“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 spiral-mg 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 first 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.”