Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Amy was doing the thing again. Brannik recognized it now, the way she tucked some part of herself inward when she thought he wasn’t watching.
But he was always watching—that hadn’t changed and never would—and this morning, as they broke camp and started up the glowing road with the cold thin air biting at their faces, he watched her tuck something small and quiet away behind her eyes.
She thought she hid it. She hid most things well. After all, she’d survived four years by hiding. But not from him.
“Amy.”
“Mm?” She glanced up, quick and light, arranging her face into something easy. Too easy.
He said nothing for a while. The road climbed.
The Aurelian map still hung faintly in the air overhead, its bright thread pulling them up and up between shoulders of grey stone, and every step of it felt like walking into the mouth of something he’d wanted so long he no longer trusted his own wanting.
He set that aside. Amy first. Amy was always first now; that had happened somewhere on a stolen ship and he’d stopped fighting it.
“You’re afraid,” he said at last.
She missed a step. Recovered. “I’m always a little afraid. Occupational hazard.”
“Of what’s up there.” He nodded at the thread of light, the mountain, the unknown waiting at the end of the road.
“You don’t know these people. Neither do I.
You don’t know what we’re walking into.” He reached back and caught her hand, wrapping it inside his own, and felt how small and cold it was and how it warmed the moment his hand closed around it.
“You don’t have to be afraid of that. Whatever’s up there.
Whatever they are.” He looked down at her, and he made his voice as certain as anything in him had ever been.
“I’ll stand between you and all of it. Always. You know that.”
Something crossed her face—and it wasn’t the relief he’d braced for. It was almost the opposite. A softness, and under the softness a grief he didn’t understand, gone before he could name it.
“I know,” she said. And she meant it. He could hear that she meant it, which was strange, because it didn’t fit the rest. She squeezed his hand. “I do know that. That’s not—” She stopped, and bit her lip. “That’s not what I’m afraid of, Brannik.”
“Then what.”
She looked up the road, then looked back at him.
He watched her gather herself the way she did before she made herself do a brave thing, the way she’d gathered herself before she first crossed a cell to clean the blood off his wrist, and his chest tightened, because whatever she was about to say, it was costing her.
“When you find them,” she said quietly. “When you find your people, and hopefully you find the answers you came all this way for. I need you to know that whatever you decide, I don’t want you to feel like you—”
The road turned around a shoulder of rock without any warning at all, and they walked straight out of the bare grey pass into a bowl of green.
He stopped so hard that she collided with his arm.
The valley lay below them, folded into the high mountains where no chart would ever look for it, warm and sheltered and alive.
Terraces stepped down the sides, green with growing things.
Water ran silver through it. Low buildings of pale stone stood amongst trees, their walls threaded with the same faint silver lines that had woken under his hand a day and a lifetime ago, and over all of it hung a shimmer in the air.
A great dome of something he couldn’t see except where the light bent through it, held the warmth in and the cold and the world out.
Precursor work. Aurelian work. A living settlement hidden deep in the mountains, and every instinct he owned told him it had been hidden for a long, long time.
They’re here. The thought came up through him like the hum through the stone. They’re actually here.
Then the guards came out of the rocks.
They came from three sides at once, silent and fast and well-taught.
He identified the training even as his body dropped into a ready crouch, one arm sweeping Amy behind him.
Six of them. Weapons up, the slim silver kind he’d only seen twice before and never wanted to see pointed at him.
He went utterly still. He’d learned long ago that stillness read as no threat to nervous people with weapons, and he made himself a mountain of it, and he kept her behind the mountain.
“Hold.” A tall male stepped forward. And his breath caught, because—
Because some of them looked like his mother.
Not her features. But her kind—slim and fine-boned and luminous, with skin that held light strangely and hair like pale metal and those same silver eyes, his eyes, a whole ring of them staring at him out of faces that resembled his mother.
He’d spent his whole life as the only silver-eyed person on every deck of every ship, the strange one, the wrong one.
And here stood several of them looking back at him with his own eyes and he didn’t have a word for what it did to him.
But the others weren’t like her at all. One had scaled skin along his jaw.
One stood nearly Brannik’s own height, broad and tusked, some warrior species crossed into the fine Aurelian line the way the Tuori had crossed into him.
Mixed. Like him. He wasn’t the only one of those either.
He’d thought he was the only one of those in the entire galaxy.
The tall one’s weapon didn’t waver, but his eyes moved over Brannik’s face and his horns and his size and stopped on his eyes. They stayed there.
“Silver,” the guard said, half to himself. He looked at the others, and something passed between them, quick and wordless. “He woke the outer markers. The valley door recognized him, or he’d not have found the road at all.” He turned back to Brannik. “Only our own can wake those.”
“I’m not here to take anything,” he said. He kept his voice low and even and his hands where they could all see them. “I came up the road it showed me. I didn’t know what waited at the end. I didn’t know—” His throat worked. “I didn’t know if there was anyone left to find.”
“Yet you looked.”
“All my life.”
The guard studied him, and the weapon lowered a fraction.
He didn’t put it down, but that small adjustment among people this careful was an entire conversation.
“You’ll forgive the greeting,” the tall one said.
“We are hidden for reasons. Those who look for us do not usually mean us well.” His eyes cut to Amy, half-shielded behind Brannik’s bulk.
“And you bring another kind we don’t know. ”
“She’s mine.” It came out flat and absolute, before he’d decided to say it, and she froze against his back. “She’s under my protection. You want to point those things, point them at me. Not her.”
