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“If anything goes wrong,” Claude said, because he had to say it, because they had to be able to respond to anything that happened and not even Judith had been able to hold back Edelgard’s Black Eagle Strike Force, “anything at all, you’re going to retreat, right?”
Hilda rolled her eyes, exaggerated and dismissive, and poured them each another cup of tea. Almyran pine needle, fresher than he’d had since coming to Fódlan, courtesy of Nader and his unsubtle gifts of tribute. If Hilda guessed why, and she probably had, she kept her mouth shut.
“Of course I will,” she said. “What do you think I am, Faerghan?”
He laughed at that, sipped his tea. For all that she’d never asked him and no one had ever caught her learning, she knew the right way to brew it. Most Fódlani steeped it too long, leaving the flavor somehow dull and bitter at the same time, with none of the sharp intricacies that made it such a popular drink among commoners and royalty alike.
Hilda had made it perfectly from the first time she’d served it to him, just after the arrival of Nader’s first envoy.
“All of that talk of chivalry and duty and dying for honor,” Hilda continued, wrinkling her nose. “Ugh. It sounds like so much effort.”
“Of course,” he said, with a smile that almost reached his eyes. “Goddess forbid.”
They both knew perfectly well that she hadn’t gotten to where she was, a general in the Alliance army, his trusted right hand, without at least a little bit of effort. Sure, being Claude’s friend and the daughter of his most powerful allies helped—he wasn’t about to pretend there was no nepotism at play here, not when he believed so strongly in a world that was better than that—but she’d worked for it too.
But she’d earned her place on the front lines by fighting there, knee-deep in the bloody mud like any other soldier, never tiring despite spending long hours the day before checking over the equipment, because for all her complaints, she couldn’t rest until everything had been done correctly either.
And she’d earned her place by Claude’s side because he trusted her. Despite who he was, despite who she was, despite or more likely because they were both born politicians—which is to say liars, smiling with poison in their cups—he trusted her to stand beside him and advise him when he needed advice, or make him laugh when he needed that instead.
Sometimes, when she asked about his family, he thought about bringing her back to meet them, and then the tempting impossibility of that world made him think about another world, just as impossible, in which he returned and took the throne with her beside him.
If he stayed in Leicester, he might invite her to be his partner in governing Riegan, would gladly leave Derdriu in her hands when he left. Not because he loved her the way his parents were in love, though if he introduced her to them his mother would undoubtedly tease him as if that were the case, but because she was his friend. Were it not for the centuries of history that lay between them, in his wildest daydreams he might have brought her with him and made her a consort, even queen. The royal couple didn’t just need to be lovers, they needed to be comrades and co-conspirators, and she was the best co-conspirator a guy could ask for.
But he doubted the Almyran court would allow a second foreign-born queen in as many generations, especially a Goneril, any more than many of the officials would want a half-foreign prince to ascend the throne. And when it came down to it, he didn’t want that either. He cared for Hilda, and he respected Holst, but he could not forget—could not afford to overlook—that everything they had was earned in blood, that their inheritance was the maintenance of walls he wanted nothing more than to tear down.
He would give her Riegan. He would not give her Almyra.
He would find someone else to marry, of course. Despite what the most insular of his father’s courtiers might say, the last thing he wanted was for Almyra to become a second Fódlan.
(He wouldn’t inflict Fódlan’s social hierarchy, or the way it got into your head and convinced you of all sorts of messed up things about yourself, on even his worst enemies. Not that Almyra had no social stratification, of course, but at least Almyra didn’t worship Crests. At least in Almyra more people understood that the way things were wasn’t the way things always had to be. Probably because in Almyra that kind of understanding wasn’t being deliberately suppressed by a hegemonic religious authority that encouraged total obedience to church doctrine over any possibility of structural change, but that was beside the point.)
So no, he wouldn’t offer to marry Hilda, but he might invite her along to become one of his advisors– No, she would reject any sort of official position, but she would advise him all the same, with some legitimacy granted to her by marriage—if she wanted—to one of his official advisors, or maybe one of his brothers, one that had been convinced to support his bid for the throne.
