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rainbowfic2013-07-09 08:14 pm
dray) wrote in rainbowfic2013-07-09 08:14 pm
Iceberg #7, Silver #1
Name: dray
Story: Edilion
Colors: Iceberg #7 (Skiing), Silver #1 (Tarnish)
Supplies and Styles: Canvas, Stain (July 8th: "People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust." - E. B. White), Glitter (July 8th One Word Prompt: "Burn"); Portrait
Word Count: 5459
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some in-world cursing, some child-peer cruelty and fighting
Summary: Fara and Jael meet the Cupers and get in over their heads
Notes: Comments and critique are always welcome! I'm actively looking for suggestions on side-storybits to write: between other scenes, of certain characters not focused on here, anything that catches your attention that you'd like elaborated on. I know this one is hella long, but I wanted to challenge myself to a Portrait! Thanks for bearing with me if you decide to read. The next few will be short ones.
Fara didn't expect any place called a 'lodge' to be so huge! The building she thought had referred to her uncle's domain was merely one part of a sprawling tumble of buildings. The passageways built below ground were big and well-lit -- and more importantly, reassuringly warm during the middle of the winter.
Fara and her cousin, Jael, had been woken by a servant with a single light-striking spell when their morning summons came. The sun did not rise until much later at this time of the year, so when the older woman sparked a twinkling glow into the orb hanging between Fara and Jael's beds, it was the only light they had to dress by. Fara listened patiently as she dug through the large, dove-grey chest that had been brought to her room for the duration of their stay, finding just the right dress and fluffy pants as the servant explained the course of the day.
"You'll be wanting to set out your outdoor clothes," the old maid rasped, "but first you're to follow me to your grandparent's estate for breakfast. Everyone's been summoned to see you girls."
"Everyone?" Fara squeaked. She was half trapped in her dress, but she was glad for it at that moment. The prospect of meeting the entirety of her father's side of the family struck her as overwhelming. She hadn't even had anything to eat, yet!
"That'll be everyone," the servant agreed. "You'll want to hurry, too or you'll miss what's being served."
Jael made a raucaus noise and threw down a pair of tawny gloves. "There's food already?!"
"Oh yes, has been all morning!"
"What time is it?" Fara cast Jael an alarmed look.
"Long enough for little girls to be scampering out of their beds!" The servant held a perfectly stolid gaze over the two, impervious to their attempts to behold any teasing.
Fara finished wriggling into her dress, then hurriedly helped Jael with the ties at the back of hers. "We're ready!" She could feel her stomach rumbling already. "Please show us where to go!" Relatives be taken; Fara was hungry!
The servant doddered into the hallway, and Jael and Fara kept hot on her heels as she led them down the tall, mahogany-red painted hall of their sleeping quarters and down a flight of stairs, then another. When they passed Saum's dining room, the two girls tossed looks to one another curiously. "Where are we going?" Jael wanted to know. She had been dragging one hand on the wall as they bit at their proverbial champs, wanting to run ahead of the woman but knowing better than to try. There were paintings and trophies along the walls: stern and smiling faces of Cupers past, taxidermied creatures that Fara had never seen before, golden sculptures of exotic shapes. The gangly young girl was entranced.
"What's that?" The servant paused, and Fara shot Jael an accusatory look for holding them both up. Jael bit back a face of her own when the old woman faced her down. "You mean all this?" With a wave of her hand she encompassed the long, sloping tunnel hallway they'd begun to pass down through. "Oh, yes, you've never heard of these before, I expect. 'Sunny Edilion'." She cackled. "These go on all the way down to the beaches, link all the Cuper's homes together. Nobody wants to go outside late into winter, when they can help it. Not up the slippery slope!" She began down the hall again, and the girls hurried to follow. "Mister Saum oversees the warehouses for all the trade from Erevion, so of course he lives up the hill. Your grandparents, though," the servant cast a grin over her shoulder. "They manage the rest. I suppose you know all that, though, being lofty noble little girls."
"My uncle writes to me every year," Fara replied, feeling suddenly hesitant. This old woman sounded reserved in a way that Fara was familiar with: it was the resentment she often heard in the voice of her cousins -- the ones that expected her to butt in front of them in the line of inheritance. "But... this is all new. It's very exciting!"
"I'll expect it is," the old maid replied.
Fara and Jael cast a look to one another behind the woman's back, silently agreeing not to ask any more questions. At least the long path down the hill was full of curious displays of wealth and history that they could prod one another about and point to!
The hallway to the main dining room was only oversized because it was meant to accomodate two dozen people at a go, but it was so richly decorated that Fara couldn't help but continue to gawk around. Her Aunt Elera's hall back in Edilion was far larger, boasting a dance floor and a human-appropriate mezzanine, above which much larger Asandus-sized balconies overlooked any official proceedings, but everything at Aunt Elera's hall was gilt in silver and gold and faced with marble and slab. Where the Edilion property stood, resplendant and airy under layers of thick, crawling ivy, the Cuper Lodge felt warm and cramped. Fara caught the gaze of her parents, who were sitting at one side of a high, heavy table made of an unfamiliar black wood, but it was the glances of the rest of the Cupers that made her want to wipe her palms on the sides of her dress. She sought some kind of comfort in first Baar's eyes and then Colette's -- but if she felt somewhat relieved by her father's smile, her mother's concerned gaze dispelled Fara's courage like a popped bubble.
Taking Jael's hand, the young girl curtsied before the head of the table. In a high-backed chair with velvety soft arms, back and seat, an enormous man with weather-wrinkled copper skin, a long, black-dusted grey braid and a thin, meagerly-braided beard resided. He looked down on her with hard black eyes, and when Fara rose from her curtsy, he folded his fat hands over the girth of his belly. "Fara fa Edilion, Jael ru Edilion," he rumbled. "Good of you to finally rise from your slumber."
Fara would not allow herself to grimace! "Grandfather Cuper, it is an honour to finally meet you in person." She could hear her belly rumbling, but it seemed as though the old man had missed the missive, or else chose to ignore it. He held Fara's gaze for some time, what felt like hours, and Fara felt her lips pursing tighter and tighter together as anxiety set in. She knew very little about Maurerr Cuper, save that he was a merchant king in Navale and that her mother had thought very highly of him even if she didn't say as much. She knew from her father that Maurerr was a tough man to please, and she truly believed him on that just now.
Finally the elder quirked his lips. "You have your mother's face, little Edilion. Find your seat at the children's table now; there ought to be something left for you and your cousin."
Though she would have liked to sit between her parents and uncle, Fara knew when she'd been given a direct order... and while she was not necessarily versed in orders and commands, she was well versed in the the rank of the table, and Maurerr was certainly at the head of it. She curtsied once more, elbowing her cousin to do the same, and bowed her head as she walked arm-in-arm with Jael to the table that had been set at the back of the low-ceiling'd hall.
Half a dozen children were gathered around plates of flat cakes and silver boats full of preserves and mountains of links and mugs that steamed, and Fara found her stomach rumbling as she slipped into an empty chair. "Good morning," she began, but the boy at the head of the little table interrupted.
"That's not your spot," he proclaimed.
"I beg your pardon?"
"That spot's not yours!"
"Is somebody still arriving?" Fara had thought that she was the last, with the comments being made around her!
Jael saw a retort coming, it seemed, for she intercepted, "I don't care whose spot it is, it's empty and I'm hungry!"
