Page 99 of Flames and Blood

“No,” I say. “I wouldn’t.”

She almost laughs, thinks better of it, and shuts the door.

I sit down on the bed.

The pack goes on the floor. The wet coat goes over the back of the chair. There’s no sound down here at all; no wind, no water, none of the noise a building makes. Just the lamp guttering.

This is the first time since I got her free that I’ve been in a room she isn’t in.

The job is done. She’s inside her own borders and in her mother’s hands, which is the job I was hired for. Aurora is finished with me. So is the Court.

I have a payment sitting there I could name tonight and be off this mountain by tomorrow’s nightfall.

One decision from me right now, and it would all be over.

But that’s the problem.

I don’t want it to be over.

Chapter 23

Kalli

They keep me in the hall until my head starts to throb. There’s a woman who nursed my mother and needs to hold my face in both hands. There’s a man from the eastern ledges who walked two days to watch me stand up. There’s the council, who ask questions until they blur into each other. I take hands. I say names. I eat what’s put in front of me, and I sit the way I was taught to sit.

By the time my mother lets me go, my jaw hurts from holding my face still.

Hesper walks me to my old rooms. The bed has been made up with the good sheets. Somebody has put winter flowers in a bowl, the small white ones that grow above the falls, and I have to stop in the doorway and look at them. A year ago, I’d have walked past them without seeing them at all.

“Sleep,” Hesper says. “The mountain will still be here in the morning.”

“I know.”

“You don’t look like a woman who knows.”

She goes. I stand in the middle of my own room and work out that I’m not going to sleep in it.

They put him four levels down. I heard my mother give the order in front of the whole hall. A room with no window, at the back, beneath the old stores. She spoke like she was handling staff. He stood there and took it, and I stood there and let him take it. I can’t stop thinking about that.

I know the way. I know every passage in this mountain.

I stare down at my bed with the good sheets and have a conversation with myself. The last time I had a conversation like this, it was very different.

I’m going down there. Me. Awake. All of it. You stay where you are.

My dragon turns over once under my ribs and settles.

Good.

Of course she’s not arguing. This is where she’s been pushing me since she saw him in that loading bay. Finally, the two of us want the same thing at the same time, and it’s so unfamiliar that I stand there another minute just to let it sink in.

Then I pull my boots off and set them by the bed, because boots are loud, and I go.

The Eyrie never fully sleeps. Somebody is always watching a fire, and there’s always a runner on the outer stairs, or somebody’s grandmother awake by a hearth with her knees aching. I grew up knowing which passages carry sound and which ones don’t, and I take the ones that don’t.

At the second staircase I hear voices below and have to stand in a doorway while two of the kitchen girls go past with a basket between them.

This is ridiculous, Kalli!