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Dorothea sighed as she contorted her arms to do up the last button on her gown. That was starting to hurt—she was going to have to see about gowns with fewer buttons, or perhaps a gown she could just pull over her head or get on some other way that didn’t involve buttons, or too many laces.
Maybe she’d sighed a little harder than she had meant to. From the other side of the screen, there came a call of, “You know I can do that for you, if you need.”
“I know. I just like being able to do this myself.”
Married a year, and she still clung so fervently to dresses and gowns she could get on without needing a maid to help her into them—or Linhardt, for that matter. Her hair, too, she would much, much rather she wore in styles she could put up and take down herself. No complicated updos that required two poor girls to stand poised with a hundred pins in hand to put up. Not for her. The resulting headaches could easily last the rest of the day.
It had been different when she was on stage. When she was on stage, she was someone else, and that someone else required the best costuming available to ensure that everyone believed it as well. It was fine when she was on stage, even if she did start to get sweaty in the spotlights under half a dozen layers of cloth sooner or later. It was just part of being a performer.
In a way, she was dressing to go on stage tonight as well. Still dressing to perform, even if the role was always the same, and her audience considerably more restricted. But when Dorothea performed on the stage of the Mittelfrank Opera House, the only thing that had been unpleasant was, even then only on occasion, her costuming. When she went onto these types of stages, the only thing she was guaranteed to find pleasant was the company of her husband. Everything else would be a bit like poison—not the poison that saw you frothing at the mouth on the floor until dead, but the kind of poison that would make your chest hurt and your stomach cramp for days until it finally left you alone. She was allowed to wear comfortable clothes to that kind of performance.
(People liked to drip little drops of poison into her ears about her clothes. That Dorothea clung to gowns she could get in and out of unaided meant that, often, her gowns were not as elaborate as those of the women who were now her peers. That tended to be noticed, and not to her benefit.
It wasn’t always so bad. The people most likely to go about dripping poison tended to dress like they had dived headfirst into half a dozen wardrobes, all of them belonging to different people with wildly different tastes in the cut and fabric and color of their clothes, and had just walked away wearing whatever would stick to them. Those critics, it was considerably easier to ignore them than it would have been if it had been one of the more tastefully dressed women sneering at her behind their fan. Irrational to be worried about it at all, but she still bled when someone stuck pins into her flesh. She and Linhardt had managed to make a game out of it, aided by some of the sketches Petra and Ashe sent them of the brightly-colored—and very obnoxiously behaved—birds to be found in Brigid. They didn’t really keep score, but Dorothea managed to walk away every time feeling as if she had grasped victory in her hands. It made the bite of poison sting a little less.)
She was dressing to go on stage in a certain sense of the word—and she happened to be doing so on a time limit. Not a particularly punishing one, but, well, she’d gotten distracted before. They’d gotten distracted before together, and while there were precious few people they could be visiting with whose feelings Dorothea actually cared enough about to avoid being late for them, they had to keep their minds focused on the main objective. It was harder to blend into a crowd when you showed up to join it so late that everyone couldn’t help but make note of it.
“How do I look?” Dorothea asked upon emerging out from behind the screen.
Linhardt, who had taken up a post at her writing desk at the far end of the room, looked up from his notes to catch her eye and smile. “Wonderful. But then, you always do.”
Dorothea shook her hair out, rolling her eyes a little. Big room, bigger than any she had slept in as a single woman or as a girl, and yet it still took her so little time to cross it to come and stand over him. “And you are still horrible with compliments.” She bent to kiss the crown of his head. “As always.”
“I don’t recall you regarding flattery as being especially high on my list of virtues,” he replied easily, fingers curling around the edge of a page in his notes. “But then, the concept of my having enough virtues to list them out at all is strange enough that it is potentially still significant.”
Dorothea found herself rolling her eyes again, smiling up at the ceiling all the while. “It’s definitely significant in some ways. As for the others, we’ll have to talk about those more when we get back home later.”
A little huff of a laugh rattled in the air. “I look forward to it.” That laugh quickly turned into a long, hard sigh. “Far more than another dreary gathering, anyways. I wonder if I could get away with napping in a corner for a few minutes once Lady Menja launches into another one of her parlor games?”
Riddle games were pretty excruciating to sit through when nearly all of the participants had no imagination whatsoever. Dorothea would give him that. But as she made her way back over to her vanity, banishing for now the ghosts of anticipated pleasure, she shook her head. “You’d better not. If she splits the men and women up again, you’re going to have to listen to what the other men there say—I won’t be able to hear any of it from my end.”
