Thirty-Three Rosser House, Aeadine

THIRTY-THREE

Rosser House, Aeadine

Twenty Years Ago

SAMUEL

I awoke with a coin in my hand and a scream in my throat. I registered figures shifting around me in the dancing light of a fire—leaning, reaching, conversing in tense, hushed tones. They were hunched and grotesque, distorted by shadows, and so close. Too close.

I let the scream loose.

"Samuel, my dear boy, stop. Stop! Listen to my voice." A large, warm hand cupped the side of my face and pressed me into the damp softness of a sweat-soaked pillow. "It is only Uncle John. Your aunt is here too. You are safe."

I choked on a sob and pinned my eyes closed, anchoring myself to his hand, his voice. I wished his was my father's voice but had long grown accustomed to that disappointment.

"Where is Ben?" I whispered. "Is Papa back? Where… where is my mother?"

"Your mother has been taken away for her own safety. She is not herself, Samuel. Open your eyes, let me see you."

I complied and found my uncle's face, illuminated not by fire but by the steady warmth of an oil lamp on a table beside my bed. My bed, in my own room.

My uncle smiled. His smile was a dependable thing, kind but brief, always the bridge between other expressions.

"Now," he said, turning graver. "Ben is here too. He woke up a little before you and is in the kitchen eating. Your father, Samuel, is dead."

I stared up at him, his familiar face losing its consolation with every thinning breath I took.

"John! Now is not the time!" my aunt hissed, shoving at her husband and going to her knees beside my bed, trying to take my hand.

I pulled it away and shifted back, staring at the pair of them. My father, dead? That could not be. He was one of Her Majesty's finest officers, a hero, rarely seen but as fixed in my world as the sun or seasons.

"There is no good time to tell a child their father has died," my uncle countered, rising to stand over the pair of us but keeping his gaze on me. "And Saint knows the boy's mother put it off too long, poor mad creature. Your father died at sea six months ago, a good, honorable death defending Aeadine. I will take you to his memorial in Ismoathe as soon as you are well. They have put a fine plaque in the cathedral."

His words dripped through my mind like oil, smearing at the slightest touch. "Ben," I croaked.

My aunt stood and offered me her hands, which I finally accepted. "Come, I'll take you to him. Carefully, now."

A handful of minutes later, I stood in the doorway of the back kitchen. The flagstones were warm beneath my stockinged feet, and the fire was high, the ovens built into the enormous fireplace radiating a dozen good smells. The sky outside the single window was bright and clear, at odds with the ache in my chest.

"Sam." Ben looked up from where he sat too close to the fire, the edge of the blanket he wore like a cloak inches from the neatly raked coals. His face was bruised, and one foot, also too close to the coals, was wrapped in bandages.

Tsk ing, our aunt bustled forward and reached for Ben. "I'll help you up now, Ben, and move your chair. You will be singed, my love."

"No," Ben replied. He did not move. He did not even look at her. Instead, his eyes moved from me, back to the flames.

It was not his wounds that made me stare, nor the realization that they were well into healing and that I must have been lost in the Dark Water for quite some time. It was the emptiness in his eyes as he said that singular, "No," and his total disregard for my aunt—not simply as a fussing adult, but as a human altogether.

"Ben?" I asked tentatively.

I noticed that behind him, on the kitchen's heavy table, several of the cook's habitually decorous platters of food lay scattered. They looked as though a feral dog had been at them.

"Did they tell you Father is dead?" Ben asked, not a scrap of regret in his voice. "And Mother went mad. So now we will go to the Naval Academy and learn how to sink ships and cut apart pirates. I think I will enjoy that."