QUATRE FACE
Written in 2021
Author's Notes: Originally written for the Gran Grimoire Ivalice fan zine.
Dycedarg had not anticipated he would arrive in Zeltennia alone. Perhaps he should have. The messenger had been no real shock when he had appeared on the road winding up to Orbonne—his bedraggled chocobo looking pitiably small with the rain having slicked down its feathers.
He recalled that it seemed the most natural thing in the world—that he had already known what would be said and accepted it before the boy spoke. They had just delivered their sleeping sister over to strangers with tokens and whispered farewells in the place of brothers. Why should they not be sundered from one another thereafter? On a practical level, they all had surely known where things stood with Romanda?
He walked down the dark marble floors of the castle, waiting for Goltanna to finally find it in himself to acknowledge him. Orlandu's visit, Alma's sudden instatement as an oblate, the slow influx of munitions and men to Igros: it had been blatant to those who wished to see. He supposed he hadn't. He had not set the pieces together until he was presented with a breathless squire and a thick piece of vellum telling him that the war now had two fronts.
Zalbag had looked to him, eyes wide. For the first time Dycedarg could remember, he suddenly seemed the boy of sixteen he actually was, nervously fidgeting with the pommel of his sword as the remnants of the storm grumbled overhead.
"Am I heading back west then?" he had asked with a hesitant awkwardity.
Dycedarg hadn't answered. It had struck him as strange to begin with that Zalbag should be sent to any front and not remain at least another summer in Gariland. That he should be carted out east with the promise of killing Ordallians and then turned about back west to kill Romandans would be strange to the point of absurdity. He had skimmed the contents of the scroll again, passing over all the particulars of the formal declaration of war, the details of the landing in Fovoham, and all of General Beoulve's formulaic attempts at paternal warmth. Just preceding the valediction were the only two lines in the document pertaining to the house's second son:
"Whether or not you bid your brother return to me or proceed with him into Zelmonia, I leave to your discretion. I know not what this turn forebodes for Gallione."
He had handed the scroll over to his brother silently—perhaps a little brusquely. He'd recognized later that he resented being saddled with decisions about Zalbag's life, particularly when it seemed clear to him what decision he was expected to make.
His "discretion," as it turned out in the end, was to let his brother come to his own damn conclusions as to which army he wished to tilt at. Still waiting in Zeltennia, he sat down on an exquisitely ornate but thoroughly uncomfortable bench. He mused that Goltanna was short his best general and therefore had nobody to marshal him into politeness. It didn't really matter. Diplomacy was an art that taught one to be bored gracefully. Having already poured over his documents to the extent that he knew more about Varoi's court than the Varoi himself, he looked out a window, watching the movement of so many black dots on the distant hills. Peasant children, he thought, chasing crows from the barley seed.
He wondered what Zalbag might say to pass the time had he decided to keep pushing east with him—if he would have any shrewd observations about another duchy or demand to go traipsing about the ruined chapels. He wondered what their father thought at having a doubtlessly unexpected son join him on the western front. He wondered why the old man hadn't just sent all of his children—bastards and all—into Zelmonia together.
It would have been a far more practical turn, he reckoned. Loathe as he was to think of being responsible for that arrangement, things would have to go very poorly for Ordallia to have somebody slash their way into the embassy to cut down boys and impale toddlers.
Still, his father wasn't the sort of general who concentrated all his forces in one place. It had no doubt made sense to scatter them. A child in Zelmonia, in Ordallia, at Orbonne, within Igros...
One heir, he imagined, would have to survive the war that way. When the oaken door to the great hall finally creaked open, Dycedarg smiled automatically. Diplomacy was an art that taught one to be warm by reflex. The sunburnt man who stumbled in, however, was neither Duke Goltanna nor his seneschal nor anyone who might have a care in the world as to who he was and why he was here. He was of self-evident common birth—the yeoman possibly—and he had his hands full: one clutching a filthy, crying boy of maybe eight, the other holding a dead rabbit.
"Is Glevanne about?" he barked. "I caught this little pox blister poaching one of his Grace's coneys!"
Dycedarg looked at him, blinking a few times as the urchin in custody continued to bawl.
"I'm afraid I wouldn't know," he said very politely. "I'm Lord Beoulve's son, and I myself am waiting..."
