Chapter 420: A Lamp in the Nursery

Io arrived first.

She came through the Concordia gate in a dressing gown with her hair half pinned and her healer's bag already open, and she walked into our rooms as though she had been expecting the summons for weeks.

She probably had.

“How far apart?” she asked.

Evelyn did not look up from Adriana's wrist.

“Two so far. A long gap.”

“Good. Long gaps are good.” Io set down her bag and knelt beside the couch. “Hello, Adriana.”

Adriana looked at her with an expression of profound betrayal.

“It's too early.”

“It's not,” Io said gently. “It's a little early. That's different.”

“I had a list.”

“I know. Evelyn told me about the list.”

“There were things on it I hadn't done.”

“There always are.”

Adriana closed her eyes.

“The dress isn't finished.”

Io glanced up at me.

“What dress?”

“The one that kept changing,” I said.

Io nodded as though this explained everything.

“It can finish changing afterward.”

Liora came next, still tying her sleeves. Then Rysa, who had been at the far end of the castle with the twins' measurements and arrived slightly out of breath and entirely composed.

Then Helena.

She did not come in. She stood in the doorway in her night robe, looked at Adriana, looked at her daughter, looked at me, and said, “I'll put the kettle on.”

Then she left.

“She's going to put the kettle on,” I said.

“That's what she did when the twins came,” Evelyn said. “For nine hours.”

“That's a lot of tea.”

“Nobody drank any of it. She just needed to keep putting the kettle on.”

Adriana laughed.

Then stopped laughing, gripped Evelyn's hand, and breathed very carefully through her nose for what felt like a long time.

Io watched the clock on the mantel.

When it passed, she nodded.

“That's three. Still a long gap.”

Adriana opened her eyes and looked at me.

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Looking as though someone has attacked the castle.”

I tried.

Evelyn noticed the effort.

“Go and tell my mother she needs more cups,” she said.

It gave me something useful to do.

Helena did not need more cups.

She had already set out eleven.

I stood in the small kitchen beside our rooms and watched her measure leaves into the pot with the same care Corran gave to stone.

“Is she frightened?” Helena asked without turning.

“She says it's too early.”

“That means yes.”

“She says the dress isn't finished.”

Helena smiled slightly.

“That also means yes.”

She poured water into the pot and set the lid on. Then she turned around and looked at me properly for the first time.

“And you?”

I thought about lying.

There did not seem to be much point.

“Yes.”

Helena came over and straightened my collar, which did not need straightening.

“Good. It means you understand what's happening.”

“Evelyn says I asked whether she needed help climbing three steps. With the twins.”

“You did. I was there.” Helena patted my chest. “It was very sweet. It was also very annoying.”

“I'll try not to do that tonight.”

“You'll fail,” she said comfortably. “Everyone does. Take the tea in.”

I took the tea in.

Nobody drank any of it.

The fourth pain came an hour later.

The fifth, sooner.

Io began timing them with a small sandglass she had brought from Concordia. Rysa made notes in a careful hand. Liora sat on the floor beside the couch where Adriana could reach her and talked quietly about Lethan and the mule, because Adriana had asked her to talk about anything that was not happening.

“He said it out loud?” Adriana asked between breaths.

“One word.”

“Mule.”

“Mule.”

Adriana laughed, winced, then laughed again.

“That's the best thing I've heard all week.”

“He'd be pleased.”

“Tell him.” Adriana squeezed Liora's hand. “Tell him tomorrow. Tell him the mule helped.”

“I will.”

Evelyn sat behind Adriana on the couch, supporting her shoulders. Every so often, the gold and blue around her eyes brightened as she checked something only she could feel.

Each time, she said, “Good.”

Adriana stopped asking what was good.

She seemed to find the word enough.

Aurelia came a little before midnight.

She did not use the gate. She simply arrived, the way she sometimes did, standing in the corner of the room as though she had been there for a while and had only now decided to be seen.

Io looked up and nodded to her without surprise.

My great-grandmother crossed to the couch. She did not touch Adriana until Adriana looked at her and nodded.

Then she laid one hand very lightly against the side of Adriana's stomach.

Healing light moved beneath her palm. Soft. Unhurried.

