[tw for description of a panic attack. starts with "Cognac was frozen looking at it," and ends with "Looking at her lap while she wiped her face, she quietly said, “Yes. Thank you. I’m sorry.”"]
They had only spent about a day in the estate, but Cognac and Odessa quickly found themselves plagued by boredom and listlessness. Odessa could leave the suite to wander the estate if she had liked, but Cognac was trapped by the wounds on her feet, and it guilted Odessa to leave her alone. The suite had no books, nor really anything at all they could use to entertain themselves. Unable to think of anything else, they continued playing school and word games. They even named reigning sovereigns in order going backwards through history, until their brains became tied and they grew annoyed at putting in effort. Sitting across the room from each other, they began to just ask each other questions.
“What year were you born?” Odessa asked. She was scribbling lines and shapes on a paper at a letter desk at the corner of the room. It seemed to be a page of nonsense.
“Insum 21.”
Not looking up, Odessa told her, “Oh. I was the year before.”
Curled up like an egg on the drawing room couch, Cognac picked at the decorations tied around her feet. After having received the prince in their bedclothes, they had decided to get dressed that next morning, enjoying the rare excuse to wear things so finely made. She absently asked the first thing she thought of. “When were you home, last?”
Odessa had to think a bit about that. They were permitted to leave the academy once a year, but it was quite a hassle, because they needed an escort from the estate to come fetch them in order to make the journey. “A few years ago I went to see my sister perform,” she said. “She was ten, so…it must’ve been Insum 35. I became primary messenger soon after that, and I haven’t left since then, since the relief messenger is still quite young. I don’t like the idea of her receiving my duties because I’m away on recess.”
Cognac was surprised to hear that. Of course especially now, she knew that Odessa wasn’t in any way a mean-spirited person, but she was always very placid. It was often said around the academy that she was cold hearted and had few friends. To hear she worried so much for another student that she’d put off her own travels was jarring; Cognac wondered just how young the relief messenger was, for Odessa to dote on her like that.
She was blankly thinking about this when Odessa asked, “What about you?”
Feeling awkward, Cognac said, “Ah, last year, actually. It’s quite a short trip, so I go fairly often. My parents are obsessed with training me in the family trade despite sending me here, so they like me to come home when I can.”
Odessa turned to look at her, clearly confused. “Why go to academy at all, then?”
Cognac smiled slantedly, saying “It’s a bit strange, isn’t it? When we got news of the entrance exam being distributed, I took it on a whim. I scored really high, though, so we all thought it’d be a waste not to go.”
This was fairly shocking to Odessa. She really didn’t know what to say. Her circumstances had been quite opposite—she had wanted very badly to go to the academy, but she scored low on the exam and considered herself incredibly lucky to have been accepted at all. Still mildly dumbstruck, she just said, “I…cannot relate.”
Even before having spent time with her, Cognac was quite intimidated by Odessa. She felt instantly as if she had said something wrong, and her spine was chilled by Odessa’s blank response. Trying to salvage face, she asked, “What’s your situation, then?”
Odessa looked far away. “My mother is a slow movement dancer. From the start, I was very bad at it. I took the entrance exam because I knew I would never fetch a high salary by putting on such clumsy performances.”
Plainly curious and probably lacking some tact, she asked, “Do you still practice dancing?”
Odessa made a noise in her throat like she didn’t like that idea. “Not—no, not really,” she sputtered. “I said I was bad at it, didn’t I? I could probably do the first set of holds, but that’s pretty elementary.”
They passed a fair amount of time in silence, after that. Cognac stretched her legs out on the couch and idly counted squares in the wallpaper. Odessa was watching the courtyard through a window. Their time together so far had been very on-and-off like this, where they spoke and passed time together for a quite a while, and then became awkward and decided not to speak anymore.
While they were busy not speaking, Sedan surprised them by entering the suite.
“How are you faring?” He asked. It was hard to tell if he was being polite, or if he was genuinely concerned. Like Odessa, he had a face that didn’t change easily. Cognac suspected he was naturally that way.
The two gave vaguely positive answers.
Sedan set his weapon against the door frame. Approaching the low middle table, he said, “I’d like to show you something.”
He carried with him a couple of papers rolled together. He came to sit on his knees at the table across from Cognac, spreading out the first paper in front of her. Odessa came to look as well, standing off by the side of the couch.
It was a red chalk portrait. The subject had on a hat that was somewhat like a woven basket and a strange, thick patterned robe. It was shut with a ribbon clasp that Cognac nor Odessa had seen before, and the pattern was an unusual repeating geometric stripe. It was a relatively small paper, and only as far as the torso was drawn.
“You said the intruders had unusual clothes,” Sedan said, looking up at Cognac. “Was it anything like this?”
Cognac shook her head, thinking hard on it. “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s hard to say without seeing a full figure.”
Odessa came closer, sitting on the ground in front of the couch. “Is that an islander’s hat?” She asked.
Sedan nodded. “This is a friend of ours from Shyashyahii-ba.” He spread out his other paper on top of the islander, asking, “What about this?”
Cognac felt like she had been punched in the chest.
It was an ink wash of a man and a woman, happily pressed against each other’s sides. Their hair both looked to be shoulder length and was put up in partial buns. The woman had a scarf, or some kind of swatch, wrapped around her chest and over her shoulder. She had on cinched pants and sandals. Next to her, the man had on an undershirt with a notched collar and a flat layer skirt. Over the skirt was what looked like the bottom half of a robe tied around his hips. He had sandals on, as well.
