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When they were caught, Annette had tried to claim they were just two lowly scouts, look at their uniforms, they weren't worth two coppers. Unfortunately, the person in charge of the Imperial Army squad they'd run into had been a student at Garreg Mach and knew exactly who they were. It had been worth a try! Fortunately, the officers who ran the camp where they were taken were obviously waiting for someone with a more impressive title who made more gold than them to tell them what to do with two very high-ranking prisoners. In the meantime, someone decided, stupidly, that if Felix and Annette were unarmed and couldn't use magic they weren't dangerous, and put them in separate but adjacent cells for two weeks straight--where they could see and talk to each other. And plot.
They did a lot of plotting. As it turned out, they were very good at plotting. Either one of them by themselves would have been an ineffective spy, but they worked nicely together, a fact that Professor Byleth had been quick to see and exploit after sending them out on exactly one scouting mission together.
Getting the evening guards' keys was easy. Felix wielded a sharpened spoon he'd spent the past five days lovingly sharpening against the stone wall on the first guard; Annette tripped the second through the bars of her cell and strangled him with the sheet from her cot. When he slumped--dead or unconscious, she didn't care--she got the keys off his belt.
"That could have gone much worse," Annette said, holding her wrist through the bars. The cuff that suppressed her magic was made out of some strange metal with an oily sheen. It pulsed uncomfortably against her skin sometimes.
Felix had gotten progressively quieter these past few days. His nerves were already very delicate, and being insulted daily by guards who threatened to beat Annette if he mouthed off to them had strained them to the breaking point. He went key by key to find the one to unlock the cuff.
"'We did well,'" she prompted, deepening her voice to a still-squeaky imitation of Felix. "'Good work, Annie.'"
His brow furrowed. He was never going to call her Annie, no matter how much she tried. He found the right key, and the cuff popped off of Annette's wrist, and Annette thrust it into her pocket for later study. The skin around the cuff was chapped and bruised.
Felix grabbed her by the wrist and massaged the skin there, clumsily pushing healing magic into her flesh. His hand was so big compared to hers. Annette, suddenly very aware of her disgusting frizzy hair and unwashed face, felt herself turning red. It was just a healing! They'd had sex-- not recently--for obvious reasons--there was no reason a healing should feel this intimate.
"We did do well," Felix said, pressing a kiss to her forehead through the bars. "Now we have to do the rest of it."
Annette melted the hinges of her cell door and blew it off with a wind spell. The guard she'd strangled (who was definitely dead) wielded a sword. That was fine, she could handle herself with a regular sword. An axe would have been better. Felix insisted on testing the balance of the other guard's sword, and tucked the spoon into his sword belt when he seemed to think Annette wasn't looking.
The camp's makeshift jail was in the middle of camp. The buildings on either side of it had looked like administrative buildings, but they couldn't be sure. Once they were out, they meant to head north, to the deep forest they'd been caught in. It was well-patrolled, but they'd learned its s They'd gone back and forth about when Annette should use her magic, and she'd protested that she had two weeks of solid rest to build up her reserves.
There was only one door to their jail. Annette made a new one, on the north side. Unfortunately, when the wood came loose, it fell outward into a pair of off-duty soldiers dicing and arguing.
"Hi!" Annette said, stepping around the opening she'd cut in the wall.."Could you tell us which way is north?"
One of the soldiers, a tall, blond man, opened his mouth to raise the alarm. The other one looked petrified, suddenly, at the sight of Felix drawing his sword behind Annette.
In addition to being good at plotting, they were extremely good at good knight bad knight.
"Ah, ah, ah," Annette said. "You don't want to do that. Neither of you! Felix Hugo Fraldarius"--people were always really terrified when she dropped the full name, and this time was no exception--"be nice. We're all friends here, aren't we?"
She reached into the pouch sewn into the underside of her robe sleeve and tore the fabric. Both soldiers tensed and prepared to run, until they saw that she was pulling out a heavy, jingling bag of coins she kept for just such an occasion. The search they'd done on her person had been much less thorough than the one they did on Felix, on account of Felix getting very disagreeable when someone put their hands on her.
"We could all be very good friends," she went on, weighing it in her hand. "I know how much you make... corporals? Corporals. It really isn't enough. I'd say this is about six months' wages for both of you. And all you have to do is have been gambling on the other side of the building when we got out."
Behind her, Felix was vibrating with the desire to hit someone with a sword until they stopped moving. She didn't have to look at him to know this. The soldiers glanced at one another and looked as though they were considering it. Bribes, according to her own very meticulous study of trying to bribe their way out of tight situations where she didn't necessarily want to murder anyone, were only effective about a third of the time if offered without any knowledge of the character of the person being bribed.
Unfortunately, this attempt fell into the two-thirds.
Annette saw it on the blond man's face: the moment honor and principle won out over a large sum of money. He opened his mouth again. She sighed, and stepped aside so Felix could get on with it.
After it was gotten on with, Annette had new splatters of blood on her already blood-crusted robes, and after helping Felix drag the bodies into the jail she felt grosser, physically, than she already had. She was going to bathe for a week and sleep for a month when this was over.
If it was ever over. If no one noticed the missing soldiers or saw the hole in the side of the building; if they weren't caught, if they weren't put to the sword right away for being more trouble than their ransoms were worse. They'd gotten out of tight situations before, but never this tight. She had to be calm. She had to do it for Felix, who'd try to fight his way through a whole camp of Adrestians and would die in a stupid and ugly way if anything happened to her. As evening turned quickly to night, they moved quietly in between buildings, avoiding patrols and stray soldiers. Near the edge of camp, she had to shove Felix into an empty outhouse to avoid being spotted by a group of guards headed out to patrol the woods.
"I love you, Felix," she said quietly, wiping the sweat from her brow on her sleeve.
"I love you, too," Felix replied, peering out the crack at the passing patrol, his sword half-unsheathed and gleaming in the scant torchlight from outside.
She took a deep breath. She'd been thinking about this the whole time they were locked up, and hadn't had the courage to say this until now: "When this is done," she said, "let's get married. Right away."
Felix straightened very quickly and turned to face her.
"Annie," he said, keeping his voice soft with an obvious effort. "We cannot do this here."
"If not now, when!" she hissed.
He turned back to the door. "We're in a latrine. In an enemy camp."
For someone who did espionage and assassinations, Felix could be very missish! Annette did not tell him this. She was pretty sure he thought he was cool. Instead, she said, "And? It's very clean. Would your answer be different if we were at the market in Fhirdiad? At a grand ball? On one of those cute little harbor boats in Derdriu?"
"No," he said.
"Oh." Her stomach sank. This had been a stupid idea. "Well. I mean. It's okay if you're not ready, I just thought--I mean, it's been four years, everyone keeps asking me--and I'm sure they keep asking you--but we don't have to, there's our houses and titles to think about, and our Crests--"
"Yes!" Felix cut in, with an uncharacteristic note of panic in his voice. "I meant yes, Annette Fantine Dominic, I will marry you. No, my answer wouldn't be different if we were somewhere else. The path is clear, let's hurry up and go."
She drew the line at grabbing his face and kissing him in the outhouse. She did so later, when they were deep into the woods, safe and clear.