#the gap years | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

winterpinetrees · 11 days ago

Text

Esther (The Gap Years 2x2)

September 14th

The Elven Palace

The word hubris can mean excessive pride, or it can mean defiance against the gods leading to an inevitable downfall. This 5'1" secretary is doing both.

Navigation Guide

………………

Esther does not expect deliverance. She would like to be free, of course, but no help will find her here, not when her grandmother, mother, genetic model, whatever Rivka was to her, had to claw her way out with political intrigue and legal loopholes. Half a billion humans look at her and only see the bringer of justice. They see a savior in her red curls and the shape of her eyes. She’s the one who watches and saves. Prince Marin Sondaica would be dead without her. And yet, these are all background thoughts. Most days Esther is only delivering letters.

She is a glorified secretary. The humans workers have their own hierarchy to keep things smooth, and elves will only serve each other. There has to be a go-between. A messenger that humans will respect and elves will obey. She argues with staff, balances costs, and does the work to figure out how closely wild humans are really paying attention to their security cameras. As a girl, she was told that the position meant so much more than paperwork, and it sometimes does. Esther is the first person Amedi will ask for help and their last line of defense. A seneschal is a secretary, but also a personal servant and a trusted companion. That’s where her and her grandmother’s fates diverge. A kidnapped wilder getting her revenge against her enslavers is one thing. A seneschal turning traitor is another.

Truly she was made for this. Not even in the proverbial sense like if she had been raised from birth to serve, but literally made. Most seneschals descend from a few ancient bloodlines, but Esther was a custom model. Rivka Tzedek- may her memory be a blessing- had the sharp mind, empathy, and focus that any future apex or councillor would want the help of. She was also unfortunately as stiff-necked as the stories said, driven by revenge, and already had a history of resisting the nobility. Some of that was trauma, but the elves weren’t taking risks. It means Esther isn’t exactly a clone. She was supposed to be more accommodating. She wasn’t supposed to fight back. Her grandmother’s indomitable will was impressive, but would only be a pain for a servant. Not trying to change it would be like keeping a sled dog in a city apartment. That’s not what it was made for. What she was made for. Elves usually remember not to call her “it”. Dee always gets it right, at least.

So in the end she was grown in a lab and handed back to the Tzedeks to raise, in case a rustic human upbringing was essential to Rivka’s genius. Esther has someone else’s nose, skin a few shades darker than a typical Ukrainian Jew, and brighter red hair, but otherwise she’s the perfect image of the woman who escaped slavery by getting twenty elves arrested for human trafficking. Elves usually comment on her eyes. They shudder and ask if she knows all of their darkest secrets too. Esther is the head of Councillor Amedi Kebero’s staff. On some level, she runs a fifth of the whole elven world. Of course she knows.

Esther knows that Plaguekeeper Eburos keeps two wildborn humans captive on his estate in the north, and that they never last longer than three years. She knows that Daphne hides bruises under the cuffs of her uniform because Councillor Marolak will never, ever, trust a human with tech. She knows that the Apex and Councillor Stormson have a shared account on a human fanfiction website. Her mother brought the elven world to its knees with just gossip. This should be more than enough. As for Amedi? Well, like all nobles, Dee will start staggering if they sleep for anything less than a full third of the time. The night is hours without an apex predator breathing down her neck. That is, except for the nights when Amedi screams themself awake. Sometimes they want to talk, but more often they’ll stumble wordlessly into Esther’s room, long ears folded back, and fall back to sleep on her small couch, secure that they aren’t the last soul in the worlds.

That hasn’t happened in a bit, but Amedi’s been spending more time on the shooting range or taking missions. With so many Lazarin nobles on the loose, it seems like everyone is realizing that they can fight back. Even the former Apex’s twin sibling, Cai Sondaica, has reemerged to warn scientists and cause trouble. The councillor is some sort of soldier again, and they come back tense and bristling with magic. Esther offers a shoulder to lean on when Dee vents over all of their problems she has so casually caused. They should have been sweeping away the last resistance, but instead there’s dozens of prisoners loose. Sierra Bracken should have been captured, which would have split the other humans’ allegiances, and left the heirs without emotional support and tactical advice before very long. Esther, of all people, knows how much the nobility rely on the humans they keep around.

