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Chapter Text

“I'm going to bathe,” Ovelia announced stiffly to the back of her captor-saviour, who was busying himself with pitching the tent. 

The sun hung low in the sky, turning the smooth surface of the river to soft gold. They had made camp some way up the falls, far from the road and the rickety bridge clinging to jagged rock, should assassins have set upon them—upon her—again. It was a good idea, though it drew them distant enough from civilization to chafe Ovelia’s nerves. Zaland was now a day behind them, and the knight insisted they would not stop at the gates of Fort Besselat and leave her safety in the hands of the Southern Sky's foot soldiers. It was only the two of them and the vast wilderness.

She unclasped the heavy cloak from her shoulders, which was embroidered with the crest of the princess who died a long time ago, and folded it on an uneven stump, in a show of good faith. “If that is permitted.”

The holy knight glanced up from where he crouched on the ground, winding a cord around a tent peg. 

“Certainly it is permitted.” He finished the knot he was tying and rose to his feet.

The knight’s stance was entirely too decisive for Ovelia’s liking. “Alone,” she replied tersely, “if you please.” 

Delita bowed affectedly low, hand to breast. “As it pleases my lady.”

Heat crawled up Ovelia’s neck. She pressed her lips together in a thin line, turned on her heel, and marched out of the copse of scraggly pines without another word. She followed the bank of the river west, some way towards the falls they had crossed that morning, and did not stop until the rogue knight of the church was no more than a brown-haired speck in the distance.

Ovelia knelt at the water’s edge. The dying light and rolling current muddied her reflection, the features of her mirrored face inscrutable. She dipped her fingers into the surface, and retracted them with a hiss; the water had an icy bite. For a moment, her resolve faltered. It would surely be easier to postpone this ritual until they reached civilization, where an attendant might at least warm a bucket of bathwater for her? But Zeltennia was far, and the surly knight had indicated they were to keep well away from cities, lest someone troublesome spy her and recognize the princess. Her hair had also taken on a heavy, oily sheen–and if she did not wash now, all that awaited her was the vexing company of the knight. She would bear it. 

She loosened her braids and set the ornamental clasps on a nearby flat rock, and laid her gown beside it. She gritted her teeth, scooped a palmful of river water, and let the frigid liquid trickle onto her scalp. Once, twice, thrice more, until the water numbed her senses and her nerves. She forced herself to stand in the stream up to her calves, eyes screwed shut against the temperature. The block of foul-smelling soap, a gift from the monastery, thinned with each dip into the river. By the time she had finished, the sun was a narrow glow at the edge of the horizon.

Shivering, Ovelia returned to shore and put on her layers. Without a second pair of hands, the laces took some effort. When she was done, she lifted her head–and made sudden, startled eye contact with a feathered yellow avian face from across the river. She froze.

The chocobo blinked at her, clucked softly, and dipped its beak into the river. Ovelia stood motionless and watched it in anxious fascination. It ignored her entirely. Were the domesticated ones quite so large? 

The fearsome bird reared back from the river, sated, and trotted away without a backward glance. Ovelia released her bated breath. The remarkable encounter was over as quickly as it had begun.

She finished dressing, wound her hair into a simple braid, and made her way back to their sheltered camp, eyes tired and fingers stiff.

—

By the time she returned, the tent was finished, and Delita was sitting cross-legged in front of a small shielded fire, eyes closed, as still and unreadable as ever. His golden armour gleamed in the flames. As she approached, he slipped something into his pocket.

Ovelia lifted her cloak from the misshapen stump and perched on the edge of the wood. 

“I saw a chocobo, down along the river,” she said. The words came regardless of desire. Between you've quite a mouth on you, princess and there are many who would be gladdened by your passing, he had not been a stirring conversationalist, but she could not keep herself from prattling. The pious silence of the monastery had been stifling.

“I'm not used to seeing them in the wild.” She rummaged through her things and produced a thimble and an ornate needlecase, the intricate design in the metal long since faded. She squinted at the needle eye and threaded it with a string of red. “But it left me well alone.”

Delita cracked an eyelid, observing her needle through the flames. 

“Mind your distance with the wild ones,” he said curtly. “They’re hardier than domesticated stock. And they have a nasty bite.”

Ovelia’s mouth turned down at the corner. Even the most innocuous of subjects could not pass muster. Mayhap he would prefer she kept her tongue stilled entirely, and save himself the reminder that his charge had thoughts of her own.

She blinked at the needle eye, shimmering in the light of the flame, and stabbed it rather violently into the hem of the cloak. “I shall keep it in mind.”

They lapsed back into the usual silence. Ovelia held her composure at the end of the needle’s point. Focusing on the knight on the other side of the fire would drive her to madness, so she focused instead on the rhythm of the stitch.

When the only lights were those of the fire and the distant moon, she finally spoke. “I should thank you for saving me, earlier. I do not mean to seem ungrateful.” She looped the stitch around, her murmuring not much louder than the crackling of the fire. “I recognize the effort, even if I question the ends.”

“You oughtn’t thank me.”

Ovelia meant to say something waspish, some petty indulgence in wrath. That was until she glanced across the fire. Under the banner of rescuer or prison guard, whichever it pleased him to call himself at the time, the knight’s glower remained steadfast. At times, Ovelia wondered if the gods' carving tools had slipped, and they had graced him with that perpetual scowl when they had put him on earth as a babe. Yet the frown that sat on his features now wasn't quite that. Its queer solemnity left her wrong-footed.  

“But I— ah!”

Ovelia held her finger aloft. A miniscule drop of ruby shivered on the tip.

She set aside the cloak and prodded dully about for a handkerchief, finding none. The gods had spoken. She ought not argue with their mysterious soldier, lest she risk their ire.

There was a quiet sigh and the creak of metal. “Here.”

A handkerchief was clasped in the knight’s gauntlet. He held it out to her with a reluctant sort of chivalry. His golden armour gleamed in the firelight.

Ovelia took the proffered bit of fabric tentatively and pressed it to her tiny injury. Blood seeped through the off-white.

She tilted her head back, considering the strange knight whose company she had irrevocably found herself in. He thought her tiresome and petulant, she knew, no better than a stubborn child thrashing against the tides of fate. He would not spare a comforting word for her in her hour of need. Yet he would relinquish his handkerchief? This simple act of knightly chivalry left her at a loss.

Thank you was the most sensible reply. She meant to say it. But the gleaming gold caught her eye, and what passed her lips was something else entirely. “Do you always wear armour?”

Of course he took his armour off around her at times–at dusk and dawn, when readying for sleep or rousing himself from it. But he did not do so at meals or at short rests, and even in the few hours of sleep he took, he kept his blade under his arm.

Delita’s eyebrows lifted minutely. “When I am expecting attack.”

“Even now?” she murmured.

The knight answered Ovelia’s plaintive look with an unreadable one, then glanced away.

He sat on the earth near her feet. Then, with little ceremony, he removed his gauntlets, and began to unfasten his braces.

Ovelia stilled the handkerchief on her finger. In the orange glow of the fire, she could see his strong arms and rough hands. She was struck again, as she always was in the vulnerable twilights of her capture and rescue, that he was young, that he could not be much older than she was. She lowered her eyes respectfully as the gold piled up.

She waited until the speck of blood on the cloth was dry enough to crack, and held the handkerchief out for him to take. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

Delita said nothing, but took his handkerchief back and folded it between his hands. 

“You would best get some sleep.” His voice was too soft to be truly gruff. “We are a week’s travel from Zeltennia.”

It was true, and Ovelia was far too tired to argue, and there were odd rustles and burbles along the river bank that she would rather not dwell upon. She slid the needle into the needle case, rolled up the thread, and put her thimble away. She collected her things in a bundle to her chest, rose, and picked her way around the knight at her feet.

At the mouth of the tent, she gave him one last backwards glance. Exhaustion softened the formality. “Good night, Ser Delita.”

Ovelia ducked inside the tent and crouched to the bedroll furthest from the opening. She laid her things down in a neat pile near the head, and removed her dress, laces loosened from the trip to the river. She lay back, pulled the princess's red cloak over her light shift to keep out the chill, and listened, drowsily, to the crackling fire and the soft bubbling of the river. Such sounds she would not have heard through monastery stone.

And she listened, too, for the movements of the young knight, until sleep finally claimed her.

—

Alone, Delita unfolded his handkerchief, and smoothed it against his knee. A spot of the princess's blood yet marred its fabric, and he considered the rusted edges of the stain in the flickering light.

He kept watch, and warned the goblins from the tent, and put out the fire. When he was good and sure that the princess slept, he entered the tent, with his sword, and his handkerchief, and a plain black pendant spooled inside of it. He made as little noise as possible, lying down against the other side with his back to his charge.

"Good night, Ovelia." His breath was as quiet as a whisper on the river bank.

Chapter Text

It had been a gruelling four days. They had travelled wide of Fort Besselat to skirt the dunes, and for their trouble were weary, dusty, and sunburnt. Sweat had soaked through the fabric under Delita’s mail, and however many times he turned out his boot, there contrived to be as much sand inside. But now, as the first stars of evening glimmered above Bervenia, they were to take rest in an inn, a squat brick building that protruded from the road above.

On opening the door, a wave of raucous noise swept over them. The air was thick with the smells of tallow fat, spilled ale, and the less inviting effluvia of human bodies in close proximity. In the flickering light, nondescript shadows moved across the walls, distorted by the forms of dozens of people. Delita cut a path through the crowd, and Ovelia, clad in his traveller's cloak that none might see her for the princess, trailed exhaustedly behind him. A few souls spied his armour and moved aside without being asked, hiding their curiosity with pewter mugs. In the course of this forceful march, the pair were separated by the jostling elbows of revellers, and Delita was compelled to stalk back, greatly martyred, to herd the stunned princess onwards.

At the bar stood the innkeeper, a stout man who was also a local petty official. He locked eyes with Delita, who nodded, then slid a key across the bar, attached to a block of painted wood. This, Delita wordlessly pocketed. Ignoring the princess's suspicious attention, he led her back through the shuffle, up the dimly lit stairs, and over a man deep in his cups, to their room.

Inside, Delita dropped his pack on the floor, unburdening himself of the cursed thing for the first time in several hours, and sat on one of the beds, simple pallets with ascetic sheets that were nonetheless finer than what they had been making do with these past weeks in the strict confines of the tent, elbows drawn in to avoid knocking against each other.

“I’m going to market for supplies.” Delita took off his boot as he spoke, turning it over, and giving it a whack for good measure. “Stay here until I return.”

Ovelia stalked beyond him, towards the shuttered window, but, despite the wobble of her gait and the weariness at the corners of her eyes, she did not yet sit. “And I suppose if I do not, your man on the first floor will keep me here in your stead?”

Delita lowered the boot he was inspecting to give her a measured look. “I would take the chance to enjoy having a room, Princess. We leave at first light.”

He put his boot back on with an air of finality. His foot slipped at an angle against the grit.

“While indeed welcome,” replied Ovelia from the window, “the privilege of a room is not my principal concern.”

“And which privilege would be?”

“‘Tis a duty of which I speak,” she corrected him, tartly. “I have spoken my prayers at every dawn and eventide, but we have not stopped once for mass. Should one desire the Gods' forgiveness, there is but one way to seek it.” She faced him, mouth set. “Before we leave, it is my desire to pray in a chapel.”

A somewhat incredulous look crossed Delita’s knightly mien. For all the Church’s machinations, the princess’s piety hadn’t dimmed since Orbonne.

“Our priority is stealth, my lady,” he said, voice creeping sarcastic. “Worry not. The Gods will doubtless understand your plight.”

Ovelia reddened, eyes tightening at the sides. “Our priority,” she retorted, “or yours?” She splayed her hand at the shuttered windows. “We stand at the birthplace of Saint Ajora! You do not mean to deny me the right of the faithful to honour the holiest of the Gods' messengers?”

Instead of answering her question he said, with infinite patience, “There will be time enough for devotions once we reach Zeltennia.”

Ovelia scoffed. “Time enough? Do you find the divine places of worship to be so interchangeable? Is that what you think I–” She interrupted herself with a furious hand. “No, I will not argue it. I hereby order you to find me a chapel, by my divine authority as an—”

She broke the declaration before voicing the name of the royal house, as though choked by an invisible hand.

The princess's eyes in her parchment-wan face looked through him into empty air. That was, Ovelia's eyes, for she was not in truth the princess. She could as easily have been a butcher's daughter.

He ought to have said something—small words of comfort, musings on that truth. Yet oration failed him; he found himself unable to silver his tongue. They stared at each other.

The standoff was broken by Ovelia, who dropped to the foot of the bed, legs and arms laced as tightly as the tie on her dress at the back of her neck. “Do as you wish.”

Delita’s eyes faltered on the crown of Ovelia’s ignoble head. Outside the window, one youth hooted to another, and that brought him back to himself. The light outside was a sickly red, and all the tears in the sea wouldn't feed them on the road.

He stood, mechanically, and walked out of the room. The drunk in the hallway sat up at the noise and dry-heaved perilously close to his boots. He pushed out of the inn, sick of the place, feeling as if the noise was corkscrewing under his skin, out into the market and open air.

—

As far as they were from western Gallione, some things were true of every city: the seagull-cries of vendors dying down to the shuttering of daylight stalls, the shop that was open at any hour whose taciturn proprietor bought or sold aught and all, the lovers wandering the promenade, the wayward children for whom any merchant’s cart could become another barricade in their games of war. When Ramza's sister had visited Eagrose for the summer, the four of them—Delita, Ramza, Tietra, Alma—used to rampage around the market as a group of tiny, stick-wielding terrors. But the princess had not come home from the monastery. Watchful eyes needed to keep her where she was.

When he returned some time later, it was with sleep throbbing at the edge of his temples and a bag of provisions in his arms. Apart from the supplies for the road, he had brought back a fluffy bun rolled in the shape of a crescent—meant to evoke a crab, for the month of Cancer. If he had thought about it, he wouldn't have called it a peace offering. But girls liked that sort of thing.

