GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 1: THE HOUSE OF FEAR
CHAPTER 3: A MOTHER’S SHIELD
Watch how a man is when he thinks the people aren’t looking.
That’s the true face.
The rest is a coat he takes off at home.
At the school open house, Damien watched his father be the best man in the room.
He was seven now, tall enough to stand at Dale’s elbow, and Dale had put a hand on his shoulder and left it there, warm and heavy, while he talked to Damien’s teacher.
Ms. Reyes had a soft voice and tired eyes and a coffee cup she held with both hands, and Dale had her laughing inside a minute.
He asked about Damien’s reading.
He said he worried the boy was too quiet, that he tried to draw him out but a father could only do so much, that Elena’s people were shy that way and he loved them for it.
He said he was proud.
He squeezed Damien’s shoulder when he said it, and Ms. Reyes looked down at Damien with something soft and a little sad, like she was sorry for the quiet boy with the good father, and Damien understood that she believed every word.
That was the thing.
Everyone believed him.
Dale could stand in a bright room full of decent people and become one of them, funny and humble and kind, and there was no seam in it, nowhere you could see the join.
Damien watched his father’s real face put on this other face like a coat, and he understood, standing there under that heavy warm hand, that the coat was the lie and the man underneath was the truth, and that most people would only ever see the coat.
His mother had told him: Watch how a man is when he thinks the good people aren’t looking.
Damien was starting to think it should be the other way round, too.
Watch how a man is when he knows they are.
The bruise came a few weeks later, on the side of his jaw, from the back of Dale’s hand for a spilled glass.
By morning it had gone the color of a plum, and there was no hiding a thing like that on a boy’s face.
Ms. Reyes crouched by his desk when the others were at the reading corner.
“Damien. Honey. That looks like it hurts. How’d it happen?”
He thought about it.
He thought about the coat and the man underneath, and about the open door and the way sound carried, and he did not do any of the calculating he would learn to do later, because he was seven and she had a kind tired voice and she had asked him a plain question.
So he answered it plainly.
“My dad hit me.”
She got very still.
“Your dad hit you.”
“I spilled a glass. He hit me with the back of his hand.” He wasn’t crying and he wasn’t dramatic about it.
He said it the way you report the weather.
“It’s okay. I’m okay.”
“Did he — does that happen a lot?” She kept her voice easy but her hands had gone tight on her knee.
“Does he hurt your mom?”
Something in Damien woke up at that, some watchful thing, and he heard his own voice go careful without deciding to make it careful.
“Sometimes he gets angry.”
She asked him a few more questions, gentle ones, and he answered the small ones and went quiet on the big ones, and she told him he’d done nothing wrong and that he was a brave boy and that she was glad he told her.
He believed her about the first two.
He would spend a long time deciding about the third.
He should not have told Elena where his father could hear.
He knew better even then — he knew about the open door and the way the living room shared its air with the kitchen — but he was seven and he was proud of himself, proud that he’d told the truth to a grown-up who cared, and he wanted his mother to be proud too.
So he told her at the kitchen table, low, leaning close, about Ms. Reyes and her tired eyes and her careful questions.
He did not know Dale had come in the front.
He did not hear the coat come off.
“What did you tell her.” Dale was in the kitchen doorway, and his voice was flat, and Damien’s stomach dropped straight through the floor.
“What did you tell that teacher.”
“Dale—” His mother was up out of the chair, already moving, already putting herself in the space between them the way water finds the low place.
“I’m asking him.” But he wasn’t looking at Damien.
He was looking at Elena, and the thing building in his face was the old thing, and it had found what it always looked for — a reason.
“You put him up to this. You’ve been coaching him. Turning my own boy into a little liar to run to teachers with. That’s you. That’s your people, always running to somebody, always making us the story.” His voice climbed.
“It’s private. What happens in this house is private, and you send him out to spill it to strangers who want nothing but to see this family torn apart—”
“She didn’t tell me to say anything.”
Damien had not meant to speak.
It came out of him the way his defense of his mother always came out, too big for his body, and both his parents turned to look at him, and he could not stop now that he’d started.
“She didn’t. Mamá never said anything. Ms. Reyes asked me and I told her the truth. That’s all. That’s all it was. Don’t be mad at Mamá, be mad at—”
He didn’t finish it.
He didn’t have to.
Dale had already decided what the rest of the sentence was, and defiance was the word that landed in his face, and after that it happened fast, the way it always happened fast, and Damien’s memory of it afterward was only pieces.
