29. Chapter 29
Kalli
I’ve been smiling for four days. Right now it’s at a woman with pins in her mouth who wants my opinion on a sleeve.
I give it. She’s pleased. I’ve been giving opinions on sleeves and seating and flowers since sunup, and every one of them comes out warm and easy, and every one of them takes a little more of the patience I woke up with.
“That one,” I say. “The narrower cuff.”
“I thought so too.” She writes it down. “You have good instincts for this.”
I do. I’ve always been good at saying the right thing to the right person at the right moment.
One of the people I’ve smiled at this week paid to have me killed. I don’t know which face it is. So I smile at all of them.
The trouble is that I’m the Heir, and the Heir can’t ask questions.
I can’t walk into the records room and start pulling ledgers off a shelf.
Three people would ask if I needed something before I got the first one down, and by evening my mother would know which ledger and why.
Anything I do openly goes straight to her, and anything that goes to her goes to the whole house.
So I do it the way I did it in the cell. Sideways, through people, while looking bored.
Hesper is easiest, because Hesper likes to talk.
“You washed the body,” I say, while she’s pinning my hair for the meal.
Her hands don’t stop. They slow.
“I did.”
“That must have been hard.”
“It was the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.” She sets a pin. “I don’t like to talk about it, Heir.”
“You don’t have to.” I let the quiet stretch. Hesper can’t stay quiet. “I only wondered how long the party was out. Nobody’s ever said.”
“Three days,” she says. “Two out, one back with her. It felt longer than a search should take, but I don’t know how long a search should take. I’ve never been on one.”
“And when they brought her in?”
“Aldis carried her. Your mother was there. Nobody else went in with them, and nobody else asked to.” Her hands go back to my hair. “It was the right way to do it. Nobody needed to see.”
Two people. Out of a full mountain, two.
“Was it difficult, dressing her?”
“That’s the strange part, and I’ve never said it to anybody.
” The pinning stops altogether now. “It wasn’t.
Burial clothes never fit. You always have to take something in at the waist or let something out at the shoulder.
I didn’t touch a seam. Not one. It was as if the clothes had been made for her. ”
She goes back to my hair, and I move the talk to the seating for the meal before she notices what she’s handed me.
They had my measurements.
I know exactly what being measured feels like. A doctor did it to me in that compound, and those numbers were noted in a book. I have thought about that book maybe twice since I got out.
I get out of that room the moment Hesper will let me and go out to the north gallery, because it’s the only place in this mountain where nobody can come at me from behind.
Kaevor finds me there anyway.
“You look like you’d rather be somewhere else,” he says.
“I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.”
“That’s not what I said.” He leans on the rail next to me, not too close. He’s careful about the distance. He’s careful about everything. “You say the right thing every time. But your heart’s not in it. Your mind’s somewhere else.”
“You noticed?”
“I notice things. It’s a flaw.” He smiles. “I’m not going to ask where you go. I wanted you to know somebody sees it happen.”
“There’s a lot on my mind,” I say.
“Of course there is.” He straightens off the rail. “If there’s anything I can help with, tell me. I’d like to be of some use.”
He means it. That’s the trouble with him. It’s the same with my mother. They keep doing the right thing, and I can’t seem to appreciate it.
He goes in to the meal. I don’t. There’s an hour before the council sits, and I already know where I want to spend it.
The grave is a plain stone in a row of plain stones, on the ledge where this family has buried its dead for longer than the mountain has had a name.
My name is cut into it. Kallista Ondrathe, two dates, and under that, “Heir of the Aldrake, taken too soon.” It’s not the first time I’ve been here since I got back to the Eyrie, but it’s still the same shock every time I see my name on a gravestone.
Somebody chose this spot, close to the path, easy to reach in bad weather, so a woman who visits every week wouldn’t have to climb for it. Somebody else stood exactly where I’m standing and watched my mother cry over ground that doesn’t hold me, and knew it.
I read every letter of the stone twice. Then I go to the council session, and I’m pleasant to eleven people about grain.
The session runs until the lamps get lit. When it breaks, I go back out to the gallery instead of up to my suite, and I’m out there long enough for the cold to get through my sleeves before Sereth comes looking for me.
“You’ve been asking around,” he says. Not accusing. Just saying it, which is how he says most things.
