Adda is an older sister, and older sisters are supposed to take care of their younger sisters. Adda doesn't understand this concept but she does remember when Arabella was born and she looked over the crib to the very small tiny human sleeping there.
It took Foltest months to get Adda to stop leaving scraps of meat on the baby. But when she held the impossibly small child she screamed and cried when her father took her away. Adda did not understand how something was so small, but those big eyes looked up at her and she babbled and clung and she knew she'd do anything for her.
No one really understood Adda, but the toddler wobbled as she walked and babbled on and on. No one really seemed to understand the toddler either.
Adda remembered the first time though, that she realised her sister might be like her. Those big eyes were usually starry and bright but, in an impossibly itchy dress, during the middle of a loud ball, her sister started screaming. She rushed over instinctively grabbing her sister away from the noble boy she was playing with. Her sister screamed and kicked and bit and the realisation hit her.
It's loud. Adda thought. And despite the protests and screams she brought the girl out to the garden, not even noticing she was bleeding. She wanted to scream too. But instead she sat her by the lake, with nothing but the crickets and the frogs. The screaming died down and the thrashing stopped and she was left with a hiccuping crying little sister who started bawling more when she realised she was hurt.
She didn't know what to say, so she grabbed a frog and held it up to her. The child, between hiccuping sobs, looked at the frog and quietly reached out and held it. And there they stayed that night. It was better than the loud ball anyways.
Adda is not a typical older sister, meek and demure, she does not tend to her sister's wounds with grace and elegance. That has never been Adda, that will never be Adda. But older sisters are supposed to take care of their younger sisters and what Adda knows how to do is protect, fight.
When their father got home he found his daughter, so small and little, in a bed being tended to by people much more skilled than Adda at caring for those wounds. His other daughter lay there at her bedside, refusing to move. But the dead bodies in her bed chamber of the would-be assassins were not there because of guards or Vernon. No, because Adda had never been disturbed by the sight of blood before, and had taken on men greater than they. But there was one exception to the rule. It should never, ever, be her little sister's blood.
Because Adda is an older sister, and an older sister protects her little sister.