Chapter Text
Cyril is not many things. The most important things he is not, are, in order: a kid, an idiot, and a narc.
He is fourteen but he’s not a kid. He’s seen more in his fourteen years than he suspects most of the young nobles about to flood the monastery have seen in far longer. He can’t read but he’s not an idiot; he has good eyes and he uses them, and he is alive because he sees things before they see him. He is loyal to Lady Rhea but he’s not a narc; he keeps his mouth shut when business isn’t his and keeps his nose out of it.
Usually.
He’s being tempted, a little, right now.
The new house leaders arrive early at the beginning of the Lone Moon and Cyril watches them cross the threshold from an upstairs window. The delegation from the Empire drops a short girl with a straight back and impossibly pale hair on the doorstep and is followed by the Kingdom delegation throwing a tall boy with silvered armour and hair the colour of wheat to her side. They hold themselves like royalty, so Cyril thinks they might be. He doesn’t know their names, but he knows the kind of people who hold themselves like these two do and he resolves to never speaking with them if he can help it.
Then the Alliance delegation shows up, and their offering strolls through the gates of the monastery like he already owns the place.
A reminder, for those who need it: Cyril is not an idiot. He has good eyes and he uses them.
An observation, for those who want it: The Golden Deer house leader is Almyran.
(Or, at least, Cyril thinks he is. From this distance? He’s maybe seventy-percent sure.)
The boy, shorter than the other boy but taller than the girl, drifts forward like a snake in the grass. He throws arms around the other leaders’ shoulders—whispers something that makes the girl shrug him off and turn up her nose and the other boy blush a deep red. He laughs.
Cyril just stares in… abject horror, maybe? An Almyran representing the Alliance? Has he slipped into some kind of upside-down nightmare realm? Did he hit his head when he got out of bed this morning? Is he dead?
There are little things that burn uncertainty into Cyril’s mind. The boy’s skin is darker than his two peers’, sure, and his hair is thick, brown, and curly like Cyril’s, but his frame is slight, like so many northern Fódlan boys, rather than the stocky teenagers Cyril knew in the home country.
He reminds Cyril of a boy in his company back in Almyra. His name had been Malik, and Cyril uses past tense when he remembers Malik because he’s quite sure he’s not alive now. Not because he would have been killed in the line of duty, though; Malik had been a cook’s assistant banned from service for his ‘questionable loyalties’, after all. No. Malik will be dead because Malik’s skin was on the paler side, like this boy’s is. Malik will surely be dead because the nicest thing anyone ever deigned to call him was ‘mixed’ and the worst thing they ever called him makes Cyril’s skin crawl when he remembers it.
Cyril knows he’s probably the only person for miles that would call the Alliance boy below him ‘pale’. But that’s just because if they were in Almyra, Cyril knows the boy swathed in black and gold would stand out like smooth quartz on a dark riverbed. In that same way, though, next to the prince and princess with their skin like fresh snow, he stands out like tannin stain on white sand.
He straddles that same delicate knife’s edge Malik had straddled of not really looking like anyone, of not fitting any mould at all—or perhaps trying to fit too many at once. But it still stirs something inside Cyril to see even a hint of that complexion—he’d been pretty sure he wasn’t ever going to see it again.
The light catches the glint of a single earring in the boy’s left ear as the trio walk inside.
(Cyril is at least seventy-five percent sure.)
Another reminder: Cyril is not a narc; he minds his own business.
An addendum to the previous reminder: That doesn’t automatically mean he’s not interested.
He doesn’t see the leaders enough for the rest of the day for him to learn their names, but he does spy the Almyran (?) boy a handful of times. It’s enough for him to see the braid (the war braid, he’s almost positive) by his ear and knock his internal sure-ness percentage up to ninety-percent… maybe ninety-five.
There’s still doubt in Cyril’s mind, but it all but vanishes the first time he speaks to the boy.
It’s three days after the leaders arrived and Cyril has succeeded in keeping out of their way for the most part. But fate is cruel, and it’s while Cyril is sweeping the steps of the cathedral that fate jumps him and throws him in front of a speeding carriage.
