The Knight in Reverse
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
This was written for Challenge 006, "Wager," at the fe_contest LiveJournal community.
It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender
i.
He came to her door in the night, in the rain, in the descending edge of autumn when she would have let any passing stranger take shelter. At first she blinked her eyes against the onrush of shadow and saw no one, but then she made out his silhouette in the entryway. She recognized the pose. Palla led him inside and ignored the trail of dark spatters he left on her floor.
He said nothing at first, just a mumble of thanks. He sat at her table with his long limbs slack and a thatch of rain-damp hair over his face. She turned her back on him to make the coffee; it wasn't as though he'd disappear if she took her eyes away. He wasn't a dream, or a ghost. Abel was as real as the mud on his boots. Her fingers brushed against his as she set the coffee down before him; he drained the small cup instead of sipping it. Only then did he look at her, and she could see bursts of red blood around the green of his eyes.
"I couldn't find her."
He was not there in the morning when she went to check the bed she'd given him, the one that once belonged to Catria. The faded wool blankets lay in disarray, and so Palla knew she hadn't simply dreamed him. She found him soon enough by the back window, staring out at the garden, and she in turn stared at the sight he made- his familiar lean profile, the way he absently ran his fingers through her dogs' curly hair.
"It was only a hunch that I'd find you here. A gamble, if you will," he said, and there was so little life in that soft voice of his that Palla ached with the longing to hold him close and give him something back.
"You win," she said after a moment, and she said nothing at all of the foolishness of being there at all, of a solitary woman living in that great empty house meant for a family of five. Some days, Palla didn't know whether she lived in the place or haunted it.
She cooked for him that morning, and Abel was still there when she returned from the Aerie in the late afternoon. Still there, communing silently with her dogs, his features grave and pensive. To see him filled her with the strangest sort of relief. He sat at her table, a table far too large for two alone, while she prepared their supper.
"Does Catria mind that I've taken her bed?"
"She hasn't been here in years." There was almost nothing left of Catria in the room with the blue-draped bed, but Catria's room had always been curiously bare, like a boy's room. Catria never needed anything that didn't fit on the back of her pegasus, and so Catria took her saddlebag's worth of belongings and left to Palla the house and the dogs and the garden. It made sense to give Catria's room to guests, while Est's door stayed shut and locked. Shut and locked even to Abel.
"I see," he said quietly. After a pause, he asked in more normal tones, "What has she been doing?"
"Working," said Palla, and fearing the answer too terse, she hastened to clarify. "She leads the Corps of Engineers."
"Engineers," he echoed. "You mean shooters?"
"No. Builders, architects. Roads and bridges."
"Ah," he said, and before Abel might ask Palla what she did with herself, she asked him how he made a living.
"I place bets."
"Bets? On horses?" It made sense, as Abel would be as fine a judge of horses as might be found.
"On horses, on cockfights, on tomorrow's price of silver in the marketplace." He took out deck of cards wrapped in a sheath of stained paper- beautiful cards, the quality only nobles might afford, all painted in the Altean suits. "Whatever it takes to see me through another week."
"Ah." And she looked upon the cards as a dull sadness took root in her heart. A gambler fell somewhere in between sellswords and gladiators on the social ladder- a far, far descent for a paladin. For any honorable man.
He tucked the cards back into his tunic before they ate.
"Est tried to make these for me," he said around a mouthful of lamb and broadbeans, "but it never turned out the way she wanted it to. The cheese was different, the spices were different. I thought it was good, mostly."
Irrelevant thoughts crossed Palla's mind- that she should have sent Est off with more things, that she'd been a bad sister, that a mother would have done better in setting Est up for her new life in a foreign land. All of it foolish, none of it worth speaking. The contents of Est's spice rack made no difference in the end.
It was a strange and strained meal, with the conversation punctuated by the lull of empty chairs. But then Palla brought out the wine, and Abel brought out the beautiful deck of cards, and they played for pleasure only, with chickpeas and honeycakes as their bets.
"Do you remember the first time we played cards?"
"Yes," she said. "You beat me handily. Had I won, I'd have claimed your extra blanket." It was cold in the desert at night, alarmingly cold on the road to Khadein. Palla could feel a shiver pass along her arms even now as Abel looked at her with the eyes of a man still dreaming.
"I asked you to wager a kiss. Up to then, I'd truly intended to ask for your silver lance; it was a fine weapon, and I'd been eyeing it since we met."
"And I agreed." She felt herself spin backward in time, felt herself again as she'd been in those days- self-assured in the saddle, but thrown off by the Altean knights and their strange ways. She had agreed not knowing if the act were proper or... decidedly not so.
