Chapter 101: Helena's Garden

Selvane came to Greykeep on the fifth morning after the vote.

It was her own idea. She'd been sitting on the sea-tower roof the evening before, watching Pim light the lamp, with Tessaly in its cup in her lap, and she'd said, quite suddenly, to nobody in particular:

"I'd like to see where the letters came from."

Benjamin, on his stool, nearly dropped his tea.

"Inland?" he said.

"Every harbor in the Accord," said Selvane. "That's what they voted. Every harbor." She looked at the cup. "Havenreach has a quay, doesn't it? On the river? Below the castle?"

"It does," I said. "Barges come up to it from the coast. Salt and fish and Orselle glass."

"Then it's a harbor," said Selvane. "And it's mine now. They said so." She hesitated. "I'd like to see if it's true."

* * *

So in the morning she came through the Westmere arch into the lower hall of Greykeep, with Benjamin on one side of her and Ilyra on the other, and Tessaly in its cup in both hands, and stopped on the flagstones under the six arches, and stood very still.

I was watching her shoulder. I couldn't help it. I'd been watching her shoulder every morning for nearly two weeks.

I couldn't see through it.

"Selvane," said the Castellan, from the stones under us. "Of the harbors." A pause, as if it were checking a list. "Of Tessaly. Of Westmere. Of the Havenreach quay." Another pause. "Inward. Asked."

Selvane let her breath out.

"Of the Havenreach quay," she repeated, very quietly.

"It's on the list," said the Castellan. "Since the vote. I updated it." A pause. "I should like it noted that I did."

"It's noted," I said.

* * *

She could feel it. I could tell. She stood in the lower hall with her head on one side, the way you'd listen for a sound in another room, and after a while she smiled.

"There's a barge coming in," she said. "Down below. At the quay. With salt." She closed her eyes. "Somebody's just thrown a rope. Somebody's caught it." She opened her eyes again. "It's a very small harbor. It's lovely."

Ilyra, beside her, said nothing at all. But she let go of Selvane's hand, for the first time since Westmere. And Selvane didn't notice for nearly a minute. And when she did, she looked down at her hand, and then at Ilyra, and Ilyra smiled.

"You don't need it held anymore," said Ilyra. "Not every minute."

"No," said Selvane slowly. "I don't think I do."

* * *

My father had wanted to show her the great hall. Aurelia had wanted to show her the chapel. Mary had wanted to show her the Council book, where every name from the vote was written in her own hand, and Caitlin had wanted to show her the map room, and Faelan his ledger, and Elenos the orchard.

Helena didn't want to show her anything.

Helena met us at the foot of the east stair, outside the door of the little kitchen, in her apron, with her hair pinned the way it always is, and looked Selvane up and down once, the way she looks at a new delivery of flour.

"You'll want tea," she said.

Selvane blinked.

"Yes," she said. "Please."

"Come in, then," said Helena, and went back into the kitchen, and Selvane, after a moment, followed her. And the door shut behind them.

My father looked at the door. Aurelia looked at the door. Mary looked at the door.

"Well," said my father. "That's that, then."

* * *

I'll tell what happened in the little kitchen because I was there for some of it. Not invited. Helena never invites anyone; you're either in the kitchen or you're not, and if you're in it, you're useful. I came in for a cup of tea a quarter of an hour later and was handed a bowl of peas to shell, and stayed.

Selvane was at the scrubbed table with a cup of tea from the heavy blue pot in front of her. She wasn't drinking it. She was holding it in both hands, the way she'd held Tessaly, and looking at the kitchen. The fire. The window rack, with the first loaf of the day cooling on it. The pear tree outside the garden door, and the blackbird in it. The herb beds.

Helena was rolling pastry and not looking at her at all.

"It's a very small kitchen," said Selvane at last.

"It is," said Helena.

"For a castle."

