Archive of Our Own ^beta

Up close, the aura she gives off falls, and the Empress Sanaki becomes that which she truly is: a young woman with the weight of the world upon her shoulders. She’s still a child, and although she can school her face to neutrality and speak with a deeper register, learn the complexities of court language and cadences of speech, hide her height with high-heeled shoes and the voluminous folds of her stately robes, beneath it she is still an adolescent. As all adolescents, she is too quick to speak, too quick to start fights, too quick to rush headlong into trouble.

For headstrong children born to rule, this recklessness can be a double-edged sword: they will never listen to their elders as they ought, but also nothing puts them out of commission for long. Even being nearly toppled in a coup, almost arrested, several varying assassination attempts, your country falling, and the end of the world.

It leaves Sanaki deeply out of sorts, a haunting fear that makes her—well, not so much skittish, but Giffca can tell her hackles are raised. If she was a Laguz, she’d be puffed up, her fur on-end, her tail bottle-brush and her back ridged.

He catches Sigrun staring at her, eyes far away, expression unreadable. Her face is still, but her eyes speak volumes, a worry etched between her brows and anxiety in the way she bites at her nails. She doesn’t move, but she paces internally like a caged lion.

Giffca comes to join her at the table where she sits in the bustling camp, sets down two cups of weak drinking beer, and sits down across from her. His tail drapes over the other side of the bench where he sits, tip twitching, patiently. It takes Sigrun a moment to notice him, and then she starts, a moment of processing as she takes in the cup, her companion, the bloody great Lion watching her as patiently as he might watch a distant deer, but with much less malice. A slow, unblinking stare.

“My Lord,” Sigrun sighs, relaxing. “I wasn’t expecting your company.”

Giffca half-smiles. “You looked as if there was a weight upon your mind.” Sigrun hesitates: they do not know each other well. They have only met a few times. Giffca is a Lion, older by far than Sigrun, and he and his have at turns been enemies at war and barely-trustworthy friends at peace. But now they are allies, united unquestionably in their desires to see these two great wars come to an end.

The tower looms in all their futures, although they don’t yet know it. Giffca can’t put a name to the thing that he has not yet seen, but he knows it, with a deep, sure-sense foreboding, in the same way that he can tell the sun will rise and set.

“Sanaki reminds me of Skrimir,” Giffca says, then adds, “Like Caineghis, when we were young.”

Sigrun stares at him. The tension binding her shoulders is trembling, like it wants to release but doesn’t know where it’s going. She hesitates, unsure where he’s taking her.

“He used to do the same thing when he was frustrated, with no way to solve the problems. He’d pace back and forth, tail lashing, snarling and starting fights with me for the sole purpose of having a fight.” Sanaki’s cruel words, which she has turned oft of late on anyone near enough to be in range, leave marks that fade quicker than do claws and teeth.

Had she claws and teeth, however, Giffca is of no doubt that she would loose those as well.

“I suppose I can’t blame her,” Sigrun admits, turning to face him, wrapping both her hands around her cup. Her thumbs trace its rim in slow, reliable patterns, feeling the rough shifts of the ceramic. “In some small way, that’s why we’re at war. To be Empress of Begnion and have as much control over your country as you do over the weather...”

“She’s still very young,” Giffca agrees. “At her age, to be told you’re meant to rule a country but that everyone else will do it for you, and to then have those men make foolish decisions...” he huffs a laugh. “Were she a Lion, she’d cut payment from their hides.”

Sigrun also laughs. “She would!” She sets her chin on her hand, smiles wistfully. “I used to fret myself nearly sick that the Empress never took to any martial weapon, afraid she’d not be able to protect herself were she without magic. But I confess, if she had, I’m afraid she’d challenge a dozen Senators or more to trial by combat.”

“And win,” Giffca agrees, good-naturedly. He’s seen Sanaki in combat: she takes to martial magic like a fish to water. The Senators are mostly older men, many gone to seed, and against Sanaki they would last precious little time. Particularly if she countered their magic by simply hitting them with a sword.

“And win,” Sigrun repeats. She takes a long drink of her beer. “I can only assume that Caineghis was the same when he was young?” Giffca nods.

“I have no few scars from fights he started and I ended up having to help finish.” He shares a grin with Sigrun, then, a look of shared understanding: yes, she is familiar with this. “He was always frustrated that there were those who would present their suggestions as if it was expertise, and expect him to follow them, even if they were foolhardy at best and worthless at worst.” Giffca takes a drink, and then ponders for a moment, thinking of how to word that which he has on his mind. “The frustration of being too young to rule in truth while your elders continue to squander your future creates a restless, frustrated ruler.”

