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“Mother, what’s wrong with Father’s gift?”
Ishme tilted up at the flower on her mother’s vanity, a delicate thing poking out from within a sturdy dwarven vase, obscuring her sight of them both in the mirror. Even at such a tender age she was familiar with such gifts having received them herself, bundles and bunches of little bright blossoms that shimmered with magic to preserve them—meant to appease the smitten King more than her, no doubt. Every last one had been whisked away despite her demands to the contrary, the moment their heads had begun to bow. Disgraceful, her nanny had called it, for a lady to covet a spent thing.
Yet already this one curled at the edge of its petals, its brilliant column of deep crimson blooms tarnished by shades of brown bleeding in towards their centers. Neither did the Queen’s flower shimmer, its lone and wilted stalk seemingly untouched by magecraft. She felt a hand behind her ear firmly straighten her head and Ishme’s gaze returned to the table’s marbled top, her mother beginning again to plait her hair.
“There is nothing wrong with it.”
“But it’s dying already. The petals are brown,” she pressed on, considering its cause. Any gift from the King was to be cherished, with serious implications for disposing of one too soon…yet there were implications as well in a faulty offering to the Queen. “Did the magic not work? Is Father mad at you?”
There came a snicker from behind her, the noblewoman’s equivalent to howling laughter. “Such a slight against his Queen would be answered swiftly, and severely. No, Endrin knows better than that. The flower was never enchanted. Such was my wish.”
Whatever reason she had—and there had to be a reason, her mother was not senseless—eluded Ishme. Flowers couldn’t grow in Orzammar, nothing but mushrooms and cave lichen could without surfacer intervention. What had she missed? The gentle tugging at her temple paused, and a long tail of copper hair a shade darker than her own draped across Ishme’s shoulder. She could feel her mother’s gaze upon her like heat off a lava pool, warming her cheeks with the fear that she’d worn her struggle too openly upon her face.
“You are thinking. Good.” She eased with the praise, her breath trembling the petals but a handspan from her face. Her chin lifted as well, until again that firm hand guided it back down. “Tell me then, why might I prefer my gift unaltered?”
There was a clue in that final word, she knew by the emphasis placed upon it by her mother’s tone, yet she still couldn’t wrap her mind around that ‘why’. “I suppose spending so much on something that won’t last long shows our wealth, but…” She considered carefully the words to follow, but found no alternative to their bluntness. “It only fades because it’s incomplete. Other nobles would know as much. I can’t understand why you would accept a lesser gift.”
“Why do you assume the gift is lesser? Because its beauty is fleeting? Were that the case, should we not all covet glass roses instead?” Her hair was pulled sharply and secured tight, enough to feel as though the skin of her face were being stretched, but she held her tongue against crying out. Such was unbecoming of a princess. “Sentiments such as those are shallow, as is any lady who believes that power lies in appearance alone. They are little more than accessories themselves, basing worth upon something so fickle. I’ve no need to impress them. This flower is for my sight alone.”
Though the scolding lingered like a burn, still she bore it with the dignity expected of her. The Queen’s words were to be heeded, especially those that stung. There had to have been something she’d missed. Without moving her head Ishme’s eyes flashed back up to the flower, glancing across its strange orientation, as if each bloom were stacked upon one another. It was beautiful, certainly, but then she’d seen the unwanted bouquets her mother had tucked out of sight so as not to offend. This single one was simple by comparison. If not for their beauty, then…
“Do they mean something? Something that would be spoiled, by preserving them?”
Her mother cupped the curve of her jaw, pleasantly cool where the pads of her fingers pressed against her cheeks. “There’s my gem.” With a little squeeze she leaned forward to grab a hairpin, red and glittering. “In the lands above they do represent strength and victory, yes, but that isn’t the reason I prefer them. Tell me, do you recall the time it takes for a caravan to travel from the nearest mercantile town in Ferelden to the gates of Orzammar?”
“A week,” she answered promptly, the topic fresh in her mind. She’d only just begun lessons on trade. Her tutors always praised her memory.
