[Wids]

When First We Practice to Deceive
The Life of Corella d'Margo
(or is it?)

[Wids]

To the Estate of Lord Segren Coldwell
From the Estate of Lady Corella of Margo
7 Flamerule


A fair season to you, Cousin Segren. May this missive find you in good health.

Thus far, Zhengyi the Witch-King continues to spare my dominion from his predations. And so, as always, I shall lighten the spirits of the commonfolk with a great festival, one dedicated to my birthday. The hamlet of Margo has more than a tenday to prepare for this celebration, and I earnestly hope that they shan't disappoint me.

We expect an abundant harvest of barley and grapes this year, and I am deeply proud to state this much. A great many doubts were raised over the quality of my leadership when my husband suddenly went to walk with Jergal and left his throne to me, but this renewed prosperity shall surely lay such worries to rest.

As my husband did, my servant girl Nella has quit this world after an all too fleeting bout with pestilence. Where in Damara am I to find her replacement with so little time until my birthday festival? I have already delivered my invitations among the gentryfolk, and my reputation shall stumble most soundly if I falter with the preparations.

As always, dear cousin, you need no invitation. Pray attend and drink wine with me if you are so able, will you?


With Love,
Cousin Corella

[Wids]

To the Estate of Lord Segren Coldwell
From the Estate of Lady Corella of Margo
10 Flamerule


Tymora has surely smiled on me, Cousin Segren! With my entourage at hand, I ventured to Praka to procure ample wine for the festival. The vintner of the Seven Widows Vineyard so curtly bade me to wait in the alley passing aft of his warehouse until he had readied the purchased amphorae and loaded them aboard my spare carriage. And there I met my new servant girl.

A comely yet squalid creature who could not have seen more than eight winters, she came bumbling up to me, unshod and clad in a filthy and threadbare dress of rudely tailored broadcloth, tearfully asking me if I would help her find her parents. I berated her for daring to impose on a noblewoman so presumptuously, but she fell to bawling and pleading, and her demand grew twice the louder. And in that state of weakness and fear she seemed all the more darling to me, and I knew that I must have her. Besides, her loudened whining had grown twice as irritating, so I calmed her with a gentle hand across her lowly shoulder. "Little maid," I assured her, "I can surely help you, if I but know your name." "Anneletta," she said in answer, "Anneletta Sardant." "Anneletta, your parents are to meet us at my manor, where a great birthday celebration is soon to take place. I have sent them ahead of us to help spread our feast. Come into my carriage and, with the morrow, you shall dine with them and with me."

I cannot count myself too clever for beguiling a girl so young and naive, but enter my carriage she did. She is but a pauper girl; no one of any merit shall ache for her loss. I have my servant, she is removed from hopeless poverty and her parents have one fewer mouth to feed. Is anyone truly at a loss here?

Of course, I shall need to have the carriage seats lathered and scrubbed where her filthy rump sat. That can be little Anneletta's first task. Do wish me well with breaking her willfulness and setting her into her new role, will you?


With Love,
Cousin Corella

[Wids]

To His Ineffable Verbosity, The Most Wretched Emperor of Dust, Exexexes X, Possibly Acting Bishop of Jolo's Perfectly Ignoble Boarding House
From Her Most Luminescent Cowherd, Deaconess-Baroness Zenzylina Q of the Discarded Mop, and the Outhouse of Brutal Serendipity
17 Flamerule, the Year of the Uphill River


By the Mistshadow, O Eminent Deceiver, I greet you.

We are expecting two pilgrims from the House of Leira's Left Armpit in Impiltur, yet we have but one downy bedroll to lay for them. I ask your grace and your permission in opening the tithe coffer, that I may canter off to town and buy another bedroll ere the pilgrims arrive. I anxiously await your reply, Great Mistwalker.

On another note, Lady Corella of Margo continues her aggression in oppressing the Leiran faith here in her little reach of Damara. Three days past, she personally bought the beautiful flower garden which bordered our shrine to the East, though the exchange was less a legitimate purchase and more a sack of coin handed forcefully to the gardeners (by way of the unspoken yet unmistakable command to "Keep your feet moving and your mouths shut") as Lady Corella evicted them from their land. Yesterday, she handed that lovely garden over to a family of pig farmers after coming to some hasty agreement or other. Even now, the pigs are uprooting the pink philodendrons and leaving so many decades of the Pinewold family's hard work as so much slop, scat and other messes. Betwixt the new pig farm and the tannery which Lady Corella planted to our West, the odors hereabout are becoming awfully repugnant, and my fits of nausea promise to grow even worse.