There were hushed gasps around the table. Fara felt a stray kick at her shin from across the way, but looking across the table, none of the children seemed more than meanly scandilized.
Aghast, she rose from the table. "Well which spots are free?" she asked. She felt herself shaking. These children were horrendously rude!
"They're all taken," the boy mocked. He leaned forward, elbows just shy of the stained table-cloth. Fara thought he looked like a house-daemon tracking a scared rodent; realized that the look he was giving was at her and that she was going to have to do something about it...
"I'm sorry, but they're clearly not at this moment. Grandfather Cuper requested my presence here and I'm hungry, too." She resumed her seat. Jael made a face the boy's way and received an anonymous snicker from one or two of the resident children. Fara couldn't help it, she added, "if somebody arrives I am happy to move for them." Impeccable manners were the final flourish, her mother always told her.
It seemed to work for now: the boy thumped back in his chair, glowering their way as he stabbed a piece of link around his plate. Fara, feeling on edge, did her best to ignore him. Before she took anything to her own quite empty plate, she greeted the older girl sitting to her left. "Good morning," she attempted to re-initiate the conversation she'd meant to have to begin with. "What's your name? I'm Fara fa Edilion, of the city Edilion. My mother is second in line to the Evren Stones, which makes me second, too!"
The girl, a shorter lass with discordantly thick black hair pinned all around her head in a failed attempt to keep it from cascading down her shoulders, gawped. Fara served herself several pancakes as she waited politely for a reply, ignoring the girl's incredulity as she had been trained to do. Her mother often said that most nobles in other cities did not possess the same pride of place as Edilions did, which was what made Edilions proper royalty and the others merely ambitious. Fara wasn't sure what ambitious was, not entirely, or at least she didn't connect the word to the fighting matches that her parents sometimes had or the deadly-quiet moments in her aunt's huge hall when somebody said something out of line. Fara was preoccupied with fluffy, golden pancakes just now; politics could sit politely by.
"I'm Siia," the girl said, "Siia Cuper."
"What does your mother do?" Fara asked. She ignored the rest of the conversation around the table, especially the part where she could hear Jael hissing snide comments at the boy who deemed himself head of the table.
"She does the books," Siia replied proudly.
Fara blinked. "The books?" Was her mother an author?
"Of course," the short girl smiled knowingly. "She teaches me arithmetic. I'm very good."
"Oh!" Fara feigned understanding. "That's very exciting!"
Siia rolled her eyes at the younger newcomer. Changing the subject, she said, "my dad makes the deals. He's from Everion."
"My father is, too."
Siia made a face. "He is not. My mother says your father would rather play with southern girls than properly do hard work."
Fara nearly spat her breakfast back onto her plate. Raising a napkin to her mouth, she cast a hurt glare at her acquaintance. "She does not!" around a mouthful of pancake and manners be bitten!
"Your dad's my uncle, the bad one," Siia replied, tweaking onto Fara's hurt with some satisfaction.
"He's the best father in the world," Fara retorted, throwing her napkin down on her plate. There was that deadly silence again from around the the children's table. It made Fara feel like Aunt Elera, somehow -- and when she loomed over the older girl, she felt even more so. "He knows ten thousand more things than your stupid mother with her stupid books and arithmetic! He sits on the Edilion council and he defends Navale when important people bother to bring it up at all!" She covered her mouth with both hands, then, sinking back into her seat when she realized what she'd said.
Siia looked positively wrathful. Fara cringed when she felt a flurry of kicks under the table, wishing that they'd only stop so that she could crawl beneath the tablecloth to hide away.
"I like Navale," she tried to recompense, weakly, quietly.
"Stupid land-locked foreigners," she heard someone say. She didn't look up for the rest of the meal, so she didn't know who had said it.
To Fara's horror, she was placed in the care of the Cuper children by unknowing family once breakfast was well and truly over. "We'll be in meetings today," Fara's mother told her. Though her daughter clung desperately to her hand it seemed that Colette could muster only mild embarrassment over the state of her child's agitation.
Fara had gestured desperately for her mother to lean down, had whispered in her ear, "mother, they hate me! They're mean to me!"
"That's their job," Colette had reassured her, garnering anything but reassurance. When Fara's lips thinned into a grimace that looked fit to turn into teary eyes, Colette went on with exasperation in her whispered voice, "they safeguard their interests: it's in their blood. Right now you're of very little value to them. They don't know anything about Edilion or the importance we bear. It's your job as an heir of the stones to convince them." She stood fully erect again, pulling her hand away in the process. "Have fun," she told her daughter, voice particularly intense.
Fara stood by herself, folding her hands one over the other in lost consternation. Before she could return to Jael, who was standing with her arms crossed, glaring in a sullen match with one of the other children, Saum and another man stopped before her. Her uncle kneeled beside the girl, putting his great frame nearly on even with the gawky young Edilion, and he took both of her hands in that comforting way he had. "Hey, Fara," he shook her from her malaise. "You know what happened when I married Felligh? My father, my sister, and every other Cuper in town nearly had a petition to put him on a boat right back to Mejalli."
"I sat with your grandfather for three days straight," the other man added, grinning ruefully. "I convinced him that just because I was from across the ocean didn't mean he was losing another son. Cupers are hard to sway," he advised, "but they can be swayed."
"It helped that Baar roared up here to add his voice to my side," Saum fondly added. He clapped Fara's face in his rough palm. "Fara, you've got allies."
"Can you come with me and the others?" Fara wanted to know. She felt fit to burst with anxiety, and all this talk of allies and convincing was not helping in the least!
Saum laughed, managing to modulate the bellow to something of a sympathetic tone. "Oh, no, but we have your back in other ways. Just try to have fun. Maurra's kids are on a strict leash today, you shouldn't have too much trouble with them... and if you do, tell them Saum's got a tally on their birthday presents." He winked, released the Edilion girl, and passed on into the hall that invariably would lead to the meeting room that Fara knew so little about.
She turned back to Jael, who looked very near to a hair-tugging fight. "Oh dear!" Sweeping over to the gaggle of children, Fara intercepted a snide retort and said, voice very loud, "we need a moment to return to our rooms!"
"Get your warm clothes on," the boy she'd intercepted spat, "if you even have any."
And, like a small gang, he gestured for the other kids to go. Fara stood with her cousin in the nearly empty dining hall, biting her lip.
"I'm going to punch his stupid nose into his ugly face," Jael growled once they were well and truly out of sight.
"We have to convince them that we're valuable," Fara intoned, uncertainty clear in her voice.
Jael scoffed. "We're valuable? They're so stupid they don't even know what an Evren Stone is! They think their stinky piles of fur and pickled fish makes them the best in the whole world!"
Fara wanted to say something to that, she truly did... but their servant had returned to sweep them up sloping hallways to their rooms. She at least had time to think about the situation -- and to worry about her own grim prospects.
They met outside of Saum's part of the Lodge, in the middle of the snow-dusted grounds. Fara and Jael were both bundled in their best furs, ones, ironically, which had been provided from Navale to begin with. Siia and the boy and a couple of other Cuper children had assembled, dressed in something sleeker than the Edilion's puffy clothing. They wore layers of tightly-knitted scarves around their necks and faces, but those were pulled down to reveal already rosy cheeks and noses. "What took you so long? You had to do your hair?" the boy called.
