The Greykeep Chronicles

My father told me to tell him every time. So I did. Mary kept the count.

It’s in her book, in a column down the margin of three pages, the way she counts sacks of flour in the autumn. A little stroke for each one, and every fifth stroke across the other four, like a gate. I’ve looked at that column a great many times since. It’s the most honest thing anyone has ever written about me.

On Sunday there are fourteen.

* * *

The first ones were small. I want to put them down, because people think it started with the sea, and it didn’t. It started with spoons.

I was sitting at the scrubbed table in the little kitchen at half past six on Sunday morning, doing number nine on the list, with my son on my knee eating porridge with honey, not sugar. Helena was at the range. Eleanor was at the window with her egg. And the boy’s wooden spoon, the one he was eating with, wasn’t in his hand.

It was in Mary’s desk drawer. In her office. In the south range.

I know because Mary came across the court ten minutes later with it held up between two fingers, the way you’d carry a mouse by its tail, and put it down on the table in front of me and looked at me over it.

”I opened my drawer,” said Mary, ”to get a pen. And there was a spoon in it. With porridge on.” She sat down. ”The last time I found something of the household’s in my drawer without being asked, you were two, and it was all my pens, in the coal scuttle, and the coal in my drawer.”

”I didn’t mean to.”

”I know you didn’t mean to,” said Mary. ”You didn’t mean to when you were two, either.” She took a small book out of her apron pocket and opened it and drew a little stroke down the margin. ”One,” she said.

My son had already found another spoon and was going on with his porridge. He hadn’t even noticed.

* * *

By noon there were nine.

Helena’s rolling pin, from the kitchen to the top of the north tower stair, a hundred and forty steps up, outside Carol’s door. One of Grandpa’s wooden horses, from the solar basket to my coat pocket. A bucket of water from the well in the inner court to the middle of the great hall floor, where it sat upright, full, not a drop spilled, and Thor looked at it for a long time and then drank it. The snow off the gatehouse roof, all of it, at once, onto my father’s stool, with my father not on it, luckily, but the milk churns were, and Dickon Varley was very quiet about it for the rest of the day.

None of them hurt anybody. That was what I kept saying to myself. Little things. A spoon. A bucket. Snow. Nothing that mattered.

At two o’clock in the afternoon I was walking across the inner court with my son on my hip to take him to Fenrir on the warm strip, and the nursery door opened.

Not the door in front of me. The nursery door. Our nursery, up in the east range, behind me and three floors up. I didn’t see it open; I felt it, the way you’d feel a window go in a house you’re standing in, a draft on the back of your neck. And through the fold that came open in the air beside me, in the middle of the court, at the height of my shoulder, I could see into it.

Not the nursery.

An orchard. Grass under trees. Bare branches. A long low wall. A smell of cold earth and old apples.

The Lyradon orchard. The first tree Queen Mirelle planted, the one Julian will be crowned under at midwinter. I could see it through the hole in the air, thirty miles away, as clearly as if I were standing under it.

My son looked at it with great interest and put out his hand.

I turned away so fast I nearly dropped him.

The fold shut. The orchard went. The court was the court.

”Ten,” said Mary, behind me, from the kitchen door, where she’d been watching. Her voice wasn’t quite steady. She drew the stroke.

* * *

My father came down from the gate.

He didn’t say anything. He took the boy off my hip and gave him to Helena, who’d come out behind Mary, and Helena took him straight across the court to the warm strip and put him down by Fenrir, and Fenrir got up and stood over him, not lying down, standing, the way he’d stood over him under the stockpot. Watching me.

That was the worst part of Sunday. Not the orchard. The wolf.

”He put his hand out,” I said. ”To the fold. Father, he put his hand out. If I hadn’t turned—”

”You turned,” said my father.

”What if I don’t next time?”

”Then I’ll be there, or Helena will, or the wolf.” He put his hand on my shoulder. ”Garrick. Look at me.”

I looked at him.

”You’re not dangerous,” he said. ”You’re cracked. There’s a difference. A dangerous thing wants to hurt you. A cracked thing just can’t help what comes through it.” He held my shoulder hard. ”You’ll tell me every time. You’ll keep him on your right where you can see him. And you won’t stop holding him because you’re frightened of what you’ll do. That’s not on the list.”

”It might be number eleven.”

”It isn’t,” said my father. ”I’ve read it.”

* * *

I went up to the east wall at dusk, to the nook, to be by myself.

