Chapter 65: The Apple’s Worm
In the not-so-distant past, somewhere far to the east, beyond the great desert, in the far pastures of the kingdom of Jairiesnovlie.
"Who. Are. You?" asked the woman's voice, politely firm.
The girl stood in front of her, her mouth open, stammering. She could not hold eye contact with the adult. Her gaze slid away and around the room, studying the things there instead. That rug. Was that always this shade? How did it get here? Who had woven it, and how long ago, and why that particular border pattern? Her mind wandered off down the corridor of the question before her body had finished standing still.
"It is nice to meet you. I- I- I am—"
"No. Again," said the woman. She reached down and took the girl's chin in her hand and turned it up. "Keep your eyes on me. Who. Are. You?"
The girl clenched her fists and tried her hardest. But it was too much. Looking into the lectrice's eyes was too much to process at once. The fine movements of the features. The small shifts of expression. What was the woman expecting? What did she want her to do with her face, her hands, her voice? Why couldn't she ever do it right? A thousand thoughts went racing through the girl's head, stacking and tangling and overstimulating her until her whole skull hummed with them.
She clenched her eyes shut so that she could focus.
"I am—"
"No. Open your eyes. Again, Mademoiselle."
"I cannot! I—"
"Again," reaffirmed the lectrice sternly. "From the start."
The girl started crying because she could not do it. It was too much. Her mind could not keep up with everything around her, and it kept wandering, and she could not call it back.
"I wish to read my book."
"Again. You must be ready for your father's ceremony. Look at me."
Somewhere nearby, something made a small crinkling sound as she shifted, and her mind left the room entirely to go and investigate it.
"It is nice to m-m-meet you. I—"
"Again."
"Father! Father!" said the girl, running down the hall, holding a flower cupped in her hands.
He had finally come to visit. It had been weeks since his last arrival.
She was not allowed to live with them, where he lived. His wife and his other daughters did not like her because her mother was a different woman. She was something kept in a separate building, in a separate house.
"Look! I found this yesterday! I had dreamt that I was a bug, and then I went outside yesterday and I saw these really nice clouds, and I thought that they looked like a scary monster," she explained, in an excited ramble that picked up speed as it went. "But then I was eating lunch and I saw this flower. And when I was looking at it, I was thinking about you, but then I got cold so I went back inside to get a coat. When I saw this man who was outside by—"
"Not now, girl," said the man. He stood with other adults, speaking of things she did not understand, in the clipped cadence of people who have already allotted the amount of time they intend to give. "Don't ramble at me. We have plans to make."
"Ah, but Father, I—"
"Go."
She stopped. She lowered her head and walked off.
Ead put the flower down on her little table and then went to pick up her inks to start painting.
She could not look them in the eyes. She stood holding her drawing in both hands.
Next to her, a girl was talking. Next to that girl, another girl was talking. Next to that girl, a boy was playing with a wooden sword, hitting a beam with it again and again.
She covered her ears. It was too much to process.
Someone laughed. She squeezed her head harder. The noise of it all was making her angry and upset, and she did not know why. It was just too many noises, and they hurt her. The collective of them pressed in like a thousand needles poking into her brain.
"Ead, Ead," said the girl next to her, shaking her arm. Ead looked at her, staring, her hands still clamped over her ears. The girl pulled at one of her hands, trying to get her palm off her ear. "At the big party, do you want to—"
Ead, fully overstimulated, cried out and hit her. "Leave me alone!"
The girl stumbled back and then, processing it, started crying. The noise of the crying rang out like a nail being dragged across her senses. Everything in Ead's head physically hurt.
"Stop it!" yelled Ead as the others looked at her.
There was a loud thwack, and Ead stumbled, her vision spinning. The boy with the wooden sword had struck her across the side of the head. Ead fell down.
"There's something wrong with her," said the other girl, as Ead sat there crying. The boy helped the pushed girl up and then left, leaving Ead behind on the ground, crying.
"It is so unfair!" cried Ead. She was trying to look at the lectrice's eyes and couldn't. "It was not my fault!"
