"Come come!" the dressmaker calls sharply, and Vespidine obediently turns from an earnest discussion about neckties with one of the junior tailors, over a tray of fabric swatches; and chokes.
Harri does not have the education to read elven fashion in the way she can a text, but she is certain she has exacty what she asked for. Perhaps in excess. The dress is modest; ankle length, high at the neck, squarish and severe in the shoulder. In colour, a mild grey; in itself, an inoffensive canvas — so long as she remains perfectly still.
In motion, the bodice and sleeves reveal themselves: an intricate work of interlocking slashes, and a lining of terrorising red, heart's-blood vivid. The slightest movement proclaims her a battlefield's worth of wounds; or, perhaps, subject of the thousand vampiric mouths of gossip.
"Harika," Vespidine says, quailing, "is it altogether too late to ask you if you're sure about — that dress?"
Harri looks her in the eye.
"Six years sure," she says steadily.
Vespidine inhales, holds it a long moment, and bows her head in acknowledgement. "You have me," she promises, and holds out her hands for Harri to take the few steps to her and take them. Drawing her in, Vespidine kisses her forehead, the corners of her eyes, her cheeks, each corner of her mouth, and finally, lightly, her lips. "Merciful skies smile on us," the elf adds under her breath.
They stop at the korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater mansion, first.
("The old lady is an artist," Vespidine says earnestly, "but I cannot abide this necktie through three hours of reprised wedding toasts from bores who only attended for a free meal. It's so terribly elven that they can't even go home without talking us all to death. She knows perfectly well I'll change it for a looser cravat, but she will insist....")
"I'll wait downstairs," Harri says, fidgeting.
"Oh, you needn't." Vespidine, foot on the stair, pauses to glance back at her, and Harri favours her with a dry and sceptical look.
"I should prefer not to be late today," she says.
Vespidine smiles like a particularly self-satisfied classical painting. "It takes hardly any time to tie a cravat," she coaxes.
"You should be back soon, then," Harri tells her, and slips primly away into the solarium.
As expected, it is not Vespidine's footsteps which approach first. Harri has had so many questions, asked so much of people; Vespidine's cousins, and through them, quiet and delicate introductions to their fellow Weststone residents, members of the korvu Snowflower kanru Tidesheart korvu by-Clayfield family, Cosimisa's new family.
Cosimisa's reputation is no secret to anyone. Harri need not explain it, nor feign an ounce of her rage that nothing has been done to stem it, to rein in Cosimisa's behaviour; has pleaded and bargained and harangued everyone she has access to, any reasonable chance of swaying to support her. It is, she's told them, time.
"Harika," says a voice behind her, and Harri, having steeled herself all day for the moment, turns, composed, to face the lady korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater, consort to the House; the princesses' mother, public wife to their father.
She fiercely resists the urge to curtsey.
"Some indecorosa are content to be the littler power behind the throne," the lady of the house says, gaze crawling over Harri with the pace and thoroughness and crawling feeling on her skin of ants, from the peak of her hair to the tips of her shoes, and back to her face. "I see you have chosen to be the littler power beside it, il generalina."
"Yes," Harri says, voice far steadier than she imagines herself capable of.
"A hard road," Vespidine's mother says, with a kind of careless condescension that burns Harri's throat; as if permitting six years of her younger daughter's mistreatment, turning her nose aside from it in distaste at no more than the vulgarity of its visibility, was nothing. "I do not care for surprises."
"You're not surprised," Harri says, and they look at one another.
The lady of the house issues a thin smile, as if it were orders to hang a peasant rebel. "No," she allows, and puts one hand into her pocket, gesturing imperiously with the other for Harri to step closer; and Harri, nerves jangling, throat tight, does as she's bid.
"I ordered this made as a birthday gift for Iridessa," the elf says. "You do not know her name; only that my husband had an indecorosa, before the End. Hold out your hand."
The pendant that she drops into Harri's palm is an exquisite disc of translucent glass; a mosaic assembled from pinprick flecks of colour, fired into a seamless whole, the pre-End arms of the House in perfect miniature, held in a setting and hung from a hair-fine chain of pale gold.
"The End came before her birthday," Vespidine's mother says, without detectable emotion. "It is a blessing to expand the family. Wear your allies well."
