The Greykeep Chronicles

There was frost on my window again on Friday morning.

Not a word this time. Just ferns, all the way up the glass, thick and white and even, the way she does them when she’s calm. I put my hand on it before I got up, and the door between us was cold and steady and far away, a window open in a big house a long way down the corridor, and on the other side of it Carol was standing on a harbor wall with her hands in her pockets, holding forty feet of ice against thirty-one ships, and she was bored.

I could feel her being bored. It’s one of the best feelings there is. When Carol’s bored, nothing’s wrong.

Seraphina was still asleep, with our son flat on his back between us with both arms flung up over his head like a man who’s surrendered to something enormous. I lay and looked at the frost for a while. Then I got up and went down to the little kitchen, and Helena gave me an egg without asking, and I ate it standing by the window like Eleanor, and it was a good egg.

* * *

Eleanor asked the twins at ten.

They came through the Concordia arch on the quay together, as they do everything, two round fair women of forty in floury aprons with their sleeves pushed up, arm in arm, already talking. They’re called Mab and Moll Brightwater. They were Eleanor’s apprentices for three years, a long time ago, and then they both fell in love with bakers on the same afternoon in the same Concordian market and gave up cutting gates for bread, and Eleanor has never quite forgiven them, and goes to see them every spring.

I was on the quay with Aldren when they came out. They saw Eleanor and both shrieked and fell on her at once, one on each side, and Eleanor stood between them with her spectacles knocked crooked and her arms pinned and an expression on her face like a cat being kissed.

”You’ve got thinner,” said Mab.

”You’ve not been eating,” said Moll.

”Is Helena still putting your egg on?”

”Is it still the one egg?”

”It’s one egg,” said Eleanor, ”it’s always been one egg, let go of my arms, I’ve asked you here for a reason.”

”She’s asked us,” said Mab to Moll.

”She’s never asked us anything,” said Moll to Mab. ”Not in twenty years. She tells us.”

They let go of her arms. Eleanor straightened her spectacles. And then she asked them, there on the quay, in the wind, with the gulls going over, both at once, because, as she’d said, they’d only tell each other anyway.

”Are you all right? Is there anything you want?”

The twins looked at each other.

I’ve watched a great many people be asked that question this autumn. Hob’s knees. Perrin’s lathe. Calum and the naming. They all did the same thing first, the same small stop, as if they’d been walking along a road their whole lives and somebody had suddenly pointed out that it had a fork in it.

The twins didn’t stop. They looked at each other, and something went between them, the way it goes between Carol and me, and Mab said:

”We want you to come to dinner.”

”Both houses,” said Moll. ”Same night. We’ll put the tables together in the street between.”

”You’ve come to see us every spring for twenty years,” said Mab, ”and you stand in the shop and look at the bread and say it’s very nice and go home.”

”You’ve never once sat down,” said Moll.

”We want you to sit down,” said Mab.

Eleanor stood there on the quay with her coat flapping.

”That’s all?” she said.

”That’s all,” said the twins together.

”I thought you’d say you wanted to come back. To the gates. Bettrys does. I thought.”

”Oh, no,” said Mab, quite comfortably. ”We were terrible at gates.”

”Shocking,” said Moll. ”You said so.”

”I never said so.”

”You said it with your face,” said Mab, and Aldren, beside me, made a noise into his sausage that he turned into a cough.

Eleanor said yes to dinner. She said it the way you’d agree to something frightening and necessary, like a tooth being pulled. The twins kissed her again, both sides, and went back through the arch to Concordia arm in arm, already arguing about whether to do a ham, and Eleanor stood looking after them.

Then she took the list out of her pocket and drew two small lines through it. And looked at what was left.

”One,” she said.

She didn’t say his name. She put the list away and went up the hill.

* * *

At four o’clock Tamar Vale came through the Westmere arch in the lower hall, soaked to the skin and smelling of smoke.

I was in the drafting room with Eleanor and the Greymere plate. The Castellan came for me itself. It doesn’t do that. It came up through the floor of the drafting room, which I’ve never seen it do, rising out of the flagstones like a man standing up out of a bath, and said, ”Garrick Grey. Westmere,” and went back down, and I went down the back stair three at a time after it.

