Chapter 133: Evacuation

Westmere has three thousand one hundred and six people in it. Caitlin knew that before anyone asked her. Goss knew it too, because it's written in his ledger.

By midnight on Wednesday, we were moving all of them.

* * *

My father decided it at a quarter past nine, in Tamar's kitchen, with Severin's boat still a dark shape going away across the flat sea.

"Everyone," he said. "Not just the little ones. Severin said the coast. Thora says the sea's going to stand up. I'm not going to stand on that pier tomorrow and find out which of them was wrong." He looked at Tamar. "It's your town. Your harbor. You'd have to ask them."

"I'll ask," said Tamar. "They'll go." She was already on her feet, pulling her coat on, her bad hand doing up the buttons as fast as the good one. "Where?"

"Greykeep," said my father. "Through the Hold gate. Into the lower hall, and up into the castle, and the town, and the farms. Every house that has a room." He looked at my mother. "And Lyradon, through the next arch, if Greykeep fills. The upper terraces. Queen Mirelle will open every door she has."

"She will," said Adriana. "I'll go and tell her myself."

"And the little ones," said my father, "go first. Before anybody. Tonight."

He didn't look at me when he said it. He didn't need to.

* * *

Seraphina was in the room Tamar had given us at the top of the Hold, with little Uriah asleep on her shoulder and his flame on his blanket, under his chin, the size of a thumbnail.

She looked up when I came in. She'd heard. Of course she had. The whole Hold had heard; Tamar's bell had started ringing down in the town, a different ring from the watch bell, three and three and three, and doors were opening all along the harbor.

"I'm taking him to Greykeep," said Seraphina. "Through the gate. To the nursery. Thor and Iggy are already there; Mary sent a raven an hour ago."

"Yes."

"And you're staying."

"Yes."

She looked at me for a long time over the top of our son's head.

"I know why," she said. "Your father. The pier. Stand where I can see you." She shifted little Uriah higher on her shoulder. He made a small cross noise in his sleep and went quiet again. "I'm not going to ask you to come."

"Thank you."

"I'm going to tell you something instead." Her eyes had gone white-gold at the edges. Not angry. Just very bright. "The fold said give me the whole one. He wants our son. And the only way he gets him is through that gate, or through me, or through you." She came across the room and stood very close. "So you stay here and stand next to your father. And I'll stand in the nursery doorway at Greykeep. Not in the doorway. Next to it. And between the two of us, nothing gets through."

I put my arms around both of them. Her and our son and the little gold flame, all at once.

"Heard," I said into her hair.

* * *

The Hold gate at Westmere is in the lower court, under the oldest part of the castle, where the waterways come in. Two pale pillars with Eleanor's brass plates on them, and the gray shimmer between, the same as all the gates, only smaller. It was built for the steward and her household and the odd cart of herring. It was never built for a town.

At ten o'clock, the town started coming through it.

* * *

The Castellan stopped them at the first family.

I'd known it would. It doesn't open its gates to people it can't find. And the Castellan has never been to Westmere. It doesn't know the herring wives and the rope makers and the barge men and their children. It only knows names. Real ones. The ones underneath.

"I do not have them," it said, from the gray shimmer, in its dry old voice. Not unkindly. "I am sorry. I do not open my gates to people I cannot find."

A fisherman's wife at the front, with a baby on her hip and two more holding her skirt, started to cry.

And Goss stepped forward.

* * *

Goss is the harbormaster of Westmere. A thin, frightened man with a long nose and ink on his fingers, who has kept a ledger every day of his working life. Every ship. Every cargo. Every birth in the harbor town, every death, every marriage, every child who ever fell off the north pier and was fished out again by Dunmore's crew. It's what harbormasters do, at Westmere. It's older than the Hold.

He'd brought the ledger. Not one; all of them. Eleven big calf-bound books, in a handcart, that Callow had pushed up from the harbor office through the dark, complaining the whole way.

Goss opened the newest one on the top of the cart. He found the page. He put his ink-stained finger on the line.

"Bess Harlow," he said to the gate. Very clearly. "Wife of Tom Harlow, net mender. Of Westmere, the third house on Gull Lane, by the pump. And Annet Harlow, aged six. And Joss Harlow, aged four. And the baby, Tilly Harlow, born at the turn of the year, a girl, eight pounds and a bit, I wrote her in myself." He looked up at the shimmer. "Will that do?"

There was a pause.

"Bess Harlow," said the Castellan slowly. "Of the third house on Gull Lane, by the pump." Another pause. "There you are."