“Hey! Are you Cyril?”
He almost drops his broom as he jumps. The voice comes from behind him, which is concerning, because Cyril is usually more aware of his surroundings than most.
He pushes that aside and spins around, taking a big step back from the Golden Deer leader, who is shining there in his dorky looking half-cape with a confidence that almost makes Cyril feel like he’s the one intruding, rather than the other way around.
“Yeah?” Cyril snaps. “What d’you want?”
Cyril doesn’t want to talk to him at all, which is why he replies so rudely. Because maybe he’ll leave if he’s rude. Because the only thing Cyril wants to talk to less than an Almyran is the heir to the country that made him an orphan, and this boy is apparently somehow—somehow—both.
But the boy just smiles. There’s something a little blank in it.
From here, as close to the Golden Deer leader as Cyril has ever been, he can see the touches of his homeland in him even clearer, his dark skin and thick hair and long lashes. The braid, swinging like a pendulum with its glittering bead. But there’s touches of… not-Almyra, too. His eyes are green, piercing, like bottle glass. Cyril hadn’t ever seen eyes that colour before coming to Fódlan with its candy-coloured people.
“I heard you’re from Almyra,” he says, and Cyril’s stomach does a little flip at the way Almyra rolls off his tongue like honey. The doubt fades again in the face of how well he says the name of a country no one from the Alliance should have any business saying with such care.
“Yeah,” he says, maybe a little too strongly. “I live here now though.”
“I can see that.” It’s not entirely nice, but it’s not entirely unkind either. It just… is. Cyril doesn’t like how much uncertainty this conversation has packed up and brought along with it. He doesn’t like not being able to tell if the boy’s smile is real or not.
“Why do you care?” He asks.
“I’m from the Alliance, is that not reason enough?” The boy doesn’t sound genuine at all, but Cyril still can’t be sure.
“Sure,” Cyril counters. “But usually the Golden Deer kids like to push me around, not talk to me.”
That seems to get him to pause, just for a moment, and that smile Cyril can’t crack falters.
“Really? Well, uh, I’m not going to do that to you.”
“Cool. Wanna tell your classmates that when they show up?”
“I will,” the boy says. “I really did just want to say hi.”
“Do you ‘say hi’ to all the staff?” Cyril snaps back dryly. He doesn’t like this conversation, even if this guy is a little nicer than the usual Deer.
Oh, great, the smile is back.
“Only to the staff that seem interesting,” the boy says, twirling his braid like he’s expecting Cyril to call him out on it.
Cyril doesn’t take the bait. “Well, I only talk to students that seem interesting.”
This earns him a snort and, though the conversation is clearly dead in the water, neither of them makes a move to leave immediately. Cyril ends up leaving first and only realises later that he hadn’t caught the boy’s name.
The rest of the students arrive a week later, and Cyril learns three important things about the Golden Deer house. These things are, in order: They have a Goneril with them, the Almyran boy’s name is Claude von Riegan (which isn’t very Almyran, so, ninety-two percent), and none of the other students seem to suspect he’s Almyran. At all.
Cyril finds out this is in no small part due to the efforts of Claude himself, who almost effortlessly pushes back any questions of his background with a laugh and a smile as gilded in gold as him.
The only person who really seems to take issue with him is a purple-haired boy whose name Cyril is forced to learn after he runs into him during stable duty. Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, owner of the worst name Cyril has ever heard, seems convinced Claude is “hiding something” but isn’t sure what.
Cyril wonders if he should be offended that the sons and daughters of the Alliance can’t seem to be able to identify a citizen of their eastern rival. He doesn’t have enough national pride to really care, so he settles on simply being confused.
No one notices. If they do notice, they’re damn good at keeping their mouth shut.
But Cyril notices—in part due to the fact he’s probably the only person at the monastery who knows what he’s looking for.
Claude’s style of archery is one thing. It’s barely distinct enough for anyone to call it anything other than a quirk, but Cyril served in the border army and he knows what an Almyran draw looks like like the back of his hand. Ninety-seven percent.
