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Midnight in Enbarr, 1184. The wind caterwauls through alleys and mourns the fourth anniversary of war. The streets are quiet in the palest hours of moonlit morning. For now, the city is theirs.
“Good news for the emperor?”
“She has already received it. I can’t stay long, I would like to get some distance from the city before dawn. But it is always good to see your face, Hilda.”
“Let me see yours." She steps through a curtain of rain to join Marianne and her horse under the arcaded walkway. Once more, unto the breach. Pushing back the hood, her fingers brush damp strands of hair loosened from its braid. “Oh, Marianne. You look miserable.”
She does. Her eyes are shot from lack of sleep. She holds wanly around her a thin cloak and trembles under it in petulant shivers. Hilda places a hand, no warmer, on her cheek. Her conspirator scrapes at the ground with a gloomy toss of his head, anticipating a restless night.
“They don’t suspect you’ve left Edmund?” Her concern is quiet, fearful of discovery. Close together as they are, Marianne presses forward still to hear over the incessant water against stone. Hilda’s fingers fuss over her face, thumbing her cheekbones, pushing aside her bangs. Marianne bears this attention patiently.
“If I miss a roundtable, let them believe I am confined by my ailments. And of what would they suspect me? Would they think me capable of—this?” And she is right. Who could accuse the girl who bruised her knees in the cathedral at night? Who would believe that she would cast aside those repentant letters to crawl into the great defiler’s pocket?
“Ailments?” Hilda repeats. “They know, then?”
Marianne cringes at the implication. “No—no, not of that. They think me frail and dispirited. At times unable to handle even the journey to Derdriu. And my reluctance to fight in our school days gives them no reason for doubt.”
There is something strange on the brink of words that is difficult to swallow. “Good,” says Hilda, speaking around it. “Good.”
This strange thing is known as a secret. The dream that howls behind sealed lips and turns Marianne’s back to the church and the people of her land. What Hilda had first fallen in love with, before anything. Yes, secrets: people keep them trapped in their throats so that they do not escape as words, but they are still there, leaking out into their voices. She will guard Marianne’s jealously, in the savage hope that they will remain hers and hers alone, as the only part of her she is allowed to possess anymore. Not her heart, her hands, her lips. Separated by the length of Fódlan and the wrath of armies entire, all Hilda has to her name are secrets.
The continent of Fódlan, 1184.
· · ·
Hilda is summoned to the palace study the next day to discuss tactics and countertactics, the fragile neutrality of the Leicester Alliance, and Marianne. Emperor Edelgard wears her armor, Hilda does not. They sit side by side on the desk bench and hunch over Marianne’s messy script, her retainer watching them, and for a moment Hilda is struck by the memory of academy classes.
“It was good to see her,” says Hilda.
She knows, by the gentle hand that falls on her shoulder, that the emperor notes the wretched want that shows in her voice, or in the turn of her face, or in the saying of it at all. This is the nature of their roles: as long as she knows Marianne to be true, then she will trust Hilda to follow. Hilda who had once deserted a classroom for her and so too would desert her country.
“We may begin our campaign to take the Alliance capital soon.” Edelgard informs her, almost gingerly. With these secrets of nobles, of inchoate battle plans and rumbling bases of support within Leicester, the wind blows greater at the Empire's back. “We will have to, if we wish to move against the Kingdom. Can you remain at my side?”
She looks down and does not respond. She has always been poor at hiding her feelings. But her position will not be questioned, because Edelgard believes that from love follows loyalty. That love shackles her to Adrestia. They have never been like that, her and Marianne. They do not make such demands of each other; enough is demanded of them by their leaders. Hilda thinks this belief must be one of the emperor’s flaws, prays that one day it shall be made fatal.
“Next time, I would like to accompany her on the journey back. If my emperor allows it.”
