Motherland

Disclaimer: I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

This was written, as many 'fics are, to answer a question that bothers the 'fic author. In this case, the question was, "Why does it take Marth and Caeda so very long to get together if they both love each other so darned much?" We hope the answer suffices. This 'fic is dedicated to Myaru, explorer of world-building, and to Pen and Paper71, defender of Caeda.

On her first morning home, Caeda threw wide the windows of her bedroom. The hills of Talys, smooth curves carpeted in green, rose to weathered gray peaks in the east. It was the curious moment of not-quite-day, when the sun lurked behind the mountains and a lingering film of mist lay like a veil across the horizon. She leaned as far out the window as she dared and drew in a breath of cool, moist air. Nothing said home to her quite as much as the taste of that air and the feel of it upon her face-- it was so different from arid desert heat or the stagnant miasma of southern lowlands.

Caeda drank in the air for a time, then at last turned away to study her room in the soft shadowless light. The hangings on her bed embroidered with heartsease and butterflies, the dolls arranged atop her cedar chest, the books in which she pressed flowers to dry-- all were exactly as they'd been when she'd left them the year before. The piece of embroidery she'd left unfinished when the Galder pirates broke through the castle gates still lay on the small table by the window. The maids had been in to dust, and to air the room out, but Caeda could not say that anything in her room had changed.

When her maid Delyth brought up her tray for breakfast, Caeda felt the same eerie sense that time had been frozen. Her favorite scones and cream and cloudberry preserves, her favorite cream-pitcher in the shape of a plump cat, the scattering of primrose blossoms on the tray... all to suit the tastes of a fourteen-year-old princess who had never really known hunger, never felt intolerable heat or unbearable cold, never experienced true hatred or fear. Caeda picked up one of the primroses and looked closely at its delicate yellow petals. They were perfect; no one would let a flower less than perfect adorn the breakfast of their princess. The gesture touched her, especially as she no longer expected it. And yet....

She pulled the petals off, one at a time, making a wish upon each.

XXX

Her father requested a formal day of thanksgiving that she had come home safe and victorious, without the loss of any men in her party; afterwards, those men returned to their homes. The bards let her know that Talys was a barren land without her-- a garden without scent, a sky without stars, a crown without its brightest jewel-- but they sang their laments through a smile. Her mother made sure that her favorite foods appeared at the table for every meal, and each day bunches of the flowers she was most partial to appeared in her rooms. Across the sea, kingdoms tottered and an empire lay ruined, and yet Talys remained, set in its own ways, with life proceeding at its own easy pace beneath the streaming skies. After a week beneath her father's roof, Caeda felt as though the war across the continent had been but a weird jumble of a dream. Surely none of it had happened; surely she had never twisted her lance in the gut of a dying man to finish him off, or stood before a fire-dragon armed with only a javelin, wondering if her own death was at hand. Surely she never had spurred her pegasus to the shelter of a ruined fort deep in enemy territory, as her loved one's grip around her waist grew tenuous and his head rested heavily upon her shoulder? Caeda looked one morning at the little cat of a cream-pitcher, there for her delight, and felt a quiet sadness drift like mist across her heart.

These things once meant so much to me, and now they mean so little.

Not that her father wanted her to forget. No, he spoke often of the war against Dolhr. To the clan leaders, the king boasted of his daughter's valor on the field of battle, of the number of men who fell to her lance. To emissaries of foreign courts, the king instead spoke of his heir's diplomatic skill, of how she engineered the surrender of Olbern Castle without the loss of a single life. While it was all quite true, Caeda saw the design behind her father's words; when Blondyn the bard dubbed her the Silver Lady-- silver of lance, silver of tongue-- it was less flattery than it was propaganda.

It was a relief when, at the next gathering of chiefs, her father gave them all a lecture on another subject.

"Some of my counselors, including some of you seated here around me, said that it was folly to take in the child heir of a fallen kingdom, that it would bring the wrath of Dolhr onto Talys, and that the most prudent course would be to hand the lad over to the occupation government before the Sable Order set foot upon our land."

