Chapter 143: Thor and Kessavel

She came down on the white ship.

Not on the harbor. Not on the pier, beside my father, where any sensible god would have come down to ask what was going on. One bolt out of the clear blue east, over the hills, over the Hold, over the snowy roofs of Westmere, so bright that every shadow on the North Sands jumped and spun, and it hit the deck of Kessavel's white ship six feet from his bow so hard that the whole narrow hull went down a yard into the sea and came up again streaming.

The thunder came after. It rolled down the coast and back, and every gull on the beach went up at once, and Gorrow lifted his head out of his snow bed and said, very sulkily, "Who's that?"

"Thor," said Aurethar. He didn't lift his head from Sabrenne's shoulder. "She's very loud. You'll like her."

* * *

I've known Thor all my life. She spent two summers on the east wall at Greykeep when Carol and I were babies, hitting my father with the hammer every afternoon and laughing. When I was three, I'm told, I asked to hold it and she let me, and I sat down very suddenly. When I was eleven, at Concordia, she taught Carol a word I'm not allowed to write in this book. She'd stood on the pier at Westmere with Avarn the night the fleet came back, and gone south to Concordia before the dome came down, to fetch Loki.

She hadn't changed since. Gods don't, much.

Tall. Taller than my father, and broader in the shoulder, which nobody is. Red hair in one thick braid down her back, as thick as a ship's rope. A gray traveling cloak over armor that had been rained on and burned and dented and never once, as far as I could tell, polished. And in her right hand, hanging loose at her side the way you'd carry a bucket, the hammer.

Mjölnir. Short in the handle. Square in the head. The most ordinary-looking thing in the world, unless you'd seen it come down.

* * *

She looked at Kessavel.

Kessavel looked at her.

He'd stepped back again. All the way to the very point of the bow, where the white rail came together like the tip of a knife. His closed hand was at his side. His gray coat was wet through from the splash. And the thin gray chain on his throat, I could see even from the beach, was singing.

"You'll be Kessavel," said Thor.

Her voice carried the whole length of the harbor without trying. Not into every ear, the way his did. Just loud. Like a woman calling the cattle in.

"I've heard about you," said Thor. "In Concordia we've a saying about locksmiths. Do you want to hear it?"

"No," said Kessavel.

"Locks are for honest people," said Thor cheerfully. "Everybody else just uses the door." And she lifted Mjölnir off the deck, and swung it once around her head, and threw it at him.

* * *

I've seen my father freeze the western sea. I've seen him turn a wave a mile high into green glass. I've seen Aurethar swallow fire. I've seen Seraphina cut the dark.

I'd never seen anything as simple as that.

The hammer went from her hand to his chest in a straight line, spinning, and the air around it went white, and the sound of it was a crack like the world's biggest door being kicked in.

And it stopped.

A foot from his coat. In midair. Held.

* * *

There was a chain on it.

Not a black one. Not iron. A gray one. Thin. Ash-colored. The same as the ones that had come up from his fist to the dragons' hoods. It had come out of nowhere. Out of the air. And wrapped itself three times around the square head of the hammer, and pulled tight, and held it there, spinning, sparking, a foot from Kessavel's buttoned gray chest.

Kessavel hadn't moved. His closed hand hadn't even lifted.

"You throw it," said Kessavel, "so that it will come back. That is what it does. Return." One clean click. "I have spent four thousand years learning to stop things returning."

He closed his hand a little tighter.

And Mjölnir, which had come back to Thor's hand every single time it had ever been thrown, since before there was a Concordia or an Avarra or a sea between them, hung in the air above the white ship's deck, and shook, and didn't come home.

* * *

"Huh," said Thor.

She held her hand out. Palm down. Fingers curled, the way you hold your hand out to catch something you've caught a thousand times.

The hammer shook. Rang. Spat lightning in every direction, so that the white rail of the ship went black in long scorched lines, and the water all around hissed.

It didn't come.

"Huh," said Thor again. Thoughtfully. Then she grinned. All her teeth. "Well, that's new."

And she walked across the deck and hit him with her fist.

* * *

I don't know what I'd expected a god of chains to do in a fistfight.

I hadn't expected him to be good at it.

He didn't hit her back. He didn't even really dodge. He just wasn't where her fist went. And wherever he'd just been, a chain was. Gray, thin, out of the air, and it caught her wrist as it went by, and closed, and held. And her other fist. And her ankle when she kicked. And her braid, when she turned her head.

