Chapter Text
It would be wrong to say the hall smelt of flowers because to do so would not be specific enough. Would instead imply that a delicate shake of jasmine might have just scented the air or a lovely shower of roses, freshly doused in the first spring rain, to have been recently delivered from the garden and arranged in the vases mounted along the walls.
At the time, Ella Ashmore hated it more than words could pin down but she also hated how poorly description seemed to stretch at the time to convey her meaning. She’d never wanted things to be clearer, and yet she couldn’t seem to get the words right. The same way she couldn’t seem to get through a night’s sleep or find a moment’s peace as of late.
The staff, without her saying a word, knew this as you could tell good air from bad air. Black bile from yellow bile from blood from phlegm.
As you knew the moment a table was about to be wrenched upwards because something shoddy in a banquet’s preparation had been deemed too much to stand a moment longer.
They’d done their best to accommodate, as was their lives’ ambition, but there was only so much they could do. From the top of the hardly touched attic towers to the bottom of the coldest root cellar (hiding beneath even the dungeons), the place simply bloomed in how fiercely it reeked.
Most of them wouldn’t have tried to see it dealt with, hadn’t actually minded it all that much, but for how it rankled the queen.
That meant it had to go, but the beautiful stench wouldn’t be banished by soap or pots of water set to simmer with clove and orange in various fireplaces or the lofty swing of incense along a censer’s chain and the thing that had truly upset her couldn’t be sorted out by any the likes of them. The serving folk. The subtle, quiet people who slept downstairs and saw everything.
Some had tried, incidentally.
One of the men-at-arms, specifically the one who’d gingerly taken position at his head while the other had seen to his feet, while ferrying him to the infirmary had blustered a curt, “Sir,” directly into his ear.
He’d thought it would have worked for how often the prince’s uppity man had always seemed to rise to correct (always standing on ceremony, that one) the misconception that he’d been in possession of any title or house.
But he hadn’t said anything. The journey down and across the inner ward to the healer’s stone hut had only jostled and done him a disservice in the inelegant flop of his head. He’d have probably been mortified, if he’d been conscious.
That man-at-arms, who’d often fought in other people’s wars until taking up this position, hadn’t been inclined to mention how similar the heft of his body had been to one that might have been dumped (removed of its valuables and left only in his shirt sleeves with a whispered prayer to guide him on his way) into a ditch. He’d only done what he’d been told by the old crone and deposited him on the bed.
He hadn’t looked at his queen who’d followed behind, while seeing himself out, as she’d have certainly seen it his eyes.
The cook, who’d first been told to pull together some sort of broth when they hadn’t been sure if the poor thing would still require victuals given his predicament, had been in possession of a wealth of bones to choose from in setting a pot to stewing and gone for beef bones (knuckles and marrow and even the good shanks she’d been saving for a rainy day) as they’d been the type he’d sent compliments on once.
It had been a waste of the good bones then.
He didn’t swallow, didn’t breathe, and certainly did not taste. The rest of the pot had been made into the night’s appetizer and only the cook soured over each exquisite spoonful. The queen wouldn’t touch a morsel.
A servant girl, hardly more than a wisp with a broom, who’d slept at her own hearth and not yet been permitted to tend to floors in the main keep (for how often she might be overtaken by a daydream) had taken a moment to hover over him, this man who’d not learned her name yet but had told her, “good day,” twice in their acquaintance. She’d always jumped, as most had avoided eye contact, and he’d been dressed so fine and always looked as though he had somewhere to go.
To think that he truly did look awful and whisper, in a voice so small that even the guard who’d been told to keep to the room could hardly make it out, “oh, won’t you rise? For her sake?”
He hadn’t risen. The room had remained silent, but for the crackling fire in its little hearth, with only enough breath for one living person stirring the dust left within as she’d become distracted.
They all knew what it was truly about, but they could pretend (more easily than their realm’s beating heart) it was just a matter of flowers. That a solution might come about so easily.
None commented on the truth; they wouldn’t dare.
Nobody seemed to be saying much of anything at all, speaking even of common things in half tones, as if afraid that the very stones would carry their uncertain whisperings to the queen’s own ears like a line of crooked ants returning home; a sort of thing which had, unfortunately, a precedent.
One might have assumed a spell to be on the place for how little the assembled staff, and those few courtiers who hadn’t felt the change to the atmosphere and gone home for the time being, spoke at all.
Such a person would be assuming so for the wrong reasons, if so, but the effect remained. Disquieting as a mourning shroud. Intangible as the very air itself.
Where before there might have been humming, laughter, or the fond trappings of life now there was only discomfort. A quiet pressure, pulled taut from person to person, as the meals were still cooked and the floors still scrubbed and the world seemed to hold its breath in anticipation.
Not mourning, not yet. Pointedly so as it was well known already that the queen very much did not want any member of her retinue to die (a thoroughly modern philosophy) but believed such things quite fiercely in regards to him.
There might have been the occasional snide whisper of someone being someone else’s favorite and how he’d an unfair head start on top of everything else he’d been unsportingly blessed with, but given his current state those whispers had been curbed.
If asked, and somehow miraculously given leave to answer, the man in question would very much have doubted that anyone would care enough to mourn him when he was gone in spite of the change in leadership. The whole affair would silence him quite thoroughly, bringing a mottled red about his face and ears, just to see how much people could care as to whether he lived or died. Would think it more a credit to Her Majesty’s efforts than anything he’d ever done.
There would still be no answer, if you did ask him now, as he’d only lay there.
Looking, undeniably, to be caught hesitantly in the first step in death’s general direction. He would seem quite…still to any observer with any sort of sense.
