Page 28 of Astarion

“No, you wouldn’t. No one would. Society would hardly allow—” She stopped, the last words lost on her tongue.

“Allow what?”

The dwarf woman shook her head dismissively. “An unimportant distraction. In your case,” she said, putting her hands on her squat hips, “no matter how finely you are dressed, if you go into society speaking as you do, people will laugh behind their hands at the country bumpkin.”

Astarion flushed. His clothes were indeed very fine—silk that slipped over his skin like mist, kidskin gloves that felt almost buttery against his fingers, embroidered cuffs in all the colors of a peacock’s tail. They had all been rescued from the upper attics and cut down to fit him, but the castoffs of previous generations of Ancuníns were almost absurdly luxurious.

Bajia and Astarion had been sent up to the attics the day after Astarion arrived, with instructions to “find something suitable for him to wear for now.” Astarion had climbed up the ladder, itself a beautifully gnarled piece of druidic craftsmanship, and found himself gazing across a vast space the size of a ballroom. Dust motes danced in the light of dormer windows, which illuminated enough chests, trunks, old furniture, suits of armor, and moth-eaten taxidermy to provide a respectable hoard for the more peculiar sort of dragon. Nearly a thousand years of Ancuníns had accumulated an unbelievable amount of stuff, most of which had eventually found its way to the attics.

“Right,” Bajia said, cracking her knuckles. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

The first trunk contained old linen sheets, the second trunk held letters between two long-dead lovers, and the third trunk proved to be locked.

Bajia reached into her pocket, pulled out two thin pieces of metal, inserted them into the lock, and popped it open in the space of a couple of breaths.

Astarion was immediately diverted from the stuffed bulette he’d been coveting. “Did you just pick a lock?”

“I did indeed,” Bajia said, sitting back on her heels. “And I have uncovered a trove of…old silverware.” She held up a tarnished salad fork. “How nice.”

“Can you do it again? And show me how?” Astarion had read books where dashing rogues picked locks, but the authors had never gone into detail. He’d been half convinced it was some sort of magic spell.

“Your great-grandmother probably wouldn’t approve of me teaching you.”

“Pleeeeease? Please, please, please?”

Bajia sighed. “Fine, but if I find out you’re using it to get into places you shouldn’t, I’ll have your great-grandmother put a geas on you. This is the pick, and this is the tension bar…”

It turned out that it wasn’t as easy as Bajia made it look. You needed incredibly sensitive fingertips and a great deal of patience. She had probably expected him to give up in disgust within a few minutes. But he wanted to impress Bajia as much as he’d wanted to impress his old teacher, and the single-minded focus of a child on something he genuinely cares about is the bane of parents everywhere.

When the lock actually clicked open, Astarion was so surprised that he fell over backward, then began giggling wildly. “I did it! I actually did it!”

“Well done,” Bajia said. “And the chest contains…oh, these are some rather nice velvets.” She pulled them out and shook off the dust. They smelled of cedar, but when Astarion ran his hand over the fabric, it was like stroking the fur of some gloriously exotic beast.

“Looks like these were tunics.” Bajia held one up to Astarion’s shoulders and snorted when the fabric pooled on the floor at his feet. “Still, we can have them cut down to fit.” She nodded to his lockpicks. “Now, let’s see if you can find some silk to go with it, hmm?”

By the time they had assembled the makings of a suitable wardrobe, most of a tenday had passed, and Astarion could pick both a pin tumbler lock and a warded lock, which turned out not to be magically warded but to have a complicated system of metal walls to prevent keys from turning. Bajia gave him his very own skeleton key, which he treasured above all his other possessions.

It was a glorious tenday of luxury and illicit learning. Unfortunately, at the end of that tenday, the speech tutor arrived, and Astarion learned the downside of being a noble.

He wanted to be angry at the dwarven woman. He wanted to say that it didn’t matter how he sounded.

Nevertheless, it was true that when he spoke, he could hear the broadness of his vowels compared to hers, Bajia’s, and those of the other upper servants.

I sound like my father, he thought, and winced.

His instructor touched his shoulder. “Listen to me, Astarion. I am not here to make you feel badly about yourself. In many other places, your accent would be thought charming. But society is full of bullies who will turn on you if they perceive the slightest weakness. I am here to make certain that when you go about in society, there is nothing in your voice or your speech that they can use against you.”

Astarion drew a breath and let it out. Part of him still wanted to be hurt, to nurse that hurt within himself and pick at the pain like a half-healed scab. But another, more adult part of him whispered, Do you want to stay in this world of silks and chocolate and grand houses? Or do you want to sulk and refuse to learn and go back to spreading cow shit on the dirt under the grapes?

He straightened to his full height, which was only a few inches taller than his instructor. “Teach me,” he said. “I’m ready to learn.”

The dwarf smiled. “Let us begin with the proper terms of address for people of rank, starting at the top. Repeat after me: Your Majesty…”

—

It was not only speech and deportment that Astarion learned in that first year in his grandmother’s house. She hired a tutor who said plainly that there was little they could teach Astarion of reading, but they taught him an elegant hand to go with the serviceable script he had learned in the schoolhouse. The stable master taught him to ride a horse, which he did not particularly enjoy, though arguably they had gotten off on the wrong foot. On the first day, the man had asked him if he’d ever ridden before, and Astarion said, without thinking, “Oh, yes. I’ve ridden my mother.”

The stable master’s face went absolutely blank, and he said, in an extremely careful voice, “I’m sorry, youngster, I think I misheard you.”