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Eula supposes she has to thank Kaeya Ragnvindr Alberich that she'd finally gotten into the Knights.
It's a bit of an open secret that the Knights of Favonius, for how clean and outstanding they claimed to be, harboured a few rotten apples.
These kinds of thoughts weren't the kind you thought out loud, though - not when the knights' patrol routes could happen to miss the road you had to take out of the city when hilichurls are about, or not when the Church looked towards the Knights' administration for their coffers.
Mondstadt was the city of freedom, and her citizens supposedly prided themselves on being carefree and accepting. Not that it ever really stopped anybody from scorning Eula whenever she got close, nor the undercurrent of racist tendencies that were displayed to the outsiders in Mondstadt (particularly the citizens of Snezhnaya).
But who cared, really - didn't everyone hate the Fatui of Snezhnaya, anyways? And didn't everyone hate the Lawrences, too?
It was definitely no secret that Eula's application to the Knights of Favonius had fallen on the desk of whoever administrative grunt it landed on, and laid there through several seasons of recruits.
She had watched new Knights shutter in and out of the barracks for months, and Recruiter Fawn had then quite snippily told her "Applications will be processed, when they are processed!" All while Uncle ranted and raved at her for watching the training regimes instead of retracing her etiquette.
Eula pushed and pushed and then was told in no uncertain terms that her application has been misplaced, and then in far fewer words that she need not reapply.
She said, "I will enact vengeance upon you," and relished the look on Recruiter Fawn's face.
That was, of course, until Kaeya then-Ragnvindr took Mondstadt and the Knights by storm.
Many years ago, news that the patriarch of Ragnvindr's Dawn Winery had picked up a ward had travelled far and fast - not very accurately, but fast it was, and gossip rags landed on the Lawrence's doorstep in what must be record time, just a few hours after the boy was dragged sopping-wet out of the rainstorm that late summer.
"They ought to make a servant of him," Uncle had said to her Father, "that Natlan boy." He paused, lip curling. "Those Natlan savages. There ought to be just too many of them, around these parts."
Father had said in response, "the Whispering Wind said he was from Sumeru."
"Does it matter what the boy is?" Uncle protested loudly.
The front page of Dandelion Daily (Uncle was clutching it so hard the paper had crinkled) had a description in bold font - dark skinned, blue hair, and apparently a bandaged eye. She brought her hand up to her own hair.
She saw the boy the next morning, when the commotion from the city square roused her from her sleep and carried her to her veranda windows. Master Ragnvindr and his entourage of servants were surrounded by early-morning market goers, and a maid's arms carried a little child that looked about five. (She found out later that Kaeya was eight at that time - he had just been very, very small.)
Master Ragnvindr was always an imposing man and he said, "Please excuse us, we will be heading to the church." His voice had carried up to Eula's window.
The rags reported mid-afternoon that the young boy named Kaeya (whose etymology was still unknown) hailed neither from Natlan, nor Sumeru… nor anywhere within Teyvat, as it seems. Scholar Reid had sat by his infirmary bedside for the day with his language texts and the boy had babbled in something never-once-recorded that no one could place.
An offworlder, or an outlander, then. There were few of those who have ever appeared in Teyvat’s records, and fewer who made appearances as children. But unlike his predecessors, Kaeya the tiny ragged boy was not a warrior in glided gold nor a mind with tools ripe for picking.
"...A grostuque eye wrapped behind that bandage, with his pupils so pale and misshapen it was a wonder that this child was not blind..."
"What useless drivel!" Uncle had said, slapping the paper down. Mother hummed lazily as she seemed to always do, and Father stood up to open the windows.
It seemed then (for the immediate few months after Kaeya first arrived) that Eula was no longer the centre of attention as she always had been; and she almost pitied the new Ragnvindr ward for it.
He was lucky, though, as the Ragnvindrs took him in amongst the orphans in the Master's staff, and thus the boy stayed away from the milling gossip in the city that Eula herself couldn't quite escape, still.
She had seen him again a few weeks later when she was in the city - the boy stumbling over the cracks on the cobblestone as the young Ragnvindr tugged him along (were they friends?) Behind them followed hushed whispers and pointing fingers.
