One year—they had both been, what, nine or ten?—their father had allowed the Master of Hounds to give them a puppy to be their own, a beautiful black hound. Barrick had wanted to name him Immon, but Briony had refused. She had been very religious then and had not used even the mildest curses, not even silently to herself. Barrick had always laughed at her, calling her “the Blessed Briony,” but she had been firm. They were certainly not going to name him after the powerful god of burial, the Earthfather’s gatekeeper—that would be blasphemy. She named the puppy Simargil instead, after the faithful dog of Volios (although she toyed with sacrilege herself by generally referring to him as “Simmikin”) and except for the ordinary high spirits and growling, nipping play of a young male dog he had been an exceptionally sweet animal. Briony had been as attached to him as if he had been a baby brother.
She had been shocked, then, when Barrick refused to play with him, saying that he was vicious and evil.
Being who she was, Briony would not let her brother rest until she had forced him to join her in playing with the dog— or at least being in the same room with the animal, since at first Barrick hung back in the doorway while Briony scratched Simargil’s stomach and engaged him in playful, mock-fights, the dog growling in delight and throwing himself from side to side as he struggled to catch up with Briony’s moving hand.
When she at last convinced Barrick to come forward, she quickly saw the problem. He approached the dog like someone entering a wolf’s den. Simargil was already on his guard, watching Barrick not as he had watched Briony, with the bright gaze of a friend waiting to see what new fun would come, but with the narrowed eyes of someone who expected to be cheated or worse.
“Just stroke him gently,” she said. “Reach out and scratch his head—he likes that. Don’t you, Simmikin? Don’t you, my Simmikin?”
The dog looked to Briony, white showing at the corners of his eyes as he struggled to keep watch on Barrick, too. If he had spoken to her, told her out loud that he was confused by this sudden change of mood, the animal could not have more clearly let her know what he felt.
Barrick’s hand moved toward the dog’s face as though toward a hornet’s nest. When Simargil let out a low growl, Barrick snatched it back, making the dog lunge. Briony caught his collar.
“Do you see?” Barrick said.
It was her brother, not the dog. Something about him, perhaps only his mistrust, but maybe some scent of fear, had the dog’s hackles up. Still, Briony could not believe that her beloved Simmikin could ever do anything really bad— not with her right here on the floor beside him. “Stroke him again. I’ll hold his head. He just needs to get to know you.”
“He has known me since he was born, and each day he hates me worse.”
“Hush! That’s not true, redling. Just let him smell your hand and don’t yank it away just because he growls.”
“Oh, should I let him bite it off?” He scowled. “It’s not as though I have one to spare like most folk.”
Briony rolled her eyes. She felt sorry about her brother’s terrible injury, of course, and would have done anything to spare him the pain it brought him every day, but she was not going to let it be an excuse to treat him like a child half his age. “Stop sniveling. Put your hand out.”
His scowl deepened but he did as he was told. Simargil growled, but only for a moment, and Barrick actually managed to touch his head. Briony should have known that the dog’s sudden silence was a bad sign rather than good, but she was too pleased with her own peacemaking activities between her favorite animal and her beloved twin to pay the sort of attention she should have. As Barrick gave the animal a tentative touch on the head, letting his fingers slip down near Simargil’s throat, Briony let go of the collar to stroke the dog’s chest. The dog’s ears went back and he snarled, a high sound almost like a yelp of fear, and snapped at Barrick’s right hand, getting his sharp teeth into the meat behind the knuckles. Barrick shrieked and leaped back. For a moment, the dog hung on, but Barrick hit him on the snout hard enough to make him whimper and let go.
An instant passed, the dog’s ears still back, Barrick staring at the beast as though he had never seen anything worse in his life. Her brother’s face was bone-white, his eyes wide in horror. Then blood came flooding back into his features like waves rushing onto a muddy strand, a demon-mask of red that almost blurred into the roots of his hair, as though his entire head had caught fire. He snatched up one of Briony’s bows from where it leaned against the wall and brought it whistling down so fast she could not even move as the end of the staff hissed past her face. He beat at the dog until the bow cracked and the animal scrambled snarling and whining onto the floor, then tried to retreat under Briony’s bed, snapping at the bloody weals on its own back as Barrick continued to belabor its hindquarters. Shrieking, she grabbed her brother’s arm, and was splattered by blood that might have been from his hand or the dog’s tattered back, or both.
At last, with the dog wedged so far under the edge of the bed that only its feet could be seen, Barrick had thrown down the splintered bow and run out, sobbing and cursing the gods.
If it had been anyone else but her brother, Briony would not have understood now why she missed him with such a painful yearning. Simargil would not have understood: the dog had limped thereafter, and used to lay himself down on the floor at the first sound of a raised voice. Although her brother never touched him again, he would also dart out of any room some time before Barrick arrived, which often made it easy to track the prince: wherever black Simargil was moving hurriedly, she had only to retrace the dog’s steps to find Barrick.
If it had been anyone else, Briony would have cursed them as a bully and a coward and that would have been the end of it—an enemy forever. No one else convicted of such crimes in her private court could expect to have the sentence of her disgust commuted. But she knew her twin too well, had known even at that tender age that all his worst angers were the spawn of his fears, those night terrors that followed him around in the way that Simargil, before he limped, had followed Briony herself.
Barrick was monstrous sometimes, but she ached for him. No one but Briony knew the sweetness that lay behind that sour, even cruel mask he showed the world. Since their mother had died, only she had held him in the night, when he woke crying and uncertain where he was or even who he was. Only she had heard him say she was his very heart, that without her he would die. And how he feared that when he did die his soul would wander homeless forever, because of his blasphemous thoughts and his stiff neck which would not bend even to Heaven, as Father Timoid always said of him.
“My black thorn bush,” their father had often called Barrick, alluding to the colors the boy had worn ever since he was old enough to choose his own clothing. “Fit to lash the fiercest penitent’s back,” Olin had gently mocked.
Had her father always known the curse he had passed on to his younger son? It was painful to think about it—not the thing itself, their shared ailment, although that was terrible enough, but the fact that her twin and her beloved father had conspired to keep this thing secret from her. It made all Briony’s other memories seem suspect or outright false. At best they felt shallow now, as though her entire childhood, her life, had been nothing more than something devised by her family to keep her busy while the real matters of importance were being settled.
Each thought of her lost brother and father carried enough pain that the gods would have forgiven her for trying never to think of either of them again. And yet, of course, she did think of them, and suffered anew when she did so, which was at least once in almost every hour of every single day.