Chương 203: Chapter 224: Freg and Herry

On Oneday morning I went back to the jeweler's shop to get an address on Gedes. The delivery address was to his mailbox at the prison, which I should have seen coming. It would have been great if I'd gotten my answer as easily as that, without having to talk to anyone in the prison system who might have a bad reaction to a former inmate coming around with questions about their staff. It turns out they have a very strict policy about this.

I need to head down to the subsidiary appellate board for the review council and request an exception for request, Hearstcliff Reformed Division non-janitorial without military service lasting less than two hundred hours.

"What?"

"I said the subsidiary app-""Fuck you." And I left. But the fact that I left does not mean I'm giving up on this. I just don't have nearly enough time for this right now. And this moment would probably have been forgotten and ignored, save only for the luck of the draw. It was still semi-fresh on my mind the next day, when that resentment collided with new information. My schedule for Twoday was a bunch of political meetings.

A breakfast, a brunch, a luncheon, a tea, and even eating just the smallest most delicate portions I was getting uncomfortable. Those quartered tea pastries add up. It's a rookie mistake, if I had spent years doing my political maneuverings on a daytime schedule like everyone else I would have known better and broken up the sit-down meetings with some promenade walks or a theater appointment. The daytime arrangements are a weakness of mine.

I have already pushed my case at the galas, making big strong moves, walking straight up to dukes and duchesses, arranging big alliances and ambitious plans. And people did humor me along, but I haven't really felt a depth of commitment. Nobody is making any promises they can't take back, and I am aware of this. I made big steps when I got the dukes or their representatives to give me their nods and their declared approval.

But I need to take the next steps, turning that momentum of soft power and the recognition from highest authorities into a support movement that is not only broad, but deep- comprehensive. When the chips are down I don't just want the generals to support me, I want the officers who are going to step up when the general falls off a horse, and the soldiers they're going to be leading. The common people, the middle managers, the ivory towers.

I want enough backing that when I move the nation moves with me, not just twenty or thirty people on the other end of my strings. So far I have gotten a lot of mileage out of two factors: first is that the king and queen are total asses. They are rude, highhanded and spiteful, which does not look good on seated positions of authority. They're also willing to burn a lot of goodwill for small gains, and willing to break important rules with poor excuses. Not to mention the necromancy thing.

Most of my big gains have been made specifically against the royals- it's not so much that people love me, as that they hate them. I've made my banner the easy way to thumb your nose at the throne and crown, The second is that there is, currently, a lot of threads being pulled together to bring the Rapier Revolt to bear. Deep under the waters are power brokers and operatives coordinating to launch a massive attack against the seats of power. Most of the people involved do not know about it yet. But I do.

And the powers that be, plus the powers that will be, have noticed that I'm wedging myself into this movement and that I'm very well-qualified to serve as figurehead of their revolution. Right now only a handful know that we're going to have a revolt. It's been worked out, slow clunky backroom deals. The leaders and the dealmakers have their understanding, and it's going to be allowed to propagate through the ranks slowly. Those dukes whose handshakes I collected, they were in the know, they had that understanding.

In months, everyone will see the writing on the wall. And by the time that happens, I want all of them to think my leadership is a foregone conclusion. So I've got a lot of very shallow very public approval based on animosity, and I've got a lot of very deep, very covert support based on self-interest. What I don't have is all the meat in the middle. And that means putting the work in.

Making grand plans without putting in the hours and the legwork is how you find yourself powerless at the doorstep of victory, watching all your alliances crumble and all your soldiers abandon you while you scream "no! it cannot be!" or something like that. The world is full of people that thought having big dreams was good enough. The prisons, too. The process of turning superficial approval and support from the machinations into a sustainable, years-long engine of ambition, involves a lot of meetings.

Renting out a room at a restaurant or bringing together a bunch of people for a 'friendly get-together' at someone's home. I'm not as well-versed with these settings as I am with big fancy gala balls, but I get by. I still have to work within the restrictions of my rank; I can't really attend a to-do that only has a dozen or so people attending. There's still this whole thing about marriageable nobility needing to be monitored.

If I'm sat with seven or eight grand dames of society, the rumor that forms immediately is that I'm auditioning matchmakers for my wedding plans. If I sit down with men? Then it's assumed I'm looking for a husband among their numbers. If those men are married? Then the rumor is that I'm a hussy and a homewrecker. Mixed group of men and women? That invites the kind of speculation that I'd rather not hear about at all.

Every time I am known to have a chat that is too private with just a handful of people, it gets people talking. And it's the kind of talk where my bank representative needs to send me letters alerting me that information requests are being filed regarding my dowry fund, with preemptive injunctions against its transfer to escrow. It's a big fucking headache, is what I'm getting at. I am a person with everything that entails, sure.

But in a very different way, Ducal Princess Natalie Harigold, esquire is an institution, and institutions cannot move casually. But I can bring together twenty or so people with certain qualities in common. A score of Independent faction industrialists who are known for donating money to important causes in a quiet but influential way. Two dozen midrange noblewomen of the marches who follow a lot of gossip, and always seem to pass on a slightly different message than they took in.

