Chapter 10: Both Sides of the Gate

Father didn't say anything for a long time.

He stood at the end of the map room table with his hands flat on the wood, looking down at the floor. At the coast of Westmere, drawn in the Castellan's fine black ink. At the bare gray stone beyond it.

Aurelia stood at the window. She hadn't turned round when I said it. I'd watched her shoulders, and they hadn't moved at all.

"The jam," Father said at last.

"Yes."

"And Io's words after it."

"Excellent priorities. Exactly that."

He nodded slowly.

"Castellan."

"Yes, Majesty."

"Yesterday. The great hall. Who was there?"

The Castellan didn't hesitate. It never does. It began at the top of the hall and went down every table, every chair, in order, the way Mary would have. Family. The households of Concordia and Lyradon. Thirty-one gods and goddesses of the Accord. Four dragons on the walls. Kitchen staff, by name. Guards, by name and post. Two musicians. Loki's goat.

It took nearly four minutes.

When it finished, it said, "I recognized every person in the hall. Every one entered by a door I watched or a gate I opened. None was a stranger. No one left whom I did not see leave."

"No one," said Father.

"No one I could see," said the Castellan.

There was a pause.

The Castellan does not, as a rule, qualify things. It knows what it knows, and it says so, and when it doesn't know a thing it says that instead, plainly. I had never once in my life heard it say that I could see.

Neither, from his face, had Father.

"Then it wasn't someone," said a voice from the doorway.

Loki was leaning against the frame with his arms folded. I hadn't heard him come up the stair. Nobody ever does.

"It was something," he said.

* * *

They argued about it for an hour.

I don't mean shouting. Nobody in the map room raises their voice. Mary won't allow it. I mean that Father and Aurelia and Loki and Thor, who had come up the stair a minute after Loki with Mjölnir in her hand and an expression like a storm front, went round and round the same question, quietly, from every side. And none of them could find the bottom of it.

A spy in the castle was impossible. The Castellan would have known.

A god in the castle was not impossible. Thirty-one gods had been in the hall, and the Castellan recognized every one of them. But a thirty-second god? One who didn't want to be recognized?

"Can that happen?" Father asked.

Aurelia had turned round at last. Her face was very calm, which with Aurelia is a bad sign.

"It shouldn't," she said. "The Castellan was made to see what walks in Greykeep. It saw Varrick's frost come up through the floor of the lower corridor. It sees Nyxa, and Nyxa is difficult to see. It saw me the first day I set foot in this castle, and I wasn't trying to be seen." She paused. "But there are gods who are very small, and very old, and very quiet. Gods whose whole domain is not being noticed. I've known two or three. They could stand in a crowded hall and listen, and no one would ever look at them twice."

"Even the Castellan?"

"Even the Castellan." Aurelia looked at its still gray form at the end of the table. "I'm sorry," she said to it. "I don't think it's a failing. I think it's what they're for."

The Castellan inclined its head.

"I will look harder," it said.

"Thank you."

"The Kethran gods," said Thor. She was standing by the window with her back to the dark, Mjölnir hanging from one hand, the head of it resting on the floor. Every so often a thin blue spark crawled up the handle and died at her wrist. "The ones who never answered your letters. If one of them is in this castle..."

"Then it's already been here a day," said Loki. "And heard everything we've said since."

Nobody spoke.

I looked round the map room. At the doorway, the dark windows, the corners where the lamplight didn't quite reach. At the bare stone floor beyond the coast. I wondered whether something was standing in one of those corners right now, very small, very quiet, listening to us wonder whether it was there.

The seeds in my chest were still. I couldn't tell if that was good.

"Then we say nothing that matters in this room," said Father, "until we know."

He looked at Loki.

"Can you find it?"

Loki considered.

"I can try," he said. "Mischief recognizes mischief. If it's a small god whose domain is hiding, it's a cousin of mine, in a way. I might be able to smell it." He shrugged. "Or I might walk past it every day for a month and never know."

"Try."

"I'll try."

Father straightened up from the table.

