Final Steps

"I can't do it, Honoroit."

Emmanellain slid down to sit in a miserable heap on the floor, leaving Honoroit standing over him holding his master's as-yet-unfastened sword belt.

"I am told that my lord comported himself admirably at the grand melee," Honoroit said.

"Play-fighting, Honoroit. Practice swords against allies. This...this will be a real battle, against real enemies...Dravanians...monsters." Honoroit noted the slur in Emmanellain's voice, the reddish flush across his face from ear tip to ear tip -- Emmanellain had been drinking again, of course, but this time Honoroit could scarcely blame him save that his master often made a rather morose drunk. The poor soul could not even successfully drown his sorrows.

"If I may," Honoroit began, with a smooth confidence that he did not really feel, "my lord has been stationed at the eastern wall. It is unlikely that we shall see a great deal of direct --"

"We? WE?" Emmanellain laughed, a short, humorless bark of a laugh. "Honoroit, please. Please. Don't come with me. There's still time for you to run away."

"Run away, my lord?" Honoroit tried to keep the trembling from his voice; he had to be stronger one, always. Had to be the more rational and reasonable of the two of them. Emmanellain clutched at the edge of his jacket, a pleading look in his eyes.

"Yes. Stay home. No one will blame you for a nonce, and you can..." He swung his hand out towards the window, indicating the skyline of Ishgard outside. "Keep living here. Go find some girl with a rich father and charm her into marrying you, or..." Emmanellain's wine-addled brain could not come up with anything else Honoroit might want out of the future, so he gave up. Honoroit had seldom seen his master so dejected, and he did not like the sight -- Emmanellain was at both his best and his worst when he was cheerful, but there were few things more pitiable than Emmanellain miserable. Emmanellain's hand tightened on the hem of Honoroit's coat. "Fury's sake, Honoroit. At least someone under this wretched roof ought to be happy someday"

Honoroit was silent for a long moment, twisting the sword-belt in his hands. Of course, he'd considered that very thing -- staying back from the front, hiding inside the walls of Ishgard and praying they would hold. What difference could he make in a battle, anyway? He'd never shot a bow at anything more threatening than a target set on a bale of hay, and the closest he'd ever been a fight on a grand scale had been dashing a vanu-vanu scout over the head with a handy stick and sprinting for the nearest encampment.

There was nothing stopping him from turning and walking out the door, least of all Emmanellain himself. Just as he'd said, no one would have blamed him for it. He might even be commended for his discretion. And yet...

"How long have I followed you from one fool's errand to the next, my lord?" Honoroit asked quietly. "And now you ask me to--"

"Go, Honoroit," Emmanellain snapped. "That's...that's an order."

"Begging my lord's pardon," Honoroit said, gently laying the sword belt aside for the moment. "But you WERE warned, in no uncertain terms, not to expect obedience from an ill-bred Brume brat, if my memory serves me aright."

Emmanellain was quiet for a long time, his shoulders hunched in a posture of abject defeat. The mop of his hair concealed his face, but Honoroit could hear the tremble in his voice when he finally spoke again. "I've never done anything to deserve you, Honoroit, in my entire miserable life," he mumbled.

That, Honoroit could answer easily. "Not true, my lord. You..." And here Honoroit paused to try and swallow the swiftly growing lump in his throat, "you saved my life."

"Any man with half a heart would have done exactly what I did. It's hardly worth--"

"Do you really think," Honoroit interrupted, "that you were the only rich man who ever saw my master strike me?" Emmanellain looked up at him, surprised at the interruption to his self-pity, but Honoroit went on. He couldn't stand by and let Emmanellain disparage that very well of kindness in his heart that had spared him from losing hope so many times over. "I watched the great men and women of Ishgard pass me by without a second glance, day in and day out, all my life, and you... you were the only one who ever stopped."

Emmanellain had no rejoinder to that, or perhaps he had simply run out of strength to protest. He never did have the heart to order Honoroit about, anyway, and crumpled under the slightest of withering glances, however headstrong he might have been when it came to his own plans. Instead, he simply asked, "What would you have me do, Honoroit?"

"You'll take your sword, and we'll go to face tomorrow together," Honoroit said. "And then after that, we'll march ourselves back to a better world."

Emmanellain's hand found the discarded sword belt, and closed around it, fumbling with the buckle. "You're a fool, Honoroit," he muttered, pulling himself to his feet and doing his best to wrap it around his waist. "But I'm glad of it."

"And you," Honoroit said, with a tiny smile, "have hung your sword on the wrong side, my lord."

"There," Artoirel said, as Honoroit buckled his belt around his waist. "I had suspected we were of a size, when I was your age."

"Does that mean I shall grow up tall and fine-looking like your grace?" Honoroit asked, and then bit his lip as he waited for the response. The eldest Fortemps brother -- the Count de Fortemps, now that his father had stepped aside -- had always been difficult for Honoroit to read. He was, in almost all ways, the opposite of Lord Emmanellain -- where Honoroit's employer wore his heart upon his sleeve and there often seemed no barrier between his mind and his tongue, Lord Artoirel's expression rarely wavered from calmly neutral, and every word that passed his lips seemed to have been chosen with the care of a rhetorician. And, though he had never once been cruel to him, Honoroit could not help but find him a little bit frightening.

"Unlikely, I'm afraid. Outliers do occur, but given the circumstance from which my brother plucked you, I would advise that you not hang your hopes upon being tall." Honoroit winced; Lord Artoirel was always a realist, sometimes painfully so. And, he had glossed over the compliment about his appearance as if it was of no import. Perhaps it was not, to him -- Lord Artoirel had never had an inclination to marry. "Now, go on -- see how well you can move in it."

