Six-and-fifty winters is he, when his daughter is born into her very first.
No one recalls. Even he had not recalled, not till now, long after the nurse carried her up the stairs, wrapped her up tenderly and lay her down in the quiet of the nursery for a few bells' sleep. Not till now -- when, having hauled himself up after them and crept in through the door, he looks down at her pink and tiny, impossibly tiny face -- does he realize that all of Heavensturn's come and gone, and that the sun that now rises over Abalathia is the second of Halone's moon.
"You must get some rest, milord," says Nurse Berthoise from the couch, herself groggy. "You've been up more than twenty bells."
"I will," he lies, and he stands there, his knuckles white on the cot's railing.
The babe, though, sleeps; eventually, so too does the nurse. He at last sits in the chair beside, to relieve his lightheadedness -- but he continues to watch. For one bell, two bells, he watches, almost without blinking, hand tight on his cane, till she just begins to rouse. At her first murmur, he stands straight up, startling the nurse awake -- and so she is swiftly borne away, back downstairs, before she even gives her first cry for milk.
Rosaire is left behind.
He looks after them long after they've departed, then sits down again, slowly, in the chair.
Fifty Namedays ago, he was playing by the pond at the country estate with his two siblings nearest in age. His own nurse and a footman had meant to keep an eye on them, but their eyes proved too full of each other, and soon he and the girls had ventured, against instruction, onto the ice.
He does not remember the moment he went in -- nor, truthfully, does he remember much of what happened after, save being bathed and made to give thanks to Halone (though not to the lowborn who rescued him) that the water was shallow -- but he remembers the feeling: the shock of cold, the flood of overwhelming fear, his head emptied of everything else. Time became immensely slow, seconds stretched out into years and years -- and yet in all that luxury of time there was nothing he could think of, nothing he could do but sink down, down into the numbness, down into himself, powerless.
It is the same feeling he has now, and has had for these past twenty bells.
Not at first. At first he was afraid, yes -- but he was also Rosaire Ledigne, the logical, the Staid. He simply had Helenne summon the midwife and bid the maids make ready, set the book-cradle at the bedside and lay in it his codex open to the relevant page, then sat down next to his lady to murmur encouragement and wait. Such was his duty and his role: to be calm and remain calm, to stand out of the way but ready to assist -- to put the nightmare out of his mind, to pray without speaking, and to give no evidence of aught but a placid heart.
And so he remained, steady and dutiful, keeping his countenance as she suffered and wept. He even flattered himself with the thought that he might be able to feign tranquility and comfort her through her screams -- until, a mere few bells in, the midwife drew him aside.
"You'd best call the chirurgeon," she murmured. "The local one -- then ring your specialist in Ul'dah and give the linkpearl to me."
"Is something wrong?" he asked, like a fool.
She looked at him, weighing an answer, then shook her head. "For now, just call them," and she turned to go back into the room.
It was then that he began to feel it, and felt himself sink down, down into the cold and dark.
One chirurgeon became two, when Doctor Tristelle arrived from the south. They timed Gwenneth's pulse, put an ear-trumpet to her chest, inspected the swelling of her feet, then shook their heads and argued in whispers in the corner. For a long time he could not persuade them to enlighten him, but at least the heat of his frustration provided some sort of relief from the numb fear; but he tamped it down and held her hand when he was not gently cooling her face and neck with a cloth.
When they finally offered her the option of a draught for the pain, she didn't answer; words, if they were words, came from her mouth in a jumble, and she looked at Rosaire only a moment before her eyelids fluttered and her cloudy gaze went back up to the ceiling.
Some time after that -- minutes, bells, years, he was no longer sure -- he was taken aside again.
"You'd best call the priest, my lord."
The words he'd prayed, bargained, and begged not to hear.
He listened to the Reconciliation and observed the anointing, though he could hardly hear or see. 'He' was there, listening and watching and even taking Mother Judithe aside to grasp her hand and thank her, but he -- he did not quite feel present in his body, as it went through those movements and spoke those words mechanically. He was somewhere else, floating in the ice-cold water, looking down at the scene as it unfolded with painful slowness.
