Garance nó Bryony is the child of Anselme nó Bryony, a legend of whom it was said that he lost only one wager in his life: when he bet a certain Mandrake woman that she couldn't make him enjoy pain. Their joyous and increasingly bizarre liaison lasted half a dozen years before she left Mont Nuit to become the consort of a Kusheline lord, its sole fruit being this daughter fostered in her mother's house until she was found to be more suited to her father's canon.
Among the youth of Bryony House the thing to do is to make one’s marque as swiftly as possible, by the most ingenious means one can devise. Garance, knowing she had her father’s own fortune coming to her, was less initially covetous, spinning out the process as long as possible by giving her patrons to understand that she desired gifts of a nature more symbolic than fluid. She was three and a half years about it and prized meanwhile for her own charms, a collision of circumstances which ensured that the house and the Dowayne made a glorious profit from her time as adept. This deliberate tardiness did not go unrecognised; her careful game made her a favourite with the house’s leadership, and established her as a creature who sought long-term gain over quick profits, the house’s benefit over immediate independence.
Her contracts likewise tended to be of the longer variety, for she was willing to put infinite effort into cultivating a patron in whom she saw a good prospect for the future.
In the games of chance which are so much a part of Bryony life she was expert in letting lovers win just often enough that they never became discouraged — until such a time as she had a secure hold and might win, and win, and win: incomparably sweet as she bled them of their substance. She made enough of a study of cheating, in all of its ramifications, going back through the recollections of elderly retired Bryony courtesans and the house’s own crumbliest archives, that she served often as an arbiter of games and tournaments for colleagues and patrons who trusted that no trick could get past her careful eye. And, rather than tangible commodities, she preferred to trade in options, possibilities, futures, the ephemeral and manipulable. This mode of thinking and the contacts it produced — notably, a Flatlandish burgher of deep resources who made regular business trips to the City of Elua — led to her inspiring the idle rich of Terre d’Ange with a brief but heady passion for the tulip flower.
For much of 1302 through 1305 these blooms were so coveted as to be almost unobtainable, save through commerce with Garance herself, because for some reason other shipments of bulbs coming into the country — from Flatlandish dealers, or straight from the Far East by sea — had a distressing tendency to arrive rotten and worthless. The flowers’ value rose and rose to dizzying heights as the fashion for them spread — and then the bubble collapsed, in a domino effect originating in the Flatlands and spreading then through other markets infected with the same craze. Of course it wasn’t Garance’s doing. She was as upset as anybody by the plight of those connoisseurs who found their tulip collections so much less valuable one day than they were the day before it. Though — it must be said — and she is one who said it — a garden amply planted with beautiful flowers, is a sensual rapture with a value all its own…
After that Garance directed her energies toward other, less colourful projects.
The Bryony Dowayne was ageing, growing unwell in body though still startlingly canny in mind; and the atmosphere of the house shifted year by year, for although her Second was expected to succeed her according to custom, that would naturally create a once-in-a-generation vacancy for a new Second. Net worth being so often the deciding factor, the majority of fully-marqued Bryonys were sitting up at their ledgers later and later into the night, dreaming up money-making schemes that would surely prove them the house’s best choice. Garance was no exception, and as time went on the in-house betting — always an oracle of Bryony opinion — began strongly to suggest, via six-to-five odds constantly flipping to and fro, that the new Second would be either she herself — the Dowayne’s acknowledged pet — or… well, the Second’s own candidate among the junior courtesans. A person whom Garance does not like to mention by name, with whom she had existed in a state of sometimes-friendly rivalry since they were novices together, the irritations inflicted by each serving as a spur to the other’s achievements.
The hour came; the Dowayne passed on and was buried in state; the Second succeeded; the next Second was appointed; Garance, narrowly by all accounts (yes, it’s all about accounts), perhaps because her strongest champion within the house was no more, lost.
As consolation she was presented with a plum of her own, a recommendation to the position of deputy treasurer to the duchesse d’Eisande — which employment would, incidentally, remove her from the house, the city, and indeed the province occupied by her victorious rival. Let nobody say Bryony House lacks pragmatism in its personnel arrangements.
In the spring of 1311, thus, Garance retired from Naamah’s service and made her way south to Marsilikos to embark upon a new career. She hit the ground running, one of her first assignments being an overhaul of the provincial import and export taxes. Among her many visits to ships in harbour — because nothing puts the wind up a captain with dual account books like a ducal treasurer sitting in his private cabin, asking friendly but intelligent questions — she found herself caught within a quarantine cordon, when half a dozen sailors in the same afternoon began to show symptoms of the same grievous malady carried by a passenger from Menekhet who’d become ill during the short voyage north over the middle sea. The Menekhetan died two days later, unmourned; the sailors survived or they didn’t according to their initial states of health, tended by a priest of Eisheth who entered the cordon because he considered it his religious duty. Garance was one of the lucky ones who lived through it — but when her fever broke and she returned to her senses she had lost the sight in both her eyes.
This diminution in Garance’s capacities threw into question her place upon the duchesse’s staff. But, given that she incurred her disability in service to House Mereliot, and that her wits seem unaffected, she is continuing on a trial of sorts, with the aid of a competent clerk whose duty it is to read aloud to her… when he isn’t simply leading her about by the hand.
