Chapter 422: What the Calendar Holds

Evelyn found Io in the infirmary garden at Concordia.

I knew this because I was there too, carrying Roderic, who had decided that morning that the only acceptable place in the world was against my shoulder while I walked. Standing still was not acceptable. Sitting was an outrage. Adriana had looked at me with exhausted gratitude and gone back to sleep.

So I walked.

Around the nursery. Down the corridor. Through the gate to Concordia, because Evelyn was going and I had run out of corridor.

Io was sitting on a bench beneath the silver-leaved tree, the one Carol and Seraphina had set on fire and frozen and grown on the same afternoon years ago. A stack of infirmary rosters lay beside her.

She was not reading them.

She was watching a pair of healers in training argue over a bandage in the doorway across the garden, and she was smiling.

“They're doing it wrong,” Evelyn said, sitting down beside her.

“I know.”

“You haven't corrected them.”

“They'll work it out. Or the patient will tell them.” Io leaned back against the tree. “Brenna's been running the morning shift for four days. I've been sitting out here for most of it.”

“How does it feel?”

Io considered.

“Like I've misplaced something,” she said. “And I keep patting my pockets for it. And then I remember I put it down on purpose.”

Evelyn laughed softly.

I kept walking. Roderic made a small sound of approval at the change in scenery, then subsided against my collar.

They talked about ordinary things first.

The new rosters. Lysandra's first week on the council Io had given up, and how she had already asked a question that made two senior members look at one another in alarm.

“A good question?” Evelyn asked.

“A very good question. That's why they looked alarmed.”

Lisbeth.

Io laughed before she could even begin.

“She brought me a list,” she said. “Foods. Forty-one of them. Things I must eat and things I must never eat. Some of them appear on both sides.”

“Which ones?”

“Pears.”

“Pears?”

“Essential in the mornings. Dangerous after supper.” Io shook her head. “I asked her where she'd learned that. She said her mother told her. I asked where her mother learned it. She said that wasn't the point.”

“And the cradle?”

Io's face lit up.

“We argued for an hour yesterday. East wall or north wall. She says east, so the baby wakes with the sun. I said north, so the baby doesn't wake with the sun.” She grinned. “I don't even care. I just wanted to argue with her and enjoy it this time.”

“Who won?”

“Lexander. He came in, listened for a minute, and said the cradle could go in the middle of the room on wheels.” Io laughed. “Perrin's building it.”

“Of course he is.”

“He says it will have brakes.”

I walked another circuit of the garden.

When I came back around, they had stopped laughing.

Evelyn had her hands folded in her lap. Io was looking at her with the quick, careful attention of a healer who has noticed a symptom.

“You're thinking about something,” Io said.

“I'm always thinking about something.”

“You're thinking about something you haven't said out loud yet.” Io tilted her head. “I know what that looks like. I've been doing it for weeks.”

Evelyn did not answer at once.

She looked across the garden at me. At Roderic, asleep against my shoulder.

Then she looked back at Io.

“When I asked Adriana to have her first child before I had another,” she said slowly, “I meant it. I wanted her to have that. Everyone fussing. Everyone frightened. Everything about it new.” She paused. “And I didn't let myself think past it. What came after. Whether I still wanted another, once she'd had hers.”

“And now?”

Evelyn was quiet for a long time.

“I held him the morning he was born,” she said. “After Adriana. After Mirelle. After Aurelia gave him back. I held him for a few minutes, and he yawned, and I thought—” She stopped. “I thought about Carol and Garrick. How small they were. How I can barely remember it.”

Io's face softened.

“The same as me.”

“Not quite the same.” Evelyn shook her head. “I remember them. I remember a great deal. But I remember being frightened more than I remember being glad. Every time one of them sparked. Every time they reached for each other and the wards changed. Every time someone came to look at them and I didn't know whether they meant well.” She looked down at her hands. “I was a saint by the time they could walk. I don't think I was ever just their mother. Not for long enough.”

Io reached over and took her hand.

Evelyn let her.

“I've been watching Adriana,” Evelyn said. “With Roderic. She's tired, and she's frightened, and she's still finding him every few minutes like he's a surprise. She looks at him like the whole world went quiet.” Her voice dropped. “I want that. I want to look at a baby and have the world go quiet. Before Carol and Garrick are so grown they don't remember being small.”

She stopped.

Then, very quietly, as if admitting something to herself:

“I want another.”

I had stopped walking.

I had not meant to. My feet simply stopped of their own accord, halfway across the garden path, with Roderic warm against my shoulder.

