Seams
between a rock and a hard place
Mithrigil Galtirglin
Ondore died as he lived; a galleon ever with its prow to the horizon and great respect for the future, but upending all those in his immediate wake.
His funeral was held on Bhujerba, and the continent itself seemed to sag in the sky's embrace. The Aerodome teemed with ships like a corpse with flies, and the city proper wept sweat. The streets were congested as the denizens listened to an audio feed of the rites, the chapel of his great manor closed even to the humble people who revered him.
As for those who were not humble, these still flooded the Marquis' private chapel, the echoes of the Kiltias filling their ears and all mourning with varying degrees of dignity. Hours; divine words; song; then it was done.
The people of Bhujerba will live more or less as ever they had. The title of Marquis will pass to his grandson formally on the morrow, with royals and relatives bearing witness.
"Life after death," Ashe muses, her deep sigh echoing down the deserted corridor, and she steps out of Basch's horned, blue shadow. His footfalls are leaden in his mail, creaking, and he tunes them out to hear her.
She goes on, "The people have this. If you think of them as one thing, one mass, and not as individuals…they live on." They turn a corner, and she reaches out for the tapestried wall, brushing her fingers along the swirling Rozarrian pattern. "They grow and they change but they decline to die."
"It is not only individuals who die," Basch contests, and as ever it sounds unduly harsh within his helmet.
"No," she concedes, "it is not."
He thinks to himself that perhaps on the stage of this world, countries and ways of life are as people, and can wither, be murdered, or fall. They can be disgraced or exalted on the whims of their peers. And surely they can hate, and act upon it, so perhaps they can love in kind.
Ashe's tread is quiet, irregular, passing in and out of the pale light cast by the crystal sconces. She wears black mourning clothes, not unlike those she wore when her first husband died, a decade and a half ago. Her bare waist between skirts and bodice is no longer so girlish nor worrisomely thin, but her skin is still hale and firm, only the faintest proud stretch-marks spidering up her hips. Gold bracelets and half-gauntlets weigh down her hands; she had carried a sword on her back at the funeral, but left it in her room with her veil and her husband. None of these things are ceremony, least of all the sword, Basch remembers, and follows her through the halls.
The windows on this corridor face north, into a courtyard four stories down, black in the absence of the moon. The rooms are on their left, south, flanked by tapestries and vases perched on tables of gleaming wood. It is a hodge-podge of cultures, some living, many dead, and from what Basch can see through his helm each artifact is coddled like a child.
He remembers this hall. He has patrolled this hall. He tells Ashe so, and she smiles back at him, her hand resting on the knob of a door they both know well. "Come," she says, and opens it; he takes it from her by the door's edge and steps aside, holding it for her.
The view has not changed since she was a child, and the parted curtains on the picture window reveal a frame within a frame, the glittering south wings of the palace outstretched on the far side of the glass. The dark sky seeps between the massive feathers and even through the visor of his helmet Basch knows how stark it is. He steps in behind her and reaches out a hand, to flip a familiar switch—Princess, it is far too late for you to be abed—and the muted crystals that light this room awaken gently and groggily, like old women.
It is no longer girt for a child, or even a teenager. None of the things that Ashe had prized so over the years remain. The armoire and night-tables, a dark Mosphoran brown, are empty of her stuffed animals and game-figurines; the carpet is years untracked, unblemished by discarded sandals or trailed bathwater; the coverlets and canopy on the bed are plain and ivory, not the deep blue Ashe had always demanded.
"How long has it been since you stayed here?" he asks, to turn her thoughts from the present.
She stares out the delicate muslin curtains at the overcast, black sky. "Uncle Halim insists…insisted," she corrects, "on Al-Cid's and my staying in larger quarters. I've…" she begins to clarify, but never does.
--
"What?"
"I said I was with Eva last night," Noah answered, smugly squinting at the pages of his book. "You remember, Sisi's friend Eva?"
Basch stared for a moment, tight-lipped and considerate, then went back to unlacing his mud-caked boots.
The twins had only recently turned fifteen, but that day had seen another Archadian offensive and passed uncelebrated in the truest sense of the word. Between the casualties and the reconstructive efforts, something so inconsequential as an anniversary of an event past cowed before the merciless present.
Nudging the boots toward the door with his sweat-rank heel, Basch rolled his aching shoulders, shrugged out of his socks, and crossed toward the breakfront they kept their shoes in. Eva, he thought with only the vaguest of attention to the concept. He did not rightly remember her, but perhaps it was none of his concern.
