Chapter Two

“Where do babies come from?”

I am young again, looking up at her as I sit at her feet. Her hand falters, the needle catching on the jacket she had been working on. “That’s an interesting question, my love.”

I sit and wait for her to elaborate. Next to me is my own jacket, much smaller than hers, but they both have holes in them and she wants me to learn to fix it. I got bored ages ago, resorted to watching her with her skilled fingers and quick movements instead. She is so much better at mending than I am, and ever will be.

Her eyes dart up from her work, seeing that I am still waiting for an answer. She hesitates for a moment. “Well, most babies come from a very complicated process that is too much to explain right now, so maybe another time, yeah? When you’re older. You have to finish your jacket first.”

“Did I come from that too?”

She hesitates again. “No, actually. You were brought onto the earth in a very special way. You arrived by the water, in a little boat made just for you.” She enunciates the just, dragging out the U in the way that adults like to do to make children happy. “The entire village came to see you coming down the stream, and since I found you first, I got to help you grow up into the lovely little thing you are now.” She smiles.

I grin at her. “So I’m specialer than the other kids because I’m from the stream and they aren’t.”

“More special, not specialer,” she corrects me, a slight smile at her mouth, “and I don’t know about the official stance, but you needn’t worry, because you will always be special to me.” She picks up her jacket again, nudging mine with her foot. “Now fix your jacket, yeah? You’ve barely touched it. And when you’re done, we can go have some cake and I’ll tell you about my adventure in the woods yesterday.”

Her name is—was—Ariadne. Most holy, given to her, allegedly, by the gods. Her parents laid her at the feet of their sculptures on the day of her birth, returning to the village at sunset claiming to have been gifted with the name. Since that day, and in the entire time I have known her, she has done everything within her power to live up to it.

Ask anyone in the village, and they will say she was doing that beautifully until she found me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was no accident that I came to be via that stream. Ariadne always made it out to be this beautiful miracle, a gift from the mountains, but as I got older I came to know the truth. I was only in the stream because I was pushed into it by someone who didn’t want me. Ariadne didn’t tell me that the “little boat made for me” was actually just a basket with some frozen twigs and dead grasses in it—an attempt at a cradle, I would guess. She didn’t tell me that by the time she found me I was half-starved and almost submerged in the stream because the basket had holes and was slowly sinking. And the whole village came to see me, yes, but only because they had never seen someone like me before. They let Ariadne have me because no one else wanted me; they thought I was a bad omen, some sort of curse.

Ariadne didn’t tell me that I had a pouch hanging on a string around my neck, the only thing that was ever truly mine and not given or borrowed to me by somebody else. She didn’t tell me that when she brought me home, her family despised her, saying that this child would bring horrors into their house. They weren’t exactly wrong. At seven years old I fell through a rotted ceiling beam that nobody had noticed, then got blamed for bringing decay into the house; except that it was already there, it’s just that nobody had noticed. At eight years old I befriended some crows, who then recognized me and followed me to school the next day. By the end of the week, dead mice and blackened apples started to turn up on my windowsill, and when Ariadne’s mother came to wake me one morning, she almost fainted at the sight of six crows at the foot of my bed.

I “brought horrors into the house” in other ways, being the reason Ariadne’s family was singled out, not invited to things anymore. I tainted their reputation, caused the neighbours to swap their bushes for brambles, made my teachers leave their positions for more manageable children. Nobody ever outright blamed me—how could they, when I was under Ariadne’s wing? The golden daughter of the village, most holy. But deep down we all knew whose fault it was.

She was hardly twenty when she found me. Nowhere near experienced enough to be a mother, but with more compassion and care in her heart than anyone else. She was smart, she was responsible, she was helpful. She had goals and ambitions and was going to leave the village one day and travel with the merchants who came through our mountain pass on their way to bigger and better places. She was going to go to those places and make a life for herself. And although nobody ever outright blamed me, we could all see those dreams slipping from her slowly, with each passing day. She loved me and I loved her, but she sacrificed everything for me and all I ever did was take more.

I am fifteen when we move out. Her parents have grown tired of me.

Our new house is smaller. A lot smaller. It’s a cottage at the edge of the village, pushed right up where the fertile land starts to turn into rock and roots. There is an old abandoned watermill at the bottom of the garden which would have once had access to the stream. I would’ve passed this place as I made my way to Ariadne in my basket as a newborn.

I did not get the gift of a god-given name.

The cottage is a mix of bricks and white cobblestones, and would have been quite a pretty place if it hadn’t been sitting empty for practically as long as I’ve been alive. There is thick ivy growing up one side and choking the chimney, old charcoal and ashes still in its hearth inside. The garden is overgrown, full of weeds and brambles that have endured years of snow and hardened ground. Rats have made a home in the cracks in the walls and under the floorboards. Ariadne’s face will dim a little when we find them for the first time a day or two after we move in. Nevertheless, we move in at the start of spring, and she makes it her personal mission to fix the place up as much as she can before the snow comes in the winter. Time is limited, but I know how much she doesn’t want me to see her falter, and so she makes herself very busy very quickly.

Being fifteen at the time, some things do go over my head, yes, but I am not oblivious to everything. I notice the difference in the nights she comes to bed late because she’s working and the nights she’s late because something is bothering her. The former will have her smelling of wood and sweat and rusted metal from the tools she was able to salvage from the garden shed. The latter, she will only smell of the cold air of the front porch. I notice the place on the back of her neck where she rubs when she’s stressed, the hair slowly giving up on growing back. The unopened letters by the door, sealed with shiny blue wax imprinted with an ornate crest, which she glances at every now and then. The growing number of tinctures, ointments, and things you tuck under your pillow or place in your shoes.

