GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 1: THE HOUSE OF FEAR
CHAPTER 2: A MOTHER’S LOVE
He can break the jar.
He cannot spill what you carried home in your head.
The curtains were open, and that was how Damien knew the whole day belonged to them.
Dale had left before dawn.
A big job an hour out, two days of it, maybe three — a good thing said in a hard voice, and then the truck grinding down the driveway and out onto the road until the sound of it thinned and vanished.
Damien had lain still in his bed with the door open, counting past a hundred the way he always did, waiting to be sure it would not come back.
When enough quiet had passed, he had heard the thing that meant the day was truly theirs.
His mother, singing.
Not humming.
Singing, out loud, with words, in the kitchen, an old song from back home that climbed and dropped and climbed again.
Damien did not know what all the words meant, but he knew the tune the way he knew her hands, and he came down the hall on the sides of his bare feet and stopped in the doorway to watch her before she saw him.
She had thrown every curtain wide.
Morning came into the kitchen in long yellow bars and lay across the counter and the floor and the side of her face, and she was moving at the stove, her hip bumping the drawer, a wooden spoon in her hand for a microphone, and Damien thought — he did not have the exact words, but he thought it anyway — that she looked younger.
The careful was gone out of her.
The listening was gone.
She was not holding a full glass without spilling it.
She was just his mother, spilling everywhere, and it was the best thing he had ever seen.
He tried to dance into the room and did it badly, all elbows, and she laughed so hard she had to grab the counter.
“That’s terrible, mijo. That’s the worst dancing in the whole state.”
“You do it better.”
“I do everything better.” She spun him once by the hand, careful of the hot stove, and set him down dizzy and grinning.
“But you’ll learn. You learn everything if somebody bothers to teach you, and I’m going to bother. Come here. We have work today, you and me. Real work.”
The work was this: she was going to start a new batch, and he was going to help her do all of it, from the first berry to the last word written down.
She turned the music low but not off, and she cleared the big table, and she set out the wide glass jars and the funnels and the little scale and the notebook.
The notebook was the important thing.
It was thick and soft-cornered and the cover had gone dark at the edges from her hands, and inside were her grandmother’s slanted letters and her mother’s rounder ones and her own, and drawings Damien had made when he was smaller than smaller, and dates going back before he was born.
“First,” she said, “you clean. Always you clean before you make. A dirty jar spoils good fruit faster than a hot day.” She showed him how, hot water and the brush and then held to the light.
“See that? A film. Not clean. Again.”
He did it again.
He held the jar to the window and there was no film, only sun through the glass, and she nodded once like he’d done something that mattered, and he felt it go warm all through his chest.
They tipped the berries out onto a tray and she taught him to sort them — the firm dark ones into the bowl, the soft gray-fuzzed ones into the scraps.
“This one.” She held up a berry gone soft and pale on one side.
“Smell.”
He smelled.
He made a face.
“Bad.”
“Spoiled. One spoiled berry can turn a whole batch. You learn to find the one bad thing before it ruins the good things.” She said it lightly, sorting as she talked, but Damien heard something underneath it, the way he was learning to hear the underneaths of things, and he did not know yet what it was.
“Write the date. Here. I’ll hold your hand for the numbers.”
He wrote the date in the notebook with her warm hand over his cold one, and a berry had stained his thumb dark, so the number came out with a little purple smudge beside it.
She looked at the smudge and did not wipe it away.
“Good,” she said.
“Now it’s yours too. Your mark’s in the book now, right next to the day.”
When the crate scraped his finger and a bead of blood came up, she did not fuss.
She took his hand, looked at it close, pressed a clean cloth to it, held it a moment, and told him a small cut wants pressure and patience and nothing more.
Later, when she noticed the button gone from his shirt cuff, she threaded a needle without stopping the story she was telling and sewed it back on him while he still wore the shirt, in and out, tie it off, bite the thread.
He watched her hands do it.
He was always watching her hands.
The story was about her grandfather.
And his father before him.
“Back home,” she said, crushing berries now with a wooden press, her sleeves shoved up, “my grandfather made tequila. And his father. Real tequila, the old way, from the agave, and it took years, mijo, years, before you ever tasted a drop. You had to wait for the plant to be ready the way you wait for a child to grow. You could not rush it. They respected that. The timing, the plant, the clean tools, the family way of doing it that came down and down and down.”
“That’s boring,” Damien said, because at six he was allowed to say such things on days like this.
She laughed.
