Chapter Text
When Calliope was ten, her father gifted her a horse.
It had been a birthday gift the same way all of her father’s gifts went, which was to say, Calliope had worked for it for months through tactical appearances in long, boring banquets and conversations with perverted old friends of his, and when it was given to her, it was a barely weaned foal who couldn’t yet be ridden. To that, there were long, lonely afternoons lost halter-breaking the thing: a summer filled making sure it knew how to accept being led and groomed, sitting in the stables watching it just to remember herself it was hers, glaring at the stablehand’s son when he watched her with judgment from corners.
She listened to the boy’s father, and read all the books she could find in the library, and regarded as her own father mounted his stallion from where the man couldn’t see her, making all the possible observations. Four years later, Calliope would say there was not a lot to be grateful for in that life—from the little that made her list, Alkaios won easily.
Her beloved ride. Her trained stallion. Hers.
Calliope was not her father’s heir, not even close. Her father had been married six times and believed wholeheartedly that what that kingdom needed the most was not only more alphas, but specifically more alphas of his lineage, which had resulted in a good fifteen older brothers and five older sisters for Calliope, all of which she knew just as well as her father knew them, so not well at all. By the time she’d been born, he was an old man with all the time, all the influence, no obligations concerning such power, and no interest whatsoever in stopping his golden years to raise a final daughter he hadn’t planned to have. The one to birth her hadn’t been interested in doing so either, and so, largely, she grew in Akadios’ fields, away from any grown-up’s watch for most of her days.
There was a little spot in the gardens she’d dubbed hers, as much as Alkaios was. It sat right on the one edge of her father’s lands where there were no tenants, far enough from the Manor she had to ride for an hour to get there. At the edge, it so was, of the hill they ought to go down to if they wished to get to the closest town.
She liked standing there as Alkaios rested, her hair whipping around every possible way, although mostly right into her face, as she peered down the fall, holding down her hat. She liked sitting on the grass and drawing the view, a wax tablet perched against her knees; and napping under the milder sun sometimes, when her father had been breeding the omega so loudly she hadn’t managed to sleep right the night before. She liked going through the fields looking for dandelions to blow, and talking to Alkaios where the stable-boy couldn’t see and stare at her as if she was crazy, and doing flower crowns for herself and her horse.
She loved being as far away from the omega as she could ever get.
Calliope knew she was the most bitter of daughters. She could see that sourness in herself and it was all because of him. Her omega parent was a strange creature—a silent, dead-eyed creature that did not appear to see her even when he was looking right at Calliope’s face. He only ever looked at her when his eyes were so unfocused he clearly was not aware of anything around, anyway. Otherwise, he kept his face down.
Calliope hated him more than she could ever imagine hating anyone else.
Every day she got out of that house grateful for being away from his stupid, ugly face.
It was quite dreadful, that day. The kind of suffocating, gray morning they got after a night filled by storms, the kind from which even that kingdom’s grandest, prettiest piece of land came out looking like a mysterious, shifting mirage: reality swallowed by fog, the grass wet and slimy under her boots, heavy where it clung to her skirts. Calliope felt like the only person alive, as if she, too, had been lost in the mist. She could hear Alkaios, and she could feel the dirt under her, but everything else was far away. The Manor. Its Baron and its bitch.
She held her hand up to the sun. Spread her fingers open, so the weak light came in between them. Calliope squinted.
“It’s going to rain again,” she told Alkaios. She tilted her head. “Today, by noon. A terrible, terrible storm, my friend. I can scent it.”
The horse didn’t answer.
Calliope pinched her lips anyway, exaggerated, as if he would find it funny.
“I think,” she said out loud, though she didn’t know yet what she thought. After a pause, Calliope decided, in the gray, the humid, that bad joke of an afternoon, “I think I’ll ask Philo to make her lemon cakes for supper. Think she’s going to say yes if I bring the lemons?”
Rhetorical. The betas pitied her, as a general rule, and the cook was a bit restless working there anyway, when the omega ate so little and her father too started losing his famous appetite as age had its way. Calliope was the only one to make specific requests and Philomena quite liked her for it.
