Chapter 1: The Kettle

My son woke at two in the morning and wanted to discuss my nose.

He was nine months old. He had opinions about very few things. My nose was one of them.

Seraphina pretended to be asleep for the first ten minutes. Then she pretended to be asleep for another ten with her eyes open. Then she rolled over and said, "He's yours until dawn," and went back to sleep with the efficiency of a woman who had decided something.

So little Uriah and I discussed my nose.

He held it with both hands. He told me about it at length. None of his words had consonants yet, which made the argument difficult to follow, but I gathered that he approved of the nose in principle and had reservations about its placement.

At some point he fell asleep on my chest.

At some later point, so did I.

When I woke the window was still dark and he was back in his cradle. I had not put him there. Seraphina could fold a short distance in her sleep when she wanted to, and apparently she had wanted to.

She was curled on her side with one hand trailing off the bed toward the cradle. The First Flame showed faintly beneath her skin the way it always did when she slept, a warmth more than a light.

I dressed in the dark and went down.

Forty-one stairs from our rooms to the east wing. I had counted them when I was four, because Carol bet me I couldn't, and I had lost the bet because she had counted them at three and a half and I was still bitter about it.

The little kitchen was at the bottom.

It was not the great kitchen. The great kitchen belonged to Beatrice and had six hearths, a bread oven that had not gone cold since before I was born, and a staff large enough to field a small army. The little kitchen had one window, one table with a scorch mark shaped faintly like a rabbit, and one kettle.

The kettle was already on.

It always was.

My grandmother sat at the table with her back perfectly straight and her hands folded, waiting for the water.

"You're early," Helena said without turning.

"He wanted to talk about my nose."

"It's a good nose. It's your grandfather's." She considered. "Before it was broken."

"Mine has never been broken."

"Give it time."

I sat.

Helena Valewood was in her middle seventies and did not look it, which was not the gods' doing. Mother looked young because she had been Aurelia's saintess since I was a baby. Father looked young because he was Father. Helena looked young because she had decided age was a matter of posture and refused to concede it any.

Her hair had gone silver. Her eyes had not changed at all. Mother had inherited them, and so had Carol, and so, according to everyone, had I, though I had never been able to make them do what Helena's did.

What Helena's did was look at you until you told the truth.

"You slept?" she asked.

"Some."

"Seraphina?"

"More."

"Good. Someone in that room should."

The kettle began to tick.

She got down the tins. Black leaf for anyone who had to be useful. The honey-flower blend for anyone who'd had a bad night. A third tin, unlabelled, which Loki had brought back from somewhere he declined to name. It tasted of pine smoke and made Thor sneeze, and Helena kept it largely for that reason.

She had been putting the kettle on in this room for twenty years.

Nobody had asked her to. The morning after the stream, when the castle was full of people who had not slept, she had come down here and found the kettle and filled it, because there was nothing else in the world she could fix at that moment and she refused to be useless.

People had come.

They had kept coming.

I had been three. I didn't remember that morning. I remembered a hundred mornings after it, all of them starting here, and in my memory they had blurred into one long morning with the kettle in the middle of it.

"Your father's on the stairs," Helena said.

I hadn't heard anything.

A moment later, I did.

King Uriah of Greykeep ducked under the low lintel. He had to; the little kitchen had been built for shorter people in a smaller century. He was in his shirtsleeves with a sheaf of papers under one arm, and he looked, as he had looked for my entire life, like a man of about thirty who had slept badly.

"No," Helena said.

Father stopped.

"I haven't said anything."

"You've brought papers."

"I always bring papers."

"And I always tell you no." She pointed at the bench. "Sit. They can wait until you've had something hot. They waited all night."

Father looked at me.

I looked at the kettle.

He set the papers face down on the far end of the table, which was as close as he ever came to obeying her, and sat beside me. Helena counted it as a victory. I could tell because she poured his cup first.

"Evelyn's asleep?" she asked.

"Evelyn was up with Elenos." Father wrapped both hands around the cup. "He had a bad dream."

"What about?"

"He dreamed the sea came up the stairs."

Helena's hands went still on the tin.

Just for a moment.

"The sea is a very long way from the stairs," she said.

"That's what I told him."

"And?"

Father drank.

"He said the sea doesn't know that."

Nobody said anything for a while.

Outside the window, the sky went from black to the grey of a dove's wing. Beyond the walls, Havenreach was waking. I could see the lamplighters' poles bobbing along the canal roads, putting out the night lamps one by one. Farther off, past roofs and spires and bridges that went on until the eye gave up, the three great gates to Concordia caught the first light.

When I was small, Havenreach had been a town.