He knocked sharply to announce his presence. “My lady?” Met with silence, he hesitated. “Ovelia?”

No candlelight shone from under the door. Perhaps, stricken as she was, she had decided to use the bed after all.

He turned the key with soft precision, to avoid waking her, and the door swung open in a ghostly arc—and his stomach lurched as, in the light from the hallway, he realized his fatal error. The room lay empty, the beds still as perfectly made as on their arrival. There was no princess, false or otherwise, and there was no sign of his travelling cloak.

Cursing up such a stream of invective as to make the Gods in their heaven blush, he flung the bag of provisions onto the bed and stormed out once more into the street, before the wayward damsel could get too far.

—

The Temple of Saint Ajora was a humble offering. It was the landmark of Bervenia, but it did not tower; the gaggle of squat cottages clustered around it like goslings to the goose. The nave of the temple was not so much larger than the chapel at Orbonne. A wine-red runner led worshipers to the crossing, and to the altar beyond the choir. The stained glass windows illuminated Saint Ajora's storied life, from the babe who walked to the well, to robed preacher, to holy knight of the Zodiac Braves, and finally to the white-winged child of the Father of the Gods. On the vaulted ceiling over the crossing, fearsome painted waves crashed into a city alone in the sea: the fall of Mullonde.

Evening mass had passed, but a few wakeful worshipers remained in prayer. A priest greeted any who came near the altar. Cloaked and hooded, Ovelia shied from wandering eyes, and once she had glimpsed the windows she tucked herself into an empty pew in the nave and knelt on the cool stone.

“O Father.” She recited the murmured greeting into clasped fingers, eyes squeezed shut.  “Abandon us not, Your wayward children, but bless and keep us, as You blessed Your most faithful, most devoted servant.”

Prayer was a gentle meditation. On some nights in monasteries, her own fervent muttering, forehead pressed to her straw-stuffed mattress, had been her only saving grace. She held lengthy conversations with the Gods and heard them sigh in the silence between her breaths. But tonight, the rote welcome did not calm her anxious heart, and in the silence she heard only her quickened pulse.

“Pashtarot, Knight-Star,” whispered Ovelia, “shepherd of righteous hearts. At the dawning of Your holy month, guide Ivalice to the truth as You guided the infant Ajora to the well.” She swallowed back the rising bile in her throat. “Let us not mistake the poison for blessed water, and when the cup is set before us, grant us the courage not to drink…”

The insolence of her treacherous lips, to produce breathtaking hypocrisies in the house of the Gods! She drove her forehead into the back crest of the pew until her head throbbed.

“Saint Ajora, forgive me.” Her knees ached against the stone. She willed herself to bear it. “My heart is weak and sinful. You spoke the truth and spread the word of the Gods.”

She opened her eyes to a baleful squint. “But I have come to You in naught but deception. I have been deceived. All of Ivalice has been deceived. We are on the brink of war and the people know not wherefore their blood must spill.”

Her lips brushed her bone-white knuckles, her voice quivering with the strain of keeping her reproachful timbre hushed. “But You knew. You, and Our Father... You knew all along that this was to be my path. The Gods do not put Their children on this land of sin without reason.” She screwed her traitorous eyes shut. “I thought I knew mine! All I have endured was for the good of Ivalice! I would have contented myself with that life if I knew it to be Your will!

“So what is?” Desperation drew her gaze up, to the stained glass behind the altar. Even from the humble pews of the nave, the brilliance of beautiful white-winged Ajora, his palms open and peaceful, could not be denied. “What is it You wish of me?”

As if to answer her scalding prayer, a breeze from the door tickled the back of her neck. The candles of the altar flared in an austere dance.

The reproach in her voice melted to anguished pleading. “Do You wish for me to act as You did, when You walked among us? To emulate Your unflinching virtuousness, as all the Gods' children must strive to do? To bear the truth proudly and to strike down base falsehoods, undaunted by the violent, weak hearts of your fellow men?” Her breath caught horribly in her throat. “And... and to then be h-hanged for it?”

Tears spilled freely from her eyelashes. “I—I cannot! I am neither blessed nor holy—I am weak, and craven, and common! If the Gods have chosen me to lay down my life so that innocents might be saved, then You, in Your infinite wisdom, have chosen wrong! I cannot do it!”

Her voice broke as a fever might. She slumped forward, collapsed her face into her arms on the back of the pew, and wept.

She knew not how much time passed in that way, crumpled on the floor, with naught for company but the gentle slap of her tears against the stone. Every sob set her travel-worn body aching, in a series of lessening waves, until her cries died to a trembling sniffle.

“My lady,” came a soft voice at her shoulder.

Panic seized Ovelia’s heart. She gave a terrible start and lurched from the pew, all colour leached from her cheeks. At the end of the pew stood Delita, with his stern brows and dark eyes. Candlelight shimmered on gold plate. 

He held her gaze with the look of a man holding his fingers over open flame. “We should return to the inn.”

In spite of her open weeping, which he was often quick to disapprove of, neither threats nor chiding followed; that was all he said. The fright cooled to suspicion. Ovelia rose only as far as the seat of the pew. “Were you listening to me?”

“If your prayers are for the Gods’ ears alone,” the knight replied curtly, “then don't recite them with your mouth.”

Naked hurt crossed Ovelia's face. She scowled to hide it, and turned her head from his to mop her seeping eyes. Delita had his fleeting moments of softness, but never had she known him to blunt his tongue. She was foolish to expect gentleness now, when a bared heart was so easy to break.

“Of course,” she said bitterly. “What are temples for, but silent contemplation?”

That he had not yet reached down to drag her by the arm emboldened her. “But you are right, ser knight,” Ovelia amended mutinously. “We do not speak in privacy. I had best watch my tongue, lest some lowly priest of the Church recognize me and escort me to Zeltennia in your stead.” She met his eye fiercely. “After all, you would be scorn to return to your masters empty-handed!”

For a moment they glared at each other. Then Delita broke eye contact, and looked instead to the crashing waves on the ceiling. “They are not my masters.”

Ovelia’s brow creased. She brushed damp strands of hair from her cheeks. “But that knight of the Church, who was at Lionel... do you not take me to Zeltennia on his orders?”

The knight's armour creaked as he sat down on the pew next to her, the folding of his hands too loose and irreverent for prayer.

“I mean to take you to Zeltennia, and I mean to keep you alive. That is all that need concern you.”

Before her curiosity could forge bravely ahead, he nodded towards the temple's altar. “Have you finished entreating the Gods?”

Ovelia sniffled wetly and frowned at him. It was the usual story he spun—that he meant to save her, that he sold his sword to no man—regardless of what ought to have contradicted it. The knowledge of her common provenance had not appeared to change this.

“...No,” she mumbled, as she wiped the rest of the tears from her cheeks. “I... I wish to pray just a little longer.” She pursed her lips and eyed the gold plate, identical in fashion to the Knight Templar who colluded with the cardinal. “If you would be so inclined to allow me that small mercy, Ser Delita.”

Delita glanced to her, and away. “As you like.”

He folded his arms and settled back against curved and unyielding wood.

Ovelia twined her fingers together and lowered her head—her knees ached still, and, Gods forgive her, she had not the strength to bear the pain longer when they had much further to walk on the morrow—but she cracked a curious eye at Delita's irreverent posture. Crossing his arms in the birthplace of Saint Ajora!

“Mayhap you ought to bow your head as well, good ser,” she said, with a quiet sort of coyness. The weeping had left her hoarse. “You pray at neither dawn nor dusk, nor before meals... the Gods must miss your voice.”

“No one has ordered me to pray,” Delita said, peevishly. “Unless you are, now.”

“I see the Church did not induct you for your piety,” Ovelia muttered.

The way Delita flicked his eyes to the ceiling fell short of communion with the Divine Host, but he sat up, and clasped his gauntleted hands together, and bowed his head. “Halmarut, Arbiter, if you would hear a lowborn boy's prayers, please send me glad news of those I keep in my thoughts.”

He spoke the prayer with all the verve of a student reciting to his tutor that Lesalia is the capital of Ivalice. Save for his austere choice of deity, it was also bereft of any personal information worth offering the Gods.

He lowered his hands, and opened an eye to glance at her. “Satisfied?”

“It is not I that you should aim to please.” Ovelia dutifully lowered her head and closed her eyes.

“Fandaniel, Protector…” The deferential supplication was a little louder than virtuousness would demand. “...Watch over Agrias. Keep her whole and hale. And, one day, may You see her safely returned to my side.”

—

The streets of Bervenia were dark and barren, merchant wares long packed and patrons home to supper. Weary and footsore, they did not make conversation, but on the unlit roads between the temple and the inn, Ovelia stayed near the surly knight. At first, she thought he kept a measured pace for her sake, but in the silence of their solemn march, the thudding of his boots on the hard-packed dirt staggered at an uneven rhythm. They turned a corner, and in the shafts of moonlight, she wondered if he was perhaps favouring his right leg.

Their return to the inn did not go unnoticed. The innkeep's ruddy countenance paled to a ghostly hue at Delita's returning glare. Guided by the pointed gauntlet at her back, she picked her way through the thinned revellers to the shadowed mouth of the stairs, and they at last arrived in their humble little room.

Delita closed the door. With the soft glow of the moon, Ovelia lit the candle stub on the bedside table. Back to the knight, she made with the arduous task of loosing the laces at the back of her neck. Their tent had been much too small to hold her scandalized shyness.

In her peripheral vision, the knight sat heavily on the bed, freeing himself from his boots. Then there was the sound of a bag rustling, which abruptly ceased. After a moment, the pallet creaked, and his footfalls paced closer.

Ovelia quickly glanced over her shoulder, fingers stilled on the loosened tie. “...Yes?”

Delita stood just behind her, a bread roll in his hands. Wordlessly, he held it out to her. 

Ovelia’s eyebrows pinched. She laid a forearm across her chest to hold her drooping dress in place and accepted the offering with hesitant fingers. The crescent of bread had been rolled into a funny sort of shape, round and hearty in the middle, with tapered ends that trailed off into two points each. It put her in mind of another loaf she had received as a gift several summers before... 

Delighted recognition broke through puzzlement. “Oh—crab bread! For Cancer? Elder Simon brought me one from Dorter years ago, I never would have expected…"

Ovelia blushed, remembering herself and the stern company she now kept. She ducked her head stiffly. “Thank you.”

Her so-called protector had admonished her often enough for her tears. Yet here, when she smiled at this small concession, he appeared ill at ease. He nodded, schooling his countenance, and retreated to the opposite side of the bed, where he sat to unfasten the rest of his armour.

Ovelia tore her eyes from his back and looked down at the fluffy loaf resting in her hand. Delita must have bought it when he was acquiring provisions, after he'd left her here. She set the little bread near the candle on the small wooden table, and recommenced with the business of removing her dress, ever aware of the clink of his armour as it met the floor.

They did not acknowledge one another again. Delita consumed his rations in silence while Ovelia clasped her fingers over the gift of bread. But her mind lingered not on the blessings of rote gratitude, but a different prayer, spoken shortly before they left the temple.

However she longed to see her stalwart protector again, she doubted even a miracle of Saint Ajora’s could grant that particular wish. Agrias, the progeny of an honourable bloodline and the pride of the Lionsguard, had promised her services to a princess. Ovelia had a new knight, now: an irreverent lowborn, with blasphemous patrons, pledged to protect a common pretender. It was a more fitting placement in the end. Perhaps this was the Gods’ plan after all.

Chapter Text

"What about a Minotaur? Have you slain a Minotaur before?"

"A few, yes."

"A few? Really?" Ovelia considered this as they marched along the riverbank. Finnath Creek was not very wide, but dreadfully deep, according to Delita, so they were finding a safe place to cross. A day’s travel beyond the river waited Zeltennia, where she might, in exchange for sequestering herself behind its walls, have a warm, clean bed to sleep in. "How many? Do you know?"

He shook his head, stepping carefully between limestone rocks. "Three… four…?"

"Hmm." Ovelia trotted along after him. Perhaps they would never find a crossing, she thought, and she would not make Zeltennia after all. She pretended that they might go elsewhere, for a different adventure. "That is no small accomplishment. Where did they learn to wield axes like men?"

Delita shrugged. "Perhaps in distant times the fell blood of the Lucavi was mated with a cow."

"Oh!" The princess’s tongue poked out in surprised, fascinated disgust. "That's horrible! I'd not like to think of that."

She moved on from Delita's macabre sense of humor quickly. "What of a coeurl? Have you faced any of those?"

"Yes. Many."

"I would hope not all at once!" Ovelia said. "I have seen only the red ones, and they are fearsome enough."

She ducked beneath the branch of an evergreen, and plucked a pine needle from her hair when she emerged. "What about...a dragon?"

Delita pushed a branch out of the way, and held it for his charge, looking back incredulously. "A dragon?"

Ovelia hurried after her captor-saviour, lest he grow impatient and loose the branch. He had not done so before, and had been much more chivalrous on this leg of the trip, but there was still time to play cruel tricks before they reached Zeltennia.

"They are proud, fascinating beasts, and terribly rare. Have you seen one, on your travels?"

Delita lifted his eyebrows, deadpan, releasing the branch and continuing on down the rocks. "Only from a very great distance. I know my measure."

It was the practical answer, but it did not make for very exciting conversation. "How far away were you? Do you know which color it was?"

Delita hid a malevolent smirk. "Green, it was. A great beast with hideous teeth, on a limestone hill. I thank the gods the creek between us was so deep."

Ovelia gasped, and slapped her hand over her mouth to quiet the echo. She craned her neck to peer upriver, at the cliffs of limestone lining the bank, and a green silhouette nearly stopped her heart.

A passing breeze ruffled her hair, and rustled the leaves of what was clearly a bush.

She lowered her hand fractionally and directed a sour look to the knight's back. "I suppose you were very fortunate, then," she said cheerfully, but quietly, and through her fingers. Perhaps there were things that were not bushes along the riverbank. "The green ones cannot spew the elements like their brethren."

