rthstewart | Harold and Morgan: Not A Romance Chapter 10

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Harold and Morgan: Not A Romance Chapter 10

Chapter 10 is UP, finally. Shocking, but it got long, so I need to finish up the second half of Conclave which is the very oldest part of the story in my head and very visual and so I've struggled with it. But this is still 9,000 words or so, so, yeah, time to get it UP AND DONE. The full exchange between Pierce and Maeve is in this chapter. Heh. Pierce is such a GUY and Maeve has turned all gooey.

I've picked up some new readers and such so I do hope you all won't be strangers!!! Songstream, HikalnStyle, and EleanorJane, thanks so much!!

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing;
Wasn't that a dainty dish,
To set before the king?

The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes;
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose

With Link fixed!

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Just reviewed, and now I'm intrigued by the inclusion of the nursery rhyme.... Did the Maid do it, with the ~~candlestick~~ ~~dagger~~ rahat in the ~~billiard room~~ ~~cellar~~ delivery room?

And I think you should change the blackbirds to Rats and Crows. :-)

Heee. Reading the chapter right now. I read the word "Lightning" and started giggling xD I love how Pierce actually has the list of people ready to kill him for having sex with Maeve.

It's very interesting to see things from Pierce's POV especially once you move back to the plotty things. I love the not-a-romance aspects of the story but right now the plot has me thoroughly intrigued :)

I enjoyed seeing all of this from Pierce's point of view. He has a clear understanding of the banking side of things and leaves us wondering about what Edmund is up to.

Thanks for writing!

Bad link is bad. :-( (Found the chapter anyway, but thought you should know -- off to read!)

BAD Link! Thank you!!! and now it's fixed!

Wonderful update. I love what you've done here: the OC POV is very effective in showing Ed's character and development. I wanted to smack Pierce upside the head for a while there - he was getting rather ahead of himself, contemplating pregnancy after just one encounter - talk about giving a girl some space to get her head together. And the repeated line 'Narnia is coming' made my hair stand up - it's so full of portent and meaning. Oh, and Constance and Maeve's prescience - I really want to know what comes next now :-)

I thought about trying to redo the rhyme, but I just wanted the darn thing UP. It's funny -- when I first started this, WAY BACK WHEN, I had been visually inspired, such as it was, by the movie Becket, with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton and the black bird was Becket's symbol. Blackbirds became crows, which became the line in Chapter 8 of Part 1 about the Rats and Crows, which then became BRD. Heh.

I love the icon! Yes, Pierce is a bit of a pig. He's a nice, respectful, pig, but he's just a GUY and can't quite help himself. I've got the next chapter and that's all in Pierce's POV too. As for the final Lone Islands chapter... I'm not sure if I'll even go back to Edmund's pov. I've got... GASP... Morgan's point of view...

The trunk had a false bottom. Morgan could see that. It sounded differently, hollow-ish and the trunk wasn’t as deep as it should be – smaller on the inside than it was on the outside, so there were secret compartments.

Morgan felt like that’s how she was, broken into so many pieces and compartments. Because she was so broken, she had always been good at puzzles and patterns. She knew just how to make each piece fit just so, in trunks and spreadsheets and bricks in buildings, she could see the threads no one else could see, count all the beans in a jar, and know when things just didn’t add up. She just never could make her own pieces fit.

Thank you so much!! I so appreciate hearing from you!

Thank you for letting me know about the link. I used the new ff interface for the first time it was a FAIL. I hope you liked it.

Yep, Pierce is just such a GUY. It was a little unsettling to write something like that, but as I said in the other post, there's a point to it, and it is real. It's a more parochial and patriarchal view of things. And he's so cavalier about it. Babies! GREAT! I had a whole bit of internal dialogue where he was thinking of fondly of teaching a daughter or son how to use an abacus and learn numbers. I may trot that out somewhere else.

I keep thinking that when Bree says that in the North, girls are not married unwillingly, that he's thinking first of Narnia, and second that really, what would Bree know of Archenland?

I had a whole convoluted head canon going about Archenland values of women and how one reason the unseen Mrs. Linch was able to take a lover and have two children was because she had already proven herself able to birth sons -- or that after Pierce, that was sort of a proving ground and she'd produced one son, and so therefore would be able to produce a second one. Either way, she enjoys a high status in Archenland because she can produce babies. It's sort of lurking there, but not developed. I have no basis for it -- I'm just inventing it out of thin air, but I like playing with cultural conventions that exalt a female status on a basis other than virginity.

Errr, right, stopping now.

Someone else mentioned the feeling of a “mustering army” that this chapter has, and I just want to add that I enthusiastically concur. Damned, painfully subtle cliffhangers...

All of the wishful longing of the next generation of the Houses is very fascinating -- there are always those who long for change within a system, but there are few who will actually act on it. All it takes is one little nudge to tip the scales... Narnia is coming, after all. And the shift was made evident just by others’ reactions to HaroldcomeEdmund alone.

Peridan. Peridan is still an enigma I’d love to see cracked. I trust him more than I do Constance, though.

To comment briefly on your other entry regarding Pierce and Maeve.... well, we already had that conversation regarding personality types, and I am so glad to witness those types that exist in abundance in the real world yet rarely make an appearance in fanfiction. Hooray for realism and for those with “flawed personalities”, AKA humans! I can imagine what types Pierce and Maeve would test to be.

