THE CUCKOO: II

Completed August 1, 2021 (♌︎)

It was summer, and the capital bled citizens like an open wound. Word had come that Limberry had joined with Zeltennia in support of the accusations against the queen. Both the Northern and Southern Sky seemed as though they would converge in Gulofavia in full force before the week was over. Men with close ties to one side of the country or the other had fled first. The current lot were those lost to panic: those who had never truly thought that Goltanna would turn his swords on countrymen.

The Lionsguard was overwhelmed; the palace was in disarray. Five senators had thrown their lot in with the Black Lion and demanded that Ruvelia be detained to stand trial. It was enough that the crown had neither the clout or manpower to hold them for treason, and after the younger Lord Basanda was found tumbled into the Grog river, there were whispers of assassins on both sides. When the Hokuten were finally arrived Ruvelia demanded that she and her son be brought out of Lesalia with all due speed.

There was a great deal of gossip when she refused an escort by her own guard, insisting instead that it be Lord and General Beoulve who personally undertook the removal of her family. Some said that it was distrust as to the Lionsguard's loyalties; rumors flew that there had been a defector. Others saw it as merely the natural order of the crown's collapse that House Larg should lean on its ancestral retainers. In the moment she was sundered from the prince, however, Ruvelia Atkacha thought she made her motivations very clear to those who should know them.

"If I am still the queen, you both shall obey." Her voice was cold; she looked to Dycedarg very intently. "I am riding south with the general; you are taking my son through Fovoham to meet with our men."

Zalbag tried to object then—listing all of the very practical considerations as to why it was better he be on the field personally when the Nanten arrived. Dycedarg told his brother to be silent.

"If you can manage an army, you can manage one damn bird and a passenger," he said brusquely. "All your men don't amount to much if the throne has no claimants outside of a false princess."

Orinus had seen four summers pass now, and he had begun to understand the various protocols and precautions that surrounded his short existence. He was quiet as he clung to the dark linen of his mother's dress, fidgeting a little with the gold chain of her girdle as he looked to the stranger to whom he was to be consigned. Ruvelia took a deep breath when she finally knelt down to address him, and she held that breath a long while—waiting until she felt the slightest bit giddy before she spoke.

"You will be going riding with Lord Beoulve to see your uncle." She ran a hand over his head, trying to smooth down the perpetual cowlick that seemed to sprout there. "I may not be able to join you for some time."

Orinus nodded. Somewhere outside there was a barking shout from one of the guardsmen. Ruvelia hoped that whatever the upset was would not detain them. She was taken a little off guard when her son embraced her suddenly, and she tried not to consider whether he was shaking as he did so. She held him fast as Dycedarg knelt beside her.

"If my brother is fitted to his task, I don't think it should be all that long, your Highness." He smiled. "Your mother would not want to leave you too long without her company."

Orinus flinched visibly as Ruvelia placed his hand in Dycedarg's, and she thought for the briefest instant that she should call the whole thing off and carry him alongside her into the southlands, safe insofar as he might never be out of her sight.

"You are certain that this is how you would use the two of us, your Majesty? You are certain your son should have no escort but me?"

She stood up as Dycedarg did, and as they looked to one another, Ruvelia kept to the serene façade a decade of queenhood had trained into her. She did not show any trace of emotion not fitted to her aims. She stifled every urge to weep or to accuse or to plead or to apologize. She let show only the sincerity of her command.

"Lord Beoulve." Her voice was soft now. "I am certain that of all men in this world, you are the one who will deliver my son to safety."

She recognized after that pronouncement that Dycedarg Beoulve, perhaps, was not so good at dissembling as he thought himself. The look he gave her was as natural as that of a child.

She had every faith that they understood each other, and she kept her gaze upon him until he and Orinus finally departed, vanishing into the far end of the palace's great hall like a pair of shadows. When there came the sound of further clamour from outside, she did not tarry when Zalbag pulled her in the opposite direction.

It was six summers prior, and the morning twilight had caught Dycedarg off guard. The bell for lauds was not yet ringing, and he was already awake. He could look through the long slit of his window to see the purple of the sky dimming to red. He did not remember his dreams before waking, but he recalled that all the chatter of wrens and sparrows outside had intruded upon them.

