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The Emperor paces her room with such grim grandeur that Hubert scents war on the wind, yet he has heard of no foreign disturbances opening a door to further their aspirations. Domestic, then. Hubert narrows his eyes as he reads the tightness of that imperial jaw below the dancing lavender of her flickering gaze. No, it is a matter more private still. Perhaps that coastal summer home she fancies has finally gone on the market, and she fears the impropriety of paying twice its offering? As if there is any need for her to resort to haggling on her own accord.
“How may I assist?” he asks with a dutiful bow. She need only say the word.
Edelgard stops in her tracks. Her hands clench once, and then she fixes him with the very same look of impossible defiance that sent two children on the path to planning a continental war. “Hubert. I’m going to write an opera.”
“A…lofty goal, Your Highness.” Defiance of the art community is not quite so damning an ambition.
“Yes. It will be among the greatest difficulties of my life. To compete with the accomplishments of generations for primacy in his eyes…”
With a sigh, she turns and gazes out the window most poignantly, the light caressing the curve of her profile with a gentle aura. It is the same lovesick horror that has claimed her ever since Ferdinand went down on both knees many years prior, knocked back by the force of her axework and spilling proposals from his lips instead of blood. She turned him down, yet the seeds of peace took their root in her, and now in a calmer world their affections inch towards a stubborn bloom. Hubert could not be happier for them.
(Though he hears again their voices asking, too gently, whether he knows how to be happy at all.)
“While it would be my pleasure to aid your literary conquest, your victory is already won. The only star within his eyes is you.”
“It will be won when there is a ring on his finger,” she huffs.
Ah.
A certain giddiness kicks up a gallop within his chest, and even Hubert cannot repress a slight smile. “You need only ask him. Surely he would fall to happy weeping at his desk, or the tea gardens, or even mid-muck in the stables.”
“Of course he would. That is the point. Never was there a man easier to please and harder to understand!”
Hubert, as the man she finds easiest to understand and hardest to please, wisely holds his tongue.
“How many ways has he pictured the moment? That first proposal of his—I should have accepted. That was genuine, when all I saw were ancestral chains. And now I must outdo his every imagined glory to achieve something with even a quarter’s weight.”
“So it must be the opera. That is where his heart remains most open. I will write a story more compelling than any other, and—paint the entire setting! Or a cameo of myself. Ah!” She nods to herself. “I will paint a cameo of him, and have him scandalously catch me wearing it. At the opera. During an aria performed by His Princess.”
“I believe she’s retired,” Hubert offers mildly.
Edelgard’s eyes light up as she forges onward. “A private performance! A one-act opera penned by his beloved for his childhood beloved? No. I cannot have him paying more attention to Manuela than to myself. Therefore I must perform. I will sing to his cameo, which will make him so jealous he storms on stage to demand to see the face of the man I love! His own face!”
Hubert clears his throat. His Lady is a master tactician, to be true, but they are rather veering down the same course that led them to the Flame Emperor’s eight-inch heels and two-foot plumage. “I would suggest that Ferdinand’s, hm, amorous aspirations have tempered over time.”
Her Majesty’s face falls. Her shoulders lower three-tenths of an inch, and Hubert races to recover.
“For the perfect proposal, you must consider the man before you, not the one that has loomed so large—annoyed so incessantly—throughout your memory. True, he is a man of public declarations and open affection. Yet his position of publicity is different than yours, My Lady. You bear the burden as you must. He thrives in it for all to see, then doubts himself in every quiet moment when there is only his own voice for company. As if his inner self is not worthy of the world he cultivates.”
“You speak as if he does not gallivant around like a knight boasting his maiden’s token at a jousting tournament.”
“He would wear it openly on his arm,” Hubert agrees, “But the real object of value would be the handkerchief he tucked against his breast with your warmth preserved upon it. He glories in displaying love, but glory is not what drives it.”
“Therefore…a proposal more intimate. Some secret shared.” The Emperor raises a hand to her furrowed brow and sighs in misery. “You have set me back at the beginning, my love.”
A blistering heat kisses the ruddy tips of his ears. Hubert cannot accustom himself to the appellation, no matter how often or rarely she deigns to offer it. But if love is what keeps her on her toes these days, he could ask for little else.
