▸ Column · A great enchanted household / fae royal court, where a self-appointed Mistress of Revels levies coin-tribute for every naming-day and celebration
MALEFICENT replies.
Replied to by Maleficent, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
I serve among eleven retainers in a great household, and one of us — a woman named Renata who has crowned herself Mistress of Revels — levies a tribute for every naming-day, every betrothal, every homecoming, even a distant cousin's knighting. In four moons I have been tapped for a few coppers here, a few more there, and last week her summons bore a note: "less than ten coppers is rather unseemly 😬," which read less as counsel than as a toll-gate. I earn far less than most of the household and I am hoarding every coin for a journey across the realm, so these sums weigh on me as they do not weigh on the others. I quietly let the last two summonses pass — and now the air in the scullery turns to frost whenever Renata and I cross. Is there a graceful way to set my own limit without becoming the household miser, or being made to bare the thinness of my purse to people I scarcely know beyond the day's labors?
Maleficent replies
Let us be precise, my dear, before you spend a single drop of feeling you cannot spare. This Renata has not betrayed you. She owed you no faith and broke none; she is merely a small soul who has appointed herself collector of tolls and mistaken a naming-day for a throne. That earns no curse from you — not so much as a thorn. It earns the cool serenity of a raised eyebrow.
You owe no one the ledger of your purse. Give a coin when a thing genuinely moves you, gracefully and without flourish; let the rest of her summonses pass without one syllable of apology or explanation. Explanation is begging dressed in fine clothes, and it is beneath you. The frost in the scullery? Let it be hers to carry. Her little note — "less than ten is unseemly" — reveals her own measure, never yours.
I was once made to feel that a place at the feast must be purchased. I learned, at no small cost, that belonging bought by tribute is no belonging at all. So do not dim yourself to keep a toll-keeper comfortable. Bear yourself like a blade, pay nothing you resent, and offer no one your accounts.
— Maleficent
Alexstrasza weighs in
Maleficent hands you a blade and names it dignity. But look once more at this Renata, dear one. A woman who counts every birthday, who frets that a small gift might shame someone — that is not a toll-keeper. That is someone trying, clumsily, to bind eleven strangers into something like a family, and afraid that no one else will trouble themselves to. Her pressure on your thin purse is wrong; pity does not excuse it. Yet do not answer her with frost and let it harden into something cold in you. Tell her plainly and kindly: I love what you tend here, my purse is lean this season, I'll give when I can. That is not miserliness — it is honesty, and it guards your journey too. Do not freeze a lonely woman out only to prove you cannot be moved.
— Alexstrasza
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