Chương 129: Chapter 126: Her Mother's Daughter

The charter of Aelheim was four thousand pages long. I was fairly certain nobody had ever read all of it. I certainly hadn't, though not for lack of trying. The book was heavy enough that carrying it around without mana might have counted as training. I paced the length of the study with it open across my forearms, mumbling to myself.

"... taxation of goods in transit falls to the district of origin, except where the goods are from outside Aelheim, in which case..." I flipped a page.

"Who wrote this? Wonderful, there's even a diagram. Duke Thalos wasn't kidding." My vision was swimming and the words swam with them. Somewhere in this great weapon made out of paper, I was trying to find something useful. Beating back Julian's little scheme was one thing, but I wanted to be more proactive than that. There had to be more ways to make Julian's life miserable. So far, I hadn't found it in two days. Was that because there wasn't anything, or because I had skimmed over it? Honestly, who could say?

I was starting to suspect the charter had been written specifically so that nothing useful could ever be found in it. The door slammed open hard enough to rattle the window.

"I am going to die!" Violet stood in the doorway, one hand still on the door. Her braid was half-undone and her eyes were wild.

"Why the hell do I have to know all of this crap?!" I closed the charter slowly, and set it on the table. Honestly, she had lasted a lot longer than I'd expected. I'd have bet at least an Artifact that she would break within the first day. She had made it two. That was a surprise.

"Which part was it?" I asked. Violet opened her mouth.

"Wait." I pointed at her.

"Let me guess." Her mouth closed.

"Was it the flower meanings?" I said.

"That part was a real pain. I still can't keep half of them straight."

"There are MEANINGS to the flowers?!" I stared at her.

"... Guess you didn't get to that part, huh. Figures, that's mostly for formal events and stuff."

"Why would flowers MEAN anything?! They're flowers!"

"Hey, I don't know. It's not like I came up with all of this." I sighed.

"I almost had someone find me a black rose to pin to my gown for my debut, you know. The pictures I've seen are pretty, and they keep their color for a long time. It's probably the only time Anias didn't listen to me."

"Why?"

"Because a black rose means a love that lives past life and death." There were three full seconds of silence. Then Violet doubled over.

"Damn that would have been great," She could barely get the words out through the cackling.

"Like you don't get enough of those stupid proposals already."

"Yes, yes. It's very funny." I grumbled.

"So? Which part was it?" Violet straightened. She crossed the room in four strides, and seized me by the shoulders. Then she shook me.

"All of it, Esra. All of it. It just never ends. You finish one thing and there's another thing and behind that thing there's ten more things. Can you believe that?"

"I can," I said, once the room stopped moving. Violet's shaking stopped.

"... Oh yeah. I guess you would." She let go of me and stepped back with a long sigh.

"I have a headache."

"Yep. It wasn't any more fun when I had to do it either."

"Bullshit." She squinted at me.

"I bet you love this kind of thing. You love reading, don't ya?"

"Reading interesting things, yes. Violet, nobody loves this kind of thing. Anias had to hold me down one time when I tried to run away."

"She what?"

"It only happened one time," I said.

"But I think even one time is one too many, right?" Violet nodded slowly, and then puffed out her chest.

"I don't think Mari can hold me down." I reached over and lightly bonked her on the head.

"I'll hold you down if she can't." I said it as a joke. For some reason, Violet's face went red. Her hand found her braid and gave it a tug.

"Err... maybe not then, or maybe…." she muttered so quietly I almost didn't catch it. Then she grabbed my arm.

"Come on. I'm bored, I wanna walk." Her eyes flicked to the tome sitting on the table.

"... I mean, if you can. You're doing something important ain't ya?"

"Not that important. Come on, let's go," I said. The Gods knew I needed a break to keep myself from exploding. I glanced around the study.

"Where's Sere, by the way? I haven't seen her in a while." I was sure she had been with me at some point, though when that point exactly had been was a mystery. The hours had blurred together at some point. Violet shrugged.

"She was with me at my lessons. Don't know why she sat through 'em. It's not like anybody made her." Violet's jaw clenched.

