Author's Note: I think Anne Bishop tried to give Kartane a fleshed-out character. She inserted that section in Daughter of the Blood about Kartane's childhood and how Daemon Sadi fit into it, but she didn't really go anywhere with it, as he faded almost entirely from the story after the end of the first book. I like books about how bad guys become bad, so that's what this is. Kartane is still going to be the horrible monster of an adult, but let's grieve for the little kid he was, all right? His mother was Dorothea SaDiablo (who was portrayed as senselessly evil with no real story and no cleverness that she should have had to gain all that power in the first place).
I'm testing the waters with this fanfic, so please review if you're interested. I want feedback not only as assurance the story is worth continuing but also to hear what you have to say and any suggestions or questions you might have.
Rated Teen for now for disturbing scenes and language; maybe a higher rating later for nudity and sex.
Snow
1 / Terreille
It sort of came on all of a sudden, as if a bolt of lightning seized a clear blue sky. Everything was peaceful, calm. He sat at the high table to his mother's left, a few lords down. This was his first time dining in the great hall with the lords and ladies of his mother's court. He was nervous before entering, but there was plentiful entertainment and a great deal of good food—and his mother's eye couldn't reach his unless she maneuvered about, peering over heads and such, and it just wasn't a possibility.
He was listening to Lady Florencia tell a story about the good ol' days when some force squeezed his bladder. Now, he sits still, his muscles tense as he tries to keep the flow back. He has to get out of the hall quickly before it's too late. The panic must show on his face, he thinks, but nobody looks, nobody cares. He digs a tooth into his lip, grinding into it until his tongue gets a taste of tangy blood. His eyelids flutter.
Dorothea is laughing gleefully at something one of her Blackwidows said to her and she claps her hands in barely restrained delight. He wonders briefly if he should ask for a dismissal or if he could slip out undetected. He sees men and women entering and exiting at will, but he finally decides he should request it.
He stands, the jarring of the movement causes his bladder to flounder and his control lapses momentarily. He takes a deep breath. It's not as if he hasn't gone all day. He has. He even remembered to go before dressing to come down for dinner. He can hear the thump, thump, thumping of his heart as it thunders in his chest with each painful step he takes toward his mother. With each step, he's more and more aware of damp under garments, not a lot. Just a few drops. It's warm against his skin, but he's too frightened of what will happen if he darts out of the room without permission. It's not noticeable, he assures himself. No one knows.
Dorothea sees him approaching her. If she picks up on his discomfort, she doesn't acknowledge it. Instead she smiles at her young son and reaches out to pet his cheeks. She strokes his cheek with her thumb when he comes within an arms' distance. "Kartane, you've met Lady Aliss, haven't you?"
He forces a smile and nod of his head, but quickly bows down to whisper in his mother's ear that he wants to leave. She lifts an eyebrow, looks at him with her piercing and all-knowing golden eyes, and replies, "Very well. Go on." She turns back to her company and mutters a few things to them.
Now all he has to do is get out of here without running. He takes one step, then another. It becomes easier now that he knows he'll be all right. All this worry is thrown to the wind. As his steps become easier, they become faster, too. It's only a matter of time. But Lanzo steps in through the door. It's a wide door, really. It's not like Lanzo could block it, but he does. Somehow his whole form fills the doorway and he stops there with a frown.
"Where are you going?"
"I need to go," Kartane murmurs, his head bowed. His heart beat quickens in the face of this new obstacle.
"Does your mother know you're leaving? After all that begging to come..."
"I need to go, Father," he whispers, a renewal of panic summoning a well of tears to his eyes. He blinks them back. "Please."
"You must have been in her face all day yesterday with that high pitched whining."
"I-I just need to use the bathroom. I-I-I'll come right back."
"You can't hold it? Are you a man or aren't you?"
"Just get out of my way." He says this through his teeth, fighting the urge the scream, fighting the urge to release the pressure on his bladder. His hands are balled as his sides, but he still won't look up into his father's face.
"I don't like your tone."
"Just move. Please." He offers this plea in a whisper. The restraint makes his shake, he can't take it anymore.
Lanzo doesn't budge. So Kartane cries with his eyes shut tightly, "Just get out of the way, asshole!"
The room gets quiet and everyone turns their prying eyes to the father and son at the hall's entrance. Even Dorothea is watching, sitting on the edge of her seat to stand and demand everyone's attention at a second's notice.
