Page 110 of Flames and Blood

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.