Juggler

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

swords

"Once upon a time, there lived a little princess, who was born to the sword…"

Leif would go still then, would pull the covers up to his chin and listen closely to Raquesis. He didn't close his eyes, though, not yet. He'd watch her from underneath his lashes because she was beautiful, with hair like dandelions, and he loved watching her read as much as he liked listening to her voice or to the soft sounds of each page turning in the book. Sometimes he would manage to stay awake to the very end of the tale of the princess and her magic sword, but often the lovely sounds would send him off to sleep in the middle, and so he'd have to ask for that story again the next night, and the next, and the next.

fire

One reason Leif loved bedtime stories with Raquesis was that she would make a little ball of fire in her hand and use it as a light while she read to him and Nanna. Finn couldn't do any magic and had to make do with a candle. Leif thought the old book that Raquesis balanced in her lap was surely a book of great stories, each of them as exciting as the tale of the princess with the magic sword, but one day Leif got to the age where he realized that Raquesis turned a different number of pages in the story every night, and so she surely couldn't be reading it to them. He decided to catch a glimpse of the actual writing on the pages in the book that Raquesis handled so carefully and then put away on a high shelf, and on the night that he succeeded Leif realized that strange signs and symbols covered the pages. It wasn't a book of stories at all, he realized, but something else altogether, something wonderful and strange.

lances

Finn told stories, too, but they were stories about Leif's own people, and that meant a couple of different things. Stories about Leif's parents made him sad because his parents were dead and he had Finn and Raquesis and Nanna instead of his real parents and sister. Stories about the Earth Lance of Leonster were sad and a little frightening, but he was getting to the age where he wanted to be scared, a little, as long as everything was all right in the end. The folktales of Leonster were frightening too sometimes, even if the talking animals and little fairy people always belonged to some other town long ago and far away and Leif should never, ever meet any.

Raquesis didn't tell stories like that. Her talking-animal stories were funny, like the one about the rooster who played tricks on people, and the stories she told about his parents were different from the ones that Finn had to tell, tales of how his heroic father was once a schoolboy who got into trouble for things and his sainted mother was a tomboy princess who also got in trouble for things. And of course Raquesis had the other story, the old one from Leif's childhood that wasn't in a book, the one about princess with the magic sword who tried to face down an army by herself and then tried to save her brother.

Leif went through a time where the parts he liked most were either about the brother who was a perfect paladin or about the other warriors who showed up to rescue the princess from the army that encircled her castle. He thought they were the actual heroes of the tale for the way they rescued the princess, until one day that felt wrong, somehow, and they weren't.

bows

In one of her stories Raquesis spoke of winning an archery contest against the most skilled bowman of the Kingdom of Verdane. Leif never saw her fire an arrow, from a silver bow or any other bow, and soon forgot this story.

thunder

It wasn't until they left Alster that Leif realized how much magic Raquesis could actually do, and how it wasn't just for parlor-tricks like the ball of fire that cast a warm glow in his old bedroom. He watched her bring down thunderbolts from the skies so that enemy knights fell to the ground, smoke seeping out of their armor, and for the first time ever he really understood that Raquesis was a warrior just like his parents and grandparents and all the Crusaders. It scared him a little, or maybe a lot, because to him Raquesis meant a warm embrace and a lovely voice telling him sweet things and funny things and she was almost as good as having his own mother.

He got to see Raquesis use her magical sword, too, the one that made people fall down dead without ever touching them. His mother had carried a sword like that and she'd left it to him, but he wasn't ever allowed to play with it and now Leif understood why.

staves

For almost as long as he could remember Leif knew that Raquesis was very good at making scrapes and bruises go away, but as he watched her close up the terrible gash in Finn's shoulder Leif realized that healing magic was really magic and just as serious as making fireballs or thunderbolts.

"I'll teach you how to do this someday," Raquesis said to Nanna, because Nanna was scared and crying and a princess descended from Crusaders shouldn't cry.

