Chapter 460: The King Who Held the Door

Aurelia could not answer.

She stood in front of the door with her hand still raised against the oak, and her mouth opened, and nothing came out.

I watched her try.

Her lips moved. Her throat worked. Her whole body was shaking so hard that I stepped forward without thinking and put my hand on her back, and she did not seem to feel it.

On the other side of the door, silence.

Then, again, very quietly:

“Mother. Is that you?”

Aurelia made a sound.

It was not a word. It was not anything shaped. It was the sound a person makes when two centuries come down on them all at once.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Then, louder. Cracking.

“Yes. It's me. I'm here.”

Something struck the other side of the door.

Not a blow. A weight. As though someone had leaned against it. Pressed their whole body to the wood.

“You came,” the voice said.

“I came.”

“I called. Every night. I didn't know if—” The voice broke. “I didn't know if you could hear.”

Aurelia pressed both hands flat against the door.

She leaned her forehead against the oak, beside the burned mark.

“I couldn't,” she said. “I couldn't hear you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I thought you were—”

She could not say it.

“I know,” the voice said softly. “He told me. He told me you thought I was dead. He said you'd stopped looking.”

“I never stopped grieving,” Aurelia said. “But I stopped looking. I thought there was nothing left to find.”

Saelis had turned away.

He stood at the edge of the summit with his back to the house, looking out at the sea, and his shoulders were shaking.

Ysolde stood very still beside the path, her hands clasped in front of her.

Cael was staring at the burned mark on the door. At the closed door with a line through it.

“The seal,” he said quietly.

Aurelia did not lift her head.

“Who sealed it?” Cael asked.

He was asking the door. The person behind it.

The silence was long.

“I did,” the voice said.

I did not understand at first.

Neither did Aurelia. She lifted her head from the oak and stared at the mark.

“You,” she said.

“I sealed it,” her son said. “With my own hand. Two hundred and twenty-two years ago.” A pause. “The night Greykeep fell.”

“No,” Aurelia whispered. “No. You died. In the throne room. Holding the doors.”

“I held the doors,” her son said. “Until Caitlin was through. Until the children were through. Until the last of the servants reached the roads.” His voice was very quiet. “And then the cold came into the room. And a voice.”

Aurelia had gone white.

“Varrick,” she said.

“I didn't know his name,” her son said. “Not then. He didn't give it. He only told me things.” A long pause. “He told me that the passage you'd opened, the one Caitlin went through, could be followed. That the gods binding you would follow it. That they'd find her. And the kids.”

Aurelia's hands had curled against the door.

“He told me there was only one way to stop them,” her son said. “Someone had to hold the door. Not the throne room door. The passage. From this side. For as long as it took.”

Nobody spoke.

The wind howled across the island. Far below, the sea had begun to stir in the darkness, restless against the rocks.

“He brought me here,” the voice said. “Through a door of his. To this house. On this island at the edge of the world.” A pause. “He said this was where the passage could be held. He said if I sealed the door with my own hand, from the inside, nothing could ever follow them. Not the gods. Not anyone.”

“And you believed him,” Aurelia whispered.

“I believed him,” her son said. “I was nineteen. My city was burning. My mother was bound somewhere I couldn't reach. My wife was gone through a passage to a world I'd never see.” His voice cracked. “He told me I could keep them safe. If I stayed.”

He was silent for a long moment.

“So I stayed,” he said.

Aurelia slid down the door.

Slowly. Until she was kneeling on the cold stone of the threshold, her hands still flat against the oak, her forehead pressed to the wood.

“Two hundred years,” she said.

“Two hundred and twenty-two,” her son said. A faint, cracked sound that might once have been a laugh. “I counted. Every winter. I carved a line in the wall beside the window for each one.”

Cael flinched.

“He came sometimes,” the voice said. “The cold. The voice. Not often. Every few years. To remind me.” A pause. “To tell me that if I opened the door, they'd follow the passage. That Caitlin would die. That Caroline would die. That the baby would never be born.”

Aurelia closed her eyes.

“So I didn't open it,” her son said simply. “I sang instead. The soldiers' song. The one I used to sing to Caroline.” His voice softened. “I thought if I sang it every night, somewhere, on the other side of the passage, she might hear it. In her sleep. And know I was still holding the door.”

