In Human Skin

by Akemi Homura-san

In January, a.t.b. 2010, Empress Marianne vi Britannia, Knight of Two and His Majesty's favoured consort, was assassinated at her residence in the Imperial Villa at Aries. But for Justine and Juliette vi Britannia, her daughters, this proves to be a blessing in disguise... Surrounded by old foes and sheltered by new and unexpected allies, their tale heralds the dawn of a new era.

15. WITCH

Imperial Capital of Pendragon, June, a.t.b. 2012

Upon reflection, perhaps one of the most unsettling recent developments in Juliette vi Britannia's life thus far was the somewhat harrowing realisation that she could no longer honestly say that she truly minded the gaudy ostentation and gauche orientalism of Warwick Palace. The painstakingly accurate replica of George IV's Brighton Pavilion—the penultimate of the Hanover monarchs, a man succeeded by the only one of his many storied bastards who was ever legitimised, his daughter Elizabeth III—was as much of an affront to the eyes as ever, to be certain, that much she could thankfully not deny. But by the same token, she'd been in and out of this very place so wearily often over the past two years that her mind no longer registered the atrocity against architecture and interior design; for though Clovis was a coxcomb and a dullard, he had a surprisingly good memory, and due to his painfully obvious incompetence concerning any endeavour that did not revolve around a blank canvas laid upon a wooden easel, a horsehair brush, and a broad array of different paints (he was truly talented as a painter, she could give him that), it was not uncommon for those around him to underestimate him, and so people told him things they perhaps very much should not have.

And with Justine away at school, Juliette continued to call upon her attention-starved and neglected half-brother in her absence, and as such was the beneficiary of these same individuals' collective lack of discretion.

She had to give her older sister credit where it was due: Juliette, too, might have written Clovis off as a waste of time and effort, a persistent annoyance and little more, had it not been for the elder princess's keen eye for talent and sharp instincts leading to their discovery of the wealth of information and rumours that people just…told Clovis la Britannia, of their own free will.

Admittedly, it was a bit difficult at parts to keep up with his ebullient chattering, for of the pair of them, Justine was the one who knew enough about the nuances of painting and of art as a whole to actually be able to engage with Clovis intelligently, sometimes to the point of argument (which she knew Clovis all but fawned over, as unused as he was to anyone considering him actually knowledgeable enough to debate on just about anything), but she made a valiant effort, knowing the Second Prince craved the validation. It had actually managed to work out rather well, shockingly enough, for where Justine was a peer of his in an area in which he was quite thoroughly passionate—Justine had privately mourned that the man was wasted as a prince, an assessment with which Juliette was inclined to agree entirely—she had managed to present herself as someone he could teach and inform.

In perhaps the most peculiar of ways, listening to Clovis wax philosophical about the technical and artistic merits of different charcoal stroke techniques when employed in impressionist portraiture reminded Juliette of Justine's lectures, whenever the topic at hand had truly managed to capture the Fourth Princess's interest. The thought made her smile fondly as she sipped at the imported Darjeeling blend Clovis favoured, and always leapt at the chance to serve whenever she, or Justine, or the both of them together visited him and his frail mother, Empress Gabrielle (his younger sister Laila lived with their maternal family, out in the Grand Duchy of Virginia), both to assuage the boy's desperate loneliness and to pick his brain about the latest highborn machinations that had been so carelessly divulged in his presence.

They were seated at a table that had been brought out to the middle of the palace's greenhouse, for the June sun was strong in Pendragon this year, perhaps to account for the unusually cold winter and spring seasons that had preceded it, and Warwick Palace's gardens were necessarily climate-controlled, boasting as they did a broad array of horticultural oddities with peculiar requirements. It was a riot of blooming colour, like the natural world's equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, which Clovis apparently found soothing.

Priscilla had been sure to teach Juliette several different styles used by Friederike, and indeed Justine's majordomo Taliesin seemed to know many more, and so her own sandy-blonde hair was styled much more casually, in tandem with the sky-blue voile-and-chiffon dress with puffed and airy sleeves she'd chosen for the summer day, in contrast to the more elaborate silken gowns she had since gained some measure of courtly notoriety for wearing. The white muslin shawl embroidered with golden thread that she'd brought with her had long since been folded and secreted away elsewhere alongside her lace parasol until it was time for her to see herself back to Belial Palace, but her silvered ivory fan sat on the table beside the small plate of pastries she'd taken from the offering the la Britannias' staff had provided (as was only proper for afternoon tea), and so even now she was not entirely without accoutrements, keeping to the role she played amongst the trio of herself, her sister, and Milly, as the quintessential noble lady of their number.

Perhaps it is only fitting, she considered, and not for the first time, as Clovis seemed to come to the end of his long and winding recounting of this gorgeous flower he'd just seen at the Botanical Gardens, and how he just had to get a cutting to tend to for the sake of his paintings, so taken he was with assembling the still life he'd render of it at the sight of the plant. Justine has not the talent for this sort of thing, and Milly lacks not the talent but rather the patience. I'm the only one who actually enjoys this roundabout game…

"…And so I had my man Bartley see it done," he finished, pressing his cigarette into his mouth to draw from it, while valiantly attempting to pretend not to feel sickened by the sensation—of course, to no avail. She grimaced internally, and only internally; it was a disgusting habit, and he very obviously felt no joy in the experience, but one of his fair-weather friends had gone on about how much fighting men were known to smoke, and so Clovis had been attempting to develop a taste for tobacco in an endeavour to adopt a more 'martial' image ever since. Never mind that the trappings of such a quality fit about as well on him as they might on a particularly miserable half-drowned cat—there were certain qualities the peers expected a prince of the Imperial Family to exhibit, a certain sanguine swagger and bloody braggadocio, and with Odysseus having developed a reputation as a mediocre mild-mannered specimen in his late thirties, there was some measure of pressure upon Clovis, as the second-born son, to have what his elder brother lacked.

"Mm. When will you have this inspirational plant-clipping, then?" Juliette inquired, picking up the thread of the conversation as easily as breathing. She might not have her sister's preternatural brain, but she was discovering herself to be something of a born socialite, which of course made all of these humdrum banalities of preparation quite a bit easier to bear up under the weight of.

"Ten days hence, and not a moment sooner," Clovis beamed weakly, still looking somewhat green around the gills for the drag he'd taken off of the cigarette just now. For all of his attempts, it seemed that the nicotine no more agreed with him now than it had when first he had embarked upon this shockingly foolish yet somewhat understandable endeavour. Juliette believed it safe to conclude, upon consideration, that she'd developed some degree of sympathy for the young man sat across the table from her, seeming every inch the foppish princox in his opulent styles and rich fabrics, for all that she knew he'd look far better in a simpler, less intricate ensemble than the one he seemed to be perpetually lost in—and of course she'd still ruin the man utterly the moment she deemed it necessary, but the savour to it would be entirely different than if she'd cultivated some measure of antipathy towards the fact of his existence, for all that she knew it would be no less delicious for the novelty. "Acquiring the necessary materials and facilities to ensure that it thrives here has proven somewhat time-consuming…"

"Well, the season ends in two weeks' time, no? The marriage-mart drawn to a close until the advent of the new year encroaches once more upon us," Juliette recalled, mentally running through the dates she'd memorised to better play her part. "Perhaps it wouldn't go amiss to host a little fête on the grounds here to herald that occasion, with your newest acquisition serving as the centrepiece of the festivities?"

"Juliette," Clovis said very seriously, suddenly quite riveted. "That is a capital idea. Why had I not given it any thought sooner?! Oh, and of course, you must come…"

"I wouldn't dream of missing it," Juliette replied with a soft smile, lifting her porcelain tea cup once more, as though beginning an impromptu toast with it. "Not for all the world. I'll even bring Euphy~!"

"That would be absolutely splendid, Juliette," Clovis proclaimed earnestly, clasping his hand to his breast above his heart. And then he looked down at the still-lit cigarette that he had just held to his clothes, his very flammable clothes, with some great measure of alarm, dashing the cigarette away in a momentary flash of panic. He looked back at her, very embarrassed, but Juliette very pointedly refrained from displays of displeasure or mockery, leaving him looking only quite sheepish instead of thoroughly mortified as he awkwardly stood from his chair and walked over to the smouldering ember, stamping it out inexpertly, but undeniably effectively. "Where is Euphy, by the by?"

"Last I heard, she was visiting with Marrybell's friend, Oldrin," Juliette replied, and she allowed a small twist to creep into the corner of her lips, expressing her sadism only to the point where it would still be misidentified as schadenfreude, like as not. "It seems the two of them are quite taken with one another."

"Oldrin? Oldrin Zevon?!" Clovis hissed, returning to the table and very obviously enraptured with the prospect of fresh new gossip. "And here I'd thought she'd only had eyes for Marrybell…"

"Oh, well you know how it is, Clovis~. Young love can be so very fickle, after all," Juliette prefaced airily, with a wave of her hand and her wrist. "But, if I may confide in you…"

"Anything, sister, anything at all," Clovis promised without hesitation.

