The Greykeep Chronicles

I heard Siriel first.

Thursday. Five o’clock. The yard at Greykeep, cold and dark, with the stars going out one by one over the east wall. Avarn on my right. Siriel on my left, barefoot on the frozen cobbles, because she said if she was going to stand on things she was going to feel them. And Alistair behind her, leaning on his stick, with his wooden sword under his arm.

She came at me from the left in the dark, and I heard her. Her breath. The whisper of her plait. I turned my head and caught her wrist before her hand reached my shoulder.

And then Alistair’s sword tapped me on the back of the neck.

”Behind her,” said Alistair. ”I said I’d be behind her.”

”You did,” said Siriel. ”He heard me. That was the point.”

”The point,” said Alistair, ”is that there’s always someone behind the one you heard.”

Avarn, on my right, said nothing at all. But I saw his mouth twitch.

* * *

The packs came down the coast road into Westmere at noon.

Not all of them. Thirty or so. In their wolf shapes, gray and brown and one nearly black, coming down out of the hills behind the town in a long loping line with their tongues out, the way they come every night on their walk from Westmere south to the last fishing village before the marshes. Only it was noon, and they’d never once come in daylight, and the Westmere children ran out onto the walls to see them.

At the front, walking on two legs with her blackthorn stick, came Grenna.

* * *

Grenna is the mother of the packs. She’s very old, and small, and wiry, and brown as a walnut, with white hair cut short and a long gray cloak and yellow eyes, and very long teeth. Around her throat, from her jaw to her collarbone, there’s a wide pale band of scar. Smooth. Like the skin’s been polished. That’s where Surtr’s collar was, in the war, for twelve years. Every werewolf in Avarra old enough to have fought has one.

Behind her, in human shape, came Ansgar’s three daughters. Sigrun, the eldest, with a ledger under her arm, because Sigrun keeps the accounts for everything. Ragna, the middle one, my age, who once threw a drunk sailor across the Havenreach butchers’ street for kicking a dog. And Ulla, the youngest, whose laugh you can hear from the castle hill.

Grenna came down onto the North Sands and stopped.

She looked at the dragons. She looked at the forge-bed, and at Surtr asleep along it with the red banked low in his cracks. Her yellow eyes rested on him for a long moment. The scar on her throat moved when she swallowed.

Surtr opened one coal eye.

”Grenna,” he said.

”Surtr,” said Grenna.

That was all. But Ulla, behind her, put her hand on her great-grandmother’s shoulder. And Surtr closed his eye again, and the red in his cracks went very, very low.

* * *

She found my father on the end of the north pier.

He’d been out on Jörmungandr’s back again that morning. He went every day. All the way around, beside the nine, talking. He was standing on the end of the pier watching the long green-black back go around the harbor mouth, with the nine gray figures walking on it in their slow line, when Grenna came down the pier with her stick and stood beside him.

”King,” she said.

”Grenna.”

She didn’t look at him. She was looking at the nine.

”My young ones walk this coast every night,” she said. ”You know. You gave them leave, eight years ago. Westmere to the marshes.” She leaned on her stick. ”Every night for a week, they’ve come down to the end of this pier. And sat. And looked at those.” She nodded at the serpent’s back. ”And smelled them.”

My father turned and looked at her.

”They smell of home,” said Grenna. ”Nine different homes. Faint. Under the iron and the burned hair. Under the oath. But it’s there.” She looked at him at last. Her yellow eyes were very bright. ”Nobody asked us. Nobody ever asks a wolf to do anything. So we’ve come to ask you.” She paused. ”Will you let us try?”

* * *

My father didn’t answer straight away.

”Why?” he said. Not suspicious. Just asking.

Grenna touched the scar on her throat. Lightly. With two fingers.

”Twelve years,” she said, ”I had a collar on that told me where to go. I didn’t know my own name for most of it. Not really. I knew the collar’s name for me.” She looked out at the nine walking. ”Somebody found it again. Your mother. Aurelia. She sat with me for three days and asked me what I used to be called, until I remembered.” Her voice went rough. ”I’d like to find somebody’s. Just one. Before I die. It would be a thing to have done.”