· · ·
They ride through the night. At the suggestion of sunrise, Marianne diverts them from the road and into the forest, stopping with startlingly practiced ease by a nondescript thicket. Hilda helps unpack while Marianne identifies species to her by birdsong. In the aureate embrace of light through the tree branches, they lay flush together from shoulder to hip. The bedroll is cramped. The second goes unused. Hilda regards their closeness and imagines begging for Marianne’s life—Please, Claude, you can’t kill her—she imagines begging for Claude’s life—He’s like a brother, don’t let her do this—she runs a finger along the sheath at her belt and imagines plunging a blade through Marianne’s ribs before she can wake up so she will never hear her last words—Will it be the Goddess she begs for forgiveness, or me—a sudden elbow digs into her side and she yelps. Marianne blinks awake into Hilda’s neck.
“Are you alright?”
The morning-calls of birds overhead and nothing else.
Hilda exhales sharply. “Nightmares." It sounds ridiculous, incongruent with the sleepily unthreatening idyll surrounding them.
Marianne wraps around her, feeling the outline of her side, the seam of her riding trousers, the leather of her dagger’s grip. Her skittish, hesitant hands are not yet familiar with how Hilda wants to be touched, which has never bothered her. Marianne has always been charmingly terrible at sex.
They break camp come sundown. After another exhausting night of riding, they reach the edge of Adrestia. Once again, they sink into the deep, unguarded parts of the forest. They will part here, and Hilda will force herself to return alone, wearing the boots of the enemy, with only the companionship of mountains.
“I feel like I’m always saying goodbye to you,” she says, possibly sounding a little pathetic. Shaken by the unreadability of her expression, Hilda realizes she would not be able to name and recite Marianne’s prayers the way she used to. In days apart, she only becomes more acquainted with the memory of her. Will they, broken parts of a united nation, be at all recognizable to each other in the end?
“When this ends. I’ll. I’ll come find you,” declares Marianne. “Wherever you are.”
Now those would have been nice last words, she thinks. A war of promises of war, of beginnings, of ends. The dagger digs into her skin like a reminder, ever-present.
· · ·
In daylight she turns back west for the first leg in her journey back to Enbarr. It is the warmest city in Fódlan and the second-furthest from Edmund. On the way, she sleeps at inns and selects among their offerings the dinners that remind her most of home. In her thoughts and dreams she kills Edelgard in her study, and her retainer’s retaliation is violent and painful. She kills Hubert, and the emperor's is instead swift and precise. She kills Lysithea, in the unlikeliest twist of fates her only even vaguely real friend as of late, as she chases mirages in the palace library at Enbarr, reading as if she had been starved of it all her life. In aggrieved and indulgent poeticism, she kills the Goddess. She sneaks into Marianne’s quarters in the dormitory and enjoys the simple comfort of tangling their legs under the bedlinens. Then she kills her—Marianne has already lived four years too long to promise her a war's end.
She kills Claude, two months after the fall of Garreg Mach. You know she offered for me to be a part of her stupid strike team? Me?
She should not have told him. She really should not have told him. Instead of telling him, she kills him. Instead of telling him, she returns to her home in blissful ignorance, waiting for the war to meet her. She imagines dying by Marianne's hand. I think you should. This could be an opportunity for us, you know. Think of what we could have done if we had known about her plans in advance. Think of all the fighting that could have been stopped.
I really hate you sometimes.
I’m sorry Hilda. But you’re the only one that can do this. You really are. You have to know that. Just like I’m the only one that…
She says goodbye in the forest in an embrace so tight that she can feel the pumping of blood through Marianne’s body, the beast-blood that Marianne calls cursed and is sacrificing everything to cleanse. Claude discovers the truth of her allegiance and orders the end of this beating heart and offers up those same empty words as comfort. You’re the only one that could do this.
She kills Claude, who has condemned her to four years in hell.
