Nine – The Escape that I Long For

I hate you, I hate you, I hate you all. May you all burn in the deepest, darkest stretches of Hell.

Those unforgivable, terrible, vengeful words ran through my head as I suffered my father's cold stare down at me, maids tittering behind their hands, and the midwife absentmindedly patting my hand as her fat belly quivered.

Utter humiliation, that was what my father wanted me to feel—and he was successful. He was successful, like with any other instalment he inflicted upon me.

I did not know what he had heard about this journey. I did not want to know. The men had hurried me through the forest, back to the palace, with no more explanation than they had already given me. They weren't excessively rude—probably because they did not know how to handle their position "higher" than me yet. Or they didn't want to embarrass me, but unless they were stupid to the core, they would have known I was already embarrassed by Tone Rion.

My father cleared his throat again, and a wave of snickering and hidden snarky smiles behind hands swept throughout the room. He didn't yell for anybody to quiet down. He only smiled tolerantly, the dangerous gleam still lingering in his eyes.

"So, let us begin again," he said calmly, adjusting his robes, and turning to his best advisor. "Shion, would you please."

The blue-haired man stepped forward, his hair peppered with spirals of gray and white. He leaned heavily on a cane to support himself, swept a hand across his wrinkled face, pinched his nose, pushed his glasses up his nose, coughed, and at a snail's pace raised the curled sheet of parchment up to the light to read. Then Kaito Shion squinted at the tiny but elegant writing that swirled across the sheet, coughed again, and reached up to take his grime-coated glasses, dusty and gray with age, off the bridge of his nose to wipe them with a handkerchief that was just as dirty. I stared at him in mild fascination—for it is not often that Lord Luki would employ such a turtle to do the most important readings, transcribe the most important scripts… and such. The Shion family had always been advisors of our family line over the centuries; and Kaito Shion was last of them that still had the surname of Shion, but it was hardly for sentimental purposes that my father did anything. Then I understood why Father had kept him when Shion finally opened his mouth to speak.

His voice was creaky and unstable at first, but soon flowed in a rich warmness—warmness, as in liquid gold, the syrupy, flaming power that enveloped the listeners in its almighty embrace. Shion's voice was not warm like a summer day, the warm that told me I was forgiven, or the warm that beckoned a child for some biscuits… no, it was the malevolent, ferocious flame that licked upwards toward the sky at a witch burning.

Kaito Shion had originally been a preacher… or a priest. When his father before him died, he took up the job of king's first advisor. He had a sister, named Kaiko perhaps, who was too weak and sickly to marry and spent the rest of her short life as a spinster in bed. Due to centuries of inbreeding to keep the Shion name and family blood (though it happened less often with us), Kaito wasn't the brightest, but certainly the most flexible- and powerful-voiced. He aged quickly, maybe because of the stress being the lord's first advisor heaped on him.

Although Shion was a powerful speaker, I quickly lost interest, for all too soon as he began reading, he started droning when he came to the "crimes" I had "committed" against my father, of which I had no intention or idea of doing—tripping over my dresses, spilling a pail of milk on my way to the outside on a horse—in fact, it was a sore shock that they were crimes at all.

All of the peasants would be in prison if they knew that these were crimes, I thought as I stood there, catching a phrase or two of what I was accused of. So this was what it was like at a criminal's hearing, although I supposed that instead of my father sitting in that high position, it would be the judge.

From what little I knew of peasant lives, I knew for one that they mended and sewed and milked cows and made cheese from the milk. They ate salted pork, water flavored with lemons—or that was just my luxury?

Regardless of that, my anger peaked at some points during the speech, and slowly climbed down again. It was only a boring, long lecture.

Finally, Shion folded up the scroll and shuffled back to his spot in the line. My father idly tapped his throne armrest for a few minutes before speaking again.

"So you see, Luka," he said silkily, "those are your disownment papers."

You're disobeying your own laws.

"So what are we going to do about you, hmm?"

Tripping shouldn't be a crime.

"So…" His chin rested on his hands. His glittering, ice-cold eyes bore into me. "You've some explaining to do. Before we… ship you off, the midwife will hear your entire story and remember it as you said it. She can, however, make any edits that may seem necessary."

I had to bite my tongue to refrain from demanding what use there was in the midwife listening to my story anymore. But this was the midwife, and probably she still told some truth, and so probably she'd listen to me—though, sneaking a glance at that fleshy, moon-shaped face beaded with sweat, that seemed unlikely. The flighty woman would probably shy away from anything death-related other than the delicious retellings of what they did to one in Hell.

l~u~k~a

I hadn't thought about the midwife forgetting about any part of my story until I opened my mouth (rather reluctantly) to tell it. But making changes as necessary… it meant that there was no penalty if she did leave out a chunk of the story I was going to "tell," was it? My father probably wanted her to twist the story in some way, that was his nature, to deceive.

