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[sythyry]

Arfaen's Credentials (when things go wrong) [22 Hispis 4385]

Quendry:"Jemp-jinga? Do you know that you have a squirrel in your yard? I think it eating mushrooms! Maybe also cheese! Does a squirrel eat cheese? I think maybe your squirrel eats cheese!"

Jempjinga:"We have hired it at the exorbitant price of three fine cheeses a week, payable in full every third day, for the sole purpose of entertaining distinguished young visitors from Vheshrame such as yourself. And keeping the mushrooms under control.."

Arfaen:"Quendry, please don't bother the gentleman."

Jempjinga:"Madam, chatting with the young and innocent is rarely, if ever, a bother." He tilted his left ear by a very careful eleven-and-a-quarter degrees. Or something. I couldn't see any gesture, but Arfaen cringed.

Arfaen:"He had nothing to do with it."

Jempjinga:"No, I should think not. Young master Quendry, I have three granddaughters not far from your age. Perhaps you could figure out which of you has affan in decorating tails with ribbons?"

Quendry:"Can a squirrel tail be decorated with ribbons? Maybe a mushroom can be decorated with ribbons!" Arfaen hugged him, and he ran off to play with the clan Coryn girls.

Jempjinga:"And now we come to the matter of your clan standing."

Arfaen:"Well, I was born to clan Denn, auxiliary clan Coryn. I had to change when I married a Denn man."

Jempjinga:"He would be the father of your charming and innocent son, I take it?"

Arfaen:"He would."

Jempjinga:"You are estranged?"

Arfaen:"We are divorced from three years."

Jempjinga:"You did not see fit to change back to clan Denn?"

Arfaen:"The situation was not propitious."

Jempjinga:"I should imagine not. Ah, Frise. Please allow me to introduce Arfaen, the cook to the visiting wizard, from Vheshrame."

Frise:"A pleasure to welcome you to Eigrach, good Arfaen." She was another pure-white Cani of some rather elongated breed, and wearing flowing (and quite revealing) robes of white gauze.

Arfaen, Frise, Jempjinga:A variety of politenesses and courtesies for some nine minutes.

Jempjinga:"Arfaen is presenting her credentials in Clan Coryn. However, she is an adulteress, and, indeed, not even the most decent sort of adulteress. I do believe she's taken up with the Herethroy currently nibbling on sweetmeats in the parlor, if I am not mistaken."

Vae:"And how does he know that? She never said any such thing."

Me:"I have no idea."

Frise:"Goodness gracious."

Jempjinga:"The question being, of course, who knows precisely what?"

At which point a phantom Cani hand caressed me about the head and wings. I rather jumped. One of the more accidental features of the insignia is that one wearer may thusly pet another, which had engendered some small amusement when it was first discovered. I was uncertain why Arfaen (or Phaniet) was petting me just then; neither of them had done it ever before. (Nor in person, in case you are pruriently keeping track.)

Arfaen:"Well, Mellilot knows most of it, I will say."

Jempjinga:"As one might expect."

Arfaen:"Phaniet, of course, is my confidante. I have no secrets from Phaniet. Nor from Thiane, who tutors Quendry."

Frise:"Indeed."

Arfaen:"I am sure that other people suspect. We are aboard a skyboat, after all, and the quarters are rather close. But there are no other Cani aboard, save my son and, lately, a stowaway of no great interest. I should be surprised if any of my friends were unaware of it, or found it upsetting."

Frise:"Right."

Jempjinga:"Of course there is a good deal that you are concealing."

Arfaen:"I'm not!"

Jempjinga:"And if you believe that, Frise, you are more of a greengrocer than a countess capable of producing substantial rewards at a mere whim."

Arfaen:"I won't be doing anything disloyal!"

Frise:"But you already have, haven't you?"

Arfaen:"I have not!"

Jempjinga:"Few people can lie to me successfully, and fewer can lie to Frise."

Frise:"I can see by your face that you are trying to be a honest girl. I don't imagine it can have been that bad... but you'd best tell us what it was. "

Jempjinga:"And a fine time you'll have on Srineia, if we refuse you for being a liar and scoundrel."

