How many days had she been here, in the dark, beneath the cold, ancient stones of Sk?rdsta, not knowing if other Blossoms yet drew breath, if she was all alone in the world, now, soon to wither until there was nothing left of her? During the first days of her confinement, Vira had thought that the worst part about her cell was the stench, her pail overflowing on a corner of the enclosure, until at last some gaoler remembered its existence. But somehow she got used to that. It was the darkness that ate at her soul. When her captors arrived with food and water, the relief was almost greater for the torchlight that accompanied them than the scarce meals. Yet it was always brief, and Vira was soon returned to the dark. By now she knew better than to beg. A gaoler soon learned to see prisoners as things rather than people, or he would not do well at his task.

  She placed the palm of her hand but an inch before her eyes, and saw nothing in the complete absence of light. During the brief moments of respite, when a meek orange glow revealed blackened silhouettes, Vira would inspect her own body, as if to ascertain that she was real. She felt real enough, pained and weak and frightened, but no words were spoken to her, and she could see her surroundings only for a moment, so in time she began to wonder if she had ever been more than a ghost fading in the shadows. Left in silence, soon learning that all her words would be ignored, it became easy to believe that the plates and cups left on the grimy floor were meant not for her but for rats and worms.

  I never found any rats, though. Here was not a place for life. So what did that make her? It was never knowing how many days had passed that was the worst, that and the darkness, though they really were one and the same. This had always been a land of short days and lengthy nights, but now Vira missed those sad grey skies.

  Please accompany us, my lady, her hosts had told her, and fool that she was, she obeyed. That day, now a lifetime ago, if not another woman’s life, had been a haze of sorrow and harrowing silences. Dead, all dead, she heard again and again, and when she opened her mouth to speak, her voice failed all her words but for all? All of them, all of the Blossoms, all of my sisters, all of us? She roamed Sk?rdsta as if lost in fog, headed nowhere in particular, the familiar stones suddenly too distant, the walls too far apart, the ceiling stretching higher than the skies, everywhere an empty space, and in the staff of the castle a newfound emptiness in those pitying eyes. Poor thing, some serving maid said, she’s lost her wits. It was not her wits that Vira had lost, of course, but her bloom-sisters, her life, her heart. None had any news to share with her in any further detail, and the castle doors were barred to her, so that she would not run away before all was clarified. Fool of a child, she thought of herself now, they could only restrain you because you allowed them. Now they put these manacles on you, the left cold and the right always warm… Warm like flesh.

  Her magic was gone now, stifled like a whisper in a storm. That a prison would have hex shackles was hardly surprising, but somehow it still felt like this was what stung the most in this betrayal. Few born in these cold wastes ever learned to weave magics, yet the gaolers had dozens of shackles stored away. Such was Vira’s shock and despair that day that she hadn’t even considered that. She only realized she’d been manacled after the torches had been lit and extinguished five times. Then, all her rage pouring out of her at once, she called forth flames to sear her captors and to melt the bars before her. But only a choked scream came out, and with it her tears, her sorrow and agony.

  She resolved to die, then, refusing the food and water brought to her. But that was too slow a way to die, each moment spent in pain and awareness of the light slipping away, and somehow death must have frightened more than life because at some point she found herself kneeling as she licked her plate and bowl clean, like a hound. She decided, then, that she would live, for knowing little else. She felt repulsive, her food - whatever it was, for in the dark she could not see - dribbling down her chin along with thick water, her hair in knots and her body reeking. Life, she thought ruefully.

  They said no words when they locked her here. Then again, if they did, Vira would not have noticed. When she lost her fellow Blossoms, her friends here and elsewhere, everywhere, there ceased to be a world outside of her head. Even here she spent most of her days retreating inside. It was better than dying, in a way, for at times she could cease to exist entirely, helped by the silence and the darkness. She would halt her breath, her slightest motions, and stifle her own thoughts. I am nothing, she told herself until she didn’t need to remind herself of that, until she became nothing and no one, devoid of past and future, just a part of the darkness.