Noah turned a page, his elbow digging into his mattress and eliciting a faint creak. "You need not cover up for me," he said with a dismissive inflection. "Father already knows."
With a slight nod, Basch excised a pair of sandals from the cabinet and set them down before stepping in.
--
Unclasping his helmet from under his chin, Basch rolls his shoulders uneasily and lifts it off, then sets it atop the decorative table beside him. He glances down and ascertains that there is naught to be shoved aside, and then remembers why. "Forgive me," he chuckles, low, "I seem to have infringed upon Angel's place." He smiled lightly at the memory of the heirloom doll, fashioned as a holy knight, that Ashe had received from the Marquis upon her sixth birthday, and had ever stood guard on the inside of the room while Basch or Vossler or whomever else remained without.
"Angel!" she exclaims, whipping around to face him, them perhaps, at the door. "Is he still—"
To hear her voice so youthful again wrenches him a little, especially as he shakes his head 'no'. He looks away from her, over her shoulder at the window, and the light has cast him a reflection. It perplexes him, to see in the muddled image of this room a man, gaunt, pale, and careworn-cheeked, golden hair short and greying, girt in full plate with the cape of a Judge Magister, with an Archadian helm on the table beside him. He has not looked himself for a long time, and in that moment he no longer feels so either.
"I suspect he is still in the palace somewhere," Ashe mutters through a false smile. "I shall have someone seek him out."
Basch watches as she wanders through the room, staring at pictures long since taken down and toys stored away. She lifts her hands to caress phantom objects, rests her fingertips on the polished surfaces of furniture that no longer smells of her. Her long skirts catch on the corners of the raised crystal sconces that rise from the floor, and the light passes through the delicate fabric, the moments of shadow cool on Basch's face. A pause, and then she weaves toward the curtains, reaching out to pass her knuckles over them as if they will ripple and fade if she touches them further.
"Do you recall…" she begins to ask, in a beckoning whisper.
"Hide-and-Seek?" Basch finishes. "Of course."
Trepidation gone, Ashe wraps herself in one of the curtains, whirling a bit like a dancer. She hides her face in the thick, ivory cloth, and then the rest of her, save her sandaled feet. Nearly giggling, she throws her voice into that of an old nurse, "Oh my, where on earth has the Princess got to?"
"I've seen neither pelt nor penny of her, ma'am," he answers with a dramatic shrug. The armor on his shoulders feels suddenly unfamiliar and unwelcome.
"You sound older," Ashe chides in her own voice, and peeks out of the curtains. She looks him up and down, and her smile is less worn, more summoned. "You've fallen into attention."
Basch regards himself, and agrees. "I cannot help but remember," he apologizes, and cannot help but smile either.
As if to approve him, Ashe excises herself from the curtains. The heavier fabric tugs at her bodice and clasps protectively around her skirt. "Years…" she whispers, glancing back out the window.
"When was the last time you stayed in this room?" Basch finds himself asking again, perhaps to distract himself.
"I was sixteen," she answers this time. "I believe Vo—Captain Azelas was the one sent with me then. It was right before Rasler…" she adds quickly, diluting the venom of one name with the salt of another.
Basch nods and is silent, and Ashe continues to bear down upon her caravans of thought with menial observations. "Uncle must have replaced these," she says of a night-table, on the window side of the bed. Something about her posture calls him away from the door, and he steps toward her, his armor clanging even on the carpet. The sound seems to startle her, and if it startles her than so would others hear it. He reaches behind him, and closes the door.
When he turns to regard her again, her shoulders are lowering and something in her cheeks has softened. She strokes the canopies of her bed, and the starch on them crinkles like a knife on stale bread. "I want to be here tonight," she says.
Still halfway across the room, Basch stares a moment, then slowly nods. "Shall I send someone for—"
"No," she interrupts, so quick it seems to unnerve even her. Slower, she clarifies, "I…want to be here." Her meaning clears with her eyes, "Then, really," before husbands and sons and betrayal and murder and everything tarnished.
He understands, and not more than she knows.
She grasps a bedpost, the same way she holds, held, her weapons while casting a spell. "Take off your cape," she says, or asks, he is not certain. "And your gauntlets at least," she adds quicker. "You…do not look like yourself."
