The Errant Frost: A Children's Story

[Morning Stars]

-{closed}-

The snow had a way of dancing in Salvar that was inspiring. Within Knife’s Edge great theater round, great ballets were danced in white muslin. Every piece of silver embroidery was a tribute and offering to the whirling lace snowflakes and fine traces of frost that adorned the windows in the mid-morning light. The child that looked with interest at the middle boughs of an evergreen knew nothing of the great dancers that were raised and sent from her homeland to bring art and beauty to the Southern Countries. She’d seen pictures of the graceful angels, their toned figures poised in impossible portraits of skill and poise, but they had been in a picture book she’d long ago lost to some tougher, taller girl. The girl in question was standing not far from her now, whispering things that Dannika could hear even through the shouts of a nearby snowball fight and the wind through the evergreen needles.

"Go on the left, she can't see over there."

Did they think she was half-deaf as well as half-blind? They treated her like this most days, as if she were a simpleton that couldn't reason for herself. Nonetheless, she reached into her hair, groping along the unbalanced strands of ash blond tresses until her fingers curled around her prize. She pulled the small hairpin away, smoothing her other hand over the enamel and tin visage of a small green and pink hummingbird before replacing it on the right side. This was an old trick, and she anticipated the groans of defeat as much as the muttered, "Well, we'll get her later." when they came. Why they didn't seem willing to take it anyway, when they'd taken everything else, was beyond her. Instead, she didn't dwell on it, replacing thoughts of foiled bullying with the perfect little daggers that floated in front of her.

On the few forever-green trees that clung to the sides of the orphanage, big snows always brought big icesickles. They gleamed like the crystals that had been appearing in some of the storybooks a traveling Dheathain couple had given to the small wayhouse, and no matter the warnings that had been delivered every morning since the summer months had waned and the big snows once again returned, she was drawn in by their sheer perfection. Spindly and delicate, they were a hope of what she might one day become. Unlike her scarred and tarnished face, every lump and twist only made one seem more amazing, turning the light as it shone through them into highlights and shadows that made the ice come alive. They could nourish your thirst as snow could, when allowed to be warmed in compassionate hands, and no matter what the matron was fond of saying, they only became dangerous weapons of gravity when messed with too roughly.

Lifting her hand, the fingertips rosy with the cold, the half moons under her nails a strikingly argumentative blue, and touched the bottom of one of the hanging ornaments. It broke with the slight trembling of her hand, sliding into her palm. She'd been holding it only a bare moment, and she could already feel the wetness in her hand where it was melting with her body heat. Her movements, like always, was slow and methodical. Ever since the accident that had turned her left eye into an ornamental ball of cataract blue, she'd learned that fast movements with her altered depth perception were her undoing. There was enough laughter at her back without her own clumsy actions adding to it.

Her hand moved in slow motion, bringing the shard of ice she grasped carefully to her mouth. She knew that half of it would have melted in her hand, but she didn't care. The tree's abundance wouldn't run out before they were called in from their recess play, and these little tastes of fresh water that hadn't been sitting in the still rain barrel or drawn from the gritty well down the path were few and far between. The ice nearly to her lips when she heard the sound of giggling voices again, the child turned so that she could see what all the fuss was about. It was to Dannika's utter surprise, both round eyes wide and filled with pain when a soft pillow of freezing cold hit her square in the face. It came with a small, sharp pain and for a moment she was sure she'd been betrayed by the ice. Hadn't she taken the winter offering gently?

As her perception cleared, she dabbed a hand at her mouth. A small smear of blood came back with clumps of snow, turning the water pink as it melted and pooled in her palm. Upon the ground, sunk into the soft snow, a small rock that had been concealed within the hard-packed snow lay innocently. It's shape, however, the sharp edges and corners, revealed it to be the traitorous offender. She looked up to see not the girls, but a small group of boys all staring, a few with their mouths open in mocking laughs or just shock that such a small prank could have brought blood. An orphan's life is hard, however, and there were more than a few vicious grins that almost mocked her for not bleeding enough.