He looked, for a moment, very tired. He looked his age, his real age, the one nobody ever sees because the years don't show on him. Then he took a breath, and the tiredness went back wherever he keeps it.

"Go and see to your sister," he said to me. "The rest of this can wait until morning."

* * *

Carol's rooms are at the top of the north tower.

She chose them when she was twelve, because they were the highest rooms in the castle and the windows faced every direction at once. Mother said it was too far from everyone. Carol said that was the point. She has lived up there ever since, in four round rooms stacked one on top of the other, with a spiral stair in the middle, and lightning rods on the roof that Davren put in after the third time the roof was struck.

The stair was cold.

Not the ordinary cold of an old stone tower at night. A sharp, dry, biting cold that got worse with every turn of the steps. By the third landing my breath was smoking in front of me. By the fourth there was frost on the treads, a thin white fur that crunched under my boots. At the top, the door to her sitting room was furred with it, every board and every nail-head, white and glittering in the light from under the door.

I knocked.

"Come in," said Ignatius.

* * *

The room was very warm.

That was the first strange thing. The stair outside was colder than a winter night in the passes, and the moment I stepped through the door it was like walking into Helena's kitchen. Ignatius was standing in the middle of the floor with his hands held out, palms down, a little away from his body. A low gold light came off him, steady and patient, the way it comes off the embers at the end of a long fire. He was holding the cold back. Pushing it out of the room, inch by inch, and keeping it out.

He'd been doing it for a long time. I could see that in his face.

The windows weren't so lucky. Every pane in the round room was white with frost. Thick, layered, feathered patterns grown right across the glass, the kind you only see in the deepest part of winter. On a summer night they made the room feel like the inside of a snowball.

Carol was sitting on the floor under the west window with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up.

She looked up when I came in.

She didn't look frightened. That was the second strange thing. I'd been braced for it all the way up the stair. I'd felt her flinch through the bond at sunset, felt the cold come off her a hundred miles away, and I'd been ready to walk in and find my sister in pieces.

She looked angry.

"You saw them," she said.

"I saw them."

"And you heard it."

"I heard it."

She looked at the frosted window over her head.

"So did I," she said. "From here. From a hundred miles away. I was in the garden with Fenrir and the sun went down and it was like someone had put their mouth right up against my ear."

I sat down on the floor beside her.

Ignatius didn't move. The gold light came off him steadily. I felt the warmth of it on my face.

* * *

"What did it sound like?" I asked. "To you?"

Carol didn't answer for a while.

"Do you remember," she said at last, "what it was like? When we were three. When Varrick fell and everything came into us at once?"

"Some of it."

"Do you remember what it felt like? All those things he'd taken?"

I did. I didn't like to. It's not something I think about, if I can help it.

Varrick kept things. That was his whole domain, in the end. Captivity. The dead behind a door. Gods in cages. Souls in cells. A thousand years of things taken and held and never let go. When he fell, all of it came loose at once and poured into Carol and me, and for a moment, before we could start handing it back, we held all of it. Every kept thing.

And every kept thing remembered being kept.

"It felt like that," said Carol.

I looked at her.

"The singing," she said. "It wasn't words. It wasn't anything I could understand. But it felt exactly like that. Like being held. Like hands, a great many hands, very far away, reaching out across the water and closing around something." She looked down at her own hands, in her lap. "Around me."

The room was very quiet.

"Wanting," said Ignatius softly, from the middle of the floor.

We both looked at him.

"That's what it was," he said. His voice was tired, but steady. "I heard it too, through her. It wasn't keeping. It was the step before keeping. It was wanting." He closed his eyes for a moment. "Like someone looking at a thing in a window and deciding it's already theirs."

I thought of Ansel, in the doorway of the Council Hall. A god of wanting. Of reaching for things.

I thought of the letter on the map room table. The King's daughter, Carol, in whom lightning sleeps.

Carol's hands had closed into fists in her lap.

"I won't," she said.

She said it very quietly. Not to me, not to Ignatius. To the window. To the dark beyond it, and the long road west to the sea, and whatever was sitting out there on sixty black ships, singing.

