I.
“Gloriam maiorum: To the glory of our ancestors.” This is the command that Michelle was born into as a Jones, and it is one that is meant to define her every waking thought.
Her father often uses the same creed to justify the conflict that has been escalating since Michelle’s birth. “They fought this same battle in their time,” he likes to inform Michelle and her mother from across a scarred, wooden table in the empty dining hall. “We cannot let their fight be in vain.”
Still, Michelle cannot help but question it. If the fight for territory has lingered so long that its initial reasons have almost been forgotten, then has it not been in vain all along?
According to her mother, these are not questions for her to ask. She will be happier, the woman encourages her, if she finds other ways to occupy her thoughts.
After marrying Michelle's father, the duchess took up needlework and stringed instruments herself. These occupations once soothed the bitterness of a vibrant woman who had come to live in an empty kingdom; these are the kindnesses she seeks to extend from mother to daughter. Michelle is certain that these are the hobbies her mother and father wish for her to pursue.
But though Michelle's father is a king, he is also a weak-willed man. So Michelle grows up able to do whatever she pleases, which is wander to her heart’s desire.
The castle is old, and it is not a place any court would seek to reside for long. It is too small for a long-term stay for one thing, or so she is told by a few of the servants who are old enough to remember grander days.
To Michelle, the cold, hollow edifice is massive.
In certain empty halls, she swears she can still hear the ringing of a celebratory feast in the rafters. A crackling fire babbles just out of earshot, and a harvest wind plays with the curls at the nape of her neck even indoors. No such gathering has been held there for a century at least. Still, the ghosts of the glory days linger so that Michelle can hear the popping embers over her shoulders every time she leaves the Great Hall.
In the ancient days, the castle was a glorious center of power and history. Time has left it filled with vaulted ceilings and cobwebs, and its crumbling towers pierce the gray sky like broken needles. Its winding passages lead nowhere. It is here that Michelle grows up: a world of hollow decay and heavy, silent hours spent alone.
And this? This is exactly how she prefers it.
Michelle grows up surrounded by high stone walls, rotting books, and abandoned chambers. Though it is hardly a healthy environment for a young child, Michelle manages alright. Sure, in her youth the servants often find her with a gash on a bare foot or a scraped elbow. As she grows, bruises litter her limbs from impatient explorations of forgotten rooms. When Michelle is seven, she even knocks out a tooth after taking a fall down a particularly dilapidated staircase.
Despite her falls and her various injuries, the child continues to wake up each day and continue in her pursuits. Each day brings options for a new adventure: wander some forgotten wing of the structure, sift through artifacts, or explore the grounds and the tangle of woods beyond. The few servants do not understand why she does all this, but they do not question it.
No one comments on the child at all. When they do, it is to note that no matter how bruised and battered they find her, the young girl has never appeared to cry. She does not have the time; there is too much to understand and too much mystery to unfold.
Her father is the only one who sees anything in her pastimes worthy of comment. He mentions often at the table that he does wish she would devote herself to pursuits that might develop her character. After all, when she is older, no one will wish to marry a girl who smells like the musty chambers and dense forests where she spends her time. To a ten-year-old Michelle, that sounds more like a reason to celebrate than anything else.
Michelle’s expeditions begin to assume a more sophisticated structure as she grows. Rather than allowing her whims to dictate which part of her crumbling realm she visits, she begins to take a more strategic, methodical approach to her cataloging of the castle’s secrets. Michelle starts in the nearest wing to her room and works her way through each day. No piece of molding history escapes her grasp.
A lot of them do find themselves discarded after she has thoroughly examined them. Still, Michelle never simply throws away anything based upon its haggard appearance.
Because of this, the girl gathers a rather impressive collection of objects as she grows. Broken bits of jewelry fill a worn pouch in her room; squares of tapestry that have not rotted away with the rest of their fine threading line her windowsill. Chipped vases are set on crumbling pedestals, and scraps of clothing that hide in untouched armoires begin to cover the floor of the hutch in her room.
But Michelle loves the books best, and these become better than any companion as she grows.
She brings them back to the drafty bedchamber where she generally loathes to stay. Michelle has never much enjoyed her time spent there; the room is always pretending. The vaulted ceilings and haughty four-poster are loudly juxtaposed against the threadbare blankets and lack of furniture. This has always been displeasing to the girl who loves things for what they truly are. But the walls and ceilings are more bearable when they melt away into another plane entirely. It is in this realm of nothing and everything that Michelle begins to spend her hours, joined by the books she collects from forgotten rooms. Michelle lives out epic poems, puzzles through philosophy volumes, and revels in the mysterious and the twisted of the novels she has managed to secure.
Unfortunately, this talent for reading is not lost on her father the king.
Michelle’s father begins to take a more vested interest in the actions of his daughter as she ages, and so he does not hire any of the private tutors most young royals study with.
“Unnecessary,” he states. The servants whisper that the word “expensive” might be more accurate. The monarch is too proud to admit to this. Instead, he cites her independent motivation to read as a justification for giving her volumes of his choosing to study. Michelle speeds through them, though they bore her senseless. The books contain a variety of subjects that her father wishes her to pursue. Some of them are propaganda that speaks to the glory of a “virtuous woman." He assigns her the tragedies that follow love ballads of a forbidden nature, as well as materials on the role of a good wife.
She reads them, but very rarely without leaving a tangle of sarcastic annotations in the margins.
The women he wishes her to emulate are pliable. Michelle does not scorn them for their femininity; she is feminine in her own right as she ages from seventeen to eighteen and older. Michelle is intuitive and perceptive. She sees more clearly than anyone the value of cleverness over the brute strength. After all, have not hotheaded decisions of diplomacy kept the kingdom locked in conflict for years? But the literature scorns such traits, undervaluing them.
So Michelle takes to the abandoned wings of the fortress to escape. Her explorations take her further and further away from the central rooms of the castle. After all, it is there her father spends his days allowing his council to pour poison into his ear and to empty the kingdom’s coffers.
In the furthest abandoned rooms, Michelle makes herself a library with books that are more to her liking. There is a makeshift laboratory in the room beside it where she studies what she wishes. The young woman recreates many of the experiments that she reads of. Sometimes, she conducts her own to various ends, recording the results in an excited scrawl to read on an uninspired day.
It is hidden away in these rooms, free to sort out the secrets of the universe by herself, that Michelle learns to separate herself from the women in her father’s books. In these rooms, nothing else matters. There is no pointless series of conflicts draining the kingdom dry. There is no mother who is little more than a trophy. Most of all, there is no father who thinks of her the same way he thinks of his peoples’ crops and cattle: as his, and his alone, to benefit from.
These rooms are a refuge, and they do their job so well that Michelle barely notices the shrinking number of servants. She does not pay attention to the lessening amounts of food or the fact that luxuries once available cannot be obtained. Knowledge alone sustains her, and it will be all she needs for the rest of her days.
But war cannot be evaded forever, and not all casualties take place on the battlefield.