Chapter 111: Ansel at the Stream

I didn't tell anyone.

That was harder than it sounds. In our house, not telling anyone is a thing you have to work at, like holding your breath underwater. Mary notices when you've skipped breakfast. Helena notices when you've drunk your tea too fast. The Castellan notices when you've walked down a corridor at a different speed than usual, and writes it down, and doesn't say anything, which is worse.

And Carol notices everything. Through the middle.

* * *

She found me in the map room at nine, standing in front of Eleanor's long plan with a cup of tea I'd forgotten to drink. She came in without knocking, which she's allowed, and stood beside me, and looked at the plan too.

"You've got something," she said.

"Yes."

"Something that isn't yours to tell."

"Yes."

She was quiet for a moment. I felt her through the middle, the way you feel someone leaning against the other side of a door. Not pushing. Just there.

"Is anyone in danger?" she said.

I thought about that honestly. About a hollow god in a trough, and two hundred and nine seams, and three hundred and eleven gray roses, and a man on a low wall with his fist closed on his knee.

"Not tonight," I said.

"All right." She took my cold tea out of my hand and drank half of it and made a face. "When it's yours to tell, tell me."

"I will."

"I know." She gave me the cup back. "You've got your listening face on. The one where you're holding something carefully so it doesn't spill. You had it when you were six and you found the bird with the broken wing and didn't want Roderic to see." She went to the door. "Day two, Garrick. Tomorrow's the third. Get some sleep at some point. You look like a gate nobody's oiled."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome," said my sister, and went.

* * *

That was the second day of my father's three.

It was a strange day. Everybody in the house was getting ready for Blackstack and pretending they weren't. Caitlin had her blue book open on the long table in the library and was ruling columns for pieces she hadn't counted yet. Loki had been seen, twice, in the kitchen garden, standing in front of the scarecrow and looking at its coat with an expression nobody could read. Iselle had gone out on the north tower with Roderic at dawn and come back with her hands open and red with cold, and Roderic carrying her shawl, and neither of them saying anything about it.

Halemar was oiling the Patience's oarlocks on the quay at Havenreach, very slowly, and humming.

My father went to the sea.

He went alone, at noon, down the coast road to the long shingle beach below Cape Ennis, where the water goes deep very suddenly. He stood at the edge of it for an hour. And then he said a name, quite quietly, the way you'd say the name of an old friend you'd fallen out with and weren't sure you were speaking to.

The whole sea went still for a mile out.

Then something very large, very far down, turned over in its sleep.

My father came home at four with his boots wet to the knee and didn't say anything at dinner except "He'll think about it," and then, after a while, "He always says that," and then he ate two helpings of Helena's lamb, which he never does.

* * *

I went down to the stream at eleven.

Seraphina was in the nook already, with the blanket and the tea. I stopped beside her.

"May I go on my own?" I said. "He asked me. At the stream. Not us." I swallowed. "You can say no."

She looked up at me for a while.

"It's not a doorway," she said at last. "It's a stream. And he knocked first. On our door. While we were asleep." She held out a cup. "Take your tea. I'll be here. I'll feel you the whole time."

"Sera—"

"If you're not back by two," said Seraphina, "I'm coming down. Next to you. And I won't ask."

"That's fair."

"It's very fair," said Seraphina. "Go on."

* * *

I walked. I didn't fold. You don't fold to the stream.

Everyone in Greykeep knows the stream, but nobody calls it by a name. It hasn't got one. It comes down out of the hills to the north, under the old road, and runs along the bottom of the long meadow below the castle wall, and goes into the river half a mile east. In summer you can step across it. In autumn, after rain, it's knee-deep and fast and very cold, and it talks to itself over the stones.

Twenty years ago, when Carol and I were three, a god of cages and keeping fell beside it.

I don't remember it properly. I remember being cold. I remember my sister's hand. I remember feeling very, very full, the way you feel after you've eaten too much, except it was everywhere, in my fingers and my teeth and the backs of my eyes, as if every god in the world was sitting inside me at once. Which, Aurelia says, they more or less were.

And I remember a stone.

A long flat gray stone on the bank, about the size of a kitchen table, half in the water. My mother says she found us sitting on it afterward. The two of us, side by side, with our feet in the stream, perfectly calm, giving things back.

She says we were singing. I don't remember that. Carol says she does, but Carol says that about a lot of things.

* * *

Ansel was sitting on the stone.

He was at the far end of it, the end that goes into the water, with his boots off and his feet in the stream. In October. At midnight. With his brown coat around his shoulders and his hands folded on his knees and the faint gold light at his side, low and steady.

