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But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
— John Donne, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"
Dear Hubert,
It is a fortnight now since your departure from Enbarr. I realize only now that I have spent the ink to write it that this is a silly way to open a letter. Certainly you know how long it has been, for it is your journey! Well, there is no helping it, I suppose. Now you know that it has been a fortnight, and I know that it has been a fortnight, although perhaps by the time this reaches you it will have been much longer—three weeks? Four? I know not how promptly a letter will reach Fhirdiad, even if it is from someone in as important a position as I.
(Dorothea says that I have spent enough of this paragraph telling you about time. I have taken care to remind Dorothea that this is not her letter, and that if she wishes to send one, she may freely do so at her discretion.)
So then, how is Faerghus? I trust you are finding the climate agreeable? I have not traveled there, of course, but based on text and anecdote I am given to the impression that it would suit you. You must spare no detail when you write back. As the future prime minister, I must cultivate my knowledge of such things! That aside, I imagine tensions must be running high between Edeglard and King Dimitri. Do continue to watch out for her. I have no doubt that you will—but pray do so in as reasonable a way as you are able.
All is well here. Splendid news, which I have neglected to share with you in the flurry since the war’s end—Saga, my dear Haflinger, will likely birth a foal come spring. Much of my time has been spent in the stables, tending to her. Linhardt says that I am being “fussy.” Not so! I am simply doing everything in my power to ensure that she is kept healthy and happy in preparation, that the foal may be happy and healthy, too. This is perfectly reasonable. But far be it from me to spend my unencumbered afternoons, which are already in such short supply, caught in one of Linhardt’s meaningless debates. I simply laugh and wait for it to drive him off. It will surely work one of these days.
May you find your way to the other side of this long, stubborn winter. I dutifully await your response.
Your obedient servant,
Ferdinand von Aegir
“You’ve got that look on your face again, Ferdie,” Dorothea drawls. “All besotted. Tuck that heart of yours under your sleeve once in a while; it would do you a good many favors.”
Ferdinand sits up very straight in his desk chair, the better to aim a glare over his shoulder. Dorothea, reclining on the chaise longue with a book of poetry in one hand and a Braeburn apple in the other, meets it with a familiar look of pure, undisguised pity.
“I am not besotted,” he says tartly. “I’ve no look on my face. And even if I did, what business would it be of yours?”
Dorothea bites into the apple, green eyes wandering along the open pages in front of her. It is a bright silver day in Enbarr, and through the open curtains Ferdinand can see the sea, glistening away.
“If you take issue with what is and isn’t my business, you can tell Edie so,” she retorts. “I’m sure she’ll be accommodating.”
Dorothea lords Edelgard’s decision to assign both her and Ferdinand to watch over the capital in her absence over him daily—nay, hourly. Ferdinand can scarcely get a word in edgewise without her bringing it up. It is not that he takes any particular issue with the allocation itself—Dorothea is more clever and competent than the finest nobles in the Empire by half—but it has certainly given her the political wherewithal to besiege him at every turn, which is among her favorite hobbies. Certainly she’d had the wherewithal to do that in the first place—certainly nothing had ever stopped her when they were students—but now that she can do it on Edelgard’s authority, not only as one of her closest advisors, but as her betrothed? Ferdinand has not known a moment’s peace.
“If looking at my face grieves you so,” he says wearily, “then have you considered… looking away from it?”
“Would that I could,” Dorothea says with a frankly over-acted sigh. “But I’ve a charitable heart, Ferdie. You know this.” She slips her crimson bookmark between the pages and snaps the book closed. “You’re writing to Hubert, aren’t you?”
Ferdinand lays a protective hand over the parchment in front of him, as if Dorothea would have any line of sight to it at all from across the room. “In fact, no. I am journaling.”
“Journaling,” Dorothea repeats, arching one perfect eyebrow.
Ferdinand straightens up in his chair, puffed up with pride. “Indeed! Bernadetta suggested the pastime to me—why, she even decorated this book for me, look, you see—and I am finding it quite pleasurable! At present I am chronicling Saga’s pregnancy—” Dorothea makes a face. “And considering what names might suit the foal. Perhaps Sigrún, or Dellinger, or Vestra—”
“Ah, I see,” Dorothea cuts him off—quite rudely, he might add—lifting a finger in the air. “So you weren’t writing to Hubie, you were just thinking about Hubie.” She bats her eyes at him, sticking out her lower lip. “Oh, Ferdie, that’s much more damning. I never took you for the lovelorn type.”
Ferdinand flounders, caught. Unwelcome heat bursts on his face. Vestra had just come to him; it had not been a particularly intentional homage to Hubert at all—what is so damning about that?
“Th-That is irrelevant!” he splutters. This does not seem to dissuade Dorothea, whose smirk only grows, to the degree that it might make him wonder how many canaries she’s ingested, were she feline in species. “Have you not anything better to do than tease me so?”
Dorothea hums, slinging one arm across the back of the chaise and tilting her head to the ceiling. One earring glints in the light.
“No,” she says after a great deal of thought. “Not today, anyway.”
