You Are Made of Iron

Chapter II pt. 5

​The next day, Zeilla sat up. She had bruises all over her body, and if it were possible she thought she might be in even more pain than she had been during the beating. Her neck was stiff, her clothes torn, and the side of her face that had been lying on the floor was covered in dirt. She brought a small hand up to her face and felt it. She was not prepared for what she found. Her left eye held a full on shiner, it hurt at the slightest touch. She had two smaller bruises on her face, but the one under her eye was the worst. Zeilla was not a child who cried often, and when she did it was for a good reason. She cried.
​Hours later she was escorted back to the throne room by a large man. He didn't even bother to let her walk, he just picked her up and carried her. This time Zeilla did not mock the king, or insult him, but she did glare at him with hateful eyes whenever he wasn't looking.
​King Galleon spoke to her, "Zeilla, I want you to meet someone." He gestured to another man, about five feet away from her. "This is Silas Gruff." The new man nodded to her. "He is to be your master."
​Zeilla was silent. She could tell that the King had wanted a reaction from her. More screaming, maybe breaking down in tears, but she was in no mood to give him what he wanted. She sized the new man up, accounting for his unusual size and height, his brown eyes and his sandy colored hair. She began to think about ways of escaping him.
​The King seemed annoyed by her lack of reaction, as was her intent. "Well? Don't you have anything to say, Zeilla?"
​She had many things to say. But not to him. "What shall I call you? Sir or master? Or shall I call you Silas?" Zeilla could see that King Galleon had chosen the man as her master because of his size and, she was assuming, his bad personality. Zeilla had intentionally asked the impertinent question to irk him.
​Her suspicions were confirmed by his answer, which was given in a low growling matter-of-fact voice, "Girl, You do not call me. You will do what I say and do not get underfoot or I will beat you. On the rare occasion that I will speak to you, you will address me as master. If I am to entertain guests and they speak to you, you are to call them Sir or Ma'am. Although I do not often entertain women. I will buy you new clothes whenever you need them, but do not expect dresses or anything of the like. You will wear trousers like a boy, and you will have two outfits, no more. If you step out of line, I will beat you. If you cry, I will beat you. If you shirk your duties-"
​"Yeah, yeah, I get it mister. You'll beat me." Zeilla's mocking tendencies emerged in the face of fear, and she immediately regretted it.
​Silas took two long steps and stopped in front of the girl, crossing the five foot distance with ease. Zeilla's straight cocky position shrank away from him slightly. He looked down at her, and she looked up at him. He loomed above her. Silas seemed large to men his own age, but to the child he looked enormous.
​King Galleon looked at the pair with satisfaction. Him, slightly angry, and her, fearfully stubborn. Silas Gruff slapped her in the face, and her head snapped back. He had hit her with his left hand, she noted, he was probably left handed. Zeilla noticed that a small smile had broken out on King Galleon's face. She was sure that he was doing this for his own entertainment. She looked back up at Silas, still stubbornly staring at him.
​Silas sighed, "I will deal with you later, child." Addressing The King, "I'll take her. She's a bit heady for my tastes, but I'm sure I can beat that out of her." His words chilled her, not because it was a threat, but because she knew it was true. She had seen how slaves acted all brow-beaten and sad. If she didn't get away from him, this man would take every ounce of self-respect and confidence from her.
​King Galleon had one of his men take her outside of the courtroom and wait until he and Silas had finished speaking. The man did, and he held her wrist so tight that she was sure she would get a mark.
​When Silas Gruff came out of the room, he addressed her, "Zeilla, we're going to my home. If you attempt to escape, I will catch you. And I will beat you. Do you understand?" She gulped and nodded. He motioned for her to follow him, and she did. The two of them left the room. Silas walked and Zeilla followed. She had decided that she wouldn't attempt her escape until they were almost out of the city. She had seen the speed with which Silas had moved his long legs, she had to get lost in a crowd.
​They walked out of the castle. It seemed that Silas Gruff was the only person in the city who never used the main routes. At first she had thought that it was to prevent her from running away, but then she realized that he actually had an aversion to people. Whenever Silas encountered someone, he went out of his way to avoid them. But finally Silas had no other option to get out of the city than to go through the large crowd in front of the third main gate.
​He looked down at the girl, and after a few second's thought he took her hand in his. Zeilla later remembered the time as one of the preciously few times that he had touched her to not hurt her. He led her through the crowd without mishap for the most part, but when someone bumped into Zeilla, she disappeared. Or at least that was what Silas must have thought. She had been holding his hand tighter, so that when she let go he wasn't gripping hard enough to stop her from running.
​She slipped behind the woman who had walked into her, and ran through the crowd. Trying to slip between people in a crowded area when you were only waist high wasn't an easy feat. Especially as Zeilla was trying to bump into as few people as possible. It's easier to spot someone in a crowd if there was a line of people who kept getting pushed and annoyed as they passed.
​Zeilla moved as best she could without getting trampled, but even that was difficult. She looked up and saw a part of the gates, at least she knew she was headed in the right direction. Silas's house was apparently in the same direction that her mother's house was in. She had to get back home.
​Eventually she made it out of the gates, and before Silas it seemed. He was probably looking for her or something like that. She didn't really care what he was doing, as long as she got home. In the future, she realized that if she had just hid, instead of going to the most obvious place she could, she would have probably gotten away. He didn't know her patterns back then.
​It took Zeilla hours to walk the trip that had taken them a half of an hour while riding Da'rvan. She stepped through the gates to her family's mansion, and found it the same. There was one slight difference, there were no people in sight. On a normal day you should be able to spot at least one or two of the servants working from this spot. But there was no gardener. And there was no maid. Zeilla began to feel the fear of things that she had been dreading since her mother abandoned her.
​She slowly went into the house. The door was open. Just as she had feared, the house was empty. There were no servants, there were no maids or cooks, but what Zeilla had dreaded the most was that her family was gone. She went up the staircase. The rooms were cleaned out. Everywhere she looked she saw empty rooms, curtain racks without curtains, and no people.
​She went into her bedroom, hoping to find something, anything, and to her surprise, her bed was still there. It had no sheets or pillows, but what did have were three things. A note, a necklace, and the brand new cloth doll that she'd gotten for her birthday two days before. She inspected the items. She could not read. She had been taught her letters, but she didn't know all of them, and she could not yet string them together to make words. However, she kept the note. Maybe it would tell her where her family had gone, although she doubted it.
​Next she inspected the stone on a chain. It was only a rock, not silver like most of her other jewelry, and she was pretty sure, even with her untrained eye, that the chain was worthless. However, the necklace had two letters on it. The first one was a Z for Zeilla, she knew that much, but she had no idea what the second one was. Lastly, she looked at her doll. It was nothing fancy, but her mother had made it for her. She couldn't believe that her birthday had only been two days ago, it had seemed like a lifetime ago.