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She hadn’t expected him to find her, tucked into the heavy, stone-hewn pillars of another arching construction that was both bridge and further support to layers of architecture above. Ishgard seemed to have them in abundance, like building themselves into the sky was the city’s best defiance. She didn’t really expect him to find her in so many of the places that he did – places she wandered when she couldn’t find a good reason to fly into the endless snows of the Highlands instead. Places that he arrived at with purpose.
It wasn’t surprising that he seemed to know every ilm of the Holy See, but the places their feet took them when their mind wandered said a lot about a person. She wasn’t brave enough to ask if it was happenstance that she found herself at the end of so many of his paths. He gave her a vague smile when he found her there, as if he knew very well what she was thinking. Lord Commander, Viscount of House Borel, immaculate son of an impossible father. Aymeric. It wasn’t so long ago that he’d been nothing of what she knew now and she’d known nothing of all the little things that meant everything.
She hadn’t expected him to find her there, but she might’ve been waiting. She’d never tell.
“I hope I am not intruding.” He draped a hand lightly over Naegling’s hilt and looked at her askance, as if there was reason to make himself seem more approachable. She shrugged and tried not to think too hard about why he treated her like she was always thinking about running. She was something new every day, lately. It was going to be hard to leave.
“It’d be my own fault if so. There are better places to expect privacy.” She extracted herself from the nook she’d been using to shelter from the chill winds that whipped across the higher structures of the city. She went to the thick, carved rail across the lofted promenade, leaning over to look down on the milling people - all the life - far below. He touched the shell of his ear, long fingers tracing down to the earring she thought he checked for often. A gift from a mother he knew on behalf of the one he couldn’t. Habits he let her in on in the moments they stared across tables and said too little for too long, stuttering propriety in the late hours of the night that she loved and he sheltered in.
“That may be true,” he said. He’d shown her a few of these hideaways himself. Solitude in plain sight, moments that were beautiful in secret. It was a kind of language he’d found her fluent in immediately, which might’ve been concerning if he hadn’t been quietly pleased to find somebody who might understand the ugliness, and the majesty, of his home in the same way he did.
It was charming that she seemed not to expect he’d frequent his own haunts.
There was a version of this where they first met in the sunlight: balmy spring day, cotton boll clouds, rolling hills. A gentleman of minor name and a woman. There was a version of this where there was no pretense or maneuvering, just a, “hello, pleasure to meet you.” Her eyes would still have been dark and striking, but there was a version of this where he’d have likened them to garnets instead of blood. He still would’ve been too beautiful for anyone’s good, but there was a version of this where she’d have thought of faerie tale princes instead of manufactured sainthood.
There were so many versions of this where things were better.
But, it was bitterly cold, even by the lately adjusted standards of the Coerthan populous. Lucia was agitated, though she wouldn’t have admitted it. She never had acquired the fondness for chocobos that seemed to come naturally to Ishgardians. The Lord Commander was placid, natural on his mount and long since acclimated to the cold. She followed him a few strides back, disinterested in bringing their birds too close lest they squabble. She thought he seemed lost in thought as they trekked toward Camp Dragonhead; he wasn’t prone to idle chatter, but she knew him well enough to estimate the shades of his silence. “Have you reconsidered meeting?”
He looked surprised by the question, a brief flicker across his pleasantly inscrutable neutral. “Not at all,” he said. He wasn’t disposed to lying for the ease of it. There were a handful of excellent reasons for his present course, most of which he felt followed his personal convictions in earnest. There was also the shade of distrust in the Archbishop’s gaze that had followed him out of his Eminence’s private study and the vague air of reproach that might almost have been fatherly under any other circumstance.
I pray you do not construe ambition for altruism, Aymeric.
It was easy enough to put one foot in front of the other when they’d been doing it for generations. It was easier still to call it devotion.
The Camp emerged from the thick fog banks rolling across the snow, respectable and, impossibly, inviting for the impenetrable rise of stone walls. It had been too long since he’d last visited and he should’ve been less grim. Knight Commander Haurchefant was some years his junior, but they’d trained shoulder to shoulder all the same. The gravity that leveled all recruits even had appealed to them in a similar way; a quirk of poor birth, perhaps. There had been a microcosm of a life where he stayed among them all and found his footing at their sides, rather than stumbling ahead and finding so few of them still left standing when he’d gotten the chance to look back. That was the way of it, though, among unbroken lines of bastards and childless mothers. There was so very much to be done and too much running through his head, but it had been too long since he visited, nonetheless.
