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"You really expect me to believe he is an upstanding citizen of the Adrestian Empire?" the guard at the city gate asked, holding a pair of meticulously forged travel papers. He stared at Annette and the aforementioned upstanding citizen to her left, an armed swordsman who was definitely hired muscle and not the heir to a substantial portion of Adrestia's enemy nation.
Felix Fraldarius, in all his personable glory, scowled right back.
There was nothing suspicious about the papers, she told herself. There was no reason to be suspicious of her or Felix. Annette was just a simple concoctioner, bringing aid to Adrestia's weary soldiers whenever those dastardly Faerghus dogs got lucky on the battlefield. Her partner? It's unwise to wander the roads without protection during wartime, don't you know?
"Our wares are desperately low," Annette explained, trying very hard not to babble. She fiddled nervously with her sunhat, turning it in circles by its rim in her hands. When they first set out for Brionac, she worried it looked out of place with her rusty-red tunic, but both Mercie and Constance said it was a popular fashion choice in the Empire during the hotter seasons. "A caravan is waiting half a day's travel west, and I need to return to my garden to replenish my ingredients or else I can't brew their medicine!"
The guard was still staring at Felix, his eyebrows furrowing deeper until they met and formed a single scrunched, brown caterpillar on his forehead.
"So!" she chirped with a clap of her hands. "We'll be on our way, yes? Yes! Thank you for your time, and keeping our city safe—"
The guard's sword slipped from its sheath, and his mouth opened to bellow—
"Quiet!" hissed Annette, and she flung her hands out to send a gale crashing into the guard's chest. He smashed against the stone wall with an armored clang.
Just as it had happened the last two times they failed to pass effortlessly into an Adrestian city, she felt Felix's iron grip pull her through the gate before anyone could think to lower it. They escaped into the startled mass of early morning marketers hunting for the perfect breakfast spreads to haggle over.
Turns and turns around unfamiliar, sandstone buildings lost any pursuers they had, and Felix finally stopped their mad dash beneath the awning of a cobbler's doorway. It kept the sun off of their necks while they caught their breaths.
It really did get very hot in Adrestia. If it was to be believed, Almyra was even hotter, and Annette was grateful they were only sneaking into enemy territory instead. There was something wrong with that way of thinking, but she was too hot to worry about it.
Fanning her face with her sunhat, Annette complained, "How do they always know? We left all of our identifying articles back at Garreg Mach, and Hanneman said our papers are immaculate! Why have they wised up?"
"It's not you," Felix stated, and his arching frown only grew more acute. "It's me. There's something wrong with me that's compromising us."
Quickly, Annette gave him a once over. Starting from the top of his head, nothing seemed out of place, even if his low tail was still a strange sight compared to the high knots she remembered him favoring in adolescence. His face was still unfairly handsome for all the ugliness he put it through (even if his angry frown was still kind of charming, and his upper lip was a little more brown than the bottom, which had healed up nicely after a different guard nicked it at the last town), but if a foul temper was enough to convince gate guards to draw their swords, then they'd all be at each other's throats. Sunburn pinked his cheeks and banded over the bridge of his nose in an angry, red line, and it looked painful. Annette told herself she'd let him borrow her hat when they hit the road again.
The (enticing) line of Felix's throat disappeared into the neutral brown leather of his jerkin, and his mail was of standard make. Patches gave his breeches a little personality, one that said he played rough for proper payment, and dirt clouded the toes of his boots in a sandy color. Felix looked… like a peasant sellsword with a pretty face and a cutting scowl.
"Is it your weapons?" she worried.
"If anyone's concerned about my weapons, it's me," he retorted. "I left my good steel behind. The smith said the swords will last, but—"
"Felix. Are you a sword snob?"
"A good weapon is important! It's life or death!"
"Honestly, I should have known by now," Annette mused. "That's on me."
"Enough about the swords!" snapped Felix. "Can you see anything about me that's tipping these bastards off?"
Warily, Annette shook her head. "There's nothing."
"By the time we reach the fort, they'll be ready and waiting with how many gates we've crashed. All of Brionac's archers will fill us with more holes than cheesecloth before we can even dream of raiding the fort's correspondences," he groused. "It wasn't like this when we first set out. What am I doing wrong?"
Annette watched his frutrations turn inward. It hurt to watch, mostly because Annette used to do it to herself all the time. If she was good enough, Father would come home. If she was good enough, Father would talk to her. Why wasn't she good enough? The self-flagellation had gone with the way of most useless trifles once the war drums started beating.
Mercie used to drag her away for tea when Annette nearly collapsed under her own stress. Good snacks and better company and maybe a few tears into her friend's shoulder usually took Annette out of her funk, and she reminded herself that if she was good enough to be Mercie's friend, then she was doing something right.
"We haven't had breakfast," she said, because there was no way Felix would agree to tea. "Let's find an inn and grab a bite, okay? At the very least, we won't have to solve our dilemma on an empty stomach."
"The guards will be cycling our descriptions around by now," Felix responded. "Nowhere reputable will feed us."
"Disreputable, then."
Felix grunted, but took the first step out from beneath the awning. Annette settled her hat back onto her head and followed.
The place they found was ramshackle at best, the inn's sign falling off its pegs and pockmarked by years of curious, pecking birds. One shudder was stained a dark brown, and another was mysteriously charred. Stepping inside made Annette feel like she was hiding in an empty wine barrel, the aged wood permanently pungent with its odor.
The innkeeper took a single look at them and grumbled, "Early for a tryst, ain't it? Fee's real gold. Stiff me with the fake stuff and I'll be replacing your teeth with it."
"Do you serve food?" Felix asked bluntly. He pulled out a pouch from within his boot, and the air filled with the sound of jangling coins. "Make sure whatever you cook is prepared properly, and I'll leave the whole purse."