Her bottom lip pouted, now stained dark to the left side, and one eye - dark as the midnight sky - began to water.

[Grey Twilight]

Amused faces were all around him, like an audience that was witnessing a well done puppet show, their fingers pointed as they wallowed in roughshod laughter. But Lukas found himself unable join them. He wanted to – standing in the middle of such a congregation and not doing what they did excommunicated you faster then the Church excommunicated child-molesting bishops. But despite the mentality of the crowd calling him to bask in the repercussions of the recent prank, the orphan tyke couldn’t find entertainment in what was done to the petite blonde. How could he when his was the hand that sent the snowball on a crash course with Danni’s face?

They had tried to blarney him into doing it. And when he had refused, they tried to goad him. And when that failed to produce the desired result, they said that he was a coward that probably couldn’t even throw a snowball that far. And that had been the final prod that sent him in the direction they wanted. Because nobody told Lukas Agathon what he could or could not do except Lukas Agathon. If they hadn’t played the card of his stubbornness, the orphan would’ve wondered why they hadn’t just barraged Dannika themselves. Most of the boys that had tried to wheedle him were all bigger, older boys that had had no problems bombarding some other girls with snow. Especially Marius, who had about three years and half a foot on Lukas and who was the self-proclaimed ringleader of the shoddy gang of orphan boys. But once he threw the snowball that Marius had given him and it bit the blonde child in the face with more then just teeth of frost, Lukas understood.

“You! You put a stone in, didn’t you?!” Lukas shouted, finally pointing his finger but not at bleeding Dannika like the rest. The stocky kid at the far end of his forefinger just kept on with his irritating chortle and patted the black-haired orphan on the shoulder for the job well done. Lukas wanted to punch him in his freckled face. Not because he particularly cared about the stricken blonde, though. Dannika was a girl and all girls were just a whiney nuisance that had cooties and played with stupid dolls and deserved to be snowballed. He wanted to hit Marius because the bastard talked him into doing something he didn’t want to do. Because, regardless of how much he disliked the girls, stoning somebody made him feel guilty.

“I so did. And you sent it straight into that ugly face!” Marius clasped him on the shoulder as the laughter subsided. Nobody approached Danni to help her or ask her if she was alright – such was the life as an orphan. Despite the care from the grown ups, it was still the survival of the fittest, hardiest, those with the thickest hide. “Now, go to her and take that pretty hairpin of hers. We’ll trade it for some sweets.”

Lukas shook the hand off his shoulder and took a step away from his malevolent peer. “I don’t want to!” Below the scarlet bandana fastened tightly around his forehead, the riddled visage of Lukas Agathon was sulking. “I am Lukas Agathon the Third and I am no thief, you varlet!”

“At least I’m not a coward, Lukas Agathon the Turd,” the ten year-old with curly ash blonde hair guffawed and the rest were more then eager to join in. Even some of the girls giggled in their high-pitched tones that sounded like discordant, tiny bells. The fact that he did come of as a coward for recruiting another to do his dirty work was obvious to nobody at all. That was the way the child’s mind worked; it latched onto the easiest explanation and held on no matter what. It was easier to make fun of somebody then to stand in their defense. “So if you don’t want to be known as a coward, you better get me that hairpin.”

“I said I don’t want to!” Lukas bawled, kicking at the shin of the older boy. His oversized boots did their job, forcing Marius to hop on one foot for a second, just long enough for a shove in the chest to send him onto his back. The laughter died with the fall of its instigator. Most of the girls recoiled and most of the boys stood with dumb expressions on their faces, all waiting for the retribution of the fallen boy. But it never came. Out of the insides of his threadbare sweater, Lukas procured something that looked even more threatening then the chunky arms of Marius. With a wobbly wooden handle and half of a rusty blade, the kitchen knife barely looked like a weapon, but it was still more then enough to strike fear into the hearts of the youngsters. “Now, you better leave me alone or I’ll stick you.”

