#oh there's a huge malevolent religious organization called the magisterium

[jomiddlemarch]

To fly is to be perfectly ourselves

Despite her upbringing, her family’s high connections, the time she’d spent at a French finishing school, Emma Rosamond Aude Greenough would have never dared to speak to Henry Calvin Hopkins, the Magisterium’s representative from Geneva who cut a most impressive figure in his formal robes and had a face that looked as if the Authority had wielded the chisel himself, save that her daemon Oupis flew right over to his peregrine daemon and fluttered her gleaming green wings beneath his beak.

“Oupis!” Emma whispered with an intensity matched only by the look in Envoy Hopkins’s eyes. “What are you thinking? Come here at once!”

“Is he always so forward?” Envoy Hopkins asked. Oupis and the great peregrine were deep in conversation and ignored them.

“I’m terribly sorry, but when it suits him, Oupis is governed only by his own impulses,” Emma said. “One can only do so much when one’s daemon has the gift of flight. And a luna moth requires particular care.”

“A delicate creature,” he said. “Lovely, the colors on his wings. Like opals.”

“Beauty is a delight but never an excuse,” Emma replied. Just then the peregrine spread its wings wide, as if she would take to the skies, a gesture at odds with the finely appointed drawing room they occupied.

“Eanswythe,” Envoy Hopkins’s voice was firm, solemn, and Emma would have thought he had far greater command over his daemon than she did, except that the bird gave a great wail, clearly startling the man. Emma concealed her smile with a well-trained fluttering of her hand which he might think natural. Her sister Alys would have rolled her eyes at the lack of sophistication and her governess Baroness von Olnhausen have shaken her head slightly at the coquetry, but Emma refused to fret. Oupis flew back and landed on her delaine sleeve, a charming ornament, for the moment. Within its embroidered cuff, her pulse leapt.

“Tea, I think,” Emma said. “And we might open the French doors to the portico. For a breath of air.”