A light drizzle sprinkled its way across the Shepherds' training grounds, steady as it had been all week, keeping the layer of mud on the ground constantly refreshed and ready to splatter. Chrom had wisely decided to forsake most of the ornamental aspects of his armor today, but that was a small comfort while lying face-first on the wet sparring ground, laid out because his foot had been six inches too deep in the ground to evade an incoming blow.
Vaike helped him to his feet, a massive grin on his face despite the fact that by square footage of mud he was still losing quite badly. "Another round?" he said.
"No, I think I'm going to check on how everybody else is doing," Chrom said. Everybody else was almost certainly doing about as well as he was, but any excuse that got his face away from the ground for a few minutes was a good one. After he was back in the palace, priority number one was getting some grass planted here.
Vaike paired off with another figure made unidentifiable by coverage of earth, while Chrom made his way slowly through the training grounds, trying to pass along helpful comments and observations as slowly and leisurely as possible. This wasn't a good day for training, but since the alternative was to head back into the palace and find out what new problem demanded the immediate attention of the Exalt, he stretched out his time for as long as possible.
He found himself wandering towards the pitch on which the pegasus riders were practicing, hoping to catch a glimpse of his wife. Sure enough, she was blazing through their pace trials, leading the pack despite the weather. As he got nearer, she broke off from the pitch towards him, made a banking U-turn overhead as she excitedly shouted "Hi, honey!", and made her way back to the pitch without even losing her place.
After they had been married, some of the palace staff had tried to explain that the wife of the reigning monarch was not required to continue working. Sumia had considered this for all of five seconds before she had realized that this would mean less flying.
Back on ground level, the Shepherds' magic-users were running through a remarkably efficient training program of Frederick's invention. The idea was that the pegasus riders, in the course of their movement drills, would drop large targets to mark the locations they had visited. Meanwhile, magic users on the ground would try and hit the targets before they could hit the ground, to hone their aim and reflexes. In theory the mages and riders didn't need to pay attention to each other's progress, but it had quickly warped into a sort of competition between the two to see if the riders could drop a certain number of targets without the mages hitting them down. This naturally resulted in a bit of overzealousness, and a few missed spells making close calls near the already-skittish horses almost launched riders from their saddles, eventually forcing Frederick to step in and disallow carpet-bombings.
Chrom caught sight of Robin and Tharja standing in the row of magic users, and made his way over to them. Despite the stationary nature of the exercise, Robin's coat and pants were still splattered with dirt up to his knees. Tharja was perfectly clean. Life was full of mysteries.
"Afternoon, Chrom," Robin said genially while Tharja glowered beside him. He waved a clipboard that didn't look like it was particularly capable of casting spells. "How's the rain treating you?"
"Same as always," Chrom said, wondering how long you could keep a foot suspended in water before it bloated uncontrollably. "You guys leading in targets hit, I suppose?"
"Nah," said Robin. "I'm not participating, and Cordelia asked Tharja to stop for the day."
"I was winning," Tharja said firmly. "It still counts if you hit the targets before they drop them."
"I was on your side; I thought it was brilliant," Robin said. "Some people just don't like fire. It doesn't matter; we can start experimenting today anyway."
"Experimenting? Is that what the clipboard is for?" Chrom asked. Robin's tendency to think of perpendicular paths through problems had proven useful on multiple occasions, so Chrom was ready to give anything he offered a shot, even if it sounded daft at first impression.
"Exactly," Robin said. "I've been meaning to try it out. I have this new idea."
"He has a very bad idea," Tharja said.
"I'm telling you, it'll work," Robin said confidently.
"I don't care how well it works, it's still a bad idea," Tharja said
Chrom held up his hands. "Can I at least hear what it is before I start mediating?" he asked.
Robin nodded. "Ask Sumia to land and meet us over-" he looked around and pointed to a large empty patch of the castle grounds- "-there. And ask her to bring some of those targets if she can."
"Okay," Chrom said. "But what for?"
