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The night Armand told me about his childhood, it was snowing at the Château. Fluffy white powder collected in piles in the courtyard, and it coated every limb of the evergreens on the mountainside. They told me he had gone out into the forest—utterly alone, it seemed.
“You know he took that longbow with him,” Allessandra said. She sat at the marble-topped table in Marius’s library with Sevraine, Pandora, and Fontayne. I couldn’t tell if they minded my interruption of their game of MahJong, but I wouldn’t stay long. My fingers were already drumming against the doorframe.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I confessed. “What longbow?”
She slid a tile across the table, her lovely brow knit in concentration. “The one that hangs above the suits of armor in the great hall.”
“That old thing?” I was aware Barbara’s staff kept the antique weapons in good repair, though hell knows why. They had only ever been meant for decorative purposes. Polishing the maces and flails, keeping the swords sharpened. A meticulous completionist, my Barbara. She was always inventing more work to do that I never would have considered necessary. I recalled, too, that there had been a buckskin quiver of arrows on a hook beside the bow.
“I suppose he’s taken that as well?”
Alessandra pulled her eyes from the game to give me a smile of such serenity as befitting a saint. And with her simple gray gown and the lamplight at her back caught in the gossamer mane of her fair hair, I could nearly believe she was one at that.
Why are you dallying with us? the smile seemed to say. Go find out for yourself.
Visitors of all kinds continued to fill the halls of court since the grand ball we held on the solstice three nights ago. More new vampires attended than we ever realized were yet living in this world, and many lingered among us since. Armand had been in his element, playing host right alongside the council of elders and the younger members of the household. I’d seen him often with Louis in the crowded salons, or with Sybelle on his arm as he patiently answered the endless stream of questions from one and all who were bursting with excitement for our shared future, our communion, our people.
Now and then, we caught each other’s eye, and every time, there was again that faint smile, that calm, accepting expression. But had we spoken? No. Not for a fortnight. Not since the night before we found the prison where Rhoshamandes had secreted Marius and Louis and Gabrielle. The night he had rained down upon me all his ire. Hatred and resentment I had thought long forgotten for years. Did these looks he gave me now mean that he had at last forgiven me? Did my discovery of the prison and restoration of our loved ones finally erase all that contempt? I would like to think so. But I dared not ask.
And now, he was shirking society again, so soon, off in my lonely forest with an antique bow and arrows.
The snow stopped falling by the time I made it through the woodland edge, and his tracks were still just barely visible. A good thing, too, because his mental signature was silent to me now. For all I could know, he had taken to the air within the cover of pines and was already far from here.
But hmm… No, don’t think so. Even in the utter midnight quiet, I could feel him out there. The magnetic pull of like to like.
My own approach was so completely silent that when I found him in a thicker copse and he did not turn around to me, I was sure he did not sense me at all. He was tracking something, much in the way I had tracked him, his eyes on the upper limbs of a dense tree, the bow drawn taught, arrow nocked, as its tip followed his target. From where I stood, I couldn’t make out whatever he saw amid the white-soaked needles and cones, only the faint flutter of powder that sprinkled through them to the ground.
An owl? What else would be up there at this hour, in this weather?
As my fingers curled into my palms, my hands felt icy at my sides, and it was only then that I realized I hadn’t remembered my gloves. Or an overcoat, for that matter.
He wore one of fine cashmere, three quarter length in a deep navy color that would have looked black to mortal eyes, even in the brilliant moonlight filtering through the trees. But I didn’t think it was his; it looked too large for him. He had closets full of sumptuous clothing at the Château, his home away from home. Why would he borrow someone else’s coat? The buckskin quiver hung loosely over his shoulder. His hair, he had left uncut tonight, and it was curling with the wet, the dark strands shining through the dusty coating of snow upon it like veins in rare marble.
I wanted to speak, to tell Armand not to kill my owls, but before I could make my mouth say anything at all, he let loose. The arrow zinged up into the branches, and it was only my preternatural senses that allowed me to hear the last gasp of breath from the animal. Then it was tumbling down to land almost soundlessly in the deep snow. Not an owl at all, but I still couldn’t tell what other innocent creature he had just slain in my forest for petty amusement.
“You don’t really mind,” he said softly as he lowered the bow to his side, though he still did not turn toward me.
My impulse was to argue, but he was right. Damn him.
“What is it?” I asked, going to where it had fallen since he made no move to do so himself. “A weasel?”
“Genet.”
Now that surprised me. Almost as much as the fact that I couldn’t smell any blood. I crouched and dug the thing out of the snow, arrow and all.
He’d shot the cat right through the eye. Show off.
