"Vespidine?" Harri calls.
Her apartment smells of spice and wine. Yesterday, the family celebrated the new year, all together at the mansion atop the Hill; tonight, the two of them will host just a handful of friends.
(Yesterday, Cosimisa stalked the party, wineglass in hand. The cowed secretary in her wake staggered along under the humming weight of a wireless telegraphy satchel, dutifully murmuring the contents of incoming missives and keying her barked replies.
(Leaning on a doorway, late in the evening, Cos gave Harri a comfortably narrow-eyed look. "This is not the year I thank you," the elf said.
("This is not the year I'm ashes," Harri returned regally, and Cos almost-smiled, nodded sharply, and went back to being a strident, striding terror.)
Vespidine appears in the sitting-room doorway, hands covered in flour, a smudge dusting her cheek. "Sì, battito del mio cuore?" she says, sounding just a little stressed.
Harri looks over her pince-nez at the elf, and gives her the slow smile that's just for her, just because. "I'm—" she indicates the fresh-printed chapbook of poetry in her lap with the mechanical pencil in her hand; down the side of the page, she is attempting translation. "I don't know this word; is it some kind of poetic archaism?"
"Where?" Vespidine pads over, peers over her shoulder. "Is that Myriana's boy's work?"
"Sì." Harri puts the point of her pencil beneath a word.
"Ah, teenage poetry," Vespidine murmurs. "Skies, he's a wordy little fellow, isn't he? I wonder what Myr makes of his subject matter. Meditations on family is so traditional—"
Vespidine's cousin, freed from comptrollership of the family's Weststone business, dived immediately into funding a commune for the most radical art movement she could gleefully locate; her parents bewailed to Cosimisa's that they lacked the same recourse they'd taken to restrain their wayward own. The following new year's celebration saw her arrive at the family's lavish public party with five black-clad artists in tow, men and women, elf and human; one wild-eyed and ferally thin elf of uncertain lignaggio noticeably pregnant. She declared them to be radically equal anarchists rejecting the hierarchy of intimate relation, and therefore collectively her plus-one, and levelly threatened to publicly argue the point on the doorstep until allowed in.
The specifics of Myriana's gaggle of consorts has changed over time, continuously; but the child (and his mother, still stubbornly known only as Knife, of no family name) remains, and he is now attending university, and producing the densely allusive poetry for which elves are notorious.
"Oh," Vespidine says, amused and warm. "No, amatissima, that's not ancient; he's writing about family. It's finicky pedantry; a classical-mode phonetic elvenisation. See? Ah-rì."
"What does that...."
Vespidine hides her smile at Harri's halt in her indecorosa's hair. "He's writing about family, Harri," she emphasises, as Harri presses a hand to her chest.
"Well," Harri croaks, staring at this casual immortalisation. "You realise this means I have to move to the Weststone and marry this budding artist, of course."
"Oh, really? Can't I persuade you otherwise?" The elf nuzzles behind Harri's ear. "If he takes after Myr's convictions about relationship equality, you'll have to work much harder in bed than you're accustomed—"
Harri scoffs and shoves playfully at her. "Somebody has to wear you out," she declares.
"You civic-minded martyr." Vespidine laughs into her neck, trailing off into a low hum, and nips at her a little.
"Generale mia," Harri breathes, and stretches in her chair; turns her head to demand kisses on her mouth; quirks a brow.
"What?" vespidine murmurs.
"You're going to burn everything you're cooking," Harri tells her sweetly, and Vespidine yelps and bolts for the kitchen.
