The Greykeep Chronicles

Father came through the gate at a quarter to midnight, and the weather came with him.

We felt him before we saw him. Everybody in the Ember Room did. One moment we were standing in the frozen dark around that heap of ash, with the guards’ lanterns making long shadows on the scorched cedar, and the next the air changed. The way it changes on a summer afternoon just before the sky opens, when the birds stop singing all at once and the back of your neck goes tight. A pressure. A weight. Something enormous, coming down the long stone corridor toward us, filling it up.

Far above us, over the palace roofs, thunder rolled. Long and low and very close. In Concordia, in autumn, on a clear night.

Then he was in the doorway.

He was in his socks. Of course he was. His old gray socks, the ones with the darned heel, and his nightshirt with a coat thrown over it, and his hair standing up on one side from the pillow. He’d come straight from bed, carried by the clouds as a bolt of lightning, without stopping to dress. He had the frost hammer over his shoulder. I don’t think he’d noticed he was carrying it.

Nobody laughed at the socks.

You don’t, when it’s my father. People who’ve only met him in the kitchen, or in the boat on Greymere, or down at the lower market buying Helena’s eggs, sometimes forget what he is. He makes it easy to forget. He’s quiet, and he’s kind, and he says please to the Castellan, and he hasn’t sat in his own throne in twenty years because he doesn’t like the chair.

But my father is the god of storms and winter. Not a god of storms. The one. He stood on the walls of Greykeep when it was a ruin, with nothing behind him but a cat-eared woman and a rabbit-eared woman and a deed, and held them against the world. He fought the war against Surtr, and the war against Varrick, and he was standing at the stream when Varrick fell. There are gods on the Council who have lived ten thousand years and who still lower their voices, very slightly, when he comes into a room.

He came into the Ember Room, and the frost on the floor sang. A thin high ringing, like a wet finger around the rim of a glass. Every ice crystal I’d laid down in that room turned toward him, the way iron filings turn toward a lodestone. The way the rivers had turned toward Carol and me through the seeds. Yes. Here. You.

My father looked at the frozen corner. At the black ash. At the cracked plaster of the ceiling, and the guards’ buckets frozen solid, and me, standing in the middle of it all with my hands still shaking.

”That’s mine,” he said quietly.

”I asked,” I said. ”In my head. I knew you’d...”

”I know. I felt it.” He crossed the room, and the frost sang under his socks with every step. ”I was asleep. And I felt it go out of me, all at once, a long way off. Like somebody opening the back door in the middle of January.” He stopped in front of me and looked at my hands. Then he took them in his, the way he used to when I was small and had been playing in the snow too long. His hands were cold. Not cold like Carol’s. Cold like the inside of a mountain. Cold that was home. ”I knew it was you. Nobody else uses it like that. You pour it like you’re angry with it.”

”I was angry with it.”

”Good,” said my father. And then, more quietly, so that only I could hear: ”You asked. Even with the fire on the wall. You still stopped and asked.” He squeezed my hands. ”That’s my son.”

Then he let go, and turned, and looked at Io.

* * *

They talked for a long time, the four of them. Father and Lexander and Io and Seraphina, around the long table in the middle of the ruined room, with the lanterns between them and the frost slowly creeping back from the walls. Ignatius and I stood by the door and listened.

I’ll say this about my father and Lexander. They have been friends for longer than I’ve been alive, and they fish together on the first rest-day of every month, and what’s said in the boat is never repeated. But I’d never seen them like that before. Not friends. Kings. The one-eyed king and the storm king, sitting across a scorched table from each other in the middle of the night with their hands flat on the wood, talking in low voices about who could have done it, and how, and what it meant.

Lexander still had the axe. He’d set it on the table in front of him, and every so often his hand went to it, as if to make sure it was still there.

And Io sat at the end of the table with her back very straight and her hands folded, and she didn’t say anything at all for a long time. And then, when the men had gone quiet, she said:

”I want Thora home.”

Lexander looked at her.

”She’s in the south,” he said. ”With the Council’s embassy. She’s only three months from the end of the circuit. She’s been asking to finish it for a year.”