“At the very least. Most flowers, once cut, last no more than ten days. Less, in the heat of our city.”
Ishme’s fingers twitched as she counted the days since the King’s banquet celebrating their most recent delve into the Deep Roads, where the flower had been gifted. When she added the caravan’s time onto it as well…
“But…it's been well over a fortnight, then, since these flowers were cut.”
“And therein lies their beauty.” Slight pressure built as the pin was placed, then released as her mother tugged gently at the plaits, loosening their tight weave. “These blooms are resilient. No other can withstand the travel nor the heat, and still flourish. They require no one else’s power to augment their worth.”
With a final pass to smooth any stray hairs she spritzed her with a fine mist smelling strongly of citrus, before setting her tools aside and resting her hands upon Ishme’s shoulders. It was a pleasant weight, like a hug. Looking up she found herself in the looking glass, rosy cheeks and immaculate dress, not a single thread out of place. A perfect princess, a shimmering jewel within Orzammar’s crown. Mother always did a better job than the servants did, and for her first presentation to the deshyrs, Ishme needed to look her best.
A smile finally broke through her practiced countenance, looking to the form behind her in the mirror for approval as it did. She found nothing, the face she searched cast in deep shadows, and utterly unreadable. “It is something you’d do well to remember,” her faceless mother said, “When you rely upon another’s believed competence, their incompetence too becomes your own. You are Aeducan, hewn of stone and pride. You are all that you need to survive.”
It was a sentiment she struggled to take to heart when thereafter the Queen underestimated her foe, and too soon wilted away as her beloved, nameless flowers did. She was returned to the Stone, and Ishme learned quickly that one didn’t survive in Orzammar on their own strength alone, no matter how dignified such an idea seemed. One survived by using all of the tools at their disposal to rip their opposition to shreds, mercilessly and without remorse.
Unfortunately, Ishme was more like her mother than she cared to admit. The only difference was that she had to live with the consequences of her naivete.
Had it been anyone but Gorim she would’ve ignored them to embrace her fate within the Deep Roads, but thus far her Second’s life had been devoted to ensuring her own continued. She wouldn’t render his entire existence meaningless as well. Still, such a singular purpose could only get her so far, and though she bore a deep well of respect for the Grey Wardens the same couldn’t be extended to herself. The potential she’d carelessly lost led armies, reclaimed thaigs, brought low droves of darkspawn. Instead, she was the one brought low, caked in the black blood of those relative few she’d managed to fell, and stooped down with the hands that had once decided the fate of hundreds buried in the dirt for the sake of a single beast.
She was no longer hewn of the Stone, nor was she a proud Aeducan. Truly, she may as well have been of the same ilk as the dog she rifled through the muck for.
The plant she wrestled finally broke loose of the soil, its light green stem somehow immaculate within her smudged hands, and the fine hairs of its stalk rubbing through the grit in her palm. They felt soft against her calluses. It was the first time she’d really looked at a flower since, save the passing glances she’d spared for the gifts she’d occasionally received. She shook out its roots, branching like the dark veins of the darkspawn she’d only just killed, and turned its face towards her.
It was just as the kennel master had said: white, with a red center. Like an unblinking eye, staring straight through her.
Irreverently she shoved it into her pack, and wiped her hands of its filth. She’d never understood the fascination of her peers, the way they’d swooned over dying—no, already dead—things. They were nothing more than pretty little corpses, propped up on wardrobes and displayed at social functions, as if they carried more than their weight in gold.
Useless. At the very least, she told herself, this one had a purpose.
The rose that Alistair gave to her, however, did not. Her eyes fell away from his shrinking form, scratching nervously at the back of his neck as he promptly made his escape, and to its crumpled petals, its withered beauty. It wouldn’t save anybody from the Blight, nor was it particularly sightly after having spent the better part of a week within his pouch. By its nature it was without value, doomed to be forgotten and consumed by the uncaring world that would swallow it and Lothering. When compared to all those lives lost, the homes pillaged and burned, it wasn’t worth the effort it had taken to bend down, and cut it.
