They mingle with the crowd of relatives and other close undesirables whom it's impossible to refuse to invite to a wedding.
It feels darkly funny to Harri to think of them like that — the sentiment is pure Cosimisa, she practically hears it in the elf's spite-dripping intonation — when she hasn't seen or spoken to Cos in weeks. May never have to — or be allowed to — again.
Then again, perhaps it's merely that sparkling wine is flowing like a burst water main, and Harri's single incautious long-stemmed glass of it, on her rebelliously queasy, empty stomach, has spun her head. She fastens herself tightly to Vespidine's elbow, and gives her best blank heavy-lidded smile to an endless parade of elves who have things to say, in various degrees of veiled, to Vespidine about her. Or to Vespidine, about Vespidine, with reference to her.
Vespidine holds a glass of her own, never takes a single sip, and would seem imperturbable if not for the way the muscles of her arm are clenched steel-tense under Harri's fingers. Harri wonders if any part of it is because the elf is aware, now, that Harri might somewhat understand any given one of the slights.
Probably it's just that families are hell.
An eternity later, Vespidine's polite, recurring, "Do excuse me," sees her wheel Harri abruptly into the kitchens, where — in the absence of most of the noise and crowd, in a staff area of the house — she takes Harri by the elbows, turns her face-to-face, frowning, and lifts Harri's chin with the tip of a finger and thumb.
The elf sighs, almost silently. "Sit down, Harika," she says, gesturing Harri in the direction of a stool, and Harri sits and watches her as she gathers a glass of water and a small plate of salted crackers. "Did you eat anything this morning?"
"I couldn't have kept anything down," Harri says.
"It's another two hours before the ceremony starts," Vespidine says quietly. "Please," and holds the plate out, face strained but patient.
Harri is agreeable when she's tipsy. It makes her usually busy brain pleasantly quiet, leaving plenty of space to pour suggestions into her. Cosimisa found it endlessly entertaining.
Harri takes a cracker and agreeably, if unenthusiastically, nibbles at a corner of it.
"Your sister likes me like this," she says conversationally, and Vespidine's mouth tightens, just a little. (Harri is agreeable — that doesn't make her unobservant.)
"Drink some water, Harika," she says quietly, and Harri takes the glass that's held out to her and sips water and Vespidine stands too close and watches her, stiff and sad. "Eat another cracker, please."
"Since you said please," Harri says, the glib lie sweet on her tongue; she'd have done it anyway. It doesn't matter what tone the korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater girls take with her.
(Well...she's equally agreeable, regardless of tone; that's not to say it's precisely the same. She presses her thighs together, under her expensive ruffled skirts, and demurely sips her water and nibbles her cracker and watches Vespidine watching her.)
"How much elvish do you speak, Harika?" Vespidine says finally, and Harri sighs and rolls her eyes.
"I attended university," she says, a touch impatiently, because if Vespidine cared about the answer she could have known everything already. "Literature. I wrote my thesis on comparative translation strategies in difficult classical elven texts — the Mordantiad, the older works in the Tenstone Cycle—"
"Oh," Vespidine says, wincing. "Not — not precisely limited to enough to do your job, then."
"Not precisely," Harri agrees, and watches Vespidine visibly reconsider that even her distant elder relatives' obscurely snide classical allusions haven't passed Harri by.
The elf's jaw twitches, as if she might say something.
"Eat another cracker, please," is what finally comes out.
Harri looks at the crackers and sighs. They are, in fact, settling her stomach a little, and her head feels a little less cloudy — which she's not sure is an improvement, under the circumstances.
"Alright," she says.
Another hour passes, purgatorial, before the extended family and guests are packed into a cavalcade of motor-cars to be delivered all the way to the top of the Hill, to the amphitheatrical shrine, highest construction on the Northstone save for the summit's sealing petroglyphs themselves. It has no religious function — the gods unleashing the End will never be forgiven — but much as shrines and cathedrals always did, ostensibly secondarily, stands as a testament to the people of the End themselves; their refusal of the gods' will to casually dispose of the entire world.
Harri ends up amidst a row of seats, Vespidine on one side, her parents further along in that direction; one of Vespidine's grandparents on the other side of her. Vespidine, eyes casually forward, reaches across and takes Harri's hand, cradling it between both of her own in her own lap, as if the gesture is smoothly unconsidered.
The grandparent ignores Harri as thoroughly as if they were seated next to a wall, not a person. She's left with nothing to do but watch the ceremony; the armfuls of scattered flower-petals, the symbolic fire, the winding of a length of beaded ribbon to join the forearms of Cosimisa and her soon-to-be spouse, the nominal token proof that the groom can afford to support a wife, in the traditional elven form of a golden ear cuff. Cosimisa, with her perfectly performed dutiful-daughter mask of nuptial joy.
It hurts, in a hollow sort of way. And Harri feels sick at herself, for hurting. For the way she's anticipating, in the ache, missing Cosimisa; and for the meagre but appreciable comfort she takes in having her hand held by the other sister.
