GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 2: FORGED IN WAR
CHAPTER 1: FOSTER YEARS
Find your people.
Don’t you go through it all alone.
They buried his mother on a bright day, which seemed wrong.
Damien stood at the front in a borrowed jacket with the cast on his arm and Elena’s brewing notebook held against his chest in his good hand.
He had not let go of it since a caseworker put it into his hands with the rest of his things.
He did not let go of it now.
People came.
More than he expected — women from the place she’d worked, neighbors, a few faces he half-knew.
And Sofie, who came straight to him and knelt down in the grass and did not say any of the things the others said.
She only looked at him and said, “She was coming to me. She almost made it. I’ll never stop being sorry I didn’t come get you both myself, a year ago, whether she was ready or not.” Damien didn’t answer.
He hadn’t answered anyone in two days.
But he understood, standing there, that this woman was the only adult present who knew what had actually happened in that house, and that everyone else was working from a story.
Because they kept saying things.
She’s at peace now.
They said it over and over, and each time it went through Damien like a splinter.
At peace.
As if his mother had been ill and tired and had gone gently.
As if she hadn’t spent ten years holding a full glass without spilling it, hadn’t sewn buttons and drawn dragons and packed a bag and oiled the hinges and waited two years for a perfect night that never came.
She hadn’t been given peace.
Peace had been taken from her, on a road three miles from town, by a man who would rather kill his family than be left by it.
There was nothing peaceful about any of it, and they said it, and they smiled at him sadly, and Damien said nothing at all.
Afterward there was a table with food on it, and a woman put a plate in his hands and told him he should eat something.
He set the plate down without looking at it.
He had not eaten since the morning he went to get breakfast and came back to find the doorway full of people.
He would not do that again.
He would not leave a room to eat, ever, if someone he loved was in it.
They put him in a car.
The car took him away, and no one in it was taking him home, because there wasn’t one anymore, and Damien watched the fields go by and understood the arithmetic of his life with a cold, complete clarity: he had gotten out of the house, and it had cost him everything the house had ever contained.
They gave him a bag.
Everything he owned fit in it.
Some clothes.
School records.
Three photographs — his mother at nineteen, laughing at someone off to the side; his mother holding a baby he was told was him; the two of them at a kitchen table with a bowl of berries between them.
Elena’s brewing notebook, soft-cornered, water-marked now along one edge from the wreck.
And pressed inside the notebook, flat and safe, a paper label with a small wolf drawn in the middle and a dragon curled all the way around it, both of them facing outward.
Not the letters.
He asked about the letters at the first office they took him to, and they told him the letters were evidence.
He asked again a month later and was told the case was still being processed.
He asked the next caseworker, and the one after her, and got: someone will look into it, the records have to be reviewed, the property can’t be released yet, I’ll make a note of it.
They always made a note of it.
Nothing ever came of any note.
Eight letters with his name on them in his mother’s slanted hand, and one of them said Open if I cannot come home, and she could not come home, and they would not give it to him.
He stopped asking when he was eleven.
Not from peace.
From arithmetic.
He had learned that asking adults for things put you in their power and changed nothing, and he had learned it thoroughly enough that it would take him twenty years to unlearn.
The people who handled him called him an easy child.
He read that in a file once, upside down across a desk, and thought it was probably true.
He did what he was told.
He did his chores before anyone asked twice.
He kept his room bare and clean and made his bed with corners.
He got good grades.
He did not fight, did not steal, did not run, did not swear, did not argue, did not slam a single door in eight years.
He also did not join.
He did not go to the movies with them.
He did not want the gift.
He did not play the game or come to the barbecue or try out for anything.
He did not call anyone Mom or Dad, and he never once unpacked all the way, because the bag was the only honest piece of furniture he owned.
Silence was the last thing that was his.
Dale had taken the house, the jars, his mother, the letters.
But the quiet inside Damien — that no one could get at, no one could search, no one could throw at a wall.
So he kept it, and he kept everything in it, and he learned that if you say nothing at all, nobody can use your words against you later.
The first family that mattered wanted very badly to save him.
They were good people.
That was the part he understood only afterward.
They made family dinners with everyone at the table and asked about his day.
They had movie nights and left a space on the couch.
On his tenth birthday they gave him a bicycle, and Damien said thank you and rode it exactly as much as politeness required.
They asked him about his mother.
Gently, at first, then more.
They told him it was okay to be sad.
They told him he could talk to them, that this was a safe space, that holding it in wasn’t healthy, that they wanted to help him work through his grief.
He could not explain to them that he was not holding it in.
