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"Canta?"
"Canta, when you see this…"
"Canta, if you see this, please respond?"
"What's going on in Rinascita? Is everything alright?"
"I've asked a Black Shores Consultant — they've said they don't know anything, but if it were peacetime they wouldn't have to say that, would they? What's happening there? Is it the Lament? The Dark Tide returned? Is Leviathan making its move again? I thought the Fisalias were…"
"Canta, please, I'm just…I'm just worried about you. Please answer when you're safe, okay?"
White stockings bleed red. Her blood, but not her blood.
The hands clamped over her stomach are clammy, cold, and her own. Her nails shake in their nailbeds, aching pain from the grip, but nothing overrides that ill pain that spreads through her abdomen, the sickening grip of realisation, dread, pooling down from her hairline, sweat and tears and blood flowing down her legs.
I didn't know.
She didn't know.
I didn't want to.
She never would have imagined.
I would never have.
She would never have dreamed of doing this.
But the deed is done. The chalice full of the newest poison. The cauldron boiling thick fumes of medicinal smoke while Rosemary fights for every second that they're losing, every bit of blood she's losing. The Order is banging on her castle doors today; did someone offend them again? The Montellis were only just by this morning, yet another failed negotiation, Carlotta Montelli reaching out to her Terminal in a readjusted negotiation.
A busy morning as always. A breakfast skipped. Her panini untouched. The cortisol in her veins, the nausea in her chest, her usual morning companion. The missive from the elders informing her of an updated concoction of the 'antidote', requesting that she trial it on the servants to test its effectiveness. Her frustration that put the chalice to her lips, and drank.
She should have stopped when her stomach twisted so sharply. Should have paused amd breathed when it burned down her throat like the bile threatening to rise and return, acid going both ways in the tightness of her oesophagus. Should not have ignored the signs of her head pounding, faster than her heart was racing, faster than her breaths were lacing the stitches between her ribs, the spitfire swallowing her stomach until she finally, finally, succumbed, and threw up nothing but air and a gasp of agonised regret.
Then the blood started flowing, and she knew, for certain, what had got wrong. Why today, of all days like her past, her Forte did not provide her immunity. Her blood did not innoculate her against the toxcity. Her tongue, numbed, the last sensation she'd felt before the warmth trickling down her thighs, down her calf, draining against her ankle into her heels.
Was she arrogant? Was she naïve? Was there a force beyond her understanding, some tacit result forged from what they did not know nor understand? There was a celebration a while back. A reunion with an old friend, after the most pressing crisis had been resolved, the Fisalia name absolved.
Had she let herself free, had she let herself go too much, her lips too loose and her tongue too greedy, a stolen sip or a dozen more that drained the osmanthus wine down her throat? Tossed her hair over her shoulders, her dress over her shoulders, her hand up against on her friend's soft waist when she'd kissed a mouth full of wine burned warmth.
One night.
A haze.
A slip of control, of composure.
A forgotten affection adjourned by all her work.
A fruit of the forbidden — the thought sickens her, but there is nothing left to retch. Between poison and life, only one may be chosen. Choose both, and you'll find that it's only an illusion. The finality of the choice will only prolong itself until the end. Poison or life, a pathetic dichotomy.
And now that the poison has nestled itself, coiled tightly within her stomach, a life must go.
"Matriarch…" Rosemary's calm countenance is full of distraught despair, desperation for forgiveness, for uselessness and for and broken sympathy. "Lady Cantarella, I've tried my best."
The herbal soup tastes charred. Burnt, bitter, searing down her throat, but the pain has long stopped. Her abdomen has numbed, her body paralysed with an ache and an exhaustion, harshened in prematurity. The bleeding has slowed, with Rosemary's concoction, but she dares not dream further. In this Porto Veno Castle, in this land of the doomed, the estate of the Fisalias, only poison will win in the very end. The strongest poison has the strongest say, and it has said to spare her, she who lays on the bloodied chaise, and breathes the stolen air. It has lost to her, but life has lost to it, and her mind is so purely lucid, while she blinks away the sweat from her eyes, and downs the rest of the mixture.
"I won't die just yet." She smiles, at her butler, at the pharmaceutical prodigy of the younger generation of Fisalias. The best ending, the best way it could have happened. Nature's fight for the fittest — a life lost, but a life never to be sucked into the cesspool of the Fisalia damnation. "I can't die until Leviathan's deed has been laid to rest, and Ragunna sees to peace again."
"Lady Cantarella…" Sebastian, her well-taught butler. He knows better than to protest, better than to pity, better than to spend his breath on the useless and the vulnerable. "Will you respond to your Terminal?"
The breath that sighs from her lips is not hers, not voluntarily released, but it comes from the depths of her chest, to piece together her voice from her ruined throat, to hold the Terminal to her lips and to whisper, to smile, to lie.
"It's just been a long few days, Changli. Draggy days, dreary weeks, tiresome work these months. When all is over…I'll visit you again in Jinzhou, or you can meet me when the Rinascitan skies are cleared and beautiful once more."
Changli doesn't reply immediately, but maybe Cantarella doesn't want her to. Doesn't want to acknowledge the truth of what has happen, the brick within her bleeding mind, the poison burning a heavy hole in her heart.
But let her so bear this weight alone.
It's the only way to ground her within the eye of a storm.