WHO: Nicola + You WHAT: Fresh meat. And eventually old gross meat too. WHEN: Bloomingtide, pre-mod plot. WHERE: Kirkwall & the Gallows for now. NOTES: Putting open and closed things for all my dudes in here as I write them, so if you want to plan something with any of them, tap my shoulder about it.
Two weeks after his arrival, Nicola loses an argument with a well-dressed merchant at the docks. Their debate is held in quiet and rapid Antivan, gestures louder than the words, and reluctantly concluded by a handshake that transitions into a friendlier clasp of his hand to her collar. She's leapt back onto her nimble little ship before he remembers the letter in his pocket, and they have to each lean over the grey, kelpy water for him to hand it across.
She tucks it into her shirt, and then she's busy with ropes and commands, and he's left him with the subject of their disagreement: ten sizable crates, arranged in five stacks of two.
He could lift one of them alone. Maybe. But the rest would not necessarily be here when he came back for them.
He's weighing the relative costs of (a) nine lost crates of shitty table wine, (b) having to broadcast a request for help, and (c) shelling out his own money for some loitering dockhand's time, when he spots (d) a single semi-familiar face or uniform that might be waylaid with a beckoning hand.
gallows.
Whoever has volunteered or been volunteered to teach a newcomer how the eluvians work — and what an eluvian even is — welcome to the room where Riftwatch's Gallows eluvian is kept. Nicola has been quiet. He hasn't expressed any reluctance to learn. However, when the mirror lights up, dully reflective surface giving way to a shimmering glimpse of what's waiting beyond it, he doesn't jump, exactly, but he does go from a curious lean forward to a more alarmed slant back from the mirror.
"I see," he says.
He has seen one of these before. His aunt has one, inert and decorative in her drawing room between a mounted halla head and a gleaming restored mosaic. Should he warn her? He'll consider it.
He does not step bravely forward or volunteer to go first. He says, "In Sirone everyone thinks Riftwatch is enormous. They think there is no other way you could be everywhere and do everything that you do."
“Good thing we’re limited by our imaginations and not theirs, then,” Gwenaëlle says, standing beside the mirror, clearly weighing whether or not she should outright remind him that the next step is literally stepping, or take pity on him and say she’s going first, or just haul him through and see how that goes. “If we stopped to consider how impossible most of what we achieve actually ought to be more often than we do,”
Nicola has had more charming first impressions than the cocky and implying his entire city lacks imagination. But he's also had less charming first impressions, and made them himself, so he only raises his eyebrows and tips his head as if giving this some thought.
What he's actually giving thought to is her contemplation of him. What her options here must be. The worrying fact that she has not already taken pity and gone first.
Maybe he should be embarrassed, about the hesitation, but he isn't. He has been very calm about meeting more mages in a single day than he'd ever encountered in his life. Extremely relaxed and reasonable about his roommate options being exclusively mages, too, plus one rifter. He didn't gawp at the griffons. He has, by his calculations, earned some hesitation over stepping through what is supposed to be glass into an alternate dimension.
It probably isn’t an immediate comfort to him that she stops to think about this question, or that she seems to be deciding what counts toward its answer—
“Not never,” she decides, “and the delay on returning wasn’t inexplicably magical and unique.” Borderline explicably magic and unique, except she doesn’t think a kidnapping is inherently, as a cause for disappearance, that special just because a demon did it. Impersonating everybody was the fucked up part, and hardly related to the eluvians,
Riftwatch has to answer a lot of questions most people never have to consider. It shifts one’s perspective, over time.
“Here,” she says, deciding that neither leaving him unattended to pussy out or sending him through ahead to somehow immediately find mischief are ideal outcomes for either of them and looping her elbow through his, “we’ll go together. It’ll be less impressive once it’s less mysterious.”
Maybe they’d have more support if more people realised they were seven people with the budget of three trying not to understand that they shouldn’t be able to fly in case they realise it’s true and plummet to their deaths.
Not never. That's great. That's fantastic. That's rocketing this from his least favorite part of his experience here so far to still his least favorite part of his experience here so far, but by a wider margin. How about he just takes his horse and meets Riftwatch wherever they're ever going in a week or five?
