"Little Monster: Part 1 (Amathera)" by Sarah ´SRW´ Bevon

Despite being Queen of the realm of Armia, I do not dictate everything, not even concerning my own life. Most of my memoirs were written by others, recording gatherings and proclamations, celebrations and judgements. The final part, which I may write myself, is designated as the place for a story. All know my great-grandfather's story of the Royal War. He was young when it happened, and none still live that remember it except from the stories.
During this war, the largest in the past three hundred years, many of the world's greatest heroes fought. They all died, to live on in song and story. My great-grandfather told me when I was young that they were not such great heroes, only men and women who did stupid things that worked out well. Those who died doing stupid things or who planned things more intelligently were lost behind the bold, fearless heroes. But, he added, there were enough of those heroes that no one could win, and the more intelligent, unmemorable people chose to end the war with a treaty.
Ah, but now in my old age I do run on, telling stories no one would care to hear. Perhaps, though, they will care for my story. It is of a very different sort, I think. It begins when I was not quite two years old.
Mera was one of my mother's maids. The women of her family had served the women of mine for time out of mine. She had been my nurse since I was born. It was a great honour to be so trusted, especially with the life of the heir, but Mother always insisted she deserved more. Mera always refused. Her humility and humbleness was shocking compared to the other maids' even though she was Mother's favourite.
She married Joseph, a large, mean man who worked for the palace guards. He scared me horribly when ever I saw him, though he never once made any move against me. I never learned what Mera saw in him, and I sometimes wonder if she even knew. Regardless, they had twin daughters shortly before my second birthday.
Myself, I don't remember any events at that time, but they've been related to me several times, by many different people, all of whom agree on every point. I can imagine the girls' nameday, and Mera standing over their two cradles with my mother and a woman who's face changes with each imagining. One cradle, which has been mine, was hung with silks and velvets, with long lavender and grey ribbons hanging all around. The other was much newer, created quickly when it was found that Mera was to have two daughters, not one. It was new-hewn wood, with only a few small blankets inside.
In the first lay Amalisa. In the second, Amathera. Amalisa was already the preferred daughter. She was the elder by perhaps twenty minutes, and many said the prettier. I highly doubt she was. The twins have always been identical for the most part, except for a few small things. What truly distinguished them were Amathera's ears. While Amalisa's were small and prettily rounded, Amalisa's extended half the normal length again, and ended in delicate points.
Mera and Joseph almost cast Amathera away as deformed, despite her being as healthy as Amalisa. She was always fractionally smaller, it is true, and somehow seemed more delicate, but she never sickened. It was Amery, Mera's father, who stopped them doing away with the younger child. He saw the girls for the first time and announced Amathera to be his true granddaughter, no matter what people said. Amery was like that.
On their nameday, a local fairy, the woman I can only vaguely imagine, came to the palace. Fairies came to important births then, to bless children or foresee their lives. They are rarely even seen now. The woman said simply that she needed to be there, and no one argued. She bent over Amalisa first, they say, and looked the sleeping babe up and down.
"A pretty one," she said finally. Joseph and Mera looked pleased. Amery didn't. He was a very wise man, my mother always said, and now, decades later, I agree. "Oh, I'm not blessing her with it, if that's what you think," the fairy said. "She is and will be that way without my help." Fairies could do that. They had made me beautiful, able to make beautiful embroidery, a wonderful dancer, and so on and so forth. Such gifts seemed wonderful at first, but grew old quickly. "I give her a different gift. She shall never be mistaken for anyone but who she is."
Mera shook her head. "I don't understand how that's a gift, but thank you anyway. I hope you have a safe journey home."
"No," Amery and the fairy said at the same time. "What of my granddaughter?" the man asked.
The fairy bent over the little cradle. In her arms she lifted Amathera, a silent child despite all that happened around her. She, unlike her sister, was awake. Her big eyes blinked at the gathering.
"There is nothing I can give this one," the fairy said sadly, "much as I wish I might. Something to ease the road ahead. Her path is her own, and neither I nor any other may touch it." She smoothed the thin, pale hair. "All I can offer is hope." She bent her head to whisper to the child, then laid her down again.
