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Chapter Text

Flint scrapes on steel, then steel on flint, neither sparking enough to catch the too-damp grass tinder at the base of Jagged Leaf's small pile of sticks. She glances up at the sky and breathes in petrichor, then groans and stows her sparker in its small wood-carved box before cinching it shut with beargut string. Her coat, strung-up tarp, and the measly cover of this slanting slate boulder will have to keep her warm and dry for the night.

It's nowhere near as cold as winter on Aisbryda, of course, but she's woken up stiffer than a spruce trunk for five days in a row and it's slowed her traveling pace considerably. One of her older brothers usually lights the fires. Even they might not be able to get this waterlogged, half-rotten wood lit.

She hugs her knees to her chest and shuffles her bedroll under herself, then drags her rain tarp over her head and huddles in the darkness. Her breath warms the little coccoon slowly. She wriggles her fingers and toes, then settles into a half-upright doze for the night.

Three nights later, she's sitting cross-legged across the firepit from Gareth. His chocobo is tethered to a nearby tree and the remains of a small beastkin is floating in a pot over a pleasantly crackling fire. Gareth is stirring the soup, squinting and blinking against the pillar of steam from the boiling broth. He hooks a stick through the pot's handle and lifts it higher off the flames, easing it down to a simmer.

"How long have you been a merchant?"

"A long time, Jagtloef."

She's stopped insisting that he use her new name. "Is that how you count? Long or short, a lot or a little?"

"Figured a mountain lass wouldn't know her figures."

"Have to count snowflakes somehow." That's an old one. Her cousin brought it back five years ago when she returned from a pilgrimage to Coerthas, along with the names of two hundred stars.

"A long time is what I say and what I mean."

She chuckles and shifts awkwardly on her buttocks. This is their game: wits and deflections, secrets that don't matter and truths that do. Campfire riddles at which she's never excelled. "How do you mean it?"

Gareth, ever quicker than her and infinitely patient with her slowness, answers, "Halfway from Vylbrand to Ala Mhigo."

That's too good a hint. Maybe he's assuming she doesn't know when Ala Mhigo was taken by Garlemald, though, so she takes the bait. "Ten years?"

"Halfway, I said."

"Halfway when the city fell? You can't be that old."

"Limsa ain't fallen."

"Oh, sod off."

"With the soup? Figured you'd be hungry after fightin' off those dogs."

Her arms and shoulder have been in agony since this morning. She washed the wound in her shoulder and changed Gareth's speedy, half-adept wrappings for fresh bandages from her traveling pack while he made the fire. She isn't sweating anymore, so she thinks she got most of the mongrel's saliva out of the wound. It still stings badly. "Don't push it, old man."

She flinches as soon as she says it, sure she's overreached their nascent friendship, but Gareth laughs it off. "And I won't. Apologies. Not much longer now," he smiles, twirling his wooden ladle in the soup pot.

Not much longer. A few more days to Vesper Bay, where the beginning of her journey will end.

Chapter Text

No one in the Pugilists' Guild will tell Jagged Leaf what "the steel balls" are, but the sympathetic grimaces they offer her when she asks sketch a clear enough picture. Hamon insists she's ready for them, despite Chuchuto's protests.

"Nobody should have to do that! It's insanity!" she shouts, hopping up and down and waving her arms as Hamon loads up a pack with his lunch and a can of red paint.

"She'll be fine. You've seen her sways!"

"I don't care how good her sways are! She could be a godsdamned walking, talking willow and I'd tell you this is insane!"

"Well, you know…"

"Just because Pakik survived it doesn't mean she can!"

Jagged Leaf straightens her shoulders. "I can do it."

"You don't even know what it is!"

"That's my girl," Hamon grins two fulms up at Jagged Leaf and pats her elbow. "She'll be fine," he lilts down at Chuchuto, rocking his arms in a half-jig. "You'll see."

The walk to the abandoned quarry takes half the morning. Jagged Leaf jogs a zigzagging path along the road to keep her muscles warm, looping around Hamon and Chuchuto as they argue.

At the north end of the quarry lies a long-dried sluice channel, sloping steeply down into an empty basin where the tailings pond once sat. The channel is a rough V shape with a narrow, flat bottom; its walls and floor are pocked with bumps and divots. It's probably two armspans wide, as deep as Jagged Leaf is tall, and it extends about fifty yalms down.

Hamon tosses his pack onto the ground at the top of the channel, extracts the paint can, and hands it to Jagged Leaf. "Head on down to the bottom and cover your hands with this paint."

"What?"

Chuchuto kicks Hamon's ankle hard enough to make him stumble. "You could at least explain the exercise first!" She waves to a gray tarpaulin laid over some kind of pyramidal pile of what Jagged Leaf assumes are rocks. "He's going to roll these down the channel at you."

Hamon whips the tarpaulin off the pile with a flourish, revealing a stack of fulm-wide steel balls. Jagged Leaf's heart flops dead into her stomach. The balls each look like they weigh eighty ponze.

"Maybe I can't do this."

"Hah, didn't take you for a toadlet! Your old hero passed this test in two tries! Kept her at it for two weeks after that, just because she needed the snot beat out of her, but you're better behaved."

"Test?" If those balls are going to roll down at Jagged Leaf from the top to the channel, she'll be lucky to survive with a single intact bone. "What's the test?"

"Paint's to mark which ones you touch. Test's passed when you get paint on every single ball. I've got," Hamon rummages in his pack for a moment, "lunch for me, and none for you, because I'm sure you'll beat Pakik's record and pass this on your first try."

"The trick," Chuchuto pipes in, "is to let the balls pass you by and slap them as they do. You've caught the wrong end of some of Hartfyst's haymakers? Get through this and you'll never take another one. Do it perfectly and you'll be able to make him dive straight into the ground with the same strength you'd use to lift a kebab."

Jagged Leaf winches her heart back into place in her chest. "So it's a timing exercise."

"And spacing."

"No! Wrong!" Hamon shouts, his voice echoing off the quarry walls. "Both of you! Shame, Chuchuto!" He hops halfway up the pile of steel balls and squats to heft the one on top, then thrusts it up over his head. "IT'S FOR YOUR GUUUUUUUTS!"

He heaves the ball straight at Jagged Leaf's face. Her eyes snap wide; she ducks forward and left, letting it pass over her shoulder, barely grazing the seam of her shirt. It cracks onto the stone ground behind her, then bounces a fulm into the air and begins to careen down the channel. The grooves and bumps in the slope catch the ball and send it flying up, then sideways, ricocheting between the channels' walls and floor faster and faster until it slams into the bottom of the basin and kicks up a spray of gravel. The crash echoes like a pavestone dropped in an alleyway.

It's going to be a long, painful day.

Chapter Text

"You can't keep wearing the same chestwrap to every match."

"What? Why? I wash it."

"It makes you look like a bum! Our reputation isn't exactly sparkling, you know!" Chuchuto plants her hands on her hips. "You're representing us out on those sands, remember? Look, Hamon and I were talking. We've put in an order to get you some fighting clothes that look the part of our rising star."

Chuchuto drags Jagged Leaf to the tailor two doors down from the Pugilists' Guild. In the back room of Sunsilk Tapestries, Jagged Leaf's protests are silenced when the hyuran tailor Rianne gives her a cheery, appraising glance up and down, then orders her to strip to her underclothes.

"What? Wh—"

"So I can take your measurements."

"For…?"

Rianne's laugh drowns out Chuchuto's chuckle. "Your new fighting garb!"

"I… don't understand why you need me in my underwear for that."

"The Bloodsands' rising star has to look her best, doesn't she? I'll need to measure you so my man can cut your new clothing to give you room to move." Rianne winks at Chuchuto. "I know why you're here. Anyroad, take it off!"

Jagged Leaf groans, then starts unlacing her baggy shirt. Rianne works quickly and adroitly once Jagged Leaf has stripped, her fingers barely brushing Jagged Leaf when she draws a measuring tape across seemingly every ilm of skin from throat to ankle. She shivers a little when the measuring tape tickles against her lowest ribs.

Once Rianne dismisses them, Chuchuto drags Jagged Leaf to Sapphire Avenue to shop for jewelry.

"When in the hells am I going to wear jewelry in a fight?"

"For the walkout, dimwit. You'll hand it off to your second before the bell."

The sensation of metal around her neck and wrists makes her feel like she's being clapped in manacles. She tugs at the jewelry incessantly, adjusting it and finding that there's no comfortable way to wear it. After an apology to the increasingly frustrated vendor, they move on to ribbons, which are almost as bad.

Jagged Leaf pulls off the last headband Chuchuto hands her and drops it back onto its hook on the merchant's table. "This is stupid."

Chuchuto sighs. "I know you think so. But the fights aren't just about winning, you know."

"What else, then?"

"They're about winning with style. You're too mechanical out there. Your basics are rock-solid and that's why you're winning, but the crowd couldn't give a toad's piss about you when you're walking out there. You need them to want you to win. You need them to need you to win."