Apparently, according to the usual credible sources, he’d been very still after falling and stayed that way all the while. Something particularly strange. No pitching about or moaning or thrashing or terrible gasping, he’d just gone limp. Hardly breathing, he’d dropped and he hadn’t risen again.
His legs caught at an awkward angle. His head hauled into her lap. Her hands wrenching at whatever they could find purchase on upon his person as if to tug him back by force.
She’d called out his name more than once, so they said. Her voice had done something terrible in the wake of the repetition. That had been what had summoned aide to her. That and a sudden feeling that had struck all in her service, as obvious as a blow to the face, that something was horribly wrong in the queen's castle.
Not many had seen him fall, but they’d certainly heard the commotion that had followed. Perhaps the sound of it, all the expelled consonants and leftover breath, still lurked up in the rafters of the now empty hall.
She hadn’t told them to, but the staff had disassembled the display that had only just that morning been brought together. The only thing they could do, with rags and broomsticks and their own plain hands, to make it as though it had never happened.
The Crystal Jubilee, on no one person’s orders, had been placed on indefinite postponement (and if he was dead then it would undoubtedly be cancelled).
It was unprecedented to all but the servants who’d have done all this anyway, broken down the beautiful thing in the night to make it as though it had never happened at all, at some point.
They’d cleaned the tribute away, retiring most of the pieces to various vaults. Removed the grand tables. Left the room undressed and hollow with a certain, standard shine to the floor, but it had still felt marred all the same. By past commotion. Uncertainty. A terrible voice crying out. A body struck down.
Perhaps the sound still lurked with the particularly floral stain upon the air.
Its own kind of curse.
There had been a trend recently for certain flower tokens, pungent and charmed to riotous color, to be pinned beneath capes and up ladies’ sleeves to cover the oh so human stench of summer (which had arrived with tremendous aplomb upon the coronation of a new queen).
Those not in possession of their own gardens would take silk flowers and soak them in perfumes, but only those who weren’t so creative or willing to pluck from the world around them. The world had been all but celebrating, glad to share in the bounty.
All branches capable of such favor had bloomed riotously through spring and stayed around to see a new age dawn, as if each shivering petal was waiting for that whispered of hand to reach out to pluck them. Hesitant to leave without seeing her. Desperate for such a chance as each drop of rain hoped to slip down her sleeve as it fell and each blade of grass reverently dreamt of brushing the hem of her gown as it twisted in the wind.
As such, there had been blooms to spare all these months. An abundance of exquisite bodies that might be worn by each and every man. A general air of camaraderie and plentifulness that would have even the poorest miner or unluckiest fish monger consider how they deserved something nice.
It was a fad that had spread throughout the kingdom, a sign of the prosperous times that this was something people were able to spend such time considering, but it had truly begun amongst the queen’s castle in those first few days.
It had started there because, for all the work of those sworn to the scullery, something as foul as the latest wedding’s remnants had left a lasting malodor in the chapel that had drifted with the wind and expanded bulbously with the heat.
It had maliciously tumbled across the moat and all but invaded the inner courtyards in spite of the battlements. None of the efficiency of a bumbling army, it had instead appeared without warning. No chance, really, to fight back.
Just as the rot of roses, along with the serving folk’s uncanny silence and stillness, had come to occupy the rest of the castle now.
Ella Ashmore had privately considered it to be her stepfamily’s final revenge, that stench.
While the queen, herself, hadn’t minded the pungent reminder of dead trolls all that much as she’d smelled far worse, the rest of the castle’s occupants had promptly gone out in search of flowers with such fervency that peasant girls with baskets had only just stopped milling about the moat looking to make a sale as carriages came in and out. They’d worn them on their person to alleviate the effects.
They’d all become intimately familiar with the rises and falls of the floral that had recently come into fashion. The biddies with violets and baby’s breath at their necks, the romantics with roses and peonies pinned just over the heart, and the queen who’d only had to mention a childhood habit of drinking from honeysuckle blooms with a fond sort of smile to see maids send themselves to pluck from its vine daily. To let her sip from them, yes, but pin them to her person as well.
Who possessed a natural loveliness, or perhaps a bit of magic, that saw those petals remain fresher for longer than usual in her presence, some even twining out new strands of thin vine over the royal person as if they only wanted to hold her.
She’d taken to wearing woven tokens that had, if ever loosed from her person, always been swept up and returned by a particular hand. Ever at her back.
An unconscious bow in the bend at his waist, a luminous shine to his eye as he’d offered, “My Queen,” in a voice that said he considered it an honor (and hadn’t had his mind crossed by the implications of him offering a woman a flower in the slightest) no matter how many times he had to do so.
If she’d teased him about this, he’d have blushed, but never stopped reaching. Never hesitated or grumbled at the task, or its repetition, as he might have for his last charge.
Perhaps there was a reason she never bid a lady-in-waiting find a more stalwart pin to affix them to her sleeves. Perhaps she enjoyed the game a bit, might even stoop one day to dropping it while pointedly looking at him, just as he seemed to enjoy making her smile.
She never could help but compare the brush of his hand, the tender hesitation in his smile that bound them together like those spindly shoots of honeysuckle, to a day wherein she’d dropped a basket of mismatched linens (secreted out of the cupboard) along the Bog’s Hollow thoroughfare.
On a market day the square, crammed with traveling carts of peddlers and pawning and traveling musicians, had been crowded enough that some folk had to touch her and she had to find relief in it. Unfamiliar faces. Hiding in plain sight.
Her stepmother busy with her usual business at the butcher’s, the baker’s, and that day she’d have even reached an understanding with the candle stick maker.
She could recall a faint hope, pathetic in its fragility, that some strangers might not know her name, might not yet have heard of her circumstances, and might take pity on her for all her wretchedness.
