Page 97 of Flames and Blood

Her mouth comes open. One hand goes out, and it stays there. A sound comes out of her, short and sharp, and her knees sag. Then she catches herself. She closes her mouth, and her chin comes up, and she walks the last eight feet at a normal pace.

“Kallista.”

“Mother.”

They don’t embrace. Her mother takes her by both forearms and holds on hard enough that I can see the fabric bunch, then lets go.

“You are cold, and you are wet,” she says. “That will be dealt with first.”

“After I have spoken.”

“Kallista—”

“After,” Kalli says. “There are people in this hall who need to hear me say it in my own voice.”

Then she turns and walks out into the middle of the floor, and I stop recognizing the woman I just spent the past days with.

Her back goes straight, and her chin goes high, and it is the same chin I just saw on her mother a minute ago. Everything about her goes steady and still. Even her hands are quiet, and I’ve never seen Kalli’s hands stop moving. She talks with them. She picks at the seams of things. She taps two fingers on the truck door when she’s thinking.

Now, she stands in the middle of that hall and doesn’t move at all.

“Hail, Ondrathe,” she says, the words crisp and clear. Even her voice has changed. It’s slower. The rhythm is old, and it comes naturally to her.

“We greet you, Heir,” a hall full of voices respond as one.

“I have returned,” she says, still using that voice. “You will have questions. And I will answer them. For now, know that I never would abandon you.”

“Never!” someone calls from the back. “I always knew you weren’t truly gone.”

“Always.” She dips her head. Someone cheers, and then someone else joins in and suddenly the hall is in uproar. She stands through it all as if this sort of thing happens every day. Maybe it did, before she was taken.

I thought I knew her. How she takes her food, what she does with her boots, the complaints she makes at four in the morning when she’s had enough of the road. The sounds she makes in pleasure.

I’m watching a woman I have never met.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this version.

When it’s done, they come forward in ones and twos. She takes hands. She says names. She knows each of them and remembers them.

An old woman gets to her near the end. Small and wide, and older than anybody else on the floor.

She takes both of Kalli’s hands and turns them over and looks at the new skin on the palms.

“We put you in the ground,” she says.

The hall stops.

“Hesper,” her mother says.

“We put her in the ground.” The old woman isn’t listening to anybody. She’s holding Kalli’s hands and her thumbs are going back and forth over the knuckles. “I washed you. I did it myself. They brought you down off the north face on a board. I washed you, and I combed your hair out, and I put you in the ground with your grandmother’s ring on your hand. I have been to that stone twice a week for thirteen months.”

Kalli doesn’t move.

I have watched a great many people receive bad news. Most of them do something—sit, swear, take a step. She does none of it. She goes so quiet that the old woman stops talking.

“There was a body?” Kalli says.

“There was a body.” Hesper nods.