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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Avrenne Esprit signs her marriage contract to Siamus Fallon. 3300-ish words. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
Arc: Ringside Seats
Chain: Siarenne
It was often said, by soldiers, how the waiting was the worst of it, that moment after you knew for certain that an action would happen, but before you could take action, that it was a form of slow torture and the strain of waiting bore down on the soul with a crushing pressure; but Avrenne Esprit had always had an affinity for the things In Between.
There had been a calm that descended on her since leaving the Commodore’s office, and it remained. For all that uncertainty should have lingered – how well she knew that no contract should ever be considered complete until it was signed – there was that sense that it had already been signed, written in the air between her and the lord of House Fallon, as binding as anything on paper.
Of course…she was still going to wait for that paperwork. She trusted the Commodore, as much as she might be able to trust any man at all now, but she trusted in the recourse of a contract more, for the symbol that it was as much as the legal protection it offered.
The return home had been ordinary, although Avrenne could feel Sophie beaming even under the attempt at seriousness. She hadn’t wanted to speak of it on the street, and so she had led them back to her simple home. Finley opened the door a few seconds before she could get up to the handle – he’d clearly been watching from the windows, and she could almost feel the scrutiny of his gaze on her like he was patting her down looking for concealed weapons or signs of wounds she might be hiding. “What was it?”
Instead, Avrenne felt it again, and this time she let it bubble up fully, a laugh of a salt water spring from deep underground emerging into the air of a summer’s day. She threw back her head and laughed from the pure joy of it.
“What happened?” Finley asked, and the confusion was audible in his voice as he looked between Sophie and Avrenne.
Avrenne gently disengaged her arm from Sophie, now that Sophie was back in familiar waters, and reached up a hand to start unpinning her hair. She felt freer than she had in over a month. “The Commodore wanted to negotiate a betrothal,” she said as she walked forward, unable to keep the grin off her face. “I accepted. The paperwork will be here by the evening at the latest.”
Finley had the grace to look a little shocked at least. “What?” His eyes darted between Sophie and Avrenne again, looking so much younger than he really was. There were times that she could see that 17-year-old boy still, as if something had been caught in him in the Fall, and never able to grow since, a moment arrested within the man like a choking weed. “He offered it?”
“Yes,” Avrenne said and there was again that soar of joy in her heart.
"Ye will pardon my sister her little games. I was under the impression ye were aware that I asked ye here to hear my terms of betrothal."
She’d thought, for a brief moment, that she had been dreaming. Her dreams had never been so vivid – they were murky, strange things that made little sense and were a confused jumble of thoughts and impressions, but for a moment she had wondered. She thought her heart would leap out of her chest the way it had pounded, but the surprise at least had been an explanation for it all.
“And you just…” Finley seemed at a loss, the fight draining out of him.
“It was a very reasonable offer,” Avrenne said as she continued for her room. She would not need to change the dress for the courier, but she could repin her hair into something less severe. She felt free, as free as she had felt galloping at speeds she hadn’t been allowed to indulge in for almost a decade on the evening star of a horse, feeling as though she was exactly where she was meant to be.
The thought pulled her up a little short, a small wondering gasp of the thought that she would be going back.
"Now you must come to Fallon House again at your earliest. We're going to have such fun."
Avrenne set a hand against her chest, feeling the race of her heart at the thought. It had felt like another wonderful, brief transient fairytale, a repeat of the ball where she pretended, for that moment, to entertain the Commodore as an option – a handsome, charming, intelligent option. It wasn’t quite so easy to pretend when she knew he would be there, but for that time when she had thought him far away in the harbor, she had let it be. Just a little dream on a shooting star. She had been grateful to Sintha for the moment of it, the sweet lie for that small time, a moment to imagine a life where she was marrying the Commodore, where that was her sister with her, where that life was hers every day.
It was no longer a fairytale. Or if it was, it turned out that she was the princess in it.
But if the Commodore was the prince, then did that make… The thought didn’t want to complete. She stopped in the doorway of her room. She would have to think of it again, eventually. That thought couldn’t stay set aside forever. She would need to think of the Captain.
Not yet.
“I will have lovers. I have lovers. You may do the same, once the business of the wedding night is past.”
The Captain's face had flashed in her mind’s eye, those absolutely ridiculous blue eyes staring at her, and she knew the moment it did that she could not take the thought back and she knew exactly why she thought of it. Avrenne had never considered taking a lover just for love – she only began considering the necessity of it that it might have been to secure her line when the Captain insisted on his own provisions for an engagement. Once she had considered it, it had become simply another reality, easily adjusted to accommodate. But, here she was, considering the very real possibility that she could love the Commodore, be his wife in the way she had longed to be wanted, and she could perhaps love the Captain in a very different way, as only Avrenne, small as that person was.