She wouldn’t dare to ask them to take her away.
She’d only been hoping to sell these castoffs of her house, hoping to amass some petty sum to procure herself some proper food, but the brusque passing of a book peddler who wore his wares strapped to his chest had upended her basket and sent the richly embroidered napkins tumbling into the dust as the wind had scattered them.
She hadn’t cried but after all the trouble she’d gone to in keeping each piece pristine, she’d briefly considered screaming in violent fury if that wouldn’t have been a waste of time. If it wouldn’t have dragged the beautiful clockwork innards of a typical day to a halt. If it wouldn’t have been playing into what was already being said about her.
She’d, on her hands and knees, scrabbled through the dust to save each one, but the way that all the passersby hadn’t deigned to assist was something she couldn’t forget. Their feet, level with her hands. The way some had walked on and cared not for what they might crush on their way.
The cool disdain in their eyes as if they couldn’t tell what they wanted more: her apology or to see what her face would do if her pathetic wares were snatched away by another capricious wind.
The way each napkin had gone from snowy white to mottled with dirt.
The way her stepmother had actually been watching, having no reason to employ a candlestick maker, all the while from the cart and hardly even cared. Had let the scene play out.
It wasn’t something you could easily wash off like a thin skin of dust, being brought so low. So disregarded. To blink off the miasma of the past and suddenly be standing in a library of a castle. With him and one of her silly flowers.
He’d, meanwhile, seemed to take offense to any moment the token might have been left on one of the cleanest floors in all the realm. Might, unbeknownst to her, later (in a meeting) pick at a hangnail and find himself hesitating at the scent of honeysuckle that had lingered at his fingertips. His mind, lingering too. His smile, fond and seemingly conjured in response to the slightest of things.
She’d been wearing a token that day. It had been crushed in all the chaos, a splatter of nectar on her sleeve, and she couldn’t deny the consideration of just how many times he’d picked one of its kin up for her without chiding. She couldn’t muster up any sadness for it, she’d felt so hollowed out.
Of all the things to think of as she stalked her castle, trying to do anything other than what she wanted most as moments had become hours without word as to what could be wrong with him, Ella Ashmore couldn’t seem to stop thinking about flowers. Perhaps it was easier to consider them, especially with the ever-present reminder, than the truth.
Even before she’d come to inherit such a dwelling place (and the total sum of its storied history), she’d heard tell of the day the young (at the time) king had first wooed a visiting courtesan by filling his throne room with orchids.
He’d had them, in a single night, dug up from all over the kingdom until they had to be potted in serving bowls and even the occasional spittoon. Some left in clumps of loose dirt on the floor until their pale roots inevitably escaped.
Her favorite flower, supposedly. A true gesture of naked affection, most definitely, in the way that only young kings could provide it.
A blatant token of favor and appreciation, or a show of force, whether the fact that she favored them was true or not. Something to inspire poetry or portraiture or encourage the support of a visiting botanist who’d found a way to keep spring indoors if only plied with a wizard and the transfusion of royal coin to his empty coffers.
A story, according to her closest advisor when Ella had idly brought it up once, that had mostly taught their son, His Royal Highness, that things should never be done in halves and you didn’t really need to spend time fussing about with followup questions. It was more about the overall statement, about the flair, when it came to true love.
Such a thing could be fabricated easily enough, and most doubted they’d ever know the difference. What was love if not the moment one’s breath was first stolen away?
All the stems had been thin and delicate. The colors pale, as if the pigment had been applied sparingly due to cost. The air had been misted with fragrance and a few pixies had eventually peeked their soft heads from their flowery bungalows to discover an unintentional relocation of sorts (they would go on to lay claim to the garden for generations).
But it must have been worth it, if you asked the king, to see the eyes of his lady love glisten with want at the sight of what he’d do for her.
Such was the point of tribute, as her advisor might have said. The gesture. The unspoken favor offering promises that couldn’t simply be made aloud. The flexing, vexingly vague, of power and promise. If this was the start, what could be expected to follow?
That also would have been the point of the gifts and the airing out of the great hall instead of the summer hall, which Ella would have preferred for how the breeze would move its airy curtains and fewer people would fit inside it to hungrily watch her select a prize, and the eventual cause of their argument which she very much didn’t want to think about.
The proceedings had been cancelled due to, what some were calling, an attempt on the queen’s life. The first of its kind.
One that had only been thwarted by accident.
She didn’t much want to consider that part either.
So she thought about the orchids instead.
That courtesan had gone on to become queen, of course, just as she’d also gone on to run off with a music tutor once the line had been preserved at the birth of their first and only son (the sort of conditions which had to be met before such things would be permitted, in an arcane sense).
It was sometimes said that the old king could still ask after the scent of all those orchids when wading through an ocean of petitions. Folk who’d wait in line for days on end to beg on bended knee for his favor, his assistance, and all he could focus on was that ghost on the air. Like he was still waiting for the return of her step.
Or, at least, such a claim was true according to the queen’s advisor. He’d been right there, after all. A shadow at the old king’s elbow, his voice gone low to remind His Royal Excellency of all the names because he’d owed the usual attendant a favor and it had been the day of a rather exciting tournament.
That usual attendant had gotten to go off with the prince to watch the bear-baiting and jousting while the prince’s man had instead stayed back and subtly returned His Majesty’s attention to current events like guiding a small boy to bed after a sudden outbreak of thunder.
That wasn’t to say the scent, the orchids, hadn’t been real, her advisor had been sure to clarify. Not in a place as charmed as the king’s castle.
Or, now he’d supposed, her castle.
