The Estate, Sidra, Glacia, Saturday Evening Fandom Time

[wwiii]

Some days, Warren found himself drowning in paperwork. Some days, he walked into his office to be faced with a stack of petitions to Glacia's Consort that was so high he was pretty sure he would never see the bottom.

Today, incidentally, was not one of those days. He'd run through all of the paperwork on his desk two, three, four times just to be thorough, had even gone so far as to write thank you notes to those Queens and Consorts in other Courts to thank them for their attendance at this official function or that one. Karla was busy elsewhere, his phone battery was dead, and Warren had gotten to that point in the day where all there was to do was sit and pass the time by drumming his fingertips on the top of his desk.

It was fortunate that the Court Steward, Lord Mallory, stuck his head into Warren's office before he could drum some gouges into the wood.

"My Lord," he said, clutching a stack of paperwork to his chest, "Lady Karla would like me to remind you that if you're late for dinner and leave her entertaining alone again, she'll tie you to the General and throw the both of you into a closet."

Warren gave a wry chuckle in response to that, gesturing to his empty desk.

"That shouldn't be an issue. I have a few hours to kill yet, and nothing to kill them with." A beat. "What do you have there?"

Mallory looked at his own stack of papers, and then gave his head a shake, even as Warren pulled himself up from his seat to investigate.

"Nothing of any importance tonight, Lord. Merely the sort of correspondence that I've taken the liberty of separating out from the papers that actually need to make it to your desk."

Warren pursed his lips a little as he leaned over the stack. Considering the one on the top was addressed to, 'That Landen Bastard of a Consort,' he could wager a guess as to what the rest of the stack contained.

"Why not leave those with me anyway? It'll help me kill some time, at least. And I'll get a chance to see where I stand in the eyes of the general public, these days."

Mallory's expression suggested that he didn't think it was one of Warren's better ideas, but he wasn't going to argue with the Consort. He tended to do his damnedest to keep out of the way of Warren's baleful glares as much as possible.

"If you wish, my Lord, but do keep in mind that these letters aren't representative of Glacia's most rational people."

"It'll be just like looking at hashtags on Twitter," Warren replied, smiling faintly as he was met with a puzzled glance from the Steward. "I can handle it."

A few minutes and a few more cautionary statements from Mallory later, and Warren was sitting at his desk again, leafing through the mail with one eyebrow raised. He supposed be probably shouldn't have been surprised that 'Landen Bastard' wasn't the worst insult the locals had come up with, and he even set aside a few letters addressed to Karla that were obviously written with the intent of turning her against him in order to give a 'real Blood male' a chance at his position. They could laugh at them together later. Or, at least, make a mental note between them to laugh behind their backs at social functions.

Not that they were petty.

It was a letter about halfway down the stack that managed to actually grab Warren's attention, all of the rest aside. Written in a childish hand, it was one of the few letters that actually used his name, and though it was from outside of the Territory, there was something about a small child writing to the Consort of Glacia that made it difficult to set aside.

A few minutes later still, and he was stalking out into the hallway again, letter in hand, wings mantled, and bristling.

"Mallory! What the Hell were you thinking!?"

Mallory was not having a good day.

[OOC: For one!]

Comments

[wwiii]

Warren was a half-step behind Karla when she called for him, leaning over her shoulder to look inside.

Now it was his turn to feel his insides lurch.

"Empty?" That was bad. That was really, really bad. "Okay... Okay, we can still work with this. They had extended family, right? I remember Cora mentioning that she had an aunt they stayed with, once. Maybe they're with them again, if her mother's health has slipped that much."

[glacial_queen]

"Did Cora mention anything about that in her letter?" Karla asked. "Her aunt was in Doun, if I remember correctly. She had a ton of kids, which is why Cora and her mom didn't stay with them long, but if Mrs. Hewer needed the extra help..."

It was a place to start, if nothing else.

"Ready for a another long flight?" she asked. "We have a lot of ground to cover. And it will be late when we arrive."

[wwiii]

Warren gave his wings a stretch, and then nodded.

"She didn't mention anything, but for all we know, Lord Mallory might have sat on that letter for a long time, never mind the time it would have taken to get to us." He frowned a little, and then shook his head, reaching to scoop her into his arms again. "Doun? I'll have us there in no time."

