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

[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."