speaking to him now, to Lehran, would be like talking to a complete stranger. Would Lehran remember the child Sephiran claimed would blossom into a goddess in her own right?
She was no goddess. Sanaki was merely an empress, and her reflection had changed enough she thought, perhaps, he would not even recognize her. Her hair was longer and darker; her face was narrower, her hands were thinner, more tapered. Maybe he would ask who she was if they met again, search her face for some reminder, and her mouth would fill with ashes.
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XII.
It came to her one day when she was looking at a map and her gaze lingered on the forest, drawn in green and gold ink: why. Why he submitted, why he left without a word. Sephiran hadn't said very much after the tower. There was no apology powerful enough to soothe the burn, no way to ask forgiveness for the unforgivable. But she remembered--
I would have taken you with me, he said, his first words since the goddess's defeat. We could have lived in peace. Even Ashera, he told her, was known to show kindness - on occasion.
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XIII.
He said Ashera was not interested in destroying the world - merely in starting anew. War is a disease, a deformation. It must be struck from the body before the greater part of creation could be tainted. It was because she was so imperfect, imbalanced, that she sought perfection so single-mindedly. Such was his theory.
But if she achieved her goal, Sanaki said, she would have been left with nothing. If she couldn't create new life, she would be alone.
She would have had us, Sephiran said. In time you would have given birth to our new world.
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XIV.
Sanaki remembered that most clearly of all their fragmented conversations before he disappeared. He didn't look at her when they spoke, perhaps because he couldn't bear her stare, but his hooded gaze met hers when he said that - you, you would have done it, been the mother of a new existence.
She remembered looking down at her lap and clenching her hands together, afraid that if he reached to touch her she would tremble - or worse, give in and crawl into his lap like a child, put her arms around his neck, and bestow that kiss of favor she often thought of giving, but never quite had the courage to try.
Would it be so terrible an existence? she asked herself. He said they would have lived in peace, and Sanaki wanted to believe. But it would have been a peace purchased with a million lives.
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XV.
Even years later Sanaki felt sick at the memory. He'd looked concerned, and she knew her face had drained of color when she considered the proposal, become white and corpse-like. Her lips felt cold. Maybe they'd turned blue.
Her companions would have died if his plan succeeded, and Yune would have disappeared. Her sister would have crumpled to dust like their nemesis did when Ike struck the final blow. The world would have been empty and silent, as it was during their march to Sienne, if she were weaker. Sanaki was glad he'd never given her the choice. She would have refused - she would have - but there were times she thought it was best to be driven by fate rather than having the freedom to choose.
I defied my goddess for you, he said, catching her hand when she raised it to touch him. What else would you have me do? Anything, anything--
If only she had been older, and able to do more than offer an embrace to silence him. Things might have been different.
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XVI.
Five years before, Lehran told her he'd hoped she would be the beginning of a new existence. How and why he never said, though Sanaki thought the implication clear enough; he would never hand her over to a stranger, were any to survive the judgment. But Ashera's new world had never come to pass, and whatever he meant for her to see in that statement was still a mystery. If he wanted her, he wouldn't have left. He would have found a way to defy her. She wanted to believe it so.
Sanaki was a selfish empress. It wasn't enough to merely be told. She wanted to see and feel.
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XVII.
She waited. Another year, two. Three. More than that. Laguz rights to government office were contested and properly defined for the first time, and killing a laguz citizen became a crime equal to its companion regarding beorc; the perpetrators of the Serenes Massacre offered themselves up for justice, though she could not in good conscience punish them as harshly as the deed deserved. Most were ready to part with the world naturally.
Sanaki didn't push these issues for Lehran, but their success made her think of him, and the reforms he tried to initiate before she was born. All of it - his despair, the planning, the search for her sister, then her mother - was history older than she was. He would never see her as anything but a child. Standing next to Micaiah reminded her how few her own years were, in the present and the time to come.
A century. It would have been enough for her, but never for him.
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XVIII.
