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"She had hair as long as the month of May," Colin says easily, his hands held open. The teacher walked out and not even he's sure how he managed to acquire everyone's attention in her wake, leaning forward as he is into a circle of blank faces, but he'd like to keep it, please. "This is because she hadn't cut it since her father died, you see, and that was long and long ago, such that it was her mother who decided that was how they'd show her mourning. The girl had been too young to understand. Later, now, she was said to be the loveliest woman in the world, so fine and lithe she could have been a doll."
"Did this chick have a name or anything?" someone he doesn't care about asks rudely. That's exactly what Colin didn't need, to have his attention called to how he's making this up as he goes along before he quite has the swing of it. He doesn't snarl.
"I've not been told," he answers instead, not bothering to keep the stiffness out of his aspect. That's just unpleasant. Vindictively Colin thinks: he's the youngest in the class and not even very tall, he could pose no threat and offer no meaningful coercion in that fashion, but he can and will — he's utterly certain — make them listen to him. They're not really people so it should be just easy. "But her family was poor; she had a mother, who worked all the night—" The thing his eyebrow does there isn't at all on purpose "—to earn them their food and rent, and a lady aunt, her dear late father's sister, who was much better-off and could have helped them had she not despised the both of them."
"Why was that?" a girl with glasses who he's known since he was ten asks (he wonders what her name is in return for her polite, half-unwilling interest).
"Because she hated the woman her brother had married," Colin smiles. "So she despised the daughter for being living proof of that relation, proof with innocent eyes and soft footsteps, proof that was sent to live with her when her mother died too young, proof that steadfastly just refused to do anything to justify this hate."
He sighs, just a little, as punctuation. Colin's not deluded, he doesn't think his not-actually-on-his-level peer group is paying attention out of anything other than morbid fascination (morbid half-interest) and boredom, but he'll win them over. At very least, he can enjoy putting on the show, in the interim.
"So once the girl was an orphan, her aunt wasted no time at all handing her over to the first slave traders she found."
There, there, finally (how can it be final? This is the beginning), he gets a few people looking up from whatever they were doing, starting the suggestion of a question. He cuts them off before they can truly begin:
"And at this time the king of the land had a son, a young man in his twenties, notoriously indiscreet and — perhaps for this reason — still unwed. Some of the misdeeds credited to him were quite astonishing, and certainly unsuitable for a future king. The trader who took the girl without a question happened to pass through the capital on the right day, then."
Another girl, one with a red ponytail shaped like a comma, seems to be trying to hide in her oversized cardigan as if to conceal that she's as close to white as melanin allows. Colin catches her eye and smiles.
"One of the king's men happened to see—" He takes an inopportune gulp of air and curses his phrasing "—her on sale and immediately thought of the prince, so battered with these accusations and allegations of children out of wedlock and illicit relations, and thus the girl was brought to the palace, the loveliest of their slaves. An odalisque, so to speak, if I may twist the meaning just a bit." Not that anyone here will know what the word means in the first place.
Still, at this Colin holds up his hand, certainly polite when he interrupts himself. "And that," he adds, a touch of spite like seasoning in his words, "is why I do not know her name, for none of these men along her way had cause or care to learn it. They tended to speak in blows instead."
Cardigan Girl has such a strange look on her face. It makes Colin want to go for his knife, safe and sign of safety and ironic incitement to suspension as it is in his pocket, or at least know more through some other means, but he settles for looking at her often under the guise of seeing everyone.
"She didn't understand why any of this was happening or had happened to her, not really. She'd known but little of the world before she was orphaned and then her aunt had even professed affection, and to have her best interests at heart; she'd sweetly told her niece not to cry as they took her away, for it was for her own good." Colin lowers his voice, thinking more of the thickness of the walls than of the effect. But they don't need to know that. He lowers his eyes to match it, mournful. (The part he's looking forward to, in this story he is making up as he goes along but even so, is soon and soon and soon.) "Now, though in some respects life in the palace was much better — for she was fed and clothed well, and not roughly shown to strangers nor kept in a cage at night — she nevertheless was usually restrained somehow, chained at very least by an ankle or a wrist, but...
