LTSV - Lost & Found 60 (Patreon)

For once, Bertram came further into the building than the dining room or nearest soft surface. Mira took everyone up to her formal sitting room and dismissed all the servants (including Anna and Nanny, who’d just realized that she’d breached containment and were not happy with her about it.)

Mira was pouring tea and trying to get Bertram to eat something so he’d stop staring blankly into the middle distance, when Alan popped a squat next to her with a wide, infectious grin and asked, “Senior, I noticed you were in the middle of doing something once you had his former highness on the ground. Do you mind sharing with me?”

She stared at him, trying to gauge his sincerity. Alan was still primarily Cecily’s friend, right? So why was he talking to her like they were friends too? He never even crossed paths with Violet in the game aside from a few scenes where she showed up as the school Prefect and they had no dialogue together. 

Well, fuck it. She might as well explain. He didn’t look like he was going to leave her alone, otherwise.

“I was going to stomp on his groin and watch him fold like a hinge.” 

Alan burst out laughing and Bertram did a spittake of his tea. “Mira!” he shouted. 

Oh no, he and Cecily sounded just like one another when they did that. 

Mira turned a wide, guileless look on her father and noticed that Adra was snickering behind his back. “Yes, Papa?” she asked, sweetly. If this was what pulled him out of his head then she was going to milk the conversation for all it was worth. 

He stared at her for a moment before clearing his throat. “I am very sure Nanny Byrde taught you that ladies don’t start fights,” he said after he’d gathered himself.

One of Violet’s memories popped up and played like a short reel in her mind’s eye. Nanny had said that. She’d said some other things too, though. Mira chuckled and stood up to press a kiss to her father’s forehead. “She did something to that effect,” she agreed and then finished with, “...she also told me that ladies finish fights when one happens anyway.”

“Young lady, you aren’t as funny as you think you are,” Bertram harrumphed, but he was also smiling. 

“I’m hilarious,” she disagreed. 

Bertram sobered and glanced at Alan and William. “Gentlemen, may I have a private word with my daughter?” He looked at Adra. “You too, Adelram. I’ll call for you if necessary.”

Adra cocked a pale brow at him, but escorted Alan and William into the hallway. Obviously, some shadow matter darted under the furniture and into her skirts. Mira didn’t think he’d actually leave her alone.

Bertram cleared his throat and leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees with his hands folded. “I suppose we ought to talk about what happened in the prison.”

Mira felt a chill. She’d thought, for a moment, that the revelation of Madame’s many indiscretions had buried her little moment of villainy in the prison. In retrospect, she might have gotten carried away on the tide of how good she’d been feeling of late and her victory over Andrei. It was possible that she’d let a few old habits slip the net of her control.

“I suppose we ought to, yes,” she agreed, wilting. 

Hopefully, she could get through this with a promise to pretend to go to therapy or something. Bertram had been pretty tolerant of his girls getting involved in violence, but there was a lot of space between Cecily defending herself with a familiar and what Mira had been getting up to of late. It was only a matter of time before she finally reached even this man’s generous limits. 

Bertram hemmed and hawwed for a second as Mira took a seat opposite him and braced herself for the worst. 

“I…” he coughed again and finally managed to spit out what was on his mind, “...did not intend to be unfaithful to your mother.”

“...what?” Mira felt like she’d just missed a step while descending a staircase. This was not where she thought this conversation was headed. 

Bertram’s ears were fully red now. “It is true that I was in talks with the Sheppards to marry Valeriane prior to marrying your mother. Hurandel, who was the Prince Consort then, was pushing for an alliance between the Sheppards and the Coventries. I was willing to hear him out, but I had my doubts after meeting with Valeriane’s family and was not going to pursue the union. They seemed like they’d become a political liability in short order. It was around this time that the late Queen settled on her successor and released her ladies to begin their own families. That included your mother. I had always admired Altmandine Priestly and the late Queen took it upon herself to, well, to fix us up.” 

He rubbed the back of his head and ducked his gaze. 

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a love match. She was sent into my house because she was an excellent politician and I have always been a warrior first, but we were very good friends and, ah, compatible enough that you came to us much sooner than we’d planned on having a child.”

Mira took that to mean that their fantasy condom broke and that Violet had been an ‘oops’ baby. Maybe she needed to publish her contraceptive sigil. She hadn’t actually cared to look into the state of family planning in this world, but maybe she should have.

“Mandi was delighted to be pregnant, but her body…” his voice cracked, “...her body was struggling. The doctors told us that we would have to choose between you and her. Mandi chose you. Towards the end, she was on bedrest and I wasn’t handling it well. She had some of my friends come along and take me to a party so I’d stop checking on her every few minutes.”

