The delight was clear on Cousin Flora's face when she opened the door to find him standing on the doorstep. "It's been so long!" she said.
"Months," he nodded, looking around curiously.
"This? Oh, it's just mine," she said quickly. "My fiancé isn't even in the same building. Propriety, you know."
Dalliance nodded dutifully as he was shown into her 'receiving' room, the same one the other apartment he'd been in recently had used as a living room. He saw a doorway the other one hadn't had, though—this was a nicer one, being lower down the building, then.
"I was wondering if I could bother you for some advice," he said.
"What are cousins for?" she said in a quick and willing response. "I am no doubt full to brimming with unplumbed depths of experience which I should be only too happy to put at your disposal, dear cousin."
"I think Dad's trying to kill me," Dalliance said.
She paused. "I thought you had been disowned."
"He's getting his buddies on the Wall to put me into the front lines."
"I see."
Dalliance suspected that she continued the tea ceremony out of pure habit. Cups and saucers went just so, the tea heating to a boil in an instant with the application of a charm on the kettle. She measured out leaves into two tin strainers, hinged so they could close, with a tiny clamshell spoon.
"No cloves for me, thank you."
"Oh, I knew that," she said. "Absolutely, Dalliance. That's really serious."
"I know."
"But you've not yet come to harm," she said.
"I . . . well . . . no, but it's because I can handle myself a little. I could have died several times."
"Manipulating the system seems likely to be in violation of some principle or other. Have you told those in authority?"
"I . . . no."
"Why not?"
"Nobody seemed to question it. I think it's within their authority to do!"
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"Then is it wrong . . . I'm sorry, of course it's wrong. Just so easy to entangle wrong with illegality."
She poured. His cup filled with streamers of gold, orange, and brown notes. He watched it steep.
"I knew, of course, that he was troubled. Mother spoke of his temper. But I didn't expect something like this once you were out. You made it. You're an academ now."
She hadn't thought he would, he remembered.
"I guess I'm mostly asking: is there any way to get him to stop? Would a family meeting do anything? Would Uncle Solidarity—your father—try to intervene?"
Ex-father, he didn't say. But they both knew.
Divorce was such a scandal.
"Would my . . . father . . . confront someone for making decisions they have the authority to make, which haven't produced any injurious outcomes as of yet? Dalliance . . . ."
"No, he wouldn't."
That had been the only lever Dalliance thought he had under the old man.
That and one other.
He sipped his tea. It was hot, potent, and bitter.
Fitting.
In the end, the decision to plant the letter was easy to make, and if Topaz struggled to approve, she had at least admitted that the cause was sufficient.
Dalliance had left well enough alone. Told no one about the affair, though it was obvious enough that there had been one. Whatever dysfunctional partnership remained between his parents, and his mother and his blood father, could all remain their own business and none of his.
But if he was going to get Dalliance killed?
There weren't that many options on the board, but he could depend upon his father avenging a public loss of face, and the wizard Pleasant had impressed him as dangerous.
Perhaps sufficiently dangerous?
Cadence Rather had duelled men for far, far lesser reasons.
He'd turned his head at what his wife did on the last Remembrance Day. But as Earnest had mentioned, knowing something, and knowing it in front of people, were two different things.
Killing Sir Worth's [Court Wizard] would be a mistake in and of itself, of course, if it came to that. Dalliance hoped not, not that he saw much difference between the two. Absent. Abusive.
He was still going to raise his sister by himself.
The Tolbotton town notice-board was for missing things, children, husbands, or desired things, such as lovers, employees, or employment. Dalliance had always found it to be an intriguing and entertaining read, if somewhat age-inappropriate at times.
Now, as he pinned Parsimony's note to his mother, dead center, he reflected wryly that his Da would finally find it diverting too.
Furtive glances, along with his [Prediction], had assured him he was unobserved: it was afternoon, to judge by the sun's brightness. At this hour, men would be in the fields, or, if idle, in the taverns. The scents of bacon and apple pie drifted from the pub, making his stomach rumble. Nothing to eat all day, too busy with the wall, and plotting. Nothing but tea.
Dalliance was growing used to eating street food when he was peckish, now. The long hours of hunger between scheduled meals were unnecessary, and so Dalliance hadn't subjected himself to them.
The sign looked quite a bit like Mister Big Cheese with a beer in hand. Good food, he thought he remembered hearing.
He had thaums to spare.
Dalliance entered the Pickled Egg.
crossover begins.
It's here.