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The owl arrived in the middle of the night with a letter for Felix.
Annette could appreciate that Duke Rodrigue knew his son wouldn't open a letter that came to him directly from his father; the owl was bespelled to come to her instead, and had slammed into the side of her tent and clawed and hooted until she came out and took the envelope. She didn't know that she liked His Grace's presumption that she was the one who'd get Felix to open his mail, but she could be annoyed when she was more awake and had a cup of tea in her.
This was not to be. She shoved the letter under her pillow and tried to fall back asleep. She couldn't manage it. Once she was up, she was up, so she slipped on her rumpled robes from the day before and banged on the side of Felix's tent, only to find it empty, the cot neatly made and the candle still faintly warm when she touched it.
She gave in to the urge to look around at Felix's things. He had two spellbooks on his camp desk with a half-dried inkwell atop them, which made Annette twitch. Before she could think better of it, she made to move the inkwell off the books, then stopped herself short before she left behind signs that she'd been poking around in his tent while he was gone.
Only the watchfires were lit, and those were far off. The moon was dark; all she had was the dim distant dawn light and the stars to navigate by. Fortunately, there were always people awake in a military camp, and all Annette had to do was find and follow the trail of annoyed and offended people to get to Felix. The last person she spoke to, a hostler attending a pregnant mare, told her they'd seen Felix headed to the quartermaster.
Oh, Annette thought, great, as if he doesn't have enough swords!
But he was nowhere near the weapons depot. This made sense. No one actually needed a sword at three bells past midnight. The soldiers who manned the field bakery were already up and working on the army's breakfast, but she wasn't going to find Felix there. But he wasn't in armor storage, or at the nearby medical tents.
She sighed and yawned. Back to the field bakery, then. He was bound to have annoyed someone there.
Annette had a vague idea of how her breakfast loaf got to her in the morning. It was perfectly fine bread, baked in large quantity and very quickly, and almost never burnt on the bottom. When she woke up some days, she could feel all the magic that went into fueling the massive traveling ovens like a pressure on her ears. They were a feat of useful sorcery, not the kind of magic she'd gone to school to learn. At one point, she'd thought cooking magic was less interesting than slicing an apple in half with a gust of wind from a hundred paces or boiling someone's blood out of their body. She'd been silly, of course.
Everything she knew about baking she knew from watching Mercie at a minimum safe distance from any bowls, spoons, scoops, pans, or trays, and she was absolutely not allowed to open ovens under any circumstances to see if anything was done. As she approached the field ovens now, the magic was a roar she felt but could not hear. Hoewever, she could read what was happening in the spell, which was really a dozen little spells: among other things, it held the temperature in the oven perfectly constant through all its openings and closings, which was no mean feat! Two dozen people or so were at work shaping perfect loaves from big lumps of dough, loading them thirty at a time to go onto slats to go into the oven, or pulling them out the other end to be cooled with yet more magic.
And in the middle of all the activity, kneading a shaggy lump of dough about three-quarters as big as Annette with practiced ease, was Felix Hugo Fraldarius. Periodically, his Crest manifested in a faint glow of blue light, more often than she'd ever seen it on the battlefield.
She stared at him. He glanced up at her, met her eyes, and went totally still. Then he went back to work.
Did he do this every morning? And no one knew? Impossible. Or maybe everyone knew and they were keeping it a secret from Annette, that the heir to the Fraldarius dukedom woke up at two in the morning to make bread in secret--
"Miss?" a slender young girl said, wiping her flour-dusted hands on her apron. She couldn't have been more than fifteen. "Begging your pardon, but you'll need to queue up for your breakfast at the mess tent like everyone else."
"Oh, um!" Annette said. "Actually, I have a letter. For one of the bakers."
The girl took in Annette's warlock uniform with the practiced and skeptical eye of one used to sizing up the rank and level of deference owed to a superior officer. Annette got that a lot.