The shimmer cleared. Bess Harlow walked through it with her three children into the lower hall at Greykeep, four hundred miles away, and Helena was on the other side with a blanket.

* * *

Goss read all night.

I stood beside him. My father asked me to. Hold the lamp for him, he said. And when his voice goes, hold that too.

So I stood at Goss's elbow beside the handcart, with the little oak sword tucked under my arm and a lantern in my other hand, and I held the light over the ledger. And Goss read names. Family after family. House after house. Lane after lane. Gull Lane and Net Row and the Long Steps and Chandler's Yard and the cottages out on the Point. Every one of them with a house and a trade and a pump or a chapel or a crooked chimney to find it by. Children with their ages. Grandmothers with the years they were born. Babies with their weights.

And every time, the Castellan said there you are.

* * *

At one in the morning, Goss's voice gave out.

He'd been reading for three hours. He opened his mouth for the next name, a cooper called Ned Avery of the Long Steps, and nothing came out but a croak. And he stood there with his finger on the line and his eyes full of tears, a thin frightened man who'd never once in his life been in charge of anything bigger than a harbor, holding up a whole town.

So I held his voice.

I didn't take it. I asked him. Borrow? And he looked at me, and nodded, because he couldn't say Take. And I put my hand on his shoulder, and I read the name.

"Ned Avery," I said, in Goss's voice. Thin and careful and a little high, the voice of a man who's been reading names aloud for thirty years and never once thought anyone was listening. "Cooper. Of the Long Steps, the house with the barrels outside."

"There you are," said the Castellan.

And Goss put his hand over his mouth and cried, and I kept reading. In his voice. For him. Until Caitlin came down at two with a mug of honey and hot water and made him drink it, and he could go on.

* * *

At half past three, Pim came through.

He's eight. Dunmore's nephew. The boy who waves from the north pier at every boat that comes in, every single one, whether he knows it or not. He was holding Dunmore's hand; Dunmore had walked him up from the harbor to put him through himself. And he stopped at the gate and looked back down the lower court, past the handcart, past Goss, out through the open sea door at the end of the court toward the harbor.

"Who's going to wave?" said Pim. "If I'm not on the pier. Who's going to wave at the boats?"

Dunmore didn't know what to say.

"I will," said my father.

* * *

He'd come down the stair behind us without anyone hearing. He crouched in front of Pim on the wet stones. Huge. In his shirt and his bare feet.

"I'll be on the north pier all day tomorrow," said my father. "Right at the end. Where you stand. And if any boat comes in, any boat at all, I'll wave at it. The way you do." He held up his hand, open, and moved it slowly back and forth. "Like that?"

Pim looked at him critically.

"Faster," he said. "And you have to smile."

My father smiled. It wasn't much of one. But Pim nodded, satisfied, and took Dunmore's hand again.

"Pim," said Goss, in a whisper of a voice. "Son of nobody, raised by Dunmore, master of the Kittiwake. Of the north pier." He swallowed. "Of the north pier, mostly."

"There you are," said the Castellan.

* * *

Not everybody went.

Edric wouldn't. Tamar's father, who handed her the stewardship three winters ago and has lived by the harbor wall ever since, fishing badly with no bait on the hook. He sat on his upturned crate at the end of the harbor wall with his line in the flat water, and he looked up at Tamar when she came to fetch him, and said, "I've a hook in the water, girl."

"There's no fish. Draum's holding the sea. Nothing's moving."

"Then it'll be a long wait," said Edric, "and I'd best not miss the start of it." He looked at her. "I handed you the town. I didn't hand you the harbor wall. You'll have to ask me again tomorrow."

Tamar stood there for a long moment.

Then she sat down on the wall beside him. And didn't ask again.

* * *

Selvane wouldn't either. Couldn't.

She can't go inland. Aurelia said so, in the autumn. Away from salt water and boats she'd go thin, a little more every day, until she was gone. So she stayed where she always is, at the end of the south mole, on the old stone that is the oldest part of her, older than her name, with her feet in the flat dead sea that wouldn't move for her.

And Benjamin stayed with her.

My great-grandfather. Aurelia's son, who held a door for two hundred and twenty-two years. He was sitting beside her on the stone with her hand in his, singing the soldiers' song very quietly, the one she heard every night for years across the water from the north. He looked up when I came along the mole with my lantern at four in the morning, and smiled at me, and didn't stop singing.

He didn't need to say anything. I knew. He'd held a door once. He knew how.

* * *

At ten to five, the last family went through the gate. The Orrels, of the cottage on the Point with the blue shutters. Goss read their names in a voice like paper tearing, and the Castellan said there you are, and they were gone.

