BackStory 2

“Maaru, Maaru, slimy skin.
Maaru, Maaru, never king.
Maaru, Maaru, ugly thing.
Maaru, Maaru, won't be king.”
Mesonoth was chanting again and, no matter how little reaction Maaru showed, he wouldn’t stop.  Sometimes, he seemed to go on for hours.  Maaru went to look for their mother but, when he found her, her ladies and midwives shooed him out of her quarters.  Apparently, she was busy birthing another full sister for the little prince and she didn’t have time to sort out petty squabbles for her Halfling.
Maaru didn’t even try to approach the king because anything he said could only make his situation worse.  The king already resented the queen’s eight-year-old misshapen first child and had threatened to send him to a tower in the mountains, where only the servants would have to see his twisted dog-like ears and his watery yellow eyes.  Only the servants would put up with his rank odour and constant slimy trail.  And the king could forget he even existed.
Maaru wished his mother had chosen to go back to her own people and taken him with her.  She’d smiled wistfully when she’d sung lullabies from a long time ahead and a distant country in the sky.  She’d told him in spoken words that his real father had been taken back by force but, if he’d been able to stay, he’d have loved his son.  She hadn’t needed to say that she didn’t love him herself; she could barely bear to touch his stinking skin.  She had never given him a hug in the way she cuddled the princess and prince to her.  And now she was giving the king another royal child, another sister to blight Maaru’s days.  Sometimes he wished she’d relent and let the king send him away.  At least then he wouldn’t have to watch them cooing over each other’s beautiful royal skin, golden like his but dry like the king and the less noble inhabitants of this spirit-haunted labyrinthine castle.  Turned quickly and grabbed the pointed shorter ear of the prince and twisted it sharply and his three-year-old half-brother dropped his stupid chant in favour of a loud and mindless howl.
Maaru shot along the corridor, grinning with satisfaction.  He ran into the skirts of his former carer - a nursemaid who was old by the standards of the native species but whose reactions were still too swift for him to escape.  She dragged him, struggling, back the way he had come, gathering his yowling tormentor and sweeping him along with them, all the time rubbing vigorously at her skirt as if, in that way, she could remove his viscous slime from her clothing.  On another day, he’d have taunted her with the words that it was both pervasive and corrosive and that, even at eight years old, he was aware that organic materials could never be restored to their former state.
“I want to see my mother!” he commanded imperiously and the blubbing prince seconded his request.
“That’s where I’m taking you, young masters,” the maidservant replied, beginning to puff with the effort of dragging two reluctant children across the courtyard, up the stairs and the full length of the long gallery.  “And you’d better be respectful when we get there, Maaru, because this is the last time you’ll see her.”
Maaru didn’t have long to worry about her words; he could see the light chinking out through his mother’s half-open doorway the maidservant bundled him and his hated half-brother inside.  Their sister was already standing at the bedside crying like a five-year-old which, given her age, was hardly surprising.  The new baby was crying too, emitting weak little yowls like a newborn lamb, despite their mother’s favourite’s efforts to calm it.  “How far does that wet-nurse have to come?” she whispered with desperation in her cracking voice.
Maaru took uncharacteristic pity on the helpless mewling infant and suggested: “Why not let my mother feed her?  She’s got teats as good as any servant woman.”  He remembered his jealousy when, a few years before, he’d burst into his mother’s quarters and found her clasping her other son to her chest.  She’d sworn him to secrecy and informed him she was giving the baby milk to relieve the pain of a swollen breast, despite the wet-nurse’s presence in the room.
He was shocked by the sharp reprimand from the midwife then his old nursemaid informed him gently: “Your mother won’t be feeding any babies, even if she was allowed.”  She led him and his brother to the long footstool at the head of the bed.  Their mother had used it as a kneeler when she’d prayed and as a low seat when she’d watched her children play.  Now it was a step to enable her younger children to see over the edge of the bed; to watch their mother lying with her long golden hair brushed out over the pillows and her left hand positioned over the embroidered best coverlet, where the visitors of the next few days would wish to kiss the lustrous blue stone in her ring of state.  She was still and silent and serene but she would never smile again.
That evening, while Maaru gathered his favourite possessions to go into his trunk, the nursemaid, still wearing the rapidly disintegrating dress, asked what memory of his mother he would like.  He requested his mother’s footstool and the nursemaid smiled as she offered to ask the king on his behalf.  The castle in the mountains might be beautiful but it would be lonely without some reminder that he had once been loved.