Not Shahid; he would most likely try to have Claude assassinated as soon as he set foot in the capital, or maybe this time he’d cut out the middleman and do the job himself. But maybe she would hit it off with someone like Samir, who had always been more interested in his engineering projects than the struggle for the throne, and whose mother, Lady Fatima, could do things with textiles that would make Hilda weep with jealousy.
And Claude, who would need a consort if he wanted to make a serious play for kingship, would marry some nice Almyran noblewoman. Well. No. She would have to be a politician as well, as capable of charm as she was of ruthlessness, same as him or Hilda. He wouldn’t know what to do with a nice wife. He had never really known what to do with nice people, ones who were genuinely nice on the surface and kind and caring underneath, not just hiding knives behind their smiles and rote niceties.
One of his sisters was nice—Mahin, who was always recommending musicians for their father to patronize and who had once, unsuccessfully, tried to teach Claude how to play a strange wind instrument she’d bought from a Morfisi trader—and Claude had never known how to talk to her. Ignatz had been nice, too, and look where that had gotten him.
“And that goes for you too,” she said. He pretended not to see her spoon more sugar into her tea, like it was some cheap Adrestian blend that needed the sweetness to hide the poor quality of the leaves. His mother did the same thing except with honey, though she preferred it when his father’s sister Lady Dima made tea the way her mother taught her, with plenty of cardamom and a touch of saffron. He suspected Hilda would enjoy it as well; he could never get it exactly right and he didn’t want to serve it unless he could do it justice. Also, it was a pain to get his hands on saffron in this country. “No dramatic last stands, okay?”
“Dramatic? Me?” he said, holding a hand to his heart in exaggerated mock offense. It was a gesture he’d picked up to tease Lorenz, and it wasn’t nearly as funny now that Lorenz had followed his father into the Imperial fold. He didn’t begrudge Lorenz that, exactly, knowing that Lorenz had never had an easy time maintaining his father’s affection and respecting that at least this time his choice meant better lives for the people of Gloucester territory. But it did make his calculations more difficult, without Gloucester supplies and Gloucester funds and Gloucester cavalry. And then there was the empty space in Claude’s life left behind by Lorenz himself. More soberly, he continued, “You know me, backup plans for backup plans. No matter what goes wrong, as long as there’s another day we can work something out.”
“So true,” said Hilda. “And right now, all I want to work out is the menu for our victory feast.”
It was supposed to be bad luck to plan the celebration before the fight, like seeing the bride too early on your wedding day. Claude’s mother had taught him that, and Lorenz had been fond of reminding him. Must’ve been a Leicester superstition.
But his father had taught him it was worse luck not to. Not thinking about what came next meant you might not be facing the right direction when you got there. You had to know what you wanted in order to get it.
And besides, his father would always say, there were few things less enjoyable than a poorly planned feast.
Hey, it had worked for his father, had won him the throne despite the efforts of his three older brothers, one of whom he’d killed in a duel on the steps of the palace. Claude was hoping that if he returned and made his play for the throne, he wouldn’t have to do anything like that. Partially because even though several of his brothers were far from his favorite people, he did still care about them and wanted to build the future with them instead of on the backs of their corpses, and partially because it would probably be Shahid, and he always fought dirty.
Anyway, the point was, planning the victory feast the night before the battle had become a ritual for him and Hilda, and so far it had always worked out in their favor. Not that Claude particularly believed in luck, other than what he and his friends could make.
“Okay,” said Claude. “How do you feel about salmon? And maybe pairing it with the last barrels of that wine from Margave Edmund?” The wine that Margrave Edmund had gifted to the Riegan estate in happier times—a light, dry white from a Gronder vineyard in which he had invested—was, at this point, the only thing they had enough of if they wanted to serve everyone at the feast the same thing. After that, they would have to start mixing and matching. Or maybe after they staved off the invasion of Derdriu they could take back a castle with a fully stocked wine cellar.
“But salmon is out of season,” said Hilda, crossing her arms. Goneril, despite being largely cut off from the ocean by the tail end of the mountains, was close enough to being on the water that Hilda had very strong opinions about seafood. Though from Claude’s understanding, salmon were a coldwater fish, far more common off the coast of Edmund land than in the warmer waters that lay between Goneril and the outlying islands of Morfis. They were certainly nowhere to be found in the seas around Almyra.
