That makes you one of us
Backdated to the day after Carina's brawl.
8-12-2006 (Carina, Reyce):
Caucus Barracks
This large cavern is kept in a state of perpetual gloom. Rows and rows of cots and presses stretch out from the door, separated by wide aisles. The walls have been covered with old tapestries taken from stores, both to provide warmth and to muffle the sound of multiple people snoring. A section near the front of the cavern has been partitioned off with large opaque screens to make an area for holdbred women who prefer privacy.
(OOC Note: You may either @link yourself here or build a cot to serve as your home. If you build a cot, it must be set dark. Please do not leave objects or puppets laying about in the room.)
Obvious Exits:
Out (O)
Morning. Early afternoon, really. Not that you can tell in an underground cavern that has been barely made up for human living. Or maybe you can, given that the cavern has emptied out of human bodies, all good little Caucus students up and off to their classes. Carina is still in here, feigning sleep. Her blankets have been pulled over her head and tucked under her pillow. Her fingers stick out, curled into balls and clutching the fabric close to her.
Reyce is nobody's idea of a good little Caucus student, so he has chosen to skip his afternoon class and return to the empty barracks. He walks in a with a pair of books tucked under his arm; he throws them down on his bed with nothing even remotely close to the respect required for a sleeper. As he does so, his head is turned towards Carina, watching her face for a response.
Carina rolls awake. Literally. She rolls up from her prone position, hands tossing down the blankets around her legs which have folded under her for sitting on her cot. Once they finish fluttering down, they cover her legs. Her untied and unbrushed hair also falls around her face, partially obscuring the bruises which are now in their mature flush of dark purple and red. She turns her head to look at him, apparently too tired to raise the customary eyebrow in question.
Reyce shoves his hands into his jacket pockets, tilting his chin down and eyes up in that bull-about-to-rush manner he sometimes has. No rushing here, however; he takes in her disheveled appearance slowly, with a calm eye, and at long last draws in a sniff. "Good look for you."
"Shove it." Very ladylike in the morning is Carina. She lifts a hand to smooth over her unaltered brow and then reaches down for her pearl hair clips in a basket under the cot. With three quick violent sweeps, she has most of it gathered up and pinned back out of her face. "Are you staying to watch me dress too, you little letch?"
Reyce shrugs, pulling his hands out of his pockets as he looks away. "Nah," he answers, moving over to his bed. He gives the books a little flip, rolling them away - one lands with its pages sprawled open, terrible for the binding - and promptly falls onto the cot, his face smushed in the pillow. His muffled voice emerges: "I wanna be able to eat lunch in a little while."
"Hrmph," Carina replies, allowing the taunt to slide. She reaches down again for a pair of black stockings, turns them inside out and then slips them on with a little frown that dies as immediately as it was thought. "You're supposed to be in class, right now."
"It's history," Reyce points out, still with his face in the pillow. "Be the same story tomorrow."
Carina hangs her feet over the side of her cot and delicately sets one down after the other. She reaches out, slipping a finger under the poor book to pick up and set it aright. After that is done, she stands and pads over to her big trunk, pulling it open to reach for some folded clothing, which she brings back over to rest on her unmade cot. Then she pads over and grabs her toiletries bag, and flops back down on her cot next to her clothes. "All the same, only one of us should be seen to have a flagrant disregard for rules and manners at a time."
Reyce is growing impatient with having to keep his head in the pillow: his breath is making it uncomfortably hot, and it's hard to speak. He rolls onto his back, bringing an arm up to further shield his closed eyes. "That'd be shooting kinda high, don't you think?" Belatedly realizing that he's brought his booted feet on the bed, Reyce swings his lower legs off the cot and lets them hang off the edge.
"I meant you and I, here at High Reaches. It's unreasonable to include our other siblings in the count." She digs through her toiletries bag, spritzes some perfume under her arms and then slides her top off. Perhaps to annoy him, she tosses it over to land on his head before she slips her blouse on. Carina hops onto the floor again to change pants, as she does so saying, "I have my date planner, perhaps we can divide the time equally between ourselves." There's an oof as she finishes the sentence and buttons up the top button at the same time. "You can look now."
