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Byleth has always woken up like this: all at once, no drowsy gap between sleep and alertness. Just an immediate snap of awareness. She is curled up on the floor, cold stone beneath her back. Her breathing stays carefully level, eyes still shut, as she catalogues what little she can gather.

A rustle, some distant footsteps. She pays attention to the echoes, how the sounds travel. Enclosed space, then, but large, stone walls. Other people—not close, but not far away. Her own body, aching. The place on her hip where her dagger sits is empty, her collar gone from her neck and bracers from her arms and legs. No metal allowed, she supposes.

At last, she lets her eyes blink open, rolls over silently, and takes in the room. Well, not a room. A cell, part of a long block stretching down the long room. It’s a nice cell, as they go, clean and generously sized, but still. A cell. The bars are narrowly spaced, and when she glances down the long row, she can make out the shapes of other people, but no identifying features. There are small windows high in the walls, also barred, and it appears to be daylight. But that doesn’t tell her much.

A guard is pacing up and down the corridor just beyond the wall of iron bars, and he looks Byleth over carefully as he passes. She lets her face go empty in the way people often mistake for confusion, and calls out to him.

“What day is it?”

He stops, and steps closer. “Wednesday. Day after the battle.”

She looks up at him, then fakes a confused flutter of her gaze around the cells. “What… happened? Where am I?”

He smiles. It’s not a pleasant thing. “You’re still in Arianrhod, dearie. You lost.”

Well, obviously. “Oh,” she says. “The—the Emperor?”

“She’s dead,” he says, and grins. “Your little secret attack plan wasn’t as secret as you thought, no?”

She stays silent, and he scoffs a laugh, then resumes his patrol. Shuffling over to the back stone wall, Byleth leans her head back against the stone. Edelgard is dead.

She sits there motionless for a long time. It’s half grief, yes, but her life has been nothing but turmoil lately. The knowledge of Edelgard’s death hurts more than she’d ever expected it would, but she’s never been a backwards-looking type of person. Byleth only likes to sit still to come up with a course forward, and more of her mind is already devoted to rapidly trying to pick out any possible way out of this mess. The worst of her wounds have been healed and bandaged, and she’s merely bruised and sore rather than dead or bleeding out, so they presumably want her alive. Beyond that, though? The possibilities require careful thought, but the only thing she’s sure of is that she isn’t remotely inclined to spend any more time than she can avoid locked up like this.

Time is hard to track in a place like this, so she has no idea how long it is before someone stops by her cell again, and she looks up. The guard sneers at her. “Someone to see you,” he says, then steps back to stand against the wall.

Byleth has no idea who would be visiting her here, but when she turns to look, it’s somehow not a surprise to see Felix Fraldarius pace into view. He stops by her cell, and one eyebrow lifts.

“Professor,” he says.

Byleth stares blankly at him. And then she opens her mouth, and unexpected laughter comes rushing out. It’s almost hysterical, as the accumulated tension of the last several hours flows out of her. Felix looks entirely baffled, which only makes her want to laugh more, but she calms herself.

“Welcome,” she says, pulling herself to her feet. “Would you care for some tea? If we’re pretending to be at the Academy still.”

She could swear the corner of Felix’s mouth lifts, but it’s gone almost immediately. “Miss Eisner,” he corrects.

“Hm.” She grimaces, but shrugs. “Better.”

He stands there in silence, as though expecting her to say something more. She sees no reason to oblige him, though, and goes to sit on her little wooden bench at the back of the cell. She stares at the places where the iron bars meet the floor and ceiling, vaguely considering how difficult they would be to get past.

Felix makes an irritated noise, and she looks back at him. He scowls, and his foot taps impatiently on the floor. “You must have questions,” he says.

“The guard answered them,” she says. The flatness of her tone irritates him, she can tell, so she keeps it. “Did you come to gloat?”

He scoffs. “No. Actually, I wanted to thank you for the fight out there. Been a while since anyone challenged me like that.”

“You must not be looking hard enough,” she says. She’s not a proud person, generally, but she does enjoy his frown enough to soothe the slight sting of the fact he’d managed to knock her unconscious for long enough for her to be dragged back here. “I saw plenty of mistakes. Just a shame I was already wounded.”

“That’s just making excuses,” he says, recovering something of a smirk.