He’d have had to explain that the storm had gone down into a room somewhere behind his ribs and pulled the door shut, and that he did not have the key, and that if he ever did find it he was not sure the house would survive what came out.
He was ten.
He didn’t have those words.
So he said, “I’m okay,” which was a lie so simple it slid past everyone.
He watched it curdle over about a year.
The mother’s smile got thinner.
He heard them once through the wall — nothing gets through, he doesn’t want us, I’m trying so hard and I get nothing back — and heard the hurt in it, and understood that his silence was landing on them like a rejection he had never meant to throw.
When the caseworker came, they said all the right things.
Not the right fit.
He’d do better somewhere with more structure.
They hugged him goodbye and the mother cried and Damien stood in it, hollow, and did not cry, and thanked them for having him.
He drew the lesson on the drive, the way he drew every lesson: precise, permanent, and slightly wrong.
Kindness has a limit.
Kindness stays as long as you can pay it back the way they want.
When you can’t, it leaves — and it isn’t even their fault.
The second house liked his obedience and hated everything else about him.
They were rigid, and they were suspicious, and they had decided within a month that a boy that quiet was hiding something.
Quiet meant sneaky.
Quiet meant he thought he was better than them.
Quiet meant defiance wearing good manners.
So they made rules.
He would answer in full sentences at dinner.
He would participate in family activities, not observe them.
He would take on the extra chores, since he had so much time to himself.
And there would be no closed doors in that house — not for a boy they couldn’t get a straight word out of.
A closed door was a door somebody was hiding behind.
Damien stood in the hallway when they told him, and the floor tilted very slightly under him, and he heard the words in a different voice entirely, a voice ten years dead.
A boy in his own house has nothing to hide, does he.
He obeyed.
He always obeyed.
He slept in that room for fourteen months with the door standing open and the hall light lying across the floor in a stripe he knew the exact shape of, and every night his body lay awake in the dark listening past the house to the street, for tires, for an engine slowing, for boots on a porch — and every night nothing came, and it did not matter, because the listening was not a decision anymore.
It was just what his body did in a room with an open door.
He answered in full sentences at dinner.
He said less than ever.
The third house had six kids in it and no time for any of them, and it was, strangely, the easiest place he ever lived.
Nobody had the attention to spare to be hurt by him.
He was invisible in the good way, and invisibility let something in him unclench a half-inch.
He did the dishes because they needed doing.
He fixed the wobbling chair, the sticking drawer, the chain on the little kids’ bikes, quietly, without announcing it.
He sat at the kitchen table most evenings and helped whoever brought him homework, and he was good at it, patient in a way he never was about himself.
And at night, when the youngest ones got scared — of the dark, of a fight downstairs, of the next placement — they came and sat on the end of his bed, and Damien listened.
He didn’t fix it.
He didn’t tell them it would be fine, because he did not lie to children about that.
He listened, all the way through, without once looking bored or telling them they were being silly, and it turned out that was a rarer thing than any of them expected.
There was one boy, seven, small for it, who was terrified of a man his mother used to bring around.
He told Damien about it in pieces over a couple of months, in the dark, in whispers.
The day the caseworker came for Damien, that boy cried so hard he made himself sick, and clung to Damien’s shirt in the driveway and would not be pried off, and kept saying the same thing over and over — you’re the only one who listens, you’re the only one who listens to me.
Damien held on to him.
He put his hand on the back of the kid’s head, the way his mother used to, and he said, quiet, right into his ear: “You’re not making it up. Whatever they tell you. You’re not making it up, and it’s not your fault, and one day you’ll be big and you get to leave. Wait for it and don’t let them make you the same as him.”
Then he got in the car.
He sat with his notebook against his chest and the driveway shrinking in the mirror, and he did not cry, and he learned another lesson that would take a long time to shake loose.
Everyone leaves.
Better to be the one who says nothing, so it costs them less.
School he could do.
School was a system with rules, and Damien was extremely good at rules.
He read ahead.
He read past the assignment, and then past the textbook, and then whatever else the library had — history mostly, and science, and government, and anything about how things actually worked.
Teachers wrote the same things on his reports year after year: bright, disciplined, works well independently, doesn’t participate, never asks for help.
He never asked for help.
Not once, in eight years, in four districts.
But the notebook came out sometimes, late, in whatever room he had.
He’d copy something into it — a diagram he liked, a fact worth keeping, a fix he’d worked out for the sticking drawer.
Once, when he was thirteen, he wrote a page on a batch he’d tried to reconstruct from her handwriting and gotten wrong, and he wrote out exactly how he’d gotten it wrong, because that was the rule.
You write down the ones that fail.
That’s not nothing.
