Chapter 128: What Iselle Knows

At a quarter to five on Friday morning, I went down to the old tilt yard below the stables and asked.

It was still dark. There was frost on the cobbles and a single lantern hung on the post by the mounting block, and under it my brother Roderic was stretching his arms over his head and yawning so wide I heard his jaw click. And on the low wall at the end of the yard, with his back to the paddock and his hands folded on top of a plain wooden staff, sat a god I'd never met.

I'd seen him across the Council Hall, twice. Never closer. Avarn of the sword is not what anyone imagines. He's old, and lean, and gray all over, gray hair cropped close, gray stubble, a gray coat worn white at the elbows. He has a carpenter's hands, square and scarred, with the nails cut very short. He looks like a man who mends gates for a living and has opinions about hinges.

He didn't get up. He watched me cross the yard.

"I'm Garrick," I said.

"I know who you are." His voice was the dry old voice I'd heard in my brother's memory, on the stair. "You held a candle-snuffer like a shovel."

"Yes."

"And then you held it properly. Because you'd taken it off him." He nodded at Roderic. "Which is cheating, in my yard. Or would be, if he hadn't nodded."

I took a breath. "May I learn? Properly. Not borrowed. You can say no."

Avarn looked at me for a long time. Behind me, Roderic had stopped yawning.

"Why?" said Avarn.

I thought about it. I thought about the stair, and my voice going down the well, and reaching for the world and finding nothing there to ask.

"Because on Tuesday night I couldn't ask anyone for anything," I said. "And I didn't know how to do a single thing on my own. I'd like to know one."

Avarn stood up. It took him a while; his knees cracked like kindling.

"You're not good," he said.

"I know."

"Are you patient?"

"No," said Roderic, from behind me, before I could answer.

Avarn's mouth twitched. Just slightly, at one corner. He tossed me the staff, and I caught it, badly.

"Again," he said.

* * *

I won't write about the lesson. It was two hours long and I fell over eleven times, and Roderic counted every one of them out loud, and Avarn said again perhaps two hundred times and nothing else at all. At seven the kitchen bell rang across the yard and Avarn said, "Tomorrow. Five. Both of you," and walked off toward the paddock gate without looking back.

"He likes you," said Roderic.

"How can you possibly tell?"

"He said tomorrow." Roderic picked me up off the cobbles by my collar. "He's never said tomorrow to me. He just stands there till I come back."

* * *

At noon there was a Council.

Not a full one. Not forty chairs and gods standing along the wall, the way it was for the war council in the autumn. My father asked for a small one, and Aurelia, who leads the Council but never calls it, agreed. So there were perhaps twenty of us in the round hall, in the ring of plain wooden chairs, under the high windows full of thin winter light.

Aurelia. My father, standing, as always, behind his chair instead of in it. My mother and Adriana. Carol and Ignatius. Seraphina, without the baby; Helena had him in the kitchen. Thor with her hammer against her knee, which isn't allowed, and nobody tells her. Loki on the windowsill. Brannoc, sitting the way he sits, as if the chair were a wall. Avarn, who'd washed and changed his coat for one exactly as gray. Lexander, through the Concordia gate, with Io. Saba, small in a big chair with her feet not reaching the floor. Roderic, standing behind Iselle's chair, not in his own.

And Marra, beside Iselle, unmasked, in a borrowed blue dress of Caitlin's, with her hands folded open in her lap. And me beside Marra, because I was the only person in the room who could hear her.

Iselle had asked for this. On Wednesday night, in the lower hall, after the biscuits.

"I've been here since autumn," she said to my father. "You've never once asked me about him. About the court. What he's like. What he wants. And you've never asked me why. And I know why you haven't. You didn't want me to feel like you'd taken me in so you could take things out of me." She held her hands open. "I'm in now. I asked. So I'd like to tell you. All of it. Before he sends anyone else up a stair."

My father had looked at her for a long time.

"You can stop," he said. "Any time. In the middle of a word. Nobody will ask you to finish."

"I know," said Iselle. "That's why I can start."

* * *

So at noon on Friday, in the round hall with no locks, Iselle stood up in the middle of the ring of chairs, and told us what she knew.

* * *

I'll put down most of it. Not all. Some of it was for the Council and not for anybody's book, and some of it Iselle asked me to leave out, and I said I would.

