Practical Matters
Twenty-Seventh Day of the Ninth Month 294 AC
Alinor Torchwood was, for all the power that resided in her quill and word, a woman who made a clear delineation between her public and private life. She always left her seal in her office, behind warded glass, and she rarely talked about work outside its due hours. It was partly to keep herself sane, to keep the avalanche of paper and the river of ink from drowning her, but mostly it was a sort of bureaucratic hygiene.
Of course, there weren't any laws that said you could not talk about work with people in a social setting, there weren't even any customs to the effect. Even the most zealous lawman would agree that it was a long way from talking about the new bridge contract or the new possibilities of steam-trains and... trouble, but Alinor was the Censor in a very real sense, the most powerful person in the entirely of the state apparatus. The only person she answered to directly wore a crown of steel, so even a carelessly spoken word from her could set ventures in motion that could shake the markets to their foundations.
So she simply did not talk about it.
If someone wanted her opinion on a tax exemption or if they really needed to know who to talk to in order to get a new Hall of Healing funded, she would tell them her office hours and how to get an appointment. She would not talk shop in the middle of a garden party no matter how insistent the person in question was, and in her line of work she dealt with a
lot of insistent people.
But to every rule there was some exception, and that night under the bright stars of the capital the exception came in the form of a grim faced Duke of Storm's End sitting ramrod straight in his seat looking through the action on the small stage more than at it, and giving the poor girl who was showing off her skills with the lyre the mother of all stage fright.
"Not a lover of the lyre?" she asked, walking up to the man. He was no more than a few years older than hers, though a hard life had carved far more lines upon his brow.
"I don't see the point," he replied with curtness that another might have mistaken for being rude, though Alinor could tell there was no malice there, only the absence of the usual social space filler.
"Well, who knows. Maybe she will help lay a road in a few years, or expand a city," the Censor replied with a smile.
"You jest," the words were almost an accusation.
"Only in part," she shrugged. "There is a reason why we have these gatherings, and it is not just to give the idle highborn a chance to be idle where the Imperator can see them rather that get into mischief. It is to give a chance for the young to get acclimated to the capital and take back with them a sense of what we have built here, or better yet, ask to stay and be educated in the ways of the city..."
"The city?" now he sounded annoyed by her lack of specificity.
"Oh, sorry. I mean
this city, the capital. I call it that because that is what the worst of the Volantene Old Blood call Volantis, yet they do not dare correct me when I give that title to the Deep. Petty, of course, but then so are they."
"Are there many Volantene magisters about?" the duke prompted, merely curious this time.
"I think there is one on the other side of the fountain there, Lord Yargos. Mostly it is just a verbal tic that slipped into my vocabulary. My apologies for inflicting it on you, Your Grace."
After giving her a long look she could not quite read, he tilted his head slightly. "No apologies are necessary, my lady, though if I may ask for a few moments of your time, I wish to know if there are any plans to set grain prices to prevent speculation with basic goods in light of the market disturbances last month."
"Not at this time. The matter was handled without the proverbial sledgehammer of economic policy. Rest assured, however, we are keeping it in reserve should things get out of hand again before trade normalizes..."
They were still talking an hour and a half later when the other guests were starting to move inside.
What next?
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OOC: I rolled who Alinor would meet out of a list and it came up Stannis. They get along surprisingly well given their very different outlooks on life as it turns out.
