Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

With a pop and a sizzle, the device in Claude’s dorm room finally failed. Shit, he thought in frustration and mounting panic. It was so close, it had only needed a few more hours. The device had been limping along since he’d first set it up, making concerning noises and occasionally belching a thick cloud of black smoke, but Claude had hoped it would last until its job was done. Nearly three months ago, during the Harpstring Moon, Nader had snuck it all the way to Garreg Mach from the Almyran artificers who had constructed it. Claude was grateful, but he suspected the man had been tossing it around like a sack of grain during the journey. It had arrived half-functional at best, and now it had broken completely. At least Nader’s other package hadn’t been damaged in transit. Even that oaf knew to be gentle with one of those. That gift sat nestled in the Almyran device, warm and safe. For now.

Claude took a deep breath and tried to still his hammering heart. He ran his hand through his curly brown hair. This was fine, he told himself. He could fix this. He just needed to find someone who could use fire magic and wasn’t doing anything for the next few hours. No problem. Lots of people at the Garreg Mach Officer’s Academy were studying fire magic, and there were no classes tomorrow. Someone would be available.

Then surveyed the scene in his room again, and he felt a sinking pit in his stomach. In most respects, it was a normal room: a small bed, a student’s desk, a dresser and the clothes and sundries he’d brought from home. But in the center of the room, sitting openly out on the rug, there was a broken piece of forbidden foreign technology with illegal contraband inside it. If Seteth or Archbishop Rhea saw this, Claude would be put to death for possession of heretical materials. Not even his status as the future head of House Riegan would protect him from the headsman’s axe. So he couldn’t ask anyone aligned with the Church.

That wasn’t necessarily a huge problem; plenty of students here harbored some level of distaste for the Church of Seiros. That wasn’t particularly surprising; the Church was high-handed, violent, and bigoted, and even here in the center of its power many chafed under its dogma of Crest superiority.

However, even if he found a confidante who would help him without reporting him to Archbishop Rhea, revealing this scene to anyone would still put his whole life in Fodlan at risk. Claude was using an Almyran machine and reading from an Almyran book to operate it; whoever he brought in would figure out pretty quickly that Claude wasn’t from some out-of-the-way Fodlani village like he suggested. And if the nobles of the Leicester Alliance learned he was Almyran, his life in Fodlan was over. He would be disowned and exiled, and all his plans would be shattered. He would have to retreat back home to Almyra with his tail between his legs to an uncertain future.

Actually, he thought glumly, his future wouldn’t be uncertain at all. With no accomplishments to his name and no power base of his own, it was certain he would be assassinated, and one of his brothers would become the next King of Almyra.

But that was in the future. There was no time to be worrying about what-ifs and potential problems, because there was a life depending on his actions right now. He was going to walk out of this dorm room and find a fire mage to help him, and hopefully that fire mage would be incurious and lazy and not ask him too many difficult questions. It was a good plan, and he was going to make it work. I don’t need luck, he thought as he strode into the hall, willing a confidence into himself he did not fully feel. This is fate.

—

The proper fitting of heavy armor is crucial to maintain the optimal balance of safety, combat ability, and comfort for long-term use on the battlefield. Great care must be taken to ensure the below steps are performed in the proper order to secure the armor and effectively protect against weapon attacks. For cuirasses in the traditional Adrestian style, straps should first be loosely connected in the following order; following this, a second pass is performed to fully secure the armor (For armors in the new Faerghan style, follow the order below but first tighten the left and right trapezial…

Edelgard’s eyes glazed over as she read the passage again. She paused, took a deep breath, and steeled her resolve. This was crucial to her education, she reminded herself. There was a war coming to Fodlan, her war, and soon she would be risking her life in heavy armor every day. She was going to conquer two nations, tear down an ancient church, overthrow a useless and self-satisfied nobility, and destroy the secretive order of dark mages that had killed her family and turned her into their weapon. She was not going to be defeated by her coursework in heavy armor. Edelgard von Hresvelg was meant for greater things than to bleed out in some field because she had tightened straps in the wrong order and a blade or arrow had pierced her armor.

But it was so boring, a small part of her whined. To her housemates in the Black Eagles and to the world at large, Edelgard projected nothing but ambition and confidence. However, she sometimes heard within herself the voice of the soft, spoiled princess she might have been in more peaceful times. Often it told her to just lay around all day eating sweets instead of plotting a coup and a war. Tonight it told her to take this heavy armor manual and throw it into the fucking pond so she could read something that didn’t put her to sleep instead. Perhaps that novel Dorothea had lent her about the noble girl and the bandit king…

She shook her head. This was important. This was the path she had chosen. She gritted her teeth and started again from the top of the page.

She did not make it far before her eyelids began to droop again, and the knock at her door came as a blessed relief.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Claude,” came the answer from beyond the door.

Edelgard frowned. What did he want? In the nearly five months they’d been at the Officer’s Academy, she had not spent much time with Claude von Riegan, the head of the Golden Deer house and future leader of the Leicester Alliance. Her house had trounced his at the Academy’s opening mock battle, and since then she’d had her hands full with her own studies, running her house, and her… extracurriculars as the Flame Emperor. She’d endured Claude’s teasing from time to time, but she wouldn’t say they were close. Certainly not close enough for him to come knocking on her door during one of their free evenings.

She opened the door to see him, leaning with a hand propped up on the door frame. As always, he wore a false, unctuous smile. Edelgard loathed that smile. It never reached all the way to his eyes, which were usually cold and calculating. It made him look like he had two different faces stitched awkwardly together. She didn't understand how everyone didn’t see through his facade. Professor Byleth did, she knew, but most of the other students saw the gregarious jokester Claude pretended to be. But she saw something different. Something piercing and dangerous, not to be underestimated.

Tonight, though, Claude looked out of sorts. His uniform was partially undone, sweat streaked his brow, and his hair was disheveled as if he’d been running his fingers through it compulsively. His smile was faker and more perfunctory than ever, and while his eyes were searching as always, there was also something close to panic behind them.

“Claude,” she said evenly. “Do you need something?”

“Hey, Edelgard!” he said, trying to sound chipper. “Yeah, actually, I need a favor. Are any of the Eagles around that can use fire magic? None of my house is here, I think they went into town with Professor Byleth and Captain Jeralt.”

Most of the Black Eagles had also gone to the town tavern that evening with Professor Byleth and her father. There wasn’t much to do in the monastery in the evenings, so the tavern was a popular destination even for students who wouldn’t be served alcohol. It was especially popular when Captain Jeralt went, because he didn’t care about noble decorum or church rules, and he drank like a fish. An enterprising student could usually sneak a drink or two or six off of Jeralt’s table that they wouldn’t be served otherwise.

Dorothea was one such student at the tavern that night, and Hubert had another mission Edelgard had sent him on to advance their goals for the coming war. Edelgard wasn’t certain where Linhardt was, but it was almost certainly either in the library or in bed. In both cases he would refuse to be disturbed. However, one more mage among the Black Eagles was available: Edelgard herself. “You’re in luck, Claude,” Edelgard said with a smirk, and she held up a gloved hand. She concentrated like Professor Byleth had taught her, and she wreathed her hand in golden flame. She shrunk the flame down to a candle light and danced it along her knuckles like a thief with a coin.

Claude did not look pleased to find what he had been searching for. He actually grimaced, as if in pain. “O-oh,” he said, “I didn’t know you- um. Look, I know you’re busy, it's really not a big deal, so I don’t want to bother you with it, maybe there’s somebody else in your house who can make fire?” He looked at her hopefully.

Edelgard bristled with irritation. The nerve of this man! He bangs on her door asking for a favor, and when she actually has the skills he needs, he turns her down? He wanted help, just not from her. What an absolute horse’s ass.

She crossed her arms and said, “There’s no one here tonight but me and Bernadetta. She doesn’t know fire magic, and she wouldn’t help you if she did.”

“Who?” Claude asked, and Edelgard snorted. That wasn’t surprising, Bernadetta spent every spare second alone in her room (and many of the non-spare seconds as well, when she should have been in class or training) and interacted with other students only under duress. Edelgard made a mental note to try to get Bernadetta to at least meet all the students at the monastery once.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Do you want help or not?”

Still, Claude hesitated. His eyes darted about wildly, but he wasn’t seeing her or their surroundings. He seemed to be deep in frantic thought, searching for another way out of whatever his mysterious predicament was.

Edelgard’s irritation shifted to concern. Claude was clearly terrified of not getting the help he needed, and perhaps equally terrified of getting that help from Edelgard. What in the world was he up to?

But besides her concern, Edelgard was also intrigued. Claude was one of the most guarded people she had ever met. He looked genuinely frightened now, and he was a man who wore emotions on his face like masks: he never looked genuinely anything. Edelgard had to know what could have put him in this state, both because it could be a risk to her, and for her own edification.

Eventually, Claude came to a decision. His shoulders slumped slightly and he finally looked back at her. He took a deep breath and said, “I do want help, yeah. It’s life or death. Come with me.” His fake smile was gone, and he looked deadly serious. He turned to head back to his room, gesturing at her to follow. Edelgard glanced back at her heavy armor manual, and considered her options. But not for very long. I’ll get to that tomorrow, she thought of the armor studies. Or hopefully never, added the small voice inside her. Edelgard slid on her shoes, locked her door, and followed Claude down the walkway.

Chapter Text

Claude glanced around suspiciously as they approached his room. Seeing no prying eyes, he unlocked the door, opened it just enough for them to squeeze inside, and ushered Edelgard in. She entered the room and he followed close and locked the door behind her. There was a lantern on his desk that filled the room with yellow light, even at this late hour. In most respects his room was identical to hers, except for the object sitting in the center of his floor.

It was about as tall as her knees and more than a foot across, a hexagonal cylinder that seemed to be made of dark canvas stretched over a wood frame. The base was iron or some other metal, and it had a lid that had been removed and set off to the side that resembled a ladies’ hatbox. The inside was hollow, and resting in it there was a large, oblong stone. The smooth stone was the color of cream, shot through with green veins like emeralds and flecks of gold. The canvas of the container was decorated with geometric shapes in a foreign style Edelgard didn’t recognize, and each of the six panels had a scene in the center. Each scene showed a stage in the life cycle of a wyvern. On one panel she could see a hatchling surrounded by bits of eggshell, the next had a gangly, presumably adolescent wyvern, and the next had an adult wyvern in full flight.

Claude pulled a pair of pillows off his bed and placed them in front of the device. He knelt on one and gestured for her to kneel next to him. As she knelt down, he touched the cream-colored stone gently. Seeing the question in her eyes, he said, “It’s an incubator, from… Anyway, it was damaged in transit, and it limped along for a while until it broke down about an hour ago.”

An incubator. Edelgard looked again at the stone in the center, and placed her own hand on it. It was warm, and she thought she could feel movement inside it. So not a stone at all, but an egg. Likely a wyvern egg, if the decorations on the incubator were any indication. Claude was trying to hatch a wyvern in here.

She had heard of similar devices that burned wood to keep hens’ eggs warm, but those were large freestanding structures built on farms, they were not compact portable devices like this, and they certainly weren’t for wyvern eggs. There was not much tradition of wyvern husbandry in Fodlan; war wyverns were typically hatched in the wild and taken from their broods when they were young to be raised as mounts. ‘Brought from savagery into the light of the Goddess, to serve her aims,’ was the teaching of the Church, she recalled. As far as she knew, raising a wyvern from an egg was unheard-of.

“So that’s why you need fire magic,” Edelgard said. “You can’t keep it warm any more.”

“Yeah,” Claude said, and he ran his hand through his hair again. He asked, “Can you- will you do it?”

She did not hesitate. “Of course,” Edelgard said, and Claude sighed in relief. Now that she knew the nature of the task, she was not reluctant to help him. This wasn’t some jape or prank, and it didn’t seem dangerous or criminal (of course, it was heresy against the Church, punishable by death, but Edelgard had been swimming in those waters for years and she did not fear holy judgment).

Also, she understood now what Claude had meant by ‘life and death’ earlier. Without her fire magic, the little wyvern in this egg would die. Now that she knew that, how could she do anything but help? Was she supposed to go back to her room and study heavy armor while an innocent life was lost because of her inaction? Of course not. She already knew that her actions in the coming years would spill a great deal of innocent blood in pursuit of a better world. She would not start spilling it now for no reason. She would help.

She wreathed her hands in flame again, and reached toward the egg. She hesitated, and asked, “How do I know if it’s too hot? Or not hot enough?”

Claude pointed to a narrow glass tube hanging inside the incubator. It had a bulb at the bottom filled with a silvery liquid. “This is a ‘thermometer.’ The liquid inside expands when it’s hot and contracts when it’s cold. Keep the liquid between these two notches,” he said, pointing to two horizontal marks on the glass tube’s side, “and that’ll be the right temperature.”

It was another ingenious device Edelgard had never encountered. She was starting to see why Claude was so hesitant to bring help in here. The Church of Seiros would take his head for possessing all this forbidden knowledge, the backwards fools. Meanwhile, she could only think about how useful these things could be if they were allowed to spread freely. She pushed those thoughts aside for now, she had more pressing concerns in the moment. She directed the flames on her palms around the egg, and watched the liquid rise in the thermometer. She eased back on the flames as it passed the lower mark.

Once she had stabilized the temperature, she spoke. “How long until it hatches?”

Claude looked embarrassed. “It should be soon. Um, within the next twelve hours.”

“Twelve hours!?” Edelgard replied in consternation, and she had to will herself to be calm as the flames on her hands flared up dangerously high. “That’s ’soon?’ You expect me to stay in your room all night and make fire for twelve hours?”

“I’ve been incubating it for months, so yeah, twelve hours is soon!” Claude protested. “And it might come sooner, it’s not an exact science.”

Edelgard huffed indignantly, but she did not move from her position in front of the incubator. She knew the stakes, and she kept the temperature steady.

They spoke only a bit over the next few hours. Edelgard focused on maintaining the temperature of the egg, and she shifted from kneeling to sitting. Claude moved back and forth between the incubator and his desk. At the incubator he checked the egg, examining it with his eyes and hands, and then he would go to his desk to flip through a large book, muttering to himself occasionally. When Edelgard spared a glance at the book, she did not recognize the characters written in it, but she noticed some illustrations of wyverns and eggs.

Eventually, Claude spoke as they watched the egg. “I didn’t know you were studying reason magic,” he said.

“It’s fairly recent,” Edelgard responded. “The Professor says I have a knack for it. I’m not sure I’ll continue. I won’t have much chance to use it; the Adrestian Emperor traditionally fights with armor and axe.”

Claude raised an eyebrow at her. “You never struck me as a traditionalist.”

Edelgard didn’t respond, partially because she had no satisfying answer, but partially because the exertion of generating continuous flames was beginning to get to her. Sweat began to bead on her brow and drip into her eyes.

Claude looked at her with concern. “Are you okay? You look-”

“Be mindful how you finish that sentence, Claude,” she said tersely. “I’m doing you a favor.”

“You look like you’re working hard, and I appreciate it,” he said, with a (typical, ugly, fake) smile. Then he dropped the smile and looked worried. “Is it too much?”

“I can hold,” she grunted. “This just… isn’t what the spell is designed for. They teach us to create a fireball and throw it at the target. Quick generation and quick release. Maintaining a continuous output is quite a bit harder, especially for this long.”

Claude clenched his jaw. “Typical Church of Seiros behavior. Magic is just another tool for killing. They teach you just enough to fight and not enough to do anything useful.”

Claude had voiced similar heresies against the Church in the past; they were probably the only things he ever said that didn't annoy her. She had done the same in his presence. Ordinarily, she would playfully warn him to watch his tongue while signaling her agreement, and he would do the same for her own dangerous opinions. They had each taken turns leading in that dance. It wasn't safe or prudent to be more honest with each other than that.

But tonight, Edelgard simply lacked the patience to play coy. Perhaps because she was exhausted from maintaining the fire spell. Or because of the strain of knowing the helpless life inside that egg would die if she failed. Or because she had seen more of the real Claude von Riegan in the last several hours than in the previous five months, and it felt natural to repay him in kind.

So instead of saying something prudent, Edelgard said something true. “The Church is a blight on all of us. It holds humanity back in innumerable ways, and all of Fodlan would be better off were its power broken.” Her arms started to shake from exhaustion but she maintained the fire spell. Sweat began to pour off her forehead into her eyes, and she blinked rapidly to clear them.

“Not just Fodlan,” Claude muttered. Noticing the sweat in her eyes, he said, “Let me help with that.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and moved to crouch next to her. He dabbed gently on her forehead, so gently that she wasn’t even sure the white silk was touching her at all; it might have been just close enough to absorb the beads of water without making contact with her skin.

Edelgard spared a glance from the egg to look up at Claude. He was intensely focused on drying her brow, and for once there was not the slightest hint of a smile on his face. He did not notice her looking at him. When he was finished, Claude pulled back his arm and his gaze drifted down to meet hers. They locked eyes for a moment.

A long moment.

A very long moment.

Edelgard swallowed. This was… perhaps too long to be staring into his eyes, which were a more brilliant green than she’d noticed before, like the foliage in the Imperial Gardens in the summer. She also noticed his delicate features and soft-looking lips and realized with a start that he was very attractive when he wasn’t wearing that oily fake smile. She should look away, she thought. Or say something. Her mouth worked up and down as she struggled to find words, but none came. She noticed tiny movements in his brow, it twitched and furrowed as if he was thinking very intensely about something. His face began to drift closer to hers. Neither spoke. Edelgard tilted her chin up towards him, and-

There was a loud crack from the egg.

They both snapped to look at the incubator. Edelgard felt hot all over. From the fire and the exertion, surely. The heat in her cooled and was replaced with fear as she examined the egg. Had she lost focus for too long? Had she ignored the temperature and hurt the helpless creature? She anxiously studied the egg and hoped she had done no harm.

There was another loud crack, and now a piece of the shell fell away. She could see a snout inside, nearly the same cream color as the eggshell, as the tiny creature wriggled and poked against its prison.

Claude sighed in relief. “It’s starting.You can relax.”

Edelgard let the flames on her hands die and leaned back, breathing heavily. Claude moved back to his desk quickly (Edelgard did not notice the redness of his face) and reached under it to pull out a large shallow tray with a few inches of sand filling it. He dragged it over to the incubator, then reached in gingerly and pulled out the egg. He placed it on the sand and then sat back next to Edelgard. “The next part is up to it,” he said, nodding at the egg. It gently rocked in the sand as the creature inside pushed against the shell.

“There’s nothing more for us to do?” Edelgard asked nervously. “We shouldn’t… heat the egg directly, or break the shell, or-”

Claude smiled softly, and this time his eyes sparkled. “I love the enthusiasm, Princess, but it has to hatch on its own. If it can’t fight its way into this world, it’ll never survive.” His voice projected confidence, but he held his breath as he watched the egg, and Edelgard could see fear and concern in his eyes.

Somehow Edelgard’s hand found Claude’s and she squeezed. She felt her face turn red and focused her eyes very intently on the egg. Claude glanced at their hands in surprise, then at her face, but Edelgard did not meet his gaze.

“She’ll survive,” Edelgard said firmly.

Claude cocked an eyebrow at her and smiled crookedly. “What makes you think it's a she?” The sex of a wyvern couldn’t be determined until at least a week after hatching, and this one wasn’t even out of the egg yet.

“Intuition,” Edelgard replied. Claude rolled his eyes.

The hatching continued for another hour. Edelgard used her magic to boil water and Claude prepared herbal tea, while they listened to eggshell cracking like crinkling paper, and increasingly, to the chirps and grunts of a frustrated baby wyvern. Though Edelgard’s magic fire was no longer required, the thought of returning to her room never occurred to her. This wasn’t done.

Finally, the wyvern dragged itself out of the broken shell, and tumbled into the sand. It was two feet long, skinny and almost all tail. Its rear legs ended in three talons, thick and fierce even at this young age. The forelegs were webbed with the wings that would one day carry the creature aloft; the skin on the wings was the same cream color as the egg, while the scales on its body were a more brilliant white. Its eyes were a flat yellow, and stubby antlers jutted backwards from its thin face. The wyvern wriggled happily in the sand, vocalizing with tiny grawps as it cleaned the egg fluid off its body.

Claude reached out and stroked the wyvern’s face with a finger, and it nuzzled against the contact. Edelgard did the same, but she coated her hand in magical flame first. The fire would warm but not burn while it was still in contact with her body. The wyvern eagerly rubbed its body against the warm hand, its eyes closed in bliss.

When Edelgard retracted her hand, the wyvern followed it eagerly, clambering over the edge of the sandbox and into her lap. “Oh!” she exclaimed, surprised and delighted, as the tiny creature curled into a tight ball on her legs and promptly fell asleep. She continued to stroke it gently with her flame-wreathed hand.

Claude frowned. “So much for gratitude,” he grumbled at the wyvern. “I took care of you for months. She just got here.”

Edelgard laughed. “You should have studied fire magic,” she said. She patted the wyvern’s cheek with a warm finger. It grawped in annoyance and curled up more tightly, pulling a wing over its eyes to block out the light.

“You’re beautiful, you look like the moon,” Edelgard murmured to the pale wyvern. She looked up at Claude. “I’ve never seen one like this. Does she have a name yet?”

“No,” Claude replied. “The first couple weeks can be touch-and-go. We don’t name them until we’re sure they’ll make it.”

Edelgard nodded. “Then you’d better start thinking of names for her,” she said confidently with a small smile on her face.

She was quiet for a moment, petting the sleeping hatchling in her lap. Eventually she spoke again. “So, Claude, are you going to tell me why we just hatched a wyvern? I’m certain Professor Manuela didn’t assign you this as coursework.”

Claude grimaced. This was why he hadn’t wanted to get Edelgard involved: the follow-up questions. He cursed himself for not finding a duller fire mage. Finally he said, “Because I’m going to ride it.”

Edelgard looked down at the sleeping creature in her lap. “She’s awfully small…” she said dubiously.

Claude scoffed. “Not NOW, obviously, I- wait.” He grinned at her. “Did you just make a joke? Did Princess Edelgard von Hresvelg, first of her name, scion of the Adrestian Empire, the two-headed eagle herself, just crack wise at me?”

“Of course not,” Edelgard said primly. “Such things are beneath me. Do you take me for a clown? Or you?”

He chuckled. “No, you’re not nearly as much fun as me, but you’re learning.” She scowled at him. His face turned solemn as he continued, “But I’m serious. I’m going to fly with it. Where I’m from, we don’t take hatched wyverns from their flock to train them the way the Church does. It’s bad for the flock and it’s bad for the wyvern, and ultimately it’s bad for the rider too. This is how the best fliers do it, their wyverns are companions from the moment of hatching, so by the time they’re ready to fly they’ve been training together for years. The Church will just throw anybody who’s passed a few tests onto a strange adult wyvern, because flying is just another tool of war to them. It’s like magic: they only teach you to kill, and they leave you ignorant of everything else.”

Claude sighed and leaned back. His gaze pointed at the ceiling, but his eyes were far away as he said, “But flying is incredible, Edelgard. It's the best feeling in the world.” There was a very genuine smile on his face, and it made him look boyish, unguarded, real for once. As Edelgard watched him speak she felt the same strange warmth from before, when they’d been caught in each other’s eyes. He continued, “It deserves so much more than to be another weapon for Seiros. I’m not going to fly their way. I’m going to fly our- my way, and that starts with a hatchling.”

Then Edelgard quietly asked the question Claude had been dreading all night. “You said ‘where I’m from.’ You said ‘our way.’ Where are you from, Claude?”

He didn’t look at her for a long while. She studied his face, and she watched his walls go back up. He smiled unctuously at her, but his eyes were intensely cold. He said, “Oh, nowhere special. A little fishing village in Leicester. That raises wyverns. For fishing. How about you, Princess? Where are you from?”

Edelgard nearly groaned. Unbelievable. This slippery fucking eel of a man! He was going to persist in these ridiculous lies, with the truth scattered all around him, obvious to anyone with eyes? No one in Fodlan had this technology. No one in Fodlan had this tradition of wyvern husbandry. No one in Fodlan talked about the Church like it was a foreign invader. Claude von Riegan was not from Fodlan.

She and Hubert had investigated Claude’s background when they’d learned he would be in their class. They had not found much; he had appeared a year ago as the legitimate Riegan heir with the legitimate Riegan crest, but no other information to speak of. Their search had determined that Tiana von Riegan was likely his mother; she had the right crest, she was the right age, and there was no record of a spouse or children from her. In fact, shortly after her graduation from the Officer’s Academy twenty years ago, there was no record of her at all. It was as if she had disappeared. Or left the continent, moving beyond even Hubert’s sources.

And if she had left, there was one place more likely than any other: Almyra. Almyra, which shared a border with the Leicester Alliance. Almyra, which boasted the fiercest wyvern riders in the world. Almyra, which had access to knowledge suppressed by the Church. Tiana von Riegan had gone to Almyra, she had borne and raised an Almyran child, and years later that child had returned to claim his birthright in Fodlan, calling himself Claude von Riegan.

“You’re from Almyra,” Edelgard said. It was not a question.

Claude’s shoulder slumped, and he hung his head. Eventually he looked at her with a grim expression and said, “No. I’m not,” and so great was the conviction in his voice that Edelgard nearly believed him in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

He continued, “I’m not from Almyra. I can’t be, because I’m the heir to House Riegan. I’m going to lead the Leicester Alliance one day. And in Leicester, Almyrans are boogeymen. Monstrous invaders, stories to scare children-” his voice was filled with disgust. “The head of the Leicester Alliance can’t be one of them. The Duke of House Riegan can’t be one of them. So I’m not.”

Edelgard looked at him for a long time. “My mistake,” she finally said. Claude snorted a mirthless laugh in response.

She looked down at the sleeping wyvern again. “So what happens now?” she asked.

Claude sighed, and said, “I guess you and Hubert write letters to the Alliance roundtable telling them about me. My family will be humiliated, I’ll be expelled, disowned, and exiled, and probably killed, when I get home if not sooner. The Alliance will be thrown into chaos that may take years to recover from, which I’m sure will suit the Adrestian Empire just fine. We’ll probably be ripe for takeover. It’s a smart play.”

“I meant with the wyvern,” Edelgard said. “Claude, I’m not going to tell anyone about you. Not even Hubert.” Unless I need to, she thought, and this thought had the voice of the Flame Emperor. Unless it helps me achieve my goals. She tried to push that thought away.

Claude thought similarly. He shook his head. “Sure you will. Maybe not immediately, and you might not want to, but this is bigger than what either of us wants. You have a dagger pointed at my heart, which means Adrestia has a dagger pointed at Leicester’s heart. If the Empire benefits from ruining me, you’ll do it. Just like I would do it if the roles were reversed.”

If the roles were reversed, Edelgard thought, and suddenly she had an idea. A foolish, reckless idea that would have Hubert grinding his teeth in frustration.

She said, “You’re right. No matter what I say, your secret is a weapon in my arsenal. A dagger at your breast. For what it’s worth, I would personally find its use distasteful. If we are to be foes, I would prefer to bring you down with an axe instead of a whisper.” Claude grinned at this, but it was fierce, predatory, a flash of bared fangs that said ‘try it.’ Edelgard tried not to find it exciting.

“But what if we both had a dagger?” she asked. Claude cocked and eyebrow and looked at her quizzically. She continued, “If you had a similar weapon, a dangerous secret of mine, then I couldn’t destroy you without destroying myself.”

Claude leaned back on his hands and considered this. “It’s a tempting idea,” he said, “Certainly it's a better option for me. But where would I get one of those dangerous secrets? Or rather, why would you give me one?”

It was a very good question. Hubert would have asked her the same, through gritted teeth, the way he did when he furiously disagreed with her but was too dutiful to say so. And Edelgard wasn’t certain she had a good answer. Not an answer that would have satisfied Hubert, and not an answer that would have satisfied herself before she had come to Garreg Mach.

But her brief time at the Officer’s Academy had already started to change her. Professor Byleth and the Black Eagles had opened her eyes to the possibility, to the sliver of hope, that she would not walk her bloodstained path alone. That she would have allies and even friends to help her make the world a better place. Claude von Riegan could be an extremely valuable ally. He was brilliant, he was resourceful, he saw the ways Fodlan’s broken society could be fixed like she did. From his outsider’s perspective, he saw ways it could be fixed that she didn’t see; he could raise her goals higher still.

