Chapter 472 Epilogue: The Lamp in the Window

Epilogue: The Lamp in the Window

Mary still keeps the key.

Not the one that opens anything. Castellan opens everything now, and the great gates of Greykeep have not been locked in years. But the old iron key she held out to me in the courtyard on my first morning in this world, with Melody beside her holding the deed, is still in the archive. On a velvet cushion. In a glass case beside the long table where Tobin writes his sevens backward.

There is a card beside it, in Mary's hand.

Held for the true king. Given freely.

Melody added a second card underneath, the year after, in considerably less careful lettering.

Also we kicked people.

Mary has never removed it.

It is the longest night again.

Six years since the first one I remember properly. Since the first time the city lit its windows for a queen who had kept a lamp lit for her son, and a goddess I did not yet know by name carried every one of those lights down every road she could reach.

I am standing on the northern battlements.

I have stood here a great many nights. Watching for riders. Watching for fire on the horizon. Watching a road run north toward a basin where a god lay in the grass of a stone cell and could not decide whether to walk out the open door.

Tonight I am only watching the lamps.

They are everywhere.

Every window in the city. Every tower of the castle. Every shelter along the western road, from Brisa's a mile beyond the gate to Hesketh's at the foot of the climb. Sixty-three of them. Tobin keeps the list. Every keeper's name, every year. Some of the names have changed. A daughter taking over from her mother. A grandson from a grandfather.

None of the lamps has gone dark.

Beyond them, I cannot see, but I know. The coast road, thirty-four shelters strung along the cliffs to a lighthouse that a girl named Bryn keeps now, the way Sefa showed her. The forty-one shelters over the eastern mountains to Hollin's End, where Bram finally finished Tomas's roof and then the well cover and then the sheepfold gate and then, Gwen writes, simply stopped pretending he was ever going to leave.

The marsh causeway. The river road. The burned forest, which is not burned anymore.

Every road the Keeper ever walked.

Every road Asta keeps.

Evelyn finds me there, the way she always does.

She does not come up the stairs quietly. She never has. She comes up them with a child on her hip and another holding her hand, and a third running ahead of her shouting my name, and she arrives on the battlements slightly out of breath and entirely unrepentant.

“You said one bell,” she says. “It's been three.”

“I was counting lamps.”

“You always count lamps.” She hands me the child on her hip. “Take your daughter. She's decided she can't sleep until you tell her about the road.”

Caitlin Asta Grey settles against my shoulder as though she has been waiting there all along.

She is five. She looks nearer eight. All the children in Greykeep grow too fast; Rysa stopped trying to explain it years ago and simply measures them, every season, on the strip of wood Garrick Valewood keeps in his workshop. Caitlin's notch is the newest. It is already above where Carol's was at her age.

She has her mother's eyes, gold rimmed with blue. She has Caroline's hands, my grandfather says, which means she has Aurelia's.

And she is warm.

Not feverish. Not glowing. Warm the way a room is warm when someone has been sitting up in it all night, waiting.

Every healer in the castle has said so. Nobody has ever been able to explain it. Nobody tries anymore.

“Which road?” I ask her.

“The first one,” Caitlin says. “The one Papa came on.”

So I tell her.

I tell her about a road in another world. A crosswalk outside a theme park. A little girl chasing a balloon into the street, and a truck that did not stop in time.

I tell her about a goddess so beautiful I thought I was dreaming, who asked me what I wanted, and was surprised when I said please.

“What did you want?” Caitlin asks. She knows. She always asks anyway.

“To be strong enough to protect the people I loved,” I say. “And a place to call my own. Somewhere not surrounded by problems and tragedy.”

Caitlin considers this with the gravity of someone who has heard the story many times and still finds it unsatisfactory.

“There were lots of problems,” she says.

“There were.”

“And some tragedy.”

“Yes.”

“So the goddess got it wrong.”

I look out at the lamps.

At sixty-three shelters on the western road. At a city with every window lit. At a castle that was ruins and weeds and two maids holding out a key, and is now the place where dragons use the door and the World Serpent sleeps in the field outside the eastern gate with his head on the river road, and a fire lord across the ford keeps watch over a giant's grave through a dead king's helmet.

“No,” I say. “I don't think she did.”

Caitlin is quiet for a moment.

“Did she ask Asta?” she says. “Where to send you?”

I look down at her.

She has known Asta's name since before she could speak her own. She talks to the fountain every night, the way Lirien used to talk to the floor. She tells it about her day. She asks it questions nobody else would think to ask.

