Feral

1 ⇞ Red, Angry Eyes

     

Her eyes opened slowly as she took in a gasp of breath. She must have stopped breathing while she slept because she'd never woken up with such a need for air before. Hunger and the panic of unfamiliar places were the only morning greetings she'd ever known, and now she was acquainted with the morning welcome of near suffocation. It took her a few, priceless moments, but soon she was breathing evenly once more, and she'd remembered where she was, where she'd been since she was stolen away from the forest and its winters of cold, cold hunger.

She sat up from the small bed and glanced at the thin door that told her the tiny excuse of a room she was in led to other places. Maybe even held a trail back to the trees, where she'd stashed the nuts, roots, and berries she'd found. Her eyes narrowed, and her lips parted slightly in what could have been a snarl or the baring of teeth. If any creature had raided her stash when she'd managed to get back, she would hunt it down and use its flesh as a replacement for the food she'd lost to it. The beast, having long ago become so much a part of her that it was as much her as she was it, huffed out a breath at the thought of chasing a little squirrel. Her own lips curled at the response from the beast. It was an amusing idea, petty though it was.

Quietly, so the guards at outside the room wouldn't hear her through the thin door, she got up and lifted the worn bed–a mattress they called it–to reveal her stash of trinkets and foods. Quick as prey burrowing into a den, she snatched a piece of food and stuffed it into her mouth, glad she'd stashed all she could away. The food the woman who came each day had brought her was different than before. It smelled wrong to her, like the dead things the big black birds ate up with glee. She never ate what they ate. She always copied the big cats, the wolves, and the bears when the emerged after the cold snows went away.

Her eyes flicked to the wooden thing the woman always placed her food on. Stepping softly—it wasn't that hard to keep quiet here, where all the ground was made of cold stone—she approached the construction of wood, walking around it, looking for signs of weakness and how it had been put together. She prodded the edge of the flat surface the food was always placed on and watched the thing wobble. Tilting her head, she walked around to the other side of the thing, where she found one of the four things the surface part stood on didn't touch the floor. Her lips curved and she began to poke and prod at the piece, trying to get it away from the rest of the wood. It took time, and several attempts at pulling the thing off—which all resulted in her freezing the moment the wooden thing moved and made noise—before she realized she could twist the support off.

Feeling proud of herself, the girl slowly set the wooden thing back on the ground so there wouldn't be any loud bangs to alert the people standing sentry on the other side of the thin door. Knowing she couldn't use the wood stick in her hands just yet, she slid it under the bed, where it would be easy to overlook. Then she curled up in the corner of the little space she'd been locked in and waited.

The beast was very good at waiting.

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"Miss Tessa!" a young woman exclaimed, leaning against the door of Tessa's office as if she'd run to the room as fast as she could. Tessa looked her over and surmised that the younger woman had indeed run. Why though, was the real issue. Nothing that deserved running ever happened on the floors the junior maids were assigned to.

Tessa stood and approached the girl—in the grand scheme of things, she was just that, a girl. "What is it, Maribel?"

The woman stood up straight, years of conditioning kicking in despite her distressed state, "It's the girl Miss Tessa, the one confined in the last room of the girl's corridor."