Lisandre Peel

[rosalind]

"You're either cheap or holding tight to your words, which means you're either wise or very wise, but I need you to tell me what your brother did."

Compliments and flattery-- artifice-- did not work on any member of the Peel family. Lisandre often attributed this to her parents' almost miraculous ability to see only that which was in front of their collective gaze. As cloth merchants, it was a fine skill.

As parents, it left something to be lacked.

As a daughter with an older brother who wanted to find his way in life yesterday, Lisandre was the unwilling accomplice to many of the problems her brother, Jaden, caused. She was a mitigation factor. She looked at the costs, because it seemed the invisible were more important than the tangible; Jaden had only his father's eye for the empirical.

She didn't really begin to see people until that moment in time when she realized that her parents saw it, too. Oh she was clever enough in managing her brother's affairs with chicanery and outright tricks, but in the end, they knew the fundamental nature of the exchange if not the details. And they didn't care.

"They wouldn't notice us unless we were diamond twill, Jaden."

Growing into their roles, Jaden as one of the buyers of flax and more rare fibers still; Lisandre at her loom, working patterns into everything from carpets to fine linens on a modified counterbalance floor loom. Their luxury fabrics sold well.

A successful operation meant movement into a better class, as her mother would say, or one with more money and leisure time, as Lisandre herself would prefer. She took to reading with abandon and enjoyed the time about Caemlyn. There was, again, so much to see.

There were the glorious High Ladies that appeared as if announced by Gleemen and trumpets, their dresses and retinues so bright. There were the beautiful women from other nations, places Lisandre doubted she would ever see, and she learned in time not to gawk openly at the thrill. Twice there were Aes Sedai, although only in passing, and only in areas inaccessible to Lisandre. But it was enough just to be near. In a world where all of this was possible, where mythic women in glorious carriages careened down thoroughfares and once yelled "Damn it all, jump the boulevard!" and everyone-- except traffic on the boulevard-- cheered, Lisandre was finding her way in life.

Where she had been quiet, she was growing extroverted. It took her a bit to figure it out, but what she mistook for disdain was flirtation from a young Cairhienin lord of a minor House; social conventions were social conventions, but once you saw the Game, you could turn the tables and make even a nobleman blush with naught but a smile.

It wasn't enough just to watch; one must participate!

And this grand social experiment began, and in the jingle-jangle mornings and endless afternoons and rainy days... somewhere between all those different kind of nights, she just lost track of Jaden. Lisandre knew, fundamentally, her place in the world. And she figured that she already had the best kind of gift anyone could ask for: the ability to learn from others. The ability to truly see not just what was in front of her, but what wasn't there, too. The price. The cost.

It wasn't gleeman tales of Aes Sedai calling down lightning, but like a darned sock, you make do. And Lisandre did a lot more weaving than darning socks to bail Jaden out of a cell when his gambling debts ran high, leaving Lisandre in her current position: mostly alone in Caemlyn, working as a weaver for a fine House, and when was the last time anything suspicious spun a web of its own?