OLD YOU IN THE GARBAGE, NEW YOU IN DISPLAY CASE

[bouchonne]

WHO: Byerly, Alexandrie, Petrana, Sidony...and Helena???
WHAT: Going to reconcile a married couple
WHEN: Prior to the battle
WHERE: Orlais, in Val Fermin
NOTES: This post is part of a player plot leading into the Battle of Ghislain

Two months ago, Comte Michel du Val Firmin found a new lady-love. It's a familiar sort of story, one that hardly even raises an eyebrow in Orlais - the Comte and Comtesse have their lives taken over by duties; their relationships cools, their love is forgotten; one or the other or both meet someone a touch more comely, a touch more exciting. For the Comte, that someone was a lively peasant woman named Eloise, an educated literate young lady with curly hair and strong opinions.

Truly, this wouldn't be grounds for any attention at all...save for the fact that Eloise has strong opinions about world politics, and a strong willingness to voice them to the people around her. Including the Comte. Who listens to her. And so now, on the eve of a major battle, he's debating withdrawing his troops, suddenly (under her influence) troubled by the questionable morality of sending common people off to die.

Byerly Rutyer got word of this looming disaster through a dear friend of his*. And so he recruited a few diplomats, friends, and complete oddballs to help him sabotage this turn of events...by ensuring that the Comte's heart is taken away from Eloise and is instead returned to the Comtesse.




*Monarchies tend not to like nobles - even nobles of other countries - turning all democratic. The peasants tend to get ideas. So this info got slipped courtesy of a few attentive folks down south.

Comments

open; the de la fontaine estate

[coquettish_trees]

It has been months since Alexandrie has been home. Not home, the apartment in Kirkwall, or home, the estate she all but lives at now with Loki, but home. In other days, they would be preparing to go to join the Empress and the rest of the court at Halamshiral soon. The Comte and Comtesse de la Fontaine still are of course, as is her brother Matthias and his wife, their two children, but that preparation is one that Alexandrie will miss this year.

She wanders the mansion she grew up in, its grounds, in a dreamlike state. Here the tree she had leapt from in an attempt to break her own ankle once Evie had broken hers; here the molding on the wall she had measured her height against when she still grew. Here where she had written letters containing all of her young and foolish heart, here where she had learned to sing, to play the piano forte. Here where she had wept, had learned to lie. It hadn't been so long, but it felt like forever all the same. Felt like a gulf that could no longer be bridged, the other side only viewable from afar, never tread again.

Then there were the gardens. How many hours had she spent within their paths? And how many with him?

It's still there, the old oak with its sturdy branches, with the swing she'd clapped delightedly for the hanging of. The numerous tosses of its ropes over the branch it hangs from, most of them for her amusement. Sitting there now, her hands finding purchase on those ropes amidst the climbing rose vines that twine around them, their petals dropped for the coming of winter, she can feel the tingle of hands on her back, often more gentle than she could allow herself to think on.

She will sit for a while there, eminently findable. And then she'll kick off with more energy, a kind of determination to leave the ground behind. To finally touch her feet to the leaves, or to the sky, her skirts fluttering with the movement.

[strangel]

From up in the branches, Helena watches, gaze sharp and curious. This is the sort of life that belonged in story books, for princesses, and now there sits so near her the woman who this made the life of.

Helena moves slowly, near silent, until she is hanging upside down from the branch, knees hooks around it as her hands and hair hang down, and she looks at Alexandrie.

"You are looking lonely."

[coquettish_trees]

Startled, Alexandrie can't help but laugh, short and abrupt, at Helena's sudden and unconventional appearance from above her in the tree. The question that follows it touches a little close for comfort. Is she? Perhaps, but it is a loneliness for want of something that is gone now—that must be gone now—and moreover she does not want to be lonely.

"Bonjour, cherie!" she exclaims instead, wiping away whatever it was that had made her self-indulgent melancholy so obvious on her face. "A fine climbing tree, is it not?"