Alkaios didn’t answer, still. Calliope let her hand fall, like a trick of light.
“Might get her to give me some more honey, if the thunder gets bad enough.”
She attempted to smile to the horse, and it was almost a success.
When Calliope’s father smiled, it was a crooked thing. Steady. Rough. Impossibly, it was warm, like a hug, or a gentle hand touching the top of her head, or a bellyful laugh that was neither mocking nor cruel. With someone, not at someone. He never smiled with Calliope, though. There was only one thing in the entire world he saw deserving of his smiles, and it was that stupid omega that couldn’t ever even smile back.
It made her feel sorry for her father. When she had been very small, she used to train how she would react, in the mirror in her room, if he ever smiled at her, so he would at least once get the reciprocation he deserved. She didn’t do that anymore. Too little chance of ever needing to.
She still wished, sometimes, that she had a smile like his. It was a good one. Surprisingly good for such an alpha. Strong, but kind on the face of a man that didn’t know kindness.
Calliope knew, in some faint way, that her pregnancy and birth had been hard on the omega. She knew she was supposed to have a twin brother, only he had not survived labor and the omega had never fully recovered from it, so much so he had never gotten pregnant again, and her father told Calliope he never had a real, complete thought or feeling again.
Calliope also knew, as a small little footnote to her life that she never bothered thinking about, that the omega had been young when he had her, enough so she understood that was supposed to be sad and all, only it was not her fault, was it? She only wished to have a parent who did not look at her, lost and empty, as if thinking of all the other better children he’d never get to have, because of Calliope.
Was she not allowed to hate Evander for not allowing her to have a real parent, when Evander so clearly hated her for not allowing him to have a dozen great sons that were nothing like Calliope?
In her worst days, she simply hated her poor father for having married one of Evander’s lot. In others, she pitied him for having to live the rest of his life with something like that. A silent, dead creature who was just as half-formed as all of his kind. Who could never be a complete mate or a complete parent, or complete in any other way, truly, even before birthing Calliope had cracked the rest of his mind.
Somehow, her father still loved him.
He was still the only person her father had ever truly loved. The reason for all his smiles, the only one to ever reap from his tenderness, and when longing filled her father’s eyes, he didn’t talk about his time in the war, or his other five wives, or even his children—he didn’t even talk about his God, despite being that kingdom’s most zealous priest. He simply talked about how lovely the omega had been at thirteen.
In the end Calliope had been right, if only half so. It did start to rain, but earlier than she had imagined. Before she got to the manor, before she had even started to head back, and it was only a slight drizzle as she jumped out of one of the trees, stolen lemons stuck in the depths of her skirt’s pockets, but by the time she had mounted Alkaios, a heavy storm had already begun.
It was Anthea that was waiting by the entrance when Calliope came, shivering and dripping. Anthea was the housekeeper, which meant it was always her waiting for Calliope with pursed lips and judging eyes.
Her glare darted to the wet floor. “Lady Calliope,” she said tensely. She was the only person who ever really called Calliope by her name, although she said it like a curse.
Girl was all her father used. She preferred so, because when he tried to call her by name, he usually attempted a bunch of his other children’s before calling hers, not even just his daughters. Her parent only ever said Lady. It was her title. It was what she heard the most every time she was forced to go to some party or banquet. Little Lady Akadios.
She was Sweet Callie to the old cook who used to slip some honey on warm milk for her when she was even smaller, sneaking into the kitchens after a nightmare, before her father had tried to fuck the cook and she’d refused and been promptly fired. Cal, to the garden boy who taught her how to climb trees and clean her scraped knees when she fell from up the trees, which the cook took with her because she didn’t trust Calliope’s father around children that weren’t his.
