Chapter 423: The Day Without a Kettle

Melody came back from the north with mud to her knees and a folded map held against her chest like something alive.

She did not stop at the receiving yard. She did not stop to change. She walked straight through the eastern gate, past two guards who knew better than to ask, and up the stairs to the archive, where Mary was in the middle of explaining a tariff dispute to three merchants who had come all the way from the coast to be told they were wrong.

Mary looked up.

She saw Melody's face.

“Gentlemen,” Mary said, “you are wrong. My clerk will explain in detail. Good afternoon.”

The merchants left with the expressions of men who had expected a longer conversation.

I arrived a few minutes later, because a guard had come to find me, because the guard had seen Melody's face too.

She was sitting on the edge of Mary's desk with the map spread open beside her. Mary was holding her hand.

“Whitebrook,” Melody said, before I could ask. “Merek marked it. The third valley past the ridge. He said there used to be smoke.”

“And?”

Melody looked up at me.

Her eyes were very bright.

“There's smoke.”

Not much.

Melody was careful to say so. Her scouts had approached from the high ground, the way Merek had described, and watched for two days before going any closer. The settlement itself had been burned. Most of the houses were gone.

But farther up the valley, in a stand of old pines where the stream came down off the rock, someone had built new shelters. Low ones. Roofed with bark and earth. Hard to see from the road.

And there were people living in them.

“How many?” I asked.

“Thirty, perhaps. Maybe fewer. They don't all stay in one place.” Melody's ears flattened slightly. “Some of them don't stay in one shape.”

“Werewolves.”

“Some. Not all. There were children. Old people. A woman who came down to the stream every morning with a bucket and three dogs.”

I went very still.

“Three dogs,” I repeated.

Melody nodded slowly.

“I didn't go close enough to ask her name,” she said. “I didn't want to frighten them. I didn't want them to think we were the next ones with a dead man in robes.” She swallowed. “But she had three dogs. And she walked like someone who was waiting for someone to come home.”

Merek was sitting up when we came to his room.

His shoulder had healed enough that the binding around it had been reduced to a sling. Caldris had removed another layer of the working the week before. The fragments that remained no longer tightened when he slept, only when he tried to change form.

He had not tried for several days.

He watched Melody come in with the map.

He watched her face.

Then he put his good hand very carefully on the blanket and held it there, as though he were bracing for a blow.

“Tell me,” he said.

Melody sat down in the chair beside him.

She told him.

The valley. The pines. The bark-roofed shelters. The children. The old people. The ones who did not stay in one shape.

The woman with the bucket and three dogs.

Merek did not move.

His face did not change.

But the hand on the blanket began to shake, and he could not make it stop, and after a while he stopped trying.

“Tavia,” he said.

“I don't know,” Melody said honestly. “I didn't ask. I didn't want—”

“Three dogs,” Merek said. His voice cracked. “Harlon had three dogs. They followed her everywhere. He used to say she was the only one they listened to.”

He turned his face toward the wall.

Melody looked at me.

I shook my head slightly.

She stayed in her chair. I stayed by the door. Neither of us said anything for a long time.

When Merek turned back, his eyes were red, but his voice was steady.

“She doesn't know,” he said. “About Harlon. Does she?”

“I don't think so.”

“Someone has to tell her.”

“Yes.”

Merek looked down at his hand.

“It should be me.”

Caldris, who had come quietly to the doorway at some point, spoke without entering.

“You can't travel yet.”

“I know.”

“And you can't change. Not until the last fragments are out. If you try to run as a wolf and the working catches—”

“I know.”

Merek's jaw tightened.

“I've been afraid to try,” he said. “Every time I think about it, I feel the collar. Even though it's gone. Even though you took it off.” He pressed his good hand against his throat, then let it fall. “I used to change every week. For the hunting. For the joy of it. Now I can't think about my own other shape without feeling someone else's hand on it.”

Caldris was quiet for a moment.

“That isn't the binding,” he said. “That's memory.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Yes,” Caldris said. “I can remove the binding. The memory is yours. It will take longer.” He paused. “But it will heal. They usually do. Not all at once.”