The other two parts of her job, servant and secretary, haven’t stopped even while her role as emotional-support-human has grown harder. In the chaos she’s caused, Esther has even more to manage, and she’s been trained too well to slack off. A girl doesn’t become a seneschal by being a quitter. Rivka did more with less. It’s made worse by the beautiful weather. The capital is warmest when the winds change around the equinox, and Ishtar’s council had been expecting a smooth autumn before a mad winter. Instead, everyone, elf and human, is working until they can hardly hold a pen. Of course, the threshold for human exhaustion is a lot higher. The five seneschals to the high council aren’t too close, but there’s no one else to lean on. Other humans have to obey them, and their charges are counting on them for support. Still, considering her past and her plans, Esther has to be desperate to crash in the break room.

The break room is a well-kept secret, though the elves know it must exist just as surely as Esther knows an army requires a supply line. She even jokes about it on occasion, but no one reveals the location. Seneschals are trusted with the secrets of kings. They can keep their own. One night Esther manages her work (not finishes. The busywork of an empire never stops) enough to climb though the maintenance tunnels and join the other four in their lead-lined den. They’re talking quietly while an American political drama plays on the largest screen. The technology here is worse than what she’s stolen for herself.

Ryn’s seneschal, Callum, waves her over with a bold smile. He’s as old as her father and near retirement, though genetically speaking her own “father” is more like a half-brother. Damn elves with their century-long generations didn’t care that cloning a woman in her 70s would tangle the family tree. Esther’s a bit shocked to compare the two. Callum likes to think of them as a family, but that isn’t right. He doesn’t know any better though. Seneschals are raised collectively. They have to be socialized properly, after all. A seneschal with issues isn’t good for anyone.

He’s genuinely happy at least, and not as creepily dependent on his charge as some older seneschals she’s seen. Callum’s oddly argumentative, probably because it made Councilor Stormson more comfortable to have a slave that didn’t act like one. He’s sitting with Alyse, who serves the apex, and they’re nearly as close as Ryn and Ishtar are. Esther suspects Alyse will follow him into retirement in a few years. By the time she’s in her sixties and Dee has to pick a new human, half the wild humans alive now could be dead. Maybe she’ll be one of the bodies. If she is caught committing treason, will Amedi be the one to put her down?

It would probably hurt them more than her.

She closes her eyes and breathes slowly. Four different clocks tick on the walls. Even late at night, the air still smells like the good Voyager coffee they got at midsummer. Her chair is covered with an embroidered blanket. Esther knows it’s a landscape scene with a sabertooth prowling through the grass. There was another High Council, with their own staff, four months ago. This space is still scattered with things they left.

Perhaps the elves' mistake was giving her back to Rivka’s family. Maybe this rage is all nurture, not nature. She was raised like a Tzedek, not a servant, and only joined the rest of her seneschal kind once she was twelve. It’s nearly unprecedented, but the only other active seneschal to not grow up in their academy is right beside her. That doesn’t mean they get along. His name is Quarrel, like a fight or a crossbow bolt, and the altered musculature in his neck around his ID collar lets his jaws crush bone. A wilder seeing him on the street would probably remember. His long white hair is closer to fur and his fuzzy ears swivel at every sound in an almost elvish way. He’s also twenty-six and meticulous about paperwork even by their standards.

Quarrel is Eburos’s seneschal and pet project, with the project being to selectively breed a pet. Eburos wanted a secretary, not a companion, and he certainly didn’t want human empathy getting in the way of a good time, so a standard seneschal just wasn’t going to work. Quarrel’s smart as anything and brings a new meaning to human determination, but Eburos never bothered to teach him the social parts. He didn’t do anything wrong, but to Esther, he’s like a different species. Lazarus knows he’s the product of enough generations of selective breeding that he might actually be one. He’s nice though. On some bone-deep level he doesn’t feel it, but he’s compassionate, and will hold the door open.

Devana Marolak’s seneschal is the opposite. Daphne’s perfect, but it doesn’t do her much good. The break room is the only place where she so much as casts a shadow. Esther is mostly a clone of Rivka, but the modifications weren’t drawn from a database. Elves think artificial genes are a recipe for disaster, so instead of consulting their massive genetic library, they grabbed DNA from the meekest servant they had. That infinitely forgiving seneschal had a brother, who had a daughter, named Daphne. If the modifications count as equal to fathering a child, then they’re first cousins.

There’s some visible resemblance, but the similarities end there. To put it bluntly, Daphne has been scared out of her mind every day for the past ten years, while Esther acts with the mad courage of a woman who’s been raised as the heir to the most spiteful woman in history. Esther thought Daphne would support her plans to defend human freedom, screw with the nobility, escape, etc, but in fact Quarrel (who is complicit in trafficking and torture) is less likely to rat her out than she is. If Esther had been raised on anything other than stories of defiance and survival, she’d understand. The truth is that hope is a skill, and not one seneschals are taught. Why should they need it? Their jobs are to handle the details, and provide support to the elves that really need strength.