“I suppose so. Frankly, I’m not certain any of them actually have the wherewithal to have been plotting with sinister mages from a city below the earth, but who knows—maybe Gehring will show himself to actually have a functioning mind under all of that bluster and self-importance.”
It was amazing how easily she could smile, when she knew what she was going to be walking into in just a couple of hours. “Lin, I’m not exactly complaining that you’ve learned how to hold a grudge, but… Actually, no, he was completely awful.” She eyed his reflection in the mirror she had stopped short in front of, silvered and slightly tilted as it was. He was still nearly draped over her desk, but there was a slight stiffness to his shoulders which she was nevertheless able to pick out at a glance. “If you decide to find some way to confound him, make sure you do it where I can see it.”
“You have my word.”
Dorothea’s smile faded slightly as she sat down at her vanity, reaching for a hair brush and wondering if she could get away with just wearing her hair loose tonight. Lady Menja was… Maybe the best way to put it was that she was just shy of being difficult. She had a habit of making carelessly snide comments, comments which, no matter how many times Dorothea picked them apart in her head (and she had done, many times), she could never quite tell if they had been intentionally snide or not. Like when she had asked Dorothea if it had been difficult for her to adjust to bathing when she and Linhardt had gotten married, or when she had clapped her hands together and congratulated Dorothea on how well she had adjusted to using forks and knives when she ate.
The words were objectively insulting, and it wasn’t just Dorothea who was aware of the barbs buried under the syllables. A few of the ladies who had been sitting near enough to overhear had tittered behind their fands or their hands, though their tittering had a high, brittle quality to it as if they were afraid that the fight that would inevitably break out over those words would spill over to them. (They never failed to seem surprised when a fight didn’t break out at all.) Whenever he happened to be close enough to overhear, Lady Menja’s son would, politely horrified, take his mother aside and whisper something to her. Dorothea hadn’t always been able to hear what he was saying, but she knew that he had on at least one occasion pointed out to his mother that, with her marriage, Dorothea outranked Lady Menja, and that offering insults to House Hevring was perhaps better avoided.
Lady Menja’s son never apologized to Dorothea for his mother. Neither did Lady Menja ever apologize. Lady Menja was either genuinely ignorant of how she could possibly have offered insult with her words, or she was a far, far better actress than Dorothea herself, for she would always blink up at her son, no matter what he said to her, in perfect confusion, her eyes wide and blank as if he had been speaking to her in a different language. It was… It was difficult to plan a counteroffensive when your opponent gave you no ground to gain purchase on. As long as they still needed access to the social gatherings Lady Menja hosted, there was really no way Dorothea could actually strike back against her, not so long as she could plausibly hide behind ignorance as an excuse for… for just about everything she had ever said to Dorothea one-on-one. So ignorant was she, or so ignorant was she apparently, that she had not even noticed Linhardt scowling at her on the occasions when he had been close enough to hear what Lady Menja was saying.
I think we’ll both be happy to drop her like a rotten orange once we’ve gotten everything we can out of these get-togethers. The problem about that was that neither of them actually knew when they were going to wring every last bit of information that they could out of these gatherings. Though outwardly they could be a bit silly, a lot of the women Dorothea had been trying to ingratiate herself with were surprisingly tough nuts to crack—even the ones who spoke graciously to Dorothea and kept the tittering and sneering to a bare minimum were very careful about who they let into their confidence, and so far, Dorothea had gotten no further than being able to exchange pleasantries with them about how their families were, as opposed to before, when she could discuss nothing with them but the weather.
As for Linhardt… Oh, poor Linhardt. This was not his strong suit at all. Dorothea would readily admit that he was doing very well, all things considered—most of the typical fellow gatherers seemed now to think of him as pleasantly eccentric, rather than sneering behind their hands at him as deeply, deeply weird as they had originally done—but this was very much not his strong suit, and like her, he had not managed to escape entirely the scorn which some quarters were determined to heap upon them. (Dorothea was not the only one who could feel the persistent dripping of poison into her ears when they attended gatherings at the home of Lady Menja and others.)
On top of that, Dorothea could not help but sympathize with Linhardt’s thorough lack of eagerness to speak with Lord Gehring again, and his implicit reluctance to engage with any of the men who were likely to be at Lady Menja’s this evening. They were nearly all of them unspeakably dull-witted. They’d all been born with enough money that there had never been any real obligation on them to use their brains for anything in their lives, and it showed. The only things they seemed to be quick about were offering insults just subtle enough that one couldn’t really respond to them without looking like a boor, and clinging to their own power, even in the face of the collapse of the Adrestian Empire as they had all once known it.
