the development

development: (in fencing) "A simple thrust and lunge, executed as one movement."
(source: Bluegrass Fencers' Club)

"POINTS TO NOTE ON THE DEVELOPMENT

1. Hand slightly higher than the shoulder.
2. Front knee above instep.
3. Left leg straight.
4. Left arm parallel with rear leg.
5. Left foot flat on the floor.
6. Body upright.
7. Head erect.
8. Above all, sword-arm straight."
(source: Southampton University Fencing Club)

i.

He has always known, of course. Since too young to entirely understand; and then, once he was somewhat more capable, he supposed first that the fancies of his mind on taking himself in hand were ordinary, and then that they were perhaps not so ordinary but of no concern to him. It was only later that the concern became clear, but it was never that he did not know. He has. He does.

ii.

Vossler is sixteen; his friend is a little older. He has served in the army for two years, for love of home and country and simply for love of battle, for the calluses his sword-hilt leaves scarred upon his palm. They are shield-mates of the same regiment, boy-soldiers fair and true.

His friend is handsome, fair-haired and bronze-skinned as any Dalmascan, all unlike the darker aspect that, apart from his surname, was the only gift of Vossler's Rozarrian father. The older boy is lanky but strong, his hands large and full of cracks made by leather and sand in their knuckles, which he cracks sometimes as Vossler tends his blade and feigns he does not watch. They wrestle to a fall on the dusty pallets of the training-salle, and his friend lands on his lower belly and pins his hands above his head, laughing, the sun catching in his straw-pale hair and filling it with gold. There is never any chance for him to miss the stirring of his captive's loins, trapped against the full secret curve of his rear.

His eyes widen with shock, and then shock seems to turn to curiosity. He presses down harder, and the sound from Vossler's lips startles birds out of their roostings in the rafters, up to beat senseless wings against the cracked boards that crown under the sun.

But his friend rides hence in the Giza Rains in two months' time, a friend no longer; and he swears to himself never again, never such a thing again. To those best loved, the door to this room must be always locked.

iii.

He is bored by the brothels that the soldiers frequent. The women hold no savour for him, and although there is a steady traffick in boys as well, and they are uniformly young and uniformly lovely, graceful smiling creatures in silks and kohl, he thinks privately that they are not unlike enough the lady-trulls for his taste. He stays in barracks on the nights his fellows go carousing, practicing his forms with a veney stick or finding other pleasures in solitude. He takes his pleasure in his swordplay, for the most part: development, parry and riposte. Perhaps this will not do forever; but then, there is many a man who finds his life's contentment in solitude.

He does go on a few occasions, and lies with one or another, languid and perfumed in his arms, but what pleasure he takes is perfunctory. There are times he cannot perform at all, and sits humbled as the pretty pillicock counts up his money and shrugs over his shoulder: "It's all the same to me," he says, "don't trouble yourself; by three o' the clock my arse is so sore I'd thank the gods for more like you, sergeant, no mistake; although you are as handsome a man as I'd hope for, and kind as well," and there is little he can say but to excuse himself out into the cold desert night. They all talk too much; there's another problem. Too much of nothing at all.

iv.

"Basch fon Ronsenberg," says Jarnier, and shrugs. "Or so they say. Of Landis, that is no more."

Vossler frowns, lifting his head again from his low sparring stance. "Landis... I've heard that name."

"Aye, and well you would've." The last word comes on a grunt, as Jarnier spins into a surprise strike; he always liked to take an advantage fair or foul, and whip about like some mad holy man. Waste of energy, thinks Vossler, but refrains from saying so, in part due to his present occupation with blocking the attack. "Crushed by the Empire not long hence, 'twas. I hear they never stood a chance. Only a little northern backwood, rolled flat under the Archadian machine." He withdraws, arming sweat from his brow. "That was a hit, was it not?"

"No." Vossler speaks unthinking, staring instead toward the far side of the salle, where the strange man stands alone with a practice dummy, unloading on its straw-stuffed back some fighting form he has ne'er before seen. "To lose home and country all... I pity the man's ill luck."

"Not so ill," Jarnier points out; he tries to dart under his guard once more, and forces Vossler's attention back to hand. "He's luck enough to have escaped alive, and found so sympathetic an ear as His Majesty's. That's more luck than some men see their whole lives." Vossler's blade strikes back against him, and throws him back, swearing. "'Sblood, Vossler, sparring with you's enough to put a man off battle altogether! Has no one ever taught you to pull a strike?"

Vossler glances at him, and offers a slight smile. "I've never let them." But his eyes are drifting back already, to the figure with the dummy, his spinning kicks a far more controlled dervish. Basch fon Ronsenberg, indeed.

v.

A fine tangle, he thinks, lying awake and listening to Basch's heavy breath in the bedroll just to his side, to want so badly and so hopelessly, and not even know what.

As it turns out, Basch rides in his regiment, shelters behind his same shield wall. Their brief column tours the Westersand, routinely patrolling the borders, and they have ridden much of the way together, and talked. He has heard tales of Landis, 'round their fire at night, as the knots in the dry wood burst and send up showers of sparks in twilight; he has seen the way Basch's eyes cloud sometimes when he speaks of it, even as still he smiles. He has seen Basch scan the split of blue and brown where the desert sky meets mountain, and seem at a restless sort of peace at the sight, a homesick homecoming. He has found lovely the sound of Basch's voice: the accent a sort of burr, the quality low and worn rough, a sound he thinks he could enjoy for days if he could but persuade Basch to speak at so great length. He has already come to think of Basch as a friend.

He has harbored attractions to his fellow-soldiers before -- a cruel joke, it seems to him, on his lack of interest in the boy-whores -- and dismissed them; he is no fool, and knows what in his life has no place there. This is both something like those, and nothing like at all; both something like the ugly longing that brought his last such friendship to ruin, and something that could not be more unlike. And at the very least, it will not be dismissed.

Basch is so kind, and he thinks this is what troubles him. Basch is simply so very kind.

So he stares at the stars, tonight, near the end of this too-long and too-short duty, for despite all his chastisements he cannot force himself to sleep. And he listens. And he wonders.

vi.

The man is a royal knight. He commands a division, but not Vossler's division; still, 'sir' comes from his lips every time, as unpracticed as any gasp or any groan. He has a narrow mustache that, if meant to do so, poorly hides a cruel, roguish smile.

"Remove your clothes," the man says, and he should not have come. Should never have come to such a one's private quarters; should never have so much as acknowledged him on the street, in spite of the crest blazoned on his armour, the respect due to his rank. Should not have turned his head at the insinuation of the man's tone. But he has; in this dream, he does. And he does.

"Kneel," the man says next, "and serve me."

He tastes of salt, something not unlike tears. He has a short rod to which are knotted a thatch of strips of soft leather. On striking they seem to make every nerve cry out, the skin turn flame. There is no sight, no thought, in the grip of such a thing; it is all he can do to help but close his teeth.

Surely this cannot be it. Not this.

But "Yes," the man hisses, though his own closed teeth, through his thin, terrible smile. "This is what you want."

And so he supposes it must be.

vii.

And then he kneels instead before his king, in the vaulted nave of the grand cathedral, and his sword balances on His Majesty's hands above his head. "And to what end do you aspire to the ranks of the Order?" King Raminas asks him -- the questions rote and ritual, his responses long since carefully deliberated and crafted. Long hours spent in vigil the night before, sitting in meditation and watching the tapers burn down to stubs, in which to decide.

"Your Majesty, I wish to serve Dalmasca," he says, staring at the mailed hands fisted on his knee. "I wish to be the shield that defends her royal family from all harm; I wish to be the sword that cuts down her enemies before her. I wish to swear myself in brotherhood to those brave souls whose arms are already sworn to her service. To these ends, I so aspire."

A slight smile across his king's mouth; not ritual, and nor is the answer that leaves him reeling, giddy with praise: "It is fair spoken." He stands back, the sword still borne before him. "Then rise; and receive the raiments of your office."

He resumes his feet, and is fitted with his full plate by swift, efficient hands, attendants who have flanked him for just such a purpose. Princess Ashelia, six years of age now if he remembers correctly, draped white and decked with gem-wrought flowers, steps from her father's side with her eyes cast down and a goblet between her soft child's hands. He is obliged to kneel down again to receive the wine to his lips, and then the dab of folded white cloth she holds there instead, and looking up upon them both his heart swells in loyalty and in love. She is a fair child, her father a fine king, this commission a long dream at last found true on waking. He would gladly die in their service. By his troth, he would die no other way.

His sword is delivered into his hands, and he holds it aloft as King Raminas draws his own; as its rune-encrusted tip touches his shoulders each in turn, and he is told to rise a knight of the Order, in the name of the gods and of Galtea, and the priest genuflects and speaks faram.

It is a good day, a fine day; the sky crowns the desert city with faultless blue, and seldom has he ever felt so at peace in himself, so right or so true. He will need to think back on it often, in many days to come.

viii.

Enlisted men are best. From another regiment entirely, if at all possible, to remove any suspicion of misuse, and any complications in the chain of command thereafter. He seeks out the privates, the officers without commission, gutter-trash by and large but all who look at him in a certain way, with a knowing in their eyes. It becomes easier as he becomes older, and he cannot but wonder if this were always here, a lost continent simply waiting for his discovery. The notion seems too fantastical to comprehend.

Even so, he has not met a single one who did not take to it at once; not once has he been required to stoop to the absurdity of coaxing a man to force him on his knees. They are men of action, men of war. He takes no pleasure in the scars laid on him in due course of battle, of which there are a fair few, but perhaps there is something in it all the same: his warrior's pride, his warrior's shame. And as for all of them, even where respect runs deep, and rank, violence runs deepest.

The leather strap that girds his throat is a gift from a man of no particular importance, save that he was a dalliance of more than once and thus something of a rarity. He knows not why 'twas given, but wears it to remind himself, even in his proudest moments, how much he has to keep him humble. Were it a ring he could engrave within, he has thought at least once and not exactly in whimsy, it would bear the legend RUIN HAS COME FROM LESS.

ix.

The rope about his wrists cinches like a noose, and Vossler can hear the creaking of the rough pulley it threads upon as he is pulled up to his full kneeling height. His head hangs limp almost to his chest, but his teeth lock in his head so tightly that it aches with pressure. It is not defeat that saps his neck of its proud strength.

The shorter length of rope cracks in the air, and against his upper back makes a sound like a whisk beating the dust from a rug, a sound that fills Rabanastre's streets come spring. His closed teeth cannot catch all his cry. The man wielding it is clumsy, he will think later, strikes too hard, at the wrong angles, hurts him more than stings him; he is a soldier inexperienced, who does not strike clean. He will think this later. Here and now he is in flames, too drunk with lust to think. The first beads of hot blood cooling on his back, and the first of hot spend cooling at the tip of his prick. The first of many.