”I know where she is.” Io’s voice was very calm. ”I wrote her name in that book, Lexander. Nineteen years ago. In the margin, beside the line. Thora Elizabeth Dinar. Daughter of Io. Does not carry the Flame.” She looked down at the ash. ”I wrote it so that whoever came after me would know she was outside the line. So they wouldn’t look for it in her. So they’d leave her alone.” She closed her eyes. ”And now someone has burned the book. Or read it. And I don’t know which. And I don’t know what they think she is.”

Nobody said anything.

I knew Thora the way you know someone who is three years younger than the girl you married, and who spent most of your childhood trailing after the four of you with a book, demanding to be included. Small and fierce and very blonde, with her mother’s eyes and her father’s terrible habit of being right. She’d left Concordia eighteen months ago, when she was eighteen, to travel the southern kingdoms with the Council’s peace embassy. Carrying letters. Sitting in on treaties. Learning the kind of patience, her grandmother Lisbeth said, that you can’t learn at home because at home there’s always someone to interrupt you.

She doesn’t carry the Flame. Io always said so, very clearly, to anyone who asked. But she carries something. Everyone in the family knows it, even if nobody says it out loud at dinner. You can’t be born to a woman who remembers being Frigg and a man who remembers being Odin, and come out of it entirely ordinary. When Thora was small, the birds in the palace gardens used to come and sit on her shoulders and tell her things. When she was eight, she found Lexander’s lost eye patch by sitting down in the middle of the courtyard and going very quiet and then pointing at the stables. Grandmother Lisbeth says she has the knowing, and that it skips a generation, and that in her day you didn’t make a fuss about it, you just put it to work.

It’s not the Flame. It’s something older. Something from the far side of both her parents’ memories.

And if somebody had read the line, they’d have read Io’s note in the margin.

Does not carry the Flame.

And anyone who knew what Io and Lexander had been, a very long time ago, would know exactly what that meant she might carry instead.

”Send for her,” said Lexander.

Io was already reaching for paper.

She wrote it at the end of the long scorched table, by lantern light, with a pen Ignatius found for her in the wreck of the shelves. I watched her write it. It was very short.

Thora. Come home. Not in danger yet. Come anyway. Mother.

Lexander stood up and went to the narrow window high in the wall, the only window in the Ember Room, a slot of black night no wider than a hand. He put two fingers to his lips and whistled. Not loudly. One low note, falling.

And out of the dark, through that impossible slot of a window, came a raven.

It was very big and very black, and it landed on Lexander’s wrist without a sound, and turned its head and looked at all of us, one by one, with one bright black eye. It looked at me longest. I didn’t like it. Then Io rolled the letter small and tied it to its leg with a thread from her own sleeve, and Lexander said something to it in a language I didn’t know and didn’t think was meant for me.

The raven went back out of the window like smoke.

”Six days,” said Lexander, watching the dark where it had gone. ”Five, if she flies.”

”She’ll fly,” said Io.

* * *

Ignatius didn’t sleep. Neither did I.

At first light, when the others had finally gone up, Father back through the gate to Greykeep with a promise to Helena to be in time for the kettle, Lexander and Io to their rooms, Seraphina home to little Uriah, Ignatius came and found me on the bench outside the Ember Room door, where I’d been sitting for an hour with my back against the cold stone, not thinking about anything very successfully.

He had his sleeves pushed up, and the look on his face that he gets when he’s about to set a bone. Calm, and quiet, and not going to be argued with.

”Come and help me,” he said. ”I want to read the ash.”

I stood up.

I should explain about Ignatius. People who don’t know him think he’s the gentle one. The kind one. The healer. Seraphina’s quiet big brother who makes tea and warms cold hands and never raises his voice. And that’s all true. But people forget that healing is just another word for paying very close attention. Ignatius can put his hand on your shoulder and tell you which rib you cracked falling off a horse when you were eleven, and that it healed a little crooked, and that it aches when it’s about to rain. He doesn’t guess. He reads. The Flame in him is the kind that remembers.

”Fire doesn’t forget what it eats,” he said, kneeling down in front of the heap of ash in the frozen corner. ”Most people think it destroys things. It doesn’t. It changes them. Everything that burns leaves a little of itself behind in the ash. What it was. What it was made of. Where it came from.” He held his hands out over the gray-white heap, not touching it. ”If you’re gentle, and you ask properly, the ash will tell you.”

”Ask?”

