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On the day of his great-aunt’s funeral, Lorenz knew she was beloved.
He did not know why, mind you, because all she had ever done was call him Lory and make him eat mushy peas. It had not particularly endeared her to him. But it must have endeared her to someone since the evidence was incontrovertible.
Gloucester had sent all her roses.
All of them.
At the age of eight, Lorenz was already familiar with the fantastical potential of a well-placed hyperbole. This was not mere wordplay. All the roses. Fifty-seven wagons of them had rolled in at dawn from every corner of the countryside, and well over a hundred rolled back out after those immaculate blossoms had been plucked of their petals. The velveteen slips of scarlet were strewn along the funeral procession route so that the carriage bearing Great-Aunt Patrice’s casket could grind them down into the cobblestones and stain the world with luxury. Or maybe so that her spirit had something obvious to follow? Her vision had not been particularly commendable.
Fodlan had sent gifts of her own as well in the sheer number of far-flung family members riding in from distant lands. Lorenz made so many introductions that he scarcely remembered his own name, let alone theirs. He only knew their masks.
There amid the flickering torches and cloud-swept moonlight, the line between living and dead blurred to one unending legacy of glory. The manor staff had crafted papier-maché copies from the wax death masks in the reliquary, and now all of Gloucester’s famous forebears attended the proceedings with the same grim gravity as ever, as though they truly possessed the men wearing their visage.
Those faces had haunted Lorenz’s nightmares ever since the first history lesson Father bestowed upon him, and he swore they smiled at him now, expectant and proud. Someday Father’s face would join this highest honor.
Someday even his own would be so adored.
For now, Lorenz drifted through the crowd of less prestigious mourners. Someone had brought a flute, another a harp, and the notes wavered like a breath over the lip of a wine glass, fragile as broken shards. No one wept. No one muttered or touched or tarried. This silence, too, displayed the measured reason of their bloodline — there would be no shrill, unbridled despair such as that found among the boisterous mourners at common funerals. No, all it took was a single glance to know true nobility had passed.
On a cloudless night, the stars should have pranced across the sky, yet the smoke of the funerary torches seemed to blot out the very heavens. Step by step, wheel by wheel, every bruised petal underfoot released its scent into the haze of evening. Lorenz could scarcely breathe for the force of the land’s love for that lost daughter.
It choked him tighter than the itchy black capelet cinched with lace around his neck. All of his finest clothes were two seasons too small, but etiquette demanded one not mourn in lavender, so he marched stiffly and tried not to burst the seams. As he had escaped Mother’s attempts to muss his hair and dab his cheeks with ash, he could not risk another breach of propriety.
Yet the whole ceremony was a terrible bore. He was too young to wear the mask of an ancestor, too short to bear a torch, too unpolished to speak at the ceremony. No one had even let him join the rose-plucking lest his fingers be bloodied by the thorns. He got one little bud to pin over his breast and all the rest were lost.
Still, it was easier to focus upon the petals stuck to the bottom of his boots and the cloying fog than the heaviness of his heart. A terrible waste of beauty, even if that was the point.
Lorenz would simply need to be worthy of ninety-seven wagons of his own someday.
At last the procession lurched through the wrought iron gates of the Gloucester Necropolis, a sprawling garden complex that ringed the family tombs in three miles of pristine beauty. To the east were the orchards, the plums and apricot trees that Lorenz tested his newfound height and climbing mettle against each summer, and to the west the pleasure gardens with their marble paths and sculptures amid the thriving lilacs and many flowered boughs. Though ostensibly there to soothe the hearts of mourners, Lorenz knew they also provided a deep seclusion for the most private of political meetings; Father surely did not venture forth to pay that much tribute to his own shades, after all.
In the heart of this lush, carefully maintained paradise stood a towering labyrinth of hedges worked into the shape of the house crest. Climbing roses wove through the hardy shrubs and amassed along the heights, as if gloating spectators of the massacred petals below. While the outer rings of the labyrinth offered some true mystery as they tempted one through the meandering boughs of Gloucester history, the procession took the central path directly to its heart.
And there stood the pyre.
Father stepped forward to speak a few words as head of their glorious house. Lorenz could barely look. His bones itched every time he glanced at the earthen pit and its stacked tiers of ruby silk. Patrice’s ashes were transferred to the highest platform and doused in incense and spices, and then all waited for Father to set alight the reed thyrsus which would trigger the blaze.
Even before the flames burst to brutal blaze, Lorenz’s feet broke into a run.
The smog of perfume, the crush of so many titled strangers, the nauseating bleed of plucked velvet under his boots — the weight bore down and down, a hound upon the fox, and Lorenz squirmed through the hedges before it could suffocate him on cinnamon and sorrow.
A dozen rows away he found a little fishpond with silver minnows who did not mock the tears he brushed furiously from his cheeks. How mortifying. He kept his back to the nearby tomb and his face turned away from the heavens so no one else would ever know this weakness.