“It was my own funeral. I think I’m owed some curiosity.”
“Fair.” He puts his back to the rail. “Ask me, then. I was on the party. I found her.”
I go still.
“You found her?”
“I did. Some days I wish I hadn’t. Other days I’m glad it was me and not somebody who’d have handled her worse.
” He says it plainly, but his jaw works before he continues.
“She was on a ledge below the north face, where the wind piles the snow. I nearly walked past her. I thought she was rock until I saw the color of the hair against the white.”
“Sereth—”
“No. Let me. You asked, and I’d rather say it once and be done than have you piece it together out of Hesper and whoever else you’ve been working on.
” He looks at me sideways when he says that.
“I called the others up. Aldis decided to bring her down on a board, covered the whole way, so nobody in the lower passages would see more than a shape under cloth. I carried the front left corner.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me for that part.” It comes out rough, for him. “One more thing, since you’re not going to stop until somebody tells you everything. Hesper told the whole hall about the ring, and she told it wrong. She said your grandmother’s ring. It wasn’t.”
The gallery goes very quiet.
“What do you mean, it wasn’t?”
“I mean I saw it on that hand, and I knew it wasn’t right.
I’ve never said so to anybody, because what was I going to say?
‘Your daughter’s dead and also her jewelry is wrong’?
” He rubs the back of his neck. “The stone sat too high. The band was worn on the wrong side. I watched your grandmother turn that ring with her thumb my whole childhood, Kalli. I know which side wears.”
I put my hand on the rail and hold onto it.
Hesper told the whole hall that my grandmother’s ring went into the ground on that woman’s hand. I have believed it since the day I got home, and it was never true.
“Kalli.” His hand comes toward my arm and stops short of it. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” I sit down on the bench along the gallery wall, because my legs have decided to do it without asking me. “It’s a lot to hear at once.”
“I shouldn’t have given it to you in one go.”
“You should have. I asked.” I make myself look at him. He looks concerned. “You’ve done more for me tonight than anybody in this house since I got back.”
He goes red at that and looks away toward the cloud.
“Shall I walk you in?”
I smile. “It’s okay. I’ll go back in a minute.”
He smiles and leaves without another word.
I don’t go back to the long room. I go up to my own rooms, and I stand in front of the shelf by the window for a while before I do anything at all.
My grandmother’s ring lives in a wooden box on that shelf. It has gone in there every night since the day she died, and it went in there the morning I flew out, the same as always, because you don’t wear a ring like that on a boundary flight.
I’ve been home ten days, and I haven’t opened it once. I’ve walked past that shelf a dozen times a day and not put my hand on it, and I don’t know why.
I open it now.
It’s there. Exactly the way I remember it.
It has been in this room the whole time. Nobody took it. Nobody needed to.
Somebody made one instead because they couldn’t lift the real one out of my suite without the entire house knowing it was gone by morning.
I put it on. It goes on the way it always has, and I don’t take it off again.
Everything I’ve learned today points the same way. Somebody who knows me handed over my details so a dead woman could wear my name. Somebody close.
I go through them one at a time. My mother, who wept over the wrong body. Sereth, who just told me about the ring unasked. Kaevor, four days of road away when it happened and nowhere near this house. The council, eleven faces I’ve known my whole life.
I get through four names. The fifth one that comes to me is somebody I don’t want to look at yet, so I stop.
You’re not going to like where this ends, my dragon says. It’s the only thing she’s said all day.
“I know,” I whisper. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Heir.” It’s Hesper. “There you are.” She’s at my door, a folded cloth still in her hand. She’s left something mid-task to catch me.
“What is it, Hesper?”
She’s out of breath. “Two people have asked me this evening what you’ve been wanting to know about the recovery party. Sereth’s cousin, at the fitting. And the steward’s boy, not an hour ago, wanting to know why the Heir is so interested in who signed the gate log.”
“People talk,” I say. “It’s a small community.”
“It is.” She doesn’t look convinced. “I only thought you’d want to know it’s being noticed.”
She leaves with her cloth, and I stand at my door a while before I shut it.
People are keeping track of what I’m asking. I started this morning, and by tonight they already know.
“It was always going to happen,” I tell myself as I head back into my room and prepare for bed.
I don’t sleep much, and I’m awake before the woman with the slate gets to the end of my bed.