· · ·
A study of scars: it is in sequential journeys to Garreg Mach where Hilda witnesses the gradual project of time's making. The southern side has always been beautiful and still is. Like scattered regrowth after a forest fire, the wildflowers grow short and sickly where once burned lines of sweeping dragon’s breath. They bob and bow in deference to the snow-eaters running downslope. Foehn clouds pour over the peaks, an enormous cascading waterfall. The sky is endless. The stretching landscape offers a humbling glimpse into Fódlan's longue durée; as affirmed by the centuries-old catacombs below, it is not the first war this abandoned monastery has endured. At its foot lies the village, now a ghost town of little more than a few fishing, hunting, and poaching operations existing either self-sufficiently or in fragile cooperation with the bandit camps that grow more audacious with each moon’s passing.
Hilda pulls a hood over her eyes, tucks her hair into her cloak, and follows the mountain paths to a fishing shack embedded within this recovering ecosystem. She wraps cloth around the lower half of her face and tightly around her breasts. Through unknown means, her contact here holds news from Derdriu in his hands. They exchange parcels, never words. Hilda’s always includes a plea. Please, Claude. Let me come home. And his always includes a response to the one she sent last. I still need you there, Hilda. I’m sorry. Straddling the three nations of the continent, the ruins of this place have become the bars of her prison cell, this fisherman with the parcels her jailer. She turns away and begins her descent.
As always when riding through Hresvelg, the clock tower comes into view far before the gatehouses, the tip of its belfry piercing through the domed and tiled rooftops. The palace arrives last, buried in the southernmost part of the city. Hilda travels the full length of the canal—Enbarr’s vena cava—passing through every district and reaching at last her quarters. As sorry recompense for her endless suffering, she sits in the bathtub until her skin shrivels up. She wastes as much water as she can in an act of private rebellion. She lounges for days on end. She sleeps until noon, and then descends past the back gardens alone to drink in the ocean air. There on the promontory she sleeps some more and returns sunburned. Betrayal is so much work. Lysithea ignores all of her sweet-voiced pleas and drags her out of bed for this and that, to go look at books and wyverns and vegetables. Waterfront shops and market stalls teem with customers not yet touched by violence. If it reaches this city, it will break in ways that will not unbreak. Hilda reasons that her love is much the same way, indelible, a young girl’s once fickle and innocent heart, made martyr and sanctified. It is a sign of the times. Borne of and defined by war, her love for Marianne will last until the end, whether a minute or a decade away: a study of scars.
· · ·
The emperor returns with a living, breathing Byleth. The self-styled Black Eagle Strike Force makes the monastery their base of operations. Hilda realizes she’s up not against the Empire, but destiny itself. She avoids the professor whenever possible. At mealtimes she scurries from her room to the dining hall where she makes doomed efforts to hide behind Lysithea. She takes notes at council, bent over in false diligence so that she does not have to look up and meet those spirit-touched eyes. It is ultimately futile, as Hilda is forced to—shudder—feign a newfound interest in fishing so as not to arouse suspicion when she escapes to the village to run imaginary errands. I've found it calms me, Professor, she says, lying through both sides of her mouth.
Lysithea seeks her out to scold her after one too many ditched training sessions. “As lazy as ever, Hilda. You do know that these are matters of life and death, right? We’re not rooting out bandits anymore."
“You know me. I’m useless at all this fighting stuff.” Hilda waves her hand airily.
“Hmph. You don’t have time to be loitering by the pond like this. But I guess there are things that even war doesn’t change.” The barb should feel toothless in its utter falsehood but instead cuts open a deep vein inside of her, a place that has not felt pain in a long time.
She wishes it were true. Hilda hates change. She misses the Hilda-shaped indent in her bed that has been hollow for years. Her childhood servants and easy conversation with her brother and getting spoiled with trips to the gemstone shops in the middle district. The way her body feels without the weight of obligation and the fear of losing everything she loves. She misses how she will never be able to get any of it back. Oh, Lysithea, she thinks. If you only knew.
· · ·
The Great Bridge, 1185. Hilda faces certain death and is forced to come to terms with things very quickly.
