Eden never had much of an eye for Brunnhold girls.

But as of the sixteenth, they bordered on utterly repellent.

Pinched and yellow-pale, their freckles stark as cookie crumbs floating on milk, pin-straight hair running the gamut from rust to ink. They didn’t look like the way he was taught a real girl should look. Brunnhold girls were like doll-girls, okay to look at sometimes but nothing you’d want to kiss or hold.

His brothers liked Brunnhold girls just fine – Etheros IV married one, and she made a couple of tan babies with shocks of curly golden hair. Eremani had been a green skirt chaser beyond compare. But not Eden. The dreamiest of them all, the biggest romantic around from all his silly wondertale books, yet he couldn’t be bothered to bat an eyelash when all those girls in green would flounce by him in the halls, tug on his golden fleece and giggle.

And when a girl would stoop down like some exotic animal to fix her spats, a haze of hair falling in her face, skirt riding up her calves, the stalks of her stocking clad legs on display for an utterly beautiful instant?

Eden breezed right by without a blink. But other boys, normal boys, rubbernecked for a glimpse and bumped into a each other like hormonal marbles. He didn’t blink at any of the boys either, which had been Endymion's guess ("...and it's not like that's something to be embarrassed of, Eddy. It's positively cosmopolitan. Why, in Mugroba, boys young as twelve exchange poetry. Is that not so artistic? And you do like art, don't you? You should have gone to Thul Amat with me. You'd have been kissing by thirteen, and not -- oh hullo, Mother! Need help with the tea? There's a dear").

He was completely content with just letting his adolescence steam by, while the rest of the world was relishing in the joy and anxieties of their first kisses, first loves, first dates. Eden knew nothing of these things, curled up in his fantasy stories and big ugly engineering books and crippling homesickness.

Past tense. Was. Did. Were. Things had changed.

This, Eden knew, was called metamorphosis. He just didn't quite know what he'd be been before, or what he was now.

+

He went back to Hesse for the Hamis break, as he always did. Madame Aiello wouldn't have it any other way. In the last few years, theylost the mansion went the gold trade fell through the floorboards. They couldn’t afford Mestigia anymore, the city so fair and populated with galdori. Populated with his real friends, mind.

Fortunately, Evelien had secured a prefecture of farmland in the East, and he was kind enough to relocate his mother and baby brother to a sprawling country home. It was open air and beautiful, white pillars and hanging silk. The only draw back is that it was plopped right in dead-center of goldmine country. Plowfoot country, Eden thought sourly. Every Hamis, every summer, he was abandoned in this big old house with his laudanum laced mummy.

And her servants, but those never bear mentioning.

His mother went out of her way to hire the dullest servants ever. She didn’t want any crafty-eyed beasts prowling her corridors, when it was just her luscious, defenseless self and her young fool of a boy in the house. “They have indecent proviclivities, Eden darling,” she murmured once, raising her head from a velvet pillow.

An all female staff of maids and kitchen ladies, the most cross-eyed and hatchet faced Madame Aiello could conjure up out of the fertile Hessean soil. They were sturdy, industrious women the lot of them – but nothing to look at. Wild nimbus of curls hidden under headscraves and braids, middle aged curves that challenged every bodice smothered beneath bandeaus and high-necked dresses. All 40-somethings, making their way into crone-hood amid their baking and window washing. There would be no human harlots darkening this door step to tempt her kitten from the path of goodness, no ma’am.

There was one exception, here.

Ireni was a kitchen lady’s daughter, her youngest, a brown thumb of a girl with crossed cow eyes. She was a young thing, not too many years beyond Eden himself. Her hair was a hurricane, a force of nature. Her curves were frothy-wonderful, but they were hidden under an avalanche of clothing and a tragically dull face. Soft lipped, snubbed nose Ireni. Boring Ireni.

Slow Ireni. Yes, that was the key to Amathea Aiello’s trust. The girl was dense as a brick. Cross-eyed, stuttering, stumbling. It was like music to her. But those hands could knead bread well enough and she was too stupid to plot any daring subterfuge, and that’s all Miss Aiello cared for.

Until:

“Excuse me,” the servant girl piped.