“Vesper mentioned this to me,” Mira said, to spare him having to recount every detail. “You drank too much and something happened.”

He shot her a sideways look. It was hard to define the expression in his eyes, but Mira thought she understood him all the same.

“I had a single glass of wine, handed to me by a friend,” he clarified. “Then I felt ill and went to get air. The next thing I knew, it was the following morning and I was in a bedroom with Valeriane. Later, we learned that she was pregnant. Your mother died not long after you were born. Her health never rallied. It happened around the same time that the Late Queen passed away. Once Hurandel was named Regent, he made it clear that he expected me to do the correct thing by Valeriane. That was when I realized she was one of his agents and he had used my grief to insert someone into my home that I couldn’t get rid of.” 

Mira swallowed. Those Violet feelings were starting to surge again. “Did you ever tell Mama what happened?”

Bertram blinked at her. “Of course, I did. I told her as soon as I was home,” his gaze turned a little distant as he recalled the conversation. “I went to her bedroom and she asked if I’d had a nice time. I–I told her what had happened. She listened until I was done. Then she told me I wasn’t at fault, but that she didn’t want me seeing those friends anymore.”

“Obviously not,” Mira said, sounding a bit more short than she’d meant to. “Did you ever suspect that Viola might not have been your child?”

“Sometimes,” Bertram admitted. “Especially when Valeriane suggested we divide parenting duties; I would raise my first two children and she would raise all hers. I agreed because I didn’t want her to interfere with you or Vesper after she’d already managed to infiltrate my house. I suppose it was true, now that I’ve seen Cece. She’s the second coming of your great grandmother on my side. You might not have remembered her even before your memory loss. She passed away when you were very small, but Cece is her spitting image.”

She couldn’t help her smile. “Did you tell her that? About Great Grandmother.”

He nodded. “We talked about the family a bit on the way to and from her scholarship meetings. I have promised to show her the portrait gallery at Fort Nightfall, during the winter holidays. You’ll have to bring your consort with you. Might as well start breaking him in. The Princess assured us he’s, ah, capable fulfilling of his duties to you despite his odd heritage. I’m not sure you two have discussed that yet, but Vesper was thorough about vetting him and she’s always been much better about that sort of thing than I.”

“Has anyone in the family actually believed that Colvin was just my aide aside from Cece and I?” Mira sighed. 

It was now embarrassingly obvious to her that Vesper had been making arrangements within arrangements in preparation for Violet’s role as one of Princess Millica’s Ladies. Gawain Fenby had been the decoy she used to sneak Adra into Violet’s household, right under the Prince Regent’s nose. No wonder Adra had bragged to her about how well he’d positioned himself for their future. He was right, she was impressed. 

Adra seemed well aware that he’d been recruited as the future father of her children and, that said, Mira wished she had more confidence than she did about his understanding of and ability to hold up his end of the child-making process. He understood the recreational bits, to be sure. She could confirm that. It was all the other invisible biological parts she wasn’t sure he fully got, but apparently he’d managed to convince Millica that he did.

That got a laugh out of Bertram. “He was the one to approach us through the Princess,” he chortled. “I wasn’t sure about him in the beginning, but Vesper vetted him for an entire year. I’ve tossed him around the ring a time or two myself, just to see what he’s made of. Huradel’s rotten apple could only make him look good by comparison, but we still took our time to make up our minds about him. Normally, the Queen would choose your consort, but the Princess gave us her blessing to pick a man for you on her behalf and she gets along well with him, if reluctantly.”

“I must say,” she admitted, “This isn’t what I expected you to want to talk about.”

Bertram cocked a brow at her as he helped himself to a ginger biscuit from the tea tray.

“I thought this would be about the things I said to Madame,” she clarified. “I may have gotten carried away when I spoke to her. It was my intention to frighten her into behaving, not to embarrass the family in front of her highness.”

“Ah,” he said and sighed wistfully. “Well, in a way, it was about that. Seeing you break that woman over your knee reminded me of how much I miss your mother. She would have been very proud of you today and I realized you might not remember everything we’ve talked about over the years, especially about her and how my third marriage happened. So I came to explain myself.”

Mira blinked.

“I…see,” she managed to say and wondered just how much she’d missed out on by never getting to meet Violet’s mother. “Thank you.”

000

Madame’s interrogation kicked over an ant’s nest. It turned out there were more conspirators in the Palace than just the ones they’d caught when Cecily purified Hurandel’s sleeper agents. In short order, Princess Millica was forced to retire her Minister of the Interior, the Master of Coin, and the Lord Chancellor. 

