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On her wedding day, she keeps expecting him to walk in but he doesn’t.
They get married in an ornate little chapel somewhere in rural Saltzburg. Outside the windows there are vast swaths of fields and lavender farms, probably owned by the wealthy aristocrats who’d built the place. The type of unctuous people she’d be forced to interact with now because she’d be his wife and the pipe-smoking men in tweeds told her that such labels meant responsibilities.
She walks down the aisle slowly, as if doing so will change the outcome. In her head, she is giving him more time. Every few seconds her foot hesitates is another few seconds Gilbert has to get here, another few seconds of him on a horse, wind in his hair, gallantly coming to save her.
The pews are full. Politicians and royals- the humans that know - watch with a morbid sort of curiosity. Like this is some alien mating ritual that has the potential to cause earthquakes, to rupture mountains. Little do they know this is all ceremony, a just in case because no one really knows how this works and the real echelons of politics are done by signing pieces of paper, not wedding bands gleaming on a finger.
Her dress is a white bag of expensive layers of fabric and makes her feel that much more uncomfortable. Ever since she’d found out, she’d resented girl clothes. Her limbs were clumsy, like they’d grown too fast for her to learn how to handle like she was a pilot without a license, and the constricting forms of dress patterns only exacerbated her uneasiness in her skin.
Eventually, she reaches the alter. Her own specialized guillotine.
“You look beautiful,” he says as if this isn’t a mechanism for a lamb to the slaughter. He is so different from when they were children. He is taller now and his face is smooth with its own regal handsomeness, his voice rich like butter. She bets his hands are like that too, so very different from her own that are calloused from the hilt of a sword and of a day’s hard work.
In her head, Gilbert is right outside, just about to barge in, ready to stop this madness.
In her head, there is no possibility that this could go on, that she could actually be married.
His fingers press against her cheek in some facsimile attempt at tenderness. She stares at the cement under her shoes like she expects the ground to swallow her up whole.
She doesn’t hear the priest or his sermons or the vows. She is thinking of how typical it is of Gilbert to be late- and maybe that’s part of it. It’s always most dramatic when it’s the last second or maybe even a little after that. Romantic-tragedies are their own prolific genres.
At the end of it, even if he does come, she knows it won’t change anything really. She’ll be plucked up from her current life like a marionette and dropped into his prison-castle but she wants Gilbert to be here. Needs him to be here.
She can still remember the way he had scowled, leaning against that tree, you shouldn’t marry him, you shouldn’t marry anyone. Marriage is for people that aren’t whole enough to stand by themselves.
Barely cognizant, her pale pink lips mouth the vows.
The house has a lot of windows.
Breakfast maids are another perk. However independent Eliza might be, she certainly doesn’t mind when a tray is rolled in full of brioche and cake and tarts with all manors of jams as she lays lazily on her bed in a chemise.
Roderich is as elusive as a snake and she only ever sees snatches of him in the hallways and from courtyard windows. It feels like he is a ghost, an apparition, haunting the many rooms.
The army that makes up the staff are far more oppressive. There's a gaggle of maids constantly knocking on her door, inquiring about towels and clean-up times and smiling knowingly at her in the foyers as they do before launching to gossip with their fellow workers about their new mistress and how strange and stilted their sham of a marriage is.
It’s not awful but it is boring and most days Eliza finds herself curled up on her desk chair, her quill quivering slightly as she writes on the parchment.
You did not come for me.
Steal me away from this place.
Are you well? Are you at the bottom of a trench slowly dying from gangrene and starvation? Have you taken ill? What excuse do you have for not speaking to me?
I miss you most ardently.
She crosses out every line. Once. Twice. Feeds the letters to her fireplace again and again until there’s no point in bringing up wood, Miss Becker, there’s enough fuel in there to last me through the winter.
At some point, Roderich walks into her room and she does not notice. His gloved, pristine hands are on her shoulders before she drops her pen in surprise.
The gesture is vaguely affectionate and he smells like lavender.
“What’re you writing?” He asks with genuine curiosity.
Eliza moves her hands to cover the name but as she does she knows its too late. He’s already seen it.
The silence stretches until Roderich speaks, the tenor of his voice slightly confused.
“You’re writing to Gilbert? And hiding it from me? Why?”
“Because you hate him,” All at once, her childhood comes back to her. Her skin screams yearning for that leafy forest, the feeling of mud soaking through her pant knees and cuts on her elbows. “You told him that you’d skin him alive if you ever saw him again.”
