The Claiming

[Fiction]

Kethryn ne’Lassiter had always known. That was the bottom line. The Prime daughter of House Lassiter waddled about the house like a whale that had grown legs, bumped into things, carelessly snatched what was not hers, and all the while stared about herself with a benign morbidity that was the core of her innocent nature. She had been told as early as age four, and then again every year of her life, taken into that room on her birthday, and told again.

Taken in where Selena herself was never allowed. Given presents that Selena would never touch.

As the Prime daughter, once she was of age, Kethy would be taken into the Room of Claiming where the Heartstone lay, and all she was, up to that point of her life, would be laid down faithfully as a permanent record within the ancestral awareness of House Lassiter.

And what a life!

It was wasted on the bloated manikin that was her sister. She had a weak, wheezing voice that always seemed to be on the verge of a whine. She always stared, mesmerised, at things that took her interest, as though they would rise up and strike her. Maybe she just couldn’t understand why she desired them.

In those moments, it was most hard for Selena to forgive her. She wanted to forgive Kethy for being born before her. She wanted to forgive her very much. Somehow she just couldn’t. It was simply out of her reach.

Other people talked about empathy and the healing heart, but Selena thought it was all self-lies for people who couldn’t face up to themselves. Of course, she didn’t let any of this on. That would have gotten everybody angry.

Occasionally Kethy would glance at her, sort of sidelong. It was an open, vacant gaze that reminded her of a deliberate, dispassionate heifer. Inhuman.

Selena had wanted to slap her whenever she’d looked like that at her. It had made her feel ashamed. How could Kethy, this… this cow be the Prime of their family? It was a farce.

She’d satisfied herself with a simple poke in the ribs. It was a familiar gesture between them. Yes, it was a mockery of Kethy’s bulbous physique, but also harkened back to their younger days when Selena would sit by Kethy’s sickbed and bounce her hand up and down on her flanks which were so soft and pillowy that it was almost impossible to detect when your hand ceased falling to her midsection and began rising again.

In those days they had been friends. Not that they weren’t friends now, of course they were – they were sisters. Back then they had been closer and Kethy would sit by Selena’s bed and read out stories through the dark, drumming weeks of the Storm Season when walls of water would sound against the bowels of the city and make the teacups shake in their saucers.

Since she’d been told, Kethy had sort of run back into herself, like a sheet does after much tossing and turning in the night. Selena barely knew her sister really. She never said anything.

Mumma and dadda had primped and fussed and provided for her since Kethy’s first blooding, while Selena was relegated to the role of a scullion. She had to work while the princess whale blinked obscenely, eating, drinking, and taking clueless instruction, and even reading books.

All the things that would have made her happy indeed, had Selena ne’Lassiter been allowed them. Things she would never do her whole life.

The injustice of it was too much. She should be the Prime, not that silly, blubbering cow. She should be given the sweetmeats and perfumes, the horse rides and the training. She would never let herself become a whale like Kethryn had. She would have been perfection right up until her day of Claiming to show her strength to dadda, and to the ancestors as a shining example of their family’s pride.

But it was not to be: the whale would be the one who was remembered. Sometimes Selena’s hands shook at the irony of that cruel joke.

Selena had never meant to actually do anything at all.

Not really.

It was only a matter of weeks before the Claiming. What if Kethryn was not able to complete the rite? What if there was some doubt as to whether it would work? It was known that the subject is required to be in peak physical condition, a requirement that Kethy only narrowly fulfilled… if you could use such words to describe her.

Every day Kethy took the risers to bed one at a time. A maddeningly slow process, which Selena could have done several times in the time it took Kethy, in one supreme effort, to manage once.

One night, Selena stopped on the landing that Kethy always used to catch her breath. Selena’s body thrummed with excitement. Nothing was going to happen, but the knowledge that it could filled her body with an intense expectation that felt like an abdication. It awoke feelings of such excitement in her that she actually enjoyed watching Kethy’s slow ascent towards her.

Something in her face must have betrayed her, for Kethy halted four steps before the landing, white knuckles clasping the rail as she blinked up at her.

“Se- Selly?” she puffed.

Selena felt her foot drop to the step below. They were face to face, Kethryn now looking at her with that vacant gaze that just begged to be slapped. Selena felt the rage come like a river up from the base of her spine.

“Selly?” the bovine creature beneath her repeated inanely.

“I should have been the Prime, not you.” Before she could stop them her arms flung out and pushed with all her might against those meaty shoulders. Kethy swayed back, a tight grip still on the rail, but sliding.

With one foot Selena slammed them away and all of a sudden she was gone.

She seemed to take so long to reach the bottom, all elbows and arms and legs flailing under such a weight of unrestrained flesh. When it was finally over, she realised she was standing there, gripping the rail with her eyes squeezed shut.

