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Ashe can count on one hand how many times he’s seen the ocean, and all of them were during wartime. The Rhodos Coast and the gritty sand that he still dumped out of his quiver for a whole moon, the cold iron-gray waves beyond the walls of Fhirdiad, the glittering sunlit sea carrying ships into the Port of Derdriu…all held their own beauty, from the austere to the picturesque.
None quite compares to the beaches of Brigid.
Ashe has never seen such a pristine blue just a shade or two darker than the sky. Though he’s hardly an artist like Ignatz or Bernadetta, the expanse of water meeting the horizon as the sun parts the waves fills him with the sort of awe he first felt meeting the crown prince of Faerghus. Any trace of exhaustion that lingered after Petra prodded him awake and dragged him away from the villa fades with every hint of red and orange painting the sky brighter.
Gentle fingers tap his chin, and Ashe shuts his mouth - only then realizing his jaw dropped - with a click. Heat rushes to his cheeks as he turns to find Petra grinning at him.
“You are seeing that I was right now, yes?” she wonders.
Ashe nods and offers, “I never doubted you.”
“You were surprising me with how, um, lazy you can be in morning,” Petra teases. Her hand tightens around his, and Ashe wonders not for the first time why a woman - a princess - fell for a man like him.
“You are like those…knights in shining armor,” Petra said, laughing until she broke off with a wet cough that wracked her whole body.
Fear made Ashe ’s heart quicken, made him urge his horse faster as she clung to him. Her body was still warm - perhaps hot - but all he could think of was getting her to Mercedes. Maybe under less harrowing circumstances he would’ve blushed at the insinuation, but now all he could do was demand, “What kind of knight am I if I can’t even save you?”
“Hey, I’m not lazy,” Ashe denies, though Petra’s smile belies any hurt in her words. “I’m just not used to the heat and humidity in Brigid yet.” Even this early in the morning, the dampness in the air clings to him, making sweat trickle down his back under his shirt.
“You will be getting used to it, Ashe,” Petra promises him, and this time there’s a hint of shyness in her grin.
“Oh, I intend to,” he swears. He tugs her a little closer and wraps his arm around her shoulders, reveling in the feeling of her warmth and the damp sand digging into his bare feet and the easy crashing of waves on the beach.
Petra sinks into him with a sigh, but before he can so much as bury his nose in her hair she pulls away from him. “I am not only bringing you here to be watching the sun rising,” she reminds him.
“Oh…right,” Ashe remembers with far less enthusiasm than she’d probably like. The ocean, he always thought, is best enjoyed from afar, but with how Petra speaks of it, with how much she missed it while in Fodlan, he had no choice but to indulge this request.
“The water here is not like the water of Fodlan,” Petra reassures him. She grabs his hand with both of hers and walks backwards towards the sea. She tugs him with her, a broad smile stretching across her face, brighter than the sun at high noon.
Ashe follows - he’s already followed her all the way to Brigid, he’d follow her even further if she but asks - but stops when the first wave laps at his feet. “It’s—it’s warm!” he exclaims, shocked. “I thought it would be cold.”
Petra laughs. “I was telling you,” she says. “It is not only the weather that is warmer in Brigid.”
A few more steps and the water brushes Ashe’s knees and soaks into the trousers he’d rolled up, dragging it down, but he finds he doesn’t mind. Petra doesn’t have to coax him to follow anymore, and soon enough their fingers entangle under the waves.
Sand shifts beneath his toes with every step, the water rippling gentler than he dared expect, and as the sun rises higher, he can see deeper underwater. He giggles, tickled, when fish smaller than Petra’s pinkie finger nip at his ankles, but jumps in alarm when something bigger bumps against his feet.
“W-what was that?” he demands, yanking on Petra to draw her closer, his other arm raised to fight off something unseen.
She frowns, squinting at the waves before - to his alarm - diving below. His heart jumps into his throat - though she never drops his hand - until she resurfaces with a splash.
She tosses her hair away from her face, water fanning from her head in an arc and splashing him. He spits out a mouthful of saltwater.
“It was only seaweed that was touching you,” Petra tells him. She points further away from the beach towards the horizon. “There is a, um, a reef I am thinking it is called,” she explains, “in the deeper water.”
For one horrified moment, Ashe thinks she’s about to suggest they swim out to it, but then she adds, “You will be practicing swimming with me every morning now, and maybe someday you will be strong enough to be swimming out there.”
“Oh?” The prospect delights him more than he ever expected; just as he once shared haggling techniques with her, he wants her to share even more with him. The beach at sunrise with its soothing waves is but a start. “What’s at the reef?”
Petra faces him again, a thoughtful furrow in her brow. “Fish with many more colors than were in the fishing pond at the Monastery,” she tells him. “Seaweeds, and corals, and an animal with spikes…more things than what I can be naming in the language of Fodlan.”
He can’t help the smile stretching across his face as she lists it, can’t help the warmth in his chest that Brigid’s ocean can’t rival. “Then tell me in the language of Brigid,” Ashe suggests. “If I’m to be your knight, I should learn your language too.”
Petra’s eyes widen, and when her cheeks darken he resolves to surprise her more. Her hand, damp from the ocean, cups his jaw. “I would be liking—no, I would be loving that,” she murmurs. “I would be loving that more than almost anything.”
“Almost anything?” He leans towards her, his heart racing in his chest. Drops of water stick to her eyelashes, but Ashe’s eyes drift down to her mouth instead. “Petra, can I kiss you?”
He hears the instant her breath catches, how her eyelids flutter as she tilts her head back. “You don’t even have to be asking anymore.”
Ashe can tell her that a knight must always ask permission from his queen, or that he asks because he’s still not sure he’s worthy of her, but for once - in the light of the most beautiful sunrise he’s ever witnessed - he sets aside his scruples and closes the distance left between them.
Salt never tasted sweeter.