The Greykeep Chronicles

The fourth night after Sahrun said his name, I nearly didn’t wake up.

That’s the only way I can describe it. I was asleep, the ordinary way, with Seraphina’s cold feet tucked under my leg and little Uriah snoring like a small bellows in the nursery through the open door. And then I was somewhere underneath asleep. Somewhere deeper. Warm and heavy and dark and very, very comfortable, like sinking into a feather bed that goes on sinking forever. And somewhere a long way above me, someone was saying my name.

”Garrick Grey.”

The whole thing. The way Carol says it every morning.

”Garrick Grey. Garrick Grey.”

And I came up out of it the way you come up out of deep water. Gasping. With my heart going like a drum and the room spinning and a hand on my shoulder, shaking me, hard.

It was Elenos.

He was standing beside the bed in his nightshirt and his hand-me-down coat, with a candle in his other hand, and his face in the candlelight was very white and very calm, the way it must be in the long ward at the back of the infirmary when he hears the Keeper on the road.

”Good,” he said. ”You’re up. I wasn’t sure you would be.”

”What...” My mouth was thick. I could barely move my tongue. ”What time...”

”Nearly half past three.” Elenos took his hand off my shoulder. ”Don’t go back under. It’ll try to pull you. Keep your eyes open and say your own name if you have to.”

I turned over. Seraphina was lying beside me with her face on her arm and her red hair across the pillow, breathing slow and deep and even.

”Sera,” I said.

She didn’t move.

”Sera.” I shook her shoulder. Hard. The way Elenos had shaken mine.

Nothing. She didn’t even sigh. She just went on breathing, slow and deep and even, with a very small, very peaceful smile on her face, as though she were dreaming of something she’d wanted for a long time.

I went cold all over.

”I’ve tried everyone,” said Elenos quietly. ”Mother. Father. Adriana. Carol. Ignatius. Roderic. I went all the way up the north tower. I shook Carol so hard her teeth rattled. Nobody wakes up.” He swallowed. ”Only you. I think because you’re used to someone saying your name every morning. Carol said it to you yesterday. It was still in you.”

”Elenos. What is it?”

My brother stood in the dark beside my bed with his candle, and tilted his head a little to one side, the way he does on the wall when he’s listening to the garden.

”Something’s breathing,” he said. ”In the house.”

* * *

I could hear it once he’d said it.

Not with my ears. Underneath. The way Elenos hears everything. A long, slow, soft breath, in and out, going through every room in Greykeep at once, the way the sound of the sea goes through a house by the shore. In. And out. In. And out. And every time it went out, the dark in the room got a little warmer, and a little heavier, and I wanted very badly to lie back down.

”It’s the one you take just before you fall asleep,” said Elenos. ”Right at the edge. The last one. The one where you’d say yes to anything, because you’re already half gone.” He was very pale. ”I hear it all the time. In the long ward. It’s the breath before the Keeper. Only that’s one breath. One person’s. This is...” He shook his head. ”This is the whole castle’s. At once. Over and over. Somebody’s breathing it for us.”

I made myself get up.

My legs didn’t want to. Nothing wanted to. But I got up, and pulled my coat on over my nightshirt, and pushed my bare feet into my boots, and the whole time that warm, slow, enormous breath went in and out through the walls and pulled at me like a tide.

”Garrick Grey,” I said, out loud, to myself.

It helped. A little.

”Who else is awake?” I said. ”Anybody? The Castellan?”

”The Castellan doesn’t sleep.” Elenos was already at the door. ”It’s in the lower hall. It’s frightened. I’ve never heard it frightened before.” He held the door open. ”And Fenrir.”

”Fenrir?”

”Fenrir’s been awake since before I was,” said Elenos. ”He’s in the court. He’s got the scent.”

* * *

Fenrir doesn’t usually stay at Greykeep. He’s Loki’s son, the great gray wolf, who was bound once with a chain made of impossible things, and when he got free he swore that nobody would ever hold him in one place again. So he goes where he likes. He wears a red cloth around one foreleg that the werewolf packs in the lower market gave him, which means one of us. And sometimes, in winter, he comes up to the castle and sleeps in front of the hall fire, taking up most of it.