I could not breathe.

I stood on the summit of an island at the edge of the world with my hand on my great-grandmother's back, listening to my grandfather tell her through two inches of oak that he had spent two hundred and twenty-two years in a stone house singing to a little girl who had grown up on the other side of a passage he believed he was holding closed.

My sister.

Caroline.

I thought about the nights I could not remember. About my father, born after the crossing. About a life I had lived without knowing any of this.

About a song I had never heard.

“He lied to you,” Aurelia said.

Her voice was very quiet. Very steady.

The silence behind the door was absolute.

“The passage,” Aurelia said. “Nobody followed it. Nobody could. I made it myself. I chose a world beyond the reach of every power that was closing around us.” She pressed her hands harder against the oak. “Nothing ever followed them. Nothing was ever going to.”

“He said—”

“He's the god of captivity,” Aurelia said. “He lies to keep people. That's all he's ever done.” Her voice broke. “He didn't need you to hold a passage. He needed you to hold yourself. Here. Behind a door you sealed with your own hand. So that you'd never come home.”

For a very long time, there was no answer.

Then, from the other side of the door, very quietly:

“How do you know?”

Aurelia did not answer at once.

She turned her head.

She looked at me.

I understood.

I knelt beside her on the cold threshold.

I put my own hand flat against the door, beside hers.

The Crown warmed against my palm.

“Because I'm here,” I said.

The silence on the other side was so complete that I could hear the sea breaking on the rocks far below.

“Who's that?” the voice asked.

I did not know how to answer.

I had thought about it the whole way north. On Aelune's back. In the lighthouse. Watching the tide go out. What I would say if there was someone behind the door. If it was him.

Nothing I had thought of was right.

So I said the truth.

“My name is Uriah Grey,” I said. “Caitlin was my grandmother. The baby she was carrying when she went through the passage was my father.” My voice was not steady. “Caroline was my sister.”

Nothing.

No sound. No movement. No weight against the door.

Nothing at all.

I knelt on the threshold with my hand on the oak and waited.

Aurelia's hand found mine against the wood.

She held on.

“Your sister,” the voice said finally.

It was barely audible.

“Yes.”

“Caroline's—your sister.”

“Yes.”

“Then she—” The voice stopped. Started again. “Then she grew up.”

“She grew up,” I said. “They all did. Grandmother raised them. They had lives. Over there. Safe.” I swallowed. “Nothing ever followed them. Nothing ever came.”

The weight returned against the door.

Not leaning now.

Sliding.

Down the oak, the way Aurelia had slid. Until whoever was on the other side was sitting on the floor with their back against the wood.

I heard him breathing.

Ragged. Uneven.

“She had my mother's hands,” he said. “Caroline. When she was born. I remember thinking that. She had my mother's hands.”

Aurelia made a small sound.

“She did,” I said. “She always did.”

I did not know if that was true. I had never thought about my sister's hands. But I remembered her braiding her own hair in the mirror, quickly, impatiently, the way she did everything. I remembered her fingers.

I decided it was true.

“And the baby,” he said. “The one Caitlin was carrying.”

“My father,” I said.

“What was he like?”

I did not know how to answer.

I thought about it for a long time, kneeling on the threshold with the wind in my face and my hand on the door.

“He looked like you,” I said finally. “Aurelia showed me. In a vision. When she first told me who I was.” I swallowed. “I saw you in the throne room. Before the passage. And the first thing I said was, he looks like Dad.”

The breathing on the other side of the door stopped.

Then started again. Very slowly.

“He looked like me,” my grandfather said.

“Yes.”

“He was born. Over there. And he grew up. And he looked like me.” His voice was barely audible. “And he had a son.”

“Yes.”

“And the son came back.”

“Yes,” I said. “He came back.”

Nobody moved.

The wind tore across the summit. Far below, the sea was rising. I could hear it. A low steady rush against the rocks at the foot of the island, growing louder.

Sefa had said three hours.

I did not know how much of it was gone.

Saelis had turned around. He was looking at the causeway. At the long dark line of stones running back across the sand toward the headland, where the lighthouse lamp burned.

The sand on either side of it was beginning to shine.

Water.

Creeping in.

“Uriah,” Saelis said quietly.

“I know.”

I put both hands on the door.

“Grandfather,” I said.