Cognac was frozen looking at it, completely unable to breath, unable to even blink her eyes. It felt like she had stopped perceiving what was actually in front of her, and instead, all she saw was the blurry feeling of the foreigners who had killed the academy groundskeeper. Knowing that she wasn’t, she felt like she was in danger. She clamped her jaw shut and a strangled breath hiccupped in her sinuses. She started pulling in air desperately, taking short huffs quickly in and out. She backed against the couch, nodding over and over. “It looked like that,” she said. “It looked like that. It looked like that.”
She put her hand against her chest, absolutely wheezing by now. Her heart was pounding. Trying to make it stop, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breath evenly, but she couldn’t. Frustrated tears pricked her eyes. Over and over, the memory of an arrowhead splitting through someone’s throat played against her temples. She went on trying to calm herself and the memory warped, it was like she could see an arrow aimed at her own throat. She felt she was going to be killed. She saw a flash of Odessa being killed. She couldn’t keep different iterations of danger and death from plaguing her. She was incredibly overwhelmed. She had a feeling like those bandits were here, that they could still hurt her. She knew that it wasn’t so, but couldn’t keep the fear out of her veins.
Odessa had stood back up, shocked. She didn’t know what to do. It was different seeing something like this in the daylight, fully alert.
By contrast, Sedan immediately covered the ink wash and rushed forward, sitting himself next to Cognac while gently saying, “Whoa, there, it’s alright, come on little one, come on.”
He put a hand on the top of her head and she looked at him full of fear, openly crying now.
“It looked just like that,” she breathed. Her eyes couldn’t settle on any one part of his face.
“I’m sorry I made you remember that,” he said evenly. He tried to keep her eye contact, bobbing his head in front of her face. “You need to start breathing more slowly. Do you understand that?”
Cognac’s voice was watery and broken. “I can’t. I can’t, it. I don’t know what’s happening. It won’t stop.”
Still keeping his voice carefully smooth, Sedan said, “Just worry about your breathing. I know your throat must feel very tight, so it’s difficult, but you can control it if you focus.”
Miserably, Cognac nodded.
“I’m going to breath slowly, and loudly. I want you to listen, and try to match me. It’s okay if it’s feeble and not strong or even, like mine will be. Just focus on drawing it out to the same length.”
She nodded again, her shoulders shaking so badly that it was hard to tell if it had been her intent.
As promised, Sedan drew in a loud breath. His chest displaced with it, slowly rising. He let it out in a long stream. Cognac tried to follow. Her breath stuttered horribly, and as Sedan had said, her throat was terribly tight. It was like forcing air out of a flat chewed straw. Sedan kept on going. His hand was still on the crown of her head, and it proved to be a strangely grounding weight. With all of her attention on the length of breaths, Cognac’s tears slowly dried up. After a number of weak tries, she started to match Sedan.
When he was confident she was no longer at risk of hyperventilation, Sedan patted her head and took his hand back. “Better now?”
Looking at her lap while she wiped her face, she quietly said, “Yes. Thank you. I’m sorry.” Though she was calm again, she was clearly miserable.
Sedan looked at her very seriously. “Little one, don’t feel such guilt,” he said. “You’ve been through an ordeal. This is a normal response to that.”
“It doesn’t feel normal.”
While they spoke, Odessa grew embarrassed by the fact that she had just stood by all of this, unable or unwilling to help. She had just watched, grossly curious. She gracelessly stalked away and began sifting through cupboards, looking for their tea set, hoping to look at least mildly empathetic. She felt cowardly and shameful, and turned her pink face away while fixing tea. Unable to find a tray, she had to awkwardly go back and forth from the table and the counter to set the cups and kettle.
While she poured his cup, Odessa quietly said to Sedan, “You seemed to know how to help quite quickly.”
She had meant it as a way to say thanks, but it came out as a strange sort of accusation. Her face seemed to have permanently become red, which only made her more angry with herself.
Sedan however appeared to have a fairly good nature, despite his stoic face. He swirled the tea in his cup while he explained, “Though we’re called the royal guard, we’re actually soldiers. We see a lot of violence in our lives. It’s a difficult thing to become accustomed to, especially for those of us who are able to graduate very young. Many of my cohorts have reacted how this little one did when reminded of certain things. You become used to it.”
They shared a quiet moment. The tea cooled to a comfortable temperature.
Looking away, Cognac asked, “Were you quite young?”
Her voice felt empty. Distinctly, she was quite sorry for herself, to have deteriorated to this state.
Humming a short affirmative, Sedan swallowed his tea and said, “I was a few months away from fifteen.”
Odessa wanted to choke. That was more than three years younger than her. Thinking about herself at that age, she couldn’t imagine having the maturity or discipline one would need to graduate combat training, let alone from a school of the royal guard. She felt childish, having not finished her studies on botany as an eighteen-year-old, when this person before her had mastered a much finer trade so much earlier. It probably had compounded against her inability to react kindly to Cognac’s sudden crisis, but she felt sourly like she had been born useless. She had often called herself a dunce, but rarely did she feel that way so strongly as she did in this moment.
Sedan took the rest of his tea in one gulp. “Not to change the subject,” he said flatly, “But in addition to showing you portraits, I was sent this way to let you know we’ve told the queen what’s happened. Normally, Lark and I would go to palace heights ourselves to speak with her, but we’ve decided to take a more…unconventional approach.”
Odessa noted that unconventional seemed to be a bit of a trend of Prince Lark’s. Grandparents and older folk had always said he was eccentric, but growing up and attending academy, that had seemed baseless to her. Maybe they had been right after all. Still feeling upset about her own character, she bitterly asked, “Why do you tell us this?”
Simply, Sedan told her, “Knowing what is being done to resolve this sad event can help your friend regain a stable temperament.”
Comments (0)
See all