~5. Night Visits~
Kitty
A tenday passed, and Kitty was still reeling.
She had hugged a drow. Not only that, but she had looked him in the eye. Dared to call him by name. Sung to him forbidden songs.
She hugged him. A drow! She hugged a drow!
Her horror and mortification were equally nerve-wracking, but there was nothing she could do. She returned to her corner every night terrified that Toloruel would throttle her for it. She woke each day certain Rismyn would find her in the halls and deal with her punishment himself.
Yet so far, nothing about her misery increased. She was still tormented, of course. But Toloruel never mentioned Rismyn in his games. Then again, he wasn’t in the habit of giving reasons for her punishments. As for the page prince, she’d only caught one glimpse of him since the incident. Strange, for after the first encounter he seemed to be everywhere.
She had to be careful. And she had to make sure it never happened again. She thought about the day obsessively, trying to puzzle out what led her down the path of self-destruction.
Everything had seemed so ordinary. She’d been sent to the chapel to dust again, and thinking she was alone she’d started humming. The humming had become singing, a nonsensical little tune of her own invention. She barely remembered the words anymore, but she remembered the way it had made her feel. Like she was a person again. Someone with worth and value.
That feeling had carried her all the way into Rismyn’s arms. She was lucky he didn’t strangle her right then and there for daring such a thing. It was unbelievable. Even more unbelievable was feeling the drow’s arms wrapped around her. Tightly, as if his whole world would crumble if he let her go.
Her cheeks burned and her terror mounted. They had both cried like little children, holding each other for support. They stayed that way until a distant noise caused them to spring apart. With one last startled glance, the drow prince hurried away, his whole body glowing red hot in her infravision.
Rismyn would certainly try to kill her now since she’d witnessed his weakest moments. He had to. She was surprised at first that he hadn’t already cornered her until she realized he was probably waiting for the right moment. Toloruel was still home from patrol, which meant she wasn’t often alone. Between her work and her sleeping arrangements, there was no chance to cut her throat. Once, she looked forward to Toloruel’s patrol tours. Now she lived in as much dread of one brother as the other.
Of course it was only a matter of time. When the first night of Toloruel’s absence finally came, she delayed the end of the day as long as she could, begging Tika for more work until the ogress finally chased her out of the kitchen with a broom.
Resigned and trembling, Kitty made her way to Toloruel’s room. She cracked the door open and peered inside, holding her breath. The room was as dark, cold, and empty as ever. Breathing a sigh of relief, she took a tentative step inside.
The door slid shut behind her with a deafening click.
Kitty squeaked and spun. Her worst fear was confirmed. Rismyn had come for her, after all, lurking behind the door. He flung one hand outward and Kitty flinched, but he only lit the sconces with purple faerie fire, gently illuminating the room in a cool wash.
She didn’t take the time to read his expression before she fell to her knees and cowered before him. “Please, I swear I won’t tell anyone,” she begged. “I’m a good Kitty! I haven’t told anyone anything and I swear I never will.”
The expected blow never came, nor did the shouting. Instead, when Rismyn spoke, he sounded exasperated. “You are so weird. Are all faeries like you or are you just odd?”
Kitty didn’t know how to respond, so she remained on the floor. “I’m a good Kitty,” she tried again. “I swear I won’t tell anyone.”
“Stop groveling. I don’t like you this way.”
This, Kitty could not do. “I’ll do anything you say,” she pleaded. “I’ll be however you want me to be.”
His presence loomed over her, a small wave of warmth rather than a shadow. She flinched as his hands slid under her arms, but though his grip was firm it wasn’t painful. Before she knew it, he pulled her to her feet. She was so startled she looked him right in the eye.
“There,” he said with a firm nod. “I won’t tell anyone you raised your eyes if you won’t tell anyone I raised mine.”
Bewildered, Kitty could only nod fervently. She was so mystified that she didn’t even realize he took her by the hand and led her to Toloruel’s writing desk. He gently pushed her into the chair and plopped himself on the edge of his brother’s bed before Kitty’s mind caught up to her body and she squeaked again, sliding to the floor.
Rismyn frowned. “He’s not here. He won’t be back for two tendays.”
“I know,” she said, hugging her arms around herself. “But he’ll know.”
“You said that last time, but he didn’t know.”
Kitty shook her head in protest, then froze.
Rismyn was right. Toloruel hadn’t known. Maybe he didn’t actually know everything, after all. It was a strange and alarming revelation.
She wasn’t about to risk finding out. “I like the floor,” she said, curling her knees up to her chest. “If that’s okay with you, master.”