"Mademoiselle, you must not strike others," said the maid, from across the cold room. "It is not befitting of a lady of your position."
"They hurt me!" protested Ead.
"They did no such thing. You must not lie, Mademoiselle."
Ead lowered her head. "...I am not lying. It really hurt."
"Mademoiselle, you must learn to be a normal girl," said the lectrice. "If you continue the way you are, you will not ever have any friends."
"That is unfair!" replied Ead. "I did not do anything wrong!"
The lectrice sighed. "You have put your father in a very difficult position. You know well that the countess is very protective of her daughter, whom you attacked."
"I was protecting myself! They started it!"
"Mademoiselle!" snapped the lectrice.
There was a loud crack as her palm hit the table. The fog of her breath floated in the cold air of the room.
Ead jolted and flinched.
It was quiet.
The lectrice stood there for a moment. Then she walked off.
Ead looked down. The flower on the table had been crushed by the impact of the lectrice's palm. And beside it lay the crinkled drawing.
"Lectrice, wait. I- I- made this!"
The door closed.
Ead sat by herself. She looked down at the drawing, at the two figures in it, herself and the lectrice.
She let out an animal noise, crushed the drawing into a ball, and then started hitting herself in the head with her own fist. It was to punish herself for being stupid.
Ead sat by herself, reading her book.
It was the only thing she could do. In truth, it was the only thing she was able to do. Outside, the window was frosted over, the ice crawling up the glass one crystal at a time.
If she did not immerse herself in reading, her mind would wander. It would go down avenues of thought and get lost in them. She would be asked a question, have the answer immediately, and still need ten minutes of internal discussion to walk the answer out to where her mouth could reach it. By which point, most people would have lost interest in talking to her and moved on.
She did not have friends. Her behaviour was too odd, they said. Too strange. Too much.
She hated herself. She hated the way she was.
"I am afraid Mademoiselle's mind is fae-touched," said a voice from the other side of the door. "I see little hope of a change."
Her father's voice.
"One day I'll marry her off. I'll be glad to be rid of her when some fool takes her off my hands."
Ead pulled a blanket over herself, hiding with her book. She liked books. Books were very clear. A book had one sentence to give you at a time, and there was nothing else to consider. No facial expressions, no second meanings, nothing.
It was very easy for her to understand what a book was saying, but not people.
The party.
People were everywhere. It was loud. Colors. Movements. Sounds. A hundred faces and bodies moving all around her at once, all of them talking, all of them glittering. This party was for her. For them. She was a debutante, meant to be presented to the world.
Ead sat as far back as she could manage. But the lectrice had taken her arm and begun dragging her through the crowd.
"Come now, Mademoiselle. Do not make a fuss today. Please. I am begging you.”
"I do not want to!" cried Ead.
Suddenly, an eruption. Smoke. A blast.
A magical explosion, somewhere near the far wall. A scream that did not stop. A man came apart in the middle of it, unravelling in a red mess.
Terror spread through the crowd faster than the smoke did, and the whole room tore itself apart in every direction at once.
Masked men came through the windows. The crowd ran. Spells flew. People screamed. Colors. Movement. The lectrice tore her one way, but Ead could not process the motion and tore the other way, and their hands slipped apart. Bodies crashed into one another. The doors hammered. Explosions. Everything, all of it, at once.
A man saw her. He came through the crowd. He wore a mask. He was fast.
"Mademoiselle!" cried the lectrice, diving between them.
The knife plunged into her.
The lectrice stumbled back and looked at Ead and then fell over.
Ead, covering her head, fell down without a sound. She pressed her hands over her ears, shaking her head, clenching her eyes shut. It was too loud, too much, and too many things at once. Her head felt like it would explode.
And then, like a switch being flipped, it was quiet.
It all stopped.
Ead lay there, crumpled on the ground. Slowly, she opened her eyes.
Everything was blue. Pale.
