Darelle

4

"Wake up!"

Darelle turned her head to the other side of her bed and ignoring the soul, the taps on her back, and the gong that told her of the hour of the day.

"Get up, princess." Marisa said, with her voice so loud that she used a pillow to cover her face.

When the bugging persisted, she sat up and tossed the white pillow to the side and looked at her face with a tired face. "Leave me." she said and heaved an exhausted sigh.

"Get up, this instance." Her friend said, with a stern face as she looked down on her.

Darelle yawned without covering her mouth, making her lady-in-waiting twitch in anger. "Let me be." she begged before she dropped back to the bed and closed her eyes.

A smile appeared on her face when she had been able to pass the hurdle before her, she cuddled in the sheets and told herself she would get up later. But now, she would sleep, after all, she didn't commit anything grievous.

Then her eyes popped open as she heard a large splash and sat up to see herself drenched in water. Her eyes settled on Marisa, who held an empty pail with two maid behind her.

"What did you do!?" she asked as she squeezed the fabric in her hands.

"Good, you're wake now." Marisa spoke in her reasonable manner. "I don't know why you were sleeping like a log of wood after how many years in the place. If you were a boy, I hate to imagine what I would have to do . . . to you."

"You didn't have to bathe me in cold water!" Darelle complained of the injustice she endured the first thing in the morning.

"Warm water, I had them tested personally. It was warm water."

It took everything in her, not to leap out of the bed like a starving half mad wolf and scratch out the eyes of her friend.

Instead she stood up and looked down at her white nightgown. "Can we get this over with?"

She couldn't mask her sleepless night. She had spent the night in the library and stayed attentive, drinking a cup of hibiscus tea as a young girl read a book on her behalf.

"You look like you are one with the dead. Your eyes are puffy and your hair is a mess." Marisa tsk, then she turned to one of the maid. "Go, get ice cubes from the cook."

And one of the girls left to fetch the thing used to torture her as soon as it made contact with her skin. And she almost swore at everything and everyone.

The remaining people in the room moved to her and cut the distance between them. She loosened as they helped her to strip. After they were through, she spread her arms for them to put on the bath robe and shrugged it on.

She sluggishly bent her back as she dragged herself to the bathing chambers, when she received a slap that her straighten her back and become more alert about her surroundings.

"You, better, don't mumble." Marisa warned her, reading through her like she was so easy to predict.

She forced her mouth closed as she shrugged off the robe and stepped into the large ceramic tub with show of gold here, and there.

Fully submerged, saved her head, she turned to the door, where the maid sent on a errand returned, handed a small basket to Marisa, that size of her palms and came to her side.

There was really nothing she could do.

Minutes after a good scrub that had her skin almost redding, she sat in front of a white vanity mirror in her quarters in a pale blue gown, one of her simpler options and hissed as her best and only childhood friend combed through her tangled hair with uttermost care before she settled the pink comb on the table to plait her wild hair down.