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Dorothea’s eyes are crusted with sleep when she finally cracks them open. Sunlight spills in through the dirty muslin curtains of her cheap inn room. It’s a large departure from her diva days, but it’s the best she could afford now with the last of her coin.
Little songbirds chirp outside the thin windowpanes, and Dorothea savors the calm. It’s quiet here, peaceful in a way that suggests this little village never saw the horrors of the War or its subsequent reconstruction. She lays on her thin mattress and breathes the scent of freshly baked bread and leftover stew reheated on the hearth. There’s a crick in her neck.
The proprietor of the inn, an older man with a permanent scowl, tosses a wooden bowl of thin stew and a crust of bread across the counter carelessly, grumbling under his breath about beggars. Dorothea wonders, picking at her food, what he’d say if she told him she used to be a General in the Imperial Army. Surely, he’d laugh in her face, dressed as a pauper with nary a copper to her name.
She wonders, more sourly, if he served during the war under Ferdinand von Aegir. The village is nestled deep in former Aegir territory, a day's walk from Boramas. It’s a region of the country she’s avoided since they buried the last scion of its house.
The bread is suddenly dry in her mouth, and she pushes her unfinished breakfast away. She will not need it, anyway, not where she plans to go. She wipes her hands on her grimy dress and smiles at the proprietor, who does not smile back.
“Excuse me,” Dorothea asks. “Which way is it to the sea?”
#
The path from the village to the Pearl Sea is long but well-tended. Fat, purple-gold kernels gleam like drops of honey on the vetiver. They grow in great clumps along the coastal region of Aegir, and the air is sweet with their grassy scent and the salt of the ocean. The smell is nostalgic; Dorothea realizes with a pang that it reminds her of Ferdinand.
Long ago, he told her that he’d see House Aegir restored after the war, and only then would he bring her to see the splendors of his territory.
“You shall see,” Ferdinand had told with a smile as they took their meals by the campfire, his honey-hued eyes glowing against the firelight. “Aegir’s capitol, Boramas, is a fine port, as splendid and beautiful as Enbarr and Derdriu. You shall have a wonderful time, I promise you.”
The edges of Dorothea’s eyes crinkled. “I always have fun when I’m with you.”
She liked the blush that spread over his cheeks when she teased him. She liked the blush that spread over his cheeks when she kissed him more.
“I am a fish in love with a bird,” Ferdinand confessed to her one evening, his head in her lap as she combed out the tangles in his hair. Privately, Dorothea thought it a wonderful premise for an opera.
Once, Dorothea had told Edelgard that she’d write an opera about them after the war. How foolish it seems now, making promises she couldn’t hope to keep. As if she’d sing about Bernadetta and how she’d been burnt to a crisp on Grondor Field, or about how Linhardt had been cut in two and Caspar had died crying out for him.
No one would want to hear a dirge about how Petra’s corpse was sent back to Brigid, or how her family must have wept upon receiving her body after all those days baking in the sun. Kingdom and Alliance soldiers might like to hear how Hubert was flayed open on the streets of Enbarr, or about how Dimitri speared Edelgard like a fish, but Dorothea would certainly break into hysterical sobs before the end of the first stanza.
She thought of Ferdinand, hastily buried at sea to avoid his grave being desecrated. Poor, sweet Ferdie, who had opposed Edelgard nearly all his life, bleeding to death on a lonely bridge for a cause he didn’t believe in and for people who hated him, simply because he loved his homeland.
No, Dorothea thinks miserably as she trudges along the golden path, there’d certainly be no opera of that.
#
The Goddess had a cruel sense of humor: the Mittelfrank Opera survived the siege of Enbarr, jutting out grimly from the burnt corpse of the city. Even so, it would be some time still before Dorothea would return to it. The Opera remained shuttered for quite some time; the arts were amongst the last things to return when a country was being rebuilt from ash and bone.
Many of the divas Dorothea knew from her opera days were either dead or displaced. Most found grueling work as farmhands, birds of paradise reduced to humble sparrows. The unlucky ones went to the brothels.
Dorothea was lucky. In the immediate chaos after the siege of Enbarr, Viscount Essar’s widow found her on the street. It was a miracle, really, how she had recognized Dorothea amongst the other survivors, straggly-haired and covered in soot, her dress torn.
