With legs folded beneath her, Lajka sat upon the worn floorboards of her family home, a book resting in her lap. In a soft, careful voice, she recited the notes she had hastily scratched onto parchment copied from a missive she had scarcely been granted time to read. Ink still smudged faintly where her hand had moved too quickly, a few stains left on her wrist.
"Barbarian?"
The word lingered on her tongue as her fingers traced each letter in her notebook. A small frown, knit tight with thought. It was a word she knew yet did not. Familiar in sound, but distant in truth. Were she older, wiser in the cruelties of the world, she might have deemed it a fitting title for the young man whose words had so diminished her. Yet her heart would not settle.
Instead, her thoughts turned elsewhere—not to him, but to those who must bear the weight of his temper, who had shaped him or suffered him long before she ever had.
“It is no kindness, to be named by others,” she murmured at last.
The quiet conclusion felt like a small defiance, the only sliver of pettiness she would allow herself. And even that, once spoken, left a bitter taste. With a soft sigh, she closed the book upon her lap, her mood soon deflating.