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I had seen his face, well part of his face, and then he had left. But what if he left, left?
What if he wasn’t dead.
What if he was gone.
Oh, by the Goddess. Something like a pit opened up in my chest, all the air sucking from the room as the thought had more than my fists clenching. My gut was a tight little ball as I took one step, then another toward the room divider.
“Boy?” I asked, knocking softly as I attempted to force that panic driven hole in my chest shut.
Except there was no answer, which of course made it worse.
“Boy?” I asked again, my voice more air than words as I pinched my eyes shut and made that last forbidden step to peer around the wooden panel that kept us divided.
He wasn’t there. But nothing much else was either.
A small cot was pushed into the corner, the linens and pillow perfectly made. A spare black uniform was on a hook next to a black sleeping gown, both looking like bits of broken soul as they hung lifelessly against the wall.
A small shelf had been tacked into place above the foot of the bed, a book, a cracked piece of glass, and a red stone set nicely in place. There was a small stretch of floor before the bed, the wood worn down from repeated steps.
But that was it.
No luxuries, no clues as to who he was, or what his name might be.
I turned toward the shelf, fingers fluttering over the glass, and then the red stone, something buzzing over my skin as I moved toward the book. It was well worn, the leather loose and supple, the strapped bindings that were common for the servants fraying in some places.
Fingers moving over the spine, I swallowed, wondering if a name had been written inside. Or what kind of book it might be. Did he like fantasy like I did, science, or Goddess save me: romance.
Attempting to swallow away the rock in my throat, I grabbed the book, the well-worn tome flopping open in my hand.
“Girl and her dog take a walk,” I read the words on the first page in a whisper, the picture of the girl and her dog above as some poorly formed letters mimicked the sentence below.
It was a primer, like the one my governess had used with me so many years ago. He had been assigned to me when I still had a governess, and he spent most of those hours in training while I sat reading and playing the harp, and drawing and all the nonsense things that princesses are supposed to know how to do.
While I learned, he fought. While I read, he trained. But there he was, teaching himself. There he was breaking one of the rules that Mother had set for him. He wasn’t supposed to know how to read and write, because he wasn’t allowed to have any way to communicate.
He was supposed to be as alone as I was.
That hole in my chest clenched as I flicked the pages forward.
“The girl is happy,” I flipped forward. “A professor is teaching arithmetic.” The sentences grew more and more complicated until I reached the end of the book where lines were set for writing instruction. The pages stopped flipping and I caught sight of my name, the crude writing slow and steady as he wrote.
‘Elara,
I am happy to be with you. You make me happy. You are funny. Love, Ar Boy’
I stared at the words, the writing making it look like they had been written by a child, who knows how long ago. But it wasn’t that that had my heart leaping into my throat. It was the tiny ‘Ar’ scrawled into the line before it was crossed out and replaced by ‘Boy.’
Ar.
His name started with ‘Ar’, or maybe it was a ‘N i’ I couldn’t be sure. My heart was leaping as I flipped forward a few more pages, looking for any other clue. There wasn’t much else, only carefully written words from the primer, ‘boy’, ‘cat’, ‘food’, ‘walk’, and then:
‘Momma, I am being a good boy. I am doing what she wants. I will help you, too. We will go home soon.’
“What she wants?” The page was dotted with what looked like tears, the ink from the pen having pooled around the word ‘she’ as if he had pressed too hard.
There was something about that phrasing that was off, something ominous, and yet I knew what exactly it was.
“She,” I whispered the word, visions of my mother flitting before my eyes as I ran my finger over the long since dried ink.