He sees how he goes to mass with the other students but never prays. How he stubs his toe on a desk in front of Cyril once and cries for numerous Gods rather that the Goddess whose roof he stands under. Ninety-nine percent.
But he’s not like Petra-from-Brigid or Dedue-from-Duscur, both of whom Cyril is terrified by for wildly different reasons but learns the names of anyway because they’re different like him. No. Claude-from-Leicester-but-also-probably-definitely-Almyra is more reserved.
It becomes clear to Cyril that he’s hiding, but more than that he’s playing a side. It’s that knife’s edge again, the one Malik walked.
He hadn’t ever been close to Malik, but he hadn’t hated him and that was, in the end, almost the same thing. When Cyril had come to Fódlan and he’d experienced the pangs of distrust towards outsiders, he’d understood Malik a little more. In that way, he thinks he understands Claude a little too.
So, Cyril almost opens up to him. Almost.
A note on Cyril: He is stubborn and a little standoffish, but he is not unkind, and he remembers enough about Malik to know that Claude is probably hurting.
A note on Claude: He is hurting, quite a bit, and has been for his entire life, but he has grown up being told he can never let other people know that.
A note on both: Cyril hates liars. Claude is the most dishonest person he will ever meet.
“Actually,” says Claude one day, a month or so into the school year, “I wanted to talk to you about Rhea.”
Cyril narrows his eyes. When he’d run into Claude during chores today this wasn’t the conversation he’d expected to be having. It isn’t a conversation he wants to be having. Not with Claude, at any rate.
He knows how his attachment to Lady Rhea looks to others. He knows exactly what it would like to the people he grew up with.
Cyril doesn’t know Claude. He doesn’t know how much of his heart lies beyond the Throat. But what he does know is, right now, there’s a dishonesty and cocky confidence in the older boy that reminds him so starkly of the men who commanded him in Almyra. Does Claude foster the same hatred for Fódlan as them? Is his interest in Lady Rhea anything more than the interest of an enemy?
Cyril will let Claude disrespect him, but he won’t let him disrespect the woman he owes his life to.
“There's so much we don't know about her,” Claude is saying, “but I thought maybe you—”
“Yeah,” Cyril cuts him off. “I know more about Lady Rhea than anyone, but why should I tell you anything about her?”
Claude laughs humourlessly. “So cold,” he says. “Think about who you’re talking to.”
Whatever Cyril had expected Claude to say it hadn’t been that. What the fuck was that supposed to mean?
“What are you to me?” Cyril has to physically stop himself from spitting the words.
Claude’s smile fades. “You… don’t know who I am?”
The tension… falters… for just a moment. Cyril’s next retort dies in on his tongue and apparently Claude’s does to. It’s an odd, staggered moment, where they both just stare at each other and the air is filled with the ambience of the monastery and nothing else.
Know who he is? Cyril thinks. What? Like know he’s the heir to the Alliance? Is that a threat? How is that even relevant?
So, he answers truthfully:
“Of course I do. You’re Claude. Leader of the Leicester Alliance.”
Or whatever. That’s all he cares to know about Claude, at any rate.
But two things become abundantly clear to Cyril the moment his response leaves his mouth. The first is that somehow—and he doesn’t know how—that was the wrong answer.
Claude’s carefully controlled expression shifts just for a second, his eyes widening a fraction and his lips pulling down at the corners almost imperceptibly.
How was that the wrong answer? What did he expect me to say?
The second thing that become clear to Cyril is that Claude is a bigger, more practiced liar than he ever could have imagined.
In an instant the smile is back.
“Well, never mind then,” Claude says with a wave of his hand. “Tell me, don't you ever miss your homeland?"
Cyril blinks.
"Almyra?"
Claude raises an eyebrow.
"Yes, Almyra,” he confirms slowly, and then he cocks his head. “Judging by that expression, I'm guessing you're not terribly homesick."
Cyril feels annoyance bubble in his throat, annoyance at the masks Claude slips on with no feeling. How is he supposed to trust him if he won’t stop hiding? Diverting and changing the subject with the swiftness of a river?