Of course, this was the weakness she was here to exploit: Clovis was terrible at keeping secrets.

"Well, I have reason to believe that Oldrin's eye has not in fact strayed. It is merely that her gaze has begun to…broaden, as she continues to grow into her gallantry," Juliette confessed. "It seems that our sister Marrybell has found her own attention drawn to Euphy in turn."

"Indeed?" Clovis asked rhetorically, astonished. "How scandalous…"

Juliette shrugged. "I don't believe that Euphy ever intended to reach for the throne in the first place, so that's not entirely true. And if she has no intention to claim…"

"Then there'd be no sordid conflict brewing if a romance between the three of them begins to bloom," said Clovis, coming easily to the conclusion she'd shepherded him towards. "I see… On second thought, it's not nearly so scandalous as the business with Duchess Evangeline…"

"Evangeline? Evangeline of the House of Vander?" Juliette gasped, feigning incredulity while she readied herself to pry the information out of her older half-brother. "Lady-in-waiting to Johanna ne Britannia? That Evangeline?"

"The very same," Clovis shared gleefully.

Yahtzee, Juliette smirked internally. Empress Johanna ne Britannia, mother of Carine ne Britannia… Perhaps the exact moment I've been waiting for…

"Well, now you simply must tell me," Juliette enthused, leaning forth and doing her best to align her enthusiasm with his own. "Come now, brother, don't keep your sweet sister in suspense…"

Clovis held out with a growing grin too innocent to be Cheshire, though entirely too effusive to truly be anything else, before taking his seat once again, grasping both sides of the table, and beginning with a half-whispered, "Well, you see, dear sister…"

---

There was an unsettling air of normalcy that seemed to rule the halls and corridors of Belial Palace, Cornelia mused. The chequerboard marble tiles were polished almost to a mirror sheen, though not quite, and the walls were painted with rich greens and blues and other calming colours. The large windows during the daytime flooded the interior with light, and the paintings on the wall, far from being the portraits of the previous Britannian emperors just like every other insipid highborn dwelling, were filled with paintings of Juliette, Carmilla, Euphemia, Marrybell, Oldrin Zevon, Jeremiah, her monstrous sister Justine, the Kururugi girl, and it seemed every combination thereof, all of which portrayed the collection of them as oddly happy, instead of the stately disdain for which Britannian portraiture considered to be in good taste by aristocratic sensibilities was somewhat known. Interspersed with these seemed landscapes and scenes of a dramatic and striking nature, and a few of them she'd seen hanging on some wall or other of Friederike's in years past (particularly anything that depicted a famous performance of that retired diva of whom the Second Princess was fond, Marguerite d'Arcy) before she became captivated by photography, which led Cornelia to assume the paintings she didn't immediately recognise as people with whom she was at least vaguely acquainted to be operatic in origin.

The majordomo was perfectly polite, eerily so, and informed her promptly that Euphy was nowhere to be found, but that her timing was excellent, and he'd just prepared a fresh pot of tea. She'd found herself immediately overwhelmed—not the least because though she had admittedly neglected the finer points of her highborn etiquette, she was still somewhat certain that it was rather late in the day at the moment to be just now serving afternoon tea—but all the same accosted and seated, through a veritable hurricane of pleasantries, niceties, and courtesies, at a small table in a drawing room deeper into the palace's first floor.

In no time at all, the spread had been arrayed before her, and she'd found herself sipping on a rather strong elderberry tea and an assortment of fresh scones (she was rather shocked, actually, for though she'd taken great pains to cultivate an image as someone who frequently resorted to black coffee, elderberry tea was something of a secret pleasure of hers, and this uncommon potency was just right to her tongue); then, left more or less to her own devices, she looked around at the decorations arrayed about the room. Earthen tones dominated the walls, and the carpet was rich and of fine make, but otherwise nondescript. Bookshelves were arrayed around her, bearing a multitude of titles and authors of which she'd only vaguely heard. There was a great deal of history, from accounts of the Punic Wars and all six volumes of Gibbons's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to what seemed to be compiled parliamentary proceedings from the mid-fourteenth century all the way up to the Humiliation of Edinburgh. John Milton's Paradise Lost was sandwiched between a folio of what looked to be trade ledgers and a compilation of literal Byronic poetry, quill-pens were aligned in special glass cases where there were not bookshelves, and altogether this seemed a very hodgepodge assemblage of different materials that provided no clear image of the room's primary occupant. All of this was, of course, immaculate, but it had the same very lived-in feeling that had made the rest of the palace seem so very uncanny and alien to her, and she found herself wondering, as the moments ticked past, exactly why she'd been brought to this particular room.

The question did not linger long before she had her answer.

A knock on the door startled her slightly, but the one who knocked did not deign to wait for her to give a response before the knob turned, and the door squealed slightly on its hinges as it swung inward.

The Adonic figure of Jeremiah, Margrave Gottwald, moderately broad-shouldered and strong, filled the threshold, but he spared her barely a word before stepping aside, and in walked she who was the lady of the house at present. Juliette had grown in loveliness over the past two years, very nearly; her features were soft and kind as the late Empress Marianne's had been in life, if not more so, and her light hair sat straddled upon the border between brown and blonde, and the looser style in which she wore it, seeming free for all that it was undoubtedly pinned in several strategic places, came together with the bright blue shades of her dress to present a figure at once both innocent and kind. Her white shawl was already half-unwrapped from her shoulders to display its golden embroidery, and one of her first moves upon crossing the threshold for herself was to hand her parasol off to Jeremiah. Her violet eyes were the same shade as their father's, she couldn't help but notice, distinct from her sister's in that very subtle yet impactful way, lacking, amongst other things, the hard, gem-like quality of Justine's gaze, and they scanned her up and down openly. "Well now, dear sister, this is a surprise. I must confess I was taken quite off-guard when Taliesin informed me of your…impromptu, shall we say?…arrival, but it is nonetheless good to see you, Nelly. What brings you?"

"I'd hoped to see Euphy," Cornelia answered carefully. She hadn't believed Justine when she'd said that Juliette's issue would be that Justine was too lenient with the whole Area Eleven business a little under two years past—though she'd since come to think Justine deluded in that regard, and not actively lying; perhaps this was the opportunity she needed, then, to neutralise the threat that the monster she was related to posed. "And to…speak with her, if at all possible."

"Mm. That may yet prove somewhat…difficult," Juliette commiserated, handing off her shawl and taking a seat across the small serving-table from Cornelia as she reached out to pour herself a cup of tea. "I don't believe our dearest Euphy is particularly willing to converse with you of late, I'm afraid. She was quite adamant in her refusal to attend the latest commissioning ceremony—oh, and congratulations on your most recent promotion, as well! It's quite the accomplishment, making lieutenant-general at your age, even amongst those of royal birth, I daresay~!"

"…M-my thanks," Cornelia replied in mild yet mounting discomfort, unprepared for the effusive and earnest praise from her younger half-sister. She did her best to conceal it by emptying out her teacup, and reaching for the pot to fill it anew. She hoped that she was at least moderately successful.

"Still, I can assure you at least that Euphemia is alive and well; and safe, to boot! She and that boy of hers, Lord Mycroft—thick as thieves, they are! Why, they're practically inseparable~. But then, that much you should already know, given that he has remained diligent in his reports back to his impressive specimen of a father, your man Brigadier-General Darlton, on the topic of our dear sister's well-being," she said airily, making a dismissive gesture with a flippant wave of her hand.

Cornelia bit back the urge to wince. "Ah… My friendship with Andreas Darlton has become…less than it once was, of late…"

"Truly? Oh, Nelly, I'm so sorry," Juliette replied, her eyes wide in shock and then soft in sympathy. And the more she spoke to this girl, the more certain she was that Justine was as deluded on the subject of her sister as Cornelia had expected. Juliette was all of twelve years old, after all, and she acted it, sweet and almost guileless, and Cornelia struggled mightily to reconcile the image before her with the portrait Justine had painted of her sister during their ill-fated confrontation. "Well, I suppose it's…heartening, that he remains a good enough man to continue with the discharging of his duties to Euphy even in the midst of your very much unfortunate falling-out, no?"

"I suppose you're quite right about that," the elder princess nodded thoughtfully, taking a savouring bite into the soft, flaky scone, and as the tart taste of the sweet elderberry preserve flooded her senses, she had to bite back a pleased moan at the exquisite sensory experience, for the sake of her dignity. She gave her hostess a mildly embarrassed glance. "These are… The scones, they're quite good."

"To say that our man Taliesin is a deft hand at baking does him a grave disservice," the younger of the two princesses remarked knowingly. "I myself have very nearly been undone by his creations on more than one occasion. The man is simply masterful~."

"He certainly seems to be," Cornelia agreed honestly.

