TheresiaBaru Rewrite: CHAPTER 04: OLEANDER: WHAT THE ROAD TOOK (Patreon)

The oleander is the handsomest shrub that will grow in poor soil, and every part of it is poison, down to the smoke it makes when it burns. Travellers plant it along roads because it needs nothing and flowers all summer. Children are told to admire it from a distance, and children do not listen, and that is why the old name for it in the southern provinces is the roadside widow.

It was her mother's idea, and it took her mother four months to arrange it.

Theresia understood that only afterward, when she went back through the calendar in her head looking for somebody to blame and found her mother's handwriting all over it. A letter in the autumn moving a tenants' assembly. A quiet word with Thames about the muster schedule. A conversation with the steward in November about the state of the north road, which had seemed at the time to be about gravel.

Tishua van Astrea had spent an entire season quietly clearing a single day, the way a woman clears a table, and she had not told anybody what she was clearing it for until it was already done and could not be argued with.

"We are going to Vellhorn," she announced at breakfast in the second week of spring. "All of us. On the ninth."

Her husband looked up from a dispatch.

"On the ninth I am—"

"On the ninth you are free," said Tishua, "because I have made you free. I have been making you free since December. Do not spoil it."

There was a pause, and then Veltol van Astrea put the dispatch face down on the table, which Theresia had never once seen him do, and said, "Then I am free on the ninth," and went back to his eggs, and that was the whole of the negotiation.

Vellhorn was the nearest thing to a city within a day of the estate: forty thousand people in a bowl of hills, with a river running through the middle of it and a bridge market that had been operating continuously for two hundred and eleven years. Theresia had read about it. She had read the tax returns for it, which she suspected was not how most seven year olds encountered a city.

She had never been.

That was the thing her mother had noticed, and nobody else had, and it was not really about Vellhorn at all.

Theresia van Astrea, national treasure of the kingdom of Lugunica, had not left the estate grounds in nineteen months. Not once. The world came to her, in carriages, with letters and folders and proposals, and she received it in the study and the long hall and the kitchens, and in between she went out to the garden and put her hands in the dirt, and the entire circumference of her existence was about eleven hundred paces across.

Her mother had watched that happen and had said nothing, because saying something would have made it a matter, and instead had spent four months making a day.

"You will want a coat," Tishua said, over the rim of her cup. "The good one. And do not bring a book."

"I might need a book."

"You will not need a book. You will look at things. That is the whole of the exercise."

—=<>=—

The morning of the ninth was cold and clear and entirely without any sign at all.

She checked, afterward. She went over it a thousand times and there had been nothing. The sky was blue. The frost was still on the grass in the long shadow of the stable block when they came out, and it went as the sun came round, and there was a smell of woodsmoke off the estate village. The escort was eight men under a captain called Oren who had been at the house since before Thames was born and who let her sit on the guardroom bench and eat their nuts.

Carlan had wanted to come and had been told no, because there was a tutor.

That was the part she could never entirely get past. There had been a spare place in the carriage, and an argument about a tutor, and a nine year old boy sulking on the steps, and because of a tutor, Carlan van Astrea lived to be thirty one.

The carriage was the good one, with the family crest small on the door, because her father disliked the large one and had said so publicly enough times that the wheelwright had given up.

They went out through the gate at a little after eight.

The road ran north east along the shoulder of the valley for two hours and then dropped through woodland into the Vellhorn bowl. It was a good road. It had been a good road since her great grandfather's time and there were stones along it with the distances cut into them, worn shallow, furred with moss on the northern faces.

Theresia sat in the middle of the seat between her parents, which she had not planned and which happened because her mother sat down first on the left and her father sat down second on the right and neither of them appeared to consider any other arrangement.

Her mother talked for most of the first hour.

She talked about the bridge market, which had four hundred stalls and a guild that was older than the Crown, and about a woman there who dyed wool in a blue that could not be got anywhere else in the country and would not say how. She talked about the fabric halls, and about a bolt of something green she had seen eleven years ago and thought about since. She talked about the pastry sellers on the south end, and the fact that there was a man who sold nothing but three kinds of pickled fish and had made enough money out of it to put two sons through a scriptorium.