And a quieter voice inside her said something else, something she did not fully hear: that he had risked everything by bringing her into his confidence, all to save the life of the baby wyvern in her lap. That he was bright, and beautiful, and he dreamed of flying. That he had already been so wounded by the world’s bigotry that she could never use more of it against him. She was not ready to hear that part of herself yet, but it spoke nonetheless.

“I would rather have you as an ally than an enemy, Claude. Or a corpse,” she said. “And alliances require equality. Reciprocity.”

“Reciprocity,” Claude repeated, still dubious. “Alright, I’m intrigued. Let’s hear it. What’s the deep, dark secret that will destroy the mighty Edelgard?”

Edelgard had not actually expected to get this far. She scrambled to think of a suitable destructive (but not too destructive) secret. “Well, I’m… deathly afraid of rats?” she offered.

Claude rolled his eyes. “Not nearly good enough. And everybody at Garreg Mach already knows you’re afraid of rats. The first week we were here we all saw you come tearing out of the showers screaming ‘Eek! A rat!’” He chuckled at the memory. “Ah, good times.”

“I’m quite certain I didn’t say ‘eek,’” Edelgard grumbled, her face turning pink.

“Maybe it was more of an ‘aaugh,’” Claude allowed. “Still, that’s nothing. It has to be a secret that could destroy your life. Are you serious about this, or not?”

“I am,” Edelgard said, and now she realized what to show him. She had revealed this secret once already, to Professor Byleth, and she still believed that was the right decision. This was the right decision too, and it was easier to reveal the second time.

She lifted her right hand, still warm with magical fire, off the wyvern in her lap. It chirped in irritation and rolled over. She turned her hand so the palm was facing up and manifested the ghostly fan-shaped image of the Crest of Seiros. Claude looked unimpressed, everyone knew she had a minor Crest of Seiros. He opened his mouth to protest when she raised her left hand and concentrated harder. The Crest of Flames appeared above that hand.

Two Crests in one body, an impossibility in and of itself. And one of them the Crest of Flames, which had been thought lost for a thousand years until it was discovered on Professor Byleth. And now, apparently, on Edelgard.

Claude’s eyes went wide and his jaw dropped. “Whoa… that’s not supposed to be possible. In a couple of different ways. How-”

Edelgard cut him off. “No questions. A secret for a secret, a dagger for a dagger, that was the agreement. I don’t know if Archbishop Rhea would kill me or make me a cardinal if she discovered this, but either way my life would not be my own any more. So does that pass muster, Claude? Is your dagger sharp enough?”

Claude whistled. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So, does this make us allies now?”

“Perhaps in time,” Edelgard replied. “For now, let us just say that we’re no more capable of destroying each other than we were yesterday. And there’s one more thing I would ask of you. Call it payment for the favor I did you tonight.”

Claude, more relaxed now, grinned at her crookedly. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

Edelgard stroked the wyvern in her lap again, and thought of the heavy armor manual waiting in her room. I might get to throw that damned thing in the pond after all. She smiled.

“I want you to teach me to fly.”

Chapter Text

“I want you to teach me to fly.”

Edelgard’s request hung in the air between them. Claude’s smile didn’t shift, but his mind raced behind it.

Tell her ‘no,’ was his first thought. Make some excuse. She’s too close to you already. His identity, his plans, his life all hung by a thread because of what Edelgard knew, and she could snip that thread at any time. He could do the same to her, but that would be cold comfort when the knives came out for him. He’d planned to keep his origins a secret for years while he rose to power in the Leicester Alliance, and it was already starting to fall apart. Exposing more of his true self to Edelgard could be disastrous. The smart thing to do was concoct some reason he couldn’t train her. She’d never believe he didn’t know how to fly a wyvern after what he’d told her, but maybe-

“I’d love to, Princess,” Claude lied, “but you know I don’t have a Church flight certification. I’m not even studying flight. They don’t just let any student take a war wyvern out of the stables. What am I supposed to train you on?”

Edelgard was unfazed. “You’re very resourceful, Claude. I’m confident you can find a way around that obstacle. Surely there’s some stablemaster you can bribe, or some scoundrel with a wyvern you can borrow.”

She leaned forward, smirking at him, and continued, “In fact, given the way you just waxed poetic about the joy of flight, I suspect you already have such a resource at your disposal. You’ve probably been sneaking out to fly for months. All I ask is that you bring me along next time.”

Claude had the self-control not to groan, but his smile became more strained. She’d read him correctly; Claude knew a man in town who owned a wyvern (he’d won it in a dice game somehow), and he was happy to let Claude take her out for a flight whenever he felt the itch. In exchange for a hefty sack of gold, of course.

“What if I say ‘no?’” Claude asked, and Edelgard sighed.

“Then I’ll be disappointed. I’m not blackmailing you, Claude. There’s no pressure; if you don’t want to teach me, I’ll ask Professor Byleth. She’ll teach me directly out of Church flight manuals, and I’ll learn just enough to kill with it, like you said. Even that would be preferable to slogging across a battlefield under fifty pounds of steel plate armor, but…” she fell silent for a moment, struggling to find the words. Eventually she located them. “But you told me there’s more to it, and I would see for myself.”

Absolutely not, he told himself. His plans for the future were elaborate and measured in decades, and he was not going to compromise them to share his hobby with a rival from school. Even one who shared more of his views and ambitions than he’d expected. Even one who had just saved the life of his wyvern, which still snoozed happily in her lap. Even one who looked through him with steely lilac eyes, as if she knew he was going to bend and her asking him was just a formality.

And indeed, his resolve wavered. On the other hand, he thought.

On the other hand, she was already in it. There was no way to erase what she already knew about him (well, there was one way, but even if Claude wanted to murder Edelgard, he was confident it would not be an easy task). How much more danger could one flying lesson put him in? Plus, it wasn’t as if there was no upside. Indulging her made it less likely she would burn him by revealing his heritage. He didn’t really expect her to expose him, at least not yet, but it was still worth staying in her good graces.

Also his whole goal in being here was to bring his two worlds together, to break the Church’s xenophobic teachings and drag this backwards continent into the rest of the world. To make Fodlan and Almyra both places where no one would be an outsider. If he could teach the Emperor of Adrestia to fly like an Almyran, if he could teach her what his homeland was really like, that would be a small but significant step toward his goals.

So really, it made sense to teach her. She’d seen through his attempts to avoid it anyway, and it had plenty of practical benefits. Giving Edelgard flight instruction would help him down the path to the future he envisioned.

And I’ll get to see her fly. She’ll be fucking magnificent on the back of a wyvern, he thought. Wait, no. He pushed that intrusive idea away. That’s not what this is about. This was strategy. He had coolly weighed the risk of revealing more of himself against the upside of-

Her hair streaming in the wind, fluttering behind her like a cloak of snow. Her face wearing that fierce, hungry look she gets in battle as her roaring wyvern dives out of the clouds. Claude took a deep breath and tried to still his thoughts. He told himself that training her was a calculated, rational decision he’d made by weighing the pros and cons. It was strategically wise. It was tactically sound. He almost believed it.

“Alright, Princess, you’ve convinced me,” he sighed, “but I can’t leave the hatchling alone for a while. How does our free day in two weeks sound?”

Edelgard nodded. “It sounds excellent. I’m looking forward to it. One fortnight from tomorrow.” She glanced out the window and noticed the weak gray light of the dawn begin to trickle in. She grimaced. “Or rather, one fortnight from today. I should go, perhaps we can still salvage an hour or two of sleep. I should go train this morning, but-” she yawned. “Perhaps casting the fire spell nonstop for hours last night will be an acceptable substitute.”

Then she looked down and frowned in concern as she considered how to get out from under the sleeping wyvern. Softly, she said, “I’m sorry, little one, but I have to leave,” then slid her hands underneath the hatchling. As she lifted it off her lap and deposited it in the sandbox, it chirped in alarm, then blinked at her in a sleepy haze. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said defensively. The wyvern huffed at her, then wriggled into the sand and fell asleep again.

Now she looked at Claude. “You’re going to stay here with her? Do you need anything?”

Claude was reluctantly forced to admit he did. He’d been scrambling last night after the incubator failed, he hadn’t had a chance to prepare for after the wyvern hatched. “Yeah, actually. I was gonna raid the kitchens last night to be ready to feed it but I didn’t have a chance. Can you bring back some meat? They had Gronder skewers last night, a few of those would be perfect.”

—

Edelgard slipped out the door and headed to the dining hall. At this early hour, it was largely empty; few students were diligent enough to be up this early for breakfast and training on their day off. Typically, Edelgard was one of them, but today was not a typical day. She entered the kitchen, and was struck with a wave of heat from the ovens, and the fragrant smells of baking bread and frying bacon. Her mouth began to water, and she realized how famished she was. It was unsurprising, Edelgard thought: she had been up all night exerting more magical power than she’d ever used before. Her body still felt sluggish from generating flames for hours.

She picked over leftovers from the previous night and wrapped a few meat skewers in a napkin to bring back for the wyvern. Her stomach grumbled loudly at this, so she also grabbed a few boiled eggs, pastries, and strips of crispy bacon. A few minutes later she was knocking on Claude’s door again. He let her back in, and she unpacked her haul onto his desk.

She was curious to see the small wyvern eat, so she was shocked and furious when Claude grabbed one of the skewers and promptly shoved half of it into his mouth and began chewing furiously.

“What are you doing!?” she shouted at him. “I thought those were for her, you ass!”

Claude looked frustrated. “Ish naugh-” he started to say through a mouthful of roasted meat. He coughed, and held up one finger, and kept chewing silently.

“At least take smaller bites,” Edelgard said. She took a step back to avoid any spray in case he tried to talk again. “And chew with your mouth closed. You look- what are you doing now,” she asked, because now he was spitting the half-chewed food into a shallow bowl on his desk.

Once his mouth was free, Claude said, “This isn’t for me. It’s a baby, Edelgard. It can’t eat solid food yet. You know how mother birds feed baby birds?”

“Oh,” Edelgard said. After a moment, her lip curled in revulsion. “Oh,” she repeated.

“Yeah, well, I’m not wild about it either,” Claude grumbled, and he crammed more meat in his mouth.

Claude unhappily chewed his way through three Gronder skewers and gradually filled up the small bowl. Edelgard turned to watch the hatchling as she tried to ignore the sounds of mastication and spitting.

The commotion had finally woken the pale wyvern, and it stood and stretched languidly in the sandbox. First it raised its rear in the air to stretch its hind legs, then it reared back and extended its forelegs out, demonstrating its full wingspan of perhaps three feet. The skin of the wings was a translucent pink in the dawn light, and the wyvern’s body trembled from the exertion of the stretch. The wyvern dropped back down onto four legs, shook its body to remove a layer of sand, then stuck its head in the air and sniffed. It caught the scent of the meat skewers, so it turned towards Claude and toddled in his direction across the sand. The wyvern clambered over the edge of the sandbox and tumbled headfirst to the stone floor. Edelgard started to move towards it, because that landing had not looked comfortable, but the wyvern quickly righted itself and continued moving towards Claude. It reached his legs where he was seated and butted its head against his ankle.

He smiled indulgently at the hatchling. “Yeah, yeah, here you go, buddy. Breakfast is served. Hot off the-” He grimaced. “Never mind.” He placed the bowl on the floor and the wyvern attacked it with gusto, growling softly but fiercely as it ate the first meal of its life.

Edelgard watched the wyvern eat, and then her stomach growled again. She turned pink with embarrassment and looked at Claude. Of course, he was smirking at her. He shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I’m fresh out. Mama bird’s got nothing left,” he said.

She gagged at the thought of eating what the wyvern was eating. “Disgusting,” she said. She reached back into her satchel to pull out another bundle wrapped in a napkin, the rest of her breakfast haul. “Fortunately, I also got food for-” For us, she had meant to say, but for some reason she stumbled over the words. “-for people,” she finished.

If Claude noticed her hesitation he gave no sign. “Perfect! I’m people. And I’m starving too,” he said as he grabbed a pastry and a pair of boiled eggs. “Do you want tea?”

Claude brewed a breakfast tea with the help of Edelgard’s magic fire again, and the two hungry students and one hungry wyvern finished their breakfast quickly. After they had eaten, Edelgard and Claude took turns waving a feather for the wyvern to chase. Its eyes were wide in concentration as it hunted and pounced on the feather, biting it and kicking at it with its powerful rear legs. After a few minutes, it tired of the game and crawled back into the sandbox with a yawn. It spun around a few times, patting at the sand with its forelegs, then curled up in a ball and went to sleep.

Edelgard said, “She has the right idea, I think,” and stifled her own yawn. The sun was well and truly up now, but perhaps she could still rest her eyes for a few moments before her day began. “This time I really should go,” she said as she stood and began to gather her things.

Claude watched her carefully for a moment, then he spoke. “Edelgard,” he said. His face was solemn when she turned to look at him. “Seriously. Thank you for everything. You were a lifesaver last night.”

She felt that strange warmth again. “It was my pleasure, Claude,” she said. “I’ll stop by later to see her again. And to ensure you don’t weasel out of our flying lesson.”

Now he smiled, but not one of his unctuous false ones. “I wouldn’t dream of it. See you soon, Princess.” He stood up from his chair to show her out. Edelgard exited Claude’s room and returned to her own. She collapsed on her bed and was asleep within moments.

Chapter Text

Hubert smiled in grim satisfaction as he watched Claude leave his room. At last.

Lady Edelgard’s behavior had become enormously suspicious over the last week, and Hubert was beginning to grow concerned. After barely interacting with Claude at all in their first five months at the Officers’ Academy, she was suddenly visiting his room every other evening. Claude himself was acting no less oddly. Hubert had learned he was claiming to be sick and skipping Professor Manuela’s lectures, and he barely left his room except for meals (which he took back to his room) and to use the bathing facilities. However, he looked completely healthy, if a bit tired, and the meals he took from the dining hall would have been large for anyone at Garreg Mach besides Raphael.

Hubert’s liege lady had not seen fit to explain her behavior to him, and he had not yet asked. Hubert supposed she could simply be having a romantic dalliance, but Lady Edelgard had shown little interest in romance in general (she was nearly as single-minded as he was, Hubert thought admiringly), and enormous disdain for Claude in particular. He thought it unlikely that she had become intimate with a man she had called a “duplicitous snake” on more than one occasion.

That left only more sinister explanations: that Lady Edelgard was being coerced or extorted by the man, to some unknown purpose. And if that was the case, then it was Hubert’s responsibility to crush it before it could progress any further. He had vowed long ago that he would allow nothing to deter Lady Edelgard from her path, and whatever scheme Claude von Riegan had hatched was no exception.

But before Hubert could crush anything, he first had to gather information. He had been observing Claude’s comings and goings for several days, and he knew that the man would be headed to the dining hall for his evening meal. Hubert would have perhaps ten minutes to investigate Claude’s room before he returned. Lady Edelgard was in the training yard this evening, so she would not be disturbing him either.

Hubert was standing around a corner from the dormitories, in a long shadow cast by the setting sun, as he watched Claude lock his door. Claude then pulled something from his pocket, swiped a thumb against his lips and pressed it to where the door met the frame. Clever, Hubert thought. He was clearly paranoid about intruders; presumably he had stuck a thread to the door frame with saliva that would be disturbed if anyone opened the door in his absence.

Of course, Hubert didn’t plan to use the door, so the countermeasure was useless. But still. Clever.

As Claude hurried in the direction of the dining hall, Hubert glanced around to confirm no one was observing him. Hubert tended to loom ominously, both because of his height and the dark aura he purposefully cultivated, but he was capable of stealth when the situation required it. He pictured the inside of Claude’s room to orient himself for a warp spell. He had only seen the inside through an open door from a distance, but that was sufficient for the spell, especially given that it was the exact same size and shape as all the others. With a soft zap and the scent of smoke, Hubert disappeared.

He reappeared in a darkened dormitory room. It was nearly identical to his own, but messier, with books and clothes scattered over every flat surface. There was a musty, earthy smell in the air that he couldn’t identify. Hubert wrinkled his lip in disgust. It was bad enough that Claude lived like this, but Hubert was ill at the thought of Lady Edelgard spending so much time in this…sty.

Hubert knew he would not have much time before Claude returned. He needed to investigate quickly, without disturbing anything that would reveal his presence. There must be something here to give a hint at why Lady Edelgard was spending so much time with Claude. Even the tiniest clue could-

Hubert felt something pinch his ankle.

He looked down. Yellow eyes looked back up at him.

Ah, he thought. I suppose it has something to do with that.

—

Every day the hatchling ate voraciously, and every day it grew larger and stronger. Its length hardly changed, but every part of it filled out and thickened until it scarcely resembled the slender creature that had hatched from the egg a little over a week ago. Its whip-like tail grew thicker, and the scales on its back developed shallow ridges until it appeared the creature was wearing white plate armor. Its hips and wingspan grew wider as it thickened with flesh and muscle, and its belly grew round and full.

The young wyvern also grew fiercer and more adventurous. For the first few days after it was hatched, it did little but sleep, but now it was full of energy. It clambered over every flat surface in Claude’s room, knocking things over in a mix of clumsiness and curiosity, and pestered Claude incessantly for attention. It usually woke at dawn and began scrabbling loudly around the room, yowling for breakfast, but that wasn’t as bad as the nights when Claude would wake in the middle of the night to a weight on his chest or a scaly belly covering his face. Feeding times were no less challenging; on nights when Edelgard didn’t visit, Claude had to physically restrain the wyvern while he chewed its food. It whined and wriggled to break free from his embrace, but if it weren’t wrapped up in his arms it would try to steal the unchewed food off the plate, or worse, directly out of Claude’s mouth.

Claude grudgingly had to admit that Edelgard’s presence made things easier. She could distract the wyvern with play or calm it with scratches from her warm hands while Claude chewed its food in peace. She visited every other evening, and they had fallen into a comfortable routine over the past week. One or the other of them would bring food from the dining hall, always for the wyvern and sometimes for the two of them as well. Claude would chew the wyvern’s food into paste while Edelgard played with the hatchling or let it snooze in her lap.

And after they ate, they talked. They only spoke of trivial things; neither was ready to reveal anything serious, but they learned more about each other nonetheless. Claude learned that Edelgard was charmed by the monastery’s cats; to him they were just a nuisance that made him sneeze. Edelgard learned that Claude enjoyed fishing nearly as much as Professor Byleth, while she found it unbelievably boring. They traded tips on interesting books they’d found in the monastery’s library, even some borderline-heretical tomes that had escaped Seteth’s censorship.

Of course, they talked most about the wyvern. And on this night, a bit more than a week after they had hatched it, the wyvern was what Claude was most excited to talk about.

“I’ve got big news, Princess,” he said with pride.

Edelgard was back in Claude’s room tonight, kneeling in front of the wyvern and rubbing under its chin with a burning hand. She had brought a plate of grilled herring and left it on Claude’s desk for him to chew. “Oh?” she replied, looking over at him.

“Yeah. She’s grown enough that I could check her sex. She’s female,” he said.

Edelgard shrugged. A wry smile flickered across her face and she said, “I knew that already, Claude.”

“You mean you guessed it,” Claude argued.

“If you insist,“ Edelgard said smugly. One of Claude’s eyes twitched. She turned back to the wyvern and the smirk fell off her face, replaced with concern. “She’s larger and stronger every time I see her. Is she… is she past the ‘touch-and-go’ period you mentioned?” Her real question, is she definitely going to survive, hung in the air unasked.

“Yeah,” he said, “she’s doing really well. So I’ve finally given her a name too.” He cleared his throat, and with exaggerated formality he said, “Princess Edelgard von Hresvelg, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Mahsa… von Riegan, I guess?”

“Mahsa,” Edelgard repeated as she petted the wyvern. Mahsa blinked back up at Edelgard. “It’s a lovely name. Does it mean something in Almyran?”

Claude groaned inwardly. If Edelgard was smug about the sex, she was definitely going to be smug about the name he’d chosen. He had picked it because of something she’d said that he couldn’t get out of his head. He had hoped she wouldn’t ask, but Edelgard was nothing if not thorough.

“Sort of,” he said. Edelgard arched an eyebrow at him and he continued, “it’s a big kingdom and we have a few different languages. High Almyran is the official language, but in another one of them, Serran, it means ‘like the moon.’”

Edelgard smiled again. “I told him you looked like the moon the night you hatched,” she said proudly to Mahsa. “I’m glad he was listening.” She rubbed Mahsa’s cheeks with her hands, and the wyvern nipped at her fingers. She glanced at Claude and said, “You’re welcome.”

Yep. Smug, Claude thought sourly. He glanced at the rapidly cooling plate of grilled herring on his desk and decided to wipe that smirk off her face. Claude had some complaints about the division of labor in raising Mahsa so far, and he had a plan to rectify them tonight. He tried not to smile as he knelt down next to Edelgard.

“Listen,” Claude said. “I want to tell you that you’ve been absolutely indispensable since we hatched Mahsa. I didn’t plan it like this, this past week would have been a lot harder without you around. I really think we’re a team, equal partners when it comes to raising her.” He schooled his face into an expression of solemn gratitude. He needed to seem honest here, because honesty was the bait for his snare.

Edelgard blushed at his praise. “Why, thank you, Claude. I’m honored, and of course I want to help in any way I can.” While speaking, she removed the ribbon holding her hair back and began to wave it in front of Mahsa, whose eyes grew wide and alert.

Claude smiled widely as he sprung his trap. “I’m really glad to hear you say that, Edelgard,” he said effusively. Edelgard’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, but it was too late. He continued, “and so in the spirit of equality and teamwork, we’re going to change the jobs up a little bit. I’m tired of you being the fun one every time, so tonight I’m going to play with Mahsa and rub her belly, and you’re going to chew up a pound of fish for her to eat.” He deftly plucked the ribbon from her hand and offered her the plate of herring in return. “Equal partners,” he reminded her with a shark-like grin in response to the queasy look on her face.

Now she’ll balk, he thought. She’s a Fodlani princess and she’s just here to play around with the cute baby wyvern. No doubt her Highness considers herself above such degrading work.

This has been fun and all, but you can’t trust her to stick it out. You can’t trust anyone.

And for a moment she looked as if she would prove him right. Edelgard looked hesitant as her gaze moved from the plate of fish, to Mahsa, and then back to Claude. But then her eyes blazed and her jaw set in determination.

“Give me the fish,” Edelgard said curtly, “and don’t look at me.” She snatched the plate from his hand, and sat down at the chair in front of Claude’s desk with the plate of herring in front of her. She took a deep breath, stuck a piece of fish in her mouth, and began chewing.

So Claude waved Edelgard’s ribbon in front of Mahsa’s face and she chased it around the floor enthusiastically while Edelgard chewed and spat herring into the wyvern’s bowl.

After a while, the sound of Edelgard's chewing stopped, and Claude heard her heave a heavy sigh. The sound of chewing started again, slower now. Claude asked, “How’s it going back there?” and he turned to smirk at her. Edelgard glared at him. She looked-

Claude felt his face heat up. She looked adorable. Her lilac eyes were furious, but the anger in them was severely undercut by her chubby cheeks, puffed out from all the food in her mouth. Claude told himself he couldn’t look away because he was burning this image into his mind for teasing purposes.

He stared for a moment too long, and the fury in her eyes softened to puzzlement. “Whagh?” Edelgard asked around a mouthful of food. He turned back to Mahsa before Edelgard could see his embarrassment and quickly said, “Nothing. Just wanted to check on how it was going. Don’t talk with your mouth full, Princess.” She growled at him in irritation and continued chewing. Claude took a deep calming breath as Mahsa looked at him quizzically.

After Edelgard prepared Mahsa’s meal, she and Claude sat on the floor together and watched the wyvern eat in companionable silence until Claude spoke.

“We need a cover story,” he said. “People are gonna notice you coming to my room so often. They’re probably already talking about it. We need to be on the same page when they start asking questions.”

Edelgard nodded thoughtfully. After a moment she said, “Perhaps I’m tutoring you. Your knowledge of Adrestian and Faerghan history is shaky at best.”

Claude frowned briefly at this insult to his scholarly pride. He didn’t spend all those hours reading in the library just to be accused of ignorance by a haughty princess. Even if it was, maybe, a little bit true. He thought he was doing pretty well for someone who’d only been on this continent for eighteen months, but his studies had been heavily focused on Leicestrian history and politics. Still, he couldn’t let that jab go unanswered.

“Maybe I’m the one tutoring you,” he countered with a smile.

“I think our cover story should be believable, Claude,” Edelgard replied lightly.

“Ouch,” Claude said.

Edelgard noticed the game board on Claude’s dresser. In contrast to the clutter that filled the rest of his room, the area around it was clear and the pieces had been put away carefully. “You enjoy chess?” she asked. “We can tell people we’re playing chess.”

Playing chess? Claude thought. Pathetic. Who taught this girl how to lie? People will never buy that. If we tell people she’s coming over secretly at night to play chess, they’ll just think-

Oh. Claude tried not to grin as he formulated a scheme. Chess? That was perfect.

Edelgard was going to hate this plan, of course. Which was why he wasn’t going to tell her about it. She’d find out soon enough, just as soon as she tried to use that ridiculous excuse.

“Chess will work, Princess,” he said with a smile. “If anybody asks, tell ‘em we’re just playing chess.”

Chapter Text

Dawn was just beginning to stain the night sky pink when Edelgard arrived at the training grounds for her morning exercises. The yard was empty except for Felix, whose brow already glistened with sweat as he attacked a training dummy with a wooden sword. The cool stone walls of the training yard echoed with the dull thwacks of his training sword striking the dummy. He turned when he heard Edelgard approach, then gave her a curt nod and turned back to his straw-filled opponent.

Edelgard grabbed a training axe from the rack and squared off against her own dummy. She didn’t plan to have a strenuous workout this morning; she was sparring with Caspar and Petra in the evening and would need all of her strength to face both of them at once. This morning she would merely practice the textbook axe combat forms, just enough to center and invigorate herself for the day.

The basic axe maneuvers were taught by combat instructors across Fodlan, and they were second nature to her after years of training in them. Their usefulness was limited; real battle was messier than the textbook combat forms, of course. Real battle was blood, smoke, and chaos. It was cutting down one’s opponent by any means necessary, with any tool available. Still, they were a necessary foundation for true axe combat, and Edelgard found them to be meditative as well.

Left step forward, downward strike. Cross cut, right step forward, pommel strike. This was second nature to her; Edelgard could nearly perform these motions in her sleep. She flowed through the forms like water, and her mind wandered to the busy day ahead of her. After training, she would break her fast, then attend Professor Byleth’s morning and afternoon lectures. After that she would study, spar with Caspar and Petra, have dinner and check on Mahsa and Claude, and finally review some secret correspondence Hubert had received from Count von Bergliez.

Edelgard smiled to herself. She hadn’t expected that caring for an animal would be such a priority in her time at Garreg Mach, but that darling little wyvern had quickly become an important part of Edelgard’s schedule, and the high point of her day. Before coming to Garreg Mach, she’d had almost no experience with animals. In the years since her Crest augmentation she hadn’t made time for them, and she wasn’t sure if she or her siblings had kept pets when they were younger. She would have to ask Hubert; her memories of that time were largely lost. She had emerged from the dungeons underneath the Imperial Palace with little memory of her childhood; all was obscured by the torture and trauma inflicted by Those Who Slither in the Dark.

The thought of her long-dead brothers and sisters briefly made her heart ache and her eyes sting. She pushed those feelings out of her mind; she reminded herself that the Edelgard who could cry over such things had died with her family in the Enbarr dungeons.

Her axe came down where the dummy’s shoulder met its neck, but her angle was too steep. Against a real opponent her axe would have gotten wedged in the enemy’s armor and bone. She would have to wrench it out, and that would leave her vulnerable and waste her time. Edelgard paused, frowning.

Unfocused. Sloppy. You’re getting distracted, she thought. She took a deep breath to center herself and started her combat forms from the beginning. Again. Left step forward, downward strike. Cross cut, right step forward, pommel strike.

Before long, her thoughts drifted again. Tomorrow was a free day, and when she and Claude had agreed on the flying lesson. It had been a struggle to focus on her heavy armor coursework over the last two weeks, but she wasn’t yet sure she would take to flying and so she needed to continue on the path she’d chosen. Perhaps if tomorrow’s lesson went well then she’d change her course of study and drop heavy armor once and for all.

