caper_est | Quinquereme of Ophir

Slightly more rested. About 400 words of The Popinjay, covering Beauty's father's business trip. Many of these, without any premeditation, ended up as a rhapsodic catalogue of the stuff he carries from his profoundly obscure hometown to a merely undistinguished market on the other side of the wild woods. It is amazing how much better that carries the story over the leagues than the merely descriptive linking passage I was going to write instead.

This is, specifically, a full-on fairy tale without fairies or princes, or even any very notable role for soldiers and peasants and woodcutters. It is about merchants and clerks, artists and physicians, diffident middle-class ingenues and howling madness from beyond the walls of the world. And, I find, it is also about the abundance and kindliness and strangeness of those currents of life where silver is a nobler metal than steel.

And - to get back to the root of the original rose - where spells may be this thing or that, but promises are everything.

Which in turn, no doubt, explains why the trip turns out not to be any matter of lost and found argosies, but a necessary reaction to a very mediaevaloid credit crunch. I swear I never planned this!

As to the main WIP, I have a serious Kate-out scheduled for the weekend, and shall oblige myself at least to finish the interminable council scene by one means or another.