"I won't be kept," said my sister. "Not by anybody. Not ever. I held a hundred kept things when I was three years old and I gave every one of them back, and I am not going to become one."

The frost on the west window cracked.

A single long line, straight across the pane, from one corner to the other. Then another. Then the whole sheet of white feathered ice split into a hundred pieces and slid down the glass and dropped in a glittering heap on the windowsill, and through the clear pane behind it I could see the stars.

The cold went out of the room.

Not slowly. All at once, the way a held breath goes. Ignatius let his hands drop, and the gold light faded off him, and he swayed on his feet and sat down rather suddenly in the nearest chair.

Carol looked at the clear window.

Then she looked at me.

"If they ask for me," she said, "I want to answer them myself. Not Father. Not the Council. Me."

"All right."

"Promise."

"I promise," I said. "And I'll stand behind you while you do it."

"Not in front of me."

"Behind you."

She nodded once, and leaned her head on my shoulder, and we sat there on the floor of her tower with the stars coming in through the clear window, while Ignatius sat slumped in his chair looking at her with an expression I've only ever seen him wear for her.

After a while she held up one hand, and a small light gathered in her palm. Soft and white, the size of a plum. She held it a moment, then sent it up to hang in the air above the three of us, turning slowly.

She used to do that when we were small, whenever one of us couldn't sleep.

I didn't sleep. Neither did she. But we stayed there until morning anyway, the three of us, under her light.

* * *

Mary wrote the reply.

She always writes the replies. Father can write perfectly well, but he writes the way he talks, which is plainly and with a tendency to say what he actually thinks, and there are letters where that is a gift and letters where it is a weapon left lying on the table. Mary knows which is which. She has known for longer than I have been alive.

She sat at the long desk in the study with Mother's good pen and a sheet of the heavy cream paper that is only used for kings, and Father stood by the window with his hands behind his back, and the rest of us tried not to look like we were watching.

We were watching.

"Short," Father said.

"I know."

"Polite."

"I heard you the first time."

"Nothing about the jam."

Mary looked up at him over the rims of the reading glasses she pretends she does not need. "Uriah. I have been writing your letters since this castle had a hole in its roof. Have I ever once mentioned jam?"

"There was the letter to the Duke of Pellam."

"That was about an actual shipment of jam."

"It still counted."

Melody, sitting on the arm of the chair behind her wife with her ears tipped forward, made a small noise that might have been a laugh. Mary ignored both of them and wrote.

It took her eleven minutes. I know because Ignatius counted, under his breath, the way he does when he is tired and needs something to hold on to. He had not slept either. None of the three of us had. Carol was curled in the window seat with a blanket around her shoulders and a cup of tea she had not touched, and every so often she looked at the north window, and every so often I looked at her looking.

When Mary finished, she read it aloud.

It said that the King of Greykeep thanked Severin Dask for his courtesy in writing. It said that the gate between Greykeep and Westmere was kept for the use of friends and family and those with urgent business of the crown, and that it could not, in good conscience, be opened to a guest the household had not yet met. It said that the King would be glad to receive him at Havenreach, by the ordinary roads, at a time of his choosing. It was signed by Father, and sealed with the closed hand, and it did not say one word that mattered.

"That's perfect," Father said.

"I know," said Mary.

The Castellan was waiting at the gate when we brought it down.

The gate to Westmere is the smallest of the six in the lower hall, a plain arch of gray stone with a brass plate beside it and a ledger on a stand. Every crossing is written in the ledger. Who, which way, what hour. The Castellan keeps it in a hand so neat it looks printed, and it has kept it without a single gap for as long as the gate has existed.

It opened the ledger to a fresh line.

It wrote the date. It wrote: Request of passage. Severin Dask. Declined. And then it took a small brass watch from somewhere inside its chest, looked at it, and wrote the time beside the word, down to the minute.

"Is that necessary?" Melody asked.

"Everything in the ledger is necessary," said the Castellan. "That is what makes it a ledger."

Tamar Vale took the letter.

