To Freely Serve

Disclaimer: I do not own Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon or any of its characters.

Warning: Rating increased to T for wartime ugliness.

Chapter Two: Six Guys and Norne

By the time they finally got to Talys, Norne understood why Prince Marth had gone there to hide. It took forever and a day to get to the place, and Talys was so far off mainland Archanea that even on the best day, you couldn't possibly see the continent from the island. Even worse, they had to take the long way there, going around the Isle of Macedon instead of cutting through the sea between Dolhr and Gra. Norne never had sailed before and feared she might spent the voyage seasick like poor Sir Abel, who was as green as his armor most of the time. Aside from one rough day rounding the south end of Macedon, though, Norne felt just fine, and by the end of their journey she was climbing the rigging in hopes of being the first to catch sight of land.

Along the way, Norne collected the answers to many mysteries. No one knew the whereabouts of Queen Liza, but they had a fair idea of where Princess Elice was, and it wasn't pretty. The princess stayed behind on purpose when the castle fell, just to make sure her young brother had a chance to escape. On hearing that, Norne vowed that she wasn't ever going to complain about the food or the bad air below deck or any of it, not with their own princess suffering as bad, or worse. And as for the prince, Norne had been right in her reckoning of young Marc the archer there at the Sword and Crown- the boy was a newly-made orphan who hadn't begun to get used to the idea. He didn't seem like he was planning to get used to it anytime soon, either, given that he continued to speak of his mother as though she was alive.

"My mother is a princess of Talys. She's the king's younger sister. She's always wanted us to visit the island. Maybe she and Elice will be able to join us. Elice told me she was going to search for Mother." He went on like this for most of the way to Talys.

So it was that they crept out of Altea like thieves, but came into Talys like it was a second home. Once off the boat, it was straight to the castle to meet with the King of Talys himself, who acted like a whole pack of long-lost relatives had finally made it to his table. His Highness made the biggest fuss over the prince, of course, but he had a word for each of the soldiers, which impressed Norne. Sir Jagen, formerly known to Norne as Gramps, introduced her to the king and queen and their little daughter.

"Your Highnesses, this is Norne of the town of Port Anri. When the fortunes of Altea ebbed their lowest, and every sworn knight was marked for death, she stepped forward and offered to freely serve her country."

Put that way, it sounded almost heroic. To be fair, when Norne volunteered her services, she didn't quite realize a slow boat to Talys was part of the bargain. But she just smiled at the king, and pulled off a passable curtsey, hoping her manners were to be judged by the standards of soldiers and not ladies. Nobody laughed, so Norne figured she'd done well enough. She was glad when the attention shifted back to Prince Marth, though.

All through the dinner- a feast, really, with more food than Norne had ever seen in one place- Norne thought she felt a pair of eyes upon her. She finally realized that the big eyes of the little Talys princess were watching her.

"Are you a Pegasus Knight, Norne?" the princess finally asked in her honey-sweet voice.

"No, my lady princess. I'm an archer."

"Oh." Princess Caeda tipped her head and looked to be thinking it over. "I'm a Pegasus Knight, but I think we can still be friends." And she smiled the most shining smile Norne had seen in many a long year.

"Ah... it would be an honor, Princess!"

Friends! With the right royal princess of the Isle of Talys! Norne decided life on the king's charity was going to be even more interesting than she expected.

-x-

The king didn't lack for generosity. He gave them their very own castle on the eastern side of the island and a band of servants to go with it. They had a cook and a groundskeeper, a serving maid and a scullery maid. At first, it bothered Norne to be waited on; she showed up in the kitchens to lend a hand, and the cook shooed her away. Norne was a soldier now, and she might be the lowest soldier in the pecking order, but that was still a ways above scullery maid. But Norne wanted something to make herself useful, as one couldn't fill an entire day with archery practice, and so she found work in caring for the horses. They had three great war-horses, a couple of useless old nags, and Norne's own Isolde. She'd been relieved that Isolde survived the journey, coming as it did after a run from one end of Altea to the other and back. She probably should have offered so fine a horse to the prince, but he didn't ask for Isolde, and Norne was secretly glad of that.