Poor thing, to the young maid who taught her how to braid her hair and tie her shoes, after seeing her hair falling into her face and Calliope tripping on her bootstraps one too many times, and then taught her how to wash her hair and clean herself properly when she noticed no one had done that right before, after finding how dirty it apparently was behind her ears. Brat, to the old matron who took care of her studies and hated Calliope with a burning passion for all the times she came inside caked in mud, who’d scrubbed her until her skin was raw and hit her hands with a ferrule more times than she could even count, before the omega fired her too. Little dove, to her terrible Uncle Orius. Bitch, to the stablehand’s son. To her father too, sometimes. She thought that was perhaps the fairest name she got.
Calliope was Anthea’s, and not happily. She took off her riding coat with difficulty, the dripping thing clinging to her body, and handed it to Anthea.
“It’s raining,” she told her helpfully.
“So I have seen.”
Calliope smiled, all teeth. “I’ll be going to Philo, now.” And she could relax knowing Anthea couldn’t see the stolen lemons and chastise her for the climbing. When she tried passing by the beta, however, Anthea grabbed Calliope’s arm.
“Baron Senectus calls.”
“Father can wait.” Calliope pulled her arm away. “He knows I got something to talk to Philo.”
“Philomena,” she replied curtly, “can wait. Your father cannot.”
The Baron waited in his office, and he did it in the same way he always did: with his trousers open and the omega tending to his arousal, mouth full. Her father’s friends called him the kingdom’s ugliest, most beloved cockwarmer, and never bothered softening the words around her because her father had never bothered softening the things Calliope could hear or see when with him. She frowned at the spot in the floor a little to the left of the scene, but the omega waited obediently until the Baron tapped the top of his head before taking his mouth and his tongue and his useless throat away. Calliope didn’t sneer. She’d done it before and her father had struck her for it, as soon as the omega was not around.
Instead, she held her hands in front of her body, careful. The omega closed father’s trousers with uselessly anxious fingers, before settling in his knees by the man’s feet. Calliope had hardly ever seen her omega parent lift his eyes. She couldn’t recall the last time she had seen him standing tall either, and she knew she hadn’t seen him sitting down anywhere that wasn’t the floor or her father’s lap.
“Come here,” her father ordered and so she did.
She stopped close to the table, watching as his fingers played with Evander’s curls. His touch had grown even gentler with age, at least with the omega. His eyes, which she had only known aged, had grown somehow milder, a little misty at times, and she knew a greater amount of care was being taken with him for the last couple of months. She knew he had pissed in the omega more than once, because Anthea had spent an entire afternoon in the kitchens waving her heated face the first time it happened, concerned as all heavens about what failing kidneys might mean.
The Baron was a legend—Calliope had heard enough whispers about failing bowels and servants punished because her father had forgotten things he should by all accounts remember, and would have easily done so before, to have begun to understand what happened when a legend lived for seventy years, slowly rotting.
She worried, like all of them did. When the man turned to her, his eyes were sharp, yes, but there was a second where he looked just like Evander, which was to say, there was a second where he needed his eyes to refocus before he was able to quite catch what it was that he was seeing. Calliope swallowed, slow, and he squinted.
“Anthea tells me you ran from another lesson.”
“She wants me to do needlework,” said Calliope.
It came bursting out, indignant, because she couldn’t bear a second sitting still stitching, but Anthea wanted to fill all her days with just that. Stitches. Harps. Lineage books and calligraphy lessons. She knew Akadios wanted her to be made a good wife, and she hated how boringly stiff it was. She hated that it asked her to stay inside, elbows tucked, posture perfect and hair pristine, under those walls and with those sounds.
He pulled his lips. “I had her teach you that,” he replied, spitting. It didn’t use to be so literal before. “You are a daughter. This is what daughters learn, girl. If they do not, they become fond of mathematics and philosophy and go to the King’s College to be impressive sights that make men proud. They do not take horses out and come back looking like wild sprouts at the end of the day.”
Her fingers curled.
“Alkaios is mine,” she replied. It didn’t answer anything he said. It mattered too much to her not to be said.
Her father stood up. There were spots in his trousers.
“I have spoken to the Lords of this land,” he commented. “All of them with their own spirited children. You will be going.”