I stopped on the bank.

He didn't look around.

"You can knock," he said. "If you like. On the stone. I'll know what you mean."

So I knelt and knocked three times on the near end of the stone, the way you'd knock on a table, and felt slightly ridiculous, and also not ridiculous at all.

"Come in," said Ansel.

* * *

I sat down on the stone. Not right next to him. About an arm's length off. I took my boots off too, because it seemed rude not to, and put my feet in the stream, and the cold went up through me like a bell.

Ansel almost smiled.

"It's very cold," he said.

"It's very cold," I agreed.

"I come here sometimes." He was looking at the water. "Not often. When I can't sleep. This is where I came back, you know. Not on the hall floor. That's where everyone saw me. But I came back here, first. On this stone. On my own. In the middle of the night, three years after he fell." He moved his feet in the water. "There were two little marks on it. Here. Where you and Carol had sat. I could feel them. Warm. Like where a cat's been sleeping." He was quiet for a moment. "I sat in them. I didn't know whose they were. I just knew somebody had given something back here, and it had been the right thing to do, and the stone remembered."

I didn't say anything.

"Then I walked up to the hall," said Ansel, "and two six-year-olds were sitting on the floor in a ring of gods, handing back the last of everything I'd ever stolen. And I was holding my name." He looked at his hands. "And I didn't know how to knock. So I just stood there until your mother saw me."

* * *

We sat for a while.

The stream talked over the stones. Up on the wall, a long way off, I felt Seraphina in the nook, warm and steady, not reaching. Just there.

"You came last night," said Ansel. "You and your wife."

"Yes. I'm sorry. I felt your lamp go out."

"Don't be sorry. You stayed on the hill." He turned his head and looked at me for the first time. "Do you know how many people have stayed on the hill for me, Garrick? In a thousand years?"

"No."

"Two," said Ansel. "Both of them last night."

* * *

He looked back at the water.

"I wanted you to stop me," he said. "When it held up my doors. I wanted you to come down out of those birches and stand between me and it and say, no, Ansel, you can't. I was waiting for it. Every second."

"I know," I said. "Seraphina said."

"Your wife is very clever."

"She is."

"And then you didn't come," said Ansel, "and I was so angry. For about a minute. Angrier than I've been in twenty years." He moved his feet in the water. "And then I wasn't. Because if you'd come down, it would have been your no. Not mine. And I'd have spent the rest of my life wondering what I'd have said, if you'd let me say it." He was quiet. "Which is the whole trouble, isn't it. I still don't know what I'd have said."

* * *

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You can always ask."

"Do you want them? The doors?"

Ansel didn't answer for a long time.

The stream went on talking. Somewhere in the meadow behind us an owl said something and something else answered.

"Yes," he said.

He said it very quietly. To the water. Not to me.

"Yes. I want them. I want them more than I'll say to anyone else. More than I've let myself want anything since I came back." His hands, on his knees, didn't close. But I watched him not let them. "I can feel them, Garrick. Right now. On the bottom of that trough. Three hundred miles away. Humming. Every door I ever made. They were mine. I made them with my own hands. Some of them were beautiful. Some of them were so well made that Vaust cried when he cut the plates." He swallowed. "And I want them back the way you want your own hands back. That's the worst of it. It doesn't feel like greed. It feels like being whole."

* * *

I thought about that.

I thought about it for a long time. Because it was the most honest thing anyone had said to me in weeks, and because I knew exactly what he meant.

"I keep things," I said.

Ansel looked at me.

"You know I do. Everyone does. Carol and I, we borrow, and we keep what we borrow. Seraphina's fold. Thor's thunder. Uncle Lexander's ravens. A river god's voice I borrowed for one afternoon when I was nine and never quite gave back." I looked down at my feet in the water. "Malachar called me a magpie. A magpie with a nest full of rings. I've never told anyone how much that stung. Because it's true. I've got a nest full of rings. And I like them. Every one. I'd hate to give any of them back."

"But you would," said Ansel.

"I'd hate it."

"But you would."

"Yes," I said. "If someone asked. I would."

* * *

Ansel looked at me for a long moment.

"That's the difference, isn't it," he said. "Not the wanting. Everybody wants. The difference is whether there's somebody who can ask for it back."

"I think so."

"Nobody could ask me." He looked at his hands. "That's what Othellos was. He wasn't a god who wanted. He was a god nobody could ask anything of anymore. He'd built too many doors. He was behind all of them."

* * *

"There's something else," said Ansel.