As far as living went, the King gave Prince Marth an allowance in gold to keep them all fed and clothed, and he gave them permission to use his own hunting forest, well-stocked with deer and small game. Norne did a lot of the hunting herself- better to practice on a moving target, after all- but the knights accompanied her some of the time. Sir Draug joined her most often, but to Norne's surprise Prince Marth came along more than a few times. It made Norne nervous at first- was she supposed to set things up so the prince always got the kill? But it turned out the prince, while not a "very good" archer at all, was at least passable with a crossbow when it came to bringing home a bit for supper. More than that, he didn't seem to care if Norne outshone him with the bow. Norne was supposed to be good with a bow, and the prince was expected to master the sword, and that was that.

So they settled into a new life that was probably as strange for the others as it was for Norne. Sometimes, it was almost like a family, with Sir Jagen playing the kind of father who said no and winked yes, and Malledus the old bishop playing the kind of mother who truly ran a house and just let the father fancy himself in charge. This house was upside down, though, because when push came to shove it was the word of the littlest boy that mattered most. It was like having the Fool's Festival every day of the year, with a child-king telling everybody to jump and them doing it. Norne and her new set of brothers- Draug and Abel and Cain- slowly got used to living with the old men, the prince, and each other. Abel named their home "The Villa," and when Norne asked what a villa was, Abel explained it was the word for a fancy house in the Holy City of Pales. Norne reckoned that was some kind of joke she didn't know enough to get.

There was plenty to do besides archery practice, in the end. Prince Marth let them all know there was never any doubt but that they'd set off for home again. He had to find his mother and sister, after all. Time was the issue; the King of Talys, Sir Jagen, and Malledus were agreed on two points- things were going to get worse on the continent before they were to get better, and Prince Marth was entirely too young to pull off any invasion. Before they could get around to saving Queen Liza and Princess Elice, the prince needed to get better at using his sword, and the rest of them needed a plan. The old men did most of that planning, as they actually knew what they were doing. Sir Jagen was a veteran knight, of course, and Norne had been hearing stories of his great deeds going as far back as she could remember. Malledus turned out to be a "tactician," which was some kind of expert on how to fight a war. The pair of them set all five of their children to preparations for a full-scale invasion of the continent.

Cain and Prince Marth dug into dusty piles of books on strategy and tactics, trying to cram six hundred years of warfare into their heads. Abel took care of the maps- he studied old ones, made new ones, and must have memorized the lay of the whole continent. Draug brushed up on the history and peoples of all the different kingdoms and free cities of Archanea, figuring out who might be friends, and who were definitely enemies, and which ones they might play against the other when the time came. Meanwhile, Norne looked after the horses and kept her ears open for gossip. She and Isolde rode around the island more times than Norne could keep track of, visiting every dock and drinking hole in Talys to collect news from the mainland and elsewhere. It was interesting work, and she did make herself useful; more than once, Norne caught wind of some new development in the war before they learned the official news from the king. It wasn't so much that Norne blended in as it was that people tended to figure a young girl wasn't much important and so spoke freely around her.

A typical mission would begin with some everyday task like a trip to market; on one such day, Norne went to a village to the south of their castle on the grounds that Prince Marth needed some more writing supplies.

"You're from the mainland," a pretty young shopkeeper said as Norne filled her basket with parchment and jars of ink. "You must be one of the refugees."

"Aye," Norne said cheerfully. No point in lying about it, was there? Besides, she couldn't pass herself off as a local, even before she opened her mouth. Copper-colored hair was a rarity on Talys; everyone Norne met sported either shades of brown, or hair so black it was near to blue.

"There's a healer over in the village south of the castle from the mainland, too. I think he said he was from Altea."

Norne paused with her hand suspended above the basket. Could Father Harald have ended up in Talys, as well? But she asked the shopkeeper for a description, and the skinny baldheaded man hiding in the other village couldn't be Father Harald by any stretch of the imagination.