“Praise the Saints, Dorothea,” Viscountess Essar held her by the elbow, her expression plaintive and relieved. She spoke low and fast, her eyes darting nervously from side to side. Desperation drove many to crime; Dorothea herself always kept a dagger up her dirty sleeve. “Hanneman always spoke so highly of you. I would have you for an attendant in my household, if it pleases you. My maid was killed last week during the siege by falling rocks, poor thing.”
The offer would have been laughably insulting before the war, but it was a rare gift these days, to be married into or offered work into a minor noble house. The Kingdom did not care to cull minnows.
It was while purchasing herbs for the Viscountess’s diminished medicine supplies that Dorothea encountered Adrienne, the diva who succeeded her at the Opera. Adrienne had called out to her, her face grubby with soot, dressed as a factory worker and scrubbing her dirty hands across the front of her apron. If it wasn’t for her familiar voice, Dorothea might not have recognized her at all, so weathered was Adrienne’s complexion and stooped was her back. Shamefully, Dorothea feared what she might look like, herself, and hurried to tuck a limp strand of unwashed hair behind her ear.
“You are looking well, Dorothea,” a slow, dry smile stretched across Adrienne’s cracked lips. She had grown alarmingly thin and frail, so much that she reminded Dorothea of a dry twig. “You always had a hummingbird’s luck, flitting from flower to flower.”
The face of her drone bee flashed before her, unbidden. Oh, she’d give anything to see that face again. Dorothea’s eyes were wet, and she blinked them back rapidly.
“Oh! Don’t cry, I didn’t mean it as an insult,” Adrienne’s hands were coarse against her own, hands that had been nourished in years past with the most expensive of creams. “I am happy to see that you’ve survived the war. May I be so lucky as to be scooped up by a wealthy benefactor someday, too.”
“Yes,” Dorothea smiled weepily. “I’ll keep an ear to the ground for you.”
They exchanged information on where to find the other, but in the end it did not matter. A few weeks later, Dorothea learned that a fire had broken out in the encampment Adrienne lived in on the far side of the city. It swept through the neighborhood quickly, razing everything to ash. Too many people cramped together in the cold, the city officials said, and in the dead of night. They didn’t have a chance. Dorothea knew that what they meant was that the meager resources of Enbarr would never have been spent on peasants.
#
The sun is gentle today and the breeze catches on her skin like the caress of a lover. Dorothea’s feet ache in her well-worn shoes and she thinks she can feel blisters forming, but she can see the sea on the horizon, deep as Blaiddyd blue.
It’s a color that’s still unusual to see in Enbarr even after all these years, draped in places that ought to be Hresvelg red. It was also a color that was unusual to see on Ingrid, when she had come to Enbarr years ago.
Ingrid Brandl Galatea was a name and a face from another lifetime. Seeing her standing across from the opera house in Blaiddyd blue armor and bearing the King’s standard, though, Dorothea felt a cool rage burn in her veins like ice. If she had known that the schoolgirl that she saved from that ill-fated betrothal would have aligned herself with the people that would murder all her friends, Dorothea would have offered the girl up on a silver platter herself to the would-be captors.
Dorothea’s cheeks burned with shame: how ridiculous it was that she had cherished the ring Ingrid had given her, and how stupid she was to have searched for it when it fell into the creek shortly after leaving the Academy, her dress hiked over her knees. She could still remember Ferdinand, his trousers rolled up, and Petra, her stockings slung over her shoulder, wading into the water with her.
Looking at Ingrid now in all her knightly finery, Dorothea wanted nothing more than for her to choke on that stupid, damnable ring.
Ingrid must have felt Dorothea’s glare burning into her and turned at the waist to look across the street. It would gnaw at her for years, how long it took for Ingrid to recognize her. When she did, her face lit up and she began to cross the street. Dorothea’s first instinct was to run, but she found herself frozen to the spot, her jaw clenched and the blood roaring in her ears.
“Dorothea!” Ingrid’s smile waned a little at the frosty reception. “It does my heart good to see a familiar face.”
Up close, Dorothea was even more keenly aware of the chasm between them. “I can’t say the same.”