He stilled his breath as he recognized that the Queen of Ivalice, trueborn sister to the Duke of Gallione, was still collapsed atop him. It was a complication he'd never had to navigate before. Ruvelia was seldom eager to prolong any of their appointments beyond the bounds of necessity, and Dycedarg had never been so imprudent as to attempt to detain her. He supposed they had both been tired. Between the swelter of late July and the two cups of Warjilis claret they'd shared, he could see how the heat of their blood might mellow itself into a sluggish idiocy. He certainly felt an idiot. It was not wise—even at Igros—for her to be stealing through the halls by daylight. He tried to recall what she had worn when she came to him; he hoped it was unobtrusive enough that she could be mistaken for a wayward domestic. Dycedarg had no real reputation for despoiling serving girls, but he could afford to develop one.

As he considered all the best ways to hide their joint treason and adultery, his thoughts kept drifting to how very warm Ruvelia felt atop him, and how different a creature she seemed at rest and by daylight. In all the months since this venture had started, their lovemaking had remained a very pragmatic affair. It did not do to linger in carnal pleasures that could be had of somebody less dangerous.

Dycedarg realized how seldom it had struck him that the queen was—in fact—very beautiful.

When she awoke, it was with a little sigh, and she looked at him a few moments with drowsy contentment before she realized their predicament. She bolted upright as she pulled the blanket over her shoulders.

"Good morning, your Majesty," he said blithely. "I ought to apologize for detaining you."

"What hour is it?" Ruvelia hissed.

"Early enough that we can hope nobody's awake save for drudges and devouts—how quickly can you dress?"

Ruvelia stood up without responding, dragging the covers from the bed as she did so. She laughed a little as Dycedarg found him exposed.

"You don't seem very... apologetic."

"I didn't apologize." He gestured towards his lap, grinning. "It's obvious all my worst parts would detain you further."

Ruvelia threw the bedclothes back in his direction.

"It's a shame you're the best I have that would detain me," she said as she began to look about for her shift. "I would never see Lesalia again regardless, were it my choice."

Dycedarg didn't respond, looking instead to the swell of Ruvelia's breasts in the sunlight—to the curve of her bare hips and the soft glow of her hair. He thought a little about further acts of idiocy he could commit.

"The senate is trying to push a law that will let a man marry his way into a crown, you know?" she continued as she found the article and pulled it over her head. "They'll be in session arguing that my husband be ready to give away the daughter he just acquired."

"Saints, but they do move quickly."

"I hope if it passes their daughters all marry stable boys. I hope that every march and barony is handed off to the first peddler who can win a girl's eye."

Dycedarg peered over the edge of his bed to find a dull grey kirtle there. He leaned over to retrieve it and handed it off when Ruvelia finally took note of him. Looking out the window, he saw that the sky was starting to progress towards gold.

"It would be a transformed world in a few years," he said philosophically. "The gentlest of revolutions. Imagine yourself—my dear—joined to a peddler king who will win Lennard over with paste diamonds and chestnuts."

Ruvelia had dressed and was plaiting her hair into a tight braid now.

"A charming thought," she replied, "I suppose with enough matches, all Ivalice shall be kings and queens… or else priests and nuns. You should snatch your sister out of a monastery and get her a peddler of your own before she takes orders."

"My sister isn't yet thirteen."

"Maids have been wed younger, particularly in families full of decrepit bachelors." She discovered the cloak she had worn the night prior and flung it about her shoulders. "Somebody in House Beoulve has to marry."

"Do they, now?"

Ruvelia pulled the hood of the cloak over her head as she turned away from him. Although he could not see her face, Dycedarg imagined her smiling.

In his mind, it was a cold smile.

"I suppose that's the outlook of a man never pushed toward the altar." She leaned to look through the narrow slit separating the door from the wall. "If you can grant the rest of your kin the same reprieve…"

She stilled her breath as Dycedarg moved to catch her in his arms from behind. Her posture stiffened a moment as he leaned her back against his body, naked save for the drapery of the sheets, his face pressed now against her neck. The embrace was supremely awkward before she softened a little, giving a little sigh as he kissed her skin.

"There are a lot of altars in this world," he whispered hotly. "I'll thank you not to speculate as to mine."

When they parted, Ruvelia did not say farewell. For the rest of the morning, images of her floated through Dycedarg's brain—fixed as though the dawn had burnt them there. He lay long in bed considering her, stroking himself feverishly as he imagined how the night before would have played out were it day—all the contours of her flesh bright and golden as he buried himself within her again.

