Hem

by Mithrigil

The Emperor of Archadia is to be wed. Ashe clings desperately to her youth and her past. [Basch and Ashe, Al Cid and Ashe, Larsa and Penelo.] [Fourteen years post game.] [Follows an earlier fic, Seams.]

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Note: It is probably best that you read an earlier fic of mine, Seams, for context. Please go to my profile or back to the FFXII section (using rating: all or rating: M) in order to access it.

Note also that this takes place almost fourteen years post-game.

Thank you for your enthusiasm, and I hope you enjoy the ride.

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Hem

she has not lost her edge

Mithrigil Galtirglin

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With Four Days Remaining, Early Afternoon:

"But the purpose of a castle is to be accessible to the people," her husband is saying, "for when the city is besieged, for when the rivers have run dry, for when one man's Nanna is bearing the calf of another's…" he trails off, the tossing wrist he was using to itemize relaxing into a stronger gesture, resting on the earpiece of his sunglasses, "for when the people need their sovereign, he needs to be there for them. It is the old way, it is a good way, and while it may not work for everyone I do not see why it would not work in Archadia."

"Nothing in Archadia is accessible," she tells him with an amused smile. "The blood of the body does not rush to the aid of the heart ere it is spilt."

One of Ashe's guards snickers to himself, and she swears that she can hear her husband's aide—little birds, he calls them—making one of those noises in the back of her throat that Ashe can neither translate nor discern.

Al-Cid slides the sunglasses a hair forward on his nose as they turn a corner through the halls. "Yes, instead it flows, obdurate and all the quicker. But the castle is not the heart of the country, nor is the populace its blood."

Ashe glances at the corridor's walls, tiled and tapestried, with suits of armor long-unused like sentries every three strides. "When a country has been growing for so long, the parts that have always been its own become precious; the shrines, the schools, the sacred places. And thus they are sequestered lest the country reap what it has sown."

"But then all that remains when the conqueror falls are ruins—"

"Ruins," she answers, overlapping with him, and loud enough to reverberate down the smooth-walled hallway, "yes." She interlaces her fingers as she walks, brushing the plain and signet rings she wears, and feels a knowing smirk creep up her cheeks. "I never said that it was wise, only that it is so."

His smile down at her is just as satisfied and oddly warm, as ever. "And so the past continues to be glorified, when only the best and brightest stand as testimony to a land destroyed,"

"And so history repeats," they finish together.

Another corner turned, and the story-high doors of the Archadian Emperor's throne-room loom down, the gilt figures and Solidor emblem winding toward the carpet in the flickering, unnatural light.

"Which of us is rubbing off on the other?" Ashe laughs, raising her eyebrows as they stop before the Emperor's herald.

"My beloved desert bloom," Al-Cid asserts, "we have ever been in agreement."

"Welcome, your Highness, your Majesty," the herald intones, nodding first at Al-Cid and then at Ashe. "The Emperor will attend you presently."

A word from the herald and the great doors part outward—another aspect of the foreign castle that Al-Cid tends to disparage, citing its martial implications—and sunlight floods the hallway from towering clear windows, drowning the pale crystal sconces and sending a twinge of pain through Ashe's sinuses. Once her eyes adjust, grounded by the lush redness of the throne-room's carpet and furniture, she advances, Al-Cid evenly at her side, and their guards and little bird remain outside with the herald.

His Majesty the Emperor of Archadia Larsa Ferinas Solidor is half-risen from the throne when Ashe can finally focus. She notes that the arm of the throne is half-desk—there is never a desktop far from Larsa—and covered in papers and crystals. It is time enough since she has seen Larsa that his appearance still troubles her; as he straightens and approaches them, he is taller than her even under his heavy winged crown, and his neatly curled black ponytail is longer than Ashe's hair. She tries not to see Vayne in the young Emperor's features, and ever fails.

"Your Highness, your Majesty," he addresses them, beaming, and crosses first to Ashe, taking both her hands in his. His parted robes swish about their feet as he bows his head toward hers, not quite kissing her forehead, and Ashe remembers when he stood only as high as her chest.

He is twice the age he was then, she recalls. More than that.

Her husband is laughing, and reaching up to ruffle the Emperor's coal-black hair, setting the crown askew. "And here I thought flaunting your increase in height grew old with you."

Larsa flicks Al-Cid's hand away with a mocking wrinkle of his nose—hooked at the top, just like his brother's—and a melodramatic, tongue-in-cheek pout. "You will soon stoop with your years, your Highness, and then where will you be?"

"Borne about on cushions so that I may still buss your pretty head, your Majesty," Al-Cid answers, with a slight incline forward, conceding.

Ashe chuckles at their exchange, and Larsa turns back to her, at least his eyes still young and expectant. "I trust naught is ill?"

"Your trust is sound," she replies.

"And the baby?"

"Ha, Rasler is not such a baby anymore," she admits, and thinks on her son proudly. "He reads and writes now."

"Wonderful!" Larsa exclaims, shaking Ashe's hands once before letting them go. His gloves, she notices, are of very thin cloth, starched to the point of filmy coarseness.

"He says as if any son of mine had not an epic in his soul," Al-Cid chides, and takes off his glasses, rolling them in his hand, and smiling proudly. "The child was weaned on tales of princesses and stones."

"I do wish he were of age enough to join us," Larsa says. It is poor form, he had told them, for children who have not reached the age of reason to attend weddings, in Archadia, inauspicious for couples who desire many children of their own.

"As does he, but he understands well enough," Ashe assures Larsa, thinking on her son's reaction, the somber pout and wise nod that children only learn from devouring the gestures of adults.

Al-Cid again laughs, gesturing with a roll of the glasses in his hand. "It would do him well to walk into your little faerie-tale, boy-king, and meet your princess."

"Will we be introduced to Adina today?" Ashe asks quickly, stamping out her husband's slight condescension with a flick of her eyebrow and addressing Larsa.

"Alas, that will wait until tomorrow," the young Emperor says, with a slight shrug and a sidelong glace at the sprawling light from the windows. "She has gone to the temple she was raised in for maiden's lustrations, and to gather her cortege for the ceremony. They will be conducting the most of it, and the more uniquely Nabradian rites of it all. I hope that everything weaves together at the rehearsal."

"And again, I thank you for the honor of including us," Al-Cid says.

Larsa waves his gloved hand, dismissing. "Think not on it. The gratitude is mine, that you have remained by me all these years." And that others have not, he does not say, but Ashe hears it; she spoken to Penelo and knows what passed between them.

Al-Cid is the one to manipulate the conversation this time, and with more finesse than Ashe, his glottal accent spearing through the tense air. "Oh, that is right. Will those other children—ah, not such children any longer, permit me—but those others, from the reclamation, will they be here?"

"Vaan is coming," Larsa says, and smiles wanly, and looks at least to Ashe as if he might say more, but again will not. His thin shoulders sag under his robes and slashed vest, and he reaches up again to straighten the crown that Al-Cid set askew.

"I've not seen him since our wedding," Ashe recalls aloud, and does not want to believe it has been close over seven years since. There had been opportunity, she is sure, and certainly he had been invited to the funeral on Bhujerba last year, but he did not go nor send condolences.

Uncle Halim's funeral, Ashe recalls, and old, phantom bruises swell under her skin. She clasps her hands together, her ears twining with rattling breaths and the wet, recurring pounding of Basch's back against the headboard, and there is a dryness in her cheeks that she swallows and cannot abate.

"What has he been up to?" she asks Larsa, of Vaan, to stifle the memories.

"He is Balfonheim now," Larsa answers. "The proceedings went through not six months ago; Reddas' Manse is his, as is the shurocracy."

"…This is the rats-bane boy?" Al-Cid asks on the heels of a disbelieving chuckle.

Larsa's smile up at Al-Cid is feline, condescending. "Children grow."

"To be sure, to be sure," Al-Cid laughs openly, the bugle of his neck shuddering.

There is cold metal in Ashe's hands, and she is prying it apart and flinging it aside and trying to find the past underneath it, and she runs her fingernails under each other and tightens her elbows into her sides, knowing it is not the time to remember.

"But please," Larsa goes on, stepping between them, and Ashe is glad to move, to concentrate, "allow me to accompany you to your corridor. South-facing of course, toward the city as last time; a window to the West, your Highness, for your convenience."

"You are magnanimous," Al-Cid says.

"I expect your brothers to arrive on the morrow. I've allocated them the wing under you."

"And canny as ever!" Al-Cid claps Larsa on the shoulder as they follow the Emperor out of his throne-room, turning away from the wall of unabating sunlight. "Surely we are not where we will keep the Judge awake, like the last time?" he asks with a jocular, song-tone to his accent.