The words in Eden's book crawled on like ants. He was just to the part where Frederick and his bride were running for the ferry, a mob of plowfoot laborers hot at their heels with torches and knives, and he really wanted to keep reading, though he knew the way these things would go. Frederick was just about to whip around to confront the savages and unleash a spell of Bash’s Fury so intense the earth would split at the seams and swallow them all and –

“Excuse me.”

He whipped his head up like a little viper, face pinched into an annoyed pout. Poised above him in startling clarity was that girl, that dumb girl, blinking shrewdly down at him.

“Issat…'Betwixt the Moon and the Mountain?" And Stupid Ireni's stumbling speech was clear as a crystal bell. Still plowfoot-y and callous, but not a stutter nor slur. Her mouth was full and round as a ripe cherry, it was quirked into the faintest of smiles, and the smile was for him.

Under the tight scrutiny of those liquid brown eyes, Eden was suddenly scandalized by his naked feet and shoulders. He stuffed his toes under the tassled cover of a blanket, but the shoulders he couldn't work with. Hesseans did seem to like bare shoulders. Tugging up the fabric to cover them was a bit difficult, as it went against the whole cut of the shirt, a white silken piece elegantly cut from the cool bottoms of his shoulders, straight line cutting just beneath the shelf of his collarbone.

"Yes, it is -- how nice, you can read the title of a book," Eden sulked, drawing back into his shell. He was just getting to the very best part and this plowfoot girl was interrupting him.

"I've read the whole thing."

"Yes, I am so sure--"

" 'All I need in this world is to love, and be loved by you' "

The resulting silence was huge and profound.

Until she said, "That's in the eighteenth chapter or summat, right? After the king weds Ama?"

"Yes," he mumbled, curling into himself all the more. Eden very much wanted to curl up under his blanket and wait for this nosy girl to toddle off and go lick windows or whatever it was she did all day.

"I -- " he popped up from behind the bomb shelter of the book. "You touched my things?"

"You ent 'round much and your mama still makes me dust your room. All those books just layin' around untouched...it's almost sinful, y'know? Does it bother you?"

"You can read?"

"Well...ya couldn't have guessed, huh?"

"You must have been able to -- but that doesn't...why on all of Vita were you going through my things?"

"Does that upset ya?"

"Maybe. I think, but ... Just don't ever get anything on them or..." he floundered for a proper threat. "...or I'll have my mother sack you."

"On my honor, young master. Nothin'll happen to 'em." And she was still smiling -- still smiling -- that funny cat's smile, hip cocked on her broom like a pistol. Eden seen that face so much, and he didn't know it was a face a cross-eyed plowfoot girl could manage. Haughty, intellectual, witty -- the kind of face that said there was a joke here, and he was the only one not getting it.

"Whyever are you talking to me, anyway? Do you bother my mother so?"

"Mercy, no. I've been 'round her for months, and she's always the same. I ent never seen you before, not 'til you came in from school. Saw you poking around in the halls and lounging about like a bored l'il blossom on the patio. But I ent never heard your voice afore."

"I think...I think I'd be better off if I didn't have to hear yours."

"Yers is nice," she piped, not slighted in the slightest. "Your voice, that is."

Inside, he balked -- but his traitorous mouth twitched and said, "Really?"

"Really really. Real sweet, y'know? Unsure o' itself. Like it ent figured out what it wants to be yet." She paused. "What's my voice like?"

"It's...soft, I guess? Kind of smart, maybe," Eden told the inner spine of the book.

Ireni beamed, basking in the glow of his compliment no matter how begrudgingly it was given.

"I know you got a bucketload of brothers -- which un are you, anyhow? I know she gives you twenty diff'ent names."

"I," he said -- and he felt his back straighten against the arm of the divan, his shoulders setting -- "I am Edenai Andriocus."

"Aww!" The female sympathy noise was not a mystery of nature Eden had explored much. It was a strange country, the land of girls. Dark and curious and creeping around with shadows other boys (and some choice girls) were breaking their necks to illuminate. "Fuck --! I mean...uh," and he could almost feel the blood creeping across her cheeks, warming her from ear to ear. He could follow the trail of warmth with his fingertip, he thought. And then insantly thought whyever he was thinking that in the first place.

Coarse word, plowfoot word -- it made his ears burn. "Clocks, leavin' you all alone in the manor like this? Ya must get awful bored." Eden cringed back from all this funny mystery. It was so suddenly intriguing.

