I didn’t think I could maintain the prince’s prison if I left Cadmael’s mind, but I moved away from his hissy fit and accidentally stepped into a flare of memory.
Cadmael, bare-chested, wearing a hip-cloth, is carrying a baby, holding him up to the others crowded around his hut. Pride gleams in his eyes as he makes a pronouncement in a language I don’t understand. The message is clear enough, though.
The memory goes dark and jumps to Cadmael moving silently through the rainforest, a spear in his hand as he hunts. A small child follows. Cadmael stops, waits for the child to stand beside him, and then crouches, pointing through the trees at a boar snuffling in the leaves.
The child nods, stepping to the side to watch his father. Cadmael changes his hold on the spear, sending it speeding through the air, hitting the boar in the neck. The animal squeals and charges farther through the brush and trees, but Cadmael and his son are in pursuit.
Cadmael leaps, landing on the boar, driving it to the ground. A blade is already in his hand as he finishes off the kill. The child watches intently, his arms moving in imitation of his father’s, learning what to do when the time is right.
I feel Cadmael’s heart swelling with each new memory, with his son’s first successful hunt, with his growth into manhood, until there was nary a difference between father and son, save for a few gray hairs.
I feel Cadmael shying away from the next memory, not wanting to touch it, to revisit the horror. His son and a hunting party of two other men went to bring down a deer that had been spotted from a distance.
Only one hunter makes it back to the village as the sun is setting. People gather around the frantic young man who is bleeding, his eyes wild. Cadmael looks for his son. The hunter’s out-of-breath rantings and wild gesticulations become background noise. Grabbing his weapons, Cadmael runs into the rainforest.
He’s able to easily track the one who made it back to the village. The ground is disturbed, branches broken. In a panic, the young hunter did nothing to hide his path.
Eventually, Cadmael finds a second hunter. The man is face up, a broken branch dropped on his face. Cadmael studies the scene. The hunter’s abdomen has been ripped open, organs torn out and eaten. An animal wouldn’t feel shame over a kill, wouldn’t hide his meal’s face.
Sickened, fearing what he’ll find, Cadmael races silently through the forest, following the sounds of yips and growls. When he bursts into a clearing, he sees a deer with his son’s spear in its neck. The deer’s eyes roll while its legs try weakly to push itself up, to escape. Cadmael barely glances at the deer, though. His attention is focused on a huge wolf, his snout in his son’s abdomen, feasting.
Cadmael throws his spear. The wolf senses the change in the clearing and moves, dodging the tip. It stands over its kill, claiming Cadmael’s son as his own. Refusing to acknowledge his son’s unseeing gaze, Cadmael leaps in with a blade in his hand.
The fight is vicious but short. Cadmael cuts the animal many times, but he’s no match for the huge wolf. Bleeding out on the same ground his son has stained red, Cadmael watches as the wolf begins to transform. He assumes in his state he’s hallucinating. How could a wolf become a man?
When the transformation is complete, his friend stands over him, eyes wild with excitement. The werewolf, though Cadmael had no word for such a thing, looks between the dead and dying, wiping the blood from his face. He goes to the now dead deer, hefts it over his shoulder, and heads back toward the village.
Cadmael stares up into the canopy of trees, uncomprehending. How could his friend be a wolf? Moreover, how could he kill Cadmael’s son? Betrayal courses through him as his blood soaks into the forest floor beneath him.
Later, as he feels himself drifting on to a warrior’s welcome in the afterlife, his son waiting for him, a man steps into the clearing. Eyes black, he breathes in the scent of blood and falls on Cadmael, fangs in his neck.
When Cadmael wakes, bursting out from under dirt and branches with a fiery, uncontrollable thirst, he’s somewhere else. He experiences a brief moment of worry over his son before he’s mindlessly racing through the trees, the forest and all its inhabitants alive to him, their scents and sounds making the hunt laughably easy.
He brings down a boar and feeds, draining the animal, finally cooling the fire in his throat and allowing him to think. He finds a break in the canopy, checks the stars, and slowly, through the night, makes his way back to his village, to the hut of his friend.
Silently, he pads across the packed earthen floor to the sleeping skins and rips out his friend’s throat. Eyes bulging, clutching his neck as blood gushes between his fingers, his friend watches as Cadmael kills first the man’s mate and then his child. Cadmael does it fast, knowing the former friend has only a moment left of life. Cadmael wants to make sure, though, that his last moments are filled with a crippling grief that will match his own.
Get out of my head! Cadmael roared. My memories are my own.
I can’t. I’m what’s keeping the prince contained. You’re going to have to put up with me a little longer until we can figure out how to free his prisoner.
“Clive?” I called.
The door must have opened because light fell across my face.
“Hey, listen. I’m holding the prince captive. I have no idea how long I can do this.”
“How can I help?” Clive asked.
“Can you take me down to the basement? The tub room?” That room had felt important from the beginning.
Clive swung me up like I was a backpack. “Should we be concerned about Cadmael?” he asked.
“No,” Cadmael responded. Looking through his eyes, I saw him look down at his raw hand and drop my axe, letting it clatter onto the marble floor beside him.
“Can you grab that, please?” I asked Clive. “I don’t want to lose it.”
I felt Clive dip to pick it up and then hand it to me, jogging to the secret door. I kept one arm around Clive’s neck and held the axe away from his body, not wanting to accidentally hurt him. As Clive went down the stairs, I heard a high-pitched tone I’d never heard before.
