The priest smiled. “Don't think of the sheets. Put her down.”
He went across and laid her gently on the bed. Her body so small and frail now in this near death and the furs swallowing her. Her head drifting to the side, her dark hair falling in all directions. He slowly slid his arms out from under her and thought for the shortest moment of kissing her forehead when she left, the horse rearing in the fireflame as the keep burned, and then he rose.
“They'll be here,” the priest said.
Brack turned. “Who?”
“The healers.”
“You can't help her?”
The priest turned both of his palms upward, lowering his head. The dagger was gone and Brack did not know where to. “I am afraid I cannot. But those who can are coming.”
“She might die.”
“I know,” the priest said. “Who is she to you?”
“My sister.”
The priest looked up at him slowly and Brack did not look away but he felt something in him when he met those eyes. He had stood and looked at more men than he could remember who tried to look him in the eyes and make him fear them but most of those men were dead now and he'd never felt anything like this.
“You don't have to lie to me. I know who you are.”
He swallowed. “My daughter. She's my youngest daughter.”
“You know he should have killed you.”
“Who?”
“The dragon.”
Brack nodded. “I know. Many times.”
“Then why?” The priest looked at Kayhi on the bed, her chest moving just slightly. “Why did he wait for you here?”
“Did you see it?”
The priest nodded to the windows of the spire.
“Dragons are just men,” Brack said. “They're just men and they fight for revenge the same as any man and it makes them just as foolish. It wanted me to watch her die and so she killed it.”
“You think that's all it was?”
“If it wasn't, I'd be dead.”
The priest was quiet for a moment. “Perhaps,” he said at last. “Perhaps.”
Two women came in through a door in the wall. Brack had not seen the door and did not know how it could be, having seen the spires rising into empty air from outside the temple, and yet it was. A seam in the marble bricks slowly sliding aside at the far end of the bed and both of them stepping into the room. Each wearing robes the same as the priest's, but theirs as red as blood. Their hair cropped close to their heads. One with skin nearly as white as the marble and the other as dark as those towering doors below.
“You see,” the priest said, nodding with a faint smile. “They're here.”
The women went to Kayhi and knelt and began to work. One wiping her lips of blood and lifting her head. The other running her hands down the girl's face and neck and ribs. Holding her hand against her stomach and then her breast to feel both the breathing and the heartbeat. Then nodding to the first who took from her pocket a small vial, removed the cork stopper, and poured what appeared to be no more than water into Kayhi's mouth. Just a thin trickle, then holding her head again as she worked to swallow.
Brack turned and Juoth was not watching them but watching him and he stepped past him and went to the far window and looked out. He could hear them working still behind him and the wretched breathing that was his daughter and he looked far out over the wall to where the dragon lay. He could not see it for the wall but could see far off the people gathering and staring. This thing that had once been near to killing them now headless and broken, and in that some gruesome attraction.
Or perhaps merely the draw of disbelief.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned and the women stood together in front of him. Like the priest, they did not look away or shy back from him, did not appear to think him anything more than a man. Or did not care what he was.
“We've done what we can,” the woman who'd touched him said, speaking softly. “We'll know in the morning. If she dies, it will be tonight.”
“Thank you,” he said.
The woman looked at him for a long moment. “Stay with her,” she said. “All of you.” Then, turning, they went back out the way they had come, through the door in the wall of the spire. Slipping through that marble as though they had never been. He could not see what lay beyond.
When he turned from them, the priest also had left. Faintly his footsteps descending on the metal of the spiral staircase, treading that iron down into the dark.
He hadn't thought of her mother in a long time. The strongest memory right after leaving the keep, that place blackened with fire, sheltering in the snow-buried cave and dreaming of her that time by the river. Her face in the warm sunlight and the riverside garden around them. In that dream he had only seen her for a moment and then she was gone and he'd woken in the snow and the cold.
That night in the marble spire, he dreamt of her again. Kayhi's mother, with the same long dark hair and that thin but strong frame, the same power and fire in her eyes. A woman the girl had never known but that she had become nonetheless.
He finally saw her again but this time it was not in the garden or near the river. Nor was it in the Ringed City or the fields and vineyards beyond.
After they'd married they'd rented a house in a high mountain pass. The town so far below them they could barely make it out. The dirt path to this place walking in stones along the spine of the mountain range, the open green fields falling off on both sides. From below they looked like fields you could lie in on a summer afternoon but when you got up to them they sloped away so steeply and then fell into stark cliffs and walking all along that spine was just a step or two either way from a drop of a thousand feet.
The house was small and made all of stone and set in a place where the spine dropped into one last true field, a hundred yards of grass and flowers in either direction. Behind the house a stand of tall trees where treading in the moss and browned fallen needles they sometimes saw rams and mountain sheep with their spiraled horns and heavy coats. Inside the house a single room with a hearth and a bed and the fire always crackling warmly and the sunlight falling in through the windows.
He dreamed of her sitting in that field and the time he'd taken the wine in their stone mugs, each filled so full he thought they'd spill because this was not a place where you worried about the conventions of pouring, and he'd walked out to her. Looking at her in that yellow dress with the wind pulling it back and her hair also and her looking out over the wooded mountains, far over the town, to the distant mountains where they reached all the way up into snow and winter. But here the heat of the sun and when he sat beside her and handed her the wine she smiled and leaned and kissed him and waved a hand out at the world before her.
Look at it all, she said, both then and in the dream.
He'd smiled and said nothing and drank the wine which was cold and good. The sun on his neck. The weight that was always on his back for this day gone. Finally gone.
Where do you want to go? he'd asked her.
She leaned over and put her head on his shoulder and just looked out at it. The dark rock crags that fell away and the thick green forest and the other path far below them, twisting in the treeline. A beautiful and tranquil place, set above the real world as if this was somehow another world entire up here, another plane in which men could choose to live if they wanted. Where the things that harvested the men below could not reach them and perhaps nothing was real and perhaps it all was.
And now in the dream she said: You'll kill her, Ironhelm. You'll kill her.