"What for? Doesn't change me winning." She is winning, most of the time.

Chuchuto grabs her by the wrist and pulls her down into a squat, then leans in to whisper, "Because we're broke and we need the Syndicate to throw us a bone."

"And winning doesn't do that?" Jagged Leaf shuffles toward the nearby wall as Chuchuto leans there. She slides down to sit on the pavestone, then flattens her back against the wall and folds her legs under herself.

"Winning doesn't. Winning with style does. Why do you think people buy tickets for the Bloodsands? It's not because you have a clean left cross. They don't know the first damned thing about pugilism, or even fighting. They're there for the story. Shush—I'll explain," Chuchuto interrupts, putting a finger to Jagged Leaf's lips. She's still twice as quick as Jagged Leaf can blink. "You have fans, sure. A few of them. Hartfyst has more and he only fought once. Know why?"

Jagged Leaf groans. "I'm not going to take them to b—"

"No! Because he's got bluster. He went out there and beat his chest and roared, kicked up a racket, and they remembered him for that. Only once, and they still ask when he's coming back. You? You just walk in, fight, and leave. 'Jagged Leaf' is a name on a fight card, not a story they can tell. Your opponents are drawing the crowds because people are attached to them. You beat 'em? It's your job to pick up those threads and make them your fans."

"And a few rings is supposed to do that."

Chuchuto slaps Jagged Leaf's forehead. "No, but it'll help. Your style is all basics, no flair, so we're going to start working on playing that up. Show them how you aren't showing them anything, you know?"

"What in the hells are you talking about?"

"Ugh. Just follow me. Rianne should have the first few cuts done by now; you'll see."

When they ring the service bell at the front desk of Sunsilk Tapestries, Rianne calls them inside, shouting from the back that the door is unlocked. It isn't, but she hurries to open it for them.

Inside, Rianne returns to a broad, low table where she and a Sea Wolf man hunch over a seemingly disorganized mess of cut fabrics. Each brandishes a little stick of black graphite, a measuring tape, and scissors as they mark, measure, and carve through the cloth. The pile is mostly white and gray with a few trimmings of black: the colors of the forest floor just below Aisbryda's treeline when the late spring heat has almost finished melting the snow away.

"Since you're from up in the mountains, Rianne suggested snow and Aergsath suggested a cloak. Just for the walkout, at least. They're working on a fancy fighting shirt, too." Chuchuto hops up onto a stool to squint at the cutters' handiwork. "Well, I can't exactly picture it yet, but I'm sure it'll look great." She winks at Rianne.

"Only the best for our friends at the Guild! We should have the shirt ready for a test fit tomorrow morning. We have an order of Sultansworn parade uniforms to fulfill once this next shipment of white fabric comes in—cloud white, not snow white, naturally—so this will be a bit of a rush job, but rest assured our standards don't slip!" Rianne doesn't look up from her scissors as she speaks.

Chuchuto excuses them both, then leads Jagged Leaf back out into the street. They sit together on one of the stone planter benches that run along the middle of the Steps of Nald; Jagged Leaf leans her head back against the fat, waxy leaves of of a succulent sprouting there. "Did I really need to take the whole day off traning just for this?"

"Today's your rest day," Chuchuto grumbles. "You're not supposed to train every single day, you know."

"What am I supposed to do on my days off, then?" Jagged Leaf hasn't spent her free time on anything but eating, sleeping, or stretching since her first week in Ul'dah.

Chuchuto buries her face in her hands. "This is why you don't have a ring persona." She hops up to stand on the bench and jabs a finger up at Jagged Leaf's nose. "You! Are boring!"

Jagged Leaf doesn't bother trying to rebut that. What else does she do but train? What else is there to do? Everyone at the Guild insists that Ul'dah is a city that never truly sleeps—that there's always some riotous energy bubbling beneath the pavestones that keeps sweat and coin flowing through the streets. It smacks of Nald'thal worship to Jagged Leaf, but she isn't exactly on the best terms with her own god, so even if she hasn't seen what her guildmates see, she also hasn't argued the point. "What else am I supposed to be, then?"

"Nothing! You're our perfect little pugilist—oh, shush, as long as I can still lay you flat in two strikes, I'm calling you little—we just need to figure out a way to make the crowd love you. A blank slate, just like how you came to us, that they can project onto." Chuchuto leans her hip against the back of the bench and lets a fond little grin creep across her face. "Came to us in rags, and now I'll bet gil to goulash that you're on your way to riches."

Jagged Leaf frowns. "How is the cloak supposed to help?"

"Oh, it just looks cool. I'll make Rurukuta show you how to do some nice flourishes with it next time he comes around. Anyroad, follow me."

Chuchuto jogs north along the Steps of Nald toward the Bloodsands. The route tastes of sweat and iron tang, echoing the giddy anticipation Jagged Leaf has weathered every time she prepares for another fight. She counts breaths and bricks absentmindedly as she trots after Chuchuto.

There's no fight today, so the arena is empty. They clop down the stairs to the eastern staging room, then step through the entrance tunnel onto the sand.

"I've never been down here when it's empty." It's backwards and upside-down, trying to feel relaxed here.

"Listen close, then," Chuchuto chuckles. "Hear that?"

Jagged Leaf closes her eyes and inhales, then holds her breath. It's silent. When she fights, the roaring crowd dulls to a hum in the background of her senses, but this is different. It's quieter than the windswept slopes of Aisbryda, with their whistling couloirs and groaning trees. She lets out her breath and the rush of hot air is the only sound.

"Your skill is how you win the fight. That silence," Chuchuto tuts, "is how you win the crowd."

"I think I feel it." There's a brushing like soft fir boughs on her skin: tingling absence. Quiet in which she can shout, stillness in which she can strike. Emptiness for her to fill. "If I'm here before I… No, this is confusing."

"Hah! Look on your face says you'll get it." Chuchuto slaps the back of Jagged Leaf's calf. "You know what? I'm adding an exercise to your training. Starting tomorrow, every day there's no fight here, you trot your merry little way into this arena and listen to the quiet. Walk around, kick some sand. Feel it when it's dead."

So she can own the silence before it comes to life.

"Learn the Bloodsands when they're empty, make this place your friend, and your opponents won't have an ilm to move when you step out of that tunnel. The crowds will tie themselves to you just for that. Show them that this is your house and they're your guests. Jagged Leaf," Chuchuto says, her voice lowered, "figure that out and you'll be the godsdamned Sultana of this place."

"As long as I keep winning."

"No shit, Manderville."

Chapter Text

Carefully, with the same precision necessary to execute a flying armbar, Jagged Leaf balances her newest prize onto the dot of glue. She sets it next to its nine companions and blows gently onto the glue, holding the rightmost soldier in her little ivory army in place.

"Nobody ever tell you that little collection makes you look like a maniac?"

"Shush," she hisses at Hartfyst's jibe, counting in her head. Thirty-four, thirty-five... the alchemist said to count to sixty, so Jagged Leaf measured the rhythm of his breathing with a stare whose meaning he mistook. By the time he had started stammering a confused apology, she'd figured the most likely pace of his counting and excused herself.

"I'm serious. T'minsha asked me if you were a serial killer yesterday."

Forty-eight, forty nine, "She's a bit stupid, isn't she, though?" fifty-three...

Hartfyst's boots creak as he squats beside her and shrugs. "Maybe. Least you're not collecting ears, I suppose."

Sixty. Jagged Leaf straightens and looks down at her thin trophy shelf, mounted to the wall above her cot on an iron bracket, and grins at the teeth she's glued there. The Bloodsands demand all its fighters leave something of themselves behind, but they don't say anything about taking. With nothing to spend prize money on while she's living at the Guild, she's begun a bit of a game in her matches: if she can knock out one of her opponent's teeth hold onto it until she wins the fight, she's won. Otherwise, she marks it down as a draw.

She's made four draws and ten wins since inventing this rule. "I could wear them on a necklace, if that makes it better."

Hartfyst guffaws and slaps her back. "See what that damn new announcer makes of that. Flip your whole persona on its head."

They step back into the echoing thumps and grunts of the Guild's training floor. It's busy today, but Jagged Leaf had a match four days ago, so the new blood hasn't yet learned that they're going to wash out. T'minsha, the diminutive Seeker girl who begged Jagged Leaf for a signature on her forehead (partially obliged with a quick scrawl on her headscarf), is one of the few who looks like she might stick around.

Jagged Leaf meets T'minsha at the pendulum, where she's practicing her timing on ducks. Stopping the swinging leather ball against the tip of her toe and tapping T'minsha on the shoulder, Jagged Leaf interrupts the girl's training to say, "Back on the jump ropes."

"Ah!" T'minsha heaves herself out of her focus on the pendulum, losing her footing and nearly twisting her ankle. "But I saw you using this yesteday, and just thought I'd—"

"You're jumping ahead," Hartfyst cuts in, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms while Jagged Leaf adjusts the pendulum's arm up to suit her own height, three fulms taller than T'minsha. "Your footwork's wrong eleven ways to solstice. Going to build bad habits."

