Inherit the Flame

Chapter Sixty

Detan found it rather rude that his auntie sent him a summons while he hung out in Ripka’s room, chatting, instead of coming to visit him like she had the ladies.

Tibs a steady presence beside him, they limped their way down the halls, nursing aches and pains and generally taking their sweet time of it. If his auntie wanted to speak with him, she could wait. He was sick to the bone of jumping to other people’s needs.

They found her sitting on her big chair – she’d pinch his ear if she ever heard him call it a throne – arms folded across her lap while she listened to Gatai deliver some dire news or other. Detan pictured himself in that same chair, and his stomach dropped.

The moment she sighted them, she waved Gatai away with one hand, leaned forward.

“I hope you both are well?”

Detan exaggerated his limp, just for the pits of it, and Tibs joined in. The Dame rolled her eyes and slumped back in her chair. “Will you two ever stop?”

“Stop what, exactly, ma’am?” Tibs asked.

“You are well?”

“We made it down here without fainting, so I suppose that’s well enough,” Detan said.

“And what will you do now, nephew?” Dame Honding asked, eyes like flints that’d just been put to the spark. Detan looked to Tibs, saw the question in his single, cocked eyebrow, the hint of a smile in the corner of his boot-leather lips.

“Ole Rippy’s got a lot of work to do, getting the Remnant into shape, don’t you think, Tibs?”

“It ain’t an easy thing, keeping a prison in shape, that’s for sure.”

Auntie Honding cut a hand through the air. “Miss Leshe is perfectly capable of the task she has chosen. What of you, nephew?”

Detan just kept on looking at Tibs, not daring to glance into the smolder of his aunt’s expression. “Know what prisons need lots of? Locks, you know. Gotta’ keep ‘em all in nice and snug – that’s the idea.”

“True ‘nough, can’t be much of a prison without locks.”

“Will you both stop your inane babbling–”

“Need metal for locks, though. Good iron ore.”

Tibs quirked a grin, catching on. “Yes indeed, sirra.”

“And I just happen to know that rotten ole’ Mercer Grandon is sending a fresh load of the stuff down the eastern caravan route, to a weapons forge on the coast there. Trunk-loads of it.”

“Dangerous route, that. Bandits rove those skies.”

“Bandits?” Detan faked a shiver. “What’s the sky coming to?”

“Heard tell most mercers running routes down that skyroad hire mercenaries to see ‘em through.”

“But wouldn’t you know it, Mercer Grandon is in a pinch. Put a lotta’ money behind some venture that fell through – something to do with honey.”

“You don’t say,” Tibs drawled.

Dame Honding threw her arms into the air and let loose an exasperated huff. “Are you even listening to me, boy?”

He gave up the limp and stepped closer to the throne, leaving Tibs just an arm’s length behind him. Caught between two Honding futures, he thought, and neither one of them he really wanted.

“I have never stopped listening to you, Auntie. But this…” he dragged his gaze over her throne, tipped his chin to stare pointedly at the family crest carved into the wall above her head. “This is not what I do. This is not how I help. Not yet, anyway. The world needs a little time to get used to me in it. And…” He swallowed, thinking of a particular sunset on a particular beach. “I have some promises yet to keep.”

Detan straightened, feeling the ache in every joint, and turned toward the door. With his aunt’s shadow thrown over his shoulder he hesitated, just a breath. Then Tibs was beside him, offering an arm to take some of Detan’s weight. He picked up like they’d never stopped chatting.

“It wouldn’t do to leave the mercer in such a lurch, would it?” Detan asked.

“Wouldn’t be right.”

“Wouldn’t be gentlemanly.”

“Mmhmm. And we can’t leave Ripka without proper supplies. It’d be beastly of us.”

“Downright traitorous.”

Shuffling, limping, they made their way down the long strip of red rug that spilt like blood from the foot of the Honding family throne. His aunt’s shadow did not waver over his shoulder, but it did not cause his knees to quake as it once would have. Outside, the night gleamed on, a bruise-black sky shot through with hundreds of thousands of stars.

His flier waited. The open sky waited.

He was leaving Hond Steading, but he was going home.