SUM OF OUR DEEDS
Written on October 9, 2019 (♎︎︎)
Author's Notes: Written for FireEye for the 2019 Exchange on the Big Bridge.
"Would you please be so kind as to see that His Majesty is alerted to my arrival, my dear?"
Agrias did not know what to say, although she stilled her nervous impulse to comply with the Duke’s request. She had been told, very emphatically, not to allow anybody to intrude upon the royal couple during their tour of the grounds, and she supposed that must mean saying no to the Lord of Zeltennia. It seemed a much weightier task, however, than she had anticipated she would face within the first week of being formally inducted into the Lionsguard. She recalled that as a girl her naïve fantasy was that knights slew dragons or some such thing instead of having to reroute intruding old nobleman.
"My dear..." Goltanna continued impatiently, seeing that she was flustered, "I feel I must explain. I am his majesty’s cousin, and..."
"Druksmald," interrupted the hooded knight alongside him, "I do not believe this young lady’s name is 'My Dear'"
Duke Goltanna shot the man Agrias presumed to be his retainer a very exasperated look. He turned to her again.
"Well then, Miss..."
"I believe the appropriate title is 'Ser,' Druksmald. She is a knight or else she wouldn’t be here." He tilted his head towards Agrias "Isn’t that correct Ser...?"
"...Oaks," Agrias replied, grateful for the handful of seconds he’d bought her to compose herself. "Ser Agrias Oaks of His Majesty’s Lionsguard." She took a deep breath. "And I’m afraid I must inform you that I am under orders not to let anybody see any member of the royal family for the time being, your Grace."
Hearing her own voice, it struck her that she almost sounded like she knew what she doing. She smiled.
Goltanna did quite the opposite.
"As I was saying... Ser Oaks, I am in a manner of speaking, a member of the royal family myself, and I’m certain my cousin would wish to see me while I have the opportunity to be in the Capital."
"Have you requested a formal audience via the Chamberlain, your Grace?" Agrias asked.
"I imagine the Chamberlain wouldn’t like to be bothered given the present state of affairs."
"You’re being rude, Druksmald," the cloaked figure interjected calmly. "I don’t see why its our business to cause trouble for the knight. She has her orders, and as they come from the crown, they supersede whatever we might wish."
"Gads, Orlandu, she can’t be any older than that boy you took in!" Goltanna replied in a low hiss, obviously getting impatient. "I don’t see why we need to kowtow to every child in the capital brandishing some title or another—they hand them out like sweetmeats here."
Agrias said nothing. The man, evidently named Orlandu, slowly lowered his hood, and she suddenly had a mortifying realization as to whom it was who had been rallying to her defense over the course of this unpleasant conversation.
"I believe that you are being very clumsy altogether today in picking your words,” he said in a calm voice that nevertheless betrayed the slightest hint of rising irritation. "You seem to have said ‘that boy I took in’ in when you meant 'my son.'"
"Orlandu, we don’t have time for this."
"I’m afraid time is all we have, your Grace,” Orlandu continued, using for the first time—Agrias noted much to her private bemusement—the proper address due a duke. "At least until you go find your way to the Chamberlain in question and make a petition."
"Don’t be a mooncalf; do you really think she would allow..."
"I think she is probably a great deal better a conversationalist than you are as of late and—if I may say so—a good deal prettier a one at least insofar as her husband is concerned. I would advise you to consult the Chamberlain. In the meantime, unless Ser Oaks here has additionally been commanded to keep anyone from intruding upon this particular patch of grass." He grinned very jovially in her direction. "I can remain here, and should the King suddenly appear in a desperate search for a cousin, I will be on hand to alert him as to your presence."
Duke Goltanna, the lord of Zeltennia and commander of the Southern Sky, said nothing on this point, but turned to walk away in obvious ill humor. He was, Agrias noted, moving back towards the palace and in the rough direction of where the offices of the Chamberlain lay. She thought it would be good fortune for once if the machinery of the imperial bureaucracy ran slower than usual. She turned her attention to the man now lackadaisically propped against the archway to the southern gardens.