He gave the princess a surly look over his shoulder. "And what do you mean by that?"

“Well, you were in hardly any danger at all, Ser Delita.” Ovelia laced her fingers behind her back, the picture of innocence. "A dragon cannot swim, and if it cannot conjure flame in its jaws, then you were quite safe after all. 'Tis most comforting, though a good story it makes not."

After a simmering pause, Delita grumbled agreement, and marched on.

For a while, there were only the sounds of the slow-moving river and the crunch of pebbles underfoot. Had she humiliated her knight into silence? It was a little endearing that he could be laid low by a simple observation. Petty revenge for all the times he had spoken of horrible, frightening monsters in the forest that would surely never choose to dine on soft princess flesh.

"Fear not, Ser Delita," said Ovelia, after a time. They had not yet found a crossing. "I shall make your harmless encounter with a dragon much more interesting, and immortalize it in legend."

"Oh?" Delita’s tone was polite, and not at all exasperated.

"Indeed. If you shall not tell me an interesting story, I shall spin one myself."

She tipped her head back. The sky was a deep, clear azure, the sun a searing beacon hanging in the sky. They were a few hours from nightfall. They would make camp soon, the last fire and pitched tent of their journey, and then they would be at Zeltennia, where they were likely to part ways as she resumed the mantle of princess, regardless of its truth, and he vanished in some dark corner to pursue his mysterious agenda.

"On one fine spring day in a distant kingdom," Ovelia began at length,"the Holy Knight Delita went riding into the woods." She spoke the well-worn beginning with more confidence than she felt; improvised stories could never come as easily as the scriptures at mass.

With the toe of her shoe, she nudged a pebble into the river. "Not for pleasure, you understand, but for the most serious of business. He did naught for pleasure, and would not care to be so gravely maligned."

Delita gave a weary sigh.

"You see, it was... that..." Ovelia cast her mind about for details. If the dragon was to be the foe, it could not appear so early in the legend. She fixed her eyes on a fluffy cloud lazily drifting across the ocean of blue.

"…A wild boar had been sighted within the country's borders for the first time in an age, and the King himself had called for a grand hunt to claim the creature's pelt. Whosoever slew the prized beast, he declared, would win his daughter's hand in marriage. All the fine young men of the kingdom packed their bags and saddled their chocobos and clamored to join the hunt, for the princess was said to be very beautiful indeed."

She tilted her chin loftily, adopting a dramatic affectation. "But Ser Delita the Holy Knight did not care for such things as princesses. He thought only of the price the pelt might fetch from the Poachers' Den, and of how undisciplined and foolish his competitors were."

The real Ser Delita was picking his way around unstable, muddy riverbank. Was he listening? Perhaps he had tuned her out, severe stare fixed on his route, as he oft did when she prattled on. She might as well have spoken to the birds and the grass. She would entertain herself, then.

Ovelia lifted the hem of her dress, skirted the mud, and continued. "And Ser Delita was very disciplined. While the young hunters gathered in taverns every night to boast of their accomplishments and inevitable victory, he travelled the countryside without rest. Through wind and rain and scorching heat he hunted his prey. For three days and three nights he did not eat, drink, or sleep. He sat in his golden armour, and he stalked, and he watched, and he waited."

"He did not eat or sleep?" Delita cut in. "He would be too weak for battle."

Ovelia perked up. "Oh, no, he did not!" she insisted. "He needed not that which most mortal men desire, and took care to keep distance between him and the most dangerous of monsters, and should battle have found him regardless, he wore his armour always."

"Of course he did," the knight muttered.

Ovelia delicately cleared her throat. "Ser Delita stalked the wild boar for three days and three nights, and at the dawn of the fourth day he came to a narrow river, and into a limestone cave on the opposite riverbank he saw the wild boar disappear. 'Twas most unfortunate, for the cave was likely home to some manner of beast, and he would not see his prey felled by a monster.

"So he crossed the water, and drew his sword, and saw within a mighty red dragon."

"I should humbly beg your highness’s pardon, that green was not exciting enough."

"You ought to be grateful," Ovelia admonished him, eyes glittering in earnest. "A red dragon is a much more fearsome adversary for our hero!"

The look Delita levelled at the princess was not precisely gratitude.

She trotted near enough to the knight to almost stride alongside him. "’Twas a most monstrous dragon, as tall as three men and twice as long." She lifted her hand far above her head. "Smoke billowed from its nostrils, and electricity sizzled in its dripping maw. And safe beneath its wing was the wild boar, unharmed. The creatures were colluding.

"The dragon opened its jaws, and said—"

"Dragons cannot speak."

Ovelia pursed her lips. "Well, this one could. It was a very old and intelligent dragon."

"Unlikely." The noble knight lifted his chin. "Dragons are mindless beasts, known for their brutality, not their intelligence."

Ovelia crossed in front of him, incensed. "’Tis a fairy story, ser! If the dragon cannot speak, it swallows him whole right there." She sniffed. "Or, if it pleases you, I might finish the real tale."

One would think brave Ser Delita had swallowed a bit of lemon. Oh no, thought Ovelia, how strenuously he must disagree! That would not possibly be his fate, as, of course, the holy knight could through force of will hold a dragon in place...

"Pray continue, lady."

She smiled sweetly, and fell back into place.

"The dragon opened its jaws and said…" Here, she dropped her volume to a gravelly rumble. "‘Foolish hunter, I have bested you. Lay down your sword and painless be the feast.’"

"A clever beast indeed, to speak in verse."

Ovelia narrowed an eye, spots of color high in her cheeks. She smoothed one of her braids over her shoulder. "…The Holy Knight Delita knew he was no match for a creature of such strength. Should he strike, its talons would crush him, golden armour and all. Should he flee, its mighty breath would turn him to ash on the spot."

"— ‘Death comes for us all,’ said the holy knight, drawing his sword." Delita mimed this. "The mighty dragon quailed, knowing itself outmatched by his divine blade—"

"No!" She cut in front of him again, hands on her hips, and stomped her foot upon the mud-crusted pebbles. She had not been so animated since before he snatched her from Orbonne, and certainly not at all on their somber trek from Lionel—but here, at the end of their lonesome quest, on the eve of their arrival into the heart of the Southern Sky, she positively quivered with agitation. "He drew his sword before he entered the cave, were you not listening? And—you told your tale already, of the green dragon you saw across the river!"

Delita halted, gesturing widely with a hand. "A good knight is quick enough that he might draw his sword and slay his foe in a single move. I make it more accurate—"

Ovelia folded her arms. "’Tis contrary to the point! Stories ought not be interpreted in the exact. They are meant to tell us of men's hearts through their deeds, not instruct on proper swordsmanship!"

Delita grumbled something inaudible. "...the point if they do not fight in the proper manner, no one would believe it..."

The holy knight likely wished for her to stop talking, as he always did, but this was the longest they had ever carried on a conversation, and they had still not crossed the river. She would rather bicker at the riverbank than shut herself away with unfeeling stone.

So she tossed her braid over her shoulder, lifted her chin, and enunciated each word fiercely. "The Holy Knight Delita was outmatched. Do you wish to know what it was he did instead?"

Delita watched her with his stern, not at all petulant, gaze.

Ovelia kept his eyes, her lips pressed, her face pink.

At length, Delita sighed, and moved on to poke at the edge of the riverbank with the toe of his boot. "...What did the Holy Knight Delita do instead."

Ovelia assumed her place just behind him. "The Holy Knight Delita was outmatched, but he was clever, and cunning, and determined. He had come a very long way for his prey, and would not see his end here.

"He dropped to a knee, and he bowed his head, and he said: ‘O Mighty Dragon, you have bested me. Your scheme is a resourceful one indeed. The wild boar you keep has brought you many men for you to feast.’

"The dragon stared at the holy knight, and breathed smoke, and said nothing.

"‘But I wonder,’ said the Holy Knight Delita.” Ovelia fixed her eyes on the curve of hair at the nape of Delita’s neck. "‘I do not mean to insult Your Greatness with what I imply. But a stray arrow could fell your bait in an instant, and you would be forced to take up the hunt once again yourself. That cannot please Your Mightiness.’

"The dragon watched this human curiously. Few dared to speak to him directly, in all his frightening splendour. They would sooner scream and run, or stand and fight."

There were no more protests from the knight, who instead listened to her tale with an expression she could not read.

"‘Mayhap,’ said the Holy Knight Delita, ‘you could do with a different lure. We men are hardy and strong, and we speak the common tongue. I could draw your prey to your lair in numbers a little boar could not hope to match. You need never hunt for yourself again.’

"’Twas a most tempting bargain. The dragon agreed, on the condition that the wild boar stay with him, until such a time as he could be certain of the holy knight’s loyalty. Ser Delita accepted the terms."

This part of the creek was narrower, the water only calf-deep. A conveniently placed stone provided a step that even a sheltered princess could navigate. But not yet. The story wasn’t over.

"And?" Delita turned to face the princess, arms folded, back to the creek. "That is no small price to bargain for. Does he follow through?"

Ovelia folded her fingers primly before her and raised her eyebrows. "Oh? You'd like to know what happens, would you?"

Delita lifted a sardonic eyebrow. "I am simply curious."

Ovelia lowered her voice to an eerie volume, swept along by her own storytelling. "He does indeed.

"First, he lured the foolish hunters to the dragon, one by one, and they were all devoured. Then the King's men came, to see what became of the hunt, and they, too, were offered to the ravenous beast. Even the King and his Kingsguard could not escape the creature when the holy knight claimed to know of the missing patrols, and led them to the dragon's lair instead."

"A grim end to a grim tale." Delita stooped to collect a sprig of a wild plant, rolled it between his fingers, and cast it aside. "Why did he do such a thing?"

"’Tis not quite the end!" Ovelia said, lifting her palms. "The Holy Knight Delita did not wish to leave empty-handed, and a pact made with a dragon much stronger than he was not so easily broken. So he watched and he waited, just as he did before, when he stalked the wild boar across the land. And when the dragon grew fat and lazy, Ser Delita slew it in its sleep. And the hunters, and the King, and all of the King's men crawled out up its limp throat and out of its mouth, and the King offered his daughter's hand in marriage.

"The Holy Knight Delita did not take it. He had achieved what he set out to do. He collected the wild boar and departed the kingdom for lands unknown, as he had done many times before.

"But after spending so long in its company, he could not kill the wild boar. He let it come along with him, and when it grew old and tired after a good long life, he slew it, and skinned it, and made it into a fine stew."

She twined her fingers together and ducked her head. "…The end."

Delita frowned up at the limestone cliffs. She expected a protest, or perhaps more bickering; but she did not know what to make of the contemplative threading of his stern brows. Perhaps he disapproved of this mischievous protagonist who could not fell monsters in a single blow. The hero of the tale had not been especially heroic, after all, inviting all manner of people into a dragon's mouth.

"I wonder what the wild boar thought about the whole affair," was all he said.

A faint, surprised pink tinged her cheeks. "I... do not think the wild boar thought much about it at all," Ovelia said haltingly. " ’Twas only a boar. I would not think hard on it."

Delita gave her a long, thoughtful look. "...Indeed."

After a moment, Delita released her from his gaze, and faced the burbling water. "We should cross here."

He stepped to the middle of the creek. The rock was slick with algae, but did not shift under his weight. From there he hopped to the other side, where he waited for Ovelia to follow.

She hesitated at the riverside, head bowed. The story was over, and they would cross the river and reach Zeltennia by next noon.

She gave the green-slicked rock a doubtful look. But Delita would surely scold her if she waited any longer, so she lifted her skirts to her calves and hopped to the stone. It was a near thing; she wobbled, unbalanced, but managed to right herself without assistance.

The water lapped at the edges of the rock, made smooth with time. Was the river very cold? Was the current very fast? ’Twas shallow enough to see the bottom, but would that stop the river from cruelly sweeping her along, uncaring of her fate?

She looked downstream. "Might we find a different crossing?"

"I have crossed this way before," Delita said. "There is not much better."

Not much better than a single slippery stone... which meant they were not to stop anywhere else, and she must cross here. She lifted a tentative foot and touched it to the opposite riverbank. It slipped through loose stones and hit the water with a splash. She reeled and retracted it.

"I—I can't." Ovelia craned her neck behind her. "We shall have to find another place." Or perhaps she was simply to be trapped on this stone forevermore. It would not be such a bad thing.

Delita grasped a scraggly tree which protruded out over the water, and extended a hand. "Here."

He did not give a hand to her often; the holy knight preferred to keep his distance. She took it, tentatively at first, but when her foot slipped through stones again, she gripped his gauntlet tightly with both hands, skin taut across her knuckles.

Delita had strength enough to lift her weight. As she fell forwards, he stepped backwards, releasing the tree to support her back, and pulled her to safety.

Ovelia stumbled to shore with the holy knight's help. If him extending a hand was rare, touching her anywhere else was unheard of—yet his hand rested firmly at her back. It was intimate if only for the proximity, and the strangeness. The last time he manoeuvred her bodily, she had been on the back of the chocobo, and he had firmly been her villainous kidnapper. He was not quite a kidnapper anymore. He was not quite a saviour, either. He was certainly not her friend.

Her eyes flicked to his, nervously.

Delita met her gaze for a moment, then looked away and released her—if not politely, then neutrally. "...We should make haste."

Ovelia ducked her head and burrowed her sweaty palms in the fabric of her skirt. "Of course." He might frighten her, but, regardless of his ends, Holy Knight Delita would never see her come to harm, not after that first night. He had made that quite clear.

Delita moved on, but Ovelia lingered near the water, casting her eyes across the river. All of Ivalice seemed to be on the other side. It would not be long, now, until the journey was but a distant, colourful memory. Zeltennia beckoned.

She hurried after the knight before he had the chance to scold her.

Chapter Text

“Has the princess wandered off?” Viscount Blanche tapped his finger impatiently on the table. “I fear the pheasant shall grow cold ere long. Could we not discuss the preparations without her?”

