Chapter 127: Defection

I didn't sleep.

Nobody expected me to. Roderic slept enough for both of us, in the big chair by the fire in my father's rooms at the Concordian palace, with his left hand wrapped in a clean bandage and his mouth open, snoring like a cart going over cobbles. Caitlin slept on the bed with her orange scarf over her face. My father didn't sleep either. He sat at the table by the window with Lexander until four, talking quietly, and then went down to the palace kitchens, because that's where my father goes when there's nothing left to do but wait.

I sat on the floor with my back against Roderic's chair and watched the window go gray.

At six there were three knocks on the door.

"Come in," I said.

It was Iselle. She was dressed. Her short dark hair was combed flat and pinned back, very tightly, the way she wore it the first week she came to the college, before she learned that nobody would mind if it stuck up. She looked at Roderic asleep in the chair, and her face did something soft and brief, and then went back to being careful.

"I want to see them," she said.

I didn't ask who. "Now?"

"Before anyone decides anything about them." She held her hands together in front of her. Open. Palm on palm. "I need to ask them something. And I don't want to do it alone."

I got up off the floor.

* * *

My father was in the kitchen, sitting on an upturned crate by the bread ovens with a mug of tea going cold in his hands, while the Concordian cooks worked around him as if he were a piece of furniture they'd got used to.

He looked up when we came in. He looked at Iselle's pinned hair and her careful hands. He didn't ask where we were going either.

"Take your brother," he said. "The other one, I mean. When he wakes up. Not now. Let him sleep." He looked at me. "Captain Hesk has the keys. Tell him I said you could. Tell him I'll be down later."

"You don't want to come?"

"I want to," said my father. "That's why I'm not going to. Not yet." He turned the mug in his hands. "If I go down there, they'll be looking at the man who froze the college. Let them look at you first."

* * *

The old cells are under the palace hill, below the kitchens, down a long stair cut into the rock. They were built during the war, for prisoners of the war, and after the war Io had most of them filled in with sand and planted the courtyard above with roses. She kept six. "In case," she said. And then said she hoped she'd never need them. And then, after the festival, she had needed all six.

Captain Hesk was at the bottom of the stair, at a table with a lamp and a ledger, the way he'd been every morning since the festival. He's a square, gray man with a face like a closed door, and he's the only person in Concordia who's never once been surprised by anything my family does.

"Prince," he said. "Lady." He stood up. "They haven't moved. Any of them. Not since your father brought them down."

"May we see them?"

He looked at Iselle for a moment. Then he picked up the lamp.

* * *

I'd seen the cells before. Twice. Once just after the festival, and once with Loki, when he'd tried for an hour to make one of the twenty standing Hushed laugh and had come out looking, for Loki, very nearly sad.

Nothing had changed.

The twenty were still standing in their row in the long cell on the left, masked, in gray, with their hands at their sides. Closed. Every one of them, a fist. They hadn't eaten since the festival or drunk or slept. Io's healers came twice a day and checked them, and they were alive, and that was all anyone could say.

The eleven anchor-Hushed were still lying on the straw in the next cell, limp, with their eyes open behind their masks.

And in the last cell, against the back wall, the stooped man. The one with the left shoulder lower than the right. The bottle man from Orselle. He'd taken his own mask off on the parade ground, and it still lay on the floor beside him where he'd dropped it. He was sitting with his knees up and his hands between them. He'd stopped crying, Hesk said, about a month ago. He hadn't started doing anything else.

There was a three-legged stool outside his cell door. Kip sits on it every Wednesday. He comes through the Concordia gate at noon with an apple and sits there till dark, eating the apple and not saying anything. Nobody asked him to. He just does it.

It was too early for Kip. The stool was empty.

And at the far end, in the sixth cell, the one that had been empty since the war, were the seven.

* * *

They were standing in a loose half circle, the way they'd been standing on the stair when my father caged them. My father's lightning had gone out of the cages sometime in the night. He'd said it would; Hesk's iron bars would do. But they hadn't moved to the bars, or the walls, or the door.

They were just standing with their hands held out in front of them. Open. Palms up. Exactly the way they'd been on the stair, in my brother's rain.

Like people waiting to be given something.

Hesk set the lamp on the floor outside the bars and stepped back. "Like that all night," he said quietly. "I've had men in these cells for thirty years, on and off. I've never seen anyone stand like that." He paused. "It's worse than the fists, somehow."

"It isn't," said Iselle. "It's better. It's just that nobody's put anything in them yet."

* * *

She went to the bars.