[glacial_queen]

This flight lacked even the sparse conversation of the first. True night had fallen and the wind had picked up, which meant that more of Warren's attention was on flying them safely through the air than on making small talk that neither of them were truly interested in.

They landed in Doun almost a full hour later, Karla scattering the crowd that had formed when Warren fell with a snarled curse. The Blood of Doun were pale, short-lived Rihlanders, like the native population of Ebon Rih, though much less used to winged people landing in their midst.

One Blood boy, slower to scatter than the rest, found his collar getting tugged back over to where they were standing. "The landen section of the city?" Karla demanded. "Seamstress Street?"

The boy pointed and babbled off directions, clearly less interested in why a Queen would want a landen street than making sure she had no reason to turn a baleful eye on him. His original trepidation had no trouble turning to excitement when she slipped him a silvermark for the information. "Thanks, my lady!" he shouted, darting away. "If you need any more directions, just ask about for Nyles. S'me!"

[wwiii]

Warren watched the boy scurry off, and then nodded to Karla, offering her an elbow.

"Let's, then?"

His wings ached, though they'd be quick to soothe themselves, thanks to his healing factor. But the directions that Nyles had given them were simple, and the walk didn't seem too terribly far. They could handle this one on foot.

A few minutes later, and they were knocking on the door that Karla recognized as belonging to Cora's aunt.

[glacial_queen]

A middle-aged woman answered, one who looked far older than her years. Her face was lined and her hair prematurely gray. Her back was stooped and her knuckles were swollen and red. She was clad in her nightgown and looked very cranky at having been summoned to the door.

"I swear, if you woke my brats up, I'll--!" Her demeanor instantly changed upon seeing two members of the Blood standing in front of her. The anger smoothed away to be replaced by badly-hidden fear and an obsequious smile. She bobbed an abbreviated curtsy in her nightshift. "Good evening, my lord, my lady. How can I assist?"

"I don't know if you remember me, ma'am," Karla said gently. "I met you several years ago, looking for your sister and your daughter. I left you a pot of lotion to help with the stiffness in your hands?"

Rather than putting her at ease, the woman in front of them stiffened further. "I remember," she said. "Worked like a miracle it did, for as long as it lasted. My thanks, my lady." Yet she didn't acknowledge her sister or niece, certainly didn't say they were within.

"I shall have to give you a bigger pot this time," Karla continued. "I can only imagine how much worse your arthritis is in the winter. But anyway, I know the last time I was here, you told me that Cora and her mother had moved. I hope you can give me the same information again? We visited their cottage and they appear to have left."

[wwiii]

The woman looked uncertainly between Karla and Warren, and it was perfectly clear on her face, even without the ability to sense the unease and a hint of sorrow on her psychic scent, that the two weren't going to like the answer.

"Apologies, my lady," she said, carefully. "My sister has been dead at least this past month."

Warren put effort into not flinching visibly. He still didn't quite manage.

"And her daughter? What happened to Cora?"

The sinking feeling in his guts was really not improving any. Especially when the woman in the doorway stood quietly for a few moments more before she felt she could even begin to answer.

"If you're asking if she's here, my lord, I'm afraid she's not. I've already got far too many mouths to feed here, I can't go taking in each and every child to end up on my doorstep, my sister's daughter or not."

[glacial_queen]

"Then where is she?" Karla asked, clutching Warren's hand. Her voice felt tight, like her throat was closing up even as she tried to make words. "Where do you send her, when you threw her out of your house, away from her family?"

It was possible that the jar of lotion wouldn't be forthcoming now.

"Forgive me, lady, but we can't all be wealthy Blood aristos," Cora's aunt snapped. "I've got seven children of my own and my man got on the wrong side of a Blood dispute and now he's lame and can barely work! One more child, even my own kin, could push us right over the line to poverty. What could I do for her if we were all kicked out of this place and unable to eat?"

"Still more than you're doing for her now," Karla said bitterly.

"I sent her to a Blood-run orphanage," the woman hissed. "If she's not being cared for there, then it's your own people's fault and not mine!"