  But then the light would briefly shine upon no one, and meeting the empty gaze of her captors she was reminded she was someone, she was Vira. Try as she might, she could not become a thing, she could not return the embrace of the dark. A moment later, when it returned, when the gaolers departed, Vira Ulkatsil would be all too aware of herself, of being alive, of every pain in her body. And she would think of her fallen sisters, and weep.

  How many hours pass when I sleep then wake? Have I slept only once today, or twice, thrice? She had once started pacing in circles and counting her steps, but she lost count at some point and stopped. She would have screamed in frustration if she thought it would make a difference, but of course it would not. She could scream until her voice was gone and it wouldn’t matter.

  Soon she realized she could not speak anymore, when her bloom-sister asked her a question and she tried to answer.

  “I wonder why you were spared,” said the sister without a face and without a voice. Yet she felt so real. I’m mad, Vira thought. They were right, I lost my wits. “Bite out your tongue and join us. We await you.”

  Forgive me, she would have said if she could.

  “This is not your fault,” it said, or she said, or something said. “Death merely forgot about you.”

  It was her mother she saw then, her mother she heard, her mother she remembered, her mother she reached for but grasped only air.

  “Don’t go,” she managed some words in a frail voice. “Don’t go. I’m alive.”

  “I’ll forget about you too. My child of scorn.”

  Vira jumped to her feet. These are my thoughts, not a ghost. She knew it could not be her mother, because her mother would not have given her the satisfaction of cruelty. Mother would have preferred to pretend such an unsightly thing was not there, this thing that reeked and shat and pissed.

  The torches blazed again. She heard a man’s voice, and wondered how it was that her mind had spoiled to the point of imagining a voice she never heard before. But they approached her cell, the guards, and after these long stretches of silence the noise was deafening, just as Vira’s eyes started to hurt when the lights lingered. The men’s lips were moving, too. They were real - this was real.

  “Come with us, please,” the man spoke not unkindly, so Vira wondered if he had been one of her captors all this time, suddenly seeing her as a person. She hadn’t paid attention, for once she understood that they would ignore her words she didn’t direct her gaze towards them. “Lord Stensrud wants to have a word with you.”

  My host, she thought, but not quite. Gorne Stensrud was not lord of Sk?rdsta, but the province’s lord was sworn to him. My lord’s lord wants a word, she thought, almost stumbling as she shambled along by her gaolers’ side. Ah, but this castle’s lord is not the lord of the province, it occurred to her, and she started to laugh. Last she knew, Stensrud was not king of this frigid shithole, and even that pale land whale paid homage to the Basileus. And the Basileus suckles on the teats of the Rose. She laughed loudly now, as loudly as her strained voice allowed. The guards must truly think she had gone mad, and Vira almost agreed with them. On and on this chain of allegiances stretched until it closed in on itself. The serpent swallows its own tail, the flower seeds its own buds, and man takes his shit and eats it.

  “How long have I been imprisoned?” She asked, and the men did not reply, but this time they had the decency to appear ashamed. “Surely you can answer that without your master’s approval and words. I’m not asking why I was imprisoned.”

  “Lord Stensrud will explain matters to you,” the man closest to her said. He had a youthful, clean-shaven face, which made him quite different from his peers, burly and rough men whose scowls and rustic vestments firmly placed them within the exalted tradition of the men of Valkeavise who praised their past as reavers and warriors to pretend this country was anything but a miserable sunless graveyard for those in the winter of their lives. Young men that had good sense and talent would rather leave this place than serve here. Was this soldier, then, a lackwit, or a cripple?

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  Vira accompanied them wordlessly after that. Every cell she walked past was vacant, and most of the torch sconces were empty as well. That was unsurprising. The dungeons ill suited what today was a castle with more history than purpose, seat to a lord with more pride than influence. Hundreds of years ago, Sk?rdsta had been wealthy, the jewel of a petty kingdom long since subsumed into Valkeavise. If her memory didn’t fail her, Vira recalled that these lands had amassed riches through trade and farming, harvest and market, but today one could be fooled into thinking otherwise, what with how her hosts of Balleborg adorned their halls with swords and shields and oriflammes. Men with good sense would have known to boast that they’d known centuries of peace and that they were farmers, fishermen, artisans, and that their people were fed and clothed through harsh winters.