"Are you..." she began very hesitantly, not certain how best to ask. "Are you... really the Thundergod?"
Orlandu burst out laughing, and Agrias passed through several shades of red thinking she’d been mistaken in identifying the Duke’s associate. Evidently noticing her embarrassment, he quickly composed himself.
"My apologies," he said with what struck her as a deep sincerity. "I just find it an odd thing after all that quibbling over address and protocol to have to face what my own name has become."
"Oh! I’m sorry if..."
"Please don’t apologize, Ser Oaks. I am, as you deduced, Cidolfus Orlandu of the Southern Sky, and people have seen fit to call me by any number of other names besides.” He sighed. "I suppose it happens to everyone if a war goes on long enough: King of the Forge, Savior of Ivalice, Silver Prince... all well deserved, of course."
She nodded, still a little bit in shock that the most renowned general in all the seven kingdoms was standing across from her.
"So, ah... how would you like to be addressed, then?"
"We’re all knights here. I think I’ll just be Ser Orlandu to your Ser Oaks if that suits you?"
She stiffened her posture a little, smiling as she bowed.
"Well met then, Ser Orlandu."
He returned the gesture. "Well met, Ser Oaks."
She grinned, half out of nervousness, half out of excitement. She made a mental tally of everyone she might tell that Cidforas Orlandu had bowed to her and then remonstrated herself for being so gauche as to imagine she might actually do so. Then, not entirely realizing what she was saying asked, "So do you often call your lord by his given name?"
Orlandu laughed again. "You don’t mince words, milady. I ah... see you picked up on that.”
He mistook her embarrassed silence for that of somebody awaiting an answer and continued. "I’m overly familiar with Lord Goltanna insofar as its occasionally in his best interests I do so. In this case, he needed a bit of rather pointed direction to remember his manners, which are something he should be minding in particular if he’s trying to speak to the His Majesty independently of Her Majesty."
Agrias, having all of a week’s worth of various knights’ and officials’ opinions on Queen Ruvelia, did not ask further as to Orlandu’s meaning there.
"I’m sure you’ll learn much the same about the obligations knighthood if you persist in it long."
"Oh?" Agrias asked, eyebrows raised. She felt a bit vulnerable to know that he seemed aware of how green he was.
"A knight honors his... her lord, yes? But honor—for me at least—means following one’s liege at their most honorable self. When Duke Goltanna appears at Lesalia with a genuine interest of the state at heart, he has my dying breath. When Druksmald—Ajora forgive his poor father that name—bullies about knights such as you and I so he can skulk around as if he were the villain in a two gil morality show, I do my best to redirect him until he’s Duke Goltanna again."
"That’s a somewhat mercenary definition of honor, isn’t it?"
Orlandu looked off a moment towards the skyline of the castle, its towers and spires bristling around the palace gardens' little island of green. "You have a very forthright manner to you, Ser Oaks." He smiled. "I appreciate it. Pray you don’t abandon it in the days to come."
"I’ll do my best not to, Ser,” Agrias replied softly. "But as I was saying..." She breathed deeply, trying her best to remain as forthright as she could. "As I was saying, it leaves an awful lot up to the knight? What would you do if you were beholden to a Lord genuinely no longer honorable? Would you presume to know better than your liege?"
Orlandu looked to her, and Agrias, for all she knew he was more ancient than the War itself and had weathered near to every battle of it, felt that he suddenly looked very old for a man his age—much older than he ought.
"I would not, Ser Oaks," he said very softly. "If it came to such a point of conscience, I would leave."
"Leave?"
"If there was nothing I could do to bring him back round, I would not remain in a bad man’s service." He fidgeted with the polished steel pommel of his sword. "I think the real paradox of knighthood, if I may, is that one must be beholden to honor itself before one is beholden to those honor binds one to."
"Without a liege though, isn’t one no longer a knight?"
"And there’s the paradox," he replied. "To be most truly knightly, one must consider forsaking the profession insofar as the world recognizes it."