Norne dallied a while in the tavern after she completed her shopping. The Blue Pegasus was much like the Sword and Crown in some ways, with the customers an odd mix of old village men and young seafarers. Norne wasn't sure she liked the food, as Talysian fare came more highly spiced than she was used to, but the lamb stew was comforting enough. The idea of eating meat every day, instead of just feast days, was a novelty she hadn't tired of yet. She'd also developed a taste for the pies filled with little round berries that left both teeth and fingers stained a vivid shade of blue. The fraughan-berry pie gave Norne an excuse to loiter as she listened to a pair of old men playing checkers near the door; she'd encountered them before and they usually had something interesting for her to bring back to report.

This time, the men chatted happily about a rumor so heady it verged on a scandal. It seemed the Talys King didn't have any heir but his little daughter, and so the villagers felt this mysterious lad who looked a bit like young Princess Caeda must be her own half-brother, the King's son by some other lady. It seemed perfectly simple to the old men- the King had given up on having a son by the Queen, and was grooming his by-blow to serve as the heir. On one level it was daft, and mean to the poor little Princess in the bargain, but part of Norne was delighted. Of course there was going to be talk about this strange group of people holding court in the old castle. With rumors like this one going around, no one should ever guess the truth.

Norne reported the rumor to Sir Jagen when she got back to The Villa. Sir Jagen had a laugh over it, as Norne expected.

"Let them talk," he said. "The more wild the rumors, the less likely anyone will be to latch on to the truth." And so Norne had the quiet satisfaction of knowing her own instincts weren't far off from the great knight's reading of the situation.

Other days, the rumors weren't quite so amusing.

"The Dolhr-Grust alliance is offerin' a hundred thousand pieces of gold to anyone who can bring the, er, former prince of Altea to the occupation government. In any condition."

Norne heard a clink of steel on pewter, and without even looking she knew that the prince was playing his game of pretending that his cut of meat was General Camus of said Dolhr-Grust alliance.

"They're fools," said Abel of the enemy generals as he worked on his maps that evening. "If they had any sense at all, they'd make the most of the rumors that the prince is dead. Produce a body, even- they've killed enough people to manage it. Instead, they spread the word that there's a steep price on Prince Marth's head, which just serves to keep hope alive in anyone listening. They don't deserve to hold on what they've conquered."

Norne looked at Abel with admiration.

"It's a good thing you're on our side and not theirs, Sir Abel. They'd be able to hold onto it then, I'm sure."

Abel flashed a quick smile at her, and a touch of color rose in his face. He quickly bent back over his maps, and Norne watched him a while. The squiggles and lines that came from his pen were so graceful, a far cry from Norne's own writing, which looked more like the scratches left by chickens in the dust. Norne was so entranced by the work Abel did with his pen that it was a while before she noticed she didn't recognize anything on the map he was marking up.

"That's a different one, Sir Abel." The map looked to have more water on it than land.

"This? It's a map of the world, Norne."

"The whole world... you mean there's other continents besides Archanea?" Norne always had thought that Archanea was the whole of the world.

"This, to the west, is Valencia." Norne took him at his word there, as the map itself said "Barensia" pretty plainly. It was a small continent, and looked as though there weren't but two countries on it.

"Does that say 'Northern Unknowne Land?'" She pointed to a large vague shape in the upper left part of the map.

"Indeed. It's the legendary continent of Yugdral."

"If it's an Unknown Land, how does anyone know it's even there?"

"Myths, Norne. Old stories. 'The Child of Light, true son of his murdered father, gathered his companions and rode against the Dark Empire.' Have you ever heard the Song of Selis, Norne?"

"Not a bit of it, sir." Of course, she might well have. Father Harald told all manner of stories and songs to the children.

"They say people from the Unknown Land sailed over the cold seas in great ships painted like dragons. Some landed in northern Aurelis, where they turned their backs on the sea and became the people of the plains. Some went south to Macedon. Maybe some landed in Altea- I've heard you can tell the descendants of the Yugdral sailors by the color of their hair." He reached out to tweak a strand of her hair. Norne squinted at the coppery blur Abel held up in front of her.