"He's very adaptable, as well," Juliette continued, biting into a scone of her own and then washing it down with her tea. "It is good that he is, given the…quite diverse, shall we say, range of tastes amongst those who regularly occupy this household. Milly's quite fond of Earl Grey and citrus, a palate she shares with Jeremiah. Suzaku's much fonder of more mild flavours, and it's a taste Euphy has, by some fell quirk of circumstance, acquired for herself as well. And while I have a rather improper sweet tooth, Justine likes to have her tea oversteeped, and served to her almost intolerably bitter."

That sounds very fitting, Cornelia mused, the mention of the creature she'd seen the truth of all that time ago, which had formed for itself a fixture in her nightmares, sobering her immediately.

"How so?"

Cornelia blinked rapidly, her jaw dropping slightly to leave her mouth undeniably agape. "I… Did I say that out loud?!"

"Even if you hadn't, Nelly, it's written plain across your face," Juliette replied with a small frown, setting her teacup down gently upon its saucer. "A base charlatan could perceive the lay of your thoughts as you are now."

Desperate for a change of subject, Cornelia abruptly and awkwardly switched gears. "So, where were you that you weren't here when I came calling?"

"Clovis and I were having a luncheon together, and it ran overlong, so we resolved to take our tea in Warwick Palace, as well," Juliette explained, undeterred. "Come now, sister. What troubles you so? Your brow is so furrowed that I fear it might attract storm-clouds, and it's a touch out of season for rain."

Cornelia sighed. She'd hoped to broach the subject more delicately than she was—for the sake of her sister's remaining innocence if nothing else. "Juliette, has Justine ever told you of what transpired when the Second Pacific War came to an end?"

"No, I don't believe that she has," Juliette admitted, and it looked in that moment rather as though she'd bitten into a particularly tart lemon. "She told me that she prevailed upon Friederike for aid in seeing the war to an end, and that she negotiated with a girl by the name of Sumeragi Kaguya to accomplish that goal. She was rather vague on the details beyond that, however."

The Third Princess of the Imperial Family took a deep breath, steadying herself to shatter the view Juliette held of her dear elder sister. She wondered at the cruelty of this, at how Euphy might react upon seeing her sister in her element, the horrors she would visit upon others for the sake of her own victory on the field, honourably won if brutally waged; but she knew her own younger sister so little these days. She became aware in that moment of a nugget of white-hot resentment in her heart of hearts, and of a malicious spite that looked upon what was to come not as a cruelty, but as a retribution; Justine the Monster has taken Euphy from you, it whispered to her, and so it is only right that you return the favour… A sister for a sister.

She was thankful that she had just reasons beyond her spite. It let her feel a little less foul about it.

"Sumeragi Kaguya's brother was murdered on Justine's orders," Cornelia confessed, at once swept away in the tableau of atrocity she had uncovered since—the more she discovered about the circumstances of her sudden victory, the more and more certain she continued to grow that the bridge between herself and her late mentor's firstborn was one she had been correct to burn. "Boruhito was his name, and Justine then proceeded to negotiate with her over her brother's corpse. It was laid there on the table between them, like some demented centrepiece. And when I confronted her, she said that it was ruination visited upon one for the sake of the salvation of all. That I should be grateful to be party to this…this evil she has committed. I saw her as she truly was that day—a monster, a foul and perfidious fiend, clad in the flesh of a girl."

Silence greeted her revelation, and she raised her gaze to find Juliette's face turned inscrutable and blank. But that was well; Cornelia knew better than to expect a more explosive reaction from those raised as they were, potential aspirants to the throne from birth. They sat in a pregnant moment devoid of speech, and then Juliette opened her mouth, and spoke very deliberately, equally as reserved: "Then I suppose I can understand why she saw fit to keep this from me. She anticipated my displeasure."

"Did she, now?" Cornelia prompted, sceptical.

"I had my suspicions, of course," Juliette replied at length. "But I can say with all honesty that I did not anticipate that she would act to such an extent…"

"I understand. You have my sympathies, Juliette," Cornelia assured her, reaching forth across the table to lay her hand upon one of her younger sister's, half-curled as it was upon the surface. "If you would like it of me, I loved your mother well, and I would be glad to shelter you as well as I am able, to take you away from this place, from all of this."

"Is that what you think this is, Nelly?"

Cornelia recoiled almost without thinking, nonplussed by the sudden mirth that brightened Juliette's voice. "…What?"

"I asked if this is what you think this is," Juliette repeated, her expression the image of conciliation. "That you would swoop in here and come away from this with two new sisters to protect?"

This conversation had turned so swiftly that Cornelia felt acutely whiplashed. "I…"

"Oh, my dearest Nelly. We've all always known you were lacking in imagination, but I confess, I had not expected that you would find seeing past the end of your own nose to be such an impossibility. I simply wished to think better of you, I suppose. More fool me," Juliette continued, as though Cornelia had yet to make the attempt to speak, the Sixth Princess's tone as soothing and sympathetic as ever it was. "You don't understand even now, do you? I'm displeased because my sister was sloppy. Sparing Sumeragi Kaguya's life was a foolish move, for she has wounded that which she is not yet willing to kill, and in so doing, she's left our proverbial flank dangerously exposed. It can't be helped for the moment, sadly, but she really must learn to rein in this, frankly, quite ridiculous sense of fair play of hers. It's going to get her killed one of these days…

"My sister's betrothed distrusts me mightily, Nelly. Did you know that?" the girl confessed. "It isn't personal, you understand—she trusts very few, would trust none but herself if she believed it at all feasible, where Justine is concerned. She sees all the wounds our late mother left upon Justine that my position as her sister leaves me without the power to heal, and though we have our…disagreements, to claim that Milly is good for her is something of an understatement. Her wariness, then, is her way of seeking to protect Justine, to defend her well-being against those who mean her ill, even and especially should they be close to her and thus uniquely positioned to do her harm, as Marianne once was; and in that sense, I am quite glad of her suspicion.

"I love my sister, Cornelia, and though I would be deluding myself to deny that I love her less than Milly does, that says nothing of how I love her and everything of the Heiress of Ashford's devotion." And here, she took another long draught of her tea, while Cornelia remained poleaxed. "And how could I not? She who held me when I sobbed, who dressed my wounds and nursed my ills, who made my favourite sweets and read to me almost every night that I might never once feel isolated or lonely, unwanted or unloved: Justine was my mother in all the ways that Marianne failed to be. So I would caution you, Nelly, to guard your tongue well, lest you speak ill of her again in my presence. You profane her with your impetuousness. You're lucky that it is I with whom you have spoken this day, for I fear that dear Euphy may have thought to withhold this out of spite."

Cornelia's indigo eyes snapped down at the new sight of motion, as the curled hand turned over and opened to reveal a phial clenched within Juliette's grasp. She propped it up onto the table, and slid it across to the Third Princess's side of the surface. It was brown, thick glass, with a black stopper, fluted and without even a label's ornamentation. Cornelia stared at this for a few moments, uncomprehending, and picked it up to examine it. She ventured to ask, "What is this?"

"Milly's own mercy, Cornelia," Juliette replied, and then gave a very derisive scoff. "Honestly… Between the two of them, it's nothing short of a miracle thatwe get anything done."

"…Mercy?"

"You can imagine my shock and acute horror when I began aiding Euphy in earnest. That your lady mother never bothered to train either of you in mithridatism says a great deal about her eventual attempt to murder you both, and none of it very good," explained the younger princess, and now that Cornelia was listening closely, she could discern the undertones of condescension so clearly that she could never now forget how they rang uncomfortably in her ears. "I had to start from scratch thanks to that rank amateur. I do sincerely hope this isn't a trend, because it will be thoroughly disappointing if all my work is this painfully easy. But I have braced myself for that hope to be in vain all the same."

Mithridatism… Cornelia contemplated, turning the familiar word over in her mind as it worked to recall from whence she had first heard it, though it chugged along oddly sluggishly. Then it came to her in a flash of flame and horror. "…Poison?!"

Juliette regarded her once more with sympathy, but now she could see the hidden jeering in her eyes as well as the cruelty in the curve of her lip, and when she spoke, it was as though she was addressing a particularly simple child. "Naturally. And do be quick about it, Cornelia. I daresay you should be starting to feel the effects right about now."

As though summoned by Juliette's words, cold sweat beaded at the nape of Cornelia's neck, and her grip grew feeble and unsteady as her hands began to shake, her strength draining from her body at an alarming speed, leaving her feeling frail, diminished. Fear flashed through her as she struggled to unstopper the phial to no avail, and when Juliette's sure hands entered her view and uncapped the antidote for her, she did not resist, and wasn't in a fit state for it besides. The younger girl helped guide the phial to Cornelia's lips, and helped her drink, having risen from her seat to better do so.