Evelyn looked up and saw me.

She did not look away.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I meant to tell you properly. Not in a garden. Not while you were holding the baby.”

“I don't mind,” I said. “The garden's nice. And I'm always holding the baby now.”

That made her laugh, a little unsteadily.

Io let go of Evelyn's hand and stood up.

“I'll take him,” she said, holding out her arms. “You two should talk.”

“He'll wake up,” I warned.

“He won't. He likes me.”

I handed over my son.

He did not wake up.

Io settled onto the bench with him and very deliberately turned her back on both of us, watching the healers in training, who had finally worked out the bandage.

I sat down where she had been.

Evelyn looked at me.

“Well?” she said.

I did not answer at once.

I thought about Carol and Garrick, the night they were born. The fire in the cradle. The wards changing. Evelyn's hand gripping mine while three healers worked to keep them both breathing, and Helena in the corridor putting the kettle on for nine hours.

I thought about the voice in the receiving hall at the White Measure, saying my name in the middle of a sentence, and then saying something about the children that had made Evelyn ask me to repeat it word for word.

I thought about Roderic, six days old and already being guarded by his siblings.

“I'm frightened,” I said.

Evelyn nodded slowly.

“So am I.”

“Othellos knows about the children. He said so.”

“He said he knew. He never said he could reach them.” She held my gaze. “Castellan checked every gate. Every endpoint. Every repair. There's no door into the nursery that he can open.”

“He's building false shrines to trap a goddess.”

“And she said she could see by every lantern he lit.” Evelyn took my hand. “Uriah. If we wait until it's safe—”

“Io said that.”

“I know. I was there. I'm saying it too.” Her fingers tightened. “It was never safe. It wasn't safe when Carol and Garrick were born. It wasn't safe when Adriana found out she was carrying Roderic. It will never be safe. We'll just get better at keeping the lamps lit.”

I looked at her for a long time.

At the gold and blue around her eyes, faint in the afternoon light. At the woman who had held Adriana through every moment of the birth and never stopped saying good.

“Then yes,” I said.

Evelyn's face changed.

“Yes?”

“I want it too. I've wanted it since before Adriana. I just thought—” I stopped. “I thought you'd say when you were ready. And I didn't want to ask in case you weren't.”

Evelyn laughed, and her eyes were bright.

“You were being considerate.”

“I was trying.”

“It's very sweet,” Evelyn said. “It's also very annoying.”

“Your mother said the same thing.”

“My mother is usually right.”

“Not yet,” Evelyn said a little later.

We were still on the bench. Io had wandered off across the garden with Roderic to show him the silver tree, murmuring to him about which branches Carol had frozen.

“Not yet?”

“Adriana needs us. Roderic needs us. I don't want her waking up in the night and finding everyone's attention has moved somewhere else before he's even a month old.” Evelyn leaned against my shoulder. “And there's so much coming. Father's birthday. Then Mother's. Then the observance.”

The observance.

Aurelia's birthday.

The winter festival had begun in Greykeep three years ago, the first winter after we learned who she was. Nobody had ordered it. People had simply begun lighting lamps in their windows on the longest night, because someone had heard that the old queen of Greykeep had once kept a lamp lit for her son, and someone else had decided that a queen who did that deserved to have the favor returned.

Aurelia had wept the first year.

The second year, she had walked through the city in a plain cloak and stopped at every window with a lamp in it to say thank you.

This year would be the third.

“And then the twins,” Evelyn said softly.

Carol and Garrick.

Three years old.

Though they looked closer to six, and asked questions like nine-year-olds, and Garrick had recently informed Avarn that he would like to learn swords when his hands were big enough, and Avarn had looked at his hands with alarming seriousness and said, “Soon.”

“After the twins,” Evelyn said. “After their birthday. When the winter's turned. Then.”

I took her hand.

“After the twins,” I agreed.

We told Adriana that evening.

She was sitting up in bed with Roderic at her breast, looking tired and fierce and happier than I had ever seen her. When Evelyn sat down beside her and said, “I need to tell you something,” Adriana looked at her face, then at mine, and said:

“Oh. Finally.”

Evelyn stared at her.

“Finally?”

“You've been watching him with that look for six days.” Adriana adjusted Roderic slightly. “I assumed you'd tell me eventually. I was going to give you until his first month.”

“And then what?”

“Then I was going to ask.”

Evelyn laughed. It came out rather wet.

“I didn't want you to feel—”

“I know what you didn't want me to feel.” Adriana reached out with her free hand and took Evelyn's. “You gave me this. You gave me room for him to be first. He was. He is. That doesn't stop being true just because he's going to have a brother or sister.”

