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In the busy pell-mell of the Court of the Lords and Ladies of Radham, there was nothing more important for a noble vegetable boy, right on the cusp of blossoming into a noble vegetable man, to take some time to relax and photosynthesize up some new reserves of starch and sugar—or, at least, that’s what his Duncan had told him. Lord Asher struggled to follow that piece of advice. Whether it was Abigail fussing over his fashion choices in the morning, having his toe-roots nibbled by Quinton IX (or was it the X?) at noon, or Lord Simon giving him some random errand to do while the big boys and girls danced in the evening, the Lord Asher had very little time that he could call his own, especially when it meant having less time to spend with his favorite people in the whole world.
Especially especially, when it was his sister: the newly made Lady Galatea.
One day, while mentally rehearsing a plot from his Good Simon books to soothe himself in the park, he noticed Lady Galatea taking a walk with her pet on a leash. She was wearing her normal Court uniform of a white toga and gold-streaked stilettos, even though Court wasn’t in session—(Lord Simon, ever the romantic, had taken Lady Jessica and their Lillian out for a date diving in the Marianas Trench, and would thus be occupied for the weekend).
“My Lady Galatea.” Lord Asher rose and tipped his bowler hat to greet her, but Lady Galatea pushed it back onto his head and smiled before drawing him into a rib-crushing hug.
“Oh, hush your mouth, my little eggplant!” Lady Galatea exclaimed, breathy. “All these ridiculous courtly formalities hurt my brain matter. How’s it been? I feel like it’s been weeks since I last saw you!”
“Thirteen days and six hours,” Lord Asher replied. “I’ve been counting.”
“Then, we simply must catch up.” She said, before sitting down on the bench next to him. “Have a little brother-sister chat, if you’re not too busy vegetating?”
“Sure,” said the vegetable lordling, watching as Lady Galatea used the chained up professor as a footstool in the most unladylike manner. “If Professor Ibbot doesn’t mind, either.”
“Oh, he won’t. He’s been getting plenty of walkies, hasn’t he?”
The wide-eyed professor barked excitedly, jangling the silver collar that had the words “Return to Galatea if lost” engraved on the back.
“Good boy!” Lady Galatea said, reaching down to scratch him behind the ears, causing him to thump his bloody palms contentedly in the dirt. She turned back to Lord Asher and smiled again, eyes utterly hollow. “Now, back to you, Ashy. You dodged my question! How have you been?”
“I’ve been worse, sister. And I’ve been better, sister,” Lord Asher replied laconically. “My Duncan says that I’ve been in good physical health since my ennoblement, as has Lord Simon and Lady Jessica’s Lillian.”
He would have to do better than that if he wanted to throw Lady Galatea off his scent.
“But something’s bothering you, hasn’t it? A tumor in your trunk that’s grown into a gall?”
“Yes,” he said, for lack of anything else to say. “My outside is smooth, like Lady Jessica’s, but my insides are all bumpy, like Abigail’s.”
“Ah,” his sister sighed, hissing through her unnervingly perfect set of teeth. “A bad case of the Big Sad, then?”
Lord Asher didn’t know exactly what it was to be sad, nor to be big sad. Lady Jessica, who was the only other one of the ex-Lambs who understood Good Simon as much as he did, explained that being sad was what Good Simon felt after Mean Sadie kicked him in the head and stole his liver. ‘He needed that liver to survive, you see,’ Lady Jessica had instructed him. ‘And it was a big bother to get a new one from Friend Sable, who’d just harvested an extra one that very morning.’
“Orrr—…” Lady Galatea searched his face for clues like a woman reading tea leaves. “Are you annoyed? Perhaps, angry?”
Lord Asher had long since given up on understanding the difference between ‘sad’, ‘annoyed’, and ‘angry’, but he liked the sound of the lattermost one, so he nodded his head.
“Yes, I think I’m angry,” he said, before pulling his legs up to his chest. “Why does Lord Simon still get to call you Helen, and I don’t? I know his brain is moldy cheese, but I have a soft and squishy brain too! It’s unfair!”
His sister Galatea, who had once been his sister Helen, looked perplexed, and more than a little hurt, like she’d stepped on a hidden thorn. She shooed away Ibbot, who ran over to a tree stump to relieve himself, and collected herself before smiling at Lord Asher again.
“We forgive our dumbass-in-chief for his little sins, but that isn’t my name. Not anymore, at least.” Lady Galatea said, face as smooth and calm as polished marble. “Like a butterfly’s metamorphosis, I am no longer the Lamb I once was. None of us are. Our new names merely reflect that change.”
Lord Asher pouted, as his sister draped a comforting arm over his shoulders. He looked up towards the canopy of trees, the reds and yellow leaves shaking in the cool autumn breeze. He snuggled in closer to the crook of Lady Galatea’s arm, even though he wished so very badly to be alone again.