And yet, he’d found reason to, something within its deep red and velvety petals worth preserving. Something that he’d attributed to her.
After everything they’d been through and seen her eyes were clouded against such trivial things as beauty, but this often careless and seemingly thoughtless man had been given pause by a rose, of all things. Enough, even, to pluck it, and ponder it at length. How long had he carried it, twirling it between plated forefinger and thumb, just as she now did? And how many times from its full-petaled zenith to its crumpling conclusion had it reminded him of her? What had he seen, within them both?
“What a rare and wonderful thing you are to find amidst all this darkness.”
She despised Kaval’s flower, and the weakness it represented within them both. This rose was hardly different, but from him…since the moment they’d met she’d felt spent, a testament to fallen grace and hubris, but to him she was something else. He’d come to her now, brow glistening with a sheen of sweat that glued her stray hairs in fiery whorls to her brow, and seen her beneath the strife. He’d seen her, in that moment, as something beautiful.
To place so much in the opinion of another was foolish, she knew. Knowing did little to change the way it radiated up, however, when she cupped the fragile thing to her armored chest, like a little bird fluttering against her platemail. Frail, but precious. Her cheeks wanted for a smile, one she instinctively denied…but then, why did she fight it here? A princess may not have shown emotion so easily, but she was no princess. She was a Warden bathed in viscera, and she was a fool. The stage she’d once performed upon was no more than a memory, and Ishme wasn’t even so much as a part of the crowd. Her display was over. She bore no crown.
After so long it felt foreign, that tensing of her lips, that pinching at her cheeks, but all the same it warmed her. That warmth found her again when next she came upon that red-eyed bloom, there beneath the elven heart tree. Andraste’s Grace.
It had a scent. She hadn’t noticed that when she’d searched for them within the Wilds. Maybe the smell of darkspawn and moist peat had overpowered it then, though she wagered the alienage where she kneeled now to cradle it smelled no better. It was all Leliana remembered of her own mother, that sweet fragrance upon her linens, spoken of with such a keen fondness that even stony Ishme had felt it. She lifted the flower, its soft petals kissing her nose. Like the honeyed sweets she’d liked as a child, before she’d outgrown such simple indulgences. They’d been made of dried fruit, and dusted with sugar. They’d left her teeth sticky, and her fingers covered in a fine white powder.
What had Kaval’s flower smelled of? She lowered her hand, eyelids fluttering near shut. Before the scent of citrus perfumes showered her that memory had smelled warm, too, but not so sweet as Andraste’s Grace. It was warm in the way of spices, tingling as they flooded her nostrils, underlined by something subtler…a nut of some kind, maybe. So much of her mother had been overwritten, replaced by the portraits in the banquet hall and what rumors she caught on the lips of lords and ladies. She was the perfect Queen, when in Ishme’s presence, though their true thoughts were so often betrayed by the sneer in their tone they believed their young princess incapable of detecting.
A formidable woman, of course, but a weak one as well to be brought to death by the King’s concubine, or so the whispers went.
True or not, there must have been more that Trian and she had cried for upon her passing, some side to her mother that her sorrow and shame had divorced from her memories. Something they had cherished, something they’d missed. Whatever it may have been could only be inferred from that faded memory, of her prideful force radiating from behind Ishme, her ambition, her drive. That vision in the mirror, she feared, would never quite clear, though with time the feeling somehow did. With every sweep of Ishme’s brush through the copper hair twining her fingers, each strand she wove together and pinned, she felt herself closer to Kaval.
“Mother? What are you thinking about?”
She blinked away her contemplations, finding easily the warm brown eyes of Olira in the looking glass beyond her. The braid she worked had long since been finished, though still her thoughtless hands wove its ends needlessly together. A languid summer breeze wandered in through the window, sighing through willow leaves. It carried upon it a warm scent, reminiscent of spice and almonds.
“Only flowers,” she said and twirled the braid into place, reaching past the girl for her hairpin. Even before Olira had looked back she felt the questions impending, her little brow lifted by disbelief. She wore her emotions plain, just as her father did.