The thought of keeping the Judge awake comes too quickly for Ashe to stop, but she suppresses the flush in her cheeks with a guarded exhale.

Larsa edges out of Al-Cid's clasping hand on his shoulder by taking a slightly larger step forward, Ashe notices because she tells herself to. "I do learn from my oversights," he says, and his frail chest quirks with a silent laugh. "You are collectively three floors higher."

They are through the door and in the hall by now, the measured tread of the royals augmented by Ashe's guards and the little bird falling into step behind them. "And how are the Judges Magister?" Ashe asks, now that it is safe and polite.

"You might ask us yourself," a throaty, orders-old voice states, tinned by the helm he wears.

Larsa, who is setting their pace, slows a touch to accommodate Judge Magister Zargabaath, who Ashe is relieved to see still wearing the same bull-aspect armor as ever, but his shoulders are stooped forward like his horns and the black hem of his cape hangs closer to the carpet. It is not without a wrenching of her bowels that Ashe guesses the man to be seventy.

"Consider it inquired after, your Honor," Ashe says, and smiles at him, sure that Larsa and Al-Cid are doing the same.

Zargabaath likewise inclines his head and shoulders as they walk, and Ashe hopes it is not with encumbrance and more with gesture. "I serve with what strength I have," he says. "You will be able to ascertain the same of Merke and Posner later, if you wish. Rhuan is returning with the Ninth from the Cataract, and Gabranth with the Princess' cortege tomorrow afternoon."

Ashe is fairly certain that she masked the twitch of her shoulder with a forward step.

"I sent him west with her," Larsa tells her over his shoulder as they walk, and his bangs do nothing to mask the scheming sparkle in the corner of his eye. "I thought he might have some interest in the temple itself, and its island is of no paltry significance," he clarifies, and says it so naturally that Ashe almost forgets that there is obvious innuendo in nearly everything Larsa says, and this is no exception.

"Considerate," she says, and it is almost a murmur, and she begrudges nothing, but even on the heels of relief at not having to yet address her concerns with Basch, of what happened and what it means and what they are and whether it will change them, she feels his palms on the bare small of her back and it hitches her forward step, almost tramping on the edge of Larsa's robes.

Larsa's response is pointedly to Ashe, or at least that is how she hears it. "He will be glad to return, though, I imagine."

"And who would not be, for an occasion as this?" Al-Cid asks the assembled, though who among them has the right to answer, Ashe is not sure.

--

With Three Days Remaining, Late Morning:

"Penelo told me," Ashe admits.

On the heels of a sigh, Larsa replies, "It was no secret."

Zargabaath has just excused himself from the balcony, and Ashe still cannot help but wonder if she will ever see his face, and whether it will matter. One of Ashe's guards peeks in from outside the door—Gren, she notices—but returns to his conversation with the other even before it has closed. Ashe backs away from the balcony and its view of the vast castle grounds spreading west toward the city, under the high sun. In the shade of the room, Larsa is sitting against his desk and staring at his hands, his crown beside him on the desk-mat like a castle itself among the paper fields. His robes are reclining in his abandoned chair, and without them his shoulders are thinner than ever, effeminate and lost in the silks of his shirt and vest, the bones parting his hanging ponytail.

"What was your intention with her?"

"I…do not…" he loses the words but restarts, firmly, "I have not stopped loving her. I did not wish to."

"And you will not." Ashe is struck by her own somber tone, and regards precisely how many rings she wears, and whose, and which fingers are bare (and who they have touched— "But rare is the woman content to be sealed and stored until she is required."

"But it would not have been—"

"I speak of Adina."

Larsa had turned to her, and his wide-set eyes are heavy, defensive and lost, grey as armor. He peaks his hand on the desk and the papers under his glove rustle, too sharp and martial and human to be leaves.

On the heels of a deep breath, Ashe calculates her words and tells herself as well. "Her entire life has been lived that she may aid in your restitution for your family's wrongs. And you would have put Penelo in the position of denying Adina even that?"

"I…" He begins, and then seems to understand. Well of him, Ashe thinks, because she is not sure she does.

"That is another reason she left you," Ashe goes on. "Not only because she was offended. It may not have been iniquitous to ask Penelo to remain with you."

"But it would have been vile to suffer Adina that…indignity," he finishes, closing his eyes but not hanging his head. The heel of his slipper clicks against his stocking as he raises it from the floor, scuffing the sole against the wood of the desk. He begins to say something further, but time enough for Ashe to come away from the balcony passes before he does.

The word, indignity, slithers behind her eyes like the taste of spiced tea, too milky and too hot, and the zipper-teeth of Basch's splayed pants dig into the back of her thigh. She stabs the memory, once, and air cracks out of her spine.

Larsa sighs; it allays Ashe's wandering mind. "Penelo wrote me, before she left, rather than speak," he whispers, now that Ashe is close enough to hear it. "She said that my first love was…Peace."

"It rings true," Ashe says; she said the same of you to me.

"It is true. And mark me, I would sooner have Peace for a wife than any woman yet living, and to her I am unwaveringly faithful."

"And that is another reason." A flicker of the child Ashe once knew surfaces indignantly on Larsa's cheeks—why must he so resemble Vayne?—and Ashe welcomes the glimmer of the past. "You were already committing adultery to be with Penelo."

His shoulders slouch and he chuckles wryly, "Wed to Peace." A passing cloud cools the lighting of the room, and he looks up at Ashe from the new shadows beside her. "What is this, then?" and then, spells out, "Adina."

Not without irony, Ashe answers. "Polygamy."

Three raps of metal on the knocker of a door shoot through the room, and Larsa snaps up and says "Enter" almost automatically.

The humid tension in the room twists audibly, Larsa's clothing scraping off the desktop and its leather mat with a sound like a bandage peeling from an open wound. A shiver races up Ashe's neck, the hot, battle-ready kind, a relic from nights of second-watches and Mist-thick air. Basch's armor-heavy step falters in her direction as he comes through the door, and the clang of his greaves against each other stutters through her temples.

Upon a time, he entered the room and she slapped him across the face. Her blood swerves now as then, but it is not he she desires to raise a hand against.

"Adina, Gabranth—welcome home," Larsa calls, and it is too loud as he slides off the desk and goes to them, only nodding at Basch and passing him for someone Ashe cannot see. She watches Basch lean forward into a bow, hand curled in an absent fist, his helm and plate rutted with shadow and the black cape clinging to his back. Ashe knows what his expression is under the helm, as steel as its mask but with his small eyes closed, but she still feels him watching her, as in her youth, as on the battlefield, as ever.

"Home indeed," someone chirrups, and there is the quiet press of lips together, somewhere else.

Smiling warmly, Larsa lets go of only one of the girl's hands and leads her out from behind Basch toward the desk where Ashe still stands. "Her Majesty Ashelia B'Nargin Dalmasca," he instructs the girl, gesturing palm up toward Ashe.

Another person to know me first as Queen, Ashe restrains, teeth grit.

Turning his indicating hand to the girl, Larsa states the inevitable, "Princess Adina Giheris Nabradia," and Ashe wonders for how long she has been called such, and from whom she took a middle name. "Adina."

And then there is a hand taking Ashe's, tugging it gently forward, and breath against the correct rings.

Ashe finally turns away from Basch, who is still bowed, still silent, and still not looking at her although she can feel his eyes.

Stooped before Ashe in a curtsy, her first look at Adina makes her heart thud violently into her sternum. Adina is yellow-toned and round-chinned, with the kind of well-fed and sheltered, fleshy girlishness that portraits of Ashe's mother share. Her nose and eyes are small and coarse, but her hair bound back at the sides is white-blond and textured like so many royal Nabradians'. Her garb is simple, ivory and a flattering pale green, every article solid-print as if she is unused to patterns.

"You do me much honor," she says as she straightens.

Ashe chokes back a seethe and hopes that it does not let itself out when she finally finds the words to say.

Larsa, thankfully, diverts Adina's attention. "The lustrations…?"

"All well," she says, turning to him, his hand still loose in hers. "I do expect I will return to the temple, if only to visit. That is all right?"

"Of course. I would go again as well. It is a haunting place," the Emperor muses, with a glance at Basch—who still stands there, Ashe sees, at attention to everything, a statue like the relics in the halls.

"…Congratulations, the both of you," Ashe says, belatedly, when she has worked as much emotion out of her throat as she can.

Adina turns not just her eyes but her torso as well from Larsa, and curtsies again. "I thank you, your Majesty."

Almost before she words have time to sound, Larsa scans the room as if there were more than the four of them in it, and the bangs before his eyes obfuscate whatever intent the gesture held. "If you would excuse us…?" he asks of Ashe, in the way that if any other man said it would be nearly a command.