For all of that, Dorothea thought she would rather wear her hair loose. Less potential for headaches when it wasn’t all piled on top of her head. Oh, some of the ladies would make comments—noblewomen who called themselves Imperial even when the Adrestian Empire wasn’t really extant anymore all tended to be of the opinion that for a married woman to wear her hair loose in public was… indicative of certain things which were not flattering to say about her character—but Dorothea could see enough of their hair, even piled up as it was and half-hidden behind ribbons and elaborately jeweled hairpins to tell that they wouldn’t have made a good showing if they had had to wear it loose, anyways. Petty as it was, she could at least take some satisfaction in the knowledge that she had considerably better hair than most of them.
This could just all be a dead-end. We could be subjecting ourselves to their company for the next ten years, and never learn anything else about where those people dug in in the Empire.
(They had once hoped to get all of the information they needed from Linhardt’s parents. The former Count Hevring in particular had been mired in all of this up to his neck. It had seemed impossible that at least one of them wouldn’t know exactly where all of the hidey-holes were, wouldn’t have an exhaustive list of all of the households these people—Hubert’s letter had called them ‘Those Who Slither in the Dark,’ but, no offense to Hubert, Dorothea refuse to dignify them with a name so evocative as that—had embedded themselves into.
But those hopes had come to nothing. Lady Hevring had been kept out of the spider’s web that was the court’s dealings with these people most assiduously by her husband, and had never sought them out on her own account. She had been approached exactly once, and had rebuffed the approaching party so bluntly that she and her husband had increased the number of guards posted around their Enbarr residence sharply for years to come afterwards.
As for Dorothea’s father-in-law, he had little more to offer than that. Though the man did niceness so well that Dorothea’s hackles went up just listening to him say hello (no one was that calm and genial all the time), he had apparently been unable to hide his distaste at having to continue cooperating with them after a certain blood-soaked bridge had been crossed, and he had been kept out of the loop a great deal as a result.
Duke Gerth had confirmed that the former Count Hevring wasn’t lying about having been unable to hide his distaste. He had probably not been lying about ultimately knowing very little that could actually be helpful. Both Dorothea and Linhardt would argue that his distaste had arisen too late to absolve him, let alone forgive him (Linhardt was, when pressed, still quick to point out scathingly that his father’s distaste had only arisen after they had given him all that he and the others had asked for, and that scathing tone only managed to become ever more scalding when his father actually managed to look hurt), and the fact that he had so little of real substance to contribute had not helped matters. Dorothea couldn’t remember precisely when last either she or Linhardt had actually managed a conversation with him that wasn’t stiff, stilted, and short-lived, let alone one which remained civil.)
Why do I even bother worrying about what these people think of me? Dorothea wondered gloomily to herself as she brushed out her hair. Even if they haven’t been collaborating with those people, they still turned a blind eye when Edie and all of her brothers and sisters went missing. Still turned a blind eye when Emperor Ionius’s granddaughter was abducted—she was officially dead, but no one had ever turned up the girl’s body, so really, as far as Dorothea was concerned, she had suffered the same fate as her father and her aunts and uncles—and her mother was murdered. These are the people who jeered at Petra when she was a scared little girl torn away from her home and laughed at her when she was trying to learn the language. These are the people who heard rumors about the way Bern’s father treated her growing up, tut-tutted, shrugged their shoulders, and did nothing about it. These are the people who left me to starve when I was a girl.
Dorothea glowered at her reflection, willing her face to show less trepidation and only glaring all the more fiercely when she couldn’t keep trepidation at bay. This is ridiculous. It ought to be like water off of a duck’s back. Nearly all of them have never actually done any good in their entire lives—why do I even care what they think about me?
Tender flesh, still. It was one thing to toss off a light shrug and say airily that the past meant nothing to her—to them—when the self-appointed arbiters of propriety tried to put her down by telling her that a proper noble lady would never dress or act as she did. It was another thing entirely to weather all of the slings and arrows, all the poisoned barbs and darts, without coming out of it bruised, or bleeding, or fevered.
Hard, she thought, shooting a fond look at the silvered blur of Linhardt’s reflection in her mirror, not to get defensive when some of those slings and arrows and barbs and darts were fired at him instead. No one ever particularly liked the shape of her claws or the length of her teeth when she caught them jeering about him in her hearing. No one really liked it when Linhardt talked endless repetitive circles around them and left them feeling insulted in a way they couldn’t even describe, let alone act upon, when they made choice remarks about her where they could hear.