"Ankles—and toes—too weak. Back on the ropes," Jagged Leaf repeats, smiling down at the girl.

There's a little spark in T'minsha's eyes when she looks up to meet Jagged Leaf's. It might smolder, might catch. For now, it'll bounce up and down two hundred times as the girl completes her exercises on the jumping ropes.

"You've got quite a chain of admirers coming in here, don't you?" Hartfyst chuckles as the girl trots away.

Jagged Leaf sets the pendulum swinging. "Rich from you," she replies, settling into a steady, swaying rhythm to weave across the leather ball's path. "Never leave the Quicksand alone, do you?"

"They don't chase me back to the Guild."

"Well," Jagged Leaf sighs, "it isn't like I'm inviting them." She taps the leather ball with a right jab, resetting its swing and adding front-to-back bobs into her rhythm. "Besides, wasn't recruitment down just a year ago? Before either of us got here." Her dodges grow slimmer; eddies of air off the ball chill her shoulders and jaw.

"Ain't complaining, Jagt."

She shoots him a glare for the nickname.

"Just wondering... y'know. That hyur, Carellin, sure tossed some eyes your way."

"And I didn't toss any back."

Hartfyst scoffs and reaches out to catch the ball, but Jagged Leaf interrupts her rhythm to bat his wrist away with the heel of her hand, then returns to her exercise.

"I can't take the time off training."

"Ow! Hells..." Hartfyst shakes out his wrist, then plants his hands on his hips. "So it's teeth, then. Cold cot, cold trophies, huh?"

"Warm enough in that room," Jagged Leaf growls, then swings a soft left hook into the ball to start it spinning in a circle. "What's it to you, anyroad?"

From the corner of her eye, she sees a smarmy grin crawl across Hartfyst's face. "Was the first one to try, is all."

"Oh, really?" She reverses the ball's revolution with her elbow, then reverses it again with a crescent kick. "Think I'd remember that." She wishes she didn't.

"And you're no less icy since then."

Jagged Leaf lets the slapping beat of her strikes take the place of her response for a while, then hammers a roundhouse kick into the ball to send it into Hartfyst's face.

"Wh—ow!" He grunts, narrowly deflecting it and jamming his third finger in the process. "Seven hells, Jagt—"

"You can keep on making notches in your own bedpost. I'm at ten teeth. Give me three months and I'll have a whole godsdamned mouth's worth."

Chapter Text

It's been a long time since Jagtloef has had a reason to show off. Here, with a small crowd of veteran marauders piled onto stools and leaning back against the walls of their undersized training dungeon, she rolls out her neck and shakes her wrists in the usual pre-fight ritual while considering what will impress her combat authority on them the best. The stink of anticipation clogs her nostrils and throat; she breathes it in cleaner than mountain air.

None of them seem concerned about the stump of her right wrist. One or two might have glanced at her prosthetic hand when she removed its harness and set it on the table by the door, but they're real soldiers; they've likely severed a few hands themselves.

She's only had this contract for two days and she doesn't intend to muck it up just yet. Her spar with Wyrnzoen has proven her in the eyes of the few who watched it, but her audience here includes none of those men and women. What to do? What to demonstrate so they understand what she's here to teach them? She could just thrash the toughest one.

No, better to show them why she was the champion.

"You," she points to a thick-legged miqo'te leaning casually on a cloth-wrapped training axe. If her guess is any good, his casualness is earned. "What's your name?"

"K'tabro," he answers, shifting his weight smoothly back to his feet and choking up his grip on his axe. Good. He's unafraid on purpose, by rote. "We get right into it?" He steps forward.

"Sort of." Jagtloef flicks her left wrist one more time, cracking the first knuckle of her thumb, then slides her feet into a relaxed stance. Her thin cloth shoes have a little less friction against the wooden floor than she'd like, but it's enough. Her arms stay low, fingers and wrist loose with her elbows half-cocked. A phantom instinct tenses her right forearm; she suppresses a wince at the empty ache where her hand should be. "Take a few swings at me. I'm going to show you something."

A few snickers from the audience tell her he's either a neophyte or the best fighter in the room. K'tabro shrugs and shoots a glance over his shoulder to silence the hecklers. Definitely the latter. He hefts his axe, rolls his shoulders, and rocks the haft in his hands. "Ground rules: weapons down to yield. I suppose you can just lift your hands. Hand," he grimaces.

This isn't a spar, but K'tabro doesn't need to know that yet. Jagtloef nods.

K'tabro flourishes his practice axe, rolling the haft along his shoulders like an Ul'dahn fire dancer, then spins it in one hand before thumping the butt of it in to the ground.

Jagtloef rocks up onto her toes, keeping her arms low and her feet wide. "Whenever you're ready," she chimes, sloshing condescension into her tone.

With a veteran's calm, K'tabro takes a hard step forward, testing Jagtloef's range. She pretends to take the bait with a snappy half-flinch toward him, but he sees the feint and stands his ground. She's fought former marauders before—hotheads, nearly to a man—and K'tabro already steps with more assurance than any of them.

He darts inside her range with a perfectly controlled horizontal swing. By Jagtloef's guess, its path is exactly the width of a pirate ship's bulkhead door. In return, she shows him why she's here.

There is a moment during every strike—at fighting pace, it's approximately one and a half heartbeats—where any fighter worth a bent gil has to pour all their focus into the blow; they're closed off to the world during that moment, so it leaves a particularly astute opponent freer than the wind. Jagtloef knows when it begins and ends by the tension in K'tabro's hips and the ice behind his eyes.

She rocks her weight to her back foot when the practice axe is two ilms from her, slipping outside its arc. When it's half an ilm from her, she shifts her weight forward and begins to rock back inside K'tabro's range, reversing her dodge with the precise minimum required motion. The axe passes through the space she was; she returns there the instant it's clear.

All K'tabro and the little crowd of marauders see is the practice axe passing directly through her belly. A strained whisper hisses from the audience as K'tabro plants his heel to follow through on his swing. His eyes have bulged out wide in shock. His instincts are screaming dissonant tunes: he saw Jagtloef where the blow should have struck, but his axe didn't stop against her. He carries his swing around and brings the weapon down at her right shoulder.

Jagtloef repeats her trick. She sways left at the moment K'tabro's focus narrows to his strike, then returns to her position in a snakelike sidestep, giving him the illusion that his axe passed through her like she's a reflection in a pool of water.

He thrusts the blunt tip of the practice axe at her belly. This time, she parries the strike with the back of her right forearm, slapping it wide, and pivots her left foot forward to throw a full-bodied left straight punch that she halts a hairsbreadth from the pit of K'tabro's throat.

His axe clatters on the ground. "Llymlaen's salty lips, woman, Wyrnzoen didn't say you were a mage!"

Jagtloef laughs and relaxes her stance. "Not magic. Here, I'll explain. You! With the ponytail. Step up, let K'tabro watch."

When she meets Loeflona at the Mizzenmast for dinner that evening, she's unscathed except for a single tiny bruise.

Chapter Text

Jagtloef's clothes choke her. Her jacket's collar, stiff as wood, bars her from turning her head without wrinkling the fabric. Her trousers seem tailored specifically to restrict her movements, especially after weeks spent in loose exercise clothing. Even her boots, turned down at the calf, feel more suited to a stone statue than a flesh-and-bone foot. Her shirt collar, though, is the worst. It rises high above her jacket, buttoned all the way up her throat, and ends in a ring of frills along the underside of her jaw and the base of her skull. Perfect stillness seems to be her only respite from the light, tickling brushes of fabric against skin that rarely feels anything but knuckles and lips.

Stillness, however, is nowhere to be found amid the smorgasbord of social obligations through which Loeflona leads her. There are social codes at play in this Ishgardian ballroom that Jagtloef could never have memorized, even if Loeflona had explained more than the most basic, so she tries her best to restrict herself to tight smiles and short answers to the verbose half-questions their fellow gala guests ask. These Ishgardian nobles communicate through a hundred layers of unspoken words that Loeflona could only explain as a series of feints designed to determine whether they're in a fight at all.

The analogy makes as little sense to Jagtloef as the conversations themselves, but Loeflona's adoptive father specifically requested their presence at this event, hoping a celebrity appearance would entice more of the High Houses to contribute funding for his effort to build tenements in the Brume. Admiral Bloefhiswyn was reluctant to allow Jagtloef leave from her freshly renewed contracts with the Maelstrom and the Coral Tower, concerned about interrupting their training schedule for a week, but twenty-nine words from Loeflona convinced her to relent and allocate a Maelstrom airship to carry them to Ishgard.

Coerthan chill suits Jagtloef while threatening to freeze Loeflona solid, so the latter has spent the entire visit with her fingers buried in mittens or in Jagtloef's cupped hands. Even in the warmth of the House Haillenarte's ballroom, among fires and bodies aplenty, she has opted to wear heeled thighboots under her bulky-skirted maroon gown so that she can layer three pairs of socks inside them. Her upper arms are covered by sheer sleeves embroidered with stark scarlet vines; her pale pink gloves extend nearly to her elbows.

