Chapter 93: The Light Kept for Him

Lexander found Thor in the passage outside the receiving hall, holding a coat that belonged to someone considerably smaller than she was.

She had hooked it over two fingers. One cuff had been turned back twice. There was a badly repaired tear beneath the arm, and the lining had been replaced with a different shade of wool.

For a moment, he thought she had been asked to carry it somewhere.

Then he saw the way she was looking at it.

“Whose?” he asked.

“One of the children leaving with the grain wagons. He dropped it.”

“Have they gone?”

“Not yet.”

She continued studying the little coat as if the answer to something difficult had been sewn into its lining.

Lexander waited beside her. Through the open door at the end of the passage, he could hear a wheel being persuaded into alignment with several blunt blows. Someone protested that hitting it harder would not make the axle straighter. The next blow sounded harder.

Thor lowered her hand.

“Aurelia's going north.”

“With Uriah?”

“And the others who know the road.”

“You?”

“No.”

She said it without looking at him.

He had known his sister in fury and in grief, had watched her endure wounds that would have ended mortal lives, had seen her make decisions quickly enough to look like instinct. This stillness was harder to read.

“What did she say?” he asked.

Thor rubbed her thumb over the small, rolled cuff.

“She asked me what I would do if it were one of mine.”

Outside, a child shouted that he could find his coat himself.

Thor shut her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she went to the door.

“Then you should begin by looking where you left it.”

The boy took the coat with an expression of profound injury at the injustice of being found forgetful by a goddess. He thrust one arm into it, missed the other sleeve, and tried to continue running anyway.

Thor caught the collar.

“Both arms. You will need both.”

She held him long enough to settle the coat over his shoulders. He escaped without thanking her. She watched until he reached the wagons.

Only then did she turn back.

“I would go,” she said.

Lexander nodded.

“So would I.”

“I know.”

There was no comfort in the agreement. It merely brought the shape of the choice into view.

They walked toward the map room together.

Io had been in Greykeep less than an hour when Evelyn told her that Aurelia had thought her son dead.

They were folding clean cloth at a worktable near the infirmary. Evelyn had begun doing it before Io arrived, and Io had recognized the kind of task it was: something simple enough for hands to accomplish while the mind circled a thing it could neither solve nor leave alone.

“She believed she felt him die,” Evelyn said.

Io flattened a crease with her palm.

“And now?”

“Now she doesn't know what she felt.”

Below them, somewhere beyond the stairs, a voice began the travelers' song. Another joined it after a few uncertain notes. The singing no longer startled Io. Sometimes its absence did.

“Uriah told her?”

Evelyn nodded.

“I found them in the garden.” She folded a strip too narrowly, opened it, and began again. “She kept saying she hadn't answered him.”

Io looked at her friend's face.

“She couldn't hear him.”

“I told her.”

“Did she believe you?”

“For a breath, perhaps.”

Io set her cloth down.

There had been mornings, before the work at the First Grave was finished, when she had looked at Lexander asleep beside her and tried to remember every moment she might have recognized the danger sooner. The mind could make a ladder of such moments. It could climb them endlessly without reaching any useful height.

“She may need to hear it more than once,” Io said.

“Yes.”

“And not only today.”

Evelyn's hands stopped moving.

For a while they stood without speaking. Then Evelyn leaned her hip against the table and breathed out with the tired impatience of someone whose body had begun submitting demands independently of her plans.

“Thor told me I was staying.”

“I imagine you took that well.”

“I told her I wasn't made of glass.”

“Were those your only words?”

Evelyn glanced at her.

Io smiled a little.

“She had reasons,” Evelyn admitted. “Good ones. I disliked them enormously.”

“That's usually how one recognizes them.”

Evelyn laughed, briefly enough that it almost escaped her notice.

Io drew a chair out from beneath the table with her foot and waited. Evelyn regarded it with suspicion.

“You too?”

“I intend to sit in the other one.”

That, apparently, was acceptable. They sat together, the cloth between them, with the window open just far enough to admit the smell of rain from the yard.

Evelyn rested a hand against her belly.

“Does yours make you hungry at the least convenient moments?”

“Thora has developed strong opinions about when I should stop working.”

“Mine objects to the smell of a perfectly respectable stew.”

“Has anyone informed the cook?”

“No. I would rather fight Varrick.”

Io laughed properly at that, then covered her mouth when someone glanced through the doorway.

Evelyn shook her head.

“Let them hear.”

