The child was given the name Rudeus, and what an unsettling child he was. He never cried, and never made a fuss. It might just have been that he was physically frail, but that notion was soon proven false. Once Rudeus learned to crawl, he began to make his way anywhere and everywhere around the house—the kitchen, the back door, the supply shed, the cleaning closet, the fireplace, and so on. Sometimes, somehow, he even made his way to the second floor. As soon as anyone took their eyes off him, he was gone.
Regardless, he would inevitably be found within the house. For some reason, Rudeus never ventured outside. He’d look out the windows, but perhaps he was still too scared to leave the house.
Lilia wasn’t sure when she developed an instinctual fear of the child. Was it around then, with him slipping away whenever unobserved, always needing to be tracked down?
Rudeus was always smiling. Whether he was in the kitchen staring at vegetables, or at the flickering of a candle in its holder, or at unwashed undergarments, he was always burbling under his breath, chuckling as an unsettling grin rose to his face.
It was the kind of grin that viscerally repulsed Lilia. It reminded her of the smiles she’d gotten from a particular cabinet minister as she made her way between the harem and the royal palace in the past. He was a bald man, his smooth head gleaming in the sunlight and his corpulent belly wobbling as he walked. Rudeus’s smile resembled the grin on the minister’s face when he eyed Lilia’s chest. A smile like that, coming from a mere baby.
What happened when Lilia picked Rudeus up was particularly worrisome. His nostrils flared, the corners of his mouth drew up, and he’d start panting and bury his face against her bosom. His throat would twitch as he made weird, gleeful little giggles.
It was enough to send a chill down Lilia’s spine, almost to the point where she wanted to reflexively hurl the boy to the floor. The child showed absolutely no affection. That smile of his was, quite simply, creepy…the same smile as that cabinet minister, who was rumored to have purchased a number of young women as slaves. And this was an infant, smiling like that. Nothing could be more unsettling. Lilia felt she was bodily at risk from a baby.
She could only wonder why this child was so strange.
Was he possessed by something malevolent? Had some curse been laid upon him? When she considered those possibilities, Lilia knew she couldn’t stand idly by.
She rushed to the store, spending a small sum on what she needed. Then, when the Greyrats were asleep, and without asking Paul for his permission, she performed a traditional charm of banishment from her homeland.
When Lilia picked Rudeus up the next day, she was certain: It hadn’t worked. The baby still had the same unsettling aura. Just the look on his face was enough to give her the creeps.
Zenith herself had often said things like, “When that boy’s feeding, he really goes at it, doesn’t he?” She was completely unperturbed by the whole thing! Even Paul, a man of weak principles who was something of a womanizer, didn’t give off vibes like his son did. The boy didn’t even line up with his own parentage.
Lilia had once heard a story in the palace harem. Back when the Asuran prince was still a baby, he’d crawl all around the harem grounds, night after night. It turned out he was possessed by a demon. Not knowing this, one of the attendants picked him up, and he pulled out a knife he’d hidden being his back and killed her by stabbing her in the heart.
It was a frightful story. And Rudeus was just like that. Lilia had no doubts: This was another case of demonic possession. Oh, the boy was calm and placid now, but once the demon within him awoke, he’d make his way through the house while the family was asleep and kill them all one by one.
Lilia had been far, far too hasty. She never should have taken this job. At some point, she knew, she was going to be attacked.
She was, after all, the type to take superstitions quite seriously.
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And so, Lilia lived in fear for the first year or so.
At some point, however, Rudeus’s ever-unpredictable behavior changed. Instead of disappearing and reappearing at random, he stayed holed up in Paul’s study in one corner of the second floor. Well, perhaps ‘study’ was a generous word for a simple room that housed a few books.
Rudeus would shut himself in there and not come out. One day, Lilia took a quick peek and there he was, staring fixedly at a book and muttering to himself. What he was saying didn’t sound like words. Not words from the common language on the Central Continent, at least.
Besides, he was too young to be talking already, and certainly nobody had taught him to read. Which meant the boy was just looking at the books—not reading them—while making random sounds.
For it to be anything else would just be weird.
Even so, Rudeus sounded like he was speaking with an actual, meaningful cadence for some reason, and it looked like he understood the content of the book he was looking at. That’s so strange, Lilia thought as she watched secretively through the crack in the door.
And yet, she strangely felt none of her usual revulsion toward him. Ever since the boy had taken to hiding away in the study, his hard-to-define, unsettling oddness had abated a fair bit. Oh, he’d still occasionally laugh or smile creepily, sure, but Lilia didn’t get chills whenever she held him anymore. He had stopped burying his face in her chest and panting.
Why had she been so unsettled by him, anyway? In recent days, she’d gotten a sense of earnestness and diligence from him that she was loath to interfere with. Lilia spoke with Zenith about it, and she’d apparently gotten the same impression. From that point on, Lilia figured, it was best to leave the boy be.
It was an odd feeling. Leaving an infant alone wasn’t something responsible adults did. But now, intelligence glimmered in Rudeus’s eyes, in contrast to mere months ago when there had only been a crude dullness. And there was the gleam of a resolute will to go with that intellectual brightness.
What should they do? Nothing in Lilia’s meager experience had given her the tools to make the right decision here. There’s no one right way to raise a child, she’d been told. Had that been from one of the older royal handmaidens? Or perhaps her mother? At least there was nothing too off or unsettling about the boy now, nothing to fear.
In the end, Lilia decided to leave well enough alone. Any interference might cause the boy to revert to the way he’d been before.