The tip of her broad, hooked nose is pink over the rim of her wine glass, so Jagtloef is plenty warm.

Their most difficult compromise was Jagtloef's bare face. Wearing a man's suit was contentious enough, albeit forgivable given the reputation of Ul'dahn "deviancy" among Ishgard's High Houses, but a woman attending an Ishgardian gala without even a dusting of powder on her cheeks was near to unthinkable. After an entire morning of debate—not argument, no matter how many times Jagtloef had to spit her frustration into the fireplace—followed by an entire afternoon of attempts and half a dozen washcloths stained all manner of colors, Loeflona surrendered, admitting she had never painted a face besides her own, and decided that these potential donors could bear the sight of Jagtloef's few blemishes and scars.

Which is all well, because they seem to be serving their purpose perfectly.

"I was unable to attend, of course, but I have heard many a tale of your bout against Rajata Marajata. Is the scar by your left ear the very one I suspect?"

Jagtloef schools her left hand to stay folded behind her back, resisting the urge to trace the scar, and adjusts her shoulders. Her right arm is cocked out awkwardly to allow Loeflona to drape her wrist in the crook of her elbow. It leaves her entirely off-kilter, but Ishgardians are seemingly unaware of the concept of being left-handed. A pair of long, black gloves extend halfway up her forearms, tugged carefully up over her prosthetic hand. Evidently, showing the prosthetic to "that rambunctious Haillenarte child," as Loeflona called him, has to wait until after the gala. Loeflona taps her index finger three times against Jagtloef's forearm: her signal to give the long answer to the Lady Dzemael, whose slender and pale features are only distinguished from the dozen other slender and pale women in the room by a red gemstone hanging in a silver necklace in the hollow of her throat. All the dresses look the same to Jagtloef's. Except Loeflona's, of course.

Jagtloef catches a sigh just before it happens and turns it into the beginning of the story. "Yeah—yes, milady. Marajata was... formidable," which isn't entirely a lie, but he hadn't been in his prime since that mysterious miqo'te challenger crushed him in a tournament that predated Jagtloef's time on the Bloodsands. "I hadn't learned much about fighting opponents using a sword and shield at the time, especially not lalafellin ones." Loeflona strokes her thumb along Jagtloef's elbow: her signal to keep talking. "Ah, and... well, Marajata's shield technique forced me to overreach. I couldn't get under his guard, but getting over it made me extend past my center of gravity, so when he blocked my downward roundhouse, I panicked and fell for his feinted thrust, and—"

"The misstep she made resulted in quite a grisly wound," Loeflona lies, stepping in to rescue Lady Dzemael from Jagtloef's detailed explanation of her pugilism technique just as her eyes begin to glaze over. "Of course, the tenacity to continue fighting after being wounded is no new concept to the people of Ishgard."

Lady Dzemael blinks and a mischievous sparkle enters her eyes. "Naturally. You must be proud of overcoming Marajata, wearing your scar on full display here."

Loeflona's wrist tenses the same way it does when the arcanists at Mealvaan's Gate bring up Jagtloef's exile from Ul'dah, but she keeps her mouth shut.

Jagtloef hunts for something to say that might excuse them from the conversation. Failing that, she mumbles, "Yes. I'm proud of all my scars."

She feels Loeflona's fingers stroke the straps of her prosthesis through her sleeve.

"Hm! What fun," Lady Dzemael exclaims before sweeping away and leaving them alone by the hors d'ouvres.

"Was that... bad?"

"Yes, but the lengths to which we would need to go to satisfy the Lady Dzemael are far too great to even consider. And," Loeflona glances at a clock tucked into the corner, "sod the time, I'm starving. Hand me one of those mushroom pastries, will you?"

Loeflona's etiquette-breaching hunger seems to elicit a shift in the flow of bodies through the ballroom, attracting them toward the hors d'ouvres; a small army of servants appears from thin air to carry the trays of tiny foods through the crowd. Jagtloef watches their footwork with narrowed eyes. They slip through the throng so unobtrusively that at first she thinks they'd make excellent pickpockets, but after a few moments, she realizes that the nobles are part of this dance. There seems to be an agreed-upon pattern—or, rather, type of pattern—that the servants follow to keep their feet moving uninterrupted. The pattern doesn't flow in time with the soft songs humming out from the stage against the north wall, but it seems to have a beat of its own. She's tempted to try to find it, but she outweighs most of the party guests by a few dozen ponze—not to mention that she's just beginning to figure out how to move properly in her stiff suit. Barreling over a lord or lady seems counterproductive. Instead, she keeps her gloved prosthesis draped into the lapel of her suit coat and her elbows tucked in close to let Loeflona guide her through the next few incomprehensible deathtraps of conversations.

Emmanellain de Fortemps stumbles excitedly through a tale of dragonslaying so patently fake that Jagtloef wonders whether he's ever seen one in person. His occasional winks at her suggest he's either flirting or trying to impress her. His brother Artoriel, only recently made Lord, has to drag him away before he claims to have been present when Nidhogg was slain.

Stephanivien de Haillenarte somehow manages to smell the oil off Jagtloef's prosthesis through her glove. The glint in his eyes elicits a near-silent groan from Loeflona and the next half-hour is dedicated to her repeated assurances that Jagtloef will show him the prosthetic hand tomorrow, despite the fact that they're due at the airship landing soon after dawn. "How he deduced the source of the scent, I cannot begin to guess."

Ser Aymeric de Borel, blessedly, seems largely uninterested in Jagtleof and Loeflona themselves, but thanks them for their attendance. His tone would sound icy outside Coerthas, but in this Ishgardian ballroom, it's nearly scorching. He offers a small, distracted smile to Jagtloef as he says, "Ishgard has only just begun to reconnect with our fellow Eorzeans in matters of culture. I hope you will find the patience to forgive our ignorance of your customs."

When he leaves them to speak to a severe, dark-haired man leaning on a cane in the corner, Loeflona whispers, "He was trying to compliment your suit."

"Oh. Why couldn't he…?" Jagtloef clamps her mouth shut, then squints around the ballroom, finally putting a name to the observation that's nagged her for half the evening. "Hm. Can women not marry each other here?"

Loeflona covers her mouth with a pink-gloved hand and chokes down a snort. "Ah. Unconcerned as the rest of Eorzea is with the practice, Ishgard's marriage law is… extreme. Concerns of lineage, you see: High Houses need heirs, after all, and heirs must be direct offspring. The expectation is extended to families of lower status, as well. Would that we could have passed you off entirely as a man…"

"We probably couldn't trick them into thinking you were pregnant, though."

"Halone works her miracles as she wishes."

It takes them so long to reach Loeflona's adoptive father that Jagtloef almost forgets that he's the reason they've come. From a distance, Lessaine de Connealaux holds himself like a man who's just stabbed someone through the kneecap: with utter confidence at his superiority and utmost caution facing down a desperate and unpredictable enemy.

When he sees his daughter and Jagtloef, his facade collapses, his eyes swim, and he rushes to wrap them both into a hug. His arm barely reaches around Jagtloef's back. What's left of his white hair smells like pine. "Loeflona, you look on the verge of freezing solid! Here, let us step closer to the fire." He drags them bodily through a narrow gap between two conversations, finding them a place where Loeflona can put her back to the hearth and shed some of the color in her cheeks.

Jagtloef draws herself up straight, squaring her shoulders. She's practiced for this part. "Mister Connealaux, it's an honor to—"

"Oh, none of that from my daughter-in-law!" His voice is low, but not hushed, carrying no further than Jagtloef's ears. "Loeflona has seen fit to make you family and I would be no father at all to deny her judgment."

With a wry smile, Loeflona nudges Jagtloef with her elbow. "Which is why he had to leave Ishgard."

He chuckles at that. "Indeed, 'tis with no small hesitation that I return, but Ishgard's poor require more aid than the nation can provide. Someone from outside must be the first to offer it." His smile widens, then he reaches his right hand toward Jagtloef, palm-up. A tap of Loeflona's fingers tells her to take it, but she's already extended her gloved left hand toward Lessaine, magnetized by this switch in his demeanor from rime-coated Ishgardian calm to an animated familiarity that would be at home in Ul'dah in the same way his generosity wouldn't. His eyes widen for a brief moment as he realizes her right hand is occupied, then he reaches out his left to clasp hers. He leans in a little closer and the outer corners of his eyes pinch. "Thank you, Jagtloef, one thousand times, for the happiness you have brought my daughter. I only wish I could have attended your union."

It's Jagtloef's turn to laugh. "We, uh… did it my family's way. Just the two of us."

Loeflona has doffed her left glove to show her father the marriage scar there. He winces in empathy at the jagged line, but any questions he might have are silenced by the ear-to-ear smile on Loeflona's face. She slips her glove back on. "The ritual was… moderately painful," she grimaces at Jagtloef, "but by the Twelve, the view! But I digress. We have a few more visitations before the dancing starts. So, to business: our address is unchanged, but we will be travelling to Dravania come spring. I have no need of income for the duration—and on that note, Daruloix carefully refused to say hello."

