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Never had Annette done a significant amount of traveling on foot. She hadn’t done much traveling, period. Her family was based in the Dominic lands, yes, but the trip between their seat and Fhirdiad wasn’t such a long one by carriage, and that road was well-trodden enough that it was no longer strange to her. It didn’t count.
That trip to Gronder Field had taken three days by cart, though packed into said cart with all of her friends, it actually hadn’t been that bad. She and Lysithea had gotten a lot of reading done on that trip, though it had been to the tune of Lysithea’s grumbles about the inconvenience of being dragged away from their studies, while she constantly adjusted the hat that kept the sun off of her pale face. Annette really didn’t travel very often, and it had been fun to see new places, even if the sight had not been a lingering one. She wondered, sometimes, if the opportunity would ever come again, and if she would find those lands intact, or ravaged by the chaos that had Fódlan by the throat.
But all this wasn’t entirely relevant to Annette’s current situation. Traveling on foot. There was little in her life that could have prepared her for making the journey from Fhirdiad to Garreg Mach on foot. The fact that they were currently making their way on foot through a warzone made it worse, though if Annette was given the choice of a peaceful walk, or a carriage, she would likely have chosen the carriage. Fighting was, at least, something she was accustomed to.
Annette had reached a level of footsore so extreme that her feet didn’t even feel sore anymore. Her feet didn’t feel much of anything anymore. Mercedes had warned her to bring at least one extra pair of shoes with her, and Annette began to wonder if her feet weren’t going to split open the way the right shoe of her original pair had split open after a week. Her feet just felt… Her legs just felt…
By the time this was over, she was going to either be significantly more muscular than she was before, or down a leg or two. Annette wasn’t sure which.
It made sleeping in something that wasn’t a soft bed a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.
Not that she would have minded a soft bed.
“We’re sleeping in the barn again?” Annette asked, without much in the way of enthusiasm, as Mercedes emerged from the house they had found sitting off the road, barely in sight for all the pine trees that surrounded it. Mercedes had a bundle of cloth in her arms and wore an expression that, as far as Annette was concerned, did not exactly lend itself to hope.
“Yes, we are.” Mercedes, meanwhile, was considerably more philosophical about it, though she didn’t look especially overjoyed at the prospect. In a flash, though, her lips were twitching, a sly gleam lighting up her eyes. “Would you like me to check the hay for you, Annie?”
Annette shuddered. “They didn’t tell you there’s rats in there, did they? Please tell me they didn’t say there’s rats. I’m not sleeping in there if there’s rats; I’d rather sleep outside.”
“Oh, hush, silly; I was just teasing.” As she proceeded on towards the barn that bordered the woods, Mercedes added airily, “You know there’s always something to be found in a barn, particularly in winter. The woodsman didn’t say anything about rats in particular, but we could be sharing our bed with a vixen and her cubs tonight. Or maybe a porcupine? Have you ever seen a porcupine, Annie? Their quills are terribly sharp, especially if you happen to roll over onto them during the night.”
“Mercie, that’s not funny!” But Annette was laughing as she chased after her, able to ignore the ache in her legs for a few moments, the ghosts of her laughs lingering as silver clouds in the frigid air. It had snowed briefly that morning, and the light dusting of white crunched underfoot so loudly in the near-silence of the clearing.
The barn was only dimly illuminated by the rust-crimson light that spilled in through the windows on the second level. There was a single horse in a stall, a dappled brown mare with a thick green blanket wrapped around her barrel; all of the other stalls were empty. There was farm equipment gathering dust in a far corner; Annette could make out spots of rust that gleamed like old blood.
(She tried not to think of the state they’d found the last farmstead they happened across in.)
And, of course, the hayloft was on the second level of the barn, with a rickety old ladder the only way to get up into it. Annette’s legs wobbled just looking at it.
