CHAPTER SIX (OTHER CHILDREN)
The sunlight (that woke me up) had turned green by the time it got through the trees.
It made me look green, which was strange, because I was used to not being green, but once I got away from the window I was normal-colored again, and to be honest I had mostly forgotten about it until now. Funny the things we remember and don't know it.
Ma'am and I broke our fast with bread, like she had said, though Sir had already left for the fields again. It was good enough, I supposed. Perhaps it had tasted better when I was hungry.
"Do you like it, then?" asked Ma'am. She looked at me expectantly.
I stuffed another bite in my mouth, and chewed it slowly so I could have more time to think of something to say, but by the time the bread finally disintegrated it tasted like all I could think of to say: nothing.
"Mnehh," I grunted, quietly enough that I hoped she would just interpret it as whatever she had wanted to hear, but she looked as if she had not heard it, so I had to say something else. "Nice. Thank you. May I go outside or something after I finish?"
"If you must," she said, retreating to the kitchen as she spoke. "Tell me first, and come back safe!"
"I am telling you that I am going outside, then," I said, before turning around and walking out the front door.
Outside was green, and it turned me green again. But outside was big, and surely there were people in it (that could talk my language) and that was good enough to make getting turned green look like a very tiny inconvenience. Which it probably was, really, but even tiny inconveniences are still inconveniences.
There was, across the dirt path, a cluster of children that looked like all the other people in the forest. Except smaller, of course. A number of them were smaller than me, even.
"Good morning!" I called out, running across to them. They all looked at me like I was a spider.
"Good morning," said the tallest of them hesitantly.
"Who are you?" asked the shortest.
"Well, I forgot my name," I said. "But Sir called me Taurwen, and I like that better than what Ma'am called me, at least, so I suppose you may call me that."
"Ma'am and sir?" said one of the middle-height children. "Who do you mean by that?"
"I think their names were Caerwen and Maithion," I said, with the overwhelming confidence of a little child who has apparently forgotten her own name and is not sure about anything anymore.
"You mean Gaeren and Naithion," said another middle-height, very sarcastically. "They are only taking care of you, you might have the decency to remember their names."
"I will remember their names when I can remember my own!" I said, my face heating up.
"We can all remember our names," said the same middle-height. "Whatever is wrong with you that you cannot remember yours?"
"I hit my head," I said, resolving to hit theirs if they did not stop blabbering. "And might we not talk about something else? It gets tiresome, everybody asking about the same thing."
"Why does your hair look like a carrot?" squeaked the shortest.
"It does not!" I shouted, and regretted it when multiple adults looked over, concerned. "It does not," I told him, more quietly this time. "I am not sure what it does look like, to tell the truth, but it does not look like a carrot. Carrots are undignified."
"And what makes you not undignified?" asked the sarcastic middle-height. "My big sister says people who hit their heads on things are the most undignified people in the whole world!"
"Well, whoever did she say that about?" I asked. "It could hardly have been me, because nobody but the healers knew that I had hit my head until now! And me, of course, but that is beside the point."
The sarcastic middle-height flushed, and said something I could not hear but was probably, extrapolating from context, a very mumbly, "Me." Or she could have been trying to lie, but she seemed so far like an honest kind of sarcastic middle-height child. Even if she did try to lie I got the sense that it would mostly fail.
"And I asked to talk about something else," I said, crossing my arms. "If you must always come back to that I will find someone else to talk to."
"Stop being ridiculous, Carcostel," said the second-tallest of them. "Everybody hits their head sometimes, and nobody wants to talk about it."
"Yes," I said, "stop being ridiculous."
The second-tallest rolled her eyes, probably at somebody who I could not see that was not me. "When did you start living in Gaeren and Naithion's house?" she asked me, which was not quite what I wanted to talk about even if it was better than talking about how I hit my head.
"Yesterday," I said. "I was in the healers' rooms before that."
She nodded. "I thought so."
