Focus
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
This came out of several things- a few ideas I'd been kicking around for years, a request to "write something with Marth as a little kid," a few more requests for pre-game fiction, and some cool LJ discussions on magic and healing with writers like Asherien and Xirysa. So, here we go with a pre-game FE11 story featuring Elice, Marth, and a walk-on by Merric.
"Watch over your brother."
This was one of the ground rules in Elice's life; one taken to heart even before Marth was old enough to run around and get himself into trouble. Elice made sure her small brother did not slip away to hide when it was time for his riding lessons (he had an inexplicable dislike of horses- most odd, for a prince of the horse-taming Alteans). She made certain he did not climb too high in the trees when searching for birds' nests, that he never ended up in the moat when trying to fish.
She might sit at the edge of the fountain with her study-books when Marth played knights-and-dragons in the courtyard with his small group of playfellows, but if she kept one eye on pages inscribed with the wonders of recovery magic, she kept the other upon the boys as they went at one another with wooden swords and lances. And, sometimes, real bursts of magic.
When one of these playfellows came to her, holding out red fingertips that bore the marks of his experiments with fire, Elice could not resist trying an experiment of her own.
"Hold still, Merric," she told the boy. "I'll fix this for you now and we won't have to tell anyone."
Merric, a spirited child despite his small size and frail build, found this secrecy to his liking; he grinned up at Elice as she placed her healing staff above his scalded fingers. She moved her lips in a silent chant as she thought of the keywords to the Heal spell, focusing her attention on the staff in her hands, willing it to release its powers. The red orb at the end of her staff began to glow with a warm light. Elice expected that she would have to deliberately stop the spell, but it seemed that the staff itself knew when enough of its energy had been used. As the red light died away, she saw that Merric's fingers were a healthy and ordinary light pink.
"Thank you, Princess," he said, lisping a little through his missing front teeth.
"My pleasure, Merric. It was good to be able to help you."
Elice felt quite proud of herself as the little boy with the unusual gift for battle magic ran off. She'd never used a staff to heal a person before, and doing so- even in secret, without the permission of her teachers- gave her a nice warm feeling like the glow of the orb in her staff. She also felt... bigger, somehow, as though something inside of her soul had expanded.
So, not a few days later, when her brother cut open his hand reaching for something sparkling in the garden that turned out to be a shard of glass, Elice had no qualms about another such "experiment."
"It's all right, Marth. I can heal this up for you."
She brushed the dirt off his bloodied palm with her handkerchief; the cut looked nasty, but the edges were neat and the wound itself looked clean. Marth, who ran from horses but could tolerate the sight of blood, waited patiently as Elice raised her staff. His wide blue eyes seemed mostly curious about what his big sister was going to do.
Elice concentrated on the keywords; it seemed easier this time to activate the staff. She could feel a subtle vibration through the staff as it worked, and she also felt that it was somehow changing her, giving her that wonderful feeling of being bigger, of being able to do more. She smiled at Marth, who was biting down upon his lip.
"There. It's fixed."
The cut in his palm had sealed nicely. It looked as though the injury were several days old.
"Thank you, sister," Marth said, and Elice heard something in his voice quite unlike Merric's breezy gratitude at escaping a lecture from the adults.
"Now, you be careful with that hand the rest of the day," she cautioned him. "No playing knights-and-dragons, all right?"
"No, sister."
She took her brother by his uninjured hand and led him back into the castle.
-x-
Elice began to borrow books from her mother's library, advanced books on recovery magic. She read of spells that could knit together broken bones, that could heal at a distance, that could heal great numbers of people at one time. Her teachers said that such spells could only be mastered after long years of study, but they did not know that Elice, at the age of ten, had been able to activate the most basic of all healing spells. Yet the spirits who guarded the spell had granted her access to it, so Elice considered it her duty to progress as quickly as the spirits would let her.
Besides, she wanted to touch that warm, glowing, expansive feeling again.
... yet humans, in their ambition, sought to surpass their benefactors. Envious of the longevity of dragons and scornful of their own mortality, they created the staff of Aum, which restored souls to dead bodies and caused the deceased to rise again, pink with health and sound of mind. This so alarmed the dragonkin that the staff was taken and locked away, deep in the wastes of Dolhr, at a temple so heavily guarded that no army of men might there trepass...
Elice shut the book; it was one of the more wild accounts of magical history, filled with tales of the strange "machines" used by the dragonkin in ancient times, of cities lit by towers a hundred feet high, of bridges that spanned impassable divides. It was entertaining, but there seemed not much of use to her in it.
Elice was reaching for a less fantastical work on warp magic when a skittering sound, the sound of leather on stone, caused her to look over her shoulder. Her brother had been playing quietly with his platoon of lead soldiers; his usual playmates were absent, for one had come down with a rash and the other, fever. Marth was far less inclined to get into mischief without Merric to incite any, and Elice thought it safe to let him play a while, marching the gaily painted toy army up and down the paving-stones.