"You found that little rascal?" Lessaine lowers his voice. "Where in the seven hells did he turn up?"

Jagtloef answers, "Well, he saved my life outside Ul'dah six years ago. Dragged me to safety after I nearly drowned in a flood." Lessaine beams. "We saw him again six or seven months back, driving his cart through Mor Dhona. He's trading. Maybe smuggling? Hard to tell."

"Anyroad," Loeflona cuts in, "we have only worked through a third of the list of names you sent us, so please excuse us for the moment. Can we find you afterward?"

"I doubt that I will still be—oh, hells if I am so old that I cannot keep myself awake an extra hour for my daughters." Lessaine pats his own cheek. "I am staying with the Count de Fortemps. I will await your call there after the gala concludes. And Jagtloef," he adds with a grin, "You look quite dashing in that suit."

As they dive back into the melee of chatter, she whispers to Loeflona, "I can see why he doesn't live here anymore."

Loeflona chews her cheek, but mirth blushes through the powder on her cheeks.

Other names and faces flit past Jagtloef, each offering her little by which to remember them. Now that she's learned just how provincial Ishgardian politics are, their hesitant questions and wandering eyes start to trace obvious paths: marking Jagtloef's high collar and lightly scarred face, passing only a little more quickly across her chest than Hamon's ever did, lingering for a moment on her arm held out for Loeflona, then flicking back up to match her polite smile. Her own cheeks threaten to cramp as she accepts that she's being ogled.

Some intangible shift in the atmosphere dictates that the musicians start playing louder and that space be cleared in the center of the room. Jagtloef steels herself. Loeflona has spent a week teaching her five different Ishgardian dances, and even if none of the steps were particularly hard to learn, it's still her first time dancing anything but drunken jigs in the Quicksand.

"Remember, they will notice if I lead."

"And they've already noticed everything else I'm doing wrong."

"So why give them the last ilm for free?" Loeflona tugs on Jagtloef's arm. "If not for spite, then for me. I've been leading you around this ballroom all evening; it's left me quite exhausted. You'll simply have to carry me through this dance, love."

That makes it sound a little more appealing, but not by much.

Loeflona has to catch Jagtloef's wrist to stop her from shaking out her arms. The instinct to hop on her toes and get her blood moving is squashed where it stands. "Shah, moh, swah," Jagtloef whispers to herself, mouthing the mnemonic sounds her boots will make against the hardwood floor and marking their pace against the musicians' tempo.

They have no reason to enter first. Jagtloef struggles to keep her ankles loose while she and Loeflona mill about at the edge of the dance floor. All this pageantry is wearing on her. She's no stranger to making things look easy—late in her years on the Bloodsands, she mastered the art of slipping past opponents' guards without ever raising her own—but maintaining this veneer of nonchalance injects tension into every muscle, exhausting her. The mounting effort of watching her words, watching her posture, untraining well-trained instincts, and quelling old, thoughtless habits would leave her ready to snap if not for the rejuvenating encounter with Lessaine.

The song changes. Loeflona taps her arm four times. Jagtloef leads them onto the dance floor.

Everything in the world is a fight. Rules change, arenas take on different faces, audiences jeer and cheer as they wish; still, a fight. Every smile tonight has been a sway, every quip a kick, every tap of Loeflona's fingers a shout from the stands. Every pull of Loeflona's arm an instinct, every veiled hint in her words a spark of muscle memory. Jagtloef only needs to trust her own body and the skill she's pounded into it.

With Loeflona's fingers laced into her left hand, cocked out between their shoulders, Jagtloef breathes the beat and takes the first step. Here, the choreographed motion of setting her gloved prosthesis against Loeflona's waist. Here, the rhythm of the pendulum in the rocking of her left hand and the tempo of a jumping rope in her knees. Here, Loeflona tapping once to indicate which set of steps belongs to this song.

Here, the first blow of the match: a pair of Ishgardian nobles stepping too close, slipped with a subtle turn of her heel. Jagtloef and Loeflona fight on.

The music sends long, precise spear jabs their way as if through molasses. The rules don't allow Jagtloef to move any faster than them. She grinds this dance's steps directly into her legs so that her mind can't take over the motions, trusting them to place her out of the spear's path. Rote discipline wins out over dynamic reflexes and carries her to the end of the first song. Positioned just so at the northeast quarter of the dance floor, she lifts her prosthetic from Loeflona's waist and rolls her shoulder in the harness to splay its fingers, then swings her arm out as she ducks into a deep bow toward Loeflona.

Glancing up, she sees Loeflona lit from within.

The next song is a pair of long knives, hissing and glinting across the ballroom. A quicker step, the third dance Loeflona taught her, weaves the two of them through the tempo so the blades glance at obtuse angles off bare skin.

"Jagt," Loeflona murmurs. "You look ready to throttle someone."

"Hush, my sky. I'm focusing." Hells, she has her fighting face on. No time to change it.

"To the edge. Your left."

Jagtloef heeds, spinning slowly through the meandering paths of the other dancers, until Loeflona tosses her back into the crowd with a flick of her wrist. Lessaine, into whom Jagtloef has nearly stumbled, pats her on the back and takes her place, leaving her stranded in the crowd.

The music sounds awful from out here. Not a drop of energy. She'd never have known a person could dance to it if Loeflona hadn't taught her the steps. Jagtloef slips a step away from the edge of the dance floor and snatches a tall, thin glass from a servant's tray, then takes a sip of the saccharine, bubbly champagne. Why put sweetness in their drinks, but not their music? In Ul'dah, it's the opposite: spicy and bitter lalafellin cocktails strong enough to put less toxin-resistant races facedown in an infirmary bed that, coupled with drums pounded by heavy-shouldered percussionists, drive people to their feet in stomping, chaotic dances that look like bar brawls from the outside.

Jagtloef has held off drinking to keep her tongue under control and, in the process, forgotten water as well. The first sip hits her like a hammerbeak's stomp. She nearly misses when she reaches to another servant's tray for a few slices of hard cheese impaled on toothpicks.

Loeflona probably is exhausted, having spent the evening speaking for two and watching Jagtloef's every movement. Even on the airship ride, she gave relentless quizzes about how to stand, how to speak, which words to use, and with whom to make eye contact. Ridiculous rules for ridiculous people, but here Jagtloef is amidst them.

There Loeflona is, skating across the dance floor with her father—no, she's changed partners; Stephanivien's expression burns with misdirected infatuation. When they turn, Loeflona's eyes bulge pleadingly at Jagtloef, then flick toward the southwest corner of the dance floor.

Swallowing her cheese half-chewed and stuffing the toothpicks into her jacket's lapel, then spinning to find a table on which to set her half-drained drink, Jagtloef wends through the crowd to intercept Loeflona as she extricates herself from Stephanivien's hushed yammering.

"Gods above," she whispers, then taps Jagtloef's arm five times to indicate the correct dance. "I have had men attempt to take me to bed with similar alacrity, but not to a 'manufactory'. I almost thought he was being euphemistic."

Jagtloef misses a step; she blames the joke while Loeflona blames the drink. They twirl by Lessaine, who has returned to his aloof Ishgardian demeanor as he leads Lady Dzemael across the dance floor with all the enthusiasm of a man cuddling a sodden mountain bear.

"I could step in…"

"No, you could not," Loeflona hisses. "Half a drink and you think you're a match for the Lady of a High House? She would chew you to pieces in a heartbeat. We've embarrassed ourselves enough out here as it stands."

"What? I thought we were doing well."

"I am. You stopped leading properly ten measures into the first song."

"Oops." She's sure she's executing the steps almost perfectly.

Loeflona's expression has begun to twist, but she schools it back to a pleasant smile. "Still, I imagine we're doing better than they expected. Here," she squeezes against Jagtloef's left hand and shifts her waist into the prosthesis, then eases the pressure off. "Lead."

Pulling where Loeflona pushed, Jagtloef leads. It's rougher than she thinks it should be; instead of ushering her wife through the steps, she hauls her along. Her first few moments on the dance floor felt sloppy because of how much power she'd put into her hands. For all Ishgard's pretensions of delicacy, they seem to love force.

Jagtloef is about to ease off when Loeflona whispers, "Good. Lead, don't suggest."

There's a part of Jagtloef that's still afraid to touch her wife. Memory will not release those four notes of the siren's song; she hears them rapping at her eardrums when she least expects it. They knock now, asking to be let in, to play out that ghastly scene at the top of the lighthouse again. Push her, crush her, break her, force her. High-low-lower-lower. Her breath hitches and she swallows hard to stop herself from choking. She squeezes her eyes shut.

When she opens them, Loeflona has led them to the edge of the dance floor, eyes wide and frantic. She disengages and tows Jagtloef to the wall. "I am sorry, I… I wasn't thinking."