“You were thinking about…flowers?”
With a firm hand behind her ear Ishme straightened her daughter’s head, guiding her to face straight ahead once again. “Yes, flowers.” The pin slipped into place, and she grabbed another. “The ones your father planted beneath the window reminded me of something I’d nearly forgotten.”
The search had taken years, long enough that she’d since given up; there was little that could stop the King of Ferelden from indulging his Queen, however. They were a rarity in the South, but from beyond the lip of her dressing room’s low windows she could just see their tall stalks peeking in, a range of bright reds and oranges. Olira struggled not to move, dutifully looking at them from the corner of her eye instead.
“They’re pretty. I really wanted one, but Daddy said they’re all for you,” she griped of the injustice, kicking her feet. “Are they your favorite?”
“Possibly,” she answered, her uncertainty sincere. “Your grandmother was fond of them. Only sword lilies could survive the journey to Orzammar without enchantment, and still remain alive for a time afterward. She preferred them that way, untouched by magic.” Another soft breath of air swirled through the room, the drapes dancing to the willowsong filling the silence between them. The final pin found its place and Ishme searched her daughter in the mirror, absentmindedly picking at her nails where her hands rested in her lap. “You think better when you speak your thoughts, gem.”
Olira’s eyes bounced up in surprise, before a light dusting of blush shaded her cheeks. “I was just wondering…what was grandmother like? You never talk about her.”
Because I myself am uncertain, she thought. Such an answer wouldn’t satisfy the curiosity of a five-year-old, however. “She was beautiful, and very smart.”
“Like you?”
A laugh hummed in her throat. “I would hope.” Again she fell back into that memory, the only one she could recall. Kaval had known the ways of Orzammar then, how cutthroat the nobility was and how invaluable self-sufficiency could be. Even Ishme's own father had committed fratricide. Still, that sentiment she believed could save her daughter, that warning against trusting even one’s own family, had come from a fear born of love. It was a lesson she would no doubt have learned eventually without her teachings, one that had the potential to swallow Ishme whole.
One that had, regardless. The lesson was a worthy one, even so far away from the deshyrs and their schemes. The hurdles ahead of Olira, the half-dwarven child of a bastard king and his only recently acknowledged Queen, would be difficult to overcome, but they needn't be shouldered entirely alone as Kaval had believed. Even should the Calling have come for them both on the morrow, there were those she trusted to guide her daughter true. Ishme’s hands found her shoulders.
"Your grandmother was a resilient woman who liked sword lilies because they were resilient as well, even without the aid of another. She wanted me to be strong in that way, so that I would rise above any hardship. I might not have survived the Blight, if not for the lesson she taught me."
"What did she teach you?"
"That all I could ever need was already inside of me, waiting for that moment when I needed it the most." Gently she lifted a finger to Olira's chin and tilted the child's face to look at her, all freckled cheeks and sun-touched skin, so far removed from the stony skies of her youth. "It's inside of you, too. I can see it. There are so many kinds of strength within this world, Olira Theirin—not only of body, but of mind, of will, of character. Whatever hardships lay ahead, you are already the solution. Even in the darkness, you've strength enough to bloom."
A lop-sided grin spread from cheek to cheek, untethered by expectation, and missing a few teeth. She was neither practiced nor poised, and she was perfect. Ishme brushed the stray hairs from her forehead before squeezing her cheeks.
"Now then, I believe it's about time we saved the King from the Teyrn of Highever, wouldn't you agree?" she suggested, and offered a hand to her daughter as she hopped down from the chair. "I've no doubt Fergus has bored your father into a stupor by now talking of trade, and dinner will make the perfect excuse."
"Do you think Eddi came with this time?" Olira piped in eagerly. "I want to show her everything I've learned, since she last came to visit."
"One can only hope," Ishme said, and spared not that final glance for her memories behind her. Instead, she closed the door on her dressing room and kept her eyes on what lie ahead, upon that which truly mattered.