“Hollis says so,” I say. “Hollis says the goddess asked the Keeper where to send me. And Asta said Greykeep. Because it was the only place left in the world that still knew how to wait up for someone.”

Caitlin nods slowly.

“Because of Great-Great-Grandmother,” she says. “And the shrines. Beside all the gates.”

“Yes.”

“With no locks on the inside.”

“Yes.”

Caitlin rests her head against my shoulder.

“Then Asta got it right,” she says, satisfied. “Not the goddess.”

I do not argue.

Carol is up here too.

She is the one who ran ahead of Evelyn shouting my name. She is nine now and looks nearly fifteen, tall and serious and impatient, with her braid swinging down her back and frost forming at her fingertips whenever she forgets to pay attention. She is leaning on the parapet beside me looking north, the way I was.

Garrick is behind her. He is holding Evelyn's hand, though he would deny it if anyone mentioned it. He is nine also, broad-shouldered already, with a real sword on his hip now instead of a wooden one. Avarn gave it to him last spring. The pommel is shaped like a horse's head.

He has never once drawn it in anger.

Avarn says that is the best thing about him.

“Roderic's asleep,” Garrick reports. “Finally. He wanted to come. Adriana said no. He asked if he could ask again. She said he could ask as many times as he liked and the answer would be no every time.” Garrick pauses. “He said that was fair.”

“He asked first,” I say.

“He always asks first now,” Garrick says, with considerable pride. “I taught him.”

Adriana is not up here.

She is on the eastern wall, where she goes every longest night, with her hands flat on the stone and her eyes closed. Holding.

The wall does not need her the way it once did. It has not needed her to stand alone for years. Every keeper on every road holds a piece of it now. Brisa's hand on her shelter wall. Sunniva's at Tarrow. Hesketh and Oren at the trough. Julian, who wears his father's helmet when the giants work outside the city and has grown taller than me and still sets every foundation stone the way Hrafn taught him.

But Adriana goes to the eastern wall anyway, every longest night. She says it is not because the wall needs holding.

She says it is so that if anyone on any road is looking back, there will be someone on the wall looking back at them.

Her father would have understood that.

My grandfather is in the garden.

I can see him from here. Sitting on the bench beneath the pear tree, which has never stopped blossoming and never will, I think. Aurelia is beside him. Hollis is on his other side, having come through the relay gate that afternoon as she does every year. Fenrir lies at their feet, very old now, very gray, sleeping more than he wakes.

My grandfather still cannot sing.

He sings anyway. Every longest night. Under the pear tree his wife would have planted, if she had stayed. The soldiers' song, slow and sad and dreadful. Aurelia says it is exactly as bad as it was two hundred and twenty-eight years ago, and that this is a comfort.

He does not walk with a stick anymore.

He teaches the guards in the barracks beneath the western wall the song he learned there as a boy from an old soldier named Corwin. He tells them what it is for.

Most of them laugh.

Most of them learn it anyway.

Lethan walked his road the second summer.

He did it on foot. All of it. From the northern gate of Greykeep to the river, to the place where a camp had once stood above the water, where he had lain in the dark pretending to sleep while a soldier sang badly beside the fire.

It took him nineteen days.

Teren walked beside him. Maren walked behind, with Nell and Bryony and Ada. Liora walked on Lethan's other side, and nobody asked her why anymore, and when they reached the river, Lethan sat down on the bank where the camp had been and looked at the water for a long time.

Then he said, “Same color.”

Liora asked him what he meant.

“Dunstan,” Lethan said. “His father. At the end. Said he'd forgotten. The water was that color.” He looked at the river. “I didn't forget.”

They married that autumn. Lethan and Liora. In the chapel at Westmere, beneath the statue of a woman holding a lantern both ways. Teren sang at the wedding. Caldris had taken the last thread out of his throat the winter before. He sang the soldiers' song all the way through, every verse, in a voice that cracked on every high note and went flat on every low one.

Maren put a pillow over her head.

Everyone in the chapel laughed until they cried.

Dellan is still in the hall.

He goes there every evening. Not to live. He lives at Hesketh's shelter, mostly, with Oren and the old man and a goose Oren found on the road two summers ago that has decided it belongs to Dellan and follows him everywhere. Hollis says it is the most sensible creature she has ever met.

But every evening, Dellan walks up the climb into the basin.

The hall is empty now. The officers are gone. The east wing is a guest house, kept by Marta Quill and her son, with forty-one lanterns burning in the courtyard every night and an oven by the east well that never goes cold. The long building is a granary. The inner hall is a school. Ysolde teaches counting there. She says it is very important that children learn the days are real.