She shrugs. “Shame it doesn’t look like we’ll have a chance for a rematch.”

Felix frowns, crossing his arms tightly over his chest. “Hmph. Yes.”

⬥

⬥

Byleth only gets a few hours of peace after he leaves before her next visitor arrives. She’s made frustratingly little progress with her escape plan—the bars are firmly embedded into the floor and ceiling; this place is obviously purpose-built. But when Duke Rodrigue Fraldarius turns up with guards who begin unlocking the door, she quickly starts rethinking the whole thing. Escaping while being moved is always easier, so depending on how far—

“General Eisner,” Rodrigue says, cutting off her thoughts.

Nobody had even used such a title for her, even while she was actually commanding Edelgard’s army, but it’s certainly better than most of the alternatives. She lifts an eyebrow at him.

“I hope your time here so far has not been too uncomfortable. We wish to treat you courteously, I hope you know.”

She’d met him once before, at Garreg Mach and he seems pretty much unchanged by the intervening years. “Where are you taking me?” she asks, more than anything simply curious if he’ll actually tell her.

“You are a prisoner of war, General Eisner, and a highly-ranked one at that. We will be taking you to quarters more appropriate to that station.” He motions a guard into the cell, who brings out a pair of handcuffs, and Byleth reluctantly holds out her wrists to him. Better to be compliant and not be cuffed behind her back.

“The king, regrettably, is very much occupied with the continued suppression of Adrestia’s war effort, and so you must be held here for now,” Rodrigue continues. “We will question you, and if you comply that will be entirely to your benefit, you will find. However, until such a time as the war is fully concluded, what will be done with you will not be decided.”

Well, that’s certainly better than she was expecting, though she’s not entirely sure she believes it. Rodrigue strides ahead of them as the guards drag her by the cuffs out of the cell and down the corridor. Unfortunately, they don’t go outside on the short walk, and she doesn’t know the surroundings well enough to risk making a break for it, even if she could overpower the guards.

Her new room is, in fact, an actual room, with walls rather than bars, and actual furniture, though the only windows are still high and narrow, and barred anyway. Someone undoes her handcuffs, and Rodrigue leaves her with a courteous bow, the lock clicking distinctly behind him. She sits down on the bed and surveys her new surroundings. The room is small but comfortable enough, the mattress firm and generously blanketed. There are even a few books on the shelves, and a chess set on the desk in the corner.

She falls asleep quickly that night, still exhausted from the battle the day before. But after that, she soon discovers, captivity is nothing so much as it is utterly dull. People bring her food a few times a day, and she observes them closely as they do. Unfortunately, she can see no opportunities for escape in their carefully regimented guard formations. She doesn’t have the attention span to do nothing but read all day, and the few amusements they’ve given grow boring very rapidly. It’s certainly more pleasant than the cells, but if anything it only increases her intent to escape. The assurances of her safety are far from reassuring, and there are few things she finds so chafing as confinement. Byleth itches with the urge to run free.

By the fourth day she is practically bouncing off the walls, and when the lock clicks open again a mere hour after they’d brought her lunch, she is on her feet instantly. Her racing heartbeat calms a little when Felix enters.

He frowns at her. “What’s the matter?”

“Thought you were my executioner,” she says, giving him her flattest smile.

“We’re not going to execute you,” he says, almost affronted.

She shrugs. “You never know. Even if you lot don’t want to, orders get sent down. That kind of thing.”

“Who’d order us to kill you?”

“Rhea, for a start,” Byleth muses. “Though I suspect she’d want to do it herself. Anyway, not the point. What are you here for?”

Felix snorts. “Spar with me,” he says bluntly.

Byleth is rarely shocked. “You’ll let me have a weapon?”

“A wooden one. And guards,” he says. “Lots of guards. Anyway, who says you could get past me?”

She lifts an eyebrow. “I do.”

Felix actually goes so far as to smile. “We’ll see.” He opens the door again, and calls a guard in. “Cuff her. Then bring her to the training yard.”

When they step out into a wide courtyard, Byleth blinks in the bright light. She’s suddenly very aware she hasn’t been outside or walked more than a few paces in several days, and she almost wants to shout just from the relief of being able to move around again. And when they reach the yard, and Felix picks up two wooden swords, she feels her blood thrum in a way that just feels right.