Given the general hullabaloo, Andrei’s trial passed quietly. Princess Millica was not cruel to him, but also didn’t spare him from the consequences of his choices. He forfeited the rich property in the North that she’d planned to give him as his retirement and was sentenced to serve five years in the military as an infrantryman with no possibility of promotion. He still received a retirement property, but it was a timber plantation near the Moqui border. He would never want for food or clothing, but he’d never be the rich and influential man that he could have been in the North.

Mira thought that was a bit too lenient, but Adra revealed to her that the timber farm was absolutely crawling with magical mutates and monster spawning areas. Andrei was powerful enough to keep his land under control, but he would never know another day's peace for the rest of his life. Millica might have been limited by law in the ways she could neutralize his influence and opportunities for cruelty, but she was creative enough to find a satisfying solution that also served her people well.

In light of her confession, Madame was re-tried for treason and willingly aiding in an attempted coup. Double jeopardy was apparently not a thing yet in Avenon. She did not escape the hangman’s noose this time. She was quietly executed before the Royal Press Office was obliged to release the details of her trial.

Raoul did not pass his paternity ritual, but Bertram kept him as a ward. At fourteen, he was still a child and there was no evidence that Madame had cultivated him into an agent the way she had with Viola. Mira privately thought that Raoul's temperament had probably prevented her from ever trusting him to be more than dumb muscle.

Raoul was not doing well as a trainee soldier, but his maternal family and biological father were all dead. He was too young to bear any share in their guilt and Fort Nightfall was the only home he’d ever known. Mira didn’t expect that his story was going to have a happy ending, but she understood that Bertram had to give him a chance to grow beyond his terrible teenage self. In any event, Bertram had forbidden from having any contact with his former sisters and it was unlikely that their paths would ever cross again.

Viola escaped execution by virtue of being just slightly underage, but that didn’t mean that she went unpunished.

Even if the legal codex of Avenon forbade the execution of minors, there were measures that needed to be followed. First of all, a team of priestesses crippled her mana reservoir. It was not a painless process. Then she was sentenced to ten years of supervised probation, which was actually the lightest sentence that could be levied for her crime. The codex would have allowed her to serve a house arrest if her guardians agreed to fund it, but it turned out that Mira had been correct about the new cook that Sir Rousseau had hired shortly before the paternity ritual that had turned into Saintess Cecily’s awakening and his entire household had come down with typhoid. Like the legendary Mary Mallone, the cook had known she was a silent carrier of disease and that typhoid spread the easiest in a kitchen, but she couldn't give up the superior wages of an experienced cook.

Adra's men traced the woman's references back to a friend of the Sheppards who'd ben struggling with money troubles and hadn't seen the harm in helping to whitewash the employment history of an unlucky woman.

Mira’s timely warning to the public health board prevented any deaths, but Ferdinand and Archibald’s health would be impacted forever. They both ended up with the long term complications of a severe infection; chronic fatigue, muscle wasting, and bowel scarring. Sir Rousseau wasn’t doing great either, he got the same plus neurological impairment and cardiovascular weakness.

He actually had the audacity to try and write to Cecily again and order her to come heal him. That letter hadn't gotten far enough for Mira or Adra to need to intercept it. He'd sent it to her offices in the Temple District, where a very junior priestess put it in a box with all the other inappropriate messages a young girl in public office tends to get. Cecily noticed a brief mention about the letter in a report she received several weeks later, with a footnote that his request had already been rejected by the preliminary review board who existed to winnow down the demands on her time.

They'd referred him and his sons to a charity ward, which was a very different sort of sanatorium than the one he'd confined his wife in. It was clean, well-funded, and carefully managed to be sure. However, the doctors, nurses, and priests there had very little tolerance for people who demanded that their care take priority over other deserving patients and Sir Rousseau ran out their patience for nonsense within a week so he wasn't getting any of the little extras that the staff scraped together from whatever they could.

Sir Rousseau would probably end up in a paupers grave because Adra came through for Lady Carolina. The solicitors he hired on her behalf had managed to retake control of her fortune, leaving Sir Rousseau to return to his origins as the down-at-heel minor noble he’d been when she married him, with the additional burden of all the debts he'd taken on in anticipation of her one of her shipping concerns paying out. It turned out he hadn’t managed to fully gut her assets and what remained was plenty for her to live on if she ever wanted to quit her work at the women’s shelter. There was even a case pending in the county courthouse to begin the arduous process of their divorce. Sir Rousseau wasn’t in a position to hire himself a good lawyer anymore, so Mira anticipated that things would go smoothly for Lady Carolina.

