Page 118 of Flames and Blood

It’s more.

The words are my dragon’s, and finally, I’m beginning to agree with her.

“It isn’t that.” I fold my arms over my chest.

“It always is.”

“He matters to me.” It comes out of me flat and loud, in a small room, to my mother. I’ve never said it out loud before. I didn’t say it to him. I didn’t even say it to myself. I’ve said it now. To the one person who was never going to take it seriously.

My mother looks at me. Nothing in her face hardens. She tips her head, and I know the look. I got the same one at eleven, standing in front of this desk, telling her the falcon with the broken wing would live.

“Oh, my girl,” she says.

That’s it. That’s the whole answer. Two words and that face.

I would take shouting. I would take being sent out of the room. I have never once in my life wanted to be struck, and I want it now, because that would mean she thought there was something real to strike at.

She’s not going to give me that.

“Okay. We won’t discuss him. We’ll talk about what happened to me,” I say.

Her hands come off the desk.

“Somebody in this clan sold me,” I say. “They found a body that looked like me, and you mourned me while I sat in hell. That person is among us. I want to know who.”

“No.”

“I want the recovery party’s names. I want to know what was left of her—”

“No, Kallista.”

“Why?”

“Because I cannot.” Her voice rises. It’s the first time I’ve heard it do that. “You want me to describe what I looked at. I will not do that. Not now, not ever.”

“Then let somebody else—”

“No.” She says it over the top of me, quietly, the way she always has. “All of that is over. Now we have a betrothal to announce. If I stand up in that council and say we have a traitor among us, all of that stops. Every family on this mountain will be suspicious of every other family for the next twenty years. Is that what you want to inherit when I’m gone?”

So that’s the reason.

We’ll never get to the bottom of anything that happened, because my mother is worried it will spoil the wedding.

“So it stays buried.” My arms are still folded.

“So it waits.”

“That’s the same thing.”

She doesn’t answer that. I’m standing in a room with my mother and watching her decide that it’s safer not to learn what really happened.

“So I can’t talk about who tried to kill me. And I can’t talk about the man who saved my life.” My back teeth grind together. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”

“Kallista.” She stands up. “This is where it ends. He’s gone. There’s no point wasting any more time on it. It’s over. I don’t want to hear it mentioned again in this house, by you or by anybody. In a month there’ll be nobody left who remembers there was ever anything to speak of.”

“You can’t order me to stop thinking.”

“No. I can tell you what it will cost you if you don’t, and then you’ll work it out, because you always do.” She comes around the desk and puts her hand on my arm. “You’ll be all right. I promise you that. In thirty years you won’t be able to remember his face when you go looking for it. You won’t even feel it happening.”