Two weeks in, and Rattleglass was bored. Her grief had slowly waned, under the monotonous weight of summer. She had already had two years to mourn the death of her brother, and over a month in that grey empty house, to come to terms with the fact her parents were gone. The grief was a wound which would never heal, but it would scab over, and that was enough.
Shortfire had been her constant companion over those two weeks, and together they had explored the woods around The House. Before she turned up, they had been the youngest child, and had mostly stuck to the willow tree den, but with a companion…
They found small secret places, forgotten ruins and a mine which appeared to have been abandoned many generations before, perhaps the reason the remote house was built in the first place.
But, by the end of the first two weeks, she was bored, and that was when they decided to explore the village.
-
Peering out from the corner, she saw Shortfire nod. "C'mon, it's clear!"
Rattleglass nodded and scurried across the narrow street, diving into the alleyway between two houses on the other side, panting for breath. Two weeks of running around in the woods had made her fitter, but she wasn't all there yet, and several months of grief and poor food, along with being thirteen years old had left her thin and weedy.
She panted, "Ok, your turn next," Rattleglass looked around, before pointing to a nearby roof, "you have to get over there, over the roof and down the other side without anyone spotting you!"
Shortfire wrinkled up their nose and sniffed, rising it into the air, "of course your majesty," then she broke down giggling, "easy!"
She looked surreptitiously around, narrowing her eyes and doing several over-exaggerated checks, before spinning around and charging towards the steps. A few hops and she was up and over, a scuffle as she made her way through the roof garden, and then she was down on the other side.
Rattleglass took the ground route through the alleyway, and met her on the other side, sneaking like a thief from a novel.
-
Come lunchtime they were bored of the game, and resorted to wandering the streets looking for coins. They didn't get any sort of pocket money at the house, why would they need it, so they had nothing to buy food with, but you could often find pennies in the gutters or half-buried in the soil. If you knew where to look, that would be enough to get food for both of them.
It was more of a town than a village. Neither Rattleglass nor Shortfire knew the name of it, and neither of them felt like asking. It was simply "the village" to them. The settlement was a blip in the woods, and consisted of small rows of three or four houses, with gaps between and sometimes bridges overhead. The roofs weren't accessible to the public, and to travel you had to stick to the ground.
Rattleglass had never lived in the town, and she had only ever travelled through it in carriages, but Shortfire complained a lot. Apparently, where she was from, it had been different.
There was a main street, where there were grocers and butchers and bakers and all of the good stuff, then a couple more streets of shops, and the rest was housing. There was a market held once a week on the main street, but they hadn't been in on that particular day yet. Today was some sort of weekly rest day, and the streets were quiet as they walked.
Having failed to find pennies, they settled down at the end of a garden they had found earlier in the week. It was overgrown and neglected, and on ground level so it didn't need to be maintained to prevent the roof collapse. The two of them had burrowed into the undergrowth and dug themselves a small den amongst the vines.
Shortfire fiddled with a tuft of grass, weaving it into little ropes, "my ma" she started suddenly, and then halfway through the sentence changed their intonation, "my ma wanted me to be a boy, and I didn' wanna be a boy. Not all the time." They didn't look up from their weaving. "I got in a fight with me dad and he hit me and then I dunno what happened after that. Ended up here."
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Rattleglass looked over, biting her lip and suddenly realising she didn't know how to word what she wanted to say
"My ma…" She started, but that wasn't right, "my… My brother died."
She held herself very still for a moment, controlling it, "he was… He was the other half of my soul."
She looked down. Around them, the breeze rustled the grass, and she could hear the noises of the town. The clatter of horses and the murmurs of human conversation.
She let out a breath. "I loved him and he died anyway. Then…" She drew it back in, "I guess my parents died too. Later." She paused, "Nobody… Nobody found me?"
Shortfire looked up, and she looked away, leaning back against the warm brick wall behind her. "They took them away, but… I just ended up on my own for a while, in the house."
"Nobody came to get you?"