Now it was the largest city in Avarra, and still growing, because people kept arriving and asking to be inside the walls.

The castle began to arrive in the little kitchen, a few at a time, the way it did every morning.

A kitchen maid put her head in, saw the king, squeaked, and withdrew. Adriana came down with Mirelle asleep on her shoulder, took the honey-flower without asking, and sat by the window to watch the light come up. Two guards coming off the night watch stopped in the doorway for a cup each and drank standing. Mary arrived with her book open, wrote something in it, accepted a cup, wrote something else, and left.

"What did she write?" I asked.

"That I gave her tea," Helena said.

"Why would she record that?"

"She records everything. You know that." Helena refilled the kettle. "Somewhere in that book is the exact number of cups I've poured in this room."

"Do you want to know it?"

"Certainly not."

The Castellan's voice came through the stone, quiet and clear, the way it spoke inside the castle when it didn't want to wake anyone.

"Lord Garrick Valewood, from the workshop."

"Thank you," Helena told the wall.

"He is carrying a wooden duck."

"Thank you," Helena said again, with slightly less warmth.

Grandpa Garrick came in smelling of sawdust and linseed oil.

He was the size of a door and moved like one that had decided to retire but hadn't told the hinges. His hair had gone from iron-grey to white since I was small. His hands had not changed at all. They were square and scarred and permanently dark in the creases, and there was a pencil behind his left ear and another behind his right, because he'd forgotten the first.

He was holding a wooden duck.

"Where is he?" he said.

"Asleep," I said. "Upstairs."

"Not anymore."

He was right. A moment later I heard Seraphina on the stairs, and a moment after that, a high wordless shriek of delight that could only mean one thing. Little Uriah had seen his favourite person in the world.

It was not me.

I had made my peace with this. I was heir to Greykeep. Carol and I held a seed of more divine domains than I could count without Mary's book, kept like pressed flowers after we had given the rest back. On a bad day I could fold a mountain range into the space behind a door. None of it mattered to my son.

My son wanted the man with the duck.

Seraphina came in with him leaning so hard out of her arms that she handed him across the table before he dove. He landed against Grandpa Garrick's chest and grabbed the duck with both hands.

"There's my apprentice," Grandpa Garrick said. "Big day. We've got a cradle rocker that squeaks, and I need someone to stand over me and shout."

"He's very good at shouting," Seraphina said.

"Takes after his mother."

She kissed his cheek, then Helena's, then stole Father's cup and drank half of it. Father watched his tea vanish with the expression of a man who had long ago surrendered every argument with his daughter-in-law.

"His mother," Seraphina said, "is going to have a lovely, quiet breakfast with his father and not shout at anyone at all."

"Then go and have it." Grandpa Garrick settled little Uriah more firmly against his shoulder. "He'll have porridge in the workshop and a nap in the shaving basket."

"He doesn't nap in the shaving basket."

"He naps in the shaving basket very nicely when his mother isn't there to see."

He looked at me over the top of the baby's head.

It was a short look, and a kind one. I had been receiving it all my life. It was the look he gave a joint he had glued the night before, checking whether it had held.

Apparently I had.

He nodded once and went out through the yard door toward the workshop, singing a song about a goat that I was fairly sure he was making up as he went. Little Uriah sang along. Neither of them knew the words.

* * *

There is a place on the east wall where the walkway bends around one of the old towers. It is too narrow for a sentry post, so nobody posts a sentry there.

Seraphina and I claimed it the year we were married.

It was not a secret. Half the castle knew where we went in the mornings. Eliza had once caught a new guard trying to walk his round past it and had turned him around by the collar. It was simply understood, the way castles understand things, that if the heir and his wife were on the east wall, the east wall was occupied.

She had brought bread. I had brought two cups of Helena's tea, which had cooled to exactly the temperature I liked by the time we reached the top.

We had forgotten the jam.

Seraphina looked at the bread. Then at me.

Then she held out her hand, and the air beside it folded very slightly, and a small jar of plum preserves sat in her palm.

"That's Beatrice's," I said.

"Beatrice has eleven."

"She counts them."

"Then she'll have something to do this morning."

She sat on the parapet with her back against the tower and her boots hanging over a sixty-foot drop, and I sat on the walkway below her with my head against her knee. The sun came up over Havenreach. For a while neither of us said anything.

There's a story my mother tells about the first time Seraphina and I sat at the same table. We were two. Io had brought plum jam through the Concordia gate, and the four of us, Carol and me, Ignatius and Seraphina, had been asked what we wanted.

We had all said "Jam" at the same moment.

Mother says it was our first shared declaration. Io says it showed excellent priorities. Mary, who was there, says I then folded the jam onto everyone's bread without a knife, and Helena told me that was clever, and also not how we pass food.

