Chapter 142: Chained Wings

The green one came.

I don't know how she heard me. Over the roar of the fire on the ice, and the screaming of the hoods, and thirteen dragons going up in a storm of spray. But she did. She came down out of the smoke over the harbor like a leaf falling, if a leaf were the size of a barn, and landed on the end of the north pier so lightly she didn't crack a single stone.

She put her great green head down beside me. One eye, the color of the Fourth Canal at dawn.

"Is this about pears?" she said.

"No," I said.

"I didn't think so." She lowered her shoulder. "Get on, then. Quickly. And don't call me anything but Green. I've had a long week."

* * *

Carol was already moving. The magpie dragon, the black-and-white one, had dropped onto the water at the foot of the pier steps, and she ran down the steps barefoot and jumped onto its neck without asking, the way she used to jump onto the hay cart when she was six.

The magpie looked back at her.

"Sorry," said Carol. "May I?"

"Huh," said the magpie. It was the first word I'd ever heard it say. Then it went straight up, with my sister clinging to its neck and screaming with delight again, and I thought: she's going to be impossible about dragons for the rest of her life.

* * *

I looked back once. At my father.

He was standing at the end of the north pier with the frost hammer in both hands, its head set on the stone, leaning on it. Holding the wall. A hundred feet of curving ice over the whole of Westmere, and eight blind dragons throwing fire at the outside of it, and every time the fire hit, I saw him feel it. His jaw. His shoulders. The frost on the stones around his boots went thick and white and then thin, and then thick again.

He didn't look at me. He couldn't. But he lifted one hand off the haft of the hammer, just for a moment, and held it out to the side. Open.

Go.

I climbed onto Green's shoulder, with the oak sword in my hand and the Lockwarden's key in my pocket, and she went up.

* * *

From the air, it was worse.

The wall stood over Westmere like a frozen wave, white and enormous, steaming everywhere the fire touched it. And around it, around and around, the eight chained dragons were flying. Blind. In their yoke. They'd hit the ice and turned and hit it again and turned. Sabrenne at the front, steering for all of them, the way the lead ox steers the team, and she couldn't see where she was steering. Every time she turned, the whole line swung out behind her like a whip, and the dragon at the tail end slammed into the ice or the hillside or the air, and screamed.

Around them, Aurethar and his twelve flew in a ring. Not attacking. Shepherding. Every time the chained line swung toward the town, toward the ice, toward the cliff, one of them would put itself in the way and take the fire on its own scales and the blow on its own body and turn them. Gently. Over and over.

The slate-gray one's whole left flank was black with soot. The copper one had a torn wing. Aurethar was taking more than anyone. Every time Sabrenne swung toward the wall he was there first, in front of her, with his crooked wing out, taking it.

"Sabrenne!" he was roaring. "Sabrenne, it's me! It's Aurethar! Stop! Listen to me!"

She couldn't hear him. Or she couldn't stop. Her head in its riveted hood swung toward his voice and away again, and the chains on her wings sang, and she breathed fire at the wall.

* * *

Far below, out in the harbor mouth, on the bow of the white ship, Kessavel stood with his closed fist raised.

I could see the chains from up there. Not the black ones on the dragons' wings. The others. Thin, gray, ash-colored threads, the same as the one on his throat, running up from his fist to every hood. Eight of them. Taut. Every time he tightened his fingers, the hoods rang, and the dragons screamed and turned.

He wasn't flying them. He was steering them. Like a man with eight reins in one hand.

"Green," I said. "Get me on the last one."

* * *

She didn't ask why. She didn't tell me it was a bad idea. She just tucked her wings and dropped, the way a hawk drops, out of the ring of shepherding dragons and down onto the tail of the chained line, and matched its speed so exactly that for a moment we hung beside it, wing to chained wing, like two boats tied up in the same berth.

"I'm not going to be able to stay here," said Green. Very calm. "When the line swings, it'll swing into me."

"I know."

"So if you're going, go now."

I went.

* * *

Avarn taught me to stand on things.

