Lady Grayeras

Background

Her given name is Alyphe, and almost nobody in Haudh-Gwenn uses it. She sits on the council, eight seats held for life, and she and her husband Traxian hold two of them, which is a quarter of the town in one household. The arithmetic is worse than that. The High Councilman’s vote counts twice and hers goes where his goes, near enough every time, so two seats deliver three votes before anybody else has spoken. Most of the remainder can be bought, and the Grayeras have the money to buy them.

For years she was a silhouette and not a voice. A councilwoman sweeping past a merchant’s door without looking at anyone in it, and strangers asking who she was and being told that she and her husband are two of the eight, which means her family runs a quarter of the city. That was the whole of her.

Appearance

An older woman, straight-backed and purse-mouthed and eloquent, in fine clothes well fitted to her and bright jewelry, always of the current fashion. At a glance she reads as the younger of the two Grayeras, perhaps mid-sixties, and she puts work into it down to the color in her hair. She is neither the younger nor sixty-five. She is human and in her early eighties, a decade or more her husband’s senior in years, and Traxian is a Peren in his early seventies, which in a Peren is a man in his early fifties. Two peoples in one house, on two clocks, and their two children are half of each.

The difference between them is posture. Traxian has begun to slump under the work, poise and command notwithstanding. She has not. She keeps the straight back and the sharp eye, and she is always scanning a room, always watching, always taking in what is around her. When the person she is speaking to glances away, that is what she uses the moment for. Walking into a crowded common room she stands stark apart from everyone else in it.

Personality

Fierce nobility, and a proper woman through and through: domineering, rigid on etiquette, sharp of wit and sharper of tongue, and entirely devoted to her family. An informant who made his living selling Haudh-Gwenn’s gossip had nothing on her beyond that, and said as much: she does not leave breadcrumbs lying about, and that told him more about her character than anything he could have picked up. Whent, who was in and out of that house for thirty years, said his father talked freely around him and his mother never said much of anything.

The one hour of her conversation anybody wrote down bears it out. Asked a question about her son with a shade too much familiarity in it, she raised an eyebrow and offered the man an opportunity to rephrase. Told that a source had spoken well of her, she asked whether he had verified how valiant his sources were, which was a trap laid inside a pleasantry. Reminded that she had once had dealings with a person she now had no use for, she agreed that they were in the past, and closed the subject with the word.

Relationships

She and Traxian move as a single vote, and which of them is deciding it is not agreed. She loved her son, by every account including the ones hostile to her, and she was the only person anybody ever saw give Beltran an order to his face and be obeyed in the shape of it: you will not order your mother around, and then come here and sit down. Her daughter Naevora she dismisses as frail and sensitive, which is the reason the family has given for keeping her out of public life for twenty years.

She also sat in the conspiracy to take her son’s sword from him. That is the testimony of a corpse, made to answer three questions and no more, which named the clerk Davi Solt, the Silver Web, and Beltran’s mother. The blow was to be delivered and the tip of the blade stayed, at his mother’s command: spare the son, take the sword off him. Nobody has ever put the question to her, and the corpse was the only mouth that ever said any of it.

Her acquaintance with Voler Bria is older than the night he used it. He greeted her as someone glad of the chance to speak with her again, and when he worked his illusions across the room she followed them with her eyes and told him he always did put on quite the show. Johanka Materai, who has to share a chamber with her, times the speeches at her own parties so that the Grayeras arrive obnoxiously late and are seen to.

The Last Night

A letter carried by Katalia brought her to the Color Stay under a false pretext, and Bria received her with an over-elaborate bow and nearly an hour of pleasantries before he came to what he wanted. She was ahead of him on part of it. People of importance had been disappearing, she said, people close to her son, and she had noticed. On the seven put in rat-boxes in the street two days earlier she pursed her lips: it had not been sanctioned, and her son had not even requested sanction, and she moved her chin the smallest amount to say that the questions stopped there. Of Tazrih, the spymaster who had moved against him, she said she was glad, and let the rest of the sentence go. Of Whent she said he was the first to go, and that Beltran had been in a spiral since.

Then Bria told her, to needle her, that Whent had come back and gone to her son with the truth, and the pleasantness went out of the room. She leaned forward with a genuinely dangerous look and asked whether that was what he was telling her, and then whether he had really sat through an hour of small talk before mentioning it.

The door opened on Beltran with the Wraithblade drawn and already bloodied, wanting a private word with his mother. She refused him the private word. She turned a fraction in her seat, told him he would not order his mother around, and invited him to sit and speak in front of her friend. He did not have her practiced calm and could not hide what was on his face. The party walked out to the festival in the road and left them to it, the inn burning around them with Bria’s conjured fire, and what passed between mother and son was never discovered.

Beltran died in the street outside. She came out of the burning inn alive and found her son dead at her feet. She outlived him, and so did Traxian’s seat and its double vote, and the collapse of the house has not taken a shape anyone can see yet. Nobody has made her answer for what the corpse put on her.