LTSV - Lost & Found 51 (Patreon)

Mira wasn’t the only one who’d been busy. 

Vesper had been incommunicado for days. Mira only saw her when her women dragged her back to Rosepark to pass out around midnight in one of the guest suites, which was rapidly becoming ‘Lady Vesper’s Apartment.’ Bertram was no better, except he didn’t show up to sleep in anything so nice as a bed. Nanny had crossed paths with him raiding the kitchens in the dead of night and one time he’d only made it as far as one of the benches in the front hall before he just lay down and slept there, half on the floor, and ended up scaring the absolute shit out of a scullery maid who was up at dawn to feed the salamanders. 

Cecily, meanwhile, had not been to Rosepark since they parted in Princess Millica’s reception room. She’d also been kept occupied for days with public appearances to support Princess Millica, giving testimony at the former Prince Regent’s pre-trials, and personally checking the all remaining Palace staff for mind control before she finally appeared at Mira’s door with a parcel under one arm and a pink patisserie takeaway box in the other. The takeaway box had the gold seal of the heroine’s favorite bakery, Maison de Rosier.

They hadn’t spoken since the day of the aborted coup and the day she’d almost challenged Adra to a duel.

Mira looked down at the box and asked, “Are those rosewater macarons?”

“And a raspberry mousse cake with almond sponge,” Cecily confirmed, holding the box up between them. “Can I come in?”

Fuck, those were all the things she wanted to eat from that place. The game had fantastic food styling; classic mouthwatering anime-style food art that could never be matched in reality. Mira opened the door to let Cecily in. She glanced at one of the bowler hats and asked, “Can you call for tea?”

“Yes’m,” the big buff demon man replied. “White tea or black?”

“Green tea, idiot,” the other big buff demon man growled. “It’s for an afternoon sweet.”

“Green’s too bitter, moron!” the first demon snarled back. “White tea is for fruit-based desserts! Green’s for when you’re eating greasy food!”

Mira held up a hand between their faces before they could finish closing in on one another. “We’ll have the white peony buds, thank you.” She pointed up at the man to her left and then the one on her right. “If you brawl in the corridor again, I will throw you out a window and into the rose hedges. No one will stop me.”

They wilted and muttered, “Yes’m,” in unison, addressing their shoes. 

She made a ‘shoo’ gesture at the one she’d asked and closed the door behind Cecily. 

“Please have a seat,” Mira said, gesturing to the wingback chair next to where she’d been reading. The shadows under it moved and Mira glared. “You shoo, too,” she addressed the room.

“He’s here?” Cecily asked, startled. 

“Not all of him,” Mira replied as she settled herself back into her comfy seat. “He leaves a bit of his matter around in case I need something, but her Highness is keeping him busy today. The Bowler Hats outside are keeping an ear out in case they hear me fall.”

“Well, that’s something,” Cecily huffed and kicked the tendril of shadow matter that tried to startle her by poking her ankle as she sat. “First of all, I have a parcel for you from Mama.”

“For me?” Mira asked as she accepted the paper-wrapped parcel. The packing paper was light pink and had been tied with a sprig of dried meadow flowers. “Are you sure it wasn’t for you?”

“She sent one for me, one for you, one for Vesper, and one for Viola,” Cecily explained. “I already opened mine. She knit me this sweater and sent me my favorite butter cookies to have with an herbal tea she dried herself. Yours should have a letter in it too.”

Mira cocked a brow at the news that she and Vesper merited parcels. It was less surprising that Viola got something. She was still under house arrest at Lyonhall. Princess Millica had no reason to think that she was complicit in her mother’s collusion with Huranel the Usurper. It was more that no one knew what to do with her, yet. 

Mira’s hunch that Madame had snitched to the former Prince Regent about Cecily’s ascension to Saintess had turned out to be correct, but Madame wasn’t among his mind controlled agents. It turned out that the Sheppards were deep in debt and the former Prince Regent owned all her father’s IOUs. Some of those IOUs were even Madame’s, taken out in her name by her father when people stopped lending him money.

Bertram had already filed for a separation. Mira didn’t understand the particulars, but there were rules against any territory lords or their direct family members carrying debt, which was how the Usurper had been controlling her. Mira had been a little conflicted about Bertram’s decision until Vesper pulled her aside to explain that Bertram hadn’t originally been looking for a third marriage. That marriage happened after he overindulged at a house party, when some friends had taken him out to distract him from the stress and worry over his second wife's complicated pregnancy with Violet, and he woke up in the same bedroom as Madame. That was how Cecily had been conceived and why his third marriage had taken place at such speed, following the death of Violet’s mother. 

That incident was also, Vesper explained, the reason why their father now refused to drink anymore except in very select company. 

There was no proof that Madame had been sent into Bertram’s house by Huranel, but the Usurper had already owned the Sheppards’ assorted debts by then so it had always been a possibility that weighed on Bertram’s mind. The debts in Madame’s name were only taken out after she married, presumably so Huranel could keep a tight leash on her. That said, Mira didn’t think that Madame would end up going to the block with her master. A good lawyer could make the case that she and her family were serving the Usurper under duress and they wouldn’t have been wrong. Avenon law made allowances for treason by reason of extortion, but the only thing they would be spared from was execution. All their titles and properties would be forfeit and they’d be exiled to the northern frontier, where they’d have to take their chances with the monsters. Madame’s situation was less clear, since she had been doubly extorted, but she wouldn’t escape unscathed.