“Going?” repeated Calliope, stepping closer to the table. Her boots were heavy, filthy under the mud-stained soles, and she didn’t know how much that helped anything she could ever tell him. Her voice raised. “To—”
“To be fostered by the Earl,” he interrupted. “A dear friend. An alpha who can make you sit, not some beta housekeeper that lets you sneak and then comes shivering to repent at my office.”
Calliope got close enough to her father that Evander stood, one hand grabbing the side of the table, eyes glued to the man’s face with surprise as if he hadn’t known of it either. “You would send me away?”
“Children need real tutelage,” he huffed, gruffy as he had been growing into so deeply. “By a holy, studied, military alpha that can mold them right. All my children were fostered somewhere. I fostered many. You will spend some months at a great house, girl, and you can come back understanding your place.”
She blinked, eyes swimming. “Come back when?”
“When it fits. When it is right.”
“Sir.” It took her a terribly long time to realize it was Evander speaking. A terribly long time, to realize she did not even remember the last time she’d heard his voice. If she perhaps had ever heard him say as complete of a phrase as, “Sir, please. Your daughter—”
He was still holding onto the table, face open and eyes wide as he leaned closer to her father, one hand grasping at his arm.
Her father slapped him.
It was a hard, booming slap that sent him right to the floor, falling to his hands with a cut already swelling and bleeding on his cheek from the man’s rings. Calliope stared. She froze, wide-eyed, and expected to blink and for it all to be a strange mirage, the next second. Evander shook terribly, as he got on his knees to bow his head. “I am sorry, sir. But please. Think of her—”
“Come here, my wife.” Evander crawled to him, kneeling obediently by his feet. Her father cradled his cheek, thumb caressing the cut he put there. He snorted, shaking his head. “This is my fault, I know. Oh, I have spoiled you, but how could I ever stop myself when you look so sweet like this? You may be dull, but I am sure you remember. We have discussed this before. You do not argue with me about my child. I cannot allow it, even if it is you.”
His hand touched Evander’s head, twisting his curls. Evander looked so small, looking up with blank eyes. “Please,” he said, no feeling at all to be seen in his voice or expression. Calliope couldn’t take her eyes away from the red in his face. “Not with her.”
“Girl,” her father called, his eyes dark, focused on Evander and not on Calliope at all, because that was always it. It was always the underlying of it all. “Go to your room. You will be going to Agapi. Start preparing what you will take with you.”
-
Her siblings hated her. She knew so, even if she didn’t know any of them all that well.
She had heard them screaming about her with their father, about how spoiled and soft Calliope was. She understood from many angry comments and cutting glares that her father had beaten his other children when they were young. She understood, vaguely and distantly, that he had whipped them. She never thought much about why she had never received much more than some rare slaps then and there.
Her father’s anger was not a rare occurrence, because even though her father was her favorite, their relationship was still as troubled as any Calliope got.
Her father was a strange, peculiar man who smiled a lot to his omega pet, made odd little jokes all the time and was very pleased as long as he got things his way, and turned into a monster the second he did not. She often fought with him about shallow issues and annoying quirks, of which both of them had plenty, and he always got that glint in his eyes, like he wanted to take her by the neck, strip her down and whip her bloody. When he got the angriest, he told Calliope she was a stupid little cunt and her siblings were right about her needing to be put in her fucking place.
Usually, Evander just reached for his hand. Usually, her father just took Evander and went to his office to calm down. It always made Calliope angrier. She imagined them together, whispering in between themselves, soothing one another while Calliope had no one, when Evander would never argue for her, would never take her side or soothe her after a fight.
They had never doted on her. They had never cared about her at all.
One of the older servants had told her, once, that even when she’d just been born, Evander hadn’t even been able to hold her or feed her. If they were left alone in a room, the betas would come back to Evander staring at nothing and Calliope crying in her crib, and he hadn’t held her once, hadn’t soothed her cries or changed a single diaper. He didn’t even look for a wet nurse or order someone to—the betas had to do it themselves when it looked like they would just let her starve and sob in the corner.