Sharp eyes watched them carefully. Slowly, the innkeeper nodded. "Kitchen's down the hall. There's tables you can sit at," he instructed. "Tell the wife Hugh says to use the good butter."
Annette would be concerned about the bad butter if they hadn't just scored the good stuff.
After entering the kitchen and passing along the gut-churn-ing interesting message to the baffled, thin-faced woman manning it, Felix directed them to the table with the fewest wobbling legs. Someone had left a pair of rough-hewn bone dice behind, and Annette inspected them carefully.
"Do you think they're weighted?" she asked, rolling them across the table. A two and a four landed face up.
"Couldn't tell you."
The conversation immediately died, which meant Felix was still in a sour mood. Having to entertain herself for the wait, Annette continued to roll the dice, listening to the background noise of the cook's puttering.
Felix, for his part, whiled the wait with a dour glare set on the table, perhaps hoping to burn through it or, inversely, fix its legs. He was still paying attention, though, and kept the dice from rolling off the table at least twice when Annette tossed them too far.
Eventually, the innkeeper's wife swept into their tiny corner of the world, a wide tray balanced on her fingertips. Swiftly, two bowls of simple oatmeal were placed on the table, followed by smaller plates of sliced apples and a roll of bread just large enough to split between them.
Annette stared at the small plate of butter placed next to it, thought too hard about the good butter, and nearly missed the woman's words.
"Not often anyone gets the good butter," she commented. The sweet smell alcohol wafted off her breath, but whatever day drinking she'd done only seemed to make her rosy-cheeked and gregarious. "You lovebirds enjoy the stash. Forked over enough gold for it, if the lout up front said so. Do you want ale, or ale cut with juice?"
Annette didn't really want ale at all, actually—wait, lovebirds?! Shocked, Annette lost her grip on the dice, and they tumbled wildly to over the side of the table. Felix, frozen across from her, didn't even attempt to catch them.
"Ah!" the woman exclaimed, clutching her tray to her chest and laughing. "Look at you! Didn't mean to make you blush like those sunburned bums up north! It's like they're born out of that wretched snow, and a tiny bit of sun melts the skin off their bones."
Finally, Felix croaked, "The ale is fine. Cut hers."
"Aye," she agreed jovially, and her tittering, birdsong laughter followed her back to her station.
"Lovebirds?" squeaked Annette.
"Sunburn?" Felix blurted.
Their whisper-shouts collided and dissolved into another stunned silence. It lasted until their drinks arrived, as if the tiny thuds of tankards hitting the tabletop contained reanimating magic. A stray droplet of ale raced down the side of Annette's cup to absorb into the unfinished wood like cork.
Felix planted his elbow onto the table and held his face in his hand. The fingers at his temple went white with how tightly he was squeezing his skull. Into his palm, he growled, "It's the sunburn giving us away?"
"She thinks we're lovebirds!" Annette exclaimed more to herself than to converse.
"We can pick up a salve somewhere in town," Felix grumbled.
"We aren't even—I mean, we could, I think once you stop yelling you're actually weirdly, dubiously, uncharacteristically—"
"I'll need a hat. Or a helment. That's annoying."
"—devastatingly, shockingly—"
"I can't believe I didn't even consider it."
"—tooth-rottingly sweet."
Together, they asked, "What?"
Imagining Felix with a hat was too funny of a mental image for Annette to handle, and she laughed a little before teasing, "You don't want hat hair?"
"You think I'm sweet?" Felix asked, equally amused.
He reached over and broke the bread, thrusting half toward Annette and resting his beside the apple slices.
Lips pursed, she accepted it. Buttering the bread, she asked, "You don't think so?"
"You hardly think so," Felix pointed out.
"But I do!" argued Annette. "Maybe not all of the time, since you always want to be a sourpuss, but I have seen you be kind, especially to the cats back at—" She paused, remembered their location, and finished, "—home."
"Fleabags," he said with deep affection. "Every stray on the continent finds its way there."
"And you like them."
Nodding, Felix agreed, "Of course. You know, it sounds like you watch me with the cats quite a bit."
Refusing to be flustered (and failing, but he did not need to know that), she replied, "W-well, everybody notices you. You have… striking features. Ingrid says its a shame that you ruin the illusion by opening your mouth."
"I don't want Ingrid looking at me, thank you. There's only one person I want noticing me."
He said it like a dare. Or… maybe like it was significant? Because Felix wasn't yelling, that meant he could be weirdly, dubiously, uncharacteristically, devastatingly, shockingly, tooth-rottingly sweet. He was saying something here, the words presented like a puzzle between them.
"I would prefer," he continued, "that I captured her attention as much as she has captured mine."
A nervous tingle pulsed through Annette like a miscast thunder spell. With the smell of breakfast right next to her, she was almost nauseated. If—if—Felix was referring to her, then all her little observations about his lips and hair had consequences. They became more than passing thoughts or idle fancies, and she could act on them.
It almost meant if he was not, then… then she should stop thinking about him and all his striking features. She was already too far ahead of herself as it was.
"You should say something to her," Annette opined, "and find out."
Surprisingly, Felix nodded. "I believe I will. However, I'd like to finish breakfast with her first."
Annette nearly dropped her bread. Huh? HUH?
Having said what he needed to, Felix turned his attention to his breakfast, poking a spoon at the oatmeal tentatively before his bold, Fraldarius courage puppeteered the first bite to his mouth. His eyebrows rose, but he didn't express any disgust, so it was probably better than the building's crumbling architecture would imply.
Hoping to sooth the pounding of her heart before anticipation killed her, Annette bit into her bread.
"Oh," she gasped, "that is good butter."