He was in the inner court when we came down.

He was enormous in the dark. Bigger than a horse. Gray as smoke, gray as winter fog, with his great head down and his nose on the cobbles, moving very slowly across the court in a long low zigzag, the way a hound moves on a cold trail. His breath came out of him in clouds. His eyes, when he lifted his head and looked at us, were yellow as lamps.

He didn’t say anything. He doesn’t, much, in wolf shape. But he looked at Elenos, and at me, and then back down at the cobbles, and then he did something I’ve never seen him do before.

He growled.

Very low. So low I felt it through the soles of my boots more than heard it. And all the fur along his great back stood up in a ridge, from his neck to his tail, like a field of gray grass in a wind.

”What is it?” I said. ”Fenrir. What’ve you got?”

Fenrir lifted his head again. He turned it, slowly, and looked across the court. Toward the east side of the old keep. Toward the little kitchen, and the east stair, and the kitchen stair beside it that goes up and up to the little room at the top with the round window looking west.

Sahrun’s room.

Then he put his nose back down on the cobbles, and breathed in, long and deep, and I saw his lip curl back from his teeth.

”He says it smells of salt,” said Elenos.

I looked at my brother.

”You can understand him?”

”No,” said Elenos. ”But I can hear what he’s breathing in. Everybody’s breath sounds like what they’ve got in their nose.” He tilted his head. ”Salt. Sea. And lavender. Like a pillow somebody’s slept on for a very long time.” He paused. ”And iron. A little bit of iron. Cold.”

”A link,” I said.

I’d known. Somewhere under the warm slow breath, I’d known since I opened my eyes.

”One of the Chained,” I said. ”Aurelia told us. In the chapel, in the summer. There’s a god of locks, and a god of fences, and Draum, who holds the sea. And a goddess.” I swallowed. ”A goddess of the last breath before sleep.”

* * *

Greykeep has never had a moat.

Ignatius argued about it when he was six. He said a proper castle needed one, with fish in it. My father said Greykeep had a hill and a river and a Castellan, and that was quite enough, thank you.

That night, it had a moat.

I saw it from the top of the east wall, where Elenos and I ran while Fenrir went on casting across the court with his nose down. I leaned over the parapet in the cold dark, and looked down the long slope of the castle hill, past the orchard and the oldest apple tree, toward the river.

And the hill was moving.

Not the hill. Something around it. Something enormous, and dark, and gleaming faintly in the starlight, lying in a great ring all the way around the foot of the castle hill, through the orchard and across the road and along the riverbank and back. A coil. Thick as a house is tall. Scaled in green and black and bronze, with frost on the scales. And at one end of it, lying on the road below the castle gate, a head the size of a barge, with two eyes in it like great gold lamps, turned up toward the wall.

Toward us.

”Jörmungandr,” said Elenos softly.

The world serpent. Loki’s other son. Who sulks in Greymere because there are no roads in a lake, and loves it when I fold, because a fold is a kind of road. Who’d come all the way down the river from the lake in the middle of the night, without anyone asking him, and wrapped himself around the foot of Greykeep’s hill. Around the whole of it. Head to tail.

He didn’t say anything. He just lay there, looking up at the wall with his great gold eyes, and very slowly blinked.

”He’s not letting anything out,” said Elenos. ”Is he?”

”No,” I said. ”I don’t think he is.”

I found out afterward that nobody had sent for him. Fenrir had smelled the salt and the lavender and the iron at the top of the kitchen stair a little after two, and he’d gone up onto the castle wall and lifted his great gray head and howled, once, very low, so low that nobody in the castle heard it but the Castellan and my youngest brother. And forty miles away, at the bottom of Greymere, his brother had heard it too, and come.

Wolves and serpents don’t need to be asked. Not by their own family.

* * *

The kitchen stair is a tight stone spiral, past the spice loft and the room where Helena keeps the jam, up to one small room with a round window looking west. Sahrun had slept in it every night since Helena gave it to him, with the window open, even in the frost, so that he could hear the weather.

Fenrir couldn’t fit.

