Page 96 of Flames and Blood

The woman on the left drops her spear.

It goes off the edge and takes a long time to hit anything. She doesn’t watch it fall. The younger man has gone back two steps with his hand up over his mouth. Aldis stands there, and his throat works, and no sound comes out of it, once, twice.

Then he gets down on one knee on a wet stone step, and stays down.

“Heir,” he says.

“Get up.”

“Heir—”

“Aldis. Get up. It’s cold, and I’ve been walking for hours.”

He gets up. He doesn’t take his eyes off her while he does it. His hand comes out halfway toward her arm and stops before it lands, then goes back down to his side.

He says three words to the younger man in a language I don’t know. The man goes up the stairs at a run.

Then the two of them look at me.

“He was contracted by the Aurora Collective to bring me home,” Kalli says. “He has passage to the Eyrie, and he answers to my mother when he gets there. Nobody puts a hand on him before that.”

“What’s the Aurora Collective?” he asks.

“I’ll explain all of it inside.”

Aldis nods once. The woman stands behind him and doesn’t say a word to either of us.

We climb another three hours. Twice the stairs pass under an overhang of rock, and I get out of the wet for thirty seconds and back into it. Behind and below us the darkness has started to fade. From the way Kalli keeps glancing back, I know she’s aware of it too.

Then the cloud thins for a few seconds, and I look up, and I stop walking. There’s a castle in the side of this mountain. Not on it. In it. The rock face above us has windows cut into it, rows of them, lit from inside, going up further than I can see before the cloud closes again. Balconies. A gallery with a rail on it, hundreds of feet over my head. The Aldrake Eyrie, the ancestral home of the clan that holds this region. It’s overwhelming.

“You could have mentioned this,” I say.

“You’d have thought I was exaggerating.”

The stairs end in a gate. Kalli stops just inside it and puts her hand on the wall.

“It’s warm,” I say.

“It’s always warm. There’s water under the mountain, and it runs hot.” She takes her hand off the stone and wipes it down her coat. “My grandmother used to make me stand here for half a minute every time I came home. So the mountain would know I was back.”

“Did it work?”

“I’m about to find out.” She almost smiles, and then she starts walking.

There are people in the passages, and every one of them stops.

A woman with a basket stops. Two men carrying a beam between them set it down and don’t pick it up again. A boy of about ten comes round a corner at speed, sees her, and puts his back against the wall.

Not a head turns toward me.

The one Aldis sent up ahead has clearly spread the word. Voices swirl around us, picking up intensity. Not a single person spares me a second look.

We come out into a hall with a roof I can’t see the top of. A woman is already crossing the floor toward us.

She’s smaller than Kalli. Gray coming in at the front of rich red hair. The burning smell comes off her hard enough to reach me at forty feet, and so does the heat. There are twenty people at the far end of the hall standing very upright and not moving.

She stops eight feet away. For four seconds, she just stands there.