Page 146 of Flames and Blood

“I’m glad you’re back,” he says, just for me. “I was worried when I learned you’d left.”

“Yes, I’m back.”

His hands are warm. His face is glad. He means it, and that’s the part that hurts.

My mother takes her seat at the raised end.

“Caleb Craven, leader of the Craven clan, has brought something before us,” she says.

Caleb raises a hand. “We are here in support of your daughter. She is the one with a case to put before you.”

My mother doesn’t miss a beat. “Very well,” she says. “The clan will hear it.”

I stand up. Caleb Craven moves a pace back and to my left. He doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t need to. He’s put himself where the whole hall can see him standing behind me.

“Fourteen months ago somebody paid a woman to build a body that would pass for mine,” I say. “That’s her trade. People hire her when they need somebody to be dead. Whoever hired her gave her everything she needed to get me right, down to a drawing of my grandmother’s ring.”

Nobody says anything.

“That’s what you buried.”

The hall stays quiet. My mother’s face is expressionless.

Gideon speaks now. “The same man went back to her two weeks ago,” he says. “He wanted to know how to stage an accident. That was the week Kalli came home.”

A man in the second row gets to his feet.

“Who is this woman?”

“A criminal,” I say.

“And we’re to take her word?”

“On its own? No.”

That stops him for a second. He wasn’t expecting me to agree with him.

“Then what have you actually brought us?”

“Not enough,” I say. “Not yet.”

“She’s being modest.” Caleb doesn’t raise his voice, and the hall goes quiet for him anyway, because he’s the first Craven any of them have ever seen. “Before we flew up here, I had my people confirm it.”

“That’s a Craven’s word on it.”

“It is.” Caleb looks along the benches. “We don’t put our name to anything we haven’t checked ourselves. We’ve checked it, and we’re standing behind her. That’s why five of us chose to be in this room.”

An older woman stands up along the wall. “We’ve grieved this girl once,” she says to the man who’d objected. “Don’t make this family do it again because you won’t take her word.”

There are murmurs from the others. Then somebody moves along the side wall.

“Regardless,” the man says, “we need more than just a visit to a forger to convince us that we have anything to be concerned about.”

Someone clears his throat. It’s Aldis. He comes up the middle of the floor with a book under his arm and stops a pace short of me.

“Before you left, you came to me with questions,” he says. “They made me start questioning things myself. I kept looking after you’d gone.”

He puts the book in my hands, open to a page. “Take a look here.”