by Tad Williams
“Because they do not come to see me. Days go by, weeks, and I do not see them.” When she was excited her accent grew thicker. “I do not think they will love me like a mother, but they treat me like a serving maid.”
“I don’t believe Princess Briony and Prince Barrick feel that way at all, but they are much occupied,” he said gently. “They are regents now, and many things are happening . . .”
“Like that handsome young Summerfield. I heard. Something bad has happened to him. Didn’t I say that, Hisolda? When I heard he left the castle, I said ‘Something is not right there,’ didn’t I?”
“Yes, Queen Anissa.”
Chaven patted her hand. “I know nothing for certain of Gailon Tolly except that there are many rumors. But rumors are not to be trusted, are they? Not in a household already so upset by death and your husband’s absence.”
She grabbed his hand again. “Tell them,” she said. “Tell them to come to me.”
“You mean the prince and princess?”
She nodded. “Tell them that I cannot sleep because they shun me—that I do not know what I have done so they are angry with me!”
Chaven resolved to pass the message along in a slightly less heated form. It might be useful to convince the twins to come and visit their stepmother before the child arrived, for any number of reasons.
He removed his hand, disguising the escape as another kiss across her knuckles, then bowed and bade her farewell. He suddenly found that he wanted to be alone to think.
The little page had been roused from his pallet on the floor and sent to make his bed anew in the outer chamber. They were finally alone.
“What’s troubling you so?” Briony sat down on the edge of the bed. “Talk to me.”
Her brother pulled the fur lap robe up across his chest and huddled deeper into the blankets. It was not a warm night, not with true winter on the doorstep and Orphan’s Day less than a month away, but Briony did not find the room particularly cold. Is he still suffering with that fever? It had been at least a tennight but she knew some fevers did not loose their grip for a long time, or came back again and again.
“Why did you say that idiot poet could stay in the household?”
“He amused me.” Was she going to have to discuss it with everyone? “In truth, I thought he might amuse you, too. He tried to convince me he was writing an epic poem about me—a ‘pangegyric,’ whatever that is. Comparing me to Zoria herself. The gods alone know what he’ll compare you to. Perin, probably . . . no, Erivor in his seahorse chariot.” She tried to smile. “After all, Puzzle isn’t as diverting as he used to be—I think I’m beginning to feel too sorry for him. I thought it would do the two of us good to have someone new to make fun of. Which reminds me, Puzzle came to me when I was leaving your room earlier today. Told me that on the night Kendrick was killed, he saw Gailon in the hallway.”
Barrick frowned. He seemed not just sleepy but a little dazed. “Kendrick saw Gailon . . . ?”
“No, Puzzle saw Gailon.” She quickly repeated what the old jester had told her.
“He has heard that Gailon has disappeared,” Barrick said dismissively. “That is all. He wishes to be remembered as denouncing him if it turns out that Gailon is a traitor.”
“I don’t know. Puzzle never bothered with politicking before.”
“Because Father was here to protect him.” Barrick’s expression suddenly changed into something vague, distant. “Do you like him?”
“Who?”
“The poet. He is handsome. He speaks well.”
“Handsome? I suppose, in a prettified sort of way. He has an absurd beard. But that is certainly not why I said he could . . .” She realized she had been led astray again. “Barrick, I don’t want to waste any more breath on that callow fool. If you dislike the poet so much, give him some money and send him away, I don’t care. I’m convinced he’s nothing to do with the greater matter. Which is what we’re going to talk about.”
“I don’t want to.” He spoke with all the dolefulness that he had made his art. Briony wondered if other siblings felt this way, sometimes loving and hating at the exact same moment. Or was it only twins, so close that it often seemed she had to wait for Barrick to breathe before she could get air into her own lungs?
“You will talk. You almost killed that potboy. Why, Barrick?” When he didn’t reply, she leaned across the bed and clutched his arm. “Zoria preserve us, this is me! Me! Briony! Kendrick is dead, Father is gone—we only have each other.”