Felix uncuffs her and hands her the sword with a warning look. “There are guards up on the walls,” he says, pointing them out. “Bows aimed at you if you even look like you’re trying to escape.”

“And you actually have the manpower for that?”

He shrugs. “For now. None of our soldiers have been reassigned yet, and there’s no threat coming our way.” His mouth curves into something mocking. “Since we disposed of the threat.”

Edelgard’s most steely expression flashes behind Byleth’s eyes again, but she ignores the tightening in her chest, and nods. “Fine. Are you ready?”

Felix’s eyes harden. “Always.”

⬥

Despite how tense all the guards evidently are, Byleth doesn’t even try to escape that day. She’d like to attribute it to some strategy, that she’s aiming to put them at ease, or that she’s biding her time to learn the layout of the fortress better. But the truth is, once the sword is in her hand she forgets more or less everything else. Being able to move again is too much of a relief, and Felix is too good an opponent for thoughts of much else.

“You’ve got a lot better since the Academy,” she admits on their way back to her room. They’d drawn most of their bouts, but had eked out a few wins each.

“Of course I have,” he says, sounding almost offended. “I haven’t been idle for five years.”

Byleth forgets about those five years sometimes. Years in which everyone else lived, improved, and which she just… missed. She hums non-committally, and is almost glad when he leaves her to the peace of her room again.

She has space to think there, at least, though she’s rather tired of her own thoughts. Some of Felix’s stray comments were intriguing, and with some of what Rodrigue said a few days ago… She can deduce some things about the state of the war from it all, but she’s still left with a burning curiosity.

When Felix comes back the next day, and she is escorted to the training yard again, it takes a lot of effort to resist the urge to pepper him with questions. Asking too much about the war would probably be suspicious, and wouldn’t even get her any answers.

She limits herself to one question after her cuffs are taken off. “Still got all your soldiers here?”

Felix glances up at the crossbows that are still aimed down at her, and smirks. “For now.”

“Adrestia can’t be that simple to defeat. I can’t believe they aren’t needed.”

He gives her a sideways glance. “I’m not sure you need to know that.”

“Come on.” She made her best attempt at wheedling, though it probably wasn’t very good. “Seriously, what harm can I do with the information?”

Felix stares at her, expression considering. “How about this,” he says eventually. “Whoever wins each bout gets a question. To be answered honestly.”

She considers this. “What are you going to ask me?”

“Troop movements.” He shrugs. “The remaining defences in Adrestia. Edelgard’s next plans before she was defeated.”

“Hmm,” she says. “Only if I can refuse to answer specific questions.”

“Fine,” he says, looking irritated. “But it goes both ways.”

Byleth grins, lifts her sword, and they don’t speak again for a while. Neither of them likes to concede in the first place, so with the added stakes their first match stretches much longer than any from the day before. But Byleth is stubborn, and despite the ache of disuse in her body and the five missing years of training, she still has plenty of mercenary experience over Felix.

“Concede,” she pants, standing over him with her wooden sword pressed into the soft place between his collarbones.

“Fine,” he says, disgruntled, and she steps back to let him up.

“All right, answer my question,” she prods.

He sighs. “Cornelia’s paranoid. She thinks the remainders of Edelgard’s army are going to attack her again.” With a little snort, he shakes his head. “She sounds fucking insane, to be honest, but she has enough power to demand that a few battalions stay here.”

“And you?” Byleth asks. “Surely you and your father are more useful elsewhere.”

“I said that too,” he spits. “And my father’s gone now, back to Fhirdiad. But no, apparently I’m vital here.”

“Vital,” she says drily. “And yet you have time to spar with me.”

Felix doesn’t quite crack a grin, but he does stop looking like he’s going to punch a wall. “It’s better than war council meetings,” he admits.

⬥

Somehow, they fall into an easy pattern. Every afternoon, Felix and his guards pull her out of her solitude, and they battle answers out of each other until they’re both sweating and exhausted. Byleth learns a lot as the days turn into weeks—that Hubert is, miraculously, still alive, and that the main hurdle still standing between the united forces of Faerghus and the church and complete victory is his command over the remnants of Edelgard’s half-demolished army. That he has retreated to Garreg Mach and, despite all efforts, still holds out there. That—and her blood chills when she hears this—that the church has asked several times for her to be handed over to them, for her to be interrogated more thoroughly.