Below the infirmary, the song continued. A singer lost the tune and found it again. Io listened until she knew which verse they had reached, then returned to folding.

They had enough fear in the building. A little laughter could be allowed to stay.

Lexander was not part of the small meeting that decided who would travel north. He heard the decision afterward from Uriah, standing over a map whose corners had begun to curl despite the weights holding them down.

Aurelia. Uriah. Saelis. Ysolde. Cael. Sefa, who knew the lighthouse and the tides.

Aelune would carry them.

Thor would hold Greykeep. Adriana would remain near the threat already within its walls. Evelyn would stay where her healing could reach the people Varrick might hurt while the others were away.

Lexander studied the northern coast.

“There isn't a useful army you can put on a causeway,” he said.

“No.”

“And no certainty that force will open the house.”

“No.”

Uriah had one hand against the edge of the table. His fingers were spread, the heel of his palm taking more of his weight than it needed to.

Lexander moved a map weight away from the coast road. Beneath it, a small section of ink had blurred where somebody's wet sleeve had dragged across it.

“Tell me what you need here.”

Uriah looked up.

The question seemed to reach him more slowly than it should have.

“Thor has the defenses.”

“Yes.”

“Castellan has the watches and the gate.”

“Yes.”

“There are stores still coming from Concordia.”

“They will continue.”

Uriah looked back at the map.

“I don't know,” he said at last.

Lexander stayed beside him.

“Then I can begin with the things you shouldn't have to remember while you're there.”

Uriah's mouth moved without quite becoming a smile.

“That's a long list.”

“I have a council. They enjoy lists.”

“You make that sound like a virtue.”

“At times it has proved almost indistinguishable from one.”

For a moment they were simply two men at a table, tired enough to find the smallest joke useful.

Then Uriah looked north again.

“I don't know what I'll say if it's him.”

Lexander had no answer prepared. He considered offering reassurance and found nothing in it that Uriah could use.

“When I don't know what to say to someone I love,” he said, “Io generally recommends that I stop looking for the impressive version.”

“That sounds like her.”

“It is frequently inconvenient advice.”

“And does it work?”

“More often than anything I devise myself.”

Uriah nodded once.

Lexander put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed it, and left him the map.

Hrafn's grave was wider than Edmar's.

The difference struck Lexander before anything else. Two openings in the same earth, beneath the same oak, and still the world insisted upon the particular shape of each person it had lost.

The giants worked without asking for tools made for smaller hands. Earth rose in heavy, dark clods. Roots were eased aside where they could be and cut where they could not. Skarn paused once to examine the slope toward the stream, then spoke to the others and shifted the edge of the grave farther from the lowest ground.

Lexander understood none of the words. He understood the care.

Julian had brought a foundation stone.

He stood beside it while the digging finished, his hands reddened by its weight. The stone had been cut square. Its faces were plain. He had brushed away the dust, but a pale trace remained caught beneath one fingernail.

Io stood next to Lexander. She had said little on the walk from the relay station. Now she slipped her hand into his.

Across the gathering, Surtr waited at the edge of the oak's shadow.

Lexander could not look at him without remembering fire in places that should have held beds, tables, toys. Nor could he look at Julian without remembering the boy on the riverbank, trusting the destroyer to burn one mark from his father's helmet while leaving the other intact.

There was no easy arrangement of those memories.

The grave was filled. Julian set the stone. He checked its position with the concentration of a student determined to do something properly for a teacher who could no longer correct him.

Lexander heard him mention the spring floods.

Io's fingers tightened.

Skarn spoke to Surtr.

The answer came low enough that Lexander felt it as much as heard it. After a silence, Skarn moved aside.

Surtr approached the grave and knelt.

Heat touched Lexander's face. Under the broad, dark hand, the stone brightened red, then white. Io did not step away, though he felt the muscles of her arm tighten beside his.

When the hand lifted, a small upright flame remained burned into the stone.

Surtr said he would know if anyone tried to take Hrafn.

Then he rose and went toward the river.

Nobody applauded him. Nobody called him back.

Lexander watched until the trees interrupted the view, then turned to the grave again.

Julian was still standing by the stone.

“He chose it well,” Io said softly.

Lexander looked at the level top, the solid setting, the ground falling gently away toward the stream.

“Yes.”

They remained until the giants began to leave.

On the path back, Io stopped to shake a pebble from her shoe. Lexander offered his arm. She used it, balancing easily, and looked toward the oak once more.

“I won't make what he did today smaller,” she said.

