Sleep of the Just

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

Warnings: All pairings are canon, though some of them are not presented as mutually exclusive in this case. In other words, love triangles. Consider this your only warning.

It could be you, it could be me

Working the door, drinking for free

Carrying on with your conspiracies

Filling the room with a sense of unease

Chapter One

It was not difficult for Innes to feign a depression after the duel. Not difficult at all. On his return to the Frelian capital, Innes kept to his chambers. Meals were sent up to him, well-wishers were turned away from his apartments- though his informants were welcomed. Only at night did he emerge, slipping down to the practice-yard where he emptied one quiver of arrows after another into a target until either the target was obliterated or his arrows all were spent. The servants treated him as though this were normal behavior, which made it easier for Innes to continue the charade. Had they treated him as a child, or as some manner of invalid, he might have grown disgusted and given it up.

His sister, though, was bemused by his actions.

"Don't be silly," Tana pleaded with him. "Eirika didn't care about the outcome of that stupid duel. She won't reject you just because you lost to... to him."

Tana, at least, had learned to treat Ephraim's name like the most vile curse when in her brother's presence.

"Go to her, Innes. Talk with her. She will love you, Innes."

At least Tana had the grace to admit that Eirika didn't love him at the present. But hope welled eternal in Tana's heart- it was so like her, to think a square might be made a circle if they all willed it.

But if Tana believed Innes to be wallowing in the grief of a love denied, their royal father saw otherwise. His pale eyes regarded Innes with little concern, only a silent acknowledgment that there was something more to all this than the failed suit for Eirika's hand. Innes wondered, at times, what twists King Hayden's own life had taken on the road to becoming the renowned Sage of Frelia. He'd gathered the experience and wisdom to see through his son's facade, that was for certain.

Hayden only once took Innes to task, and that was after the engagement fiasco. Innes found it all too easy to summon rage and loathing when Tana, after an indecent wait of a few scant months, announced her plans to become Queen of Renais. It took little effort for Innes to consume too much wine at the engagement feast, to sneer at Ephraim, to spill his drink on the young king's boots. His hangover the next morning was anything but a sham. But Innes stood tall before his father's throne- though his head spun and his stomach felt tied into knots- as Hayden looked him over with a steely unblinking gaze.

"I don't precisely know why you decided to act the fool last night, Innes, but I do know that you chose that course of action. If thwarted love has sickened you, find yourself a remedy. In any event, I want no re-enactments of last night under my roof."

It was not, Innes decided, happenstance that the king had summoned Dame Vanessa to escort Innes back to his chambers to sleep off his hangover.

With Tana gone, Innes had one member fewer in his audience, one conduit fewer to spread rumors through the fine halls of other nations. His performance, such as it was, became more subtle, and the gray haze over his days seemed less a smokescreen and more a natural part of his being. He welcomed it- not the soul-consuming darkness of true despair, the kind of fear that made a literal demon of Lyon of Grado, but rather a comforting, shadowy gloom. In that gloom, there was no fear, no joy, no great heights or sickening depths. No black, no white... only gray. No news brought to Prince Innes could trouble his heart or stir the depths of his psyche. Every crisis was merely a puzzle that begged to be solved; some answers proved simple and definitive as mathematic equations, others as many-faceted as the philosophical issues he would discuss with Father Moulder. A spate of murders among the Carcinese council was an interesting challenge to unravel, while the Great Earthquake in Grado was more of a multi-headed conundrum. From the shadows, Innes found he could see more clearly than did the men who walked in bright light and bright colors- he saw the details and nuances that they missed when brilliance dazzled them.

Not that everything in his world was monochrome- Vanessa added a splash of color. Innes thought his father was, indeed, quite a wise man.

-x-

Innes did not attend his sister's wedding. His first diplomatic visit to the court of his brother-in-law was for the funeral of General Seth. This was an unremittingly tragic occasion; the still-young commander of the Renais knights had never recovered from a grave wound received at the outset of the war. He had borne that fatal injury without complaint through many battles, and so earned the admiration of all who served with him. Innes spoke briefly of Seth's virtues at the service, and not a word of it was flattery- though nothing said as much for Seth's value as did the bereavement of his mourners.

Eirika's eyes streamed with undisguised grief. She had loved the man; this love was never spoken of openly, but Innes had pieced the truth together from a myriad of fragments sent his way by his informants in Tana's retinue. There was nothing coarse in what they told him, naturally, and while Innes could not fathom the attraction any more than he understood Tana's affection for her husband, he at least could acknowledge the fact of it now.

She stood at his shoulder at the funeral feast, when the casket had been shut away behind polished marble and all the mourners tried to forget themselves with wine, slices of sugar cake, and war stories. She wore deep gray and violet- no princess of Renais might wear black for a subject- and though the colors did not suit her, it hardly mattered. Her beauty had never lain solely on the surface; even in childhood Eirika had possessed more than mere prettiness, and now it seemed to him that all her losses had served to bring out some deeper beauty, akin to the holy aura of Saint Latona.