“That was when we were children,” Roderich tells her, amused and wry and she hates the slightly condescending note that’s begun to leak into his voice, “I’ve met Gilbert a few hundred times since that moment and you’ll notice that he’s distinctly skin-full, for a lack of a better word.”
Eliza pauses. She digests this, “But you still hate him. You’re just not a violent person” And hadn’t it been Gil and her, always? Hadn’t loyalty been everything?
“I dislike him,” Roderich agrees, “But only because he acts like a slightly delusional child. He thinks we’re still in the age of fistfights and bloodlust. And he’s always going to think that. It simply how he is as a person. He’d rather die than say a few emotionally charged words.”
Eliza’s skin colours pink.
“Words are hard,” she protests and she doesn’t know if its in defense of Gilbert or in defense of herself. The crumpled-up papers are rotting in the fireplace, ink bleeding.
“They are.” He says this with the benevolence of a slightly amused god, “but I personally would prefer them to the loss of a few limbs. I shall see you in the evening, wife.”
She’d imagined that as a husband, he’d be more imposing. At dinner, she watches him from across the table, a delicate flower, and he says nothing as she disregards all table manners. Elbow bumping against the white cloth every five seconds, the wrong fork, spoon, slapping down her champagne flute with a loud clang.
Roderich gazed at her a moment before copying her. He looked agonized. Eliza’s mind moved slowly, not comprehending this- what was this? A show of camaraderie? A peace offering? A way of saying I’m sorry for shackling you to me, potentially forever without words?
The porcelain bowl trembles in Roderich’s delicate hands as he raises it to his lips. A greasy, brown drop lands on his pristine white shirt. He flinches but does not stop. Tenaciously, he sips. Forgoing silverware and etiquette and all the stupid things he was known to cling to. Eliza is fascinated.
And horrified.
“I was wondering,” Roderich is still shuddering, his face like a man that had gone through war. He dabs at his mouth fervently as he speaks, “If you’d like to go on a horse ride with me. The maids have told me that you have not spent much time outdoors since you’ve arrived. And I know you have a propensity for such things.”
Eliza’s eyebrows narrowed at him, “And how would you know, pray tell? We were hardly soulmates before.”
“I’d like to know you,” Roderich tells her firmly, his mouth in a setline, “Regardless of everything else, for the time being, you are my wife and I am your husband and spouses are supposed to know each other. More than anyone else, in fact.”
Eliza wants to roll her eyes, to sneer, to tell him to keep his saccharine gestures and keep it for some saucy bodice-ripper novel.
“Do you trust me? Truly?” Eliza asks him provokingly, “Do you really think that if we sleep together at night that you will not wake with a knife at your throat?”
Roderich is silent. Austria is silent.
“Our kind does not do trust. Does not do marriage. We may sleep together, sure, we may call each other pretty words if you want, but at the end of the day its all the same as before. All of us have the same yearning for more in our bellies, for our names on the map, to conquer mountains, for our soldiers to spread across vast and wide on a chessboard and no matter what we do, no matter what silly little games you play, I will not forget that.”
Forgetting, after all, is what got her into this.
Roderich’s glasses shields his eyes from view. They could be depicting any number of emotions: anger, hurt, disappointment. She does not know. His mouth is a long line, elegant thin lips pulled taut.
“So you will not be meeting me then this evening? For the horse riding?” He does not wait for her response. He stands and bows, “I will see you later, wife.”
Eliza spends a long time scowling in the mirror. She hates him. He is a fool. He is playing a game that he is going to loose. He is trying to manipulate her and he is very bad at it.
Her skin has paled since she arrived, the star smattering of freckles across her nose is more prominent now. The scars have faded, memories, evidence of her warrior past have dimmed and with her pale pink chemise on and her curly brown hair set in ribbons, she looks very much like the demure ingenu she’d sworn to never be.
Standing up so quickly it’s dizzying, she goes to Roderich’s room.
The place feels overwhelmingly like him, lilac bundles in corners and the diffused smell of essence. She is afraid she is going to stumble and break something.
This is a transgression. A violation of privacy.
But if he wants her to like him, there are things he is going to have to forgive.
She goes through his closet and picks out one of his riding suits. She fastens the buttons and the unyielding fabric is a welcome reminder of her old self, a good hardy contrast to the soft cottons and silks they now dress her in. The cloth is tight against her chest in a way she didn’t anticipate but almost enjoys. Her shoulders look broad, ready for battle.