She didn't say anything at first. She looked at each of them in turn, the seven white masks with no mouths, one after another, the way my father looks at the weather. And when she came to the last one, the small one, the one who had knelt on the thirty-eighth step and held the silence over the whole east tower, she stopped.

The small one was looking back at her.

You can't see eyes through a Hushed mask. Not really. There are two narrow slits and a darkness behind them. But I saw it, the way you see someone across a crowded room turn their head toward you. The small one had been looking at Iselle since we came in. Not at me. Not at Hesk. At her.

Iselle said something in Kethran. Very quietly. Not the court Kethran she uses with Severin, all edges and titles. Something rounder and older, with the vowels left open. Valley Kethran. I've heard her use it twice: once to her mother, and once in her sleep.

The small one stood very still.

Then it raised its open hands, slowly, to its own face. And it found the edge of the white mask with its fingertips, the way you'd find the edge of a bandage. And it took the mask off.

* * *

She was young. Iselle's age. A narrow brown face, sharp at the chin, and gray eyes, and a shock of short dark hair that had been flattened under the mask so long it stuck up at the back like a duckling's. There was a thin pale line across her forehead and down each cheek where the mask's edge had rested for years and years.

She looked at Iselle. And her mouth moved. No sound came out. No sound ever would; she'd sworn it. But I could see the shape her mouth made, the way you can see a word on the far side of a window.

Two syllables. Iselle.

Iselle put both her hands on the bars.

"Marra," she said.

* * *

I learned it all later. In pieces, that morning and over the next weeks, mostly from Iselle and some of it from Marra herself. But I'll put it here, where it belongs.

Marra was the miller's daughter. In the Ilvane valley, where the river comes down between two mountains and the mill sits on the race below the last house on the lane. Saba's house. Marra's father's mill wheel turned all day on the far side of Saba's back wall, and Marra and Iselle had sat under Saba's loom together from the time they could crawl, listening to the wheel through the floor and telling the weather by it.

When Iselle was twelve, the Emperor's men came up the valley and took her away to be a princess.

Six weeks later, they came back and took Marra.

Nobody in the valley knew why. Saba didn't know. Iselle didn't know; she was in the golden city by then, in a room with no windows, and nobody told her anything. And Marra was taken to the Temple of Oaths, and was told that the girl from under the loom had been taken to the palace and would be kept there forever. And that there was one way to stand outside her door, every night, for the rest of her life.

So she swore. Her face and her voice. To Kessavel. Before the first link.

She was twelve years old.

"I used to see the Hushed outside my door at night," Iselle said to me, much later. "When I was small. In the golden city. I used to lie awake and watch their feet in the gap under the door, standing there. All night. Every night." She stopped. "I thought they were guarding the door to keep me in. I never thought one of them might be standing there so I wouldn't be alone."

* * *

But that morning, in the cell, I didn't know any of that yet.

I only saw Marra lift her hands.

Not to the bars. Not to Iselle. She held them up in front of her chest, open, and she moved them. Quick, small, precise shapes. Fingers folding and unfolding. A flat hand turning over. A fist (I flinched) that opened at once, like a flower, and became something else.

And Iselle laughed. Out loud, in that cell, with her face wet. And moved her own hands back.

"What is that?" I said.

"Mill talk," said Iselle, without looking away from Marra. "From the valley. You can't hear yourself think, inside a mill, with the wheel going. So the millers talk with their hands. Marra's father taught us both under the loom." She made a shape: thumb and two fingers, a little turn of the wrist. "That's river. That's high. That's the wheel's going too fast, shut the race." She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "I haven't used it since I was twelve. I've forgotten half of it." Her voice cracked. "She hasn't. She hasn't forgotten any of it."

* * *

So I watched.

I've said before that's what mimicry is, under everything. Watching. Seeing how a thing is done so closely that your hands learn it before your head does. I'd done it on the stair, six hours before, with my brother's feet. I did it now with Marra's hands.

I sat down on the stone floor outside the bars, by Hesk's lamp, and I watched the two of them talk. Marra's hands fast and sure. Iselle's slow and halting, stopping to find a shape, starting over, laughing when she got one wrong and Marra corrected her with a little flick of the fingers that meant, obviously, no, you idiot. It was like watching someone remember a song.

And after a while I started to see it. Not the words. The shape underneath the words. The way the hand that says river is the same hand that says road and going home, just turned. The way a closed fist always opens at the end of a word, never stays shut. Millers don't keep their hands closed. They need them.

After half an hour, I raised my own hands and made a shape. Clumsily. Water. Going. Over.

Marra's eyes came around to me.

And her hands said, very fast: Who is this?

And before Iselle could answer, my hands answered for me. I didn't know I knew the shape until I'd made it.