“What are you doing up here on the mountain, little thing?” I murmured, stroking the soft, spotted fur, running its long, ringed tail through my icy hand.
“Dying.” He was directly behind me now.
With a twist of my wrist, I pulled the arrow out—it belonged hanging above the suits of armor in the ballroom, after all. Wallop of blood scent then, but nothing appetizing about it.
“Let me have it,” he said, and I peered up at him over my shoulder. His face was in shadow, and I could make nothing of his expression. Hardly unusual, that. Porcelain doll face, his fathomless eyes huge and dark, tiny flakes of snow clinging to his long lashes.
“Why?” I gave the genet to him anyway as I stood.
“Not a good pelt.” He sighed, his hands running over it, turning it this way and that. “It was starving, must have been.” He flung it away, and it spiraled off into the underbrush.
I scowled. What waste. “I don’t think there’s much of a market for genet skins. Since when are you a fur hunter?”
“Since the fifteenth century.” He gave me a look that said, You should know this, but I only rolled my eyes.
“Why?” I asked again.
Taking the arrow out of my hand, he used a handkerchief to wipe the blood from its head. “I wanted to see if it would work.”
“What? The bow?” I’d never hunted with bow and arrow when I was a boy in this countryside. We had more efficient means. I’d been an excellent marksman with a musket, but that straight through the eye trick was surely thanks to his dark gifts.
“No,” he said. “My father taught me that.” He put the clean arrow back into my hand along with the bow this time. “Don’t believe me? You try it. You won’t be able to do it.” The smile he gave me then was so innocent that I wanted to cover it, or wipe it clean away. “Go on.”
“I’m not in the mood for a contest.” Slinging the bow onto my shoulder, I reached over his head to pop the arrow back into the quiver. Flash of annoyance across his features. I think he hates it when I do that, when I come close enough that he has to crane his neck to look up at me.
But then, there was a great deal about me he hated, wasn’t there? We’d gone well over all that two weeks ago.
Biting the insides of my cheeks to keep my own expression from flickering, I withdrew.
“Why?” I asked for a third time. “Why are you out here on a night like this, playing with this toy, killing starving cats in the snow?”
He tilted his head, and some of the snow sifted out of his hair as it fell over his shoulder. “Why did you follow me?”
I wouldn’t have answered that even if I knew how.
Exactly, his warm brown eyes seemed to say.
“It’s not a toy.” A touch of petulance in his voice, and he tried to take the bow from me, but I stepped backward, evading him.
His hands fell to his sides, and for a moment, he looked unbearably small and tender in his oversized coat. For some reason, I shivered, as if the freezing air could actually hurt me. It never does, the cold. Not for any of us, not truly. It is only the complete absence of comfort. And sometimes that matters to me.
“It was livelihood,” he said, taking a backstep of his own and tilting his head back to look up between the trees. The moonlight fell full upon his face now, and I wondered if he was doing it on purpose, if he knew how young and beautiful he looked in the snow.
His hands slipped into the deep pockets of his coat, as if to mock my icy ones. “Life itself. Food, yes, but the trade was what really mattered. The pelts and furs, that was what brought in the money. He was the best at it, Ivan, my mortal father. No one else could shoot like he could, and he had been teaching me everything he knew about the hunt since I was four years old. Bears are much easier to pierce through the eye. Though it’s not the best place to shoot them, is it?” He laughed softly under his breath and looked at me again. “No bears around here, are there?”
“You’ll have to make do with polecats and deer,” I said with a shrug.
“No wolves?”
“Don’t mock me.”
This made him laugh in earnest. “I’d like to see you take on a bear. It would be over quickly, I know, but what a battle. I don’t remember the first time I watched him and the others kill a bear, I was too young, but the first time I did it myself…” His brow furrowed, and he looked down, pushing his foot through the snow, making a little pattern. “Yes, I remember it well now, though I had forgotten for a very long time… I was seven or eight. The snow was a lot like this that day, thick and soft, making everything silent. You should have seen how it would glitter in the morning light over those fields, the sunrise casting pink streaks so that they looked like lakes of fire. We always went early. Morning is wiser than the evening. Those who wake up early are served by God.
“‘It’s time, Andrei,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll be there, but I won’t do anything to help you.’
“My bow was smaller than yours there. Nowhere near as long as his, but it was powerful, and I could string it myself, which I was more proud of than I should have been. It was wickedness, this pride, but I don’t know that I’ve ever not been wicked.
“I was still small enough that I rode out on his horse. With his thick arms around me holding the reins, the warmth of him at my back, and the excitement of the hunt, I think I forgot to be cold that morning. Too excited to be afraid, even though he told me, ‘Either you kill the bear or she kills you. You’ll show me what you can do.’