Lorenz had strong views on seafood as well, despite hailing from landlocked Gloucester, though of course his main stance was that trout from the tributaries that fed the Airmid were the only fish worth eating.
Lorenz had strong views on most things, to be fair; he always made their feast-planning sessions entertaining. Never let it be said that Hilda and Claude couldn’t fill a room with conversation, but Claude still felt like there were gaps where Lorenz’s opinions should have gone.
“We just got some imported on that last ship that made it into the harbor,” said Claude, “you know, the one from Albinea that also brought your favorite jam?” She’d been rationing her last jar of it up until the ship came, spreading it thinner and thinner on her scones every morning until it was more of a suggestion of fruit than anything else.
Claude had already agreed to add a provision for the import of wild cherries into the trade deal he was going to make with Albinea once the war was over. Or maybe he would just get on friendly terms with whomever they sent as ambassador.
“It’s not the same once it’s been put on ice,” Hilda said with a pout. “We have enough spices left to hide the taste but we don’t have enough Noa fruit to make the sauce thick enough to hide the texture.”
“We could use blackcurrants instead,” said Claude, because he knew Hilda would hate the idea, though Lorenz, who rated a good glass of blackcurrant cordial almost as highly as a fine Airmid Valley rosé, would have agreed, “and I know we have plenty of dried apples to make up for the lost volume. That would probably work, we can even call it a winter variation on an old favorite.”
“Are you crazy?” Hilda said, as he thought she would. “Absolutely not! I’m putting my foot down, we can’t pair currants with the Gronder white. Don’t you know how sour that will make everything taste?”
Claude laughed, glad that she was playing along, grateful to be able to take refuge in the normalcy of the conversation. And really, wasn’t that what feasts were all about? Giving people an excuse to have a good time, no matter how bad things were, and make them feel like together they could make things better? Well, besides how feasts were a great way to watch people and figure out who was on your side, who was demoralized, who was sleeping with whom and who wasn’t but wanted to be, who was planning on stabbing you in the back. Or the front.
“What if,” Claude said, “we just go hunting and roast up whatever we catch? We’re bound to find something that goes together.”
Hilda laughed too, setting her tea down before she spilled it, and smacked him playfully on the shoulder, and for a moment they were back at the Academy again, splitting a bottle of wine liberated from the Knights’ Hall and making increasingly ridiculous bargains over their chore assignments, war still only a distant inevitability.
Claude reached the border between Leicester and Almyra when the sun was low in the sky. Even this far south, even over a month after the winter solstice, daylight still didn’t last especially long, and the hardy, gnarled pine trees that grew in the foothills of the mountains cast long shadows.
Holst Goneril cast an even longer one.
At least Claude didn’t have to break the news himself; Edelgard’s messengers, sent to every corner of the Alliance to herald her victory, had done it for him. And though Edelgard had kept Freikugel, presumably to destroy it in her mission to rid the world of Crests and Relics, she’d allowed the surrendering Goneril troops to return Hilda’s body to her parents.
So there was, in some ways, no real reason for Claude to be here. It would’ve been more direct for him to cross the mountains farther north, flying through the lands once controlled by the Eastern Church. The Empire would have less of a presence there, since the Eastern Church didn’t have enough power to be a threat the way some of the noble houses of the Alliance did, and they broke the Alliance’s power when they took Derdriu.
He’d had to avoid more patrols in Goneril land, flying low as he wound his way through the most remote forests of the territory, and at the end of his flight was this: a clearing in the rugged hills below a mountain pass, at a stretch of border marked only by a stone bearing the names of both lands because the terrain was too impassable for a battalion let alone an army, and just as impassable of a man.
Holst Goneril was the terror of the Almyran infantry, the scion of a house that many Almyrans considered their greatest enemy in all of Fódlan, and he was the brother of Claude’s best friend. Claude’s dead best friend, now, dead because she’d followed him into battle and didn’t follow him out.