Tamar was on his knees on the floor of the lower hall in front of the little arch with his hands on the stone, getting his breath. He’s a few years older than me, square-jawed, steady, the sort of man who has been Steward of a hard harbor since his father gave it up and has never once come through a gate running. He’d come through running. There was soot on his face and a burn on the back of one hand, and the salt water was running off him onto the pale patches where the other arches used to stand.

”Ships,” he said. ”Black ships. Three of them. Cutters. They came in on the afternoon tide behind the shoals where the watch couldn’t see, and they’ve fired the salt-houses on the north pier and the old boats in the inner basin. They’re shooting fire arrows at the Hold.” He got up. He nearly fell. I caught him. ”Garrick. I’ve got a town on fire.”

My father was there by then. He’d come down the main stair from the gate. He didn’t run either. He never runs. He just arrived, the way weather arrives, and looked at Tamar’s hand, and at the smoke on his face, and at me.

”Go,” he said.

”Father, Carol’s away. Ignatius is away. If something—”

”Thor’s on the walls. I’m at the gate. The Castellan knows every name.” My father put his hand on my shoulder. ”Westmere’s ours too, Garrick. Go.”

”I’m coming,” said Benjamin.

I hadn’t seen him come in. He’s Aurelia’s son and he moves the way she does, like the light changing in a room. He’d been in the herb garden with Helena and Selvane; he had earth on his knees. His face was white.

”Selvane’s lamps are on the north pier,” he said. ”She’s here. She’s safe. But her lamps are there.”

”Then come,” I said.

Seraphina was on the back stair with our son. She’d heard. She didn’t say don’t. She’s never once in her life said don’t to me. She came down the last three steps and held my face in her free hand for a moment and looked at me with the First Flame small and bright in her eyes.

”Come back,” she said.

”Always.”

”Not always,” said Seraphina. ”Tonight.” She kissed me. ”I’ll keep him. Go and put their fires out.”

I went.

* * *

The Westmere arch comes out in the lower court of Westmere Hold, an old gray fortress built on the rock at the end of the harbor, with the sea on three sides and a long stone pier running north from its foot.

We came out into smoke.

It was thick and yellow and stank of burning salt and tar, and through it, high up and very bright, came the fire arrows. I saw three go over while I stood there, little streaks of orange arcing up over the Hold wall from the harbor side and coming down in the court, skittering on the stones, spitting. Men were running with buckets. Somebody was shouting about the stables. And over it all, under it, the Hold was humming, low and angry, the way it does when something’s wrong, like a cat with a dog in the yard.

Tamar’s wife was in the court with a bucket and her skirts tucked up. She saw Tamar and threw the bucket at him, water and all, which I gather is how she says thank God you’re alive. Then she saw me.

”North pier,” she said. ”They’re off the end of it. Go.”

I went up the Hold stair to the wall.

From the wall I could see it all. The harbor below me, gray and choppy, with smoke lying on it. The north pier running out into the bay, long and straight, with the salt-houses along it, the long low sheds where they dry the salt, all four of them burning, roofs gone, the fire roaring up out of them orange and black. In the inner basin, behind the pier, half a dozen old hulks burning to the waterline. And off the end of the pier, a hundred yards out, three black cutters under sail, close-hauled, moving slowly back and forth across the harbor mouth, and on their decks men with bows, and braziers, lighting arrows and loosing them over the Hold wall in long slow arcs.

Three cutters. Small ones. Thirty men, perhaps, all told.

I put my hand out.

* * *

I’m not going to pretend it was difficult. It wasn’t. I’m not boasting. It’s only that I’ve got stronger this year, much stronger, in a way I don’t entirely understand yet and that Aurelia says I’m not meant to understand until it’s finished. Every power I’ve ever borrowed I’ve kept, and they’ve started to go into each other, like rivers going into the sea. My father’s frost. Thor’s lightning. Seraphina’s flame. The fold under all of it, the first thing, the thing that’s mine.

I folded the sea.

I took the gray water from the harbor mouth, a great slab of it, a hundred yards wide, and I folded it up and over and down onto the north pier, onto the salt-houses, all four at once. It came down out of the empty air like a wave breaking on nothing. The fires went out with a sound like the whole world hissing through its teeth. Steam went up white, a hundred feet, and hung over the harbor.