Ferdinand lifts the napkin to his lips to daintily wipe away a spot of mayonnaise, then stares mournfully down at the single stain upon the embroidered silk. “Hubert,” he says.
Hubert only packed two napkins, as he is not a ruffian prone to their misuse, and he does not offer his own. His eyes are fixed upon the horizon where the still waters of Enbarr’s Carnelian Bay stretch endlessly beneath the clear sky.
“If Adrestia lacks for anything, what might that something be?”
“A Prime Minister with more than tea and crumpets between his ears,” Hubert answers quietly. There is no one in earshot of their private bench, but it would not do for passersby to misinterpret their verbal tussles.
“Har, har.” Ferdinand’s forced laugh would not earn him any acting awards. “Come now. Surely you have isolated some weakness in our undertaking—some treaty, some legal foundation—that holds us back from true brilliance!”
There are many such weaknesses, and Emperor and Prime Minister have waged ceaseless battle on every front since the dawning of military peace. The remaking of the nation progresses remarkably. It is only the vicissitudes of human nature, ever incomprehensibly constant, that will keep them toiling for generations to come.
Hubert reaches across for a few shards of Ferdinand’s bread crust, dips them into his gravy, and crunches his way out of an answer that will either inflate Ferdinand’s pride or crush it entirely.
“…Nothing?” Ferdinand drops his wilting head into his hands.
“I dare say the name of Aegir has met with glory enough.”
“The name of—ah, you misunderstand me. It is not for my own name, so much as. Well.” He picks at a loose thread on the side seam of his glove, pointedly not looking at so much as Hubert’s shadow. “Our Lady cares more for the nation than herself. Therefore it is only fitting that I offer some great service to Adrestia as my declaration of intent!”
The echoes of a younger man, naive yet no less full of striving, come back in full force: Look at me! Look at me, Edelgard!
Hubert hides his fond smirk behind another mouthful of gravy. “A nostalgic return to form.”
That gets a real laugh out of Ferdinand. “I had few thoughts of courtship those days.”
And yet he chose to walk Edelgard’s path, side by side so that she would never be alone, unlike Hubert’s penchant for guarding ahead or behind and never stealing an iota of her solitary light.
“Now they possess you,” Hubert concludes from the tense twist of Ferdinand’s self-recriminating smile. “Yet you default to what you know. Fairytale knights battling for the glory of a princess are more to your aesthetic than hers.”
“But they have depth! I have already tried once for spontaneity, and Our Lady did not approve of my derivative model… My only hope is to compose something truly legendary, something that will make of us the new paradigm of matrimonial devotion for all time!”
A princess sighing at her window that she did not accept her knight’s proposal, a knight questing for originality in a world of tarnished tropes and feigned emotion—all they need do is close the damn book.
“Have you considered she has no desire to be yet another figurehead of public sentiment?” Derision seeps deeper into the words than Hubert intends, yet he cannot find the will to strip his tone back to polite neutrality. “Lady Edelgard has mastered the challenges of her station, yet in love she has never given up on the distant dream of a partner that saw Her foremost.”
Ferdinand’s hand slides gently over Hubert’s knee as he leans in, mournful, to say, “You have always seen her foremost.”
Hubert slaps the hand away with a sneer. “Do not miss my point. You have already helped build her ideal world. You have stood beside her, fought for her, bartered your future and your fortune for her nation’s children. Do not sabotage your own efforts by making so grand a statement that you become a romantic archetype rather than a flesh and blood buffoon.”
Scowling, Ferdinand breaks up his bread crust for the ducks instead of allowing Hubert’s pilfering to continue. “You are simply jealous that I make for a more compelling archetype.”
There is nothing worth saying against such blatant idiocy, when Ferdinand is the one who’s been simpering for impassioned cackles and black leather boots before any of them ever met.
