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Title: Lemon balm
’Verse/characters: : Wild Roses, Sebastian du Lac d’Sabaey
Prompt: 053 “Home”
Word Count: 1000
Rating: G
Notes: after Sebastian left his teacher, his father gave him his mother’s house to do with as he wished. It’s a definate ride away from the major city, and as such almost entirely cut off from the politics.
By the standards of old buildings, this one was barely a blip on the map, built and entrenched only three or four lifetimes ago. A fair-sized manor house, by anyone’s standards, gray stone and weathered wood beneath curved-tile assymetrical roofing, trailed here and there by flame-leaved vines that turned a pale yellow in fall.
The designer had never expected the grounds to be immaculately kept, great foreign expanses of green grass and ornamental trees trimmed into fantastical beast-shapes. She’d been far too familiar with herself and her husband for that. Instead, there had always been an intentional unkemptness, a wildness to the plantings. Sedge grasses of varying natural heights and colours could be flattened by rain onto disheveled moss pathways. Clusters of half-wild flowers grew in protected pockets between shrubs.
If you knew where to look, you could spot the places designed to slow walkers, minor hedgemazes of thorny shrubs and natural-looking dips that sent you past the huge trees with untrimmed branches. His father’s touches, those.
While it wasn’t polite to expect the neighbours to try invading and stealing the chickens, servants or house if they could, it was considered a little dim not to prepare for such an eventuality as a manticore pack trying to take up residence in the kitchen garden.
Not that manticores had been seen in the area in the last six hundred years, but it never hurt to be prepared. The miller upstream from the carp lake had a stone-walled maze, and the boys he apprenticed took turns keeping watch from the archer’s rest near the top of the building.
His father had let loose a pack of werewolves he’d befriended centuries before on the grounds, with the mild injuction that he’d prefer not to have his neighbours coming to complain about wolves eating cattle or attacking passerby, but if anyone was stupid enough to try poaching or invading, there were weapon-caches here, here and here, and the fastest safe way to the house was this particular path.
The current packleader, Donovan, still came by now and again--usually with a deer haunch or a few rabbits--to make sure Sebastian was eating regularly, even if he’d never called on the pack as fighters and they both doubted he ever would. Sebastian had given them free run of the kitchen garden one summer, after he’d made the mistake of remembering that there were tea roses along one wall and a particular spell would benefit from them.
This had been a mistake, not because the roses were no longer there (he sincerely pitied any invader who ever tried climbing over that particular wall, as the roses had had time to grow into great spiny stockades of thorns to protect their flowers) but because the kitchen herb beds hadn’t been weeded or trimmed back since his mother had died and his father moved back to the city. The rosemary had been roughly the size of a horse, undisputed ruler of its bed, the path leading past its bed, and half the bed beyond the path. The basil was fighting a losing holding action against the peppermints, and as nearly as he’d been able to determine the sage had been eaten.
After dragging the branches and plants (and a considerable amount of dead ornamental grass) he’d had to cut away to get at the roses inside the house, he ended up throughly shielding off one of the great fireplaces and setting the whole heap alight. Donovan claimed the room still smelled like autumn, all toasted seeds and burnt leaves, whenever he went by it hauling a doubled armful of twiggy herbs to take back to the pack. Sebastian supposed this was better than getting teased about being king of the dust bunnies and discarded papers, and purposefully scattered lemon balm leaves in the corners of rooms whenever it had been long enough that Donovan was probably on his way over. The faint lemony smell matched better with the dust than peppermint or the aggressive piney smell of rosemary.
He kept no servants--it didn’t seem worthwhile for only one person--and rarely ventured into the rooms that had been his mother’s domain when she’d been alive. The shutters on her stained glass windows stayed closed, and the living-portraits and paintings on her walls stayed unviewed.
Many of them were beautiful, even the paintings he’d done as a boy, and especially the stained glass his younger brother had brought back towards the end of her life, but there were too many memories tied up in them for them to either be given away or taken down and the rooms reused for something else. Besides, most times there was no one to see or care how he conducted his life, and when there was, they were usually distracted by the downstairs rooms and the crinkled leaves in the corners.