The only sign of any of these thoughts is a slight tightening of his jaw and the fact that he doesn't unclench his teeth to answer her out loud. He only takes a deep inhale and nods on the sighing exhale. Less impressive, less mysterious.
Sure.
For what it's worth, however, he does not need to be dragged. Her hooked arm is a sufficient spur in his side, and he steps through without jostling feet to make her go sort-of first.
"Oh," he says immediately, wincing against the — what? The everything, squinting and shielding his eyes as if it might only be a matter of a glaring sun before realizing there is no sun to glare. Eloquently: "Why?"
Her prompt answer of, “Ancient elvhenan was full of showy cunts,” does not actually seem intended to be some kind of niche jest, but rather her extremely specific and strongly held opinion on the matter. The remnants of that lost empire that remain mostly try to kill them in ways that suggest a kind of creativity arm’s race that stopped being impressive around the third time a spirit that looked like someone she loved tried to convince her to kill herself.
Maybe if Arlathan was so fucking great it’d still be here, or at least left some kind of legacy beyond mostly things that arguably shouldn’t exist.
It may be fair to say that the particular nature of their work is a biased sample (of things that shouldn’t exist), but say what you will about the Chantry (and she will, at length): they mostly aren’t booby-trapped out the ass. What refreshingly mundane oppression it engages in.
“Here,” she adds, letting go of him to direct them forward, “these are the mirrors we control.”
There is another man nearby, hands in pockets and loitering in a way which looks like he’d rather fade into the background; not explicitly wearing Riftwatch colours or pins, not outright trumpeting the fact that he works for them, but Nicola will have seen him around the dining hall and the residential tower. The Gallows are small enough, and the faces become familiar.
And since Cassian is already waiting at the docks himself and there’s really not much to do until the ferry gets back —
After a moment’s hesitation, he obediently saunters over at that wave of a hand, sizing up the ten crates with the arch of an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of luggage,” he says.
Cassian would not have been his first choice. Nothing wrong with him, of course, so far as Nicola knows, but Riftwatch does have burlier people. One makes do with what one has at their disposal, however, and two sets of mediocre muscles are still better than one.
Nicola taps one of them with the toe of his boot. It's not an earnest attempt at nudging it across the stone street, so he doesn't have to be disappointed when it doesn't budge at all.
"My cousins from a condition that makes her believe she is funny," he says — suffering, perhaps, from the same condition — and then comes out with it: "It's wine. To help me make friends, she says. Do you feel befriended yet?"
Some of that wary distance starts to thaw. It’s like carefully adjusting a dial, Cassian calibrating his demeanour accordingly to match and echo the other man: how much playful warmth to exude, how much to try to make this stranger like him in turn. Likely familiar calculations.
“Well,” he says, musing with a twinkle in his eye, “I haven’t had any yet, so I can’t say. What if it is very terrible wine?”
Nicola is a quiet, serious addition to the Diplomacy offices; for his first few days he does little more than introduce himself, listen, and read, working to get up to speed. He could be mistaken for shy. After a debriefing meeting, however, as he passes Byerly and Benedict, there's nothing shy about the way he stops and looks at them — no polite hovering, waiting for an opportunity to interrupt their conversation, but with an apparent expectation they'll stop and pay attention to him.
"Señor Rutyer," he says. "Señor Artemaeus. Any relation to Aurelius Artemaeus?"
Benedict is mid-sentence, telling Byerly about some fussy thing or another that the latter may or may not actually care about, but he stops short when they're addressed. His smile locks into Personnel Officer mode, only to freeze oddly with the invocation of his father's name.
If there's one thing that has always been true of Benedict, since he first set foot on the Gallows and even before, it's that he is a singularly terrible liar. He at least has the presence of mind to not answer at all, but looks to Byerly with a familiar searching, wide-eyed look. help
Byerly knows full well that if this man is asking that question, he already knows the answer to that question. Antivans are rarely curious. They are, more typically, excessively well-informed.
Still - that’s Benedict’s father, right? Who gives a damn about the father? He’s a minuscule presence next to his wife.
“Me? I suppose if you went back far enough, you could find something. Rutyer sap can be found in most of Thedas’ noble trees.”
Byerly smiles brightly. He watches closely to see how this no-longer-so-meek newcomer reacts to a bit of nonsense.