"There's a big one," said Helena. "Down the passage. It does the hall. This one does the family." She turned the pastry a quarter turn and rolled it again. "Nobody important eats in the big kitchen. Everybody important eats here."

Selvane looked at her for a long time.

"I've never been in a kitchen," she said. "Not inside. I used to look through the windows, from the piers. At night. The fishermen's kitchens, with the lamps lit, and somebody waiting up." She turned the cup in her hands. "I always wondered what it smelled like."

Helena stopped rolling.

She didn't say anything. She just went to the oven and opened it, and the whole kitchen filled up with the smell of hot bread and cinnamon, and closed it again, and went back to her pastry.

Selvane put her face over the cup and breathed in. And I saw her shoulders come down, very slowly, as if they'd been up around her ears for a hundred years and had only just been told they could stop.

* * *

After the tea, Helena put a trowel in her hand.

"Can you weed?" she said.

Selvane looked at the trowel as if she'd never seen one.

"I don't know," she said. "Nobody's ever asked me."

"Well, I'm asking," said Helena. "The herb beds want doing. The mint's getting above itself and there's bindweed coming through the thyme." She looked at Selvane. "You can say no. Then you can sit on the step and watch me do it and tell me I'm doing it wrong. Mary does that."

"I don't," said Mary, from the doorway, where she had been lurking with her book.

"You do," said Helena. "Out."

Mary went out.

Selvane looked down at the trowel in her hand. Then up at Helena.

"Yes," she said. "I'd like to weed."

* * *

So that's what the harbor goddess of Tessaly and Westmere and every harbor in the Accord did on her first morning at Greykeep.

She weeded Helena's herb beds.

On her knees, in Tamar's wife's knitted jersey with the sleeves rolled up four times, with Helena's old gardening gloves on her hands, which were too big, and the trowel, and a basket for the weeds. Helena knelt in the next bed over and did the parsley. And I sat on the garden step with my peas and watched them, because I'd been told I could stay if I was useful, and shelling counted.

Helena didn't explain anything. She didn't need to. She just did her bed, and Selvane watched her for a while, and then did hers the same way. The bindweed first, following the white roots down as far as they went and easing them out whole. Then the mint, pulled back where it had crept into the thyme. Then the little weeds, chickweed and shepherd's purse, between the rows.

Selvane pulled up a sprig of thyme by accident and held it up, stricken.

"That's thyme," said Helena, without looking. "Put it back in. Firm it down. It'll forgive you."

Selvane put it back in and firmed it down, very carefully, with both gloved hands, the way you'd tuck a blanket around someone.

* * *

They talked. Not much, at first. Then more.

I didn't listen to all of it. Some of it wasn't mine. But I heard some.

I heard Selvane say, after a long silence, with her hands in the soil, "I lost them because of the letters. The harbors. One for every letter. I knew it would happen, every time, and I carried the letters anyway." Her voice was very low. "Sometimes I think I gave them away. All four hundred. For a bit of paper."

And I heard Helena say, without stopping, "Did you want to carry them?"

"Yes."

"Did anybody make you?"

"No. They asked. Every time. Benjamin said I could say no."

"Then you didn't give anything away," said Helena. "Somebody stole it. That's different." She pulled a long white root out of the soil, all in one piece, and dropped it in the basket. "When the fox gets into the henhouse, you don't blame the hens for laying."

Selvane was quiet for a long time.

Then she went back to the bindweed.

* * *

Later, I heard Selvane say, "There are so many. Four hundred harbors. Three hundred and eleven in the garden. I don't know where you'd even start."

And Helena sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and looked at the herb beds. Six of them. Thyme and sage and parsley and mint and chives and the rosemary by the wall, which is older than my father.

"How long have I been doing these, would you say?" said Helena.

Selvane looked at her.

"Fifty years," said Helena. "Near enough. Every spring. Every summer. Every autumn." She looked at the bindweed in the basket. "That comes back every year. I've never once got all of it. Not once in fifty years. It's in the wall, behind the rosemary. It'll be there when I'm dead."