"Sweet Ajora! You're the diplomat!?" The child went quiet as his captor laughed. "No wonder everyone's gone to ground! Now that both sides of the country are in for it, poor Druksmald's got to scramble and make everyone remember how particularly in for it we are—even if Romandans won't be marching over the Finath anytime soon!"
Dycedarg did not find the situation as funny as the overseer apparently did. Thinking back to the sun-warped stocks he'd ridden past at the last crossroad, he wondered if they treated this level of presumption in Zeltennia as they might in Gallione.
"Being only an aide to the present ambassador, my business out east is sadly limited to what my superiors and the crown tell me," he said after a moment, his eyes drifting to the dead animal. "I'm sure his Grace has his concerns, of course, and I'll relay them where they are most needed."
The peasant nodded. The boy snuffled through his tears. Dycedarg continued to smile.
"Well, looks like I'll have to deal with this'un if everyone's going to be dealing with you. Best of luck! You've already made good getting yourself out of Gallione before the storm!'"
The boy gave a shriek as he was yanked back towards some fate unknown, blubbering apologies to the extent that he hadn't known the small game was his Lordship's now—only the deer and doves. Dycedarg did not pay the child much notice. As his cries faded, he looked to the patterned tiles, tracing outlines and puzzles with his eyes as he fitted their edges together: on the bower, in crosses and squares, through the crooked paths of chess knights. "Before the storm..." he muttered to himself.
He supposed that it had come from a man who thought Gallione stood under calm skies.
The globe of the summer sun finally dipped back behind the Yuguewood, and the haze of so much smoke gave its glow a bruised, purplish cast.
The cratered south wall of Riovanes still held. The Grand Duke insisted it would hold tomorrow. They were three days into the siege, and no bird brought news yet. Zalbag told himself that one might appear tomorrow.
He'd descended the parapets to find his command down by two: an archer—Anselm—had taken a bullet through the eye, and somebody reported that Sysley had succumbed to infection. It was a loss to be expected. At three days in, his unit being only down by two was near miraculous. He watched laconically as the chemist who had tried to patch up poor Sys began to break down, shaking against the wall as if he'd been struck.
"Please better compose yourself and hold together," Zalbag said tersely. "We'll have worse hurts to weep over before the month's out, and we'll bear them all the better by not weeping now."
Werner—he remembered him from when he was a stripling back at Gariland—seemed to sober up, a brief flicker of bitterness playing across his features as he did so. Zalbag did not pause to see if anyone else bore his admonition poorly.
He walked coolly toward the keep, trying to think what on earth he was supposed to say to Barrington in the face of their seeming abandonment. He heard the sound of a deep moaning shout somewhere, as of a woman crying. He did not pay mind to it. He stopped instead to catch his reflection in the splintered diamonds of a lead-glass.
He was very pale. The fast healing scar across the line of his jaw looked all the worse for it. Many things make a man pale, he told himself, and not all of them frailty.
He wondered how bad it must have been two summers past. He'd been riding ventre à terre for all the fifty leagues back to the Lenalian plain: five days journey in a day and a half. His bird nearly died under him, and he suspected it did not live long after he'd joined the Hokuten. He had been very young then; he had been egotistical. Romanda had not been waiting on a boy not yet seventeen.
His father had made no spectacle upon his arrival, but it was evident that he had not been anticipated. The soldiers had said nothing as he dismounted, unsteady, and hoarsely announced himself as having come from Orbonne as quickly as he could. The General did not treat him as a son until later, when he was taken aside.
"You did us no great service, coming when you did. It does not speak well to House Beoulve that one of her children should appear on the verge of collapse before a battle has even begun."
Zalbag knew he must have been an awful fright. He was ill for the better part of the week, which was a blessing in that it let him pass time until the Romandans finally did land twelve days later.
He had made himself the picture of reserve when his first battle finally came. His father had not even realized it was one in which he had been wounded.
Walking into the iron-gilt belly of Riovanes, he thought to himself about what he should have said back at the wall, about all the fine differences between a "hold together" and a "hold on." He thought about the Saint. He thought about whether or not he would die tomorrow.
When Barrington finally greeted him, it was with two children tugging at his coattails. They could scarcely be much younger than Ramza and Alma.
