Silence had a sound in the old estate house. It was the creak of wooden beams in their stone sockets, the sigh of the wind past the four chimneys, and the tap of her hooves on the wooden floor as she paced her study.

It wasn’t true silence, not the way she could create it with a spell, but this quiet felt emptier than the absolute of magically created solitude.

Rosemary was gone, and she had no idea for how long.

Worst of all was that she was just across the river, within range of a teleportation spell. Save that she’d already taxed her limit for the day by teleporting to the promontory above Damme to watch Collar’s progress with a spyglass.

She could have used that magic to break into Prim Palace… and likely been captured herself. Lace would make it easy for her to be captured. Take away her magic, even for a minute, and she’d be in chains before the whistles stopped echoing.

That was just one of the plans currently waiting for a spell to turn them into fuel on the hearth. She’d gone through half a dozen after getting back from her ill-advised and ill-planned trip to the forested hills overlooking the city, and each and every one of them was a ball of kindling.

She’s not gone forever.

It was easy to think it. She’d thought the same thought at least a dozen times, and another half dozen variations on it at least that often.

Believing was harder. So many ponies had been taken from her through her life, scared away, exiled… dead.

Even Glory, her sometimes companion far outside the city, late into the night, was gone, captured through Roseate’s machinations, and cutting off her information from the Rose Palace.

She could, again, walk down the path of everypony she’d lost contact with through the years, or she could stop moping and start planning.

The desk passed by her left again as she paced, the newest blank page already stained by tears. It would be a hidden message to Rosemary if she left it. “Mother loves you, and she misses you.”

The crow’s feather quill rose, fell as she sat at the desk again, and settled back into place, unused once more.

She needed to plan something. The letters had helped somewhat, but what to do after she delivered them had escaped her, as if she’d only planned for it out of worry.

You should have planned for this before.

Coward that she was, she hadn’t wanted to think about Rosemary being taken from her, too. She had, in fact, done everything she could to prevent it.

Did I? Did you never consider giving it up and defecting?

She laid her cheek on the paper, staring at the quill rocking back and forth slowly as her breath stirred it to a semblance of life. Defection was an option. It had always been an option. All it would mean was doing to her ponies what had been done to her.

Abandoning them.

Only, this time it would be her choice. She would do it willingly.

She couldn’t. As much of a coward as she was, that had never been an option.

Duty.

Rosewater closed her eyes.

When she opened her eyes again, her neck was stiff and it was growing dark outside. The paper had wrinkled and stiffened with salty white stains where her tears had patted against it. She almost threw it away, too.

Instead, she folded it in half and kissed it lightly, then set it aside. Tearstained paper could be used in a variety of ways to write a note. It would be a message Rosemary would understand that few others would.

The fading sun in the west cast stripes of gold across her office where the storm slats didn’t quite block out everything, and where the low, scattered skyline of Merrie didn’t block the light.

Glittering silver and glass with a muted swirling pink caught her eye, set beside a special quill she’d used to pen the secret message for Rosemary, done in the hopes that by planning even this little bit for her to not make it back, she would confuse fate and make it not come to pass.

Fate, of course, didn’t care. But sleep had been kind enough to leave her feeling more numb than hurt. That the sleep had been her passing out from lack of it helped.

She slipped the vial into a mane-clip and secured it tightly. She had only a little time before the moment to use it came.

After, she stood, stretched, and made her way to check the mailbox.

Set into the estate home’s outer wall, and double-sealed against intrusion, it was a welcome feature that let her check the mail without needing to step outside.

The expected gold-edged envelope was there, sealed with silver and gilt wax, along with another in a plain red envelope. Official notice from the Rose Palace as well.

She opened the Treaty envelope first to read the formalized notice of a prisoner of war being captured in the act of performing an unlawful hostile act in Damme. As the guardian on record, one had been delivered to her, and the other to the ruling seat of Merrie.

It was expected, but it still hurt.

The red letter took that hurt and twisted it deeper.

Citizen of Merrie Rosewater,

It has come to my attention that you have sent several unsolicited letters to the Prim Palace. As I had not given express permission or denied, I will do nothing at this time but warn you that all correspondence is to be directed through me to the Prim Palace. Failure to heed this warning will result in legal action against you, up to and including exile at my discretion.

Formally,

Baroness Roseate

Forbidding her from communicating with Rosemary would be verboten, as she was Rosemary’s guardian, and Roseate knew it.

Damn her!