Cyril wants to stagger him, wants to make him stumble in the way only he can. He wants to crack those gilded smiles.
"Life was a whole lot harder for me there than it's ever been around here,” he says, and he hopes it’s the answer Claude doesn’t want. “My dad and mom both died in the war, and there was nobody there to look after me."
Claude’s lips form a thin line. He goes still. But Cyril is too wrapped up in his own overflowing story to read too far into the minute changes in his audience’s expression
"The king... he didn't do anything to help. So I survived by being smart. I had to stop being a kid real quick."
He looks at the ground.
Fuck. He doesn’t want to talk about this. Why is he talking about this?
"I'm sorry to hear that.”
Cyril looks up. Claude looks back.
He looks sad.
Cyril almost laughs. "You don't have to apologise. It's not your fault."
"Regardless of whose fault it is, I'm still sorry,” Claude shrugs. “I'm sorry that I didn't even know that an acquaintance of mine was suffering. And sorry for asking a tactless question about your homeland. I should have known that was likely to bring back bad memories."
There’s tension again, but it’s different than before. It’s tension born of Claude’s tone—more serious than Cyril’s ever heard him.
He almost feels like he needs to console him.
“Nah. I get sad or mad when I think about it,” he explains, not really thinking. He’s more focused on Claude’s face, bent into forms of odd sympathy he hadn’t expected. “But I'm used to it. I don't mind any."
Claude shakes his head. "Even still, I apologize for being careless."
Cyril huffs. Nobles were so weird with their drawn-out niceties.
"Okay, well.... Thanks, Claude” he says, as way to hopefully end the back-and-forth. “If the king of Almyra was like you, maybe things would've been better. Maybe the king's not a bad person and just had other stuff to worry about, but that's not much of an excuse."
Claude's smile is strangely tight. “If I ever meet the king of Almyra, I'll give him a stern talking to on your behalf."
He cracks a proper smile, and Cyril realises it’s a joke, probably. So he laughs, because it is a funny idea—the heir to the Alliance and a turncoat orphan, however Almyran they might be, are less likely to get the ear of the king than just about anyone.
"Yeah, okay," he laughs. "Anyway, I gotta get back to work. Buncha things to get done."
“You’re really on the other side now, aren’t you?” Claude says abruptly.
Cyril laughter falls away. He meets Claude’s green, green eyes as the words hit him like a horse at full gallop.
One-hundred percent.
He tries not to talk to Claude alone too much, after that.
They’re halfway through the school year when the other shoe drops, which is interesting because Cyril hadn’t even known there was another shoe, so he hadn’t been expecting it.
He’s in the library with Lysithea, who is teaching him his letters. She’s the only person he’ll let do it, because there’s this unlikely kinship between them and he’s never had something like that before, but he knows he likes it.
She’s teaching him to read phonetically and has taken to tossing tomes of family trees at him. She’d settled on showing him the Alliance ones first, citing that it would be better to practice on the people he knew best, as well as ‘Blaiddyd’ and ‘Hresvelg’ being too much to ask anyone to try and spell on their first try.
He opens the most recent tome to a random page, and flicks through until he finds a sound he recognises.
“O… Or-de-lee-ah?” He sounds the letters out. “Oh! Is this your family—”
Lysithea has her hand slammed on the page before Cyril can read anymore.
“Ah! Yes, but, uh, no.” She looks uncharacteristically nervous. “Let’s read another one, shall we?”
“Uh, okay?”
Lysithea flips to the next entry, maybe a little to violently, and peers down at the pages.
The text is loopy and scrawled. Cyril can really only parse the letter ‘R’ from a glance. But that’s okay, because the delicate lines of a crescent moon at the top of the page tell him exactly what family it is.
“Oh! This is okay,” Lysithea says, sounding relieved. “Here. This is House Riegan—Huh, Claude’s not in it—it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in ages but…”
Lysithea’s eyes skirt around the page before settling on a name. She turns the book around.
