The Greykeep Chronicles

Helena sent me back to the college a week later with a second packet of honey biscuits and strict instructions to watch Iselle eat at least two of them.

”Not one,” she said, at the kitchen door. ”Two. And not crumbs. Biscuits.”

”What if she doesn’t want two?”

”Then you ask her why not, and you come back and tell me, and I’ll make something she does want.” Helena put the packet in my hands. ”Go on.”

So I went. Through the Concordia gate, where the Castellan wrote Garrick Grey, outward, Concordia, biscuits, which I am fairly sure it did on purpose. Across the parade ground. Under the old arch with the worn-away swords. Into the square, where the fruit trees had started dropping their leaves into the long stone fountain and the students were all wearing scarves.

I found Iselle on the bench in the corner of the square that gets the sun at four, exactly where Caitlin’s list said it would be. She had a book open on her knees and her feet tucked up under her and a scarf of Caitlin’s around her neck, a terrible orange one that Caitlin knitted the winter she was fourteen and has been trying to give away ever since.

She ate two biscuits. I watched. Not crumbs. Biscuits.

”Helena will ask,” I said.

”Tell her they were very good,” said Iselle. ”Tell her the refectory had fish soup again last night and I thought about her the whole time.”

”She’ll like that.”

”I know.” Iselle almost smiled. ”That’s why I said it.”

* * *

Caitlin found us before I’d been there ten minutes.

She came across the square at something close to a run, with her blue book clutched against her chest and her hair coming out of its pins and ink on her chin, and she didn’t say hello. She just stopped in front of the bench and said:

”You need to see something. Both of you. Now. Before I lose my nerve and decide I’ve made it up.”

Iselle looked at her. ”Is it the notebook?”

”It’s the notebook.”

”Then you haven’t made it up,” said Iselle quietly. ”I told you that last night.”

Caitlin looked at her for a moment. Then at me.

”Library,” she said. ”The back.”

* * *

The library at the college was the armory, once. You can still see the racks on the walls where the pikes used to stand, though they’re full of books now, floor to ceiling, and the long tables down the middle where they used to clean weapons are covered in ink stains and scratched initials and the occasional sleeping student.

At the very back, behind the last of the stacks, there is an alcove. A small square room with one window and one table and a door that sticks, where the library keeps what Caitlin calls the books nobody’s supposed to read. Not because they’re forbidden. Nothing at Io’s college is forbidden. Just because they’re old, and fragile, and in languages nobody can read anymore, and the librarian would rather people didn’t breathe on them.

Caitlin shouldered the sticking door open, and pulled us in, and shut it behind us. Then she put the blue book down on the table and opened it, very carefully, to a page near the middle.

”I asked first,” she said. ”I want you to know that. Before I copied anything. I asked Iselle if I could, and she said yes.”

”I said yes,” said Iselle.

”Good,” I said. ”What did you copy?”

Caitlin didn’t answer. She just turned the book around so that it faced me.

The left-hand page was covered in letters.

Curling, angular letters, very neatly drawn, in Caitlin’s careful hand, in rows. With little notes beside each one, in common tongue. Sound like ”ah.” Sound like ”ss,” soft. Used at the start of names. And at the bottom of the page, in Caitlin’s writing: Kethran. Common script. Copied from I.’s primer, with permission. 3rd day of term.

I knew those letters.

Not the way you know a language. The way you know a face.

I had traced them with my finger on brass plates in the lower hall since I was old enough to stand. I had copied them, crooked, on Aurethar’s back, with the wind tearing at the pages. I had watched Eleanor bend over them with her nose almost touching the paper and say it isn’t like ward-writing, Garrick. It is ward-writing.

”Caitlin,” I said slowly. ”These are Eleanor’s letters.”

”No,” said Caitlin. ”They’re not.”

She reached into her satchel and took out a small book and laid it on the table beside the notebook. It was very old and very worn, bound in faded green cloth gone soft at the corners, and the pages inside were thick and yellow and covered in big, clear, hand-printed letters, three or four to a page, each one with a little picture beside it. A fish. A loom. A mill wheel.

A child’s primer. The kind a mother teaches her daughter her letters from, at a kitchen table, in a small town between two mountains.

”That’s mine,” said Iselle quietly. ”My mother taught me from it. When I was four. It’s the only thing I brought from the valley.” She looked down at it. ”The engineers didn’t think to take it. Nobody thinks a primer matters.”

Caitlin put her finger on the first page of the primer. Then on the first row of her own copy, beside it.

”Look,” she said. ”Properly. Look at which way they go.”

I looked.

And then I thought of my own notebook from the sea, the one I’d carried home on the dragon and Eleanor had locked in her drawer. The hull script. The script she had told me was her own ward-writing, cut backward, by someone who had learned it from the wrong side of the door. I could see every line of it. I had copied it with my own hand.

And then I looked at the primer again.