Maybe we aren’t quite the best people for this job, after all. A little, wry smile pinned itself to Dorothea’s lips as she set down her brush and reached for the jewelry she had selected earlier in the afternoon. Lady Menja favored louder, larger pieces. Though Dorothea could also favor those sorts of pieces when the mood struck her, they wouldn’t really pair well with her gown—and frankly, she felt like striking the biggest contrast between herself and her host humanly possible, and damn anyone who called that petty. I’m amazed we haven’t been banned from these gatherings already. I can’t remember a time when it was either of us who started things, but when does that ever matter to people like her?
Maybe they weren’t quite the best people for the job they were trying to do. Even with Dorothea’s expertise as an actress, it was hard sometimes. But they weren’t exactly flush with choices for people who could have done this job instead. For this particular community, at this particular time, it had to be them.
I think I’ll like it better when we can actually visit Ferdie and Bern for more than a couple of days before we have to hurry back here or to Mozghuz. I might like it better when we can pin Caspar down for more than a day before he’s off again. I will definitely like it better when things quiet down enough for us to go visit Petra and Ashe.
There were many things that Dorothea would have liked better. But the world had never cared very much for what she ‘liked better.’ Whenever she looked to a quarter that would actually care about her preferences for the way her life should go, she was looking towards people. Not that many people, either.
She couldn’t quite help scraping at the wood of her vanity with her fingernails as she stood. It was already so easy to imagine sinking those fingernails into somebody’s face, and she couldn’t indulge in such an impulse, not tonight. This was a battlefield of a sort, but it was a very different battlefield than the blood-soaked hills and plains and bridges and palaces that Dorothea had known. Out there, things were simpler. It was easier by far to find your heart wrenched from your chest and shredded to a pulpy, mutilated mass before you ever managed to get hold of it again, but it was also easier to know who to attack, and when. It was easier when the only consequences for a misstep was injury or death.
Linhardt looked up from his notes when she approached, slowly, as if rousing himself from sleep. “Are you ready to go?”
Dorothea sucked in a deep breath, ribs creaking against her stays, before she managed a short, choppy nod. “I… think so.”
When Linhardt stood, it was to set his hands under her elbows, to tilt his head to one side for a closer look at her face. “You don’t seem to be looking forward to it.”
“Are you?” Dorothea asked with a laugh, though that laugh trembled and warbled like birdcall from a mile off. She lifted up her own hands, set them under his elbows, and prayed the stability it granted her would last her through the evening. She would need all of the strength she could get, and then some. “I wonder if this will even yield up anything more than the failures we’ve had the last few times we’ve gone—what a handsome reward for sitting through hours of dull conversation with people who think I belong in a gutter or a whorehouse.”
Linhardt let out a whistling sigh. “I could always send to her and tell her you’re not feeling well. It wouldn’t be too far off of the truth—and I don’t care to be the night’s primary entertainment any more than you do. Let them whip themselves up into a faint over someone else, for once.” A little spark of mischief dancing in his eye, “I’m sure Lady Siegel would suit excellently. She already sticks pins so artfully into other people—perhaps she could stick pins in herself for a change of pace, and see if she could manage any recognizable pattern with the pinheads?”
Actually thumping him would have required a little more energy than Dorothea could really afford to expend at the moment. She was going to need all of her energy later for the dinner and for whatever it was that came afterwards, the better to ensure that she didn’t lose her temper badly enough to actually sink her fingernails into somebody’s face. But to loose her right hand and set it against his chest, that wasn’t so difficult. The faint echo of his heartbeat and the gentle warmth filtering through his clothes never failed to comfort her. “Thank you, Lin, but I’ll be fine.”
He gave her left elbow a gentle squeeze. More soberly, Linhardt said, “Really, Dorothea, if you don’t want to have to pretend to actually enjoy their company, we don’t have to go. I’ve never set much store by keeping up appearances, and even if I did, there must be limits somewhere to what anyone can reasonably expect.”
“That’s not why we’re doing this, Lin. You know that.”
Now, it was his turn to sigh. “I… I know,” Linhardt answered, in such a small voice that she had to strain to hear him.
The Church had declared all said and done with the sacking of Shambhala. All was not said and done, but the Church had been so quick to wash their hands of the whole thing that Dorothea and her former classmates (those who were still here to draw breath, anyways) understood right away that in their own efforts, they would just be on their own. If they wanted to ensure that these people could not continue to plot in whatever outposts and hiding places they might have managed to dig for themselves in the soil of what had once been the Adrestian Empire, they were on their own. If they wanted to ensure that none of the atrocities that these people had committed could ever happen again, they would have to rely on their own power, and no one else’s.