“Try… hmm… Try this one,” she says, pointing to one of the loopy cursive names on the tree. “This is Claude’s mother, I think. It’s an easier one to pronounce.”
Cyril peers down at the words, letting the letters piece together sounds in his head.
“Tee—Tia—Tiana?”
The name falls from his lips and hits him like a punch to the gut.
“Great!” Lysithea says, oblivious to the way Cyril is now sitting frozen in place. “You don’t have to draw the ‘tee’ sound out so much, but that’s pretty much it! Now try this one…”
Cyril has never done a puzzle before, because they look like they take a long time and he’s a very busy person, but he thinks this might be what it feels like to finish one—to click in the final tile and complete the image of a castle or a dog or a forest or whatever, and step back and see the whole thing.
This puzzle’s image is Claude, with his dark skin that’s not quite as dark as Cyril’s and his green eyes and his archery and his hair and his Gods and his—
Pinched eyebrows. His disbelieving eyes. “You… don’t know who I am?” he asks. Cyril calls him Claude. Cyril gives the wrong answer.
And the strange look in his eyes after that?
Cyril finally realises it had been relief.
A recollection: While Cyril had only ever met one person with both Fódlany and Almyran blood, he’d known of one more.
A name: Khalid.
The king’s youngest and alleged favourite son, despite the rumours surrounding him. His mother is a queen consort of Almyra, the third wife of the king; The Western Shrike, Tiana. The Great Storm that crossed the Throat.
Tiana von Riegan, apparently.
Oh Gods. Oh—
He’d called him an idiot. To his face.
“I—I have to go,” Cyril blurts out. Lysithea looks up at him, confusion apparent.
“Huh? Why so suddenly?”
“I have, uh, chores.”
“Oh. Okay?”
He stands up, his chair scooting across the floor with an awful screeching noise, and he bolts for the door.
Oh shit, this is—
Cyril isn’t even out the door when he runs directly into the last person in the world he would want to run into right now, knocking both himself and the person to the ground, along with the startlingly high stack of books they’d been carrying.
Cyril goes pale as Claude—no—as Prince Khalid ibn al-Azhar, The Undying, youngest son of King Hassan of Almyra, falls on his ass and starts to choke.
Cyril, absolutely staggered both physically and emotionally, offers only an: “Oh, sh—Claude? Are you okay?” He doesn’t move to help him—not that he would in a regular situation, but this time it can be chalked up to raw shock rather than indifference.
Khalid raises a finger in a ‘hold on a second’ motion and gives himself one or two good smacks to the chest. He stops choking on whatever he’d had in his mouth and starts to laugh.
“Gods, Cyril,” he wheezes. “You could kill a guy like that.”
He coughs again.
Something to note: Cyril is not an idiot, but he does care about the rules, and sometimes that cancels out the first thing.
Cyril notices the apple on the ground and realises the reason Khalid had started choking.
“Wait—were you bringing food into the library?”
“Uh, yeah?” Khalid says.
“You’re not supposed to eat in here,” Cyril retorts before he can stop, voice sharp. “You wouldn’t have choked if you’d followed the rules.”
The voice in the back of Cyril’s head that is usually quite reasonable starts to scream at him after that. You can’t just say that to him, it yells. What are you thinking? That’s the prince of fucking Al—
Khalid just starts laughing again.
“You’re a regular prison warden, Cyril. Fine, I’ll throw it out.”
He picks the apple off the ground, takes another bite (gross) and tosses it across the room into a wastebasket at the other side of the library. It’s needlessly showy—Cyril feels a twinge of annoyance despite his hammering heart.
“Claude!” Cyril hears Lysithea screech from around the corner. “Is that you making a mess?!”
Khalid chuckles. “Yep!” he calls. “Didn’t scare you, did I?”
The only response is some loud spluttering.
Cyril shifts into autopilot, gathering Khalid’s dropped books in hands he’s trying hard not to let tremble. He freezes, both in body and in spiralling mind, as two soft-palmed hands lay themselves on his wrists.