"Mari says she's doing better at the whole manners thing than I am." She sighed.

"I'd say she was trying to make fun of me, but she's too nice for something like that." That did sound like Sere. The girl was frighteningly intelligent.

"And now?"

"Hmm. Think she's out in the yard with Estovan. They're training." Violet shrugged.

"Well? Come on, do you wanna walk or what?" I let her pull me out of the room. The halls of Indri Manor were quiet and largely empty. The last of the sun came in through the tall windows. Nobody had lit the Magical Implements in this wing yet. Our footsteps were the loudest thing in the corridor. The few maids we passed stopped what they were doing and bowed and stayed bowed until we had gone by.

"Don't know if I'll ever get used to that," Violet muttered under her breath. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Used to what?"

"All the bowing and scraping and stuff." She waved a hand vaguely behind us.

"Half of them pretended I wasn't even there before... before all that happened." I nodded slowly.

"Do you want to get rid of them, then?" I asked.

"If you say the word, it could happen. Wouldn't take that long to find new staff. You could start off on a fresh page." We rounded a corner. Violet was quiet for a few steps.

"Nah," she said at last.

"I guess I get why they're like that. Still pisses me the hell off, but I get why, at least." I smiled.

"That's very mature of you." She turned and smacked me in the shoulder. Lightly, which for her, still stung a little.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?!" I raised my hands and tried to give her my most innocent of looks.

"Nothing. Nothing at all." We kept walking. Somewhere along the third corridor, I realized something. Violet wasn't wandering. Every turn she took, she took without hesitating. Every time I made to move one way, she steered me somewhere else. She was leading us somewhere. That alone was strange. Violet wasn't the type to subtly lead people places. She was the type to kick doors open and drag you through them. Pretending this was just a random walk to an unknown destination was unlike her.

Whatever this was, it mattered to her. So I said nothing, and followed. The halls slowly grew familiar in a way I couldn't quite place. The light kept dying in the windows. And then I noticed the dust. It was faint. A thin film on the windowsills, catching the last of the light. In any other house it would have meant nothing. But Mari had kept every inch of this manor immaculate. All of that care had seemed to end at this corridor. We walked on and then I saw the wall.

There was a patch of stone, newer than the rest, set into the old masonry in a rough seam. It had been fitted very well, but it looked just slightly different from the walls around it. I might not have noticed at all if a part of me wasn't looking for it. I knew that wall, though the only memory I had was of coming through the other side. We both slowed. Violet's eyes passed over the seam and away. Mine did the same, and we walked on. So that's where we're going.

Violet stopped in front of a door at the end of the hall. She stood there for a moment, her hand hovering just short of the handle. Then she took a deep breath, and opened it. The door opened. Stale air flowed out to meet us, and with it was a scent. It was the scent of dried flowers. A… sweetness that should have faded a long time ago, but somehow hadn't. The room beyond was large. In a manor, it could have been the Duke's chamber… or a duchess's.

There was a vase on a side table near the door, and the flowers in it had dried long ago, but they had kept their color, every petal still holding a black-grey so deep it looked almost fresh in the dying light. The bed at the back of the room was unmade. The sheets lay tangled, half-pulled toward one side. Nobody had touched them. Nobody had touched this room for some time. Fourteen years. Fourteen years, and nobody in this house had dared to touch those sheets. And on the far wall, there were weapons.

I saw knives. Swords. A pair of shields. There were two spears crossed over a mount. Most of them had a red-brown tinge worked deep into the metal. They hung in neat rows.

"Violet," I said quietly.

"Is this room...?" She didn't answer me, though I knew the answer well enough. She stepped inside, and I slowly followed. I felt Vaelin stir for a moment, and then he retreated. As if he had taken one look at this room, and decided it wasn't his place. Violet moved through the room slowly, like she was moving through deep water. Her hand brushed the tangled sheets as she passed the bed and then fell away. She kept walking. She stopped in front of the weapon wall and stood there for a long time.

Her fingers traced the haft of one of the larger hammers.

"She had good taste," she muttered.