The rope cuts again and he shouts through his teeth, clenched eyes watering at their corners. The incoherent image that comes to his mind, that always comes to his mind, a crossbow pulled taut and, its mechanism learned, fired; quivering bolts burying one by one in wood at every pull. Triggered and triggered and triggered, and at this rate soon fired empty --

"And how is it on your knees, sir?" the soldier breaks in on him, speaking soft and low, almost the caressing words of a lover. Panting, sweating, he cannot even remember the man's rank. Is it all such bitterness, all the way down to the lowliest foot-soldier? Or is that only the ones he chooses? After a moment the man laughs, and jerks his head up by his collar. He chokes on his breath, seeing white. "Sirrah?" he asks instead, into Vossler's ear. He swallows, and trembles, and speaks not.

Triggered and triggered and triggered and...

The soldier waits, but given no answer seems unperturbed. "Such a spectacle of a royal knight," he murmurs. His hand is still clutched in the back of the leather strap; Vossler's throat burns, and air will not seem to pass it, but he has no fear to spend. "Terrible scandal, I should think. Why, if 'twere to be known -- "

The dangling tip of the rope just touches the swelled, aching shaft of his prick, the fluttering vein in its lower side. It drags up along it, a kiss of rough-woven fibers, grating unbearably on that tender agony. Where it touches him it is smeared with his heart's blood.

And as always he has seed enough to follow.

x.

Each time, as he sits in his small chamber of the palace barracks washing the dried blood away, each time as he thinks with cold chill of the coin of bribery and whether its metal is heavy enough to weigh down a wagging tongue, each time he comes back he tells himself it will be the last. That he can bear this no longer; that his luck will not hold. Each time, he tells himself that he is stronger than this.

xi.

He spills over his hand with one final shuddering gasp, in hot rivulets already cooled by the time they touch his fingers. At last he can unlock his teeth, and lies still and shaky with his eyes yet shut; then he passes the back side of his other hand across his brow, the first still holding a loose circle 'round his softening prick. The last fragments of fantasy -- bitter, sweet, somehow strange -- recur as he draws himself up to sit upon his cot, and he stares down toward his stained hand as they go passing.

It is a curious thing; but then, it is also the problem in itself. Basch is a fellow knight now, a comrade, a brother-in-arms, and no base grudge-holding private, nor, worse yet, any scoundrel haunting a seedy doorway with a list of names in pocket. There is no reason his desires from each should be the same, and yet he stares into his hand in the dim light that makes its slickness glow gold, and wonders at what it has wrought, and with so little effort, at least of his usual sort.

Their friendship has lasted years now, and yet still Basch is a mystery, and one he would just as soon not solve: his fascination is endless in obscurity, and Vossler has been fascinated long before ever quite realizing the danger. There is that gentleness in his nature that undoes Vossler, leaves him speechless; it is nothing he has ever wanted before, but now faced with it cannot seem to help but to crave, a meal never tasted but, once scented, obsessing the appetite. Basch calls him friend and brother, and he responds with a stirring he cannot explain, a tidal pull as toward the light of day. His longing disturbs him, but will not release him. And all-unknowing Basch presses their foreheads to one another and speaks his loyalty with passion, embraces Vossler after a night spent drinking in each other's amiable company and before retiring to his own chamber, and Vossler is left staring after him with shattered heart, and sick with a fever he cannot name.

But even nameless, even deadly, it is not to be broken with his wretched lust, and this much if nothing else he understands. He has not forgotten his oath. It has been long and long ere he saw such a friendship, and he will not fail it again.

He stands, and goes to the basin to draw water and rinse his hands clean. He dashes water on his face after, careful not to wetten the leather at his throat, and then stands for moments more before drying himself and beginning to dress.

No; in this, at least, he must find restraint. Enough is enough. He must think on it no more.

xii.

This man's hair is Dalmascan blond: sun- and sand-bleached as bones in the Sands, more white than yellow. Surely not the honey-gold of some unimagined autumn light, pouring through trees in a distant, northern place. It doesn't matter. In the dim starlight and with the man behind him, he cannot see it anyway.

"Yes," he pants, "yes, that's -- " and Vossler does wish he would stop talking. If he could hear no more voice but breath, perhaps he could imagine in the half-wild accent, the rasping, husking speech that can set him burning with no more but a friendly word. The man is not his ordinary sort, chosen more for his passing resemblance than for any dark shine behind the eyes; he whimpers and gasps like a green boy in Vossler's ear, even with Vossler's body trapped 'twixt his member and the bricks. The street is cold at night, wind moaning through the colonnades. He can hear distant noise from the alehouses: wine, women, and song.

A hand too soft and too uncallused closes around his own prick, and he shuts his eyes, thinking hard upon a land he's never seen.

xiii.

Even still, he has finally just begun to think all may yet be well when Basch begins sleeping in his bed.

Admittedly, the palace does hold a chill in the dark hours, particularly down in the lower levels where the royal knights are chambered (although he can hardly imagine that the temperature can come as any shock to Basch, hailing as he does from a northern land that he routinely describes as though it were buried in snow half of the year, but be that as it may). But it is far less this that wins Basch his way into Vossler's cot than it is the look in his eyes when he asks, appearing one night at Vossler's bedside after he has but begun to doze. He could not deny even half so pleading and hungry a look on Basch's face, even did he not know what little he does of Basch's past.

And Basch is warm beside him, but in Vossler's present disposition, it is not a warmth that comforts. He does not sleep that night, nor when Basch appears again, or again, only lies awake staring at the stones in the walls, nerves all alight and every muscle tensed and unrelievable; he lies with Basch each night coming to tuck himself closer to Vossler's side, his head into the hollow of his shoulder. He lets his arm rest around Basch's shoulder and despite his weariness counts the stones, and lies, and wants, and wants.

And finally, after all these many years, one nameless night when all seems too easy and too close, takes.

xiv.

And Basch stays.

xv.

They are two among a rotation of knights whose duties include guardianship of the princess, and though many of their fellows will complain good-naturedly of this responsibility, Vossler finds it no imposition. In the course of his protection he seldom has call to speak with her, but when he does he finds between them a mutual liking; he treats her with a gentleness unaccustomed to his character, and finds her a serious, devoted girl: mature, mindful, honest, modest. She is in many aspects the image of her father, a man Vossler reveres above all others, and it is no strain on his resources to transfer that reverence to his daughter. She would be a fine queen, were it not for her morass of elder brothers, but she will likely be at least as fine a diplomat.

He walks behind her through the bazaar on her afternoons out with his hand on the pommel of his sword, scowling at any rabble who dare to stray too close; and as he does, he admires her possession of herself, and the grace with which she makes her way in the city that is hers. Let the rest laugh in their cups and call themselves the Governesses' Order. He cannot think of a duty he would more treasure than to keep her safe.

xvi.

His dalliance with Basch is something of an open secret; the other knights are well aware, at least, as Basch could hardly spend years leaving his quarters disused and retiring instead to Vossler's without attracting some notice. That's just as well, for most of them care not in the slightest, and the jokes when off-duty in the Sandsea are always friendly ones. He suspects even the king may have some inkling, as both knights continue to be trusted implicitly with the princess's safety throughout the blossoming of her young womanhood. He finds it all comforting, after a queer fashion: an open secret that diverts attention from the ones he yet keeps closed.

What he finds curious -- particularly after some of his early experience -- is how little of anything it has changed. Basch still counts him friend and brother, still embraces him much the same as ever, and though it would have killed his heart to find that he had altered such things with his indiscretion, it does also seem strange. Almost a frustration, as though something new and revelatory lay just beyond reach, never drawing closer. There is a kind of curious distance in Basch, one he supposes he has always been aware of but which only their physical closeness has forced to light: a sense of tragedy, even, a wistful sadness, as though some great love has been long lost to him. He supposes Basch might well have been married in Landis, or at least betrothed, and of course he knows what became of all who dwelt there. In any case, he resolves to be content, for if something there is else he wants from Basch, still he cannot name what it might be.

And even if there were, he thinks as he shakes under the sweating, straining body of a border guard, his collar connected by a makeshift leash of chain to the man's thick fist, as no doubt Basch lies abed and wonders what duty has kept him so late, he could not possibly deserve it.

xvii.

"It's nothing," he repeats, but still smiles as he lets his muscles ease in the heat. "A scratch only."

Basch's arm tightens around his chest, urging him still further back, and he goes willingly enough; water laps softly at the high sides of the basin. He watches as Basch's fingers stray near the angry red weal in his shoulder -- undressed for the time being to save bandages from water -- and then shy away, although he does nothing to stop them in any case. His collar lies amid clothing and armor near the entrance of the bath, and Basch's having it off him always gifts him a sense of peaceful helplessness, a happy defeat. Although Basch surely knows nothing of this. "Even so, I mislike having you returned damaged," Basch murmurs, near his ear, and his smile grows.

"I'll keep it in mind in future." He laces his broad fingers into Basch's, where they rest on his chest, and lets his eyes close, turning his head so his temple almost rests on Basch's shoulder. "You worry too much. Or not enough about the right things; I'm never sure."

It wasn't precisely an ambush, for an ambush generally has the distinction of going somewhere eventually. A volley of arrows and spells under cover of darkness, in Nabradia's curious hinterlands, with no source to be found and no satisfaction to be gained, save the meager one of finding some truth in the rumors of infiltrating forces -- likely from Archadia, possibly not. The detachment returned to friendly Nabudis not much diminished but more than a little shaken, and from Nabudis to Rabanastre with a hunted edge to its movements of which he has not seen fit to tell Basch, nor indeed his Majesty. There will be time for a full report, but the arrowhead taken from his shoulder and his present contentment make the urgency of such things seem dim indeed. Although he knows in time it must be so, he does not wish his worry, like a cancer, to spread.

For now, Basch laughs, low beneath his breath, and Vossler feels the press of Basch's mouth to the damp hair at the crown of his head. "Lie easy," he speaks soft, in lieu of any answer, and reaches for the cake of soap at the rim of the bath; he brings it to the top of Vossler's chest, away from the wound, and there begins to make a lather. Vossler lies easy, and lets a small sound fall from his lips -- and ones not so small in time, when Basch's slick hand slips well below the level of the water. It is good to be home, he thinks, blurrily, and then that he has missed the desert light, is grateful even with his eyes closed for the skylights here that let it fall inside. It is good; and surely fears can wait.

xviii.

He is deeply amused when he first realizes that Prince Rasler is terrified of him.

