22. Chapter 22
Crowe
The road ends that same night at a walled yard cut into the rock. There’s a gate, a stone shelter with a chimney, and eleven vehicles parked nose-in against the wall with snow packed on their roofs.
Past the yard, the ground goes up at an angle no truck can manage, and a set of stairs goes up with it, cut into the rock and turning back on itself until it disappears into the cloud.
There’s no moon behind the cloud and no stars. The only light in the yard is one bulb over the gate.
“How long will it take?”
Kalli gets out and looks up at the stairs.
“Four or five hours, I think,” she says. “I’ve always flown.” Her lips purse. “I’ve never taken anybody up it who couldn’t fly. Maybe I should shift and fly us both in.”
“No.”
“What? Am I offending your manly sensitivities?”
“My sensitivities are just fine. I’m just not allowing your dragon to make a long trip under load after all you’ve been through.”
“But—”
“I said no, Kalli.” I shake my head. “You’ve already dealt with enough.”
Fuck. And I drank from her on top of it all.
“Besides, you might weaken and drop me,” I add.
She gives an outraged little snort. “I’d never drop you!”
“Let’s not put it to the test.” I get the pack out of the back and look at the sky over the wall while I do it. Black, and no edge on it anywhere yet.
“How long until it’s light?” she asks.
“Six hours. Less if the weather turns.”
“And if we’re still on those stairs when it comes?”
“That would be bad.”
“No, it wouldn’t, because I’d carry you out of there inside a minute.”
“I know you would.” I’ve already offended her once. I don’t plan to do it again.
She starts up the stairs. We climb. The steps are worn down in the middle, and they’re wet, and there’s no rail on the outside. After the first hour, my coat is soaked through at the shoulders. Her hair has gone dark with it.
The rock smells of water and cold iron. Under that, faintly, there’s a burned smell coming down the stairs from somewhere above us, dry and old, and it gets stronger the higher we go.
They stop us at the fourth turning.
Three of them come out of the rock on both sides at once, which means they were there for the last twenty minutes and I never heard one of them. That’s a first. I stop moving my hands and let them see both.
The burned smell is all around us now, and it’s coming off them. Two men and a woman. None of them draws anything, and there’s no reason for any of them to.
“That’s far enough,” the older man says.
“It is,” I agree.
He isn’t looking at me for more than a second at a time. He’s looking at Kalli, and he’s looking hard.
“Name yourself,” he says to her.
She’s pale and thin, and she’s in a coat and boots off a shelf at Aurora, her hair wet and pushed back. I doubt she looks anything like the woman they remember. And it doesn’t help that she’s come up this mountain on foot in the dark with a vampire.
“Aldis,” she says. “You taught me to knap a flint when I was six.”
He doesn’t move. “Name yourself.”
“Kallista Ondrathe. Heir of the Aldrake, of the Eyrie Seat. Daughter of the line of Ondrathe.”
The woman on the left drops her spear.
It goes off the edge and takes a long time to hit anything. She doesn’t watch it fall. The younger man has gone back two steps with his hand up over his mouth. Aldis stands there, and his throat works, and no sound comes out of it, once, twice.
Then he gets down on one knee on a wet stone step, and stays down.
“Heir,” he says.
“Get up.”
“Heir—”
“Aldis. Get up. It’s cold, and I’ve been walking for hours.”
He gets up. He doesn’t take his eyes off her while he does it. His hand comes out halfway toward her arm and stops before it lands, then goes back down to his side.
He says three words to the younger man in a language I don’t know. The man goes up the stairs at a run.
Then the two of them look at me.
“He was contracted by the Aurora Collective to bring me home,” Kalli says. “He has passage to the Eyrie, and he answers to my mother when he gets there. Nobody puts a hand on him before that.”
“What’s the Aurora Collective?” he asks.
“I’ll explain all of it inside.”
Aldis nods once. The woman stands behind him and doesn’t say a word to either of us.
