25. Chapter 25
Kalli
I promised Gideon I’d be back, standing in his doorway with my hand on the frame. That was four nights ago. I have spent every night since lying in my own bed, listening to my floor stay full of people.
He’s still down there. Hesper would have told me if he’d gone. He’s still down there with his pack by the door, and he hasn’t gone to my mother to tell her his fee.
My dragon hates it. The only thing keeping her sane is knowing he’s close.
You’re not being fair to him.
I know it’s true, but I haven’t had the time to do anything about it.
By the sixth day since my return, there’s a woman at the end of my bed with a slate before the lamp’s properly lit, and I’ve stopped being surprised by it.
“Fittings at seven,” she says. “Council at nine. The eastern families at eleven, the western at half past, and there’s a document for your attention before the meal.”
“What document?”
“The confirmation of the succession. It’s been drawn up since last spring.”
“Since last spring.” I sit up. “I was in a cell last spring.”
“Yes, Heir.” She says it kindly. She doesn’t look up from the slate. “Shall I have the gray one pressed, or the blue?”
Every day has looked like this one. A slate at dawn and not one free hour in it.
At the fitting there are three of them around me with pins in their mouths and a fourth writing measurements into a book.
“The waist will need bringing in a long way,” one of them says.
“She’s been through an ordeal, Erran,” another replies.
“I know that, thank you. I was speaking about the cloth.”
“How long does this take?” I ask.
“Not long.”
It takes two hours.
Two hours. Four floors under this room, a man who came here for me is sitting in the dark, and I am standing on a box while three women argue about a waist seam.
Halfway through, Hesper puts her head in with a cup of something hot and hands it to me without asking whether I want it, which is the only decision anybody makes on my behalf all morning that I actually like.
The council chamber is a long room with a long table and eleven people who have all been sitting in the same chairs for as long as I can remember.
“The grain stores need attention,” says one. “There’s less in the north cellars than there should be.”
“Most likely the damp,” someone replies.
“The last crop wasn’t good,” someone else responds. They bounce this around until I think my head’s going to explode, and not one of them is willing to say the word “theft” out loud. They finally put it to bed, and a grizzled elder at the end of the table raises a hand.
“The boundary,” he says. “There’s a shepherd on the Corrin side who has been letting his animals up our ledges for six summers. We should do something about it.”
“Raising it now would look like weakness,” someone points out.
They haggle it for forty minutes and decide to raise it in the spring. Which is what they decided last year.
Then it’s whose turn it is to hold the midwinter ceremony, and the answer is Vessa’s family, and it has been Vessa’s family for three hundred years, and they discuss it anyway.
I sit at my mother’s right hand, and I keep my face calm and look at all eleven of them. One of these people, or somebody they drink with, stood at my graveside and knew. I’m going to be in rooms like this one every day for the rest of my life, smiling at whoever it was.
Somebody down the table says the word “customarily” for the ninth time, and I put my thumbnail into the pad of my finger to have something to feel.
Nobody in this room is frightened. I’m the only one at this table who knows what it’s like to be taken out of my own life, and they’re arguing about catering.
God, help me.
It occurs to me, an hour in, that I have not spoken since I sat down and that not one person has noticed.
So I speak.
“I want to ask about the funeral.”
The table stops.
Two people look at my mother. One looks at the ceiling. Aldis, who is standing at the door because he has decided that’s where he lives now, looks at his own boots.
“That’s a heavy thing for a council morning,” somebody says.
“It’s the only clear hour they’ve given me all week.”
“There’ll be time—”
“There’ll be less time every day. Who found the body?”
Nobody answers.
“A recovery party went out,” I say. “Somebody led it. Somebody carried her down. Somebody decided who she was. I want the names and the order they happened in.”
My mother sets her hands on the table.
“The party went out on the second day,” she says. “Aldis led it. They brought what they found down off the north face on a board. It came in through the lower gate at dark. Hesper washed her.”
“And who said it was me?”
The room has gone very quiet.
“I did,” my mother says.
“You identified the body?”
“I did. It was my responsibility.” She says it evenly, and her hands don’t move on the table. I have known this woman my whole life, and I have never once seen her hold herself that carefully. “I looked at what they brought in, and I said it was my daughter. We buried her on the fourth day.”