As well he might be, Vossler supposes; he is a particularly imposing presence in the princess's service, and views her long-since betrothed at first with a healthy scowling skepticism. Still, as the boy stays in Rabanastre in the months before the wedding, Vossler grows to respect him, even like him -- although of course he would admit no such thing. Like her Majesty, he is serious, dedicated, if a little prone to worry. Basch, who has charge of the prince's protection while he visits, also reports that the two intended seem quite taken with one another, and this also speaks in his favor, in Vossler's opinion.

Their wedding day is a star of hope, amid a long troubled twilight in the shadow of possible war. Vossler marches in the retinue behind their nuptial carriage, in ceremonial armor and so warm a smile as seldom comes to his lips. They are bright and fair in the noonday sun, and for the moment it is possible to forget that the wedding has been hastened along its course to strengthen relations between Nabradia and Dalmasca, so that they might present a united front in the face of any Archadian aggression; it is possible to believe that this is only a celebration of the highest order, that all may yet be well, that they may yet flourish even through fear.

He is required to remain behind through the battle at Nalbina, in the princess's guard, and it is when Basch returns, hollow-eyed, with the prince's body slung over his saddle, that Vossler begins to realize that what little they have had of hope may be finally gone.

xix.

He will remember later, with the vividity of the obsessed: Basch telling him Go ahead, I will handle this rabble; himself willing him godspeed; and above all the trust he felt in that moment, trust so implicit as to be un-thought-of, and boundless as time was then short. He will remember these things, and in time come to wish he did not. The words will echo in his mind as the years pass, grinding him to a fine madness.

He pounds up the stairs, breath heavy in his ears, down a corridor and then another. Basch and the others occupy the majority of the forces, to a curious degree; the upper levels are all but silent. He does not think to question his fortune, particularly not when that all but silence is broken at last by a detachment that drives him afield rather than be mired, rerouting across another staircase and broken hall and nearly losing his way. It loses him precious minutes, and he returns to his trek apace and infuriated, cursing beneath his breath.

Stairs and hallways, throats of metal and stone. Eerie silence that does not seem as though it should be so deep. And at last he turns a final corner -- and faces Basch, at the end of the hall.

Incomprehension grinds him to a halt, and his stuttering footsteps make Basch look up; he appears to have been pacing the end of the corridor, which is all the more inexplicable. Surely Vossler wasn't lost for that long -- but it must be, what else could have happened? He must only have lost track of time, as well as his course. As he stares, so Basch stares back at him, and it seems somehow long and long ere he finds the voice to speak.

"What's happened? Have you found his Majesty?"

"Ah," Basch says, and seems rather more nonplussed than Vossler might have expected. But nothing seems as it should be, though none of it in any way he can grasp at the time (but later, oh later: something curious about the set of his face? how has he come ahead of Vossler and yet not at all winded?). "How did you -- where..." His mouth twists, in a fashion all unknown to Vossler, and he spits, "Oh, damn the luck."

And does he think, then, that something is off about Basch's voice? Perhaps, perhaps not; once he has thought back on the night a thousand times he will no longer remember the true way of things, only the revisions of his mind. In truth, most likely not, or not consciously at least. He first met Basch when Basch spoke still thick with the accent of Landis, and it has faded over time so gradually that he has scarcely marked its passage. Its nigh-full return is therefore jarring in no way he could name. Not now, at any rate. Nothing now.

"What do you mean?" he asks now, his confusion bowing to concern. "Has something happened?" Basch does not answer him, nor even meet his eyes, and he comes closer, so that they stand face to face. In company, particularly that of lower-ranking soldiers, he would never commit such indiscretion, but they are alone for now; and so he rests the comfort of his hand on Basch's shoulder, looking as close into his eyes as his words are gentle. "Basch, what's wrong?"

He almost doesn't finish the sentence. At the touch and his tone Basch's head snaps up, and there is some wild, cold, just as unfamiliar look within his eyes that he has not even time to properly see before Basch's mailed fist crashes with unchecked force, entirely unexpected, into the side of his face.

The first blow fells him easily enough, but not so swiftly that he cannot feel the second follow.

Nor that he cannot feel, upon waking to sprawled body and throbbing head after he knows not how long, that the second was not the last.

He staggers up, bleary and numb, to find that he is alone. He wipes his mouth with the heel of his own gauntleted hand, and stares at the blood in his palm. The eye on the side that was struck (that Basch struck, his mind tries to remedy, and mostly fails) almost cannot see it at all; it seems to peer out of a hot, screaming cave. And oh, there is pain, yes, pain all through and through him, but in spite of it, he is numb. Numb.

Behind the door Basch had been pacing before, he finds an abattoir. The king, seated, slain, a gruesome spectacle. Corpses of soldiers: by his count their company entire. No one living here either, save himself -- but then he nearly trips over evidence that 'tis not so, a youth fallen upon a knife lodged in his chest but still breathing in shallow rasps. The very boy Basch was coddling along earlier, he realizes after turning him over, and finally he can feel something: a dim tide of rage. What had even been the point? The gods-bedamned point?

Not one blow, enough to lay him out in short order; not even just two, to make sure. Another worm inside his heart, gnawing through the years. It had been a gentleness he had seen in Basch, that had perhaps perversely attracted him, his love of battle drawn to Basch's dislike. A gentleness with nothing to say to that fierce twist of Basch's mouth. He will want to believe that the gentleness was true, but it will be that twist that is fresher in his mind. That second strike when he was already falling.

Vossler frees the dagger with a nigh-savage twist; it grates off the boy's ribs and makes him cry out slurrily in his swoon, but he pays no mind. He makes the best and quickest field dressing he may, then picks the boy up off the floor and slings him over his shoulder. He'll have family in the city who'll want him, even if by then his breath has stopped.

No one meets him on the stairs. They are the only living souls in a house of the dead.

xx.

He goes to his knee before her before she can look too closely at the mottled swell all around his eye. He's not seen it, but he can feel how it must look, and doesn't wish to frighten her more than necessary. The palace is eerily still, emptied as it is, forcing back to his mind the memory of Nalbina's sepulchural darkness. The stones echo.

"Dead?" she repeats, and he feels he would give anything to take that tone of weary horror from her voice: as though she only wishes to lose her heart entire, so that there would be no more of it to break. But he has nothing to give. Less than nothing, now.

"Yes, your Majesty; and all our company with him." He tries, genuinely, to begin his next sentence with the name Captain Ronsenberg, but finds that for all his efforts he simply cannot. The words will not come to his tongue. "...We are betrayed," he manages at last, instead. "You must leave at once. I know not how much time we have."

From the corners of his eyes he sees her struggling to process, fighting her grief to put his words and their implications in order in her mind, and he more than respects her for it: in a way he loves her for it, his distant half-numbed heart swelling with pride where he knows her father's should instead. "I cannot simply leave Rabanastre," she says at last, lifting up her head. "I cannot spare myself and leave my kingdom to an Empire of murderous cowards."

"You can, and you must," Vossler says, still to the rich patterns of the carpet. "And you will, be it upon my mount or over it."

She stares down at him for some time; he feels it more than sees. Her voice is so soft it could almost be taken for gentleness, even for docility. "Would you be insolent with me at such a time as this?"

"No, your Majesty." And at last he lifts his head, and meets her eyes. "I would only fufill my pledge to keep you safe; and I do not so if you throw your life away to defend what is already lost."

She meets his gaze as he looks up, for even longer moments, and conflict twists across her face as though it were a stormy sea. She is still dressed in mourning for her husband, the black silk in folds around her face and shoulders, and he supposes it may serve doubly now. She looks tired, but very young. "Your eye," she says then, falteringly, and the relief he feels at knowing he has won, it is done, she will come, is bitter.

"Will heal," he tells her curtly. "Bring only what you need. We ride hard."

xxi.

And they do: into the Westersand, away from Nalbina, into wilds that spread too far and deep to be worth investigating without cause -- or at least, so he hopes. She rides before him on the chocobo, heavy cloaked for their escape from the city and against the desert's night chill, he only presuming to tuck his arm 'round her waist so much as he must to keep her balanced. She says nothing, and so he spurs the bird on as hard as he may and tries not to think. The speed helps, a little, making it seem for a time as though he may leave everything behind him where it lies. It is a temporary blessing, but he is grateful for even the smallest of same.

She sleeps for a few hours before sunrise, folded into the cloak and a thin blanket from his pack, the strong legs of the sleeping chocobo sheltering her one side and he sitting wakeful to the other, sword across his knees. He dares the light of no fire, but no wolf strays too near for comfort; perhaps the animals can scent his desperation, or the mass of steel that awaits the folly of seeking a meal in his little camp. He wakes her when rose light touches the sky.

It is only as they ride west, the rising sun at their backs, that he is able to tell her the full truth -- that Basch's name will finally leave his lips. Still she does not speak, but she need not. He knows full well the name of the gnawing worm he has set loose inside her chest.

As he had hoped, they run across a clutch of soldiers not long after dawn: a border-garrison, spared this most recent slaughter by their tour of duty, as yet all-unknowing of what fate has befallen Dalmasca's liege. When he explains to them, and shows them whom he guards, the garrison's men fall in behind them without question, letting themselves be drawn away in a small column from their erstwhile charge and into hiding with their liege with nary a murmur. Most of them are soldiers of the expendable kind, green boys too young yet to shave, with cheap swords and naked, baffled faces, the occasional fool or drunkard, and perhaps one commanding officer who might yet be worth his salt. They are perhaps ten in all, and nonetheless they will do. For now he and her Majesty must only swell their ranks where they may, and wait.

They pick up a few more stragglers as they push deeper into the desert, into the greyer areas of Dalmasca's borders, almost to the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea. A few trade patrolmen, drifters, even a civilian here or there, come from the city with an ear to the ground and a sword to lend. No one comes from Archadia, searching out the missing princess. He can almost begin to believe, as those first few days drag by, that all may yet be well; that he will take her Majesty to her uncle the Marquis, as she has at length suggested, that with Bhujerba's aid and protection she may recover her throne, that this exile is only a thing of the moment, not a shame to merely be borne and not corrected.

And then a man who has been spying for them in the city rides back to the desert, into their camp, his eyes wide and scarcely seeing and his mount nigh exhausted. Everyone along his path turns to stare, but he cuts a straight path to her Majesty, to bow on his knee with fist to forehead.

"Your pardon, your Majesty," he says, as she turns from a discussion of concealment with Vossler to look down upon him in surprise. "But I bear ill news."

He sees the first of the light die in her eyes at surrender without terms; the last at taken your own life. But it is to his great shame that, even in the face of all her agony, all he can hear is executed for his treason.

xxii.

He stands and looks down upon her, waiting. When still nothing comes, at last he says, "Get up."