Lexander knew whom she meant.

“Neither will I.”

“But I won't let it make everything else smaller either.”

He bent to pick up the pebble she had shaken loose, then dropped it clear of the path.

“No.”

She put her shoe back on. They went together toward the relay station, where someone was already unloading sacks of flour and asking where they should be stacked.

Concordia smelled of bread when they returned.

The ordinary warmth of it caught Lexander unprepared. A baker had opened a side door into the lane, and a boy in an apron was carrying a tray with his sleeves pulled over his hands. Beyond him, two women were arguing over whether a delivery had been counted twice.

Lexander had spent so long learning the sounds of alarm that he sometimes forgot how much noise a city made when nothing was wrong.

At home, Seraphina was waiting with a question.

“Did the giant go where Edmar went?”

Io unfastened her cloak slowly.

“The people who were with him believe he found the road.”

“Adriana helped?”

“Yes.”

Seraphina considered that. Ignatius, seated on the floor with the repaired wooden horse between his knees, looked up.

“Will he need his stone?”

Lexander sat beside him.

“The stone is here so people can remember where he's buried.”

“Oh.” Ignatius rubbed a finger along the horse's new join. “Then he won't have to carry it.”

“No.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He lifted the horse and demonstrated that all four legs still held.

Seraphina had not finished.

“Could Aunt Thor bring Aurelia's boy home?”

“She's staying in Greykeep,” Lexander said.

“Why?”

“To help keep everyone there safe.”

Seraphina frowned. It was an expression he recognized from Io, though it had acquired its own particular seriousness on their daughter's face.

“If someone is lost, shouldn't the strongest go?”

Lexander rested his forearms on his knees.

“Sometimes the person who knows the way is the one you need most.”

“Does Aunt Thor not know?”

“Not this way.”

Seraphina leaned against his shoulder, dissatisfied with an answer that made strength less useful than she had hoped.

He understood that too.

Io sat in the chair near the hearth. Ignatius immediately carried the horse to her, holding it at the height of her belly.

“For Thora,” he explained.

“When she's bigger,” Io said.

“When she can hold it.”

“Yes.”

He lowered it reluctantly.

Lexander watched his son inspect the repaired leg once more. The join would remain visible. He had used a small piece of darker wood because it was what he had and because Ignatius had refused the suggestion of a different horse.

“What if she breaks it?” Seraphina asked.

Ignatius looked distressed.

Then he looked at Lexander.

“We could fix it.”

“We could try,” Lexander said.

Io met his eye over their son's head.

For a little while, no one asked him to promise more than that.

They were back in Greykeep before the northern party departed.

Lexander had slept badly, but he had slept. The distinction mattered to Io, who had made him eat before they used the gate and had threatened to ask his sister to enforce breakfast if he became difficult.

“I thought we agreed to keep military threats out of our marriage,” he had said.

“We agreed no such thing.”

Now they stood in the cold yard while Aelune lowered herself for her passengers.

There were fewer preparations than Lexander had expected. A handful of bags. A careful adjustment of straps. Instructions repeated because wind and nerves made people miss things the first time.

Sefa moved with the deliberate economy of someone who knew the cost of falling. Ysolde helped her. Cael checked a fastening, checked it again, then made himself stop.

Aurelia wore a traveling coat.

Lexander had seen her authority fill rooms. This morning it seemed to gather tightly around her, held close so that nothing escaped before she could reach the place she needed to go.

She looked at Thor.

His sister inclined her head.

No grand assurance passed between them. There was nothing useful to add to the promise already made.

Io went to Evelyn, who stood with her arms folded against the cold. Lexander remained beside Thor.

When Aelune rose, the wind of her wings sent dust racing across the stones. Lexander turned his face from it. By the time he looked up again, she was climbing, the raven a small dark movement beside her.

Thor watched until they were difficult to distinguish from the sky.

Then she turned.

“Show me the latest watch changes.”

The officer waiting near the arch straightened. Thor went with him without looking back.

Lexander followed.

Holding a city involved far more questions about hinges than the songs admitted.

A service door near the lower stores had begun sticking in damp weather. Two watch posts had been given conflicting instructions about the passage beneath the infirmary. A cart of bedding had reached the gate without the healer who was meant to explain where it should go.

Thor dealt with the watches. Lexander found the healer, discovered she had been called to a sick child before leaving Concordia, and asked Io where the bedding was needed.

By midmorning the service door opened smoothly, the watch orders agreed, and the bedding had reached three places instead of being piled uselessly in one.