Agrias did not quite know what to say. If she had heard the High Confessor deny the divinity of the Saint Sunday next, it would not seem much more extraordinary than this interview. As a knight of all of seven days, she felt there must be a great wrongness to how readily she seemed to agree with him. Still, there was one point about his case that gave her pause.
"So Duke Goltanna, then?" she asked. "He is a good man?"
Orlandu said nothing for a moment.
"Duke Goltanna is many things." He sighed. "He’s ruler of a duchy under threat of invasion and he has been watching the creep of the Ordallian lines since he was a boy. He’s a general who chafes that Gallione and Fovoham won so much glory while sending him so little aid. He's a clannish sort of fellow who feels deeply about those he considers 'his own.' He’s..."
He drifted off, letting the thought escape him. Although Agrias considered doing so, she did not repeat her question in search of a better answer. Their silence was eventually broken by the sound of footsteps clacking on the white flagstones as the royal entourage reemerged from the garden. Agrias stiffened, fretting for a moment that there would be some consequence to her not permitting the Duke’s intrusion. However, when Omdolia III, ruler of the seven kingdoms, finally appeared in the thick of his retainers, he said nothing to her nor cast a glance in his direction. He stopped instead before the man to whom she’d been talking.
"I take it my cousin is in the city?” he asked faintly, his eyes seeming to lose their focus a moment as is gaze drifted across the reddening sky.
"Yes,” Orlandu replied. "His Grace is in the process of requesting an audience. He very much wishes to see you."
Omdolia didn’t quite react to the news a moment, but then smiled weakly.
"How uncharacteristic of him to go through protocol," the queen interjected coolly, "It’s a shame you are so fatigued this evening." She tilted her head softly, and Agrias watched the myriad little points of sunset reflected by her jewelry dance about on the ground.
Agrias waited—for Orlandu to further his Lord’s petition, for Omdolia to make some remark, for Druksmald Goltanna to come barreling down the stone path to make himself some new manner of botheration. She was a little disappointed by the anticlimax, when the King nodded towards the leader of the Nanten in acknowledgement and walked on, his lady’s slender hand grasping his own.
"How long have you been a knight, Ser Oaks?" Orlandu asked, watching the royal family disappear into the distance.
"All of a week," she admitted.
Orlandu nodded. "As I said, please don’t lose your aptitude for difficult questions when you’ve been at it longer. Old men need to have them asked."
Agrias frowned a little, uncertain if it would be wrong to ask what would happen with Goltanna and the audience he was seeking. She suspected that wasn’t the sort of difficult question of which he spoke.
"I must be going," he said pensively. "Druksmald is probably going to need a great deal of my aid before he remembers himself as the Duke of Zeltennia again."
He smiled a little bitterly as he bowed to her once more and turned to leave, his cloak fluttering a moment until it grazed the purple edge of the sky.
Years later, when the world had traded one war for another and Agrias was no longer a callow girl of eighteen, she finally found herself again on the same patch of grass as Cidolfus Orlandu, although she was many miles from Lesalia. After leading the recently executed traitor out of Bethla whole and unscathed, Ramza had had them ride east without much time for introductions, and it was only when they’d made camp for the night that she had the chance to approach him.
"So, how does it feel to live the paradox?" she asked, uncertain if he remembered her or their conversation. "Do you still feel a knight even without a lord?"
He looked back at her, the light of a campfire throwing into contrast the weathered lines of his face.
"Do you, Ser Oaks?" he smiled. "I hear there is no Lionsguard without a king.”
"I think Ser Orlandu, that your means of address answers my question."
"And yours mine." He laughed.
He gestured for her to sit down next to him, which she did, and as the first star shone through canopy of trees around them, she spoke once more.
"It’s good to have another knight for company, you know?" Her voice was bright. "Even if dukes and popes won’t grant us distinctions beyond a noose."
"Well," he said contemplatively, laughing a little. "I think that’s a distinction of a sort for knights of our stripe."
He looked back at her, "But let’s try to avoid it if we can."
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