Reyce twitches in surprise when her top lands on him, letting out a phlegm-hacking throat sound to make his disgust known. He quickly reaches up to yank it off, pausing a moment to listen to the sound of her rustling around - he has sharp hearing, and can target that way. "Equally?" He snaps his elbow to send it hurling back at her at about the same moment he receives permission to look. Naturally, the first thing he looks for is whether his throw was on-target.
Carina catches her shirt right in front of her chest and tucks it close to her under folded arms. "Two of us suggests a division of half-and-half, but of course, I will demure to use less of the time than you if you wish." She falls back and lands on her bum on her cot, and then folds her nightgown on her lap, taking effort to press the creases back into place with her hands. It doesn't seem like it works that well and her frown at this is noticable. "Of course, I am also likely to be back home before nightfall."
Reyce lets his head sink back down when he sees her catch the shirt (foiling him), but in a second more he's up again, rolling to a seated position and shooting her a sidelong glance. "Yeah, that'd make things a bit easier." He draws in another sniff, reaching a hand up to scratch at his stubble while he squints at an empty cot across from him. "So. What's next?" A look at her, then back to the empty cot. "On your planner."
Carina catches that scratch and fehs, "Honestly, Reyce. You can't shave in the morning like a normal male?" She sniffs and digs through her bag, pulling out a mirror and a brush, then unpins her hair. She proceeds to begin brushing it out on her own -- you can see her lips move from time to time in silent count, although she hasn't ignored Reyce's query. Her head is still tilted towards him. Somewhere around stroke thirty, she says, "Speak to Sefton. After Sefton, find a Threadchart and check that there is no fall between here and Keroon today. After that, arrange for a rider to take me to Keroon."
Reyce's stubble-scratching pauses, then resumes with just a moment of defiant vigor. "Guess not." He waits it out while she brushes, his hands stuffed into his pockets to fiddle with a loose mark he finds in one, flipping it round and round with a distracted look on his face. When she speaks again, he snaps back to reality and considers her for a bit. "Gonna eat shit?"
Carina wrinkles her nose distastefully at his comment. "I am going to prostrate myself before the good Lord Keroon and assure him that while his daughter and I may have disagreements, even violent ones, that feeling is a personal one that should not enter into Benden's good relations with its neighbor." She tilts her head to look at him and says, "Fifty," aloud, before continuing her thought: "I rather imagine metaphorically, shit eating will be involved." She moves towards brushing out the underlayers of her hair, which is growing more frizzy with each stroke.
Reyce closes his eyes when she says fifty, and the coin-flipping comes to an immediate halt. Knowing his habits, she'll recognize the expression: it's an unusually peaceful one, for Reyce, and so it stands out whenever he's playing games with the numbers in his head. It doesn't distract him long before he answers, "Got to do it sometime. Eat shit. Worth it to you?"
"I have a contract with Lord Keroon for two by Defiance this foaling season." Carina replies. This /is/ an unusually peaceful meeting between the two, for all that she's momentarily not paying attention to his habits. Her hair, you know. She goes layer by layer, moving from the bottom to the middle layers now. "We'll see how angry Sefton is with me, but I am sure he can be convinced to break our contract."
Reyce has his numbers to distract him, or at least keep him calm enough to explain the peace. He did just come from a morning math class. "Guess it depends how much he wants to fuck with your head. He gets a free score on Benden." His eyes narrow as he says this, and while he looks about to say more, he snaps his teeth shut on the words. After a pause to collect himself, and redirect his energies, Reyce finds something across the room to stare at. "Anyway, not what I meant. I meant, worth it to you to start this shit, with Keroon."
"She called me a whore to my face, Reyce." Carina says flatly as she finishes her brushing and looks over at him. She does, however, actually rolls her eyes in his description of Sefton.
Reyce stops looking at the wall and meets her gaze. "I'll call you a whore to your face."
Carina looks at him stormily, "You're my brother."