"You will like the fish man," she said. "He is extremely rude."

"Why are we going to see a rude fish man?"

"Because rude people who are good at one thing are the most interesting people in any city, and everybody polite is the same everywhere." Her mother smoothed her skirt. "And because I want to see what you make of him."

"That is not a day out. That is an examination."

"Everything is an examination, sweetheart. I am simply honest about it."

Her father, on the other side, had his head back against the panelling with his eyes shut, and he said, without opening them, "She is going to buy things."

"I am not going to buy things."

"She is going to buy things," Veltol said to the ceiling of the carriage, "and she is going to say that they are for the house, and then in four years I am going to find them in a box in the west wing with the paper still on. This has happened eleven times."

"Nine."

"Eleven. I counted." He opened one eye. "And you, small one, are going to be worse than she is. I can see it already. You have expensive taste and you have not found out about it yet. One day some poor man is going to have to pay for all of this and he has my sympathy in advance."

"I earn my own money," said Theresia.

"Oh," said her father, "she earns her own money," and her mother laughed so hard she had to put a hand against the window frame, and Theresia sat between the two of them with her arms folded and her ears hot and felt, for about ninety continuous minutes, entirely and uncomplicatedly happy.

She wanted that on the record.

She had spent seven years being ironic in her own head, and holding things at arm's length, and narrating her own life to herself as though she were watching it, and for ninety minutes on the north road on the ninth of spring she did none of those things. She was warm, and slightly squashed, and she was being teased by two people who loved her, and she was looking forward to a rude fish man.

She was happy. It was the last time for eleven years.

—=<>=—

The road went into the woodland about forty minutes short of the city.

It was old growth, close on both sides, the trunks going up thirty metres before they bothered with branches, and the light came down in long green columns with dust turning in them. The wheels went quiet on the leaf mould. The whole sound of the world dropped by half.

And there were no birds.

Theresia noticed it. That was the thing she could never forgive herself for, and it sat alongside all the other things she could never forgive herself for, in a room that was getting crowded.

She noticed that the wood had gone silent, and she noticed that Captain Oren had brought his ground dragon up level with the carriage window and was riding there instead of ahead, and she noticed that the man's hand had moved to sit on top of his sword hilt rather than beside it, and she looked at all three of those facts, and she thought: how nice, it is peaceful here.

She was seven. She had read six hundred books and understood nothing.

Her father had stopped talking about four minutes earlier. She noticed that too, later, when she went through it. He had stopped mid sentence and had not finished the sentence, and he had turned his head very slightly toward the window and left it there.

The first thing that happened was that the  ground dragons screamed.

Not screeched. There is a difference, and she had not known there was a difference until that afternoon, and afterward she could not hear a ground dragon make any sound at all without her hands going cold.

The carriage lurched, dropped, came up hard on one side, and slammed back down. Theresia went into her mother's shoulder and her mother's arm came across her chest like a bar. There was shouting outside, several men, none of it words.

And then a sound came through the panel beside her head that she had no category for, a heavy wet impact and a crack after it, and something warm hit the outside of the window and ran down it.

Her mother said her father's name once, in a voice Theresia had never heard her use.

He was already moving.

He came up off the seat with an economy of motion that did not belong to the man who had been lying back with his eyes closed and telling jokes about pickled fish. His sword was out before he had straightened. He did not look at either of them.

"Stay inside," he said. "Both of you. Whatever you hear. Whatever it sounds like."

And then he did look, and it was at Theresia, and only for about half a second, and there was nothing in his face at all.

Then he shouldered the door open and went out into it.

She saw what was on the road for perhaps four seconds before her mother pulled her down.

Four seconds was enough.

They were called MaBeasts, which was a word the world used the way people use a word for weather, and she had read the standard text on them and had privately thought it hysterical. Ordinary animals, the book said, altered by exposure to concentrated mana over generations, growing larger and faster and hungrier and losing every instinct except the hunger. Not demons. Not spirits. Just wolves, if wolves were the size of ponies and had too many joints in the legs and did not stop when they were wounded.

