“The young mistress…she has been abed for three days. Has she taken ill?”

“You…ah, you are the new girl, are you not? Anna?”

“Alice, madame.”

“Yes, of course. Walk with me and I shall explain.”

For five generations, House Fortemps had kept to a strict schedule for its heirs. Unlike many other families within the peerage, or even among the common folk, their offspring were affected by the season during which they were born. This hereditary significance had led to an intense study of the main and branch lines for the purpose of elevated breeding, a fierce pursuit of the head of house during the last major period of conflict on the continent. At that time, such cruel practicality could be understood: war raged, and a strong child was the most likely to survive it.

The summer and the winter. Those were the seasons of strength and plenty. A Fortemps born at the height of the warmest months would have a talent for the blade, the bow, and the spear, and the constitution for long campaigns. A Fortemps born in the depths of the winter would have a mind like the edge of a knife and a quick mastery of strategy and diplomacy. There was some argument for autumn: those were children of charisma, counting books, and coin houses, a boon for those days when peace might finally come.

“But what of the spring, madame?”

“Yes…what of the spring.”

A child born in spring will die young. That was the first and most damning conclusion reached at the end of the long and arduous study. Spring children were frail. They were prone to sickness. Should they reach a healthy adulthood, they would be physically inferior to siblings of another season. For the good of the house, no heirs of the main family were ever to be born in spring; for the good of the child, it was recommended that the branch families follow the same rule.

For a very long time, no Fortemps babe was born in spring.

“Not for three hundred years, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, you are right. You have studied, I see.”

“Yes, madame.”

Three hundred years, some say to the very day, a second son and his lady love were too young and too reckless to do as their elders had told them. In their selfishness they brought into the world an infant girl at the very start of spring, when the new buds had just begun to show upon the trees in the gardens. Almost at once all the old knowledge proved to be dreadfully true: she was a small child of delicate stature, irritable and prone to crying, and failed to thrive for nearly all her first year. The expectation was that she would pass soon as the family literature said that she would and in their grief her parents would experience a more bitter punishment than any of the family could levy upon them.

But the family literature was three hundred years out of date. The wars had ended two generations ago and in the calm that followed physicians had come to understand that a child does not constantly cry just because she has a poor temper.

It was celiac, which we now know spring children are prone to. A change in diet was all the little babe needed to regain her health and her temperament, and that all-knowing study was proven to be deeply biased. Yes, in a nation mired in conflict, raising such a child would be much more difficult, but the world had drastically changed, and it was a world that welcomed a life born in spring.

“But the young mistress, she has quite the love of cake – “

“Haha, yes, yes she does. She is blessedly free of celiac and has been burdened with fatigue instead. It is most strong during the winter.”

“Ah! So the sleeping…?”

“Yes. It is not illness so much as…dreaming. The young lady dreams of spring.”

That was the specialty of children born when the first green buds showed in the trees. Theirs was the love of dreaming and the talent to share it. The name of that first spring child from those many years ago was far more well known today than any of her contemporaries; even now, the finest of her paintings hung in imperial halls and held places of honor in galleries from here to the southernmost tip of the continent. They were studied, cherished, inherited, and exchanged for sums greater than the worth of this very manor, and while not all spring children have reached the height of her fame, they have all shared her dreaming.

In music, on the page, in the gardens, in marble and in clay, in woven threads and even in spun sugars and rich spices: each child put into the world their dazzling visions of color and light. When the spring comes, the young lady will do the same, and we will see what she has seen, what sparks and songs and sweet whispers have put that smile on her sleeping face.

“Even…even if what she writes is a little…?”

“Yes. Even then. What she writes is her joy and you know what is said about joy, don’t you?”

“What is said, madame?”

“Joy is never wasted.”

~+~

A short story as character lore and a commentary on creative pursuits.

Artwork is a wonderful commission from that inspired the above writing. Character is the feral form of my fursona, Gwyn.