Reyce shrugs. "Half-brother." Forgetting about his boots, he yanks a foot back onto the bed and holds it in front of him - he'd be cross-legged if the other foot weren't still on the floor. "People call me a bastard to my face. So do I. It's true."
"It's more the behaviour and not the blood," Carina retorts, continuing to glare at him, "And in any case, you shouldn't allow others to treat you like that. No matter how much mother hates it, or father dislikes you, he did acknowledge you and she did raise you. That makes you one of us. Have a little more respect for that." And then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a jar, uncorking an extremely fragrantly smelled hairwax.
"Like fuck she did," Reyce snaps, his upper lip drawing into a snarl. "And don't start counting me as 'one of us' all of a sudden. The fuck are you here for, anyway? You're nobody's fucking chaperone, and I don't believe you'd do it just to keep an eye on me." So much for the peace: he's apparently dragged all he cares to out of the number she handed him.
The outburst makes Carina stop, a handfull of gooey wax sitting in her clawed hand. She brings it over to her lap and cups her other hand under it so as to avoid it. "Jays, Reyce. You act like it is so terrible, to have been ignored at the court of Benden. Would you have rather been a drudge, mucking out the wher shit all day? If so, why not give us some peace and go do it already."
Reyce draws back, the snarl still frozen on his features. "Thank you for sparing me such a lowly lifestyle," he answers with incongruous politesse, while his tongue lingers with distaste on the word 'lowly.' "What a generous family." His eyes narrow even further, and he drops the act. "Didn't answer my question."
Carina plops the hairwax into her hair, turning from Reyce to look at herself in her mirror and slick back her hair. Without looking, she pulls out a long ebony colored slat of wood with scrollwork at the top and begins to wind her slick waxed hair into a twist. "It could have been worse for you, Reyce. You'd be a happier person if you decided to stop resenting Carlin and I for whatever you think we had from our parents that you didn't get. And if you're really smart and clever, you and I can have a very exciting future doing all the work to run Benden that Carlin hasn't the attention span to do."
Reyce is silent for a long time, looking at the foot still on the floor. His snarl fades over time, to be replaced by a milder if still fierce-looking frown. At last: the snick of a smile, pulled up at the corner of his lip, and then gone. "That what you came here for, then? To incorporate me?" He looks at her, some trace of smugness hiding in the sneer he gives.
"That and to make sure that the future Lord and Lady of Fort know I hold no ill will towards either." She pins her hair again with the pearl clips to hold it into place and she turns her head side to side to make sure that it's all done up. After she's convinced, Carina lays the mirror face down in her lap. "I also wanted to see if we couldn't match Coren up with Aelan."
Reyce is taken off-guard by her last suggestion, an incredulous snort spat through his teeth. "Well, that got fucked up." He raises an eyebrow here, not above reminding her: by you. "That why you were working her over?"
Being in a good mood, Carina smiles, pain from the bruise on her cheek being ignored for the pure emotion. "I did rather bollocks it up." She lifts her hand, as if putting her finger on a mark on the page and looks askance, "As they say, it isn't over until it is over."
Reyce grabs the edge of his pants leg and uses it to help haul his foot off the floor, pulling it over the other leg so now he is sitting cross-legged on the bed. "Why not just have him meet her and let his natural charm rule the day?" he murmurs, his smirk returning. Restoring his voice to normal, conversational level, he muses, "So it's back to getting rid of Coren, then. Is the Little Lord having a little trouble with his little brother?" His smile seems almost feral.
Carina rolls her eyes ever so slightly again and then pulls over her bag and brings out her little case of kohl sticks. She sharpens the end of one carefully, dips it in a little jar she unscrews and then proceeds to very carefully line her left eye. "Oh, please." She snorts as she finishes her line. "Even /if/ you are fool enough to think you can cross me, surely an alliance on this one issue benefits us both. Coren on Keroon's throne cements our dynasty over most of the Eastern coast, and takes him out of contention as Benden's heir."
"How I fear for Nerat," Reyce answers, his smile unchanged. He shifts a little on the bed, pulling his legs closer while he watches her and thinks. The smile seems to lessen for a moment or two, and then sparks back up with even more venom than before. "So Carlin gets Benden, and Coren gets Keroon. What is the nothing that Reyce gets?"