He came across the court in three long bounds when we came down off the wall, and stood at the bottom of the kitchen stair, and looked up it, with his yellow eyes and his ridge of fur standing up, and I saw him understand that he’d never get his shoulders through the door.

So he changed.

It happens all at once and very slowly at the same time, like watching a cloud change shape. The great gray wolf folded in on himself, and stood up, and was a man. Tall, very tall, taller than my father, with long gray hair down his back and a gray beard and gray clothes that might have been fur and might not, and the red cloth still tied around his left forearm. His eyes were still yellow. They didn’t change.

”Up,” he said.

His voice was very rough, like a voice that isn’t used often. He went up the kitchen stair two steps at a time, barefoot, without a sound. Elenos and I went after him.

The breath was stronger on the stair. Much stronger. In and out, in and out, warm and slow and heavy, and it pressed on me from every side like warm water. Halfway up, past the spice loft, my legs went weak and I had to put my hand on the wall.

”Garrick Grey,” said Elenos, behind me. Sharply. ”Garrick Grey.”

I kept going.

At the top of the stair, the door to Sahrun’s little room was open.

Fenrir stopped in the doorway. He put out one long gray arm and stopped me too, gently, with his hand flat on my chest. And I looked past him into the room.

The round window was open. The cold came in through it, and the starlight. Sahrun was lying on the narrow bed under the window, on his back, in his new nightshirt, with Helena’s patchwork quilt pulled up to his chin and his face turned toward the night sky. Asleep. Deeply asleep. With the same small, peaceful, wanting smile on his face that Seraphina had had.

And somebody was sitting on the end of his bed.

* * *

She was small.

That was the first thing. I don’t know what I’d expected. Something like the Lockwarden, tall and gray and terrible on the bow of a ship. She wasn’t anything like that. She was a small, slight woman in a long soft dress the color of dusk, with dark hair loose down her back to her waist and bare feet tucked up under her on the quilt. She looked tired. Not the way people look tired at the end of a long day. The way the very old people in the long ward look tired, Elenos told me afterward. The way you look when you haven’t slept properly in a hundred years.

Around her throat, on a thin black cord, there was a single small link of black iron.

She was leaning over Sahrun, very close, with one hand resting lightly on the quilt over his chest. And she was breathing. Slowly. Softly. In, and out. And every time she breathed out, the whole castle breathed out with her, and the warm dark pressed harder on my eyes.

And between the breaths, very quietly, so quietly I could hardly hear it, she was whispering.

”Sahrun,” she was saying. ”Sahrun. Will you come home?”

On the bed, Sahrun’s lips moved.

”It’s cold here,” she whispered. ”It’s strange. Nobody knows you. You don’t know how to be weather anymore. You said so. You don’t know where to go, or when to stop.” Another long, slow breath. ”Come home. Come back to your tower. It’s warm in the tower. Everything’s quiet. You don’t have to decide anything ever again.” She bent closer, so that her loose hair fell over his face. ”Just say yes. That’s all. You’re nearly asleep. It’s so easy to say yes when you’re nearly asleep.”

Sahrun’s lips moved again.

”Y...”

”No,” I said.

I said it loudly. It came out of me before I’d decided. It cracked through the little room like a stick breaking in a frozen wood.

She turned her head and looked at me.

Her eyes were gray. Soft and gray and heavy-lidded, like someone who’s about to drift off. She looked at me for a long moment with no surprise in her face at all. Then she smiled, very slightly, and breathed out.

Toward me.

And I went under.

* * *

It was the most comfortable thing that has ever happened to me.

That’s what frightens me most, still. How good it was. Like coming in out of a long cold day and lying down in front of a fire, and everything aching letting go at once, and somebody kind putting a blanket over you. Warm, and soft, and safe, and nothing left to decide. Nothing to be afraid of. Nobody to keep safe. Everything held.

And somewhere very far away, a soft voice saying, Garrick. You’re so tired. You’ve been tired since the ships came. Wouldn’t you like to put it all down? Just say yes.

And I wanted to.

I don’t know how long I was under. A breath. Two. I could feel my knees going and I didn’t care. I could feel something enormous and warm and gray holding me up by the back of my coat, and I didn’t care about that either.

