The Book Eaters(50)
Every month or so, in between the trainings and beatings and exhausting regimen, Kingsey would repeat the exercise, putting Ramsey back in that room with an unleashed dragon. Learn to handle your fears. All the young men went through it. Still dreamed of those encounters.
But he got older and learned to fight and memorized command words. Soon, those sessions did nothing at all to spark fear in Ramsey until, at last, at the age of twenty-four, he got bored and killed the fucking dragon. Broke its head against the wall and screamed at it while it bled to death, because he could.
Afterward, such stillness. The silence shocking. Kingsey coming in, hand landing heavy on Ramsey’s shoulder and that gravel-grinding voice saying, You will never have to fear what you have mastered, only this time Ramsey had understood it.
Banish fear by dominating what you fear. Simple enough. Amazing he’d not thought of such a self-evident truth on his own. Some things had to be experienced to be understood, though.
As a lad Ramsey had cursed the man for dragging him out of Fairweather Manor and upending his life. As an adult, he was thankful. Cruel training had hammered strength into his spine, lent a cold speed to his actions. Sharpened his raw edges. Violence, he came to realize, had only happened to him because he had once been the kind of person to deserve it.
These days, he was another kind of person. One who meted violence out instead of suffering it. He would not feel guilty for causing harm any longer. If the people he hurt didn’t like being hurt, they should never have been weak in the first place.
So Kingsey had taught him, and so Ramsey had learned.
But Kingsey had forgotten all the things he’d taught others. Become weak, become the kind of person who made mistakes. The kind of person who deserved to be hurt.
At present, Ramsey had some new thoughts about that.
* * *
A couple hours of walking and he finally washed up in some suburb or another. Wasn’t Alnwick, though. Checked his watch, looked around. It was 2 A.M. on Christmas Day; no buses, no taxis. He’d left his motorbike in Newcastle. For the sake of speed, Ramsey decided he’d have to nick a vehicle rather than walk and be late.
The nearest house had a car parked in the garage. Toyota Prius, red, newish; that would do. Only, he needed a key for the car, and that meant breaking into the house to find it.
Front doors were easy to jimmy. He had no trouble. Gripped the handle, wrenched until the internal mechanisms snapped. Wrestled into a family home strewn with toys and Christmas Eve mess. He sniffed at the smell of cold goose, curled a lip at the unwashed flute glasses still pooled with last night’s champagne—gone flat, now.
Some Families celebrated Christmas, some didn’t. The Fairweathers had, with their usual Romanian customs. The knights hadn’t. Ramsey remembered liking the festive fun, but could no longer enjoy the memory of anything Fairweather-related, not anymore.
Told himself to focus, then rifled casually through the kitchen until he found the car keys hanging on a hook. Got it. He turned to go.
A small girl was peeking around the corner, wearing unicorn pajamas.
“Morning, little one.” No need to alarm or harm the kid, he decided. If she started howling, he could always reassess the situation. “What are you doing out of bed, eh?”
“I heard you come in,” she said self-importantly, then added with a suspicion he found extremely admirable, “You don’t look like Father Christmas. At all.”
“I’m one of his elves,” he told her. Cheeky on a whim. “Can you keep quiet till I’m gone?”
She did keep quiet, only giggling a little bit when Ramsey walked out of the front door and unlocked the red Toyota Prius. Merry fucking Christmas. He gave the girl a grin and a wave. Then put the car into fifth gear, roaring down the icy roadway with indifferent abandon.
Street signs pointed toward the town he wanted; he followed. Less than forty-five minutes till the rendezvous. Plenty of time. And then his own personal reckoning with Kingsey.
Close. He could sense it. The make-or-break moment of their order; transformation, or disintegration. Could go either way. He was excited by either prospect, satisfied he’d have been a major player regardless.
Without the knights, the Families might have died out, too self-serving and small-minded to arrange fair marriages and keep the lineages from collapsing. They should have all been on their knees with gratitude for the knights ruling and protecting and serving. Instead, the patriarchs spoke of disbanding, and “redundant organizations” in casual tones.
The Family didn’t care. Saw the knights as finished, superfluous in the face of fertility treatments. No arranged marriages with reluctant houses meant no need to internally enforce those monetary agreements and keep the lines of succession flowing. No more heavy-handed knight commanders, wielding more power and influence than any non-patriarch was ever supposed to do. And the dragons, long a source of contention the patriarchs could not form a consensus on, could be disposed of entirely.
Not acceptable. Not to Ramsey.
He cared intensely whether the knights survived, found himself appalled by the idea they might be disbanded. The dissolution of their order predicted a kind of dissolution of himself. Knight was all that he was, and without that identity or purpose he might disappear into the ether. So he felt, anyway. And he didn’t fear that dissolution exactly—he feared almost nothing anymore—but he did object to it.