“Hey, come on now Cyril, it’s fine,” Khalid says, gently prying the younger boy’s hands away. “I’ve got this.”
“But I—I ran into you. Plus it’s my job.”
Khalid scoffs good-naturedly. “To what? To pick up every single book in a library that already has a librarian?” He says. It sounds a bit stupid when he says it like that. “Don’t worry, you looked like you had somewhere to be, right? Don’t let me keep you.”
He smiles. Cyril looks away.
Cyril actually doesn’t have anywhere to be. He’d been intending to return to his room, where he was planning to scream into a pillow for the next few hours about how, for the last several months, he’d been openly treating the prince of Almyra like an everyday nuisance. To his face.
The real reason he wants to help, of course, is that Cyril doesn’t want to owe him anything. Doubly so now. Because before it would have been him owing something to the heir to the country that had killed his parents, but now it would be that as well as owing something to the son of the man who had left him to be forced into service, the blood of the dynasty that had neglected an orphan and left him to rot.
A follow-up to an earlier point: There are many things Cyril is not (a narc, a kid, an idiot), but there are also many things Cyril is. One of those things is ever so slightly vindictive.
A realisation: The king has never cared about people like Cyril, and now Cyril has been presented with the perfect opportunity to fuck with his son for free.
A choice: Cyril is a hard worker, but he’s never been one to turn down a free thing.
“Okay,” Cyril says. He stands up, letting the books he’s gathered fall back into the pile at Khalid—no—Claude’s feet. Claude’s eyes widen a fraction, and Cyril is inclined to agree with the shock, because this is the first time in his stay at the monastery that he’s ever made a mess bigger on purpose. “I’ll see you around then.”
He’s gone before he can see the look on the prince’s face.
Cyril thinks about what he knows about Khalid and what he knows about Claude and tries to reconcile the two of them in his mind.
It’s very hard.
The king's children are the subject of intense gossip in Almyra, or at least they had been when Cyril still lived there. He hadn’t paid much attention to the stories that had travelled west from the capital on the trade winds, and now he’s regretting his disinterest a little.
There were four children in total—three sons and a daughter—three from marriages before the King’s third wife had travelled from the west, and one from her. Cyril had been slightly more interested in stories about the youngest, Khalid, because Khalid had only been a few years older than him, which was sort of interesting in the same way fun facts about birds or ball-and-cup games were interesting, which is that it was only vaguely more interesting than nothing.
But his parents had quickly told him not to ask questions.
“He’s bad luck, Cyril,” they’d said. “We do not want people to think we support him.”
Khalid had been given the title of ‘The Undying’ before Cyril had been born, which was odd because while Almyrans very much liked giving people dumb titles, they usually didn’t give them to toddlers. It’s a name attributed to the fact he’d allegedly survived at least three separate attempts on his life before he’d even started walking. Some said he was immune to poison, others said he was a demon, tainted by mixed blood and a birth under bad stars.
When Cyril had been six or seven, he’d heard stories that Khalid had killed an assassin single-handedly. Someone had snuck into his room at night to drive a dagger into his heart and Khalid, only ten or eleven himself, had slit his throat—with a dagger, some said, though others swore it was with his own razor-sharp claws—and walked away with little more than scratches.
Cyril thinks about this as he picks at his lunch, and watches across the hall to where Claude—the Undying Demon Prince of Almyra—is absorbed in seeing how much of Lorenz’s mashed potatoes he can spoon into the poor guy’s book-bag before he notices.
Idiot, Cyril thinks, stabbing a roast sweet potato with his fork.
Cyril tags along with Hilda to the border to fight his countrymen. It’s stupid, but he does it anyway because he knows what the Gonerils do to child soldiers and he’s not letting what happened to him happen to anyone else.
Claude is mad about the whole thing in general—the mission, Holst’s appointment of Hilda, Cyril wanting to go—which is initially hard to notice because for Claude ‘mad’ just seems to mean ‘quiet’.
He tells the professor he isn’t going and that’s it for a while. It’s it until he corners Cyril before the convoy rolls out to the Throat.