Then, from much closer, sharp and clear and thin as a needle, a boy’s voice.

”Garrick Grey.”

And then again, the other way, as if he were calling down a well:

”Sahrun. Sahrun of the high plateaus. Here comes Sahrun.”

And then, from somewhere below us, rising up through the stone of the old east tower and the narrow spiral of the kitchen stair and the walls and the floors and the old copper pipes that run through every bedroom in that wing of the castle, so loud and so high and so shrill that it went through my head like a lightning bolt through a bell tower...

Helena’s kettle.

* * *

It was four o’clock.

Helena comes down at four. She has come down at four every morning for twenty years. Mary says she came down at four on the morning after the war ended, and on the morning after Carol and I were born. Nobody in Greykeep has ever once seen Helena oversleep. Not once. Not ever.

And it turned out that not even a goddess of the last breath before sleep, breathing for a whole castle at once, could make her.

She told us afterward that she’d been awake the whole time. Mary says she was very clearly asleep, because she came down the east stair in her nightgown with her hair down, which nobody in the house had ever seen before, and her eyes shut, and her slippers on the wrong feet, and filled the big kettle at the pump and set it on the stove and lit the fire under it with a taper without opening her eyes once. And then stood by the stove with her hands folded, swaying very slightly, waiting.

And when the water boiled, the kettle did what it has done every morning for twenty years.

It whistled.

Through the old copper pipes that run up from the little kitchen to every bedroom in the east wing. Up the kitchen stair. Up the east stair. Into every room in that part of Greykeep, the way it does every morning, the sound that every single person in the house has heard every single day of their life, the sound that means it’s morning, come down, there’s porridge.

And everybody woke up.

* * *

Sahrun sat bolt upright in bed.

He sat up so fast that the woman in the dusk-colored dress was thrown back against the wall, and the patchwork quilt went flying, and his eyes came open, wide and dark and absolutely awake. He looked at her. He looked at the black iron link around her throat. And I saw him understand, all at once, where he was and what had nearly happened.

”No,” said Sahrun.

The thunder came from inside the little room.

Not loud. Not a storm. One single low roll of it, right there under the round window, so close that the glass rang and the candle in Elenos’s hand blew out. And all through the little room, out of a clear night sky, it began to rain. Hard. Cold. Straight down. On the bed, on the floor, on the woman in the dusk-colored dress.

She stood up.

She looked at Sahrun, sitting up in his narrow bed in the rain with his fists clenched in the quilt. She looked at me, swaying in the doorway with Fenrir’s great hand fisted in the back of my coat. She looked at Elenos, white-faced, holding a dead candle.

And then she went out of the round window.

Not climbing. Not jumping. She went out of it the way a breath goes out of you. One moment she was standing in the little room in the rain, and the next there was just the window, and the cold, and a faint smell of lavender, and a long soft sigh going away down the outside of the tower into the dark.

”Down,” said Fenrir.

He let go of my coat. He went down the kitchen stair so fast I never saw him go, and at the bottom of it I heard him change back, the sound of something enormous landing on the cobbles of the court on four feet, and then the scrabble of claws, and then nothing. And far below, at the foot of the castle hill, on the road outside the gate, I heard something else.

Jörmungandr.

Hissing.

* * *

We found her on the road below the castle gate, ten minutes later. All of us. The kettle had woken the east wing, and Sahrun’s thunder had broken the breath for everyone else. My father in his socks, who’d come down the fast way, in a crack of white-gold light, and was standing in the middle of the road with his hair on end and his frost hammer in his hand. Carol and Ignatius and Seraphina, in their coats. Sahrun, barefoot, soaked to the skin, with his own little cloud still raining on him. Elenos. Me.

And in the middle of us, standing on the road with her back to the gate, the goddess of the last breath before sleep.

She couldn’t go any further. On the far side of the road, across the whole width of it, so close she could have reached out and touched it, lay the great green-and-bronze coil of the world serpent. It went around the whole foot of the castle hill, head to tail, without a gap. And his great gold head lay on the road just beside her, with one enormous eye open, watching her.

