Chapter 203 The Princess Isabella
POV: Valentina | Rookeries, then the shelter
Dante has always asked the hard question first. It was a quality he had as a child and which the hunter training sharpened rather than softened, the instinct to go directly to the thing that matters rather than building toward it through safer territory. I used to find it annoying. Now I find it the most honest thing about him.
Why did you stay.
I take him through the Rookeries the way I take anyone I am trying to help understand what this place is, which is not a tour but a walk with attention, letting the place show itself rather than describing it. The supply stations at the corners. The message network that Tom built, runners and relay points, the specific architecture of information moving through a community that cannot always use technology safely. The shelter three streets over where Isla has thirty-one children and is running on determination and fae healing supplies and the community contributions that have been arriving since the raid.
Dante walks beside me and looks at everything with the hunter's eye, which is the eye that assesses everything for threats and which in this context keeps finding not threats but something else, which is the quality of a place that has decided to survive.
Inside the shelter, Estella is at the table with the blocks again. She has been practicing every day since the first time, with Katherine's guidance, and the blocks now rise and hold for thirty seconds before she loses the thread, which is thirty seconds longer than last week. Ash is beside her, not supervising exactly, just present, which is Ash's way of supporting things.
Dante looks at them for a long time.
"The hybrid children," he says.
"Thirty-one of them," I say. "Most of them have been in Order facilities since they were toddlers. Most of them do not have families to return to. Most of them are going to live here, in the Rookeries, in whatever we build after the war."
He is quiet in the way he is quiet when something is landing.
I tell him the rest of it then, the parts I did not tell him on the street because the street was not the right place. The running years, the specific quality of a life lived at the edge of survival, always moving, always one step ahead of the Parliament's hunters, what that does to a person over time. The transition to full vampire, which I do not have comfortable language for but which I describe as accurately as I can, what it cost and what it gave and what it changed.
The way I feel about Callum, which I describe in the same flat accurate way I describe everything, because Dante is my brother and he deserves the honest version.
The embryo. Lucia. What it means to have a daughter I have never met who is three months from being born and who is currently in a facility we raided three days ago and who is the reason I did not run when running was still possible.
"You stayed because of her," Dante says.
"I stayed because running was surviving," I say. "This is living. There is a difference and I did not understand it for a long time and I understand it now."
He looks at Estella with the blocks. He looks at Ash. He looks at the shelter walls, which have the quality of a place that has been made habitable through sustained effort rather than through having been built habitable, the specific quality of a space that people have decided matters.
"What do you need from me?" he says.
It is the right question. It is always the right question and he has always eventually arrived at it.
"Stay," I say. "Fight." I look at him directly. "Be my brother. You have been doing that from Italy for six years by being alive somewhere even when I did not know it. Do it here."
He nods once, the nod of someone who has made a decision rather than the nod of someone performing agreement.
"Parliament wants me specifically," I say, because I am not going to pretend he did not tell me that on the street. "I know. I have known something like this was coming for a while." I look at the shelter, at Estella and Ash and the thirty-one children who are here because people walked into facilities and brought them out. "It does not change what I do next."
"I know," he says. "You never changed what you did next. Not once. Not even when you were sixteen and I was eleven and Father said the training was too dangerous and you told him you were going to do it anyway."
"I was right," I say.
"You were right," he agrees. "You have been right about most things. It is extremely irritating."
I look at my brother, who is alive, who has been alive for six years while I thought he was dead, who came to London to find me and who is now sitting in a shelter watching hybrid children practice their abilities in the afternoon light.
"I'm glad you're here," I say.
"I know," he says. "I'm glad I'm here too."