Carina clucks and says, "Lord Faysal /is/ getting up there." She's joking, but perhaps you should be afraid of Carina's jests. "The same nothing that Carina gets," she answers after a moment as she does her eyeliner on her other eye. She blinks into the mirror and then looks over at Reyce.
Reyce's expression does not change: still venomous, still smiling. "A bastard on the same level as a woman? What a bump in status," he murmurs, half-closing his eyes while he reflects.
"You have great financial skills. I am an excellent politician. Carlin is easily distracted." Carina checks off, one finger after the other. Then she breaks to pull more cosmetics out of her bag. A jar and a face poof. "Think about it for a moment." And while she applies some blush to try and mask the bruising without hiding it, she says, "Do you take philosophy here?"
Reyce pulls a face, his cruel smile yielding to a grimace of disgust. "No. Fuck that shit." His hands slip off his ankles, no longer holding his legs crossed; that done, he can unfold them and stretch them out, which he feels a sudden need to do. His arms go behind him for another stretch, his whole body giving in to a cooped-up desire for motion.
"Was that a response to my offer or a general reaction to philosophy?" Carina asks, setting aside the blush to look at her face again. Hm. Her eyes flick to Reyce and she sets down her mirror. Almost all ready to face the world now, isn't she?
Reyce, still arched back in a stretch, arrests the motion to give her an arch look. "Philosophy." He says it as though it were so obvious.
Carina smiles and then stands up, turning her back to Reyce to put her cosmetics away in the wardrobe and pull out a velvet jacket, which she slides into, one arm after the other. She turns around to button it up, watching him. "Too bad. Philosophy was never my favorite either, but it contains wisdom that you might appreciate."
Reyce finishes his stretch with a final, bone-popping roll of his neck. Loosened up, but no more friendly because of it, he pins her with a narrow-eyed examination that lasts for several seconds before he answers. "What are you trying to say?"
Carina says, "Nothing, Reyce. Just that you should lift your head out of your numbers more often." Her voice is silky as she tugs her coat down and then fussily arranges the edge of her blouse. She hasn't put on her boots yet, but she asks, "How do I look?"
Reyce shrugs, dismissing the suggestion with a look cast over his shoulder. That look soon returns, however, to do a squint-eyed scan of her appearance. After it's finished, he looks away again with a short sniff. "Like someone beat the shit out of you yesterday."
"She didn't actually hurt me, Reyce, it's only a surface bruise." She squints at him as she says this and folds her arms in front of her. Carina rocks on her hips, from one foot to the other. After tiring of staring Reyce down, she turns her head and scratches the nape of her neck with one finger. Then she bends down and picks up her heeled boots to slip her feet into them.
Reyce lets out a low breath of laughter. "Think the definition of a bruise says it's not on the surface." The stare-down does not phase him at all, as he continues to look coolly in another direction. After he answers, however, he may as well turn back to her and so he does, his eyes trained on her feet without much real interest.
Carina snorts at him, only half amused. "The point remains: no broken bones, no pulled muscles. The healers would appreciate it if I did not wear a corset for several days just to be sure, but I acquitted myself well and would have won if the guard hadn't arrived." Now that she's in her heels, she stands up -- several inches taller than she was just a moment ago.
Reyce's eyes smoothly follow the transition, then, from boots to now-elevated face as she stands up. He, however, continues to sit on the bed. "Everybody says that, when their fight gets broken up. No way to disprove it." His snarled smile reappears, mockery dancing in his eyes. He's trying to goad her, no question.
Well, Carina paces a bit by her cot, looking around the barracks with an empty expression on her face. She's quietly observing it, at the very least and seems intent on ignoring Reyce. "I'd best get going to speak to Sefton. There are only so many hours in the day. You should run along to your history class."
Reyce stops watching her in turn, then, and stretches back out on his bed. He crosses his arms behind his head and closes his eyes. "Yeah, I should," he says, not sounding very interested. "See ya."
"See ya," Carina echos in sing song as she clomps her heels right on out the barracks.