She raises her head to favor him with a glower, though it leaves him unmoved. Her hand cradles her sword-arm's wrist; at least she has only dropped her blade across her splayed knees, and not all the way into the dust, he notes with faint exasperation. "You've bruised my wrist." Her tone is accusing, and he raises an eyebrow. She turns it over, as if to show him. "It hurts."

"I'm certain it does," he says, without interest. "Get up."

She glares harder for bare seconds, then sees that it will swing no weight with him and turns it instead down to the sword. "I want to stop," she says to it.

"No," he says. He sees no need to dress up his refusal. "We haven't finished, and your form still needs work."

She snaps her head up, alight with fury that he can almost see in a blaze about her eyes and head. She seems to be all fury these days, and it would bring him a kind of savage pleasure, except that she can never seem to turn it into the proper channels; it only runs mad like a spoiled, untamed beast, cutting a circle all around her but never honing its blade nor finding its strength. He supposes that is the work laid out for him -- or rather, for them both, for if she cannot find the desire to master her own heart then there will be nothing he can do for her. It is a sobering thought for this long, bitter session. "How dare you presume to give me orders?"

"I presume nothing of the kind," he says, with all the patience he has. It is a greater sum than he had once thought, he has found. "You asked me to teach you to fight, Amalia, and I am trying to teach." He pauses, then adds: "And I doubt the forces of the Empire will stop at a bruise."

Since the announcement, he has insisted that the words 'your Majesty' be spoken no more in their encampment: too risky, and spies can run both ways. The ragtag band that is not quite calling itself a resistance -- not yet -- now calls her by the old bit of code with which the royal knights once avoided causing any undue alarm with the use of her name. It pains him, to give up that formality even when they are alone, but the necessity is real enough. So it is Amalia who sighs, and scowls again at her sword as she pulls herself to her feet. He taps his own blade against his leg as she does; he has never liked one-handed swords, dislikes even more leaving Nightmare idle as he even sports at fighting with this toy, but she requires a lighter weapon and it seems only fair to match style to style, at least for now. "I thought it was you who would protect me from the Empire," she says -- almost in a mutter.

He manages not to roll his eyes. She is very young, he must remember, and grieved, and it will serve them nothing to make her angrier still. "Aye, and so I will," he says, "and with my last breath should it come to that. But if it does come to that? When my last breath is gone, would you be then helpless? Without someone to guard you, would you prefer not to be able to guard yourself?"

She thinks on that for long moments, her head down. At last -- at long last -- she draws a deep breath, and he can see her shoulders square and set. He hates having to do this to her, to push and push and push her, to make of her too quickly what she has never had to learn to be... but he cannot deny his pride either, when he sees her raise herself up. Perhaps she would have been pleased never to learn swordplay beyond the light, courtly fencing lessons of her youth, and perhaps it would have suited her best, but now there is no choice. And she is young; and her courage, in the face of this corner into which she has been backed, has not yet failed to leave him humbled.

"Again, then," she says, taking a ready stance, and smiles. That smile is terrible, a bitter, wasted ghoul of a thing, and he hates it but loves it as well, cannot help but love it though it breaks them both apart. "Perhaps you'll finish the day with a bruise or two of your own."

xxiii.

They plan. They practice. They see their numbers increase. But most of all, they wait. He would never have thought that it would be the waiting that would be so hard, most hard by miles: a torture, slow death by drowning. Yet the times that are always worst are when each day is most like another.

One night, when her progress in their bitter lessons has impressed even him, Vossler rides back into the city in disguise, caring not for the risk, and manages to procure a cask of one of occupied Rabanastre's less disagreeable wines. It is a costly voyage in more than coin, as well, for he loathes with all due poison what he sees becoming of her Majesty's fair city: Archadian soldiers haunting her streets, those no doubt lowest in life at home now set free abroad to swagger, all but the rich and the Imperial being driven underground in slow steady streams. Trade has slowed to all but nothing, and he has little enough about his person with which to grease the wheels, but there are always favors. Someone always knows his name, if he but takes the risk to speak it.

He takes the cask back to camp, his mount complaining in squawks under the unaccustomed weight, and he and his charge spend the evening in one another's sole company, away perched on rocks about a small fire, drinking to pleasant excess; the wine serves to close some of the formal distance between them, and they talk with a companionship that could almost be friendship, if not quite. She rails against their idleness and the Empire, and he refills her cup and reminds her how all will be repaid, and as much as they try to work toward the near future the best either can do is stew in the recent past. He cannot be sure how they come to talk of Basch, but it seems natural enough, and just as much the way she spits upon the ground in place of his name. He cannot blame her; in fact, in spirit at least, he joins her, in spite of all else. Even in the face of all her pain and her towering rage, he has never forgotten his own.

And yet that night, full with wine and less steady than he ought be, is the closest he ever comes to telling her: telling her everything, all she would never have cause nor likely desire to know. To explaining that his faith was not all Basch broke, and that the news of the man's death has left him, even still, all but insensible with grief, and plagued with hungry ghosts. That there was something wrong with his voice, and the set of his jaw, and he fears he will never know what it means.

But of course he can say no such thing. She would never understand. It would change him, to her; it would change this fragile and necessary bridge between them, perhaps even burn it all away. In the end he gives her water and guides her to her bedroll, and his tongue lies as still as it ever has been. And it is best this way. He knows it well.

Whenever they act, he thinks, it will be easy. It's this waiting that is hard; and all this time to think.

xxiv.

"Are you ready?" he asks her, over his shoulder, scarcely above the rushing of the water. They came through the Waterway back into the city perhaps a week ago, by a drainage ditch that opens in the northern Sands, in order in Lowtown to prepare; now the Waterway will lead them to the palace, where gods willing all their preparation will at last bear fruit. She trails her hand along the damp, mossy stones, as though to feel through them the city's beating heart. They are deep enough in its body for it, he supposes, though perhaps not in precisely the right organ.

"For two years I have been ready," she says, and comes 'round to meet his eyes. "Are you?"

He of all people could argue this point, but it seems churlish at present. "Never fear me." He allows her the ghost of his smile. "Think of it, Amalia. Perhaps this all ends tonight."

She strides past him, watching the movements of the men who serve her as they take their places. Water is struck up under their heels, in dull, brackish fans; it drips from the stones above as well, in places, making the air dim and vision strange. The smell is quite wretched. He can remember a time when she would have stared in horror at the suggestion that such a filthy place even existed; now, when he told her their best path was through the sewers into the city, she had nodded at once with her eyes already far, perhaps inside her mind already looking down her sword at some loathsome target. "For Vayne it does, at least; no matter whether for the rest of us."

A curious thing, he thinks, then, and later as he hefts his sword up in his hands, holding poised upon the stairs. From that bright day in the cathedral so many years ago, all the way down to this.

And then the sky is full of fire.

xxv.

"Run!" he roars, cutting at last through her hesitation, in the midst of his towering downswing onto some hapless soldier's head. His marking crossbow would never have even nearly hit her, but Vossler ever strikes on principle. "Back underground! Whatever comes you must be safe!"

Mortar fire cuts the air, and showers of stone pour from above, in cubic chunks and sheeting granite dust; for a moment he must needs run himself, and by the time he has fetched up on open ground, panting for his breath, she has gone. He scans the shadows, but sees no sign, not before more men charge at him and he extends them the same courtesy of separating them from their heads. She must have done as he's asked, surely; surely back in the Garamsythe she'll be safe, and may find her path away. He must follow when he may, but where has she gone? And how --

"Fall back!" he calls, whipping his head around him to find just whom he addresses now. They are scattered, fighting for their lives, the courtyard littered with stone, crushed limb and bone. Even as he turns to look a soldier's polearm spears the body of a youth he vaguely knows, throws him aside limp as cloth and air, and he grits his teeth and turns his head away. "Whoreson bastards -- Back! We can't fight them with air support, it's done! Save whom you may and make for underground!"

He cannot tell who listens, if any man does. And it is perhaps in that moment that first he thinks, truly and consciously, that this cannot be done. That they cannot win this fight as they are, rats in the sewers and running under the city, never hearing until too late the beating of hawk-wings from above. That in the end, either their lives or their pride will be stripped from them, and the most they can do may be to decide for themselves which.

And as for him, the most he can do is to lead the retreat.

xxvi.

The knock on the door wakes him after no more but three hours' sleep, and he staggers toward it barechested and with his beard overgrown, and his head a throbbing wasteland in the backtrail of wine. He'd given up only when exhaustion had defeated him utterly, when he had begun to see dark colors around objects at the corner of his eye and even the thick Dalmascan kahve at his elbow could not lift the greyness of the world; he'd abandoned his seat at the days-long meeting amid useless arguments and vain pretensions, and returned to the shabby townhouse that he and a few others have shared in rotation since their return to the city, there to drink until it seemed at last sleep might come.

No sign of her in the Waterway as he made his escape, no sign later when he went back in from Lowtown, mad with worry and against all protests, to search again. No one else had seen her, save for a few swift glimpses as first she fled the battle. The crowning absurdity of the night, it seems: saved from the Ifrit's shelling, only to be lost in a sewer. She yet lives, however, by the report of one of their men who lingered outside the palace: caught by Vayne's men in, of all things, a band of thieves who had made free with the palace treasury in the confusion, but taken off separately. Vayne Solidor is many things, some of them not suited to voicing in polite company in Vossler's opinion, but he is no fool; he must know her for what she is. So she is alive -- but in the Empire's keeping, for how long?

He has tried to think of some answer, but there is none. Only the dim, shaky idea of the Marquis of Bhujerba -- uncertain footing indeed -- and their own sorry recognizance. He swore to protect her, and he has failed utterly... and now he has a wretched hangover and barely a drop of sleep in him, and some halfwitted bastard is a-pounding on his door.

His growl is all prepared when he flings it wide, and then dies in his throat. What first he thinks, with perfect, tired clarity, is Well, at least I'm still asleep; but I think I'd rather wake than have this dream again.

"Vossler," Basch says, and then says nothing more. Only stands, looking on and into him with sunken eyes. He looks terrible: wasted to bone and gristle, his hair long and matted with filth. Like a spectre of himself. Vossler stands in the doorway for moments so long they might be hours, until at last his belief begins to swell and grow. He opens his mouth knowing not what it will say.

"Get inside," is what it does at last, and with no expression at all. "You'll be recognized."

And with nary another word Basch passes by him into the house.

Vossler scarcely takes time to shut the door behind before he whirls, seizing Basch by his scrawny shoulders and slamming his back into the front hallway's wall, with a forearm pinning him up there by his throat. The impact is hard enough to sift plaster dust from the cracks, but the look in Basch's eyes, the startled, alarmed flash, is all the bitter medicine his aching head seems to need.