Jael ran at him before Fara could pull her back, and would have jumped him had she not been intercepted by the boy's body-guards. They shoved her back and Jael only just barely retained her balance on the slippery patch of ground they'd made their stand upon. The Cupers laughed as Jael pinwheeled her arms, as Fara caught up to her and they managed to balance one another out. "Zenite takes a big squat in your mouth every morning and you gargle it!" the younger Edilion shouted, infuriated. When gasps resulted at the truly foul slur, Jael wrinkled her nose in a predatory grin and glared at the lot of them.
Fara felt her ears ringing. "Jael!" Six-year-olds didn't know phrases like that, they couldn't!
The boy recovered from the name slinging with some poise, for he had planted his mitted hands on his hips when he retorted, "Yeah, well your mom took a squat and she had you!"
Jael tried to go at him again but Fara was clinging desperately to her, arms around the girl's chest. She couldn't help gaping with sheer incredulity -- this was so crass... so infantile! "Jael hold still!" she shouted, swinging her cousin out of harm's way and literally leaning into her to keep her from attacking the boy. "Now look!" Fara insisted over her shoulder, "I don't even know your name! Can we please settle this like proper humans? Please?" It took some wind out of her hypothetical wings to beg, but Fara thought that if she heard one more curse she might melt with embarrassment. Zenite, the Caetran Goddess, was a name invoked only in the worst of circumstances to describe the most reviled of situations, and it certainly wasn't slung about in Fara's home. The worst her father had ever said was "Zenite take it!" when he'd broken his toes a year ago in an accident, and Fara had been shocked then, too.
She felt her cousin going slack enough to stand on her own, and, cautious, Fara turned to the Cuper kids. The boy still stood imperiously with his hands on his hips, but he eyed Fara now as though sizing her up. "I'm Eean Cuper," he finally introduced himself, then, voice high and mocking, "Inheritor of the Cuper Holdings, Incorporated, and Heir to All the Ships and Horses."
Fara made a face. "That's not a true title."
"Of course it's not," Eean replied. "Cupers don't have titles. We have jobs. We make profit enough to pay our workers and ourselves and we make Navale the best port on Avengaea."
"Not with your sour face, you don't," Jael thought to interject.
"We make lots of friends," Eean sneered. "We just make the good ones. Not boring ones like you two."
Fara huffed while Jael scoffed. The elder of the two said, "we're not boring! You haven't even given us a chance yet!"
"I know your type," Eean flipped a hand their way, rejection clear in his voice. "You probably sit on your laurels and play with dolls and never leave your stupid Edilion houses."
"We do not!" Fara found her voice rising. It stung that she'd just spent a month trapped inside a carriage for most of the trip up here; she didn't want to be told off for something she had no control over!
Eean's eyes narrowed, his smile looking positively vindictive. "You think you can prove it?"
"Yes!" Fara flung back, at the same time as her friend added, "of course!"
"Then come with us," Eean suggested. His mitts went up, covering his face with his slick looking scarf. There were no other words exchanged as he and his siblings and cousins led the two Edilions around the side of the colourful stables, out a poorly guarded exit to the Lodge's tall wall, and down the ridge road that overlooked Navale. Fara looked down on all of the buildings with a new anxiety... everything had seemed so much more simple when she was on horseback with her father only the other day.
The glare off of the streets was lending Fara a headache, and she had long since found the novelty of the cold a nuisance as she had to raise her muff up to her face just to keep from freezing her nose. Already the lovely white fur was pasted down under her sniffling suffering. They had been walking a long way along the ridge-road, the Cuper's waving at those who were traveling in the opposite direction. No words passed between Edilion and Cuper on the way, though Jael was muttering murder to her older cousin. Fara felt merely numb and anxious all at once. Her mother's words and Saum's encouragement rang hollow to her: how was she supposed to convince these mean-spirited people that she was of value, when really, it should be the other way around? Fara would have been congenial if they'd been visiting her. She would even have taken to pouring their tea and addressing their dinner plates. She'd have prepared conversations and she would personally have congregated a musician that knew Navalese tunes because she knew better.
They had reached their destination almost before Fara realized it, but when she did, all thoughts of proper hosting etiquette fled her mind.
A road branching from the ridge plunged nearly straight down into harbour some several hundred feet below, or so she felt looking down from vertiginous heights. Worse still, there were specks of people gliding down the entire length of the road on flimsy wooden boards. Fara's heart dropped into her stomach: some were flying over huge mountains of snow that had been set up to block a particularly smooth descent. When Eean caught sight of her and laughed, she knew that her face had gone completely white.
"Haven't you never sledded before?" he asked, teasing.
Fara shook her head in all seriousness. 'Nor,' she thought, 'do I ever want to.' She had a sick feeling that that wish would not be granted.
Several other children had come up to greet the Cuper boy, and Fara was struck with another sense of outsider discomfiture: two were quadrupedal, about the size of a pony, and starkly foreign to her own experiences: Asandus children! They weren't even Askans, either. One, the bulkier of the two, was brighter red than even the that on murals that hogged eye-level on most Navale buildings. Her fur was fluffed up huge where it hadn't been matted with chunks of ice, and her head possessed a toothy grin that looked almost feral. She wore nothing but a loosely woven net to cover her wings, which were folded to her back. The second Asandus looked like what Fara guessed was a Cascatan, but he was bundled up so that she could only catch glimpses of blue seal-thick fur beneath his layers of garments. The way his clothing hung, completely stitch or weave free, suggested that he must have made his clothing from magic -- as many Asandae did -- but seeing him wearing so much while standing on four extremely long-fingered feet looked very strange to the girl. Lastly, a bizarre creature that looked half-spider, and equally bundled as the Cascatan, approached Eean and raised two long, gangly arms. Fara witnessed the ritual gloves thumping against thick mittens without enough context to realize that the kids were intermingling as familiar friends.
"Meet the Edilions," Eean introduced his two prisoners. "They don't know what sledding is."
The red Asandus, the Riyalan, cocked her head. "Edilions, huh? My mother stops in there all the time. Askan run," she scoffed. She slapped tails with her Cascatan friend as though sharing some private joke. "What's your names?"
"Ah... F-fara and Jael," the elder girl replied, eyes huge. The Asandus was staring at her with amiable curiosity, but the size of her head on her long, fluffed up neck was unnerving, and her gaze was scrutinizing to the point of leaving Fara feeling like prey. "We're visiting my father's family."
"Well Fuhfara," the Riyalan greeted, "I'm Solvi Salus. My mother trades magic with the Daemon Isles." She grinned. "They pay a lot for it." And no wonder, given it was used for everything.
Fara bowed her head respectfully, and found the horrifying spider-creature thumping her on the back. "You'll like sledding," it told her, its voice a rasp of words that didn't fit its strange, round mouth. "It's more fun than sailing winter storms!"
"I beg your pardon," Fara turned to face the creature, "I'm not sure..."
"Caix," the creature rasped, pointing one of its many hands towards its heavily-covered abdomen. "Solvi's my friend. My parent travels with the other daemons to trade for the magic."
Fara felt uncomfortable shaking its hand. Caix the daemon. She had never really greeted one before, had never seen her mother do so, either. She didn't have a framework by which to address this new experience... but she seemed to be saved that particular turmoil as Eean was edging in on the conversation. "They're just going to sit up here like babies while we go have fun," he predicted. "I'll race you to Harbour Road!"
