The Greykeep Chronicles

Grandpa Garrick does not like gates.

He uses them. He uses them every week, sometimes twice, because Lyradon is three days’ ride from Greykeep and one step through the arch, and he is seventy-nine years old and has better things to do with three days than sit on a horse. But he does not like them. He says a man ought to feel the distance he’s crossing. He says a road you can’t feel under your boots isn’t a road, it’s a rumor.

Jörmungandr would agree with him. I’ve never told either of them.

”You’ll carry him,” Grandpa Garrick told me in the gate chamber, and put my son into my arms.

”Of course.”

”Properly. Head up. He likes to see.”

”I know how to carry my own son.”

Grandpa Garrick looked at me over the top of his spectacles. He has worn spectacles for close work for ten years and has never once admitted that he needs them for anything else.

”You know how to carry him across a room,” he said. ”Across a gate is different. The light takes him by surprise. He’ll want something to look at that isn’t the light.” He reached into his coat. ”Here.”

It was a wooden horse. Small enough for a baby’s fist, sanded so smooth it felt like a river stone. A dark oak, the same oak as the horse on the shelf in the old nursery with my tooth marks in its neck.

I looked at it for a moment longer than I meant to.

Then I gave it to my son.

Little Uriah examined the horse with enormous seriousness, put its head in his mouth, and bit down. Grandpa Garrick watched him do it with an expression of deep satisfaction.

”Runs in the family,” he said.

”Lyradon has been asked,” said the Castellan. ”Lyradon has answered.”

The lines on the floor brightened on both sides.

We went through.

* * *

Lyradon is the kingdom that was burned.

I don’t remember it burning. I was a baby. But I’ve heard Adriana tell it, on the nights when she tells it, which are not many. The day her mother came to Greykeep’s southern gate with what was left of their people behind her, Adriana and Cassia and Julian at her side. King Roderic dead at Harrow Plain. Surtr’s armies over the northern passes. Thousands of people on the road with what they could carry, and nowhere left to go but the one castle on the continent that had said it would take them in.

It took them in.

Then, after the war, it helped them go home.

When I was nine, Eleanor Stonehand took me to Lyradon to see the rebuilding. She wanted me to understand what a city looks like from the inside, with its walls off and its bones showing. I remember the smell of new-cut stone and the dust that got into everything. I remember the old palace standing roofless on its hill, and the cracks in the great hall’s floor where something enormously hot had walked across it.

It doesn’t look like that now.

It was spring, and Lyradon was in bloom.

The gate chamber opens onto a terrace above the old town, and the whole valley spread out below us in shades of pink and white. Every road was lined with fruit trees. Almond, cherry, plum, pear. Queen Mirelle had them planted the year the people came home, one tree for every family that walked back through the gate, and twenty years on they had grown into a city of blossom so thick that the petals drifted across the streets like snow.

Little Uriah took the horse out of his mouth and stared.

Then he pointed, with the horse, at all of it, and said something long and urgent with no consonants in it.

”Yes,” Grandpa Garrick told him gravely. ”It is.”

* * *

Julian met us at the bottom of the terrace steps.

He was holding his son upside down.

Roddick Garyn of Lyradon was three years old, and had recently discovered that being upside down was the funniest thing that could happen to a person. He was shrieking with laughter. Julian had him by both ankles and was walking toward us with the slightly glazed expression of a man who has been doing this for most of the morning and can no longer remember how it started.

”Garrick,” he said, to Grandpa Garrick. Then, to me: ”Garrick.”

”Julian.”

”He wants to see the baby.”

”Which way up?”

”I’ve stopped asking.”

Julian is Adriana’s younger brother. He’s quiet, the way Elenos is quiet, with a carpenter’s hands and a habit of holding things very carefully, as if they might break. He was a boy when Lyradon burned. He spent most of the war at Greykeep, and most of that in Grandpa Garrick’s workshop, learning to make things out of wood while everything else in his life was being unmade.

Grandpa Garrick taught him to plane a board. To glue a joint. To sit beside someone without needing to say anything. Julian learned all of it, and when his hands shook, which they did for a long time, Grandpa Garrick would cover them with his own and wait.

When Julian’s son was born, he asked Grandpa Garrick to name him.

Grandpa Garrick refused, three times. Then he named him Roddick, for the king Julian never got to know, and Garyn, which nobody has ever been able to get him to explain but which everyone assumes is as close to Garrick as he would let himself go.

Roddick is not, strictly speaking, Grandpa Garrick’s great-grandson.

Nobody has ever said so where Grandpa Garrick could hear it.

Julian turned Roddick right side up and set him on his feet. Roddick swayed, looked at little Uriah in my arms, and walked straight toward him with both hands out.

”Gently,” said Julian.

