29. Chapter 29 #2
“The nineteenth,” she says. “Your mother’s decided. The blue for the contract signing, the white for the ceremony, and there’s a fitting for both on Thursday.”
“I wasn’t asked.”
“It’s not really that sort of decision, Heir.” She says it kindly and moves on to the guest list before I can answer.
That’s how I learn the date of my own wedding. From a woman reading it off a slate, in the middle of a sentence about shoes.
I find my mother before the morning fills up.
She’s at her desk with the letters. She looks up when I come in, and she doesn’t reach for her pen, which is what she usually does to tell me she’s already working.
“I want to talk about the body,” I say. “Properly.”
“Kallista—”
“Let me finish.”
She sits back and waits, and I tell her everything I know.
The burial clothes that fit without Hesper touching a seam, and what it means that somebody had my measurements.
The ring, which was in a box on my own shelf the whole time, and the copy good enough to fool her at the worst hour of her life.
The party gone three days for a search that should have taken one. Two people looking at what came back.
I lay it out the way I’d lay out a case to the council. One fact after another. I watch her face the whole time.
She doesn’t argue with any of it. That’s how I know she’s already thought all of it herself.
“You believe me.”
“I believe you.” Her voice doesn’t change. “I’ve believed some version of it since the week we buried her.”
“Then why—?”
“Because it serves no purpose aside from causing dissent, Kallista. Whoever did this took a year of my life already. I won’t let them have the clan as well.”
“So they get away with it?”
“Sometimes you have to weigh one thing up against another.”
“I can’t just leave it at that. They took a year of my life too, Mother. And I can assure you, my year was worse than yours.”
“So you think you can track them down yourself. And do what? Get revenge?” She shakes her head.
“You’ve been asking around,” she says. “Three people have come to me about it already. That’s how long you lasted.
” She pulls in a breath. “It stops now. Not because I don’t believe you.
Because you cannot do this from inside this house, and this is the only place I can keep you safe. ”
“I can take care of myself,” I mutter, then spin on my heel and leave.
I go out into the passage and stand there.
Pushing for answers is getting nowhere. There is no place in this mountain left for me to work.
But there is a man who does this for a living, and he’s been gone for days. Knowing him, he isn’t sitting still.
I stand in that passage a long time.
Finding him isn’t the only reason I want to go.
I go looking for Kaevor, and he’s already looking for me, which is how it’s gone since the day he arrived. I decide right there that he gets the truth before anybody else does.
“I need to tell you something,” I say. “Privately. Not in a passage.”
He closes the door of the small sitting room behind us and doesn’t sit down. He’s already braced.
“You’re leaving,” he says, before I’ve said a word.
“How did you—?”
“You’ve been deciding it for days. I told you I notice things.” No anger in it at all. “Is it him?”
“It’s what happened to me. He’s part of finding out what that is.”
“That’s not really a no.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
He nods, slow, and looks at the window for a moment. When he looks back, there’s nothing hard in his face.
“I’m not going to ask you to stay. I’ve watched you every day since I came up that road, and every one of them took something out of you. I’d rather have the truth once than a performance for the rest of my life.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You never told me it would be otherwise.
I did the hoping on my own.” He says it kindly, and that makes it worse.
“Go and find out what you need to find out. If it turns out to be him, I hope he’s worth what you’re about to give up.
If it isn’t, you know where I am, and my answer won’t have changed. ”
I don’t have anything to say to that. He crosses the room and puts a hand on my shoulder, briefly, the first time he’s touched me since he’s been here. Then he takes it away and lets me go.
My mother is where I left her, letters half finished. She looks up.
“I’m going.” I don’t bother softening it.
She stiffens a fraction. “Then let me tell you what that means, because I won’t have you say I didn’t warn you.” It’s the same voice she uses for everything.
“Go ahead,” I tell her.
“You walk out that gate to chase a man who is not of your class, and you are no longer the Heir. The seat goes to whoever the council names next. Your name comes off the wall.”
I set my shoulders. “I understand.”
“Do you?” Her eyes narrow. “You realize that the Eyrie gate might not open to you again.”
I swallow. Low blow. “I’m willing to take that chance.”
She folds her hands. “There is another way, Kallista. Stay. Marry Kaevor in three weeks. You keep the seat, and you keep your name, and everything I’ve just said stays between us.”
“No.”
“That’s my whole offer. I won’t repeat it.”
“You don’t need to. I’m going.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I wait for the argument. The pleading. The thing a mother is supposed to do when a daughter is walking away.
“Your mind is made up.”
“It is.”
She picks her pen back up. “Then go carefully,” she says, and starts on the next letter, and doesn’t look up again.
If I were a different daughter with a different mother, I might wait a second to see her show some sign of remorse. But I know better than that.
I leave and go back to my suite.
I take almost nothing. A change of clothes. The little money that’s mine and not the clan’s. My grandmother’s ring, on my hand, where it has been since I took it out of the box. Nothing with the Aldrake’s mark on it.
Aldis is at the top of the stairs when I come down with the bag.
He doesn’t ask where I’m going. He looks at the bag, then at me. Then he reaches past me to the wall, takes down a small lamp from its bracket, and holds it out.
“Six hours of oil,” he says. “Take it.”
“I’m not supposed to take clan property.”
“It’s a lamp, Heir. Nobody counts lamps.” He steps aside from the top step. “Go carefully on the wet steps.”
I stand there one breath longer than I mean to. Then I go.
The long stairs are wet, the way they always are. There’s no rail, the way there never has been. I go down carefully, because nobody is coming after me if I don’t.
The yard at the bottom is empty. There are trucks parked nose-in against the wall with snow piled on their hoods, and I couldn’t drive one of them if my life depended on it, which it might.
So I walk out of the gate and onto the road and head west, because it’s the only direction the road goes. By the time the sky starts going gray behind me, I’m further from that mountain than I’ve ever been on my own two feet.
No seat behind me. No name to fall back on if this goes wrong.
I’m more alone than I’ve ever been.