Ragnvindr had been oblivious as he skipped along, but Eula of course noticed the gossip ire (which used to be directed to her). Kaeya walked like he could hear all those disparaging remarks thrown his way, although Dandelion yesterday still wrote that he couldn't read or write Mondstadtian yet.
Then she overheard while hiding behind her stairwell banister that her tutor, who travels to the Ragnvindr Estate weekly for the Young Master's lessons, that the ward spoke shitty Mondstadtian with the same vocabulary a two year old would possess but far less fluent, with the inflections in all the wrong places.
The news was gleefully spread in the market bubble, with a zone of inhibition about Angel's Share, because word had spread that the Master himself had grown fond of his new ward and nobody wanted to fall on the bad side of the Tavernmaster.
The church had offered publicly to take the boy in with their cart of orphans, but one look on Master Ragnvindr's face (as he stared at his son tug the younger boy around, a smile beaming babbling-wide) could tell the whole of Mondstadt that Kaeya would be staying.
All the rumors stopped immediately after Master Ragnvindr announced that he'd be adopting.
And then eyes turned back to Eula again, because god knows the merriness of the Square needed chatter to sustain itself, and if they couldn't gossip about Kaeya, then the young ward of the Lawrence Clan it was.
And then there they were - Eula's "misplaced" application, Diluc Ragnvindr's overt enthusiasm, and Inspector Eroch's smarmy look of surprise when Diluc asked (demanded), "Why can't Kaeya join the Knights?"
There was never any clause forbidding outsiders to join Mondstadt Public Forces - it would have been quite befitting of their Archon's ideals of Freedom otherwise.
People, however, were more fallible than an Archon that hadn't been seen for five hundred years, (despite Lady Vennessa's name and visage wrapped over the decree of the Office), and people whispered loudly whenever Eula walked the streets or whenever Kaeya was seen in the city following the Ragnvindrs around like a lost puppy. Nobody liked thinking of themselves as racist or discriminatory but that didn't stop them from being so. (Eula sometimes perhaps felt that bit of kinship with the Snezhnaya Fatui.)
Diluc Ragnvindr was one of those exceptions. Perhaps either deaf or blind. He held Kaeya's hand like it was no different of a hand from everyone else's and never laughed at the way Kaeya curled his tongue funny for some of the Mondstadtian phonetics. He bore no particular ill will to the Fatui even when the Master himself curled his lips at their names, and he never turned away from Eula when they ran into each other at the Society flutterings.
Eroch could only stammer out a "of course" in the face of Diluc Ragnvindr's childishly admirable blindness to the world.
(Diluc Ragnvindr himself, who had fallen into the graces of a pyro vision last summer, had burnt a grass-singed path from Dawn to the Knights' Headquarters, and subsequently won a seat amongst the recruits with a hand on a claymore and a red stone on his belt. He'd been freshly fifteen then, somehow yet not quite understanding that people only barely-tolerated Kaeya because of his last name. Perhaps it was because Inspector Eroch didn't want to sully this naivety, or the more plausible reason that Eroch didn't want a flaming claymore to the face should he really speak of any form of discrimination, so he flagged down Fawn and had her write an application immediately.)
That very afternoon, Eula marched back to the Knights' headquarters. "I heard Kaeya Ragnvindr is trying out for the knights."
Fawn battled between her consternation for her cover story, and her distaste at Eula's very presence. "Oh, look," she said with no amount of surprise in her voice, "I found your application."
Eula had raised an eyebrow at her. She said, "tomorrow, 8am sharp."
That was when Eula met Kaeya in person.
If Diluc Ragnvindr had looked surprised to see her there… it showed all over on his red face, wide eyes and a shocked gape. Kaeya looked over at her impassively, one eyebrow raised. It could have had been two eyebrows raised, Eula couldn’t tell - his other eye in an eyepatch, half-hidden by his hair.
Inspector Eroch, who quite obviously wanted zero part and minutes of Eula or Kaeya on his Knights' courtyard, had said loudly (mostly to drive the point in between Ragnvindr's hard head), "we can't have a knight that is blind in one eye."