Nicola would not admit it, and he would be cross to know anyone else might be able to see it, but there is some amusement at that, hidden in infinitesimal shifts around his eyes. Some part of him does think it's funny. Or some distant part of him is only susceptible to the influence of big, bright smiles.
But aside from that faint glimmer, he looks as stern as if he were back home waiting for a hungover cousin to finish pulling on his pants.
"Then it is even more convenient to find you here," he says. "Your," what, eyebrows raising and a deep breath accompanying the guess, "seventeenth cousin however many times removed was in business with my relatives for some time. Perhaps they will reach a new agreement now that Governor Levati is dead — "
Benedict looks from Byerly back to Nicola, silently working to piece together what exactly is going on here and, as one might predict, coming up short. It’s with genuine indignant surprise that he meets the latter’s eyes again, on the subject of some dead governor or another—- why would he have anything to do with that? Why would his father, for that matter?
“…sorry?” His inclination is to scoff, roll his eyes toward Byerly. Who’s this weirdo?
Governor Levati. A relation of this newcomer, he supposes - or maybe not. Would a Crow be so unsubtle as to take the name of the person they were taking revenge for? Surely Yseult would have been aware if there was no Nicola Levati in existence and she was bringing in someone under a false name. Though - well - she was rather busy of late…And an Antivan didn’t need to be a Crow to have a blood vendetta.
Byerly’s smile remains pleasant, though his hand drifts slowly towards the knife at his belt. Just in case the man decides to pass along someone-or-other’s regards.
“I hope you’re not laboring under the misapprehension that dear Artemaeus is some emissary of some bit of his family’s business.”
Lounging with the suspicion, maybe — offering to buy the possibility a drink so they could talk —
He glances between them. Dear Artemaeus. The repeated looks to Rutyer. Interesting. Nicola can play along with that well enough: he focuses on the older man and speaks to him as if he's Artemaeus's minder, since that seems to be more or less the case. He only belatedly glances down to notice Rutyer's hand's progress toward the knife, eyebrows quirking in surprise, so he's either not a Crow or very good at pretending not to be one.
"This" Riftwatch, "would be a strange business for him if he was."
Well. Since this man has had the bad manners to overtly acknowledge Byerly’s move towards his knife, By will have the bad manners to openly lay his hand on its hilt.
Nicola's attention flicks back to Benedict. He takes a moment to stand there, silent, considering their expressions.
"Apparently not. I am sorry to have troubled you," he says.
He unfolds his arms from their formal rest behind his back and moves to continue on his way, but two steps in he stops and pivots back as if having just remembered:
"Chiaro Matelizi was my cousin — "
Not his first cousin. Or his second. But a cousin, somewhere in there.
" — and as you know, Señor Rutyer, he is also dead. I am busy this week, but... next Saturday?"
The name has an immediate effect upon Byerly. He grows suddenly very stiff, and very still, his face utterly immobile and his lips thin. But it’s not from anger, or even from fear; his grip falls away from his knife, rather than tightening on it. It’s something else - something more haunted.
“I…” He takes a breath in, then lowers his gaze. “Wartime is a very bad time for a duel, Señor Levati. Is there no other type of satisfaction you’d accept?”
Unprepared for how that escalated, Benedict is caught in a stare at Nicola for far too long before he has the sense to look at Byerly instead, who... takes the situation into stride.
Benedict opens his mouth to question, but closes it again, having the sense not to interrupt what is clearly a negotiation between whatever it is they call themselves. He casts a furtive glance back at Nicola, reassessing him.
Nicola, as serious as anything, gestures with both hands to himself.
"Antivan."
Which is a no, to accepting anything short of a duel.
"I will find a second somewhere," he adds, because even issuing a challenge this way has obviously been horribly informal and he never would have if he were not freshly arrived without any people to speak of, obviously.
"I can - " Byerly pinches the bridge of his nose. "Provide a list of recommendations. If need be." If it must happen, it ought to happen properly. Right?
Maker, he had thought this chapter of his life was finished and done. And who is this man? Is he the sort to take a slash and call it done - and if he is, is he the sort to leave his blade plain, or coat it with venom?
