Credit where credit is due. Tamora Pierce owns these characters. They are hers, I just borrowed them for a bit. I got this idea from a work entitled 'a squire's pain'. It was an interesting idea that I had never seen before and I hope that the author does not mind if I jump off from there.

In a small bed in a lonely corner of the castle Keladry of Mindelan cried. She pressed her face against her odd looking dog's fur as he licked her forhead. In her mind, she felt the pressure. "Nobody likes a probationary Lump!" she sobbed. In her mind, she felt useless. She was overwhelmed by the amount of classwork she had been assigned. She had finished everything, but it was very late at night and she needed to sleep. If only she could stop crying.

Her mind jumped quickly from her desperate need for sleep, to the helplessness of probation, to the fear of failure, to the hurtful remarks of others, to her inability to succeed at tilting, and back to her need for sleep. With each loop her mind got more and more frantic and she cursed herself for being a bad Yamani.

As her crying became more desperate, she began to hyperventilate. Her head pounded getting worse by the minute only adding to her panic. Then, as though a light had switched, she threw back the covers. She stumbled to her desk madly opening drawers until she found what she sook. Her heart beat wildly as a tear dripped off of the end of her nose. She could not think straight. Her head hurt so terribly. She lifted her shirt and pressed the yamani folding blade against the skin of her hip. She hurriedly made a line across the broad part of the hip bone.

As the blood welled and slowly dripped she took a deep breath. The pounding in her head had slowed. She could now focus. She took her time on the next cut. The knife was dull enough that she needed to press fairly hard to draw blood. She liked it that way. By the time she actually saw the blood her skin had already formed angry welts which would soon stop the bleeding. Her skin prickled with the sensation. She made two more cuts on the other hip before she stopped feeling anything at all. She felt like her mind had been stuffed with cotton. Her headache was gone, all of the terrible emotions she had felt before ceased to matter. She felt like whatever happened, she was strong enough to handle it. She crawled back into bed and felt her mind drift off to easy and dreamless sleep.

When she awoke in the morning, Kel struggled to remember the events that had passed. She still felt as though someone had stuffed her brain full of cotton. Slowly, she remembered what she had done. She ran her hands over the four raw places on her hips to be sure. She gasped as she realized just how bad they were. She had not remembered that one of the cuts went all the way around her hip. It looked to be a hand's length. None were terribly deep, but they hurt when she sat up. She sighed. "What's done is done and cannot be undone." she quoted a Yamani proverb. "I mean it this time. I'm going to stop this." Jump wagged his tail seeming to agree with her.

The upside to being quiet all of the time is that, when you are exceptionally quiet, nobody notices. She was relieved that no one seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary with her. Not that she'd ever been caught before. As the morning progressed, Kel felt the numb feeling slip away to be replaced by a terrible gnawing feeling of worthlessness. The two biggest feelings were the desire to turn into liquid and seep down into the flagstones, and the desire to cut again. She cursed her own weakness while keeping up her well-practiced Yamani mask.

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"I'll need your essays on the habits of stormwings by next class. You are dismissed." Sir Myles said, "Mindelan may I speak to you for a moment?"

Kel's heart skipped a beat as everyone else left. She felt naked without boys on either side fo her. She felt exposed. She did not notice the looks that Neal and the prince gave each other as they exited.

Myles shuffled papers on his desk seeming to be searching for something without looking at his hands. Kel stood in front of his desk waiting for him to speak.

"Thirty years as a teacher has taught me a thing or two about students. Well, that and living here at the palace for more years than I want to count. While I have no idea exactly what is bothering you, I do see that you are troubled. Please do not allow your problems to fester like an open wound." he said as Kel felt a blush creep up her face. He was much too close to the truth for comfort. "Should you require a friendly ear, I will listen. Should you choose instead to continue to struggle by yourself, know that your friends will worry about you. That is all, please go away."

Kel's feet took her from the room as her mind digested the words. As she headed to the practice courts she ran a hand across her hips making sure that everything was safely hidden.

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It seemed that day on the practice courts that the gods were laughing at her. Kel could not remember being hit on the hips before today, but it seemed like every blow that slipped by her defenses landed there. Riding Peachblossom hurt. Running up that dreadful hill to get to her room hurt, the hot water on her cuts hurt. All the while, Kel did her absolute best to dissapear. To evaporate, to melt. Anything but stay the way that she was. ANYTHING. That evening Kel climbed into bed wishing that she had not cut wishing that she had resisted. She cursed herself calling herself weak and useless before drifting off into nightmarish sleep.