She had not really cared before that it was the Fraldarius family in charge of her imprisonment, but from the dark look Felix gets when he mentions interrogation, she doesn’t think the church means the light questioning he gives her. Hubert’s survival, too, sends a wave of relief washing over her, but she forces herself to dismiss it quickly. He cannot hope to last long, but if he’s still holding out by the time she finally manages to get out of here, he might at least be a place she can run to.

In turn, she reluctantly parts with scraps of information about the last known positions of Adrestian defences, how they had gone about conquering Derdriu, that sort of thing. She has never been more glad that Edelgard and Hubert dealt with most of the large-scale logistics, only turning to her for battle command. But Felix, on the whole, shows less interest in all that than she’d expected. He still asks about it on occasion, but his questions lately on military matters have been perfunctory, clearly asked out of duty rather than anything else. The rest of his questions have been tending towards the more personal—how she came to be at the monastery, her mercenary upbringing, her missing five years.

It’s just as embarrassing now to be unable to answer these questions properly as it had been when Edelgard started asking them, years ago, and they make the memory of her friend sting a little more. The wound of her death is still fresh, despite Byleth’s attempts to focus her attention elsewhere. Sometimes she half expects to look up after a spar and find Edelgard watching, half a smile on her face like it had often been back at the monastery. But Felix is, at least, a good distraction.

“What happened to the Sword of the Creator?” she asks idly after a victory, one day. She misses it sometimes in these matches: against a mobile opponent like Felix its whip-like extension would be invaluable.

“The church wanted it back,” Felix says. “My father sent it off not long after we captured you.”

“Of course. I’m surprised they’re satisfied with the sword. I thought they’d get more insistent about taking custody of me themselves,” she adds, wryly.

He stiffens slightly—not enough that most people would notice it, but Byleth is finely attuned to his flickers of movement now. “They have been,” he mutters.

She sighs. “It was too much to hope for that Rhea would give up on it.”

“It?”

“Killing me.”

There’s a moment of dead silence. “You weren’t joking,” Felix says. “That first day. When you said she wanted you dead.”

“You thought I was joking?”

“I assumed so, yes! The church doesn’t normally want to kill people.”

She scoffs. “You know perfectly well that’s not true. You remember Ashe, surely? He was your classmate, and look what happened to his family. And besides. I don’t exactly joke much.”

“I noticed that,” he says, but he’s still frowning, even when they go back to sparring.

They don’t even fight every day, any more. At first when there had been too much rain, and the outdoor space was too unpleasant to fight in, Felix had either skipped days, or they’d fought in one of the more spacious corridors of the fortress, guards watching closely from either end. But now, when it rains, Felix turns up in her room without his sword or the handcuffs, and he sits down at her desk and pokes at her chess pieces until she challenges him to a match just to stop the torrent of his complaints.

He complains a lot more than she expected, especially given his taciturn demeanour when she’d known him at the Academy. And that doesn’t seem to have changed much. But she supposes he must be running low on alternative companions, since he’s surrounded mostly by men under his command and Cornelia, who is the source of most of his complaints.

The passing weeks also give her time to refine her escape plan. It’s not easy, to be sure, but as session after session passes in the training yard, the soldiers positioned round the sides grow fewer and far more relaxed. If she’s fast, and lingers back near the entrance when they’re removing her handcuffs, she may well be able to be out of there faster than they can shoot.

She picks up more of the layout of the fortress, as well. Curious questions and a carefully applied mixture of taunting and cajoling persuades Felix into showing her good chunks of it, usually with the excuse of hunting out more interesting sparring locations. And she deliberately keeps the maps of the area around Arianrhod that they’d reviewed before their attack fresh in her memory. Soon, she’ll be ready to go.

⬥

Rodrigue returns to Arianrhod a few months into her captivity. The only notice she gets of it is that one day Felix entirely fails to turn up for their sparring session. It’s the first time in weeks he hasn’t appeared at her door, and then the next day he barely even speaks to her. He’s too busy scowling at everything around him, and though he throws himself at her sword-first with renewed frustration, he’s distracted enough that he ends up losing every match.

“What is it?” she eventually asks, after winning five in a row.

He just glares back. “My father’s here again,” he says.

