Chapter 107: Soren Targeted

Selvane felt the Patience come home at a quarter past five in the morning.

She was in the little kitchen, on the bench by the fire, where she'd taken to sleeping. Helena had just come down the stairs, asleep, with her slippers on the wrong feet, and filled the kettle. And Selvane sat up so suddenly that Benjamin, on the floor of the passage outside, woke and banged his head on the doorframe.

"Kestle," said Selvane.

Helena, asleep, put the kettle on the hob.

"She's passed Kestle," said Selvane. "The Patience. Coming north. I felt her go by the end of the pier. Like a hand on the door." She was on her feet. "Halemar. He's back in my water. He's back."

Helena, still asleep, turned around from the stove and said, very clearly, "Good," and went back up the stairs to bed.

* * *

By breakfast the whole house knew. By noon, the whole of Westmere.

She'd be in by dusk, Selvane said. A day's sail from Kestle with this wind. And Westmere, which had sat on its harbor wall to watch the Full Council come and go, and stood at its windows to watch the vote, turned out again to watch a ferryman come home.

* * *

I wasn't supposed to go.

I'd been awake for two days. I could walk down the stairs and back up them. I could hold little Uriah for as long as he'd let me before he wanted Seraphina. I could eat Helena's bread, all of it, under supervision. But Aurelia had said no folding, and Seraphina had said no anything, and my father had said nothing at all, which was worse.

"I just want to stand on the wall," I said. "I won't do anything. I want to see him come in."

Seraphina looked at me for a long time across the breakfast table.

"You'll ask," she said. "If you want to do anything. Even lift your hand. You'll ask me first."

"I'll ask."

"And I'm standing next to you. Not in a doorway."

"Next to me," I said.

She looked at me for a moment longer. Then she nodded, and handed little Uriah to Helena, and went to get her coat.

* * *

Carol went too. And Iselle, and Roderic. And Selvane, of course, and Benjamin a step behind her. And Thor, who'd come through the Concordia gate at noon on the grounds that "somebody should be there who can hit things, if things need hitting," and Halemar's ferry was the most interesting thing that had happened all week.

And Soren.

He'd asked to come. He'd come down from the chapel, where he'd been sitting with Meriel every day since I grew her back, and found my father in the lower hall, and asked.

"It's a homecoming," he said. "Somebody should light the window."

My father looked at him for a long moment.

"Faelan's ledger," he said. "You're on it. You've got a seam."

"I know," said Soren. "Meriel's got none now. I've still got mine." He smiled, the way he does, as if everyone in the room were a relative he was glad to see. "But Halemar carried that letter across a sea nobody's crossed in three hundred years. He went for all of us. Somebody should be on the pier with a light when he comes back." He paused. "That's what I'm for. I'd rather do what I'm for and risk it than sit in the chapel and be safe."

My father didn't say anything for a while.

Then he looked at Carol.

"I'll be next to him," said Carol. "The whole time."

* * *

So we went to Westmere through the arch, at four in the afternoon, and stood on the harbor wall.

The whole town was there. Goss in his blue coat, with his ledger. Mistress Ostry. Callow, pretending he'd only come to check a barge. Tamar and his wife. Edric on his bucket. Dunmore, recovered from his cold, with a new handkerchief. And Pim, on Wil's shoulders, in her too-big cap, with her tinderbox clutched in both hands.

Soren went out to the end of the north pier. Carol went with him. Iselle and Roderic stood a little way back along the pier, and the rest of us on the wall, and the light started to go.

* * *

At a quarter to six, Selvane said, "There."

And there she was. A little blue-hulled lugger with a patched brown sail, coming up out of the south and west, out of the gray sea, low in the water and very slow. Not limping. Just tired. The way a boat sails when the man at the tiller has been at it for eleven days and knows exactly how much he has left.

The whole wall let out its breath.

Pim wriggled down off Wil's shoulders and ran along the pier to the end, where Soren was, and stood on her toes and opened the little brass lamp, and struck her tinderbox. Three times. Four. It caught.

And Soren lit the window.

* * *

I don't know how to describe what Soren does. I've seen it all my life and never thought about it.

He doesn't light anything, exactly. He just is, very hard, on purpose, the thing he's for. And every window that has someone behind it waiting for someone else to come home glows. Not brighter. Warmer. As if somebody had just moved the lamp a little closer to the glass.

