LTSV - Lost & Found 22 (Patreon)

Mira didn’t wake up again until well after dark. She was in a very Dickensian hospital room with plain, utilitarian furniture and the smell of carbolic acid in the air, but at least her bed had the virtue of not being in an open ward. 

Vesper was asleep in a faded wingback chair opposite Mira’s bed. Cecily was sitting on the floor with her head in Vesper’s lap. They were both covered with thin hospital grade blankets.

Mira startled when a patch of shadow near the door asked, “Are you awake, miss?” and Colvin stepped out of it. 

He looked like crap. He’d lost his jacket somewhere and the starch in his shirt had wilted long ago, leaving him looking like he’d slept in his clothes, although he clearly had not slept at all. He looked tired and worried and something about that brought tears to Mira’s eye. This was not how she would have wanted to learn that she only had tear ducts still on one side.

Colvin crossed the room in response to her first hitching sob. He produced a handkerchief and stroked her back as all Violet’s feelings came pouring out of her on top of her own frustration and helplessness.

“This is b-bullshit!” she gasped once the worst of it was past, so upset and pissed off that she forgot to screen her language for the current setting. “I s-should not b-be this fragile!”

Colvin took the kerchief away from her before she tore it in half and used it to dry her face. “This is not what fragility looks like,” he told her. “You’re alive when someone else might not be. How are you feeling?”

“Like I was run down by a cart horse,” she sighed and flopped over on her back. “Do we know what happened?”

He settled down on his heels so that they were at eye level and answered, “Miss Cecily thinks you might have seen the fourth prince right before the attack hit.”

“I think it was already coming on before that,” Mira admitted. “My feelings were becoming overwhelming for no reason and I think that happened last time as well. I did get some upsetting memories back, though. That couldn’t have helped.” She squinted up at the ceiling, trying to recall. “Did she say the inscription was amplifying the seizure?”

“It’s a theory,” Colvin said. “The doctors aren’t sure yet. His highness’s presence at the scene complicates matters since, as you say, he stimulated your memory.” He paused with his mouth in an unhappy twist. “May I ask…?”

“He was a terrible fiance,” Mira said bluntly. “I’m glad I don’t have to marry him.”

“You were clutching your face at one point during the episode,” Colvin said, very clearly trying to be gentle. “You screamed like you were dying.”

Huh.

Mira had absolutely no recollection of that. What else was she missing?

“I remembered the acid attack,” she said bluntly. “Some of it. I don’t remember my attacker exactly, but they were connected to him somehow. I think that person was also the one who startled my pony. I remember someone standing outside my bedroom window and saying that it would be worse next time if I didn’t behave. That memory triggered another memory of the acid attack, so it must have been the same person.”

Colvin covered his mouth with one hand and dropped his gaze for a little bit. Something about the watery light of the moon seeping into the room through the curtains made it look a bit like his red eyes were glowing in the moonlight. That wasn’t possible, of course, humans didn’t come with photo-emitters in their irises. 

“It was Prince Andrei’s valet and childhood playmate,” Colvin explained after a while. His voice sounded hoarse. “This happened during a house party that the fourth prince was obligated to attend as your fiance. You two had an argument earlier in the day, shortly before ponies were brought out for the children to ride and that was when you fell. There was a maid sleeping by your bed that night on the side opposite from the window who heard him when he threatened you and she reported it to Lady Vesper.”

“What happened from there?” Mira asked, trying to match the story up to the disjointed scenes floating in her head. 

Colvin snorted, “Vesper informed Prince Andrei’s steward that if the boy was ever seen on Coventry land again then it would be the last time he would be seen anywhere. They locked up the valet straightaway, but— then he escaped.”

“Escaped and got his hands on some acid?” she guessed.

Colvin nodded gravely. “There was a poorly secured supply of vitriol in the barracks attached to Fort Nightfall,” he said.

Mira squinted as she recalled that Fort Nightfall was the name of the Lord Warden’s seat of power. It was equal parts estate and fortress so it made sense that they might have sulfuric acid hanging around where a cruel child could get his hands on it.

At least that answered the question of why her head injury was never properly treated. The acid attack happened so soon afterwards that they’d likely had to prioritize the acid burn. Her caregivers might have even forgotten about the first incident in the wake of the second until it was too late.

“I was wondering what could have happened that took both my entire eye and the whole ear canal,” Mira sighed. “I was turning away from him when it happened. It must have hit my ear full on.”

“You were getting up to run,” Colvin confirmed. “Madame Coventry, two maids, and your nanny were present when it happened and he was still shouting at you when the guardsmen responded to the screaming. Lady Vesper had him executed that same day.”

Mira was past being ashamed about feeling relief to hear that someone who wanted to hurt her was dead. The only thing she could possibly have to say about the valet’s ignominious end was ‘good riddance.’ Instead, she got distracted by something else.”Does Vesper have the right of summary execution?”