In the meantime, her brother had arrived at other ideas.
"Marth, you shouldn't run at the wall like that."
A tumbler had come to court to entertain the royal family, and his antics had captivated Marth, who now was attempting to mimic the tumbler's ability to run up a wall and perform tricks in the air. These were tricks that the tumbler must have practiced for years to execute so flawlessly, and a child of Marth's age couldn't possibly expect to-
Elice realized what would happen a moment before it did; her brother's foot struck the uneven stone of the wall at the wrong angle and he fell to the courtyard pavement, landing hard upon one knee. Marth picked himself up before Elice- staff already in hand- reached him, but blood stained both that knee and the pavement.
"I'm not hurt, Elice," he said, as though this would convince her more than would the sight of the red splash across his knee.
"Just sit down and let me have a look at it," she replied. He'd made quite a mess of that knee, but at least he hadn't broken anything. The wound was wide but not very deep, and no gravel had gotten under the skin. "Marth, it's fine. I can heal this for you. Be still."
"No!" He scrambled away backwards until he came up against the castle wall. "Please. Just leave it alone, Elice. I'm fine."
"You're bleeding," she told him, using the same tone their mother used when either of them were being silly.
He gazed back at her, all large eyes and messy hair.
"No," Marth repeated, sounding less certain. He was, after all, trapped between the wall and his elder sister.
"Marth, let me help you." She took him by the hand and steered him into a sitting position against the wall. "This will only take a minute or two. It'll feel all warm and tingly and then the bleeding will stop, just like before."
"It hurt like burning when you did it last time."
This was so odd that Elice was left speechless for a moment.
"It won't hurt at all," she replied. "This is nice magic, and all you need to do is relax and let the staff do what it's supposed to."
She didn't want to imply that her brother, the future king of Altea, was afraid, though that was the way Marth was behaving. But Marth obeyed her, and sat braced against the wall while Elice activated her staff. Everything worked just as before- the gentle red glow, the lovely warm feeling inside of her- but Elice was nearly distracted into skipping a keyword by the sight of her brother with his small fists clenched at his sides, his face resolutely turned away from her. He gasped once, then pressed his lips together so as not to make a sound again.
"There. Almost good as new."
"Thank you, sister," Marth said, sounding oddly stiff, the way he did when their father had asked him to recite a little poem in front of an ambassador at a banquet. "I will do my best not to make a mistake like that ever again."
She wondered if Marth meant the mistake of falling, or the mistake of allowing her to heal him. As Marth ran from her as fast as his short legs would allow, Elice suspected it was the latter.
-x-
Healing a minor scrape shouldn't feel uncomfortable in the least. Elice remembered her own skinned knees and banged elbows from when she was very young, and having them healed had always been pleasant, almost like being tickled. She knew from her books that healing grave injuries was anything but pleasant, that both the healer and the patient would feel distress, but this just didn't make sense. She would think that she was doing something wrong, yet healing Merric's burns had been so easy! Why then, did she cause such pain to her own brother when she was only trying to help him? Was the work of healing even a small cut really beyond her? Had she done something terrible in going behind the backs of her teachers?
Elice worried over this in secret for several days, and felt a pang of dismay each time it seemed her brother might be avoiding her company. On the fourth day after the incident in the courtyard, Elice accompanied her mother on a tour of the kitchens and stores. Peering into sauce-pots and counting the jars of saffron on the shelves was a good distraction from Elice's worries. She and her mother ended up outside, where pitted plums lay on sheets to dry in the sunshine.
"When I was your age, perhaps a little older, I would spend summers at a convent, studying under the sisters. They supported the convent by tending an orchard and selling the dried fruit, and I'd help by turning over the plums and apricots to make sure everything dried properly. It turned out to be helpful to my studies- the work was almost like meditation, and I learned discipline working down the long rows of fruit."
"Yes, that sounds very helpful, Mother."
Maybe if she learned discipline from turning over dried plums, she wouldn't be such a terrible healer...
Elice was working down the fifth row of the second sheet when her mother asked if there was anything the matter. It was a great relief to simply be able to tell the whole story of her "experiments," or at least to tell as much as she dared. She left out Merric's name specifically, lest he be viewed as a bad influence in all of this. Merric already had gotten himself into trouble for using his untrained, unpredictable fire powers around the royal children.
When Elice was done, her mother was looking at her with wide, surprised eyes that looked very much like Marth's eyes.
"You performed a healing spell on your brother?"
"Yes, Mother. Only twice."
"Elice, your brother is very susceptible to the effects of magic. I've told you this before."
"I didn't think recovery spells counted..."
"As magic? Elice, all magic comes from the same source, and it can all be used for good or ill. It's very hard for magic to harm you, Elice. You're strong in it, so you feel almost nothing if someone uses a healing spell on you- just a trace, like the warm touch of sunlight. Your brother doesn't have that, and what he likely felt when you tried your spellcraft on him was something akin to being grazed by a blast of light magic."
