Page 127 of Flames and Blood

I find my mother before the morning fills up.

She’s at her desk with the letters. She looks up when I come in, and she doesn’t reach for her pen, which is what she usually does to tell me she’s already working.

“I want to talk about the body,” I say. “Properly.”

“Kallista—”

“Let me finish.”

She sits back and waits, and I tell her everything I know. The burial clothes that fit without Hesper touching a seam, and what it means that somebody had my measurements. The ring, which was in a box on my own shelf the whole time, and the copy good enough to fool her at the worst hour of her life. The party gone three days for a search that should have taken one. Two people looking at what came back.

I lay it out the way I’d lay out a case to the council. One fact after another. I watch her face the whole time.

She doesn’t argue with any of it. That’s how I know she’s already thought all of it herself.

“You believe me.”

“I believe you.” Her voice doesn’t change. “I’ve believed some version of it since the week we buried her.”

“Then why—?”

“Because it serves no purpose aside from causing dissent, Kallista. Whoever did this took a year of my life already. I won’t let them have the clan as well.”

“So they get away with it?”

“Sometimes you have to weigh one thing up against another.”

“I can’t just leave it at that. They took a year of my life too, Mother. And I can assure you, my year was worse than yours.”

“So you think you can track them down yourself. And do what? Get revenge?” She shakes her head. “You’ve been asking around,” she says. “Three people have come to me about it already. That’s how long you lasted.” She pulls in a breath. “It stops now. Not because I don’t believe you. Because you cannot do this from inside this house, and this is the only place I can keep you safe.”

“I can take care of myself,” I mutter, then spin on my heel and leave.

I go out into the passage and stand there.

Pushing for answers is getting nowhere. There is no place in this mountain left for me to work.

But there is a man who does this for a living, and he’s been gone for days. Knowing him, he isn’t sitting still.

I stand in that passage a long time.

Finding him isn’t the only reason I want to go.

I go looking for Kaevor, and he’s already looking for me, which is how it’s gone since the day he arrived. I decide right there that he gets the truth before anybody else does.

“I need to tell you something,” I say. “Privately. Not in a passage.”

He closes the door of the small sitting room behind us and doesn’t sit down. He’s already braced.

“You’re leaving,” he says, before I’ve said a word.

“How did you—?”

“You’ve been deciding it for days. I told you I notice things.” No anger in it at all. “Is it him?”

“It’s what happened to me. He’s part of finding out what that is.”

“That’s not really a no.”