Viola was now in limbo. She was a minor and not technically a Sheppard. She had had no personal contact with the Usurper, so she would not be charged with treason along with her ‘maternal’ family. The only problem was that Sir Rousseau certainly wasn’t about to take her in, now that she was a political hot potato and her grandparents weren’t answering anyone’s letters. For the moment, the Crown Princess was keeping her in custody just so that Bertram and Vesper wouldn’t be in a position where they felt like they had to take her in again. 

Rather than think about that, Mira opened the parcel. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but what she found was an exquisite set of lace gloves and a fine knitted shawl that felt like cashmere or merino wool. She also found a little rectangular cushion, about the size of an eye pillow, that was full of hard little pellets.

“That one is full of polished cherry pits,” Cecily explained. “You can warm it up and lay it over your face when your head hurts. Mama told me that some of the ladies at the hospital who struggled with complications from old head injuries swear by them when they have a headache.”

“How kind of her,” Mira said, feeling bemused. She opened the letter and it was written in a very pretty script with big loops and ornamental swashes that didn’t detract from the legibility of the handwriting. Reading the letter made it clear that Lady Carolina did not see herself as having had her daughter replaced, instead she seemed to believe that she now had three additional children and was eager to get to know them.

‘I wish Violet had lived to see this,’ Mira thought, not for the first time, as she took in the feel of a mother’s love, freely offered, through the pages in her hand. ‘Or that she sees this through me.’

She was no longer as certain as she once had been that she just inherited the lives, bodies, and grievances of the young women she lived in place of. She kept flashing back to that glimpse of her past eternity that the Veiled Goddess had shown her. 

IT WAS TOO SAD, She’d said, SO WE CHANGED IT.

Violet could easily have been one of the girls in those past lives. She’d been an Archmage trainee long before Mira inherited her life and family and Mira had always been something special in all her incarnations, before the long-term consequences of being too special caught up to her. Mira was starting to think that she had been inheriting her own lives, all this time. She knew that she was reborn alongside Melody and the others. It might be that all her memories of being ‘Mira’ slept inside her reincarnated soul until she was in danger bad enough to die of it and that was when she would ‘wake up’ to save herself. 

If that were true, then it meant that Mira wasn’t just an immortal thing inhabiting Cecily’s sister’s body like a spiritual hermit crab. That would mean that Vesper was Mira’s real sister and Bertram was her real father. 

She couldn’t tell if she really thought that was true or just wanted it to be true. That was a question she might spend the rest of her lives trying to answer.

Adra’s Bowler Hat, the white tea enthusiast, brought a tea service with perfectly steeped tea. Mira thanked him with a smile and let him go back to the corridor to snip with his counterpart. 

“Mira, what was his name?” Cecily whispered, as soon as he was gone. “I would swear he worked in the carriage house at home, but I never learned his name.”

“That’s not him,” Mira sighed. “The stablehand is shorter and none of them will say what their names are. They call each other by numbers. I think it’s cultural.”

That was a bit of a lie, but the truth wasn’t Cecily’s business. The demons in her first life had used names with her, but Adra had explained that there’d been a cultural change in the millennia since she’d lived among demons. They were multiplanar creatures, a bit like Ghost Drakes, and had experienced a growing problem with weaker demons being summoned to other realities and being unable to get home by themselves. As a consequence, any demon who couldn’t planeswalk under their own power now hid their names and used callsigns among themselves. Being able to use your name openly had become a status symbol among demons and the Bowler Hats were not powerful spellcasters. They were physical fighters and had to rely on upper level demons to transport them between planes.

Cecily went quiet and occupied herself with unboxing the desserts for a little bit. “Do you…” her voice broke on a squeak. “...has he…” Cecily turned pink. “He told you his real name?” she managed at last.

Mira squinted at her and realized something she possibly should have before now; Cecily didn’t know that Mira also had her past memories. Cecily would have only just grasped the idea that Mira and Alanamira were the same soul right as the Veiled Goddess dismissed them. She might well have thought that she was talking to a vision, rather than a person. 

“Melody,” Mira drew her shoulders back and deliberately shrugged on the deportment of a Princess. “I know who I’m talking to. Do you?”

Cecily’s eyes flew wide and the tea cup in her hand clattered into its saucer. Thankfully, she hadn’t poured herself anything yet. “Your Highness?” she breathed. 

“I’ve been many, many people since then,” Mira said because a plain ‘yes’ felt awkward. “...but, yes. Once upon a time, I was the Dark Queen Alanamira the First. It’s a consequence of how I died back then. I retain the memories of all my subsequent lives.”

A hidden hand caressed the back of her neck, hidden by her hair, perhaps to remind her that she was still the Dark Queen, Alanamira the First, insofar as he was concerned. 

“Then, you remember what I—what Melody and the others did?” Cecily asked, sounding small.

“I was there for all of it,” Mira agreed. “I even remember that infernal statue of me in the Royal Gardens.”

Cecily frowned and got that distant look again as she struggled to remember. Then she frowned for a different reason. “Was—was it a bronze statue?” she asked. 

“Don’t try and recall it,” Mira said before Cecily fully recovered an image of Alanamira being depicted as a limp figure in the clutches of a winged gargoyle thing with her nightgown torn down the front. The brass tarnished over the years, except for her lips and the tops of her breasts, which remained a bright gold. 

“Oh nooo,” Cecily gasped as the memory hit and she covered her mouth with both hands. 

Mira rubbed her temples. “We don’t need to discuss the particulars,” she said.