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mark_asphodelI guess it'll go here, for now, just to prove it existed.
Public Enemies
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
The sheriff of Melgen expected to die. It showed in his trembling hands and the twitch in his jaw.
“Calm down, man. Just come clean to us about what Blume and his son have been up to.”
Oifaye didn’t say the words “child hunt,” as people tended to clam right up whenever the phrase was uttered.
“Prince Ishtore--” the sheriff began, but then cut off his own protest of the prince’s good character and mumbled that Oifaye and Shanan ought to follow him.
They accompanied the sheriff to the the office that had been the heart of law and order-- or the opposite-- during Ishtore’s reign in Melgen. The office boasted a fairly grand desk and wood-paneled walls; upon those walls were portraits of King Blume and his late son along with several dozen posters of the Public Enemies most wanted by, and hated by, His Majesty. It occurred to Oifaye then that Shanan was the source of the sheriff’s terror, and it wasn’t entirely from the simple fear that a long-haired, sharp-bladed man of Isaach inspired in the heart of a southerner.
“There’s some familiar faces up on this wall,” Oifaye said of the gallery of fugitives from imperial justice.
“Yeah.” Shanan stared up at his own likeness-- a decent one, Oifaye thought, based off a snapshot from some years back. The charges writ beneath it were all the usual thing-- fomenting rebellion against lawful authority, the murder of imperial agents, aiding and abetting other fugitives. “I see my life is only worth twenty thousand in gold around these parts.”
“I wouldn’t take it personally,” Oifaye replied, for his own value in gold was a mere fifteen thousand to Blume; the late “King” Danan of Isaach had wanted far more for them both. Blume’s own priorities were clear enough-- fifty thousand for Lord Seliph (living or dead) and two other targets would net some lucky bounty hunter thirty thousand apiece.
“Wanted: Leif Faris Claus. The so-called “Prince” of thieves has been disturbing the peace and preying upon His Majesty’s subjects...” Shanan’s voice trailed off while he studied the poster, but when he spoke again his voice sounded almost admiring. “That is Quan’s son, isn’t it? That’s a whole host of crimes for a boy not yet seventeen.”
“Hardly a surprise, given the company he’s been keeping. The Fiana Gang, the Purple Mountain Gang, the Dandy Lion Gang-- those are some names!-- not to mention Public Enemy Number Three over here.” Oifaye began to recite from the poster that, in style and fervor, was a twin to the one featuring Prince Leif. “Wanted for murder, conspiracy to murder, armed robbery, and stealing horses. Does that sound like the Finn we used to know?”
“I don’t know. After seeing what I’ve supposedly been up to, I’d believe anything,” said Shanan as he reached for his own wanted poster. “I think I’ll keep this one for myself.”
Oifaye shook his head, though he fully intended to take his own likeness down from the wall once they’d gotten done with the sheriff. It did a man good to see himself now and again through the eyes of his enemies. But the sheriff was quivering between them, and Oifaye returned to questioning the man.
“So, I take it Blume hasn’t had any luck with the Prince of Thieves and his accomplices?”
The sheriff made a noisy swallow before replying.
“Some of Leif’s gang made a raid on Alster some weeks back and got wiped out. His Maj... Blume sent a posse up to Leonster to smoke out the last of them. The captain came back with a bayonet wound in his gut and the news that the rest of his men suffered the same fate. All his doing.” And the sheriff indicated Public Enemy Number Three with a jerk of his head.
“A bayonet, huh?” Oifaye glanced up again at the wanted poster of Finn. “I guess some things do stay ever the same.”
“Nastiest weapon around, aside from those electrocution machines,” said Shanan, and he thumped the rolled-up poster of himself against the palm of his hand. He had a swordsman’s disdain for the savagery of the bayonet and its “dirty” wounds.
Oifaye, for his part, thought of it more as a quaint affectation. Against the guns of twenty years before, a bayonet could be an even match. With all the new rifled-barrel guns flooding through the Empire, a bayonet wasn’t much use unless someone had a talent for dodging bullets.
But Oifaye, after seeing Shanan take on Prince Ishtore’s best efforts with only his sword, had to admit that some people seemingly did.
-x-
The sheriff-- or former sheriff, for they’d locked him up in his own jail awaiting trial-- gave them a treasure-trove of paperwork detailing exactly what Blume and Ishtore had been doing to the people of Melgen. Including the child hunts. That alone quieted any misgivings that Shanan had about killing the young and fairly popular prince.
“How can anyone say these were good people?”
“Good by comparison?” Oifaye offered. “They weren’t killing citizens for sport the way Danan’s people were up in Isaach.”
“If Blume and Ishtore were sent to Isaach, they’d be doing it too,” replied Shanan. “They don’t fool me.”
Oifaye didn’t contradict him; feeling against Isaachians ran deep enough in Melgen that he didn’t doubt either that had there been a supply of Isaachian women and children handy, the citizens would have joined in the hunts just to get rid of the foreigners. As it was, the Isaachians in their own army had problems on that count almost every day.
“What’re you starin’ at?”