[wwiii]

Warren's feathers prickled at that, and he couldn't help but ball his hands into fists. Deep breath in. Slow breath out.

After a moment, he reached to gently lay a hand on Karla's arm.

"Then we'll see to it that Cora sees better care than any of your own," he said, simply. He could sympathize with their troubles, to a degree, having seen the landens of Glacia struggling to survive under Hobart's reign. But any landen here had to know full well that sending a landen child to an orphanage run by the Blood could only lead to further misery for the girl. To be an orphan and to be raised by a group of people who would only ever think of you as inferior...

His wings mantled again at the thought.

"Just tell us which orphanage you sent her to, then, and we'll be on our way."

[glacial_queen]

"Like there's more than one landen orphanage," the woman snapped. "Your people don't give us that kind of consideration. We get one and are expected to be happy about it!"

And with that, she turned around and slammed the door in their faces, so frustrated that she didn't realize that, as Blood, they could tear the door right off its hinges (or the front wall right off its foundation) to get the information they wanted. By the time common sense caught up to her, she was halfway up the stairs and decided that it was better to hide and risk their anger that way than to go back and face it directly.

Luckily for her, neither Karla nor Warren were the type to teach her a lesson about the proper respect due to Blood from a landen. Or, rather, Warren wasn't and Karla was properly ashamed of that flash of 'I am a Queen, how dare you!' temper that she quickly swallowed back.

"Well," she said, shakily. "That's that, I guess."

[wwiii]

"That's that," Warren sighed, biting back his own spiteful urge to just rake his claws across the woman's doorframe. Give her a reminder of the sort of people whose faces she just slammed that door in. He wasn't that spiteful, though, just frustrated, and he let out a sigh to match. "What did that kid say his name was? It looks like we're going to need more directions."

Nyles? Nyles, who actually turned out to be fairly easy to find. After all, he wanted to be easy to find, if it meant he could get a few more silvermarks tonight. If it was well past his bedtime, well, he was hardly the sort of child to care.

"Hey," Warren said, giving the boy a wave as he spotted him down the road. "We've got another question for you..."

[glacial_queen]

"That so?" The boy asked, turning a cheeky grin Warren's way. "Well, I've got plenty of answers, though I'm awful hungry. Might be hard for me to concentrate on answering them, if you know what I mean."

*Someone call Dickens. Tell him an urchin is missing,* Karla thought sourly at Warren. She was in no mood for games.

"Give us directions to the landen orphanage and we'll give you plenty of money for dinner and breakfast, too."

The boy's expression shifted, sombered. "Well, my lady Queen, I'd love to do that, I really would, but me giving you directions right now wouldn't do you a lick of good. It's locked up tighter than a Blood jewelry store. Doubtful anyone'd answer right now anyway."

"They'll open for me."

Nyles shook his hear regretfully. "None but landen staff there now. The Blood administrators won't be in till mid-morning. No luck getting answers or information or much else till then."

[wwiii]

Warren exchanged a look with Karla, and then crouched down a little, so that he could look eye-to-eye with the boy.

"Can you give us directions regardless? A very dear friend of mine is in there by mistake, and I intend on making certain that she's safe and well." A beat. "Unless, of course, you happen to know where the administrators themselves spend their nights. I'd be willing to add a goldmark to your pay for information like that."

Rather than, you know, ripping the hinges from an orphanage door and leaving the landen caretakers to catch Hell for the damages come morning.

[glacial_queen]

Nyles leaned back on his heels, considering his options. "What if I brung you to the nicest hotel in the city," he suggested. "We can stay there for the night and then bright and early tomorrow, off we pop to the orphanage. You can wait for the administrators there and yell good and proper?"

"But we want to fetch her now," Karla said, trying not to grind her teeth in frustration.

"But she's probably already asleep," Nyles argued. "You wanna wake her up and for a whole bunch of arguing with folks who can't even help you? Tomorrow, you can actually deal with the people in charge. Get an eyeful of the orphanage, too."

[wwiii]

Warren frowned a little, turning a glance to Karla.