Of course I’ll retreat, she’d said. What do you think I am, Faerghan? And he’d laughed, because everyone knew that Faerghan knights were fools who would throw their lives away for king and country and church, and he could understand dying for an ideal but not for one as cruel and unthankful as chivalry. But it had been Felix Fraldarius, who would have been Shield of Faerghus, who had abandoned his king to fight for Edelgard and her new world, forcing Nader the Undefeated to retreat, while Hilda, who had scoffed at the idea of self-sacrifice, had died throwing herself in front of Adrestia’s army—in front of Sylvain Gautier and his awful, ill-fated lance—just to slow them down before they reached Claude.
He didn’t know who had struck down Ignatz, or Judith, though to hear her surviving soldiers tell it, she’d nearly turned the tide of the battle on her own before being overwhelmed by the Empire’s superior numbers, bolstered by rogue Kingdom battalions.
(At least Lorenz had left, at least Lorenz had survived–)
Not that he begrudged any of the former Blue Lions their treason—he wouldn’t have stuck around, with Faerghus being ripped apart to fuel Rhea’s revenge, no matter how much sympathy he felt for Dimitri, who was just as trapped as any of them—but he couldn’t help but wonder: what if he hadn’t written them off so quickly? What if he’d been the one to impress Felix or persuade Sylvain, instead of Edelgard and her professor? Felix he’d never been able to have a conversation with because no one did unless they wanted to talk about swordsmanship, but Sylvain had almost been his friend.
They’d played chess together, anyway, and Sylvain had been good enough to beat Claude a few times—which was more than anyone else at Garreg Mach could say, and none of them would have stood a chance against Claude’s father, who had taught him how to play, or his brother Malik, who had taught him how to cheat—and maybe if Claude had pushed him harder to say something real, had risked lowering his own guard enough to ask what Sylvain thought about Fódlan, about the system, about the future, would it have been enough to win him over?
Could they have stood together against the Empire for long enough to convince Edelgard to hear him out, to negotiate with her, to show her that they wanted so many of the same things?
All useless questions now, hypotheticals for his biographers. The only question that mattered was what would happen next.
“Duke Riegan,” said Holst, respectful as ever even though he had to know that Claude had renounced his claim on the title when he had fled the land and people which granted it, face unreadable in the stark shadows, as Claude dismounted his wyvern. He faced west, his back to the stone that marked the border, squinting into the sun as Claude approached. He was never as theatrical as Hilda, but he was the next Duke Goneril, and he knew how to make a statement. Right now the statement he made—positioning himself with the sun in his eyes, giving Claude the advantage should this turn into a fight, but planting himself between Claude and his way out—was that Claude was leaving because he permitted it.
Or maybe just that he wasn’t allowed to leave without saying goodbye.
“General,” said Claude, returning Holst’s respectful nod. And then his words failed him, unable to capture the enormity of everything he needed Holst to know he felt. When Jeralt had died, he’d given his best shot at comforting Byleth, even though he couldn’t begin to fathom how it felt to lose someone so important to you. He’d felt inadequate then. He felt more inadequate now, understanding but unable to do anything about it.
“You’re leaving,” Holst said, while Claude floundered. He’d spent all his optimism when he spoke to Edelgard and Byleth, and he’d been alone in the wilderness for too many days to be able to don the mask again so quickly. “Aren’t you.”
It wasn’t a question, but it wasn’t a command either, only the flat resignation that lay in between.
“Leicester would never be at peace if I stayed,” he said, an argument he’d made to himself over and over until it outweighed the arguments against leaving.
“Leicester is no more,” said Holst. “Leicester belongs to the Emperor now.”
“The Alliance may be no more,” Claude said, “but Leicester remains. The people of Leicester remain.”
“Not all of them.”
“No,” Claude agreed. “Not all of them.”
He’d written a letter to Ignatz’s parents after receiving the news from Myrddin, an unfinished sketch folded into its pages. Marianne had found it while going through his things, and Raphael had recognized it as the view from his attic bedroom at his parents’ house: the River Avon lined by beeches and elms, the spire of the local church visible just beyond. His home, calm and peaceful and safe.
Ignatz would still be alive if his parents hadn’t pushed him to be a knight, if Edelgard hadn’t decided that the lives of the people of the Alliance were worth less to her than a second route into the Kingdom, if Claude hadn’t called on his friends to fight for him.
