Chapter Text
“Hm?” Marth put down the book he was reading, turning his ears to the sounds of commotion outside. Something is astir out there? He hadn’t expected the fighting to reach Altea Castle so quickly. Or to reach it at all, in fact.
Marth parted the curtains blocking his pale face from the fierce afternoon sun to see soldiers clashing in the distance. He winced in the face of the sun’s angered glare, a light that forbade him from seeing the colours of the soldiers who were fighting.
Judging from the lack of draconic roars, however, there were no Dolhrian manaketes among the violent crowd. Good. No need to have those barbarians linger overlong on our doorstep.
Mother ought to be warned. Queen Liza of Altea had always held all the answers the fourteen-year-old prince needed. He was sure she would have an explanation for this sudden conflict.
Marth donned his azure cape, picked up his royal rapier just in case, and swung open the door to his quarters. However, in front of him stood an armed Gra soldier.
“Prince Marth!” He snapped off a quick salute before relaying to the Altean prince, “The castle is under attack from the Grustian horde! We are afraid we cannot win!” Ah. So while Dolhr occupies my father, Grust attempts to strike at his heart. Clever, if brutish.
“If you would come with me, sir, you will find that there is a boat ready to take the royal family to a save haven.” The soldier then turned around to leave, but Marth’s hand caught him by the shoulder.
“Wait!” The child did his best to yank the soldier back, but thankfully the much larger man got the message and turned back around. “Will we make the garrison face their fates alone?!” Gra, Altea’s neighbour, had taken up the responsibility of guarding their castle while the nation’s army was away fighting Dolhr. Its king, King Cornelius, was leading this army. Marth, Queen Liza, and Princess Elice had all stayed behind.
An alliance between Gra and Altea was to be sealed with Elice’s marriage to King Jiol of Gra, but the Dolhrian invasion had massively delayed those plans. Much to the sixteen-year-old princess’ relief, Marth had humorously noted at the time. This army was part of said alliance’s terms.
“And let our future queen perish?” Oh. That would make sense. I have no wish to die, or see Elice and Mother subjected to the same fate.
“No, I certainly would not wish that.” Marth meekly nodded and took the soldier’s hand. “Please, lead the way.”
*
Elice and Liza were waiting in the Altean throne room. Both women let out sighs of relief when they saw Marth enter. Elice greeted him, her voice laden with nerves, “Brother! Thank Elysium you are safe!” She rushed forward and hugged him.
Altea’s queen, meanwhile, held an ever-regal air about her, reflected in her posture. Even in a state of panic, she held firm. Her voice was restrained, if still caring, as she ordered, “Good. It is a wonder that all of us are safe, in this… sudden state of panic.” A look of suspicion flickered across her face, for a moment so brief her son almost thought he had imagined it. She spared a quick look around the room before bluntly stating, “Let us be off. I imagine we have precious little left to us in the way of time.”
“What?!” Marth found himself objecting to his mother’s idea at a pace faster than thought. “And abandon the very proof of our royalty?!” His cheeks flushed against the queen’s glare, and his lips slammed closed.
Liza responded, a thin veneer of calm covering a trembling lip, “We shall return once the Grustians have been repelled.” Did that soldier not cast doubt on the inevitability of that outcome?
“Queen Liza!” A blue-haired soldier stumbled into the hall, one in Altean armour. He was clutching at his wounded stomach, and blood dripped from his mouth. “Gra has betrayed us! King Cornelius is by the snake’s fangs, and Gra’s forces have laid siege to the castle!” All three members of the royal family gasped in horror. Father… he is gone?!
Liza shouted, “Marth! Watch out!” and unsheathed a dagger. Immediately after, the Graian soldier in the room with them confirmed the Altean soldier’s accusation by lunging at Marth, spear point first. “There has been a change of plans, men! Kill them all!” Aah! Marth meekly raised his rapier in self-defence, freezing from panic, closing his eyes, and waiting for the sharp point of the spear.
That point never struck home, however. After a few seconds, Marth opened his eyes to discover the point of his rapier buried in the soldier’s mail shirt. He backed away, pulling out a blood-soaked rapier and leaving behind a bleeding hole in his chest. He stood there, pondering his own survival, and how it had come at the cost of another’s life. A soldier for a prince. A good bargain for any reasonable man. … I think?
The blue-haired Altean tackled another Gra soldier out of the way as the fighting from the courtyard spilled into the throne room, Altean farmers and Graian vipers clashing. Marth’s expression hardened, and he grabbed on to the gauntleted hand offered to him. I may not be able to stamp out these traitors now, but I will come back for all their heads.