"Who's it for, commander?" the girl asked. (Commander was the lowest rank a warlock might possibly be. The girl probably didn't mean to be insulting, so Annette didn't correct her.)
"Him," replied Annette, pointing at Felix.
"Who's writing him?"
"What do you mean?" Annette was pretty sure they were out of Felix's earshot. It was loud over there. "I was"--she scrambled for a lie--"was just told to bring it to him."
"Oh. He doesn't talk much, but he's a nice lad," the girl said, as though Felix wasn't much older than her. "He might be a bit slow? Monstrous strong, though. We didn't think he had family at all."
"But he has a Crest," Annette said. "Am I imagining the Crest? Do you see it too?"
The girl shrugged. "None of my business, commander," she said. "He wandered through one morning and sergeant put him to work. Shows up when he feels like it, but he saves us having to use magic to knead the dough, he does. He's got the knack."
Annette took the desire to pelt the girl with more questions and stomped on it firmly. Felix looked like he was at peace, his perpetual scowl exchanged for calm focus. She wasn't going to ruin this for him by making them suspect he was a noble.
"Well, I'll just deliver this and be off, then!" Annette said, holding the letter in front of her like a magic staff.
She slipped past the girl and into the whirl of activity. She nearly upset two people on their way to the oven with trays, and apologized profusely each time. When she finally got to Felix, the dough was much less shaggy than it had been before. As Annette looked on, Felix paused and cut a piece off of the lump with an odd rectangular knife, stretched it out, and held it up to the quavering mage-lights, frowning at whatever he divined there.
"I have something for you," she said.
Felix spared her a look that would have been withering if Annette wasn't so tired and Felix's deep blue apron wasn't covered in flour from his chest to his knees. "I'm busy. Put it on the bench," he said.
Annette came in close to him and dropped her voice: "It's from your father. It seems important."
"Private!" a woman's harsh voice said from behind the two of them. "That dough isn't going to knead itself! Get to it!"
No one had spoken like that to Felix since Professor Jeritza brought in a group of Knights of Seiros to weapons practice to humble them all. Annette braced herself.
Nothing happened.
"Yes, sir," Felix said meekly, and went back to work.
-
Annette managed to sleep a few more hours after she got back to her tent. When she woke up, she wasn't entirely convinced that the whole thing hadn't been a weird dream.
She was assigned to provide magical backup for a scouting party that afternoon. Felix was not assigned, but he showed up anyway just as they were heading out of the camp and fell in with them.
The two of them hung back behind the group as they went. Felix opened his mouth to speak. Annette beat him to it.
"I didn't see anything!" she said. "Let's just pretend nothing happened, okay? I'm glad you, um, have a hobby! And everyone seems to like you--"
"Annette," he said slowly. "It's fine."
"--it is? Where did you learn how to do that?"
"The bakers taught me. And my mother, a little. I enjoy it."
It was good to know that Felix had interests above and beyond hitting things with sharp sticks and being mean to Dimitri. There was a more pressing issue, though: "Your mother?"
Felix frowned. "Mercedes's mother was a noblewoman, too."
Yes, okay, true, and Mercedes learned everything she knew from her. But he'd never mentioned a mother. No one ever mentioned Felix's mother. Then again, she'd never asked, had she? Annette pictured a tall, wiry woman with dark hair and Felix's high cheekbones. Maybe she'd taught him the sword, too. Duke Rodrigue preferred a lance, after all. This was way too many revelations for the amount of sleep she'd had last night.
Felix stopped walking. Annette went a few steps past him before she realized he wasn't next to her, then turned around and faced him. How was he so calm, when she felt like twitching out of her skin--he put his hand on her shoulder.
"If someone had to find out," he said, "I'm glad it was you."
The scouts were out of view now. They'd been talking and laughing amongst themselves and not paying much attention to either of them, anyway.
Felix was looking down with her with the weird intensity he got sometimes and which Annette was pretty sure she was imagining--until the hand on her shoulder moved up to cup her cheek.