"He said it burned." Elice now felt a knot of regret forming in her throat.
"Yes, to him it probably did. Light burns, Elice. It burns and can kill."
The queen of Altea kept a number of useful things dangling from her belt, and one of these was a small piece of curved glass, like a tiny version of a scholar's monocle. Elice watched as her mother held this lens to the light, casting a concentrated beam of sunlight upon one of the drying-sheets, a beam too bright to look upon. When Elice closed her eyes, she could still see the bright spot of that sunbeam dancing before her, and when she dared open her eyes again, she saw the black-edged hole that now marred one corner of the sheet.
"No more experiments with your brother. Not until you've mastered your studies and your teachers can affirm to me that you're ready to practice your gifts. Do you understand me, Elice?"
"Yes, Mother."
-x-
Offensive light magic, as in the great spell of Aura, works by principles similar to the recovery class of magic. It infuses the target with an excess of vital energy, such that brain and body both are unable to tolerate the force of vital essence...
Elice slammed shut the book with enough force to break loose a few flakes of gilding from its pages. She had not been able to forget her mother's demonstration with the burning-lens, and she could imagine the full effects of the Aura spell all too well. It made her glad that she was being trained in recovery magic, even if it did all stem from the same source. Offensive magic just seemed terrifying when its principles were laid out in writing.
Elice gathered up her books and staff and decided to walk to the stables; Marth ought to be nearly done with his riding-lessons, and hopefully he would let Elice walk with him back to the castle. Elice arrived at the stables just after the lesson ended; the grooms were brushing down Marth's pony, and Marth himself was looking on... and was, Elice noted, standing awkwardly, as though he didn't want to completely stand on his left leg.
"You'll give him sugar anyway, won't you? He didn't mean it," Marth was saying as Elice approached.
"Of course, Your Highness. D'you need any help- ah, Princess Elice. Come to walk your brother home?"
"Yes. Is anything the matter?"
The head groom waited for Marth to issue a soft "no" before telling Elice that everything at the royal stables was just fine, and did the princess want a tour?
"That would be kind of you, Lot, but it'll have to wait for another day. We need to be back. Come along, Marth."
"Yes, sister."
"So, what did the pony do... without meaning it?" Elice asked it once the grooms and stableboys were well out of earshot.
"He kicked me." Marth pulled up the left leg of his riding-breeches to show Elice the back of his calf. The discolored, slightly swollen skin definitely had the look of a pony's hoofprint. "Not very hard. I... I was holding him wrong, maybe."
"Well, now, that's ugly, but I think that ought to heal up. We need to put ice on it as soon as we get you home."
Really, they should have had some ice on hand at the stables, but the groom and his men likely took the view that being able to handle a pony's kick was all part of toughening up, as much a part of training as being able to stay upright in the saddle. So Elice gathered, anyway.
"You can heal it if you want to, Elice."
Marth was looking sidelong through his lashes at her staff as he said it, and Elice understood that this tentative offer really was that- an offering to mend relations between them. An offering to bite his lip and deal with the pain if healing the bruise was what Elice wanted. And Elice could simply have said that a bruise, even an ugly one, wasn't something to expend her staff on, but instead she placed her hands on Marth's shoulders and bent down so they faced one another, eye to eye.
"We'll put some ice on it, and then I'll get some herbs from the garden and make a poultice to take the swelling down. Then I'll see if Father will agree to cancel your riding lessons until you're better- if you agree not to play outside until lessons start again. All right?"
Elice was pleased with herself for thinking up the deal, a bargain that allowed her brother to get out of something he hated without being rewarded overmuch for it. And Marth for his part appeared to grasp the terms of the deal and to find it acceptable.
"Yes, sister."
And he said it in the way that let Elice know that Marth thought his elder sister was just marvelously clever and maybe even perfect. He slipped his small hand inside hers, and as they walked home, Elice decided to forgive herself for not doing a perfect job of watching over her brother. From now on, she was simply going to do better.
The End
The concepts of how magic work in Archanea, and some of the terminology used here, come from the FE3 designers' notes.
Merric isn't intended as a pyro (though Pontifex Wendell does indicate in FE11 that Merric likes to cause "explosions"); my headcanon says that magical children pass through a stage of uncontrolled outbursts before they enter formal training, and Fire spells are of course the most basic offensive spells in FE1/3/11/12. Fortunately he got out of Fire and went into Wind Magic.
As for Marth, he has abysmal RES in the remakes- that's true of a lot of non-magical characters, but Marth doesn't get a promotion bonus and so he usually stays around zero RES in FE11 unless you use stat boosters. By Archanea standards his total lack of resistance isn't freakish (it would be by the standards of other FE game worlds), but I imagine having a child with no magical resistance at all would be a cause of at least some concern to Queen Liza. Too many magic-using assassins out there...