“You’re dead set on going?” He asks, and there’s more to his question than just what he says, so Cyril gives him more of an answer.
“I gotta make sure no one on our side gets any ideas… I don’t… I don’t want a repeat of what happened with me.”
Something passes over Claude’s expression. He looks sad and exasperated, but understanding flickers in his gaze. Cyril knows why he’s not coming, but he’s still surprised to see sympathy.
“Here.” Claude suddenly holds out a sheathed dagger. “I want you to take this. I know you’re not super confident with axes yet, so I want you to have something on you if shit goes sideways.”
Cyril takes a half step back. “I, uh, I couldn’t—”
“Cyril,” Claude says in a heavy voice. “Please. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
And, huh, would you look at that?
He means it.
There’s some etiquette thing about gift-giving that Cyril doesn’t know—perhaps he had been too young to be taught. He thinks this moment might be something significant, like he’s supposed to use a specific hand or refuse it first or say some sort of call and response, but he can’t remember.
So he just takes it, in the end, and draws it. It’s nothing special, just a typical iron dagger with a bone hilt. What strikes him about it is that it’s obviously worn.
It’s obviously used.
They say Prince Khalid killed the assassin himself, slit his throat with a dagger and walked away healthier than he’d started—
“Is this yours?” Cyril asks.
“It’s yours now,” Claude says with a thin smile. He doesn’t stick around to wave them goodbye.
Cyril doesn’t end up having to use the dagger, but he can’t decide whether that’s a good thing or not.
On one hand, it means he hadn’t been backed into a corner. It means they’d been victorious. But on the other hand it meant he had been pretty good at killing people before they got close to him. He’d been pretty good at killing.
To the surprise of probably no one but himself, Cyril returns from the Throat more confused and scared and angry than he had arrived.
He knows he should talk to Claude—to Khalid—he needs to talk to someone who has the barest hope of understanding him.
But he doesn’t.
He waits. He waits too long.
War is announced and the church shakes to its foundations—the most constant home Cyril has known since his first looks ready to tear itself apart. He hates it. He doesn’t know how he can help—he’s just one person, one useless little boy…
But there are people who don’t see him that way. People who want to help.
They’re at the training grounds when things come to a head.
Claude has one hand on Cyril’s bent elbow and the other resting in the space between his shoulder blades. His touch is light—barely there—but there’s a force behind it.
Claude presses his back a little harder.
“Remember this feeling, alright?” Claude’s voice is firm in his ear. “When you start flagging, you bring your elbow too far forward. That’s a flaw you can work on.”
Claude pulls Cyril’s elbow back slowly, lining it up with his outstretched arm, and Cyril feels his shoulder blades come together on the sides on Claude’s hand.
“Remember how far I’m pulling,” Claude says. “I want you to imagine my hand on your back and try to hold it there with just your shoulders.”
He lets go, leaving Cyril frozen in the new position.
“Don’t freak out,” Claude says. “I know you’re tired but that’s when you need to be more focused than ever. Breathe. Release.”
Cyril feels Claude’s phantom touch on his back and concentrates on it. He breathes out, holds, then fires.
The arrow flies true, piercing the centre ring of the target.
Cyril lets the tension slip from his shoulders and Claude gives him an encouraging pat on the back.
“Great job, buddy! Gimme one more.”
Cyril nocks and draws again, and Claude’s hands dance out over his arms, deft fingers adjusting his placement on the grip and the twist of his fingers on the string. He’s showing him a new draw—the kind Cyril might have learned if he’d stayed in the army.
He doesn’t want to think about the fact the hands that guide him, that raise his elbow up and press the space between his shoulder blades and applaud him when he lands a bullseye, are the hands of the king’s son.
Claude leans around to gauge his pupil’s eyeline, and Cyril feels the soft brush of the older boy’s braid on his cheek.
“Are you going to cut it off?” He asks quietly. Abruptly.
Claude pulls back and drops his hands. “What?”
“Your braid. She’s declared war,” Cyril says. He lowers his bow.