“Have a care, Blanche,” Orlandeau replied, seriously. “You speak of a trueborn Atkascha, and the rightful Queen of Ivalice.”

Duke Goltanna chuckled. “You need not be so stern with him, Orlandeau. He spoke only the thoughts of his fellows. But no, we cannot proceed without Her Highness, for now. If we are to crown her, we must know her, and until now our efforts in the war have kept us from Zeltennia. 'Tis true it shall be some time before she rises to the responsibility—but do you not wish to know the lady who shall one day head our nation?”

The conversation echoed off the marble floors and high stone ceilings of Orlandeau's solar. In one corner of the room, a bard strummed his lute indolently. The Duke's standard hung along one wall, gules lion rampant sable, framing a dining table on an ornate rug. Light streaming from a tall window landed on Goltanna, who sat at its head. His inner circle filled the rest of the table—Count Orlandeau at the Duke's left, as well as the Marquis Elmdore, the Baron of Bolmina, and Viscount Blanche—with a place left invitingly open for the princess at Goltanna's right. And next to this open place, in a starched red doublet he had not owned a few months ago, was the fresh-faced commander of the Blackram Knights, at barely eighteen, the youngest man in the room.

“Unfortunate though it may be that few of us have had the opportunity to acquaint ourselves with our reclusive Princess,” Marquis Elmdore said, “is it not so that one among our number has spent considerable time with her?”

Delita inclined his head politely. “Indeed, my lord. The road to Zeltennia was long.” 

He had also spent considerable time with the Marquis Elmdore, but thanks to unconsciousness or other factors, the man did not remember the peasant boy who numbered among his rescuers, and in their days fighting alongside one another, Delita had not seen fit to remind him. 

The Baron of Bolmina smirked, swiveling to face the young knight. “Ah, but of course, the Princess's savior! Well, don't hold out on us, Heiral. Tell us of the Princess!”

Duke Goltanna smiled expectantly at his favored lieutenant. 

“In truth, my lord, there isn't much to tell,” Delita said, with all humility due to his current liege lord. “Our acquaintance was limited to dire circumstances. Her highness has a noble air befitting of her birth, and oft devotes herself in prayer."

Inside his calfskin boot, his ankle twitched just shy of tapping his foot. Plunged into war, he had had little time for rest in the months since he last appeared at Zeltennia, having rescued the princess, having uncovered treason. This would be the first time he saw Ovelia since that day. Did she think of him as often as he did her? Delita hardly thought that possible.

The commander of the Blackram Knights was always busy. But his plans were a delicate machine, a golden device of Goug that requires the carefullest of balance, and so, during the few hours he had to himself in the officers' tent, his thoughts turned always to Ovelia, and what he would say to her when next they met. He reviewed their past conversations, sorting details and chastising mistakes. He thought rarely of the time before Lionel, both because the gnawing shame would eat him alive if he let it, and because, just as the Duke's men did tonight, his men had asked him to repeat the story of the princess's rescue dozens of times, and in his line of work, it behooved one to remember the true story while believing the false one. But he had studied the Ovelia of their journey extensively. He recited the story she had told, and reflected on the lines of her face, finding imaginary deviations with that of the man on Ivalice's coin.

And, of course, he silently rehearsed the conversation that would determine the rest of his life. He thought about alliances, and proposals, about those who used, and those who were used, and where the lines of battle truly lay. No more talk of truces or politics. It had to be something that would speak to this commoner girl who wore the highest raiment in the land. She had to believe it, and so, he had realized, it had to be true. What could he tell her that was true? 

Across hundreds of imaginary conversations, he had told Ovelia all sorts of things. He told her specific plans for the government, that he knew who might suit her royal court. He spoke of commoners who wore noble clothes, and puppets, and his childhood in Gallione, before Ramza and after. That the sunset had set Mandalia Plain ablaze, and he'd thought it was an omen, and it had been. That Zalbaag had always been kind to him, and grappled with him as he'd imagined an older brother might, and brought Tietra spun sugar and petted her hair, and it hadn't made any difference, in the end. He told her she was beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the real princess would have been, at least to him. He let loose about what he really thought of the nobility, that they were parasites on the common folk, what they had done to him, and what he would like to do to them. Night after night, he spilled his soul to the Ovelia of his mind.

The fabricated conversations played out differently. In some of them she would be suitably impressed by his rhetoric, in others she shed honest tears at what he had been through, and told him she would pray for his sister's soul. Sometimes she would run ashen-faced for the Duke, or beseech him to help her govern, a few times she had slapped him for his boldness, and on one memorable occasion he had seduced her on the altar beneath the watchful stained glass eyes of the Saint himself. This last version he dismissed, considering it as unlikely as it was impolitic.

But at long last, after many months, he had managed to winnow the chaff of his thoughts to one simple, sincere idea: I'll build a kingdom worthy of you. He simply hadn't had the chance to say it, yet.

“...She will make a fine queen,” he said, resisting the urge to turn and watch the door.

The Baron of Bolmina tutted. “That cannot be all.”

“Leave the man be, Baron,” said Goltanna. “We shall have the measure of her soon enough—”

The doors to the count's solar opened, and in strode an armor-clad knight in the colors of the Black Lion. He bowed his head. “The princess is just outside, Your Grace. She is ready to see you.”

Goltanna waved a hand. “Yes, yes, send her in.”

Delita was on his feet before the rest of them.

The castle knight pulled the door open and bowed at the waist. “Right this way, please, Your Highness...”

The door was thrown wide, and the princess stood behind it as though she had lost a hiding place. She entered the room where the generals waited with her fingers wrung tight. 

Ovelia had changed since last Delita had met her. Her pious white dress had been traded for an elegant gown befitting of her station, a high-waisted, silken thing richly embroidered in the reds and golds of the Southern Sky, the sloping neckline trimmed with dark fur. Her complexion was hale and pink, at least in her cheeks, far more so than when they had been travelling together. But her exposed neck and shoulders were as pale as parchment, her collarbones hollow, her face drawn. When their eyes met, it was with apprehension on her end, and relief on his. 

Duke Goltanna lifted his hand warmly. “Welcome, Princess. Come and sit, so we may greet you properly... Delita, if you would?”

“Your Grace.” With a nod to Goltanna, he walked up to the princess, and offered her his arm.

Ovelia eyed the proffered sleeve with undisguised suspicion, and laid stiffened fingers upon his arm. “Ser Delita.”

“I am glad to see you again, Princess,” Delita said, respectfully, as he led her to her seat. “I hope Your Highness has been well these past months.”

The princess dipped her head. “Yes, thank you. Our long journey left me weak, I'm afraid, though my strength is much improved. But I wish to congratulate you on your appointment, and express my belated condolences for the fate that befell your compatriots many months ago.” She paused, bringing them both to a halt. “I had not been aware of your affiliation with the Blackram Knights.”

Only the most attentive of wine-tasters could have caught the note of poison that slipped into his expression. For all his many imagined interactions with her illusory counterpart, Delita had not (he now recalled) successfully captured the maddening tongue of the princess herself. 

Ovelia’s eyes glittered with the small triumph. She set her mouth in a fierce line. 

“You mean to keep the princess all to yourself, eh, Commander?” Orlandeau called.

The duke beckoned impatiently. “Now bring her here, Delita, and let us all be acquainted.”

Delita led the princess to her seat, where Goltanna took her hand and clasped it between two of his own. “Princess Ovelia. Why, last I saw you, your crown hardly came to my knee—yet here you stand, a woman grown!”

Any brief satisfaction at catching Delita's falsehood dissipated from Ovelia’s face like morning mist. Under scrutiny, she lowered her gaze. “Forgive me, Your Grace, I do not recall the occasion.”

“You were young, 'tis to be expected,” the Duke said. “But I'll not hear such titles from you, my dear. We are family, are we not? I am the old king's cousin, of course—Father keep him—but it would please me greatly if you would call me Uncle.”

“As you wish, Lord Uncle.” Ovelia’s reply did not come immediately. Delita wondered if her mind had gone to the same questions as his: whether this meeting had ever happened, and if it had, whether it had been the same Ovelia.

Duke Goltanna gestured widely to the assembled generals. “Now sit, and we shall dine with the finest of the men who fight for your kingdom.”

—

The first time that Delita had dined alongside Ramza at the Beoulve manse, and been served meat, he'd thought that he should never eat so well again in his life, and the young Ramza had taken his hand with one still sticky with chicken grease and sworn that he lived here, now, and he would make sure he would always be able to eat whatever he liked. 

Time had proven the lie of that, of course. Even a nobleman's bastard couldn't make such assurances. But the food at Duke Goltanna's table surpassed even the Beoulves' finest fare. There was pickled parsnip and burdock root, fish stewed in a cream sauce, and a pie whose crust had been tortured into amusing decoration. There was roast pheasant and ox, seasoned with pepper and some other spice that Delita couldn't identify: cinnamon, perhaps, or galingale.

He had heard tell that there was a war on, and more strikingly, that there was supposed to be a famine; the Southern Sky's land sat parched while the Northern Sky's drowned. You wouldn't have known it from this meal for seven. No act of the Gods, it seemed, could stay the Duke's taxes. 

In the face of such extravagant waste, he ate mechanically, determined to clear his plate, trying not to look too disgusted, or too eager. 

The generals were keen to curry their future queen's favour. They introduced their grand titles, named their impressive holdings, and framed their soldiers' contributions to the war as personal achievements. All the while, pheasant and parsnip on the princess's plate sat untouched and steadily cooling.

Soon enough, the count diverted the braggarts' conversation with a wave of his hand. “But you must tire of the endless boasts of old soldiers, Highness. When all a man knows is battle, his sword stays sharper than his wit.” Orlandeau smiled, the expression warming his otherwise stormy countenance. “I should like to hear of you and your affairs. I trust your time at Zeltennia has kept you well?”

“Yes, thank you.” Ovelia’s words sounded effortful. “I suppose it is you whom I must thank for the hospitality—Zeltennia Castle was originally your family's holding, was it not?”

Orlandeau inclined his head. “I regret that it is not so splendid as the Zeltennia of old,” he said. “Such is the way of war. But I hope that your highness might come to see it as a home, all the same.”

“I hope that as well, my lord,” Ovelia murmured. “I do not mind the ruins overmuch. They stand as a sobering reminder of the costs of war.”

Mindful of the relative proximity of their elbows, Delita observed Ovelia thoughtfully. It was a disarmingly wise perspective from the princess. They had not discussed politics much, on the road. But then, there hadn't been a war until his arrival at Zeltennia. With naught else to do, the princess wandered the ruins of her own war-scarred building, perhaps praying to the Gods... 

The viscount shuddered humorously. “I'm afraid on this we cannot agree, Princess. Zeltennia is entirely too dour for my tastes. And Limberry far too draughty!” A sly look passed from nobleman to commoner. “When shall Duke Goltanna dole out a parcel of land for you, Heiral? Then I might finally have somewhere pleasant to summer.”

Delita’s natural scrutinizing glare shifted from Ovelia to Blanche. 

“I suppose only Duke Goltanna could answer that question,” he said, mildly, after a moment. “I would only hope that, should His Grace ever grant me such an incredible honour, it would be because I had distinguished myself in his service.”

“Of course I shall see your loyalty duly rewarded, Delita,” Goltanna reassured him, magnanimously. “All in due time.”

Elmdore peered at the viscount over the rim of his goblet of red wine. “If our holdings in Zeltennia so displease you, Viscount, mayhap you may consider summering in the Northern Sky instead?” He smiled blandly. “I hear the flooded plains of Mandalia are quite beautiful in the rainy season.”

The marquis's comment earned a chuckle from both the baron and the duke. A muscle worked in the viscount's jaw. The smile he directed at Delita was more tooth than mirth. 

 “After saving the princess and slaying the treasonous chancellor, I should like to see what incredible feat our young commander will accomplish next. You know, Princess—”

Ovelia looked up from her full plate, startled by the sudden address. 

“We have all asked him to tell the tale of your rescue, but our humble commander has not been eager to regale us,” Blanche continued. “We are all terribly curious about it. Mayhap you would be fain to indulge us?”

“Ah, yes!” the baron agreed. “This I would like to hear!”

Count Orlandeau folded his arms. “I will admit to harbouring some passing curiosity in the affair, myself. To hear the commander tell it, he had been sent to uncover a plot to assassinate you by the late Baron Grimms, disguised in the colours of our own Sky.”

“I hope you do not mean to cast aspersions, Orlandeau,” said Goltanna.

“Certainly not, Your Grace.” Orlandeau replied, carefully. “But I would not spurn the opportunity to hear the tale from the princess's own lips.”

Delita sat with his spine rod-straight, held in Orlandeau's peripheral vision. In the viper's nest of Goltanna's court, Count Cidolfus Orlandeau was the only honest man. And it was he that Delita could trust least of all. 

“There is little more to the facts, unless you wish to hear of our long journey through the woods,” Delita told them. He turned to the princess, mouth pressed up at the edges. “But as the count says, we would all be interested in hearing Your Highness's recollection of the affair.”

The expectant silence that followed was thick enough to run through. Delita's mouth was beginning to hurt from tempering the uncertainty in his mien. The faces of the generals at the table ranged from open curiosity, to skepticism, to thinly-veiled mistrust. Ovelia had made it perfectly clear not minutes ago that she remembered his true employers. Now, she was lost in thought, and said nothing. Did she fear that he would repay her in kind, revealing the truth of her birth? The Church would not do so, except to draw out the war, and he had no friends here. Or perhaps it was the conspirators themselves she feared. Not knowing pained him more than the threat. He looked to her, and waited, and swiftly reviewed the other version of the story he had prepared.

Ovelia met his tense gaze with a quick and unreadable look, before tearing her own away. “I do not recall the finer details of my rescue,” she said, placidly. 

Delita released the stem of his goblet before he had the chance to snap it.

“No?” Orlandeau prompted her gently, despite his shrewd eyes. “You remember naught at all?”

Ovelia shook her head stiffly, like a wooden doll. “I was very frightened.”