"And now I shall dispense with my own mercy, since we seem collectively determined to throw all caution to the winds to wander wheresoever they may," Juliette remarked with a long-suffering sigh. "Your first mistake was neglecting to bring Guilford, in calling him off to keep an eye on Darlton that he does not grow tired of your neglect and seek other, less troublesome patrons. Knights of Honour are not pageantry, Cornelia, they are not for show.

"Your second mistake was drinking or eating anything before the lady of the house had done so. It wouldn't have helped you here, of course, but it's good practise nonetheless," Juliette continued, as she stepped away to return to her chair, and Cornelia slumped against the table, her frame wracked with violent coughs as the phial's contents went about their work within her. Her half-sister plucked a scone off of the plate and bit into it with a visible savour once again, and drank down her tea as well, as though nothing illicit whatsoever was contained within it. "It is good that we had this opportunity to reconnect, dearest Nelly. I daresay we've come to understand one another a little better now, haven't we~?"

Once Cornelia gained her breath once again, she glared at the girl balefully. "Monster…"

"Spare me the theatrics, Nelly dearest," Juliette said primly. "Justine believes you ill-suited to seek the throne if a bit of fratricide turns your stomach so, but you and I both know that all it would take to move you to atrocity is just the right sort of prompting—and a bit of motivation for good measure. For you do not know your hatred, Nelly, as Euphy once did not know her anger, and so the day shall come when it is all that you have left; and on that day, it shall consume you utterly. You shall find yourself twisted and warped by it, made a grotesquerie by virtue of your own acrimony, and when you look in the mirror on that day, only to realise that all of this was your own doing? I expect it shall unmake you utterly.

"And speaking frankly, dear sister?" said Juliette, propping her elbows upon the table and leaning in to meet Cornelia's anger with her own sinister smugness, the kindness of her face shifted by mockery into a beatific sneer. "I can't wait to watch."

Cornelia wanted in that moment, desperately, to move her hands up and wring the girl's neck, to bring this bloody dynasty in the making to an end once and for all, but the poison had unmade her strength utterly while her attention was elsewhere, and now she had not the power left in her body to do it.

And when she looked up into her once-sister's pitiless violet eyes, which savoured her debasement, she saw the knowledge of her impotence glittering there.

"Good talk, Cornelia," she concluded, leaning back in her chair, the mask of kindness set so firmly into place upon her countenance once again that not even Cornelia's newfound awareness allowed her sight past the exquisitely-crafted fiction. "Oh, and our dear brother Clovis has decided to hold a season's end fête in the next few weeks, though I personally have no doubts that it will have expanded into more of a gala by the day-of, knowing him as I do. You are, of course, invited to attend, with a plus-one if it so pleases you. But otherwise, that will be all, I think. Jeremiah and Taliesin shall, of course, see you out."

---

Throughout Pendragon, and indeed throughout the entire Imperial Family, there was not one person whose reputation for festivities exceeded that of Prince Clovis la Britannia; and so it came to pass that whenever an invitation to one of his 'gatherings' was sent out, it became a fixture of conversations amongst courtiers, both before and after the fact. Invitations had become hot commodities, a political weather-vane of sorts that discerned whose fortunes were soon to take a dip, and whose were about to become ascendant, and as such they were coveted, and in short order became topics of rumours all their own. No one knew, exactly, how it came to be that Prince Clovis, a maccaroni by diplomatic definition and a fop in less charitable terms, was an oracle of sorts of courtly scandal, but then, that the Imperial Family was exceptional was a given, and so most did not think to scrutinise it much more closely than that.

The Second Prince's Season's End Gala followed this pattern exactly.

Warwick Palace was decorated in spectacular fashion, the already ostentatious edifice fully adorned and resplendent with all the grandeur and pageantry that the more festive members of the peers of the realm took to with shockingly eager aplomb, as though celebrating simply the very fact that they were Britannian nobles, and as such answered to only one man in truth, that they might scheme and grasp and climb to their hearts' content. The driveway of the great building was backed up all the way down to St. Darwin Street in full accordingly, as each luxurious and prohibitively expensive car or limousine made to bring itself to the open front door of the palace, through which flowed music with great bombast, over even the clamour of the veritable crowd of highborn and well-to-do socialites making small talk amongst themselves, a delicate dance of one-upmanship that was every bit as much a spectacle as the party itself. An entire complement of servants flowed to and fro, with Bartley, Clovis's blustering and rotund moustachioed majordomo, a man utterly unequal to the task of conducting a gathering of this magnitude, having ceded all authority to the vi Britannia majordomo, the vastly more capable Taliesin; and under his direction, the staff worked together like a well-oiled machine, such that every arrival was properly announced, greeted, and summarily thrust into the increasingly ribald convocation of libertines.

Wines and champagnes expensive enough to feed entire families for a year were passed around and imbibed, libations flowing increasingly freely as the crowd awaited the host's presentation, and a plethora of hors d'oeuvres each composed of various delicacies of far-flung lands under the rule of the Holy Britannian Empire, were picked clean from their platters with a speed that could be considered befitting the proud and unabashed voracity of those in attendance. As the invitations allowed each invited guest to bring with them a 'plus one' (which had only further served to stoke the frenzy around the sure-to-be-legendary party in the past few weeks), couples of all sorts, men with men, men with women, and women with women, in pairings ranging from the platonic to the carnal to the romantic, mingled with one another on the exquisite polished chequered marble floor of the grand ballroom, and yet the flow of newcomers refused to abate.

Dame Emilia Ravencroft was herself such a 'plus-one', incidentally, and though few, in fact none, knew her, more than enough of the guests had seen her at these sorts of functions to consider her something of a regular fixture of them in her own right. They spoke at great lengths amongst themselves wherever they believed that she could not hear them of both her seeming-youth and much more obvious beauty, of the queer yet alluring spectacle of her golden eyes like fresh honey. They speculated her being a cousin of the Margrave Gottwald so as to explain her frequent attendance accompanying the Sixth Princess, who was herself coming to be known to be a gregarious and influential socialite in her own right; and they spoke of much and more besides, little of it of any sort of import for all that they seemed to believe the matters were each an axis upon which the world might be in a single moment turned—and not for the first time, the woman who had for the past few centuries went by the sobriquet of 'C.C.' mused that there was perhaps no greater example of Taliesin Blackwood's less evident talents than this dramatis persona of hers he had concocted almost two years prior.

She'd spent the full turn of a moon, one month, in seclusion in Belial Palace, studying intensely at the feet of the elder immortal Izanami upon their return from the freshly-dubbed Area Eleven, but upon her exit from that cloistering, she'd been practically ambushed with false documents and retroactively-admitted 'originals' that created the formerly-Austrian junker line that begat the bastard descendants by the name of 'Ravencroft' from whole cloth. Utilising some concoction or other, the older immortals had taken care of preparations to dye her distinctive lime-green hair a chestnut brown, and repeated the process painstakingly with her eyebrows and eyelashes, and then given her a refresher on how to best comport herself when those who were not of their immediate coterie could see her; then, she'd begun to attend Clovis's parties as Juliette vi Britannia's companion, who remained, for all the acrimony thrown in Marianne's direction, a member of the Imperial Family and a princess of the realm. Perhaps it was therefore no surprise that it hadn't taken her very long to slide under the radar, as though she'd never been a newcomer or outsider at all.

The dress she wore was, much like Juliette's, a high-waisted evening gown of silk and satin, but contrasted in colour, and in the choice of lace versus ruffles; C.C. dressed in sea green and aquamarine, while the Sixth Princess adorned herself in vivid crimson and sunny orange and lustrous gold, all of them bold choices to better contrast with her gentler hair colour, the very same as Charles's when he was young (though it had not taken her very long at all to learn that Juliette did not appreciate that comparison any more than her sister liked being compared to Marianne, for all that Juliette was much better at concealing her displeasure), the same way C.C.'s own contrasted against her adopted darker tone. The two of them made for a tasteful yet no less eye-catching pair on the ballroom floor, but while Juliette had wasted no time in making herself the centrepiece of several different yet concurrent conversations, the highborn guests were more than happy to humour C.C.'s admitted tendency to remain at the periphery of such things, so as to better remark upon her from afar, no doubt.

If she looked off to the side, she could easily catch a glimpse of Euphemia, who had entered dressed in a midnight blue garrick-style overcoat, and could now be seen milling about in long breeches, polished black Hessian boots, a white linen shirt with a rich silk cravat covered by a cream-coloured waistcoat, double-breasted with gold filigree, and a dark coat with tails that she wore open, but secured with a scarlet sash that had become something of a trademark for her. Her bubblegum-pink hair hung in ringlets around her face, but the majority of its length was bound back with a bow of black silk ribbon, and C.C. took in the restrained confidence with which the Seventh Princess had learned to comport herself alongside her plus-one in the form of Oldrin Zevon, noting not for the first time that Euphemia's adopted dandyish dress sense worked for her in a manner that Clovis's contrasting foppishness never seemed to accomplish for him.