She took a deep breath and calmed the fury and hate burning in her, putting it away neatly into a box to be used or discarded later.

One card left in her hoof could change the outcome if she played it at the right time, in the right place. All she had to do was ask the Treaty Office to unseal the birthday present Carnation had given her for her twenty-first birthday.

Formal adoption papers signed and sealed by Carnation and the royal notary.

It had taken less thought to add her signature to them than it had to remember to breathe when she’d first seen them.

They were secret, still, held in a sealed lockbox in the Merrie Treaty Office, and she had the only key still in either city. It was one of the treasures she kept locked away in her safe room in the perfumery.

Playing the parent card needed to come at the right moment, and she needed to see if she could play it close to the heart. Letting Roseate know that the relationship between Rosemary and Rosewater went deeper than an obligated guardianship would only make her insane mother try all the harder to take yet another pony away from her.

The chance to play it would come, and if Roseate continued to be Roseate, it would come soon. The mare never could resist gloating.

That would come later. The next part of her plan, she’d come up with before she’d had time to think about what it would mean to have Rosemary actually gone from her life, however long it meant she was gone, and it meant she needed to put her mask on.

And a scarf. The nights were growing chillier as autumn left behind summer’s heat and the cooler northern weather began to remind them all just how far north they were.

Roseate’s goons were waiting right outside the door, as she’d known they must be, waiting for a glimpse of the interior of her home in an unguarded moment. They were disappointed, of course, and only got a look at the mudroom and a bit of the hallway beyond.

“Good evening, gentleponies,” she said genially. “I trust my mother is doing well?”

One mare stepped forward, somepony who might have been a beauty in her own right, had she any sense of decorum, and wasn’t perfumed with enticements that she plied against Rosewater to little avail. “She would like to talk to you, gorgeous,” the mare simpered, flirting her tail in what she surely believed was a fetching way.

“I feel the opposite,” Rosewater said, dousing the mare’s enticements with a single spell, pulling the chill fragrance from the air to cool the warming lusty scent. “Run along… Rosejoy, was it?” She thought the name fit from what Rosemary had told her of her more frequent harassers.

Now that they hadn’t Rosemary to shadow… apparently they’d picked her.

“And tell my mother to stop trying to entice me to come visit. She wastes everypony’s time. If she has official business, she knows how to reach me.”

Rosejoy pulled a vial from her mane, lips twisted into a malicious smile, apparently believing she had the upper hoof. Right up until it and every vial clipped into her mane came free and, with a series of distant plops, flew into the river a hundred paces away.

“Do not attempt to entice me, either, Rosejoy. I am not to be trifled with, and my tolerance for the arrogance of goons runs thin. On this night, thinner than most.” Rosewater glared at her, then at her nearest companion, pushing a touch of heat into her voice and her posture. “Begone.”

They scurried away. At least there was some use for her “Rose Terror” moniker, as much as she hated it.

She watched them go, holding onto the sour thoughts for a moment only before she pushed them away. This wasn’t a time for sour thinking.

Tonight, she would share with Rosemary memories of Carnation. Even if she couldn’t be there with her to remember together, she could at least catch sight of the prison and the palace.

That was no time to be in a snit.

There were a few other ponies wandering the meandering river road, couples and thruples in their conversations, laughing and prancing in the hinted at chill of months to come, their breath nowhere near to fogging. That didn’t seem to stop them from trying to accomplish the feat a month early.

Love. It was what she wanted to preserve in Merrie. The pure joy of partnership, of relationship, and of friendship. Here, like no other place in Equestria, it could bloom without restriction.

It was the love that Carnation had brought Rosewater up to believe in, that her father had passed on to her in the few years that she could remember of him, and it was the love that she and Carnation together had encouraged to thrive in Rosemary.

It was the love she held in a vial of pink and gold.

She’d named it Mother’s Kiss, but the first time she’d inhaled her triumph, she’d seen her father, too, beaming at her as she worked on her first letters, his tall, lanky frame and white coat too thin, even in the memory.

Halfway between the Rosewine and the Midway bridges, Rosewater caught sight of the Palace in the distance, framed perfectly down Damme’s straight streets.

Whether Rosemary was there or in the Prison, she wasn’t likely to get a better view of either than this.

She stopped, raised her scarf high in the air, and shone a bright light from her horn on it. The silver threads embroidered through it shone like the moon, and Carnation’s paintbrush rose Cutie mark, embroidered there by Rosemary years ago, gleamed against the creamy orange of the scarf.

