Bouquet

(C) Intelligent Systems and Nintendo

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A Thorny Road Ahead (part one): Cardamine, Tamarisk, Almond Tree, Black Thorn
(the paternal error did not lie solely in the crime, but also in the thoughtlessness for what difficulties would lay ahead for his child.)

-Twenty-five minutes ago-

It was over.

Pent stood alone in one of the palace's opulent waiting rooms, far too anxious to sit down and wait in a pretense of calm until he was called. He didn't know how long he had already been waiting for; all he knew was how difficult it was to maintain any semblance of his normal disposition. Even the audience he had just had with the king hadn't been this difficult, even though various courtiers and guards had lingered in the throne room while he revealed everything he knew, every single harmful fact of what had gone on within House Reglay from the last years of his father's reign. He could imagine all those facts now flying out of the castle from the lips of the courtiers like flocks of honking geese, unable not to be heard as they spread throughout the kingdom. And yet, even knowing that, he had the temerity to request from the king one favor despite how useless it would be.

The king had looked at him so kindly after he made his request that he knew he was being pitied, but Pent could do nothing more than bow his head and repeat himself.

It was over. What judgment would be rendered? As it had also happened during his tenure, pleading ignorance was nothing more than self-absorbed foolishness. He had not done so. The king had commended him for his integrity, but Pent had never wanted it to be tested this way. And, even though he had been ignorant, even though he had only been compliant in the most tacit of ways, the crime had been committed because of him. Because his father had...loved him.

What a horrible way to find out.

Pent ran his hands through his hair as if the action could spend the nervous energy twisting within him--useless, of course. All he could do now was wait for the king to finish meeting with his advisors before receiving him back to the throne room, where he was to learn the punishment he would bear. And after that, everyone else would know. Etruria would not help but know.

A shudder ran through him at that thought. Louise would know. What would she think?

But he had already made his decision when he requested an audience with the king, right after he had learned everything he had never wanted to know. Now all he could do was wait, and remember.

-Yesterday, noon-

"Please tell me everything you know."

The auburn-haired clerk--Raike Nachett of Reglay, ancestry from the Lycian canton of Khathelet according to the basic application forms required of anyone who worked directly for House Reglay, yet another brilliant regulation Pent's father had been responsible for--nodded at Pent's command, the first thing of consequence he had to say once he had summoned the clerk. "I was hoping you had called me for that reason, or else I can forget having a job once I return with these in hand." From his overcoat Raike pulled out the financial ledgers he had brought last time, placing them on Pent's desk. "Master Borenze locked these up after the failed meeting I had with you and lectured me most severely, but I've learned a thing or two about lock-picking from my wife."

Pent raised an eyebrow at this dropped bit of information. "What sort of occupation requires that?"

"She was a chambermaid here, actually, and the head woman in those days never would unlock anything unless it was for her favorites. That woman was fired for assisting an ongoing theft ring while you were still away at school." Raike paused, looking thoughtful. "And before that she was a pegasus knight."

The other eyebrow rose, then Pent decided it was best not to get too distracted. "Right. Anyway, first tell me this: Have the ledgers always been locked away except for when the annual budget time comes around?"

"Only these two. Well, three including nine-seventy's, our most recent one."

"But none of the others."

"No, milord."

"I see." Nodding to the leather-bound ledgers, Pent said, "Show me what you found, in full detail."

Raike opened one of the ledgers, looked through it, then closed it and picked up the other. Pent watched as the clerk skimmed through it, eyes narrowed in concentration, before stopping and placing it open before him. "This year I was assigned to work on the budgetary notations for the palace's records, so I decided to look up the past few years to see how to label everything correctly. Sixty-seven's was fine, but when I looked through sixty-eight's I noticed several imbalances. You can see for yourself here, even without looking at the past year's."

As he looked where he had been directed, Pent noticed several figures seemed off. They were not small amounts, either. "Taxes were raised here," he commented more to himself as he began flipping through the pages to see where the extra money was distributed. Yet, he couldn't seem to find anything. "Approximately how much was missing from this year?"

"Actually, I can give you an exact figure: ten thousand gold."

