Chapter 21 – Dresses and Drama

Wherein Rose looks forward to the holiday, until tragedy befalls her.

There were several visits to the dressmaker and the antiquarians in the last week before the holidays. This left Rose with barely any time to play for coin. She couldn’t wait to have two blessed weeks without mandatory school attendance. 

Valentina said nothing about the jewellery that her friends had been gifted by her father. Instead, she took her friends around town in search of something classy and chic that was timeless and wasn’t equal in value to a small fiefdom in the countryside.

The first of the parties Valentina had chosen for them would fall on a Lawday night. They would have to start getting ready in the late afternoon, but Rose knew where she was going to go on Winter Wake morning.

She looked forward to visiting with the gang of old men, enjoying their company. She was going to play music. Wonderful music that would lift her soul up from the dredges of awful sludge it was immersed in now. Up until now, the only lessons at Bardic College she had found truly worthwhile had been that one course on arcane arts.

Since those seminars, she had been carefully experimenting with putting intention behind her music. Exploring how she could get people to calm down considerably, or put them in a dreamy mood.

That Thaumday morn, exactly nine days before Winter Wake, as she played at Paragon's Cup, she thought of Valentina. The woman had said little before Rose had gone out, but it had been clear her mind had been preoccupied. As Rose played for the early afternoon clientele to pass time between classes, she prayed her friend found peace.

Rose ignored Brittany as much as possible, while the spoiled princess and her court went on another drama bender. The people she hung out with at college – fellow students, friends to some extent, for lack of a better word – did the same. At some point in time, they had all borne the brunt of Brittany’s ire. 

Thankfully, this week’s drama was about a teacher. Rose didn’t even know exactly what had happened for Brittany to pick on the poor man; all she knew was that he had been handed his resignation and ordered to leave campus immediately.

Rose wasn’t the only student looking forward to the holidays. Only two people from the group Rose kept company with were leaving the city to head home, since both lived within travelling distance of Splendor. Another two had grown up in the city and would spend the holidays with their families without leaving the gates.

Walking to class on Paladay, the students who were staying made plans to meet up in the middle of their free weeks, to catch up, hang out, and play together. Close friends and siblings would be welcome. It wouldn't be a party, not in the classical sense; it was planned as a casual occasion.

After a little deliberation, since the weather had turned nastier as winter’s grip closed around the city, Rose offered that they could gather at the Redemption Era house, her house, on Stygian Way. She envisioned something like the get-together she had witnessed at the old men's house. Friends, family, laughter, food. Good times.

She would have to consult with Bosra and Tina, to make sure they didn’t mind the intrusion, but she was pretty sure they would enjoy a party like that as well. And if they didn’t like the idea... a community space could be arranged here at college, even if it was likely to turn into a rollicking free-for-all fuelled by excessive alcohol if that happened.

It was Lawday, with only two more days of classes to go until the reprieve. As the students filed into the classroom to sit through another practicum on modern classics – i.e. atonal drivel that nobody in their right mind should have to listen to, much less play in front of an audience of their presumed peers – Brittany bumped into Rose, colliding solidly with her side. The entire bitch-club proceeded to do the same as they entered. 

Rose struggled to get out of the throng, but somehow she was stuck in the middle. One arm dangled in the hallway, her cheek pressed to the doorjamb, the pressure of other bodies pressing past keeping her there. Just as she managed to move forward, someone banged the door shut with tremendous force, her violin case stuck between the steel-reinforced jamb and a solid maple pane.

The crunch was deafening.

Gasps of horror went through the room. Rose turned. She stared at the pieces of the case, still holding the handle and nothing else. She stared at the sesters that spilled on the floor and the stray ends of the broken strings that sprung up from the wreckage.

Tears seeped down her face as a terrible feeling settled in her chest.

Every microscopic little detail was enhanced, looming larger than life. The sounds in the classroom. The frantic beating of her heart. The smell of cheap floor wax and the perfumes that clung to her clothing. The exact angle of the strings and the shape of the shards of the lacquered casing.

A hand on her arm as she was pulled aside by a friend. Another who kneeled and gathered the pieces in her skirt.

She was taken to her seat. The pieces of her shattered heart shifted from skirt to linen shopping tote. Silent, reassuring hands on her arms, her shoulders. Shows of support whilst the teacher pretended it was all business as usual.

He cleared his throat with a raspy, discomfited cough, making a note on his attendance pad. "Alright, Miss Cerdos, you shall be relegated to score-keeper today."

Protests went up behind her. The teacher’s burning look shot to somewhere over Rose’s left shoulder. "Unless all of you want to be marked down for today’s practicum," he said in a concise, toneless way.

 The room became deadly silent. Not even Brittany made a sound, though she looked as smug as a pug in a rug. One of her worshippers giggled, an oddly high-pitched sound coming from a young man with more gleeful malice than sense.

The teacher shot him a deadly stare, too.

"Hand Miss Cerdos your scores. She will mark every note you play differently than indicated."

People passed forward their bits of paper. Stacks were assembled and put in front of Rose on her empty desk.

She sat, stunned. The terrible feeling in her chest had grown to the point where she could no longer feel her fingers and toes.

Whispers passed her by. Voices warped somewhere between her ears and her brain. Hallways stretched endlessly. Every fiddle squawk pierced the fog, shooting straight to her heart, spreading tendrils of pain through her otherwise numb limbs.

Her notebook entries for the day were devoid of words. No doodles illuminated the sidelines. No words crossed her lips.

All day, the linen tote over her shoulder added debilitating weight to her already sluggish movements. It seemed to weigh more than the millstones used to crush grains to flour; it was the anchor that drowned her in the stream.  

She made it home.

She didn't know how she got there. She had no recollection of how she reached the front door. Of opening the heavy gleaming wood panel with its brass knobs, with the knocker that mocked her with its grotesque face.  

She closed the door. Her shoes left muddy footprints on clean white tile.

"Rose?" Tina's voice sounded from the upstairs landing. Music in a disharmonious world. "Rose? Is everything alright."

Silence.

"Rose... what happened?" Compassion. A gentle touch. "Where's your violin? You didn't leave it on the tube, did you?"

Shaking her head was a conscious effort. "It broke." Her voice broke, too.

The bag slipped off her shoulder. Clattered to the floor and spilled forth the remains.

A horrified gasp pierced through the cotton clouds in her head – Valentina’s gasp.

"Rose..." her name that was breathed with misplaced awe. Shock. "What...? What happened?"

Rose had no control over the tears that streamed down her face, nor over the sob that wrecked her, wrenching her chest inside out.

"Oh darling..." Valentina's arm wrapped around her as she was guided to the music room. To Bosra's oversized fauteuil. Involuntarily, she curled up in the leather chair that smelled of hay, of leather soap, of horses; the smells of home.  

A freshly baked biscuit, perfect and sweet, found its way into her hand. A large mug of tea followed.

"Can you tell me what happened?" she heard Valentina ask distantly, as if through a speaking tube. There was distance and echo, delay, the tinny quality associated with thaumaturgic devices.

~

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