Left step forward, downward strike. Cross cut, right step forward, pommel strike. She wondered how Claude planned to secure a wyvern for tomorrow; he hadn’t mentioned it yet but she assumed he had some sort of scheme in place. As her body moved through the axe combat stances she considered whether there were new forms she’d need to learn to prepare for aerial combat.

Left step forward, downward strike. Cross cut, right step forward, pommel strike. She thought about Mahsa, and hoped she wouldn’t have to chew the wyvern’s dinner tonight, or at least that the dining hall wouldn’t be serving something loathsome like pickled rabbit. Still, Claude had prepared most of Mahsa’s meals already, so if necessary she would do her duty. They were equal partners, after all.

He didn’t mean that, a voice whispered in her mind. You know how he is. It was a trick, he said it to goad you into chewing her food for him.

The axe twisted in her hands, and the flat of its head smacked harmlessly against the training dummy with a clunk. Felix turned his head at the sound and snorted at her in disdain. Edelgard ground her teeth in frustration. She’d practiced these forms ten thousand times, and she hadn’t slipped like that since she was a child.

Perhaps he did say it merely to mock me, but I called his bluff, Edelgard thought. I’m committed to helping. That means… something, doesn’t it? She didn’t know. She was startled to realize she hoped it did.

Because she liked caring for Mahsa, and she liked being partners with Claude. It was… relaxing. Normal. It let her be a person named Edelgard instead of Her Imperial Majesty, the Princess of Adrestia. She’d been distant from other people since the moment of her birth; as an Imperial princess, no one but her family could treat her like an equal. Now her family was gone, and she was carving away what remained of her humanity bit by bit as she schemed her way towards war.

And she feared who she would be when she finished carving. Part of her feared there was already nothing human left in her, but then Mahsa fell asleep in her lap, or pounced on the ribbon she was waving, or she comfortably bickered with Claude, and for a while she felt like she was still Edelgard. Like she wasn’t a monstrous warmonger. Like she wasn’t a weapon forged from the corpse of a little girl by a cabal of scheming nobles.

This is foolish self-indulgence, she thought, and the thought came in the voice of the Flame Emperor. You are going to remake the world. You are going to fix what is broken in Fodlan and smash what cannot be fixed, or you will die in the attempt. That animal is not your responsibility. Claude von Riegan is not your partner. They are distractions you cannot afford.

And would he call you his partner if he knew what you planned to do? What you’ve already done? Of course not. You hired a man to kill him. You will conquer his nation, cut down his allies, and strip him of his lands and title. An ocean of blood separates you from him.

When the war starts, you won’t be able to keep him. You won’t be able to keep any of them; not Claude, not the Professor, not your classmates.

Nothing has changed. Your path is still the only thing that matters, and you’ve always known that you would walk it with servants and not partners. You will walk it alone.

Alone. Edelgard’s eyes stung again. The thought was not new, she’d had it many times over the last five years, but it struck her differently this time. It hurt more than usual, but it also felt… hollow. False. Like her loneliness might be something less than the necessity she’d long believed it to be.

She breathed in and out deeply, and took up the starting axe form once more as she squared off against the training dummy. Her mind was still troubled, and after a moment she dropped the stance with a sigh. She’d never be able to stick to the forms like this. Edelgard set her training axe back on the rack and finished her morning workout with a run around the academy grounds instead. As she ran, uneasy thoughts of partnership followed her.

—

After her training, Edelgard showered and returned to her room to change, then made her way to the dining hall, preoccupied with the same thoughts that troubled her during her training. She filled her plate and looked towards the tables. She saw that Dorothea had just started her own breakfast, and Edelgard sat down across from her.

“Oh Edie,’ Dorothea said. “You’re frowning again! And you’re usually so upbeat after training. What’s wrong? Did you realize there’s another twelve hundred year old institution you need to topple?”

Edelgard snorted a laugh. “No, it’s-” she paused. Over Dorothea’s shoulder, she saw Claude hurrying out of the dining hall toward his room with a plate piled high with breakfast meats and eggs. He met her eyes and they nodded at each other.

Her frown must have deepened as she considered Claude’s words again, because Dorothea turned to follow Edelgard’s gaze, saw Claude, and turned back toward Edelgard. She looked concerned.

“Is it… something to do with Claude?” Dorothea asked hesitantly. “You two have been awfully friendly recently. Whispering in corners, visiting his room in the evenings…”

Edelgard was glad that Claude had brought up the need for a cover story last night. Dorothea was the first member of Edelgard’s house to ask about Claude, but she knew she wouldn’t be the last. Fortunately, she thought, her story was already decided upon. She lacked Claude’s enthusiasm for weaving falsehoods; Edelgard preferred to prepare her lies ahead of time.

“It is,” she admitted. “He’s an excellent chess player, and we’ve been playing chess in the evenings.” There, she thought. Straightforward, practiced, confident. That should convince her.

She did not notice Dorothea’s skeptical frown.

Edelgard continued. “And last night, during chess, he said something to me, and I’m… unsure if he meant it.”

Dorothea’s eyes widened, and she leaned forward and took Edelgard’s hands in her own. Edelgard looked at her in surprise. “He didn’t mean it,” she said fervently. “Men like him never mean it, Edie. He’s just trying to take advantage of you.”

Edelgard was bewildered by Dorothea’s sudden urgency. She said, “Take adv- what?”

Dorothea looked back towards the door Claude had left through, as if to assure herself that he was gone. She turned back to Edelgard and continued quietly but firmly, “I don’t like him, Edie. I don’t like the way he smiles. It’s cold and it’s fake and you can’t trust it. I’ve seen that smile on a lot of men, and it’s always bad news. I know you don’t have, um, the most experience with romance, and I don’t want you to get hurt by a smooth talker with a fake smile.”

Romance? Edelgard thought, then she absorbed the meaning behind Dorothea’s words. She blanched. Oh.

Dorothea had rejected her chess story out of hand and assumed it was a cover for a romantic tryst with Claude. And to make matters worse, she thought Claude was somehow pressuring Edelgard into it. He preyed on my girlish innocence to seduce me, I suppose, Edelgard thought ruefully. She was a little insulted that Dorothea thought Claude could coerce her into anything, but no doubt the other girl had seen a lot of men take advantage of women during her time on the streets and in the opera. Men like Claude, apparently.

Perhaps she could salvage this. She tried again. “No, he- it isn’t like that, Dorothea. It’s just… chess,” Edelgard said. She began to sweat. Had this lie sounded so feeble when she’d suggested it to Claude last night? She couldn’t change course now, and she couldn’t tell Dorothea the truth, but obviously this wasn’t going to work as she’d expected. She wondered if Claude was going to have this much trouble convincing his house that he was just playing chess with Edelgard in the evenings. Somehow she doubted it.

Dorothea looked no less worried, so Edelgard continued, “Dorothea, I see it too. I hate his smile, it’s hideous, and I know better than to trust him. But I promise you, we’re not like that. We’re playing chess together.”

Still dubious, Dorothea said, “Okay, Edie. If you say so. I still don’t trust him, but I trust you.” Edelgard’s heart swelled at this. She hoped that would be true forever. “And if there’s something he said you don’t believe, you just have to ask him if he meant it. He may not tell you the truth, but he’ll give you an answer to think about. That’s the best you can do.”

Edelgard smiled. “Thank you, Dorothea. That’s good advice. I’ll do that.”

Dorothea squeezed her hands. “Just… be careful, okay? With Claude. And with, um,” A smirk flickered across Dorothea’s face. “With ‘chess.’” She put extra emphasis on the last word. And then she winked.

Edelgard felt her face turn pink. Well, at least she thinks my nonexistent tryst is consensual now. I suppose that’s progress.

She said, “Th-thank you, Dorothea, but-”

“And have fun! It’s supposed to be fun. If you’re not enjoying it, you should stop.”

Oh dear. Now Dorothea was going to be supportive. This might be worse than her thinking that Claude is using me, she thought, mortified. The pink on her cheeks deepened to red. “Ah, that’s-”

“Oh, and if you’re not using preventatives, you should talk to Professor Manuela about them. She’s very discreet.”

Edelgard resolved to be kinder to Bernadetta, because she suddenly understood the girl’s desire to hide in her room and never see another person again. She said, “O-oh, I don’t need-”

“Everyone should use preventatives if they can, Edie,” Dorothea said with authority, as if she were a professor delivering a lecture. Edelgard wondered if perhaps the bodily strain of having two Crests could hurry up and kill her right now. “Better safe than sorry! Even if you’re just-”

“Dorothea,” Edelgard interrupted. “I appreciate your support. And your- your advice, but Claude and I are not… intimate.” She took a bite of the pastry on her plate, and a rogue thought whispered, although we do have a baby together. Edelgard choked on the flaky pastry and coughed into her hand. “W-we’re just playing chess,” she finished lamely.

“Of course you are, Edie,” Dorothea said indulgently, not believing a word of it. “Just come to me if you have any questions, or if he makes you uncomfortable at all, okay?”

Edelgard sighed. It was inescapable. She couldn’t tell Dorothea the truth, so she was just going to have to live with the lie. “Thank you, Dorothea,” she mumbled in defeat. “I will.”

“After all, you don’t want him to… jump your pieces?” Dorothea giggled to herself. “Hm, that doesn’t sound right. I wish I knew more about chess!”

Edelgard groaned. “Can we talk about something else?”

—

Lectures had ended for the day and Claude was studying in the Golden Deer classroom. He had been preparing to go back to his room and check on the wyvern when Hilda sat down next to him.

“So…?” she asked expectantly.

“What?” Claude replied.

Hilda rolled her eyes. “‘What,’ he says. Oh, I don’t know, maybe Edelgard, dummy?” she said. “She lives right next door to me, but lately she’s been spending an awful lot of time in your room, Claude. Is there anything you want to tell your best pal Hilda about?”

Claude frowned in response. “Uh, no, there isn’t. Because there’s nothing I want to tell the entire Academy about.”

Hilda gasped theatrically. “How dare you! I can keep a secret. I promise, whatever you say stays between me and you. And Marianne, obviously. And Ignatz. And Mercedes. And Lorenz if I get tired of listening to him talk.”

“Which you definitely will, because everyone does,” Claude said. “It’s not a big deal, Hilda. She’s good at chess. We’re playing chess.”

“Chess,” Hilda repeated, in a tone that suggested what she meant to say was ‘bullshit.’ “She’s sneaking over to your room every other night to play chess.”

“Yep,” Claude said, smiling at her. She frowned in response.

“The extremely boring game with the kings and the queens and the little wooden horses.”

“It’s not boring if you’re good at it, Hilda,” Claude replied. “And we’re both good at it.”

“Right,” Hilda said, still suspicious. “Because you practice so much. In your room. Alone with Edelgard. At night.”

Claude shrugged. Still smiling, he said, “Well, we’re busy during the day.”

“Claude, come on.” Hilda leaned toward him conspiratorially and lowered her voice. “This is me you’re talking to. You can tell me the truth. You’re not playing chess. You two are, like, fooling around, right?”

Claude’s smile briefly became genuine. It was a smile of satisfaction, of seeing a plan come together perfectly. It really was a clever scheme, Claude thought, and it was unfortunate that Edelgard wouldn’t appreciate it.

Because “we’re getting together at night to play chess” was a terrible cover story. Everyone who heard it was going to react exactly like Hilda did, with disbelief and suspicion. Specifically, the suspicion that Edelgard was sneaking over to Claude’s room because they were seeing each other.

And “we’re secretly dating, and we’re failing very badly at hiding it by telling implausible lies about playing chess” was an excellent cover. Everyone would be so sure they’d discovered Claude and Edelgard’s illicit romance that they’d never suspect their illicit baby wyvern. And the more they protested, the more they spun and deflected and stuck to their flimsy chess story, the more everyone else would believe what Claude wanted them to believe.

Also, Edelgard’s probably gonna flip out when she tells someone we’re playing chess and they assume she’s secretly jumping into bed with me. He sighed wistfully. It would be hilarious; he wished he could be there to see her deny it. There was sure to be both blushing and stammering involved.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Hilda,” Claude said with a big smile on his face. “We’re just playing chess.”

“Ugh, fiiiiinnneee,” she whined. “Keep your secret.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. Five seconds passed and she leaned forward again. “C’mon, just give me a little something. Like, is she a good kisser? Because I bet she’s not. She seems like she learned how from reading a book.”

Claude opened his mouth to issue another denial, when his mind unhelpfully conjured a vivid image of Edelgard’s face the night they hatched the wyvern. Her face was glistening with sweat, flushed with exertion, and very very close to him. A strand of white hair was stuck across her forehead. In spite of her exhaustion she looked powerful, fierce, primal. Her lavender eyes were locked with his, and even in the memory they pulled at him like a lodestone pulls iron. His mouth went dry for a moment and he gulped. The classroom suddenly felt very warm.

He forgot what he was going to say, and what came out of his mouth eventually was, “Uh-”

Hilda’s eyes went wide and her jaw dropped as he hesitated. “Claude, what was that reaction!? Is she an amazing kisser?” Then she thought for a moment. “Or wait, maybe you’re both bad and you just don’t know it. That’s probably it.”

“We’re not- we haven’t kissed,” Claude stammered. Barely, his rebellious brain added. Yet. Even true, the denial sounded pathetically false coming out of his mouth. Claude realized that this was still the scheme he’d concocted, and it was still going off without a hitch, and yet for some reason he was much less keen on it than he had been five minutes ago.

Hilda’s eyes narrowed and she studied him carefully. “Like, not on the mouth, but-”

“Hilda. It’s not like that. I swear on the grave of my mother, we’re just playing chess.”

“Okay…” Hilda said, her voice full of doubt. “Hang on, isn't your mother still alive?”

“Gotta go, Hils! Don’t be late for training again!” Claude stood abruptly and shoveled his books and papers into his satchel. He raced out of the classroom and Hilda watched him leave with narrowed eyes. He wasn’t fleeing an awkward conversation, he told himself. He was maintaining his cover. This was all according to plan.

Well, you were right, said an irritating voice in his head as he left. There was both blushing and stammering.

—

And of course it’s pickled rabbit for dinner, Edelgard thought glumly. It was that evening, and she was knocking on Claude’s door with a plate of meat skewers for Mahsa. After her conversation with Dorothea that morning, she was now keenly aware of the prying eyes that were no doubt watching her rendezvous with Claude, and the wagging tongues spreading rumors about the pair of them and their “chess matches.”

“Who is it?” came the answer to her knock.

“Edelgard,” she replied.

The door opened, and Claude stood just beyond it with a crooked grin on his face. His eyes were cold and searching as usual, but they looked right past her as he glanced up and down the hall, checking for any observers. Finding none, he nodded for her to come in. After she entered the room, he closed and locked the door, then moved back to his desk. Every square inch of it was covered in open books or unfurled scrolls, and he closed a few of them and tossed them onto his dresser to make room for the plate Edelgard had brought.

Mahsa was curled up on a pile of laundry under Claude’s bed. When Edelgard entered, her head popped up; she chirped and quickly crawled out of her nest. She stood on her hind legs and stretched, unfurling her cream-colored wings as she crowed a greeting at Edelgard. She flapped a few times then dropped back down on all fours, and butted her head against Edelgard’s leg.

Edelgard knelt in front of the wyvern with a smile and warmed her hands with magical flame. She rubbed the scales along Mahsa’s face and neck as the wyvern preened under the attention. “Such a fierce dragon!” Edelgard said. “It’s so good to see you, sweetling, I was thinking about you all day.” Tension she hadn’t realized she was carrying bled from her shoulders as she tended to Mahsa, who had now rolled onto her back to get her belly rubbed. Edelgard obliged the tiny wyvern as Claude sat down at his desk and popped a few chunks of rabbit into his mouth.

Edelgard felt relieved that Claude had started preparing Mahsa’s dinner. She considered offering to help, she wanted to demonstrate she was an equal partner in this, but… she really did hate the taste of pickled rabbit.

“Dorothea asked me today what we were doing together,” Edelgard said. “I told her we were playing chess, but… she didn’t believe me.”

Claude spat some chewed rabbit into Mahsa’s bowl and nodded slowly. He needed to play this carefully, he thought, as if he was just as surprised as her by the failure of their cover story. “Yeah,” he said, “Hilda was the same way. Does she think we’re sleeping together too?”

“She thinks you’ve pressured me into bed somehow, yes,” Edelgard replied.

“What?” Claude asked, this time in genuine surprise. He didn’t have the best reputation around Garreg Mach, by design, but he hadn’t thought it was that bad. “Why?”

Edelgard shot him a withering look. “Would it surprise you to learn that people consider you untrustworthy, Claude?”

Claude ran his fingers through his hair. “I guess not, but… Yikes. I didn’t expect that.” His eyes widened as too late he realized his slip. “I mean-”

Edelgard narrowed her eyes at him in suspicion. “But you did expect the rest of it,” she said, her anger rising as she realized what game he’d been playing. “You knew our story would fail, and people would think we were…”

Claude grinned shamelessly at her. “Fucking?”

“Intimate,” she growled through clenched teeth. She wanted to strangle him. Perhaps wringing his fool neck would wipe that ugly smile off his face. At the very least, it was worth a try.

Claude shrugged. “I had an inkling,” he said. “Would you really believe it if Dorothea told you she was sneaking into somebody’s room at night just to play chess with them?”

“Well-” Edelgard said as she thought about it. It did seem unlikely when he put it like that. “Perhaps not, but I’d expect her to believe it of me.”

“Wow,” Claude said, still with that infuriating smirk. “Never lose that innocence, Princess.”

Edelgard’s hands twitched as she glared at him. You can’t strangle him, she told herself. It wouldn’t be fair to Mahsa. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and stroked the wyvern’s back, feeling the warm ridges of her scales under her fingertips.

Claude continued, “Anyway, this is good. Everyone can tell we’re hiding something, and this way they all think they know what it is, and nobody will look deeper. Personally, I think it’s a brilliant plan, but I understand if you don’t want to tell me that.” He leaned back in his chair, looking entirely too proud of himself.

Edelgard ground her teeth. She amended her earlier thought. You can’t strangle him to death, but perhaps if you release him just before he dies…

“If that was your plan all along, you should have told me,” Edelgard said. “I can appreciate the necessity. It certainly seems as if it’s the only story anyone would believe. But…”

Dorothea’s words rang in her ears. You just have to ask him if he meant it.

“But why not tell me? Are we… are we partners, or not?” she asked as she watched his face intently.

She hated the weakness in her voice as she asked. She hated the insecurity of not knowing the answer, hated the coil of anxiety in her gut that his answer wouldn’t be one she wanted to hear. Trying not to be alone was nearly as painful as being alone, she realized.

But only nearly.

The smirk slowly fell off Claude’s face as he studied her face for a long while. He started to speak and stopped. Eventually he sighed and his head drooped. He said, “I don’t know.”

Edelgard felt that coil tighten.

Claude continued, “I haven’t had much opportunity for partnership before now. Back in… back home, I’m no less an outsider than I am here, just because of my mother’s heritage instead of my father’s. Knives have been out for me my whole life. I had my parents, but they wanted me to fight my own battles, and I didn’t have anyone else. So I fought alone, or I ran alone, or I schemed alone. It’s what I’m used to. I’m not used to working with someone.”

“I understand that feeling,” Edelgard said quietly. She felt a surge of familiarity at his words, and it quelled her anger and frustration. Similar thoughts had been plaguing her all day, and indeed they had been plaguing her for the past five years.

“It still feels like the only safe way to live,” Claude said, and Edelgard nodded, to herself as much as to him. “But…” he gestured at Mahsa. “Taking care of her is hard. Harder than I expected when I decided to do it. I don’t think I could do it alone, and by chance or fate or the will of some god, you’re here to help. It goes against every instinct I have to say this, but I need that help.”

“And I want to give it,” Edelgard said. “But I won’t be used. I despise being used. So if I’m part of this, then I’m a full part of it. And the next time you hatch some scheme to protect her, don’t lie to me about it.”

Claude nodded. “Done,” he said. Then he grinned. “But I can still lie to you about other stuff, right? Lying is a skill like any other, and I’ve gotta stay in practice.”

Edelgard sighed and rolled her eyes. “I can’t stop you, Claude,” she said. And I’ll lie to you about other things as well, she thought sadly. But she could see a glimmer of a future where that wouldn’t be true forever. And she wanted to make that future real.

—

After Mahsa finished her dinner, and Edelgard confirmed that Claude was prepared for their flying lesson the next day, she returned to the Black Eagles classroom with a lighter heart than she’d had all day. Hubert was waiting outside with a folio of papers. He nodded as she arrived and they entered the classroom together. Hubert locked the door behind them as Edelgard lit fresh candles, and they started in on their work. From a distance, they could be mistaken for students completing their coursework, but in reality they were preparing for Edelgard’s coup against the Adrestian nobles and the war that would follow. In the dim candlelight, Hubert was reviewing intelligence reports from his spies, while Edelgard composed a response to a letter from Count Bergliez.

Or rather, she attempted to. From time to time, she glanced at Hubert and thought about her disastrous conversation with Dorothea earlier that day. Hubert had not yet asked about all the time she’d been spending with Claude, but he must be aware of it. She wondered what he’d heard.

After starting and stopping the letter several times, Edelgard sighed. She was just going to have to ask him, and then feed him the flimsy story about late nights of chess. This conversation might be even more mortifying than the one she’d had with Dorothea.

“Hubert,” she said.

“Yes, my lady?” Hubert asked.

Edelgard hesitated, then took a deep breath to steel herself. There was nothing for it, this bandage needed to be ripped off. She began, “You… may have heard certain rumors, regarding me and-”

“You are raising a baby wyvern with Claude von Riegan.” Hubert did not look up from the documents he was reading.

Edelgard gaped at him for a moment. “How-” she paused, and closed her eyes and smiled. “I should have expected you to investigate. You broke into Claude’s room, I suppose?”

“Of course not, my lady,” Hubert replied. “I broke nothing. I merely investigated Claude’s room to determine what was occupying so much of your time, and whether it posed any threat to us. The truth was not difficult to discover.” He smirked. “In fact, the truth bit me on the ankle almost immediately. Fortunately, it has no teeth, so that was merely a surprise.”

Pride swelled in Edelgard in spite of herself. Good girl, she thought. Protect your home. Aloud, she said, “I suppose you must think me frivolous for spending my time like this.”

He looked at her. “Never. And I wouldn’t begrudge you a bit of frivolity, Lady Edelgard. We spoke only a few weeks ago about how pleasant our time at the monastery has been. We should cherish this opportunity for… normalcy. It is likely the last such time we will have until our bloody work is complete. I don’t know how you’ve been roped into raising that creature, but I can tell that it is important to you. I trust you completely, Lady Edelgard, and I’m sure that this diversion won’t compromise your plans.”

Edelgard sighed in relief.

“And if it does,” Hubert continued, “I will of course take the necessary action to put you back on your path.”

The air suddenly grew cold between them. Edelgard eyed him warily. “The necessary action being that you will speak to me about it,” she said.

Hubert hesitated a moment too long. “That is what I meant, my lady.”

“And you will not harm Claude or that baby wyvern.”

Hubert’s pause was longer this time, and eventually he said, “I will not harm that baby wyvern.”

That’s honestly better than I expected, Edelgard thought. More forcefully, she said, “Hubert.”

Hubert sighed, and grudgingly said, “I also will not harm Claude von Riegan unless ordered to do so.” Edelgard knew that Hubert was both independent and proactive in his protection of her, and even an explicit promise not to harm Claude didn’t necessarily mean Hubert would refrain, but hopefully it would at least make him think twice about it.

“Thank you, Hubert,” she said. “And you should know that this isn’t a purely personal endeavor. Claude shares our disdain for the church and its teachings; it may yet be possible to make an ally of him like Professor Byleth.” This had been Edelgard’s initial reasoning for helping Claude after the night they’d hatched Mahsa, but she realized somewhat guiltily that she had made no progress toward that goal in the days since. Instead, she’d been caring for the wyvern for her own sake.

Hubert frowned. “You know that I have my doubts about the Professor, and Claude is no better. However, if he can be trusted, which I doubt, I admit that he would be a useful ally. I hope you are successful, my lady.”

Edelgard smiled confidently. “I will be. And you needn’t worry. Ally or enemy, I can handle Claude von Riegan.”

Chapter Text

Darkness. Cold. Screams from behind the iron door.

The girl shivered. It would be her time next. Dripping water. Quiet weeping from the cell next to her. One of her sisters; the girl didn’t know which. The only one that was left.

The iron door slammed open. Men in plague masks dragged a body down the hallway. Her brother, once. Now something less. His hair had gone white, like hers. The men in masks opened her cell and tossed him against the far wall. Like trash. He did not move. He rarely moved anymore, and never spoke.

They grabbed her from her bed as she screamed. Her time. She tried to struggle, to thrash, but her limbs were so heavy.

She saw the rats emerge from their holes as she was dragged out of the cell. Their eyes glowed like embers. They knew a feast when they saw one. Her brother was too weak, too despairing to fend them off any more. They set upon him as she was pulled through the iron door.

They tore off her shift and strapped her to the table. A man in a plague mask honed a razor on a strop. Another one leaned over and said, “Stop whining, beast. This is going to make you powerful.”

She saw her father now, horrified, watching. A man with wispy orange hair and a face like a toad had a hand on his shoulder.

Father… Save me…

Her father’s eyes welled up with tears. His lip quivered. His fists clenched. The hand on his shoulder tightened, and he did not move. The toad smiled.

The man with the razor moved to her side. “Let’s begin,” he said calmly. Torchlight glinted off the steel of the blade. She tried to move again, but she couldn’t. The leather straps tore at the soft skin of her wrists.

The blade came down on her stomach. The girl screamed.

Edelgard awoke with a gasp. Her hand flew to her stomach, where the razor had cut her open. Old, she reminded herself as her fingers ghosted across the raised, scarred flesh. That scar is old. You’re at Garreg Mach. It’s 1180. It has been years since they cut you. They will never cut you again. It was just a dream. She rubbed her wrists absently, as if the cuffs still chafed. It was just before dawn; weak grey light trickled in through her window, the barest hint of the coming morning.

Edelgard clenched her fists in frustration at her own rebellious subconscious. Those horrors were in the past, and she was working tirelessly to turn Fodlan into a place where they were impossible, so why did her mind torture her with them night after night? She climbed out of bed, blearily rubbing the sleep from her eyes, then padded over to the basin on her dresser and splashed cool water on her face. She removed her sweat-soaked nightgown and tossed it into her laundry, then began to dress for the day. For her flying lesson, she recalled with an excitement that started to drive away the phantoms of her nightmares.

Claude had told Edelgard to forgo her academy uniform and dress for riding, so she chose a red blouse with billowing sleeves that tucked into her traditional white gloves, white riding pants, and calf-length black boots. As with all her outfits, the long sleeves and high collar served to hide the jagged pink scars that covered her body, the ugly byproduct of her Crest augmentation.

When she had dressed, she grabbed a light breakfast from the dining hall and made her way out of the monastery gates into the town. Claude’s mysterious wyvern-owning contact lived in town, and they’d agreed to leave separately and meet in front of the tavern; there were already enough rumors spreading about her and Claude without them being seen leaving Garreg Mach together.

The sun had begun to burn away the chill of the morning as Edelgard waited by the tavern. Memories of the nightmare still troubled Edelgard, so she closed her eyes, turned her face toward the sun, and took deep, calming breaths. With the breeze gently kissing her sun-baked skin she felt nearly human again. Her fair skin always burned easily in the sun, but she didn’t let that stop her. Edelgard never took its warmth and light for granted. Not anymore. Not when it could be taken away so easily.

After a few minutes basking in the sun’s rays, Edelgard heard a familiar voice call out to her. She turned to see Claude sauntering up to her with a crooked smile under suspicious, darting eyes. He wore a white shirt with the collar undone, with black riding pants and ankle boots. Through the loose collar Edelgard could see from the base of his throat down to the subtle cleft of his chest muscles. A few lonely brown chest hairs peeked out from under the shirt. She willed her eyes back up his face before her gaze could linger too long or drift further downward.

If Claude noticed her wandering eyes he gave no indication. She assumed he didn’t; if he had, he would have teased her about it. “Come on, we’re headed this way,” he said, nodding toward the southern edge of town, and they headed off together.