That’s where the rest of Sunday happened. Four more. Mary counted them from the court below, watching the wall. A gull from somewhere over the river, folded onto the parapet beside me, very surprised. Every candle in the chapel, lit at once, though nobody was there. The weather vane on the north tower turned all the way around twice. And at a quarter to nine, the frost on the inside of the nook window, my father’s plain frost, went to ferns. Carol’s ferns.

Just for a moment. Then back.

I looked at it, and I thought: that one wasn’t me. That one came the other way. Through the door between us, from a horse on a road somewhere between Caldermouth and home, riding very hard in the dark. A hand on my shoulder from two hundred miles away.

Hold on. Coming.

I held on.

* * *

On Monday there are sixty-one.

I don’t want to write all of them. Mary wrote all of them, in the margin of her book, very small, a word or two for each, and I’ve read them, and I don’t want to write them again. Most of them were small. A door. A window. A cart of turnips in the lower market, a mile away, turned upside down in the street with the turnips still in it, the cart on top. A wall of the bakehouse folded six inches to the left, bread and all, and then back; the baker said it was like the floor tipping on a ship. The well in the inner court, which went dry for an hour, and then came back with sea water in it. Salt. Gray. Cold. Westmere water. I know because I tasted it.

And the lightning.

At eleven in the morning on a clear blue day, with not one cloud from one side of the sky to the other, lightning came down on Greykeep. Out of nothing. Out of the blue. It came down on the north tower, on the eight iron rods Davren put up after the third time Carol struck it as a child, and the rods took it and rang like bells and sent it down into the stone, and nobody was hurt. Then it came again, on the gatehouse. Then on the great hall roof. Then in a long crawling fork across the whole sky from west to east, so bright the whole of Havenreach came out into the street to look.

Thor’s lightning. The bit Carol took to the sea, and the bit I borrowed years ago and never gave back. Coming out of me. Without me.

Thor came down off the walls and found me in the inner court, where I’d stopped walking because I was frightened to go anywhere near anyone, and she sat down on the cobbles beside me, cross-legged, with her hammer across her knees, and didn’t say anything.

The next time the lightning came, she put her hand up and caught it.

I’d never seen her do that. It came down out of the clear sky toward the east wall, a long white fork, and Thor reached up one great hand without even looking and closed it on the lightning like a woman catching a moth, and the lightning stopped. Just stopped, in her hand, crackling, a fistful of white fire. She looked at it. Then she put it in her mouth and swallowed it.

”Mine,” said Thor. ”I will take it back now, if you do not mind. You may have it again when you are mended.” She belched, very slightly, a smell of storms. ”It is very good lightning. You have kept it well.”

She caught eleven more that afternoon. Mary counted them separately, in a different column.

* * *

At four o’clock on Monday my father asked Thor.

I was there. We were in the little kitchen, because the little kitchen was the only room in Greykeep that hadn’t folded once all day, and Helena said that was because she wasn’t having it, and nobody argued. My son was asleep in the kettle cupboard, on the bottom shelf, in the nest of tea towels. Helena had put him back there on Sunday night without a word, and Fenrir lay across the door, and nobody suggested moving him. He slept better there than anywhere. Nobody looks in the kettle cupboard. Not even, it seemed, folds.

”Thor,” said my father. ”Will you go and fetch Carol?”

Thor was eating bread at the end of the scrubbed table. She stopped.

”She is coming,” said Thor. ”She is on a horse. With the prince. She will be here in three days. Perhaps two. The prince rides like a man who is being chased by bees.”

”I know,” said my father. ”I’d like her here tonight.”

Thor looked at him across the table. Then she looked at me. At my white left hand, which still hadn’t come back. At my right, with the light in it.

At the light in it.

Because it had changed. I hadn’t said anything. I hadn’t said anything to anybody. But the light in my palm, the coal, Seraphina’s flame, the size of a coin, gold and steady since Saturday, had been getting smaller since the morning. Not going out. Not flickering. Just smaller. The way a lamp on a ship gets smaller as the ship sails away from you down a long harbor. Gold still. Steady still. But the size of a pea now, not a coin.

Thor saw it. Thor sees everything about fire.

She put down the bread.

”I will come down that coast so fast the gulls will lose their feathers,” said Thor. ”I told the little one so, on Thursday. I keep my word.” She stood up and picked up her hammer. ”Tonight.”