"But Kaeya's a really good fighter!" Diluc protested.
"You can't have depth perception with one eye," Inspector Eroch said. "He may be able to reasonably handle himself in a close friendly spar, but can he see a Hilichurl arrow flying towards him on the field?"
"..." Diluc said. Eula hid a snicker.
From across the courtyard, Kaeya met her eyes, and his own (sparkling) curved into a little crescent. So much so that Eula wondered if he was as dumb as what the tabloids tried to make him out to be (just last week publishing a claim that the young Ragnvindr ward (yes, they still called him that, nevermind he is legally a full-fledged son) had just then forgotten how to write.) ((Eula later learns that Kaeya is proficient in dialectic Sumerun code; the whistleblowers to the Windmill Weekly ? Not so much.))
"The Lawrence girl is here too," Fawn had said, like Eroch had somehow missed her.
"Yes, yes, two very... esteemed candidates."
Diluc looked like he was trying to be offended but was not quite sure what to be offended about. Eula's lips curled. Kaeya looked impassively at Eroch, and glanced back to meet her gaze, like they were sharing some sort of furtive secret.
"How about…" Inspector Eroch said, curling his moustache. "Ah, yes." He turns to them, glaring. "The two of you will spar, and the winner gets to join the Knights of Favonius."
"How is that fair?" Diluc Ragnvindr had yelled in the face of Inspector Eroch’s obviously unfair competition. Kaeya looked over his shoulder, eyes rolling.
"All knights undergo a recruitment process," Inspector Eroch reminds him. "As this session was arranged in such… short notice, I'm afraid we don't have training dummies to spare. A spar is fitting, I would say - if Kaeya is as good of a fighter as you claim him to be, if he wins this match, I will trust him to handle himself in the field."
Fawn coughs.
"Same goes for the Lawrence girl."
Diluc looked affronted, and Kaeya looked an amused sort of resigned. "It'd be fine, Diluc."
Diluc cast a conflicted glance at her, like if he wasn't sure it's be overtly rude to tell Kaeya to defeat her.
They walked over to where lies a scattered rack of training weapons, and Kaeya smiled a little at her, his one starry eye squinting funnily. "Hi."
"Hello," Eula said. The training claymore is lighter and less durable than her own. "Pleased to make your acquaintance."
"As am I, my lady," Kaeya said to her, bowing. He had a bit of an accent that Eula couldn’t place, and it was a little funny, but it curled in a little wisp, and accompanied by his bow she felt like it was more of a unique sort of charming than it was strange.
"As a son of Ragnvindr, one of the three leading clans of Mondstadt, we are of equivalent social standing. There is no need to bow to me."
"But we all know I'm not really a Ragnvindr," Kaeya said, and Eula didn't know how to reply, so all she could do was frown at him. (Much later when the young Master Ragnvindr denounces his brother and Kaeya names himself Alberich, she thinks back on this conversation. The tabloids were rife with rumors from inheritance disputes to secret lovers but the real reason would elude everyone but the two themselves. Eula would wonder if Kaeya had known that he would have one day been cut out of the Ragnvindr line just as he was drawn in - the not-quite squint of his slanted eye and the curl of his lip had been quite perplexing.)
Kaeya continued, "I'm sure you want to be a knight."
"Of course," Eula told him, holding her head up high.
"I suggest you let me win," Kaeya said, eye twinkling.
"Pardon?"
"Not to infringe upon your integrity, my Lady," Kaeya said (and bowed a third time). "But although I am not from Mondstadt, I have been named a Ragnvindr. And the difference between the two of us…"
Eula had been offended. Her pride, capabilities, and dignity had been insulted. Yet, above all the slights to her character, she had understood what Kaeya then-Ragnvindr was trying to convey to her.
The thing is, she would never know if he was right, or if he had just pulled a very convincing bluff because he wasn't as skilled with his bladework as he was sharp with his tongue - because years later she wore the Knights emblem on her breast, and she got and held that position with her own vigor, but whos to say that she would have gotten to if Kaeya hadn't opened a door?