Hesitating at his underwear drawer, she’d even pulled on his boxers and they are now bare against her skin. The thought makes her blush but isn’t this what he’d said? No boundaries between spouses? A melding of hearts? It’d be cowardly if she hadn’t gone all the way. (She thinks of it, the fact that his manhood had been here, that if it hadn't been washed so thoroughly it might even smell like him)
The reflection in the mirror makes her heart turn into molten lava. It’s not a terrible feeling but its far from pleasant- a squeeze that she wants to get away from. It is a reminder of who she could’ve been. What she had. (She can still feel of it, the iron weight of a helmet, a musket in her hands, dust and debris spraying everywhere.) (The shock when they’d told her her body would never grow out like the other men, how her limbs suddenly felt terribly inadequate.)
When she stands in front of him, she smiles widely.
Renounce me , she thinks, tell me that i should be ashamed, that the maids will gossip, that you will not have me for a wife. Tell me how improper I am being, tell me how you are disgusted, so the two of us can pull away and forgo this sham of a marriage,
His mouth quivers, a feather in the wind. His eyes are wide with surprise.
“You look… regal.”
“Oh,” she bites her lip, suddenly out of her element. Her provocation turns into anger, simmering, “That wasn’t what I had expected you to say.”
“What did you expect me to say?” he asks in confusion.
She shakes her head in disappointment and brushes past him, gazing at all of the horses. The stable smells of fresh grass and wood, sunlight glaring through the holes in the panaling. The pedigree of horses surprises her, but it shouldn’t, really. Roderich has always had a penchant for the finer things.
“This one,” she points to an angry, rugged looking one. It looks just how she feels, out of place against an ornamental background. This one was a warhorse, she can tell.
“That’s not the one I usually pick.”
“I know.”
Eliza swings herself onto him, takes the reins in her hand. She can feel his muscles and bone shift underneath her, a powerful beast. Excitement knots in her stomach. “I’m going to be the one driving. You can ride side saddle.”
“I expected nothing less,” he tells her with a sigh, climbing up behind her.
“I ride fast,” She warns.
His arms fall around her waist like a chain. Like a necklace. She can’t decide which. His chest is warm against her back and suddenly Eliza’s face feels very hot, “I’ll hold on tight, then.”
It’s a good day to be riding and Eliza feels like she is betraying herself. Her head is in his lap and the way he holds his pocketbook of poems shields her face from the warm sun rays.
Far away from prying eyes, from castle gossip, from noise. She could yell anything and no one would hear except Roderic; the horizon extends for miles into verdant green meadows and then the glossy orange sunset.
It is perfect. It is terrible.
Roderich’s voice, now, is as soothing as music, his voice carrying a cadence with the words. She knows he loves these poems without him having to say.
“Who wrote this?” She asks. His pants are soft against her cheek. She can hear him breathing.
He shakes his head, “No one famous. An advisor. Someone I had been close to. He died in a war. Some 30, 40 years ago. It could be 70.”
“He talks a lot about his love for his country in his poems,” She points out, comforting him like its a knee jerk reflex.
“He talks about about how he is glad his family is safe within the country. He compares his country to a fortress, a box,” Roderich corrects her, his mouth set in a line with a grimness she knew hadn’t left him since he’d lost this unnamed human. It had festered inside him, like all loss does. “The province where his family had lived in had been partially annexed. They’re gone.”
Eliza closes her eyes, something heavy in her head like liquid lead. Pooling behind her eyelids. All those humans and all their fragility, their words lost to time, a paper left on a bedside table, ink dying, a writer that would never come back. A paper yellowing with time. A paper trampled on, under the boots of widows and orphans and eventually from the soldiers that had invaded. A paper in the fireplace. No more paper.
“Isn’t it funny, the things humans will insist on dying for? Any honourable man would lay their life down for their family. And then there’s us, actively killing our own, brother on brother sice the begining.”
“It was written into our blood,” Eliza protests, “that hunger. Besides, not all families are like that. Able and Cain existed for a reason.”
“Do you regret it?” He asks, and his fingers linger on the strands of her brown hair, touching her forehead and cheek like a lover would, “Not having a family? Not having anyone to die for? No one to lean on, to trust?”
She thinks of Gilbert, and all her fantasies of children running free in a battlefield, of childhood friends marrying in abandoned churches. She says nothing.
“I do,” he says, and then laughs, self-conscious. She finds his vulnerability charming, although she would never voice that.