"I'll explain when we get there. She needs to hear it as well." Robin said.
He departed to the indicated field. Tharja followed with an elaborate but extremely rapid show of reluctance. Chrom shrugged, looked up back up towards the group of riders, and waved until he caught Sumia's attention.
Through a complicated feat of body language, he managed to indicate that she should head towards the field as soon as she could, that she should bring her targets along with her, that she would be able to get back to practice immediately afterwards, and that Robin was having one of his idea moments and it would be best just to go along with it. She waved in recognition, and soared away.
Chrom arrived to the field a few moments earlier, where Robin and Tharja were waiting quietly on top of a slight rise at the edge of the field. Moments later, Sumia plopped into a landing in front of them, and dropped off her horse directly into an ankle-deep patch of mud.
"Hey guys!" she said loudly, staggering her way to more solid ground with a dull sucking noise. "Sorry I'm late. I went to get a few extra targets for you." She patted the saddlebag with a dull thump. "I don't need to get back to practice for a while. What's your new idea, Robin?"
Robin aimed a curious sidelong glance at Chrom, who shrugged as evocatively as he could.
"Well, I'm not going to profess to being an expert on pegasus warfare," Robin said, returning his gaze to normal. "But I've been working for you guys for a long time, and I think I've developed a decent sense of how these things tick. For instance." He pointed at Sumia's mount, "Your pegasus can carry more than one person at a time, can't it?"
"Well, yeah," she said uncertainly, affectionately rubbing the neck of the winged horse, which stood where it had landed staring disinterestedly at the sodden ground. "This guy can carry up to three person's worth of weight for a while. Maybe more, but he'd get tired pretty quickly and the people would probably have to sit on each other's shoulders. Why?"
Robin stowed away his clipboard somewhere inside that unfathomable coat of his, and walked over to start rummaging through the saddlebag on Sumia's horse. She looked confused for a moment, but apparently saw no use in questioning him. Eventually, Robin found the bag he was looking for and pulled out an armful of targets that they and the mages used to practice. "Do you think somebody on pegasusback would be able to hit one of these things on the ground from the air?" Robin said.
"Sure. That's what dark fliers do, isn't it?" Sumia said, her armor quietly clanking as she shrugged.
"What about somebody riding behind you? Would they be able to aim reliably?" Robin said.
"What with the wings obstructing vision, the lack of control, and being a hundred feet in the air," Tharja added.
Sumia seemed thoughtful. "I don't know. The wings would probably get in the way from a lot of angles, come to think of it. Plus carrying two people messes up the flight profile, and that might go really bad if you mix wind magic into the mix," she said. "And I don't see why we would need to double up anyway; we've never been short on mounts," she added, a hint of pride creeping into her voice over serving such an equine-rich nation.
"I'm not really thinking of a permanent arrangement," Robin said, nodding. "Just something in case we need an aerial strike force with a bit more firepower on short notice, or the terrain doesn't suit our ground-based ranged units. Plus, it lets the male Shepherds get more advantage out of our winged mounts even if the horses don't listen to them."
"Sounds like an interesting concept," Chrom said, shrugging. "What's the catch?"
"It's a bad idea," Tharja said.
"It doesn't really sit well with Tharja," Robin said diplomatically. "That's what we're out here to settle."
Chrom nodded. Tharja's lack of enthusiasm was characteristic of her personality, but this particular issue probably ran slightly deeper. She was one of the only female members of the Shepherds who had never done even basic training with any flying mount, which meant a certain amount of paranoia in that direction made sense. She had done short hops for transport, but any strategy that would inevitably involve her having to spend large amounts of time in the air was unlikely to catch her interest,
"So what's the plan?" Chrom said.
"We do a short trial target practice run with one of us in the air and one of us on the ground, and see if there's a substantial difference between the number of targets we leave standing," Robin said, holding up the row of discs in his arm. "That's why asked for you, Sumia. Way I figure it, you're the best flier here."
