Page 124 of Flames and Blood

Chapter 29

Kalli

I’ve been smiling for four days. Right now it’s at a woman with pins in her mouth who wants my opinion on a sleeve. I give it. She’s pleased. I’ve been giving opinions on sleeves and seating and flowers since sunup, and every one of them comes out warm and easy, and every one of them takes a little more of the patience I woke up with.

“That one,” I say. “The narrower cuff.”

“I thought so too.” She writes it down. “You have good instincts for this.”

I do. I’ve always been good at saying the right thing to the right person at the right moment.

One of the people I’ve smiled at this week paid to have me killed. I don’t know which face it is. So I smile at all of them.

The trouble is that I’m the Heir, and the Heir can’t ask questions.

I can’t walk into the records room and start pulling ledgers off a shelf. Three people would ask if I needed something before I got the first one down, and by evening my mother would know which ledger and why. Anything I do openly goes straight to her, and anything that goes to her goes to the whole house.

So I do it the way I did it in the cell. Sideways, through people, while looking bored.

Hesper is easiest, because Hesper likes to talk.

“You washed the body,” I say, while she’s pinning my hair for the meal.

Her hands don’t stop. They slow.

“I did.”

“That must have been hard.”

“It was the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.” She sets a pin. “I don’t like to talk about it, Heir.”

“You don’t have to.” I let the quiet stretch. Hesper can’t stay quiet. “I only wondered how long the party was out. Nobody’s ever said.”

“Three days,” she says. “Two out, one back with her. It felt longer than a search should take, but I don’t know how long a search should take. I’ve never been on one.”

“And when they brought her in?”

“Aldis carried her. Your mother was there. Nobody else went in with them, and nobody else asked to.” Her hands go back to my hair. “It was the right way to do it. Nobody needed to see.”

Two people. Out of a full mountain, two.

“Was it difficult, dressing her?”

“That’s the strange part, and I’ve never said it to anybody.” The pinning stops altogether now. “It wasn’t. Burial clothes never fit. You always have to take something in at the waist or let something out at the shoulder. I didn’t touch a seam. Not one. It was as if the clothes had been made for her.”

She goes back to my hair, and I move the talk to the seating for the meal before she notices what she’s handed me.

They had my measurements.

I know exactly what being measured feels like. A doctor did it to me in that compound, and those numbers were noted in a book. I have thought about that book maybe twice since I got out.

I get out of that room the moment Hesper will let me and go out to the north gallery, because it’s the only place in this mountain where nobody can come at me from behind.

Kaevor finds me there anyway.

“You look like you’d rather be somewhere else,” he says.

“I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.”