"Then why do you keep doing it?"

"Because the thyme's in this row," said Helena. "And the thyme's lovely. And if I do this row, today, the thyme can breathe." She picked up her trowel again. "You don't do the garden, love. Nobody does the garden. You do a row."

* * *

Selvane didn't say anything.

But she bent her head over her bed again. And I watched her work her way down it, slowly, one plant at a time, not looking at the rest of the garden, not looking at the wall where the bindweed lived, just the row in front of her.

And somewhere around the middle of it, she started to hum.

It wasn't a tune I knew. Low, and slow, and a little rocking. A harbor song, I think. The kind you'd hum to yourself on a pier at night, waiting for somebody.

And Helena, in the next bed, without looking up, started humming too.

Not the same tune. Her own. The wordless one she always hums in the kitchen and never finishes. I've heard it all my life. I don't think anyone's ever known what it is.

The two tunes didn't match. They shouldn't have gone together. But they did, somehow. Like two boats coming into the same harbor from different directions, at the same time, both of them with someone waiting.

I sat on the step with my peas and didn't move, because I didn't want to make a sound.

* * *

At three o'clock it rained.

Just on the kitchen garden. Just for a few minutes. A soft, warm, gray rain out of one small cloud over the west wall, while the sun shone everywhere else. Tobias, who was in the leek rows at the far end, looked up and said, "Well, Sahrun?" and Sahrun, on the wall above him, smiled, and the rain came down gently on the herb beds and the two women kneeling in them.

Selvane turned her face up to it.

"Is it always like this?" she said. "Here?"

"No," said Helena. "Sometimes it's worse." She stood up, with one hand on her knee, the way she does now. "Come in. You're wet. There's soup."

* * *

Carol was at the kitchen table when we came in.

She'd been there, Helena said, since one o'clock, with a stack of Mary's good paper and a pen and a pot of tea gone cold. There were eleven crumpled balls of paper on the floor around her chair. She looked up when we came in, and her face was the face of somebody who's been trying to say one thing for three hours and can't.

"The letter," said Selvane.

"The letter," said Carol. She put her pen down. "I can't do it. Every time I start, it's either angry or it's begging. And it mustn't be either." She looked at the crumpled paper. "Aurelia said plainly. I don't know how to be plain to him. I've only ever been frightened of him, or saying no."

Helena put a bowl of soup in front of her, and one in front of Selvane, and one in front of me, and sat down at the end of the table, which she never does.

"What do you want him to do?" said Helena.

"Let them go," said Carol.

"Then ask him that."

"It's not that simple."

"Yes it is," said Helena. "It's only you that's making it hard." She picked up a spoon. "You've been asked things your whole life, Carol. By people who love you. How did they do it?"

Carol didn't answer.

"They said your name," said Helena. "And then they said what they wanted. And then they said you could say no. And then they waited." She dipped her spoon in her soup. "That's all asking is. You don't need eleven sheets of Mary's good paper. Mary'll have your head."

* * *

Selvane had been looking at her soup.

"May I say something?" she said. "About him?"

Carol looked at her.

"He asks," said Selvane. "He always asks first. I told the Council. The letter, the black paper. Come and be still." She turned her spoon over. "But he never asks what you want. Not once. In three hundred years. He tells you what you want. He tells you you're tired. He tells you you'd like to rest. He's very good at it. He's usually right." She looked up. "But he never asks."

Carol was very still.

"Nobody's ever asked him either," said Selvane. "I think. What he wants." She hesitated. "Ansel said he wanted someone to hold it for him. I think that's true. But I don't think anyone's ever asked him." She looked down at Tessaly, in its cup beside her bowl. "Maybe you could."

* * *

Carol wrote it in twenty minutes.