None of it made the northern coast closer.

At the lower corridor, the song moved among changing voices.

Lexander had expected solemnity. There was some. There were also sore throats, missed verses, an argument over a cup that belonged to someone else, and a woman who insisted everyone was beginning too low.

Callan sat with his record of the bell. Someone had brought him food. He had eaten enough of it to prove he had started and left the rest within reach.

Lexander stopped beside him.

“May I?”

Callan moved his foot, making room on the bench.

The door beneath the infirmary remained where Varrick had made it.

Lexander could look at it now without feeling the old machinery reach for him. That absence was becoming familiar, though not comfortable. His fear still knew the route. It arrived out of habit and found the particular summons gone.

He let his hands rest open on his thighs.

Callan glanced at him, then at the door, then back to his record.

“Do you sing?”

“According to my wife, occasionally.”

“According to you?”

“More successfully when no one can hear.”

Callan nodded with the gravity of someone considering useful information.

“There are several people here who would benefit from that arrangement.”

Lexander laughed before he could prevent it.

The woman who had objected to the starting note looked at them sharply.

Callan lowered his eyes to the page.

When the next verse began, Lexander joined it.

He knew enough of the tune now to follow. The words still surprised him in places. They had once sounded like the sort of old song carried from camp to camp because nobody remembered who had first sung it. Now every familiar turn seemed to lead toward a door he had never noticed in it.

His voice was not particularly good.

It was sufficient to stand beside the others.

Io found Thor in the yard at noon, watching three men move a stack of timber away from an access passage.

“Your brother is singing,” she said.

“He does that.”

“With other people.”

Thor looked at her.

“Voluntarily?”

“Apparently.”

“That is concerning.”

Io offered her the folded piece of bread she had brought. Thor accepted it without taking her eyes from the timber.

One of the men tried to lift more than he could comfortably carry. Thor's expression changed. He reconsidered and set half the load down.

“Does it help?” Io asked.

“What?”

“Making the rest of us behave sensibly.”

“Very little. You resist.”

Io leaned against the stone beside her.

For a while they ate and watched the work. The last beam was moved. The passage opened. Thor nodded to the men, who looked relieved to receive so modest a conclusion to being supervised by thunder.

“You wanted to go,” Io said.

“Yes.”

“You still do.”

“Yes.”

Io brushed crumbs from her sleeve.

“Lexander wanted to go as well.”

“He has more sense than to add himself to a journey because waiting offends him.”

“Sometimes.”

Thor glanced at her and almost smiled.

Then the smile disappeared.

“She named my children.”

Io waited.

“Asked what I would do for them.” Thor folded the last of the bread in her hand. “I could have argued the danger until evening. It would all have been true. It would have changed nothing.”

“No.”

“I have walked toward terrible things for reasons far less worthy.”

Io watched a small puddle tremble as a cart passed beyond the archway.

“She has people with her who can help.”

“I know.”

“And people here who can make sure there is a home to return to.”

Thor looked toward the castle.

“That sounds almost wise enough to be irritating.”

“I've had practice.”

“With my brother.”

“With both of you.”

Thor finally ate the rest of the bread.

The afternoon passed without news.

Lexander returned briefly to Concordia to hear the matters Lysandra had held for him. A dispute over compensation for a storehouse. A request to extend the hours at which the gate received ordinary deliveries. Two households wishing to take in relatives who had reached the roads but had no settled place to live.

He listened. Asked questions. Made decisions where they were his to make.

At the end, Lysandra closed the last document and looked at him across the table.

“You've asked the time three times.”

“Have I?”

“Yes.”

He looked toward the window.

“The tide matters.”

“Does knowing the hour here change it there?”

“No.”

She did not soften the question by pretending she had meant something else.

Lexander rubbed his face.

“Have the stores for the coast been set aside?”

“They have. Until we know where they can be received, they will remain dry, accounted for, and ready.”

“Good.”

“And the children have eaten. Before you ask.”

He looked back at her.

She lifted an eyebrow.

“Your daughter informed a servant that you might forget supper because you were helping a mother find her boy.”

His throat tightened unexpectedly.

“I hope the servant was discreet.”

“Extremely. Only the kitchen knows.”

“Then I can expect several people to feed me by force.”

“I would cooperate.”

He did.

He ate with Seraphina and Ignatius, listened to a lengthy explanation of why the horse needed a blanket despite being made of wood, and sent a message to Io saying he would bring food when he returned.