"And I claimed my reward, just like this." He rose to his full height and leaned across the table. She felt his lips graze her cheek, felt the edge of stubble along his jaw. "While you stood there like a marble column. Cain made me apologize the next morning. He always was my conscience."
Palla swallowed. She wanted, with a need verged upon pain, to tell him that she understood what it was to be without the one who made life a complete picture, as the right eye needs the left. Understood the numbness and deafness that came with the absence of a lover, a sister, a lifelong companion. But these were unnecessary words, for Abel of all men knew of her losses. As he stood there, so close she could hear each indrawn breath, Palla brought up her hand and touched her fingers to his lips. He closed his eyes, and she watched the flickering motion beneath his sealed eyelids. Like a man still dreaming.
ii.
Palla stopped taking her work home. Work could stay in her offices at the Aerie. She threw wide the windows of her parents' house, made up her parents' great bed with fresh clothes, and began to dress for supper instead of standing at the table in her uniform. There was no reason for it, really, beyond that it felt good to come home to someone. To be greeted by someone more articulate and less fatuous than the dogs.
Not that Abel was a happy presence under her roof; if Palla thought herself at times to be a lonely ghost, Abel proved a tormented one. When he spoke, he would often glance over his shoulder, searching for an escape. Searching for the road home. He talked to himself as he lay abed, as though he could lull his own dreams and fears into a torpor. Most nights he talked himself to sleep and seemed wearied in the morning. Palla woke at daybreak and would lay next to him as the rays of the strengthening sun spilled into the room, illuminating the fine lines around his eyes and mouth, the small slanting scar upon his left cheek that still glistened when he turned his head. If she'd only had a portrait of Abel as he'd been, she might have been been saddened by the changes in him, but as it was Palla felt that the lines and the years hadn't diminished Abel any. She in her empty house had not stayed ageless; the living bore their scars, while the dead remained perfect... forever seventeen, twenty, twenty-four.
She pressed her lips to the mark on his cheek, and he ran his fingertips over the great gash in her back, the one that had nearly gone through to her heart.
iii.
She taught him to play cards as they did in Macedon, where each suit represented a basic element, and each card's value depended on how it was drawn.
"So the suit of Tomes is same as the Fire suit, Salamander, which governs power. The suit of Staves represents the Basilisk suit and governs emotions. Stones would be the Gaia suit and rule over health, and Swords become the Naga suit and rule the intellect."
"Why wouldn't swords represent power?" he asked, with the crease of a frown between his eyes.
"The ways of the dragons still run deep in Macedon," she said, for it was the only answer she had. "So if I draw the King of Staves like this, with the head pointing toward me, the card becomes the lowest one in the deck, but this Two of Tomes drawn in reverse has the value of a Queen now."
"I see. And this Five of Stones, with its head facing away from me, is simply a five."
"Yes."
He drew another card and looked at it as though reading his future in its value.
"Knight of Swords. Upside down."
"That's a three," she said, and made to draw another from the deck before he placed his hand across it.
"But what does it mean?"
"It's a three," she repeated.
"What does it mean?"
"The Knight of Swords represents resolve and clarity of thought," she said. "When reversed it represents... confusion. Indecision."
"This isn't a game," he replied, and she heard an edge of revulsion in the words. "It's cartomancy."
"Not really. I mean, no one takes it seriously anymore."
"But they did. Once."
"In the old days," she said, and it was meaningless, because everything beyond five years past was "old days," consigned to history.
"In Altea, this was illegal. It might still be, for all I know."
"This is not Altea," Palla said, and with conviction, for it wasn't. "The laws may be the same from sea to sea, but no one cares to regulate playing cards anymore."
"When I was a child, the penalty for cartomancy was to be burned alive."
"No one cares about card games." Clean water, sufficient food, shipping channels free of pirates, highways free of bandits, a good thick wall at the borders of Dolhr... cartomancy had not once ever made the list of things Palla need concern herself with.
So they played, while Abel asked questions, too many questions, about every card in the deck. He stared at his hand as though he'd never seen his own cards before.
"What's this?" And he showed her his hand in frustration. He was so caught up in occult meaning that he'd forgotten the basic rules of the game. Palla pointed to his central card, The Fool in reverse.
"The fool stands on his head and can't be beaten. You've won."
"Won what?" he asked then, for they were playing for nothing, not even chickpeas. He had no gold, and she had nothing to offer him besides her hearth and shelter, both already given. She merely watched his fingers as Abel shuffled the cards again so that the winners and the losers mingled together in no special order.
iv.