“It is a little boring, the waiting. But here’s the part that isn’t.” She leaned in like a secret.
“They couldn’t help themselves.
My grandfather especially.
He’d do it right, all proper, and then he’d take a little bit off to the side and he’d put things in it.
Just to see.
Herbs.
Bark off a certain tree.
Berries like these.
Flowers.
Honey.
Once he burned some wood and put the smoke in.
He put in anything he could reach, just to find out what it would do.”
“Was it good?”
“It was terrible.” She grinned.
“Most of it was terrible. There was one — your great-grandmother said one of them was so bad you could strip the paint off a door with it. Bitter. Sour. Like licking a stump. They poured it in the field and even the field complained.” Damien was laughing now, really laughing, and she went on, feeding it.
“But every so often — maybe one time in fifty, maybe one in a hundred — something would come out that nobody had ever tasted before. Something new. And that was the whole reason. All the terrible ones were just the road to the one good surprise.”
She stopped pressing for a moment and looked at him, and her voice changed, went gentler and more serious, the teaching voice.
“That’s the thing I want you to keep, whatever you do with your life. The world’s got more in it than one person could ever learn — more crafts, more ways, more wonders than you could get to the end of if you lived to be a hundred. So learn. Everything you can, whenever somebody will show you. And when you try a thing and it fails — and it will, most things do — you don’t throw the failing away. You keep it. A batch that goes wrong still teaches you what wrong tastes like. That’s not nothing. That’s how you get to the good surprise.”
“But your grandfather did it the old way.”
“He did. And he respected the old way. But respecting the old way doesn’t mean you can’t ask if there’s a better one.” She tapped the notebook.
“Both. You hold both. You learn what the ones before you knew, and you write down what you learn, and you leave the book fuller than you found it. That’s the whole job. Anybody’s whole job.”
She wiped her hands and pushed a curl off her forehead with her wrist.
“You don’t have to love this, mijo. Berries and jars, this is mine. Yours might be something else. Building things. Fixing things. Growing, or carving, or writing, or making people well. I don’t care what it is.” She crouched down to his level.
“I only care that you find something to do with these” — she took both his small hands and turned them palm-up in hers — “something that keeps your hands busy and your head awake. Because a boy who’s always making something? Fear can’t get all the way into him. There’s no room. You leave fear a little corner, maybe. You don’t give it the whole house.”
Damien looked down at his own hands in hers, stained purple, small.
“He breaks things,” he said.
He didn’t have to say who.
“He does.” She didn’t flinch from it.
“You live with someone who breaks things. But that’s him. It doesn’t have to be you. You get to pick. You can be the kind that makes.” She squeezed his hands and let them go.
“That’s the only thing I need you to be. Not brave, not strong, not quiet. Just — one who makes more than the world breaks.”
He asked her the hard question a little later, while they were spooning fruit into the jars.
“Then why do you still make it? If it’s the drinking that turns him bad.”
She was quiet long enough that he thought he’d done something wrong.
When she answered she was honest, and he could tell she was choosing to be, because her voice had that careful weight in it.
“I like it less than I used to,” she admitted.
“That’s the truth. There are smells now — ” She stopped.
Started again.
“Some smells I used to love, now they just bring back bad nights. He took that from me, a little. The thing my family made for a hundred years, and he’s put his hands on how I feel about it.” She capped a jar, firm.
“But listen close, because this one’s important, more important than the berries.
The bottle doesn’t decide anything.
It sits on the shelf.
It doesn’t lift itself.
It doesn’t make a fist.
He does that.
A man is what he does, and drinking is no excuse for one thing he’s ever done, not to me, not to you, not ever.
Do you understand?
The drink is not to blame.
He is.”
“But it makes it worse.”
“It lowers the fence he’d have to climb to be who he already is.” She thought about how to say it to a six-year-old and found it.
“It’s like fire. Fire in the stove cooks your dinner. Fire in the lamp lets you read at night. Fire keeps the whole house warm in winter. And fire burns the house down. Same fire. It’s not the fire’s fault which one happens. It’s whose hands it’s in, and what they choose to do.” She touched his cheek.
“A thing isn’t good or evil, mijo. The person holding it is. Don’t ever let anyone tell you the sword did it, or the bottle did it, or the money did it. People do it. People always do it.”
He would remember that in the snow.
He did not know that yet.
By afternoon the jars stood in a row, dark and full, and it was time for the best part, which was the naming and the drawing.
“Every good batch gets a name,” she said, “and a label, so you know it from the others. What’s this one?”
