(no subject)

[iniquiticity]

Damnant quod non intellegunt. They condemn what they do not understand.

 

 

His mother and the witch had raised him, and bid him go to village, when they needed something. It was not that the villagers hassled him, exactly, but he was never given the best seat or the choice cut of wood or the sharpest knife. To these insults his mother and the witch told him it was them who was lacking because of it, because you, Luvo, were much more than any of their petty games and rituals.

He had not understood it, then, but he did now.

So it was he came already-accustomed to the side-eye looks and the mutters and the way they turned from him, closing their conversational circles. He wondered if the thought he was too stupid to see, hear, know, feel what it meant. He felt loss from these things, yes, but he knew it was a greater loss, for them.

That loss was not only him, no, thought he could list the things they failed to learn from him, with their cold shoulders: poetry, woodworking, herbalism, all the wisdom his mother had passed to him, everything the witch had told him and all the raps of his knuckles that had come with it. It was only that there was a vaster everything they turned away from, and he was only the smallest, barest flowering bud of that tree.

Ludvic knew better to pick a plant before it was rooted and strong, and knew to save enough of the plant to return; he knew better than to cut too deeply into a wood; he knew better than to jump back in fear, from some strange animal or insect.

Ser Igaz, who was the most adventurous of the noble guards, sat with him one day. The imperial guard had, as he was accustomed to, only begrudgingly accepted him: he had passed their tests and they needed bodies to stand over the sleeping emperor.

Ser Igaz had sat there in silence for a few minutes. He had asked all the perfunctory noble questions and Ludvic had given him the correct answers. Then, evidently gathering his confidence, he said, “Does it bother you, to eat alone?”

“Why would it bother me?” Ludvic asked, and Ser Igaz had clearly not expected that answer, “I’m not the one not learning anything. The palace teaches me a lot every day.”

Ser Igaz blinked at him. “I never thought of it that way,” he said, which, Ludvic supposed, was as much of an apology as you got from a noble in the Palace of Stars. Ludvic waited for him to speak again, because he clearly had something to say. He had never felt any pressure to end a silence or to contribute when he did not have something valuable; his upbringing had brought him that, too.