As they made their way to the outskirts of the monastery town, Claude described the man they were heading to meet. Otho was an odd-job man and courier who had owned a wyvern named Gracie for a number of years. Claude had been snooping (he’d used the term “investigating”) around the town and decided to introduce himself to the man when he saw the wyvern stable attached to his house. Otho and Gracie were apparently known to the Church; Otho did some courier work for them on occasion and Seteth came down once a year to give the wyvern a health check-up. It seemed owning a wyvern was accepted by the Church but hatching one was subject to sanction. This seemed stupid and arbitrary to Edelgard, but then many things about Seiros worship seemed stupid and arbitrary to her.

“But how did he get the wyvern?” she asked.

“The way he tells it, he was rolling dice in the tavern a few years ago and he won a hatchling off some drunken adventurer,” Claude said. “Who knows where that guy got her.”

“Really?” said Edelgard. She imagined risking Mahsa on the roll of a few dice and the idea turned her stomach.

“Apparently,” Claude said. “So he woke up hungover with a scaly belly on his face and a new mouth to feed. And he didn’t have a pushy princess around to insist on lending a hand.” He grinned and winked at her.

Edelgard chose not to rise to his provocation; giving Claude the shove he deserved would only prove his point. Instead she smiled and said, “How unfortunate for him.” Claude chuckled as they continued through the town.

Eventually, they arrived at a modest one story wattle-and-daub house on the outskirts of town. There was a stable attached to the side that opened into a small paddock, far too small for horses. Edelgard supposed that a wyvern paddock only needed to be large enough to allow the creature to take off and land; their exercise logically happened in the air. The stable had been tacked on haphazardly and was clearly years newer than the rest of the house; the thatch on its roof was cleaner and its walls were closer to white than the yellowing walls of the main building.

Claude knocked on the door until a lean middle-aged man answered. The man had thinning dark hair that hung down nearly to his shoulders, and a long black mustache with a gold ring woven into each of the tails. He wore a vest and no shirt over a sinewy torso. His skin was tanned and leathery from a lifetime of working in the sun. He was also, based on his unfocused eyes and the slight sway to his body, rather drunk for this early in the morning.

He smiled broadly when he saw Claude. “Ah! Young master Caulder,” he said as he stuck his hand out for a shake. Edelgard raised an eyebrow at the unfamiliar name Otho had used for Claude. “What a pleasure to see you again! What brings you down here this fine morn?”

Claude took Otho’s hand and said, “The usual,” confirming Edelgard’s suspicion that he’d done this numerous times before. “I was hoping we could take Gracie out for a few hours.”

Otho looked at Claude with wide-eyed innocence. “Gracie? I don’t rightly know who you mean, young master.” He released the handshake and conspicuously turned his palm upward as he spoke.

Claude rolled his eyes and pulled a purse from one of his pockets. “Yeah, sure you don’t. Good one. It’s hilarious every single time, Otho.” He dropped the purse into Otho’s hand. It was small, but stuffed so fat with gold that it barely clinked when he put it down. “Maybe now you know who I mean,” he said.

Otho grinned and tucked the purse into a back pocket. “Ah, Gracie, of course, of course! We got back from a delivery down to Varley territory a couple days ago and I’m sure she’s eager to stretch her wings by now. I was going to take her out this afternoon, so you’ll be doing me a favor.”

Claude frowned at him. “If it’s a favor, then can I have my gold back?” he asked.

“What gold?” Otho replied with a twinkle in his eye. Claude sighed as Edelgard put a hand over her mouth to hide a snicker.

Otho glanced over at Edelgard, then back at Claude. “And you’re bringing a lady friend this time, young master? That’s new.” He waggled his eyebrows at Claude, then turned to address Edelgard. “You must be very special, young miss.”

“I am, yes,” Edelgard said confidently. She smirked as Claude pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something unintelligible. She extended her hand and said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance. My name is-”

“Della,” Claude said quickly. Edelgard glanced in his direction but did not contradict him.

Otho’s gaze flicked between the pair of them, then he smiled and took Edelgard’s hand and said, “Pleased to meet you as well, Lady Della. You two enjoy yourselves with Gracie.” He turned and entered his house, closing the door behind him.

They walked around the house to the small adjoining stable. Once she was confident Otho was out of earshot, Edelgard said, “Caulder and Della?”

Claude snorted and replied, “Obviously we’re not giving that guy our real names. A couple of noble brats under Church protection aren’t supposed to be anywhere near here.”

Edelgard nodded as she considered that the man who called himself Claude von Riegan probably hadn’t given her his real name either. It was not the first time she’d thought that since learning of his Almyran heritage. She wondered how many people in all of Fodlan even knew his name, whatever it was. As she did, she felt a pang of sympathy; Claude, like her, had chosen to walk a very lonely path in life. The puzzle she had yet to solve was why. Claude wasn’t the clown he pretended to be; he wouldn’t insert himself into the vipers’ nest of Leicestrian politics without a purpose, but that purpose was yet unknown to her. She supposed he could just be running from something in Almyra, just hiding in a foreign land with a false name, but that seemed beneath him. He must have a plan, She thought. A goal. An ambition. But what?

And can it be compatible with mine?

As they entered the stable, she pushed those thoughts to the back of her mind. Getting to the buried truth of Claude von Riegan was a project that would take some time, and that wasn’t what today was for.

Today was for flying.

Claude grabbed the bridle and reins that hung next to the wyvern’s stall and walked up to Gracie. She was full grown, half again as long as a horse, with a wingspan of at least twenty feet. Unlike Mahsa’s stubby horns, hers branched into multiple prongs like a deer’s, and her wide-set yellow eyes were separated by a broad snout armored in scales. Her long jaw and the underside of her neck were nearly as pale as the baby wyvern, but the rest of her scales were the reddish-brown of dried blood. Her mouth was filled with the sharp, curved teeth of a deadly carnivore. Grace craned her neck out at Claude’s approach and growled softly as she nuzzled his hand.

Claude led the wyvern out into the paddock. Unlike Mahsa, who stumbled around on all fours, using both her taloned feet and her winged forelegs, Gracie walked out of the stable on her rear legs like a flightless bird. Once outside, Claude handed the reins to Edelgard and went back in to get the saddle and blanket. Edelgard extended her free hand towards the wyvern; Gracie sniffed her twice and bumped her hand with her massive head.

“It’s hard to believe Mahsa will be your size one day, “ Edelgard said to the wyvern. She wreathed her hand in magical flame and scratched under Gracie’s chin; to her great satisfaction the larger wyvern reacted just like Mahsa always did, by closing her eyes contentedly and extending her neck to allow Edelgard more access. Edelgard put her whole arm into it, rubbing the wyvern from her the underside of her jaw down all the way down to her chest as Gracie soaked up the heat and attention. “You like that, don’t you, good girl,” she murmured to the wyvern as she scratched the dry, pebbled scales. Another soft growl from Gracie signaled her agreement.

Claude came back with the saddle and threw it onto Gracie’s back. Edelgard watched him carefully as he connected and tightened the wyvern’s saddle and harness. Soon enough, she would need to be able to do this too and she needed to learn everything she could. Also, it was enjoyable to watch Claude do something seriously and diligently, with none of his typical foolish affect.

She certainly wasn’t watching to admire the way his muscles tensed and flexed under the soft linen of his shirt. Nor was she noticing how little his riding trousers left to the imagination compared to the loose pants he wore with his academy uniform. The snug pants clung to his form as he shifted his body, accentuating the lean muscles of his legs and thighs.

(Edelgard could almost hear Dorothea in her head, snickering at her as she watched Claude move. She shook her head to clear away the intrusive voice).

Claude finished securing the saddle and took the reins back from Edelgard. He lifted one foot into the stirrup, and with a quiet “hup!” he easily leapt atop the wyvern’s back. He perched himself towards the back of the saddle, just in front of Gracie’s wings, and extended a hand back down to Edelgard.

The sight of Claude offering her his hand from atop the wyvern, an easy smile on his face and an uncharacteristic twinkle in his green eyes, flipped something in Edelgard’s stomach that she resolved to ignore. This is just a flying lesson, she told herself. There’s nothing to be flustered over. This isn’t a… romantic rendezvous, it’s teaching and learning. Just like when Byleth gives you private tutoring, and you don’t get nervous over that, do you?

For some reason the fluttering in her stomach intensified at that thought. Edelgard swallowed, pushed the thought away, then took his hand and climbed into the saddle in front of him.

When Edelgard had settled, Claude snapped the reins and spurred Gracie with his heels. The wyvern crouched, then leapt off the ground and began flapping her leathery wings to gain altitude. She pointed her nose skyward as she climbed, and the tilt of the saddle forced Edelgard back against Claude’s chest. He said, “lean forward, into the climb,” and Edelgard grabbed the horn of the saddle for leverage and leaned her body in towards the wyvern’s neck as she ascended into the cloudless sky.

As she looked at the monastery town shrink below her, a small part of Edelgard was surprised to find she felt no fear. The sky wasn’t so dissimilar to the ocean, and Edelgard was terrified of that. She feared its vastness and flatness, the way she could be pulled under it and disappear without a trace. By any objective measure, the open air below her was more deadly; falling from the wyvern would kill her even more quickly than falling from a ship, and yet she felt none of the terror she felt when she beheld the sea. She only felt awe at the beauty of the land spread out below her, and an eagerness to drive the wyvern through it.

Once they’d gained sufficient altitude, Claude leveled out Gracie’s climb and allowed the wyvern to glide gently on the wind currents high above the town and monastery. They drifted lazily through the skies, the glide punctuated occasionally with a flap of Gracie’s leathery wings as she maintained her flight. After a moment Claude handed Edelgard the reins and leaned over to speak into her ear.

“You ready, Princess?” Claude asked. His voice was soft and husky, and Edelgard felt another flutter in her gut as his breath ghosted against her ear. He’s doing this on purpose to unnerve me, she thought. He must be. She turned to look at him, hoping the sight of his ugly, mocking fake smile would still the butterflies that agitated her.

Um, Edelgard thought as she took him in. That didn’t help. Claude wore a boyish grin and for once his eyes matched it, sparkling with mirth. Flying had clearly put him in a good mood and lowered the barriers he normally kept up. She felt warmth pool in her cheeks and her stomach as she looked at him. Hastily, she turned away and said, “I was born ready. What do I do?”

“I’ll show you,” Claude murmured, in a tone that made Edelgard’s jaw clench. “I’m gonna use my hands now to physically guide you through the motions. Is that okay?”

“Of course,” Edelgard said archly. “I’m not a child. I won’t be unnerved by your hands on the reins with mine. I brought you up here to teach, so teach.”

“You got it, Princess,” Claude replied. “You’re wrong about one thing, though.”

The skin on the back of Edelgard’s neck began to prickle. “What’s that?” she asked.

His lips nearly brushed her ear and a jolt ran up her spine when he whispered, “Only amateurs use the reins.”

She gasped as Claude slid forward in the saddle to press his body against hers. They were two pieces of a puzzle; her calves against his shins, his knees in hers, their hips joined and her back against his chest. Claude gently placed his hands on Edelgard’s legs just above her knees. He said, “Real fliers steer with the legs. Still good to go, Edelgard?”

Edelgard nodded, then swallowed and forced some steel into her voice as she said, “Obviously. Stop talking about it and show me how to fly.”

Claude chuckled, and her face grew hotter as she felt it reverberate from his chest against her back. “As you command, Your Highness,” he said playfully.

He held up one hand in front of Edelgard, flat with his palm down. “We’re going to bank right first,” he said, his voice still distractingly close to her ear. He tilted his hand to the right and pointed the tips of his fingers in that direction to demonstrate the path of the turn. “Follow my movements. Squeeze with your legs and pull her in the direction you want to go.” He dropped his hand back on Edelgard’s thigh. “Like this.”

He pushed her left leg up and into the wyvern, and pulled her right leg gently away. She pushed her legs the same way, and as smooth as warm butter, Gracie pointed her nose to the right and rolled a few degrees into the turn.

As she pressed, Edelgard glanced down and realized she was leaning over open air. Far, too far below her she could see the thick forest that covered the Oghma mountains. Her mouth went dry as she dangled over the side of the wyvern, she imagined slipping from the saddle and falling-

Claude’s right hand moved to the base of her ribcage and pressed firmly against her. “Don’t look down,” he said. “Keep your eyes on the horizon. Lean up, against the turn and keep your head upright.” Edelgard looked up again and was greeted with the dazzling sight of Garreg Mach shining silver and blue in the morning sun.

They wheeled around the sky lazily for a few moments, completing a full circle in the air. “Good work. Shift your weight back to neutral to level her out, then we’ll turn the other way.” Edelgard pushed her legs in the other direction and Gracie ended the turn as smoothly as she began it.

They drifted through the sky, practicing bank turns for a while. With each turn Claude provided less and less instruction until his hands fell away entirely, though Edelgard could still feel the warm imprints of his hands on her legs. Each turn was even and confident; Gracie responded so effortlessly to the pressure of Edelgard’s legs that the wyvern felt like an extension of her own body. Claude taught her to pull the wyvern into a climb next, and again his instruction fell away as Edelgard gained experience.

Eventually Claude told her to level out the wyvern again, and he placed his hands back on her legs. “Time for the fun one,” he said. “Now we’re gonna dive. A shallow one, to start. Press together and down, and lean into the dive.” He pressed her knees down and in, and she followed his movements again.

Gracie tucked her wings close to her body and pointed her snout downward. The wind rippled past Edelgard as the wyvern picked up speed, stinging her eyes and whipping her hair back. Her mouth went dry as she watched the mountains grow closer, and her chest tightened in exhilaration. It’s no wonder Claude throws so much gold at Otho to do this, Edelgard thought. No wonder he was willing to risk everything to hatch Mahsa. This is extraordinary. She leaned forward, rising out of the saddle until her torso was flush with the wyvern’s neck. She patted Gracie fondly and pressed down harder with her legs. The wyvern’s dive grew steeper and the wind buffeted them more fiercely as the ground rushed toward them. Edelgard was enraptured; a fierce grin spread across her face as she leaned further forward, her whole body out in front of the saddle now.

“Alright, Princess, pull up,” Claude said, but Edelgard ignored him.

Again he said, “Edelgard,” and again she gave no response. Claude swore under his breath.

“EDELGARD! PULL UP!” he shouted.

When he went unheeded once more, he pinched her legs hard to get her attention. Edelgard flinched at the pain, then glared back briefly at Claude. She gritted her teeth and squeezed up on the wyvern, pulling Gracie out of the dive. She felt her stomach continue to drop as Gracie pulled up hard; the wyvern’s belly just avoided skimming the tips of the trees as her trajectory flattened out.

Claude leaned back, his hands on the back of the saddle, and breathed heavily. “Fucking stars, Edelgard, if you want to get us both killed there are easier ways.”

“You didn’t need to panic,” she said. “I was going to pull up. I had room.”

Claude laughed in disbelief. “Are you serious? You’re pretty confident for someone who’s almost had one flying lesson.”

“I had room,” she insisted. “And I don’t have time to dawdle my way through the basics forever. What’s next?”

Claude hummed as he thought about the question for a moment. He said, “I can’t teach you anything else right now.”

“What? That’s outrageous. Just because I didn’t pull out of the dive soon enough for you?” Edelgard was furious. She’d had no more than a taste of it, there was so much more to learn. She had barely begun flying and she couldn’t imagine stopping now.

“No, although I think a novice should listen to her flying instructor,” Claude said testily; Edelgard fumed at his tone. “I meant that we got through the easy stuff faster than I expected today. The next things I want to teach you are rolls and loops, and I’ll need to swipe some safety harnesses from the monastery stables before I let you take a wyvern upside-down. I don’t wanna get executed for breaking the Princess’s royal neck when you fall out of the saddle.”

Edelgard was disappointed, but she supposed his concern was reasonable. She imagined rolling Gracie belly-up and clinging to the saddle with only the earth below her; her stomach clenched and a frisson of excitement shot through her at the thought. Her disappointment was also tempered by the words the next things I want to teach you. Two weeks ago, she reflected, he hadn’t wanted to teach her at all, and even this morning she wasn’t sure there would be another lesson after today. Now she knew he wanted to keep going, and it thrilled her.

Because of the opportunity to learn more advanced aerobatic maneuvers. No other reason.

“So that’s it?” she asked. “I’m not ready to stop. I’d like to practice the basics more, at least.”

“Yeah, I guess… oh,” Claude laughed softly to himself as he remembered something. He said, “Wait. There’s one more thing I can teach you today. You’ll love this. It’s gonna be loud, though.”

Edelgard asked, “What is?” and Claude didn’t respond. She felt his chest expand against her back as he took a deep breath.

Then he screamed.

Edelgard flinched as the sound struck her; it stabbed into her ear and through her skull like a blade of lightning. The sound was an awful, bloodcurdling thing, a white-hot shriek full of pain and rage, and it did not stop. It was as if he’d been struck with an arrow, but they were miles from any battlefield. She turned to look at him in alarm, but he seemed fine to her eyes. He’d thrown his head back and he looked… carefree?

She studied him in confusion, then she noticed the sound grow louder. It was suddenly not just loud but deafening, and it emanated from all around her. The scream drilled into her ears from behind, and somehow it echoed louder and deeper in front of her, making her entire body vibrate. It was so loud it felt like a physical force pressing against her from every direction. It was something larger than a scream now, and Edelgard suddenly realized what was happening.

Claude was roaring. And the wyvern was roaring with him. She could feel it thrumming through Gracie’s body underneath her seat and between her legs; the vibration nearly turned them to jelly.

Edelgard’s ears were still ringing when Claude and Gracie fell silent. She said, “That was incredible. How did you do it?”

“Wyverns are flock animals,” Claude said. “They listen and speak to each other. It’s kinda like a pack of wolves or hounds will all start howling when one of them howls. Up here, we’re part of her flock, and if she hears her flock roar, she’ll start roaring too. Give it a shot.”

Edelgard took a deep breath and tried to imitate Claude’s shriek.

“Skreeee…” A tentative sound came out of her mouth. It gradually faded into awkward silence as the wyvern failed to respond.

Edelgard’s eye twitched as Claude started laughing behind her. “That was terrible, Princess!” She elbowed him in the ribs. Claude grunted and said, “Hey, don’t take it out on me.” Though she couldn’t see it, Edelgard could practically feel his infuriating smirk.

“Perhaps you would like to teach instead of just laughing,” Edelgard growled.

“I’m good with laughing, actually,” Claude said drily. “If I’m being honest.”

“Claude…” she said, a warning tone in her voice. She extended her arm, preparing to elbow him again.

“Alright, alright, there’s no need for violence, Edelgard,” he said, still chuckling as Edelgard considered the pros and cons of tossing him from the saddle. “If you want her to roar, you have to really feel it first,” he continued, patting the wyvern’s flank under his leg. “Wyverns are smart, she can tell if you’re just pretending. It won’t work if you don’t commit.”

“Commitment is not something I struggle with,” Edelgard said, thinking of the Flame Emperor and her coming war.

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that,” Claude replied. “So you’ll get it this time. First, put her into a dive. It’s easier to do the first time if you see the ground racing toward you. Second, get mad. Don’t just try to sound like I did, really scream in anger. Roar at the things that piss you off. So for you, I guess that’d be the how much you hate Crests, or what a pain in the ass it is to wrangle your house for class every day, or-”

Edelgard turned to look at him, a wry smile on her face. “-Or mocking, handsy flying instructors?”

Claude looked offended. “Handsy? Handsy? How dare you, Princess. I’ve been both a perfect gentleman and a consummate professional all morning. I haven’t once, not once, touched you in any way that wasn’t necessary to teach you to fly. And you call me handsy. What an outrageous accusation.”

Edelgard felt a twinge of guilt at his tirade. He can’t really be upset, can he? She’d only been teasing, he hadn’t really done anything untoward. She knew she had a well-earned reputation for seriousness, and she wasn’t the most experienced at joking, so perhaps she’d overshot and hurt his feelings?

No. It’s another jape. It’s Claude. It must be, she thought, but she studied his face to try to read his true feelings. He didn’t meet her eyes and there was a grim set to his jaw as he watched the horizon. That was worrisome. Perhaps he was serious after all, she thought.

Edelgard opened her mouth to apologize when Claude suddenly slid a hand halfway up her thigh and squeezed. She yelped in surprise and jumped in the saddle, which had the unwelcome effect of pressing her body even more tightly against Claude’s.

“Oops,” he chuckled. Edelgard glared at him.

Unbelievable! she fumed. This impossible man! He’d fooled her again! Every time she thought she’d glimpsed something real in him, it was another fucking joke, another fucking tease.

Her voice dripping with scorn, Edelgard started to say, “You utter-” but Claude interrupted her.

“Use it,” he said. He looked past her; his face was serious and his verdant eyes were fixed on the sky in front of them. “Roar.”

(Roar for me, Edelgard, he thought.)

Edelgard snarled at him as she squeezed her legs together and pushed the wyvern into a steep dive. She grabbed the horn of the saddle and leaned forward, and she felt Claude’s body move with hers. The lush green peaks of the Oghma Mountains rushed toward them as the wyvern and her riders plummeted out of the sky.

Edelgard considered Claude’s words as they dove. Get mad, he said. Out of the corner of her eye, Edelgard could see the spires of Garreg Mach monastery; its blue and white towers thrusting unnaturally skyward like a host of spears. She sneered at it. From that profane seat, the Immaculate One had secretly dominated humanity for more than a millennium with her false doctrines and her army of zealots.

She thought of how the dogma of that fucking dragon and her cult had empowered the worst people in Fodlan; useless and self-satisfied at best, more typically cruel and evil. Those people had killed her siblings, crippled her father, and carved up her flesh to give her a “Goddess’s blessing;” to turn her from a person into a tool they could use to expand their own power.

She thought of her uncle Volkhard, likely dead now, and the slithering thing that now wore his face. He and his ilk were no different from the Immaculate One; they were simply another type of ancient monster, sneering down at humanity as they continued their endless, pointless struggle. She despised herself for needing their power to remake the world, for not yet being strong enough to see justice done to them. She swore once again that their time would come, that she would repay them a hundredfold for the horrors they had inflicted, on her and on countless others.

As her anger swelled, she thought of her smaller irritants as well. She thought of Ferdinand’s incessant, ridiculous competitiveness; his challenges sprouting up like weeds no matter how many times she defeated him. She thought of coaxing Bernadetta to leave her room and come to class for the umpteenth time, an exhausting process that inevitably ended in Edelgard being shrieked at and fled from no matter how gentle she was. She thought of Caspar’s rudeness and Linhardt’s smug laziness. She truly believed her classmates were among the best and brightest in the whole Adrestian Empire, but they could also be such fucking children.

And she thought of Claude. Her sometime partner, her handsy, laughing flight instructor. How he was a puzzle that infuriatingly defied her every attempt to solve him with a tease and a smile. How there was something cold and distant and wounded in him that she wanted to understand, because there was something achingly similar in her. How he made her feel so angry and warm and confused and not alone. How she could still feel every touch of his hands on her legs, her skin warm and tingling as if his fingerprints had been burned into her.

They were all so maddening, so infuriating, that thinking of them all at once made Edelgard want to scream.

No. Not scream. They made her want to roar.

She opened her mouth and an unworldly sound came out of it; it was the sum of all the outrage and grief and frustration that one woman could possibly feel. The sound was barely human; Edelgard only knew it was hers because she could feel it scraping her throat raw. She would be hoarse for days, she thought, but she did not stop. She couldn’t stop; if she tried to bottle these feelings back up she was certain she would explode.

This time, she heard her own voice swell and multiply just as Claude’s had. She heard her roar echo in front of her as the wyvern joined in. She felt it thrum through the wyvern’s body back into her legs, her core, her head, her heart. Behind her, Claude shifted; one hand moved off her leg to grip the horn of the saddle, the other wrapped around her waist. He shifted his head forward over her shoulder so his cheek was nearly pressed against hers. She felt his chest expand again as he drew breath, and his roar joined hers in chorus.

Eventually, her lungs reached their limit and her roar faded. As the trio fell silent together, Edelgard eased up on the wyvern’s dive and allowed Gracie to glide gently over the trees. She leaned back in the saddle, feeling Claude’s warmth against her back, and recovered her breath. She felt pleasantly drained in both body and mind, like she did after an intense workout or a hard-fought victory. The anger she had summoned was gone, expelled by her roar into the placid mountain skies.

“Not bad, huh?” Claude said behind her, and now the closeness of his lips to her ear didn’t discomfit her at all.

Extraordinary. Incredible. “Not bad,” she agreed.

They stayed in the air for a while more, practicing the basic maneuvers, the wyvern wheeling lazily through the cloudless sky. Too soon it was time for the lesson to end. Edelgard pulled Gracie around to point her towards the paddock as Claude explained how to land. It turned out to be a simple affair; the wyvern knew how to land if she was pointed at the ground.

With a few great flaps of her leathery wings, the wyvern touched down in the paddock. Claude swung a leg behind him and hopped into the dirt. He turned back toward the wyvern and offered Edelgard his hand with a grin and a mocking flourish.

Edelgard rolled her eyes and dismounted, but when her feet hit the ground, her legs buckled. As she pitched forward, Claude slid an arm under her hands and another around her waist to keep her upright. Her nose nearly bounced off his chest as she leaned against him, and she noticed his scent for the first time; he smelled of leather and foreign spices.

“Careful,” he said. “I wasn’t teasing you, Princess. Well, I wasn’t just teasing you. Pulling a wyvern around takes a lot out of you, especially the first time. You don’t have your sky legs yet. Take it slow.”

“You could have said something,” Edelgard grumbled, trying to ignore how warm her face felt, how firm his arm was under her hands, and how much of her body was pressed against his. “Instead of…”

“Instead of what?” Claude asked. “Offering you my hand? What’s the matter, Edelgard, do you not trust me?” He beamed down at her with an extremely broad, extremely phony smile, while above it cool green eyes studied her carefully.

Edelgard stared at him in disbelief. Every time she trusted him he turned out to be mocking her, and every time she distrusted him he turned out to be genuine. It was infuriating! He would be less frustrating if he would just always lie.

“You don’t make it easy,” she finally said.

“Nothing worth doing is easy, Princess,” Claude replied smugly. She snorted in irritation and regained her balance, shoving off from his arm. As she turned away from him to compose herself, Edelgard did not notice the flicker of disappointment in his eyes.

Once Edelgard had found her footing again, she helped Claude remove Gracie’s saddle and stable the wyvern, and they knocked on Otho’s door again to thank him for lending her out. They returned to the monastery separately just as they had left it, and the sun was low in the sky when Edelgard passed through the Garreg Mach gates. She greeted the cheerful gatekeeper and walked through the market, her legs still stiff from the lesson. Her mind was swimming, she could still feel the wind in her hair, see the ground rushing towards her as she dove, hear the roar she had shared with Claude and Gracie. She hoped it wouldn’t take long to get the safety harnesses he’d talked about; Edelgard had been off the wyvern for less than an hour and she was already hungry to fly again.

As she walked through the market, she caught Dorothea’s eye. The other woman was thoughtfully examining a merchant’s wares; when she saw Edelgard she raised an eyebrow and strolled over to her side.

“Hey, Edie!” she said brightly. “Have you been… playing chess with Claude?”

Edelgard furrowed her brow. She and Claude had departed and returned to the monastery separately to avoid any connection between them today, but clearly something was amiss and Dorothea had picked up on it. She asked, “What makes you say that?”

Dorothea pressed her lips together to suppress a smile. She said, “Well, your hair is a mess, your face is flushed, don’t take this the wrong way but you’re smiling more than usual, and you’re walking like you’re, um, sore. And Claude came through that gate twenty minutes ago and he looked pretty much the same as you.”

Edelgard buried her face in her hands as Dorothea rattled off her evidence, her cheeks growing hotter with each new detail. “I-I see,” she said weakly. Perhaps I could tell her I was riding horses, she thought in desperation. Although I’m coming from the opposite direction of the stables…

Dorothea considered adding that Edelgard’s voice was raspy, as if she’d been screaming herself hoarse, but poor Edie looked embarrassed enough already. Wow, maybe I’m the one who should be going to her with romance questions, Dorothea thought. She still thought Claude was an untrustworthy creep, but obviously he was leaving Edelgard in quite a state after their ‘chess matches.’ She pulled a small hairbrush from the bag she was carrying and stepped behind Edelgard to begin taming her windblown hair.

“So did you win? At chess?” Dorothea asked playfully as she brushed. “Because you look like you won.” She looked over Edelgard’s shoulder at her bright red face, and her eyes sparkled with mischief. “Although Claude looked like he won too, and I didn’t think chess worked that way,” she said innocently.

