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“Ancient Skifandrian warrior discipline. Hardly ever taught to outsiders,” Zeetha said with careful emphasis.
Gil frowned at the implications of this comment, but there wasn’t any hint of caginess or deception on his face, which was enough to convince her this was genuinely new information for him. She changed the subject quickly when she saw gears starting to turn in his head, but her own mind kept racing.
Before Zeetha herself, the last person in decades to actually leave Skifander had been her father, not long after her birth. The way the histories told it, he had gotten word of a threat to his homeland and been forced to make the terrible yet noble decision to leave his new family and go back to join the fight. A tragic separation, but he had served the Queen well in his time and had provided her with a fine heir in Princess Zeetha, and so he would be remembered and honored as a hero.
Zeetha, having been only a few weeks old when this all occurred, naturally had no memories of the events in question, and her mother had always been tight-lipped about it. But people talked at court, and Zeetha had learned early on that listening to that talk was a good hobby for a princess to have.
Whispers suggested that her father had left under much less noble circumstances, that he had stolen something important to the throne and made his escape in the dead of night.
Other whispers said that he had done all this with the Queen’s full knowledge and blessing.
(Zeetha tended to believe that last one. Her mother’s wrath was something to behold, and even with years of distance, Zeetha doubted she would ever have talked so fondly of the man if such a betrayal had actually occurred.)
It had taken some time for Zeetha to realize that the precious thing her father had taken away with him probably wasn’t some grand trophy or sacred artifact. Little clues over the years - more court whispers, strange gaps and vague references in the histories, the touch of melancholy behind her mother’s eyes each year when they celebrated Zeetha’s day of birth - had all eventually come together to form the shape of what was missing.
And now here was this boy her age with knowledge only Skifandrian royalty and their most trusted companions should have.
It was impossible. And yet every other explanation she could think of seemed even less likely.
She watched as Gil turned his attention back to arguing with Agatha’s little clank and grinned to herself. She had been planning to keep a close eye on him for Agatha’s sake anyway; now she had another reason.
Plus, he was already proving to be pretty entertaining to mess with.
When the dust was beginning to settle and Agatha was getting her town back in order, Zeetha found herself with the rare opportunity to get some answers from a direct source. She stepped up first and volunteered for the task of keeping an eye on the former Baron Wulfenbach, just in case he had any more tricks to try. He’d been quite cooperative so far, at least after being freed from Lucrezia’s influence, but still no one seemed all that eager to fight her for the job.
“It’s quite unnecessary to guard me like this,” Klaus said once he was left alone with her. He was annoyingly calm, considering his circumstances. “The time stop was my last, most desperate effort, and it hardly even seemed to make your Heterodyne girl blink. At some point, even I must accept defeat.”
Zeetha tipped her head to the side and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Well, that’s alright. I’ve got a few things I’ve been wanting to ask you, so I’m sure we’ll pass the time just fine.”
That managed to put a crack in his calm. Avoiding her eyes and instead starting to look around for an escape, he muttered, “Perhaps that would be best saved for another day…”
Zeetha drew one of her swords and casually swung it into his path. “No, I think right now is good.” She gestured him toward a nearby hunk of debris, some masonry blasted from the town wall. “Sit down, Father.”
The subtle flinch of his shoulders really told her all she needed to know, but he sighed and sat and said, “Where would you like me to start?”
She had him go through the whole story, from his dazed arrival in Skifander to his frantic dead-of-the-night flight with Gil clutched tight in his arms. She nodded along to much of it, interrupted occasionally to make him go over the parts that differed or were completely absent from her mother’s tellings in greater detail, and by the time he reached the end of the tale, the sun had dipped quite low in the sky.
Zeetha closed her eyes for a moment, frowning as she processed it all. The twin thing made enough sense, she supposed, though it still left questions. It was definitely a real stigma back home, particularly when a male child was involved, though in Zeetha’s experience, that mostly just came out through a few of the nastier sparring taunts in the training yards. Some of the elders and priestesses certainly took those old traditions a lot more seriously, but even if they had wanted to do anything about it…
“You know Mother never would have let anyone hurt him,” Zeetha said, opening her eyes again. “She’d have cut out every tongue that even suggested it.”
Klaus smiled slightly at that. “I know. And by taking Gilgamesh away, I ensured she would never have to.” Off Zeetha’s skeptical look, he elaborated, “We had already fought one long, bloody battle to reclaim your mother’s throne and then another to secure it. Her most vocal opponents were dead, but there were still plenty within the court who doubted her and would have latched onto anything they could use to stir up trouble. If Gil had been allowed to live as a Prince of Skifander, he would never have been safe. You would never have been safe. Your mother hated my plan, but she knew it would keep the peace and protect the both of you.”
Zeetha frowned again, but she had no easy rebuttal to that. It was clear now where Gil had picked up his talent for making even his most infuriating actions sound entirely reasonable after the fact. Something still bothered her, though. “But you thought I had been sent to kill him.”
