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A plainchant melody resonated throughout the cathedral’s vaulted ceilings. Like the branches of a great tree, the stone ribs stretched along the upper wall’s curves and spread out into fans above. Along the perimeter where the centuries-smoothed piers met the rows of pointed arches, colored reflections from the clerestory’s stained-glass windows beamed down from on high. Dappled light dribbled into the nave, refracting across the gray tiles.
“Your Majesty,” uttered Ingrid. She touched his arm lightly as if she was afraid he would break. Her eyes shone in a more verdant hue than the rose window’s curled depictions of the Goddess’s green hair. “Are you ready?”
Dimitri looked at his childhood friend, the weight in his arms even more prominent now that Ingrid had reminded him that he had a duty to abide by.
Was he ready? In his arms, his newborn son shifted. The baby’s eyes were half closed, blinking slowly with the kind of ever-present sleepiness any young infant seemed to have. Dimitri caught glimpses of violet—the soft color of his mother’s eyes before she had changed. He did not know what his inheritance of her eyes from back then meant, whether his beloved wife’s touch of the Goddess’s power was hers alone or if her crest was something more mysterious than he could ever fathom.
But violet was more important, like the lilacs in the spring. As the purple-pink edges of valerian petals fluttered in the wind. A beautiful thing, a handsome moment, the irises of his only son. The eyes of his wife.
In the crook of his arm, his son’s hair was stark gold against the royal blue of his sleeve. His little socked feet kicked out in subtle motions, poking from the white swaddling. And somehow, in that moment he was reminded of just how amazing this baby was to be out in this world.
Dimitri felt a smile now about to grace his own lips as the baby’s face scrunched with curiosity. His little fist rose, reaching for someone behind Dimitri’s shoulder.
Byleth hovered beside him. She brushed the strands of hair on their son’s forehead. Her pale fingers trembled for just a second, long enough only for Dimitri to notice before she dropped her arm to her side. She hummed in soft agreement.
Dimitri tilted his face to her. The light pink rouge on her cheeks and the tint on her lips served to make her appear as if she were a delicate porcelain doll from the East, but her gown matched his colors, gliding into a river of blue at her back. She was elegant, and poised.
Yet as happy as she appeared, there was a tightness around her eyes.
He sighed. Finally, he nodded. “We’re ready, Ingrid,” Dimitri said. He straightened. He felt his friends behind him shuffle into loose positions.
Ingrid gestured to a guard standing at the entrance alongside the propped-open wooden doors. Images of the four saints from all the phases of their lives and their various deeds were carved in distinct rows in the grain. Their blank pupils bore down on him, a reminder. Accusatory.
He tightened his hold on his son.
He walked forward, the gentle sonorous sound of the choir’s overlapping chants filling him with a kind of calm. Byleth fell into step at his side. Her breaths were steady, her gait never faltering. He found solace in that at least. That she could always be so strong when he knew he should be too.
The choir sang in an ancient language he only heard in services. He had never understood it and had never intended to decipher the willowy words as they billowed from the small crowd of lay people at the right of the altar to the dome.
Once, his father told him that the language of the Church’s ordained was one so old that it was lost to only those who deigned to learn it. “A relic from the time of the Goddess,” he had told him when he was young. “If your curiosity needs to be satiated, I can have your tutor come up with a basic curriculum on the language.”
Dimitri had thought it beautiful for a time, for he had only heard the ancient language sung. He had loved to know about different forms of communication back then, even the unconventional tools. He wanted to be a king his father would be proud of. It was not long after that his goals shifted. He never learned the language.
Byleth’s steps hesitated, and he brought himself closer to her should she fall. He hoped no one noticed. He hoped more that though he could not be the king his father had imagined him to be, he could be the king his queen deserved.
The choir’s voices lowered, then petered out. Dimitri and Byleth had arrived at the stone basin at the foot of the altar. Fhirdiad’s elderly bishop stood next to it, a gilded tome in hand, stooped over the basin as if he was brewing a potion inside. Seteth remained ready next to him, a tender smile on his face.
The bishop’s head dipped low when he saw Dimitri, and slightly lower when Byleth stopped. She had given up her title of Archbishop three years after the war when they had decided that Fódlan was stable enough for her to step down from a position she had never thought she was right for in the first place, making way for Seteth to take up the mantle.
Dimitri knew that she was more content this way, far from the duties of a church she had not known existed until she had taught at Garreg Mach. By Dimitri’s side, aiding him and advising him on governance and training his knights. A queen through and through.
Even so, her three years had gained her respect throughout the congregation. People could not quite shake the past, no matter how much anyone wanted to distance themselves from it.
“Your Majesties, we are honored that you have chosen this day for His Royal Highness’s naming ceremony,” said the bishop with a magnificent bow. “Truly honored.”
“The honor is ours,” replied Dimitri. The baby cooed from his arms as if echoing him.
“Most of all we congratulate you,” added Seteth. He had an odd expression, one that transferred from Dimitri to Byleth. He settled finally on the baby. “He is a precious child.”