The prince merely shrugged and leaned back, regarding her with an intense stare that made her nervous. “Are you only kind to me when I’m hurt?”
Kitty blinked. “What? N-no. I want to always be kind. Am...am I not being kind now?”
“You’re being scared now,” Rismyn said. “You were scared last time I came to see you here, too. But when I was hurt, you weren’t scared, just kind. I’m trying to understand how it works.”
Kitty’s face flared with heat, but hopefully, he wouldn’t notice in the dull magical light. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?”
She opened her mouth to reply, but no answer came. Was she sorry for being scared? Or sorry for being kind? Neither felt like something to apologize for, but she still felt the need to apologize for something. “How may I serve you?” she asked instead, hoping to get to the bottom of this mysterious meeting.
To her surprise, Rismyn shifted uncomfortably and looked away. “Stop being scared, for starters,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Kitty didn’t believe that for a moment, but she tried to look less afraid if only to please him. He still wasn’t looking at her, though, so it hardly mattered.
“And secondly,” he added, and she realized suddenly she could see the flush of face, “would you sing that song again?”
Her jaw dropped. This had to be a trap. No drow would permit her to sing. She gaped at him so long he was forced to glance her way.
He scowled when he saw her expression. “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t like it, I just want to hear it again. To understand.”
Kitty snapped her mouth shut. She should have been afraid of his tone, but his obvious distress was somewhat endearing. Unfortunately, she couldn’t abide by his command. “I can’t.”
His face fell. “No one will hear, and Toloruel won’t know. I won’t tell anyone.”
“It’s not that,” Kitty said. “I don’t remember the song. I made it up and I’ve forgotten how it went.”
It was remarkable how much like an innocent child Rismyn appeared, as his face took on a sullen cast. “Can’t you make it up again?”
Kitty tilted her head to the side, considering. “I’ve never tried to make up a song on purpose before,” she said. “They sort of just come to me in the moment, and then they’re gone.”
“Oh,” was all he said, and his disappointment was so visceral she found herself determined to please him.
“But I can sing another song I know,” she said quickly.
Rismyn brightened considerably, but then looked skeptical. “Is it pretty like the last one?”
Kitty stared. She couldn’t have heard him correctly. It almost sounded like a compliment. “I, uh, think, so...you thought it was pretty?”
“Of course not!” Rismyn spluttered. “But it has to be a similar song, or I won’t learn anything.”
“Okay.” She fell silent and thought for a moment, trying to think of a song that would fulfill Rismyn’s requirements. Unfortunately, her mind had gone completely blank. What if she chose the wrong one? What if Rismyn didn’t like her singing after all and hurt her for it?
Heart racing, she scrunched her eyes tight and tried to recall something from her life before the Underdark. Just as she was growing desperate, it came to her.
A slow melodic tune her mother sang often to her father. Home is the Heart of My Love. She opened her eyes and tried to square her shoulders the way Papa had always done before a performance.
But Rismyn was still staring at her. A viper ready to strike.
Kitty had to restart twice because her trembling wouldn’t allow her to find the right note. Each time she flushed redder as Rismyn frowned a bit more with every wrong note.
At last, she closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. She thought of her mother’s voice and the string of pretty notes strummed on her father’s dulcimer. Warm sunshine and the breeze sighing through the boughs.
Like it used to be.
It was easy to find the right notes, now. She just had to harmonize with them.
When the song ended, she kept her eyes shut, savoring the precious feeling of being safe and home. Tears leaked from beneath her lashes, and though she cried often, these burned more than usual. When she finally opened her eyes, the slap of reality hit harder than usual. She gasped when she saw Rismyn, not because she had forgotten he was there, but because she wasn’t ready for him to be more real than the music.
The page prince merely stared at her, his face a cipher. After a very long moment, he stood up and left, leaving a very bewildered Kitty in his wake.
Rismyn returned again the next night, and the night after that. By the third night, Kitty began to believe he really didn’t plan on killing her. But what he wanted, she didn’t understand. He never lifted a hand against her, and the only words he spoke was to ask her to sing. When she finished, he stared, and then he left.
By the fifth night, she had become comfortable with this pattern, so she was completely taken aback when he spoke after the last note vanished into the darkness.
“What do the words mean?”
Her head was still spinning with the daze of the music. “The words?”
“Yes. What do they mean?”
“Oh, uhm…” she hesitated, having not really thought about it before. She had been singing in Common, but the drow (at least this drow) didn’t speak Common. His language was Undercommon, which was just similar enough that she picked it up quickly but just different enough to make poetry in Common sound foreign. “It’s called ‘Home is the Heart of My…’” she trailed off, wondering where to go from there.