Aurelia closed her eyes.

When she opened them, she was smiling.

“Strong,” she said. “Impatient. Entirely well.”

Adriana let out a breath that was half a sob.

“You're sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“Can you tell—”

She stopped herself.

We had agreed, months ago, not to ask. Not to turn every quiet moment into an examination.

Aurelia's smile deepened slightly.

“I can tell that you will meet them very soon,” she said. “I think that should be enough until then.”

Adriana laughed shakily.

“That's a goddess's answer.”

“I am a goddess,” Aurelia said. “And a great-grandmother. Both of us are very good at not spoiling surprises.”

She drew a chair close to the foot of the couch and sat.

She did not leave again.

Mirelle arrived soon afterward.

Adriana's mother had come through the gate from Concordia with Cassia and Julian beside her, all three of them dressed in whatever had been nearest. Julian's coat was buttoned wrong all the way down.

Mirelle went straight to the couch.

She did not say anything. She knelt beside her daughter, brushed the damp hair from Adriana's forehead, and held her face in both hands.

Adriana's eyes filled.

“I wanted you here.”

“I'm here.”

“Father would have—”

She stopped.

Mirelle did not try to finish the sentence for her.

She only kept her hands where they were, and after a moment Adriana leaned into them, and her mother held her through the next pain without saying anything at all.

Cassia sat on the arm of the couch and took her sister's other hand.

“You're squeezing,” she said after a while.

“I know.”

“Very hard.”

“I know.”

“Good,” Cassia said. “Keep doing it. I'll tell you if anything breaks.”

Adriana laughed through her teeth.

Julian stood in the doorway.

He looked at his sister. At his mother. At Evelyn and the healers and the goddess sitting quietly at the foot of the couch.

Then he looked down at his coat.

“My buttons are wrong,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I didn't notice.”

“Nobody will mind.”

He began fixing them anyway, very slowly, one at a time, because his hands needed something to do.

I knew exactly how he felt.

The castle was awake.

I had not asked anyone to wake it. But by midnight, there were people in the corridor outside our rooms who had no particular reason to be there.

Mary sat on a bench with a ledger open on her knees, not writing in it. Melody sat beside her with her head on Mary's shoulder, eyes closed, ears very much not asleep.

Thor leaned against the far wall with her arms folded.

“You're not needed,” I told her when I stepped out for air.

“I know.”

“You could sleep.”

“I could.”

She did not move.

I sat down on the floor beside the door. After a moment, Thor slid down the wall and sat beside me.

“When my brother's children were born,” she said, “I stood outside the door with a hammer.”

“Why?”

“I didn't know what else to do with my hands.” She looked at her empty palms. “I've learned since. You don't have to do anything. You just have to be close enough that they know you came.”

I thought about that.

About Thor at the shelter, carrying stones.

About Hesketh, kneeling beside a trough at dawn.

About Hilde, sweeping a hallway for nine years.

“That sounds like something the Keeper would say,” I said.

Thor considered this.

“She'd probably say it more kindly.”

“Probably.”

We sat there together.

Down the corridor, Castellan's lights glowed very softly, as though the castle had dimmed them on purpose so as not to disturb anyone.

Carol and Garrick woke at one.

I heard them before I saw them. A pair of small voices in the nursery, arguing in whispers about whether something was happening.

“There's lights,” Carol said.

“There's always lights.”

“More lights.”

I went to the nursery.

They were sitting up in their beds, both of them, staring at the doorway. One of the nursery staff had lit every lamp in the room as Evelyn had asked, and the soft glow made their faces look very young and very serious.

They had grown again.

I noticed it more at night, somehow. Carol's feet reached nearly to the end of a bed that had been far too long for her in summer. Garrick's wooden horse looked smaller in his hands.

“Is it the baby?” Garrick asked.

“Yes.”

Carol's eyes went huge.

“Now?”

“Soon.”

“Can we see?”

“Not yet. When the baby's ready.”

Garrick considered this with the gravity of someone who had recently been taught that some things could not be hurried.

“Like bread,” he said.

“Exactly like bread.”

Carol climbed out of bed and put her arms around my neck.

“Are you scared?” she whispered.

