Hey guys, RoseSaiyan 2 here again! As you've noticed I've changed the description of the elements involved in this story as I've realized in writing this story that it doesn't really have anything to do with Dragon ball. Anyways that's just a small update on things. Enjoy the story!
Chapter 6: Foreseer
---
The fountain in Castle Ylisstol's inner courtyard ran at night as reliably as it ran during the day, indifferent to the hour or the mood of whoever happened to be standing near it. The water caught the moonlight and broke it into moving pieces across the stone basin, and Chrom stood at its edge watching the pieces and not quite watching them, his hand resting on Falchion's hilt in the way that it did when something was working through him that hadn't found words yet.
The footsteps that approached were familiar. Two sets — one measured, deliberate; the other slightly quicker, lighter.
"Chrom." Sarai's voice was quiet but specific, the word directed at him rather than the garden generally.
He didn't turn immediately. "I thought you'd both found your beds by now."
"The castle has a particular feeling tonight," Robin said, coming to stand at his other side. He glanced at the hand on the hilt. "We could leave, if you'd prefer."
"No." A pause. "No, stay."
The fountain ran. Somewhere in the garden behind them, something moved in the dark — a night bird finding a better branch.
"Gangrel," Chrom said. The word arrived like something set down with care, the way you set down something heavy when you're finally near enough to a surface. "For all his madness, for all the theater of it — he isn't entirely fabricating his grievances. That's what I keep coming back to."
Sarai moved closer. Not touching, but closer — near enough that the shift was intentional rather than incidental.
"My father," Chrom said. "The previous Exalt. History calls him a warrior, which is a kinder word than he earned." He finally turned from the water, and the moonlight found his expression, which was the expression of someone who has been sitting with something for a long time and has decided, tonight, to put it outside himself. "Fifteen years ago, he launched a campaign against Plegia. He called it a crusade. That word — crusade — makes it sound like it had a shape, a purpose, some notion of justice behind it. It was nothing of the sort."
Robin listened with the attention he gave to things that had tactical implications he wasn't yet fully seeing.
"He believed that destroying Plegia entirely was Naga's will," Chrom said. "He believed it genuinely — I think that's what makes it harder, not easier. Villages burned. Families. He made no distinction between soldiers and civilians, between people who could fight and people who couldn't, because his criterion was their faith and not their capacity for harm." He looked at the water again. "The bloodiest campaign in Ylissean history. Countless dead on both sides. He fell in battle before it concluded, which is what stopped it." He was quiet for a moment. "I'm not sure whether to be grateful for that or to find it simply appropriate."
"Emmeryn was ten years old when it ended," Sarai said. Not a question.
"Ten years old, and suddenly responsible for a kingdom that had emptied its treasury and its moral standing at the same time. People were grieving and bitter and some of them were both at once, which is the hardest thing to address. And she chose peace." There was a reverence in how he said it, the reverence of someone who has considered the alternative and found it unthinkable. "She chose forgiveness when she would have been understood if she hadn't."
"And Gangrel takes that history," Robin said, quietly, "and uses it. Paints himself as the defender of a people who genuinely were harmed, which makes his position harder to simply dismiss."
"Every time I draw Falchion, I'm carrying it." Chrom's voice had the specific, low quality of something honest. "The blade's blessing. And my father's war, underneath it." He exhaled. "When Gangrel talks about Ylissean crimes, he is not inventing them."
Sarai's hand found his arm. The touch was deliberate, steady. "The sins of a father are not the property of his children. They are a history to acknowledge and a course to correct — not a sentence." She held his gaze when he looked at her. "You and Emmeryn have spent your entire lives correcting that course. The fact that war is still approaching is not because you failed. It's because someone else is choosing it."
"There is a difference," Robin said, "between a kingdom that sought conquest and a kingdom defending itself from a provocation that has been twenty years in the making. Gangrel knows that difference, which is why he works so hard to obscure it."
The night breeze moved through the garden and the flowers that bloomed in the dark released their particular quiet scent. The three of them stood in the sound of the fountain for a while without needing to fill it.
