ffxii - a kind of integrity, cont.
Tensions rise higher in the North with every day that passes, and it is easier and more profitable to do business inside Rozarria’s borders, with at least less of a chance of having the Strahl conscripted for service. Balthier is in low spirits for not having uncovered the Dusk Shard, and there seems little in the way of new information, even as the skies fill with chatter. No matter where they touch down, there are always nervous questions, wariness or worry all the more evident when it is badly masked with politeness. What is going to happen, and when, and no one has the answers. Bur-Omaisce has called for negotiations, that all sides might come together under a flag of truce, and put a halt to what is happening before it can begin. Each nation has sent ambassadors, even Archadia, though Balthier barely gave the news any notice, not quite polite to say it was all doomed to failure.
The Strahl comes under a bit more scrutiny, as does every ship of anything approaching an Imperial design. Rozarrian ships are hewn from darker metals, silver and gunmetal trimmed with wrought-iron lacework, the perfect contrast to Archadian cream, ivory and gold. Balthier contemplates painting the ship, and Nono contemplates taking the wrench to him again, but in the end nothing much comes of it. So many ships in the skies now, hailing from every port and all moving south. Those with the money to do so are shifting their trade routes, adjusting their strategies, and that is a thought that can make Balthier’s mood turn even darker, that there are those who are waiting with anticipation for what is to come, those who see profit to be made in chaos and strife.
They land one morning at the edge of a city on the Rozarrian coast, a small, wealthy town far away from even the hint of strife or danger. Balthier is off to discuss a job that is both legal and simple, for once, and he had left a surprise behind for her. A family name, for a youngest son who had disappeared many years ago near the Golmore, no sign of him ever recovered. Before arriving, Balthier had written to them and mentioned her book and the response had been immediate, brought by private courier to meet them the moment they’d docked. A request that Fran should come as soon as she was able.
So here she is, making her way along a narrow coast road, the sea crashing up in great bursts of foam around spires of stone like iron, the cliffs rising high with dark-roofed slate mansions stretched all across its edge, high walls separating them from the road. Each of these barriers is lined with its own pattern of painted tiles in brilliant colors, and Fran can imagine an adventurer born here, growing up between a forest of lush greenery and the ever-present roar of the sea.
She had feared she might find a widow, with children who had grown up waiting for their father’s return, but Balthier had been given the name of the family’s estate alone. When Fran reaches the door a servant bows and leads her to a stone courtyard trimmed in white flowers, the walls high enough that the sea is shut out by the peaceful trickling of a water garden. The floors and walls are all carefully set with more of the same colorful tiles in complicated patterns. It is custom to bring a gift when visiting a Rozarrian home, especially on one’s first visit, though Fran could think of nothing that would mean anything against the book in her hand. As the time passes, and no one comes to see her, she wonders if perhaps they have changed their minds. If coming here had truly been the right idea.
The lady of the house is tall, modestly dressed compared to their opulent surroundings. Old, for a hume, moving slowly and carefully, but her eyes are clear and steady as she meets Fran’s gaze, pausing for a moment before she smiles and bows her head in welcome.
“I apologize for not attending to you more promptly. I… it has been many years since I have seen one of your people, and never so close, and I had heard…” The woman pauses, and Fran has the suspicion she is rarely this far out of her composure. “I was told that you might have news of my son.”
Fran holds out the book, and even before the woman has taken it her eyes have filled with tears.
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“He had always wanted to see more of the world. Always more. His brothers were all businessmen, like their father, but even when he was small, my youngest was always off on his own. Adventuring.”
Fran watches the woman turn the pages slowly, reaching out now and then to smooth a line with a fingertip, smiling gently. A few moments of weeping, and she had regained her calm enough to offer Fran a seat, and an apology for not knowing her way around viera appetites, unsure of what might offend. When Fran makes no particular preference, there are instantly plates of cake and sandwiches, rich coffee and imported Archadian tea - Rozarrians take great pains with their hospitality, a point of pride and one of the reasons they are so successful in trade. The servant girls, all dark eyes and dark curls, have been peeking around corners and through windows, never quite stopping to stare but certainly making sure their tasks keep them at this side of the house, and passing by the door as much as possible.
“I used to think my heart would stop, when he’d come back home with some tale of some monster he’d seen, some… hunt, I think they call them, that he’d followed along on. He liked to chase after whoever was willing to go the furthest. So curious, always so curious, and he could never tell me why. I’d hoped… I’d hoped he would find a wife, or some occupation to keep him from harm.”
“I believe I know someone a good deal like your son,” Fran cannot help the slight, wry smile, “I doubt the highest of positions would have kept him out of trouble.”
“Or a dozen wives.” The woman says, laughing a little, though it seems to open up an unexpected floodgate and she breathes in sharply, going pale once again. “Did… did he suffer?”