Caeda strove to keep any emotion from her face as her father rubbed Prince Marth's successes in the faces of the chieftains. She did not smile as her father heaped backhanded compliments upon the too-cautious and the craven. She simply looked at the chiefs to see which of them bore the scorn with calm and which of them squirmed in their seats.

"And now, we can expect a great reward for our faith," her father concluded after his point was made, clear as crystal. "We, the steadfast allies of Altea, we who held fast to our principles when lesser men bargained their souls for gold and promises, we have forever the debt and the gratitude of Altea, and we have earned it."

And the king gestured to the gifts from the Altean prince, fine temple vessels of chased gold, a fragment of the sacred Aum staff set between two cabochon sapphires, and some beautiful weapons that Caeda recognized from the raid on Raman Temple. Heaped at the back of the hall were sacks of gold coin to be used for the restoration of the villages burned by the Galder pirates. There had also been a ring for Caeda in the shipment of gifts, but for the present she wore it on a cord around her neck and not on her finger. For her father had omitted something regarding the bond between Altea and Talys-- he said not a word about Caeda's promise to return to Marth's side. He said not a word of their promise to marry. But the first King of Talys was a man who did things in his own way, at his own time, and Caeda did not worry then about the omission.

In the space between training sessions and ceremonies, Caeda visited the men who had served her in the war. She flew often to the coastal fortresses where Captain Ogma stood on guard against the pirates that still swarmed in the seas between Talys and the mainland. Ogma always had interesting news from the ports, and he always did seem pleased to see her. She visited the horseman Castor, who had returned home to tend to his mother and his many, many brothers and sisters. Caeda made sure to leave some coins hidden about their house when she visited; she initially planned to slip the coins into the shoes of the little ones, but she found they had no shoes, and so she had to fix that before going on with her plan. Yet it seemed Castor had gone back to his old life without much trouble, and so had the the twin brothers Cord and Bord, who returned to their lives as woodcutters. Famous woodcutters, in truth, and prosperous ones, but they seemed little changed. One her second visit, Caeda found they'd fashioned a little chair for her out of a fallen stump, one with a high fan-shaped back and a place where she might rest her feet. She sat on this woodland throne while they offered her rabbit stew and black ale flavored with elderberries, and they had a grand time remembering the war together. Caeda honestly found it a relief to speak to them, as at times it seemed these sessions of tale-telling were the only way she could be sure the war had even been. But no, she had been there when Matthis, the silly knight from Macedon, came blundering through their ranks lamenting his missing sister and not realizing she was right there among them until he'd nearly put a lance through her. They laughed about it now as they laughed about a hundred other close calls and narrow escapes.

As Caeda flew home from a visit with the brothers, she brought down her mount at the margins of the forest, where wood-sorrel carpeted the ground in pale green. She broke off a juicy stem and sucked a while on its comforting sourness. The taste of wood-sorrel was among the many constants of Talysian life that Caeda took for granted as a child and hadn't thought to treasure until she found herself in the middle of a hostile desert without a scrap of green, much less wood-sorrel, to wet her mouth.

"What a funny world," she said to herself, unsure as to how she felt about any of it.

She flew, once, to the eastern fortress where the Altean exiles had made their court during their stay in Talys. It had been a little neglected during the war; her father had spent his time and resources on the rebuilding what the pirates had damaged, and had not enough to spare for an inland fortress that now stood unoccupied. Caeda sat a while in the practice yard-- once full of young men and their noise, now silent but for birdsong, with the ivy creeping thick upon the walls. She climbed the ivy to a second-story window and so let herself in to the room that had once been Prince Marth's own. Caeda had never been in the room before, and compared with her own bedchamber it was a sad place. No one had come in to dust the faded hangings in a long time, and the few belongings left over were things Marth or his advisors had deemed no longer necessary. Caeda found a stray piece from a set of knucklebones on the carpet by the bed; she attempted to rub the tarnish off its once-bright metal with her fingertips, then sighed and tucked the game piece into her pocket. Like the primrose blossoms on her breakfast tray, it belonged to another life.