The Altean throne room was soon decorated with the marks of the dead, as Elice, Liza and Marth did their best to stay together. Their hands were linked, with the wounded Altean soldier who had first warned them of their doom at the front of the line. Elice had her eyes closed, mumbling something to herself. Marth found himself fighting the temptation to do the same, but battled it back soon enough. I am a prince, and a man before such. A man who shrinks from the sight of blood is a child himself, much less fit to sire one. And if he was a child then, he would not be one much longer. That was a certainty, with the sudden revocation of his nest.
Altean and Graian alike locked their wooden tusks in stalemate, only for the latter to uncloak a dagger and plunge their weapon-clad hand through a gap in the former’s armour. Another Altean had his head nearly separated from his neck by the plunge of a blade. A severed arm went flying into Elice’s chest, making her scream and flail about to knock it off. The faces of both women went pale at the desecration of Altea’s pride. Marth wished he could be certain that he was not the same.
A sudden spurt of blood covered Marth’s left cheek, and he turned to see the point of a spear before him. Said weapon’s shaft had pierced the chest of his escort, now a corpse which Marth had to abandon. It was then that Marth heard a gruff command, “Don’t let them get away!” and what little order he had been able to hold on to shattered.
The young prince ducked as an axe cleaved the space where his head was but a moment before. He felt Elice’s hand being ripped from his, as soldiers separated the siblings and their mother. Marth caught only a glimpse of Elice’s twin cobalt eyes before his family was obscured from view.
Elice’s panicked scream was drowned out by the screams of the dead men resting on Altea’s heart. Marth turned to run, ducking through the legs of a lanceman who attempted to grab him by his azure cape.
Once Marth cleared the doors to the throne room, he spotted a familiar face dressed in purple armour: General Jagen, His Majesty’s Commander of the Army. The man who was singlehandedly responsible for making Altea’s small army into a viable fighting force.
Not that his genius seemed to matter, if the army and its crown had been crushed by Dolhr’s raw might.
His armour had been dented, even torn off, in multiple places, and the spikes he normally adorned on his shoulders had been snapped in twain. Nonetheless, his face carried only the scars of time. Marth exhaled for the first time since he had left his quarters and rushed to hug the old soldier. “Jagen! Are the rumours of Father’s fate true?”
Jagen grimly nodded. “And it seems I arrived just in time to save the heir. Are your mother and sister alive?”
Tears welled up in Marth’s eyes as he pressed his bloodstained cheek to Jagen’s chest plate. “I ca-“ he was interrupted by an inconvenient hiccup, “cannot tell you that with any certainty. I think they are still in the throne room!”
Jagen bit his lip to stifle a curse. “We must go, then. Your safety is paramount, my prince.”
“W-what?!” Marth had failed to hold back the flow of sorrow from his eyes, bloody tears running down his cheek and marking Jagen’s breast plate. He turned up his gaze to stare into his mentor’s hard, wrinkled face. “L-Leave them to die?!”
Staring into a young Marth’s gleaming eyes, Jagen’s face softened slightly. He picked Marth up in his arms and fiercely clung to him. “In war, women are rarely killed. Only the cruelest men would crush a flower in full bloom.”
“These men are cruel. They would do it.”
“I should have specified. The cruelest and most stupid. Women are more attractive as hostages than corpses. That is a lesson in war and peace alike you shall learn quite rapidly as you age.” But Marth took in little of what Jagen said. His head was spinning with blood, and war, and death. Kind words and hope were being strangled in their cradles by Gra’s vipers.
Two more soldiers came into the hall, and judging by the relative tranquility of the space, they were Altean. Marth lifted his head to see that one wore red, the other green. Jagen curtly ordered the two of them, “Cain. Abel. I trust my horse is safe?”
“Sir, yes sir!” The one who said that had a relatively high-pitched voice. “Our horses are outside.”
A lower-pitched voice, presumably the other soldier, bluntly commented, “They won’t be safe for long. Let’s get moving.”
“Yes.” Jagen cradled the prince of tears and ruins as he chided the rude soldier, “Use proper language around the prince. He is a royal, not a child from the smoldering ruins of a village.”
“You seen this place? I’m not seeing much of a difference anymore.” Jagen growled but said nothing at that moment.
“I will address that later. Now, we must flee.”