I shall send Gilded Bastard Oleonor Rex to speak with Lady Corella in the morn. Let us pray by the Endless Mists that he can reason with her and persuade her to cast her hostility aside.


By the Mistshadow,
Zenzie

[Wids]

To the Earl of Arcata-on-Leinespere, Earl Garalder Cornall
From the Estate of Lord Aidrick Cornall
20 Flamerule


Father,

I am delighted to say that my courtship with Lady Corella deepens, though I must admit to harboring my misgivings.

I attended her birthday gala, as did no small throng of other invited noblefolk, and she greeted me in the plaza of her manor. Hours of hearty food, wine, music and chatter followed, with servants darting about and getting underfoot as society's elite traded tales and rekindled acquaintenceships. When dusk settled and the lamps began to burn, Corella took me by my hand and gleefully led me to the terrace overlooking Hippogriff Pond, where we sat for the better part of an hour, murmuring sweet words and gazing into each other's eyes.

Our goblets then ran dry, but Corella was prepared. She plucked a small brass bell from her sash and shook it with vigor, and before over long we were joined on the terrace by her dainty winebearer, a young raven-haired girl bearing a large amphora near to half her size. Though the servant girl was pretty in a way, her air was tarnished by soot-smudged cheeks and heavy, tired eyes which seethed with anger for my lady. Corella ignored the burning stares, or so I believed. But in turning to leave, the girl pitched forward and fell, shattering the amphora beneath her ribs and showering wine across the marble tiles. The culprit was then revealed as Corella kicked her leg upward with a sharp laugh, unhooking her own foot from the wine girl's ankle with force enough to jar the girl's sandal from her heel.

Clearly the servant girl had yet to find her servile heart, for she was promptly off the floor and on her feet, screeching terribly at my lady over some matter involving the girl's parents. Corella did not suffer her servant's harangue for long at all, silencing her with a blow from her backhand sound enough to send the girl reeling to the floor. And then, I fear, it was Corella's turn to be enraged, for she savagely lifted the servant by her hair only to send her back to the floor with four vicious cuffs from her open hand.

Perhaps Corella noted my confusion or dismay as I stepped in to part them, or perhaps I was afraid of facing my lady's rejection. For whatever the reasons, she took the battered servant by her hair again and set to goading me. "Try it, Aidrick! Strike her! She's only a peasant girl! Do with her what you want! Hit her! I enjoyed it, did I not? And you shall too! Now do it!"

And may Ilmater pardon me, for I did it.

I could never truly explain what I felt as the shock from that poor girl's jaw sank into the back of my hand and traveled up my arm with the peal of her scream. I was horrified by what I had done. I enjoyed what I had done. I was horrified that I enjoyed it. And then I did it again, and again, and several times more. And I was vaguely aware of Corella, somewhere near, joining in the sport with a berserk flurry of wicked stomping and kicking and pulling and clawing through what minutes followed.

Corella lifted me to my feet, or perhaps I lifted her to hers; I am not certain, having witnessed the entire moment through a red haze as I did. And tenderly we held each other in a warm embrace, numb to the servant girl's sobbing and wimpering at my calves. Sensing my disquiet, my lady lent the girl a cutting remark about learning her place, then led me to the water closet where we could straighten our garments and wash the blood away. Soonafter we returned to the party, and the servant girl, still drenched with wine, blood and tears of pain, was weeping pitifully into her disheveled black hair when we passed the terrace.

After two hours of midnight dancing with my Corella, I had finally pushed the suffering maid from my mind in time for me to quit the celebration and return to my carriage. But more suffering graced my ears as my lady and I passed through the breezeway: the pained howls of a man in horrid anguish. "What manner of man is that?" I asked. "Damara has no absence of scoundrels: pickpockets, swindlers, burglars, Leirans and worse," came the answer. "All of them find their way to some gaol or another. That man has surely earned his reward."

The report of something cracking and splintering--something in that nether torture chamber not unlike wood, yet wet and thick with sensations of agony--rippled over my back as I left Corella in that breezeway and hastened to my waiting carriage, ending that moment of ghastly punctuation for a checkered evening.