Ashe nods, and leans on the desk a little as she leaves it, realizing how improper it must be to stare so at another when she is meant to be meeting a future ally.

"There will be time later for you to talk, of course," Larsa tells someone, and when Adina answers that she "would like that very much," Ashe concludes that the statement had been intended for the new Princess.

"As I," Ashe says to her, because it is polite and mostly true, and turns—and Basch's passivity is there, not blocking but deterring her from the door.

He regards her openly now, the neck of his helm turned that he may.

"Gabranth," Larsa says, "if you would be so kind as to escort her Majesty." And in this case, Ashe can hear, it is a command.

Basch is nothing if not quick to obey. His nod—at Ashe, not Larsa—says naught else.

As composed as she may be, Ashe turns a cursory glance to Larsa and Adina—the girl's smile is shyer than the person she reminds Ashe of, and for that she thanks the dead King Heios and his moment of weakness—and curses those words as soon as they cross her mind, moment of weakness, she wonders, dare I call it such? Basch steps aside for her, opening the door to let her past, and Ashe's own two guards remain there, in animated conversation until their Queen passes between them, deflecting their words.

That's right, Ashe remembers, guards. "You are dismissed," she tells them, and tries to smile with it, but Gren is smiling enough under thankfully raised eyebrows and Orn scratching his dangling ears before saluting. The guards look confusedly at each other before Orn tosses his maw in a direction and they saunter off in it, Gren rambling spiritedly about Nethicite.

Ashe starts in the other direction, left, west, and rather slowly, unsure of where to focus. Basch has fallen into step just behind her, as if nothing has changed, and she is so relieved that it stops her, and she reaches out to the wall beside her. Her hand meets tapestry and she recalls carpet under her knees and no, she shouts internally with another step forward. He breathes, and it is reassuring in its metallic evenness, a filler of silence. The natural light is gone; the halls are lit only by sconces, and time is confused, and her slack hand brushes against her skirts, soft as neglected curtains and her blood surges into her ankles "—So that temple was in Landis."

"…Aye," he answers, as quiet as his breath, four more steps toward a carpeted corner.

"Had you been there before?"

"Nay, not that I recall." His tone is not just subdued but covert, almost too soft for his helm to allow the words forward. "And it is the sort of place I would recall."

"Were the Kiltias uncommon in Landis?" The questions pour out of her as soon as she thinks them, as soon as they are appropriate, as soon as they are not directed at herself and her indiscretion, if she can call it an indiscretion, and how dare she think of it as an indiscretion.

"Aye," he answers again. "It is a young temple…" he goes on, and almost overtakes her as they turn the corner, still windowless. "The stone is still new-cut, and the quarry still rough, but the island is old. A winery."

"A Kiltian temple on a vineyard island," she repeats, drowning out the admonitions in her head and forcing a smile. "A paradox, that."

Only his footfalls respond, and do nothing to assure her. A year, she reminds herself, more than a year, and no words between them since his froth-split shouts into her skin. What does one discuss with she begins to ask herself, and cannot finish the question.

She stops short against a wrinkle in the carpet. "Are you glad of having gone?"

He is alongside her for a moment, and she holds him out of the corners of her eyes, but he backs away sooner than catch her eye. She turns toward him, and the silence is excruciating, and his breathing, though quiet, is visible, the hem of his cape tweaking against the raised terry of the floor. "…I feel my years."

"Nonsense."

His exhale is lighter for her smile, which feels genuine to her, and as he turns toward her she can almost see his eyes through the tinted visor of his helm. "I do."

Ashe lingers beside him and almost starts walking, the helm looming over her as she searches through it, dissuading and evading her even in its stillness.

"…And how is it with you?" he asks, and it stays her.

"In terms of feeling my years?"

"…On any terms."

"…As well as can be expected, though I do miss swinging a sword around." The words are frail and catch on the back of her teeth as their whistling shapes contract her lips. "It spends much time on my back and not enough in my hands," she says, and tries to smile, and a second later perceives the innuendo and a blush creeps up her neck. And she is certain that he picked up on that entendre, if the swift shudder of his helm is any indication. "I ought find an excuse to train," she tries not to stammer. "Or someone to spar with at least."

She can feel his smile, and perhaps it is as tenuous and guarded as your own. "But who is your equal?"

They are standing very close, she realizes, and almost whispering, and her toes curl against her sandals, masticating the carpet.

"—said, 'Archadian or Ordalian?'" a thick, Rozarrian voice chortles—Al-Daraf, the elder of Al-Cid's brothers-who-are-also-not-Emperor, and where he is the rest cannot be far behind—and there the rest of the laughter is, Al-Cid's and Al-Nir's and the entourage that follows the Dukes Margrace around.

Ashe takes a sudden step forward, and Basch back.

The Rozarrians round the far corner; the three men, three little birds, and four guards in crested leather with kohl around their eyes, and the men are laughing, and even two of the little birds are covering their mouths. Al-Cid's sunglasses catch Ashe's eyes as soon as the are visible past the fluorescence of the crystal sconces and he claps a hand onto his elder brother's shoulder, with a proud smile. Al-Daraf, the eldest of all the Dukes Margrace in his late forties, is stocky in his patterned leathers, surly in mien but immediately amiable; the other, Al-Nir, is younger than Ashe, a warrior and aware of his own comeliness.

"Aha," Al-Cid calls to her, "and here I was just coming to fetch you!"

She smiles at him as they near, and nods at his brothers. "Your Graces."

They do not touch her—it is improper to lay a hand on another man's wife—but Al-Nir and Al-Daraf bow fully at the waist, their oil-black hair on level with her bare stomach, as it would be for any King. "As lovely as ever, your Majesty," Al-Daraf says; Al-Nir, nothing.

"And surely you remember the Right Honorable Gabranth," Al-Cid goes on, indicating Basch over Ashe's shoulder.

Al-Nir snickers, but masks it with a cough into his sleeve; Ashe sill notices.

There is no rule about laying a hand on another man's Judge Magister, and so Al-Daraf swings past Ashe and clasps Basch meatily on the upper arms in greeting. "Also looking well! Perhaps this time you will actually join us for the stories and the dice?"

"Or at least now, for a meal," Al-Cid amends, then brushes his fingers lightly up the side of Ashe's neck, "which is why we sought the breadwinner."

At that, all three Rozarrians and at least one of the guards laugh—and Ashe, but more because of the sudden, feather-light touch.

"I must respectfully decline," Basch says, and the metal-blocked voice is almost too high to be his, thick and sour like the man he is supposed to be emulating all these years. He nods and is just about to turn on his heel, addressing them as "Your Graces, your Highness—" and his helm stops trained on Ashe, "…your Majesty, I leave these men in your care."

"We will—" she starts, and does not finish; speak? later? No. "Good afternoon, Judge Magister."

"Good afternoon." His voice is deep again, and departs with him and as him, the cape snapping suddenly as he turns, back the way they two had come from.

"So he has left us in your care, dearest Queen!" Al-Daraf chides, and demands her attention, so she does not see Basch go. "The choice is yours, then, to the gardens? Or to the city?"

--

With Two Days Remaining, Morning:

"Dalmascan cloth is so lovely," Adina deflects, pinning the fabric between her fingers as she pricks it gently with her needle.

After a moment, Ashe says, "Thank you," because Adina seems to expect that.

Adina's solar is as unadorned as her garb, and she has been living in the palace long enough that novelty is no excuse. It reminds Ashe of her elder brothers' rooms, abandoned to frugality when they were fostering, neglected for war and sunshine, quarantined and stripped for illness and then draped with frayed canvas in death. The curtains are parted and plain, the windows immaculate, and as the sun is on the other side of the palace Ashe can stare and be comforted by the cloud-crossed summer sky. There are few tables, round and barely surface enough for drinks, but the chairs are thick and lushly cushioned, the kind that pets curl up in. Half-picked plates of fruit and rice-flour pastries and empty glasses of water and juice sit on such a table just out of their reach, and have for twenty minutes unmolested; it shocked Ashe just a little to see the girl wash her hands with a basin and pitcher, enough that she almost forgot to herself.

"Was it so at your wedding?" she asks.

Again, it takes time for Ashe to guess Adina's meaning; the cloth, she surmises, Dalmascan. She sews her own sheets for the marriage bed; it is a tradition that Ashe kept as well, but "Only the first."

"Hm?"

"It is a tradition of purity," Ashe explains, and wonders how much this girl does not know. "I am twice married; it follows that the second time I was no maiden."

"Oh, of course." Adina gets a few stitches in over the pinned fold of the sheet, wringing her lip in concentration. "Were you to be the primary ruler the first time as well?"