"How are you alive?" he says in a voice that grates like stones, up into Basch's face from a space of inches. His breath is surely not a sweetness to write songs to, but as Basch seems to be in far worser straits he feels no particular remorse. "Tell me how you dare to live, when so many good men are dead."

Basch closes his eyes a moment. "I'faith, I know not," he says as they open again. "But I will tell all I may."

"Oh, indeed." Vossler snorts a snarling kind of laughter, and shoves his arm's grip deeper, making Basch wince. "A fine tale, no doubt, filled with fancy and misadventure, but alas I am out of patience at present."

Basch's hand closes around his arm. Not pulling or drawing it away, only resting around it, touching as though to give or take comfort from the skin. The gentleness of that touch, the way it calls back Basch -- Basch as he had always known him before, without that bitter twist in his mouth or the wild look before his striking fist -- takes Vossler so aback it nigh undoes him, knocks away his balance and redoubles in his heart an ache he had thought was at last beginning to fade. "I did not kill his Majesty, Vossler," Basch says, into the space that faltering has gained him. "I am no traitor in heart nor deed."

But that hardens him again. He has played the fool in this theatre once; for a second time he should ought be hanged. "Oh, aye?" Again his lip curls, although with rather less sincerity. "'Tis a touching delivery, I must grant you, but might play better with one who has been less acquainted with your fist."

And most maddening of all -- Basch is frowning now, as though he has said something honestly puzzling. "What do you mean?"

"You know very well -- " he begins, almost shouting, but Basch cuts in again.

"You met him? And he struck you?"

Now it is his turn to frown and stare. "Who?"

Basch hesitates, seems about to speak, and then only sighs. "I can explain," he says, and this time Vossler does produce another snarling laugh.

"Of course you -- "

Again Basch cuts him off, ere his savage mocking can begin afresh. His voice is too quiet, too steady to be ignored. "When I told you of my youth in Landis, I told you that I had a brother. But I did not tell you that he was my twin, as like to me in looks as I to myself." He pauses, letting that statement take on weight, and then sighs. "I suppose I did not tell you much of anything about him; there was little I could yet bring myself to say. You may have imagined he was dead, and in truth I imagined as much myself. Landian men do not suffer captivity by their enemies." His eyes are on Vossler, but distant, looking into some vague away. "But nor do Landian men flee on the eve of battle, so mayhap I should have guessed that he might tarry."

"You're barely making sense," Vossler tells him, but the anger has leached from his voice. He does remember. Basch's gaze snaps back to him, back to here and now, and Basch smiles thinly.

"Most likely," he admits; "I've not eaten in nigh on a week." He looks at vossler closely. "You do not believe me."

"How can I?" asks Vossler. And a silence falls between them, stiff and heavy as new leather.

At last, Vossler releases him, drawing his arm back from Basch's throat; he steps away, and lets the man stand on his own. "But I can find you a meal," he says. "And you can tell me more."

Basch's smile is soft with faint apology, and again he reels with how familiar it is, how unlike all he had thought. "Could I perhaps begin with a bath instead? I've not had one of those in far longer."

Vossler hesitates for only a brief moment, and then nods. "Then go and rest," he says, "and I will draw water." Another pause, and he adds, "And make no attempt to leave. Traitor or no I know not, but if you try to fly me, the sword that gives truth to rumor will be my own."

Basch nods, still with that faint maddening touch of a smile. "Where have I to go?"

He leaves the hall for the dim, cobwebbed sitting room, and Vossler leaves up the narrow staircase, toward where the pump and basin lie. He has taken no more than a few steps before his feet thud to a stop, and abruptly he falls limp with his arm against the wall and his face turned into its crook, and breaks down into heavy, silent sobs. They wrack him for so long that he begins to believe they will take his life: that his breath will stop, his heart lie cracked beyond repair, and he unable to continue as he has so long in despair, in the face of this brutal, unexpected hope.

Then he stands again, wipes his cheeks, and goes to draw the bath.

xxvii.

He hisses through his teeth when first he sees Basch without his clothes; he cannot help himself. He is all sunken concavity, skin sunk against rib -- but the worse by far is the scraped angry scream of flesh about his neck and shoulders. The flesh there looks like a cut of raw meat in a butcher's window, all marbled purple-red and white.

"Your shoulders," he says, with perfect idiocy, and knows at once at the sound of his voice that all the fight has left him. He will keep himself brave, keep himself at a distance, but it will only be for show. Already he is prepared to believe everything; he would all but kill himself to swallow any lie.

Basch glances down at himself, in mild surprise, and then offers that small, pale smile again. "Oh, that," he says. "I'd forgotten."

He can say nothing to that. "...Wait here. I have a bit of salve in the other room."

So Basch bathes, and he sits on the rim of the basin, salving Basch's punished flesh where it rises above the water; and Basch tells his story. It's Vossler's instinct to draw aside when the treatment is done, to let Basch finish on his own even, perhaps, but he dares not trust Basch alone in the water, so scarcely does the man seem able to fight his weariness enough to keep from drowning. He cannot help but think of the scar in his shoulder, Basch's hands working a careful lather around his injury, a mere three years hence (can it be so little?) when he was glad to be home in Dalmasca and though fear hovered at the corners and out of easy sight, all was more or less well. He thinks of how good it was to come home to the light.

He does not tell Basch I missed you -- is not even sure of the truth of such a statement -- but his heart throbs with it nonetheless, like rot in the flesh.

When Basch has finished with his bath, Vossler leaves him alone to do the rest, escaping back to the makeshift meetingroom to make ready his audience. Just now, he dares not trust himself to keep from drowning.

xxviii.

He has met the Marquis only briefly before: a formal nodding of heads at one gathering or another, no more but that but no less either. Ondore's private chambers are lush, appointed in glass and marble and elaborate Bhujerban carpeting, and he fights sour thoughts of their own reduced circumstances.

"I must say, Captain," says Ondore, hands folded before him on his vast desk, "I had not anticipated such a request." His gaze, piercing and steady. "The company you lead has not precisely made free with its trust."

"The more fools we if we did." It is blunt, but why not be so? Impropriety will be the least he has chanced this day. "On your Excellency's good faith I withhold my judgement, for now. But in my present circumstances I cannot wait for certainty." Pride tries to hold his tongue, but in the end honestly makes him add, "Nor have I elsewhere to turn."

The Marquis continues to look upon him as though he amuses, but the look does not grate as have some such he's received; Vossler is invited in on this joke, Ondore's gaze seems to say, and though no doubt it is but a politician's trick, it eases him. At last the man sits back, folding his hands instead atop his knees.

"The woman you seek is kept aboard the Leviathan, as no doubt you have surmised," he continues, in more confidential voice. "Although the ship docks at my estate at present, however, Judge Ghis of course has not seen fit to bring his prisoner ashore. The Imperial force departs this eventide for Rabanastre; and the Leviathan with it." He tilts his head, leveling his gaze at Vossler. "So I put it to you, Captain Azelas: what aid would you beg?"

"I must be aboard the Leviathan when she departs," Vossler says at once. "If I may, disguised as one of the Empire's own, so that my presence raises no alarum. Can this be done?"

Ondore watches him a moment more, then nods. "It can. And will, by my hand."

A knot inside his chest, one tied so many days hence he has ceased to notice its presence, at that finally slips its ends and begins to loosen. "Then I owe you a debt of gratitude," he says, and wishes he could not hear the relief in his own voice. Ondore smiles -- not cruelly, but more than he'd have liked, all the same.

"Provided that I keep my word, of course."

"Of course," Vossler echoes, with a touch of the Marquis's own irony. "...I fear I have little more material than gratitude with which to repay my debt, however, in particular compared to Bhujerba's -- " But Ondore has already begun to shake his head, lifting one hand from the other in a dismissive gesture.

"There is no need to fear, Captain; your gratitude as a reward I would happily accept." He lowers his head, looking up through hooded eyes. "Although perhaps you might see fit, should I indeed prove as good as my word, to pass on to your assembled that the Marquis of Bhujerba is not so well saddled as he may have seemed?"

Vossler inclines his head, only with some small effort not finding Ondore's humor contagious. "A good word is fine currency indeed, your Excellency; my debt will shame me no longer."

"I am pleased to hear it." Ondore pushes himself to his feet, linking his hands behind his back as he rounds his desk. "I also hear a curious thing from Vyaaghra," he remarks, seemingly off-handedly. "Apparently, Captain Basch fon Ronsenberg is not only alive -- posing risk of great personal embarrassment to myself, I must confess -- but at large in Bhujerba, and represented by a very small Dalmascan boy, with a very large voice." He casts a glance at Vossler, his brows quirked. "Were you perhaps aware of this development, Captain? I ask only because you and Captain Ronsenberg do possess some small history of comradeship."

He doesn't much care for that last, but he offers a measured nod all the same. "I was. No doubt he will seek your counsel as well in time, but we keep each to his separate course for the nonce."

"I see," says Ondore in tones musing, coming to rest against the near side of the desk, his hands bracing himself on it behind. "Yes, I have scheduled a meeting with the captain for after sunset, not long before the Empire ceases to grace us with her presence." He meets Vossler's gaze once more, with a smile he does not much wish to trust, but does nonetheless. Ondore is not the man he had anticipated, at this proximity, and who has more cause to be glad for it than he? "I had hoped that perhaps you might remain in my company, Captain, in the intervening time, as I have arrangements made for your own safe passage. Surely you have no pressing engagements elsewhere before?"

"Your Excellency," Vossler agrees, amiably enough although not without a slight frown. Ondore nods, and then with no preamble gestures toward the band of leather that wraps about his throat.

"This collar you wear," he says, tactfully ignoring the way he has made Vossler jump, "intrigues me. Tell me, does it bear some significance?"

Long moments pass, moments where he can do naught but stare. His mouth hangs slightly agape, he realizes of a sudden, and sure that he must look very foolish, he closes it at once.

"You know," he says when at last he may, in a voice dry and husky. "You must, else you would not ask."

Ondore smiles once more; it seems more honest somehow this time, honestly pleased with his answer. "I suppose you are right. I think perhaps what I should inquire is whether it indicates allegiance to any one particular master."

He thinks all at once, for no real reason, of what he said to Basch, before the latter man left Rabanastre: how the eyes of the resistance watch unblinking. How much he has dared in coming to see the Marquis, and how he has dared so little for so long.

"No," he says in answer; "not anymore."

xxix.

Ultimately it is of all people Lord Larsa, the Emperor's youngest, who convinces; who makes the unthinkable route stretch straight before him. Vossler supposes this is no less implausible than anything else that has happened to him of late, although not by much.