A pause. Then the guard nodded with something that might have been respect.
“Understood,” he said. He lowered the weapon the rest of the way, and at some signal Brannik didn’t catch, the others followed suit.
“You’ll answer questions before you go down into the valley.
But you’ll answer them sitting down, like a guest, not standing here in the cold like a captive.
We are not the ones you’ve been running from. ”
They came down into the green.
The warmth of it hit him like a warm blanket as they passed under the shimmer of the dome, the warmth of soil and leaves and running water after two days of nothing but dust and cold stone.
Amy’s fingers found the back of his jacket and held on.
He reached back without looking and tugged her against his side, keeping her against him the whole way.
They brought him to a low open building near an orchard, all pale stone and silver-threaded walls.
They sat at a long table, and more of them gathered, drawn by word of the stranger with the silver eyes who’d woken the map.
They looked at him. He looked at them. He saw his own eyes, over and over, in face after face, and every one of them was a small blow he didn’t know how to defend against.
An older male who introduced himself as Ishala sat across from him with his hands folded. No one announced him as their leader. They didn’t need to. The others deferred to him in a hundred small ways he recognized immediately.
Ishala asked the questions Brannik had known were coming.
Where had he come from? How had he found the outer road?
Who else knew of it? Who had followed him?
He answered the questions honestly, keeping back nothing that mattered.
He told them about the port and the priest and the Grorn and the word Key.
At that word a stir went through the gathered Aurelians, a ripple of alarm carefully mastered, and Ishala’s folded hands tightened.
He marked it but didn’t ask any additional questions.
Not yet. He’d come too far to spend his welcome in the first hour.
“You’ve told us how you came,” Ishala said at last. “You haven’t told us why. A male doesn’t spend his life looking for a hidden people out of idle curiosity.”
And now, at last.
“My mother was Aurelian,” he said, and his steady voice suddenly cracked.
“A Tuori warrior found her, and loved her, and she stayed, and I was born.” He set his huge scarred hands flat on the pale table to keep them still.
“She carried a sadness, always, as if some part of her was somewhere else. And when I was eleven, she went away. To find what she’d lost, perhaps.
Her people. This.” He looked up, and swept the ring of silver eyes with his own.
“She never came back. My father went after her and never came back either. I’ve spent twenty-five years walking every road there is, looking for her.
For any of you.” He drew a breath that shook. “Her name was Serei.”
The silence that came down over the table was not the silence of people who had never heard the name.
He’d spent his life reading the small tells people thought they hid, and he saw their reaction to the name, even though they tried to conceal it.
A female near the wall even pressed her fingers to her mouth.
They knew. He was on his feet before he realized he’d moved, the bench scraping back.
Three of the guards reached towards their weapons and stilled at Ishala’s raised palm.
“You know her.” It came out of him like a growl, all his careful control gone in a single heartbeat. “You know her name. I saw it. Tell me. Is she—”
“Sit.” Ishala didn’t raise his voice, but his authority was clear. “Please. Sit down, friend. There are things that must be said carefully, and things that are not mine to say. Let me have tea brought. Let us—”
“Tea.” The word left his lips like a curse.
Twenty-five years. Every empty road, every dead port, every trail that frayed to nothing in his hands, and every night he’d told himself he’d stopped hoping and lied.
And now they sat him at a table and offered him tea.
“I’ve traveled half the galaxy to find this table and you would put a cup in my hand and change the subject. Where is she?”
A small, warm hand closed on his arm.
“Brannik.” She’d risen with him, and now she stood at his side.
She didn’t pull him down or tell him to be calm, but she stood there with her hand on his arm and her steady hazel eyes on his face.
“Look at them,” she said quietly. “They’re not saying no.
Do you hear me? Nobody at this table has said no.
” Her fingers tightened on his arm. “Let them do it their way. Whatever it is, they’re afraid of it for you.
Let them bring the tea. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. Sit down with me.”
The great wave of frustration broke and drew back.
Not completely gone, but calm enough that he could stand in it now, with her hand anchoring him.
He looked down at her, at the female who had crossed a cell to touch a chained monster and hadn’t flinched since.
Then he lowered himself back onto the bench, and she sat beside him.
She kept her hand on his arm, and he let her, in front of all of them.
He let them see exactly how much he needed it.
“Forgive me,” he said roughly to Ishala.
“There’s nothing to forgive.” The Aurelian’s voice had gentled.
His eyes moved between Brannik and Amy, and something in them grew solemn.
“You have come a long, hard way. And you have named a name that—” He stopped.
He glanced involuntarily towards the wide doorway that opened onto the green terraces climbing down into the warm heart of the valley.
As if he couldn’t help it. As if the name had turned all their eyes the same direction.
He followed the look.
There was movement in the doorway. A figure, backlit against the green, small and slight and hesitating at the threshold before she stepped inside.
An older Aurelian female, luminous even in age, her pale hair gone paler still, her fine-boned face lined with the quarter century he hadn’t been there for. And her eyes.
His eyes.
She saw him. She stopped as if she’d walked into a wall.
Every drop of color drained out of her face between one breath and the next.
Her hand rose, trembling, to press against her chest. Her mouth tried to say something and nothing emerged.
But then the word came, cracked and disbelieving.
One word. His name, the name only she had ever said in that particular way, the way that disarmed him in a single instant and left an eleven-year-old boy standing there in his place.
“Brannik?”