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With the ground damp from the earlier rain, the task of digging a grave was laborious and difficult. Still, Edelgard did not seek any aid. She clutched at the shovel with gloved hands. She dug.
The body lay in a heap where she had left it. The head―When she had returned to the field hours after the execution, she had found it rolled several feet away from the corpse, golden hair bloodied and tainted with mud. She had reached for it, to return it to the body, but she caught sight of the still open eyes and stumbled away, falling to her knees and spilling the contents of her stomach until she was left dry heaving on the ground.
El, he had called her.
A hand outstretched towards her, fingertips chewed and gnawed on by the rats scurrying across a cell. Glassy eyes staring sightlessly at her curled in a corner. El, one of her brothers had gasped, then nothing more.
How often would her name be another’s final word, she wondered.
In the aftermath of the dungeons, memories came and went like the tide. It took tremendous effort to pin them down. Sometimes she recalled the shine of sunlight on a head of brown hair, or the wide, gap-toothed smile of a child, or the crinkle at the corners of kind, brown eyes. A melodic laugh like the wind chimes still kept at the window of one of her sisters’ chambers. The sensation of fingers running through her hair. Running through the halls chasing after a sibling, their giggles echoing.
The dagger still at her belt served as a reminder of the noble boy from her brief years in exile, though she could never think back the shade of his hair or eyes, let alone his name, only the kindness in his voice and the oath he handed to her. Cut your own path, he had said.
Only when the grave hollowed out as deep as she was tall did she stop digging. Far too shallow for a proper burial, but she couldn't risk getting stuck. She pulled herself out. Dirt smudged her bloodied gloves.
Edelgard forced herself to look at Dimitri.
Arrows stuck out from his back, through the thick of his furred cloak and armor. The furs themselves did a proper job of hiding the corpse. She had taken advantage of that; had hidden the head beneath the cloak so that it could not stare back at her. The betrayal in those eyes hadn’t faded in death.
His stepmother, he had said, who was slain by her own daughter, then accused her of killing them all. And while the blood pooling round her feet grew with every passing day to resemble a lake, an ocean, she knew little of his family’s tragedy outside what was known to all.
I don’t understand, she wanted to say. I don’t understand, and now I never will, but she bit her tongue.
A coffin. He deserved a coffin. He deserved a proper burial, not a shallow grave dug in the dead of the night with only a dim lantern and the moonlight to keep them from complete darkness. He deserved better than what she could give him.
“Lady Edelgard.”
She turned around. Hubert stood on one side of the grave, a lantern in one hand.
“Hubert,” she answered, and found her voice rough. She cleared her throat. “Does something require my attention?”
His eyes traveled from the poorly dug grave to the body at her feet. The silence settled uneasily between them.
“Had you asked,” he said, “I would’ve done this for you.”
Her jaw clenched. “This is not your burden to carry.” She tightened her grip on the shovel. Her hands ached. “Some things I must handle myself.”
“I disagree, Your Majesty.” He came to stand beside her. Like her, he had yet to change from his battle gear. With great care, he reached for the shovel and eased her grip from it. “And I find myself at a loss for why you would sneak away to bury a madman.”
“Don’t call him that.”
His eyes flickered up to meet hers. “Very well.”
Edelgard reached up to smooth a trembling hand over her forehead. Dirt smudged her face. “He would’ve made a kind king had the circumstances been different. I…owed it to him.”
The scowl on Hubert’s face told her what he would not. She could not find the words to explain this to him. That she now stood between one childhood friend and the corpse of another. That she hardly remembered Hubert when she emerged from beneath the palace and that their friendship was forged anew with the silent acknowledgement that only he truly remembered those few years of childhood. That Dimitri held that same burden until he spat the past at her feet before his death at her hands.
She hadn’t remembered him. Even now, she could barely remember him as the boy whose oath kept her sane throughout the years underground. All she knew was the residual warmth that his company once brought her; the loneliness his presence curbed throughout those blurry years kept from her home and family.
My stepmother, slain by her own daughter.
No records existed of her mother. Whatever remnants of her hid at Arundel territory she had never been privy to, kept prisoner at the Imperial palace until her enrollment at the Officers Academy. All she had was a love story about a Goddess Tower. All she had was the haunted eyes of her father after placing a crown atop her head, the brush of his lips at her forehead, his whispered, You look just like her.
“Hubert.” He tilted his head for her to continue. “Once we take Fhirdiad, look into King Lambert’s marriage and affairs.”
“Consider it done. Though, if you’ll pardon my curiosity, I must ask whatever for?”
Edelgard turned back to the body. She sank to her knees. “Because,” she said, reaching to pull an arrow from his corpse, “Dimitri may have been my brother.”
She did not look to catch Hubert’s reaction. The arrows had sunk deep through fur and armor and skin. For every one that she managed to wrench free whole, another snapped in half. Behind her, the sounds of the shovel digging into the soil broke through the silence.
Together, Edelgard and Hubert laid the body to rest. She took the shovel from Hubert’s grip and piled dirt back into the grave. Her shoulders shook. She ignored it.
Sunlight began to break over the horizon by the time she finished. The shovel fell from her grasp. Locks of silver hair spilled from her updo, strands sticking to her dirtied and tear-stained face. A mound of dirt rested at her feet. Several yards away, Hubert stood with his back to her, waiting.
Edelgard had thought herself beyond grief. Yet, it reached into her, as invasive as the morning light spilling over the Tailtean Plains.
“May you rest well,” she said, “my dear, forgotten friend.”