We climb another three hours. Twice the stairs pass under an overhang of rock, and I get out of the wet for thirty seconds and back into it. Behind and below us the darkness has started to fade. From the way Kalli keeps glancing back, I know she’s aware of it too.
Then the cloud thins for a few seconds, and I look up, and I stop walking.
There’s a castle in the side of this mountain.
Not on it. In it. The rock face above us has windows cut into it, rows of them, lit from inside, going up further than I can see before the cloud closes again.
Balconies. A gallery with a rail on it, hundreds of feet over my head.
The Aldrake Eyrie, the ancestral home of the clan that holds this region. It’s overwhelming.
“You could have mentioned this,” I say.
“You’d have thought I was exaggerating.”
The stairs end in a gate. Kalli stops just inside it and puts her hand on the wall.
“It’s warm,” I say.
“It’s always warm. There’s water under the mountain, and it runs hot.” She takes her hand off the stone and wipes it down her coat. “My grandmother used to make me stand here for half a minute every time I came home. So the mountain would know I was back.”
“Did it work?”
“I’m about to find out.” She almost smiles, and then she starts walking.
There are people in the passages, and every one of them stops.
A woman with a basket stops. Two men carrying a beam between them set it down and don’t pick it up again. A boy of about ten comes round a corner at speed, sees her, and puts his back against the wall.
Not a head turns toward me.
The one Aldis sent up ahead has clearly spread the word. Voices swirl around us, picking up intensity. Not a single person spares me a second look.
We come out into a hall with a roof I can’t see the top of. A woman is already crossing the floor toward us.
She’s smaller than Kalli. Gray coming in at the front of rich red hair. The burning smell comes off her hard enough to reach me at forty feet, and so does the heat. There are twenty people at the far end of the hall standing very upright and not moving.
She stops eight feet away. For four seconds, she just stands there.
Her mouth comes open. One hand goes out, and it stays there. A sound comes out of her, short and sharp, and her knees sag. Then she catches herself. She closes her mouth, and her chin comes up, and she walks the last eight feet at a normal pace.
“Kallista.”
“Mother.”
They don’t embrace. Her mother takes her by both forearms and holds on hard enough that I can see the fabric bunch, then lets go.
“You are cold, and you are wet,” she says. “That will be dealt with first.”
“After I have spoken.”
“Kallista—”
“After,” Kalli says. “There are people in this hall who need to hear me say it in my own voice.”
Then she turns and walks out into the middle of the floor, and I stop recognizing the woman I just spent the past days with.
Her back goes straight, and her chin goes high, and it is the same chin I just saw on her mother a minute ago.
Everything about her goes steady and still.
Even her hands are quiet, and I’ve never seen Kalli’s hands stop moving.
She talks with them. She picks at the seams of things.
She taps two fingers on the truck door when she’s thinking.
Now, she stands in the middle of that hall and doesn’t move at all.
“Hail, Ondrathe,” she says, the words crisp and clear. Even her voice has changed. It’s slower. The rhythm is old, and it comes naturally to her.
“We greet you, Heir,” a hall full of voices respond as one.
“I have returned,” she says, still using that voice. “You will have questions. And I will answer them. For now, know that I never would abandon you.”
“Never!” someone calls from the back. “I always knew you weren’t truly gone.”
“Always.” She dips her head. Someone cheers, and then someone else joins in and suddenly the hall is in uproar. She stands through it all as if this sort of thing happens every day. Maybe it did, before she was taken.
I thought I knew her. How she takes her food, what she does with her boots, the complaints she makes at four in the morning when she’s had enough of the road. The sounds she makes in pleasure.
I’m watching a woman I have never met.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this version.
When it’s done, they come forward in ones and twos. She takes hands. She says names. She knows each of them and remembers them.
An old woman gets to her near the end. Small and wide, and older than anybody else on the floor.
She takes both of Kalli’s hands and turns them over and looks at the new skin on the palms.
“We put you in the ground,” she says.
