‘Sihen, two weeks have passed by. I have indeed much to learn in the proper ways of being a handmaiden. The basics were very straightforward, and I would even say that it was easy.’
‘Helping the queen and following her like a silent shadow for the majority of the day wasn’t that challenging. Especially so, that she rarely left her pace, and even then a small battalion of guards and those strange assassin droids were esc her.’
‘I quickly realized that me being a bodyguard was more of a prestige thing than my actual job. Of course, that fact wasn’t enough reason to let my guard down. After all, my life depended on it.’
‘But, bay inal thought, being the queen’s personal servant was mostly easy, yet as the saying goes, the devil is iails. I had to learn a few hundred of those details to represent her Majesty properly as her handmaiden.’
‘The queen was ly a tolerant teacher, either. I have lost ts of how often were my palms filed or how many hours did I spent kneeling in the er without food. She has definitely realized that my palms were healing ridiculously fast for her to prefer that exact punishment. It could also be the fact that I hated it the most, and she was amused by the sight of fear on my face. She even made me stand by her bed aire night oh a tray of refreshments. Only when I actally woke her falling asleep for a sed and dropping the silverware on my feet after aremely tiresome day did she relent and choose to drop that type of punishment all together.’
‘Of course, only after she spped me for the first time. The sounds of cttering tray and silverware must have reminded her of some previous trauma, for her to react so harshly. I mean… the queen wasn’t pletely against beating sves, but she never did it with her own hands. Meaning she preferred to make us do it to ourselves, or use some medium like a stick.’
‘I will not sugarcoat the overall experience.’
‘It was infuriating. It mao drive home her message. Meaning that I was alone in her world, nobody will e to my help, nobody will care if she humiliated me, punished me or even killed me. I was nothing more than a valuable accessory of her power. Pricy, but not irrepceable. She was making me uand this, slowly but surely moldio a shape that she preferred the most.’
‘Yet… the punishments were not the hardest to resist. Those were the praises. When I did well, she praised me with such genuiion that it made me question my entire look on the world. I initially thought the queen to be evil, but it was far from the truth. Of course, she was nht in the head, as in the way on people look and i with the world. However, from her twisted sense of justid perception. She was far from an evil person. This… troversy tio fuse me to this day.’
‘The queen, in all her punishments and teasings, has never punished me just for the sake of punishment or for the joy of seeing me squirm. She ouched me inappropriately after the first time at the baly, which she silently agreed to be an attempt to provoke me.’
‘Above all else, she was far from someone incapable of love. I have thought for a long time about her personality. In the end, I have e to the realization that the woman was akin to a perfeist gardener. She loved her flowers from the depth of her heart, but only until those flowers blossomed in the exact way she wahem to. Every unruly leaf, every unnecessary bud, had to be cut away and strictly reguted. Even if it caused the pnt to die, eventually. Oh, and of course her flowers were sves.’
‘And there was another harsh tradi. Through these few weeks after I went through a few arguments with her. I have noticed a straendency. She iionally created and sought out situations where people were forced to front her or be publicly humiliated.’
‘The queen wao be challenged. She wanted people tue with her, but at the same time she puhose who dared to oppose her with the slightest of gestures.’
‘I have told her more than a few things that should have resulted in my execution when she pushed my buttons just a bit too far and too quickly. Yet she would never eveertaihe idea of any punishment that would leave a perma mark on my body.’
‘All in all, she was a mystery to me.’
‘Anyway, I am going to summarize how my time passed in the pace.’
‘The first week had passed in a haze because Eqomu was stantly teag me those exact minor details over ten hellish hours a day. Oh, Eqomu, as I ter learned, is the name of the mirian boy I first met when I woke up here. He has a unique personality for sure, but I am not oo talk in this regard. Maybe that is the reason why we so quickly became friends, but that doesn’t ge the fact that I utterly hate his etiquette csses. No doubt he also hated me as his student, but that didn’t staween our friendship, especially since we didn’t really have that many other options to make friends.’
‘You see, Eqomu was one of the queens favorite sves, and I say it certainly after these two weeks I spent with her, that she didn’t have many favored sves, or individuals in general. To be more precise, there was Eqomu, and now me.’
‘Thanks to Eqomu’s expnations, I also found out that the other handmaidens were not sves.’
‘They were the third or sed daughters of wealthy Zygerrian families, and all of them took great offense because I, as a simple dirty sve, was elected to be their equal.’
‘Sihe moment I met with them, they began to make fun of me and humiliate me in every imaginable way.’
‘Envy was certainly a great motivator, but fear was just as good. I figured after I had grown tired of their ridiculous acts of pettiness, like smearing honey on the inside of my clothes, especially my undergarments.’
‘In the end, I decided to send my regards.’
‘By pg them in a force choke for a few seds. Nothing too serious. Sihen, they haven’t even dared to look me in the eye and they try to run away every time they see me. Quite hirious if you realize that we are often summoo appear in the queen’s preseogether. Seeing the way they squirmed around me was a small bit of payback, almost as sweet as the perma st of honey lingering around my clothes.’
