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The Blade That Cut the Mouse's Tail
Chapter 18: Truth & Lies

Chapter 18: Truth & Lies

Mouse stood face to face with a round-faced boy who bore upon his head the most hideous crop of yellow hair she had ever seen. She had seen him before, though she could not remember his hair looking so garish, and wondered that she had never bothered to learn his name.

“Enter,” she could hear the old man call out from somewhere behind him.

The boy moved aside to let her pass, closing the door behind her, as Mouse stepped into the room.

Ludger sat behind his large acacia desk as usual, pen in hand, scrawling absorbedly on the parchment in front of him.

“Tea,” he said curtly, without looking up, and the yellow-haired boy disappeared out the door without a word.

Mouse shifted uneasily as she stood in front of the desk, trying to maintain the composure she had walked in with. She waited for the old man to say something, to bid her to sit or ask her purpose, but he did not speak. In fact, he did not even look at her.

Perhaps she had made a mistake in coming, she began to think. If the old man refused to even acknowledge her, what was the sense in any of it? What could she hope to gain from seeking the ear of someone who treated her as little more than a piece of furniture cluttering his rooms?

As the minutes passed, Mouse felt her irritation at being ignored begin to grow, but at last, the boy returned, tray in hand, and place the tea things on the desk. Ludger waved the boy away, and he vanished once again, this time through a narrow door by the bookcase.

It was funny, Mouse thought. Ludger never called for tea while she was with him. She was his pupil, not his guest, as he had often reminded her, and tea was only for guests.

With a final flourish, the old man replaced his pen on the desk and leaned back into his chair.

“So,” he said, giving Mouse an appraising look, “have you come to tell me that I was wrong?”

Mouse lifted her chin, looking at the old man behind the desk unflinchingly.

“No,” she said defiantly, though it was clearly a lie.

“No?” the old man raised a bushy brow at her. “Then why?”

Mouse did not know what to say. The old man knew her well, too well for her to think she could conceal her intent from him. And he knew her, she realized now, far better than she knew him.

But still, she would not substantiate his surmise.

She looked down at the parcel held within her arms, the blue linen doing little to conceal the shape of the box it swathed, and set it upon the desk.

“I’ve come to return this,” she said solemnly.

The old man settled into his chair, lacing his fingers over the bulge of his protruding stomach as he watched Mouse from behind penetrating grey eyes.

“I am afraid you cannot return it,” he said. “It is yours.”

Mouse shook her head.

“I do not want it,” she said decisively.

This was perhaps the closest she had ever come to arguing with Ludger, the closest she had come to defying him.

The old man did not break his gaze, as if by continuing to stare at Mouse he might bend her to his will.

But Mouse would not bend, not here, not now. This was her stand.

She might have little power to defy the Empress, the Council, the court, even the old man himself, but she could, she thought with satisfaction, deny him this. She could refuse his gift.

And in doing so, she could refute his otherwise absolute authority over her.

But what the old man said next all but rendered Mouse’s defiance of him ineffectual.

“Your father wanted you to have it,” he said.

Mouse felt something reel inside of her at these unexpected words, as though someone had grabbed her about the waist and knocked the wind out of her for a moment.

No one had ever spoken to her about her parents. All she had ever known was that they were Toths, and that they had both perished when she was still a babe.

She looked at the old man, her mind gripped by the thought that whatever hid inside the box may have been passed down from her father, a man who she would never meet but had longed, for the whole of her life, to know.

If there was any truth in what he said, it was worth knowing, and it was with a diminishing reluctance that she lowered herself into the chair across from the old man’s desk.

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Ludger lifted the pot of tea, pouring it out carefully into one of the small white cups, before gesturing for Mouse to take it.

Mouse had never seen him pour tea before. She didn’t know he could pour tea.

She took the cup as bade and looked down into the thin grey drink. The tea was warm, Mouse reflected as she held the cup her hands, not hot as it was when the Empress called for it. Perhaps his age would not allow for it, she wondered, but more likely, it was the case that when the Master of Tomes called for tea, it was not treated with the same sense of urgency as when the sovereign called for it.

She brought the cup to her lips, sipping gingerly from it to make sure it was not poisoned.

“He would have like to have given it to you himself,” the old man continued, “but,” he drew a breath, “circumstance prevented it.”

Mouse felt a strange heat begin to build behind her eyes as she raised the cup to her lips once again, this time draining it in a feeble attempt to swallow down the lump forming in her throat.

The old man nodded toward the box. Open it, his eyes seemed to say. But Mouse suddenly found that she did not want to open it.

She had been eager before, nearly brimming with curiosity as to its contents. But now, she had become afraid, as if in opening the box, all the pain of her past might suddenly come spilling out.

What secrets might be held within? Or worse, what disappointments?

