❝SHE'S GOT A SICKNESS, THAT ONE. IT'S IN HER BLOOD. SCARY TO THINK WHAT SHE'LL BE LIKE WHEN SHE'S FULL GROWN. IF THE GODS ARE GOOD, SHE'LL DIE BEFORE THAT.❞
In the North, there are whispers of a cruel and sickly girl lurking in the Dreadfort. Her sk...
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DRUCILLA DIDN'T REMEMBER how she had gotten into her bed.
In the dense fog of her memory, she could make out the faint outline of her brother's face amidst candlelight and shadow. His smile was sad, his eyes a cloudy grey. "Forgive me," he uttered, as if the words were strangling him, and then he bent down to kiss her forehead. When he pulled away, a tear fell and landed on her cheek, warm as the summer rain. "Rest well, sister," he said, his presence fading with the dimming light, and Drucilla heard herself whimper behind her clenched jaw.
Domeric, she might've said, brother, stay, but he was gone before her voice could reach him.
That night Drucilla dreamed of the flayed man, of dungeons and torture and endless screaming. She saw the pink-and-red man sitting in the great hall, upon her father's oaken chair, with a rug of wolf skin sprawled at his feet and row of torches burning behind him. Elsewhere, Reek was laughing in the darkness as his flesh rotted away and worms wiggled in and out of his empty eye sockets.
In the dungeons, she saw men and women alike lying upon the torture racks, shrieking in terror as the pink-and-red men peeled away their skin with sharp knives bathed in flame. Drucilla knew their faces, every one. Benfred Tallhart, his golden hair drenched with cold seawater, taunted his torturers but cried the loudest when the hot blade hissed against his skin. Daryn Hornwood and his poor mother were kept together in one chamber as a final kindness. The old woman's body was shriveled and shrunken and missing all its fingers. She begged not for mercy but for food. The flayed men fed her generously from her own flesh, and she thanked them for it. The headless Ser Rodrick Cassell was there as well, she saw, cursing the turncloak that had betrayed him, and Cley Cerwyn lay groaning in agony with a bloody hole in his left eye. The flayed man took the skin from his face while the young boy screamed.
Then she saw him, the bastard, with a bloody knife in his hand and a wicked grin on his face. Beside him, a skinless man lay bound to the wooden rack with a burlap sack over his head. The bastard ripped off the sack, and Drucilla screamed and clawed at her face in terror.
"Those eyes!" she cried. "Those eyes!"
The grey eyes of her brother, staring without a face. The bastard standing in front of her, smiling. He handed her the blade just as she woke suddenly, screaming her brother's name into the night. Her face was pale and frightened. For a moment she saw her hands stained red with her brother's blood, felt the slickness of it between her fingers, but it was gone with one blink of her eyes.
Was this a nightmare, she wondered, or the beginnings of madness? Aunt Rowenna, Grandmother ... Is this how it starts? A sickness of the mind. Maester Uthor said it claimed them all. It comes from the blood. Bad blood ...
And she wasn't alone, she saw. The flayed man was standing by her window with the pale moonlight shining upon him. One breath from his lips snuffed out the fire in her hearth; then the darkness came, a bitter wind swept through the clattering shutters, and Drucilla smelled death in the room.