8-12-2006 (Carina, Reyce):
Caucus Barracks
This large cavern is kept in a state of perpetual gloom. Rows and rows of cots and presses stretch out from the door, separated by wide aisles. The walls have been covered with old tapestries taken from stores, both to provide warmth and to muffle the sound of multiple people snoring. A section near the front of the cavern has been partitioned off with large opaque screens to make an area for holdbred women who prefer privacy.
(OOC Note: You may either @link yourself here or build a cot to serve as your home. If you build a cot, it must be set dark. Please do not leave objects or puppets laying about in the room.)
Obvious Exits:
Out (O)
Morning. Early afternoon, really. Not that you can tell in an underground cavern that has been barely made up for human living. Or maybe you can, given that the cavern has emptied out of human bodies, all good little Caucus students up and off to their classes. Carina is still in here, feigning sleep. Her blankets have been pulled over her head and tucked under her pillow. Her fingers stick out, curled into balls and clutching the fabric close to her.
Reyce is nobody's idea of a good little Caucus student, so he has chosen to skip his afternoon class and return to the empty barracks. He walks in a with a pair of books tucked under his arm; he throws them down on his bed with nothing even remotely close to the respect required for a sleeper. As he does so, his head is turned towards Carina, watching her face for a response.
Carina rolls awake. Literally. She rolls up from her prone position, hands tossing down the blankets around her legs which have folded under her for sitting on her cot. Once they finish fluttering down, they cover her legs. Her untied and unbrushed hair also falls around her face, partially obscuring the bruises which are now in their mature flush of dark purple and red. She turns her head to look at him, apparently too tired to raise the customary eyebrow in question.
Reyce shoves his hands into his jacket pockets, tilting his chin down and eyes up in that bull-about-to-rush manner he sometimes has. No rushing here, however; he takes in her disheveled appearance slowly, with a calm eye, and at long last draws in a sniff. "Good look for you."
"Shove it." Very ladylike in the morning is Carina. She lifts a hand to smooth over her unaltered brow and then reaches down for her pearl hair clips in a basket under the cot. With three quick violent sweeps, she has most of it gathered up and pinned back out of her face. "Are you staying to watch me dress too, you little letch?"
Reyce shrugs, pulling his hands out of his pockets as he looks away. "Nah," he answers, moving over to his bed. He gives the books a little flip, rolling them away - one lands with its pages sprawled open, terrible for the binding - and promptly falls onto the cot, his face smushed in the pillow. His muffled voice emerges: "I wanna be able to eat lunch in a little while."
"Hrmph," Carina replies, allowing the taunt to slide. She reaches down again for a pair of black stockings, turns them inside out and then slips them on with a little frown that dies as immediately as it was thought. "You're supposed to be in class, right now."
"It's history," Reyce points out, still with his face in the pillow. "Be the same story tomorrow."
Carina hangs her feet over the side of her cot and delicately sets one down after the other. She reaches out, slipping a finger under the poor book to pick up and set it aright. After that is done, she stands and pads over to her big trunk, pulling it open to reach for some folded clothing, which she brings back over to rest on her unmade cot. Then she pads over and grabs her toiletries bag, and flops back down on her cot next to her clothes. "All the same, only one of us should be seen to have a flagrant disregard for rules and manners at a time."
Reyce is growing impatient with having to keep his head in the pillow: his breath is making it uncomfortably hot, and it's hard to speak. He rolls onto his back, bringing an arm up to further shield his closed eyes. "That'd be shooting kinda high, don't you think?" Belatedly realizing that he's brought his booted feet on the bed, Reyce swings his lower legs off the cot and lets them hang off the edge.
"I meant you and I, here at High Reaches. It's unreasonable to include our other siblings in the count." She digs through her toiletries bag, spritzes some perfume under her arms and then slides her top off. Perhaps to annoy him, she tosses it over to land on his head before she slips her blouse on. Carina hops onto the floor again to change pants, as she does so saying, "I have my date planner, perhaps we can divide the time equally between ourselves." There's an oof as she finishes the sentence and buttons up the top button at the same time. "You can look now."
