An instant passed, the dog’s ears still back, Barrick staring at the beast as though he had never seen anything worse in his life. Her brother’s face was bone-white, his eyes wide in horror. Then blood came flooding back into his features like waves rushing onto a muddy strand, a demon-mask of red that almost blurred into the roots of his hair, as though his entire head had caught fire. He snatched up one of Briony’s bows from where it leaned against the wall and brought it whistling down so fast she could not even move as the end of the staff hissed past her face. He beat at the dog until the bow cracked and the animal scrambled snarling and whining onto the floor, then tried to retreat under Briony’s bed, snapping at the bloody weals on its own back as Barrick continued to belabor its hindquarters. Shrieking, she grabbed her brother’s arm, and was splattered by blood that might have been from his hand or the dog’s tattered back, or both.

At last, with the dog wedged so far under the edge of the bed that only its feet could be seen, Barrick had thrown down the splintered bow and run out, sobbing and cursing the gods.

If it had been anyone else but her brother, Briony would not have understood now why she missed him with such a painful yearning. Simargil would not have understood: the dog had limped thereafter, and used to lay himself down on the floor at the first sound of a raised voice. Although her brother never touched him again, he would also dart out of any room some time before Barrick arrived, which often made it easy to track the prince: wherever black Simargil was moving hurriedly, she had only to retrace the dog’s steps to find Barrick.

If it had been anyone else, Briony would have cursed them as a bully and a coward and that would have been the end of it—an enemy forever. No one else convicted of such crimes in her private court could expect to have the sentence of her disgust commuted. But she knew her twin too well, had known even at that tender age that all his worst angers were the spawn of his fears, those night terrors that followed him around in the way that Simargil, before he limped, had followed Briony herself.

Barrick was monstrous sometimes, but she ached for him. No one but Briony knew the sweetness that lay behind that sour, even cruel mask he showed the world. Since their mother had died, only she had held him in the night, when he woke crying and uncertain where he was or even who he was. Only she had heard him say she was his very heart, that without her he would die. And how he feared that when he did die his soul would wander homeless forever, because of his blasphemous thoughts and his stiff neck which would not bend even to Heaven, as Father Timoid always said of him.