Once, when you were even smaller and stupider than you are now, your brother told you he wanted to play with you.
This should have put you on guard instantly. Your second-eldest brother never wanted to play with you. He’d told you so often enough, even thrown things at you to get you to go away.
But you were too excited to see the warning signs. Maybe, you thought, maybe you turning five was the tipping point, and your second-eldest brother would always play with you from now on, and your elder sister would let you try on some of her shiny things with her, and your eldest brother might even give you a piggy back ride!
Maybe, just maybe, your father would ruffle your hair and smile at you, just like he did with everyone else.
And then you followed your second-eldest brother to where he said the game would be, and you saw the servants holding open a wriggling burlap sack that was tied to the branch of a tree.
You tried to run then, but your short stubby legs never were going to get you away from your brother.
He was laughing as he tackled you down, and he was laughing as he dragged you back, and he was laughing as he shoved you into the sack, and he was laughing as the servants pulled it closed.
Inside the sack were wasps, and spiders, and rats, and frogs, and toads, and a snake.
None of them reacted well to you landing on top of them.
The rats, spiders, and snake all bit you as much as they could. The frogs and toads leapt onto you and off you and onto you again because there was nowhere else to go. The wasps stung you and flew into your face.
And you screamed and screamed and screamed until you were hoarse, thrashing and flailing to escape, begging your brother to let you out, apologizing, shrieking every time something hard hit you from outside the bag and sent it spinning anew.
By the time your brother tired of the game, a lot of the wasps and spiders had been squashed or eaten. By the time you finally stopped crying, sore and tired, there was only one rat, frog, and toad left.
Soon the sun went down, and you huddled in on yourself to try and stay warm. The cold light of the Companion shone through the burlap.
The rat was nesting in your hair, and the spider was weaving a tentative web on one of your horns, and the wasp was patrolling under your collar, and you were cradling the last frog and toad so that they couldn’t eat the spider or wasp and so the snake which had coiled itself around your tail didn’t eat them too.
It was then that you realized something:
Everything in the sack was just as scared and as trapped as you were. None of you wanted to be there. For some of them, being in the sack could mean their death if you weren’t careful. But none of you were really enemies.
That title belonged to the one who put you all in here.
You didn’t think any of these creatures actually liked you. Even at five, you weren’t that dim. They were all wild animals, and not attacking you at the moment was just more sensible.
But you did get the oddest sense, as the dawn broke and the sun rejoined the Companion in the sky, that everything alive in the sack was more your ally than your enemy.
And all of you were waiting for the perfect moment to strike back at your tormentor.
After several more hours, shadows played on the burlap. The sack shifted and rocked unsteadily, and then there was suddenly ground under you.
As you watched, the opening of the sack was untied, and you saw the fair, grinning, elven face of your second-eldest brother.
And your muscles may have been worn and sore from sitting so tense, but they did not fail you.
You launched the frog and the toad into his face, and threw yourself out of the sack after them as he began to shriek.
You managed to give him a black eye and ensure all of your compatriots had a go at him before the servants pulled you off. You were scolded by your father and sent to write lines with no lunch or dinner for “skipping lessons” and “playing a horrid trick on your brother”.
But, ‘til the last day you saw his hateful face, your second-eldest brother never got over his paralyzing fear of vermin.
