The Haven of Animals
they will adhere to the terms of the sentient races' decency
Mithrigil Galtirglin
for Eric
I.
His empty coffin was buried among the rubble of Nabudis, and thus a new one had to be built. That took two days; it was sufficient time for the remains of his father and elder brothers to be recovered as well, but Archadia would not have it. So Rasler Heios Nabradia came to be interred in Dalmasca, and not in the coffin that had been laid aside for him since his birth, twenty-three years ago.
"Twenty-three?"
Basch shook his head. "Twenty-one," he corrected, and his chest rose gently and sank with a thick exhalation.
Pulsing his eyebrows by way of a nod, Vossler glanced sidelong at his comrade, then felt his eyes narrowing and looked back toward the procession. "I might have named his coenesthesis both elder and younger."
Perhaps because it was a word he did not know, Basch remained intent on the motorcade, his entire face, from bruise-ringed eyes to sunken cheeks, trained on the high-borne casket. It would have been trite to describe the Prince's aspect as in slumber, and Vossler, who had seen the Prince asleep, knew that he did not appear nearly so peaceful. Rasler was ever restless and supined, his shoulders, and the right one in particular, jutting out with the stable curtness of the second-hand on a clock, only not so often; it kept Ashe half-awake. In that brief vigil over the newlyweds, a recalcitrant churning had snaked through Vossler's bowels, and echoes of it whenever the Prince was by. It did not leave him even now.
The pallbearers passed, and it occurred to Vossler to ask of Basch why he was not among them, as Basch had been the one to carry the Prince from Nalbina. Before he could form the question, though, Vossler regarded the pallbearers in earnest, and found he recognized not a one of them; two Seeq, a Bangaa, and three Hume with pale hair.
Vossler found the spleen to turn his covert attention to Basch's again, and he had seen the expression in the man's heavy-lidded eyes before, if long ago; of a man who has lost his country.
--
II.
If the Princess wished to be the last in the chamber, then Vossler would allow it, but he stood expectant on the far side of the open double doors and could not help but will her to rise and leave. She had knelt beside the coffin until it was borne up and excised from the hall, just as it had come in; she had not moved since, her black skirts and veil pooled about her and her knuckles white against the floor. She had not shed a tear, and had been silent, and was so even now. This display, from a girl who spurned weakness in all things, who was motion and light and pride; it sickened Vossler as much as moved him, set his arteries throbbing for lack of a fiend to slay.
Not even the candles on the dais flickered in this mute tranquility, and the faint glass-stroked hum of the crystal torches rang low and mocking, a present affliction like age. Vossler leant his shoulder against the left frame of the door, and blanketed himself in shadow, and waited.
At last, it seemed, she stood, gathering herself clumsily to her feet as from sand instead of stone. The veil slipped down her hair to her shoulders, resting between the frayed ends of the short strands and the collar of her dress. Vossler had read and heard tell of the power of grief to titivate an already exquisite form. That he saw this power manifest now in his Princess, a woman made lovelier still by her recent loss, stilled his heart none at all.
"Vossler—" she started, and it reverberated through the empty hall. He found her eyes; she had not expected to see him there, but did not falter in her descent from the dais, her glance fluttering from him to the stairs and back.
He stepped partway into the room, the slide of his mail from the doorway louder than he anticipated. She was near him soon enough, wringing her hands like the paws of a rat, and it was a gesture he had never seen in her countenance before.
"I..." she began, worrying at the ring—no, Vossler saw now, rings—on either hand.
The first she had been prone to worry at, as she had the engagement-band before that. The Princess was not one for jewelry; her wrists were often unadorned, and she usually wore no more than one bauble at a time, if that. But now in addition to her wedding-band on its small left finger, she wore the late Prince's on her indicating right.
"I," she began again, softer, when she saw that he had noticed, and "yes," she sheepishly answered a question he had not raised.
He thought of those hands, working at the flesh of her husband's corpse. "You would not leave a path to yourself, for him to follow?" As ever, Vossler could not keep her eyes, and sought the floor, between deferent and dismayed.