But their strength would be enough. It had to be. She and Linhardt split their time between Enbarr and Mozghuz, while Ferdinand split his time between Enbarr and Boramas, all three of them trying their best to ferret out information from gatherings such as the one Dorothea and Linhardt were about to leave for. Bernadetta was ensconced in Varley and showed no sign of wishing to leave it again, but she was actually fairly well-placed to make inquiries, and inquiries she had made. Caspar was wandering about Fódlan at large, upturning every rock and breaking up every gathering of scoundrels he could find in the hopes that one of them might know something. Petra and Ashe made inquiries from Brigid, seeing if these people had ever had dealings outside of Fódlan. Lorenz made inquiries in Gloucester territory, seeking the same, but regarding the former Alliance territories. Manuela and Professor Hanneman did what they could, but having tied themselves more strongly to the Church which, even if in name only, was the new ruling power in Fódlan, there wasn’t as much that they could do. Their central location at least made it easier for them to make inquiries into the north.
For Edelgard, who never had the chance to rip these people up by their roots and ensure that no child would ever again be made to suffer for their aims, Dorothea would do this. Maybe the others had different motivations, but this was hers. This was her conviction. Unpleasant as pins in her flesh could be, as much as it hurt, she would endure it. This world would never know peace if they left even one of them alive to wreak havoc.
(She thought about children, sometimes. It was an inevitability, of course; they were going to need children to inherit the title and the territory, to continue the bloodline. But Dorothea really thought about children, sometimes. About the sort of life she wanted them to have, and the sort of world she wanted them to live in. There was no room in the world she wanted for her children for people who could melt out of the shadows and drag a child of hers back down into the dark with them.)
She smiled up at him. “Let’s get going. It’ll be harder for us to blend in if we’re late.”
As they were heading down the stairs, out of earshot of the maids or the steward, Linhardt asked her, almost casually, “When this is over, would you rather just leave Enbarr?”
Dorothea raised an eyebrow. “And go back to Mozghuz?” When Linhardt didn’t answer her immediately, she pressed him, “What, for good?”
They’d spent some time in the capital of Hevring territory since they were married. Linhardt had been born in Enbarr, the same as her, and had spent the vast majority of his childhood in his family’s residence in Enbarr. From what he had told her, Linhardt had only spent any real amount of time in Mozghuz after their school year in the Academy had come to such a tempestuous close, and then again after the war, when he had somehow managed to balance seriously preparing himself to inherit the family title, beginning to make inquiries about the people they had fought in Shambhala, and his Crest research.
As for Dorothea herself… Mozghuz was different. It was one of the largest cities in Fódlan, though still utterly dwarfed in size by the bloated behemoth that was Enbarr. The city was right at the coastline, and did a fair amount of trade as a result. Even if it wasn’t as cosmopolitan as Enbarr or Derdriu or even Boramas, there were still so many things to be seen there that you so rarely saw elsewhere in Fódlan. And with the borders not quite so firmly shut to outsiders as they had once been, Mozghuz was seeing a trickle of traders from Brigid and Dagda that increased little by little with each passing year. The wind smelled of possibility.
Enbarr stirred up a deep wellspring of emotions within her, love and hate, despair and hope. It had been her home for so long, even if she had so rarely had any real joy of it. The city always loomed so large in her thoughts, even when she did not think about it. Compared to that, Mozghuz still felt like a blank slate.
Something she could write a story for herself on, without having to worry about the interference of those who thought that story should have a different plot, a different ending.
Linhardt shrugged. “I never had much of an opinion about where I was living as a child, so long as it had a comfortable bed and plenty of books to read. I never thought much about living anywhere but the house I had been born in. But the more I get to know Enbarr, the less I like it.” As if just realizing that his words could put some sort of pressure on her, he added a little hastily, “If you would rather stay here, then I am content to stay here as well. But we could just…” He waved his hand in the air, waggling his fingers. “…Just leave, and not come back.” Stopping on the stairs to frown to himself, “Actually, I think we might still have to come back sometimes. But considerably less often than we are right now. Maybe twice a year? Yes, I think probably twice a year at most. And it’s not as if we don’t have an excuse.”
Dorothea smiled warmly, and slipped her arm through his, before they continued on towards the landing. “I’d like that.”
First, they had business to finish here. But once they found purchase, it would be easy. Everyone always managed to underestimate the two of them, somehow, though Dorothea thought she understood what it was with her. Everyone drank in her clothes and her hair and they always thought her so simple, even when it was plain she was not.
But one day, they’d have their pleasant, uncomplicated life. Far away from here, breathing in air that smelled of possibilities. She’d like that.