"Most jumps gets to be leader," Solvi roared. The group fled towards a pile of slick-looking boards which had been tossed thoughtlessly near one side of the road. Fara and Jael watched as the lot of them took turns leaping onto their sleds as they took to the ice-slicked street. Some literally dove onto already moving boards, while the daemon more carefully arranged its limbs within the confines of its vessel before pushing off down behind them.
As Eean dove towards the first leap, Fara's heart reemerged back into her mouth. "I feel sick," she admitted to Jael.
"I hate snow," her cousin admitted right back.
The two approached the pile of sleds with the same trepidation that they might approach a sleeping Askan. Jael grabbed the first board, prompting Fara to grab a second. "We have to impress them," Fara said over and over, a mantra, one that didn't grow more reasonable in her mind with any one repetition.
"HERE I GO!" Jael was already screaming at the top of her lungs while Fara was still negotiating the finer points of keeping her sled from going on without her.
"Jael!" Fara threw her hands up over her mouth, forgetting her sled. Jael's form was laid flat against her sled, hands on the coarse rope without a clue how to guide the thing down the hill. Fara's sled trailed after her aimlessly, and the girl shook her hands in frustration as she watched it curve off to one side and slap into a leafless tree. "Oh, bitten." She turned her attention back to Jael, who had gained speed and was avoiding jumps with success, mostly. The very last, the biggest, was almost impossible to avoid, and Fara felt likely to faint as she saw Jael rocket up and over it, putting at least a metre between herself and the ground. All too soon the girl was at the bottom of the slope, shooting into the pile of children who had walled up to catch her. There was a lot of screaming drifting up the hill.
"Now you!" a voice drifted up. Fara couldn't make out who had said it.
Flustered, she ran down the slope a few metres to retrieve her sled, then, trepidation over the prospect of cheating catching her up, she returned to the top again.
"Hurry up!" another voice egged her on.
Fara looked down over the hill with a sudden sense of shame. She couldn't do it! She wished for her horse now; all of a sudden Jael's earlier suggestion about running away crystalized in her mind as a viable alternative. Fara put the sled down on the ground, anxious of letting it go again. She sat herself on the very edge, clutching the rope beneath her mitts like a life line. She looked down over the hill behind the anxious fog of her quick, shallow breathing.
"Do it!"
"I don't want to!" Fara replied, but not loud enough to carry. She yelped when the sled slipped under her weight and bailed from the board as though she were fleeing a burning building. The sled ambled down a few metres of hill before it curved off into the side of a building. Fara could hear laughing billowing up from the bottom of the hill, and then shouting while Jael defended her friend with what Fara thought might be vicious little punches and kicks. Pursing her lips beyond the shame of her fear, Fara ran down the hill after her sled. She righted it, sat herself on it with legs splayed to keep her from slipping for a moment, locked in on the tangle of kids, and with a short, scared breath, she let go.
The sled started off slow, but picked up speed with little effort. Fara was leaning back, tugging on the reigns of the front and screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs. She missed the first jump by mere centimetres, flinging her weight to the side and promptly rolling off, losing all momentum. So much for the cavalry... at least she had held on to the rope this time. "Jael stop!" Fara shouted down the hill. She got on the sled again, screaming the rest of the way down the slope, but this time with frustration rather than sheer terror.
When she made it down to the bottom the pile of children seemed more amused than righteous. "You missed all of the jumps," Eean told her.
"I did it on purpose!" Fara retorted, wiping snow from her face and desperately trying to ignore the stinging cold of snow in her boots. "Your jumps are scary!"
The trip back up the hill was far from silent, but Fara at least felt like she could say something -- anything -- to the Cupers and their lofty opinions on Navale and their stupid sleds.
It was only when they returned home that Fara realized that Jael's face hadn't gotten any less red, her anger hadn't diffused any less once they'd parted ways from the other children. She was helping the girl take her jacket off when Jael positively screeched.
"What's the matter?" Fara exclaimed, backing a step away.
"My arm!" Jael sat rigidly on her bed.
"What did you do?"
"I landed on it funny. It hurts."
"I can't believe she went the entire day with her shoulder out of her socket, and fractures just so," the healer stood over the side of Jael's bed. Once again the sun had gone down -- hours ago, though Fara hadn't noticed. Jael was resting, arm carefully arranged and bound. The top of her doll's head was plastered in tears and worse, for she'd finally deigned to cry when the man had gone about fixing her.
Colette and Baar stood nearby, too, framing Fara as she clasped their hands for strength. "Fara," Colette's voice sounded very quiet, which chilled the girl to the bone. "You have to watch out for your younger friends."
"I know, mother," she replied. She wanted to cry again, but her eyes sore and dry and there were already tear-tracks down her face. She'd apologized a million times to Jael already as the younger girl had to go through the agony of diagnosis and treatment. Fara was sure that she'd never crawl up out of the pit that she'd made for herself this time. Sniffing despondently, Fara felt her father squeeze her hand, so she clung to him harder.
"Supper will be occurring within a few minutes," her mother informed the girl. "You're to bring Jael her food and to stay in your room."
Fara took some time to think about that. "Yes, mother," she replied when a response seemed warranted. Truthfully, she was glad. She didn't want to sit with the stupid Cuper children. Their price for being seen as valuable had been far, far too steep.
((I've also got a Lint Roller Request Thread up if you'd like to ask for any secrets!))
drayStory: Edilion
Colors: Iceberg #7 (Skiing), Silver #1 (Tarnish)
Supplies and Styles: Canvas, Stain (July 8th: "People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust." - E. B. White), Glitter (July 8th One Word Prompt: "Burn"); Portrait
Word Count: 5459
Rating: PG
Warnings: Some in-world cursing, some child-peer cruelty and fighting
Summary: Fara and Jael meet the Cupers and get in over their heads
Notes: Comments and critique are always welcome! I'm actively looking for suggestions on side-storybits to write: between other scenes, of certain characters not focused on here, anything that catches your attention that you'd like elaborated on. I know this one is hella long, but I wanted to challenge myself to a Portrait! Thanks for bearing with me if you decide to read. The next few will be short ones.
Fara didn't expect any place called a 'lodge' to be so huge! The building she thought had referred to her uncle's domain was merely one part of a sprawling tumble of buildings. The passageways built below ground were big and well-lit -- and more importantly, reassuringly warm during the middle of the winter.
Fara and her cousin, Jael, had been woken by a servant with a single light-striking spell when their morning summons came. The sun did not rise until much later at this time of the year, so when the older woman sparked a twinkling glow into the orb hanging between Fara and Jael's beds, it was the only light they had to dress by. Fara listened patiently as she dug through the large, dove-grey chest that had been brought to her room for the duration of their stay, finding just the right dress and fluffy pants as the servant explained the course of the day.
"You'll be wanting to set out your outdoor clothes," the old maid rasped, "but first you're to follow me to your grandparent's estate for breakfast. Everyone's been summoned to see you girls."
"Everyone?" Fara squeaked. She was half trapped in her dress, but she was glad for it at that moment. The prospect of meeting the entirety of her father's side of the family struck her as overwhelming. She hadn't even had anything to eat, yet!
"That'll be everyone," the servant agreed. "You'll want to hurry, too or you'll miss what's being served."
Jael made a raucaus noise and threw down a pair of tawny gloves. "There's food already?!"
"Oh yes, has been all morning!"
"What time is it?" Fara cast Jael an alarmed look.
"Long enough for little girls to be scampering out of their beds!" The servant held a perfectly stolid gaze over the two, impervious to their attempts to behold any teasing.