Every time she moved, there was a lock waiting where her movement would end.

Thor broke them. All of them. That's the thing about Thor. She'd go still for a moment, grinning, with a chain on her wrist, and then there'd be a sound like ice going on a river in spring, and the chain would just go, in a shower of gray sparks, and she'd be moving again. Laughing. She was laughing.

But for every one she broke, there were two more. Out of the air. Out of the deck. Out of the sea. Locking. Locking. Locking.

* * *

"Garrick," said Carol beside me. She was awake. Barely. Her head was still on my shoulder and her eyes were half shut. "She's losing."

"I know."

"She doesn't know she's losing."

"I know."

I tried to stand up. My legs went out from under me again, and I sat down in the snow. My left eye was still dark. Just gray, all the way across, like a window with frost on it. I couldn't have folded a teacup.

Behind us, along the tideline, eight dragons were lifting their heads one by one to watch, with the sun in their eyes for the first time in three hundred years. None of them could fly. Aurethar didn't take his neck from around Sabrenne.

"Where's Father?" said Carol.

* * *

He was walking out to the white ship.

Across the water. On ice. Every step he took, the sea went white under his boot, a single round plate of frost no bigger than a doormat, and then he took the next step, and it went white again. He wasn't hurrying. He had the frost hammer over his shoulder, the way you'd carry a spade home after a day's digging, and he looked very tired, and he walked out of the harbor mouth toward the white ship as if he were walking down the lane to the post.

"Uriah!" Thor shouted. She had a chain on each wrist and one around her waist and was standing perfectly still, grinning at Kessavel, with her muscles standing out like ropes. "Is that you? Don't help!"

"I'm not," said my father mildly. "I'm just coming to watch."

"You always say that!"

"And then you always lose," said my father, "and I have to help."

"I've never lost!"

"Fourth summer on the east wall," said my father. "You put the hammer through the dovecote and couldn't get it back out."

Thor laughed so hard the chain around her waist broke.

* * *

He stopped at the edge of the ship. Stood on the water, on his round plate of frost, with the hammer over his shoulder, and looked up at the deck.

He didn't go up.

He looked at Kessavel. And at the chains. And at Thor. And at Mjölnir, hanging in the air, shaking in its three gray loops, spitting lightning at nothing. And he looked at it for a long time, the way he looks at a lock in the old part of the keep that he's not sure the Castellan wants him to open.

Then he turned his head and looked back across the water. At the North Sands. At me.

And I understood. He wasn't going up because it wasn't his to fix.

He'd seen what I'd seen.

* * *

Here's what I'd seen.

When Thor held her hand out for the hammer, she'd held it the way she always held it. Palm down. Fingers curled. Ready to catch. Ready to close.

A closed hand, calling to a thing held in a closed hand.

Kessavel's whole domain is that. Holding. Keeping. Things that can't come back because something's got its fingers around them. And Thor's hammer is the thing that always comes back. Two closed hands, pulling on a hammer between them. And Kessavel had four thousand years of practice at holding on.

You can't win that. Not pulling. I'd known that since I was ten years old and asked Avarn for everything and he said no, and I pulled, and he didn't let go, and I walked away.

You don't get a thing back by gripping harder.

* * *

"Carol," I said. "I need to talk to Thor."

"You can barely talk to me."

"Through the middle."

"Thor's not in the middle," said Carol. "Nobody's in the middle but us."

"Then I need to be loud."

Carol lifted her head off my shoulder. She looked at me with her eyes half shut and her hair full of snow and sand. And then she smiled, very slowly, the smile she's had since she was three and found out the north tower had lightning rods on it.

"Borrow?" said my sister.

* * *

Not her strength. She didn't have any left; she'd given it all to me in the sky. Not her lightning.

Her thunder.

Carol's thunder sounds like a door slamming. I'd known that all my life. And it's the only thing in the world, apart from Thor herself, that Thor has ever stopped to listen to. Because the first time Thor ever heard it, Carol was three years old and standing on the north tower in a storm, and she'd slammed the sky so hard that Thor heard it from Concordia and came all the way back to Greykeep to find out who'd done it.

That was the visit I don't remember. When I sat down holding the hammer.

"Take," I said.

* * *

I opened my mouth, and I said Thor's name.