The sign she’d written for Rosemary to look for.

It would confuse her watchers, both in Merrie and in Damme, but if Rosemary was watching from somewhere in the Palace, she would see it, she was certain.

A count of ten, and she lowered the scarf, wrapping her memory of Carnation tightly about her again, and counted again to ten.

She had to trust that Collar would give her the perfume. She had to trust that he was a decent pony, and that her attempts to sway him, few and paltry they might have been, had been enough to get him to trust her.

The cloud of perfume glowed soft pink as she infused it with magic, empowering the latent spell hidden in the matrix of the fragrance, and drew it in.

Cloudy napped on and off at the Rosewater watch post, Prim Note waking her at intervals to give her an update and occasionally making comment that she should find an actual bed, and not the lumpy dispatch bag she was using as a pillow and sun-shade.

Throughout the day, Note reported that the silence would come and go, but he had faint sounds of cursing, some sobbing intermittently, and then a long silence.

He woke her up again when the goons arrived to loiter in the cartwright’s yard across the way from Rosewater’s home.

By then, she’d gotten enough in the way of catnaps and shut-eye that she wasn’t groggy. She spent some time writing up a description of each of the goons while Note tended to his other watch duties, more to pass the time than to make any real attempt at identifying them. Priceless likely had postcard portraits of all of them along with their vices and known crimes.

Still, it helped to pass the time and keep her mind off of Rosemary and Collar. What she was going to do about that situation, she wasn’t sure yet, but it was something she was going to have to put thought into, and more than “I’ll figure it out.”

Just as the sun was setting, and Cloudy was sure that Rosewater had actually fallen asleep, or into unconsciousness, her door opened, and the mare walked out, scarved against the moderate chill. She watched as Rosewater dealt quietly and quickly with the goons and resume her walk without seeming to skip a beat.

Note relayed the conversation word-for-word back to her.

“She’s on a timetable,” Cloudy murmured.

“Is she going to try and rescue her cousin?” Note asked, raising a brow. “Or attempt to? Lace is at the palace today.”

“No.” Cloudy shook her head slowly. “She wouldn’t risk it. But…”

She watched as Rosewater made her way past revelers delighting in the chilling air and wished for a moment that she could walk beside her and ask her what was bothering her. She knew, or thought she did, but sometimes a simple question she thought she knew the answer to had unexpected depth.

She stopped some distance from the lookout post, and well within range of another of the main posts, almost half a mile away and still visible thanks to her white coat.

“I’m changing stations,” Cloudy said abruptly, rising and stretching out her wings before stepping onto the ledge. “Keep watch, Note.”

“Can’t do much else from here,” he said sourly. “I can’t reach that far.”

She grinned at him and took off, watching as Rosewater flashed some kind of signal toward Merrie using her scarf, and landed just as she wrapped it about her again.

From the Midway lookout post, she was able to watch Rosewater as she pulled out a silver and crystal perfume bottle, unstoppered it, and enchanted a pink and gold glittering mist into being in front of her.

For a moment, afraid of some kind of attack, Cloudy arched her wings, ready to rebuff any attempt at sending a scent her way.

Instead, she pulled the cloud closer and inhaled slowly, her eyes closed.

“My lady,” the watchstander said, his salute audible behind her. “Rosewater watch?”

“Yes. Please, do you have a spyglass?” She held out a hoof, not letting her eyes leave Rosewater. Whatever she was doing, she seemed not to be moving at all, save for shrinking the cloud as she inhaled it slowly, the glowing pink mist descending on her until it was all gone.

A heavy metallic weight settled in the crook of her ankle, and she sat back, peering through it and getting a look at the mare’s face as if she were only half a dozen feet away instead of more than three hundred feet distant.

“What’s she doing?” The stallion asked.

“Shh. Do you have an aural mage on staff tonight?”

“Nay, my lady.” Again he used the noble title she’d not earned or inherited. Not in Damme at least.

Rosewater’s lips were moving, her brows high and tight as a beatific smile spread to take in her cheeks, the cut-like marks of her Rosethorn heritage pulling to cup them, like a lover might before leaning in for a kiss. She was beautiful when she smiled so brightly, and Cloudy felt a need to know what it was that made her do so.

When her eyes opened, the smile slipping from her face, the faintest sheen of glowing pink and gold spilled from them before it faded to be replaced by tears as she went from nearly ecstatic to grief-stricken in the span of moments.