"It's not nice to tease me, Sir Abel."

"I'm not teasing. 'Norne' is an uncommon name in Altea. You'd fit right in with the ladies of the Song of Selis." Abel seemed to realize he was making her a little cross, and he put away the world map and pulled out a very different one.

"Look there, Norne. Galder Harbor. Are you familiar with it?"

"No, sir. I've heard of the place, but I don't know more than that."

"When we set sail from here, that will be our destination." He had a smile on his lips and a faraway look in his eye. "They'll be expecting a direct assault on Altea, up the river to the capital. They won't imagine what we actually have planned for them."

"And why might they be expecting us with such confidence, sir?"

"Because it's what a noble-minded fool would do. And because a little red-haired scout will be spreading the rumor that our prince has just that sort of noble foolishness in his head." He winked at her. "And I'm not referring to Cain."

"Aye, sir!"

The next evening after supper Abel brought out some of his works, including his own version of the World Map. Most everyone was impressed by his skill, but Prince Marth didn't care for the way Abel described the ocean between Archanea and Yugdral.

"'Here be Dragons.' Are you trying to be funny, Abel?"

Abel had a little light smile that he used when he was trying to calm somebody down. He used it on Cain most of the time, but now he put it on for Prince Marth.

"It's just a traditional way of expressing man's terror of the unknown, sire."

"Why bother? We know where the dragons are." And the prince left a slash of black ink across Abel's carefully-lettered drawing of Dolhr. Abel looked down at the damaged map, and Norne could see the little smile never faded.

"Forgive me, sire. I do not mean to make light of our situation." Sir Abel rolled up his maps and left with all his grace and elegance in one piece.

Norne spent the rest of the evening out in the stables. Draug came looking for her after a couple of hours; he found her in the hayloft making braided shapes out of hay stems.

"I'm trying to keep out of sight," she confessed.

The prince was, in Norne's personal opinion, something of a pill at times- crying without real provocation and snapping at the old men. Norne was willing to overlook such evidence of unkingly behavior in a little boy, though she knew that if she ever heard that Prince Marth had mistreated the horses, she'd have a hard time forgiving him. Abuse of dumb animals just wasn't something Norne could stomach. Abuse of his elders wasn't much better, but there was some history of ill will between the prince and his tactician that nobody had properly explained to Norne. It had something to do with the way Princess Elice was left behind, and something to do with a knight that died during their flight to Port Anri. These tragedies weren't things spoken of around The Villa.

"You might want to come down, Norne. It's getting dark."

She came down, but she didn't go back to The Villa right away. She and Draug seated themselves on hay bales and talked about nothing much- the barn cats, at first, and then the stray cats Norne used to feed in Port Anri, and then Draug told her of the barracks cat that served as the mascot to the Temple Knights.

"Matilda was a good girl. She slept at the foot of my bed most nights, but she took a fancy to Cain as well. She'd leave him presents." He and Norne shared a smile at the thought of Sir Cain, a stickler for dignity, waking up to dead mice on his pillow. "Matilda disappeared a few days before the castle fell. I have to wonder if she didn't suspect something."

That ended the conversation on a gloomy note, and they were silent for a while. Norne leaned back on the prickly bale, enjoying the smell of the hay and the soft, warm fur of the cat cuddled next to her. The cat was purring so loud that she almost missed the next thing Draug said.

"Norne... you helped Abel to bury Gordin."

"Aye." It wasn't really a question.

"I knew Gordin well. Good lad, excited about having a place in the Royal Guard. He had a brother about three years younger who just adored him. Ryan wanted to join the Guard as well as soon as he was of an age for it." He paused, and even though Norne couldn't seem him well in the near dark, she could sense how uncomfortable Draug was. "The Gra forces took him somehow, captured or kidnapped him. They stuffed him in a Gra uniform and left him in our path, hoping we'd kill one of our own by mistake."

Norne sucked in her breath; she well remembered the dead boy's odd uniform.

