With money you squeezed from the peasants (open)

[toujoursdroit]

WHO: Open to all Riftwatch agents who care to attend. Plus-ones allowed within reason.
WHAT: The duke de Coucy is throwing a celebration to mark his eldest grandson’s 18th birthday, which he would do anyway and which is definitely not a blatant attempt to keep said grandson from running off toward the nearest opportunity for combat.
WHEN: Mid-Kingsway
WHERE: The de Coucy property in Hightown. (The servants are spying in case you break anything.)
NOTES: If you’d like your character to come but think some maneuvering would be required to make it happen, hit me oocly and we’ll figure it out. Similarly, if you need or want a starter with Romain or an NPC, just let me know.

The engraved invitations only go to a select few: the division heads and project leaders, Alexandrie d'Asgard, Petrana de Cedoux and (after some deliberation) Hugo and Jehan Mercier d'Annecy. Others, without a specific addressee, are posted in common areas in the Gallows including both dining halls, the herb garden and the game room:



Those at ease enough or bold enough to take him up on the invitation arrive to find the duke’s Hightown residence lit with a mixture of opulent scones, torches and enchantments. Once admitted through the outer gates—the servants at the door have a list on which one’s name must appear, seemingly including every member of Riftwatch—guests will be ushered a short walk back from the street to the house proper. The foyer boasts more servants, ready to take any outwear (the weather does not dictate it, but fashion may), as well as any gifts for the marquis.

Guests are then shown through to the ballroom. While it is generally used these days as a training area, it has been converted back to its intended use for the evening. The space is brightly lit and features a small but talented collection of musicians. The center of the room is clearly intended for dancing, but chairs and railings along the edge of the room provide a place for those who need a breath or who simply prefer conversation to dancing. Staff circulates with wine and hors d'oeuvres (mainly local shellfish and assorted pastries from Romain’s imported Orlesian patissier). In addition to their fellow Riftwatch agents, guests may run into carefully selected individuals from Hightown society, gratified to varying degrees at having been included.



Those who find even the edges of the ballroom too much may discover that the lower level of the two-level library is open, though servants pass through with enough regularity that it is not truly private. (Assuming one thinks servants count, of course.) The upper level is roped off. Anyone attempting to make their way up will be gently but firmly redirected by the staff. The lower level, however, does offer a few tables and various comfortable chairs and chaises, good for quiet conversation or simply a break from the crush of society.

About two hours after sunset, dinner is announced. All present guests are shown into the dining room. Those few in attendance who have seen the duke’s estate in Orlais, or even his home in Val Royeaux, would know this room is smaller than either. Everyone is seated comfortably, but in addition to the long, rectangular table at the room’s center, a few smaller circular tables hold the overflow. The seating has been chosen carefully for status, affiliation and balance of conversation. The duke heads the long table, and his grandson Thomas sits opposite. Thomas, like his grandfather and younger brother, is masked, but those who chat with him will easily be able to determine his buoyant mood from his voice and manner. The food is excellent, if less varied and exotic than it would have been had supply lines not been so constrained. (Romain thought to bring a few things back from his most recent trip to Orlais and finds himself glad of it now.)



After dinner, guests may resume dancing and gossiping in the ballroom, or engaging in quieter conversation in the library. Or they can make their way out to the courtyard in the rear of the property. While Hightown’s constraints mean the outdoor space is not extensive, it is walled to offer privacy from the nearest neighbors and boasts a water feature, impressively lit in honor of the occasion.

The duke circulates throughout the party for the evening, seemingly doing absolutely nothing other than chatting with his guests. Yet somehow after he passes through, any guests with empty glasses find someone offering to fill them, any low-burning torches are promptly replaced, and any guests causing a scene are discreetly spoken to or, if necessary, shown into a carriage that will take them home. In addition to Romain, guests may have a chance to speak to the guest of honor, Thomas, or to his younger brother, 15-year-old Raoul, who has been given a special dispensation to stay at the party as long as he likes and is seemingly determined to make the most of it. The festivities will drag on until dawn, for those most committed to a bit of merriment in the face of invasion, or at least most committed to eating the duke’s refreshments and drinking his wine until they’re cut off.