People think a sword is about your arms. It isn't. It's about your feet. Where are your feet, Garrick? Where's your weight? If you can't stand, you can't do anything. Every morning at five, from when I was five to when I was ten. He stood me on fence rails. On the rim of the horse trough. On a plank laid across two barrels in the yard while he rolled the barrels. Again.

I'd never stood on a dragon in flight.

It's like standing on a hillside in an earthquake while someone pours an oven on you. The scales were hot and smooth and moving under my boots, the whole back heaving with the wingbeats, and the wind came at me like a wall. I fell to my knees on the first stroke and got up on the second and stayed up on the third.

Where are your feet?

On a dragon's back, Avarn. Where are yours?

* * *

The hood was an iron bucket riveted over her head, with no holes in it. Not one. Not for eyes. Not for air. They'd been breathing through their own fire for three hundred years.

And on the back of it, where the hood was riveted to the collar, there was a padlock. Black. Heavy. Shaped like a closed fist.

Iselle's lock. Kessavel's lock. All the same lock.

I put my open hand flat on it.

"Aurethar!" I shouted, up into the wind. "Her name! This one! Her name!"

And from somewhere above me, over the roar, a bell rung underground:

"Mirrow! The little one! She's the youngest! Mirrow!"

* * *

"Mirrow," I said.

I said it into the iron. Close. The way I said the seven names on the stair in Concordia, close enough to touch.

"Mirrow. My name's Garrick. Aurethar's here. He's right above you. He's been looking for you for three hundred years." I swallowed. "I can open this. But you'll fall. Your wings haven't worked on their own since before my grandfather was born. You'll fall, and I'll try to catch you. I don't know if I can." I held my hand still on the lock. "You can say no."

The hood was silent. The wind howled. Far below, Kessavel's fist tightened, and the gray thread on Mirrow's hood went taut and rang, and she screamed, and turned with the line.

Then, through the iron, through my hand, very small:

Open it.

* * *

I opened my hand.

And the padlock opened with it.

It's still the strangest thing I know how to do. You can't explain it. You don't push, or pull, or turn anything. You just open your own hand, all the way, the way Iselle opens hers, the way the miller's daughters in Ilvane always open their fists at the end of a word, and the lock remembers it was a hand once too. And does the same.

The padlock fell away into the wind. The rivets in the hood popped, one, two, three, all the way around, like buttons coming off a coat. The gray thread from Kessavel's fist went slack and floated away like a cobweb.

And the black chain between Mirrow's wingtip and the next dragon's opened, link by link, all along its length, and let go.

* * *

She fell.

Of course she fell. I'd told her she would. She dropped out of the line like a stone, her wings flapping wild and weak, the iron hood tumbling off her head and away, and me on her back, falling with her, and for one long moment I saw her face.

Gray-green. Thin. Much smaller than Aurethar. Her eyes screwed tight shut against the light. The first light she'd seen in three hundred years.

Then I folded us.

* * *

I fold every day. I've folded across the world. I've folded the whole of Greykeep's kitchen staff to Havenreach and back in a morning because Helena forgot the saffron.

I'd never folded a dragon.

It's not like folding a person. A person is a person-shaped hole in the world, and you just move the hole. A dragon is a mountain. A hot, heavy, falling mountain, full of fire, and the hole she makes in the world is so big that when I reached for it I felt the whole of the fold buckle under me, like a floor giving.

I held it. I don't know how. I gritted my teeth and held it, and moved it.

Down. Two miles. To the North Sands. The great flat wet mirror of a beach below the Hold, where the black wreck ribs stick up out of the sand and the gulls stand facing the wind.

* * *

We landed in snow.

Soft, deep, enormous snow, piled up along the tideline like a feather bed. Mirrow went into it with a sound like a house falling into a haystack, and a great white cloud went up, and I rolled off her shoulder and lay on my back and looked at the sky.

Snow. On the North Sands. In the middle of an autumn morning, under a clear sky.

I lifted my head.

