Flashback piece with some caretaking and family relationships, sequel to here.
Jetta de Graer climbed the stairs up to her brother’s room, holding a cloth-wrapped package against her chest with one hand so she could lift her skirt up out of the way with the other. The skirt was already scuffed a little around the hem; it had been cut long. At nine years old, she was ‘shooting up like a weed’, as the housekeeper was prone to saying - disapprovingly, as if Jetta was doing it on purpose to vex her.
As she’d expected, the landing was dark but light shone under the door. It was too early for Illiam to have gone to bed, even if it hadn’t been a bad day.
She let go of her skirts, and tapped smartly on the door.
“Illiam,” she called brightly. “It’s Jetta!”
She listened, and heard nothing. He didn’t yell at her to go away. He didn’t say she could come in, either, but Jetta hadn’t been expecting him to. After a minute of waiting, she turned the door handle and went in anyway.
Illiam was lying on his bed, face-down, in his undershirt and breeches. Gangly and lean, but almost as tall as their father already, there was a lot of Illiam to sprawl. There were books scattered listlessly around the bed and the floor, but he wasn’t reading any of them.
“Hey,” Jetta said, closing the door behind her and sidling to stand with her back to it.
Illiam propped himself up on one elbow and scowled. Over eight years her senior, he had been basically an adult in Jetta’s eyes for a while now. But as the months passed, and Father gave him more free reign, and castle servants started to speak of him as a young lord and not just the Duke’s child… Jetta had become more and more afraid that the way he spoke to her would transform into the way Father and her brother Brant did. Looking past her. Seeing a child.
She had been standing there in silence for a long moment. Illiam made a noise that was almost a snarl of frustration. “What?” he demanded.
She fidgeted with the package in her hands. “Can I come in?”
He snorted. “That’s rich. You’re already in, what do you want?”
A little knot of tension eased in Jetta’s chest. She smiled tentatively. “I missed you at dinner.”
He frowned, looked away. If the crease between his brows might be as much pain as annoyance, maybe even if he looked like he’d been biting his lip hard, he would never have admitted it. “I wasn’t hungry. And I don’t want company. So if you don’t have anything important to say, go away and leave me alone.”
Jetta made a show of biting her lip, and raised the package. “Oh. Soo. If you’re not hungry… you don’t want these, then?”
He opened his mouth to say something, probably to tell her to go away… and then paused. Jetta shifted from foot to foot and watched him considering, his eyes narrowing. She didn’t think Father had actually told Illiam he couldn’t have dinner; surely that would have been too much. He was staying away because he didn’t want to talk to people at the dinner table. This suspicion was confirmed when Illiam rolled over and sat upright, pushing strands of dark hair out of his face.
“All right,” he muttered, low and grudging.
Jetta grinned and came forward immediately, laying the wrapped package of food on the bed. She picked up one of the books, moving it out of the way to clear a space. When Jetta was smaller, she had resented those books, quite a lot. Illiam eyed her as if he was going to object, but she stacked the books together very carefully and gently. Eventually he sighed, took the stack away from her and let her perch on the bed beside him.
As he moved to put the books on the floor, Jetta caught him wincing. She looked at his back; it wasn’t much, but there was some brown spotting of blood on his shirt. She sobered, slipping her shoes off and pulling her legs up onto the bed. She wrapped her arms around her knees.
“Was it bad?” she asked, hushed.
Illiam glanced over at her, realised what she was looking at, and gave an angry shrug.
“No. It’s fine,” he said gruffly.
“It looks like it’s pretty bad. Father didn’t - ”
“It isn’t,” he said curtly, dismissing her with a wave. He unfolded layers of cloth from around the pair of bread rolls, each torn open and filled with a cold cut of meat. “Honestly, this damned noise in my ears is much more annoying. Did you sneak this from the dinner table, Jetta? You’ll get in trouble.”
“The cook let me have them,” Jetta said, watching him over her knees. A thought struck her and she sat bolt upright. “Oh - Illiam, the healer gave me some ointment when I cut my knee, I still have some left. I should go get it!”
“No,” Illiam muttered. “It’s fine. Jetta, it’s fine, you don’t need to…”
She was already up off the bed, hopping as she slid her shoes back on, halfway to the door. “I’ll be back soon!”
By the time she had run to her room, found the ointment, and come back, Illiam was just finishing the last of the rolls - nothing left but crumbs. His scowl was noticeably lessened. Jetta suppressed a smile as she hopped back up onto the bed beside him. Not hungry, hmm. Well, I know you better than that, don’t I?
“Here it is,” she said, attempting without success to pull the stopper out of the little jar of ointment. “Turn around, I’ll put this on for you.”
Illiam frowned, carefully sweeping crumbs of bread roll into the cloth and folding it up. “I don’t think so. Thank you for bringing it, but it won’t be necessary to expose you to…” He shook his head. “Leave the ointment here, I’ll put it on myself.”
She frowned, still working on the stopper. Expose her to what? Her shirtless brother, or a belt mark? She’d seen both of those before. “How?” she demanded. “You can’t put stuff on your own back. ”
“Yes, I can,” he said. He held out his hand for the jar. “Give it here.”
She held it away from him. “Don’t be silly. You don’t even have a mirror.”
“Give it to me, Jet, I - ”
“I’m here, why shouldn’t I do it?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What? Why? You’re being an idiot about it, Illiam. Let me help.”
“I can manage by myself.”
“Can not.”
“Can so.”
“Can not.”