He looked at her from beneath his lashes like a frightened child. “You don’t really want to know. You just want me to behave well. You just hate it that I embarrassed you in front of Brone and . . . and that poet.”
She blew out breath in exasperation. “That’s not true. You are my brother. You’re . . . you’re nearly the other half of me.” She found his eye and held it, but it was like trying to keep a skittish animal from bolting. “Look at me, Barrick. You know that’s not what happened. The potboy said something about . . . about dreams. About your dreams. Then you tried to throttle him.”
“He had no right to talk about me that way.”
“What way, Barrick?”
He pulled the blankets even tighter, still deciding. “You said you read the letter from Father again,” he said at last. “Did you notice anything interesting?”
“About the Autarch? I already told you . . .”
“No, not about the Autarch. Did you notice anything interesting in it about me?”
She stopped, confused. “Anything . . . no. No. He sent you his love. He said to tell you his health had been good.”
He shook his head. His face was grim, as though he were stepping out onto some narrow prominence, trying not to look down at a great distance opening before him. “You don’t understand.”
“How can I? Talk to me! Tell me what has you so upset. You tried to kill an innocent man . . . !”
“Innocent? That potboy’s no man, he’s a demon. He saw into my dreams, Briony. He spoke about them in front of you and Brone and that mongrel quill-carver!” Despite the chill, Barrick had a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. “He is probably talking about them still to anyone who’ll listen. He knows. He knows!” He turned and rammed his face against the cushion. His shoulders heaved.
“Knows what?” She grabbed at his arm with both hands and shook him. “Barrick, what have you done?”
He turned, eyes damp, red-rimmed. “Done? Nothing. Not yet.”
“I can’t make any sense of this at all.” She combed a tangle of damp red hair back off his brow with her fingers. “Just talk. Whatever is wrong, you’re still my brother. I’ll still love you.”
He let out a snort of disbelief but the storm had passed. He let his head fall back on the cushion and stared up at the timbered ceiling. “I’ll tell you what Father’s letter said. ‘Tell Barrick that he should be glad for me. Although I am a captive, my health has actually been much better this last half year. I almost think it has done me good to get away from the damp northern airs.’ That’s what he wrote.”
Briony shook her head. “What, do you think he means that he is happier being away from us—from you? He is jesting, Barrick. Trying to make light of a terrible situation . . .”
“No. No, he’s not. Because you don’t know what he’s talking about and I do.” The fire in him had died down. He closed his eyes. “Do you remember the nights when Father couldn’t sleep? When he would go to the Tower of Summer and sit up all night with his books?” She nodded. The first few times Olin’s ability to slip away had been the cause of much alarm around the residence, until his family and the guards had learned to look for him in his library in the tower. The king had returned each time from these midnight excursions with an embarrassed air, as if he had been found in drunken sleep on the throne-room floor. Briony had always believed that it was thoughts of his dead wife that tormented him so badly on those nights that he could not sleep: he always spoke of their mother Meriel as th
ough he had loved her very much, even though the marriage had originally been arranged by his father, King Ustin, when Olin and Meriel, the daughter of a powerful Brennish duke, were both very young. Everyone in the household knew that her death had been a hard, hard blow for him.
“And you remember that he would always bar the door?”
“Of course.” Locked out, the guards had only been able to rouse the king by banging on the door until he came to open it, blinking like an owl and wiping at sleepy eyes. “I . . . I think he cried. He didn’t want anyone to see him weeping. Over our mother.”
Barrick showed a strange, tight-lipped smile. “Weeping? Maybe. But not over our mother.”
“What . . . what do you mean?”