I don't remember any of it.

I remember Seraphina's hands, though. I don't think there was ever a time I didn't know them.

"You're thinking," she said.

"I'm always thinking."

"You're thinking loudly." She broke off a piece of bread, spread it with an outrageous amount of plum, and passed it down to me. "Is it the lessons?"

It was the lessons.

For most of a year, Father had been teaching me to be a king. That turned out to be a different thing from being a prince, and very different from being a god.

As a prince I had been allowed opinions, and allowed to be wrong about them in public as long as I was wrong charmingly. As a god I could do nearly anything I liked. As a king, it seemed, I could do almost nothing. I could listen to people for hours. Then I could do something modest, sensible and dull that annoyed everyone equally.

"He had me read grain tariffs yesterday," I said. "Three hours, Sera. I know more about barley than any man alive."

"What do you know about barley?"

"That the Westmere millers think the Concordia millers are thieves, and the Concordia millers think the Westmere millers are liars, and they're both right." I chewed. "I could fold the whole Westmere harvest into Concordia overnight. Every sack. They'd wake up and it would just be there."

"And then what?"

"And then Father would explain, very patiently, why that's a terrible idea."

"Is it?"

I sighed. "Every carter between here and Westmere is out of work by midsummer. Yes. It's a terrible idea."

She laughed, a soft breath of a laugh, and ran her fingers through my hair. The First Flame was warm in her hand. On cold mornings I could feel it through her sleeve, and I had long ago stopped pretending I didn't lean into it.

Below us a dragon rose from a bell tower in the merchants' quarter, a long green ribbon against the sky. It circled twice and settled on a slightly sunnier tower, like a cat changing chairs.

"Do you know what my mother told me," Seraphina said, "the night before the wedding?"

"That I was too skinny."

"Besides that."

She was quiet a moment.

"She said, 'Power is the easy part. Anyone can have power. The hard part is having it and not using it, every day, for the rest of your life.'"

I tipped my head back to look up at her.

"Io said that."

"Io said that."

"Io, who once burned down a siege tower because it was blocking her view of the sunset."

"She said she learned it the hard way." Seraphina's mouth twitched. "She also said the tower had it coming."

I laughed properly then, and she grinned down at me, and for a little while there was nothing else in the world. No tariffs. No lessons. No seeds of other gods' domains humming in my chest like bees in a wall.

Just a cold morning, a stolen jar of plums, and my wife.

* * *

The lesson that morning was not barley.

It was blue.

"Blue," Father said, "is the problem."

We were in the small audience chamber, the one with the good chairs. Father used it when he wanted people to feel listened to rather than judged. Mary sat at the side table with her book. Before us stood an elven weaver named Thessaly Ann, tall and silver-haired and visibly furious, and a dwarven dyer named Brokk Haldsson, short and copper-bearded and equally furious.

Between them, on a little table, sat a glass jar of canal water so blue it looked like someone had bottled a piece of the sky.

The facts were not in dispute.

Brokk's dye works sat upstream of Thessaly Ann's workshop on the Fourth Canal. Three weeks ago, Brokk had begun a new indigo process. It was very fine and very profitable, and its runoff had turned half a mile of canal blue. Thessaly Ann washed her silks in that canal. Every pale silk she had made in three weeks had come out the colour of a bruise.

"He knew," Thessaly Ann said.

"I did not know," Brokk said. "Do you think I check the water downstream every morning? I make dye. I don't make rivers."

"It's a canal."

"I don't make those either!"

I kept my face still.

That was most of the job, I was learning. You kept your face still while people shouted, and you didn't let them see that you had already solved it.

And I had solved it, in about four seconds.

I could feel the canal from here. Every reach of it, the slow drift of the blue toward the harbor. A fold the size of a cart, opened once below Brokk's outflow, would take every drop of that dye and set it down in the sea three miles out, where nobody would care what colour it was. I could do it every morning for as long as Brokk kept dyeing. Thessaly Ann's silks would come out white as snow. Everyone would go home happy.

I glanced at Father.

Father wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the jar.

"Master Haldsson," he said. "How much does the new indigo earn you?"

Brokk blinked. "Majesty?"

"Roughly."

Brokk named a figure. Thessaly Ann made a noise like a kettle.

"And Mistress Thessaly Ann. How much have you lost?"

She named a figure too. Smaller than his. Not by much.

Father nodded.

Then he did something I had seen him do a hundred times and still didn't fully understand.

Nothing.

He sat in the good chair with his hands folded, and he let the silence go on. Mary's pen stopped. The silence went on long enough that both petitioners began to shift. It went on long enough for them to look at each other, really look, perhaps for the first time since the canal turned blue.

