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the thing with petals
All things considered — and when you ignore the swamp and the paint-stripping moonshine — a Wardens’ party is not so different from a Crows’.
The letter from Antoine comes about two weeks after Rook had stumbled back through the eluvian with Davrin and Bellara — filthy, exhausted, exultant. Rook seems disinclined to go, right up until the postscript from Evka that Davrin reads aloud, with a few pointed glances up over the top of the paper: “I know you’re busy, and I’m not in any position to summon you, but seeing as we did go out to meet you in Arlathan, I’d say you owe us the return trip.”
(“Oh, that’s low,” Rook had said, sounding almost impressed.)
And so, they go. It’s an open invitation to them all, although only Bellara and Harding seem tempted. Taash goes because Harding does. As for Lucanis… well. War, fade, blight-infested swamp — where Rook leads, he will follow.
Which is how he finds himself seated on a wall in the Anderfels with a nine-year-old, watching the last Wardens get drunk in the mud.
“My dad says I have to smell everything before I drink it for the rest of the week,” Mila observes, swinging her feet.
He thinks, absurdly, of Viago. If he were here, he'd would be so busy launching into a lengthy explanation as to why that ought to be the bare minimum of precaution for the rest her life that he would miss the point entirely. For his part, Lucanis offers a nod. “That’s probably for the best. I haven’t tried any yet. It smells like rust.”
“Oh! Yeah, that’s cause Ewan made it in a bathtub we found in a field.”
…that sounds about right, yes.
Below, the villagers and Wardens mix in a wave of brown and grey and blue. He can’t see Harding, but Taash and Bellara are off to one side, which means the scout can’t be too far. Davrin was pulled further into the center long before, and Lucanis can just make him out holding court—tall and proud with Assan at his hip—near the statue in the center of the village. A huddle near the makeshift infirmary has produced fiddles, pipes, a hand drum. There’s dancing. People trip in the loose soil and catch each other, laughing. A few children and dogs run underfoot through the crowd. It smells like roast meat and apples and… yes, rust. Even those who volunteered or drew short for duty tonight seem relaxed at the barricades. Voices rise and fall, untroubled.
They're still here. Alive, when they shouldn’t be, when they almost weren’t. For tonight, they’re happy.
On reflection, it bears very little resemblance to a Crow party. Terrible drinks notwithstanding, Lucanis is finding he might like it.
Rook had been in the middle of it all too, for a time — a flash of auburn lost in the crowd. Lucanis watched from a distance as she’d been tugged in alongside Davrin, Evka, Antoine. She’d looked over her shoulder at him just before she’d vanished in the press of other Wardens who flocked to jostle the shoulders and smack the backs of the heroes who'd held back the New Blight. “Hey—” he had seen her mouth form, although it was too noisy to have heard it. Pure indigence, the way she had glared at him, but then the throng had swallowed her.
Mila’s got some kind of rolled pastry studded with almonds and raisins, half-bundled in old, thin cloth. She breaks off a chunk and offers it to him.
“Were you born at Weisshaupt?” he asks.
She shakes her head, curls bouncing. “No, my dad and I were from near Perendale. Some darkspawn came down from the mountains and attacked our village. My mother died, and my dad got blighted. That’s how he ended up a Warden. I don’t remember any of that, though. I was only little.”
It’s the simplicity of it that gets him, how she announces it so casually and then takes an over-ambitious bite of pastry. He’d started training with Caterina already by her age, and he’s seen this same child dart through terrors that would send a grown man screaming, but she seems so impossibly young, licking the icing from her fingers with a pleased hum.
“What will you two do now, do you think?”
She blinks at him, curious. “What do you mean?”
“When this is all over, I mean. No more archdemons. Will you and your father stay in Lavendel?”
Mila looks out on the village thoughtfully. Her father is somewhere down there, in the crowd — Lucanis saw him not too long ago, near the fire pit where the boar is roasting. “Dunno,” she says after a moment’s thought. “I don’t really care where we go, as long as I’m with my dad.”
“Maybe you two can come visit Treviso, sometime. I’ll show you around.”
Mila considers this, tips her head to look up at him with her face scrunched skeptically. “Is it true that everyone in Antiva wears capes all the time and goes everywhere on their own boats?”
It startles a laugh out of him. “Who told you that?” Although, of course, it was—
“Taash,” Mila supplies.
—Taash.
“Come see for yourself,” he offers. And then, conspiratorially, “I’ll let you steer the boat.”
The girl grins at him, wide and toothy, and pops the rest of her pastry in her mouth. Lucanis takes a bite of his own. It’s better than he expected — flaky, not too sweet. The almond slices crunch between his teeth. If he’s lucky, no bathtubs were involved in its production.
“Don’t talk to deserters, Mila,” a voice says behind them.
Mila’s expression brightens a little further as she twists around. “Rook, he says if I visit him in Treviso he’ll let me drive a boat.”
Rook laughs as she approaches, a clutch of blue flowers in one hand, wrapped loosely in twine. “I’ve seen them,” she admits, settling down on Lucanis’ other side. “They are pretty great.”
“Did you get to drive one?!”
“Not yet. You’ll have to teach me.”