“Well you’re fighting like shit,” she says.

“I fucking know,” he bites back, and then they’re sparring again.

She wins again, and drops her wooden training sword onto the ground and sits on the dirt floor while Felix is still catching his breath. “It’s no fun when you’re like this,” she says. “And anyway, I get a question.”

“Fine,” he huffs.

“Why does your father being here make you so annoyed?”

His expression turns even more sour. “We have different ideas about what the right thing to do is.”

“Hm. Fair enough,” Byleth says. “What is it you want to do?”

“Lots of things,” he says darkly. “He doesn’t like that I’m sparring with you, for a start.”

“Come on, that can hardly surprise you,” she laughs.

He glowers. “One of the soldiers told him about it. I wasn’t going to. Now he’s worried about me talking to you, thinks I shouldn’t get close to a prisoner.”

That startles Byleth, somehow. She hadn’t even thought of it in these terms, but Felix has by necessity become her only acquaintance lately, and the impression she’s got is that she’s his only real confidante. And she supposes that’s close, in a way.

“Huh,” is all she says, though.

He sighs, and sits down on the dusty ground as well. They aren’t in private, really, but nobody is close enough to overhear, especially when Felix drops his voice. “The church still wants you.”

Byleth’s mouth thins. “I’m sure. Are you going to give me to them?”

“I’m not,” he says, affronted. “But… they’re close to taking back Garreg Mach, you know. With the Archbishop there, the church becomes more powerful than Faerghus, really. And then they have all the bargaining power on their side.”

“And I’m sure there are things that are more valuable to Faerghus than me,” she concludes.

Felix nods, and his face turns grim. “I don’t know how long it will take, but I’m sure it’s coming.”

⬥

Her planning ramps up after that. She begins to eat just a little less of what they bring her, storing anything she thinks might keep in a piece of cloth ripped off the back of a pillowcase. They still aren’t giving her any sharp objects, but she manages to pry a thin but sturdy splinter of wood off a discreet part of a table leg, and grind one end into a point. It makes her miss her dagger sharply. They’d given her back her arm bracers eventually, and her pitiful excuse for a weapon ends up tucked neatly into one of those most of the time, ready to be put to any use.

She gets two more weeks of respite before Felix turns up with a grim expression and tells her the church has retaken Garreg Mach.

“Hubert?” she asks, though she’s sure of the answer.

“Dead.”

Byleth nods, and they spar in silence. Neither of them bother with their questions today, either, preferring to just raise their swords again, and go back to it.

She doesn’t speak again until they’re walking back to her room. “Will you tell me?” she asks softly. “When they start asking for me again, and you think that Faerghus is going to agree?”

Felix’s eyes are bright, and his gaze is brutal to be under the scrutiny of. It bores into her, terrifyingly clear, and Byleth can’t breathe until he finally looks away again, and nods. “I’ll tell you.”

He doesn’t come back the next day. There’s a bitter ache in her chest when the sun begins to sink through her tiny window, and she realises he’s not just late. She doesn't even blame him, really. Their conversation yesterday had made it clear that this strange little lacuna of peace she’s found herself in is not going to last. If he’d rather get used to her absence in advance, she can’t blame him.

Hell, she isn’t even sure if they’re friends now, or what. They’ve spent so much time together, but always across the strange barrier of an ending war. Byleth sighs, and buries her face in her pillow. If she does get out, she’ll probably miss his company. And that is a very strange feeling.

⬥

It’s four days before they ask for her, and Byleth feels every second of them. Felix comes to spar on two of the days, but he’s distracted, his mind elsewhere. On the fourth, he bursts into her room hours before she was expecting him. He looks flustered, his hair falling down around his face, spots of bright colour sitting high in his cheeks.

He locks the door behind him, too, which he’s never done before. “Listen to me,” he says, tone urgent, before Byleth can even get a word out. “I’ve just come from my father. A letter from Fhirdiad arrived. They’re going to make a deal for you.”

Byleth keeps her expression blank. “What am I worth, then? Tell me how much I’m being traded away for, at least.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.” She keeps staring at him, and he shrugs. “In return for Faerghus’s generous aiding of the church during the war, and handing you over, we get… well, we get most of Adrestia. Once it’s conquered properly, I mean.”

She manages half a smile. “Well, that’s not too bad. At least I’m a valuable bargaining chip.”