It felt strange in my mouth. A word I had never said to anyone. I said it anyway.

“The tide's turning,” I said. “We have to cross back before the causeway floods. We came to bring you home.” I paused. “But you sealed the door. With your own hand. Only you can open it.”

Silence.

“I know,” he said.

“Will you?”

He did not answer.

I heard him breathing on the other side of the oak. Ragged. Uneven.

“Two hundred and twenty-two years,” he said. “Every time I put my hand on that handle, I heard him. The voice. Telling me what would happen if I turned it.” His voice cracked. “I can hear it now.”

Aurelia went very still.

“What's it saying?” she asked.

“It's saying you're not real,” her son said.

His voice was flat. Hollow.

“It's saying you're a trick. That he sent you. That if I open the door, he'll follow me through it, and through the passage, and find them.” A long pause. “It's saying Caroline will die. And Caitlin. And the baby.”

“They're already gone,” I said.

The silence was terrible.

I had not meant to say it like that. I closed my eyes.

“Not like that,” I said. “Not because of anything that followed. They lived. They grew old. Over there. And they died, the way people die, in their own time.” My voice was shaking. “There's nothing left on the other side of that passage for him to find. There's nothing to hold. There never was.”

“Then why do I hear him?”

“Because he's still talking,” Aurelia said. “He never stopped. He only wanted you to think it was your own fear.”

I felt it then.

Through the threshold. Through the stone beneath my knees. Through the thin dark line on my palm, beneath Aurelia's light.

Cold.

The cold at the bottom of a well.

Coming up from somewhere deep beneath the island. Rising through the rock.

Aurelia felt it too. Her head snapped up.

“He's here,” she whispered.

And from the burned mark on the door, the closed door with a line through it, very faint, very pleasant, very kind—

“Hello, Aurelia.”

The mark was moving.

Not the burn itself. The darkness within it. Seeping out of the grain of the wood like ink from a crack. Spreading across the oak in thin black threads.

Aurelia stood up.

She stepped back from the door.

Her hands had risen. Healing light around her fingers. Faint. Thin. Still not recovered from what she had given in the basin.

“Varrick,” she said.

“You found him,” the voice said. It was coming from the door. From the darkness seeping out of the mark. “I wondered if you would. I wondered for two hundred years.”

“You lied to him.”

“I told him what he needed to hear,” Varrick said mildly. “That's all I ever do. People keep themselves, Aurelia. I only tell them why.”

On the other side of the door, I heard my grandfather make a sound.

“That's him,” he whispered. “That's the voice.”

“Yes, little king,” Varrick said gently. “It's me. It's always been me.” A pause. “And if you open that door, I'll be on the other side of it. With your mother. With your grandson. With everyone you've just been told is safe.”

The black threads had spread across the whole door.

They were reaching beyond it. Into the stone of the frame. Into the ground of the summit. Into the threshold where Aurelia had been kneeling.

Toward me.

I stood up.

I did not step back.

I put my hand on the ground.

Not lightning. Not frost.

The thaw.

The black frost beneath my palm cracked. Thin green threads came up through it. Grass. Moss. The tough wind-scoured plants of the island, waking.

Varrick laughed.

“Again,” he said. “The storm king and his spring.” His voice was very soft. “You're a long way from your wall, Uriah. A long way from the little queen who refuses. A long way from the soldiers singing at my door beneath your infirmary.”

“I know,” I said.

“The tide's coming in.”

“I know.”

“You'll drown on the causeway. All of you. Your great-grandmother. The raven. The clerk. The counting woman.” A pause. “Or you'll stay. On this island. With him. Behind a door. Forever.”

The black threads tightened.

“Either way,” Varrick said, “I keep you.”

Ysolde moved.

I had not seen her move. She had been standing very still at the edge of the path with her hands clasped in front of her. Now she was beside the door, her hand flat against the oak, and her face was very calm.

“Three hundred and eleven,” she said.

Varrick fell silent.

“That's how many steps from the end of the causeway to this door,” Ysolde said. “I counted. Without meaning to. On the way up.” She did not look at the black threads crawling across the wood. “Three hundred and eleven steps. And two thousand, four hundred and six from the headland to the island.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Varrick asked.

“I'm not telling you,” Ysolde said. “I'm telling him.”

She pressed her hand harder against the door.