Lukas backed away slowly at first, struggling to keep his fear behind a cloak of determination, his heavy boots nearly making him stumble as they struggled with the shin-deep snow. Once he was at the safe distance, he put the knife away – it would do him no good if Mistress Shauna saw him with it. He wanted to run inside just then, but the recess time wasn’t over yet. And he wanted to run away from the orphanage just like he did every day, but he knew that he wouldn’t get far. He tried that once, led by desire to seek out his father in the North Steppes, but he nearly froze before he got to the next town.

Seeing as nobody was quite fond of his company at that moment and he had no place to be, his huge boots took him to Dannika. He didn’t know the girl; he was rather certain that nobody did since she always kept to herself and probably didn’t even have more then half a tongue given how silent she was. And she wasn’t really easy on the eyes, what with that creepy, white eye of hers. But then again, with his face marred by fire years ago, he wasn’t pretty to look at himself. And he did hit her in the face. An apology certainly wasn’t in order – she was a girl after all – but he felt obligated to at least check if she was alright. So he stuffed his hands as deep as they went into the pockets of his denim pants and tried to look as nonchalant as possible, kicking some snow ahead of himself as he walked.

“You alright?” he asked once he was close enough. “I... It wasn’t my snowball. They gave it to me. I would hit you with a normal one.”

[Morning Stars]

She'd just finished wiping off the snow from her face. The blood had dried up almost the moment it welled up to spot her lip, and as she pushed the slush from her reddening skin, much was done to wash away the signs that the small, dark cut was new. Even as her small fist balled up and began to rub at the hot tears that had gathered unfallen in her right eye, she caught a glimpse of a shadow stretching long over the white snow. Someone was approaching from the left, where the snowball had been thrown from. She felt a little angry over it, insult being added to injury. She shrunk away from him, her body squeezing closer to the pine tree as if it could protect her. When she turned her head a little, keeping her chin down to look at him through her thick, pale eyelashes, she was surprised to see Lukas.

He was the youngest of the older boys to have his own bed, and long had Dannika considered him to be the most interesting. He told stories of a great dragon that had caused him to be here, taking his family from him. He told stories of hope, that one day he was going to take back his rightful place with his family and live a rich, happy life. It was more hope than most of them had, especially Dannika. Most of all, though, beyond the stories and the bandanna he wore as religiously as she kept her hairpin, there were the scars of fire that caressed his face.

Above all else, Dannika Valaan understood scars. After all, how could she not when all around her left eye were the long marks of torn and slow healed flesh of her own? Without the strange mark, perhaps she'd be one of the ones left alone to her own devices. Without them, perhaps she would have been one of the children laughing while these pranks and tricks were pulled on someone else. She didn't think of that much. She just knew that if she didn't look so different from the rest of them, maybe she'd wouldn't be standing here with a stinging lip. When the knife was put away, she didn't huddle so close to the prickly pine needles, and when he stopped within a stone's throw from her, she didn't return his earlier favor. Instead, she nodded a little when he asked if she was alright, and listened to what was as close to an apology as she was probably going to get.

This is what made boys stupid.

She didn't want to get hit at all. Not by a loaded snowball or a normal one, or fists or books or toys. She didn't want her things taken, to the the only one who didn't know what the joke was. Food taken off her plate, her pillow taken from under her head at night. She just wanted to be left alone. Her dark eye was focused on him, the paler accomplice staring blindly ahead as it always did. Dannika Valaan understood scars, and she understood the fact that her scars made her half blind. His made him strong. Behind him, Marius was just now getting to his feet, shocked and sullen. His eyes were on Lukas' back, his face drawn in an expression of thoughtful plotting. It was a look the orphan girl had seen many times, it was the look that was given to her before any of the big pranks were pulled. Had she not been so enthralled with the icesickles earlier, she might have caught it and avoided this whole mess. She looked back to Lukas, locking his gaze with her one good eye. She offered the only real acceptance of his regret that she could give. She gave him not one, but two sentences, a prize that even Mistress Shauna couldn't squeeze from her.

"You shouldn'ta done that. They're gonna get you now."