The yelling helps. The pressure has been released, and now he can feel the tension leaving his body. It had felt good. It was a good scream, sort of like the relief he couldn't give himself yet.
"What did you call me?" Lanzo lowers his voice. He does this often like the calm before a storm, just before he explodes into a rage. He's learned it from his wife, Dorothea, who can speak so calmly, so sweetly, when livid; it just made it that much more frightening. "How dare you..." he begins but stops himself as a few titters ripple through the hall. He studies them, as if to make a note of who was ridiculing the Consort, but when he turns his attention back to Kartane, his expression changes to bemusement.
A tremble runs through his body at the look. What does it mean? He asks himself. Why isn't he yelling at me? But he looks down, too, at himself. He sees the wet spot on his brown pants before he feels the warmth expanding across his thighs. A few beads of piss roll down his inner thighs, zigzagging down his knees until they reach his socks. It feels good, the release, like now he's got nothing left to worry about. But he can't stop himself. It gets wetter and wetter, and the laughter becomes louder and louder.
Lanzo is even laughing.
Blood rushes to his face, but tears are already falling down his face. He thinks, maybe they don't notice. Maybe they're laughing because I called Lanzo an asshole. He casually brings his hands down to his crotch as if to cover it, but it sets off another string of heavy ridicule before he's almost positive they've seen it. He begins to tremble, slowly at first and then it gradually becomes violent shaking. His feet are planted on the floor, unable to move, frozen to the core. Even Mother's laughing. She can't help herself, even if she doesn't mean it.
Run, run, run, he screams at himself. Just run away. But he can't. He's powerless to their scorn.
Salvation does come. It comes in black trousers. He sees the steady gait of the black trousers, the large hand is held out to him as he takes him by the hand and gently pulls him out of the hall. The laughter echoes in his ears as they retreat deeper into the mansion. The man speaks in a low voice, his words calming and nonsensical niceties. His hand is warm, his grip firm and reassuring.
The man leads them to a small room. It's adorned tastefully, with a fluffy bed in deep, rich colors topped with a mound of pillows. He stares at them as he tries to stop the tears from falling. The man takes him into the bathroom, a plain white thing, devoid of the richness of the bedroom's black and gold tapestries, of the rich reds of the comforter.
He stands in the center of the bathroom, shaking, sobbing. He's not really sure what they're doing or why, so he just tries to stand as still as he can in his condition. His eyes follow the man as he switches on the faucet, dropping the plug into the bathtub and pouring a bit of scented salts into the water.
The man then kneels down in front of him, tugs off his clothes. He keeps murmuring these words, so foreign and so pretty. It's not as if he speaks a different language, but the way he speaks makes his words sound beautiful, like a song. He finally ends his murmuring with, "These things happen." Kartane uses the man's broad shoulders to steady himself as the man peels off the shoes, the wet socks, the soggy trousers, and when it's all over, the man sweeps him off his feet and carefully places him in the water. It's warm and smells nice. It smells like the man.
Kartane thinks, I'm old enough to do this myself. And the man just hands him a wash cloth to clean himself.
They sit in a pale silence for a while as Kartane scrubs himself clean. The man busies himself with dropping the clothes into the hamper and putting away the bath salts. He turns the faucet off, too.
Kartane has to ask it. It circles around him like a vulture. "Were they laughing at me?"
He meets the man's eyes for the first time. They are golden-brown, like Dorothea's, but a little different. Softer, maybe. He pauses in his even routine of capping the salts and placing them among other salts beneath the sink. "Would you really like to know?"
"Yes."
The man's lips flatten into a straight line. He swallows, then says, "These sorts of things happen to everyone."
"They were laughing at me?" It's not really a surprise since he knew the moment he heard the first wave of barely contained snickers.
"It's okay."
The tears come again. The man pulls him from the tub and pats him dry with a fluffy towel and escorts him into the bedroom. He pulls a plain shirt, much too large for Kartane, out from a mahogany dresser drawer and tugs it down over it Kartane's head. It falls about him like a dress. He's shaken by some strong sobs; they wrack through his body with a violence, his shoulders quake.
The man watches him in a silence, his eyes hinted with a sadness Kartane doesn't understand. He is thinking about something, deciding how to go about dealing with this crying heap on his bedroom floor. Kartane can't control himself; if he had control, then he wouldn't even be here. He'd still be in the hall or he'd be racing down the corridors until he came to a bathroom. No one would have laughed. He thinks, they are still laughing. He can almost hear their crowing all the way from the man's quarters.