Ashe has her hands folded neatly in her lap, worrying at her rings, all of them, each of them a fetter, to a dead man, a living man, to her father and grandsires and herself—she recalls that Balthier wore such as well, and that she never asked him after it. "No. I believe...had it lasted, we would have been equal. He was the heir to his kingdom, and I to mine, though only recently so. My elder brothers were taken by the plague." The plague, she realizes, there has not been one since, and the part of her that governs wonders why.

"Oh," Adina says again, looking up from her hemming, and it is an entirely different 'oh'. "I am sorry."

"It is years," Ashe says, and dismisses it with a wave of her hand, rising from the folds of her skirt. Up until now, she has been thankful that for all her resemblance to the man, Adina has not asked after who that first husband was, and why there is a second, and whether they would have been equal.

Instead, the girl asks, "And your son? Is he of the first or second marriage?"

One Rasler for another, Ashe thinks, and her fingers stroke those rings again. "He is Al-Cid's and mine. My first marriage I was as young as you are now; had I a child with him, he would be nearly as old as you."

"Hm. I would not have suspected."

"Your flattery is undue," Ashe assures her, and guesses that perhaps it is genuine. On looking the girl over, she is either as earnest as Vaan or as good a liar as Larsa, and likely not the latter.

"If you say so." Her smiles are consistent; demure and well-schooled, evasive, as Ashe learned from her aunts in Bhujerba when they bested the wives of Ordalia in their own tile-games. Adina twists the needle in her fingers and works a swift, tight knot into the thread, then cuts it with her fingernails—such finely whetted nails, Ashe notices—and begins to re-thread, all in a practical flicker. "Neither you nor Al-Cid seem so old. Enough to be parents, I mean, but not to have children that are nearly youths."

"Al-Cid is forty-two last year, and I am nearly twice your age." It stiffens her heart as soon as she says it.

The girl giggles a bit, apparently oblivious, or perhaps Ashe betrays herself to herself alone. "In his case, it must be the Rozarrian lifestyle. They seem to live so much!"

"…They do."

Her rounded chin crinkles as she squints at the obstinate needle and thread, still separated. "Have you been to Rozarria?"

"Yes. I suspect you will like it there; I do, its sights and sounds at least. A custom or two I could do without."

Again she giggles, and like her 'oh' it is an entirely different giggle. At last—her eyes light up a touch, so it must be an occasion—she has the needle threaded and knotted, and gently attacks the fabric again. "Does his Highness Al-Cid keep many of those customs in Dalmasca?"

"Not the ones that irk me," she says, and her smile feels warm and welcome because it is entirely true. "But yes. And we both see to Rasler as well; though he is heir to Dalmasca, to deny his father's blood would be inequitable."

Adina makes an affirming noise behind her pursed lips, and Ashe cannot help but feel like a tutor. Perhaps, she postulates, this was Larsa's intent.

Ashe goes on, "It will be so with your children as well; Larsa is something of a polyglot, after all."

"I do like him," Adina says, and smoothes the sheet across her lap.

The words feel as if they should shock her, attract her, ring behind her eyes; they do not. Ashe turns toward the window, and the faint outline of Archades miles away, the cabs teeming like a pox around the skyscrapers. "Did you suspect you might not?"

"I expected some indifference, to be frank," Adina says, and Ashe does not look to her, does not require looking at her, to know that she has no desire to. "And I was a bit afraid. The stories speak of Princes, not of Emperors and Kings… The very idea of an Emperor is dwarfing… But it is exhilarating, to be here, to be in this life, and he is a kind man. I am blessed."

Yes, Ashe does not say. Yes, you are. And you had best not forget it.

"I shall grow to love him," Adina says.

Ashe opens her eyes—when had they closed?—and states, a fact, "He is not difficult to love."

When she glances back at Adina, the sewing has paused again; she has reached the edge of the side, and started knotting the thread again. "I wonder if he will say the same of me."

Ashe considers this a moment, staring out at the sky again. She knows how the pirates speak of the sky, how Al-Cid speaks of freedom, and her father of dignity and Rasler of family and Basch of home. She sinks into the passive embrace of her chair and it creaks plaintively, resigned. "I believe that in a way he already does."

--

With Two Days Remaining, Dusk:

"I would have you walk with me."

Larsa has excused him, and Basch stands at one of the pavilion's flaps, primed to leave alone, implacable and almost surly among the animated crowd of notables and their servants. He had not joined them all for dinner, though Zargabaath and Rhuan had, but now even the end of the capernoite approaches and the party has departed with the Dukes Margrace, Al-Cid in their all too willing tow and those Judges Magister inclusive. And upon seeing their pointed looks at the gathering Ashe waved off Gren and Orn in that general direction as well.

"To where?" he turns back and asks her.

To the ends of the earth, she does not say, and is not sure if it is true, but it fits into their covert tone so well and perhaps it is true, and he would do it, and "I am not sure," she says. "But I would welcome the open air, and your presence." After a glance at Larsa and Adina, the latter of whom has the upturned eyes of a child on market-day, Ashe faces back to Basch with a slight shrug. "About the grounds, then, I suppose. And for that I would have need of you."

"It is a circuitous place," he concedes and nods, and makes a yielding motion out the flap of the tent. Ashe feels a targeting smile behind her and acknowledges Larsa, to whom that smirk belongs, and she has seen it before and it is almost as bad an idea as she has ever had.

She leads Basch over the grass, in a vague direction that turns out to be west, toward the city, the lights almost individually visible and plainly bright over the palace grounds. There is no path, and the trees are not natural, labeled with plaques that denote their species and donor and year of assimilation. They are too near the city for stars, and the moon, if there is one, is thin and caged among the towers, and behind them the windows of the palace are mostly black. As ever, Ashe is a few steps ahead of him, even after the fremescence of the pavilion has faded. She peers at the city lights, squinting until they until they are haloed, the whirring hovercabs almost like fae.

The past bubbles up from her chest in a quick, harsh laugh. "Do you recall those asinine chops?"

His tread falters next to her, and a curt chuckle rings out from under his helm, and it seems to cut through something, letting Ashe's shoulders down and her sandals sink into the sharp summer grass.

"I was about the city yesterday with Al-Cid their Graces, and had completely forgotten to bring aught other than my one Sandalwood. Providence, Al-Cid had on hand for gratuities…"

She turns to Basch, and thinks he might be smiling. At least his shoulders relax, and his hands are still at his sides. Not for the first time, she disparages that helm.

"I…I find it perplexing," " she goes on, and begins to walk again, toward a ripple in the flat earth and a knot of three trees, "that even now the city thrives on such ephemeral things as gossip, that one still advances quite literally on the coattails of others."

"And what would you have of them?"

The gilt plaque, at the base of the trees, denotes them "linden", and it is familiar to her, from songs and the past, and the hem of her skirt brushes the carved letters but does not hide them. "What does Archades create?"

Basch sees what she sees, and turns aside to the city itself, and his tone is sullen, skeptical, guarded. "Art, it fancies," he says after a time. "One comes to Archades to learn how the old ways have become new again. To wade through what the evasive will teach. To find things without form that remain lost. It is the purpose of Draklor, of the Akademy, even the Magistracy; Archades is concerned with that it cannot touch."

"And they think it a higher state."

"Aye."

He has crossed ahead of her, though they are walking no longer, and Ashe turns to him, with a smile that is only partly forced. "Well, I do not have to ask after your feelings on the matter," as they are obvious, she adds to herself.

His cape rustles and the dark, cruel hilts of his swords at repose flicker with the city's reflection "It is the privilege of an idle ship to carve its prow."

"Thus a mind whet sharp by years whittles at its own buoyancy."

"You liken it to senility."

"Basch, you are not old," she contends, and neither am I and neither am I.

"Yet grows my young charge to a man's height." He does not turn to her, but his voice seems to, no louder but actually in her ears, and she reaches up and tucks her hair behind them, her hands resting nerveless on her collar.

She cannot help but scoff, but it is light, and she lets down her arms with the sounding breath. "And have you cowed from yours?"

"My father did not reach half a century." Here he turns to her, but only his chin, and only for a moment, as if his hollowed eyes would have passed on a burden that the rest of him would not have anyone else bear. "But he was not slain by Time."

He has never spoken of his father to her, and she is almost flattered by it; his brother she knew through only vile circumstance, and he may never have told her of him were their paths not made to cross. And she realizes that, despite their shared crutch of the past, she never speaks to him of her own brothers, and has not spoken to him of the mother she does not know, nor of Rasler since his death, nor Vossler since his, nor her father since absolving Basch of the crime that still blackens his name. And not one of these men, as Basch said, has been slain by Time, all of them sundered from this earth before their limbs withered and cheeks sagged. "Then why do you worry?"