I held her.

“A little.”

“Why?”

I did not know how to explain it to a child who had grown faster than any child should, who had been born into a castle full of people who loved her and had never known anything else.

So I said, “Because it matters very much.”

Carol thought about this.

Then she let go of my neck, went to the shelf by the window, and took down the box of wooden animals.

She selected the sheep.

The one that had been a ship's captain.

She pressed it into my hand.

“For the baby,” she said. “It's brave. It can be in charge.”

I looked down at the small wooden sheep.

Garrick had climbed out of bed too. He came over holding his wooden horse.

He did not offer it.

He looked at it for a long time, clearly struggling.

Then he said, “The baby can borrow it. Not keep.”

“That's very generous.”

“Borrow,” Garrick repeated firmly.

The pains came closer after two.

Io stopped turning the sandglass and started watching Adriana instead.

Rysa put away her notes.

Liora fetched clean linens and warm water and set them within reach without being asked.

Evelyn had not moved from behind Adriana in three hours. Her face was calm. Her voice was calm. When Adriana gripped her hand hard enough to whiten both their knuckles, Evelyn only said, “Good. That's good. You're doing well.”

Aurelia sat at the foot of the couch with her hands folded. Once, when Adriana cried out, a faint silver light rose around her, the defended-wall light I had seen the day her power first woke, and Aurelia leaned forward and touched her ankle.

The silver softened.

“You don't need to guard anything,” Aurelia said gently. “Everyone in this room chose to be here. Let them hold the door for you tonight.”

Adriana looked at her, wild-eyed.

Then the light faded, and her shoulders loosened, and she let Evelyn take more of her weight.

I stood where Io had put me. Close enough to be seen. Far enough to be out of the way.

Adriana looked at me between pains.

“Come here.”

I went.

She took my hand and pressed it against her stomach, the way she had so many times over the past months.

The baby moved.

Not a kick this time. Something larger. A shift, deep and slow.

“He's coming down,” Io said quietly, then caught herself. “They're coming down.”

Nobody commented.

Aurelia's mouth moved very slightly at the corner.

Adriana's fingers tightened around mine.

“I can't do this.”

“You are doing it,” Evelyn said.

“I can't.”

“You can.”

Adriana looked up at me. Her face was wet and flushed and furious and frightened.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Tell me something ordinary.”

I knelt beside the couch.

I could not think of anything ordinary. My mind had gone entirely blank. Every story I knew had fallen out of my head.

Then I remembered the trough.

“Hesketh fixed the pipe,” I said. “At the shelter. The one they broke.”

Adriana breathed.

“And a boy named Oren came to break it again,” I said. “And instead he asked if Hesketh was there. Because Hesketh used to give him apples. On the market road. When he was small.”

Another pain came.

Adriana held on.

“And Hesketh told him to get up,” I said, “because the trough needed a second coat of pitch.”

The pain passed.

Adriana laughed. It was small and shaky and almost a sob.

“Apples,” she said.

“Apples.”

“That's ordinary.”

“That's the most ordinary thing I know.”

She closed her eyes.

“Again. Tell me again.”

So I told her again.

He came just before dawn.

I will not try to describe all of it. Some of it belongs only to Adriana. Some of it belongs to Evelyn, who held her through every moment and never once stopped saying good. Some of it belongs to Io and Liora and Rysa, whose hands were steady when mine were not.

And some of it belongs to the small, furious, slippery person who arrived in the gray light with his fists clenched and his face screwed up in outrage at the entire world.

He did not cry at first.

There was a moment, very short and very long, when the room went entirely silent.

Then he drew a breath.

And he roared.

Io laughed. Liora laughed. Evelyn laughed with tears running down her face.

“A boy,” Io said. “A very loud boy.”

Adriana did not laugh.

She reached out with both hands, and Io placed the baby on her chest, and Adriana looked down at her son with an expression I had never seen on anyone's face before.

Not joy. Joy was too small a word.

Recognition.

As though she had been waiting her whole life to meet someone and had only just realized who.

“Oh,” Adriana whispered. “There you are.”

The baby stopped roaring.

He opened his eyes.

Dark. Unfocused. Enormous.

He looked up at his mother.