She opened them. Silly to close your eyes against a sound.

Then mumma was there, looking at poor Kethy, lying in that broken heap. Selena couldn’t look at it. For a moment mumma’s eyes flashed upward to her. Selena had been expecting anger, or grief, rage, anything other than the compassion that she witnessed. It almost looked like pity, but that couldn’t be right.

Selena had done an unforgivable thing.

That didn’t matter now. None of it mattered. Kethy could never be Prime material now.

Selena’s little fingers clenched and released, clenched and released. The Claiming was hers, as it always should have been.

Servants had been called: Jade and Selny, Hortus and Gus. They helped poor Kethy, who was thankfully unconscious, onto a gurney made from an old door which had been lying in the shed since before the Storms. They carried her carefully out to the front sunroom and laid her gently on the soft bed.

One leg stuck out at a strange angle and there was blood at the break under her loose garments. One arm looked broken at the elbow, the other at the wrist. Her face had taken a massive blow against the wall. Selena couldn’t tell through the mess of blood where the actual wound was. Then she looked lower.

She wrinkled her nose and turned away.

Kethy’s nightshirt was stained yellow in a long smear to the hem.

She felt a lump in her throat, but forced it down. Soon enough, dadda would arrive to bring her the good news.

Her ascension to Prime was a joyous notion that had become blurred with the evening’s events. It was still a goal, but had lost its substance – as though that pure thought had taken a tumble down the stairs as well.

She was sitting alone in the hallway when mumma emerged after the physician had gone.

She sat down next to Selena and said nothing for a long time.

Mumma always had a way of holding her lips together when she was anxious, and she held them that way now. Her silence was maddening.

Selena got up to go to her room when she heard her mumma softly state, “And so you will be Prime, my daughter.”

Selena turned at the strange ring in her voice. There was something wrong. This was a great thing, to be celebrated, not pitied. Selena would carry the pride of her house. She had a tasty rejoinder on her lips, but the wind died in her lungs when she saw mumma’s face.

She took the steps two at a time.

Beautiful, serene, happy days followed. Gone was mumma’s pity of the night before. Nothing could dissuade her. No, that wasn’t right. Nothing made her unhappy.

There were no tears, no remonstrance. She made sure that dadda’s eyebrows remained constantly raised at what a change had taken place in the spirit and the heart of his Selena.

She made sure to bring joy to all who spoke with her. She reached out lovingly and patted the hand of a maid who served her breakfast, a woman she had never touched in her entire life before. Dadda exchanged a glance with mumma at this, at the sheer effusion of spirit, at the sheer unbridled wonder, hope and esperance that now sat in the eyes of their daughter.

Occasionally she would go to visit Kethy in the sick room. It was a quiet, light room, unlike the rest of the house it had been spared the heavy adornment that was the fashion of the day. It was designed to lift the spirits with sun and solace.

Kethy seemed almost happy when Selena visited her. Kethy would always reach out her hand wordlessly when she saw her standing by the door. She would beckon her to her bedside, reach forward for a kiss. And in those few moments the two sisters forgot who they were. When they held each other tight with a serene understanding that no matter what befell them or how they might change that this thing, this kiss would always stay between them.

Now that Kethy was no longer in line, sick as she was, her body slowly mending, never, never, to be in time.

And Kethryn also blossomed anew, drawing a new shadow for herself. She knew not what the future would hold for her, but knowing that she would be relieved of the great duty was enough to put a smile on her face every day.

The truth was, the Heartstone scared her. Selena had seen it, and it was this final reason, stacked at the pinnacle of all the others, that Selena had taken it upon herself to right things. It was as though, in that one violent impulsive act, somehow the sisters had swapped places, and in the pain of recovery there was a kind of reckoning. The remuneration of a debt owed… a debt that Kethy seemed happy to pay.

Paid in full, with the stitches and the pins and the rebreaking of bones.

The House doctor was a man by the name of Victor Engles, with bandy legs, an ancient silver fob watch at his lapel, a silver hip flask and an insolent grin. He went about his business with about as much compassion and diligence as if he were treating a horse. Kethy bore it all with a tight, anguished smile.

It was Selena who would be the one to fill the chalice of this generation’s memory in the Heartstone. It was her mind that would seep into the bedrock of her family’s honour. Her mind that would glory in the knowledge that would immortalise her. That she would live the rest of her days knowing that this permanence, this wonderful permanence of soul would exist beyond the boundaries of her slight and dainty body. She craved it above all. She thought about nothing else. Every single day. Every single moment of time that passed there was a little corner of her, no matter how happy or how sad there was always one tiny part of her mind that she had allotted to be watching. To be watching herself be happy and sad. To be watching and storing the full brightness of the knowledge that suffused her body and made it light with the understanding that even this, this knowledge, this brightness, would exist past her own life and into the minds of all the Lassiter that were to come.