“Would he have really let me be mauled to death by a bear?” Armand shrugged. “Either way, I wasn’t afraid of that actually happening. We had dozens of arrows. I would shoot it, over and over again if I had to, and then it would be dead, and it would be my kill alone. No other outcome was possible to my mind.
“He would never have admitted it, but he made the first one easy for me. A few days prior, he’d found the den of a bear hibernating under the root mass of a tree. I knew what sort of place to look for, so when we left the horse to go on foot, taking our own route away from the rest of the party, he made it seem like I discovered the gnarled oak all on my own.
“‘Don’t make me have to knock that look off your face,’ Ivan said, taking me by the shoulders, the fingers of his huge hands digging in hard enough to hurt even through his hide gloves and the fur I wore. ‘Arrogant boys make mistakes. God keeps those safe who keep themselves safe.’ The puffy clouds his breath made between us and its heat against my cheek soothed me despite his words. Fortified me.
“After all, how hard could killing a hibernating bear be?” Armand slid the bow off my shoulder, and I didn’t try to stop him this time. I thought he would nock another arrow, but he took the quiver off himself and set both of them against a tree.
I watched him closely, uncertain what to make of all this. “Harder than you expected, I take it?”
“You have to shoot them here,” he said, pressing his palm flat to the center of my chest, his eyes fixed up on mine. I couldn’t tell if he felt it when my heartbeat tripped.
“And you couldn’t, because it was curled up to sleep.” I don’t know what it was that made me pull away from him. This was all so much after two weeks of silence and all that came before it.
Trick, my mind hissed at me. Trap.
I privately told it to shut up. Really, was it even possible for him to hurt me any more than he already had?
Armand took one of the arrows from the quiver and quietly inspected it, running the pad of his thumb over the fang-sharp tip. “There’s a reason they say in this century, ‘Don’t poke the bear.’ Of course, that was a proverb Ivan never would have used.” His thumb pressed until the arrowhead pierced his white flesh, drawing a bead of blood. Altogether different scent than what had come from the genet. It made me shiver anew, but he just watched the single drop fall to the snow beside his boot. The only splash of red in the white-muffled night. His tiny wound was already healed.
“Have to poke it,” he said.
“The entrance to the den was all the smaller for the snow that the wind collected in those giant roots, some of the knees as tall as I was. Only one way in and one way out, the decline slick with ice. I could see nothing through the shadows for how deep the den went, but I could smell it, clean and fresh, almost sweet like grass, unmistakable.
“I braced myself against the tall roots so my feet wouldn’t slip out from under me, and I took a shot in the dark.
“Well, it hit. The roar was deafening. Much closer than I expected. I panicked, tried to retreat too fast, and stumbled. My back slammed into the frozen slope, and I slid feet first, straight toward the darkness.
“‘Andrei, get up!’ my father was shouting. ‘Up, you idiot boy! Where are your wits?’
“The sunlight glinting off the snow caught two great eyes, glowing green in the dark, and a puff of hot air steamed over me. Another roar, and a thud that made the whole tree shudder. Ivan was true to his word; he might have rushed to me, reached down to pull me out of there, but his hands never came
“My bow was still in my hand. Through it all, I never dropped my bow. Proud of that bit too. Arrows had scattered out of my quiver with my fall, and I snatched one from the snow and shot it straight between those eyes.”
Armand glanced at me. “It bounced off.” He tapped his forehead. “Thick skulls. But it bought me the time to catch hold of the roots and haul myself up from the pit.
“A second later, the den erupted, snow and splintered wood flying. A jagged piece caught me across the cheek.” He traced a finger absently over his skin as if he could still feel the cut, and my eyes were helpless not to follow the motion.
“I stumbled into more roots again, but this time, the fall probably saved my life. When its massive claw swiped down, it caught only wood.
“Where were my arrows? I felt for the quiver. Only two left in it. My heart seized.
“My father was shouting, demanding I get up again, and I could hear the horses of the hunting party coming fast. Even if Ivan refused to act, they might make it in time to help me. But I couldn’t bear the thought. It was too painful for my wicked pride.
“‘Up, you stupid child!’ The rest of his words were drowned out by the roaring and the shuddering and cracking of the wood above me. Its enormous shape blotted out the light, eight feet tall, and still fat and glossy so early in the winter.
“No, I wouldn’t get up. I wouldn’t give up. I saw another way.
