The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Before starting this week's Headless Over Heels, Dukerino had an announcement (which had already been pre-mulled on his discord).

I will be dropping the update frequency from 3 to 2 times a week, with no more updates on Tuesday. Really sorry that I have to do this but I've run low on the generous buffer with which I began this story and need to lower my output down to a sustainable pace that matches my rate of writing.

When the story started I'd intended to stay at 1.7 to 1.8k words a chapter, but they have evened out into my usual pace of roughly 2.2 to 2.5k words instead (with this one being 3k, for example!)

If I get my buffer back into a nice spot I will see about going back up to thrice a week! But at the moment, between this and PotV, I'm putting out more than 10,000 words most weeks and it's unfortunately not a pace I can sustain while working my day job. I hope some day to become a full time writer who can put out a billion chapters a day for you. Until then, please accept my apology and enjoy the chapter!

I know I enjoyed getting to see the al Ydris Estate.

It was smaller than Rohan il Agante’s big garish hall; that caught Seth by surprise. But it was many times older, and many times more expensive. He could tell within seconds. The tall A-frame center turret, ornamented with delicate blackstone roses. The clustered columns of metamorphic marble stone arch above the heavy wooden front door, with its tympanum displaying an image of a helmed and hauberked warrior standing boldly alone amidst a phantasmagoric host of seraphs. It was huge and beautiful and gothic and imposing, but somehow it was warm, too, outstretched and eager to welcome them. Something about it said home.

Just like its mistress, Seth realized, and the last of the shock faded. Suddenly he couldn’t imagine a woman like Annalise living anywhere else.

There were flowers growing wild and tall on the manor’s eaves, and lights on in the central circular window. They trooped inside, casting off their dusty boots. Tongue-and-groove paneling in rich blackstain mahogany wound its way at waist height down the corridor, sprouting upward at regular intervals in art deco arches to ensconce flylamps. Thick amber glass encased the bulbs, turning their pallid corpselight warm and caramel where it lay across the ivy-patterned sagebrush wallpaper. Seth had seen rich homes and sumptuously appointed hallways before—he’d run for his life through them. None of them had felt as cozy as Annalise’s.

They stopped by a door set into an A-framed archway, its crest topped with crossed pistols. A clawfooted seat was nuzzled into the hall’s opposite corner where a staircase led to the manor’s second floor, each step paneled on its front face with scenes of hunting hounds and foresters. Annalise tossed her coat onto the seat and hung her battered roadwarden hat on the globe atop the staircase’s banister. She swept into the pistol marked room. “Dalf!” came her ebullient cry. “You’ve made a menagerie of my drawing room.”

Milady, I am mortified.

“Milady, I am mortified.” A man’s lacquered voice babbled beneath her rummaging. Seth followed her into the drawing room and came face-to-face with a painted badger, its beady stare surprisingly vivid from its canvas underpainted in dim chiaroscuro. In the midst of a veritable gallery of oil paintings and the lumpy shapes of cloth-concealed furniture, a balding fellow with pince-nez glasses perched on his broad nose was desperately tidying. Lit, Seth noted with surprise. his skin a ruddy lit pink and his eyes tawny brown, not black.

“Your arrival came as a surprise, milady.” The man scurried through the room, yanking down paint-stained shrouds, packing easels and canvases into corded bundles. “I would never have allowed the manor to be in such a state for your return had I only known.”

“Such a state, he says.” Annalise followed him, looking over his shoulder at the paintings he fussily hid. “It’s as lovely as ever, Ydalf. Don’t fret.”

“Your study—”

“My study’s exactly why I didn’t send ahead. It was the only way I could finally get a gander at your work. Look at this one.” Annalise pulled a landscape from the floor and propped it onto an easel. “Gorgeous, eh, Seth?”

“Very,” Seth said. His idea of good art depended mostly on the frame it was stored in—the quickest and trustiest way of judging the market value on the fencing circuit, according to his mentors.

Annalise gave a shake of her head. “And the bashful blighter hides these if you give him the chance.”

Ydalf sighed with exasperation and gave up his attempt at retrieving his painting from its jovial captor, to continue tidying the room. “It’s not ready, milady.”

“G’way, Dalf. It’s gorgeous.” Annalise took a step back from the canvas. Her black gaze swept admiringly across it. “You’d never think it’s ready. It’s better like this. A wee bit rough, here and there. Alive.”

Ydalf took the drafter’s pencil from his ear and pointed it at the rich darkness of his painted forest. “You see the trees aren’t rendered right. It’s all a soup.”