"Commander," the man said with the affected reticence of one not used to being on the field himself. "Have you had any word yet from your father?" Zalbag shook his head, trying to look at the Grand Duke and not at the dark-haired boy who was rolling a top in his fingers with obvious nervousness. "Gallione has leaned heavy on Fovoham these past two years, you know. I hope your father remembers his responsibilities."
"My father looks to end the war, your Grace. He knows the sacrifices Fovoham has made to that end."
There was a silence between them. Barrington knelt to hand his daughter a sucket, which she grabbed greedily but did not eat. Her brother did not seem to expect he should have one for himself.
"At the very least, he has sent you to make sacrifices with us," Barrington finally said, looking up at him with a smile.
"Papa," the boy said quietly, obviously unnerved by the conversation, "who are we sacrificing?"
Barrington chuckled.
"The Romandans hopefully, my little mouse." He handed the child the unasked for candy. "The commander's been sent to pile them up like a hecatomb, so his father might light the pyre."
The boy popped the sweet in his mouth and looked at Zalbag, as if he were skeptical of the Grand Duke's pronouncement. Zalbag said nothing. "We might expect word tomorrow, then?"
Barrington asked pointedly. "I think," Zalbag said, "that both you and I should hope for it very much."
It was after that, when plans had been laid out and more barbs left unspoken, that Zalbag found himself on the long, spiraling route towards the little chapel that overlooked the dovecotes. He had been told once that the Fovohamese were half heathen and disinclined to religion, but upon arriving he found it an overstatement; they were merely more reserved in the performance of faith. The church was spartan: a plain bronze icon and windows of barest ornament. It was, all in all, a fitting place for a soldier to pray.
He wondered, as he knelt, if they thought him monstrous over Anslem and Sysley. He wondered if they would think him soft should he have shown some mark of grief. In that moment, two dead knights were a small matter, but here, where the scent of the greater fires outside were drowned out by incense, the dead could enjoy their lamentation.
Hands folded, however, he did not lament them—not even as he mouthed the words bidding God convey them safe to paradise. He was—as always—a hypocrite in the privacy of prayer. He thought of his own hurts, of his own anxieties, of Igros and what it might look like with siege engines shadowing her walls.
He prayed thereafter for a remedy to vanity and trembled before the myriad candles, whose light slowly overtook that of the sunset. That—he thought—was one of the greatest benefices of God: that there was never any shame in trembling before Him.
He could be as pale and pitiable as he liked here, and it would be to his credit.
"Sometimes," Alma said laughing, "I think it's like we're in a fairy book—like we were taken down under the old barrows in Mandalia and when we get back it will only be a few days have passed."
Ovelia furrowed her brow but did not look up. She stayed quiet, stripping the leaves off a piece of chasteberry and then piling them up in a neat little square. For a girl of eight, she always took care to make such a careful arrangement of her simples, even knowing all were doomed to be crushed and drowned in so much tincture.
"I don't think this is a fairyland, Alma," she said very quietly after a moment. "Fairies have queens and courts."
"Aren't you going to be queen someday?" Alma asked. "That's what happens to princesses, isn't it?"
Ovelia said nothing. Somewhere the bells tolled vespers, and Alma looked to the thick oaken door in anticipation of Simon's arrival. "When you're queen, do you think you'll close the monasteries? After you outlaw the war, of course. If everyone had to go to gaol for going to war or going to church, we'd be allowed out, and we could go to Mandalia and see if there are fairies there."
Ovelia blinked, fidgeting with the bare stalk of her herb. "I don't think you're allowed to make war illegal, Alma."
"You'd be queen, wouldn't you?"
"I couldn't make it illegal for Ordallians to go to war, though. I wouldn't be queen of Ordallia."
Alma furrowed her brow, realizing that she hadn't quite thought through this particular complication in her schemes for the succession. As the daylight began to wane, she tapped her foot a little, wondering when they would be fetched to dinner and made to undergo the agonies of reciting the end of the credo in full Ikoku. She had never understood why Saint Ajora cared so much that they should all ask his blessing on some overcooked lentils and turnip greens. If she were a God, she wouldn't want to be saddled with credit for them.
She breathed deep, pushing her own pile of leaves into a little heap, and looked at Ovelia firmly.