There are eleven people at this table, and not one of them is breathing properly.
I sit with it.
She looked at a body and said it was me. She was wrong. She has been wrong every week for thirteen months, kneeling at a stone with somebody else’s daughter under it, and there is no possible way to feel okay about that.
And underneath it, colder, the other thing.
Whatever they laid on that board was good enough that the Aldrake of the Eyrie Seat looked at it and said her own child’s name.
That isn’t luck. It needed a woman of the right build and coloring, dead and dressed, left where the search would find her.
Whoever did this had money and a plan ready before I was ever on that ledge.
“Mother,” I say. “How much of her was there?”
The room moves. Somebody’s chair.
“Kallista.” My mother’s voice doesn’t rise. It goes flat and final. “Not this morning.”
“I only want to know what the fall left—”
“Not this morning.”
She isn’t cruel about it. That’s what stops me.
There’s no edge on it at all. But her fingers have gone white where they’re pressed flat to the table, and I understand that if I ask again in front of everyone, she will answer me, and she will not get through it without breaking in front of all of them.
“All right,” I say.
“Thank you.” She picks up the next paper. “The document, then, before we lose the morning.”
I sign my name under a paragraph that was written while I was chained to a floor.
Sereth gets me out at midday.
He does it well. He comes in with a message that isn’t urgent and delivers it to my mother, and on his way past my chair he says, “There’s a thing about the eastern families I need you for,” and my mother waves us both away without looking up.
There is no thing about the eastern families.
He walks me out onto the north gallery instead, where the cloud comes right up to the rail, and you can’t see the drop. He leans on the stone and doesn’t say anything for a while.
“Nobody’s asked you yet,” he says eventually.
“Asked me what?”
“I’ve been watching it all week. People keep telling you how glad they are you’re back, and none of them wait for an answer.” He turns round and puts his back to the rail. “So. How are you? You can say something awful. I can handle it.”
The cloud goes past. Somewhere below it there’s water moving.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“That’s fair.”
“Everyone in there is so pleased. And they want me to walk back in and just pick up where I left off. I’m trying to do that, but it’s exhausting.
” I put my hands on the rail. The stone is warm.
“Being in the facility was hell, but I was left to myself most of the time. Here, I’m never alone.
Would I sound ungrateful if I said it was easier in the cell? ”
He laughs. “That’s the most Kalli sentence I’ve heard from you since you got back.”
“Really? I didn’t think I could do that anymore.”
“You just need practice.” He knocks his knuckle on the rail. “I’ll get you out of the afternoon session if you want. I’ll invent something with a horse in it.”
“You can’t invent a horse in this mountain.”
“I’ll invent a goat. I’m very good.”
I’m still laughing when he continues, which is why it doesn’t register at first.
“The one thing I can’t work out,” he says, “is how anybody found you at all. To take you. You were on a boundary flight. Nobody knew the route but the household.” He shrugs at the cloud. “Did you ever work out how they knew where you’d be?”
“No,” I say. “I’ve never figured out any of it.”
“Mm.” He straightens up off the rail. “Come on. They’ll be sending Aldis for you soon.”
By the middle of the afternoon, I’m ready to take Sereth up on the horse suggestion. I’ve said the same things so many times I can’t remember who I’ve spoken to anymore.
I get my mother alone for ninety seconds outside the long room while they set the table inside.
“I want to talk about Crowe.”
“Crowe.” She checks the fall of her sleeve. “Has he named a sum?”
“That isn’t what I want to talk about.”
“That’s all there is to talk about. If he doesn’t give me a figure, I’ll set it myself and send it after him. It will be a great deal.” She looks up. “He’ll be treated properly, Kallista. He already is. He has a room, he’s fed, and nobody has been unkind to him. I asked Hesper this morning.”
“He’s not livestock, Mother.” I sound exasperated because I am.
“I’m not treating him like livestock. Wherever would you get such an idea?”
“He’s four levels down at the back of the stores.”
“He asked for a room without a window.”
“You offered him a room without a window. He didn’t ask for that one. There are rats down there. Did you know that?”
“Perhaps he’ll have one as a snack.”
My mouth drops open. “I cannot believe you just said that. That man risked his own life to save me. Are you forgetting that?”