This isn't the first time this has happened. Across a dinner table, in bed, on the floor cushions at Nebbliht and Tatuputo's house, Loeflona will occasionally shift so Jagtloef is pressing against her just a pin's weight too hard. Jagtloef will find herself unmoored from the present, unsure of anything but that pressure, and the siren's song will fill the space of that confusion until Loeflona calls her back.

"I'll… just take a break." Jagtloef's breath is steady again. "Are you okay?" Why Loeflona doesn't share this terror, Jagtloef doesn't think she'll ever understand. It was her throat being crushed. It was her life being squeezed out.

"Of course I am, Jagt." She leans in to breathe the words against Jagtloef's neck, "Ought we make an early exit?"

"No! No, I'm fine. I can still dance."

"Not like this, you can't. Here, I have something better for you to do: do you see Count Haillenarte, over there with the colossal hat?"

It makes him hard to miss.

"We couldn't catch him earlier, but I need you to go thank him for his generosity in hosting this gala. Just put on a little of your Ul'dahn charm," a trait Jagtloef has only recently learned she has. "He won't much like it at first, but these old soldier types love a good, solid handshake."

"What about you?"

"I have a few more people with whom to dance. Something of a quota, you see. Fortunately, I believe Count Artoriel can handle his footwork, and Viscount Jannequinard is unlikely to even notice he has a dance partner."

"If I'd known this gala was going to be this complicated, I would've just stayed in Limsa Lominsa."

"And miss all this fun?" Loeflona taps Jagtloef's nose with her index finger, offering a broad smile. "Don't think I didn't notice how much you enjoyed learning to dance out there."

Jagtloef stretches tall, lifting a little onto her toes, and watches the dancers move along. No one seems to have taken offense at her hasty exit, but a few eyes dart toward them. She drapes her prosthesis back into the breast of her jacket and folds her left hand behind her back. "I'll just… try again when there aren't so many people around."

An unreadable expression cracks Loeflona's smile. "We will see." After a last brush of her fingertips against Jagtloef's jaw and a quick adjustment of her collar, she stuccoes a smile across her face and sweeps back toward the dance floor.

The roiling plane of heads makes a bit more sense from the edge. With something to focus on, Jagtloef marks Loeflona's pace against the gyre of bodies on the dance floor and spots the two men she has to find, then watches as Loeflona slows her gait so that she'll reach the edge of the dance floor in perfect concert with both Artoriel's path and a lull in the music.

It isn't quite fighting. It's fake, for one—like a rigged match, but everyone is in on the scam. All pageantry, because the bets are being placed elsewhere; all that matters is that the right people make the right bets. And bets are placed on those bets, and on those in turn.

Or something. Jagtloef plucks another flute of champagne off a tray and drains half of it. The simmering strain of her episode on the dance floor flushes it through her blood quickly, putting a wobbling film over the ballroom, and she starts making her way toward Count Haillenarte.

"Good evening… madame?" The Count looks her up and down, frowning.

"Madame if you want, but my name's Jagtloef," she jibes, slathering on some of the 'Ul'dahn charm' she's supposed to have.

"The brawler, yes," he says in perfectly flat affect. "An odd name to present itself on my guest list, to be certain, but Lessaine de Connealaux is ever the eccentric."

Ah, this part's a fight. Easy. "I'm finding most Isghardians share the trait." Maybe the champagne is helping.

An indignant blush frees itself from the Count's face in the form of a barked laugh. "Kah! 'Twould seem so to those unfamiliar with our ways, I suppose. Much has been changing of late, and all too quickly." Sloppy overhead swing, easily ignored.

Jagtloef forces her eyes to smile humorlessly, despite the obvious comedy of the Count's disdainful tone. "It's very generous of you to offer your home to this cause," she prods, testing the Count's guard despite her growing confidence that his arrogance is leaving him exposed.

"Cause? Oh, yes, the tenements."

His tone is bait, a feint to force her to overextend, so she holds her indifferent half-smile in place.

"The expenditure is titanic for such a petty effort, but I suppose we have all begun to rethink which causes are truly lost. Those in the Brume voice appreciation, 'tis sure, but," he leans in closer to Jagtloef so she can smell the red wine on his breath, "Wise investors have installed contingencies for the inevitable destruction of the place."

If this is bait, it works. "It's hard to imagine people turning down warm beds and hot meals."

The Count's lip twitches. "Then you would be shocked by how stubbornly bred those occupying the Brume can be," and Jagtloef is glad her left hand is occupied with a champagne glass.

"I see. Well, you can only hope for the best."

"And prepare for the worst," finishes the Count, raising his glass. Jagtloef stares at it for a moment, then takes a sip from her own.

His eyes pop from their sockets. Even in the hot air of the ballroom, steam puffs from his nostrils. He turns on his heel and marches away.

Lessaine appears from Jagtloef's left, grimacing. "That may take some effort to mend."

"What? What just happened?"

"You refused his toast? Ah, I see. Knowledge of your ignorance ought to prove an effective salve. Come with me."

Jagtloef traces Lessaine's footfalls through the crowd until they're facing down Count Haillenarte again, along with a woman who's likely the Countess.

"My apologies, Baurendouin; you see, the short notice with which I extended invitation to my acquaintance allowed her little time to acclimate to such fine environs and elevated company."

Jagtloef can't help but wrinkle her nose. "Right. Sorry. I, uh, didn't know what you were doing."

The heat in the Count's face has only partly subsided, but his tone is level. "Of course. I certainly erred in expecting you to act the part of a civil guest."

In her mind, Jagtloef transports herself and the Count to the center of the dance floor and simulates ways to dismantle him to a hiccuping wreck. In the flesh, she has an idea. Extracting her prosthesis from her lapel, she extends it toward him. "Before we meet again, I'll be sure to have my wife teach me more."

He bristles, huffs, and takes her hand. His jaw falls slack when he feels the hard metal beneath the glove; his own obsession with propriety closes it again with a click. Jagtloef rolls her left shoulder to pull on the harness, closing the prosthesis' grip around the Count's hand just firmly enough to leave him unscathed.

Through clenched teeth, he replies, "I am sure you will," then wrenches himself free and tries to disappear into the crowd, but fails due to his massive hat.

"What in the seven hells did you do, Jagt?"

"Beat him." She grins at Loeflona, flushed pink from her rush off the dance floor.

"You weren't supposed to beat him, you were supposed to thank him!" Loeflona hisses. "What did he do?"

Lessaine clicks his tongue. "I did catch the latter end of their initial conversation. Count Haillenarte is not sympathetic to this project so much as confident in his ability to take advantage of it. Which is," he nods appeasingly to Loeflona, "a useful bit of information for your wife to have unearthed."

"By sheer accident! Gods, Jagt, alone for ten minutes…"

Jagtloef has shrunk so that her jacket seems to hang off her shoulders like drying laundry.

"Oh, love, I'm sorry. I know you're exhausted. Jannequinard will hardly notice my absence?" Loeflona looks to Lessaine, asking with her eyes and stating with her shoulders.

"Hardly," he nods, though it's hard to tell whether he agrees.

Loeflona leads Jagtloef back toward the wall, where the latter leans on her left shoulder, and sighs. "It is not your fault. I am not thinking straight; it has been far too long since my last gala and the customs are returning to me too slowly. I sent you into peril with your hands tied and for that I apologize."

"It's fine. But… Lona, what in the hells is wrong with these people?" Jagtloef asks under her breath.

In lieu of a response, Loeflona snorts loudly enough to draw the attention of half a dozen guests. "A discussion for later. You've hardly eaten, Jagt. Come," and she leads the way through a veritable road trip of hors d'ouvres, during which Jagtloef realizes that she's developed a throbbing headache and a growling stomach. They wind through the crowd from tray to tray, giving Jagtloef a chance to practice a more familiar kind of footwork. She smooths her gait, keeping her knees slack and forcing the ankles of her boots to bend where they want to stay stiff.

Over the next hour, she cures both headache and hunger. A third encounter with Count Haillenarte—this time with Loeflona's support—slaps a bandage over the rift she opened. Conversations begin to fade and the music takes on a softer tone, but boots and skirts ruffling across the ballroom keep the echoing space flush with sound. They don't return to the dance floor.

With seemingly no cue and shockingly little fuss, the ballroom empties. The musicians retreat, taking their instruments with them. The Count is already gone, as is Lessaine. High glass windows invite only starlight. No bouncers throw beer-sodden drunks onto the street like every other party Jagtloef has ever attended. The chandeliers still burn, but the trays of food and drink have been carried away. The hearth crackles on. No one even tells them to leave; it seems that custom dictates that they should.

"I thought you might want to see it empty."

Jagtloef stands in the middle of the room, warmed only by the dying hearthfire. "It's still loud." Her breaths echo. Her ears ring. There's no silence here, no void she can master like the Bloodsands. The place dies when the dancing ends.

"Ishgardian architecture favors designs that—oh, I'll shut up." Loeflona loops her arm through Jagtloef's and straightens; Jagtloef takes the invitation to lean her head against Loeflona's shoulder.