Aymeric dismounted smoothly ahead of the gates and turned to offer Lucia a hand down from her bird. She did not take it, bothering to scowl at him.
“Do you suppose the Warrior of Light will be all we have heard?” Lucia asked as their boots crunched through the snow. Aymeric de Borel knew better than most that words were their own kind of magic, potent as any aether. A gilded tongue could weave subtle spells as fine as any glamour – define truth, build an empire. Across from oration, he was an animal slinking along the periphery of campfire, cautious and wired taut, teeth ready. He hadn’t been imbued with the same sort of respect for wyrm talons or another man’s blade. Those things, at least, were always what they seemed.
“Perhaps it is best to hope that she is not,” he said.
He hadn’t been looking for a miracle worker; Ishgard had known war for too long. Peace couldn’t be won easily lest they die of the shock. But he’d followed the stories of the Eikon Slayer’s exploits, warped as they must have been by the time they crossed the Gates of Judgment. He’d taken note when her name, and the Scions, had appeared in Haurchefant’s reports. Aymeric wasn’t looking for a place, or a reason, to put his hopes down. He’d always held them closely, almost jealously. There was nowhere worth going if he couldn’t walk himself alongside everyone else. But he’d followed the news and her rise. He wasn’t there for her. He wanted to meet her.
A knight of House Fortemps came to greet them and take their birds, bowing deeply as she directed them toward the Intercessory. He had overtures to make in the dressing of demands, and the Warrior of Light had very little to do with any of it. He straightened the blue sash on his chest and didn’t sigh.
“Perhaps,” Lucia agreed. She held open the door for him and they stepped in from the cold.
He’d told himself all the verbal enchantments and written incantations were as good as a summoning. Powerful, but not wholly real, and not to be taken for granted. But she was so different from what he’d imagined.
She was barely of height to her adolescent companion, and had less than half of what Alphinaud Leveilleur had to say. And she was distant, so far above that room that he had to catch the urge to catch her, as if her mind walked ahead because her body had already been offered for tribute. He wasn’t there for her, not really, but he had the sense that, somehow, he ought to have been a little ashamed that any version of her had been threaded into his plans at all.
She carried herself like a woman of the cloth. She had the presence of god. She was everything and nothing of the stories crudely sketched out in the papers and, more than anything, he was certain she was no warrior.
Lucia watched him from her place at his side and said nothing.
Aymeric trekked through introductory pleasantries with mostly honest flattery and felt the breath leave his lungs when her eyes met his. She didn’t say a word. He was a faithful man. There wasn’t a version of this that didn’t feel like confession. But there was work to do and enough versions of himself to prove.
The encounter was bureaucracy with teeth the way he’d long ago learned could be surgical - and he wished the Leveilleur lordling hadn’t stood there with the kind of defiant self-righteousness that he knew too well. It didn’t seem fair. Haurchefant touched her shoulder. Alphinaud clenched his fists. Aymeric’s smile was fleeting and apologetic. She looked at him without an onze of expectation and it made his skin crawl. She couldn’t have known.
There was a version of this that wasn’t the heavy air heated by the blazing hearth or the weight his father’s dispassion and the specter of her mythology. But it wasn’t his. Aymeric saw her for the first time, wine-dark stare without a hint of recognition, and there was something terrible about the fact he’d never quite see her look at him that way again.
This meeting had nothing to do with her and he wished he could do it all over; he wouldn’t do it differently.
She hadn’t thought that he would be too meticulous to be real, too beautiful, too overtly virtuous, and too keen. But he was. A man who had crafted himself into the image of a Saint for his people, and a guardian against those beyond his fold. He could speak with the Holy See’s courteous dispassion as convincingly as he admitted, almost disarmingly, that very little was within his control. They met in silence across the table; the things he said weren’t for her but something in the spaces between was. She thought that for all he had come to ask them for, he wanted nothing from her. They could’ve met anywhere. It could only ever have been this way.
She sat straight-backed and symbolic because it was most of what she’d been made good for, and Ishgard’s Lord Commander was just a man.
He watched her while he was talking to Alphinaud and it didn’t seem to be pertinent that he couldn’t give them a single thing Alphinaud wanted and hadn’t planned to. She stared back, a little furrow in her brow and red lips parted so barely it wasn’t worth noticing. She’d learned his name and it had meant nothing to her; he was somebody because Haurchefant said so and Alphinaud had not impressed upon her why any of it mattered. He watched her discover him out of nothingness, held at a distance, and thought it might have said something about him that it would have driven him to distraction if he’d had the luxury of time.
