The Golden Cage

[Omi]

What was the angle here? Charlotte couldn't see it, and her expression had subtly shifted from a sort of polite interest to something almost bordering on contempt. The victim card didn't suit Enma, that was for sure.

"Maybe you and your people should have thought of that before you struck at the Crown," she replied sharply, stabbing at another mussel so hard she nearly cracked the plate. "Your raiding and barbarism would have provoked something like this eventually. There is no scenario in which the Kingdom could tolerate your kind on its borders forever." And soon, it won't have to. It was a soothing, vindictive thought - the idea that these drug-addled, upstart savages had doomed themselves simply by the act of touching her person. Each second of trauma they'd inflicted on her would be repaid in blood, each bruise a new continent set aflame by a bombardment that could crack moons open like eggshells. There was no way the Maltese Navy - or whatever passed for it - could stand against a determined Gallic assault. Could it? The more she thought about it - Gallia had no idea of the true extent of Maltese territory. It was all estimates, all suppositions. Maybe the Orange Empire was larger than anyone had-

"Why are you telling me all this?" she said suddenly, dropping her fork abruptly. She had to change her chain of thought before the doubts wormed their way in again. The diplomatic veneer had gone now - she didn't understand Enma's little display of weakness at all. If it was genuine, it was contemptible - she had expected much more from the Maltese leadership, particularly from this one woman who claimed to represent them. It had to be affected, had to be some type of tactic to influence her - but if it was, Charlotte couldn't see it. Her confusion only bred more annoyance, and she decided she was through with their verbal dancing. The anger was boiling up again, never too far from the surface, and against her better judgement she allowed it to spill out. "Do you expect me to feel sorry for you? Do you expect me to care that your people brought this on yourselves? Look what your society, your culture has done to me-" she inclined her head towards the other woman, showing her bruised eye "-and tell me how much I care." The other woman was hardly even looking at her, her gaze seeming to spend most of its time fixated on the chair or down in her lap. "You are far, far too late to try playing these false niceties with me."

Even as she finished, Charlotte had already begun to realise that she might have stepped too far. Testing her boundaries was one thing, but a faint tingle of nervousness ran down her spine as she realised the extent of what she had just said. If Enma had been baiting a reaction, she had given her more than enough to work with. The other woman's expression was unreadable, though it was clear she'd heard every word. For a moment, she had forgotten herself - in her mind she had been holding court on Orleans, not a prisoner of a savage, vicious race of Sirians. It was another lapse in her judgement, a relic of the horrors the past few days had brought her. The wounds were still raw inside, even if her body had gone some way towards healing. Eating fine food and holding civil conversation with these people felt wrong, and it was bringing her anger and vulnerability to the fore each time they pushed her.

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