The primer wasn’t backward.

The hull script wasn’t backward.

They were the same. Exactly the same. Every curl, every hook, running the same way. The letters on the black ships at Westmere were nothing more than the ordinary common script that Kethran mothers teach their children at the kitchen table, with a picture of a fish beside each one.

”It’s not that they learned Eleanor’s letters backward,” said Caitlin. Her voice was shaking very slightly. ”Garrick, it’s the other way round. These are theirs. These are the ordinary letters. Every child in Kethra learns them.” She put her hand flat on the page. ”It’s ours that are backward. Eleanor’s ward-writing. Every plate in the kingdom. It’s Kethran common script, written from the wrong side.” She swallowed. ”The ships weren’t writing in our letters. We’ve been writing in theirs.”

* * *

Nobody said anything for a while.

The little alcove was very quiet. Through the one window, I could hear students laughing out in the square, and the long stone fountain running, and somebody’s dog barking at the leaves. Ordinary sounds. They seemed to be coming from a very long way away.

”How did you see it?” I said at last.

Caitlin sat down on the edge of the table.

”I’ve had a desk in Mary’s office since I was nine,” she said. ”You know that. I’ve been reading gate ledgers since I could read. And Mary keeps copies of every plate Eleanor’s ever cut, in a folder, for the record. I used to trace them when I was bored. I know them better than I know my own handwriting.” She looked at the primer. ”And then the first night of term, Iselle was writing a letter to her mother at her desk, and I was sitting on the end of her bed, and I looked over, and I thought, that’s funny, she writes like a gate.”

”I didn’t know what she meant,” said Iselle. ”I thought it was a joke.”

”It wasn’t a joke,” said Caitlin. ”So I asked if I could look. And she said yes. And then I asked if I could copy the primer, and she said yes again, and I sat up all night with a candle and did the whole alphabet.” She rubbed her eyes. ”And then I held my copy up to the window. Backward. The way you’d see it from the other side of the glass. And it was Eleanor. Every single letter. It was the plate on the Lyradon gate.”

She looked at me.

”I didn’t tell anyone. I wanted to be sure. I wanted sources. So I spent a week checking it against everything. Mary’s folder. The ledger copies. The little brass plate on the Concordia gate, the one at this end. I went and stood in front of it with the primer in one hand and a mirror in the other until the porter thought I’d gone mad.” She took a breath. ”It’s the same. All of it. Every letter.”

* * *

”There’s something else,” said Iselle.

She had been very quiet. She was standing by the one window of the alcove with her back to the light, and her arms folded, and Caitlin’s terrible orange scarf around her neck.

”Caitlin told me about your notebook. From the dragon. The great letter, on the sea. The one all sixty ships made together.” She looked at me. ”She said you drew it, and Eleanor read it, and said it meant given.”

”It’s the closing mark,” I said. ”Eleanor’s closing mark, the one she puts at the end of every ward. Hers means held. The one on the sea was the same mark, the other way round. She said it meant given. Permission.”

”Will you draw it for me?”

I took Caitlin’s pencil. I drew it on a clean page at the back of the blue book, as carefully as I could. The long hook. The double kink. The short hard stroke at the end. I had drawn it so many times by then, in my head, at night, that my hand barely had to think.

Iselle looked at it for a long time.

Then she reached over and picked up her little green primer and opened it to the very first page.

The first page wasn’t like the others. There was no fish on it, no loom, no mill wheel. There was just one mark, large and clear, printed in the middle of the yellowed paper all by itself, the way you’d print the most important word in a book where a child could not possibly miss it.

The long hook. The double kink. The short hard stroke.

The same letter. Running the same way. Exactly as the sixty ships had written it on the face of the sea.

”In Kethra,” said Iselle quietly, ”every primer starts with this. Every one. In every town. It was the law, before I was born, and now nobody remembers it was ever a law, they just do it.” She put her finger on the mark, very lightly, the way you might touch something hot. ”It’s the first thing children learn to write. Before their letters. Before their numbers.”

”What does it say?” said Caitlin. Her voice had gone very small.

Iselle looked at the mark for a long moment.

”It’s his title,” she said. ”Not his name. Nobody writes his name. It’s what you say instead of his name. Who Holds.” She took her finger away. ”Every child in Kethra learns to write Who Holds before they learn to write their own name. My mother made me copy it fifty times, at the kitchen table, before she’d let me try Iselle. She said that was how it was done. She said everyone did it.”

The alcove was utterly silent.

I thought about Rysa, in the nursery, with the snow coming down around our ears. Name. Want. Permission. Name first. Always name first. Before anything. Before you do anything at all, you ask the person in front of you what they are called.

And on the other side of the sea, a whole continent of children, sitting at kitchen tables, writing Who Holds fifty times before anyone would let them write their own.

”From their side,” I said slowly, ”it says Who Holds.”

”Yes.”

