「The Secret Life of Gardenias」
「October, 181: Shared Bonds – Zinnia」
…
Actually, had Lucrezia truly taken after her mother, she would have dunked Milliard in the nearest duck pond weeks ago, damn the consequences!— still, that was a long time ago and we are none of us at thirty what we once were at sixteen.
The last of her father's brood, with all the social unimportance of a nouveau titre's daughter, young Elena Beicher had been free to pursue whatever she pleased until her Cinderella marriage into the Court of the Iron Crown.
It is a story popular, for a time, in most of the European dominions. The details smudged between tellings, as stories do. Sometimes she was half of a pair, star-crossed lovers mutually conspiring against class traditions that would keep them apart; in others, he is the princess in his ivory tower and she is the besotted knight questing for his favour. Occasionally, he is the wily rogue who tricks past her defences to win her hand. It is the nature of things for people to take from stories what they will.
In Roma, Duca Ermanno frowned upon any shadow of the tale. In Sanq, it is a tavern song demonstrating the superior skills of an ordinary Sanq girl over a nobleman of the Neo-Lombard Empire.
Elena took nothing from it: she was neither the story-telling nor reflective sort. But if pressed by the right questions at the right time, in the right place, she would smile wistfully out the northern windows and shrug.
.
Alessandro Larucca is too young to be as angry as he was, though not without excellent cause. News of his sister had been near impossible to acquire, and what he finally did hear was catastrophical.
"She is a cousin of the Iron Crown! How can any half-wit allow this to happen?"
"Here now, Larucca, no need to get excited," his roommate remarked, casually putting himself between Alex and the unfortunate messenger to inspect his immaculate reflection in a mirror six feet away. The servant, a discreet sort used to his master's temperament, bowed quietly and slipped away.
"No need? That's my sister they've packed off into service!" Alex cried, stabbing blindly at the air with the offending fistful of paper. "Service! Like some common mule! To that mudspawn prince of Sanq, no less… Sanq, Khushrenada, of all the wretched, flea-bitten, pig farms!"
"An absolute outrage," the lanky, airy, blond agreed, fussing with his cravat. "But I suppose someone ought to make use of all that education, god knows it's lost on the boy.
"Although," he added a touch too glibly, "isn't your mother from Sanq?"
Alex would have liked to rip the smirk off his face, but he already knew from experience that the other boy would win. Despite his girlish wrists and lacy trims, Treize was a skilled boxer, good enough to go up against opponents twice his size and half again his age, so Alex kept his fists to himself and ground his teeth instead.
"Which is why Zita and I cannot afford mistakes such as these!"
Mother seemed happy enough—how could she understand? The complex rules of custom and protocol are not readily apparent to those not born of their higher echelon, nor were they meant to be. To mother, a fork is a fork and dinner is dinner. She does not notice the slights made to her in serving orders or distinguish between heraldic sanguine and gules. She does not see what it means that she shall always be no more than a Lady, while his wife, whoever she may be, would instantly be styled Duchessa; and he hopes for her sake that she never will. The complex family life of the Laruccas was plainly not one to which she had schemed and aspired.
Alex's parents had met one idyllic summer by a certain river in rural Germany. How was she to know that the dreamy-eyed youth with delusions of poetry was the favourite godson of Granduchessa Donatella of the d'Leo-Sanmedici, the most influential force behind the Iron Crown?
But things are not the same for him and Lucrezia. They are legitimate heirs to their father's dukedom, courtesy cousins to the Emperor of the Iron Crown and eighty-sixth and -ninth in line for Imperial succession respectively. Nothing must threaten their socio-political standing, especially in their current vulnerability.
And Vittoria's too, he thought with a pang of guilt. It was difficult to remember that he now has two sisters. Vittoria had been barely three months old when he was sent away, hardly old enough to strike an impression. He cannot even remember the colour of her eyes, he realised. They might as well be strangers.
Treize laughed.
It was a magical laugh that would, in time, grow to be an infamous chuckle capable of disarming politicians and maidenheads alike.
"This is Saint bloody Anthony's, Larucca, nothing you do from here on can be worse than what's already been done for you."
This time, Alex did not hold back.
.
There are two kinds of boys at Saint Anthony's Academy for Fine Gentlemen: those who understood their place and those who did not. Alessandro had always considered himself the former.
Father had always promised him a school in Roma, close to home and in the coveted shadow of the Imperial family, going as far as to present Alex with a precious letter of acceptance to the Emperor's own alma mater on his ninth birthday— so imagine the boy's horror when, instead of the magical marble halls of the Emperor's old haunts, he found himself ushered through the tedious arches of some mere academy in a miserable backwater he had never heard of.
Trouble is, despite appearances, Saint Anthony's is not like any other institute. It is its own country, self-contained in six-point-four acres of breathtaking, largely inaccessible hillside and overlooked by every map, nation and alliance in the world. A Neverland referred to only in awkward allusions outside its walls, a repository of lost secrets, itself a better-kept secret of true aristocracy.
