Page 54 of C is for Captive

The graves were down at the valley’s edge, in a row along the old stone wall. The real ones. She had insisted they touch nothing there, only carefully clear enough of the weeds that a searching eye would find them at once. He had stood over one of them in the dark for a long time once he’d understood which one it was, and he had not been able to breathe for a while.

Garmek. His father was down there under one of those cleared stones, and today his father’s grave was going to save the people his father had died for. She had held his hand while he’d knelt in the dark and had said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and she’d known it.

“He’s setting down,” she whispered, drawing his mind back to the present.

The ship landed on the flat ground at the valley’s mouth, dust rolling out from under it in a slow pale wave. A ramp lowered. His lips pulled back off his fangs before he caught them, because he knew that scent even from up here, cold and dry and wrong, with a smell like old bone and burnt copper.

The Grorn priest walked down the ramp.

He was smaller than he remembered from his cell, or perhaps he had grown larger in his own mind since the chains. A grey figure in a dark uniform, unhurried, his hands folded and his head turning slowly to read the valley the way a male reads a page he already knows the ending of. Behind him came three armed males, none of them Grorn. They stayed close to the ship with the watchful unease of hired muscle on unfamiliar ground.

And one of them he knew.

“That one.” His voice was less than a breath. “By the ramp. He’s one of Krebb’s. I saw him in the compound.”

She went still against him, then nodded. “Vashen. I know him.”

They were too far to hear at first. But the wind, which carried the settlement’s silence away from the priest, also carried the priest’s voice up. She had known it would and had chosen this crevice for exactly that reason. He had stopped being surprised by her somewhere around the middle of the night. Fragments of voices came to them, thin and clear across the cold air.

The priest was angry. He heard the anger before he heard the words, the flat, controlled Grorn anger that carried a knife somewhere inside it.

“—your master’s incompetence—” the wind brought the words, and then it fell away, and then, “—the male escaped. Do you understand what escaped from that filthy little port?”

Krebb’s male said something, low and pleading, that the wind ate.

“—silver eyes. Silver. Do you know how long—” A pause, and the priest’s voice dropped to something almost gentle, which was far worse. “—not even full-blooded. A half-breed. A mongrel. And still he carried old blood, and your master let him walk out through a wall.”

Amy’s fingers closed hard around his forearm, and he understood the message in her grip perfectly. Don’t move.

He didn’t move. It cost him. Every year of the search, every rumor chased down a dead alley, the silent grave below—all of it represented by the male below wearing dark robes and calling him a mongrel. He could be down that slope before the crew cleared their weapons. He knew it in his bones the way he knew his own strength. He could put his hands on the priest and get justice for all of it. He could get justice for a grave with his father’s name that the priest would never even realize⁠—

Her grip tightened on his arm until her nails bit through his sleeve. She didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes down on the valley, small and still and absolutely certain, and she didn’t need to say a single word.

He breathed out through his nose, slowly, and let it go.

Because she was right. She was right the way she’d been right all night. If he killed the priest, and the crew scattered, and one of them got a signal off before he could reach them, then the story the priest was meant to carry home of an old trace and a dead valley would die with him. The Grorn would get a new story in its place. Our priest went to a valley of Aurelian graves and never came back. And that story would bring a fleet.

Justice for the dead was worth a great deal. It was not worth Serei. It was not worth Amy. He had learned from a small human who talked to him in a cell because his silence made her nervous, that the difference between a warrior and a corpse was often nothing but knowing which fight to walk away from.

Below, the priest was finished with Vashen.

It happened without warning and without heat. The priest turned, mid-word, as though to walk towards the ruins. His hand came up, and there was a sound like cloth tearing, and Vashen folded down into the dust and did not get up. The other two crew stepped back from the body. Neither of them said anything. Neither of them looked surprised.

Amy’s breath caught. She flinched against him, and he carefully slid his arm around her and drew her in, putting his body between her and the Grorn below even though there was a mountain’s worth of stone and distance already between them. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t try to.

“He blames Krebb,” she whispered, her voice not quite steady. “For you. For letting you go.”

“He’s cutting the cord,” he said. He watched the priest step over the body without looking down at it and walk on into the ruins. “Krebb’s no use to him now. Too clumsy. He held a clue in his hands and lost it. So the priest killed his male and is leaving the corpse where Krebb’s people will find it, if they ever come here.” A cold satisfaction moved in him. “Krebb bought himself a Grorn patron. He just found out what that costs.”

“Good,” she said, and there was something fierce and small in the word. He looked down at her and loved her so much it was almost painful. She’d delivered that male his supper. She’d carried a tray past that male for a year while he called her boy and never once saw her. And she looked down at his body in the dust with no pity at all, and he understood that too.

Then they settled in to wait, and the waiting was the worst part.

Thressk did not hurry. He walked through the dead settlement house by house, unhurried and patient, the way she had said a priest would. He stood a long time in the doorway with the child’s toy in it. He crouched by the old ashes in a cold hearth and put his hand into the ash as if he could feel how long they had been dead. He walked the row of graves and stood before them one at a time. Brannik’s jaw ached from clenching when the grey figure paused at the one that was his father’s, then tilted his head, and moved on.

Look somewhere else, he thought at the grey figure, every muscle locked. Take the lie. You want the lie. She built it for you out of exactly what you want. Take it and go.

The sun climbed and crossed and began to fall. The crew grew bored and sat in the shade of the ship. Twice one of them wandered towards the base of the slope, and both times he felt Amy stop breathing beside him. Both times the crewman scuffed at the dead ground, found nothing, and drifted back. The road markers up the mountain read as cold stone. The wind kept rising towards the hidden enclave and away from the valley below. The valley held its silence like a held breath, and the lie held with it.