Then I did the hulks in the basin. One fold each. Six.

Then I turned to the cutters.

I didn’t sink them. I want that noted. I could have. There were thirty men on them and they’d been shooting fire at a town full of children. But my father has never sunk a ship he could turn around instead, and I’m my father’s son. So I put my hand out toward the three black cutters at the harbor mouth, and I borrowed my father’s frost, which I’ve had since I was a baby and never yet used on the sea, and I froze the water around their hulls.

Not the whole sea. Just a ring. A ring of ice around each ship, a few feet thick, gripping the hull like a hand.

The cutters stopped dead. Their sails filled and strained and the masts groaned and nothing moved. On the decks the men with bows stood very still and looked down at the ice. Somebody dropped a burning arrow and it went out on the frost.

”Thank you,” said Tamar, beside me on the wall. He’d come up. He was still dripping from the bucket. He was looking at the three ships held fast in the harbor mouth in their rings of ice, and at the steam going up off the north pier, and at me. ”Garrick. Thank you.”

”It’s not finished,” I said. ”Get your boats. We’ll go out and ask them who sent them.”

* * *

We went out in Tamar’s own boat, the Hold’s pinnace, eight oars, with Dunmore at the tiller, old Dunmore the foreman with his white beard and his knitted cap, who has been at the end of every bad night at Westmere for forty years and says he doesn’t intend to miss one now.

Benjamin stayed behind on the north pier. He’d gone straight there when we came through the gate, through the smoke, while the fire arrows were still coming down. Selvane’s brass lamp stood at the end of the pier, the one that relit itself, and beside it, since the summer, a row of little lamps the Westmere children had set out for her, one for every harbor she’d ever lived in, so she’d have them all in one place. Every one of them was broken. Somebody had gone along the end of the pier and smashed them, one by one, her own lamp last, the glass all over the stones. I saw Benjamin as we rowed out past the end of the pier, on his knees in the wet, picking the glass up piece by piece in his bare hands and putting it in his hat.

We came up alongside the first cutter.

It was empty.

I mean that. It was empty of anything that mattered. There were eleven men on board, and they stood along the rail with their hands open and empty and their bows on the deck at their feet, and they didn’t fight, and they didn’t speak. They were Kethran sailors, ordinary ones, young most of them, in black coats with the closed hand stitched on the shoulder. There were no officers. No priests. No letters, no orders, no flags. Just the men and the braziers and a great many arrows, and in the hold, when Dunmore went down to look, barrels of pitch and oil and nothing else. No food. No water. Not enough to get them back across the sea, not by half.

”They didn’t mean to go home,” said Dunmore, coming up the ladder. He spat over the side. ”Or they didn’t mean to go far.”

It was the same on the second cutter. And the third.

I stood on the deck of the third cutter with the ice holding it and the steam drifting over the harbor and looked at the eleven young men standing along the rail with their open hands, and I asked them, the way my father asks.

”What are your names? Where are you from? What do you want?”

Nobody answered. Then one of them, the youngest, a boy no older than Dickon Varley, with a scar through his eyebrow, said in heavy common tongue:

”We were told to burn the pier. And the boats. And shoot at the castle. Until the one who folds came.” He looked at me. ”Then to stop.”

”Stop?”

”To stop. And wait. That is all we were told.” He looked down at his hands. ”We were told you would not kill us. We were told you never do.”

I stood there.

I want to set down exactly what I felt, because I’ve been over it since, the way I’ve been over Wynn’s face on the quay, and the thin letter, and the man in the doorway. I felt cold. That was the first thing. The same cold I’d felt on the harbor wall at Caldermouth, the fold going still before it opens. Until the one who folds came.

Then I thought: they wanted me here. They fired a town to bring me here. And I looked around me, at Westmere, at the steam and the smoke and the broken lamps on the pier, and I thought, why? What’s here? What are they keeping me from?

And then I thought: home.

* * *

I went back to the Hold at a run.

I went straight down to the lower court, to the Westmere gate, the far end of the little arch, which stands here in an old storeroom off the court with a brass plate on a plain stone frame, and I put my hand on the plate and listened, the way Eleanor taught me.