“I counted for three years,” she said to the man on the other side of it. “In a cell. In the east wing. Doors and steps and lanterns. So I wouldn't forget the days were real.” Her voice was very steady. “Then someone opened my door. And I walked out. And I found out the days had been going on without me the whole time. Real. All of them.”

She paused.

“Two hundred and twenty-two winters,” she said. “You carved a line for each one. That's how you knew they were real.”

On the other side of the door, silence.

“They were real,” Ysolde said. “And so is this. Right now. Your mother on the threshold. Your grandson. The tide coming in.” She looked at the black threads. “He's the one who isn't real. He's a voice. That's all he's ever been. Telling you the days don't count.”

Cael stepped forward.

He stood beside Ysolde with his ink-stained hands at his sides.

“I wrote your house down,” he said. “In the ledger. The first one. The oldest.” His voice cracked. “I drew the mark beside it. A closed door with a line through it. I never once asked who was inside.”

He swallowed.

“My grandmother sealed my door,” he said. “At a lighthouse. On the other end of that causeway.” He looked back toward the headland. Toward the light. “She sat at the bottom of my stairs for three years, listening to me count. And when someone asked her to, she opened it.”

He put his hand on the door beside Ysolde's.

“She's keeping the lamp lit for us,” Cael said. “Right now. Up there. Waiting for us to come back to it.”

The black threads had stopped spreading.

They hung across the face of the door, motionless. Waiting.

“Clever,” Varrick said. “All of you. Very clever.” His voice had thinned. “But none of it matters. He sealed the door with his own hand. Only he can open it. And he's been listening to me for two hundred years.” A pause. “He won't stop now.”

The silence on the other side of the door was very long.

Then my grandfather spoke.

Not to us.

To Varrick.

“You told me,” he said slowly, “that if I opened the door, Caroline would die.”

“Yes,” Varrick said.

“You told me every few years. For two hundred and twenty-two years.”

“Yes.”

“And she grew up,” my grandfather said. “And she had my mother's hands. And she had a brother. And her brother had a son.” His voice was shaking. “And her brother's son is standing on my threshold. With my mother. With the tide coming in.”

Varrick did not answer.

“You didn't keep them safe,” my grandfather said. “They were always safe. You only kept me.”

The handle turned.

I heard it. The iron scraping in the lock. Slowly. Stiffly. A handle that had not been turned in two hundred and twenty-two years.

The black threads across the door screamed.

The same thin high shriek I had heard from the helmet when Surtr burned Varrick's mark out of it. Like a nail dragged across glass.

The darkness pulled back into the burned mark. Fast. All at once.

The mark itself began to fade.

The door opened.

He was standing just inside.

Thin. So thin his clothes hung from him like sails without wind. A coat that had once been fine, deep blue, embroidered at the collar with the arms of Greykeep, now faded almost to gray. His hair was long and dark, streaked with silver, tangled. His beard was untrimmed.

His face—

I knew his face.

I had seen it in Aurelia's vision. In the throne room, before the passage, turning to look up at his mother.

I had seen it in the mirror, sometimes, without knowing.

He looks like Dad.

He was looking at Aurelia.

She was standing three paces from the threshold with her hands pressed against her mouth, and her face—

I will not try to describe her face.

He did not step forward.

He stood in the doorway of the stone house with one hand still on the handle, and behind him I could see the single room he had lived in for two hundred and twenty-two years. A bed. A table. A cold hearth.

A window facing south.

And on the wall beside the window, carved into the stone, line after line after line. Rows of them. Two hundred and twenty-two.

“Mother,” he said.

Aurelia took one step forward.

Then another.

She stopped in front of him.

She reached up with both hands, very slowly, the way you reach toward something you are afraid will disappear, and touched his face.

He closed his eyes.

“You're real,” he said.

“I'm real.”

“You're not him. You're not a trick.”

“I'm not a trick,” Aurelia said. Her voice broke. “I'm your mother. I'm here. I came.”

He opened his eyes.

He looked at her for a long time.

Then his knees gave out, and Aurelia caught him, and the two of them went down together on the threshold of the stone house, the goddess and the king, holding each other, and neither of them made a sound.

“Uriah,” Saelis said.

His voice was sharp.

I turned.

He was standing at the edge of the summit, looking down at the causeway.

