he Foster family is beautiful. Where no one is a criminal, no one is a failure, no one is needy, and no one is wrong. We are old money, back to the beginning of Terrastella when the first Foster pressed ink to parchment. We are old money with wide smiles, beautiful faces, and perfect teeth. Even then though, I cannot find an ounce of Foster in my smile. The Fosters are there in the hold of my shoulders, they are there in the directness of my gaze, they are even there in the grace of my steps, but I look at my smile, I only see a stranger residing in the muted curve of my cheeks.
Grandfather’s only failure in life, he says, was that he never had a son, but everything else, Foster through and through. Perfection. Really, it was no matter. All three of his daughters were tall, staggeringly beautiful, and blessed. They were cashmere cardigans, fine champagne, and grand parties. Lawrence was the first born grandson, and liable to inherit everything, sure, we all have our trust funds, which are to be obtained on our seventh birthday, but Lawrence would gain the house, the beach house, the library along with other distant Foster cousins. I am the youngest girl, I should be grateful if I inherit a copper coin after Grandfather finds himself six feet under.
I am a Foster. I often tell myself in times of doubt. I don’t entirely know what it means or understand it, but I think it is supposed to bring me a certain amount of comfort. I pretend that it does.
“Good Isabella, hold it steady, now let it go!” My archery teacher calls as I release my arrow. It flies straight across and hits just left of the bullseye. I narrow my brow, and the tiniest of scowls cross my lips, but it is enough for my instructor to notice. “Don’t give me that look, it was a good shot,’ she says and comes close to me, she moves to give me some sort of comfort, but the coldness of my eyes, like storm clouds passing over, stops her, she retreats. I think that best.
I could love my archery instructor, you know. Like really love, not like my cartography tutor whom I simply adore and admire enough that it becomes the type of love from a pupil to and elder. But my archery instructor, she is young, maybe close to Bennett’s age, and dreadfully attractive, and maybe I would even have a crush, maybe my spine would shiver whenever she comes close to me to help draw the string of my bow and assist in taking aim. As it is, she is far too close to my family, far, far too close. I see enough of them, hear enough about them, I do not need someone to look at me and instantly think of my mother, my grandfather. If someone wants to hold me, I want them to do it without any recognition. Too often I have been spurned by those too close to the Fosters.
So when she smiles at me, she receives nothing but an exhaustingly polite simper in return. “Good work today,” she says, handing me my arrows to put into my quiver. It is slung over my shoulder as I dip my head in goodbye. “I’ll be practicing before the next time you see me,” I say. She only laughs like she has never had life weigh her down. I don't wander too far onto the idea of it, I am too busy thinking maybe I can con Bennett into letting me shoot an apple off the top of his head.
My family believes my archery lessons to be longer than they really are, afterwards I like to go to this pond just outside the city and feed the ducks the bread from our kitchen before wandering back home. One of the servants, who looks young, maybe my age, hands some to me. I pull the bread apart into tiny pieces and I start to feed them, watching as they each approach and grab the piece before the other ones do, before looking at me expectantly, to toss them more. I have hardly the option to not oblige them. Pull. Toss. Grab. Look. And the pattern repeats itself like madness on a loop.
code by rallidae
picture colored by Elidhu
@Maybird
Lean on the ground with you
On, on my knees
Kneel in the water down low
But you can't go where they all go
✧
W
e are approaching the city.
No longer are the frilly tops of black gum trees pressed shoulder to shoulder like the heads of whispering conspirators. The sky, let in by slivers as canopy gives way to cloud, is the pale wintry blue of forget-me-nots; and the moment I make the metaphor, I am instantly proud of it.
It's been so long since I've seen the sky that the comparison is really quite literal.
Before I know it, the swamplands are less swamp than they are civilisation, or so Rook tells me, because to him the swamp I used to live in was as far from civilisation as one could be, and so of course he knows more about this than I do.
I stare hard at a rolling white manor as we pass by its leafy lawn, and comment blithely how similar it looks to Elder's house. The house, I tell him, that I was born in.
Perhaps I wouldn't be so convinced of your tribe's lack of civilisation if you'd ever brought me back to see it.
I turn my head so that I am no longer staring hard at the white manor but at him. Now isn't that the debacle! I think, so loudly that he turns away and scoffs.