Ferdinand whirls away from her, huddling back over his parchment with a scowl. There is absolutely no reason for him to get wrapped up in one of Dorothea’s silly games at his expense. After all, as the future prime minister of the Adrestian Empire, he must develop a calm and rational mind, and not permit himself to rise to taunts. He has much left to do today, first the supper with the diplomats from Gaspard, then the evening stroll with the Duchess of Arundel, then the dinner with the Margraves, then checking in on Saga again, for goddess knows—ah, that’s right, not goddess, not anymore—
“Ferdie, are you listening?” Dorothea’s voice cuts in, and Ferdinand jumps. “For goodness’ sake. I said I’m sorry for teasing, there’s no need to ignore me. We aren’t children.”
“I am not ignoring you, I simply—” The rest of the sentence breaks off, or perhaps it was never there to begin with. Ferdinad slumps in his chair. “Forgive me for being ill-tempered. It—” He struggles for a diplomatic way to say it. “It would be ignoble to say that I am feeling taxed by my new role in the Adrestian cabinet, so… well, you cannot think less of me if I have not said it.”
“And you haven’t,” Dorothea says, “and I don’t.”
That is one of the many miracles of Dorothea, Ferdinand thinks, with a touch of friendly affection. She does all things plainly, even kindness.
His eyes wander over the page before him—the tiny places where his hand had faltered or grown weary, the words remember and strive and oats. The word Vestra.
“War has truly made my noble penmanship go to seed,” he says aloud. “I must hold myself accountable! I used to be possessed of the finest calligraphy in all of House Aegir, you know!”
“Ferdie, I’ve proofread your essays,” Dorothea says tiredly, back to her usual self, but then she lets out a chuckle, and when Ferdinand glances over his shoulder, she grins at him before taking a bite of the apple. “But there, see? You’ve cheered up already.”
“By Saint Cichol, Dorothea, do not talk with your mouth full!”
To Duke Aegir,
I thank you for taking the time to define for me the term “fortnight.” Truly, that a man in my position is kept abreast of such elusive knowledge is a blessing for which no words shall suffice. This may sound strange to you, but I find it gratifying to discover that your writing mirrors your speech—all ludicrous flourishes, all showboating. Oh, how I found myself wishing while reading your needlessly lengthy letter that you would get to the point. It was very nearly nostalgic in that regard, for until quite recently your voice had been absent from my ear for so long that the cadence of it was growing difficult to call to mind. Now, however, I am having no trouble at all.
Faerghus is miserable; it has always been miserable. Let’s not jest. There is nothing whatsoever agreeable about the climate. That any fool would think to build a castle in such an inhospitable place boggles the mind. Lady Edelgard, however, has taken to it quite painlessly—so my suffering matters not. And pray don’t raise your eyebrow at that sentence. The mere notion of it vexes me.
Cultivate your knowledge, you say? Does a farmer cultivate the crops of another, or sow and reap his own seeds? I dearly hope that the future prime minister of Lady Edeglard’s illustrious empire will not be so remiss as to have based his understanding of her subjects on secondhand accounts. You’ve the means to travel the world now, Ferdinand—well, you’ve always had the means; perhaps the term I search for is—the circumstances. The occasion. Yes, the occasion. Oughtn’t you use it?
But very well. I’ve the parchment and ink for it, so I’ll tell you. The northernmost of Faerghus is as bitter and cold as I remember; it is the kind of cold that clenches all things inside of it as a prison, unforgiving. The sun rises late and departs early. The wind could cut through chain mail. Nothing grows save for threadbare lichens and patches of brown grasses—here and there, the occasional poppy. The poppies are tiny, pitiful things, barely the size of an Adrestian coin, but they endure. Lady Edelgard has told me that this is an achievement worth noting. So I have noted it.
It does not compare to the winters of Enbarr—those tonic, rain-lashed afternoons that I cannot extricate from my memories of our time at Garreg Mach—before the war, and after. Spring will open like a blade here, when it comes. I daresay it will be welcome.
Tell me, then, of Enbarr. What I feel for it is not quite nostalgia, but a sort of absent curiosity, I suppose. I’ll thank you to give my regards to Bernadetta, and to Dorothea. Do not give my regards to Caspar.
I wish good health upon your horse. May the foal it births be stalwart and true, and may the peace that we have built outlast its lifetime.
Your obedient servant,
Hubert von Vestra
“Why, Hubert!” Ferdinand exclaims. “Will you not dance?”
In the warm golden light of the great hall, Hubert’s typical dour expression looks even more out of place than usual. Ferdinand is breathless and giddy from dancing and eating and laughing and—and simply from being glad. His face feels flushed, his legs weightless. Next to Hubert, who has been sulking in the eastern corner like some great bat all evening, he must look blinding.
“Dance?” Hubert repeats in his usual protracted drone, uttering it as he might utter the name of a neurological disease. “I elect to abstain, thank you.”
“Oh, come off it, now,” Ferdinand exclaims with a laugh, clapping a hand on Hubert’s back. Hubert makes a noise like he is trying to withhold a cough. “You will not be judged as if it is the White Heron Cup! A ball is a ball, my friend. You cannot—”
Hubert’s single visible eye shifts to him. His expression does something strange and indescribable.
Very slowly, he asks, “Friend?”
Ferdinand blinks back at him. It is not every day that he, the most eloquent and admired heir to House Aegir, finds himself at a loss. In fact, he has not found himself there in quite some time—not since weeding a fortnight or so ago, when he had fallen inelegantly on his rear attempting to extract a thistle from the earth and Hubert had laughed, not his typical eerie chuckle but something quick and thoughtless, something human. It had rendered the pain in Ferdinand’s pride all but irrelevant.