At the nursery door, Seraphina caught his sleeve.

“When they come back, will you tell us?”

“If you're awake.”

“If we're asleep?”

“In the morning.”

She thought about that and nodded.

Ignatius had already curled around the horse. Its new blanket was too large and trailed across his knees.

Lexander tucked it beneath the little wooden body, kissed both children, and left the room without checking the window a second time.

Halfway down the stairs, he realized what he had done.

He stopped.

The urge to go back rose with such clarity that he could almost feel his hand on the nursery latch.

Then he took the next step down.

Dusk drew the warmth out of Greykeep's stone.

Io ate beside Evelyn in a quiet room near the infirmary. Neither of them had much appetite until they began. Then the bread, cheese, and cold meat disappeared steadily enough to make Io suspect they had both waited too long.

Evelyn poured more water.

“I keep thinking of what she'll see.”

“The house?”

“The door.”

Io set down her cup.

Evelyn stared at the table.

“What if he's there and she can't open it?”

Outside, footsteps passed quickly and continued down the stair.

Io let them fade before she answered.

“Then she'll have people beside her who understand that a closed door can lie about what is possible.”

Evelyn looked at her.

Io thought of the stone chamber, of Lexander standing far from her while the old claims were isolated, of the terrible simplicity of waiting for somebody else's hands to finish the work that would determine the shape of their lives.

“I hated being unable to reach him,” she said.

“At the grave?”

She nodded.

“I knew why I was where I was. I had agreed to it. I still wanted to cross the distance every time someone took too long to answer.”

“What stopped you?”

“Knowing that wanting to be closer and being able to help were different things.”

Evelyn rested her forehead against one hand.

“I dislike that distinction.”

“So do I.”

They sat together until a healer came to ask for Evelyn. Io gathered the plates while her friend went to the door.

Evelyn paused there.

“When Thora comes, you know you can send for me.”

Io looked up.

“I know.”

“Even if everything is quiet. Even if you decide afterward that you didn't need me.”

Io smiled.

“I doubt I would decide that.”

Evelyn's answering smile was tired and warm.

Then she went where she was needed, and Io carried the plates out herself.

By full dark, Thor had checked the lower passage twice and the walls once.

On the second visit to the passage, Lexander intercepted her before she could begin a third conversation with the same watch officer.

“Walk with me.”

“I am walking.”

“In a different direction.”

She gave him a look that would once have sent sensible people looking for shelter. He held out the cup he had brought.

“It's warm.”

“That is not a compelling argument.”

“It's all I have.”

She took it.

They went up to a sheltered stretch of wall. The city below them showed itself in separate lights: windows, lamps, a forge burning late, the moving glow of someone crossing a yard.

Farther off lay the river.

Thor leaned her forearms against the stone, cup between her hands.

“Three hours,” she said.

Lexander did not ask what she meant.

“Perhaps a little more. Sefa said the water comes in quickly.”

He looked north. Darkness made the distance impossible to measure.

“Have you ever tried to protect someone so thoroughly,” he asked, “that you nearly forgot they were supposed to be living?”

Thor turned her head.

“That sounds like a question for a man married to Io.”

“It may be.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I put the children to bed. I started to go back and check something I had already checked.”

“And?”

“I didn't.”

His sister studied him for a moment, then looked over the city again.

“Good.”

The word was quieter than he expected.

“I'll make mistakes,” he said.

“You already do.”

“Thank you.”

“Regularly.”

“I was trying to have a serious conversation.”

“I am taking your mistakes very seriously.”

He laughed. After a moment, she did too.

It left the silence easier to bear.

Below them, a door opened and someone called a name. A child answered from much farther away than the caller had expected. The voice changed at once from impatience to alarm, then back to impatience when the child came into view.

Thor listened until both had gone inside.

“You won't keep them from every danger,” she said.

“I know.”

“You'll hate knowing it.”

“I do.”

She nudged his shoulder with hers.

“But you've given them something we didn't have.”

He waited.

“They won't have to spend their lives finishing the thing that was done to you.”

Lexander looked at his hands on the stone.

For once, he let that be enough.

The raven came after the waiting had grown heavy enough to feel permanent.

Lexander heard the wingbeats before he saw him. Thor straightened so abruptly that a little water spilled from her cup onto the parapet.

Saelis landed nearby and changed.

For a heartbeat he seemed unable to choose where to look. His gaze moved from Thor to Lexander, then toward the castle windows.

“Evelyn,” he said. “Adriana.”

