"Oh, you're here," Cosimisa says, languid and poisonous, as Harri steps into the gardens of the korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater mansion.
"So I am," Harri says. So she is, irregularly but somewhat often, these days; to be seen keeping Vespidine korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater company. Here, around town, and at select social events; and today is both here and social event. Beneath the cloudless sky, a select and refined guest list enjoys the hospitality of a quiet garden party.
"She's still shut in her study upstairs," Cosimisa says, and tips back a flute of sparkling wine rather unhealthily fast. "Go and drag her away from whatever it is—"
"Aqueduct renovation," Harri says.
The city's infrastructure was assembled rapidly, before any complete idea of the long-term practicalities of the End had solidified. The rainwater reservoir, and the aqueduct which feeds the lower city, would not perhaps be anyone's choice from a position of later knowledge; the use of land too great, when balanced against the inexhaustible plenty of raw magic from the friction of reality's torn edge against the void intended to devour it. Conjured potable water is skilled but undemanding work; simple water is easy, but too pure for good health. Careful mineralisation is key.
Like all the niche trades of the End, the work has become a fiercely protected political pothole on the road to wider works. The aqueduct is slowly crumbling, and requires structural repair, before sections deteriorate to the point of collapse onto the city blocks below. Being lower in the city, and thus poorer, the affected residents have limited capacity to directly demand it; successive administrations have taken the usual approach of requiring the problem to occur to be considered real enough to spend money on. And any fluctuations in the water supply require redistribution of responsibility from the reservoir to conjured fluid, which loops back around to industrial negotiation with two blocs of specialist water-worker, neither of which wishes to cede any temporary inch or penny to the other.
Harri's office is involved only to their usual extent, of furnishing statistics, analysis, and impact studies. Vespidine, working as she does on the side of politics not merely impacting upon the political, but principally involving politicians, has been more affected; toiling long hours and painstaking shuttling between professional antagonists, triangulating upon compromise.
Acrimony internal to City Hall, generated by the purge of certain corrupt interests, manifests as a constant friction on everything. Document procurements take as long to fulfil as anyone dares; people are precisely as forthcoming and helpful to one another as their job specifies.
"This," Cosimisa says, flinging the glass away into the bushes before stalking off to snatch a full one from a passing tray, "is part of her family duties. If she can't take her eyes off her fucking paperwork, then distract her." A flash of tooth, beneath a curled lip. "You know what you're for, Harri."
Hot shame is an excruciatingly familiar feeling, intimately paired with Cos herself. But then, Cos has inextricably tangled shame with Harri's sense of her own desirability, her own desire; and Harri may have only the barest handhold to cling to now, but it's more than she ever had before.
She wets her lip, with a calculated sweep of her tongue.
"In her study?" she breathes. "I'll find her right now, and be sure to get right...down to what I'm for."
Cosimisa's eyes, as Harri deliberately turns away from her, are hotly murderous.
Harri taps on the doorframe of Vespidine's study, watches the oblivious elf frowning over strewn papers for a short while, and quietly closes the door between the two of them and the rest of the house.
She steps nimbly between elf and her rolltop desk, leaning back against the edge, paper crinkling behind her.
"Oh!" Vespidine says, eyes flicking to the carriage clock atop it, and catches her breath. "Oh."
"Cos is furious that she's having to present a respectable face in your absence," Harri says. "She sent me up to use my wiles to tear you from work."
"No wiles necessary," Vespidine says shortly. "A simple reminder—"
"I knocked, Vespidine," Harri says, and smiles crookedly. "Be honest; the moment I move, you'll lunge for the papers I'm sitting on, on the excuse that you simply need to leave them organised, and as soon as you set eyes on them it'll be just one more page, one more minute, one more report—"
"There's so much to do," Vespidine mutters.
"Vespidine," Harri says. "Do I need to get on my knees to break your concentration?" and the elder korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater sister shoves her chair back as though jolted with an electric shock, takes a breath as if she's going to shout in temper, and then visibly clamps down on her own behaviour.
The papers she has in hand, she taps into square with each other, a precise sheaf, before raising her eyes to Harri's.
"Cosimisa," she says precisely, "is trapped in a world where she had everything and nothing. She needs work for nothing, but she will never hold any real power. Everything she has, I have too, and I am also the heir. She chooses to give her empty pleasures the illusion of depth by causing them, wherever she can, to pain someone else." She leans forward, gripping the edge of the desk to either side of Harri's hips. "I am not Cosimisa, Harika," she says.
Harri swallows.
"She is a caged songbird, yelling her primacy over the entire territory of her tiny prison, and viciously winning her fights with her own reflection in a thimble-sized mirror. I," Vespidine says, "am a tactician, raised and trained to oversee the field of every struggle from the general's perspective, to command. To press my skills to victory on victory on victory, until all opposite me know only surrender and exhaustion and my utter dominion." The elf stands, slowly, not retracting her bracketing arms. Looms closer. "I would not have you on your knees, Harika," she says, low and sure. "I would have you on your back."
And then she takes a shuddering breath and steps back, hands dropping to her sides. Turns her face to the side.
"But I'd rather you never hate me, the way you do my sister," she says softly into the silence, while Harri can't breathe. "I don't know if you truly understand, Harri, why my parents put you in my orbit instead of being done with you. What the social function of the indecorosa is. Marriage is — a long state of affairs, for elves, and hard to cleanly unpick if there's any mistake. The indecorosa is — a practice family. Your removal from her reflects poorly on Cos; if it were possible, any more, arranged marriages have foundered on less. What kind of monster can't be trusted near their own paramour? And your assignment to me reflects poorly on me — what kind of incompetent can't discover their own? But you are—" and she makes the twitch of an abortive gesture of some kind, "family. Not on an equal footing, no, but of a kind, and very much real. In their own light, you are being reflected the loyalty you're due — that you've shown us."
Harri struggles to draw a breath of her own. "Your pardon if that doesn't make this chalice's poison burn less," she chokes out.
"I know!" Vespidine snaps. "Do you think — I am a general with a sword pushed into my hand, and then thrust into a children's sandbox crowded with unarmed tykes. Cosimisa's frustrations don't make her a fool; but her resentment of me? I am as useless a princeling as she is. I don't ask you to like this, Harri, I have never asked for that, but please listen to me when I say that you are not here for me to simply use. No matter how Cosimisa regards you."
"Do you mean to tell me," Harri whispers, "sincerely, that what I'm here for is for you to love?"
Vespidine hunches her shoulders, and says nothing.
Harri feels cold and slow and terrible, like a glacier. "Sooner give me Cosimisa's honest contempt, a thousand times over," she says deliberately. "Sooner bed me callously and discard me every morning. Sooner simply use me, than I be a pretend wife for a princeling to play dolls with in the hopes of sparking the revelation that other people are real, too."
Vespidine inhales sharply through her nose, and stands very still. "Consider me distracted from my work," she says finally, and strides toward the door.
Harri takes a steadying breath of her own and pushes off the desk, rubbing damp palms down her dress. "I'll accompany you around the garden—" she says.
"Sooner you don't," Vespidine says, viciously polite, and goes without her.