There was something in the way Ingrid was looking at her that broke the dam inside her chest. A torrent of thoughts rushed forth to escape her lips like whitewater. I’m so alone, she wanted to sob. The angry, hateful part of her threatened to drag her under like a current. You took everything from me.
Ingrid shifted from foot to foot, quietly taking in Dorothea’s pathetic state, and then cleared her throat. Dorothea wanted to stab her, but it wouldn’t be enough to fill the ache in her heart.
“I wish you had killed me in Enbarr,” Dorothea said suddenly, the memory of the city’s cobblestones stained red with blood bubbling up behind her eyelids. Petra and Hubert died here; street vendors and a refugee camp now existed where they were slain. “Why did you leave me alive?”
“Because you were my friend,” Ingrid said quietly.
“Bernadetta was your friend, and you burned her alive.”
I can still hear her screams, Dorothea wanted to add, the words like venom on the tip of her tongue. Can you? Do you remember our friends?
“She nearly shot Dimitri,” snapped Ingrid. Her face quickly melted into regret and her shoulders sagged. “Dorothea, we didn’t have a choice. I’m sorry.”
Dorothea rubbed her eyes with the dirty hem of her sleeve, her throat too thick with emotion to respond. The floodgates had burst open, and now she was drowning in her grief.
Ingrid’s expression was pitying. “His Majesty has given new orders regarding the restoration of Enbarr, and I’ll make sure it is carried out with haste. The Opera will be open again soon, I promise.”
#
The timpani sounded too much like war drums, and the mournful warble of the horn was too familiar. Her heart fluttered too fast, and her nerves were like the strings’ tremolo as she peered, wide-eyed, into the audience. A multitude of faces stared back, excited and expectant and all seated in as if in formation – “front towards enemy!” as Edelgard has once shouted. The stage lights were blinding and hot like flames, and she could smell the smoke and burning flesh, too.
When the audience erupted into cheers at the Mystical Songstress’s return, Dorothea began to cry.
#
The smile on the opera director’s face was paper-thin.
“Perhaps the Viscountess will reconsider you. I am sure you were of great help to her household,” he said.
Dorothea wanted to scream, but she kept her mouth shut. They both knew that Viscountess Essar hanged herself two moons prior upon discovering that the Kingdom would seize all her remaining assets.
#
In the days after, Dorothea would scramble to collect the memories of Ferdinand on the eve before he left for Myrddin, tucking them carefully away for safekeeping. Time, however, was the cruelest of fires, and it burned everything in its wake regardless of its value. Dorothea could no longer recall the words he whispered to her, what they might have been doing before she kissed him, or how his bare skin felt against hers, but she did remember these: the smell of him when she buried her nose in the crook of his neck, the taste of his lips against her own, and the look in his eyes – of hunger, of desperation, but mostly of love. She remembered the little sound in the back of his throat when he entered her for the first time, his trembling hands, the little furrow between his brows, how the lamplight danced across his warm skin. Mostly, Dorothea remembered how she had wanted to anchor him to her, fearful that if she let him go, he’d be lost to her forever.
Years later, Dorothea would search for these little reminders of Ferdinand in her customers. Sometimes, she would see a little bit of him in the color of their eyes, or the unruly cowlick behind their head, or even in their pompous manner of speech. Other times, they would whisper hollow declarations of love into her hair, and she would pretend it was the buzzing of her beloved bee instead.
Sometimes, when she was feeling particularly lonely, Dorothea looked for traces of her other friends in the men and women who purchased her company. Petra’s tinkling laugh, Caspar’s endearing stupidity, Bernadetta’s shyness, Lindhardt’s snoring, Manuela’s maternal warmth, Edelgard’s halting awkwardness, and even Hubert’s cold countenance.
And on the days she could find none, Dorothea searched for them at the bottom of the bottle.
#
“I miss you,” Dorothea says to the wind.
#
A mother and her young son smile at Dorothea, and she steps aside to let them scramble up the sandy path.
“It gets chilly after dark,” the mother warns, noticing that Dorothea does not have a shawl. “You’ll catch a cold dressed like that.”
“I know,” replies Dorothea, wearing her diva smile as naturally as her skin. “I just want to see the sunset. I hear it’s beautiful.”
