…looks down upon her with a sneer of cold command, glory made flesh, a titan bestriding the New World, her stride defining the very span of continents, boots like burnished blood. “I,” Condottiero hisses, “do not sully myself in the kennels — cucciola.”
“No!” she sobs. “Condottiero, no — I swear — I am a capo-lancia, not a, a beast—!”
Il Condottiero’s smile is icy and cutting. “No longer,” she declares....
Cosimisa korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater throws aside the cheaply-printed romanzo with a snarled curse. She has permitted herself a rare afternoon entirely away from paperwork, sitting in her Weststone residence’s personal study, a dish of olives and a flask of cordial on the desk to the side of her propped-up feet. She directs a glare at those feet, in her favourite ankle-high boots, sharp-toed and with a moderate heel. Leather. Red.
“Telegramma!” she barks, snapping her fingers rapidly to summon her closest aide from the corner of the room. Cosimisa has been pretending not to learn Anna’s name for some two decades. She is very valuable, in that she is not only supremely competent; not only just the correct amount of ambitious to want to work for Cosimisa, but not enough to want to surpass her; but also very tolerant of Cosimisa’s temperament.
It’s terribly annoying, really. Cosimisa sometimes permits herself, after a glass of wine, to imagine tugging on the girl’s golden curls. Tears in her eyes. Biting on the plump flesh of her cheeks, her neck, her breasts, her thighs.
But then she’d either break her somehow, or the girl would get ideas, and she’d need to find another aide.
She directs her scowl at the telegram machine, and imperiously dictates.
VESPIDINE STOP REQUIRE USE OF ONE OF YOUR SPIES STOP
She stares daggers at the machine until Vespidine deigns to reply.
NO STOP
VESPIDINE STOP REQUIRE USE OF SPY TO TRACE SOURCE OF SEDITIOUS MATERIAL STOP
COSIMISA YOU KNOW WHO IS WRITING THE ROMANZI DI FUTURI SOGNATI STOP I WILL NOT BE INVOLVED IN YOUR FLIRTATIONS STOP
“Send to my sister,” Cosimisa decides murderously, rummaging in her desk drawers for something with more kick than cordial, “IL GENERALE CAN KINDLY GO FUCK HERSELF, STOP—”
“Signore instructed me to remind her, if she asked me to send that thing to her sister, what happened last time,” Anna says, in her unobtrusively matter-of-fact way. Cosimisa imagines, for a second, bending her over the desk. Hisses through her teeth.
“I am reminded!” she snaps. Anna is already keying the message.
Of course Cosimisa is pretty certain which fucking witch is taunting her, some bastarda bohemian fucking artist a degree of professional separation or two from Myriana. The past perpetrator of some selfconsciously dense, arch poetry chapbooks, some mediocre printmaking, some avant-garde attention-seeking stupidity wherein another artist doused her nude body in paint and directed her to writhe around on a series of large canvases spread on the floor — Cosimisa bought one, yes, they were fashionable — and, under an assumed name, this — this popular fantasy fiction.
Those of high taste scorn the literature as self-aggrandised fairytale juvenilia. Purist enthusiasts of the form scorn the specific strain for a myriad muddled reasons Cosimisa doesn’t care to be able to make sense of. This, this one author? She writes of these titanic armours and their gladitorial clashes, the reduction to bestial bloodlust of their capo-lanciæ, and of the singular Condottiero who brutally draws this atavistic greatness from them at the cost of their very being. An untouchable, cold and cruel figure, distant as the sky and searingly fascination-sparking, an enigma of inviolable command and torturous, enflamed sexual obsession.
Unmistakably, if you can recognise it, Cosimisa.
Cosimisa gnaws wrathfully on her thumb.
It’s a taunt. It’s a game. It is a flirtation, from a not-unattractive specimen of good lignaggio and enough of a scandalous reputation to be interesting; not enough of one to be offputting. Cosimisa is not so self-unaware that she doesn’t know what it is, and that any way she responds but ignoring it is an encouragement to tease her further; but she is so very bad at ignoring provocation. Another elf of none-too-dissimilar standing is — well, again: she’s not self-unaware. To win at a sexual dalliance is an unusual and ill-formed notion; but she cannot abide to lose. She is averse to any situation in which she even might, a refusal of vulnerability which — well, it’s been some long time since she last weakly gave to the temptation to be vulnerable to a lover, and it only led inevitably to the kind of terrible conversation in which she was exhorted to stop being a narcissistic, closed-off brute about her feelings, and there was crying and clinging and heartbroken wailing about being thrown out on Cosimisa’s doorstep, and then angsty haunting of her doorstep and general environs, which went on for weeks, as if she might not have been entirely serious about it.
Cosimisa will not be repeating any such talk about feelings, thank you; she is far too busy.
She grinds her teeth.
The point is that she is being taunted, and one does not generally taunt Cosimisa korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater without having it demonstrated upon you, as a warning to others, why one ought not. But she will look silly. It’s all so deniable, and low-stakes, and she will look tyrannical and humourless and, if all else fails, her tormentor can bat her lashes and say, wounded and serious, that it was intended to flatter—
Ugh.
“This is all Harri’s fault,” she says to nobody, ancient rote complaint.
“Of course, Signore,” Anna says kindly; not that any of her staff even know who Harri was, any more, and Cosimisa sighs and splashes some brandy into a glass, raises a silent toast to her sister’s wife, and fishes the book back off the floor.
Perhaps she’ll be in better mood if she rubs herself off again to the part in which the author slaveringly imagines humping her boot.