  But if men had good sense, she thought, the Red Rose would have no reason to exist. These lands were no longer wealthy, its harvests no longer plentiful and now its people knew hunger. But Lord Balleborg could boast of keeping relic weapons in his vaults, and enough people learned to fill their bellies with pride.

  There was not much color in the castle’s halls, nor sufficient light, but Vira could tell when she left the dungeons. I’ve not forgotten what this place looked like, at least. I must not have been confined for too long. It was dark enough to be midnight, and the castle was mostly empty, though it had never been the most bustling of environments. Only guards remained now, a sparse garrison fit for an impoverished House. When Sk?rdsta housed half a dozen Blossoms, it could be said to be formidably-defended, though there had not been cause since the unification of Valkeavise for conflict to reach this deep into the country. Fifteen or twenty soldiers are more than sufficient to guard mounds of snow and yak dung.

  Three lords awaited her at the audience chamber, which was also the castle’s feasting hall, council chamber, and had been a throne room for petty kings forgotten to history. Stay, Sergeant Agnur, said Lord Balleborg to the clean-shaven youth that led his household guard. Torgir Balleborg had a smooth face as well, though his hair was long and untamed. He never did manage to grow a beard, to his embarrassment. Gorne Stensrud, by his side, had a fine manly beard he stroked with obnoxious pride, though his short tidy hair was more fitting of a cosmopolitan Tesmarian fop than a warrior. Duke Hallgor Lovas, however, was a proper Valksman, in appearance at least, though he made a significantly less striking impression with his hair and beard white and brittle, his eyes milky. He may have been an actual warrior, in his prime, and not too modest to refrain from putting his own deeds to song, of battles waged in the far north of the kingdom. There was no mention of how Blossoms, too, fought and bled upon the ice there, for they did not fit tales of warring glory. Nevertheless, a warrior who’d grown old deserved some respect, if only Vira were in a respectful mood.

  “I am here, my lords,” she said, “and your business must be urgent indeed that you’d not allow me the dignity of washing and dressing myself in something more seemly than rags. Forgive me if I reek.”

  “That was ill done, keeping you there,” said Duke Lovas. He squinted to get a better look. “I pray you’ve not been harmed. That would be most unchivalrous indeed.”

  “No harm save for being chained and restrained,” she said. “I should like to know what crime I’ve committed, for I seem to have forgotten. In my folly I have also found myself confused, as where I come from, an accused learns the nature of their crime before imprisonment.”

  “As of now, you make me wish it was to teach you some courtesy,” said Lord Stensrud. “Your attitude ill-fits your station. You very well could have been kept there in the dark, which you mustn’t forget.”

  “I see. I apologize for failing to express all the gratitude I feel,” she said, then held her tongue. Lord Balleborg rubbed his eyes with his gauntleted thumbs. Why wear your armor day and night, my lord? You impress no one.

  “It was… Folly, to imprison you,” Torgir Balleborg said. “A decision taken too quickly, out of… Out of concern, after what had happened. All Blossoms gone… We were afraid, my lady. We did not know what had happened, we did not know your intentions-”

  “You did know,” said Vira. “All dead, I heard. You must have gotten news. None felt inclined to share them with me in detail, however. Nor to let me depart.”

  “For your safety, you should not have left,” Balleborg said, gently. “We heard… We heard little, yes. No details, not initially. We feared… We feared that all Blossoms had been… Had been lost.”

  “All save me,” she said. She was beginning to understand, then. “Until you learned that was not the case.”

  Lovas nodded. Vira wondered if it was shame that she saw in his furrowed brow. It should have been.

  “Yes, well… Mistakes were made,” said Stensrud. “As they are wont to be, when decisions are taken in haste and fear. That is the unfortunate truth. Lord Balleborg informed me and immediately understood that he had acted in folly, but you must understand his fears. To release you would risk retribution, for in your grief you might not have forgiven his error. That is all.”

  That is all. They were lying to her. They had to know that she knew that. She could not accuse them, not still manacled and weak. Not without knowing more.

  “More Blossoms remain,” said Duke Lovas. “More than we could tell at first, thank the stars. Your Tower of Rebirth stands, and your Order, damaged as it is, has pledged to continue to safeguard the world from vile darknesses and infernal magics.”