As if sensing weakness, Blanche leaned forward eagerly. “Pardon my boldness, Princess, but does fear not oft sharpen our senses? After all, your harrowing adventure lasted over a fortnight. I can scarcely believe you recall none of it. If your chill yet affects you so, my lady, perhaps you ought return to your chambers.”

Silence fell over the dinner table. Ovelia’s mouth flattened into a thin line. The generals’ eyes waited upon her form expectantly. The count frowned, but he did not protest.

Ovelia trembled in place. Delita thought he heard a sigh of resignation, inaudible to all but him, but it may only have been his imagination, for her demeanour shifted, the line of her neck straightening.

“The fateful night that Orbonne was besieged,” she finally began, “I was due to be escorted to safety by a company of mercenaries. But before we had the chance to fly, we were set upon by a contingent of men dressed in the colours of your order.”

“Though they were not our order,” Goltanna interrupted hastily, “not truly. They were the feckless hounds of that treacherous Glevanne.”

“As I have since been informed,” Ovelia said. “At the time I’d not known what they had meant for me. And as they laid in wait outside the monastery and bade me to come out, a great storm had rolled in from the coast, and cast the world in a terrible dark shadow.” Her voice took on a whispering quality, as though the details she conjured were that of a nightmare from which she had not yet awakened. “A fouler omen I could not invent.”

(What she could invent, he dared not guess, Delita thought.)

“A storm, Highness?” the Baron of Bolmina echoed, intent on the story.

“Oh, yes.” Ovelia splayed her fingers wide. “Lightning cracked open the sky, and thunder shook the walls of the chapel. From beyond the doors, I heard only the clash of steel on steel and the cries of the wounded men, and I wondered at my fate.”

“Ah, you poor child,” offered Elmdore.

Delita endeavoured to listen as solemnly as the rest, which was not difficult, as he was now seriously considering the possibility that he was about to be hanged. 

“'Tis a coward who sends his men to end the life of an innocent.” Orlandeau spoke in a measured voice, lifting a bushy eyebrow at the young commander. “I can scarcely believe our chancellor had a part in this bloody game.”

“Nor could I when the late baron's informants told us, Your Excellency,” Delita replied.

The Baron of Bolmina slammed his fist emphatically on the table. “The cur!”

Duke Goltanna shook his head, gravely. “A most inauspicious hour for the Southern Sky. But pray continue, Princess; I would hear more of your frightful tale.”

“As would I,” Count Orlandeau said. “Was the late Baron Grimms' man among their number?”

“He wore the crest of the Black Lion, yes, but he did not rush the front with the others.” Ovelia’s doleful eyes stretched wide. “No... under the cover of the storm, his dreadful companions none the wiser, he stole into the back, and spirited me away into the dead of night.”

Viscount Blanche had been sulking quietly, but at this, he cocked an eyebrow. “'Tis a rougher rescue than I would have imagined, Highness. Was this truly committed on the baron’s orders?”

“By no means,” Delita told him, fluidly. “My mission from the baron was to save the princess's life. Those cowardly false lions made for the front of the monastery to a man. I merely seized what I thought was my only chance, under adverse conditions.” This was true—or at least as true as the tale the princess wove. 

Blanche pursed his lips, as though the pickled burdock root had soured on his tongue.

“I take it the young man made plain his purpose after you were safe, dear?” the marquis asked.

“I know of his allegiance now, but then?” Ovelia grasped the empty space over her heart. “I knew not.”

“You knew not?” Blanche repeated.

“I knew not,” Ovelia affirmed.

Delita took a sip of wine to disguise a rather ugly expression. 

“'Tis a long way to come on faith alone,” Orlandeau said, with a pointed look at the knight in question. “You did not think to elucidate the truth to your charge?”

“Would you have done so, in my position?” Delita countered, lowering his goblet calmly. “The banner I fought under was hardly likely to have earned her trust.” 

“Then how did he, Princess?” Blanche asked, with a simpering smile. 

Delita thought he felt the prickle of Ovelia’s eyes on him, but when he looked over, she remained as still as a statue, her eyes carved forward. 

“... The stragglers from the monastery stalked us to Zeirchele Falls,” she replied. “They stranded us upon a dilapidated bridge, with neither rope nor rail to keep me from the churning waters. Were it not for the dogged courage of this knight, I surely would have been slain, and my body left to rot in the riverbed.”

“'Tis a grisly thought, Highness,” Elmdore said, mildly, at this pessimistic conclusion.

Viscount Blanche muttered, “Indeed.”

Orlandeau stroked his chin, his countenance unreadable. “Of course,” he mused. “How could you do aught but follow the one who turned assassin blades?”

The thoughtful look Delita gave the princess had little to do with any grisly fate—between Ramza and the princess's true bodyguard, both erased from this narrative, the chance of that had been laid soundly to rest. Throughout the retelling he had thought, or hoped, that it would end with the two of them on the same side. He thought, but could not be sure, that they were. If Ovelia was aware of his studious gaze, she did an admirable job of pretending not to notice.

“There you have it, then.” Goltanna spread his arms. “From the lips of the princess herself: our young commander is her saviour for true. As we all knew, months ago, when he graciously delivered her, whole and unharmed, to our gates. I pray that shall be enough to quell further doubts, Blanche? Orlandeau?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Viscount Blanche said, stewing.

Count Orlandeau, on the other hand, had his eyes trained on the gaunt visage of the young princess. A tale that would satisfy curious knights and lady's maids might not pass muster for an experienced general. Delita was put in mind of the look the old general wore when he was considering which of his men to deploy. Perhaps he was.

But when Orlandeau spoke, all he said was, “Yes, Your Grace. But I am concerned that, in our careless curiosity, we have exhausted Her Highness.” His brow furrowed. “Are you well, my lady? You've hardly touched the feast.”

As a night bloom curled its petals before the glare of the sun, Ovelia wilted back into herself. “My apologies. It seems my appetite has not returned.”

If it had ever left, Delita thought—he'd not seen her eat much in all their acquaintance. 

Duke Goltanna took his charge’s slender hand, frowning. “Ah, but child, your skin is like ice! This will not do. We must have you crowned within the fortnight, and 'tis paramount that the Queen of Ivalice present herself to her people in the best of health. You must return to your chambers at once, and I shall have the kitchen send you a hearty broth...”

Ovelia’s hand rested like a stone in the Duke's. “Are you certain, Uncle? Oughtn't I be present to discuss the preparations?”

Goltanna stood, guiding Ovelia to her feet. “Worry not, my dear, we shall handle aught and all. You need only appear when the time is right. Delita, I have need of your special talents. Would you kindly escort the princess back to her chambers? Return here when you have seen her safely to bed, and we might discuss other matters.”

“At once, my lord,” Delita said, dipping his head in a manner that evoked subordination. 

—

The two of them had not been properly alone since they crossed the gates of the castle many months ago. Now, escorting Ovelia once again, their footfalls muffled by carpet over stone, they fell into old patterns without speaking. The princess trailed behind him, and Delita glowered ahead for any wayward assassins and brigands that might stalk the castle halls.

They reached a stretch of hallway free from prying eyes, as he noted with a cast of his head. Here, Delita turned with abrupt purpose in the exact wrong direction to the princess’s apartment, and tugged Ovelia by the hand into an antechamber before she had the chance to catch her breath. 

As the door snapped shut, Ovelia snatched her hand away from his furiously. “What is the meaning of this?”

Delita folded his arms and leaned against the door, lit only by the edges of moonlight from the high window. “That was an interesting story you told them.”

Ovelia held her wrist to her breast, momentarily cowed. Her eyes darted between Delita’s shoulder and the door's iron handle. Light glinted off of her hollow cheekbones. 

“I would say the same of your fairy tale,” she retorted, in a voice too low for the castle's ears. “Your orders from the Baron Grimms aligned with the Church's most fortuitously.”

“I am a Blackram Knight now,” Delita said, evenly, “whoever gave me my orders.”

Ovelia inclined her head, a bold little bow that fell short of polite. “Then I wish you naught but good fortune in the appointment, Ser Delita. But we have little to discuss in the dark recesses of the castle.” She strode purposefully to the door and curled her fingers around the curved handle. “Now I should like to retire, as my Lord Uncle bade me.”

Delita didn't respond to this latter remark, nor did he move away from the door. Instead, he kept his eyes trained on Ovelia, and asked, “Was it true?”

Ovelia glared at him in the darkness. Her grip on the handle was white-knuckled. “I told no lies.”

Delita turned against the door, so that his bicep held it closed as he faced the princess. “Except by omission. You left out a great deal. Perhaps the Gods bother not with such technicalities?”

An unbecoming flush coloured Ovelia’s sallow complexion. Delita wondered if she meant to strike him. But her eyes pinched at the corners, and her forthcoming answer, when it came, was subdued. “I cannot speak the truth if I do not know it.”

The answer Delita had been preparing died on his lips. Throughout the night he had, by turns, anticipated a battle or an alliance; what now held them together was neither, but a heavy blanket of silence in a low-lit room. Here was the measure of it, he realized: Ovelia did not know where the line of battle lay any more than he did. Escorting her back to her chambers was not simply to keep her ear from the coronation plans—she had a sickly look about her that powder could not hide. The princess had no allies in her Lord Uncle's court. And Ovelia had no friends.

There was one clear way to delineate which side he was on: he could tell her the simple truth. What he found himself saying instead was a quiet, “Thank you.”

Ovelia released the handle, stricken. She studied her fingers in lieu of his eyes. “...You oughtn't thank me.”

Delita examined her expression, and, after the briefest hesitation, nodded.

“We should hasten to your chamber, my lady, before either of us are missed,” he said, opening the door. The darkness, and whatever strange mood had occupied them inside, was dispelled in encroaching torchlight.

He led Ovelia back out into the hallway, and she fell into step behind him. This had been their routine six months ago, the knight guarding the princess, the captor leading the captive. He could feel Ovelia's eyes on the back of his neck.

With a slight glance over his shoulder, he stuttered his pace, and fell into step alongside her.

Chapter Text

Orran’s fingers probed the soft ridges of Ovelia’s palm while Ovelia observed, spellbound. Laid upon the table between was an open tome and a red-feathered quill wet with ink, the remains of a lesson forgotten. In the hazy candlelit glow of the library, they might have presented a scandalous image, were it not for her maid quietly hemming a gown beside her, or for the scholarly patience of his examination—much like the chemist who’d felt her ribs for the cadence of her breath when she’d taken ill.

“You have hands born of the water, my lady,” Orran said.

“What meaning does that hold?” Ovelia asked warily, for, last she heard, all babies could claim thus from the womb, high and lowborn alike.

“Long palms and fingers are indicative of deep emotion and many sensitivities,” Orran explained, cupping the back of her hand with genteel delicacy. “Had I not already known of your gift for healing magicks, I would have gleaned it from the shape of your hands. Mayhaps,” he added, with a teasing smile, “I ought to teach you the way of the lute, in addition to history and statesmanship.”

Ovelia shuddered. “Take care not to say such things within earshot of my lord Uncle, else I fear my reign shall be as inconsequential as a jester’s might.”

Her maid’s cough was conspicuously pitched.

Orran did not laugh, but returned to Ovelia's palm with a faint smile. “Have faith, princess. You have made great strides since we began. All Ivalice will aspire to be so learned.”

She had made some strides, that was true. Ovelia had not slept a wink since the generals’ departure for the front, so consumed she was by her studies. History and statesmanship—but also schedules from the housekeeper, and etiquette from her ladies, ceremony from the bishop, as well as reading, writing, embroidery, and the names of every notable face at court. Gone were the days of languishing in the shadow of the drawn curtain, forbidding all but the maid who collected her laundry to enter. She could not ask a kingdom to be worthy of her if she was not worthy of it.

Yet, at all turns, the Duke’s men distracted and stonewalled her. If it was not the seneschal interrupting her lessons for trivial tasks—she doubted Louveria spent idle days blessing babies and entertaining the daughters of minor lords!—it was her own ladies-in-waiting, assigned to her by her Lord Uncle. Were her days steered by Viscountess Blanche, she would waste entire afternoons gossiping in the gardens, her every passing thought coaxed from her and delivered to Goltanna’s inner circle. And, in spite of her best efforts, she knew frustratingly little of the war fought in her name. All lips sought her ear, and she knew not which were coated in poison.

“Look here,” Orran continued warmly. “Your sun line is strong—clean, unbroken. ‘Tis a good omen for your reign, Your Highness. See how it intersects with your fate line?” He drew his finger above the curved line circling her thumb. “When the time has come for us to usher in an era of peace, you shall have all the help you require from your loyal subjects.” He caught her eye seriously. “Myself among them.”

“Thank you, Orran.” Ovelia's acknowledgement was tentative. She did not put much stock in the knowledge of men, but the honest declaration soothed her. “I pray that day comes swiftly.”

“What of my lady’s other lines?” her maid asked. With her hands busy and her eyes on her task, she was the innocent picture of the loyal, hard-working servant. “Head, heart… Marriage…”

“Forgive my maid’s cheek,” Ovelia interposed with haste, withdrawing her hand before the court astrologer could divine scandal. “She has a curious mind, which is an enviable thing, if improper, on occasion.”

But Orran only chuckled. “No offense was meant—Emeny, is it?” His eyes sparked with shrewd knowing. “I know you. Were you not my father's laundress?”

Emeny's complexion tinged red. “One of many, my lord.”

“Yet none were bold enough to ask him to recite,” Orran said slyly, “in ghastly, lurid detail, the Battle of Rhana Strait, whilst he suppered with his son!”

“Ah…” The humble dip of Emeny’s head was not quite abashed. “The gods have blessed you with a fine memory, my lord.”

Ovelia hid a smile. That did sound like her risen handmaiden, who had earned the ire of the Duke’s seneschal long before Ovelia’s untimely arrival at Zeltennia’s gates. ‘Twas another reason she favoured the girl her own age; Ovelia’s sudden presence at court surprised many, yet the moment she crossed the threshold of the castle, her servants and ladies in waiting mobilized with such breathtaking immediacy that she wondered if they had not received advance warning after all. Emeny, appointed later, was free of her suspicions.