There were many things Sanaki could convince herself to imagine; there were days when she thought she heard his voice echo in the corridor, or saw him in her peripheral vision, only to turn and find her cloak draped over a chair, or Kilvas at the window instead of a pair of wings she'd never actually laid eyes on. They're black, Naesala told her, but a different shape. Herons aren't that great at flying - their proportion is all off. Neither mentioned Lehran was immune to that particular worry.
She could imagine his wings. She knew him so well, it was a simple matter to adjust her memory of his posture and the fall of his hair to make room for them. Yet, it was impossible to close her eyes and imagine he was really there with her rather than someone else, someone she allowed to touch her because an empress belonged to her country and must give of herself to protect it. When she invited someone else to lay hands on her skin, and someone else's hair to brush her shoulders, she knew the battle was lost before it began. She knew the shape of his hands better than his face, because she'd clutched them more times than she could count. When she was afraid, his embrace gave her comfort. When she was melancholy, his voice soothed. When she battled the senate, his stare cowed the most vocal of her opponents.
There was nothing quite like him in this world. Sanaki didn't want lovers - she wanted to hold Lehran's hands again and know he would never let go.
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XIX.
There was an attempt on her life that year - a knife to her throat as she slept, and now a faint white scar across her chin where the blade bit when she knocked it away. He was a fool, however, not an assassin, and the crash of china, of his back shattering the mirror when she threw him aside with a wind spell, brought her guards bursting through the door to take him before she could pull a robe on. She remembered standing there in just her skin, staring at him, noting the details that made her choose him to share her bed: dark hair, pale complexion, tall, slender. The eyes were blue, not green, his hands bloody, a wrist broken.
Sanaki was the fool. She pulled her robe on slowly, stared at the unlit lamp on her bedside table and her warped reflection in the glass, and decided that ten years was long enough. He might refuse her, but she would not labor under his shadow any longer.
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XX.
When summer crept north and warmed the treetops of Serenes, Sanaki left the capitol with a small escort and went to Leanne. She didn't have to say anything; like Micaiah, the heron knew her mind, and told her in perfect modern dialect where she should go. On clear nights, she said, he goes to the lake to map the stars - a crystal-clear lake beyond the altar, so deep it was said to reach the center of the world. Sanaki didn't believe that, but she went. Every lake on the continent was sounded and documented by the Cartographer's Guild, and this one was a league or so deep, certainly an intimidating number, but still measurable by magic and human invention.
The water was cold when she knelt at the shore and dipped her fingers in. The moon was at a low point in the sky, but there was enough light to illuminate the smooth rocks paving the shallows and the little, silvery fish that darted above them. It seemed she watched them through glass, the surface was so still.
She might have mistaken his arrival for the wind, but she knew the sound of wings, and the graceful whisper of the grass shifting was too light a landing for a hawk or raven. Sanaki flicked droplets of water from her fingers, rose, and turned.
Lehran was just as she remembered. His hair was longer, and when his wings folded the feathers slatted together like the blades of a fan, gray instead of black with hints of silver at the tips. She watched them when he approached her, fingers twitching at her sides, and didn't think to look up again until his hand traced the scar on her chin. "You've... changed."
Sanaki tilted her head. "We mortals tend to do that."
He pressed his thumb to her lips. "But you're as insolent as ever."
Her reply was to twist her arms around his neck and press her face against his throat, whispering ten years-- like an eternity. Lehran held her tightly, and his fingers combed through her hair. It wasn't her imagination. His hand pressed against her back, and she knew the arch of his fingers and the shape of his palm, and felt his nails through the silk.
"I forgot something important when you left," Sanaki said, lifting her head. "I've thought about it every day since then."
He looked at her, and his lips thinned. "I-- I'm sorry about--"
She covered his mouth and he blinked. "None of that."
"You--"
"I--" she stroked his hair back over both ears, rubbing her finger over one tip, and watched him widen his eyes to keep them from lidding. "I have come to rescind my order." Sanaki leaned forward, pausing. "Among other things." She pressed her lips to his, and he didn't draw away.
That, if nothing else, was enough to make her smile.