Arfaen petted me again. Rather roughly! It would have tugged my feathers, if it were actual touch rather than simply displaced sensation.

Arfaen:"It wasn't much."

Frise:"Tell us!" She stood in a traditional Cani pose of assertion of dominance, ears high, tail high, that sort of thing.

Arfaen:"I've been having a bit of an affair."

Jempjinga:"With Mellilot?"

Arfaen:"Cheating on Mellilot, I mean. With an Orren boy from the skyboat."

Jempjinga:"Such is the honor of the transaffectionate, I suppose. You'll be having affairs with five others soon, I imagine." He flicked his tailtip a whole inch to the left.

Arfaen: Tail low, ears flat, and so on.

Frise:"But you might do better to explain the rest of it, whatever that may be."

Arfaen:"Syth ... someone important on the skyboat has their eye on the boy."

Frise:"You can say the rest of zir name, dear. We are quite aware of the wizard's proclivities."

Arfaen:"I'm sure Sythyry would be very upset if zie learned about me and Inconnu. Please don't tell!"

Vae:"And have you been seeking Inconnu?"

Me:"Not particularly. He is quite pretty, but he's so very young, even for someone his age."

Vae:"And why would you be upset, from what Arfaen has done?"

Me:"I have no idea what Arfaen is going on about. Or why she keeps poking me."

Jempjinga:"Full information is necessary for the clan! But it can be kept confidential. For a greater or lesser length of time."

Arfaen:"What would you have me do?"

Jempjinga:"Nothing that would cause yourself or your companions the least bit of trouble, of course."

Frise:"But if you chance to hear of your wizard discussing making weapons for other cities of Srineia, well, letting your friends and dominants in Clan Coryn would hardly cause the least bit of trouble for yourself or your companions."

Jempjinga:"And you could keep your little betrayal of your betrayal of wedding vows secret."

Frise:"And there might well be some gifts. From your friends in your clan, of course. Nothing would be surprising about that."

Arfaen rubbed around my ears, quite hard.

Arfaen:"I'm only the day-chef. I don't hear about everything. But if I do hear something, my superiors in Clan Coryn will hear it as well."

Jempjinga:"Ah, excellent. You are, in the end, a sensible girl."

Frise:"Can you give her the clan-tags, Jempjinga?" Of course Frise herself isn't clan Coryn, since she's the wife to someone who is.

Jempjinga:"Of course, since you request it, my dear. I must say that if you dishonor yourself again -- say, by concealing information that you have sworn to provide -- I shall have you stripped of your Coryn membership. I don't imagine your reputation could survive that, especially given what else it's had to endure."

Frise:"Of course Mellilot and even Inconnu are your own private matters. I can't imagine that your clan will have anything much to say about it. I can manage my husband, I'm sure, should the situation arise."

Jempjinga:"Well. Should her membership need to be ruined, rest assured that no secret will remain unrevealed."

Frise:"I can't imagine how such a fate as that would ever come to such a sensible girl as our Arfaen. Do you like codelieth perfume, Arfaen?"

Arfaen:"I usually can't afford any."

Frise:"Just a few drops, dear, but you won't want to be using too much, what with that Herethroy and all." She gave Arfaen a tiny glass teardrop of a bottle.

Arfaen:"Oh! This is quite nice!" She sniffed it deeply, and wagged her tail with a dangerous ferocity.

Frise:"My pleasure, dear!"

Jempjinga: [who had left to get a clan emblem from Bwipin, and just returned] "And here you are." He handed it to Frise, who tied it on Arfaen's arm.

They were polite (Jempjinga) or friendly (Frise) for a presumably carefully-calculated nine minutes or so. Then Quendry and three cute little puppy-girls skipped into the room.

Quendry:"I have affan! I have affan in purple ribbons!"

Arfaen:"You certainly look like you do!" Which he did. One of the girls was wearing nothing else, and the other two were rather entangled.

Quendry:"They have an oyster bed! In the back yard! It is full of water! Oysters like to sleep in water! Now, the oysters are sleeping with purple ribbons in the water!"