Little is known of the founder, Winston Volk. They say that he is ninety-six, though he does not look a day over forty-two. That he is an exiled war hero, a deposed royal, a vampire, a spy, a sorcerer, a fraud, and it may all very well be true.
Here was a man who named himself after a handful of American cigarettes and the moose-hunting Russian wolf, whose legend claims the ability to have turned the tide of the Colony War with a flick of a finger, had he chosen to. The gilded portrait in the Academy's main foyer pictures a stout figure of indeterminate nationality parading an epic salt-and-pepper moustache on an otherwise ordinary face, dark eyes hidden behind clownish, rose-tint teashades, a puffed-chest creature bordering on the ridiculous. Not the kind of man one would expect Emperors and Generals to roll over for at all, but they did.
And this tiny kingdom in the middle of nowhere, his seat of power, if you will, is where the sons of Kings and Emperors, Dukes and Princesses go, if they are lucky, to be forgotten when they are no longer appropriate to the current climes.
Later, someone will question the wisdom of this practice and, perhaps, the ethics; but no one would be able to produce a better solution. Inconvenient children are dangerous things in any polite society. They are leverage for your enemies, handicaps to your position, and are themselves all too prone to inconvenient interests. What else is a responsible parent to do?
.
No matter how hectic his days got, there was always time for tea with Katrina.
These were proper adult affairs with real teas and coffees and savoury jellies instead of sodas and ice-creams, served on fine china in the Queen's private garden, and Milliard approached them with due gravity. He took his tea unsweetened, like a man, between the honeydrops Katrina smuggled to him under the table, and carefully rehearsed small talk on such popular grown-up topics as fashion and polity, putting every care into his grooming so as to present himself as a gentleman ready for Court.
"Don't you think he takes things a little too seriously?"
"That's part of his charm, Dennis," Katrina mused behind her teacup. Today she was serving a gold-tipped Assam with rock candy and unstirred cream, the way it was drunk in Bremen when they were young.
Weridge sighed. He tried not to comment on Katrina's parenting in general. After all, he was not a particularly stellar example himself. Elisa, much as he adored his adoptive daughter, was being raised almost entirely by his sister.
Still, despite its overall insignificance, Sanq is a Dominion nation with certain standards and appearances to be maintained, "And between you and Byron, you've just about used up all of our neighbours' tolerance for scandal for the next sixty years."
Katrina smiled.
"You said 'our'."
A lesser man than he would have blushed and sputtered. Weridge's only gesture of discomfort was to run his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair.
"We have been here nearly five years now, Your Majesty," he replied gruffly.
Any other woman might have reached out and touched their fingers to his. Katrina just smiled.
"Thank you, Master Weridge."
And then the prince was upon them and the talk turned to other things.
.
The children have been vying over everything possible since their fight in the Salle. The King thought this to be an improvement, and perhaps it was— Lucius had never seen Milliard so lively in a class he had not booby-trapped— but then, Byron Peacecraft did not have to teach in these conditions.
"Algebra's too easy, Lucius. Let's do Binaries."
One of the greatest luxuries of having your own Royal Tutor is the flexibility to change one's syllabus according to one's tastes and whimsies whenever one liked. In an attempt to prove his superiority, Prince Milliard had taken to demanding lessons in ever more complex and bizarre subjects for himself and, by association, his 'Boy' of the Chamber.
"That's just counting in twos," the latter announced smugly.
Lucrezia, in response, had thrown all class propriety out the window and no longer bothered to hold herself respectfully back in either academic performance or etiquette. ("What's the harm?" Byron had laughed. "Isn't it great that Milliard's finally found someone unafraid to challenge him!" But Lucius was concerned that this was no way to bring up a young lady.)
"And I've already learnt to do that. In Roma."
It riled the Prince in true child-like fashion that any other country could possibly be considered more advanced than his own in anything, and Lucrezia took great pleasure in baiting him.
It hardly mattered that Roma was not, in fact, in the habit of teaching its five year-olds any computer science. Someone had shown her older brother to count in base-2 and derive a simple secret code from it last winter, and when Alessandro could not keep up with the messages, he taught the code to Lucrezia so that she could do all the grunt-work encryption for him.
"Then we'll read… Differentitals," Milliard recovered with barely a pause.
"That's Algebra with pictures," Lucrezia challenged after a moment's perusal at the topic introduction.
"Fractals."
"Now you're just reading off the Contents!"
The princling shot her a dirty look and started wildly flipping pages. Lucius sighed and resigned himself to another wasted afternoon. It was days of feverishly revising lesson plans to suit these bewildering new interests before he finally caught on and admitted the futility of it… at least, until the children sorted themselves out. It was the business with the dinner menus all over again. Milliard, Lucius had started to fear, was shaping up to be a one-trick pony.
