Chapter 138: Tamar Holds

The first of them came over the harbor wall at nineteen minutes past five.

I know because Goss wrote it down. He was in the doorway of the harbor office with his ledger open on a barrel, writing names as people went past him up the street to the Hold, and when the first gray shape came up out of the smoke onto the end of the north pier, he looked up and looked at the clock over the office door and wrote it in the margin.

5:19. They're here.

Then he went on writing names.

* * *

It came up the steps at the end of the north pier. The steps where Pim stands every morning to wave at boats. Where my father knelt with the hammer. Where the Lockwarden knocked on the bollard and his key still lay, small and black, in the frost.

A Hushed. White mask, no mouth. Gray coat smoking, the hem of it burning, because it had walked a quarter of a mile through Cindrel's fire to get here and hadn't noticed. And its hands held out in front of it, the fingers bound into the palms with black chain, the little padlocks swinging.

It stepped up onto the pier. It turned its mask toward the harbor wall, where three thousand Kethran sailors stood with their hands open.

And behind it, out of the smoke, up the steps, came another. And another. And another.

* * *

Dunmore's men were at the end of the harbor wall, where it meets the pier. Eleven of them. The crew of the Kittiwake. Fishermen, not soldiers. With boathooks.

The first Hushed walked toward them.

Dunmore set his feet and jabbed the boathook at its chest. The hook caught its coat. The Hushed didn't stop. It didn't even slow down. It just walked forward with the iron hook in its coat, pushing the pole back through Dunmore's hands, and swung one chained fist sideways, and the boathook's ash pole snapped like a breadstick.

Dunmore fell back. The Hushed raised its fist again.

I was already moving.

* * *

Watch the shoulder. Never the hand.

I came along the top of the harbor wall with the oak sword in my hand, the one with the crack down it. And I didn't try to hit the Hushed. You can't hurt them. I watched its shoulder. And when the shoulder moved, I was somewhere else. And the chained fist came down where I'd been and hit the iron bollard at the end of the wall.

The bollard rang like a bell. The Hushed didn't feel it. It raised its fist again.

I touched the inside of its knee with the flat of the cracked oak blade. Lightly. The way you'd tap a man to tell him he'd dropped something.

Its knee folded. It went down onto the wet stones. It got up. It doesn't feel anything. But it had to get up. And while it was getting up, I was already somewhere else, and the next one came at me, and I watched its shoulder.

* * *

It wasn't enough.

On the stair at the college there'd been seven. Here there were hundreds, coming up out of the smoke onto the north pier, walking along it toward the harbor wall in a gray line, all of them with their chained fists held out, all of them walking through anything in their way. And behind them, on the burning ice, more, coming in off the red ships.

I could make one of them hit a bollard. I could make two of them stumble. I couldn't do anything about three hundred.

* * *

"Nets!" shouted someone.

* * *

It was Tamar.

He was standing on top of the harbor office roof. I don't know how he'd got up there; there's a drainpipe, I found out later, and he'd climbed it in his nightshirt. He had his spyglass in one hand, and he was pointing with it, down at the long low shed along the back of the harbor wall. The net loft. Where every herring boat in Westmere hangs its nets to dry.

"Nets!" shouted Tamar again, in a voice I'd never heard him use. "They can't open their hands! They can't untangle anything! NETS!"

* * *

For one moment, nobody moved.

Then Dunmore, on his back on the wet stones, with a Hushed standing over him and a broken boathook in his hands, laughed. A great hoarse bark of a laugh. And rolled sideways, under the chained fist, and was on his feet and running for the net loft before the fist came down.

"Kittiwake!" he roared. "With me! The big herring seine! The one Old Morrow mended!"

* * *

They came out of the net loft at a run. Eleven fishermen of the Kittiwake, and behind them fifty Kethran sailors who'd understood at once, because they're sailors, and every sailor in the world knows what a net does. They came out with the great herring seine between them, eighty feet of it, tarred brown and heavy, the cork floats bobbing along the top edge and the lead weights clanking along the bottom.

And they ran it down the harbor wall toward the pier, and threw it.