As Caeda looked around the empty room, seeking something else with meaning, she noticed a number of notches scratched into the wall above the bed. Before she had counted very many, she realized what they must surely be-- they were the number of days Marth had endured his exile. It stung her for a moment to think that he had so fervently numbered the days, marking each one in deep scratches of even length and spacing. Perhaps, she thought, Marth had hated Talys more than he ever had let on. He spoke of gratitude often, had been thankful that her father provided a safe haven for the Altean exiles, but had he ever praised Talys for its own sake? Caeda thought on it for a time, hoping to remember a moment in which Marth spoke of the beauty of Talys, or some other comment in which it was clear that he found the place good and not simply different. She could not remember such, at least not in that moment. Perhaps he had, after all, only wanted to go home.

And yet, tucked between the pages of an old schoolbook, she found a long feather, still whole and pearl-white despite the dust and the bugs. She knew at once it had come from no bird. She held up the feather from her faithful old pegasus, weighed it against the marks on the wall, and decided the feather carried more consequence.

XXX

Midwinter's Day brought its annual tide of joy to Talys, and yet for Caeda it served as another notice that the days were changing her. She was now too old to wear a wreath of candles and bring her mother a tray of spiced buns; though this had been her favorite part of the holiday, even the Princess of Talys couldn't disregard convention to that extent. Instead, Caeda went with her father and his nobles and sages out to the ancient Dragon Temple to watch the first rays of the newborn sun break above the great stones that some said could only have been raised with the aid of the dragons themselves.

"Hope comes always from the east, lass," her father whispered, as the dragon-patterned torc at his collar reflected the red light of dawn. "Let Talys be a beacon to those who live in darkness at our backs."

Caeda, left mute by the power of the sun reborn, nodded agreement to her father. One Talys, strong and united, unconquerable as the very sun was unconquerable... and yet she remembered all too well whose sword it was that kept Talys free. And she knew for certain her father had not forgotten it, even if his chieftains preferred to forget. She still carried the ring close to her heart.

Midwinter's Day might not mean spiced buns and a crown of candles for her any longer, but it still meant gifts. From her father, Caeda received a new lance, with a shaft of blackthorn and a head of magic-infused silver. From her mother, she received a new gown and hair-ornament, both of them appropriate only to a woman of the age to marry. The nobles presented her with a splendid golden torc with a feather design, again a gift for a woman and not a small girl. She wore the entire array to the festivities to show her father's people that their princess was ready to fight or marry as the situation demanded it.

The present she anticipated most arrived a day late.

"Forgive me, Princess. The seas were terrible rough t' the east of Galder," said the ship's captain who brought her the small basket trimmed with satin cord.

She gave him a bonus in gold for his valor in braving the seas for her pleasure, and the instant she was alone, Caeda unlaced the top of the basket and began to tear apart the silken tissue within it. Beneath the wrappings was an orange, studded with so many cloves that it resembled a hedgehog. Caeda brought it to her nose and breathed in the sweet-spicy fragrance. Oranges, the legendary "golden apples" of the western isles, were so rarely seen on Talys they once cost their weight in true gold. Yet, in Altea, it seemed they hung from trees in every garden. She pulled out one clove and tucked it between her teeth; the taste of it reminded her of their first kiss.

More gifts followed, despite the tempestuous winter seas. Even before the first of spring, she received a basket of small, sweet oranges with crinkled rind. Next came a beautiful round box decorated with gilt and lacquer, and in that were preserved fruits, plums and peaches and apricots that tasted like the concentrated essence of a sun-drenched western summer.

"Why doesn't your prince send you pearls and rubies?" asked Delyth.

Caeda had to laugh at her maid's puzzlement; she well knew why she wasn't receiving rich gifts of jewelry. Her father's goldsmiths rivaled any on the mainland, as the feathered torc around her neck demonstrated. Her father's treasury had come through the wars in excellent shape. If she wanted pearls and rubies, Caeda need only ask her own father. If she wanted a taste of sweet oranges, of cloves, of honeyed apricots, then she must turn her head west and think of Altea.

But thinking of Altea was as far as things went after Midwinter's Day, for Caeda was held as a woman grown in the eyes of her father's court-- and, more importantly, held as her father's true heir. She rode with him as he made his circuits to the villages to administer justice; she sat alongside him as he listened to the priests mediate disputes in the temple. No more did anyone hear chatter of the king adopting some chief's son to be his heir, for at his death Talys would pass to its First Princess. So Caeda was called now, to distinguish her from clan nobles who bore the courtesy title of princess. It was an honor, truly, and the highest sign of her father's love and regard... and yet, with each day, her plan to sail westward seemed a fainter wish.