[Grey Twilight]

With his hands out of his pockets and on his hips instead, Lukas pushed out his chest as far as their scrawniness went before he threw his head back and guffawed as if Dannika just told the best joke ever. Laughter was good. Bold laughter was better. It was a perfect camouflage for fear and anxiety, and right now Lukas was troubled with both. He knew his little retribution didn’t come without strings attached. He maybe was a light sleeper and one to usually pull pranks on others, but there was only so much that a starving orphan could do to keep himself safe. Sooner or later Marius would push him against the wall and make him pay for this little transgression. But that came later. Right now he was Lukas Agathon the Third, future Lord of the North, and he believed in the delusion that he feared nothing.

“They can try. I’m not afraid of them,” the shaggy-haired tyke answered once his forced laughter subsided. His belly laugh had been loud enough to draw pretty much every eye in the vicinity on the isolated pair of orphans, but Lukas refused to pay attention to what happened behind his back. He was on his high horse now and he was riding it for as long as it went.

Instead, his eyes were on Dannika, looking down towards the petite orphan from below the hem of his crimson bandana. Contrary to what he had expected, the girl neither shied away nor tried to return the snowballing favor once he approached. Instead, she seemed to bounce back from the impact quite fast and even offered a reply. A spoken reply. With words and all. Those few sentences that they exchanged on that chilly afternoon quite possibly surpassed the sum of all their communication throughout the years they spent under the roof of the same orphanage. But that wasn’t surprising. The tiny blonde was too coy, too introverted and ultimately too much of a girl for any real fraternization. She always seemed to wander around on her own, excluded from the company of other, mostly older girls. There was hardly anything of an interest on her; she was just another underfed, unfortunate child in a congregation of unfortunate, underfed children.

“Besides, you should worry more then me. They’re after your little hair thing.” He pointed towards the enameled hairpin that held her locks of faded blonde color in somewhat of an order. At this, Dannika did recoil, furthering the distance between them by another pair of tiny steps. “I don’t want it, stupid. They wanted me to steal it from you, but I told them I’m no thief.” This was said with a perfectly proud, matter-o-factly tone and a raised chin, the kind that only children can utter when they feel like they’re saying something strangely profound. The fact that he did occasionally ‘borrow’ an apple or a melon from the local marketplace without notifying the hawkers of the said fruits didn’t seem to faze the tyke.

This didn’t seem to assure Dani, though. In fact, the harebrained lass even ran for cover behind the snow-crusted pine. It took but a second for Lukas to realize that while she might’ve recoiled from his hand, she fled from a cluster of snowballs that Marius and his group flung at the pair. Lukas turned just in time to see them descend upon his fearless figure and did the only thing he could. He flinched, froze and stood there with a ridiculous expression of a rabbit caught in the crosshairs. The snowballs fell around him. Literally. Some struck the pine, bringing down loads of snow and icicles and some whistled past his ears and some even fell short, digging harmlessly into the soft cushion of white. But by an odd stroke of luck, a lot of these snowy projectiles failed to do what he succeeded to do to Dannika with a single snowball.

Lukas’s boldness piqued. Right then and there, he knew he was untouchable, a genuine king of orphans. Imitating the derogatory gesture he picked up from one of the queer looking travelers, he lifted the balled fist of his right arm while his left struck at the elbow of the raised appendage. He had not a clue what this gesture meant, but the stranger he stole it from had a nasty scowl on his face when he did it, so it seemed appropriate to the black-haired boy. They were all worthless bandits.

Lukas meant to make that fact known to all within earshot, but then a snowball struck him in the face and brought his feet back on the ground and his head down from the clouds.

“That’s quite enough, children,” a stern voice of Mistress Shauna announced from the porch of the rundown orphanage as the boisterous boy spat slush and started to collect some snow underfoot for a pair of missiles of his own. “Time to come inside.”

