To Rhial

31

Tells

The first few weeks were painfully tedious. I was thrust into being Lady Simira's full time servant. She trained and quizzed me on noble customs, the current affairs and the important people within the city and household. I had so much one-on-one time with her that being with her started to feel normal. It was strange, but around the second week I stopped thinking about it and I never saw her temper flare as violently as before. She was, for lack of better words, normal. Intense at worst and micromanaging at best, but I grew accustomed to her mannerisms slowly and learned when to and not to approach her.

I didn't see Adam or Vetia, nor did Simira answer me when I asked about them.

Every morning at the asscrack of dawn, the corty handler woke us servants up with a swift kick to our door, which usually knocked it right open. I was to immediately wake Lady Simira. I would knock and wish her a good morning. If she wasn't awake, it was my duty to wake her by knocking on the door. What a joke that was. Firstly, her room was through another door in her study, so hearing me knock was already impossible. Secondly, she was an abnormally heavy sleeper who wouldn't wake up most of the time. The second day of being there, I wasn't loud enough, saying her name for probably an hour outside her door before another servant got annoyed by my constant repeating her name, and kicked Simira's door, screaming loudly to scare her awake. So I started doing that. She would scream at me with some variation of "shut the fuck up" and glare at me like I was disturbing her for doing my job when she finally let me in, but it worked.

For the first activity of the day, she joined the guard for their armored formation run around the quarter, taking half the guard on different days, alternating days between Simira or Zev leading. Simira's group was made up of distance runners like her, but she was a well-oiled machine that never needed to stop unlike the rest of us humans. No distance, incline, or obstacle could break her breath or stride. Low and behold, she dragged me along for it. She threw a brass chestpiece, a belt with a scimitar and dagger, and a chainmail shirt on me, then we ran. We did a loop around the quarter, starting at the manor, which had to be about twenty miles. From the manor down the hill to the market to the factories to the residential zone and pleasant way, across the farmland, then back up the hill to the manor. That fucking hill. I'd never cursed a hill so much in my life until I had to run up that one every other day after already feeling dead at the end of the run.

We returned to her study, where she lectured me on Vehfirn and Triala history and politics while she trained in her personal dojo. Her routine was a mix of intense stone throwing and lifting, bodyweight exercises, and sparring with Captain Zev on her run leading days, or me when Zev was off leading the run. Despite him being a giant compared to her, she'd learned how to take him down well in hand-to-hand combat, though she only managed to execute it about every one in ten attempts. Not to mention the constant complaints that he was pulling punches, which he would then correct, promptly winning nearly every bout because his reach and sheer power was ridiculous compared to her. She always said "If we were using sigils, it'd be different."

Surprisingly though, she rarely lost to him when using a Triali scimitar and dagger, being nimble and agile, able to read Captain Zev like a children's book. They played a point game similar to fencing, where points were scored based on where they struck each other with wooden scimitars and daggers. Those other days, my sessions, were when she'd use me as a punching dummy while quizzing me on her lectures. I ended up with more bruises than correct answers, but I couldn't deny that I was learning.

After my daily lessons, she washed in her personal quarters and I washed in the servant's shared baths, then I worked with the other servants while Simira reviewed the quarter's legal work. Strangely enough, Lady Simira kept me away from the other servants as much as she could, saying they would "taint me." However, I did learn how to act as a servant. Servants greeted people of higher status with a military salute and a slight bow of the head.