Tristan shook Isa awake just after dawn. His eyes were luminous in the half-light, and he moved with purpose, his resolve undulled by sleep. Isa blinked at him.
"Isa, get up! I figured out what we need!" His whisper was earnest and alive with excitement.
She sat on the edge of the bed, and regarded him sleepy-eyed. "And what might that be?"
"We need armour."
"I'm sorry?"
Midas looked dolefully up at Isa from the floor, as though to suggest he'd already tried talking Tristan out of this. But the boy would not be swayed.
"Remember yesterday, when we were walking around looking for hiding spots in the main building? We passed a bunch of trophy cases."
"Yes."
"And there was one with weapons and armour in it. If we have armour and swords and shields and stuff, maybe Stagger will run away scared. Maybe we won't even have to fight him!"
Isa shook her head. She knew the display case Tristan was talking about.
"Those weapons aren't real, buddy. The theatre department put on Julius Caesar last year."
He looked at her uncomprehendingly. Because he was five, or maybe eight.
"It's a play about Roman soldiers. The armour and the weapons and stuff are props built to make the story seem real. They're made of wood and plastic and tin and stuff."
Tristan frowned, and seemed to consider this for a moment. "Do you think Stagger is smart enough to know the difference?"
Isa sighed. "I don't know. But I do know that those weapons won't protect us if it does come down to a real fight. To be honest, I don't know that real weapons would help us against Stagger. We don't even know what he is."
"I do."
She looked at him sharply. "Oh?"
Tristan nodded solemnly. "He's a monster that wants to hurt us."
Isa nodded.
Tristan appeared undeterred by her lack of enthusiasm. "Even if it's not real, it'll make us feel brave, Isa. And maybe if we feel brave, we can come up with an escape plan. Can we please just go and look at them again? I've never had a sword before." He grabbed at her hand, and squeezed it hard.
Isa sighed and rubbed her eyes. She had no better plan, after all. If they were really intending to take on Stagger (an idea she found still more laughable in the light of day), they ought to be armed with something besides a golden retriever. She scowled the scowl of the recently-awoken, but it was mostly for effect.
"Maybe after I've gotten some food into you. When we've eaten something in the kitchen, we'll take the long way around and walk by the display cases. No promises on the sword, Tristan."
***
Tristan and Midas fairly capered up to the Dining Hall at her side, stopping briefly to let Midas relieve himself against the enormous oak that stood on one side of the common. While he waited, Tristan stood gazing up at the branches above his head, regarding the dancing leaves and blue sky with the same wonderment with which he seemed to behold everything. She cursed under her breath. Who would abandon such a child? Who would abandon any child?
For he had been abandoned, as surely as she had. He must have been. He was young and had obviously been traumatized into memory loss by whatever had happened to him in the woods, but the reality was that he, too, had simply been left.
Midas finished his business, and sauntered back over to her side. Tristan continued to look up at the tree, transfixed. Absently, Isa reached down to scratch Midas's back, and her fingers grazed the rope collar that still encircled his head. She frowned down at it. Try as she might, she had been unable to get it off, even with Tristan's help. The rope was thick and coarse, and had proved all but indestructible. They'd managed to loosen it up, at least - it dangled further down Midas's body now, and he would trip over it every now and then. Other than this, the dog seemed not to notice it.
She looked back at the boy. The curve of his little nose reminded her of Malcolm's. She felt nearly strangled by her grief sometimes, still. At odd moments, and even when nothing around should have reminded her of her brother, it was like his memory snuck up behind and wrapped its arms around her chest, squeezing her breathless.
There were still pictures of him all over their house. A childhood picture of him standing astride the track, sweaty and beaming after a race. A picture of him on his fifteenth birthday, their father smiling tightly beside him, a stiff arm propped on his son's shoulder. A neighbour had taken a picture of Malcolm on stage performing in his short-lived band; their mother had hung it in the upstairs hall against their father's strenuous objections. Mr Piper disliked music on principle, and he particularly disliked that playing it seemed to require his son to have unruly hair. To his intense relief, Malcolm had given up the guitar three months later, after he discovered that his band mates were planning to walk out on him to form their own band. He'd gotten too good, and they were jealous of his skill. It was just as well, he'd told her: those bastards had been stealing from his wallet whenever he'd left the room. Ungrateful pieces of shit.
There were very few pictures of Isa in the Piper home. Isa wasn't photogenic. Her mother had first informed her of this when she was eight, and had taught her a number of tricks to "offset her weak chin" and widen her eyes that were "too small and squinty for a round face." From then on, anytime a picture was taken of her, Isa's mother would be somewhere in the background shouting "Open up your eyes, Isadora!" At birthday parties, during Christmas family gatherings, even at the summerhouse, the beach, or the park. "Open up your eyes, Isadora!" And Isa would obediently open her eyes as wide as they would stretch. And it became so normal to see herself looking like a startled ferret in every photograph that she kept up the practice of widening her eyes whenever there was a camera around, long after her mother had given up shouting the instruction.
*****
The trophy case was up against the wall in the theatre foyer. The two mannequins inside stood severe and unseeing, as though awaiting inspection. The expressionless, featureless alabaster dolls had always creeped her out a little, though she never would have admitted this to Tristan. One was draped in a toga and sporting a laurel wreath; the other wore a helmet, a faux silver beast-plate, a scarlet cape, and a wooden sword at his belt. Another helmet lay on the ground at their feet, along with a few more weapons and a shield, which was propped up against the back of the case.
As they approached, Tristan seemed to be drawn in by an invisible magnet - he ran ahead, and pressed his nose up against the glass, smudging it. As Isa drew level with him, he exhaled with excitement.