All along the Westmere waterfront, the windows went gold. Tamar's. Goss's. The harbor inn. The net lofts. Every house where someone had sat up, at any time in its life, waiting for a boat. Which in a harbor town is every house.

And out on the gray water, the man at the tiller of the Patience lifted his head.

* * *

And I felt Soren's seam open.

I'd been feeling for it all afternoon. I couldn't help it. Ever since Faelan's ledger, two hundred and twelve places on two hundred and twelve gods, I'd been feeling for seams the way you feel for a loose tooth with your tongue. And there it was. In the middle of Soren, where Carol and I had stitched him back together on a hall floor twenty years ago, a thin bright line, like the crack of light under a door. Wide open. Because he was doing what he was for.

And under the end of the north pier, in the dark water, something felt it too.

* * *

The sea came up.

Not a wave. Not the wall the oracle had warned about. Just the water around the end of the pier, rising. Silently. Smoothly. The way a hand comes up out of a bath. And then it wasn't water at all.

It was hands.

Dozens of them. Gray-green, glassy, streaming, reaching up out of the harbor around the end of the pier, with nothing behind them but more water. Some of them had arms. Some had shoulders. A few had something like faces, smooth and blank, like drowned men seen from below. They came up out of the sea in silence and reached for the end of the pier.

For Soren.

"Draum," said Thor, beside me, and her hammer came off her shoulder.

* * *

I was already moving. I want that written down, because it's true and because I'm not proud of it. I'd promised. I'd said I'd ask. And the second those hands came up out of the water I forgot every word of it and reached for the fold, for the gray, for anything.

And Seraphina's hand closed on my wrist.

She didn't pull. She didn't need to. She just held on.

"Ask," she said.

I looked at her. At the end of the pier, the hands were reaching for Soren's legs, and Pim was screaming, and Wil was running.

"Ask," said Seraphina again. "You promised."

I looked down the pier. At my sister.

And Carol, at the end of the pier, with a hundred drowned hands coming up out of the sea at her feet, turned her head and looked back at me along the whole length of it. And I heard her, through the middle, as clearly as if she'd been standing next to me.

Not alone. I said I'd do the next. Ask me.

"Carol," I said. Out loud. Across the whole harbor. "May I stay here?"

"Yes," said Carol.

And turned around.

* * *

I've seen my sister do a great many things. I've seen her hold a river. I've seen her hold Malachar's hand still in a dream. I've seen her say no to the Emperor of Kethra and mean it.

I'd never seen her fight.

She put Pim behind her with one hand, without looking, the way you'd put a cup out of reach of a baby. She put Soren behind her with the other. And she stepped forward to the very end of the pier, to the edge, with the drowned hands reaching up for her ankles.

And she let the winter come.

* * *

It came off her in a ring. White. Silent. Out across the water from the end of the pier, the way my father's had gone out across the sea from the hall window. Not as far. Not to the curve of the world. Just as far as she needed.

Every hand it touched stopped.

They froze. Mid-reach. Mid-grab. Dozens of them, standing up out of the harbor like a forest of glass, gray-green and white-rimed, with the last light of the sunset coming through them. Some of them had their fingers an inch from her boots. One had its hand open around the ankle of nobody, where Pim had been standing a second before.

And then Carol lifted her hand, and the sky over the north pier went white, and the lightning came down.

* * *

It came down once. Not on the pier. Not on her. On the water, in the middle of the frozen forest of hands, in a single blinding white-gold line from a clear evening sky. And the sound came after, the great flat crack that I've heard over the north tower all my life on the nights she can't sleep.

The frozen hands shattered.

All of them. At once. Into a sort of glittering salt rain that fell back into the harbor with a sound like someone pouring sugar. And where they'd been, the water was just water. Gray, ordinary, sloshing gently against the piles of the pier, as if it had never been anything else.

Pim, behind Carol's skirts, said, very loudly, "Oh."

* * *

All of them except one.

I felt it before I saw it. Under the pier. Right under Soren's feet, between the piles, where Carol's winter couldn't reach without reaching him too. One hand. Not frozen. Gray-green and glassy and streaming. And it had come up through the gap between the planks, and it had its fingers in Soren's seam.