She told us about the golden city. How it glows at night from the eleven storms held in its towers, so bright you can read by it on the ships fifty miles out. How there are no shadows on the main streets at midnight. How the children of the golden city have never seen the stars.

She told us about the palace. How it has eleven hundred rooms and very few windows. How the Emperor never touches anyone, and nobody touches him. How the court kneels to him with their hands closed into fists against their chests, because an open hand in his presence means you're asking for something, and you never ask him for anything. He asks, she said. Only he asks. Once. And then once more. And never a third time.

How nobody says his name. Not his ministers. Not his generals. Not the Chained, who love him. They say Radiance and the Emperor and He Who Holds.

"I used to say it at night," said Iselle. "In my room with no windows. Under the blanket. Malachar. Very quietly. Just to hear somebody say it." She looked down at her open hands. "I thought he must be very lonely. To have nobody ever say his name."

Thor shifted in her chair and said nothing. My father's face didn't move.

* * *

She told us what he wanted.

Not Greykeep. She was very clear about that. He has never wanted Greykeep, or Avarra, or anybody's land. "He has enough land," she said. "He has twelve valleys and a coast and a river and the high plateaus and every king who ever ruled them. He doesn't want more of anything he already has."

"Then what?" said Lexander.

"Something he can't hold," said Iselle. "He's never had one. Everything he's ever reached for, he got. Every kingdom. Every god who said yes. Every storm. And then there was one thing that he couldn't." She looked at Carol. "A girl who climbs things."

Carol didn't look away.

"And something else," said Iselle. "Something older. That he's wanted since before I was born." She took a breath. "But to tell you that, I have to tell you about his mother first."

* * *

Her name is Cerys.

She was a scribe's daughter in a small river town in the south of Kethra, more than three hundred years ago. Severin told us that much, in the autumn, in the great hall, the first time he came. A god saw her, and wanted her, and did not stay.

What Severin didn't tell us, because I don't think Severin knows, is that she's still alive.

"She lives at the top of the tallest tower in the palace," said Iselle. "In a room made all of glass. One of the held storms is in the tower right under it, so it's lit from below, day and night, the same white all the time. There are no shadows in her room at all." Her voice was very even. "She doesn't sleep. She doesn't get old. She doesn't get ill. She doesn't change. She's been exactly the same since the day he took the first crown. He holds her. The way he holds the storms. Like a jewel in a case."

Nobody in the round hall said anything.

"She's kind," said Iselle. "She's very, very kind. She has silver hair and ink on the side of her middle finger that never washes off, because she was copying a deed for her father the morning the god walked in, and she says she's been meaning to finish it for three hundred years. He sent me to her every evening. To read to her. I was twelve, and I couldn't read his letters yet, only the valley ones, and she laughed, and said she'd teach me." She stopped. "She did. Every evening. For two years. Before they moved me to the room without windows. She taught me to write."

"Does he visit her?" asked my mother. Very gently.

"Every night," said Iselle. "At midnight. He sits on the floor of the glass room, by her chair, and she puts her hand on his head. I saw it once. I wasn't supposed to. I was hiding behind the curtain, because I'd forgotten my slate." Her hands closed, just slightly, in her lap. Then opened again. "He didn't say anything. Neither did she. They just sat. And when he got up to go, she said what she says to every single person who comes into that room. Me. The servants. Him."

"What does she say?" said my father.

Iselle looked up at him.

"Is it time yet?" she said.

* * *

It was very quiet in the round hall.

"And he says?" said my father.

"Not yet." Iselle's voice cracked, just once. "Every night. For three hundred years. Not yet, Mother."

* * *

I looked across the ring of chairs at Aurelia.

She'd closed her eyes. Aurelia, who sits at every deathbed she's asked to, who holds the hands of the dying in shepherds' huts on the high moors, who has been praying with midwives and nurses and old women at bedsides for less than four hundred years and more than anyone. Her face was very still.

"He won't let her go," she said. Not a question.

"He can't," said Iselle. "She's the only thing he ever had that he didn't have to ask for. She's the only one who ever held him." She wiped her eyes, quickly, with the back of her hand. "I used to think he was cruel. Keeping her. And then I watched him sit on the floor with his head under her hand. And I thought: he isn't keeping her because he's cruel. He's keeping her because he's frightened. And he doesn't know any other way to hold something than to never put it down."