The table shoved.
His mother’s arm coming around him and turning him, folding him into her, her back to the room, her body the wall it always became.
The impact felt through her, transmitted into him where he was pressed against her, so that he took it the way you feel thunder in your chest without being struck by lightning.
Her voice, low and level, saying the name over and over, Dale, Dale, okay, okay, look at me, it’s me, pulling all of it onto herself, taking the boy out of the center of the storm and putting herself there instead.
It went on longer because Damien had spoken.
He knew that even as it happened.
His defending her had not saved her one blow.
It had cost her.
It always cost her.
When it was over and Dale had gone out to the truck and the driveway had emptied of the sound of him, Elena sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet and Damien in her lap, and she was breathing carefully, favoring her side, and there was a fresh mark high on her cheekbone.
“I made it worse,” Damien said.
His voice had gone somewhere flat and far away.
“I always make it worse.”
“No.” She turned his face up.
“No. You listen to me. What he did is his. Not yours. Not because you told the truth, not because you defended me — I would not trade that, do you hear? I would not trade a boy who stands up for his mother for all the quiet in the world.”
But he had learned the lesson anyway, the wrong lesson and the right one both tangled together, and no words of hers could quite pull them apart.
The right lesson: that his father was to blame.
The wrong one, the one that sank its roots down deep into him and stayed: that his mother got hurt worse whenever he loved her out loud, that his existence in that kitchen gave the storm a second thing to strike at, that the safest gift he had to give her was to not be there at all.
And a third thing, colder than either, that would serve him and cost him for the rest of two lives.
Speaking without thinking has a price.
Dangerous men listen best when they look like they aren’t.
Timing is everything.
Guard what you know.
He was seven.
He stopped being loud in that kitchen for good.
Time moved the way it moves for a child in a house like that — not in years but in signs, and Damien learned to read every sign there was.
By eight he knew his father’s footsteps the way a sailor knows weather.
Slow and dragging meant a bad night coming; quick and loud meant he wanted an audience; soft and even was the worst, because soft and even meant he was thinking.
He learned the sound of his father’s breathing through a wall, the difference between the deep slow drag of real sleep and the shallow catch that meant Dale was only pretending, waiting to see what the house would do when it thought he was gone.
He learned to check the money jar without seeming to, to notice a drawer left a half-inch open that had been closed, to catch the sharp unfamiliar smell that meant a new kind of drinking.
He learned to read his mother’s eyes for the redness that meant she’d been crying where he couldn’t see, and to read his father’s calm and know, almost always, whether it was real calm or the other kind.
And he learned the most important sign of all, the one he checked for first every time the truck came up the drive: whether his father was carrying the gun.
He kept it all inside and showed none of it.
He drew, still, in the dark corner of his room with the door open.
He kept the notebook safe under a loose board he’d found, and sometimes he added to it, a recipe half-remembered, a small careful drawing, and it was the one place the quiet in him could go and still be making something.
Keep your hands busy and your head awake, his mother had said, and there’s no room left for fear to have the whole house.
He gave fear a corner.
He fought it for every other room.
He was eight and a half the first time he heard the name Sofie.
He was supposed to be asleep.
He came down the hall on the sides of his feet for water and stopped at the mouth of the kitchen, and his mother was at the table with the phone pressed to her ear and her voice so low it was almost nothing, and she was saying a name he didn’t know, and then she was saying I can’t, Sofie, I can’t yet, it’s not — no, listen, it has to be right, I only get one try at it and if I get it wrong—
He stood in the dark and understood, slowly, that his mother was doing the thing she had told him to do and could not seem to do herself.
She was reaching for a pack.
And it was killing her to do it.
He learned, in pieces, over weeks, who Sofie was.
A woman his mother had worked with, once, before.
A woman who had lived a life like theirs and had gotten out of it, and now lived on her own and was not afraid anymore, or was less afraid, and who did not tell his mother what to do or push her or make her feel like a fool.
Sofie offered a bed for a night.
Sofie offered a car and a long drive to somewhere far.
Sofie offered a place to meet — a diner, one that never closed — and a promise to raise the alarm if they didn’t come.
Sofie offered all of it and asked nothing, and every time she offered, Damien heard his mother find a reason to wait.
Not yet.
Soon.
When it’s right.
When the boy’s safe.
When I’ve thought of everything.
Her one flaw, laid bare.
She would take Dale’s whole weight onto her own back rather than trust another soul to help her carry it, and the taking of it was slowly breaking her, and she could not see that the waiting for the perfect moment was itself the danger.
