The tailor would like to see you for final measurements and adjustments. I have left strict instructions that whatever appointment best suits your schedule is to be accommodated.
For your comfort, I need not be present.
—Vsp.
Harri discovers the note on her desk — expensive dark ink on heavy, smooth paper, immaculate copperplate — folded once and tucked half beneath the diary she uses to keep track of her work meetings and deadlines. She can't help but compare it to terse and very occasional ones penned by Cosimisa: same ink and paper, presumably the same kind of high-quality fountain pen, but in a sprawling, illegible spider-stagger.
Cos also invariably misted her missives thoroughly with her personalised perfumier's blend, End-lily over ambery base notes; Vespidine's carries no scent but the paper and ink themselves.
Harri feels deeply foolish for holding it to her nose at all.
She does her best to work until lunchtime, then marches across to the wing containing the mayoral staff. Vespidine korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater is not, unlike Harri, someone to be tucked away in a labyrinthine cubbyhole; Harri is not a frequent visitor to this side of the building, but it's not difficult to find Vespidine's office. She knocks sharply and doesn't wait to be called.
"Harika," Vespidine says, eyes wide and dark, pen swaying in startlement over her paperwork, and Harri helps herself to the chair on the near side of the desk, crosses her legs, and extracts her packet of sandwiches from her bag.
"I don't have the luxury of a long enough lunch break to leave the building," she says, hard and bright, takes a neat bite of sandwich, and watches Vespidine, chewing, as the elf slowly caps her pen and puts it down, places her palms flat on the desk, and sits back in her chair.
"I thought," the elf says guardedly, "that your feelings about further contact were abundantly clear."
Harri snorts. "No," she says. "You didn't like feeling scolded, and you liked even less that it felt justified, so you found a way to avoid it that you could square away as being for my benefit."
Vespidine's lips part as if she's about to exclaim something, then catches herself and clamps them shut, spots of colour on her cheeks.
"You like to think you're entirely different to Cos," Harri says, and takes another neat bite.
Vespidine inhales, deep and slow.
"What is it you'd like, Harika?" she says, carefully polite.
"I'd like to know what to expect from you," Harri says.
"We'll be making a public appearance together." Some of the tension in Vespidine's shoulders begins to ease. "I don't expect anything untoward; to hold your elbow, perhaps, or put a hand on the small of your back—"
"You don't have the power within your family to say no to this, for yourself or for me," Harri says. "What should I expect from you, the next time they order you to parade me somehow for your family's benefit?"
She chews another bite, holding Vespidine's eyes as the elf sits very, very still.
"I should hope it won't come to that—" Vespidine begins eventually, in a careful tone.
"You are such a liar, Vespidine," Harri says, tone still hard, but much less bright. "You can't even look at me and say, Yes, Harri, I'm afraid that's exactly how it is."
"Harri—"
"I've spent the past six years being used," Harri says. "As no more than an object, to be pushed around in the space between the two of you, for her to take play-swipes at you through me like a cat." She reaches into her handbag, pulls out Vespidine's note, and pitches it contemptuously onto the elf's desk. "Just more of the same, Vespidine. You'll never treat me with respect; you'll never treat me as a person."
"Harri—"
"I know what to expect of you, korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater," Harri says. "But thank you for confirming whether I can expect your honesty, and exactly how much to think of your professed interest in me. I'm afraid my lunch break is over."
She cries at the fitting appointment. Not over the dress, cream-and-emerald ruffles; nor over the matching shoes. (Not even the still-stinging memory of a function Cosimisa had dragged her to, and the anonymous sneer, deliberately just-loud-enough for her to overhear: "I say, Bunny, do you know how to recognise a mistress? Expensive dress; cheap shoes!" It can be taken for granted that her own footwear had not been an oversight by Cos.)
No, the accessorising choker, unsubtle proclamation of ownership around her throat, is what's finally too much. The dressmaker, ancient, elven, no doubt the kind of longtime family friend who'll report Harri's every breath back, pats her arm in ungentle sympathy.
Anything less than an absolute statement that Harri's leash now ends in the grip of a new fist, one Cosimisa doesn't dare gainsay, will leave open the door for Cos to wriggle through: only quashing the possibility of a scene on the day, not the day after, or week, or month.
Better to get the tears out of the way now, without undercutting the message.