Not right now. Not while she was still caught in the joy of being engaged to the Commodore, and the pit in her stomach threatened to open with the thought of what if –
what if the Captain didn’t want her anymore when he was never going to marry her just like all the rest
Avrenne set the thought aside again, and continued into her room to sit down at the desk fitted with a mirror she could open up on a hinge, so that her desk could double as a vanity table. She let herself be happy for a little longer, looking at her neck as if she could see the fingers around it eroding, the wind and the water of the Commodore washing them away.
She took her hair down carefully, letting it be simple and loose, gently flowing around her face, smiling to herself all the while, thinking of the Commodore’s dark eyes on hers, serious and bright, that enigmatic smile of his.
"I will say, that — no' at once, perhaps — but from a point in our first meeting, ye struck me as a sharp and sensible woman, wi' a decency to be admired. I am glad no' to be disappointed in my impression, Your Grace."
Of all of the compliments he had given her, the touches of flattering here and there, those three had hit perhaps the deepest, of a cherished moment, to be seen in exactly the way she had wished to be seen, particularly by a man. Not beautiful, not a picture, not something lovely and small – sharp and sensible and decent. Admirable for what she could do, for what she was, for what she had worked so hard for.
“Is it true?” Isla almost yelled it at the threshold of Avrenne’s room, gasping in a way that made Avrenne drop her eyes to her ward’s knees. Sure enough, there was evidence of a tumble.
“Isla, if you do not run so in the hall,” Avrenne started.
“Then I won’t lose time when I trip,” Isla finished with her. “I know, I know.” She came into the room, still breathless with it. “Is it true? You’re going to marry the Commodore? Commodore Fallon.” There was that slight emphasis on his name, that suggestion that Isla knew the name in some starry-eyed fantasy of a thought.
Avrenne let the smile show as she removed another pin from her hair. “Yes, it is true.”
Isla sighed in that dramatic, romantic way Avrenne’s youngest had, both hands clutched to her chest. “Oh.” She moved forward on that same cloud of a dream for a few steps, picking up the brush for Avrenne’s hair as she went. “Because of what happened with Mr. Green?”
It was a sudden, brief shock of cold water on Avrenne’s face, but it didn’t last.
"I see Ta left some matters out. Little monster. It seems we've no' been talking in perfect understanding, Your Grace."
She might have thought so, had Sintha said it. She would have assumed she would need to go there to the Commodore’s house and explain that she would not allow either of them to be caught into a marriage by her possibly slightly tarnished reputation. She had caught it soon enough, yesterday, to restore propriety. If anyone had seen, and they might have seen, it was brief, and they would have seen her walking away, alone, without him. She would have gone into that room ready to tell him that it was unnecessary.
Instead, she had assumed they were to talk about his bid for the House, or perhaps an offer to take Mr. Green to court on the Fallon’s gold simply to see justice done, or even possibly something more personal like what she might need with the shipping of the uniforms. So she had worn one of her business dresses, and gone to see a man she loved about business.
In the end that had been accurate. “No. Not because of that. He had been reviewing my…” Avrenne considered the best way to put it. “Portfolio of what I am able to do, and how I do it. He was very interested in what I can bring to House Fallon, and my nature as a person to do so.”
Isla made a face, the face of a 15-year-old with romance in her heart being told the ending of an anticipated novel was that it wasn’t a romance at all, and she’d been tricked. “What? He doesn’t…I mean, what about…”
Avrenne made the gesture forward for her hair. Isla started brushing automatically, moving mechanically. “I have explained before what I was looking for, Isla,” she said gently. “It was everything I could have possibly hoped for.” And she meant it, too. “He started with unveiling my contracts, to ask questions about my decisions, and what choices I had made. He must have gone through quite a bit of trouble to acquire them all, even one of the guns I had made for Valiance.” It had been one of the most strangely erotic things a man had ever done, and she was including the way the Captain had plucked and eaten a strawberry from her hand on a balcony.
Even now she could hear him asking it again.
"I was concerned, about your price on the wood. It was low enough I had concerns about quality. Although, I would no' have expected that of ye. But I have to do my research as well, aye? It's very fine stuff. How did ye secure it so low?"
She had almost laughed in delight at it. It has been a bit of cleverness on her part, and to have had him see it had made every single moment of the wait for that particular ship to come into port worth it. She had smoothed the relationship out of the Dun Eru lumbermill after as well, of course. It helped that she had never bought from their competitors, and that she had shown them eventually what she was using that wood for – the younger brother of one of the lumber mill operators was stationed in Valiance.
She had written hundreds of small contracts like that, for so many, over the past seven years. But, most never noticed those little things of hers. They saw the final amount and assumed that it was ordinary. There was a warm glow in her chest that Commodore had known exactly how high that number should have been, and that it had been her skill and expertise that had brought it so low.
“Are you really happy?” Isla asked, a confused look on her open face.
Avrenne let herself beam out a little. “Yes. I really am, Isla.”
Isla frowned, but she left it there, turning her attention to Avrenne’s hair. After a few brushes, the young girl said quietly, “Otto will be sad that you’re not marrying the Captain.”
