They traveled through the night and into the morning and into the afternoon of the following day, the hours accumulating in the particular way hours accumulated on long journeys — not quickly, but not entirely slowly either, the distance between where you started and where you were going collapsing in increments that only became visible when you stopped paying attention to them.
The group was quiet for most of it.
Not the heavy suspended quiet of people waiting for something terrible. The specific quiet of people who have said what needed saying and are now in the space between the saying and the doing, carrying what they carry, not adding to it.
Niall slept for several hours in the back of the vehicle with his head against Kristen's shoulder and Kristen reading something on her phone and her free hand occasionally checking that the shoulder she was leaning against was still comfortable for him without interrupting either activity, the particular domestic ease of two people who had been carrying the same thing long enough to have developed an economy around the carrying.
Courtney sat with Jasper in a quiet that was its own kind of conversation, the specific language of two people for whom presence was sufficient and words were supplemental.
Carlyle and Katherine did not speak much but the twin bond was active between them in the way it was always active when they were both paying full attention to the same thing — a low warm hum, the specific connection of two people made from the same material finding that the material recognized itself.
Fenix looked out the window.
He had been looking out windows for most of the journey, the hazel eyes watching the landscape change, the particular attentive quality of someone who had spent a long time in small rooms and had not finished being amazed at the size of the world outside them.
KaSandra did not sleep.
Katherine noticed this without commenting on it, the way she noticed things in this group that were significant without needing to be addressed — KaSandra sitting with her hands folded in her lap and the golden eyes looking at nothing specific and the quality of her stillness different from the ordinary stillness, the specific quality of someone moving toward something they have been moving away from for three hundred years and finding the direction change strange even when it is chosen.
Katherine looked at her once.
KaSandra looked back.
Nothing needed to be said.
Thomas drove. He always drove, which Katherine had come to understand was not about control but about the specific way Thomas managed his own anxiety — by keeping his hands occupied with something useful that required his attention without fully claiming it, leaving the part of his mind that needed to be thinking free to think.
He drank his coffee without letting it go cold.
They arrived at the valley road as the sun was beginning its descent, the light going the particular gold of late afternoon in November, and they stopped at the top of it where the road stopped being a road that appeared on maps.
Katherine got out and stood at the edge of the valley and looked down at Miralba.
It was exactly as Ashton had described. Small. Stone. The buildings pressed together in the narrow valley with the specific quality of a place that had been existing outside ordinary time for sixty years and had grown into its own strangeness. The valley held the cold the way valleys held cold, deeply and without apology, and the late light touched the rooftops of the town below with the specific gold that made everything look like the last of something.
KaSandra came to stand beside her.
She looked down at the town.
Katherine looked at her face.
KaSandra's face was the face Katherine had come to know over the months of this — still, certain, the long coat and the golden eyes and the three hundred years. But underneath the stillness, in the specific quality of her looking, something that was the expression of a person who has been dreading a place for a very long time and has arrived at it and is finding that the dread is not what they expected it to be.
Not worse.
Not better.
Simply true. Simply the actual shape of the thing, which is always different from the imagined shape, and the difference makes it possible to stand in it in a way that the imagined version never was.
"Ready," Katherine said. Not a question.
KaSandra looked at the town.
"No," she said. "But that has never been the relevant question."
Katherine looked at her.
"What is," Katherine said.
KaSandra looked at her.
"Necessary," she said.