Happy new year to Samuraiter! Sorry this isn't quite finished by the deadline, but I hope it provides a least a little amusement to your day. Here it is: a what-if scenario of Ursula joining the army, with quasi support convos (Nino, Jaffar, Erk, Vaida).

Intro

Ursula let a thunderclap fly from her Bolting. The light made her blink, and when she opened her eyes she found that in that small sliver of time Jaffar had sprung to the other side of the corridor, and the lightning charred nothing but the stone floor of Bern's castle. He kept moving for her, striding with purpose, both knives sheathed.

"Stand down!" she shouted as she pulled Excalibur from her saddlebag. He strode on. She lanced purple light at him and he rolled under it, back on his feet in an instant as if he'd merely somersaulted on a whim, and kept coming.

"I am one of the Four Fangs! I order you to—"

She thought he was too far away but she underestimated him, and his dive took her off her horse. They both hit the ground hard and pain wrenched through her ankle—her foot had twisted in the stirrup on the way down. In an instant he'd hauled her up and slammed her back against the wall. A knife was out; she saw it flash cold just next to her ear.

"You have failed in your duty," she told him. "Where is your shame?"

No emotion flickered through his eyes, not even for a moment, but he hesitated. She'd never seen that before. He's changed. Sonia's girl has changed him.

The pause lasted only an instant as a razor edge grazed her throat—

"Wait," a voice commanded, the light tenor of a young man. Jaffar halted but did not move his hand and kept his eyes boring into her face. She looked behind him and saw the accursed, rag-tag army headed their way: the famous savage Lady Lyndis, a wyvern rider with a scarred face, a young mage with hair as purple as her own, and the useless girl: wide-eyed, mouth agape, green hair in a shock of frizz around her face.

The man who spoke stepped forward. The circlet around his brow and the colours he sported, gold on blue, marked him as the Pheraean lord.

"Wait, sir," he said again. "Let her live."

"Damn it, Eliwood!" shouted another, and a burly man pushed his way through the crowd. An Ostian insignia clasped his cloak to his armour. "This is war, now! Did you see what happened tonight? War!"

"She's a woman, Hector."

"She knew what she was getting herself into."

"I agree," said Lyndis, sheathing her sword so that she could fold her arms. "We can't keep prisoners; we don't have the strength."

"I don't mean that she should be a prisoner." Eliwood walked closer and Jaffar slipped behind Ursula, keeping the knife at her throat. She contemplated making a run for it, but between her ankle and Jaffar's deadly precision, she knew she had no chance. Instead she spat at the Pheraean's boots.

"I won't join you," she said. "I am of the Black Fang. My master is Sonia. You must kill me."

"Call me old-fashioned, but I find taking the lives of women in cold blood to be distasteful."

"You're old-fashioned," said Lyndis irately from behind him.

"If you don't kill me," Ursula told him, "they'll do it when I return a failure. I'd rather die with honour, at the hands of my enemy."

"Why are we your enemy?" he asked, sounding genuinely confused, even frustrated. "What have we done?"

"Don't play innocent. Sonia has told me everything. You are corrupt; warmongerers on a crusade to expand your own influence. To oppress the poor, and to kill us, who would fight for them."

"Those are terrible things to say about people you don't know."

She almost swung a leg up to kick the sarcastic white teeth out of his mouth, whatever the punishment from the traitor Jaffar would be, but he leaned closer and the sincerity of his voice stopped her: "Come with us. Learn about us. A valkyrie as powerful as you must know how to educate herself, surely? To make her own opinions?"

"I am a soldier of the Black Fang. Their opinions are my opinions."

"Loyalty is valiant," said Eliwood. "Ignorance is not."

She glared at him while she thought. To return in shame and accept her punishment would be the right thing to do, and even what she yearned for. Her failure ached in her bones, turned her ribs inward to prick at her heart and her lungs, reminding her that she did not deserve life. Yet if there was even a chance that she could redeem the Fang, that she could kill even one of their targets while their backs were turned—Jaffar, Nino, the three Lycian lords—she would take it. In the end she would die at their hands as she wished, and if she got away she could make it back to Sonia and accept her death with a measure of dignity.

"I will come," she told him.

"No you won't," said Hector, angrily. "Eliwood, just have her killed. Can't you see she'll just turn on us in the middle of the night?"

"We'll take her spellbooks."

"Magic's not the only way to kill someone!" Hector thumped his axe against the floor for emphasis.

"Ask Nino."

Ursula started so severely to hear the assassin's voice in her ear that she almost cut her own neck on his knife. The lords looked similarly surprised, but they turned to the girl anyway, who immediately blushed violet and began to tear up. Pathetic.

"It's not up to me," she said, holding out her hands placatingly. " I don't know anything; this night has made that clear to me. I just don't want anyone else to have to die."

"She'll live," Eliwood assured her, and Ursula watched Lyndis's face soften slowly, as if against her own will.

"She'll live," said the Sacaean. "For now. Erk, take the books."

"And burn them," said Hector.

The mage looked aghast. "But Lord Hector, we haven't any others. Once mine are used—"

"We'll buy more."

"But this…it's an Excalibur."

"Burn it. And the damned lightning one, too."

And so Ursula had to watch, with Jaffar's arms still around her, while the young mage with hair like hers burned her power away page by page.

A

They had given her a staff and taken her horse, practically demoting her to a cleric. Ursula ground her teeth and welcomed the twilight as it swamped the camp. The sooner it got dark, the easier it would be to choose her target.