Despite everything though, the house comes along. She lets me stay home from school for the first handful of days. We both pretend staying home is a luxury for me and that I’m only there to help her fix the worst of the house. I sweep the dried leaves and rat droppings from the floor, clear the thick layer of dust off of just about every surface, and rub the grime and grit out of the walls, sinks, windows, and mouldings. The paint is still peeling and under the floor still smells vaguely rotted, but by the time she sends me back to school, we are able to spend a moderately comfortable night in the house.

School comes with its own set of problems. One might think that the children might not be as bad as the adults. More open-minded, maybe, or curious instead of hateful. Unfortunately, their parents’ imprint on them is strong, teaching them fear, alienation, and scorn towards those who are not like them. I am driven to the outskirts of their conversations and interactions. When we were younger they were content to simply exclude me from their games. Now, however, they find enjoyment in actively seeking me out to cause me trouble. I learnt many years ago that it was better to find myself a quiet place away from everyone else and to just leave myself to my thoughts, but in recent years it’s no longer enough for me to be invisible; I have to be visible, but only on their terms, and only when it suits them, and only when they can use it to cause me some kind of misery.

The problem with children taught to hate is that the intensity of their hate is exactly the same as adults, but they don’t quite know why they should be feeling such an emotion. They don’t have the wisdom to understand it, much less to discern for themselves whether it is justified or not. It is a cruel thing to introduce into the mind of a child.

Aside from the most basic reading and writing, with something occasionally more intellectual, the only other thing taught in Ariadne’s village—and I say her village and not mine—is how to leave it. The place is tucked away between two large mountains near the Tarnora-Agnacia border; or at least, the spot where Agnacia has decided to deploy its military presence. Merchants and tradespeople travelling between the two regions will stop here to spend their money, either purchasing the first or last shred of Tarnoran gold they can get their hands on, depending on whether they’re coming or going. This is the one thing drilled into our heads at school: get on the good side of the merchants and tradespeople, and maybe one day you’ll be able to get out of here.

The village has a particular distaste for me because, yes, at my arrival I was seen as a bad omen, but on top of that, because I took away their best child’s chance at getting out.

Any time a stranger passed through, looking particularly eager to gain something from the village, they would send Ariadne out. Quick, get Ariadne! Where is Ariadne? Somebody’s just stepped foot in the market! She would sweep out into the village square, dusty skirts and boots with holes and all, yet so easily charm them, convincing them that the gold the village had to offer was unlike anything to be seen anywhere else. And in a way it was, because it had her face and her name and her charm to go alongside it. Whatever the villagers had managed to bring in was always sold in full whenever it was up to her to do the negotiation. She would come back to the house grinning from ear to ear and slap her earnings into her parents’ palms. Usually a hefty bag of money, but sometimes it would be hunted animals, or beautiful furs and fabrics. My favourite was always when she brought back freshly-caught fish from merchants who had been coming from the South. There was something so blissful about the salt and the fat and the beautiful, beautiful smell that would fill the house when Ariadne’s mother was cooking them later that evening.

However, that smell gradually became a far-away memory the older I got. Ariadne started to realize the weight of taking care of a life, the consequences of the decision she had made compelled by pure compassion. I don’t think she ever fully understood what she was getting into when she took me and my basket home that winter. She had probably been so overwhelmed by the idea of not doing anything to save me that she hadn’t really thought about what would happen if she did. I was an extra mouth to feed, one that her parents begrudgingly helped with at first but gradually became resentful of doing. I was an extra body to clothe, which meant extra clothes to sew, which meant extra fabric to source and extra money to spend. As a baby, I couldn’t be left alone at home, and as an older child, Ariadne’s parents did not trust me to be there on my own. Even though I wouldn’t have done anything. That meant I had to go everywhere with her, which meant she had to be seen everywhere with me. The demon child and the golden girl.

And because she was now associated with me, people stopped asking for her when a stranger came through the village. Her smiles and her charm were tucked away and put in a box on the top shelf, and the money, game, furs, fabrics, and fish stopped coming.

What I’ve always found curious is how far people are able to feed their own rhetoric about a person. I was never a particularly unruly child; I never had any kind of innate desire to seek out destruction or disturbance. Yet even so, it always found me. Other children would leave dead animals and insects on our doorstep and blame me for it. Shopkeepers would accuse me of stealing when I hadn’t even touched their goods. People become incredibly full of fear when faced with something—or someone—they don’t understand. And that fear turns to hate. And that hate encourages more fear, and it more hate, until the thing they don’t understand has been twisted into some kind of horrible creature unrecognizable from what it used to be, but at least now it is understood to be something deserving of being hated.

I do not look like the other villagers; that is the baseline. Even if I had arrived in the village in a beautiful cradle draped in silk and perfume, bestowed with a god-given name, it wouldn’t have mattered. They are beautiful and I am not. Where they are elegant and confident, I am disorderly and withdrawn. Where they are all curves I am all angles, and where they are angles I am curves. Where they are beautiful browns, greens, and blues, I am red. Red, red, red. Always red. They knew I was wrong from the beginning, and every single person in that village save for Ariadne made sure I knew that.

Eventually I got used to it. I found my own ways to fend for myself. I did not need them and would make do without them. But it started to become an issue when their hate for me slowly started to reach her as well.