"I wonder sometimes," Chrom said, and his voice had shifted — lower, more private, the register of something being admitted rather than stated, "if the Exalt's brand is as much a mark of penance as it is of blessing. A reminder built into the bloodline. *Be better than the one before you.*"
"Then honor it by being exactly who you are," Sarai said. "A leader who walks among his people instead of standing above them. A man who worries about this at all, which is the first requirement." Her grip on his arm was firm without being hard. "You are not your father, Chrom. And you are not alone in making sure of it."
"Whatever comes," Robin added, with the quiet certainty of someone who has examined this from several angles and arrived at the same place each time, "you have people who believe in the path, not the precedent."
Chrom looked between them — his tactician, with the careful mind that saw the world in patterns and found in those patterns reasons for things; and Sarai, who had lost a kingdom and was still here, still fighting for someone else's, and who was looking at him now with something in her expression that was neither pity nor performance.
"Thank you," he said. "Both of you."
The clouds that had been building across the moon shifted, and the garden went briefly dark, and then found its light again.
---
"Well said."
The voice came from the shadows near the garden wall, and it came with the particular timing of someone who has been present for longer than the conversation would have chosen.
The three of them turned.
Marth stepped into the moonlight with the ease of someone entirely comfortable having emerged from a shadow, which was itself a kind of information. The butterfly mask caught the light. The posture was the same as it always was — contained, considered, carrying more than it was willing to put down.
"Good evening," Marth said, with the formal courtesy that had become characteristic.
Chrom's eyes narrowed, not in hostility but in the specific narrowness of someone doing rapid accounting. "How did you get in here? The castle gates are—"
"The cleft in the wall behind the maple grove."
A pause.
A rather specific pause, as Chrom's expression went through several stages in quick succession.
"You know the place?" Robin asked, with the tone of someone making an observation rather than asking a question.
"I—" Chrom cleared his throat. "Yes. I bashed through part of the wall during a training exercise with the Shepherds. The section was only partial and I'd thought it adequately concealed." Another pause. "How would you even know to look there?"
"Your secret is safe," Marth said, and there was something in the measured delivery of the assurance that Sarai found specifically funny, and she made an attempt to conceal this that was only partially successful.
Chrom looked at her.
"I'm not laughing," Sarai said, which was a statement that was undermined by the fact that she was, slightly.
"You are laughing."
"I'm really not."
Before this could develop further, Marth spoke again, and the quality of the voice changed — the slight warmth of the previous exchange closing, replaced by the flat, careful tone of someone delivering something they have been carrying toward this moment for some time.
"I came to warn you. The Exalt's life is in danger. Tonight."
The garden went very still.
Chrom's expression completed its transition to the serious version of itself in approximately half a second. "That's—Emm has her guard, the palace is fortified—"
"I know what the palace has," Marth said. "And I know what is coming through it anyway."
"You're telling me you can predict this," Chrom said, and the skepticism in his voice was honest rather than dismissive — the skepticism of someone who wants very much to be wrong.
"I'm telling you that I have reason to believe it." Marth paused. "Would a demonstration be of use to you?"
The sword came out in one motion.
Chrom's hand went to Falchion reflexively, but the blade was not pointed at him — Marth was already past him, already moving toward the garden wall, and the motion that followed was precise and immediate and ended with a man who had emerged from the hedge with a blade losing the use of that blade and then losing consciousness, in that order, in the time it took Chrom to register that the hedge had contained a man at all.
Marth straightened. Looked at Chrom. The mask offered no expression, but the posture communicated: *this is what I mean.*
"I'll accept the demonstration," Chrom said.
The second assassin came from the left, and this one moved faster, and Marth turned and the footing found an obstacle in the dark — the fallen man's blade, lying at an angle that no one had accounted for — and the consequent stumble was only slight but it was enough.
The attacking blade came at the mask rather than at flesh, which was luck of a particular geometric kind, and the mask split cleanly along its butterfly seam and fell in two pieces on the garden stones.
