"I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms"
-Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

Teta: Thirteen Ways

I.

To her father, Teta was a complication. It was a difficult and undesired pregnancy; the child was at last born small and weak. She never cried. Instead, she mewed like a dying kitten.

He could have gotten a better place, he always knew. He was unappreciated in the Beoulve stables. But a man cannot move his family to another estate with a child so precariously alive.

And it never got better. The mewing infant grew into a shivering girl, prone to fevers and chills.

He listened to her cough at night and often thought that death would be a simplification.

II.

To her mother, Teta was a doll, helpless and pliable. She brushed her young daughter's dull brown hair with a wire brush and hard, chapped hands.

The lady of the manor had a daughter a few months older. The lady sent her out-grown baby clothes to Teta's mother, who grimly dressed Teta in a different-patterned smock every day. "These are the dresses of a princess," she told Teta.

For some reason, young Teta thought that her mother was talking about her, that she herself was the princess. Teta would spend hours by the window, waiting for the queen to return.

III.

To her brother, Teta was first a briar: always tangled in his clothes, always tugging him down. She whined. She dripped snot. Delita could not wait to escape her. She was his anchor.

After the death of their parents, she became an egg shell: something small and fragile, something to protect. He would save her, he knew, because he must. He fed her oatmeal. He tried to brush her hair. He told her stories about princesses and ogres; he sang until she fell asleep. He cleaned away her tears. She was his gosling.

To Delita, Teta was always a symbol.

IV.

To Alma, Teta was an opportunity. The youngest Beoulve child had always burned to be a martyr; she had seemingly memorized the lives of the saints in the cradle. She ran underfoot, seeking good works, until the day Zalbag casually mentioned that the saints had been rigorously meek and quiet.

But it was not until Teta, dirty and mute, had been named her "companion" that the prepubescent Alma found her God-given canvas. She taught Teta the alphabet. She bullied her into bathing. She dragged her to chapel each morning.

Saints started small, she knew. Young Alma started with saving Teta.

V.

To Ramza, Teta was a little sister. Everyone knew that girls were no fun at all, but little sisters had to be coddled. Ramza knew this. He had a little sister, too.

And because he loved Delita, Ramza was nice to Teta. At first, this involved a masterful suppression of his natural impulses, but as years went by, less self-sacrifice was required. Teta was quiet, but she could always find the best bird's nests and blackberry bushes. Teta was useful baggage on adventures.

When she and Alma first left for their abbey tutelage, Ramza cried over both of them equally.

VI.

To Balbanes, Teta was just a girl. Initially, she and her brother were signposts of his generous magnanimity. Later, the Hyral siblings proved to be loyal companions to his two youngest children. But as a rule, he barely thought of them unless they stood before him.

When they flitted through his presence, however, he seized the opportunity to tell them stories and riddles. He liked children. The Hyral siblings had simply swollen his natural bounty. He took the boys fishing; he took the girls riding.

When he thought of Teta at all, he thought of her as Alma's loyal shadow.

VII.

To Dycedarg, Teta was always slightly unclean, as if she would always smell like the stables, no matter how much Alma scrubbed her. Watching the two girls, home from the abbey on some holiday, bending their heads together over Alma's embroidery, Dycedarg could not help thinking of lice.

Lice were the least of it. While Alma stayed as short and puppy-round as ever, Teta was growing tall and womanly. The marks were hard to miss, even without Teta visibly flushing whenever Dycedarg prowled over to sort colored thread for the two girls.

Nits breed--wasn't that how the expression went?

VIII.

To Zalbag, Teta was a relief. For one thing, she had provided a welcome distraction for Alma when his sister had been at a fever-pitch of boredom. (The chapel elders still frowned when they discussed Alma's more ambitious plans for juvenile sainthood.)

For another thing, she sang like an angel. Zalbag always watched Alma and Teta when they rose for chapel hymns. Away from home, it was the first thing he remembered about Igros: the two girl under the stained glass, lifting their voices in praise of God.

Zalbag did not love many earthly things, but he loved that moment.

IX.

To the other girls, Teta was an affront. Bad enough that Alma Beoulve had dragged her gutter maid along to the abbey, but it beggared belief that the girl would continue to associate with the dell as if they were sisters. (But then... You know what they say about her mother... Perhaps, well, you know...)

Needless to say, the young ladies of the abbey were delightedly horrified when Alma brazenly brought her companion along to tea with Her Royal Highness, the princess Ovelia.

To her credit, Ovelia neither noticed nor remembered the mousy little shadow eating buttered scones beside Alma.

X.

To the boys, Teta was a mystery. She was the kind of girl, they agreed, that they would like to get to know better, preferably in a dark corner and away from the ever-present Alma. She was quiet, they said, but you know what they say about those quiet ones, eh?

Of course, they said these things quietly, because Teta's brother held no mystery whatsoever for the squires and stablehands of Igros Castle. They fervently did not want Delita to catch them talking about his sister, which meant that they were content for Teta to remain a mystery to them.

XI.

To Prince Larg, Teta was nothing. It was possible that she had been in the same room as himself on some occasion or another, but His Highness cannot be expected to remember every minor figure in the background at every country function. Perhaps she was a shadow beside the Beoulve girl, whom Larg barely remembers. He may have once heard that old Beoulve paired off his two younger children with two common orphans, but such minor fare would be short-lived gossip in the Ivalice courts indeed.

And why would His Highness care in the first place? What is one girl?

XII.

To Algus, Teta was soft. He saw the Beoulves trying to impress themselves on her as if she were warm sealing wax.

(Algus fancied himself to be a master of split-second analytical observation. He met Teta once, maybe twice; the sealing-wax metaphor came from some book he read long ago and largely forgot.)

He saw Delita trying to make his own mark. And Teta was endlessly receptive to everyone. It is possible that even Algus briefly considered making his own score on that soul. An idle, passing consideration, surely. She was pliant; she was moist.

To Algus, Teta was mud.

XIII.

To Teta, her life was a book waiting to be read. Her life had always been a drab affair, but any moment, her prince and plot would arrive, Teta felt assured. She waited with the same quiet, desperate determination that had marked her childhood vigil by the window for the ever-absent queen mother.

She had gotten the wrong life, somehow, but everything would be sorted out eventually. All the changelings would be restored, and Teta would be recognized as the heroine she always knew herself to be.

Great things would happen any day now. Teta felt it in her bones.


Author's Note: (02/04/07) Fixed the numbering; thanks TobyKikami!