He likes the boy quite readily, to his considerably greater surprise than came liking Ondore. Vossler could read nothing but sincerity in the pretty speech made to her Majesty, for all his efforts, and the expert air with which Larsa leads him at a run out of the line of sight of passing soldiers and through the winding corridors suggests a spirited cunning that rather amuses. It would seem he's had cause for similar caution before. "It should be clear from here on," the boy murmurs, tapping brisk numbers into a panel to one side of the bay doors. "The alarm calls the troops to Judge Ghis, not to the exits -- something of an oversight, in my opinion."

Vossler starts, and looks back the way they came, his hand twitching toward his shoulder and his sword's hilt. "Then, her Majesty -- "

"Her Majesty will be well until your return," Larsa says, and glances up with a slight smile. "Trust in her and in Captain Ronsenberg." The doors push wide, and he darts inside, leaving Vossler, thus rebuked, to hurry along behind. He catches up to the boy at the ship -- a bulky sort of service vehicle -- just as he lifts its door to slip inside.

"An Atomos," Larsa's voice drifts back to him, from the pilot's seat. "This is good." He turns to peer at Vossler over his shoulder. "It will serve. Return to her Majesty and bring the others here. I shall have it operational by your return."

"You surprise me," Vossler says, hardly aware that he'd intended to say anything, and he can see the faint corner of the young lord's smile.

"We are none of us all that we seem, Captain," Larsa says, without looking up from his task. He leaves time to consider all possible interpretations of his answer, then adds, "In cooperation lies our hope. This is what I believe; I pray you consider it as well."

Neither does he think Larsa false, nor that his aid is given with cynical aim; he is a boy, for all his clevernesses, and Vossler rather thinks he may err, if he does, on the side of innocence rather than that of jadishness. But it occurs to him as he goes at a run through the Leviathan's steel gullet, to her Majesty's side, that innocence, too, has an edge that sometimes cuts. In his personal experience, the man who asks of you cooperation more often than not then sees to your agreeability with a dagger at your throat.

But even still, he muses, pounding down the corridors, perhaps that's better than one lodged in your back.

xxx.

He believes -- truly he believes -- that he still did not know what he intended to do when he left them in Bhujerba, and took the private cabin flight back to Rabanastre. Perhaps his only intention was simply to return to the resistance; to tell them all the princess is safe, the traitors most despised are not traitors at all, and there must be something more they can do to further their cause that is not the same thing that has not, so far, accomplished anything. The more he thinks back on it, the more likely it seems that that was all he meant, at first. To be a leader, or at least a gutter politician, a man of plot and reason if not one who inspires. To resume where all the madness of her Majesty's loss and Basch's restoration had forced him to leave off.

But the flight, although no longer than an afternoon's time, felt as though it drew out much longer, stretched by his fitful sleep and hard, narrow bunk and the low whisper of reprocessed air. He dreamt in sharp staccato flashes, klaxons, steel, the morning-bright sky, but only one could he remember later, as it came on the edge of waking: her Majesty, six years old and in her white dress again with the silver-set flowers done in desert turquoise and opal woven into her hair, holding her cup before him on his knees. I thought it was you who would protect me, this apparition told him, and he saw that she was still angry at him for bruising her wrist. When he tried to accept her cup, to explain to her that he had tried, she struck him -- fiercely, open-handed, across the cheek with her hands manacled. But that was Basch, it was Basch she had slapped, he was not the traitor, or neither of them was but it was Basch who had been thought so -- but it mattered little, for when the second blow landed, he understood his mistake. That it had never been her at all, and had marred not his cheek, but the loathsome, stinging pleasure of his shoulders.

The third blow jerked him awake, blinking sticky eyes in the shuttered semi-darkness. Not even two, he found the thought in his dazed and addled mind; not even two, just to make sure.

Yes, at first he probably meant, upon his arrival, to do nothing less sane and predictable than descend into Lowtown and command the men who have somehow come to partly follow him. But during his brief rest he seems to have shed some of that expected sanity, for where he finds himself instead is before the gates of the royal palace of Rabanastre. Once the home of his liege, his beloved, and himself, and now where Dalmasca's consul rests, fairly upon the bones of his enemies; now the site of his most recent of most bitter defeats. Vayne had known, he muses, staying out of easy sight of the soldiers who guard the gates, looking up at the way shafts of golden-red evening light pour over the tower stones in languid dreaming drapes. Vayne had known what they were about, and they had never stood a chance. How could a man come to know so much?

He has told Basch that her Majesty despises weakness in none so much as herself, and he both knows it to be true, and now feels only a drop of pride amidst all his sorrow that he has helped to make her so. She was a fair child, a gentle child, but all she has lost has reduced her to a frozen, wasted madness that wounds his heart to see. No one should have to suffer so much, he thinks, that she feels she must become a blade, rather than simply wielding one. And must they go on like this, both of them, mangling themselves, cutting off parts here and parts there until nothing is left to hold up their armor but its own sturdy weight? Ah, he has loved battle all his life, the calluses he so cherished from a hilt across his palm have been more constant than any lover, but he finds that he comes with time more and more to how Basch had always felt, confessed to feel first in their darkest talks of his old home: wars are wretched, wretched. To count a kingdom's history by their passing is like taking the sum of a man's life by totting up his nightmares.

He swore to protect her, but he has not saved her from her shame, nor from her fallen husband's ring that circles her third finger. There is nothing he would not give up for her, but he can do nothing for her as he is -- not truly, hasn't he always known as much? And she has Basch beside her now, and seems to be coming to trust him once again. Basch who will protect her, come what may, whoever else may leave her now. He has thought they cannot win this fight with all intact, with both lives and pride unscathed, and what is pride? What has it ever been to him? One of two tugging hands in opposing directions, fraying the rope that is himself ever more with each passing moment. And the dagger is already at all their throats.

Had he thought he had nothing else to sacrifice for her, for her and for Dalmasca? He had, and he has gained nothing since, not truly; but still he thinks that he was false. That there is still one thing.

He thinks all of this, looking up at the royal palace, with the desert sun going down upon it like the fading of all the light in the world. He would like to think, later, that it is all of these thoughts, with their carefully measured weight, that bring him to his decision, but really he will never know. Perhaps it was none of this. Perhaps it was only that he was ill-slept and unfed and bone-weary, and had had a strange dream with the humming of air circulators droning in his ear. Perhaps he was only tired, and sick at heart; and tired of longing to be done.

He will be haunted by these thoughts: of whether even his aims were ever worthy.

In any case, as the last of the light fades, he steps up where the soldiers can see him. After that, things happen very quickly.

xxxi.

"Captain," says Judge Ghis, and it is to Vossler's mild surprise that he rises to his feet, in proper greeting. He has doffed his helm, revealing the visage more of an aging politician or minor lord than a military man, and at least appears to smile. "What an unexpected honour, to again make your acquaintance under less unpleasant circumstances."

Yes, thinks Vossler sourly; I daresay these past days I've surprised us all. And again of the young lord's words to him earlier today, what feels like years hence: We are none of us all we seem.

He says nothing, however. He has come quietly -- voluntarily in fact -- and thus has passed the palace halls unbound, but soldiers flank him very closely on either side all the same. At length Ghis nods to these, with a wave of his hand. "You may leave us," he informs them, rounding the long table between his couch and Vossler. There is no sign of his wounds, but Vossler doubts they were ever deep. The soldiers leave at once, with few apparent qualms; he gave up his sword to them at the gates, pain him though it did.

He speaks without preamble, almost without forethought. "You asked her Majesty's succor in restoring peace to Dalmasca," he says, looking into Ghis's eyes. It is not difficult to meet Ghis's eyes; he knows what he is worth, in the face of one such as this. "Her... ministry, was the word you used. Pray tell, what sort of ministry had you in mind?"

If Ghis is troubled by his informality or insolence, he gives no sign, merely continues smiling on Vossler. He thinks again of Ondore's amused gaze, with grim amusement of his own. This joke most surely is on him, and he is not welcomed to it. "Impressive," is all Ghis says in a moment's time, standing before him, sizing him up. They are almost of a height, but Ghis's plate makes him larger. "You will forgive me, Captain, but I had not received the impression that her Majesty would reconsider."

"I am not here by her Majesty's request." He speaks as evenly as he may, into Judge Ghis's cold, laughing looks. They are looks that leave no doubt in his mind that an even slightly wrong answer now will see him dead; but had he not expected as much? "Only on her behalf."

Ghis looks at him, long and measuring, and somehow profane. He thinks of a cat stretching out its paw, tapping at a petrified mouse: tapping only, to see which way it will run. He does not give the satisfaction of speaking further, and at last Ghis must speak for him. "The lord consul wishes peace in Dalmasca, at nearly any cost," he says, when he deigns to. "In this matter you may rest assured. And in repayment for his efforts, why, he desires only one of the treasures of the royal family: a trifle, really, at least in the eyes of those who hold it. Tell me, Captain, have you ever heard of nethicite?"

"Of what?" he asks, frowning. Judge Ghis repeats himself, patiently, as though to an ignorant child struggling at his lessons.

"Nethicite. Also known as the treasure of the Dynast-King. Surely you have heard of that?"

For long seconds he can do naught but stare. "The Dusk Shard? That is all Vayne sought?"

"The consul, if you please," Ghis says with an air of bored reproach. Vossler's lip curls, and in the end neither pursues the issue. "The Dusk Shard, the Midlight Shard, and the Dawn Shard that sleeps we know not where: these are the treasures of the Dynast-King. His deifacted nethicite, so it is known. And if he were to obtain such treasures? Well..." And his eyes turn to Vossler's again, suddenly, spearing him through. "There should almost be no reason not to turn Dalmasca free."

He stares into those eyes, in this finely-appointed room, the mullioned glass making colored patterns with sunset light 'cross Ghis's cheeks and armor and the couch and plants and table. But he sees no lie there. He sees nothing but that cat's curiosity, the paw poised out to tap -- or to strike the killing blow, should the prey attempt to fly.

"What must I do?" he asks, at last. And now he meets not Ghis's eyes. Sudden triumph has bloomed there, and that, unlike the man himself, he cannot face.

Ghis draws breath to answer, which even if he does not see it he can hear -- and then is interrupted, as footsteps enter the room at Vossler's back. "Ah, Judge Gabranth!" Ghis says, a little overbrightly in Vossler's dazed opinion, instead of whatever it was he had intended. "Is Lord Larsa safely stowed?"

"Your Honour," says the voice, as Vossler is turning, frowning, with Judge Ghis to see who has come in on them; it is not quite a voice he knows, but somehow, the sound of it, something to the turn of its vowels... "I was informed at the gate -- "

But then Vossler has turned to look at the man, who has removed his helm as he came in to match Judge Ghis's state, and they both stop: he speaking and Vossler thinking anything at all. The hair is closely-cropped, the face clean-shaven, the look about the brows a bit more taut, but none of that matters even as all of it does. Now, with the proper context, there is no question in his mind that it is not the same man -- but oh, what was it Basch had said? As like to me as I to myself. Aye, indeed; in very deed.