It went out over the North Sands and across the harbor like a door being slammed by a giant. Every window in Westmere rattled. Every phoenix on every chimney pot went up in a cloud of sparks. Eight dragons along the tideline flinched. And on the deck of the white ship, with a chain on each wrist and one on her ankle and one in her braid, Thor turned her head.

"Open your hand," I said. In Carol's thunder. "Don't catch it. Don't call it. Just open your hand. And let it come home."

* * *

For a moment, nothing.

Thor looked at me across the water. Her red braid was half undone and full of gray sparks. Her face was black with soot down one side. She looked at me the way she'd looked at me when I was three and sitting on the ground with her hammer in my lap.

Then she looked at Kessavel. At his closed hand. At his throat.

Then she looked at her own hand.

It was curled. Palm down. The way it had been for every catch of every throw for longer than there'd been people.

"Huh," said Thor. Very quietly this time.

She turned her hand over.

Palm up.

And opened it. All the way. Flat. Fingers wide. Empty. The way you'd hold your hand out to show a child there was nothing in it. The way you hold your hand out in the rain.

* * *

Mjölnir came home.

Not fast. Not flying. It just came. The three gray loops around its head didn't break. They didn't shatter in sparks like the others. They just went slack. And slid off. Like a ring off a wet finger. Because a lock is a closed hand, and you can lock a thing away from a hand that's grabbing for it, but you can't lock it away from a hand that's only waiting. There's nothing to lock against. There's nothing there.

The hammer drifted down through the air, slowly, like a leaf, and settled into Thor's open palm as gently as an egg into a nest.

And on her wrists, and her waist, and her ankle, and her braid, every one of Kessavel's gray chains went slack too, and slid off her, and lay on the white deck like cast-off string.

* * *

Kessavel stared at her.

He looked down at his own hand. Closed. Then up at hers. Open. With the hammer lying in it.

"That isn't—" he said. And it was the other voice again. The small hoarse one. The one that hadn't been used. "You can't—"

"Can," said Thor. She sounded surprised herself. She was looking at the hammer in her open hand as though she'd never seen it before. "Seems I can." She glanced over at me, across the water, and her eyebrows went up. "Who taught you that, boy?"

I didn't have any thunder left to answer with. Carol had taken it back and gone to sleep again on my shoulder.

But I lifted my hand. Open.

And she laughed.

* * *

She didn't throw it again.

She closed her fingers around the handle, gently, and walked across the white deck toward Kessavel. He didn't step back this time. There was nowhere left to step. The bow was behind him and the sea was behind that.

She stopped in front of him. Looked down. She was a head and a half taller. He looked very small. A gray clerk in a wet gray coat, with his feet together, on a doorstep.

"I'm going to hit you now," said Thor. "Once. Not hard. Just so you know it was done." She considered. "Then my friend's boy is going to want to talk to you. He likes asking things. It's very annoying. You'll get used to it."

She raised the hammer.

* * *

And the chain on Kessavel's throat pulled.

Not tight, this time. Up.

I saw it from the beach. The thin gray thread from under his collar, running east over the hills, went suddenly taut, and lifted, the way a fisherman lifts his line when something's on the hook. And Kessavel's feet left the deck.

He didn't fly. He was hauled. Up and backward into the air like a hooked fish, his gray coat flapping, his closed hand flung out, his head jerked back on the chain. His face, as he went, was turned toward the North Sands. Toward me. And it wasn't the cold face. It wasn't Ovaren's face. It was his own.

He was frightened.

"Wait—" he said.

Then he was gone. A gray speck. Then nothing. East. Over the hills. Into the clear morning sky, at the end of a chain thinner than a hair.

* * *

Thor stood on the deck of the white ship with her hammer raised and nothing in front of it.

"Well," she said, after a while. She lowered it. "That's rude."

My father, still standing on his plate of frost below the rail, let out a long slow breath.

"That," he said, "is the most frightened I've ever seen anyone."

"Him?"

"Him," said my father. He looked east, at the empty sky. "He didn't want to go."

* * *

The white ship sank.

Not dramatically. It just began, very quietly, to fill up with water. As if, with Kessavel gone, there was nothing left holding it shut. The clean white seams opened all along the hull like a hand unclenching, and the sea came in, and it settled lower and lower, and Thor stepped off the bow onto my father's plate of frost just before it went under, and the two of them stood there together on the water and watched it go.

Then Thor punched my father in the shoulder. Quite hard.

"Uriah."

"Thor."

"You let me lose."

"You didn't lose."