"Yer her little Eden? Ya don't like so little t'me, Edenai Andriocus," she said.

"Um," he said.

+

Eden badgered the girl at all hours of the evening, from then on.

Any excuse to go poking down in the kitchens, wanting cakes or tea -- not from just anybody. He'd weave through a dozen fat and stickly house maids before finding just her, asking only her. They tasted sweeter, somehow, when twinged with budding hypothesis. Eden lurked around her shoulders as she'd roll them out. He was looking for evidence, for explanations.

She always insisted on talking to him while waiting for them to bake. About books, about pigs, about his brothers. There was a time before this when Eden wondered if humans could speak at all. But he was wrong, he guessed. He was wrong about a lot of things.

She brought a tray of tea and cakes up to his room, one damp afternoon. She'd disappeared quickly, for once, shooting her a smile over her shoulder before ducking out the door. He bit into one, and his teeth clinked on something metal. He dug in his mouth and pulled out a little gold ring.

+

Eden couldn't quite describe what happened over the next few days. He tried to, he tried very hard, used every bit of flouncy metaphor he could grasp at from his lexicon of romancing tales, but nothing could quite encompass this mysterious outpouring of feeling that tickled him every second of every day. He'd see Ireni leaning on her broom handle, Ireni licking her thumb before turning a page in one of his books, Ireni drawing a sigh down deep in her chest over a sink of dishes. After the quick conversation in his room over books, he found that he couldn't read at all. He just flopped restlessly back onto his divan, pouting at the ceiling and bouncing his heel on the wooden arm. Thinking, thinking, of a reason for her to come back.

There was clearly something wrong in the grand design of things that he found himself wanting to follow her. A force of nature, he defined it. His journal proposed all sorts flowery metaphors, the only things he could think of. The way tides crushed up on the shore, the way bees were drawn to flowers, the way moths singed their wings on lamplight. Maybe the answer was somewhere, someplace, in the curve of her neck or her mouth or something. It took a lot of staring, a lot of puzzling things out. Untwining thought from thought, examining them all individually. Sums upon sums, adding up into something rare and funny he just didn't get. It was like working out a physics problem and losing track of a variable.

The x looked too much like Ireni's arms crossing her chest, y the was the tilt of her head paired with the lift of a shoulder. And dwelling on the slow curve of parentheses was an entirely different, entirely bizarre equation all together.

On Hamis thirteenth, Eden sent his stationary book hurtling across the room, scribbled words and numbers fluttering through the air. It knocked into a Gioran vase on his bookshelf, and the thing shattered into many, many pieces.

Eden clamped a pillow over his face and flopped back on his bed.

"I never liked you anyway," he said to the vase.

Something needed to be done.

+

That something was done on Hamis fourteenth.

The night dark and deep, as all nights in Hamis were. Coffee, cakes, and tea. He could build a fire to them. He slipped on socks and scuttled down the pale corridors to kitchens, slinking and peeking around corners for any sign of his mother. She was drugged, asleep, or buried in her pillows. Creeping about hallways wasn't bad in and of itself, anyhow. Cakes and tea, cakes and tea. He had to give her that ring back, after all. It was much too tiny for any of his fingers. So this girl is cooking, somewhere.

The kitchen was dim and lovely. Candles guttering in all the bits where the frosty blue phosphor light couldn't illuminate. Ireni was there, of course. The hem of her little white gown was hitched up around her knees, stuffed with a precarious load of drying silverware. Her toes were curled into the cool tile, all wet from her sloshing water out of the sink. Her toenails were painted dark red.

"I found your ring."

"Oh?" she was smiling, teasing smile. She shifted her skirt up a bit more, placing some silverware into the sink. "Where'd ya find it, Edenai Andriocus?" Funny human voice slicing up the syllables, An-dri-oh-cus?, jarring, not liquid slurring like his mother and brothers.

"In a...in a tea cake." He wasn't wearing shoes either, yet something compelled his feet to shuffle into the puddle around her. Science could explain all of this, he thought -- it could explain why a cloud of electrostatic shivered on his skin when his feet made contact with water. That, Eden knew, was called completing a circuit.

His toes curled, it was cold. She bit her lip, tamping down a grin, looked away.

"Did you...did you do that on purpose?"

