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Maribelle hadn’t spoken the words herself, but Lissa can read her motivations better than most. She’s been scowling and scolding her as she paces by the side of her cot in the healing tent. To a casual observer, it might appear as though they have exchanged roles and are engaged in a strange bout of play acting. After all, Maribelle is the one with the reputation around camp for lecturing.
“I’ll bet you’re thinking ‘far better me than Lissa!’” To her consternation, the reprimand is performed with fully affected speech and dramatic aplomb. An astonishingly fitting likeness, but Lissa is quick to revert back to a stern tone that brooks no arguments and hints at the truly formidable will she otherwise hides behind jocular informality. “You’re just lucky it was a minor scrape!”
Though Maribelle finds the delivery exasperating, Lissa isn’t wrong. The thought had indeed crossed her mind in the little time she had to think. In the heat of battle, she had intended to take on wind magic instead of a blade, but it would be dishonest to promise she wouldn’t do it again, even with additional foresight.
“This is all simply a precaution, darling. I’ll be back on my feet before we know it.”
And ready for a bath and a trim.
She can’t see it very well without tugging, but she had lost part of a ringlet and a ribbon in the exchange. The bow had fluttered off into the muck, the ground freshly churned by hooves and boots. Better to keep her head in the end. A grimace creeps across her features as the memory begins to play in full.
The burst of Rexcalibur’s violent green light had caught her eye and drawn her to the threat against their fliers. Like most other battlefield encounters she has engaged in directly, it all happened within minutes from start to finish, each critical action taking place in seconds.
When it comes to magic, she’s grown rather resilient, but a blade had flashed as her opponent freed it from its scabbard. Dust clouded her vision followed by a desperate clash of wood against metal. She had been on the losing end of the parry, the staff splintering and her arms trembling in the aftershocks. Her steed was mostly to thank for the glancing second blow rather than a direct hit, the mare easing away from her undead counterpart. The sword sliced at the air near her ear, snapping back to cut deep into her arm before she was able to fully dodge. The stench of carrion breath from her red-eyed foe lingered in the air.
A javelin tossed the fiend from their seat, Lissa flying low and changing abruptly to her mend staff. She hadn’t wasted her breath. Hadn’t paused to question. She remembers the harried look in Lissa’s eyes as she choked out some unconvincing and likely unintelligible reassurances past gritted teeth before the magic had a chance to set properly. Lissa had shadowed her the remainder of the battle, compensating for her sluggish movement.
Despite her best attempts to mask her fatigue, it all was for naught once she saw Lissa had recruited Libra to assist in bullying her to report to the healing tent as a patient. In truth, she hadn’t the energy to endure much more than a raised brow at her weary attempt to project an image of durability, an attribute she is more painfully aware than ever that she lacks.
The only physical reminder is (regrettably) a scar and a persistent ache in her arm that occasionally burns from residual healing magic. Gingerly, she stretches out some of the stiffness as Lissa steps closer, clasping the opposite hand in both her own.
Some find the princess to be mercurial, but Maribelle has learned over the years how to trace her moods with relative accuracy. While unsurprised at the sound of quiet weeping, her stomach drops nonetheless. Of the two of them, Lissa is more openly prone to tears. Just as she begins to downplay her feelings and chastise herself with a muttered ‘I’m sorry. This is silly’, Maribelle pulls her hand back and Lissa along with it.
Lissa joins her on the cot, slumping against her, her grip still firm even as her voice wavers. Her words nearly lose themselves in the fabric of her shirt, her face pressed into her shoulder.
“We’re almost at the end, right?”
They can all sense this conflict coming to a head, their last opponents an entirely different breed than the more mindless revenants.
“It would appear so,” she says, voice muted as she offers the closest thing she can to honest consolation.
The discomforting truth of the matter is that Ylisse has been at war more than it hasn’t. The two of them are inheritors to blood-stained legacies that even Exalt Emmeryn—May she rest in peace—had been unable to escape. Whether it is Valmese or Plegians or bandits, their hands are as unclean as those of the generations before them.
She has faith in the Exalt and—secretly, but most fervently—believes even more firmly in the princess herself. Perhaps this end will lead to something else than fighting. If anything, the direction of fate has proven more impermanent than she could have ever anticipated before meeting so many from that other Ylisse.
An errant strand catches her eye and she tucks it back in place. Despite herself, Lissa smiles.
“Always fussing, huh?”
“Whatever else would you expect?”
“Even now?”
“Even at a time like this,” she confirms with a sharp nod and a serious mien.
The facade cracks as Lissa chuckles quietly and sniffles against the back of her free hand. She loops an arm around her waist, careful not to disturb her injured side and Maribelle rests her cheek against her head.
“I will… choose my foes more wisely in the next battle.”
For they both know there is a next battle and most likely a next after that, the future otherwise indistinctly shaped. Of only slightly less importance than shielding Lissa from disastrous winds is the glimmer of something waiting on the other side of it all. She cannot promise against all uncertainty her own safety, but she knows how to practice caution.
Lissa looks up, her head now cradled in the hollow of her neck, and watches her curiously. The needles that had once pricked her heart when she hadn’t the understanding nor the words to express her feelings have found abundant ways to nettle her even after she grew into them. They waste no time calling warmth to her face at the attention she can’t quite decipher.
“What is it?”
“And I’ll have my lance and staff ready whenever you need it.”
Leave it to Lissa to remind her not to go it alone. The thought is enough to hush her next words into a whisper.
“Of course,” she bows her head in acknowledgment, Lissa’s hand clutching onto her own all the more tightly. “I would expect nothing less, my darling.”