Merek looked at the map on Melody's lap.

At the third valley past the ridge.

“Then I'll write to her,” he said. “Now. Today. So she knows someone's coming. So she knows I'm alive. So she hears it from someone who knew him.”

He looked at me.

“And when I can travel, I'll go myself.”

I nodded.

“Melody's scouts can carry it.”

“No.” Merek shook his head. “Not scouts. Not soldiers. Not anyone in armor coming down that valley.” He thought for a moment. “The carters. Your Hesketh. Does he go that way?”

I looked at Melody.

“Maud does,” Melody said. “Lamp oil. Once a month. She stops at every settlement that still trades.”

Merek nodded slowly.

“Then Maud,” he said. “With the lamp oil. Someone who brings light up that road and asks nothing for it but the price.”

He asked for paper.

Melody gave him her own notebook and a pencil, and turned her chair to face the window so that he could write without being watched.

It took him a very long time.

Vaust went to Westmere the next day.

He had asked to go for a week. Evelyn had said no for a week. Then Caldris had said the strain on his wrists was finally healing, and Liora had said he was walking the length of the infirmary corridor six times a day when he thought nobody was looking, and Evelyn had said fine, but only through the gate, and only if someone carried him up the stairs, and only for one afternoon.

Vaust had agreed to all of it.

Then he had refused to be carried.

Corran met him at the chapel doors.

The two of them looked at each other for a long moment. A tall gray-haired god with bandaged wrists, leaning on a stick Perrin had made him. A heavyset mason with a stiff leg, leaning on nothing at all.

“You're the one who heard her,” Vaust said.

“You're the one who held the doors,” Corran said.

Vaust nodded.

Corran nodded.

That appeared to be all the introduction either of them needed.

The niche was no longer empty.

The lantern was finished. The hand that held it was finished. The arm, the shoulder, the line of a cloak falling from the shoulder in heavy folds.

The face was still rough stone.

Corran had blocked out the shape of it. The angle of the head, tilted slightly forward. The suggestion of a jaw. Nothing more.

“I'm waiting,” he said, when Vaust looked at it.

“For what?”

Corran shrugged.

“To know what she looks like.”

Vaust studied the niche for a long time.

Then he stepped up onto the platform, slowly, leaning on his stick, and stood beside the half-finished statue. He did not touch it. He looked at the lantern instead. At the way it was held. Out toward the door, and also, if you stood near the benches, close against the chest.

“Both ways,” Vaust said softly.

“Depends who's coming,” Corran said.

Vaust looked at him.

“You're right. She held it both ways. I'd forgotten.” His voice was very quiet. “I haven't seen her face in a very long time.”

“Do you remember it?”

Vaust was quiet for a while.

“No,” he said. “I remember how it felt to be looked at by it. That's not the same thing.”

Corran grunted.

“That's more use than a description,” he said, and picked up his chisel.

Vaust put his hand against the wall behind the niche.

Not on the stone. Not quite. His fingers hovered an inch away, the way Thesra's had hovered over the ruined doorway on the wooded slope.

He knocked.

Three times. Softly.

“It's Vaust,” he said.

The candle on the platform flickered.

The warmth came up through the floor first. I felt it through my boots. Then the stone itself seemed to soften slightly, the way a room changes when someone you know comes into it.

“You took your time,” the Keeper said.

Vaust laughed. It hurt him. He did not seem to care.

“They wouldn't let me travel.”

“Good. You need rest.” A pause. “You spent too long holding doors for him. Your hands remember it.”

“They're healing.”

“I know. I hear you walking in the corridor at night. Six times. You think nobody notices.”

Vaust looked over his shoulder at me with an expression of deep betrayal.

“I didn't tell her,” I said.

“She knows everything about everyone who walks on stone,” Vaust muttered.

“Yes,” the Keeper said, sounding amused. “That has always been rather the point.”

Vaust grew serious.

“The courtyard,” he said. “The inner wing. The people behind the barred windows. Can you hear them?”

The warmth shifted.

“Yes.”

“Can I?”

A long silence.

“If you want to,” the Keeper said at last. “It won't be easy. They're far down. And some of them are very tired.”

