shindig

[come_midnight]

Iobel is barely related to the Countess. The Countess is her great-aunt, and there are several layers of not-very-close family in there: the Countess never much liked her sister, said sister engendered little fondness in her only daughter, and said daughter - well, Iobel liked her just fine, which only served to cement the distance between her and the Countess. Iobel supposes she is technically in line for the title, but only if a rather intimidating number of cousins from that more prolific branch of the family all succumb to mortality first.

So Iobel lives in a little flat above a little store and under the old landlord and his wife, and she cohabits with her cat, and she sells hexes and custom spellcharts and consults on other people's spells in progress. It's a decent living even though she buys nice, quality things to lay the hexes on, and it's fun, and she has lots of spare time for personal research and reading since she taught the cat to operate the cash drawer and speak the few Marlese words necessary to tell customers "thank you" and "my spellbinder will be back in an hour" and convinced him to actually use those words instead of his choicer acquisitions.

But she is still noticeably related to the Countess, and when the Countess holds a big shindig, when she wants to fill up that manor house and all the gardens with eight hundred people, then Iobel gets an invitation.

So she goes, because why not, it's a holiday party and the shop's getting no business on the Equinox Revel anyway. She brings Cricket the cat along and takes the ferry up the canal to the estate and is offered a little guest room in the back wing and subtly insulted into borrowing one of her great-aunt's old dresses for the duration of the party. And then she loiters, cat at her heels making rude private-language comments about everyone they see, and she eats the hors d'oeuvres and lets some cousin teach her a simple dance because she finally managed a spell to cure her clumsiness the other month and this is as good an opportunity as any.

Comments

[come_midnight]

"What, me in particular moving to Lathalind?"

[aestrix]

"Well, not you in particular, but them doing worse than the late queen, certainly."

[come_midnight]

"I wish you luck in forestalling the eventuality."

[aestrix]

"Thank you. If you'd like to help, I'm trying to find possible queen candidates."

[come_midnight]

"I haven't met either prince," she points out.

[aestrix]

"To be entirely fair," says Natariem wryly, "I am not necessarily saying you. Unless you'd think you'd make a good queen?"

[come_midnight]

"Nobody else is springing to mind. I like to think I'd make a good queen, all else being equal, but it isn't, is it, there's a wedding involved."

[aestrix]

"Yes, annoyingly messy business, that. What would you do with it, if someone just handed you queenhood?"

[come_midnight]

"I'd need more details than I have from my vantage point as the proprietor of a magic shop -"

Cricket says something.

"- who is usually not personally staffing the till, yes, thank you, Cricket - about what needs doing, first. But the canals are disgustingly full of trash and there are plenty of unemployed people capable of manual labor; those seem like problems that could benefit from encountering each other. The state of general education is a disaster; if my mother weren't a schoolteacher I would have had a hard time even getting into a proper library to self-teach once I got past the age where her job qualified me for a slot at the school itself. I did okay, but plenty of people don't. The legal status of familiars is too vague, it's based entirely around trusting spellbinders not to want to do anything bad to their familiars once we've bound them, but even if that works ninety percent of the time there's always the possibility of the relationship deteriorating or never having been very good to begin with; there's plenty of ways to mistreat a dependent animal that don't risk killing it and unmaking the spellbinder. And as near as I can tell, tropical fruit is expensive because the queen once upon a time took a dislike to the ambassador from Ethayr, not for any sound economical reason, so I'd want to look into the underlying tariffs. I'd go ahead and make heir adoption legal, too, as previously mentioned. That sort of thing."

[aestrix]

He tilts his head.

"Hm. Okay, you would probably make a good queen. I recommend making a trip to the palace and seeing if you can meet them, and if they suit you..." He shrugs. "We get a decent queen."

[come_midnight]

"Just show up uninvited, you mean," says Iobel skeptically.

[aestrix]

"Make an excuse that you need to visit the fountain for your familiar, then mention you are nobility and would like to meet them. Or I could send an announcement for you, if that's too troublesome."

[come_midnight]

"I'm not, really, nobility," says Iobel. "And Cricket's generally very healthy and looks it. And it's a slim chance I'd suit either - I don't want to marry the overwhelming majority of people - or that if I did I could find out on the short meeting that kind of excuse might yield."

[aestrix]

"It's worth an effort, at least."

[come_midnight]

"It's a very slim chance. And they'd have to like me too, wouldn't they?"

[aestrix]

"Political marriages are a thing that do occur," points out Natariem.

[come_midnight]

"I'd rather not have one, though. I can accomplish a lot of things that are worth accomplishing without marrying a prince who might or might not like me via elaborate subterfuge."

[aestrix]

"I suppose it's not for everyone." He does file her candidacy for queenhood away for later, though. No drive to do it herself, would make good queen, might need to be shoved into political marriagehood.

His raven returns, says something to him in its language, and then he says, "I'm afraid I must go. Someone needs me, over there - it was a pleasure to meet you, my dear."

[come_midnight]

"Likewise, I'm sure."

And that is the end of that, is it not?

[aestrix]

Apparently so!