”Ask.” He glanced up at me. ”You’ve got the Flame. You’ve had it since you were a baby. Seraphina’s side. Mine too, a little. You just never use mine, because it’s slow and it’s quiet and you’ve never needed it.” He moved over, to make room for me on the cold floor. ”Want to learn?”

I knelt beside him.

”Borrow?” I said.

Ignatius smiled. He’s always found it funny that I ask him. He says it’s like asking permission to breathe the air in his house.

”Take,” he said. ”It’s what it’s for.”

So I took. Gently. And for the first time in my life, I let his side of the Flame come up in me instead of Seraphina’s. It was so different. Hers is a blade. His was like warm water. Like putting your hands into a basin of water just the right temperature, and feeling all the tiredness go out of them, and then feeling, very faintly, everything the water had ever touched.

We put our hands into the ash together.

* * *

It talked.

Not in words. In feelings. In the shapes of things. I felt the cedar first, loud and resinous and sad, the wood of the shelves, which had grown on a mountainside in Dinar four hundred years ago and been carried over the passes on mules and polished by a hundred hands. It didn’t want to be ash. It had liked being shelves.

Then the plaster, chalky and indifferent.

Then the lamp oil, quick and bright, from the lamp that had stood on the end of the shelf.

And then the paper.

Ignatius went very still beside me.

”Feel that,” he said quietly.

I felt it.

Paper. A great deal of paper. Nine books’ worth, near enough, the weight was right. But it was wrong. I didn’t know how I knew, at first. I just knew. It felt young. It felt smooth and white and flat and empty, the way new snow feels before anyone has walked on it. There was no ink in it. Not a drop. Nothing had ever been written on it. Nobody had ever turned its pages by lamplight, or pressed a thumb into its margin, or sighed over it. It had been made, and cut, and bound, and put on a shelf, and burned, and in all that time not one single person had ever read it.

”It’s new,” I said. ”It’s this year’s paper.”

”Pressed in the summer,” said Ignatius. ”In a mill. I can feel the river that turned the wheel.” His jaw had gone tight. ”And it’s blank. Every page.”

”Nine blank books.”

”Nine blank books, bound to look like the real ones, set on the real shelf, and burned.” He drew his hands slowly out of the ash. They were gray to the wrist. ”Garrick. There’s no ink in this ash. None. Io’s lineage was written in oak-gall ink, the old Dinar recipe, iron and gall and gum. It goes black as night and it never fades. You can’t burn that much of it without leaving a trace. I’d feel it like grit in a wound.” He shook his head. ”It isn’t here. Not one drop.”

I sat back on my heels.

”And the clasps,” said Ignatius. He reached into the heap again, carefully, and came out with a small blackened lump of iron, and then another, and another, laying them in a row on the frozen floor. ”Plain iron. Nine pairs. Cheap. The kind any binder in Concordia uses.” He looked at them. ”The oldest book of the line had gold clasps. Shaped like little flames. Io used to let me hold it when I was small. I’d run my thumb over the clasps while she read me the names.” He was quiet for a moment. ”Gold doesn’t burn, Garrick. Not even in white fire. It would be here. It would be lying in the ash like a pair of little stars.”

There was nothing in the ash but iron.

”They weren’t burned,” I said slowly.

”They weren’t burned.” Ignatius wiped his hands on his knees, leaving long gray streaks. ”Somebody came into this room with nine blank books, made to look like the real ones. They took the real ones off the shelf. They put the blank ones in their place. And then they lit a fire that wouldn’t go out, so that by the time anyone got here, there’d be nothing left but ash, and everyone would stand around it weeping for the line, and nobody would think to ask whether the line had ever been in the fire at all.”

He looked at me.

”It’s a trick,” he said. ”It’s a very good trick.”

I thought of Loki, on the river quay, with his hands in his pockets. Every trick wants to be found out. This doesn’t want to be found out at all.

”It isn’t a trick,” I said. ”A trick wants someone to laugh. This is a theft that wants everyone to cry.”

* * *

We went over the rest of the room together, slowly, the way Ignatius goes over a patient. Not looking for anything. Just paying attention.

The door first. Heavy oak, iron-banded, with a lock older than Concordia, a great black box of a thing with a keyhole you could put your thumb in. Io’s key had been on the chain around her neck all evening. She’d been at dinner with forty people when the bell rang. The lock hadn’t been forced. There wasn’t a scratch on it. Ignatius put his hand flat on the iron and closed his eyes, and the Flame in him went into the metal, gentle as warm water, and asked.

