And now she was an orphan. Exactly as The Tradition would like it. With an Evil Stepmother who had been appointed guardian over her, and who would now answer to no one if she vanished. Perhaps The Tradition now wanted her to be bartered off to the enemy by that same Evil Stepmother, never to see her home again. Of coursethat Path was an ugly one, too. The Evil Stepmother would trade Rosa off in return for the enemy's promise thatshe would be crowned Queen of Eltaria for as long as she lived. Which would be — probably not very long, for The Tradition dictated treachery on the part of the enemy. Then the enemy would have both Kingdoms without a struggle. And Rosa would spend the rest of her life a virtual, if not an actual, prisoner.
It was a good thing that the Evil Stepmother wasn't what The Tradition dictated....
"What does the King's physician believe?" she heard Lily ask, as she stood there woodenly. Lily's voice was still steady and seemed to come from a great distance.
"That the late King perished, worn down by duties, crushed by loneliness and a broken heart," the messenger said, in tones that impliedhe believed this, but that he did not believe thatshe would. Why hadn't Godmother Lily gotten some sort of warning? Or at least some knowledge that the King was dead?
But Rosa knew the answer, of course. The Tradition. This sort of thing was supposed to come as a complete surprise, even to a Godmother. Therefore, it had.
She bowed her head for a moment.
Lily, however, was still every inch Queen Sable. "We assume you have the requisite proclamations?"
"I do." The messenger started to open his sealed dispatch case, but Lily stopped him.
"Hold your hand. We will summon the full Council and the Court so that you may present the proclamations there." When the messenger nodded, Lily's voice took on a tone of heavy irony. "We would not have anyone claim that we somehow substituted false or forged papers for the ones you carry. Go to the Great Audience Chamber and await our pleasure."
The man clicked his heels together, saluted stiffly and left, his footsteps sounding heavily on the wood of the corridor. Lily rang for the servants, and kept ringing, until she had a phalanx of them waiting just inside the door. "There is grave news. Summon all of the Councillors to the Great Audience Chamber, and all of those of the Court that you can to await our pleasure. Inform them that they must be there immediately." With that, she dismissed them, and when they were gone, closed the door and put her back to it. She looked searchingly at Rosa. "Are you going to be all right?" she asked quietly.
Slowly Rosa nodded. The feeling of being at a distance was fading. This was real, yes. This was real. She would never see her father again. "It's...not like it was with Mama," she replied, feeling a distant grief, as distant as, perhaps, her father had been. "I never really knew him well."
Nevertheless, Lily came to her and held her for a moment, and that released whatever had held back the tears. Rosa let herself cry a little on the black-clad shoulder, cry for the father who had appeared to tell her stories, the man with eyes that worshipped her mother, the man who had somehow known the few times that Rosa had wanted something very dearly, and had always seen that she got it.
"I have seen so many of you come and go," Lily murmured, stroking Rosa's hair. Her voice sounded terribly weary in that moment. "That is the curse of the Fae-blooded. We see our friends fade and die while we go on and on...." She sighed, and Rosa thought she heard a grief that the Godmother refused to give voice to, buried in that sigh. "I think the physician is correct. When I saw him last, Thurman was a shell of himself. Maybe, with me in place to be Regent, he felt it was safe for him to...slip away. But more likely, I think, is that all of this was too much for a human to bear, and once he felt he had achieved a brief peace again, that grief and duty simply broke him between them, and his heart failed, in both senses."
Still crying a little, Rosa nodded, the velvet of Lily's bodice soft against her face. But soon enough, the tears were gone, and she lifted her head. Lily let go of her and handed her a black silk handkerchief. The Godmother searched her eyes, looking for strength, Rosa guessed. She raised her chin and determined not to give in to weakness.
"Are you ready?" Lily asked. "Really ready? This is the beginning of the worst either of us has ever faced. I've never served the Kingdom when things were this bad. Everything is going against us. You know that this is going to mean all those armies are eventually going to descend on us and tear us to pieces unless we do something before they find out Thurman is dead. You know The Tradition has all manner of paths it will try to force us down, and very few of them end happily for you."
Rosa nodded, wiping her face, feeling cold fear creeping over her. "Please tell me you have an idea," she begged.
Lily nodded. "In fact," she replied, "I do."
The Godmother faced the assemblage of the full Court and full Council, standing impassively while the messenger presented his news and his proclamations. She watched every member of first the latter, and then the former, stiffen and go white-faced as they realized just what Lily and Rosa already knew. This Court was full of all manner of men and women, and none of them was prepared for this. Thurman and Lily together had always saved them.
All those greedy neighbors would look at a Kingdom governed only by a woman and a girl, and they would assume that neither knew anything of warfare. They would gleefully decide that this was, at last, their chance to take the rich plum. Every leader of every enemy would think that if he just moved swiftly enough, he could take the prize uncontested. And they would descend in strength.
They'd have to. It was, after all, The Tradition.
Meanwhile it would be Eltaria that would suffer. It would be very tempting...in fact, nearly a necessity...for the Eltarian forces to withdraw to the cities to hold out while their neighbors beat each other into powder. At worst, all five of the neighbors would pounce, with armies, and proceed to fight on Eltarian land. And strategically it would make the greatest sense for the Eltarians to preserve their cities and populace, then emerge to battle the much-weakened winner.
Strategic sense, yes. And that assumed that none of the neighbors would have the same idea, which was not likely. So this could mean up to two years, maybe more, of trying to hold off enemies, besieged in the cities, and waiting for the chance to eliminate the last one.
Even if by some miracle of arms or diplomacy, they won free of this, the country would be ruined for a decade at least. The countryside certainly would be. Fields would be destroyed under the feet of battling armies, looters would take everything they could get their hands on, people would be displaced from their homes, and the destruction and chaos would leave hunger and disease in its wake. Eltaria's wealth was in its mines, but those would go untended while armies raged across the face of the land. What would be the point of taking anything out of the earth by great effort, when as soon as you got it to the surface someone would take it away from you? The once-wealthy country would be reduced to poverty within months.