There had never been a reason for me to lie before, but it slipped off my tongue easily. Even though the words came naturally, my heart squeezed with anxiety—at the lie and at the prospect of telling the story anyway.

"I only need to know what took you so long," said the midwife; "the rest is quite clear, where you have gone."

Her frightened bunny eyes, whenever they landed on me, handed me hints on what she might have heard. The faked authority she posed with came as a slap in the face. Just because she was raised a rank higher than me—or that I dropped lower—did not mean that she was high as the heavens. There were plenty above her. My words fueled by indignation, I began.

"We were traveling in the middle of the forest," I said, "when a… bear lumbered out of the trees, stumbling upon our—"

"Hold, hold up. Bears don't live here."

I was annoyed already at her snippy interruption. "They live anywhere, those bears. If it was not one then it looked like one. A huge, furry brown creature, its musky hide glistening with water droplets—" I was better than I thought at storytelling; maybe it was from the midwife. "So it stumbled upon our carriage—"

"Are you attempting to dupe me, Luka?" the woman said sharply. "No animal stumbles."

Honestly, this woman… of course animals stumble. "You know what I mean. Anyhow, it came, and stole our food supplies and water—"

"Without you noticing?"

"I did notice!"

"Why did you not come out and help?"

"Was I expected? That's the coachman's job! I yelled for him, but he was somewhere—gathering wood, I suppose—"

"I checked personally," the midwife interrupted; "the meat was salted, the…"

"It gets cold at night. Besides, we needed to warm the meat," I said matter-of-factly.

"Go on, then."

"And—"

"Wait." Her watery eyes, rimmed by pink fat, scanned my suspiciously. "And are you sure that all of the other people in the entourage didn't come out to see? Or were they, too, off on their own, gathering things?"

She was mocking me. The sweet old midwife, who used to be a companion, was mocking me.

"No, they were asleep."

"All of them? Except for you?"

"I am a light sleeper."

"So is Yuzuki Yukari. Oh, and you still haven't told me how they disappeared, so mysteriously."

"And you, how the men came to find me," I snapped, all of my (limited) patience gone at this point.

"We will be getting to it."

"Well, I will too! Anyway, it was night."

"The coachman is—was, as we do not know where he is—a sensible man," argued the midwife. "A little rash, a little quick to hate, maybe, but a sensible man. He would collect all firewood by sundown, not… at night. When everybody is sleeping. How do you know that he went out to gather?"

"I don't know, and I didn't know what he was doing! Besides, he wanted us to go a bit faster, bandits on the loose—"

"Ah, we didn't hear about that—"

"HE IS A SENSIBLE MAN, you said so! So he would obviously think that, with such a magnificent expedition, there would be some robbers about, looking for loot!"

"That's true," the midwife said grudgingly as she sat back in her chair, waiting for me to go on.

"So—"

"There are too many holes in the story. Why did the animal not panic? Why were the others not roused by your shout?"

"I don't know, is that okay with you? I can't possibly know everything!" Cross as I was, I had to give the midwife a little credit—she was smarter than she appeared to be. "But the bear—animal, whatever it was—came, took our food, ate some, and that was when—"

The midwife suddenly stood up. Startled, I looked up at her.

"It is an impressive story, Luka," she said, with almost a sneer on her face, "but it has gotten obvious that you're lying."

l~u~k~a

My father knew which pressure points to press, how to torture me until it hurt.

And naturally, I was to be kept in a servant's room until the missionaries could come take me away. There was, surprisingly, not a lot of fuss about it in the kingdom… which was just as well, because they did not know me well anyway, and I them. Maybe there was an uproar about it, just kept hidden from me because I hardly ventured out of the palace anyway on a regular basis.

The servant's room was a bare broom closet, maybe a little bigger than that, but a huge assortment of brooms greeted my eyes the moment I opened the door.

Therefore, I was to live among the bushy, scratchy things, made of straw and useless, stiff plants littered all around the palace. It might be better than Father just throwing me out and having the staff all over come and point and laugh at me, but not by a lot. There was not even a window from which I could see out, like there was in the "next land."

On top of that, I didn't get to know how the men came to find me and how much of the true story Father knew, the former miscellaneous but haunting, and the latter frightening.

Wonderful.

I finally got my lazy ass off the ground and wrote another chapter. The next chapter might come just as late, though, because I'm tired (already). And there's still that request on Quizilla that I have to finish up on...

Anyhow, I'm a little pissed off right now, due to Masashi Kishimoto killing off Neji. How could he. D: I don't have the energy to argue anymore, so.. let's leave this at that. Thanks for reading/reviewing~

~Unyielding Wish