* * *

My father had moved.

I didn't notice it at first. He was still standing behind his chair. But his hands had come off the back of it, and they were open, at his sides.

"Iselle," he said. "When you asked for him to be deposed. Not killed. Put somewhere he has to knock." He paused. "Was that for her?"

Iselle was quiet for a long moment.

"Partly," she said. "She'd be on the other side of the door. Someday. If he ever learns to knock." She looked down. "She says she'd like to see her river again. Just once. The one she grew up on. She says she can't remember what color it is in spring."

Saba made a small sound, across the ring. Iselle didn't look at her mother. If she had, I don't think she'd have been able to go on.

* * *

"Tell them the rest," said Saba softly. "About the slate."

Iselle nodded.

"The thing he's wanted since before I was born," she said. "It isn't a thing. It's words. Old ones. Older than him. Older than the empire." She looked around the hall. "Cerys wrote them out for me once. On my slate. In the old Kethran hand, the scribe's hand, with all the strokes going the right way. She said it was the first thing he ever asked her to read to him, when he was a little boy. And the last thing he asked her to write down, the night he took the first crown. She said he's had it carved over every door in the palace since. On the inside. Where only he can see it."

"A prophecy," said Lexander. Very quietly. He'd gone pale.

"A saying," said Iselle. "That's what the valley people call it. The old women say it at the loom. Most of them have forgotten what it's about. They just say it because it fits the rhythm of the treadle." She took a breath. "My mother used to sing it."

She turned to Saba. And Saba, small in her big chair, with her feet not reaching the floor, began to sing.

* * *

It was a loom song. You could hear it: the beat under it, the push and pull of the treadle, the click of the shuttle going across. Old valley Kethran, with the vowels left open. Saba's voice was thin and high and very steady, and the words went around the round hall the way water goes around stones.

Iselle said them after her, in our tongue, one line at a time.

When the one who holds a gift of the gods

is joined to the flame that was first,

the half shall be made whole.

And the hand that holds it shall—

Saba stopped.

"That's all," said Iselle. "That's where it ends. The valley song, and the slate, and every door in the palace. The hand that holds it shall. And then nothing." She looked around the ring. "Cerys said the end was cut out before he was born. Out of every copy. Out of the old women's mouths. Out of the treadle. She said somebody wanted it gone very much."

Lexander had closed his eye.

Torn out, I thought. Somebody wanted it very much. I'd heard that before. On the east wall, at two in the morning, from Lexander himself, about the oldest memory in his head.

* * *

"He thinks it's him," said Iselle.

"Who's the half?" said Carol.

"Him. He's half a god. His father was a god and his mother was a scribe's daughter. He's been half his whole life." Iselle spread her open hands. "He thinks if he holds a gift of the gods, the greatest one he can find, and joins it to the First Flame, he'll be made whole. He'll stop being half. He'll stop being a man who has to sit on the floor every night with his head under his mother's hand and tell her not yet." She looked at Carol. Then at Seraphina. "That's what the letter was. In the autumn. I want her. And the one who carries the First Flame. That's all it ever was. He thinks you're the gift and Seraphina's the flame, and if he can just hold you both, he'll be whole."

"Flame-consort," said Seraphina. Her voice was flat. "Her husband may visit."

"I'm sorry," said Iselle.

"Don't be." Seraphina's eyes had gone a little white-gold at the edges. "It isn't your saying."

* * *

And I sat very still, in my chair beside Marra, with my hands in my lap, and didn't breathe.

The one who holds a gift of the gods.

I hold a gift of the gods. Carol and I both do. We were born holding it. Mimicry, the stream, everything we've ever borrowed and been given and kept. And Seraphina carries the First Flame. And she and I were joined. In front of everyone. With her hand in mine.

Is joined to the flame that was first.

The half shall be made whole.

I thought of our son. In the little kitchen, right now, on Helena's hip, with a crust in his fist. I thought of the gold flame on his blanket that didn't want anything. I thought of Odin's memory, on the east wall, through Muninn: the First Flame broken in two long ago by a closed hand, into mending and cutting. Two halves.

And our son's flame wasn't half of anything.

It was whole.

* * *

I didn't look at Seraphina. I didn't dare. I didn't look at Carol.

I looked at my father.

He was already looking at me.