She sat by the smouldering fire alone, supper long over, and contemplated who it would be. Lord Hector would be the hardest to kill with her bare hands but had no guard, whereas the pitifully pacifist Lord Eliwood kept a paladin with him at all times, and the Lady Lyndis had two knights that escorted her, buffoons in red and green. Nino would have been easiest, should have been easiest, but Jaffar was with her, and had made it clear. She was issued a tent from the bumbling merchant they had with them, but when Jaffar was offered one he shook his head, assembled Nino's, ushered her in, and shot Ursula a long glance before he followed. She understood the message: for whatever reason, he wasn't leaving her side. Nino would be the most difficult target of all.

She was just deciding to steal spellbooks from the mage Erk when Nino emerged from her tent. One of its flaps pulled back to reveal Jaffar, merely sitting and watching. Keeping an eye on his new charge.

Nino walked right to Ursula and then, timidly, sat beside her.

"I'm sorry to bother you," she said, "but I have to know the truth. About Sonia."

Ursula turned away. "You know the truth."

"She really wanted me killed?"

"You were useless to her."

"What if I had killed Prince Zephiel? Would I have been useful then?"

"She knew you'd never do it. You are too merciful toward those who don't deserve it."

"He was only a child."

Ursula heard her sniff and rolled her eyes. "A mission is a mission. You failed yours."

"She was my mother."

"Then she disowned you. That is all."

The sound of Nino rising made her turn back. She walked back to the tent, weeping softly, and Jaffar closed the flap behind her.

If I had a useless daughter, Ursula was forced to think, I do not believe that I could kill her.

Still, she trusted that Sonia knew what was best. She rose and went in search of Erk's tent.

xxx

She was not considered one of the Four Fangs for nothing.

She waited until the dead of night before she approached, knelt and pulled back the tent flap inch by inch, so slowly her legs had fallen asleep before she could peek through the gap she had created.

Erk was lying on his bedroll with a tome tucked under his arm. She scowled, for it would be hard to take it without killing him first. She didn't want unnecessary bloodshed, but if he stood in the way of one of her targets, so be it.

She crawled into the tent, paused to listen to his breathing—deep, sound asleep—and reached out a hand for the book. Her fingertips landed upon the edge of the worn leather cover. She watched him take a breath in. A breath out.

Then his eyes snapped open and he grabbed her wrist, sitting up and sliding the book behind him in one motion.

"I am Lord Pent's apprentice, and he has trained me well," he said in a voice that must have only dropped recently, for he was quite young.

Ursula narrowed her eyes, feeling stupid. The boy had been holding the book in his sleep to keep a spell activated that would wake him. She should have known it from the start, but underestimated him because of his age.

"I knew you would come," he said. "Where else would you go, but toward the magic?"

"You all denied me my honour," she told him, wrenching her wrist away.

"And we gave you your life."

"I would prefer honour."

"You may as well forget it. You won't get any spell books from me."

She stared at him, gritting her teeth, wondering what to do. If she went for his throat he could use the book on her. She was so ashamed to have been caught that she wished the ground would crack open and consume her. A valkyrie of her stature, outwitted by a mere apprentice!

"I won't tell Lords Eliwood and Hector," he said. "We can just forget this happened."

She left his tent choking back a growl of rage. Pity was not anything she needed.

xxx

By the time she reached her own tent she found Jaffar by the dark fire pit, sitting still and staring into it as if there were still a fire in it. She stopped before him, clenching her hands into fists.

"You are a traitor," she told him softly.

He did not look up at her and not a single muscle twitched to hear her voice, despite her silent approach. He didn't respond, either.

"You left them—us. The people who raised you. The people who gave you everything."

Jaffar said nothing.

"You abandoned us for the enemy."

He raised his eyes to hers, then, but it was a long while before he finally said, in a voice hardly louder than a mumble, "No. For Nino."

"You should have killed her. That was your duty. Don't tell me that after all this time, the Angel of Death felt pity."

"Not pity."

"Then what could it be?"

A pause. "I don't know. Not yet."

Her gut sank with disgust. The girl had been the only one who had really cared for him, and foolishly, for Jaffar didn't understand care and couldn't return it. Could it be that her naïveté had touched him? It seemed that he wasn't nearly as "perfect" as they'd thought.

"These people will turn on you," she assured him. "They don't care about the lowly like us; they only care about advancing this war. They will use you."

"Like the Black Fang used me." His red eyes almost burned into hers.

She refused to flinch. "If they don't, they will turn you away. They'll see you for a monster—or worse, for the deserter you are."

She turned and went to her tent, leaving him with that thought.

xxx

Ursula woke before dawn and decided to prowl the foggy perimeters of the camp, hoping to gain any extra information on the people she was travelling with. She'd only gotten halfway around before a voice barked, "You!" and a figure in red armour came striding toward her through the fog.

It took her a moment to realize that this person was a woman, what with her cropped blonde hair and the scar across her face.

"Do I know you?" Ursula asked, and her hand went to her side before she realized she'd have no book or weapon there.

"No, but I know you! I recognize your description, at least. The tactician told me a woman just like you—a valkyrie—gave her a hammerne staff, so that this ragtag army could defeat me!"

So she had. Ursula felt herself smile coolly. "Then whatever are you doing with 'this ragtag army?'"

"Never mind that! You tried to undermine me! Where is your honour?"

That struck a chord. "It was denied to me. Your purpose was unjust. It was my duty to help however I could."

"Help them? Look at you. You begged them to kill you. You hate them. Us."

For the first time since she could remember, Ursula was confused. She had indeed indirectly helped these lords before, the same ones she had been ordered to kill. How had that happened?

"What is your name?" she asked, as if to a subordinate.

"Vaida," the other woman spat, "and I don't forget my enemies. If I find you alone again, I will kill you!"

She brushed past and was gone, swallowed up by the fog. Ursula rolled her eyes and finished her walk.

The second and final part will be up soon.