But quickly enough I grow quiet, because when one white manor house stitches neatly to another white manor house and both of them are mere dwarves to the next one in line, a marble monster of turrets and balconies and windows that rises out from a lawn populated entirely by statues—I see, with dismay, that civilisation isn't at all like it was at the swamp.
I halfheartedly wonder if there's a library here, at least. Not Rook's Library, the one made out of living trees, but perhaps he'll like even a regular one.
I flip my hair behind my shoulder (loose, today) and nod towards the statues in the marble monster's yard. Is this what you mean by civilisation?
Instead of answering, Rook flattens his ears to his skull and bristles against my shoulder.
At first, I dismiss the girl as just another statue. She's pale enough for it, imbued with the same alabaster refinement as the countless contorting shapes littering the snow-covered grass. But then she moves, her head bobbing back and forth as she takes something from another besides her who I don't mistake for anything but a servant.
We don't have the tradition of keeping them in Elder's tribe, but she'd sometimes joke that I was like Ma's little servant, though far better treated, and far better looking, with emphasis added at the end.
The girl walks towards us and Rook presses me into the blocky green shrubs behind us. Only the tips of his antlers are visible through the brambly leaves but they look so much like skeletal tree branches that she passes us by without a glance. I push up my mask to see better. She's carrying something with her.
A rock? All I can make of the thing is that it's brown, and roughly round, and somehow important enough to be carried by a girl who looks like she doesn't much need to carry anything.
Rook shakes his head. It smells like food.
I pry myself out from the shrub and flip my mask back over my head. Surprisingly Rook doesn't protest—he merely tails me silently as I tail the girl, a procession of marble and crow head and black-coated stag. I think he is as curious as I am.
The girl stops at the edge of a pond, and begins tearing the thing she carries into chunks. Not a rock, then. Food, soft enough to be torn, pillowy white on the inside.
Bread.
And then she throws a piece of the bread into the water, and the sight is so strange I frown.
"Why are you doing that?" Rook glowers at me and makes no move to follow as I step out carefully towards her, my hair a bright river under the sun.
The other girls never liked me. I wonder if this one will.
have strange memories. I wonder if they are memories at all or just works of fiction I can recall from an early childhood, or if they are memories at all, rather just a dream I have had. I read about an orphan once, when I had been younger, he had been dropped off at the stairs of the orphanage, no one wanted him. He had been nestled with blankets, blankets that became soaked in the downpour, he wasn't found until morning, freezing cold, but alive, and still an orphan. Something about this story echoed inside my chest and I brought the story to my mother, silver eyes asking the question before I opened my mouth. “Is this how I was born?” I had asked her, showing her the story. My mother had dropped what she was doing and reached to embrace me. While my family would give the occasional kiss, or maybe a touch on the shoulder, we were not typically so outwardly affectionate. ‘No, no baby,’ she had said. ‘You are of me and only me, I promise.’ And I believed her. She was a Foster. I was a Foster. We were—are— Fosters.
Fosters.
The birds race quickly to grab the bread before their friends can grab it, well, can they be called friends if you are constantly taking their food, stealing? And I think people swindling deals and money and think maybe they can be—just a different kind of friend. I can feel a smile twitch at the corner’s of my mouth as one comes close to me. Lawrence had asked me once when I had been too young to attend lessons on my own why, if my aim was so good I did not shoot the ducks. Send an arrow in their throat instead of bread. I think maybe that is the difference between boys and girls, or maybe the difference between someone strong and someone weak.
I am startled by the sound of another, there aren't many who make the little trek outside the city center and to this pond much less. There is another, great, more beautiful pond in the gardens. I almost lace back silver ears into my dark mane at the thought of someone else having discovered my spot, but a look of such a disgruntled attitude would send my mother reeling. Even if she is not here to see it.
“They are hungry,” I say as I glance at the girl who has found me. I manage to keep any shock from my face, as I note the mask that covers hers. Shocked I may be, but I was not put off, too often I see everyone wearing their own masks (of indifference, of smiles, of dutiful wives that meet other men in back alleyways.) But none were quite as captivating as this one. “I like your mask,” I says, and it is sincere even if it doesn't sound that way. I have never been adept at tone.
I rip off another piece of bread and hold it out to her. “Did you want some?”
code by rallidae
picture colored by Elidhu
@Maybird
