Free Web NovelChapter 76: Cross And Straw [25] A Boy In A World Without Warmth
He was crying again, soft sniffling echoing through the empty room, devoid of warmth and life.
He didn’t know when he had started. That was the worst part, not the crying itself, which he had long since stopped being ashamed of in private, but the way it arrived without announcement, slipping in through the back of his chest while he was doing something else entirely.
One moment, he had been sitting on the stone floor of his room watching the afternoon light move across the wall, and the next, his face was wet, and his shoulders were shaking.
And he was pressing himself into the corner behind his wardrobe because the corner was the smallest space in the room, and small spaces felt safer than large ones.
The castle was full of large spaces.
He had been here for—he counted on his fingers, then lost count—a long time. He had been born into luxury, but his life...was it anything luxurious?
The boy quietly shook his head, tears staining his vermilion clothes.
He pressed his forehead against the cold stone of the wall and breathed in the cold, frigid air of his room.
He was ten years old, and he was afraid. He was scared and would always be scared. But the scary man would punish him if he showed it, so the boy hid it behind a smile.
His lips curled upwards into a bright smile, yet the tears never stopped. They kept coming and coming, an endless tide that knew not the meaning of stopping.
Eventually—he didn’t know how long, time moved strangely in the corner behind the wardrobe—the shaking stopped.
His face dried. He became something that resembled functional, something the man wouldn’t starve him for.
He shivered again...starving was bad. He didn’t like it.
He stood.
His legs were stiff from the cold floor, and his eyes felt too large for his face, which happened after crying, and there was nothing to be done about either of those things.
He crossed to the basin in the corner of the room and washed his face with water that had gone cold hours ago, and he looked at himself in the small polished mirror above it until he found the expression he was looking for.
Neutral. Still. The expression that showed nothing, because showing nothing was the only option available to him in this castle, in this life, in this particular version of the world he had been assigned.
I look like father...
He hurriedly looked away from the mirror.
The hallways of the Aristeus castle were built to make people feel small, to show them their insignificance in the grand scheme of things. The ceilings were too high. The corridors were too wide. The stone was pale and cold, and the torches were spaced just far enough apart that there were always shadows between them, long and deep and permanent.
He walked with his hands behind his back because that was how his tutors had told him to walk. "Keep your head straight and back straighter." He winced at the memory.
He walked like he owned everything, like the world was at his beck and call.
He was, technically, the heir to all of it.
He walked faster.
He was ten years old, and he wore the right clothes, and he was walking in the right direction at the right time of day.
He was always walking in the right direction at the right time of day.
He had learned early what happened when he wasn’t.
The door to the east study was already open. It was always already open at this hour, which meant that he was expected, which meant that the man inside had known he was coming before he arrived, which meant—as it always meant—that there was no version of the next hour that he hadn’t already been anticipated in.
He stopped in the doorway.
The room was large, just like every room in the scary castle. But this one felt larger than the others, had always felt larger. It had a presence, mostly because of the man who stayed in it.
The man standing at the window occupied it entirely.
He was tall, with his back to the door. His hands were clasped behind him, mirror of the boy’s own posture, and the afternoon light fell across his shoulders in a way that made him look carved rather than standing.
The boy knew better than to wait to be acknowledged.
"My Lord," he said. His voice came out steady. He was proud of that. "Good afternoon."
The man turned.
His eyes were cerulean, the same color as his own. They found the boy with the efficiency of a weapon, locating a target, assessing him in approximately one second, and moving on to the middle distance. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com
"You’re late," the man said.
The boy had checked the clock before leaving his room. He was not late, but he knew better than to say so.
"My apologies, my Lord."
The man looked at him for a moment longer, then turned back to the window. "Come."
The boy followed him through the connecting door at the back of the study, into the room beyond.
It was his least favorite room in the castle. He thought this every day and did nothing with the thought because there was nothing to do with it.
The room was long and narrow, lined with weapons he had been learning the names of since before he could properly grip them.
The floor was stone, same as everywhere, and it was cold even in summer and colder than that in winter, and it smelled of iron and sweat and blood.
There was a chair against the far wall, positioned precisely, angled toward the center of the room.
He sat in it, dreading with every part of his being what would come next. ƒrēewebnovel.com
He had blonde hair and blue eyes, and he was ten years old, and his name was Leonidas Hector Aristeus, and he was learning, with every session in this cold, narrow room, that the only thing he could do with a world that wanted to make him small was to survive it until he was large enough to push back.
He was not large enough yet.
He would be.
