But there was something other than his obvious piety: an almost indefinable quality that he projected to only the most subtle of senses, so that his peers shrank from him without knowing why. He was cruel. And though he took pains never to show a hint of it in public, somehow it seemed to emanate from him and put people on edge. Perhaps it was the flat bleakness of his hooded eyes, or the curl on the edge of his voice, or his thin, gaunt, stooped body; but whatever it was, the things he did in private carried themselves to his public life whether he wanted them to or not.
Tane had been taught to hunt by his father when he was ten harvests old. He was a remarkably adept pupil, and he applied himself vigorously, having finally found something that pleased the strict patriarch. And if he noticed the gleam in Eris’s eyes was a little too bright as he watched a rabbit thrashing in a snare, or that he took a fraction too much pleasure in snapping a wounded bird’s neck, then he counted himself lucky that his father was happy, and less likely to turn on him without warning as he usually was.
When he was twelve, he was out walking in the woods and he came across his father skinning a jeadh - a long-muzzled, hairless variety of the wild dogs that haunted the northern end of the Forest of Yuna. The jeadh was still very much alive, staked to the ground with its legs forced apart. The spirits knew how Eris had subdued it like that. Tane had been attracted by the muffled whimpers and yelps that it forced through the crude muzzle Eris had formed when he tied his belt around its mouth.
He stood and watched, unnoticed by Eris, who was too engrossed in what he was doing to pay attention to anything else. He watched the slow, careful way his father parted the layers of skin and subcutaneous fat with his knife, drawing back a bloody flap to expose the glistening striations of pink muscle beneath. For half an hour he was motionless, standing in full view in the clearing, but his father never saw him as he meticulously took the beast apart, piece by piece, unpeeling it like an orange until he could see its heart
beating in terror between its ribs. Tane looked from the animal to his father’s face and back, and for the first time he truly understood that he was the son of a monster.
Tane’s mother Kenda was a pale, mousy woman, small and shy and grey and quiet. It had occurred to him in later life that her marriage to Eris might have made her this way, but strangely Eris’s cruelty never extended to his wife, and he never beat her as he did Tane. At most, he snapped at her, and she would scuttle away like a startled shrew; but then, since she seemed to possess no will of her own and dared not accomplish the smallest task without being told to do so by Eris, she never gave him a reason to be displeased with her. Tane remembered his mother as something of a nonentity, a pallid extension of his father’s wishes, a menial thing that swept and scampered and was wholly ineffectual on her own.
Kenda had bore Eris two children. Each had brought her close to death, for her weak body could barely stand the trials of pregnancy; but Tane doubted that she had even considered herself or her health in the equation. Tane’s sister Isya was six harvests younger than him, and he loved her dearly. She was the one anchor of humanity in their household. Somehow she grew up unsullied by the parents who raised her, taking on none of their traits as most children are wont to do. Instead, it was if her personality were formed in the womb, crystalline, rejecting any possibility of absorbing outside influences.
She was a happy child where Tane was serious, a dreamer, a creature of imagination and boundless energy, who would cry when she found a broken chick that had fallen from its nest, or laugh and dance when it rained. Tane envied her passion for life, her carefree joy; and he treasured it also, for just to be near her was to feel the warmth she gave off, and the world seemed better for her being in it. She endured the bumps and scrapes of childhood like any other, but he was always there for her, to bandage a skinned knee or soothe her tears. It was through learning to care for her that he first realised the healing properties of herbs, and began to apply them to his own bruises too. For her part, Isya adored her older brother; but then she adored everyone, and not even the stern manner of their father - who was careful never to beat Tane within her earshot - or the nervous shyness of their mother were enough to deflect her
affection.
It was Isya and Isya only that made life bearable for Tane as he
grew into adolescence. It was as if his father had somehow sensed the disgust his son now felt for him, after seeing him torture the jeadh in the forest. This, coupled with his increasing frustration at the town council, led to the regular beatings that Tane suffered suddenly intensifying. He would be set impossible tasks of learning, told to go to the library in Amada and memorise entire chapters of Saramyr history to recite word for word. If he failed, as he inevitably did, he was thrashed until his body was bruised black and his lungs rattled for breath.