With Sir Rousseau out of the way, that left one place to send Viola and, mercifully, Lady Carolina was prepared to take custody of and responsibility for her long lost daughter. Viola was sent to the sanatorium to live with her mother far in the west; a hinterland located so far from the Capitol that she could probably leave the continent faster than she could get back to Town. Bertram agreed to fund Viola’s room and board for the duration of her confinement, both as a courtesy to Lady Carolina and because he was one of the only adults left to take financial responsibility for Viola. The only caveat was that, while Lady Carolina was now free to leave the sanatorium whenever she liked, Viola was not. If the sanatorium ceased to operate or if no one was willing to fund her living, Viola would be transported to one of the penitent cloisters and stay there until her sentence was complete. For someone like Viola, that might have been a fate worse than death. She was barraging anyone she could reach with importuning letters, begging for leniency and refusing to understand that she'd already gotten it.  

Mira declined to attend any of the trials or the execution. She spent the afternoon that Madame died at home in Rosepark keeping Bertram, Vesper, and Cecily company as they tried to keep their minds off—well, off the obvious.

That night, after they received word that Madame was gone and her body had been surrendered to the Temples for cremation, she took Adra out on an evening walk. 

“I think the credits have to be rolling now,” she told him, once they were alone. “I can’t imagine there is anything left for the game to cover. Next week, Cecily will begin her orientation at Compton. Archmage Solvere is already sending me assignments for the upcoming term. I can’t believe we finished the entire plot over the course of one summer.”

“I suspect that game was largely symbolic for your purposes,” Adra replied dryly. “After all, the whole thing could not be true when every possible ending contradicted all the others. Besides, I expect those so-called ‘good endings’ were red herrings. You mentioned that the sequel required a save file from the first game. I would be very curious to know how playable the final game would be if the player allowed ‘Violet’ to pass away during any part of their playthrough. The ‘canon’ route in the wiki was one where she survives and appears in the next game, is it not?”

“You’re right about that,” she mused. “As far as I know, there wasn’t a way for Cecily to enter the hotel room with Vesper after the mini makeover, but it would be like those devs to just not say anything if there was a route that players failed to unlock in the first game. If so, I’m surprised no one found that scene in the game files. I’ll be pissed if I ever find out they released a DLC after I died that unlocks a Violet route.”

“Unless the route couldn’t exist until you created it,” Adra chuckled. 

Now that they were alone and there were no distractions, maybe it was time to ask him a question that had been lingering on her mind. “Adra, the Veiled Goddess showed me a vision that implied we have known each other for longer than I thought. Did you know me before I was Alanamira?”

Adra stopped walking and turned to her with an uncharacteristically somber expression, but he didn’t try to prevaricate. “I have. We’ve known each other many, many times,” he told her softly and brushed a lock of hair away from her face. “What is it you really want to ask?”

“Why were you so desperate to preserve me as I was in that life?” she asked. She leaned into his touch. “I remember when you jumped into the Dark Lake after me, you were terrified. You risked so much to save me as ‘me.’ What was special about that life?”

“You are special to me in every life,” Adra informed her and drew her into a tight embrace. “That wasn’t even the first time we became lovers.” he paused and smirked at her. “I’m sure you can guess now, but I’ve had plenty of experience in seducing you. You like to be pursued. I enjoy the pursuit. It’s a game we play that I have never bored of. No, it was for another reason.”

His smile dimmed a bit. 

“Your lives have never been easy,” he explained and touched their foreheads together. “I have never been able to prevent your sad endings. Each universe we live in has a story to tell and we are but actors in the play. Our coming is the first sign of a great change in the worlds we inhabit; you, me, Cecily and her hangers on. You are always a woman of great significance, who breaks the trail to a new paradigm for the rest of the world; such as your existence as the first supreme battlemage. I am always a counter-pressure and object of fear that forces the denizens of the world to explore the new opportunities you reveal rather than focus on why their world has changes. The others become exemplars of the New World; heroes, legends, and inspirations. They frequently are at odds with you because you are a harbinger of change and change is never comfortable.”

It sounded like they were all the harbingers of change, it was just that Mira was the one that the others could see and, therefore, got all the blame.  

“We always got along better than that and you were pleased to have me as your lover, but you were always beholden to others first; your family, your people, your responsibilities. Eventually, you would always be called upon to make a sacrifice. Sometimes it was your service. Other times it was your life. You always, always died for that sacrifice and you were never thanked for it. Once I understood the nature of the Cycle and my feelings for you, I began to offer you my help.”