The travel of information is circuitous and inefficient, and the end result is the same as if Hilda and Marianne had simply been allowed to shout at each other in the streets like gossiping window-neighbors. Hilda gets word to Claude of Byleth’s return and the impending Leicester campaign. Claude follows her advice and tells his commanders to fall back, intending on turtling in Derdriu. Marianne whispers this plan to Edelgard by moonlight. Judith, hero of the Alliance, resolves to disobey it and moves to head the invasion off at the pass. Hilda petitions to remain in the monastery and is summarily denied.
We’ll make a warrior out of you yet, the professor’s eyes seem to say, with a familiar glint. She’s resigned to it by now, people making things out of her.
Thanks to Judith’s refusal to retreat, they meet more resistance than expected at the low walls. The old stories of the Airmid River tell of healing water bringing comfort to fallen soldiers, but legends do not survive times such as these—the earthy smell of a decaying streambed rises past abutments and mixes with the pungency of spilled blood and the fire-scent of magic. Panting heavily, she thrusts her shield in front of her, advancing with her line, and tries not to panic, hiding her face as much as her flesh. Death rains down from battlements at both sides of the elevated walkways.
Leonie stands by the wall, giving orders beneath the next turret, and Hilda falters. Why didn’t they follow the retreat plan? If they do not listen to her, then what is it all for? What place do spies have serving those who value pride over survival? A mage takes advantage of her wandering thoughts. Incredible pain blooms, spreading from her torso to her legs, and she falls to her knees. She grinds the end of her axe into the deck to keep from collapsing. The next thing she remembers is Leonie’s defiant and accusing eyes.
“Use your last breath to tell me this, Hilda. Why did you join them?”
The edge of a blade swims in Hilda’s vision and her head lolls. She no longer has the strength to look at Leonie. She wants to be looking at Marianne. She tries her best to picture her face before she dies. “Apparently, I’m the only one who can,” she says, mouth thick and bitter with secrets and blood that falls and stains the stone.
The pain disappears in pieces into nothingness as if Hilda is burning away, parts of her sloughing off and turning from living things into objects, insensate. She loses feeling in her arms, then her legs. Battle is deafening and turns the perception of distance and of one’s own environs into an adrenaline-fueled slurry. The hoarse cries of doomed generals and dying animals, the thunderclap fury of spellfire, the ugly cacophony of clashing metal and breaking stone, the disappointment of a betrayed friend: as Hilda’s vision fills with darkness, all these noises are simultaneously at sword’s length and very, very far away.
· · ·
When Hilda was fourteen, her brother came home from Fódlan’s Throat bleeding in the healers’ carts. There had been another skirmish with Almyran border forces. She ran to him in tears, but thankfully Holst regained the full use of his leg thanks to what scholars called “faith magic,” as if they had willed him into recovery. Evidently, there were limitations to the power of belief: he would often claim that his knee still hurt on rainy days.
These carts are lined with linen and straw, drawn by horses, and there the healers sit and attend to the patients. After her first mission at the academy, she asked to ride back to the monastery in one and was glared at. What? It’s not like all of them are full.
She wakes up. Every time they hit a bump in the road, the shock scatters throughout her spasming muscles. A kiss on her forehead. “Just a while longer,” whispers a voice. “I paralyzed you so that Leonie would not… I am sorry, Hilda. A while longer, I promise, and you’ll be fine.” Syrupy warmth flows through her body. The lulling sensation of faith soothes the pins and needles, and she falls asleep again.
She wakes up. It is night. They are surrounded by the silent and weary. Remnants of battalions trudge alongside them, gaping holes blasted into their rank and file. Mostly empty carts imply more dead than wounded, and the two of them sit alone. “Marianne. What is happening.”
Her healer is combing through her hair, tangled and matted with dried sweat, and the vain part of Hilda laments the sorry state of it exposed to Marianne’s fingers. “I suppose you’re a prisoner of the Alliance at the moment. Most of Judith’s company were routed at Myrddin. This is what’s left. I’ll make sure you get to Claude.”
The events of the battle return to her foggy consciousness. She blinks, sits up, and loosens a string of curses that would make the Goddess herself blush, let alone Marianne, who coughs and looks away. “Leonie’s riding ahead. I think she expected to die today,” she says in the forest’s direction. “She was so calm this morning, she believed the outcome foregone.”