A sigh rattles through his chest, the cuirass jostling his swords and their belt with a retreating scrape. "Thus the weal of the survivor."

Ashe cannot turn from him, from the distant fluorescence tracing the scrollwork on his armor and evading the shadows within his cape and hollow, visored eyes. The silence is weapon's-edge, like a chandelier on a pulley, clicking into place with no human hands to ascertain its support. Her hands quiver at her sides and she pries them toward each other, running her fingernails against her own fingertips and certain, certain, that this is not the time nor the place for anything she desires to, must say.

"Speak to me of Landis," she whispers, and closes her eyes, still facing him, her feet rooted to the soles of her shoes and the shoes to the grass beneath them.

It is not a new request—demand?—but one long-neglected, and perhaps overdue. Almost murmuring, he obliges her, to her a new song, and the old language sounds strained from under the metal of his helm but still harsh and stunning like a blow from a shield, Waffenbrüder, Sehnsucht, Schlacht, words she knows only from how often they have crossed his lips these many yearsThey weave about her in hair-thin strands, a reposed ring of soldiers, torn between watch and rest in the whispering dead of night; one man, awake, yearns for the memory of his beloved's skin, and his heart burns with it as he recalls the hearth of his home, and he curses the campfire's glow for kissing the weapons in mockery. Frantic, he fights himself to sleep, abandoning even dreams of her that he may drown in it, that the coming battle is lost should he dwell on her visage 'til sunrise. And soon they are seated on the manicured grass, and Basch is singing gently, his armored back against a tree and his cape spread out beneath them, and Ashe knows not if the words are his own or of a poet long dead.

She idly traces the red emblem of his cape with her fingertips and listens, his deep, hushed voice warming her shoulders. The faraway lights of Archades fill the hollows of his armor and cast a sheen over the plate and leather, the grey-green of a mountainside, and the black spectre of his helm wavers in shadow. It is still strange, to regard him and his speech from a static mask, and she misses the motion of his lips, the way the corners of his eyes press into crow-prints when he recalls the past, bidden or un-. But she clenches at the rich black and red cloth, and feels it as sweat-soaked canvas, coarse as sand and stubble. A warm streak paints across her hipbones.

Apparently, he has not been singing for a while. She raises her eyes from the cape, and his gauntlet taps an arpeggio over his thigh, the ruddy beat of steel on hide barely louder than skin on skin. He turns to her, and his posture tenses, and the patterned shadows of the city fill him.

"…Were you so vexed, before?" she asks, as much to restrain herself.

"Before that island?"

"Yes."

"…I am not vexed."

The command comes to her lips and she bites it back, knowing that she does not require his face to know his words for truth.

He rests his helm against the tree, turning his face to her until the horn cannot accommodate him. "But I have ever striven for the way things were."

"And for things you cannot touch," she whispers.

"…Aye."

Twice, the plate of his chest rises and falls, slow and laborious, and he sags into the tree, turning his helm away over his shoulder. His breathing is just like his singing-voice, stifled and permeating and achingly low, and Ashe feels a memory of it in the crook of her neck.

To herself, she mutters, "Then perhaps 'tis well there are places as Archades."

--

With One Day Remaining, Noon:

"Are you well, your Majesty?" someone asks—an acolyte, over her shoulder, and she has almost miss-stepped into him and the garlands he is carrying.

"–Yes," she stammers. "Forgive me."

It is like mummery, Ashe considers, the way all courtly behavior, all decency, all existence is mummery, only unlike all of these this ceremony is unpretentious in its opulent artificiality. The chapel is vast and teeming with people and chatter, servants hanging cloth and frippery and devices of gold, so memorial that no one in this room knows what they are, only that they must be displayed. Around the royals, the servants are being as silent as they can in their tasks, which suits the royals well; House Margrace shows no hangover, but those unused to such carousing do, and blatantly, with crossed arms and dabbling handkerchiefs and rattling coughs. And Ashe, though sober, has only tossed and turned since returning to her room just before sunrise, when the silence between her and Basch coagulated into a dew-soaked fog. The bed was still made when she came to it, and Al-Cid joined her three hours after, having broken his sunglasses and seeking the spares.

Muffling an impending yawn, Ashe trails her eyes through the room, up the towering stairs toward where Larsa, Adina and the Kiltias Superior are measuring, half kneeling, undignified and outstretched.

"The fourth step from the top of the dais, then," the Kiltias Superior confirms, and makes a note on his crystalline tablet. "How long is the train of the robes?"

"…I actually do not know," Larsa says, and Adina shrugs demurely.

"Well, it won't reach more than fifteen steps, I'm sure," the Kiltias dismisses, and calls down at the royals, taking the steps by twos. "In that case, the assembled, at the base of the stairs," he says, and gets there, "first line Ordalia," the eastmost, "Bhujerba, Dalmasca," the middle, "Rozarria," west, "the Judges Magister, in a line behind—take note of that for the others, your Honor—" he tells Rhuan, the only of the Judges Magister here present, "the council, in an arch behind them." The Kiltias leaps down the last three stairs in one stride, brandishing his tablet and blowing the hanging, frazzled hair from his eyes. He is older than Ashe, surely, but seems so young. "The order of entry, and follow me," he orders, and the royals creak obediently.

"First, myself and mine," he elucidates. "Await our positioning ourselves at the top of the dais. Then, his Majesty the Emperor, attended by the Judges Magister." Larsa, with a bit of a sheepish smile, gets into place beside the Kiltias as it to begin a queue, but edges to the side that others may pass. "These will escort his Majesty as far as the base of the dais, whereupon they will stand aside.

"Their Graces of Rozarria; these will be halfway to the dais—there will be an arch to mark it—when followed by his Highness and her Majesty of Dalmasca—"

Everyone is queuing accordingly, most of them trudging and caring only for their own names, but Ashe notices that the Dukes Margrace are chuckling, as ever, at "his Highness and her Majesty".

The Kiltias goes on, "—the Marquis Ondore and escort—"

"I thought he was dea—oh."

The voice pipes up from the great double-doors, a crisp tenor with a bit of an airborne wheeze.

"Sorry!" it splutters. "Go on."

Ashe whips around to face him, knows who it is, and brings a hand to the bridge of her nose and grips it exasperatedly. But even so, a smile comes to her cheeks, and it is tooth-baring and fatigued.

"Vaan!" Larsa shouts, and edges his way over, the throng parting for him a bit belatedly, confused and chattering.

"Hey Larsa," the man says, waving buoyantly from the farthest pews of the room. "Um. Your Majesty."

The crowd has parted enough now that she may see him, and Ashe finds that she has left her place in the queue a full ten steps behind. It has been years since she saw him, and Vaan, at thirty, is still about the same height he was then, on her eye-level. He is clean-shaven still, or he cannot grow a beard, but now bulkier around the shoulders; she reasons that years of switching weapons on and off will do that to a man. There is a pole strapped across his back, blue and cruelly curved, Eight-fluted, and it spikes to the left of his much shorter, still sand-blond hair, a little singed on the left side. She can see a ragged, scarred patch of his scalp over his forehead and right ear, burned pink and chapped.He is still walking around without a proper shirt—Ashe prays that he will wear one for the ceremony proper—and upper arms are actually able to support bracelets and such now, which he pads with crumpled sleeves, and between them he wears a thick silver necklace. His pants are more pocket than pant at this point. There are echoes in him of Balthier, of Reddas, and Ashe stops where she is, between overjoyed and horrified—so few years, she tells herself, and Al-Cid still refers to this as a child?

Larsa is taller than Vaan when he takes the sky pirate's hands. "–So good of you to come."

"Heh, well, you're the one that invited me!" Vaan shakes both of Larsa's hands once, firmly, and lets go to step back and shrug raggedly. "Can't really turn something like this down, right?"

"Of course not," Larsa agrees, and guides Vaan rather firmly to sit down in a near pew. "Watch the rehearsal if you like—we'll be going on the hunt right after, I am glad you made it on time."

"So am I!" He leans back and crosses one leg over the other, ankle-rest. "Looking forward to it—oh, hey, Ashe! And Al-Cid!"

The entire collective of royals seems to sputter. Ashe lets go of the bridge of her nose. "…Vaan."

She is jealous, she realizes.

Al-Cid steps up beside her, laughing casually, one of the few unfazed. "So Vaan rats-bane the sky pirate is to be joining us on the hunt?"

"You bet," he calls back, and sits back down.

"Hunt?" Ashe asks, of no one in particular.

"It is a Rozarrian tradition that I thought to adopt," Larsa explains, somewhere between rejoining the queue and keeping a wary eye on Vaan.

"His Majesty was easily convinced," Al-Daraf jokes, beside Ashe too suddenly for her own liking.