Yes—that’s right, he thinks, his heart beating fast and strong inside of him (from dancing and laughing and something else, nestled far below). It had been Hubert then, too.
“Of—Of course,” he says. Hubert’s face has always been a cipher, but now it is more difficult to parse than it has ever been—and Ferdinand has a great aptitude for reading facial nuance. “Would such a thing—displease you?”
“Would such a thing displease you?” Hubert asks in turn.
Ferdinand opens his mouth. That is as far as he gets in the once-familiar, now-foreign procedure for speech. As their classmates whirl and make merry around them, blurs of gold and black and life in all its shapes, he realizes that he does not know how to answer that question. Not in a way that will have any armor. Not in a way that could withstand a blow.
“Wh-What a meaningless conversation this is,” he exclaims, adopting anger in the absence of anything better. “Fie on it, I say. It was only my intention to bring you out of your misery, Hubert. Watching you brood over here all night while the rest of us are making every reasonable effort to enjoy ourselves has left an unpleasant taste in my mouth.”
“Ah,” Hubert says, lip curling into a sneer. “I am familiar with that taste myself.”
“You—!” Ferdinand exclaims, balling his hands into fists. “It is a wretched taste what curses my tongue when I am in your company! I might mistake poison for wine!”
Hubert’s smile is wicked, and ugly, and entirely false. “I was not aware I held such power over your tongue, dukeling.”
Ferdinand throws his hands up—bah! he shouts, forgoing all tact and grace—and storms away as far as his legs will take him. As the evening whirls and glitters on he shares dances with all who will accept him, friends and peers alike, from his house and others; he gives them generously and with the aplomb befitting of his station. He lets Mercedes lead him in a waltz, joins Petra in a jig. He even entices Edelgard into a quadrille! At some point Hubert vanishes from his distant corner, and Ferdinand does not spare it another glance—not one further.
The stars are gathered devotedly in the sky, and on the walk back to his quarters Ferdinand cranes his neck to appreciate them. In the courtyard, where the grass is blue with night, he waits for his legs to remember their weight. He waits to come back down.
Dear Hubert,
If you find that my penmanship has degraded since our last correspondence, I pray that you will not express it. To tell you the truth, I have not slept in over a day’s time. My spirits are too high! So high that a pegasus might seem a mole, that clouds might seem pastures! Splendid news: Saga birthed a healthy filly in the early hours yesterday morn—how auspicious—a creature of the Great Tree Moon, just as you are! She is bright-eyed, and curious, and has the most adorable white spot on her forehead. It is the uncanniest thing. It looks exactly like a star!
Oh, how I wished Petra could have been there to assist me with the foaling—but she is away in Brigid, as you well know, and as Dorothea has joined Mittelfrank for the spring season as a favor to Manuela the only ones upon whom I could call were Caspar and Linhardt. Needless to say the filly’s first moments in this remarkable world of ours were… colorful.
As you can imagine, I have been quite occupied with ensuring that foal and dam alike are recuperating well—do give Edelgard my thanks, again, for permitting me the use of the castle stables—as well as with the usual political obligations. I will spare you the details of those, for although I find them as brisk and stimulating as ever, I know that they will only serve to bore you.
I have heard tell from Bernadetta, who heard tell from Sylvain, that the Faerghan winter at last begins to wane. I hope that it is true for your sake. Perhaps you will think it foolish of me, but of late when I have wakened to these mild mornings—not quite sun and not quite rain, but passing notions of each—I have found my mind wandering to you. I confess myself uncertain of what this might mean, or of what compels me to share it with you—you will hunger for a point, I am sure, for that is your way—but perhaps things need not have a point to be true.
In your last letter, which I received on the calends of the Lone Moon, you spoke of the summit with the southern leaders. I await further details. In the meantime, I send my regards to Edelgard and to Mercedes.
I know not how to end this letter. My heart is too full.
Is life not extraordinary, Hubert? Is it not the most extraordinary thing?
Your obedient servant,
Ferdinand von Aegir
On the ides of the Harpstring Moon, Bernadetta comes to visit from the countryside. It is a balmy, windswept morning in Enbarr when she crests the hill at the edge of the paddock, the great shape of the castle keeping vigil behind her, and the first thing Ferdinand notices is that she’s cut off nearly all of her hair.
“Why, Bernadetta!” he exclaims, wiping the sweat from his brow with his arm. “From this distance, I mistook you for a prince!”
“Hi, Ferdinand,” Bernadetta mumbles, fidgeting her index fingers together. A gust of wind rushes through the paddock, and she winces against it, halfway blown aside herself. “Dorothea said you’d be out here.”
Ferdinand beams at her. He has found himself beaming at many old friends these days, now that he has permitted himself the honest belief that they are at war no more—he beams now because Bernadetta’s nose is dusted with freckles, and her eyes are unwary, and her short hair suits her. She closes the wooden gate behind her as gently as one might crack an egg.
Ferdinand has been spending much of his spare time in the meadow with Saga and her filly, who is now a full month old. She is a quick, dancing thing, her coat summer-blond; her flaxen mane and tail, once tufts, had grown quickly, and now billow behind her when she circles her mother in the morning light.