* * *

It went up and out over the gray line of Hushed coming along the north pier, spreading as it went, the way a seine spreads when a good crew throws it, wide and flat like a brown cloud. And came down over twenty of them at once.

They didn't stop. They don't stop. They kept walking. Into the net. Their chained fists punched into the mesh, and through it, and got caught. Their feet caught. The lead weights wrapped around their ankles. They walked forward and the net walked with them, dragging, tangling, wrapping tighter around every arm and leg, and they couldn't open their hands to pull it off, because Kessavel had chained their hands shut so nothing could ever open them.

Nothing. Not even them.

They went down. All twenty. In a heap, on the north pier, wrapped in eighty feet of tarred herring net like a catch of very large, very quiet fish.

They kept moving. Pushing against the mesh. Getting more tangled.

They didn't get up.

* * *

On the roof of the harbor office, Tamar put both arms in the air. In his nightshirt.

All along the harbor wall, three thousand Kethran sailors cheered.

* * *

After that, it was nets.

Every net in Westmere. The herring seines and the drift nets and the little hand-nets the children use for crabs off the south mole. The lobster pots. The mooring lines and the hawsers and the coils of rope in the chandlery. The fishermen of the Kittiwake and the Kethran sailors worked out between them in about five minutes how to throw a net so it would catch a man walking, and how to run a hawser across the pier at ankle height so a line of Hushed would walk straight into it and fall over each other, and how to drop a lobster pot over a mask so the Hushed inside it couldn't see which way to go.

And I went where the nets weren't. Along the harbor wall, with the oak sword, watching shoulders. Making chained fists come down on bollards and mooring rings and stone. Making knees fold. Buying a heartbeat here and a heartbeat there, until the next net came.

It wasn't fighting. Not really. Avarn would have said it was the same as the stair. It was knowing. Knowing where a thing was going to go, and not being there when it got there.

And the Hushed kept coming.

* * *

At six o'clock the fire reached the harbor mouth.

* * *

The first of the red ships came in through the gap in the burning fleet and stopped just outside the harbor chain, broadside, where the ice had melted and the sea was black and open and steaming. And the piece of Cindrel on its bow lifted its arms.

The fire came off it in a sheet. Not at the wall. At the water. A road of flame poured off the bow onto the black harbor water and spread, the way oil spreads on a puddle, burning on the surface. Toward the harbor. Toward the fishing boats moored three deep along the inside of the wall. Toward the Kittiwake.

Dunmore saw it and went white.

"Not her," he said. "Not my Kittiwake—"

And the fire touched the first boat, a little blue-painted crabber at the end of the line, and it went up like a torch.

* * *

Selvane was on the south mole.

I saw her across the harbor. A small woman in a plain dress with a lamp in her hand, standing on the old stone at the end of the mole with her feet in the water. And as the fire came in through the harbor mouth, burning on the black water, she knelt down and put both her hands flat on the surface of the sea.

Her harbor.

The water around the fire stood up. Not like Draum's wave. A little wall. Knee high. Then waist high. A ring of water lifting itself up off the surface of the harbor and folding over the burning oil like a hand folding over a candle, and pressing it down, and down, until it went out with a hiss and a gout of steam.

And then another. And another.

She couldn't stop the fire on the open sea. That isn't hers. But inside the harbor mouth, the water is Selvane's. It's always been hers. She lit a lamp at the end of a pier for a hundred years so that boats could find their way into it.

She put out every flame that came inside it.

Benjamin knelt beside her, with his hand on her back, singing.

* * *

But the piece of Cindrel on the red ship's bow kept pouring.

And when I looked at it properly, through the smoke and the steam, across the black water, I saw what Selvane had meant on the salt steps.

It was screaming.

* * *

Not with a mouth. It didn't have one, any more than the Hushed do. It was a shape in the fire, the shape of a man, with its arms spread and its head thrown back, chained to the stem-post of the red ship at the wrists and waist and ankles with black chain. And all the fire pouring off it wasn't coming from it. It was being pulled out of it. Wrenched out. By the chains. The way you'd wring a cloth.