Al-Cid directs her to him, and she catches his eyes as they peer over his sunglasses. "Since it is given to man to be the protector of his family—"

"–unless he is a weacock like your husband—"

Unruffled, Al-Cid disregards his elder brother's jibe. "—the night before he is to be wed the first time, he and his fellows, all the men of the wedding party, pursue a beast of some repute. It is a competition—upon a time, I will admit that the victor in the hunt was given to bed the bride first, but this has mostly changed—the man to be wed usually affords the victor some great boon."

"And so the man to be wed still desires to win," Al-Daraf finishes on Ashe's other side; "among his family, does he truly wish to owe any favors?"

All three of House Margrace laugh, Al-Cid included and perhaps the loudest of all, and several of the assembled join in, notables and servants alike. The Kiltias superior too, at the head of the queue, smiles widely.

"We elected to go after Grimalkin." Larsa tells her, when even the sharp echo of the laughter has begun to die.

"An auspicious beast, for a wedding hunt," someone says.

"What," Vaan calls from the rear of the chapel, "curiosity killing the cat?"

It strikes Ashe that several actually laugh at that. Then again, had Balthier said it, the innuendo would have been both more and less obvious.

"You should come as well," Al-Cid tells her, against the top of her ear.

"You're certain?"

His voice lowers further, and he nods. "That greatsword of yours is gathering dust on your back."

How Vaan heard that, she'll never know. "You still carrying Excalibur?"

"Tournesol, actually," she corrects, and smiles—he can read lips, she realizes, but continues to have less tact than a nursemaid.

"That works," he says, and gets to his feet, shuffling. "You were always quicker with the Tournesol. Exalibur was heavy even for me."

On her other side, Al-Daraf snickers, "And surely if the rats-bane is too weak for the swo—"

"What time?" she snaps, facing Larsa, her cheeks sucked sternly in.

The Emperor smiles, bright and unabashed, pushing up the sleeves of his robes. "We'll fly to the Tchita Uplands after luncheon, be there by sunset."

Ashe finds a smirk curling on her lips, but it is guarded and sideward. "You'll forgive me for raiding your armories."

"A thousand times," he assures her. "I'll have Gabranth show you to them when we're through here." On that, his eyes flicker toward the double doors, and he is so close to Ashe that she knows the gesture was meant for her alone.

Basch is outside the door in half-shadow, and he is Basch, or nearly; his face is ensconced by a full Dueling Mask, but he has left the armor of Gabranth behind and he is bare-armed, and the hair on those arms is paler than she recalls. He wears now a studded Mirage Vest the color of dead grass, fingerless gloves, a Greataxe on the belt low on his hips, he is himself and Ashe remembers to breathe and turn away.

Not a ship's length from the doors, Vaan continues to be oblivious. "This is going to be fun," he chuckles, and flashes a grin at Ashe that chills the sweat beading at her neck. "Oh!" he starts, and stands again, leaning on the curled back of the pew in front of him. "By the way, which one of you all is Adina?"

--

With One Day Remaining, Twilight:

"His name means 'craze' in the Altegesprach," Basch tells her.

"'Vaan'?"

The Dueling Mask nods.

"You don't say."

She can see the ghost of a smile through the mask's mesh. "I do believe the letters fall differently, however."

Tournesol feels more welcome on her back when it is not catching on beads and trains. She widened its baldric to accommodate for a cuirass of Minerva make, well-kept but a touch tighter around the waist than she would have, and tall greaves that do not match it for color, not that it matters. The canvas shirt is the same as any Judge wears under his leathers, and large for her, the sleeves too starched to billow and rolled into her gauntlets, and she leaves it untucked. The skort is hers, and not as short as once she wore; a midriff is one thing, her aunt once teased, but legs are another.

There are five anchors berthed in what Ashe recalls is "the Chosen Path": three Imperial Strays, Larsa's; Ashe and Al-Cid's Goodwill; and Vaan's Cat. Vaan ferried Basch and Zargabaath, and a few others, and they were here waiting when Goodwill became the last to arrive. The sun set while they were in the air; it is a very bright night, still not so much in the way of stars but the waning moon close and crooked. At least two dozen men have come, and Ashe the only woman.

Al-Cid climbs up the Cat's ramp; he has taken charge of this, and no one seems to mind. "Gentles all," he summons them. "And rats-bane," he adds with a smile.

Ashe checks, sidelong: Vaan does not perceive the barb.

"Your target is Grimalkin," Al-Cid begins, gesticulating smoothly. "It is a Coeurl, larger, speckled like the others of these cliffs, and likely traveling in packs with its lessers. Bravo sky pirates aside, I do not advise going this alone. Best to append yourself to someone who does not desire the prize as much as you."

"Or someone willing to share it," Al-Daraf adds from the crowd.

"So the prize is a favor?" Vaan pipes up.

"Yes," Larsa answers, turning to him from the front of the assembly. "Within reason. Comparable to peerage in your case, future priority in the cases of others. But you need not worry about that, Vaan."

"I do, actually," the sky pirate corrects through the teeth of a braggart's smile. "I've got someone to win this for."

For a moment—and perhaps it is only a trick of the Mist and the dark—Larsa's steel eyes flash wide and lips tremble apart. "Shall we commence?" he quickly raises, the words filling in the rend in his countenance.

Al-Cid nods, and strides off the ramp toward the near Crystal, and a short pillar mounted atop a speaker. "If the beast is felled, bring the appropriate trophy to the crystal here. This will ring," he raps his hand on the speaker, "and quite loudly, when you press this." He removes his glasses and flicks them at a palm-sized button on the pillar's side. "If it takes until sunrise and no one has done so, then we convene back here and console ourselves with the fact that nobody managed to fell the thing and come back to try again a year from now."

"Guess you'll all have to find another excuse to hang out at the palace, hey guys?" Vaan chuckles from the back.

Larsa laughs with a few others, and his is not without mirth. "Let us go," he commands, drawing Joyeuse, the glint of the thin sword revealing his eyes trailing laden past Vaan. "It need not be said that we adhere to the terms of the sentient races' decency."

"In this as in all else," Al-Nir and a few others say. With a nod to Al-Darif, the Dukes Margrace saunter past the brush, east.

The assembled begin to scatter, convening as they might. Al-Cid catches Ashe's eyes, and starts toward her.

"—Al-Cid," Larsa calls, "if you would?"

"Presently," he waves back at the Emperor. "Permit me to wish another party the best of luck?"

"Oh, of course."

Al-Cid turns back to Ashe and closes the space between them in two quick strides, then takes her hand and presses his lips to the inside of her wrist. "If the Emperor does not secure his own wager," he whispers, thick and low, "and the rats-bane does not humble us all, do please put my impertinent brother in his place."

"With greatest pleasure." Ashe beams, almost, and nods at him; he backs one step away before turning; he will go east, but she does not watch him leave.

The sounds of the Uplands coalesce around her, dry brush and claws against rock. She savors it, and closes her eyes, then reaches over her head and the sword. They have all gone east, and then likely north, toward Sochen; she will go west, it is easy to decide, and even if she does not gain an unnecessary Emperor's favor she will go where the prey is.

"He did advise against your going off alone," Basch says.

Ashe opens her eyes; he has not moved from her side, and the thought eases the dimming light of the plains around her. "I gather you have no interest in the Emperor's favor?"

"He has bestowed upon me favor enough," he says; the words are easy, if slightly hoarse, and perhaps not as burdened as they could have been.

She nods cordially at him, and her heart is already racing.

Taking some time to adjust the Aegis shield on his left arm and unsheathe the axe on his hip, Basch breathes steadily and rolls his shoulders. "Have you magick still?"

"I do."

"At your word," he says, and starts to bow—but rises slowly instead, stretching his calves on the balls of his feet and relaxing into step beside, behind, beside her.

North, then west; through the Skytrail. Someone has already gone in this direction, or the brush is torn and grass flat of its own accord. Ahead, a Bellwyvern shrieks as it dies, and Ashe's stomach warms in her armor to recall the species, and wonders how long it has been since she saw one, felled one, how long since she has killed at all.

Ashe tosses her head to press on, Tournesol readied, and Basch shadows her. Something leaps at her and she swings, twice, and is surprised afterward to find the serpent unceremoniously dead.

Basch chuckles, faintly.

They stalk through the south swathe of the Skytrail to the second thin pass, and even in the twilight the three rearing serpents are too daring, too slow, too dispersed and too late. Ashe ceases to hear her own tread unless she is fighting; the sounds around her, sputters and hisses and the press of dry grass wake her, in a way.

Something springs at her, seething, a Coeurl, and it nearly impales itself mid leap; Basch's axe bites into its foreleg and the creature falls, decaying into Mist at their feet. Something wheels overhead and Basch hears it first, a Bellwyvern still far away enough to ignore and they duck past it into what Ashe remembers from bill-Hunts is the Oliphzak Rise.

