27. Chapter 27
Kalli
The long room empties out somewhere near dawn, and I’m finally allowed to go. I get three hours in my own bed, and then the woman with the slate is back at the end of it.
The second day is worse than the first, because now there are two families in the mountain and both of them want time with the Heir. Presentations. A meal. The council again. Kaevor’s aunt, who holds my hand for eleven minutes.
Every room I stand in, I’m counting minutes. I promised him one night, and I’ve spent four of them being gracious to strangers while he’s waited.
It’s dark again before I find a gap to get away. The moment there is one, I go.
I make no excuse, send nobody ahead, take no lamp.
I go out through the arch and down the first flight in the dress I’ve been standing in all day.
Somebody says “Heir—” behind me on the second turn.
I keep going. Four flights. Past the stores.
The passage that smells of grain and lamp oil and cold iron.
I stop at the last turn and breathe in.
Grain. Oil. Iron. That’s all. The fourth smell—clean cloth, old leather, the thing underneath both that’s him—is thin. Almost gone. A trace of it near the door and nothing more. My chest already knows what I’m going to find before I get there.
His door is open.
I stand in it.
The bed is made. Properly made, squared off at the corners, a blanket folded at the foot of it, the top sheet turned down and the whole thing pulled flat. Nobody would have expected him to do that, but it’s just how he is.
The chair is back against the wall, and there’s a jug on the shelf, washed out and set upside down on a cloth to drain.
There’s nothing else. No pack. No coat. No documents, no notebook, no boot marks on the floor. When I go all the way in and stand in the middle of it, there is not one thing in this room to say that anybody was ever in it.
I stand there for a long time.
The stone is warm under my feet. I put my hand flat on the wall where the lamp niche is and hold it there and don’t do anything else at all.
What did you expect? That he’d wait around for you forever?
The tension beneath my skin tells me that my dragon is pissed. I’ve ignored her for days, and now she’s watching me face the consequences.
This is all your own fault.
I turn and leave the room, trying not to think about the last night I spent there with him.
Aldis is at the head of the fourth flight when I come back up.
“When?” I ask.
“Dusk. About three hours ago.”
“Which way?”
“There’s only the one way to leave this mountain.” He says it plainly. “He took his things and walked out.”
“Nobody stopped him?”
“Why would they?”
Because I wanted him to stay!
I should have been there. I should have been the reason he didn’t leave. Instead, I’m the reason he did.
“Did he say anything?”
“Not to me.” He waits a beat. “Your mother came down and paid him first. At the inner gate. She gave him an envelope. He put it inside his coat and thanked her.”
“He took it?”
“Yes.”
I stand there with my hand on the wall.
All right.
He took the money, and he went. That’s all there is to it.
But there’s so much more.
He waited alone for me after I promised I’d be back. And then finally, he gave up.
He waited in a room below a banqueting hall where I was being toasted by the man I’ve been promised to.
Oh God, he heard it.
He must have. He told me this mountain was quiet, but last night, things were not quiet. And he would have heard every bit of it. I remember laughing. Sounding happy. And he would have heard that too.
Why didn’t you tell him?
My hand comes off the wall. One sound gets out of me—half a breath, bitten short—and I stop myself before another one can follow it.
Aldis looks at the far wall until I’m done.
“Thank you,” I say when I can do it properly. “That’s all I needed.” I turn and leave him standing there, not saying anything.
My mother is in the small room off the council chamber with the door open, which she never leaves open, and I understand as I come through it that she has been waiting for me.
“Sit down,” she says.
“I’ll stand.”
“Then stand.” She puts her pen down and caps it. “You went down to the stores.”
“You knew I would.”
“I knew you would days ago.” She folds her hands. “Kallista. I’m going to say something, and I’d like you to let me, because I’ve been trying to find a way to say it carefully, but if you interrupt me, it will come out wrong. Neither of us wants that.”
I still don’t sit down. “Okay.”
“Every young woman is allowed one piece of madness,” she says. “I had mine. My mother had hers, and hers was a lot worse than mine. Yours is a strange one, and it’s over, and no harm has come of it. Nobody died. Nobody is talking. That is a better outcome than most of us get.”
“That’s not what this—”
“You said you’d let me.” She waits. I let her. “He is not of your standing. He has no bloodline and no house. He is a useful man, I have no doubt, but in this clan, he is the help. That is not me being unkind. That is the arrangement of the world. I did not build it, and neither did you.”
