35. Chapter 35
Kalli
Five Cravens fly to the Eyrie, and I make six. Gideon can’t fly, and he can’t take the road, because the road is two days and we don’t have two days. One of Craven’s people offers to carry him, a broad young man already strapped in, and I say no before he’s finished the sentence.
“I can take him, if he doesn’t mind the grip.”
“I’ve got him,” I say.
Nobody argues with that. Gideon doesn’t either, though he waits until the others are shifting around us before he says anything at all.
“You’ve never seen me do this,” I say.
“No.”
There’s a flicker in his expression as I strip naked and hand him my clothes. There are still faint bruises on my skin from his fingers, and I force myself not to think about how they got there as I prepare for the shift.
“Hold that.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
I let her out.
Gold scales cover my skin as my body starts to reshape itself, massive wings spreading out over a frame that could only be described as huge.
It’s fast. It always is. One breath, I’m standing on gravel, and the next the gravel is scattering away from me in a ring, and I’m looking down at a man holding my clothes.
He doesn’t move. I put my head down toward him and hold still so he can look, because I want him to.
“That’s going to take some getting used to,” he says.
I can’t answer. I lower my head in front of him instead, and wait.
He gets onto my back, grasps the heavy scales along my spine and settles down for the ride.
The flight is a few hours of cold and noise, and I’m aware of him every second. I’ve never carried anything in my life with as much care as I carry him up that mountain.
The Eyrie comes up out of the cloud, and the torches in the yard below stop moving the second we clear the rock.
A man sets his lamp down on the stones and forgets to pick it up.
Two women grab each other’s arms in a lit doorway.
Somebody starts ringing the alarm bell, fast and uneven, because nobody alive here has ever needed to ring it before.
I land last, and Gideon slides down and lands on the ground as I shift. He has my clothes ready before I’ve finished coming back. I dress quickly, and neither of us says anything about it.
Then I turn around and look at the mountain I walked off with nothing.
My mother comes out to receive us. She’s had five minutes’ warning, and she’s used every one of them to prepare herself.
“Caleb Craven, of the Craven clan.”
“Aldrake.”
“You’re welcome at this Eyrie, and your people with you.”
“We’re grateful,” says Caleb. “I am pleased that you have agreed to receive us.”
Her eyes come to me once, in the middle of it. Her mouth tightens. Her chin lifts half an inch. Then it’s gone.
She doesn’t look at Gideon at all.
“Of course,” she says. “We would have preferred a little more warning, but I understand that your business is pressing.”
They take us inside.
The clan assembles in the long hall. By the time we’re seated, every bench is full, and there are people standing along the walls three deep. That’s the point of five Cravens. Whatever happens tonight happens in front of everybody, where no council can quietly decide to bury it a second time.
Sereth comes to me before anybody else does. He crosses half the hall to do it and takes both my hands.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he says, just for me. “I was worried when I learned you’d left.”
“Yes, I’m back.”
His hands are warm. His face is glad. He means it, and that’s the part that hurts.
My mother takes her seat at the raised end.
“Caleb Craven, leader of the Craven clan, has brought something before us,” she says.
Caleb raises a hand. “We are here in support of your daughter. She is the one with a case to put before you.”
My mother doesn’t miss a beat. “Very well,” she says. “The clan will hear it.”
I stand up. Caleb Craven moves a pace back and to my left. He doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t need to. He’s put himself where the whole hall can see him standing behind me.
“Fourteen months ago somebody paid a woman to build a body that would pass for mine,” I say. “That’s her trade. People hire her when they need somebody to be dead. Whoever hired her gave her everything she needed to get me right, down to a drawing of my grandmother’s ring.”
Nobody says anything.
“That’s what you buried.”
The hall stays quiet. My mother’s face is expressionless.
Gideon speaks now. “The same man went back to her two weeks ago,” he says. “He wanted to know how to stage an accident. That was the week Kalli came home.”
A man in the second row gets to his feet.
“Who is this woman?”
“A criminal,” I say.
“And we’re to take her word?”
“On its own? No.”
That stops him for a second. He wasn’t expecting me to agree with him.
“Then what have you actually brought us?”
“Not enough,” I say. “Not yet.”
“She’s being modest.” Caleb doesn’t raise his voice, and the hall goes quiet for him anyway, because he’s the first Craven any of them have ever seen. “Before we flew up here, I had my people confirm it.”