”Baby,” said Roddick, with great authority.

”Yes,” said Julian. ”Gently.”

I crouched down. Roddick put one hand very carefully on little Uriah’s foot, the way he’d evidently been taught, and the two of them looked at each other.

Little Uriah offered him the wooden horse.

Roddick took it.

Little Uriah’s face crumpled, because he had not meant him to keep it.

Roddick, after a long and visible struggle, gave it back.

Grandpa Garrick watched all of this with his hands behind his back and his face perfectly still, and I could tell, because I have known him my whole life, that it was the best thing he had seen in a month.

* * *

Elowen and Queen Mirelle were waiting in the garden court with tea.

Elowen is Julian’s wife, a princess from a kingdom in the east with three sisters and a brother and an opinion about every one of them. She met Julian at Greykeep when they were both young, the year the kingdoms first came to sign the charter. She had walked past a fountain with him every day for a week and let him explain it every time, though she understood it perfectly well by the second day.

I asked her once why she’d done that.

”He liked explaining it,” she said. ”And I liked the way his hands moved when he did.”

She kissed Grandpa Garrick on both cheeks. She kissed me on one. She took little Uriah out of my arms before I could object and handed him to the old woman in the chair beside her.

Queen Mirelle of Lyradon has gone white since I was small, and thin, and she walks with a stick now that she uses mostly for pointing. She held little Uriah on her lap and looked down at him.

He isn’t hers. He’s Mother’s grandson, not Adriana’s. There’s no blood between them at all.

It didn’t seem to occur to either of them.

”He has your mother’s eyes,” Mirelle told me.

”Everyone says that.”

”Everyone is right.” She let him grip her finger. ”And your father’s frown. Look. He’s frowning at me.”

He was. He was frowning at her the way Father frowns at a tariff schedule, as if she were a problem he fully intended to solve.

Mirelle laughed, and held him closer, and Roddick climbed into her lap on the other side so as not to be left out. The old queen sat in the spring sunlight with her grandson on one knee and somebody else’s great-grandson on the other, under a cherry tree she had planted the year she brought her people home.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look more satisfied with a morning.

* * *

Davren wanted to show us the wheel.

Davren always wants to show someone the wheel. It doesn’t matter which wheel. There is always a wheel, and it is always new, and it always does something the last one didn’t, and he always explains it with his hands moving faster than his mouth.

He came to Greykeep as a patient when I was very small, carried on a stretcher from Saint Orra’s Rest with a fever that nobody thought he’d survive. He did survive it. He spent the long months afterward in a chair by the infirmary window, too weak to walk, and to keep himself from going mad he took apart every mechanism anyone would bring him. A clock. A lock. A water pump. One of Perrin’s carts, which Perrin has never entirely forgiven.

When he could walk again, he walked straight to Grandpa Garrick’s workshop and asked whether he could stay.

Twenty years later he is Lyradon’s chief engineer. He built half the mills in the valley. He met Cassia at Concordia college before he got sick. He married Cassia, Adriana’s sister, who has never once in all that time pretended to be impressed by anything he made.

She was standing on the riverbank when we came down through the orchards, with her arms folded and her sleeves rolled up.

”He’s going to show you the wheel,” she said.

”I heard,” I said.

”It’s very good.”

I looked at her in surprise.

Cassia shrugged. ”Don’t tell him I said so,” she said. ”He’ll be unbearable for a week.”

The wheel stood in a channel cut from the river below the old mill. It was taller than the mill, built of pale new oak and bound with dark iron, and it was not turning a millstone. It was lifting water. Every bucket on its rim came up full out of the channel and tipped at the top into a long wooden trough on stilts, and the trough ran away up the hillside, over the road, across a gully on a narrow trestle, and up into the orchards on the far slope where the river had never reached.

”The upper terraces have never had water,” Davren said. He was standing beside me with his hands moving. ”Never. Not in any record. They grew nothing but thorn. Queen Mirelle wanted trees up there, one for every family that hadn’t come home, and there was no way to get water to them except carrying it in buckets, and the old women were doing that, Garrick, every morning, carrying water up that hill in buckets, so I...”

He ran out of breath.

”So you built a wheel,” I said.

”So I built a wheel.” He looked at it. His hands stopped. ”Your grandfather helped with the bearings. I couldn’t make them run true. I’d been trying for a year. He looked at them for an afternoon and told me I’d been cutting with the grain instead of across it, and he was right, and I’d been doing it wrong for twenty years and nobody had ever told me.”

Grandpa Garrick had come down the slope behind us. He stood looking up at the wheel with his hands behind his back.

”Nobody told you,” he said, ”because you never asked.”

Davren went pink.

Cassia laughed out loud.

Julian, behind me with Roddick on his shoulders, looked up at the wheel and didn’t say anything. But I saw his face.

