TVisTV Book 4: Chapter 13 (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 13 - A Thing that Time Forgot

“Be a unicorn in a field of horses.”

- Unknown.

The finished pieces would not have looked out of place in a proper gallery.

Over the course of several days, Master Vlan di Panoli had somehow managed to capture something very close to the essence of Seraphina, much to her grandmother’s delight and the young noblewoman’s carefully restrained approval. In the portrait, her smile was all mystery and quiet power, while the discerning cast of her jade eyes suggested a mind that had no business belonging to a girl so young.

Desdemona’s portrait had been easier, or at least more immediately honest. Vlan had hinted at her wildness along the edges: the turn of her shoulders, the brightness in her eyes, the stray lock of dark hair that had escaped its pins and lent the whole piece a certain dangerous invitation.

The only true fault Seraphina could find was the size. For the sake of ease of transport, the portraits were rather small. Vlan’s apprentices, boys barely into puberty and only just beginning to sprout miserable attempts at facial hair, had faithfully made several copies under their master’s exacting supervision. They worked with the solemn intensity of monks copying holy scripture, which the blonde girl supposed was almost charming.

But then again, the Mona Lisa was also depressingly small. She had once had it transported to her penthouse in Seoul for a private viewing and had been left with a distinct feeling of disenchantment.

De Sariens made a note to ensure Vlan would be rewarded for his work. After all, she was, first and foremost, a patron of the arts. For without art, we are less than animals, was one of her mottos.

Still, that was, at the end of the day, a rather small matter.

At present, Seraphina was trying on an Icedrake scale cloak lined with soft Cronir fur. The craftsman had done a fine job. The scales overlapped in subtle layers of winter blue and dull silver, catching the light with a muted sheen. Matching boots and gloves had been made as well, along with handsome bags for both her and Desdemona.

The de Savant girl had been positively delighted. So delighted, in fact, that she had given Seraphina a rather surprising hug.

Desdemona, it seemed, could become quite “handsy” when moved by gratitude. Seraphina would have to warn her friend against such scandalous displays of affection once they reached the Imperial Court. There were a thousand and one rules for these things.

And of the Empire, her grandmother had declared that they would begin their journey upon the first of the spring thaws. They would travel first to the border fortress of Tianxiaguan, or the Gate Beneath Heaven. Then from there, from post station to post station, enjoying the hospitality of local imperial officials and nobility along the way.

Lady Adelaide, not that Seraphina doubted it in the slightest, had also informed her granddaughter that there would be a veritable horde of potential suitors waiting in the Empire. She had then warned her not to choose on looks alone. This had earned her a very sharp look from Seraphina, who had made it clear that she would not choose on looks alone. The girl would, however, definitely factor them in strongly.

After all, if she was going to be wed to someone, surely it was not too much to ask that the person be attractive. A woman could sacrifice much for dynastic necessity, but there was no need to martyr oneself.

Now, she waited in one of the sitting rooms while pretending not to wait. Her friend sat nearby with her own embroidery, though her attention wandered often enough toward the windows, the fire, the tea tray, and the ceiling that Seraphina suspected the these frozen climes had finally begun to gnaw at her patience. 

Desdemona was far too high in station to order about as Seraphina saw fit. What Seraphina needed was someone who would jump at her every command. Her grandmother’s staff did so, of course, but somehow it was not the same. It was their duty, yes, but it was not their raison d’être. They did not orbit Seraphina as the natural center of their universe. Thankfully, Miriam was expected to arrive sometime in the afternoon, and a part of Seraphina was almost looking forward to it.

Thinking upon it, Seraphina came to the realization that Miriam was a bit like an old phone one had grown used to. Even when newer, cleaner, and faster models appeared, the old one, through sheer familiarity, remained much easier to use.

She sighed softly and returned her focus to her embroidery. All this attention to the softer and more womanly arts had not been without benefit, as her recent gain in Dexterity attested. Still, she doubted she would achieve much more growth from needlework alone. Perhaps she should try knitting. It sounded meditative, and it would occupy her hands while leaving her mind free to think.

But first, she would finish this piece.

She and Desdemona worked together in quiet, the fire muttering in the hearth as pale light pooled across the floor. Seraphina’s needle moved through the cloth with slow precision, drawing purple wisterias from her father’s duchy across a field of red. A rather beautiful symbol, she thought, for her bellicose ducal father. Something graceful blooming over blood.

As her needle and thread worked, she caught sight of her grandmother through the window, threading her way along one of the garden paths.

Seraphina’s hand paused as if caught.

The Duchess walked with measured dignity. Her dark cloak cut a stern line against the snow, and the servants following at a discreet distance seemed more like shadows than attendants. She was headed toward the inner garden, where the old trees stood beneath the winter sky.

Seraphina set her hoop down gently.