“No.” Fran says, glad that the truth, this time, can be kind. “When we found him, it seemed he had slipped from the path, and fallen. I am sure it was over before he knew what had happened. We buried him in the Wood. We did not… I did not know your customs.”
“… and your Wood, is it beautiful?”
“Yes.”
The single word is not enough, for either of them, and Fran wonders how to describe it all, how this hume, her son might have described it. The same journey for the both of them, searching and seeing without destination, without anything but the need to see what wonders lie past the setting sun. The breathless amazement of the world, with so much in it, too much, this terrace and this view of the sea different than anything she has seen before, and tomorrow it may be another shore just as new. The world will not stand still for anyone, nor should it, and she is sorry for the death of this boy she never knew, though carrying his pictures, his wonder with her it feels as if she knows him as well as anyone. It feels like she has brought him home at last.
“It is an endless green, and even when the rains come the sun continues to shine, and all the world is ever warm and full of life. It is… very beautiful.”
“Unlike anywhere else, I am sure.” The woman nods, and gently closes the book. “So, at least I know he is at peace. It would all have made him happy, I think, and to know such a beautiful woman kept him in her thoughts all this time.” The lady clasps the little book to her heart. “I cannot begin to thank you enough, for all that you have done.”
Of course she will try, and this being Rozarria there is no polite way to avoid accepting the gift. Fran is thinking Balthier might well enjoy a few days relaxing in some distant wing of this estate when a man lurches through the door, pale and wide eyed.
“Mother! Where is Adelia? Where is Raseda?”
The woman blinks, obviously startled by his lack of manners, and turns to Fran. “I would introduce my eldest son. Raseda and Adelia are my two youngest girls.”
The man has given Fran only the barest passing glance. He has dust on his boots all the way to the tops, and Fran can hear him panting for breath. It seems as if he ran the entire way up the road she took to get here, no simple task. “Where are they?”
“I hope this is worth your impoliteness. Raseda is in the capital through the end of the holiday season, and I believe Adelia and her husband were in in the north, in Nabradia, finishing up with some business there.”
Simply by her tone, Fran can tell the woman is unaware of how badly things have deteriorated, that her children have chosen to keep the worst from her - which makes his panic all the more unnerving. Her son is strong, broad-shouldered and solemn, but at word of Nabradia it seems as if he might fall. A tiny noise of pain in the back of his throat, all the more alarming for how quiet it is, a hand pressed to his mouth and Fran needs to find Balthier, to know what they will do now that Archadia has finally made their declaration of war.
“Where did they strike? How far have they advanced?” Fran says, just as the man talks over her.
“/Where/ in Nabradia, Mother? Where!?”
“The capital, I believe? No… no, that’s not right. He does business to the west of it, there is another town. Adelia said she might even wait for him in Dalmasca, with everything the way it is. Why? What has happened?” Looking between the two of them, with hands white-knuckled on the book that has brought some small part of her lost child back to her, even as this day threatens to take another. Fran can hear the maids speaking to themselves from inside, a chorus of hushed, high-voiced whispers and panicked, fluttering hands.
“Has something happened in Nabudis?” The lady reaches up for her son’s sleeve. “What part of the city?”
He laughs, and the sound seems torn from him like a knife.
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Fran does not need to see it. The force of it trembles and shudders through her, the same as it does through the ship, the skystone whining, fighting to stay aloft in the roiling Mist, and all the moogles are attending to it, fighting to keep the Strahl steady as Balthier stands in the cockpit, staring out over the void, the darkly churning emptiness that had once been Nabudis. A jagged gash in the heart of the world.
The radio traffic has been steady panic from the moment they’d lifted off from Rozarria, from every ship and every port, begging for news of family, of friends, and by the time they hit Dalmasca’s borders there are a half-dozen calls from names Fran barely remembers, frantic to find the Strahl. Grateful to hear she and Balthier are all right, giving her updates on anyone who made it out, and those they already know who didn’t, and the long list of those still unaccounted for. It is worse, in a way, for those in the skies, when a cargo haul might run in and out of Nabudis twice a week, and so the question becomes one of pure luck. Rose and Skylark are still unaccounted for, ‘My Bonny Bride’ not yet on any of the lists being read off, those ships that were certainly in port when it happened.
“The Midlight Shard,” Balthier had said, and nothing more, barely a grunt to acknowledge her or any of the moogles. By the time she had returned to the aerodrome he had already started in on alterations to the engines, cutting the power but providing better shields against Mist disruption. It is the only reason they are in the skies now, when most other ships have scrambled for safe harbor amidst panicked stories of those with lesser engines, skystone scraps compressed into workable machines by pirates and smugglers suddenly crumbling, or exploding midair as they prove no match against the turmoil in the sky.