That’s how you get to the good surprise.
It was the only place he ever spoke.
He was sixteen when they drove him out to a house with a long gravel drive and a garage bigger than the house, and told him this was the Hardmans, and that they’d had boys before, and that he should give it a try.
Gerald Hardman was in his early sixties, gray, wide through the shoulders, with hands like something carved.
He was standing at the mouth of the garage wiping his fingers on a rag when the car pulled in, and he looked at Damien for about three seconds, and Damien saw something move behind his eyes — recognition, of a kind he did not expect and did not like.
The old man had seen it before.
Damien could tell.
He’d seen it in men who came back from somewhere and sat in their kitchens all the way home and not home at all.
But Gerald did not say a word about it.
He didn’t say we’re going to get you talking or you’re safe now or any of the sentences Damien had learned to brace for.
He said, “Gerald,” and put out his hand, and shook Damien’s once, and said, “Room’s the second on the left. Door’s got a lock on the inside. It’s yours; use it or don’t.” Then he went back to the engine he’d been standing over.
That was it.
That was the whole welcome.
Diana was small and gray-haired and had been a school nurse for thirty years.
She showed him the kitchen, showed him where things were, told him what time dinner usually was and that he was welcome and that if he didn’t come she’d leave a plate in the microwave, no comment, no discussion.
Then she left him alone in the room.
She knocked, after that.
Every single time, for two years, on a door she had every right to walk through.
He never once heard her open it without knocking first, and it took him about four months to understand that this was not an accident.
She never moved his things.
He had left the notebook square in the middle of the dresser the first week — half a test, though he hadn’t quite admitted it to himself — and it stayed exactly where he put it, through cleaning days, through everything, untouched, until he moved it himself.
She fed him without making it a performance.
She noticed he ate the potatoes and left the peas, and after a while there were more potatoes and nobody said anything about it.
When he came in from a run she had water on the counter.
She talked to him normally, about ordinary things, weather and the neighbor’s dog and what was wrong with the truck, and she did not require answers, and she did not go quiet and wounded when she didn’t get them.
Nobody in that house ever asked him to be sad in front of them.
It was the first time in seven years that anyone had let his grief be his own property.
The work started about a week in.
Gerald put his head in the doorway — knocked on the frame first — and said, “Fence line’s down in back. Two-man job,” and walked off without waiting to see if Damien followed.
Damien followed, because he did what he was told.
They dug post holes for three hours and said maybe forty words between them.
When the last post was set, Damien put the tools down and went inside.
Gerald let him go.
That was the pattern, and it went on for months.
Yard work.
Stacking wood.
Cleaning the garage.
Changing the oil on the truck.
Gerald would say what needed doing, they’d do it, and the second it was finished Damien would leave — fast, always fast, because finishing meant you’d earned the right to disappear again, and disappearing was the whole point.
Gerald never once told him to stay.
Never said hang on a minute or don’t you want to talk.
He’d just be there the next time, with the next job, like the leaving hadn’t registered as anything at all.
Somewhere in the fourth month, Damien stayed to help put the tools away.
It was: two people put a garage back together faster than one.
But the next week he stayed again, and the week after that, and one afternoon he handed Gerald a three-eighths wrench before Gerald asked for it, because he’d watched the man’s hand start to move and had known where it was going.
Gerald took it without comment.
But something happened at the corner of his mouth, and he handed the wrench back a minute later and said, “Try it. You’ll feel when it seats.”
Damien crawled under the truck and tried it, and felt it seat.
The car was a 1969 Chevelle that had been sitting under a tarp since before Damien was born.
Gerald pulled the tarp off in October and said, “Been meaning to. Could use another set of hands,” and that was how it started.
It took them a year and a half.
Damien learned more in that garage than he had in every classroom he’d ever sat in, and almost none of it was on the subject of cars.
Every machine has a logic to it, Gerald said.
It’s not magic and it’s not out to get you.
Something’s doing what it’s doing for a reason.
Your job is to find the reason.
Don’t force a part.
That was the one he said most.
A part that won’t move is telling you something.
Force it and you’ll break the part and whatever it was attached to, and then you’ve got two problems and no information.
Back off.
Look at it.
Figure out why it’s resisting.
Nine times out of ten it’s not the part’s fault at all — something else is putting a load on it that it was never built to carry.
He said that with his head down under a fender and no particular weight on it, and Damien lay on the cold concrete beside him and did not move for a while.
Maintenance is cheaper than emergencies.
Never hide a mistake — a hidden mistake keeps costing you, and one you write down only costs you once.
Knowing how a thing breaks is the whole trick to protecting it.
