Stranger Than Fiction
By: Amber Michelle
Written for the 'unsaid words' theme at the FE Drabble Challenge on Livejournal. The limit is 500 words, and it always leaves me wishing I had more room. Flash fic clearly isn't for me.
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The charts are drawn up, and Sanaki holds them in both hands, by the fingertips, like a shield. Her sister sits on the other side of the small table, lit from the back by a large arched window, and it's hard to tell where the outline of her hair is, where the silver ends and the sunshine begins.
"That isn't... what I think it is--" Micaiah pulls her bottom lip between her teeth. "Is it?"
Sanaki lays the paper on the table, spins it to face the other side of the table right-side up. "You should be wary of anything requiring a signature." The brand is bold on her sister's hand, uncovered, and she can't stop looking at it. Her own hands are small and white, the right marked by a bruised red line, remnant of the last battle in the tower. "This is what Daein's expenses will look like in ten years, if Crimea and I are able to keep our promises."
Micaiah's fingers bend the edges of the paper. "And if you can't?"
"Look at the next one."
She lifts the first chart, and her mouth stretches down in a wince. Daein's numbers are gratifying, if only because they give Micaiah no reason to smile. It means nothing, really, it's only that the curve of her lips draws people to her like flies to honey, and Sanaki remembers being told of her grandmother's smile and its effect on the ignorant.
He told her so many things. She thinks this story might be true.
"And this one-- this is with your aid?"
Sanaki folds her hands behind her back. "Correct. But Daein still has wealth. It is only a matter of redistributing portions of it."
Micaiah is still frowning. "In other words, I ask the nobles--"
"Don't be naive."
"I tell them." The paper wavers in her grip. "They won't like that."
Sanaki can still see the calligraphy of the heron's mark, even when she isn't looking at it. Nobody else in the cathedral knows its significance, but many have noted the resemblance to likenesses of previous Apostles in paintings and prose - the silver hair, of course. Micaiah says it won't hold dye. Not even a tint will remain to tarnish her birthright.
Truth, he told her, has a way of making itself known. Sanaki would like to believe that isn't always so.
She glances away, at Sienne's skyline through the window. "Now would be the time to rid yourself of anyone still loyal to the former regime. Out with the old, as they say. I, for one, will not cling to the past."
Perhaps Micaiah frowns. "That's harder than it sounds."
True. Sanaki twists Sephiran's ring around her finger. "You have ten years, Micaiah. Ten."
"I'm sorry--"
"Don't be sorry."
Silence. A hawk keens outside, the sound echoes. Micaiah shuffles her papers. "Right."
No. It's all wrong. All of it.