The sand on either side was gone.

Water. Gray and heaving. Flooding in across the flats from both sides, racing toward the line of stones like a horse at the gallop. Sefa had said it would.

The causeway was still above it. For now. A thin dark line running back toward the headland.

But the water was rising.

“We have to go,” Saelis said. “Now.”

My grandfather could not walk.

He tried. He got to his feet with Aurelia holding one arm and me holding the other, and he took two steps, and his legs buckled.

“Two hundred and twenty-two years,” he said. He was almost laughing. “I walked from the bed to the window and back. That's all.” He looked down at his own feet. “I've forgotten how to walk farther than that.”

“Then I'll carry you,” I said.

He looked at me.

At my face. At the Crown on my palm.

“You're Caroline's brother,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You have her chin.”

I did not know what to say to that.

I bent and put my shoulder under his arm and lifted him. He weighed almost nothing. Bone and cloth and two hundred years of waiting.

Aurelia took his other side.

We started down the path.

The cold came after us.

I felt it at the bottom of the path, where the island met the causeway. Rising up out of the rocks. Out of the sand. Out of the water flooding in on both sides.

Black frost spreading across the stones of the causeway ahead of us.

“Run,” Saelis said.

“We can't run.”

“Then walk faster.”

We walked faster.

Two thousand four hundred and six steps. Ysolde had counted. I did not count. I only walked, with my grandfather's arm over my shoulder and Aurelia on his other side and the water rising on both sides of the causeway, gray and cold and fast.

The black frost spread ahead of us.

Where it touched the stones, they went slick. Treacherous. My boot slid on the first patch and I nearly went down, and my grandfather with me.

Aurelia caught us.

Her healing light flared.

The black frost beneath her feet melted. Not far. A pace. Two. Enough to step on.

She did it again.

And again.

Halfway across, Varrick spoke.

Not from any door. Not from any mark. From the water itself. From the cold rising out of the sea on both sides of the causeway.

“You can't make it,” he said.

His voice was everywhere. In the wind. In the waves. In the black frost crackling beneath our feet.

“The tide's too fast. The causeway's too long. You'll drown, all of you. The king you came for. The goddess who lost him. The grandson who brought her.” A pause. “And then I'll keep you anyway.”

My grandfather's arm tightened over my shoulder.

“Don't listen,” Aurelia said.

“I'm not,” he said.

His voice was very rough. Very cracked.

Then he began to sing.

It was the soldiers' song.

The one Teren had hummed beside Lethan's bed. The one Lethan had sung, badly, the night the lamps turned gold. The one the camps sang above rivers for the ones who didn't come back.

My grandfather sang it badly.

He had always sung it badly, Aurelia told me later. Caitlin used to put a pillow over her head.

His voice was ruined. Two hundred and twenty-two years of singing it alone, to no one, through a door. It cracked on every high note. It went flat on every low one. It was the worst singing I had ever heard.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

And from the headland, very far away, across the rising water—

Someone sang back.

I looked up.

Sefa was standing at the edge of the cliff with the lighthouse lantern held high above her head. Bryn was beside her, both hands cupped around her mouth.

They were singing.

The soldiers' song. Slow and sad. Out of tune. Sefa's cracked old voice and Bryn's young uncertain one, carrying across the water.

And behind them, along the cliffs, at the thirty-fourth shelter, at the thirty-third, at the thirty-second—

Lights.

People. Holding lamps. Standing at the shelters along the coast road, the ones Ysolde had lit, the ones Tobin had found the keepers for.

Singing.

The black frost on the causeway cracked.

Not because of me. Not because of Aurelia.

Because of the song.

It came across the water from the headland, from the coast road, from thirty-four shelters strung along the cliffs. Badly. Out of tune. The traveler's hymn, the way soldiers sang it, with the Keeper's verse at the end.

The answer.

And beneath the causeway, beneath the sand and the rising tide, I felt warmth.

Faint. Very far from her oldest road. Very far from Hollis's shelter.

But there.

“I'm here,” the Keeper said. Barely a whisper, rising up through the stones beneath our feet. “I'm here. This road is mine too. Every road that leads to a lamp is mine.” Her voice strengthened. “Walk. Keep walking. The light's lit.”

The black frost melted.