The servant had told her she should not fault herself for their relationship. He had meant it as both a way to pacify her anger and as an excuse for the omega: during those first years after she was born, they had to force Evander to eat just as much as they had to feed her, and even her father had feared that he would never leave their room again. She had been told, the servant’s voice dipping even lower, that for some long months, they’d had to force Evander to even stand to go relieve himself, as if he had fallen under a spell of apathy so strong not even soiling himself was enough to make him wake up.
It wasn’t just a general dislike towards Calliope, but something deeper. Perhaps because of her dead twin. Perhaps because of the trauma of their half-failed birth, or how hard their entire pregnancy had been on his body, or just how he hadn’t been big enough to get pregnant to begin with, according to the servant. It wasn’t her fault, was what he wanted her to believe. It wasn’t about her at all.
But that had never worked in making her feel better.
It just proved she had never been wanted. Even when she was just a newborn, Evander had never chosen her.
She’d read many books, in those fatherless, motherless days of her childhood. Parents, she knew, were supposed to love their kids. They were supposed to hold them for the first time and have their entire world changed, were supposed to choose them every time, ever since they first felt their heartbeats. Calliope had been born so wrong Evander hadn’t even taken her in his arms after her birth.
During public banquets and balls, some of the other younger nobles joked about her sounding more like a beta than an alpha. When Evander was there whispering with her father, did he care about the fact she talked more like a commoner than a noble because they hadn’t cared to talk to her when she was an infant? Because the people they paid to do other jobs had had to pick up the slack?
A slap was nothing, not in that manor, not in that life. Calliope got slapped for frowning at the wrong time, in front of the wrong people, towards the wrong omega. Servants got slapped for not knowing what her father wanted when he snapped his fingers at them, or knowing it but not doing it fast enough, or knowing and doing it and somehow still not being enough. The omega being hit made more sense than the omega being caressed.
Calliope still cried in bed about it. It was highly humiliating, and deeply stupid.
She hated the bitch. She hated him. She loathed how much seeing him be struck made her sobs catch, heaving under her blankets, burning with uncontrollable pain at the thought he had certainly never cried like that about her.
By the time she finished, it was dark and she felt as empty at the chest as Evander always looked in the eyes. Calliope curled around the blankets and stared at the walls, tears drying on her cheeks. She sobbed still, but it wasn’t the desperate heaving anymore, just that dragging aftermath where she was already stopping with her weeping, but her chest hadn’t gotten the message yet. She sat because she felt carved out. She got up because she heard the door outside, the cursing, the stumble.
When Calliope opened her own door, her eyelashes were still sticking and her eyes were bright.
The omega was on the floor in front of her father’s rooms, crumpled down, hugging himself as his shoulders shook. Calliope stared from her door across the hallway, wide eyed and terrified, as Evander sobbed and shook. She took a step closer without even thinking about it and, when the floorboards creaked under her bare feet, Evander’s head snapped up. He looked so much like how Calliope thought she herself looked. Wide-eyed and small, with the same black hair and the same nose Calliope had always hated and avoided mirrors just to forget. The same fear.
“Lady,” he breathed. Of course. When had he ever said Calliope’s name? “No. Go—go back to sleep.”
There were bruises on his neck. There were bruises on his neck, and his corset was open, his chest not visible only because he was clutching his dress desperately not to show anything to his daughter despite the fact she had seen much of that already, before, and he was right there in front of Calliope’s father’s rooms. Calliope stepped closer, reaching a hand because she wanted to help him—be a shoulder for him to lean on as he stood up, guide him to his own quarters, help him get to his own bed. Instead, Evander flinched violently, stumbling back, and Calliope flinched too, burning with embarrassment and hurt.
Instead, Calliope only ran back to her rooms.
-
For the next fortnight, Philo fed her cake with the shaking hands of a woman who had seen enough children being lost to Baron Senectus and Anthea watched her with a pale face like she had spent years thinking Calliope needed harsher treatment, but never thought that would truly send her away from Akadios.
Wild, spoiled Calliope ran.