“Is this where a soldier’s pride gets you? They should have retreated. Claude should have had enough time to evacuate. What will we do at the capital now?”
Marianne turns to look at her, cupping Hilda’s jaw with a hollow smile. “It’s funny… if you come back and Claude vouches for you, you and I might be the only two people in the world that know we’re enemies.” Stung by these words, she parries them by pushing Marianne back into the rough-hewn sides of the cart, bunching up linen with one hand and grasping at her wrist with the other. Hilda brings it up and thrusts her own throat into Marianne’s hand, pressing on fingers with her own until Hilda is nearly choking herself.
Marianne wrenches her hand away as if burned. She stares, breathing heavily.
“You’re the only person who thinks that, then. Not me. You’ve never been my enemy. And if you are, you’re doing a pretty terrible job of it.” Struck by a desperate need for reaffirmation, she kisses her messily and inaccurately. Marianne lets her. Then Hilda leans back and winces. Too much weight on her feet, too soon. But Marianne’s eyes lack reproach, so she does not lie back down, instead sitting and sulking.
Eventually, Marianne says, “I have failed so many. I have failed the Goddess. My friends. My father—”
“You didn’t owe him anything,” says Hilda, harshly. Her neck feels raw. Marianne, who felt like an obligation to her adoptive father and little more, who years ago shared old traumas and frigid childhood memories with her in secret dormitory visits. It had likely been for the best that Hilda had been sequestered in Enbarr during the late Margrave’s funeral. Somehow, she thought the grieving populace wouldn’t have taken kindly to spitting.
“He was all I had.”
“You have me, now. Through everything, until the end.” Hilda idly touches her side to check if she still has her dagger and finds the belt gone entirely. A minute or a decade away…
Marianne’s voice trembles. “Oh, Hilda, my love… it is you who I have failed the most.”
Will it be the Goddess she begs for forgiveness, or me? There’s her answer.
· · ·
Hilda is taken to the barracks on the outskirts of Derdriu and given a room two doors down from Claude’s, a comfortable bed that becomes populated by a growing pile of Marianne’s discarded clothes, and dull-tasting and meaty military rations to eat. She is visited by a rotation of curious former schoolmates who are quick to envelop the prodigal daughter into the fold, so obvious and true is her relief at having returned.
For a time, Leonie remains a trenchant paranoiac about her—she barges in one day as Hilda is getting ready for bed. She puts her hands on her hips. “So you’ve been living in the Empire for the last, what. Four, five years?”
Hilda nods.
“And Claude made you do all this so that you could find out their secret plans? You? You are Hilda, right? Hilda 'I'll never work a day in my life' Goneril?"
Hilda nods.
“…fine. But I’m not going to apologize for kicking your ass.”
Marianne knocks on the door and peeks in. “Um, hello? Is everything alright? Am I interrupting something?”
Leonie looks at Marianne, who is standing timidly on the threshold in her nightclothes. She looks back at Hilda, sitting on the bed. Hilda raises an eyebrow in challenge, the one that used to scare away all the boys that did favors for her and got overzealous afterwards. Leonie’s mouth opens with an unspoken oh and she blushes grumpily. “Right,” she says. “Well, this one sure stopped moping when you got here. Don’t get yourself killed or it’ll be right back to that, I suppose.”
Hilda can’t help but laugh. “I missed you too, Leonie. It’s good to be home.”
And it is—home, that is. For the first time in years. Imperial architecture, for all its intricate red-tiled glister, is somehow no match in beauty for these austere retaining walls and flat stone roofs. Raphael hugs her tightly and loudly and lifts her heels off the floor. Ignatz asks for stories about her time in Enbarr and presses her for descriptions of the city that he hasn't seen outside of books.
