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The only son of the King of Almyra, rightful but not presumptive heir to the Wyvern Throne, bearer of a Crest of the Ten Elites, known as Claude von Riegan for the last six years: stares out at the waters of Derdriu and swallows the taste of failure and salt.
Here, at the edge of the docks, Almyra and Leicester are both at his back. So is Edelgard’s army; so, abruptly, is Adrestia, spreading its feathered wings over the continent again. Somewhere across the water is whatever remains of Dimitri Alexandre Blaidydd; somewhere across the water is the last bastion of the Seiros church, and an ancient, ancient woman with eyes like distant winter stars. Rhea would call this a battle of heretics: apostate Hresvelgs, pagan Alymrans. If Edelgard is to be believed — and Edelgard at least believes it — Rhea has spent a thousand years forbidding her faithful to reach across the mountains.
But behind him, there is blood on the streets of his city.
Maybe if he’d swallowed his conscience and his hopes enough to fall in on one side, or the other. Maybe if he’d held the Great Bridge himself instead of sending Judith to her death. Maybe if he’d gotten Lorenz to listen to him, even once. Maybe if he’d nailed the Weathervane to the ground years ago. Maybe if he’d been a little more patient or a little more harsh with all the Alliance’s squabbling heads.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Footsteps on the docks behind him, unsteady and limping. Blood and jasmine perfume carried to him on the salt air. “Hey there, Mr. Leader Man.”
“Eh, not anymore,” Claude says lightly, turning his back on the water. “It’s in Edelgard’s hands now. We’ll see how she does with it.”
“I guess.” Hilda has cleaned herself up some, but there’s blood on her dress, in her hair, on Freikugul’s hooks where it’s slung over her back. Her right leg drags along the dock, bandaged — dingy and unartful. Bernadetta von Varley’s arrow punched through her calf and nailed her to the ground, or so Claude would bet from the way he saw the figures move. He doesn’t need to guess about the Aegir cavalry; the docks were plenty close enough for him to watch them ride her down. Her battered hands are linked in front of her, twisting together. “Claude, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Claude says, smiling. “I’ll land on my feet sooner or later. Can’t keep me down for long.” That doesn’t quite work, as imagery goes; up, down, betwixt and between. Ah well.
“No, I don’t —” Hilda shakes her head frantically; her hair slaps against her back like emphasis. Her teeth dig deep enough into her lip to turn white and dire. “I mean, I’m sorry. I… I’m sorry.” Her voice is very small. “I never wanted to let you down.”
“What?!” Claude’s feet take him three steps forward on the dock while he’s still rearranging his thoughts around her words. “Hilda, what? What are you talking about? I never — no one could ask for more.”
“Um, yes you could?” She rolls her eyes, a bitter grimacing shadow of her playful scorn when they were students. Her shoulders hunch. “I tried, I did! But then the horses, and then by the time I got back up they were already past me, and I tried to catch them but they were at the bridge before I could, and I — I tried, Claude, I just —”
“Hilda.” He catches her shoulders, only just remembering to be careful of her wounds. “Hilda. I thought —” There is still a thin red line at her throat where Ferdinand von Aegir’s lance rested. Claude thought he might vomit from wyvernback, then. He relearned how to breathe with the slow shake of Byleth Eisner’s head, the sharp no-cut of her arm from across the battlefield, and the whirl of Ferdinand’s horse. “Hilda, I thought I’d lost you. When they pinned you down before you could retreat, I —”
“Retreat?” Her voice cracks. “I mean, I know I’m not the most reliable person, but… did you really think I’d do that to you?”
A gap opens up between them like a crack in shaking earth. He thought, he really thought, he was used to the suicidal Fódlan honor.
“I told Judith to retreat at Myrrdin,” he says. His voice shakes. “She didn’t listen to me. The most important order I ever gave her, and she didn’t listen. If I’d known you thought — I counted on you retreating, Hilda. I wouldn’t have put you out there if I didn’t.” They brought Judith home wrapped in Leicester colors. Would Hilda have been buried in gold, or in the flag of Goneril, or does Edelgard’s regime mean she would be buried in red? “I never wanted you to die for me. I wanted you to come back alive.”
She sniffles slightly, unartful and muffled. Tries to smile. “Well. Here I am.”
“Good.” It’s deeply inadequate. He’s still clutching her shoulders; he lets go, catches himself flexing his fingers like he’s trying to shake off numbing cramps. He tries to smile. “I need someone to keep an eye on Edelgard’s people while I’m gone, after all. Make sure there isn’t too much trouble.”
“Oh, Lysithea will do that much better than I could,” Hilda says, with a shrug that approaches her usual airiness. “She’s pretty much part of the inner circle already, you’d think she’s a long-lost friend. More than just from the Academy, I mean. Did you know something about that?”
