Page 55 of C is for Captive

And then the light went long and gold across the valley floor, and the priest walked back towards his ship, and Brannik's chest tightened. If the priest meant to camp in the ruins and stay the night, to wake and search again at first light, then the danger stretched into the darkness. The enclave would have to remain impossibly still through hours he couldn’t guard against.

The priest reached the ramp. He stopped. He turned, and for one endless moment he looked back at the valley, and his gaze traveled up the slope, up towards the folds of rock where two people lay flat against the cold stone and did not exist.

His hand closed around hers. Gently. She understood at once and held herself to nothing, and he held himself to nothing, and the priest’s cold flat gaze passed over the crevice where they lay hidden and moved on, incurious and unseeing, up to the empty peaks and back down again.

You don’t fool people who want the truth, Amy had said. You fool people who are already lying to themselves.

The priest had come looking for the answer to a set of coordinates. She had given him one. An old Aurelian settlement, an old Grorn attack, and a row of graves and a valley empty long enough for the mountain to begin reclaiming it.

Everything was real. He only had the ending wrong.

Thressk turned. He climbed his ship’s ramp. And the ramp folded up behind him, and the thrusters woke with a low building roar, and dust rolled out across the ruins and across Vashen’s body where it lay. The ship lifted, and climbed, and dwindled, and then it was gone into the darkening sky.

For a long time neither of them moved. He didn’t trust it. He’d learned not to trust the moment something seemed to end, because that was so often the moment it turned and bit you. He kept them flat and still while the sound of the engines faded to nothing and the valley’s true silence flowed back in to fill the space the ship had left.

Then, at last, he let the breath go out of him in a slow shudder that ran the length of his enormous frame.

“He’s gone,” she said, very quietly, as though she still didn’t quite believe it either. “He took it. He took it. He’s gone.”

“He’s gone.” He turned, and got his arm all the way around her, and pulled her against his chest where he’d wanted her for the past two days and had not been able to have her. She came without resistance, small and warm and shaking a little now that it was over, the way brave people shook afterwards. He got his other arm around her too and put his face down into her hair and just breathed in her scent, the scent that had come to him first through the bars of a cell and undone the careful solitary male he’d spent his whole life becoming.

“You made that happen,” he said roughly into her hair. “You looked at a Grorn priest and you built the one thing in the universe that would send him away, and you built it out of nothing but knowing what he wanted to believe.” He drew back just enough to look at her and see her face in the last of the gold light. “My father crossed a galaxy to defeat them with a blade. You did it with nothing but an empty valley and the truth arranged in the wrong order.”

“I told you.” Her voice was unsteady, and her eyes were bright, and she smiled at him anyway. “I’m good at being overlooked.”

“You,” he said, “are the most dangerous thing on this mountain.”

And he kissed her, up on the cold rock with the safe silent valley spread out below them and the danger gone with the darkening sky, and for the first time since he was eleven years old there was nothing waiting anywhere that he needed to find.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The climb down from their hiding place took longer than the climb up, and Amy’s legs shook the whole way, though she couldn’t have said whether that was the effort or the aftermath of holding still for a long day while a male who wanted to destroy an entire people walked around in the valley below. Brannik went ahead of her on the steep parts, one huge hand reaching back for her to grip. She didn’t need it half the time. She took it anyway. There was something in the way he offered it, just there, for her to use or not, that she’d stopped being able to resist somewhere back on the ship.

The enclave came out of the rock to meet them as they reached the high pass, one figure and then three and then a dozen. Word must have run ahead of them along whatever channels the Aurelians used, because Serei was there at the front, her shining silver eyes fixed on her son as though she still couldn’t quite trust that he’d come back whole.

“He’s gone,” Brannik told her. “He believed the story. He killed one of Krebb’s males and left. He has no reason to come back.”

Serei closed her eyes. When she opened them, something old and heavy had gone out of her shoulders. She reached a long way up and put her hand against her son’s battered face, and he let her, which was its own kind of miracle.

“Your father’s grave,” Serei said. “It helped hold them off. He’s still protecting us.”

His jaw worked. He didn’t say anything. He put his own hand over his mother’s, and that was all, and it was enough.

Then the enclave took them in, pressing food on them and asking questions in their low musical Aurelian voices. The ones like Brannik with their mixed blood and their broader builds mixed with the slighter full-blooded ones, all of them alive and all of them safe, because a human woman had learned that the safest thing in the universe was to be nobody worth looking at.

She should have felt triumphant. Mostly she felt hollow and scoured out, the way she always did after fear. And underneath the hollowness, the one small stubborn question she’d been carrying since they found the Aurelians refused to be ignored any longer.

She waited until the crowd thinned. Serei had gone to see to the ones who’d stood watch through the night, and the others had drifted back into their homes in the rock, and it was just the two of them at the edge of the settlement where the mountain fell away into evening. Then she made herself ask it before she lost her nerve.

“So what now?”

He turned from the view. “Now?”

“You found her.” She kept her eyes on the valley, because it was easier than watching his face. “You found your mother. That’s what you’ve been searching for your whole life, right? Now she’s here, and she’s alive, and there’s a whole group of people here who have your eyes and who understand what you are. There’s a place for you.” She’d rehearsed this version, the version that let him off easy, too many times. “You should stay. You don’t have to worry about me. I got myself through four years. I can get myself a passage somewhere.”

She braced for his answer. She’d been bracing for it for days, ever since the hidden markers had lit at his touch and she’d understood he was about to find the thing that would make him whole. She wasn’t going to run. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t vanish before he had to say the words. She’d stand here and take it. But she braced.

He was quiet for a long moment. Long even for him.