#anselma

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Edelgard was the only child she'd ever really known - and how to judge, from only one, and only so briefly, any sort of notion of what children in general were like, or should be like? It was no true frame of reference, even if it had been possible to consider Edelgard without any bias at all. Which it was not. And never would be. 

Fierce - that was the word for Edelgard. Tiny and tenacious and hopelessly stubborn, even before she had words, only the most flailing attempts at control, determined to make her presence and her specific desires clear, through whatever nascent means her own development had, thus far, seen fit to bestow upon her. And while Anselma could claim no prior knowledge, she, then, cradled within herself the blooms of pride from Ionius' doting. And he had been doting.

Once.

Doting, but if he'd had even a few drops of the ferocity that was in Edelgard...

Well - he had not. And he did not. But he had possessed far greater stores of knowledge of the path of early childhood - a thought now tinged with aching bitterness - than Anselma had, or would likely ever have. If he found precocity in Edelgard's determined attempts to make herself understood, then there must be more to it than merely blind pride? 

Irrelevant, now. As irrelevant as the promises he had made; as irrelevant as her own blinders, even as she had pretended to have endemic talent: some natural, inherent gift for playing a game in which she had never accepted the rules. Ionius was not the only foolish one - just a fool with more unearned clout. 

He was gone now. Likely for good. And she knew nothing of the wives, of the children. 

Of Edelgard. 

She told herself not to think about it. Even before leaving the Empire, she had known it was best to try to forget. 

But what was best, and what was possible, might be two very different things. 

Especially with the little prince darting in and out of daily life like some frightened scrap of a kitten. 

Whether he was a normal child, she could not say.

But he was nothing like Edelgard. 

he was introduced to her formally, with the same coldness that seemed to have seeped from the air of Faerghus and into the souls of its people. The man she had married was a stranger to her, and she to him, so perhaps a certain frost was not unexpected between them. But the way he spoke to his son - of his son - seemed also to carry almost no warmth at all. 

"Boy," he said - and the little one, a spitting image in miniature, stepped obediently forward. His eyes found hers only briefly, before he ducked his head to a bow, and remained there. "My son, the Crown Prince Dimitri. Dimitri, your new stepmother."

And that was all. Non words exchanged between them. Another land, and still more walls, and Anselma knew no way to scale them. Instead, she knew now all that could be lost if she attempted again, and still failed. 

More than a month had passed, since the hurried formalities of a wedding, and a single, passionless night of necessary consummation. She had seen Cornelia more often than her new husband, and still had no promised answers to other question she had asked before agreeing to leave Enbarr - to leave Edelgard. She told herself to practice patience. She nurtured that anger that seemed to have always smoldered within her - feeding it slowly, carefully. Stoking it. 

Fire could be a dangerous weapon. 

And none seemed inclined to pay hers any mind.

Not yet. Not yet...

If they would not tell her the rules, what could prevent her from breaking them?

"Say nothing of Edelgard." Whispered words, but with an almost frightened, harsh ferocity she had rarely, if ever, heard from her brother's oft-simpering lips. She would not deny that something was badly amiss within the Empire, and his sudden fear only confirmed as much. "She would never be safe, even under Lambert's protection. I will see to her safety - I swear it by the Goddess, and Seiros, and all the Saints above."

She had done as told. But the Goddess? Seiros, the Saints? What would they do, to protect one girl?

Nothing  - as they always did. Nothing at all.

If anyone in the Empire harmed Edelgard, it would not be the Goddess they would need to concern themselves with. 

But until then - she had said nothing, and she would say nothing. She was not even certain Lambert was aware of her relationship to one of the small herd of Imperial children; there had never been official union between Hresvelg and Arundel, and though he knew she had spent a lifetime as "Anselma," she had never heard him call her anything but "Patricia." And she had no idea what tales might have been woven concerning her own provenance by Volkhard and those in the Kingdom seeking his continued favor. Once again, as always, she was a pawn to their minds. 

And best forgotten when the game required no sacrifice. 

She kept herself to herself, now in cold, unfamiliar, unforgiving Fhirdiad. It was not hard, when she hardly saw or spoke to anyone but the taciturn castle staff, who were all but silent even amongst themselves as they delivered meals, laid out fresh clothing, or turned down blankets and tamped the fires to warm embers each night. Even the Arundel lands were lively when to compared to dour Fhirdiad. 

But sometimes she wondered... 

She had champed and strained against her own childhood reins. So what of growing up somewhere even more stiff, and quiet, and cold?

Boy.