"Brokk," Thessaly Ann said at last, reluctantly. "Does your process have to run straight into the canal?"

"Everything runs into the canal. Where else would it go?"

"There's a settling basin behind the old ropeworks. It's been empty since before the war." She hesitated. "If you ran the runoff there first, and let the dye sink before it reached the water..."

"That's a quarter mile of pipe."

"I know how far it is."

Brokk scowled at the jar. "Who pays for a quarter mile of pipe?"

"The crown," Father said mildly, "would pay half."

They argued for another twenty minutes. It was a different kind of arguing. By the end they had agreed on the pipe, the basin, the cost, and a sum Brokk would pay for the ruined silks. It was less than she'd lost and more than he wanted to give, and both of them looked faintly insulted by it.

They left together, still arguing. In the corridor I heard Brokk say, "I don't suppose blue silk ever sells?" and Thessaly Ann answer, "Not that blue," in a voice that was very nearly a laugh.

The door closed.

Mary wrote three lines, closed her book, and left us.

Father stretched until his shoulders cracked.

"You could have cleared that water before she finished her first sentence," he said.

I hadn't known he'd noticed. I should have. He always noticed.

"I could have."

"And tomorrow?"

"I'd clear it again."

"And when you're in Lyradon? Or Concordia? Or asleep?" He wasn't unkind about it. He never was. "When you're tired, and there are four hundred canals in this city, and every one of them has a Brokk on it?"

I didn't answer.

"You can make the water run clear, Garrick," Father said. "A king has to make two people who don't like each other build a pipe. The water's the easy part. The pipe is what lasts."

I thought about Io. About Seraphina's hand in my hair.

The hard part is having it and not using it.

"That's twice today," I said.

"What is?"

"Somebody telling me that."

"Then it's probably true." He reached for the next petition and smiled. "Now. Tell me what you know about the Lyradon road tolls."

I groaned.

He laughed.

The morning went on.

* * *

I went down to the stream at dusk.

I didn't decide to. My feet went.

It runs through the low ground east of the castle, below the orchard, where the wall bends to make room for it. It isn't much of a stream. In summer you can step across it without wetting your boots. Willows lean over it. Dragonflies stitch back and forth above it. In spring, Faelan and Mirelle sail bark boats down it and lose every one.

Where the bank flattens into a shelf of grass, there is a stone.

Nobody carved it. People wanted to. There was talk of a monument, a statue, a slab with names on it. In the end Father and Mother and Adriana said no, and the stone stayed as it was. Grey. Waist-high. Rough on top, with a clump of yellow moss on its north face.

It was the stone that had been there when Varrick went down beside the stream and stayed down.

I was three.

I don't remember much. Noise. Light. Mother's arms, and Carol's hand in mine, small and hot and gripping so hard it hurt. I remember something like a door opening in my chest, and everything rushing through it at once. Rivers, storms, the long patience of mountains. A hundred voices that weren't mine.

I remember not being afraid.

That part has never made sense to me. I've only ever been able to explain it to Carol, and she didn't need it explained.

The rest I know from stories. Some came from people who were there, and some from people who said they were. According to the history lecturer at the college in Concordia, Carol and I gave a speech.

We did not give a speech. We were three. I believe I bit someone.

I laid my palm flat on the top of the stone. It was still warm from the day.

The seeds stirred in me the way they always did here, like birds shifting on a branch.

Twenty years ago, Carol and I had held every domain Varrick let go of. Then we spent the rest of our childhood giving them back. We found the gods who could be found and mended the ones who could be mended, Meriel and Soren and Ansel and dozens more, and we kept only a little of each. A seed. Enough to remember by.

We could grow any of those seeds into the whole tree again.

That was the part almost nobody understood. We could, and we didn't.

Power is the easy part.

A moth landed on the back of my hand, considered me, and flew away.

Up the slope, the castle was lighting itself window by window. I could pick out Father's study. Carol's rooms in the north tower. The nursery, where Seraphina would be singing little Uriah the song about the goat, with every verse wrong because Grandpa Garrick had taught it to her.

High in the old wing, the windows of the throne room glowed too. The Castellan had kept lamps burning in that room since the night the door beneath the throne stopped being a door. It had told Father it owed the room a great many years of light. As far as I know, it has never let one go out.

And low down at the back of the east wing, a single square of warm light. The little kitchen.

Helena would be putting the kettle on for whoever came by before bed.

Someone always did.

I stood by the stone until the dragonflies had gone and the first stars came out over the willows.

Then I took my hand away and went up the hill toward the light.