He'd been looking at me, I think, since Saba sang the third line. His face hadn't changed. Not at all. He was standing behind his chair with his open hands at his sides, the way he stands in a storm, and his eyes were on mine across the round hall. Steady. Gray. Completely calm.

And very slightly, so slightly that nobody else in that room could possibly have seen it, he shook his head.

Not here.

Because Iselle didn't know. Iselle had chosen not to know. On the day we decided how to hide it, Iselle had said no. If anyone ever comes for me, I want to be able to say I don't know, and have it be true. I'm choosing it. And Marra, beside me, didn't know. And half the gods in that ring didn't know. And Iselle had just stood in the middle of the round hall and told us that the man across the sea had wanted, since before she was born, the one thing in the world that was sitting on Helena's hip in our kitchen right now.

And she had no idea.

* * *

I don't know how I sat through the rest of it. I did. I nodded in the right places. Lexander asked questions about the fleet, and the held storms, and Draum, and Iselle answered all of them, carefully, and Brannoc took notes in a little leather book with a pencil that looked like a splinter in his huge fist. My father asked whether the glass room had a door that opened from the inside. Iselle said she didn't know. She'd never seen Cerys try.

And beside me, all that time, Marra's hands were moving.

Not to me. Not at first. Just in her lap. Small shapes. The same three or four, over and over, the way you'd mutter something under your breath. I didn't watch. I was trying very hard not to look at anything at all.

Until Aurelia stood up to end the Council. And Marra's hand came out and closed (no, not closed; Marra's hands don't close) and caught my sleeve.

I looked down at her.

Her face was white. The pale mask-lines on her cheeks had gone almost invisible against it.

I know the end, her hands said.

* * *

I stared at her.

What?

The end of it. The saying. Her hands were shaking. She stilled them. Started again, slower, so I couldn't miss a word. In the Temple of Oaths. Before the first link. You kneel on a stone to swear. A flat black stone. With your face down. Everybody does. Nobody reads it, because you aren't supposed to, and because you're crying.

She swallowed.

I could read. Every child in Kethra can read. He made sure. I read it upside down. While I was crying. Because I wanted to think about anything except what I was saying.

She looked at me.

It's carved on the stone. The whole thing. All of it.

The end too.

* * *

Across the hall, my father had stopped with one hand on the back of his chair.

He hadn't seen her hands. He couldn't read mill talk. But he'd seen my face.

And he came across the round hall in four long strides, barefoot on the wooden floor, past Aurelia and Brannoc and Thor with her hammer, and crouched down in front of Marra's chair so that his eyes were level with hers. The way he crouches in front of Mirelle when she's fallen off something. And he held out his hands, open, palms up, and waited.

"Marra," he said. "You don't have to. You can say no."

Marra looked at his open hands for a long time.

Then she looked at me.

Tell him, her hands said. Tell him I'll say it. But not in here. Her eyes went around the round hall, the ring of chairs, the twenty gods and kings, and came back to me. Somewhere small. With a window. With a door that opens from the inside.

"She'll tell you," I said to my father. My voice didn't sound like mine. "She knows the end. She read it on the stone where they swear. Upside down." I swallowed. "She wants somewhere small. With a window."

My father looked at Marra. Then at me. Then, for just one moment, toward the door of the round hall, toward the inner court, toward the little kitchen on the far side of it, where Helena was singing.

"The north tower," he said. "Top room. Ninety-one steps." He stood up. "Tonight. After he's asleep."

He didn't say who he was.

He didn't have to.

* * *

Mary's book. That evening, at six, before any of us went up the north tower.

Friday. Five o'clock: Garrick to the tilt yard, with Roderic. Avarn says tomorrow. Garrick fell over eleven times. Roderic counted.

Noon: a small Council. Iselle stood up and told them about the court. About his mother. About the saying.

Lady Cerys is alive. She lives in a glass room at the top of the palace. She asks everyone who comes in if it's time yet.

Aurelia went out into the orchard afterward and was there an hour.

Saba sang the saying. It has four lines. The fourth one stops in the middle.

Marra says she has read the end.

And under that, in Iselle's hand, which I now know was taught to her in a glass room by a woman with ink on her finger, every stroke going exactly the right way:

Iselle, for Cerys, who can't come and write it herself. She'd want it in a book somewhere. She'd want it noted: Tell him he can put me down.