"I wasn't there, but I'm told Abel was about to do the lad in with his javelin when Prince Marth recognized him as ours. Well, as soon as he was freed he happily joined in the battle- the skirmish outside your own town, Norne. Not an hour later, he was dead. I never did have the chance to say goodbye to him."

There wasn't much Norne could say to that. She continued to stroke the cat, who began to knead its paws into her side. It felt good in a way.

"He was just a trainee, of course. Only had about two years of service in, none of it in combat. He needed coddling- most new archers do." Draug sighed, and Norne could picture the expression he must have on his face. "But he had the makings of a great sniper."

"There's a lot that happens that doesn't seem right, Big D." Norne had learned that Draug practically hated his name, felt it was an ugly name that made him seem a forbidding person, when nothing could be farther from the truth.

"Yes. Too much. Far too much." Draug shifted noisily on his own bale of hay, and Norne had the impression he was looking at her. "I hope I'm not upsetting you, Norne."

"Not at all," she said promptly. "There's some men who need to keep everything inside of them, and some who need to let it all out. Whatever keeps your own heart in one piece is the right thing, that's my way of seein' it. Sometimes a man's not even consistent to himself. Take our prince. He'll talk of his mum and sister 'til runs short of breath, but you don't ever hear him speak of his father."

That wasn't entirely true. The prince said prayers for his father's soul at every service. But he wouldn't speak of him otherwise, any more than he would say prayers for the souls of the queen or Princess Elice.

-x-

They passed another summer in Talys, and the autumn, then the winter. Winter in Talys wasn't at all bad; warm ocean currents coming up from Macedon kept the air mild, and the taller peaks had a dusting of snow while the valleys stayed green. Best of all, there was plenty of food, even in the depths of the Ice Moon. Soon enough, the trees were in bud, and flowers started poking out of the grass.

One day, Norne was out hunting with the prince, and happened to notice for the first time that he had a couple of inches on her. His arms, once thin as reeds, were now thicker around than Norne's own, and he fired his bow with surprising strength. If the prince weren't so set on mastering the sword, he might have made a decent archer. Then, too, he seemed calmer of late; the outbursts of crying and such had mostly stopped. Part of it seemed to be that the prince was more caught up now in planning revenge than he was in stewing over past griefs, but a good part of the change was, in Norne's opinion, down to the influence of a fair little lass. Princess Caeda used riding practice on her pegasus as an excuse to visit The Villa, and it turned out she was far more interested in the prince than she was in being friends with Norne. Meanwhile, Prince Marth seemed invested in making a good impression on the little Princess of Talys. Whatever the cause of the improved behavior, Norne was glad of it, as it allowed her to imagine she could bring up a tricky matter with her prince.

"It's awful nice of His Highness to let us use his own hunting forest," Norne said, playing simple as an opener.

"Yes. The king has been most gracious to all of us." Prince Marth nocked another arrow, then reconsidered the dove he was aiming for and put the arrow away. "What do you think of him, Norne?"

Norne very nearly couldn't believe it. She had her way of bringing up a delicate subject all plotted out, and here the prince up and asked her for an opinion! Not that she gave her opinion, exactly.

"Well, most everybody in Talys is right pleased with their king. I've heard some talk of people who had loyalties to a different clan, and felt left out of things after Unification, but otherwise everyone thinks that havin' one king has brought nothing but good to the island." She watched the prince out of the corner of her eye, checking to make sure it was safe to keep talking. "If there's one sore point- beggin' your pardon for sayin' this- it's this hunting forest."

She didn't even need to explain what the problem was; Prince Marth frowned, but it seemed a more thoughtful frown than the look that preceded a royal tantrum.

"The forest laws exist for reasons beyond selfishness, Norne," he replied, and Norne was relieved that he didn't sound at all cross with her. "The king's protected stock ensures that, even in a poor year, there will always be enough deer for the following season. We have fishing laws in Altea for the same purpose."

Norne was quiet; come to think of it, she'd heard a bit of complaining about the fishing laws, too, back when they were at home.

