Ice and Fire

Still

It was a week after our eleventh birthday. Julian was helping Mother with the preparations for Veneralia. So he thought, at least. Doubtless, he merely trailed behind her skirts, adorably and unobtrusively, as she oversaw the collection of fresh myrtle and rose from our botanical gardens. But I had loftier goals.

For years, I begged Father for permission to accompany him and my uncles during one of their hunts. Many of my older cousins who were not yet Scarred were allowed to go. Aurelia, too, although she was only three years older than me. It felt painfully unfair. Back then, I would've been thrilled simply to tag along, downright ecstatic to be given the responsibility of carrying supplies, as I so often do, begrudgingly, now. But Father insisted I was not ready.

The Cimmerian wilds are no place for children that cannot fend for themselves. To fight is one thing, but to kill, another. When you prove yourself able and willing to take a life, my son—then, you may come.

The slingshot had not been gifted to us for that purpose. Given my enthusiasm for hunting (and no small amount of fraternal guilt, too, over neglecting us in favor of his newborn twins), Valerius had decided to start teaching Julian and I archery. But you are still too small and weak for bows, so we'll start with this. Every morning, we practiced, but neither of us ever managed to hit anything. Julian, as always, laughed freely at himself. But seeing my pudgy face contorted with rage always made Valerius chuckle. Patience, little brother. Even you can't be immediately prime at everything.

But whyever not? Am I not the best of Gold—top of the heap, cream of the crop, pride of my Color, joy of my House? Even now, a lack of innate skill still registers like failure to me. Because mine was a charmed birth, so everyone says, and a boy with my advantages has no excuse to be poor at anything.

But there was no practice that morning, because Valerius had gone with all the rest to hunt wild hippogriff on the Erebian escarpment—an easy way to empty the household so the Browns could do their work. Julian and I were left behind, of course. As ever, it did not bother him. But me? I was livid. Because how dare they leave me with the children? As if I was a child! Me, who had two whole digits in my age! Outrageous.

For hours, I sulked around the outbuildings of our estate. Occasionally, whenever I found a particularly pretty and aerodynamic rock, I would shoot at the forest critters—bushy squirrels and swift hares and slender deer. But, as ever, I never hit anything that I targeted. Everything managed to skitter away from my pathetic projectiles. Eventually, I grew bored and started disaffectedly pelting rocks into the cloudless sky, testing the limits of the wretched thing's velocity.

And for the first time in my life, I hit something. A low–flying dove, white as the purest snow, born and bred as an ornament for the festival, prematurely released. Escaped from the cage, perhaps? I never learnt.

It plummeted to the ground as dramatically as if some angry deity had swatted it down. And I rushed over to where it had fallen, swelling with pride at my accomplishment, even unwitnessed and unintentional as it was. I couldn't wait to tell Valerius, to show him what I'd done, to show Father, to prove them wrong, that I wasn't a child, that I deserved to go, that I could hunt, that I could kill—

But then I saw it.

It was dying. Injured beyond remedy. My rock had shattered one wing and the precipitous fall, the rest of it. But it was not yet dead. Convulsing from the mangled ruin I'd made of the creature's frail body, whimpering with more pain than I thought animals could express, staining the ambient foliage with a slow but sure trickle of innocent blood... it only wished it was dead.

And it may as well have been Julian, broken and bleeding on the ground, savaged by my hands, for the horror that surged through me. I tried to remember why I had done it. To impress Valerius? To please Father? To prove that I could?