Jack Whyte - Uther

One of the very first truths that she had been conscious of was that she was different, in some unknown but unpleasant way, from other children. Her earliest lessons, overwhelmingly repeated and reinforced, informed her that she was an unlovely and unlovable creature, unacceptable, unfit and undesirable. It never crossed her mind that those surrounding her in her first days were all male, since she had no mother and no female intimates, or that they were much older than she was. It never occurred to her to doubt them, or to question their views of her, or to challenge their dictates. They were her judges, her accusers and her condemners, and that was made obvious by the way they acted and by the fact that no one ever contradicted anything they said or did. Many of them were her half-brothers and many more were cousins of varying degrees of consanguinity, but all of them were united from the first in decrying and condemning her unique unloveliness.

It had been hammered home to her ever since she was old enough to walk and listen and understand that her appearance and her looks were offensive. The girls of her own age were all prettier than she, even the plainest of them, and they all liked to make themselves feel prettier by laughing and jeering at her lack of anything that might be called attractive.

So one of the first things she ever learned was that she must never cry, because whenever she did, whenever she allowed her tears to flow and to be seen, it brought her more grief and more trouble. She might be beaten or more cruelly used, or her tormentors might laugh at her and throw things at her, or they might take away from her whatever she was holding or clutching at the time. Once they had killed a wounded crow that she had found and nursed almost back to health. When they saw how deeply she grieved for the dead bird, they laughed and took note and waited for her to betray a fondness or a liking for some other creature, and then they killed that, too—a rabbit she had raised from babyhood, and then a goat she had been set to guard one summer's afternoon.

The boys, some of them her brothers, had beaten and abused her that day, tying her up and jeering at her as they killed the goat out of sheer, pleasurable malice, and after it was all over and they had all run away, the uncle who had set Jonet to the task beat her with a heavy stick for having lost his goat. It was plainly her fault the goat was dead, and everyone agreed. No point in seeking to place blame on any of the boys; no one expected anything better of them. But Jonet the Toad was neither boy nor girl. Jonet was simply there, available and unsightly, blameworthy by her very appearance.

After that day, Jonet had refused to be a victim any longer. Thereafter she had shown no kindness to anyone, shown no concern for any creature, nor had she ever permitted herself to weep openly again. By the time she was seven, she had not shed a tear for anyone to see for almost two whole years.

Of course, she wept sometimes, but only when she was alone. At such times, although she herself could not have said why the tears flowed from her, she wept for herself and for the creatures for whom she dared show no affection. She wept, unknowingly, out of loneliness and heartache, out of friendlessness and despair, and out of a cruel awareness of her own unsightliness and ugliness, but always she wept in the privacy of some deep nook she had created for herself, far from prying and unfriendly human eyes. She trusted no human being to deal with her without causing grief or pain.

Even her father had called her a foul toad and kicked her away from him one day when she had been beaten by one of her brothers and had vomited from a punch to her gut, fouling the front of her rough smock. So for a long time after that, Jonet had thought of herself as a real toad, a cold and slimy nasty thing beloved by no one, and she had examined herself carefully for similarities to the creature she believed she resembled.

She took note that her whole body was stocky and thick-set. Her limbs were short and burly, her legs bowed and muscular, and her arms, hands and fingers as stubby, thick and strong as any boy's. Her hair, too, was thick and coarse, wiry and ungovernable even when it was clean, which it seldom was. In fact, her body was compact and strong and dense with muscle, but she would have found no pleasure in those attributes, even had she been aware of them or paused to consider them. Compactness and strength were not what she required of her body, and those elements she longed for and would have given anything to have long legs and silky hair, blue eyes and white, even teeth—were simply not hers. Jonet was a toad.

And then one day she heard someone, some old woman in the village, say that toads had wondrously beautiful, liquid brown eyes—the most beautiful eyes in all the world of animals, and she grew excited with the hope that she might own something, one physical attribute, that others might admire and envy. But of course, she had to find some way of seeing her eyes for herself.

Jonet had never seen a mirror, but she knew that such things existed, and that you could see your entire face in one of them. In a village as poor as hers, however, no one was wealthy enough to own one. And even had there been several, the very thought of how people would ridicule and torture her if they even suspected her of wishing to look at her own face was enough to frighten her into immobility. And so she learned to be content to close her eyes and simply dream that she possessed the most beautiful eyes in the world.

Leir the Druid, the man who had fathered her, was one of the most powerful members of the Druid confraternity in southern Cambria, which meant that he spent much of his life conferring with his priestly colleagues, travelling between and among the various communities for which he held a shared responsibility. While doing that, of course, he spent little time in his own home—a fact that provided his daughter with one of the few pleasures in her bleak life.

One day he returned home from one of his long journeys, however, accompanied by a new wife, and Jonet chose to disappear for a while, as she often did, in the hope that her father's travels had merely been interrupted by this marriage and that he might still depart again, with or without his bride.

Even at the age of nine, Jonet was well aware that Leir's wives were generally short-lived. Her own mother, whose name had been Naomi, had apparently lasted little more than two years, dying quite suddenly shortly after Jonet was born and leaving the baby to be cared for by an adolescent servant girl called Tamara. Barely two years after that, Tamara herself—whom Leir had taken to wife within months of Naomi's death, and who would be the closest thing to a mother the infant girl ever knew—also died in childbirth, sacrificing her own life to give life to Jonet's loathsome half- brother Carthac. Leir, Jonet knew from the village gossip she had listened to so avidly, had not even bothered to visit Tamara during the final months of her pregnancy, and it was common knowledge that he had shown no grief at all when she died.

Since then, Leir had taken five more wives, and all of the five were dead, as were the three who had preceded them. There had been a first wife, before Jonet's mother, but Jonet had never known her name. Then had come Naomi, then Tamara, then the following five, which made the new wife number nine. Three of those latter five had borne children to the Druid, and one of those three had died in childbirth. The other two had simply died, somehow, once Leir had begun to tire of them. Of the remaining two, who had not borne children, one had died of a broken neck after falling from a low wall on a dark night, and the other by drowning in a flooded stream bed during a sudden mountain storm. Jonet could not even recall their names. She had neither known nor cared for any of them. She believed implicitly, though, that her father, the Druid, had killed all of them.