He found the letters by accident.
He’d gone under his own loose board for the notebook and his hand had found paper that wasn’t his — a bundle of envelopes, tied, and on each one his name in his mother’s slanted hand, and beneath his name a line of words.
He couldn’t read all of them fast.
He read enough.
Open on your thirteenth birthday.
Open when you graduate.
Open when you fall in love.
Open when someone breaks your heart.
Open when you are angry with me.
Open when you become a man.
And one near the bottom that he read twice and did not understand and was afraid of.
Open when you feel responsible for what happened.
And the last, which frightened him most of all.
Open if I cannot come home.
He carried them to her with his hands shaking.
“What are these?”
She went pale when she saw what he was holding, and then she made herself calm, and she sat him down and took the bundle back gently and set it on the table between them.
“They’re for you. Letters. From me.”
“Why do they say all that. Why does it say — ” His voice cracked.
“Why does one say if you can’t come home?”
She was quiet a moment, choosing, and then she gave him the truth the way she always did, straight but soft.
“Because sometimes loving someone means preparing words for days you pray you will live to see yourself.” She smoothed the top envelope with her thumb.
“I want to be there, mijo. I want to be there for your thirteenth birthday and when you graduate and the first time some girl breaks your foolish heart, and I plan to be, I’m planning as hard as any mother ever planned in her life. But I can’t be sure. Nobody can be sure. And I decided a long time ago that if the world ever took me out of your story before I was ready to go — I would leave my voice behind in it anyway. So that you’d never have to wonder what I’d say. So I could still be your mother on the days I couldn’t get to you.”
“You’re going to die.” It came out of him small and cold.
“Or you’re going to send me away. Or—”
“No.” She pulled him in, and her hands were in his hair, and she pressed her mouth to the top of his head.
“No, little wolf. Listen to me. These are just in case. Every careful person keeps an ‘in case.’ I’m not planning to leave you and I’m not planning to die — I’m planning the exact opposite, I’m planning to get us both somewhere he can never reach us, both of us, together. The letters are only a wolf knowing where all the doors are. That’s all. You taught me that, remember? You always know where the door is.”
“I taught you?”
“You reminded me.” She held him until his shaking stopped.
She did not tell him everything.
She told him enough to hold on to, and she left out the rest, and Damien let her, because some part of him understood that there were things she was carrying that he was not big enough yet to help carry.
He knew about the bag after that.
He wasn’t supposed to, but he knew — a canvas bag, packed and hidden and checked and re-checked: papers with his name and hers, the flat official ones; money folded small; clothes; the family photographs; and, tucked at the very bottom where it would be safest, the brewing notebook, and pressed inside the notebook, the wolf and the dragon, the two of them still facing outward toward the danger.
Everything that mattered and could be carried, packed into one bag by the door of a house that had no door anyone could close.
Then Dale went quiet, and the quiet was the worst thing yet.
Elena noticed it first, in the small ways she noticed everything.
A drawer she’d left just so, moved.
The letters not quite as she’d tied them.
A photograph slid a half-inch out of true.
Her careful arrangements, the ones only she knew the shape of, disturbed — someone had gone through their things, patient and thorough, and put them back almost, but not quite, right.
And Dale said nothing.
That was the terror of it.
He did not accuse, did not rage, did not throw a jar.
He got calm.
He got polite.
He brought home groceries and set them on the counter and asked how her day had been in a mild, interested voice.
He offered, twice, to have a look at her car.
The car had started giving trouble.
It coughed and died in the driveway; the battery went flat overnight for no reason Elena could find; a wire, she said once, low, to no one, looked cut, not worn.
Some of it might have been an old car being an old car.
Some of it Damien watched his mother turn over and over behind her eyes, and he watched her decide not to let him see the answer she’d landed on, and he knew the answer anyway.
Her way out had wheels, and someone was quietly, patiently taking the wheels off it.
How much does he know?
It hung over the house like weather.
Dale watched Elena the way Damien watched Dale — steadily, without seeming to — and his calm sat on all of them heavier than any shouting ever had, because shouting had an end and this did not.
It broke on a night that had started too quiet.
Damien was in his corner with the door open when he heard his father’s voice go low and even in the kitchen, that soft-and-even that meant thinking, and he was up and listening before he knew he’d moved.
“Whose number is Sofie.” Dale wasn’t shouting.