On the eve of Kethy’s twenty-first birthday their parents announced they had convened with the Ancestors. It had been decided that as Kethy was in no fit state for Claiming, normally it would fall to Selena. But as Selena was only but nineteen they would wait to see if Kethy improved in the time.

Selena kept smiling as she heard the announcement. She had waited her whole life for this. She could wait a little bit longer.

Kethy’s birthday came and passed. They celebrated it from her bed in the sickroom with whistles and ribbons. She ate a cake.

Dr Engles was a nice man underneath it all. Selena could see that. He would listen to reason.

He visited Kethy every Wednesday afternoon to check on her progress. Selena made sure she was there whenever he came, to worry over Kethy and make sure the prognosis never rose above ‘unlikely’. He was tractable: with little love for tending upper echelon Families, but clearly happy to pick up the weighty purse which was on the sideboard for him as he left each week.

Kethy, in her bovine way, seemed perfectly happy for Selena to carry on the charade. Such indifference sickened Selena, but it was quite convenient at times.

Kethy lay back on her fifty pillows like a beached whale and scoffed sweets at a mile a minute. Selena fed them to her gleefully, knowing they would add to her sickly pallor for when their parents paid a visit.

Selena knew that Kethy would improve unless she did something. She had only delayed the inevitable. She knew there was no convincing mumma or dadda that she was more able. There was something they were holding back from her. Some delight, no doubt, which would make her mad with jealousy over Kethy’s pre-eminence. For a time it seemed it had all been for nothing. The doctor could only be persuaded so far, but eventually their family would know that Kethy was well.

One day, when Dr Engles arrived to examine Kethy, Selena caught him looking at her strangely. She asked him if anything was the matter, he seemed flustered and needlessly fluffed a pillow. He’d seemed distracted that day.

Once he had gone, Kethy had smiled at her with those big, open eyes, scandalized.

“What?” Selena asked.

“I think… he likes you,” was all she managed, her melon cheeks a-wobbling.

Next week, Selena made sure she wore something a little more revealing, and stole some perfume from mumma’s dresser.

The doctor didn’t take long to come around.

There was an empty sickroom next to the one Kethy occupied. His feeble gropings made her skin crawl, but she only had to think of the Ancestors and the glory she would bring to her House, and it became almost enjoyable. Even this, this moment would be recorded, and her transcendence and resourcefulness and commitment would be heralded for centuries to come.

This was the tough stuff the House Lassiter had built their Empire upon.

Once she had let the doctor have his play with her, she made it known in no uncertain terms that if he gave Kethy a clean bill of health at any stage, then she would tell the Family. It didn’t matter that it was consenting. For a commoner with no Family rank to have relations with the Prime daughter would bring down a wrath both terrible and protracted.

From then on, it was Kethy’s lungs that became the problem, or her heart, or her choler. Infected bile, weak blood, and fainting were attributed to Kethy for two long years. In secret, Selena brought her sweetmeats, fruit buns and strawberries she had filched from the kitchen pantry. She brought her smoked ham and slow-cooked lamb dripping off the bone. Kethy accepted it all benignly, as though somehow she was happy to be divided from the Ancestors forever.

Dadda said the Storm Season that year passed with little damage, except for some small outholdings on the edges of their power grid.

It was Selena’s twenty-first birthday.

Dadda and mumma received her one morning at breakfast with bright, expectant smiles. They announced that today she would meet with the Ancestors for the great Ceremony.

Dadda also said that he was proud of her bravery and spirit!

The room of Claiming was at the very centre of the House Lassiter. It was so fitting that all power emanated from the Heartstone at the centre of House Lassiter. It was accessed down a marble stairway, right at the back of the Hall of Attendance, where all Family business was conducted. Four armed Condottore in the Lassiter colours guarded it at all times.

Kethy had been down there, but of course as the second daughter, Selena never had.

Mumma was waiting for her in her bedroom when she went up after breakfast. She presented her with a beautiful Robe of Claiming which was made of finely meshed silver that covered her body right down to her feet. It even joined at the ankles with slippers made of the same material, and at her neck braids of silver intertwined with an intricately woven hood so long it engulfed her face. The robe had been stained, strand-by-strand, from brilliant turquoise down to bright vermillion like the dusk of a summer sky before a storm. The silver gauze inscribed distracted sparkles of pleasure on her skin.

As mumma secured the hood with Selena on her knees before her, she fumbled with the clasp and hastily regathered the trail. Selena asked if she was all right. Mumma hesitated for a moment, took a pin from her mouth, and looked down into her daughter’s eyes.