“Only within the grounds of Nightfall Keep and in father’s absence,” Vesper replied groggily from her chair as she sat up. Cecily didn’t wake up and Mira wasn’t surprised. She could remember now, just how hard the girl had been working to keep Mira’s seizure from turning lethal. Cecily would probably sleep through the night and most of tomorrow. Even then, she’d likely only wake up enough to eat and then go back to sleep. She’d worked hard. “And only if there is overwhelming proof of the crime, as there was.”

“What did Andrei have to say about his servant?” Mira asked. He had a lot more nerve than she’d realized to give her any attitude at all for the rest of their lives, much less publicly denounce her as a bully based on no proof whatsoever. 

“He’s never commented,” Vesper sighed. She gently extracted herself from underneath Cecily’s head, propping the sleeping girl up against the side of her chair. “I had always thought he knew, but my time in Princess Milica’s service now makes me think otherwise.”

“The fourth prince’s household has been known to insulate him from upsetting news,” Colvin added. He sounded sour about it too. “Even at the expense of him unwittingly being an ass about it later.”

Vesper nodded and came over to sit on the edge of Mira’s bed. “It’s possible he never knew about the incident at all, just that his valet vanished,” she said after searching Mira’s expression for a while. “You were kept at home for years afterwards, undergoing reconstructive surgeries and recuperating. The Prince Regent would always make his son visit you if he heard you were sick so papa told everyone that you had gone to study abroad.”

Mira covered her face with both hands and tried to make sense of all that, but all she said out loud was, “What happens now?”

000

What happened was that she was kept in the hospital for another three days. Vesper couldn’t stay and Cecily was suffering from magical overexertion so Colvin received permission to stay in the hospital room with her. He had, evidently, been ejected from the hospital grounds multiple times that first night after visiting hours were over and then would just sneak back in through a window so it was more effort than it was worth to try and keep him out. 

This was the first time he’d dealt with her immediately following a seizure, but Colvin had gotten instruction from Anna because he balked at nothing, not even helping her drink or use the water closet during a period where her coordination had, once again, been set back to that of a toddler with cerebral palsy. 

Mira’s first inscription was removed through the application of a magically-charged herbal bath and Colvin was there for that too, holding her head just enough out of the water so her face didn’t get wet. Her care team went through two more permutations of the inscription before they found one that wasn’t complicated by her head wound.

In the meantime, Nanny brought her flowers, better food than the hospital had on offer, and fresh clothing for Colvin. Men in bowler hats watched her door and stopped a journalist who tried to enter during visiting hours during the second day of her stay. He wasn’t dressed up as a nurse or anything so Mira made the executive decision to let him in. It was time to take control of her personal story in the news, otherwise who knew how that whole debacle would spin out of control in the papers.

When he entered, Mira realized it was the same journalist who had been standing across from the carriage. He had a bland everyman sort of appearance that had to serve him well in his career, but had at least dressed a bit more nicely today than when she’d seen him last. Only his scuffed shoes gave him away as the type of writer who had to chase his stories. 

“I’m Adam Greer, with the Capitol Gazette,” he introduced himself and took off his hat to reveal a receding hairline. “Thank you for agreeing to see me, Lady Coventry.”

What a coincidence. This was exactly the reporter she’d wanted to see the most. 

Just that morning, Mira had tested her latest inscription under Doctor Padre’s direct supervision by reading a newspaper. That paper was the Capitol Gazette and the front page article had been written by the man in front of her. It had been a shallow recap of Mira’s incident in the street, sort of an update to the saga of the fourth prince’s marital woes. 

However, the article itself was surprisingly sympathetic towards Mira. Most of the content focused on Cecily and Andrei’s love affair. Andrei especially did not come out of the article unscathed as Greer spent most of his word count critiquing the fourth prince for having to be physically removed from the situation when Miss Rousseau was engaged in life-preserving spellwork so Cecily didn’t come out looking bad either.

In retrospect, Mira should have realized something like this would happen. In the second game, there was always an event of some kind in the beginning where Cecily had a conflict with her chosen love interest from the first game that resulted in a cooling off period where the player could pick another route to play without looking like an amoral asshole. Andrei’s breakup scene had been something else, but Mira had been changing the plot by a lot and it was about time for that to happen.

“My lady should not be distressed at this point in her recovery,” Colvin interjected. Somehow he seemed to grow taller as he loomed over Mister Greer. “Am I understood?”

Greer blinked up at him and swallowed hard. “Of course, I understand that I came without an appointment.”

“You may ask a few questions, but any longer interviews will need to be scheduled through me in the future,” Colvin continued, not letting up even a little bit. That, however, didn’t go how Colvin maybe thought it would.

Greer brightened up, “Lady Coventry is open to an interview?”