The motherless little crown prince. The skittish kitten of a creature. She caught glimpses of him, but he spoke no more than formal, necessary greetings, always with that extended bow she was beginning to believe spoke as much of a shy nature as a polite one. He was almost of an age with Edelgard. She resisted, though, the inclination to compare them. 

But not as successfully as she might have claimed, had anyone asked. (Which, of course, no one did.)

He had no ferocity to him - none at all. He seemed, if anything, so docile that it seemed some colossal jape to name him heir to a household, much less an entire kingdom. His build was study enough, but there was still about him an air of fragility, and the same seemed to reflect in his eyes, as wide and cloudless and blue as the sky on the first perfect day of summer. There was assuredly sweetness to him - but sweetness such as his was dangerous. Dangerous to himself - and dangerous to his future rule. 

In that, she had another comparison: not Edelgard.

Ionius.

Perhaps that, more than thoughts of Edelgard, led her to distance herself from him. Sweetness, weakness: his own life was not her concern. The Kingdom was not her concern. Her concern was herself, and her daughter, and if for the moment she had no power to guarantee protection for either of them, she would at least do nothing that risked jeopardizing them further. This soft, sweet, sad boy was nothing to her, and should King Lambert drop dead tomorrow, she would be nothing to this boy. It was safer for both of them. 

But she could not pretend she did not notice his presence - particularly when it was often the only one besides her own. Or maybe it was simply a consequence of all the time she had spent alone, these last few years. Time when there should have been a child... though she could not imagine Edelgard ever skulking so. 

She could feel him watching; hear the soft scuffling of his boots against the stone flooring, or an occasional sniffle or sigh. But she kept her gaze pointedly on whatever task lay before her - she saw no reason to draw more of his attention, and what purpose would it serve to let him know she was aware of his presence? It would only embarrass him. He was spooked too easily already, poor thing. 

Beyond that first month - how long did this strange little act continue? Time seemed to grow increasingly nebulous, the longer she spent in Faerghus. The seasons never seemed to change, one cold, blustery, white-skied day bleeding endlessly into another. She kept track of when it was, as she did every year, but not how long it had been; there was already sufficient past to be mourned. The day it was: that was to light a candle for Edelgard's birthday. 

She would be ten, soon.

The Garland Moon in Enbarr was a beautiful month, warm and sunny without yet the wet, oppressive heat of late summer. In Fhirdiad, she suspected things would not change much between this moon and the next. Maybe that was why the boy was about so much of the time; Lambert had said he was often out with friends, but maybe that was on a rare warmer day. Or maybe his father paid as little mind to his son as he did to his new wife. 

The thought occurred to her on one of those endless, bleed-along days - then gripped, refused to let go. She had assumed the boy was merely bored and curious about this new addition to his life, but what if...

What if he was lonely?

It brought her back to how little she knew about the ways of children. She could not imagine Edelgard quietly putting up with being bored or lonely; she would make entertainment, or demand it be made for her. But was that some prerequisite of very small children - would Edelgard be the same way now?

Because it also took Anselma back to her own memories of childhood. Her own loneliness. And her own isolation. 

She had always thought Edelgard much like her - far more like her than like Ionius. But in considering Dimitri's loneliness, she felt, for the first time, a blossom of kinship. When she felt his eyes, she now looked very pointedly elsewhere, and made broader movements: sewing or reading was hardly still likely anything interesting to watch, but there was no harm in trying to make it so. 

She considered speaking to him - she wanted, more and more, to speak to him - but after so long, she wasn't sure how, nor even, truly, if such a thing would be acceptable. She could recognize the absurdity of it - a woman almost 30 years old, and unsure of whether she could talk to her own stepson! - but the concern was nonetheless there. If such a thing was allowed, why had Dimitri still said so little to her? Too many bedtime stories of wicked stepmothers? 

(That made her smile, to think of - and she could not remember the last time she had done so. It was nice to know a smile might still come unbidden.)

Perhaps she was no longer as impetuous as the girl she had once been. perhaps Dimitri was bolder and braver than she had given him credit for. Or perhaps it was some combination of both - but whatever it was, in the end, the strange wall that had grown between them was brought down not by her, but by Dimitri. 

Dimitri, and the first time he reminded her of Edelgard. 

Her liing quarters in the castle were a set of three small rooms on the third floor - the newer part of the hulking, ancient monolith squatting over Fhirdiad like some immense, ugly, judgmental toad. The inside was hardly much better; she missed the privacy and simplicity of the cottage in Enbarr, and even the familiar confines of the Arundel manor house, with its fug of peat fires and faint aroma, always, of damp thatch and wool and leather. Still, she appreciated the semblance of privacy, especially of the bedroom; she was not so naive as to believe it truly her own, but also aware of hos much less it might be, and how little recourse she would have if it was.