“It’s textural.” Annalise tapped a knuckle on the trellis-carved frame of the room’s voluminous picture window. “I don’t need to see every tree here when I can see every tree there.”

“You really do overflatter me, Madam.”

“You got three days to finish this yoke, then I’m buying it from you and stationing it up above the mantle.” Said mantle’s current occupant was a brass statuette of a scowling Saint Jordulf, bucknaked and bearded, with a battleaxe held strategically before his junk. Annalise slid it to one side. “Gotta get this bleeding exhibitionist outta here, anyway.”

Ydalf undid his apron and piled it into the bundle of furniture coverings. “Why would you want a painted landscape of the same thing you can see out your window?”

“Sure look it, Dalf.” Annalise looked out past her faint reflection to the rolling acres before her. “That’ll all be snow and bare branches soon enough. Me, I’m only ever here when the leaves are already drying and dying. I’ll never see this place bedecked as beautifully as you do. Let this lovely work be my consolation, yeah? That’s what I want. Not the real view. Your view. If you’ll sell it to me, I’ll be grateful.”

Seeking someplace less humiliatingly complimentary to bank his obedience, the balding man turned to Seth. “Welcome to the Manor al Ydris, goodman. I apologize for its current disorder. Who might you be?”

“Seth here’s my new man,” Annalise said. “He’ll be living with us from now on.”

Ydalf smiled, without malice (and Seth made sure to check), and bowed. “Ydalf il Destine. Your servant, milord.”

“Surely not my servant.” Seth stuck his hand out. “Pleasure all the same.”

“Uh—I please beg pardon, milord.” With embarrassment, Ydalf patted the pocket of his smock and produced a linen glove from within. He tugged it on over his paint-stained fingers.

Seth wasn’t expecting such a fast and firm reminder of his lost light, here at the unlit capital of the continent. It didn’t escape him that this sober moment wouldn’t have happened if he’d accepted a bow rather than insisting on a handshake. He followed through regardless and pumped the man’s hand with enthusiasm, and even managed to smother the urge to find out what was on the end of that lovely little silver chain trailing out of Ydalf’s pocket.

“Don’t take any offense, love,” Annalise said. “The lit of the Necropolis are a careful lot. Going through life with so many unlit crossing their paths—it’s not like the countryside where you’ll shake a colorless hand once a year. They have to be judicious.”

Ofelia pulled at the corner of a lumpen white shroud and revealed a richly red leather armchair, its back stitched into a precise conch-shell crescent. “Where’s Miniara?”

“She, uh…” Ydalf’s lips pursed. Something about Ofelia’s attention discomfited him. “She’s upstairs.”

Ofelia stepped from the drawing room, to the curved foot of the manor’s wide, sunlit stairwell. “Miniara, dear,” she called. “Your lady is in residence. Come on your own time, but do come.”

Ydalf seemed to put his employer’s daughter out of his mind. “Shall I show your guests to their rooms, Madam Verdugo?”

“Seth’s staying in mine.” Annalise steered their stray Shaheilli guest by the shoulder to stand before Ydalf’s bespectacled eye. “Riccana has her pick of the lot. Will you go with Ydalf?”

Riccana nodded. She was still maintaining her stony silence, but as she followed Ydalf down the first floor hallway, her finger traced along the geometric banding carved into the wainscot at her waist. The wonder of being within all this Necropolitan wealth, showing through.

There was movement at the top of the staircase. A girl, in her late teens or early twenties, stood framed in the dramatic green of the second-floor circle window.

“Here she is.” Ofelia leaned against the staircase’s heavy banister.

“Mistress Ofelia.” The girl swallowed against her high, lacy collar. “Good—good afternoon, milady.”

“Come down here, Miniara.” Ofelia’s voice brooked no resistance, and the girl offered none. She descended the stairs with a tread trained in unobtrusiveness. Not a thief’s stance, though with a few adjustments she could passably get there. This was a servant—if the drawn-in, hesitant gait didn’t give it away, the primly pressed ankle-length onyx dress, with its high lacy collar and its silvery trim, did. Her downcast fawn eyes were large and framed with long, delicate lashes.

She wore lacy black gloves, so Seth couldn’t see her fingers—but the tips of her ears were pearly white. And her ringlets of chestnut hair darkened to jet at their edges. Here was a girl whose light was slowly, softly going out.

Ofelia’s gaze made the same trek his did, lingering on the girl’s hair, and the places it was out of place. “You were napping, weren’t you?”

“Your pardon, Mistress.” The girl swallowed against her lacy collar. “I—we did not know you were coming.”