Sumia beamed. "Sounds fun. Are you going to be riding with me, Tharja?" Sumia said, apparently oblivious to the idea that anybody could dislike flying.
"No," Tharja said shortly.
"Hey, I'm good at flying," Sumia said, still smiling, not even trying to hide her pride at being described as 'best flier here'. "I don't see what you're worried about. Even if we crash you're going to be fine, we have a lot of healers. Lissa's right over there. At least I think so. That's a lot of mud." She paused briefly, and glanced back at Tharja. "What's the matter? You've flown with me once or twice before."
"Those times we were just riding the horse from one place to another," Tharja said, eyeing Sumia's mount warily. "I am not riding one of those things if it means performing aerial acrobatics. Or making high-speed dives. Or looking down."
"I'll be riding with you, Sumia," Robin said, wisely stepping forward before Sumia tried to educate Tharja on the hidden wonders of the skies. "Tharja's just going to be standing on the ground. Not really a very scientific experiment, but it's just a proof of concept."
"If I hit more than you, you have to admit it's a bad idea," Tharja said flatly.
"I'll think about it," Robin said. He handed the stack of disposable targets to Chrom, and strode off to Sumia's pegasus. "Let's go, then."
"Wait. What do I do with these?" Chrom said, hoisting the targets.
"Spread them out in the middle of the field," Robin said, gesturing around, already climbing on top of the winged horse. "Anywhere's fine, just keep them above the waterline."
"Why is this my job, then?" Chrom said, more perplexed than actually annoyed.
"Do you really want to go back to sparring in this weather?" Robin asked, without even looking back.
Chrom, as a matter of fact, did not. He handed off half the targets to Tharja as Sumia took off and started making slow loops a short height above the field, and within a few minutes they had scattered most of them in such a way that they could be seen from both the ground and the air. Chrom tried to make light conversation with Tharja while they worked, which was a task appropriately comparable to trying to walk in foot-deep mud.
From what little discussion did occur, Chrom gathered that the basic idea was that on Chrom's mark, Robin would set ablaze as many targets as he could in two minutes, then they would reset and give Tharja her shot from the ground. Apparently Robin had originally wanted to do both trials himself, but Tharja fully expected him to deliberately undershoot the first test to skew the results, probably because that was exactly what she would do.
"He said also wants to do a run while the horse is just taking a walk on the ground. And that we might have to pin Sumia down for that one. I can help, that's an easy curse," Tharja said blankly, dropping her last target. "Anyway, let's get this over with."
They retreated back to the rise on the edge of the field, Chrom's careful tread still not preventing him from nearly losing his boot once or twice. His thoughts drifted once again to the many benefits that a growth of grass had on topsoil health. Eventually back on firmish ground, he held up both his thumbs as Sumia came around on a pass.
After a short pause, small fireballs were flinging towards the center of the field, periodically causing a target to flare up before the rain noticed the upstart and beat it back into submission. Robin's aim was quite good given the circumstances, much to Tharja's visible consternation. By the time Chrom called time, Robin had managed to hit a little over half the number of targets they had placed.
"That was a decent run, I think," Robin said, sliding off of Sumia's pegasus after she had brought it down beside them. He pulled out his clipboard again and started marking down his results. "Had a bit trouble aiming on the sudden dips, though. What do you think, Sumia?"
"Fine, I'm fine," Sumia said vaguely, a slightly singed patch of her hair speaking otherwise. She jumped off the horse and managed to land in the same patch of mud as before. Chrom was momentarily concerned, but she seemed to cheer up once she had steadied herself back upright.
"I think it went great," she said, an embarrassed smile on her face. "A bit tricky flying with the extra weight, but I can manage."
"Right," said Robin, returning his clipboard away once more into the depths of his coat. "Let's get back in the air so we can drop some targets for Tharja's go."
"Wait a minute," said Chrom, who had just spent minutes trudging through mud putting down targets and was not about to have his industry maligned. "What happened to hand-placing them? I figured you had a reason for that."
