Page 156 of Flames and Blood

“Then who holds it while you’re off doing whatever you’re about to tell me you’re doing?”

“You do. The way you have been.”

“I’m not young, Kalli.”

“You’re not old either. Stop fishing for sympathy you don’t need.”

One corner of her mouth lifts and settles. I don’t often tease my mother, and I let myself laugh at it, and then she puts her hand on the side of my face for a second in front of everybody, which is worse.

Before I turn to leave, she presses a folded note into my palm. “Kaevor came to me. He found a source. South. A man who knows the country Renwick works in.”

“Thank you.”

“I should have been working on this with you from the start.” She says it plainly. “I wanted that said before you got in that infernal machine.”

Aldis opens the gate for us and doesn’t say anything at all, and doesn’t need to.

Bastien’s estate takes two hours and looks like nothing I expected. Old stone, deep windows, shutters on every one of them, and a man in a dark coat waiting on the steps who has been alive for four hundred years and looks faintly annoyed about the weather.

“You’re late, Crowe,” he says to Gideon.

“You sent the helicopter.”

“I sent it early. That was the point of sending it.”

We end up in a long room with a lit hearth and far too much food for the number of people, which I understand within ten minutes is Serenity’s doing and not his. Odile is already there, lounging elegantly in an overstuffed armchair with a young man rubbing her shoulders. Caleb Craven is at the far end with Dorian. Torbjorn is by the fire, taking up most of it.

Odile doesn’t bother with hello.

“Negotiations are underway for Roland Vex’s release.”

“When?”

“Terms are being drawn up now. Creed’s negotiating it.” She turns her glass. “I think that man interferes altogether too much in Aurora business.”

“You’ve thought about him a good deal,” Bastien says, from the window.

“I’ve thought about the terms.”

“Of course.”

Odile looks at him with an expression I’d pay money for and then turns back to me like the exchange didn’t happen.

“Torbjorn’s people have had eyes on the crossing for two weeks.”

“Three,” Torbjorn says.

“Two weeks that were any use.” She doesn’t miss a beat. “His ground borders the country Renwick’s trucks move through. He’s usually right about what happens up there after the melt.”

“Usually,” Torbjorn says.

“Don’t doubt yourself, Torbjorn.”

It’s the second time she’s said his name warmly in five minutes, and she still hasn’t heard herself do it. Serenity catches my eye and very deliberately says nothing.

“There’s still Renwick,” I say, once the Vex business is finished with. “The house. The women they’re planning to take there.”

The room goes quiet in a different way.