Chainmail was not nearly as heavy as it seemed, Honoroit found, once one was actually wearing it -- what seemed like an unbearable weight when you held it in your hands was not so bad once it was distributed across your shoulders and back. Not quite knowing how best to test his dexterity, Honoroit first swung his arms about -- a little hampered by the chain shirt, but not so bad -- and then hopped in a circle, mimicking the footwork he had seen practiced in the courtyard by knights of the house.

When he looked up, he was shocked to see that Artoirel was smiling -- a tiny, almost imperceptible quirk of his lips, perhaps unnoticeable to anyone who had not spent years in his company -- and he was watching Honoroit with a look in his eye that might almost be called wistful, if one were feeling generous.

"I heard Haurchefant had been giving you lessons in the bow," Artoirel said. It was the first time Honoroit had ever heard Artoirel refer to the bastard Fortemps brother by name -- usually, he was beneath mention, only alluded to. "There should be a squire's bow around your size over there by the halberd rack; go take it and show me your pull."

Obediently, Honoroit fetched the bow. It was strongly made and well cared for -- and, as Lord Artoirel had said, almost precisely the right size. Honoroit seized the string and, with some effort, pulled it back to his ear and waited for Artoirel to express his disapproval.

Instead, Artoirel's hand came to rest fondly on the top of Honoroit's head, fingers nestling into his unruly mess of red hair in a manner that was very close to being fond.

"Your grace?" Honoroit asked. The silence that followed was long and fraught.

"Take care of my brother out there," Artoirel said. The hand was removed as swiftly as it had been deposited, and Honoroit relaxed his draw and bowed his head.

"As your grace commands," Honoroit said. "I mean...I'll try. As ever, I'll try."

It was beautiful beyond measure, and terrible beyond words -- the clash of dragons that shook the winter sky. Though the soldiers valiantly turned their bows and trebuchets against the chocobo-sized wyverns and dragonlings of Nidhogg's army, they quailed at the sight of Nidhogg himself entwined with the white wyrm whose every cry carried heart-rending grief. It was not fear that stayed their hands, or at least not exactly -- it was the simple knowledge that the battle occurring above was far beyond their ken, driven by passions surpassing mortal grasp.

For a moment, it seemed the goodly wyrm had the upper hand, but then Nidhogg took one of his rival's downy wings in his fearsome jaws and, with a gut-wrenching crack that all below would hear in nightmares for the rest of their lives, tore it from its place.

The white wyrm screamed in agony and sorrow, and for the first time since the Calamity, a warm rain fell upon the spires of Ishgard.

Honoroit was as good as his word. Here he was, upon the eastern wall at his master's side, bow in hand and ready to die. So far, they had seen little close-up action, but his eyes were drawn skyward by the monstrous sound of the dragons battling far above just in time to see a shower of snow-white feathers and gore that caught the light like rubies glittering in the sunshine. It was a vision so awe-inspiring that he might have wept, had the circumstances been different, but instead he choked back bile and stood his ground, finding his legs would not obey his urge to flee.

A firm hand around Honoroit's waist pulled him hard enough to nearly jerk him off his feet, and he snapped out of his paralyzed shock to find himself close up against Emmanellain's side as his lord knelt down, gripping Honoroit as tightly as a drowning man clings to a piece of his shattered ship drifting on the waves. Emmanellain had discarded his sword to seize Honoroit but had kept his shield, which he held up above their heads; the great wyrm's blood rained down upon the curved metal, splattering on the stone around them. Other soldiers had not been so quick to react, and screamed in disgust and fear as they found themselves baptized in dragon's gore, or lost their footing on the now-slick stones.

Emmanellain was shaking, hard. His eyes were screwed shut and his arm around Honoroit was so tight his ribs ached, as though he were afraid of what may happen if he were to lose his grip. His blind, naked terror was almost infectious, and for a moment Honoroit felt his heart waver.

"My lord," he murmured, a moment once the bloody shower had stopped. The wyrms had crashed to the ground, wrapped around each other like serpents, and the indescribable strength of their struggle seemed to shake the very foundations of the world. Still Emmanellain did not move from his defensive crouch, shield turned skyward. He did not answer. It seemed he could not speak.

And then, in that quavering voice, so earnest and almost childlike that Emmanellain never used with anyone but Honoroit in his most vulnerable moments, he begged, "please. I don't know what to do."

Honoroit swallowed, and put thoughts of retreat from his mind. "A flight of wyverns approaches from the west," he said. "They hoped to hide their numbers with the glare of the sun, but I spotted them. Tell the men to shield their eyes and lay down ballista fire in their direction. It should...take them by surprise. Buy some time." Even to his own ears he sounded more confident than he felt, but what more could anyone ask of him? What more could he ask of himself?

Emmanellain swallowed, nodded, and stood -- though he still trembled badly enough that Honoroit was forced to help him to his feet. But, regardless of his weak legs and shallow, panicked breathing, with a steady shoulder to lean upon Emmanellain managed to stand and heft his shield, the Fortemps unicorn on its front lost amid the stain of the white wyrm's blood. Honoroit knelt to retrieve his master's sword and handed it to him with a minimum of fumbling; Emmanellain's grip tightened around the hilt, he took a deep breath, and turned to shout to the soldiers.

Grimly, Honoroit pulled an arrow from his quiver, nocked it too his bow, and back-to-back with his master, took aim upon the chaos down below.