Now, it would be fun to keep teasing Waver for being attracted to Iskandar. She could do that for days, honestly. But he's talking about something far too serious to keep joking, so she stops. Listens to him talk about the war he lived through, and the war on the horizon back home. She was lucky enough, she thinks, to be pulled from home in times of peace. It must weigh on him in ways that he doesn't show, and she has the strangest feeling that that's a practiced skill.

"Riders and Casters," she mutters. She's building a more complete list so far. "So alchemists, then, right? People like Paracelsus or Cagliostro." The names are only barely remembered from some long-dormant corner of her mind. And dredging up that same corner brings her a memory that almost makes her drop her cigarette when it hits.

"Astolfo, Paladin of Charlemagne." Charles the Great. Of course it made sense. Of course everything about her life is starting to connect, years and years after it mattered. "Does that name sound familiar to you? As a combatant in one of the Holy Grail Wars, or, like, as a potential, or... something?"