“I held their doors for years,” Vaust said. “I never knew their names.”

“Then listen,” she said. “I'll carry it.”

Vaust closed his eyes.

His hand pressed flat against the wall.

For a long time, nothing happened. Corran stopped carving. I stood very still by the benches.

Then Vaust's face changed.

He did not open his eyes. He tilted his head slightly, the way you do when someone speaks very softly from across a room.

“Halemar,” he whispered.

I knew the name. I had heard it in Fenrir's account. The god forced to hold the way between cages.

“He's alive,” Vaust said. His voice shook. “He's—he's singing. Under his breath. The traveler's verse. Asking for the lamp.”

“Can he hear you?” I asked.

“No. Not me.” Vaust's eyes stayed closed. “He hears her. She answers him. Every night. He doesn't know it's her. He thinks he's dreaming.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“There's another. A woman. I don't know her. She's counting. Doors, I think. Over and over. She keeps losing count and starting again.”

He swallowed.

“And a child.”

The chapel went very cold.

“A child?” I said.

Vaust opened his eyes.

He looked at me, and his face was gray.

“Very young,” he said. “Four. Perhaps five. She doesn't sing. She doesn't count. She talks to the floor. Every night. Tells it about her day.” His voice dropped. “And the floor talks back.”

Mary wrote down every name Vaust could give her.

There were seven. Halemar. The counting woman, whom Vaust could not name but described so precisely that Mary drew a small mark beside the description and said nothing. Four others whose voices he recognized faintly from the years he had held the doors.

And the child.

Vaust did not know her name.

The Keeper did.

“Lirien,” she said, when Vaust asked. “She was brought in with her mother three winters ago. Her mother is not in that wing anymore.”

Nobody asked what that meant.

“Lirien tells me about the light in the window,” the Keeper continued. “The guards leave a lamp in the corridor for themselves. She can see a little of it under her door. She calls it her friend.” A pause. “She asked me last night whether the friend could come in. I told her not yet.”

Vaust's hands were shaking.

“Not yet,” he repeated.

“Not yet,” the Keeper said firmly. “Not from inside. Not through his doors. You know that. Uriah knows that.” The warmth beneath us steadied. “But I tell her the lamp is still lit. Every night. And she believes me.”

We went back to Greykeep at dusk.

Vaust did not speak through the gate or up the stairs or into the infirmary, where Evelyn met him with an expression of strong professional disapproval that softened the moment she saw his face.

She did not ask.

She only took his arm and helped him to bed, and stayed until he slept.

I found Thor in the map room.

I told her about Lirien.

Thor listened without moving.

When I finished, she did not say anything for a long time. Then she walked to the map, to the basin, and laid her hand flat over it.

“Not yet,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

“You want to go now.”

“Yes.”

“So do I.” Thor did not move her hand. “If we go now, through his doors, we lose. You heard Vaust. They built that courtyard to receive someone who believes the next room is the last one. A four-year-old talking to the floor is the strongest reason anyone could have to believe that.”

I closed my eyes.

“I know.”

Thor turned to look at me.

“Then we find another way,” she said. “Not through his doors. Not through her floor. Some third way neither of us has thought of yet.” Her voice softened very slightly. “And until we find it, we make certain that floor keeps talking back.”

Helena's birthday was in three days.

I had very nearly forgotten.

Evelyn had not.

Neither, it turned out, had anyone else in the castle.

“She won't want a fuss,” Evelyn said, as we sat in our rooms that night.

“She never wants a fuss,” Adriana said from the bed, where Roderic was asleep on her chest.

“She'll spend the whole day in the kitchen,” Evelyn continued. “She always does. Making tea. Making bread. Making sure everyone else has eaten. And then at the end of it she'll sit down and say what a lovely birthday it was, and she won't have had a single minute to herself.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

Evelyn looked at Adriana.

Adriana smiled.

“We take away the kettle,” she said.

It was a conspiracy.

It required the cooperation of the entire castle, which was not difficult, since the entire castle loved Helena and had at some point been given tea by her when they did not know they needed it.

Garrick Valewood was in charge of distraction.