“Then congratulations are in order,” Orran continued, jovial. “Personal attendant to the princess! I foresee you shall learn a great deal more, at her side.”

“Though not today, I think,” Ovelia said, folding her fingers in her lap daintily. “Forgive me, Orran, but I grow weary, and we have entertained the curiosity of divination long enough. If my Lord Uncle has plans for me, I wish to be free of them a little longer.”

Orran shut his tome and slipped the tools of his tutelage into his leather bag. “‘Tis too early to make such arrangements,” he agreed—but he did not quite meet her eye. No doubt the question of who should win the Queen of Ivalice’s hand had been one of great import, at the dinners she had not been invited to attend.

With the air of finality, Orran straightened. “I leave for Fort Besselat on the morrow, and return to my father's side.”

“Oh—” Ovelia's breath caught in her throat. How quickly were her confidantes whittled down! “So soon?—But of course you must, you must be terribly worried…”

“Please don't despair, princess.” The astrologer clasped her hand between his palms and pressed life into it. “Study hard. Gods willing, we shall resume our lessons upon my return.”

‘Twas no longer her hand alone born from water. Ovelia blinked, she hoped evenly, and rose to dismiss him. “Father keep you, Orran.”

Orran knelt at the princess’s feet and kissed the air just above her hand, chastely. “You as well, Your Highness.”

With a parting smile for herself and her maid, Orran quit their company. The scholar’s roguish lope carried him around a bookshelf and out of sight.

The weight of Ovelia's sigh sank her to her chair.

Emeny broke the dolorous silence with an optimistic chirp. “Lord Durai would not be such a terrible match.”

Ovelia’s chin found the shallow curve of her palm. “Shall I raise your suggestion with my Lord Uncle? I am sure he holds no opinion higher than that of a common maid’s.”

“‘Twould be in his best interest,” Emeny replied primly. “We are in possession of a great deal more sense.”

The “we” Emeny referred to were her fellow maids, the silent, nameless wraiths of the castle who kept the tables set, the fires stoked, and the chamberpots sparkling. Elder Simon had employed some at the monastery, though never in such numbers; Ovelia cannot say she gave them much thought before. Now she preferred Emeny's frank tongue to the waggling ones of her highborn entourage.

And it was a sensible observation. Orran was older, though still young for the ranks of Goltanna’s grizzled generals. He would take care of her—in life, and in learning, the erudite that he was. Should the war end in their favour, the nobles might even accept a trueborn Atkascha’s engagement to a man who bore no noble blood. Orran would be a safe match.

Ovelia pressed her palm against her mouth. “... He is a kind man,” she murmured, over her fate line. “But surely he is spoken for?”

“Not at all, milady!” For the first time since they sat down for the lesson, Emeny lifted her head from her sewing and leaned over Ovelia’s shoulder, voice hushed. “He has refused the hand of every fair maiden offered to him. Lady Bolmina was beside herself with heartache before you arrived—though he’d turned her down gently, or so I heard.”

“And you think I alone might be spared from this fate?” asked Ovelia, skeptically.

“Well…” The pull of Emeny’s mouth was less mirthful than bemused. “Forgive me, my lady, but you will be the Queen of all Ivalice, won’t you? If you asked, would he dare refuse?”

The sentiment gave Ovelia pause. A world in which her word was law and her will divine was impossible to imagine. She had laid the notion to rest long ago, beneath the mouldering stones of the Cardinal’s undercroft. And yet… should their conspiring bear fruit… would she not slip the bars of her gilded cage, once and for all? Was that not the point?

Perhaps Emeny sensed the sudden chill, for she retreated and busied herself with the mending. “I speak out of turn, my lady. ‘Tis not my place to speculate on matters above my station.”

The thought of Emeny withdrawing to the role of silent servant was too much for Ovelia to bear. She sat upright and touched the back of Emeny’s hand to still her sewing. “Please do not say such things. I cannot think what I would do without your guidance. You know the castle and its court far better than I.”

Emeny lifted her head with a rousing smile. “I must admit, princess, ‘tis strange that the true ruler of our realm would know less of her own kin than a stranger does.”

Ovelia sighed, relief tinged with rue. “I’d once thought the same.”

If Emeny thought the statement curious, she did not press it; instead, she laid down her needle, lips curling sly. “Though you are privy to one man that I am not.”

Ovelia forced a wooden smile and gathered her scrolls. “Ah, the Holy Knight of your fairy stories. I have told you before and I shall tell you again, no mere mortal is privy to that man's heart.”

Emeny did not appear deterred. On the contrary, the twitch of her mouth suggested poorly restrained amusement. “Of course, milady. I suppose even those who have spent ample time in his company must find him terribly mysterious.”

“Mysterious?” Ovelia scoffed, sealing her brass inkwell, inscribed with the creatures of the Zodiac, with more force than strictly necessary. “How pleased he would be to hear you think of him as such—indeed, if aught should please him at all!”

“‘Tis hard to imagine his smile,” Emeny allowed, “with those strong, handsome brows of his.”

“Surely you mean stern, and scornful,” Ovelia corrected severely. “He has a queer frown.”

“And how well that dark glare serves his brooding manner.”

“Manner? Nay, he has none; if he speaks, ‘tis to be surly, and if he is silent, ‘tis his ill temper he has sheathed. Pray that he shall stay his tongue.”

Emeny hummed, a lilting note Ovelia misliked. “He did not seem so surly when he returned you from the ruins, my lady.”

Ovelia ignored the dull flush climbing her cheeks and reached for her quill. “We have an understanding; that is all.” The handsome red plume spun from her fingers and came to rest near her shoe. She huffed and slid her chair back to grope for it, the stiff laces of her dress pressing to her ribs in protest. “But Ser Delita—cares not for such things as princesses, and would not care to be so gravely—”

A familiar hand, sturdy and calloused, plucked the quill from where it lay beyond her grasping fingers, and presented it to her with an open palm. The hand belonged to a young commander with slicked hair and impassive dark eyes.

“Princess,” Delita said.

Ovelia rose quickly and willed her burning cheeks to cool. “Ser Delita,” she greeted, taking the quill with as queenly an air she could muster. “Thank you. I did not expect… are you not departing with the generals?”

Behind her, her maid’s head was bowed, strands of her dark hair hiding her eyes, but Ovelia knew the statue’s posture of an incorrigible eavesdropper when she saw it.

“‘Tis the very reason I came to speak with you,” Delita said, “if Your Highness would be generous enough to lend me a moment of your time.” His countenance was infuriatingly placid, the still surface of a murksome pond.

“Of course,” Ovelia said. Guilt heated her visage. Confound her knight, and his uncanny ability to catch her in a moment of weakness! They have said much worse—to each other!—and yet she would rather him see her grass-stained and weeping than overhear the uncharitable gossip of maids. She thought she might perish on the spot from shame. “Emeny, leave us, please.”

“Yes, mistress.” Emeny deftly folded her sewing away and collected Ovelia’s scrolls and ink. The stack would have overencumbered two able-bodied men, but Emeny mysteriously made do. Balancing a tome on her crown, she curtsied as she departed. “My lord.”

Ovelia did not dare to catch Delita’s eye until her maid and the wobbling book were safely beyond the library’s double doors. With a breath of relief, Ovelia retreated once more behind the bookcase. “What was it you wished to discuss?”

How was one to behave in the company of their co-conspirator, when they had at best tolerated one another? ‘Twas a thought that plagued her often, when she considered their inevitable next meeting. Clearly civility and secrecy in tandem were possible; conspiracy was Ivalice's favoured pastime, even among those who loathed each other, though Ovelia could not imagine how they functioned. Perhaps, given the present state of their fair country, they did not.

If Delita was consumed by similar awkwardness, he did not show it. His eyes were trained on the doors. “A handmaiden of yours? I cannot place her.”

“And you would know all the faces of my retinue, would you?” Ovelia asked, peevishly.

“I know that Viscountess Blanche seems no more privy to your activities than her lord husband is,” Delita said dryly. “‘Tis a point of frequent vexation for the good Viscount.”

Against her better judgment, Ovelia smiled. The generals, it seemed, could not resist indulging in the sin of gossip themselves. “No, Emeny is not one of them,” Ovelia relented quietly. “She was a laundress. And she's… quite taken with you.” She peeked at her knight through her eyelashes. “You can trust her, I think.”

Delita treated her to his thoughtful gaze, the one Emeny might call “brooding.” “Can I?”

He did not wait for Ovelia to gather her tongue. He held his fists at his back and stood at a soldier's attention, or an impression of it. “‘Tis my duty to inform Your Highness that the Blackram Knights shall not be returning to Fort Besselat. We have been assigned to the princess’s personal security detail.”

“I am pleased to hear it,” Ovelia replied with some relief. ‘Twas most fortuitous for their secret machinations—and she ill liked the thought of Delita carving a bloody swath through the front. “As was my Lord Uncle, I am sure, once sufficiently convinced the idea was his.”

The barest trace of surprise crossed Delita’s expression—though of course that had to be a trick of the candlelight. “Duke Goltanna saw the wisdom in it,” he acknowledged, and braced his forearm to his breast. “The Knights and I are yours to command, princess.”

Now that she very much doubted. If the Knights were under the command of anyone, it was her lord uncle, whilst Delita answered only to himself. But it was a game that they played, and they would play their parts, for now.

“Shall we put that to the test?” Ovelia said. “Escort me to the courtyard, ser knight. I tire of the library.”

—

They strolled the vegetable gardens behind the kitchens, out from under the leery eyes of the high-nosed nobles. A strong, dry breeze ruffled the brittle, rain-starved grass. Though Delita wore his fine doublet, most of the guards posted at the corners nodded to him when they passed, and servants bowed when she did. She endeavoured to cross paths with few.

Every expression of chivalry from the Holy Knight—every door held, every step slowed for her pace—brought a wry smile to Ovelia’s lips. What had once been a source of unending agony became a private joke; she was no more deserving of receiving chivalry than he was of performing it, and they both knew that. And Ovelia was glad for the occasion to speak to Delita’s face instead of to the silly curve of hair at the base of his neck.

“I trust you and Zeltennia have been well, princess?” Delita asked as they circled a plot of leafy cabbage.

“I have been, yes,” Ovelia said. “Though on Zeltennia I'm afraid I cannot say. I can speak to little but the affairs of my ladies and the progress of my lessons.”

“And how fare your lessons with our esteemed court astrologer?”

Ovelia clicked her tongue in disapproval of his tenor of derision. “You know of that, do you? Then you would know that I would surely flourish under the finest example of virtuousness in Zeltennia, for there are none as learned, as loyal, as kind as he.”

Delita sighed. “There are worse alliances to make,” he allowed, most magnanimously. “None may doubt the depths of his… devotion, to the cause of the Southern Sky.”

“Truly?” Ovelia said. ‘Twas no small thing for the ever-suspicious knight to vouch for the sincerity of another—and yet he made even faint praise sound like an insult. “That is your full opinion of him, then?”

“My opinion, princess?” Delita asked, as though she had never been a captive audience for his most uncharitable thoughts.

“We are allies now, you and I,” Ovelia said. “Whilst our enmity did not stay your tongue before, I should hope our friendship would not blunt it entirely.”

Again Delita’s inscrutable glare held her fast. In the thoughtful silence, he offered Ovelia his arm, perhaps as a test for her nerve to cross the gap.

She took it, feeling unusually buoyant.

Delita steered them to a copse of scraggly trees, bleached bone-white by the incessant sun. “A boyhood friend once kept a little dog. It was a sweet and most devoted beast. My friend was fain to feed it table scraps... that dog would run to eat out of his hand.”

Ovelia thumped his shoulder for his mischief. “Ser Delita!”

“Mercy, princess, I am out of armour.”

“‘Tis very like you to scorn devotion,” Ovelia chastised him. “As though you are above all that!”

Delita gave her a cool look. “Your Highness shall have to make her meaning plain.”

She released his arm to pace the circle of hard-packed earth. “The monastery cat caught cellar rats. A meaner creature I have never known. He hissed and spat, and fled when I approached…” Ovelia raised her eyes to the limp, browning leaves with an innocence the Saint Himself would envy. “Yet when I sat, he slept upon my lap.”

Delita said naught, and with her back turned she could not scry his expression for displeasure. His footfalls, slow and deliberate, were muffled by calfskin.

“And what fate befell this cat of yours?” Emerging just in her peripheral vision, Delita folded his arms and settled a broad shoulder against bark. “Companion to a wild boar, perhaps?”

“In the company of Ramza’s little dog, I expect,” Ovelia countered.

Delita did not smile—of course he would not—but the look he gave the highest branches was rather arch. “Of course.”

Ovelia smiled down at her fingertips. They stood together in silence for a time, which she hoped was companionable. It was certainly the most comfortable she'd felt with the austere knight.

“His blood is common, you know,” Ovelia murmured, before she could stop herself. “Orran’s.”

“So they say.”

“I had thought…” With her thumbnail, she traced the narrow depression of her sun line. “If our aim is a fairer Ivalice, would it not be prudent to enlist a learned man such as he? We might greatly benefit from his measured perspective.”

She could not be sure, but she thought Delita’s posture had gone too still, his eyes unmoving from her form. “Have you told him the truth?”

“No,” Ovelia said quickly, unable to hold his penetrating gaze for longer than a heartbeat. “No, I know I mustn’t… ‘twas only a passing whim.”

The tree creaked with the absence of Delita’s weight. He neared—to scold her, she thought, as was her knight’s way.

But Delita spoke softly, in a tone she’d once heard him take with a chocobo. “Zeltennia is a viper’s nest, princess. Choose the wrong confidante, however noble of heart, and all we build will be for naught.”

Ovelia bent her head in wordless agreement.

“Unlike Lord Durai, I harbour no devotion for the Southern Sky.” His dark eyes bore into hers; she felt the flare of intensity in her cheeks. “My loyalty belongs solely to one.”