She looked down at her son.

“I want him to have someone close in age,” she said. “Someone he grows up with. The way Carol and Garrick have each other. The way Ignatius and Seraphina do.”

“And if they're born a year apart?” I asked.

Adriana smiled.

“Then they'll grow together. Probably faster than any of us would like.”

Garrick Valewood's birthday was in nine days.

He did not want anything.

He said this every year. He said it to Helena, who ignored him. He said it to Evelyn, who ignored him. He said it to me, the first year, and I made the mistake of believing him, and Helena had explained to me afterward with great patience that “I don't want anything” was a phrase men of his age used to mean “I want something, but I want you to figure out what it is.”

This year, he said it to Julian.

Julian had not been warned.

He came to find me in a state of considerable distress.

“He said he doesn't want anything.”

“He always says that.”

“But he meant it. He looked at me and said, 'I have everything I need, lad. I don't want anything.'” Julian's face was stricken. “What do I do?”

I thought about Garrick Valewood.

Evelyn's father. A carpenter. A builder of things. A man who had marked his grandchildren's heights on a strip of wood in his workshop and measured them every visit, who had taught Julian to use a plane and Carol to sand a block and Garrick to hammer a nail without hitting his thumb, mostly.

A man who had once said, the day we named our son after him, that he had never recovered from the honor.

“What does he do,” I asked Julian, “when nobody's asking him for anything?”

Julian thought about it.

“Fixes things.”

“What else?”

“Teaches people to fix things.”

“And?”

Julian frowned.

Then his face changed.

“He tells stories,” he said slowly. “About when he was an apprentice. About his master. About the first chair he ever built and how it collapsed under the master's wife and she laughed so hard she couldn't get up.”

“Have you ever written them down?”

Julian stared at me.

“No.”

“Has anyone?”

“I don't think so.”

I said nothing else.

I did not need to. Julian was already halfway to the door, and by supper he had asked Mary for paper, and by the next morning he had sat down with Helena to ask which stories Garrick Valewood told most often.

Helena gave him a list.

It was very long.

“Start with the chair,” she said.

Carol and Garrick had their own ideas.

They did not tell me what they were. They told Evelyn, who told me only that it involved Perrin, the workshop, and something that needed to be kept in a box until the day itself.

“A dangerous something?” I asked.

“Perrin assures me it's entirely safe.”

“Perrin assures everyone that everything is entirely safe.”

“That's why Aldren is supervising.”

That was somewhat reassuring.

Seraphina and Ignatius, not to be outdone, announced that they would be making a cake.

Lisbeth heard about this and arrived at Greykeep within the hour.

Helena was in the kitchen.

I made the decision, along with every other adult in the castle, not to go into the kitchen for several hours.

The northern reports continued.

They came every day now, carried by the carters and the relay stations and sometimes by Elyan, who seemed to have decided that flying messages between the shelters and Havenreach was a more interesting use of his time than standing guard.

Selda Varne had reached Havenreach. Her brother had been waiting at the gate. He had not said anything when he saw her. He had only held out his bandaged hand, and she had taken it, and they had stood there for a long time while Eliza found them a room.

Corran had finished the lantern at Westmere.

Only the lantern. Not the face. He was still working on the face.

Edric sent word that it was held out toward the door. And that if you stood at the right angle, near the benches, it looked as though it was also held close, against the chest.

“Both ways,” Edric wrote. “Depending who's coming. He was very insistent about that.”

And from the basin, through Hesketh's shelter, a new report.

The false shrines were lit.

Dozens of them, in Othellos's white courtyard. Lanterns carved by masons from every settlement in the basin. Troughs filled with water. Bread set out on tables for anyone who might arrive.

Nobody had come.

But the masons who carved those lanterns had begun to linger in the courtyard after their shifts. The bakers who made the bread had begun leaving a little extra. The water carriers had started humming while they worked.

The traveler's hymn.

Nobody had taught it to them. Nobody seemed to know where they had learned it.

Hesketh wrote that the Keeper had not spoken at the shelter for several days. But the water in the trough stayed warm, even at night.

“She's busy,” he wrote. “I think she's listening to them.”

Garrick Valewood's birthday dawned clear and cold.

He came down to breakfast expecting nothing, because he had told everyone he wanted nothing, and he was a man who believed that when you said something plainly enough, people listened.

The kitchen was decorated.