Not tearing. Not yet. Holding. The way you'd hold the edge of a cloth you were about to rip. Waiting for the right moment. Soren had gone very still, the way Meriel had gone still in the chapel, with his face turned toward the Patience and his light still pouring out over the harbor into every window, and I could feel the seam in the middle of him, wide open, with cold wet fingers in it.

Carol had seen it too. She'd turned. Her hand was up. The frost was already at her fingertips.

And she stopped.

"I can't," she said. Her voice cracked. "If I freeze it, I freeze him. If I break it, it tears." She looked at me down the pier. "Garrick, I can't get it off without—"

"It's holding," said Iselle.

* * *

She'd been standing halfway down the pier with Roderic all this time, out of the way, because Carol had asked her to. She walked forward now. Past Roderic. Past Carol. To Soren.

She knelt down on the wet planks at his feet.

"It's holding on," said Iselle. "That's all. It hasn't torn anything. It's just holding." She put her hand down, flat, on the wet wood, right over the gap between the planks where the gray-green fingers came up. "Holding's mine."

"Iselle," said Roderic.

"I know," said Iselle, without turning around. "I know what it'll cost. Tell my mother I'll sleep in her bed tonight. She'll want to know where I am."

* * *

She didn't do it the way she'd done Selvane's hand, in the sea tower. Not one finger at a time. There wasn't time.

She just said, very quietly, to the thing under the pier, in Kethran and then in the common tongue:

"That's not yours. Let go."

And it did.

I felt it happen. All the fingers at once. They opened, and slid out of Soren's seam, and there was a little wet sound under the pier, like a hand letting go of a rope. And Carol's frost, which had been waiting at her fingertips, went down between the planks in a single thin white thread and found it, and froze it, and the lightning didn't even need to come; it simply crumbled, like salt, and was gone.

Soren's seam was still open. Still bright. Still pouring out light into every window in Westmere.

But there was nothing in it now except him.

* * *

Iselle sat back on her heels on the wet planks. She looked at her own hand for a moment. Then she said, quite clearly and politely, "Oh. That was a big one," and fell over sideways into Roderic's arms, fast asleep.

Roderic sat down on the pier with her in his lap and didn't move.

* * *

The Patience came in ten minutes later.

She came in past the end of the north pier, past Pim's lamp, past Soren standing there with the light still pouring off him and Carol at his side with frost on her hands and Roderic sitting on the planks with Iselle asleep against his chest. And the man at the tiller looked at all of it as he went by, and I saw him take it in, the way a ferryman takes in a river: the salt-rain still settling, the scorched mark on the water where the lightning had struck, the whole of Westmere on the wall with its windows gold behind it.

He brought her alongside the steps below the harbor wall as gently as I've ever seen a boat brought in.

Then Halemar of the ferries stood up in the stern, broad and slow, salt-white to the eyebrows, and looked up at us all on the wall.

"Well," he said. "That's a welcome."

And the whole of Westmere cheered.

* * *

He was thinner. His ferryman's coat hung off him. He'd been eleven days away, alone, across water nobody from this side had crossed in three hundred years, and it showed in every line of him. But his eyes were steady, and when Tamar's wife put a bowl of stew in his hands at the top of the steps, he ate all of it standing up before he'd say a word.

Then he wiped his mouth and looked for Carol.

She'd come back along the pier. She was standing at the top of the steps with Soren on one side of her and me on the other, and Seraphina on my other side, still holding my wrist, the whole time.

Halemar reached inside his coat, over his heart, and took out the oilcloth packet. The same one. Salt-stained, sea-stained, wrapped twice around with tarred twine.

"Your answer," he said.

* * *

He told it while she held it, before she opened it. Because, he said, she ought to know how it came, before she knew what it said.

The sea had let him through. That was the first thing. Draum's sea, flat and still as a floor, all the way across. Four days and not a wave. He'd thought, the whole way, that it would stand up under him at any moment. It never did.

"I think he was told to let me pass," said Halemar. "I think somebody wanted it to arrive."

He'd come into the harbor of the golden city on the morning of the fourth day. Nobody stopped him. Nobody spoke to him. The quays were full of people and none of them looked at him at all, and he tied up the Patience at an empty berth and stood on the quay with the packet in his hand and didn't know what to do next.

"And then someone came down the quay," said Halemar. "Tall. Gray. Bare-headed. With a little black link of chain on his left wrist."

Selvane made a small sound.