“Your quarters are on this floor,” Ofelia said. “You’ve been sleeping in my room, haven’t you?”

“I—I—”

“Don’t stutter, Miniara.” Ofelia stepped closer to her maid. She was at least a head taller—the height difference reminded Seth of Seth. “Never think you can hide a thing from me, or that you have need to.”

Annalise rolled her eyes as she retrieved her heavy black boots from the corner she’d kicked them into. “Don’t terrorize the poor thing, Feeli.”

Ofelia acknowledged her mother with an absentminded wave. She remained razor-focused on the maid. “Have you been reading my books?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“And which was your favorite?”

“Moskava’s Arboretum, Mistress.”

”A lovely choice,” Ofelia murmured. Her gloved thumb found a strand of Miniara’s chestnut-to-black hair and tucked it behind the girl’s ear. “Do you have it with you?”

“I put them back on the shelves as soon as I’m done with them. Right where they were, I promise.”

“I don’t mean the book, Mini. You know I don’t.” Ofelia’s touch departed Miniara’s cheek; her palm hovered close and open. “Do you have it.”

Miniara’s breath was held too tightly in her throat to reply. She produced, from the breast pocket of her uniform, a folded square of black silk. A handkerchief. With painstaking slowness, Ofelia took the cloth from the quivering girl and brought it to her nose. She took a long, deep inhale. Her heavy eyelids fluttered.

“Kept by your heart, all this harvest season,” she murmured. Her fingers flexed into the silk. “What a splendid servant you have been for me.”

Miniara looked on the verge of fainting. “Thank you, Mistress,” she whispered.

“I think we must have a salon tonight,” Ofelia said. “Don’t you?”

“Anything you like, Mistress.”

“No.” Ofelia tsked. “No, dear Mini. That’s no answer to my question. Would you like it?”

A vivid blush colored Miniara’s face. “Very much.”

Ofelia’s eyes lidded further. “Very much, Mistress.”

“Yes, Mistress. Sorry, Mistress.”

Ofelia finally allowed a smile to creep across her face. “And would you read for us? From Arboretum, perhaps?”

“I—I would like to, Mistress. If you will allow me.”

“I do not allow it; I require it.” Ofelia fished a fistful of score coins from her purse and handed them over. “Off to the city with you, Miniara il Destine. To fetch the other ladies. And some wine, I think. Dark and dry. And something beautiful to wear tonight. Golden, to match your eyes.”

“I’ll give you a lift,” Annalise said, with cheery heedlessness at the moonfaced apprehension the offer summoned in Miniara. “Take you as far as the gate garrison. Need to let everyone know that I’m back. Get the parade ready, y’know.”

Seth chuckled. “Sure. Get me a sash to wear. Something like Chief Exark of Balloon Crashing.”

”I will, yeah.” She leaned forward expectantly. “Give us a kiss.”

He stood on tiptoes and laid a peck on her cheek. She tutted, held him still, and gave him a real kiss, one long enough that heat tinged his calves where they held him up to his statuesque lover’s lips. Heat tingled his face, too, when Annalise’s son cleared his throat pointedly.

“Are you kissing, or are you feeding him like a baby bird?” Ofelia asked.

Annalise tugged her tongue out of Seth’s mouth and shot a look down the sharp edge of her nose. “You just played out some sort’ve upstairs/downstairs maid fantasy in front of us.” She pointed at Tiago. “And you I sacrificed a soul for, so that the girl you’re crushing on could keep her ribs caged. So you can both houl yer whist while I give my perfectly normal boyfriend a perfectly normal kiss.”

“The perfectly normal boyfriend who’s our age,” Tiago observed.

“We’re in the Necropolis now, you wee dose.” Annalise laced her heavy black boots. “Age ain’t even a number here. C’mon then, Miss Miniara.” She held the door open for the trembly little maid. “I promise I’m far less scary than my daughter.”

“You should bring the head, if you can,” Seth said. “Get it somewhere secure before the damn thing causes another problem.”

Annalise sucked air through her gapped front teeth. “Ah, sure, that’s a good call. Gotta get it ready for Alice.”

“What does that entail?”

“Stripping the flesh, to start with,” she said. “And it’s a devil to do by hand or knife. I know someone with bugs that’ll get the job done. Manky little beetles.” She blew them a parting kiss. “Back sharpish, my beloveds.”

Miniara il Destine looked as though she was seeking a hole in the floorboards to crawl into. None presented itself, and the nervous maid accompanied the jolly Verdugo to the carriage.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...221-estate
coming to Scribble Hub at some point