"Please bring the car around and ensure Harika enters her building safely," Vespidine says crisply at the end of the garden party, in no particular direction, for the attention of the family's staff. She has spent the entirety of the event mingling, an attentive yet remote host; somehow making herself too busy to spare Harri a single glance, but always too aware of her to be caught up to. She still doesn't look at Harri now, and disappears back toward her study while people scurry to do as they're told.
Harika clenches her fists and considers, very hard, following the elf; but she has been unmistakeably dismissed, and she can taste fear on the back of her tongue, at everything she's already said, at what the consequences might ultimately be.
She complies.
"When's your birthday, Harri?" Sharden chirps over a deskbound lunch, perched next to Harri's blotter with the day's newspaper open in front of her.
"Why?" Harri says, bluntly suspicious, and Sharden gleefully folds the newspaper into a tractable square in order to wave Gadabout's column under her nose.
"Ugh," Harri says emphatically. "Death holds little sting for the honourable R—————, to judge by his intimate tête-à-tête with a certain débutante amidst the Ostermann's luncheon tables, still in his vidual duds!—"
"Not that bit," Sharden says, rolling her eyes.
"Am I looking at pigeon-racing times?" Harri snaps.
"...Elven heiress spotted in Calverston & Sons; sources whisper to Gadabout that she may be gift shopping for her particular friend's nativity celebration—"
"I hate birthday parties," Harri says bitterly, and Sharden drums her heels on Harri's desk.
"When is it?" she demands hungrily.
"Winter," Harri lies, refusing to look up into her smugly disbelieving grin.
Harri is sleeping fitfully, amidst another night of fretting about Vespidine and the elf's obvious avoidance of her; about consequences. Vespidine can't maintain the public appearance of a second-class auxiliary family unit on spurious gift-shopping trips alone, not for any length of time; and gift-shopping trips imply gift-giving occasions. Ones that might be expected to grant public glimpses of Vespidine measuring out the carefully lavish material rewards of the indecorosa.
Harri was in no way lying; she hates making an occasion of her birthday. She hates receiving gifts. She hates the cloying sense of bribery, of being paid off with fleeting excess to disregard habituated emotional unavailability, she hates the mandatory junior thespian façade of joy.
She hates, now, that it trained her so well for this situation she's fallen into.
She's not sure what wakes her; the rumble — not loud, but omnipresent; the tremble in the building's very fabric; or the subsequent sounds of rushing water. Exhaustion-fogged but alarmed, she opens the door, one of several faces peering out; and wakes rapidly at the oncoming, gathering swell along the corridor, now a nudgingly advancing meniscus, now toe-deep, hinting already at wet ankles to come, wet knees—
"Out," she says sharply, "we all need to get out of the building, the aqueduct is leaking onto the roof—" and bolts around her own room in her nightgown, throwing a few things into a bag. Wrenching open the wardrobe, she freezes.
Her entire life amounts to a sparse roomful of careworn essentials, destined one day for an indifferent landlord to dump on a rag-and-bone cart while her lonely mortal remains, without even a forsaken cat to chew on her cooled and decaying face, are grudgingly dispatched to a pauper's end. Nothing worth risking a second's hesitation over, a moment's inconvenience that might see her trapped in a flooding deathtrap. But the dress, the stupid useless beautiful dress. She can't leave it to be destroyed by water; she can't.
She bundles it hastily to her chest, awkwardly snatches up her bag, and — already — splashes into the corridor, into a confused, unhappy flow of neighbours. "Knock on doors," she says breathlessly, arms full; she only realises then that she's crying. "If it's not open, knock, get everyone up, get everyone out—"
She barely remembers getting out of the building, only sitting on the cold front step of a nearby shop, shivering in the clammy water-misted air, watching a dozen roof-shattering waterfalls pour into surrounding streets and buildings, filthy torrents surging through the gutters, carrying small pieces of washed-out lives into the street drains. And then, exhausted and overwhelmed, she only drops her face into the wet, filth-smeared bundle of finery in her arms and lets herself uncontrollably sob.
She has no idea how much later it is that a firm hand grips her shoulder.
"Harri?"
Knowing who's found her, she can only curl tighter, crying afresh. Vespidine's other hand, hesitant, touches her forehead, runs through wet hair, gently urges her to lift her face.
She shakes her head, instead.
The elf says something unintelligibly gutteral. Her hands leave for a second, and then, instead, one arm wraps around behind Harri's shoulders, and the other scoops unstoppably beneath her knees. Vespidine lifts her without apparent effort; Harri claws a flailing hand into the front of her shirt. Head falling back in surprise, she glimpses water-slicked hair, grimly compressed lips, and eyes trained intensely on her face under the sickly gleam of those few streetlights that haven't drowned, fizzled, or already died of neglect in years past.
The elf strides effortlessly with Harri in her arms.
"The door," she says, over Harri's head; and then she's ducking and carefully manoeuvering them into the back of Vespidine's motor-car. Someone closes the door after them, then climbs behind the wheel. "Home," Vespidine says tersely to them, and clutches Harri closer. "There's an engineering team at the reservoir, closing the sluices now," she says, into Harri's hair. "I'm sorry I couldn't find you sooner."
Harri, shivering and bewildered, simply closes her eyes.
There is something of a blur; Vespidine carrying her into the mansion from the car, Vespidine tousling her hair with a warm towel, Vespidine running a steaming, foaming bath. Vespidine sitting alongside the tub on a dragged-in chair, eyes politely averted, clutching Harri's hand as though she might otherwise dissolve and run down the plughole. Carrying Harri again, towel-swaddled, and placing her carefully on a soft bed.
Tucked into the bed, in warm and too-large pajamas; Vespidine hovers at the bedside, hesitant.
"Harri," she says, in a brittle voice, "my father — had an indecorosa, and we had a brother by her, before the End. I don't remember them very well; Cos, not at all. We had family dinners with them, all together. There's a wall in the cellars of this house, inscribed in stone with names, some dozen thousand names, theirs among them; korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwaters, korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmores, korvu by-Tenstones. Even a few older still. There are names, there, of elven indecorosa who were part of the family for a thousand years or more, all lost in the End."
She touches Harri's arm where it rests beneath the blankets, fleetingly, grimacing at herself.
"The distinction isn't — real and pretend. It isn't; it's public and private. The public marriage is arranged, political. It's a showcase, no matter how sincerely felt. I won't lie; there are many rules of etiquette around how and when the private family can be acknowledged, and many are — unkind, in effect and in intent and original context. But it's not pretend, and you, particularly — I don't think you could ever be a pretend anything, Harika."
"I'm tired," Harri croaks, because she is; warm and floating within a cloud of bedclothes, tugged at by the kind of sleep that's total and welcoming and irresistable.
"Yes," Vespidine says, "of course," and smooths Harri's hair, sad-eyed. "I'm sorry." She retreats on quiet feet, and turns out the light.