Miolleane, though acquainted with the Ledignes for just one sennight, broke down crying in the hall; Helenne sent her home, then ushered Clavis into his carrying-cage and took him to the Fortemps aery, leaving Berthoise in charge. She brought Rosaire a cup of strong coffee; it rattled so much in his hand he had to drink it at the dining table.
For lack of elsewhere to look, he fixed his eyes on the Starlight Sentinels, still bright and in good needle: the first, in bluish-green, slim and delicate -- the second, in silver, tall and thick at the middle. And then, between them, the miniature, less than a fulm tall -- the representation of a wish they'd made at last year's Starlight, both her little hands enfolded in his.
How could I?
His throat tensed around the slug of cold water he'd breathed in; his eyes stung. But he was stopped from drowning by one of the chirurgeons rushing in. "Well, if you think you're still able to help with the physicking -- 'tis the time now."
At first he knew her only by her cry -- less a cry, he later thinks, than a hearty and rather indignant exclamation of surprise. Though she was borne away immediately to receive the attention of the priest -- to whom he barely remembered to mumble the name they'd chosen -- she was soon returned, brought before him in the arms of the smiling Berthoise. "She is much improved already, milord -- a strong and healthy daughter."
He must have looked at her face then, but his eyes were too full of the blood on the sheets to see it.
"Bring the babe here -- 'twill help stop the bleeding --"
"This is a task for a conjurer -- pray, stand aside!"
Someone's hand gripped his shoulder, pulling him back to make room for the bustle of healers. He looked at Gwenneth's face -- pale and wet -- a worse sight than the blood -- and feared for a second his knees might buckle. They didn't -- he couldn't let them -- so instead of sinking to the ground, he sank further into himself, down, down.
When it was not his turn to channel physicks, he stood silently at the side, looking at the statuette of Nymeia they had placed at the bedside just a few suns before. The Weaver, friend of laboring mothers, smiling beatifically -- the promise of health and fortune, threatening to be broken -- and prayed.
He prayed to Her -- cursed Her, in a moment of rage, then prayed again -- to Nymeia, to the Twelve, even to Nophica. And he prayed, desperately, to Halone: Fury, please spare Gwenneth. Fury, please save Gwenneth. O Fury, I will serve you faithfully -- only let her live, so she may serve you far better than I. O Fury, I will do penance -- I will make pilgrimage -- anything, Fury, anything, anything, anything, only give her strength. Let her live. Let her live. I beg you -- let her live.
The gods were slow to answer. The bleeding did stop, but the chirurgeon's faces remained grave. She had faded to an awful pallor -- he wished, in sick despair, she might begin again to scream in pain, for that sound was easier to bear than the sight of her arm falling limp from one of their hands. But a bell later, they were less solemn. The Ishgardian chirurgeon went home, to sleep a few bells before dawn; Judithe followed, though not before pressing his hand in hers and telling him to have faith, be strong.
"She's made it through this night," the midwife told him. "If she stays strong through this fortnight, she will be out of danger." Unspoken, the obvious corollary -- that till then, she was not safe. He nodded dumbly, sent her home as well.
Helenne -- Fury-sent Helenne -- took watch in the bedroom till the chirurgeon returned, bag full of potions from the apothecary. It was then that Berthoise suggested taking the babe up to the nursery, to let her rest a little away from the commotion, and the chirurgeons permitted it -- and soon insisted that Rosaire go up, too, to rest and replenish his energy.
But he sits in this chair instead.
Since the date of their marriage two summers ago, they have a few times slept apart -- once due to the pressing business of the Bellworks, a few times when Institute affairs took him to southron Eorzea and Gwenneth was too ill to join. He managed, but hated it; so many years a bachelor snoring away contentedly, yet after holding her only once, gently and chastely, he could not bear to be apart from her -- her warmth, her soft skin, the scent of her hair.
He cannot bear to think of it now.