Chrom had moved during this, Falchion clearing its sheath and arriving at the appropriate conclusion before the echo of the impact had finished, and the second assassin went down.
When he turned back, what he saw was the face of the person who had been wearing the mask.
Young. Younger than the voice had suggested. Dark blue hair. The ears, when he looked — he looked — came to points that were subtle but present, and the jaw and the cheekbones and the shape of the eyes were all familiar in the specific way that the word *familiar* doesn't quite capture, the way that a thing is familiar when you have been looking at it from an angle that prevents recognition and have just moved to a different angle.
He stared.
"You're—" He stopped. Started again. "You're a woman."
"And quite the actress," Lucina — for this was who she was, though he would not have the name tonight — said, with the tone of someone who has been waiting for this particular observation and has prepared for it. "Honestly, I'm a little surprised it took this long."
The sound from beside him was Sarai, attempting to maintain composure and not entirely managing it.
Chrom looked at her. The picture assembled itself in his expression with the visible stages of someone doing arithmetic.
"Sarai." He said it with the specific weight of a name that is also a question.
"I gave my word," she said, with the apologetic smile of someone who means this and is still not going to be able to help him with it. "Her secret to keep, Chrom. Not mine."
Lucina glanced at Sarai with a brief, genuine gratitude that was the most unguarded thing she had yet allowed herself, and Sarai returned it with a small, understanding nod.
The moment was concluded by the castle.
The explosion that shook the eastern wing was not large in the way that palace architecture generally measures explosions, but it was emphatic, and it carried the particular register of interior stone under stress, which was a sound that belonged to a building that was being entered by force rather than by request.
All of them were already moving before the echo finished.
---
The corridor outside Emmeryn's chambers had the particular quality of a space that has been prepared by people who knew what they were preparing for.
Validar stood among his assembled agents with the composed menace of a man who considers himself a craftsman and this his work. Dark energy gathered at his fingertips with the patient accumulation of something that has been building for longer than this moment. His subordinates were distributed with the specific efficiency of practiced deployment.
Nearby, in the shadow of a side passage, a figure in a worn coat that had seen better years stood with his hands in the approximate vicinity of his pockets and his expression in the approximate vicinity of reconsidering his life choices.
Gaius, who was here professionally and had not agreed to *this*, watched the assembled killers with the specific discomfort of a man whose conscience is not as vestigial as his professional history might suggest.
*Kill the Exalt.* He ran the phrase back through his mind, looking for the interpretation that made it less than what it clearly was. He did not find one.
"Right," he muttered, to no one. "This would be the moment when a sensible man reassesses his commitments."
---
"*EMMERYN!*"
Chrom's voice carried the specific quality of a word that is also a force, and he was through the corridor door before the sound of it had finished arriving. The guards who had been at the Exalt's door were down but breathing — Validar's people had been professional enough to keep them alive, which suggested the mess of corpses was not the desired image.
Emmeryn stood inside her doorway with the bearing of someone who has decided that the appropriate response to mortal danger is to face it with complete composure, which was either courage or something beyond courage that didn't have a name yet.
"Chrom." Relief, precise and controlled. "Take Lissa — take the others — go while you still—"
"We're not leaving." He had drawn Falchion. "Stay back. Stay where it's safe."
Down the corridor, Validar turned.
He assessed the assembled Shepherds with the deliberate attention of a man revising his operational model, and something in his expression shifted — not from confidence to doubt, but from one kind of confidence to a more complicated one, as though he had expected obstacles and found the specific obstacles present were not the ones he had mapped.
His gaze moved. Found Robin.
"Well," Validar said, and the word carried a weight that was entirely out of proportion to its size. The smile that arrived was the smile of a man who has been looking for something for a very long time and has just found it unexpectedly on a Tuesday. "After years of searching... tonight piles its gifts rather generously."
"Robin," Chrom said, low, "stay back—"
"I heard," Robin said. His voice was steady and his expression was the one he wore when he was processing something faster than he could yet explain.
From the doorway, Lucina's voice arrived quietly enough that only those nearest her heard it: "The Falchion is responding."