“There’s a name in the phone. There’s money gone that I didn’t take. There’s letters in a bag by the door, Elena, with the boy’s name on ’em and one that says if I can’t come home.” A pause that had teeth in it.
“Going somewhere?”
“Dale—”
“Where were you going to go.” Still soft.
That was the horror of it, how soft it stayed.
“You think you’re taking my son. You think you walk out of my house with my boy and I just — what. Wave.” Damien heard a drawer open.
He heard the specific weight of a specific thing set on the counter, metal on formica, and every drop of blood in him went to ice, because he knew that sound, he had learned that sound the way he’d learned all the others.
The gun.
“Nobody’s taking him anywhere. You understand me? You want to leave, you leave. But you leave alone, or you don’t leave at all. Both of you in the ground before I let you make me a man whose family walked out on him.”
“Look at me,” his mother said, and her voice had gone to that terrible steadiness, the full-glass voice, the one that cost her everything to hold.
“Nobody’s leaving. Okay? Nobody’s going anywhere. It’s letters, Dale, it’s just — I get scared, I write things down, it’s foolish, it doesn’t mean anything. Put that away. The boy’s asleep. Put it away and I’ll pour you something and we’ll talk, just you and me.”
Damien pressed himself into the dark and did not breathe.
Through his slice of the doorway he could see almost nothing, a shoulder, a shadow, the awful ordinary shape of his father standing in the kitchen with his hand near the thing on the counter.
And he understood, with a clarity that no seven- or eight- or nine-year-old should ever have to reach, that his mother was not exaggerating anymore, that the letter that said if I cannot come home was not being careful about a far-off thing, that his father would truly rather kill them than be a man his family had left.
He understood that the door they’d been getting ready to walk through had almost closed while they waited for it to be perfect.
His mother poured.
He heard it.
She was going to drink his father calm and drunk and asleep, because it was the only key left that fit the last lock.
It took a long time.
Damien lay in his clothes on top of his blanket — she had come to him once, in the middle of it, and pressed her fingers to the inside of her wrist and whispered stay dressed, don’t sleep, wait for me, and gone back out — and he listened to the house the way he’d trained himself to listen.
He heard the drinking go on and on, his mother’s voice low and steady keeping it going, refilling, waiting.
He heard his father’s words thicken and slur and circle.
He heard, at last, near the deep middle of the night, the breathing change — not the shallow catch of a man pretending, but the real thing, the deep dragging pull of a man too drunk to wake easily, and then a snore, and then the long even sound of true sleep.
The kitchen light stayed on.
Then his mother was in his doorway.
She didn’t turn on his lamp.
She crossed to him in the dark and knelt, and he could see in the hall light that her hands were shaking now that they were allowed to, now that the full glass had been set down.
She checked something at her feet — the bag, he realized, she’d carried the bag in with her — and he heard her feel through it, quick and certain, and heard the soft sound of her fingers finding the notebook and the tied bundle of letters and confirming they were there, all there, everything that mattered, in the bag by her hand.
She had her phone.
She typed with her thumb, one line, and Damien saw the screen light her face for a second, and he saw her lips move around a word he’d heard her say into that phone a hundred times over two years while she found reasons to wait.
Sofie.
And a time.
And the name of a diner that never closed.
Then she put the phone away and took his face in both her shaking hands and looked at him, and there was something new in her, under the fear — something that had stopped waiting.
For two years she had told him someday.
When it was right.
When she’d thought of everything.
When the moment was perfect.
She had absorbed every blow and packed every bag and written every letter for a someday that always stayed one careful step away.
She did not say someday now.
“Little wolf.” Her voice was barely a breath, but it was steady, and it was certain, and it was done being patient.
“Stay in your clothes. Keep your shoes by your hand. Don’t sleep hard — half-sleep, wolf-sleep, one ear open. When I come for you, you come fast and you come quiet and you don’t stop for anything, not a toy, not a drawing, nothing. You hold my hand and you don’t let go and you know where the door is.”
“Tonight,” Damien whispered.
It wasn’t a question.
He’d heard it in her, the thing that had changed.
“We’re going tonight.”
His mother looked at him a long moment in the dark, her thumbs moving on his cheeks, memorizing him, maybe, or letting him memorize her.
“Tonight,” she said.
And down the hall, in the kitchen, under the light that stayed on, his father slept, and the gun lay on the counter, and the bag sat packed by the door at last — and for the first time in Damien’s whole small life, the door was not a thing that only let danger in.
Tonight it was going to let them out.