[Morning Stars]

The rest of the day had passed without incident. The boys were perhaps a little rougher with Lukas than necessary, but under Miss Shauna's watchful eyes and the memory of the cleverly concealed knife that had been filched from the kitchens, they did not dare move against him in any significant way this day. Dannika, however, was never as lucky as the orphan king. The real bullying had been saved for most of the day, until the evening closed in and the children were told to ready themselves for bed. The girls crowded around the smaller child, pushing and pinching. Biting was something the toddlers in the other wing were apt to do, but more than one of the girls who were so proud of their near decade of life on Althanas had stooped to marking the girl's shoulders and arms like this as she struggled in the thick woolen nightdress they held her bound in. When the arms were released and she could at last pull her head through the frayed opening in the garment, a couple of the red markings glared meanly from her pale skin, and many more remained concealed under the cloth.

The bullies gave small whoops of triumph when she finally fell to her knees, crying quietly. The feet were poised to strike at her back and arms when the door opened and Miss Shauna slipped inside to turn out the lantern lights. The older girls fled like cockroaches in sudden light, fleeing the scene of the crime as quickly as they had descended upon their victim. When the dark had come and Miss Shauna was sure that the day's excitement was starting to give way into the exhaustion it had caused, the door shut once again. The moonlight reflecting on the snow outside the window helped the children's eyes to adjust quickly to the darkness, and when it did, several pairs of eyes were all focused on one tiny, pale form.

The nights were bitter cold, and with the way the coal prices were jumping, the hearth was empty more often than not. Tonight would be one of these nights, where the younger children were huddled a handful to each bed, told to keep close to help keep warm as moth-eaten blankets were piled upon them to try and help the situation. The wall clock's long hand had barely made a turn around when two pairs of hands grabbed Dannika at her place on the end of the bed, with separate intentions. The fingers that were curled so tightly around her gown's sleeve pulled, while a pair of hands and feet pushed violently. With a thick ripping sound and a thump, Dannika fell to the floor, the arm of her wool nightdress still clutched overhead, the cloth fluttering feebly from the victorious grasp. Titters of quiet laughter followed her and for a moment she laid where she'd fallen, her small arms slipping under her head to cradle it. It didn't take long for the cold to come seeping in through the ragged wool and thin skin. As she shivered, she wondered if her bones could turn to ice. There had been nights of scary stories before from some of the older children of people made of ice that came and went with the big snows. It almost always ended in the death of children, and for just a moment, Danni wished she could be one of those silent murderers, as cold to her victims as they had been to her. Not everyone would have to die, though. She knew she would spare at least one of her housemates.

Her thoughts having turned to him, Dannika stood from her place on the floor, staring only for a moment through her good eye at the sleeping masses. Many of them snored, their mouths hanging open. She sneered for a moment and then, shaking her head, moved past the beds of sleeping girls and opened the door as quietly as she could. It clicked a little bit, but this was the time when Mistress Shauna would sit down with her books and her hot chocolate, and little noises down the hall were far easier to ignore. She crept two doors down, slipping into yet another dark room without a sound. Here, the beds were pressed perhaps closer together than in her own room, for this was where the older boys slept. The advantage of age granted them their own nests, without the need for press closed bodies. As her eyes adjusted to the new light, where the moon's rays didn't quite manage to illuminate through the thickly curtained windows the way they did in her room, she found Lukas' bed. It was the smallest of the many frames, slightly bent downward where a leg had been chipped away by some form of abuse in years past. The blankets, however, were heavy, the edges hanging almost to the floor. She crept up to the side, watching Lukas for a moment. He lay, sprawled along the mattress, his brows twitching with some dream he was having. Above all, he looked warm.

The bed, while narrow, was longer than he was tall, and though she didn't trust him to not shove her back to the floor by crawling in beside him, there was enough room at the foot for her to curl against the baseboard. With a gentle, slow movement, she put one knee on the side of the bed. The weight pressed down, squeaking the metal frame of the bottom, the mattress shifting to accommodate her. With a start, Lukas shot up, his hands shoving her shoulder. Dannika was spun, knocked back to stand at the foot of the bed, a sullen expression on her face. His voice as harsh, the whisper forced and angry, though still a little slurred from having just woken.

"What in Haidia are you doing!?"