"Did you laugh, too?" Kartane feels the need to ask it, even if it doesn't really matter after everyone else did too. He wonders if he should have laughed along with them. Is it worse to hide away after the fact or laugh with everyone?
"Am I laughing now?" But Kartane doesn't know what that means. He doesn't like when people answer his questions with a question. His mother does this; he always has to wonder if she means yes or no, because it can go both ways, you know. There's some knowledge he is lacking, just like with everything else. He is incomplete in the head or something; he doesn't know how to comprehend these responses, but he doesn't like to admit it, so he doesn't say anything.
The man retracts his response with another one; a better one. "Of course I didn't." His tone softens. "These things happen." The man approaches with long, slow steps. They aren't unsure steps or hesitant, but more reluctant, like saying, "I shouldn't, but I want to." Like with Kartane's child's mind, desire outweighs all else. The man comes to him, holds him tightly as if to keep him from shaking.
He is warm, comforting. He tries to think of a time when his mother pressed him against her and held him like this and he felt this overwhelming warmth circling him, shielding him. He thinks, it feels like a wall around me, firm and safe. This is my city and these are my walls, and there is nothing else. This is what safety feels like. He vaguely wonders who this man might be, but it's just the trivialities he doesn't like to be bothered with. I want to feel like this. I want, I want, I want.
There is no laughter here. It's quiet, except for the deep, resounding heartbeat housed by a strong body with real flesh, that beats against his own chest. The breathing is soft, too, rhythmic. There is no laughter here.
The man begins to murmur more nonsensical things, promises of better days. His words wash over Kartane like gentle waves on the coastline, constant, gentle, hypnotic. He doesn't listen to their meaning, just their laugh-less tone and the fact that he says anything at all.
Mother will call. She will wonder where I am.
He can't cry forever. His tears dry up, faint visages left on his cheeks, his eyelashes. He untangles himself from the man, who then pulls himself to his feet and whisks across the room for something.
Kartane sits without making a noise, his mind bouncing back from the humiliation. It's not so bad, is it? After all, big boys don't cry. Instead, he focuses on the man, whose back it turned to him. He wears tasteful clothes, carefully tailored and made from materials not available to those beneath the gentile. Yet he is surely not from any of the Hundred Families of Hayll. There are many names to remember and faces to put to each of them, but this man lacks the crudeness that marks the Hundred Families and plagues the entire realm. Furthermore, there are only a handful at court today, and he knows all of them by face.
The man feels his eyes upon him and turns. The face is beautiful, refined...and vaguely familiar. He wonders if he's seen this person before, had known this person? So he says aloud, his voice cracking and coarse, "Do I know you?"
Instead of answering, the man says, "I'm Daemon. We're...cousins."
He delves into his memory and picks out names from his family tree. He scrunches up his face, forgetting himself for a minute, and lay himself open to vulnerability. Confusion ample and obvious, Daemon continues, "Hespabah's son."
Hespabah, oh yes. Dorothea wraps family about her the way she does a cloak amidst the snow. Dorothea's family faction crowd the halls of the court; you can't get away from them, meowing and clawing for their interests in every breath. And Hespabah had a son everyone whispers about in clipped, breathless phrases; someone who is both family and not family to Kartane himself.
He never liked Hespabah. She flutters about like a little trapped bird in his mother's presence, but she never seems to leave it. It's as if she's ensnared in mother's web. She looks similar to Dorothea, with her sleek dark hair, kept long and pulled out of the face. Her bones are thin, but her facial features are more delicate than sharp, and as voluminous dresses become the latest fashion in Draega, her dresses become larger and larger, taking more space than 4 of her combined.
He thinks, Daemon looks nothing like her. His coloring seems off, not the classic Hayllian look but not entirely different. His face isn't sharp; fine but full. Kartane is learning to be a courtier. He can hear one of his tutors clucking. Kartane then wonders, who is the father? From one of the Hundred Families? But Daemon carries none of the traits he's memorized from these houses. Failure again.
A chill creeps into the room. It's a surprisingly small room for a cousin. His cousin Rosalina has a room in the Eastern Hall that is three times larger than Daemon's. Leo, Lanzo's older brother's son, even has a bigger room than Daemon, and Dorothea hates him. She says, "If you give him something out of pity, he will just keep asking for more." So she doesn't give him anything she isn't compelled to anymore.