It seems to be a sufficient explanation, and she watches mother and son clamber up to the shore, chattering happily, until they are specks on the horizon. The sun dips low in the sky as Dorothea takes off her well-worn shoes and feels the warm sand between her toes.
The boy’s laughter still ringing in her ears, Dorothea walks up to the water, recalling a time where she could have left the Imperial Army. Where would she be now if she had? Would she still have watched her friends slaughtered like pigs in the mud? Would she be here on Ferdinand’s favorite beach, like the mother and son earlier?
The sand is cold and wet now. Dorothea shivers, remembering when the last of the Aegir bloodline dripped down the inside of her thigh.
It was an ordinary day, much like this one. They had been marching when it happened. She kept it to herself until she grew feverish several days later, and Linhardt gave her some herbs.
“It’s not your fault,” he told her, noticing her sullen expression. But how could it not be? Perhaps she had walked too far, used too much magic, slept too poorly. Would the child have had Ferdinand’s auburn hair and friendly disposition, or her green eyes and foul temper? Would they have loved her as freely and unconditionally as their father had loved her?
Though, it was probably for the best this way. How could she have made such an impossible choice herself? Ferdinand had barely been dead for two moons. And besides, the war was going terribly and Edelgard needed her. In some sick way, it was as if the Goddess had chosen for her.
Seabirds cry in the distance, and Dorothea watches them circle and dive into the water. In another life, perhaps they could all come to the Pearl Sea together. Swim. Drink iced tea. Play in the sun.
Dorothea closes her eyes. Lets the water lap at her shins.
#
In Enbarr, it was difficult sometimes for Dorothea to remember what her friends looked like, or the sound of their voices. Like a word at the tip of her tongue, there were times when she could not summon their living faces, instead only remembering what they looked like when she found them sprawled out, eyes unseeing in a pool of red. Here though, at the Pearl Sea, it is easy to recall Ferdinand’s face, his earnest smile, the light smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose, the masculine curve of his jaw. If she listens carefully, Dorothea thinks she can even hear him singing.
Ferdinand sang often, back in the day. He sang during chores, whistled merrily as he sharpened his lance or brushed his horse, and once she’d heard him singing to himself in the kitchens late at night. She could hear him clearly at church services when the Professor invited Dorothea to attend.
Naturally, it was no surprise to her that, during a particularly long and weary march, Ferdinand would sing here, too. The sun was brutally hot and the air was thick as soup as they walked, her battalion in twin columns next to his. Dorothea’s throat was dry and sticky, and the blisters that had formed on her feet had burst. She was in a foul temper, and when she looked over at Ferdinand, placidly soldiering on without complaint, her mood soured further.
An easy smile crossed Ferdinand’s face. He did not seem to mind that her hair stuck to her neck, the wretched condition of her dress, or the frown that deepened on her face.
“Won’t you sing with me?” he asked, switching the reins of his horse from one hand to the other. She would regret never telling him how much she loved his hands, capable and square with tortuous veins and clean, short fingernails. “It will distract you from this miserable trek.”
Dorothea rolled her eyes, which only made him laugh. “Even the loveliest of songbirds sometimes have no songs left to sing.”
Undeterred, he pressed on, his tenor clear and sweet:
“When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmurs, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”
“You have a lovely singing voice,” she said once he was finished.
“As I have told you before,” Ferdinand’s smile was small and private, and he looked at her so reverently that Dorothea blushed and looked away. “I am a fish in love with a bird. Therefore, I must learn to sing to attract such a lovely songbird as yourself.”
“Oh, Ferdie,” said Dorothea, smiling now. “Don’t birds eat fish?”
#
Dorothea’s eyes are wet when she opens them. The roar of the sea is the only sound that greets her.
#
The sun is setting now, coloring the sky a brilliant swath of red and orange and pinks. The sea shimmers invitingly, tugging at her shins as if to pull her into its cool embrace. Dorothea’s teeth chatter.
I am a fish in love with a bird.
What was it Ferdinand had called her, all those years ago? A water nymph? Well, if a water nymph she was, a water nymph she would be.
I’m coming, Ferdie.
Dorothea wades into the sea.