"But one day, stumbling and bruised and pale as a whisper, she escaped. For a bare few days she was almost, almost safe, and then they found her."
Here's his goal in action: he can barely hear his classmates breathe. Polite untrue attention has given way to a grudging actual listening and watching and oh. An outsider, from the right angle, could mistake it for reverence, he thinks self-indulgently. The redhead in the cardigan is even trembling. He really will have to find out a bit more about her (for example, he thinks, isn't there anyone to tell him her name?).
"The girl who could barely remember what her mother had called her — for she was all but a child, you know; when she ran she was at very best fifteen — she was hiding when they came. And they came on horses, and in their hands they had sabres and pistols and whips, but she still tried to escape them."
Colin looks up, meets all their eyes once more, and tries not to smile. "One man caught her by her long red hair as she ran, and so she fell; she tried to kick and bite but they held her down and—"
The door opens. In walks their lost teacher and just as soon as she steps in, Cardigan Girl leaps up and starts talking to her in a too-whispery voice broken by what seem to be rasping little sobs. Why in the world is she crying? Colin barely hears at least one person as they ask him what comes next (what do you think, he comments to himself, knife-sharp and just barely starting to be carried along by the wave of glee at being reminded how simply perfect and nice it is to tell stories and have people listen) as he wonders.
He must seem as lost as he feels, it must show on his face when Ms Smith turns to him all grey-wisp fury and her hands on the too-pale tear-stained girl's.
"Meloy?" the teacher snaps. She really has no right, Colin thinks with a flare of annoyance and a twitch in his fingers; she teaches English, doesn't she? And she so irresponsibly just left them all alone. Colin was doing her such a favour.
It's not at all his fault, he thinks of protesting, that the girl in the cardigan is so delicate. How could he have known?
There is one interesting thing he takes away from the whispered, senseless, overreacting lecture in the hallway and the detention after school: his lovely, jumpy new friend's name is Eliza.
Colin keeps an eye out for her the next day, his mind filled with filmy white light. It's surprisingly easy to spend a detention working on songs, he's found; bent over a desk, writing, with his hand impatiently tearing at his hair, he was even thought to be doing it right. They let him go a bit early and he closed his eyes to see the music better and walked into a door.
She has to be somewhere, that's just logic, so he minds to that and to the song. In all honestly it's a terribly frustrating one, with parts that at the very edge of his mind he can almost hear but that he doesn't even know what instrument to long for accordingly. But the lyrics are coming along all right.
There's even an innocent, excusable excuse to be turning in search of Miss Eliza; Smith demanded that he apologise and when he finds her between classes Colin does. Sort of. (He has to get her cornered against the wall and some lockers for her to even hold still long enough for him to speak, but still.) She doesn't look as terrified as she did yesterday but she still looks strange and Colin can't fathom, even after almost a day to think about it, why he's apologising. What did he do? What do they think he did? It certainly makes phrasing awkward.
"Okay," she says shyly when he's done talking (stumbling on words as he struggles at what in the world he should be saying). "It's fine, I guess. I mean. Apology accepted."
He grins and she makes that face again, the one that's been kind of stuck curiously in his mind since yesterday. "Excellent," Colin replies anyway, peaceable as peace itself, though now he wants to know why she's doing that again, and turns from her. He's humming. Or, at least, it starts as humming.
Though he walks away somewhat, they're both going in the same direction; Colin keeps a few steps behind her to be polite but, quietly for him, he sings.
At "fifteen stitches", which is admittedly giving him some trouble to work out but it's not like it shows when he sings, Colin sees through the crowd a bit of proof that his voice might well carry anyway. Eliza has her arms wrapped around herself and her knuckles are white.
Colin can't see why, really. No one else today has seemed to mind.