#missmisdemeanor

She feels the weight of duty most acutely with respect to Aroen; she loves him more than anything in this world, and her every little slip in how she behaves towards him is agonizing to her.

When they were fairly young, Aroen helped her atone for her perceived flaws by whipping her. She would bring him the lash, confess her sins, and ask how many lashes she deserved. He would decide and administer accordingly. Most of the time her sins were minor slights: a quick response that came out terse or curt, a painful snag while combing out his hair, a corset laced slightly too loose that slipped down an inch or so throughout a ceremony. He would lash her thrice, or five times, or maybe even ten times if she seemed particularly contrite; she would feel better having suffered for her imperfections.

But one time she did something that really pissed him off. What exactly she did doesn't matter to either of them after all these years; Neora herself doesn't remember, and Aroen doesn't care. She brought him the lash and asked, "How many?"

Aroen narrowed his eyes and replied, "One hundred."

Neora is frighteningly resilient against pain and injury; Niro ensured as much. But a hundred lashes is a load very few bodies can bear, even ones coursing with divine blood.

By fifty lashes, she was folded over, unable to maintain her usual straight-backed kneel, and Aroen was pleading to stop, despite her breathless and choked-out insistence he continue. The last thirty were delivered by Aroen through tears, blubbering that he was sorry, he forgave her, he was wrong about the need for a hundred, they could stop now. But she couldn't let him stop. He said she deserved one hundred lashes. She would not be done until she had received one hundred lashes. Her sins would not be cleansed until she had received one hundred lashes.

By 85 she was all but motionless, her face pressed into the floor. She had stopped crying; she couldn't anymore. She lost consciousness at 98. Aroen gave her the last two, then ran for Orin and Niro.

They helped him put her back together. Orin unbraided and rebraided Neora's hair, finger-combing the blood-soaked ends and scratching her daughter's scalp with her pointed nails. Niro opened and reopened a gash on his forearm to let a steady stream of his blood trickle from a vein into Neora's mouth until he could see her shredded skin beginning to knit itself back together like his did. Aroen shook and sobbed as he laid strips of loose flesh hanging on by threads of tissue side by side where they looked like he belonged. By the time Neora could string a sentence together again, she insisted she had told Aroen to do this to her, that it was her fault, that he mustn't be blamed.

He never used the lash on her again.

Two centuries later, Enneiro committed a grievous offense.

Noelle, at that point just a child recently introduced to the family home, spent years being tremendously trepid around every family member besides Aroen, Neora, and Aonira. Of particular concern for her was her body: her standards of personal modesty approached Aroen's, in terms of how little skin she was willing to show.

Naturally she fascinated Orienne and Enneiro, this treasured child, utterly inaccessible to them socially and visually. They stole glimpses of her at every opportunity, determined to find out for themselves what it was that Neora was keeping all to herself.

Then one day Neora caught Enneiro spying on Noelle as the girl bathed. She dragged her son down the hall by the hair, forced him onto his knees, retrieved the whip from its box on the top shelf of the closet, where it had languished ever since, dutifully oiled and cared for on a regular basis by Aroen as a routine of some kind of personal remembrance, and Neora administered the only punishment that seemed appropriate.

One hundred lashes.

She told Ronanor and Orienne what he'd done and where to find him, unconscious and bleeding on the flagstone floor. Orienne already had an idea of what she'd done to his twin. He'd felt it too, a succession of phantom lines searing into his back for ten minutes already. He only lacked the context: of the second generation and beyond, only Aonira knew why his mother had those faint whispers of scars across her back and shoulders.

Ronanor had access to sufficient healing magic to be capable of knitting up Enneiro's bloodied flesh well enough, agonizing though the process was. Orienne pleaded to Ronanor to be given the same punishment; to be whole while his twin's raw flesh writhed and twisted back into order over hours was torment enough, and so too thought Ronanor. She would not give him that mercy. That would be his punishment for his role in the act, for he most certainly had one.