[strangel]

And evading her words, this odd princess. Helena's head tilts to the side as she hangs, watching intently.

"Is good tree. Rotting branches have been cut away, I think." Curling upwards, she knocks on the bough, and slowly lowers herself down again. Wiry, this one. "Sometimes the dead parts need to be cut away."

[coquettish_trees]

It's far too incisive an observation, and lands in precisely the same place as the first question had. Alexandrie's gaze sharpens for a moment as she re-files Helena as a force in her own right rather than a curiosity. And moreover, one of those forces like Thor who have the natural temerity to be so forthright as to cut right through the careful weave of falsehood and deflection she had so intently studied how to form the warp and weft of.

"In winter, how can one tell which are dead? What if the branch is simply... waiting, and to cut it would injure the tree?"

This is a foolish question, and a foolish place to ask it, but even so she looks at the other woman with the guarded mix of hope and sorrow with which one views a soothsayer after asking a question they can already feel the answer to. Tell me something else.

[strangel]

"Some thing are meant to be cut in winter. Then they are ready for re-growing when the right season comes."

Helena grins, then, looking at the Alexandrie girl. "Trees can't scream. If it is injured," oh well, she suggests, a little tilt of her head. "But you can wait until dead branch falls on someone's head. They might scream. Cannot grow new head like tree grows new branches."

Sometimes it is interesting to challenge and to shock, to try and understand and categorise the reactions she gets.

[coquettish_trees]

Oddly enough, that all seems to be precisely what Alexandrie needed to hear. She kicks off the ground in a slightly more sprightly fashion, looking amused.

"Mais non! We cannot. It is for the best, I think. How horrible it would be, to be wandering about with a very small head as it grows back."

[strangel]

That makes Helena laugh, a rough and almost hiccuping thing. "You are strange lady. This I like."

[coquettish_trees]

"I am," Alexandrie agrees cheerfully, with more sincere assertion of self than might seem warranted.

"I think," she says, letting herself swing to a natural stop, "I shall go and see if I can find a certain place in the woods. Would you like to join me?"

[strangel]

Helena looks to the ground, and pulls up to the bough again, unhooking her legs so she's holding on with her hands, and then dropping to the soft earth to land in a crouch.

"What is the place?" She unhooks her bow from her back - why not use the opportunity to hunt, after all.

[coquettish_trees]

"One which my sister and I used to frequent, when we were very small," Alexandrie explains. "I know not if I shall still be able to find it, but I feel myself desirous of looking."

She eyes the bow in Helena's hands, wondering briefly whether or not Felix—their gamesman—would be cross if she allowed the other woman to hunt their land without letting him know, but ultimately deciding that she could sweet-talk him later as she always had. Her smile twitches. Perhaps he would be cross if she did not immediately take liberties upon her return. He had always enjoyed pretending to be in an official huff with her.

"No does or young bucks, cherie, if you please," she says with a nod before turning to take the path that will lead them into the wilder parts of the estate.

[strangel]

A long look.

"Should I ask yous before any shooting?"

Something in her tone is deeply uncooperative. Why so fussy, this noble lady? Just because she can being, Helena suspects.

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie raises her eyebrow and, with a glance at Helena's shard hand, inquires with a carefully amenable manner as they walk, "Have you had cause to keep a herd before?"

[strangel]

"No. Deer are wild. Not needing human interfering. Same as rabbits."

Maybe she is being just a shade judgey. "Have you ever needed to hunt to eat, before? Needing to, not for sports."

[coquettish_trees]

"No," Alexandrie replies, looking entirely untroubled by that despite briefly dipping into the sort of ultimately useless pitying expression the well-meaning well-off have when confronted with another's hardships.

"But that is not what you do now. There is food enough at the château; if you take a deer now, you do so for the sport of it alone."

[strangel]

At that, she shakes her head.

"No," Helena says, head hanging slightly to the side. "Relying on others for giving food, no. They can take away as easy as they give. This is... preparation."

