Four months in was the tipping point. Her misery had finally started to wane a little, being forced to wear somebody else's body was bearable when she could have her freedom at night, and her body had started to get used to her odd sleeping pattern.
Her marks in classes had started to improve as well. She still wasn’t interested in the subjects, but admonishments, detentions, and threats to make her catch up in the afternoons were enough to make her care, at least a little.
She could have been top of the class, had she tried, but the school had beaten that out of her. If she had been treated better in the first days then maybe she would have come out of it with accolades, but it was too late for that now.
It was around this time, that Lemonleaf finally confronted her in a corridor. The girl had 4 friends behind her, and Twigseethe didn’t know their names, but at least one of them was from an upper-year, tall and intimidating.
Lemonleaf stood there, arms folded, blocking the corridor. Twigseethe tried not to make eye contact, but her attempts to squeeze past the group failed, and she was pushed back. She knew that if she turned and ran, they would have others stationed, to catch her.
With dread, she took a step back, reluctantly meeting the other girl's eyes. Lemonleaf's expression was not friendly and her body language was hostile, arms crossed in front of herself, back straight, her gaze unyielding.
“What is it.” Twigseethe said, her voice hoarse from disuse, sounding wrong to her ears. She glanced away, before squaring her shoulders.
If this was how they were gonna play it, then she wouldn’t be cowed. She had been content to keep her head down and out of the way, but if it was a fight they wanted… She lifted her eyes, meeting Lemonleaf’s gaze again.
The other girl didn’t look away, meeting her eyes back.
“I wanted to apologise,” she said, her voice hard and the words very unlike an apology.
Twigseethe blinked, that wasn’t what she’d expected. Was this some kind of trap?
“For what?” she asked, warily.
“For ever trusting you as a friend.”
Twigseethe frowned, what even was this, “we knew each other for what, three days? I don’t think that really counts as friendship.”
“It doesn’t” Lemonleaf’s voice was firm. “This is dumb and stupid.” Her eyes flicked towards her entourage, “Look, just don’t talk to me again, don’t come near me, and stay away from my brother, ok?” She seemed exasperated, as if there was some component to this conversation that Twigseethe was meant to have picked up on, but had somehow missed.
Confused, she shrugged, “Sure, I guess? I don’t even know your brother. I don’t know anyone.”
“You can’t be that much of a shut-in, surely.”
She shrugged, “Nobody speaks to me, I speak to nobody. Whoever your brother is, I don’t know 'em.”
“He’s in your stupid Growth class.”
She frowned, there was only one boy in her growth class as far as she knew, the kid who had sat with her at lunch once what, two months ago? She didn’t even remember his name.
“Alright,” she kept frowning, “I don’t even know his name.”
“Good, keep it that way.” Lemonleaf made a sharp signal with her hand, and her entourage relaxed, moving to surround her and freeing up the corridor. “Don’t speak to me again.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.” She muttered.
As the group moved away from past her, one of the followers, the one who was older than all the others, caught her eye. A look passed between them, a look which said “If I see you again, you are done for.”
Twigseethe gulped and was glad it hadn’t come down to a fight. She was deliberately short, and she had somehow lost weight over the past three months. She was pretty sure that if it had turned into a fight, she would have died then and there, beaten to death at the age of eight and a half in a school corridor.
-
Things carried on in a sort of equilibrium until the end of term. She got up, she went to classes, and then in the late afternoons, she would either nap on the rooftops or in the library.
She confirmed some things she had always suspected, in those classes. Apparently, most people couldn’t talk to birds or animals, and there were people out there who not only had no talent, but couldn’t see or detect magic at all.
She also learnt that different places had different rules. Back home, children were expected to experiment with Change, giving themselves ears or fur, changing how they presented almost daily. A boy could go to school in the morning looking normal, thinking of himself as a he, and come home in the afternoon with fox ears and a tail, thinking of herself as a she. There was nothing weird about it. If fox girl went back to school tomorrow and came back a he or a they, well, eventually somebody would throw their arms into the air and demand they make up their mind, but for the most part, it was accepted and normal.
Things were not the same here, in this city. Children were allowed to experiment, but only under strict supervision, and they were never allowed to hold those forms afterwards. They weren’t even taught magic until they were older than she was now!
