The end - seriously, this time.
The Road Home
By icecreamlova
- : -
Burning
- : -
When he lays a hand on her forehead, it feels like it's burning.
He spends more time by Rosethorn's bed than he ought to, on the first day. He has work to do: the best way he can help is to work in his greenhouse and find a way to heal her.
But it's harder than he might have thought, to stay away, when he's this close to losing her. (And how unfair that would be, to rediscover a friendship in their arguments only to lose it a few days later).
It takes more effort than Crane would have predicted, to let Briar enhance the willowbark tea, so that he'll have his magic to work. But he does it, all the same, and returns to his greenhouse alone.
- : -
Work
- : -
He unties the ribbon around Rosethorn's message and doesn't frown at how thick the stack of papers is, once it's unrolled.
She should be resting; she needs to recover. Every day she is away from the greenhouse, another day of expertise is lost, and hundreds more in Summersea join the armies of the dead. ("You're not getting rid of me that easily," she'd said, and he knows now that she meant it.)
Crane slips the top-most of her papers onto his desk, smoothing it, crisp and crackling, across the precious wood. His white, china paperweight secures the top, while his palm, set against her message's smooth surface, keeps it from rolling back together again. It takes him a few moments to adjust the lamp, to make it bright enough that reading becomes less of a chore.
He reads her words and scribbled ideas, and knows he is fooling himself. No one who has fallen ill has survived the Blue Pox. No one. Rosethorn, with her sharp mind and irrational affections and coarse mouth - she's going to die unless a cure is found. He knows this as well as her wild-eyed apprentice does. Better. He'll do anything to keep it from happening.
So he'll push himself, and the boy, and indeed Rosethorn herself, even if she's near death, until he can buy the passage for her return.
- : -
Faith
- : -
Rosethorn doesn't always think much of Crane's personality, his methods, or his empathy as a green mage. Every time she visits that little glasshouse of his, she practically breaks out in hives, and makes no secret of it.
When it comes down to it, though, Crane is still one of the few she trusts. They've worked together so long she knows his mind better than any other, and she knows he'll pull through with the cure for blue pox.
So although she is hallucinating, she has hope that she'll recover. Briar and Lark and the girls give her a reason to: Crane gives her a basis.
- : -
Romance, or a lack thereof
- : -
There were many places Crane considered romantic, or would if he ever contemplated such silly, transient notions. The perfect place, if such a place could ever be defined, to make a speech and admit a feeling strong enough to change a life forever.
The sickroom of a recently ill Dedicate Rosethorn was not one of those places, but he supposed it would suffice.
"Will you just spill it out?" Rosethorn snapped, irritable with alternating boredom, fatigue and coughing. "I have no time to waste on watching you pacing."
"I thought time," Crane retorted, "was the one thing you had aplenty."
"Not for this," Rosethorn insisted. She sat up, and though her hair was tangled and face contorted into a scowl, the healthy coolness of her skin was the loveliest thing Crane had ever seen. Not that he would tell her.
"Crane," Rosethorn said exasperatedly, "it can't be that bad-"
"I love you."
"Oh," Rosethorn said. "It is that bad." He winced and she didn't, for Rosethorn never apologized for being blunt, but the blank surprise on her face soothed him a little. She had been shocked. Truly, amazingly, shocked.
"Absolutely terrible," Crane agreed, "since I still cannot stand you."
Rosethorn softened almost imperceptibly. "All this time, Crane?"
Crane sighed. The chair he pulled out scraped against the floor as he sat in it, draped almost comfortably, but not quite. "I thought I had forgotten. If I could. But then I almost lost you. Tell me I should have pretended nothing changed."
Rosethorn didn't say yes - how could she? She was barely free of the hallucinations from her fever, and both a pitcher of cool water and a pot of willowbark tea stood on the small table by her bed.
"Some feelings are more difficult to lose than others," Crane said, covering one of her hands with his.
After a moment, Rosethorn's other hand clasped his - small but tough, strong digits and neat nails, around Crane's elegant fingers.
"I know," she said quietly, hands tightening briefly. "After all, I'm still angry with you." And she grinned.
- : -
Interlude C: This is All Your Fault
- : -
"This is all your fault," Niva muttered, wiping down the bubbling bench top.
"Excuse me?" Isas said, dismantling the volatile magic of the potions that remained in their flask.
"Who was the one that said, 'Gorse's soup, this time'?"
"Who was the one who agreed?"
"I wanted to find the ingredients for perfume," Niva muttered. "You were just afraid I'd win again."
"You were the one who suggested we use magic to test for Gorse's ingredients, rather than just asking," Isas pointed out.
"I didn't want to get into trouble."
"In case it has escaped your attention," drawled Isas, now sweeping up broken glassware, "we are in trouble."
Niva dropped her rag and sighed. "Who knew Dedicate Gorse was so secretive about his ingredients?"
Gorse, they discovered in the worst possible way, had spelled the food in his kitchens to prevent just the diagnostic they'd attempted.
- : -
Peace
- : -
Rosethorn is at peace when she tends her garden. She hums, patiently digging and weeding and reshaping. The sun crawls across the otherwise motionless sky, but she doesn't notice. She sees nothing but a sea of green: dark leaves smooth and waxy, delicate shoots creeping towards the light, pale new growth unfurling like a baby Shriek exploring his nest. All the calm acceptance she cannot shape among humans flows into her plants, and they rejoice in it. Rosethorn's garden blooms because she does.
Crane is at peace when teaching. His drawl washes over his competent students. Their attentive faces are a sort of acceptance surpassed only by his plants, which thrive in the humidity of his greenhouse. As he lectures, his frustrations seep away until only knowledge, and the passing of it, remain. Listening, his students soak it up like bean runners in the sun, and begin to understand how the condescending man they resented became a legend.