"That's it then," she said with deep gravity. "You're going to have to marry the prince of Ordallia."
Ovelia pinked, her pale skin bringing to mind the tint of the reddening dogwood outside. It was only when Alma had given over to giggling and Ovelia had finally joined her that Simon arrived.
Alma ought to have known something was afoot when she was not given any chastisement for her free demeanor or for the smallness of the prepared chasteberry in front of her. That Simon said nothing to the two girls before him did not register as strange, however, until a man walked past him. He wore a gold tabard blazed with the Atkascha double lion. When he bowed before Ovelia, Alma felt all the laughter within her collapse and sink into a round lump that weighed on her stomach.
"Your highness," the messenger said. "I have come out of Ordallia with sad tidings. Your father, Denamnda IV, protector and true crowned king of Ivalice, has died of fever on the field. Your brother is to be crowned on the morrow."
There was no more substance or detail than that. Ovelia looked to the man and to Simon and to Alma in shocked bewilderment—like a fawn realizing it's caught within a hunter's sights.
"If her majesty has any questions she would ask of me, it is my duty to report them as best I am able."
Ovelia shook her head, and even with Simon's coaxing did not utter a peep at being told her father was dead. She did not cry or break down or make any display of feeling beyond one of shock. When the messenger took his leave, with a formal bow and a further recitation of terms and titles, he assured them that he should remain at Orbonne while his bird rested. If the princess found herself more disposed to speak with him, he would gladly do so.
They went to the fraterhouse after that. It would be a lie to say that there was not some mote of private jubilation on Alma's part; Ovelia's sudden bereavement warranted both of them the consolation of the honey jar. Still, the tears she wept on her friend's behalf were very real and heartfelt, and throughout dinner it pained her that she was the only one shedding them. Ovelia had always been the exact sort of princess one keeps enshrined in a tower: still and serene as one of the chapel's marble saints. She did not weep.
It was only later that night, when they were shut into the darkness, that Ovelia said a single word of the incident.
"I'm very sorry if I made you cry," she whispered. "I didn't mean to be the cause of any trouble."
"You causing trouble?" Alma hissed. "You're the one whose papa just died—they should let you cause all the trouble you like."
"Alma..." she said, voice unsteady. "I do not think I ever met the man. If I did, I was too little to know."
Alma clambered out of her bed. She made a careful series of well rehearsed footsteps across the floor that separated them, taking care to avoid the loud creaking plank that might alert the monks to her movements.
"He was still your papa, goose!" she whispered sharply, petting back Ovelia's hair as she knelt over her. "I barely know anyone in my family, for what it's worth."
Ovelia sat up to look at her, eyes dark and questioning. Alma elaborated without prompting.
"When they took me back to Igros last year—after all the Romandans died and everyone had parades and things—it was like meeting people from books."
"But Alma," Ovelia whispered back, "people in books aren't real."
"Sometimes they are, though. St. Ajora is in a book, and he's real, and the people in histories are real. Simon says that if you write a history, it all needs to be true."
"But people in history books are all dead."
Alma paused a moment, never having really considered this. She then thought about how far afield they were getting from talk of her family and even further from talk of Ovelia's.
"It wasn't like a history, though," she said after a while. "It was like a fairy story—like earlier—like my brothers took me inside the hills and brought me back again, and there was a castle and a party and a brother I hadn't even met before, and then I woke up like it was all a dream."
She turned to Ovelia.
"But it wasn't a dream, you know, and your papa wasn't a dream either—even if he's only in history books now."
Ovelia nodded, and in the barest light of the October moon, Alma imagined she saw her crying as well. She hugged her close, trying to wring out a sorrow she didn't quite know was there.
"I'm sure he loved you very much. Besides, now your brother is king; it's different."
Ovelia made a muted squeak.
"Brothers are there to take care of their sisters."
The pale globs and bubbles of water looked strange under the frozen creek, as if some beast or spirit lay trapped beneath. Ramza watched as Delita tested it with a stick to see if the ice would break. Not half so patient himself, he stepped onto the surface, imagining that he would walk across to the great
knotted tree on the other side, light as a hare or pheasant. He got a boot full of cold muddy water as his reward.