Her friend. Garrick.

Marra stared at me. And then, behind the bars, the miller's daughter who hadn't made a sound in eight years and never would again put her hand over her mouth and shook with silent laughter.

He talks like a baby, her hands told Iselle.

He learned it in half an hour, Iselle's hands said back. Be nice.

* * *

What Marra told us, that morning, through the bars, I'll keep short. Iselle will tell the rest herself, when she's ready, and some of it isn't mine to tell.

The seven of them had been sent to bring Iselle home. That was the word they were given. Home. To the golden city, to her brother, who missed her. Marra had held the quiet on the stair so that nobody in the tower would scream. So nobody would come running and get hurt. She'd told herself that was a kindness.

And then your brother, her hands said to me, stood in front of her door in his nightshirt. And made us hold the handrail.

She looked down at her own open hands.

And then you opened them. She turned them over, as if they were someone else's. I didn't know they could. Nobody ever told me they could.

What do you want? Iselle asked her. In mill talk. Slowly, so I could follow.

Marra didn't answer at once. She looked around at the other six, behind her. They hadn't taken their masks off. They were still standing with their hands held out, palms up. But they'd turned, all of them, toward Marra. Watching her hands.

They want what I want, her hands said. I asked them in the night. They can't take off their faces yet. They're more afraid than me. But they listened.

And what do you want?

Marra's hands were still for a long moment.

Then they said a short thing, three shapes, and Iselle closed her eyes.

"What was it?" I said.

"Not to go back," said Iselle. "And then the one at the end. It's the one the millers use when the day's done and the wheel's stopped and they're going up the lane." She opened her eyes. "It means home. But not that home. Not the golden city. It means the last house on the lane."

* * *

On the way back up the long stair, Iselle stopped halfway and leaned against the wall.

"There's a law," she said. "In Kethra. Older than him. Older than the empire. If you leave one land for another, you go to the ruler of the new one and you stand on the threshold, and you hold your hands open, and you ask. Out loud. In front of witnesses. And they answer. Out loud. And then it's done, and nobody can ever undo it. Not even an emperor." She looked down at her hands. "It's the only law in Kethra he's never managed to change. Because it isn't written down anywhere. Everybody just knows it."

"You've lived in our house for months," I said.

"I was carried into your house," said Iselle. "Roderic carried me up the hill to the infirmary with my hand shut. And then your father brought me home through the gate. And everyone was kind, and nobody asked me anything, and I never asked them." She looked at me. "I never asked, Garrick. Not properly. I'm the emperor's sister and I've never once stood on a threshold and said it out loud." She took a breath. "And now there are seven people in that cell who want to ask, and can't."

"They can't speak."

"No," said Iselle. "But you can. You learned their talk in half an hour. You'll be their voice." She started up the stair again. "And I'm going first. So they can see how it's done."

* * *

Roderic woke at nine and was told. He listened to all of it with his bandaged hand in his lap, and then he got up and went and washed his face and put on his good coat, and came back and stood next to Iselle, and didn't say anything else at all. Which for Roderic is a speech.

My father was told at half past nine, in the kitchen, on his crate.

He listened to the whole thing. Then he put down his mug.

"Noon," he said. "The big gate. Concordia side to ours." He stood up. "You'll stand in the gate square, on the Concordia side, because that's the land you're leaving. And I'll stand in the lower hall at home, on the other side, because that's the one you're asking. And the Castellan will be the threshold." He looked at Iselle. "Is that right? Is that how it's done?"

"Yes," said Iselle. She sounded surprised. "That's exactly how."

"Then I'll go home and put my boots on," said my father. "No. I won't. I'll go home and take them off." He went to the door, and stopped. "Iselle."

"Yes."

"I should have asked you. In the autumn. Whether you wanted to ask." He looked at her for a long moment. "I didn't think of it. I'm sorry."

"You couldn't have known."

"I could have asked," said my father. "That's the whole point of asking. You don't have to know first." And he went out.

* * *

At noon the gate square in Concordia was very full.

Word gets around in Concordia faster than anywhere I know, faster than Caitlin. By a quarter to twelve there were students from the college all along the steps of the customs house, and fishwives from the lower town, and Master Ashby in his good gown with a notebook. And Lexander and Io on the gate platform, and Thor at the foot of the steps with her arms folded, and Captain Hesk with six of his guard around the seven Hushed.

The seven stood in a line at the bottom of the gate steps. Six masks. One face. Fourteen open hands.

Kip was there. He'd come through the gate early, with his apple. He stood beside Marra and didn't say anything and ate the apple, and after a while Marra's open hand drifted sideways and rested on his shoulder, and Kip let it.