The blade in Chrom's hand had taken on a faint luminescence — not the applied brilliance of a polished surface catching light, but something intrinsic, the kind of glow that comes from within and does not require external sources. He noticed it and said nothing, because the corridor had no space right now for questions about phenomena.
"The killers," Robin said. "If we can reach their leader—"
"Already on it," Sarai said, and was.
The corridor became several simultaneous engagements.
Odyn had moved in parallel with the main push, angling toward the gap where three of Validar's agents had formed a line specifically to prevent anyone from reaching him. The three were skilled — deployed with the deliberate placement of professionals who had done this enough to have preferences — and for several exchanges the work was precise and technical and focused.
It was when Validar turned his full attention toward the corridor's center that the dynamic changed.
The dark magic that gathered in Validar's hands was not subtle. It announced itself in the way that certain kinds of power announce themselves — the air pressure shifting, the temperature dropping by a degree, the specific sensation of something present that was not present before. He aimed it at the largest concentration of Shepherds with the efficiency of a man who has moved past the individual and is thinking in geometric terms.
Odyn stepped into the path of it.
What met Validar's cast was not the physical guard of a fighter interposing their body, but something that arrived from within — the light that had been in Odyn's eyes since birth, the specific inheritance of Albanar's ancient royal line, which had always carried something the rest of the world described as unusual and which Odyn himself simply thought of as *what he was.* It emerged through his blade in the way water emerges from a source, without announcement or deliberation, and it met Validar's darkness at the contact point and refused it.
The collision was soundless and enormous.
Validar's expression went through disbelief before it went through anything else.
"That power—" He started, and the certainty in his voice had acquired a fracture. "That is not possible. That bloodline was—"
"Was what?" Odyn said. His voice was the even voice, the controlled voice, the voice of someone who has decided to let the question land rather than fill it. His eyes held the orange fire they always held, and underneath it, something older.
Validar gathered himself. Brought the darkness back with the force of someone who does not concede to surprises — and Odyn let him come, reading the shape of it, finding the pattern in how the fell energy moved, and when he found the center of it he channeled everything he had through his blade and pushed.
The light did not overwhelm the darkness dramatically. It worked the way light actually works — by simply being present in a space that darkness requires to be absent, filling it cleanly and completely. Validar's magic failed, not with spectacle, but with the flat finality of a thing that has run out of the conditions it requires.
The sorcerer staggered.
"How could you—" His voice had lost its architecture. "This was not in the design—"
"Your design doesn't include everything," Odyn said simply.
What Validar said next came out as breath rather than words, and then he was gone — not dead, the way a body is dead, but *gone,* the way a presence removes itself when it has something outside this place to retreat to. The agents who had been deployed in the corridor seemed to register this absence the way water registers the removal of the thing it has been pressing against, and the engagement ended with the specific resolution of people who have received information and acted on it.
The corridor settled.
The Falchion's glow faded at approximately the same moment.
---
In the aftermath, the castle returned to itself slowly, the way structures do when they have absorbed something violent and are reasserting their ordinary nature.
Maribelle had arrived at some point during the engagement and had immediately organized the injured with the focused competence she reserved for moments when her usualtools — wit, precision, social pressure — were temporarily less useful than medical knowledge. She worked through the corridor's casualties with efficient grace and made no commentary on the situation until she had satisfied herself that everyone present was either stable or would be.
Robin stood at the corridor's edge with his arms crossed and his expression in the configuration it took on when he was holding a question at arm's length because he needed more information before he could do anything useful with it.
Validar had looked at him.
He set this aside for later, because later was when he would have the space to think about it properly.
Panne, who had arrived through a route that was less corridor and more window, having apparently decided that the castle's interior was the correct direction to be moving in when she heard the sounds of the engagement, had helped neutralize the remaining agents with the efficiency of someone who does not have patience for the kinds of moral calculations that slow down humans and finds direct action considerably more logical.
She stood now at the corridor's edge with the particular bearing of someone who is present in body while internally conducting an argument.
Emmeryn approached her with the specific quality that Emmeryn brought to approaches — unhurried, direct, carrying no armor but meaning all of it.