“Which leads to a hotheaded, outspoken...rambunctious ruler, desperate to break the leash.”

Giffca laughs, lifts his cup. “Aye, that precisely.” It’s strange, how much of him feels both nostalgic for that long-ago past, when he and Caineghis were young, of an age and yet Giffca always felt older, perhaps because he had so much less of a chance to be foolish and boastful.

Well. Perhaps not no chance—Giffca had his fair share of scrapes that he had started, and finished, himself. As he had no doubt Sigrun had also.

“Seeing the Empress nearly makes me miss it,” Giffca admits.He can feel Sigrun staring at him. He continues, almost wistful: “The fire of youth. Fighting for the sake of proving something. Knowing with such certainty that you are right. There’s a purity to it. A bravery so...unquestioning.” Adulthood, age, changes the way that you see the world. Nuance comes with the more years that pass by, greater weight upon your shoulders accompanies the weariness of mortality. The beorc may see their Laguz cousins as being as old as the stones of Tellius, but amongst their own kind, they are far from that. They live, and age, and die, the same as every other mortal.

He sighs, shakes his head. “You are still very young,” he tells Sigrun. She half-smiles, a look almost chiding. “You think quickly, stride forward, much as the young Empress does. You stand at her side—and when she strikes, you strike also.”

“I am her sword and her shield. As her guard, with her as my charge, I cannot let her race unsupported into the fray.” Sigrun frowns with her entire face. Her lips turn down, yes, but so does her jaw, her chin, her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead. Her entire body feels the pressure of the concept of leaving Sanaki to her own devices. “Age has nothing to do with it.”

“How much older than you are General Zelgius and the Prime Minister?”

(They don’t yet know, not now, what the truth of Sephiran and Zelgius is. This, too, comes later.)

“Not more than ten years.”

“But were Sanaki to run ahead, they would both counsel her to slowness. They are both old.” Giffca shifts, leaning back. “Think of Skirimir and Ranulf. Ranulf is not much older than Skrimir in years, for all he would pretend it—but Ranulf believes in taking things slowly unless they must be fast. That is how you can tell he’s getting older. Caineghis and I never rush anywhere.”

“I’ve seen you both rush in battle,” Sigrun replies, leaning closer to him. “You and His Majesty are faster than at least half the troops in battle here.”

“But the decision?” Giffca arches one brow back at her. “Think of how long it took us to commit to this war. Once a decision is made we may both wade into the fray, but it is never done with impatience. We sit back and think, debate, consider the potential ramifications. We’ve mellowed enough that we always second-guess ourselves. There is such a thing as thinking too much!” He laughs at himself then, an old Lion with grey in his mane, and finds Sigrun half-hiding her smile in return, as if it is too great of a lapse with a man who has until recently been often an enemy.

“I must admit, I can’t see Sanaki becoming so considerate.”

“What do you see of her, then?”

Sigrun goes quiet. Her expression is that same closed-off and unreadable as before, but the look is different, now. Before her eyes were turned outward, glassy to within herself, fearful for Sanaki’s rage turning back and burning her, instead of her enemies. Now, she is questioning something within herself, turning back and forth the pages of some great book of questions and answers in her mind.

At last, Sigrun taps her fingers against the top of the table. “Like Lady Micaiah, perhaps.”

(This, too, they do not yet have the truth of. There is still so much they do not know. But they will. And when they know, Giffca will remember this, looking back, and he will smile to himself at some secret joke that only he and Sigrun know.)

“Lady Micaiah makes a decision, and she sticks to it no matter the cost or what stands in her way. Her conviction guides her way—focus on the future, on the outcome, above all else. If that requires leaping into the fray, she does. Micaiah will fight anyone, on anything, if it creates the end she has envisioned. But she does not fall prey to petty slights and insults. I would like to see that for the Empress, temper her fire and burn it where the pyre needs the flame.”

It is a fine, fine hope indeed. Surety and doggedness are attributes that befit well a ruler; they temper fury and impatience as does water to wine.

Giffca raises his cup, still half-full. “Then let us toast to that,” he tells Sigrun. She lifts her mug as well. “To the ferocity of youth, and to the determination of age.”

“To Caineghis and Sanaki,” Sigrun agrees, and they click their mugs together and drain them to dregs, and share that drink as friends.