On the rare occasions his brother came to visit, every window in the house was thrown open, from the translucent screens in the bathrooms to the small-barred sniper’s posts hidden under the eaves of the roof, and the dust and dried leaves were gathered together and cast on the grasses edging the front of the house. The tiles were scrubbed (neither of them were willing to do that without magical assistance. Isaac Gabriel claimed there were fireplace demons in the kitchen and raiders forbid he stick his unprotected head in there. Sebastian figured that was more along the lines of his brother absolutely hating soot in his curls), the floors washed and lanterns and lights lit in all of the public rooms.
It was, Sebastian mused, rather like getting all of summer packed into one six-foot, lankily boyish body and then having it detonate from the internal pressure inside one’s home, driving all the darkness and dust out before it and leaving light behind. Thank whoever was listening that it didn’t happen very often--the darkness and dust were comfortable, a nest unreminding of the past and unmindful of the future.
’Verse/characters: : Wild Roses, Sebastian du Lac d’Sabaey
Prompt: 053 “Home”
Word Count: 1000
Rating: G
Notes: after Sebastian left his teacher, his father gave him his mother’s house to do with as he wished. It’s a definate ride away from the major city, and as such almost entirely cut off from the politics.
By the standards of old buildings, this one was barely a blip on the map, built and entrenched only three or four lifetimes ago. A fair-sized manor house, by anyone’s standards, gray stone and weathered wood beneath curved-tile assymetrical roofing, trailed here and there by flame-leaved vines that turned a pale yellow in fall.
The designer had never expected the grounds to be immaculately kept, great foreign expanses of green grass and ornamental trees trimmed into fantastical beast-shapes. She’d been far too familiar with herself and her husband for that. Instead, there had always been an intentional unkemptness, a wildness to the plantings. Sedge grasses of varying natural heights and colours could be flattened by rain onto disheveled moss pathways. Clusters of half-wild flowers grew in protected pockets between shrubs.
If you knew where to look, you could spot the places designed to slow walkers, minor hedgemazes of thorny shrubs and natural-looking dips that sent you past the huge trees with untrimmed branches. His father’s touches, those.
While it wasn’t polite to expect the neighbours to try invading and stealing the chickens, servants or house if they could, it was considered a little dim not to prepare for such an eventuality as a manticore pack trying to take up residence in the kitchen garden.
Not that manticores had been seen in the area in the last six hundred years, but it never hurt to be prepared. The miller upstream from the carp lake had a stone-walled maze, and the boys he apprenticed took turns keeping watch from the archer’s rest near the top of the building.
His father had let loose a pack of werewolves he’d befriended centuries before on the grounds, with the mild injuction that he’d prefer not to have his neighbours coming to complain about wolves eating cattle or attacking passerby, but if anyone was stupid enough to try poaching or invading, there were weapon-caches here, here and here, and the fastest safe way to the house was this particular path.
The current packleader, Donovan, still came by now and again--usually with a deer haunch or a few rabbits--to make sure Sebastian was eating regularly, even if he’d never called on the pack as fighters and they both doubted he ever would. Sebastian had given them free run of the kitchen garden one summer, after he’d made the mistake of remembering that there were tea roses along one wall and a particular spell would benefit from them.
This had been a mistake, not because the roses were no longer there (he sincerely pitied any invader who ever tried climbing over that particular wall, as the roses had had time to grow into great spiny stockades of thorns to protect their flowers) but because the kitchen herb beds hadn’t been weeded or trimmed back since his mother had died and his father moved back to the city. The rosemary had been roughly the size of a horse, undisputed ruler of its bed, the path leading past its bed, and half the bed beyond the path. The basil was fighting a losing holding action against the peppermints, and as nearly as he’d been able to determine the sage had been eaten.