Fara finished wriggling into her dress, then hurriedly helped Jael with the ties at the back of hers. "We're ready!" She could feel her stomach rumbling already. "Please show us where to go!" Relatives be taken; Fara was hungry!
The servant doddered into the hallway, and Jael and Fara kept hot on her heels as she led them down the tall, mahogany-red painted hall of their sleeping quarters and down a flight of stairs, then another. When they passed Saum's dining room, the two girls tossed looks to one another curiously. "Where are we going?" Jael wanted to know. She had been dragging one hand on the wall as they bit at their proverbial champs, wanting to run ahead of the woman but knowing better than to try. There were paintings and trophies along the walls: stern and smiling faces of Cupers past, taxidermied creatures that Fara had never seen before, golden sculptures of exotic shapes. The gangly young girl was entranced.
"What's that?" The servant paused, and Fara shot Jael an accusatory look for holding them both up. Jael bit back a face of her own when the old woman faced her down. "You mean all this?" With a wave of her hand she encompassed the long, sloping tunnel hallway they'd begun to pass down through. "Oh, yes, you've never heard of these before, I expect. 'Sunny Edilion'." She cackled. "These go on all the way down to the beaches, link all the Cuper's homes together. Nobody wants to go outside late into winter, when they can help it. Not up the slippery slope!" She began down the hall again, and the girls hurried to follow. "Mister Saum oversees the warehouses for all the trade from Erevion, so of course he lives up the hill. Your grandparents, though," the servant cast a grin over her shoulder. "They manage the rest. I suppose you know all that, though, being lofty noble little girls."
"My uncle writes to me every year," Fara replied, feeling suddenly hesitant. This old woman sounded reserved in a way that Fara was familiar with: it was the resentment she often heard in the voice of her cousins -- the ones that expected her to butt in front of them in the line of inheritance. "But... this is all new. It's very exciting!"
"I'll expect it is," the old maid replied.
Fara and Jael cast a look to one another behind the woman's back, silently agreeing not to ask any more questions. At least the long path down the hill was full of curious displays of wealth and history that they could prod one another about and point to!
The hallway to the main dining room was only oversized because it was meant to accomodate two dozen people at a go, but it was so richly decorated that Fara couldn't help but continue to gawk around. Her Aunt Elera's hall back in Edilion was far larger, boasting a dance floor and a human-appropriate mezzanine, above which much larger Asandus-sized balconies overlooked any official proceedings, but everything at Aunt Elera's hall was gilt in silver and gold and faced with marble and slab. Where the Edilion property stood, resplendant and airy under layers of thick, crawling ivy, the Cuper Lodge felt warm and cramped. Fara caught the gaze of her parents, who were sitting at one side of a high, heavy table made of an unfamiliar black wood, but it was the glances of the rest of the Cupers that made her want to wipe her palms on the sides of her dress. She sought some kind of comfort in first Baar's eyes and then Colette's -- but if she felt somewhat relieved by her father's smile, her mother's concerned gaze dispelled Fara's courage like a popped bubble.
Taking Jael's hand, the young girl curtsied before the head of the table. In a high-backed chair with velvety soft arms, back and seat, an enormous man with weather-wrinkled copper skin, a long, black-dusted grey braid and a thin, meagerly-braided beard resided. He looked down on her with hard black eyes, and when Fara rose from her curtsy, he folded his fat hands over the girth of his belly. "Fara fa Edilion, Jael ru Edilion," he rumbled. "Good of you to finally rise from your slumber."
Fara would not allow herself to grimace! "Grandfather Cuper, it is an honour to finally meet you in person." She could hear her belly rumbling, but it seemed as though the old man had missed the missive, or else chose to ignore it. He held Fara's gaze for some time, what felt like hours, and Fara felt her lips pursing tighter and tighter together as anxiety set in. She knew very little about Maurerr Cuper, save that he was a merchant king in Navale and that her mother had thought very highly of him even if she didn't say as much. She knew from her father that Maurerr was a tough man to please, and she truly believed him on that just now.
Finally the elder quirked his lips. "You have your mother's face, little Edilion. Find your seat at the children's table now; there ought to be something left for you and your cousin."
Though she would have liked to sit between her parents and uncle, Fara knew when she'd been given a direct order... and while she was not necessarily versed in orders and commands, she was well versed in the the rank of the table, and Maurerr was certainly at the head of it. She curtsied once more, elbowing her cousin to do the same, and bowed her head as she walked arm-in-arm with Jael to the table that had been set at the back of the low-ceiling'd hall.
Half a dozen children were gathered around plates of flat cakes and silver boats full of preserves and mountains of links and mugs that steamed, and Fara found her stomach rumbling as she slipped into an empty chair. "Good morning," she began, but the boy at the head of the little table interrupted.
"That's not your spot," he proclaimed.
"I beg your pardon?"
"That spot's not yours!"
"Is somebody still arriving?" Fara had thought that she was the last, with the comments being made around her!
Jael saw a retort coming, it seemed, for she intercepted, "I don't care whose spot it is, it's empty and I'm hungry!"
There were hushed gasps around the table. Fara felt a stray kick at her shin from across the way, but looking across the table, none of the children seemed more than meanly scandilized.
Aghast, she rose from the table. "Well which spots are free?" she asked. She felt herself shaking. These children were horrendously rude!
"They're all taken," the boy mocked. He leaned forward, elbows just shy of the stained table-cloth. Fara thought he looked like a house-daemon tracking a scared rodent; realized that the look he was giving was at her and that she was going to have to do something about it...
"I'm sorry, but they're clearly not at this moment. Grandfather Cuper requested my presence here and I'm hungry, too." She resumed her seat. Jael made a face the boy's way and received an anonymous snicker from one or two of the resident children. Fara couldn't help it, she added, "if somebody arrives I am happy to move for them." Impeccable manners were the final flourish, her mother always told her.
It seemed to work for now: the boy thumped back in his chair, glowering their way as he stabbed a piece of link around his plate. Fara, feeling on edge, did her best to ignore him. Before she took anything to her own quite empty plate, she greeted the older girl sitting to her left. "Good morning," she attempted to re-initiate the conversation she'd meant to have to begin with. "What's your name? I'm Fara fa Edilion, of the city Edilion. My mother is second in line to the Evren Stones, which makes me second, too!"
The girl, a shorter lass with discordantly thick black hair pinned all around her head in a failed attempt to keep it from cascading down her shoulders, gawped. Fara served herself several pancakes as she waited politely for a reply, ignoring the girl's incredulity as she had been trained to do. Her mother often said that most nobles in other cities did not possess the same pride of place as Edilions did, which was what made Edilions proper royalty and the others merely ambitious. Fara wasn't sure what ambitious was, not entirely, or at least she didn't connect the word to the fighting matches that her parents sometimes had or the deadly-quiet moments in her aunt's huge hall when somebody said something out of line. Fara was preoccupied with fluffy, golden pancakes just now; politics could sit politely by.
"I'm Siia," the girl said, "Siia Cuper."
"What does your mother do?" Fara asked. She ignored the rest of the conversation around the table, especially the part where she could hear Jael hissing snide comments at the boy who deemed himself head of the table.
"She does the books," Siia replied proudly.
Fara blinked. "The books?" Was her mother an author?
"Of course," the short girl smiled knowingly. "She teaches me arithmetic. I'm very good."