“I… had some theories,” Claude hedges. He’s not blind: Edelgard and Lysithea both have hair as fine and pale as cold mist; both have eyes with the color drained out of them; both move to a frenetic unheard drumbeat. There’s an obvious answer, rooted in blood and someone’s bad behavior, but Claude can’t quite make the math work; can’t work out when Ionius IX and Lady Ordelia would have met. Maybe Lysithea is kin to neither of the people who raised her, an Imperial bastard hidden away in Ordelia any time these last fifteen years, or maybe the answer is something darker and more strange. Another mystery it looks like Claude will never get a chance to answer.
He jars himself motionlessly out of the reverie and smiles for Hilda. “Anyway, don’t sell yourself short. You’ll do great.”
“I’m not the kind of person Edelgard would take seriously,” Hilda says, shaking her head. “Anyway, Lysithea will take care of it just fine. I’ll be much more useful with you.”
Claude is already opening his mouth around an encouraging argument when the last sentence sinks in, and for a moment his mouth simply hangs.
“Wait,” he says. He doesn’t quite recognize his own voice. “Hold on a second. Are you sure you know where I’m going, after this? Because —”
“Uh, obviously?” Hilda says. “I mean, I didn’t think you called up Almyran warships by writing them a nice note.”
“Have you thought about this? You sure you want to live with all us unreliable brutes?” The edge in his voice is harsh, unplanned, but he’s at the edge of his defeat and had an old teacher’s blade at his throat today and the anger escapes him. Hilda’s wince hurts him anyway.
“Did I say that?” she asks, fluttery and artificial. “I guess I did. You know you can’t take anything I say seriously.” Claude’s jaw clenches, and she sighs, glancing at the docks around them. The affectation slips off her again like a robe she’s forgotten to hold closed. “It turns out we all look like unreliable brutes from the other side of a war, don’t we?”
What a bitter mirror of all Claude’s dreams.
“You don’t even know my name,” he says, but it’s softer. Sadder. Hilda blinks, which isn’t surprising, but then she sets her shoulders and tilts her chin back, and for a split second she is the spitting image of Holst.
“Maybe, but I can tell when you’re really smiling and when you’re not,” she says. “Your General Nader can’t.” Hilda is surprising him in all kinds of ways, today.
“I… did not know you knew that about me,” he admits. Drags his fingers through his hair. “Okay. Wow. Okay. But, Hilda — you know it won’t be easy, right? Even without — paying attention to what you said before. They don’t like the people of Fódlan at home any more than people like Alymrans here.” They’re cowards over there, the story in Almyra goes, while on the other side of Fódlan’s Throat people are throwing their corpses headlong at their lords’ feet. “You’ll have to learn the language. The food won’t be what you’re used to.” And here he is, arguing against what he’s always believed to be possible, believed to be true: we’re not that different in the end. And yet. “And then there’s your brother. Are you sure you haven’t had enough of being on the opposite side of a war from people you know?”
That one does land. She looks away, lifts one hand to touch the hilt of her axe. “Well, no one’s going to send me to the border, right?” she says, looking at the water. “And anyway, Fódlan’s Locket is Edelgard’s problem now. Who knows who she’ll decide to put there? It might not even be him. And anyway, Holst won’t like it, but I mean — we can get him a letter, right? I can make him understand.”
“Yeah? I don’t know if that’s an easy thing for family to understand.” When Claude first met Duke Oswald, his grandfather looked at him like Claude was a ghost right out of the grave. He called out for Tiana in the last hours of his life, not having seen his daughter in twenty-five years. No, it’s not an easy thing for family to accept. But on the other hand, Holst has always seen the iron in Hilda, hasn’t he? If Claude reads him right, Holst has been waiting for years to see her will brought to bear in its full and formidable force. Everyone’s getting their wishes granted lately, seems.
“He’ll understand. Come on, Claude, don’t you have enough to worry about?” Hilda wheedles. “Let me worry about my brother.” She’s in perfect cajoling mode, head tilted, eyes beguiling. From a distance you could think she was the same as in their academy days, carefree and hopeful and trying to get out of work. Claude feels himself at the apex of a headlong jump, gravity just starting to take hold again. Time a flip badly enough, and that sudden sinking gravity will be the only hint you have about the direction of the waiting ground.
“You get that if you do this, this is it, right?” he asks her. His voice catches roughly, unexpected and unplanned. “I mean, maybe Edelgard will change things. I have to hope, right? But if things don’t change a lot, over here… they’re never going to let you come home.”
She bites her lip, silent for a moment. It should be a relief, with the reckless weight of what she’s offering: a gift that Claude has just proved himself unable to repay. It shouldn’t hollow out his stomach, shouldn’t lurch like grief. Hilda shrugs one shoulder.
“I mean,” she says. “No more Alliance, right? So… I couldn’t really go home anyway. I might as well be somewhere new.”