A troika of Marlboro Overkings are gathered past the short cliff and Basch gets right into the midst of them, the ribbon on his wrist sucking the poison from the creatures' defensive breath, and he fells two gorily, easily as Ashe splits the third in twain even as it exhumes. The musk rolls off her skin and the regenerative properties of the one of her rings ignites with a crisp haze, but she has to take a moment and concentrate to conjure up Esuna and dispel the film over her eyes.

Basch is regarding her when the blindness clears. She smiles—and there over his shoulder, far off, are the rest of the Marlboros, congregating under a cylindrical, granite ruin. "We should clear these," she says, and he nods, but gets in gets not a step before a serpent rears toward him and he cleaves it with a fierce swipe, almost over-swinging.

He is himself.

That done, they approach the ruins, and Ashe bats and sidesteps and whirls through the fiends, and it is empowering. She recalls when these serpents were difficult to fight, and part of her wonders if they have gone soft, but concludes (as the acid-sizzling head of a serpent bounces off the grass ten feet from her dripping sword) that no, she has not lost her edge.

She is ahead of Basch when the first Marlboro falls, Tournesol gleaming with streaks of the vitreous fluid from its eyes. The fiends galumph out of the ruin's shadow, their tentacles flapping on upended stones and squelching on the dry grass. Ashe charges a second, and Basch has already slain it; the third is hers, dead with a rebound swipe before she even sees it. She sees two others through the sparking Mist as it dies, clinging to the ruins' stairs to nowhere, and her heel crunches over the gravel with the blade in her wake—

The sword meets fur and flesh, she can tell by the sound, and the Marlboros are still three strides away.

Ashe whips about-face and pries her sword out of the Coeurl, bringing it down on the cat-fiend's neck almost before she sees it. It roars or hisses or wretches and its whiskers lash at her, biting into her upper arms. The cuts smart, but even that dies, and she charges at the creature to finish it off, parrying its claws and clamping her heel down on its tail. It crumbles into Mist still shrieking, the blood from its rent webbed paws streaking the grass.

She almost calls for Basch, but hears the trampling of his footwork and whips around to join him. A spell crackles through the tangle of bodies echoed by the crunch of a split skull, and one of the four, five beasts gurgles as it falls. Basch takes a calculated step backward, toward the ruin's wall, the claws and tendrils of the cats puttering against his raised shield and their swollen heads quavering with concentration. Ashe closes her eyes and reaches forward, the hilt of the sword loose under her gauntlets, but the Shell spell envelops them both when her eyes are open again and the staggered marcato blasts of lightning flare over Basch's armor, the studding and clasps a blinding white. One Coeurl rears, and Basch grunts and hammers his axe into its exposed underside, the beast flying toward Ashe in a snarling knot and she barrels at it, splitting its neck as it lands on its feet.

Something bites into the back of her knee and she chokes on a scream, kicking violently and swerving to destroy it, and the tentacles of a Marlboro hiss by her ears, severed from the flailing creature and splattering on her breastplate. She rebounds her own swing with a ground-ward stab and shoves it past the creature's maw, and the blade shatters its small teeth like a mouse's claws on tile. Tendrils of its putrid breath slosh upward, stifled by its own spilt blood. Another Marlboro is right behind it, and its breath hits her like a swarm of bees and she staggers backward, coughing too harshly to cast.

Blindly, she steadies her grip and lunges through the fog, and she can feel the fiend writhing on her sword, its muscles panicking flatulently, the steel shivering with the sudden weight. A present lightness spiders up her sweating neck, Esuna, and the veil over her eyes disintegrates and the pinpricks of dying fiends twist before her eyes like the lights of Archades. She feels leaden and restrained turning back to Basch and recalls the Marlboro's powers and edges away, an eye on the Coeurls that still surround Basch as the call for Haste dribbles passively down her chin. Basch roars and rams his shield into a beast as it leaps at him, smacking it flank-wise into the wall of the ruin. Raised red gashes streak his upper arms and drip down the visor of the dueling Mask, filling in the mesh.

As soon as the Haste hits her she is summoning the words for Curaja and they flow so easily out of her that she wonders if they sounded at all. Tournesol flashes in front of her and the chortling of a death-throe follows it, the Coeurl's fine whiskers tangling around her arm, caught between her gauntlet's catches. Again she swings, and another feline cry plummets through her ears. Basch's axe swathes through the air behind her on the heels of his own rattling growl, and she stabs downward through the decomposing Coeurl as it drops. Something whimpers. Something breathes.

Around their feet, the last three beasts fragment into embers, snowflakes or fireflies as they flicker and die. Ashe darts about, the sword almost following her, but the shadow of the ruin is silent, only the distant protest of brush in the wind and Basch's steady breaths alerting her that she yet lives.

Her chest begins to shake, and she is laughing before she knows why.

"Your—" he starts, and she turns to face him, her chest shaking and the armor rattling with the laughter, and he has only wiped half the blood from his axe and is raising his shield-hand toward her, the Dueling Mask on the ground beside him and his face dripping with sweat.

His hair is as much silver now as gold, and the close-trimmed beard on his chin and cheeks is gleaming and piecemeal and pale against his ruddy skin. Bruise-toned circles rim his eyes and for a moment Ashe thinks he still wears the helm, the concave of his cheeks are so heavily shadowed, but he is reaching for her, is concerned, and his lips are parted and eyes stern and she has been a year without seeing them, or touching his skin, or drinking in his breath, his voice.

She drops her sword, runs right to him and does.

Their armor clatters together and then against stone, and again his back is to the wall of the ruin and she pins his outstretched hand by the wrist to it, the axe still firm in his grip, her other hand up under his chin on his beard and it's softer than she remembers, and she is laughing into his mouth, shivering with it as the metal between them chatters and scrapes. She feels his free hand press the cuirass into her waist and the other is trembling where she has it pinned, but his lips are gaping and his tongue shuddering in shock.

He pants in a violent gasp of air and closes his eyes and his head tilts back, rapping it against the wall behind him. She is too busy laughing again to breathe and catches him off guard, kissing him suddenly on the bulge in his neck before it's even set back into place from gulping in air and he almost chokes on it, gripping her waist and she swears she can feel his fingertips through the metal

She is already unbuckling the vest, and feels the rasp of something through his quaking throat, one word, and perhaps it is her name if the remains of a hiss over her ear are any indication. His knuckles knock against the shield's padding as he holds onto her waist and Ashe works a leg between his and against his groin, and he moans, the hilt of the axe scraping down the ruin's face. The clasps of the leather under his arms are more stubborn than the plate, she recalls, and she throws them aside and sucks hard at his earlobe and the scar, rising on her tiptoes and sliding her right hand to his upper arm.

"Ashe," he heaves, and her name is a rumbling moan that she can feel against her abdomen, "I—"

"Drop the axe," she pants against his ear.

He does.

"And the shield."

Wringing his arm gets the shield nowhere, and he reaches around Ashe to unclasp it and the gesture pushes her against him, and she gets back to work on his jerkin, still kissing his ear, languidly, her tongue tracing the scar. Some of the clasps snap, stubborn and creaking against some other metal, and she recalls her half-gauntlets and fumbles at them just as he gets the shield unstrapped and lets it fall. It knocks against both their greaves on the way down.

Ashe pries off her right gauntlet and starts on her left as his arms loosen around her, and his chest shudders with some kind of question, not that she hears it, and she answers him, "Because," or tries to, but then her other gauntlet is off and her hands are free and she does not finish the thought. She claps her palms to either side of his face and kisses him, pulling him down to her and splaying her fingers between the hairs of his beard, and they catch under her rings.

He tugs past her canvas shirt and his hands push into her lower back, half-gloved, and she feels the wracked calluses of his fingers but leather instead of his palms in the breach between her armor and her skort. She arches against him and strokes up his goosefleshed arms and she feels him respond, the purse of his lips a second before hers, the faint, coarse edge of his tongue, the heat in their tangle of legs. She slips her hand past whatever small breach she has gotten through his jerkin and plasters her knuckles against the scars on his back, sandwiched between him and the armor and the wall, and he clutches her, almost crushes her against him. His hands slide lower, down her backside, then are suddenly gone and his tongue shivers in her mouth.

"Yes." she demands, around his spit-soaked teeth. She rolls her hips against him, slips her hands past the waistband of his shorts and his half-leathered hands are on her again, one between and behind her thighs, the other at the base of her cuirass as if it would go up her shirt were it not made of metal and closefitted. And a growl wells up in her as she breaks away from his lips, claws at his lower back and bites her cheek to stifle a rattling, tickled shriek.

His hands fly off her skin with sweat in their wake and he straightens like a hanged man against the wall, eyes wide with concern—concern, not fear, she sees, and is laughing again as she steps back from him and pries Tournesol's baldric over her head, knocking her circlet askew. She digs her palms into the clasps of the cuirass and snaps them, three at each side, then twists and hefts it off, taking the canvas shirt with it, and the circlet is still caught in her hair but she wrenches it free with a frustrated grunt and flings it on top of the open, discarded breastplate at her feet. That done, she tugs her bandeau over her head as well and throws it down, rolling her bare shoulders against the seams and bruises and the sour but welcome tinge of metal on her skin.

Against the ruin, Basch finally catches his breath. His eyes are closed, screwed tightly into the crows-press of the past, or modesty, or disbelief. She sees it and craves it and wraps herself around him again, shoving her hands down the front of his shorts and slamming her lips into his, and he retreats into the stone and digs his wide fingers into her waist, running his hands up her and clutching at the twitching muscle under her ribs, the thin white scars of age crumbling under his touch. Her hands tangle in the coarse hair between his legs and rake over his wrinkled skin, feeling the rapid swells of his blood through the muscle and flesh as it tightens. She slides her hands up his hips and bypasses his axe-belt, unclasping the hook and zipper of his shorts and tugging them down to his knees, then the undershorts after, and then raises her boot between his legs and stamps down on the fabric and he stumbles out of it, armor seething against the wall as he struggles to get the shorts off or at least around only one ankle this time, and does. He crumples down the wall and pulls her with him, kissing or lapping or just breathing between her breasts, and his lips are hot and dented, too gorged on blood to be chapped, and the hairs of his beard work into her pores and she throws her chin skyward, her throat too dry for the groan to sound.

Her hips dig into his groin and the belt that still remains across it, and he lets a choked, hoarse roar into her skin, bucking under something enough that he wrenches from her and lifts her bodily off he ground, his arms crossed around her back gracelessly and her metal greaves clattering against his leather ones. He writhes under her, and she slides down the armor on his chest and the studding raises smarting streaks on her abdomen and her breasts. He fumbles between them at something and Ashe dazedly realizes that he is trying to rid himself of the belt, and something about this entire situation strikes her as humorous but she is beyond laughing now and clamors her hands with his, and the cold clasp of the belt snaps between their hips and he rises against her with a relieved gasp, the back of his head beating into the wall behind him in time with the belt thudding against the gravel.

Ashe leans forward and tugs down her skort and her underwear with it, rolling against his groin as she stoops to slide the garments over her greaves. She staggers and her hair brushes against his pelvis, unintentionally, and Basch lets out a glorious moan and if it is in any language at all she does not speak it and he sinks a few inches down the wall, clutching at her upper arms so fiercely that a spell's glow crawls up her arm from the ring of renewal on her finger. She abandons her skort and underwear dangling around her left ankle and runs her hands over Basch's beard and to his hair, gripping the sides of his face and kissing him as they slide achingly down the wall, the studs and buckles of his armor grating along the stone with the muffled, martial scrape of a whetting blade.

He falters, and hits the earth with a clatter, bracing himself with his feet against the discarded shield for a bit and holds onto her hips and lower back. The word dribbles down his chin and into the scant space between their lips like the blood of a dying man, "How…"

She settles herself onto him, supported by the knees of her greaves as they dig into the dry grass and chapped earth around them, and tries to ask for clarification but is uncertain she actually manages.

His chest heaves underneath her and the armor prickles coolly against her soaked breasts. "How dared you ever think yourself without power…"

Ashe rolls her hips, sharply, leans to his scarred ear and whispers, "Mayhaps you are the weak one," and a smile curls up her swelling lips when she sees it relax his wild, mystified eyes.

"To—" he tries to say, cut off by his own snarls as she swerves and grinds against him, "–to continue with this I—" his back drums against the wall and the words are crushed under it, "–I—"

She stops suddenly, pulls back, and looks him in the eyes as surely as she can.

His voice is like gravel to the soles of sunburned feet. "This will…this…will keep happening..." He meets her eyes, raises a bit from the wall, slides his fingertips down her side and she cannot decide if the look in his eyes is perplexed or pleading or warning.

She rams down onto him and jerks her hips forward, sideward, and then there is no such thing as direction.

The shield that he was bracing himself with is kicked aside and Ashe grinds against him, surging and riding breakneck, her knees tearing up the dry grass around them. Her lips dig into his collar, and she grinds against him almost belligerently, so consuming that when she pries her lips from his skin she can do nothing but struggle for air and fight to keep her own pace. He slips down the wall and rights himself, the ragged accidental thrusts spiking through her so sharply she can feel them in her shoulders. His beard rakes down her breasts and up again, haphazardly, his fight for control without rhythm or constancy and she grabs the loose buckles of his armor to anchor herself, the grass and gravel and his arms clapping against her greaves and perhaps he shouts but the cacophony of armor on stone and gravel and earth sucks all other sound into it, and all that is left in Ashe's ears is the triple-time throbbing of her blood and Basch's voice, singing gently to her, years ago.

His frantic, final thrust clashes with her low writhing and swarms inside of her, and she flags and stutters and is close, is close, but her rolls against him slacken and she whimpers, grits her teeth and juts sharply forward once, twice, not enough, and his hands slip off her lower back and she refuses to let this be done, tugging him toward her and bucking, but her eyes are glassing over and it is with fatigue, not heat—

—and Ashe has no idea what just caused that but takes the sensation and runs with it, rocking against the wideness and the foreignness and the attack and distinctly understands the feel of leather against the hair around her lower lips.

She realizes that she is on his hand. That his bare fingers are inside her alongside his penis. That he is striving to bring her over, not just lying back for her and obeying her.

Her world reels and her eyes burn and she hasn't the presence of mind to bite back a shrieking, freewheeling moan. The faint, inhuman echo of that cry returns to her ears, years later.

She is collapsed backward on Basch's thighs, clutching absently at the buckles of his armor. A slick hand runs along her inner thigh, and she blinks past the haze for his eyes; he is almost waiting for her to look at him, plaintive and greybearded and young.

Her tongue hangs sandpaper-dry and she gapes, still rolling around his hips, her wet breaths scatching in her throat. His face is less than a handsbreadth from hers and she cannot move any closer, staring dazedly until the next brush of their lips is almost unintentional. But with that she kisses him, almost falling against his mouth, and it is slow and battered and grateful as they sink down to the threadbare grass and gravel. Ashe sprawls atop him, her legs straightening around one of his and her calves aching horribly in her greaves but everything else is a distant kind of wonderful, like knowing how a story will end before you've heard it.

Basch embraces her loosely, and blood from his elbows dribbles down her back and sides, the copper smell tangling with that of tattered grass and sweat and stone. She runs her hands through his hair and beard and clutches at him as if to keep him.

"…Yes," she mutters against his lips, "yes…it will…"

--

Day Of:

In Archadia, weddings are enacted at sunset, when the jewel-tinted glass of the western casements has wrung all the white from the trailing robes of the bride and groom. They are twists of indiscriminate color and shadow, only the gold of their crowns and Larsa's black hair recalcitrant against the light. Adina, while not so fair a woman, makes for a beautiful bride. Ashe cannot help but hate her, if only for a moment.

She shields her eyes with a vagrant glance, from the glow of opulent shrines and staircases to the ring-rimmed, ungloved hands of her husband, resting against his thighs. As ever, Al-Cid seems almost encumbered by the garb of his position, the shapelessness of the shirts and sashes unbecoming, the heavy braiding and gilt at odds with his rust-toned complexion. It occurs to her, thinking on his usual mien, that he might well understand the gravity of her place. Perhaps that is why he streamlines himself so.

Al-Cid is himself, she realizes; even in royal robes, he is himself. And her stomach churns with envy, and she closes her eyes against the glare from the crests of house Margrace and braids of Dalmasca that festoon the cloth-of-gold he is wrapped in. She does not let her head hang, or believes she does not, but her temples ring heavily and her bodice tightens across her chest, and her elbows grate leaden into her bare waist, hands sunken at her sides.

The cool press of metal fills her right palm like the hilt of a sword. A moment, and the leather of a glove follows it, briefly interlacing his fingers with her own. Her eyes open, quicker than she would have them, but she does not look behind her, training her eyes on Larsa and his ceremony. She wonders if, perhaps, the young Emperor planned for the Judges Magister to stand so close to the royals, and does not put it past him, but a thought upon it and the smile that her cheeks fade into is close-lipped and wry.

Ashe reaches back, surreptitiously as she may, and her fingers curl loosely around the Judge's proffered gauntlet, as if to carry sand.

---