"Of course, we could just ask somebody else to show us the way..." He gave his shoulder a shrug. "Nyles here is making some good points, but I'm beginning to get the feeling that he's far more invested in charging room service on our tab than he is in actually helping us out."

The boy's eyes widened only slightly, though it was more for a fear of losing a meal ticket than it was out of any sense of shame.

"B-but my lady, my lord, there's hardly nobody either of you can trust out here this time of night. And I should know. I've dodged 'em all."

"Very artfully, I'd wager," Warren mumbled under his breath, and then he shook his head. "You're aware you're talking to a Queen who wears the Ebon-gray and her Consort, trained by Prince Yaslana himself?" Not to drop names or anything. Really. "Neither of us are terribly inclined to worry about what sort of rogues we might encounter out here."

[glacial_queen]

Nyles looked like he was about to argue further, then shrugged and gave them an unrepentant, gap-toothed grin. "Can't blame a lad for trying, can you?" he asked with a philosophical shrug. "If I don't look out for myself, who will? Ain't all of us gets a powerful Queen and her wingy Consort to come to our rescue."

"So then you'll lead us there?" Karla asked, resigned.

"Surely will," Nyles agreed. "But only if you promise to stop and get me something to eat. You'll be glad to have extras when we get there anyway."

[wwiii]

"I'll do you one better," Warren said, thoughtfully turning a look Karla's way before looking back at the boy. "If you've got nobody and nothing here to look out for you, why not come back with us to Glacia? We can always use somebody else working in the gardens or the stables," or maybe he'd shove the boy at Mallory just to watch the man twitch, "and you'd get three square meals a day, a steady wage, and a roof over your head out of the deal."

A beat.

"And we'll stop to get you something to eat."

Look, by this point it was either this, or he find someplace that was selling maps. At two in the morning. As one does.

[glacial_queen]

Karla raised an eyebrow at Warren, broadcasting Are you out of your damn mind?! without resorting to psychic threads.

For his part, Nyles looked more than a little dubious. "Why wouldja do that for me?" he asked. "You don't even know me and all I know about you is that you like kids with no one looking out for them. Landen kids, even."

And now Nyles looked like he was ready to run in the opposite direction if they so much as twitched in a way he didn't like.

Karla was just going to let Warren field that one. Since he was the one who decided to open Glacia's Home for Wayward Urchins all of a sudden.

[wwiii]

Warren gave his shoulders a shrug, trying not to wrinkle his nose too much at the tone that Nyles' voice took on as he mentioned landens.

"It's up to you, of course. I can understand why you'd be wary." He spread his hands a little. "You're just as welcome to say no, and we'll still make good on the promise of a meal, but it seems to me like it would be a mutually beneficial arrangement for both of us. We get our friend back, and you don't have to resort to extorting expensive hotel rooms and extra silvermarks out of strangers on the street in the dead of night."

There was a pause, and then he added, knowing full well that it might make or break the deal, "And I'm a landen myself. I'm not looking for easy prey, if that's what you've got ticking through that little head of yours. I met her in what was left of Agio, and we've kept touch since. Karla and I were both deeply upset when we learned that she'd lost what was left of her family."

[glacial_queen]

"Not agreeing to nothing," Nyles said, still wary. "Nothing 'cept dinner and showing you where the orphanage is. But I'll think about it."

Karla's eyebrows were just permanently going to hang out by her hairline for the duration of the conversation. Because now Nyles was making it sound like he'd be doing them a favor by heading back to Glacia with them.

"You're too kind," she drawled. "But fair. You choose the food, you can take it right from the server yourself so you know we didn't tamper with it, and whatever else you need to do to realize we mean you no harm. But if you want any of this, you need to start moving. I'm just about all out of patience for haggling."

"As you say, my lady!" Nyles agreed, back to sounding chipper.

Other than a quick stop at a street-vendor camped out in front of a tavern selling meat pies of dubious provenance, their trip to the landen orphanage was direct. It was still in the landen quarter, though fairly close to the edge where the Blood warehouse district began. Looking up at the forbidding stone mansion, Karla decided that if Nyles was a Dickensian orphan, than this place was the conglomeration of every workhouse in his entire catalogue.

"Cora's here?" she asked, dismayed.