Fran wonders if she might do the same, feeling on fire beneath her skin as the Mist rages and roils, and it takes all her strength not to dig her claws into her arms until they draw blood, leaning heavily against the wall as she shivers and staggers down the corridor to where Balthier is still standing, his expression long fixed into a mask of such violent anger it is as painful to look at as the view in front of them. Nothing but shattered trees and vast furrows in the earth, the blurry, insubstantial shadow melting to the horizon, as if a great hand reached down and pressed the world into a blackened smear.
The Strahl is poised much higher than she usually flies, a hundred miles or more from the epicenter of the damage and still the engines threaten every few moments not to catch, to give up struggling against the chaos and sink them down into the dark. It had been a race to even get free of Rozarria, airships being grounded for their own safety, for the safety of a world still trying to figure out what had /happened/, but Balthier slipped through unnoticed, wove past the border guards when they’d hit Dalmasca, and beyond that there had hardly been any air traffic at all. Bhujerba is in total lockdown, no ships in or out, though thankfully it seems the island itself is not in danger.
The last airship they’d seen had been Imperial, the Dreadnought /Leviathan/ far off in the distance when they’d crossed into Nabradia, and Balthier had snarled ‘Nethicite’ under his breath and kept flying, and Fran had gone to her room to sleep, as if what had happened were a shock that would wear off. As if they weren’t flying right into the middle of it, and things could only get worse, but she simply hadn’t been thinking and now it is impossible to think.
The King and Queen of Nabradia are gone. The vast lake with all its little ships. The shop where Fran had last found fresh raspberries, with the little boy who’d shyly peeked out at her from behind a counter while his mother asked if she wanted blueberries as well. At least three airships and all their crew, men and women she has feasted and celebrated with. Every person she’d ever spoken to in the aerodrome, and at least two of her sisters, at least two viera who had called Nabudis home. Fran has never truly grown accustomed to the size of hume cities, long since given up on trying to figure out how many times over her village could fit in Rabanastre, or Bhujerba, and with this the loss, the sheer scope of so much devastation is simply beyond understanding.
All of them gone, all swallowed up forever by the Mist that hisses in her ears, that tenses her muscles in fury only to drain them until she can barely stand, the world slipping in and out of focus in a sickening tide. It is a fight to keep her balance, claws catching in the joins in the walls, gaze fixed on Balthier who has not moved at all in the time it has taken her to get this far. Has not moved, perhaps, since he poised the ship at the edge of the abyss, and it hurts to get closer, this is not the Balthier she knows but some other man. A man who had been an Archadian Judge, who had run from their rules and obligations, who had done his best to stop a war.
A man who knew what the Dusk Shard could do. A man who had seen this all coming, when no one had seen this coming, and tried to stop it.
Fran does not know this man at all.
“Balthier… Balthier, I…”
He turns, and Fran watches the anger drain from him all at once as her hand leaves the wall and what’s left of her balance fails her, and she falls into his arms. Balthier is staring at her with wide, panicked eyes, and speaking, but she cannot hear him over the roar of the ocean, the engine, the Mist…
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Fran wakes feeling hot, her mouth sticky and dry, aching to the very tips of her ears, but there is no more feel of the Mist raging away inside of her. Just echoes, and the darkness, and the quiet breathing of another person nearby.
“… Balthier?”
A soft gasp, and the creak of the chair, and a cool cloth at her brow. Fran licks her lips and in another moment his arm is behind her head, a cup at her lips and she drinks deeply.
“I’m sorry, Fran. I’m… I will not even ask your forgiveness. I wasn’t thinking of, I… I didn’t think.”
He has turned the lights off for her sake, though her vision is still quite good in the dark. Enough to see the stubble on a face she has never not seen clean-shaven. He looks weary and haggard, and Fran thinks that maybe he thought he’d killed her. It is likely he’s been sitting here in the dark just waiting for her to breathe her last, exhaustion dragging him into a stupor until she’d said his name. Even now he is wary, almost frightened, bracing himself for a well-deserved retaliation. As if Fran has the energy to do more than blink, a struggle to lift her hand, sliding it gently along his rough cheek. He trembles, and shuts his eyes.
“Where are we?”
“Southwest Rozarria. As far as I could get. I took her to ground. It’s hard to say who’s more annoyed with me, the engines or the moogles.”
It is painful, his feigned attempt at good cheer. He had thought she was dying.
“How long?”
“It’s been two days.” Balthier puts his hand over hers, turns his head to press a kiss into her palm, but it’s tentative, as if he doubts his welcome, and it is only when he sets her hand back at her side and rises to his feet that she realizes he is leaving. Fran tries to get up, but can do little more than lift her head.
“Where are you going?”
He doesn’t turn around. “One of the moogles will be in soon, if you need anything.”
It’s not an answer, but Fran doesn’t need one. Balthier’s going to the engine room, and he’ll lock the door, and he won’t come out for three days.