Two miles away, at the end of the north pier, a tiny figure was leaning on a hammer, holding up a hundred feet of ice over a whole town with one hand. And the other hand was out, toward the beach. Open. Palm down.

He'd made her a bed.

* * *

Mirrow lay in the snow with her eyes shut and shook.

"It's bright," she whispered. Her voice was a dry little thing. Like someone who's had a cold for a very long time. "It's so bright."

"It's morning," I said. "You can open them slowly. There's no hurry."

She opened them. A crack. Gold, like Aurethar's. They filled with tears at once.

"Is that the sea?"

"That's the sea."

"Is that the sky?"

"That's the sky," I said. "You're in Avarra. On a beach. Aurethar's up there. I'm going back for the others."

* * *

I stood up.

My nose was bleeding. I hadn't noticed when it started. I wiped it on my sleeve, and my legs went out from under me, and I sat down in the snow again, hard.

One dragon. One. Seven to go.

Garrick.

Carol. In the middle. Where we always meet.

I'm right above you. The magpie's very nice. Its name's Calder. It says your green one is showing off.

Carol, I can't. I can't fold seven more. One nearly put me through the floor.

A pause. Then, very quietly, in the middle:

Borrow?

* * *

I closed my eyes.

Take, said my sister.

And she came into me the way she always does. Not her lightning. Not a gift. Just her. Carol. Her strength. Her stubbornness. Twenty-three years of standing on the roof in thunderstorms and refusing to go in. It came through the middle like a door opening into a warm room, and my legs worked again, and the blood stopped.

Don't spend it all at once, said Carol. I need some to stay on this bird.

* * *

Green came down on the sand beside me in a spray of snow.

"That," she said, "was the stupidest thing I have ever watched a human being do. And I was in Concordia during the canal regatta." She lowered her shoulder. "Again?"

"Again," I said.

* * *

I won't tell you all seven.

I don't remember all seven, not properly. It runs together. The wind. The heat. The jump from Green's shoulder to a heaving chained back. The iron under my palm. Aurethar's voice coming down out of the sky, over and over, each time with a name in it, and each time breaking a little more.

Ondry! He used to sing!

Wennet!

Gorrow, the brown one, the stubborn one, he'll say no first just to be difficult!

He did. Gorrow said no. Out loud, through his hood, in a voice like rocks grinding. No. And I said, All right, and took my hand off the lock, and waited, and the line swung and slammed him into the side of the hill and Kessavel's fist tightened and the hood rang. And after a long minute, very sulky, Fine. Open it.

Tamsk!

Yarrow!

Every one, I asked. Every one, I said, You can say no. Every one, the padlock opened when my hand did, and the hood came off, and the chain let go, and they fell. And every one, I folded down onto the North Sands into the snow my father laid out for them, one bed after another along the tideline, without once looking at us.

* * *

By the sixth, the line was short. Three dragons. Then two. And the shorter it got, the harder it was to hold, because now there were only two of them for Kessavel's fist to steer, and he held them very tight.

By the seventh, I couldn't see out of my left eye.

By the seventh, Carol had stopped talking in the middle, and I could feel her up on Calder's neck holding on with her knees and her teeth, because she'd given me nearly everything and wasn't going to say so.

And then there was only Sabrenne.

* * *

She was alone at the front of nothing.

All her chains hung loose from her wingtips now. Long black links, swinging, dragging through the air behind her where seven dragons used to be. And without the line to steady her, without the yoke, her old wings didn't know what to do. Three hundred years of beating in time with seven others. She was flying like a bird with one wing broken. Lurching. Dropping. Climbing again. Toward the wall. Away. Toward the cliff.

And Kessavel held her. All of his fist. Every gray thread he had left, pulled into one rope, from his hand to her hood.

Aurethar was beside her. Wing to wing. Not shepherding now. Just flying next to her, as close as he could, with his crooked wing almost touching hers.