"Oh!" Fara feigned understanding. "That's very exciting!"
Siia rolled her eyes at the younger newcomer. Changing the subject, she said, "my dad makes the deals. He's from Everion."
"My father is, too."
Siia made a face. "He is not. My mother says your father would rather play with southern girls than properly do hard work."
Fara nearly spat her breakfast back onto her plate. Raising a napkin to her mouth, she cast a hurt glare at her acquaintance. "She does not!" around a mouthful of pancake and manners be bitten!
"Your dad's my uncle, the bad one," Siia replied, tweaking onto Fara's hurt with some satisfaction.
"He's the best father in the world," Fara retorted, throwing her napkin down on her plate. There was that deadly silence again from around the the children's table. It made Fara feel like Aunt Elera, somehow -- and when she loomed over the older girl, she felt even more so. "He knows ten thousand more things than your stupid mother with her stupid books and arithmetic! He sits on the Edilion council and he defends Navale when important people bother to bring it up at all!" She covered her mouth with both hands, then, sinking back into her seat when she realized what she'd said.
Siia looked positively wrathful. Fara cringed when she felt a flurry of kicks under the table, wishing that they'd only stop so that she could crawl beneath the tablecloth to hide away.
"I like Navale," she tried to recompense, weakly, quietly.
"Stupid land-locked foreigners," she heard someone say. She didn't look up for the rest of the meal, so she didn't know who had said it.
To Fara's horror, she was placed in the care of the Cuper children by unknowing family once breakfast was well and truly over. "We'll be in meetings today," Fara's mother told her. Though her daughter clung desperately to her hand it seemed that Colette could muster only mild embarrassment over the state of her child's agitation.
Fara had gestured desperately for her mother to lean down, had whispered in her ear, "mother, they hate me! They're mean to me!"
"That's their job," Colette had reassured her, garnering anything but reassurance. When Fara's lips thinned into a grimace that looked fit to turn into teary eyes, Colette went on with exasperation in her whispered voice, "they safeguard their interests: it's in their blood. Right now you're of very little value to them. They don't know anything about Edilion or the importance we bear. It's your job as an heir of the stones to convince them." She stood fully erect again, pulling her hand away in the process. "Have fun," she told her daughter, voice particularly intense.
Fara stood by herself, folding her hands one over the other in lost consternation. Before she could return to Jael, who was standing with her arms crossed, glaring in a sullen match with one of the other children, Saum and another man stopped before her. Her uncle kneeled beside the girl, putting his great frame nearly on even with the gawky young Edilion, and he took both of her hands in that comforting way he had. "Hey, Fara," he shook her from her malaise. "You know what happened when I married Felligh? My father, my sister, and every other Cuper in town nearly had a petition to put him on a boat right back to Mejalli."
"I sat with your grandfather for three days straight," the other man added, grinning ruefully. "I convinced him that just because I was from across the ocean didn't mean he was losing another son. Cupers are hard to sway," he advised, "but they can be swayed."
"It helped that Baar roared up here to add his voice to my side," Saum fondly added. He clapped Fara's face in his rough palm. "Fara, you've got allies."
"Can you come with me and the others?" Fara wanted to know. She felt fit to burst with anxiety, and all this talk of allies and convincing was not helping in the least!
Saum laughed, managing to modulate the bellow to something of a sympathetic tone. "Oh, no, but we have your back in other ways. Just try to have fun. Maurra's kids are on a strict leash today, you shouldn't have too much trouble with them... and if you do, tell them Saum's got a tally on their birthday presents." He winked, released the Edilion girl, and passed on into the hall that invariably would lead to the meeting room that Fara knew so little about.
She turned back to Jael, who looked very near to a hair-tugging fight. "Oh dear!" Sweeping over to the gaggle of children, Fara intercepted a snide retort and said, voice very loud, "we need a moment to return to our rooms!"
"Get your warm clothes on," the boy she'd intercepted spat, "if you even have any."
And, like a small gang, he gestured for the other kids to go. Fara stood with her cousin in the nearly empty dining hall, biting her lip.
"I'm going to punch his stupid nose into his ugly face," Jael growled once they were well and truly out of sight.
"We have to convince them that we're valuable," Fara intoned, uncertainty clear in her voice.
Jael scoffed. "We're valuable? They're so stupid they don't even know what an Evren Stone is! They think their stinky piles of fur and pickled fish makes them the best in the whole world!"
Fara wanted to say something to that, she truly did... but their servant had returned to sweep them up sloping hallways to their rooms. She at least had time to think about the situation -- and to worry about her own grim prospects.
They met outside of Saum's part of the Lodge, in the middle of the snow-dusted grounds. Fara and Jael were both bundled in their best furs, ones, ironically, which had been provided from Navale to begin with. Siia and the boy and a couple of other Cuper children had assembled, dressed in something sleeker than the Edilion's puffy clothing. They wore layers of tightly-knitted scarves around their necks and faces, but those were pulled down to reveal already rosy cheeks and noses. "What took you so long? You had to do your hair?" the boy called.
Jael ran at him before Fara could pull her back, and would have jumped him had she not been intercepted by the boy's body-guards. They shoved her back and Jael only just barely retained her balance on the slippery patch of ground they'd made their stand upon. The Cupers laughed as Jael pinwheeled her arms, as Fara caught up to her and they managed to balance one another out. "Zenite takes a big squat in your mouth every morning and you gargle it!" the younger Edilion shouted, infuriated. When gasps resulted at the truly foul slur, Jael wrinkled her nose in a predatory grin and glared at the lot of them.
Fara felt her ears ringing. "Jael!" Six-year-olds didn't know phrases like that, they couldn't!
The boy recovered from the name slinging with some poise, for he had planted his mitted hands on his hips when he retorted, "Yeah, well your mom took a squat and she had you!"
Jael tried to go at him again but Fara was clinging desperately to her, arms around the girl's chest. She couldn't help gaping with sheer incredulity -- this was so crass... so infantile! "Jael hold still!" she shouted, swinging her cousin out of harm's way and literally leaning into her to keep her from attacking the boy. "Now look!" Fara insisted over her shoulder, "I don't even know your name! Can we please settle this like proper humans? Please?" It took some wind out of her hypothetical wings to beg, but Fara thought that if she heard one more curse she might melt with embarrassment. Zenite, the Caetran Goddess, was a name invoked only in the worst of circumstances to describe the most reviled of situations, and it certainly wasn't slung about in Fara's home. The worst her father had ever said was "Zenite take it!" when he'd broken his toes a year ago in an accident, and Fara had been shocked then, too.
She felt her cousin going slack enough to stand on her own, and, cautious, Fara turned to the Cuper kids. The boy still stood imperiously with his hands on his hips, but he eyed Fara now as though sizing her up. "I'm Eean Cuper," he finally introduced himself, then, voice high and mocking, "Inheritor of the Cuper Holdings, Incorporated, and Heir to All the Ships and Horses."
Fara made a face. "That's not a true title."
"Of course it's not," Eean replied. "Cupers don't have titles. We have jobs. We make profit enough to pay our workers and ourselves and we make Navale the best port on Avengaea."
"Not with your sour face, you don't," Jael thought to interject.
"We make lots of friends," Eean sneered. "We just make the good ones. Not boring ones like you two."
Fara huffed while Jael scoffed. The elder of the two said, "we're not boring! You haven't even given us a chance yet!"