So spoke Princess Larcei of Isaach when confronted by the curious eyes of the Melgen populace. These black-haired “exotics” with their strange curved blades provoked fear and fascination, and the fact that Imperial Prince Seliph had been raised among them, felt comfortable around them, and almost looked like one of them with his long hair and foreign manners... well, that was turning into a problem, too. But there wasn’t anything to be done about it other than hope that everyone got used to each other, and so Oifaye turned his mind to other things. Specifically, the mystery of the electrical weaponry that Blume’s people used as their specialty. Seliph’s army had but one electrical specialist in their midst-- Blume’s own nephew, Arthur. Arthur hadn’t grown up under Blume’s tutelage though; the boy was self-taught, a tinkerer who’d produced what he called a “shock box” that summoned arcs of blue-white energy.
“I admit I still can’t fathom how that little black box can do the things that it does,” Oifaye said as he examined the device.
“But you had these back in Sir Sigurd’s time, right?”
“It was a different world then, and not just because I was younger and... innocent.” Naive was the word for it. “No railroads outside of Grannvale, no rifled guns or cannon, and just a few telegraph lines. Electrical energy seemed more... well, like magic.”
It still seemed like magic to him. As Oifaye watched young Arthur’s fingers work the wires inside of his “shock box,” he marveled that the boy could tell any single wire from the rest, much less that Arthur seemed to know what they all did.
“Besides, your mother used something very different to summon her thunderbolts. Some sort of coil inside of an orb.”
Arthur’s eyes gleamed at the mention of his mother. Oifaye wasn’t certain of it-- it’d been too long-- but he thought Arthur’s eyes were the same shade of pale violet that Tiltyu’s had been. So were Ishtore’s, as they’d found when they’d recovered his corpse.
“How did it work?”
“Your mother guarded her trade secrets,” Oifaye said, not wanting to admit that Tiltyu hadn’t appeared to know the faintest thing about the powers she controlled. She’d used electricity by instinct, perhaps, or she’d memorized how to produce shocks without understanding the the hows and whys of it. “I don’t know that she even would’ve talked to your father about it.”
“Oh,” said Arthur, and he ducked his head back down to work on his magical box.
“You could try asking Lewyn,” Oifaye offered, knowing that Arthur almost certainly wouldn’t.
-x-
In a different and maybe better world, Oifaye and Shanan could’ve had some frank discussion with the former king-turned-tactician, talking about the things that went wrong two decades back and the things that all had to go right now. But the Lewyn they had on hand wasn’t what the kids termed a “straight shooter” when it came to most things, and Oifaye soon gave up on the idea. Shanan hadn’t bothered with the notion in the first place.
“I never could make sense out of what he was saying back then.”
“Well, you were what? Eight years old? Lewyn always made a frightening amount of sense if you thought about it for a couple of moments.” The problem, Oifaye had long ago decided, was that most of their company didn’t have the patience to think for more than one moment.
“You think he’s making sense now?” Shanan’s dark eyes held more than casual interest.
“Do I think he’s leading us astray? I don’t see that we have any choice but to head toward Leonster, even if it means crossing Blume’s territory. It means a lot to Sir Seliph to be able to meet the last of his kin.”
“Yeah. I know. I’m just asking.”
“Shanan, if I thought Lewyn was... not on the up-and-up... I’d tell you. I’d tell Seliph.” Oifaye felt certain enough that Seliph would take his word over that of the man who drifted from place to place in the guise of a traveling musician. He’d had Seliph for seventeen years, and Levin had only been in their circle for... was it three months now?
Shanan’s mind was already elsewhere, though. He paced around the room they’d taken in Melgen’s rude bunkhouse, sighed aloud, and took a chair at the card table and reached for his deck of playing cards. Then he sighed again, rose to his feet and began to pace anew.
“Just come out with it, Shanan,” said Oifaye as he spread maps of the territory west of Melgen over the abandoned card table.
“What do you think about Larcei?”
“Think of her? I’m finding her quite capable in combat. She’s reined in some of that reckless behavior we saw in the skirmishes around Tirnanog.”
“No, I mean, what do you think of her?”
“When I think of Larcei,” Oifaye said in the most casual tones he could muster, “I remember the time she and Ulster chewed the finish off all four legs of my writing desk.”
“Oh, come on. You can’t blame her for that. She was two years old at the time.”
“Exactly. No matter how tall she gets, or how well she fights, part of me will always think of her as being two years old. I don’t find that attractive.”
He knew what Shanan was getting at because he knew Shanan, and he knew why Shanan was drifting in that direction because he saw how Larcei responded to the mere sight of her cousin.
“You can hold different ideas of someone in your head,” Shanan said now. “I mean, sometimes I look back on that dumb little kid who let Deirdre go outside the fort alone. Am I that kid, or was I that kid? Are we really the same... thing?”
“I don’t know,” said Oifaye, and he turned to his maps just as he had twenty years before, when he used them as a screen to not see the things he wasn’t supposed to see.
But Shanan had another question.
“What do you think about Julia?”
Oifaye pretended to study a particular patch of terrain on the map for a long moment before making a reply that was as open as his responses on Larcei were coded.
“I hope Seliph isn’t in love with her.”
(End chapter)
