The Greykeep Chronicles

I should write about my youngest brother. I haven’t, much. Nobody does.

That isn’t fair, and I know it isn’t fair, and I knew it the morning after the archive, when I came down to the little kitchen and found Faelan at the end of the bench with Moth’s page open beside his porridge, explaining to anyone who’d listen how he’d worked out the yes and the no. And Mirelle beside him, explaining about the road on the silk. And Roderic and Iselle, not explaining anything, sitting a careful hand’s width apart and pretending not to. And all of it so loud and warm and full that it took me until I’d finished my second cup of tea to notice that Elenos wasn’t there.

He usually isn’t. That’s the thing about Elenos.

He’s thirteen. He’s Mother’s youngest and Father’s quietest, with Mother’s dark eyes and Father’s way of standing very still and looking at the weather. He was born seven years after the war ended, and Mother says he cried exactly once, when he was born, and then looked around the room as if he were taking notes, and has been taking them ever since. He has the middle name Benjamin, which Mother gave him so that the family would have it back. He likes frogs and beetles and arguing with Faelan about frogs and beetles. He sits on the low wall at the far end of the terrace, alone, for hours at a time, looking at nothing. And twice a week, sometimes three times, he goes down to Aurelia for the whole day and comes back at dusk and doesn’t say where he’s been.

Nobody asks him. That’s what I realized, sitting at the scrubbed table with my second cup going cold. Nobody asks Elenos anything. We just assume he’s somewhere, being quiet, and that if anything were wrong he’d say. And he never does say. So we never ask.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to overlook someone who doesn’t make any noise.

I’d learned that from a moth.

* * *

He was on the wall. Of course he was.

It was a cold bright morning, early winter, with frost still on the shady side of everything and the sun just coming over the east wall. The terrace runs along the south side of the old keep, above the kitchen garden, and at the far end there’s a low wall with a drop of about ten feet on the other side into Helena’s herb beds and the pear tree and the vegetable plots. Elenos was sitting on it with his knees drawn up and his arms around them and his chin on his knees, in a coat that had been mine, then Roderic’s, then Faelan’s for about a week before Faelan grew out of it sideways. He was looking down into the garden.

I sat down beside him. I didn’t say anything for a while. Neither did he.

Then I said, ”Elenos. It’s Garrick. Can I sit here? You can say no.”

He turned his head and looked at me. He has a very direct look, Elenos. It goes right through you and out the other side and takes notes on the way.

”You’re already sitting here,” he said.

”I know. I should have asked first. I’m asking now.”

He considered that for a moment.

”Yes,” he said. ”You can sit here.”

He went back to looking at the garden. I sat beside him and tried to see what he was looking at. Frost on the cabbages. The pear tree, bare now except for three last stubborn leaves at the very top. Helena’s blackbird on the garden wall, puffed up like a ball against the cold. A man in a brown cap at the far end of the vegetable plots, bent over a bed with a trowel.

”Where do you go,” I said, ”with Aurelia?”

Elenos didn’t answer for a long time. I’d almost decided he wasn’t going to when he did.

”The infirmary,” he said. ”In Havenreach. The long ward at the back. Where the old people go, at the end.” He rested his chin more firmly on his knees. ”I sit with them.”

I looked at him.

”Since when?”

”Since I was nine.” He shrugged, very slightly. ”Aurelia asked if I wanted to. I said yes. You can say no, she said. I didn’t want to say no.”

”Why?” I said. And then, because that sounded wrong: ”I mean, why you? Why did she ask you?”

Elenos thought about it.

”Because I can hear the Keeper,” he said.

* * *

I knew that. I’d been there, in the lower corridor under the infirmary, the night Mirelle lit forty-three lamps and filled it with smoke. I’d watched Elenos sitting on the floor against the wall with his eyes shut, perfectly still, while everyone else ran about with buckets. I’d heard him say, afterward, very quietly, to nobody, She says thank you for the lamps. She was going to be busy. I’d never told anyone. I’d half thought I’d imagined it.

”She comes for them,” said Elenos. ”At the end. The old people in the long ward. And I can hear her coming. On the road. Long before anyone else knows.” He was looking at the garden, not at me. ”Footsteps. Slow ones. Like someone who’s been walking all day and doesn’t mind. And when I hear her, I go and sit with whoever she’s coming for, and hold their hand, so they’re not on their own when she gets there.” He paused. ”Most of them aren’t frightened. Not in Havenreach. They’re very old. They’ve had enough. They just want someone to be there.” He paused again. ”Sometimes they want me to tell them what she sounds like.”

”What does she sound like?”