"Ten thousand? That's too exact." Pent put down the ledger and closed it. "So this is nine sixty-eight; what about the year after?" The filing for nine sixty-nine had been his first, during that bleak winter of AS 970; he had been forced to sign the affirmation of the papers sent to the palace while also planning his father's funeral and subsequent interment into the family tomb. Because of everything that had been going on, he had let his steward do everything. Anything his steward had handed to him to sign, he signed without a thought.

And that made him an accomplice to Borenze's crimes.

Raike handed him the ledger he had first glanced through. "It's the same amount, but the method was different. Taxes seem to have been lowered to their usual percentage, so minor expenses were either falsified or taken out of the sums for county-wide projects like roads or village maintenance."

Frowning, Pent opened the ledger and skimmed through pages of neatly-written figures like he never had before, engrossed by the information displayed before him. "The same amount, is that so..." he muttered as he began to notice tiny errors in basic computation, equaling hundreds of gold missing at a time.

Borenze took that money from the people of Reglay? He did this underneath my father's nose? That can't be right at all, not with the way my father was...

He glanced up from the page, meeting Raike's eyes. There was something about the clerk, a quiet indignation that was building if the reddening of his face was any hint, that gave Pent pause. "Did you confront him?"

"No, I didn't think that was wise."

Pent closed the ledger. "I'm assuming the same is with nine-seventy."

"You were very busy with the planning for the birthday celebration." Raike tried to sound kind, but Pent could only cover his face in one hand, frozen solid at his own incompetence.

Is that why he pushed so hard to have such a large party for my and Louise's birthdays, no matter what I told him about the kind of celebration I wanted? Pent wondered in growing horror. To have me so distracted that I would just let him do as he liked, and have me do little more than give his crimes legitimacy?

And I let him. I let him do everything he wanted. Whenever I planned to tour the region, he was the one who would plan where I was to go. I always ended up at the specialized industries, the ones Reglay has historically been focused on, or I was visiting with the lords. Never the villages.

He remembered Alloway. Accompanied by Count Alloway and his knight captain, they conducted a vigorous tour of the small county and its vast farmlands. Lord Aramis seemed to have known every possible statistic, down to how many people lived in a certain area, what they were expected to produce, and the average quota during his sixteen-year reign. It had made Pent realize just how little he had known about his own county, and he'd asked Lord Aramis how to begin some of those same institutions for Reglay. He had hoped to implement the best ones once he made his next tour, which he had wanted to do the next time Louise visited. He had wanted her advice, since she seemed to have an understanding of land ownership and business practices.

What could he do now? Once word got out about this, he would be lucky if the peasantry began a revolt before the nobles who hated him started their own coup d'etat. The regular people, villagers, commoners, peasants, whatever they were called--they had every right to do so. This yearly embezzlement, thirty thousand gold stolen by a combination of lordly ignorance and the cunning and audacity to take the money from right underneath his masters' watch, had harmed them the most. Their roads, their villages, their very quality of life, all these things had been made worse.

That money was gone. Pent had no hope in finding it now. All he could do now was discover what would make a man who purported himself loyal to Reglay, not only the family house but the county itself, commit such a crime as self-serving as embezzlement.

"Raike," he started, "you've done a great service for Reglay, and I give you my heartfelt gratitude for it. I would like to think that I would have discovered this eventually, but how much more money would have been stolen from the coffers before then?"

Raike shook his head. "Milord, I require no thanks from you. Reglay is my home. My father was born here and he worked everyday in the castle stables so that he might send me to university and use my education to help our homeland. My family is here and..." The clerk looked away, a smile on his face. "My eldest son wants to be a castle knight someday, so I have to do my part in making sure he stays proud of his home."

Strange, Pent thought. Before, when the evidence was first shown to him, he hadn't felt very much at all. But after hearing the young clerk's words, he could feel something pull in his chest, as if inside him were a rope pulled taut.

It wasn't anger, not yet. But it wouldn't take much.

"I thank you," Pent said before gesturing to a small office adjacent to his own. "If you could, I would like you to wait in there. I would like to talk further with you afterward." Raike bowed his head in agreement to this, and a memory long forgotten appeared in Pent's mind. "You were also the one who placed Louise's name on that list," he realized.