At this point, Annette fought two strong urges: one, to punch Felix in the stomach and run off; and two, to turn her face into his cool, rough hand. She lost to both of them, and stood fixed where she was, staring up at him. When she thought late at night about kissing Felix--whatever, she thought about kissing lots of people! All of her friends were very good-looking!--discovering he had a secret life as part of the army's baking battalion was not the lead-in she pictured, but here she was. It was ridiculous. She couldn't kiss Felix like this.
"We should catch up," she said, still rooted to the spot. "To the others."
"Uh-huh," Felix said.
"After all the times you've walked in on me singing, you can't be mad at me for finding out your big weird secret."
"I'm not mad," he said. He slid the hand that was on her cheek into her hair. "You're right. We should catch up."
He made as though to pull away, but Annette grabbed the strap of his pauldron and pulled him back to her. "Don't you dare do all that and not kiss me!" she hissed.
This was of course the moment he was going to laugh, say Why do you think I want to kiss you?, and make her feel foolish. She'd be embarrassed, but she'd do her best impression of it to Mercie later and laugh it off. Why, there were people lining up around camp to kiss her, what did she need Felix for?
So engrossed was she in making her dire predictions--in reality, the entire line of thought took about four seconds--that she failed to notice Felix drawing her in until he planted his free hand on her shoulder and his face was alarmingly close to hers.
"In fact," she said, acutely aware of how her chest was rising and falling against his, "if you want me to keep quiet, you need to give me three kisses."
"That's blackmail," he said. "I guess that makes you the villain this time."
But he smiled down at her, and the smile reached his eyes and lit his whole face up from within. Somewhere in the back of her mind she was aware that the scouts might be, oh, set upon by giant wolves somewhere and need the services of an expert mage so as not to be torn to shreds. This thought was much less compelling than the way Felix looked at her right now.
"If you ever wrote to your father, he wouldn't need to send your mail to me, and then I wouldn't have been up in the middle of the night looking for you," said Annette. "Blame your father. And yourself! If you hadn't volunteered yourself for this mission I wouldn't have to--"
Before she could finish the sentence, Felix's mouth came down on hers. He took his time. The hand that was on her shoulder trailed down her front, wandering, his fingertips just brushing the patch of exposed skin her uniform revealed, stopping short of cupping her breast. Rather, he moved his hand around to her back, tracing his knuckles up and down the length of her spine.
She put her hands on his narrow waist. She couldn't think of anything else to do. When he traced his tongue over the seam of her lips, she opened to him gladly. He smelled like good leather and soap, and the scent filled her senses and made her dizzy.
His wandering hand settled on the middle of her back; his tongue delved deeper into her mouth, and he moaned into her as if he was the one whose defenses were overwhelmed by the kiss.
She swayed against him, clutching at his upper arms as much to keep herself upright as for the sheer pleasure of feeling his strength. If she'd known Felix kissed like this, she would have... no, she wouldn't have done anything at all. She was very acutely aware of how few layers she wore under her uniform, and how hot his body felt through it.
And still he kissed her. He backed them up against the nearest tree and picked her up, bracing her against the bark and putting her on a level with him. Annette couldn't help herself: she let out a delighted yelp and wriggled against him, testing his strength and his hold. Neither gave way.
This didn't have to be difficult, she told herself. In fact, it could be very simple. He wouldn't let her fall.
At that, she came to her senses--somewhat. "We really need to get back to work," she said. "We've got a mission. I've got a mission."
Felix's chest heaved as though they'd been doing something much more athletic than just kissing. His cheeks were pink in a way that Annette would have called cute aloud if she'd felt like teasing him. Slowly, he lowered her to the ground. Annette was sure the back of her uniform was filthy and everyone would know what they'd been doing, and turned around so that Felix could check; it turned out to be fine.
"I owe you two more," said Felix. He straightened his sword belt. His ears were still red.
"Well," Annette said, "I will just have to collect them tonight. Prepare yourself!"