It’s unusual to see Byerly rattled, stammering, thrown off, and Benedict is seized with a unique anxiety in the presence of it. Something else rises in him at the same time, indignation mixed with something unfamiliar.
“We don’t do that here,” he says suddenly, drawing himself to his full height and pinning Nicola with his gaze, “Riftwatch has its own rules, and if you’ve actually joined, you’re subject to them too.” This would be a great time, he realizes, to actually make sure he’s not making this up wholecloth, but maybe Rowntree could be convinced to ban dueling if he’s quick about it. Or maybe the bluff will be enough.
"I assure you," Nicolas says to Benedict with a bland confidence that some people, in some situations, may in fact find assuring, "it will happen on our own time and someone else's property."
Not pointing out that, as he understands it, the Gallows is not Riftwatch's property in the first place — that's good manners. They're welcome. But he's also giving Benedict a more thorough sort of look than he had before, intrigued by this sudden discovery of authority whether it's a bluff or not. It pulls a hint of a smile out of him before he returns his attention to Byerly.
"I will take that list, Señor, and I will remember how kind you were to offer it."
He will also find fault with everyone on it until there's nothing to do but reschedule, but that's neither here nor there.
Truly, you are an all star, get your game on, etc.
Byerly wishes he could take solace in Benedict's rare show of backbone. He wishes he might join in it. Historically, one of his greatest talents has been dodging duels; in Orlais, some of his friends used to bet on whether or not he'd show up after he'd been challenged (with odds typically sitting around a hundred to one), and parlays would focus on the excuse he'd use for getting out of it. Overslept, accidentally scheduled another duel across town at the same time, stubbed his toe, left tied to the bed after a night of passion, et cetera et cetera.
But those sorts of duels had been for a ludicrously stupid parody of honor. This was different. In this case, he had truly offended, and gravely so. And he deserved the summons.
Still. Benedict's protest does serve as a reminder that his life is not entirely his own. "It would also be proper for us to receive permission from Riftwatch. Perhaps you might see to that, Senor?"
"You're not going to," Benedict snaps, bristling further when he clocks what resembles a smile on the stranger-- how dare you make fun of me-- and feels the urgency of the situation closing in. Byerly is playing along, and he shouldn't.
"Neither of you can be spared." well ONE OF YOU CAN
"Come now," Nicola says to Benedict, in a tone he's most recently directed at one of his more distant relatives while he had a dish-shattering tantrum, as if everyone only needs to be reminded to think logically about this. To Byerly, "Is he whose permission I need to secure?"
Clearly not. But Nicola's expert read on the current situation is that Benedict isn't going to listen to him telling him it's not his call.
Between Nicola’s patronizing tone and the question, Benedict has reached full Slighted Nobility— it seems like he couldn’t get any haughtier, but Byerly’s response sends a jolt of revelation through him and he draws up his crystal.
“Gela,” he says, tossing his hair like a fancy horse, “how do you feel about duels between members of Riftwatch?”
Nicola tilts his head and purses his lips: that isn’t how he would ask. This isn’t about anyone’s feelings. People can feel horrified or judgmental about the entire concept all they like without that changing a thing.
“We could always quit for a few days,” he murmurs to Byerly.
This is a joke. He is joking, some odd sense of camaraderie with the person here who is being reasonable about social mores and customs even if he’s also a cousin murderer. It’s even a little obvious, from the corners of his eyes and mouth, that he thinks he’s funny.
"With swords," Benedict confirms, "to the death." Thanks for the clarification, Nicola.
Gela's voice is audible but not clear in response; "will you say that a little louder, please?" he asks, holding up the crystal for the others to hear it better. "I don't have time for two members of Riftwatch to kill each other with swords," rings Gela's voice, "so if you wouldn't I'd be very grateful."
"Ta," Benedict says sweetly, and ends the conversation with a pointed, distinctly smug look Nicola's way.
That wasn't a do not, that would I would rather you didn't —
But it's now two and a half against one. The odds of convincing Rutyer are getting poorer by the minute. So Nicola only shrugs, blasé in the face of both Benedict's smirk and Byerly's shame.
"Ah well."
What can one freshly-arrived Antivan with no local friends do.
"If my family sends the Crows in my stead, tell the Maker that I tried."
