Chapter 658: Wren

The great dome had no floor.

Where a floor should have been, there was water. A wide round well of it, black and still, filling the whole center of the hall from wall to wall except for a narrow ledge of pale stone that ran around its edge. The well went straight down into the dark. Vane could not see the bottom. He did not think it had one. The green lamplight lay across its surface without going in.

On the ledge, at the very edge of the water, an old woman was sitting with her feet in the sea.

She was very small and very old, older than Ysra, older than anyone Vane had ever seen except perhaps Thessaly. Her hair was white and thin and hung loose down her back to the stone. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her eyes were closed. And she was singing: the long, low, endless note they had heard from the passage, coming out of her so steadily that she barely seemed to breathe.

Beside her, cross-legged on the stone with his own bare feet in the water, sat Corin.

He looked well. That was the first thing Vane noticed, and it surprised him. The boy was clean, and fed, and wrapped in a grey-green robe like the people of the Court, and his face was calm. His eyes were closed too. He was humming the same note as the old woman, a little higher, a little unsteady, holding it beneath hers like a second rope tied to the same post.

Neither of them looked up.

"Wait," Ysra said softly. "She’ll stop soon. He’s learned to hold it alone for a little while now. A few minutes. Then she can rest."

They waited.

After a time, the old woman’s voice thinned, and wavered, and very gently stopped. Corin’s note went on without it, alone in the great hall, wavering a little and then steadying, the boy’s face tight with concentration. Vane felt the water in the well shiver very slightly, and then go still again.

The old woman opened her eyes. They were a pale, washed-out blue, and they did not quite see.

"Visitors," she said. Her voice was a dry whisper, worn almost to nothing. "Ysra. We have visitors. I can smell the sun on them."

Her name was not something she said. She did not seem to remember that she had one. Ysra called her the singer, and the people of the Court called her the singer, and when Vane asked how long she had been here, she smiled and said, "Since I was small," as if that answered it.

It was Mara who found it.

She had taken out her ledger as soon as they came into the hall, and she was kneeling on the pale stone a little way along the ledge with it open on her knees, running her finger down the page where she had copied the Meridian’s list. Nine names. She stopped at the last one.

Then she got up and went and sat down on the ledge beside the old woman, quite close, and looked at her for a long moment.

"Wren," Mara said.

The old woman went still.

"Wren Calloway," said Mara, reading. "Saltreach. Ten." She looked up from the page. "That’s you. Isn’t it."

Nobody in the hall moved. Even Corin’s note faltered for a moment, and then caught again.

The old woman turned her pale eyes toward Mara’s voice. Her mouth opened and closed. Her folded hands had begun, very slightly, to shake.

"Nobody’s said that," she whispered. "Not since the boat. Not in..." She stopped. "I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten it was mine."

"It’s written down," said Mara. "In two places now."

Wren Calloway put out one thin hand, feeling for her, and found Mara’s sleeve, and held it. She did not say anything else for a long time. Mara did not move.

"I said yes," Wren said, much later. She was sitting with her feet still in the water and Isole’s palm resting between her shoulder blades, and some of the color had come back into her face. "I want you to know that. Nobody took me. They came to Saltreach, and they asked who had a voice, and they said it would be the bravest thing a girl could ever do, and I said yes." Her pale eyes moved toward Vane. "I was ten. I’d have said yes to anything brave."

"Would you say it again?" asked Vane.

She thought about it. She thought for a long time.

"Yes," she said. "I think I would. It’s held. All this while, it’s held." She was quiet. "There were three of us when I came. Old Tamsin, and a man from the hills, and me. Then it was two. Then it was only me. Forty years, only me. I kept waiting for the next one to come down." Her hand tightened on Mara’s sleeve. "I’d have liked to see the sun again, though. Just once. I used to dream about it."

Behind Vane, someone moved. It was Ormond. He had come in quietly and was standing at the edge of the archway with his good arm folded across his chest.

"He sings it better than she does now," Ormond said. His voice was very low, so as not to disturb the note. "In two years he’ll hold it alone. In ten, he’ll hold it for eighty years more, and the sea will stay down for all of them, and there will be no breaches on your shore, Usurper, and no scales coming up off the Hesket shelf, and nobody will ever know why." He looked at Corin. "I spent twenty years making a weapon that nobody wanted. This is the first thing I’ve ever made that holds the world up."

"You didn’t make him," said Vane.

"No," Ormond agreed. "I only brought him. That was the part that needed doing."

"And he never sees the sun."

Ormond met his eyes and did not look away.

"Yes," he said.

Vane went and crouched on the ledge beside Corin.

The boy was still holding the note, alone, his eyes closed, his small face set. Vane waited until it wavered, and Wren, beside him, took a breath and picked it up again, and Corin’s voice fell quiet. Then the boy opened his eyes and looked at him.

"You’re the one from the road," Corin said. "Ormond talks about you."

"Does he."

"He says you’re stupid." Corin considered him. "He says it like it’s good."

"Corin," said Vane. "Do you want to go home?"

The boy looked at him for a long time. Then he looked at the black water at his feet, and the old woman singing beside him, and the green lamps, and the quiet pale people of the Court standing back against the walls.

"Nobody measures me here," he said at last. "Nobody holds a rod against my arm. Nobody writes me down as a number." He swallowed. "It’s quiet. I like the quiet."

Vane did not know what to say. He realized, crouching there, that he had come all this way with an answer and had never once asked the question.

"I don’t know," Corin said. "I don’t know if I want to go home."

Beside him, Wren Calloway’s note thinned.

It did not stop gently this time. It cracked, like a thread pulled too tight, and broke off in the middle of a breath, and the old woman doubled over on the ledge with both hands pressed to her chest.

Corin grabbed for the note and caught it. But his voice was thin and frightened, and wavering, and far too small.

And far below them, at the bottom of the well that had no bottom, something turned over in its sleep.