Chapter Twenty-Nine Kian
We trudge through the city toward my family, slowly. Adela is not doing well. Now that her anger has seeped away, so has all her energy. She keeps stumbling over the cobblestones, and after about twenty minutes of walking, she begins to lean on me heavily.
I don’t mind. I like the weight of her against my body, but her steps grow sluggish and her breathing shallower and faster. She shivers, and then her teeth begin to chatter. The air is cool, but not cold enough to cause these reactions.
She needs to rest, both her body and her mind.
I hurry toward home, trying not to look too closely at how I feel about telling her the truth of who I am.
Or at least part of it. My mind spins through what I can keep hidden and what I’ll have to reveal.
Obviously if she discovers I come from a family of smugglers, she’ll have to know I’m not fully the servant of the Huntress I pretend to be, but she doesn’t need to know anything beyond that.
She doesn’t have to know about my desire to destabilize the order.
Or that I’m responsible for the destroyed skulls. Not now. Not ever.
“Come, Goddess.” I kiss the top of her head and turn down the next alley. It is grubby and poorly lit, with debris in the corners of the street and missing cobblestones. Rats or mice or some sorts of small rodents skitter out from underfoot.
“We’ve turned the wrong way.” She points to the temple square, now off to our right. The belfry of the Huntress peeks out over the Insborough rooftops.
“Shhh, Goddess.” I wrap an arm around her and tuck her head into my shoulder. “We’re almost there. Then you can rest, and we’ll figure out the next steps.”
She follows, meek and quiet. She’s less terrifying when she’s bringing down entire buildings with nothing but her will.
I am not sure what is more surprising for Aunt Ujvala to find on her doorstep, her nephew in his Huntress regalia and phoenix skull or the sniffling woman in matching garments on his arm.
“Hello, Kian,” she says in her unflinching way. Because, of course, nothing ruffles my aunt. At least, nothing that she’ll admit to. “Adela.”
Adela blinks at her. “Have we met?”
“We have not. But it’s my business to know things about people.”
Unnecessarily cryptic. Aunt Ujvala ignores my look and welcomes us in. If Adela were feeling well, she’d instantly be suspicious of that statement. But she’s too tired to take it in.
While Aunt Ujvala goes to the kitchens to fetch sustenance, I take Adela to the sitting room and get her in a chair next to the fire.
I remove the phoenix skulls from our faces and set them on a small mahogany side table, then gather a pile of woven blankets from their stand in the corner and wrap her up.
One around her shoulders, one over her head and around her neck, two around her legs and feet.
I tuck them in tight until she looks like a giant, wool-wrapped caterpillar.
Slowly, she stops shivering. Pink blooms in her cheeks.
When Aunt Ujvala comes in with a white peony tea and sweets, I free Adela from some of my overexuberant tucking.
Adela shoves a sesame shortbread into her mouth and holds the mug of tea up to her face, inhaling the steam like she always does to comfort herself.
Though she still looks haunted, slivers of her personality begin to return.
Particularly her inquisitiveness. She looks around the room, soaking in the shelves of knickknacks.
Aunt Ujvala is a collector. There is art in various styles, paintings and foreign-looking jewelry, dried flowers from far-off places, and jars of lotions made with ingredients even I’ve never heard of.
Her eyes snag on a small glass bowl tucked into a corner beside embossed, leather-covered books and a very old-looking phallic statue—a bowl holding more of the red stones Aunt Ujvala gave me to mark the path into the valley.
No.
She stands, shimmying out of the blankets still wrapped around her.
“Adela, would you like a scone?” I ask, trying to catch her attention. “I think they’re chocolate and orange.”
I’m not quite ready to tell her who we are.
I wanted to tell her in the morning, after she got a night’s sleep and ate a hearty breakfast. When she wasn’t so raw, so emotional, so dangerous.
Because the moment she connects these stones to the ones she found in the forest, she’ll know. And I’m not sure what she’d do next.
She walks over to the shelves.
I look to Aunt Ujvala for help, but she’s knitting, doggedly not meeting my glare.
Adela picks up a stone and rubs it between her thumb and finger. She opens her mouth to ask about then, but Ivo comes bounding in.
I close my eyes in relief. He’ll distract her, surely. She’s beautiful and he’s a sixteen-year-old boy. He goes immediately to her and introduces himself. “I came to ask Kian to play dupe the dud with us. Would you like to join?”