But even once his lungs regained their control, an echo of quiet weeping remained.
Intruders in the garden.
Lorenz crept along a row of hedges in search of that mourning murmur. It was all but drowned out by the crackling bonfire at his back, but that only made it harder for the intruders to hear his own steps in the grass. To trespass upon the family necropolis was a crime beyond words; to do so in the middle of a funeral, unspeakable. Perhaps he had not shown his great-aunt the proper affection in life, but catching her would-be grave robbers would prove his own devotion!
There, just around the bend from the marble arch of the Clarendon crypt, Lorenz spotted two shadows crouched beneath a tree. They were only a few years older than him, which meant their hearts could still be turned away from such mischief if shown proper reason. He had only to choose his words with care. Pondering the problem, he reached to brace himself against the nearby hedge.
“Ouch!” he yelped, snatching away his bloody finger from the thorns of an untrimmed rose. What imbecile of a gardener had failed to clear the path?!
“Who’s there?” called one of the figures. She raised her face enough for the moonlight to catch the tear stains on her cheeks, as well as the sorrowful wrinkles at odds with her youthful features.
The other figure stalked across the lawn, grim and stern, then stopped in his tracks the moment he got a good look at Lorenz. He sighed in relief. “It’s just some kid.”
“I am not some kid! I am Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, future head of the esteemed—“
“And you’ll run along,” finished the young man firmly.
“I will not,” Lorenz snapped. “You are trespassing on my family’s sancrosat—sacrosanck—holy grounds! On the night of my honored great-aunt’s funeral, no less!”
“Well aware, thanks.”
Lorenz recoiled with the force of a blow. The insolence of this, this—!
The trespasser tucked his thumb behind his belt, a crude version of a nobleman tucking his hands behind his back to prevent a well-trained eye from reading the strain of his fists. “Look. You ain’t the only ones grieving tonight. Not a flower left in the whole county after your folks grabbed ‘em up, yeah?”
Grabbed them? Gloucester belonged to Gloucester. And surely the rents were merely paid in petals this month, or the tribute made of gracious heart by their happy citizens, not…
He stiffened his shoulders. “Reveal your purpose to me this instant or I will summon the guards!”
“Our grandfather is dead.” The young woman still stood aside the tree, but now that she had risen, Lorenz could see the disturbed earth at the tree’s base. “We cannot afford a service. We cannot even afford an offering, so we thought—“
To let their dead stow away alongside his own? To steal the priceless reek of sandalwood on the breeze, the blessings of the Goddess who had bestowed upon them such a peaceful resting place, the honor and glory of this most coveted resting place?
She bowed her head, tears welling once more, and at once the young man—her brother?—moved to support her. “He worked these gardens all his life. He wouldn’t rest easy if we took him from them now.”
“…He made the gardens?” Lorenz echoed softly.
He glanced down at where the thorn had pierced his skin, the blood now dry. The gardens were a work of beauty; he had never asked who worked that beauty. Nature. The Goddess. Rose spirits and water nymphs. Not a human, surely. To prick one’s fingers every hour every day of every year of your life; no, he could not imagine it.
No one could live so thanklessly.
No one should.
Lorenz stared at the little lump of soil against the tree’s trunk. His eyes burned with shame, though this time he did not begrudge his tears. He unpinned the fresh rose from his breast.
A gardener loved the land more than any, nourished beauty for beauty’s sake. And in return Gloucester had given him no grave marker, no service, no memory. To the soil he returned.
And Great-Aunt Patrice, who had never nourished anything but over-boiled vegetables, got her bones enshrined in a little golden box like a paragon to be worshiped. Even her shade gorged itself on riches, stealing beauty and wonder meant to enrich the living. How many cups of tea could have been brewed from the cinnamon consigned to her pyre? How many dabs of rosewater to brighten a day, or petals to press in a letter to one’s loved ones!
Those who honored Gloucester must be honored in return. Those who loved—
“Lorenz!”
His mother’s voice broke through the clearing, though muffled by a few rows of hedges yet. She had followed him through the labyrinth but not yet caught his trail.
The gardener’s grandchildren took a step back towards the trees, wary as bright-eyed deer. The young woman’s eyes settled on Lorenz.
“I don’t tattle,” Lorenz announced in a puffed up whisper of pride. “But Mother will, so run!”
They darted off through the trees on silent feet.
Lorenz bent down to press the stem of his red rose into the small mound of grave dirt. He swept two fingers through the soil and brought them to his cheeks, dirtying his face like the other mourners. His head swam with thoughts like a fishpond of its own.
“Mother?” he called out with as much misery as he could manage. “Mother, is that you? I have gotten all turned around, and I cannot find my path…”
A small lie. Lorenz was a son of Gloucester, and he knew his path very well.
Third row west of the Clarendon crypt. Second bush from the right.