A Terrible fate

Part 18

It took me a while to gather myself, wipe my tears away with the too-big sleeve of my nightgown, and shift myself off of my legs. They still hurt, but not as much as they had when I first landed on them.

I stared at them for a longer while. They felt foreign to me. My own body felt like it was working against me when I was finally ready to start doing things with it again. Could they even be my legs?

They didn't feel like mine, did not act like mine. My legs had never hurt this much before. They even looked different, paler than mine had ever been. Slimmer and sickly almost.

They couldn't be my legs. But they couldn't be anyone else either. I stared at my feet, wrapped in the little white knit stocking that Sir Lionel insisted I wear to bed as it was so cold.

I followed them up my ankles, the shins, the knees as they began to disappear under the skirt.

They were attached to me, so they must have been mine.

There were more tears now. More out of frustration than pain.

They were my legs, so why weren't they behaving like that? My legs would have never been like this.

They would have kept me upright and let me walk over to the window to look at the stars.

I wanted to look at the stars.

I glanced at the window again. Almost hoping that the curtains had fallen off with my fall, but the window and its curtains were nowhere near me and they remained steadfast in their blocking of my view.

I leaned back against the bed. I was so tired. My limbs felt like the long metal clubs my bigger uncles fought with. The metal was thicker than my head and longer than I was tall.

I had overheard some of my uncles commenting on how the bigger of the clubs weighed as much as a horse did.

My arms and legs certainly felt that heavy.

I just wanted to look at the stars.

I stared at the curtains blocking me from my view, my mind going blank as tears kept running down my cheeks.

It must have been an hour, or perhaps just a few moments before I came to as my whole body trembled.

If I could just get over to the window maybe I could move the curtains. They were long, trailing onto the floor. Surely I could pull them done if I just got over there. The rod the blue-gray fabric was hanging from was supported by only two small hooks screwed into the stone of the walls. If I reached the curtains and tugged on them hard enough the whole thing would come down, and I would be able to see the stars.

I turned back towards the bed behind me. Trying to bring myself up onto my knees so I could use the tall thing to pull myself up to stand.

But I couldn't.

I could barely move myself into a sitting kneeling position. My legs started to shake and tremble uncontrollably when I attempted to bring myself up on them. Even with my death grip on the bed sheets I was unable to pull myself up from my sitting position on the floor.

More tears were running down my face I realized. Was I hurt again? I couldn't feel anything, everything was just sort of numb again.

I was angry, maybe that was why I was crying. Mother always said I was an angry crier.

My brother would get loud, slamming things, screaming and shouting, and making as much noise as he could. He was the loud terror out of the two of us when he got angry.

I would sit and cry silently. My little mouth would tremble and my golden eyes would brim with tears until they spilled over my cheeks. My uncles would comment on how cute I was when I was upset, but my father was always worried about what must have been going through my head.

He always said that twins were two pieces of the same person, a single baby split into two when it was yet to be born. So whatever one twin did the other was often thinking, and what one twin thought the other often did. This is why, he would tell my brother and me, that twins may seem like opposites of each other when they were very much the same.

My brother and I shared a soul, a heart, a mind. So if he was yelling and screaming and slamming the things around him in his anger, what must have been going through my head was I would sit there silently and cry?

Was my mind as loud as he was?

I wouldn't have been able to answer that then, but I think that now I could.

My mind wasn't loud, it wasn't even the slightest bit noisy.

He must have taken all the noise with him when we two were split. He took the volume, the character, the shine that made everyone around him light up. I was the silent one, hiding behind my mother's leg, clinging to my uncle's skirts and capes. He was out and about, blazing his way through the world while I watched his fire burn as bright as the sun.

We may have both had the golden eyes of our ancestors, the bright shining stars that they were, but he was the one that shined.

That only grew clearer now. While I sat unmoving in my room, too scared to move, too stricken to do anything when our mother came in crying out to me in grief and pain, he was witnessing our whole family die at the hands of our grandfather. He took up our father's sword and ran the vile man through.

We were both thirteen, but he was every ounce of a royal that I could never have been.