Chapter 67: Others Like Me (1)
Aston’s POV
“It was not my mother, my father, nor my siblings who cared for me when I scraped myself on thorns as a boy, but a red girl, executed the very next day.”
—Aston von Rosenmahl
Arthur and I walk side by side through the streets, the rather slim greens and broad oranges in bright contrasts that clash almost violently in my eyes. Arthur resembles his family about as much as a human resembles an ape—same species, but the shared dignity stops there.
We Blues are taught from childhood not to question our reason for existing, but for days now I’ve been steeped in studying them. The Reds. Their culture, their ways, who they were before we stripped them of everything. I want to know them. I want to understand.
Arthur’s hair is blond like mine, his eyes the same piercing azure. But there the likeness ends. He lacks the elders’ beard of shimmering sand. Still, even in this thick, bluish fog, his eyes glimmer with a knife’s edge sharpness. His brow is furrowed even though his body remains relaxed, as if the tension is ornamental, something he wears with the same care he would a military sash.
He isn’t older than me—perhaps a decade at most—but when I’m forced to stand beside him, I feel dwarfed. He stands tall. I imitate him, chin up, posture stoic, exactly as all Blues are taught, whether by family or in those damned middle-class academies that pass for schools.
But I’m not like him. Not truly. I can’t be like him. I don’t want to impose. Don’t want to wear the lie that I’m proud of what I am.
My gaze follows his, my mouth parting slightly in instinctive surprise before I snap it shut. I force myself still, stiff as a candle. We stand in the middle of the road, a carriage in the hazy distance. The ground here is dry, no Denklin mud clinging to our boots. The clouds have been swept away, leaving only the pitiless sun overhead.