"Teach me, too," Leif said without hesitation. "Please," he added when Raquesis cast him a strange look, and then she smiled her beautiful smile.

axes

Raquesis carried an axe with a silver blade and often as not she used it for chopping up firewood when they were "camping" (Leif knew now it wasn't camping but he still pretended for Nanna's sake). One day Leif noticed she didn't carry it any more and when he asked Raquesis where the beautiful axe had gone, she just smiled. This was the other smile, the sad one, the one he'd come to associate with secrets.

wind

"Tell me the story about the princess with the magical sword," Leif said, because his eyes and throat were scratchy and his face was hot, his head was heavy and he just wanted to curl up under the blankets like a very small child. Since he couldn't do any of that he at least wanted to hear the old tale that once lulled him to sleep at night.

She gave him the sad smile, then, the one of many secrets, and she began to tell it. Though part of Leif wanted very much to sleep he hung on to her every word, and so he heard the story now almost as though hearing it for the first time ever. It was a story about a little princess who was born to use swords and tried to defend a castle all by herself but wasn't strong enough, and a bold band of warriors from other lands had to save her. Then she was given a magic sword that would give her great riches, but that didn't make her strong enough to save her brother the flawless paladin when he was in trouble. Then her brother gave her another sword, one enchanted with deep magical powers to protect her own life, but that protection didn't extend to the brother she loved or the kingdom they cherished, and so she lost both. So the princess then knew the limits of her swords and began to dedicate herself to every other martial art known— the lance, the axe, the bow and arrows, the magical arts of fire and thunder and wind and divine light, and even the ways of healing. She could wound a man eight different ways and could save his life a heartbeat later. She had mastery over every discipline.

And yet…

Leif then knew the secret in her melancholy smile. Raquesis, for all her grand accomplishments, hadn't been able to save her friends, those heroes who once had saved her when she was a young princess with only a simple sword in her hand. His father, his mother, his uncle Sigurd, all of their fallen comrades…

"Watch over me, Mother," he said, giving her the forbidden endearment he'd allowed himself only in his private fancies. "Watch over me, teach me, and one day I can watch over you."

Princesses descended from Crusaders weren't supposed to cry, but Leif thought that maybe Raquesis did. And because Leif was just a fragile child-prince, born to a sword he couldn't yet use, he cried with her.

light

"I don't have the magic for this," he said, because his mother's sword was just a thing of cold metal in his hands, beautiful beyond measure and something he did not yet deserve.

"You will," she promised him. "You have to use your magic to strengthen it, even as you gain strength in your arms."

He could waken a spark of rose-colored light from the blade. Just a spark. Hour by hour, day by day, they practiced. Raquesis threw what she had at him— fire and thunder and wind magic from her old worn tomes, elementary spells that she made even weaker so as not to hurt a novice. Leif fought back with his mother's Light Brand until that spark of rosy light became a glow like the dawn and he could fling magic in his teacher's direction.

"Use the Runesword against me," he said in his excitement, but this time Raquesis didn't smile.

"You're not ready," she said. "I would never use that on a child."

"Please," he said, but she resisted him, and so Leif could not meet the magic of her sword with his own.

"When you have mastered the Light Brand, I'll fight you," she promised. Leif waited.

On the day he stood before her as master of the Light Brand, Leif had in his arsenal an axe and a lance, both silver, a quiver full of arrows meant for a silver bow, a stack of tomes, and a staff that surpassed anything Nanna could use. He was no longer the boy who could protect neither himself nor his kingdom.

"I have worked hard to be a son worthy of you, Mother," he said to Raquesis, and she gave him the good smile then, the dazzling one full of beauty and joy and light.

The End

A/N: The title was inspired by some pieces of fan art in which Master Knight Raquesis "juggles" her arsenal, and is an oblique reference to Leif's Trickster class in FE13's DLC.