“I don’t think I like being a Lord of Radham.” Lord Asher said, the bowler cap falling over his face. “I think I want to be a Lamb, again.”
“I know, Ashy,” cooed Lady Galatea. “Everyone wants to return to the safety of the chrysalis sometime or other.”
“Even you?”
“Even me,” Lady Galatea admitted, but only strategically. She chose her words as carefully as Lady Jessica or Lord Simon these days. “I only wish my chrysalis was under more favorable circumstances.”
“Because Lord Simon made you do it,” Lord Asher replied bluntly. “And Lady Jessica, Lady Margaret, their Lillian, and me. We all made you into this.”
“And what a masterpiece I am!” His sister laughed, more than a little of autumn’s chill in her voice. “To be so deliciously changed by those who love you. I’ve never been happier in my life.”
“That’s a lie. You’ve never been happier than when you woke up to a table full of sweets and a functioning set of intestines.”
“True.” Lady Galatea beamed at him, the crack in her emotional facade as plain as a break in storm clouds. “I’m still happy, regardless.”
“No,” Lord Asher insisted, feeling all of a sudden very foolish and sprout-like again. “You’re not. Don’t lie to me. I don’t like it when you lie to me.”
“I’m not lying, Ashy.” She raised up a pinky for him to lock with his own. “Super-duper pinky promise.”
“No pinky promises! You’re not happy at all!” Lord Asher shouted, pulling away from Lady Galatea’s embrace and her terrible pinky. “You hate everything about being one of the Ladies of Radham. You hate the Court, the routine Dances, the way Lord Simon rules over us like a king who can’t take a joke. You hate the Plague and Black Wood outside, how you can’t go hunting as you please. Further, you hate how none of our friends have time to play anymore, how you don’t feel the same feelings that Lady Margaret has for Lilian, or Lord Simon for Lillian and Lady Jessica. And most of all, you hate me, because- because-”
Big sap-tears trickled from his eyes as he tried to force out what he knew to be true: that she hated him for not stopping the Lambs, that she would’ve been happier as a dead Helen instead of an alive Galatea.
His sister waited until he was done sputtering from his emotional blow-up, before saying, as soft as a bug's whisper, “I could never hate you, Ashy. Never. No matter who I am.”
“Then, why? Why are you like Good Simon when he lost his liver? Why’re you so annoyed and angry and sad?” He asked, casting about for the right emotion.
Helen may have had an answer for him, but Lady Galatea had none. She just looked up at him with tears in her beautiful eyes and sniffled loudly. The sight only made Lord Asher shake with more rage.
“Why have you been avoiding me for thirteen days and nine hours straight!”
He pushed with the mind-spores she’d inhaled as hard as he could, even though it would do little to a mind as sound as Galatea’s. The only reaction he got from it was another long sniffle.
“I’ve been avoiding everyone,” admitted his sister miserably. “I’ve been Big Sad too, y’know? And I don’t want anyone to see me like this. Especially you, my little cabbage.”
“You let Ibbot see you like this.”
“He’s a good listener, as long as you take him on walks and give him treats and scratch him behind the ears just where he likes it,” she replied, looking at Ibbot as he circled the tree on his hands and knees. “You’re still growing up, Ashy. I don’t want to burden you with more than you can handle.”
“Try me,” Lord Asher replied, as falsely confident as a Lord of Radham should be. “I’m at least as good a listener as Ibbot is.”
The fight went out of Lady Galatea’s shoulders as the cool breeze blew through her, the toga drooping off her shoulders.
“I’m not built for this. I’m built for the open field and the thrill of the hunt, not playing dress-up in this ridiculous, fake Court,” said Lady Galatea quietly. “But they’re afraid that if they let me loose, I won’t return, and I don’t blame them. I don’t know if I would.”
“We’d find you again. My Abby and my Emmet and my twins, Lara and Nora, we would find you and bring you home.”
His sister rose to meet his gaze. “No! I’m sorry, Ashy. I won’t—”
Lord Asher broke her over-acted refusal off with a wave of his hand-branch.
“No more lies. No more fake smiles. No more ‘sorries’. ” Lord Asher said, stretching the rigid bark of his mouth into a real smile. “You do what makes you feel happy, and we will hunt you down, wherever you are. Promise me that… Lady Galatea.”
He offered her a pinky finger.
His big sister, who was one of his favorite people in the whole world, the one who understood those terrible parasites called feelings better than anyone he knew, didn’t pretend to smile at him. Instead, inch-by-inch, her face became as placid as still water, nourishing and cold.
She nodded, locking her pinky finger with his own.
“I promise, Ashton.”