"That one!" He pointed at the wooden sword worn at the mannequin's belt.
She'd already known she was going to get it for him, but even she was surprised when, without hesitating for even the length of a breath, she grabbed one of the heavy metal-legged chairs that were stacked against the wall. It was becoming painfully clear who was in charge.
"Stand back, Tristan. Hold Midas."
Tristan retreated several feet, grasping Midas's rope. Before she could change her mind, Isa had hoisted the chair and rammed it into the glass with all her strength, keeping her face turned away. The glass cracked on the first attempt, and shattered on the second. She threw the chair to one side, reached into the case, and wordlessly pilfered the wooden sword, shield and helmet from the centurion mannequin. As an afterthought, she also stripped him of his thick velvet cape -- it might be useful somehow. She took the sword over to Tristan, and handed it to him; the look of worship on his face was enough to make her gesture worthwhile. He took it from her as though it were a delicate and lovely thing, and held it up to examine it more closely. Someone had painted the blade grey, and the helm a rich marigold yellow.
Folding the cape over her arm, Isa looked down and realized that she'd been cut. The scratch on her elbow was insignificant, but a drop or two of blood had blotted onto the cape before she could shift it.
Across the theatre foyer, a delighted Tristan began taking some practice swings through the air with the sword. Midas looked on, bemused. Isa looked down at the shield in her hand, and a thought came to her, unbidden - Daphne had done the props for Julius Caesar the year before. She ran her fingers over the surface of the shield, and determined she would keep it.
*****
They'd buried Malcolm on a day in early January, and the official version of events was that he'd met with a tragic accident.
As it was told, the family had gathered at the summerhouse for Christmas, and towards the end of the visit Malcolm had gone for a solitary walk. He'd gotten careless on the rocky cliff wall that looked out onto the lake. He'd slipped off the edge, cracking his head on the way down: a quick, relatively painless death. He hadn't suffered - hadn't even had time to cry out. And so it had been hours and hours until they found him, hours of calling his name and pacing up and down the beach and through the woods abutting the cliff face and shoreline. The lake was much too large to freeze, and when he had at last been spotted by a neighbour, Malcolm Piper had been peacefully floating just a few feet from shore.
The neighbour was a paramedic, and so he had immediately recognized that the boy was long past help. Even so, he and his wife had hastily waded knee-deep into the frigid water, towed Malcolm out by his boots, and laid him out on a blanket on the veranda of their own cottage. Another neighbour had flagged down his parents, whom they'd seen walking the icy waterline a little further down the shore. The three family members were on the scene within moments, the parents silent and tight-lipped in their devastation. The young man's little sister, on the other hand, had balled herself up by his feet and shrieked, then sobbed. So focused were they on their own grief that neither parent moved to hold her - she cried until she had nothing left, remaining at her brother's feet until he was taken away. They were clearly so close, and it was such a waste - a promising, handsome young man from a good family and an old one.
The reality, of course, had been somewhat different.
Isa and her parents were nowhere near the summerhouse when Malcolm was found. It had been some years since they'd gathered anywhere for Christmas. In the last weeks of his life, Malcolm had continued to behave erratically, often disappearing for hours and returning unobserved in the early hours of the morning. When they thought about it at all, Isa's parents had continued to dismiss this as the normal wanderings of a teenage boy; from a young age, Isa had simply accepted that Malcolm was extended a line of family credit for which she didn't qualify. He was, quite simply, allowed and expected to test the boundaries of their shared gilded cage, to rattle the bars a bit. His increasingly eccentric habits became rather harder to ignore, however, as the weeks passed.
On the Saturday morning before his death, as their mother sat chatting with friends in the kitchen, Isa had observed her brother entering the house looking - no other word presented itself - bedraggled. He looked as though he had army-crawled through a wet cornfield, then rolled back in the other direction: grass in his hair, mud caking his clothes, a wet, earthy smell clinging to him. There were few places - if any - in the city where he could have gotten into such a state. Such a sight was he that their mother had stilled in mid coffee-sip, horrified fascination suddenly decorating the carefully preserved smoothness of her face. Her friends had stared slack-jawed, and it was difficult to blame them - Malcolm's ear was bleeding, and his eyes were bloodshot and dull. He seemed hardly to see them; he spoke not a word, but simply mounted the stairs and disappeared in the direction of his bedroom.
Their father had raged at him later, distressed not so much by his son's condition as by his wife's social embarrassment. Malcolm had silently borne the taunts and eventual blows, and then simply left when he grew tired of them, leaving his father staring stupidly at his son's retreating back.
In truth it had been well over a day before Malcolm had been found, his body broken on the shoreline below the cliffs. The lake area was sparsely populated at that time of year, and no one was looking for her brother, not yet. It made no sense that he'd been climbing the cliff wall - he wasn't dressed for it, and it was December. He'd clearly jumped or been pushed over the edge, but the police concluded jumping was far more likely, given the angle of the fall. After an autopsy, his body had been delivered directly to a funeral home.
It was the funeral director who approached Isa while her parents were otherwise occupied, though she recalled the interaction only through a film of exhaustion and sorrow. Without preamble, he'd pressed something into her hand, and closed her fingers around it.
"We found these in his pocket, Miss. The police have already had a look at them, of course. I think they must be yours?"
She'd retreated to the bathroom to examine the objects: a tiny gold chickadee pin, and a balled-up piece of paper. Heart in her mouth, she opened up the note.
At the top of the paper, she saw her own name scrawled in Malcolm's handwriting. The rest of the page was filled with senseless scribbles, each painful stroke filled with the anguish of a last message her brother had never been able to deliver.