A Plague Tale
Loss of Innocence
These are characters from the Asobo Studio game "A Plague Tale: Innocence." I do not own and did not invent these characters. This takes place several years after the events of the game, all participating characters are over the age of 18.
In Flight
It had been over a year and a half since Amicia's family fled what was left of home. When they moved faster, they found the wounds of the plague's northern path still too fresh, doors and windows still shuttered. Shuttered homes meant exposure to those in the Inquisition still hunting them. So, a spring passed, and then a summer, a fall. Amicia's mother, Béatrice, made ends meet offering healing and elixirs in market towns in exchange for food and shelter. Lucas, her friend and alchemical companion since the plague, assisted where he could, complain as he may about the lack of any good laboratory. Amicia could hunt and forage, sometimes even taking Hugo out with her to practice with her sling.
It carried like this for day after endless day, traveling impossibly slowly, carefully. Staying in each village or manor home for as long as a week while ensuring the next step of their journey had no English or plague or inquisition. Amicia's brother Hugo, with his uncanny Prima Macula, would be enough to ward off the plague, but not suspicious and traumatized peasants looking for a scapegoat.
It had been two interminable winters before the gates of Paris lay before their party, their wagon long-ago beginning to fall to pieces. Amicia was handy enough to keep the wheels on, but she missed Rodric, he would have made the repairs with a hand tied behind his back and left it better than before.
She missed him for many reasons, he was kind and... strong. For reasons she couldn't put words to, she liked to daydream about his hands, rough and worn, but delicate and dexterous from long days at the forge. He and Arthur, whom she had spent many nights back at the Château d'Ombrage secretly fancying from a straw bed away, both slain violently in front of her eyes. It made her never want to love again. Not that she had time or privacy on the road.
Her mother was a bold woman. An alchemist, a writer, who cared little of what people thought and less of what they loathed. She would sometimes disappear for nights at the manor houses where the convoy stayed, showing up in the morning as well-composed as ever, back straight. Amicia got the finest beds and meals -- even wines! -- in those estates. Hugo hated it in the beginning, but by his seventh year began to hardly notice as he asserted his childhood independence. Boys his age and station, in better circumstances, would be beginning to train as knights, after all.
Amicia of course suspected what her mother might be doing, keeping the men company and perhaps laying with them to stay warm, but she had never known much of what happened when men and women were alone. She and her mother never had the privacy away from Lucas and Hugo and Lady Béatrice never made such things a priority. She'd been a stranger to Amicia from Hugo's birth until their flight from Aquitaine.
Paris was a stunning, impressive, sprawling, mausoleum. The Great Evil had left only so recently that most doors still carried a white X marking them as touched. Mass graves lay uncovered, layering the normal city stenches with a sweet icing of death. Amicia was no stranger to it. Béatrice led them nevertheless in as stately a column as possible to the Palais de la Cité. Her late husband Robert de Rune had fought with King Philip, pledged his fealty to him. It was in the King's hands the fallen house of de Rune placed their last hopes.
"Wait here," Béatrice commanded her daughter, and Amicia gathered Lucas and Hugo to await the matriarch's return. Only her daughter could have noticed the distress on Béatrice's stony face when she returned.
"King Philip has been dead for a year, King John reigns now. His wife was claimed by the Bite, he now lives in the Château de Sainte-Gemme." She went to Hugo and spoke to him in soft tones as Lucas stared. Amicia turned around and started back the way they'd come.
The King
King John assessed the family suspiciously. A noble family claiming to know his father had shown up to his castle, in the aftermath of a devastating plague and amid war, seeking a place in his court. With ongoing crises devastating every corner of his fractured kingdom, he had little time or patience. But Béatrice carried herself like a noblewoman, could read and write, and spoke Latin, and so he allowed her a temporary stay in the chateau while she sought references to vouch for her.
"And is that your daughter, Amicia de Rune?"
"She is, your highness."
Amicia looked up when she heard her name before catching herself and bowing her head again.
"She's a pretty one, if a bit rough. It would help to find her a betrothal."
Amicia was a "pretty one." Years of travel after a childhood spent hunting with her sling and horseback riding with her father and a trim but never destitute diet had left her slender and toned. Her hair was expertly braided with pink ribbon. Her face, despite a few scars, beautiful like her mother's, with softer eyes and expressive lips.
"Indeed, your majesty. I thank your majesty for your sage advice, and I will take that under consideration."
Amicia's breath caught in her chest. It had been so long on the run the thought of noble betrothal had long escaped her. She had been a girl learning to read the great romances when she had last fantasized about knights in shining armor. She couldn't focus on the rest of the brief conversation before she was brusquely whisked away by her mother from the court, deeply curtsying between every step.
The guards showed the de Rune retinue to their guest chambers, and entire spire of the chateau! It was the most space Amicia had had since the Château d'Ombrage two years ago. She even had her own chambers! She threw herself onto the four-post bed and cried tears of relief, forgetting for a moment even the words of the King.