That phase didn’t last nearly so long, but it took time for Rosewater to regain the composure she’d walked down the riverwalk with. By the time she opened her eyes again, her neck was unbowed, and a fainter smile, but no less real for that, graced her lips as she raised her head to look seemingly right at Cloudy.

Then she turned and walked back up the road, her gait even and sure, and there was even a swish in her tail. Whatever that scent had been, it had improved her mood tremendously.

Whatever it had been, it was the same one she’d given to Rosemary. She’d have staked her freedom on it.

She collapsed the spyglass and handed it back to the watchstander. “Thank you.”

“What was that all about?” he asked, his ears flat. “Was she just letting us know she was there?”

“She hardly needs to do all that to make us pay attention to her,” Cloudy said with a snort.

“Fair enough,” he said with a sigh and returned to scribbling his notes down for a report. “Are you going off shift?”

“I’ve not been on shift,” she replied, narrowing her eyes as Rosewater didn’t return to her home, but continued on down the road, following the river still as the night drew close. “I’ll be back in half an hour to take reports from the watch posts.”

“Aye, my lady.”

She took off again, making her course north, then dipping below the skyline and angling east on a course parallel to Rosewater’s until she was well outside the sight of the cities before turning south again and crossing the river in the last shadows of the dying day to land behind a farmer’s barn.

Either she would get answers or she wouldn’t, but she needed to try.

Lingering memories of her father walking her outside the city to sniff at flowers and train her heritage when she had barely been cannon high to him coerced Rosewater to follow the road out, bypassing her empty home and its promise of only misery.

Rosejoy and her gang weren’t anywhere to be seen, and none of the other watchers that would normally dog her steps seemed interested in following her to wherever she went.

Even Cloudy had parted from her watchpost to return to the Palace and report what she’d seen. They would piece it together, of course. Keeping it secret from she and Collar had never been the point.

Now, at least, they would know to search her letters for hidden secrets that she didn’t want them to be able to suss out without Rosemary’s help.

That… and she’d been able to share a moment, maybe, with her daughter.

She could still remember her father’s voice as he guided a three-year old already possessed of her letters and numbers, to identify this or that flower by the side of the road.

Most of them were still the same as they had been a lifetime ago, with only small variations in the concentrations of the roadside foliage as the years went on.

The further she got from Merrie’s gate, the wilder the grasslands around her grew, interspersed with fields and farms that were beginning their late-year harvests, some with half their fields scythed and bundled, others just starting.

Cottages stood out here and there, their either silent or streaming forth white smoke and the fragrance of dinner done or being cooked, and a few barns here and there for the larger farms stood as stark and silent sentinels against the vermin that wanted to eat the silage for the coming winter.

It was a peaceful walk, letting her draw out the memories given her by Mother’s Kiss. Blue Star had been diligent in his duties as a parent, and loving in ways that Roseate could never match and had never tried.

He taught her the mores of his home of Canterlot, the noble code of the Knights of Canter, and told her stories about the long-gone Crystal Empire, of which he claimed to be a distant descendant. He taught her that love was a force in the world, and that he loved her so very dearly.

It had been that love which had tainted Roseate against the prospect of keeping future mates around after they’d sired a foal on her. It had also been that love which had woken Rosewater’s talent earlier than it should have.

Her talent wasn’t simply bottling emotion. It was emotion.

It had been her talent that let her know that her father loved her so very much.

She stumbled as the last memory, one she didn’t need a perfume to recall, that was branded into her soul, flickered through her mind before she put it back in its box. Gently.

A minute passed before she was able to find her footing again and blink clear the tears that welled up, but she continued on, maneuvering as much around dips in the road as she was around painful memories.

As the final rays of the sun winked out below the waves to the west, Rosewater stopped to watch the moon rise, the horn of the Mare coming into view first as silver light replaced golden, and the dim pewter cast to the world made it seem even more like a memory.

“What would you think of me now?” Rosewater asked the Mare as her eye came into view. “Would you approve of the things I’ve done? Were there other ways through this mess?”

She hadn’t been expecting an answer, and when one came, from the shadows of a barn set off the road a ways, she jumped and flared her magic, slipping into shadow and darting to the side before she’d placed who the voice belonged to.

“Easy,” Cloudy said, sounding much as she remembered from their nighttime repartee, but adopting a rural twang for a disguise. “I just asked who you were talking to.” She didn’t leave the shadows, a wise precaution, even if simply being there was a risk.