Reyce twitches in surprise when her top lands on him, letting out a phlegm-hacking throat sound to make his disgust known. He quickly reaches up to yank it off, pausing a moment to listen to the sound of her rustling around - he has sharp hearing, and can target that way. "Equally?" He snaps his elbow to send it hurling back at her at about the same moment he receives permission to look. Naturally, the first thing he looks for is whether his throw was on-target.
Carina catches her shirt right in front of her chest and tucks it close to her under folded arms. "Two of us suggests a division of half-and-half, but of course, I will demure to use less of the time than you if you wish." She falls back and lands on her bum on her cot, and then folds her nightgown on her lap, taking effort to press the creases back into place with her hands. It doesn't seem like it works that well and her frown at this is noticable. "Of course, I am also likely to be back home before nightfall."
Reyce lets his head sink back down when he sees her catch the shirt (foiling him), but in a second more he's up again, rolling to a seated position and shooting her a sidelong glance. "Yeah, that'd make things a bit easier." He draws in another sniff, reaching a hand up to scratch at his stubble while he squints at an empty cot across from him. "So. What's next?" A look at her, then back to the empty cot. "On your planner."
Carina catches that scratch and fehs, "Honestly, Reyce. You can't shave in the morning like a normal male?" She sniffs and digs through her bag, pulling out a mirror and a brush, then unpins her hair. She proceeds to begin brushing it out on her own -- you can see her lips move from time to time in silent count, although she hasn't ignored Reyce's query. Her head is still tilted towards him. Somewhere around stroke thirty, she says, "Speak to Sefton. After Sefton, find a Threadchart and check that there is no fall between here and Keroon today. After that, arrange for a rider to take me to Keroon."
Reyce's stubble-scratching pauses, then resumes with just a moment of defiant vigor. "Guess not." He waits it out while she brushes, his hands stuffed into his pockets to fiddle with a loose mark he finds in one, flipping it round and round with a distracted look on his face. When she speaks again, he snaps back to reality and considers her for a bit. "Gonna eat shit?"
Carina wrinkles her nose distastefully at his comment. "I am going to prostrate myself before the good Lord Keroon and assure him that while his daughter and I may have disagreements, even violent ones, that feeling is a personal one that should not enter into Benden's good relations with its neighbor." She tilts her head to look at him and says, "Fifty," aloud, before continuing her thought: "I rather imagine metaphorically, shit eating will be involved." She moves towards brushing out the underlayers of her hair, which is growing more frizzy with each stroke.
Reyce closes his eyes when she says fifty, and the coin-flipping comes to an immediate halt. Knowing his habits, she'll recognize the expression: it's an unusually peaceful one, for Reyce, and so it stands out whenever he's playing games with the numbers in his head. It doesn't distract him long before he answers, "Got to do it sometime. Eat shit. Worth it to you?"
"I have a contract with Lord Keroon for two by Defiance this foaling season." Carina replies. This /is/ an unusually peaceful meeting between the two, for all that she's momentarily not paying attention to his habits. Her hair, you know. She goes layer by layer, moving from the bottom to the middle layers now. "We'll see how angry Sefton is with me, but I am sure he can be convinced to break our contract."
Reyce has his numbers to distract him, or at least keep him calm enough to explain the peace. He did just come from a morning math class. "Guess it depends how much he wants to fuck with your head. He gets a free score on Benden." His eyes narrow as he says this, and while he looks about to say more, he snaps his teeth shut on the words. After a pause to collect himself, and redirect his energies, Reyce finds something across the room to stare at. "Anyway, not what I meant. I meant, worth it to you to start this shit, with Keroon."
"She called me a whore to my face, Reyce." Carina says flatly as she finishes her brushing and looks over at him. She does, however, actually rolls her eyes in his description of Sefton.
Reyce stops looking at the wall and meets her gaze. "I'll call you a whore to your face."
Carina looks at him stormily, "You're my brother."
Reyce shrugs. "Half-brother." Forgetting about his boots, he yanks a foot back onto the bed and holds it in front of him - he'd be cross-legged if the other foot weren't still on the floor. "People call me a bastard to my face. So do I. It's true."