"He can follow me nowhere from beneath four times his weight in earth," she muttered, strangely undignified.
For lack of rejoinder, Vossler backed out the hall's menacing doors and stepped aside, that he may follow her.
--
III.
Archadia sent a Judge Magister. It was, perhaps, a boast; "our victory is so assured that we can dispatch our commanders to conduct such paltry things as negotiations," or "if these are what we spare, dwell on what we hold in reserve." And Judge Magister Ghis, Vossler found, was appropriately imposing, the sour voice that escaped his shark-speared helm a persistent weapon none could parry.
"Dalmasca was to be the seat of conciliations between our Motherland and Rozarria, as stood it in the halcyon days of your ancestors," the Judge Magister said now, erect in the throne room's circle of address. He had never bowed. "Alas, it seems that Dalmasca's past neutrality has interred itself beside those exemplars."
"Recall who attacked whom," Vossler snarled from the King's right, taking one stabilizing step down the dais.
"We do," Ghis half-sang, in a fashion that suggested he smiled from within his helm, and turned his eyeless glare on Vossler. "His Highness the late Prince. His was the aggressive force, was it not?"
On the King's left, Basch was silent, his mailed fingers tapping a harsh arpeggio on his thigh; Vossler heard this and silenced himself accordingly.
"While I do not fault the boy for his keenness in his father's defense, it ought not escape your memory that the conflict was between our Motherland and Nabradia, and that Dalmasca had little cause else to involve itself."
Clenching his gauntlets, Vossler scoffed, "So this is the propensity of House Solidor; to wrest its bellicose pretexts from a marriage bed."
"So too has Dalmasca endeavored," Ghis said. "Fault us not your weal of acting too late upon it."
King Raminas, who had sat taciturn and narrow-eyed the whole while, raised his right hand from the rest of his throne, and gestured with a toss of it for the Archadian to excuse himself.
Nodding—the man still did not bow—the Judge Magister turned heel, threw the words "Our Motherland and its commanders await at Nalbina" over his shoulder, and he and his cortege strode rankly out the doors. Only when they were gone did the King lower his hand.
"We will discuss this later," he sighed, "when the reconnaissance returns."
At either of his sides, Basch and Vossler saluted and bowed. The Captains caught each other's eyes as they straightened; neither had quite understood, at the fore, what war with a country of attorneys and wordsmiths entailed.
--
IV.
Never determine the course of your life when your eyes are the source of its clouds, his father had been fond of saying. Vossler very nearly shouted the proverb at His Majesty. Basch, as luck would have it, was quieter in his disapproval.
"They will demand without terms," Basch stated plainly, as if he was not as dry-throated and tired as the rest of the war council, but his hands, flat against the war-room's fluorescent table, shone red wrist-high with his weight and a faint sheen of sweat.
"They will adhere to the terms of the sentient races' decency," King Raminas countered, shoulders slumped forward, weary on his chair. "Delay We further, and that too they will withdraw."
The other councilmen twittered with unease. Again, Vossler restrained himself, bearing his heels into the carpet rather than admonish the King.
Beside him, Basch was wearing down as well; "They dispensed with all pretense of decency at Nabudis," the man near growled. "And at Nalbina they slaughtered the paling-mages before that explosion, not after. It was their will to demolish, not to conquer. I have lived through this," Basch reminded the King, and Vossler at least knew he spoke not of Nabradia alone.
"You persisted because of your indenture to Us." The King closed his eyes, and his breath was not unlike a sigh. "We will go to Nalbina, and We will sign Archadia's treaty, crooked as it is, and then we will do as you have done, Captain fon Ronsenburg, and lie in wait until such time as we may throw off their yoke.
"You mix metaphors, your Majesty," Vossler could not help but say, and the words came out with ardent froth. "And Dalmasca will draw their carriage until we may throw off their yoke."
--
V.
Perhaps his Majesty's aim was remuneration for their insolence, or perhaps it was concern for the realm itself, and whether it was either Archadia had demanded it; Basch and Vossler were left behind.