After dragging the branches and plants (and a considerable amount of dead ornamental grass) he’d had to cut away to get at the roses inside the house, he ended up throughly shielding off one of the great fireplaces and setting the whole heap alight. Donovan claimed the room still smelled like autumn, all toasted seeds and burnt leaves, whenever he went by it hauling a doubled armful of twiggy herbs to take back to the pack. Sebastian supposed this was better than getting teased about being king of the dust bunnies and discarded papers, and purposefully scattered lemon balm leaves in the corners of rooms whenever it had been long enough that Donovan was probably on his way over. The faint lemony smell matched better with the dust than peppermint or the aggressive piney smell of rosemary.
He kept no servants--it didn’t seem worthwhile for only one person--and rarely ventured into the rooms that had been his mother’s domain when she’d been alive. The shutters on her stained glass windows stayed closed, and the living-portraits and paintings on her walls stayed unviewed.
Many of them were beautiful, even the paintings he’d done as a boy, and especially the stained glass his younger brother had brought back towards the end of her life, but there were too many memories tied up in them for them to either be given away or taken down and the rooms reused for something else. Besides, most times there was no one to see or care how he conducted his life, and when there was, they were usually distracted by the downstairs rooms and the crinkled leaves in the corners.
On the rare occasions his brother came to visit, every window in the house was thrown open, from the translucent screens in the bathrooms to the small-barred sniper’s posts hidden under the eaves of the roof, and the dust and dried leaves were gathered together and cast on the grasses edging the front of the house. The tiles were scrubbed (neither of them were willing to do that without magical assistance. Isaac Gabriel claimed there were fireplace demons in the kitchen and raiders forbid he stick his unprotected head in there. Sebastian figured that was more along the lines of his brother absolutely hating soot in his curls), the floors washed and lanterns and lights lit in all of the public rooms.
It was, Sebastian mused, rather like getting all of summer packed into one six-foot, lankily boyish body and then having it detonate from the internal pressure inside one’s home, driving all the darkness and dust out before it and leaving light behind. Thank whoever was listening that it didn’t happen very often--the darkness and dust were comfortable, a nest unreminding of the past and unmindful of the future.
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 04:44 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 05:00 am (UTC)From:Yeah . . I think Sebastian might be the only one of the three of them who really could live in that house by himself, and that mostly because he tends to nest in only a few rooms at a time. His father ended up moving out not long after his mother had died, because he kept turning around and seeing something that reminded him of his wife, or something they'd worked on together, and his younger brother tends to Wander, so the house would stand empty a lot.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 04:53 am (UTC)From:All hail the conquoring rosemary!
Sebastian supposed this was better than getting teased about being king of the dust bunnies and discarded papers, and purposefully scattered lemon balm leaves in the corners of rooms whenever it had been long enough that Donovan was probably on his way over.
*grin* Oddly almost cute.
*would like to hear more about Donovan too!*
Thank whoever was listening that it didn’t happen very often--the darkness and dust were comfortable, a nest unreminding of the past and unmindful of the future.
...see, I knew I liked him. *grin*
no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 05:13 am (UTC)From:*cheerful* He killed the kitchen cleaver doing that--some of those branches were an inch in diameter. :D
Donovan . . is a massive shepard!brain. He's actually not that much older than Sebastian or Aodh, which makes him relatively young to be a packleader. Occasionally has Wall tendencies (I suspect Aodh's literally bounced off him a few times. But then Aodh might weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds fully clothed and soaking wet.), and tends to adopt people. Sebastian and Isaac are very definately the Lord's Sons, not the new lords, but they're family and are treated accordingly.
I assume the Bordeaux wolfpack originated from somewhere in the Trickwood; they've been yeomen since before the Rosenthal war, though.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 06:09 am (UTC)From:...er. that's my last name. o.O i'm officially weired out now. (altho the thought of some of my cousins wearing armor and carrying weapons makes me giggle.)
ps - i loved the line about the conquering rosemary, and the details about the basil losing ground to the peppermint, and the sage having been eaten.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 04:43 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 06:05 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 05:55 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 04:46 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-10-30 08:43 am (UTC)From: