Day by day, Lady Halflance’s timer ticked down. Laura, who was substantially more pessimistic about Lady Halflance than I was, had packed a suitcase as soon as the arrangement was made, and continually stated her readiness to leave on the morning of the tenth day. I was substantially lazier; I didn’t pack until a couple of days before the deadline, and I kept trying to convince her to at least wait until evening, or the morning of the eleventh day, to head off. She wasn’t listening, and I started to wonder if Laura was willing to leave without me.
I wasn’t sure how long we would be gone or what we would end up doing, so I ended up choosing to take a rather substantial duffel bag. I stuffed it full of decently-folded clothes, a few choice books, a box of spare revolver ammunition, and was almost ready to seal it up and consider it done when I realized I was missing one thing.
That would be my medication, a jar of powdered stimulant pilfered from Tersine’s lab, the closest thing that existed on Selene to a proper treatment for my otherwise-problematic ADHD. I had absolutely no idea where it was. That was strange, considering I always kept it on my bedside table, so, seeing as she was the only other person who went into that room, I decided to ask Laura about it.
Of course, that meant having to find Laura, which rapidly turned out to be a much more difficult proposition than one would have expected. It was maybe a touch before noon, which meant that there really should have been a limited list of places where Laura could have been. One of them was in our room, asleep. She could have also been eating in one of the secondary dining rooms that she preferred, or out on the yard practicing her sword-work, or maybe in the library if she was feeling particularly introspective. I couldn’t find her in any of those places.
Who I could find was Unity, who I decided I was going to have to ask about Laura’s location. Unity was another one of my close friends on Selene, and my second minder alongside Anna. Her story was more unique than Anna’s; she’d been a child of the streets, kidnapped by a protege of Tersine’s named Esther Nettle and converted into a remote-controlled machine-human hybrid soldier called a Mechanodrone. I’d rescued her when Lady Halflance had wanted to kill her, and convinced her to hire Unity on to the staff. Anna had offered to teach her the ropes of being a servant, and the rest was history.
She was in the middle of cleaning off a fireplace when I found her. “Unity? Do you have a moment?”
Unity stepped out of the fireplace, her bushy hair matted with soot. “Of course I-I do! What’s the matter?”
“Have you seen Laura?” I said. “I’ve been looking all over the manor for her and I can’t seem to find her in any of the places I’d expect her to be.”
“Oh, yes. I haven’t seen-seen her, but someone else did. She’s-she’s in the garden, out behind the house.”
“I’ve been out in the yard,” I said. “She does sword drills out there sometimes. I would have seen her.”
Unity shook her head. “It’s around-around the edge, on the right. You won’t see it unless-unless you’re looking.”
I thanked her for her assistance, though privately I was doubting that she was correct. Still, I did as she suggested, and from the yard I went and circled around the back of the house. To my shock, in the little gap between the physical bulk of the manor itself and the iron fence separating it from its neighbors, there was a small garden. And sitting there on a stool pilfered from inside, sketchbook in her hand, was Laura.
I moved slowly, not wanting to disturb her. She was doing her work with a pair of pencils, one in hand and one tucked into her ear as she focused intensely on an empty patch of dirt, bare of the flowers and herbs that decorated most of the garden.
“Laura?”
My voice broke her concentration instantly. “Emma. What are you doing here?”
“I could ask the same question, I’ve been trying to find you all morning,” I said. “I didn’t even know this place existed.”
“My second mother keeps it,” Laura said. “It’s one of her little hobbies; I presume you know what I mean.”
Indeed I did. Colonel Sir Margaret Halflance, second mother to Laura and first mother to her younger siblings, was a woman defined by a sort of manic energy, constantly striving to occupy her time with some new interest. Apparently gardening was one of those, which matched my overall impression of her.
“I do, yeah. Anyway, I’ve been looking for my medication, that little glass jar full of white powder? Do you know where it is?”
Even as I was asking the question, my mind quickly started to wander. I scanned the garden, trying to put names to any one of the dozens of plants lining the wall of the manor and the fence, bursting out of brick planters and scattered alongside the dirt paths. The only one I could identify with certainty were the blue roses, an indigenous plant to the eastern part of Imbrium and the namesake of Bluerose itself. The rest were totally alien to me, though a few of them I had seen before.
