Page 48 of C is for Captive

“We were so close.” She wasn’t looking at him now. She was looking at something twenty-five years gone. “One more season. That was all. And they found the valley.”

The room had gone silent. Even the far end of the hall had gone silent. Every Aurelian in the place had stopped moving.

“Your father held the mountain door.” Serei’s voice dropped to almost nothing, and yet it filled the whole room. “There is only one true way in—the road you walked, the road that reads our blood. He held it. Alone. He held it long enough for the enclave to raise the inner defenses. Long enough for a scout ship to break away and lead the rest of them off into the deep dark and be lost. Long enough that they never found the valley itself, and so we are still here, all of us, every child in this settlement alive because of what your father did at that door.” She lifted her wet silver eyes to her son. “He saved every one of us. And he did not come back down the road.”

Amy’s own tears were falling. Beside her Brannik had gone rigid as stone, his jaw working, his throat working. Twenty-five years of a boy’s why did he leave me rearranging itself, moment by moment, into something so much heavier and so much kinder—he didn’t leave you. He died reaching for you.

“Afterwards,” Serei went on, because she was clearly going to finish it, having carried it so long, “afterwards, when we were certain no more would come, when the sky stayed empty long enough that we dared believe it, I reached out. Once. To Tuor. To Garmek’s kin. To ask them to send you to me at last, whatever the cost, whatever it took.” Her mouth twisted, bitter and grieving. “They told me that you were dead. That Brannik had died of a fever, the first winter after your father left.”

“Fever.” His voice was raw. “There was no fever.”

“I know that now.” She reached across the table and laid her thin luminous hand over his enormous scarred one. Her fingers looked like nothing against his, like they couldn’t possibly matter, and they mattered more than anything in the room. “I don’t know whether they lied because they blamed me for Garmek’s death, because they couldn’t bear to surrender his son to an Aurelian, or simply because cruelty was easier than mercy. It doesn’t matter. I believed them. I had lost my mate at that door, and then they told me I had lost my son too, and I—” She stopped, her voice shaking. “I mourned you both. Every day. I never stopped. I lit the small light for you at every turning of the year, twenty-five times, for a boy I thought was in the ground on a world I could never go back to.” Her voice gave way. “And here you are. Grown so tall. With your father’s face and my eyes and the horns he would have been so… Oh, he would have been so proud⁠—”

And Brannik, the indestructible warrior, gripped his mother’s hand and bowed his great horned head over their joined hands and wept—silent and shaking, twenty-five years of tears—and his mother came around the table and held as much as she could of her enormous son.

Amy sat beside them with her own tears running freely and her chest filled with a complicated mixture of joy and sorrow. Because he finally had the answers to the questions that had driven him across the whole turning galaxy, and they were not the answers he’d feared as a boy. His mother hadn’t stopped wanting him. His father hadn’t abandoned him. They had loved him and they had wanted him and he would carry that now instead of believing that she left because of him.

He had lost his father, but not because his father didn’t love him. He had a mother. He had a whole valley of people with his eyes. He had, at last, a place that was his.

But despite that joy, a small cold current pulled at her, even though she hated herself for it, the same current that had pulled at her on the road that morning, the thing she’d been trying to say when the valley opened up and swallowed the words.

He came all this way for this. He has it now. A home. A family. His own kind, who understand what he is in ways I never can.

She looked at the arm still wrapped hard around her shoulder even now, even as he wept into his mother’s embrace. He hadn’t let go of her. Not once. Not through any of it. He’d held on to her the entire time like she was the other half of what he’d been searching for.

So what happens now, she thought, blinking hard, holding on to that arm with both her hands, when the thing that has driven him his whole life has finally been found? What if I was only ever the woman who kept him warm on the way to it?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Brannik had not wept since he was eleven years old.

He had trained himself out of it the way he’d trained himself out of speech—deliberately and brutally, a boy deciding that tears were another door his enemies could reach through. He had bled without a sound. He had endured an interrogator’s blade without a sound. He had buried the possibility of his mother a hundred times over twenty-five years and never once let the loss come out of his eyes.

And now he couldn’t stop.

Some rigid Tuori part of him, standing off to the side with its arms crossed, found it shameful. But the greater part of him didn’t care. His mother’s arms were around his neck. His mother, who smelled of green tea and old stone and the scent he’d been reaching towards in the dark since he was a child. His mother was alive, and small, and weeping into his shoulder, and every year of grief he’d packed down into silence was tearing itself loose all at once. The only thing anchoring him to the floor was the female under his other arm, whose two hands gripped his forearm like she meant to hold him to the earth by force.

“I’m sorry.” His mother’s voice broke against his neck. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. If I had known… If I had come back myself instead of trusting their word… I would have torn Tuor apart stone by stone to reach you, I would have⁠—”

“Stop.” The word came out wrecked.

“You were a child and I left you⁠—”

“Stop.” He pulled back enough to look at her, and held her face between his hands the way she’d held his. Her face was so small that her head fit in his two palms, and he thought of how she must have looked to his enormous father. He thought of how a Tuori warrior could love someone this small so completely that it drove him across the galaxy to his death. He understood it now. He understood everything now. “You didn’t leave me. You left to draw them off me. You meant to come back.”

“I meant to come back every single day.”

“And Father didn’t abandon me either.” His voice steadied on those words. He’d been wrong about that his whole life and it was finally right. For twenty-five years he had thought they chose to go, that they had chosen each other and not chosen him. And now the truth was standing in front of him with tears on her silver face. “He went to bring you home. He died in a doorway trying to make it safe enough to come back for me.”

“Yes.” She pressed her lips together. “Yes. That is exactly what he did.”

Something inside him that had been clenched so long he’d forgotten it was a fist finally loosened. He felt it go, the twenty-five years shifting and settling into a new shape, a heavy one, a grieving one, but one that didn’t have the poison in it. His father hadn’t looked at a small strange half-blood son and decided he wasn’t worth staying for. His father had loved his mate the way Brannik loved, all the way, and it had killed him, but his last act had been a door held open towards the boy he never reached.

I would have done the same, he thought, and looked down at the top of Amy’s bent head where she leaned against his ribs. For her, I would hold any door in the galaxy until it killed me.

The anger came too, because it would. A hot, old anger at his uncle’s family, at whichever cold mouth had said the boy is dead, a fever, don’t trouble yourself, at twenty-five wasted years he could have spent here where he would have been known and wanted. But the anger had nowhere to go anymore. The people who’d earned it were half a galaxy behind him and not worth the crossing. And there was a warm weight against his side that mattered infinitely more than they ever would.

He let the anger burn down. And when it had gone, what was left wasn’t the raw howling absence he’d carried his whole life. It was almost quiet.