Not elaborately. There were not enough hands or enough time for elaborate. But someone had hung wood shavings from the beams in long curling ribbons, and someone else had set a small wooden chair in the middle of the table, no taller than my hand, with a sign propped against it in Carol's careful letters:

PLEASE DO NOT SIT.

Garrick Valewood stopped in the doorway.

He looked at the chair.

He looked at the sign.

Then he started to laugh, and could not stop, and had to sit down on the bench by the door with his hand over his eyes.

“Who told them?” he managed.

“Julian,” Helena said. “Who heard it from me. Who heard it from you. Four hundred times.”

“It was the funniest thing I ever saw.”

“I know, dear. You've mentioned.”

The cake was enormous.

It was also slightly lopsided, and one side was considerably darker than the other, and there was a faint scorch mark near the top that suggested at least one of its makers had tried to speed up the baking with First Flame.

Lisbeth stood beside it with her arms folded and the expression of a woman who had fought a long war and was not yet prepared to discuss the terms of the peace.

Helena stood beside her with an identical expression.

Neither would say who had won.

“It's good cake,” Garrick Valewood said, after his first bite.

Seraphina and Ignatius beamed.

Lisbeth and Helena exchanged a look.

“The darker side,” Lisbeth said quietly, “is mine.”

“The lighter side,” Helena said, equally quietly, “is mine.”

“The middle,” Ignatius announced proudly, “is ours.”

Everyone looked at the middle.

It was by far the best part.

Carol and Garrick's gift came out after the cake.

Perrin carried the box in himself, with Aldren following close behind in case of emergencies. He set it down in front of Garrick Valewood and stepped back.

Carol and Garrick stood on either side of it, exactly the way they stood guard at Roderic's door.

“Open it,” Carol said.

“Carefully,” Garrick added.

Garrick Valewood opened it carefully.

Inside lay a strip of wood.

Long and smooth, sanded until it shone. Marked along one edge with small notches, each one labeled in a child's careful hand.

Carol. Garrick. Seraphina. Ignatius. Julian. Roderic.

It was a copy of the measuring strip from his workshop. The one where he marked their heights every time they visited.

But this one was different.

At the very bottom, below all the other notches, someone had carved a single small mark, barely above the end of the wood.

It had no label.

Garrick Valewood looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked up at Evelyn.

My wife was standing beside me with one hand resting, very lightly, on my arm.

She did not say anything.

She did not need to.

Her father's eyes filled.

He looked down at the strip again. At the small, unlabeled mark. At all the names above it.

Then he set the strip down very carefully on the table and held out his arms, and Carol and Garrick ran into them, and he held his grandchildren and did not let go for a long time.

Julian gave him the stories last.

He had written them in a bound book Mary had found him. Twenty-three stories, all of them told by Garrick Valewood at one supper table or another, all of them written down as closely as Julian could remember the way he told them.

The chair was first.

Garrick Valewood turned the pages slowly.

He stopped at one near the middle and read it twice.

“I'd forgotten this one,” he said.

“Grandmother remembered it,” Julian said. “She told me.”

Garrick Valewood looked at Helena.

She smiled at him.

“You told it the night Evelyn was born,” she said. “While we were waiting. To keep me from worrying.”

He closed the book.

He did not say anything for a while.

Then he put his hand on Julian's shoulder.

“Thank you, lad,” he said. “I didn't want anything.”

“I know,” Julian said. “You said.”

“I was wrong.”

That night, Evelyn and I sat in the nursery after everyone else had gone to bed.

Carol and Garrick were asleep. Roderic was asleep in his cradle beside Adriana's bed down the hall, guarded by a wooden sheep and a borrowed horse.

Evelyn had the measuring strip in her lap.

Her father had insisted she keep it for now. He would make another for the workshop. He had already begun planning it.

She ran her thumb over the small, unlabeled mark at the bottom.

“Did you tell them?” I asked.

“No.” She smiled. “Carol asked me, a few days ago. Whether we were going to have another baby. I said we hoped to, someday. She must have told Garrick. And Perrin.”

“Perrin carved it.”

“Perrin carved it,” Evelyn agreed. “Without asking. And then told me it was entirely safe.”

I laughed quietly.

Evelyn set the strip on the windowsill, where the nursery lamp caught it.

“Mother's birthday is in two weeks,” she said. “Then the observance. Then the twins.”

“Then the winter's turned.”

“Then the winter's turned.”

She leaned against me.

Outside, Greykeep was dark. But here and there, in windows across the city, a few lamps were already lit. Not many. The observance was still weeks away.

But some people had started early.

Some people, I thought, had simply never stopped.