And she went out of the little kitchen and across the court and up onto the east wall, and stood there for a moment against the sky, and then there was a crack like the world splitting and she wasn’t there anymore, and a long white streak went west across the evening sky so fast that by the time the thunder reached us she was gone over the hills.

* * *

The light kept getting smaller.

I sat in the nook at dusk on Monday with my right hand open on my knee and watched it. The size of a pea. Then a lentil. Then a grain of barley. Gold. Steady. Getting smaller.

I knew what it was, in my head. I’d heard it through the crack on Saturday night. A long slow western sea with no land in it. A ship. A light. She was going west. Past the islands, into the sea where nothing flies, where the phoenixes won’t go. Of course the light was getting smaller. She was getting further away. It didn’t mean anything. She’d said, it’ll stay lit as long as I do. It was lit.

I knew that in my head.

I didn’t know it anywhere else.

And the crack in me knew it least of all.

* * *

I’m going to set down Tuesday night as well as I can. I don’t remember all of it. Mary says that’s a mercy. Mary’s count for Tuesday doesn’t have a number at the bottom. It just has strokes, and strokes, and strokes, all the way down the margin of the page and over onto the next and down that one, and then they stop, and there’s a line drawn across, and under it she’s written, very small: I stopped counting.

It was a little after ten. I was on the east wall. I’d gone up there so I’d be far from everyone. My son was asleep in the kettle cupboard with the wolf across the door. My father was on the wall too, a little way along, on my right. He hadn’t left me since Thor went.

I looked at my palm.

The light was the size of a seed. A poppy seed. Gold. I could barely see it.

And then, for a moment, I couldn’t see it at all.

It didn’t go out. I know that now. Ignatius explained it to me afterward, and Lexander, and Io, and a phoenix, very patiently, all of them, more than once. It went past the edge of something. Out past the last islands there’s a place where the sea is so wide and so empty that even fire gets lonely, and the light in my palm went across that edge, and for the space of a breath it was too far to see.

For the space of a breath, my hand was dark.

If you ever look at your hand and it’s dark—

And the crack in me broke open.

* * *

I want to tell it the way Mary told it to me. I can’t tell it any other way.

Every door in Greykeep opened at once. Every one. Doors to rooms, doors to cupboards, doors to cellars, gates, shutters, windows, the lids of chests. Not because anyone opened them. Because there was suddenly nothing in Greykeep to keep anything shut. They swung open, all together, with one long sound like a great breath being let out, and on the other side of every one of them was somewhere else.

Mary opened her office door and it was the sea.

Helena’s bread oven door swung open on its own and the inside of it was snow. A field of snow, under stars, at night, somewhere in the north.

The great hall doors opened onto the lower market at Havenreach. The market was a mile away. The doors opened onto it anyway, and the people in the market, who were packing up their stalls under the lamps, looked up and saw the great hall of Greykeep standing open in front of them where the fishmonger’s stall used to be.

Faelan was coming down the east stair to find out what was happening, and the door at the bottom of it opened, and he went through it into the bakehouse, which is on the other side of the court. He came out of the bakehouse oven, which was cold, luckily, covered in flour.

And the sky went wrong.

Mary said it went the color of a bruise. Clouds came out of nowhere and boiled. Thunder that wasn’t Thor’s, because Thor had gone. Rain started, and then the rain went up instead of down, and then it was snow, going up, sideways, around in circles. Wind came out of every open door at once from a different direction. The weather vane on the north tower spun and spun until it came off its pin and went somewhere. Nobody has ever found it.

And I stood on the east wall in the middle of it with my right hand held out in front of me, staring at my dark palm, and I didn’t see any of it.

I was looking for her.

* * *

I was looking for her the only way I know how. With the fold. I put it out the way I’d put it out at Westmere, palms down, feeling for the edge of a long table in the dark. Not to go anywhere. To find. To find the light again. To find the end of the thread I’d given her.

But I was cracked. And I had nothing left in me to aim it with. So it didn’t go out like a hand feeling for a table. It went out like water out of a burst barrel. Everywhere. All at once. Every direction. Feeling for her across the whole of the country and the whole of the sea, and everywhere it touched, it opened.

It touched the sea off Westmere.

I’d been there on Friday. I’d folded the sea onto the salt-houses there. I’d frozen three cutters there. It was the last place on the western sea I knew in my body, the last place I’d stood with salt water under me, and the fold went to it the way water runs downhill, because it knew the way.

And it took her fire with it.

