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kadharonon) wrote2022-04-03 10:25 pm
A bunch of snippets of Kit and Edie stuff.
I've been poking at this project—which I'm tentatively calling Langford House for now—for Camp NaNo, so here's some incomplete stuff from maybe the next couple of chapters and a snippet from later on.
Letty fusses over Edie:
“You can stop pretending to be asleep now.”
Edie opened her eyes in a cautious squint. “I wasn’t,” she protested, feeling her voice rasp drily in her throat. “It’s just that man was so very bright.”
“Hm.” The grey-haired woman who was kneeling at the side of the couch gave her a dubious look, and Edie resisted the urge to blurt out that she’d also been too embarrassed to face him again after the way they’d just met. “Let’s see if we can get you sitting up.”
Edie lifted her head, and then swallowed hard and shut her eyes as a wave of nausea swept over her, forcing her to drop her head back to the cushion beneath it. “I’ll just stay like this, I think.”
The woman let out another contemplative little hum. “I’m Letty.”
Edie forced her eyes open again. “Edie. Verricker.”
“You want to tell me how long you’ve been wearing this, Edie?” Letty reached out and tapped the charmstone at Edie’s throat.
“Three months,” Edie lied.
A frown deepened the creases in Letty’s brow. “You know you’re not supposed to wear these for much more than a month or two. Especially if you’re elf-shot,” she said, in a brisk, no-nonsense tone. As she spoke, she got to her feet and started gathering cushions off the other pieces of furniture in the room.
Edie tried to wipe away her grimace as Letty turned back towards her. “They take nearly a month to start working, anyway,” she said weakly. “And my cycle is long.”
“Is that so,” Letty said, in a bland sort of tone that left Edie certain the other woman was seeing right through her. She knelt at Edie’s side again and helped her sit up a little, inserting the first of the cushions to help support her. “That fellow with Kit is your brother?”
Edie felt absurdly grateful for the change of topic, for all that there were other dangers in discussing this with a stranger. “In law.”
“You running off with him?” Letty asked, still in that bland, disinterested tone of voice as she hitched Edie up a little further in order to add another cushion.
Edie couldn’t suppress a snort of derision. “Hardly.”
Letty fixed her with a sharp look. “You don’t like the man, then.”
Edie sighed. She would be doing Charles a disservice to speak poorly of him. After all, he did care. In his stodgy, overprotective way. “He’s… family,” she said diplomatically.
Letty, it seemed, understood. “Ah, one of those,” she said, barely hidden laughter in her voice. “Well. I have my own fair share of annoying older brothers.”
It felt strange to hear such an intimate admission from a woman so nearly a complete stranger to her, and it made Edie shy. She shut her eyes again.
“Still feeling nauseous?”
Edie nodded. After all, it wasn’t untrue.
“Well, then, my little lamb, I’m going to go get you something that should help you with that,” Letty said, the gentle downcountry accent her voice carried becoming more prominent for a moment. Firm hands tucked the blanket that was over Edie up around her exposed shoulders and neck. “Don’t try to move, you hear me?”
Edie nodded again, choosing not to mention the fact that she probably couldn’t move from this spot even if she wanted to. She lay there beneath the blanket and listened to Letty’s retreating footsteps and tried not to panic, taking one deep breath after another in a desperate bid to calm herself. Just being in a Great House made her pulse race, a reaction that was as irrational as it was inescapable. It had been fine as long as Letty had been in the room to distract her, but now that Edie was all alone, her fear came rushing in. She knew the House was stable—had felt it, from the moment she had set eyes on Kit Langford—and she knew that even if something happened to him, there would be more than enough time for her and everyone else to escape this place. Travel was easier and faster than it had been twenty years ago; even with the snow, government magicians would be able to get here with plenty of time to neutralize the house before it went mad.
But even still, even still, it frightened her, and not just because of the potential harm. A Great House had taken her parents from her; even a sane one seemed a threat. She had kept herself far from such places for her entire life so far, a natural reluctance to face her own fear, and in doing so, had not encountered reality of how it would feel to enter one. Most people were buffered from the day to day noise of life in a world where magic underpinned all aspects of society by their own internal reservoirs. It might take someone like Charles—who was as magically sensitive as an old boot—more than a week to notice something uncanny about this place. But Edie had no such protections. There was no working more major than a Great House, and it left Edie feeling scraped raw.
