Page 116 of Flames and Blood

The long room empties out somewhere near dawn, and I’m finally allowed to go. I get three hours in my own bed, and then the woman with the slate is back at the end of it.

The second day is worse than the first, because now there are two families in the mountain and both of them want time with the Heir. Presentations. A meal. The council again. Kaevor’s aunt, who holds my hand for eleven minutes.

Every room I stand in, I’m counting minutes. I promised him one night, and I’ve spent four of them being gracious to strangers while he’s waited.

It’s dark again before I find a gap to get away. The moment there is one, I go.

I make no excuse, send nobody ahead, take no lamp. I go out through the arch and down the first flight in the dress I’ve been standing in all day. Somebody says “Heir—” behind me on the second turn. I keep going. Four flights. Past the stores. The passage that smells of grain and lamp oil and cold iron.

I stop at the last turn and breathe in.

Grain. Oil. Iron. That’s all. The fourth smell—clean cloth, old leather, the thing underneath both that’s him—is thin. Almost gone. A trace of it near the door and nothing more. My chest already knows what I’m going to find before I get there.

His door is open.

I stand in it.

The bed is made. Properly made, squared off at the corners, a blanket folded at the foot of it, the top sheet turned down and the whole thing pulled flat. Nobody would have expected him to do that, but it’s just how he is.

The chair is back against the wall, and there’s a jug on the shelf, washed out and set upside down on a cloth to drain.

There’s nothing else. No pack. No coat. No documents, no notebook, no boot marks on the floor. When I go all the way in and stand in the middle of it, there is not one thing in this room to say that anybody was ever in it.

I stand there for a long time.

The stone is warm under my feet. I put my hand flat on the wall where the lamp niche is and hold it there and don’t do anything else at all.

What did you expect? That he’d wait around for you forever?

The tension beneath my skin tells me that my dragon is pissed. I’ve ignored her for days, and now she’s watching me face the consequences.

This is all your own fault.

I turn and leave the room, trying not to think about the last night I spent there with him.

Aldis is at the head of the fourth flight when I come back up.

“When?” I ask.

“Dusk. About three hours ago.”

“Which way?”

“There’s only the one way to leave this mountain.” He says it plainly. “He took his things and walked out.”

“Nobody stopped him?”

“Why would they?”

Because I wanted him to stay!

I should have been there. I should have been the reason he didn’t leave. Instead, I’m the reason he did.

“Did he say anything?”

“Not to me.” He waits a beat. “Your mother came down and paid him first. At the inner gate. She gave him an envelope. He put it inside his coat and thanked her.”

“He took it?”