It was mind-blowing. She had never in her whole short life considered that there might be places where things were done differently, and after that class she had sat and looked around at the other students, starting to understand why they were all so compliant with the overbearing rules here.
She had spent the rest of that afternoon in the library, staring blankly into the distance. Did she want to hold onto the values of her home and her childhood, or should she allow this place to change her?
She didn't know.
-
At night she would explore the castle, or hide in her little room. She tried to avoid going there during the day, in case she was spotted, but during the nights it was her own private space, and one of the few things keeping her sane.
The school was old, she had discovered. The building had started off as a single large square box, now known as the Hall. That was the room where they ate meals and held assemblies and sat at lunchtime when the weather was bad. Built off of it were kitchens and hallways and classrooms.
The meals were simple. There was porridge in the morning, as much as they could eat, but with little milk and no spices or sugar, and the lack of variety started to wear after a while. Lunch was light, cheese and bread, sometimes a little cold stew. There was no meat at lunch, and the vegetables used in the stews were very seasonal. Halfway through the afternoon, in the break between classes, they could go to the hall for a small bowl of fruit or berries.
Dinner was sliced meat, pigeon or chicken or beef or pork, with mashed tubers and vegetables.
This had been another bone of contention. She could speak to animals, and had spent her life conversing with dogs and pigeons. For the first week, she had refused to touch the meat, but the other students had reported her to the teachers, and from then on they monitored what she ate. Her attempts to swap her meat with the other kids in return for their vegetables hadn’t worked, the teachers vigilant.
They would make her sit at the table until she was done eating, and in her misery, hounded and battered, she had given up and given in. She still parcelled off her meat to the other kids when the teachers weren’t looking, and they never complained about getting more to eat, but if they were caught then they would both get told off.
Eventually, she would discover that the oldest students had an allotment of late-night snacks left out for them in the kitchen, and she would raid that for extra sustenance, but for those first few months she was constantly hungry.
Behind the hall was a new wing, with plumbed toilets and showers. This was a recent construction, and the novelty hadn't worn off yet with the staff, judging by how often they were expected to wash. She wondered if something had happened in the past, to make the teachers so adamant about it.
On the first floor were more classrooms. Twigseethe got the impression that it had originally been accommodation for staff, but now it was just classrooms and offices. One end held a big staff room, where the teachers congregated during the day when they weren’t working, rather than climb the stairs to their own floor.
The second floor was the student dorms and common rooms and storage, the scale of it far too much for the small number of students.
The third and fourth floors were The Library. Somebody long dead had donated a fortune to have it built, starting it with their collection of books and art, and over the hundred years since, it had only grown larger.
Again she got the impression that the school used to be much bigger. There were less than a hundred students, and the library always seemed huge and empty, even with most of the population of the school studying or hanging out in there.
They were allowed to borrow books as they wanted with little oversight. Nobody could leave the school after all, and there were always more books to replace any that got lost.
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She suspected that old students donated back to it, years after they left, and due to this the shelves were stuffed to bursting, with more books in piles and stacks wherever there was a gap.
There was one rather stressed librarian who looked after the place. He seemed to have a system for where he wanted the books to go, and this enforced some sort of order and sectioning, but it wasn't enough to compete with years of neglect and a hundred lazy students.
The children had been warned at the start of the year that anyone found damaging a book or school property would be expelled, and somehow it worked, the system more or less looking after itself.
During those first few months, she learned more from that library and reading during the night than from any of the classes she attended.
The library spanned two floors, with a chaotic and confusing layout, and above that was a small floor of staff accommodation and offices. She had explored there a little, but the teachers often stayed up late and their presence spooked her enough that she never gave it more than a cursory glance. The construction of the final floor was strangely modern in comparison to the rest of the building, and it spooked her.
She much preferred exploring the second floors and library, where the layout had been reconfigured so many times over the years that she was always hitting strange dead-end corridors and forgotten rooms.
She once found a room at the back of the library, hidden behind a bookcase, which had obviously been intended to be a reading room. At some point it had been stuffed full of books and abandoned, to be dealt with by future, and as yet non-existent, librarians.
She had had to do some interesting Changes to get herself up on top of the bookcase, and again to let her slip down the back, and as she did so, she was coming to understand cats.