Even he’d supposedly caught a whiff, preserved through arcane fondness like a small body swallowed in amber, of that heady perfume. The castle, apparently, had loved its king that much that it would do what it could to bring back the beautiful things he missed. When he was lonely. When his mind wandered. It had seemingly bottled the air of that day like a fine vintage and brought it out as often as it liked in an attempt to make the king smile.
That sort of thing seemed to matter to people a great deal. A monarch’s smile. That had, after all, been the point of this whole day. The cause of all of this, the whole kingdom vying for a nod of her head. A slight upturn to her lips. The world was, uncannily, desperate to love her now and that was something Ella couldn’t yet unpacked fully. Something she was still trying to get used to.
She was loved by the horses in the stables and the dawn at the horizon and each pristine figure that had entered her domain with their best and brightest offerings. It was a national holiday, somehow, all for her. Every creature, great and small and living and not, just wanted her to enjoy herself.
The castle couldn’t do anything about the smell, now, though. No matter how much it loved Ella Ashmore. It couldn’t do anything on account of the magic, even as it tried to suppress the effect.
The great hall didn’t just stink of flowers, a smell Ella Ashmore had almost grown distant and unfamiliar with after such a time spent as a servant in her own house.
Those days had little beauty in them. At best she could have taken to picking wild violets along the road, smelling a sprig of mint or bundle of sage at market if the tender of a stall wasn’t looking and therefore didn’t throw a bucket of water her way for impertinence.
The reek that had come to lay claim to Ella’s new home was instead more familiar, actually, from those dark and dank days.
It stank, beneath the beguiling surface, of decomposition.
Petals gone soft and rotten as an old tooth. Roots gone black with mold.
Something left in its vase, bleeding sluggishly until the water was cloudy, to rancor and ruin.
A bouquet to the senses that Ella Ashmore, even as a queen with her fine jewels and a world at her feet, could stomach better than anyone else.
Her first art lessons in girlhood had seen her shakily recreate the fond hoods of bluebells, the soft wave of dandelions, and the drowsy drape of lavender in simple shapes.
Had seen her refill those vases, day after day, because she couldn’t bear to think of them withering away. No thought to thorns or anything remotely poisonous. Such things might as well have not existed.
She’d grown up, after all, in gardens. She’d spent so long running off to the wood with its strange blooms that might seem to wink at you, might only tickle your chin with butter as you leant over them in a harmless bit of mischief, that at times her father would name her wood sprite and laugh at the mud she’d barely tried to hide on her fine and silken shoes.
Her mother would only smile a small and secret smile and know, without asking, that she’d spent some of her time tucked up under the bower of a familiar tree with a collection of stories. Would know that there she’d been safe as the leaves had hushed and shushed until she’d fallen into a delicate sleep with strange and fascinating dreams.
A place she’d never been told to go, necessarily, but would also never truly have been able to avoid.
Her mother had kept an herb garden not where you’d have expected her to, but in the windows of the good house itself. Clever little clay boxes heaped with dark soil, the likes of which she covered in the winter so that they might flourish in the summer.
Ingenious contraptions that had seen rosemary and thyme, mint and kingsfoil, waving hello every morning. Little things to pluck and pinch for herself and pack into sachets in the kitchens. The smell would always stay on her hands, to the point that Ella could use it to guess which room she’d just been in from that. Could walk from her mother’s hand and carry the scent at her temples as if anointed with holy oils.
Her stepmother had destroyed the window boxes almost immediately, a senseless wound to Ella who hadn’t yet learned her truth, as yet unnamed calamity had gone on to stretch far deeper than that with great, hairy roots. The sort of thing that would sting and lash at the palms to try and yank up from where it had taken hold.
The first thing to rot upon the silent conquering of House Ashmore, even when still under the pretense of human courtship, had been the gardens.
For good things could not grow where trolls slept.
It would seem, at first, an ill omen. Unfortunate superstition.
The farmers would say the old crop had to die for a new one to take its place.
Her father would sigh and only beg her not to mention it.
Her stepmother would say, when she thought she was alone, good riddance.
One more piece of Ella’s mother that could not keep within the waking world (as she still only danced in dreaming where nothing could touch her).
Much later, Ella would wake in the night and swear she saw her stepmother, pale as milk with hair as red as the ragged inside of a sore throat, traipsing barefoot through the trellises and promenading through the peonies with a bucket of salt at her hip. Scattering it amongst the dirt like seed for so many birds. Leaving it all to wither away. The earth to its sundering.
The gardens of House Ashmore, when she is queen, will still not have grown back. She will not have yet untied the knot in her throat to ask that a druid be called to sing the land back to its old songs.
When asked by her father, only coughing a little into his closed fist over what could have been only a worn out throat of his own, if she’d want to see to saving his gardens, the woman who’d not yet married into the name of Ashmore had tutted.
Had said, staring right at Ella as if she’d seen the girl’s face peering down from the window like her own strange dream, that she possessed no talent for tending things living. No green thumbs to speak of.
After the garden had died her stepmother had been brought bouquets to make up for it, first by the staff in welcome and then by her husband to celebrate their nuptials and then by all the town to mourn the death of the late great Lord Ashmore.
Nearly everyone in Bog’s Hollow had brought their best, currying favor with the house’s new lady and its forlorn daughter after ignoring the summons of its dying lord.
He’d called for friendship and been unheeded. He’d called for help and been unheard. They’d all arrived to say goodbye, though. They’d all brought flowers.
Whether it was a shepherd’s humble palmful of wildflowers from further inland or the premium pieces plucked from other lords and ladies’ still flourishing collections, they’d quickly run out of places to put them all. Nettie, the fond old housekeeper, had been beside herself.
Along mantles. Upon tables. Dripping down the stairs and, finally, on the floor but far from walkways. They clustered and cloistered like beautifully adorned but terrified girls hugging the wall at a party and had at first made the air a riot of beautiful scents that Ella had hated (but only quietly, not nearly as loudly as she’d come to hate some things).