‘There was only oive effect to this, and that had only begun to affect me towards the end of the sed week which I spent here.’
‘Namely, the pace’s rumor mill. Sihe fact that I am a force wielder was a secret from most of the people. Only a few of the queen’s trusted advisers were privy to this information, and some also trusted sves, and by that I mean Eqomu, and the pace cook, but that is a story for aime.’
‘Anyway, thanks to my previously mentioned as. Where I lost my cool… It all happened after I pulled up my clothes ing out of a bath.’
‘I was still in my m daze, and to my shame I didn’t realize in time that the inside of the clothes I pulled on were lubricated with fug honey... o self: I have to remember to not use cuss words, because the queen will bee agitated again from hearing them. Kneeling outside on the windy baly all night was not fun. I thought I will freeze to death at one point. Where was I, again? Oh, yes.’
‘So, in my rightfully eate, after being forced to bathe again and thanks to that, receive a scolding and a punishment from the queen for my tardiness. I proceeded to pce each of the handmaids’ into a force choke while telling them that if they ever get near my clothes again, I will skin them alive and lubricate the inside of their skin with honey only to attach it back to their bodies with a stapler.’
‘Yes… well, I think that spending two weeks in this pce had left a certain mark on my mental state after all. I will admit that I vented most of my frustration, accumuted from being the queen’s new favorite on those poor bastards. Not that they didn’t deserve it, but I might have overdo with the stapler part. Recalling the vivid terror in their eyes actually made me feel bad for a fra of a sed. Then the st of lingering honey on my clothes reached my nostrils.’
‘I mean… I was clearly exaggerating things. I thought that nobody would take such a ridiculous threat seriously, right? It turns out they would. Sihe i, I was left alone, given a wide berth everywhere I went. Nobody dared to threaten my peace again, and the emphasis was on the “nobody” here.’
‘It turned out that those women were not as simple as I initially thought. Threatening them head on might have worked for a few days, but beyond that they were already starting to sew their little pns against me. They were far pettier and arrogant to simply let me be. They ged tactid instead of fronting me head on now, they decided to try to isote me in the pace.’
‘To be fair… they have done a marvelous job on that note. If I was a normal girl of my age stu such pitiful circumstahis would have defiurned me into a sobbing mess. It’s likely that I would have ended up at their feet pleading for mercy by now.’
‘Unfortunately for them, I was as far from being a normal girl as one could be. If I truly desired pany, I could simply delve into my mind through meditation and uh the spirits of old masters, sharing the rent of this body with me. It ity that most of them were sarcastic bastards that would undoubtedly mock me out of my skin if I did so.’
‘Not that I couldn’t handle being alone.’
‘Anyway, it was clearly a st ditch effort from the handmaidens to frustrate me and gain bae face. It was fih me. If they didn’t sabotage my life directly, I had no reason to attack them either. I mean, teach them a lesson, sihat would make their accusations valid and everyone would ignore me and I would get puhis was clearly a bait set by them, and I won’t walk into it. Yet it still frustrated me somewhat. This was the reason that led me to e to the only two people I was fident to share my plight with, in the hopes of some form of structive advice.’
‘The three of us were in Hava’s room, because her furnitures were the rgest and they could easily aodate all of us. She is the lead chef of the pace, and my sed friend here, oh, by the way, she is a besalisk with the astoundi of two meters and teimeters. She also had four arms, clearly part of the reason she excelled i so much. I sighed as I finished sharing my current problem.’
“So that is why everybody in the pace, except you, thinks that I am a crazy witch, and nobody wants to speak with me anymore...” — ‘I stated with a sigh finishing my expnation.’
‘The result of sharing my troubles was underwhelming. If I wao be entirely ho, I didn’t know what else I expected... I watched with hollow eyes as my two friends were g their eyes out from untrolble ughter.’
‘Equ was the first ohat mao gain baeasure of trol over his ughter, but not for long.’
“You... you are incredible... so that is why all of them looked like they had been forced to eat live frogs throughout the st two weeks. I thought the queen puhem for something, but it turns out it was you! To be threatened by a mere sve as promi members of the aristocracy. I am not surprised that the true reason for their as against you ushed uhe rug. It would shame them publically if it ever came to light.” — ‘Equ stated, trying to subdue his bubbling ughter.’
‘I stared at Ava with dull eyes, who was still ughing openly. At st my patience has run thin.’
“Ava, stop ughing already, it isn’t that funny!” — ‘I shouted at the giant woman.’
“Ha-h-h! That is where you are wrong, little mouse. It is absolutely hirious.” — ‘The woman shouted back, drying tears of joviality from the ers of her eyes.’
‘I frow the woman, she new damn well how I hated that partiiame which the queen gave me.‘
‘To top it off, she attempted to pull my leks pyfully, as she liked to do, but I dodged it. Already growing a sixth sense of sorts, to notice her iion and slight ge of body nguage. It wasn’t easy. She still gets me sometimes, as I used tet that she had two more arms. She is surprisingly sneaky for her size.’