* * *

Fenrir took them out.

He’d been lying on the North Sands with Gorrow all week, the two of them nose to nose in the snow, enormous and gray and perfectly content. When Grenna’s young ones came down to the water’s edge, Fenrir got up, and stretched, and walked into the harbor.

And Jörmungandr came around, the way he does, on his long slow circle. And Fenrir stepped up onto his back.

They stood there for a moment. The great gray wolf on the back of the world serpent. Brothers. Loki’s sons. One who’d been chained under a mountain and one who’d been kept in a lake. I don’t think they’d been that close to each other in a thousand years.

Jörmungandr’s head came up out of the water, slowly, and turned, and looked at his brother on his back with his golden lamp eyes.

Hello, said Jörmungandr. Through the planks. Through my teeth.

Fenrir lay down. Right there. On his brother’s back. In the middle of the sea. And put his chin down on the scales between his paws, and groaned, the long contented groan he makes when he lies in the grass.

On the end of the north pier, Loki turned around very suddenly and walked away up the harbor steps and didn’t come back for an hour. When he did, his eyes were red, and he said it was the wind.

* * *

The wolves went out one by one, across the water, leaping from the end of the pier onto the serpent’s back as he came past. Grenna went last, in her wolf shape, which I’d never seen. Small and gray and grizzled, with a white muzzle and that pale band around her throat that the fur had never grown back over.

And they walked beside the nine.

One wolf to each. Close. Their noses at the Hushed’s sleeves, their hands, the hems of their gray clothes, their chained fists. Walking. Breathing in. Around the harbor mouth on the back of the serpent, in the cold bright noon.

And Sigrun, on the end of the north pier, opened her ledger.

* * *

It was slow. It was very slow. A wolf doesn’t smell a thing once and know it. They smell it over and over, Ragna told me later, the way you’d read a hard page again and again until the words come up off it.

The first one came after nearly an hour.

Ragna, out on the serpent’s back, beside the fourth of the nine, a short broad woman with gray in her hair, lifted her head and howled. Just once. Short. And then shifted, right there, wolf to woman, mid-stride, so fast I didn’t see it happen, and walked beside the Hushed woman on two legs and called across the water to the pier.

”Clay!” she shouted. ”River clay. Wet. And smoke. Wood smoke and something under it, something hot, like a kiln. And onions. A lot of onions.” She sniffed again. ”And geese.”

On the north pier, among the Kethran sailors who’d come down to watch, a man put his hand over his mouth.

* * *

”Brickfields,” he said. Not loud. Then louder. ”The brickfields at Kilnford. On the Ash. Below Tessing.” He was already pushing to the edge of the pier. ”They grow onions on the dikes. Everybody keeps geese. Everybody.” He stared out at the short broad woman walking on the serpent’s back. ”That’s—is that—”

Corran Hale’s daughter, beside him, grabbed his arm.

”Tessing,” she said. ”Kilnford’s the next village. It’s two miles.” She looked at the Hushed woman. ”Da!”

Corran Hale came down the pier at his limping run. He looked out across the water a long time. At the short broad woman with gray in her hair, walking in the line, with Ragna beside her.

”Brede,” he said. ”That’s Brede Oller. Her husband had the second kiln. She went to the Temple the winter after I did. For the tithe. Same as me.” His voice broke. ”I stood outside a door in the golden city next to her for nine years, and I never once knew it was her.”

* * *

My father went out.

He didn’t wait for anyone. He went down the end of the pier and onto the water on his little plates of frost, faster than I’d seen him move since he fell, and Corran Hale went after him. My father put down a plate of frost for him, one, two, three, so he could follow, and Corran Hale walked across the harbor on my father’s frost with his bad leg and his eyes fixed on the woman on the serpent’s back.

Jörmungandr slowed. I felt him do it. Through the stones.

Corran Hale stepped up onto the serpent’s back beside Brede Oller, and walked with her, close, and said her name.

It took him four times around.

Then her fist opened. And the padlock fell off it, and slid down the serpent’s scales into the sea, and sank.

* * *

After that it went faster.