But Ignatz had still had a smudge of ink on his cheek when he’d ridden out to his death, and his final drawing had been of his home. When Claude returned home, he would have to explain to his mother that her best friend had died for him. They’d be a matching set; after all, Claude’s best friend had died for him too.
“What did you want to say to me?” said Holst. He was a smart man, he would have known what it meant when his scouts spotted a white wyvern this far south, heading toward the border. He would have known what it meant that Claude allowed himself to be seen.
“I know,” Claude said, “that it may be unfair to ask this of you.” His throat was dry. None of his addresses to his troops or to his war council or to the Roundtable had been this difficult. But then, before, he’d been able to hone the finer points of his rhetoric exchanging barbs with Lorenz, or mixed into the gossip he exchanged with Hilda.
He had come to Fódlan alone and he would leave Fódlan alone—his precious wyvern Barbarossa notwithstanding—but in between, briefly, he’d had the kind of friends with whom he could’ve rebuilt the world.
“Ask,” said Holst. His approach was nothing like Hilda’s—he commanded, face stoney, arms crossed, where she would have wheedled and whined and pouted and clung from his shoulders like he was her neglectful cad of a suitor—but his ability to cut through his equivocating was the same, and it cut through his delay tactics straight through to his heart, where he’d locked his grief away.
“If you have any plans to retaliate against the Empire,” Claude said, knowing that it was possible, even likely, that in Holst’s eyes to make such a request meant he was forfeiting his right to make any request at all, “I ask that you… wait. Leicester cannot withstand another war so soon.”
A more hotheaded man—Lorenz—or a crueler one—Duke Goneril or Count Gloucester—might have sneered, might have said that someone who was abandoning his seat deserved no say in what happened to what he left behind. But Holst just frowned and said, “My sister deserves justice.”
“Yes,” Claude said. “She does. But she wouldn’t want you to die for it, or for Goneril to be torn apart, which is what will happen if you challenge the Emperor now. I’m not saying you need to forgive her, or let it go, but just. Wait.” He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. “The world she’s trying to build, it’s way closer to the one we were fighting for than the world Rhea will make us all live in if she loses.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” said Holst, “and you haven’t even told me what this will cost you yet.”
“Haven’t I?” said Claude, with a brittle laugh, and– there, just at the corners of Holst’s eyes, he saw his expression soften, just a little. “No, but you’re right. I wouldn’t have made a request like that without something to offer in return.”
Holst shifted his weight, crossed his arms, waited for Claude to spit it out. The thing was, he’d always kind of meant for Holst to know, because he’d meant for everyone to know eventually. But he’d never meant for him to find out like this.
He pictured the look on his mother’s face when he’d told her he was leaving, the care with which she’d wrapped a traveling cloak around his shoulders and tested the sharpness of the dagger tucked up his sleeve. Her second-to-last gift to him was another dagger, this one for his boot, slim and straight as a needle. Her last gift to him was advice: Judith’s name, and the certainty that an old friendship would be strong enough to make a start on earning her loyalty.
He hadn’t understood the look on his mother’s face at the time, the softness around her eyes, the wistful turn of her lips, but he recognized it well enough by the time he saw it mirrored on Judith’s face, when Claude introduced himself as his mother’s son.
“I can give you peace with Almyra. Not right away, not tomorrow, but within our lifetimes, maybe even within a few years, I can promise that there will be an end to the fighting between Leicester and Almyra.”
“And who are you,” said Holst, almost tiredly, “that you can promise such a thing?”
Claude closed his eyes for a moment, breathed in deeply the scent of the pines and the crisp mountain air, and then looked levelly at Holst and said, “I am the son of the King of Almyra. Before another year passes, I intend to be his heir.”
Five years ago, it might have been a boast. Now it was a statement of fact. He had appeared as if from nowhere to claim his seat as head of House Reigen and won the cooperation if not the respect of the lords of the Alliance at the Roundtable and beyond, starting with nothing but a name and his wits and the friends he’d won over along the way, had been on the verge of reshaping Fódlan with his own hands.