My first memory of the twins, my first memory in fact, sits like a painting in my mind. The colours have dulled with age, the faces probably changes. But in my mind's eye I see two little girls with golden hair, running through the grass of the lawn hand in hand. Amalisa is leading, while Amathera follows in her matching dress.
From that time I can remember nothing else distinctly, but I can easily recall the outline. Other children teasing Amathera. Amalisa joining them, turning against her twin, calling her sister a freak, demon-spawn, and other names in the way of small children. Amathera running, sobbing, to Amery, who sent the others quickly on their way while he comforted his weeping granddaughter. Joseph raging that Amathera was an outcast, and that there was nothing wrong with her being treated as such. Amery taking Amathera away from her parents to live with him and his second wife.
That day, which I watched from behind my mother's skirts, is another painting in my mind. Amery stadns in his rough work clothes, holding the weeping toddler that was Amathera. Joseph stands over them, trying to tower above Amery, clearly angry. Mera sits to one side, the other little girl in her arms. She watches the scene calmly.
In my mind the image moves, and I can hear sounds, thin and faded by years. Joseph yelling to take the demon-child out of his sight. Amathera crying softly into Amery's shoulder. Then Amalisa's words cut across it all.
"Why won't daddy kill the monster?" she asked her mother. "That's what heroes do." How I hate to remember that at that time, I agreed. It is a thing of deepest shame, the way we treated the small girl with pointed ears.
The scribes tell me I must come to the story and leave my introduction. Oh, they don't order me, to be sure. But they suggest, and somehow what it is they suggest is what happens. So I must conclude this part of my story, though while there is life there is neither beginnings nor endings. I will try to do so as concisely as I can. Amathera went to live with Amery and Lill, his wife. They raised her well away from the rest of us, far enough that soon she was only a barely seen, hardly noted, shadow on the palace grounds. Mother always remembered her, and sent clothes and money for the little girl. She did what no one else could bring themselves to do, and show kindness to our little monster. I didn't understand then, but now I can see the kindness and courage it took for her to do so.
The next time I really saw Amathera, I was nine. Amalisa had already become my small servant, doing the few duties she could manage. It was her birthday, and I had begged Mother and Mera to throw her a party. How grand I thought it then! Really, there were only perhaps twenty people present, mostly family and close friends, gathered in a small room. There was a cake for Amalisa, and a few gifts. Unknown to any of us, Mother had invited Amery to bring Amathera. They arrived near the end of the party, as Amalisa finished opening her gifts.
Scared of the strangers all staring at her, Amathera behind her grandfather. I can remember, if I try, the small blond poking from behind Amery's back, hair floating on a breath of air, long pointed ears quivering. Mother approached slowly, and bent down to take her hand, whispering comforting words. Reluctantly, the child followed her up to where Amalisa sat.
The girls were identical twins, or almost, but seeing them together I could see so many differences. Amalisa sat like a queen in her pink party dress, one of my old ones. Her blond hair was long and neatly done, her blue eyes big and innocent but somehow cold.
Amathera, in contrast, was a bit dirty from her ride through the woods from where she lived. She wore an old boy's jacket over her plain grey dress, handed down from one of my younger brothers unless I was mistaken. Someone had embroidered swirling green vines along the sleeves and up the off centre opening with its small buttons. Her blond hair was cut short near her chin, and a slight bruise could be seen on her cheek. While her sister sat with cool self-possession, Amathera stood shyly, clearly uncomfortable and out of place.
"Here," she said, thrusting a small bouquet of wildflowers at Amalisa then ducking behind Mother's skirt. Her voice was very like Amalisa's, but a little warmer somehow, a little softer, and more musical. It grew as she did, changing from a little girl's voice, like any other, to one of unmistakable beauty, and put me in mind of chiming bells and flutes.
Amalisa sniffed the flowers delicately, then laid them aside.
"What do you say?" Mother prompted, slipping Amathera a piece of left-over cake.
"Thank you," Amalisa said sulkily. She clearly wanted her sister gone.
Soon she was, back to her forest vastness with her grandfather. She stayed there, hiding in the cottage and the woods, for the next nine years. Sometimes I saw her, at a distance, wearing old jackets and worn skirts, running and riding, shooting her little bow with Amery or Lill. I was growing into a dignified young woman, and thought her activities inappropriate. Neither I nor anyone else ever had a chance to tell her so, though, for she disappeared as soon as someone approached.