"I know what you are," Emmeryn said. "I know what my people did to yours, and I know that no amount of time makes that a smaller thing." She paused. "I am not asking for your trust. I am asking only to be given the chance to earn it."
Panne looked at her for a long time. The evaluation was thorough, the kind that looks past the surface layer and through it.
"You feel it," Panne said, eventually. "The weight of it. Not as an abstraction." Her voice held a specific, surprised quality — the quality of an expected thing failing to be found and an unexpected thing found instead. "I've never felt that before. Not from a human."
"I can only speak for myself," Emmeryn said. "And I speak as myself, not as the Exalt."
Another long pause.
"All I can offer you is a chance," Panne said. "Don't waste it."
"I won't," Emmeryn said.
Nearby, Gaius had been watching this exchange from his patch of corridor wall with the expression of a man who has arrived at a conclusion he finds inconvenient. He looked at the assembled Shepherds, at Emmeryn standing with Panne, at Chrom replacing Falchion with the automatic motion of someone whose hands know where things go, and at the general scene of a castle that had successfully defended itself against an assassination attempt and was now in the process of resuming normality.
He looked at the door he had arrived through.
He looked at the door he could presumably leave through.
"Against my better judgment," he said, to no one in particular, and pushed himself off the wall. "Someone want to tell me who I talk to about joining this outfit?"
---
Chrom found Marth — found Lucina — in the outer corridor, moving toward the garden with the particular speed of someone who has decided that their business here is concluded and the appropriate next step is departure.
"Going somewhere?" He was already beside her before he had specifically decided to follow. "You have a habit of not saying goodbye."
"Yes," she said. There was something almost rueful in the acknowledgment. "I'm afraid that's one of my less commendable qualities."
"You saved Emmeryn's life." He said it plainly. "You saved my life, in the garden, before any of this started. And you saved Lissa, in the forest, before I even knew what to call you." He kept pace with her. "There's no favor that matches that, but I'd like the chance to try."
Lucina's steps did not slow, but something in her bearing did. "Hearing you offer it is sufficient."
"It shouldn't be." He stopped. "It really shouldn't be. There must be something—"
She stopped too. She was looking at the garden wall, at the maple grove that had provided her entrance, at the particular angle of the night sky above it. Her back was to him.
"History has been rewritten tonight," she said, and the words had a quality in them that had nothing to do with metaphor. "That was what I came here for."
"Rewritten from what?" He asked it carefully, the way you ask a question you are not certain you want the full answer to.
"After tonight — after the assassination that I prevented — the Fire Emblem would have been taken. What follows from that is a sequence of events that leads, in the end, to the destruction of everything." She turned her head slightly, not quite looking at him. "I know how that sounds."
Chrom considered the garden, the fountain, the night. He thought about Falchion's glow in the corridor, which was something that had not happened in the lifetime of its current owner and which he had not yet explained to himself.
"Strangely," he said, "it doesn't sound like madness."
"No?"
"I find I can trust you. I don't know exactly why, but I do. And I hope—" He paused. "I hope whatever you've prevented tonight is actually prevented. I hope the history you've written holds."
"So do I," she said, and the quietness of it was the quietness of someone who cannot fully know this and has made peace with not knowing.
"If there's nothing I can offer you—"
"There is one thing."
He waited.
"Princess Sarai." She said it the way you say something that has cost you something to say. "The bond between you — cherish it. That's all I would ask."
It was not the request he had expected, and it arrived with a specificity that suggested it carried weight he wasn't yet seeing the full shape of.
"That's really—"
"*That's her reason,*" said a voice from slightly further along the corridor, "and it's hers to hold." Odyn, leaning against the wall with the ease of someone who has been here long enough to be comfortable, straightened slightly. "You don't need to understand the personal motivations behind a request to honor it, Chrom."
Chrom looked at him. Looked at Lucina. Made the calculation that was available to him with the information he had.
"All right," he said simply. And then: "Safe travels. Whatever direction you travel in."