“Rolling further under the roots, they shielded me like a cage. It was a tight space, but I was so small, and I had just enough room to crouch. I set my arrow and fired straight between the roots right at its chest. It almost felt like cheating, it was so easy. I hit it, in the perfect spot.” This time, Armand’s hand covered the place on his own chest, and though he hadn’t been looking at me, his eyes met mine now. “But it didn’t go deep. I wasn’t able to draw the bow back far enough. And this time, when it furiously pummeled the roots, they split right open, like the beast was cracking my tender flesh out of a mussel shell.
“When it lunged, roaring at me, its breath hot and wet in my face, I screamed back at it, and I pulled the bowstring with my last arrow. Its claws tore into my side just as I fired, knocking the arrow off course.”
Armand took a slow, shallow breath. “It didn’t hit here.” He tapped his chest again. “No, not the right spot. Not where I thought it needed to be. Instead, it went through the roof of its gnashing mouth. Pierced the brain. Killed it instantly. If it had fallen forward instead of to the side, I would have been crushed.
“You don’t need me to repeat what Ivan had to say about all that, do you?” A sardonic smile stretched his lips as the memories flickered behind his eyes.
“Yet somehow, my mother was even more angry once the men finally got me home.
“‘Put him on the table,’ she screamed at them. ‘How could you? All of you! At his age!’
“‘It’s not so bad, mother,’ I tried to convince her. My clothes were streaked with blood, but the leather was thick and so the claws had not gone so very deep at all. I could hardly even see the scars anymore a year later.
“She tutted over me and dressed the wounds, the scratch on my face as well, then she bundled me up on top of the oven with the little ones, even though it was not yet midday. The door to the house slammed, and I could hear the timbre of her voice clashing against the deep tones of Ivan’s for a long time, but none of the words made it through the walls.
“My sisters had a thousand questions about the bear, but I answered none of them. It was my adventure, and I hoarded it jealously, feeling I could have been a hero of legend. St. George or Theodore of Amasea. My whole body was glowing with it, though that might have been the vodka my mother gave me for the pain.
“I must have fallen asleep, because it was dark when I noticed Ivan looming over me. My arms tore out of the bundled furs to cover my head in anticipation of his mighty fist, my conscience dripping with guilt already for my vain fantasies, as if he could pluck them from my mind.
“The fist never came.
“‘My son.’ His voice rumbled low in his chest. The oven’s glow from below made the droplets of ale caught in his mustache twinkle like jewels along with the moisture in his eyes. His hand trembled as it smoothed my hair from my forehead. ‘My Andrei.’
“The tears flowed down his ruddy cheeks into his beard, his voice thick. ‘A better shot than boys twice your age. Better than half the men who ride out with us. You’ll surpass me one day soon, my genius, my son.’
“I would not for all my life have done anything to break this spell. Not even smile, lest it transform his pride to outrage at my own. It was still several years before I began to take pleasure in provoking him.
“‘You’ll eat twice as much from now on,’ he said as he tucked my arms back under the furs, his touch gentler than I could remember in ages, as if he were afraid to break me. ‘I’ve told your mother. You are too small. You must grow faster so that you can have your own horse. The gold from your bear will feed us well this winter.’
“My bear. I wanted him to say it again. Would he remember any of this once he'd slept off the ale? His face was glistening, and he looked so beautiful then with such softness in his eyes. A terribly beautiful man, my father.
“His lips were just as soft as they pressed my forehead while he drew the furs up to my chin. I thought he would climb down from the oven then, but no. He began to hum. The deep vibrations of the tune were more tavern song than lullaby, but it must have done trick, because I don’t remember anything else until morning.
“You’re shivering, Lestat.”
Was I? The abrupt change in topic sent me off-kilter. I felt yanked from a dream; I’d allowed myself to be mesmerized by the swirling images he sent to my mind as he told the story. They rippled away now like reflections in a pool disturbed by a dropped stone. But so clear they had all been. Yes, I knew him once more, as I had centuries ago, in a way I know so few others. Armand, so very young and so very human. Andrei, as he had once been.
“Still am,” he said with a shrug. “In a way.”
“Is that true?” My hands were in fists at my sides as if that could do any good against the frigid air.
“You tell me.” Again, that smile. So like the one he’d given me the night of the ball.
Did this mean…?
“Let’s go inside,” he coaxed. “You’re cold.”
It was my turn to give him that little nod. There was so much I suddenly wanted to say to him, to explain. I was desperate to make him understand. But the knot in my throat would not let me speak.
“Here.” He slipped off his overcoat to hand it to me. Before I could object, he put the quiver and bow back over his shoulders and began to lead the way, following my tracks in the snow back toward the Château.
The coat was soft, and somehow warm inside despite how he could not have been.
The coat fit me perfectly.