She makes conversation, says a few points about the black-market economy that the seneschals occasionally have to arbitrate, and excuses herself after an hour. Esther takes a winding path back to her own quarters. Human workers bow their heads as she passes, and those returning from work without anything to carry show her their open hands as a deeper show of respect. The elves she passes give her a nod or nothing at all. She makes no effort to walk quietly through Dee’s chambers. Better if they hear her returning home now, instead of wondering what she’s up to. The councilor’s bedroom is far enough from the main entrance that they probably can’t hear her anyway. She was trained to not make her presence known.

Her own few rooms are cluttered in the careful way of most seneschals. Esther touches the mezuzah the doorframe and slips inside her study. Yes, there’s hardly a bare space large enough to put a coffee cup down, but she knows every last notecard on the tables. There is a cabinet in the back that reaches almost to the ceiling. It’s full of paper, but she can just barely push it to reveal a false wall behind. Obsessively, she wonders if the rebels have sent her an urgent message, and the few hours between right now and her safe hours will be what kills them. Esther pushes the thought aside. If she did wake up Amedi, then they’ll check and say goodnight. It wouldn’t be good for them to hear her breathing inside the wall. More than that, routines are natural to her. She learned it in her training, and before that from the prayers her grandmother recited daily for sixty years after she doubted that anyone was listening. It’s also practical. Phone call time is when when Dee wakes up like Voyagers do and practices their archery outside. She’s not calling sooner. Esther takes a final fifteen minutes to review the day's work, places her collar on a little hardwood table, sets a timer, and crawls into bed.

Tonight, Amedi does not wake her up. They’re off in a courtyard somewhere shooting magic curses at a target and Esther’s burning moonlight. She makes her bed out of habit, gathers treasonous documents, and shoves the filing cabinet to the side until she can squeeze behind it. The rebellious humans would have an easier time with this part. Sierra Bracken is only a few inches taller than her, but strong. Even Clay, who evidence shows leans more towards running and shooting, probably has more strength. There’s a pulley system inside that makes covering her tracks easier, but like before, it would be suspicious on the outside. The hidden cupboard wouldn’t matter much if it were discovered. It’s filled with crates full of basic palace contraband, and the other four probably have their own. Part of arbitrating the black market requires keeping their own stock. Esther also wouldn’t be a good seneschal without hard drugs of both wild human and commoner varieties, for her and for Amedi once things go further off the rails. The part that would leave her and her family with glowing, dead eyes or slit throats is underneath the unlabeled containers of stimulants. Some day once she’s free, she’ll find ex-Councillor Celeron’s old seneschal and thank them for building an off-the-books crawlspace within a more expected crawlspace. The cupboard has a false floor, and under it, wrapping around a servant’s passage and the water pipes, is a ventilated room five feet square. Or maybe Celeron’s seneschal didn’t make the space, only inherited it, because it was empty when she found it. Esther’s added a phone, a wi-fi router, a desk, and a computer underneath that. It’s undecorated and she needs to replace the strip of LED lights around the ceiling with something less depressing. Amedi might notice if her few trinkets went missing though. She knows they’re trying to connect by asking questions. Seneschals aren’t supposed to come with a culture built in.

The humans haven’t left any messages for her, which is a good sign. The expected call comes at 1:15. She lifts the receiver smoothly and activates the distortion. The voice on the other side of the phone is painfully Californian. “Have I reached my emissary?”

Brian likes to play along with the theming. He sometimes refers to himself as a knight. Sierra’s taken Amedi’s title (without any understanding of it’s context) and is the artificer. Clay’s just Clay, or dirtboy if he’s been a pain.

“You have. Did you visit the Betrayed settlement? Has there been any trouble?”

They talk. She listens. It’s just like her work, except Esther is nameless and faceless and no one’s clone. She shares truths that might as well be miracles. Sierra jokes that she’s their guardian angel. She smiles. A flaming sword wouldn’t fit under the desk, but then again, she wouldn’t have to hide like this with one in her hands.

……………………

Esther got more explicitly Jewish with each draft of this chapter. She is also doing some sort of spiteful apostasy, but these things happen when your grandmother/genetic model has unbelievable trauma. Anyway, I recently learned that the word apostasy is derived from the Ancient Greek for revolt or defection and I’m having a lot of fun. She’s living her best life. (She really isn’t)

She is also so mean to Quarrel and I made this decision but I still feel bad! He’s just as much a product of circumstances as you are girlie!

@lokiwaffles @reggie246 @wishndreamer

#by me #the gap years #my ocs #Esther Tzedek

3 notes · View notes