Bernadetta comes to stand beside him, a short observing distance away from mare and foal. She rocks for a moment on her heels, taking in the scenery. It is a lovely paddock—lovelier than Ferdinand would expect from the Adrestian sensibilities—with fragrant grass and scattered bishop’s lace and a stately white oak in the eastern corner.
Bernadetta closes her eyes and breathes in deep through her nose. “It’s nice out here.”
“Indeed,” says Ferdinand.
Summer has already begun to creep up on the world, warming the air enough that he has rolled up the sleeves of his white cotton tunic. He had needed to braid his hair to keep it from blowing this way and that.
After a few more moments of contented silence, Bernadetta opens her eyes again and points across the field to the filly where she grazes.
“That’s it? The baby horse?”
“Yes!” Ferdinand exclaims. “Is she not magnificent?”
“She’s—” Bernadetta tilts her head, her expression wrinkled with a habitual worry, as if she fears that what she says will be the wrong thing. “She’s… bigger than I expected.”
“Ah! Well, you see—”
“But she’s cute,” Bernadetta goes on, sentimental. “She’s got such kind eyes, just like you.”
Ferdinand’s monologue of facts about horse growth tapers off in his mouth. He blinks at her.
“You mean to tell me that you can see that from all the way across the field?” he asks, looking from her to the foal and back again, and then he laughs. “Your archer’s eye is still keen, I see.”
“Yeah,” Bernadetta says, eyes drifting to her feet. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”
Ferdinand quiets. It has not been that long, he realizes, since Bernadetta’s archer’s eye was an instrument of death—it has not been that long since it beheld blood, instead of birth. She has grown around it, like vines over ruins.
He and Bernadetta talk, then, of this and that—the goings-on of House Varley, the tales of the far Faerghan winter, the plans for Dorothea and Edelgard to be wed in the summer of the coming year. They find themselves outside the paddock, leaning on the fence by their elbows, like schoolchildren.
“I heard Edelgard proposed to her in song,” Bernadetta says, hushed and faintly blushing. “I heard she wrote a whole aria, and got down on one knee and sang it. Is that true?”
“Of that, I am not certain,” Ferdinand replies, “but that does sound like Edelgard.”
Bernadetta twists a short lock of hair around her finger, sticking out her lower lip. “D’you think Hubert’s okay with it? I mean, he’s always doing that—that looming thing around her… you know that thing?” She hunches up her shoulders, sticks out her arms with crooked fingers. “You’ve been writing to him, right? What’s he say?”
Ferdinand tilts his head, glancing to the sky as if he will find the answer inscribed in a cloud. Truth be told, Hubert has not commented on the engagement at all. Ferdinand is certain that he approves of the match—he has always had nothing but respect for Dorothea, in his own gloomy way—but it is not especially out of character for him to be withholding in his opinion regardless. To Hubert, Edelgard’s heart is Edelgard’s business, not to be meddled with.
Hubert can meddle with many things, but hearts are another matter—unless it’s a matter of slipping oleander sap into someone’s tea.
“He has not said much of anything,” Ferdinand answers. “He has spoken largely of the weather.”
“The weather?” Bernadetta’s small eyebrows furrow together. “Hubert sends you whole letters all the way from Fhirdiad just to talk about the weather? Hubert?”
Ferdinand draws up a chuckle, if only because now that Bernadetta has pointed it out he supposes that it is a bit odd, and this supposition warms his face all over, quickens his heart. What he does not say is that he would gladly read a hundred letters from Hubert on the weather—what he does not say is that he could listen to Hubert talk about rain well into the next lifetime.
“Well,” he says, “perhaps he has an excess of leisure time.”
“Leisure,” Bernadetta repeats skeptically. “Hubert. Leisure.” Her voice tumbles down to a mutter. “Leisure… Hubert… leisure…”
“Oh, all right,” Ferdinand interrupts, affecting a roll of the eyes. “You have made your point. When next I write to him, I will ask him for his stance on the nuptial flower arrangements. Would that please you?”
Bernadetta makes a face like this would not exactly please her, but would intrigue her all the same. They are both distracted by a high-pitched whinny, and look over in unison to see the filly prancing through the green grass.
The wind comes, restless and lonely. It makes the trees whisper amongst themselves. Across the paddock, Saga comes to stand beside her foal and tosses her head, gently, until her white mane flutters.
Ferdinand lets his elbows settle on the wood again.
“Do you know, Bernadetta,” he asks, “that they are born ready to run?”
Bernadetta turns her head, lifting a hand as if to hold her hair back reflexively, though her fingers alight upon none. Her eyes are shimmering.
“Really?” she whispers.
Ferdinand smiles and nods. “Yes. You might not know it by looking, but by the time she is grown the length of her legs will have hardly changed.” He watches mare and foal canter through the field, out of tandem. “They come into the world with their eyes open. Within an hour or two, they are on their feet, following their mother wherever she goes. Even if the bones are still soft—even if the muscle is still lean. Even if they have to crawl. For love, they move.”
“Oh,” Bernadetta says, and when Ferdinand looks to her again there is a smile on her face, not the hesitant wobbling thing he once knew, but something gentle, steady. Her eyes follow the horses. “Oh,” she says again, softly. “I like that.”
Dear Ferdinand,
At last it is spring. Perhaps you will find this sentence amusing, being that I write it to you on the nones of the Garland Moon. Faerghus, it may not surprise you to hear, still cannot quite shake the shackles of winter even when the season has run its course—snow clings thinly to the rocky mountaintops, and I am told that it remains there perennially.
