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Shil stretched out on her bed, focusing intently on ignoring the intense heat coming from her open window.  Her adoptive mother constantly nagged her that leaving it open would only make the house hotter, but she couldn’t stand the stuffiness that inevitably came from leaving her window closed.

She fell into a light trance, something she had discovered on her own that would allow her to ignore outside influences, and let her concentrate on her thoughts.  Unfortunately, her thoughts wandered, more often then not, towards things she preferred not to think about.

What’s wrong with me?  Why is it that everything odd and unusual always happens to me, or is blamed on me? Despair started to contaminate her thoughts, before she shoved it away forcefully, so hard she gave herself the beginnings of what would be a very painful headache.  She refused to think about the loneliness and pain that the accursed rumors spread throughout her small village caused her.  She began anew to build the walls of indifference around herself, to keep any of her emotions from showing to the outside world.  She knew that if she didn’t care, nothing would hurt later on.

Her finally attained sense of peace nearly-shattered when she heard her adoptive brothers wake up in the beds in the rooms next to hers.  Soon, they would charge downstairs, where their mother had already made the large early morning meal.  It was necessary for those who worked day after day in the fields to eat when and what they could, when they often had no time to return for midday meal.  Soon, too, her mother would call up the stairs demanding to know why she wasn’t already at the table.  Wait for it, she thought to herself.

“Shil, why aren’t you already at the table?  We’re waiting for you!” her adoptive mother, Finna, called up to her from the large kitchens below.

“I’m coming, mother.”  Shil gave the reply she gave every morning, never letting on that she knew that she was not, strictly, part of the family.  She never let on that she knew she was adopted, and she suspected her parents were just fine with that.  Shil wondered how long her adoptive parents thought the charade would last.  The more obvious differences between her and her ‘family’, her long silver hair, expressionless black eyes and fine facial features differed so much from her family’s brown hair and eyes, and rounder, more homely features.  She was also considerably taller then most of the people in her family, including her brothers.

She reluctantly pulled on the same dull pants and tunics she wore everyday, suitable to working in the fields.  They were all hand-me-downs from her older brothers, and she, being the youngest, never received any new clothes, aside from the one dress she owned, and never wore.

She descended the stairs silently, still working the skills she half-remembered from before she came to live with her adoptive parents.  She had claimed she had lost her memory, but it was only a half-truth.  She remembered scraps of an escape, and a following period of wandering.  But any time she tried to figure out more then those still-elusive thoughts, she would encounter a blank.  My whole life is a lie, she thought, not for the first time.  The thought didn’t bother though.  She was, and she knew it, not the perfect angel the rest of the village girls tried to be.  She never bothered even trying to fit that image.  Her life before coming to Detscove, where she now lived, had been a hard one, where she saw and partook in things the villagers would never dream of.  Or at least what she remembered of it, but she knew that she came from a place considerably larger then the little village. 

Settling silently at the kitchen table, Shil started eating the plain food, ignoring the startled noises coming from the rest of her family.  Her mother and father gasped out loud, as they did every day, as well as her two oldest brothers.  Her only other sibling, Stef, only sighed as he did every day as well.  A whole lot of excitement, when I can predict exactly every move my family will make long before they make it, she thought glumly.  She could feel the wanderlust within her rear its head once again, but she removed her self from any emotions, hiding behind her self-built barrier.  She forced herself to think on the charity this family had shown, when they had taken her in almost two years past.

When she finished, at exactly the same time as the rest of her family, she rose with her brothers and father, and picked up her work boots from beside the door.  Without comment, her brothers did the same, and trudged out to the fields.  They worked, three seasons of the four, for the local lord, who protected the village in return for labour and goods.  She personally didn’t think much of the lord she had never seen, but the heaps of praise the villagers gave him only aroused her suspicions more.  The vague remembrances of two-faced nobility forced her to distrust this unknown. 

Shil bent to work in the fields, focusing on her work, counting, in the many languages she knew instinctively.  She settled into her working pace, even strokes as she helped her family gather in the autumn harvest.  She often went the entire day without breaking from her pace, an ability much prized by her adoptive family.  That was the only reason she worked in the fields, and did not remain in the house with her mother as the rest of the girls of the village of Detscove did.  She already knew all she wanted to know about women’s duties, and that wasn’t much.

But this day her concentration was broken sometime after midday.  She had noticed her brothers had stopped working beside her, and she knew that they would not stop for much, as their stomachs would feel it if there was not enough food for winter.  She looked where their focus was, and noticed a well-dressed man on horseback.  She wondered how this man was different from any other well-dressed man they often saw traveling the roads beside their fields, who were also normally traders with large trains.

He must have noticed her perplexity, because her father muttered to her that this man was the local Lord.  He didn’t normally stoop to watching the common folk, and she wondered why he did now.  But, deciding it wasn’t any of her business, she returned to her work after what she deemed an appropriate amount of time spent gaping at the Lord.

It was because of this very reason that she didn’t notice the Lord make his way towards where the small family was working.  Her brothers and father were nearly paralyzed with shock and reverence, and it wasn’t until she noticed that they had not returned to work that she realized something else must have happened.  She turned around irritably, angry at another disruption in her work, and looked directly into hard blue eyes that were focused directly on her.  She involuntarily took a step backwards, away from the severe gaze of the Lord, dropping her plow.

He continued to gaze at her.  The ice in his stare chilled her to her core.  The feeling of indifference he gave off, perhaps unconsciously, was betrayed by the nearly hidden curiosity and interest in his stare.  He conveyed, wordlessly, a message close to warning, as if he knew something bad, or hidden, about her.

Shil could barely restrain the urge to slap, kick, or somehow harm this man.  She sighed inwardly in relief when he turned away.  The lord gave one last, contemptuous look at her, before he returned to the road, and his waiting horse.

She filed the strange even away in her mind, carefully recording any and all details.  She didn’t want to forget anything that may come back to haunt her.  Somehow, she didn’t think this would be the last encounter she would have with this man, nor, strangely enough, did she believe it was her first.  She felt some sort of foreboding associated with this meeting, and slowly, inexorably, things were coming to a head.  Her past would be explained, but only at her own expense.

This knowledge came on a roll of discomfort.  Things were unfogging her brain, filling it with new, or old, memories, and she could now understand the gaze.  She wanted to run, to hide from the truths now presented to her, in the form of past memories, doings, and prophesies.

 

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