Harika changes into one of her smarter outfits, splashes water on her face in her tiny bathroom, looks at the dark circles under her eyes, and takes the rail-trolley uptown to the Hill. It doesn't go up, of course; the kind of people taking public transport to the Hill are only the kind of aspirants and hangers-on who live at the foot. Nor are the people who live up there the kind who walk; she toils up the steep streets in isolation, sweat trickling itchily down her spine as she knocks at the entrance of the mansion of the family korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater. A whole mouthful with which to impress on people that they're a family with so much pedigree, the End of the World and its wiping-of-slates made barely a dent in their ancestral charisma.
They say that things are different in the other cities of the End, but on the Northstone's city-mountain, the elves' hereditary power is maintained as if the Apocalypse Beasts were merely an inconvenience.
One of the underbutlers answers the door and ushers her into the cool of the house. Six years is enough for a lunch appointment without anyone still insisting on leaving her standing inside the door until her presence has been announced to the family, as if they might send back word to turn her away; no number of years will erase the faint sneer with which the staff receive her. At the Hill's altitude, even an underbutler stands figuratively and literally above a simple public servant, let alone an off-duty one here as a lapdog.
Harri steps into the familiar solarium in which the family often take their lunches when at home, jacket slung over her arm; and her stomach drops. Seated at the table with a book and a forgotten bowl of fruit is the wrong sister; instead of Cosimisa's round, placidly angelic face and mist of pale hair, her sister Vespidine is giving withering scrutiny to some luckless text, as upright and uncurved as a load-bearing pillar, hair bronze-toned and blade-straight.
She looks up, and seems as startled as Harri. "Excuse me," she says, closing her book crisply. "I wasn't expecting — Cos is not here."
Ah.
Harri can see the design, now. She's been expecting a talk from some or other of the family, for weeks. They've tolerated — for some value of tolerance — Cosimisa to have a mistress for six years, to show her off at lesser events so long as she hides her when it's politic. But elven princesses (yes, even now, despite the End of the World and all its monarchies, the elves think of them as princesses and always will) are promised away in political marriage before their births, and Harika — Harika has been permitted to Cos. A grudging indulgence to an overlong period of childish high spirits, until it's time for the princess to become serious. A toy.
A delegation from the Weststone is arriving tonight, among them one Karmac korvu Snowflower kanru Tidesheart korvu by-Clayfield. A prince. One does not have to be terribly conversant in the coded giggling-behind-fans speech of the society pages to know who he is, and the nature of old promises from family to family that bring him here. Informing Harri over lunch today that she's now-embarrassingly scandalous and surplus to any further requirement is leaving things...late. But then, Cos gets bored of things at a moment's notice all the time, but hates relinquishing anything that someone else says she ought.
It's also very like Cos to weasel out of doing any dirty work herself, Harri thinks sickly; and all there is to do is get out of here as efficiently as can be made civil, under the circumstances.
"She asked me here for lunch," she says, sounding thin and resigned even in her own ears, and watches the other princess do exactly Harri's own calculus behind her eyes, and conclude that she's been left, after six fraught years, to sweep her sister's mess off the carpet.
Vespidine pales in otherwise consummately concealed fury, and Harri, for her own sake, decides to spare her.
"I read the newspapers as well as anyone, Miss Vespidine," she says. "korvu Snowflower kanru Tidesheart korvu by-Clayfield is promissori, and it's come due. The family need to keep appearances by picking off any fleas ahead of the marriage, and your sister's indecorosa...." she lets it trail off.
Vespidine is looking at her as if she's just walked in and spontaneously caught fire.
"How much elvish do you speak?" she says finally.
"I work at City Hall, Miss Vespidine. Enough to do my job."
"Cos has spent years telling us you don't speak a word—" Vespidine starts, and strangles the rest of the sentence in her throat.
Harri doesn't think, on balance, that she'd have been treated to any fewer of the old boy's colourful Old World synonyms for miscegenating subelven invert if they'd known; but it certainly fits Cosimisa's sense of humour to arrange for Harri to hear them all, everyone thinking she was oblivious and not just acutely aware of being Cos's downtown bit of rough, allowed on the furniture only on sufferance. She shrugs, one-shouldered.
"She has you delivered to me, today, unbeknowst to either of us," the elf says finally, choked, "for me to—"
"Finally show a little family embarrassment the door," Harri supplies.
"This," Vespidine says, "is intolerably insulting to both of us." She pushes her chair back sharply.
"I knew what it was," Harri says, wishing she could sound tough and steady. Bloodied, maybe, but unbowed. "It's not as if you ever have to look me in the eye across the dinner table again, Miss Vespidine."