Rattleglass shook her head. "It was a bit like this house I guess, in nowhere. All the servants left and it was just… me."
She stared up at the green roof of their little den. Now she had said it, it seemed so much easier to keep speaking, like a door unlocked.
Shortfire reached out and patted her on the knee, and she smiled sadly at them. "They put me on the dragon to get me here."
Shortfire's eyes widened, "for real?"
She laughed, "yeah, I don't really… Remember much of it, but" she shrugged, "he seemed nice."
"Wow." Shortfire stared at her as if they'd never seen her before, eyes wide and mouth fallen open. "That's nuts! I just came by horse!"
She laughed, and the tension broke.
They spent the rest of the afternoon with Rattleglass recounting what she could remember about the dragon ride, and Shortfire reacting with reverential awe.
When she went to bed that night, things were pretty ok.
-
She didn't tell the other children about the dragon, and neither did Shortfire. She already knew that Plumsweet didn't like her for whatever reason, and she suspected that admitting she had done most of her journey by the most expensive transposition method possible would only have soured that relationship further.
Her attempts to make overtures with the others hadn't gone so hot either, so she had stopped bothering.
The oldest girl was Plumsweet, at thirteen, and the other was Coldspring, who was ten. The oldest boy was Cloverstep who was almost fifteen and the next youngest boy was Icecoat at twelve. Finally, the last boy was Teapot, who was only nine.
Rattleglass was twelve, and Shortfire only eight, but they got along well. Everyone else seemed to already have their established friendship groups and she didn't feel like trying to talk to them. She wasn't going to stay here forever, and neither were they. It was their loss.
At the start of her third week in the house, Plumsweet announced that it was time she started helping with chores. Rattleglass didn't mind so much, and Shortfire offered to hang around with the two of them. It wouldn't be a fun day, everything had to be done quietly so there would be no talking, but it was better than hanging around on his own under the willow.
She had never done any housework before, and that day involved a lot of sneering from the older girl. The bedding had been washed the day before, but there was still cooking for upstairs and some cleaning to do. Plumsweet took care of most of the cooking, and Rattleglass silently yearned to know what on earth she was doing.
She'd also never even seen the process of cooking going on, back home. After her… After her parents had died, she hadn't eaten much, mostly just drifting around the dark and empty house like a ghost. Somebody had left food for her at one of the back doors, one of the old servants, and she had broken into that when the rare pangs of hunger struck her.
Nobody had told her if it was disease or poison that had killed her parents. They had said poison, for her brother. It was a rare disease that made you foam red at the mouth, and her parents had enemies.
She scrubbed at the table in the middle of the room, with little experience but the anger of grief powering her movements.
They had to drag her away from his body, and she hadn't spoken for months afterwards. When she closed her eyes she could still see his face, and she had awoken sobbing every night for months.
Her parents had gone the same way, two years later to the day. She hadn't been the one to find them, instead, being awoken by the screams of the servants. The hit had been bad, but it wasn't the soul-tearing grief that she had felt when she lost her other half.
The servants had packed up and left later that day, and in one fell swoop, the mansion went from full and busy, to silent and empty. Nobody lit the lamps, nobody opened the shutters. Even the dogs and horses were gone. The pony she had known since she was a child no longer in her stall, the hay mouldering in the mangers.
She had wondered if she was also dead, as she drifted around that great and empty house, but if she was, then where was her soul, her Heartsdream. Shouldn't he be here too?
A hand on her shoulder, and she realised she had stopped scrubbing, her face soaked with tears. Above them, the floorboards creaked, and Plumsweet took the brush from her hand.
"Go outside," she murmured, gesturing to the door, "I'll send Shortfire after you."
Rattleglass shook her head, rubbing at her face with the back of her wrist. "I'm ok" she whispered, "just gotta think less." She wasn't going to be beaten by this. She had made it this far, she would survive now.
Plumsweet stared at her for a moment, and then sighed through her nose, shrugged, and handed her back the brush.
They spent the rest of the day working in silence.