Chapter Three
Theo
I was too young to work with the villagers by the mountain ranges. When kids turned twelve, the king would take them to work by the mountain ranges. They would dig and mine for whatever the king ordered them to and would return to their homes by sunset. I was eleven years old. I didn’t keep count of my years. Neither did Matilda or Elise, but the king’s Hawks did.
The king’s Hawks knew everything about everyone, and even though I tried to hide it from them, they knew I had six fingers on every hand. Everyone else had only five fingers, but for some odd reason I had six.
My fingers never bothered me until the day my secret was revealed to Elise. She laughed about my peculiar hands. I was sitting by the swings hanging from the willow tree near the slope that led down to the valleys. Elise was playing with the red rocks scattered all around us. She was building a small castle with the rocks, and I went over to help her.
I picked up one of the rocks and put them on top of the castle. Elise was on her knees and looked up and told me that it was uneven. She held my hand and moved it away from the castle, and that was when she noticed the sixth finger. She smiled, saw a hint of insecurity in my eyes and decided to laugh about it.
A tear fell from my eyes, and I ran to the swing, hid my face in my hands and swung high, hoping I could hide behind the sun.
“I’m sorry I laughed,” she said as I swung harder to ignore her. “Theo, get down.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” I told her and, contradicting myself, stopped swinging.
“But you’re sad, and I want you to be happy,” she said and held my hand, softly pressing my sixth finger.
I couldn’t stop myself from smiling when her lips stretched to welcome my little aching heart. I smiled, and she went behind me to push me on the swing. I could go higher when I swung alone, but it was comforting when she was the one pushing it.
“It’s not a bad thing, you know,” she said softly.
“How do you know what’s bad or not? I have six fingers. I’m different. I’m ugly,” I replied in a trembling voice.
“I like it.” She stopped the swing and turned to look into my eyes. “You’re not like everyone else. You’re different, special.”
I believed her. I always thought that something was different about me. It wasn’t that I was self-absorbed, even though all kids are, but I had always felt an emotion I knew no one felt. I can’t name the emotion, but it was the opposite of silence. I wasn’t satisfied with the way the world was, and I wanted to change it. But the world was Harold’s kingdom. There was nothing that could possibly linger beyond those black seas around us.
It was time to go back to the house and eat with Matilda. I took Elise by the hand and ran above the valleys and through the compressed trees and finally to our house in the village.
On a normal day, we would sit on the ground and eat while mother told us about the adventures in the books upstairs.
That day was different, though. While running back home, I found myself ahead of Elise. It was odd because I usually fell and rolled on the ground in failed attempts to catch up with her. This time, however, she was panting behind me, her hands clasping onto the bark of a tree.
“Elise, what’s wrong?” I shouted, but it seemed like she couldn’t hear me.
I ran back to her, and there was something wrong with her eyes. They were glowing red, and her skin was reflecting that glow in her eyes. It was the first time I ever saw Elise weak. I was startled. She was the one to always pick me up in my weaknesses, and this was the first time I had to be stronger.
I held her hand and felt as if I were dragging her all the way back to the house. She was panting hard when we reached the house. Matilda didn’t notice something was wrong with Elise because Elise was hiding her face.
After minutes of sitting down, and in the middle of mother’s story, Elise said she had to go to the bathroom. There was something wrong. I stood to follow her, but Matilda held me down. She told me Elise was going through something all girls her age went through. I didn’t understand, but I had to accept it.
Maybe it was curiosity that propelled me to learn the secret, but most I knew I had to trust my instinct. I told Matilda I wanted my meat cooked more. She liked to attend to our wants, and she liked feeling as if she spoiled us.
She continued the story as she turned her back to me and stood by the stove. I made sure the wooden planks under me wouldn’t make a sound when I moved. I put my hand on one end of the plank and my foot on the other and pulled myself up.
I tiptoed to the bathroom. I was worried Elise might have been bitten by one of the snakes that crept up from the valleys to the swing. She had taken too long inside the bathroom, and so I opened the door without even knocking and witnessed something that would launch the greatest change of my life.
Elise’s spine protruded from her back. I wanted to scream and thought she was dying. Elise back was bent, and she was on her knees. It was as if thorns were coming out of her back, adorning the spine that wandered out of her body. A cloud of luminous smoke hung above her head, and it seemed to seep out of her panting throat.
Elise didn’t look at me, probably because she didn’t hear me enter. The sound of her exhaling was far louder than my footsteps. I walked slowly toward her, and she turned around. Her eyes were even redder than they had been by the trees, bloody red.
My eyes grew wide, and I felt as if colonies of ants crawled under my skin. I shivered, and she looked like she was crying. I was afraid of coming closer to her, but I did. I put my hand on her thorny shoulders, and suddenly her spine fell back into her body and her eyes found the green again. She fell on the floor, her eyes closed.
The scream I had suppressed finally escaped. Matilda ran in and saw Elise, unconscious in my arms. She took her away, put her in the room, and left the meat and bread next to her. Mother spent the rest of the night making soup for her. She said she had a fever, and I didn’t believe that.
When Elise woke up, I was sitting next to her, singing to her a lullaby that was our first secret. I jumped out of my position when her eyes opened and began frantically trying to form words.
“Sh,” she whispered to me. “I don’t want her to hear us.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, confused.
“The secret,” she whispered. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone about what you saw.”
“Your back,” I said in hesitation. “It was like a branch of a tree sticking out of the bark.”
“Sh,” she asserted. “She’ll hear you.” She looked around and lifted her back off the bed and got closer to my face. “I’m scared.”
“You can’t be scared—you shouldn’t be scared. I can protect you from anything, Elise. I can even kill King Harold if he tries to hurt you,” I said with conviction, not in my powers but in the inspiration she gave me.
“I’m not scared of the king. I’m scared of myself,” she said, and a tear rolled down on her cheeks.
“But you’re beautiful. What is there that anyone could fear about you?” I asked, still not understanding the scene I had witnessed.
“I’ll tell you the secret, but you have to promise not to say a word to anyone, ever.”
“I promise,” I instantly replied.
I was amazed by what she told me next. It was one thing to know how different you are from everyone else, but it was a unique and rare thing to know how you became different.
That day, Elise told me that her mother used to read, too. She also told me that her mother taught her how to read, and I understood how Elise read most of my mother’s books. She said she read because she wanted to understand why she was the way she was, and she succeeded.
“Remember when Matilda told us about the war?” she asked me.
“Yes, the nuclear war. The one that made the world die.”
“Well, I read a book that talked about the war, and it said that something called radiation killed a lot of the people who survived the war. The writer said that there are three kinds of people: the blessed, the dead, and the cursed. The blessed are those who died in the war, the dead are those who lived to see the world after it, and the cursed are the ones who can turn into beasts. You’ll see a lot of those people who he called dead out there. Look outside and you’ll see the faces of everyone in this village. They’re dead because they have no purpose, no ambition, and no will to change that. But the beasts are the ones with the power to give ambition to everyone. However, they misuse their power to be kings.”
“Beasts? What do you mean?” I asked in wonder.
“I’m cursed, Theo,” Elise said, and a stream of tears exited her eyes.
“How so?” I asked.
“I can turn into a beast. Today, if you hadn’t come into the bathroom, I would have probably turned into a beast and hurt you or Matilda,” she said with a weeping face and a trembling voice.
Matilda walked in after Elise uttered these words.
“It’s time to sleep, Theo,” she told me.
My hands held Elise’s hands. My fingers slipped away, and I couldn’t have possibly imagined it would be years until I touched those fingers again.