[coquettish_trees]

"It is still relying upon the De La Fontaine household for food if you hunt our land," Alexandrie replies mildly. "This is not wild unclaimed forest we step into. My family and our household steward it. It is not as if we keep the deer within enclosures, keep the rabbits of the forest in hutches, cage each bird and feed them by hand, but Felix knows how the herds move within the forest, knows their numbers, and keeps watch on their health from afar. They are our deer, on our land, and your hunting them with our permission is the same as you sitting at our table. Your hunting them without our permission is the same as if you were to take the pearls from my neck."

She pauses, and then raises an eyebrow to qualify all this.

"By the laws of this country, if not the greater laws of nature."

[strangel]

Yes yes yes, laws. Helena shakes her head in a slow, side-to-side wave.

"This only matters if you are catching me," she says, her smiles mischievous. After all, she has done many murders, and is not being arrested yet. Law frowns upon murder, also.

No need to say that. "I do not think you would know if poachers took a deer. Even now, if you were noticing it would be only because we are having this talking."

[coquettish_trees]

"Steal often from your hosts, do you? When it would be gladly provided if only it were asked?" Alexandrie lifts her shoulders lightly and then drops them, as if she is not all that invested in having an answer to either question, that lack proven true enough as she continues to speak without waiting for one. "You are right enough in consequence applying only to those who are caught at what they do and in that I would hardly notice." Although the gamesmaster undoubtedly would. "You shall do as you like, I imagine, but it shall be plucking plants from a kept garden rather than foraging."

Then, as the path nears the treeline and becomes unpaved trail, "And rather ill-mannered in disregard of the very small favor I have asked in return for the run of the land. Simply care for it as we do, that it might continue to be bountiful, and you are welcome to its fruit."

[bouchonne]

He watches her as she swings. Which is perhaps an unpleasant thing to do, isn't it? Not many ladies treasure the thought of their ex-lover leering at them as they idly enjoy the pleasures of their childhood home. No matter who added that particular enhancement to that home. As a matter of fact, most ladies would probably run shrieking from the thought, lest said ex-lover have a knife he's about to use out of some vengeful impulse. Because most ladies are sensible.

But here he is, leering, like a demon or a ghost of the past - or, no, that's too grandiose. Like a mouth-breathing pervert out to get a glance at a girl's knickers. So he decides, after a moment, that he simply can't go on like this utter monster. And so he shucks his coat and shirt and charges right past her, diving into the ice-cold pond spread before the swing.

[coquettish_trees]

If she is surprised, which she is, mildly, it is only because it is as if she has summoned him with her thoughts. For the rest, well. On the subject of sensibility, Alexandrie is not most ladies. Her shriek has little to do with who it is, or where he has been, or what he was doing (or how long he has been there doing it, if that were something she had been privy to,) so much as she knows that pond to be preternaturally cold even early in the season, and would also lay a guess that he had not brought overmany changes of clothing with him—if indeed Byerly had overmany changes of clothing—and the party is, of course, this evening.

"Sortez de là, Byerly!" She demands loudly as she hops down from the swing, her lips pressing together against the laughter that would only encourage him. "Pensez-tu que tu êtes une carpe?"

Already, she is wondering if Mathilde might re-fit a pair of Matthias's trousers for him.

[bouchonne]

He responds by flipping over back and luxuriously back-stroking out further towards the center of the pond. Maker, it's freezing. He might die. But he doesn't let his smile flag for a second.

"Lexie, my dear, how fine the water is!" he calls. "Come and join me?"

[coquettish_trees]

"I most certainly shall not!" Alexandrie retorts, her hands resting on her hips as she makes her way closer to the edge of the pond. "You know quite well it is stubbornly frigid in there save at the very height of summer." When, for a bare few weeks, it grudgingly turns to something like sun-warmed silk even into the evening, and is eminently perfect for...

Which he knows quite well because...

She hadn't actually thought about that before saying it, but she is now. Damn. Rather quickly, then, "and if you do not come out immediately you shall catch a chill, and perish from it, and I shall not mourn you in the slightest!"