Not fast. But faster. Because now everyone knew what to listen for. The wolves walked and smelled and called out what they found, and Sigrun wrote it in her ledger in the best handwriting in Havenreach, and the Kethran sailors and the freed Hushed crowded onto the north pier and listened, and every time a wolf called a smell, someone on the pier went very still.

Pine pitch. Goats. Snow on stone. High up. Cold. Thin air.

”The Spire pastures,” said someone. ”Above Corth.”

Salt. Not sea salt. Dry. Pans. Mud flats. Birds. A lot of birds.

”The salt flats at Erve,” said Ada’s friend Lisbet, signing it at the same time for Marra. ”That’s where Wenna’s from. That’s my aunt’s—”

Bees. Ulla, out on the serpent’s back, laughing her big laugh before she even finished the word. Bees and beeswax and smoke. Clover. Somebody here’s a beekeeper.

And a boy on the pier, a ship’s boy off one of the red ships, no older than Hosk, burst out crying, because his little brother had gone to the Temple at eleven from the bee villages on the Coln, and he’d been looking at every face for a week.

* * *

My father knew things too.

That surprised everyone but me. He’d been walking beside them for a week. Talking. Every day. And when the wolves called out a smell and nobody on the pier knew it, he’d stop, out on the serpent’s back, and look at the Hushed he’d been walking beside, and say something.

”This one walks like a dancer,” he said, about the sixth. ”Look at her feet. She turns them out. She’s been trained.”

And one of the freed Hushed on the pier, a thin old man who’d been a fiddler before the Temple, said, ”The Dancers’ House in the golden city. They take girls from the river towns. There was a girl from Tollan who ran away from it to the Temple, because the Temple was easier.” And the wolf beside the dancer said river reeds and rushes, and the old fiddler said ”Tollan,” and then he said her name.

”This one taps his fingers,” said my father, about the eighth. ”On the inside of his fist. When he walks. Always the same. Three and two. Three and two.”

”That’s a shuttle,” said Lisbet Fane. ”That’s the throw of a loom. Three and two. That’s how they weave sailcloth in Marrow Bay.”

And Ulla, beside him, said flax and linseed oil and wet rope, and three sailors on the pier said, all at once, a name.

* * *

By four o’clock, eight padlocks had gone into the sea off Jörmungandr’s back.

Eight. Brede Oller from the Kilnford brickfields. Tam Corth from the Spire pastures. Wenna Fane’s sister’s girl, Hedda, from the salt pans at Erve. The beekeeper’s boy, Benno, from the Coln. The dancer, Saffi, from Tollan. The weaver, Wes Marrow, who tapped his fingers three and two. Two more whose names were found by a cook from the Fallow mills and an old woman from the fishing village at Sallow Point, who’d come ashore off the red ships on Tuesday night with everyone else and had been sitting on the end of the pier every day since, looking.

Eight, walking back across the harbor on my father’s frost, with their hands open, to people who’d been looking at faces for a week.

One left.

* * *

He was the tall thin one. The one at the back of the line. The one my father always walked beside.

Grenna was beside him. In her wolf shape, small and gray, with her white muzzle at his sleeve. She’d been beside him since noon. She hadn’t called out anything. Not once.

At four o’clock she stopped walking, and let him go on without her, and stood on the serpent’s back with her head down. And Jörmungandr, feeling her stop, slowed, and the tall thin man walked on alone toward the serpent’s head, and my father went with him.

Grenna shifted. Old woman. Stick. She stood on the back of the world serpent in her gray cloak, looking after the tall man, and her shoulders were shaking.

I went out.

* * *

I don’t fold yet. Not much. But I can walk on my father’s frost, and he’d left a line of it across the harbor, and I went out on it and stepped up onto Jörmungandr’s back beside Grenna.

”Nothing,” she said. Before I asked. ”There’s nothing there.”

”Nothing?”

”Not the iron. Not the burned hair. Not even the oath.” She was gripping her stick so hard her knuckles were white. ”Nothing. In the shape of a man. Like a hole cut in the air.” She looked up at me with her yellow eyes. ”My young ones smelled it once before. At Skellow. After the Choir came through. Nothing in the shape of something.”