Raike looked surprised, blinking rapidly. "Uh...yes, I did, milord."

Smiling, Pent said, "Thank you." He stood. "Now, if you would, please." With those words, the clerk quickly vacated his seat for what would soon be a much more comfortable place than the office he had entered, and Pent approached the door. Opening it led to the discovery of two castle guards, both who stood at attention when Pent stuck his head out into the hallway. "Find Borenze," he ordered, and both did so with unnatural speed. He supposed his tone had a lot to do with that.

He was seated again when Borenze entered the room, the older man huffing away with exertion; when the steward's eyes fell upon the ledgers on the desk, Pent noted with disappointment the way the man paled. "M-milord?" he asked, his voice wavering.

"You're going to need to sit down for this." Pent had to marvel at his cool, even tone, all while his nascent anger began to build. With extreme hesitance, Borenze did so, and Pent nodded at the ledgers that separated them. "Now, explain."

"W-what shall I explain?"

"Explain why you have been embezzling Reglay's money for the last three years."

Borenze lowered his head. "Oh, merciful saint, please forgive me..."

"I believe you should be begging the forgiveness of the people of Reglay before you plead your case before Saint Elimine," Pent said in a dry tone; despite his blasé words and expression, his anger and impatience were growing and he knew he was in danger of being overwhelmed by his feelings. "Now, let's try this again. Why have you committed this crime?"

"It was..." Borenze did not lift his head. "It was on your father's orders, milord."

That rope inside of Pent snapped cleanly and without warning, and all he could be thankful of was that he did not keep his spell tomes in his office. "How dare you," he said, his voice betraying only the smallest tremble of the deluge of emotions within him--anger, disgust, and a strong sense of being appalled that such a charge could ever be uttered. Pent leaned forward, a fist on his desk as he continued with, "How dare you insult my father with such a bold-faced lie?"

Borenze shook his head, his body shuddering with the force of the movement. "I-I do no such thing. I'm, I'm only telling the truth. Your father did command me to pull ten thousand gold annually from the budget, to do whatever I could to get that sum ready."

Pent rose from his chair with a half-realized snarl, twisting one corner of his lips in a way that he knew would be forever imprinted in the muscle memory of his face. Backing away from the disgrace that was his former steward only led him so far, and he felt claustrophobic even with the large window at his back. "My father did this, you say," he stated, his voice flat. "That man cared about Reglay more than anything else, and you would dare accuse him of a crime of this magnitude. Worse yet, you actually think I would believe you?"

"...You would have to, milord," Borenze said, his voice feeble. "Why do you think he raised the taxes in sixty-eight?"

It seemed all the energy, all the malignant hate that was powering his self-righteous streak fled Pent's body; he leaned against the great window behind him in an effort to keep himself standing. "What?" he breathed.

"He only did it for that one year because the nobles began to complain and he was far more concerned with his sudden illness, so instead I planned to take the money from existing programs." This last sentence was punctuated with a soft sigh. "It was necessary."

"Necessary?" The word felt like ashes in Pent's mouth. "What could be so necessary about it?"

Borenze sighed again. "You are so young, and yet you're already held in such high regard amongst the magic associations of Etruria. I remember the look on your father's face when he heard that you had your first published paper in one of the premier journals. Even though you never told him of your accomplishments, he was so proud of you." He shook his head as he moaned. "But your genius caught too many curious eyes. Your name was mentioned a few too many times, and you were to be enlisted as an officer in the mage corps. Imagine! The military believed they could snatch away the only son and heir of the great house of Reglay without even a word of it to the Count!"

Pent was silent, his hands tight fists at his sides.

"Your father was tormented when he found out. He knew how much you loved to research magic, and not only did he think you were unsuitable for the military he couldn't bear to relinquish his only son. It was discovered that a high-ranking courtier in the palace was willing to...defer your transfer by a year for a paltry sum, and your father agreed to it."

"As did you."

Borenze kept his head down, and Pent could see him wringing out his hands in his lap. "You were the only heir. Your father never remarried, finding marriage distasteful and a hindrance to his work, and he did not...seek outside entertainment. The Martel line has dwindled this much from its once-great numbers..."