But the fourth cell at the end of the east wing corridor has not changed.

Grass grows through the floor. Odric's stool sits beside the crack that runs from wall to wall. A clay lamp burns at its edge.

And every evening, Dellan sits on the stool and says names.

The two hundred and four. The hundred and seventeen. The eighty-seven. And every name that has been added since, by anyone who asks. Teren's. Maren's. Hrafn's. Edmar's. Ansel's.

And at the end, every night:

“Varrick. Corlan. Maddoc.”

A pause.

“The voice.”

Nobody has heard Varrick answer in years.

Dellan says that doesn't matter.

He says that the first winter, the lamp would flicker sometimes when he said the last name. As though something very far below had breathed on it.

He says that the second winter, the grass around the crack began to flower.

He says that last spring, when he came in one evening, someone had swept the cell floor.

He does not know who. Nobody does. The door is never locked. Anyone could have done it.

But Dellan sits on Odric's stool every night and says the names and keeps the lamp lit, and he says he does not need to know who swept the floor.

He only needs to keep saying it.

So that whoever is down there, beside the stream where they began, knows they are not forgotten.

And knows the door is open.

The basin is a valley again.

Not the way it was before Ansel, before the hall, before anything. But green. The ash of the outer settlement is gone. There are cottages by the east well with gardens in front of them and children running between them, and there is a road down the climb with shelters on it, and at the bottom of the valley, in a small stone house beside a stream, there is a lamp in the window.

Hollis's house.

Unfolded. All the way. Halemar did it the third spring, one crease at a time, with Vaust beside him ringing his bell at every one, until the house stood whole in the valley exactly where it had stood when a lost woman walked down the stream bed in the dark and saw a light.

Hollis does not live there.

She says she has a shelter to keep, and a goose to keep an eye on, and an old man with an empty pipe who would not know what to do with himself if she left.

But she goes down to the valley once a year. On the longest night. Before she comes south to sit under the pear tree.

She lights the lamp in the window of the house in the valley.

And then she leaves the door open.

Thor is on the far end of the battlements.

She did not come up with Evelyn. She was already here when I arrived, standing at the eastern corner where she can see the river and the ford and the dark line of the forest beyond it, with Mjölnir resting against the parapet beside her.

She is not watching for fire.

She is watching for a light.

There. Across the river. Deep in the forest, which is not burned anymore. A small red glow, very steady, in the place where Hrafn's grave would be if you could see that far.

Surtr keeps watch. Every night. He has never crossed the ford again. He has never sat at a table with any of us. Adriana has never forgiven him, and has never asked anyone else to forgive him either.

But every longest night, a red light burns in the forest across the river. Not fire. Not war.

A lamp.

Thor watches it until it goes out at dawn.

She has never told me why.

I have never asked.

Jörmungandr sleeps in the field outside the eastern gate.

He has slept there every winter since the night he came home. In summer he goes north, to the sea, and Loki goes with him, and the two of them are gone for months and come back with stories that Mary refuses to record because she says she has no way to verify them. Fenrir used to go too. He does not anymore. He is too old for the sea.

But in winter, the World Serpent coils in the frosted field beside the river road with his head on the stone, facing the city.

Facing the lamps.

The children climb on him. He lets them. He says it is the first thing in his very long life that has ever asked his permission.

Caitlin climbed on him before she could walk. She asked first. With her hands, Evelyn says, before she had words. She reached for him and then stopped and looked at his golden eye and waited.

He lowered his head.

Io's daughter is called Thora Elizabeth.

She is a year younger than Caitlin and already as tall, with Io's dark hair and Lexander's patience and an absolute conviction that any door she has not been through yet is a door she ought to try. Seraphina adores her. Ignatius pretends to be exasperated by her and follows her everywhere.

Lisbeth met her at the relay gate the first time she came south.

She looked down at the baby in Io's arms for a long time.

Then she said, “Well. That's a terrible thing to do to a child.”

And then she held her for the rest of the afternoon and did not give her back until Io insisted.

Lirien is eleven.

She is apprenticed to Anwen in the infirmary and to Corran in the chapel at Westmere, on alternating weeks, and she has not yet decided whether she would rather heal people or carve lanterns. Anwen says she will probably do both. Corran says she will probably do neither and become something nobody has thought of yet.

She still talks to the floor.

Every night.

She has never once called it Asta.

“It's what I'm used to,” she says, when people ask. “And she said I could.”

Pell Ardent keeps the lamp in the lower corridor.