But, when Berthoise returns to lay the babe down and smiles at him compassionately, he looks down into the cot, at the child who lies there -- sleepy features squashed like all newborns', little ears with little points still flat against her head, wisps of honey-brown hair on her head -- and realizes that he must, even if fitfully, in this chair.
He -- and Helenne, and Berthoise, and Clavis, when he returns -- must watch over her and keep her warm till the fortnight's end, when Gwenneth rises, and the time at last comes to celebrate their Nameday.
For your generous support, we of the Institute for the Greening of Coerthas and Dravania express to you our profoundest gratitude, for without the generosity of patrons such as your esteemed House, we could never have embarked upon this enterprise; and though our part in it be but humble, it is a project that could not, in mine own estimation, be more important or holy -- for the stewardship and cultivation of Coerthas is not only essential to ensure the bread and livelihoods of our smallfolk, but a sacred duty that we of Halone's faith must uphold as part of Her Covenant. And as Halone promised us this land, we must promise it to our descendants, and push through this Era's challenges to see it productive and prosperous, to hand on to our children and grandchildren, in hope and prayer of a spring that once more blossoms from the lowlands to the highlands, and a summer that is once more green
It's there his pen suddenly stops, and, after a minute of stillness, he sets it down.
He rises from his desk, crossing to the stairs and descending them slowly, one step at a time, cane, foot, foot. He passes through the hall as quietly as he can, easing the bedroom door open with his shoulder and craning his neck to peek 'round at the woman and child dozing there, just the same as he had left them two bells ago.
Like the snow that had fallen steadily since Heavensturn, the Ledigne household had slowly and gradually settled, from the first sennight's nightmare to the restless sleepwalk of the second, to the hazy third, the quiet fourth, and then the dreaming, peaceful, of the fifth and this, the sixth. Gwenneth was weak, but through that fortnight of terror, she lived -- and, gradually, she found her way out of that dark wood, spending more and more time awake and conversant, though she oft preferred just to hold her daughter in her arms and gaze at her in silent wonder, stroking her few soft curls with her fingertips. The maid Miolleane returned, then Clavis, in whose company Rosaire spent much of his time, practicing tricks and playing games to keep the raven happy and, with luck, from associating Alysse's arrival with his own neglect. Their prospects turned from dour to bright, enough that they were soon hosting tea again, bringing him an endless series of hands to shake and congratulations to accept on the birth of his child.
He now approaches the bedside, laying his cane aside to proceed on tiptoe -- but stops next to Gwenneth, an anxious gaze falling upon her, pausing to confirm the subtle rise-and-fall of breath. Her face is yet wan, but a bit of pink has crept into it again, and she is beautiful -- more beautiful than an angel, his irreplaceable rose -- and he feels a deep pang with even the briefest recollection of how he felt a moon ago, when he was forced to consider if, without her, he could survive.
By the grace of Halone, he would not be put to that test. He owes Her a pilgrimage, one of many things promised in his frantic supplications; he'll plan it for Nymeia's moon, he supposes, as till spring he'll stay close by his lady's side. Each time he leaves the household -- even the same room, even her side -- he struggles to pull his anxious thoughts away from her, just as he now struggles not to reach down to brush a lock from her face, leaving her instead to her precious rest.
He turns again to the bassinet and approaches -- with dread.
At the time he had promised Gwenneth his hand, he had also made a promise to Halone (and more to Her than to his lady herself) to keep no secrets from his intended wife -- and yet as soon as this, he skirts breaking it.
There is something he's not told her -- or Nurse Berthoise, Helenne, or Doctor Ferdillaix, or any other soul, in part because he was so slow to recognize it, his mind being completely consumed with thoughts of Gwenneth in those first few days. By the time the realization dawned, he wondered if it was perhaps too late to say anything -- if that thing was not itself too horrible to be said. So he kept silent -- and keeps silent, working the muscles of his face into an acceptable smile when necessary, responding to congratulations with the proper social grace, rattling off some inane comment about her growth and appetite when questioned. He files the truth away and presents his impeccable poker face, and so far has not been met with suspicion, as far as he can tell; no one knows.
No one knows but he, and he is sickened and ashamed:
He does not love Alysse.