So perhaps you can forgive me if I hesitate to give Corella my ring just yet, Father. But I simply must consider my relation with Corella for a while longer and decide if such brief dashes of excitement and dalliances from propriety may be worth what price I may pay for them.


Your Dutiful Son,
Aidrick

[Wids]

To His Dark Luminescence, The Most Wretched Emperor of Dust, Exexexes X, Possibly Acting Bishop of Jolo's Perfectly Ignoble Boarding House
From Her Most Luminescent Cowherd, Deaconess-Baroness Zenzylina Q of the Discarded Mop, and the Outhouse of Brutal Serendipity
22 Flamerule, the Year of the Uphill River


By the Mistshadow, O Illusionsmith, I bring ill word of the Outhouse's state.

Oleonor Rex failed to return from Lady Corella's manor in a timely fashion. So after taking on the disguise of a common milkmaid, I borrowed a discarded milking bucket (or an emptied slopping bucket which could pass for such) from the neighboring pig farm, then set out to find him.

I found him not far outside Lady Corella's stables, stripped of his garments, tortured beyond words and half-buried in a pile of horse dung there. So it appears that Lady Corella has given unto us her most abject refusal to consider our proposition.

I wiped the dung from Brother Oleonor's form as well as I could, then fashioned a crude litter of burlap and wooden poles to bear him back to the shrine. I have only now finished mending his broken legs and his shoulders twisted from their sockets, but far more healing awaits. He was unable to retrieve his severed tongue ere the lady's men cast him out of the manor, and his ears, his nipples and his manhood alike were burned away with hot irons; I shall need to beseech the Mist Maiden's aid in growing these parts anew. May She be so willing.

The lady's men-at-arms now come calling at all hours, asking such intrusive querries as what crimes have I perpetrated of late, who are my contacts among the criminal underworld and how much coin I have given for trade in stolen goods. I have done none of these deeds, Your Baseness! I am but a priestess; a liar I may be, but a criminal I am not. Why does Lady Corella insist on laying such accusations at the Church of Leira's feet? How could we, in her history, have wounded her gravely enough to warrant her intolerance, if not her vengeance?


By the Mistshadow. I anticipate your foolish and unreasoning reply.
Miss Z

[Wids]

To Her Most Luminescent Cowherd, Deaconess-Baroness Zenzylina Q of the Discarded Mop, and the Outhouse of Brutal Serendipity
From His Most Worthy Worthlessness, Exexexes X, Most Remotely Remote Apostate of Jolo's Perfectly Ignoble Boarding House (for one tenday only)
23 Flamerule, the Year Before Next Year


By the Mistshadow, O Holy Cowherd, I replied as swiftly as I could.

These attacks against Wise Leira's faithful are utterly intolerable, and swift steps shall be taken to rectify the affair. Has Lady Corella blinded herself to the crushingly ponderous debt which she owes to the Keeper of Liars? We know her lies and we know her deceitful gambits, even if she herself should forget them. She gained the Garndegal Residence and all of its land through deception. She disgraced her rival, Lady Alarice Hawkmoor, and removed her from her dominion through deception. She laid her hands on the Third Word of Creation (however briefly) through deception. And for her masterstroke, she brought about her husband's death and secured his throne for herself through deception! And she has perpetrated far more lies and ruses than those. Though she will assuredly go to great lengths to deny us and to oppress us, she is already ours.

So she now plays a truly dangerous game with us, for as the Mist Maiden conceals our lies, she can just as easily lay those lies bare before the teeth of the Law. And yet that fate would be an act of mercy or of charity, for despots and betrayers stand to face worse fates yet. Fates shrouded in mystery. Passages unmourned. Legacies lost. One-hundred questions which reap three-hundred answers without a dram of truth among them.

I shall send more clerics to aid you, priests who shall secret themselves among the ranks of Lady Corella's servants, where they may better keep our Church's eyes and ears on her and act whenever needed. Do make way for their arrival.


By the Mistshadow,
Bishop X

[Wids]

To the Estate of Lord Segren Coldwell
From the Estate of Lady Corella du Margo
23 Flamerule


Good day to you, cousin. How fares your mother, my dearest Auntie Berecia? I have not heard from her in a crow's age! Do send to her my love, will you?