A full two hours later, and both Captains were still in the war room, Basch scraping his fingers against the gel-screened field table and breathing coarsely, Vossler leaning against the wall and curling his toes so loudly he could hear them.
Basch seethed wordlessly; "Aye," Vossler agreed, digging his shoulders into the tapestry and his heel into the crystal sconce behind him. He closed his eyes and the fluorescent ache of the room filled his temples, swelling behind his eyebrows as if to strangle every hair.
"Captains!" someone shouted from the door. "An emis—"
Vossler and Basch started, and neither had the time to ask that the messenger be showed in before the crier was brushed aside by an arm as thick as Vossler's neck.
The man was imposing, darker-skinned still than Vossler and broad-lipped under a thick desert cowl. What Vossler could see of the messenger's hair and beard, mostly beard, was apish and nearly white, framing his neck and chin thickly but with two or three days growth over his lip and cheeks. The bulges of two weapons gathered his brown cloak over his thighs; his clothing was stormblasted, salvaged leather and canvas.
He did not introduce himself; from within his cloak, he produced an Archadian recording and transmission device, activated it, and tossed it toward Basch where he sat. The speaker slid across the table, and the static-clotted voices of an Archadian strike team choked up from the glowing map.
They were bound for Nalbina, Vossler deduced with little effort. They would reach the fortress in a matter of hours. And then one outright stated, joking to his friends back home, that the Dalmascan King would sign the treaty with his life's blood.
Neither Vossler nor Basch ever asked the messenger his name or affiliation.
--
VI.
The Judge caught Vossler's sword twixt its sneads and twisted, and Vossler near tripped over his own fallen comrades in recoil.
This Judge was not the shark from before, all brass and red leather, but a mantis, with a toothed, crustacean mace in each hand, cruel and callibombe and not unlike the cocoons of her spawn. Vossler swiped at the helm's bulb of an eye and she blocked it with her ruff, the collar denting on impact but deflecting Vossler's blade. He swerved out of her maces' path and blocked with his crossguard, barely catching sight of the second mace in time to turn widdershins out of its way, and wondered when he had started perceiving the Judge as she.
Mantis, he reminded himself. She has whet her teeth on my men and would consume my King.
Lunging hard into the floor, Vossler swung his greatsword at her middle, where the armor was hinged and the black cloth exposed. She was slow, but her maces were not, and the shorter parried his blade to scrape along her farthingale while the longer hammered down at his head. He dodged, barreling into her space as he righted his sword, and her solleret slid across the stone tile, backing toward the door that Vossler needed to be through, to save the King from Archadia's treachery. He expected her to shout, posture, recover, and still, why the Judge was she, Vossler did not know. Instead, she reseated her grip, kicked a corpse aside and charged at him from the door, her maces whirling in vicious arcs.
Vossler staggered under the first swing and took the second, turning his side into a blow meant for his shoulder. His mail cut past its leather bracing and into his skin and Vossler grit his teeth but pummeled into the Judge's side, ramming his forearm and fist and hilt into the juncture of her farthingale.
She cried out—and he was entirely correct about her gender—and then something bashed into the small of his back and he hit the floor, sword-arm first.
Rolling out of the way as fast as he could, knowing that she was too slow to apprehend him if he got to his feet now, Vossler clamored to a kneel and fumbled for a handhold and found that he was up against the throne-room servants' door.
He shoved himself through it and slammed it in the Judge's face, then thrust his back against it. A moment later, the door rattled against his shredded bruises, but held. And then, Vossler opened his eyes from under a sheen of sweat.
--
VII.
That was Basch the Archadians led off in chains, Vossler told himself for the fiftieth time, and still did not believe it. That was a treaty yet unsigned, he thought, and did not believe that either.
I was too late. This he could accept as true.
He tore through the desert, south against the sunrise, the sword strapped to his back impelling him forward, falling into every step. He had been running for hours, and his throat was torn and dripped with blood and sand, and he spared not one precious breath to mourn the murdered King—he should have stayed in Rabanastre, for all the good he did, for there was still the Princess, and now he was estranged and weak, and only that he may assure her welfare he continued to live.