They argued happily about it.
She predicted it would come out sweet and a little wild.
He said it should be called after a wolf, because wolves were wild, and she went still and smiled in a way he didn’t understand at first.
“You want to hear a wolf story? A real one, from back home?”
He did.
She sat him on her lap at the table and told him about a wolf that used to walk the roads at the edge of her grandmother’s town.
Not a mean wolf.
A guardian.
It kept to itself and troubled no one, and it stayed quiet, always quiet — but if a traveler lost his way in the dark, the wolf would walk him home.
If a child wandered too far, the wolf would sit with the child until someone came.
If someone weak was set upon by someone strong, the wolf came out of the quiet and it was quiet no longer, and afterward it went back to being quiet again as though nothing had happened.
“You know who that story’s for?” she said, into his hair.
“Who?”
“You, little wolf.” She said it like she’d known it a long time and only now decided to tell him.
“That’s what you are. My little wolf pup. You watch everything. You keep quiet. And when I’m in trouble — I’ve seen it — something wakes up in you that’s much too big for a boy your size. You’d stand in front of anything for me. I know you would.” She turned him gently so he had to look at her.
“But hear me, because this part’s the real lesson. Even the wolf in the story wasn’t always alone. Wolves have packs. A wolf on his own can be brought down; a wolf with his pack can’t. So you be fierce for the ones you love — but don’t you ever get it in your head that you have to face the whole dark by yourself. Promise me. A pack isn’t weakness. Needing them isn’t weakness.”
He promised, the way children promise things they will spend their lives learning to mean.
“And what are you, then?” he asked.
“If I’m the wolf.”
She thought about it, and something mischievous came into her face.
“There was another kind of story, too. About dragons. And there’s one thing everybody agreed on about dragons, in every telling.” She leaned close, lowered her voice to a rumble.
“There is nothing in this world fiercer than a mother dragon protecting her young. Nothing. Not armies. Not kings. You want to see the end of the world? Get between a mother dragon and her babies.”
Damien’s eyes went wide, then narrow, then delighted.
“You’re the dragon.”
“Am I?”
“You’re my mama dragon.”
And that was it; that was the thing made in that moment that would last.
She laughed and he laughed and it became theirs, a private joke sealed the way children seal things, complete and unbreakable — the little wolf and the mama dragon, and God help anyone who came at the wolf while the dragon was home.
So they drew the label together.
On the good paper, with his crayons.
He drew the wolf small, in the middle.
Then he remembered the drawing on his dresser, the one she’d told him to finish — the big one who watches everybody — and he said the big one should be the dragon, and she said yes, exactly, and helped him make it.
A dragon, large, curled all the way around the little wolf, its wings come forward and over like a roof, like arms, sheltering.
Not holding the wolf in.
Guarding it.
And both of them, wolf and dragon, turned to face the same way — outward, toward wherever the danger would come from.
She cut the label out and pasted it to the front of the jar they liked best, the sweet wild one, and set it at the head of the row where the light could reach it.
“There,” she said softly, looking at it.
“That’s us.”
They never heard the truck.
The music was low but it was there, and they were laughing, and afterward Damien would understand that Dale had come home a full day early and had not driven up the gravel at all — a coworker’s car had dropped him at the end of the road, quiet, no engine to hear, so that the first any of them knew of it was the front door opening on a house full of sunlight and music and open jars and two people who had forgotten, for one whole day, to be afraid.
Dale stood in the doorway and looked.
Damien felt the day drain out of the room like water out of a cracked bowl.
He knew, before his father moved, before his father spoke, exactly what his father was seeing.
The open curtains.
The music.
The table covered in jars and fruit and paper.
Elena with her sleeves rolled up and her face still lit and young.
The boy on her lap.
All of it saying the same thing, the thing that would be the worst thing Dale could see: that the house was better, brighter, warmer, more alive with him gone.
His mother stood, sliding Damien behind her in the same motion, so smooth it looked like nothing.
“You’re back early.”
“I can see that.” Dale did not shout.
That was worse.
He came in slow, looking at the jars, at the paper, at the notebook.
“Look at all this. Whole party. Neighbors already think you’re something, you know that? Ungrateful. Half of ’em think you’re not right in the head, the way you carry on. I defend you. Me. And this is what goes on the second I’m gone.”
“Dale—”
“They don’t understand this family. Nobody does. It’s private, what’s ours, it’s supposed to stay in the house — and you got the kid in here, teaching him — teaching him to lie, teaching him to look at me like—” He picked up the good jar, the one at the head of the row, the sweet wild one, the one with the wolf and the dragon on it, and he turned it in his hand and read the label.