And then, slowly, turned his head toward the lamp.

I do not know how long I knelt there.

Long enough that my knees began to ache. Long enough that Io gently moved me aside so she could finish her work, and then moved me back again when she was done.

Evelyn put her arms around me from behind.

“You're crying,” she said.

“So are you.”

“I'm allowed. I did all the work.”

Adriana looked up at that.

“You did not.”

“I did half.”

“You did a third,” Io said. “Adriana did the rest. The rest of us carried towels.”

Adriana laughed, and the baby frowned at the movement, and Adriana immediately stopped laughing and looked stricken.

“Did I hurt him?”

“No,” Evelyn said. “He's just learning that you're a person who moves.”

Adriana looked down at her son.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I'll be more careful.”

The baby yawned.

It was the smallest yawn I had ever seen. His whole face disappeared into it.

Adriana looked up at me with tears running down her cheeks.

“Did you see that?”

“I saw.”

“He yawned.”

“He did.”

“He's been alive for ten minutes and he's already bored of us.”

Mirelle held her grandson at sunrise.

She sat in the chair by the window with the baby wrapped in the blanket Helena had knitted, and she did not say anything for a very long time.

Then she said, very quietly, “Your father would have been insufferable.”

Adriana, half asleep against Evelyn, smiled.

“He would have told everyone.”

“Everyone. The kitchen staff. The guards. The horses.”

“The horses,” Adriana agreed.

Mirelle looked down at the small face.

“I'll tell the horses for him,” she said.

Cassia leaned over her mother's shoulder and studied her nephew critically.

“He has your frown,” she told Adriana.

“He does not.”

“He's doing it right now. At me.”

Adriana looked. The baby was, unmistakably, frowning at his aunt.

“He has good judgment,” Adriana said.

Julian came closer after that. His buttons were straight now. He looked at his nephew the way he looked at a waterwheel that had turned out more complicated than he expected.

“He's very small,” he said.

“He'll grow,” Io said. “Probably faster than you'd like, in this family.”

Julian considered this.

“Then I should start building things now.”

“One at a time,” said Garrick Valewood from the doorway, where he had apparently been standing for some minutes.

“I know, Grandfather.”

The children came next.

Carol and Garrick, still in their nightclothes, holding the hands of the nursery staff. Seraphina and Ignatius, who had come through from Concordia with Lexander at dawn because they had heard and refused to wait.

They stood at the foot of the bed in a solemn row and looked at the baby.

“He's red,” Ignatius observed.

“They're all red at first,” Io said.

“Were we red?”

“Very.”

Ignatius seemed to find this deeply satisfying.

Carol stepped forward.

She looked at me.

I remembered, and took the wooden sheep from my pocket.

Carol took it and held it up very carefully so the baby could see it, though his eyes were closed.

“This is the captain,” she explained. “She's brave. She can be in charge until you're bigger.”

The baby did not open his eyes.

Carol tucked the sheep into the blanket beside him anyway.

Then Garrick stepped forward with his wooden horse.

He held it out.

Then pulled it back.

Then held it out again, set it beside the sheep, and said, very firmly:

“Borrow.”

Adriana's face crumpled.

She pulled both of them into her arms, carefully, with the baby between them, and held on.

Garrick, squashed against his new brother, looked down at the tiny face.

“He's a boy,” he said, with the air of someone confirming an important military report.

“He is.”

Garrick nodded slowly.

“Then I'll teach him the horse,” he said. “When he gives it back.”

We had chosen half a name months ago.

It had begun as a possibility, spoken once over a scattering of ribbons and a book of wedding stories. If the baby is a boy. Nothing more certain than that.

Now Adriana looked down at her son, sleeping with a wooden sheep and a wooden horse tucked into the blanket beside him, and said it aloud for the first time as something true.

“Roderic.”

Mirelle made a sound and pressed her hand to her mouth.

Cassia's arm went around her mother's shoulders.

Julian looked at the floor very hard.

Adriana did not look away from the baby.

“Roderic,” she said again, more softly. “After your grandfather. Who would have told the horses.”

The baby's fist uncurled against the blanket, then closed again.

Then Adriana lifted her head and looked across the room.