“That’s a Craven’s word on it.”
“It is.” Caleb looks along the benches. “We don’t put our name to anything we haven’t checked ourselves. We’ve checked it, and we’re standing behind her. That’s why five of us chose to be in this room.”
An older woman stands up along the wall. “We’ve grieved this girl once,” she says to the man who’d objected. “Don’t make this family do it again because you won’t take her word.”
There are murmurs from the others. Then somebody moves along the side wall.
“Regardless,” the man says, “we need more than just a visit to a forger to convince us that we have anything to be concerned about.”
Someone clears his throat. It’s Aldis. He comes up the middle of the floor with a book under his arm and stops a pace short of me.
“Before you left, you came to me with questions,” he says. “They made me start questioning things myself. I kept looking after you’d gone.”
He puts the book in my hands, open to a page. “Take a look here.”
I run my fingertip down the logs of entries and exits, and my hand goes still on the page.
“There’s more,” he says, flipping back to where he’s bookmarked another section. “Here, and here.” He points out more logs. I look at the second page longer than the first. The entries are in the same column, and they are not in the same hand.
I meet his eye, and he gives a nod.
“This is the gatekeeper’s log,” I say, turning it so the front row can see. “It shows unscheduled entries and exits before my so-called death.” I turn through the pages. “When I got back, that same person signed out for a brief supply run. He came back three days later.”
“Who?” somebody says.
“These are days he can’t account for,” I say, not answering immediately. “No supplies to show for it. Nobody asked him where he’d been.” I close the book. “The week I came back alive, that person went somewhere and lied to the gate about it.”
“And there’s one more thing,” I say. “The succession. A new line of succession was drawn up last spring, while you all believed I was dead. Ask the council whose name stood at the top of it.”
Nobody has to ask. Heads turn all over the hall, and they all turn the same way.
I look across the hall and find him without having to search.
“You were the one, Sereth. You went out again the week I came back. And you were trying to find a way to fake an accident.”
Nobody moves.
“You sold me. You paid for a body my mother would bury with my name on it. Then you pretended to mourn with her.”
He doesn’t panic. He doesn’t reach for anything.
“Kalli,” he says.
That’s all. My name, gently, the way you’d say it to somebody you were worried about. I watch two rows of people stop being sure.
“Have your say,” my mother tells him. “This clan hears both sides.”
“I’m not going to call my cousin a liar,” he says. “I won’t do that to her.”
“Then answer it.”
“I can’t tell you where I was.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“Won’t.” He says it plainly, and half the hall takes that for honesty, because that’s what it’s built to sound like. He turns to face the benches. “I grieved her the same as the rest of you did. You all watched me do it. She was gone. I was here.”
“That’s not an answer either,” I say.
“No.” He looks back at me, and there is no anger in him anywhere. “You came home to a family that had already buried you, and nobody asked how any of it felt for you. I understand why you need to blame somebody, Kalli. I do.”
It works. I watch it work. Doubt comes back into faces I have known since I could walk, and I have nothing left to stop it with.
“I need you to know that I don’t hate you for this,” he goes on. “Finding facts that make it look like I’d do such a thing. Details that can’t be proven in any way.” He looks around at the others. “You’re looking for answers and trying to make them stick to someone. It’s your way of healing.”
“It’s not—” I start, not knowing how to defend myself against this line of reasoning.
Then my mother stands up.
“I buried that body myself,” she says. “I held those hands before they closed the coffin. There was a ring on the left one, and I remember thinking, even through all of it, that it sat wrong.” Her hand closes on the arm of her chair.
“I told myself grief was making me imagine things, because I didn’t want to consider the alternative. ”
She looks at him.
“You grieved with me, and the whole time, you were the reason I was standing there.”
The hall doesn’t move for a second. Then it does, benches coming up and voices from every side, the whole room turning on him at once.
That’s when he moves.
I understand it half a second before it happens. I’m out of the line. I gave the seat up, and the whole clan knows it, so killing me buys him nothing now. But my mother rules this clan, and with me gone from the succession, the seat is his the day she’s gone.
He goes for her.
“No!” I scream. I don’t remember deciding to move. I’m the closest one to the raised end, and I get there first. I get my body between them.