Mila fixes Lucanis with a serious look. “And the cape.”
“And the cape,” he promises.
That earns him another grin. She clambers up from her spot on the wall, brushing herself off and looking down to the crowd below with her hands on her hips. “Greta’s going to throw up,” she decides, after a brief survey. “I’ve got her.”
They watch her go. Nine strikes him as a bit young for First Warden, but he's no expert, and Mila does seem to be ready to make an admirable run at it.
Rook is smiling, tracking the girl down the stairs and into the crowd with her eyes. She’s not quite close enough that their shoulders brush, but nearly so — near enough that Lucanis can feel the warmth of her in the cool air, can smell the faintest hint of the flowers. And no rust.
“I thought you’d be enjoying the party,” he says.
She pulls a face. “Nah. It’s nice to be here with everyone. Especially after everything they’ve all been through. But this was really more for Davrin. And Antoine.”
Davrin, who seems fully unbothered by the contents of his rough-hewn mug, who looks happier and more at ease in the cluster of his brothers and sisters-in-arms than Lucanis thinks he has ever seen him. Antoine cuts a reedy figure, animated and effusive and perhaps more than a bit unsteady, but Evka at his side is clear-eyed, smiling, watchful. Of all of them, she’s the only one the other Wardens seem to be giving any space to. Lucanis wonders if any of them even notice they’re doing it — the subtle deference.
“Anyway,” she’s going on, “It’s not like we’re done out here. Some of us have to keep our feet under us to make sure one hurlock on a hot streak doesn’t wipe out the rest of the order.”
Mm. “In peace?”
Rook shoots him a broad, crooked grin, bumps his shoulder with her own. “You have been listening."
In the crowd, Davrin's laugh carries—a brief, uninhibited bark. Rook's glance downwards is fond.
“Did you hear what they heard?”
“I…” Rook frowns down at her lap. “When we were close to it, yeah.”
She seems disinclined to say more. There’s perhaps two good bites left of the pasty Mila had shared with him. He splits in it two and hands her a little more than half.
“There’s a name for these, but we always just called them snail shells," she says, smiling down at it.
“They’re good.”
“They are, aren’t they? They’d make them every Wintersend.” Rook pops her bit in her mouth as he does, chews slowly. Below, a small ripple weaves through the crowd towards the far side: Mila, marching through.
It’s hard to imagine Wintersend in Weisshaupt. To be fair, Lucanis didn’t see it under the best circumstances.
Her gaze has drifted back to her lap. She touches one of the blue petals in the cluster with a light hand. “Never any flowers for spring out there, though. I think if Evka had told us how much more had grown before we’d come, I wouldn’t have believed her.”
They are striking. Lucanis was taken aback himself, as they’d descended the stone steps when they’d arrived. So many blossoms, almost glowing in the moonlight. Bright, indomitable, Warden blue.
“They’re beautiful. Are these for the Lighthouse?”
“Harding was telling me how she and her mum used to press flowers in books, when she was a kid. To save them. She’s going to show me how to do it.”
Rook’s got one stem loose from the bundle and holds it between her thumb and pointer finger, twirling slowly. For a few moments, she seems very far away. He waits.
"I didn't realize how much I needed this win," she admits, eventually, very softly. "...I don't know. It's silly."
He's not sure it is. "What?"
She shrugs, eyebrows drawn close together, swallowing heavily. "There's still a long way to go. But if we can bring spring to a Blight..."
It is, briefly, incongruous with the image of her that has crystallized in his mind over the long months together since the Ossuary. Of all the things he thinks of, when he thinks of Rook, 'doubt' has never been among them. Not like this. He watches the blossom in her hand, the slow rotation of the petals.
"If we can do that," he offers, "What're two gods?"
Rook looks at him. She doesn't say anything, but the small, cautious smile that pulls at the corners of her lips says enough.
"She is not going to be happy in the morning." Mila is back, shaking her head as she crests the stairs with the exasperated air of a schoolteacher with especially rowdy pupils.
Rook holds his gaze for one beat more before she turns to look. "Where'd you put her?"
"The infirmary. Flynn's going to be busy, tomorrow."
A click of Rook's tongue, a wry grin. "The burden of expertise."
She climbs to her feet, bouquet still loose in her grip. Lucanis expects her to tuck the remaining stem back in with the rest, but instead, Rook extends her hand down to him: a single, perfect flower, held delicately between two fingers. He takes it. Looking down at him in the slanted light, her eyes are bright and deep.
"Are there any more snail shells?" she asks, as she walks away.
"Not down there," Mila's voice carries from behind him, perfunctory. "But I stashed a couple under my bed."
"Hmm. I don't suppose I could convince you to part with one..."
"I want a seashell. From Rivain." Their voices fade as they make their way back into the keep. "Taash said there's ones that look like big..."
The fiddling rises. He can see Harding again with the others, now, pinked cheek and sputtering and holding a mug away from her face as if it’s full of acid. Bellara and Taash. Davrin, by the statue. Assan launching from rooftops to catch balls of snow midair, flung high by children from the village.
And in his hand, one flower. Fragile, ephemeral, blooming.