Poor, poor, pitiful me. -- Anon Guest
This had to be the worst day. She couldn't find any of her servants. There was nobody to dress her and she'd been wearing the same nightgown all day. Nobody had fed her breakfast. None of her tutors had come to give her any of her lessons, and she was well overdue for Elementary Dressage.
She had had the rudest awakening with a slave grabbing her out of her bed and setting her loose -barefoot!- on the streets. Which were on fire. People were running everywhere and she had bounced off more than a few people before a complete stranger scooped her up and deposited her into a pen with a confused crowd of similarly underdressed children. Some were naked, and almost all of them were dirty. Many of them were crying.
When the grownups finally came to see to them, they came with shirts for the naked ones, washcloths for all of them, and made them sit at long benches with bowls of gruel instead of breakfast. Some had to be taught how to hold their spoons. This was not the fare she expected. A princess like her deserved far better than a bowl of gruel.
"Is there no salt?" she demanded. "No butter? No cream? No bacon?"
"Not today," said a passing grownup. "Eat and be grateful, or someone else'll eat it for you."
The Princess Emerald Gilder Phurbillou Dancie Hortensia Janneus had to admit that she was hungry. She kept her posture and poise regardless of her circumstances.
It was mostly oats, though there was also barley and millet in with the roughly-cracked grains. It was warm and bland and filling, she supposed. She was meant to breakfast on pancakes and syrup with a fruit compote. With scrambled eggs and bacon as a companion. And fresh juice or spiced milk to drink, served in crystal.
Here, she was expected to be grateful for a tin cup with water in it.
There was only one thing she could do. She had to complain. She knew her rights, and she knew she was owed more than this.
The children were allowed to stay within the tents, and told to stay out of the way of people who were busy. Emerald knew that that was a lie. The slaves were malingering. What she had to find was a servant to boss about and put things back to normal.
She found a woman with her hair woven around her head. Out of the way of all the things a servant was expected to do. Not even a cap over her hair. The woman's sleeves were rolled up and she had her full attention on someone lying on a bed.
Someone with shackle scars on their ankles. They weren't important.
The air was tinged with magic, but magic was wasted on a slave or a convict.
Emerald went right up to the servant woman and stamped her foot. "I want my horsie!"
The healer said, "this woman wants a patch of new skin. Which do you think is important?"
The audacity! Nobody had spoken to her like that in her entire life! "That's just a slave, they don't matter! Do you know who I am?"
The only answer was a mass of entangling vines wrapping up Emerald like a present. Emerald could not struggle free for all of the time this serving druid was busy with the worthless.
Only once the woman was done with her patients did she take Emerald apart from the filthy throng and announce, "Who you think you are doesn't matter. If you try to announce it, everyone here will kill you so hard that there won't be anything left to bury. Your father is dead, your home is a pile of smoking rubble, and any kind of title belonging to this realm is a death sentence. If you want to live, you will be quiet, be nice, and only ever use your favourite name. Do you understand?"
Anger hadn't helped her, so Emerald resorted to tears, "But I want my horsie..."
"Young lady, you need to become comfortable with hearing one word. It will save your life. That word," said the woman, "is 'no'. As in, no, you are not getting a horsie. Ever."
"But---"
"No. There are children here who don't have eyes. There are children missing limbs. There are children who don't have families, or names. And that is because they're infants we pulled out of the rubble. There are people who are lucky to be alive. You have all your fingers and toes. You can still breathe. You can still listen."
Emerald didn't want to say that she didn't want to listen. If she listened, she could hear the whole town screaming.
[Photo by Charles Chen on Unsplash]
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