"I know your type," Eean flipped a hand their way, rejection clear in his voice. "You probably sit on your laurels and play with dolls and never leave your stupid Edilion houses."
"We do not!" Fara found her voice rising. It stung that she'd just spent a month trapped inside a carriage for most of the trip up here; she didn't want to be told off for something she had no control over!
Eean's eyes narrowed, his smile looking positively vindictive. "You think you can prove it?"
"Yes!" Fara flung back, at the same time as her friend added, "of course!"
"Then come with us," Eean suggested. His mitts went up, covering his face with his slick looking scarf. There were no other words exchanged as he and his siblings and cousins led the two Edilions around the side of the colourful stables, out a poorly guarded exit to the Lodge's tall wall, and down the ridge road that overlooked Navale. Fara looked down on all of the buildings with a new anxiety... everything had seemed so much more simple when she was on horseback with her father only the other day.
The glare off of the streets was lending Fara a headache, and she had long since found the novelty of the cold a nuisance as she had to raise her muff up to her face just to keep from freezing her nose. Already the lovely white fur was pasted down under her sniffling suffering. They had been walking a long way along the ridge-road, the Cuper's waving at those who were traveling in the opposite direction. No words passed between Edilion and Cuper on the way, though Jael was muttering murder to her older cousin. Fara felt merely numb and anxious all at once. Her mother's words and Saum's encouragement rang hollow to her: how was she supposed to convince these mean-spirited people that she was of value, when really, it should be the other way around? Fara would have been congenial if they'd been visiting her. She would even have taken to pouring their tea and addressing their dinner plates. She'd have prepared conversations and she would personally have congregated a musician that knew Navalese tunes because she knew better.
They had reached their destination almost before Fara realized it, but when she did, all thoughts of proper hosting etiquette fled her mind.
A road branching from the ridge plunged nearly straight down into harbour some several hundred feet below, or so she felt looking down from vertiginous heights. Worse still, there were specks of people gliding down the entire length of the road on flimsy wooden boards. Fara's heart dropped into her stomach: some were flying over huge mountains of snow that had been set up to block a particularly smooth descent. When Eean caught sight of her and laughed, she knew that her face had gone completely white.
"Haven't you never sledded before?" he asked, teasing.
Fara shook her head in all seriousness. 'Nor,' she thought, 'do I ever want to.' She had a sick feeling that that wish would not be granted.
Several other children had come up to greet the Cuper boy, and Fara was struck with another sense of outsider discomfiture: two were quadrupedal, about the size of a pony, and starkly foreign to her own experiences: Asandus children! They weren't even Askans, either. One, the bulkier of the two, was brighter red than even the that on murals that hogged eye-level on most Navale buildings. Her fur was fluffed up huge where it hadn't been matted with chunks of ice, and her head possessed a toothy grin that looked almost feral. She wore nothing but a loosely woven net to cover her wings, which were folded to her back. The second Asandus looked like what Fara guessed was a Cascatan, but he was bundled up so that she could only catch glimpses of blue seal-thick fur beneath his layers of garments. The way his clothing hung, completely stitch or weave free, suggested that he must have made his clothing from magic -- as many Asandae did -- but seeing him wearing so much while standing on four extremely long-fingered feet looked very strange to the girl. Lastly, a bizarre creature that looked half-spider, and equally bundled as the Cascatan, approached Eean and raised two long, gangly arms. Fara witnessed the ritual gloves thumping against thick mittens without enough context to realize that the kids were intermingling as familiar friends.
"Meet the Edilions," Eean introduced his two prisoners. "They don't know what sledding is."
The red Asandus, the Riyalan, cocked her head. "Edilions, huh? My mother stops in there all the time. Askan run," she scoffed. She slapped tails with her Cascatan friend as though sharing some private joke. "What's your names?"
"Ah... F-fara and Jael," the elder girl replied, eyes huge. The Asandus was staring at her with amiable curiosity, but the size of her head on her long, fluffed up neck was unnerving, and her gaze was scrutinizing to the point of leaving Fara feeling like prey. "We're visiting my father's family."
"Well Fuhfara," the Riyalan greeted, "I'm Solvi Salus. My mother trades magic with the Daemon Isles." She grinned. "They pay a lot for it." And no wonder, given it was used for everything.
Fara bowed her head respectfully, and found the horrifying spider-creature thumping her on the back. "You'll like sledding," it told her, its voice a rasp of words that didn't fit its strange, round mouth. "It's more fun than sailing winter storms!"
"I beg your pardon," Fara turned to face the creature, "I'm not sure..."
"Caix," the creature rasped, pointing one of its many hands towards its heavily-covered abdomen. "Solvi's my friend. My parent travels with the other daemons to trade for the magic."
Fara felt uncomfortable shaking its hand. Caix the daemon. She had never really greeted one before, had never seen her mother do so, either. She didn't have a framework by which to address this new experience... but she seemed to be saved that particular turmoil as Eean was edging in on the conversation. "They're just going to sit up here like babies while we go have fun," he predicted. "I'll race you to Harbour Road!"
"Most jumps gets to be leader," Solvi roared. The group fled towards a pile of slick-looking boards which had been tossed thoughtlessly near one side of the road. Fara and Jael watched as the lot of them took turns leaping onto their sleds as they took to the ice-slicked street. Some literally dove onto already moving boards, while the daemon more carefully arranged its limbs within the confines of its vessel before pushing off down behind them.
As Eean dove towards the first leap, Fara's heart reemerged back into her mouth. "I feel sick," she admitted to Jael.
"I hate snow," her cousin admitted right back.
The two approached the pile of sleds with the same trepidation that they might approach a sleeping Askan. Jael grabbed the first board, prompting Fara to grab a second. "We have to impress them," Fara said over and over, a mantra, one that didn't grow more reasonable in her mind with any one repetition.
"HERE I GO!" Jael was already screaming at the top of her lungs while Fara was still negotiating the finer points of keeping her sled from going on without her.
"Jael!" Fara threw her hands up over her mouth, forgetting her sled. Jael's form was laid flat against her sled, hands on the coarse rope without a clue how to guide the thing down the hill. Fara's sled trailed after her aimlessly, and the girl shook her hands in frustration as she watched it curve off to one side and slap into a leafless tree. "Oh, bitten." She turned her attention back to Jael, who had gained speed and was avoiding jumps with success, mostly. The very last, the biggest, was almost impossible to avoid, and Fara felt likely to faint as she saw Jael rocket up and over it, putting at least a metre between herself and the ground. All too soon the girl was at the bottom of the slope, shooting into the pile of children who had walled up to catch her. There was a lot of screaming drifting up the hill.
"Now you!" a voice drifted up. Fara couldn't make out who had said it.
Flustered, she ran down the slope a few metres to retrieve her sled, then, trepidation over the prospect of cheating catching her up, she returned to the top again.
"Hurry up!" another voice egged her on.
Fara looked down over the hill with a sudden sense of shame. She couldn't do it! She wished for her horse now; all of a sudden Jael's earlier suggestion about running away crystalized in her mind as a viable alternative. Fara put the sled down on the ground, anxious of letting it go again. She sat herself on the very edge, clutching the rope beneath her mitts like a life line. She looked down over the hill behind the anxious fog of her quick, shallow breathing.
"Do it!"