The school had a lot of cats. They lazed around on the rooftops and hung around the Hall, stealing food off plates and lounging on students' laps. They were mostly banished from the library due to a few issues with littering, but even there were a few who were trusted to hang about. Two big tomcats who guarded the entrance with huge yellow eyes, whose lazy looks belied their watchfulness.
She spent a lot of time talking to and watching the cats, learning how they moved and jumped. She had once seen one jump from one rooftop to another, many meters below, landing with a grace she thought impossible.
She had spoken to many of them. Some were friendly, showing off their springy legs and instructing her on how to fall to avoid injury, while others were aloof, pretending they hadn’t heard her questions until she either met their petting quota or left, depending on the day. Together, they taught her how to move on silent feet, and how to feel the wind with her whiskers. How to smell out mice and how to judge distances.
There was a stable and paddock out behind the kitchens, where horses and ponies were stabled for trips to town, but she couldn’t get much conversation out of them. They were too used to being ignored to imagine she could hear them, socialised and dim.
It made her a little sad, but it was something she had encountered before, and she didn’t make another attempt to talk with them. It wouldn't make either of them happy.
She started to speak less and less to what she came to think of as “the humans” in the school. She did her school work and then kept to herself. As the weeks passed she had the strangest feeling, like her throat was closing up, and she wondered what would happen if she Changed herself away from speech. Would the magic let her do it?
She didn’t try. She knew the story of The Fool, and down that road lead something that she so far wasn’t sure she wanted to grasp.
What would she want to be, if she gave up on humanity? A bird was a tempting choice, flying through the air without being bothered by anyone, but she had known enough pigeons and sparrows to know that it wasn’t as easy a life as it looked. She would have to join a flock, like the one around the fire-bird. Or maybe they would chase her off, or kill her…
A cat would be a good choice. They led quiet, nocturnal lives, and she often saw them stalking the corridors at night, eyeing her with respect as she passed on silent feet, but she was almost too big for that.
She started to feel like a ghost in her own body. The strangeness of the form enforced on her only added to her dissociation.
She had stopped being able to wear the bird form during the day after a student had narced to the teachers. After that they had kept a closer eye on her, hanging out on the rooftops where she would normally practice. The summer was coming to a close, and it was too cold to go outside at night, so she just… Stopped trying. Choosing instead to spend her nights reading or exploring.
The magic lessons were interesting. She was learning to see Magic in others, and the lack of it coating her fellow students never failed to weird her out. It was like turning up to a masked ball, and discovering you were the only one who had bought a mask.
But then, later on, you discovered they did have masks, they just wore them on the inside, where nobody could see them. It was like being in a room full of ghosts.
She had tried to speak up at first in classes, to show them how to do it better, but had slowly given up, content to be silent and watch what the others in the class did, practising on her own at night what, if anything, she had learnt from the day's lessons.
They were allowed to change their forms in class, but with heavy restrictions and only under supervision, and the thought of it hurt her soul so much that she simply didn't, couldn't. The rest of the class thought she was slow, a small talent but nothing more.
If only they knew. Most of them couldn’t even store the magic within themselves, and it was frankly embarrassing to watch them struggle to enforce Changes that she could have done without even a thought.
-
Gradually, after six months at the school, the end of the first term came to an end, March heralding the start of spring. There had been a big holiday in the middle of December, but getting home would have been too difficult for most of the students, so they worked on through it. But by March the snows had cleared, and most students went home to their families for two months.
Not her though, she was a scholarship student, and the trip home would have taken months, to begin with, never-mind the return journey. Even riding on Dragon's back, the journey had taken almost three weeks, over land it would be much longer, if possible at all.
Even most of the Teachers went home, or to visit families and friends. The school was left with a skeleton staff and around fifteen students, who were all moved into the same dorm, to make it easier to heat and feed them.
The release from schedule was a strange relief. They normally had classes seven days a week, unlike a regular school which would only be five. It was made up for by their days being shorter, classes over by 3 pm. The students were left to themselves for the rest of the day, and most people formed clubs and friendship groups, hanging around in the hall or the library, or on the rooftops in the summer. The older students had sitting rooms attached to their dorms and often congregated there to play board games or socialise. She had snuck a look at those rooms during her nighttime excursions but hadn’t found much of interest.
Those who wished to study extra subjects also had the option to do so in the afternoons, but Twigseethe had never seen anything on the lists that caught her attention. She was passing her classes, but firmly in the middle, and the subjects got very little of her attention.