A wrinkling of her nose. A subtle scratch of her sleeve. The occasional leaf, plucked in guilt, and picked to pieces. Nothing wrong with the smell but for how glorious it was in the face of her life falling apart.
It had made the house almost unfamiliar. Almost dream-like, in its own way, when its halls had been walked at night. She’d had trouble sleeping. She’d had foul dreams.
A new garden that had somehow sprung up where it didn’t belong. A perpetual rustling when the windows were left open to air out the sorrow, to try and let her father’s soul escape the bed he’d died in and fly to heaven as was the custom.
It had rained the next day, but the windows had stayed open. The petals had been shaken, a few of the flimsier pieces knocked over to spill, but the sound of the wind and the trees beyond had seemed to find her no matter where she went to wait.
Something she would find herself wandering through early in the morning, she’d long since stopped sleeping well, and bump into without thinking. That had been the first mess she’d had to clean in her own home, in the wee hours of what would become the last day of peace.
The last mess Ella would put to rights simply because she didn’t want to bother anyone, as opposed to how soon there would be no other souls left to bother.
That vase, incidentally and unfortunately, had been a family heirloom of the Foix family, the founders of the nearest hunters’ guild and a vassal house to House Ashmore.
Those charged with keeping the sprawling populace of The Wilderwood from being depleted with a level hand.
They’d, soon enough, develop a new habit of leaving poachers to be picked apart by the forest’s occupants for days, but kept their fondness for both dog breeding and falconry.
Those to be first called forth when something strange rose to shake its shaggy head and terrorize the people.
Ella Ashmore had once thought them to slay monsters.
She’d sought them out first, thinking it could be so simple.
When she’d made a break for their great lodge house in the middle of the night and begged her way to the table of the family’s lady, with her hair like fox fur and her eyes like funeral mounds, the first question to interrupt her unrehearsed plea for aide had been if Ella was at last here to return the vase.
A sneer had developed, potent as a crossbow bolt to a creature’s unguarded throat, and not gone away upon the revelation that it had been broken so long ago and nobody had thought to send word.
Ella had been surprised, at first, that such a look could remain on the face of the Lady Foix even when Ella had long since abandoned standard practice when petitioning on behalf of the truth and had sincerely begun to beg.
Stooping to take the lady’s great skirts, autumnal colors in chestnut and gold beneath a cape of feathers with markings like golden eyes, in her hands as she’d become aware of a familiar step outside the great doors. As her throat had begun to burn, the words desperately tearing free from her, and her eyes had begun to water. All of it overcome by a sneering voice at the imposition of having to come and fetch her wayward charge.
Ella Ashmore would go on to become well-versed in all the ways people might refuse her aide. From those abandoned linens, choking with dust, to the beautiful stillness of the Lady Foix. Those who’d seem a little sad but stay unmoved, those who’d clearly lose any respect for her as she’d asked in the first place, and those who’d sneer in disdain at the indignity of her clutching hands.
But it had been a cruel introduction, to look to those great hunters and realize that help would not be coming from their storied house and its many scions just as her stepmother had been announced and kicked open the sorts of oaken doors that normally took two servants to haul apart.
Incidentally, after their sudden introduction as she’d entered to retrieve her wayward charge, The Lady Foix and the new Lady Ashmore would go on to become great friends. Would start at tea but move to drinks after long hunts, delighting in the tales they might trade about dismembering things and the new age they would enter together.
The poachers’ bodies, picked clean. The approval of great hunts, forays deeper into the Wilderwood than House Ashmore had ever permitted before that would see formerly revered things, unicorns or clutches of nymphs or great spirits whose step might make the land itself tremble, bound and broken and made into jewelry.
Long, uncomfortable nights in a human guise, tight as a strictly laced bodice, until her stepmother would step beyond the threshold and peel her human skin from her body with a satisfied belch (she’d always pluck a falcon or great hound from the premises on her way out for her troubles).
It had been the Lady Foix who would, upon the last anniversary of her husband’s death, gift the Lady Ashmore the latest make of crossbow to replace her tendency (when hunting alone together as something always seemed to frighten the dogs or make the falcons refuse to return when they went out) to run things down on all fours.
Even a troll knew she’d need the occasional human friend to speak on her behalf if someone got suspicious (even as it was a somewhat foreign concept to her, as there was no equivalent word in troll for friend). Just a few, carefully selected, to be kept at a distance. Deemed tolerable.
With the Lady Foix, there had been an unspoken level of understanding between them that only one of them truly comprehended. Not respect, as trolls didn’t have a word for that either, but the closest thing to kinship that would ever exist across the species. Unprecedented in regards to the relations between troll and humankind, a love of violence bound them both together.
Another item in a long list of things which could have been beautiful if given a chance. Like the assembled bouquets, left to their own devices. Impossible to tend due to their number.
All those flowers in House Ashmore, after the servants had all been sacked (a term which meant, for some, being literally thrown into great sacks and kept in the ice house for later) had been left to putrefy under threat of the removal of one’s fingernails.
That had been the scent her stepmother had truly cultivated, the real reason she’d kept all the flowers around. The damp rot of sloughing petals and fetid water left to crowd with gnats. The sort of thing that would lay claim to your hands like a second skin and follow you to town before you covered yourself in worse grime.
It was that sort of scent that now lingered about the great hall, incapable of banishment even as the fire in its grate burned low around a golden pot of homemade remedies, because the scent of magic was as personal and intimate a window into the life of the caster as burying your nose in the nape of their neck and inhaling.
Whoever had cast this spell, laid this trap, stank of rot.