Comments

[notathreat]

"One of those shots," Ellie says knowingly, startled at first by the way Gwenaëlle links their arms, but she allows it readily; she's been kind to her in deed, even when it surprised her.

Ellie snorts under her breath, glancing after the youth, who is eyeing them from behind a planter and pretending he's not. It seems like several others are doing the same, probably wondering who the hell Ellie is.

- and then,

"Wait, fuck. This is your house?"

[elegiaque]

Ellie is not the first person to realize this only deep into the evening, and Gwenaëlle laughs,

“Thomas is my cousin,” she elaborates, “and l'Duc is my grandfather. Sort of. I was passed off as his daughter's legitimate child for years, and he decided not to let a little thing like that being an illegal lie force him to give me up—when we first came to Kirkwall from Skyhold, he arranged the house for me. I haven't always lived here, but I do.”

Currently, she means. She points out Enchanter Julius, a tall, light-haired mage dressed not dissimilarly to Ellie, “He lived here for a bit in the first year, the old Forces Commander, Coupe, she made me bring someone with me for security and picking a mage was a bit of a fuck you. Ex-Templar,” as an explanatory aside. “I had never held a weapon, at that point, so it wasn't not a good idea.”

[notathreat]

Oh my god there's so much to unpack here.

Nobles are fucking bonkers, is what Ellie thinks immediately, because none of that makes sense to her. How can her being illegitimate make them not related? How can illegitimacy be illegal? What the absolute fuck? Of course, there was also Margaery and her brother's experience with the law, so maybe nobility just has a different rules all around-

What she says aloud, however, is probably less coherent.

"What the fuck, dude?" she says in a mumble, pulling a face, and tightening her arm in Gwenaëlle's. "Families are nuts."

... but hey, at least she's found out that Gwen's not afraid of mages, apparently.

"Why's the Forces Commander care about whether you have security?"

[elegiaque]

Gwenaëlle laughs, and it's got edge but it isn't unkind; not directed at anything, especially, just. Yeah, they are, aren't they.

“And I'm not even blood related to any of these fucking people.” But she says it fondly; Romain Charnier, l'Duc de Coucy, discovered that she was not his daughter's child, not his blood, and publicly asserted that he didn't give a fuck and wouldn't be parting with his favorite grandchild over a little thing like her being the bastard of his loathed son-in-law's elven housekeeper.

He chose her. She'll love him 'til she dies.

“—but I am to the mage, my uncle, that former Commander Coupe lives in filthy sin with out in the woods now. A pretty bit of hypocrisy, that. Anyway, he didn't know his brother well enough to know better than to give a fuck about us, so she stuck her oar in my business at every chance she got. Put a knife in my hands the first time.” Lived to regret it, although the knives Gwenaëlle stuck in her in turn were mostly verbal.

Her lips quirk. She loves and hates Luwenna Coupe in almost equal measure; she fears becoming her, she wants to make her proud. She misses her—

but she imagines what she'd think of all this evening, and it makes her laugh. Takes the edge off.

“We fell out, when I was involved with—do you know about the Tranquil?”

[notathreat]

Ellie follows this halfway, with a furrow in her brow, and absorbs parts of it, not sure if she got it right. Bloodlines are something she's unfamiliar with. Anyone who isn't an orphan is a goddamn miracle where she comes from, and families aren't the ones you share blood with, they're who you'd shed blood for.

But it seems like she might actually understand that.

The Commander thing she understands even if she's learnt the history of Riftwatch imperfectly. Getting bossed by a hardass of a woman convinced she had your best interests at heart.

"... yeah, kinda. People who have been magically lobotomized, right?"

[elegiaque]

“They're mages,” specifically, “who've had their connection to the Fade severed. It means that they can't perform magic any more—it also means that they feel no emotions, any more. It doesn't make them stupid, or less than people, it just makes them...they function differently. They need different sorts of protection.”