“Dorothea…” Edelgard moaned through her hands.

“Oh, hush, Edie,” Dorothea said. “I understand if you don’t want to tell me what’s going on, but you’re just going to have to endure a little teasing. Have you been to see Manuela yet?”

Edelgard sighed. If Dorothea had suspected she was making love with Claude before, she was absolutely certain of it now. Edelgard couldn’t put off her visit to Professor Manuela for unnecessary contraceptives any longer, otherwise Dorothea was likely to drag her to the infirmary and pour them down her throat personally.

“I’ll go do that right now, Dorothea, thank you for reminding me,” Edelgard said.

After a visit to Manuela that was not nearly as awkward as Edelgard had feared (Dorothea was right, the diva-turned-physician was very discreet), she supped with a few members of her house, reviewed some reports on Church army movements from Hubert’s sources, and retired to her room for bed. And when she slept that night, Edelgard dreamed again.

The sun dazzled the girl with its brightness, but she didn’t mind. Its warmth kissed her skin and the wind tousled her hair as she tore through the skies. Her mount responded effortlessly to each of her commands, twisting and turning with balletic grace. The landscape below her was too beautiful to be real, a painting by a master, all rich green trees, sparkling cerulean waters, slate gray towers and spires crowned in blue. She leaned forward as the wyvern dove, falling from the sky and yet utterly in control. There was a comforting warmth at her back and a gentle weight on each of her knees. The girl opened her mouth and roared in triumph as she danced through the air.

—

The next morning, Professor Byleth was grading student essays at her desk as the Black Eagles trickled in for morning lectures.

“My teacher,” a familiar voice said in front of her.

Byleth looked up from the paper she was reviewing (Caspar had moments of remarkable insight when it came to combat strategy, but by the Goddess he was a terrible speller) to see Edelgard standing in front of her expectantly, her eyes bright.

Byleth asked, “Something you need, Edelgard?” as she drew a line in red ink through the word ‘battleleon.’ Why would you think that word has a second L, Caspar? she wondered.

Edelgard said, “I’d like to change my course of study, Professor. I want to shift my focus from heavy armor to flight.”

Byleth blinked at this and leaned back in her chair. “Really? You’ve been pretty adamant since the beginning of the term that you’d be studying armored combat.”

“I… had an epiphany recently,” Edelgard said. “I think I can be most effective on the battlefield if I’m speedy and mobile. Flight will help me achieve my goals in that regard, and I think it will make me an even greater asset to the Black Eagles.”

Byleth scratched her chin and thought about it. Edelgard’s mobility in heavy armor was indeed a problem from time to time. She was by far the strongest fighter in Byleth’s house, but getting her to the front lines could be a challenge under all that armor. Byleth formulated her tactics to mitigate it, but she couldn’t deny it would be nice to be able to send Edelgard anywhere on the battlefield in a flash. The potential of the change unfurled in front of Byleth’s eyes, and a smile very nearly broke through the mercenary’s stoic facade as she considered the tactical advantages of an Edelgard who could fly.

“Works for me,” Byleth said. “Are you thinking pegasi?”

Edelgard shook her head, then could not stop the uncharacteristic grin that spread across her face. “No. Wyverns.”

Byleth nodded and said, “That makes sense with your axe expertise. Alright, turn in your heavy armor textbook and grab a flight manual, and Volume Two of von Bergliez’s Battalion Tactics. There’s some material you’ll need in there for commanding aerial battalions.”

Edelgard looked pleased. “Thank you, Professor. You won’t regret this.” She walked over to the bookshelf to exchange her textbooks. Byleth noticed an atypical bounce in her step. That was a good sign. She had some ground to make up in her studies now, but obviously she was motivated to succeed.

“As if that one is ever anything less than motivated,” Sothis said in Byleth’s mind. The professor’s mysterious mental passenger was floating next to her desk, unseen by all except her. The diminutive green-haired girl was observing the students with a maternal concern at odds with her childlike appearance.

True enough, Byleth thought, but this seems different. She watched Edelgard a moment longer, then shrugged and turned her attention back to Caspar’s essay.

As Edelgard swapped her textbooks on the classroom bookshelf, she heard a voice behind her. “Ah! Edelgard! I have excellent news for you. The Professor has been tutoring me in heavy armor recently, just like you!”

Edelgard sighed and turned to face the source of the voice. Ferdinand von Aegir stood proudly in front of her, looking like the cat who had gotten the cream. She had seen this eager expression on his face frequently enough to know that one of his ridiculous challenges was in the offing. “Is that so, Ferdinand?” she said.

“It is!” he replied. “And I was hoping to engage you in debate on the subject. I am certain you will find my insights on the subject quite… insightful! No doubt my ideas will outshine even your own! Now what do you think about the relative merits of Adrestian-style armor compared to the Faerghan-”

“Ferdinand, I’m sorry. I just talked things over with the Professor and I’m shifting my studies from heavy armor to flight,” Edelgard said, struggling to suppress any hint of glee in her voice. She had never been less sorry for anything in her life. She no longer needed to study heavy armor and she was avoiding another stupid competition with Ferdinand? What an excellent day today was turning out to be. “You’ll need to find someone else with whom to debate.”

“Ah. I-I see,” Ferdinand said, crestfallen. “You… are not studying heavy armor. And now, I am. Um.” He turned to look at Byleth. “Professor, perhaps I could also change-”

“Nope,” Byleth said, not looking up from the paper she was grading. “There’s a hole in our lineup now that Edelgard is going to be aerial cavalry. I need you to pivot fully to armored combat.”

Ferdinand looked ill. “I could also go back to studying riding-”

Byleth shook her head. “Heavy armor. The Black Eagles are counting on you. You’re my rock, Ferdinand.”

“And what an exceptional rock you will be,” Edelgard said, in a tone she hoped sounded encouraging and not derisive. She patted a disconsolate Ferdinand comfortingly on the arm. “Good luck tightening all those straps; it’s my understanding that the order is very important.”

Ferdinand nodded to himself, sadly at first but with increasing confidence. He said, “Yes. Yes! You’ll see! I will master heavy armor, and I will be the impregnable shield of the Black Eagles, nay, of the entire Adrestian Empire!” Ferdinand stood a little straighter as he fortified his resolve.

“Very good, Ferdinand,” Edelgard said half-heartedly. Byleth gave him a thumbs up.

“This is crucial work,” Ferdinand continued, mostly to himself. “Fear not, Edelgard, Professor, I shall be our immoveable bulwark, and all will know the name Ferdinand von-”

Leaving him to his monologue, Edelgard turned to go back to her desk. She sat down at her desk and placed the Church flight manual in front of her. Claude may be teaching her practical flight techniques, but she’d still need to pass a Church certification test to be allowed to fly before she left the monastery. She pulled a quill and scroll from her satchel, cracked open her new flight manual, and began reading. There was much to learn and very little time to learn it.

Chapter Text

Dearest Mother,

I hope this letter finds you and Father well. I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner, it has been an eventful few weeks here at Garreg Mach since I received your last letter. The seeds that N. brought me sprouted right on time, around three weeks ago. They are white roses, beautiful and-

Claude leaned back in his chair and dipped his quill into the inkwell on his desk as he considered the next words in his letter. A letter to his mother in Almyra risked being intercepted in transit, so he couldn’t write specifics about the wyvern he was hiding (a wyvern which was currently snoring in his lap as he scratched her absent-mindedly under the jaw). He needed to write around the truth, and a gardening metaphor seemed unremarkable enough to avoid arousing suspicion if prying eyes saw this letter. His mother was aware of his scheme; Nader never would have been able to bring him the egg without at least her tacit approval, so she would understand immediately what his “white roses” were.

Claude wanted to say that Mahsa was curious and rambunctious, that the fierce little beast was running him ragged and that she was perhaps a small taste of what a pain in the ass he’d been as a child; unfortunately none of those words applied to flowers. After a moment’s thought he settled on a suitable alternative.

-beautiful and hardy, and my days have been full caring for them. My gardening tools broke just before the seeds could sprout, but fortunately I found someone to assist me in the greenhouse. She is Adrestian, a fellow student at the academy and the leader of the Black Eagles this year. She has continued to aid me since the roses bloomed, and in return for her assistance I am teaching her what I know of the care and arranging of flowers.

(He was stretching this metaphor to its breaking point, he knew, but his mother was no fool. She would deduce what the “arranging of flowers” might be if the flowers in question were wyverns).

She has taken to it with such impressive speed that I’ll run out of things to teach her in a few more lessons. You would like her; Edelgard is fierce, brilliant, and relentless both on and off the battlefield. It is equal parts inspiring and irritating.

Claude tilted his head and studied his words for a moment, then he smirked to himself and continued writing.

On second thought, it is primarily irritating and only occasionally inspiring. She is also forthright to a fault and dreadfully self-serious, both of which make her a great deal of fun to needle. I fear I will have far more luck teaching her to arrange flowers than I will teaching her to take a joke, or tell one. But you know me; I persevere, even when she looks at me like Father did before he tied me to a horse. Edelgard-

Claude paused once more. He dipped his quill into the inkwell, and brushed off the excess as he reviewed his letter with a small frown. He hadn’t intended it to focus so heavily on Edelgard, but he realized he had spent nearly as much time with her as with any of his own house over the last three weeks. He should get his mind off his erstwhile flying partner and write more about the Golden Deer, he thought. This was a letter to his mother, and she rubbed elbows with Leicestrian nobility extensively. She had even attended the Officer’s Academy with some relatives of his own classmates, and she’d be eager to hear how his experiences compared to hers.

As he pondered his next words, he heard footsteps on the walkway outside his room, growing louder with each step as they approached his door. Mahsa heard them as well, and she sat up in Claude’s lap. The pale wyvern’s tail lashed back and forth and she stared at the door expectantly. The footsteps continued past the door and their volume gradually faded as their owner continued without pausing. Mahsa tilted her head, and stared at the door for a few more moments before she put her head back down in Claude’s lap, disappointment evident on her face.

Claude smiled at her, and shifted his free hand to rub her belly. “I’m sorry, girl,” he said. “The princess is going to be gone for a few days. We actually have stuff to do that isn’t just pampering you, y’know.” Mahsa huffed as if she found this idea offensive, then closed her eyes again, and curled up to bury her snout under her tail.

Edelgard had departed that morning with the rest of the Black Eagles for her house’s mission to Conand Tower, in Faerghus; they were to deal with a group of bandits led by Miklan, the disowned eldest son of House Gautier. Edelgard would be traveling to and from the tower for the better part of a week, so Claude would be wrangling Mahsa and chewing her food alone.

Nevertheless, it was with some relief that he had watched her and her class ride out from the monastery gates. Things with Edelgard had been… complicated ever since the flying lesson. Claude was willing to admit he hadn’t thought things through when he’d pressed his body against hers on the back of the wyvern.

He’d just been trying to tease and unnerve her, because he thought it’d be funny (and he was right, it had been), but he hadn’t been prepared to feel so comfortable with Edelgard in his arms. She had felt right nestled there. Claude was not typically a man who let people get close to him, physically or otherwise; he’d dodged enough assassination attempts in his young life to make anyone wary. Yet Edelgard had slipped past his defenses as effortlessly as if she’d always been there. Perhaps it was because he feared no assassin’s dagger from her (they’d already discussed how she would ruin him if it came to that), or perhaps…

Regardless of the reason, their flight had lingered in his mind for all the days after. He would try to study and be preoccupied with the memory of her warmth against his chest. He would recall the floral and citrus scent of her hair in the training yard and his arrows would miss their mark. And at night, the memory of the way she’d flinched and gasped every time he’d shifted his hands on her legs drove every other thought out of his head.

When she was around, caring for Mahsa with him, it was doubly distracting. Two nights ago, he’d handed Edelgard Mahsa’s bowl so she could chew up a roast pheasant. Their fingers had brushed against each other and a jolt of lightning had run up Claude’s arm, so strong that he had jumped.

Or what had happened last night… Claude cringed thinking about it again.

Edelgard had been sitting on Claude’s bed with Mahsa on her lap; the wyvern’s head was rolled back and her belly was up to receive scratches. Edelgard had rubbed her stomach as she said, “I’m going to be gone for a week after tonight, little one, and I’m going to miss you terribly.” Mahsa’s leg kicked uncontrollably and her tongue lolled out of the side of her mouth as Edelgard scratched her belly.

From his seat at his desk, Claude had spat a mouthful of fish into the bowl and said playfully, “What about me?”

Edelgard had rolled her eyes and smirked. To Mahsa, she said, “He’s jealous;” without looking up, Edelgard said indulgently, “Obviously I’ll miss you too.”

Claude had laughed and replied, “Aww, same!” And then she had looked up at him and their eyes had met for a long, charged moment; their smiles fell off as Claude swallowed nervously, wondering whether she had been joking. And whether he had been joking.

Claude cleared his throat and, in sudden desperation to fill the silence and change the subject, said “Uh, so, bandits in Conand Tower, huh?” Equally desperate, Edelgard had obliged him and launched into a long, rote summary of the tactical challenges of assaulting a towerful of armed thieves whose leader wielded a Hero’s Relic. Her words had tumbled out quickly and her voice had been pitched higher than usual, but Claude hadn’t been listening anyway.

So he was grateful for a little time and distance from her to clear his head. It’s just physical attraction, he told himself firmly. It’s mostly proximity. Claude was walking a dangerous tightrope here, both at Garreg Mach with Mahsa and in Fodlan as an Almyran, and he couldn’t afford to get distracted by a pair of pretty eyes. Or by a shock of snow-white hair. Or by a challenging wit or intriguing ideals or-

Claude pinched the bridge of his nose, and with some effort he turned his attention back to the letter. He wrote to his mother about his house and its members, about the subjects Professor Manuela was teaching them, and Grandfather Oswald’s health, and the responsibilities of House Riegan that he was beginning to oversee. He asked after his younger sisters and sent them his love, then closed the letter with:

Your Loving Son,

C.

Once he’d signed the letter, Claude reread it, his eyes gliding over the words in the dim and flickering candlelight. He found nothing to correct until he reached the initial at the bottom. He frowned at it for a moment, then he drew a vertical stroke on the outside of the C to transform it into a K. He nodded in satisfaction, then sealed the letter to his mother and drafted another to Judith von Daphnel. Judith had attended the Officer’s Academy with his mother Tiana, where they’d been thick as thieves; they had remained in touch even after Tiana had followed her heart into Almyra. Judith was one of only three people in Fodlan who knew something of Claude’s true origin; his grandfather Oswald and Edelgard were the other two. He would send the letter meant for his mother to Judith, who would hire a courier to bring it over the mountains to Almyra and its final destination, as she had done many times before.

His letters complete, Claude scooped Mahsa up in his arms as he stood. She squawked in alarm at her interrupted nap, and Claude kissed her lightly on the snout. She tried to nip at his nose in response but he pulled back before she could catch him. “Sorry, girl,” he said as he deposited Mahsa on her nest of dirty laundry underneath his bed. “I’ve gotta go hit the books. Be good ‘til I get back.” He stoppered the inkwell on his desk and dumped it into a satchel with a few quills and papers, then blew out the candle illuminating the room.

This was the other reason he was grateful Edelgard was away from the monastery for a few days; Claude had some research to do, and he preferred that she not be around to catch him doing it. He intended to dig a little bit more into Crests, and how a person might come to have two of them, and how one of them could suddenly appear after being thought lost for a thousand years.

Edelgard certainly wouldn’t like him digging into her secrets; but if things went well she’d never have to know. Plus, in sharing it with him, she’d acknowledged she was giving him a weapon to use against her. Claude thought that it would be downright disrespectful if he didn’t keep that weapon as sharp as possible.

His bag packed, Claude slipped out his dorm room door, locked it behind him, and headed to the library.

—

Standing at the entrance to Garreg Mach’s reading room, Claude took a deep breath and smiled. The smell of musty books was one of his favorites, and the monastery library was rich with it. This was his favorite place in Garreg Mach, and the finest collection of books he’d encountered in Fodlan. Even though Claude suspected Seteth censored the collection aggressively, it still dwarfed House Riegan’s library in Deirdru. Of course, the Royal Archives in Almyra were larger, but this was still an impressive collection.

Oh, library, he thought. My truest friend. I’ve been away from you too long.

Claude saw an enormous pile of books on one of the reading tables, and peeking over it he could just make out a crown of white hair: it was Lysithea, studying late into the night as usual. Claude dropped his satchel across the table from her. Lysithea glanced up from her book, and Claude waved at her animatedly. She rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to her book. Claude grinned; Lysithea was nearly as much fun to mess with as Edelgard. Still smiling, Claude walked over to the shelves and studied them carefully until he found his prize: a massive, weathered-looking tome of Adrestian genealogy. He intended to study Edelgard’s lineage and look for any inconsistencies in the Crests of her ancestors. He knew her father’s line carried the Crest of Seiros, but perhaps there was an unidentified Crest in his line or her mother’s that might be the long-lost Crest of Flames. The Church taught that Crests were a supernatural blessing from the Goddess, and they never mixed, nor could one person carry two, but Edelgard had shown him proof that the Church’s dogma didn’t reflect the whole truth.

Anyway, Claude didn’t believe in the Goddess. He did believe in heredity, and he knew it was more complicated than the way Crests supposedly worked. He carried that knowledge in his own skin; it was a shade lighter than his father’s and brothers’, thanks to the influence of his fairer Fodlani mother. It seemed more like that Crests worked similarly to other forms of inheritance than that they were the blessings of some nonexistent Goddess.

However, as the candle in front of him burned down to a stub after several hours of study, Claude was forced to admit that perhaps he was missing something. He had pored over several extremely dull books of genealogy and Crestology, and found that the Hresvelg family line presented only the Crest of Seiros time and again, with no others apparent in their family tree. The line of Anselma von Arundel, Edelgard’s mother, had several Crests in its lineage, but each one could be traced back to one of the Ten Elites or Four Saints, and none of them had manifested in the Arundels for generations.

Frustrated, Claude leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes as he recalled a parable one of his Almyran tutors had told him. In it, a group of blind men were examining an elephant. Each man studied a different part of the elephant and came away with a different impression of the whole. One touched its tail and said he was holding a rope, another claimed its trunk was a snake, a third said its tusk was a spear. Eventually the men came to blows over the true nature of the animal. The lesson, his tutor had said, was that everyone’s perspective is inherently limited, and the truth is always larger and more complex than any one person can perceive. He knew that Edelgard had two Crests, but that was clearly just a small piece of a broader truth that still eluded him. Claude hated that feeling, of knowing he lacked crucial information that could reveal the greater truth. It was a maddening itch that he’d failed to scratch even after hours of study.

“Pardon me, children.” A soft voice said behind Claude, and he turned to face its source. An older man with sandy brown hair and a careworn face stood behind him, wearing the white robe of a monk of Seiros. It was Tomas, the head librarian of Garreg Mach. Claude was fond enough of the librarian; he was inclined to like anyone who maintained such an excellent collection of books. “You’ve been here an awfully long time,” the older man continued. “I need to replace that candle or you’ll strain your eyes.”

“Uh, yeah, no problem,” Claude said, his mind still on the mystery of Edelgard’s Crest. Lysithea nodded at Tomas as well, and he leaned over the table, extinguished the candle stub and pulled it from the candlestick. As he replaced the candle, Tomas glanced down at the books Claude had been reading.

“Adrestian Crest genealogy? That’s quite a difficult subject for a b… for a boy of such youth,” Tomas said as he beamed at him. Claude frowned to himself. Tomas was nice, but he could be a little condescending.

Lysithea looked over the large stack of books that surrounded her, so Claude could see her eyes and not just the top of her head. “Why are you reading that?” she asked.

“I’ve been told my knowledge of Adrestian history is shaky. As a kid I heard a story of an emperor who had two Crests, but I can’t find any record of it.” He’d heard no such story, but it was close enough to his real aim to sound plausible and avoid arousing suspicion.

Lysithea’s eyes widened. “T-that must be a myth. I’ve never heard any story like that. Adrestian emperors only have the Crest of Seiros, and no one can have more than one Crest.” Claude noticed her grip tighten on the book in her hand as she spoke.

She’s nervous, he thought. What’s that about? He studied her carefully, green eyes taking in her agitation as he put on a broad smile and teased, “Well, now I know! Thanks, Professor Lysithea. You’re as smart as you are adorable!”

Lysithea huffed and rolled her eyes, then turned back to the book in front of her.

“Hm, but imagine if they could,” Tomas murmured thoughtfully, almost to himself. He used a burst of magical fire to light the fresh candle on the reading table, and his eyes gleamed in the flickering light. “Two crests in one body. What a fascinating idea.”

“It’s not possible,” Lysithea snapped. “You have the Crest you’re born with and that’s it. It’s impossible to give someone a second Crest.”

“Indeed,” Tomas said. “And even if it were, it would be blasphemy of the highest order. Crests are blessings bestowed by the almighty Goddess. Who would dare trample in Her domain by giving someone a Crest they did not inherit? Goodness gracious, what a positively wicked notion!” The librarian covered his mouth to stifle a giggle. Lysithea cocked her head and looked at Tomas strangely.

But Claude barely noticed either of them, because Lysithea’s comment had set his mind racing. Give someone a second Crest, she had said. Was that what he was missing? In all his research, he had found no evidence whatsoever that Edelgard or any of her ancestors had ever inherited the Crest of Flames. So what if she hadn’t inherited it? If her second Crest wasn’t a natural occurrence, it had to be an artificial one. The more he thought about it, the more his gut insisted it must be true. Someone had given Edelgard the Crest of Flames. But that one answer simply exploded into a constellation of further questions.

Who was capable of such a feat?

How?

And why? A second Crest of any sort was an unbelievably valuable gift in a place like Fodlan, and this wasn’t just any Crest: it was the lost Crest of the Goddess herself. Whoever gave it to Edelgard, however they did it, they surely wanted something in return.

Claude stood and gave an exaggerated yawn. He shoved his papers and quills back into his satchel and said his goodbyes to Lysithea and Tomas as he left the library. He needed to return to his room and collect his thoughts in private after what he’d learned and deduced. Edelgard’s Crest of Seiros was almost certainly natural, but her Crest of Flames was almost certainly artificial, bestowed or implanted on her by an unknown party for an unknown purpose. Investigating that party and purpose would be his next step, and he knew exactly where to start.

Because Lysithea’s nerves had given her away. She knew something about having two Crests, about being given a second Crest. She might even have a second Crest herself, on top of the Crest of Charon he knew she’d inherited. And she was his best source; while extracting secrets from Edelgard was nearly impossible, Lysithea would be a much softer target. He made a mental note to visit the bakery in town and buy a few desserts. Lysithea loved sweets, and Claude planned to have tea and cakes with her very, very soon.

Chapter Text

It had been a week since the Black Eagles had returned from their mission in Faerghus, and they had come back changed. A dark cloud hung over the entire class; even the typically carefree Caspar was oddly quiet and grim when Claude saw him around the monastery. He had already tried to ask Petra what had transpired; she was the Adrestian student he knew best besides Edelgard. She had told him he was “having imaginings” and then refused to speak further on the subject.

So, his curiosity still unsatisfied, Claude tried again. It was evening, and he was sitting on his bed, holding an impatient, wriggling wyvern as Edelgard chewed her dinner, when he asked the question.

“So what happened out there?”

Edelgard spat the last of the pheasant into Mahsa’s bowl, and then she turned in his chair and fixed him with an even, inscrutable gaze. She paused for a moment too long and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Claude chuckled mirthlessly and said, “I’m positive you do, actually. But I’ll humor you. Conand Tower.”

Edelgard’s jaw tightened, nearly imperceptibly, but it did not escape Claude’s notice. He continued, “Something happened on that mission. Something that messed you guys up, even Caspar and Petra, and not much fazes them. Something that none of you will talk about. So what was it?”

Edelgard placed the bowl on the floor, and Claude released Mahsa. The wyvern stumbled toward it and began devouring the roast bird eagerly; tiny, adorable growls emanated from her small frame as she buried her face in the mush. A soft smile flickered across Edelgard’s face as she watched the wyvern, then she looked up and studied Claude for a moment. He saw wheels turning behind her eyes; after a moment, seemed to come to a decision, because she said, “Tell me something about Almyra.”

Ever suspicious, Claude asked, “Why?”

Edelgard replied, “Because I have been-” she stopped talking for a moment and scowled, as if she’d tasted something bitter, “encouraged not to speak about what happened in Conand Tower.”

From her tone, Claude surmised it was the kind of encouragement that came with a threat attached. Edelgard continued, “And while I have little interest in keeping this secret, I’m also not in the habit of giving Claude von Riegan privileged information for free.”

That was fair enough. Claude nodded and said, “A dagger for a dagger, huh? I can work with that.” He scratched his chin as he thought about it, then clapped his hands in genuine excitement. “I know what I can tell you. Let’s play chess.”

As Claude got up from his bed to grab the board, Edelgard eyed him suspiciously. “That had better not be a euphemism, Claude. I already get quite enough grief from Dorothea-”

He laughed. “No, no, I’m serious this time.” He set up the pieces, then gestured at the other side of his bed, for Edelgard to sit. She moved from his desk and sat across from him, in front of the white pieces.

“The game,” Claude said airily, “is shatranj.” He reached down and swapped the positions of the white king and queen.

Edelgard frowned at the altered board for a moment, the recognition lit across her face. Intrigued, she looked at him and said, “You play differently in Almyra.”

Claude shook his head. With a hint of pride, he said “No, we invented shatranj in Almyra. Traders brought it west to Fodlan, and the Fodlani modified the game and called it chess.”

Edelgard hummed to herself. “I believe the Church teaches that Saint Macuil invented chess to teach the art of war to the Goddess’s followers.”

“Yeah, I bet it does,” Claude grumbled. It was the doctrine of the Church of Sothis that people outside Fodlan were mindless, violent brutes, after all. Nothing of value could possibly come from a place so devoid of the Holy Goddess’s light.

“How is it played?” Edelgard asked. “What else is different, besides the position of those pieces?”

“Not much,” Claude replied. He tapped the black queen in front of him. “This is the wazir, the counselor. It moves exactly one space, and only diagonally.”

“So the strongest piece in chess becomes one of the weakest,” Edelgard murmured to herself, thinking about how this change would impact her strategies.

Claude nodded, and tapped a bishop. “The alfil, the elephant, can move exactly two spaces diagonally.”

“What’s an elephant?” Edelgard asked.

Claude grinned. “Oh, wow, I forgot you couldn’t have seen one. It’s an animal. It’s huge, with a thick, leathery grey hide, it has a long nose like a snake, but it… it can grab things with it-” He paused, thinking about how to improve his jumbled explanation. He realized it wasn’t easy to describe an elephant even when you could see it.

Edelgard looked dubious. “That doesn’t sound like a real animal, Claude. I think you’re lying to me,” she said.

The absolute nerve of her, Claude thought. She thought he was lying? Just because he lied all the time?

With a shameless grin, he said, “That’s how you know I’m not! When I lie I try to make up something that sounds true.” She scowled at him. He continued, “anyway, I’ll check the books I brought, see if any of them have an illustration. If not, I’ll try and draw you one.”

“Fine,” Edelgard said, still doubtful. She looked back at the board. “Are there any more rules I need to know?”

“Not really,” Claude said. “Pawns can only ever move one space, and they promote to wazirs. So, you ready to tell me about Conand Tower?”

“Absolutely,” Edelgard said. She reached down and moved her wazir's pawn forward one space. “After you win.” She smirked at him and said, “you have a fairly good chance of beating me while I digest the new rules.”

Claude laughed, and moved one of his own pawns. “Fuck you, Edelgard,” he said genially. “I was going to beat you either way. The new rules just give you an excuse for losing.”

“Ass,” Edelgard replied, still smiling. “I shan’t be needing that excuse.”

Mahsa finished her dinner and nudged at Claude’s leg. He scooped her into his lap and rubbed under her chin as they played.

The first few moves passed in silence before Edelgard spoke. “I’m surprised,” she said.

“By what?”

She studied the board for a moment and continued, “It’s a slower, more defensive game than chess. I thought the strength of the Almyran military was its wyvern riders, so I would expect your war games to feature more mobility.” She reached for her wazir, then paused, grimaced, and selected a different piece. Claude smirked, she’d thought she could capture one of his knights, but it would require the queen’s moveset instead of the wazir’s.