“Why is that funny?
“Because I am the most untrustworthy bastard of us all,” He grins down at her, but the grimness is still there in his lips. The self-hatred. He has such pretty cheekbones. He belongs in a museum.
“Maybe,” She concedes, thinking of her body split three ways. Her In Vienna, Her In Constantinople, Her In Budapest, “But at least you’re alive and in one piece. Not many of us could boast of that.”
“No, I suppose not.”
The wind ruffles the grass, blowing sweet-smelling perfumes into the air. The fields are quiet with dusk, all the nocturnal creatures crawling out to conquer the world durin their moment. In this dim light, he can’t see her fact at all, and his is just a bleary outline.
“I am wearing your underwear,” she says suddenly, blushing, because it seems right to confess.
“Oh,” he says, and his breathing is louder now.
Eliza finally sends a letter to Gil. It is short, polite, docile and contains nothing of what she’d wanted to say.
If he loves her, he will be able to read in between the lines. Maybe. Probably.
Even Eliza doesn’t really know what's between the lines if she’s being honest with herself and she rarely is. Yesterday, Austria had leaned down to kiss her and his lips felt exactly as she had imagined. Two petal-soft lips, trembling as delicately as a leaf in the wind.
In the darkness, where no one could see them, she’d rolled over on top of him, her muscular thighs on either side of his hips. For the first time in their marriage, she’d felt powerful. It felt like horse riding, except it was nothing like that at all- his body was so much more lithe, moved in ways she did not expect- aside from the excitable knot in the pit of her stomach.
Eliza was not a stranger to sex. She’d laid with village boys, with soldiers, with dissatisfied wives.
But those were all humans, an indulgence. In her hands, their bodies felt like glass cups and when she touched them she felt like she was chipping away at the stemware.
With Roderich- with Austria- her body unfurled like a wing, like a flower in bloom. His hand reached up clumsily to undo her hair tie, allowing a cascade of brown hair to shield them. Soft moans, mumbles, lost to the vastness of the fields. Swallowed by the tall sycamore trees that felt like shadows, looming menacingly over them, sentinels guardian them and judging them all at once.
It felt fitting to make love in nature; dark and wild in the moonlight- although what they did wasn’t saccharine enough to necessitate that word. Today, Eliza had found tiny red marks from his nails, bites on her shoulders. She knows she’d similarly tarnished his skin- except, with a smile, hers were much much worse.
So what does she expect Gil to read? That she is unhappy? Is she still unhappy?
Eliza wants to be. She wants to be unhappy desperately but she cannot find anything that Roderich has not given to her.
Nothing except the thing she needs most.
Eliza sighs and the maids come in, bringing fresh croissants and coffee.
They have their evening meals together in the gardens now and afterwards, She teaches Roderich how to sword fight properly.
She is still wary of him, of course, but she can’t help the grin on her face as she tackles him to ground good-naturedly. The laugh as his coat tears slightly from the fall and he looks aghast. From the way they grow tender and quiet, and the way he pushes her over, the way he obscures her vision of the sky so that while he straddles her, he is everything.
Everything, everything, everything.
He places a very careful hand to the sensitive place right underneath her now naked left breast and whispers something important.
When Gilbert does arrive, it is not how Eliza expects. This is a running theme at this point.
First, he isn’t here for her. It is a meeting, all business and hushed words. Strong arm diplomacy.
Second, she isn’t informed of his arrival. It is two days of quiet talking from the maids, of Roderich not looking her in the eye, before she realizes.
Third, she wasn’t allowed to see him.
“What do you mean I cannot see him?” She demands.
They are in Roderich’s office, and she feels like a madwoman barging in as he is sitting there, looking at her with a cold apathy that she does not recognize.
“You are not permitted,” Roderich says slowly, “I hope you won’t ask me to repeat a third time.”
“But-but why-?!”
“Because he is a diplomat and you are a subsidiary of the empire. It has nothing to do with you. He has nothing to do with you. And even if he did, my words are final.”
The word subsidiary echoes loud in her head. Roderich looks very much like a despot on his throne, looking down on an unruly usurper. This is all so different from yesterday. She shakes.
“Do you understand me, Hungary?”
She slams the door.
Gilbert is as he always is- and that fact shakes her, because she feels changed. Roderich feels changed.
He stands in her room awkwardly, like he should not be there. He’s shorter than Roderich, shorter than her, and fiddles with his cross with a nervousness she’d found endearing. That she still does.