The first thing he ever built in Grandpa Garrick’s workshop was a waterwheel. A small one, no bigger than a dinner plate. It turned in a basin in the Greykeep courtyard for most of a summer. Elowen saw it there the first week she came to Greykeep. She liked it better than the fountain.

I don’t think Davren knew that.

I think Julian did.

* * *

We walked upriver in the afternoon, the five of us and the two children, to see the bridge.

I hadn’t asked to see it. Julian simply turned that way when we left the wheel, and everyone followed, and nobody said where we were going. They didn’t need to. There’s only one bridge in Lyradon that anybody walks to on purpose.

It crosses the river where the valley narrows, a mile above the town. The old bridge was stone. I’ve seen drawings of it in Mary’s records, low and broad and very old, with seven arches. It was the bridge King Roderic held, when Surtr’s armies came down out of the northern passes. He held it long enough for his people to get away down the road behind him.

Then he looked back.

Adriana has always said that. That at the end, on the bridge, he looked back at them, at his family on the road. And then he turned around and faced Surtr.

The stone bridge didn’t survive what came next.

The new one is iron.

It’s a single span, high and light and dark against the water, so finely made that from a distance it looks drawn rather than built. Davren designed it. Julian carved the oak handrails himself. The iron was forged in a single season, in a heat no smith’s fire in Avarra could reach, and when I was a boy and first asked who had forged it, every adult in the room went quiet at once.

I found out later.

We stopped at the middle of the span. Julian set Roddick down. The boy ran to the rail and pressed his face between two balusters to look at the water.

Julian stood beside him with one hand on his son’s back.

I came and stood on his other side.

We were quiet for a while. Behind us, Grandpa Garrick was showing little Uriah the river, holding him up so he could see over the rail, and Elowen and Cassia and Davren were arguing gently about whether the handrails needed oiling.

”He’s late,” Julian said.

”Who?”

Julian didn’t answer.

He didn’t need to. Because at that moment, high on the northern side of the valley, where the road comes down out of the passes, something caught fire.

Not the trees. Not the grass. The air.

A long line of flame, bright as a forge, coming down the mountain road toward the bridge at a walk.

Everyone else on the bridge looked up.

Nobody ran.

Roddick took his face out of the balusters, looked at the fire on the mountain, and clapped his hands.

”Surtr!” he shouted.

* * *

He came down the road at a walk.

I had seen Surtr before. Everyone in Greykeep has, at a distance, at a feast or a council or a festival, standing at the back of the crowd and somehow not managing to be inconspicuous. But I had never seen him like this. Coming down off the mountain toward the bridge where King Roderic died, with the air burning around him and the road smoking under his feet.

He was as small as he could make himself. Which is to say he was still twice Grandpa Garrick’s height, and broad as a barn door, and every line of him glowed like iron just pulled from a forge. His beard was embers. His eyes were molten. When he stepped onto the end of the iron bridge, the whole span gave a low, ringing hum, like a bell struck very gently.

That was why it was iron, I realized. Stone would have cracked. Wood would have burned. Davren and Julian had built a bridge Surtr could walk on.

He stopped three paces from Julian.

Julian looked up at him.

”You’re late,” Julian said.

”I am not late,” said Surtr. His voice was very deep and sounded like a furnace door opening. ”The sun is not down.”

”You came at noon last year.”

”Last year I did not stop to look at the goats.”

”What goats?”

”There are goats on the pass,” said Surtr. ”New ones. Somebody has put goats there.” He sounded deeply suspicious. ”One of them looked at me.”

”They’re Hanne’s goats,” said Cassia from the rail. ”She moved her herd up there in the spring.”

Surtr considered this.

”It looked at me,” he said again.

”Goats look at everything,” said Julian.

”Not like that.”

Roddick had let go of the balusters and was standing with both hands stretched up toward the burning giant, bouncing on his toes.

Surtr looked down at him.

Then, very slowly, with a care that made the whole bridge hum, he crouched. Even crouching he was taller than Julian. He held out one enormous glowing hand, palm up, and stopped it a careful arm’s length from the boy, close enough to feel the heat and no closer.

In the middle of his palm sat a small iron horse.

It was rough, the way things are when the person who made them has fingers the size of fence posts. But it was a horse. Unmistakably a horse. Four legs, a tail, an arched neck. It glowed faintly, the deep red of a coal at the bottom of a fire.

”Not yet,” Surtr said to Roddick. ”It is too warm. Your father will tell you when.”

Roddick looked at the horse with an expression of pure longing.

”It’ll stay warm all winter,” Surtr told Julian, without looking up. ”In his bed. At the foot. It will not burn. I asked the dwarves how hot was too hot, and then I made it less than that.”

Julian didn’t say anything.