Just outside her bedroom was the small parlor where she took her meals, and next to it the study where she spent much of her time; it had a large, modern window, and she had dragged one of the more comfortable parlor chairs in there, to take advantage of what natural light there was by which to read or sew. The castle staff left breakfast in the parlor each morning, but never went into the study except when she was awake and elsewhere, so that they might dust or tidy. It was otherwise left alone - or so she had always believed.

Which meant it came as a surprise, one bitter early morning of the Harpstring Moon, to find muddy footprints leading across the parlor, and into the study. Small prints - but she could not imagine one of the servants, even a very young one, not only going into the study instead of quietly placing tea and cakes down and leaving, but also ignoring the trail of wet muck left in their wake. Anselma ignored the tray of breakfast - she followed the prints. 

There was a cup on the windowsill. Nothing unusual about it - it was just like the one she had passed not a minute earlier, left for her tea. But there was more dirty and tiny clods of mud around it, and the toes of the footprints before the sill were deep and well-defined, as if the person who stood there had had to raise themselves on tiptoe to do their curious job. 

The cup held flowers. 

Or rather - unopened blossoms. Roses, by the smell of them - and by the smooth-silk coolness of the curled petals, when she reached to touch them. They'd been left in a meager splash of mud-darkened water; the stems were hacked off in jagged, uneven strands of green. Pink and yellow blossoms - they were the brightest thing she had seen in a very, very long time. 

But why were they here?

Edelgard...?

The overgrown back garden of their home in Enbarr, before Edelgard was taken for good: she had loved that meager patch of land. The grass, the uneven hedges, the insects and the tiny frogs that came each summer, out of the stream that separated their house from the rolling fields beyond. 

She picked the wildflowers - tiny things, like Edelgard herself, but just as determined to find a place to call their own, to take root and push their way up, through the soil, around stocky blades of grass or into narrow cracks in the paving stones. A deadly-serious job, as Edelgard took it, to gather up those flowers. She made piles on the stones, separating them by color: a red pile; a blue one; yellow and white. Carefully easing them more tightly together. She spent whole mornings at her slow, methodical work. It was a marked difference from her usual behavior, when she ran hither and yon, outside or in, nothing able to capture her attention for more than a fleeting few minutes at a time. 

They had pressed the flowers - some of them. Anselma showed her how, and Edelgard took this, too, very seriously: biting her lip and squinting at the pages before her, trying to decide the best place for each little bloom. They used a book of hagiographies, a gift from Volkhard, the largest book Anselma had in her possession - and she felt a little spark of an adolescent-esque rebellious pleasure, wondering what he would say of this use of a religious text. 

It wasn't as if Edelgard could read it. 

Flowers...

And small footprints on the floor.

Don't be absurd.

A sudden, surprised little noise behind her - followed almost immediately by a sloshing crash. 

When she turned, blue eyes met hers with no sign of bowing away - just wide, frightened shock. Dimitri's cheeks were red, his hair in its usual long muss, his buttons uneven, and his boots - his very small, mud-caked boots - now splashed and shiny with the contents of the bowl of water he had dropped. In his left hand, he held a cloth. 

He blinked at her, as if for a moment he had lost track of who she was, or perhaps where he was. Then - it seemed almost inevitable - came the bow, though it was hurried and sloppy, with none of his usual careful politeness. "I... I ask your apology, Stepmother. I did not realize you were awake, or... I would not have come in. Without knocking. Though I... I already did. I ask your apology for that, as well. I'm sorry. I will see it all cleaned up. Myself."

Dimitri had created such chaos? Dimitri had... left flowers for her? 

For a long moment, she could find no words, and no thoughts but those. Dimitri had straightened once more - his eyes still afraid, but his face and demeanor patient, waiting. Whether such was normal in a child of his age, she could not say, but just then, she was certainly appreciative of the time allowed to attempt to gather herself. 

"May I help you?" she finally asked. 

Now, it seemed his turn to merely stare. "But... I was the one who made the mess. Why would you... wish to help me?" It was the most emotion she had ever heard from him: his tone still measured and polite, but not tinged, as much his expression was, with what seemed honest befuddlement. 

Was it truly so alien to him, to have someone offer him help?

"Because I'd like to," she said.

Again, Dimitri stared. Then - another bow. But not quickly enough: she had already seen how he started to smile. 

"I'll get more water," he said, "And... I thank you, Stepmother."

As soon as he was gone from sight, she could hear the slap of his boots, as he started to run.