Caeda told herself that she was learning to be the best queen she might possibly be, and surely to be Queen Consort of Altea was as challenging in its own way as being Sovereign Lady of Talys? But these were just words to fool herself with as she delved deeper into the peculiarities of her homeland, like its system of justice that allowed for a ruling of "not proven" instead of a simple "aye" or "nay" on a man's guilt. Now that her eyes were opened to the mainland, Caeda realized how singular a place Talys truly was-- here alone could a "natural" child receive full rights of inheritance if a man and his legal wife both willed it, here alone could curates and clerics allow their children to inherit property, here alone did a husband and a wife stand on equal ground in a marital dispute.

Her father's work, her father's legacy, was the establishment of one law all across Talys, and though some sneered and said he'd brought dreadful mainland ideals to their land, Caeda saw it for a lie. Talys had its own core of value that no imported trappings of High Kingship or Holy Church could cloak. Her father crafted a strong kingdom that remained true to itself-- Talys was no puppet to Archanea! And yet... if the Sovereign Lady of Talys went off to be Queen Consort of Altea, how long would that independence last? With Queen Caeda living off in the west, in a place where her name would always come second in her subjects' prayers, how long would it be before Altean bishops crept into the temples, before Altean ministers found their way into the chambers of Talys Castle?

And so Caeda began to realize, as surely as frost turned to water in the sunlight, that the hard looks she was given by the chiefs weren't all because she was a young woman playing a man's role. She was the agent by which Talys would suffer death by slow poison, or perhaps slow suffocation. She was the means by which all her father's work might be undone. Queen Caeda, Lady of Talys might be acceptable to the chiefs and the priests, but Queen Caeda of Altea and Talys was not. Not in the least. Small wonder that word of her engagement had yet to cross her father's lips.

Was it not selfish of her to place personal desire above the welfare of these people-- her people? Caeda saw that she had few options before her. She might renounce her claim to her father's crown and go off to Altea, and thereby run the risk that Talys would fall back to warring clans once her father's days were spent. She could go to Altea and try her hand at a double existence, keeping one foot each in realms thousands of miles distant. Or she could accept that her destiny was here, in the land of her birth, the land that her father forged from ten pieces. Strange that it had taken her so long to even see these options.

Then again, she'd blinded herself before with her own wants. The part of her that was accustomed to getting what she fancied had, on some level, assumed that Marth would stay with her forever, that he would make a new home in Talys with her. Until the day that pirates surrounded her father's stronghold, Caeda had not believed the darkness across Archanea would ever stretch across the waters to Talys. Until the day she helped Marth and his knights to beat back the pirates, she hadn't really thought that the small remnant of the Altean forces, the little court-in-exile, could manage a rebellion. But manage it they had, and the gifts and letters kept coming across the seas, each a reminder of a promise she'd spoken and not yet fulfilled.

It helped, perhaps, that Marth's letters were so terribly dull. He put almost nothing of himself into the letters, almost as though he expected them to be intercepted and read by eyes beyond her own. Caeda knew it was a habit he'd acquired from the hardships of exile and war, and she'd even tried to decode these epistles for some hidden personal meaning-- without success. If his words had stirred up embers in her soul... but they didn't. They merely made her smile whenever some flicker of Marth's personality broke through the formal, elegant phrases.

A different sort of letter arrived for her one morning. Caeda recognized it as the hand of Prince Marth's close friend and confidant and broke the seal at once, half-expecting it to be some ill news. It was not quite so bad as that, though it bothered Caeda greatly to read that Marth, at least in Merric's view, now behaved as though eating and sleeping were unforgivable luxuries.

"Our prince has abandoned the midday rest, and throws himself at work from the sun's rising until it sets. Our climate does not lend itself to this sort of schedule. Princess, if you were to venture to Altea, you might witness for yourself the utility of the siesta, and convince the prince that the work-habits of Talysians are not meant for Altea."