Lady Edelgard and His Majesty King Dimitri seem begrudgingly, albeit surely, to be setting aside their differences—they speak to one another almost civilly now. It defies explanation. Nonetheless they are amicable enough now that Lady Edelgard has gone so far as to occasionally speak with him in the same room without my presence. As a result, of late I have oft found myself wandering the halls of this bleak castle in solitude.
Perhaps this will sound miserable to you—you have always languished without your attentions and conversations—but it has been some years since solitude and I have had the chance to commune as we do now. Wartime has no place for such luxuries. In the absence of it, I find myself adapting.
You and your mare and your bright-eyed star-headed foal have my felicitations. Your thanks have been conveyed to Lady Edelgard, and received as well as Lady Edelgard can receive any manner of gratitude or praise. Does the creature yet have a name? Frankly, I must confess I found it out of character that you did not impart one in your last correspondence. It has always been your way, after all, to name things.
In reading of your mind’s visits to me of late, I did not, in fact, find myself in search of the point. Does this surprise you? What was the word you used for it, in all your certainty—a hunger?
How it amuses me, Duke Aegir, to hear you speak of my hunger as if you know it.
The summit with the southern nobles went as well as could be expected. Far shrewder and more articulate writers than I have the talent for and interest in recounting such things—I am possessed of many aptitudes, but not that.
It is strange, is it not? To you, and only you, I confess my imperfections. And so blithely, without self-contempt, as though they are as ordinary as taking tea in the afternoons. Before I can stay my hand, they are written. Given. The reason eludes me. But should generosity strike your heart, you can do me the great kindness of burning this letter, that no historical record shall remain of my folly.
There will be a mere four moons, now, until Lady Edelgard and I return to Enbarr—by then, it will have been a year since I last stood on Adrestian territory, beneath those austere, familiar skies. I daresay my heart will not ache for Faerghus when we depart. You say that life is extraordinary, but I find that the more extraordinary force in this world is time. Relentless. Soon it will come time for the children of Fódlan to venture out and catch fish—as we, with all our noble privilege, never did.
My regards to Bernadetta.
Your obedient servant,
Hubert
P.S. Has the news reached yet reached the Empire? Claude von Riegan and his retainer have run off together. What a thing that must be, the running. Whatever shores their reckless hearts seek, I have no doubt that they will find them.
“Hubert!” shouts Ferdinand, bursting into the healing tent. “Are you well?!”
“By the Ten Elites,” Hubert drones. “Such theatrics. I am as well as can be expected, having lost not life nor limb.”
After a grueling three-day siege, they have at last taken Arianrhod. Despite a vicious counterattack by Cornelia’s forces, their army has suffered only minimal casualties—among them an ostentatiously bleeding gash on Hubert’s left arm, inflicted by the Wo Dao of an enemy Falcon Knight.
It is mended now—a long, shimmering seam of new skin up the length of Hubert’s pale forearm—but Ferdinand had witnessed the spray of crimson when the blow was struck. Hubert had made no sound, had let out no cry, except to cast Miasma in retaliation. His adversary had fallen, and Ferdinand had been besieged by two Dark Bishops—and in the end, blood or no blood, the battle had worn on, as every battle does, down to its dregs, until it has starved itself.
Hubert looks no worse for wear now. Perhaps his complexion is a bit ashen, but then again Hubert’s complexion is always a bit ashen, and is difficult to judge even by degrees. He is reclining on a cot, and through a split in the tent’s canvas a strip of the frail spring light gilds his wounded side. His sleeve has been torn off.
Many of the injured have gone on to the larger healing tent to be tended by Linhardt. Hubert is the only patient here. The cot beside him is empty, so Ferdinand lowers himself onto it, clasping his hands between his knees. Grimly, he leans forward to examine the scar.
“It will vanish, in time,” Hubert says.
“I am—relieved,” says Ferdinand, and in the quiet of the tent it seems magnified, reverberant—unwieldy. The way that Hubert’s face has arranged itself is more easily translated now than it might have been long ago, before Ferdinand had known of his fear of high places, his taste for Dagdan coffee; he finds his eyes lingering on the line of his thin, familiar nose. “It looked much worse from a distance.”
Hubert flexes left his fingers—which Ferdinand notices only then are ungloved. In the plain light, he can see the bones shifting beneath the skin—the bare skin.
“A gash, nothing more,” Hubert murmurs. His eye flicks up to Ferdinand’s face, and something in it deepens. “Something troubles you.”
“I—no,” Ferdinand says, shaking his head. The movement is rigid; his neck feels made of stone—now that the adrenaline of battle has begun to taper off, his body is remembering its exhaustion, muscle by taxed muscle. “It is just—” He breaks off, shakes his head again. “May I be candid, Hubert?”
Hubert is quiet for a moment, and then nods. “As you wish.”
“It is foolish,” Ferdinand says slowly, assembling the words, stitching them together, “but… ha. All this time, I… I suppose a part of me thought it impossible that you could bleed.”
It sounds foolish, dangling in the air between them, untouched. Heat washes over Ferdinand’s face; he withholds the impulse to wince. Hubert’s silence has no surface—nothing to intuit. So many things about him, Ferdinand thinks, with some mingling of weariness and longing, keep to the shadows.