At Aurelia.

My great-grandmother had not moved from her chair at the foot of the couch all night. She had held no one, asked for nothing, and kept so still that I suspected several people in the room had forgotten she was there.

Adriana had not forgotten.

“We talked about the second name,” Adriana said. “Uriah and Evelyn and I. We weren't sure. We wanted to meet him first.”

Aurelia looked at her.

“And now?”

Adriana glanced at me.

I nodded.

She glanced at Evelyn.

Evelyn smiled.

“Roderic Aurelius Grey,” Adriana said.

The room went entirely still.

Aurelia did not move.

For a long moment, I thought she had not heard. Or had heard and did not know what to do with it. A goddess. A queen. A woman who had once sent her son's wife and children away through a burning hall, and had not been able to save her son.

Then her hands, folded in her lap, began to tremble.

“You don't have to,” she said. Her voice was very quiet. “I never asked—”

“We know,” I said.

“I sent your family away. I couldn't—”

“You sent them somewhere safe,” I said. “Because he asked you to. And they came back.”

Aurelia looked at me.

“Some of them.”

“Enough of them,” I said. “Enough that he's here.”

Adriana held out the baby.

Not to me. To Aurelia.

“Would you like to hold your great-great-grandson?” she asked.

Aurelia rose very slowly from her chair.

She crossed the room as though the floor might give way beneath her.

Adriana placed Roderic in her arms.

He did not wake.

Aurelia looked down at him for a long time.

Healing light rose faintly around her, the way it did when she was examining someone, and I almost said something before I understood that she was not examining him at all.

She was only looking.

Taking in every part of him. The fists. The frown he shared with his mother. The dark hair, damp and plastered to his head.

“He has my son's ears,” she said at last.

Her voice broke halfway through.

“Your father's,” she said, looking at me. “And yours.”

I had never thought about my ears in my life.

I did not argue.

Aurelia bent her head over the baby, and her shoulders shook, and for several minutes nobody in the room said anything at all.

Helena, in the doorway with a fresh pot of tea nobody would drink, quietly set it down and closed the door.

I went to the nursery window an hour later.

Everyone else was asleep. Adriana, curled around Roderic. Evelyn, curled around Adriana. Io in the armchair with her shoes still on. Mirelle and Cassia sharing the couch. Helena in the kitchen with her head on the table beside eleven cold cups of tea.

Aurelia sat in her chair at the foot of the bed with her eyes open, watching the baby breathe.

She had not let go of him until Adriana asked, and then only because Adriana asked.

The lamps in the nursery were still burning.

Nobody had put them out.

I stood looking at them for a long time.

“Castellan,” I said quietly.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Have there been any messages from the north?”

A pause.

“One,” the castle said. “From the relay station below the western climb. It arrived an hour before dawn.”

“From Hesketh?”

“From the shelter. Hesketh asked the station clerk to send it.”

“What does it say?”

Castellan's lights brightened very slightly.

“A woman arrived at the shelter in the night. On foot. From the basin. She said she was a kitchen worker in the long building, that she had been walking for two days, and that something beneath the road had told her where to go.”

I closed my eyes.

“Her name?”

“She gave it as Selda Varne.”

The sister.

Varne's sister.

“Is she all right?”

“Hesketh reports she is cold, hungry, and very tired. He has given her soup and a blanket. Oren has given her his coat.” A pause. “Hesketh also asked me to tell you that the lantern was lit.”

I stood at the window for a long time after that.

Behind me, Roderic made a small sound in his sleep.

Not crying. Just a sound. The kind a person makes when they are very new and the world is very large and they are still learning that someone will answer.

Adriana murmured something without waking.

Aurelia leaned forward and laid two fingers, very lightly, against the blanket.

Roderic went quiet.

I did not put out the nursery lamps.

I went back to bed instead, and lay down beside my wives and my son, and listened to the castle breathing around us.

Somewhere far to the north, beneath a stolen hall full of false lanterns, a goddess was keeping a light burning for everyone still walking.

And here, at the top of Greykeep, with his great-great-grandmother keeping watch at the foot of the bed, someone had just arrived who would never have to wonder whether anyone would leave the lamp on for him.