Claude lets her slap him, twice, without complaint when she first sees him. "Stupid, stupid! Pick a better handler, you thoughtless idiot!" Hilda says, furious. "Do you know how many times I had to bait a line in front of the Professor and pretend it wasn't disgusting?" Then he hugs her, and pulls her into quiet conversation in his quarters, his desk blanketed with discarded plans. They tell each other everything that cannot be said in coded letters. Hilda cries angry tears and spouts accusations. Claude listens in grave and sympathetic silence.
“If I die here,” he shushes Hilda’s protestations, “don’t die with me. There’s still good to be done, even in a world without the Alliance. You can make things better for the people who live here, in Goneril—”
“Are you asking me to go with her if we lose? Even after all this? I—I can’t—I just came home, Claude.”
“Do you remember what I said to you before you left?”
Kneeling on the bridge, head bowed, sword pressing into the side of her neck. “Of course,” she says.
“Officially, I’m relieving you of your duties. The last thing I ask is for you to survive, Hilda. I trust you more than anyone, you know that? I'm trusting you to do the right thing, no matter the aftermath.”
I guess there are things that even war doesn’t change, Lysithea had said. She inhales deeply. With a long sigh, she lets go of the last of her childhood self. “Everyone’s got ideals, I suppose. Even me. Surprise, surprise. I keep wishing people would try harder to make them fit together instead of killing each other over it. Does that make me naive?”
Claude lays a gentle hand on her shoulder and it reminds her of Edelgard. He tells her the story of a secret boy prince who left his home and was forged in exile, who clung to dreams of a greater peace, even as he grew up among the hateful, sword-shaking nobility of Fódlan’s broken lands. And Claude tells her about Almyra, of shortgrass and endless windbreaks running through dry shrub-steppe; and of sprawling, flat cities embowered in spire-lined walls, great snakes of white and gray.
That night, Hilda goes out to the docks to see the foggy curve of the bay one last time and says goodbye.
· · ·
After the loss of Derdriu, forces led by the Church march south from the Kingdom to retaliate.
Thanks to Marianne, the emperor knows to expect Seteth’s backdoor incursion into their monastery base, and the strike force splits to intercept them. Hilda refuses to join in any capacity, locking herself in her room, the same one from her academy days. She prepares to throw a legendary tantrum if questioned, but Byleth seems to assume that she is dealing with misplaced grief for her former country and leaves her alone.
At a knock on the door, Hilda snaps. “Tell the professor that I’m not coming out! I’m hurt and you know I wouldn’t be of any help!”
“Hilda. Hilda, it’s me.”
She stumbles out of bed, blankets falling to the floor with her, and opens the door. The same vision she had, there on the stone of the Great Bridge. This is it. She’s finally done and cracked from the stress.
“Close the door behind you. Quickly, please,” she begs, and Hilda pulls Marianne inside. They sit together on the bed and Marianne immediately bursts into tears.
“What—" but she just shakes her head and burrows into Hilda’s chest. She’s out of her depth. In all their time together, Marianne has not once cried, despite looking a moment away from doing so at nearly all times.
Her explanation arrives in stumbling, near-incoherent words broken up by great heaving sobs. Some of the remaining Alliance leaders, unwilling to bend to the Empire, sought to lick their wounds in the Kingdom—Edelgard had pounced on the opportunity to install Marianne within the sphere of the Knights of Seiros’ influence—she had travelled with the back-ranks of Rhea’s army as a healer— “Seteth and Flayn ride with me, they think I need people to talk to because the other healers don’t really include me, they’re kind people, they talk of the Goddess, they say she forgives me for asking her to take my life, they don’t know who I am, what things I’ve done, it’s me Hilda, it’s always been me, I’m poisoning these people, sending them to their deaths, they take care of me and sit with me and I poison them with my tainted blood—”
So pitiable is she, wailing in anguish in her bed, so Hilda cries too. “I love you, Marianne, until the end,” she murmurs over and over, because she does not know what else to say.