What Kaeya had meant that day was, of course, this: he was a Ragnvindr and for as long as he stayed a Ragnvindr, he would have a secured place in the knights. Diluc would (then) have never let the briefest injustice about his brother slide past him.
The same thing could never have been guaranteed for Eula, who was (in her own ironically fitting words) of equal social standing as Kaeya: an outsider with a recognizable name. Except that she very well could have been run out of the knights just as quickly as she had gotten in, without a benefactor like Kaeya would have had Diluc - either driven far into the outskirts of Mondstadt for a post, or given a duty so beneath her she would have no choice but to turn in her resignation.
Getting into the Knights as a recruit was a rank so low on the knights it would have been called dispensable, and Eroch could have very well marched her off into an Abyss Order camp for a “training exercise” and then afterwards sent for a carefully worded condolences to her family’s estate.
Eula was smart enough to understand that much, and the glint in Kaeya’s starry eye made her wonder if the Ragnvindr ward was sharper than even the Ragnvindrs accounted for.
And the thing was , Kaeya and herself could have very well been wrong. What if it was Eula who had gotten into the knights, and she had impressed her superiors so well they bumped her up the ranks?
But she supposed it was simply just a possibility she would never know the outcome was, because there she had been - dropping her claymore and feinting a trip over a crack on the courtyard, the side of Kaeya’s wooden blade lightly tapping her on her shoulder, and Inspector Eroch sounded so stunned when we called out the victory, looking like he wasn’t sure if he would prefer Eula to win or not.
Kaeya had said to her, when they’re setting their weapons back on the rack, “Thank you.”
Eula said back to him, “I’ll have my vengeance for this transgression.”
He smiled at her, and Diluc gave her a wary look, and Kayea’s lone eye glittered - seeing so much more than everyone who called him blind.
The thing was, Eula could have always joined the Adventurer's Guild, if she had really wanted to trek out in the field and get paid for it. They were far less stringent in their recruitment processes and they were fond of collecting oddities. They wouldn't care about who she was as long as she got the job done. All adventure-hungry children chose one or the other - the Guild for the freedom and the Knights for the job security. It wasn't uncommon for someone in the Knights to retire and turn to the Guild. (The reverse hardly happened - the guild's adventurers could not adapt to the stringent routine of the knights.)
But it wasn't so much the calling of the adventurer's spirit that pushed Eula to the knights. The Guild was Teyvatian-wide and unaffiliated to a single government, but it was the Knights that held their steadfast allegiance to Barbatos - and what better way to send a political message than for her to join the knights?
It was not as if the Lawerences despised Barbatos, contrary to popular belief. The old Lawerence family records dating back to the age of Lady Vennessa wrote about the time surrounding Barbatos' coming; the rise to power and the life of an aristocrat (the True Way that the clans were meant to live; as noblemen, not as peasants), and then as the Lawerence clan was shunned into redundancy.
Resentment no doubt grew deep, but who dared write blasphemy against the gods in text, really? The old diary entries spoke in hushed scribbles about Barbatos' untimely visit and Eula could read between the lines… but she doubted that any of her ancestors ever hated Barbatos. How could they? They knew - deep down, in their hearts, they knew themselves that they were doing wrong.
Her parents and Uncle go to church. She learns the hymm choirs. Eula doesn't hate Barbatos, and when she sees the sigil of the Mondstadt Knights of Favonius, she thinks that if she wants to prove herself, she has to do it under Barbatos' name for all of Mondstadt to see.
She had resolved to join the Knights because of that… but now the first open door closed shut in front of her.
Kaeya Ragnvindr’s entry into the Knights of Favonius opened her next.
Not immediately, mind you - he was a (literal) black sheep the moment he pinned the Favonius Emblem onto his collar, and the rumors spread. The market was divided into half, when the rags made their rounds - whether it would have been better for Eula to have made it into the knights instead, or if Kaeya was the better choice.
Mother just hummed whenever Father or Uncle brought it up, but the latter two were insistent in their chiding remarks for Eula to have lost her dignity in a spar with the Ragnvindr Sumeru/Natlan foreign boy. She doesn’t spare them the details with her decision, not that they would understand or approve.