There were nine of them on the road.

One was on the lead ground dragon, which was down and still thrashing. Two were working at the escort from the flank with a coordination that no wolf has any business having. The rest were coming up the road at a flat run with their heads low.

A man she had known since she was two years old went past the window backward with his arm in the wrong place.

Her mother's hand came down on the back of her head and pushed her into her lap, and everything after that was sound.

Steel and shouting. Her father's voice giving orders, twice, short, and both times the shouting reorganised itself around him. The ground dragons. A man calling for his mother, which she had read about in books and had assumed was a literary convention. The particular noise a thing makes when it is hit hard enough through armour, which is not a clang. It is duller than that, and worse.

And underneath all of it, the smell coming in through the broken window: iron, and wet fur, and something underneath the iron that was sweeter.

Theresia Astrea stopped being present at that point.

She was not unconscious. She was entirely awake and her eyes were open against the wool of her mother's skirt and she could hear every single thing that was happening.

She simply was not there.

She was on tile. She was standing eleven metres from a woman in a coat the wrong colour, with her hands open at her sides, in pale flat light coming off a great deal of glass, and there was a noise going through the front of her ribs, and she was not moving. She was not going to move. She was going to stand there and be alive and go on being alive for eighteen months and then die on a floor and it would not fix anything, and now she was here, and it was happening again, and she was doing exactly the same thing.

"Theresia."

Her mother was shaking her. She registered it from a long way off, the way you register somebody knocking at a door in another part of a house.

"Theresia, look at me. Sweetheart. Look at me."

She could not. Her eyes were open and her eyes were not hers.

Something struck the side of the carriage hard enough to lift it.

—=<>=—

Afterward, she could never establish the order of what came next, and she spent years trying, because she had a sense that if she could only get the sequence right it would mean something.

She remembered the door being wrenched open, and light coming in.

She remembered her father filling it. He had lost his hat and the left side of his coat was gone and there was a great deal on him that was not his. He had his sword in his right hand low and back, and his left hand came in and got a fistful of her mother's sleeve and a fistful of Theresia's collar together, and he did not so much push them as place them, hard, into the far corner of the compartment, the way a man stows cargo in weather.

She remembered that he looked at her again then, and that this time there was something in his face, and that she did not have a name for it at seven and would not have one for years.

She remembered the wound.

It was low on his left side, under where the coat had been, and it was not the sort of wound that people in stories have. It was not a line. It was a place where the shape of him had been changed, and it was moving when he breathed, and he was standing in the doorway of a carriage giving orders in a level voice with it there.

She remembered thinking, with total clarity and no emotion whatsoever: that is going to kill him.

And she remembered that he knew that. She was certain of it. She had watched him look down once, very briefly, in the way a man checks the time, and then go back to what he was doing.

"Oren," he said, over his shoulder. "Cut the traces on the dead one and get them out. Now."

"My lord, if you—"

"Now!"

He turned back into the doorway. He braced his right hand on the frame, and his hand left a print there that the carriage builder was never able to get out of the wood, and thirty years later Theresia van Astrea would still be able to walk into the coach house and put her own hand inside the outline of it.

"Tishua," he said.

"No."

"Tishua. Take her home."

"Veltol, get in the carriage."

"Take her home," he said, "and do not let her look."

And then he stepped back and swung the door shut with his own hand, and the latch went over, and the carriage went from a room with three people in it to a room with two.

The whip cracked. The remaining ground dragons went from nothing to everything in about a second and a half, and the carriage came up on two wheels at the first bend and stayed there for long enough to be a decision, and Theresia was thrown across her mother's lap and held there.

Her mother's arms were locked around her so tightly that she could not get a full breath, and it hurt, and there were going to be marks on her ribs for four days.

Under her cheek, through the wool and the whalebone and the layer of skin, her mother's heart was going so fast and so hard that it did not sound like a heart. It sounded like something running.

Neither of them said anything at all for two hours.

—=<>=—

He did not come back that night.