He had changed out of his riding clothes into something plainer, with the steward's badge of Westmere pinned at his collar, and he held the sealed reply in both hands the way you might hold something that could go off. He had been in the castle less than three days, and in those three days he had been fed by Helena, interrogated by Rysa, taught three card games by Roderic and lost all three, and had a lamp-god spend a whole evening sitting on the windowsill of his room because, Morning explained, he looked like he could use the company.

I think he liked us. I think that made it harder.

"He'll ask me what you were like when you read it," he said to Father. "What do I tell him?"

Father considered that.

"Tell him the truth," he said. "Tell him I read it standing up, and that I thanked you for carrying it, and that breakfast was eggs."

Tamar almost smiled. "That's all?"

"That's all there was."

He stepped through the arch. The air folded around him with that soft sound I have never been able to describe, like a page turning in another room, and then the gate was just a stone arch again, and the Castellan closed the ledger.

* * *

The answer came back the next evening.

It was short, too. Severin Dask's hand was elegant and unhurried, the letters leaning slightly to the right, and he did not seem in the least offended. He wrote that he understood entirely. He wrote that a gate was a kind of door, and that a careful household was right to be careful with its doors. He wrote that he would come the long way, by water, as an ordinary guest would, and that he looked forward to it.

He wrote that he hoped the little one had enjoyed his name day.

Father read that line twice. Then he handed the letter to Mother, and went out onto the terrace, and stood there for a long time with his hands on the balustrade.

Nobody followed him. In our family you learn when not to.

Tamar's own report came with it, folded separately, in a rounder and more hurried hand. Severin had read the reply on the beach under his gray awning, standing up. He had laughed once, very quietly, at something in it, and Tamar did not know what. He had asked what we were like. Tamar had told him about the eggs.

The next morning he hired a salt barge.

There are dozens of them at Westmere, flat-bottomed and broad, made for hauling the coast's salt up the river to the inland towns and coming back down loaded with grain. They are slow and steady and ugly, and nobody has ever written a song about one. Tamar said he chose the oldest he could find, paid the bargemaster double, and had the crew rig a gray awning across the deck so that he could sit beneath it in the shade and read.

Iselle Ostrane was with him. Tamar did not say much about her, only that she stood at the bow while they cast off and did not sit down once.

The black ships did not follow. They stayed where they were, anchored off Westmere in a long dark line, their sails furled. The harbor-master had sent three polite notes asking them to move. They had answered none of them.

Upriver from Westmere to Havenreach is two weeks, if the weather holds and the locks at Brannock Falls are not backed up. Longer, against the spring current. A man who wanted to arrive quickly would have come by road, with fresh horses at every inn.

Severin Dask was not in a hurry.

That, I think, was the most frightening thing about him.

* * *

I went back up to the map room the next morning.

I had not been up there since the night I came home from Westmere on my knees. In daylight it is a different room. The floor is all map, every road and river and town that has ever sent a letter to Greykeep, and the light from the tower windows moves across it through the day like weather. When we were children, Carol and I used to walk the rivers barefoot, heel to toe, and argue about who had gone farther.

I found the Castellan already on its knees by the coast, just inland of the bare gray stone.

It had a stick of gray chalk in one metal hand. On the blue stone of the river, just above the little brass star that marks Westmere, it had drawn a mark. A small one. No bigger than a thumbnail.

"What's that?" I asked, though I knew.

"Today," it said.

It came back the next morning, and the morning after that. Each day it knelt, and found the place on the river where the barge had been seen, from the lockkeepers' reports and the fishermen's gossip and whatever Loki had managed to learn, and it drew another small gray mark, a little farther inland than the last.

By the end of the first week there was a line of them, curving up the blue stone through the marshes and the low farm country, toward the place where the river bends and the little brass tower stands for Havenreach.

Nobody told the Castellan to do it. Nobody told it to stop.

I went down most mornings to look. So did Carol, when she thought no one would notice. Once I found Father there, alone, standing at the edge of the map in his socks with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand, looking at the line.

He did not say anything when I came in. He only moved over, so there was room for two at the edge.

We stood there together and watched the river.

Seven small gray marks, coming home to us whether we wanted them or not.