They stand there for a short while. The fire sinks to embers. The echoes soak into the stone.

Loeflona fills her lungs, then uses a thimble of breath to ask, "Would you like to dance?"

With no melody and no beat, they have only each other's pulses by which to measure the tempo. Fortunately, Jagtloef's beats slowly and steadily. Loeflona's right hand settles onto Jagtloef's hip, her chin tilts up, then she pulls.

It's easy this way, with Loeflona leading. Sometimes Jagtloef thinks she ought to learn how to hold her wife more tightly. Tonight, her fingers cup Loeflona's elbow, holding sky only firmly enough to be held in return.

Chapter Text

If Jagtloef covers her ears, the maddening ring of metal on metal is almost tolerable. Naldiq and Vymelli's is not a pleasant place for someone who just left a room full of heavy-booted Marauders clanking around in full plate. When she finishes teaching early at the Coral Tower, she usually goes for a long run while Loeflona wraps up her work here, but today was the first day of four-on-one sparring, so her legs are shot.

Seated on the clients' bench just inside the entrance, she rests her ankle on her knee and folds forward to stretch one buttock at a time. She needs her hands to stretch well, so she stretches poorly; she'll pay in stiffness tomorrow morning. It's worth the relief from the resonating pinging of hammers, even if her steel prosthetic doesn't do much to block the sound. She rarely wears a glove over it in Limsa Lominsa anymore; not many people still stare.

Loeflona, dressed in a thick linen shirt and pants under her leather smith's apron, has set her tongs down while she waits for something to heat in the forge. She doffs her gloves, tosses them atop the tongs, and reaches up to retie the tiny bun she wears while working. A few locks have fallen loose from it: a fire hazard, as she explained to Jagtloef once. Her hair is barely long enough to put up, but she's been growing it out. Jagtloef chuckles at the memory of her grumbling tone two weeks ago when she said, "It's this or shaving to the scalp."

Straightening and switching to stretch her other side, Jagtloef runs her fingers across her own head. Her tight black curls are longer than she's let them grow in years, but they still only rise about an ilm from her scalp. She might have to trim them soon. Or just shave.

"Might be waiting a while," says Smydhaemr, tugging off his gloves and sitting on the bench next to Jagtloef. "She's in one of her moods."

Jagtloef chuckles. "Happy, you mean?"

"Happy like a mother couerl guarding a newborn litter, maybe," Smydhaemr groans. "Thought she'd stove my head in with her hammer when I asked to borrow her rasp."

As Loeflona ties off her bun and stuffs her hands back into her gloves, Jagtloef smiles at the jerky violence of the motions. The work seems to be doing her good. After their ordeal in the lighthouse, Loeflona hasn't had the stomach to watch Jagtloef train the marauders. She wouldn't even put the fear into words until Jagtloef pressed the issue, so seeing her throw herself into metalworking is a relief.

"What's the work today?"

"Well, she finished up the last order of rib joists for the Maelstrom quicker than H'naanza expected, so she was fiddling around with some of our new books about Hingan smithing for a while before something sparked in that bright little head of hers." Smydhaemr sighs. "You know, I was the new blood before she showed up. She's been here barely half as long as me and I'm the new blood again, stuck handing out materials."

Jagtloef stops herself from telling him she wouldn't know the feeling, instead patting him on the shoulder. "What's your day been?"

"Agh, got nothing but forks and buckles. Ticky tack, ticky tack, drives a man mad."

"Hah," she sighs, uncrossing her legs and leaning against the wall. "I still remember how Hamon would make me drill the same godsdamned heel lock for days on end. I never even used that one in a fight."

"Least training to fight is exciting, though, eh?"

Jagtloef wiggles her left hand. "Usually."

Smydhaemr barks a laugh. "Imagine it ain't dull at the Coral Tower these days."

"No," she chuckles, "it isn't."

He rises and trudges his way back to his anvil, where Jagtloef sees a bucket brimming with eating utensils. Over by the forge, Loeflona has replaced her gloves and removed the orange-glowing metal from the fire with her tongs. Her back is to Jagtloef; the cabled muscle she's built there and in her shoulders is visible even through her thick shirt as she works her hammer against her project. She'll never be bulky the way Jagtloef is, but there isn't a single soft body in Naldiq and Vymelli's. Even Dascon, the corpulent hyur, has a solidity to his movement that makes him look hard to knock over.

Loeflona's hammer falls, adding a voice to the Guild's chafing song, and Jagtloef stands to go bother her.

"What's this?" she asks, skirting wide around the shower of sparks from Loeflona's hammering so she can lean against an unoccupied workbench and cross her arms.

It takes a moment for Loeflona to respond as she grabs some kind of long, slim implement and sets it against the middle of the red-hot ingot, then taps it most of the way through the metal so it's cut nearly in half. She picks the block up with her tongs and flips it so that it folds along the split, centers it on the anvil, and hammers it a few dozen more times, squishing the halves back together. Only when the heat glow begins to dim does she look up. "Hm? Oh, hello. How was the Coral Tower today?"

Loeflona's coy smile gives up her game, so Jagtloef plays along. She lifts her voice over the ringing, "Good enough. K'tabro sent four at me today. Lucky me, that's too many for them to coordinate well. I almost have that new shoulder throw figured out."

"Hm."

"So it's for me, then?"

"I haven't the slightest inkling what you're talking about," Loeflona titters.

Jagtloef squints at the dimming ingot. It doesn't seem to have much of a shape yet, besides the inexplicable fold. It might be a bit of an oval. She taps it with her prosthesis' fingertips. "Fine. Keep your secrets. Nebbliht sent a letter; it's on your desk. I haven't read it yet."

"Oh, certainly another offer to get us sopping drunk over marlin steaks."

"So complains the woman who brings the rum."

A quirk of Loeflona's mouth dissolves the space between Jagtloef's navel and throat into a slurry. Her lips part a little, inadvertently. Loeflona sets her hammer on the table behind her and grips the ingot with her tongs, then steps back over to the forge and sets it inside. "Maybe so. Have you found time to ask Mytesyn about our window hinges? My brasswork might be advanced enough for the job, but I would prefer not to do charity work for such a profitable establishment as the Mizzenmast."

"He said he'd put in the order this morn—"

"Oi! Lona, got a quick job here for you." Guildmaster H'naanza's voice spikes across the guild.

Loeflona freezes and her eyes narrow. Turning to Jagtloef, she hisses, "This is my just desserts for explaining the narrative functions of dramatic irony to her." She cocks her head at H'naanza and says, "If you give me an order for three brass window hinges, I will simply shove my head inside the forge."

"Ach, don't be like that! Good practice."

"They are for my godsdamned window."

"Then you'll have nobody to blame but yourself when they squeak." H'naanza slaps the paper work ticket onto Loeflona's worktable. "Your brasswork is sloppy, anyroad. And you've been hogging the forge too much lately; 'bout time to get your cold cuts back to shipshape." She nods down at the forge. "Get the material you needed?"

With a wink at Jagtloef, Loeflona grunts, "I did. And very well. I suppose I don't need to worry about the deadline on these hinges."

"In your own time, but this week. Still a client job, you know," chimes H'naanza before turning on her heel and stomping back over to her post near the front door.

Jagtloef frowns at the forge. Something oval-shaped, folded in half and hammered together… She scratches her head. "Is it a hatchet? I like mine…"

Loeflona pats her shoulder. "Very nearly a decent guess, Jagt." She leans in to tap a kiss against Jagtloef's ear, then squats in front of the forge to peek at the metal heating inside, leaving Jagtloef suppressing a blush as Smydhaemr chuckles at them from his workstation.

"You know I don't like surprises."

"You'll like this one," Loeflona taunts, and she's probably right.

Chapter Text

Jagtloef cringes occasionally at the sight of her wife's marriage scar. It's on the wrong thumb because she wasn't strong enough to protect either of them. She hasn't spoken a word of her shame to anyone, but Loeflona knows.

The crisscrossing wrinkles in Loeflona's thumb are blackened by oil and dust, laying a dark, dun backdrop against which her pale scar contrasts. As she fiddles with one of the dozen tiny hinges in Jagtloef's prosthesis, her fingertips collect little streaks of grime where the oil has leached pigment from the black-dyed leather glove that Jagtloef occasionally wears over it.

Jagtloef is sitting shirtless on a stool in their room, prosthetic harness cinched snugly around her shoulder to run across her back and down her right arm. Loeflona, dressed in a cheap linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows and a baggy pair of Jagtloef's pants, swivels back and forth between the prosthesis and her array of tools on the table. She's been working on this upgrade for nine days and has swallowed more tears of frustration in that time than she has since they first met.

"There," Loeflona grumbles, lips drawn into a flat line. "Try now."

