Page 113 of Flames and Blood

And he doesn’t know about Kaevor. Nobody has gone down four levels to tell a vampire in the stores that there’s a man on the road for the Heir. I’ve had four nights to tell him myself. Longer, if I factor in the time I spent with him before we got here.

It’s the middle of the night, and he’s awake, because he’s always awake. And he has been waiting for me to keep my promise for days.

You have to go down to him. You have to explain.

Someone puts a goblet down in front of me, and they prepare for a round of toasts. Kaevor raises his drink and says something wonderful about me, and I can’t process a word of it.

All I can think of is the man who risked his life for me. How he’d have no place in this room with these people. And how that’s the least important thing in the world to me right now.

They move us down the room for the second round. At the far end there’s an arch, and through the arch is the top of the stairs that go down through the mountain. Four flights. I know every step.

I stand under that arch with the cup in my hand, and I look down it.

“Heir?” somebody says behind me. “They’re waiting on you.”

Chapter 26

Crowe

The lamp is good for about five more hours. I turn it down to save it and sit in the chair with my back to the wall.

She said tonight, late.

That was four nights ago.

I wait. It’s what I do, and I’ve never once minded it before.

Now, I do.

The first night I went up. Four flights, along two passages, as far as the arch at the end of the long room. The room was full. Fifty people in it, and she was at the head of the table with her mother on one side of her and three of the council on the other. A man was telling her something at length, and she was listening to all of it.

She never had a chance of getting out of that chair. I stood there until I was sure of it, and then I spent the rest of that night walking the Eyrie, counting doors and stairs and ways out, being the man nobody notices.

The second night I went down instead of up. There’s a lower gate at the bottom of the stores, and it’s the one they carried the body in through. It took me two hours to find it. It’s a single door onto a ledge, with a track running north along the face of the mountain, and one man on it who was asleep by two in the morning.

I stood out there in the dark and worked out that one man could bring a body up that track in a night and nobody in this mountain would know. Getting it onto the north face afterward, on a ledge where a search party would find it on the second day, and then walking out with that search party—that isn’t one man. That’s one man and somebody holding the other end.

The third night I made a list. Those closest to her who might have reason to get rid of her. It’s a short list. She’s well-liked. So I stop asking who’d want her gone and start asking who could have got a body onto that mountain. That list is longer.

Tonight I don’t go up at all.

There are more people over my head than on any night since I got here. Feet on the floor above me and on the one above that. Heavy clothes. Whatever is going on, they’ve dressed for it.

Then the Aldrake’s voice. She’s running the room, and she does it in short sentences. Everybody stops talking when she starts, then they start again when she’s done.

There are toasts. This is a celebration, and I know exactly what they’re celebrating, because I heard it said out loud on the other side of a wall four days ago and I’ve been sitting with it ever since. A betrothal. Hers.

I know what I’m listening to. Two families, one long room, and the man they’ve all been waiting on.

The festivities go on for a long time.

She isn’t coming down.

I know it hours before I stop waiting. I sit there anyway.

Then the mountain goes quiet, and then it’s morning up there, and it stops mattering what I want, because the sun is up and I’m not leaving this room for eleven hours.

Aldis brings my blood down not long after, which he has not done once since I got here, and he does not leave straight away.