When Crane and Rosethorn cross paths, the results tend to be explosive - snapping, arguing, maybe a little attempted maiming, and the bluntest, least veiled slights to ever turn Winding Circle's two greatest green mages into bickering adolescents. No one would argue that they are at peace.
But occasionally - nothing close to always, but sometimes - if you look closely, you would swear Crane and Rosethorn part ways with small, secret smiles.
- : -
Love
- : -
Crane was not a particularly affectionate creature. That wasn't what love meant to him.
(Crane didn't include in this his feelings for his plants, which were a great deal affection and much less everything else. That was one luxury allowed to the head of the Air Temple.)
He wasn't affectionate about his temple, after all. He wasn't 'affectionate' about his greenhouse.
He wasn't 'affectionate' to Dedicate Rosethorn, who would reward such gestures with suspicion and torment - he wasn't Dedicate Lark. And he certainly wasn't 'affectionate' to Rosethorn when no one else was looking, alone in the shrouded gardens of his greenhouse, where vines clung to glass and tore at bare backs unless they were gentled out of the way.
Normally, Rosethorn had a soft touch with plants, but urgency demanded force, and that, too, she had aplenty. Grass blooms beneath their entwined fingers and blushing cheeks, cushioning bodies and softening groans and moans.
Outside the greenhouse, novices passed with nary a glance past the thick vines fueled by the passion of two great green mages.
Inside, there was love, or as close as there could be between Crane and Rosethorn.
- : -
Rivals
- : -
"That lady - the one with the fox-fur bag."
"You want me to steal -"
"- ask - "
" - steal perfume from the Lady Katerine du Luca- "
" - ask her. How else will we know who got her perfume mix right? She'll listen to you. You're one of them... Isas?"
"...Very well - if I must to prove I was correct."
"Don't forget who won last time."
"I have not. I'll remedy that. Lady Katerine..."
Later...
"Your smirk somehow manages to be more annoying than a victory dance. Will you stop it?"
"I am not gloating, Niva. It is unseemly."
"Exactly."
- : -
The bird lay with its wings secured by splints. Shocks of newly grown feathers formed short, gray tufts over healed wounds. On one side of the room, Niva raised an eyebrow. Isas smirked return and moved aside to reveal his patient, a ball of fuzzy brown feathers and huge liquid eyes. Its uncertain chirping filled the air.
Niva merely frowned, crossing to the basket on his workbench to peer at the recovering sparrow. Her frown deepened and she gestured to a small indent at its heart. In a moment, she had whipped out a vial of crystalline-blue serum, a few drops fell softly where she'd gestured.
The scent of larkspurs pervaded the novices' shared workroom, and before their eyes, the indent began rising, until the bird's chest was back to normal.
Only then did Niva meet Isas's frustrated gaze, the undisputedly superior medicine in her hand.
- : -
"Osprey has recently been recognized by the duke for her role in eradicating the recent potato sickness," Crane said nonchalantly.
"Really - I hadn't heard. I was busy in the North, dealing with the recent wilting wheat. I don't know what I would have done," the capable Rosethorn admitted, "if Briar hadn't discovered the treachery from Pineridge."
Osprey and Briar followed the strands of the conversation, hands busy but eyes alert.
"I did hear that news. Osprey was put in charge of discovering a detection for the poison in the ground while we found the cure."
As they cleaned up, the true debate began: "Osprey's tomato-oak has never been thought of before."
"Of course you would find nothing wrong with doing that to a plant," Rosethorn snapped. "It was sickly and starved and wouldn't grow outside your monstrosity of a greenhouse. Briar's cinnamon is much stronger."
"It has been grown before," Crane pointed out.
The apprentices looked up, Briar wide-eyed, Osprey resigned.
"They're arguing over... which of our plants is stranger?" Briar said slowly.
"So has -" Rosethorn began, and broke off as Daja practically fell into the greenhouse, a vine of copper metal blooming what looked like six-sided stars wrapped around her wrist.
"I'm sorry for interrupting, but Tris and Sandry and I were trying to make the ore as malleable as thread and Briar said you were in the glasshouse so..."
"Frostpine wins," Briar said wickedly.
- : -
Vanities
- : -
For Rosethorn's thirty-second birthday, Crane presents her a jar of aloe ointment for her complexion. She arrives at the breakfast table before dawn and finds that infuriating man sitting with Lark, conversing cordially over the toast (Lark, Rosethorn thinks sleepily, is amazing in so many ways), a small box beside his teacup. When she opens it and stares at the present, Crane murmurs simply, "You look like you needed some."
In retaliation, Rosethorn gets him a set of milk-thistles, each bred and trained to guard one of his glasshouse doors. After all, as Rosethorn says, "I just thought you might find it useful, maybe even essential. If a ten-year-old could break in and nearly confound your guard spells, your security can't be very good."
(Somewhere in the background, she can hear Lark sighing.)
- : -
Past and Present
- : -
The teacup steams between her fingers. Rosethorn raises it slowly, noting with humor that though everything else has changed, this celestial blue teacup is still pristine and perfect.
They aren't, any longer. Rosethorn's hair is streaked with gray; Crane dyes his, but he cannot hide the wrinkles on his face.
"To think," Rosethorn muses, "you chased the future First Dedicate of Winding Circle out of your greenhouse."
"To think," Crane sniffs, "the future First Dedicate stole a shakkan."
Rosethorn has to grin. "At least now, you'll have an excuse for why he could break in."
Crane sips his tea with dignity and doesn't deign to reply. "To think," he begins a new verbal play, "you threatened to hang the future Duchess of Emelan in your well."
"Really?" Rosethorn wonders. "I must find an excuse to say it again. To my new students, perhaps?"
- : -
The end
Well?