Not everyone was at the school because of magical talent, some were there for more academic reasons, their parents paying through the nose so they could say their child was at such a prestigious school. Apparently, the morning lessons were well regarded, but she didn't see it.
She spent the first week or so of the holiday exploring the furthest reaches of the library, finding corridors and rooms blocked behind shelves or piles of books, where it seemed students hadn’t stepped in years, never mind the librarian.
With less authoritative oversight, she was more free to shift, and she gave herself cat eyes, ears, a tail for balance, and, when she needed them, claws. She had experimented with a claw/hand hybrid, so she could retract the claws to still read and hold things without damaging them, but it was easier to just Change her hands on the fly.
She thought about fur too, with the school still being winter-cold, and unheated during the half-term, but that seemed like going a bit far. She did sometimes give herself a covering of downy feathers though, and they were warm and comforting.
Scrambling through the library, talking to the cats, reading, for a short time she was almost happy.
Out of all the books, she liked the histories the most, but there was a lot of fiction hidden in the library too. The school catered for children from ages eight to eighteen and had to entertain them somehow. The best books tended to float around the school, rarely returning to the library, passed from hand to hand until they fell apart from use. With no other students to compete with, she finally got to read some of those coveted gems.
-
The dorm she was in for the end of term held around nine kids, aged between eight and thirteen. She was almost 9 now, but her birthday wouldn't be for another couple of months.
The older students were in a separate room, just a corridor away. During the day she would see them all together, clustering in the hall like kittens venturing out for the first time, suddenly realising how big and empty the world was around them, and she resented them for their innocence. They had tried to include her in their group, adversity and lack of other options overcoming whatever had prevented them from speaking to her before, but by now she was un-trusting and feral.
After the first week she stopped heading back to the dorm at night, instead choosing to stay in the nest she had built in her hidden room, all blankets and warmth, surrounded by her favourite books and lit by the light of the moon or a small candle-lantern.
It was there, in those quiet weeks alone and with no supervision, that she finally went back to work on the bird Image. While before she had kept herself mostly human, she let that go now. Humans had done nothing for her, and she had no desire to stay with them.
She had spoken to an owl on the rooftop one night, catching it coming home from its hunt of mice and rats in the city, and it had given her a stern lecture. Amongst other things, it told her that the density of bones was not just for lightness, but for structure, so she wouldn’t die when she hit the ground, so she could heal faster. It was a better lecture than any she had received in school over the past six months, and it gave her a sudden insight into why the magic was resisting her so much.
She went back to the drawing board, scrapping her image entirely and rebuilding from scratch. Much longer wings, in place of her arms, a covering of tight feathers on her body, to allow the air to pass her by. A change of shape to her legs and the way she held her body. For her face she decided not to change, but instead fashioned herself a mask out of brass, using one of the school's empty workshops. A long beak, covering the top of her face and her nose. It was an affectation, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted to make the change to her face just yet.
The owl had explained to her that her eyes were weak and her ears were deficient, so she changed those too, revelling in the ability to see movement from so far away. Later on, he had directed her towards a family of hawks, and they had helped too, asking her to choose if she wanted to be a hunter during the day or during the night.
She had decided on during the night, and they could help her no more, but she had thanked them for their help by negotiating with the local cats to leave their nest alone, and she had enjoyed their hooked beaks and ability to turn on a dime.
All these things went into her Image, along with everything she’d learnt from the cats and the fire-bird and Dragon.
Standing on the rooftop, a week before school was due to start, she really considered it. She knew the story of the Fool, and if she did this then there might be no way back. It was possible she would lose her humanity.
Did she care?
She was miserable, but she was young. A part of her knew that it wasn’t forever, that one day she would be free of this school, but at the same time, she knew she couldn’t live like this for another seven years. She would go insane. More insane. The quiet unsupervised month and a half of holiday had been a relief, but it had also pushed her even further away from humanity. She couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken, and the thought of continuing like this scared her more than anything.
Mind made up, Twigseethe took a deep breath, and then launched herself off the edge of the building.
Her wide strong wings caught the air. She held herself for a moment, and then with a strong push, she rose easily up into the sky, catching the currents of air that swirled around the large building.
With a shake, she shed the mask, turning her beak into the wind. Somewhere below she could see people running and pointing, but that was beyond her now.
She was free.