“I am very proud of you, my beautiful, beautiful daughter,” was all she said.

Selena absorbed this graciously. Mumma continued in silence.

Then it was time. Mumma led her down through the house slowly, and pointed out certain things as she went; decorations and adornments that had been part of the house for long before Selena had been born. In the keen expectation of what was to come, mumma’s words vanished into an ether over her head.

It was strange. She knew all this. She was impatient to get on with the Claiming. She wanted to meet her Ancestors. But mumma insisted on taking her through the entire house, telling her stories where this and that came from, as if she could remember it all. There were stories of merchants, of mercenaries, of disputes and alliances, and then of the Old Men who had brought ruin to the world.

She only paid attention to that last one. She hadn’t heard it before. It was marvellous to hear of these men who had pierced the Earth and gouged black blood from it. Earthblood they had used to power marvellous machines, but the Earth had rebelled and brought the Storms… had wiped it clean for the Families to be reborn upon it with no Earthblood and no machines.

The Season of Storms was the making of the Old Men, as was the crucial need of power of a different form. Power which had been given to the Families for safekeeping. She cherished this knowledge as she took it with her into the Hall of Attending. It would be one more tale to tell.

When they turned the corner into the Hall, Selena was surprised to see Kethy among the Family relatives who had come from all over the Lassiter Holding to join the celebration of Claiming. She was propped up in an old wooden wheelchair with cushions impossibly squeezed in behind her overflowing bulk.

Selena wrinkled her little nose. She felt sorry for the cushions.

In spite of the wheelchair, Kethy looked better than she had in months. Her skin was clear of the usual waxen sheen, and her expression was untroubled. She looked keener, sharper. Selena suspected perhaps she had drunk some spice wine as part of the celebration.

“Bravo, sister, bravo.” Kethy’s voice sounded droll amidst the soft and lucid conversations sprouting gently about them. You’d think it was a wake. “A battle fought long and hard. And here you are, the resplendent Victor.” She gave the last word a sardonic twist.

“Thanks, dear sister.”

Gone was the sickly heifer. Kethy’s face had a look that very much resembled – but couldn’t possibly be – amusement.

“Say hello from me,” her sister quipped, waving blithely as if it was a Saturday afternoon’s visit to dull relations.

Jealousy. That had to be it. It seethed venomously behind Kethryn’s disingenuous façade. Selena itched for a tasty rejoinder, but couldn’t find one that wouldn’t seem ungracious. “I will commend you to them, sister,” was all she could manage.

Kethy did a mock curtsey from her chair that looked as though she were flapping a blanket, and wheeled herself away directly towards a table laden with exotic treats.

Selena was chastened by Kethy’s attitude. This was a new woman Selena had never seen before. Why had she chosen this day of all days to show it to her? Something roiled at the pit of her stomach.

As she proceeded on mumma’s arm towards the marble stairs the robe that clung to her skin seemed more like a shroud.

Dadda was waiting for them, formally dressed, on the top step. He kissed her on the forehead and knuckled her under the chin as he always had when she was a girl. She looked into his eyes and was surprised to see tears there. His throat worked but he made no sound. She took one of his hands. It was surprisingly soft and warm. She kissed it, and said, “I shall commend your heart to them, dadda.”

He nodded, smiling hard. A hand went up to his face, not his, mumma’s. “This is what she wanted,” Selena heard mumma whisper into his ear. “This is what she always wanted.” He nodded then, almost to himself, almost as if, in a way Selena was already gone.

Mumma let go of her arm. What was wrong with them? Where was the dancing, the music, the streamers and speeches? Nothing was as it should be. She teetered on the brink of the stair. Looking down, it seemed like a giant mouth, wide and leery. Victor’s mouth. Massive cords like tendons ran along either side of the stairs and along the ceiling of the stairway.

She had never noticed them before. She had never been this close – they looked cunningly disguised, but she could see them now. They were the same as the cords that ran to her sewing machine, her bedside light, the iron, her radio and the oven, but much bigger.

She turned to look back at the party. The gathered relatives had already begun to talk softly amongst themselves.

She descended back down the stairs, flicking a wave to whoever would notice. Only dadda looked. Tears streaming down his face now. Giant breaths heaving his chest. Mumma tugging at him.

Selena shivered her tiny body, swathed in cold mesh. She wanted more than anything to run up and give him a hug, to console him.

She could do it when she got back.

She thought of mumma’s tour of the house, of the portraits of past Primes. They all looked of an age. There had never been a portrait of a Prime past twenty-one. She wondered why that was. Perhaps the moment of Claiming was all that mattered.

Yes, that must be it.

She stepped lightly down into the darkness, alone.