Bat Out of Hell (Promised to the Demons #2) - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,9
every man I met seemed to think I was...intriguing. I always thought I was plain, and in books, plain girls were always in despair. Then again, they do always end up having adventures and love stories after all…
No one had ever asked me something so serious before, and I felt rather important. "Yes," I said solemnly. "I'll hear your confession. After all, I might as well listen while I'm just laying here. I hope I don't fall asleep."
"Fall asleep if you need to," Piers said. "I'll just get out what I can." He poured some wine for himself and took a slow breath.
Chapter Five
Piers
"When I was a little boy, I was very close to my familiar, although those memories seem very far away..."
"And his name?" Jenny asked, drowsy but still interested enough to ask questions. Just taking in the barley vegetable soup had brought more color to her ghostly cheeks and made her look a little less like the heroine of a Victorian tragedy.
"Chester."
"That's a nice name."
Was it? I didn't think of names that way, and I didn't think of Chester that way. A name was what you made of it. My earliest memories were of the house I grew up in, an estate of fourteen rooms, not nearly as grand as that of my cousins, but just as gloomy. We lived farther up the Hudson River than the von Hapsburg branch of the family, which my uncle married into.
"I was the only child in the family. I always had the impression that my mother really didn't want any children at all, but of course, in those circles, you have to have children. At least, the one son. I had nannies and didn't see my mother very much."
"Were you naughty?" Jenny asked.
"Why do you ask?"
"It seems like in books, whenever there's a nanny, the children are also naughty, and it sounds like fun.”
“No, I was very obedient, really. I wanted to please my parents.”
“Were your parents very lovely people? Was your mother beautiful and your father stern but kind? I could imagine that.”
“No…neither of those things. I don’t think they were especially lovely. Just strict and unhappy and always complaining that they should be more rich than they were.”
“Oh…I do understand that,” Jenny said. “Mrs. Franch was always complaining…”
"I think I must have been alone a lot, before I reached the age for school," I said, reaching back to the forests of childhood, the particular rocks and ruins that became places for Chester and me to imagine ourselves as great sorcerers or pirates. "We had fifty acres, and we were five miles from the town, so it seemed like our own world. Chester was my companion, at that time. I didn't have any friends yet."
"You do sound like you were lonely," she said, her voice welling with sympathy. "But I loved playing with Bernard, just the two of us, when we were little."
"Chester must have liked my company too," I said, and for the first time in many years I was able to imagine Chester as he was to me then, just a playmate, like a brother. I didn't judge him on his scrawny, unremarkable appearance. "My parents tried to discourage us from getting too close, of course... They wanted me to play with other wizard children who lived in the town. I was sent to stay with my grandparents pretty often, because they lived right in town, but the town children had their own games and I didn't want to play with them."
I didn't tell Jenny all my weaknesses, and detail the precise feeling of cowering behind the gate in front of my grandparents' house, watching bigger boys run by, throwing a football around, and the terror of Grandfather throwing open the door and bellowing, in his thick Romanian accent, "Go and play with them!"
I had vowed not to indulge in any feelings for Jenny, but I still struggled to tell her just how pathetic I was as a child. When you're very young, you don't know when you're an inferior specimen, until you start being surrounded by strange children.
"When I reached school age, my parents sent me right to a boarding school, in the hope that I would lose interest in playing with Chester and make friends. They seemed to think I would be a leader if I just had a chance to be around other kids...but at the age of six, I was the third smallest boy in my class, and..."