“You will have to excuse me, Lady de Savant,” she said, rising with a faint, half-sardonic smile. “I have just remembered something I must discuss with the Duchess.”

“Must you always try to sound mysterious?” Desdemona chided, touching Seraphina’s knee briefly before returning to her own needlework. “You could simply say you want to talk to your grandmother.”

“I will be back soon.”

“Take your time, dear Sera. It is not as if I am going anywhere until all the ice melts.”

The forlorn sigh that followed was dramatic enough to deserve an audience.

Seraphina left the sitting room with a perfect smile.

It seemed the North was finally getting to Desdemona. Perhaps she could convince the serving staff to put on a play under her direction. No. Too dull, were the thoughts that ran through her mind as she made to join the Lady Adelaide.

There had to be some distraction in town. Perhaps Frest would know where the more entertaining places were. The man was, almost infuriatingly, always adaptable, and the cold northern months had done very little to dampen his spirits. In fact, much to her annoyance, Seraphina had caught him flirting with one of the pretty maids, a blonde little thing called Francesca, as her investigation had turned out. She was annoyed that she felt annoyed at all.

She would have to find Frest and give him something to occupy himself with before some licentious little scandal bloomed before the spring thaws. With so little to do in the long northern winter, the women here were famous for being somewhat freer with their affections than their southern counterparts.

Discipline had to be maintained, after all. That was it. Nothing more and nothing less.

“Tia, keep an eye on Frest, would you?” she asked the Fae creature hovering just behind her shoulder.

Tia’s batlike wings beat lightly as she grinned. “I will keep more than an eye on him. I shall keep two eyes on him.”

Then she darted away, far too pleased with herself.

Walking swiftly, for ladies did not run, Seraphina descended the grand staircase, crossed several corridors, and soon stepped out into the gardens. The remaining magic of the Icedrake’s scales in her cloak was working, or perhaps her Constitution was simply too high, for the winter air barely touched her. 

She glanced down again for perhaps the hundredth time that week. No snow lay upon the stone paths. Ancient engineering beneath the fortress kept them warm throughout the year, leaving dark veins of clean stone cutting through the white gardens like lines drawn by a careful hand.

She found her grandmother near the maze, beneath a large bare-limbed tree, standing before a simple headstone.

“There you are, Sera,” Lady Adelaide said without turning. “I have been meaning to speak with you. It is a good thing you remembered that today is your grandfather’s anniversary.”

Unfortunately, to her chagrin, the young girl had done no such thing. 

The older woman lit a stick of fragrant incense from a small flame and placed it in a golden bowl filled with pale sand beside the headstone. The smoke curled upward in a thin, wavering line.

“In some ways,” Adelaide continued, “you remind me of him.”

Seraphina schooled her face into expressionlessness and simply nodded. She knew this ceremony from one set of memories, and from another it was not so different from customs in her other life in Korea. The dead given a small place among the living, if only for a moment.

Mirroring Duchess Adelaide, she lit a stick of incense and placed it burning beside her grandmother’s.

“He was a good man,” Adelaide said. “Perhaps not the smartest, but the heavens do not bless us all equally. Charging a shield wall ahead of your bodyguard is not, perhaps, the wisest of ideas.”

The Duchess’s mouth tightened. Her eyes remained on the stone. “He died fighting the Empire. So this union I have planned for you is not easy for me.”

The smoke drifted between them.

“But it is a necessity. You are a blooded woman now. It is our duty, the duty of this house, to serve the throne, if not always the man who sits upon it. And if not the throne, then the ideal of Aranthia itself. Do you understand me, Sera?”

Seraphina almost offered a flippant response at the almost treasonous statement. Almost. The weight of the moment stopped her. The blonde girl had heard a thousand and one such speeches across her two combined lifetimes. Had there been a skip dialogue button, she would have been hammering it with all her might.

Instead, she inclined her head respectfully.

“When your father retook our old lands in the south, the king was forced to create a ‘new’ duchy from the lords who had opposed his claim” Adelaide continued. “And when Anatoli, my son, raised Elidion and House Barbierri to the throne, he did so with an understanding. One day, our blood would sit there as well. That those words were broken means there must be a reckoning.”

Her grandmother touched the headstone gently, her gloved fingers resting on the carved name. “I did not marry again, not because I had no love left in me, but because I wished to fulfill one of the grand ambitions of this house.”

The Duchess paused. “Not that I did not have a dalliance here and there,” she added, her mouth curving into a salaciously wry grin.

Seraphina blinked once for there were some images no granddaughter should be forced to endure.

“Too often, people think only of their own tomorrows,” Adelaide continued with a sigh. “It is a flaw in their thinking. One even your own mother suffers from. If I had remarried, there would have been fighting over the claim to these lands instead of unity. When I cross the Shallow River, only your father will inherit and become Duke of Carcaronne and Sariens. And if he has no male issue, you will inherit both after him.”