Shortly after Alisa, as Amalisa came to be called, turned sixteen, Amathera was brought to the palace.
"She needs to meet people," Amery told Mother. "She can't meet them with us, and she can't spend all her days hiding in the forest."
Thera had changed. Still blond and blue-eyed like her sister, she had a confidence to match that of any queen. She was graceful and lovely. I believe most of the young men in the palace would have fallen in love in an instant, had she not been branded an outcast so forcefully and had they not already been smitten with Alisa. I think some of them did anyway. Most of them, though, acted as if it were her fault their hearts beat quicker when she was around. Not that that was very often.
Mother sent her to the palace nursery, where she cared for the children that any royal court had in abundance. Children had not accepted her as a child, but as an adult she was much loved.
Anyone within perhaps five years of her age scorned Thera, but the younger children treated her as they did any other adult. Better. She could run faster than the fastest boy, climb higher than any of them dared, and any horse in the stable, or settle disputes fairly and quiet tears.
Despite this, she was hardly the most popular girl in the palace. That fell to Alisa, who was almost as beautiful, but somehow not quite. You could tell where each was in the palace at any given time, for she was surrounded by a crowd. Alisa moved with a drove of young men, all but hidden by their jostling numbers. Thera was surrounded by children as she led them to play in the field or swim in one of the numerous ponds.
Understand that of all the people in the palace, Thera's own family was the most distant. Besides herself and Alisa, there were twelve other children, one just a babe in arms. Now, I wonder if Mera and Joseph had so many to prove to themselves and the world that Thera was an abnormality, and in no way their fault. Three of their children ran with the other palace children, and treated their sister much the same as the others did, though they hid it from their disapproving father. Seven of the others, the ones over six or seven years of age, cared not a bit for Thera, trying to follow their other sister instead. The final child, Mattie, was a year younger than the twins. He alone amongst all the family and palace residents was a true friend to Thera. Already a hand taller than his sister, he was with her often, almost constantly, and protected her several times when ill meaning palace servants, or even nobles, tried to hurt her.
Although three years younger than me, he was handsome enough that even I paused when he passed by. Like his sisters he had blond hair and blue eyes, but he was somehow wilder than them, uncontrollable. He was like Thera in this, for though she had the same startling beauty as her sister, Thera was, I think, feral from her years in the forest.
I remember, mere days before my eighteenth birthday, I was escorting a visitor around the palace. She was perhaps a year or two my senior, and very giggly at being in the palace. We were walking slowly down one of the cobbled garden ways, amongst the palace's famed flower gardens. To the right of the path a little way ahead was a perfectly round pool, its waters crystal clear as they splashed into the basin from half a dozen fountains. Beside this, at the edge of a small grove of giant oak trees, was a little bench, seemingly twisted out of impossibly thin gold wire.
I could hear splashes and screams of delight. Their source was soon revealed to me, for the flowers parted and there were the children from the nursery, playing ball and wading in the pool. Mattie was currently engaged in a water fight with two of the oldest children, his hair plastered to his forehead and his sodden shirt sticking to his chest.
I looked around for Thera, sure she would be somewhere close by, but she was gone. I was sure I had seen her a moment before, though. My eyes roved around the base of the oak where I thought she'd been sitting and a piece of green fabric caught my eye, hidden though it was high in the branches. There, barely discernable amongst the think foliage, perched Thera.
Mattie glanced over to where his sister should have been. Finding her gone, he paused, giving his young assailants a chance to tackle him and drag him under the water. He was up dripping and coughing. Then he saw me and my guest. He froze, and around us the sounds of the children faded away.
At first I thought he was pleased to see me. I had taken great care with my dress, in the half hope that I would see him. Or rather, that he would see me. Instead, his gaze hardened and he turned away, gathering the children close. My guest and I continued walking. While she chatted animatedly about he garden I glanced back several times, seeing the children's small faces watching me without expression. The last glance, just before they disappeared, showed me Thera, back on the ground, wading into the pool, collecting the once again smiling children as she went.