I don't remember what triggered it. I never did. But I remember the crack of my leg giving way, the white-hot agony that swallowed the world, and the sound of my own screams—screams I couldn't hold back, screams that only made her worse. Her big hands, calloused and powerful, had found their target with terrible accuracy. When it was over, I lay on the dirt floor, my leg bent at an angle that made me sick to look at, and my mother stood over me, trembling, her face a mask of horror at what she had done.
She didn't call the healer. She couldn't. What would she say? How would she explain? So, she splinted my leg herself, badly, and I lay in that hovel for two months while the bone knit crooked and the fever came and went in waves. I survived. I always survived. But I walked with a limp for years afterward, until the King's healing touch—years later, when he finally learned what had happened—straightened what had grown wrong.
After that day, I learned other things too. I learned how to curl into a ball to protect my vital organs. I learned how to bite down on my own lip until it bled, because crying only made the blows come harder. I learned to read the signs—the way her eyes would go flat, the way her jaw would set, the way her massive shoulders would square—and I would run. When I could.
When I couldn't, I learned that if I went completely still and completely silent, eventually she would tire. Eventually she would stop. Eventually she would look at what she had done with horror in her eyes before retreating back into the silence or the weeping or whatever came next.
The old midwife who had delivered me—one of the few women in the village who still spoke to my mother—came to check on me during those months when fever burned through me from my broken leg. I remember her hands, cool and gentle, and her voice, barely a whisper, as she told me truths my mother never would while my mother slept in the corner of our hovel.
"Your mother was sold to your father's family when she was barely a woman," the midwife said, her old eyes full of a sorrow too deep for tears. "A transaction. A trade for some livestock and a promise of protection. Your father's family was wealthy once, you know. But they fell on hard times, and by the time your mother arrived, there was nothing left but debts and desperate men."
She told me how my father had been bedridden even then, struck by a mysterious wasting illness shortly after his marriage. How my mother had nursed him for years, watching him decay, knowing she had been traded to a ghost. How his family had eventually vanished one night—fled from their debts, leaving their crippled son and his young wife alone with nothing but a leaking roof and the whispers of the village.
"And then," the midwife said, her voice dropping even lower, "there was you."
I was not my father's child. That much became clear as I grew, with my dark hair and my eyes that no one in my mother's family or my father's could claim. The midwife never said it directly—some truths are too dangerous to speak aloud—but she told me enough.
My father—the man I was meant to call father—lay in that bed, wasting away, staring at the ceiling with eyes that saw nothing. When awake, he would fix his gaze on some invisible point above him, never speaking, never moving, never acknowledging the world around him. When asleep, he would simply close his eyes and retreat further into whatever void had claimed him years before I was born. He was a ghost who happened to still breathe.
My mother lived a cold, lifeless existence with this man. No warmth. No conversation. No comfort. Just the endless labour of keeping him alive—feeding him, cleaning him, turning him so the bedsores wouldn't fester—while he stared through her as if she were made of air.
The midwife, old and tired and too familiar with our family's secrets, told me the rest in hushed fragments over the years.