The silence spins out awkward, he is vaguely aware, as he stands staring frozen into the face of Basch's twin, the one at whose hands he paid for his dreadful mistake in blood and bruises, two years hence. Only vaguely, however. For the most part in that moment he is aware of nothing, reasons nothing, can only think incoherently, O, I am damned; this is how they do it; they throw wide the doors of hell and let you stride in unimpeded, and then from the inside there are no doors, only slick rock walls that you slide down in the dark --

"Ah," Ghis says, from miles and years away, amusement plain within his voice even on that single sound. "Do you perhaps espy a face you recognize, Captain?"

That seems to shake this Judge Gabranth -- Vossler cannot now even bring himself to think any phrase that begins with Basch -- from his own stare, and he forces his eyes back to Ghis with thunder on his brow. His look lies somewhere between irritation and pure murder. "I had wondered if your Honour might require my aid," he says; and his voice is likewise ice.

Ghis's smile, by contrast, has come to seem quite honestly pleased. "Fear not, Judge Gabranth; all is well." He tilts his head, extending his hand in a gracious gesture. "Although by all means, if you wish, do feel free to remain. You and Captain Azelas could find many fine reminiscences to share, I have no doubt."

If possible, Judge Gabranth's brow tightens further still, and he offers a stiff, negatory inclination of his head. "By your Honour's leave," he says, and exits as briskly as he may.

And with that, once more, Vossler is able to breathe; but there is a sour, sour taste on every breath that makes the pleasure a dubious one. Perhaps, he thinks, even a whiff of sulfur. But Judge Ghis's attention returns to him then, as well -- and the twist of his mouth says that this thought, and every other, is writ clear across his brow.

"You will need take your case up with the consul from here," Ghis tells him, as though they had never been interrupted. "Unless, of course, you have changed your mind?"

He would not have expected such a veiled taunt would give him pause; but it does, and a long one at that. Has he? He could, it dawns on him slowly, claim just such an occurrence, and end all this where it lies. He could yet smile upon the face of this smug, miserable creature and renounce both him and his loathsome master; he could die upon this very carpet, in this very palace where once he slept and trained and served, but with all his honor still intact, all his conviction beyond reproach. That much, at least, remains to him still, and for that moment the possibility -- the sweetness of it -- looms large within his mind. He cannot say it does not call to him; he cannot say it does not call him back from the precipice where he hovers, squinting into the wind from below.

But in the end, all these thoughts come to a choice between preserving himself without stain, and aiding Dalmasca -- perhaps even freeing her, as Ghis says, and forever. And he need not so much as review his knightly vows to know that this is no choice at all.

"Take me to him," he says; and knows at once that all along, Ghis had known he would.

xxxii.

He's seen Vayne, but only at a distance; only glimpsed through crowds and over the heads and bowguns of ranks of soldiers. They have spoken him large into their minds, however, Dalmasca's foreign dictator, a skilled politician but a man not even liked by his own people, ruthless and loveless, a cold fish with still blue blood. Meeting him at last in person, across a desk in the room where his Majesty King Raminas once held court (oh, and how that rankles under the skin, all the way down to the bone), Vossler finds him curiously small.

No less chill, however. When he is finally permitted into the room, approaching down the long carpet the desk where Vayne sits, Vayne is writing, and continues so until vossler has stood before him for some seconds yet. At last he sets down his pen, folds his hands upon the desk, and looks up, his smile scarcely there for slightness, a politician's sharpened blade.

"Allow me to recount your proposal as I understand it," Vayne says, with neither preamble nor niceties of decorum; surely neither needs be made for the sake of such a one as Vossler. For his part he can remember making no proposal, but refrains from protest. "Her Majesty is no doubt capable of locating the Dawn Shard, as she is a descendant of King Raithwall's line. In exchange for such a treasure, your price would be Dalmasca -- or rather, her release to sovereignty, and the sole governance of her exiled princess." He tilts his head, so that his curtain of hair falls away from his face. "Such a bargain would be of historic precedent, Captain; I surely need not tell you that it is not to be entered into lightly."

"Indeed you do not," says Vossler, and now in turn it is his words that are ice. "I assure you that I come quite without levity, contrary to how I have been thus far received."

"I do apologize if you have been offended." As though he could imagine no offense in himself, in standing usurper where once stood the throne of the rightful king and condescending to one of the lingering knights of that dead time. "I assure you, I have only the utmost respect for the knights of Dalmasca's former order."

He stares, and Vayne stares back, and if he cannot believe what he has just heard spoken he has no idea what it is that lurks behind Vayne's eyes. But he can find no sense of what he felt from Ghis -- the murderous, villainous playfulness of a cat at sport with its dinner -- and a realization strikes him, one with no seeming origin: Vayne believes he means every word. More than that; Vayne, he thinks, would believe every word he spoke even if the evidence against half of it were laid out before him as he did so. The thought gives him a sudden chill, and he thinks also: If he were any less effective, such as he'd be shut in bedlam.

"Respect?" he repeats at last, aloud, wondering at the word. Vayne watches him, hands still folded, for a matter of moments, but says nothing. Perhaps knowing where this will go, and only waiting for it to be done. "Do you say so? Respect of a sort that you honor by smearing one with the brushes of regicide and treason?"

There are more moments when Vayne yet says nothing, and the look of his face cannot be descried. At last he says, "Have you come here to bargain, or to fling accusations?"

"Neither," Vossler says; struggling against his sharpening tongue but still telling himself steady, telling himself rein in. It is vexing, to be in Vayne's presence so briefly and yet already so undone. "To negotiate."

"Of course." Vayne inclines his head. "Of such import as your offer may be, I should be

nevertheless pleased to consider it duly. I would require, however, some assurance from you that it is also in earnest."

And is his heart already sinking then? Does he already know what is to come?

"Why should it not be?" Vossler asks, slow, after a pause. "Surely my presence here is assurance enough. As I told you before, I came not lightly."

"Perhaps I do not make myself clear." Vayne leans forward, over the desk, eyes fixed and piercing. "I am not interested in guessing at your motives, Captain. Nor in suffering you any more to answer my hospitality with insolence, when in truth you are no guest. I wish to forge with you a gentlemen's agreement, but we are neither gentlemen nor in agreement, as I think you know; we are men at war, and with one another, and ere I may accept your terms I must insist on being sure that we have come at last to the treaty-table, and not only to another desert trap. I do not think this unreasonable, Captain. Can you tell me honestly that you do?"

He might have thought he could hate Vayne no more, but for sending him spiraling into desperation over such a matter as this, Vossler finds that the sum can be multiplied after all. Because there must be some right answer, and yet hard as he may think... "I give you my word as a royal knight of the Order," he says, into the silence, urgent and rough with battered dignity. "I have nothing else to give."

Vayne's brows arch. "Have you not? This is most curious, and most unfortunate."

And does he not know, deeper, at once that it is not all? Has he not just thought that there is yet one thing? "What have I to gain by falsity? Should I fail to produce the stone, you'll surely slay us all in any case."

"Likely I shall," Vayne agrees. He sounds less than remorseful. "Yet surely you have within you the means to ease my conscience, as I gamble such long odds."

Finally he allows his lip to curl, turn upward in a sneer. "What concern is your conscience of mine?"

"The concern," Vayne says, turning up his hands, "of whether I let snap the jaws you have so gravely walked within."

He is ready for that one, at least. "Then no one receives the prize he seeks."

"Your concern is duly appreciated. But I assure you, I am quite comfortable with the situation as it stands." Looking up at him, not quite smiling, making certain every word drives home. "Can you truly say the same for yourself? Or for her Majesty?"

For a moment Vossler does not only hesitate; for a moment he cannot seem to speak. No. He knows he can say no such thing -- and worse, Vayne knows it even better. "...My offer is advantageous to you as well," he says a moment later, and his voice sounds dry. The voice of a man who is losing his grip, whose breath has been stolen by the wind out of the pit beneath. "You know what it costs me to even make it."

Vayne smiles. Truly, now. It is the only time in his life he will ever see such a thing, and one time more than he wants to. The sight will stay with him far too long for his own comfort. "And yet," he says, drawing out his words and loading them with meaning, "I see no cost writ upon your person."

He seems to have a great deal of time to think, in that frozen moment, as he stares into Vayne's face and tries to will his understanding away. To think that he had honestly thought he knew about shame, about the worst that matters could be. About the hole where abjection lies, naked and soiled, bony arms stretched out to welcome to its embrace. But beyond that hole there is a pit, and it is deep enough that there is time on the way down to know that you are falling; and then as you lie bruised in the eventual dirt, something else clatters down behind, invisible in the dark but easy enough to feel out: a spade.

Stunned, he can do nothing but meet Vayne's eyes, and the look in them tells him he must dig deep.

He has gone some time without practice, but it is more than this that makes him move slowly. Looking at Vayne no longer, he sinks to one knee on the floor, his armor bearing him down hard with its weight upon his shoulders. The other follows reluctantly, but soon enough. He kneels before Vayne's desk, arms and head hung down, teeth clenched tight in his head. "I beg of you," he says through them; and the horror of the situation, the damned doomed familiarity of it, stirs him to the final, inescapable shame. Because as always, there is a terrible pleasure in submission. Because he was never, never stronger than this.

He supposes he should have known. He has been here before; and in the end, men like Vayne only ever want to see him in one way.

"What is it you beg, Knight of Dalmasca?" Vayne asks. His voice is cool and soft. Vossler closes his eyes, willing himself still -- and his body as well, though with less success.

"That in exchange for the Dawn Shard, you graciously permit -- " leaning on the words with savage bitterness, for perhaps the first time with genuine hate -- "her Majesty to resume Dalmasca's throne." And the conclusion, rising to his lips as naturally as breath, for this too is its own sort of ceremony: To this end, I so beg. He swallows it back with an effort.

Vayne nods, no hint of satisfaction on his face. But Vossler is not deceived, even for an instant. It is always those calmest at first glance whose poison run the deepest. "I can see that you are a man of great honor, Captain," he says, and then says no more on't. Surely neither of them needs him to. When he speaks again, it is in fuller voice, the voice of proclamation and command. "In exchange for the Dawn Shard, I, Vayne Carudas Solidor, on behalf of the Empire, give you assurance that the Lady Ashelia B'Nargin Dalmasca will be restored to her place as regent of an independent Dalmasca."

