Chapter 21
Valen
Icome down to the fire an hour after we get back. I can smell Wyatt’s cooking from the top of the yard.
They took dinner outside tonight. It’s warm enough that nobody wanted to be in the lodge, so they carried it out to the pit at the west edge and stayed.
Logs and camp chairs the whole way around, most of them full.
Half the pack is still holding a plate. Two kids are running the gap between the chairs and the woodpile.
They belong to the two families that came in this month.
The fire is bigger than it needs to be for cooking.
Somebody built it up when word got around that we were back.
I take a log at the outer edge where the light stops. The fire is warm on my left, behind me the yard runs out into the dark, he treeline sits about thirty feet past that. Old habits - from here I can see all of it and nobody gets behind me.
Dane stands up, Nova with him. The talk around the fire drops off without either of them asking.
“Valen,” Dane says. “Tell them what you brought home.”
Every face at that fire comes around to me, I’ve been off since the North Range.
It changed nothing. There’s been something else in me since I had my hand on that stone.
I’ve had the whole walk down and the evening to put a name on it.
Nothing fits. So, it’s the trip. I get up and take the stone out of my pack.
“We got it,” I say. “It was set into the rock under the oldest part of their range. Nyxiana read the layers underneath it. One is gone, cut out and sealed over, then laid back down, a rock on top.”
I put it on the flat stone at the edge of the fire where they can all see it. “It’s the same layer Drakoria is missing,” I tell them, then sit down again.
Lyanna has the Drakoria stone with her. She unwraps it, takes the wards off, sets it down beside the one I brought back. Nyxiana picks up both halves, turns them until the broken faces line up, puts them together. They fit.
A wolf on the near log stands up to see it. Two more stand up behind him. Dane has his arms crossed. He’s looking at the two halves.
“It’s one stone,” she says. She holds the halves up where everyone can see them. “There’s more of it missing than this. Two realms so far. Somebody cut the same layer out of both of them on purpose.”
I watch her hands. Then I make myself look at the stones instead.
Across the fire Kari closes her right hand, opens it again and puts it face down on her knee.
Rafe is looking at Dane and doesn’t see her do it.
I see. It’s not my business. Nyxiana crosses the fire to Kari and turns her right hand over.
She holds it and looks at her palm for a long time.
“Doria,” she says. “It moved when the stone came home. It’s reading Doria.”
“Then Doria’s next.” Dane doesn’t sit down. He starts handing out the work instead, Nova on supply, Ansel on moving the perimeter rotation up a day. Then he looks over at me.
“We keep turning up places Faelan worked that we never knew about,” he says. “Three more this week. All of them old. He was in this territory a lot longer than we thought he was. I want your read on the approach before you two go.”
“You’ll have it tonight,” I say.
Dane sits down. The talk comes back up around the fire.
Somebody laughs on the far side. A woman slides down the log to make room for her mate who puts his boots up on the stones.
Wyatt comes around with what’s left in the pot.
Plates go up to meet him the whole way around.
Rafe crosses to my end of the fire with two plates and sets one down on the log beside me.
“You haven’t eaten,” he says.
“No.”
He sits down with the other plate on his knee and starts in on it. He doesn’t ask me anything for a while. Then, “How far north were you?”
“Past the main range.”
“That’s not my end of it.” He works at his food. “Mine’s the main range. There’s nothing up there to go back to now.”
I don’t say anything.
“Yours is still standing, though.”
“It is,” I say.
“Then you’ve got more than I do.” He tips his fork at the fire. “I quit trying to get mine back a couple of months ago. This is the one that counts.”
I pick up the plate. “It does,” I say. He lets that go, doesn’t ask me anything else about it.
“Eat that before it’s cold,” he says before getting up, his hand on my shoulder on the way past. He goes back to Kari.
She moves over on the log to give him room, says something to him, laughs at it.
She leans into his side, he puts an arm around her leaves it there.
