The dead were a long way down, far beyond Triella’s reach, as she was in no rush to join them. They’d been tossed from atop the grey walls of Agaepsonia, to break apart against the crags. If Yawen was to be trusted, she had already slain them before she disposed of the corpses. So much for our Rose being able to keep them safe. She pondered the identity of the dead rotting far below. The dossiers she’d been given by Lune had a dearth of personal details, obviously. If this was ever to surface, it could well be that their assets within Loclain might choose to take their chances elsewhere.
A jar of oil and a torch shrunk as they fell, setting the bodies ablaze. Triella almost muttered an apology before realizing the futility of doing so. The Blossoms are sworn to safeguard all realms and all men, she thought bitterly. She walked away as the stench began to rise along with thick smoke. Yawen, Sieglinde and Millicent awaited at the courtyard, discussing how to proceed, but making little progress. The others were at work inspecting the defenses and stores of Agaepsonia, although a castle of this enormity would require many more eyes and hands to properly take inventory.
Triella found the three eating together, breaking hard bread and splitting the last bits of cooked hare that Prishia had killed and prepared earlier that day. Yawen waited for Sieglinde and Millicent to eat before she did so, however, and watched them intently as they chewed and swallowed. She did not make an impressive figure, Triella judged, weathered and starved, but she remained a Blossom, the most experienced here save for Sieglinde herself. The informants that sought her did not have a chance to withstand her strength.
“I did it,” Triella said. If she didn’t say the words, perhaps it would seem a more agreeable duty. That was not so, but she had offered to burn the dead, perhaps in some foolish hope to salvage something, some small hint of their identities, but of course that was impossible.
“Thank you,” said Sieglinde. “Let us keep this matter only between Blossoms. I trust we’re all in accord.”
“I feel no shame in it,” said Yawen, as though her own feelings were the matter here. “I acted to preserve our Rose. I am glad that I did. We cannot suffer threats when our weaknesses are so exposed.”
“We cannot judge your acts in the midst of crisis and mourning,” said Millicent, with great discomfort, as if she had to force the words out. Sieglinde said nothing, but Triella was judging her acts. She wondered how long she could hold her tongue. She wanted to say something, but feared that if she did, she might end up sharing Lune’s request with them, even after Triella promised discretion, and that was, perhaps, not a complication they needed now. “Still, are you certain the fort’s garrison did not learn of this? Surely they would have noticed people making their way to the castle but not returning…”
“How would I know?” Said Yawen. “The thoughts of heretics are not my concern. It is good that they should know that I shall not take any threat lightly. Best that they don’t grow bold.”
Triella tried not to think of what could have happened once Yawen’s last rations were depleted. The castle had wells to draw water from, but Jiang’s food was growing scarce.
“It is not best,” said Triella. “Our way is not fear. It has never been, it should not be now.”
“Pray tell me, have you seen a cornered animal?” Yawen asked, looking as though Triella were a great fool, a child. “A beast may lash out in its dying throes, but it may survive if it can show that there is yet fight in it. Lions and wolves alike have been cowed by their prey, and it mattered little that they were stronger, faster, more numerous… The threat was too great. For the prey, its life depended on the thunder of its roar, on the span of its horn, on the height it could reach if it stood upright with its remaining strength… For the predator, it is not so. Were the lion starving, he would pounce, for the kill would mean life, and retreat a painful death of hunger. But to the wolf it is not always a matter of life and death; to the doe it always is. Do you follow?”
“I suppose.”
“So it is for us as well. To beasts the scent of weakness is alluring. If we content ourselves with waiting and watching, we will find ourselves begirded, trammeled, corralled and butchered. We must make a statement whose loudness is as stark as the silence left behind by our sisters culled and withered. Were we stronger, we could weather any peril, any ill-conceived wager on the character of others… But now we are vulnerable. And vulnerable as we are, if we err in our choosings, then we will bend, break and shatter.”
“And could it not be an error to act so rashly?” Triella asked. “An error to blind ourselves to opportunities?”
“She has you there, Lady Jiang,” said Millicent. “I’ve heard it said that risk and opportunity are opposite sides of the same coin. Both perspectives are true enough. It is the price we pay for relying on others, and without such bonds even Blossoms cannot endure.”
“Folly. Give a starving man a coin that he may spend at a pot shop or at a gambling house, and you will see the truth laid bare. He could risk starvation at no gain, where a richer man would chance only a day’s wage. Unfortunate, but not devastating. But for the starving man…”
“We are not starving men,” said Sieglinde. “And we have come to maintain and strengthen bonds and alliances. I’ll remind you that there is a difference between gambling one’s coin away and trying to rob and assault the croupier. Are we in agreement?”
“You are not the sole authority here,” said Yawen. “As the last remaining Blossom in Loclain, and having safeguarded Agaepsonia, I am in command,” she said, wild eyes hinting that her command of herself was uncertain. “You have not been among these… These cultists, or else you would not dismiss their threat.”
“Then I am sure you will share your wise advice with us all,” Sieglinde extended a hand in friendship. Yawen looked at the gloved hand queerly, until she finally took hold of it, and nodded. “You are not alone anymore, Yawen. This means you don’t have to shoulder the burden of decision all by your lonesome.”
She said nothing. She simply finished her meal, handed her empty plate to Millicent, and walked away towards the other Blossoms inspecting Agaepsonia. When she was no longer within earshot, Sieglinde allowed herself a weary sigh.