The word for love in Undercommon didn’t carry the same weight as it did in Common. Love for the drow meant coveting, a strong desire to take and own something or someone. Wealth, power, influence, those were the sort of things the drow loved. The word always made her think of greed, and it didn’t fit the connotation of the song at all. But if she used the Common word, he would ask her to explain, and she didn’t know how.
Rismyn fidgeted. “That sentence doesn’t make sense.”
Resigned, Kitty sagged her shoulders. “Home is the Heart of My Love,” she said, using the Common word. “It’s about being warm and happy anywhere in Faerûn, so long as you’re with the person you love.”
“Love?” Rismyn tilted his head to the side. “Is that like mercy and kindness?”
She looked away. “Sort of.”
“Well, then explain it.”
Kitty let out a breath and hugged her shoulders. “I don’t know how.”
This answer was clearly unacceptable to Rismyn, but though he frowned he made no move to strike her. “Then why did you sing about it?”
“Because…”
“Because why?”
“You asked me to sing a pretty song. And it’s the prettiest song I know.”
“Oh,” Rismyn said, apparently accepting that excuse. “Well, it is very pretty. But I liked the other one you sang better.”
Kitty blinked slowly, staring at him as he admitted to liking her singing. The realization of it dawned on Rismyn as well, for his face darkened and he snarled as if it was her fault he had paid her a compliment.
“Thank you,” she said quickly, bowing her head submissively to the floor. She didn’t want him to cover his blunder with cruelty. “I did my best to serve you. I am happy to have pleased you, master.”
“Don’t call me that,” Rismyn spat. Just when she thought he was done surprising her.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. What would my lord wish to be called?”
The drow sighed in exasperation. “My name is Rismyn.”
Kitty kept her forehead pressed to the floor, unable to believe he was inviting her to use his name. Even though she already had, and far worse. “M-master Rismyn?” she stammered, hoping it would be an acceptable guess as to what he meant.
“No, Rismyn,” he corrected. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a slave around here, too.” There was a surprising amount of bitterness in his tone.
“But you’re the revered Matron’s son!” Kitty gasped. “I could never call you by your name.”
“You already have.”
“That….that was an accident...I should never have presumed to be so bold…”
“It’s alright.” She could practically hear his shrug. “I’m not mad. I...liked it...”
Kitty was completely mystified. None of this made any sense. She chanced a glance upwards. Rismyn wasn’t looking at her, but he was glowing red hot in her infravision. There was no sly smirk, no cool anticipation of her pain. He was serious. He really wanted her to call him by his name.
“Okay…” she said, though she just resolved never to address him directly. “If that’s what you want.”
Strangely, he seemed to relax after that. “Would you tell me what the words in the song mean?”
Kitty hesitated, straightening back up and peering at him as if seeing him for the first time. “I can...try to translate it...but not all the words fit into your language.”
“Why not?”
“Well...because...the surface world is different from the Underdark. We have things that you don’t have.”
“Like love?”
Kitty’s breath caught in her throat. She’d never heard a more accurate description of Menzoberranzan. She nodded.
Rismyn thought for a moment, then got up from the bed and went to the writing desk. As soon as he started rummaging around in the drawers, Kitty started to panic.
“What are you doing?” she cried, leaping to her feet. She had already shackled herself to the wall, though, so she couldn’t go far enough to stop him.
“I’m just gonna borrow some things. He won’t notice.”
“He will notice,” she moaned, even though she had never seen Toloruel actually sit at his desk and work. “And he’ll blame me.”
Rismyn froze. Then, he lifted a single sheet of paper and an ink pen carefully from the drawer and gently shut it, as if trying to be careful not to disturb anything. He offered the items to Kitty. “Here. Write the words down so I can study them.”
Kitty didn’t move. “I can’t.”
His eyes narrowed. “You can’t, or you won’t?”
His expression and tone made him look just enough like Toloruel to send a shiver down her spine. “I don’t know how to write.”
“You don’t know how to write?” he gasped, looking startled.
A wave of humiliation crashed over her. She shook her head and looked away. “I was only just starting to learn when...when I came here. It hasn’t been necessary for my service, so I haven’t been taught.”
Rismyn just stared at her. Whatever he was thinking was locked behind his surprised expression. Then, he turned back to the desk and sat. “Then tell me the words in Undercommon and I will write them.”
It was a direct order; she could see no way out of it. So, haltingly, she recited each line as best she could. She tried not to feel like she was sullying something precious by transforming the lyrics into the drow tongue. Her mother had written the song herself, as a gift to her father. It didn’t feel right to give them to Rismyn. But she was a slave. She wasn’t allowed to refuse.