* *
Marth next opened his eyes when he was on horseback, clinging onto Jagen’s back for not just his own life, but the life of Altea.
Jagen and the two soldiers beside him, one of whom was Cain and the other Abel, were stampeding though the courtyard on their armoured mounts, stabbing and slashing through the crowd. The mild-mannered green one hefted a javelin and sent it soaring into the chest of an archer, the dead man’s arrow dropping uselessly to the ground. Marth again forced his eyes to the wound, despite Jagen’s best efforts to shield him from such.
The thunder of hooves failed to obscure the sounds of crushing bone as dead men were trampled. Jagen’s proud stallion took a lanceman to the ground before the tide of his rider’s hope put a hoof through the unknown soldier’s skull.
It was quite clear, even to the eyes of a boy of only fourteen, wettened but unwhetted, that Gra was winning the courtyard. The castle was either soon to be next or had already been seized. The flame of Altea had been extinguished. Superseding it was a roaring, apocalyptic fire. Who claimed the flames was immaterial.
“Cain! Watch your flank!” Jagen’s shout alerted the redhead to the axe heading for his horse’s side. He steered away from the clumsy blow, striking back with his sword.
“Abel! Archer!” The bright green-haired cavalier put up a shield to block the arrow shooting directly for his prince. But the threat came from more than one archer. In fact, a storm of sharp missiles blanketed the riders, only three of whom could be protected by their metal coats.
The whistling of the arrows over his head filled Marth’s ears, and it was only then, staring at the horde of sharp-beaked birds, each intent on his death, that he could clearly see his own mortality staring him in the face. And he blinked.
“Get down, Prince Marth!” Jagen slung his shield off his back and passed it to Marth. “Remember that your life is worth an infinite amount of ours!”
Marth wordlessly grabbed the dark purple shield and held it over his head, eyes sealed shut. Fortunately for him, it was more than large enough to cover most of his prepubescent body.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Marth felt tremors cleave through his body with each strike upon his life-giving metal hood. The sound of hooves formed a monotonous background that his ears eventually turned rote. He heard Jagen shouting, Cain and Abel shouting, the voices of nameless, faceless weapons with human skin. Jagen bellowed, “Out of the way!” and shortly after Marth heard the sigh of one last skull caved in.
The arrows soon stopped, and the tremors of battle eventually faded. The stench of blood lingered in Marth’s nostrils, a reel of death looping in his mind.
* *
They had ridden for almost ten hours before Jagen decided the Altean renegades were out of enemy sight. The chill of the night necessitated a fire, even if it was a tactical blunder so large that Jagen would normally have had a trainee put to the lash for suggesting it. Better to die at the end of a sword than to fall into the night’s cold grasp. The horses, on the other hand, were a burden that the group could not handle. The stallion and mares’ new home was the woods, for however long their lives would continue.
The young prince Marth had fallen asleep in Jagen’s arms, snoozing soundly. The only remnant of the carnage that had unfolded that morning came when one touched his cherubic face and felt it wet with tears. Jagen stared mournfully at Altea’s hope. My life is in your hands, as is yours in mine.
No, that was understating it. Altea’s life was in the hands of both Marth and Jagen. The life of the motherland, the country that had nurtured the lives of all in it, was in danger. And there was little anyone could do to restore it at this time. All that could be done was to keep a juvenile ember burning.
The fire broke the silence with its spitting, a burning surface that reflected the hard faces of the hardened men staring into it.
“Why?” Abel’s voice had lost any sort of emotion. Its emotion, its life, had died on the blood-soaked dirt of Altea Castle. “Why is this happening? How have we just… lost everything?”
Cain bluntly answered his brother-in-arms, “Because Gra and King Jiol are slimy bastards, that’s why. Couldn’t take the heat from facing Dolhr and Grust on the battlefield, decided that he’d rather become the lizard’s lapdog.” He turned and spat on the ground. “Pathetic.”
Jagen reminded Abel, “Do not say we have lost everything.” He raised his arms, where Marth was still sleeping soundly. “He is all we need.”
Abel momentarily took his eyes off the fire to stare at Jagen. The old knight noticed that the green-haired soldier’s eyes were puffy from crying. “Really? A prince is great and all, but what about an army? Food? Shelter? Money? Do we have any of those, sitting out here in this forest, choosing whether to die of starvation or beheading?” The answer was obvious.
“Well, no.” Jagen’s expression did not change. He was prepared to answer this question. “But we have hope. We can gather all you have listed in the future. We have hope, a man to rally around, and our lives.”
