Chapter Text
The general consensus was that Lorenz preferred men but denied it. Leonie was not certain where this conviction came from, and she didn’t find it comfortable. She pointed out all the noble girls he asked out to dinner, and the other girls laughed knowingly. Well he would, wouldn’t he? It was like there was a language under the words they used, but Leonie had only ever learned it imperfectly.
The moment that made Leonie stop and think, ‘Oh, we’re becoming… something. We’re friends,’ happened one late afternoon. Lorenz talked about changelings. They were mythical, he said, strange creatures from some wilder realm that looked just enough like people to be taken in by them.
As a child, Leonie would crouch and watch warblers bring food to cuckoo chicks, wondered at how they never seemed to notice the strangeness of the creature they were rearing. The girls’—the other girls’—conviction that Lorenz fancied other men, that any apparent evidence to the contrary was deliberate obfuscation on his part, made her feel like a cuckoo chick, out of place and wondering how no one else noticed.
Listening to Lorenz talk about changelings, how the stories were always about the villagers and the strangeness wrought by the creature among them and never about the changeling itself, watching the faint frown that passed across Lorenz’s face, Leonie wondered how cuckoo chicks felt the first time they met another of their own.