He never crawled into the white cradle of her lap.
He never sat there but at her doe-eyed, pleading request, and even then he walked to her. Too often she was poised there in her quarters, slim and pale, and when he entered-- bringing a heavy silence with him that was too proud to be expectant-- she would set her book down and reach for him, simple sweetness overwhelming any grudge at this action. She always smelled of cream and clean flowers, and held him close to her heart.
But when she came back from there, she smelled of dirt.
The whole palace would coil like a snake, but the strike never came. They simply muttered and plotted and skulked out of sight as she passed with bright eyes and snow on her shoulders, peppered with dark, pungent remnants of everything unholy to Zeal. Dirt did not belong in this white realm-- and now, it became a cancerous blot on their purist of saints.
Janus did not sit in her lap much. But the explicit image of those grubby children with raw, wormlike feet struggling into her lap like beached fish with open mouths made him cold with disgust and rage. The sight of her dropping her cloak for cleaning only to know it would be dirtied again within weeks… furious. It made him averse to her touch. It made him duck from under her perfumed fingers, which were so often on the grimy, sweat-slimed brows of the Earthbound.
Janus hated this. He hated her absence, but he hated her more when she came back.
Schala seemed to sense this disruption as a malignant vibration; a coldening of the small boy before her. His unspoken anger was a specter, glaring tragically at her every benign action. A simple smile would drive that rusty dagger further in, and he would soon retreat to Alfador's company with resentful eyes and a curled lip-- perhaps leaving her with her arms outstretched.
Her punishment.