"Innes. This is perhaps not the time, but I must talk with you."

"Certainly, Eirika. I am at your disposal."

They walked to one of the courtyard gardens, where late-summer roses and lilies brightened the scarred castle walls. The decorative arch of one entrance had been blasted apart in the siege and was not yet repaired, and it lent the garden a sense that it was a place out of time. She spoke to him in a well-toned voice roughened only a little by grief, and the sound of it was enthralling.

"I have been selfish, Innes. I shouldn't have been so diffident to you, not when you bared your inner heart to me as you did. I was taken aback, Innes, but it was not... it was not appropriate, to respond as I have."

"There is nothing of selfishness in you," he said swiftly. "Your dedication to the welfare of your retainer speaks volumes of your true character."

"I owed him my life, Innes." She might have owed him that, but she had clearly given him more. Not her body, perhaps- it was unthinkable- but most definitely she had given Seth her heart.

"And for that, we all owe the general a debt." Sad, really, what the man had reaped for his dedication. Ephraim, in a typically pointless gesture, had granted Seth a posthumous title, but all it did was give the man a few more trappings at his funeral and a gravesite a few paces closer to the altar.

"Innes. I owed a debt to Seth that I could never fully repay, but he is now... at rest. I must consider my duties to all Renais, and not just to her general. If you still feel as you did... there is no need for another duel with my brother. I accept you."

Her beautiful voice still stirred him, her brilliant eyes appealed to him, bewitching even in her grief. But that door was closed and locked, and the words of denial came easily to him.

"Eirika, do not play the martyr for my sake. You are stricken with a terrible grief- see, you cannot keep from weeping even as you speak of your duty." He thought to place a reassuring hand upon her shoulders, decided against it, then added, "If I were you, I would spend a while someplace private, to collect my thoughts and decided on a clearheaded course for the future."

"Thank you, Innes."

He remembered her smile for a long, long time.

-x-

Vanessa's son lent Castle Frelia some of the cheer that had left it with Tana's departure. If ever Innes felt happy, it was watching Vanessa, a braid tumbling over one shoulder as she danced before the window with the babe in her arms, humming some tuneless bit of song. When Tana sent him a letter overflowing with love and praise for her own infant son, Innes penned a letter back consisting of one-third dry information and two-thirds praise for his own child. He knew it would discomfit straight-laced King Ephraim in the extreme. In between the lines extolling the newborn prince of Renais, Innes did find one key piece of intelligence from his sister- Eirika had retreated to Caer Pelyn, to find solace in the way of Valega. The news bothered him more than it ought to have.

Innes behaved himself perfectly through the feast wherein King Hayden proclaimed his final diplomatic triumph, the union of the heir of Frelia with the heiress of the Rausten Empire. He wasn't entirely lying when he told the delegation of Rausten bishops that he was pleased to be joined to their divine princess. Innes remembered L'Arachel as pretty, spirited, and surprisingly bold. She wasn't some drab creature dragged from a convent to the marriage bed; no, Innes could deal with Princess L'Arachel. It wasn't as though he had any illusions about her. Shortly after the wedding, King Hayden abdicated the throne to spend his remaining years in peace and comfort, and so Innes took up the reins of state without grief to trouble his heart.

Innes did not bother to keep his new bride separate from Vanessa; L'Arachel accepted the curiosity of the knight with a son and no husband, though she never appeared to follow the facts through to their logical conclusion. It was just as well. Life with the Princess of Rausten proved one long chain of side-stepping logic and avoiding the obvious. L'Arachel's strange ways suited him; she flitted across the continent, gadding about with a host of friends and acquaintances. It seemed to Innes this was the secret to their conjugal contentment; just when he was on the verge of becoming frustrated with her, L'Arachel's off-kilter mind would be taken by the fancy to visit Jehanna or Caer Pelyn or Carcino. Off she would go with her retainers in tow and a good deal of shouting. Innes thanked the Everlasting that neither of their children inherited that laugh from L'Arachel. In the proper setting, that sound would send a frisson of desire up his spine, but it was not a sound he wanted to hear from the lips of his offspring.

By his thirtieth year, Innes stood at the helm of the most prosperous nation in the continent. He earned a new name for himself- the Spider King of Frelia, secure at the center of a web whose strands reached from one coast of Magvel to the other. So what if the men of other nations deemed him a creeping thing of the shadows, a malignant creature compared to the splendid young lion of Renais? The Frelians themselves understood him. He'd secured for them peace, stability and great wealth in trade. He'd made a brilliant marriage, had provided both his realms with an heir- a boy for Frelia's throne, a girl for Rausten's. Besides, his people knew that blood and not ice water ran in his veins. They cheered Vanessa when she flew above the streets, even as the castle servants coddled her son.

After several years of mutual distrust, he even managed a rapport with the most difficult of his wife's servants. The man was, in essence, low-born Carcinese scum, but he did have talents, and Innes found a use for them. The Spider King found a use for everyone and everything in due time.

End Chapter One

Note: The epigraph comes from "Effigy" by Andrew Bird, off the album Noble Beast.