Chapter 660: The Sun

Ormond did not get up for most of a day.

The people of the Court laid him on a pallet in a small round room off the passage, and Isole went in and out of it every hour with her sleeves rolled up and her face set, and came out each time saying nothing at all. Vane went in once, near evening.

Ormond was lying on his back looking at the ceiling. His face was the color of the pale stone. The binding had cost him something Isole could not fully put back, and Vane could feel it from the doorway: a thinness in the man’s field, like a wall that has been leaned on too hard.

"Usurper," said Ormond, without turning his head.

"Isole says you’ll live."

"Isole says a great deal, very quietly." His pale eyes moved to Vane. "I’m told the boy is going home."

"Yes."

"And coming back when he’s older. If he chooses." Ormond was silent for a moment. "That was the girl’s doing. Your sister. Not yours." It did not sound like a criticism.

"I know."

"Good. You should." He looked back at the ceiling. "I’m staying."

Vane waited.

"Someone has to hold the space when the singing thins," Ormond said. "It’ll thin again. Wren is ninety. The new voices, when they come, won’t be ready for years. There will be nights when it starts to wake, and there’s nobody in the world who can close that space as well as I can." He said it without pride, as a plain fact. "I spent my life building things that held. This one needs holding. I’ll hold it."

"Down here."

"Down here." Ormond almost smiled. "Nobody is coming, Usurper. I told you that once. I was wrong about why." He closed his eyes. "Go and write your terms. I’m tired."

Vane stood in the doorway a moment longer. He did not say I forgive you. He did not think he did, and Ormond had not asked. But at the door he stopped.

"Corin says you never once called him by a number."

Ormond did not open his eyes.

"No," he said. "I didn’t."

Valerica wrote the terms that night, at a table of white coral in the hall of green lamps, with Ysra on the other side of it and Isaac at her elbow, and they took four hours.

They were simple, in the end. Valerica said that the best terms always were. The Court beneath the water would go on singing, as it had for three hundred years. But the voices that joined it would come from the Accord, from every Palace and every shore, and they would be grown men and women who knew what they were saying yes to. Not for a lifetime. For a term of years, and then home again to see the sun, and another to take their place. And with every voice would come hands: healers, binders, readers of dreams, to stand beside the singers on the nights when the deep stirred, so that nobody would ever again sit on that ledge alone for forty years.

No children. Ever. That was the first clause, and Valerica wrote it twice.

At the bottom of the page, Ysra made her mark: a small spiral, drawn in green ink. Then she looked across the table at Vane.

"You’ll carry this to Thessaly’s table," she said. "And make them keep it."

"Yes."

"They didn’t, last time." The old woman’s eyes were very sharp. "They agreed it, and then they forgot why. And when the Unbound came asking to be counted, they turned them away, and made a law against them, and kept the voices by force instead." She tapped the page with one bent finger. "The Court will come up to the table this time. For the first time since we went down. We’ll sit in the seventh chair, and we’ll watch."

"Good," said Vane. "Watch closely."

The Court had given them a single long room to sleep in, and by midnight they were all in it, too tired to care about the arrangement. Nyx had not let go of Vane’s sleeve since the well. Ashe was asleep sitting up against the wall with her sword across her knees. Isaac had fallen asleep face down on a pile of grey-green cushions and was steaming gently.

"For the record," Valerica murmured into the dark, "I have now held a sea monster down with my bare hands, and I would like it noted somewhere official."

"I’ll put it in Isaac’s letter," said Isole. "Under weather."

Nyx laughed into Vane’s shoulder, once, and was asleep before she had finished.

They took Wren up at dawn.

Isaac had to remake the stair. The ice column had held through the night, but the top of it had begun to melt in the sun, and he stood at the bottom of it with his hands pressed to the frozen wall for an hour before he was satisfied, grumbling the whole time about being treated as a staircase. Then Ashe carried the old woman up. Wren weighed almost nothing. She sat in Ashe’s arms with her thin hands folded in her lap and her washed-out eyes turned upward, toward the faint grey light at the top of the column, and did not say a word all the way up.

Mara climbed beside them, counting the steps.

At the top, Sarai Vell had brought the Lark down so that its deck was level with the mouth of the stair. Ashe stepped across onto the planks and set Wren down very carefully in the middle of the deck, and stood back.

The sun was just coming up over the eastern edge of the sea.

It came up gold and enormous out of the green water, and its light went out across the waves and over the rail of the Lark and onto the deck, and touched the old woman’s face.

Wren Calloway lifted her head.

For a long moment she did not move at all. She simply sat there with her face turned toward the light and her eyes half closed, the way a cat sits in a window. The morning wind moved her thin white hair. The Lark’s panes rang softly around her.

"Oh," she said.

Nobody else spoke. Even Nyx, who had something to say about everything, sat on the cabin roof with her chin on her knees and said nothing. Isole stood with one hand pressed against her mouth. Valerica had turned away to look at the sea.

Corin sat down on the deck beside the old woman. After a moment, carefully, he took her hand, the way Mara had taken his.

"Is it how you remember?" he asked.

Wren thought about it. The light was full on her face now, and her pale eyes were wet, and she was smiling.

"No," she said. "It’s warmer."

She sat there in the sun for an hour. Then she asked to be taken back down, because the deep was quiet but not forever, and Corin was going home, and someone had to sing until the new voices came. Ashe carried her back to the stair. At the top of it, Wren stopped her, and turned her face one more time toward the morning.

"Tell them," she said, to nobody in particular. "Tell them up here. It’s very warm. Somebody should know."

"I’ll write it down," said Mara.

And she did.