"Sabrenne," he said. Not roaring now. Quiet. Under the wind. "Sabrenne, it's me. It's the little one with the torn wing. You taught me to fly crooked. Remember? You said a crooked wing is just a wing that knows something the straight ones don't."

The hood swung toward him.

And away.

And she breathed fire, blind, straight into his face.

* * *

He didn't turn aside. He just shut his eyes and took it.

"Green," I said. My voice wasn't working very well. "Put me on her."

"You can't fold her," said Green. "You can barely fold yourself. I can see it from here. You're gray."

"I know."

"She's the biggest of them. She's bigger than Aurethar. She's old. If you open that and she falls, you'll go into the sea together."

"I know," I said. "Put me on her."

Green was quiet for one wingbeat.

"I'd like it noted," she said, "that I said so."

And she put me on her.

* * *

Sabrenne's back was like the Hold. Old. Ridged. Scarred all over, scale over scale, the way old stone is scarred. And hot, so hot my boots smoked. The loose chains on her wingtips swung and lashed, and one of them came around and caught me across the ribs and nearly took me off, and I grabbed the edge of the hood to stay on.

My hand on the iron.

She screamed. Kessavel's rope went tight. And I felt it. Not just the lock. Him. At the other end of the gray rope, two miles away, on the bow of a white ship. A small gray man with his hand shut so tight his nails were cutting into his palm. And behind him, behind his throat, the other chain. The one going east. Pulling his hand shut for him.

Take the child.

* * *

"Sabrenne," I said into the iron.

Nothing. Just the scream. Just the rope.

"Sabrenne, my name's Garrick. Aurethar's right beside you. He's been flying next to you for an hour taking your fire in his face." My voice cracked. "You taught him to fly crooked. He says a crooked wing is a wing that knows something."

Nothing.

"I can open this," I said. "But you'll fall. And I can't catch you. I'm out. I've got nothing left. You'll fall, and I'll fall with you, and I don't know what happens then." I pressed my hand flat on the fist-shaped lock. "You can say no."

The scream stopped.

Through the iron, through my hand, an old voice. Very old. Older than anything I've ever heard. Older than the Hold.

Is he there? The little one? Is he really there?

"He's right there," I said. "Wing to wing."

A long silence. The wind. The swinging chains.

Then open it, said Sabrenne. I'd like to see him.

* * *

I opened my hand.

It didn't work.

The lock didn't open. It shook. It rang like a bell. But Kessavel's rope was all of his fist and more, and something behind him was pulling his fist shut for him, and my hand wasn't enough. One open hand against two closed ones.

I felt Sabrenne feel it fail.

And then I did the only thing I could think of.

* * *

I put the oak sword into the lock.

Not to break it. You can't break Kessavel's locks; Uriah tried for two hours with a bolt of lightning. I jammed the blade of the oak sword into the shackle, between the iron fist and the hood, and held it there, with my hand on the hilt. Open. Wide open, around the grip.

A wooden sword. That a god of war made for a boy of five. That the boy carried under his arm everywhere he went for five years, and then put in a cupboard for thirteen, and then took out again. That Avarn's hands had made, and my hands had held, every morning at five, and again, and again.

Not a sword. Never a sword. It's never once in its life cut anything.

It's a lesson in how to hold things.

Never in your hand unless you mean it.

I meant it.

* * *

The oak sword broke.

Along the crack. All the way. With a sound like a branch going in a frost.

And the lock opened.

* * *

I don't think it was the sword. I've thought about it a great deal and I don't think it was. I think it was that I meant it. And that Avarn had meant it, every morning for five years, and for thirteen after that when I didn't come. And that a lock that has only ever been a closed fist doesn't know what to do with that much open hand all at once, from that many people, for that long.

The hood came off Sabrenne's head and went away down the wind like a tin bucket.

The gray rope went slack and floated off.

And on the bow of the white ship, two miles away, Kessavel staggered, as if somebody had pulled a chair out from under him, and looked down at his own hand.

It was open.

* * *

Then we fell.