“Almyra’s a big country, Princess,” Claude said. “Shatranj originated in the east, the wyvern tradition is mainly in the west.” He took a knight with his rook.

“I suppose that explains why one of these mythical ‘elephants’ has never been seen at Fodlan’s Throat,” Edelgard teased.

Claude, who had ridden an elephant before, rolled his eyes at the word ‘mythical.’ He replied, “Yeah, the Western wilaya – uh, province – is mostly mountain and desert, they don’t live there.”

“Now that is an interesting tidbit,” Edelgard said as she moved another piece. “House Goneril would have us believe they face down the full might of Almyra at Fodlan’s Throat, but the armies that attack Fodlan there are mustered locally, within the province? The rest of Almyra’s military might is elsewhere?”

Claude cursed himself internally. His plan had been to share some safe, low-stakes trivia about a game with Edelgard, but of course she had wormed a genuine secret from him. And worse than revealing details about Almyra’s armies, he’d given her another clue about him; evidence that in Almyra he was the sort of person who might know those details. A person associated with the military, or the nobility.

Or royalty.

In response, he put on a smirk that failed to warm his cold eyes, and said, “Better keep your mind on the game, Princess.” He moved a knight to threaten her king. “Check.”

Edelgard cursed softly under her breath, and captured the knight with her alfil. But it was the beginning of the end, and within a few turns Claude had her in checkmate. She grudgingly conceded, then picked up the discarded pieces and reset the board. She turned it around, so she was playing black, then gestured at Claude to start another game.

When he had moved his alfil to open, she said, “So you know we were in Faerghus to defeat Miklan, formerly of House Gautier, and reclaim their Heroes’ Relic. His bandits were disciplined and well-equipped. They reflected well on his strengths as a commander. It was a profound waste for House Gautier to toss him aside for being Crestless. Still, the battle was relatively uneventful. We pushed them back, to the uppermost floors of the tower, and eventually we routed the whole group and faced Miklan directly. On the verge of defeat, he finally drew the Lance of Ruin.”

She paused for a moment, in thought or memory, and shuddered. Claude raised an eyebrow. If even Edelgard was troubled by what happened, it must have been truly harrowing.

She continued, “Then he changed. The Relic changed him. I saw black tendrils erupt from the lance. Ichor, like tar. It consumed him. His eyes… he died at that moment. Terrified, in agony. But then he was gone and there was a… a monster in front of us, and it wasn’t dead. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t Miklan. It was mindless, bestial, three men wide and two men tall, and we slew it thrice before it finally died.”

“Then the ichor dissolved, and the beast was gone, and we were left with Miklan’s body and the lance. So we returned it to the Church, and Archbishop Rhea told the Professor to ensure our silence. She was not at all surprised by what had transpired. This is the so-called judgement of the Goddess. If a Crestless person attempts to wield a Heroes’ Relic, it consumes them. It turns them into… something else.”

Claude studied Edelgard’s face for any hint of deception. He found none, only the same troubled expression he’d seen on Petra and the rest of the Black Eagles since their mission. He leaned back to think about this revelation. He thought of Failnaught, the Heroes’ Relic of House Riegan. Even now the ancient bow hung in his grandfather’s study in Deirdru.

He’d been unnerved by the weapon since he’d first laid eyes on it; he was told it was forged of “umbral steel,” but he knew bone when he saw it. Animated, writhing bone. Even though it was far and away the finest bow he’d ever shot, he hated wielding it. The effortless power, the accuracy, the way it responded to his touch (or to his Crest, he supposed) like it knew his thoughts, they all seemed too good to be true.

And now he knew they were. If what Edelgard said was true, Heroes' Relics weren’t holy weapons, they were more like cursed ones, and only with a Crest could you withstand the curse. He wondered if the Great Houses, with their Crest bloodlines, even knew. Miklan clearly hadn't known, nor had Edelgard or the rest of the Black Eagles. Had his grandfather known when he had put the bow in Claude’s hands?

“It’s strange,” Edelgard continued. “Adrestia has no Heroes’ Relics. The descendants of the Ten Elites took them when they rebelled against Imperial authority during the War of the Eagle and Lion. They all reside in Faerghus and Leicester now. Even though I despise what Crests have made of Fodlan, and how the Church has taught us to value them above all else, that always frustrated me. I thought our lack of them was a liability for the Empire. A source of weakness should our nations ever go to war again. Now I finally believe we’re better off without them.”

Claude thought about this, then smiled a particularly cold smile. “That’s why you didn’t mind telling me, I guess. It would be much worse for Leicester or Faerghus if this secret got out than it would be for Adrestia. It’s hard to follow a lord who wields a weapon that turns regular folks into monsters if they try to touch it.”

Edelgard nodded, and added, “And hard to worship at a Church that calls that weapon a blessing.”

He asked her, “How does it work, do you think? Do the Crests shield us against the power of the Relic?” He was already planning his next trip to the monastery library, the next set of hidden truths he would need to uncover from what was left unsaid in the censored collection.

“Perhaps,” Edelgard said grimly. “Or perhaps they don’t change those of us with Crests because we are already monsters.” Claude hadn’t considered that possibility, and he didn’t like it now that he had. He wondered again about Edelgard’s second Crest. He was still certain it was artificially implanted in her, and now he was increasingly confident it had not been her choice.

Still, they were playing a game, and the mood was threatening to turn terminally bleak, so Claude attempted to right the ship. “I’m pretty sure I’m not a monster,” he joked. Edelgard did not respond, and their game continued in uncomfortable silence, punctuated only by the clicking of pieces.

Edelgard adapted to the rules of shatranj quickly, and the game was stretching toward a stalemate when Mahsa roused from Claude’s lap. She arched her rear legs and stretched out her winged forelegs, then clambered heedlessly across the chessboard towards Edelgard, scattering the pieces as she went.

The clumsy wyvern’s antics shattered the tension of their earlier conversation. Claude groaned and Edelgard erupted in peals of laughter (perhaps a little desperate, perhaps a little forced) as she saw Mahsa stumble towards her. She scooped the oblivious wyvern into her arms, and said warmly, “Mahsa, you little demon!” She squeezed Mahsa to her chest and rubbed her cheek against the pale creature’s head. Mahsa growled and wriggled in a vain attempt to escape the embrace she had just crawled into.

Edelgard looked at the ruined remains of the game as she hugged Mahsa. She sighed and said, “It’s too late to start another. I suppose my victory will have to wait for another day. I should be going. Good night, Claude. And… thank you.”

Claude grinned. “Princess, it was my absolute pleasure. I’ll beat you at shatranj any time.”

“Insufferable,” Edelgard said as she rolled her eyes. “Not that. It was a weight off my mind to tell someone about Conand Tower. More than I would have expected. There’s comfort in naming the madness around Crests and Relics for what it is. It’s good to know I’m not alone with my thoughts.”

With that, she plopped Mahsa down on Claude’s bed, rubbed the small wyvern’s face in her hands one last time, then slipped out the door as Claude watched her go.

That night, Edelgard’s dreams were more peaceful than usual. She was riding an enormous grey beast across a great plain. She felt a pleasant, familiar warmth. It pressed against her back and rested lightly on her knees. She looked down at the beast she was riding to see that it had a snake for a face, scaly and mottled, and the other end of the snake was a man’s hand, holding a sword. Then she awoke, bemused for once rather than tormented by her dreams. Can’t be real, she thought to herself.

What woke her was an insistent rapping on her door. The room was barely visible in the weak pre-dawn light. Edelgard put a robe on over sleeping clothes and answered the door to see Hubert lurking outside, looking even grimmer than usual. She said nothing; she could tell from his face that whatever he had to say shouldn’t be said outdoors. She let him in and closed the door behind him.

“What is it, Hubert?” Edelgard asked.

“Professor Jeritza informed me yesterday evening that our… allies,” he sneered the word, “had given him a mission, and that he may be gone for some time.”

Edelgard rubbed her temples in frustration. Jeritza von Hrym, the Death Knight, was a servant of the Flame Emperor; he was loyal to her alone and one of the few assets she had that was independent of Those Who Slither in the Dark. They had requested his services to them some months ago to further their common aims, and she had grudgingly acquiesced. They had called him to service once already, during the Goddess’s Rite of Rebirth, when the Black Eagles had uncovered the Sword of the Creator. Now it seemed they had put him to use again.

“We knew they would do this eventually,” she said, then she narrowed her eyes. His face was still ashen. “There’s something else, clearly,” she said. “What is it?”

Hubert grimaced. “I believe I know what his mission is, my lady. I awoke early and was researching something in the library when I saw Seteth. He was asking one of the knights after Flayn’s whereabouts. He concealed it well, but he was… frantic. Terrified.”

Hubert continued, and Edelgard felt her blood run cold. “The Death Knight has kidnapped Flayn on the orders of Those Who Slither in the Dark.”

Chapter Text

Soon enough, Byleth called her students into the Black Eagles’ classroom and Hubert’s fears were confirmed. Edelgard and Hubert pretended to be surprised as Byleth briefed them on the situation. Flayn had disappeared the previous night. The monastery gates had been observed all night and no suspicious activity had been noticed, so the Archbishop was operating under the assumption that she was still on the monastery grounds. Garreg Mach had been locked down until a thorough search was completed. All class missions and student activity had been suspended until Seteth’s sister was found.

Edelgard considered what Byleth had told her carefully, deliberating as if she were hearing it all for the first time. She recommended that Byleth interrogate students and staff for clues, and then suggested to her classmates that they each search the places they knew best (she suggested some additional spots for Bernadetta to search, because Flayn was certainly not stashed away in the girl’s room). She did not mention Jeritza’s name; targeting him too quickly could reveal her own complicity. If the search dragged on longer than a few hours she would guide it in his direction as subtly as she could.

Byleth and the Black Eagles listened to her recommendations, nodded grimly, and filed out of the classroom to begin their search; Edelgard and Hubert were left alone.

Hubert asked, “Do you think they will find him, my lady?”

Edelgard nodded. “I do. If Jeritza only received the mission last night then he had to move in reckless haste. He is sure to have left clues behind, especially if the Archbishop is correct that he is still on the monastery grounds. The Professor is clever and relentless; it is only a matter of time before she uncovers his trail.”

Hubert sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No matter what happens, Jeritza’s identity will be revealed. At best, he shall be forced to flee the monastery. Those who Slither in the Dark have deprived us of our best asset at Garreg Mach.”

“That’s their design, no doubt. They want me isolated,” Edelgard said bitterly. “The Death Knight follows my orders alone, and they begrudge me any source of power they don’t control.”

Hubert said, “Agreed. They may not even have any use for Flayn at all; she may simply be a convenient target in a ploy to weaken you, my lady.”

“Let us hope that is the case,” Edelgard said. “She might still be unharmed if they don’t plan to make use of her. If they do…” She could not speak the words, could not make them real; she could only bury her face in her hands as her mind assaulted her with recriminations. Your fault, she thought. Is it worth it? You’re not the one who suffers for it. You helped them take a child, another child, like El was, like Lysithea, like all of you were, they’re cutting another child apart because of YOU EDELGARD-

Hubert watched her with concern as she drew a shuddering breath. There were times when the cost of their bloodstained path weighed heavily on them both, never more than when they were required to serve the interests of Those Who Slither in the Dark, those who had killed Edelgard’s siblings and caused her and her father so much pain. Hesitantly, Hubert lifted a hand to place on her shoulder as she hunched over in her chair, hands still covering her face. He was an able retainer, and he would do anything to support his liege lady, but comfort had never been one of his strong suits. Before he could touch her, Edelgard sat up abruptly and met his gaze; there was nothing but grim resolve in her violet eyes. The weight would be borne. The price would be paid. Hubert lowered his hand with no small amount of relief.

“The Professor will track him down,” Edelgard said. “And then she will lead us into battle, and the Black Eagles will rescue Flayn and put a stop to the Death Knight’s plot.”

“Permanently?” Hubert asked.

Edelgard clenched her jaw. It was bad enough that she would be deprived of Jeritza’s services at the monastery. No doubt Thales and his ilk would be giddy if she were forced to kill him as well. But the choice between losing Jeritza and compromising her future plans was no choice at all. Edelgard nodded. “If necessary,” she said. “If that is the sacrifice we must make. But perhaps the Flame Emperor will be able to extract the Death Knight before it comes to that.”

“Then we shall watch for an opportunity for the Flame Emperor to make an appearance,” Hubert said. “Or I shall create one.”

—

As Edelgard had expected, Byleth’s investigation bore fruit quickly. A few hours after she had left the classroom to investigate the monastery, Byleth returned to tell Edelgard what she had discovered: that Felix had noticed something sloppy and agitated in Jeritza’s swordplay, that Manuela had been running somewhere with Jeritza’s mask, and that the two of them were now missing. Combine that with the rumors of a reaper stalking Garreg Mach (rumors Edelgard knew to be true), and Jeritza seemed the likely suspect.

“I see,” Edelgard said. So Manuela has gotten wrapped up in this too, she thought grimly. I hope Jeritza hasn’t killed that poor woman. “We should investigate Jeritza’s quarters, but if he is a kidnapper and this mysterious… reaper, we should prepare for battle first.” Garreg Mach monastery was a rat’s nest of underground passages and chambers, and she knew Jeritza’s room had at least one secret entrance, though she had never used it. That was probably where he had taken Flayn. It didn’t sound like Jeritza was covering his tracks well, so no doubt the Black Eagles would uncover the secret passage quickly once they investigated his chambers.

Byleth nodded at her words. The professor had already stopped by her own room and prepared for battle; the Sword of the Creator rested on her hip. The flickering candlelight of the classroom made the sword’s jagged yellow teeth look fearsome and hungry. Fate was a funny thing, Edelgard thought as she eyed those teeth; as a bearer of the Crest of Flames, she should have been able to wield that blade, but it only answered the call of her mentor. Those Who Slither in the Dark had never fully explained themselves, but she suspected they had grafted that Crest on her in the hopes that they would recover the Sword of the Creator and have her wield it on their behalf.

As she often did, Edelgard wondered if one day Byleth would choose to turn that sword against her. Perhaps even now Edelgard was standing in the presence of the weapon that would end her life.

“Gather everyone and tell them to gear up,” Byleth said, not noticing Edelgard’s troubled thoughts. The mercenary teacher’s face was placid as always. “Meet me at the entrance to his quarters.” With no further discussion, Byleth turned and strode out of the classroom.

Moments later, the Black Eagles dutifully assembled in the courtyard outside Jeritza’s rooms. Edelgard examined her classmates with a mix of concern and pride. Caspar’s eyes blazed with excitement and determination; every battle was an adventure and an opportunity for him. He bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, ducking and weaving as he threw practice punches at his shadow. Near him, Linhardt leaned against a retaining wall, arms crossed, chin down against his chest, and eyes closed. It was unclear whether he was conserving his energy for the fight ahead, or whether he was simply asleep on his feet.

Bernadetta nervously tested the string on her bow with a morose look on her face. Next to her, Dorothea leaned over and whispered something in her ear; a joke, perhaps, because Bernadetta cracked a small, hesitant smile. Dorothea’s arm was around Bernadetta and her hand rested lightly on the other girl’s hip; Edelgard wasn’t sure whether her intent was to comfort her or to physically prevent her from running away. Petra crouched to the other side of Bernadetta, dragging a hunting knife against a whetstone in long, even strokes. Her face was as cool and composed as if she was selecting a meal in the dining hall. Behind them all, Hubert had found a shadow to loom in as he watched his fellow students carefully.

Ferdinand was the last to arrive, as his combat kit required the most preparation. There was already a light sheen of sweat on his brow from the weight of his heavy armor as he marched up to the waiting students. Edelgard looked him over and noted with approval that the cuirass was fitted perfectly; Ferdinand had been diligent in his studies and preparation.

She also noted (with somewhat less approval) that his armor gleamed like burnished gold in the afternoon sun. Presumably he’d spent hours beforehand polishing it to a mirror sheen, hours that in Edelgard’s estimation he should have spent studying or training. Once again she was thankful she no longer wore heavy armor into combat, because if she did Ferdinand would be crowing even now about how much shinier his armor was than hers. Her own kit was the light leather armor of a brigand, and it was clean but scuffed with use.

“Goodness! What’s going on here?”

Edelgard turned to face the source of the gentle voice. A tall young woman with blue eyes and pale blonde hair looked at them in surprise.

“Ah, Mercedes,” Edelgard said. “We suspect we’ve identified Flayn’s kidnapper. Professor Jeritza’s behavior has been suspicious, so we’re about to investigate.” She looked back at her heavily armed and armored class. “Forcefully investigate,” she clarified.

Mercedes’ eyes went wide. “Professor Jeritza?” she asked. Then something hardened behind her soft eyes and she said, “I’ll come with you.”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you, Mercedes,” Edelgard said. “We-”

“Now, Edelgard,” Mercedes interrupted, to Edelgard’s surprise. “‘Many hands make light work,’ as they say. I won’t get in the way of your class’s combat maneuvers, and an extra healer always comes in handy, right?” She smiled, in a way that struck Edelgard as motherly and a little patronizing.

Edelgard narrowed her eyes at the other woman. Her initial assessment of Mercedes when she’d first met her had been that the woman was… nice. Kind. Sweet, and soft, and not worth considering further.

She was beginning to think she should revisit that evaluation. Edelgard was the heir to the Adrestian Empire, and very, very few people were bold enough to talk over her like that. There was steel in that woman that Edelgard had failed to notice previously.

Does she know who he is? Edelgard wondered. She must at least suspect. Years ago, Professor Jeritza von Hrym had worn another name: Emile von Bartels. Mercedes’ mother had married into House Bartels and given birth to Emile when Mercedes was a baby, but mother and daughter had fled House Bartels less than a decade later. As far as Edelgard knew, Mercedes had not recognized her half brother in her time at Garreg Mach. He had been cold and aloof, and certainly his omnipresent mask hadn’t helped. However, Mercedes’s insistence here suggested that perhaps she knew the truth after all.

Edelgard’s first instinct was to refuse her, but her argument was well-taken. As a healer, Mercedes didn’t need her combat equipment or extensive training with the Black Eagles to be useful. Edelgard didn’t know what state Flayn would be in when they found her, or what cost a battle with the Death Knight would exact on her classmates. An additional skilled healer could be the difference between life and death. “Very well, Mercedes,” Edelgard said. “We’d appreciate the support.” She turned to Byleth for confirmation, and the professor nodded stoically before turning to the rest of the class.

“Alright,” Byleth said. “Form up. Ferdinand, Edelgard, Caspar, up front with me. Be caref-”

She was interrupted by a ragged scream from the direction of Jeritza’s quarters. Byleth pursed her lips and said, “Move. Now.” She drew the Sword of the Creator and dashed towards Jeritza’s rooms with Edelgard and the Black Eagles close behind her.

Byleth and Edelgard spilled through the door, weapons in hand, but Jeritza was nowhere to be found. Jeritza’s rooms were clean and sparsely decorated. A neatly-made bed pushed against one wall, a bookcase opposite it, a desk strewn with weapons to be cleaned or polished. On the stone walls hung a pair of slim fencing blades, and several other weapons were placed neatly in a stand near the door. Beyond that, there were no other personal touches; the rooms seemed nearly uninhabited. As he entered the room, Hubert said, “He does not seem to be here... Hm? On the ground! Professor Manuela!”

On the opposite side of Jeritza’s bed, near his bookcase, a woman with sandy brown hair was curled in a ball on the floor. Manuela was unresponsive, clutching at a wound in her midsection with one hand.

Edelgard quickly knelt next to Manuela and put two fingers to her neck. She sighed with relief as she felt a weak pulse. Thank goodness, she thought. Perhaps they would yet escape this catastrophe without the Death Knight living up to his name. Then Edelgard noticed Manuela’s other hand, which had traced a grisly crimson trail in the direction of Jeritza’s bookcase.

“Professor,” Edelgard said, pointing to the message Manuela had painted with her own blood. “There's an opening behind that shelf. Perhaps a secret passageway…”

She locked eyes with Hubert. This was her opportunity. Hubert nodded in understanding, and Edelgard said, “My teacher, I’ll take care of Manuela. You should pursue Professor Jeritza. I’ll be back shortly. Please be careful.” She would take Manuela to the infirmary to recover while Byleth led the Black Eagles into the tunnel, and then the Flame Emperor would be free to extract the Death Knight. Hopefully before he killed anyone.

Byleth said, “Good plan,” and turned to the secret passage. “Everyone else, with me.” The Black Eagles and Mercedes entered the dark passage as Edelgard hoisted Manuela into her arms and headed for the infirmary.

As she entered the hall with Manuela in her arms, Edelgard nearly stumbled into Professor Hanneman. He was red-faced and puffing from exertion; clearly he had taken off towards Jeritza’s room when he heard the scream just like the Black Eagles. He yelped in alarm when he saw the wounded Manuela, and he quickly slid under Manuela’s shoulder to help Edelgard carry her weight.

As Hanneman and Edelgard carried Manuela into the courtyard, toward the central academy building and its infirmary, another familiar figure approached them, drawn by the scream. Claude’s mouth fell open in shock at the sight of his professor bloody and unconscious, but his cool green eyes studied the scene carefully, probing and piercing as always. Edelgard cursed inwardly. This was going to be a complication.

“Let me help-” Claude said, reaching for Manuela’s legs to share her weight further.

“No!” Edelgard snapped. Claude raised a questioning eyebrow at her response. She winced internally and searched for an explanation that would allay his suspicion. If he got involved here, he would stay involved, and she’d never be able to sneak away and defuse the situation in the tunnels below Garreg Mach. Jeritza would be killed, but probably not before he’d taken the life of one or more of her classmates. She needed to get him out of here somehow.

“Professor Byleth asked me to question her as soon as possible,” Edelgard lied. “She’s found a secret passage in his quarters and my class is investigating it now. I’ll take care of Manuela with Professor Hanneman. I don’t know what they’re walking into down there. I need you to go help them.”

“But-” Claude objected.

“Please, Claude,” Edelgard said, meeting his gaze. She wondered if he would believe her, and hoped the time they’d spent together over the past weeks had earned her some trust from the least trusting man at Garreg Mach.

Claude studied her face carefully for a moment, then nodded and took off toward Jeritza’s quarters. Edelgard and Hanneman continued to the infirmary with the unconscious Manuela.

The infirmary smelled clean and antiseptic as they entered. Edelgard and Hanneman placed Manuela on a bed, and she grimaced in pain even through the haze of semi-consciousness. They disinfected the wound and Hanneman pressed a bandage to it. His face was ashen with worry as he held the thick cotton to Manuela’s stomach. He had a concerned, stricken expression and he gently brushed a stray hair out of her eyes as he stared at her face.

The moment felt uncomfortably intimate, and Edelgard was loath to interrupt it, but she had plans of her own to attend to, and they could wait no longer. “Professor,” she said, and Hanneman looked at her in surprise. “If you don’t need me any further, I should return to Jeritza’s quarters and try to assist my class.”

“Hm? Oh, yes, yes of course,” Hanneman said, as if he’d forgotten she was there. He turned back to Manuela, clearly hesitant to tear his attention away from her for even a moment. Fortunately, he did not seem to remember that Edelgard had told Claude she wanted to question the wounded professor. “I have things well in hand here, Edelgard. Thank you for your assistance. Go, rejoin your professor.”

Edelgard nodded. “I will.” She looked at Manuela again. Her breathing was steady, and her face had relaxed from the pained grimace she had worn when Edelgard had found her. Edelgard opened her mouth again, but she could find no words. She could offer no apologies for the violence of her allies, nor any hollow prayers she did not believe. Instead, Edelgard rushed out of the infirmary without another word. When she exited the school building she broke into a run towards her own room and the armor and mask hidden there. The Flame Emperor would have to resolve this where Edelgard von Hresvelg could not.

—

I’m going to need a weapon, Claude thought as he ran for Jeritza’s room. Unlike Edelgard and a good chunk of the Black Eagles, he was no spellcaster. If he caught up with her house unarmed he wouldn’t be of any use to them at all. Not unless they had something heavy they needed him to carry.

So why did she send you into the lion’s den? A suspicious voice in his head asked. She’d seemed awfully eager to get rid of him. On the other hand, he wasn’t proficient in medicine either, and he was more likely to find a weapon on the way to the Black Eagles than he was to learn a healing spell on the way to the infirmary. Maybe she was just deploying him where she thought he’d do the most good. Although…

He felt that irritating itch again: the sense of missing information, the surety that there was a larger truth here he couldn’t perceive, but he pushed it to the back of his mind. Flayn was in trouble. She and the Black Eagles needed his help. The puzzle would have to wait; the fight came first. And for the fight, he needed a weapon.

Fortunately, Jeritza’s room was a veritable armory. The man didn’t seem to have any personal effects or decorations in his quarters that weren’t weapons. Crossed swords hung on one wall, warhammers on another; a stand near his door was filled with lances. On his desk sat an open jar of weapon polish and a few dirty rags, along with even more blades.

In hindsight, Claude thought as he looked at a bedroom that contained only an arsenal of weapons, maybe they should have figured out this guy was bad news before now. The creepy mask also should have been a bit of a tip-off.

Claude failed to find a bow in his search, but he pulled an ornate rapier from the wall and tested its balance and edge. The sword wasn’t his first preference, but he was skilled enough to be dangerous with it. The rapier’s tip and edges were sharp (apparently Jeritza kept even his display weapons battle-ready), so Claude slid it into his belt and walked across the room to the passageway behind the bookcase.

He entered the passage and descended a narrow, spiraling staircase for what felt like several stories. Lit torches in recessed sconces showed that he was on the right path; the Black Eagles had passed this way recently. He reached the bottom of the staircase and came to a large room, with walls and a floor of smooth, sand-colored stone. He heard movement ahead of him, the rustle and clanking of weapons and armor, and hushed words, so he followed the sound and the path of lit torches. He couldn’t be sure the sounds came from Pressor Byleth and her class, so he crept quietly to avoid detection.

While stalking down the corridor, he came across a body armored in black. Claude knelt down and examined him. It was a soldier, no one Claude recognized, and his sword lay a few paces away. Claude put two fingers to the man’s neck and confirmed he was dead; recently so, based on the warmth of the body. He appeared to have a lance wound in his gut and an ugly burn across one arm, likely caused by magical fire. This must be one of the Death Knight’s troops, and he’d been killed by the Black Eagles. Claude was on the right path. On the man’s shoulder, Claude noticed an unfamiliar insignia, a white flame over a red background. He scratched his chin as he studied it, but didn’t recall any army that wore that emblem. He filed the information away for later and continued on. Along the way, he came across more bodies, all wearing the white flame, all apparently killed by the Black Eagles.

Claude rounded a corner in the underground labyrinth, and an arrow whizzed past his face, so close that he felt the wind against his cheek. He yelped in alarm and stumbled backward, peering into the darkness for the source of the arrow. As it bounced off the stone wall behind him with a soft clink, a tremulous voice shouted from ahead of him.

“W-who’s there!? I m-missed you on purpose, you know!”

Claude raised his hands in surrender. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw a slight girl with mussed purple hair pointing a drawn bow at him, another arrow already nocked. Her legs were shaking, but somehow her bow arm was as steady as stone.

“Easy,” Claude said, in a calming voice. He remained very still as he kept his hands up. He didn’t know who this girl was, but he didn’t want to spook her; she looked as nervous as a fawn. A fawn who was clearly a seasoned archer, and was pointing an arrow directly at his chest, and could kill him in a heartbeat just by relaxing two fingers. “It’s Claude,” he said.

The arrow aimed at him did not budge. The purple-haired girl replied, “Who?”

Well, that’s fair, Claude thought. I don’t recognize you either. “Claude. Uh, von Riegan? From the Golden Deer. I ran into Edelgard taking Professor Manuela to the infirmary,” Claude said. “She sent me to help.”

The tip of Bernadetta’s arrow dropped a fraction as she considered this. Drawn to the commotion, Professor Byleth strode up behind her, looking unflappable as always, with one hand resting on the hilt of her sword.

“Claude,” she said briskly. Bernadetta lowered the arrow and slackened the draw on her bow. “We’ll take all the help we can get. The Death Knight has an army down here. Are you armed?”

Claude exhaled in relief, and held up the rapier he’d taken from Jeritza’s quarters. He said, “Hey, Teach. Just with this.”