She looks at me for two seconds, her lips pursed.
“Of course not,” she says. “He will be paid. Generously, and by my own hand before he goes, which is worth more to a man in his trade than the money. That’s settled.”
There it is. As far as she’s concerned, the conversation is over, and I can’t take it up without starting the fight it’s daring me to start.
I can have that fight now, in a passage, with people milling around us. Or I can have it later, when I can give it my full attention.
“All right,” I say. That’s twice now I’ve said all right to her about him. He’d have walked out of here after the first one.
“Good.” She touches my arm. “You look tired. It’s nearly done.”
It is not nearly done.
They open the doors, and the long room is full. A man stands up from the far end of the table.
My step falters.
Shit.
Nobody told me. Or it was on the slate at seven this morning, and I stopped reading after the word “succession.”
He comes down the length of the room, stops a proper distance away, and bows his head.
He’s older than I remembered. Dark red hair, cut close.
A straight nose, a wide mouth, good teeth.
He’s as tall as Gideon and as heavy through the chest. There is not one thing wrong with him.
His scent reaches me a step before he does—clean, warm, clan-smell close under it, a healthy dragon who has traveled four days and washed before he came in.
It’s a good smell. My body reads it, notes it, and does not care.
“Heir.”
“Kaevor.”
“I came as fast as the pass allowed.” He straightens.
He has a good, even voice. “I’m not going to say I’m glad, because the word barely covers it.
So I’ll say this instead: I thought about you every week for thirteen months.
And whatever was done to you in that year, you owe none of it to anybody in this room.
Nobody here is going to ask you for it before you’re ready to give it. But I am so grateful you are back.”
It’s exactly the right thing to say. It’s better than anything anyone has said to me since I got here, including my mother.
And I feel nothing.
He doesn’t repel me. He doesn’t stir the old sullen kick I used to get at nineteen when his name came up. A decent man is standing in front of me saying a kind and intelligent thing, and I can’t feel a single emotion for the man I’m supposed to marry someday.
It would be so much easier if he were awful.
I manage a small smile.
He’s not the one, my dragon says. Then she’s gone, and I can’t ask what she meant by that.
“Thank you,” I say. “That was well said.”
“It was rehearsed. Four days on a mountain road.” His mouth moves. “I’ve a worse version I was going to use.”
“Save it. I’ll want it later.”
Somebody laughs. Somebody else says something about sitting down. And then the evening starts. It goes on far longer than I can stand, and I sit through all of it.
Two families at one table. Toasts. A woman from his side who wants to tell me about her sons. The council, who have found a second wind. My mother at the head of it, running the room, and it goes on, and it goes on.
Twice I get as far as standing up.
The first time, three people stand with me, because that is what happens when the Heir rises. I sit back down and say something about the wine.
The second time, I get to the doors, and Aldis is at them. He isn’t stopping me—he’d never stop me—he just says, “They’ll notice, Heir.”
He’s right. I go back.
There is no way out of this room that won’t be news by breakfast.
Somebody brings the second course. The talk goes soft and long the way it does when people are content and not in a hurry.
Tonight. Late. I’ll get down here.
It was a promise. And I’ve broken it for four nights in a row.
Oh God. He must hate me so much.
I wait for my dragon to have something to say about it, but she’s not talking to me right now, and who could blame her? I can’t remember when last I did something so horrible to someone who deserved it less.
And he doesn’t know about Kaevor. Nobody has gone down four levels to tell a vampire in the stores that there’s a man on the road for the Heir. I’ve had four nights to tell him myself. Longer, if I factor in the time I spent with him before we got here.
It’s the middle of the night, and he’s awake, because he’s always awake. And he has been waiting for me to keep my promise for days.
You have to go down to him. You have to explain.
Someone puts a goblet down in front of me, and they prepare for a round of toasts. Kaevor raises his drink and says something wonderful about me, and I can’t process a word of it.
All I can think of is the man who risked his life for me. How he’d have no place in this room with these people. And how that’s the least important thing in the world to me right now.
They move us down the room for the second round. At the far end there’s an arch, and through the arch is the top of the stairs that go down through the mountain. Four flights. I know every step.
I stand under that arch with the cup in my hand, and I look down it.
“Heir?” somebody says behind me. “They’re waiting on you.”