Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The ship came down through the pale morning like a knife looking for a place to strike, and Brannik held himself so still against the cold rock that even his breath went silent.
Amy lay pressed to his side in the crevice they’d chosen, a fold in the mountain’s shoulder that looked down over the whole dead valley.
He’d wanted her deeper in the enclave. He’d wanted a hundred things last night that she’d overruled one by one with that quiet maddening certainty, and every one of them she’d been right about.
He was still learning to swallow how much he liked being wrong.
“There,” she breathed. Not pointing. She’d told them that too, during the long night. No sudden movement because movement is what they see first. Stillness is the lie they never question. “See how he’s coming down slowly? He’s being careful. He’s not sure yet.”
He saw. Below them the descending vessel hung on its thrusters over the abandoned settlement, and the settlement lay under it and told its lie beautifully.
It looked far worse than when they’d arrived.
That was the thing he hadn’t understood until he’d spent a night making the transformation.
When they had first walked into that dead cluster of stone houses, it had looked empty.
Too empty, she said. Like a place people had deliberately cleared before they left.
Now it told a different story.
The Aurelians had spent the night returning what remained from the old settlement to the places it might once have occupied.
A rusted tool beside a cold hearth. The remnants of a loom in one of the houses.
A child’s carved toy lying face-down in the dirt of a doorway.
Nothing new. Nothing false. Only old things arranged so that a searching eye would put them together in the wrong order.
And higher up, where the enclave truly lived, the road markers had been shut down until they read as inert stone. Every soul had gone deep, and the wind rose up the mountain and away, carrying every trace of the living with it.
The graves were down at the valley’s edge, in a row along the old stone wall.
The real ones. She had insisted they touch nothing there, only carefully clear enough of the weeds that a searching eye would find them at once.
He had stood over one of them in the dark for a long time once he’d understood which one it was, and he had not been able to breathe for a while.
Garmek. His father was down there under one of those cleared stones, and today his father’s grave was going to save the people his father had died for. She had held his hand while he’d knelt in the dark and had said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and she’d known it.
“He’s setting down,” she whispered, drawing his mind back to the present.
The ship landed on the flat ground at the valley’s mouth, dust rolling out from under it in a slow pale wave. A ramp lowered. His lips pulled back off his fangs before he caught them, because he knew that scent even from up here, cold and dry and wrong, with a smell like old bone and burnt copper.
The Grorn priest walked down the ramp.
He was smaller than he remembered from his cell, or perhaps he had grown larger in his own mind since the chains.
A grey figure in a dark uniform, unhurried, his hands folded and his head turning slowly to read the valley the way a male reads a page he already knows the ending of.
Behind him came three armed males, none of them Grorn.
They stayed close to the ship with the watchful unease of hired muscle on unfamiliar ground.
And one of them he knew.
“That one.” His voice was less than a breath. “By the ramp. He’s one of Krebb’s. I saw him in the compound.”
She went still against him, then nodded. “Vashen. I know him.”
They were too far to hear at first. But the wind, which carried the settlement’s silence away from the priest, also carried the priest’s voice up.
She had known it would and had chosen this crevice for exactly that reason.
He had stopped being surprised by her somewhere around the middle of the night.
Fragments of voices came to them, thin and clear across the cold air.
The priest was angry. He heard the anger before he heard the words, the flat, controlled Grorn anger that carried a knife somewhere inside it.
“—your master’s incompetence—” the wind brought the words, and then it fell away, and then, “—the male escaped. Do you understand what escaped from that filthy little port?”
Krebb’s male said something, low and pleading, that the wind ate.
“—silver eyes. Silver. Do you know how long—” A pause, and the priest’s voice dropped to something almost gentle, which was far worse. “—not even full-blooded. A half-breed. A mongrel. And still he carried old blood, and your master let him walk out through a wall.”
Amy’s fingers closed hard around his forearm, and he understood the message in her grip perfectly. Don’t move.
He didn’t move. It cost him. Every year of the search, every rumor chased down a dead alley, the silent grave below—all of it represented by the male below wearing dark robes and calling him a mongrel.
He could be down that slope before the crew cleared their weapons.
He knew it in his bones the way he knew his own strength.
He could put his hands on the priest and get justice for all of it.
He could get justice for a grave with his father’s name that the priest would never even realize—
Her grip tightened on his arm until her nails bit through his sleeve. She didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes down on the valley, small and still and absolutely certain, and she didn’t need to say a single word.
He breathed out through his nose, slowly, and let it go.
Because she was right. She was right the way she’d been right all night.
If he killed the priest, and the crew scattered, and one of them got a signal off before he could reach them, then the story the priest was meant to carry home of an old trace and a dead valley would die with him.
The Grorn would get a new story in its place.
Our priest went to a valley of Aurelian graves and never came back. And that story would bring a fleet.
Justice for the dead was worth a great deal.
It was not worth Serei. It was not worth Amy.
He had learned from a small human who talked to him in a cell because his silence made her nervous, that the difference between a warrior and a corpse was often nothing but knowing which fight to walk away from.
Below, the priest was finished with Vashen.
It happened without warning and without heat.