Byleth nodded, then turned to Bernadetta and said, “Give Claude your shortbow and half your arrows.” She turned to move back towards the rest of her class.

“N-no problem, Professor!” Bernadetta said, a bit of hopeful, manic enthusiasm creeping into her voice. “A-and since I don’t have a bow any more, I’ll just leave this spooky catacomb full of guys that want to kill me and head back to my room-”

“You have two bows, Bernadetta,” Byleth said without looking at her.

“I do?” Bernadetta asked, then felt around on her back. She slumped as she felt the other bow slung across her shoulder. “I do…” she said mournfully.

“Claude, move up to the second line, behind Ferdinand and Caspar. Bernadetta, keep watching the rear,” Byleth said. Then she stopped for a moment and seemed to consider something before turning back to face Bernadetta. She placed a hand gently on the smaller girl’s arm. Bernadetta flinched at it and looked up at Byleth. The mercenary wore a tiny, almost imperceptible smile.

“Really good work, Bernie,” she said. “Keep it up.”

Bernadetta’s lip quivered, and she nodded. “Th-thank you, Professor. I will.” She handed Claude her bow and arrows, then readied her other bow and turned back to face the darkness. Claude moved past her to take his position in Byleth’s formation.

As Claude moved into position behind the frontline warriors, he felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck; someone was watching him. He looked around until he saw her: Dorothea, opera diva and black mage of the Adrestian class. She was openly staring at him with a thoughtful look in her eyes and a small frown on her face. He flashed her what he thought was his winningest smile, but Dorothea’s lip curled into a sneer of disdain and she turned back forward to face the darkness of the catacombs before he could speak. Huh, thought Claude. That’s odd, people usually like that one. I wonder if Edelgard has been talking about me.

But Claude didn’t have time to dig deeper, because Byleth gave the command for her students to march, and the group moved forward cautiously into the darkness. They moved through the catacombs as a unit, lighting torches along the way. Petra scouted ahead, her shortsword at the ready and her keen hunter’s eyes piercing the darkness; when she encountered enemy soldiers she lured them back to be defeated by the assembled Black Eagles.

Edelgard’s classmates cut through the enemies with minimal fuss, and Claude found himself envious (not for the first time) of her luck in landing Professor Byleth for the Black Eagles. Byleth clearly excelled as a fighter, striking down her foes cleanly and easily, but to Claude’s eyes her skill as a commander and teacher was even more impressive. She gave curt orders and let her students take the lead, stepping in only when necessary to finish off a weakened foe or protect a student from a blow when no other option was available. The Death Knight’s army was no match for their combined might, and the Black Eagles steadily worked their way deeper into the catacomb.

Finally, they group reached a thick wooden door at the center of the labyrinth. Petra peered through the keyhole and said, “I am seeing him, Professor. The Death Knight is waiting behind this door. And… oh! I am seeing Flayn! And… someone else. They do not have- I mean, they are not conscious."

Byleth nodded. “Get that door unlocked,” she said. Petra pulled lockpicks from a pocket at her hip and set to work. “Ferdinand, Caspar, you’re first through with me. Breach on my mark.”

“P-Professor!” came a wail from behind them. Byleth turned to see Bernadetta stumbling backwards, launching arrows into the darkness; The Crest of Indech glowed blue over her hand, casting a sickly glow over her face. Her arm was a blur as she drew and loosed arrows with superhuman speed. Bearing down on her was an ambush squadron of nearly a dozen heavily armed soldiers, all wearing the white flame insignia; clearly, they sought to pin down the Black Eagles before they could assault the Death Knight. Bernadetta tripped with a panicked yelp as she retreated, and her bow flew from her hand. She looked up to see a soldier leer at her before lifting his axe, and she cringed in anticipation of the killing blow.

The serrated teeth of the Sword of the Creator whipped across the soldier’s chest, carving a deep gash in his armor and hurling him backwards as he shrieked in pain. Byleth stepped in front of Bernadetta to face the remaining attackers as her sword locked back into its dormant state. There was a miniscule frown on her face. The attackers paused, taken aback by the ferocity of her attack and the strength of her Hero’s Relic.

“Reverse lines,” she said curtly to her class. Ferdinand, Caspar, and Petra advanced towards Byleth and the ambush, while the other students shielded themselves behind their frontline classmates. Bernadetta heaved a sigh of relief and stood, grabbing her bow and moving backwards to join the second line.

The battle was joined, and steel clashed with steel as the melee fighters of the Black Eagles pushed back against the ambush. Caspar rained punches on his opponent with a feral grin on his face, while Ferdinand laughed as an enemy sword glanced off his heavy armor. He bellowed a challenge at his attacker (making sure to tell the hapless soldier his name) and struck back with his lance. Petra snuck around the scrum, hugging one wall until she was behind the enemy, then buried her blade in the back of one foe. Byleth stopped conserving her blows; this was no longer a teaching moment, but a battle for survival. Her sword was everywhere, striking foe after foe and flashing in the torchlight as she showed her enemies why mercenaries across Fodlan feared the Ashen Demon. Claude and the rest of the ranged fighters poured arrows and magic into the gaps between the melee combatants.

As the fight raged in front of them, Claude’s attention was caught by a flash of tan and blue at the edge of his vision. He turned to see Mercedes opening the door to the Death Knight’s chamber. He yelled her name, but his voice was lost in the din of combat. He looked back at the battle, then back towards the door, and cursed to himself as he followed her inside.

The Death Knight (Jeritza, Claude reminded himself) sat on his massive black courser in the center of the room. Man and horse alike were clad in heavy, coal-black armor. The Death Knight’s helm was a grinning skull with faint red embers burning in his eyes. Claude felt the chill of fear creep up his spine. This wasn’t the swordsmanship professor he’d known (he wondered if he had indeed ever truly known the man); this was a vision of Hell.

Behind him, in an unconscious heap, Claude saw two girls in Garreg Mach uniforms. One was Flayn, her green ringlets dirty and disheveled. The other was a little older, with short red hair, and Claude didn’t recognize her.

The Death Knight stirred as the intruders approached him. “You…” he said, and though his voice was distorted through the helmet, Claude thought he detected a note of wonder in it.

Mercedes walked towards the Death Knight, her fists clenched at her side. She said, “E- Jeritza, stop. Please, you don’t have to do this.”

Claude looked at her in shock. That’s what she had come here for? She had left the fighters of the Black Eagles behind and come here alone to ask the Death Knight nicely to release his victims? What was she thinking? Claude drew an arrow and aimed at the Death Knight’s eye. He could draw his attention and Mercedes could escape. Maybe he’d even live long enough for the Black Eagles to join the fight.

Mercedes turned at the sound of his bow, and her eyes widened in shock; she hadn’t heard Claude follow her. “No! Claude, run!” she said.

That’s my line, Claude thought as he loosed his arrow. It glanced harmlessly off the Death Knight’s heavy armor, barely leaving a scuff on the blackened steel. The Death Knight looked down at where the arrow had struck him, then back at Claude. “This one wants to play,” he said. There was a deadly eagerness in his voice. He readied his scythe and spurred his horse forward.

Claude drew another arrow, but his opponent was faster. The Death Knight swung his scythe, and suddenly the bow in his hands was splinters, a line of cold agony burned across his chest, and he was flying through the air. His head struck the stone wall behind him, making his ears ring and his vision blur. He shook his head in an attempt to clear it, to no avail. Weapon, I need a weapon, he thought, the idea barely pushing through the fog in his mind. The Death Knight was right in front of him. His bow was no more than kindling now, but he still had the rapier at his belt. He fumbled for it, but he was dizzy, clumsy, slow, too slow. The Death Knight sat silent and motionless as the grave. Slowly, he tilted his head to one side as he stared at Claude. Then he raised his scythe.

Suddenly, a shadow moved in front of Claude to blot out the Death Knight. Slumped on the floor, he saw blue leggings and a tan shawl. Mercedes stood between him and the Death Knight, resolute but trembling.

“Mercedes… run…” Claude tried to croak. He wasn’t sure if he made a sound, because his ears were still ringing from the blow to the head and Mercedes did not move; she merely stared at the Death Knight with wide blue eyes. He raised the scythe again and Claude willed his body to move, but he only succeeded at leaning forward before slumping to one side. The scythe came down with a silver flash.

And stopped.

The strange blade halted a hairsbreadth from Mercedes’ throat and hung there motionless. She had not moved, or even flinched as she stared at the Death Knight. Claude saw her lips form a single word. He couldn’t hear what she said, but it made the Death Knight’s arm tremble violently. A single crimson drop of blood dripped down her neck as the scythe nicked her, bright red against her pale skin.

Still shaking, the Death Knight drew the blade back again. Slumped over on the floor, Claude couldn’t reach a weapon, and Mercedes was still frozen, staring at the Death Knight. Claude braced for the end as the blade came down.

“Halt.”

The scythe stopped again, mere inches from Mercedes’ throat. The new voice came from an imposing new figure that was suddenly standing behind the Death Knight. Claude smelled the telltale odor of warp magic surrounding the new figure. They wore steel pauldrons over a long cloak, draping past their feet. Their face was an expressionless red and white mask, the same white flame over a red field Claude had seen on the soldiers. Their helmet had a long red brush jutting from its top and draping down the figure’s back. Their pauldrons were decorated with long red feathers that resembled a halo of flame around the figure’s head. Strangely, they carried no weapon, but an air of menace surrounded them nonetheless.

“You’re having a bit too much fun,” the new figure snapped. Their voice was modulated and unrecognizable, but their clipped cadence suggested barely restrained fury.

The Death Knight inclined his head toward the new figure. “You are getting in the way of my game,” he said, irritated but not surprised. He was apparently accustomed to taking orders from this figure.

“Hmph,” they replied. “You’ll have more opportunities to play soon. Your work here is done.”

“Understood,” the Death Knight said. He turned back to look at Mercedes for a long moment, then said, “I will go…” and disappeared with a zap and a flash of purple magic.

The cloaked figure turned to Claude and Mercedes and none of them moved as they studied each other. Claude could glean no hint of their intentions from the expressionless mask. The figure took a step forward, then stopped. They leaned their head to one side, barely avoiding a burst of dark magic from behind Claude. He turned his head to the door to see Byleth rushing through. Hubert was close behind, his hand still coated in magical ichor from the miasma he had thrown at the cloaked figure. Byleth glanced at Claude, meeting his eyes. He thought he noticed a tiny sigh of relief before Byleth smoothly stepped in front of Mercedes and Claude and brandished the Sword of the Creator at the interloper. The teeth of the blade dripped with blood from the previous battle, but in the flickering torchlight they looked hungry for more.

“We will cross paths again,” the figure said to the assembled group. “I am the Flame Emperor. It is I who will reforge the world.” Claude’s vision was still hazy, but he thought the Flame Emperor looked in his direction once more, locking eyes with him through their mask before they vanished in the telltale purple light of warp magic.

—

The Flame Emperor reappeared in a flash of light in Edelgard’s room. She tore off the masked helm and tossed it on her bed, and kicked off the platform boots she wore in her Flame Emperor disguise to augment her height. A river of sweat ran down her brow; she gulped air desperately as she wiped it away.

This had been a complete success, she told herself. Manuela and Flayn were alive, and she had successfully extracted the Death Knight from Garreg Mach before he could kill or be killed. She had spoken to her Professor and the rest of her class in her guise as the Flame Emperor without revealing her identity. All had gone as well as could be hoped. But still, her stomach was roiled and her heart was pounding in her chest. It had been the sight of Claude in that catacomb, his eyes glassy, his bow shattered, a smear of red on the wall behind him where his head had struck it, another bloom of crimson spreading rapidly across his chest. Jeritza had been very lucky she had gone there unarmed. If she’d had her axe in hand, she might have struck him down then and there, her hard work saving his life be damned.

She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, but the image of Claude bleeding out on that floor arose in her mind again. Edelgard doubled over and retched, narrowly avoiding spilling the contents of her stomach on the floor.

He’ll be fine, she told herself. He is alive, and you’ve seen Linhardt heal worse wounds. Mercedes was there as well, and with the battle ended they’ll bring him to the infirmary. He’ll be his usual irritating self in a matter of days. Hours, even.

She continued to tell herself this as she changed back into her battle attire. After she stowed her Flame Emperor mask and robes in the false-bottomed trunk where she kept it hidden, she checked herself in the mirror. A sweat-streaked woman with wild eyes looked back at her, so she splashed some water on her face as she finished composing herself. She repeated her cover story to herself once more. She’d been with Manuela, then she’d immediately headed back to Jeritza’s room, intending to follow her class into the catacombs.

She would need to hurry to meet them before they emerged; the Professor and the others would wonder where she was if they made it to the infirmary before she caught them. The Black Eagles were moving with several casualties – Flayn and that mysterious red-haired girl were unconscious, and Claude was injured – so they should be exiting the catacombs slowly enough that Edelgard could meet them at the entrance.

Don’t ask about him until you see him, Edelgard reminded herself as she exited her room. You don’t know that he was wounded. The image of blood on stone, of blood wetting black and gold cloth flashed through her mind again and she suppressed a shudder. She studied herself in the mirror again, and forced her face into a mask of determination. You didn’t see it, she repeated. You don’t know.

—

Claude opened his eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. The smell of clean cotton and antiseptic suggested it was the infirmary. Oh, right, because I almost got cut in half, he thought, still somewhat delirious from the blow to the head. He leaned forward and hissed in pain. The back of his head felt like he’d been struck with an axe, and a line of fire burned across his chest when he moved. He looked down and saw a wide white bandage wrapping from his shoulder down to his opposite hip. He smelled a pungent aroma coming from it, presumably some poultice to aid in the healing process.

“Don’t move,” a concerned voice beside him said. He turned his head to see Edelgard, her lilac eyes filled with relief (Claude expected she would deny it later if he asked, but he could see it was there). She was seated next to his bedside, and when he awoke she closed the book on her lap and set it aside. “You were wounded badly. Mercedes and Linhardt told me.” She stood up and leaned over him, examining the bandage that covered his wound.

“You should see the other guy,” Claude mumbled.

Edelgard’s brow furrowed in uncertainty. “Did you… hurt him?” she asked, despite knowing full well the answer was ‘no.’

“Not even a little,” Claude replied with a tired smirk. “But you should have seen him, he was fucking huge.”

Edelgard stifled a laugh and shook her head. “Well, your sense of humor is intact,” she said. “Unfortunately.”

The rueful smile fell off her face, and she grabbed Claude’s hand with both of her own. He looked down at it, then up at her face. “Claude, I’m sorry,” she said. “That shouldn’t- you shouldn’t have been there. That fight was my responsibility, and I sent you into it in my stead.”

Claude closed his eyes and leaned back. “It wasn’t your fault. It was Jeritza’s, and… the other one…” he said.

“The Flame Emperor,” Edelgard said. She feared she’d said it too confidently, so she added, “That’s what Professor Byleth said he called himself.”

“Right, him. It was their doing, not yours,” Claude replied. He didn’t see the dark cloud that crossed her face. “And we all knew the risks when we came to the Officers’ Academy. Plus, believe it or not, I’ve had worse.”

Edelgard’s eyes drifted down across his torso, bare but for the bandages that covered the wound on his chest. She noticed a collection of old scars, faded white with time: a slash from a blade here, a puncture from an arrow there, a thin line from a garrote low across his throat, normally hidden by his collar. She recalled the night they’d hatched Mahsa, when Claude had been so certain that he would be killed if his secret were revealed. These scars were likely the source of that confidence; they had forged him into the suspicious, guarded, dangerous man he was today, not so differently from the way her own scars had forged her. One of her hands drifted towards his scars. Her fingers twitched with the desire to touch them, as if she could understand him better by tracing their path. She clenched that hand into a fist and put it back at her side.

(She also noticed his torso was impressively toned, corded with slender but well-defined muscles that suggested a life of hard work and training, one belied by his lackadaisical attitude. She forced herself to look upward and focus on his face instead. It’s hardly the time for that, Edelgard, she chided herself).

“I believe it,” she said quietly. “I’m glad you’re alright. Mercedes said you should stay here overnight but you’ll make a full recovery.”

Claude nodded. “Sounds good,” he said. “I don’t… feel up to moving yet anyway.” Then he realized something and opened his eyes. “Oh. You need to-”

He stopped. For the first time he noticed snoring from elsewhere in the room. He turned to look at the other bed and saw the red-haired girl from the catacombs asleep in the other bed. Flayn and Manuela must have been moved to their own rooms to recover, he thought, leaving only him and this mysterious new girl.

“My key,” he said. Edelgard raised an eyebrow. He reached under the sheet that covered him and fished around in his pants pocket until he pulled out a small brass key, nearly identical to the one Edelgard possessed for her own room. He offered it to her with a loaded look.

Understanding washed over Edelgard. Mahsa hadn’t been fed this evening, so Edelgard would have to do it since Claude would be in the infirmary until tomorrow. Neither of them said it out loud. The girl in the next bed seemed to be sleeping but they were nothing if not careful.

She took the key from his hand and slipped it into her pocket. “I’ll take care of it,” she said. Then she smiled, and continued lightly, “I’m surprised you’re so comfortable letting me in your room unaccompanied. What if I uncover some of your dark secrets?”

He grinned crookedly. “I don’t keep any of my good dark secrets in my room,” he said, then he yawned. He was already drifting back towards unconsciousness. “’m not an idiot…”

She frowned as she thought of her own dark secret, the Flame Emperor’s robe and mask, hiding beneath the false bottom of the trunk under her bed. “Of course not,” she said. She watched him drift off to sleep, and a wave of relief washed over her as she marked his steady, even breathing and relaxed features. There was a bead of sweat on his brow, sliding down toward his eye. She wiped it away gently with the back of one finger as she studied his face.

“Rest well, Claude,” she said softly, and she looked down at the bandage covering his new scar. The scar her sworn sword had given him, on the orders of her allies. She opened her mouth to speak, paused, and closed it again. Then she turned, left the infirmary, and headed towards the kitchens.

—

When Edelgard entered Claude’s room, a plate of cold grilled fish in hand, Mahsa was there to greet her. The small wyvern reared up on her hind legs and flapped her wings, then leaned them against Edelgard’s legs. Edelgard scratched her under the chin as she sniffed the air eagerly, seeking out her meal.

“It’s just me tonight, little one,” she said apologetically, then she grabbed Mahsa’s bowl from the floor and sat down at Claude’s desk to chew up the fish. Mahsa reared up and scrabbled for the food before it was chewed, swiping her forelegs and craning her neck over the lip of the desk to get at the fish. Her head didn’t clear the desk, so her long black tongue snaked out, feeling around on the desk for the food. Edelgard wrestled her back with one hand while frantically cramming fish into her mouth with the other. All the while, Mahsa whined in dismay; she couldn’t understand why she was being held back from a meal, despite the fact that she would certainly choke on it. Edelgard hadn’t done this alone before, and as she struggled with the wyvern and spat chewed fish into the bowl she quickly gained a new appreciation for why Claude was so willing to accept her help. This was absolutely a two-person task.

“Grr… almost… stop it, Mahsa! There, there, you little hellion!” Edelgard said as she finally put the filled bowl down on the floor and released the wyvern. Mahsa turned away from her completely and dove into the bowl as if she was starving to death. Edelgard shook her head and watched the wyvern eat in exasperation. As the wyvern ate, Edelgard gathered her things. When she stepped toward the door, Mahsa abandoned her meal, darted between Edelgard’s legs, and sat down on her feet.

Edelgard barely caught herself from tripping over the wyvern, then looked at the bowl. It was still half-full. She looked at Mahsa in confusion, and the wyvern looked back at her with wide, imploring eyes. She scratched Mahsa’s chin and tried to step around her again, and the wyvern let out a pitiful whine.

“Sweetling, I have to… oh,” Edelgard said, falling silent as she realized what was the matter. She crouched down and rubbed Mahsa’s face as she asked, “Have you not spent the night alone before?” Mahsa whimpered again in response. Of course. While the Black Eagles had been sent far afield for their missions over the last few months, the Golden Deer had only done local monastery security tasks since she had hatched. Mahsa had been left alone during the day while Claude went to class but never before at night.

Edelgard sat down on Claude’s bed and rubbed her eyes in frustration. It would only be a few hours before she or Claude returned with breakfast, but Mahsa’s dismay when Edelgard tried to leave suggested she wouldn’t last that long. If the wyvern cried through the night she would certainly be discovered; the sounds of a whining animal coming from Claude’s supposedly-empty room would be unmistakable.

She sighed, and removed her shoes. There was nothing for it, Mahsa wouldn’t make it through the night alone, so Edelgard was going to have to spend the night here. She laid down on the bed and sighed as she put an arm over her eyes, and thought ruefully about how this little wyvern could foil her plans more effectively than the Death Knight or Those Who Slither in the Dark. Meanwhile, Mahsa returned to her dinner, burying her face eagerly in the soft fish now that she was satisfied Edelgard no longer threatened to leave her alone.

After she emptied the bowl, she trundled over to the side of the bed and stood up on her back lags, her winged forelegs braced against the edge of the bed. She nudged at Edelgard’s side with her snout, begging to be pulled up. Edelgard rolled onto her side and looped her arms around Mahsa’s warm, smooth belly, and hauled her into bed, hugging her against her stomach. Mahsa wriggled in Edelgard’s arms to get comfortable, then yawned and laid her head down.

Edelgard closed her eyes, but sleep didn’t come. After a few minutes she shivered. It was early Horsebow Moon, and the nights were beginning to grow chilly, especially this high in the mountains. She groaned, and sat up, pulling Mahsa into her lap as the wyvern huffed in annoyance. She stood, still clutching the wyvern, and pulled Claude’s blankets back. As she crawled back into the bed she suppressed a twinge of embarrassment. Sleeping in Claude’s sheets felt rather more … familiar than sleeping on top of them, but it was admittedly much warmer.

The warm bed, lightly snoring wyvern, and the strain of a very trying day combined to make Edelgard’s eyelids grow heavy. Nestled under the warm blankets, with Mahsa clutched against her stomach like a warm, scaly stuffed animal, her breathing grew slow and steady. She wrinkled her nose, and thought drowsily that Claude should change his sheets more often. They should smell a bit more like soap and less like sweat. Less like the foreign spice he used as a scent. Less like him. She would have to tell him tomorrow…

Her eyes flew open and Edelgard felt her face heat up as she fully considered that thought. No. Absolutely not. The stress of the day must have briefly driven her mad, because only a madwoman would consider commenting to Claude about the smell of his pillow after spending the night in his bed. She would say nothing about it, and when she woke up in the morning she would make his bed very carefully and hope she left no trace of her presence behind.

She squeezed the wyvern in her arms, and said quietly, “And you won’t tell him either.” Mahsa wriggled again and snorted softly in response, and the pair of them drifted off to sleep together.

Chapter Text

The Golden Deer classroom was dark and its door was closed when Claude arrived for the morning lecture. This was odd; he was running late because feeding Mahsa had taken longer than usual. His professor and the rest of his class should have already arrived. A piece of parchment was tacked to the front of the door, and it read:

“Golden Deer: Please report to the Black Eagles classroom. -Prfsr Eisner”

Claude scratched his chest absent-mindedly as he read the sign. He had healed well enough from his run-in with the Death Knight a few days earlier, but his new scar still itched as the flesh finished knitting itself back together. He supposed Manuela was in a similar boat; she wasn’t ready to teach yet, and that was why the Golden Deer were being herded into class with the Black Eagles.

Well, this is promising, he thought with a grin. Other than the “almost getting killed” part, fighting under Teach had been a blast. She was a peerless warrior and a skilled commander; he was curious how her performance in the classroom stacked up to the battlefield. Plus, all the juiciest mysteries in the Academy were swirling around her: her background, her ability to use the Sword of the Creator with no Crest Stone, Edelgard’s second Crest, the puzzle of the Flame Emperor. Yes, Byleth’s class was the place to be. Once again, Claude felt the hand of fate at his back, leading him somewhere great. He turned and walked down the lawn towards Edelgard’s classroom, whistling as he went.

When Claude arrived, he saw both classes already seated for the morning lecture. Extra chairs and desks had been dragged into the classroom to accommodate every student from both houses. Golden Deer were interspersed among the Black Eagles; the seating chart pinned to the blackboard showed that Byleth had intermingled the houses deliberately. Claude walked past the class to read the seating chart, then dropped his satchel on the desk in front of his assigned seat: front row, next to Edelgard.

“Hey,” he said with a nod as he sat down. She nodded back at him curtly and pulled out a blank page and an excessive number of spare quills as she prepared to take notes. She uncapped, wow, three inkwells in three different colors and wrote the day’s date at the top of her notes in elegant longhand. Claude pulled out his own stationary: a single sheet of well-creased paper, half-filled with notes from a previous lecture, and a ratty quill whose better days were long behind it. Edelgard glanced at his preparations for class and Claude didn’t fail to note the frown on her face.

Claude turned in his chair to see how the rest of his class were settling in. Lorenz chatted amiably with Ferdinand; no doubt the two most noble-obsessed nobles in the Academy got on like a house on fire. Ignatz sat in the back row, next to the girl Claude had recently learned was named Bernadetta. She appeared to be shrinking away from Ignatz in fear, and every so often he would glance at her with a similar nervousness. Raphael was talking loudly to Linhardt, who was trying without success to squeeze in a quick early-morning nap before class started. Lysithea sat next to Dorothea, and as usual she looked even more prepared to take notes than Edelgard. Marianne shrank into her chair next to Petra’s, while next to Caspar, Leonie leaned forward eagerly, staring at Byleth as she waited for class to begin.

Claude turned back to face the front of the class, and he saw that Edelgard had pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, and a fourth inkwell and quill, and pointedly left them closer to his supplies than her own. How generous, Claude thought as he rolled his eyes. Taking the hint, he slid the paper in front of him and picked up the quill. Claude dipped the quill in the ink and wrote the words 'Teacher's Pet' at the top of the paper in looping, elaborate calligraphy.

Edelgard glanced at the paper, then scowled as she read what he’d written. She snatched the paper out from under his pen and crumpled it up violently before cramming it into her bag. She crossed her arms and glared at the front of the class, refusing to look at Claude’s smirking face.

—

On Claude’s other side, Hubert was also scowling, and even more murderously than usual. Hilda sat on his far side, eyeing him mischievously.

“Hubert,” she said, punctuating the word by jabbing Hubert lightly with her quill.

He glowered and ignored her, so she continued.

“Hubert.” Poke.

“Hubert.” Poke.

Finally the last thread of his composure snapped, and Hubert said, “What?”

“Can I borrow a quill?” Hilda asked.

Hubert clenched his jaw. “What is wrong with the one you are poking me with?”

“I broke the tip on something,” Hilda said. Hubert nearly snapped the quill in his own hand in frustration. “Plus, yours are so pretty!” She gestured at the quill in Hubert’s hand; made from a raven’s feather, it was smooth, shiny, and perfectly jet-black.

Hubert considered himself above frivolous vanity, but he had appreciated the dark, sleek aesthetics of the quills when he had purchased them. He felt a tiny flicker of satisfaction that Hilda had noticed as well; it unnerved him and he quashed it ruthlessly. Sensing that she would not relent, Hubert handed Hilda his quill and pulled an identical duplicate from his bag. She smiled brightly and said, “thank you, Hubert!”

Hubert sighed. “You are quite welcome, Hilda,” he said, in a tone that suggested she was very much not.

Hilda was quiet and still for a moment, then poked him again. “Hubert,” she said.

Hubert closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Yes, Hilda?” he asked.

“Can I borrow some ink and paper too?”

Hubert’s eye twitched. “Professor,” he said. “Are these new seating arrangements perhaps negotiable?”

“Uh, rude!” Hilda gasped.

“No,” Byleth said flatly. Hubert grimaced as Hilda snickered at him. “Let’s get started.” The professor stood up from her desk and walked over to the blackboard. She picked up a piece of chalk to write on the board, then stopped and shook her head as she turned back to face the class.

“You all know me,” she said. “I’m Professor Eisner. Manuela- Professor Casagrande asked me to step in and teach her class while she recovers from getting stabbed.”

Several students winced at the Professor’s blunt description. It was true, they thought, but she shouldn’t say it. Dorothea raised her hand hesitantly. “Could you, um, maybe please rephrase that, Professor?” she said.

Byleth shrugged. “We all get stabbed sometimes, Dorothea. I’ve been stabbed more times than I can remember. That’s just life.”

