TVisTV Book 4: Chapter 1 (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 1 - The North

“Rock bottom is the end of what wasn’t true enough. Begin again and build something truer.”

- Glennon Doyle

A small snowflake, light with winter’s promise, drifted down and settled on her nose before she brushed it away. Shivering slightly, the white Cronir fur draped over her shoulders suddenly seemed to carry a greater weight. It was a most welcome burden, to be sure, for it held the precious warmth well, something not so easily come by so near the North. She would have preferred Ice Drake hide, but creatures of that sort were seldom seen so far south, and Cronir, therefore, must suffice.

Suffice. She could almost have laughed aloud at the bitterness of the word as it arose in her mind. She had grown far too accustomed to such expressions and to their melancholy companion; one must make do. They were shabby sentiments, unfit for a life that had once held every privilege.

And then she recalled, with a coldness no fur could remedy, how much of that privilege had already been taken from her. How far she had been reduced.

“Desdemona, it is not yet too late. Yours is a fine and honoured House—a Great House. You might still say that I compelled you, that you acted against your own wishes,” offered the girl, though there was little earnestness in the suggestion. It was less an appeal than an experiment. And again, more of a test than a true experiment.

“In truth, Seraphina, that old chestnut again? You begin to sound exceedingly like my mother, and had I wished for her voice in my ear, I should never have troubled myself to leave home and come so far,” returned Desdemona, passing her slender fingers through her brown hair. There was in their exchange all the ease and all the fatigue of a dispute so often revisited that it had long since lost much of its bite and power. 

Of the two, Desdemona wore her grief the more lightly. Only the occasional unguarded moment betrayed her: a brief tightening of her expression when it was time to make camp, or the faint sheen in her eyes when her thoughts drifted back to the recent past as they rode.

The de Savant girl mourned young Gravens, their brief romance born of something almost illicit, proof that love was always wantonly reckless in its aim. Brief as it had been, it cut all the deeper for being filled with unspoken promise, untouched by the casual indifference that so often infects a passionate affair.

Damn him for dying. Sir Gravens had been far too handsome to die, his only real fault being that he had not been born higher on the social ladder. Why couldn’t he have been born at least the son of a count? Then perhaps Seraphina could have kept him in reserve for herself.

The young noblewoman took a moment to touch her own hair, the gold of which was growing. She would have to cut it soon, again. The young noblewoman remembered the first time she cut it, she did so to teach Ibn that there was nothing to fear. That such things were beneath her consideration. Her pride had cost her a measure of her beauty, but now she would wear it in this way to remember him. Ibn’s sword had spoken the truth more eloquently than any of the words she had given him. It was a sword of devotion. And, devotion, it seemed, worked both ways.

She would remember Velens. One day, she would wipe that smug, superior, insufferable look off the Crown Prince’s face.

Desdemona shifted in her saddle. “Now that we are drawing close to the end of our journey, would you tell me more about our soon-to-be host, your grandmother, the Dowager Duchess Adelaide of Carcaronne? All I have heard are rumors—that she tamed half the northern tribes, that she can ride an Ice Drake, and, not least of all, that she ate her last husband. I cannot say I have had the pleasure of her acquaintance,” she said idly, as though passing along court gossip in Aran. “All very scandalous.”

She did not mention, of course, the greatest scandal of all: the fevered, all-consuming romance between Seraphina’s parents. And, the rumors that Seraphina was, in fact, conceived well before their lightning marriage.

Seraphina searched through the memories that were hers, yet not hers. She could see them spread before her in fragments and impressions, recollections of a life remembered but never lived. Memories of her formidable grandmother.

“She is not the sort to waste breath on fools, nor does she have the patience for courtly niceties. Nor do I think she is one to pay attention to rumors. In fact, I might add, she might look very negatively on even the mention or reminders of certain rumors. The Lady de Carcaronne is, I think, what one might call a direct person, and she has no love for my mother,” Seraphina answered, casting a glance at Desdemona in search of any hidden barb.

There was none, just the boring acceptance of someone who ridden with her thus far.

The fact that Adelaide had no love for her daughter-in-law Anaselena was a convenient coincidence, and one the girl would have to make full use of. The question was how to handle the Lady Adelaide without the Lady Adelaide ever realizing she was being handled.

“She will want something from you, Sera,” Desdemona said.

“Doesn’t everyone?” Seraphina sniffed dismissively. “Sir Frest!” she called, abandoning what promised to be a useless discussion with the de Savant girl.

“Yes, Lady Seraphina,” Frest answered, slowing his mount until he rode at his lady’s side.

“We will find a suitable inn in the next town for the evening,” the blonde girl said imperiously. “It would not do for us to appear unpresentable when we meet my grandmother.”

“Of course, milady,” he replied quickly.

“And you made sure to send the letters?” inquired the girl for perhaps the second time.

Making certain things continued to run smoothly in her absence was, after all, very important. It would soon be tested whether the systems she had put in place could endure without her direct oversight. They would endure, she knew, but she doubted very much that they would flourish.

“Yes, Lady Seraphina. I did exactly as you instructed, and I was assured that the Lehman representative at our last stop would see them delivered post haste,” he replied, staring fixedly at the space between her eyes. 