Harri stares at it, cold in her hand. "Your husband—" she starts.
"Vespidine has always been his favourite." A pause. "She's very happy."
"I wonder which of them is yours," Harri says softly, without quite meaning to.
"A lady of the house admits no preference." Harri looks up into expressionless, politic chill. "Ah, here she is; Vespidine, please help Harika to fasten that."
"Si, Mamma," Vespidine says from the doorway, eyes wide and darting between them; she warily rounds her mother and takes the pendant from Harri's hand, breath catching, and settles it with infinite care around her neck.
Harri's eyes close, involuntarily, at the delicate brush of Vespidine's hands against her; when she opens them, the elder elf is gone from the room.
She breathes.
"Let's not be late," she says.
Harri sits at Vespidine's side through the many speeches and toasts, upright and alert, a hawk on the hand, awash in echoes of her abjectness at the wedding itself. She toys with a wineglass; watches everything with hooded eyes; listens as, one by one, small turns of phrase in various speeches quietly set out the faint outline of the things she had begged and bullied for, each one falling like the quiet clack of a toppling domino barging its neighbour.
The air is heavy. Everyone knows something is coming; they see her, and they know — or know of — Cos.
Vespidine's cousin says brightly that she's taking the liberty — "Saving the trouble of gathering half so many of you myself!—" of making the announcement that she's stepping down from her role of overall comptroller for the family business interests on the Weststone; "after many profitable years; to pursue...more personal interests," and Harri feels dominos tumbling, encircling—
Cosimisa's new husband rises, glass in hand. Toasts to the joint future; to his new wife; to their great forthcoming changes—
Something flares in Cosimisa's expression, as she too catches the rhythmic ticking of an unwinding design.
The princesses' father. Harri averts her eyes, schools her face into iron neutrality.
Miscegenating subelven invert, she hears, and then, in his present moment and genial tone, "Her new role, in which she upholds the family's expectations—" and the word expectations strikes the room like thunder, despite being lent no emphasis.
It strikes Cosimisa, who has never been expected before to be anything other than she is, no matter how dissipated, no matter how disappointing.
Harri hears the clicking of her own machinations, and wonders, then: how much of it could have been stopped, her elven yet youthful allies immovably thwarted by even a single elder's No. How much of it has been permitted. How much unconventional expectation can be heaped on the younger daughter by opportunistic parents, under the misdirectional blame of Harri did it.
She is relatively certain which daughter is their mother's favourite.
Cosimisa's eyes light on her, war-kirtled; the elf pales, trembles, with contained rage. As soon as the speeches are over, she excuses herself from her husband's side — at which she'll shortly be leaving the Northstone, out from the perpetual purgatorial freedom of her lack of role, and lack of consequences, for the Weststone and her in-laws' presumably lesser latitude, a job and the hanging threat of expectation.
Harri digs fingers into Vespidine's tense thigh to keep her in her chair as Cos storms across the room from the seating for the departing groom's side of the wedding — unread clues in every word and pause and arrangement of the event.
"Harri, she's going to—"
"No." Harri says it with perfect confidence. "She thinks so, too, but she's not going to do anything;" and so she doesn't, transfixed on arrival by the thumbnail-sized circle of bright glass at Harri's throat. Symbol. Safe conduct. Seat at the family table.
Cosimisa grips the back of a chair, eyes wild and knuckles white, and stares at Harri; and Harri stares back.
"One day," Harri says, sounding terribly calm to herself — dying inside — "you'll thank me."
It breaks whatever stupefying state Cos is locked in. "One day I'll spit in your ashes," she hisses, turns as if to seek allies along the table, checks herself, turns the other way; parents, cousins, Vespidine—
"Traditrici!" she hisses, flinging her hands up. "I will go and sit with my husband!—" and storms away in the opposite direction, scorned and incandescent.
Vespidine plucks Harri's wineglass from her fingers and drains it in one. "Mamma, Papa," she says, dry and final, "do excuse me; I'm taking my woman home."
"It's been delightful," Harri watches herself say regally to Vespidine's openly cackling cousin, from the end of a long, echoing tunnel. "Do write to me about your personal ventures—"
"Please no more scheming today!" Vespidine pleads, and hustles her home.
