9. Chapter 9
Kalli
They drive hard through the night and into the day. Nobody talks to me. Two heavily armed men sit across from me now, and they watch me the whole time. Neither of them says a word. The stops are short. The engine never turns off. When the men outside move around, their voices are tense.
I can’t move. The second chain runs through both cuffs and down to the floor, and it holds my hands up under my chin.
If I sit up straight, the cuffs drag across the burns on my wrists.
If I let my shoulders drop, the weight pulls on my neck instead.
I shift positions through the trip, trying to get comfortable, and failing.
My arms went numb at some point, and woke up again worse.
My palms are the real problem. The blisters from the floor plate haven’t closed. The runes in the cuffs keep them open. At home, a burn like this would be gone by morning.
Breathe. In, out, slow.
In the afternoon, I feel the wall before we reach it.
It starts as pressure behind my teeth, the same feeling my cuffs give me, and the same bitter taste. But this is not a cuff. This is wide. It fills the whole road ahead of us, and we drive straight into it.
It rolls through the vehicle from front to back. My ears fill. The burns on my wrists heat up and then cool. Then it’s behind us, and it stays behind us, closed.
I know what that was. I’ve lived inside ward-work for over a year. That was the same thing, built big enough to hold a valley. Nothing gets through a wall like that unless someone has allowed it through.
The road climbs. The trees outside the mesh thin out and then stop. The cold coming through the window seals turns thin and dry, and under it I can smell stone and snowmelt.
I grew up in this air. My clan spends every winter in air exactly like this.
I’m not surprised. The doctor who measured me was a dragon. I knew it the moment he walked into my cell, and I’ve known since that day that my own kind are behind this. So this is not news. It’s confirmation. And it hurts.
We slow, and turn, and stone passes close on both sides. A gate. The sound under the tires changes to gravel. We stop.
The doors open, and two guards stand at the entrance.
“Don’t pull any moves,” one of them tells me.
I think he’s the one I bit. I grin at him, and his expression darkens.
He reaches in, unlocks the chain at the floor plate, and gives it a tug.
I don’t resist; there’s no point. As I clamber out of the vehicle, my knees give once, then hold.
I blink as I look at what’s in front of me.
What the hell?
It’s the last thing I expected.
There is no cell block. No intake office. No bars, no floodlights, no yard full of guards.
There’s a long stone house with lit windows. There’s a raked gravel drive, and lamps along a path, and people standing at the edges of the light. The house is old, and it has been looked after. Everything I can see looks expensive. Like old money.
I take in the people around me, picking up their scent first, then how much heat comes off them. The escorts are human. The man holding the front door open is human. The two people at the edge of the light are human. The gray-haired woman waiting on the steps is human.
A house on a mountain, in the kind of country my own people live in, and there is not one dragon in this yard.
Then boots come down onto the stone step, and that changes it.
A man walks out of the lit doorway. He doesn’t hurry. The staff stop moving as he passes them. The escorts straighten their backs. The one closest to me takes a step away from me without being told to.
Heat comes off the man in waves. Under it there’s a dry smell, warm stone, the smell that lives in every hall of my mother’s court. He’s one of us. He’s old—older than anyone I’ve ever been this close to—and I pick it all up before he says a word.
He doesn’t look it. He’s tall, and he’s kept his shoulders.
Silver hair cut close, a hard jaw, and a face that has been handsome for a very long time and knows it.
Everything he’s wearing was made for him.
The only part that gives him away is the hands.
The skin over them is thin and pulled over the bones of his knuckles.
“Kallista Ondrathe. Heir of the Aldrake, of the Eyrie Seat,” he says to me, ignoring the others. My name. All of it. It takes a moment to register because they’re words I haven’t heard in so long.
My spine straightens before I decide anything. My chin comes up. The posture I was drilled in as a child pulls me straight.
“You know me,” I say.
“Of course.” He dips his head. “Forgive the state you’ve arrived in,” he says. “I believe you encountered some trouble on the road. I assure you that is all behind you now.”
My back teeth clench.
He comes closer and stops out of arm’s reach, and stays there.
“The chains come off inside. Your room has been prepared, but I’m sure you’d appreciate a hot meal first.”
“Who are you? What am I doing here?”
“You may call me Renwick,” he says, then looks at the others.
“You’ll learn the household quickly. The man at the door is Hollis.