Fenrir stood on the other side of her, in wolf shape, with his fur up. He wasn’t growling anymore. He didn’t need to.

She didn’t try to breathe on anyone. She looked very tired. She stood in the cold on the road in her bare feet and her dusk-colored dress, with her hair loose down her back and the iron link at her throat, and looked at my father.

”You’re the King,” she said.

Her voice was very soft. Like someone talking in a room where a baby’s asleep.

”I’m Uriah,” said my father. ”What’s your name?”

She looked at him for a long time.

”Ithren,” she said at last.

”What do you want, Ithren?”

She was quiet for a long time. The serpent’s eye watched her. The wolf watched her. The whole of Greykeep, standing in the road in its nightclothes, watched her.

”To sleep,” said Ithren.

She said it very simply. As though it were the only true thing she had left.

”I breathe the last breath for everyone,” she said. ”Every night. Everywhere he asks me to. The breath before sleep, where people say yes. I’ve breathed it for a hundred years. For him. For the city.” She looked down at her bare feet on the frozen road. ”I haven’t slept once. Not in a hundred years. You can’t, when you’re the last breath. You’re always at the edge. Always holding everyone else there.” She looked up. ”He said when he holds the whole world, I’ll be allowed to stop.”

Nobody said anything.

”I chose him,” said Ithren. Quietly. Steadily. ”Don’t think I didn’t. I put the link on myself. I’m not one of your branded children. I’m not one of the held.” She touched the black iron at her throat. ”And I’ll go back to him. Whatever you do to me. That’s what I chose.”

My father looked at her for a very long time.

Then he put his frost hammer down. On the road. The way Thor had put hers down in the garden four days before. And took two steps away from it.

”We don’t hold people here,” he said. ”Not even you.” He looked at the serpent. ”Jörmungandr. Would you let her through? Please.”

The great gold eye blinked once, slowly.

Then the coil moved. Not much. Just enough. A gap opened in it, a few feet wide, on the road beyond the gate, like a door swinging open in a wall.

Ithren stared at it.

”Go home,” said my father. ”Tell him Sahrun said no. Tell him every one of them will say no, if they ever get the chance to say it awake.” He paused. ”And tell him, if he still wants to know which of us held his hand, he can come and ask. At the door. Properly. Like anyone else.”

Ithren looked at him. At the hammer on the road. At the gap in the serpent’s coil.

”You’re letting me go,” she said. ”After that.”

”Yes,” said my father.

She looked at Sahrun, standing barefoot in his own rain. Then she looked at Helena, who had come down the hill road in her nightgown and her wrong-footed slippers, with her hair down and a shawl around her shoulders and her eyes, finally, open.

”You,” said Ithren. ”The kettle.”

”Me,” said Helena.

”I couldn’t hold you,” said Ithren. Very softly. Almost wondering. ”I’ve held whole cities at the edge of sleep. I couldn’t hold you.”

Helena pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders.

”I have porridge to make,” she said. ”Every morning. For twenty years. Nobody keeps me from my porridge.”

Ithren looked at her a moment longer. And then, for the first time, something moved in her tired face that might, in someone who’d slept in the last hundred years, have been a smile.

She went through the gap in the coil. Not as a breath. On her own bare feet, walking. Down the road toward the river and the dark, in her dusk-colored dress, with her hair down her back, very slowly, like someone at the end of a very long day.

The serpent closed behind her.

* * *

Mary wrote it at six, at the scrubbed table, in the black book, while Helena made the porridge with her hair pinned up again and absolutely refused to discuss the slippers.

Ithren. Goddess of the last breath before sleep. Chained. Came for Sahrun. Held the whole castle at the edge of sleep, 2 to 4 a.m. Woken by Elenos, Fenrir, Jörmungandr, and Helena’s kettle. Sahrun said no. Let go.

Under it, my father wrote:

Nobody keeps Helena from her porridge.

And under that, in very small capitals, because Faelan had been standing at Mary’s elbow the whole time, waiting for his turn with the pen:

FENRIR. JÖRMUNGANDR. (They did not wait to be asked. Elenos says that is allowed if it’s family.)