He glanced up at the ceiling and took a few deep breaths, as though he were not merely standing on some high, lonely place but preparing to jump. “I . . . I went there one night. I had a nightmare. I think I must even have been walking in my sleep—it might have been the first time—because I woke up outside his chamber and I was very frightened and I wanted him to . . . to tell me things would be all right. I went in and he wasn’t there, even though his servants were all there, sleeping. I knew he must be in his library. So I went out of the residence by that back chapel door so the guards wouldn’t stop me. It was near Midsummer, I think—I only remember it was warm and it felt so strange being out in the courtyard in my nightshirt and bare feet. I felt like I could go anywhere—just walk where I wanted to, even walk to another country, as though the moon would stay up and bright as long as the journey would take, and that when I woke up there, I would be a different person.” He shook his head. “It was a full moon, very big. I remember that, too.”
“How long ago was this?”
“The year that part of the roof fell off Wolfstooth. And the cook with the skinny arms died and we weren’t allowed to go in the kitchen all spring.”
“Ten years ago. You mean the year . . . the year you hurt your arm.”
He nodded slowly. She could sense that he was balancing something, trying to decide. She tried to sit quietly, but her heart was beating fast and she was unexpectedly frightened.
“The downstairs door was locked, but the key was still in the other side and he hadn’t turned the lock all the way. It popped open when I wiggled the latch, then I went up the steps all the way to the library. There were no guards at the tower, no one there at all. I didn’t think it was strange while it was happening—the whole night seemed like a dream, not just that—but I should have wondered why he’d sent them away, or slipped away from them, just to be by himself. But I wouldn’t have wondered long. When I reached the door, I could . . . hear him.”
“Was he crying?”
Barrick took a moment to answer. “Crying, yes. Making all kinds of noises, although I could barely hear them through the door. Laughing, it almost sounded like. Talking. At first I thought he was having an argument with someone, then I thought perhaps he was asleep and having a nightmare, just like the one that had woken me up. So I knocked on the door. Quietly at first, but the noises on the other side just went on. So I banged on it with my fists and shouted, ‘Father, wake up!’ Then he opened the door.” For a moment it seemed Barrick would continue, but instead his shoulders heaved and he took in a ragged gasp of air. He was sobbing.
“Barrick, what is it? What happened?” She climbed up onto the bed and wrapped her arms around him. His muscles were as tight as the cording on a knife hilt and he trembled as though in the full grip of fever again. “Are you ill?”
“Don’t . . . ! Don’t talk. I want . . .” He sucked in another rough breath. “He opened the door. Father opened the door. He . . . he didn’t recognize me. I don’t think he did, anyway. His eyes . . . ! Briony, his eyes were wild, wild like an animal’s eyes! And his shirt was off and he had scratches on his belly—bleeding. He was bleeding. He took one look at me and then grabbed me, pulled me into the library. He was talking nonsense—I couldn’t understand a word—and he was pulling at me, growling at me. Like an animal! I thought he was going to kill me. I still think it.”
“Merciful Zoria!” She didn’t know what to believe. The world was upside down. She felt like she had been thrown from Snow’s saddle and all the air had been knocked out of her chest. “Are you . . . could you have dreamed it . . . ?”
His face was twisted with pain and rage. “Dreamed it? That was the night my arm was crippled. Do you think I dreamed that?”
“What do you mean? Oh, by all the gods, that was when it happened?”
“I broke away from him. He chased me. I was trying to get to the door but I kept tripping over books, knocking over piles of them. He had every book in the library on the floor, stacked up like towers, with candlesticks on top of each one. I must have knocked over half a dozen trying to get away—I still don’t know why that wretched tower didn’t burn down that night. I wish it had. I wish it had!” He was breathing hard now, like someone near the end of a race. “I got to the door at last. He kept chasing me, growling and cursing and talking nonsense. He grabbed me at the top of the stairs and tried to pull me back to the library again. I . . . I bit him on the hand and he let go. I fell down the stairs.