He is fifteen now. Callan is grown and married to one of the bakers from the east well and keeps the forty-first lantern in the basin courtyard on the nights Dellan cannot. But Pell still sits on Callan's old stool in the lower corridor of Greykeep every evening, beside a stone lantern with a crooked candle hollow, in front of a stretch of plain gray wall where a door used to be.

Nobody asks him to.

Nobody has asked him to stop.

He says someone should keep it lit. In case.

“Papa,” Caitlin says.

She has been quiet against my shoulder for a long time. I thought she was asleep.

“Yes?”

“Can I tell Asta goodnight? From up here?”

I set her down on the battlements.

She kneels on the cold stone with her small hands flat against it, the way I have knelt at a hundred troughs and fountains and thresholds. The way Lirien knelt beside her bed. The way Hesketh leaned over the pipe at his shelter as a boy and said his name just to see.

“It's Caitlin,” she says. “Caitlin Asta. I'm on the wall with Papa.”

The warmth comes up through the stone.

Not faint. Not far away. Not tired.

The way it comes now. Every night. On every road.

“I know,” Asta says. “I can see you. All of you.” A pause. “Your father's counting lamps again.”

Caitlin giggles.

“He always counts lamps.”

“I know,” Asta says. “He did it the first night. Standing in the courtyard. Before anyone had lit any.”

I go very still.

“The first night,” Asta says gently. “When you came. You stood in the courtyard with weeds between the stones and two women holding out a key. And you looked up at the castle, at every dark window.” A pause. “And you counted them. As though you were already wondering who would light them.”

I do not remember doing that.

I do not doubt that I did.

Caitlin leans close to the stone.

“Asta,” she says. “Do you get lonely? Keeping all the lamps?”

The warmth is quiet for a moment.

“I used to,” Asta says. “A very long time ago. Before anyone knew my name.”

“And now?”

The warmth rises.

Up through the battlements. Through the castle. Through the city with every window lit, and the road with sixty-three shelters, and the coast and the mountains and the marsh and the forest and the valley where a small stone house sits beside a stream with its door standing open.

“Now,” Asta says, “everyone keeps them with me.”

Caitlin is satisfied with that.

She stands up and holds out her arms, and I pick her up, and she puts her head on my shoulder and is asleep before Evelyn has finished telling Carol that it is too cold to make frost flowers on the parapet and Carol has finished making one anyway.

Evelyn looks at me over our daughter's head.

“Bed,” she says.

“One more minute.”

“You said one bell.”

“One more minute,” I say.

She looks at me for a long moment.

Then she comes and stands beside me, with Garrick on her other side and Carol leaning on the parapet with frost on her fingers, and the five of us look north together.

At the lamps.

At the road.

At all of it.

I asked for a place to call my own.

Somewhere not surrounded by problems and tragedy.

I did not get that. Nobody does. There were problems from the first morning, when three men stood in a courtyard full of weeds and demanded a key that was not theirs. There was tragedy. There is still. There is a grave beneath an oak by a stream, and another beside it with a flame burned into its foundation stone. There is a lamp on the third hook above Hesketh's shelter door for a man who did not remember his name until the end.

There is a crack in the floor of a stone cell with grass growing around it.

But I was given something else.

A castle that was waiting. Two women who would not give up the key. A city that learned to light its windows for people it had never met. Roads that go both ways. Doors with no locks on the inside.

And a goddess who had kept a lamp lit for every lost traveler since before there were roads, and who, when someone finally thought to ask, remembered her name.

Below me, in the garden, my grandfather has finished singing.

Aurelia says something to him that makes him laugh, cracked and rusty, the way he laughed on the cliff above the causeway the night he came home. Hollis is shaking her head. Fenrir has not woken.

In the lower corridor, Pell is sitting beside a stone lantern.

On the eastern wall, Adriana has taken her hands off the stone, and is looking north, and is smiling.

In a courtyard three hundred miles away, a young man in an old gray coat is saying the last name on a very long list.

And in a valley beside a stream, in a small stone house with the door standing open, a lamp is burning in the window.

Waiting for whoever is coming.

The Crown on my palm is warm.

It always has been, on nights like this.

The first year, I thought it was amused.

I know better now.

It is only glad.

Glad that someone came. Glad that someone stayed. Glad that every window is lit, and every road is kept, and every door is open.

Glad that the castle that waited so long for a king to come home is finally, truly, what the goddess promised when she asked me what I wanted, and I said please.

A place to call my own.

And everyone else's too.

Evelyn takes my hand.

“Come home,” she says.

I already am.

I always will be.

The End.