Something in his face curdled.
“What’s this. This your grandfather’s magic again. Your family and their little bottles. Bunch of drunks in a field a thousand miles away, and you make it out like it’s holy.”
“Put it down.” His mother’s voice had gone very level.
Damien knew that level.
“Please. Just put it down.”
He threw it.
Not at them — at the wall, but the wall was close, and the glass came apart with a sound that went straight through Damien’s teeth, and the sweet wild batch burst dark red and running down the plaster and across the floor.
Then he took the next and did the same, and the next, methodical, unhurried, purple and red spreading and pooling and soaking into the scattered paper labels until the little drawings drowned, the smell of fruit and yeast blooming up thick over the sharp smell of the drink, and his mother had Damien by the arm and was pulling him back, back toward the hall, her body between him and the flying glass, her arm coming up to shield her own face.
“A hundred years,” Dale said, breaking the last of them.
“A hundred years of drunks. And it ends in my kitchen, on my floor, that I pay for. That’s your family, Elena. That’s what your grandfather’s worth. A mess on my floor.”
Elena stood in the wreckage with her son behind her and glass at her feet and her family’s work running red down the wall, and she did not weep, and she did not beg.
She lifted her chin and she looked at him, and she said the thing Damien would carry the rest of that life and into the next one, the thing that would still be in him under snow and stone and a different name.
“You can break the jars,” she said.
“You cannot take the knowledge out of us.”
For a moment Damien thought his father would come across the room.
His father’s hand closed and opened.
But there was something in her steadiness that even Dale could not break with a fist, and he seemed to know it, and it made him hate her more, and it also stopped him — and he swore at her, low and filthy, and grabbed a bottle from the shelf, the real bottle, his bottle, and went out through the screen door into the failing afternoon, and after a while there was the sound of a car and then nothing.
Elena did not let Damien help with the glass.
She stood him in the doorway of the hall, out of the wet, and she cleaned it herself, all of it, on her hands and knees, and Damien watched her hands do that too — the same hands that had crushed the fruit and sewn his button and drawn the dragon, now picking bright wet shards out of a spreading stain.
The notebook had lived.
She’d set it on the counter, away from the row of jars, out of habit maybe, out of the same care that made her hide things and count things and arrange things — and the wreckage hadn’t reached it.
She wiped her hands and picked it up and checked it page by page, and it was whole, her grandmother’s slanted letters and his purple-smudged date and all the years of it, dry and safe.
And tucked into the back, where it must have slid when she cleared the table, was the label.
Their label.
The little wolf and the sheltering dragon, the two of them facing outward, uncrushed, a small berry stain across one corner but the drawing clear beneath it.
She smoothed it flat with her thumb, the way she’d smoothed his folded drawing the year before, and pressed it back into the notebook and closed the cover on it.
Damien came and stood against her side.
“Will we ever make it again?” he asked.
He meant more than the batch and she knew it.
She was quiet, and then she said it plainly, without a lie in it, looking at the ruined wall and not at him.
“Maybe not here.”
She let that sit.
Then she opened the notebook to a blank page and put the pencil in his hand and folded her own around it.
“Come on. Before we forget. The sweet one — how much fruit did we put in, do you remember?”
He remembered.
He’d measured it himself.
He told her, and she wrote it, and then she remembered the next thing, and he remembered the one after that, the two of them building the drowned recipe back out of nothing but what was in their heads, line by line onto the dry page, while the wall behind them still ran red.
And Damien understood something then, small and hard and permanent, the second true thing he ever kept.
His father had broken every jar.
The drink was gone, soaked into the plaster and the paper and the floor.
There was nothing left on the table to show for their whole bright day.
And it didn’t matter.
Because the day was in the book now.
The fruit and the dates and the wolf and the dragon, the recipe growing back under his own hand — none of that had been in the jars at all.
It had been in them the whole time, and his father could not reach in and break that, could not smell it or find it or throw it at a wall.
Dale could destroy anything he could put his hands on.
He could not put his hands on what they carried.
Damien pressed the pencil down and wrote the next number, and beside it, without meaning to, he made a berry-stained smudge, so the day would have his mark on it too.
The curtains were still open.
Outside, the light was going.
He listened, out of habit, for tires on the gravel — but the driveway was empty, and for now, for a little while longer, the house was theirs, and there was work in it, and the work was making something back.