I eat what’s on the plate because Rafe brought it.
I set it down on the log beside me, put my hand on the edge of the wood and hold on.
Normally I can stop thinking about a thing when I want to.
Not tonight. On that rock she came up onto her toes and stopped an inch off my mouth.
Then put a step of rock between us and told me it wasn’t me.
I’ve been handed that answer my entire life and it’s never kept me awake.
I know she’s looking at me before I look up - she’s on the far side of the fire with Lyanna.
When I look up she doesn’t take her eyes off me.
Her hair is down, the firelight turning it orange down the side she has toward it, the same light is in her eyes, violet caught up in the silver.
I don’t look away, neither does she. Nobody at this fire knows what that crossing did to me except her.
She hasn’t said a word about it to anyone. She won’t.
Twenty people between us. Six steps around the near side of the fire. I counted them an hour ago. I don’t take them. Staying on this log is harder than the causeway was. She looks back at Lyanna, I put my eyes on the fire. The treeline is right behind me, I stand up and turn toward the dark.
“Valen.” It’s Nova, from the other side of the fire. She hasn’t stood up.
“You’re taking her into his country,” she says.
“Yes.”
“So, tell me what he does about it.”
“Nothing, at first,” I say. “He’s been ahead of us in every realm we’ve been to. He’s watching us, waiting. He stays out of our way until he knows what we’ve got.”
“That’s what I thought.” She points her fork at my log. “Sit down. What else?”
I look at the dark once then sit back down. “When he does move, it won’t be inside a court,” I say. “Too many people watching in a room like that. He’ll wait until we’re between places.”
“Then don’t be between places,” she says.
“That’s the plan.”
She nods once and goes back to her plate.
Somebody brings a guitar out, tunes it for a while, then starts something slow.
Two or three voices come in on it. More come after them, everybody here knows this one.
People set their plates down in the dirt.
Somebody hauls the two kids off the woodpile and puts them on a lap.
A woman leans into her mate, he takes her weight without looking at her.
This is the part I’ve never stayed for. I do the work then I’m gone before the fire gets to it.
I keep my hands on my knees, my eyes on the fire.
The heat is on my left side and the cool air is on my right.
The song goes around twice. I don’t know the words, I keep hearing the wind off that rock up north.
Mateo comes around and sits down on the end of my log.
“I gave you a hard time when you first came around here,” he says. “That was me being an ass about it.”
“It’s done.”
He takes that. “How bad is it up there?”
“Cold country. Hard walking.”
“That’s it?” He asks
“That’s it.”
He gives it a second. I leave it there. He nods and goes back to his own seat.
Out past the firelight Ansel stands where the yard ends, back to us.
He’s watching the trees. I didn’t hear him get up off the log to go out there.
Across the fire Evren says something to Evie.
She laughs at him, when he laughs back a thin line of smoke comes out of his mouth.
He doesn’t notice it and nobody else is looking.
I’ve got no idea what makes smoke come out of a man like that.
I leave it alone. Nyxiana comes around the fire and sits down on the log next to me.
Close up, the fire has put color back in her face.
Her hair is loose and there’s a pine needle caught in it from the walk down through the trees.
“You haven’t moved in an hour,” she says.
“No.”
“That’s new,” she says.
I let that go by. “When are you feeding?” I ask.
“Tomorrow.”
“Before Doria.”
“I said tomorrow.”
“Say the time,” I tell her and she looks at me for a second before answering “Early. First light.”
“Good.”
She doesn’t get up, doesn’t move down the log either. “Now you,” she says.
“What about me?”
“You’re still up there.”
I don’t answer that. “That’s not an answer either,” she says.
“No,” I say. She stops there. “I’m not going to make you talk about it tonight,” she says. “Tomorrow I will.”
“I know you will,” I reply. She stays where she is. Whoever has the guitar starts another one. Nobody comes over to us. The fire burns down some. I’m still on the log.