“I didn’t realize you were– ” Klaus cut himself off sharply, shaking his head. He looked at her for a long moment, and then, with a quiet sigh, started over. “I never allowed myself to imagine what you might look like grown. It wasn’t something I would ever get to see, so I thought to spare myself that little torture. Had I recognized who you were at the time, I would have made different assumptions.” The corner of his mouth twitched briefly upward. “Of course, it should have been obvious. You’re the spitting image of Zantabraxus.”
Zeetha had been trying to keep stoic throughout this whole conversation, but she couldn’t quite stop a small grin from creeping through at that. “Mother always said I looked like you.”
Klaus smiled then with sudden, surprising fondness. It was an unexpectedly gentle expression that smoothed long-set scowl lines and softened his whole face, and for a moment, Zeetha could see both the fearsome, brilliant warrior and the loyal, loving companion her mother had always described.
And with that, nearly all of the lingering resentment she’d been holding onto left her in an instant. She sighed, sheathed her sword, and flopped down next to Klaus on the hunk of rubble. She kicked her legs out in front of her and stared over the stretch of town before them, which was mostly not on fire anymore - definitely a good sign for Agatha’s progress.
“You know, when I was a kid, I used to think a lot about what it would be like to actually meet you,” Zeetha said eventually, breaking the long silence that had settled.“I imagined tracking you down and showing off what a great warrior I’d become, maybe getting you to teach me some foreign fighting techniques I could use against my cousins in the training yard, and then dragging you back home to explain yourself.” She laughed, shaking her head. “It all turned out just a little bit different.”
Klaus glanced sideways at her, then followed her gaze again to look back out over the town. After another moment of silence, he cleared his throat and said, “Well, if you’ve been doing any sparring with Gil, I doubt there’s much new I could teach you at this point. But I would be interested in seeing how you’ve improved since the last time I saw you fight.”
“A rematch, huh?” Zeetha said, baring her teeth in a grin. “Well, I’m always up for that, but I don’t want to damage this poor town any more than it already is, so maybe another time. Anyway, I think Agatha has earned the right to punch you in the face first, and she’s busy now.”
Off in the distance, another building suddenly caught on fire, but going by the enthusiastic cheering of the townspeople, that one was probably intentional on Agatha’s part.
Klaus grimaced slightly but nodded. “I suppose that’s fair.”
The good thing, Zeetha told herself with slightly forced optimism, was that talking to her other newly confirmed family member was almost certainly going to be less tense and fraught than talking with Klaus.
It probably wasn’t going to be much less awkward, though.
She stepped into Gil’s makeshift lab at the edge of town, and he immediately fixed her with a pointed look and said, “You already knew.” It wasn’t quite an accusation, but it definitely wasn’t a question either. He’d obviously reached and confirmed his own conclusions while she was working on hers.
She winced and shook her head. “I had some idea, but I really didn’t know for sure. Not until I talked to your– our father about it.”
They both immediately pulled a face at that, near-identical grimaces conveying the number of deeply complex emotions they were still working through.
“Yeah, that will take some getting used to,” Gil noted. He sighed and rested his chin on his fist. “I suppose I should go talk with him myself soon. Even though I already know the truth, it’ll be interesting to hear how he tells it. And anyway, I have plenty of other questions he promised to answer after all this was over. I wonder if he’ll actually keep to that…”
“Well, now’s probably a good time to try. He seemed to be in an unusually cheerful and talkative mood.”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t he be? Everything turned out pretty well, despite his best efforts.” Gil stopped and exhaled harshly. “No, I know that’s not fair. He was doing what he could with Lucrezia’s little bug fighting him. I just wish he’d been more willing to listen and trust me before.”
Zeetha shifted awkwardly, unsure what to say to that. Her own mixed feelings toward their father were still largely overshadowed by the happy novelty of actually having a father to have those feelings about. But Gil just looked… tired.
Gamely, she stepped forward and gave him an enthusiastic punch to the shoulder. “Hey, I’ll go with you, if you want. He’s not used to dealing with more than one kid yet. Between the two of us, we can probably guilt or confuse him into saying something interesting."
“Heh. Maybe.” Gil gave her an odd look, a crooked half-smile on his face.
“What?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Nothing, just… Well, I was pretty lonely growing up. I think I would have liked having a sister.”
Zeetha blinked at him, surprised, then grinned and slung an arm around his neck, ignoring his indignant squawk of protest and dragging him closer so she could aggressively ruffle his hair. “You know I would have tormented you mercilessly.”
Really though, she understood what he meant. Her own childhood probably couldn’t be compared to the things Gil had gone through, but the loneliness she could definitely relate to, the way their circumstances and duties and the status of their parents had kept them from ever really becoming close to any of the other kids their own age.
If they had grown up together instead, running amok through the temple halls and deep forest ruins (or even, in a world where things had gone very differently, climbing all around the twisting vents and rigging of Castle Wulfenbach), always having each other as equal partners in mischief…
Yeah, Zeetha thought she would have liked that, too.
She released her brother from the hold and gave him a fond smile as he grumbled and vainly tried to smooth his hair back down. “Come on,” she said, hooking her thumb over her shoulder. “Let’s go have a nice family talk.”