All of it. At once. Across the whole length of the causeway. The stones beneath our feet went from slick and black to wet and gray and solid.

The water kept rising.

But it did not reach the causeway.

Not yet.

We reached the foot of the headland as the sea closed over the last of the stones behind us.

I did not look back. I could not. I was carrying my grandfather up the narrow path from the causeway to the top of the cliff, with Aurelia on his other side and Saelis and Ysolde and Cael behind us, and every step was harder than the last.

Sefa was waiting at the top.

She held the lantern up. She did not lower it until we had reached the grass at the edge of the cliff and set my grandfather down on it, gently, and Aurelia had knelt beside him and taken his face in her hands again.

Then Sefa lowered the lantern.

She looked at the man lying on the grass.

At his faded blue coat with the arms of Greykeep at the collar.

At his face.

“You're the one who was singing,” she said. “Every night. On the island.” She shook her head slowly. “I heard it. For eighty years. From the top of the tower. I always thought it was the wind.”

My grandfather looked up at her.

“It wasn't the wind,” he said.

“No,” Sefa agreed. “It wasn't.”

He sat up.

Slowly. Aurelia helping him. He sat on the grass at the edge of the cliff with the wind in his long tangled hair, and he looked out.

Not at the island.

At the coast road.

At the lamps strung along the cliffs to the south, thirty-four of them, burning in the dark. At the people standing beside them, still holding their own lamps up, still singing.

He stared at them for a long time.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Keepers,” Ysolde said quietly. “Of the shelters. Fishermen. Villagers. People whose grandparents used to keep the lamps for the boats.”

“Why are they singing?”

Ysolde looked at him.

“For you,” she said. “Sefa sent word down the road when we crossed. That someone was coming home.”

He did not answer.

He sat on the grass with his mother's arm around his shoulders and looked at the lamps along the coast road.

“Is that for me?” he whispered.

Sefa answered.

She was standing beside him with the lighthouse lantern in her scarred hands, and she looked down at him with her lined, weathered face, and she smiled.

“It's for whoever's coming,” she said. “Tonight, that's you.”

He laughed.

It was the first time.

It came out cracked and broken and rusty, like a hinge that had not been used in two hundred and twenty-two years. But it was a laugh.

He looked at me.

“You carried me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Across the causeway. With the tide coming in.”

“Yes.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“Caroline would have done that,” he said. “When she was three. She used to try to carry me. Across the nursery. She never got very far.” His voice softened. “She was very stubborn.”

“She still was,” I said. “When she grew up.”

He closed his eyes.

“Good,” he said.

Aurelia did not let go of him.

She sat on the grass at the edge of the cliff with her arm around her son's shoulders and her face pressed against his tangled hair, and she did not let go.

She did not speak.

She did not need to.

Below us, the tide had covered the causeway completely. The island was a dark shape in the middle of the sea, with a stone house on its summit and a door standing open and a window facing south.

There was no lamp in it.

There did not need to be.

Nobody was waiting there anymore.

Bryn brought tea.

She had made it the way Sefa showed her. The right amount of leaf. The right time to steep. She brought it out from the lighthouse in a chipped cup and knelt on the grass beside my grandfather and held it out.

He looked at her.

At the cup.

He took it in both hands.

He drank.

When he lowered the cup, there were tears running down his face.

“It's hot,” he said wonderingly. “I'd forgotten tea was hot.”

Bryn did not understand.

But she nodded very seriously and said, “I'll make you another,” and went back inside.

Saelis was standing at the edge of the cliff.

He had turned away from all of us again. He was looking out at the sea. At the island. At the house.

I went to stand beside him.

“The message,” I said.

Saelis did not answer at once.

“It's gone,” he said finally. “The word. The one I've felt every night for as long as I can remember.” He looked down at his hands. “I'll never feel it again.”

I did not say anything.

“I don't know what I'll do,” Saelis said, “without it.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

Then he turned around and looked at the man sitting on the grass with his mother's arm around him, holding a chipped cup of tea in both hands.

“I think,” Saelis said slowly, “I'll carry a different one.”

“What?”

Saelis almost smiled.

“To Greykeep,” he said. “To the saint. And the queen who refuses. And the goddess of thunder holding the castle.” He changed. A black shape lifting into the night sky. His voice came back to me on the wind, very faint.

“That the king is coming home.”