He took to retreating into the deeper forest for days at a time. His father’s lessons in hunting and survival served him well during these periods when he was away, and he began to yearn more and more to stay on his own, surrounded by the animals and trees, none of whom could possibly be as cruel to him as the lean ogre who waited at home. But there was one thing that always drew him back: Isya. Though his father’s casual violence had been hitherto directed only at Tane, he did not dare leave his sister to Eris’s mercies, in case one day he might seek a new target to vent himself on.
When he was sixteen harvests and Isya was ten, that day came.
He had been away for a week, searching the stream sides and rocky nooks for a particular shrub called iritisima, whose roots were a powerful febrifuge, used to bring down fevers. By now most of the time he was not away he was at the library, learning the intricacies of herblore alongside the futile task of keeping up with his father’s lessons. Isya missed him, but he was faintly dismayed to see that she got along fine in her own company, and did not need her older brother half as much as he liked to think. She had cultivated friends in the village, too; real friends, not the acquaintances Tane had. He could never begin a true friendship while he still had to hide the bruises and mysterious convalescences that were part of his routine.
When he returned home to the cabin, sitting beneath the shade of the overhanging oaks that leaned over the low cliff at its back, he found it silent. The day was warm and humid, and his shirt was damp with sweat. Using his bolt rifle as a walking staff - the way his father had warned him never to do - he made his tired way to the door and peered inside. A quiet house usually meant Eris was away, but this time there was a certain malevolence about the peace, something that prickled at his intuition.
‘Mother?’ he called as he propped his rifle inside the porch. Her
face appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, a flash of fright, and then she disappeared. He felt something cold trickle into his chest. Striding quickly, he went to Isya’s door and opened it without waiting to knock.
She was huddled in a corner by her simple pallet bed, curled up like a foetus, her hair a straggle and her face puffy with tears. In that moment, in one terrible second, he knew what had happened -hadn’t he always feared it, secretly? His breath stopped, as if to plug whatever it was that was rising from his belly to his throat. Seemingly in a dream, he crossed the room and crouched next to her, and she threw herself into his arms and hugged him tight, desperately, as if she could crush him into her and he could take away the pain as he had always done before. The veins on his neck throbbed as she screamed into his shoulder; his eyes fell to the spatters of dark, dark blood on her pallet, the bruises on her thin arms where Eris’s hands had gripped. Her saffron-yellow dress was a dull rust-brown where she had gathered it between her knees.
He remembered holding her. He remembered brewing her a strong infusion of skullcap and valerian that put her to sleep. And then he went out, into the forest, and did not return till the next morning.
His father was back by then, sitting at the round table in the kitchen. Tane went in to check on Isya, who was still asleep, and then sat down opposite Eris. He swung a half-full bottle of liquor on to the table. His father watched him stonily, as if this were a day like any ordinary day, as if he hadn’t ruined and dirtied the one precious thing he had ever created, forever destroyed the fragile innocence of a creature more beautiful that the rest of her family combined.
‘Where did you get that?’ he asked, his voice low, as it always was before he struck.
‘It’s yours,’ Tane said. ‘I took it.’
His mother, who had been hovering by the stove, began to scuttle out quickly, sensing the rising conflict.
‘Get us two cups, Mother,’ Tane said. She stopped. He had never
ordered
her to do anything before. She looked to his father. He nodded, and she did as she was bade before retreating.
‘You’re drunk.’
‘That’s right,’ said Tane, filling the two cups. Eris rarely drank, but when he did it was always this: abaxia, a smooth spirit from the mountains.
