Chapter Text
She was not exactly what he’d expected.
“Master and Mistress Jaeger, the Duchess Arbinger and her escort, Sir Ian Corrigan.”
She was not at all what he’d expected.
“Thank you for receiving my sister-in-law and I on such short notice,” Sir Ian said with a winning smile. His large stature, carefully trimmed hair and strong, masculine features did not diminish the elegance of his carriage.
Eren considered the possibility that he was the prettier of the two.
The Duchess looked like she might have once been pretty, in her youth. When he let his eyes slide out of focus, she almost was.
She did not, however, look like she’d ever had an overwhelming taste for smiling, and no amount of staring imploringly at the air above her head could change that.
“Mister Jaeger,” Eren heard his mother say to her husband in a hushed tone. Her knew her face was still holding its polite smile. “Why are you selling off our son to an ugly spinster? Did you know about this?”
He couldn’t guess at her age aloud, but inwardly, he suspected it was somewhere between a late twenty-something and an early thirty-something.
He was twenty-two.
And he suspected it was closer to the latter.
“Mistress Jaeger,” Eren’s father said tightly, “the Duchess Arbinger is a powerful woman in the north, and our son could do far worse. He should consider himself lucky to entertain the interest of someone with such close connections to the queen.”
Eren didn’t feel as though she was especially interested in him.
She didn’t look especially interested in anything.
She just looked kind of tired and annoyed.
“Rumoured to have such close connections to the queen, Grisha,” Carla said through her teeth, and then smiled brilliantly as the Duchess finally finished climbing out of her carriage and came to stand with her escort in front of them. Eren could hear her smiling- her could also hear the tension in her voice. “My lady duchess,” she greeted warmly, and Eren knew she was curtseying, though he’d long since learned not to let his eyes wander during formal meetings. “It is our pleasure to receive you. This is our son, Eren.”
There was a beat of silence, and Eren abruptly realized he’d forgotten what he was supposed to.
“Eren, welcome the duchess,” she said tightly, and he jerked, walking mechanically to stand in front of her and bowing severely at the waist as he did the queen’s salute.
She was shorter than him, mercifully, but he was starting to suspect her shoulders were broader than his.
He hoped it was just the style of her dress.
“It is our pleasure to receive you,” he parroted stiffly, and then stood, still holding his salute as he stared over her head into the coach behind her.
She said nothing.
‘I fucked up,’ he thought, almost relieved, ‘she just got here and I’ve already fucked up.’
Sir Ian cleared his throat politely and Eren glanced in his direction.
“My sister is withdrawn,” he said with an apologetic smile. “You’ll have to excuse her for her shy and soft-spoken nature- if need be, I’ll undertake the task of speaking up for her.”
At that, the duchess leaned her head towards him and whispered something Eren couldn’t quite catch into his ear.
What he could hear of her voice sounded low for a woman’s- it only made her more imposing. His heart sank.
Sir Ian paused, blinked, and straightened. “My sister says she’s much obliged to you for you hospitality,” he smiled.
If the way her brow wrinkled and her lips thinned was anything to go by, Eren was quite certain that wasn’t what she’d said at all.
***
Her black hair was, admittedly, beautiful, though he was confident at least half of it was fake. He’d seen the tricks his mother’s servants used to make her curls more impressive, and even they couldn’t create such precise and consistent curves.
Her large, heavy-lidded eyes could be soulful if they weren’t so bitterly piercing, he supposed.
Under her decidedly unflattering powder and rouge, her skin seemed like it could be nice, he guessed. She didn’t look diseased.
She was-
Well, she was shorter than him. He could be assured of that.
He was trying very hard to reconcile with his fate, but thus far, his only comfort had come from the discovery that she ate with movements as crisply uncomfortable as he did and seemed altogether quite annoyed with her obligation to take small, becoming bites.
That, at least, he could sympathize with.
***
He’d been willing to take her shyness as a blessing right up until his father made clear in no uncertain terms that he was still obligated to attempt to make conversation with her.
He watched his family entertain Sir Ian in the sitting room after dinner as he sat beside the duchess in miserable silence.
She didn’t look like she wanted to talk.
He’d almost convinced himself that their companionable silence was for the best when he caught his father looking sternly in his direction.