Ovelia stared at him, rendered mute by the vow. She recalled the impatient, ill-tempered boy from the riverbank, and found that the Delita before her resembled him only superficially, that the broadness of his shoulders and the sternness of his brow belonged not to a surly boy but to a serious, brooding man. She recalled, too, the tender embrace they had shared in the ruins, the sturdy weight of his hands against her trembling back. He had worn his golden armour then. He wore no armour now.

The patter of harried feet broke the spell. “Milady!”

Delita fluidly stepped away from Ovelia as Emeny bounded into their hiding place.

“My lady,” Emeny said, and bowed deeply. “My lord. Forgive the interruption.”

“All is forgiven,” Ovelia said. Her voice sounded far away to her own ears. “What is it?”

“The Viscountess has sent for you. She wishes to know if you shall be joining her for tea this afternoon, or if you have forgotten the appointment…”

“Yes, yes of course,” Ovelia said. The affairs of her ladies were the furthest from her mind. “Tell her—tell her that I shall attend to her shortly. Ser Delita, my apologies, we shall speak another time…”

He inclined his head. “Of course, princess.”

But she could not flee, for Delita took her hand. He brought her fingers to his lips and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. The moment lasted but a breath, and Orran had knelt to kiss her hand just hours before—but the occasions were incomparable.

Too soon, Delita released her. “Good day, my lady.” He stood to knightly posture and stalked off without another look.

“Milady?” Emeny whispered. She touched Ovelia’s frozen arm. “Princess?”

Ovelia did not reply. The back of her hand tingled where Delita’s lips had brushed her skin.

Chapter Text

Shadows spidered up the austere brick of the chapel, nestling in the grooves of a triptych of Halamrut, the God to whom this place of worship was consecrated. The flickering candlelight gave the image the knight kneeling before the holy scales the illusion of movement. The congregants were the esteemed lords and ladies of Zeltennia castle. Delita, meanwhile, stood sentry at the door, gauntlets clasped behind his back. The Blackram Knight commander’s duties did not end at mass.

“Much could be said of Simon Penn-Lachish’s devotion to Our Father,” Bishop Canne-Beurich murmured to those assembled, crosier grasped in his gnarled fingers. Every time he spoke, his mitre quivered. “Of his great love of knowledge, sought out and cherished in the Gods’ names… of his pure and noble heart.”

The woman who would be Ivalice’s queen, and her ladies-in-waiting, sat in a place of honour towards the front. Ladies Blanche and Bomina were slumped over their handkerchiefs, but the princess stared straight ahead; in the darkness, her rigid frame passed for a decorative sculpture. Delita did not allow his gaze to rest on her, but could not fail to be aware of her presence. As iron filings to a lodestone, he knew where she was, always.

This—in the candlelit chapel, the princess a stone silhouette too distant to touch—was the closest they had been since the day he kissed her hand. He had stayed true to his word; he stood always in her shadow, and he posted only his most stalwart knights at her door during the daylight hours. But the rare twilit moments in which they were alone were more dangerous than any attempt on the princess’s life. He dared not seek them out, not until the Duke’s corse lay cold. Delita trusted no one; so what was to be done when he could not trust himself? He would not ruin all he had built. He dared not.

Ovelia had noticed his sudden reticence, of course. He considered himself fortunate that icy silence was his only punishment thus far.

The bishop cleared his throat, his frail timbre further muffled by his tufty beard. The esteemed assembled inclined forward as one, much akin to a flock of sheep. “But ’tis only a God that might know the heart of a man, so I shall speak instead of Elder Simon’s deeds…”

There was nothing he could do for her now, so Delita wrenched his attention away. The servants were sequestered to the back. Silently, whilst the bishop lamented, Delita tested himself to put names to silhouettes, or, at least, the names of their handlers.

Emeny was not among them. Her brother had died a hero’s death in the war. She would be in Sal Ghidos another fortnight yet, to mourn with her five remaining siblings, all younger. Delita had heard the family received some token recompense for the sacrifice in the name of the Southern Sky. Surely that would be enough, Delita thought, in dark jest; Ivalice famously spared no expense for their honoured veterans.

“... Before he housed and kept our most beloved, most devout princess, he delivered the Gods’ merciful judgment upon the pagan nonbelievers…”

On the end of the servants’ pew, there was the slight frame of a serving girl he did not recognize. The droop of her shoulders made her appear smaller still.

“... And it was for these principles, this unwavering belief in Our Father beyond the firmament, that the brutish reprobate, the vile heretic, struck him down upon the very stone of the monastery…”

Delita concentrated hard on the girl, forcing the bishop’s sermon to the edge of his hearing. If his memory served him—and it always did—Viscountess Blanche was supponed to be short a handmaiden. Jellion had enlisted in the war, had she not? Perhaps this was her replacement.

“... Let us pray.” As the congregants bent in prayer (and Delita gave the barest incline of his head), the bishop set aside his crosier, and poured red wine into a stone goblet. “Dear Father, please bless and keep Simon's rare and worthy soul eternally at your side. Halmarut, Arbiter, let your judgment be swift… Let the heretic fall to your righteous blade, let him claim no more of the faithful.

“Come.” The bishop raised the goblet in both hands. “Simon has returned to Heaven, in soul, body, and blood. Let us taste of this wine; let us not grieve, but rejoice, for one day our blood shall join his and return to the Gods, and we will be born anew at their side… Your Majesty, if you would?”

Ovelia stood to receive the goblet, and the congregation watched her, and Delita watched the unfamiliar maid. One of his duties was the appraisal of all prospective servants, but this one seemed to have jumped the queue. Clearly, he ought to implement stricter—

A terrible crash echoed across the chapel’s high ceilings. The lords and ladies gasped. Delita's hand was upon his sword at once. A burgundy liquid seeped into the runner, and there was a moment in which his heart seized, and he feared the worst.

But Ovelia, whole if not well, turned from the slack-jawed bishop, stepped over the downed goblet, and strode for the chapel doors with furious haste, nervous titters in her wake.

She met his eye as she passed, fiercely. Her gown was stained with wine.

Delita caught the heavy door as it swung and, before anyone could rise, followed swiftly after.

—

The well-trodden path winding back to the castle proper was empty. The princess seemed once more to be engaged in her favoured occupation: vanishing. Delita shared a look with the leaf-bare branches, as if they could tell him where she was, or at least offer their condolences. He then crossed the grass, towards the misshapen shadow of the crumbling wall where the old chapel used to be.

Turning the corner, he nearly collided with the princess’s doubled figure. Her slender frame trembled—with weeping, he thought, though she made no sound.

“Your Highness,” Delita said, quietly. When she did not respond, he risked another step. “...Ovelia?”

“Liars,” Ovelia hissed, with a vehemence that stilled his tongue. “Liars, all of them! In Libra’s House! That we, the craven, the guilty, pray for divine vengeance against the pure-hearted and innocent—oh, what bitter tears Halmarut must weep for us. And we deserve them not!”

She spat venom on the coarse grass.

His lady was worse off than Delita had imagined. Whether her illness be anger or grief, he expected tears, not this raw, unflinching fury. If she had shed any, they would have evaporated with the heat of her rage.

Behind them the chapel doors creaked, and concerned voices called out into the night.

“And you.” Ovelia rounded on him, fierce and sudden. “Why did you not stop this farce? You know the truth better than any of those souls who tonight prayed for the death of your dearest friend. Why did you not speak?”

Dangerous waters, these, and Delita did not hesitate. “What would that have done, for him?” Where her voice was near a shout, his was low and rapid. “Do you think the good will I’ve earned in Goltanna’s court to be enough that they would willingly suffer an abettor of heresy?”

Ovelia scowled away.

Delita tilted his face to catch her eyes, deliberately. “Or do you think I alone would be spared the gallows?”

Fury turned to fluster. She bit her lips.

The approaching voices echoed across the courtyard. “Princess? It is not safe!”

Ovelia’s hand struck the air with reinvigorated desperation. “They think me the princess!” A crack splintered her hard tone, and Delita’s heart jumped in his throat. “If anyone could spare Ramza—”

Delita closed the gap with one swift step, his timbre yet lower. “Do not speak that name.”

She drew a sharp, startled breath.

“Princess,” he tried again, with a modicum of gentleness, “I warn you, we cannot afford the ire of the Church. Not in the thick of war.” When she did not recoil from him, he lowered his head to her ear. “If you have ever sought my counsel, Lady, then heed it now: do not let Ramza’s name pass your lips.”

Lantern light flooded their hiding place. Delita stepped back, as though he had maintained proper distance throughout, and shielded his eyes from the needling spark.

“My lady!” The shadow of the servant bowed deeply. “My lord. Your ladies worry for you, Princess.”

Delita lowered his hand. The wispy-voiced maid was the very one he had not been able to place.

“I hardly think the commander would allow danger to reach me,” Ovelia said, coldly.

The maid’s head stayed bowed. “Of course, my lady.”

“Princess!” Lady Bolmina stumbled into the candlelight, the first of the stragglers to find their hiding place. She took Ovelia’s wooden arm. “What frightened you? Are you well?” Belatedly, the baron’s unmarried daughter bobbed into a diplomatic curtsy. “My lord.”

“’Tis the sickness of grief that has taken her mind.” The young Viscountess Blanche rested her hand on her swollen belly, heavy with the viscount's child. “What else might possess her to run off in the middle of mass? We must clean you up before bed, dear, now that you’ve made a fool of yourself.”

“I am well enough,” Ovelia protested, though she did not resist her ladies’ grasping hands. “Is your own health of no concern?”

“You needn't worry about that,” the viscountess replied loftily. “I do not gallivant about the courtyard at all hours in… questionable company.” The suspicious glance she shot at Delita suggested precisely which questions she had in mind.

“She means no offense, Ser Delita,” Lady Bolmina interrupted; the friendly snare of her arm unsubtly drew the princess away from him. “There can be no doubt of your valiant and heroic contributions to the war effort. Yet you must admit, your name is still unknown to Zeltennia… and in times such as these, who else can one trust but one’s house?”

Delita smiled in answer, a flat mask that pulled his muscles taut. Yes, he was certain the noble lady’s concerns regarding his birth were well-intentioned and unrelated to the horror of common blood besmirching the pure Atkascha line. Perhaps she would rest easier knowing that he had not been the first to soil it.

“My first and only concern is the princess’s safety,” he replied placidly. “For tonight, I shall leave her in your ladyship's capable hands.”

Lady Bolmina laughed, breathless and awkward, and turned her face to hide her blush.

“Wait.” Ovelia wrenched her hands from her ladies and met his eyes squarely. “I am ill at ease this night. My heart is sick with a fear I cannot place. I would feel better, Ser Delita, if my chambers were guarded.”

She spoke the plea with faint weakness, but the stubborn set of her mouth was anything but. He entertained the fantasy of following her, leading her away from prying eyes, whispering into her ear not admonishments but sweet nothings, to soothe anguish that ached in his heart for every moment he was bereft of her company.

Behind Ovelia’s head, Viscountess Blanche muttered something to Lady Bolmina.

“Yes, princess.” Delita bowed his head so he would not see his lady's disappointment. “I shall send the finest of my knights to the post.”

“Come, Your Highness,” Viscountess Blanche said imperiously, steering Ovelia away. “We shall remove you of those dirty things and brew you a strong cup of tea. Girl,” she barked at the mousy maid, with a snap of her fingers, “see to it—now, if you please!”

“Good night, Ser Delita,” Ovelia said, bitterly, as the women hustled her to the garden path.

The lantern's halo flickered and bobbed until it disappeared into the castle. Delita glared at the spindly trees, those voyeurs. If he was to be caught in a compromising position with the princess, he could at least have been guilty of what they feared.

—

On the way back to the cellars, Delita stopped at the barracks and woke a slumbering lieutenant with a terse word, sending him off to the princess’s chambers. By the time he had descended into the undercroft, board and chalk in hand, he was in as darksome a mood as the room that had never seen a sliver of sunlight.

The cellar was quiet. Though worn to a stub, the tallow candle was still lit, which saved him laborious trek to the hearthfire. He passed the barrels of fresh apples and goat’s cheese that he and the night watchman had catalogued a few hours earlier. Monitoring the manifests was not commonly the job of a soldier, let alone a knight of his esteem. Delita had seen fit to correct this.

“Ivan?” he called out sharply. Perhaps Ivan erroneously believed, with the commander off at mass, he would be permitted to retire from his post for the evening?

Cursing, Delita slammed the board and chalk onto the lid of one of the barrels. He was halfway up the stairs when he heard a shuffle and the clink of glass against stone.

“Commander!” The night watchman emerged from a dank corner of the cellar, far beyond the candle’s halo. He held one hand at an awkward angle behind his back. “Apologies, ser, I’d not heard you come in.”

Hadn’t heard the stormy clanking of Delita’s armour? Delita wove between the crates and barrels with violent swiftness. Up close, the man’s upright posture was at a slant, and his breath reeked with drink.

Delita swiped for the object Ivan held behind his back; in his inebriated state, the watchman could only fumble for the bottle.

“What is this?” Delita asked, dangerously calm, dangling the bottle of wine before the night watchman’s face. The dregs sloshed audibly.

Even drunk, Ivan seemed aware of the grave trouble he was in. His bloodshot eyes roamed the cellar, avoiding Delita’s cold glare. “Er… ’twas a late shipment, ser. From Orbonne Monastery. S’posed to be for mass tonight, but we’d received a gift from Bervenia a few hours earlier, so…” Ivan trailed off, unable to conjure the simple string of words that would bind the concepts together.

Fortunately, Delita knew this already, as he was the one who’d arranged for the delivery from Bervenia. He frowned at the bottle, as though his piercing glare might convince it to give up its secrets. “Show me the shipment.”

With a drunken wobble, Ivan led him to an open crate in his shadowed corner. Despite its size, a meagre three bottles remained, resting on their sides. There was a single empty bottle on the stone floor, rolling indolently. And that was all.