"Dunno." Nyles' voice was muffled; he was answering around a mouthful of meat-pie. "If she's a landen orphan with nowhere else to go, she is. Unless she's made her escape already. Then who knows where she could be. Prob'bly dead, if she don't know the city."

[wwiii]

Warren's feathers were probably going to just never un-prickle, at this rate.

"I'm not even going to consider that as an option until after we've been through here," he decided, stepping up to the front door and giving it exactly the sort of looking-over that this sort of thing required. Which mostly meant he was taking a look at the hinges to see how easy they'd be to simply rip free, if it came to that, before looking at Karla and shrugging his shoulders. "Here goes nothing?"

And then he was raising his fist and knocking on the door with enough upper body strength behind the gesture that the hinges were groaning anyway.

Nyles didn't comment, though his eyebrows did go up a little. Warren didn't so much as glance his way. Not when he could vaguely hear murmuring from inside - the exasperated sort, the sort that clearly didn't care for being woken up at all hours of the night - before the locks unlatched and a rather exhausted looking landen male pulled open the door.

"We're closed," he greeted the trio, his eyes still foggy enough with sleep that he couldn't tell, and likely didn't care, that at least one of the people he was speaking to was wearing Dark Jewels. "Business hours are between ten an' ten, come back in the mornin'..."

Warren's hand planted firmly against the solid wood of the door before it could close in their faces. He'd really had enough of that for one night.

"Actually, we'll be doing business now, if it's all the same."

"Well, s'not." The male planted his feet and gave closing the door another attempt. It didn't budge so much as an inch. "... But I might be persuaded to hear you lot out, if it means I'll be able to close the door and go back to bed soon."

[glacial_queen]

"We're looking for a little girl--" Karla started.

"You'll definitely have to come back in the morning for that," the male interrupted. "All work details are handled by the master. You wanna request someone, you have to do it through him."

"No, no, not to work," Karla explained through gritted teeth.

"Then whaddaya want her for?" the male asked, drawing himself up in indignation. "We ain't that kind of place, lady. Now get outta here before I report you to the guard! Doun's no place for the likes of you."

Furious, Karla closed her hand around empty air and jerked her fist upwards. The male screeched as his feet left the ground and he dangled, helplessly.

"We want Cora!" she demanded. "We're here to take her home and take care of her! So shut up and fetch her!"

[wwiii]

It had been a long night, but it was probably bad form to go attempting to rattle the teeth out of landen heads around here with Craft. Even if they did deserve it.

Warren put his hand on Karla's arm and shook his head.

"He can't show us anything if you're hanging him in midair," he pointed out, reasonably. And then he turned to glower at the man. "Though it's generally not highly recommended to go mouthing off to a Territory Queen who wears the Ebon-grey."

Yeah, yeah. He was flinging Karla's Jewel rank around a lot, here. But it seemed like a safer option for everyone involved, at this point.

"Cora is under our protection. She has been since she was a little girl. Her ending up here was a terrible mistake, and we intend to rectify it immediately. Your cooperation would be much appreciated." He almost let it sit at that. Almost. "But it isn't necessary."

[glacial_queen]

"I can't do anything without the master's permission!" the male squawked. "Do you really think I can just let children march out into the dead of night with the first few people who come to call? What kind of establishment do you think we run here?"

...The man had a point, Karla grudgingly conceded as she gently lowered him to the ground. Handing over children to complete strangers would likely be a poor plan for everyone involved, especially the child.

"Then fetch him," she suggested, also reasonably. And certainly not through clenched teeth.

[wwiii]

"We'll wait," Warren said helpfully, sounding at least slightly less frustrated than Karla, at least. "Here, on the front step. But be quick about it, hmm?"

The man, still in his nightclothes, stammered out his agreement before scrambling down the steps and out into the yard.

Warren looked between Karla and a somewhat wide-eyed Nyles, and then shrugged his shoulders a little. He was tired, damn it. He wasn't about to go running even more laps when there was a perfectly capable guy right there, who actually knew where he was going. He even closed the door that the landen male had left open, so as to not let the winter chill inside any more than it already was, before taking a seat for himself right there on the front stoop.

"Tonight," he murmured, "is fired."