She hid in the gardens, most days, and was brought back after it was already dark out by furious guards her father had sent looking, taken into their arms and hauled with muddy skirts and kicking boots. If not, it was by the furious rain, which made even her retreat miserable and lost to the manor. She threw what she thought was a glorious tantrum as she refused to prepare her things that was easily punished not by her father’s fists, but by the omega, who silently went and packed her bags for her anyway. She had a tantrum about that too, but she didn’t know how she couldn’t not, coming to her room to find him folding her riding trousers although she had never had him step there when she was younger and needed someone to soothe a nightmare, or touch her heated cheeks when she had a fever.
She threw a riding glove at him. She knew it was cruel and she knew she wouldn’t dare do that to her father or with her father present, but she was fourteen and exiled and bruised, and it only made her all the more bitter when the omega flinched at the movement of her hand and then stared, numbly, at the fallen glove. He took it from the floor, brushing the old leather, and stood on unused legs. He folded it, settling it carefully in the corner of the bag so gently it made her blood boil.
“Tell him to keep me here,” she said. It sounded like an alpha ordering their lesser. It sounded like a child pleading. When he didn’t speak, she stepped closer, only that startled him and the recoil made her more heated. “If you don’t, at least don’t do this! Don’t stand there. Don’t pack me to leave like it’s the best thing he ever gave you. Don’t fold my clothes like it’s the first time anything about me makes you want to do something, and the thing is me leaving.”
Anthea would have made little sounds of distaste and told her she ought to be better with her words. Instead, facing Evander, she fumbled with the sounds and the hatred and the need. Her chest burned worse than her cheeks somehow.
The omega set his palms over her trousers, for a lingering moment. He had his eyes lowered towards them, not her, and his face scrubbed of any reaction. His thumb brushed the coarse linen and he said, small, “Senectus has said you may take Alkaios with you.”
Her throat burned. She wanted to say that isn’t the same as telling me to stay. She wanted to cry and ask can’t you let me stay. She wanted to shake him by the arms and beg why were you in the hallway, why did he slap you, why can’t you look me in the eyes and tell me anything real, how can you prefer keeping quiet and making everyone think you are mindless just so you won’t need to have a mind around me. She wanted to cry out a lot worse.
Instead, Calliope wiped her cheeks with hands that shook with frustration and anger, and snapped, “I will pack it myself,” taking away the clothes.
Evander stepped back. He stared at her shoes, for a second, his eyes going tight at the corners and strange, and then he nodded, a small thing, and left.
When it came time to, he didn’t go see Calliope off. She didn’t know that she’d hoped he would until she stood there in a stiff dress in her father’s colors, sitting at the dining table as the alpha ate like nothing much would happen later, and the omega wasn’t kneeling by his feet being handfed carefully. She stared at the empty spot on the rug until it burned and the second her father wasn’t paying attention, she sneaked out to his office, where she knew Evander usually waited when he was being useless and left aside.
He was there. She also hadn’t known that a part of her had been hoping that he wouldn’t be until she felt the way her heart lurched upon seeing him sitting in front of her father’s armchair, by the fire, staring at the flames.
He didn’t even turn when Calliope closed the door not too quietly. He didn’t react at all.
Hoarsely, she could only stand by his back and whisper, “I thought you would be happy to see me go.”
Evander blinked, turning his head. There were, Calliope noticed, stubborn tears stuck to his eyelashes that neither fell nor were wiped off. He took a shuddering breath and, when nothing came, when the silence stretched and his lips were pressed into a trembling line, Calliope was hit with the heartbreaking thought that he would not say anything to her before she was gone. Only—
“I shall count the hours until you come back,” came, a small murmur just as Calliope had already turned and started to leave.
She took a deep breath that was not so different from the ones the omega was taking, before turning back to him. “Can I touch your hand? Just this once.”
A pause. His fingers tightened on his lap.
Evander closed his eyes. “I am sorry.”
Which meant no. Which meant she could not, because her own parent could not bear the thought of being touched by her. Calliope quickly wiped her cheeks, furious at herself, humiliated by the pain and embarrassment and anger, and how much it stung.
She went away.