“I was very polite about it,” she says, dry enough that it sounds like what it is: I tried to be polite and I was transparently fucking unhappy about it. She thinks he had seen it for the kindness she wanted it to be, that she thought he was worth making the effort for even if she couldn't, quite, convincingly sell it. It is not Gwenaëlle's nature to say a thing she doesn't mean; there was no earlier point in her life where she was somehow any better at it. “He hadn't seen his brother in, I don't know, forty years. He hadn't met me, ever. He'd stopped in Orlais and got caught up with a quickness, inasmuch as that was possible,”
debatable, and from a biased source, and it had been reasonably clear to her on first impression that he was reserving his own judgment on more than he wasn't.
“I had lost my standing, by then. Someone had dug up the proof of my parentage and I'd been stripped of my inheritance, imperial auditors come to take stock of what the throne would gain from clawing back the de Vauquelin holdings after my lord's death. My uncle had some news for me from Orlais; what could and could not be promised to me. I hadn't expected it to matter so fast, except that all of us were at the Grand Tourney when word spread of the Venatori invasion into Orlais. My lord went to the front from there— I went to Halamshiral and the Greatwood, to see to his final affairs. I think we all understood, without him saying so, that he didn't want to come back from it. I saw to what we could take while he was still living and it was still his, the bequests he wanted seen to, those who he wished to provide for before the homes were shut up. My uncle's portion, which I assume paid for the cottage and its land. Mine, stored against the end of the war. Guilfoyle's, which has funded his retirement,”
her emotional support murder butler is actually retired and technically unemployed,
“references for servants. Jobs, where we were able to arrange them. Everyone dismissed, and everything locked up, and I've never bothered to find out what became of it all after Ghislain. I remember, I found a letter in a drawer that had never been sent. It had never even been finished. He wrote to la roitelet, the wren, in his terrible grief, and I remember saying to Coupe after, I had always thought he was just talking about birds.”
no subject
debatable, and from a biased source, and it had been reasonably clear to her on first impression that he was reserving his own judgment on more than he wasn't.
“I had lost my standing, by then. Someone had dug up the proof of my parentage and I'd been stripped of my inheritance, imperial auditors come to take stock of what the throne would gain from clawing back the de Vauquelin holdings after my lord's death. My uncle had some news for me from Orlais; what could and could not be promised to me. I hadn't expected it to matter so fast, except that all of us were at the Grand Tourney when word spread of the Venatori invasion into Orlais. My lord went to the front from there— I went to Halamshiral and the Greatwood, to see to his final affairs. I think we all understood, without him saying so, that he didn't want to come back from it. I saw to what we could take while he was still living and it was still his, the bequests he wanted seen to, those who he wished to provide for before the homes were shut up. My uncle's portion, which I assume paid for the cottage and its land. Mine, stored against the end of the war. Guilfoyle's, which has funded his retirement,”
her emotional support murder butler is actually retired and technically unemployed,
“references for servants. Jobs, where we were able to arrange them. Everyone dismissed, and everything locked up, and I've never bothered to find out what became of it all after Ghislain. I remember, I found a letter in a drawer that had never been sent. It had never even been finished. He wrote to la roitelet, the wren, in his terrible grief, and I remember saying to Coupe after, I had always thought he was just talking about birds.”