Byerly, though, is frowning at the mention of the Crows. The threat has drawn him out, ever so slightly, from his miserable introspection.
"Is that considered honorable in Antiva these days? Sending assassins in place of holding a duel?" Though Maker help him, it actually might be acceptable by the rules of honor. Antivans are all completely insane.
Nicola's hands spread in a shrug: it's not dishonorable. It's Antiva. And, "If it's not in my hands, it's out of them. I did try."
Maybe Byerly should make friends with people who have more confidence in his skill with a sword? But that's none of Nicola's business, of course. He verges on smiling, the vaguely pleasant expression or someone who's not unhappy but just doesn't do a lot of smiling on the clock, and he steps back from the pair of them.
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kirkwall (open)
Two weeks after his arrival, Nicola loses an argument with a well-dressed merchant at the docks. Their debate is held in quiet and rapid Antivan, gestures louder than the words, and reluctantly concluded by a handshake that transitions into a friendlier clasp of his hand to her collar. She's leapt back onto her nimble little ship before he remembers the letter in his pocket, and they have to each lean over the grey, kelpy water for him to hand it across.
She tucks it into her shirt, and then she's busy with ropes and commands, and he's left him with the subject of their disagreement: ten sizable crates, arranged in five stacks of two.
He could lift one of them alone. Maybe. But the rest would not necessarily be here when he came back for them.
He's weighing the relative costs of (a) nine lost crates of shitty table wine, (b) having to broadcast a request for help, and (c) shelling out his own money for some loitering dockhand's time, when he spots (d) a single semi-familiar face or uniform that might be waylaid with a beckoning hand.
gallows.
Whoever has volunteered or been volunteered to teach a newcomer how the eluvians work — and what an eluvian even is — welcome to the room where Riftwatch's Gallows eluvian is kept. Nicola has been quiet. He hasn't expressed any reluctance to learn. However, when the mirror lights up, dully reflective surface giving way to a shimmering glimpse of what's waiting beyond it, he doesn't jump, exactly, but he does go from a curious lean forward to a more alarmed slant back from the mirror.
"I see," he says.
He has seen one of these before. His aunt has one, inert and decorative in her drawing room between a mounted halla head and a gleaming restored mosaic. Should he warn her? He'll consider it.
He does not step bravely forward or volunteer to go first. He says, "In Sirone everyone thinks Riftwatch is enormous. They think there is no other way you could be everywhere and do everything that you do."
gallows.
more than none, less than they should,
“we’d get fuck all done, probably.”
no subject
What he's actually giving thought to is her contemplation of him. What her options here must be. The worrying fact that she has not already taken pity and gone first.
Maybe he should be embarrassed, about the hesitation, but he isn't. He has been very calm about meeting more mages in a single day than he'd ever encountered in his life. Extremely relaxed and reasonable about his roommate options being exclusively mages, too, plus one rifter. He didn't gawp at the griffons. He has, by his calculations, earned some hesitation over stepping through what is supposed to be glass into an alternate dimension.
"Has anyone ever gone in and never come back?"
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“Not never,” she decides, “and the delay on returning wasn’t inexplicably magical and unique.” Borderline explicably magic and unique, except she doesn’t think a kidnapping is inherently, as a cause for disappearance, that special just because a demon did it. Impersonating everybody was the fucked up part, and hardly related to the eluvians,
Riftwatch has to answer a lot of questions most people never have to consider. It shifts one’s perspective, over time.
“Here,” she says, deciding that neither leaving him unattended to pussy out or sending him through ahead to somehow immediately find mischief are ideal outcomes for either of them and looping her elbow through his, “we’ll go together. It’ll be less impressive once it’s less mysterious.”
Maybe they’d have more support if more people realised they were seven people with the budget of three trying not to understand that they shouldn’t be able to fly in case they realise it’s true and plummet to their deaths.
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The only sign of any of these thoughts is a slight tightening of his jaw and the fact that he doesn't unclench his teeth to answer her out loud. He only takes a deep inhale and nods on the sighing exhale. Less impressive, less mysterious.
Sure.
For what it's worth, however, he does not need to be dragged. Her hooked arm is a sufficient spur in his side, and he steps through without jostling feet to make her go sort-of first.