"Please, I'm not interested," Pent said, disgusted even as his mind worked out other odd occurrences as fast as it could. "That drive for money...it was why you had me find a potential bride so early, why you tried to push me into an early wedding with Louise under that ridiculous 'guardianship,' and why you were pushing so hard for a large dowry that her father nearly called everything off. I thought Reglay didn't need the money, but we did, didn't we?"

"Yes, for the 'encouragement money.'"

"Call it what it really is--bribery. You were bribing a palace courtier for years under my father's orders." Disillusionment couldn't begin to describe what Pent felt at this moment. "And how long was this supposed to go on? The minute you balked at paying, that official would have gone straight to the king and had us all charged with 'conspiracy to disrupt the integrity of the national government,' or perhaps even treason since I was apparently dodging enlistment for so long. Do you..." He had to stop; his throat constricted for reasons beyond him. He swallowed once, ignoring the ache of it. "Do you have any idea what you've done to House Reglay? To the county and all the people within its borders? Do you have any idea how you've dishonored my family name by going through with such an asinine plan?"

Now it was Borenze's turn not to say anything. Disgusted, all Pent could do was stride past him on the way to the door. Opening it, he told the guards to have a carriage ready for him by the time he went downstairs, and they ran in response. "What are you doing?" were the words the former steward greeted him with when Pent closed the door.

He took a deep breath. "I'm going to fix this...this horrible mess you and my father have made for me. I will go to the palace and tell the king everything."

"You can't do that!" Borenze shouted, rising from his chair with a speed that belied the man's aging body. "You'll ruin everything!"

"Everything? There's still something left to wreck? I had best protect it from your so-called help, then." He stared down at the man he had depended on to be the count he knew he could never be, no matter how diligently he had worked. Now he knew better. "You're dismissed. I suggest you leave Reglay before the news comes out here as to what exactly you've done."

"You..." Borenze seemed so decrepit, so run-down and pathetic that Pent was almost inclined to feel sorry for him. That he didn't was a sign of his better judgment showing through. "Condemn me as you will, milord, but understand that your father did this out of his love for you, his only child. You do your father a disservice to assume malice in his actions."

"Leave," Pent said, his voice choked with finality. "Leave, and be grateful your next home isn't the dungeon. I...will never forgive the perpetrators of this crime."

Was that a lie? Pent didn't know. All he knew was that, even if he believed his father had hated him and had wished to torment him from beyond the grave by doing this...this thing, it would still be less of a disservice than the tainted legacy his father had left for him to deal with. Once, he had believed his father to be the very best count, a tireless administrator who was exacting, grasping, and utterly devoted to the county their ancestors had ruled over for centuries. He had admired and resented his father for being so excellent at being Count Reglay, all the while believing that he would never compare. And, all the while knowing that he was nothing more than a result of his father's devotion to his duty, a son born shackled to House Reglay.

He had preferred all his naive resentments and insecurities to the inescapable burden of his father's love.

-Now-

It seemed the throne room was even more crowded than before, though Pent had to wonder if that was just an observation born of paranoia. All their eyes were on him and that was a fact, the weight of their stares as oppressive as a dragon's aura must have felt when that race had still existed. He did not tremble or twitch in any way, preferring vastly to keep his dignity to the end. All he did--all he could do--was follow the appropriate procedures, kneeling before the throne as he waited for the king to speak. Only once he bowed his head did he let himself swallow in nervous calm, wrapped within an oxymoronic haze where he knew to dread what was going to happen, and yet feel strangely fine with whatever the verdict would be. He had done everything he could, he had kept strict accordance to his morals and his beliefs, and no matter what he suffered he could take comfort in that.

It was over. All that was left was to hear out the king's judgment.

He waited.

-end to part one-

Oh no, what's going to happen next? I can't wait to show you, so please expect the second part of Bouquet's first 'season finale' on 8/27! And, if you're feeling particularly blindsided by the sudden explosion of plot, might I suggest rereading from Flowers in Disarray onward? Thank you all for reading, and please feel free to let me know how I'm doing!