"Don't you have the slightest self-respect when it comes to my fucking sister," Vespidine says with unprecedented venom, and Harri balls her fists and shoves them in her pockets.
"Six years of coming to this house and being treated as the help too stupid to know to stay below stairs," she says, and steady comes easier mixed with sour. "Apparently not, ma'am," and Vespidine stares at her and stares at her with the jewel-like eyes of an elf that can buy and sell a thousand of Harri over breakfast; and then, abruptly, her mouth crumples.
"That was—" she says, and falters. "In my head, it sounded more critical of my sister than of you."
"Never been my forte," Harri says, shakes out her jacket, and starts to shrug into it. "—So rest assured that I won't wash up into the gossip columns, speaking ill."
Vespidine snaps out of whatever temporary disconcertion she'd fallen into, back to utter hauteur and self-possession. "It would never have crossed my mind," she says dismissively. "You wouldn't."
"I wouldn't?" Harri says, eyes narrowed, feeling obscurely moved to fight any and all such final pronouncements the elf might make on her, no matter how low she has to profess her morals to do so, and Vespidine scoffs at her, steps forward, and takes hold of her wrist.
"You've had the worst of this house from everyone in it," she says. "Worse than I'd thought, and I thought — well, it hardly matters, when I let it happen anyway, does it? I'm going up to my study and mixing myself a drink, lunchtime be damned, and if you're not dead set on leaving immediately — merciful skies know you're entitled — I'd like to show you hospitality enough to offer you one, too."
"One last drink before your folks have the carpets cleaned and the silverware counted," Harri says, and laughs emptily. Her stomach's stewing hard enough that she's not sure she can stomach one. "...Fine."
She's been welcome in few enough of the rooms of the house; Vespidine's study is new to her. Books; a writing-desk; a comfortable chaise. The mansion has a library, but this is evidently Vespidine's own; smaller, more focused, and unlike the main collection, well-used. Vespidine works in the mayoral administration, some job with a dry and innocuous metasecretarial title, wherein elven fingers carefully, directly brake or spur on the gears of the machinery of power. Her books are half political theory, half poetry: a very elven split.
The elf mixes, without asking, two tumblers of something complex-flavoured and bittersweet over ice, crushed-leaf notes evaporating over a rich heart of mellified fruit. Just as well, Harri muses, cautiously sipping, that it's not a day she needs to return to work afterward. The study isn't intended for more than one person; Harri sits on the only chair, by the writing desk, and Vespidine sits, ramrod-backed, on the chaise. There are cushions on it, indented from long use; Harri can see that someone kicks their feet up and reclines, sinking into them. She can't make her brain picture it as Vespidine; can't picture the elf unbent enough.
Cos is soft, on the outside. Forever coldly amused on the inside, twitching Harri around like a madly scrambling, anxiously desperate-to-please puppy on a collar and leash when it amused her. Forgetting Harri existed whenever something else had her attention instead, for whatever days or weeks or months it took to say a word to her again, and the word was always, however it was phrased, heel.
And Harri had; and now she is surplus to requirement, and Cos wouldn't even say so herself, and Harri finds her eyes threatening to well.
She stiffens herself, and does her best to swallow her feelings along with the deceptive elven cocktail. Crying in front of Cos right now would be humiliation; in front of the coldly respectable sister, the upstanding one, the one so concerned with the family maintaining face that she's even worried about Harri letting herself look pathetic, in some me-reflected-in-you-reflected-in-me hall of mirrors way Harri can't wrap her mind around — she's not going to fucking do it. She blinks, several times, breathes through her nose.
"I can't find any way to say anything," Vespidine says suddenly, "that doesn't sound condescending. Or somehow worse than that."
Harri shrugs, one-shouldered. "I can't find much of anything at all," she says. "Thank you for the drink, Miss Vespidine."
"I can drive you downtown," Vespidine says, and Harri watches one of the elf's delicate pen-callused hands pick at the chaise's fabric, and suddenly thinks this is concern, that Vespidine is concerned because Harri has — been hurt. And Harri wants to laugh, but she doesn't, because it won't be a funny laugh, not at all, and it'll unstoppably ratchet her open until all the mess falls out.
"No thank you," she says. "The fresh air will do me good." She nods. That's good. A nod is professional. Comradely, at most.
"I can—" the elf says, then, quieter, "you don't want me to. No. Of course not."
They both look, more at the silent space in between them than at each other through it.
"I wish," Harri says, and stops herself, because she doesn't even really know what she wishes. "Never mind. Too late."
"Too late," Vespidine korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater says quietly, and walks Harri to the door of the elven mansion on the Hill, and clasps her hand, and looks at her with inexplicable concern, and then Harri walks away, down into the parts of the city where actual people live, and goes home.