Rosewater swallowed her panic but kept the veil in place. This far from the city, she could more easily blend into the wild, the mottling easier to cast doubt on the shadows than it was with sconces and lanterns laid all about.

“I didn’t come to fight,” Cloudy continued, “but to talk.”

Privacy. Rosewater hadn’t given much thought to who might have followed her.

A simple spell, weaving gossamer threads of telekinetic force together in a web around her, then casting it out, let her feel her surroundings for as far as she could reach. Glory couldn’t have hidden from it, except by hiding behind something, and the only something in the area immediately around her was the barn.

There was nopony else with her on the road, not as far as she could feel, and while that wouldn’t have given Rose Crown an issue with her abilities as an aural mage, it gave her some hope that she could hide this conversation.

Another spell silenced the area as she crept behind the barn to find Cloudy watching and waiting for her, worry in her expression, but determination underlying it.

“Truce?” Cloudy asked.

“For tonight,” Rosewater agreed. “Tomorrow night, I would not count on it.”

“Why are you still acting like you’re our enemy?” Cloudy demanded.

“Is that truly the reason you took a risk to talk to me?” Rosewater sniffed and turned away to peer around the edge of the barn and sent another whisper of telekinetic threads across the landscape, letting them build a mental map of her surroundings and look for anything pony-shaped. Still nopony there. “I could capture you now and have Rosemary back by the end of the day tomorrow.”

“But you won’t.”

“You sound so sure of that.” Rosewater turned to face her, risking a little light to bring the mare’s features into view. Cloudy’s face told her the story in the dim pink light. “You aren’t, are you?” And she’d still come. “You’re either brave or stupid.”

“Or I know you better than you think,” Cloudy growled, stepping closer. “I know you could capture me right now, and you’re not wrong. Collar would, at the very least, return Rosemary for me.”

Which begged the question of why Rosewater wasn’t doing just that right then. She had no witnesses.

Rosemary loves her. Collar loves her.

“You love Rosemary,” Cloudy said more gently, touching her foreleg with a gentle hoof. “You know what it would mean to her if I was used as a bargaining chip for her return.”

“I wouldn’t betray her trust.” It would also gravely damage her hope of gaining Collar’s trust. “Where is she being held?”

“Why?”

“Personal reasons.”

Cloudy eyed her for a moment. “Second floor of the Palace. I trust I don’t have to tell you attempting to break in would be ludicrously futile?”

“You don’t.” Rosewater stepped back from her, eyes closed, and made sure her mask of emotional control was firmly in place. “Why did you come here?”

“Collar asked me to. He’s convinced you’re not a danger to us.”

“Then he’s an idiot.”

“And yet…” Cloudy spread her wings a touch.

“Not completely an idiot,” Rosewater amended. “What did he want to talk to me about?”

“You, I presume.” Cloudy smiled faintly. “I’m afraid Rosemary was… she had a shock delivered last night, and today it hit her heart that she wouldn’t be making a jaunt across the bridge to flirt with the guards and make her merry way home.” She touched Rosewater’s foreleg again. “She was worried about you, and how you would take it.”

A dozen responses came to mind, playing to the various masks she’d worn in the past years, all of them antagonistic toward the mare who’d come to tell her that her daughter was terrified, but still worried for her.

“I will survive,” she said at last. She took a breath. “And I have something I need to share, though I am trusting that you won’t spread it about. Roseate has forbidden me from contacting Prim Palace for any reason, on pain of exile. That includes you.”

“Why?” Cloudy demanded, stalking away and then back. “Aren’t you her guardian?”

“I am.” And more. More that would hopefully let her throw her mother’s order into the river and let her take the offense for once against her. Whether or not Cloudy and Collar would let her… “Go. Before somepony thinks to follow me.”

“I’ll be seen.” The way Cloudy said it made it a reminder rather than telling her she was being stupid.

“No, you won’t.” Rosewater split her concentration between her veil and a short-lived veil powered by a Heart’s Opening sigil. “Fly quickly north and get to ground before this wears off. You have a minute.”

“Thank you.” Cloudy leapt and dashed to the north, the draft from her launching downsweep scattering dust and bracken out from Rosewater’s silence.

A few seconds later, Rosewater marshalled the last of her flagging reserves and recalled herself to the basement, remembering to keep her posture just so.

She made it after only two tries this time.

Author's Notes:

The next several chapters are singles, not having reached the threshold of splitting them up yet. Thank you for reading!

(part 2 tomorrow morning)