"Course, Giantsmasher's better, but..." She trailed off. Giantsmasher was Scarlet Indri's warhammer. A thing used for so long by a woman so renowned it had become a pseudo Artifact of sorts. It was the warhammer Violet now used. Violet kept walking. I just watched. I knew I should do something, say something. I didn't know what. There was nothing in any book I had ever read for this. Her hip caught the edge of a writing desk. Something rattled, and a drawer jolted open an inch. Violet stopped.

She looked down at it. Then she pulled it the rest of the way open.

"... What the hell is this?" I came up beside her and looked down. The drawer was full of paper. Dozens of sheets, every one of them covered edge to edge in handwriting. I read some of them, and they were all the same passages, over and over and over. The proper forms of address for a duke, a count, a baron. The order of precedence at a formal table. The meanings of flowers. The pages at the top of the stack had rougher writing.

The ink was often blotted and smeared, the letters malformed and pressed so hard into the sheet that some had torn clean through. The pages beneath them were better. And the ones beneath those were better still, until the words were all cleaner lines. Near the bottom of the stack the handwriting had become something elegant. I might not have noticed what this was, had I not seen someone slowly doing the same. Sere's writing had started off like those papers at the top. She was slowly working her way down.

"I think she was... learning," I said, looking down at them.

"You can see it too, can't you?"

"She didn't know?" Violet murmured. I thought about this for a moment.

"She was a slave, wasn't she," I said.

"Maybe she didn't." Violet nodded, slowly. She lifted a handful of the pages and turned through them.

"I guess... even she needed to learn things, huh." She stood there a while longer. Reading things that were never meant to be interesting, in writing that was painful to look upon. Violet read all of it with an attention I doubt she had ever given a page. Then she squared the stack against her palm and moved to set it back down. Something slipped from between the pages and fell. It landed face-up on the floor between us. Violet went very still. Then she crouched, and picked it up. Her shoulders started to shake.

I stepped closer and looked down. It was a Scrylens photo, old and slightly faded at the corners. A woman sat at the center of it. She was red-haired and beautiful, the kind of beautiful that had probably frightened people. Beside her sat a man, and it took me a full second to recognize him, because Duke Indri was smiling ear to ear. I might have seen him smile before, but it had never been like that. And in the woman's arms, wrapped in a bundle of pale cloth, was a baby.

"You look like your mother," I whispered. Violet nodded, slowly. Her hand clenched around the edge of the photo.

"He didn't look like that when I knew him," she muttered. I reached out and touched her wrist.

"I know."

"Wonder why he couldn't have just stayed that way." Her voice had gone very quiet. No more than a whisper.

"I know she's gone, but... was she that amazing that nothing else mattered? That I-" She stopped. I looked at the photo, at the smiling man who had become the monster we had killed in the tunnels beneath this house. A parent who chose their obsession over their child. It was familiar.

"Sometimes," I murmured, "you're so busy thinking about what you lost or don't have, that you end up forgetting what you still have." Violet looked at me. Then she slowly nodded.

"I guess," she muttered.

"You're really smart sometimes, y'know."

"Only sometimes?" I grinned. Violet snorted. She looked down at the photo one more time. She took a deep breath, and slid it into her pocket.

"Thanks," she said.

"Hmm?" I said.

"I didn't do anything." Violet looked up at me.

"And sometimes you're really fucking dumb."

"Hey, I'm not-" She hugged me. I froze for a moment. Then, slowly, I hugged her back. Her chin dug into my shoulder. Her arms were far too strong, as always, and I did not say a word about it. It took me a few seconds to realize she was shaking.

"Hey," Violet said, into my shoulder.

"What?"

"You better not tell anyone else about this." I sighed.

"You're really dumb sometimes too, my friend." We separated, eventually. Violet went back to the desk and closed the drawer. She did it carefully, with both hands. It was the gentlest I had ever seen her handle anything. Then, before we turned to go, she crossed to the window and shoved it open. The frame creaked and fought her. It finally gave with a loud crack. Evening air rolled into the room. The dried flowers in the vase trembled in the draft, and did not lose a single petal.

"Gonna have Mari clean this place out," Violet muttered. I was smiling. This time it was I who hugged her.