story - part 11 - memory three - 1242 words

That hurts. Her words, instead of quelling me into obedience, start an angry fire in the pit of my stomach. Everything little thing that I was afraid to do before suddenly comes out in a rush. There is no point in keeping it all in, if she is all I will ever have. There is no point in hiding and waiting, if nothing will ever change.

My rebellions start small, and gradually become more serious, less carefully hidden. I start out not paying attention in class, and eventually end up not attending. I sneak out late at night to stare up at the mountain, and eventually attempt flight again. I head out into town with a cloak swept over my shoulders, without her permission. I no longer speak to her, except in her role as my teacher. I stop calling her 'mother.'

At first, I am not sure she has noticed, I do not know if she is angry - but as days pass, a week, two, I can tell that there is something boiling inside of her as well. Barely suppressed rage. She probably wants to make me obey again, and is plotting how best to go about doing it. She does not want to spook me, and drive me to do something stupid. Not yet.

In secret, I dig up maps of the country, I draw up plans for where I could go and where someone might snatch me up. I am tempted to leave these out, for her to find, but I want it too much. Food is pilfered slowly and carefully from the kitchen. Bread, cheese, dried meat, water skins. I pull together bags, and hide it all in the chest at the foot of my bed.

I come home one night with old scratches on my knees from tumbles, with half a loaf of bread hidden in one pocket, to find her sitting on my chest with a careful map in her hand. Like that, the jig is up. She knows what I have been working on, and there is no way I will be able to continue, to escape.

For a moment, there is a heart-wrenching feeling of disappointment, of hopelessness. Weeks of work gone to waste. There is no way I could slip out unnoticed, now, it is impossible for me to get away from this place. I am wrapped up in her grasp again. Forever.

"You...you were looking through my things?" Trying to take on her indignant tone and posture. A hand is still buried in my pocket, to hide the supplies I have hidden in there, but I try to make it look casual. Maybe she will not know.

"Are you planning on taking a field trip, Corbett? I do not remember giving permission for this." Her tone defeats mine, crushes whatever hope is left. Her eyebrows arch finely, stormy grey eyes lift to lock on my face, daring me to lie.

For a moment, I think I can tell her the truth and she will accept it, she will nod and point me toward the door, she will let me go. But then I take in the tightness of her lips and the tense shoulders, the fact that she looks like she's coiled, preparing to pounce, and I know three is nothing I can do.

"No, ma'am. I was going to...to run away. Wait until you were dead or captured before coming back out of hiding." Voice trembling, this time, I cannot hold that sense of indifference. I can feel my shoulders hiking up around my neck, I feel like I am still a child being scolded.

Her slow nod seems to say that she was expecting this, that she is not surprised. She still grips the map as she stands and steps forward, too close to me. There is a strange, thrumming feeling. Again I recognize how beautiful she is, and my breath catches as she grabs my arm and shoves me down beside the bed.

She is tiny, but somehow she manages to make herself seem huge. She hovers over me, dropping the map to flutter down beside my hand on the ground. I blink down at it and wince at her fingerprints, smudging the crisp lines that took me hours to mark in and the careful labels on each of the towns. The tiny houses arranged in careful clumps. She has wrecked the cities, left them as piles of crumbling rubbish.

As I reach out for the crumpling sheet of paper, her toes settle on my hand - a gentle pressure, a warning. It drags my head up to stare at her. She is furious, I can tell now. Her calm of the past week has been a mask, one far better than she has ever taught me. I am sure my face has dissolved into wide-eyed, uncontrolled fear, and it probably only makes her more angry.

"How stupid do you think I am, child?" Low and dangerous. There is no right answer I can give to that.

"How long did you think you could hide from me? Did you think I would not notice?" Eyes flashing as she says it. That pressure slowly lifts, and I jerk back against the bed, hands folding in protectively against my chest. She sinks down to a crouch before me, arms draped casually over her knees. She knows that she is in control now, that anger is still flashing in her face but it is muted, she is using it.

There is a ringing silence, it stings my ears and makes my heart race. It takes me a moment to realize that she is waiting for answers from me, that she wants me to speak. I swallow hard, searching for words that will not get me in more trouble, something that will help me back out of this situation.

"I'm just tired of everything. I want to leave. I want to head back to Secular Verra, speak to my father - " Snapping the last shreds of her calm. There is a sudden blossom of pain across my cheek, and it takes a moment for me to recognize it as her hand, a solid slap. I should not have mentioned him.

But now it is too late. My mouth has opened, my thoughts come spilling out - I cannot swallow them, now that I have started. And I am angry, almost as much as she. This is my life, not hers.

"Why are you doing this? Just because you're bitter, because you made mistakes, because you lost your wings. It's not my fault, you know. You'll never be queen, and I'll never be king, and you have to take the blame for both. You made your mistakes." Coming out in a rush. She seems to get smaller in front of me, to slowly shrink and lose her edge, her control.

"You knew that I wouldn't ruin my life the way you ruined yours, so you decided to fuck mine up for me. What kind of mother are you?" There is anger and upset on her face as I speak, something crumbling about her expression.

This is when the world bursts into black and golden stars. Perhaps I have blacked out the memory, or perhaps I lose consciousness. I only remember waking, hours later, with an agony of pain against my back. Blood and broken feathers. Grabbing my supplies and taking for the hills.