The Rod

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On Aarlen's eleventh birthday, Father gave her a sword and said by the time a year passed she would take a man's life with it. Now, the bone-colored courtyard walls seemed to close around her. She gripped the sword's hilt. The cool metal numbed her callused hand. The rankness of smoke and decay hung in the air. Father's words of a year ago gnawed at her. Today was Aarlen's twelfth birthday.

Studying the crenelated walls veined with crimson, Aarlen wondered how far she could get if she climbed over. Her back burned with the memory of her last attempt to escape FalconHall. Steel lashed through her mind. She shivered.

Guardians dressed in Father's ash-gray livery stalked the battlements. FalconHall's sentinels were more to keep people in than to repel enemies.

Aarlen glanced across the cobbled yard to the barracks. The sword master would soon come to test her. She stretched to get the kinks out of her muscles. She needed to be limber to perform the torn'fratar properly.

She saluted as one of the officers crossed the yard. At her motion, he stopped, his dark eyes even with hers. Since Father's red-suited alchemists began injecting her with their potions, she'd grown through four sets of clothing and could look most men in the eye. He frowned and strode away. The sight of her seemed to trouble the guards. Aarlen had asked why, but none would speak to her.

Sighing, she ran her fingers through the spectral-white strands of her hair. Before Father sent her sister away, it had been brown. She wished Marta were here. If she hadn't been so dumb and clumsy-- Three summers had passed since the bad day in the vestibule.

She'd knocked over a vase where the two of them were playing. Marta tried to catch it, but it broke into a million pieces.

Father found Marta crying, and Aarlen trying to put the porcelain back together. He cursed at them. She had tried to tell Father that Marta didn't do it, but he hit Marta with his rod anyway. Aarlen tried to make him stop but he knocked her down and ordered a servant to take her upstairs.

The girls had made Father so angry he sent Marta away. She asked Mother where Marta had gone. She said Marta was with the creators now. Aarlen never saw Mother after that. She guessed Mother joined Marta with the creators. The servants put wreaths of flowers around the manor as going away decorations.

Aarlen remembered the smell of the blossoms. The decorations stayed until they became sad and dried up. The flowers missed Marta too. Father was angry all the time after that. He gave up hitting her with the wooden switch after breaking two of them.

Marta, I wish you'd come back. I don't want to kill anybody. I only want to go to the creators to be with you and Mother.

A twinge shot through Aarlen's spine. Father always caught her. Sometimes her body ached for weeks. In her mind's eye she saw that slender shaft as it hissed through the air; heard and felt the crack of metal on flesh. Her hands knotted into fists.

She stretched. Something warm caressed her ankle, Fennel, a big gray-and-white manx-cat who hunted FalconHall's vermin. She scratched behind his tufted ears and under his chin. He blinked with big gold eyes and gave her his funny cat smile.

He reminded her of another cat, Jacques. Aarlen wished she could undo the bad things she'd done; on that day especially.

She remembered sitting near the balustrade at the top of the marble steps that ran down into FalconHall's main colonnade. She wore her favorite dress, black velvet that hung loose on her pudgy body. Jacques, the manx who terrorized the manor's many rodents, struggled to get away from her. Aarlen's grip loosened as she paused to sniff the scents of cinnamon and spice wine wafting up from the kitchens.

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⏰ Last updated: Feb 16, 2021 ⏰

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