”It was opened with a key,” he said, after a while. ”It remembers turning. Properly. All the way around, the way it’s meant to.” He frowned. ”But not Mother’s key. It knows Mother’s key. It’s been opened by Mother’s key for twenty years. This was a different one. Cold. Very cold.” He took his hand away. ”It liked it.”

”Liked it?”

”Locks don’t have opinions. Usually.” He looked at the lock for a long moment. ”This one turned for that key the way a dog rolls over for someone it trusts. As if it had been waiting all its life for that key to come along.”

I thought of a tall gray figure on the bow of a black ship, with one small link of iron on his left wrist. Every door in Kethra used to belong to him, a little.

I didn’t say it. Not yet. Ignatius saw me not say it. He didn’t push.

Then the ring.

The great iron ring on the outside of the door, the one you pull it shut by. Ignatius almost missed it. I almost missed it. It was the kind of thing you’d never look at twice. But I put my hand on it to pull the door to behind us when we went out, and felt something under my thumb that wasn’t iron.

I turned the ring over.

On the inside of it, where your fingers go when you pull, there was a smear of wax. Not much. A thumbprint’s worth. The kind of smear you’d leave if you’d been sealing a letter a few minutes before and hadn’t quite wiped your hand.

It was gray.

Plain gray wax. Not red, like Concordia’s. Not green, like Lyradon’s. Gray, the dull gray of a winter sky, the kind of wax nobody in the kingdoms uses because it looks like a mistake.

And pressed into it, very faintly, the whorls of a bare thumb.

I’d seen wax like that once before. In the south solar at Greykeep, on the day the trade agreement was signed. Severin had set down his plain steel pen, and taken a stick of gray wax out of his coat, and sealed the agreement not with his closed-hand ring, but with his own bare thumb. I’d thought at the time it was the most honest thing I’d ever seen him do.

Ignatius was looking at it over my shoulder.

”Kethran,” he said quietly.

”Or someone who wants us to think so.”

”Yes.” He was quiet for a moment. ”Or that.”

* * *

We sat on the bench outside the Ember Room door afterward, with the gray wax wrapped in a clean handkerchief in Ignatius’s pocket and the sun coming in through the high windows at the end of the corridor, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

There was one thing we hadn’t talked about. We’d gone around it all morning, the way you go around a hole in a floor.

”The fire,” said Ignatius at last.

”I know.”

”It was Flame, Garrick. Real Flame. I’d know it anywhere. It leaned toward Mother. It leaned toward Seraphina and me. It knew us.” He looked down at his gray hands. ”But it wasn’t ours. None of ours. It didn’t come from anyone in this family. Mother would have known. I’d have known.” He shook his head slowly. ”Somebody who doesn’t carry the Flame lit a fire with it. And told it to stay lit. And it obeyed them.”

I didn’t answer.

”You can’t borrow the Flame,” said Ignatius. ”That’s the whole point of it. It’s not a tool. It’s not a trick. It’s born. It comes down the line, mother to child, the way Mother wrote it in those books. You carry it or you don’t. Nobody can just pick it up and use it.”

”I can,” I said.

He turned and looked at me.

”I can,” I said again. ”So can Carol. That’s what we are. You know it is. I just did it, an hour ago, with your hands in the ash. I’ve been doing it with Seraphina’s fire since before I could walk.” I made myself say the rest. ”There are exactly two people in the world I know of who can use a god’s power that isn’t theirs, Ignatius. Who can light a fire with the Flame without carrying it. One of them was in her tower holding her own hands, so she wouldn’t stop a candle by accident. And the other one was in Greykeep.” I looked at him. ”With forty witnesses. Eating supper.”

”So it wasn’t you.”

”It wasn’t me.” I looked down the long corridor toward the sun. ”Which means there’s someone else.”

Ignatius was quiet for a long time.

”Someone else who can do what you and Carol do,” he said slowly.

”Or something like it.” I thought of the cold that had come down the Ilvane, and touched my sister’s hand without asking, and known her. Known where we kept the seeds. ”Something that doesn’t ask first.”

Somewhere far above us, over the palace roofs, thunder rolled again. Long and low. In Concordia, in autumn, on a clear morning.

My father hadn’t gone back to bed after all.