HISTORIES
Written on July 7, 2020 (♋︎︎)
Author's Notes: This ficlet is set during the gap between Chapters 2 and 3 in the game... during which there is apparently a battle that kills 400,000 people that nobody except your local barkeeper seems to remember.
Agrias had imagined that there would be time to ask more about Ramza's history after the princess was rescued. In the aftermath of whatever they had seen at Lionel, however, revelations that she'd been defying dukes and murdering cardinals alongside House Beoulve's bastard became less and less jarring. When they'd made it to Zaland to discover it stuffed with soldiers come from Gulofavia, she'd all but forgotten the bulk of her questions.
Estimates as to causalities varied widely, and the only consensus they could discover was that both sides had little to celebrate. Half the senate was unaccounted for by the time the siege broke in Lesalia; nobody knew yet where the queen was taken to. Taverns were thick with whispers of poisonings and betrayals; the rest of the city thick with men wounded or dying. When Agrias thought she glimpsed any outfit blazoned with Atkascha heraldry, she lingered longer than she ought on its wearer. She had not been the only Oaks to join the Lionsguard.
They eventually paid double price at one establishment for a few nights in an empty stable, and during that time there was much serious talk as to where any of them could go. The course the province would take following Delacroix's death was not yet clear, and it was still uncertain as to who might know of their involvement. Agrias knew it folly to go east then, however ardently she wished to see Ovelia safe with her own eyes. Ramza spoke at length about many places in the world, but he did not speak of Igros.
When it finally seemed established as to where the royal family was scattered—Zeltennia, Romanda, or Bethla—they settled on trying the imperial city. All the long road there, Agrias tried to think as little as she could on signs of what had happened in the gulf between the two duchies. She tried not to mark the calling of crows or the scent of smoke. She did not contemplate farmers whose carts glittered with mail and spear heads. As the dry, sun burnt hills of the capitol came into sight, her thoughts turned instead past years in the palace guard, for all she little wanted to think of that either.
She had discussed early on with Lavian and Alicia as to what their lot was to be when the royal family divided against itself—how she would not force them to divide themselves as well. Even as firmly as her own fealty lay with the princess, however, there were still divisions Agrias found. She recalled how she had seen the queen in her garden, the late king in his study, the little prince darting down the marble halls like a damselfly—nurses trying to catch at his leading strings. It was only when they reached the white walls of Lesalia city, stained with fire and scarred with the work of siege engines, that Ramza finally touched upon her history unspoken.
"Do you know anyone in the capitol?" he asked.
"Aside from your brother, do you?"
It was—she later thought—the mark of a deepening sympathy between them that both allowed the other to answer with silence.
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