The Hollow Choir. Kessavel’s choir. The ones whose names he took.

”He hasn’t got a name,” said Grenna. ”Not lost. Not forgotten. Taken. There’s nothing left on him to smell. Nothing for anyone to find.” Her voice cracked. ”I wanted one. Just one. And I’ve found eight. And I can’t find him.”

* * *

My father was walking beside the tall man. Ahead of us. On the serpent’s back. Talking to him, quietly, the way he had for a week.

I watched them.

That’s what I do. I watch. It’s the one thing I’ve never stopped doing, even with one eye.

And I saw something.

* * *

”Grenna,” I said. ”Can I borrow your nose?”

She stared at me.

”I can’t smell like you,” I said. ”I’m not a wolf. But I can borrow things. If you say yes. Just for a minute.” I looked at the tall man. ”I want to smell what you smelled.”

”Nothing. I told you. There’s nothing.”

”I know,” I said. ”I want to smell it anyway.”

Grenna looked at me for a long time. Then she held out her hand. Open. Brown and wiry and old, with long nails.

”Take, then,” she said. ”Gods know I’ve nothing else to give him.”

* * *

I’ve borrowed a great many things. Fire. Winter. Lightning. Folding. A voice. A fleet. A way of opening a hand.

I’d never borrowed a nose.

It was like opening a door in a dark house and finding every room full. Everything at once. The sea, the salt, the tar on the pier, the smoke from Helena’s kettle up the hill, the dragons on the North Sands like hot stone and burned sheep, the phoenixes like cinnamon, the goat, Surtr like a forge, Grenna herself beside me like rain on old leather. Jörmungandr under my feet like cold deep water and very old, old stone.

And ahead of me, walking, the tall thin man.

Nothing.

Grenna was right. Nothing at all. Not iron. Not oath. Not him. A gap in the world. A hole in the shape of a man, walking.

Except.

* * *

Except at the edges.

Faint. So faint I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been watching for it. On his right sleeve. On the right side of his gray hood. On the right side of his face. The side he’d walked on every day for a week. The side my father walked on.

Frost.

Frost and rain and iron and ice on stone. Cold clean wind off a high wall. Woodsmoke from a kitchen at five in the morning. The pages of an old book. My mother’s soap.

My father.

* * *

”Grenna,” I said. My voice wasn’t steady. ”Smell his right side. His right sleeve. Where my father walks.”

She looked at me. Then she shifted, wolf again, small and gray, and went up beside the tall man on his right, and put her white muzzle to his sleeve. And breathed in.

And stopped.

And shifted back. And stood there on the serpent’s back with her hand over her mouth.

”Uriah,” she said.

* * *

My father turned around.

He was ten paces ahead, still beside the tall man, still talking. He stopped. He looked at Grenna, and at me, and at our faces.

”What?”

”You’re on him,” said Grenna. ”You. Your smell. All down his right side. Every day for a week, you’ve walked beside him and talked to him, and he’s got nothing of his own left, nothing at all, and he’s—” She stopped. She swallowed. ”He’s keeping it. Holding onto it. A week of you. It’s the only thing on him.”

My father stood very still on the back of the world serpent.

”He’s been listening,” I said. ”All week. Everything you told him. The kitchen. The yard. The room he’ll have. The soup.” I swallowed. ”He can’t hold his own name. Kessavel’s got it. But he’s holding yours.”

* * *

My father didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he turned, and fell in beside the tall thin man again. On his right. And kept walking. And after a few steps he held his hand out. Open. Palm up. Beside the man’s chained fist.

Not touching. Just there.

And the tall man’s fist, inside its padlock, moved.

Not open. It didn’t open. It couldn’t. There was no name to open it with. But it turned. A little. On the wrist. Toward my father’s open hand. The way a plant turns toward a window.

* * *

”I won’t name him,” said my father, very quietly. To me. To Grenna. To nobody. ”You don’t give someone a name. You find it. It’s theirs. If I gave him one it would just be another collar.” He kept walking, with his hand out. ”His is somewhere. Kessavel’s got it. In a box, or a book, or a chain. Somewhere in the golden city.”

”Then what do we do?” said Grenna.

