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His look went forward. “You recall when I told you about my dog, Wolf?”
“Yes.”
“Well, after I stole him away, saved him by giving him to the blacksmith’s family, I went back to the castle and my father was livid. He’d wanted to kill the dog for tripping him.”
“Did you father break a bone—or get hurt?” It was the only reason she could think of to cause such a dire reaction.
He scoffed. “No. He wasn’t watching where he was going and tripped and fell and looked the fool. That was it. But my father didn’t stand for looking a fool, even if it was by an innocent dog that was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
He heaved a breath. “He asked me what I did with the dog and I refused to tell him.”
Victoria drew in a deep breath, holding it in her lungs. She didn’t care for how this story was progressing.
“So he sat me down at our dining room table. The food for the dinner meal all laid out before us. I had my plate full. Heaping full of food as I was growing so fast in those days. And I was so hungry. I remember that. I was so hungry.”
His head shifted to the side, almost in a shake before he stopped himself, straightening from the movement as his dark eyes slipped into the familiar chilliness. “Just before I had my first bite, my father told me to pause for a moment. There was nothing in his voice. Not anger. Not rage. Nothing. I stopped, setting my fork down. He told me to put my hand on the table. Then he stood and drove the tip of a dagger between my pinky and ring finger. I jumped, but I knew I couldn’t pull my hand away. Couldn’t cry out.”
His words stopped. Stopped for so long the sick feeling roiling in her stomach churned almost to the point of bile coming up her throat.
“He twisted the sharp edge of the blade down onto my pinky and sawed at it. Sawed for minutes, cutting through the flesh and bone. I had to sit there. Sit there and not move.”
Bile did chase up her throat and she had to swallow it down. “How…”
“It would have been worse if I had moved. I knew that even at that age.”
She gasped air into her lungs, trying to not heave. “But…but…why?”
“To prove a point.”
“Which was?”
He shrugged. “Everything comes and goes. Everything is eventually discarded.”
She knew how huge her eyes must be, but she couldn’t wipe the horror from her face as she stared at him.
“The lesson was that you don’t need the things you think do. You might miss them, but you don’t need them.”
“He cut off your pinky as a lesson? But that’s…that’s deplorable.”
“Is it?” He asked the question with so little emotion, so little understanding that it set her back in her saddle, her jaw gaping for a long moment.
“Yes, it is deplorable. And I worry for your sanity if you don’t think so.”
His chest lifted in a heavy sigh, and his look swung to her. “I was brought up in extremes, Vic. It’s been like this my whole life. I have never found balance in what the rest of the world deems normal. I am not normal and I am aware of that fact.”
She nodded. Even those words, his assessment of himself, he said with no emotion.
He pointed forward. “We are coming upon the village.”
She offered him a half-teasing smile. “When I asked for a story, I was thinking a fun tale of youthful hijinks.”
He chuckled. “I don’t have any of those.”
“You could have made something up.”
“You stayed awake, didn’t you?”
A burst of raw laughter cut from her mouth. It was easier than crying.