When she finished, Rismyn looked over the lyrics, his brow furrowed. “It makes even less sense than before,” he muttered, mostly to himself. Then, to Kitty, he asked, “Why would someone leave their walls behind for the open sky?”
She was afraid this interview would happen. Kitty sighed and hugged her knees to her chest, wishing he would just leave her alone. “Because of love.”
“You keep saying that word, but you won’t tell me what it means.”
“It means lots of things,” she said. She may as well try to explain it, or he would pester her until Toloruel returned. “In this context, it means you care about someone so much, you want to always be with them. Even if that means leaving behind your home to go be with that person.”
Once more, Rismyn looked at her, astonished. “That’s madness. The House is our identity.”
“Only if you let it be,” she dared to say. She understood why he reacted so. To be houseless in Menzoberranzan was to be orphaned and vulnerable, the lowest caste in drow society. Even an eleven-year-old page prince had more dignity than a four-hundred-year-old houseless drow. Rismyn would never understand a different way of living.
But that didn’t stop him from trying. “What does that mean?”
Kitty bit her lip. She could talk until all the air in the Underdark was used up, and she still didn’t think she could make him understand. But she had to say something before he got angry. Perhaps an illustration would help.
“My mama wrote that song,” she began. “For my papa, because she loved him. Mama was really pretty, and had a beautiful singing voice. They told me people used to travel hundreds of miles to hear her sing. She had lots of gold and a big house all to herself. But when she met papa, she loved him more than any of those things. So she left it behind to travel with him and be his wife.”
“Your mother left her house?” Rismyn asked, incredulous.
“Yes, to start a new home with my father.”
“Ah. Because she was not the matron or the heir to her house.” He nodded sagely as he completely missed the point.
“No,” Kitty sighed, weariness creeping into her tone. “Because she loved him. And Papa used to feel sad about how little we had. Just a wagon for a house. So Mama wrote this song and sang it to him, so he would remember she loved him more than anything and wherever he was, she felt like it was home.”
“I don’t understand that word,” Rismyn said, growing frustrated. “Is love insanity? Some sort of sickness of the mind that makes a person suicidal?”
“No, I mean, not usually.” She thought of some of the tragic tales that were sung by her troupe. “I mean, I guess sometimes love can make a person sick. But love is a good thing. It’s...it’s...the most beautiful thing in the whole world. Without love, there’s no point to living.”
“Tell me of this love,” he demanded, with such ferocity it made her jump. “I want to understand what it means.”
Kitty just stared at him. He seemed earnest, even sincere, in his desire to know. She couldn’t fathom why.
But she was a slave. Refusing was not a choice she had.
She swallowed hard and nodded. “O...kay...I’ll...I’ll try.”
And so, she tried. But it wasn’t easy. Everything, from the concept of love to compassion, were completely alien to Rismyn. To her horror, she even found herself having to explain what a hug was. As if the fact that she embraced him wasn’t humiliating enough.
But how could he know? He’d never had the chance. His mother never sang him lullabies at bedtime. His father–if anyone even knew who his father was–had never sat with him at the fire, reciting epic tales. His sisters beat him with whips to remind him he was a lowly boy child, and his brother pretended he didn’t exist.
Despite the poisoned blood running in his veins, making him forever a monster, her heart ached for him. As she spoke, she found herself wondering how different the drow might be if they gave hugs to their children. Maybe they’d relearn how to love, and unite together to overthrow the wicked deity that demanded the blood of her own people.
But such fancies were a waste of time. The drow could no more become good than she could ever see her parents again. Their hearts were as cold and dead as the corpses they left in their surface raids. Withered and decayed.
That was a truth she reminded herself, as Rismyn curled up on the floor beside her and listened attentively to her words. It was only a matter of time until he grew bored of her talking and found his entertainment in other, more violent ways.
Like his brother.
No matter how many liberties he allowed her, he was still a drow. Her captor, her enslaver. Not a curious boy who bore the same miseries as her.
They talked until the hour became late, until her sentences began to fade before she completed them. When the page prince finally realized her exhausted state, he did something unthinkable. He hopped up to his feet at once, blushing, and apologized. Then he hurried away, and Kitty was too tired to puzzle out what he was sorry for. She lay down on the floor and fell into instant sleep.
When she awoke the next morning, she believed the apology had just been a part of her strange dreams; dreams in which a drow prince was kind to her instead of cruel, and carried her away from Menzoberranzan for good.
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