As you may expect, my birthday was a smashing success! Only two of the invitees did not attend, and my darling Lord Aidrick was among those who did. I spent so many hours sharing wine with him, or dancing with him, or talking with him on the terrace. Father was here to help me oversee the servant staff, and all transpired quite readily. I had one brief and minor episode with Anneletta growing cross with me and raising her voice, but Aidrick gallantly leapt to defend my honor and corrected Anneletta's insolence, all without my urging! He is quite the firm-handed disciplinarian. He will be a superb husband and father to my children, to be sure, and joining his lands with mine might even make for enough land and influence to elevate us into the ranks of barony. Let us hope, yes?

I spent a wonderful evening with my many other guests as well. The Vaasan ambassador is such a charmer! And he insisted on addressing me as "Madame du Margo" or "Madame d'Margo". I like it. That name has a certain exotic flair to it, does it not? Mayhap I should take this as my title. Claiming a willing hand in foreign affairs could only help me, I would wager.

But I am having more problems with those vulgar Leirans, I fear. Earlier that day, one of them truly dared to set foot in my courtyard! He claimed that he wanted to speak with me, but I have had my fill of their lies. Besides, he was surely there to swindle me out of my jewelry and mayhap snatch something valuable once my eyes were diverted. So I had him locked away and punished for a few days, and whether he lives or dies beyond that is not my concern. Mayhap the Leirans shall find the sense to pack their belongings and leave my domain, if not the whole of Damara. I trust Leira's church as much as I trust Cyric's church, which is to say that I trust them not in the least.

The barley harvest shall begin soon, and with that comes more coin for the coffers. I can hardly wait!


With Love,
Cousin Corella

[Wids]

To His Dryest Moistness in the Diluted Desert, The Most Wretched Emperor of Dust, Exexexes X, Possibly Acting Bishop of Jolo's Perfectly Ignoble Boarding House
From Her Most Resplendent Cowherd, Deaconess-Baroness Zenzylina Q of the Discarded Mop, and the Outhouse of Brutal Serendipity
25 Flamerule, the Year of Something or Other


By the Mistshadow, O Grand Master of the Truth, you need not trouble yourself or your minions so.

I and Leira, eternally blessed be Her name, are but a hair shy of finishing our healing work with Oleonor Rex. And courage is truly his name, for his first utterance with his new tongue was "I wish to return to Margo Manor". What suffering he endured at Lady Corella's hands has steeled either his determination or his vindictiveness; either way, he shall be secreting himself among Lady Corella's servants. He was a stablehand in his youth, so with a new name, a cleanly shaven face, a proper horsehair wig, some dye for his eyebrows and a forged recommendation from the Duke of Arcata, he may find his place toiling in our good and kindly lady's stables (the same stables where Lady Corella cast him out into a dung heap, no less). Noblefolk are quite fond of their steeds, so the stables should be an ideal place for some delicious eavesdropping.

And if Lady Corella becomes too great a nettle and begs to be removed from the board, saddles and stirrups can be easily sabotaged to come undone from the rigors of a full gallop, can they not?


By the Mistshadow,
Miss Zenzie

[Wids]

For the Eyes of Lady Corella
From the Hand of Chamberlain Ironpate
1 Eleasis

Your Ladyship,

I do hope that your Midsummer stay in Sembia has been wholly pleasureable and relaxing, and I am truly loath to disturb it. But I must bring this preturbing matter to your attention:

Two days ago, a man and a woman arrived at our estate. By name they are Dorren and Gaiwyn Sardant, and they are seeking their lost daughter Anneletta, who fled with them to Damara in the face of a great featherlung epidemic in their native Impiltur. I was prompt in denying all knowledge of their daughter and sending them away, but they claimed to have been sent here by the vintner Marsus Vinnbotham, who seems to have happened across Anneletta during one of his deliveries to your residence. So while the Sardants are gone for the moment, I fear that they shall soon return. I have taken the liberty of confining Anneletta to the Servant Quarters until further notice, for we could face a horrible embarrassment were they to find her here. What, then, am I to do in resolving this affair?

On a lighter note, our new stablehand has been working quite well for us. He is perfectly punctual, skilled and learned, and he is always properly groomed in appearance. Yet I cannot help but think that I have seen him before. Has Duke William of Arcata ever brought his stablehands along during his visits to this fair quarter of the Duchy of Carmathan, perchance?


Your Diligent Servant,
Chamberlain Wilgerd Ironpate of Margo