Of ill-intent left to linger long through the dark.
Before now Ella Ashmore had thought all magic smelled of hot metal and sharp, burning things. Like ozone. Lightning. Scalded sugar forgotten in a pot. The sear of unnatural light.
And, beneath that, something long buried. Copper left to go green. Some ancient relic lined with soil like the grave. Something recently resuscitated. Rescued, but not yet washed.
Something that would make your nose bleed when you returned, dizzy from the sudden brightness of the night when compared to absolute dark which had no end, while your gleaming dress sizzled and caused that dribbling to evaporate with a fierce hissing. Just as it would with the drips of condensation that had beaded off a glass she’d been handed.
Where it stayed cool under her hands, but nowhere else.
Where there was light, inevitably, there was heat. A lesson she’d learned quickly.
She’d feared, the first time the prince had gone to place his hands about her waist, that something would burn him. It had been one of the many fears that had clustered around her for that enchanted evening.
Nothing had, of course, but when he’d first commented on how strange she’d smelled with his head pressed close enough for his voice to nestle under her ear (which he might nibble at if so inclined) she hadn’t first thought of that lightning struck, metallic thing that now draped her in anonymity.
She’d instead worried, as she hadn’t washed at the tree, that it had been the blood. The grime. The sweat. Something that stank to high heaven and would send him away as word of her house’s disrepute had done at the riverbed.
People had often said, when she’d gone to town, that they’d smelled her long before they’d seen her. Humiliation had been hot at her face, had long cast her eyes down, and for a moment there could be no dreams. No gifts.
For a moment it was a mistake to have come, to have hoped, at all. Safety once again pried from her hands when she’d only just begun to remember what it had felt like to not have to be afraid.
But the magic had reminded her, out in the air of the veranda with the prince’s servant (who’d have most certainly said something if it had been noticeable) at her side, that it was there. That she was safe. All things unsightly and strange tucked away to perfection while the slippers stayed upon her person. It would be like she was never there.
Here, the magic wasn’t being kind. Wasn’t hiding anything now that its intentions had been brought into the open.
It was a violation. A staking of claim. It had taken something from her, it had meant her ill, and in following the rot of nonexistent flowers she could walk to the exact spot where Tadius had fallen and stop. A room she’d been avoiding at all hours of the day, trying to think of anything else.
She could stand there, as she did in muted fury, and look down to where the presence of the curse was all but announcing itself.
She could see, where none had thought to look beneath the beautifully abandoned things, a thin line of silver.
Caught between two floorboards and held as if waiting for her. The castle reverently offering it to her as a bit of light from the fireplace caught it and held. As the floral rot, like the stench of a limb that would need amputation, remained just as she could still recall the fog that had come over his eyes as he’d stumbled.
She could bend down, blinded to fear in her curiosity, and roll the needle beneath two pinched fingertips. She could pick it up, avoiding the tips, and hold it to the light. A bitter thing with no eye to feed thread through, no humble purpose, it might be better to call it a pin. Something used for tacking an insect to a board, holding a flap of skin apart for a dissection. Longer than anything she might have used to piece a quilt together but flashing beautifully in the light in spite of what it had been brought here to do.
She could see which end, dyed ever so slightly reddish, must have pricked the pad of his finger while the air stank and stank and stank and her heart grew hard.
For as much time as she’d spent contemplating the nature of flowers, all their fecundity and festering, she’d not spent long nearly enough on the thorns.
~*~
He can’t realize how fitting it is that he be ever so slightly miserable at the start of the whole affair. Like waking from sleep with a crick in your lower back from how you’d twisted in the night. On the wrong side of the bed, most assuredly.
Nothing too dire, or complicated enough that it would make him pinch at his nose and contemplate a change in identity. Nothing to make him so miserable.
Just a touch of unhappiness for the sake of the whole illusion’s efficiency. Even in this, something he doesn’t know is wholly based on his own desires, he cannot simply be happy to start with. To do such a thing would be to go against his very nature.
It is a very clever dream and he considered himself to be a rather clever man. It would not be so obvious, so simple, to ensnare him.
He is not king. He cannot be. Nor can he be wholly at peace. He would not take to such things. He’d go mad.
He is, instead, already elbow deep in a problem when he comes back to himself. It makes the whole affair easier to swallow, the answer all the more obvious to the question, “now, what was I doing?” An unspoken buzz at the back of his mind to hurry up now and stop dawdling that left little time for contemplation.
To be fair that was normal for him. It would make sense that he wouldn’t find it strange.
The prince, having spilled a drink on himself just after the ball’s commencement ceremony, needed to be redressed in a completely new ensemble before someone noticed any part of it. So, the longer he tarried the closer it all came to rise to the surface.
His Royal Highness’ absence and therefore tardiness.
His Most Charming Prince’s abysmal manners.
The sudden change in costume not even announced with a musical flourish.
The truth to just who the magnetically charming prince truly was when conversation went on for too long and he turned not to poetry or progeny but pornography.
And so it had fallen to Tadius to see the matter handled promptly.
This wasn’t entirely unexpected.
They’ve actually four changes of clothes stashed in different hideaways across the grounds after previous social outings proved, time and time again, that one simply wouldn’t be enough.
The prince, for his mastery of the right hand technique at the lute and the things he’d seemingly taught himself to do with his tongue, was never too keen on learning lessons the first time. Never came to care about the consequences of the messes he made.
Tadius also can’t know, for how good he is at lying to himself, that for how potently he must have rolled his eyes at the familiar sound of an ensemble being ruined, there was also some small part of him made glad at the utilization of his preparations.
He’ll never know it but this is actually, in some small and twisted part, the way he likes things.
Fixing something simple. A sense of relief, even amidst the wad of tension, that he was here to see it all set to rights.
