Promises
It was the evening of that third day, and she was nearly finished packing.
Before her was a half-filled trunk to be fetched by the porters at dawn, and she kept telling herself that once she was through, and the luggage all closed up to be bound for Manor Pepin, she would keep her promise to Eliane and Helenne of attempting a full night’s sleep. She’d exhausted herself to such a point that the idea had become more likelihood than possibility anyway.
For the moment, though, she kept herself awake, having politely declined assistance from the maid so as to spare the girl her melancholy and to be left alone with her thoughts. And so in the silence of her bedchamber she folded gowns and petticoats, rolled stockings and gathered hairpins, tucked in books, and parchment, and wax, and ribbons. Her every movement was mechanical -- no better than a machine out in the factories -- ‘til as she reached for a box on the table beside her, a different object was jostled and fell to the floor.
The sight of it broke Gwenneth from her daze. There -- almost forgotten in all that had transpired since Helenne put it into her possession -- was the rose.
A sweetbriar rose, she considered. The faintest hint of a smile tugged at the corners of her lips...and then faded.
...For she remembered the way he had taken her hand, and remembered the tone of his voice as he promised her -- assured her -- that one day she would have the truth from him, no matter the circumstances that lead her to it.
The truth. His truth.
“If ill does befall me,” he had said, “I request that you look beneath the rose. You will find my answer there."
And there, no longer under the rose, was the file that would tell her everything.
She had been angry, in reality, when he first alluded to its existence, if only a little and in her own way. He couldn’t know how he’d sown the seeds of fear in her: fear of the idea that he prepared for the worst, however realistic -- however necessary. Fear of the worst.
So perhaps it was that very fear which caused her to hesitate when confronted with the Folder Once Under the Rose. For ill had befallen the Inquisitor, and yet he was not gone from them. He lived, and in Gwenneth’s mind and heart she believed that to open the promised cache of his secrets was a failure on her part; a failure to wait and to trust that soon -- yes, surely soon -- it would all come from his lips, and the folder and the rose would be without purpose.
Resolved, then, to wait, Gwenneth reached for the rose and made to put it back atop the folder on the table from which it had fallen. She would have done so successfully, too, were it not for the slightest twist of fate: knocked about as it had been in the woman’s clumsiness, the folder’s contents had slipped out just enough to catch her eye…
...affording her a glimpse of yellowed paper and its faint and tender lines, blooming with a hint of colour.
And the face of a woman -- eyes downcast, and so very beautiful -- that caused her heart to stall.
From that moment, she needed to know after all.
So she rose from the floor, locked the door to her room, and drew the lamps closer; their flickering candlelight dancing across the portrait that waited for Gwenneth to take up again with trembling hands the story she was entrusted and soon to know.
And so there, on the floor, in the silence, page by page and line by line, she began to read.
And the bells ticked by in agony.
She had combed through it all with reverent care; altogether incomprehensible at first, until she walked further and further back through that collection of memories, her eyes lingering on places and faces that were familiar and not: a staid countenance she feared would vanish one day, the colour of blossoms in Coerthas that she longed to see again, and the smile of that woman -- something she understood, deep in her, without ever knowing the person to whom it belonged.
And every page she turned over was another finger that tightened ‘round her heart. Lines in letters that were meaningless at first, she read twice -- thrice -- then four times over. Names began to stand out. Names that could not, together, with all she had before her, be a coincidence.
The fingers closed all the more tightly. She pored over metres of poetry for what must have been the sixth or seventh time -- she’d lost count. A cold and inexplicable dread crept into her, but she’d not know it, lost as it was beneath a powerful sorrow. How long had she been holding her breath?
And when, she wondered, had she begun to cry? For oh, how many tears she had shed these last days! How was it possible she’d any left to spare? But she saw the tears fall and stain the confession under her eyes -- the cramped and despairing hand of a schoolgirl who wished to die -- that proved too much in the wake of all else she’d come to discover, so that laying there on the floor of her chamber, clinging tightly to her pile of realizations and that last sheaf of paper that spoke of a springtime she wanted for so dearly -- of the dreams she’d quietly nurtured -- she could only weep.
So she wept. And she wept, and she wept, until her eyes burned and her throat was aching; until her stomach was sick with discomfort. She wept for every bell -- every sun -- she’d withheld the need to do so, hidden behind a smile. She wept until there wasn’t a sound that left her.
She wept for them.
She wept, until at last -- in the silence of that room, behind a door locked tight, curled around a promise -- she stilled...and at long last faded to sleep.
@heavens-light-and-hells-ice (And I cannot find a proper source outside of Pinterest for that header image I cropped, so thank you to the Photographer, wherever you are.)