"Should we go back?" Delita asked in a tone that conveyed concern but not fear. "If it freezes too long, I think they might have to cut it off. It happened to one of the brewer's dogs once."
"I'm sure it would take a while, right?" Ramza asked, a little uncertain. He hopped back onto the bank and tried to look for another way to pass over. "Soldiers march through the sleet for days on end, and most of them still have feet, right?"
Delita said nothing.
They had made away from the less than watchful eye of their tutor less than an hour ago, and it seemed to Ramza a shame to return to the keep and submit to their inevitable punishment after so short-lived a freedom. They had wandered west, into the vale below a swath of orchards. Ramza figured to himself that if they kept walking, they might come to one of those tall hills from which you could catch sight of the distant grey band of the Larner.
He found where the stream ran shallow. Figuring he had already condemned one of his feet to amputation, he thought it well to dash across and condemn the other. He ran briskly, giving a shout as the damp soaked through again. Delita, for all his apprehensions, followed close behind. They laughed when they made it over; clasped hands; and trudged numbly to the next hill, apparently willing to sacrifice their limbs together in solidarity.
He'd known Delita for less than a full course of seasons, and he had been told he had never seen the sea before.
"Delita?" he asked as they reached the crest, the first flutters of more snowfall landing about his hair.
"Yes?"
"What's it like to have a sister?"
The question did not seem to have come from anywhere, but Ramza was wont to speak things he thought without yet knowing he thought them. "You have a sister, Ramza."
"I meant..." Ramza stubbled a little as they hit a rocky patch. "I meant having a sister you actually see. I only know about my sister through letters."
Delita lent a hand to steady him. He did not respond until they were several dohms farther into the grey.
"It's not quite like having a friend, I think. It's like having somebody who can't leave you." He paused. "Who you can't leave either, not even if you stop liking each other. You're stuck, and you can't come apart." Ramza nodded.
"I like Teta alright, though," Delita continued. "It would be different too if my Da weren't dead. I could have left then—gone and joined the Death Knights or something."
"They don't let twelve-year-olds be knights, Delita."
"The Death Knights aren't normal knights, though. The rules are different."
Ramza nodded again. He thought to himself that this was probably correct, although he'd never really thought it through. He also thought that he didn't understand sisters anymore than he had before. He'd never been close enough to his sister that he could leave her anywhere. She'd been left behind since whatever day it was that the Romandans came—when his mother had told him that they would have to weather together a while as a family that was just the two of them.
"What's it like to have brothers, Ramza?" Delita asked after a moment, evidently attempting to keep up the conversation.
"I don't know." Ramza frowned a little. "I don't ever see them, either."
"Well, I don't have any to see or not see."
"They're not even really brothers, really. They were grown-ups pretty much when I was born, and we're only one-half brothers anyway."
They reached the top of the hill, and Ramza ran about a little, looking for a point from which he could best squint towards the horizon. Delita, who had never been informed of his plan to show him the tiniest sliver of the West Burgess Ocean, sat down, giving him an odd look. He began to rub his hands along his legs, trying to press some warmth back into them.
"We really should go home, Ramza. I can barely feel my toes, and it'll be far worse before we get back."
Ramza craned his head this way and that, blinking the bits of snow away from his eyelashes as best he could. He hadn't heard Delita at all. He was trying to find the line that edges the white stretch of the next hill: a little rope of dull silver that lay beyond the shore. When he found it—or found what he thought was it—he grabbed Delita and pointed enthusiastically in its direction.
He watched then, and his friend did his utmost to be excited at the sight of that dim shadow of distant water. Delita told him with all seeming sincerity that he was flattered he had thought to show it to him.
On the way back—as they felt their bodies sink into the damp, cottony expanse of the growing white—the boys interlinked their arms and leaned against one another as they pushed on.
"It's different, you know," Ramza said. "It's different when there's something you can see."
"You've seen them all before, haven't you?" Delita asked, turning the conversation back to all the Beoulves he'd never seen.
Ramza stopped and cast his gaze up towards the grey white sky above. "I suppose I have," he said. "Maybe—when the war is over—I'll see them again. Maybe it will be like you said."
He laughed a little, and a puff of his breath stood stark in the winter air a moment before it was drowned beneath the snow.
"Maybe once we're all together again—maybe then we won't be able to come apart."
BACK