”Tired,” said Elenos. ”And kind. Like Helena at the end of a long day, when she’s put the last of the bread in and sits down with her feet up.” He was quiet for a moment. ”Sometimes they want me to sing. Mother taught me the soldiers’ song. Benjamin taught me the rest of it last week, the verses nobody remembers.” Another pause. ”Mostly they just want me to say their name. Out loud. At the end. So that the last thing they hear is somebody saying it.”

I sat on the cold wall beside my youngest brother and didn’t say anything at all for a long time.

Thirteen. Four years of it. Two days a week, sometimes three, sitting in the long ward at the back of the Havenreach infirmary, holding the hands of the dying and saying their names, so they wouldn’t be alone when the Keeper of Roads came up the road for them. And coming home at dusk, and eating his supper, and arguing with Faelan about frogs, and never once saying a word to anyone.

”Does Mother know?” I said at last.

”Mother knows,” said Elenos. ”Father knows. Aurelia asked them first. Before she asked me.” He glanced at me sideways. ”Nobody else asked.”

”I’m sorry,” I said.

”For what?”

”For not asking.”

Elenos looked at me for a long moment with that direct look of his. Then he turned back to the garden.

”You’re asking now,” he said.

* * *

We sat for a while without talking. The sun came further up over the east wall and the frost on the near cabbages began to go dark and wet. The blackbird on the garden wall shook itself and fluffed back up again.

”Everybody has a sound,” said Elenos.

He said it the way Mirelle had said there aren’t any roads that go out. As if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and he was surprised I needed telling.

”Not their voice,” he said. ”Underneath. The thing you’d hear if they were standing behind you in the dark and not saying anything.” He tilted his head. ”Helena’s is a kettle just before it whistles. Father’s is the wind before snow. Carol’s is ice ticking on a window. Yours is...” He considered me. ”A door opening in another room. Somewhere you can’t see.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I’m not sure there is anything to say to that.

”Aurelia says it’s part of hearing the Keeper,” said Elenos. ”If you can hear the road, you can hear what’s walking on it. Everybody’s walking on it. Just most of them aren’t near the end yet.” He shrugged again. ”So I hear them. All the time. Everyone. It’s very loud in the little kitchen at breakfast.”

”Is that why you sit on the wall?”

”Partly.” He almost smiled. ”And because the frogs come out at the bottom of it in spring.”

Then he stopped smiling, and lifted his chin off his knees, and nodded down into the garden. At the far end of the vegetable plots. At the man in the brown cap bent over the bed with the trowel.

”He hasn’t got one,” said Elenos.

* * *

I looked.

He was a man of about forty, I’d have said, or fifty. It was hard to tell. Middle height, broad in the shoulders, with a brown wool cap pulled down over his ears and a brown coat that was too short in the sleeves and a pair of heavy boots that looked as if they’d been borrowed from someone with bigger feet. He was kneeling on a sack at the edge of one of the winter beds, the one where Helena’s leeks go, with a trowel in his hand, and a flat basket of onion sets beside him.

”Who is he?” I said.

”The new under-gardener,” said Elenos. ”He came up from the town five weeks ago. Asked old Tobias for winter work. Tobias said yes, because his knees are bad and nobody wants to dig in the frost.” He watched the man for a moment. ”He said his name was Halm. From the river villages. He doesn’t say much.”

”And he hasn’t got a sound.”

”He hasn’t got a sound,” said Elenos. ”I noticed the first day. I was on the wall, and he walked right underneath me with a barrow, and there was nothing. Not quiet. Nothing. Like a room with the door shut and nobody in it.” He frowned. ”No. That’s not right. Like a room with the door shut and somebody in it. Holding their breath.”

I looked at the man in the brown cap again. He’d stopped digging. He was kneeling quite still on his sack, with the trowel in his hand, looking at it.

”Watch him,” said Elenos. ”Just watch.”

So I watched.

The man in the brown cap looked at the trowel for a long time. Then he turned it around in his hand, slowly, as if he weren’t sure which way it went. He held it by the blade, with the wooden handle pointing down at the earth, and pushed the handle into the soil, the wrong end first, and levered up a lump of frozen dirt with it. Then he looked at the hole he’d made, and at the trowel, and turned the trowel around again, the right way this time, and looked at that too. As if he were trying to remember something from a very long time ago.

Then he picked up an onion set from the basket and put it in the hole.

Upside down.

”That’s the ninth row,” said Elenos quietly. ”All upside down. Tobias will have a fit in the spring.” He paused. ”Yesterday he watered them.”

”What’s wrong with watering them?”

”He didn’t have any water,” said Elenos. ”He had the can. It was empty. I watched him fill it at the pump and then pour it out on the path because he’d forgotten what he filled it for. And then he walked down the row with the empty can, tipping it over the bed, very carefully.” He was looking at the man in the brown cap with an expression I couldn’t read at all. ”And the bed got wet.”