At least this was a good room, unlike that entryway. There, any joyful reunions were far in the past; decades of bitter and tearful partings overwhelmed what remained of their influence. But this room had mostly escaped that taint. Here, there was the memory of laughter, of friendly chatter, of warm family feeling. Distant, still—there was a heaviness that permeated the room, like a thundercloud she could feel the pressure of without seeing—but not so far in the past nor so infrequent as it had been in that entryway.
The breaths Edie had been struggling to take became easier as she pushed past that heaviness, reaching for those lighter moments the room had held witness to. By the time Letty’s footsteps entered the room once more, Edie had almost drifted off to sleep, warm and drowsy and comfortable on this couch, as so many had been before her.
“Well, now. Let’s see if we can get some of this tea into you. Mind if I help you drink?”
“Let me see if I can manage?” Edie asked, opening her eyes in a cautious squint. She fumbled with the blanket, and after a moment Letty set the mug she was carrying aside and helped her. Somehow, her fur wrap had gotten twisted around her, trapping her arm against her side, and it took a great deal of awkward maneuvering to wrench herself free of it. Once her arms were free, Letty offered the mug handle-first, clearly waiting until she was certain Edie had a firm grip on it before releasing her hold on it.
The contents were warm and fragrant, with the smell of ginger dominating. Edie frowned as her hands trembled and took a cautious sip. The tea was sharp against her tongue, but Letty was right; it did help with the nausea.
One of her fingertips felt strange against the warm side of the mug, and she balanced the mug against her chest with her other hand so that she could inspect it. There was nothing she could see, but…
“I misread the situation at first,” Letty said, sounding somewhat sheepish. “Kit took a drop of blood. To open your connection to the house.”
Edie swallowed hard as the nausea returned in force. “I see.”
“You sound as if you understand.”
“My parents were government magicians. Specializing in Great Houses. And there was a time in my life when I had… an interest.” Back when Great Houses had just been the stuff of old, heroic stories. Back when she had been less… intimately acquainted with the ways in which they could go wrong.
“Ah. Well.” Letty sighed. “Kit stopped before… well. He stopped.”
Edie wrapped her fingers back around the mug and forced down another sip of the tea.
Letty and Kit have a conversation (that needs fleshing out):
The door to the other half of the master suite opened, and Kit lifted his head off his pillows to peer over at it. Letty came through, locking it behind her and pocketing the key.
“Why were you in there?”
“That’s where we’ve put Edie,” she said briskly. “Thought I ought to come warn you.”
“In there?”
“Someone had to go in there. It’s not as if we keep all that many rooms ready for visitors these days, and it was that or that room we keep ready for any visiting magicians.”
“So put Charles next to me, not…” Not a woman who was married to someone else and travelling with her over-protective brother-in-law.
“We were planning to, but she had a seizure when we tried to put her in the other room,” Letty said in a matter-of-fact tone.
Kit pushed himself the rest of the way upright. “Shit. Is she all right?”
Letty came to sit on the side of his bed and reached out to tousle his hair gently. “Yes. I was there."
Kit sighed and relaxed back against the mound of pillows. “Don’t let Charles know that’s where she is.”
“I wasn’t planning to.” But Letty wasn’t getting up, which must mean she had something else she wanted to talk about with him.
“Well?”
Letty gave him an innocent look. “What?”
“You’ve got something else you want to say to me, so just spit it out.”
“It’s about my niece.”
“No.” Kit shook his head. “Absolutely not. Letty, you know how I feel about bringing on new staff.”
“Tonight would have been a lot easier with a few young people around here,” Letty said firmly. “Yes, you’re going to die some day, and anyone here will have to decide what to do then. But until then, the work still needs to get done, and my arthritis cures can only do so much, Kitten.”
Kit grimaced. “You know I hate that nickname.”
“And yet, you’ve never told me to stop using it.” She reached out to ruffle his hair again, and Kit removed his reading glasses and shut his eyes, accepting her offer of comfort.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. You’re right. Once the weather clears up, your niece can come for a visit. Just to see if the house likes her, mind. And…”
“And?”
Kit sighed. “And I’ll put some real thought to Hiram’s proposal of a job fair this summer. Good enough?”