At length Hubert lets out a sigh, one that fills the chest, and angles his head to one side, gazing at some point Ferdinand cannot find. The world through the tent flap, perhaps. The blade of spring.
Handsome. Ferdinand has never thought it before—not in that word, but rather the anatomy of it; in an admiration for the stern mouth, the cheekbones—but he thinks it then. He thinks it, even as Hubert goes on looking past him, unaware.
“I bleed in excess, Ferdinand,” Hubert says—a murmur, vulnerable, momentary—in a different voice, with a different heart. When he turns back his head, he holds Ferdinand’s gaze like a hand holds a lance. “You simply do not see it.”
Ferdinand looks in wide-eyed shock at the man across from him, whose dark hair curtains one side of his face even now, rendering all expressions incomplete. He wishes, for a stark, clear moment, to reach across the distance between them and brush aside that hair, tenderly, a gesture lost to history, and find what it keeps from him.
“That is by design, of course,” Hubert goes on, and just like that he is speaking like himself again, shadowed and inscrutable. “And in the end a wound is merely a fault of the flesh. It can be mended.”
Ferdinand makes his peace, then, with not knowing what to say. He only nods his head, and exhales, and permits his shoulders to shudder when he does, freed of a great and terrible weight. His every bone and muscle twinges with an ache anterior to hunger.
Here, at the dawn of a new age, at the end of the war, all that he can focus on is the bend in Hubert’s elbow, beneath which his veins remain, tangling toward the heart.
Hubert,
It is many days now since your last letter reached me. It happened to arrive while I was out with the horses, and thus the first hands to hold it were Dorothea’s. She delivered it then to me. Perhaps it is my imagination, but the parchment seems to have a potent and familiar smell to it—I am not certain how it can be described. When last I encountered it I was a knight in Edelgard’s army, passing by your tent in the evening on my way to the riverside.
Ah, I am prosing—my mind cannot seem to settle. You see, I have read your letter what must be two dozen times over, poring over each word, each stroke of your distant hand. I take it with me to the fields, where the heat of the Blue Sea Moon expands throughout the blue, blue sky; where Saga and her foal graze now with the other horses: war horses, pack horses, draught horses—all of them put out to pasture, now, never to fight or labor again. It is strange, but only upon seeing their peace have I begun to accept our own—not in my mind, but in my heart. The great war of our generation has come and gone, and here I am in its shadow, writing letters, raising horses. Remembering.
Is the sun with you in Fhirdiad? Does the wind smell of things quietly aging, as it does here?
Just after the solstice, we were surprised by the arrival of Petra. She sailed from Brigid to join us for the festival honoring the return of the Blue Sea Star, which she says was always her favorite tradition from the mainland. Her guardian knight accompanied her—our old classmate, Ashe Ubert. Of course, the moment that Caspar received word of their visit he rounded up many old friends: Raphael Kirsten and Ignatz Victor (who are now wed!), Marianne von Edmund and Leonie Pinelli… even Lysithea von Ordelia and Cyril, who came all the way from Garreg Mach. Do you know that Lysithea is now a professor, and that Cyril has been knighted? It warmed me to see them again.
The festival is different now, and yet it is not. We celebrate the Goddess’ rebirth no more. We light the lanterns, and play the songs—we dance, we swim, we make merry. But we no longer do it to pay tribute. We do it because we are human—out of defiance and joy.
The filly is three months old. Soon it will come time to wean her. I am always loath to interfere with the bond between foal and dam, seeing it take form before me with such quiet, gentle beauty—it is said that they communicate almost entirely in silence, through the eyes, the subtle rearing of the head—but I suppose she must learn, as we all do, that love languishes in seclusion.
My regards to Edelgard.
Your obedient servant,
Ferdinand
“Dorothea,” Ferdinand asks, “might I trouble you with a question?”
It is twilight—the silky, lingering twilight of late summer. Soon the rains will come, but for now the skies are still clear, and from the sea-facing balcony of Dorothea’s study, Ferdinand can watch night come to the world as a veil to a face, delicate and mild.
Beside him, Dorothea is tying her hair back with a velvet ribbon. It had been a gift from Edelgard—sent from Fhirdiad last moon—and is the color of forget-me-nots. When she is finished, she drapes it over her shoulder.
She had been kind to permit Ferdinand a visit. The both of them had come from a meeting with the cabinet to discuss the Empire’s contributions to relief efforts in Remire Village, which had taken up the whole afternoon and then some. Certainly the Empire’s work in collaboration with the Leicester Alliance has not been for naught, but they must always strive to do more. And Ferdinand would be a fool if he did not recognize the Adrestian nobility’s general aversion to the word “more.”
“You can always trouble me, Ferdie,” Dorothea replies, running her hands absentmindedly along the stone railing, “if I am amenable to being troubled, of course.”
“Careful, or that generous heart will be the death of you.”
“Snippy today, aren’t we?” Dorothea does not sound hostile, however; when Ferdinand frowns over at her, she is smirking. “All right, out with it. What’s grieving you?”
“I would not use the word ‘grieve,’” Ferdinand says with a sigh. He lets his posture slacken until he is leaning on the railing on folded arms. “Not precisely. It does not feel akin to grief, and it is not painful—or at the very least it is a pain that I can bear, with practice. But regardless… I am wondering—that is, I wish to ask you—” Even now, the question feels absurd, but it has done him little good to keep it inside, and so now he lays it out: “When you fell in love, Dorothea, how did you know it?”