As he obeys, he sees in her face an echo, an expression he has not seen but knows she wore. He unlaces his cape, and readily at first, some part of him longing to be free of it. But as he folds it, he catches her eyes again, and they are defiant and troubled. Her hand slides down the bedpost, languid and hesitant, and her feet lead forward in protest of words no one has said. He has seen this before, the eyes of her trial, of weeks torn between vengeance and peace, the throbbing of her blood and the security of irrevocable obligation.
Again, he understands, and not more than she knows.
--
She was twelve years old but did not look it. Nor did she sound it, nor act it, nor give any indication that she was straddling the razor's edge between child- and womanhood. In fact, Margaret gave Basch every impression of being neither child nor woman at all, but something fey or divine, removed from the banal and caustic cares of the waking world.
From the outset he refused to call her Gretchen. She favored that. It also helped her to differentiate Basch from Noah, to whom she was indisputably a little girl.
At the first, she followed Basch; soon, Basch was following her. Her father spoke to his, and perhaps they may have approved something, but Archadia threatened the horizon anew and the council turned to one of war.
And she had been the one to come to him, to stand on her toes and kiss him, to hiss against his skin commands no child ought convey, and he, being seventeen, obeyed them. She cried, afterward, and Basch, uncomfortable and afraid, swore that they were tears of pain, not parting.
--
She decides.
Throwing her hand from the bedpost she runs to and against him, and pulls him down to her lips by the back of his neck. He suspected, recognized, but the kiss still cows him, the immediacy and the ardor but most that she actually is. His gauntlets shudder at her sides, hesitating at the small of her back.
The chill of the metal makes her shiver and he gasps away, parting his hands so quick to rattle his cuirass. "The armor," she breathes against his lips, and he feels her hands tugging at the left-side clasps.
He protests, "Your—"
She kisses him again, urgent and almost violent, one of her hands like a sword to the back of his neck and the other on his cheek. The hand on his cheek is light and gentle, wondering at his silvering stubble even as her lips and tongue conquer him outright. Her lips are unpainted and she tastes the way her armor once smelt, of fresh riverwater and effort and Mist.
"My lady," he gasps when their lips click apart for air, "I beg you reconsider—"
"I have," she states plain, grabbing his left gauntlet between them and flicking the clasps. "I won't."
Before he can protest further she divests him of a gauntlet and a glove, and kisses him again even as she starts on the other, pulling him down to her by his wrist. He stumbles forward, and in his confusion catches their approach to the bed, from the corner of his addled eye. The other gauntlet thumps against the carpet and the glove a moment after, and he presses his hands into her back again, to stay her or to touch her, even he is uncertain. His palms meet half cloth and half skin, and she is warm and her muscles sure. He staggers when she pries at his cuirass again, her kiss flagging with the concentration.
His voice is hoarse and his lips bruising. "Your—" husband, son, something he tries to say.
She parts the seam of the breastplate. "Not now." The armor slackens against his far shoulder and she snaps another clasp, and it echoes off the polished wood and glass. "Then." She tugs at the armor, away and down, and it catches on his sword-belt. "Before," she clarifies, and has her hands on the belt's buckle, damp and impulsive.
He grabs her by the wrists.
She turns on him, indignant and panting. "Basch." His name is a command.
His chest heaves, and the loose clasps of the armor drum against the plate.
The belt unclasps so loudly that he feels it and it clatters to the floor, first one sword then the other, then the chattering buckle against his greaves. He still holds her wrists, perhaps tighter, and she glares at him, defiant, longing. "We are doing this," she says, and widens the breach in his cuirass, prying it off his shoulders and leather shirt.
He feels her pulse and lets go of her wrists, almost throwing himself away from her. The armor and her weight pulls at his shoulder and he stoops, a hand on the brace behind his left knee. He tries to keep her eyes, but she is intent on the armor, and he is pusillanimous, hand trembling above his greave. It thumbs the catch, unbidden.
She pries the cuirass asunder in earnest, and it slips down its tentpeg-balance on his far arm. In a beat she is against him, her tongue and teeth hard under his left ear, and he is moaning, his shoulders against her chest and his knees weak. Something like a growl crawls under his skin from her lips and when he can open his eyes again she is kneeling in front of him, his leg between hers and the buckles that hold up his greaves snapping like bones.
Words abandon him.
She tugs the armor off his boot and shoves it aside, and starts on the other, her hand tangling with his where it had faltered. He struggles to clasp her hand in his, and some kind of remonstration escapes his lips but he knows not what he says.