She was surrounded by ice, on all sides. She did not know where it had come from. It had simply appeared, out of her, out of somewhere deeper in her than she had ever known existed, and now it surrounded her on every side like a cage.
It was deathly silent.
Through the ice, she could see shimmers of movement. Shapes were moving past the filter of it out in the hall, but none of the sound came through. The ice was metres thick. The only thing she could hear was her own breathing and her own heartbeat.
Slowly, Ead pulled her hands off her ears and looked.
The lectrice's face was there. Suspended in the ice, preserved perfectly. Her eyes were closed. Her features were calm, at peace.
Finally, somewhere quiet, the girl sat down on the floor and stared up at her.
It was the first time she had ever really been able to see it. The lectrice's face.
Lectrice had raised her like a mother since her earliest years, but if Ead would have been asked to pick her face out from a crowd, she wouldn’t have been able to. Because she had never been able to look at it. Without eyes expecting things from her. Without the features moving, demanding, and processing her, she could just see it.
Outside, the world was going to hell. But she was separate from all of it, wrapped in the one thing she had ever made that her mind could not overfill itself with. Silence.
Almost blank and emotionless, the girl looked at the dead woman in the ice.
"It is nice to meet you," she began. She did not feel nervous, staring at the empty expression. "I am Ead."
Present day.
Ead sat there, listening to the voices coming from the left, and from the right, and from the far end of the treasure chamber.
The princesses were all chattering about this and that. She could not identify a single topic among them, because she was trying to process all of the topics simultaneously, and her mind would not work that way, had never worked that way, and could not be forced to work that way no matter how many years people spent telling her to simply be normal.
Her heart was racing. It hurt her head. It was too loud, too much. They were hurting her, without meaning to, without knowing. Why couldn't she be like them? It was unfair.
She reached up and pulled the edges of her wide-brimmed hat down so that the brim covered her ears and her eyes. She could feel herself boiling. She could feel it becoming too much to handle. All of the stimulation, pressing in. It was an overload, and it was coming, and there was nowhere to—
Then, something else.
A total shutout.
But it wasn’t ice.
Warm. Heat. Quiet.
Slowly, Ead released her ears and lifted the brim of her hat, looking back out.
It was dark.
Quietly, she sat down on the ground, holding a hand against her chest as she exhaled and felt her heart beat begin to normalise.
A large pair of red eyes looked at her from close by.
Barjuchne lay along her hoard in her wyvern form, the black coils of her draped across the gold. One of her massive wings was open and unfurled, cupped down over Ead, shielding her. The dragon's head lay on the ground inside the wall of it, the two of them enclosed together in the shelter.
The voices of the princesses came to them from far away now, muffled to nothing by the wall of the thick wing, distant and harmless as a party heard from another house.
Ead, calming, leaned back.
She stared up at the darkness of the inside of the wing. It was quiet here. Warm, from the heat that radiated off the dragon's body. Her head rested against Barjuchne’s side.
The scholarly princess turned her head and looked at the large pair of ruby eyes, peacefully watching her. She did not find that they made her nervous.
So, Ead sat there quietly, staring, and those eyes stared back.
Nothing was said. They just looked. That was all.
The stimulation was there, but it was different. Rather than coursing through her body like a wild electricity that made her actions and thoughts become ungovernable, it simply pulsated in her heartbeat a few times and then fought its way up the usual pathway.
Ead smiled.
And the wing pulled in a little closer.
“Oh! I was reading this really interesting article on the migration habits of kobold-chinned toads!” began Ead, remembering what she had come here to talk about.
In a way, the dragon was the perfect conversationalist, because everything one told her was knowledge, and knowledge was something the dragon could collect like any other treasure. So she would sit quietly and listen for hours on end, as Ead went on her verbal excursion.
Most of the conversation wasn’t even about the topic she herself had mentioned. It was around the periphery of it. It was about what she had been doing, thinking, and about the things she saw and all of the things that others might consider to be irrelevant and inconsequential matters.
Because they were of great consequence, actually.
And, yes, she would eventually get to the toads.