“Ooh, I’ve heard of that game. Could be fun,” she says earnestly. She holds up one of the stones to Ivo and says, “But first, what are these?”
I watch it all as if she were one of the furious little jackalopes bent on impaling me for daring to step into their territory. I try to catch his attention, to will him silent or, better yet, away. It’s not that I don’t want her to know. Just not yet. And not through Ivo.
“Ivo,” I say when my silent, exaggerated looks go ignored.
He doesn’t even see them. He’s too busy smiling at Adela, whose full attention is on him.
I’ve been a smitten sixteen-year-old boy, full of lust and hope.
He’s not listening to his tiresome older cousin.
Ivo doesn’t even know I exist. Or maybe he thinks she already knows who we are.
After all, it’s not like we invite random strangers into our home, which is grander than any house in this neighborhood should be.
“Oh, those are just glass markers we use to denote paths sometimes when we go on runs,” he says. “Ready?”
She continues smiling at him, but it’s a little too frozen, not meeting her eyes.
“Give me a few moments, and I’ll do my best to join you.”
It’s not our link through the phoenix that lets me know her thoughts and feelings.
I can see them on her face as she connects the small pile of red stones beside her in the forest, to these.
And that I told her I knew people who could get us back into the valley.
She’s working through what it means, and it’s only a matter of moments before she figures it out.
I’m not ready. To explain myself. And she’s not ready to hear. We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t take down the whole house around us, like she did to the lopsided building.
“Come join when you can!” Ivo bops out of the room.
Adela turns around. She does not look at me, or Aunt Ujvala. Even I can see she’s dropping stitches, waiting to see if Adela is as astute as suspected.
Unfortunately, she is all of that and more.
“Runs,” she says to herself as she takes in the large connecting doors, the shelves full of unusual artifacts and books, my aunt in dark, close-fitting clothing. “These are the people who can help get the foal back home. You’re smugglers.”
“Clever girl.” There is clear admiration in Aunt Ujvala’s voice.
“And you”—she points at me and holds up a stone—“led them into the valley on your initiation night, marking the safe path in.”
I hold my breath, waiting for the fallout, hoping she won’t hate me for bringing outsiders into her precious valley and potentially jeopardizing the creatures her community is called to protect. But then she laughs and claps her hands, like a delighted child.
She turns to Aunt Ujvala. “You used to be the ones who brought us books and sweets when I was little! But why did you need Kian to give you the path back into the valley if you already had it?”
“Only two of us knew the path.” Aunt Ujvala tucks away her knitting and begins to tidy up the mugs and plates. She looks at me. “And we lost it when we lost them.”
“Your parents?” Adela looks at me with a pity I both hate and want to lean into. I don’t want her pity. I want her admiration, her adoration. Her love.
I nod.
“We’re actually going back to the valley tonight. If you’d like us to take anything with us?” Aunt Ujvala says.
Adela’s eyes gleam. “There is something I’d like you to take back to the valley, actually. What do you know about smuggling creatures?”
Ivo’s going to be crushed she won’t be joining him for that game tonight.
If ever there was someone born to be a smuggler, apparently it is Adela.
She explains to us what she’d like to do and how almost immediately. She and I will return to the temple and steal the alicorn from the stables. Then Aunt Ujvala will lead her and the alicorn back to the valley.
“I’ll come with you,” I say.
She grunts a half-hearted agreement and turns back to planning with my aunt.
My aunt suggests she and my Uncle Jamie will meet us at the edge of the temple square with the wagon, and we’ll hide her and the foal in the back just like we do any other illicit good.
I’m allowed follow behind on foot to protect them both and make any necessary distractions.
“Jamie won’t go into the valley,” Aunt Ujvala says. “None of the others will, after Ivo’s stories about the dragon and his jackalope wounds.”
Adela nods and gestures to our wet, dirty novitiate robes. “Do you have clothing I can change into that’ll help me blend in a bit better?”
Happy to finally contribute something, I hop up. “I do!” I don’t have a lot of options, but I have some nondescript pants and tunics that I keep here, just in case I need to run away quickly from the temple.
I return to them talking through the details of timing and paths through the city where either we’ll be totally unnoticed or the inhabitants won’t rat us out to any order members who come asking questions.
“What about our skulls?” I ask, pointing to where I’ve set the two phoenix skulls.
This makes them both pause.