"Basch, you're sworn to protect me," she snaps along with the last clasp of the last greave. "Do it," she commands; from herself, from the future, from becoming a concept, he understood. But she slides herself up him and knocks the half-open cuirass down his right shoulder, grabs him by his sides over his ribs and kisses him, works her thigh between his legs and even that understanding is shoved aside.
It overwhelms him and he lets the armor fall off his shoulder, presses his hands into her back and is kissing her, and it has been decades since he has kissed and so it is ungainly and new and goes straight to his blood. Hers is a conqueror's tongue and its edge is halting, and every time he tries to pry himself from it her lips are there, refusing to let him end it. He hears the warning buzz of zipper teeth and cool air flaps against his chest through his undershirt, but then her hands are there against the knots of his skin, and he is tugging at her clothing as well. She evades him; he realizes they are approaching the bed again, and that she is guiding him there, and he curses himself for it but cannot bring himself to stop her.
Perhaps, he considers absently, he does not want to stop her.
She pulls the leather shirt down his arms, and writhes as the sleeves blunder—on or off, he is not sure—but she tugs it off and it spins him half around. The back of his knees brace against the mattress and his shoulder hits something along the way, one of the canopy-posts, he does not know. Something tightens around him and her hands are on his hipbones, down the front of his pants and undershorts and her thigh is against his groin and that topples him onto the bed. He runs his hands up the back of her shirt and only then realizes that she is on top of him, still insistent at his lips and soft against his half-exposed skin and under his palms. Heat spreads through him and still the tips of her fingers set his skin crawling with shudders, and in his alarm his hand slips past the waistband of her skirt and he wonders how to divest her of it.
"—Ashe!" he gasps into her mouth, his eyes shooting open in what has to be fear.
He watches her sandals fall to the floor, and she twists her hips. She straightens her back and trails a finger under his waistband—and she smirks, and he has never seen that countenance before—before slipping her hand up her own skirt. His breath catches in his throat and he has no idea what her movements mean, until she straightens against him and he sees the white cloth dangling off her ankle. "I miss you," she breathes under his ear before she kisses it right where the scar has split him, whip-harsh and stinging.
His hands are shaking as she guides them past the bunched up fabric of her skirt to her thighs, and the tremors pass from his skin to hers. The muscles of her inner thigh shudder and twitch and her lips trail down his cheek, raking against his day's-beard. Blood throbs in his ear and in the wake of her kiss, and then she turns her knee at the breach of his legs and he finds himself grabbing onto her, anchoring himself in the curves of her flesh.
He can almost hear the vessels bursting under his chin over the zipper of his pants.
--
Nothing mattered any more but home.
They were ever on the move, pitching camp for only days at a time, playing like ants at warfare or children at robber-baron and knight-errant. The militia coagulated from the spent blood weaving out of fallen towns and the ashes of burned villages, gathering on the mountainsides like leaves in the gutter. They amassed and acted and sometimes divided when their strength was sufficient, like jellyfish and germs.
And like a disease they assaulted their own cities, recovering and recalibrating them. Where they succeeded, they purged the reek of Archadia from Landis' walls but could not resurrect what had already fallen; in their haste to claim, there was no time to create.
Nineteen; the twins were no longer men, but commanders. Even when the men of the resistance caroused and celebrated, if there was aught to celebrate, the twins abstained. So went their mantra, their countersign, their prayer to gods who seemed to have forsaken them; nothing mattered any more but home.
--
With a strangulated noise somewhere between a moan and a growl, a spike peaks through Basch and he arches, bucks against Ashe so suddenly that he near throws her off and not because he wants to. She yanks down his pants and the undershorts with them just far enough, and they crumple against the top of his boots. The cold air and the sweat of her hands still callused after all these years and the force of it all and that it's Ashe catches up with him and he is running his hands down her thighs and he did not tell himself to do that.
Through half-slit eyes he sees her, intent on her own hand. Her fingertips brush against the fair hair between his legs the same way they had tapestries and curtains, up the rising underside of his penis to the straining arc of parted skin at the tip, the barest of touches and still it overpowers him, and he slides back along the bed and out of her reach, his breath ragged and hands still gripping her thighs, or higher, now, he has not the presence of mind to. She crawls onto the bed, over him, and her hands are everywhere at once, and she kisses down his chest to his hips and rests her chin on his abdomen, trying to catch his wild, unfocused eyes.