“I thought you just said that the things that happen in the Cycle are pre-ordained?” Mira looked up at him, frowning. 

“They are,” he agreed with a pained look. “I knew my efforts might not succeed, but I intended to try.”

“Then, when you came into my room that night…” Mira frowned and let the question drop, unsure of what she was even trying to ask.

“It was the first time you ever said ‘yes’,” he said quietly. “I’d offered you my hand a hundred thousand times over, but there is only one iteration of you who has ever accepted it.”

Mira’s jaw dropped. “Really?” she asked. “Only once, ever?”

Adra nodded.

“You were so tired, my love,” he explained. “It was an exhaustion that transcended your lived experience as Alanamira, even with the endless war you fought on your father’s orders. I could feel it bleeding through from your soul. Every machine wears out eventually and souls are no different. Your experiences are never truly lost, merely made inaccessible to you. How else could the Veiled Goddess have recovered Cecily’s memories of being Melody so long after the fact? How else could you remember your past lives now? What I attempted to do when I followed you into the lake was to break the mechanism through which your memories were cordoned off between incarnations, to keep you from being plunged back into ignorance so that you would never allow yourself to be led to the slaughter again.” 

His gaze dropped. “Admittedly, I did not succeed. I still don’t understand why They chose to finish my work even though I am grateful that they did.”

Mira wet her lips and looked away. “The Veiled Goddess said it was ‘too sad’,” she admitted. Her fingers dug into Adra’s sleeves as she spoke. “‘Too sad for too long.’ I suppose even They have an upper limit for watching the same tragedy over and over again. She said ‘it’ would be different, going forward. She didn’t have time to explain what that meant, but if what you say is true and ‘it’ is the Cycle then…” she trailed off again.

“Perhaps our future lives will be very exciting,” Adra agreed. 

Mira still wasn’t done. There was one gaping hole in the story Adra was telling her and she had to address it. “My lives haven’t been like that, though,” she argued. “It’s true that the others are cast as protagonists and I get cast as an antagonist, but I have some leeway in what I actually do and I almost never have to die anymore unless it’s an accident or of old age. I’m not a figure of particular importance nor would I say there was any ‘great change’ to the worlds I lived in. I would say I’m a misunderstood deuteragonist at best and starter villain at worst.”

Adra winced. “That may be my fault,” he admitted guiltily. “I am as much a member of the cohort as you or the Godservant, although I am not as gifted as you are when it comes to recognizing the others. I usually don’t see them until they’re in my yard spoiling for a fight. I’m not sure the group functions correctly if any part of it is missing. You all may have been in a holding pattern until I earned my release. As I said, our future lives will probably be very interesting.”

He paused and frowned as he picked up on something Mira couldn’t sense yet. They stepped back from each other so that whoever it was wouldn’t find them in an embrace. They weren’t supposed to be official yet and they were trying to not rub anyone’s nose in their relationship.

Sure enough, a pair of guards rounded a corner further down the garden path from them. They were escorting three young men; Randall, Alan, and William. Randall was carrying a bouquet of flowers. William had a bundle of books tied up with a black cord. Alan had a bottle of light wine tucked under one arm. 

The guards paused a respectful distance from Mira when they spotted her. “There are visitors for her Holiness,” one of them reported to her.

“Yes, I can see that,” Mira said, looking past the guard to the former male lead candidates—or maybe just the two former male lead candidates. Those flowers in Randall's hands did not look platonic to Mira. He'd always suffered from B-male lead syndrome, but with Andrei permanently out of the way surely even Randall had to know that he had a chance.

“We came to cheer her up now that the execution has concluded,” Randall explained. His ears were turning hot pink as he spoke so that wasn’t the entire truth, or at least it wasn’t for him. Alan and William seemed far more relaxed and Alan was nudging Randall with his elbow. It seemed to Mira that Alan and Will had come to cheer their friend up. Randall was here to see his sweetheart. 

“I brought some of my mother’s elderflower cordial,” Alan announced when Randall’s shoulders had turtled up around his ears. “Come back before we finish the bottle! This is the last one we’re going to open until the winter festivals.”

“We’ll do that,” Mira promised as they walked past. 

She shared a conspiratorial look with Adra and waited until the boys were out of earshot to tug Adra down into whispering range.

“Randall route?” she asked, barely able to suppress her giggling.

He nodded and agreed with a smug sparkle in his glowing red-gold eyes, “Randall route.”