Eris looked steadily at Tane. Ordinarily, Tane would be rolling and pleading beneath his fists or the buckle of his belt by this point. But Eris had sensed he had gone too far this time, crossed some invisible line, and Tane was strong enough now to stand up to his father. There was a belligerence about his manner, and beneath that a look in Tane’s eyes that he had never seen before. A kind of emptiness, like something had died inside him and left only a void. For the first time in his life, he secretly feared his son.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked slowly, warily.
‘You and I are going to take a drink,’ Tane replied, pushing his cup towards him. ‘And then we’re going to talk.’
‘I’ll not be told what to do by you,’ Eris said, rising.
‘You’ll sit
downV
Tane roared, slamming his fist on the table. Eris froze. His son glared at him with raw hatred in his eyes. ’You’ll sit down, and you’ll take a drink, or the gods help me I’ll do worse to you than you did to Isya.‘
Eris sat, and with that the last of his authority was gone. For so many years he was used to his word being unchallenged in his own home that he simply did not know how to react when it was. His hands were trembling as Tane composed himself again, brushing a flick of dark hair back from his forehead. His skull was unshaven then.
‘A toast,’ Tane said, raising his cup. Shakily, Eris did the same. ‘To family.’
With that, he drained his cup in a single swallow, and his father followed him.
‘She was all I had, Father,’ Tane said. ‘She was the only good thing you ever did, and you’ve ruined her.’
Eris’s eyes would not meet Tane’s.
‘
Why
?’ he whispered.
His father did not reply for a long time, but Tane waited.
‘Because you weren’t here,’ Eris said quietly.
Tane let out a bitter laugh.
Eris looked at him then. ‘What are you going to do?’
Tane tapped the bottle of abaxia with a fingernail. ‘I’ve already done it.’
His father opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. The expression of horror on his face was something Tane had never seen before.
‘Tasslewood root,’ he said. ‘First it paralyses your vocal cords,
then robs the strength from your limbs. After that it gets to work on your insides. It takes up to fifteen minutes to die, so the books say. And best of all, it’s practically undetectable and the cadaver is unmarked, so it seems like a simple heart failure.‘
‘You… but you drank…’ Eris gasped. He could already feel the numbness at the base of his throat, his larynx swelling.
‘It’s quite a plant, really, the tasslewood,’ Tane said conversationally. ‘The leaves and aerial parts provide the antidote to the poison in the roots.’ He opened his mouth, displaying a wad of bitter green mush that he had kept concealed under his tongue. He swallowed it.
His father tried to reply, to plead or beg; but instead he slumped off his chair and fell to the floor. Tane got down and crouched next to him, watching him twitch as he lost control of his limbs. His father’s eyes rolled and teared, and Tane listened dispassionately to the soft bleats of agony that were all Eris could force from his body.
‘Look what you made me, Father,’ Tane whispered. ‘I’m a murderer now.’
He took the cups and the bottle when he left. They were the only evidence that could be used in accusation against him for his father’s death. Not that he believed he would be accused. His mother did not have the initiative. He walked into the woods with the sound of her rising scream coming from the cabin behind him, as she discovered the body of her husband.
That day he roamed the woods, half mad with grief and self-loathing. He had no idea what would come afterwards, how they would keep going, what would become of them. He knew only that he would look after Isya, protect her, and never let a man such as Eris harm her again. He only hoped she would emerge from her ordeal as the same girl he had known before.
He returned to the cabin at night, and it was once again silent. He found his father still lying in the kitchen. Of his mother and Isya, there was no sign. At first he felt a flood of panic; but then reason calmed him. They had gone to a friend’s house, or to have Isya seen to by the physician in Amada. Whatever else, his mother did not have the strength of character to leave her home permanently. He took the corpse away and buried it in the darkness, and settled to wait for their return.
After a week it became apparent that they were not coming back. He had underestimated his mother. Perhaps her need to run had
overcome her fear of facing the outside world without her husband. Perhaps she truly loathed her son for what he had done. Perhaps she was terrified that he would come back and kill them, too. He would never know. She had gone, and taken his sister with her. He had lost the one he meant to protect, and now there was no one and nothing. Only him.