"Oh," he says immediately, wincing against the — what? The everything, squinting and shielding his eyes as if it might only be a matter of a glaring sun before realizing there is no sun to glare. Eloquently: "Why?"
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Maybe if Arlathan was so fucking great it’d still be here, or at least left some kind of legacy beyond mostly things that arguably shouldn’t exist.
It may be fair to say that the particular nature of their work is a biased sample (of things that shouldn’t exist), but say what you will about the Chantry (and she will, at length): they mostly aren’t booby-trapped out the ass. What refreshingly mundane oppression it engages in.
“Here,” she adds, letting go of him to direct them forward, “these are the mirrors we control.”
docks.
And since Cassian is already waiting at the docks himself and there’s really not much to do until the ferry gets back —
After a moment’s hesitation, he obediently saunters over at that wave of a hand, sizing up the ten crates with the arch of an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of luggage,” he says.
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Cassian would not have been his first choice. Nothing wrong with him, of course, so far as Nicola knows, but Riftwatch does have burlier people. One makes do with what one has at their disposal, however, and two sets of mediocre muscles are still better than one.
Nicola taps one of them with the toe of his boot. It's not an earnest attempt at nudging it across the stone street, so he doesn't have to be disappointed when it doesn't budge at all.
"My cousins from a condition that makes her believe she is funny," he says — suffering, perhaps, from the same condition — and then comes out with it: "It's wine. To help me make friends, she says. Do you feel befriended yet?"
no subject
“Well,” he says, musing with a twinkle in his eye, “I haven’t had any yet, so I can’t say. What if it is very terrible wine?”
diplomacy offices (benedict & byerly)
"Señor Rutyer," he says. "Señor Artemaeus. Any relation to Aurelius Artemaeus?"
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If there's one thing that has always been true of Benedict, since he first set foot on the Gallows and even before, it's that he is a singularly terrible liar. He at least has the presence of mind to not answer at all, but looks to Byerly with a familiar searching, wide-eyed look. help
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Still - that’s Benedict’s father, right? Who gives a damn about the father? He’s a minuscule presence next to his wife.
“Me? I suppose if you went back far enough, you could find something. Rutyer sap can be found in most of Thedas’ noble trees.”
Byerly smiles brightly. He watches closely to see how this no-longer-so-meek newcomer reacts to a bit of nonsense.
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But aside from that faint glimmer, he looks as stern as if he were back home waiting for a hungover cousin to finish pulling on his pants.
"Then it is even more convenient to find you here," he says. "Your," what, eyebrows raising and a deep breath accompanying the guess, "seventeenth cousin however many times removed was in business with my relatives for some time. Perhaps they will reach a new agreement now that Governor Levati is dead — "
He looks back at wide-eyed Benedict.
" — coincidentally, I'm sure."
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“…sorry?” His inclination is to scoff, roll his eyes toward Byerly. Who’s this weirdo?
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Byerly’s smile remains pleasant, though his hand drifts slowly towards the knife at his belt. Just in case the man decides to pass along someone-or-other’s regards.
“I hope you’re not laboring under the misapprehension that dear Artemaeus is some emissary of some bit of his family’s business.”
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Lounging with the suspicion, maybe — offering to buy the possibility a drink so they could talk —
He glances between them. Dear Artemaeus. The repeated looks to Rutyer. Interesting. Nicola can play along with that well enough: he focuses on the older man and speaks to him as if he's Artemaeus's minder, since that seems to be more or less the case. He only belatedly glances down to notice Rutyer's hand's progress toward the knife, eyebrows quirking in surprise, so he's either not a Crow or very good at pretending not to be one.
"This" Riftwatch, "would be a strange business for him if he was."
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He's distantly aware of receiving a new dossier, an Antivan one, that he hasn't had the chance to look over yet. In the moment, he wishes he had.
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He arches his eyebrows. Can they help him?
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"Apparently not. I am sorry to have troubled you," he says.
He unfolds his arms from their formal rest behind his back and moves to continue on his way, but two steps in he stops and pivots back as if having just remembered:
"Chiaro Matelizi was my cousin — "
Not his first cousin. Or his second. But a cousin, somewhere in there.
" — and as you know, Señor Rutyer, he is also dead. I am busy this week, but... next Saturday?"