“They’re still arguing over the details, but it’s bound to happen now. The letter was to tell my father to get you ready to transport to Fhirdiad.”

“When?” Byleth asks, her mind already racing as she stands up to pace out the length of the room. A journey might be easier to escape on—no, but if she left it too late, then it would all be over, that was too risky.

“A few days,” he says. “But they’re not going to take you.”

She looks back at him, his folded arms and drawn together eyebrows. “Aren’t they?”

“I’m sure you have an escape plan. Use it. Today, preferably.”

“And why should I do what you want?” she says, hackles immediately up.

“Because I’m going to help you.”

⬥

Byleth surveys him, face impassive. “Why the fuck would you do that?”

“Because strange as it might seem, I don’t want you to fucking die!” Felix says. It’s the first time his voice has lifted above the low, secretive urgency he’s apparently been containing himself to. He glances back at the door quickly, then drops his voice again. “I thought about what you said, you know. That the Archbishop will kill you.”

“And you believe me?”

He hesitates just slightly. “I think so. I… I do remember Edelgard’s rebellion, you know. Even though I wasn’t there, the whole monastery knew how furious Lady Rhea was—with you as much as her.”

“She said,” Byleth relates with clinical detachment, “that she would take back my heart herself.”

Felix stares. “What does that even mean?”

“No idea. But I’m pretty sure it’s not something I want.”

“I don’t know what they’ll do,” he repeats. “But I believe you enough that I don’t think it’s anything good. Like I said, I don’t want you to die.”

“Well, that’s very touching,” she snaps back. “But why the fuck should I trust you on this?”

He glares. “As far as I can see, you don’t have any better options. What’s the worst case scenario, anyway? I don’t actually help you, and you get put back here? That doesn’t change anything.”

Byleth sits back down on her bed, and sighs. “Worst case is that you close off all my actual chances of escaping. But fine, let’s say you’re not doing that. What do you want in return, then?”

“I don’t want anything,” he says impatiently. “Hell, am I so untrustworthy you believe I’d want you to die?”

“No, maybe not. But I do find it hard to believe you’d put that over your family, and your country.”

“Fuck Faerghus,” Felix says, voice vibrating with suppressed rage. “I don’t give a damn about that. Just get out of Fódlan, and you’ll be better off for it.”

In the back of her mind, that had been Byleth’s plan. There’s nowhere else for her to run, so she’d get to the coast somewhere, find the first merchant ship she can heading to Dagda, or Albinea, or Morfis—anywhere not here. Petra escaped, she knows, so maybe Brigid. “Fine, let’s say I let you help me,” she says. “What’s your grand plan?”

“I don’t know. Whatever you think will work. I could have a horse ready for you to take?”

She nods, slowly. “All right. A horse is good.”

“I can go down to the stables and tell them I want to go for a ride, then. That’s easy. What else?”

But Byleth hesitates again. Trusting people has never come easily, for her, and the instinct to rely only on herself is a hard one to overrule.

“What in the seven hells do I have to do to get you to trust me?” Felix exclaims.

She sighs. “I don’t know. It’s not that I don’t want to, there’s just… a lot riding on it.”

“Wait, no!” he says, eyes flashing as he fumbles at a pocket in his long coat. “Here, I brought you this. Does that help?”

He pulls out her dagger, and Byleth just stares.

“I—noticed there was an engraving on the sheath,” he continues, a little awkwardly. “I thought maybe it was… important.”

“It is,” Byleth manages, throat dry. She stretches out a hand, and he gives it to her willingly. Calling it an engraving is exaggerating, but she runs her thumb over the little scratch marks on the metal band round the top. If you squint, it just about reads as her name.

“Does that help?” he asks, hushed and somehow softer than before.

“It was my first weapon,” she tells Felix, staring down at it. “My father put…” She shakes her head to clear it, and looks back up at him.

“Will you tell me now?” he says.

She rests the dagger on her lap, and thinks about it for a moment. He’s armed, yes, but he’s off guard and vulnerable, and she could have the knife to his throat before he has time to draw his sword. “OK,” she says. “Here’s how we do it.”