"I don't want to!" Fara replied, but not loud enough to carry. She yelped when the sled slipped under her weight and bailed from the board as though she were fleeing a burning building. The sled ambled down a few metres of hill before it curved off into the side of a building. Fara could hear laughing billowing up from the bottom of the hill, and then shouting while Jael defended her friend with what Fara thought might be vicious little punches and kicks. Pursing her lips beyond the shame of her fear, Fara ran down the hill after her sled. She righted it, sat herself on it with legs splayed to keep her from slipping for a moment, locked in on the tangle of kids, and with a short, scared breath, she let go.
The sled started off slow, but picked up speed with little effort. Fara was leaning back, tugging on the reigns of the front and screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs. She missed the first jump by mere centimetres, flinging her weight to the side and promptly rolling off, losing all momentum. So much for the cavalry... at least she had held on to the rope this time. "Jael stop!" Fara shouted down the hill. She got on the sled again, screaming the rest of the way down the slope, but this time with frustration rather than sheer terror.
When she made it down to the bottom the pile of children seemed more amused than righteous. "You missed all of the jumps," Eean told her.
"I did it on purpose!" Fara retorted, wiping snow from her face and desperately trying to ignore the stinging cold of snow in her boots. "Your jumps are scary!"
The trip back up the hill was far from silent, but Fara at least felt like she could say something -- anything -- to the Cupers and their lofty opinions on Navale and their stupid sleds.
It was only when they returned home that Fara realized that Jael's face hadn't gotten any less red, her anger hadn't diffused any less once they'd parted ways from the other children. She was helping the girl take her jacket off when Jael positively screeched.
"What's the matter?" Fara exclaimed, backing a step away.
"My arm!" Jael sat rigidly on her bed.
"What did you do?"
"I landed on it funny. It hurts."
"I can't believe she went the entire day with her shoulder out of her socket, and fractures just so," the healer stood over the side of Jael's bed. Once again the sun had gone down -- hours ago, though Fara hadn't noticed. Jael was resting, arm carefully arranged and bound. The top of her doll's head was plastered in tears and worse, for she'd finally deigned to cry when the man had gone about fixing her.
Colette and Baar stood nearby, too, framing Fara as she clasped their hands for strength. "Fara," Colette's voice sounded very quiet, which chilled the girl to the bone. "You have to watch out for your younger friends."
"I know, mother," she replied. She wanted to cry again, but her eyes sore and dry and there were already tear-tracks down her face. She'd apologized a million times to Jael already as the younger girl had to go through the agony of diagnosis and treatment. Fara was sure that she'd never crawl up out of the pit that she'd made for herself this time. Sniffing despondently, Fara felt her father squeeze her hand, so she clung to him harder.
"Supper will be occurring within a few minutes," her mother informed the girl. "You're to bring Jael her food and to stay in your room."
Fara took some time to think about that. "Yes, mother," she replied when a response seemed warranted. Truthfully, she was glad. She didn't want to sit with the stupid Cuper children. Their price for being seen as valuable had been far, far too steep.
((I've also got a Lint Roller Request Thread up if you'd like to ask for any secrets!))
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I do love Jael, though--what a spitfire! Even if she wound up getting hurt, she really did hold her own back there. But it's still not Fara's fault she's so gentle-hearted.
Your imagery and world-building is wonderful, as always--somehow that casual light spell in the morning with that maid really brought things to life!
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Jael has become something of a dark horse for me. She resembles another character that shows up down the line (or at least one who has a lot of the same qualities!) so perhaps that's why I'm playing her up so much!
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this thing! I'm really honoured. :)
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tl;dr: yes, you succeeded! I am just so angry at Colette on Fara's behalf, to the point where I wish Fara's dad would start speaking up, because it's horridly unfair and wrong. I might sympathize with her later on down the line, but I have a feeling if that did happen, it'd be when things are too late to fix between her and Fara.
I like Jael's take-no-crap attitude. Maybe unseemly for a child her age, but it's made her tougher.
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But more on that to be properly revealed through narrative. Hopefully!
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Like, I can understand that maybe she doesn't mean to treat Fara that way, but yeah, I still see this coming to bite Colette in the butt if she's not careful. If that happens, because I haven't read the rest of the story yet! :)
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Having said that, if grown-up Fara decided to lash out at Colette for years of this(because I have a feeling this is just the beginning), I would not be surprised. Hell, I'd be cheering her on!
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So is it a culture thing that has the Cuper kids so hostile? Like a distrust of outsiders? Or does Fara represent some kind of direct political threat to them or their family? And how much of this hostility is coming from what their parents have told them? I'm getting the impression Fara's father's decision to marry her mother was not a popular one among his family. Which might go toward explaining why Colette is so stressed out about the trip.
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I think I may try to go into some side-story depth about the Cupers because I'm not entirely sure why they're so xenophobic; there is the matter of Baar's sister holding a grudge and Maurrer, his father, being a hard man to please. But I think that there may be an element of actual xenophobia in Navale due to the proximity of Cascatan Asandae (who are notoriously xenophobic and tend to pass that on when they do have to interact, they tend to filter people into 'trusted' 'friends of trusted' 'trusted with a caveat' and 'most other people' so getting onto one of those good lists is very complicated and note-worthy. There are also ships coming in from the Daemon Isles, and each brings its own culture that can be really very different. Novinitu as a continent is overseen mostly by Asandae, and daemon presence is regulated to fit the system. By comparison the Daemon Isles are unregulated, and where Asandae are the supreme force that enjoy the privilege of being on top, if one were to wash up on the Isles things would be incredibly different. There's a mess of contentions to worry about when daemons deemed disrespectful show up with loads of very valuable goods from across the rest of the world and fussy Asandae who want it but don't want to deal with them. Humans become the buffer and take on all sorts of aspects when trying to keep things in control. That plays a big part (consciously or no) to the Cuper family, so their kids tend to vet outsiders ferociously without really knowing why at that age!
(This behaviour is also probably what has kept Navale out of the Edilion Official Families for so many years. Even if the Edilion-Isiodoth consortium is a powerful human network of trade and culture, it's a new cog to add to the machine of keeping people pleased-and-trading, so dealing with that has been bringing Maurrer and Colette all kinds of new headaches!)
Blah blah blah; I'll make some notes to flesh some of this out in a more-narrative less-infodump manner when I get a chance! Thanks so much for asking, though, I love receiving these kinds of prompts!
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I have a deep respect for my grandmother, but some days her memory terrifies me.
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I find it interesting that the only really nice person in this scene is the demon.
Also, your description is AMAZING.
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Thank you!
(Just to show that no two daemons are alike and most humans assume they're all horrible because they look like wildlife-extreme!)
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NAILED IT. ALL OVER THE PLACE. And with sausages. OMG, the desciptions of the rooms and the glarey snow.
Oh, Fara. You tried. I appreciate your trying.
(And, seriously adults? You let the kids alone and you're surprised this happened? Fara could negotiate circles around most of you. Srsly.)
Did I read that right? Your dragons... are FUZZY?
:D Please say yes.
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The dragons are so fuzzy that one of our friends crocheted a stuffed version and mailed it to us for christmas a couple of years ago. 8D They are the best fluff-butts! (Some of them anyways!) Check out a really really old version that still sort of works. Prudentu looks like an old version of the yellow one, the fluff-butt is like the red one and the one with the creepy long fingers is like the long-necked blue one.
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All I can do is rec other people for now.
FUZZY DRAGONS.
I AM IN HEAVEN.
Thank you very much for the visual aids. I want to hug one of your dragons very badly!
Even if it's just their ankle.