He was to wake her early, as he always did, and suggest a walk in the garden before breakfast, as he occasionally did. Then he was to keep her in the garden for exactly as long as it took.

“How long will it take?” he asked.

“An hour,” Evelyn said.

Garrick Valewood looked doubtful.

“Your mother has never walked in a garden for an hour in her life.”

“Then tell her stories,” I suggested. “Julian has twenty-three of them written down.”

He brightened.

Mirelle and Lisbeth were in charge of the kitchen.

This had required delicate negotiation, since both women had very firm opinions about how a kitchen should be run, and the last time they had shared one, a cake had resulted that was neither of theirs.

They agreed, after a long discussion, that Lisbeth would make the bread and Mirelle would make the tea.

“And I,” Lisbeth announced, “will not make any comment about how she makes it.”

Mirelle looked at her.

Lisbeth held up both hands.

“Today only.”

The children were in charge of the kettle.

Specifically, they were in charge of hiding it.

Carol and Garrick took this responsibility very seriously. They spent an entire afternoon conferring in whispers, consulted Seraphina and Ignatius by way of a message passed through the gate in a folded paper bird, and finally announced that they had chosen a hiding place nobody would ever find.

“Where?” I asked.

Carol looked at me with great pity.

“If we told you,” she said, “you would know.”

Helena woke at dawn.

Garrick Valewood was already dressed.

“Walk?” he suggested.

She looked at him with deep suspicion.

“It's cold.”

“I brought your shawl.”

“You never bring my shawl.”

“I brought it today.”

Helena looked at the shawl. At her husband. At the window, through which she could see three of the kitchen staff hurrying across the courtyard with their arms full.

She sighed.

“Very well,” she said. “But I'm putting the kettle on first.”

She went to the kitchen.

The kettle was not there.

She looked on the hook where it always hung. On the shelf beside the stove. In the cupboard beneath the window.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her hands on her hips.

Then she noticed Mirelle and Lisbeth, standing very still beside the bread oven, both wearing aprons and the expressions of women who had been caught.

“Where,” Helena said slowly, “is my kettle?”

“What kettle?” Lisbeth asked.

Mirelle said nothing at all.

Helena looked at the two of them for a long time.

Then she turned around and saw Garrick Valewood in the doorway, holding out her shawl.

“Walk,” he said.

Helena took the shawl.

She walked in the garden for an hour and twenty minutes.

Garrick Valewood told her eleven stories.

She laughed at nine of them, corrected four, and told him that the one about the apprentice's hat was entirely wrong and that she had been there and knew exactly what had happened.

He let her tell it.

When they came back inside, breakfast was waiting.

Not in the great hall. In the small sitting room off the kitchen, where Helena usually took her tea at the end of the day when everyone else had eaten.

The table was set for one.

One chair. One plate. One cup.

And beside the cup, a pot of tea. Already made. Already steeping.

Helena stopped in the doorway.

“What's this?”

“Breakfast,” Evelyn said. She was standing by the window with Adriana and me. Roderic was asleep against Adriana's shoulder.

“For whom?”

“For you.”

Helena looked at the single chair.

“Where's everyone else?”

“Eating in the hall,” Evelyn said. “Lisbeth made bread. Mirelle made tea. Carol and Garrick hid the kettle. You don't have to do anything today, Mother. Nothing at all.”

Helena looked at her daughter for a long time.

“I don't know how to do nothing,” she said at last.

“I know,” Evelyn said. “That's why we're making you practice.”

Helena sat down.

She poured her own tea, because she would not let anyone else pour it, and took a sip.

Her face changed.

“This is Mirelle's,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It's very good.” She sounded almost offended. “She uses less leaf than I do.”

“She says you use too much,” Adriana said.

“I do not.”

“She says it very fondly.”

Helena sniffed.

Then she took another sip.

And then, very slowly, she leaned back in the chair. Not the way she usually sat, perched at the edge, ready to get up at the first sound of a kettle or a child or a door. She leaned all the way back, until her shoulders touched the wood, and she let out a long breath, and looked out the window at the garden she had just walked through.

“Oh,” she said quietly. “That's rather nice.”