“You don’t know anything about him.”
“I know what he is. I know what he did. He was very good at it, and I paid him for it.” She doesn’t raise her voice. “And I know what happened to you. You were taken, kept in a terrible place, and treated badly. Then a door came open, and the man on the other side of it was kind to you.”
“That’s not what it was.”
“You know what I mean, and you know that I’m right.
” She says it gently. That’s the whole trouble with her.
“You were frightened, you were alone, and he was the first thing that came to help. Every woman who has ever been rescued has felt what you’re feeling.
It’s the most ordinary thing in the world.
It isn’t love, Kallista. When you have been that frightened for that long, the one who seems safe feels exactly like love. That’s all this is.”
“I never said anything about love,” I tell her. Because I haven’t. The word has never been part of it.
Suddenly, it is.
“You didn’t have to,” she says. “I was once as young as you are now. I know how the heart works. But it’s not love. It’s gratitude. Maybe a little adventure.”
It’s more.
The words are my dragon’s, and finally, I’m beginning to agree with her.
“It isn’t that.” I fold my arms over my chest.
“It always is.”
“He matters to me.” It comes out of me flat and loud, in a small room, to my mother. I’ve never said it out loud before. I didn’t say it to him. I didn’t even say it to myself. I’ve said it now. To the one person who was never going to take it seriously.
My mother looks at me. Nothing in her face hardens. She tips her head, and I know the look. I got the same one at eleven, standing in front of this desk, telling her the falcon with the broken wing would live.
“Oh, my girl,” she says.
That’s it. That’s the whole answer. Two words and that face.
I would take shouting. I would take being sent out of the room. I have never once in my life wanted to be struck, and I want it now, because that would mean she thought there was something real to strike at.
She’s not going to give me that.
“Okay. We won’t discuss him. We’ll talk about what happened to me,” I say.
Her hands come off the desk.
“Somebody in this clan sold me,” I say. “They found a body that looked like me, and you mourned me while I sat in hell. That person is among us. I want to know who.”
“No.”
“I want the recovery party’s names. I want to know what was left of her—”
“No, Kallista.”
“Why?”
“Because I cannot.” Her voice rises. It’s the first time I’ve heard it do that. “You want me to describe what I looked at. I will not do that. Not now, not ever.”
“Then let somebody else—”
“No.” She says it over the top of me, quietly, the way she always has.
“All of that is over. Now we have a betrothal to announce. If I stand up in that council and say we have a traitor among us, all of that stops. Every family on this mountain will be suspicious of every other family for the next twenty years. Is that what you want to inherit when I’m gone? ”
So that’s the reason.
We’ll never get to the bottom of anything that happened, because my mother is worried it will spoil the wedding.
“So it stays buried.” My arms are still folded.
“So it waits.”
“That’s the same thing.”
She doesn’t answer that. I’m standing in a room with my mother and watching her decide that it’s safer not to learn what really happened.
“So I can’t talk about who tried to kill me. And I can’t talk about the man who saved my life.” My back teeth grind together. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
“Kallista.” She stands up. “This is where it ends. He’s gone. There’s no point wasting any more time on it. It’s over. I don’t want to hear it mentioned again in this house, by you or by anybody. In a month there’ll be nobody left who remembers there was ever anything to speak of.”
“You can’t order me to stop thinking.”
“No. I can tell you what it will cost you if you don’t, and then you’ll work it out, because you always do.
” She comes around the desk and puts her hand on my arm.
“You’ll be all right. I promise you that.
In thirty years you won’t be able to remember his face when you go looking for it. You won’t even feel it happening.”
She means it as a comfort. She means every word of it as a comfort.
Then she picks her pen back up, because she has letters to write.
“Go to bed,” she says. “You look terrible, and there are people here.”
I go out into the passage, and I stand there, pulling in long, slow breaths.
I have an enemy in this place. Maybe more. One of them watched me walk back into that hall alive, and has had time to decide what to do about it. And the only person who might help me just turned and walked away because I didn’t have time for him.
It’s enough.
I’m done arguing. I’ve argued with the council, with my mother, with my own dragon. It’s never gotten me anywhere.
So I’ll do it myself.
I’m going to find out who sold me. On my own, in my own house, with no help from anybody in it.
And I’m going to smile at every last one of them until I do.