“My father tells me you’re from the north,” he said, for a lack of anything else to say. “Do you enjoy it?”
She looked at him.
"It probably gets very cold there,” he commented inanely, trying not to frown when he realized she seemed to be sweating under the combined weight of her heavy, high-necked dress and the burden of sitting beside the fireside. He could see sweat gathering on her brows. Her composure was admirable. Oddly enough, he found that made him like her more.
She continued to look at him.
“Are you planning to stay in Shiganshina for the summer?” he asked, almost concerned despite the decidedly one-sided conversation he was having. “It gets very hot.”
She looked at him some more, furrowed her thin eyebrows, and looked towards her escort with a concentrated stare.
He saw her begin to fidget impatiently as she waited for him to notice her and wondered about her shyness.
She’d certainly held his stare without faltering.
Her impatience had begun to affect him by the time she caught Sir Ian’s attention- Eren found himself almost at the point of getting up to fetch him, as absurd as fetching someone to speak for someone who was sitting directly beside him and appeared perfectly able to speak seemed.
Sir Ian approached with a pleasant smile, leaning down when the duchess beckoned to him with long, but rather unusually thick-knuckled fingers. She whispered something in his ear, eyes flickering to Eren’s face as she did so, and for a moment, in the firelight, half-shadowed and made almost dainty-looking by her escort’s imposing frame, he almost thought she was pretty.
Sir Ian’s face did a peculiar dance of surprise and ill-restrained amusement.
He took entirely too long choosing his words for someone relaying another’s message.
“My sister says that you have a very charming voice,” he said finally, and then, “and that no, she does not intend to stay for summer, as she is-” He closed his eyes for a moment, nostrils flaring with apparent amusement. “As she finds herself overcome by the heat even now. If you’ll excuse us.”
He watched the duchess as she was escorted from the sitting room and wondered what it was she’d really said.
***
He’d almost begun to enjoy her peculiar company and odd faces of disgust at particularly trite social niceties when it happened.
“Master Jaeger,” one of the house servants said urgently, bursting into the dining room during the soup course, “we’re being attacked by brigands!”
Across the table, Sir Ian tensed, going to stand as Eren’s father dashed to the front room to fetch his rifle and Eren’s mother dashed to the kitchens to hide the silverware.
He paused mid-movement, eyes settling on the space beside Eren with an exasperated look. “What are you doing?”
Eren knew not to look.
Eren knew perfectly well not to look.
Despite all of his training, Eren looked.
Beside him, the duchess was methodically pulling long pins from under her curls. He stared as she calmly removed the entirety of her hair from her head and set it on the table. Underneath, it was still black, but finer-
And considerably shorter.
When she scrubbed the makeup from her face with a handcloth from the table and pulled a small knife from her boot, he started forming an idea of what exactly it was that was going on.
A ridiculous idea.
“Erwin, I haven’t spent the last month with my balls marinating in sweat just so I can wait for a bunch of classless lowlifes to ruin our con before I do it myself,” she said in a very low, very unwomanly voice, and set the edge of her blade to the heavy fabric of her dress with a look of concentration. “Where are my blades?”
“Levi, don’t, that’s-” Sir Ian, or the man the woman who was not a woman had called Erwin, protested, fading into a sigh as the one he’d called Levi sawed the front of his dress open and shrugged it off. “That’s very expensive,” he finished.
The woman who was not a woman and who Eren was almost certain was not a duchess at all, or Levi, who Eren could not help but notice was increasingly naked- and who absolutely did have broader shoulders than he did- just looked at him with sour expression as pried off his uncomfortable-looking shoes. “Where are my blades?” he repeated impatiently, and his companion gestured to the stairs with a weary expression.
“In the hatbox,” he sighed, and then Levi was gone up the stairs on frighteningly quiet and quick feet, leaving nothing but the torn remnants of his dress and immaculately styled wig behind.
Eren stared at them in amazement.
Across the table from him, Erwin poured himself another glass of wine, expression wry.
“Well, it’s as they say,” he told Eren companionably, propping his feet up on the table, “you can turn a guttersnipe into a queen, but not for very long.”
Eren had not heard that particular saying.
He was, however, very interested in anything else Erwin and his nonchalantly half-nude partner may have had to say.