“Oh, yippee.” Cain rolled his eyes. “So we can have hope when we get crushed like mice. Very helpful.”
“What would you have us do, then?” Jagen flicked his gaze to Cain and stared at him until the redhead’s cheeks matched his hair. “Sit around and bring the Prince to despair? Wallow in your own misery until your head and your neck part ways?”
“Well-“ Jagen cut Cain off with a raise of his hand.
“I have a plan. One who, judging by the rustling of the bush around us, should be upon us at any moment.”
The three men around the fire waited for a few seconds more, only to see a hooded, cloaked man burst from a nearby bush. Cain and Abel hurried to grab their weapons, but Jagen raised his hand and asked for calm. “Do not worry. This is one of ours.” At least, he had better be. If not, we are all dead.
The hooded man raised his hands in surrender and called out, “Please, rest easy! I am a man of the prince!” He tossed back his hood and revealed the face that Jagen was hoping for: that of Malledus, the King’s Scholar. One of the most important men in Altea was still alive and free.
“Good to see you, Malledus.” Jagen’s voice was level as he greeted the royal scholar. “Do you bring news from the palace?”
Malledus nodded. “Yes, yes. When I left a few hours ago, Princess Elice and Queen Liza were alive. Hostages of Gra, now.” As I suspected.
Prince Marth will be overjoyed when he wakes. “Good. And Mostyn?”
“He was already prepared to send aid. Talys’ ships should be on our coasts at this very moment.”
Jagen turned to his disciples and spread his hands, leaving Marth in slumber on his lap. “And that, men, is your plan.”
“Flee to Talys?” Abel confirmed. Jagen responded with a nod. “At least we’ll get to keep our lives if this works. And that hope you’re so concerned with, Jagen.”
“That’s a big ‘if’ we’re talking about.” Cain’s fingers scuffed the soft, wet dirt beneath him as he dragged them across the fertile ground. A shame it is not to last under the maw of Dolhr’s reapers. “Altea is occupied by Gra. Getting out of here is going to be a nightmare.”
“Heh,” Abel smirked wryly, “I’d call it more of a dream than anything.”
“H-Heh,” Malledus could not help but let out a chuckle. “that was excellent wordplay, Abel. I-If war tires you as you age, you might consider a career as a humorist.”
“What, a doctor?” Even the stern Jagen smirked at that one.
“I am afraid not, no. That would require a second ‘u’ in the term.”
“Oh, so you want me to be a jester.” Abel raised an eyebrow, staring at Malledus. The writer blanched under his steady gaze. “Meh. I could think of worse places for an old man to be.”
“Like behind a book, drowning in letters and numbers all day.” Cain and Abel both let out hearty chuckles at the former’s jibe. “Doesn’t sound like the most pleasant place to be, if you like the feel of a woman’s skin.” Jagen and Malledus both scowled.
“Men.” Jagen’s inquisitive gaze quieted both soldiers. “It appears I must remind you that Malledus outranks you tenfold. He is the uncle of the Duke of Aritia, and you two lack surnames.”
“That,” Malledus added, “and I am one of the most important men in the realm. Managing the treasury and foreign relations, as well as directing the young royals’ tutoring in the intellectual arts, is far more vital to our kingdom’s health than waving blades around.”
Cain glared at the wise writer. “And that did how much? Because it seems like it did fuck all for Altea, in the end.” Jagen’s glare, enough to stop a soldier in his tracks, did nothing to deter the rogue fighter. “It still fell. We’re still on the run, barely clinging on to some shitty hope. All that money, all those alliances? They did shit to help us.”
Malledus shot back, “And clearly swords and spears were not enough, either.”
Cain had no response. He opened his mouth as if he wished to say something, but no words came out. The only thing he unleashed was the force of furious tears, flowing down his red cheeks.
Jagen stared down both Cain and Abel as he rhetorically asked them, “Is your solution to lay down and hope the earth claims you before Gra or Grust does? Or worse, Dolhr?” Upon receiving no response, he continued, “Or are you going to try and save your kingdom, even if that means accepting some loss of control for now?” He then received two nods in return. “Good.”
Malledus leaned over and asked Jagen, “Has Prince Marth been asleep all this time?”
Jagen shrugged nonchalantly. “For about five hours. Our dear prince has had an extraordinarily long and painful day. We should grant him some respite from the horrors he has just witnessed, before the sun wrenches him into a new day.”