They stay there for hours. Hilda’s stomach starts growling. Sunlight from the crack in the door is replaced by an indistinguishable evening darkness. Someone knocks. Hilda takes her shortaxe in hand and waves it, unafraid, at the waiting Emperor of Adrestia with a baleful stare. She does not ask for names of the spared or for the deceased. “Let her go home, Edelgard,” she says. “Let her go home, or so help the Goddess.”
So much has been asked of this girl, curled up asleep in the bed, exhausted and spent. She is 24 and can hardly fight. Her arms shake when holding out a sword. She hates herself for her Crest and for what she believes herself incapable. She cannot even speak ill of her father’s memory, bearing the weight of his mistakes and believing them to be her own. This girl, who came late to class because she passed a hungry alleycat, who covered her ears and drew up her knees in the healers’ tents, who ran into the forest to sit against scratchy bark when she could not find words. This girl has been asked to tear apart the world and live among the pieces.
· · ·
Edelgard executes the Holy King at Tailtean and rides side by side with Byleth on the journey back. Hilda follows behind and catches brief glimpses of her; she is weeping silently.
“Dimitri was a friend,” Edelgard tells her that night, shadows flickering in her armor and across her face.
“This is war,” says Hilda, pitilessly. “Friend pitted against friend. It can’t be helped.” She does not look up. Her eyes sting from the dry heat of the campfire. She has always been poor at hiding her feelings.
“Yes.” Edelgard’s voice carries a strange note to it. She joins Hilda in standing. “I hope it does not come to that for you, Hilda. I am fighting so that people will not suffer as I have.”
Edelgard pulls Hilda into a limp, pressureless embrace. Her long white hair seems to glow in the firelight and her skin is cold. It is like being held by a ghost. Hilda freezes in her arms and is left afterwards to stand and stare until nothing remains but embers.
· · ·
Tomorrow, they begin their march towards Fhirdiad and the end of the war. The professor expects to reach the capital in three days’ time. Even though Hilda has no love for a kingdom whose own history of subjugation is less than a generation old, she watches the battalions making travel preparations and feels sick. Violence has colonized her like the castles Faerghus builds on stolen land, the demanding teleology of warfare shaping her love and her grief and the soreness of her muscles and how she wakes and sleeps and trusts. But some part of her will always remain unhabituated, repulsed by violence.
Edelgard appears behind her. “You never did have much of a stomach for fighting,” she says, reading her mind and coolly summarizing its turmoil. “I recall at the Academy; you would always try and find a way out of it.”
Hilda swallows. “I never stopped.”
“No. I suppose not. There are times we could have used a warrior such as yourself with us.”
Hilda turns. “Am I that strong? I got captured, didn’t I? Could I really lead these men better than your generals?”
“You may have been taken at Myrddin, but your strength lies not in your axe. It lies in your conviction.” Suddenly she feels known, every part of her stripped away. Emperor Edelgard wears her armor; Hilda does not.
“You—you knew, didn’t you? That I was spying for him.”
“Not until after Derdriu fell. But I had always wondered.” Her eyes are light and gentle, almost affectionate. "You, Hilda? Fishing? For fun?"
Hilda laughs. From love follows loyalty. “I’ll wait in the holding cells. When you return…” Hilda summons her courage and turns away. “I would marry her in Enbarr. If my emperor allows it.”
· · ·
Of course, the monastery does not have holding cells, and she deems the Holy Tomb the best alternative. Edelgard seems content to let Hilda go about her self-imposed imprisonment. The morning of their departure, the Flame Emperor stops by to say farewell to the chamber where she began the war.
“I hope you are aware that I will not be posting guards here. I simply do not have any to spare. And regardless, you’ll have to come and go so you can eat.”
Hilda blinks and continues her vigil over the desecrated graves of the Goddess’ children. She is so very tired.
“I hope you can find peace here, Hilda. It would be a terrible shame if you let yourself waste away in this place.”
Lysithea comes soon after and eyes the chamber suspiciously. “Well, someone’s being awfully melodramatic,” she says. “What are you doing here, anyway? Edelgard wouldn’t tell me, so it must not be research. And we took all the Crest stones, did we not?”