He reached out, and his hand wasn’t shaking at all, and took the glowing horse from Surtr’s palm.

It must have been very hot. He didn’t flinch.

He put it in his coat pocket, where Roddick couldn’t reach it, and Roddick wailed, and Surtr made a low rumbling sound in his chest that took me a moment to recognize as a laugh.

* * *

They argued about the handrails for an hour.

I’m not exaggerating. I counted. Surtr thought the oak should be replaced with iron, because oak was weak, and burned, and he had nearly leaned on it once. Julian thought the oak should stay, because it was his oak, and he had carved it, and people’s hands needed something to hold that wasn’t cold in winter. Surtr pointed out that iron was not cold when he was nearby. Julian pointed out that Surtr was only nearby one day a year. Surtr said that this was not his fault, and that he would come more often if there were fewer goats.

Cassia sat on the rail and laughed until she cried. Davren took notes. Elowen sat in the sun with her back against a balustrade and watched her husband argue with a fire giant, with an expression I have only ever seen on Mother’s face, watching Father do something foolish that she secretly loved.

I stood at the far rail with Grandpa Garrick.

Little Uriah had fallen asleep against his shoulder in the warmth coming off the bridge.

”Every year?” I said quietly.

Grandpa Garrick nodded.

”Every year. This day. Since the bridge was finished.” He shifted my son a little higher. ”He walks down the same road he came down. The same way. Except he walks.”

I looked at Julian, shouting about the grain of the oak at a giant made of fire.

I knew the story. Everyone in Greykeep knows the story. King Roderic held this bridge, and looked back at his family, and turned around and faced Surtr. Later, Surtr was on his knees in a frozen field with Varrick’s shadows around his wrists, and Julian walked up to him wearing his dead father’s helmet. Julian took it off, and held it in both hands, and told the giant who had killed his father to burn the god’s mark out of it.

Then he threw it to him.

Not hard. Not far. Three paces. The way you toss something to someone you trust to catch it.

And Surtr caught it.

”I never understood,” I said. ”How Julian could.”

”No,” said Grandpa Garrick. ”Nor did I. For a long time.”

”And now?”

He was quiet a while.

”I asked him,” he said. ”Julian. A few years after. In the workshop. He was planing a board for that rail, and I asked him how he could stand to have that creature in the same room.” He looked at the bridge. ”He put the plane down. And he said, ’Grandfather, you taught me that a joint only holds if both pieces are cut to fit. You can’t glue a thing together from one side.’”

I didn’t say anything.

”Surtr cut himself to fit,” Grandpa Garrick said. ”Every year since. He walks down that road at a walk. He learned how hot is too hot.” He looked down at little Uriah, asleep on his shoulder. ”That’s the whole of it, I think. Julian threw him the helmet. And Surtr has spent every year since trying to deserve having caught it.”

* * *

The sun went down behind the mountains. Surtr stayed until it did. Then he stood, and the whole bridge rang, and he looked once more at Julian and at Roddick and at the river.

At the very end, before he left, he turned and looked at Julian’s coat.

Julian sighed. He reached inside and drew out the helmet.

I hadn’t known he was carrying it. It was a plain old soldier’s helm, dented and mended, with no ornament at all except for a single black line across the crown. Faint, and very old. Surtr’s beacon. The mark that had let him find this family once, when he was hunting them, and that let him find them now, when he wasn’t.

Julian held it up.

Surtr looked at it for a long moment.

Then he nodded, once, and turned, and walked back up the road toward the passes, and the air burned behind him in a long line of light, all the way up the mountain, until it went over the top and was gone.

Julian put the helmet back in his coat.

Roddick was asleep in Elowen’s arms with one hand reaching toward his father’s pocket.

* * *

We went home at dusk.

Grandpa Garrick carried little Uriah through the orchards, under the blossom, down to the gate. Julian came with us to the terrace and shook Grandpa Garrick’s hand, and then, after a moment, hugged him, which I had never seen him do. Elowen kissed my cheek and told me to bring Seraphina next time, or not to bother coming.

Queen Mirelle had fallen asleep in her chair under the cherry tree. Nobody woke her.

”Greykeep has been asked,” said Lyradon’s gate-warden, an old soldier with one arm and a ledger he kept in imitation of Mary. He made a mark in it. ”Greykeep has answered.”

We went through.

The light came up and went away, and the gate chamber at Greykeep was cool and dim and smelled of stone instead of blossom. The Castellan was waiting. It recognized us. It welcomed us home.

Grandpa Garrick stood for a moment in the middle of the chamber with my son asleep on his shoulder.

He was frowning slightly, the way he frowns at a joint that has gone together better than he expected.

”Felt that one,” he said.

I didn’t ask what he meant. I didn’t need to.

I’d felt it too.