There was never time and it was always winter.
A young knight thrust through the doorway, panicked. She closed her eyes and listened, like it was a prayer she’d expected to come. “I’ll go,” she said, and they went.
Aymeric stared up at Snowcloak’s rising glacial wall with the same impassivity as the ice itself. She stood in the cold, bundled awkwardly in a coat she’d clearly borrowed, and she was distinctly and painfully mortal in their midst, as the cadre of knights fanned out around them. They crawled over the length of the huge rise, alive and jittery with the promise of a fight. She just waited with the kind of stillness that felt personal; a lily on a weapons rack but she stood like the next step was inevitable.
Plucked from one side of a negotiating table and set back into the snow, sword in hand with men waiting for his order, she saw him clearer. His lips had pressed into a grim line, thoughtful, and unhappy with what he found at the far end of his mental exercise. She wondered if he’d made a similar sort of face before he’d come to meet them at Camp Dragonhead.
And he’d been unperturbed when Alphinaud questioned the fervor of his faith. What was the point of worship that begged for death or a goddess inclined to revel in it? He had folded his arms and stared up at the long, glimmering rise of ice like he’d find Halone herself at its pinnacle. She wondered what kind of theology he might wrap her in - an empty shrine, a divinity without followers. She wondered why it might matter what he thought at all, and found him watching her. Clarity and focus that she couldn’t face directly. It should’ve been the kind of expression that preceded asking her for something impossible, but it wasn’t. Instead, she thought he’d arrived somewhere else entirely and had paused to care what she might be thinking. She had to step away.
“I’ll go,” she said again.
Aymeric might’ve been surprised enough to reach for her, fingers flexing in the empty air between them. He didn’t know her, after all. She said the tunnels would be tight and ill suited to a large contingent. And you are worried they won’t come back.
She wasn’t wrong, but maybe it shouldn’t have mattered.
The Lord Commander, she determined, might be the voice of a nation rather than its mouthpiece, given the chance. The look in his wintry blue eyes had said he was willing. And she supposed that was why it seemed Haurchefant liked him so much. She thought that was probably admirable. She also thought it might be stupid. And a little frightening. He agreed to let her go ahead and seemed no more pleased that it was her than one of his own men. Alphinaud agreed she could go alone. Aymeric and Haurchefant moved together. “I will accompany you then—”
It was Haurchefant that walked ahead of her, shield up as they descended into the snow-swamped warren, and Aymeric watched her back disappear into the dark with the borrowed coat left in his care. He had the sense that he’d only just crossed her shadow. “Thank you for thinking of it,” she’d said.
She made it easy for a dangerous kind of hope to blossom.
Aymeric de Borel did not believe in love at first sight, but maybe he could believe in love at first meeting. And in falling at every meeting after, so subtle and so easy that there was no hope of recovery by the time he understood he’d been devastated.
She slung her legs over the rail, perched in a manner he’d have called precarious if he hadn’t known better. Surely, they knew each other so much better. At some point he’d gotten greedy. “What brings you?” she asked. “To places like this.”
“Like this?” he didn’t look below at the city, his gaze following the stone buttresses that winged out into the frozen haze and disappeared into cloud cover at the far perimeter of the quarter. She made a noncommittal sound.
“Little places,” she said. He bit back a smile. There were so many versions of this that pulled the weights from their shoulders and let them collide in green pastures under heavy fruit trees. But they weren’t his, or hers, and now he knew her in all the small ways that had only come because of this.
“‘Tis all little places.”
“You prefer it that way,”
“I know it that way.” Aymeric leaned against a low post of the rail, the sharp corner of the stone driving into his hip. “I like to think it helps me see things clearly.” She looked over at him, her dark gaze glimmering like gemstones in the flat afternoon light.
“Where you wish to go?”
“Where I fit.”
“The Lord Commander…”
He shook his head, “just Aymeric.” She flushed, or it was a trick of the misty light, and he couldn’t have said why but he wanted to.
“I feel like, maybe, I’m still just meeting you sometimes,” she admitted, quiet. “In different ways.” He stared at her until she couldn’t hold his gaze, but he was two steps toward her and reaching for her hand before she could shrink away. And he was startlingly close, effortlessly, and studying her face with too much intention. A gentleman of minor name and a woman.
“Permit me to be glad to hear it.”