Such a turn of events is, really, quite logical to expect. All his life he has known of that defect of his character -- less defect than strength, when 'twas his duty to serve Halone with the Inquisitor's tools -- that makes him incapable of tender feeling, or at least not capable in the manner of ordinary men. As a child, he looked upon his parents with, at best, indifference; from his adolescence, he no more wept, and the sights of the Special Office never once disabled him with horror. It is what makes him Rosaire the Staid, the logical and clear-sighted, an excellent servant of Halone's nation and a poor facsimile of a living, mortal man.
He does love Gwenneth. He fears he loves her not as well as she deserves, that his passions are not as warm and pure as those of the lover worthy of her -- but she chose him regardless, and he accepted that choice, as the unworthy supplicant accepts the grace of the Twelve. For her he lay aside his woodcuts, and through her he began to learn how to live as a man, to scheme no more in the shadows and instead to savor, for their own sakes, the pleasures of friendship and family.
Gwenneth is his angel of life; his heart beats for her. So perhaps it is not strange for that heart to be cool to the one who was nearly the agent of her demise.
She adores Alysse, embracing her closely and looking on her face with awe. But when he looks at her face, that awe doesn't strike him. Most oft, he feels nothing at all. Her puffy, creased face does not strike him as particularly darling, and though her tiny fingers are perhaps moreso, they are not to him any more precious than any other infant's -- and among the many things for which he is known, a fondness for infants is not. Sometimes, when Berthoise holds Alysse towards him and the child gurgles, he finds himself turning away in aversion, even a sort of disgust -- and on a few occasions, when Gwenneth was still very unwell, he would watch Alysse fidget and whine and be suddenly hit by an upswell of rage, a reaction itself so upsetting he'd immediately quit the room, appalled at himself.
She is an innocent babe, and Gwenneth's child, besides -- so of course he does his part to hover attentively over her, small though a one-armed father's part may be next to a mother's or a nursemaid's. He is anxious for her wellbeing and assiduous in his attempts to proof the house against the infectious miasmas of the city, and every night he prays for the Twelve to preserve and protect her young life. But he does not love her, by no fault of her own -- the fault is all that of a man without a heart, a man in the shape of an Elezen but perhaps without an Elezen's soul.
That is why he hesitates to look over the rim of the bassinet, for fear of what he'll feel: emptiness, aversion, perhaps even hate -- but certainly, certainly shame.
However -- in the end, none of those are what he feels.
It was one-and-thirty years ago; he was a young man, twenty-five.
It was the height of summer, the sun blazing at its zenith in the azure sky above. He was astride Achille, the chocobo's feathers slightly lathered from the labor of climbing up the alpine road; his own hat provided only little shade, and sweat pricked his brow as well.
He turned his bird off the main path to approach a goatherd's cottage; he did not bother to knock on the door, but dropped out of the saddle and looped Achille's reins loosely around the post of a water trough. He removed his cloak, laying it over the chocobo's back with the satin inner lining, embroidered with the symbol of the Holy Inquisition, prominently displayed -- and then his jerkin and doublet so he could splash his shirt and face with the icy water, the touch of Halone upon Her mountaintops tangible even in this season. While his bird drank and the damp evaporated off his skin, he wandered some yalms away, ascending a small hill that he might look around. He shielded his eyes with a hand, his sleeve billowing with the breath of the wind.
It was a fine spot to look from; high on the alm as he was, the valley fell away below him for as far as the eye could see. The meadows burned an emerald-green as brilliant as the blue of the sky, scattered with conifers that gathered into thick, dark mats growing up the sides of the flanking mountains, whose peaks, jutting up like halberds into the cloudless heavens, still glittered at their utmost reaches with lingering snow. If he turned to his left, he could trace the winding road as it continued, up and up, eventually fading into gray of the crags leading to the pass; if he turned to his right, he could look down the path he came, flowing like a looping river from the pastures, where here and there the goats and cattle were tended by their herders, to the village with its many shingled roofs and the lone tall spire of the church. Beyond were fields watered with mountain runoff, rich with highland wheat soon to burst into gold that would glimmer and ripple in the wind; further yet, the rest of Coerthas, green and growing -- quivering, like the string of a viola da gamba, with the note of life.