The big gate stood at the top of the platform, between its two pale pillars, faced top to bottom in Eleanor's brass plates, with the gray shimmer between them the size of a barn door. And through the shimmer, if you looked, you could see the lower hall at Greykeep. The pale granite floor. The six white arches. And everyone.

My mother and Adriana. Carol, with Ignatius. Seraphina, with little Uriah on her hip. Grandpa and Helena. Faelan with his ledger, Mirelle with her hand in Elenos's. Aurelia. Loki on the stair rail. Mary with the black book open. And Saba, small as a wren, with her long gray plait, standing with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes on the gate.

And in front of all of them, in the middle of the pale floor, alone, in his shirt and his bare feet, my father.

* * *

Iselle went up the steps first.

Roderic went up with her as far as the top step. Then he stopped and let her go on alone. I saw him want to follow. I saw him not.

She stood in front of the shimmer, on the Concordia side, very small between the two great pillars. And she held up her hands. Open. Palms out. The way she'd held them to me on the stair.

And she said it in Kethran first, the old way. Valley Kethran, with the vowels left open. And then, so that everyone could hear it, she said it again in our tongue.

"I am Iselle. Daughter of Saba, who weaves. Of the Ilvane valley, where the mill is." Her voice was steady. It carried right across the square. "I was the Emperor's sister. I was taken from my mother's house when I was twelve and I was kept. I'm not kept now. I'm leaving his land. I'm not asking to be anything in yours. Not a princess. Not anything. I'm asking to stay." She took a breath. "With my hands open. In front of witnesses. May I come in?"

* * *

My father didn't answer straight away.

He looked at her through the gate for a long moment. Then he walked forward across the pale floor of the lower hall, barefoot, until he was standing just on the other side of the shimmer. Close enough that if she put out her hand, she'd almost touch him.

"In this house," said my father, "we don't have a word for asylum. We tried to make one, once. In the war. When the Lyradoni came. We sat up a whole night trying." He glanced back at Adriana, and something passed between them. "We couldn't find one we liked. So we use the one we've got."

He held up his own hands. Open. On his side of the gate.

"Iselle, daughter of Saba," said my father. "You can always say no. You can always go home. Nobody in this house will ever make you stay, and nobody will ever make you leave." He paused. "Come in."

And the Castellan, which had been waiting, said in its dry old voice, from everywhere at once:

"Iselle, daughter of Saba. Of the Ilvane valley. Asked. Answered." A pause. "In."

Iselle walked through the gate.

Saba caught her on the other side.

* * *

Then it was the seven.

I went up the steps with Marra. Hesk's guard stepped aside. The other six came behind us in a line, masked, slow, with their hands held out in front of them.

At the top, in front of the shimmer, the Castellan spoke before anyone else could.

"I do not have them," it said. Not unkindly. "I do not open my gates to people I cannot find."

I'd known it would. It said the same to Iselle once, the first night, when she tried to come through under her court name. The Castellan can't let in a mask. It can't let in a voice that's been given away. It only knows a name, the real one, the one underneath.

"Then I'll find them for you," I said.

I turned to Marra. And my hands asked her, in mill talk, slowly: Your name. The one your mother called up the lane.

Marra's hands answered.

And I said it out loud, to the gate.

"Marra. Daughter of Corrick, the miller. Of the Ilvane valley, where the mill is." I looked through the shimmer at my father. "She was the Emperor's. She swore her face and her voice when she was twelve. She can't ask out loud, so I'm asking for her. With her hands open." I swallowed. "May she come in?"

My father looked at Marra for a long time. Then at me.

"Marra, daughter of Corrick," he said. "Come in."

"Marra," said the Castellan, slowly, the way you'd say a word in a language you hadn't spoken for a while. "Daughter of Corrick. Of the Ilvane valley." And then, very quietly: "There you are."

* * *

She stepped through. And on the other side, Saba let go of Iselle and put out both her arms.

"Marra," said Saba. "Oh, Marra. Your father still keeps your chair."

Marra fell into her. And on the far side of the hall Mary wrote something down, and her pen was shaking.

* * *

The other six were harder.

They couldn't take off their masks. They were too afraid; Marra said so, and I believed her. And they'd been Hushed so long that some of them barely remembered being anything else.

But Marra had remembered for them.

She came back to the shimmer, on the Greykeep side, with Saba's arm still around her. And through the gate, with her hands, she told me their names. One at a time. Each with its father or mother, each with its valley or harbor or town. She'd kept them, she told me later. Every night, standing outside a door in the golden city with her face and voice given away, she'd said them over to herself with her fingers inside her sleeve, so she wouldn't forget who they'd been. Like Caitlin counting. Like Meriel's candles.