He was returning to Almyra in defeat, but he had led armies, had fought alongside Nader and earned the respect of his men, and that would earn him the respect of the other generals and admirals and martial-minded nobles and common soldiers alike. He had honed his ideas on governance—good and bad—by observing at the Roundtable and reading through everything the Church allowed to be read in the library at Garreg Mach, and everything the Church didn’t allow to be read in the library below it, and that would allow him to hold his own in dialogue with the philosophers and orators who spoke at court, and earn their respect as well. And he had spent years earning Judith’s respect and bickering with Lorenz over supply line logistics and balancing Derdriu’s budget—a tangled mess of archaic tax codes and underfunded social welfare projects—which would give him experience that even the most conservative of the bureaucrats would at least have to listen to.
And he’d always had an ear for gossip, but with Hilda it had been a game, one in which they pushed each other to excel, and that had made it tolerable to act as his own spymaster, which wouldn’t earn him any respect but it would help keep him alive.
None of his brothers had that kind of experience. Each of his brothers, or at least those with serious ambitions, had their own factions of followers—painstakingly courted aristocrats and generals and admirals, merchants and civil servants and priests to whom they owed favors, the people of regions who had benefited from their various infrastructural projects, though the latter mostly applied to Samir with his irrigation canals and Rahim with his controversial but long overdue overhaul of the toll network—but none of them had been able to consolidate their power. None of them had the experience unifying a country, and none of them would think to reach out and compromise. Or even if they might someday, none of them were there yet, and Claude was ready now.
If Claude had reached out to Edelgard sooner, if he hadn’t been so worried that the delicate balance of the Alliance might break, if she had sent diplomats instead of a vanguard, if he and Lorenz had been on the same page, maybe–
“I see,” Holst said, crossing his arms. The shadows across his face rendered his expression unreadable, but Claude couldn’t imagine he looked too impressed. And then: “Can you guarantee it?”
“As much as anyone can guarantee anything,” said Claude, because Hilda would’ve snorted at that and he hoped that Holst might at least crack a smile. “Once I retake my place in court, I’ll use my influence to… buy Leicester some time to rebuild, at least. And as crown prince, as king, I’m hoping to build a lasting peace and even cooperation between our nations.”
He felt himself slipping into the cadences of a roundtable speech, but he couldn’t help it, no matter how much of a politician it made him sound in what should have been a personal moment. His dream was too important to him, too close to his heart, for him to be able to use any words that he hadn’t already practiced and polished until they felt like they belonged to someone else.
“Of course, if Fódlan attacks Almyra, we will defend ourselves. If the Emperor gets any ideas about continuing her conquest and turns those ambitions toward Almyra, we will defend ourselves. And if the various petty lords”—in both senses of the word—“think that they can twist a peace treaty solely for their own gain, and that I will allow it because of my mother’s name, they could not be more wrong.” He smiled, pleasantly, the way he would smile when he needed to convince Lorenz and Hilda of something particularly audacious. “But if you’re on board, I’m pretty sure we can make it work. I mean, they respect you in Faerghus, even. You’re the Hero of Leicester, the gorget guarding Fódlan’s Throat. If you say you want peace, with the Empire, with Almyra, people will listen to you.”
The thing was, Claude wanted communication—cooperation, even open borders if he could swing it—between Almyra and Fódlan, whether or not Holst agreed. It was just that unless he could convince Holst to stay his hand instead of taking on Edelgard with everything he had, he wasn’t sure there would be a Fódlan left for him to make peace with. And besides, a victorious Rhea, even one helped to her victory by Holst's intervention, would be far less likely to negotiate with Claude at all.
It was a gamble; how could it not be? House Goneril had made their name fighting against Almyran incursions, venturing onto Almyran land for their own raids. Their proven military mettle had won them the respect of the rest of Leicester, the rest of Fódlan even, enough that they could afford a non-Crested heir. Their strength didn’t come from their Relic, the way House Gautier thought theirs did; it came from their tactics, their numbers, the determination of their soldiers.
True peace would render their troops obsolete. The heir to such a house might’ve dreaded peace as a result, might have done everything to cling to their old ways of holding power instead of adapting to a new world. There would be many heirs and lords in similar positions who would object for those reasons alone, before you even got into the way most of them felt about Almyra, and it would take more than a peace treaty to dismantle that kind of thinking. And maybe Claude was lying to himself, thinking that any of this could possibly work out, but there was no one left to call him on it.