She straightened, and for a moment the old woman seemed carved from the same stone as the fortress around them. “Stability, Sera. That is what I have built. And I will not have anyone threaten it.”

Duchess Adelaide turned to her then, and the softness in her eyes did nothing to blunt the iron beneath her voice. “And I will not suffer further insult to my most precious granddaughter.”

She held out an arm. “Come with me.”

Seraphina took it and slowly, the two of them walked arm in arm through the winter garden, separated by a single generation and a great many unspoken things. Despite herself, Seraphina felt the love her grandmother bore her. It was there in the careful pressure of Adelaide’s hand, in the way she matched her pace to Seraphina’s. The girl’s heart, not being made entirely of stone, stirred.

The love of a mother might be unconditional, but the love of a grandmother was doting. There was a particular danger in that. A mother might forgive an insult to teach a lesson. A grandmother might hire men with knives. Like this, together, long minutes passed before Seraphina realized they were walking toward the stables.

Perhaps the old biddy is going to invite me for a ride about Carcaronne, complete with the complimentary and unwanted lecture about its history, thought Seraphina, her usual disrespect for anything and anyone that was not her rising to the fore.

But what awaited her was most definitely not a ride and a lecture.

The courtyard in front of the stables was full. Full with a large, motley crew of armed men and women had gathered there, hard-eyed and martial in their bearing. Almost a legion of them. Some wore hide, mail, or plate and sometimes a mixture of all three. Others carried spears, daggers, maces, axes, and heavy clubs. A few were wrapped in exotic armor made from monster hide, scale, and lacquered bone. Some were young, younger than Seraphina even, with sharp faces and hungry eyes. Others were old in the way certain trees were old: not with weakness, but with deep roots and a tenacity to weather the storm. The young girl even spotted several Magister’s staves among them.

They watched her as she entered, whispering among themselves, a few of them laughing. And every one of them, man or woman, wore the same metal badge somewhere upon their person. A sword crossed over a torch. Monster hunters. Adventurers.

“Yours is an easy date to remember,” her grandmother said, smiling with an expression mixed from happiness and old sorrow. “It falls, as it does, on the day my Ecktor crossed the Shallow River. Happy birthday, my dear.”

For one awful, dreadful moment, Seraphina thought her grandmother intended to gift this rabble so that she might sally forth and begin her bid for the crown immediately. It was not, she admitted privately, the worst birthday present imaginable.

“Make way for the Duchess!” called a tall man.

He was just past his prime but still lean and strong, with corded muscle visible beneath his leather vest. Strange garb and it looked like the cold did not touch him. He had a large, overbearing nose, and his skin was splotched in places, bronze broken by patches of albino-pale flesh. In place of one eye sat a rough-cut lump of orange Zajasite, set deep into the socket. When he looked upon Seraphina, she felt unnerved. Not because she feared for her safety, of course. It simply looked terribly unpleasant.

The sea of predators slowly parted. Grudgingly, almost, like the first wolves that had ever learned to wear a collar.

“Thank you, Master Bern,” Duchess Adelaide said, dismissive as a queen passing through a market. “Do remember to keep your people in line.”

Bern inclined his head. The crowd parted further, and Adelaide led Seraphina toward the stables.

“With this,” her grandmother declared, “no one can ever again impugn your honor. This is my gift to you.”

Still slightly confused, Seraphina trailed after her.

Then she saw it.

A wounded beast lay in chains before the stable doors, bound in thick steel flecked with grey Dullstone. Its coat was shaggy and wild, green and brown like a summer forest, slashed through with stripes of black that ran along the length of its spine. Around it stood several minor lords in heavy northern cloaks, proud in the way they held themselves, their faces solemn and watchful. These were the powerful ones beholden to Carcaronne before the Crown, her other set of memories supplied.

The beast was immense. Perhaps fourteen hands from fetlock to shoulder, perhaps more, all muscle beneath torn hide and matted fur. Its proud coat had been ripped in several places, and stablehands attended to the wounds with fear staining every movement. They applied sweet-smelling unguents, high quality healing potions reduced to a thick paste, flinching whenever the creature shifted.

Small fangs jutted from its upper lip. And from the center of its noble head rose a long spiral horn.

For a moment, the blonde girl could say nothing as her breath caught in her throat. Between her ample breasts a miniaturized Cornelia started to stir in her torpor.

The sheer expense of capturing such a creature staggered her. An expense, she knew, born partly from her own failed attempt. The potions alone would have bankrupted a lesser house. The men and women gathered outside were not mere monster hunters, but true professionals. As expensive as they were dangerous. The whole scene was an expression of raw, generational wealth and power, laid before her.

Seraphina did not need Identify to know the creature before her was a mythic beast.

It was a Unicorn.