  You know my bloom-sisters are not all gone, so you can’t act against us without punishment. When you thought us broken and gone, you seized your opportunity when you were not under our watch to… To do what, exactly? This she could not tell. She had to ask carefully, understanding her situation was precarious indeed.

  “Your Rose doesn’t know you survived,” explained Balleborg. “And, to tell truth, we scarcely know how to justify your treatment to your Stonetree, so their queries have gone unanswered. We cannot ignore the Tower of Rebirth forever, of course. Therein is our complication, and my folly…”

  “There were talks of secession,” Lovas said bluntly. “In the confusion, in the uncertainty, some ravens flew, some words were said, signals were given, scrying fires were lit. Valkeavise has not partaken of the fruits of empire that the southron realms grew fat on. The future that is spreading across the lands, blooming forth from Cartasinde, will leave us behind. But Rosavor is too far to reach us, and we are perhaps too insignificant, we dared believe. Their imperial grasp writhes with your vines and roots, so with the Red Rose withered, perhaps… Perhaps the world was ripe for change.”

  And there it is. It was not the worst scheme, if the Blossoms were truly gone. Without their power to keep the kingdoms together, it was indeed the ideal time for independence. But it was far too hasty. Why would the lords of Valkeavise think they had such a brief window of opportunity?

  “Have my lords brought me from the depths to ask that I sing a more agreeable tale to my bloom-sisters? They would not be glad to learn that you have imprisoned me in an attempted move towards rebellion, but I needn’t tell them that.”

  “We should like to remain within the graces of the Blossoms,” said Lord Stensrud, begrudgingly. “Not all of us feel that way, however. There are a hundred lords in Valkeavise, not all quite so reasonable and capable of changing their minds when faced with new information, like myself.”

  Ah. So you gave the order.

  “From what I can see, you are all loyal friends of the Ruby Blossom and of the Rosavors,” she sang the song they would demand of her, “and have nothing to do with this vile talk of rebellion. Do I dare ask how many of your fellow lords have succumbed to this madness?”

  “We dare not answer,” said Balleborg.

  Most of them, then. Still, it would have been easier to have my head and be done with it all. I am living proof of your ambitions, restrained not out of loyalty but because the opportunity you saw was but a mirage. If Vira would only tell the truth, who could tell what punishment would befall them…? The only risk greater and more idiotic than arresting her was freeing her.

  “We need the Rose,” said the sergeant behind her, whose presence Vira had almost forgotten. Her shackles were enough proof that they did not trust her, and Sergeant Agnur’s spear was further certainty of that. “We do not have the strength to fight so many remaining Blossoms, and even if we did, why should we? My lord of Balleborg, I tried to tell you that this was a mistake. And my father-”

  “I know what you said,” Lord Torgir interrupted him. “Speak not of your father, not here and not now. What matters now is showing the Lady Ulkatsil how apologetic we are. And how we need her help, her good word, her strength of arms.”

  So you lords are fighting one another. Vira was impressed, she had to admit. Most countries would take longer than a month to descend into civil war. For a bunch of farmers and merchants playing at being warriors with a glorious past, they were combative enough. Vira stared again at the scared faces of the lords before her, though they tried to conceal their concern with pride, grit, strength. Somehow Vira did not feel so compelled to burn them alive anymore. The Red Rose lives, she thought, and it was enough to make her feel hopeful, even forgiving.

  “I understand it now, my lords,” she said, politely, sweetly, words with courtesy that almost concealed the stench of her own piss and sweat. “None need know about your lapse in judgment, for your loyalty shall serve as atonement. I will help you keep the peace as best as I can, and perhaps even bring a swift end to this talk of rebellion, of which you have never played any part. The Rose rewards its friends, you may well know.”

  “We would… We would be most grateful for your aid,” Lord Stensrud looked like he was in actual physical pain when he had to swallow his pride. My life is in his hands, but he knows that his is in mine as well.

  “But of course,” she said, bowing low enough that they could not see how she grinned. When she looked at them again, her face was kindness itself. “Valkeavise are our stalwart friends in the north, a bastion against the evils in the World-Wound. And us Blossoms live to serve.”