Being dismissed out of hand for something I struggled to wrap my head around did not leave a pleasant taste in my mouth, and Andreaki soured the situation further with the threat of leaving within two weeks if I could not make progress.

As I walked down the hall in shame, the statues and magic I adored did not invoke the same level of love I felt minutes prior. Instead, they invoked a sense of bitterness, and were they not attached to their pedestals, I might have tried to knock them off. The pitiful stares they gave me nudged me through the hallway faster than I would otherwise go.

“You’re back early, how did-” Dragoslava began, stopping when I slammed the door closed behind me as I walked into the dining hall.

The moment the door left my hand, a pit tore through my stomach as I realized what I had done. Through my clouded anger, I failed to consider how my maid would react to such an action. The fact Dragoslava was my personal maid meant nothing to her, and she did not hesitate to punish me for behavior she did not approve of. Experiences from past told me she did not approve of slamming doors.

Her outrage never came. Instead of starting a verbal fist fight, she stopped cleaning a porcelain shelf and walked through a door to the kitchen.

That was a first, I thought, not sure how to react to her unusual persona.

Her lack of reaction prompted me to stay planted until Dragoslava came back with a plate filled with an absurd amount of eggs, a peculiar favorite of mine that only she knew.

“How did it go?” Dragoslava asked.

“I’m not sure,” I replied, looking down at my food with an emotion that would have been shame if I knew what to feel shame over.

“What did she teach you?” she inquired, offering me a place to start.

“She told me what magic was, but she then said she couldn’t teach me until I figured out what’s different now than before I used magic.”

Dragoslava frowned more than she usually did, and I could hear the gears turning in her head, grinding away at thoughts I could not comprehend.

“What do you imagine magic feels like?” she asked after a solid minute of silence.

“I’m not sure. I’ve never considered it,” I answered after a similar amount of silence. “Tingly, I suppose.”

Once again, silence returned between the two of us as I picked away at my eggs, my disappointment eating away at my appetite.

As I neared the end of my meal, I saw a smile grow on my maid’s face. Smiles were not new to her face, but I had learned to be afraid whenever she did.

“To think the daughter of the great Medvedevs would force a tutor to end a lesson early. I mean, how little talent must you have for a draconic being to have nothing to work with?” she lamented.

“It’s not my fault. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel!” I shot back.

“No, no, of course not. It has nothing to do with you, I’m sure. It couldn’t have anything to do with your situational awareness, or lack thereof. How could that even be possible?” Dragoslava continued, turning her back on me to continue her work.

I never cared much for what my maid thought of me. It was difficult to do so when I found her as difficult as I did, but her words cut me deeper than I expected. I didn’t have a grip on sarcasm at that point in my life, but what I understood was that I did not like the tone she spoke in. It nagged me further that I did not know why.

“What am I supposed to do then?” I retorted.

“Oh, that’s not for me to decide. You’ll just have to find out what you're missing on your own, just as Andreaki told you,” she said.

“And like I said, I don’t know what kind of difference I’m looking for!” I shouted back, my frustration spiking to a degree that did not match the level of anger I felt towards Dragoslava.

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Knowing how she would respond to an outburst against an elder, I shrank back, preparing for a verbal spar. She left me confused when she did not reciprocate my anger let alone react to it.

“And like I said, you will have to find that out yourself. The daughter of the Medvedevs will have to spend who knows how many months, or maybe even years, not knowing how to use magic. I wonder how much money your parents spent on Andreaki, she is a dragonoid after all, and they did have to get permission from The Nest, so it can’t be pocket change. To think it’ll all go to waste because you couldn’t figure something so simple out. I mean, if a maid as simple as I can use magic, it can’t be that difficult, can it?”

To show off, she flicked her wrist into the air, causing sparkles to fly from her fingertips.

Before I could give her an answer, Dragoslava spun around on her heel and marched out of the dining hall, a glimpse of a greater smile on her face.

Everything about the last few seconds of the interaction caused my blood to boil and my fists to clench. I could feel something going on behind my back, but I couldn’t comprehend what it was.

Fueled by my anger, I stabbed my fork into my last eye and chomped down. I should have known from the unnatural resistance in the egg that something was wrong, and I spat it out when it felt as though I bit into a rock. The egg was frigid to the touch, which made me question whether or not it chipped my plate when it landed.

That woman! I seethed, keeping my thoughts to myself in case my maid was hiding.

Throwing my fork across the table, I shot up from my seat and stormed out, feeling more tired leaving than I did entering and cursing the chill that permeated the air.

—

For the next four days, Dragoslava mocked me through subtle mannerisms that went over my head when she first performed them but became obvious when I looked back on them. An unnecessary spell here, claiming how I shouldn’t have difficulty with a task there.

An outsider would be oblivious to her antics, which made the situation worse.

Because of her subtlety, no one could do anything for me, a fact I learned when I went to my father about her teasing. He dismissed me out of hand, saying I was too sensitive and that Dragoslava would never stoop to such a thing.

The drama with my maid did nothing to help my situation with Andreaki. For reasons beyond my understanding, my parents required me to attend her lessons in the study despite her refusal to teach me anything.

At first, I tried to coax some kind of tip out of her through questions, but she would shut me down before I could finish the question. As if to make up for the lack of teaching, she entertained me with her own magic for a few minutes before sending me off.

Regardless of what she did, it had no effect on the timer she gave me, and I spent most of my day in pseudo-meditation in the loosest sense of the word. I did not sit in a quiet, empty room with my feet folded, taking deep breaths with my eyes closed. Instead, I sat on my bed, trying to look inside myself to get some idea of what I lacked.

After coming up empty-handed time and time again, I ended up exploding at my maid for no other reason than to vent my emotions over my lack of success.

Somehow, she made it worse when she did not respond to my outbursts the way I expected her to. Dragoslava would respond by teasing and ignoring me. She treated my shouting, and rightfully so, as nothing more than a child throwing a tantrum.

For those four days, I could never get warm, no matter what I did. No matter how many layers I put on or how deep I buried myself in blankets, the chill always came to me. No one believed me when I brought it up to them, saying the spells keeping the house warm all worked. Trusting them not to lie about it, I could do nothing but drape myself in thicker clothes despite how little they did to help.

At the end of the fourth day, I knew it had to end, and upon coming to that conclusion, I marched up to Dragoslava.

“I don’t know what you’re doing, but this needs to stop,” I declared.

Though my maid did not smile, possibly because of the presence of other maids, I could tell I amused her with my statement. Who wouldn’t be if a ten-year-old marched up to them, bundled in a blanket, and made a demand for something you had been denying?

“Stop what?” she asked.

“That! Stop that! Whatever that is, stop it!” I yelled.

“Now, whatever do you mean, Guinevere? I would never dare to do such a thing as tease the daughter of a great Medvedev. How would I keep my job if I were to do such a thing?” she replied, maintaining her stoic tone.

“I don’t know! But stop doing that!”

Aside from my already spiked nerves from everything prior, my maid created something else inside me, something I had never felt before. It made my arms and legs tingle as the fluids drained from my extremities without feeling drained, swirling around and emptying into a bottomless pit in my chest. I wanted to dismiss the feeling as an extension of the emotions generated by my maid’s behavior, but my reasoning did not explain the ever-increasing weight of my eyelids.

It did not help when the warmth I tried so hard to preserve started leaving my body, bringing me to the brink of shivering.

Seeing my struggle, Dragoslava smiled.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.