”We go and get it back,” said my father. ”When we go.” He looked at the tall man’s turned fist. ”And until then, I walk with him. Every day. And talk. So there’s something on him that’s his to hold.”

* * *

The wolves went home at sunset, south along the coast road toward the marshes, the way they go every night. Grenna went last. At the top of the town she stopped, and turned around, and looked back down at the harbor. At Jörmungandr, going around. At one tall gray figure walking on his back, with a smaller figure on its right.

Then she lifted her nose, the way wolves do, and breathed in the wind off the sea.

And her whole body went still.

* * *

”Garrick,” she said.

I was standing at the top of the harbor steps. She was twenty paces away. I heard her anyway. Left ear. Faint. But there.

”Smell the wind,” she said. ”West. Off the sea. You’ve still got my nose. I haven’t asked for it back.”

I turned my face to the west wind and breathed in.

Salt. Weed. Rain coming.

And under it, faint, very faint, so far away it was almost nothing:

Burned hair. And cold iron.

* * *

”The Hushed smell like that,” said Grenna. ”The branded. All of Kessavel’s.” She stood very still at the top of the town, with her stick and her scar and her yellow eyes, looking west at the darkening sea. ”That’s not on the nine. That’s not on the red ships. That’s out there. On the wind.”

”How far?”

Grenna breathed in again. Slowly. Reading it. The way Ragna said you read a hard page.

”Not far,” she said. ”A day’s sail. Less. North and west. Out past the shoals.” Her yellow eyes narrowed. ”A lot of it. Stone, and iron, and a great many people, and burned hair. Like a town. On the water.” She looked at me. ”Something that doesn’t move.”

”An island,” I said.

”An island,” said Grenna.

She held out her hand. Open. And I gave her nose back. It went out of me like a lamp going out in a room, and the world was suddenly very small and quiet and ordinary again.

”Tell your father,” said Grenna, ”that my young ones will walk the coast tonight, as they always do. And tomorrow night. And every night.” She turned to go. ”And tell him that when the war starts, and it will start, we would like to be asked.”

* * *

Mary’s book. Thursday. Written on the end of the north pier at sunset, with Sigrun’s ledger open on the stones beside her, so she could copy every name in the best handwriting in Havenreach, and did, and said hers wasn’t as good.

Thursday. 5 a.m. Siriel on Garrick’s left. He heard her. Alistair behind her. Alistair says there’s always someone behind the one you heard.

Noon. Grenna and thirty wolves. Ansgar’s daughters. Grenna and Surtr said each other’s names. That was all.

Grenna asked Uriah if the wolves could try. She wanted to find one name before she dies.

Fenrir lay down on Jörmungandr’s back. Brothers. Loki went away for an hour and came back and said it was the wind.

The wolves walked beside the nine and smelled their homes. Ragna: clay, kiln, onions, geese. A Kethran sailor: the brickfields at Kilnford. Corran Hale: Brede Oller. He walked on Uriah’s frost and said her name four times around. She opened.

Then: Tam Corth, the Spire pastures. Hedda, the salt pans at Erve. Benno, the bees on the Coln; his brother was on the pier. Saffi, the dancer from Tollan; Uriah noticed her feet. Wes Marrow, the weaver; Uriah noticed his fingers, three and two. Two more. Eight.

The ninth smells of nothing. Kessavel took his name. Garrick borrowed Grenna’s nose. He smells of Uriah. All down his right side. A week of Uriah. It’s the only thing he’s holding.

Uriah won’t give him a name. He says you find a name, you don’t give it. He says we’ll go and get it. He walks on his right.

Sunset. Grenna smelled burned hair and cold iron on the west wind. A day’s sail. An island.

She says when the war starts, the wolves would like to be asked.

And under that, not in ink at all, but pressed into the page with something that wasn’t a pen, so that it stood up from the paper in a raised line you could feel with your fingertips, a long, slow, careful track like the print of a paw dragged across wet sand, and beside it, in Sigrun’s beautiful hand, a translation:

Grenna. Eight. I’d like it noted. (She says she’d like it noted that she’d have liked nine. She says the king will find it. She says she’ll wait.)