Jagtloef straightens and rolls her left shoulder, manipulating the prosthesis' harness to open and close its fingers. Where the leather strap crosses her upper back, she feels the slight extra pressure from the two new cables Loeflona has installed; they're supposed to articulate her index and middle fingers separately. She cants her left shoulder forward, lifts her right arm, and tries to twitch the index finger alone. "No change."

"Sodding godsdamned hells, this miserable scrap of shite can't—agh!" Loeflona slaps her hands over her eyes and clamps her jaw shut around the brand-new curses she's been picking up from her fellow smiths at Naldiq and Vymelli's. Breath shaking and eyes covered, she asks, "Are you quite sure you have the angle right?"

"Hm." Jagtloef clenches her left hand on her knee to stop herself from reaching out to Loeflona. It'll look like pity, even if it isn't, and Loeflona doesn't need pity right now. She takes a breath and swings her left arm in a slow, full circle, pulling the harness every angle she can manage, gesturing like one of the Maelstrom's semaphore relayers. "Maybe… Ah!" She freezes with her arm outstretched, rotated forward so her palm is facing up, as the middle finger on the prosthesis twitches. She deepens the motion, stretching her ligaments a little, and curls the middle finger against her palm. "Lona, look! Look! I got it!"

Gasping relief, Loeflona uncovers her eyes, revealing black streaks on her forehead where her dirty fingertips pressed, then nearly falls out of her chair laughing. Jagtloef is doubled over on her stool, belly pressed into her knees, left hand extended behind her as if an invisible grappler is holding her in a joint lock. "It's a start," Loeflona wheezes, gesturing for Jagtloef to hold still for a moment while she inspects the harness.

The rest of the morning is whiled away with Jagtloef maintaining a monklike calm while Loeflona's usually even temper threatens to detonate. The blast comes around noon when Jagtloef breaks her silence to say, "I think it's time to ask Stephanivien for help."

"That gawping little monster? Are you insane?" Loeflona shoots to her feet and stomps to the wall, thumps her forehead against it twice, then turns around wild-eyed. "I don't give a damn how smart he his, or how good the Skysteel Manufactory's products are, that is the one place I will not go for—"

"It's just a little flirting…"

"It's awful flirting! It's miserable flirting! The boy," she spits, despite his being several years older than they are, "can't flirt to save his own life, and mark my words, his life will need saving if he tries again! Besides, we hardly have time for another trip to Ishgard, and sending the plans by letter sounds a nightmare." Loeflona ruffles her own hair, clenching her fingers against her scalp and working grease into the roots. Her scar stands out bright against her blackened hands, screaming to Jagtloef that all's askance.

Jagtloef works her tongue across her teeth. "I didn't actually throw away that linkpearl he slipped into your dress pocket."

"After I specifically requested—oh, Jagt, you toy with me. I wouldn't have thought you had it in you!" Loeflona teeters and smacks the back of her head against the wall. "No, I can solve this. I built the damned thing. I can install a new sodding cable in it."

Jagtloef's throat tightens. A tendon in the knee overworked until it tears, a twinge in the spine ignored until a disc slips, a grapple drilled incorrectly until it dislocates a hip. An idea iterated endlessly until it chars the mind. "He'd at least loan you the equipment…"

"Is there something in Ishgard you wish to see? Are you trying to trick me into planning us another trip?" Loeflona's cheeks flush pink as she draws herself up straight. "You practically screamed to leave during our last visit!"

"I didn't—!" No, she did. "But this is—!" She lifts her prosthetic hand. "It's been making you crazy for a week!" Her voice crackles a little when she says, "I don't even—" No, telling Loeflona she doesn't need the improvements is a bad idea. "I just don't like seeing you upset."

The fight sags out of Loeflona and Loeflona sags out of her looming posture. She slumps onto Jagtloef's lap, seating herself on one thigh and leaning against a bare collarbone, and presses her fingers against the side of Jagtloef's ribs. "You're right. I am s—"

"No, I'm sorry." Jagtloef slips her flesh-and-bone fingers through Loeflona's hair, combing out a nascent snarl and scraping grime from the roots. "I know you hate him, but he is good at what he does, and I don't know how else to help you."

Loeflona grumbles into Jagtloef's sternum, "I just need time. And space. And seven million gil's worth of machining equipment."

"Best I can do is two out of three. You'll have to handle the last one."

Loeflona hiccups a laugh at that, but Jagtloef feels heat still flushing her cheeks. She rests her prosthetic hand on Loeflona's thigh, starts humming, and hopes for the best.

Chapter Text

I pop out of the Lifestream at Zenith with Samonji hanging from one hip and three joints in a pouch on the other. All my shit's in order, or at least Tataru says it is, and I have the rest of the month free.

I also have a promise to keep. When Gosetsu handed me this sword, he told me that I'd know when it was time to learn to use it. I still haven't figured out how he managed to be right about so many things. Ten years ago—or four, however long has passed in the Source—he told me that there'd be a time when I wouldn't know where to go or who to be, when I ran out of fights and there was only the space between them, and that he wanted me to carry Samonji with me while I looked for my answers. Never hurts to have a sharp stick on you, either.

I hop my way down the crumbled stairways to the lower-slung islands of the Churning Mists, mean-mugging a few dragons that think about testing me, and hunt for an outcrop or summit where I can really focus.

This is the quietest place I know. If you come here at the right time with the right weather, there's no horizon, no up or down, and you can stare out into an impossibly empty sky. It's not like the black void at the far end of Ultima Thule or the dead well below the world; it's not nothing. It just isn't anything.

The first half-decent spot I find to study Samonji is occupied. Two roegadyn, one dark and one pale, sit at the edge of an island with their legs dangling into open air. A pair of heavy traveling packs lie slumped behind them, half empty, and a tent sits against a short rocky outcrop. A ring of stones marks their campfire, full of enough charcoal that they've probably been here two or three days.

"HEY, ASSHOLES!"

Both of them jump out of their skins. The darker one scrambles to her feet and raises her arms in a familiar stance as the paler one lunges for the packs, pulling out a long, shiny gun like the ones Stephanivien makes.

"Wait, put that down. I know you. Jaggle, or something, right?" She's from the Guild, if my memory and her stance are any good measures. Bigger than I remember, but she's got half as many hands as she did back then. "Jagged… something. Chuchuto talks about you all the time."

Her eyes bulge wide. The pale-skinned woman at her side keeps the gun trained on me. "Jagt, who is this?"

"Pakik?"

"Sure am."

The pale one only lowers her gun as far as my belly. "The Warrior of Light?"

I wiggle my hand. "Sort of. Anyway," I step forward, "How've you been? Didn't expect to find anybody here."

Jagged Something drops her hands and gestures for the pale one to put down the gun. "Lona, it's fine. She's from the Guild."

"I know she is from the Guild," Lona huffs, easing the hammer on her rifle back out of its firing position. "You did share the tale of her mercilessly thrashing you when you had just begun training."

I plop down to sit cross-legged by their firepit, pull out a joint, and snap it alight. "Wasn't that merciless. Mind if I join you?"

"It seems a touch late to protest," Lona grumbles as both of them sit. Jagged Something mirrors my pose while Lona kneels and rests her butt on her heels. "But I suppose proper introductions are in order. I am Loeflona Fraefarwynn; you have already met my wife Jagtloef."

It's one of those untranslated Hellsguard names, untouched by the Sea Wolf accents, so it sounds more like "yacktloof" when I repeat it back, partly because of the joint hanging from the corner of my lips. "Jagtloef? Why's everybody changing their fucking names all the time?"

"Close enough," Jagtloef chuckles. She drapes her wrists over her knees and asks, "What brings you all the way up here? You must've seen the whole world twice over by now, with all the stories I hear about the Scions of the Seventh Dawn."

I blow a raspberry. "Not the whole thing. Gotta, uh…" I pluck my joint from my mouth and pull Samonji from my belt, still in its scabbard, then lay it across my lap. "Gonna learn something new, I guess."

Loeflona's shoulders relax a little. She still has a hand on the gun, which is cute.

"What about you? Wife, you said? Got married?" I glance between them.

Jagtloef beams at Loeflona. "We did. A while ago, now. We've been living in Limsa Lominsa for the past few years, traveling when I can get a break from training the Marauders. This is our third trip to Dravania, but we haven't made it all the way up Sohm Al before."

"Marauders. You wash out of the Guild, then? Hamon give ya the boot?"

Her cheeks go ashen.

"Jagtloef was subject to a deeply unjust series of tragedies that were only marginally her own fault," Loeflona answers.

"The Syndicate exiled me from Ul'dah."

"Huh. Well, d'you wanna go back?" I flick the sputtering end of my joint off the edge of the island.

"What do you mean? They won't let me through the gates." There's a tightness in her eyelids that says she'd sooner die than say no to this.

"Nobody's gonna bother you if you're with me. Those Syndicate fuckers remember my face, every last one of 'em."

The two women look at each other for a long while, and for a second I wonder if they're talking like Kethry and I do.

Jagtloef's tears are in her voice, not her eyes, when she says, "I would owe you the world."

"Too late, already found it. C'mon, let's go!"