Panting, he spat, red sand onto red sand, and shouldered through the wind. That was Basch, he thought again, and watched the throne room's main doors creak shut, the throng of Archadian hoplites swarming around him like carrion-fowl on a fallen Marlboro's eyes. That was a treaty yet unsigned.
But the Lady Ashe yet lives, he consoled himself, and with her, the realm.
--
VIII.
He knocked, sternly.
"What is it?" she shouted from the other side, and Vossler remembered the tantrums of years ago and wished for things to be so inconsequential as then.
Rather than answer, he opened the door in an unrepentant swipe, stepped in, and shut it behind him.
She was curled on the floor in the doorframe of her balcony, half-sitting with her shoulder boring into the stone and her hip into the hardwood floor where the carpets no longer met it. Her nightshirt and the pale blue sheets torn off her bed were heaped around her, and the bedclothes frayed and clawed so that the sunlight caught on their twisted threads. Vossler could see long, ivory scratches in the floor from where he stood. She whipped around to him, the tattered fabric pooling about her, and the smell of salt and war redoubled in Vossler's sinuses.
For a long time, she said nothing, and he stood with his gauntlet flaccid on the doorknob, unable to meet her eyes.
--
IX.
She tripped, but caught herself, teetering at the steep of the airstrip stairs. Her satchel swung dangerously and clipped a passing Moogle worker at the pompon, but neither seemed to notice.
Vossler overtook her, and regarded her, and stepped past her down the first slate stair. "To Bhujerba," he reminded her in a prodding whisper. "And to the Marquis. That was your plan."
"Your plan as well," she chided, and humorlessly; her eyes were red-rimmed still and the veins under her skin spidered up her pale neck and cheeks, and the noontide sun washed all the color from her. Vossler turned away, cursing himself, and reset their pace, torn between rushing and tarrying, as any other traveler. He directed her toward the small craft, an old Ramuh model, nondescript and battered but it would serve, then stepped aside for her. She ascended without preamble, and he followed her to the cockpit, its window-shields up and signals and monitors already flickering to life, and he watched her drop her parcel beside the co-pilot's seat. The strap whipped against the metal arm of the chair, almost like a weapon unsheathed.
"My beloved People of Ivalice," an overriding voice from the speakers began, "I am the Marquis Halim Ondore the Fourth, and the bearer of tidings most saprogenic and most grave."
--
X.
One of Lady Ashe's hands, half-curled into a fist, hovered over the ship's console, shivering. The tremor thickened and the fist asserted itself, until it was her shoulder that shook and her hand that was still. "Uncle," she mouthed, but Vossler heard the word at the nape of his neck, under his skin and between his gritting teeth. He watched the wrinkles form at the corners of her eyes, even started to reach for them, then clamped his fingers down on themselves in silent admonition.
"We must go," he told her, only loud enough to stifle his vagrant thoughts.
"Where can we go?" she snapped, a sob wavering through the word and rending it in twain.
She turned to him then, looking up from under a knotted forehead and sweat-slick hair, her pupils thinned with fear and anger and Vossler understood every flicker of it. Her shoulders lurched toward him and she hesitated forward, opening her hand as if to catch a vagrant moth—and then, simply, did not.
Right there beside her, in the sickly yellow light of the cockpit, Vossler sank to one rattling knee and bowed his head. "Though she be taken, I am still Dalmasca's man, and yours," he said, and the words emerged in a whisper as hoarse and broken as her own. The plate of his shorts faltered against the metal floor, and its scrape shot through his ear and echoed between them, and he watched her shins twitch at the sudden sound. Closing his eyes and filling his voice, he declared, "If you will have me, I will reclaim her for you."
The echo of steel on steel had long died when he finally noticed the hand before his lips. It was her right, delicate and pale, the thicker ring strangely plain against her skin.
He relaxed his forehead to it, and she withdrew. A forward strand of his dark hair caught between the band and her finger and it was, perhaps, the first time he had ever touched her..