After all, there was never any clause forbidding foreigners to join the knights - just the judgemental eyes of the recruiters. Kaeya was an almost startling sight in the platoon of men he trained with, with an accent despite the years he’s had learning the Mondstadt tongue, and a flashy foreign bladework that spooked the training masters who had no choice but to continue to let him use it, because the Favonius arts wouldn’t account for his missing eye. He worked and trained and never made it past the ranks of frankly someone his calibre should have, when Eula makes her rounds by the market and hears of the exploits of the Ragnvindr siblings in the knights.
(She hears of the Gunnhildr girl too, who is vying for the position of Grandmaster between herself and Diluc Ragnvindr. Eula herself would never (even now) have a shot of that seat, but it’s a fantasy she perhaps entertains privately to herself, very occasionally when she passes the closed office door. Although she learns that she has to take her hat off to Jean, who handles her works with a brutal efficiency, that she thinks even the Ragnvindr boy could not work up to with such devotion. She digresses.)
It all comes to a head, several years later. The old Master of the Ragnvindrs passes an untimely death, the new Master Ragnvindr vanishes from Mondstadt with nothing but a missive and a resignation from the Knights of Favonius, and Kaeya Ragnvindrshows up at the doorstep of Jean Gunnhildr’s house one stormy night.
The gossip rags spill with pure filth brimming at the pages - many of which headlines a romantic tryst triangle (a raunchy description of Jean Gunnhildr in her silks, head bowed towards Kaeya as she greets him at her door, a delicate hand pressed to the broad flat of his tan chest.)
The tabloids only get more bold from then on, when Kaeya hobbles to the church gashes of fire burns trailing up his arms. The then strongest pyro user in Mondstadt, and the last person seen with Kaeya after all, was -
Eula could only watch as Kaeya trudges through the muddied politics of what his brother left in his wake. No longer a Ragnvindr, no longer under the protection of one. Blind in one eye, crippled in his hands, foreigner of dirty blood and unknown name. The only reason, Eula knows, that the doors have not been shut on him is the new cryo vision (glittering blue like his icy eye) hanging from his belt.
(She remembered hearing from three gossip chains, from a friend of a friend of a friend in the knights, that the Ragnvindr “oh, no, no more!” boy was eyeing up a catalyst. It’s the only way he has left to fight, said Dandelion Daily , Uncle reads from the paper, and sneered.)
((She remembered watching Kaeya much later, raising cryo constructs so threatening that she almost agreed with the tabloids after all - Kaeya was rather wasted as a swordsman, with a wit and elemental mastery like his. He should have chosen the catalyst.))
Two months later Kaeya Ragnvindr Alberich drives Inspector Eroch out of Mondstadt City with a herald of accusations and the tucked-tails of the Fatui.
(Eula always knew he was the smarter brother.)
And that’s when it happens, she knows. It’s only when Kaeya drops the Ragnvindr from his name and fully becomes into himself - Alberich, of foreign name and tongue and blood, proving to the people of Mondstadt that citizenry is not a marker of trust, do the invisible barriers on the doors of the Knights of Favonius come down.
(It is, after all, not about your family name or background, but who you are.)
The headlines crowed about it for days when a fresh graduate from Sumeru walks through the front doors of the Knights’ headquarters with her head held high.
A Liyuen girl, who shared a quarter lineage with someone Mondstadtian many decades ago, planted her feet on the ground and brought back the once-defunct Outrider department.
A alchemist speculated to be an outlander who knew too little and too much about the world, stumbling past the gates with heavy tomes and a weather-worn letter.
Eula, herself, years later - when she finally, finally , wins that spar against Kaeya Alberich.
“I remember watching you two at the courtyard that day,” Grandmaster Varka says to her, in amusement. (Later that evening - after Kaeya picks himself up and rubs his sprained wrist and says, 'you hit hard, Eula", and she hides a smile behind the hilt of a sword before they head back to their respective captaincy duties.) “When you and Kaeya were undergoing your recruitment spars. You deliberately lost to him, didn’t you?”
“A Lawrence honors all their battles to the fullest.”
Varka laughs. “Of course, of course. I would never imply otherwise.”