Thor was already moving.

Lexander followed, leaving the cups where they stood.

They found the others quickly. Io came from the infirmary passage with Evelyn, saw Saelis, and stopped. Adriana joined them before anyone had settled into a room.

There was no ceremony to it. They stood in a passage beneath an ordinary lamp, and Saelis told them that Aurelia's son was free.

Lexander heard Io draw breath.

Evelyn put a hand against the wall.

“He opened it?” Thor asked.

Saelis nodded.

“He opened it himself.”

The words changed the air around them.

As Saelis spoke, Lexander began to understand what had waited on the island. The king had sealed the house because Varrick had told him that staying there would protect the family sent through Aurelia's passage. A wife. Children. Lives beyond his reach. Fear had been made into a duty, and duty into a lock.

Years had passed. He had counted them on the wall.

Lexander felt Io's hand find his.

The trap had not needed to extinguish love. It had needed to tell a frightened man what love required.

Saelis told them of Uriah at the door. Of Ysolde speaking about the steps she had counted. Of Cael speaking of his grandmother at the lighthouse. Of Aurelia refusing the lie that had kept her son beyond her reach.

“And Varrick?” Thor asked.

“Was there.”

Her face hardened.

“The king heard him,” Saelis continued. “And opened the door anyway.”

For several breaths, no one spoke.

Then Evelyn asked about his condition, and practical questions gave them somewhere to put their hands and voices. Weak. Unable to make the crossing without help. Alive. With Aurelia. At the lighthouse when Saelis left.

The causeway had nearly drowned beneath them.

At that, Thor closed her hand against her thigh.

But the people along the coast had kept the lamps. They had sung. The Keeper had reached the road beneath the tide, and the black frost had melted from the stones.

Io leaned a little closer to Lexander.

He thought of the voices downstairs, the uncertain notes, Callan guarding a half-eaten meal, a woman insisting they begin the song properly. He had not understood how much work an ordinary voice might accomplish when it answered another.

Saelis's own voice softened as he described the headland.

The old king had been given hot tea.

That was the detail that undid Evelyn. She covered her mouth and turned toward Io, who caught her before she could pretend she had merely lost her balance.

Thor looked away, jaw tight.

Lexander watched the messenger. There was relief in his face, but something else too: the uncertainty of someone whose oldest burden had vanished so completely that he had not yet learned how to stand without it.

“The message?” Lexander asked gently.

Saelis glanced at him.

“The one you carried all that time.”

“Gone.”

He looked toward the open end of the passage, where the night waited beyond the windows.

Lexander knew that absence now. Not the same absence, never exactly the same, but enough to recognize the strange space a finished suffering could leave behind.

After a moment, Saelis drew himself upright.

He had another message to give them.

The king was coming home.

They did not wake the whole castle.

News traveled anyway, in the ways good news traveled when people had grown cautious about raising their voices. A hand against an arm. A whisper at a doorway. Someone stepping into the lower passage and waiting until the verse ended before telling the singers.

Lexander went with Io to prepare a room.

There were people better placed to decide which room, and healers better placed to decide what it required. They asked, listened, and took the tasks left over. Io checked the blankets. Lexander moved a chair closer to the bed, then farther away when she pointed out that someone might need to pass between them.

“Leave room on that side,” she said.

“For the healers?”

“For his mother.”

He moved the chair again.

There was a lamp on the table. He filled it, trimmed the wick, and lit it. The flame steadied after a brief wavering.

Io opened the door fully and stepped back to look at the room.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He waited.

She touched the edge of the door.

“I was thinking we should ask him whether he wants this closed.”

Lexander looked from her hand to the handle.

“Yes.”

“People will want to keep out noise. Give him quiet. They'll mean well.”

“Yes,” he said again. “We'll ask.”

They left it open while they worked.

Later, Lexander sent a short message through the gate for the nursery in Concordia. It was to be read in the morning, unless the children were already awake.

They found him. His mother is with him. He is coming home.

He considered adding more, then folded it.

Io stood beside him while the messenger departed.

“Seraphina will have questions,” she said.

“She always does.”

“Ignatius will want to know whether he needs a horse.”

“He may offer mine.”

“He'll offer his own. Yours can't climb onto a bed.”

Lexander smiled, then put an arm around her shoulders.

For a little while they remained at the quiet end of the passage, listening to Greykeep prepare for someone it had believed lost.

Somewhere below, the song began again.

This time, when Lexander joined it, Io joined him.