Author's Note: This is set the night after the final battle against the spidrens at the end of First Test.
Disclaimer: If I were Tamora Pierce, the size of my bank account would be very different than it is now. That is all I have to say on the subject of my identity.
Severed
Seaver of Tasride woke up screaming. As usual, he wasn't screaming out loud, but rather shrilly and silently inside his own skull. For what must have been the hundredth time in his life, he wished that he had a tendency to scream aloud like everyone else did. He wished that his mouth didn't go as dry as parchment and his lips as immobile as a boulder every time he was terrified. He knew that many people—those who regarded screaming as a sign of weakness almost as humiliating as wetting your breeches—would have killed for the gift of naturally screaming silently.
Such beings didn't understand how awful it was to realize that your screams could last forever if you screamed inside your head because you could never run out of breath. They didn't recognize how the screams ringing in the empty cavern of your ears and clashing with the quiet of the outside world could make you insane if you weren't already. They didn't comprehend how nauseating it was to know that you could scream forever and nobody would ever be able to hear you.
What had awoken him wasn't a nightmare. Nightmares never plagued him, since in his dreams he always did everything right. In his dreams, he obeyed his father and never strayed into the dark forest. In his dreams, he was never clumsy enough to become ensnared in a spidren's web. In his dreams, his father never had to ride in and rescue him. In his dreams, he never had to scream silently as the men-at-arms dragged him away from his father's half-eaten corpse. In his dreams, his hands were never stained crimson with his father's blood. In his dreams, he had never been guilty of patricide.
In his dreams, everything was different, and, after this recent battle with the spidrens, Seaver had another dream to torment him. In this dream, he didn't lose his wits during the fight and need Kel to rescue him. In this dream, he didn't blame the spidrens for a crime he had committed.
Every single one of his most haunting dreams involved him doing everything right, which meant that his real nightmares entailed what he saw and what he remembered when he awakened. His nightmares weren't lies; they were truths he couldn't bear to face.
Looking around the dark cabin where all the pages who hadn't chosen to sleep outside were staying, Seaver's gaze fell on a spider web gleaming in the moonlight. When the pages had first arrived here, Lord Wyldon had made them clean the cabin out, and the only bugs that had survived the purge were the spiders, because spiders were known to eat mosquitoes and other banes of summer camps.
Of course, if it had been up to Seaver, every spider in the cabin would be dead. Spiders were monsters. Their whole lives were devoted to making beautiful, deceptive snares for the naïve and the unwary to become entrapped in, and their only sustenance was helpless insects. Besides, spidrens—the worst monsters of all—were horrid mutations of spiders.
No, the truth was that spidrens weren't the worst monsters. Seaver only told himself they were because he couldn't bear to acknowledge the fact that he was the worst monster. After all, what made spidrens so horrifying was the fact that they were part human. Spiders could be forgiven for being monsters since they never pretended to be otherwise, but, by being part human, the spidrens feigned some semblance of normalcy, and for that, they couldn't be forgiven.
That meant that Seaver was even worse than spidrens because he pretended to be a normal human. Every time he studied with his friends he acted as though he were a typical page boy. Every moment he lived a lie. Every breath he took he behaved as though he wasn't guilty of murder.
Oh, he had tried to atone for killing his father. He had made offerings to Mithros, begging the warrior god to speak in his father's favor at the Black God's court. He had spent hours on the frigid flagstones of his family's chapel until his knees were as cold and as hard as the floor, imploring the Black God to show mercy on his father's soul.
He had confessed his crime to Mithran priests, who were supposed to be concerned with justice, but they had never assigned him a penance harsh enough to wash away his guilt. They had just assigned him prayers to absolve him of filial disobedience rather than patricide. Then, they had always assured him that the gods had forgiven him, the priests and priestesses had forgiven him, and now the only obstacle on the road to his redemption was whether he could forgive himself.
Whenever a priest told him this, Seaver could feel himself drowning in frustration and remorse, as he alone seemed to understand the truth. That meant it was his obligation to explain it to everyone else, but he could never do it properly, and he knew he couldn't do it effectively because the priests had never cringed from him in revulsion. They had never eyed him with fear as though he were the monster he knew himself to be. Instead, they rested palms on his shoulder, adopted sympathetic expressions, and addressed him with more compassion than they ever displayed when he confessed to lying or cursing or some other frequent failing of his. All that meant Seaver hadn't described clearly how he had murdered his own father. After all, he was well aware that, if he had explained himself properly, the priests would never be able to forgive him, and that was why he could never forgive himself.
Maybe it would have been better if Kel and the others hadn't managed to save him. Perhaps if he had died in the same brutal manner in which he had killed his father some cosmic equation would balance out at last. Maybe death was his only true shot at redemption.
Even with those morbid ideas spiraling around inside his brain, though, he could not bring himself to wish that Kel and the others had failed to rescue him. After all, he was a loathsome coward who loved life too much to allow himself to die in the name of absolution.
Suddenly, he found himself musing upon his own name. It was such an odd one, and he had always hated its similarity to the verb "sever." However, the name Seaver with its resemblance to "sever" was the right name for him. He was severed from mercy, from grace, and from redemption. Seaver—there was a perfectly cutting name for a monster.