The gate was quiet. Ordinary. Warm. On the other side of it, half a country of folded air away, I could feel the lower hall at Greykeep, cool and empty, the two last arches, the Castellan standing beside them.

”Castellan,” I said, into the plate.

It answered at once. It always answers. Its voice came through the gate small and gray and very far away, like a voice down a well.

”Garrick Grey.”

”Is everyone there? Is everyone safe?”

There was a short pause. I know what the pause was. It was the Castellan counting. It counts everyone, every name, the way Faelan counts gods.

”All,” said the Castellan. ”Uriah Grey at the gate. Thor on the walls. Seraphina in the east range with your son. Evelyn. Adriana. The children. Mary. Helena. Eleanor. Grandpa. Iselle and Roderic in the college. Loki in the Concordian rooms, talking to Fenrir. Two hundred and eleven of the household. All. Nobody has come in who was not asked. Nobody has gone out who was not written.” A pause. ”Wynn Harlow is not yet back.”

”Is anything wrong? Anything at all?”

Another pause. Longer.

”No,” said the Castellan. ”Nothing is wrong. The walls are quiet.” Then: ”Garrick Grey. Uriah Grey asks me to give you a message. He wrote it on my slate. It says: Stay with Tamar tonight. They may come back after dark. We’re all here. Thor’s on the walls. I’m at the gate. Hold Westmere. U.”

I stood with my hand on the plate.

I should have gone home. I know that now. I’ve known it every day since. I should have stepped through the gate there and then and stood in the lower hall and counted them myself. But the Castellan had counted them, and the Castellan has never been wrong about a name. And my father had asked me to stay. And Westmere’s ours too.

And three ships had come to bring me here, and if three had come, more might come after dark, and Westmere had no one else who could fold the sea onto a fire. And there were children in Westmere too.

”Tell him yes,” I said.

”I will tell him,” said the Castellan. Then, after a moment, in a different voice, the voice it uses when it’s thinking about something it doesn’t have a word for: ”Garrick Grey. You are worried.”

”They wanted me here. The sailors said so. They were told to burn things until I came.”

”Yes,” said the Castellan. ”Then you are here, and they are stopped, and nothing has happened at Greykeep. Perhaps that is all they wanted. To see if you would come.”

”Perhaps.”

”I will watch the walls,” said the Castellan. ”I always watch the walls. Sleep if you can.”

And the gate went quiet under my hand.

* * *

I didn’t sleep.

We brought the three cutters into the inner basin before dark. I thawed the ice one ring at a time and Tamar’s men towed them in, and the thirty-three Kethran sailors walked up the north pier with their hands open and sat down in a long row against the wall of the Hold while Tamar’s wife and the other women brought them soup. Not one of them made any trouble. When the soup came, the boy with the scarred eyebrow cried. Tamar’s wife put her hand on his head the way Helena does with Carol, and he cried harder.

”They’re not soldiers,” said Tamar, watching. ”They’re fishermen in coats.”

”They’re somebody’s sons,” said his wife, and went back for more bread.

Dunmore set a watch on the north pier and on the Hold roof, in Tamar’s little watch hut, with the long brass spyglass and the watch book. Tamar took the first watch himself. I took the second, at ten.

I sat on the stool in the hut on the Hold roof with the stove ticking and the watch book on my knee and the spyglass across my lap, and I looked out at the dark sea. There was nothing on it. No ships, no lights, no sails. A clear cold night with the stars very sharp and the water black and still. I wrote in the watch book every hour, the way Tamar does: 10th hour. Nothing. 11th hour. Nothing. In my terrible handwriting.

At half past ten Benjamin came up the ladder with two cups of tea.

He’d been on the north pier all evening. He’d picked up every piece of glass. He’d got it all into his hat and brought it into the Hold and laid it out on the kitchen table, every broken pane and twisted brass cap and shard, sorting it, lamp by lamp. Selvane had come through the gate at seven when it was safe. Tamar’s wife said she’d sat at the kitchen table with Benjamin for two hours, the two of them not talking, fitting the pieces together.

”Are they mendable?” I said.

