Edmond Carey
July 24, 2010 7:54 PM
Carelessness by Edmond Carey
The crossing lines filling up the blank space beneath the end of Morgaine's letter were dense enough to serve their purpose as a device against forgery, but it was still not difficult, once Edmond had deciphered the words made from underlining seemingly random bits of other words in a too-long, too-cheery missive and recognized the instruction as one she'd told him she might use to let him access mildly sensitive information and had held the bottom of the letter over a candle for a while, to read the sentences she hadn't wanted to write openly and had so transcribed in no longer invisible ink:Being questioned by Aurors, referencing Bennett. Don't worry about it if the news gets out at Sonora. They have nothing because I did nothing. He and his sister are both out of their trees.
He had, of course, been worrying since he finished burning the message. Edmond believed her when she said that she had not done - whatever it was she was being questioned about, but he didn't trust her to be polite to people who implied otherwise. She had trouble being polite to people who were polite to her, never mind Aurors who were trained to push people into confessions. If they tried to talk her into a circle, he was very afraid she might call them out on it, and then they would read implications into that, and it would all spiral out of control from there.
Since he worried more when he was alone in his room, with fewer books and less quiet sound than made the common room very comfortable for him, Edmond had decided to sit down in the commons to write a reply to the decoy message that had been attached to, the main point of which, amidst rambles she would have never normally indulged in about her work as a trainee Healer and sometime associate of northeastern purebloods, appeared to be the news that the youngest of the Richards was now the father of twin girls. This was very good news, since their family was the second-smallest branch and the Richards were easily the most respectable part of it, but Edmond wasn't sure what he thought of the children's names. They were both clear enough references, for anyone with an interest in etymology, to his sisters.
For the sake of form, because it felt vaguely important to do exactly as his sister had done, he included as many anecdotes about his classes and conversations as he could think of and felt comfortable writing about. Morgaine would not want to hear anything about reluctance to take his place when she had been forced out of hers by all this. It would be foolish to include references to that. And there were other things he thought about that were simply not appropriate for discussing with her, too.
After he was done checking back over the completed missive for any odd spelling errors, since even a letter that wasn't entirely real needed to show proper use of language, he put it down and allowed himself a moment of satisfaction for both the lack of such errors and for, he thought, doing a good job of concealing that he knew anything more about what was going on at home than he was supposed to. It was a shorter moment than he would have liked, though, because as he put the letter down, he knocked over his inkwell, spilling black ink across the table and, though he was able to snatch up the letter before it was damaged, sending a rapidly-extending tendril toward the things of someone who, without him noticing, had either sat down nearby since he began or who'd been there to begin with and he hadn't noticed as he sat down. "Watch out," he said, more sharply than usual to get their attention.
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