Evelyn's eyes filled.

We left her there.

She stayed in the chair for most of the morning. People came to the door, one or two at a time, to wish her a happy birthday. Mary. Melody. Thor, who brought her a sprig of winter holly from the garden and set it in her cup without asking. Perrin and Aldren, who argued in the doorway about whether to come in and finally did not.

Julian brought the book of stories.

Helena read the one about the apprentice's hat and told him it was entirely wrong.

Then she told him what had really happened.

He wrote it down.

The children found her in the early afternoon.

All five of them. Carol and Garrick. Seraphina and Ignatius, who had come through the gate the moment they were allowed. And Roderic, in Adriana's arms, because Carol had insisted that he was old enough to attend a birthday, and nobody had found a convincing argument against it.

They stood in a row in front of Helena's chair.

“We have to tell you something,” Carol said.

Helena looked at her granddaughter.

“Do you?”

“About the kettle.”

“Ah.”

Garrick stepped forward.

“We hid it,” he said solemnly. “Somewhere nobody would find it. Not even Papa.”

“I see.”

“But it's your birthday,” Carol said. “So you can have it back.”

“If you want,” Garrick added.

Helena looked at them.

“Where is it?”

The four older children looked at one another.

Then, very slowly, Carol pointed.

At Roderic.

Helena stared at the baby.

Adriana, laughing, turned slightly, so that everyone could see what was tucked into the blanket beneath him.

The kettle.

Small. Copper. Slightly dented on one side from forty years of use.

Roderic was lying on it like a nest.

“He was guarding it,” Ignatius explained.

“He's very good at guarding,” Seraphina added.

“Nobody looks under a baby,” Garrick said.

Helena looked at the kettle.

At her grandson asleep on top of it.

At the five children standing in front of her with the grave expressions of conspirators who have just confessed to a crime they are very proud of.

She started to laugh.

She laughed until she had to put her teacup down. Until she had to wipe her eyes. Until Garrick Valewood came to the doorway to see what was the matter and started laughing too without knowing why.

“Leave it,” Helena managed finally. “Leave it with him. He can give it back tomorrow.”

That night, after the children were asleep and the castle was quiet, I found Helena in the small sitting room.

She was sitting in the chair by the window.

Not perched. Leaning back.

There was no tea.

“You found the kettle?” I asked.

“Adriana brought it back. After he woke up.” Helena smiled. “It was very warm.”

I sat down across from her.

For a while, neither of us said anything.

Then Helena said, “Evelyn told me. About another baby.”

“She did?”

“This morning. While I was doing nothing.” Helena looked at me. “She said after the twins' birthday. When the winter's turned.”

“Yes.”

Helena nodded slowly.

“When she was born,” she said, “Garrick told me stories all night. To keep me from worrying. I didn't hear half of them. I was too busy being frightened.” She looked out the window. “I've been frightened for her ever since. When she healed people she shouldn't have been able to heal. When she became what she is now. When she married a king who walks into storms.”

I did not say anything.

“And today,” Helena said quietly, “I sat in a chair for six hours and nobody needed me.”

“Everyone needs you.”

“I know.” She smiled. “That's what I learned. They need me, and they can manage without me for a day. Both of those are true.” She looked back at me. “I think that's what Evelyn's learning too. That's why she's ready.”

I left her in the chair.

On my way back to our rooms, I passed a window that looked out over the city.

The observance was still nearly three weeks away.

But in the windows of Greykeep, more lamps were lit tonight than there had been the night before. Not many. A few dozen, scattered among the dark houses.

One in a carpenter's workshop near the eastern wall.

One in the room above the bakery where the buns had too much honey.

One, high in the infirmary wing, in a window I recognized.

Lethan's.

Someone had set a lamp on his windowsill.

I did not know who. Liora, perhaps. Or Perrin. Or Lethan himself, who had been moving his right hand a little more each week, and who might, with great effort, have pushed a small lamp the last few inches across a sill.

I stood looking at it for a long time.

Somewhere far to the north, a little girl named Lirien was telling the floor about her day.

And the floor was telling her the lamp was still lit.

I hoped, very much, that she could see it.