Goss closed the ledger.

Then he sat down on the wet stones of the lower court, right where he was, beside the handcart, and put his head on his knees.

"Three thousand and ninety-one," said Caitlin, behind me. She'd counted every one. "Fifteen didn't go. Edric. Tamar. Dunmore and the eleven men of the Kittiwake; they won't leave her. And Goss." She looked down at him. "He says somebody has to keep the ledger." She paused. "And Selvane and Benjamin. But they're not in the ledger. So I didn't count them." Another pause. "I counted them anyway."

"There you are," said the Castellan softly, from the gate.

I looked up.

It said it again. To no one. Into the empty lower court, with the gray light of morning starting to come in through the sea door. There you are. As if it were saying it to Goss. As if it had found him, at last, a man who'd spent his whole life finding everybody else.

* * *

At five o'clock, I went down to the north pier.

Avarn was on the bollard at the end. With his staff across his knees.

And standing in front of him, on the wet black stones, in his shirt and his bare feet, with a plain wooden staff in his hands exactly like mine, was my father.

* * *

I stopped dead.

Roderic, coming up behind me at a run with his collar inside out, walked straight into my back.

"Ow," said Roderic. "What—"

Then he saw. And stopped too.

Our father didn't look around. He was standing very still, with the staff held low and his weight on the balls of his bare feet, and Avarn was looking at him the way he looks at me. Critically. Patiently. As if he'd seen a thousand men stand on a thousand piers and was waiting to be shown something new.

"Again," said Avarn.

And my father moved.

* * *

I've seen my father do a great many things. I've seen him freeze the western sea with one hand. I've seen him come down out of a clear sky as a bolt of lightning. I've seen him frost a whole college in two heartbeats. I'd never once seen him hold a staff.

He held it the way Avarn taught me. Low. Loose. Watching the shoulder, never the hand. He stepped off the line of Avarn's staff instead of back from it, the way I'd done it for the first time on Sunday and been so proud of. Only he did it without thinking. He did it the way you'd step around a puddle. And the old god's staff went past his ear and his own came around, slow and easy, and touched Avarn's wrist. Lightly. Like tapping a man on the arm to tell him he'd dropped something.

Avarn grunted.

"Twenty-two years," he said. "You've let your left foot go."

"I know," said my father.

"You're still not good."

"I know."

"Still patient, though." Avarn lowered his staff. "That was always the thing with you." He looked past my father, at me and Roderic standing frozen at the landward end of the pier. "You'd better tell them. They've got faces like two fish on a slab."

* * *

My father turned around.

He looked at us. At the oak sword under my arm. At Roderic's collar.

"Avarn taught me," he said. "When you were very small. Both of you. Carol and you, Garrick. You weren't two yet." He leaned on his staff. "Five o'clock. Every morning. The tilt yard. For a year and a half."

"Before me," I said.

"Before you," said my father. "Who do you think he kept five o'clock for, the first time?" He almost smiled. "When you came down to the yard on your fifth birthday and found an old man on the wall with a wooden sword for you, you didn't think he'd just happened to be there, did you?"

I had. I had thought exactly that. For eighteen years.

* * *

"Why?" said Roderic. "You can freeze the sea. Why would you need—"

"Because I couldn't stand in front," said my father simply. "Not properly. Not then."

He looked out across the flat gray sea toward the line of black ships at the shoals, and the eleven glass towers with their storms going around and around inside them, dim now in the morning light.

"When you were babies, there was a war," he said. "You know that. And in the war, I learned that being very strong is not the same as being very hard to get past. A storm is strong. You can't stand in front of anything with a storm. A storm goes everywhere. Over everyone. Friends and enemies and the people in between." He turned the staff in his hands. "I didn't want to be a storm. I wanted to be a wall. So I asked Avarn to teach me where to put my feet. And I asked Thor to teach me the hammer."

"Thor taught you?" said Roderic.

"Every afternoon. On the east wall. For two summers." My father rubbed his shoulder, as if it remembered. "She was a much worse teacher than Avarn. She hit me with it every day and laughed. But she taught me how to hold a thing that heavy so that it only goes where you send it. And nowhere else."

* * *

"The frost hammer," I said slowly. "The one you carry. Sometimes."

"Sometimes," said my father.

And he held out his right hand, open, palm up, over the end of the north pier.

And the air above it went cold. Very cold. All at once. Snow came out of nowhere, a little whirl of it, out of the clear gray morning, and spun in the air above his palm. And then it wasn't snow. It was iron, or ice, or something that was both: a long haft, pale as winter, and a head the size of a loaf, white and gray and frosted all over, so cold the air around it smoked.