They frowned at each other in silence. Jetta tugged fruitlessly at the jar stopper. “Ugh!”
Illiam put his hand out again, giving her a superior look. She pouted and gave him the jar, which he opened with a twist and a faint twitch of his lips.
“I just wanna help,” Jetta mumbled. She pulled and worried at a loose thread in her skirts, shoulders slumped, lip pushed out. “Doesn’t it hurt? Why do you have to do things the hard way? Just because you don’t want me to help you? You can let me see, I’m not going to hurt you, or make fun of you, or think it’s gross, or tell anybody about it…”
Illiam hesitated, turning the jar between his fingers. Then he sighed, and passed it back to her.
Jetta smiled, pulled her skirts out of the way, and clambered up onto her knees on the unsteady surface of the bed. Illiam leaned forwards, tugging the back of his shirt up to sit on his shoulders, a low hiss of breath escaping him.
Jetta winced in sympathy at the sight of his back. It wasn’t just the red criss-crossing lines of his punishment; there was also a bruise like he’d been kicked by a horse. She wondered if it was true that the explosion had thrown him out of the library and across the hall, like her maid had said.
But the stiffness of Illiam’s shoulders and the way he stared, fixedly, at the floor warned her not to say anything about how painful it all looked. Silently, as gently as she knew how, she dipped her small fingers into the jar and began to apply the cool, sticky ointment to the biggest of the weals, and ignored any more little hisses or sharp breaths her brother might have made.
“Brant was talking about the trip to the capital at dinner,” she commented, in an attempt to distract him. “Are you going to go?”
“Hm. Yes, I think so. Assuming…” He shifted, breathed in and out deeply as Jetta treated a particularly deep cut, leaning his elbows on his knees.. “Well, that was the plan when I heard of it last.”
“Why can’t I come?”
“You’re too young. Anyway, you wouldn’t find it very interesting. It’ll all be politics and trade. It’s not a leisure trip.”
“I might find those interesting,” she protested.
He snorted. “Would you? Maybe you should go instead of me, then, I’m not sure I will.”
Jetta wondered whether or not he wanted to go. It was hard to tell, sometimes. Maybe he was worried Father would no longer take him after today - that would be a hard thing for Illiam to bear, even if he genuinely didn’t look forward to it.
He cleared his throat after a few moments. “You said you cut yourself? How did that happen?”
“I was climbing the rockfall up on the western edge of the woods and I fell off,” Jetta said absently, gently smoothing ointment over an angry red mark that ran over the edge of Illiam’s shoulderblade. “It wasn’t bad or anything. It’s all gone now, the healer just worried it was dirty.”
Illiam grunted disapprovingly. “You shouldn’t be climbing the rockfall,” he said,officiously. “It’s too dangerous. And what do you need to be up there for anyway?”
“You always used to climb it,” Jetta pointed out. “Fell off more than I do, too. Don’t you remember that one time when -”
“That’s different. It isn’t ladylike.”
Jetta pulled a face at the back of his head. “I don’t care.”
“Well, you should. You’re going to be a woman soon, Jetta, and you can’t be a married woman running a household and be climbing through the woods and… ”
“Why do you get to scold me?” she said, frowning, gently dabbing at his shoulder. “I mean, I think that it’s not very gentlemanly or grown-up of you to blow up libraries. So.”
He jerked away, biting back a gasp of pain. They glared at each other for a moment.
Illiam turned away first, hunching his shoulders and folding his arms. “Shut up, Jet,” he said, his words low and ground out between his teeth. “Don’t try and talk about what doesn’t concern you.”
Jetta felt twin pangs of frustration. She hadn’t meant to say that; why do something that was bound to make Illiam snap and pull away? She hadn’t intended to bring up the library at all. And yet... It doesn’t concern you, Jetta. Be ladylike, Jetta. Don’t bother me, Jetta, I’m too busy.
It feels like nothing concerns me any more.
She waited, half expecting him to snatch the jar of ointment away from her and tell her to get out, and mean it this time. He didn’t; he sat in stony silence. She went back to her work, pressing her lips together, trying to ignore the prickling in her eyes. There were still a lot of welts to paint with the ointment. She’d been right - all of this would have been way too hard for Illiam to treat on his own. But he’d shut himself in here, and previous experience told Jetta he might have stayed up here for days. He needed her, even if he didn’t seem to see it that way sometimes. He did, and he always would. Even if the things that filled his mind now weren’t childish things, or ladylike things, he would always need her to talk to.
Wouldn’t he?
“There,” she said eventually. “It’s done.”
He sat up, rolling his shoulders and pushing the shirt down, so quickly Jetta thought he must be regretting allowing her to help.
But then he sat there for another minute, and cast her a sideways glance from under brows that were low and dark over his eyes.
“Thank you,” he muttered.
Jetta shimmied down off the bed, pulling her skirts down to cover her thin knobbly knees. She pocketed the jar of ointment and the discarded cloth from the bed next to him.
Her brother brushed nonexistent dust off his knees, rubbed absently at a cut on one of his hands. He spoke jerkily, without looking at her. “You know - you know I only want what’s best for you. Right? Jet?”
Jetta tried to smile. “Yes,” she said.
“All right, then.” He nodded, head down. “Go on off to bed, then. It’s late.”
“All right,” she agreed. “Good night, Illiam.”
He gave her a little smile - the kind that wasn’t sardonic or mocking, rarer now than they used to be, particularly coming after the kind of day he’d had. “Good night.”