There were flowers in a brilliant variety of purples and reds and yellows and blues, from huge sunbursts to tiny clusters of black buds. Surrounding those were various plants that appeared almost herbal, with thin little leaves like a rosemary bush. Over in one corner there was a cluster of much taller plants with woody stalks taller than I was and huge funnel-shaped leaves at the very top.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Laura said, grinning at me. “Wish you looked at me like that more often.”
“I do that plenty already.” I furrowed my brow. “I didn’t think you were capable of finding anything about this place beautiful.”
Laura got pissed, a little bit. “It doesn’t have anything to do with who planted the damn thing. Anyone with eyes could see that it’s a bunch of nice-looking flowers.”
Even as she finished speaking, though, I could see her expression revert to a sort of placidness that was almost unheard of coming from her. “I don’t know. I had to start doing something or I was going to go mad. I’m good at drawing, I have to be, so I decided to start in the garden.”
I maneuvered behind the stool where Laura was sitting, getting a peek over her shoulder at the sketchbook. The picture was of a low, relatively unremarkable shrub, notable mostly for the dense fragrance wafting off of its leaves. She had captured it almost perfectly, in places creating the exact impression of dense foliage with only a scattering of suggestive lines.
Laura flicked the sketchbook shut. “It’s nothing much. I’m an archaeologist, a scientist, not an artist.”
“Oh come on, don’t downplay yourself. Even if it’s not all high-minded and stuff, even if it’s just depicting a pretty plant in graphite on paper, that’s still art. Like, that took a lot of skill.”
“Do you even like art?” Laura said, pivoting around to face me. “Last time I checked you don’t look at paintings that aren’t on office walls.”
“Fuck you! I’ve been to art museums on Earth; just because I don’t have the time to appreciate culture here doesn’t mean I can’t.”
I looked down: Laura had not only shut her sketchbook, but she appeared to be trying to hide it from me. A smirk of realization wrote itself across my face, and to soothe what I was about to do to Laura I pulled her into a hug, resting my chin in the crook of her neck.
“Is somebody embarrassed that I caught them drawing pictures of plants?”
“Fuck you, Shortcake.”
“Mmmm, I love when you say that,” I said, and hugged her even tighter. “There’s no need to be embarrassed. I think it’s wonderful that you’re getting to do something so artistic.”
Laura sighed, carding her hands through my hair. I’d been mostly letting it grow out for a couple of months, ever since it got burned off in a fire in Urcos. By then it was almost down to the back of my neck, almost the length where it would stop being socially appropriate to not have it done up in some way.
“So, was I right?”
Laura cracked a smile. “What part of ‘fuck you’ do you not understand?”
“You’re not embarrassed about it, then?” I asked.
“I never said that,” Laura said. Her expression was right back to being sour.
“Do you want to talk about why that’s the case, then?” I said, retreating from the hug just enough to properly look Laura in the face. “I don’t really get it, if I’m being honest.”
Laura hesitated for a while, her chest rising and falling steadily as she cast her eyes around the garden. “What you said before, about me not finding anything about this place beautiful.”
“What about it?”
Laura’s brow furrowed up, and she kept sucking in breaths like she was about to start saying something. Eventually that look of focus decayed into one of disappointment, and with an air of defeat she said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right, I don’t feel like myself.”
I threw out a guess.“Because you appreciate your second mother’s garden?”
“Exactly, yes. Well, no. It’s…” She shook her head. “It’s the whole thing. When I left Halflance manor to go to New Alderburg, I swore to myself that I would never come back. And the only reason I did was because of you, and because we needed my parents in order to beat Tersine.”
“Mhmm.”
“I never wanted to lose myself, I never wanted to get sucked back into my mother’s orbit. But these last couple of days, I’ve started…” Laura paused, as though the words were threatening to cut up her throat if she didn’t say them properly. “I’ve started appreciating this place more and more.”
I shrugged, rubbing my hands across Laura’s back. “I mean, there’s plenty to appreciate about it. It’s a gorgeous architecture, and I love how quiet it is in the library, how there’s this big field out here for you to—”
“You don’t get it,” Laura growled. “I hated this place. I spent the first eighteen years of my life watching this place slowly rip the blood and bone from my body and make me wonder if I wouldn’t be better off dead. I can’t start liking it now.”
I had to choose my words very carefully. “Do you have any idea why it is you’ve started liking it?”