It came down into his hand. He closed his fingers around the haft.

Just like that. Out of nowhere.

"From my domain," said my father. "I don't carry it. Not really. It's always there. Like the winter's always there, under everything, waiting. I just ask for it, and it comes." He weighed it in his hand. "Thor taught me how to ask."

* * *

Roderic's mouth was open.

I don't think mine was much better.

"You've got a sword too," I said. "Haven't you? A lightning sword. Severin said once. In the autumn. Storm and winter. He said Kethran sailors still tell stories about it."

My father was quiet for a long time.

The hammer smoked in his hand. Out at the shoals, the glass towers glimmered in the gray light.

"Yes," he said. "I have a sword."

"Why have I never seen it?"

"Because I've only drawn it twice," said my father. "In my whole life. Both times in the war. Both times in battles that weren't going to end until somebody was dead." He looked down at the hammer. "The hammer is a wall. It goes where I send it, and it stops there. The sword doesn't stop. The sword is the storm. All of it. Every bolt I've ever thrown, at once, in one edge." He looked at me. "The first time I drew it, there was a valley in the north with a name. There isn't anymore. Nobody lives in it. Nothing grows there. It's just stone, all fused together, like glass."

Nobody said anything.

"So I don't draw it," said my father. "Not for a fight. Not for a war, even. Only for the end of one. Only when there's nothing left on the other side that can be talked to, or knocked for, or let in." He opened his hand. The hammer went back into the air, into a little whirl of snow, and was gone. "It's in my domain. With the winter. It always will be. I can call it any time I like." He looked out at the shoals. "I'm hoping very much I never have to call it again."

* * *

"But you might," said Avarn. From the bollard. Not a question.

My father didn't answer.

He didn't have to. We all knew who he meant. Not Malachar, sitting somewhere out on those black ships, waiting to be asked in. Somebody else. Somebody who put a hand inside another man's letter and threatened his mother. Somebody who'd never once knocked.

Avarn stood up. His knees cracked like kindling.

"Then you'd better get your left foot back," he said. He picked up his staff. And looked at the three of us. My father, and me with my wooden sword, and Roderic with his collar. "All of you. Since you're here."

"All of us?" said Roderic.

"I've kept five o'clock for twenty-two years," said Avarn. "I'd like to see what it was for." He set his feet on the wet black stones. "Again."

* * *

So that was how the last morning before Draum's storm began.

Three Grey men on the end of the north pier at Westmere, in the gray light, with an empty town behind us and two hundred and fifty-one ships in front of us, taking a lesson from an old gray god with a carpenter's hands. My father lost his footing twice and laughed both times. Roderic fell over once, and claimed it was the stones. I fell over once.

Once.

Avarn didn't say anything about it. But at seven, when Tamar's watch bell rang in the empty Hold above us, and he said tomorrow, he looked at me for a moment before he said it. And then he said it again.

"Tomorrow," said Avarn. "If there is one."

* * *

At eight, my father went to the end of the north pier and stood where Pim stands.

And all day, through the long flat silent hours, while the fleet sat on the shoals and the storm towers glimmered and the sea lay like glass and nothing moved anywhere, my father stood at the end of the pier in his bare feet with his open hand raised.

Every time a gull came in off the water, he waved at it.

Faster. And smiling. The way Pim told him to.

* * *

Mary's book. Westmere. Thursday morning. She'd gone through to Greykeep at four with the last of the old people from the Point and come back at seven, because she said she wanted to see how it ended.

Wednesday night. Westmere evacuated through the Hold gate. Goss read every name in the ledger. The Castellan said there you are 3,091 times. Garrick held the lamp, and then Goss's voice. Caitlin counted.

Fifteen stayed. Edric has a hook in the water. Benjamin is singing to Selvane on the south mole.

Seraphina took the little one to the nursery. Thor and Ignatius at the door. Seraphina says she's standing next to it.

Thursday, five o'clock: Avarn taught three Greys on the north pier. Uriah first, twenty-two years ago. Thor taught him the hammer. He called it out of the air and sent it back.

He has a sword. He has drawn it twice. He says he hopes there isn't a third.

He waved at the gulls all day. For Pim.

And under that, in a thin, careful, high hand, the hand of a man who has written in ledgers every day of his life and never once in a book like this one:

Goss, harbormaster. 3,091 in. 15 out. Ledger balanced. I would like it noted that the Castellan found me last.