Merric was ever one for a jest, but on reading the letter Caeda decided that Merric, too, was being cautious, using humor to understate his concerns rather than emphasizing them.

"I need to go there. I do need to go," she said. "It's been well over a year. I promised him...."

Worse than that, she'd led him. She didn't like to think about the awkward and sometimes frustrating conversations that led up to their promises to one another, but Caeda knew all too well that if she hadn't spoken so plainly to Marth that she wanted to be at his side, whether in Altea or a scrap of rock in the northern seas, he would not have made the invitation. He'd have bid her a reluctant farewell and let her go back to her father's side... where she belonged. But they'd muddled through and reached an understanding, and she'd gone home "to see my parents one more time" before joining him-- and that brief visit had turned to months on end.

XXX

The delay stretched out longer still as Caeda failed to make a decision-- stretched out past another Midwinter's Day. She kept up with her duties alongside her father, kept up with visits to her soldiers. Ogma cautioned her about going overseas. The Archanean king was ruling with a heavy hand, he said. It might be prudent to simply stay home, in the safe haven of her father's land. Cord, Bord, and Castor all remained much as before, though the twins reported that their elder brother had deserted from the Archanean army. The faintest hint of trouble on the continent stirred her turbulent heart still more, and Caeda found her only recourse to be prayer. She prayed in her room, at the temple, at the Shrine of the Pegasi, prayed that her soul might be touched by guidance, that her best path through life be lit. The only sign she received was another gift from Altea that survived the winter tempests, this time a box of quince paste, pink and sweet as rose-petals. The note that accompanied it was as brief and formal as ever, but as Caeda nibbled at the quince paste one thin slice at a time, she felt the gift was a little more overt than usual. The sugared pink stickiness of quince paste sent a different message than did a basket of oranges.

With prayer having failed her, Caeda resorted to her final means for getting an answer from the heavens. She took her pegasus and flew alone, high into the mountains where lost souls were said to dwell. The air was so damp that her mount's coat and trappings were soon drenched in dew. Caeda climbed to the top of a large mossy boulder and looked down at the valley, a subtle tapestry of greens and grays. She closed her eyes and remembered the bright colors of Altea, the broad curves of the River Alicante. Caeda chanted a brief prayer to the spirits of the mountain and flung a thing both fragile and precious to her-- her cream-pitcher-- to the rocks below. It landed on the grassy slopes, bounced yet did not break.

"I stay here, then," she said. Now that she had her answer, she felt sick, felt a cold knot in her stomach, but there was nothing to be done. She had given her offering, the spirits had given their guidance, and that was the end of it. "I wish I hadn't...."

Her pegasus nickered a warning, and Caeda turned to see a long-robed figure picking her way along the rocks. Caeda had never laid eyes upon the woman, but she knew her by sight nonetheless. She walked with a strangely serpentine motion, as though her joints were not fastened right. Even at a distance, it was plain that she stood taller than any human woman, with long gray hair like streamers of dirty cobweb. Rags wrapped around her head concealed her pointed ears, and a pouch about her neck held the shattered remains of her firestone.

Song and story spoke of her yet, though in a dozen different lights. She was the goddess of flame who protected the early peoples of Talys, the being who bestowed the divine gift of fire on the weak mortals shivering in their furs. She was the beacon of light that kept Talys safe from mainland invaders as great empires rose and fell on the continent to the west. She was the tyrant and bane of humans, justly dealt crippling defeat by great heroes of old. She was, despite centuries of disgrace, remembered even now in the name of Caeda's own ancestral clan, the Dragon clan. For this, without doubt, was the Red Dragon of Talys.

Caeda rose, and would have knelt in proper obeisance before the ancient manakete, but the Red Dragon cackled a greeting to her first.

"Hail, Caeda, seven-crowned queen."

"I don't understand your meaning, Lady." Her father was sometimes called King of the Ten Clans, but Caeda had never heard of any seven crowns or seven kingdoms inside Talys.