And it was screaming. A thin, high, endless sound, under the roar of everything else.

I've heard a god scream before. It's not a thing you forget.

* * *

I went down the harbor steps to the water's edge.

Tamar shouted something at me from the office roof. I didn't hear it.

The red ship was fifty yards out, broadside, just outside the chain. The piece of Cindrel on its bow was screaming. The fire was pouring off it onto the water. Selvane was holding it out of the harbor, but she was shaking; I could see her shaking from here.

I stood on the bottom step with the black water lapping at my boots and the oak sword in my hand.

And I asked.

* * *

Not borrow. Not yet.

"Do you want to stop?" I said.

Out loud. Across fifty yards of burning water. To a piece of a god chained to the bow of a ship.

* * *

The screaming stopped.

Just for a moment. Just that one piece. The others, on the other red ships out past the harbor mouth, went on. But that one went quiet. And the shape in the fire turned its head, very slowly, against the chains. Toward me.

It didn't have a face. But it looked at me.

Yes, it said.

Not out loud. Not in words. The way the storm in the glass tower said it, when Carol put her hand on the glass. The way the wave said it, when I held it. Something that wasn't a word but meant one. Yes. Please. Yes.

"Then let me borrow it," I said. "The fire. All of it. So they can't pull it out of you anymore."

Take.

* * *

It came into me like swallowing the sun.

* * *

I'd had fire before. Ignatius's, since I was two. Warm and gold and mending. Seraphina's, a little, sharp as a blade. This was neither. This was wildfire. The kind that runs on the surface of things, on water and oil and marsh gas, that doesn't care what it burns or why, that just wants to run.

It came across fifty yards of water into my open hand and up my arm and into my chest, and for one terrible moment I wanted to run too. Everywhere. Over everything. Across the harbor and through the town and up the hills and away.

And then I remembered Avarn. Don't push. Stand.

And under the wildfire, deep down, I found my father's winter. The cold with no bottom. The one I'd kept.

I let the fire run into it.

Not to put it out. Just to give it somewhere to go. Somewhere very deep and very cold and very still, where it could stop running and lie down. Like a fire banked in a grate for the night.

* * *

On the bow of the red ship, the shape in the fire went out.

Not dead. Not gone. Just out. Like a lamp when the oil runs dry. The chains on its wrists and waist and ankles hung loose, with nothing left in them to wring. And for a moment there was a man there, chained to the stem-post, a thin pale man with no hair and burned-black eyebrows, with his head down on his chest, breathing.

The road of fire on the water in front of the ship flickered, and shrank, and went out.

And the thin pale man on the bow lifted his head and looked at me across fifty yards of black water. And his lips moved.

Thank you.

* * *

I sat down on the harbor steps. I couldn't stand. I had wildfire banked in my chest under my father's winter and it was the strangest thing I've ever felt, like having a hearth inside you with a sleeping dog in front of it.

There were forty-five more red ships. Forty-five more pieces of Cindrel. Screaming.

I couldn't do forty-five. I knew that. One had nearly knocked me flat.

But I could do one more. Probably. If I sat down for a minute first.

* * *

"GARRICK!"

Tamar. From the top of the harbor wall.

I looked up.

The nets were running out.

* * *

The north pier was a mound of tangled gray shapes in herring net, lobster pots, coils of rope, all still moving, all still pushing, none of them able to get up. Two hundred, perhaps. Maybe more. But behind them, up the steps from the burning ice, more Hushed were still coming. Climbing over the tangled ones. Walking along the top of the heap of their own netted, struggling brothers as if it were a road.

And the net loft was empty. Every net in Westmere was already on the north pier.

They came off the end of the heap onto the harbor wall. Twenty of them. Thirty. In a gray line, with their chained fists held out. Toward the three thousand Kethran sailors standing on the wall with their hands open and nothing in them.

Toward the top of the harbor steps. Where the street goes up to the Hold.

Where, at the top of the street, the Hold's great door stood open, and Goss was still standing in the doorway with his ledger, writing names, as the last of the women and children went in past him.

* * *

Tamar came down off the harbor office roof.