And once, holding a rebuilt water pump up to the light: She’ll never be factory again.
That’s just true.
Something that’s been through it doesn’t go back to what it was.
He set it in place and started threading the bolts.
Doesn’t mean she won’t run.
Runs different, is all.
Sometimes better, if whoever put her back together knew what they were about.
He did not look over when he said it.
He never once, in two years, compared Damien to a damaged machine.
He just talked about the machine, correctly and at length, and let a sixteen-year-old lie there on the concrete and do his own arithmetic.
The other thing Gerald did was wear him out.
It started when Damien came in one evening with his jaw set and his hands shaking with something he could not name and would not have named if he could.
Gerald looked at him for a second, then said, “Garage. Ten minutes,” and when Damien got there the old man had pulled out two pairs of gloves.
Boxing, first.
Then wrestling, then the joint-work he’d learned somewhere overseas, then running, hills, weighted hikes, the pull-up bar bolted across the garage rafters, breath control, cold water, all of it.
Gerald was in his sixties and still hard as a fence post and knew forty years of tricks, and Damien lost.
Constantly, at first.
He got put on his back in the dirt more times than he could count.
And nothing happened.
That was the thing.
He lost, and Gerald put a hand down and pulled him up and said again or you dropped your elbow or that one was better, and nothing bad happened, not once, not ever.
Nobody’s face changed.
Nobody went cold or quiet or looked for a reason.
Losing cost him nothing but the loss.
It took Damien most of a year to trust it.
But somewhere in there he stopped bracing at the end of every round, and started to notice that the shaking thing in his chest was quieter on the days they trained, and one afternoon he caught Gerald’s arm in a way the old man hadn’t expected and heard him bark out a laugh — actual delight, at getting caught — and Damien found he had smiled.
Involuntarily.
Like a reflex he’d forgotten he had.
The changes were small enough that no one made anything of them, which was probably why they were allowed to happen at all.
He started coming to dinner.
Not every night; then most nights.
He carried the groceries in without being asked, and after a while Diana stopped even reaching for the heavy bag, because she knew he’d take it.
He fixed the porch step.
He fixed the dryer.
He fixed the neighbor’s mower, twice, and would not take money for it.
He began telling them where he was going.
That one surprised him — the first time he heard himself say “Going for a run, back in an hour” out loud in the kitchen, he’d nearly stopped in the doorway, because nobody had asked, and he’d said it anyway, and it had come out of him like an ordinary thing that ordinary people said in a house where somebody would notice if you were gone.
He sat in the same room while they watched television.
Not talking.
Just there, in the chair by the lamp with a book, while Diana crocheted and Gerald complained about the news, and the three of them not saying much of anything, and it being fine.
And one night, late in that second year, he went to bed and left his door partly open.
He stood there a moment afterward with his hand still on it, waiting for the old reaction, the cold drop in the stomach, the listening.
It didn’t come.
The hall light lay across his floor in a stripe he knew the exact shape of, and it was only a light, in a hallway, in a house where the two people asleep down the hall would sooner cut their own hands off than come through that door to hurt him.
He’d spent eight years learning that a door you could close was the whole difference between a home and a cell.
It turned out that was only half of it.
The other half was this: a door you could close, and choosing to leave it open anyway, because there was nothing on the other side of it you needed protection from.
They finished the Chevelle on a Saturday in the spring, a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday.
Gerald turned the key and it caught on the second try and settled into a low, even idle, and the two of them stood there in the open garage listening to it — the big engine turning over steady in the quiet — and Damien felt his shoulders come down from where they’d been living for most of his life.
It was an engine.
It was just an engine.
It was a sound that meant a thing he’d built with his own hands was running the way it was supposed to.
Gerald shut it off.
They wiped down the fenders.
They put the tools away, each one back in its place, which was the only thing the old man was ever strict about.
Then the work was done, and Damien did not leave.
He sat down on an overturned crate by the bench, and Gerald leaned against the car, and neither of them said anything at all.
Out past the open door the light went long and gold across the yard.
Somewhere down the road a truck went by, and Damien noticed it and let it go.
Gerald turned his coffee cup slowly in his hands.
The radio played something old and low.
Twenty minutes went by like that, in a garage, saying nothing.
It was the first silence of Damien’s whole life that he was not using to hide.
The screen door banged, and Diana called across the yard that dinner was on the table and she was not reheating it a third time.
Gerald pushed off the car with a grunt and said, “Well,” and started for the house.
Damien got up and followed him in.
Once, he had finished every chore he was given as fast as he could, so that he could disappear the moment it was done.
That evening, the work had been finished for twenty minutes, and he had not left.