“…Lysithea, do you ever miss home? Do you ever regret coming to the Imperial Palace?”
She is quiet for so long that Hilda, turning back away from the entrance, assumes she had left without responding. But then she says, “I don’t. I told you about what happened to me when I was a child. You knew what I had to do. But… after crossing the bridge… seeing all that familiar scenery, I didn’t expect it to be so painful.”
Then she leaves, to battle.
Hilda closes the doors with great effort, sealing herself inside the tomb. Her eyes adjust to the darkness. She returns her relic to its rightful grave. She does not eat or drink for a day, and she rests fitfully and dreams and hallucinates in watercolors. She watches as Marianne, dancing and singing, sets the chapel at Goneril ablaze. She is a child playing hide and seek in the castle courtyard and is found by Edelgard, galloping around on horseback. She fails her certification test and is comforted by Professor Lysithea.
Once again, she arrives like a vision. Light streams in from the open doors, haloing her silhouette. The blinding figure descends the stairs towards her prostrate form. It is the Goddess come to take her away. “Hilda,” she says. “Oh, Hilda.” You have suffered greatly.
Yes, Goddess, she thinks dazedly, eyes burning and watering. I am ready to rest. Then she remembers an unfulfilled promise and pushes herself upwards to sit. Her elbows scream in protest, shaking from the effort.
Marianne tips water into her mouth and from the cold comes a sliver of clarity. “Marianne,” she mumbles, still half-stuck in a dream. “You’re here?”
“Edelgard sent a wyvern rider to Edmund to bring me. She said you would be here.”
She doesn’t understand. “You’re supposed to be home.” Then she drinks too much and too fast and dissolves into coughs. Marianne pats her back apologetically. “She said she didn’t have anyone to spare. I told her I was spying for Claude, you know. She said she already knew. Can you—” a fit of coughs once again overtakes her— “can you believe that?”
Marianne thinks for a while. “One day, I think that Claude will return from his exile, and be able to return home.”
“I wonder…” says Hilda. “Perhaps he already has.”
After that, for the first time since it began, they allow themselves to forget the war. Marianne sits on the bottom of the stone stairs and paints pictures of the last few years in Leicester. Hilda, with a deep homesickness uncured by her recent, merely days-long return, listens rapturously. They get halfway to undressing each other before giving up for the sake of Marianne’s back, which hurts from the unrelenting pace of her journey, and Hilda’s, from lying down on a stone floor for hours. For once, they are not hurried. For once, there is time. Although its promise is frail, they luxuriate in it. They gossip about inconsequential things: of teasing Lysithea about the muffin crumbs in the library, and of Ignatz and Raphael’s not-so-secret relationship. They eat stale bread with jam from the kitchens by the warm healing-light of Marianne’s upturned palm. “All we need is the professor and it would be a proper tea party,” she giggles. Hilda recounts her final conversation with Edelgard and spins the story as much in her favor as she can get away with. “She told me she wanted me at her side because of my, and I quote, conviction. Can you believe it? Me, of all people? That’s what I’m known for these days, apparently!”
Marianne tucks a smile into Hilda's shoulder. “I can believe it.”
“And then,” says Hilda, “I turned away, and I said I’d marry you in Enbarr. And then I just walked away. Wasn’t that dashing of me?”
Marianne’s laughter comes in little choked yelps and squeaky wheezes and is beautiful. Then she sits up straight, belatedly startled. “Marry me?” she exclaims.
“Well, yeah. You don’t want to?”
“No, no, I would very much like to,” says Marianne, leaning into her. “I have been apart from you for enough moons to last a lifetime. I think there is only the future ahead of us, now.”
Hilda holds her close and agrees. The future is finally, finally theirs. Soon, these graves will be nothing more than resting-places. These relics will be nothing more than bones. There will be no magic that lingers here, cursed or holy. She draws soothing lines over Marianne’s collarbone until she falls asleep in her lap. Then she falls asleep too, unhaunted by dreams.