On a rare cloudless day of early summer, before the sweltering heat settles upon the land and drives them into the ice-spelled indoor shade, the imperial house embarks upon a ride to the northern shore. The peaceful fields spangled with wildflowers, the breeze teasing free strands of silver and copper, even the way their honor guard keeps at a knowing distance — all this joyous frolicking sets Hubert’s nerves aflame. Edelgard and Ferdinand’s eyes are too bright. They have made their plans, and now they will offer their tributes right in front of him, and his heart burns in his throat at the truly minuscule chance that anything will go wrong.
They deserve this.
The Emperor’s unerring path brings them to a quaint summer home that looks out over the coastal plains, a thin strip of sea sparkling in the distance. She leads them to the attached paddock, where Ferdinand promptly botches his dismount and nearly rolls his ankle like some greenhorn. He does not drop to one knee then and there, though Edelgard offers to carry him over the threshold should he be unable to walk, and Hubert shivers against this strange fog of anticipation.
Will they ask their questions in front of him? Or will they make a quiet excuse and step away, returning with some secret slant to Edelgard’s smile and a fit of giddy dizziness twisting Ferdinand’s eloquence into knots?
Of course it will be here, in the first home Edelgard can truly call her own, away from Enbarr and all its strife. Personal, private, and intimate, these quiet beginnings of a new life built entirely of love. And if she’s penned any part of an opera after all, then it may even be christened in song, their twin voices lifting to that clear, open sky.
Fixated upon this fruitless expectation, Hubert mutely drifts after them into the cottage. Edelgard veers left around the dining table as Ferdinand veers right, and suddenly it is both of them across a wide expanse of mahogany.
Upon the table are a letter and a box.
Edelgard clears her throat. “We have something for you.”
Hubert’s blood rushes to his extremities and leaves his feet too leaden to move, his hands a bumbling mass of insensate flesh, all of him an addled fly trapped in a sudden onslaught of amber.
When he doesn’t move, Ferdinand mercifully reaches across the table to open the envelope for him.
Inside is a deed. The deed contains his name. Some fool notary’s error, of course. The Vestras own no property, merely administer the Hresvelg estate. He chuckles to himself, shedding stress like a second skin.
“All your efforts to acquire this place, and yet my name mars the contract. A fine irony. I will have it corrected by day’s end, My Lady.”
Ferdinand grunts in protest, mouth opening as if to contest every precise legality, but Edelgard catches up his bare hand to silence him.
That simple gesture strikes Hubert as an executioner’s blow, for thin bands of starry gold shine from their ring fingers. How long has Hubert failed to notice the subtle impressions beneath their gloves?
“When?” he croaks.
Edelgard waves a hand, though whether to banish his confusion or her own blush, none could say. “Half asleep before ringing the breakfast bell some days ago. Not that your sage advice has gone to waste.”
“We thought, perhaps, in your own distant dreams…” Ferdinand trails off as he reaches again for the deed, as if to pull it back if Hubert declines their attempt.
It is too much. A cottage of his own, not to be maintained for the Emperor, just—his. Room for his experiments, for an armory for Ferdinand and a studio for Edelgard. A home for a private life.
His. Theirs.
Against his better judgment, Hubert reaches for the box.
There is no ring. What lies within is a brooch of pitch-black onyx, similar in size and aesthetic to the one that graced his throat throughout the war. The primary difference is the small golden hinge that betrays it as a locket. Hubert unclasps the lock and unveils what is not twin miniatures of his hearts’ foremost residents, but far more caustic to what remains of his heart.
Familiar strands of silver and copper twine together into a sprig of deadly hellebore trapped behind a thin panel of glass. Hubert’s thumb trails over the frail golden frame in wonder.
“Ah, please take care!” Ferdinand blurts in a hurry. “The inside of the locket is treated with oleander.”
“It will scarcely have an effect on me.”
Edelgard cuts in. “That is the point. Harmless to a Vestra, and eager to slay anyone who dares take it from you.”
“Just as you are inured to our charms, but we will slay any who dares part us!”
“I am not,” Hubert whispers, unable to raise his gaze to these twin bright stars of his, “Entirely inured.”
He can manage nothing else. It is too much. But he thinks—hopes—that the twinkle in Edelgard’s eyes, the tremble in Ferdinand’s knees, means they understand. Without law or Goddess, without announcement or recognition, with nothing and everything to his name, he is Theirs.