He can almost enjoy a sense of superiority, when the problem is small enough to not possess its own gravity that might change the state of the very world they lived in. A mistake he could have bet upon.
A job easily done, a gladness that he was here to solve the problem, is as close to a balm to the soul as he is permitted while it is all set to rights again.
The easy, well-worn paths of graceful indignity are familiar enough as the way he walked them to find this hideaway, which the prince had submitted to with little grumbling and no absolutely effort on his part to help put anything on.
Again, the removal of clothes was practically a second language to the personification of their kingdom’s future. He’d simply never possessed a similar devotion for their being put back on.
This is something Tadius has frequently fumed about. Has made pointed eye-contact with tailors over and rolled his eyes at when regarding the whole affair and having to let the prince put both hands on Tadius’ shoulders for balance while helping him step into a pair of stockings. Having to crouch down to tie his garters.
One of the most powerful men alive, the future sword of their nation, and he can’t even put on a shirt without someone telling him to hold his arms still as it needed to be spun around. Can’t manage his own lacings and the buckles at his boots.
For as often as Tadius had taken down great words to paper or been bid to arrange consequential meetings or even occasionally speak on the crown’s behalf, he’s also been bid to strip the old king of sweat stained nightshirts and the prince of yesterday’s clothes that were quite telling in what they’d been through thanks to yesterday’s stains.
He’s never enjoyed playing nursemaid. But he can’t bring himself to hold the anger for long. Especially not on a night like tonight.
After all, it wasn’t like the prince had ever possessed true cause to learn to dress himself. He’d simply been trained this way, to stand and raise his arms over his head without pausing to consider anything he could do on his own.
The world moved around him, and it all was beautiful in the end.
A dissimilar lack of grace would occur whenever someone else went to dress Tadius. To help him into a coat or wordlessly go to manage a button he couldn’t reach on his own.
He couldn’t help the flinch at the hands along his back, the consideration that he could manage it himself, thank you. Just as he’s managing this, what he assumes cannot be the worst thing to occur at the prince’s engagement ball. Something wholly expected.
This is entirely ordinary. This is by design.
They need to hurry, and so he does.
They stand in a closet of mirrors, a cleverly rigged sanctum stationed just off the ballroom for wardrobe malfunctions of this nature.
Technically, there should have been a button-eyed imp lurking about who’d been trained as a tailor and bound by the spilling of blood and the threading of a bone needle to the employ of the royal family.
Nothing spectacularly complicated in the spellcraft, nobody had taught it to bead or designate lace by its city of origin, but certainly a replacer of buttons and mender of tears. A snipper of loose threads who had a purpose but no name.
A creature set to spend its entire existence in this glass pocket, to the point that it had long since secreted away little piles of salvaged threads and scattered buttons or beads, even the occasional stray hair, which it treated with the same reverence as a king’s ransom. Apparently, its collection had grown so much that it had begun to weave little faceless poppets of its wares.
It always remembered names, though it at time had trouble with faces, and approached any and all conversation with such a slathering need that things oft became uncomfortable.
It hadn’t yet seemed to realize that the door to its domain could be opened, but as of late any reference to something beyond bobbins and embroidery had been sought as far off tales of distant wonders. Even if it tried to hide itself within, you could always hear it rustling. The frenetic clicking of its little talons, which it used in place of seam rippers, against the hard bone affixed to its face. Replacing its eyes.
And yet the closet with its glass walls was quiet this evening. As if it had only just crept out of the dark itself.
Tadius had expected to be dodge the imp’s desperate thrill for good conversation and been surprised to find the hideaway quite empty instead.
He makes a note to check in with the warlock who’d bound it, if the little thing was nowhere to be seen, and simply adds this to a long list of worries that never seem to end.
Tadius and the prince are left alone, Tadius with the ruined doublet in black and purple draped on a form for someone to eventually be rid of the stain, and the party murmuring without their presence beyond. Comforting as the voice of a loved one from another room, as even Tadius can’t deny that it has been a beautiful party (for all of four minutes).
He can only hope that it will stay that way.
The prince is ever so subtly fussing with himself while Tadius brushes off his shoulders. There was no telling how long ago this selection had been laid out, and so a little dust has crept along the garment like frost along a windowsill.
The waiting ensemble came with a cape, which the prince normally rolled his eyes at, in a deep and verdant green. A matching circlet, ever so slightly humbler than the mirrored crown the prince favored at these sorts of events, set with a golden gem.
It suits him, Tadius decides, and normally that meant the prince would refuse it. Would see Tadius’ appreciation and consider such things an omen of the unfashionable. But, now, he doesn’t notice. How noble the color makes him appear. How it might speak to a new age dawning when compared to the burgundy and dusky plum hues of his father’s reign. Colors of opulence, of the costliest dyes.
He could have seemed, if caught outside of motion and subtly frowning at the way the tunic’s elegant and pale sleeves dipped onto the backs of his well formed hands, a different man.
He never seemed nervous, theirs was a prince who’d spent more of his life making a fool of himself in public than he’d ever spent alone, but was subtly making adjustments. One of the few outward signs that Tadius has ever recognized that might convey nerves, the slightest drip of concern that he would in fact like this to go well.
He’d seem to be, if met by a stranger, the sort of man who rather looked forward to falling in love. To having all this laid out for him. Who knew what was at stake.
It’s an oddly tender performance for Tadius, who’d assumed the prince hadn’t ever truly conceived of the true weight behind a betrothal such as this one. The final corner he was being backed into one step at a time. The last resort, throwing the doors wide open.