He didn't climb down the drainpipe. He jumped. Into the street, in his nightshirt, and landed badly, and I heard something go in his ankle, and he got up anyway. And he went and stood at the top of the harbor steps, in the middle of the street that goes up to the Hold, between the gray line of Hushed coming along the wall and the open door with the children going in behind him.

A small square man in a watch coat over a nightshirt. With a brass spyglass in his hand. Who'd rather have been a chandler.

And he spread his arms.

* * *

"Harbor-right," said Tamar Vale.

Not shouting. He didn't need to. The Hushed were twenty feet away.

"Old coast law. Older than the Hold. Older than your Regent. Older than your Kessavel." His voice was shaking so badly I could hear it from the bottom of the steps. "Any vessel in distress that comes and asks gets the harbor. They asked. I said yes." He swallowed. "You can't fetch them. They're in my harbor. You'll have to fetch me first."

The first Hushed walked up to him.

It raised its chained fist.

Tamar didn't move.

* * *

I was on my feet. I was halfway up the harbor steps. I wasn't going to be in time. I knew it. I could see the fist coming down and I knew I wasn't going to be in time.

And the big red-bearded Kethran sailor, the one from the street, the one whose boy had sat on the coil of rope on the frozen deck, stepped in front of Tamar.

With his hands open.

And the fist came down on his shoulder instead.

* * *

He went down on one knee. I heard his collarbone go.

And then another sailor stepped in front of Tamar. And another. And another. Not touching the Hushed. Not fighting them. Just stepping in. Between. With their hands open. The way the six sailors on the fourth tower ship had stepped in front of their own officer with his sword.

Ten of them. Twenty. A hundred. A wall. A wall of Kethran sailors in their shirtsleeves with their hands open, between the Hushed and the steward of Westmere and the open door of the Hold.

The Hushed struck them. They didn't feel it. The sailors did. They went down, and got up, and stepped back in. Again and again.

Because that's what Tamar had done for them. Stood on the wall and said nobody fetches anybody out of my harbor. And meant it.

So they did it for him.

* * *

That's what I mean when I say Tamar held.

He didn't fight anyone. He didn't have a sword or a hammer or a single god's gift in his whole body. He stood at the top of a street in his nightshirt on a broken ankle and spread his arms, and said harbor-right, and stayed there.

And because he stayed, everyone else did too.

* * *

I don't know how long it went on. Mary says Goss wrote it down: fifty-two minutes, from the moment Tamar came off the roof. It felt like a day. I went up and down that wall the whole time with the cracked oak sword, watching shoulders, making fists hit stone. I folded Dunmore out from under a pile of three of them. I borrowed a second piece of Cindrel's fire from the next red ship, and nearly fell into the harbor doing it, and Benjamin pulled me out by the collar, and Selvane put out the last of its flames on the water. I banked it beside the first, deep in my father's winter, two fires sleeping in front of the same hearth.

I couldn't do a third. I tried. I stood on the bottom step and asked, and the third piece said yes, and I opened my hand, and nothing came. I was empty. I sat down on the step with my head between my knees and the third piece of Cindrel went on screaming.

And overhead, all that time, the dome rang. Every few minutes. Like a great bell. My father's lightning, pressed against the outside of Kessavel's lock, pushing, pulling back, striking again.

It hadn't broken.

* * *

At ten past seven, I couldn't stand up anymore.

I was sitting on the harbor steps with my back against the wall and the oak sword across my knees. Tamar was at the top of the street on his broken ankle, still there, still with his arms out, gray in the face, with a wall of bruised and bleeding Kethran sailors in front of him. The Hushed were still coming. Fewer now. But still coming.

I put my head back against the wall and looked up at the dome. At my father's lightning, white-gold, pressed against the sky.

And I thought about Carol.

* * *

She'd been there all morning. Through the middle. I'd felt her the whole time, faint, very far away, the way you feel someone in another room of a big house. On the other side of the dome. On the other side of everything. Pressing. Like my father was pressing. Trying to find a way in.

I'm coming, she'd said. I'd felt it, at five in the morning. I'm coming. I don't care how.