”And from ours. Read backward. Through Eleanor’s grammar. From our side of the door.” I looked at the mark in my own hand on the back page of Caitlin’s book. ”It says given.”

Nobody answered. Nobody needed to.

The same mark. The same strokes. Sixty ships long, on the face of the sea, pointed at our shore.

From their side of the door: Who Holds.

From ours: permission.

Caitlin closed the blue book very slowly, as if it might go off.

”Garrick,” she said. ”Where did Eleanor learn her letters?”

* * *

Eleanor went very white.

We were in her drafting room above the chapel, the three of us, Caitlin and Iselle and me, with the late afternoon light coming in through the long windows over the slate roofs, and the jar of peppermints on the sill, and the blue book open on her big slanted drafting table between four brass weights. She had read Caitlin’s notes twice. She had held Caitlin’s copy of the alphabet up to the window, backward, the way Caitlin had, and looked at it for a long time. She had turned the little green primer over in her hands so carefully that I thought she was afraid it might break.

Then she had turned to the first page, and seen the mark, and gone white.

She took her spectacles off and set them down on the drafting table. Her hands were shaking. I had never seen Eleanor Stonehand’s hands shake except when she was pouring tea.

”I didn’t invent them,” she said.

”We know,” said Caitlin gently.

”No. I mean... I always knew I didn’t invent them. Not the letters. The grammar was mine, and the hooks, and the way you tie them into salt water. But the letters themselves...” She put her hand flat on the primer. ”I learned them. The first winter after your father came. When the castle was still half a ruin and I was still drawing plans on the backs of old flour sacks.” She looked up at me. ”I copied them off the Castellan.”

I stared at her.

”Off its plate,” said Eleanor. ”The one on its chest. It’s covered in them. You’ve seen it. Everyone’s seen it. Nobody looks at it, because it’s just there, the way a door handle’s just there.” Her voice was very quiet. ”I asked it what they were, that first winter. It said they were the oldest letters it knew. It said if I learned them properly, it could teach me how to make a door remember who it belonged to.” She closed her eyes. ”So I learned them. From its plate. Off its chest. Every letter. And I’ve been cutting them into brass for longer than you’ve been alive, and I’ve never once asked where it learned them.”

Nobody said anything.

”Then we’ll ask,” said Iselle.

We all looked at her. She was standing very straight by the window, in Caitlin’s orange scarf.

”That’s what you do here, isn’t it,” she said. ”You ask.”

* * *

The Castellan was in the lower hall, by the Westmere arch, writing in the ledger.

It looked up when we came down the stair. All four of us. Eleanor in front, with the primer in her hands. It put down its pen.

”Castellan,” said Eleanor. ”May I ask you something?”

”Yes.”

”The letters on your plate. The ones you taught me. The first winter.” She held up the little green book, open to the first page. ”Where did you learn them?”

The Castellan looked at the primer for a long time.

Then it lifted one metal hand, slowly, and touched its own chest. The plate there. A wide square of old brass, dull with age, set into the gray of its body just below where a heart would be, if it had one. Covered edge to edge in fine, curling, angular script, so worn in places that you could barely see it. I had seen it every day of my life. Eleanor was right. I had never once really looked at it.

”I did not learn them,” said the Castellan. ”They were on me when I woke.”

”When was that?” said Caitlin.

”Before the king came. Before the woman with the open crown.” It meant the statue in the court, I think. ”Before the walls fell. I do not know how long before.” It paused. ”I have never known who wrote them.”

For the first time in my life, the Castellan sounded uncertain.

Not frightened. I don’t think it can be frightened. But it stood there by the Westmere arch with its metal hand flat against its own chest, as if it had just noticed for the first time that there was something there, and it didn’t say anything else for a very long time.

Then it took its hand away.

And I saw it.

I don’t know how I had never seen it before. I suppose because it was so small, and so worn, and right down at the very bottom of the plate, in the corner, where the brass met the gray of its body. The kind of mark a smith or a mason leaves on finished work, so that people will know whose hands made it. A maker’s mark.

Not a letter. A picture. Pressed into the brass, long ago, and almost polished away by time and weather and the brush of a thousand sleeves.

A hand.

Open. Palm out. The fingers spread wide.

Iselle made a sound. Very small. She took a step toward the Castellan, and stopped, and put her own right hand up, without seeming to know she was doing it, palm out, fingers spread, the way she had held it up on the balcony of the east wing on her first night here, to a man on a wall in the dark.

The Castellan looked at her hand. Then down at the little worn mark on its own chest.

”Ah,” it said softly.

The same word Severin used, when he saw something he hadn’t expected and understood it all at once.

Then it picked up its pen, and turned back to the ledger, and in that neat printed hand that looks like type, at the bottom of the day’s page, below all the crossings, it wrote one more line.

Asked. Where my letters came from. Not yet known.

And underneath, after a moment:

To be found.