He anticipates laughter—a jest or jape, any number of the things that he has come to expect from Dorothea, who tends to find his predicaments amusing before anything else—but is met with only a plain and pensive silence. In the absence of words, there is only the sound of the waves far below, brushing faithfully against Enbarr’s rocky crags, seeking caves.
“It was more… understanding than knowing,” Dorothea says at last, and Ferdinand does not miss how her hand strays up to the end of the ribbon, how she gently fingers the cloth. There is a faraway look in her eyes, a faint smile on her lips. “Carrying a feeling for so long that I learned how to name it, eventually. Something like that.”
Ferdinand nods, examining the answer. Hubert’s words return to him, unbidden, in their spindly, huddled script: It has always been your way, after all, to name things.
He knows not how to name this—this lingering feeling in the wick of his heart. It is wound and not, word and not. It stretches toward the light.
“Of late,” he says to Dorothea, “I wake each day feeling as if I am certain of something. But I do not know what I am certain of. It is like… like I am sitting in one of the Professor’s old seminars, and know the correct answer, and am eager to share it… but the words have abandoned me. And in reality I am not at one of the Professor’s seminars—I am not a schoolboy playing at politics—I am out in the field before dawn, with a bucket of oats in my hand, and I am thinking to myself: hang the answer—I do not even know the question.”
Once more Dorothea hands him silence, as if waiting to ensure that he has finished speaking.
At last she lets out a thoughtful, humming breath. The wind dances in the ends of her hair.
“Is it Hubie?” she asks.
Ferdinand’s answer surprises him. “Perhaps it always has been.”
Dorothea does not laugh at that, either, though she has every right and reason to. Instead, she reaches over without looking to lay her hand on his upper arm and give it a little pat.
“Well,” she says, without pity or pretense, “the heart wants what it wants, Ferdie.”
Ferdinand scoffs. “Could it not want something a bit more attainable?”
“Attainable? Oh, please.” Dorothea tosses her head back, letting out a laugh so musical that Ferdinand cannot bring himself to resent it. “The man tied a sprig of lavender to his last letter to you. I saw it. Even the maid who delivered it was blushing.”
“Th-That is of no consequence,” Ferdinand sputters, his ears as warm as they might be if they’d been burned by the sun. “It is for the fragrance alone, nothing more.” He scowls at her. “You looked at my—”
“It would have been hard to miss!” Dorothea exclaims, and that pat on his arm turns into a shove.
Then her face softens, grows kinder.
“Ferdie…” she says. “The question doesn’t matter, you know. If your heart’s wish is to answer, then you’ll answer. It’s that simple.”
Ferdinand has nothing of worth to say to that, and so he simply lets it settle onto him, bit by bit. He and Dorothea slip into a long, companionable silence, and overhead, the stars have begun shyly to emerge, holding court with the waxing golden moon.
“You know, Dorothea,” he says after a time, “you are very wise.”
Dorothea preens. “Aren’t I? You do owe me for this, though, and compliments won’t cut it.” She holds up one finger, grinning at him mischievously. “One plate of von Aegir confections! That is my wage!”
“Von Aegir—” Ferdinand claps a hand over his forehead, but against all sense he finds himself laughing, full-bellied, free. “I have not baked since we were in school! But very well. It is the least I can do.”
Before he can quite register the movement, Dorothea has reached over to lift his hand, and within a second she has looped her pinkie through his. She looks him firmly in the eye, and smiles.
“Generous hearts,” she says, and jostles their joined hands in the new and brilliant night.
Ferdinand,
I wonder which will reach you first—me, or this letter. Perhaps it will seem foolish to you for me to send you a letter at all when only a fortnight remains until I am within speaking distance—but after much deliberation I have decided that the writing of the words, rather than the speaking, might better serve the message that I wish to extract from my heart. After all, I am no great orator, nor poet, nor scholar. Truth be told, I only grew into the habit of picking up the quill at all to write to you.
While that alone might make something evident to you, I also wish to share with you an anecdote, if you’ll indulge me. Perhaps you recall the summer of Imperial Year 1184—before the Professor returned to us—when our days were spent in the ruins of Garreg Mach. It was a long and scorching season, made for waiting. What we were waiting for we did not know. A boon, a movement, an omen. We had reached a bloody stalemate with Faerghus; neither side saw fit to yield. Our forces were thin. I had never seen Lady Edelgard so despondent. Yet, for only that summer, some alignment of circumstances led to a time of relative peace. We were still at war, yes, but our campaign saw a brief period of inertia; it was fortuitous that King Dimitri’s saw much the same—it lasted for a moon, maybe more, but for that moon we did not march, nor did we do battle. Not once.
I recognized for the first time that summer that you were a different man than the one I knew during our halcyon school days. Not in the way you carried yourself, and not in the manner that you spoke—not even in your habits, which I have come to know so well. How your attention flits to some high place when you are paid a compliment. How you wield your lance. How you take your tea. Rather, this difference manifested itself in your eyes. Even now, the words for it elude me—how tedious it feels, writing out such nonsense without a point to make, an end to strive for. But one evening as you and I took our supper late in the dining hall—we’d both been sent to clean up rubble, and had spent the whole day toiling, in a way I’d once have thought you incapable of toiling—you looked up from your plate and asked me what I wished to do with my life after the war’s end. I could tell that it was a question that had burdened you for some time, for you asked it swiftly, self-consciously, though still your eyes met mine, and though your voice wavered, those eyes did not.