The priest turned, mid-word, as though to walk towards the ruins.
His hand came up, and there was a sound like cloth tearing, and Vashen folded down into the dust and did not get up.
The other two crew stepped back from the body.
Neither of them said anything. Neither of them looked surprised.
Amy’s breath caught. She flinched against him, and he carefully slid his arm around her and drew her in, putting his body between her and the Grorn below even though there was a mountain’s worth of stone and distance already between them. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t try to.
“He blames Krebb,” she whispered, her voice not quite steady. “For you. For letting you go.”
“He’s cutting the cord,” he said. He watched the priest step over the body without looking down at it and walk on into the ruins.
“Krebb’s no use to him now. Too clumsy. He held a clue in his hands and lost it.
So the priest killed his male and is leaving the corpse where Krebb’s people will find it, if they ever come here.
” A cold satisfaction moved in him. “Krebb bought himself a Grorn patron. He just found out what that costs.”
“Good,” she said, and there was something fierce and small in the word.
He looked down at her and loved her so much it was almost painful.
She’d delivered that male his supper. She’d carried a tray past that male for a year while he called her boy and never once saw her.
And she looked down at his body in the dust with no pity at all, and he understood that too.
Then they settled in to wait, and the waiting was the worst part.
Thressk did not hurry. He walked through the dead settlement house by house, unhurried and patient, the way she had said a priest would.
He stood a long time in the doorway with the child’s toy in it.
He crouched by the old ashes in a cold hearth and put his hand into the ash as if he could feel how long they had been dead.
He walked the row of graves and stood before them one at a time.
Brannik’s jaw ached from clenching when the grey figure paused at the one that was his father’s, then tilted his head, and moved on.
Look somewhere else, he thought at the grey figure, every muscle locked. Take the lie. You want the lie. She built it for you out of exactly what you want. Take it and go.
The sun climbed and crossed and began to fall.
The crew grew bored and sat in the shade of the ship.
Twice one of them wandered towards the base of the slope, and both times he felt Amy stop breathing beside him.
Both times the crewman scuffed at the dead ground, found nothing, and drifted back.
The road markers up the mountain read as cold stone.
The wind kept rising towards the hidden enclave and away from the valley below.
The valley held its silence like a held breath, and the lie held with it.
And then the light went long and gold across the valley floor, and the priest walked back towards his ship, and Brannik's chest tightened. If the priest meant to camp in the ruins and stay the night, to wake and search again at first light, then the danger stretched into the darkness. The enclave would have to remain impossibly still through hours he couldn’t guard against.
The priest reached the ramp. He stopped. He turned, and for one endless moment he looked back at the valley, and his gaze traveled up the slope, up towards the folds of rock where two people lay flat against the cold stone and did not exist.
His hand closed around hers. Gently. She understood at once and held herself to nothing, and he held himself to nothing, and the priest’s cold flat gaze passed over the crevice where they lay hidden and moved on, incurious and unseeing, up to the empty peaks and back down again.
You don’t fool people who want the truth, Amy had said. You fool people who are already lying to themselves.
The priest had come looking for the answer to a set of coordinates. She had given him one. An old Aurelian settlement, an old Grorn attack, and a row of graves and a valley empty long enough for the mountain to begin reclaiming it.
Everything was real. He only had the ending wrong.
Thressk turned. He climbed his ship’s ramp. And the ramp folded up behind him, and the thrusters woke with a low building roar, and dust rolled out across the ruins and across Vashen’s body where it lay. The ship lifted, and climbed, and dwindled, and then it was gone into the darkening sky.
For a long time neither of them moved. He didn’t trust it.
He’d learned not to trust the moment something seemed to end, because that was so often the moment it turned and bit you.
He kept them flat and still while the sound of the engines faded to nothing and the valley’s true silence flowed back in to fill the space the ship had left.
Then, at last, he let the breath go out of him in a slow shudder that ran the length of his enormous frame.
“He’s gone,” she said, very quietly, as though she still didn’t quite believe it either. “He took it. He took it. He’s gone.”
“He’s gone.” He turned, and got his arm all the way around her, and pulled her against his chest where he’d wanted her for the past two days and had not been able to have her.
She came without resistance, small and warm and shaking a little now that it was over, the way brave people shook afterwards.
He got his other arm around her too and put his face down into her hair and just breathed in her scent, the scent that had come to him first through the bars of a cell and undone the careful solitary male he’d spent his whole life becoming.
“You made that happen,” he said roughly into her hair.
“You looked at a Grorn priest and you built the one thing in the universe that would send him away, and you built it out of nothing but knowing what he wanted to believe.” He drew back just enough to look at her and see her face in the last of the gold light.
“My father crossed a galaxy to defeat them with a blade. You did it with nothing but an empty valley and the truth arranged in the wrong order.”
“I told you.” Her voice was unsteady, and her eyes were bright, and she smiled at him anyway. “I’m good at being overlooked.”
“You,” he said, “are the most dangerous thing on this mountain.”
And he kissed her, up on the cold rock with the safe silent valley spread out below them and the danger gone with the darkening sky, and for the first time since he was eleven years old there was nothing waiting anywhere that he needed to find.