may sunflowers grow on their graves

In this, the House is generous too. Unsparing. Blood flows freely—spilled on tiled floors and terracotta roofs, enough to fill the emptied casks in the villa's cellar. The boy need not reach maturation to gain an inheritance that served as his baptismal waters. He gives his own in offering, replenishing a well that will never run dry.

It is not only blood the House gifts. The boy feels the weight of his inheritance, though he has not yet learned to bear its ungainly form: his first taste of the intangible. He sags beneath it like the dockhands at the harbor bow beneath great crates bearing all the riches of merchant princes who turn their backs to the labor that fuels their wealth. One day, he too will sign a ledger, stamp his seal, averting his eyes. His back will be strong then from so many days beneath this weight. When the Crows fly on his command, he will not shirk to see the carrion they return to the nest as tribute. He will take their obeisance well, knowing it was always his to take.

There is nothing in this boy's world that is not an inheritance. The villa's towering walls and wrought iron gates that keep him safe from those who would seek to plunder these gifts, the spun silk sheets that cocoon him in the dark, even the goose-feather pillow that cups a should-be sleeping head: they belong to the House, but he understands now that there is no line of demarcation where it ends and he begins.

The boy is young still, but his mind has run ahead of a body too slow to follow. If all contained within these walls is his, he thinks, what truly does that entail? His grandmother will not live forever; she has already lived longer than any he knows, wearing wrinkles like the rings of a severed branch of a towering pine, evidence of survival against all that would see it cut down. When she is gone, what of hers will be his to carry? A stoic disposition? A clever mind? A tongue that cuts so seamlessly to the quick? Or perhaps it will be her cruelty, tempered by duty, whittled into a duller but no less ruthless impulse. They are inheritances too, he thinks, no less real than the tapestries covering the bloodstains on the east wing walls.

Summer nights make for fitful sleep. A gentle cross breeze turns a smothering into a sweltering, but the boy is not allowed even that modicum of relief. Open windows are a luxury afforded only to daylight hours when wits are sharp and blades drawn. At night, the villa seals itself from the world, a mausoleum as effective at keeping ghosts in as grave robbers out. The boy has never slept soundly, but nights like these rob him of the will to even try.

There is a familiar rhythm to his nighttime wandering, one the villa knows. When the boy creeps into the kitchen there is a glass of warm milk waiting for him beside a plate of sweet fried bread. The servants know better than to sit with the boy where his grandmother cannot see, and so they leave their offering as one leaves cream for the cat that hides in the shrubbery.

He sips his milk and chews on his bread in solitude, his most constant companion in his cousin's absence. There is no loneliness to solitude, not anymore, not when he has learned to listen for the thrumming beat of the villa's heart. It is always there, even in these desolate hours, for those that know how to listen. When his glass sits empty he creeps through the halls, careful to press his lithe weight only onto the balls of his feet. It is a sort of game he has made for himself, a test of his grandmother's lessons to go unnoticed. He thinks she would be proud of his performance, though it is difficult to say. His grandmother is an impervious woman. Some secrets he keeps to himself.

The boy goes in search of the heart.

He knows just where to look. He has found it many times before, following its arrhythmic beat to his grandmother's favored study. In winter its fireplace roars at all hours of the day, engulfing rows of books and her great mahogany desk in an orange glow. In summer, it is as dark and lifeless as the rest of the house. No, not lifeless. Never lifeless. Because here he finds the heart.

The heart does not favor warm milk and sweet bread. It favors strong wine and pipe tobacco, that which dulls as it fortifies, smoothing over sharp edges so adept at cutting through thrice-scarred skin. The heart is often here when the boy is, and he does not know if this is coincidence or some sign it has already begun to endow this particular inheritance.

Sometimes, when it is not here, the boy goes in search of it. It is easy to find; the heart has lungs—good lungs, powerful lungs, lungs that cry out in the night. On those nights, the heart hides behind closed bedroom doors, but if he is patient, if he stays in shadow, he sees it retreat to the study where it takes up the wine once more. Often, he tires before the heart, creeping back to his room to try and find the sleep that so easily takes his softly snoring cousin. When he sees the heart the next day, red-eyed and drawn and still smelling of sweet smoke, he wonders if it tires too but cannot face whatever nighttime visitor prompts those cries.

The boy has bad dreams. He thinks the heart must too. He wonders if they are the same, or if different fears haunt it, the dream world morphed from refuge to torture. After all, the heart is fearless, but it has much to grieve. The boy has heard the stories in whisperings, he has seen the evidence in names etched in stone, but he was not there. He does not remember. A gift, to be sure. That is what the others tell him.

The House has many gifts.

The boy need not remember, for memory serves as inheritance too. Preserved like dried cuttings, crushed and malformed through the telling, he will inherit them all, one by one, a garden of grief for him to tend. He will plant his own in time, twisted, poisonous things, and they will seep their grief into the soil on which he lays his head each night. From that fertile ground, new nightmares will be born, great clawed things with glowing eyes and hungry mouths. And he too will find he has lungs with which to cry out, that the wine may not be to his liking but strong coffee is.

Years from now, when he is a man and not a boy, he will understand what these nightmares are.