"Few men understand my meaning, and the ones who can have been touched by the spirits to the point where other men think them cracked." The Red Dragon sounded almost merry. "But hear me, girl-child, hear me like the human boy I told to unite all Talys under his rule. When east is joined to west by love, and north to south by conquest, when the last of the Ancient Ones bows her head before a mortal man, remember the worlds of this mad old woman. The one who stays home and tends to the hearth gets a crown for her virtue, and the one who goes out into the world for justice gets seven."

"I hear you, Lady," Caeda said, even as the sheer proximity to the Red Dragon sent a bolt of caution into her heart. She would have liked to hear more, and would have asked more, except that the Red Dragon seated herself on a nearby boulder and promptly settled in to a trancelike sleep. Caeda knew just enough of the strange ways of dragons to know that her interview with the Red Dragon was ended.

"East joined to west by love," she murmured. "That must surely be my contribution to peace."

Convinced now that her marriage was the key to the fragile peace of the mainland, Caeda flew straight towards the castle-- once she'd retrieved the cat-shaped pitcher from the grass. It'd be something of her homeland to treasure, after all. She intercepted her father on his own ride home from a visit to the southern villages. They chatted a while, then dismounted to watch the sun as it descended for the evening into a thick band of haze.

"I will go west, Father, as soon as the seas calm. Though it saddens me greatly to leave you and mother and to leave our land, my heart speaks clearly to me-- and the Red Dragon spoke to me as well."

And canny King Mostyn, who made it a point never to be off his guard, arched his brows in genuine surprise.

"Did the fire-goddess speak clearly to you?"

"Clear enough, Father, to light the way ahead of me."

A hot tight feeling in her throat made the words come out sounding strange, but her eyes remained dry. Caeda watched her father, and the tension made her dig her fingernails deep into the palms of her hands as she awaited his reaction. After a moment, he smiled-- the rueful half-smile she recognized from the council table, the one that marked the end of a negotiation that had been unexpectedly hard.

"I'm glad you stayed with us a while, lass. I know you were anxious to start off on a new life with your sweetheart, but it paid to wait a time. Our people have seen you-- they hold you in their hearts more dearly than ever. But if you'd left us when your own heart first whispered of love, the people would only have remembered you as a dear little girl, gone off into the sunset. Now, they'll remember you in a different light, as their warrior queen, a woman who if need be will fly home at the head of a great army, with a strong king at her side." And he addressed her with his hands placed at her shoulders, as a man might talk with his son. "If something should happen to me with you not here, there won't be some ambitious youngster claiming the throne for his clan. They'll wait for you to come home, and to take what's your own."

"Thank you, father," Caeda said, though words were perfectly inadequate to the moment.

"And now, you'll take that little engagement gift out from its hiding place and let it shine beneath the sun's grace?"

The leather cord was well-worn by now, darkened and shiny where it rested against the back of her neck, and ragged wherever she was prone to twist it. Her father helped her undo the knots, helped her to secure the ring. He even placed it on her finger, and it shone in the red light of the closing day.

"I'm sorry, father."

"Ah, that's not the way," he said to her. "All these months, and I've never once heard you say, 'But they do such-and-such on the mainland,' never heard a complaint of 'Altea this' or 'Altea that.' I know you'll carry the spirit of Talys in your heart, and it won't be the mainlanders corrupting Talys in the end. If anything changes, you'll change them, lass."

He smiled to her as one sharing a secret.

"Besides, I had a few years to corrupt your prince and twist him out of his mainlander thoughts. I think he learned a bit about our quaint island ways."

"He did, father. Most certainly."

And though tears pricked her eyes, the ring fit comfortably on her finger, as though it belonged-- a band of Altean metal around the warm flesh and pulsing blood of Talys. If the metal constrained the flesh, the flesh endowed the metal with some of its warmth, until both were as one beneath the undying sun.

The End

Author's Notes: War of Darkness ends in Year 605. Marth and Caeda are just on the verge of getting married when Hardin spoils the party in 607. I'd assume there's a fair amount of pressure on Marth to get married-- last heir of Anri and all that-- so what gives? Well, the unaddressed matter of royal succession in Talys might possibly play into it, and so this 'fic, dear readers, is what I concocted to fill that two-year gap. Yes, Talys is a Scots/Welsh/Irish place here, with a dash of Scandinavia. I have my reasons.