He had come to notice that the further north they journeyed, the more irascible Seraphina had rapidly become.

“Humor, Frest? What did I tell you about your attempts at it?” Seraphina said with a venomous look. 

Frest studiously avoided looking at Seraphina directly. “I believe you said it would serve me best to refrain as much as possible. I shall treasure that advice and bury it beside all my other worldly ambitions.”

The young noblewoman clicked her tongue. “Impertinence, Frest, is like a wild and unwanted growth. It has a habit of being pruned.”

“I will keep that in mind,” replied Frest, studiously looking at a hedgerow as if it held the secrets of the universe. “As well as take up a hobby in gardening.”

Indeed, Frest had been talking back rather a lot of late. A few weeks earlier, Seraphina might have had him executed for such insolence. But circumstances had forced her hand, and now she was obliged to enact her will through flawed vessels like Frest. In short, she had to make do.

That horrid expression again. Make do.

Then again, Frest was something of a sunk cost. She had invested far too much time and effort in him to just simply chop off his head. He was loyal, she would grant him that much. It was simply unfortunate that he had refused every direct order to shave off his scraggly excuse for facial hair. Otherwise, he might even have been fairly pleasant to look at in a roguish sort of way.

The former bandit possessed a certain aura that seemed to warn any sensible person not to speak to him at all, despite his efforts to soften the impression beneath the thin veneer of newly acquired knighthood. It was the sort of dangerous appeal that suggested both slumming and standing too close to a dangerous animal. Thrilling, perhaps, if one could overlook the many and varied defects.

More important than any of that, he was competent. With help from Tia and Kiwi, he had brought them all this way, to the very edge of her grandmother’s lands, through a kingdom that had been less than welcoming, with the king’s men close on their heels. Setting aside his little incident at the rope bridge, he had performed admirably. He was so competent, in fact, that Seraphina might almost admit it made him faintly attractive, in a last-resort, stranded-on-a-desert-island-with-no-better-options sort of way. He had simply been solid, a reliable rock throughout the journey. 

Frest had even stopped drinking.

If only he would do something about his incorrigible attitude and his attempts at fashionable facial hair.

She pushed the thought aside and turned her mind to the scenarios before her. Yet in every one of them, she was forced to concede that Desdemona was right. The real question was what Seraphina was willing to surrender, and what she actually wanted now that so many of her long-term machinations had gone up in smoke.

The messages to her allies in the south were little more than reassurances. Above all, they served to ensure that no one mistook her for dead. Token gestures, really, to keep her ship from sinking any further. She still possessed leverage in certain circles, and certainly a measure of economic influence over the kingdom, but it had not yet ripened into the kind of stranglehold that was absolute and beyond challenge. It was still nascent. Still growing.

Heavens forfend, part of her even found herself missing the incompetent Miriam. And her Knights, too; Hadraine, Filippe, Gascoigne, and Smith. Though woefully incapable of actually protecting her, they had at least provided the illusion of safety. Yes, she even missed the wastrel Haze. For a moment, she wondered what Haze was doing with the stipend Seraphina had provided. She could have done with some silly ditty or cheerful tune to take her mind off her present tribulations.

All of them represented considerable investments of time, guidance, money, and emotion. Then there was, of course, her mirror, Eloise. Was she distraught? Would she make her way north? There had been rumors in Meridian that she had been seen with Sir Gallant, once her tutor… a rumor that had surfaced amid the whole Desdemona-and-Gravens affair.

Why could people not be reasonable, instead of forever allowing themselves to be ruled by such messy things as emotion? Was everyone nothing more than a bundle of stupid chemical impulses?

Why… why did everything go wrong? the young girl thought for the umpteenth time, the question a broken song caught on endless repeat.

“Milady, I will see to our lodgings… but there seems to be a matter…” Frest began hesitantly, snapping Seraphina out of her maudlin thoughts.

She looked around and saw that her mount had carried her into the courtyard of a serviceable inn. Had she been so lost in thought that she had let time slip entirely away?

“Payment, Frest. I know.” She knew full well that they had run out of coin the day before, after purchasing a few necessities.

Namely, proper clothes for the harsher northern climate. Clothes, and a few odds and ends. Still, she rather wished her people would stop presenting her with problems and start solving them themselves, in accordance with her wishes. But then, it was so difficult to find good people these days.

She reached into her saddlebag and withdrew a perfect facsimile of her father’s ducal signet ring. Or perhaps it was the original. She had forgotten. The effect would be the same.

“Use this as proof, but tell the good innkeeper to send the bill to my grandmother,” Seraphina ordered.

“Is that altogether wise, Sera?” Desdemona interjected. “There will be word of your coming here…”

“Exactly. One way or another, it will force my grandmother’s hand. She will not be able to sit on the sidelines. Not that I think she would want to anyway,” Seraphina replied with a thin smile.

“And what if the innkeeper is…” Frest added, rummaging through his new memories for a suitably grand word. “Recalcitrant,” he finished at last.

The old Seraphina would have used a euphemism, subtle or otherwise. This Seraphina was slowly losing things she had once actually cared about.

“Then kill him or her, Frest,” the blonde girl said without the slightest concern. “And when you are done, we will give Cornelia an early supper.”

Frest shivered, and it had nothing to do with the cold.