Dimitri felt more than saw Byleth lean against him. Ever so slightly, a brush against his side. Like she had released a breath she had been holding. “Yes,” she agreed. “He is.”
Seteth nodded. “And the godparents?”
Dimitri tilted his head, eyeing the two friends who had trailed after them. Dedue took his post next to Dimitri and Mercedes next to Byleth’s.
Ingrid appeared now with Felix, Sylvain, Ashe, and Annette. They and their small group of friends from other houses formed a semicircle around the altar.
“Good,” said Seteth. “Then we may proceed.”
As their friends surrounded them, a warm wall of bodies and toothy smiles, Byleth’s shoulders relaxed. Her eyes glistened. The quiver in her limbs was a little less prominent. She slipped her hand into the bend of Dimitri’s elbow, and the relief he felt when her fingers stopped trembling along the creases of his sleeve exhaled from his lips.
She was safe. She was sheltered.
She would not leave him.
The bishop opened his tome and muttered passages that Dimitri did not much pay attention to if he was honest. Seteth added phrases, prayers, and litanies in that ancient language.
A warmth expanded in Dimitri’s chest when Seteth finally poured water over his son’s forehead, perfumed with flowers grown at the Red Canyon’s basin. A sacred thing from a sacred place, all for his son.
“The godparents, of course, will bestow a name,” said Seteth expectantly.
Dedue and Mercedes stepped forward. Dedue appeared as stoic as ever, but Mercedes looked as if she could barely contain a joyful grin.
“Benedikt Jeralt Blaiddyd,” remarked Mercedes. “In keeping with royal tradition, His Highness bears the name of one of his mother’s parents.”
“And Benedikt,” continued Dedue, his voice a deep tenor that reverberated beside him, “is a name we have chosen because it means—”
Blessed.
Dimitri did not hear when Dedue finished his sentence. The meaning of his son’s name was a chorus to him, a tremendous presence that engulfed him with bittersweet pride. The languages he did study as a child, no matter how little he was able to learn, embraced him then. From Dagda’s harsh-sounding consonants to Brigid’s lilting tones. He remembered the names of kings long passed, of rulers from distant lands whose names were symbols of power and hope. For a short while he had picked names apart because they meant something. They told him about the people who had named them, about their cultures, their places in life.
Dedue had not broken eye contact with him. Emotion flickered across his features, a fleeting thing. Then Mercedes, whose smile had finally broken through, dabbed at the corners of her eyes and held both of Byleth’s hands tight.
The bell rang in the belfry, clanging joy into the cloisters outside.
“Benedikt,” said Byleth. And her voice was a tinny sound, pulled taut on the balance of a shivering string.
Their friends sprung around them, laughing—patting their backs, their shoulders, their arms. A crowd overflowing with an energy palpable enough to cause a stir.
Benedikt fussed. Byleth reached for him. Still, her skin was pallid. Dimitri led them to a pew nearby, then handed their son to her. He draped a careful arm around her back.
Tears dropped down her nose, dripping onto their son’s cheek. She hastily wiped them away as he whined in his sleep.
“I’m happy, Dimitri,” she whispered. “I’m so happy.”
He held her close.
In her words, she had laid bare their truth.
Her hot skin, her pallor. The bruises that purpled her eyes. He wished he could take on her suffering himself.
On the cathedral’s walls and from its radiating chapels, the apostles and the saints stared at him from their homes on painted triptychs and wood panels pressed with gold leaf. Narrow faces, glowing halos, lips as if they were frowning.
If you had been more, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened, they seemed to be saying. But you have always been lesser and undeserving.
It had not been a month since Benedikt’s birth. That day when Byleth went into labor was one he would never forget.
Mercedes had burst into the hall with the wonderful news that a healthy prince had been born. Dimitri had been beside himself with excitement. But another healer inside had yelled in warning soon after that.
“She’s bleeding too much!” they had exclaimed.
From then on, it had been a blur. The baby had been taken care of by healers on the side as he wailed with strong lungs through the castle halls. Dimitri had been pushed aside, then pulled into the delivery room, the healers preparing for the worst.
He would have lost her.
Byleth laid her head on his shoulder. “He’s our son, Dimitri,” she murmured so only he would hear. “I am happy that I have this child with you.”
The effigies on the walls and triptychs shuttered their calls after that.
He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of that day.
Mercedes came up with a solution. It would save his beloved’s life…but it came at a cost.
Byleth would never bear a child again.
In his arms now, he felt how listlessly she fell against his chest. Weaker now than she ever had been before, recovering from the surgery that had removed her womb and saved her life. Not even a month later, she insisted on a naming ceremony. They could have waited. No one had rushed them.
Still.
He thumbed the tears away from her eyes and pressed his lips to the crown of her head.
The sunlight streamed down upon them, the choir’s voices faded into single notes, and the chatter from their friends a welcome background noise.
Despite the war, despite their losses, they had lost again. But even after all they had gone through, they had not lost it all.
Benedikt opened his eyes and yawned so wide that his tiny face turned red with exertion.
Dimitri did not let either of them go. “I am happy too.”