”Some of them.” He gave me a cup. He sat down on the floor of the hut with his back to the stove. ”Not all. She says it doesn’t matter. She says they were only lamps.” He looked at his hands. They were cut in a dozen places, small cuts, from the glass. ”It matters. The children made those for her. She’s lived in every one of those harbors. She lit that lamp so people would know she was there. So she’d know.” He was quiet. ”I’m going to help her mend them. All of them. Even the ones that can’t be.”

”How do you mend the ones that can’t be?”

”I don’t know yet,” said Benjamin. ”I’ll ask her.”

We drank our tea. The stove ticked. The sea was black and empty.

”Garrick,” said Benjamin after a while. ”Why did they smash the lamps?”

”To hurt her.”

”They didn’t know she was at Greykeep. They didn’t know whose they were.” He turned the cup in his cut hands. ”Unless somebody told them.”

I looked at him.

”Everything they did today,” said Benjamin, slowly, the way his mother speaks when she’s thinking out loud, ”was to make you come, and to make you angry when you did, and to make you stay. The fires to make you come. The lamps to make you angry. The empty ships to make you wonder. The men who wouldn’t fight, so that you’d have to stay and look after them.” He looked at the sea. ”My mother says the cruelest thing you can do to someone who loves people is give them someone to look after.”

The stove ticked.

Like a man standing in a doorway, Carol had said. So you’ll look at him. And not at the door.

I put the cup down. I stood up. And I said, ”I’m going to the gate,” and I went down the ladder.

* * *

I put my hand on the Westmere plate at eleven forty.

It was quiet. Warm. Ordinary. Exactly as it had been at five o’clock. I could feel the lower hall at Greykeep on the other side, cool and dark, the high lamps at each end, the two last arches. I could feel the Castellan beside them, its slow stone attention, like a great patient animal awake in the dark.

”Castellan.”

”Garrick Grey.”

”Is everyone there?”

The pause. The counting.

”All,” said the Castellan. ”All asleep, but your father at the gate and Thor on the walls. The walls are quiet.”

”Nothing’s opened? No gate? No door?”

”No gate has opened,” said the Castellan. ”No door. I would know. They are mine.”

I stood with my hand on the plate for a long time.

”Garrick Grey,” said the Castellan. ”Go back up to your watch. If anything happens I will tell you. I will tell you before anyone. I promise.” A pause. ”I have never promised anything before. I find I would like to.”

”Thank you,” I said.

And I took my hand off the plate, and went back up to the roof, and sat down on the stool, and wrote in the watch book in my terrible handwriting, 11th hour. Nothing. Asked the Castellan. All.

Benjamin had fallen asleep against the stove with his cut hands in his lap.

The sea was black and still. The stars were very sharp. Somewhere a long way east, on the other side of half a country of hills and rivers and dark woods, was Greykeep, with my son asleep in it, and my wife, and my father on his stool at the gate in the cold with his frost hammer across his knees, and the Castellan in all the walls, watching.

It was twenty minutes to midnight.

* * *

From Mary’s book, Friday. There’s no drawing in the margin. Mary wrote this page on Saturday, afterward, when she wrote the others; she says she couldn’t draw that day. The hand is very small and very straight, as if she held the pen hard:

Friday. Clear and cold. Frost on Garrick’s window. Ferns, no word. Carol bored (Garrick says).

Eleanor asked the twins, Mab and Moll Brightwater. They want her to come to dinner and sit down. She said yes. One left.

Four o’clock: Tamar Vale came through the Westmere arch on fire (nearly). Three Kethran cutters burning the north pier and shooting at the Hold. Garrick and Benjamin went. Uriah said: Westmere’s ours too. Seraphina said: Tonight.

Garrick put the fires out with the sea. Froze the cutters in rings of ice. Didn’t sink them. Thirty-three sailors, no officers, no orders, no food for going home. Told to burn things until the one who folds came, and then stop.

Selvane’s lamps all broken on the north pier. Benjamin picked up the glass.

Uriah asked Garrick to stay the night at Westmere and hold it.

The Castellan counted us at five and at twenty to twelve. All.

Coin flat.

There’s no guest line under Friday. Under the last entry, Mary has drawn a single straight line across the page, from edge to edge, and under the line she has written nothing at all.