10. stable

Yuriko Kazarishi had grown up hearing her grandfather despair of the wild streak that ran in the women of his family, but her eldest daughter would have put all her rebellious aunts and cousins to shame. And how could she not? Kaede was born malms from civilization, to a mother too young to know how poorly she had chosen in her choice of husband. Her entire pregnancy, and the first few moons of Kaede’s life had been spent in travel, fleeing the Garlean Empire by sea from Doma to Thanalan, and then overland towards the great beacon of peace and knowledge that supposedly lay beyond the highlands – Sharlayan.

Even when they’d lived in peace and temporary happiness, Kaede had been restless. Too sharp, too fierce, too perceptive for her father’s liking, especially once their second daughter, the gentle, sweet, biddable Ayame had been born. And then when their family had been torn apart, it had been Kaede’s willfulness and strength that had kept Yuriko from losing both her children, rather than just the one. Though she tried to love one daughter enough for two, to make up for what they both had lost, the damage had been done. Kaede’s faith in the constancy of love, and her worthiness of it, shaken perhaps beyond repair.

After they had come to La Noscea, she had only grown more tempestuous, like a summer storm. Too willing to draw blood, and shed it in kind. That someone would put a blade in her hand was inevitable, and she took to it like she was born to it. It was then that Yuriko became certain she would lose her someday, watch her cast herself into the Navigator’s winds and hope that one day she would return, calmer and gentler for it.

So it was that as her eldest grew, Yuriko found herself parroting the words she had heard so many times in her youth. Words that she had hated then, but now wished she had heeded.

“You need someone stable, my summer child. A home for that wild heart of yours, who will keep it safe, even when you cannot.”

For years she was met with an eyeroll and declaration of how boring that sounded, and of course her first choice had been a foolish boy who was as inconstant as the waves he had grown up on, but Kaede’s tune changed after the Calamity ravaged the land. So many lives lost, people they had known and loved gone forever. The guilt of surviving made them all smaller, clinging to one another like children. And when Kaede spoke of settling for the first person who had ever treated her gently, Yuriko could not stand to see her daughter’s spirit dimmed, as hers had been for so long in her first marriage. Irynbryda was a good partner and a good friend, kind and sweet, but a mother could see the panic and dread in her child’s eyes when she spoke of marriage, even when all others were blind to it.

For the first time, Yuriko had taken Kaede by the hands and told her to seek her own path, make her own choices – to stop trying to fill the hole her younger sister’s absence had left in her mother’s heart. That she would not tremble or weep as long as Kaede deigned to send a letter home, every now and then.

Perhaps she would not have chosen for her daughter to run off in the middle of the night with a handsome highlander, but neither could she judge her, considering her own choice of second husband.

Yuriko received few visits but years of letters, some long and some brief, and never did they mention that her wayward daughter had found love. Family, yes – names that appeared more and more often, with fondness and with exasperation. A xaela girl as close as her own shadow. Elezen twins with whom she seemed annoyed at first, but slowly grew fiercely protective, as if they were her own siblings. Friends she had lost, and missed bitterly. But it was the one she always spoke of with careful formality that slowly caught Yuriko’s attention. Ser Aymeric she wrote, or the lord commander, but never his name alone. And later, he disappeared from the letters altogether, replaced with vague references to a mysterious “friend” of hers.

And then there were no letters at all, but her homeland was free, and the alliance was moving to do the same for her husband’s. It was in a war council Ala Mhigo – hardly the first place she would have expected – where she finally set eyes on the man she suspected her daughter had fallen for, and she wasted no time taking his measure. Tall, broad-shouldered, with an easy, confident bearing but sharp, intelligent eyes that seemed to miss very little – her own resemblance to her daughter included. He turned white as new fallen snow when she revealed herself, and wasn’t that curious, if Kaede and he were merely friends?

Speaking to him privately revealed that her assumptions had been correct, but also other things. Ser Aymeric was more soft-spoken than the lord commander had been at the war council, considerate and sincere, and polite to a fault. He was, in a word, a gentleman. And though her husband groused and grumbled about the “trussed up Ishgardian dandy” that Kaede had chosen to bring home – in a sense, anyway – Yuriko thought that perhaps her daughter actually had been listening to her words of caution all those years ago.

It was only when she saw them together that she was sure – her daughter turned from storm gale to cool summer breeze, truly happy in a way that Yuriko had not seen since she was a child. Her spirit remained unbroken, tamed but not fettered. Everything that Yuriko had ever wanted for her, and despaired that she would ever allow herself to have. The dangers Kaede faced were innumerable and beyond understanding, but in this, at least, Yuriko could rest easy, knowing that her daughter was safe.