"I'm sorry," he said. "It's for the sake of the family."

Which meant something coming from him. If it were Ensio or Quincy or even Ives, I could've chalked it up as bold-faced self-delusion, but Tristan's Jetton gift was clairvoyance: He had known our father's second wife would die in childbirth, he had known which of our brothers wouldn't make it past twenty, and now he knew with the same certainty that I was a scourge on our family name in some way so horrible that he buried a knife in my gut ten years too early.

Take from that what you will. At the time, though, I didn't really get it; I was freshly twelve and just as freshly stabbed, so the implications were lost on me until I had some years to ruminate. I never got the chance to ask him about it, either. I just did what I'd been taught and started gnawing for dear life.

Tristan had never been considered a serious candidate in succession, in part because his gift was useless to a combatant, and in part because--well, he was just a bit too gentle for killing. He'd gone so long without a real taste of it that he didn't even know what to do with a scratching and screaming adolescent bleeding out beneath him. He'd been petrified by the feeling of handle plunged to hilt: In the end, it just took one kick to the gut too many to send him rolling off the cliffside.

I had lost too much blood by then to even realize what I'd done. The last of my sense was spent sealing the wounds, and then I just closed my eyes and lay there, not asleep, but certainly not conscious: If the rest of my brothers had any idea what had happened, they'd have come to finish me off then. It was too sweet an opportunity to pass on.

No one knew. Not until I clawed my way back with rips in my new dress and blood on my knees and no Tristan. I left the ribbons he'd used to braid my hair and the knife he'd used to gut me on the dinner table for the house to deal with; On my next birthday, we used that same knife to cut the coffeecake.

(You can imagine how I felt hearing this story from the mouth of my brother; It wouldn't have been much worse if he'd gone and told the whole table in graphic detail how he'd lost his virginity to a bird, since that was clearly where things were headed. If Ives noticed my discomfort, though, he didn't make any alterations for my benefit.)

"...So," I started, since I just couldn't help myself, "does Kite have a-"

My mistake; It had seemed like the time since he'd just subjected me to the story. But I didn't bother pushing it once I realized which stairs we headed down. Jettons don't have an ordinary sense of propriety, but even I didn't want to hear about where my brother stuck his dick while we visited father's body.

Not even our father was able to, say, drop one of us off a cliff because they had been inconveniently born without a dick or functioning ambulatory system, no matter how clear it was that he wanted to.

"Bastard!"

Aude shushed me, which was about as unhelpful as my shouting, but since I was the bigger person between us (and because we were hiding from the aforementioned beast of catastrophic proportion) I thought better of starting an argument.