When Catria dropped by unannounced, Palla was pleased for all that she had to pick her words so as to sidestep around any number of topics. It made her guilty, too, to think that she'd made a part of her heart a shrine to Est, who had left and never returned, while sparing so little care for Catria, who at least did come by on occasion. Catria, her living, breathing, present sister, flicking back strands of untidy hair and talking of work. Catria spoke of her work always, spoke of it only. This dam, this bridge, this aqueduct was finished at last, and the world was a better place for it, as though the success of her life would be measured in the amount of marble she could lay down. But Catria sensed something wrong, something different, in the house this time, and she began to glance around with a soldier's sense of danger, of suspicion. When Catria snapped her teeth shut on a half-finished sentence, Palla glanced over her shoulder and saw Abel standing in he doorway, his lean arms folded before him. He held his empty hands out to show that he was harmless.
"I'll be going," said Catria, already rising from her seat.
"Catria, don't."
"I've a terribly busy week coming. Some Archanean engineers are coming and I'll need to show them the Dolhr Wall..."
It might have been true, though that hardly mattered. As the wingbeats faded from the sky, Palla stood with her hand upon the door and realized she was a stranger to herself now.
Abel said little that evening. He sat at her table for hours after dinner, shoulders hunched over his solitary game. He scrutinized each card as intently as a priest would take the auspices, reading the future in the painted figures. He was still playing cards when Palla lay down, alone, in the wide bed of her parents. She fell toward sleep thinking that Catria's visit had, of course, changed everything between them.
And yet, the next morning dawned blue and cloudless, and it was Palla's day of rest for that week. Instead of going to the Aerie, she hired them a horse-cart and they went into the countryside. They went to the banks of the broadest and fairest river in Macedon and there rested in the shadow of a great span of a bridge that stretched halfway across the water. Half-completed, half-destroyed... it was impossible to say. They ate the lunch she'd packed, the cheese and figs and the fish in oil, and they shared a skin of tart wine, and for a few hours it was not all that different from a respite on the march, from the moments where they might try to convince themselves that the rose light of dawn would bring something other than death. Palla watched Abel slip some biscuits to the horses, and as she tasted the salt and oil on her lips it seemed nothing had truly changed beneath the sun. Yet, if she glanced behind them, she could see that Catria's workers swarmed on the bridge pier that rose on the opposite shore, black specks against the dusty white.
"Does that bridge go anywhere?"
"Not really," she said. "It's just the road to Dolhr. All our roads lead there in the end."
v.
"You've weakened my resolve," he said, and she tensed her shoulders at the strange blend of emotion in his voice. Yet Palla did not deny it or question him; she said nothing as he continued. "I've been here too long. I... if I stay any longer, I won't leave."
"Wherever will you go?" He still had no gold. The very clothes on his back came from her own hospitality.
"I never had a map, or a plan, to get me here or anywhere else," Abel said, raking his thin fingers through his hair. "It's fate, or chance... I don't know. I have to follow my heart, and you've weakened it."
So everything seemed to be her own fault in the end. Palla leaned back against the locked door to Est's room. The wood creaked behind her but held solid.
"I have to find her," he said, and Palla wondered if some latent twist of madness in him had finally surfaced. And yet, she saw him off, waving good-bye to him as he crossed the great bridge, borne away on a horse that she'd paid for. As long as a corner of her heart belonged to Est, and as long as Abel's own heart bore the same brand, they would be little more than strangers fumbling in the dark.
The next evening, she did not bother to change from her uniform before supper. She ate her cold meat and vegetables standing in the kitchen, dropping bits to the dogs. They both seemed sad. Afterward, she ran her broom over the tiles, turning up clots of dust and spilled grains of rice. As she swept beneath the table something skittered across the floor, perhaps a dried-out leaf. But its colors caught her eye, and as she reached for it she realized it was the Fool, standing on his head. The winning card lay among the other scraps of refuse.
She'd lost, Palla realized, not because she'd wagered everything on Abel's heart, but because she'd refused to ever bet anything of value at all. She'd played for chickpeas and extra blankets, and so wound up with a handful of nothing.
The End
Author's Notes: the epigraph, and the inspiration for the story itself, comes from "The Stranger Song" by Leonard Cohen. The "Macedonian" card suits- Basilisk, Salamander, Naga, and Gaia-come from the three canonical dragon tribes listed in FE1 and a fourth tribe with game-data that never made it into the script. There's an unused "Gaia" tome in FE2 as well. :/