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“I…” He takes a breath in, then lowers his gaze. “Wartime is a very bad time for a duel, Señor Levati. Is there no other type of satisfaction you’d accept?”
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Benedict opens his mouth to question, but closes it again, having the sense not to interrupt what is clearly a negotiation between whatever it is they call themselves. He casts a furtive glance back at Nicola, reassessing him.
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"Antivan."
Which is a no, to accepting anything short of a duel.
"I will find a second somewhere," he adds, because even issuing a challenge this way has obviously been horribly informal and he never would have if he were not freshly arrived without any people to speak of, obviously.
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Maker, he had thought this chapter of his life was finished and done. And who is this man? Is he the sort to take a slash and call it done - and if he is, is he the sort to leave his blade plain, or coat it with venom?
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“We don’t do that here,” he says suddenly, drawing himself to his full height and pinning Nicola with his gaze, “Riftwatch has its own rules, and if you’ve actually joined, you’re subject to them too.”
This would be a great time, he realizes, to actually make sure he’s not making this up wholecloth, but maybe Rowntree could be convinced to ban dueling if he’s quick about it. Or maybe the bluff will be enough.
it's been... ONE MONTH since you looked at me
Not pointing out that, as he understands it, the Gallows is not Riftwatch's property in the first place — that's good manners. They're welcome. But he's also giving Benedict a more thorough sort of look than he had before, intrigued by this sudden discovery of authority whether it's a bluff or not. It pulls a hint of a smile out of him before he returns his attention to Byerly.
"I will take that list, Señor, and I will remember how kind you were to offer it."
He will also find fault with everyone on it until there's nothing to do but reschedule, but that's neither here nor there.
Truly, you are an all star, get your game on, etc.
But those sorts of duels had been for a ludicrously stupid parody of honor. This was different. In this case, he had truly offended, and gravely so. And he deserved the summons.
Still. Benedict's protest does serve as a reminder that his life is not entirely his own. "It would also be proper for us to receive permission from Riftwatch. Perhaps you might see to that, Senor?"
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"Neither of you can be spared." well ONE OF YOU CAN
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Clearly not. But Nicola's expert read on the current situation is that Benedict isn't going to listen to him telling him it's not his call.
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"No," he replies. "That would be the head of Diplomacy."
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seems like he couldn’t get any haughtier, but Byerly’s response sends a jolt of revelation through him and he draws up his crystal.
“Gela,” he says, tossing his hair like a fancy horse, “how do you feel about duels between members of Riftwatch?”
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“We could always quit for a few days,” he murmurs to Byerly.
This is a joke. He is joking, some odd sense of camaraderie with the person here who is being reasonable about social mores and customs even if he’s also a cousin murderer. It’s even a little obvious, from the corners of his eyes and mouth, that he thinks he’s funny.
“Whoever lives joins again afterwards.”
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Gela's voice is audible but not clear in response; "will you say that a little louder, please?" he asks, holding up the crystal for the others to hear it better.
"I don't have time for two members of Riftwatch to kill each other with swords," rings Gela's voice, "so if you wouldn't I'd be very grateful."
"Ta," Benedict says sweetly, and ends the conversation with a pointed, distinctly smug look Nicola's way.
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“I wish I could give you some satisfaction. But I fear that duty must come before honor.”
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But it's now two and a half against one. The odds of convincing Rutyer are getting poorer by the minute. So Nicola only shrugs, blasé in the face of both Benedict's smirk and Byerly's shame.
"Ah well."
What can one freshly-arrived Antivan with no local friends do.
"If my family sends the Crows in my stead, tell the Maker that I tried."
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“I suppose you’re returning to them, then?” don’t make me onboard you
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"No. I have come to work, and 'neither of us can be spared,' as you say."
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"Is that considered honorable in Antiva these days? Sending assassins in place of holding a duel?" Though Maker help him, it actually might be acceptable by the rules of honor. Antivans are all completely insane.
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Maybe Byerly should make friends with people who have more confidence in his skill with a sword? But that's none of Nicola's business, of course. He verges on smiling, the vaguely pleasant expression or someone who's not unhappy but just doesn't do a lot of smiling on the clock, and he steps back from the pair of them.
"I will see you around."