“This one will trouble us yet, I can see,” she said. “May we be so fortunate as to see her at ease now that she is not wholly isolated. So far from home, with no news from the world, and seeing enemies everywhere, all the while expecting her own death… Small wonder that she would break, but nevertheless we must suffer the consequences, and live with them. If the news were to spread of a Blossom slaughtering those who sought refuge…”
“It won’t spread,” Triella said with a confidence she did not feel.
“I know,” said Sieglinde, who turned to face the vast and empty training yard just outside the armory. “I did not expect to find Agaepsonia so deserted. Supposedly a token garrison remained and would have received word of our approach.”
“You don’t suppose Yawen could have-”
“No,” Sieglinde said before Millicent could finish. “No, she would not go that far. It is far more plausible that time saw the fortress diminished and news of that were never broadly spread. Agaepsonia has not served a purpose since a time out of mind. It is monstrously large, and built upon a perfect defensible position… So perfect, in fact, that none would ever dare an attack through the Vale of Dreighr, and so a much smaller structure would be more than sufficient to hold the pass.”
Sieglinde looked up to the towering spires of Agaepsonia, and Triella imitated her. The uneven terrain of the region made it difficult to estimate the true height of the walls and the castle, how much of it was discolored stone and mortar and how much was the height of the cliffs the towers were built upon. Fissured lines ran everywhere, but, though weathered and faded, the stone remained sturdy, the curtain walls as impregnable as when they were first erected. If anything, its age only made Agaepsonia appear all the more imposing. Too grand for mere humanity, as foreboding as the mountains around it, the word that kept creeping into Triella’s mind was eternal. Like the cliffs themselves, millennia of wind and rain and force saw it utterly unchanged. Millions of years would be spent upon its stones before they would crumble. Just as the Dreighern Range which was shaped by ages before memory and mind, all men would be long dead before the fortress was gone.
“How could this have been built thousands of years ago?” Millicent questioned. “Castles of Loclain far closer to our time can scarcely match this enormity. How, then, could primitive techniques raise such stones?”
“Are you certain that they are primitive?” Sieglinde asked. “We have this weakness, I think, an arrogant lack of imagination, where we look back and think that those who came before us are savages to some degree. Less enlightened, less capable. How marvellous that we have surpassed the brutality of our rough past, and thus today we wage no wars, stoke no hatreds, and are wiser than our irrational, superstitious ancestors… No, I see nothing unbelievable about Agaepsonia. Our Rose was always capable of greatness. And that is our birthright.”
Triella nodded as though she had strong feelings one way or another. To her, the Ruby Blossom was not castles that dominated horizons, nor towers that reached for clouds. It was the orphanages and workhouses the Rose funded, the relief kitchens established in the aftermath of the scouring of the Nighting Coast. It was cold here, and empty. Nothing like the warm blanket and kind word that saved her every day when she was lost in the world with nowhere to go. But I always had somewhere to go. I always had the Rose.
With the excuse of accompanying her bloom-sisters, Triella departed, though in truth half of her wanted to be free of the sight and smell of the smoke of the burning dead, and the other half felt it grievously dangerous to leave Yawen unattended. This is not a woman to be left alone, she thought with both pity and fear. Triella hastened her steps, but it was Erika Chantesse that she found first, inspecting a grand dining hall; far too grand, in fact. It was fit for seating an army, not a small company of Blossoms not even measured in the dozens.
“One marvels at the hubris,” Erika said, her voice too thin a whisper in the desolate vastness of what was but one of the many towers of Agaepsonia. “Was there ever a time this castle could be garrisoned? The dust of eras leads us to believe that we pale before the greatness of a distant, mythical past, but should you attempt an estimate, you will struggle to conceive a force that could hold this expanse. Most curious.”
“I suppose so,” said Triella. “It is the surroundings that leave me disconcerted. It is no passage of great import, not a position which warrants a structure so brutally immense, for a small fort could allow a small garrison to hold a force many times its size. Such splendor consigned to far-flung and barren stretches so unsuited for tilth and herd. Could it be that, in that distant past, the Rose’s magic made these lands bountiful?”
“It could well be so,” said Erika. “As I said, most curious. You would think that we would have learned more of the history of a structure so plainly significant. And yet we have only ever heard of Agaepsonia as a stronghold in disrepair, its import in a long waning of millennia… If a work of such greatness has been in descent for years beyond count, could it truly be regarded as a giant of fallen opulence? No, after all this time it is as though its purpose is to be ruin and vestige. A stonier scar than one rent in flesh. When mad Lady Jiang speaks of ghosts, I wonder if perhaps she truly is mad, or merely perceptive.”
It is only madness I see in her, Triella thought, but it was best to say nothing. Erika ran a finger along a lenghty, dusty table once fit for banquets. Though this bore the features of any feasting hall, Triella could not imagine it occupied, as anything but this sad, cold emptiness. Imagination failed her when she tried to fill these spaces with Blossoms, with color and life. Even her footsteps sounded wrong here, and this was not even the greatest of the castle’s towers. There are not enough of us to fill these halls again, she thought, and the bitterness turned to dark amusement. So perfect was this cruelty it could only be a farce spun by a mind that jeered down at them. Once there were so many Blossoms, and now all are gone, all but a pale imitation of what the Rose had been. They were kin now to spiders and moths, brides to grief and dust, and all around them, the emptiness they were too small to complete.
She tried to laugh, though it hurt so much, coughing bits of bread and hare and bile, a rattle echoing in the ruins.
The Rose's Torn Petals 