"It's more the behaviour and not the blood," Carina retorts, continuing to glare at him, "And in any case, you shouldn't allow others to treat you like that. No matter how much mother hates it, or father dislikes you, he did acknowledge you and she did raise you. That makes you one of us. Have a little more respect for that." And then she reaches into her bag and pulls out a jar, uncorking an extremely fragrantly smelled hairwax.
"Like fuck she did," Reyce snaps, his upper lip drawing into a snarl. "And don't start counting me as 'one of us' all of a sudden. The fuck are you here for, anyway? You're nobody's fucking chaperone, and I don't believe you'd do it just to keep an eye on me." So much for the peace: he's apparently dragged all he cares to out of the number she handed him.
The outburst makes Carina stop, a handfull of gooey wax sitting in her clawed hand. She brings it over to her lap and cups her other hand under it so as to avoid it. "Jays, Reyce. You act like it is so terrible, to have been ignored at the court of Benden. Would you have rather been a drudge, mucking out the wher shit all day? If so, why not give us some peace and go do it already."
Reyce draws back, the snarl still frozen on his features. "Thank you for sparing me such a lowly lifestyle," he answers with incongruous politesse, while his tongue lingers with distaste on the word 'lowly.' "What a generous family." His eyes narrow even further, and he drops the act. "Didn't answer my question."
Carina plops the hairwax into her hair, turning from Reyce to look at herself in her mirror and slick back her hair. Without looking, she pulls out a long ebony colored slat of wood with scrollwork at the top and begins to wind her slick waxed hair into a twist. "It could have been worse for you, Reyce. You'd be a happier person if you decided to stop resenting Carlin and I for whatever you think we had from our parents that you didn't get. And if you're really smart and clever, you and I can have a very exciting future doing all the work to run Benden that Carlin hasn't the attention span to do."
Reyce is silent for a long time, looking at the foot still on the floor. His snarl fades over time, to be replaced by a milder if still fierce-looking frown. At last: the snick of a smile, pulled up at the corner of his lip, and then gone. "That what you came here for, then? To incorporate me?" He looks at her, some trace of smugness hiding in the sneer he gives.
"That and to make sure that the future Lord and Lady of Fort know I hold no ill will towards either." She pins her hair again with the pearl clips to hold it into place and she turns her head side to side to make sure that it's all done up. After she's convinced, Carina lays the mirror face down in her lap. "I also wanted to see if we couldn't match Coren up with Aelan."
Reyce is taken off-guard by her last suggestion, an incredulous snort spat through his teeth. "Well, that got fucked up." He raises an eyebrow here, not above reminding her: by you. "That why you were working her over?"
Being in a good mood, Carina smiles, pain from the bruise on her cheek being ignored for the pure emotion. "I did rather bollocks it up." She lifts her hand, as if putting her finger on a mark on the page and looks askance, "As they say, it isn't over until it is over."
Reyce grabs the edge of his pants leg and uses it to help haul his foot off the floor, pulling it over the other leg so now he is sitting cross-legged on the bed. "Why not just have him meet her and let his natural charm rule the day?" he murmurs, his smirk returning. Restoring his voice to normal, conversational level, he muses, "So it's back to getting rid of Coren, then. Is the Little Lord having a little trouble with his little brother?" His smile seems almost feral.
Carina rolls her eyes ever so slightly again and then pulls over her bag and brings out her little case of kohl sticks. She sharpens the end of one carefully, dips it in a little jar she unscrews and then proceeds to very carefully line her left eye. "Oh, please." She snorts as she finishes her line. "Even /if/ you are fool enough to think you can cross me, surely an alliance on this one issue benefits us both. Coren on Keroon's throne cements our dynasty over most of the Eastern coast, and takes him out of contention as Benden's heir."
"How I fear for Nerat," Reyce answers, his smile unchanged. He shifts a little on the bed, pulling his legs closer while he watches her and thinks. The smile seems to lessen for a moment or two, and then sparks back up with even more venom than before. "So Carlin gets Benden, and Coren gets Keroon. What is the nothing that Reyce gets?"