Dycedarg Beoulve had never been made to marry, but it was not for want of pushing. All of Igros seemed to have effaced his ill-starred engagement from any recollection. It was little wonder that Ruvelia Atkascha had no memory of that span of months in her girlhood, when her brother had blithely spoken of wedding feasts and she had caught occasional glimpses of a wan, round-faced lady stalking about the gardens and halls.

She had been the daughter of the Fovohamese knight, and it was known by those who know such things that her station was well beneath the house to which she was pledged. Ruvelia, then a spiteful child of ten, did not know. She had little care for the elder Beoulve brother in those days, and whether he was to be wed or tonsured or sent out to north Zelmonia to die in the snow was not a matter with which she concerned herself. He was of her brother's sphere in terms of age and ambitions; the fate of the Beoulve closer to her own years was generally of more interest.

It was unfortunate that during that summer Zalbag was not particularly interesting. Having departed from his mother in being born, he had spent the first decade of his life on the precipice of joining her. Ruvelia had resented more than once that the only child of comparable position to her at Igros should be forever ill and full of insipid piety on account of it. It was easy business, apparently, to love the Saint when one was under continual threat of meeting him.

She had barely seen Zalbag during the term of his brother's engagement. He had been caught in a long fever that would not break, and talk of funerals had nearly come to outweigh talk of weddings. If she had met with him, it was doubtlessly a meeting arranged that she might make a farewell, and she carried with her vague impressions of being made to hold a conversation from a room's threshold, a silver pomander looped round her neck as though she were a cow with a bell.

Zalbag himself was perhaps the only living soul to recall the particulars of his brother's broken betrothal with any detail, although it was detail he doubted. He remembered many strange things from that season in which he did not die. He remembered hearing the roar of what sounded like great fires in the night—of thinking more than once that he'd fallen from sleep into death and whatever awaited him there. He remembered at one point he saw what he took to be his mother.

There were far more vivid moments in his delirium than the one concerning Dycedarg and the woman from Fovoham, and with all of them proven false, he never questioned this particular instant as anything other than a dream. Still, there had been a conversation he wasn't supposed to overhear—a clamor of voices not yet risen to shouting.

Dycedarg had been very matter-of-fact, his fiancee confused:

"It's been agreed to, my lord." Her voice was soft—dull even in the midst of a disagreement. "If your father rescinds the offer, it will not be to the credit of Gallione."

"My father will not rescind any offer and neither will yours. I think it's clear, however, that you and I are ill-suited to one another. It seems that we ought to amicably agree to part ways and wish one another well.

"Have I done something to displease you?"

"Nothing save for being a woman I do not wish to marry."

Zalbag never recalled exactly what came next—having no sense in this half-memory as to whether and how he should have been present to hear it. There was the sound of a blow being struck perhaps? Of something crying? Of somebody clapping to the rhythm of an unheard song?

Most of the words were lost to him—as were the images to which they might have been tethered. When the bulk of the recollection was shed, however, the one instant that stuck with him well into adulthood was sudden and shocking. He had been standing before a window, body shivering in the heat of midsummer, and he had seen a woman hanging like a white flag from a high balcony, her dress fluttering like the wings of some vast great bird about to tumble to earth.

His brother's voice had sounded across the sky like a roar, shouting that House Beoulve had no need for more sons or for wenches to bear them.

Zalbag said nothing. Zalbag did nothing. When he was told that his brother's betrothed had severed their engagement and thereafter returned to Fovoham, he told himself that this was an event upon which his fever dreams could have no bearing. The vision he had seen, the argument he had imagined… no other soul in Igros admitted to such events.

When against all expectations he recovered from his most recent malady, he did his best to look only to the future before him. Ruvelia, in the meantime, was glad to have somebody to pester again, and jokingly asked him if he couldn't try dying more seriously next time—that it might be his best chance at reprieve from the war that had already drawn both of their brothers back east.

Author's Notes: Basanda is another nobleman whose only mention in FFT comes when he is victimized by Phantom Thief Zero. The pomander a younger Ruvelia wears is a precaution against illness, based on the medieval idea that illness was transmitted by foul smells/vapors (miasma theory) and could be repelled by aromatic herbs. Ruvelia and Dycedarg's banter about the senate's new law is, in fact, intended to address the impending reality that Delita can marry his way into being king regnant instead of a prince consort.

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