Sabrenne and me. Off the sky. Her old wings loose and wide and useless, her great head turning and turning, her eyes wide open, gold, the gold of a coin that's been in a pocket for a hundred years, looking at everything. The sea. The sky. The ice wall. The hills. The sun.

Aurethar.

"Oh," said Sabrenne. "There you are."

* * *

He caught us.

Of course he did. He came in under her the way she must have once come under him, when he was little and his wing was torn and he couldn't stay up on his own. He got his back under her chest and his crooked wing under her loose one and he held her, all of her, three hundred years older than him and bigger than him, and his wings beat so hard I thought they'd tear.

They didn't. They knew something.

And Green came in under me, because I'd slid down Sabrenne's neck and off, and caught me on her shoulder like a pear off a tree, and said, quite crossly, "There. Noted."

* * *

We came down on the North Sands together. Very slowly. In a long, crooked, lopsided spiral, Aurethar under Sabrenne, the two of them landing in the last of my father's snow beds with a sound like the world sitting down.

Seven dragons were lying along the tideline in the snow, blinking at the sun. Mirrow. Ondry. Wennet. Gorrow, sulking. Tamsk. Yarrow. And one more whose name I've lost, because I was very tired. Every one of them lifted their head as Sabrenne came down.

Aurethar didn't let go of her. He lay in the snow with his great gold neck around her, and she lay with her old gray chin on his shoulder, and neither of them said anything at all for a very long time.

Calder set Carol down beside me. She slid off its neck and sat down hard in the snow next to me and put her head on my shoulder and didn't say anything either.

* * *

I was holding the two halves of the oak sword. I didn't remember picking them up. I must have caught them as they went. One in each hand.

Out in the harbor mouth, the white ship hadn't moved.

Kessavel was still standing on the bow. Looking at his open hand. Turning it over. Back. Palm. Back. Like a man who's found something in a coat pocket he didn't know was there.

The thin gray chain on his throat drew tight. I could see it from the beach.

He closed his hand again. Slowly. As if it hurt.

* * *

At the end of the north pier, my father lifted the hammer off the stone.

The ice wall over Westmere stood for one moment more, white and steaming in the morning sun. Then it began to fall, very gently, in great soft sheets of snow, down over every roof and chimney pot and street in the town, until the whole of Westmere looked like the morning after the first snowfall of winter, and the young phoenixes on the chimney pots shook it off their feathers, outraged.

My father didn't look at the town. He was looking at the white ship.

And in the east, behind the hills, behind the Hold gate, from a clear blue sky with not one cloud in it, there was thunder.

Not Carol's. Carol was asleep on my shoulder.

Carol's thunder sounds like a door slamming. This sounded like a hammer coming down on an anvil the size of a mountain.

On the white ship, Kessavel lifted his head.

* * *

Mary's book. Wednesday. She came down to the North Sands at ten with a basket of bread and three blankets, which were no use at all to the dragons and a great deal of use to Carol and me. She wrote it sitting in the snow.

Wednesday. 7 o'clock. Garrick went up on the green dragon. Carol on the magpie. Its name is Calder. Uriah held the wall over the whole town with one hand, and with the other he made snow beds on the North Sands.

Garrick jumped from dragon to dragon. Aurethar shouted their names. Garrick asked every one. Every one said open it. Gorrow said no first, then yes.

Eight dragons home. Mirrow, Ondry, Wennet, Gorrow, Tamsk, Yarrow, Hask. And Sabrenne last. Garrick couldn't fold her. Aurethar caught her. She said There you are.

Carol gave Garrick nearly everything she had. She says she didn't. She did.

The oak sword broke. Garrick has both halves.

Kessavel's hand opened. For a moment. He closed it again.

Thunder from the east. Not Carol's.

And under that, in a hand nobody had ever seen in the book before, very large and very careful and pressed so deep the pen nib split, every letter shaped like something carved in old stone, set down by a claw dipped in the ink pot that Mary held up for it at arm's length, with both her hands:

Sabrenne. Three hundred years. I'd like it noted that the little one learned to fly.