Carina clucks and says, "Lord Faysal /is/ getting up there." She's joking, but perhaps you should be afraid of Carina's jests. "The same nothing that Carina gets," she answers after a moment as she does her eyeliner on her other eye. She blinks into the mirror and then looks over at Reyce.
Reyce's expression does not change: still venomous, still smiling. "A bastard on the same level as a woman? What a bump in status," he murmurs, half-closing his eyes while he reflects.
"You have great financial skills. I am an excellent politician. Carlin is easily distracted." Carina checks off, one finger after the other. Then she breaks to pull more cosmetics out of her bag. A jar and a face poof. "Think about it for a moment." And while she applies some blush to try and mask the bruising without hiding it, she says, "Do you take philosophy here?"
Reyce pulls a face, his cruel smile yielding to a grimace of disgust. "No. Fuck that shit." His hands slip off his ankles, no longer holding his legs crossed; that done, he can unfold them and stretch them out, which he feels a sudden need to do. His arms go behind him for another stretch, his whole body giving in to a cooped-up desire for motion.
"Was that a response to my offer or a general reaction to philosophy?" Carina asks, setting aside the blush to look at her face again. Hm. Her eyes flick to Reyce and she sets down her mirror. Almost all ready to face the world now, isn't she?
Reyce, still arched back in a stretch, arrests the motion to give her an arch look. "Philosophy." He says it as though it were so obvious.
Carina smiles and then stands up, turning her back to Reyce to put her cosmetics away in the wardrobe and pull out a velvet jacket, which she slides into, one arm after the other. She turns around to button it up, watching him. "Too bad. Philosophy was never my favorite either, but it contains wisdom that you might appreciate."
Reyce finishes his stretch with a final, bone-popping roll of his neck. Loosened up, but no more friendly because of it, he pins her with a narrow-eyed examination that lasts for several seconds before he answers. "What are you trying to say?"
Carina says, "Nothing, Reyce. Just that you should lift your head out of your numbers more often." Her voice is silky as she tugs her coat down and then fussily arranges the edge of her blouse. She hasn't put on her boots yet, but she asks, "How do I look?"
Reyce shrugs, dismissing the suggestion with a look cast over his shoulder. That look soon returns, however, to do a squint-eyed scan of her appearance. After it's finished, he looks away again with a short sniff. "Like someone beat the shit out of you yesterday."
"She didn't actually hurt me, Reyce, it's only a surface bruise." She squints at him as she says this and folds her arms in front of her. Carina rocks on her hips, from one foot to the other. After tiring of staring Reyce down, she turns her head and scratches the nape of her neck with one finger. Then she bends down and picks up her heeled boots to slip her feet into them.
Reyce lets out a low breath of laughter. "Think the definition of a bruise says it's not on the surface." The stare-down does not phase him at all, as he continues to look coolly in another direction. After he answers, however, he may as well turn back to her and so he does, his eyes trained on her feet without much real interest.
Carina snorts at him, only half amused. "The point remains: no broken bones, no pulled muscles. The healers would appreciate it if I did not wear a corset for several days just to be sure, but I acquitted myself well and would have won if the guard hadn't arrived." Now that she's in her heels, she stands up -- several inches taller than she was just a moment ago.
Reyce's eyes smoothly follow the transition, then, from boots to now-elevated face as she stands up. He, however, continues to sit on the bed. "Everybody says that, when their fight gets broken up. No way to disprove it." His snarled smile reappears, mockery dancing in his eyes. He's trying to goad her, no question.
Well, Carina paces a bit by her cot, looking around the barracks with an empty expression on her face. She's quietly observing it, at the very least and seems intent on ignoring Reyce. "I'd best get going to speak to Sefton. There are only so many hours in the day. You should run along to your history class."
Reyce stops watching her in turn, then, and stretches back out on his bed. He crosses his arms behind his head and closes his eyes. "Yeah, I should," he says, not sounding very interested. "See ya."
"See ya," Carina echos in sing song as she clomps her heels right on out the barracks.