Kartane rubs his arms, bare. The shirt is a thin cotton thing, not well crafted with loose stitching. It's a commoner's shirt. It's unlikely it's Daemon's, not with his classy attire. Dorothea would be incredulous if she saw him wearing this.
Daemon crosses the room, closes the window, pulls the curtains shut. "It's cold in here," he says as if on cue. "I'd give you something else to wear, but nothing would fit. I'm bigger than you."
Kartane rubs at his eyes. He's not sure if he wants to leave the comfort of Daemon's room. It has less nice things than his own, but it's cozy. Daemon opens the chest at the bottom of the bed and extracts a throw, wool dyed crimson. Handing it to Kartane, he says, "I have to go soon. You can stay here if you'd like." He searches his closet for something.
The humiliation is long past, but it feels like a raw wound. If he steps outside, it might come back to him. Will someone laugh at him when he walks down the hall? But he's a big boy now. He shouldn't be crying, and he shouldn't be hiding here in his cousin's small bedroom.
"Every day comes an end," says Daemon, pausing in his task. It's not what Kartane wants to hear, but it's comforting. Or his voice is just comforting. He puts a heavy hand on Kartane's shoulder and squeezes.
When he leaves, he expects to return to his chambers without sighting Mila, but he finds her standing in the hall in front of his door.
Mila is Kartane's nurse. She's young and pretty and she spends a great deal of time behind closed doors with pretty young men. He can hear her giggling from her chamber in the dead of night and other sounds he can't comprehend. She mewls like a cat sometimes, and once he's seen her on all fours. She is Hayllian but not from the best stock, but Dorothea chose her because Kartane goes through nurses the way a baby goes through diapers. Occasionally the nurses quit, but mostly Dorothea blames them for her son's shortcomings and rages at them, punishes them.
She has particular punishments in mind for the nannies. When Kartane admitted to his mother he was afraid of the dark, Dorothea pulled his nurse from her bed and had her eyes gouged out. When Kartane gained more weight that Dorothea would have liked, she starved the nurse. When Kartane wasn't groomed properly, she pulled the nails off the nurse's fingers and toes. Sometimes, these were just punishments, and the nurse would continue being his nurse, but they hated him if they didn't hate him before or hated him even more if they did. No one wanted to be his nurse, suffice it to say. When Dorothea had her chamberlain out looking for a new nurse, he often couldn't find enough applicants.
Mila was hardly even Blood, a simple White Jeweled witch welcomed in a desperate situation. Dorothea said, "You're getting too old for a nurse, aren't you? Maybe she'll be the last." Once he's old enough, he'll either be sent off to a boarding school or be fostered. He hopes for the latter, but it is a tradition that is becoming less vogue in favor of ridding the nobility of the youth entirely. Just sweep them off to boarding school and no one but those teachers have deal with them. Dorothea hasn't said one way or the other, but Kartane doesn't mind either, really. All he wants is to rid himself of the Milas in his life.
She's giggling into the chest of a pretty youth, her forehead pressed playfully into his collarbone. Her hand rises to touch his face, guide it downwards as she lifts her own face to meet him. He approaches warily. Mila doesn't appreciate the interruption normally, and she'll hit him for it.
When she spies him in the corner of her eye, she pulls away from her beau. She laughs and says, "That's him." The guy cranes his neck around to smirk at him. "Did you go pee-pee in your pantsies?" she coos.
"Ah, poor kid," the youth says.
"Who does that? I mean, really, how old are you?" She snickers, but it fades when she sees her's not still wearing his dinner clothes. She screws up her face, her nose scrunched up. "Where are your dinner clothes?"
He shrugs. "Dunno."
"What do you mean, you don't know? Well, go find them. You can't come inside until you bring back the clothes."
"I just want to go to sleep."
"Yeah, well so do I. But this little shit-head just made my job even worse. Go find your clothes. I won't have your mother yelling at me because your best clothes have gone missing. Psh, I should make you wear them around still soiled, maybe then you'll learn to hold it in."
"I threw them away," he says out of habit.
She reaches out and slaps him. "I said go find them. If they're in the trash, all the worse for you. If you come back here smelling like garbage, I'll lay into you. Mother Night, if he has to bathe again today, I'll go mad." She turns back to the youth and starts playing with the collar on his shirt. Kartane spins on his heels and goes back. What did Daemon do with his outfit? It wasn't worth salvaging. He could have another tailored just like it. He tries not to make a face. If it means he can bury himself in his sheets and sleep everything away, he will go back to Daemon's room and retrieve what he needs to. It's worth it.