And speaking of the Master of the House…

She looked up towards the balcony at the top of the twin staircases at the rear of the ballroom, and sure enough, it was from there that Clovis la Britannia emerged at last, attired in a fashion that she found to her own sensibilities made him look like a particularly gauche peacock (though of course, you wouldn't know he was attired so ridiculously by just looking at his face). He grinned broadly as he visibly seemed to bask in the atmosphere of his own creation, and when he motioned for one of his servants to bang a gong in the background, conversation did die down; before long, the attention of the entire chamber was upon him, and him alone.

"My lords and ladies of Britannia! Gentlefolk and peers, bosom companions and masters of all you survey! I bid you all a fond and warm welcome to my home, and my most sincere thanks for rising from your estates and townhouses to attend this, the Season's End Gala!" he bellowed from his high perch, and as he got into the swell of speaking, addressing his adoring crowd, C.C. considered that perhaps there was a hidden advantage to squeezing oneself into such an…unmistakable ensemble—which brought to mind what Juliette had had to say regarding her own assessment of Clovis: Our dear brother is a truly terrifying and perplexing creature, for he can be an amazingly competent man, but absolutely never on purpose. He has managed, somehow, to blindly stumble into a position of indispensability through sheer force of buffoonery. "To be certain, Warwick Palace would not be half so radiant tonight but for your invaluable contributions. Words cannot describe the joy I feel to find you all here, making merry.

"Before we begin, I would like to express my utmost gratitude to my indefatigable sister and muse, Princess Juliette vi Britannia, my inspiration and the source of many of my greatest ideas," he continued, gesturing to Juliette in the crowd with a dramatic flourish; Juliette, to her credit, gave a genial smile and a textbook-perfect curtsey, as all eyes in the crowd turned to her with muted murmurs. "And with our sister Justine away, learning that fine and fashionable art of killing, such a title shall doubtless prove to be all the easier to defend."

Juliette gave a polite chuckle, raising her fluted glass of sparkling amber champagne to Clovis's japing on high; and that laugh quickly spread thereafter to the rest of the assemblage, once the vultures had ascertained that this was not some new royal drama to which they should bear witness with bated breath. It seemed Clovis, too, was gratified to see his joke had landed, and he smiled at his sister as he continued.

"Indeed, not two weeks past, we sat together during luncheon, and I told her, in fact, of a particular acquisition I had recently made, of a botanical nature. A rare orchid, Ophrys apifera, I am told it is called, that which the unlearned of Europia United deem the 'bee orchid,' and to look upon it was such a diverting inspiration that I arranged to purchase a clipping from our very own Botanical Gardens here in Pendragon; and after much labour, it has flourished in Warwick Palace's own greenhouses. Juliette suggested that we throw a party to commemorate it, as well as the end of another fruitful season of that which our beloved late Saint Wilde affectionately referred to as the 'marriage mart,' and it was such a capital idea that I simply had to take her up on it. Thank you again, dear sister. I know not what I would do without you."

All eyes were on Juliette once again, this time in applause, the collective gesture both restrained and composed as was only proper and expected in courtly manners and civil conduct. C.C. kept the urge to roll her eyes on a leash, if only barely, but the princess put on a flawless performance of eating it all up, even as her violet gaze swept across them, the look of a shrike scouting out its next few morsels as it so often was.

Clovis grinned broadly, then, heartened, and continued. "As such, I now pronounce the greenhouse gardens of Warwick Palace open to your perusal. Feel free to wander and witness there at your leisure, my lords and ladies, for I surely shall. Until then, I bid thee partake of thy libations 'til thou art sated, and then indulge some measure further! For by my name as Clovis la Britannia you shall all speak of this night as the most splendid you have ever lived—until, of course, you return again to brighten my halls once more. Maestro!"

At the prince's prompting, the musicians once again sat, took up their instruments, and struck up a lively gavotte, swinging the festivities back into full bloom as the nobles began to make to clear the floor; then, with a raucous clamour, those who came with a partner to whom they were attached, it seemed, lined up in two rows, each across from their companion, and then began to dance in time.

Change the costumes, C.C. mused to herself, looking on as one of the many unattached guests who elected to remain on the edge of the room, and this wouldn't have been out of place at court in Versailles. Gods above and gods below, I was so young back then… But then again, I suppose that this irony must ever have been at the heart of Britannia, since before there was a Britannia, even…

The gavotte bled seamlessly into a volta as she watched, sipping at her drink and refreshing herself. Once upon a time, this splendour would have dazzled her, but after centuries upon centuries of looking on as the same lavish affects repeated themselves time and again, as though reproduced by rote, even the sorts of debaucheries once scrawled by an admittedly accurate scoundrel upon the walls of the Bastille no longer managed to stir her to any appreciable extent.

One does not cease to live with the passage of time as an immortal, she recalled then, as her mood grew increasingly maudlin, Taliesin's almost grandfatherly admonitions in her ear. We are not ourselves so diminished from the mortals. We love and laugh and cry as they do. Living doesn't stop for us, we just start having to work at it a little harder…

"Are you enjoying the party?"

C.C. blinked, jolted quite abruptly from her own thoughts, as she turned to face the man addressing her. "I beg your pardon, my lord?"

The aristocrat was olive-skinned, with dark brown hair, emerald eyes, shockingly white teeth, and a roguish sort of comeliness; his long face made the boyish, youthful softness of his handsome features seem somehow mischievous, and only just this side of trustworthy; only the crow's feet at the corner of his eyes, and the smirking lines around his mouth seemed to give away the fact that he was older than he otherwise might have seemed—the streak of stark white through his dark mane could have been a stylistic choice just as easily as it might have been a sign of maturity. He was dressed like someone who had just come in off of an afternoon spent riding, and planned to return to such an activity in short order, for all that his attire was fine enough that it would not have given insult at the door, with the frilled jabot and loose, airy blouse he wore, bound with a midnight-blue sash embroidered with gold thread underneath his sturdy black coat, his trousers cut close to his strong legs to give off the same impression she had just registered. It was a mercy, she supposed, that his black jockey boots lacked the jingling of spurs. His full, ochre lips peeled back into a smile that some part of her recognised as disarming, and that were she a young maiden or guileless ingénue, she might be inclined to swoon at the expression. "I asked if you were enjoying the party, Miss Ravencroft. You're so often at these soirées that I confess I may have developed something of a curiosity on the subject."

C.C. looked him up and down critically, still at a loss as to what had motivated him to come over to this part of the room and attempt to make nice with her. After a few moments of deliberation, she decided to be as truthful as she dared. "I wouldn't know. I very much might have, I suppose, once upon a time; but as you've so astutely observed, I've attended so many of these sorts of parties that they have long since blended together, to some extent."

Something shifted in those green eyes, yet she still found herself puzzled by his intent. "Do you see His Highness's festivities to be lacklustre, then?"

"Oh, heavens no," C.C. denied easily, and honestly. "The effort he puts into these is undeniable, as is his deft hand at them; but there are only so many ways to flaunt such splendour, you understand, and it all begins to get a bit stale after a while."

"I…see what you mean," he said hesitantly, his strong brow deeply furrowed.

C.C. allowed herself a teasing little smile as she lifted her champagne flute to her lips once more. "Somehow, I very sincerely doubt that…"

They stood there in silence, his awkward, hers expectant, for a few moments longer. Then, the man bowed with a flourish, doing his level best to save face, for some reason or other. She didn't think she'd insulted or embarrassed the man? She was fairly certain she'd recall having done so, if indeed she had; she possessed quite a sharp memory concerning the subjects of which people she'd insulted, how she had done so, and perhaps most crucially, when—if she said so herself. "Well then, Miss Ravencroft, I very sincerely hope that you find greater diversion in the festivities to come."

"We are of a mind in that, my lord," C.C. replied wryly. Then, when he moved to leave, she recalled that she was meant to at least attempt to be polite at these gatherings, and so she tacked on, "Take care."

The man walked away with a swiftness she thought was wholly uncalled for, and brushed past the Seventh Princess on the approach in the course of doing so. There was a pinched bemusement to the smirk on Euphemia's face, as though she was just barely biting back laughter and struggling mightily not to let it slip in too uncouth a manner. "Well. You certainly showed him."

"You say that, but I'm sure I have absolutely no idea what he'd hoped to accomplish," C.C. groused into the glass as she lowered it from her face.

"And here I thought it rather obvious he'd hoped to be seen speaking to you—and that he believed getting under your skirts would prove a simple enough matter indeed," Euphemia chuckled, swiping her own flute of drink from a passing servant-boy. "Something he could boast about to his friends, no doubt… But then, the thought has not once crossed your mind, has it?"

C.C. grimaced. The fact that indeed, the possibility had not even remotely entered her consideration was more than a little embarrassing. "How do you know he wasn't merely coming in search of a little bit of friendly conversation, then?"

