#seteth fe16

There was her father, of course, Jeralt Eisner, whose service in the Knights of Seiros, if one was able to construct anything resembling a coherent narrative from the patchy record-keeping more than fifty years back, went so very, very far back that it was plain to Seteth what Rhea must have done, even if she would not say anything. Jeralt was the one consistency in this story, the one piece of it all that did not have any rogue elements to bedevil him as he tried to put it all together.

Then, there was Sitri, Jeralt’s first wife. So very, brutally young. So loved by those who knew her in life, but so quickly forgotten after her death that by the time that Jeralt returned to the monastery Seteth would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in Garreg Mach who remembered her at all. Dead before her time.

Sitri’s child, consumed in flame, dead so young that she did not even have a name.

Melusine, born in the wide world and unknown to all until she was a young woman.

Melusine’s mother, Jeralt’s second wife, a stranger cast in shadow, shadow so deep and so thick that she was totally obscured from sight and scrutiny. Dead so long ago that her daughter had no memory of her at all.

Had this been her home, to start with? Had it been she who lived in this remote house in this dense forest in a part of the Kingdom where scarcely anyone had lived even before the plague that had ravaged it years ago? Had Jeralt fled the smoldering ruins of the life he had built for himself at Garreg Mach, just run as far away from it as he could, and had he come riding up the road seeking shelter for the night, and had this woman been standing in the doorway, waiting to beckon him in?

It all sounded so very much like one of the old romances, if Seteth was being generous in his assessment. Tastefully done, it was like one of the old romances, one of the stories Flayn had devoured eagerly with stars shining in her eyes when she had been a little girl. But Seteth had been nearby from time to time when Flayn was listening to those stories being told round a campfire or before an assembled crowd of children in a church or the hall of whatever noble their contingent had happened to be staying with at the time, and he knew that this story did not end the way Flayn’s favorites all would. When last he had occasion to listen to one of the stories Flayn loved so dearly, he remembered quite clearly the hero and heroine both living long enough lives to really enjoy their lives together. None of those stories had detailed the hero losing his first wife, happening upon love again unlooked-for, and then losing his second wife nearly as quickly as he had lost his first.

This site of desolation, this old, abandoned house, eaten to its core with rot, had it, too, been the site of love which had come to nothing in the end?

But that could not be right, either. Melusine had been so oddly insistent that, for all that her earliest memories were of this place, of the dark, quiet house in the dark, quiet woods, she had not been born here. She had been equally insistent that her mother’s grave was not to be found here. How she could even know that, unless Jeralt had told her so…

So many fluid elements, still taking shape, and taking on shapes that Seteth was not certain that he liked. So many elements that did not meld together at all, that did not seem like pieces of the same story, for all that they must be, for all that they must be proven to be separate sections of the same narrative, if only he could find the common thread to tug upon that would make all of it fall in line and all of it make sense. For now, he was just left with these fragments.

The Crest of Flames, manifesting in Melusine Eisner.

(Nemesis’s bloodline is gone. She told me that it was gone, assured me that she had hunted down everyone who even might be kin to him and effaced them from the earth. They could not be allowed to persist; we all knew that. The children of his inner circle might be spared if they were willing to swear fealty, but not any kin of his. It was too dangerous. We had no way of knowing just how much he had told them, and she— No, she would never have allowed them to live, even if they knew nothing. If I had been with her then, neither would I have spared them. There should be no one living now who bears that Crest.)

Seteth still could not make sense of that point, not at all. When he had pressed the point with Rhea, she had been so stubbornly vague about what she thought this could mean, how it could even be possible. She had danced around the questions he asked of her with the skill she had spent more than a millennium cultivating. At length, she had professed a belief that it was the will of the Goddess, which was not… was not especially enlightening. And it was not likely. It was not likely at all, and Rhea knew that just as well as he did.

No, no, that could not be it. This power was passed down in the blood. Perhaps it was not just Nemesis who had drunk of Sothis’s blood, perhaps that other person had simply remained hidden, and had successfully slipped the dragnets and vanished out of history. Ah, but was that even likely? Surely, one depraved enough to commit such an act would not simply have gone to live in obscurity? No, Seteth could scarcely believe it possible. It was Nemesis’s bloodline, or nothing.

But either way, then it could not be Jeralt that Melusine had come to this power. No one could bear more than one Crest in their blood. For Rhea to have successfully imparted her own crest upon Jeralt, his blood must have been clear of all others before.

It was not impossible that it had come from Jeralt, Seteth supposed. If he had profited from listening to Hanneman expound on such matters in no other way, he had at least learned there could be several generations between humans of the same bloodline who bore the same Crest. But though it might be possible, it did not seem probable. For Jeralt not to have borne the Crest at all, and then for Melusine to manifest it so strongly…

It must come to her through her mother.

So. On the one hand, we have this nameless figure, most likely to be found living alone in the woods, away from most people—except Melusine insisted without saying so directly that that had not been the case. This woman whose name and whose bloodline was totally unknown.

On the other hand…

On the other hand, we have Sitri. Sitri, a foundling brought to Garreg Mach as a newborn, her origins a complete mystery.

On the one hand, we have a simple truth: Rhea could never possibly warm to one of a bloodline who had drunk of Sothis’s blood. Never could she possibly look upon them with favor. But then, on the other hand, there was the favor she so plainly showed to Melusine, Melusine who bore all the hallmarks of descending from such a bloodline. A bloodline that could not possibly exist.

Surely, she would not have doted upon Sitri as Seteth had heard tell of her doing if she had thought her to be of such a bloodline, but for her to have taken this frail girl under her wing at all, she must have seen something in her…

Jeralt was so cagey about the subject of his two wives, his two daughters. As cagey as Rhea was about the subject of the partiality she had shown for Melusine from the moment she laid eyes upon her.

Sitri and Melusine…

No, that was another dead end. Melusine could not be Sitri’s child. Seteth might not know the year of her birth, but he knew the day, and the moon, and neither corresponded to the day and the moon of Sitri’s death, Sitri who had died giving birth to her short-lived daughter.

They never found the baby’s body.

No, no, no. To suggest that Melusine was Sitri’s child was to suggest that Jeralt had concealed her survival and fabricated her death, and why would he even do such a thing? If he wished to flee the ruins of the life he had hoped for with Sitri, why would he need to fabricate his daughter’s death to do so? Why could he not simply scoop the baby up in his arms and flee with her in tow? No, that poor child must be dead, dead so young that she had not even been given a name. The fire that had consumed the knight’s hall of the time had been so terrible; its blackened ruins had still cast cursing fingers into the sky when Seteth had first come to Garreg Mach at Rhea’s pleading, months later. The fire had been so terrible that perhaps it had simply swallowed the baby’s body whole, and left nothing behind.

There was a danger, still, in not being able to make sense of all of these clashing fragments of the narrative. There were pieces missing from it. Sometimes, Seteth thought he was close to understanding, but then understanding slipped from his grasp, and he was left to flounder once again. There was danger here. He no longer thought it was Melusine who posed the danger. But still, his heart was uneasy, and he could not say why. He felt as if something was moving, just beyond the limits of what he could discern. It was moving, and he could not say for what purpose.