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“A child, yes! But a month ago, she was a babe in arms, Sir Ector.” Crescent’s voice had turned shrill. “And a few weeks later she was a toddling thing, walking, then running, then speaking sooner than any child anyone in Camelot has ever seen. Her nurses would not stay, Sir Ector. They simply would not stay. Have you ever known a woman to leave an infant they nursed? I never have. Usually you have to beg them to leave. I certainly had to with Taina’s. Her old nurse still visits at least once a month.” He gave a stiff laugh which Sir Ector did not return. “Well, you get the general idea.”
“She frightens people,” Sir Ector said. I could almost picture him scratching his chin. “Yes. I understand what you are saying, Crescent. I suppose the question is—does she frighten you?”
A pause. A long pause.
“No. She doesn’t frighten me,” Crescent said finally. “And I care for the child. I would never abandon her. I know my duty.”
I had been biting my lower lip hard without even realizing it. Now I let out a breath and let my body relax, sinking down into the soft grass.
My lip hurt. My hands were full of something.
Looking down, I saw I had pulled all of the grass up around me. There was a circle of dirt surrounding the spot where I crouched.
Well, grass would grow back. Unlike Taina’s doll’s head.
Blood was trickling down my chin from where I had split my lip. I wiped it away with a dirt-smeared hand.
“But doesn’t it bother you?” Crescent had lowered his voice. Perhaps another person would not have been able to hear him from where I hid. “She’s stronger than she should be. Larger. Smarter.”
But I could. I could hear all sorts of things most people couldn’t hear.
The mice running through the castle walls. The ants as they scurried through the dirt.
And voices. Always the voices. They came in my dreams, and I tried to shut them out.
“It wouldn’t make sense for her to be one thing without the others,” Sir Ector answered. “She couldn’t be bigger without being stronger. And it would be odd if she looked like an older child without having the comprehension of one.”
His voice was calm and soothing. It reminded me of the sparrows who had built a nest outside my window. For days, a female and her mate had brought twigs and twine, grass and feathers, until the nest was complete.
Then the female had laid a clutch of four perfect little eggs.
“It’s more than her comprehension, though what she understands is incredible,” Crescent replied. “It’s her anger.”
Crouching in the grass, I shivered and licked the blood from my lips.
“What do you mean?”
“Surely you’ve heard the servants speak of them. She’ll have tantrums. Fits of rage. She loses control, flees from me when I try to calm her. She’ll hide. Even break things.” Crescent rubbed a hand over his face. “The servants have said she may be taking things.”
“Well, it’s her castle. She can take what she wants, can’t she?” Sir Ector sounded more amused than I’d expected. Not angry with me.
“Yes, but it is my duty to oversee this castle and everyone and everything in it while Medra’s aunt and uncle are away. I don’t think they’d take kindly to her stealing things. Or worse, stealing and then breaking them.”
“Well, I doubt the girl is making off with priceless works of art and destroying them. She’s probably snatching little trinkets, that sort of thing. She’s troubled. The poor thing has no mother, no father. Isn’t it to be expected?”
“In any ordinary child, yes, of course. But in Medra... the anger is so intense.”
It was bad to be angry. It was bad to make other people angry.
That was what Crescent was really saying.
Somehow I knew this. Yet I couldn’t stop doing it. I couldn’t stop what I felt.
As soon as I had discovered what anger was, it seemed I had always been filled with it.
I was angry because people were afraid. I was angry because they looked at me as if I were different.
It didn’t help to know Crescent thought I was strange and different, too. So different from his daughter. Stupid Taina.
