| Interlude: Cotswold |
| Summary: | Alia, at work in Cotswold. |
| Date: | 1875-08-20 |
| Related: | None |
| NPCs: | None |
| Players: |
 |
Alia frowned, her fingers unclenching from the quill as she set the pen aside, using her other hand to work at the cramp that knotted the center of her palm. She had not left the cellar of the hall since she had locked herself away there in the hour just after the sun started to rise. Cotswold was rebuilding, and that was a necessary thing. They were using every resource they could reuse and recycle to do it, excepting only the tearing down of the pyramids, which were still the people of the fief's best defense against incursion by both the Qatunax and the goblins. Though, thank the One, the green-skinned enemy had not returned for another assault on the fief. Still, rebuilding was not enough. If the Empire was to survive, it needed to offer something profitable to the colonias.
The farmlands and surrounding countryside had not been wholly burned and salted when the Qatunax had been driven from the lands, and they were slowly but surely being brought back into production. The sheep as well had survived, though their number was much reduced, and they were, once again, being raised and bred for their wool, which, she hoped, would be as fine as it had been in the days before the fall of d'Meloni and thus offer some new income for the empire.
But this could not be the sum total of all that remained of the family's resources. Whatever was said about d'Meloni and the malfeasance which had, no doubt, prompted the King, when the House had been slaughtered and the lands invaded, to declare the House defunct, the lands had been profitable. She knew that. She might not have lived in them, during her time at the Guild, but she had communicated regularly with her brother and her mother. d'Meloni had never flagged in its production of goods and trade, so what had her father and his castellan done with it all? And more importantly, could she get it back?
Alia pushed herself back from the desk she had had brought into the small room, stepping over towards the two chests of ledgers which had been uncovered as the servants had turned the hall over from basement to high tower, at once salvaging all that they could of what the Qatunax had left behind and scrubbing all traces of them that they could find. Only the Lord's own chambers had been left stripped but disused. Even Alia did not like to venture there. Though the view of the fief it commanded was grand indeed, there was a chill which lingered there that sank into the bones and brought the taste of bile to the throat. It felt a cursed place.
Alia did not stand on ceremony, but only sank to the floor to cast back the lid of the nearest chest, pulling the first of the ledgers out from where they had been carefully stored away. Whatever her father had done, which had doomed her family, even before the Qatunax came, she would find it.