“You snuck into my room for me.”
He frowns at her, “Of course I did.” But does not go on to explain why, or what he’s here for. The distance between them is so large. Eliza feels like she’s looking at a vintage portrait instead of her best friend. A photograph of something she’d loved once, a long time ago.
“You didn’t come to the wedding,” she says this hollowly- but the words have festered in her for so long that they’ve lost their meaning. Her wedding was so long ago, “You didn’t write me letters.”
“Did… did you want me to..?” Gilbert asks, his voice raspy with confusion. He moves towards her, but then moves back, knocking over and breaking a vase in the process. “Er-”
“It’s okay. I hated that one. It was Roderich’s favorite, though.” A ghost smile.
“In that case, I won’t apologize.” Gil mumbles, squinting guiltily at the mess, “God, does he put flower prints on everything…?”
“It’s not that bad,” She says defensively. This all is so, so horribly incogruent. He is her best friend. This shouldn’t feel strange. “It adds a certain texture. It makes things pretty.”
Gilbert snorts, looking more than a little lost, “You don’t need texture on a battlefield.”
She rolls her eyes at him, but knows that a decade ago she’d have agreed with him. Gilbert feels like a child, like he hasn’t yet understood things beyond what they’d grown up with. Beyond god and power and how to calm a horse and how to maximize your influence on a battlefield. Even now, his sword hilt glimmers at his hip.
He flushes, unsure now that she hasn’t verbally assented, “And you- are you well?”
“I am.”
“Oh,” he seems almost disappointed. For the first time since he’d arrived, she feels like he properly sees her for what she is now. For the silk chemise and flower in her hair. “I didn’t expect you of all people to enjoy marriage.” Said spitefully, with all the vitriol of a ten-year-old left out of a game.
He was never going to come to the chapel, Eliza realize because that isn’t who Gil was. Is. He was never going to walk in, never going to cry out I object.
Gilbert, always fighting tooth and nail for that last bit of sovereignty, had never understood what it was to be a lover. To be a brother. To even be a friend, really. All that had ever mattered to him was church and bloodlust. A child born with a dagger in one hand and a cross in the other.
“Did you ever love me?”
Something flickers across Gil’s face before it melts into the usual scowl, the one reserved for when he lost at a game of chess or when Roderich said something particularly feminine. “You know that stuff isn’t made for us. Thats human nonsense. Just the thought of it will make you weak- will make you less than you are. It is a pestilence, a disease. We are not them, we cannot forget that distance. You canno-”
All at once, their little house of cards trembles. Gil was that boy in the forest but he’d never walk out of it alive. Even now, she can see a vague miasma of fear and bitterness laced under his speech.
A scribble of a boy and girl running off into the sunset with vibrant laughter blurs in her memory. She would never be that girl again. They would never be those children again.
“Oh,” her voice struggles, something caught in her throat; all her dead fantasies perhaps.
Gilbert looks at her with sorrow. He knows all too well about the ways he has disappointed her. He’s made this choice before, and he has chosen solitude every time.
“I am sorry.” His finger reaches up to trace his cross again, the silver slightly rusty and chipped with age. She’s seen him wear it for 500 years. Maybe longer. God and glory. Ahe wonders which charismatic bishop had given it to him as he told him to cross the Euphrates, promising eternal salvation? Whether his bones are still recognizable as bones or if they’ve turned to dust. If Gil even remembers his face.
“So am I.”
For the first day in months, it rains. Eliza watches Gil leave from her high balcony. Unlike a normal diplomatic mission, he has no carriage. No guards, no security detail, no servants. Just Gilbert and his slumped shoulders on the back of a weary horse, disappearing into the distance.
“I know you met him in your bedroom yesterday,” Roderich tells her quietly. He is standing beside her. He is inflection-less. There is no hint of betrayal, of trust broken.
A subsidiary of the empire.
“I did. We spoke for a few minutes and then he left.”
Roderich nods.
Below, the children of the servants are milling around in the grey drizzle. The entire estate has relaxed now that the foreigner has gone.
“Roderich, we are not really married, are we?”
He shakes his head, then hesitates, “I want to be- I’ve always wanted, I still do- but we are what we are.”
She leans over the balcony, her body slumping over unconsciously. The water dampens her hair, “Gilbert said yesterday that he didn't think I was the type that I’d enjoy marriage.”