The hall stops.
“Hesper,” her mother says.
“We put her in the ground.” The old woman isn’t listening to anybody.
She’s holding Kalli’s hands and her thumbs are going back and forth over the knuckles.
“I washed you. I did it myself. They brought you down off the north face on a board. I washed you, and I combed your hair out, and I put you in the ground with your grandmother’s ring on your hand.
I have been to that stone twice a week for thirteen months. ”
Kalli doesn’t move.
I have watched a great many people receive bad news. Most of them do something—sit, swear, take a step. She does none of it. She goes so quiet that the old woman stops talking.
“There was a body?” Kalli says.
“There was a body.” Hesper nods.
“Whose?”
Nobody in that hall has an answer.
“We… We thought it was yours.” Kalli’s mother is the only one to speak now.
I watch it all, and it takes me less than a minute to figure it out. Somebody put a body on the north face made to look like Kalli. That person stood among this group, watched them deal with the fall and the recovery, and then stood at her graveside, without saying a word.
This wasn’t some rash act of anger. This took planning. It took resources. And it took more than one pair of hands.
Whoever it was is standing in this building. Probably in this hall. Probably close enough to touch her.
Something tightens in my gut. Without thinking, I take a step closer.
Her mother is the one who ends it. She says a few words and the hall empties out into the passages, and it takes a while, and Kalli doesn’t move through any of it.
Then her mother comes to me.
She stops in front of me and looks up, and she looks at me properly, which is more than anyone else in this mountain has managed.
“Who are you?”
“They call me Crowe.”
“Crowe,” she repeats. “Vampire.” She’s already reached this conclusion. She’s not asking me.
“Yes,” I tell her anyway.
“You brought my daughter safely through country where a single hour of daylight would have finished you.” She says it clearly, and loudly enough for the twenty people still in the hall to hear every word.
“He did more than that, Mother,” Kalli says. “He was the one who got me out of there. There is a story to it that you might not believe.”
“Indeed.” She’s still looking at me. “My house owes you a debt that it will pay. You will name a figure. If you name it low, I will double it. I don’t want it said that the Aldrake paid under price for a daughter.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
“Do. There’s no hurry. You’ll be a guest here as long as it takes.” She turns her head. “Hesper. He’ll want a room with no window in it, and he’ll want feeding, and what he takes is blood. Give him a beast and don’t stand about while he uses it.”
“Aldrake.”
Every word of it is gracious, and every word of it is correct. It’s also the sort of thing you’d say about a horse that’s just come in from a long day of labor.
Across the hall, Kalli is standing with two of the council, and she has heard all of it.
She looks at me. It’s a short look. There’s a lot in it, but I turn away before either of us can make more of it.
Hesper takes me down.
The room is four levels under the hall with no window in it, as specified, which is what I’d have asked for. A bed, a chair, a jug, a lamp burning in a stone niche.
“They’ll assign you a beast,” she says at the door. “A goat, or a hill sheep. Bled into a jug. I trust that will suffice.”
“That’s fine.”
“There’s a bar on the inside of that door, and there’s a bar on the outside as well.” She looks at me while she says it. “The inside one is for you. We never use the outside ones anymore.”
“Also fine.”
“You’d be surprised how many of them are out there arguing about using that outside bar right now.”
“No,” I say. “I wouldn’t.”
She almost laughs, thinks better of it, and shuts the door.
I sit down on the bed.
The pack goes on the floor. The wet coat goes over the back of the chair. There’s no sound down here at all; no wind, no water, none of the noise a building makes. Just the lamp guttering.
This is the first time since I got her free that I’ve been in a room she isn’t in.
The job is done. She’s inside her own borders and in her mother’s hands, which is the job I was hired for. Aurora is finished with me. So is the Court.
I have a payment sitting there I could name tonight and be off this mountain by tomorrow’s nightfall.
One decision from me right now, and it would all be over.
But that’s the problem.
I don’t want it to be over.