Lucina looked at him for a moment with an expression that the mask would have concealed and which the absence of the mask did not. "Thank you," she said, and the weight in the words was enormous and she did not explain it, and then she went.
---
Odyn stayed where he was until Chrom had gone back inside, and then stayed a little longer.
The garden was quiet. The fountain was still running, because fountains continue regardless of what happens nearby. The broken pieces of the butterfly mask lay on the garden path, which was a fact that would need to be addressed before morning.
He had heard the conversation. He had not been trying to hear it — or rather, he had been nearby for purposes of his own, and the night was quiet and his ears were elven-sharp and there was no version of standing where he was standing that did not involve hearing.
He looked at the gate through which Lucina had departed.
In the corridor, when his light had met Validar's darkness and held it, he had been running on the instinct that had always been there underneath the training — the sense of something present in him that the training had disciplined rather than created. He did not think about it much. It was simply part of what he was.
But when Validar's expression had gone through shock and the words *that bloodline* had arrived and stopped themselves, Odyn had felt something very specific, which was the sense of a door being visible from a distance, with no indication yet of what was behind it.
He thought about that now, and about Lucina — about the weight she carried, the very specific way she moved in combat, the quality of her grief which was the quality of someone grieving something that had not yet happened and might be prevented if she worked hard enough.
He thought about what she had asked of Chrom, and the specific way she had asked it.
He would not follow that thought further tonight. There was too much else happening, and the thought required care that the night could not currently provide.
He simply stood in the garden for a moment longer, in the specific quiet of someone holding something with both hands and being careful not to drop it.
Then he went inside.
---
Elsewhere — not in any direction the castle's geography could accommodate, not in any place that answered to cartography or compass — Validar came to rest in darkness.
He came to rest there because the darkness had received him, which was not the same as the darkness choosing him, and which was not the same as the darkness being glad of his presence, and which was not the same as any of the comfortable things a person might prefer to believe when they arrive somewhere because they had nowhere else to go.
He lay in it and his wounds should have been fatal and were not, which told him everything he needed to know about whose interest was being served.
The presence that moved in the darkness around him was not a thing that announced itself. It did not need to. Announcement is for things that require acknowledgment, and what moved toward him now had been acknowledged in its bones before language existed.
"Validar." The voice had the quality of something being spoken for the last time, and also the first time, and also all the times simultaneously, which was not a paradox to the thing that was speaking. "Your weakness is noted. Your purpose continues."
"My lord Grima," Validar said, which was the appropriate form of address, and his voice had the particular quality of a man who is familiar with the presence of enormous things and has made his accommodation with the fear of them. "The prince's companions — one of them carries—"
"I know what he carries."
A pause.
"And the princess?" Validar ventured. "The one who moves against you—"
"Let her move." The fell dragon's presence was not impatience — it was older than impatience, older than the category of feeling that impatience belongs to. "Every step she takes is within a pattern she cannot see from where she stands. Every history she rewrites is a thread I have already woven around." A sound that might have been laughter in a structure that was less ancient. "She came to change the future. She cannot see that every change she makes only sharpens the instrument that I have been forging."
Validar felt the dark energy moving through him, closing what had been opened, and he was careful not to allow himself to feel relief, because relief assumed good news and what was happening here was not good news.
"Your obedience is what is required of you," Grima said. "Not your understanding."
"Yes, my lord."
"Rise. The pieces are not yet in place. But they will be."
The darkness held Validar in its arrangements, and he rose as he was told, which was what you did when the alternative was not available, and the void around him pulsed with the patience of something that has been waiting since before the word *waiting* existed and is entirely prepared to wait considerably longer.
---
The corridor outside Emmeryn's chambers had settled into the particular productive activity that follows a crisis when the crisis has been resolved but its implications are being processed.
Frederick was at a table with maps. Chrom was beside him, back from the garden with his expression the expression of a man who has concluded a conversation that gave him something to carry and has decided to carry it without complaint. Robin stood at the table's edge and was thinking about several things at once in the way that he always thought about several things at once. Phila had the bearing of someone who is professionally mortified by the evening's events and is redirecting that feeling into logistical precision. Emmeryn stood at the center of all of it with the specific calm of someone who refuses to be the eye of a storm when it is her responsibility to be something steadier.
