you cannot kill a flower, for it will grow back stronger than before...
caecilia tyrell shed her petals a long time ago and replaced them with thorns. no longer the daisy of highgarden, she brandishes a bow and arrow and devotes herself to the seven...
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THE FIFTH letter arrives on a calm day.
The air is chilly, but the rain has staved off and the clouds rarely gather for long. Caecilia is sewing a new rip in her dress from having walked the lengths of the forest, gathering flowers to crush into wine. The pale blue thread does not match the exact shade of the dress, but it is all she can do without asking for help from her husband's family. Her fire burns low in its grate and she sits with a heavy blanket around her shoulders that usually sits on her bed, keeping her warm now that her husband is fighting somewhere in the Reach.
Lunette knocks and enters without waiting for Caecilia to let her in. She holds two letters in her hand. One is sealed with the striding huntsman of House Tarly. The other is unsealed and curling at the edges. Lunette hands the sealed letter to her friend and they sit together in front of the dying fire, opening their letters as one and reading silently.
Trevyr has been writing her letters since the war started many months ago. Updating her on the fighting, of his well being, of the laughter the men share in the camps, of how much he misses her. She misses him too. She did not think that she would. She thought she would enjoy her freedoms, to walk the forest as much as she liked, to refuse to eat with the Tarly women left behind, to sit in this chilled room and rot.
But it is far lonelier without Trevyr to share a bed with.
She eats up his words, pretending that Trevyr whispers them to her, that he is here and he is alive and he is telling her everything right in front of this fire. Alas, he is not and she must come to terms with the fact that her husband could die at any moment and she will never see him again.
"Randyll," Trevyr's eldest brother, "defeated Robert Baratheon at Ashford. Robert lives, but it is a great victory for us. Trevyr says hello," Caecilia tells Lunette, who has been staring at her letter with her face growing ashier as every word looms in her mind. The blonde leans over and touches her friend's wrist gently.
Lunette barely wakes up.
"Acrux has deserted the Night's Watch." Caecilia's fingers wrap around Lunette's wrist. She can feel her heart beating through the grip. The quickening ba-dum, ba-dum. "This is a letter from him. He says he cannot live in the cold dreariness any longer. If he is caught, he could be killed. I– I have to burn this letter."
Her hands shake as she leans forward and throws it into the already dying fire. The flames catch the curling paper and life is breathed into them for a few moments as they chew up the last words of a brother to his sister and spit it out, paper turned to ash, love turned to blood. Lunette stares at the hunger of the flame. A solitary tear slips from her eye and curls down her cheek until it drops off of her chin. It lands on her violet-coloured dress and becomes threaded into the fabric.