"That was Tharja's idea," Robin said, shrugging.
"I thought if he placed the targets from the air he would make sure they fell in places that were easy to hit from the air," Tharja said in a tone that suggested it was the most obvious thing in the world. Her clothes were still perfectly clean. Life was unfair.
"I don't blame you. That does sound like something I would do," Robin said, already back on top of the horse. Sumia climbed up after him, and they were back up in the air. This time, instead of making a casual loop around the field, they made an erratic pattern across while periodically dropping the targets. Gods be damned, it was a better way of placing them.
Tharja stood tensely watching the targets fall, her spellbook already flipped open to the appropriate page, obviously keen to prove her point. Her usual paranoid grimace was now one of fixed determination, and her overall body language was precisely the magical equivalent of somebody holding a warhammer over their head, very eager to drop it but more eager to make sure it hit something squishy.
Robin let the last target go and gave the thumbs up from across the field. Then a lot of things happened in the space of about four seconds.
First, Tharja let fly a volley of spells almost instantly, the latter ones igniting about half a dozen of the targets nearer to them. The first one she fired, however, honed with a couple weeks training with the pegasus fliers, went straight across the pitch and set ablaze the target that Robin had just dropped, right as it was passing beneath the horse's hind legs.
The poor creature, probably already skittish to the point of shellshock, did not react well to something of that size igniting directly behind it. It probably wanted nothing more in life than a nice open sky to fly around in, a cool stream to drink out of, and some green grass to eat, all of which were natural enemies of fire. Small bits of fire going away from it were presumably anxiety-inducing, and a large volume of fire erupting beneath its feet could only be the final straw. Therefore, it could not be blamed for what it did next, which was buck.
Sumia was an experienced and naturally gifted pegasus rider, which provided her with the necessary skill and experience to stay on her mount's back long enough to bring it back to the ground and calm it down. Robin was a tactician.
In most circumstances, the fall off of a pegasus in flight was inevitably a short story with an extremely predictable outcome. Chrom had that story reenacted right in front of him as Robin fell from the saddle, but luckily aspects of the setting served to give it a twist ending. First was that Sumia had been flying lower than normal in deference to Robin's experiment. The second was that, at the moment, the ground was very, very soft. Robin's landing was safe, if undignified.
Robin unsteadily got up from the spot he had landed, only vaguely human in shape and color but at least upright. Chrom breathed a sigh of relief, and only then noticed the fresh spray of mud up his side. While investigating the source, he realized that Tharja was no longer standing next to him, but sprinting full-tilt across the field towards Robin, staying atop the mud like a small lizard running across a river.
When Chrom had finally caught up with her, she was clinging to his neck, decidedly filthy from contact but no less willing to let go. Robin, being quite prepared for this, merely shifted his weight to accommodate her as he discussed the finer points of the flight with Sumia. Luckily for everybody involved, he seemed less than eager about continuing the experiment.
"It's a flaw I really should have seen from the beginning, though," he said, paying no regard to Tharja's face buried in his neck. "I mean, you get bumps and dips like that all the time when you're seriously flying, don't you?"
"All the time," Sumia said, fretting slightly. "Cordelia almost had an accident like that earlier today on the pitch. I'm really sorry, though. It's my fault, I didn't think you would get thrown off."
"That's because you sit on one of those things like you're nailed down," Chrom said, putting his arm around her. "Can't blame you for forgetting that us mortals are only used to two dimensions."
"Well, whoever's fault it is, I think we can agree that it was a bad idea in general," Robin said. A muffled sardonic cheer was audible from Tharja's direction. Chrom merely nodded in agreement.
"Worth a shot, at least," he said. Truth be told, he thought there was still some merit in it, at least if they let the passengers get some basic experience in hanging on during tight maneuvers. But he wasn't about to bring that up in front of Tharja right now. Instead, he looked around between the four of them, thought over all they had been through today, shrugged, and then made the sort of judgement that call that people expected out of an effective leader.
"We all need to take at least three baths."