Odyn, Sarai, Roy, Hailfire, and Valvahdern arrived in that order, each having concluded their immediate business.
"Then it's settled," Phila said, with the tone of someone confirming a conclusion they have not entirely made peace with. "Her Grace travels to the eastern palace. My most trusted knights provide the escort."
"The route needs to be the second-best route," Sarai said, moving to the map without being invited to. "Not the most obvious one, and not the most concealed one. The most obvious will be watched. The most concealed is the one an intelligent enemy prepares for second. You want the route that looks considered but not too considered." Her finger traced a line. "Here. Slower, but controllable."
"Misinformation first," Hailfire added, looking at the map from the opposite side. "If Plegia has eyes in the capital — and they do — you want three plausible departure directions and two false starts before the real movement begins."
"Agreed," Frederick said, with the approval of someone recognizing their own professional thinking in someone else.
"The force size is the other problem," Odyn said. "Large enough to handle threats, small enough not to announce the movement." He looked at Chrom. "Twenty, maximum. Distributed rather than consolidated."
"I'll organize the defensive formations," Valvahdern said. "Ground and aerial both. Plegia has shown it can operate in both registers."
Chrom looked at the map, and at the people arranged around it, and at the particular quality of the conversation — which was the quality of people who are good at what they do working on a problem together and finding, in the working, that the problem is more manageable than it appeared in isolation.
"Whatever defensive calculation we settle on," he said, and the room quieted to hear it, "doesn't change what this is. We're not just moving an Exalt. We're protecting someone that all of us have come to—" He stopped. "We've come to care for Emm. Not just as Ylisse's. As ours." He looked at the group. "That changes how we do this."
Emmeryn was quiet for a moment, and the things in her expression were not available to everyone in the room but they were available to her brother and to Sarai, who had learned to read her.
"My dear friends," she said, and the word *friends* was not a formality. "Whatever our security arrangements, our greatest strength has always been and will always be this." She looked at each of them, briefly and completely, the kind of attention that makes each person feel they are the only one in the room for the moment it rests on them. "Don't let the urgency of the situation make you forget it."
"It won't," Chrom said, for all of them.
The planning continued. The night went on.
---
The conversation that Emmeryn had been holding in reserve since the corridor found its moment when the others had dispersed to their respective preparations.
She moved toward the garden passage, and Sarai, reading the intention, fell in beside her without being asked.
They walked together through the castle's quieter passages — the ones that existed for people who wanted to have conversations the corridors weren't large enough for — and came to the small private garden that Emmeryn had always preferred for its ability to hold sound without transmitting it.
Night-blooming flowers. The fragrance of them, gentle and specific.
"I'll spare you the opening formalities," Emmeryn said, "since I suspect you've been anticipating this conversation and have already prepared for them."
Sarai produced a look that acknowledged this without confirming it.
"I've watched my brother for his entire life," Emmeryn said. "I know what he looks like when something matters to him. I know the specific weight of it, and the specific lightness that comes with it simultaneously, when the thing that matters is also something he cares about properly rather than just caring for." She looked at the flowers. "With you, I see both. I've been seeing it for some time."
The tips of Sarai's ears, if the light had been sufficient for anyone to check, would have been warmer than usual.
"We haven't made any formal—"
"I'm not speaking to you as the Exalt," Emmeryn said. "I'm speaking as Chrom's sister. Those are different conversations, and this is the second one."
Sarai clasped her hands together — an unconscious gesture, the kind that arrives when the careful management of how one presents oneself has temporarily relaxed. "When I came to Ylisse," she said, slowly, "love was not on the list of things I expected to encounter. I expected conflict. I expected the work of being a Shepherd. I expected to help secure things for my people, and then perhaps to move on." She was quiet for a moment. "The heart is inconvenient."
"It is," Emmeryn agreed, with warmth.