‘I looked up from my daydreaming as she tinued her senteer a healthy break to ugh more at my childish pouting.’
“Don’t worry, Nizzy, the others are also ughing their guts out behind those stupid handmaidens’ back. The reason they don’t talk to you is only because they are afraid of them. They are not sves like us, you know? Their influence reach far in this pace, and their bullying is known to many of us. Also, not everyone of us is the queen’s new favorite pet, like you, little mouse.”
“But I...”
“Don’t even try to deny it. The queen likes you. I am not acg you for it. Any of us would have dohe same. I am just pointing out that you have pyed your cards well. It is not simply the fact that you use the force. It has just as many things to do with your quick wit and ce to question her.”
“Well, thanks I guess. I simply wao have a more fortable life and avoid any type of unnecessary suffering while I am at it.” — ‘I said in a subdued voice, admitting something that was so material felt a bit wrong. Yet I did not o fake my feelings in front of these two, so I did it anyway.’
“Aren’t we all like that? Hmm?” — ‘Ava added teasingly. Managing to sneak pull my left lek.’
“Oh, by the way, how is it that you guys are still talking to me?” — ‘I asked, suddenly ied, after sending a gre at the besalisk.’ — “I mean, in Equ’s case, it is probably because everyone is already hating his guts... so that is that…”
“Hey!” — ‘The mirian shouted in the background, just registering that he was casually insulted.’
“But what is the situation with you, Ava?” — ‘I tinued my question, ign the boy.’
“I have other friends too, like the fishes in the garden’s ke, her majesties’ birds...” — ‘The young boy started to t all his supposed friends on his fingers while Ava and me tinued our talk.’
“Well, you see, I am in a special position.” — ‘The rge woman admitted with a wink.’ — “In a position where nobody really threaten me except the lords and the queen herself.”
“I have at least three loth-cats, and there was that stray dog three weeks ago. I gave it a little food.” — ‘Equ tiirelessly.’
“And why is that?” — ‘I asked from Ava, as she picked me curiosity.’
“There was also that strange big flying bug with six wings, it was bigger than a bird... Are, are you ign me?” — ‘Equ finally seemed to realize what was going on.’
“Simply put, everybody who knows what is good for them will not fuck with the people who make their food every single day.”
“Stop ign me!” — ‘The boy was throwing a tantrum in the background.’
“Now I see. That makes sense.” — ‘I o myself, listening to Ava’s words.’
“I will make your handmaiden lesson into a living hell!” — ‘Equ shouted, in an enraged voice that sent cold shivers down my back.’
‘I immediately raised my arms, g as I stuttered out a few words.’
“E-Equ... don’t do that... I was just kidding, because you ughed at me so rudely for almost ten damn minutes... If you won’t do that, I will fet about yhing...”
“Hmm... okay.” — ‘The boy said, happy to not be ignored.’
“Thanks...” — ‘I added, a bit surprised of how easily he accepted my offer.’
“Nizzy, I have also something to add to the topic you guys were speaking about.” — ‘The boy said, and I was a bit surprised that he actually paid attention to what we talked about while being so occupied with his own strife. Then I shook my head, reminding myself that the boy was not as simple as he seemed. There was undoubtedly a reason why he became one of the queen’s favorite.’
“Then share it with us, Equ.”
“It is clear that the biggest reason why the others are ign you is ected to your supposed witch powers.”
“Don’t start with that, you guys know that I am not a witch...”
“Oh yes, my dear.” — ‘Said Ava’ — “But the others don’t.”
“Urgh...”
“There is one more important factor that you have pletely ignored.” — ‘Equ added.’
“Which is?” — ‘I asked back, a bit annoyed by his stranding.’
“You have brokeural order of the pace. It never really happened in our lifetime that a sve appeared suddenly and basically skipped the whole pame, rising instantly to one of the top and most envied positions of power among sves. Although you are not the first or the st handmaiden who was chosen among the sves, but the abruptness of how it happened was very different from normal.” — ‘The boy expined slowly.’
“You are right about that. Thanks for sharing your opinion. It was quite eye-opening.”
‘I holy praised Equ, who was clearly happy with my open reition. He immediately began to tell us a more detailed version of the current pames ihe pace. pletely missing the fact that we didn’t really care about that.’
‘I sneaked a knowing gowards Ava, and our eyes met halfway. Both of us sighed with weariness. Yes, that was just your normal Equ. The sixteen-year-old mirian boy was far above average in intelligence. Yet it was bound to make him socially inapt. Especially in a striviro g any source of creativity, like this one was. Sihe things he was ied in were pletely different than his age-groups, he was quickly deemed strange and ironically stupid by his peers.’
‘Therefore, we and by that I mean Ava and me, decided to try to teae level of emotional intelligeo the boy. It was funny, as he had already learned every small detail of the proper body nguage for certain things. Yet, and I don’t really know how that could have happened, but he was pletely uo read those exact things on others. He has a long way to go... for sure.’