Roderich bristles, she can feel him racing to defend her. Even now, “Well, what would that lonely little harbinger of destruction know about about marriage anyways-”
“I was supposed to hate you, you know. I was supposed to hate you and he was supposed to save me. I was supposed to be whisked away- because that’s what little girls dream about, isn’t it? Fairytale men that will take them away into the horizon. I was never a little girl, though. I didn’t know I was female until I was 400 years old. That is a long time to live with the wrong identity.”
“You’re allowed to hate me,” he tells her quietly, taking her hand from the railing. His fingers are so much more delicate compared to hers.
“I do. I do,” she shakes her head, laughing, pulling her hand away as she yanks back jerkily, accusing, “But you’re so- you’re so kind to me. And you like all of me, even the parts that are ugly. Even the parts Gilbert hates.”
“That doesn’t absolve me of my sins.”
“I know.” She covers her face with her damp palms, “how can you forgive someone that has cut you into pieces? How can you lay in bed with them-?”
“That is how we were built. You can’t be at war with your own nature.”
“But this isn’t my nature. It isn’t supposed to be!” In the distance, thunder roars. The children cheer. They are racing farther and farther into meadows and fields, young and wild and free, “I wish I was a child again. I wish I didn’t know everything was so complicated. I wish all there was to life was victory and loss. I wish I could kill you. I wish a sword would feel the same in my hand.” She quivers on the balcony like a crumpled, wet tissue, defeat heavy on her shoulders.
“I’m in love with you,” In his mouth, are those words a weapon or a submission? Things are so much easier when you have all the power. “I think- I think I always have been. Ever since you beat me. I was laying in the dirt with all my bones broken, only half alive, and all I could think about is how beautiful you looked when you’re victorious.”
“I haven’t been victorious in so long,” she says, half a mourn, half a sneer.
Roderich shakes his head, “you are victorious every day. With me.”
She snorts at this, “That’s just because you’re naturally bad at fencing. A novice could beat you.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
They sit on the floor with crossed legs, folded into each other like origami. They feel too hollow to pretend they don’t need each other. Water soaks into the bottoms of their clothes but neither minds. It feels like the world is being born again, the rain washing away everyone’s sins, the clamor of peasantry from the manor gardens.
“You know what’s the worst part? If we were like everyone else, we could run away.” he says off-hand, his glasses moist with condensation, “like all those books. But our problems would follow us. Wherever we went, your heart would beat with Budapest.”
“Why would you run?” She asks weakly, “This is your home.”
“It isn’t, really. And you won’t be mine forever, I know that. Empires tend to have a very tentative shelf life and me personally- I’ve never been very strong. I think that’s why I fell in love with you. You always seemed to be ready to offer your arms to people. I used to watch you carry in large bags of flour for the old, widowed bakers. So maybe, one day, the tides will turn and I will be yours and I will be at your feet.”
“I’d like that, I think. You at my feet,” to anyone else, the words would seem slightly sociopathic but to them, it is the closest admission of love Eliza will ever give.
“For now though, things will remain as they are. I am your king.”
“And I am your subsidiary.”
“And my wife. The closest thing I will ever have to a friend. A lover, maybe. It doesn’t have to just be one thing.”
“What does that even mean- Wife ? Am i supposed to cook for you and make your bed and lay in it when you ask?”
Now it is Austria’s time to snort, “I do not feel like being poisoned, consciously or not. And I’ve seen the way your pillows look when you get anxious- no. Being my wife would mean,” he thinks, “would mean listening to the poetry of dead men. Would mean wearing my clothes. Would mean running off to the meadows when we need to be alone. Would mean being retched to me and me being wretched to you.”
“What if I was your husband instead?” Eliza picks at her dress. The lace flowers look mutilated now that they are damp. It fits her, she thinks, though a distant part of her misses how vibrant the pink had been.
“Then your duties would remain the same.”
Eliza has been so lonely for so long. The fields of her youth no longer exist. Neither do the towns, even. They were eaten by neighboring cities, by foreign monarchs, by time. All of those humans that remembered her as the strapping young soldier boy are tucked in their graves, safe from the aches of the world.
Roderich looks at her with an open vulnerability though they both know what is said in whispers on balconies is nothing compared to the wills of kings and popes and politicians and paper. Whatever is said now will not be eternal. She will be free again, one day, and she will be different too.
He is asking her if she will be his wife, but this time the implications of the vow are different. This is Eliza, putting her hand in Roderich's. Hungary and Austria and their merged flags have no place here.
“I do.”