Slumped in his chair, Jacques Halceaux sat staring at his fireplace, its lonely log licked slowly by flames. A chipped cup of brandy hung from his fingers, threatening to spill onto the worn carpet under his feet.
He heard the door open, heard the quiet footsteps and the soft swish of skirts and his lip was already curling as he said, “Come to gloat?”
“No, Uncle.”
His eyes narrowed, “Don’t call me that. We are not family.”
“We almost were, once.” She rounded the chair set beside his, her hands resting on the winged back, “There was a time you were thinking of marrying me to your son, when we got older. It seemed a perfect match, the silversmith’s son and the jeweler’s daughter.”
“Things changed.”
“As things tend to do.”
“Don’t patronize me, Odilia, I’m not in the mood.”
“I’m sorry.” She slowly eased herself down to sit in the other chair set before the fire. She sat silently for a long moment before she asked quietly, “Why did you let it go so far? The city did not need to know about your grievance against me. If you had come to talk to me-”
“As if your arrogant Dahlia House would have let a poor merchant like me through the front gate,” he said sourly. “My purse would never be heavy enough to buy even a quarter-hour of your time.”
“I would have seen you,” she whispered. “If you had come, I would have seen you.”
He scoffed wordlessly.
“Talk to me, Uncle. You don’t really care about the Cereus seat on the Judiciary, do you? What is this really about?”
He sat silent for so long that she did not think he was going to answer. Then finally his lips parted and he managed to rasp out, “You…you were blessed with a pretty face. And because you are beautiful, they came and they took you away and they raised you up from a nobody like me, to someone who is powerful and charming and charismatic enough to have the attention of the – Blessed Elua! – of the King!”
He glared at the weak fire without seeing it, “My father was a silversmith and his father before him, that is all I will ever be. My hands are calloused, the work is hard, and I’m training my son to be a silversmith after me. Everything I have, my family earned with hard work and generations of trying to convince the arrogant nobles to buy our silver and keep us in business. And what did you do to earn what you have?”
He scoffed, bringing his brandy cup to his lips, “You were born pretty, and you opened your legs.”
How bitter he had become, Odilia saw as she watched him take a long swig of the liquor. She pitied him. She really did. Bitter and resentful, the anger twisting him until the easiest way for him to deal with the acid burning him alive from the inside out was to lash out and try to make someone else hurt the way he did. But there was a part of her – the part of her that still remembered being a girl born to the streets and learning the importance of pride and hard work, that remembered helping her father set the little gems in his designs because her hands were smaller and more nimble, that part of her that was the seed of who she was – that understood how he saw the world. She didn’t work with her hands, she didn’t have a craft or a marketable skill she could use to support her family the way he does and the way her father did. She had been plucked up to the highest rungs of society because of her face and her charisma and she lived a comfortable life because someone found her and gave her a chance.
“You know me,” she said, leaning forward slightly to get his attention. “You know where I started, you know my family, did you really think I would forget that?” She frowned at him, “Didn’t you stop to think that, with the King’s ear, I could be a voice for the people? I know the streets; I could speak for the common people within the palace. I could do good for the city, Uncle.”
She shook her head and he watched her walls crack a little as she gave a wild little laugh, “Did you really think I would ever forget where I came from? No one will let me!”
Her dark eyes met his light ones as she continued desperately, “You think I am a traitor to my own class for something that I never had control over. The nobles of the court know that my blood isn’t blue enough to ever be one of them. I’ve betrayed my own people and I’ll never belong in court. The only thing I have now is Dahlia. That is what I have been trained for, that is all I thought I could do.”
She reached to touch his wrist, “And then he came to me. And I saw a way that I could help my people. He listens to me, Uncle. And I know that was part of what angered you, but if you stop and think, think about the things I could tell him. I could tell him about how your wife shared your food with us when my mother was sick. I could tell him how the sailors in the Harbour District take side work ferrying people across the river for pennies to make sure no one gets hurt trying to swim it late at night. I could tell him how the little thieves steal the apples from the trees around the Temple of Elua because they know the Priests won’t punish them just for being hungry like some of the merchants in the markets would. Uncle, I could make a difference, a real difference. A girl from the streets with the ear of the King could do so much good. But I can’t do it if you fight me every step of the way.”
He looked down at her hand on his arm. Pale, manicured, soft with lotion, anointed with perfume oils. It belonged to a stranger.
“Did you tell the nobles wrapped around your pretty fingers to start the embargo on silver?” The flickering firelight threw the age lines of his face into sharp relief as he glared at her. “Did you do that?”
“No,” she said, “I had nothing to do with that.”
He pulled his arm away from her touch. “They taught you pretty words at the Night Court, little Lia. But that’s all that you have, and words won’t buy my food or stoke my fire. They’re worthless. Use them with your King or your Duc, I don’t have the stomach for them.”
“If I convince him to lift the embargo,” she asked, “Would that change anything?”
He looked at her, his eyes hard as stone, “Get him to lift the embargo, then we’ll talk.”