Someone has to keep them, her hands said.

So I said them. One by one. Six times, out loud, at the threshold, in front of all of Concordia and all of Greykeep. Daughter of. Son of. Of the coast. Of the high plateaus. Of a harbor on the far coast that isn't on any of our maps.

And six times my father said come in.

And six times the Castellan said there you are.

* * *

When the last one had gone through, my father turned around and looked at the seven of them standing in the lower hall of Greykeep, on the pale granite floor, six masks and one face, with their hands still held out in front of them, palms up.

He looked at their hands for a long time.

Then he went to Helena and said something, and Helena went to the little kitchen. And came back with a tray. And my father took it from her and went down the line himself, barefoot, and put a honey biscuit into each open hand.

Seven biscuits. Fourteen hands.

They stood there holding them as if nobody had ever given them anything before.

* * *

That evening I went back down into the cells under the Concordian palace with Kip.

I don't fully know why. My father said I should. "Somebody should tell the rest," he said. "That seven of them asked. That it can be done." He looked at me. "I'll come later. Let them look at you first."

So I went down with Kip and his second apple, and Hesk let us in, and Kip sat on his three-legged stool outside the last cell, and I stood beside him, and I told them.

I told the twenty standing in their row with their fists. And the eleven lying on the straw. And the stooped man against the back wall, with his knees up and his hands between them. I told it in our tongue and in Kethran, as well as I could, and with my hands in mill talk, just in case.

Seven of you asked, I said. Marra, daughter of Corrick, and six more. They're in Greykeep. They're eating biscuits. They can come back here and visit you any time they like, and nobody will stop them going home again.

If you ever want to ask, I said, somebody will be here. Every day. To listen.

The twenty didn't move. The eleven didn't move.

I waited a long time.

Then I turned to go.

And Kip said, "Garrick."

* * *

The stooped man had lifted his head.

He was looking at Kip. Not at me. At Kip, on his stool, with his apple. The boy he'd given a bottle and a coin and a cloth to, in Orselle, the boy who'd put both hands on his chained wrist on the parade ground and said I'm not doing it anymore. And neither are you.

And he took his hands out from between his knees.

Slowly. Like a man lifting something very heavy. He held them up in front of him in the lamplight.

He'd opened them himself.

Nobody had borrowed anything. Nobody had opened them for him. Iselle was in Greykeep, asleep in her mother's arms. My hands were empty. It was just a man who'd sat against a wall for a whole autumn, holding his own fists, and had decided, on his own, in his own time, to stop.

"He's asking," said Kip. Very quietly. "Isn't he?"

"Yes," I said. "I think he is."

* * *

My father came down at nine.

He came down the long stair into the cells with his boots in his hand, and he looked at the stooped man and his open hands, and at Kip, and at me. And he didn't say anything at all. He just asked Hesk for the key and went into the cell, and sat down on the straw beside the man, with his back to the wall, the same as him.

"Do you know your name?" my father said.

The stooped man shook his head. Slowly.

"Then the Castellan won't be able to find you yet," said my father. "That's all right." He settled his shoulders against the stone. "I'll wait with you till it can."

"Father," I said. "That might take a long time."

"Then I'll be very hard to get past," said my father. "In the meantime." He looked up at me. "Go home. Tell your mothers where I am. Tell Helena I'll want breakfast down here."

So I went home. And my father sat all night in a cell under Concordia with a man with no name and no voice and an open hand, and Kip fell asleep on his stool outside the bars with his apple core in his lap.

And in the morning, Hesk told me, the stooped man had put his head on my father's shoulder, the same as Roderic had on the stair.

* * *

Mary's book. That night. Her hand not quite steady.

Wednesday. Noon. Iselle, daughter of Saba, asked at the big gate, Concordia side to ours. Uriah answered. The Castellan wrote it: Asked. Answered. In.

Seven more asked after her. Garrick asked for them; he learned the mill talk this morning in half an hour. Marra, daughter of Corrick, and six whose names Marra kept. All in.

Uriah gave each of them a honey biscuit. Nobody ate one for an hour. Then they all did, at once.

Saba says Corrick kept Marra's chair by the mill fire for eight years. She says she'll write and tell him to dust it.

In the cells, the stooped man opened his own hand. Uriah is sitting with him. He has asked for breakfast to be sent down.

And under that, in a hand nobody in the house had ever seen, small and square, pressing very hard into the paper, like someone who's had to write with her fingers inside her sleeve for a very long time:

Marra. Daughter of Corrick, the miller. Ilvane. I kept all their names. Now somebody else can.