But you had to start somewhere, and Holst had never loved fighting for its own sake: more than anything Holst had loved his sister, and he had wanted to keep her safe.
“I see,” said Holst again. And then he shook his head, with a breath of disbelieving laughter. “You know what, why not. If anyone can do it, it’s you. I’ll be looking forward to it.”
“Thank you,” Claude said, with an attempt at his sunniest carefree smile. “See you at the peace talks, then. Keep yourself safe in the meantime, okay? Don’t go accepting food or drinks from the Emperor’s shadow or anything.”
He began to turn away, dried needles crunching underfoot as he stepped back towards Barbarossa, but Holst called him back, holding out his hand to shake. He didn’t pull him in for a back-slapping hug, the way he might’ve before, but he held him there for a moment, their arms clasped together, one last moment in which they were comrades.
“She really believed in you, you know,” said Holst, as he released him.
“I know,” said Claude. His throat was tight. Hilda was always pretending she didn’t care about anything but the latest fashions and hottest gossip, didn’t believe in much of anything besides getting out of doing chores, but he’d known. One performer to another, he’d known. For all her complaints, she’d never left. For all her flippancy, she’d been the one to coax Marianne out of her shell, to encourage Leonie in her rare moments of doubt, to get Claude absolutely wasted on gin cocktails—all varying shades of pink, the ingredients of which he had no hope of recalling—the night they received their last letter from Lorenz, declaring on behalf of Count Gloucester their intention to join the Empire.
“Don’t forget,” Holst said, “what she did for you.”
“I won’t,” said Claude. When he shook his head, two of his earrings clinked together softly: one had been a gift from his brother Karim, back when he was young enough that his gifts were jewelry or a new book instead of poison on the lining of a new shirt or lessons from a dancing instructor who turned out to be a hired assassin, and the other Hilda had made for him, deftly twisting the wires and threading the beads as she listened to him talk through the latest reports from the front. “I swear it.”
Holst nodded, said, “Travel safe,” and turned his back before Claude could see more than the first sheen of tears in his eyes. Claude pretended that the tears pricking at his own eyes were caused by the cold mountain breeze.
He fed Rossa a scrap of jerky before climbing into her saddle. They would have to fly through the night before finding a place to rest; now that Edelgard had announced her intention to keep the border in Goneril’s stead, there was a risk of Imperial patrols until he reached the Almyran side of the pass.
At least he could now be sure that Holst wouldn’t turn him in. Even if some of his generals, angry at their loss and looking for someone to blame, still might.
As a rule, Claude didn’t trust the old lords of the Roundtable, or their generals. If it were just their hands in which he’d left the future, well. He couldn’t honestly say he would have left, consequences be damned.
But he understood Edelgard's goal of a new, more equitable Fódlan, which was a kind of trust, and he knew Lorenz, knew him despite everything—his defection, his tendency to put his foot in his mouth whenever anyone let him talk for too long—to be honorable and true and dedicated to the improvement of the lives of all people, with the logistical sense to back it up, and that too was trust.
And maybe Lorenz and Holst—and Lysithea, who had surrendered at Derdriu and now served at the Emperor’s left hand, and Marianne, who would return to her father and his careful politicking—could convince Edelgard that Leicester was better off governing herself, as soon as the Archbishop and her influence had been removed. It wouldn’t even be that great a task; Leicester had always preferred the Eastern Church over the Central, and local parish churches over even that.
Maybe someday Holst and Nader would meet at the negotiating table instead of on the battlefield, and afterwards at a table in a tavern where they could arm wrestle and finally determine who was the strongest. And maybe when Lorenz planned an afternoon tea to welcome the diplomats to the first peace summit, he would serve the biscuits with Hilda’s favorite jam, as if she were there nagging him about it until he caved.
He would look forward to watching the new future that would be built for Fódlan. If only Hilda—and Ignatz and Judith and Claude himself—had been able to shape it too.
The sun was setting at his back as he flew towards the pass, casting long shadows beneath him, but in the morning the sun would rise again and he would be moving steadily towards the dawn.