"He didn't speak," said Halemar. "He just held out his hand. And I thought, if I give it to him, I'll never know if it got there. And then I thought, the young lady said you can say no. So I said: May I ask where you're taking it?" Halemar looked down at his broad, salt-cracked hands. "He looked at me for a long time. Like nobody'd asked him anything in years. And then he said: Up the hill. To the door. I'll put it in his hand myself."

"The Lockwarden," said Selvane quietly.

"I waited three days on the quay," said Halemar. "In the boat. Nobody came near me. Nobody sold me so much as a loaf; I'd brought my own. On the third evening, he came back down. The gray one. He had this." He nodded at the packet in Carol's hands. "He gave it to me. He walked me to the end of the quay. And just before I cast off, he said: Tell the lamp-lady I'm sorry about Tessaly. I didn't hold that one. But I didn't stop it either."

Selvane put both her hands over her mouth.

* * *

Carol untied the tarred twine.

Her hands weren't quite steady. The frost was still on her fingertips, and it left little white marks on the oilcloth. Inside was her own letter. Her one sheet, written at the end of Helena's table in twenty minutes with no crossings out. Folded the way she'd folded it. Sealed with her own gray wax and her own bare thumb, and the seal had been broken, and carefully pressed back together, as if whoever opened it had wanted to put it back the way they'd found it.

She unfolded it.

Her own handwriting. All the way down. To Malachar. Not Who Holds. Just Malachar. The garden. The harbors. Will you let them go? The door, open on this side. What do you want?

And under her name, at the very bottom, under Of Greykeep, where the doors are asked, there was one more line.

In silver ink. In a heavy, pressed, careful hand that I'd seen once before, on the black page in Iselle's drawer.

* * *

Carol looked at it for a very long time.

Then she held it out so I could read it too.

Carol Clara Grey.

That was the first line. Her whole name. All three words of it. The name he'd never once said, in the river or the dream or the fog or the iron room.

And under that, smaller, as if the hand that wrote it had pressed less hard:

I do not remember.

* * *

That was all.

No yes. No no. Nothing about the garden, or the harbors, or the door. Just her name, whole, and four words, under her question.

What do you want?

I do not remember.

* * *

Carol folded the letter up again very carefully along its old creases.

She didn't say anything for a long time. Westmere was cheering around us, and Halemar was being given another bowl of stew, and Pim was showing Thor her tinderbox, and Soren was still standing at the end of the pier with the last of his light going out softly over the water, the way a lamp goes when the person it was lit for has come in and shut the door.

"He wrote my name," said Carol at last.

"Yes," I said.

"All of it."

"Yes."

She looked down at the folded letter in her frosted hands.

"He doesn't remember what he wants," she said. Very quietly. "Garrick. He's held on so long he doesn't remember what for."

* * *

Mary wrote it at midnight, at the kitchen table at Greykeep. Iselle was asleep upstairs in Saba's bed, with Saba sitting beside her with the shuttle. Soren was in the chapel with Meriel, telling her all of it, and she was saying heard after every sentence. Halemar was asleep on the bench by the little kitchen fire, in Selvane's place, because Selvane had given it to him and Helena had put a blanket over him without being asked.

Selvane felt the Patience pass Kestle at a quarter past five in the morning. Helena, asleep, said: good.

Soren went to Westmere to light the window. He said: I'd rather do what I'm for and risk it.

His seam opened. Draum's tide-spawn came up out of the harbor. Hands. Dozens.

Garrick reached. Seraphina held his wrist. She said: ask. He asked Carol: may I stay here? Carol said yes.

Carol froze them all and broke them with lightning. Salt rain. Pim said: oh.

One had its fingers in Soren's seam. Holding. Carol couldn't reach it without hurting him.

Iselle said: holding's mine. That's not yours. Let go. It let go. Then she said: oh, that was a big one, and fell asleep.

No seam torn. No seed spent. Nobody fell down except Iselle, on purpose.

Halemar came home. Eleven days alone. Draum's sea let him pass. The Lockwarden carried the letter up the hill and put it in Malachar's hand himself. He said: tell the lamp-lady I'm sorry about Tessaly.

The answer, in silver, under Carol's question: Carol Clara Grey. I do not remember.

He wrote her whole name.

And under that, in Carol's hand. Small. Pressing hard.

Then I'll ask him again. Until he does.