Laura grunted through gritted teeth. “I don’t know! It’s just… it just feels like a manor now. I’m forgetting all the bad, all the suffering that I went through—this damned human brain—all I can think about is how nice the fucking foliage looks.”
“Because Lady— because your mother is gone? Your first mother.”
“I don’t know,” Laura said, already starting to calm down again. “Maybe. Maybe that’s it.”
“I mean, from what it sounds like, it wasn’t exactly the house that was hurting you for all those years. It was her.”
“Maybe,” she said. After a moment to look up at the body of the old Halflance house and take a slow, deep breath, Laura gave me a nice peck on the cheek before slipping the sketchbook into her pocket and hopping up off the stool. “But enough of that. Your medication is in the pantry, by the way.”
It took me a second to catch up and remember that that was how the conversation had started. “And why, exactly, is it in there?”
“Because the maids kept complaining that they didn’t like having to clean our room with it around, so I moved it somewhere they wouldn’t be able to complain about.”
I sighed. “You could have at least told me about it.”
“Next time, maybe,” Laura said with a shrug.
She helped me finish packing. By the evening of the ninth day, I had a full suitcase, containing everything I would need for days or even weeks spent away from Halflance manor. The next morning, with still no news of Lady Halflance, I hopped out of bed, ready to set off at once, like Laura had been suggesting. To my surprise, Laura wasn’t nearly as ready, arguing that the spirit of the agreement really required that we wait the one extra day, so that it had been a full ten days of waiting and not just nine. That ended up saving us.
It was a little after lunch on that tenth day when we heard the heavy knocking on the front door of the manor. Laura and I were in one of the back sitting rooms, trying out something new, specifically portraiture. I was lounging on a fancy chair with my shirt unbuttoned halfway down my front, the torture of being forced to sit still something that I could only suffer through out of desire to see the final product. Laura was studying me with an exceptionally keen eye, but she also had the disadvantage of facing away from the door, which meant that I was the first one who saw Lady Halflance walking in on us.
“Oh, Lady Halflance, good to see you back!” I said, trying and failing to make myself look presentable. “What’s the news about Tersine, then?”
Upon hearing me speak, Laura whirled around, pressing the sketchbook to her chest… with the open side facing out. An instant later, upon seeing her first mother’s increasingly disturbed expression, she quickly flicked through the pages of the sketchbook until landing on some of the flower illustrations from earlier.
“I’ve been getting into art,” she said, pointing desperately at the flower art. “Landscapes.”
“Truly, you are the…” Lady Halflance froze. “Landscapes?”
“Well, maybe it counts as still-life? I’m not totally sure on the nomenclature.”
In three steps, Lady Halflance was across the room and snatching the sketchbook out of Laura’s hand.
“Hey! That’s hers!” I tried to protest, while Laura herself cringed back. Halflance did nothing.
Several seconds passed, Halflance squinting intensely as she studied Laura’s sketches one page at a time. “You never liked to do art before. Thought it was ridiculous.”
Laura was too scared, or maybe too embarrassed, to speak. Fortunately for everybody present, it wasn’t just the three of us, or the stalemate might have remained for quite some time. The already-open door admitted one Lady Joyce Alonhall through it with ease and grace. It had been a while since I’d seen her in her daywear, all iridescent and gaudy, loose shirt and tight, tight pants, instead of all dressed up for her role as the Blackbird.
“Well, hello there. Laura, Emma darling, it’s so nice to see you. What’s that you have there?”
Lady Halflance slapped the sketchbook back into Laura’s hands, her expression somehow even more dour than it had been before. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
Alonhall raised an eyebrow, but didn’t pry further.
“Wait, hold on, as much as I like seeing you… what the hell are you doing here?”
“Lady Alonhall is the reason why I’ve returned here,” Halflance said. “She is the one who uncovered Tersine’s… what did you call it?”
“Secret base,” Alonhall said. “Let’s find somewhere to sit down and I can tell you the whole of the story, because it’s quite interesting indeed.”
Alonhall was nearly skipping as she turned around. Many an awkward look was shared between the three of us in the room before Halflance finally gestured for Laura and me to follow Alonhall out of the room. A couple of minutes later we were in one of the sitting rooms, all seated around a small table with the door locked from the inside.
“It all began,” Alonhall started, “immediately after I finished dealing with the aftermath of the Alderburg Society fire.”