It is the best; it is the worst; it is enough. He slumps, limp and heavy, in on himself, and the blackness of mingled rue and relief folds around him like the wings of a terrible bird. It is done, and not undoable. For better or for worse, it's done.

Dimly he is aware of Vayne rising from his seat, rounding the desk, can hear the creaking of leather and clinking scale and the heavy sounding of his boots against the floor. The sound freezes him, when it breaks through to his ears, and he kneels chill and unmoving, knowing all at once what is to follow -- and what else could it be? What else would have brought him here? The footsteps will stop, and then will come the ragged breath, the dangling rope, the words almost those of a lover. The hand jerking up a fistful of his collar to raise his head, the voice in his ear that will call him sir, then sirrah, heavy and dark with laughter. That will inquire of him, in ringing mocking tones, how it is, how it is on his knees, and he will have no more answer than he has ever had -- and no less.

A trigger pulls by any finger, whether the bow wills or no. The sword's hilt fits in any hand. Is that treason? Perhaps of a sort; but the object knows not how to be other than what it is.

None of it happens, in any case. Vayne comes to stand over him, and no more, his boots appearing in the narrowed field of Vossler's vision; he towers over like a parent satisfied with some punishment, pleased that the lesson has been learned. "Rise, Knight of Dalmasca," he says instead. "And know this day you have done well to ensure your fallen kingdom's restoration."

Vossler stands up swift, not at Vayne's command but before this situation can grow any worse. He has no doubt that it always could. "I have sold my soul, you mean," he says, his voice yet dry but steady. With the worst of it over (or at least waning) he can find a little of his strength again -- enough at least to spit, suddenly, at Vayne's feet. In troth, he thinks the gesture shocks them both. "At least I had one to begin with."

After the first cramp of disgust and startlement has left his face, Vayne looks upon him with only boredom. "You will cast upon me none of your guilt. It is yours alone, and I shall not share in it."

Vossler's lip curls again, and he reels away from Vayne as though from offal in the street. "Cleave to your own, then," he returns; "it should serve you well enough."

"A man who knows much of virtue, I see," Vayne says softly. The contempt that plays about the corners of his mouth almost forces Vossler's eyes away again, but he works to hold them fast. "Tell me, how came you then so ready to shake so soiled a hand?"

"Mine own honor is a small sacrifice for Dalmasca's." And it is all the answer he has, and he knows full well the truth of it -- but it does not feel like enough. He supposes that it never will.

Vayne's mouth turns its corners even further up, into something mostly but not entirely unlike a smile. "'The ends justify the means'... this is a Dalmascan proverb, is it not?" He pauses, sembling to consider, his gaze lingering long on Vossler's face. "Or perhaps Rozarrian? I can never recall."

He cannot see his own expression, but he need not; he can see Vayne watching him, and he can feel the muscles of his features set, like clay fast-hardened in the desert sun. Locked in by the stoniness of his own look. "Am I free to go, then?" he asks, and his voice, too, sounds of the Sands. He does not quite meet Vayne's gaze then. He has no desire to see, as well as know, the man has won.

"As you will," Vayne agrees, after only another slight pause, a beat of confirmation. He gestures toward the door with an elegant turn of his gloved hand. "I await your return."

Vossler sees no need to answer that, not even with a nod. Let Vayne think of his insolence what he may. He pushes through the double doors without another word, into the cool dim of the hallway, where soldiers wait again to escort him out. Only when the doors have both fallen shut, their hollow boom not quite swallowed entire by the lush carpets that line the passage, can he begin to breathe.

Never mind it. Let it go. She needs him still, at least for this last journey; and as long as she will have him, he will be at her side.

xxxiii.

He is not able to forget, as they ford the Sandseas, but he is able to let his false pretenses weigh a bit less heavy on his mind than they might, at least for a time. Her Majesty is full of questions, and the sky pirates' presence rankles -- particularly the man, with his Archadian clip and habit of sneering insinuation -- but he sets these things and his conscience aside, and devotes himself fully to his task. At least the travel is rough enough that it demands all his attention. Nor does he think he faces any particular suspicion, questions or insinuations or no; he does not comport himself so as to invite them, after all -- save once, and it is a once he cannot or will not avoid.

Some time passes ere he and Basch find themselves in one another's sole company, but at last the small traveling party divides itself in just such an uneven twain. He would prefer to have neither of them away from her Majesty so long, let alone both, moving as they do with this untested rabble, but he is able to quiet his unease with knowing that it has been so several times of late, and thus far without incident. They scout around the far side of one of the rusted jutting hulks as the rest trail behind along the near, cutting a path in advance, for the Urutan-Yensa are thick here: hiding with their bows in the rotted rigging, leaping from oil drums with febrile insectile speed, knives brandished and their clittering language sounding of curses. But they go not on forever (nothing ever does), and soon enough he is cleaning his sword and Basch reslinging his bow as they wait for the others to arrive.

Basch says something, as Vossler is stowing Nightmare o'er his back -- something innocuous and smiling, easy, something like Well done as always or Brings back memories, does it not? He will be unable to remember later exactly what it was. And perhaps it matters not, for almost before it is done, almost as the last word is leaving Basch's mouth, he turns and seizes Basch's shoulder, driving him halfway back against the red hulk of the station. Under the bare palm his gauntlet hides the metal shoulder-guard is warm, almost hot with the sun, and with Basch's own surrendered heat. The battle is as nothing; this is where memories lie: in the startled cup of Basch's mouth, hard-pressed enough to clash their teeth, in the skim of half-day whiskers against the parts of his own face that he keeps bare.

And then he is moving again, striding away, before Basch can speak even a word, or the rising voices round the corner and join them once again.

xxxiv.

And did Basch know, even then? Was he understood all the same? It is impossible to know, and also likely immaterial, most of all now. If he had known aforehand it would not have changed his mind; he would not even then have rescinded that last settling of affairs.

If his last flare of conscience had held through, the one moment in which he did try, in his panic, to change his mind -- Your Majesty, we must go, torn from his lips with no plan and not much hope -- then what would that have changed? If she had heard him, and somehow agreed, and they all simply turned and walked out of that dead and brooding place? Perhaps nothing. Heaven knows that little enough has come of holding fast in the end. Perhaps it would have been all only the same, except he with the knowledge hovering over his head that not only had he sold himself, but not even had the courage to keep to the bargain.

Was there any point at which it could have changed? That is the question that haunts him, and his only salvation is that it has not long to haunt. When could he have ever done else? At what mark could he have altered course, and stayed this gruesome crash?

The ship shudders, and he groans; the vibration rattles his mail coat against his chest, and the agony there whites out his eyes so hard and long he fears he may lose consciousness before finishing his business. Some of his ribs must be broken. That must have been the run-mad viera woman, he thinks, and not without some measure of respect. She'd had a kick like a mule, and that he'd as soon not have known firsthand.

In the end, however, the white wave recedes, and he is able to drag his breath again from the glowing core of pain within, blink the blood out of his eyes. His blade has slipped down halfway to the floor again, and he drags it up shakingly with a muttered oath. Favor its heft though he has, with rue he must now confess its inconvenience; it is too long by far to brace between his knees on the floor as he kneels, and he must push it out at some distance and hope for the hilt to catch. His unshielded palms have been cut bloody with gripping 'round the blade. The point, now pointing to him, wavers as though in a drunkard's grip, try as he might to hold it steady.

If he has failed in anything -- and what a piteous jape indeed, to feign there is some question that he has! -- he understands now that 'twas in faith: and not in faith as speaks of loyalty, but the faith that is, at bottom, belief. Belief in gods or governments, belief that is so oft misplaced, but perhaps its absence an even worser folly than that of its blind maintenance, even across long odds and evidence. His loyalty to her and to Dalmasca he kept true until the end, but what he did not do for her -- could not do for her, perhaps -- was believe that she and he and they would win out in the end. And indeed it may well be that he could not have done otherwise, has in fact been so wholly unprepared by circumstance that he has not the capacity for such faith, such hope. It would be a kindness to think so, and not too great a strain. It had never even occurred to him that that boy, that first friend, of whom he has not thought in so many long years now, might when he rode out to duty have yet intended to return.

Nevertheless, he has failed, and he will not argue that he is guilty. His crime may not have been treason; but it was trying to save her battle, when he himself had bid her take up her sword and bear it to the end. His crime was hypocrisy of spirit, the treason only of the weary shrug and the bitter smile. His crime was not believing.

And now, as such crimes always are, it has been punished with miracle.

He sets his sword, and it slips again for one white-knuckled moment, then holds. It is not stable, and the edge not keen, and why should it be, on a sword of such size? But perhaps it will suffice for so brief an errand, and the shaking of the ship may in the end aid his hand. Or its blowing apart, for that matter, that will surely turn the trick, but he hopes it will not come to that ere he has at least tried.

He lifts the tip -- and his hands shake harder; it is so heavy now, so heavy -- and aims it just against the strap of leather under his chin. Not cutting yet, not yet.

They've long since gone, and should be well on their way, perhaps already aboard a ship and flying from this place. He hopes it is so, if only for her Majesty's sake, and of course Basch's -- Basch, who lingered even when she had given him up, who stood him watch long enough for him to make his apologies, if not absolve him. Who might have stayed longer, he sensed, were it but for the danger; who might even have tried to bear him hence, had he not had the respect still to permit Vossler the death he has chosen. He is glad for that, will be gladder still if he can choose a bit more finely, and die with sword in hand as ever he has sworn himself to do. Perhaps it will regain some of his honor for him, but even if not, he would not have been made to live in this condition -- not even if to do so would strike the sorrow out of Basch's eyes.

He supposes that is his treason, but even still it does not change his mind.

The point rests at his throat now, and for a wonder it has even stopped shaking, although the ship has most certainly not; indeed, its shuddering is all the more, and now he thinks he can feel some monstrous heat eating up the air above his head, sucking up a backdraft from beneath. There is a soft curtain of grey over his vision, and blood stinging at his eyes, but his mind is still clear, and still aware. Any second now, he knows. It's time.

He steadies his sword in his hands. Looks up, where there is only ceiling, never sky.

With my luck, he thinks, and not without humor, I'll miss.

xxxv.

He doesn't.

xxxvi.

The explosion in the Leviathan's engines is total, of such unnatural heat that little but ashes remains of the 8th Fleet's flagship when it is done, and only scarce fragments of rubble of the rest. There are certainly no remains, human or otherwise, to fall to the jagd in flames, digging little craters in the bedrock beneath the sand; and anything carved in two, and reduced to no more but a meaningless scrap of leather in so doing, is likewise lost. As is any honor gained, or already gone forever, in the final seconds of its existence, and of those of all aboard. No one will ever know precisely what happened there.

It matters not. Sometimes, not knowing is best.

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