"I'm bored of numbers anyway," His Highness declared, "We're going riding." This was the one thing she could not accompany him on, not having a mount of her own. Skagen Castle kept a limited stable, much too small to provide a child with suitable loan on such short notice, although, Lucius suspected, Byron would have loaned her his own charger just to see the look on Milliard's and his faces.
Lucrezia crossed her arms and chewed irritably on her lip. "Afraid I'll beat you again?"
"You did not beat me! And it's not my fault you can't come," Milliard stuck his tongue out at her in a rude gesture.
Every so often, Lucius Darlian wished his King had had the sense to hire someone actually qualified in child education to tutor his son. He was well-learned, admittedly, but it took a special touch to be a teacher of any respectable description, and Lucius, for all his talent in the study of human knowledge, was simply quite giftless in that regard.
"Make your parents get you your own horse," the boy prattled on, aware only that horses were an expensive commodity and not that the stable's inability to accommodate her was a reflection on his Kingdom's poverty more than anything else. Colour rose to Lucrezia's face.
"Now, your Highness," Lucius interjected inadequately, unsure of whom to be shielding against whom.
"Neo-Lombard horses are much better anyway, but why would they want to leave Roma and come here!"
"Lucrezia!"
"Well, go back to Roma then, if it's so great!"
.
Anywhere else, the Headmaster's office would be bursting at its seams with parents, retainers, lawyers and hysterical maiden sisters or aunts, each demanding to be heard Right This Instant. It was a matter of appearances.
Thankfully, this is Saint Anthony's Academy, where many, if not all, of the students came from families who would rather forget they exist.
"What have you to say for yourselves, gentlemen?" Mister Crane peered across folded hands at a pair of ragged boys in what he thought was a suitably intimidating manner. "Who started it?"
The dark-haired one swiped sullenly at the corner of his split lip with a clenched fist and opened his mouth.
"I did, sir, I insulted Larucca's mother. He had no choice but to fight me," the other boy replied.
Crane turned his attention to the blond. "I see," he said, even though he did not.
Both parties will be punished equally, of course, but the unofficial code of the students has always demanded that the defeated child be the one to bear responsibility. And although slightly scuffed and missing some buttons, Treize Khushrenada had clearly been the victor.
"Don't expect me to be grateful," Alex hissed, back in the privacy of their shared room. "I don't need your charity!"
"Not at all," Treize shrugged casually out of his rumpled shirt and began hunting for a fresh one. "I just wanted Crane to write my mother."
Normally, parents of the Academy did not care for communications from Volksland. All fees and allowances are arranged silently through reputable banks such as Swiss Union and Romefeller Universal, and the all correspondence forwarded to anonymous Post Office boxes, to be collected at each parent's discretion. The exception is made for notices of non-payment, graduation and death, and disciplinary issues, particularly ones that involve mention of the other parents. One never knows what secrets these children may carelessly let slip and what feuds one thoughtless angry word may fuel. The parents like to be prepared.
"A disciplinary letter might help her remember my birthday."
"So you set me up? You bastard…!"
"Actually," said the golden-haired boy neatly avoiding his roommate's outraged tackle, "it didn't occur to me until we were outside Crane's office."
Something in the way he said the last made Alex stop.
"When is your birthday?" He asked curiously.
"February." It was a long way to and from February. "It probably won't make a difference," Treize concluded.
Alex sobered and let Treize help him up. "Does she often forget?"
A birthday is a serious occasion for boys of any age. Alex could hardly imagine how it must feel to be neglected by one's own mother on their birthday.
Treize shrugged.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be," the other boy clapped him heartily on the back. "It's what happens to all us bastard sons here. They remember the first two if you're lucky, and no one's ever been remembered three years in a row. Now, how about we go to the gym and I show you how to throw a proper punch?"
...
A/N:
Italian noble titles – I opted to go with local language titles so one can more easily tell where a particular individual is ennobled. Duca and Duchessa are Duke and Duchess respectively in Italian, and Granduchess of course being the higher ranked Grand Duchess.
Skagen Castle – one of the distractions these past months has been trying to figure out exactly where the Sanq Kingdom and, thus young Milliard's home, is. If you choose to subscribe to my reality, it is in Skagen, Denmark, the Northernmost point of Denmark where I shall one day spend inspired summers and finally complete my original material. We'll get back to why Relena's Sanq was obviously in Greece one day.
Glossary:
nouveau titre – French, in the fashion of "nouveau riche", literally "new title".
Flower Language 花言葉:
In Japan, Zinnia is also known as the Hundred Day Grass (hyakunichisou百日草), and its language is "kizuna"絆, the ties between people. It is the birthflower of, among other things, the day NASA's Phoenix was launched, and classically regarded as "thoughts for absent friends".