"Pft. The day that Edward, Earl Hyde seeks another person, be they man or woman, for company of a merely pleasant and not pleasurable nature, another notch in his bedpost, will be the day the bells toll and trumpets sound, my friend," Euphemia replied with an undercurrent of incredulous disdain, sipping at the contents of the flute.

"…And how do you know this man?" C.C. asked, vaguely uncertain if she wished to know what the answer would be, in truth.

Euphemia smirked, shrugging her shoulders. "I dallied with his daughter. Same thing with half of the nobles I know by name."

C.C. went still, knowing for certain by now that she had indeed made a most grave error. "I thought you, Marrybell, and Oldrin were…?"

"Oh, we are," Euphemia agreed. "But dearest Marry's something of a free spirit, and honestly, have you seen Ozzy? The girl could charm the chastity out of a nun. The bed we share has a lot of…guests, and many highborn girls our age have seen the insides of at least one of our rooms—some of them multiple. Lucretia Hyde, in particular, was a favoured guest of ours some two months past."

I'm discussing a teenage girl's sex life with that same teenage girl, C.C. realised with no shortage of horror and rising dread. Something, please happen. I'll take literally anything at this point, so long as it gets me out of this mortifying situation…

"Announcing Her Royal Highness, Carine ne Britannia, Eighth Princess of the Realm!" called the herald, and were C.C. a more fanciful sort of person, she might have entertained the sudden notion of another finger on a monkey's paw withering shut. Cursing whichever djinn continually derived pleasure from interpreting her wishes, pleas, and prayers in the most personally inconvenient manner possible (and not for the first time, at that), C.C. nonetheless swung her gaze to the front of the hall, looking across the murmuring mass of highborn to the threshold of Warwick Palace.

Princess Carine ne Britannia was a thoroughly unpleasant child, even by the standards of Britannian royalty; but though she was known for insisting on having her crimson hair tied up in those ridiculous twin-tails of hers while otherwise dressing like a harlequin, she was known for being the favoured sibling of the First Princess, and so took care never to appear even slightly dishevelled while attired in such outlandish garments. Yet, the visage of she who stood before them now was one that was practically soggy with sweat, her hair down, and her clothes rumpled and stained and torn to the point of complete and total disarray. The glint of mad fury and outrage in her blue-grey eyes contrasted quite sharply from the image of distress that the rest of her presented, however, and the fact that C.C. could pick it out from across the room must have meant that others closer to her had noticed it as well, details of this even now being fed into the thresher that was Pendragon's rumour mill. C.C. had no doubt that even if she turned around and left at this very moment, having done nothing beyond arrive, the princess's reputation would be in a sorry state on the morrow even still, and indeed for months hence.

And judging by the look in the girl's eye, C.C. felt reasonably certain in the conclusion she arrived at, that this situation was only going to get worse.

C.C. caught sight of Clovis, now on the floor and working his way through to the front to see what all the fuss was about; but Juliette drew close to him, placing her hand on his arm, and whispered in his ear, before leaving him behind, where he stayed put. The nobility parted before the Sixth Princess, then, for the speech earlier had whetted their appetite for royal drama; and now that it had finally appeared before them, none would suffer to be the one to stand in the way of the spectacle about to take place.

As Juliette came out into the wide berth the guests were giving the freshly-arrived young princess, she began to speak, her voice calm and clear as a bell, and the concern and soothing edge to her tone was so pitch-perfect and flawless that even C.C. couldn't detect its falsehood from witnessing the performance alone. "Carine! We are, of course, glad to have you here, but dear sister, you look…positively dreadful. Come, and let's get you tidied up, hmm?"

And Carine, whose blue-grey gaze had taken to sweeping back and forth across the assembly in the manner of a cornered animal with its teeth bared, snapped that gaze over to lock onto Juliette's mien of affectionate worry. "You. This was your doing, you bitch… Why…? Why did you do this?! How dare you, you… You… You half-breed filth! Your whore mother isn't here to protect you, bitch! And yet you have the audacity to raise a hand against a princess of the realm?!"

"Carine, if I were you, I would choose my next words with great care," Juliette replied calmly, the kindness stricken from her tone, leaving only cool regality—the platonic ideal of Britannian civil conduct. "I'm sure I have no idea what you're accusing me of, but sister or no, if you insist on continuing to speak these perfidious lies and vile calumnies, on my honour as a princess of the realm, I swear that I shall have no recourse but to seek redress, and with all haste."

Carine's already livid expression grew even uglier, her face contorting into a hideous rictus of fury with every word out of Juliette's mouth; and when the Sixth Princess was done, the Eighth erupted into a wordless, inhuman shriek, and lunged at her sister, fingers curled into wretched talons as she tackled her to the ground in a clutter of ungainly limbs. Euphemia shoved her glass off to a servant that had been making to pass by them, and surged forth, fighting her way through the press of highborn bodies, and C.C., who prided herself on never being the last to catch onto her part, likewise abandoned her drink and then made to follow in the pink-haired princess's wake.

Already they caught sight of Carine's wildly flailing arms as she clawed at Juliette's face, heard her incoherent shrieking about her family's ruin, her mother's death, her estate's destitution, and how it was all your fault, you half-breed whore!, and finally the muted gasping and choking sounds as Carine wrapped her hands around Juliette's windpipe, her white-knuckled grip strangling the life out of the other princess as she lay prone upon the black-and-white chequered floor of the ballroom—and the two of them burst into this scene, the gleam in Carine's eyes as she glutted herself on the experience of throttling her slightly older sister to death clearly visible to all and sundry. Clovis was in the background, waving his arms in a flurry of panicked and horrified gestures in his ridiculous robes as he commanded his guards to put a stop to it.

Yet it was not they who arrived in the nick of time to save the Sixth Princess's life, but a gallant son of Britannia, with a tousled head of teal hair and eyes of burnished amber. With shocking speed, he surged forth and wrapped his arms under the maddened Carine's armpits, and swiftly hauled her off of Juliette as she screamed and thrashed; without a moment's hesitation, then, he expertly manoeuvred her to the ground in a textbook-perfect armlock, keeping her restrained even as she continued to buck and thrash and demand that he let go of me! Unhand your princess right this instant so I can fucking kill the bitch!

Juliette rose into a seated position with some effort, then, welts in the shape of long scratches upon her face in obvious evidence of the assault; and with all the experience C.C. had had with wounds both of a mortal and near-mortal severity, she could clearly tell that the redness around her fair-skinned throat were the beginnings of a rather nasty bit of bruising in the days to come. Euphemia broke from C.C.'s side and dashed to her sister's aid, murmuring to Juliette in hurried tones as the princess coughed and then replied in kind, voice clear but scratchy, and with a faint tremble underneath her voice, a perfect example of a girl who had very nearly just perished, but was nonetheless holding her composure together admirably.

Euphemia waved her over, and C.C., following her cue, grabbed hold of one of Juliette's arms while the Seventh Princess took the other, both of them working together to lift Juliette to her feet. It was then that the members of Warwick Palace's household guard, a collection of what could generously be referred to as paramilitary personnel who were attired in gleaming, mirror-polished parade armour of a style dating back to the age of Napoleon, arrived at the scene from where they were stationed around the ballroom, which then allowed Jeremiah to release the restrained Carine into their custody; and though she continued fighting to get free, screaming, cursing, kicking, thrashing, and trying to bite, it was all for naught. They managed to haul her off out of sight with relative ease all the same, to be detained until such a time as the Royal Guard could be called to haul her away to the Oubliette in the bowels of the Imperial Palace—a complex built to hold political prisoners as they awaited their public executions. It hadn't seen proper use since the end of the Emblem of Blood, C.C. knew, with Charles preferring to store his cast-offs on Alcatraz Island, out of sight and out of mind; and some part of her found it oh so terribly amusing, in an ironic way, that its newest occupant after such a long period would be one of Charles's own brats.

"Out of my way, damn you! Out of my way!" roared Clovis, his voice rife with uncommon rancour and ironclad firmness. It took him only a few moments more to reach them, but when he did, his cheeks ruddy with exertion and stress, his eyes glittering with fear and anger, he rushed forth and moved to crush Juliette within his arms, as though he desperately needed reassurance that she yet remained. C.C. found her nose curling involuntarily at the stench of tobacco lingering on his preposterous clothes, but she said nothing as Juliette wrapped her arms around him in turn, and rasped out soothing words in soft tones as she coughed here and again, steadily regaining her voice. Then he released her, and stepped back, uncertainty in his gaze as his lip quivered with poorly-hidden distress and anxiety. "What should we do? I… Should we tell them to go home? I… You were just attacked!"

"Nonsense, Clovis," Juliette disagreed firmly. "I'm fine, and I certainly won't let you be made into a liar on my account. You promised these good people a night to remember, didn't you?"

"But Juliette… I—" Clovis fretted, but Juliette interrupted him, placing a single finger gloved in white lace upon his lips, and a soft hush gently bade his silence.