It occurs to him, the idea of her tongue instead of her hands between his legs. And it makes him shiver and disturbs him but that he wants it disturbs him more.
And he swerves, and with her legs out of reach he has found her half-bare back again and cannot help but palm her sides, her ribs, the hollows under her breasts—she has scars, from age or wounds or childbirth he cannot tell—and he remembers who she is and tries to stagger to his elbows, to sit up, to stop her and this and himself.
Instead, she pulls him up to her by the cloth of his undershirt, into a violent kiss. He darts away from her, half-hobbled knees bashing together, and his back hits the headboard and his shoulders the wall behind it. Faint fingernails dig into his lower back, her hands between him and the pillows, one of her nails catching on a prison scar.
His eyes flare open and he is suddenly conscious, and she is straddling his thighs.
She is Ashelia, the queen of Dalmasca, and Basch has been her sworn sword since she was a child.
She has not been a child for a very long time.
She has a King-Consort and they together have a son, four years old.
But this is everything, this heat, the force of her lips and her fingernails and her skin, the woman-more-than-a-symbol that he loves and has shamed himself for time and time again, and that she feels this for him, trusts him this completely.
Either way lies pain, Basch realizes, in the part of him that still sees reason. He can end this now, save her honor and his, protect her from herself and whatever will come of this, and nothing good can come of this. And the other path is of ignominy and fear and her pride shattered, and her trust in him (in everything) slain, this time never to be rekindled, for the fault would truly be his own.
He has walked that path before. He could do so again.
He refuses to.
Ashe guides him into her, and he buries his face in her shoulder, kissing her where her collar meets her neck. Her hips roll against him and she claws at his, and he tightens about her back, the wrinkling cloth of his sleeves and the hem of her bodice slapping against their soaked skin. He thrusts up and she counters it, and again his back hits the headboard and his shoulders the wall, the paint chalk-slick against his scars. And everything about her surrounds him, even the furrowed gasps in her throat, and he forgets that he is hobbled by his own clothing and pinned against a wall—or perhaps he doesn't forget, but it does nothing but encourage him. They clash and grind, and he loses himself in it, not so much kissing her neck as panting against it. He clamors for some control, any control at all, and grabs her hips and she barely lets him, already quickening her surges against him.
And for a moment, he is seventeen again.
He can hear her stifling her own cries, the way she used to beside him in battle, refusing to be aided even in direst need, and his wordless, bestial snarls rumble between the bones of her chest. She shudders and flags and halts herself against him, rising on her knees and lowering herself slowly, catching herself shallowly on the tip of his penis and just lingering there, the low lips of her skin pressing back the fold of his. Suddenly cold air streaks through the wetness of his skin and makes him shake and choke, throwing his head back and it raps against the wall. Ashe bears down on him and kisses him, sliding lower and somehow tighter against him and clamping her knees against his hips. She twists almost sideways, rolling one hip forward and if he were more lucid it would remind him of her sword-stance, but all he can do is try to part his knees or find his footing and fail to, and a faint whimper sneaks past his rattling, low breaths and into her mouth. Her pace accelerates and something around him coils and he writhes, unable to restrain what is almost a scream, a grunting explosion that makes him wonder if he has died.
He lets go inside of her and slams back into the headboard. A few desperate seconds after, she throws herself backward, trapping her hands under his thighs and arching her back with a determined gasp. Half-raised from his hips, she suddenly falls back to him, and the sultry heat that surrounds him makes his hair stand on end.
Minutes, years pass, and even then the world has not righted itself around him. He is still embracing her, albeit loosely, his arms sliding down the sweat of her back, and when he tries to open his eyes the colors of the bed's canopies assault his senses and the black mourning cloth that Ashe is still wearing looms closer. His pants are tangled against his calves and his feet feel like lead in his boots, knotted and caged.
She sinks against him, and he slides off the headboard to the covers, wrapping himself around her as best she can. But she slides off of him with a wet hiss, and lies facing him, burying her hands in his hair, screwing her eyes shut before he can catch them and turning away the way she had the first time she beheld the grey in it. Hesitant—hesitant, still—he reaches up to hers, the strands parted piecemeal and clinging to the back of her neck, and he runs his fingers through it, once, twice. When he makes a move to do that again, she nestles closer to him, and he lets his hand fall flaccid to her neck.
In his arms, her breathing evens; his still echoes raggedly though the room. She hides her face in the soaked cloth of his undershirt, and Basch is unsure if it is sweat or tears plastering against his skin.