They sat up for him. That was how it was done, apparently. Her mother did not give an order about it and nobody asked; the house simply organised itself into a shape that involved lamps being lit in rooms nobody was using and the front doors standing unbarred and a boy posted at the gatehouse who was relieved every three hours and who was seven years older than Theresia and wept when he was relieved.

Thames rode out with eleven men at five in the afternoon, before the physician had finished with his mother's hands, and Theresia was standing at the top of the steps when he went and he did not look at her.

Karan went at first light with more.

They found Oren. They found four of the eight, and the wreck of the lead ground dragons, and a great deal of the road churned up, and six dead MaBeasts inside a space about nine metres across, which the men who saw it talked about for the rest of their lives in a particular flat way.

They did not find her father.

That was a thing she had not known could happen. She had assumed, in some part of herself that had never been examined, that death produced a body, that this was simply one of the rules. It turned out not to be a rule. It turned out that a man could go out of a carriage door on a Tuesday and simply not be anywhere afterward, and that the world would go on having the same number of hours in it.

They searched for nine days.

On the fourth day a knight of the household came up the drive at a walk rather than a canter, which Theresia understood the moment she saw it from the window, and dismounted, and stood in the hall with his helmet under his arm while the steward went to fetch her mother, and did not sit down when he was offered a chair.

She was not supposed to be in the gallery above. She was in the gallery above.

"My lady," he said. "Lord Astrea fell in the defence of his wife and daughter. He did not withdraw. The men who came back came back because he did not."

Her mother said, "Thank you," and her voice was perfectly steady, and she asked three questions about the disposition of the other families and the pensions due to them, and she asked them in order, and she got the answers, and she thanked him again.

Then she went upstairs and closed the door of her own room and Theresia did not see her for two days.

—=<>=—

They buried a box.

That was the part nobody had prepared her for either. There was a service, because there had to be a service, and the kingdom sent a man, and half the province came, and the box went into the ground in the family plot at the edge of the garden under the yews, where eleven generations of red haired men were already lying with their identical expressions, and the box had his sword belt in it and a letter from the King and nothing else.

Theresia stood between Carlan and Casiles in a black dress that had been made for her in four days and watched them shovel earth onto a box containing a belt.

The sound of the first spadeful going in was very loud. She thought, distantly, that she would probably never forget that sound, and she was correct.

And standing there, with her hands in front of her and her chin up and her face doing the thing that faces do at funerals, she finally understood the reckoning.

She had spent seven years resenting it. She had lain in a crib at eleven months old and felt her father's warmth slide off his face and something else come up underneath it, something that measured, and she had decided that she was being appraised. That she was an asset with an entry in a ledger. That the affection was real but that it sat on top of a calculation about what she might be worth to the house.

That was not what it was. She saw it in one piece, standing in the wet grass, far too late and in entirely the wrong order.

He had been measuring the world.

He had looked at her on the first night of her life, when she was nine minutes old and screaming, and he had begun totalling up what it was going to cost to keep her in it. That was the sum he had been running every fortnight for seven years, in the middle of sentences, in the nursery, over the top of her head. Not what is she worth. What will this take. Every time he looked at her he was pricing the thing, and the price had been going up the entire time, and on the ninth of spring on the north road he had looked at the bill and paid it without any visible change of expression, because he had known the figure for years and had simply been waiting to be presented with it.

He had not been cold. He had been keeping accounts. He had been keeping them since the first minute, so that when the day came, he would not need to think.

I could have asked you, she thought, looking at the box. Any time in seven years I could have asked you what you were thinking about, and you would have told me, because you told me everything, and I never asked you once because I had decided I already knew.

Somebody put a hand on her shoulder. She did not look to see who.

There was a reception afterward, in the long hall, with food that she had designed.

She stood at the edge of it for eleven minutes while three hundred people ate flatbread off silver and told one another that Veltol van Astrea had been a great man and a fine soldier and that it was a mercy it had been quick, and one of them, a lord from the west whose name she never learned and never wanted to, crouched down in front of her with his hands on his knees and said that she must be very brave now for her mother's sake.

Theresia looked at him.

Then she walked out of the hall, and up the west stairs, and down the corridor, and into her own room, and shut the door.

She did not open it again for four months.

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