“That’s what they like, you know. Darkness. They’ll go for your eyes first.”
“Please! I can’t—”
“Good night!” she sang.
That had been the first night of Alistair’s unofficial training as champion, and he’d sobbed all the way through it. Until Hendry had snuck into his room a little before dawn and helped him clean his soiled bedsheets. And reminded him that he’d need to endure these fears in order to become fearless himself.
The dream changed. This time Alistair was older, but not by much.
“Goblies are nasty creatures, always hunting for buried treasure,” his mother cooed, looking down on him. He was wedged in an open grave beside the coffin of his dead father, and Alistair sputtered as his mother dropped a handful of silver coins on his face. “The coins should be enough to draw them in. And you should be strong enough to fend them off.”
Alistair had gotten better at these tests by then, but he still panicked—though quietly—in the grave. The Lowes had sewn shiny buttons onto his sweater, and he swore every anxious pang in his chest was the claws of a goblie, searching for treasure within his flesh.
Hendry couldn’t interfere with the tests—even at that age, they both knew that. But later, he’d brought Alistair a blanket. Logic told Alistair that fleece would hardly protect him from a monster, but even chained to a half-buried coffin, the blanket helped him feel safer.
As the years passed, their mother had used more than imagination to hone Alistair’s resolve. She’d used magick.
“I see something! There! In the water!”
Alistair whipped around as he treaded in his family’s murky black lake. A dark fin emerged from the surface, nearing him.
His mother stood on the bank, her expression approving as Alistair ignored his fear and continued swimming for the lake’s center.
Hendry also watched, and it was his brother’s soothing presence that helped Alistair ignore the sensation of something slimy grazing his ankle. It was Hendry who emboldened him, even though it should’ve been his family’s lesson guiding him onward. The same lesson they were always trying to teach him.
Monsters couldn’t harm you if you were a monster, too.
* * *
Alistair woke from the dream unsettled. Since it was the morning before the tournament, such nightmares felt like a bad omen. And so, as he always did when something was wrong, he decided to find his brother.
He threw on a cable-knit cardigan and ventured down the hallway. Unlike Alistair’s slobbish room, curtains drawn in perpetual darkness, littered in half-read books, spellstones, and discarded knits, Hendry’s was immaculate. His window faced eastward, toward the sunrise. Alistair squinted at the harshness of the daylight and found his brother’s bed empty and cleanly made.
He checked Hendry’s usual haunts. The kitchen smelled of roasted macadamia nuts and buttered croissants, yet the sweets hadn’t beckoned Hendry for breakfast. His favorite napping spot was empty, the grass beside the tombstone of dear Aunt Alphina unbruised by the outline of Hendry’s body. The music room was silent. The halls, vacant.
Maybe he’s curled up somewhere else for a nap, Alistair thought. Or maybe he’s in the study practicing magick. That seemed unlikely. Hendry avoided everything that involved getting out of bed during morning hours.
Growing increasingly uneasy, Alistair strode down the estate’s maze of bleak hallways to the parlor. He didn’t find his brother there, but he did find the rest of his family.
The Lowes were one of the smallest tournament families in Ilvernath, and it was especially apparent with the lone child and three adults sitting there so solemnly, dressed all in gray. Portraits of their ancestors lined the room’s walls in gilded frames, so numerous and so dated that Alistair couldn’t recognize all of their faces. Only the champions. Their eyes followed him wherever he roamed in the house.
Gifted, studious, he imagined those portraits whispering about him. But remember him as a child? So afraid. So anxious. If nightmares are enough to unravel him, how will he fare when he lives in one?
Above the stone fireplace was the portrait painted before the last tournament. His grandmother, just as stern and serious as she was now, despite being twenty years younger, was surrounded by her four children: Alistair’s mother, Moira; his uncle Rowan; his aunt, Alphina, who’d won the last tournament only to hang herself several years later; and his uncle Todd, who’d died tragically not long after the portrait was commissioned.
Alistair glanced at the most recent portrait, completed barely a month earlier. Around him, his grandmother, his mother, his uncle, and his eight-year-old cousin, Hendry was the only one smiling.