Chapter 23 #3
It had never made sense to Eldest, but now she remembered something Day-Father had said: if you wish to reshape something, break it first. She found herself remembering many things on her journey down the flights of creaking steps.
She had a family. She remembered that. Their faces still refused her summons.
She saw them only as if they were pressed to a curtain, the taut cloth revealing the planes of their faces but hiding all detail.
The children lined up beneath the flicker of the parlour’s chandelier, eyes slitted against the light.
Eldest stood at the back today rather than taking her place at the front.
Yesterday’s discovery had driven a splinter of hope into her heart.
She had managed to separate herself from the awfulness of her existence, to sever the unwanted bonds of kinship with Father and Mother.
She had felt a momentary sense of worth and belonging.
The ghost of actual love had warmed her, not at the hearth of memory but a reflected heat that promised more if only she could sweep aside the remaining veils.
Today new worries stalked her, as if there had been room for them in the queue all along.
Had her family given her up? Had they placed her here, unwanted, a reject from their perfect lives?
Starving and sick now with a thin cough trying to burrow into her lungs, Eldest sat silently and let the waves of Father’s lesson wash over her.
Today he wanted them to know about pain.
As if he were describing nothing more than a recipe for a cake, Day-Father laid out the theory behind the practice that Night-Father demonstrated to the unlucky during sleeping hours.
When at last they were released from their lessons, Eldest once more resisted the gruel, though the reek of the loathsome stuff had become a fragrance and her sunken belly cried out to be filled.
The others watched her, aware now of her abstinence as they were aware of her weakness.
She knew it wouldn’t be long before she lost her place as their leader.
She shouldn’t care, they were an anchor on her, not the prize that Lip-Scar and others with ambition might think.
Without her the youngest would suffer, but… She walked away from the table.
“I’m not a good person.” Perhaps that was why her family had given her up.
Had they let her be cast into this hell because they saw the evil in her, or was it her weakness?
“I’m not a good person.” A good person would fight to lead because she knew it might save the others. A good person would care more, do more.
None of her siblings asked what she was doing when she hauled the mirror from the grand bedroom down the stairs, one loud, jolting bump at a time.
There were shards littering many of the rooms, but this mirror, cracked as it was, was the only one still entire in its frame.
Brother Small had killed Sister Quick with one of the shards from the Music Room.
He’d driven it up through her chin during an argument over something…
Eldest couldn’t remember what, something…
small. Brother Small had died weeks later.
The injuries Night-Father inflicted on him were no worse than the rest had suffered, but something inside him broke.
Eldest thought maybe Small had died from fear.
Perhaps it was fear that led him to kill his sister. Fear was the author of many crimes.
The scrape of her dragging the mirror through the dining room into the parlour felt loud enough to fill the whole house like one of Night-Father’s maniacal screams. At last, weeping at her weakness, Eldest brought it beneath the candlelight.
She had wanted to see herself whole, not her eyes staring through a wedge of fractured mirror.
She had wanted to see all of herself at once, and now she could.
She stared at herself, skeletal in the bundle of her scarfs and the stained satin of a dress repurposed as a cloak. Sunken eyes returned her study.
She hadn’t performed this labour to admire her features.
Rather, as she approached the silvered surface, setting her fingertips to the razored webs of cracks, she hunted for whatever it might have been that had made her parents reject her.
For surely, she couldn’t have endured years in this place if they had truly wanted her.
They would have come for her by now if she were worthy of them.
Was the imperfection visible among the hollows of her face?
Could the guilt that had condemned her be seen at a glance?
She thought she saw it there, in her eyes, a shadowed hurt that invited the blows that had changed her life.
Satisfied, she toppled the frame, letting the last mirror burst into bright fragments.
It was easier this way. The hope had been too painful.
If Father had planned this, if he had seen her waste away and known her purpose, then he had excelled himself and found a new cruelty that outdid all those that came before.