@Saen I quite like how magic works in this universe! One of my favourite things about it is that it's actually a massively inconvenient way of doing things. While an ear for magic allows you to achieve impossible feats, the steps you have to take to bring them about are often time consuming and nonsensical. You could use magic to wash your clothes and tidy your house, but, quite honestly, it's a lot easier to just do it by hand. Other than governmental/royal informants and degas who Read magic for a living, only pretentious academics can be bothered with it.
@TheWeirdoFromBeyond Daisy is a walking spoiler in a lot of ways, so...
Spoiler
Daisy is actually a posie to Kesecmatreau, a degas that Hildegarde is never introduced to on account of his being comatose. The circumstances under which Daisy became his posie are complex, but they're at the heart of a lot of the conflict in the novel.
Originally, Daisy was going to be pose to a degas called Ghelrosen, who belongs to one of the most affluent clans in Europe. She was sold to him unwillingly and absolutely refused to trust him, making it impossible for him to entangle his soul with hers. To resolve this issue, Ghel planned to have her memory erased, with a view to making her more amenable.
Memory erasure is possible via magic, but immensely tricky. In the months spent waiting for a Reader to find a means to do it, Ghel treated Daisy...pretty horribly. Used her for a perverse kind of entertainment, force her to do things she had no power to refuse. Because none of it mattered - it was all going to be wiped away soon enough.
But at some point, Daisy struck up a strange relationship with Kesecmatreau, who attended most of Ghel's soirees. Kesec, being a bit of a dumpster fire and generally more morally aware than most degas, ended up taking Daisy away from Ghel and going on the run with her for about a year.
Given that Daisy was effectively Ghel's property by this point, this was both a legal crime and a huge insult, so it caused a huge rift between the Matreau clan and the Rosen clan, who already had long-lasting tensions.
So Daisy and Kesec drift around the UK for about a year, and most of the time they get on really well. There's a lot of respect between the two of them and they see each other as they are, and Daisy learns to trust him more than anybody else in her life. But towards the end of that first year, due to a number of factors, Daisy starts to get restless, saying she's sick of trailing after him and wants to make her own way. Kesec, as afraid as a degas can be of being abandoned, entangles his soul with hers, robbing her of her emotions and reducing her to a husk.
He regrets it immediately. Dealing with emotions for the first time and consumed by confusion and guilt, he does the only thing he can think of and goes back home to York, to his clan.
But this makes tensions with the Rosen clan even worse. If stealing another degas' posie-to-be is an insult, making them your own posie and then brazenly returning homewards is equivalent to spitting in the other person's eye. Tensions escalate. It all winds up with Ghel, who's just got his own posie and hasn't yet learned to control his emotions, making an attempt on Kesec's life.
Kesec only survives due to Paris's magic, which he uses to preserve Kesec in a sort of stasis while he searches for a permanent way to revive him. Daisy, still tethered to Kesec and still emotionless, is confined to the Matreau estate, because a posie cannot stray far from their degas.
One year on, Hildegarde arrives.
In terms of the whole of the novel, Daisy is crucial. Hildegarde is mistrustful of her at first, because she comes across as distant and strange and deeply unfriendly. But as she grows more suspicious of the degas and finds herself in need of answers, Daisy is the one she turns to. She is the one who tells Hildegarde what the fate of a posie truly is.
When Hildegarde realises she has to escape the estate and somehow rescue her brother, she also knows she can't do so without Daisy's help, as the latter knows so much more than she does about survival in the outside world. But Daisy can't escape while she's still tethered to Kesec, and so comes the plan to kill him, flee the estate, and get down to Cornwall to save Dante.
It's also worth mentioning that, because of her connection to Kesec, Daisy has the ear for magic that is typically reserved only to degas, and that access to magic is crucial to their escape attempt.
Wow, this got long. Long story short: Daisy was stolen by Kesecmatreau, who was later almost killed by Ghelrosen for the insult. She is the one who eventually tells Hildegarde the true purpose of a posie, and her magic underpins their escape attempt towards the end of the story. I'm aware it all sounds like garbage lumped together like this, but hopefully I can make it work when I actually write it xD
Originally, Daisy was going to be pose to a degas called Ghelrosen, who belongs to one of the most affluent clans in Europe. She was sold to him unwillingly and absolutely refused to trust him, making it impossible for him to entangle his soul with hers. To resolve this issue, Ghel planned to have her memory erased, with a view to making her more amenable.
Memory erasure is possible via magic, but immensely tricky. In the months spent waiting for a Reader to find a means to do it, Ghel treated Daisy...pretty horribly. Used her for a perverse kind of entertainment, force her to do things she had no power to refuse. Because none of it mattered - it was all going to be wiped away soon enough.
But at some point, Daisy struck up a strange relationship with Kesecmatreau, who attended most of Ghel's soirees. Kesec, being a bit of a dumpster fire and generally more morally aware than most degas, ended up taking Daisy away from Ghel and going on the run with her for about a year.
Given that Daisy was effectively Ghel's property by this point, this was both a legal crime and a huge insult, so it caused a huge rift between the Matreau clan and the Rosen clan, who already had long-lasting tensions.
So Daisy and Kesec drift around the UK for about a year, and most of the time they get on really well. There's a lot of respect between the two of them and they see each other as they are, and Daisy learns to trust him more than anybody else in her life. But towards the end of that first year, due to a number of factors, Daisy starts to get restless, saying she's sick of trailing after him and wants to make her own way. Kesec, as afraid as a degas can be of being abandoned, entangles his soul with hers, robbing her of her emotions and reducing her to a husk.
He regrets it immediately. Dealing with emotions for the first time and consumed by confusion and guilt, he does the only thing he can think of and goes back home to York, to his clan.
But this makes tensions with the Rosen clan even worse. If stealing another degas' posie-to-be is an insult, making them your own posie and then brazenly returning homewards is equivalent to spitting in the other person's eye. Tensions escalate. It all winds up with Ghel, who's just got his own posie and hasn't yet learned to control his emotions, making an attempt on Kesec's life.
Kesec only survives due to Paris's magic, which he uses to preserve Kesec in a sort of stasis while he searches for a permanent way to revive him. Daisy, still tethered to Kesec and still emotionless, is confined to the Matreau estate, because a posie cannot stray far from their degas.
One year on, Hildegarde arrives.
In terms of the whole of the novel, Daisy is crucial. Hildegarde is mistrustful of her at first, because she comes across as distant and strange and deeply unfriendly. But as she grows more suspicious of the degas and finds herself in need of answers, Daisy is the one she turns to. She is the one who tells Hildegarde what the fate of a posie truly is.
When Hildegarde realises she has to escape the estate and somehow rescue her brother, she also knows she can't do so without Daisy's help, as the latter knows so much more than she does about survival in the outside world. But Daisy can't escape while she's still tethered to Kesec, and so comes the plan to kill him, flee the estate, and get down to Cornwall to save Dante.
It's also worth mentioning that, because of her connection to Kesec, Daisy has the ear for magic that is typically reserved only to degas, and that access to magic is crucial to their escape attempt.
Wow, this got long. Long story short: Daisy was stolen by Kesecmatreau, who was later almost killed by Ghelrosen for the insult. She is the one who eventually tells Hildegarde the true purpose of a posie, and her magic underpins their escape attempt towards the end of the story. I'm aware it all sounds like garbage lumped together like this, but hopefully I can make it work when I actually write it xD