Not the coal. The rest. Everything I’d ever borrowed from her. Every bit of the First Flame I’d ever held out my hand for and been given, since I was a child. Years of it, kept, the way I keep everything I borrow, sitting in me quiet and banked. It went out of me through the fold in one great rush, looking for her, because it was hers and it knew she was somewhere out there on the sea, and it went into the sea off Westmere.

Tamar saw it from the Hold. His watch book has the entry. I’ve read it.

10th hour and a quarter. The sea past the outer shoals is boiling. A mile of it. White. Steam up past the stars. Fish coming up dead on the tide. No ships near it, thank God; the frozen ones are well to the north. Nothing to be done. Garrick, I think.

* * *

My father was beside me.

He’d been on the wall all along, on my right. He’d watched it start. He put his hand on my arm and the frost came off him and went into me, the deep cold, the cold under his patience, and it held. For a moment it held. The folds slowed. The doors in the castle below creaked on their hinges, swinging half shut.

And then they opened again.

Because frost can hold a thing still. It can’t shut a door that isn’t there. And the doors coming open in me weren’t in the world. They were in me. And nobody can freeze the inside of someone.

My father held on anyway. I felt him holding on. I felt the frost going out of him into me and the folds going out of me past it, everywhere, and him not letting go, not once, though I know now what it cost him, because Mother told me. His hands were frostbitten to the wrists by morning. He’s never once in his life been hurt by his own cold. He was that night. He held on.

”Garrick,” he said. In my ear. Through the wind. ”Garrick. What’s your name?”

I couldn’t answer him.

That’s the thing I can’t forgive myself for, even now. Over the lake, on the way home, three hundred miles of dark on my back, he’d asked me in my head and I’d answered. Garrick Elias Grey. And here he was, really here, on the wall, holding my arm with his hands freezing to the bone, asking me out loud.

And I couldn’t hear the question properly. It came from very far away. Like a voice down a well.

The folds went on opening. Out there past Westmere the sea went on boiling. And somewhere in me, very quietly, the way I’d felt it over the lake, I started to come apart. Not like that night. Not into the dark between places. Into the places themselves. Into every door I’d opened. A little bit of me in the sea, and in the snow in Helena’s oven, and in the lower market, and in the Lyradon orchard, and in Mary’s drawer, all of them, spreading out thin across everything I’d opened, like frost.

I could feel it would be easy. I could feel it would be quiet.

My father’s hands on my arm. Very far away.

And then, out of the west, a crack like the world splitting.

* * *

A long white streak came across the boiling purple sky from the west, low, so fast the clouds tore open around it. It came down onto the east wall of Greykeep fifty feet from where we stood. The whole wall shook. Stone came off the parapet and fell into the court.

Thor stood up out of the dust with her hammer in one hand and her braid standing straight up off her head with lightning, and under her other arm, held against her side like a parcel, a prince of Concordia, green in the face, with his hair on fire.

And in front of her, already moving, already running along the top of the east wall toward me through the wind and the snow going up and the doors banging open all over the castle below, barefoot, in a blue coat, with frost coming off her in a wake behind her like the wake of a ship:

Carol.

She didn’t stop. She didn’t slow. She came along the wall at a dead run with her hands out in front of her, palms open, the way she runs at me across the court when we’ve been apart, the way she’s run at me all our lives, and she didn’t call out to me, and she didn’t need to.

Because the door between us was open. It’s always open. It was the only door in me that night that I hadn’t opened myself.

And she came through it.

* * *

From Mary’s book. The pages for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday have the count down the margin. On Sunday, fourteen strokes. On Monday, sixty-one, with a second column of twelve beside it headed Thor (caught). On Tuesday, strokes, and strokes, all the way down two pages, then a line across, and under it:

I stopped counting.

And at the bottom of Tuesday’s second page, in Mary’s ordinary hand:

10:20 p.m. Thor came back with Carol and Ignatius. Ignatius’s hair was on fire. He says it’s fine.

And under that, in big, square, careful capitals, a little floury, with one letter backwards:

FAELAN GREY. ID LIKE IT NOTED THAT I WENT DOWN THE EAST STAIR AND CAME OUT OF THE BAKEHOUSE OVEN AND IT WAS NOT HOT AND I AM NOT HURT AND I DO NOT MIND. AND THAT GARRICK DIDNT MEAN IT. I KNOW HE DIDNT. I HAVE WRITTEN IT IN MY LEDGER. GARRICK (DIDNT MEAN IT).