“What did you do with the rest?”

“The rest?” Ivan scratched his head. “Begging your pardon, ser, but this was the rest. The little lady maid helped me move down here… bleeding thing was so heavy, thought we’d fall arse over teakettle down the stairs!” He chuckled.

Delita waited in silence, radiating murderous impatience.

Ivan cleared his throat. “So we set it down here, then I nip back upstairs to finish supper. When I come back, crate is open, and the lady maid’s already taken most everything inside. She was in a right hurry to get to the chapel.”

“Everything?” Delita repeated skeptically.

“Oh, you know those serving girls, ser.” Ivan leaned in as though imparting a grave secret. “They might look small, but they can carry thrice that of a grown man. Reckon it's a bit magic.”

The night watchman was very taken with his fairy story. Delita was less so. All the magic and extra pockets in the world wouldn't allow one maid to smuggle out a dozen bottles of wine unseen–if that's what was in the crate at all. He had a bad feeling.

“This maid. Who was she?”

Ivan screwed up his face, wracking his sodden brains. “Didn't catch her name, but she's with House Blanche. The one what replaced Jellion. Poor lass. You know when the viscountess says jump, you say how high.”

Delita was no longer watching the watchman. His eyes were fixed on the mouldering ceiling. Far above their heads, Viscountess Blanche and Lady Bolmina prepared the heartsick princess for slumber.

The scrape of his sword against his scabbard broke the silence.

Ivan’s ruddy hue took on a ghostly pallor. “S-ser? I'll never drink again, I swear!”

“Your lapse in judgment shall be addressed later.” Delita turned his back on the watchman and ascended the stairs at a clip. “Go to the barracks, now. There is an assassin in our midst—this may be another attempt on the princess's life!”

At the top of the stairs, Delita raced for the princess’s apartments, collecting two stoic guards along the way. Sweat boiled beneath the heavy plate, pasting skin to gambeson; he strained to hear through his thunderous pulse.

As he rounded the corner for the final stretch, there was a great shattering of glass, and a feminine gasp of fright. Cowering near the princess’s door was the viscountess’s maid. A teacup laid in splinters on the floor, steam peeling from the pool of liquid that surrounded it. Slumped before the princess’s door was the guard he’d woken from the barracks, unmoving.

“Commander!” The maid rose at once, pale and trembling. “Thank the Gods! There’s an assassin, he fled this way—” She waved a wild arm behind her. “If you hurry, you can catch him!”

Up close, he could see blood oozing from a thin red line on the guard’s throat.

“You must think me a great fool,” said Delita.

The girl said naught, but all the colour drained from her rosy cheeks. She stood silent as the grave. For the first time this wretched evening, someone acknowledged his measure.

“Arrest her,” Delita ordered coldly, “for conspiracy to assassinate the princess.”

The soldiers did as they were told and seized the maid by her wrists. Still she said naught, though her eyes were no longer trained on him; she stared, unseeing, into the cavernous hallway, as if, at the end of it, she could see the faintest outline of a rope.

Delita spared her no further thought and pushed into the princess’s solar.

All was quiet inside, and bathed in pitch; the candles had been extinguished. He kept to the rug to muffle the traitorous clink of his boots, sword at the ready. Their assassin had likely heard the commotion outside—mayhap that was the very reason the girl dropped the teacup, as an improvised alarum—and either skulked in the shadows of the solar, awaiting the moment to flee, or committed to finishing the task he’d been hired for, come what may.

Midway into the solar, the dimmest sliver of light caught his eye. The door to the princess’s chambers was cracked.

Delita lunged, and not a moment too soon. A keening shriek broke the tense silence and pierced his breast. By some miracle of the Gods, Ovelia lived; she was frozen in terror on one side of her stately four-poster, beclothes mangled. On the other side was a veiled assassin, dagger in hand, who did not wait for the princess to catch her breath.

Neither did Delita. The assassin moved, and so did he. His blade plunged through the man’s back and out of his chest.

The assassin gasped wetly and twitched like a beetle on its back. Delita withdrew his blade, cutting the hole wide. The man slumped to Ovelia’s feet and did not move again.

Ovelia clasped her hand over her mouth. Her chest rose and fell in quick, panicked pants. “By the Father, h-he…”

Delita watched his lady, countenance pointedly unreadable. She stood pale and rattled in her sleepshirt, hair wavy where her braids sat by day. He would have liked nothing more than to draw her into his arms and murmur reassurances. He covered for that dangerous imagining with patter. “Dycedarg’s dogs grow bolder by the day. You are unhurt, Princess?”

“No,” Ovelia answered breathlessly, “I mean, yes. I am unharmed.” She ducked her head, still transfixed by the weeping hole in the man’s back. “Thank you, as always, Ser Delita.”

He cared not for the waxlike emptiness in Ovelia’s face as she gazed upon the corpse. He thought back to their argument in the courtyard, her accusatory glare when he abandoned her to grieve alone with the ladies she did not trust… He could weather her fury, but not her sorrow.

“I am glad of it,” Delita said. He cleared the roughness from his voice and turned his head to call the guards.

But Ovelia moved first. She crossed over the body and dropped her forehead on his chest.

Delita raised his bladeless hand, a slight and indecisive gesture. “Princess…” He thought the note of anguish in his voice disguised.

However that sentence was meant to end, it was cut off by a guard appearing at the door. “Your Highness—!”

Delita stepped neatly away from that lady. “Her Highness is unharmed, the assassin felled. See to the body in the hallway, I shall handle the one in here.”

“Go with my gratitude, Ser Delita,” Ovelia said, quietly, as the guard bowed and disappeared. “’Tis a debt I fear I cannot repay.”

“...You should have a guard posted to your chambers tonight.”

He did not miss the way Ovelia’s shoulders sank.

Delita sheathed his sword and took the assassin’s corpse under the arms, dragging it from the bedchamber. “I shall return anon.”

—

It took time to clean up the mess left in the assassin’s wake. The body of the lieutenant was delivered to the chapel by a Blackram honour guard; he would be remembered as a hero for his role in the night’s events, dying in service to the princess, in spite of his sound failure. The assassin’s body Delita dumped unceremoniously in the chapel’s cellar, to be investigated later by the undertaker.

The matter of the maid was trickier to put to rest. She was destined for the dungeons, a severe interrogation, and a swift end; whether she was Dycedarg’s creature or quick to take easy gold mattered not. In the event that she felt lonely, he left Ivan in the next cell over, with the firm instruction to sleep off the drink. Last, he instructed his men to place the Viscountess under house arrest. To this, he expected argument—the wife of one of the generals, suspected of conspiracy!—but both the Blackram Knights and the castle guards obeyed this order without question. He truly doubted the Viscountess had much to do with the bloody affair, as she would gain nothing from the princess’s death, but her retinue was a weak link in castle security. That would have to be addressed.

It was near dawn when Delita finally returned to Ovelia’s chambers, holding a candle lit from the hearthfire. He passed a serving girl on the way there (he studied her features carefully and was relieved to recognize her as a kitchen maid) who told him without prompting that after they had worked the worst of the blood out of the stone, the princess had turned her and all others away—though, she’d amended dubiously, if the commander wished to see her, he was welcome to try.

He entered her solar, still dark as pitch, and tapped his knuckles softly against the door to her chambers. “It’s me.”

There was a silence, long enough that Delita wondered if Ovelia slept, or if the kitchen maid had been right after all.

“Come in,” came the princess’s muffled reply.

He let himself in and closed the door behind him, with a quiet click. Ovelia had filled a washbasin with water; she sat at the foot of her bed and ran a linen over her bloodied soles. Were it not for the pall of death lingering in the air, it might have been a moment of peace.

“You came,” Ovelia said. A rust-tinted bead of water trickled down her foot. “I did not know that you would.”

“I keep my promises,” Delita said, softly.

He made no move to close the space between them. The stone floor seemed as wide as Finnath Creek.

Ovelia twisted the cloth tight over the basin. Water dripped from her fingertips. “So you decided to stay after all? Do you think it likely assassins yet lurk within the castle?”

He could make out a watery impression of Ovelia in the moonlight. Details caught, a shoulder, a tress of hair, a wrist, a pink-soaked cloth. “I would leave nothing to chance.”

“I suppose it is good you are here, then.” Ovelia folded the cloth over the lip of the basin and petted the wrinkles flat. “I confess I could not sleep, before. The Viscountess offered me a tea, but I had not the stomach to drink it.” She rolled a damp thread between forefinger and thumb. “Mayhap that was a blessing of the Gods. Had my slumber been peaceful, so too would have been my death. Perhaps it would have been painless as well.”

Delita glanced towards one of the arched windows, as if he were inspecting the distant treetops for shadowed assassins, which also happened to obscure his expression in shadow.

He moved to Ovelia’s desk and lit a candle with the one he held. “You’re safe now,” he told her gently. “There is no need of such talk.”

“No,” Ovelia murmured. “I yet live. We must speak of other deaths instead. Always we must speak of the dead. Such as the man who perished in this very room, before my eyes. Such as,” she continued, her voice grown hoarser still, “Simon, poor, dear Simon. Dead by our friend's hand. Do you—do you think he made it swift?”

Delita set his candle next to the one he lit. The flames sputtered in an unseen draft, but in the mirror, their twins flared with sudden vigour, made livelier in reflection.

He found Ovelia’s eyes in the looking glass, weary. “You and I both know Ramza could not have done such a thing.”

Ovelia pressed her knuckles to her lips, surprised by his candour. “Then, it is as I thought—you must know who…?”

Delita shook his head.

In truth, the murderer must have been among Folmarv’s cohort of the damned. Isilud, perhaps, boastful and hungry to prove his worth, or Loffrey, the deadly left hand. It could even have been some footsoldier of no special importance, whose name would never be known to history. But he had long resolved that Ovelia would be untouched by the hellish forces that engineered this wretched war. She slept poorly enough. She needed not be plagued by nightmares of whispering stones.

“So.” Ovelia lowered her crown, bitter with disappointment. “The Church decides which story is the truth once more. And Ivalice can do naught but bleed and die in service of their lies.”

“Aught I do is for you,” Delita reminded her reflection quietly. “My lady.”

“So you say. And yet you cannot bear to look at me!” Ovelia trembled with the force of her outburst. “You will cut down countless men for me, strip them of their precious lives in my name, and yet you will not embrace me when I weep? Are we not allies? Not—friends?”

This line of inquiry was more dangerous than Ovelia grasped. Delita faced her, carefully, the iron grip of his gauntlet to the desk his only tether.

“Is that what you desire, princess?” he asked, soft as a dove’s fallen feather. “My friendship?”

Crimson bloomed across Ovelia’s face, as though she had been caught in a lie. She jerked her chin away. “I shall keep you from your post no longer. You may go, ser knight.”

His post was her, as well she knew, and she could hardly pull rank on him now. Delita released the desk. There was nothing left to stop him from taking the step he should not take. And another. Then he crossed the room and knelt at her feet.

“Ovelia.” He should not have spoken that quiet word aloud, either. But it conveyed more than a thousand others.

The angry pinch between her brows turned somber. Heartsickness filled her brown eyes. She stretched out her hand (he stilled, muscles anticipating a blow) and touched her fingertips to his cheek. Her skin was warm, and soft, and slightly damp. The barest contact set his nerves aflame.

“Surely you hold something in your heart for me,” Ovelia whispered, half to herself. “Besides scorn, and pity. Surely you must.”

When Delita laid in bed, remembering the soft skin of his lady’s hand beneath his lips, he imagined she might feel as he did, idle, impossible fancies, and he thought of his plan, and wondered if that would be better or worse, when all was said and done. He had never dreamed anything as far as this. There were two people in all Ivalice who might claim to know him, and only one who knew his heart. He had not loved anyone since Tietra’s death, was as yet uncertain he was capable of such... But no Lucavi could offer words so seductive.

As if anticipating the strike of an assassin, he saw the move Ovelia meant to make before it occurred to her she was making it. He could have stopped her.

She slipped through his defenses and touched her lips to his.

It was a soft, chaste thing, a token of affection from the fair princess. Neither of them were worthy. She began to pull away; he coiled his arm around her waist and drew her back in.

And pious Ovelia, blessed by the gods with the gift of ambush, met him with an ardent gasp, and wasted no time tangling her fingers in the hair he’d greased so carefully that morning. She curled her soft legs around his torso—his heart thudded at a gallop—and trapped him at her feet.

She kissed him wetly, and clumsily, and passionately, and he could do naught but meet her desperate bid. His neck craned at the angle, and she had little protection from the angle of his armour. He would not have minded if the kiss were to last a hundred years.

At last they extricated themselves, but only just. Ovelia's lips were parted and shone in the candlelight. As she panted, he felt her body curve, though not so closely as he would have liked. He laid a kiss on her jaw, her neck, her fluttering pulse. For his efforts, his lady rewarded him with a sigh that was half his name, half pleasure.

How sweet, how fervent, how he would like it to continue... Too fervent by half, for a room that yet stank of blood. With restraint a monk would envy, Delita pulled away from the warmth of her neck. “My lady,” he said, creakily. “It is late.”

Ovelia blushed deeply. “Of–of course.” Her lips were pink; she covered them with anxious fingers, suddenly abashed. “Forgive me. That was—most improper, I ought not have…”

She moved to separate from him. Delita cupped her cheek to keep her there.

“I will stay,” he vowed. “Until you sleep.”

Ovelia hesitated, and peered into his eyes as if to scry an untruth. What she saw in his face must have satisfied her, for she touched his glove, unwound her legs and arms from him, and pushed backwards into the tumble of blankets. As a show of good faith, he moved to sit on the floor at her side. Ovelia fell into a deep slumber with her hand resting on his pauldron.

But Delita stayed awake, even as the sky beyond the treeline paled. There were things in this life that, once done, could not be undone. Ovelia was a princess. Ramza was a heretic. In another world, perhaps that would not be so, but they could only move forward in this one.

As dawn stretched through the princess's arched window, Delita considered how he might best contrive to do that.