"The Stillyard."

He closed his eyes.

"Yes," he said. "That's the one I can't put down."

He opened them again and looked across the stream, at the dark meadow, as if there were something on the other side of it only he could see.

"I could do it," he said. "That's what's so cruel about it. It wasn't lying, Garrick. If I had my doors back, I could walk up to that wall in the golden city. I could put my hand on it. And there'd be a door in it. Because there isn't a wall anywhere that I couldn't find a door in, once. Not one." His voice went very quiet. "And I'd open it. From the inside. And I'd walk in among those gray roses, and I'd say their names, one by one, the way Carol says names at the new moon. And I'd walk them out. Three hundred and eleven. In an afternoon. Without a single fight. Without anyone tearing anything. The goddess of the first warm day of spring, in the third row." He stopped. "I'd walk her out myself."

"I know," I said.

"And they'd see me." He wasn't looking at me anymore. "That's the part. That's the part I want so badly my hands close. Not the doors. Not even the gods. I want to stand in that garden and open that wall and have three hundred and eleven gods walk out past me and look at me, and see Ansel. Not Othellos. Not the man who built the first cages that god ever learned from. Ansel. Who opened the door." He laughed, very softly. It wasn't a happy sound. "Isn't that a terrible thing to want? After all of it? To be thanked?"

* * *

I didn't answer right away.

Because I knew that one too. I'd stood up out of those birches last night with every part of me wanting to go down that slope and put myself between him and the hollow thing in the trough. Not only to keep him safe. I'd wanted to be the one who did it. I'd wanted him to look up and see me there. I'd wanted to have been there.

"No," I said. "I don't think it's terrible."

"Don't you?"

"I wanted to come down the hill," I said. "Last night. I want to be honest with you. Part of it was for you. And part of it was because I wanted to be the one. The one who stood there. The one who stopped it." I looked at the water. "Seraphina held my arm. She said his road. And I was angry with her for about a minute too."

Ansel was quiet.

"It's the same thing," I said. "Isn't it? Wanting to be the one who opens the door. Wanting to be the one who stands in it."

"Yes," said Ansel slowly. "Yes. I think it is."

"Then I don't think it's terrible. I think it's just wanting." I turned my feet in the cold water. "I think it only goes wrong when somebody finds out which thing you want most, and holds it up in front of you, dripping, and tells you it's yours if you reach far enough."

* * *

Ansel went very still.

The gold light at his side flickered once. Not gray. Just a flicker. Like a candle when a door opens somewhere else in the house.

"It's the lamp again," he said.

"Yes."

"It's always the lamp." He looked at his hands, front and back, the way he had at the trough. "A thousand years. A different lamp every time. Order. Walls. Doors. A valley where nobody ever got lost. And now this. Three hundred and eleven gods I could save, if I'd just reach." He let out a long breath. "It was clever, wasn't it. It didn't offer me the doors for myself. It knew I'd say no to that. It offered me the doors so I could save people. Because that's the lamp I'm reaching for now. And he knows it. Whoever he is."

"Someone who showed you the lamp," I said.

"Someone who showed me the lamp." Ansel almost smiled. "The first asking is always large. I told you that, at Westmere. And it's true. This was a large one." He paused. "But I think it was a second asking too. All at once. Large on the outside. Small in the middle. Only one door. Everything else free." He shook his head. "That's very good work. I'd almost admire it, if it weren't me."

* * *

We sat a while longer.

I'd stopped feeling my feet some time before. I suspected Ansel had stopped feeling his some time before that, and was keeping them in the water on purpose, the way you'd hold your hand near a candle to remind yourself it's hot.

"What will you do?" I said.

"I don't know," said Ansel.

"That's all right."

"Is it?" He looked at me. "It's two nights, Garrick. It'll be back in the trough in two nights. With my doors in its hands. And I'll have to go and sit on that wall and tell it something."

"Then you'll tell it something," I said. "In two nights. Not tonight."

He looked at me for a long time.

"Your father says that," he said. "Not tonight."

"He does."

"Not angry. Not alone." Ansel looked back at the water. "I've been alone for most of it. Even after I came back. I've been in that chair by the door for twenty years, and everybody's been kind, and nobody's been unkind, and I've been alone in it the whole time. Because I never told anybody the wanting was still there." He paused. "I thought it would go away if I didn't say it. It doesn't. It just waits."

"It's said now," I said.

"Yes," said Ansel. "It's said now." He sounded surprised. "To you. On a stone. In the middle of the night." He moved his feet in the water. "That's strange. I thought it would feel worse."