"The punishments may sound severe, but King Mostyn knows he can't stop every poacher determined to shoot in his forest. He can only punish the ones he does catch in a manner that might discourage others from trying their own hand at it."

It sounded sensible enough coming from her prince, but Norne still felt in her gut that a public flogging was a bit too much lay on someone who'd stolen a rabbit.

"Aye, sire. It makes sense that the king's just looking out for his land and his people. All the same, sire, maybe the punishments shouldn't be quite so harsh?" And Norne laughed her I'm-just-a-silly-common-archer laugh, and hoped the prince wouldn't take offense at her for trying to play the advisor.

"The happier everyone is with their king, the safer we are here," Norne said to her pillow that night, as she couldn't shake the feeling that she'd gotten a bit too meddlesome. "If we get turned out of this place, I don't know where we can run to." The capital of the Holy Kingdom of Archanea had fallen, and if that was lost, there wasn't much left for Dolhr to conquer.

Some time later, Norne heard chatter in the village that King Mostyn had stopping giving out floggings for poaching in his forest, and instead assigned any caught poachers to do hard labor in exchange for their stolen supper. Norne smiled to herself, figuring that Prince Marth had brought the subject up with little Princess Caeda, and the princess in turn took the word back to her father. She probably turned on the tears, at that. Norne never spoke of the matter again to the prince, nor did he ever mention the forest laws to her, but Norne felt in her heart that maybe she'd done a little bit to keep their new home in Talys secure.

In the end, though, it didn't matter what Norne did or wanted, any more than it ever had. War came looking for them, but instead of the Sable Order or Macedonian dragonriders, it was pirates. Princess Caeda came screaming out of the sky one blue evening to announce that pirates had come ashore in the west and were endangering her father's castle. After a short period of where's-my-cuirass, where's-my-javelin, the Temple Knights rode again, with Norne running along behind them.

The pirates had a head start on the Temple Knights, though- they'd already sacked and burned the village where Norne did her shopping. The Blue Pegasus was a heap of ashes with copper pots and chess-pieces scattered in the filth. Norne saw one old man dead at the chessboard, saw shopkeepers slain in their own stalls, lying beneath their own ruined goods. The pretty girl who sold inks and parchment lay dead in the lane with her skirts hiked up around her hips. Norne's eyes burned from the smoke and her own tears, and it gave her horrible satisfaction to bury an arrow of her steel bow in the throat of the next pirate she laid eyes upon. Even after they'd saved the other village, and rescued that Altean priest, and reclaimed the castle, the bitterness lingered in Norne's throat. In spite of King Mostyn's praise and generosity, Norne was right glad when they sailed west to plant the flag of Altea on the mainland again, and to let all of Archanea know that Prince Marth and his knights were back in the fight.

End Chapter Two

Author's Notes: Well, there's my take on the Exile Years. Marth isn't on his best behavior in this chapter, but in his defense (and my own) he's going through his teenaged Awkward Phase (age fourteen through sixteen). That's hard enough without war, murder, exile, and living on charity. I took the FEDS reference to "shak[ing] with anger and grief" to be a recurrent issue rather than a one-time instance. He's settled down by the end of the chapter, anyway.

Canon'n'Stuff: No, there isn't anything in canon to back up Queen Liza being from Talys. I liked the idea and I think it makes sense in terms of King Mostyn being a true ally of Altea- he's protecting his own sister's kids. Yes, that makes Marth and Caeda first cousins in this story. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and it's historically plausible. Deal. Same thing with Abel the Mapmaker- I make him the artistic cavalier to contrast with straight-arrow future tactician Cain. The Yugdral (Jugdral) reference has a grain of canonical truth, though, as apparently the two continents are on the same world, with the events of FE4 and FE5 taking place a thousand years prior to FE1/3/DS. Oh, and Talys is vaguely Irish in this, the same way Altea is vaguely English. "Ogma" is a Celtic name, and "Caeda" looks to me like Romanized Celtic something-or-other, so... yeah.

And yes, those were intimations of Draug/Norne. Next stop, the actual war path. Full notes to go on my DevArt account when I have the time.