It was a curse the older boys liked to use when Shauna was away, and though Dannika's eyes widened, she didn't express any of the shock one of the sillier girls might have. Instead, she lowered her head, shivering slightly as she stared at her toes. The ripped arm of the gown showed dark marks where the bites had reddened along her skin, and where pinches and too-hard hits were starting to bruise a deep purple. Saying nothing, she waited, expecting fully to be sent away.

[Grey Twilight]

As agile on his mental feet as he was on the real ones, Lukas was quick to comprehend what was going on. The telltale signs were all there: the torn sleeve of an already haggard nightgown that left Dannika with even less protection from the bitter chill; the marks of trauma typical for childish squabbles; the abject expression on the face that merely sought a place to rest. The girl has clearly been abused bunkmates and wound up a pariah from their company and their bedroll. Lukas knew this because several years ago, when he was still a mere child (as compared to now when he believed himself to be growing into a real man, as delusional as that thought sounded), the boys did the same to him. Several times. He wound up sleeping under the bed instead of on it, praying to whatever gods looked over Salvar that some bug won’t crawl into his ear and eat his brains.

Going to the Mistress of the house wasn’t very effective either. Shauna Evereth wasn’t doing this sort of charitable work out of kindness of her heart. True, there was some benignity in the woman, and patience that one had to have in abundance when dealing with a bunch of headstrong orphans, but in the end being their Mistress was a job for which she got paid. So while she would probably walk Dannika back to the girl’s room and reprimand those that assaulted her, she would do little else then return to her quarters and her beloved literature. Lukas knew this from experience as well; the first, last and only time he went to whine like a little baby resulted in such turn of events. If anything, it only made the others meaner to you for being a crybaby.

However, all these realizations and bad memories didn’t change one simple fact and that was that Dannika was a girl. Girls and boys didn’t sleep together, that was why they had separate rooms after all. Why girls and boys didn’t sleep together was outside of Lukas’s reach, but he didn’t dwell too much on it. It was one of those things that grown-ups said and insisted on, one of those undisputed facts of life that were reasoned into children by repetition and practice. It was simply something that wasn’t supposed to be done, like licking a frosty piece of metal or swimming after a meal.

“Shoo, shoo! Go away and leave me alone,” he tried to send her away, tried to make his voice both silent and strict. He succeeded in the latter, but failed the former because the blonde girl was still standing next to his bunk, rubbing one bare foot against the other and doing the same with her arms. There was also a foreign sound in the room, a sort of clicking one could hear when two pieces of broken porcelain were put together. It took Lukas and his spry mental feet a couple of seconds of searching through the moonlight-lit bedroom to realize that it was made by Dannika’s chattering teeth.

Lukas would’ve loved that he didn’t care. He almost wished that he was like Marius, who loaded snowballs and shared knuckle sandwiches with anybody, regardless of age or gender. He would’ve been able to kick at the half-blind girl, turn on the other side, be fast asleep in a matter of minutes and avoid any further complications. But while Lukas Agathon was a lot of things – a thief, a hypocrite and a liar being some of them – he wasn’t a heartless brute. He cared. Not in the soppy, luvvy-dubby kind of way, but concern was there, as sure as the rotten feeling in his gut. Sending her away would’ve been the wrong thing to do, no better than kicking a three-legged mutt that came hoping for a bone. And it didn’t take a chivalrous man to see the wrongness in that.

So, in spite of the laws of life (which made the sleeping arrangements clear) and the fear of being noticed by one of the boys in the adjacent bed, Lukas succumbed to that thing that so seemed to lack nowadays; conscience.

“Fine, just get in,” he said in what was barely a whisper. His eyes were that of an owl on a night hunt, watching over the room filled with beds and slowly-rising bundles of blankets and bodies. No-one seemed to be alarmed by Dannika’s visit so far. He pulled the twin sheets off of his body, letting the incorporeal blanket of coldness enfold his body for a moment. It made him understand the girl’s plight even better. “But you better be gone by the wake-up call or I’ll throw you out the window.”

The warning was there more to make him look meaner and stricter then he really was, a fragment of the tough-guy routine that he couldn’t afford to lose. Toughness was what kept you alive, one step ahead of the pack. Softness got you pushed into a corner way too often.