Some of that light dimmed. Avrenne dropped her eyes and looked at the hair pins on the desk. “I will handle it.” She always did. Sweet, guileless Otto. So easy to fool, so shy in expressing his thoughts. Even now, when he did speak, there were still moments when Avrenne wondered if he didn’t say anything because those two silent years had made him accustomed to never saying anything out loud.
She tried not to think about what had finally made Otto start talking again. Avrenne did not want another thought to linger on the memories of Mr. Green. It had been painful enough recounting why she had let herself get engaged to him as it was. Let the details eventually fade from memory until he was nothing at all except for the story of the unusual circumstance that she met her husband.
“Do you want Daisy to make anything special?” Isla asked, suddenly brighter in that way of her mercurial moods, because now she was surely thinking of desserts and what might be allowed even though it was a Tuesday.
“Oh, very well,” Avrenne said in answer to the unasked question, which was much more about whether or not they would get to eat something special rather than what Avrenne wanted. “You may tell her that she can make the strawberry shortcakes.”
Isla put down the brush with a squeal, and ran off. Avrenne closed her eyes and waited to hear the –
– sound of someone hitting the floor in a trip – OOF –
“Isla?” Avrenne called.
“I’m fine!” Isla yelled back.
Avrene sighed and began pinning her own hair up into a simple, loose twist.
The courier and notary of Miss Curran arrived promptly in the early evening.
Otto was still in the garden, watching the moths around the garden lamp in the late spring twilight, and so Avrenne had not disturbed him yet. There was time to tell him about the Commodore and the Captain. Daisy was working on the strawberry shortcakes as Isla chattered at her about what they might eat at the wedding. Finley remained in the hallway, his eyes fixed on some point that told Avrenne he’d gone somewhere in his own head again, unwilling to share those thoughts with her. Sir Somer and Sophie had been talking quietly in the dining room for the past hour and Avrenne had no intention of ever interrupting them talking. Eventually, she would see those two to finally speaking of their feelings for the other. But, she would not force it. There were wounds still for both of them, and it was not yet time to push.
Finley answered the door when the contract came, in fine form, and Avrenne felt some relief at it. Miss Curran was reasonable, and clearly very competent, with that practical attitude of exactly the type of person Avrenne liked to deal with in matters of this magnitude. The Commodore selected his people well.
And then. There it was.
It was on her table, laid out in full, the terms and conditions of an entirely unsentimental marriage, made and offered for a lifetime of partnership of a House that would see its duty done through action and not only words, the opportunity to become everything that Avrenne had wanted to be since a small child. She stroked her fingers over the pages as she read through them. Reasonable conditions, compatible with her own aims, not a single thing between them in strife or in discord. From the beginning, she had felt that meeting of minds with the Commodore, that sense of seeing someone so like-minded to herself that it was beautiful.
The words were their own poetry to her, the prose of the terms sweeter than any novel could ever be, singing through her with more passion than any song had ever moved her to feel. Their accord, laid out in full, agreed upon by both parties that knew exactly what they wanted. Avrenne finished reading it with a faint sigh when it was over, looking at the Commodore’s signature, already dried.
She took her pen, and she wrote her own full name there, and she felt it –
Those fingers around her neck that had been holding onto her throat since the moment she read the news about Mr. Green’s marriage finally, finally let go, and Avrenne pulled in her first gasp of pure, clear air. She let out the breath, and felt the fire in her veins dim back as the fear and rage left her in full.
She placed her initials down where it was necessary, quick beats of pleasures at each occurrence.
Miss Curran marked it, notarizing it in her book, and it was all business handshakes around as she took up the contract to deliver back. And then she presented something else – a gift. Avrenne considered opening it there, in front of her, so that Miss Curran might report back, but it felt too close to the surface already. She accepted it, and dismissed the courier.
She didn’t let it happen there in the sitting room, not where the children could see her or hear her, and where they might misunderstand.
Avrenne went to her bedroom, closed the door quietly behind her, locking it in a way she rarely did, and walked to her bed. She held onto the gift with both hands, tilted back her head, and let them fall – the tears. She sobbed and wailed and cried out silently, in sweet relief, in the end of fear and rage, and let the salt water wash it all away.
When it was over, she collected herself, and finally opened the gift. They spilled out on a string into her hand – silvery blue saltwater pearls, mirrors of the ones streaking her face.
His voice in her mind, dark eyes on hers in the moonlight.
"After a time, whenever Halia swam wi' them in the harbor, Ery would salute her — and after more time still, Ery began to find shy gifts of fish or pearls left for her."
Avrenne moved the pearls over her fingers gently, passing them over the back of her hand where she could still feel Siamus’ kiss on her skin. And she thought about it. What he called her. A mermaid with calculus.
"So the tidesage and the mermaid fell in love eventually.”
Avrenne smiled, and held onto her gift of pearls, of the possibility for this other ending for her fairytale.