I did not have my answer then. I knew only that when I looked back at you, in that moment, I saw something so true, so righteous, that my heart rose to it ardently, with such force that I felt for a moment it would desert me.
You spoke of that future—my future—as though it were already mine. No—as though it were already yours.
And perhaps it was.
My heart rises to you still, Ferdinand—Ferdinand, of noble House Aegir; Ferdinand, of the hills. I have made every effort to ground it, but its want outruns me. This wretched, withered thing is yours for the claiming, and you may do with it what you will. Caress it or crush it; it makes no difference to me. After all, the war’s end has come and gone. Only my life remains. I have done my pondering, all these years. And at last I have my answer.
What is yours?
Your obedient servant,
Hubert
Ferdinand has always loved the world the best in autumn, when the setting sun illuminates even the gnats with such majesty that they might be mistaken for embers. Soon the Ethereal Moon will be upon them again, and he will not have so many temperate occasions to wander out to the pasture at the day’s end, so he is taking advantage of the season’s last kindnesses while he still can—even if it means hurrying out to the golden field in full fig, fresh from a day of councils and treatises.
Saga comes to meet him at the gate, approaching at a lazy trot. Over her left flank, Ferdinand can see the filly—and how she has grown!—frolicking with one of the young draft ponies, a mild-mannered bay. When Saga reaches the fence, she cranes her great neck over the rail and gently noses at his waist.
“Ah—forgive me, old girl,” Ferdinand says, patting her cheek. “I rushed out on such swift heels that I neglected to pilfer any carrots.”
Saga snorts grouchily. Ferdinand runs a hand up and down her neck a while, just the way she likes it, and watches the glow of the golden world.
“I thought that I might find you here,” a voice says.
Ferdinand blinks. Saga tosses her head, shying away; his hand hovers in the air where her body had been.
At length, he turns his head.
“Duke Aegir,” says Hubert, in a black cloak and black trousers, with light burning at every edge of him. “Your hair has grown.”
Ferdinand’s mouth is replete with words, but the only one to make it out is, “I.”
Hubert does not look any different—not in the least. It is as though he never left. The gaunt face, the pale green eye, the gloved hands and the thin nose; the sharp, underlying look of perception, as though there is some layer of being to which only he is privy. When the wind rushes through the valley, it musses his dark hair. For an instant, Ferdinand sees both eyes.
“I’m not interrupting,” Hubert says, the closest to a self-conscious question he’ll ever tread.
“No,” Ferdinand rasps, and then swallows, wrenches his noble bearing back into place. “No, certainly not, Hubert. I… Hubert. When… I’d no idea that you were back.” A contraction! What on earth is the matter with him? “It is good—the Empire rejoices!”
“The Empire will rejoice on the morrow,” Hubert says, folding his arms at his back. He takes one step forward. “Lady Edelgard insisted that today be a day for reunions of the private kind.”
Ferdinand’s heart leaps as he, too, takes a step. “I see.”
Hubert takes another step. “It is… good, Ferdinand, to see your face.”
“And yours,” Ferdinand says, and moves closer—so close that another stride would bring their chests together.
For a long, long while, Hubert is still, and simply looks at him. Then he brushes his fingertips against the knuckles of Ferdinand’s left hand, and guides it upwards.
Ferdinand’s laugh emerges breathlessly. “Hubert, what—”
The word breaks off when Hubert gently sets his lips to Ferdinand’s inner wrist, on the sliver of skin exposed between the edge of his sleeve and the hem of his glove. He inhales through his nose—deep, and soft, and hungry.
“I received your letter,” he murmurs into the skin.
Ferdinand’s breath stutters in his chest. His comprehension of language has utterly dissolved. “You…”
Hubert draws away—Ferdinand’s wrist is cold in his absence—and reaches with his other hand into his breast pocket, producing a yellowed envelope, opened, with the red wax of the von Aegir seal perfectly preserved.
“It,” Ferdinand says, smiling, “it reached you.”
Hubert nods. “It did,” he says, with an understated smile of his own. “We’ve much to discuss.”
From the field, Ferdinand can hear the horses running.
“So we do,” he says.
Hubert,
I know not if this is the answer that you seek, but it is the answer that I have.
First, I keep that sprig of lavender in a small gossamer satchet beneath my pillow. Its fragrance comforts me, for I think each night before I sleep that it is a fragrance you, too, smelled, and that you perhaps held the stem in your careful fingers, and gently knotted the twine below the flower, thrice. My dreams are rewritten, Hubert, when I think of your hands.
Second, you asked after the foal’s name. Very well, then; I will share it with you. Many moons ago, you expressed your wish for her to be stalwart and true. She is both of these things, and many more. When I saw the star mark on her small, perfect head—when she came into this world on the seventeenth day of the Great Tree Moon, among the rain and thunder—I knew what name I would give her. And she knows that it is hers, for when I call it out now, across the pasture, she lifts her head, flicks her tail, and comes to me. She recognizes her existence in it.
That name is Vestra, for the western sky. And for you.
May the Goddess, or our memory of her—what we hoped, always, that she could be—see you safely home to me… that you may call out my name when you come, and I will answer.
Yours,
Ferdinand