“For now,” Letty said in a tone of voice that made it clear this wasn’t the last he was going to hear of the matter.
“As if any of the locals will be willing to come to a job fair, even if we hold one,” Kit muttered, shuffling his shoulders against his pillow pile, looking for a more comfortable position. The fact that his discomfort was more mental than physical probably wasn’t helping.
“Hm.”
“Oh, stop judging me and go to bed, old woman,” he snapped half-heartedly.
“As long as you go to bed too,” Letty said, scooping the book he’d been failing to read out of his lap and frowning at it. “This looks… dense.”
“Family history,” Kit said, making a face. “Most of the first generation born after the founding of Langford house was elf-shot too. I thought I would see if there was any way I could… well, never mind.” His face heated; there was no real reason for him to be looking in to the matter, after all. Edie would be gone in a day or two, as soon as the weather cleared, and he doubted she would ever return. And it wasn’t as if he had any reason to be kind to a woman who had shown only horror at the sight of him.
Letty gave him a sharp look, and then turned back to the book, her eyebrows raised. “I see.” Her lips pursed contemplatively. “She’s an attractive young woman.”
“She’s a married woman, Letty. And she looked at me like I was some sort of demon when we met, so don’t go getting some fool idea in your head about me getting to know her better, because that’s not going to happen.”
“I’m just saying, you could try.”
Kit rolled his eyes and pointed towards the main door of his bedroom. “Out!”
“Fine, fine.” Letty shut the book and set it on his bedside table, then leaned over and pressed a kiss to his forehead as she retrieved his reading glasses from where he’d set them against his chest. “Sleep well, Kitten.”
“I don’t need you to mother me,” he grumbled. “I’m thirty-seven. It’s ridiculous.”
“But you’ve still never told me to stop doing it,” Letty responded with a smile, getting back to her feet. She turned out the light on her way out the door, and Kit tried to fall asleep.
He wasn’t surprised to find that he couldn’t.
A conversation between Kit and Edie about reproductive autonomy, probably following after that previously posted conversation where she propositions him:
“Why do you want to have a child, anyway?”
Edie tilted her head to one side, studying his face from beneath her lowered lashes. “My life has been constrained in ways you can’t imagine, Kit Langford,” she said, a bitter twist to her voice. Her lashes lifted, and her eerie, pale eyes gleamed in the firelight as she caught his gaze and held it. “I want it because I have always wanted it, and because I have always known it might be beyond my reach entirely.”
Kit flinched, and looked away. It was hard to meet the steady gaze of those elf-shot eyes of hers. “How so?”
“When I was eleven, they inked an infertility charm on my skin.” When he looked up, startled, she only raised her eyebrows. “Oh, yes. There’s a chance that any child I have could bear my curse, after all. The last thing our country wants is more frail, oversensitive citizens who can’t contribute.” She spat that last word venomously, as if repeating something she had been told time and time again from a young age. A sentiment he recognized well; there were more than a few words he spat the same way. “Of course, I could get it removed with the permission of my spouse.”
“Thus, Trevor,” he offered blandly.
She almost smiled as she echoed him. “Thus, Trevor.”
“But surely… I can understand wanting what you were denied, I suppose.” He had never wanted a child of his own blood, but with a great deal of struggle, he could almost imagine how Edie must feel. “But you are a wealthy woman, and more than capable of providing for a child on your own. Why not adopt, if you were so desperate?”
The corner of Edie’s mouth twitched, as if she could not decide whether to smile or frown. “I am considered—legally—to be a deficient guardian for a normal child.” She let out a crack of broken laughter. “These days, perhaps one in a hundred thousand is born elf-shot. If I had lived fifty years ago, things would be different. But now…”
Now they had learned how to prevent it, and it took some very careless magic to produce a child with Edie’s condition.
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“Kitten” that made me giggle. I really enjoyed the conversation about Edie’s room being next to Kit’s, and the matter-of-factness of Letty saying in so many words that the house objected to moving Edie to a different room. “Haunted house playes matchmaker” is such a good GOOD concept.
Edie describing her difficulties trying to have a child was… oof. It’s very rough and I can imagine how bitter it would make her, and I’m excited to see what that makes her do because I’m sure she’ll make some bad choices before this is all over because of it.
Good luck with your camp nano writing goals! Keep me posted on this project, I’m waiting with baited breath for more :P
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