[Title?], Work-in-Progress - Episode 1
Thank you for lighting the fire underneath me to get started, Kelsey. :)
prologue
He looked from over the edge of the railing, what he had once jokingly called “the Balustrade.” The wood beneath his hand was ragged. The ground on which his eyes fell was ragged. For a moment - brief enough to settle solidly in his mind, and fleeting enough to echo afterwards in his memory as truth - he knew beyond doubt that this was not his home. He had time, if not money, to spend, and it would be a worthwhile pursuit to find out where, exactly, was “home.”
chapter one Once upon a time, desperate
Jilyan was once a lady. Her bearing still spoke of this. She was straight-backed, grave-faced, but gracious in her bearing. When she spoke to a person, she looked them in the eye, and her minute movements showed that she seriously reflected on what she was being told. On paper, her inheritance proved her rank as a woman of consequence. But everything else that once made her such was stripped away and consigned to shame, from whence nothing can be returned. This stripping is what one saw in the lines across her forehead and between her brows, her cheeks - slightly sunken beneath the rouge that attempted to mask it - and the dark under-eye circles that elaborated on her many nights of troubled sleep.
Jilyan was young, if not by your standards, reader, than by the standards of anyone who has lived long enough to detect ongoing distress in the telltale signs of a human face. She had celebrated her twentieth year only a handful of summers ago. This was a fact that at times she had taken pains to conceal, but on this particular day, it did not seem to matter. The clouds clung heavily, greedily to both the feet of the hills and the stink of the streets in Shavila that morning, and the air was near and warm and stifling, so that anyone who was out wore her linen hood close about her face in a feckless attempt to ward off the oppressive weather.
Today, Jilyan had more than the broad goal of finding employment both quickly and legally. Finding a way to gain both things at once was proving to be a confounded nuisance, if not, she was beginning to think, an impossibility by the Iron Laws of the universe.
Today, Jilyan's goal was to put herself at the mercy of one person rather than the whole city. Instead of passing by Eckthellie’s shop as she had done every day before, she checked herself, and veered through the doorway before her pride got the better of her. The fog trailed through behind her.
Eckthellie Tutt was a milliner, and her reputation as a true artisan of the trade seemed like the only thing that kept Shavila’s economy afloat. The woman was also, historically, Jilyan’s avowed enemy.
The sparkly chime of the bell was ill-fitting alongside the shadow on Eckthellie’s brow the moment she perceived just who had come into the shop.
“If you’re looking for a handout, Miss, I’m afraid that all my tolerance for such things has been spent,” the woman said drily, though her blue eyes were spitting behind the tasteful wisps of grey hair loose about her face.
“You mistake me, Madam. I’m here because I intend to avoid all handouts” – Jilyan swallowed, and managed – “at the expense of my pride.”
Eckthellie’s eyes widened minutely, though it could’ve a trick of the fog-addled light. The woman stopped adjusting the elaborate hats in her display window and unconsciously wiped her hands down the pleats of her skirt, a tell of discomfort Eckthellie had never been able to kick. It was possible the shopkeeper didn’t know that she did it, though Jilyan doubted that.
Jilyan, folding her hands to avoid betraying her nerves, continued. “The relationship between your family, Mrs. Tutt, and my own, has been…tenuous…for a long time. Seeing as I am the only one left of mine,” — she inhaled deeply; why did tears try to spring up at the most inconvenient times? — “I wondered if that enmity should really pass to me. I think it would be foolish to maintain a ruse of hatred, when there is nothing about you I’ve ever hated. Had I been born with a different surname, I think you and I might actually have gotten on very well.”
Eckthellie’s shoulders tensed, and Jilyan suspected she had pushed her luck too far. Well, it was an honest statement, and she could hardly berate herself for honesty, with no games of power or underhanded politics to play. Jilyan did respect, if not like, Eckthellie. The woman had grit. It was a virtue Jilyan only hoped she would possess on reaching the same wizened age.
The silence stretched to its breaking point. Fittingly, it snapped in Eckthellie’s curt reply.
“It’ll take you a fair lifetime to catch up on what you should already know about millinery, especially in my renowned shop. So,” she smacked her hands together peremptorily, making Jilyan start, “if you want to maintain your newfound employment here, I suggest you batten down the hatches and get to work.”