* * *

"Can I ask you something else?" he said.

"Yes."

"If I went," said Ansel, slowly, "on the third night. To the trough. And sat on the wall, and said, yes, give me my doors." He was watching the water very carefully. "They'd have to give them to me. Before I built anything. I'd have to have them in my hands to build with. And then they'd have to show me where. The rock. The palace. Which wall. Who's waiting." He stopped.

I looked at him.

"Ansel—"

"No," he said at once. "No. Not like that. I don't know yet if I mean it like that." He shook his head. "I don't know which one of me thought of it. The one who wants to help, or the one who wants the doors and is looking for a good reason to say yes." His voice was very quiet. "That's the trouble with being an old man who used to be clever. You can't trust your own good ideas anymore."

"Then don't decide tonight."

"I won't." He looked at me. "But if I do decide it. Either way. I'd like to have told someone first. Before I go. So that somebody knows which way I was walking when I set out." He paused. "Will you be that? Not to stop me. Just to know."

"Yes," I said.

"You can say no."

"I know," I said. "Yes."

* * *

He took his feet out of the stream at last, and looked at them, white and wrinkled and shaking, and said "Oh dear," very mildly, and I laughed, and so did he.

We put our boots on. It took a long time. Neither of us could feel our fingers either.

When we stood up, he put his hand flat on the stone, at the far end, where he'd said the two little warm marks had been. He held it there for a moment.

"They're still here," he said. "Did you know? After twenty years. Fainter. But here."

I knelt and put my hand on the stone too. On the near end.

And he was right. I hadn't ever noticed. Very faint, very small. Like the warmth of a cup somebody had put down and walked away from a long time ago. Two little places, side by side.

Carol's and mine.

"Giving back leaves a mark," said Ansel. "Taking does too. But it's a different kind." He took his hand off the stone. "I'd like to leave the first kind. Somewhere. Before I'm done."

* * *

At the bottom of the meadow, before we went up to the gate, he stopped.

"Garrick."

"Yes?"

"Don't tell Faelan," he said. "Not yet."

I looked at him.

"He'll ask me," said Ansel. "He's ten. He's got my name in the middle of his. He'll come and find me and look at me with those enormous gray eyes, and he'll ask me what's wrong, and when I tell him, he'll say, oh, but you'll say no. Just like that. As if it were obvious." He looked up at the dark castle, at the one lit window high in the west range where Adriana sits up reading. "And I'm not ready for anybody to be that sure of me. Not yet. I don't think I could bear it."

"I won't tell him," I said.

"Thank you." Ansel turned up the path. Then he stopped again, and looked back at me over his shoulder, and the gold light at his side was low and steady and very warm.

"Thank you for knocking on the stone," he said. "It's a silly thing. I know it's a silly thing. But nobody's ever knocked on anything for me before."

* * *

I climbed up to the east wall at a quarter to two. Fifteen minutes early.

Seraphina was in the nook. She'd been asleep, I think, and woke when I sat down, and put the blanket around me without a word, and then said "Your feet are ice," in a voice of real outrage, and put them in her lap, and the First Flame came up under her hands, very gently, the way it does for our son when he's been out in the snow.

"Well?" she said.

"He wants it," I said. "He said so."

She was quiet.

"He wants it," I said again. "And he said it out loud. To someone. For the first time in twenty years." I put my head back against the stone. "I think that's the bit that matters. I think it's the only bit that matters, tonight."

"Not tonight," said Seraphina.

"Not tonight."

"Two more," she said.

"Two more."

She held my feet in her lap until I could feel them, and then a while longer, and the stream went on talking to itself at the bottom of the meadow, and somewhere in the west range, very late, Adriana's window went dark.

* * *

Mary wrote it the next morning. Not the stream. That was Ansel's. Just the day.

Day two of three.

Caitlin ruled columns for pieces she hasn't counted.

Loki looked at the scarecrow's coat for a long time. Twice.

Iselle and Roderic on the north tower at dawn. Hands open. Shawl carried.

Halemar oiled the oarlocks. Humming.

Uriah went to the sea at noon and said a name. The sea went still for a mile. Something very large turned over. "He'll think about it. He always says that."

Uriah had two helpings of lamb.

Garrick didn't sleep. Carol says he looks like a gate nobody's oiled. She is correct.

And under that, in a plain, careful, very upright hand. Somebody had come to the library before anyone else was up, and knocked three times on the open door of an empty room, and waited, and come in, and written in the black book for the second time that autumn.

Ansel. Who wants. Who said so.