I turned and looked at him.

”Just that bed,” said Elenos. ”Just the leeks. A little rain. Out of a clear sky. It came down on the leek bed for as long as he was tipping the can, and then it stopped.” He rested his chin back on his knees. ”Nobody else saw. Everyone was at breakfast. It was very loud in the little kitchen.”

* * *

I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

I was thinking about the eleven storms. Severin, at the long table in the summer, telling us in his tired, careful voice that Kethra held storms. Eleven of them, from the high plateaus, asked to the golden city one by one, long ago, and kept there, and drawn off to light the streets, so that the city glows fifty miles out to sea and hasn’t had a wild storm in two hundred years. And Thor setting her hammer down so hard the whole table jumped. Nobody holds a storm. It’s weather.

And Benjamin, standing in the doorway of the little kitchen a few weeks ago, telling us what Selvane had said through the stone. That on the night Carol stopped Malachar’s hand, for one breath, every god he held had felt the grip go still. That a river in the south had moved for the first time in forty years. That they were whispering. All over Kethra. On their shelves.

Asking who did it.

Down in the garden, the man in the brown cap had put the trowel down. He was kneeling on his sack with his hands open on his knees, looking west. Not at anything. Just west, over the garden wall and the orchard and the long falling hills, toward the sea, the way you’d look at a door you’ve just come through and aren’t sure you’ve closed behind you.

And under my breastbone, very faintly, in the place where I keep everything I’ve ever borrowed, something stirred.

My father’s winter. Thor’s thunder. The storm I’ve carried in me since I was a baby sparking in my cradle every time someone with weather in them leaned over it. It stirred, the way a dog lifts its head when it hears another dog a long way off. It didn’t do anything. It just turned, very slightly, toward the man in the brown cap at the bottom of the garden.

And recognized something.

”Garrick,” said Elenos.

I looked at him. He was watching my face.

”Don’t,” he said.

”I haven’t done anything.”

”You’re about to. You’ve got Father’s face. The one he gets before he goes down to the lower hall in his socks.” Elenos uncurled himself from his knees and put one hand flat on my arm. It was the first time I could remember him touching me on purpose since he was about six. ”Don’t go down there. Not yet. Please.”

”Elenos, if he’s what I think he is...”

”I know what he is,” said Elenos. ”I’ve known for three days. I just didn’t know what it was called.” He looked down into the garden. ”But it doesn’t matter what he’s called. That’s not the important part.”

”What’s the important part?”

Elenos was quiet for a long moment.

”He’s frightened,” he said. ”He’s more frightened than anyone I’ve ever sat with in the long ward. Even the ones at the very end. He looks west every hour. He doesn’t sleep. Tobias says he sits up in the potting shed all night with the door open.” He swallowed. ”And he hasn’t got a sound because he’s holding it in. All of it. Every bit of himself. The way you’d hold your breath under water. Because he’s been held so long he doesn’t know how to do anything else, and because he’s terrified that if he lets go, even a little, somebody will hear.”

He took his hand off my arm.

”If you go down there with Father’s face on,” he said, ”he’ll run. And I don’t think he has anywhere to run to.”

* * *

I stayed on the wall.

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Everything in me that I’d borrowed from my father wanted to go down the garden steps and across the frozen beds and stand in front of that man and say who are you, the way you’d say it to someone you’d found in your house at night. And everything in me that I’d learned from Rysa, and Brannoc, and a six-year-old in a bakery in Thistlemoor, said wait.

So I waited. And I watched my brother, instead of the man.

He was sitting with his knees drawn up again, perfectly still, watching the garden the way he must watch the long ward at the back of the infirmary. Patiently. Without needing anything to happen. The way you’d watch a road for someone you know is coming, eventually, at their own pace.

”What do you want?” I said. ”Elenos. About him. If it were up to you.”

He didn’t answer at once. He never does.

”I want someone to ask him his name,” he said at last. ”His real one. Not Halm. Not whatever they called him over there.” He was watching the man in the brown cap. ”But not yet. Not while he’s holding his breath. If you ask someone their name while they’re holding their breath, they can’t answer. They just go blue.”

”So how will we know when?”

”He’ll make a sound,” said Elenos simply.

* * *

The blackbird came down off the garden wall.

It does that, Helena’s blackbird. It’s not afraid of anybody. It hops along the edges of the beds in the mornings looking for worms the frost has brought up, and it’ll come within a foot of you if you stay still. It came down off the wall now, and hopped along the end of the leek bed, the one with the nine rows of upside-down onions, and stopped a little way from the man in the brown cap, and cocked its head at him.