Oh, well. Annette had no intention of seriously trying to make her bed on the cold, hard ground. (Unless there were rats. In that case, all bets were off.) Mercedes climbed up first, with such ease that Annette really had to wonder just what kind of daily chores Mercedes had done when she was still living in that church. Sure, it had been years since she last lived there, but Mercedes seemed far more accustomed to brutally long walks than Annette would have guessed. It was, Annette thought moodily, as she struggled up the ladder, calves screaming protest all the while, just as obvious that Annette had had no such experiences.
“Well, I’m exhausted,” Annette declared, flopping down onto the hay. She rested her head against the side of Mercedes’s thigh (much warmer than the hay, and much more welcome, too) as Mercedes dug around the bundle she’d emerged from the house with. “I don’t know if the walking’s getting harder, of if I’m just getting weaker. Maybe it’s both.”
Mercedes paused from whatever it was she was doing long enough to smile down at Annette. “I don’t think that’s true. We’re making much better time than we were when we first set out from Fhirdiad.”
“Are you sure? I could swear I’ve slowed down.”
“Oh, yes. If you’d slowed down, we’d still be miles away from here.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
There was silence for a minute as Mercedes turned her attention back to the bundle and Annette pressed her cheek into the soft wool of Mercedes’s skirt. She couldn’t decide what she wanted more: to dig some of the food they’d brought (though that was mostly gone, in favor of the food they’d bought along the way), or find some way to ask Mercedes to stroke her hair for a bit. Whenever she’d done it before, it had always been unprompted; Annette wasn’t sure how to ask…
Both had their appeal, and both were going to have to wait until after Annette had had a minute to stop feeling like every muscle in her body was about to hand in its resignation.
“Oh, here it is!”
Annette looked up, turning a quizzical gaze on Mercedes, who had pulled something from that… much larger than it had appeared at first bundle. A… smaller bundle, as it turned out, though unlike the larger, this one was bound with thick white yarn. What was that? she wondered, just as her stomach took the time to growl its displeasure.
Mercedes giggled. “I’d say this was just in time. We have to give these blankets back in the morning, but the woodsman gave us some food, too, and to keep.”
Loath as she was to move her head, Annette propped herself up on her elbows, and ignoring the protests given by what felt like every inch of her stiff, aching body, sat up properly. “That was kind of him.” She eyed the packet as Mercedes attempted to undo the knot. “What did he give us?”
“Hmm. Well, I saw him pack some salted pork and hard cheese away for us.” Finally, the knot unfurled and Mercedes opened the packet. Annette craned her head to get a better look. “We have some biscuits and sausages, and I think these are dried mushrooms, and… Oh!” Mercedes’s eyes lit up. “Dried Noa fruit.”
Neither of them had thought to pack dried fruits when they were packing up the food they intended to last them through the first week of their travels—though Annette thought she could be excused, just this once, as she was trying to avoid attracting her grandmother’s attention to what she was doing. Very few of the places willing to sell food to them (or give it away, in cases such as this one) had fruit to spare, fresh or preserved. Annette hadn’t realized how much she had missed it until her mouth started to water just looking at it—and she didn’t even like dried fruit all that much.
“We’d better eat the biscuits and the fruit first,” Annette said, and not just because they promised a taste very different from what she’d experienced since they left Fhirdiad. “They’ll spoil more quickly, won’t they?”
Mercedes shrugged as she handed off two of the biscuits and cut the lump of preserved pulp in half with a small knife that had been packed with the food. “I don’t really care if they spoil more quickly or not, Annie.” She smiled down at her half of the fruit. “I’ve been craving fruit for so long, I’d eat it no matter what.”
Annette laughed. “That’s funny; I feel the same way!”
The pulp of the Noa fruit had been preserved in sugar, and the overpowering sweetness of it was such that Annette’s head spun for a few seconds after popping the first bite into her mouth. By contrast, the biscuit was dry, possessing little flavor to recommend itself with, but at least it hadn’t turned. Food in hand, Annette had no problem indulging her complaining stomach; the first biscuit was gone in moments.
All the same…
“I would love stir-fry right now.”
“Or some sweet buns. All the bakeries in Fhirdiad are full of them this time of year.”