⬥

Felix leaves soon after that, and Byleth spends the next few hours before he returns for their usual sparring session working out how to hide the various things she’s stored away about her person. She has her long jacket still, so she fashions the pillowcase over food into a makeshift parcel that she tucks into the back of her waistband, where it’ll be hidden. Her dagger replaces the piece of wood tucked into a bracer, and though it’s harder to hide she thinks she can manage it.

In the middle of the afternoon, just as normal, Felix comes to collect her. He puts her handcuffs on himself this time, rather than letting a guard do it, and she hides that they aren’t quite clicked shut properly by discreetly pressing her hands against her thighs so they stay in place.

He glances into her eyes once before they set off, and she gives him the most discreet nod she can manage. Then she follows him out, walking demurely beside him.

They make their way through the now familiar passageways of the fortress, on a slightly circuitous but not unusual route towards the training yard. Byleth’s eyes dart back and forth as they progress, on edge and ready.

Then they reach a split in the path, and Felix mutters, “Now,” softly enough that only she hears.

Her handcuffs clatter to the ground, and in a flash her dagger is out and she grabs Felix’s shoulder, bringing the blade to his neck.

“Stay back!” she yells. “Or I kill Fraldarius.”

The guards go from relaxed to mindless panic in less than a second, and Byleth backs carefully towards the passageway heading for the stables.

“Drop your weapons,” she orders, and with terrified glances between them, they comply. “Kick them to me. Good. Now if I hear anyone coming after me, he’s dead.”

She waits until they all nod back at her. “Stay here. Make no sound.” And then before they can do anything else, she drags Felix around the corner, and they take off running.

“That won’t last long,” he pants.

The passages in this part of the fortress are narrow and winding, crushed between barracks and other buildings. But there’s a direct route down to the stables, and Felix leads her careening down tight turns and stone staircases, until they emerge again to the smell of manure and hay.

“Dagger again,” he says, and Byleth nods and lifts it to his throat as she grabs his shoulder, pulling him over to where a stable hand holds the tresses of a large, sleek horse.

“Hand him over,” she tells him sharply, as he looks on in shock.

The boy must barely be a teenager, and he stares in shock without moving for a long moment, until Felix adds “Do it.” Then he drops the bridle, and bolts out of sight.

Byleth returns her dagger to its sheath, and looks back at Felix uncertainly. He pulls a cloth bag off a hook just inside the stalls, and hands it to her.

“Here. There’s some water, and a few bits of food. I couldn’t get much without raising suspicion, but… hopefully it’ll help.”

“I… thank you,” she says, and adds her own hidden parcel of food to it, then slings it over her shoulder.

They stare at each other for a long moment. Felix is the first to break the eye contact.

“Let me give you a hand up,” he says, and seconds later she’s looking down at him, feeling the horse shifting impatiently beneath her, ready to be off.

“I—I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”

“Just go,” Felix urges. “They won’t be held up for long.”

She stares down at him. He looks pained, but his eyes are clear and certain. “What will they do with you?” she asks. “They’ll know you gave me the dagger.”

He shrugs. “My father only has one heir. He has to forgive me eventually.”

“You don’t want to be his heir though, do you?” Byleth says desperately.

“Who else am I meant to be?” he snaps. “You need to leave, Byleth, now.”

“Come with me,” she says instead. It’s an impulse, but it feels right—it’s been building ever since he handed her that dagger.

Felix makes a small, choked sound. “Byleth, I can’t.”

“What’s stopping you? They’re not going to like that you helped me, Felix, you know that. Just leave them behind. Come with me.”

He scrunches his eyes shut for a single moment, and it stretches and stretches until there’s a shout from behind them.

“They’re here!” a voice shouts, and she hears pounding feet just around the corner.

“Felix,” she pleads, and his eyes open.

They blaze brightly into her own as she stretches her hand down to him. He takes it, grip firm in hers, and then he’s pulling himself up and swinging onto the horse behind her. “Go!” he shouts, kicking his heels into the horse’s sides, and then they’re flying out of the stables, round the corner, and then out, out, out, into the plains surrounding Arianrhod, the walls of the Silver Maiden rising up behind them.

Felix’s breath is hot in her ear, harsh pants at first, but then it turns into a low chuckle. And before she knows it, Byleth joins him, laughing full-throated into the wind, feeling the shake of Felix’s body in unison with hers where he’s pressed tightly behind her. Then she bends low over the horse, and they run.