The man looked at it.

He didn’t move for a long time. Then, very slowly, the way you’d move if you’d forgotten how and had to think about every part of it, he reached into the pocket of his too-short coat and took out a crust of bread. Helena’s bread. I’d know it anywhere. He broke a crumb off it with his thick fingers, very carefully, and held it out on his flat palm, low, near the ground.

The blackbird looked at the crumb. Then at him. Then it hopped forward, twice, and took the crumb out of his palm, and hopped back.

And it sang.

Just a few notes. The way blackbirds do in winter, when they’ve got something and want to tell somebody. A little bright run of sound, up and down, in the cold air.

And the man in the brown cap laughed.

It wasn’t much of a laugh. It was barely a breath. But it was the first sound I’d heard him make, and I saw Elenos’s head come up off his knees, very sharply, the way a dog’s head comes up when it hears its name.

At the top of the pear tree, the three last stubborn leaves began to flutter. There wasn’t any wind. The rest of the garden was perfectly still. But those three leaves were shivering on their twigs as if a small, warm breeze had come up out of nowhere, just there, just for them.

And somewhere far off, beyond the hills to the west, out of a sky that was clear and pale and cloudless from one edge to the other, there was a sound.

Thunder.

Very faint. Very far. A single low roll of it, like a cart going over a wooden bridge a long way away. And then nothing.

”There,” said Elenos softly. He’d closed his eyes. ”Oh. There. That’s him.”

”That’s his sound?”

”That’s his sound.” Elenos opened his eyes. There was something on his face I’d never seen there before. I think it was joy. ”He’s been holding it in so long. And a blackbird sang at him, and he forgot. Just for a second. He forgot to hold his breath.”

Down in the garden, the man in the brown cap had gone rigid. He was staring at his own open palm, where the crumb had been, as if it had bitten him. Then he looked up, sharply, west, at the clear empty sky where the thunder had been. And then, slowly, he looked around the garden. At the beds. At the pear tree with its three leaves gone still again. At the garden door into the little kitchen.

At the wall.

At us.

I didn’t move. Neither did Elenos. We sat on the low wall at the end of the terrace, my brother and I, and looked back at him. And for a long moment, across the whole width of Helena’s frozen kitchen garden, nobody did anything at all.

Then the man in the brown cap pulled his cap down further over his ears, and picked up his trowel, the right way around this time, and bent back over the leek bed. And went very carefully back to planting onions upside down.

* * *

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

”Well,” I said. ”He’s seen us.”

”He saw me three days ago,” said Elenos. ”He looks up here every morning. I think he thinks I’m part of the wall.” He paused. ”I think he likes it. Someone sitting still. Not asking him anything.”

”We should tell Father,” I said. ”Elenos. We have to. If he’s what I think he is, if he’s one of them, one of the held ones, come all this way on his own...” I stopped. ”Father needs to know. And Thor. And Aurelia. And Carol, especially. Because I think I know what he came looking for.”

”I know,” said Elenos. ”That’s why I told Helena.”

I turned and stared at him.

”You told Helena?”

”Yesterday,” said Elenos. ”After supper. While she was doing the bread for the morning.” He looked faintly surprised that I was surprised. ”She was the only one who asked me what I’d been looking at all week.”

”Elenos. What did she say?”

Elenos considered this.

”She didn’t say anything,” he said. ”She just kept kneading. For a long time. And then she said, Thank you for telling me, Elenos. Go to bed. And I went to bed.” He paused. ”But when I came down this morning she’d made extra bread. Two extra loaves. And she wouldn’t tell me what they were for.”

I looked at him.

Then I looked down into the garden. At the garden door into the little kitchen, at the bottom of the east stair, with the pear tree beside it and the herb beds and the scrubbed step where Iselle stops every morning to check the door is still there.

It was opening.

And Helena came out of it.

In her apron, with her hair pinned up the way it always is, so that nobody in the house has ever once seen it down. Carrying a tray. On the tray were two cups, steaming in the cold air, and the heavy blue teapot, and a plate with half a loaf of the morning’s bread on it, cut into slices of exactly equal width, with butter.

She came down the scrubbed step, and stopped at the bottom, and looked across the frozen garden at the man in the brown cap kneeling over his upside-down onions.

Then she started walking toward him. Not fast. Not slow. The way she walks down the table in the morning setting out the cups, one for everybody and one extra for whoever’s about to come through the door.

”Oh no,” I said.

Beside me, on the wall, my youngest brother wrapped his arms around his knees and put his chin on them, and for the first time in I don’t know how long, I heard him laugh.

”Oh yes,” said Elenos.