"He is — he is genuinely good." Sarai said it the way you say something you have examined carefully and found to be simply true. "Not in the performed way of a person who is trying to be seen as good, but in the way of someone who has no other way of being available to him. Which makes him endlessly, infuriatingly reckless, because the same instinct that makes him good makes him incapable of protecting himself when someone else needs protecting first." She paused. "I find I have opinions about this."
"I've noticed," Emmeryn said.
"The opinions are not going away."
"I know." Emmeryn reached for Sarai's hands, and took them, and held them with the specific, gentle certainty of someone extending something real rather than performing an extension. "I want to tell you something as his sister. He has carried Ylisse on his shoulders since he was old enough to understand what that meant, and he has done it willingly, and he has rarely allowed himself to consider what he carries it for rather than what he carries it toward." She looked at Sarai. "You see him. Not the prince, not the captain, not the heir to a painful history — you see Chrom. And that is worth more than anything the politics of this situation could offer."
Sarai felt the thing in her chest that had been present since the courtyard — that careful, deliberate warmth — take on a slightly different quality. The quality of something that has been allowed rather than simply felt.
"Thank you," she said, and meant it in the complete way.
"Though I should warn you," Emmeryn added, and something in her expression arrived that was startling in its resemblance to her younger sister, "Lissa has already begun leaving books about Ylissean royal protocol in places where you're likely to find them. I thought you should be prepared."
Sarai stared at her.
"She's been doing it for two weeks," Emmeryn said.
"Two—" Sarai pressed her lips together against a laugh that was also somewhat mortified. "She's been doing it for two weeks."
"She has a gift for preparation."
The laugh won. Sarai laughed — the genuine, unguarded version that appeared when she was caught entirely off-guard by something delightful — and Emmeryn's laughter joined it, and the garden held the sound of it against the quiet of the rest of the sleeping castle, and for a moment the weight of the day and the war and everything leaning toward tomorrow was not absent but was simply not the only thing present.
---
Valvahdern had not been intending to linger in the castle's outer passage when Emmeryn's voice found him.
"Sir Valvahdern." She had the quality of someone who does not raise their voice and does not need to. "A moment, if you would."
He turned. Approached. Inclined his head.
"What you did at the border," she said, "was not in your current commission. You were not under Ylissean service. You simply saw someone who needed protection and provided it." She looked at him with the direct, assessing warmth that was her particular gift. "That kind of character doesn't require a commission."
Valvahdern said nothing, because the observation was accurate and he had nothing useful to add to it.
"Lady Maribelle is the Duke's daughter," Emmeryn said, and her voice had shifted into the register of something that was both personal and precise. "Her position makes her a person of interest to those who want to disrupt the alliances that keep this kingdom whole. She will continue to be a person of interest as the situation with Plegia develops." She paused. "She is also someone I am personally fond of."
"I understand," Valvahdern said, because he did, and because he had already been thinking about this since the border crossing, and because the Exalt's request and his own conclusions had arrived at the same place by different paths.
"Not as an official guard," Emmeryn said. "That would announce itself. But as someone who is simply present, and watchful, and prepared."
"You have my word," he said. The simplicity of it was not bluntness but exactitude. "As carefully as I would guard your own safety, Your Grace."
Emmeryn looked at him for a moment longer, and in her expression there was something that was not entirely political consideration.
"I think," she said, with the gentleness of someone choosing their words with care, "that Maribelle may find the arrangement less intrusive than you expect. She is perceptive, and she notices quality when it presents itself." A pause. "I am only observing."
Valvahdern held the observation with the composure of a man who has survived thirty years of royal service and knows the difference between an Exalt making policy and an Exalt making an observation.
"I will begin immediately," he said, and bowed, and withdrew.
Emmeryn watched him go, and in the passage behind her, the castle continued its patient work of becoming tomorrow, which was what castles did, which was what all of them were doing, moving through this night toward whatever the next one held.
Whatever it held, they would face it as they had faced this one.
Together, which was the only way any of it had ever made sense.
---
To be continued...
Next Chapter — Chapter 7: Incursion