Mouse looked at the box that sat waiting for her to open it. There was only one way of knowing.

She took the blue linen into her hands. You are a mouse no more, she told herself. You are the jewel of Aros, vanquisher of mysterious boxes.

She fumbled with the knot of the wrappings, feeling the old man’s eyes on her all the while. She tugged at the linen, the box slowly revealing itself, and gazed down at the familiar polished wood, the ivy engraved into the lid identical in every discernable way to the one she had seen on the Empress’s table.

She traced a finger along the design carefully etched into the wood, admiring the intricacy of it, before hooking a thumb under the smooth brass latch and lifting it.

“It was made on the occasion of your birth,” the old man said, “as a gift for your mother.” His voice was somber but not without emotion as he spoke. “Unfortunately, she did not live long enough to wear it.”

Within the box laid a blue velvet pillow, upon with was draped an ornate golden necklace. The design consisted of tiny flowers pressed delicately in gold encircling one another to form a chain. Mouse stared down at in stunned silence. She had never seen anything so beautiful in all her life.

“Perhaps you recognize the design?” Ludger prodded.

“The mallow of Toth,” Mouse answered quietly, unable to look away from the necklace.

Here it was, the one thing left to her by the two people in the world who mattered more to her than anything else.

She did not understand why she had been given this opulent gift, this thing that she could never wear. The mallow was the sigil of the Toth family, old as the Empire itself, but only royalty was allowed to outwardly bear it.

But it did not matter, for she knew now that at some time many years ago, her parents had thought of her as they placed the necklace gently inside the box. They had imagined her, Mouse thought, not as the babe that she was but as the woman she would later become, and they had loved her. She felt that love now, reaching out through time to touch her where she sat in the old man’s chambers.

She did not feel the tears coming, but she saw them as they landed on her hands, as they fell onto the small blue pillow inside the box.

“I wonder,” said the old man, “if you understand what it means, what I am trying to tell you.”

Mouse shook her head, her chin trembling as the tears continued to roll down her cheeks. She knew what her own heart felt, but she did not understand what he might be trying to tell her.

Perhaps it was an apology, she thought, his way of making amends for the damaging words he had spoken to her.

“What I am trying to tell you,” Ludger said, his word slow and measured, “is that you, Maudeleine Toth are the trueborn daughter of Emperor Lothar Toth and Elke of Ahnderland.”

Mouse pushed away the tears on her cheeks, listening to the old man’s words travel to her as if from somewhere far away.

“In other words,” he said, “you are the sister of the Empress Idalia Aemilia Toth. Or to be more precise, her twin.”

Mouse did not look up at the old man. Instead, she continued to stare at the necklace she held in her lap.

What a strange thing to say, she thought to herself, to tell someone they are the sister of the Empress.

With one last look, she closed the lid of the box, flipping the latch closed and replacing it upon the desk.

Reluctantly, she lifted her eyes to the old man’s face, wiping at the last of her tears with her sleeve. She looked at the sun spots that dotted his skin, the thin white hairs that sprouted from his ears, the thick bushy brows that hung over his eyes.

He was old, she reflected, older than she probably had realized. Perhaps this was his death rattle, to lash out at her with cruel accusations only to then draw her into bizarre fabrications, some desperate last attempt to mold and manipulate her.

Mouse sighed. He had made a fool of her, she realized, just as the Empress had done with her fool’s drink.

She looked at the box before her.

How much of it had been a lie? she wondered. How much of the old man’s story had been invented?

All of it, she supposed.

Her parents, whoever they had been, had not left her some opulent golden chain to wear about her neck as she pranced around playing Empress. No, they had left her nothing more than a name, that and a face full of dark southern features that had sealed her fate.

Mouse did not know whether to hang her head in shame or laugh at her own stupidity. She could forgive the old man for tricking her, but she could not forgive herself.

She placed her hands on the arm of the chair, and raised herself to leave.

“I know you do not believe me now,” Ludger said, “but you will come to, in time.”

Mouse bit her lip and turned her head away, suppressing every urge she had to pick up the box and hurl it against the wall.

“Sooner or later,” the old man said, “you will be brave enough to face the truth.”

Mouse felt the anger begin to build inside her. Bravery? she thought with a bitter laugh to herself. Bravery had nothing to do with this.

Bravery was what had been required for her to come here, to approach with an apology and a plea to be heard to someone who would never deign to offer her either.

But credulity—that was what had compelled her to stay, and it seemed that was all the old man desired of her.

“Your parents wanted more for you than this,” Ludger persisted. “They wanted you to know who you truly are.”

But Mouse found that she could listen no more to the old man’s ramblings, could bear his oppressive nonsense no longer.

If that was so, she thought to herself as she pulled open the door that led out into the hall, then perhaps they should not have left me.

And without another look back at the old man or the box, she left.