(One of those 'wait, when--?' moments, kinda like when the sunset caught you by surprise.)

"Yeah. Uh huh."

He fished it from his pocket. She took it from him. She clasped his hand, he clasped back. Whyever would he -- forces of nature, he told himself. Here in this place, all dim and wet and she was right there and she was holding his hand. Soil, sweat, soap suds. The buttercream fluff of her hair pillowed about her shoulders. Maybe, the secret of this was buried in the perfect 45 degree angles the cut of her dress made on her chest. The slow, gentle parabola of her clavicle bowing back towards her shoulders.

...Didn't they intrinsically know they would get hurt, those moths? Did something in them flinch away just before they touched that hot glass, realizing that maybe the light inside wasn't worth the searing?, he thought.

Nah. Not that Eden cared.

His mouth found hers in all the gloom. The only thing he could compare it to was the swell of pride when two puzzle pieces snap together perfectly perfect.

This, Eden knew, was called completing a circuit.

Magnets, Eden reasoned. Electrostatic. Achieving hydraulic equilibrium. The buoyancy of hydrogen. The stretch quotient of leathers. Words from books that made no sense tumbled together in him, and they had meaning now.

His arms twisted around her shoulders with the strength of an octopus. Ireni squeaked, but the sound melted away until it was nothing at all.

It wasn't the sun, nor moon, nor sky. It wasn't revelation or damnation or anything too big at all. But it was something (he just couldn't say what, if it wasn't the sun nor moon nor sky).

F= m/a ?

p = mv ?

F = G m1 m2 / r2 ?

Or, maybe, it was simply ft = mv - mu.

When she pulled back, she didn't pull back too far. She tipped her forehead against his and laced their fingers together.

"Fuck," he breathed. A soft sound, barely slipping past his lips before his eyes went wide. Ireni tugged at his curls -- when had her hands slipped into his hair? -- and her mouth was there again. She bit his lip -- bit! nipped at him like a cat! this didn't make a lick of sense, but then again...nothing about this did. Whatever all this was, it was something mysterious and callow as all those fae human words.

Eden wasn't quite certain who started laughing first. But it was there -- it was bubbling up from his lips and he was shaking with the sound. Somewhere, somewhere in there, Ireni's voice rippled in and out like a bell.

Nothing in the world quite made sense for those fifty seven seconds. There wasn't much left in that world, even. Only Ireni's hands skating up his spine, only her hair, only the overflowing sink. The splash of water on tiles. There was no mum, there was no Brunnhold. Just.

"Godsdamn," she huffed. "Lookit the princeling. Shit...you ent so little."

And he kissed her again. Little by little, he kissed her.

+

"She'll never terrorize you again, Edenai."

Madame Aiello cradled her littlest, her finalest son to her chest.

"Not that little plowfoot whore or her negligent mother, either. No need to cry," she crooned. Her thumb skated under his eye, wiping away tears. Her chill gold bangles rattled against his cheek. "They're far away, now. So far not even the crows can find them. They say mine work grinds the indecency from them."

Madame Aiello said a lot of things. Eden? Eden just cried, cried in that silent vibrate-y way a person has to really work at. It takes time, but people can get very very good at that kind of crying.

"Time will heal the scar she rift in you."

"Thank Ophur your virtue is still intact."

"You had no impact on these events. She was utterly intent on being a slut. Most of them are. You were just there, my darling."

This, Eden knew, was called mitosis. All squished together nice and perfect, then you cut them right down middle, split 'em right up in half. Eden wasn't quite sure if there was a way to squish the cells back together again. (There was phagocytosis, yeah, but that just seemed mean.) He also wondered if the cells ever felt bad, losing the other cell like that. Eden had asked his biology professor that, once.

Eden felt very bad, losing his cell.

"Now. Let us do away with these hysterics and -- Emil? Yes, yes. Be a dear and fetch my laudanum, please. Ah, there's a sweet boy --clear off into the atrium. Missus Alexandros is popping over for a visit, and you know how much she loves music. You can play for her, it shall be just darling!"

"Yes, mum."

"Oh, say 'mother', dear! Any more of that plowfoot talk and I shall swoon from shame."

"Yes, mother."

I love this lit so much, I'm glad you finally posted it! It's nice to see bby Eden as not so much of a bby.