Jempjinga:"Oh, dear. I shall have to have the gardener untie them. "

And they were all perfectly friendly, just as if the Eigrachters hadn't just bullied Arfaen a few minutes before.

Vae:"And what was that about, and what just happened?"

Me:"I hope Arfaen is willing to explain."

Vae:"And why did not they check that Arfaen was in the clan, the way they did Phaniet?"

Me:"I guess they weren't trying to blackmail Phaniet."

Comments

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

Honestly I'd be rather flattered. Clan Coryn is trying to install spies upon you, even while you are spying on them.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

... Let's see... Arfaen let you spy on the Cani... and the Cani expect her to spy on you... and she's the cook.

... I think she just qualifies as the most dangerous person on the ship now, by Blockbuster Tradition. :D

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

Somewhere along the line I'd forgotten that Cani are essentially Roman Catholics (a wealthy and influential religious sect on our world that doesn't believe in divorce).

[rowyn]

I would guess that Arfaen was making sure you were listening to her being blackmailed, especially since they were blackmailing her to give information on you. But I do rather wonder about her comments on Inconnu. If she were lying about all or part of that -- like the bit about thinking you'd be upset? -- would her inquisitors know? Or put any anomalies down to her existing agitation? Hmmm.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

Huh I thought she was just establishing she had a reason to not talk or be familiar with Sythyry, making her a poor source of information.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

I thought she might have been providing them with some extra, more immediate blackmail material to make them happier, and was poking Sythyry so zie would know to go along with it...

... but I'm not very sure of that.

[rowyn]

Ahhh, that makes a certain amount of sense. So does Perlandria's hypothesis, though.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

At least you can ask Arfaen about it as soon as she's sufficiently alone.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I did!

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

Me:"I have no idea what Arfaen is going on about. Or why she keeps poking me."

The thing she was actually hiding from them was that she has unlawful posession of Quendry. She made up the story about Inconnu to throw them off: they knew she was hiding something, she gave them something that fit their prejudices about the transffectionate and so they never bothered to inquire further.

PS - When Arfaen gets back to the Strayaway, can you check out her clan tag surreptiously? You may not be the only person who uses enchanted insignias to spy on people.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

So far, this is a remarkably gentle doom!

Am I to gather that your confidence Arfaen was the one giving those various contacts was based on further interrogation? At first you'd suggested it could've been Phaniet... Or was there, in fact, some other clue that gave it away?

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it wasn't entirely made up. But it might've been something she was making an unnecessarily big deal over.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Waitwaitwait, hold on. Cani are exogamous. Wouldn't it be more likely that Arfaen changed her primary clan from Denn to Coryn if her ex husband was clan Denn, not clan Coryn?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

That's what happened ... did my translator say it wrong again?

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

I fear so:

Arfaen:"Well, I was born to clan Denn, auxiliary clan Coryn. I had to change when I married a Coryn man."

[rowyn]

Oooh, that makes sense!

[rowyn]

So when are you going to tell us? Enquiring minds want to know!

An Edifice of Souls

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

The more I see of Cani, the more impressed I become with their creator's skill at psychological sculpting. You'd think they would tear each other to pieces with revenge-wars, but they have the loyalty thing to balance it. You'd think they could cooperate to the point of totally taking over the world-tree, but the fussiness prevents it. They're a giant kinetic sculpture, always moving and rebalancing, but never crashing down. And he did it just because he could, because it was cool.

I can do that with languages. I don't think I could do it with a species, even with my grasp of genetic engineering (a favorite skill in some lives), and even though I'm good at balancing fortes and foibles within a character. So I just kind of stand back thinking, "Wow."

Re: An Edifice of Souls

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I shall be certain to convey your appreciation to the god Reluu the next time I am making small talk with him.

[Bard beams!]

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I shall punish my translator severely, rest assured!

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I did!

Rather, I did my part. My translator is rather a sluggard.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

(She told me later -- before I wrote this -- and it was too awkward being uncertain about it.)

Re: An Edifice of Souls

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh, I also told my monster friends about this, so they could read the relevant diary entries.

Re: An Edifice of Souls

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I am pleased! The more extradimensional monsters who read my diaries, the better, as far as I am concerned. Many thanks!