"Don't you worry your pretty head about that, dear brother," Juliette reassured him fondly. "Just relax, and leave it all to me, okay? This is your party, so please, do try to enjoy yourself—for me?"

Clovis nodded mutely, and the relief at having the decision made for him was written plain upon the Second Prince's face.

Juliette favoured him with one more softly reassuring smile, and stepped back from him, turning to address the riveted guests, who watched them in stunned, sepulchral silence. But the Sixth Princess cleared her throat pointedly, and, projecting her voice, declared, "All is well, and the show must go on! Maestro!"

The band, clearly unsettled, took a moment to regain their seats, and strike up a tune; but play they did, choosing a light, airy waltz, and with that, it was as though a spell had been broken, and the festivities resumed, now with an undercurrent of lurid rumour stoking the engrossed atmosphere to new heights. But before they could rejoin them, as Juliette chaperoned Clovis back into the mix, getting him involved in a number of conversations where he would flourish before she made to return, Euphemia tapped at C.C.'s arm lightly, drawing her attention once more. The immortal turned to the rosette princess quizzically, but elected to follow her gaze instead of merely asking, and turned to regard a familiar magenta uniform and a telltale head of unmistakable fuchsia hair at the threshold of the ballroom.

She could tell it disturbed Euphemia as much as it did her, that neither of them knew exactly when, during the recent kerfuffle, Cornelia li Britannia had arrived at Warwick Palace, with none other than Ser Gilbert G.P. Guilford as her brooding, looming, bespectacled shadow.

And yet, by the look on Juliette's face as she returned and gauged their faintly shocked expressions, the Sixth Princess very much did.

"We should be getting back to the party presently," Juliette informed them.

She turned, then, and fixed Cornelia with a smile that was equal parts false friendship and merciless mockery, as though she hadn't just been assaulted and strangled not ten minutes past—C.C. found that she was impressed by that despite herself—and gave the elder royal a jaunty wave.

The elder li Britannia sister paled, then, and with her face newly ashen, she turned abruptly on her heel in a sharp pivot, and strode away into the darkness; her knight was transparently perplexed, but he did not hesitate to faithfully dog her retreating steps.

Eyes dancing with cruel mirth, Juliette turned towards the two of them, one of whom (Euphemia) was struggling mightily not to laugh, herself, and assured them, "We'll talk more on this a bit later, girls. I shall make absolutely certain of it."

---

"Well then," huffed Euphemia, as she collapsed gracelessly onto the settee in Juliette's parlour—at least, one of the comfortable ones, intended for guests whose presence was actually welcome. On another such piece of furniture, across from hers, C.C. lounged upon the sumptuous cushions as though she was prepared to be committed to portraiture—Euphemia would make a 'draw her like a French girl' joke if she hadn't already worn that particular bit ragged some months past—while the undying woman's slender, pale fingers traced errant swirling patterns into the lavish upholstery. "That was certainly something."

"Ever the master of understatement, I see," C.C. remarked drily, her honey-gold gaze fixed upon the nearly featureless ceiling above them as they waited for Juliette to rejoin them. She'd even told them to feel free to make themselves at home, as though this wasn't already practically Euphemia's second residence.

Hells, the only place I spend more of my nights in than Belial Palace has to be Lilith, she reflected idly. And thinking of Lilith Palace, I hope Ozzy made it home safely…

The doors to the parlour swung inward on softly-squealing hinges, then, and the current lady of the house made her unceremonious entrance not a moment later, briskly stepping into the chamber with a quiet, dutiful Jeremiah Gottwald in tow. The sight of him brought her own shadow to mind, and Euphemia gave herself a moment to hope that Mycroft was taking advantage of his time off with his brothers, not wasting what was meant to be a break from his duties guarding her by worrying about her wellbeing; then, she once again directed her attention to her (slightly) younger sister, clad in a pale shift, the nightgown of fine make but for the most part unadorned, with a richer maroon open-faced tea-gown decorated with swirling designs made of cloth-of-gold instead of the gold thread that might adorn more formal attire draped about her frame. Her hair was down, a wave of brown locks so light it was practically a sandy blonde falling in a thick, voluminous sheet, given form by the remnants of the braids she so regularly styled her mane into, and she stepped lightly, such that her gait gave the impression that the hem of her shift danced of its own accord.

"My apologies for the delay, girls," Juliette sighed airily as she plopped her backside down into an armchair; but where that same motion often communicated a weary frustration from her, tonight there was a definite note of satisfaction about the whole affair. "As it turns out, our soon-to-be-late sister Carine's touch was as foul as her personality. Quite a bit of dirt under her fingernails. It was shamefully grotesque. I do hope you two weren't cooling your heels into boredom too much in my absence?"

"Barely noticed you were gone," Euphemia snarked back without missing a beat, used as she was to the repartée, while she shifted in her seat to a position that felt a little less unbearably decadent to attempt to speak from. "Now, I believe you implied you'd let us in on the juicy details. So spill."

"Oh, ye of little patience," lamented Juliette. "Can't you let a girl bask in the afterglow a little, you incorrigible brute?"

"Big talk coming from the pillow princess," Euphemia shot right back.

"I'm sorry, could we not talk about your sex lives?" C.C. complained with an exasperated whine, a surefire sign that their teamwork had once again managed to get under the immortal girl's skin. "I'm almost eight hundred years old, and in all that time I have never come across a sequence of words that accurately describe just how much I do not need to hear this."

"Back when you were our age, you'd already have been considered old enough to bear children, you fucking hypocrite," Euphemia objected good-naturedly. "So I don't want to hear that from you of all people, Miss 'Younger-Than-She-Are-Happy-Mothers-Made.'"

C.C.'s expression twisted in faint disgust at the thought, but even so, she bit out a snippy "Touché."

Juliette laughed, a clear and rueful sort of mirth. "I have to say, Euphy, letting Justine get you into Shakespeare continues to be one of the most questionable decisions that I think I have ever made."

Euphemia scoffed, equal parts amused and affronted as she leaned back into the settee and crossed her arms beneath her growing bust. "Hey, she started it."

"Mm. A fair point, I must concede," Juliette admitted wryly.

C.C. jolted upright, turning an affronted gaze upon Juliette in the armchair. "Hey!"

"Well, I'm sorry, C.C., I truly am," she replied playfully, her tone coy and transparently insouciant. "But you really have brought this upon yourself…"

"And speaking of things we bring upon ourselves," Euphemia remarked, chuckling at the banter but steering them back to the matter at hand all the same. "Did you plan out that whole thing with Carine?"

That provoked a distinctly indelicate snort from Juliette. "No. Of course not. Why the fuck would I have had a plan? Plans can be discovered, pieced together, figured out, or worse, prevented. Now, did I orchestrate the absolute ruin of the line of ne Britannia? Of course I did~. But intrigue, Euphy dearest, is, at its core, a game of opportunism."

"Well then, how did you do it?" Euphemia asked patiently; for many of Juliette's most illuminating insights tended to be given this way, off the cuff and unscripted, and so in order to make of herself a good student, Euphemia had long since learned to pay close attention in moments like these.

"Now that, dear sister, would be telling," Juliette replied in a teasing tone, her mouth twisted into a sadistic little curl of a smile that the rosette had long since learned to appreciate. "Let's just say I had a few favours lined up—dominoes, if you will, set out in expectation of a rainy day. All I really needed then was a catalyst, which just so happened to be oh-so-graciously provided by our darling brother Clovis. The rest, as they say, is history—well, history in the making, at any rate~."

"So. you just…heard a bit of gossip that someone had told Clovis, and ran with it, and just…wiped out an entire branch of the Imperial Family?" Euphemia recounted, slightly amazed.

"That's about the gist of it, yes," Juliette affirmed, her violet eyes glittering with cruel mischief. "And now that Carine, a princess of the realm, has attacked another princess of the realm, based on lies and slander alone, in full view of a ballroom full of more witnesses than the OSI could possibly have silenced all of, even back during its heyday? Well then, she'll naturally lose her life in a suitably public and brutal fashion~. If she's shown even the slightest hint of mercy, then His Majesty's edicts that underpin so much of the current political climate, preventing the sparking of a national succession crisis that could easily spin out of control into a second full-blown Emblem of Blood, become effectively toothless, thus undermining his rule quite egregiously~. If he wants to keep the throne, his hands are, for all intents and purposes, tied! Ah, the sword of hegemony cuts so wonderfully both ways, doesn't it, Euphy~?"

Astounded, Euphemia nodded slowly, and let out a low whistle. "As Suzaku would say: Bad. Ass."

"Isn't it?!" Juliette gushed in delight as she leaned forth out of her chair, and a light, bubbly laugh danced upon her lips. "And would you like to know the best part? I know there was no plan involved in any of this, and now so do you—but they don't! Can you even imagine it?! Every ally Guinevere can call to her aid to investigate her favourite sister's complete and total unmaking, all chasing a plan more shadow than substance, that in fact never existed in the first place~! Oh! Just thinking about the face of anguish she'll make as one of the few people she truly loves suffers and dies, while she's powerless even to understand how this happened, itgives me chills~!"