Annette sighed. “Anything hot, really. We haven’t had hot food since that first inn we stopped in after leaving Fhirdiad.” And then, the deeper they delved into ‘contested’ territory, the more likely they were to find inns standing empty, completely abandoned, the question of what had become of the proprietors one Annette wasn’t certain she wanted an answer to. “But beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.”
Mercedes frowned pensively. “No.” She shook her head, as if throwing off some internal cobwebs. “No, they can’t.”
Annette peered at her out of narrowed eyes, but Mercedes was attending too closely to her supper for Annette to catch her gaze. And honestly, the rest of Annette’s supper was calling to her. (A few new songs had started rattling around in her brain since leaving Fhirdiad, though she’d had little opportunity to try to put them into words. More often than not, they’d been in situations where raising her voice in song would have been a danger, even—or especially—after settling in for the night.)
They ate, and finished eating, and still, they were silent, as the light outside turned from rust-crimson to a bruised, ugly purple. Annette leaned back into the hay, taking one of the blankets the woodsman had provided (it would be nice to have more than usual) and pulling it up over herself. It was blue with yellow appliqué in the shapes of stars, a thick and scratchy wool that made Annette long for something softer. She knew better than to kick it off.
“Annette?” Mercedes was still sitting up, craning her head so she could look out of the window further down the loft. “I have a request, if you’re not to sleepy to talk.”
“I’m fine. What is it?”
“Well, if we keep up the pace we’ve set these past few days, then sometime tomorrow afternoon, we should reach the church where my mother lives. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay there a few days before we set out again.”
Suddenly, their mad dash away from the monastery five years ago was back in the forefront of Annette’s mind, looming over her like a Demonic Beast. It was a few moments before she could quell those memories and push them back down into the darkness of the back of her mind. “I don’t mind it. It must be ages since you and Lady Constanza last got to visit with each other.”
The last (and, as it happened, first) time Annette had met Mercedes’s mother had been on their way back to Fhirdiad from Garreg Mach. The road had taken them by the church where Lady Constanza lived, and the group being low on food, they’d needed to stop there for a while to try and get their bearings. Dimitri had wanted to press on, but even he had needed the rest by the time they got there.
Lady Constanza had been… Annette had never formed any concrete ideas in her head of what she should expect Mercedes’s mother to be like. Mercedes didn’t talk about her family often, even when they had attended the School of Sorcery together—and that had been before Mercedes was adopted by the man Annette refused to call her father. Just a few passing comments here and there, little bits of fluff that never gave away anything of substance.
Annette had had precious little information with which to piece together expectations of what Mercedes’s mother would be like. Perhaps that was why she’d been so surprised when she actually met the woman.
It wasn’t that she and Mercedes were wildly different from one another in looks, or personality. Actually, looking into Lady Constanza’s face had given Annette what she thought was a pretty accurate impression of what Mercedes would come to look like in about twenty years or so. But the differences in personality were, while not overt at first glance, strong enough to be jarring.
Lady Constanza was a bit rougher in speech than Mercedes. And while she seemed reasonably happy having taken religious orders and become a nun, she wasn’t nearly as philosophical about the way her life had gone after her first husband died as Mercedes. That anger just oozed out of her like pus from a blister, even when she wasn’t talking about it. That much had been obvious to Annette, even after having only been around her for a few days. What must it have been like for Mercedes, after being around her for so many years?
Meanwhile, oblivious to Annette’s reverie, Mercedes was nodding. “Hmm, yes. And it was much easier to stay in contact with her when I was attending the Officers Academy; we haven’t been able to send word to each other too often since then.”
Annette looked over at her, frowning. “Why is that? I know there are checkpoints on the postal routes; I’ve heard stories about Cornelia’s men opening people’s mail. But if they don’t find anything in it they think might be a threat, they let the mail move on.”
“Oh, no, this goes back to before the war started.” Mercedes smiled, and there was a hint of something in her smile that it took Annette a moment or two to identify properly as bitterness. “When that man adopted me, I remember sending my first letter to my mother, and never getting a reply. I asked him about it, and he said we had never received any such letter, but soon after that, our steward came to me and told me that my adoptive father had received a letter from my mother, addressed to me, and destroyed it.” She sighed, adjusting the veil on her cap; she’d lost one of the pins holding it in place a while back, and had been having trouble with it ever since. “I was able to send letters without his noticing fairly easily, but it was troublesome finding a way to receive her letters without my adoptive father intercepting them.”