Or, a room full of bureaucratic officials with honorary titles whose encyclopedic knowledge of easily-abused laws was only known to a select few..

And that is how I can drop by for a "visit" at someone's residence, and sit at the dining table with a great many other people in a big easy conversation that will inevitably gravitate to what these people have in common, and so now I am included in a large round-table discussion with a bunch of business owners whose politics support whatever is beneficial to them, and are willing to put their money into the process if it gets money back out as well.

Or a nice airy chat with some eager socialites who might like a little help figuring out how to collectively shape some important narratives. Or a detail-oriented argument about finer points of procedure and policy where I can choose to add a pertinent suggestion, or just to sit back and learn the sort of back-end dynamics that I could never learn any other way. I am only five minutes into one of those confabs when I realize that I need to be taking notes on this stuff.

I reach under the table, snag a notebook and inkwell from my portal, and drop it to hover under the table. I curve ink to have it carefully print all my findings in the pages. I chose ink instead of bringing in a pencil so that nobody would hear the scratch of graphite on paper. So I sat and looked attentive while these name-traders and who-you-knows all discussed and debated the benefits and particulars of registering for a limited-liability charter for the shell organization in charge of the slush fund accounts.

Nitty gritty stuff, very pragmatic, very detail-oriented, and very much a whole different world from how I've been pursuing events up to this point. My notes began to include titles for books I need to find in a library or bookstore, I have severely underestimated how much of this process runs on paperwork that most people have never heard of. And because of that I want to make sure I'm very well-defended against those angles.

Learning how to use bureaucratic minutiae to push my agenda is a low priority but not entirely irrelevant. Learning how to stop Nathan's chicaneries from blindsiding me in exciting new ways? That is a high priority. It's not something that is explicitly mentioned in the spy route of Glitter, but there's lots of things that a tricky Nathan can do that kind of get glossed over.

The video game did not get real pinpoint-specific on exactly how a high Language skill would get those trade documents, it was covered with a pithy quip instead. And the spy-route Nathan is as tricky as it gets. So, honestly, I can't be sure that he won't do something bureaucratic. It is exactly the kind of tedious detail that a video game would paper over with a cute quip.

And if my brother is willing to sign a service contract in my name, there's not much that stops him from incorporating, say, a law firm in my name, naming himself the head of my board of directors and helping himself to an unspecified portion of my earnings. Buying and selling property in my name. Demanding fiduciary disclosure of my affairs. The whole world of official paperwork is a playground to a man with his skills, and I have a lot to learn about how much power that can swing and how far it can reach.

If I'm going to keep myself from being an easy target, I need to master his methods as well as my sorcery, as well as the public-facing politics, the academics, technology, industry, military strategy and -oh yeah! - my own romantic relationships. Honestly I would be stretched too thin even if I didn't need to put time and energy into guarding myself from my brother's schemes. The bell had struck and our allotted time was up.

I forced the ink to dry instantly and took up my notebook as our teatime appointment wound down. The cynical paper-pusher seated to my right, who had casually mentioned a method to have properties listed as a crime scene transferred by deed without auction, gave me more of a bow than I expected.

"My lady, this was... surprisingly enjoyable," he said.

"You are an admirable hostess and you kept Herry from taking the whole afternoon with his rants about syndicalism."

"Fuck you Freg," Herry said amiably from my other side.

"But this really was rather pleasant. I rarely enjoy get-togethers with business acquaintances." Around the table, chairs pushed back, and the tenor of conversations broke into pairs, the quiet conversations of people leaving a place at the same time. Freg rolled his eyes.

"Indeed. Well, I really must be off. See you at the subsidiary appellate board for the review council, Herry." Oh and then my arms got goosebumps. It was like stepping off an elevator, how fast my perceptions shifted. I felt like my ears should have popped. This was not a meeting of like-minded folk for me to bond with. I have been undercover behind enemy lines. None of these people were my allies, not really. Never would be. Maybe they understood that, or not.

But they walked a world that belonged to Nathan, and to Muranda Nhullit. These were the oceans they swam in. I had heard her name mentioned so many times this afternoon that she might as well have been in the room with us. Her presence loomed. And I had sat and listened to a frank and unrestrained conversation among experts about how to have power of attorney stolen away, how to manipulate a will, how three particular forms filed in the right order can bypass the entire oversight committee to defund orphanages...

This was the weapon of the enemy. I had gotten a look at it. I had a notebook, and some leads. And I could already tell that I would never be as good at this as Nathan, or Nhullit. At best, I could manipulate these mechanisms enough to keep me safe from their meddling, for a while. There's a certain cast of nuance and subtlety that, frankly, escapes me. I just don't have that flexibility, I'm too used to thinking in terms of problems and solutions. Besides: that's not me.

I'm not going to teach myself to operate the labyrinthine recesses of Hearstcliff's nightmarish red tape. I'm not that person. I've spent too many years learning to conjure voids to mess around with this. I can't bother filing a request to authorize the release of the forms I would need to disclose my A-19 adjusted ratings for the review board to rule on my bracket license of whatever. I can blow stuff up, I don't have to deal with this.

Kind of a strange jump-off point for a new series of plans, but I'm having a strange week.