The pointedness of her clarification isn't because Ellie is a rifter; it's because Gwenaëlle is used to arguing the point of whether or not the Tranquil are people, and she comes to every discussion of it ready to die on the hill that they are not dead and to treat them as a lesser shade is—

unacceptable, to her

“It's meant to be something a mage can choose. It's not meant to be a punishment. But the Circles weren't meant to be the personal fiefdoms of Templars, either, and here we are, much rebellion deep. Anyway, Casimir Lyov, he was asking about when people first knew magic. He used to be Tranquil. It's sort of a big deal that we went to quite a lot of trouble to help him restore his connection to the Fade, and 'the Chantry killing everyone involved so no one remembers it's possible to do' is probably still on the table.”

Coupe had been, in a word, unimpressed.

[notathreat]

It hasn't been explained to her quite like that before. Instantly, Ellie's mind travels to how someone like that could be easily hurt, even more than the slow-creeping horror of being severed from their emotions.

Gwenaëlle says it like she expects Ellie to disagree, which is fucked up for different reasons. Instead she nods, her grip tightening on her arm a moment as she listens.

"When you say "we" restored him, who are you talking about?"

[elegiaque]

Better to ask forgiveness than permission—they hadn't got the latter and the jury's still out on the former. Gwenaëlle shrugs, lithe,

“It was mostly mages involved, other than me,” which can come as no real surprise, although her own involvement well might. Had, to Luwenna Coupe. “The Enchanter in the tight trousers over there. The mage one of the Averesches, and his stone cold fox redhead friend. I took Guilfoyle, who is over there,”

a tall, severe Orlesian man in well-tailored but muted black, unremarkably faded into the background of the evening but keeping a weather eye on whether or not he's going to have to turf Astarion,

“and we worked with Adalia, a rifter who's gone. That was where I got my bow, actually, and the really good scar story. I don't know exactly how they pulled it off, but they needed extremely specific supplies. I specifically do not mean 'we' as in the Inquisition, which is what we were a part of at the time and who were, on the whole, not thrilled.”

[notathreat]

The implications aren't lost on Ellie, and her eyes linger on Guilfoyle for longer than a few seconds, picking up on his interest in Astarion -- the old bat can certainly take care of himself, but Ellie's not going to forget a look like that.

"... so, just in case," she says carefully, "Do you have more of the stuff you need on hand? If you had to do it again?"

[elegiaque]

“That's a question for the mages,” she says, not because she wouldn't like to know it or because she doesn't think it'd ever matter, but: “If I had everything we needed and no mages who knew how to use it and were willing to do so, I would have a very expensive pile of nothing doing. But the methods and everything that was needed—there's documentation.”

Of course. If you're going to upend a foundational tenet of the world, you take some fucking notes.

(And probably, given the story this began with, the cost she's talking about isn't financial. Guilfoyle meets Ellie's gaze briefly, the impassive expression not shifting even as he takes in Gwenaëlle on her arm, and passes back to his sentry position at the edge of the affair.)

“Casimir is a friend,” as if that should explain everything. As if it should just go without saying that she'd be prepared to upend a foundational tenet of society, if a friend asked her to.

Probably, she thinks it should.

[notathreat]

Ellie meets that gaze like a brick wall, nothing to say what she's feeling, though the flatness of it may say something in and of itself. Sometimes she gets feelings about people, but this guy, she can't get a read on, and she's a suspicious sort.

It's probably fine, but some habits die hard.

"So... did someone make him Tranquil as a punishment then?" she asks, quiet, letting her voice get lost in the sound of the music and conversation around her, dropped for Gwenaëlle's ears only. "What happened?"

[elegiaque]

“I don't know,” she says, frank. “It's sort of a personal—if he ever wants to tell me how it happened, that's up to him, not for me to pry.”

It is a natural assumption that they were friends first; that she had known him before, and then wished to return him to that. It isn't what had happened, but to most people it would make more sense.

[notathreat]

That's one thing that Ellie utterly understands. She nods, her hand firm on Gwenaëlle's arm.

"I'm glad you helped him," she says, under her breath. Almost viciously satisfied. She's coming to realize, more and more, that not everyone would. It's incredibly fucked up, but something is in every world.

Best that they're not blindsided by it.