Claude is silent for a long time, and Cyril doesn’t dare turn around.
“Not on me specifically,” Claude says quietly. “I haven’t accepted her challenge. Not yet.”
That’s when Cyril braves it.
He turns and is met for the first time with the cold eyes of the Prince Khalid from scary stories and nightmares, the one with claws and fangs and flesh that cannot be cut by common blades. His gaze is sharp, like cut glass.
Cyril sucks in a short breath, holds it. “I’m sorry.”
He watches as Claude’s gaze softens as quickly as it hardened.
“No, I—don’t apologise, Cyril,” he says softly. “How long have you known I’m Almyran? I wondered if you knew… but…”
“A while,” Cyril admits. “Wasn’t hard when I sorta know what to look for.”
Claude sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “I guess if anyone was going to figure it out it would be you, huh?”
I also know you’re a prince, Cyril thinks, but he remembers how relieved Claude had looked when he hadn’t figured it out earlier, and Cyril doesn’t want to rock that specific boat, so he keeps his mouth shut.
“Kinda stupid to think I wouldn’t,” he says instead.
Claude laughs. “Yeah. I can be a bit of an idiot sometimes, can’t I?”
“Yeah.”
They fall into silence, and Cyril becomes acutely aware of how alone they are in the training grounds. It feels private here, in the early hours of the morning before the Lions bluster in to tear it apart. It feels like they could talk about anything.
Cyril knows he could speak in Almyran now, if he wanted to. But he doesn’t, and he knows it’s as much Claude’s refusal to draw out the mother tongue as his that leaves the space empty
“It’s, uh… It’s long,” Cyril says, gesturing to Claude’s braid. The older boy smiles.
“Bet you never saw ones this long out west,” Claude muses. He toys with the end of the braid, a sour sort of look on his face. “I’ve managed to go a long time, haven’t I?”
All Cyril can find it in himself to do is nod.
Braids in Almyra are worn by young people and grown until they see war for the first time. To cut a braid is to answer a challenge, to take up arms against a foe that has slighted you on a grandiose level. Once cut the hair is never tied the same way again.
Cyril had cut his at eight.
“I guess I’m hoping I won’t have to,” Claude says. “Like, maybe this whole thing is a big misunderstanding, and everything will work out in the end.”
He laughs.
“Makes me sound like a bit of a coward, right?”
“I don’t think it does,” Cyril says. “I don’t think not wanting to go to war makes you a coward, I think it just means you care about stuff besides fighting.”
A preconception: Cyril hates Claude.
A reason for a preconception: Cyril hates the king. Claude is Khalid and Khalid is the king’s son. Claude was allowed to grow his braid long in a golden palace in the sun and wanted for nothing while Cyril’s parents and then his childhood were taken from him.
But Cyril can’t help but think that everyone is missing the point. Everyone seems to forget that Khalid didn’t get the name ‘The Undying’ because he’s a monster. He got the name ‘The Undying’ simply because people hated a little boy so much they tried to murder him in his home while he slept, over and over, and kept fucking it up. And that’s not his fault. It won’t ever be his fault in the same way it’s not Cyril’s fault that the Knights stare daggers at him in training and push him around.
A realisation, belated as it is: Cyril actually doesn’t hate Claude at all.
“Thanks, Cyril,” Claude says gently, “for not telling anyone.”
“I wouldn’t,” Cyril says and means it. “You don’t gotta worry about that.”
Garreg Mach falls.
Lady Rhea and the Professor fall with it.
In the aftermath, among all the haze and rubble, Cyril sees Claude on his knees, eyes red with unshed tears—sees him raise a trembling arrow to the side of his head, one hand on the shaft and the other wrapped around his braid.
Claude jerks the arrowhead forward, slicing clean through the coiled hair in one swift motion. It falls from his fingers to the ground.
A declaration of war. An answered challenge.
Cyril knows he could go talk to him, but he doesn’t.
An irony: It’s the Almyrans that call people from Fódlan cowards, but Cyril feels like, right now, he might be the biggest coward of all.
He does not see Claude for five years.