” The one holding the door is somewhere in his fifties, thick-necked, with a flat nose and a boxer’s ears, and he hasn’t looked at me once.
“Mrs. Nell runs the house, and she’ll take care of all of your needs.
If you want something, ask her, and it will happen faster than if you ask me. ”
“You didn’t answer the rest of my question.”
“No,” he agrees. “It’s cold out here. Let’s do the rest inside.”
“What is this place?” I look around. “Are you running this as part of the network?”
“No. Everyone on this property is paid by me, and has been for years. Nobody here comes from any of the facilities you’ve been in.”
“That still isn’t what I asked.”
“Mrs. Nell,” he says, “is the food ready?”
“It’s been ready for an hour.” The woman with the gray hair comes down the steps. “And it’ll be ruined if you keep her standing in the cold while you don’t answer her questions.”
“Then we’ll go in.”
He doesn’t seem to mind that she’s telling him off, which tells me that there’s a different set of rules around here. That doesn’t set my mind at ease.
Inside, the hall is wide, and the furniture in it has been passed down through generations. The Persian carpet is soft under my boots as they lead me through it and into a dining room.
They sit me at a long table in front of a fire. There’s bread, and a roast chicken with steaming vegetables, and water in a jug.
“Just a moment, dear.” Mrs. Nell kneels in front of me with a key. Up close, she’s older than she looked on the steps. Sixty, maybe more. Gray hair rolled and pinned, a wide face, and a soft chin that doesn’t hide the steel in her jaw.
She removes the cuffs and chains without any sign that she’s afraid of what I’ll do when I’m free. It feels odd after being treated like a dangerous animal for so long.
She watches as I roll my shoulders and twist my neck from side to side. My arms feel like they don’t want to straighten, and I wince as I bend and stretch my elbows.
“Oh, my goodness.” She takes my hands, turns them over, and looks at the palms. “These should have been cleaned on the road,” she says beneath her breath. “Sit still.”
She brings a bowl of warm water and a cloth and a jar of something that smells of herbs.
She washes the burns on my wrists and the blisters on my palms. I hiss at the sting but don’t complain.
Nobody has treated an injury of mine in over a year.
I watch her wrap my palms in clean cloth, and my throat aches.
“There you go,” she says, straightening and clearing the table. I don’t reply. I’m worried that I’ll choke up, so I reach for a hunk of bread and shove a piece of it into my mouth instead.
The man sits across the table while I eat. He doesn’t touch the food.
“What do you want from me?” I finally say after I’ve devoured an entire thigh and two roast potatoes.
“Tonight I want you to eat and sleep in a warm bed,” he says. “You can sleep as long as you like tomorrow. There’s nothing planned for your day after that.”
“That isn’t the question, and you know it.”
“You should try some of the gravy. It’s Mrs. Nell’s specialty.”
I put my fork down.
“Before I left the facility, a doctor came into my cell. A dragon doctor,” I say. “He measured my hips, checked my teeth, and spoke about my heat cycles. Then he said the word ‘match.’ So you can skip past the kind words. There’s something going on.”
“He shouldn’t have done any of that in front of you,” he says. “It was clumsy.”
That’s all he has to say? Not that I was inspected like a broodmare, but that it was clumsy?
“You’ll stay here,” he says. “You’ll be looked after, better than you have been. And in time, there will be a meeting with someone I believe you’ll approve of.”
“A meeting.” I don’t like the way he says it.
“Yes.”
“What kind of meeting?”
“That will become clear in due course.”
For fuck’s sake!
I slam my hand down on the surface of the table, then regret it when pain shoots up from my palm.
“I’m getting sick of all this cryptic shit,” I snap. “I don’t know where I am, or who you are, and now you’re talking in circles about some kind of meeting that you won’t tell me about.”
He sits calmly, as if I hadn’t just yelled at him. “I want you to focus on settling in right now,” he says. “Just be assured that you are considered to be very precious to us.”
“Why?”
“Because there are fewer of us every year, and there have been fewer every year since before you were born. Seats that were full when I was young stand empty now. Old lines have died out to nothing. Your family is one of the few that is still strong, and people have been searching for someone like you for a very long time.”
“People?”
“People.”
“How long have they been searching?”
“Longer than you’ve been alive. Eat something.”
I glare down at my plate, then spear a carrot and put it in my mouth, because a woman who won’t eat is a woman who might cause trouble, and because I’m hungry.