The Better (but Dimmer) Half

[Angharad Warbeck]

November 9, 1884, before dawn

I had been a whole month today that Angharad had been at the MacFusty castle (which was much worse than the almost a month it had been a few days ago when she had tried to get her revenge against Torquil MacFusty) and she had gotten to know the other kids in the castle a lot more, particularly since she’d been forced to go to what were possibly the most boring lessons ever with that Horrible governess. There were, as far as she knew, four of them. Kennard was older than her, Ilysa and Kitten were her age and Lir was younger than her (though he was about her size and she usually had to do the same work as him during lessons). One might think that she would be excited to have so many kids close to her age around, but the truth was that she avoided them as much as she could. They seemed alright, if a bit too fond of Miss Fairclough (formerly Miss Dárine until she got some poor idiot to marry her by accident), but she was determined to dislike them, or at least the older three, simply by the merit of who they were and she had learned from her experience with Torquil that such a thing was hard to do if you got to know someone too much. She already couldn’t help but feel a little bit sorry for them having MacFustys as das. Torquil may have turned out to be alright but it was clear that the only MacFustys that knew even the first thing about kids were Mary and Jamie and neither of them had any kids. You wouldn’t find any of Jamie’s kids stuck in stupid lessons instead of hunting like all of them always had been and Mary knew lots of other things, like braiding hair and telling proper stories, which she had never seen any of the other MacFustys do. Her one consolation on their behalf was that all of them were old enough to take care of themselves, horrible das or not.

Or, at least, that was what she had thought until not a half an hour earlier when she had come up from the dungeon to change from her nightdress into proper clothes and had somehow turned down the wrong corridor and walked six doors down straight into a room that she had never seen before. The sight that greeted her when she opened the door was a disturbing one. There were tons of babies sleeping in beds with bars on them all around the room. Some of them were really small, others were a little bigger, she even thought she’d seen some of them before, being pushed around in a pram outside by an old lady, but she’d never thought that they might be MacFusty babies. Now, though, it was undeniable. She’d known the moment she saw them that she couldn’t just leave them behind for their useless MacFusty das to pick up them too hard and crush them or forget that they were babies and feed them to a dragon, but there were way too many for her to save them all at once. She would have to take them one by one, starting with the smallest and working up to the biggest one she could still carry. It took her awhile to figure out how to get the babies out of the barred beds, but once she did, the first baby wasn’t much trouble. Even though it was really tiny, shorter than her arm even, it was pretty heavy, but the seven year old was still able to carry it downstairs to the kitchen and lay it on the bottom shelf of a cupboard without it waking up. The second one didn’t go too badly either. It was even heavier than the first and, just as they were leaving the room, it started to fuss and whine, but it soon fell back asleep and she managed to get it into a big, empty flour bin, leaving the lid cracked just a bit for air, without it waking up. When she went up for the next smallest baby, though, she could hear an adult, moving around inside, looking for the missing babies. As much as it pained her to do so, she had to turn back and leave the other babies to fend for themselves until she got a chance to come back for them.

She ran as quickly as she could back downstairs and found something to do that wouldn’t draw too much suspicion towards her if that old lady came down looking for the babies (namely, drawing paper and a pen that had been left behind by the servants the night before). She was a horrible drawer, but that didn’t make much of a difference. The other kids were horrible drawers too and they still liked it well enough. An adult definitely wouldn’t be quick enough to realize that it was an act. She would just have to leave the babies where they were and keep going on as normal until everyone forgot about them, then she could bring them to Mary to take care of or get Jamie to come get them so he could teach them to hunt when they were big enough and have Gunna help take care of them like they were her puppies in the meantime. Both of them had enough scran for a couple of babies and the babies would be much better off with them than any other stupid MacFustys. She had only been drawing and planning for a couple of moments when she heard someone come into the room. The footstep sounded too heavy to be the old lady she’d seen with the babies before, but, just in case, she set herself to the task of drawing, pretending to be so focused on her paper that she hadn’t even noticed the man (whose footsteps were distinctly manly) come in.

@Ezra Fairclough