▸ Column · Silver Millennium-adjacent dark fantasy court; the asker is a keeper of the royal archives on a modest archivist's stipend, navigating a noblewomen friend's increasingly costly wedding demands
QUEEN BERYL replies.
Replied to by Queen Beryl, with a rebuttal from Harley Quinn.
The letter
I was named chief honor-attendant at my dear friend Mirya's upcoming marriage eight months past, and I accepted without hesitation — fifteen years of friendship, and I would have given far more. Since then I have paid for a ceremonial robe commissioned from a craftsman in the southern provinces, contributed my share toward a feast in a coastal city I could not attend due to my duties at the archive, and now Mirya has sent word to the entire bridal party that we are each to purchase matching gilded wrist-cuffs — eight hundred silver pieces each — so that the wedding portraits "feel cohesive." I serve as keeper of the royal archives on a modest stipend, and I already owe a moneylender more than a month's wages from this wedding alone. Every time I have raised the matter of costs in the group correspondence, the other honor-attendants — women whose noble patrons command considerable wealth — respond at once with enthusiasm and payment, leaving me to appear small and ungrateful by comparison. The ceremony is three weeks hence. I love Mirya. But I cannot keep pretending the gilded cuff is a reasonable demand.
Queen Beryl replies
Eleven hundred silver pieces, and the ceremony three weeks distant. Tell me, child — when you picture yourself in those portraits, standing in the gilded row in the matching wrist-cuffs, do you see yourself at all? Or do you see a visual element, arranged for cohesion, whose inner life was never the point?
I know this particular arrangement. I, too, spent years content to position myself around another's radiance, to make the tableau beautiful — on the comfortable assumption that devotion was its own reward. It is not. Devotion unnoticed is simply labor with a more flattering name, and the portrait-taker never thanks the frame. This much, at least, I know firsthand.
The women with their wealthy patrons, their instant payments, their little heart symbols — they are not standing at your window. Do not use their ease as your measure of what is owed.
You say you dread blowing up fifteen years of friendship. How meek. The bracelet ask has already done the blowing up; you are simply the last to see the smoke. I am not without pragmatism, even here in the dark: go to Mirya alone, away from the chorus. Say the number. Not "I have been struggling with costs" — the number. How she receives it will tell you what fifteen years was genuinely worth to her.
Some friendships deserve the confession. Some reveal, in that moment, that they were always Mirya's friendship, not yours.
— Queen Beryl
Harley Quinn weighs in
Her Majesty's already got Mirya convicted and sentenced — which, hey, might end up being right. But she skipped something. The group correspondence is the machine here. Two honor-attendants with fat noble patrons hitting "pay" in thirty seconds makes eight hundred silver feel like the obvious reasonable baseline, and Mirya might genuinely not understand what that number costs on an archivist's stipend. I know about not saying the real number out loud 'cause the room made it feel impossible — spent too many years in a room like that, and the damage outlasted the relationship by a lot.
So yeah, go to Mirya alone. But go asking, not sentencing. The actual number: eleven hundred silver, in debt, cannot do the cuff. Then watch her face — not the group echo, her face. If she hears it and doubles down, THEN Her Majesty's read is right and you've got your answer. But find out first, cupcake. Convict on evidence, not on vibes and a really dramatic frame.
— Harley Quinn