Euphemia smiled wryly, understanding her sister's glee as she physically shuddered in anticipation; and the Seventh Princess had no qualms admitting that she even shared the feeling, albeit to a noticeably lesser extent. "Okay, that I've also got to see. Now you've got me looking forward to it, too…"

"So wait," C.C. interjected, her brow furrowed as she held up a single finger, but otherwise made no motion to shift out of the reclined languor to which she had since returned. "Juliette, do you mean to tell me that you arranged for Carine to sign her own death warrant, for the sole purpose of hurting Guinevere?"

"Well, of course," Juliette replied with a shrug, as though the motive behind what had transpired tonight, and what further affairs were to transpire henceforth, was nothing more and nothing less than the simplest and most obvious thing in the world. "She derided Justine, after all. So really, she brought all this ruin and sorrow down upon herself. I only get to choose the shape and the manner of her ruination, really. Now, Milly would have simply arranged for Guinevere to meet with an unfortunate accident, but I've had something of an unfortunate tendency to play with my food, I'm afraid—ever since I was small, in fact. So she'll simply have to suffer a bit before the end."

C.C. stared at Juliette in silence for a few moments, opening and closing her mouth in a number of false starts, before finally she seemed to regain her powers of speech. "…And here I thought your sister was the mad one—but no, it's the both of you!"

Juliette's previous good humour seemed to cool, and she turned her attention to C.C. with the same shrike-stare as before. "Beg pardon?"

"Oh, don't get like that. I didn't mean it that way," C.C. sighed, leaning her head back and staring at the ceiling again, her lips curling up into a saucy, not-so-vaguely feline smirk as she spoke. "When you get to be my age, let alone Taliesin's or Lady Izanami's, novelty becomes an increasingly rare find, a treasure and a necessity in one. You and Justine both, you're interesting, more so than any contractor I've had in the past five hundred years, even. Really, even if my two elders weren't in the picture, even if I'd never caught even the slightest whisper of their existence, I'd be of a mind to stick around to see where this leads—and maybe even help it get there. Do you have even the slightest inkling of how rare that is, that I'd desire to involve myself directly, and of my own volition…? I mean, seriously, as far as interesting contractors go, the two of you have somehow managed to beat out everyone since Jeanne la Pucelle—not that she was so chaste for very long after we met…"

Euphemia started, her mind seizing on that last bit with a suddenness that would have provoked a sense of whiplash were it a physical sensation. "Wait, you mean to say you bedded Joan of Arc?!"

C.C. stopped in her tracks, as though frozen mid-motion; and then, to her shock and Juliette's, and indeed Jeremiah's, from where he stood by the door, a light dusting of pink bloomed upon the immortal's cheeks. When she spoke at last, her tone was clipped, and her voice was tight to the point where it bordered on seeming choked: "No comment."

Just then, there came a knocking upon the parlour door, shattering the silence that had just begun to settle in the aftermath of C.C.'s uncharacteristic slip of the tongue. Talk about being saved by the bell…

"Who is it?" Juliette called.

"It's Taliesin, my lady," came the familiar genial voice of the immortal majordomo through the door of the chamber. "I thought I might ask if you young ladies would like some refreshments, after that spot of bother earlier this evening."

"That would be lovely, Taliesin, thank you," Juliette called back.

"I'll get it, your highness," Jeremiah volunteered, giving a brief nod before he strode forth from his corner of the room to swing the door open, allowing Taliesin entry with a trolley laden with pastries and tea in tow.

It trundled in on its oiled wheels, and with practised grace, the majordomo drew it alongside them, perpendicular to the low table that sat in the middle of their settees and armchair. With motions equally deft and swift, he unloaded it—favouring Juliette with a sly wink when he unveiled a platter piled high with a fresh batch of powdered, jelly-filled doughnuts (which Euphemia understood to be something of a shameful secret of hers, that she would enjoy commoner food like this)—and C.C. finally sat up to pour them all tea, fresh from the pot. Euphemia wasted no time before taking up her own white-and-blue saucer, but she did not dare place it to her lips. Instead, her attention was fixed on Juliette, who noticed the weight of her gaze with a chuckle and an approving nod, before taking a drink of the tea herself. Then, she laughed again, her shoulders quaking with uproarious amusement. Euphemia felt her brow begin to furrow in confusion.

"What's so funny?" she asked quizzically.

"Oh, nothing—nothing!" Juliette laughed. "It's just… I mean, I caught your sister with that one just the other day~."

Euphemia's brow grew even more furrowed, but the moment it clicked into place with a flash, she felt a combination of incredulity and mirth all her own rising like a tide within her. "Cornelia, you mean?"

Juliette nodded vigorously. "She didn't even notice! Not the taste, not the smell—and she might've never found out, if I hadn't pointed it out to her before it nearly killed her! Euphy, I didn't even have to use a flavourless poison!"

Euphemia leaned back against the plush cushions of the settee, and she laughed, so hard that the act became physically painful, until actual tears began to well up in her eyes. "Oh gods, that's hilarious!"

"It got to the point where I had to physically force the antidote down her throat, because her hands were already shaking too violently at that point for her to even open the phial," Juliette continued, amazed herself, in that odd sort of astonishment that came from the sight of an act of such surpassing idiocy that it was actually somewhat wondrous. "Jeremiah was there, too—he'll back me up."

"I was indeed, your highness," Jeremiah agreed, stepping forth into the conversation. "And if I may say so, you played her like a fiddle."

"Oh, please," Juliette scoffed. "At least a fiddle would require some modicum of skill and effort."

"In fairness, my own experience with poisons was equally lacklustre," Euphemia interjected.

"Yes, but you never took a drink until we were already drinking," Juliette rebutted. "Now, you still got caught out because I was immune to the poison we used when we started, but even as a novice, your poison discipline was still leaps and bounds superior to hers. Frankly, how she hasn't been assassinated yet, I will never understand. She makes it so easy. Takes all the fun out of it, really—there's no sport in pulling the wool over the eyes of a blind man, no…satisfaction."

"Speaking of blind men," C.C. cut in, setting her own tea back down on the table and fixing herself a small saucer laden with a slice of cranberry clafoutis, the immortal's favoured dessert. And, of course, the fact that it's thankfully too late in the evening to rationally explain making and serving pizza factors into that favouritism in a big way… "Do you think Clovis just…doesn't see himself in the mirror? I cannot for the life of me imagine a world in which anyone, especially an admittedly talented artist, could see their own reflection and still choose to attire himself so…"

"Now that you mention it, yeah," Euphemia replied, leaning forward to better help herself to a few of the lemon tarts that were so alluringly calling her name. "What in the actual hell was with that outfit he was wearing tonight?"

"Mm? Oh. That," Juliette grimaced, lowering her teacup to the table and attempting to discreetly clean the powdered sugar from off her cheeks, lips, and chin. Already, two of the initial thirteen doughnuts were rather conspicuously absent from their platter, an image of gluttony at rather comical odds with the prim motions she used to clean herself. Juliette spoke true about her food—excruciatingly slow eater that she was during mealtimes—but she certainly didn't tarry whenever she found herself face-to-face with her personal paradise of fried dough and fruit preserves. "Well, apparently, Clovis's little weekly book club is currently making steady progress through Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and that same impulsive, fool part of him that has him convinced that repeatedly failing at successfully smoking a cigarette would make him look more like a soldier also attested to how fantastic of an idea it would be to attend his own party in his most faithful and 'period-accurate' Lü Bu cosplay, resulting in…well, you saw."

Euphemia blinked, gobsmacked, and the reaction was one that C.C. couldn't help but mirror. "You must be joking…"

"Trust me, Euphy dearest, I'd very much like to be," sighed Juliette. "Incidentally, that's where the gong came from, too—in case either of you were wondering."

C.C. scoffed. "What, does he think he'll look more like a politician dressed as Fu Manchu?"

"Make sure that you don't mention such things in his presence," Juliette chided the immortal with a rueful little laugh, equal parts fond and exasperated. "He's very suggestible, and I'm afraid that you might wind up giving the poor boy ideas."

That provoked a chuckle from all three of them.

I had my doubts that I'd be able to cut it, in the beginning, Euphemia reflected. That I'd be able to fit in if I tried, that I'd be able to learn what I needed—that there was indeed something more to me than the kind-hearted, naive, airheaded Euphemia people saw me as. Now, though?

She swept her gaze around the organised discord of the room around her, the low, warm light, and the way C.C., Juliette and she herself had figured out how to just be around each other. And for once, she could think of how far the road was that she had yet to tread, and found that she could regard the idea of it with excitement and anticipation instead of dread.

It was a relatively recent development, granted, but it was no less precious for it.

Now, I look at the life I've made, that we've made together, and I cannot think of a single path that I would rather tread…