365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 08

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 08 – Giselle Vale’s Eyes

Two old men, ninety armed sons and soldiers, and one girl in the middle of a field.

Lord Redmont is seventy-four and built like a bull that’s been dying angrily for a decade. Lord Silvercrest is eighty, thin as wire, with a cane he doesn’t need.

“They’ve sent a child,” Redmont said.

“They’ve sent a Vanguard Commander,” I said. “First question. Why do you want this land?”

Redmont opened his mouth to bark something about ancestral right.

And Echo went absolutely still in my head, and I heard the thing under his answer – the thought he was actually thinking, sitting under the words like a stone under water.

Because if HE gets it, he’ll dig.

I turned to Silvercrest.

“Second question. What’s buried out here?”

The old man’s cane hit the ground.

Both of them stopped breathing at the same time. Ninety men shifted, confused, waiting for orders that didn’t

come.

“Nobody’s farmed this land in a hundred and eighteen years,” I said. “You’ve both spent two years and a fortune making sure the other one doesn’t own it. You don’t want the land, my lords. You want it closed.”

“There’s nothing out here,” Redmont growled.

“Then you’ll have no objection to a survey.”

Silvercrest sat down slowly on the low stone wall behind him and put his face in his hands.

It took forty minutes and a bottle of Redmont’s whiskey to get the story, and I sent my entire unit thirty yards back so two old men could stop performing.

In 1908, both Houses buried something here. A girl.

Nineteen years old. Married off from a third House to seal a trade agreement between them. She died fourteen months later, and the marriage certificate was destroyed, and both Houses agreed that the field would stay empty forever, and both of them had spent a century terrified that the other one would one day dig her up and use her.

“Whose daughter?” I asked.

Redmont looked at the grass. “Doesn’t matter. She’s been dead a hundred years.”

“Whose daughter.”

“They never gave the House name,” Silvercrest said, and I heard the lie land in his chest like a dropped plate.-

He was thinking it, though. Clear as a bell, in that old cracked voice inside his skull.

The Vale girl.

My hands went cold.

I kept my face perfectly still, because I’ve had a year of practice at holding a face perfectly still while my

chest caves in.

“Here’s your solution,” I said. “You cede the land jointly, in perpetuity, to the Crown. Neither House owns it. Neither House can dig. The Crown consecrates it as a memorial and posts a warden. You both stop paying ninety men to stand in a field, and you both stop losing sleep.”

Silence.

“And you put her name on a stone,” I said. “Whoever she was. She was somebody’s girl before she was your

problem.”

Redmont, who has hated Silvercrest since the Nixon administration, was the one who broke.

“Fine,” he said hoarsely. “Fine. God help me. Fine.”

They signed at ten p.m. on the hood of my SUV, and Silvercrest’s hands shook so badly Orson had to hold the

paper.

As they were leaving, the old man stopped in front of me and stared at my face for a long, long moment.

“Forgive an old man,” he said. “You have Giselle Vale’s eyes.”

The world tipped about eleven degrees.

“You know my mother?”

“Knew her father.” He was very pale. “You’re the Vale girl.”

“I’m Commander Vale.”

“Child.” His hand closed on my forearm, and his voice dropped so low that no one on earth without my gay’s could have caught it. “Does anyone know what you are?”

don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do,” he whispered. “You’ve been listening to my thoughts for the last hour.”

Every hair on my body stood up.

“Do not answer that,” Echo said sharply.

“Good night, my lord.”

“They killed the last one,” he said, and his eyes were wet. “Not in a field. In a house, slowly, over nine years, by

a husband who found out what she could do. That’s what’s buried out here, girl. That’s what both our Houses

agreed to bury.”

He let go of my arm.

“Go home. Get behind your family’s walls.”

“I don’t have a family,” I said.

And I got in the car.

I resolved a two-year war in ninety-four minutes. The King called it the fastest arbitration in Vanguard history. My unit was insufferable the whole drive back.

I didn’t hear a word of it.

Because I finally understood what Mara had tried to tell me. Two bloodlines on record.

And I was doing math I didn’t want to do a girl with my mother’s eyes, buried in 1908, and a family that started screaming at me in silence the morning after my seventeenth birthday.

We pulled into the Vanguard at dawn.

Flora went up the steps ahead of me to unlock our wing, and stopped dead.

Before we’d left, she’d wedged a playing card in the doorframe, at ankle height, because a few of them had a feeling somebody had been coming into our quarters.

The card was lying on the floor.