Annette stared at Mercedes. Then, she stared up at the ceiling. That was…
“Remind me again,” she said, conversationally, “why we haven’t burned his house down yet?”
Jarringly enough, Mercedes responded to that with a laugh. “Oh, silly, don’t you remember? If the house burned down, all of our servants would have no way to earn money to support their families, and he’d just use the insurance money to build a bigger house.”
Annette grimaced. “Oh, yeah. Still… We should do… something.”
Mercedes smiled gently down at her. “Later, Annie. He’s not important enough for us to trouble ourselves over him right now.”
That was fair enough. They had far bigger things to worry about than one greedy, selfish man back in Fhirdiad.
The light was fading fast, from bruised purple to the dense blue-black indigo that to Annette had always seemed so much darker in winter than during any other time of year. Mercedes spread out one of the blankets from their packs over the hay, giving Annette just enough time to roll on top of it before she went for the other ones and laid them down over top of the both of them. Like this, it wasn’t warm, not exactly, but they had shelter from the wind and more blankets than usual, so Annette couldn’t find much to complain about. She’d already worn out all of her complaints during the first week of their trip; no sense in resurrecting them now.
Something else was bothering her, though.
“I…” Annette sighed heavily, and shifted closer to Mercedes in the quiet, frigid dark. “…I wonder if the others will show up.”
“Why do you say that?” Already, Mercedes sounded sleepy, and it just begged more questions about what sort of conditions she had lived in over the course of her life.
“Well…” Annette blinked hard, the corners of her eyes prickling a bit, though she couldn’t be sure if it was emotion, or just fatigue. “His Highness is dead.”
Her father had returned to Faerghus after the fall of the monastery, but he had gone straight to Fhirdiad, and never contacted her or her mother. Sometimes, Annette wondered if she should begrudge Dimitri that. It was stupid to begrudge a dead man anything, but in the end, he’d had more of her father’s care and attention than she had, and the knowledge squeezed her heart like thorny vines: sharp, tight, and impossible to be rid of unless you wanted to rip it all up by the root, and the root was Annette’s love for her father, so the idea of ridding herself of it was not to be borne.
If I could just see him again…
“His Highness is dead, and we don’t know what happened to Dedue.” Annette waved a hand in the air. “We keep hearing all those different stories about what happened to Ingrid—her father says she’s dead, but apparently someone saw her in Fraldarius territory. Sylvain and Felix are fighting the Dukedom armies with their fathers.” She peered at Mercedes’s barely-visible form. “And have you heard from Ashe at all since we got back to Fhirdiad? Have you seen him, even once? I haven’t.” She let out a shuddering breath. “I’m just worried that we’re going to make it to the monastery, and we’ll be the only ones there. We’ll be alone there.”
A hand settled into Annette’s hair, and oh, she hadn’t need to ask for it tonight after all. “So what if we are?” Mercedes asked softly, running her fingers through Annette’s hair. “We all promised to be there, but so much has changed since that day. Times change, Annie, and we have to change with them. Even if they can’t make it, we shouldn’t hold it against them. We’ll still be there. We can still pray for their safety, and Dimitri’s peace.”
Annette leaned her head into Mercedes’s hand. “I’d like more to do than just that,” she muttered. “I hate feeling so helpless. Times change, sure, but I don’t like the way the world’s been changing.”
Mercedes bent over her and kissed her forehead. Her lips were cold, just shy of uncomfortably so. “Then we pray to the goddess for guidance. With so many troubles in this land, we’re bound to have something fall into our laps. We just have to wait until we reach the monastery.”
Annette nodded. She wondered if they would find their answers there, or if that abandoned place would just pose her another question, and one she had no answer to at all. For now, sleep, and pray her legs were still working when she woke up the following morning.