Ah. Well, that makes a bitter kind of sense, doesn’t it?
“You know I can’t promise you anything, right?” he asks, grabbing at the last handhold he has. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when I get home, what my position will be. I was hoping I could prove myself over here, and it hasn’t exactly worked out the way I hoped. It’s not going to be easy, even for me, and I’m not leaving everything I’ve ever known.”
“All the more reason you should have someone you can trust to back you up,” she says, and slows, her gaze dropping to the dock. “I mean, unless you’d rather I didn’t? If you think I’d just get in the way…”
“What? Hilda, no.” He grabs for her hands before he can think, clutching tight at bloodied skin. “There’s no one I’d rather have with me, but I can’t —” He stops then, because Hilda is smiling, tiny and satisfied and fierce. “Wow, you got me, huh?” he says, and even with the Alliance in pieces behind him, he can’t help but laugh. So does she.
“I mean, it was true a little,” she says. “I was worried! But I had to get you to stop arguing somehow, didn’t I?” She squeezes his fingers. “Look. I know where I want to be, okay? So just… let me stay there.” Between him and the world.
“No one could be luckier. Or ask for more.” He runs his thumb along the side of her hand, over the edges of the callus. “Just — promise me something, all right? Where I come from —” He stops, half-laughing. Shakes his head. “I guess I can just say it now, huh? In Almyra, you haven’t completely lost a battle as long as you still walk away. You’re going to have to pick up a few things, so… make that one of them? If we go into battle again, bring me Almyran victories. Because if you do this, and I lose you…” I’ll never forgive myself. I’ll be alone. I might give up on everything I dream of, just so I never have to watch another person die for me, if you follow me over the mountains and learn what my home is really like and then you sacrifice yourself. It hurt enough this first time. “…well, let’s not find out,” he says, smiling crookedly.
“It’s not like I want to die, you know,” she huffs. “I like being alive! So yeah, sure, next time I’ll fall back. As long as I know you’re ready for it. And if there even is a next time.”
“I’ll take it.” He’ll let her know, every time, that he doesn’t plan on her death. As many times as it needs to be said. It may be a few.
“So, Mr. Leader Man,” she says, letting their hands sway gently between them like a bridge in a wind, “are you going to tell me what I should start calling you?”
He opens his mouth to speak and has to swallow, instead, against a rush of animal terror. But he’s spent his life proving he’s not a coward, throwing himself into air and gravity to prove it, and this fear doesn’t make sense anyway, so he licks his lips and says, “Khalid. I’m Khalid ibn Shahin.”
“Khalid,” Hilda repeats thoughtfully, and then corrects herself: “Khalid? Khalid. Khalid ibn Shahin. Like that?” Her mouth is a soft pink curl around the worlds.
“Yeah. Like that.” His own full Almyran name, in Hilda’s mouth, here on the docks of Derdriu. How about that. There’s an army behind him and he’s failed this city, and his mother’s country is freshly gone, and if he’s not outright fleeing Fódlan with his tail between his legs, that’s mainly by virtue of a good half-bluff and stubborn pride. But Hilda Valentine Goneril, daughter of the border guards, is memorizing an Almyran name for him. He clears his throat. “Hope it’s not too hard to get used to.”
“I’ll manage,” Hilda says, and then shifts her weight slightly, shoulders rounded and feet delicately close together. “I’ll just have to save my energy with some other things to make up for it, okay? No wyvern-tending.” Her eyelashes flutter, obvious enough that it’s clearly aimed for him to catch. He laughs.
“Just think, a whole country of people who aren’t on to you yet,” he says, and bites his lip. “But, you know… I’ve gotten pretty fond of Claude, as a name. Maybe you can dust it off once in a while, when we’re alone?” He’s not, after all, leaving Fódlan behind entirely — it’s in his veins, Fódlan blood and Fódlan mountains, a Fódlan Crest and Fódlan madness. And he’s not leaving it with nothing, either. Not quite.
“I can do that,” Hilda says. “So. Which ship is ours?”
“Take your pick,” he says, letting go of her hand just long enough to gesture grandly at the waiting ships. “Which one do you like best?” It’s true; it doesn’t matter what ship he takes, going home. Wyverns dart between ships easily, if he needs to talk to Nader or any given captain. Hilda can let her tastes run free.
In another life he might have offered her the Alliance, if he could persuade her to take it. Or gotten her to keep Holst or Lorenz from dropping the land, or turning harsh on Almyra. In another life he might have offered her a seat beside him on the Wyvern Throne, something assured and waiting instead of a slim and stubborn hope. Instead he can offer her first choice of ships to take her into exile with him. And yet — she’s coming.
People ascribe a lot of their own works to the goddess’s credit (or discredit) in Fódlan, and one of them is grace.