Sisters Three (Completed)

3. Adair (1/2)

Brenna and Morna's aunts came a fortnight after their parent's death. The letter announcing the arrival of the aunts preceded them by only a day, and it bore no mention of Adair anywhere in it. Adair wasn't that surprised. They were related to her only by her father's marriage to their sister, and so Adair was probably no more than a forgotten side-note. She pretended that it didn't bother her that they only wished Brenna and Morna well, but she planned to sneak off to spend the day in the barn behind Nurse's small cottage.

The aunts came with a grand carriage painted black with canary wheels. They were in the latter part of their life, with graying hair and old fashioned dresses. They smelled of strange lands and brought along a pair of matching dogs that could have fit in a hatbox and which had an annoying habit of licking shoes. Adair found the aunts and the dogs of an annoying breed.

"Hello, niece," one aunt said, austerely. She bent and embraced Morna stiffly. Adair would have tensed, repulsed by the bony elbows and wrinkled neck, but Morna melted into it, a smile stretching her face. Brenna smiled nicely, dipping into a curtsey. Adair stood with Nurse in the doorway of the cottage, her mouth pressed thin and her arms crossed over her chest.

The elder of the aunts, Nora, held her skirts out of the mud that been churned up by Nurse's brother's cart, and looked around at the ramshackle and erratic out-buildings that came with a small farm. Her eyebrows drew together and her thin nostrils just barely flared. She leaned toward her sister, Perta, and whispered loudly, "You'd think our nieces would have at least warranted a room in an inn. This... dairy farm isn't fit for the cows it milks." Perhaps it wasn't meant for Nurse to hear, but she heard it all the same. Her large ears went red and she shuffled indoors to try and shine the smudges off the tea-cups once more. Adair stayed put as the aunts edged forward, led by Morna and Brenna.

"Nurse made some tea and some bread for you," Brenna said, as if this offering was something that was her idea and thus she should deserve all the credit. She flipped her hair over her shoulder, forgetting that she was dressed in rough homespun and not her usual finery.

"We ate before we arrived," Perta said, although the last inn they would have passed had been at least four hours away.

Morna and Brenna entered the cottage first, dashing to the table and Nurse. Adair waited by the doorjamb, her eyes following Perta and Nora.

"The innkeeper is very loyal to Allica's officers," Adair said as the aunts passed her. "We would have been lined up and shot in the head if they'd taken us there to stay."

Perta's mouth popped open and Nora looked about to say something, but Adair pushed away and out of the house, heading for the stable. Her stomach was empty, but she couldn't stand watching those two women ignore her and insult Nurse. She could find better company in the old nag that had been retired to permanent stable care last season.

The stable was really only a small barn with three pens. One for the nag, one for the workhorse, and one where they occasionally kept any of their dogs that were whelping. Straw covered the floor and the smell of animals and oats filled the air. It was not a place that would be familiar to Adair, but perhaps that is why she liked it. Better to start over in a completely different place than to try and hold onto what fragments of the past life that she could scrape together.

She gathered a little mountain of straw together in the empty stall and draped an old horse blanket over it. The prickly horse-hairs and the rough fibers of the blanket conspired to rub her exposed skin raw, but she was too stubborn to care. She wanted a seat and she wasn't willing to get straw stuck to her dress and hair. So she sat on the blanket and tucked her legs into her skirt, staring at the far wall and hoping the aunts would not stay much longer.