Many summers he’d spent at his family’s estate in Coerthas, surrounded by green lawns, green hedges, green trees -- but his father was so much devoted to the fashion for improvements to the landscape that he supposed he'd seen little of the land's true character till he was grown and graduated and riding the countryside, as now, alone. And now -- gazing across the valley, listening to the lowest note of Halone's hymn -- he felt he at last saw, and knew.
As he gazed upon the scene, he noticed, about halfway between his position and the village, two distinct figures -- small ones, he guessed children -- dressed in madder red, climbing a rise speckled with the yellow of wildflowers and the white of sheep. After a minute of labor, they reached its peak -- and then, quite suddenly, tumbled from their perch, rolling down the hillside at a much greater speed. As the Inquisitor, somewhere between bemusement and concern, watched, the fallen pair picked themselves up, and soon they began again their climb, little ants creeping slowly to the apex again -- and, as soon as they regained it, they tossed themselves down again, stretched out on their sides like logs, tumbling in a blur back down to the hill's foot.
He looked up towards the sky, breathing deep of the air of this place, Halone's Promised Land, and, privately, he smiled.
It is six years hence; Alysse is six, and if he still lives, he'll be sixty-two.
It might be the highlands or the midlands; he cannot quite say which. But the sky would be blazing blue, a canopy of blinding azure draped from the snow-topped spires in the east to those in the west. Below, a meadow lying fallow, flanked on one side by a field of wheat, on the other by beanstalks; stretched across the grass and wildflowers, a red blanket, the proper place for infirm old men to lie and absorb the warmth of the sun.
But the young are not so restricted. A young woman of three-and-thirty would still have breath to run and play -- though not with all the vigor of a child dashing around around them, barefoot, shrieking with delight. Her curls would shake free of their ribbons, and her mother'd have no hope of catching her to fasten them again; she'd freely skip and frolic, at times on all fours, like a mischievous lamb.
She could only be persuaded to sit on the blanket by the opening of the picnic-basket; inside would be honey loaves, apricots and peaches, cherry tomatoes, carrot cake, and rolanberry pie. The mother would laugh at the girl smearing filling on her face; then, stuffed with the summertime bounty, all three of them would stretch out to feel the sun and listen to the murmuring wind and the grumble of the bees, straining their ears to hear the accompaniment, a low note played by Her bow upon the string of Coerthas.
But not all of them could stay so long in contemplation, and when the child would tire of picking flowers -- rampion, gentian, edelweiss -- to pile in a heap upon his belly, she'd soon be dancing 'round the blanket again, then dropping to the ground and rolling, arms stretched over her head, down to the bottom of the hill. To the top she'd run back up and next time be joined by her mother, both tumbling joyfully through the grass and flowers, laughing, embraced by this living, perfect land.
And perhaps none of this will ever happen.
When his lady wakes -- perhaps by the sound of Alysse's stirring, the babe's huge, ice-blue eyes blinking open along with mumbles of her hunger -- she finds her husband half-crumpled at the side of the bed, the knuckles of his good hand white on the rim of the bassinet, his face buried in the crook of his good arm, his shoulders trembling, for he is stricken -- what was once for him the abstract having collapsed into the real.
O Halone -- let her have a summer that is once more green.
For a full sennight the letters are not sent, the house in too much chaos for it to be remembered. By the time they do arrive, at the homes of the Ledignes' closest friends in Ishgard and in the south, quite a few of the recipients have already had word, the gossip spreading from the families of the servants and chirurgeons.
But at last, here it is, only two short lines handwritten on heavy paper in the husband's neat script:
On the second sun of our Goddess's moon, Gwenneth and Rosaire Ledigne were delivered of a daughter, hale and strong, affused the same day in the grace of Halone and given the name Alysse Lucerne.
We give praise unto the Twelve for Their blessing, and we thank each of you who joins your prayers to ours for the mother's swift recovery.