Either these were dreadfully boring children, I was a dreadfully boring child, or the strangeness of the whole situation had driven all the interesting things to talk about clean out of everybody's heads. "A hideous bug flew into my room last night before dinner," I said in an attempt to start a conversation worthy of the name. "It had the normal number of legs for a flying bug, I think, but there were all sorts of strange things hanging off it that made it look like it had fourteen legs. It was big, too. Are those common here? Are they all that big?"
The sarcastic middle-height girl whose name was apparently Carcostel had been wandering slowly and vaguely away from me, but at that she turned around. "You mean a spiderbeetle?" she asked, grinning. "I heard those only come from the darkest parts of the forest, where nobody but the guard ever goes. Half beetle, half spider… and not the normal kind of spider either. The big kind, that the guard has to kill with arrows and spears. My brother joined the guard last winter, and he says—"
"Stuff and nonsense," said the second-tallest whose name I did not know. "Spiderbeetles are hard to kill, to be sure, but they only look like spiders."
"Well," said Carcostel, "My brother says he found a whole nest of spiderbeetle eggs, and none of the beetles hovering around it were spiderbeetles, and when somebody in his squad poked the nest with her axe-handle a whole lot of big spiders jumped out of the bushes and attacked them, and the one who poked the nest almost had her arm bitten off, and she had to stay in the healer's rooms for a whole season because of all the spider poison, and—"
"What does she look like?" I asked. "Maybe I saw her while I was in the healers' rooms."
"That was back in spring," said Carcostel, her tone of voice making it very clear what she thought of my intelligence. "This is summer."
"Well, how was I to know that?" I asked, and I was not shouting, even if I was talking a little bit louder than usual to make my point. "Your brother only joined the guard in winter, or at least you said he did, and how was I to know he would be going into the 'darkest parts of the forest' by spring? And how am I to know what summer looks like here when I only just got out of that horrible cave your silly king lives in, and furthermore—"
"Go back inside then, if you like outside so little!" shouted Carcostel. "You won't need to know anything about summer then."
This was an insult indeed, and it took great personal strength to keep myself from bursting into a tiny fury of fingernails and teeth. "Well!" I said. "The same to you, then. No doubt the people who have had to put up with you will be glad."
"Oh, stop it," said the tallest of them all. "If you keep shouting we will all get in trouble."
"I am not inclined to care," said Carcostel, glaring at me.
"I am not inclined to lay down and let you stomp all over me," I said, glaring back. I felt very much like all my insides would burst into flame at the slightest provocation.
"Talking is not stomping," said Carcostel, looking down her nose at me— she could not have been more than an inch taller than me, but disadvantaged as I was I could only retaliate with a kind of squinty glare.
"It was a metaphor," I said, "if you know what that is."
"I did not think you did!" she said, which was the highest form of absurdity to which I had ever been witness. "I only thought that hit to your head must have shaken up the words you knew, and was kindly correcting what would have been an embarrassing mistake in other company—"
"Go eat a beetle," I said.
Carcostel stared into my eyes, her own eyes so nearly shut I could not see the dark circles in the middle. She knelt down, holding the stare, and picked a small bug off the ground.
She ate it.
I began to feel excruciatingly cold and hot by turns, my mind casting about for something to say.
"That was not a beetle," I said, and immediately began to chew on the inside of my mouth, for it had been a beetle, and a particularly vile-looking one at that.
Evidently Carcostel agreed; she let out an animalistic screech and swung her fist toward my face.
Something inside me burst asunder, and I let out a screech of my own, doing my honest best to pummel her into the ground.
A surprising number of the other children joined the fray, though I had no idea exactly how many— most without any particular allegiance, I think, since Carcostel took some blows that were not mine. But the tide of the fight was not turning in my favor, and though I did what I could, I began to feel that I was losing a great deal of hair.
"Stop that this instant!" shouted a random adult, beginning to drag children away from the pile. I was one of them― I considered putting up a fight, but the adult was much bigger than me and I could not think of any way it would actually improve my situation. While I thought, the adult set me down some distance away from the pile and went back to get another child.
I squinted at the pile, trying to determine how quickly my hair would recover. I could, I thought, go back to defend my honor; but I had not been winning. The path of discretion, then— I ran toward Ma'am and Sir's house, steadfastly ignoring the shouts that followed me.
Fin