One sheet. No crossings out. She wrote it at the end of the scrubbed table with the soup going cold beside her, and Helena humming at the stove, and Selvane across from her with her chin in her hands, watching, and the rain stopping outside and the blackbird starting up again in the pear tree.

When she was done, she read it over once. Then she held it out to Selvane.

"Would you read it?" she said. "You'd know if it's wrong. You've carried more letters to him than anyone."

Selvane wiped her hands carefully on her jersey and took it.

I read it over her shoulder. Carol said I could.

* * *

To Malachar.

Not Who Holds. Just Malachar. I hope that's all right.

My name is Carol Clara Grey. You know who I am. I told you no, and I meant it, and I still do.

I'm writing to ask you something else.

There is a garden under your palace hill. You know which one. There are three hundred and eleven people standing in it. There are four hundred harbors with your hand over their eyes. There are gods in your ships and storms in your cellars and people in your holds who were taken off coasts a long time ago and are waiting to go home.

Will you let them go?

All of them. Not for anything. Not in exchange for me, or for anyone. Just because I asked.

If you do, the door is open on this side. For every one of them. We've voted. Every god of the Accord. A ferryman called Halemar is carrying this letter, and when it's time, he'll carry them home.

And the door is open for you too. If you ever want to come and knock. Somebody here will say come in. I promise you that. I'll say it myself, if no one else will.

I'd like to ask you one more thing, and you don't have to answer.

What do you want?

Not what you hold. Not what you're owed. What you want. Nobody's ever asked you that, I think. I'm asking.

You can say no to all of it. I'll understand. I'll still have asked.

Carol Clara Grey.

Of Greykeep, where the doors are asked.

* * *

Selvane read it twice. Then she put it down on the table, very carefully, and smoothed it flat with both hands.

"It's not wrong," she said.

Her voice wasn't steady.

"I carried a hundred letters to him," she said. "From kings. From the Council. From Severin, from Iselle, from the Princess of Concordia." She looked at Carol. "I never carried one that asked him what he wanted."

Helena, at the stove, had stopped humming.

* * *

Halemar came for it that evening, through the Westmere arch, in his ferryman's coat, with an oilcloth packet to keep it dry. Carol gave it to him at the foot of the east stair, sealed with plain gray wax and her bare thumb, the way Iselle seals hers.

"You can say no," she said. "It's a long way. Nobody's crossed from this side in three hundred years."

"I know," said Halemar. He tucked the packet inside his coat, over his heart. "I'll go at first light. From Westmere. Tamar's lending me a boat." He looked down at her. "I'll bring you his answer. Whatever it is."

"Thank you," said Carol.

He went back through the arch.

And Selvane, who had been standing beside me on the stair, watching, with soil still under her fingernails, said quietly:

"He'll let a ferryman through. I think. Halemar's right." She looked at the arch. "He never stopped me carrying letters. He only took a harbor for each one. I think he wanted them to arrive."

* * *

Mary wrote it that night in the little kitchen. Selvane was asleep upstairs, in a guest room in the east wing, with the window open toward the river so she could hear the barges. It was the first night she'd slept anywhere but Westmere.

Selvane came to Greykeep. The Castellan said: of the Havenreach quay. It updated the list after the vote and asked that it be noted.

Helena gave her tea and a trowel. They weeded the herb beds all morning. Bindweed, mint, chickweed. One sprig of thyme by accident. Put back. Forgiven.

Helena: you don't do the garden. You do a row.

They hummed. Two different tunes. They went together.

Sahrun rained on the herb beds at three.

Carol wrote eleven letters and threw them on the floor. Then Selvane said: he never asks anyone what they want. Then Carol wrote the twelfth. It asks him what he wants.

Halemar has it. He leaves from Westmere at first light.

It worked better than the Council did. I'm not sure the Council would like that written down. I've written it down.

And under that, for the first time in all the years Mary has kept the book, in a small, square, firm hand, like a recipe:

Helena. Two rows done. Thyme fine.