“When I woke up, it was the next day and Chaven was setting the bones of my arm—or trying to. I could barely think from the pain, and from the way my skull had been rattled when I fell. Chaven said that Father had found me at the foot of the steps in the Tower of Summer, which was probably true, that he had carried me to Chaven himself, crying over my injuries, begging him to heal me. That was probably true, too. But Chaven says that Father brought me to him at dawn, which means that I had been left lying there the rest of the night. The story told was that I had come looking for him and had fallen down the stairs in the dark.”
Briony could barely think. Like Barrick on that night, she was in a waking nightmare. “But . . . Father? Why would he do such a thing to you? Had he . . . was he drunk?” It was hard to imagine her abstemious father drinking himself into that kind of roaring, black mood, but nothing else made sense.
Barrick was still shaking, but only a little now. He tried to slide out of her arms, but she held on. “No, Briony. He was not drunk. You haven’t heard the rest, although I’m sure you won’t want to believe me.”
She didn’t want to hear any more, but she was afraid to let Barrick go, afraid that if she did he would somehow fly away like that half-tamed pigeonhawk she had lost when its creance snapped and it had gone spiraling out from her, never to return. She tightened her grip so that for a moment they were almost wrestling, rucking the covers around Barrick’s legs until he gave up trying to escape her. “I have always had nightmares,” he said at last, quietly. “Dreamed that there were men watching me, men made of smoke and blood, following me all through the castle, waiting to catch me alone so they could steal me away, or somehow make me one of them. At least, I always believed they were dreams. Now, I’m not so certain. But after that night, I began to have one that’s worse than the others. Always him—his face, but it isn’t his face. It’s a stranger’s face. When he came after me, he looked . . . like a beast.”
“Oh, my poor Barrick . . .”
“You may want to be more careful with your sympathies.” His voice was partially muffled by the cushion. He seemed to have grown smaller in her arms, curled into himself. “You remember I was in bed for weeks. Kendrick came to bring me things, you came and played with me every day, or tried to . . .”
“You were so quiet and pale. It frightened me.”
“It frightened me, too. And Father came, but he never stayed more than a few moments. Do you know, I might even have believed it had all been a nightmare—that I really had just been sleepwalking and then fell down the steps—except for the way he could not be around me without fidgeting and avoiding my eyes. Then, one day, when I was finally up and limping around the household instead of confined to that cursed bed, he called me into his chambers. ‘You remember, don’t you?’ was the fi
rst thing he said. I nodded. I was almost as frightened then as the night it happened. I thought I was the one who had done something terribly wrong, although I wasn’t sure what it was. I half thought he might try to murder me again or have me thrown in the stronghold to rot in a cell. Instead he burst into tears—I swear it’s true. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him and kissed my head, all the time crying so hard that he got my hair wet. He was hurting my arm badly, which was tied up in a sling. Once I stopped being frightened, I hated him. If I could have killed him at that moment, I would have.”
“Barrick!”
“You wanted the truth, Briony. This is what it looks like.” He finally wriggled himself free of her. “He told me that he had done a terrible thing and begged my forgiveness. I took him to mean that chasing me so that I fell down the stairs and shattered my arm, crippling myself so that I could never play or ride or draw a bow like the other boys was the terrible thing, but as he clutched me and talked I began to understand that the terrible thing he had done was to sire me in the first place.”
“What?”
“Be quiet and listen!” he said fiercely. “It is a madness that Father has. It came on him when he was a young man—first as terrible dreams, later as a restless, monstrously angry spirit that, on the nights when it takes him, grows so strong it cannot be resisted. He has it and one of his uncles had it. It is a family curse. He told me that it had grown so strong in him that although months might go by and it remained absent, on the nights he felt it coming back he could only lock himself away to rage by himself. That was how I had found him.”
“A family curse . . . ?”
He showed her a bitter smile. “Fear not. You don’t have it and neither did Kendrick. You are the lucky ones—the yellow-haired ones. Father told me that he had studied the Eddon family histories, and that he had never found any trace of the curse in any of the fair-haired children. Only the gods know why. You are the golden ones, in more ways than one.”