The combined class stared at the professor in shock. Sometimes it was easy to forget that their taciturn young teacher was a hardbitten mercenary with years of combat experience, and that she had a very familiar, casual relationship with violence. And sometimes, like right now, it wasn’t.

“I-Is it?” Dorothea asked.

Byleth stared back at her blankly for a moment, then said, “Fine. Professor Casagrande asked me to step in and teach her class while she recovers.” She paused.

From getting stabbed, every student in the class silently appended.

“Let’s start with the reading from last week,” Byleth said. “Black Eagles, I asked you to read two passages on the motivation of troops under your command: Volume 1, Chapter 3 of Battalion Tactics, by Leonardo von Bergliez, and ‘That Thing I Wrote Last Week About How To Make Mercenaries Do What You Want,’ by Byleth Eisner.”

Claude’s eyebrows raised. This was, to put it mildly, not how Manuela’s classes typically began. He leaned over to whisper in Edelgard’s ear, “Is she serious?”

Edelgard did not spare him a glance. “Yes,” she said. “Be quiet.”

“Who wants to start?” Byleth asked. She pointed toward the back of the classroom at an unruly head of teal hair. “Caspar. Please summarize the reading. Golden Deer, jump in if you have something to say.”

Caspar stood up, his chair squeaking in protest against the floor as it was pushed back. He said, “Well, uh, I didn’t actually read Great-Grandpa Leo’s-  I mean, former War Minister von Bergliez’s writing. It kinda… puts me to sleep? When I was a kid, my mom would read from it to-”

As he spoke, Byleth and Edelgard let out identical, exasperated sighs. Caspar sensed he was losing his audience, so he said, “B-but I did read that thing you wrote! And you said that the best way to motivate mercenaries was: pay them. Pay them on time. Pay them a lot. Make sure their food is good, and that there’s plenty of it. Pay them bonuses for really good work.” Caspar ticked the points off on his fingers as he listed them. Byleth didn't object, this was apparently an accurate summary of her writing.

Ferdinand raised his hand. “That’s all rather tawdry, isn’t it?” he said. Next to him, Lorenz nodded as Caspar sat down. “Von Bergliez writes about motivating one’s troops with a rousing speech, or a thoughtful prayer to the Goddess, to remind them what they’re fighting for. But by your account, the only things that soldiers care about are food and gold.”

“Spoken like someone who’s always had plenty of both,” Dorothea muttered.

Byleth pointed to the songstress. “Exactly, Dorothea. Say more,” she said. She leaned back on her desk to observe the discussion.

Dorothea blinked in surprise as she was called upon, but she quickly stood up to address the class. She turned to look at Ferdinand. She asked, “Have you ever been hungry, Ferdie?”

Ferdinand was taken aback as Dorothea turned the question on him. He stammered, “W-well, as a matter of fact, just this morning, I sk-”

“Ferdie,” Dorothea said, her voice deceptively, poisonously sweet. “If you say ‘I skipped breakfast,’ I’m going to strangle you.” Ferdinand gulped and did not finish his sentence.

Byleth rubbed her temples. “Without the threats, please, Dorothea,” she said tiredly, as if she had made this request of her students before.

Dorothea looked down in embarrassment. “Yes, Professor. Sorry, Professor.”

“Sorry Ferdinand,” Ferdinand mumbled. Dorothea shot him a baleful look and continued.

“Missing one meal isn’t hunger,” she said. “I mean really hungry. The kind that only sets in after days without food. The kind that makes it nearly impossible to even move. Where you eat grass and dirt just to fill your belly with something. I’ve been hungry. I’d do anything to avoid being that hungry ever again. So if somebody offered me bread, and my ‘noble lordship’ offered me a rousing speech? I’d fight for the bread. I'd kill for it. Every single time.”

Claude’s eyebrows rose as she spoke, and he wasn’t the only one. He sensed the other Golden Deer shifting in their seats as they listened. He’d known that Dorothea was a commoner and an opera diva, but he hadn’t looked into her background further than that. She was beautiful and elegant, and she took great care with her appearance; if Claude had been asked he probably would have guessed she was the child of merchants or performers, and that she’d been born with painted nails and perfectly-conditioned hair. He’d had no idea her circumstances had ever been so desperate.

Meanwhile, Edelgard’s thoughts were far away. Dorothea had told her the story before, and it infuriated her anew as she considered it again. Dorothea had been born to a commoner mother in a noble household, and mother and daughter had been thrown out onto the street when she’d been born Crestless. It offended Edelgard that in her own hometown, in the empire her father ruled, Dorothea had been starving on her streets because some worthless idiot lordling couldn’t see farther than her crestless blood. It didn’t matter that Dorothea was smart, and driven, and talented; she’d been thrown out like trash before she could speak or walk. Dorothea had deserved so much more, and so did the thousands of Dorotheas Edelgard had never met, all denied the chance to thrive by a nobility and a church obsessed with propagating Crests. I can end it. I will end it, she promised herself, not for the first time.

Byleth nodded at Dorothea’s explanation. “Right, thank you,” she said as Dorothea sat back down. She continued, “Von Bergliez was writing for wealthy nobles; people who always know where their next meal is coming from. But you’ll also be leading mercenaries, or conscripts, or enlisted troops, and they can’t take food and gold for granted. As officers and as leaders it will be your responsibility to make sure they have both. If you don’t, the best-case scenario is that your soldiers are hungry, and hungry soldiers fight worse than full ones. The worst case is that they turn on you entirely when your enemy makes them a better offer.”

“But Captain Jeralt would never do that,” Leonie said. “Turn coat on an employer because someone else offered more gold.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

Byleth looked at her. “The Blade Breakers never break a contract,” she agreed. “But if they’re not paying us what we’re owed, then we’re not the ones who broke the contract, and they're not really our employer.” Leonie looked troubled as she considered the implications of this.

Byleth walked over to the blackboard again. She drew a large triangle, and split it in two with a horizontal line. In the top section she wrote, ‘Purpose;’ in the bottom she wrote, ‘Food.’

“Imagine you’re building a tower. You want to make it tall, but you can’t do that without a solid foundation. Food, shelter, gold,” she pointed to the bottom section of the pyramid. “These are the foundation of your soldiers’ lives. Nothing you build on top of it can survive if the foundation isn’t there. That’s easy to forget when your foundation has always been solid.”

“But you will have to build the top of the tower too. So, Bernadetta,” Byleth said. She pointed further back in the classroom, where Bernadetta cringed as attention turned towards her. “What else did von Bergliez write?”

—

After more than an hour of lecture and discussion on leadership and the motivation of troops, Byleth called for a break. Some students ducked out to use the restroom, while Hubert walked over to the tea cart in the corner of the room and refilled his coffee cup from the carafe he’d brewed that morning. He sat back down at his desk and sipped from the delicate porcelain.

Hubert did not allow himself many indulgences, but coffee was the rare pleasure that he savored. He closed his eyes and sighed in contentment as the beverage warmed his chest and invigorated his mind. This might be his best cup yet, he thought. He’d done well preparing it; his roast had cut most of the bitterness, and left the flavor bright and earthy.

He set his cup down then noticed Hilda next to him, staring at it in confusion. She pointed a manicured finger at the cup, and asked, “What is that brown sludge you’re drinking? Are you… really bad at brewing tea? You know Ferdinand will do it for you if you ask him. He falls all over himself to do it for me.”

Hubert snorted. On any other topic he would have tried to ignore her, but he felt compelled to defend his beloved coffee from her slander. “I do not need Ferdinand to prepare my beverages for me, Hilda, and this is not tea. It is coffee. The beans are sourced from Dagda, and I ground and roasted them myself.”

“It’s made of ground-up beans? Weird!” Hilda said. “Can I try it?”

Hubert raised a curious eyebrow at her, and said, “Really? I didn’t take you for an adventurous sort.” His desire to evangelize coffee to a tea-drinker warred briefly with his growing disdain for Hilda, and somewhat surprisingly, disdain lost. “You may. I brewed a full carafe this morning-”

He turned to point at the tea cart at the side of the classroom where his copper coffee pot sat next to a porcelain teapot. He turned back to see his coffee cup in Hilda’s hands as she slurped from it loudly.

He gaped at her in disbelief, and said, “wha-”

She lowered the cup and grimaced. “Bleaugh! That’s bitter. You like that?” she asked. She took another tentative sip and frowned again.

“I- Some people flavor it with milk or sugar-” Hubert said, his mouth speaking automatically as his mind struggled to catch up to Hilda’s onslaught. Hubert knew he typically intimidated people. He knew it primarily because he worked hard at being intimidating. It was something he took for granted. No, it was something he took pride in. Obviously it was impossible to frighten everyone (the Professor was a particularly tough nut to crack), but for a shallow, flighty layabout like Hilda to be utterly unfazed by him, so unfazed that she thought nothing of drinking his fucking coffee out from under him-

Well, it was both bewildering and infuriating.

“Ooh! Good idea!” Hilda said, ignoring the outrage on his face. She stood and took the coffee cup – his coffee cup – over to the tea cart. He watched with horror as she poured an extraordinary amount of milk into the cup. Then she added sugar. More sugar. Another lump. Another. Hubert shuddered. Cloying sweetness was now the least of that cup’s problems; she had added so much sugar that Hubert suspected it would fail to dissolve and the drink would be gritty as well.

Hilda returned to the seat next to Hubert, smacking her lips appreciatively. “Mm, much better! Thank you, Bertie!” she said with a smile. Hubert noted with distaste that the coffee was now nearly the same color as the milk she’d added to it.

Hubert opened his mouth to say something disparaging when Hilda set a second cup in front of him. Hubert hadn’t seen her pour another; he looked down to see steam swirling from a fresh cup of plain black coffee. He picked it up and took a cautious sip; it had none of the cream or sugar that now polluted his (or Hilda’s, he supposed) cup.

He sighed in relief, and bit back the invective he'd planned to hurl at Hilda. Lady Edelgard would not want him to start unnecessary conflict with the Golden Deer over something so trivial. He took another sip from the cup. It really was excellent coffee, he thought. Next time he wouldn’t make the mistake of offering to share.

Through gritted teeth, Hubert unconvincingly said, “I’m glad you enjoy it, Hilda.”

—

Birds chirped overhead and the sun shone brightly as Hubert sat in the monastery courtyard studying his tactics assignment. The Professor had given him a fiendishly difficult challenge this time; his army was outnumbered and surrounded by enemies, and pinned in by difficult terrain.

He raised his cup to his lips and grimaced; the coffee had cooled while he had been thinking. He could have emptied it and refilled it from the pot he’d brewed, but decent coffee was expensive, so Hubert absently wrapped a hand around the cup and channeled magical flame to warm it again. As he did, he considered his options in the assignment. His first impulse was to sacrifice the rear guard for the rest of his forces to escape, but the Professor had been insistent that this challenge could be completed without such losses. Perhaps if his light infantry charged the archers first, to give the rest of his army breathing room while the aerial cavalry assaulted the enemy rear…

Hubert’s thoughts were interrupted as he sensed a new presence approaching him. “Heyy, Bertie!” Hilda said as she sat down across from him. “What are you up to?”

Hubert resisted the urge to groan at her intrusion. I must be losing my touch, he thought. It was the only explanation. He had been seated next to Hilda during lectures for several days now, and he thought she had become far too familiar with him. He didn’t go to all the effort of cultivating this threatening aura just so Hilda could breezily ignore it. And to add insult to injury, she’d apparently saddled him with a second infantilizing nickname on top of the one Dorothea already used.

“Working, Hilda,” Hubert said curtly. “You should try it.”

“And waste a beautiful afternoon like this?” Hilda asked “Ruining my eyes staring at books? I would never.” Hubert narrowed his eyes as she grabbed the pot of coffee he’d brought and poured herself a cup.

“Yes, I’ve heard that about you,” he said with a sneer, but Hilda only laughed in response. She took a sip of the coffee and frowned at it, then stood and walked towards the kitchens. Hubert turned his attention back to his assignment and hoped he was rid of her, but she returned a few minutes later with a flask of milk and a small plate of sugar cubes to add to the coffee.

As she stirred milk and sugar into her cup, she asked, “Have you noticed that Catherine has been yelling at everybody since she got back from her Church mission a few days ago?”

“Why are you here, Hilda?” Hubert said.

“Uh, to have coffee and gossip with my new friend Bertie, obviously,” Hilda said. “Because I don’t think he has any other friends. And don’t say Edelgard is your friend. You’re her butler.”

“I am not her butler,” Hubert snapped. “My service to Lady Edelgard is – I don’t have to explain myself to you. I’m not interested in your gossip, Hilda, so you can kindly leave-”

“Ugh, come on, Bertie!” Hilda whined. “I promise you’ll like this. You’re not curious at all?”

Hubert was not, particularly; he had noticed Catherine getting short with some monks in the dining hall the previous evening but had thought no more about it until now. He doubted the information Hilda wanted to share would be either interesting or useful, but he suspected listening to her was the quickest way to get rid of her. “Fine,” Hubert said. “What do you know?”

Hilda looked around conspiratorially, then leaned forward and whispered, “She was on a mission killing bandits last week, and one of them got a lucky shot off before he died, and he stabbed her right in the butt!” Her eyes sparkled with delight as she relayed the secret. ”Professor Manuela can’t heal her yet, so she’s limping around the monastery screaming at everyone because of how much her ass hurts.”

Hubert chuckled in spite of himself. Catherine was an obsessive, irritating zealot, and it served her right to be brought low in such an embarrassing way. She would be healed long before he would cross blades with her, so the information wasn’t particularly useful, but Hilda was right: he had found it amusing.

Hilda grinned as she saw his reaction. “See? I knew it, Bertie, I knew you’d enjoy it. And do you know why?”

“No, but I suppose you’re going to enlighten me,” Hubert said.

“Because you’re mean,” Hilda said.

“And here I thought you hadn’t noticed,” Hubert replied drily.

“But that’s perfect!” Hilda said. “My friends are all so nice, but gossip has to be a little mean to really be fun. If I told Marianne about Catherine’s wounded butt, she’d gasp and run off right away to try and heal it. She wouldn’t laugh. Claude would laugh, but he’s always busy. Usually because he’s sneaking around with Edelgard. So I need a replacement gossip buddy. One who’s a jerk. And I found him!” She beamed at Hubert proudly. He glowered at her and turned his attention back to his tactics assignment.

“Also,” Hilda continued, “the last time I asked Marianne if she had any juicy gossip, she told me that Dorte was quarreling with one of his neighbors.”

This statement was so puzzling it cut through Hubert’s best attempt to ignore her, and he could not help but consider it further. He furrowed his brow in confusion; he was aware of one Dorte in the monastery, but surely Hilda wasn’t talking about it. “Perhaps my information is faulty,” he said. “Is Dorte not… a horse?”

Hilda threw her hands up in frustration. “Yes! Bertie! That’s what I’m saying! I asked her for hot goss and she told me about a fight her horse got into! It was horse gossip! And I don’t care about horse gossip, because I’m not a horse!” She sighed dramatically and slumped in her chair. “She’s lucky she’s so pretty. And sweet. And smart. And kind.”

“Yes, well-” Hubert began.

“And she has a voice like an angel, and the most beautiful smile, and her skin is perfect and her hair always smells amazing and that body-”

“Hilda,” Hubert interjected, before she could say something he couldn’t unhear. “I believe I get the point. How did you hear this about Catherine, anyway?” Hubert considered gathering information to be a specialty of his, and he hadn’t overheard anyone talking about this. How had Hilda come by information that he couldn’t obtain? Did she have sources he could make use of for his own ends?

Hilda shrugged. “I asked one of her knights and he told me. People like me and they tell me things. You should try it.”

“Being liked?” Hubert asked with a smile and a raised eyebrow. “I don’t think so. My talents lie elsewhere. Besides, why would I go to the trouble when I could simply ask you?” Though he said it mockingly, Hubert was beginning to give it serious consideration. Hilda might accidentally learn something useful to his future plans, if he could separate useful intelligence from the vast sea of shallow nonsense. Perhaps it couldn’t hurt to listen occasionally.

Hilda smiled and leaned forward in her chair. “Sorry, Bertie,” she said, “but it’s a two-way street. I’ll get bored if it’s just me telling you things; you have to return the favor. I’m sure you hear some fun stuff with all that creepy skulking around you do. So what have you got?”

Hubert hummed thoughtfully. “Alas, nothing comes to mind at the moment, but I’ll keep an ear to the ground for something that will interest you. The next time I’m skulking, I mean.”

Hilda tapped her coffee cup against his. “It’s a deal,” she said.

—

Hubert was already seated at his desk, waiting for the morning lecture to begin, when Hilda entered with Lorenz. Hubert glanced over to see Hilda’s arms were empty, while Lorenz carried two satchels, both heavily loaded with books. He smirked to himself as he listened.

“Thanks SO much for carrying those, Lorenz,” Hilda said. “Professor Eisner assigns us so much reading! I don’t think I could carry them all on my own.”

“It was no bother, Hilda,” Lorenz said. “It was merely my noble duty to assist a lady such as yourself.”

“And thanks again for scouring those pots in the kitchens for me yesterday,” she said. “I’m just not strong enough to get all the gunk off! Good thing you were there!”

Lorenz’s proud smile curdled somewhat. “Y-yes, well, that is arguably not a noble duty, but it was my, erm, my pleasure nonetheless,” he said.

“You’re so reliable!” Hilda gushed. “It’s so comforting to know I can depend on you for anything. That’s what I write to my brother, I say ‘Lorenz Gloucester is my rock, I don’t know what I’d do without him.’”

“Really?” Lorenz asked eagerly, his previous hesitancy forgotten. “Thank you! And feel free to come to me if you need anything else.”

“I absolutely will,” Hilda said. Lorenz looked proud as he turned and strutted over to his desk. Hilda sat down and glanced at Hubert; she rolled her eyes when she saw his smirk.

“You had him scrubbing pots for you?” Hubert asked.

What was I supposed to do?” Hilda asked. “I had just painted my nails! The scouring pad would have ruined them! Plus, you heard him. He loves helping.” Hubert chuckled as Hilda sighed. “I know what you’re thinking, Bertie, so let’s hear it,” she said expectantly. “‘Oh, Hilda, you’re so lazy.’ I hear it all the time.”

“Hilda, you wound me,” Hubert said. “I wasn’t thinking you’re lazy. I was thinking that you’re manipulative. Deceitful, perhaps.”

Hilda gasped. “Bertie, that’s awful! That’s so much worse,” she said. Her lip started to quiver and tears welled up in her eyes.

Hubert was unmoved, and his smirk did not waver. “Case in point,” he said. “I must say, the fake tears are really quite impressive. A masterful touch.”

Hilda’s demeanor shifted; her lip stopped trembling and her gaze hardened. She eyed Hubert coolly through narrowed eyes and hummed a wary “hm.” This was an unpleasant surprise, she thought; no one else at the Academy had managed to see through her act so thoroughly. 

“You shouldn’t be upset, Hilda. I’m paying you a compliment,” Hubert said. “Deceit, manipulation, these aren’t faults; they are skills. Useful ones. Skills that I happen to value very highly. In fact, I think I owe you an apology; I’ve been severely underestimating you.”

Hilda's eyes went wide with alarm. She liked being underestimated. It made everything so much easier. People were so helpful when they didn’t think you were capable of anything. "W-who, me?" she asked, her face the picture of innocence. Hubert looked unimpressed. "Just because I’m good at getting people to do my chores for me?”

“Because you can walk into any room like you belong in it, and the people there will fall all over themselves to do you favors,” Hubert replied. “Or to tell you secrets they shouldn’t divulge.” He sighed, and said wistfully, “Oh, Hilda, you cannot imagine the things I could accomplish if I had your talents.” His eyes gleamed in a very unsettling way as he thought about it.

Hilda laughed uncertainly. He was laying the praise on a little thick, she thought. “Bertie, come on. It’s me. I hate to work and I like to chat,” she said. “You make me sound like a… a spy, or something.”

“What an intriguing idea,” Hubert said, sounding for all the world as though he hadn’t considered such a thing. “Perhaps. If you applied your skills towards less ridiculous ends. Incidentally, do you know what spies never have to do?”

Still suspicious, Hilda asked, “What’s that?”

“Wear heavy armor and drag an enormous axe all over the battlefield,” Hubert replied. He arched an eyebrow in her direction, watching her carefully to see if that piqued her interest. “An agent in the right place can be worth a thousand soldiers without ever taking the field herself. Perhaps that would appeal to you; I know how much you hate to sweat.”

“Huh,” Hilda said thoughtfully as she sat down. She was silent for a moment as she pulled a quill and paper from her bag, then she said, “I do hate sweating...”

Byleth stood up from her desk at the front of the class and walked over to the lectern to begin the morning’s lesson, cutting their discussion short. Hubert noted with satisfaction that Hilda still looked pensive as the lecture began, and his smile took on a predatory edge, like a satisfied hunter watching a well-constructed trap snap shut.

All he did was in service to Lady Edelgard, and this was no exception. Soon the war of Fodlani unification would begin, and there was little doubt in Hubert’s mind that the Adrestian Empire would conquer the Leicester Alliance. And when that day came, if Hilda survived, she would serve the Empire and Lady Edelgard. She might serve even sooner, if Edelgard’s efforts with Claude bore fruit, although Hubert wasn’t particularly optimistic about that possibility.

Despite all her whining to the contrary, Hilda was an asset as a warrior, especially since she was the only one of her generation with the Crest to wield Freikugel, the axe Relic of House Goneril. But the world Lady Edelgard was building had no place for Crests and Relics; as soon as she could, the emperor would dissolve the nobility and destroy the Relics to erase any advantage that Crests brought. And even before then, a devious mind would be far more valuable to the Empire than a strong axe arm. They had more than enough Caspars already. While a few weeks ago Hubert would have thought the idea ridiculous, now he believed that Hilda might have that mind. If she chose to train it.

At the very least, it was worth a try. Hubert wasn’t sure his efforts would succeed, but if Hilda was going to be bothering him anyway, interrupting his work and drinking his coffee, he might as well attempt to mold her into something useful.

—

“So, how did you enjoy your first week with the Black Eagles?” Edelgard asked.

It was the evening before their free day, and Edelgard was sitting on the floor in Claude’s room, hugging Mahsa to her chest to hold the wyvern back as he chewed his way through a plate of rabbit skewers. He spat some meat into the bowl and grinned as he said, “It was educational. I knew Teach was a terror on the battlefield, but she’s even better in the lecture hall than I expected.”

“Jealous?” Edelgard asked with a smile.

“Oh, I’ve been jealous since the beginning,” Claude said lightly. “All that’s changed is that now I know exactly what I’m jealous of.” He set the bowl on the ground and Edelgard released Mahsa. The wyvern rushed over to her bowl, talons clicking along the stone floor. She dove into the bowl and her body wiggled as she tore into the softened meat. He sat down on the floor next to Edelgard, their backs against the side of his bed and their shoulders pressed together as they watched Mahsa feast.

“Our classmates are getting along well,” Edelgard said. “I think Bernadetta very nearly looked Ignatz in the eyes today. And Hubert and Hilda are spending a great deal of time together, which is… unexpected.”

Claude chuckled. “Yeah, those two really hit it off,” he said. “Hilda said she and ‘Bertie’ were having coffee again tomorrow.”

"He must really enjoy her company to tolerate that nickname," Edelgard said.

“It’s been good for everybody to mix it up, I think,” Claude said. “Teach was really onto something when she mixed the classes together.”

“Yes, it was a brilliant decision,” Edelgard said. “Isn’t she extraordinary?" Edelgard’s eyes shone brightly as she thought about her teacher. Claude felt his smile grow strained; a new and rather different sort of jealousy was bubbling up inside him. I’m extraordinary, came the unbidden thought.

“H-hey, speaking of teaching,” Claude said quickly, “I finally rigged up some safety harnesses we can use with Gracie’s saddle. What would you say to another flying lesson tomorrow, so I can finally take you through some advanced maneuvers?” He winced inwardly at his own phrasing, he hoped that didn’t sound dirty. “Flying maneuvers. Rolls and loops, I mean,” he clarified.

Edelgard’s eyes went wide with excitement. “Really!? Yes! Finally, I feel like it’s been ages, with our mission to Faerghus and rescuing Flayn, but I suppose it’s only been a few weeks.” Her face turned slightly pink as she said, “I’ve dreamed about flying a few times since then.”

A genuine, boyish grin spread across Claude’s face. “Yeah, those dreams are great, right?”

“They’re among my best,” Edelgard agreed. A troubled look passed briefly over her face. She leaned over and rubbed under Mahsa’s chin and broke into a soft smile as the wyvern wriggled with delight.

When Mahsa finished her dinner and tired of the attention, she clambered up Claude’s body onto the bed. He yelped in pain as her talons dug into his skin, and Edelgard laughed at his discomfort. He caught her eye and smiled ruefully, and green eyes held purple for a long moment. Claude stopped noticing the pain from Mahsa's scratches; he stopped noticing anything except the warmth of Edelgard's shoulder against his. Her laughter slowly died, and the smile fell from her face; he saw something undefinable in the pale lilac depths of her eyes as he studied him. Her lips parted slightly, as if- 

Mahsa butted her head against the back of Claude's from her place on the bed. She stretched out her winged forelegs, then her back legs, and yawned loudly. Claude turned to look at her, his reverie broken. She turned in circles on the bed, grumbling until she found a comfortable spot, then curled into a tight ball.

"I, um, it's getting late. I should go," Edelgard said, and Claude felt the warmth against his shoulder leave as she stood up.

Claude's head slumped backwards onto the bed and he stared up at the ceiling as Edelgard hastily gathered her things from. Before she left, she turned and asked, “The same as last time, then? I’ll meet you in front of the inn tomorrow morning?”

Claude said, “It’s a-” and caught himself before he could utter the word date. “-plan,” he finished lamely. He stood as well to see her out.

“It’s a plan,” Edelgard repeated. Apparently she hadn’t noticed him stumble over the words. “I’ll see you tomorrow. And you too, little one,” she said to Mahsa, then she turned and slipped out the door into the night. Claude locked the door behind her, then leaned his head against the door; the wood was cool against his heated forehead. Mahsa tilted her head at him quizzically.

What the fuck is wrong with me? Claude wondered. He was getting far too familiar with Edelgard, far too comfortable with their arrangement. He couldn’t get it twisted: they had a secret in common and a job to do together, that was all. He wasn’t dating her, no matter what the rest of the Academy thought. Her presence was a necessity. It was a transaction.

And he could almost believe that, until she smiled at the prospect of flying, and then he wanted to make that smile light up her somber face all the time. Or she glowed when talking about Teach and his insides twisted because she didn’t talk about him like that. Or she groused about the Church, or Crests, and he found himself nodding along, finally there was someone who got it, who got that Fodlan was backwards and broken. Someone who felt that it could be changed, and that it needed to be changed. They hadn’t probed that topic very deeply yet, but Claude was certain she had some ideas, just like he did-

Claude shook his head in frustration. He wasn’t here for that. He didn’t even plan to stay in Fodlan, long-term. He was here to learn, both the official curriculum of the Officer’s Academy and whatever other secrets he could ferret out in his spare time. He was here to make connections with the up-and-comers in the clergy and nobility, connections he would use to lead the Leicester Alliance and guide it along the path he had planned. He couldn’t afford to be distracted, not by romance, and not by revolution. Not by Edelgard. He was stretched too thin already, raising Mahsa on top of his other obligations. He had to stay focused. He had to keep his head clear, or he would lose it.

Which was easy enough in theory, but tomorrow he’d be pressed against Edelgard’s back with his hands on her legs as they tumbled through the skies together on a wyvern, and his head would be as far from clear as it could possibly be. And Claude could no longer deny he was excited by the prospect. This wasn’t blackmail, or a transaction, or an obligation, it was… something else entirely. He wanted to share himself with her, in a way he'd never wanted to share with anyone, never felt safe sharing with anyone. The risks that had felt intolerable two months ago now felt like nothing at all.

But they weren't nothing. They were still there. He couldn't lose sight of that. Couldn't keep letting his guard down, or he'd lose everything.

Claude turned to look at Mahsa, who was still staring at him with wide yellow eyes. “This is all your fault, you know,” he said. “If you’d just hatched a day earlier I wouldn’t be in this mess, and we’d all be better off.” She snorted at him and tucked her snout against her belly.

Claude sighed. Yeah, I don’t believe it either.