Excellent chapter, once again!

--Indil

I liked it very much! I fail at feedback so I doubt I've commented before, but I've been thoroughly enjoying all of your fic, and am anxiously awaiting the rest of The Apostolic Way.

I trust Peridan more than Constance as well. As I'm working on the final chapters of this part, Linch has become the Hufflepuffs (to borrow from Harry Potter); Stanleh is Ravenclaw; and the Meryl are Slytherins in the "greasing the wheels" "making it happen" Horace Slughorn sort of way.

Errr, right then. Thanks so much for commenting!!! I just need to pull this chapter together. SO CLOSE.

Thanks!

LOVE!! It was rather unsettling to find such a caveman sort of mentality somewhat endearing, but poor Pierce is just so awkward about it! Just as Maeve is discovering the intoxication of being seen as a Woman first, Banker second, and losing herself too much in it, I get the feeling that Pierce is just finding out what it feels like to be a Man first, Banker second. Must be a rather heady sensation. I imagine both as having entrenched feelings of superiority with regards to other members of their sex: Maeve has always been the "brains", probably disdainful of women who are nothing more than a pretty face; and we have already read Pierce's casually pejorative comments on Northern barbarian men. (With the new exception of Edmund; I love his burgeoning awareness of how he had treated Harold superimposed on the new image of King... and his lack of awareness of how little his preconceived notions of Northern barbarian fit with the Harold he is coming to know and respect.) Anyway, I know it isn't laudable that both Maeve and Pierce are regressing to such primitive mindsets--but considering that neither of them had ever experienced such feelings in the first place, and therefore have never had the chance to grow out of them, I think it's entirely understandable. I'm excited to see how their relationship progresses, and if both of them gradually work their way to a balance between the primal feelings of pride evoked by the other's worship of the body, and their former, more intellectual and level-headed side.

On a completely different note, I was recently in Valencia and went to the old Silk Exchange, a beautiful Gothic building that's almost like a cathedral (to the god of money). Even as I was reading your description, my traitorous brain kept superimposing *my* visuals upon the Conclave, with twisting ribbon-pillars... well, have a look. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/782 ("La Lonja de la Seda"). Thought you might be interested!

As always, an absolute pleasure to read. Looking forward to more!
~Syrena

Thanks!

Another excellent chapter!
It was interesting in the first section to have that recapping of Morgan's Narnian Adventures (Part I) from Pierce's point of view, and neat to see exactly how he got the information. Edmund is certainly being the king now, and it is nice to see him as that authority from the outside pov.
I am excited to see what comes next!

Thanks,
J.Apple

Thanks so much. Part 2 should be up very soon!

OK, there's your comment back. LJ thought it might have been spam!
I am so happy that you write exactly of what I was aiming for. These two individuals who have very much subordinated part of their personality in pursuit of the greater Banking good and they are constantly around these other people who are gorgeous and wealthy and strong and sexy and they get to hold the ledgers and count the beans in the jar. They are regressing, a bit, and Maeve especially, which is something I'll sort of call out in the final Lone Islands chapter. She, even more than Pierce, has had her head turned around by this whole experience, this validation of her femininity. For both of them, there is this whole HE (SHE) THINKS I'M CUUUUUUUUUTE!!!! It's a heady experience, to realize you are attractive to someone and they are both experiencing it at the same time. It's a bit adolescent, but they are stunted and fortunately, are with a considerate, if sometimes clueless partner.

This could turn ugly easily, but it won't. I am not interested in abusive or nasty relationships. There is some immaturity here and Pierce is terribly naive about it, but I did give him some self-knowledge and he really does respect her.

I went and looked at the pices of La Lonja de la Seda and oh my goodness, it is so beautiful and yes, very, very much like how I was envisioning the Counting House. I'll post some pictures of it and some other inspiration once I finish up this Lone Islands segment.

Something I've been thinking about is how this sort of innocents abroad in Zalindreh with Maeve and Pierce is very different from Morgan and Harold. We'll just put Haroldmund to the side because he thinks he's completely awesome. But, Morgan is a product of the same environment and yet doesn't have quite the "am I pretty?" baggage of Maeve. I'm not sure why that is. I don't think Morgan had a whole lot of experience with men (or women for that matter) before going to Narnia, but she wasn't wholly an innocent either. I'm thinking about OCs too much, but I'm going into her head for the first time in Chapter 12 as she says good bye to the Narnians and so I'm wondering more about her backstory.

Anyways, onwards, from Chapter 12 where I'm playing with Morgan's brain:

Harold's trunk had a false bottom. Morgan could see that. It sounded differently, hollow-ish and the trunk wasn’t as deep as it should be – smaller on the inside than it was on the outside, so there were secret compartments.

Morgan felt like that’s how she was, broken into so many pieces and compartments. Because she was so broken, she had always been good at puzzles and patterns. She knew how to make each piece fit just so, in trunks and spreadsheets and bricks in buildings, she could see the threads no one but the Crows could see, count all the beans in a jar, and knew when things didn’t add up. She just never could make her own pieces fit.

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Harold and Morgan: Not A Romance Chapter 10

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