They were out of time, out of options, and Tadius simultaneously feared the results of this evening and had been waiting for them as a man who watched the stars waited to see if he’d accurately calculated the day of an imminent eclipse (but in this case instead of a blood red sky, the event had been foretold by the assembling of towers of oysters and minuscule clouds of meringue).
Tadius had been suffering a perpetual stomach ache about this great occasion throughout its preparation.
He hadn’t been too involved in its arrangement, hadn’t been invited to most of the planning meetings, as his job was mostly to keep the prince from absconding for a life of anonymous pleasure.
It had been an objective that had taken up too much of his time. He’d been having nightmares about this night since its announcement. It is finally here.
He knows this as objective fact but, for the life of him, suddenly can’t name a single thing he’d ever dreamt or feared. A single thing that had truly haunted him. That distant dread is far away as his discontent merely simmers like a familiar kettle hanging over a fire. Hardly more than a murmur.
The green does suit him better, in Tadius’ approximation. Brings out the white in his teeth. Would, eventually, see a golden band sit well on his finger.
The prince gives a smile, as perfectly practiced and carefully cultivated as a work by a master painter, and it is easy for Tadius to give his own restrained one in return.
As much as he hates the prince, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he only hates the things he does and the choices he makes and the poetry he writes and the songs he sings, this is the most mutually amicable sort of moment they can have.
A smile that is objectively beautiful, a creature born entirely of habit, and his man the shadow.
This they’ve done many times before.
And, then, a surprise.
“Thank you, Tadius,” he says and the words are rare enough for Tadius to perhaps attribute them to, perhaps, a moment of growth. Of change.
A trick of the light or passing fancy instead of heartburn or his being swapped out with a changeling at some point in the evening (Tadius had been certain to rule that out by not letting the prince out of his sight for a moment).
A single gleaming iota of omniscience wherein His Highness might see the future stretching forward, the path unspooled behind, and notice who’d been there with him all the while. Who would continue to be there, even once he was married. Who’d actually been ordained, from the moment the old king had announced his son’s having to marry to ascend to the throne, to officiate just in case their only opportunity was a short-lived one.
It is oddly disarming, producing a distinct mote of distant sadness in Tadius’ heart for some reason. An area of himself that he’d long considered off limits to the prince and all his ruinous choices.
A sort of forlorn acknowledgement, as though he’d just gone a long while without seeing the prince, that there could be the occasional thing that could have given him the chance to be likable. Could have made him salvageable if only he’d been given more of a chance.
There would be many things in life a beautiful and wantonly vulgar creature like the prince would deserve and many, painful, things that he would not.
And, for a moment, Tadius feels awash with a pity that almost might have belonged to a stranger. A premonitory sort of thought that the altar and the only girl left to stand at it would be truly monstrous and how the prince’s head, for how handsome it was, could only be so well-attached to the rest of him–.
But that makes no sense.
Here they are, within? There the world is, without? The prince, here, in green? The ball, having only just started? All talk of girls and altars and monstrous things remaining purely hypothetical?
His head, perfectly, sits upon royal shoulders. As it always? Has?
He blinks.
Tadius could simply be giving him too much credit. Simply be falling for an old trick. It happens fewer and fewer times these days as he’s been proven wrong too often and thought he learned his lessons rather well, but in this moment it is easy to consider. To hope that it could somehow all end happily (even for him).
To see the more beautiful option and almost fondly shake his head, leave his hand on the prince’s shoulder for as long as it might take a bird to alight from one branch to another and say, “of course, My Prince.”
To pick a stray bit of string from that noble shoulder and watch perfection settle itself like a well-cast illusion. All morose or strange feelings gone as if they’d never been there in the first place.
A passing confusion. A flight of fancy.
He hasn’t been sleeping well, but he surely will after this.
In this moment, where nothing much has happened, it is easy to believe that the ball will go well when he’d just been considering its catastrophe. Things tend to be easier in motion.
It is easy, as the prince flows out, to take a moment to himself with the mirror.
To make a few adjustments of his own and like the way he looks.
To rake his fingers through his hair and see it fall the way he wants it to. Not to smile, he doesn’t like his smile, but take on a sort of cool disdain. His hands behind his back.
A look that would have one think, before he was handsome, that he was a composite professional.
That he was supposed to be here.
That he belonged amidst that great crowd even without a high birth or lofty title, and someone might, in the moment, think him important enough to approach.
He craves a good conversation the way a cracked tongue begs water. The way a monk might seek the faintest whisper of divinity.
He hasn’t gone so far as to assume he’ll receive such a thing tonight of all nights, but even he can be swept up by some lovely quality about the evening.
He doesn’t know that he is a romantic at heart, beneath the cynicism and all that is proper, but that doesn’t matter. It is known about him, anyway, and will become relevant soon.
He looks rather smart, if he can say so himself, though he doubts very much that anyone at a ball so grand as this one will ever notice (let alone tell him so).
But there is something about the way the mirrors have been set into the walls, both front facing and along the sides as if a great glass creature were reaching to embrace you with both arms, that meant at certain angles he could see reflections of reflections. The sort of effect that might wrap and warp around him.
Something about the way he moves in that trail of repetition that makes it hard to follow. Makes him blink. Once, twice, something strange that he can’t quite keep hold of–. It’s hard to keep his eyes open. Something doesn’t make sense. His hand, when he moves it, looks to be stained with ink for but a moment.
He worries about boot polish, about what in here might have been left on the prince and moves to call after him, before a flash of pain alights at the tip of one finger, and then it’s gone. The stain too. He’d only just opened his mouth to cry out when he realizes there’s no need to. When he stands at the doorway and, already pushes, reveals the beautiful world without. Lets it all come rushing in like so much water.
It’s all hard to follow. He’s trying–. There’s something–.
His head is spinning and, without, the world?
It’s dancing.