And all morning I'd thought: there isn't a how. It's locked. Every gate. Every road. Every fold. Kessavel locked it all.

I closed my eyes.

Every gate, I thought. Every road. Every fold.

But not the middle.

* * *

The middle isn't a gate. It isn't a road. It isn't a fold. It's not anything Eleanor ever made or the Castellan ever logged or Kessavel ever read off the back of a brass plate. It's just the place where Carol and I meet. Where we've always met. Since before we were born. Since before we had names.

Nobody's ever locked it. Nobody knows it's there to lock.

I opened my eyes. I held up my hand. Open. Palm up. Not toward the dome. Not toward the sky.

Toward her.

Carol, I thought. The middle. Come through the middle.

* * *

And on the far side of everything, I felt my sister stop pressing.

I felt her go still.

I felt her understand.

* * *

Then I felt her hand.

In mine. Exactly where I'd held it out. Palm against palm. Warm, the way her hands always are. And a fizz of lightning between our fingers, the way there always is.

And Carol Clara Grey came through the middle and sat down on the harbor steps at Westmere beside me, in her nightgown and Ignatius's green coat, with her hair standing straight up from the lightning, and looked around at the smoke and the fire and the nets and the Hushed and the wall of sailors and Tamar at the top of the street with his arms out.

"Oh," said my sister. "You idiot. Why didn't you think of that three hours ago?"

* * *

She didn't wait for me to answer. She stood up. She pulled me up after her. And she looked up at the dome, at our father's lightning pressed against the outside of it, and she held out her other hand. Open. Palm up. Toward the sky.

"Inside and outside," said Carol. "He's pushing from outside. We push from in. At the same time. Like everybody pulling on the chain at the fountain." She looked at me. "Have you got anything left?"

"No."

"Liar," said Carol. "You've got Father's winter and two pieces of wildfire and whatever's left of Iselle's opening, and you're sitting on all of it like a hen on eggs." She squeezed my hand. "Give it to me. Through the middle. And I'll give you mine. And then we'll both have both."

* * *

So I did.

Everything I had. My father's winter, deep and cold and bottomless. The two pieces of Cindrel's wildfire, banked and sleeping. The last thin thread of Iselle's opening. All of it, through the middle, into Carol.

And all of hers came back to me. Her lightning. All of it. Twenty-three years of lightning that had been asleep in her like a cat at the end of the bed and was very, very awake now.

And we both held up our open hands. Toward the dome. Toward the white-gold bolt of our father's lightning pressed against it from the other side.

And pushed.

* * *

The dome cracked.

Not like a bell. Like ice on a pond in March. A long white line, straight across the sky, from the sea over the burning fleet to the hills behind the town. Right where our father's lightning was. Right where our hands were pointing.

The lightning on the outside saw it.

And came through.

* * *

And through the gap behind it, out of the clear dawn sky over the hills, with the light of the morning on their wings, so many and so huge that their shadows went over Westmere like the shadows of clouds, came the dragons.

* * *

Mary's book. Tuesday. Written at Greykeep, at seven o'clock, the moment Carol vanished from in front of the Westmere gate with her hand held out, and then added to, all day, as the news came in.

Tuesday. 7:12. Carol went. Through the middle. Eleanor says that's not a gate. Eleanor says it's not anything. Eleanor sat down on the floor.

7:15. The Castellan says: I can see them again. Both of them. Westmere.

Goss's account, written in his ledger and copied here: 5:19, they came. Nets at 5:31, Tamar's idea. Selvane held the harbor. Garrick took the fire out of two pieces of Cindrel. Fire at the harbor mouth at 6:00. Tamar came off the roof at 6:24 and stood at the top of the Hold street with his arms out for fifty-two minutes on a broken ankle. The Kethran sailors stood in front of him. Nobody was fetched. Not one.

7:16. The dome broke. Uriah came through. Then the dragons.

And under that, in a thin, careful, high hand, the ledger hand, pressed down very hard:

Goss, harbormaster, for Tamar Vale, steward, who can't hold a pen just now. He says: I'd like it noted that I counted boats. He says that's all. I'd like it noted that it isn't.