"Your boy won it," said Thor. "That's the same as losing, when you're my age." She looked at him sideways. "And you knew he would. That's why you didn't come up."

My father didn't answer that. He just smiled. The tired smile. And put the frost hammer down off his shoulder onto the ice, and leaned on it, and Thor leaned on him, and they stood there in the harbor mouth on a plate of frost the size of a doormat like two old soldiers at the end of a long day.

* * *

They walked back across the water together, one plate of frost at a time.

On the North Sands, Thor came straight to me. She didn't say anything at first. She crouched down in the snow in front of me, which took a while, because there's a great deal of her and most of it is armor, and she looked at my face. At my left eye. At the two halves of the oak sword in my lap.

"Avarn's?" she said.

"Yes."

"Broke it on a lock?"

"On Sabrenne's."

Thor looked over her shoulder at Sabrenne, lying in the snow with her old gray chin on Aurethar's shoulder and her gold eyes open. Thor bowed to her. A short, plain, soldier's bow.

Then she turned back to me and held out Mjölnir.

* * *

"Here," she said.

"I can't—"

"You held it when you were three," said Thor. "You sat down. Let's see if you sit down now."

I took it.

It was heavy. Of course it was heavy. It was the heaviest thing I've ever held, heavier than the dragons, heavier than the wave, and my arm went down at once and the head of it sank into the snow.

But I didn't sit down.

And Mjölnir, lying in my hand, hummed. Very low. A sound I felt in my teeth. Like a cat deciding whether it likes you.

"Huh," said Thor, for the fourth time that morning.

Then she took it back, very gently, and stood up, and looked out to sea. West. At the empty water where the white ship had gone down. And then south, along the coast, toward Concordia.

"Loki's bringing boats," she said. "I told him to come quick. He said he'd come quick. He's never once in his life come quick." She sighed. "He'll be here by tonight with every ship in Concordia and a goat, and he'll say it was his idea."

* * *

Avarn came through the Hold gate at noon.

He came down to the North Sands alone, walking, in his plain shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the way he comes into the yard at five. He stopped a little way off and looked at the eight dragons in their snow beds. At Thor. At my father. At Carol, asleep in Mary's blanket.

Then at me. And at what I was holding.

He came over and sat down in the snow beside me. He didn't say anything. He held out his hand, and I put the two halves of the oak sword in it.

He turned them over. Looked at the break. Ran his thumb along it, the way he'd run his thumb along the blade when he gave it to me, eighteen years ago, on my fifth birthday, to show me there was no edge.

"What did it open?" said Avarn.

"A dragon," I said. "The oldest one. Kessavel had her. My hand wasn't enough. I put the sword in the lock."

"And meant it?"

"And meant it."

Avarn was quiet for a long time.

"Good," he said.

He gave the halves back to me. Both of them. He didn't offer to make me another. I'd have said no, and he knew it.

He stood up. Brushed the snow off his trousers.

"Tomorrow," said Avarn. "Five o'clock."

"I can't see out of one eye."

"Then we'll practice on the other side," said Avarn, and went to see about the dragons.

* * *

Mary's book. Wednesday. Written on the North Sands at one o'clock, with Thor reading over her shoulder and correcting her spelling of Mjölnir, which Mary says she spelled correctly the first time.

Wednesday. 10:40. Thor. Out of the east as lightning. Straight onto Kessavel's ship.

She threw the hammer. Kessavel stopped it with a chain. It didn't come back to her. First time ever. She said Well that's new.

They fought. She broke every chain. He made two more for every one.

Uriah walked out across the sea on frost to watch. He says he was only watching.

Garrick borrowed Carol's thunder and told Thor to open her hand. She did. The hammer came home. Every chain fell off her.

Thor went to hit Kessavel once, not hard. The chain on his neck pulled him up into the sky and away east. He said Wait. Uriah says he was frightened. Uriah says he didn't want to go.

The white ship sank by itself.

Garrick held Mjölnir. He did not sit down. It hummed.

Loki is bringing every ship in Concordia. And a goat.

Noon: Avarn. Garrick gave him the halves of the oak sword. Avarn said Good. He gave them back. Tomorrow, five o'clock.

And under that, in a big sprawling hand that took up the rest of the page and half the next, with the pen pressed so hard it went through to the page beneath, and a small scorched hole where the hammer had been set down on the corner to keep the page from blowing away:

Thor. Occasional breaker of doors. Not today. I'd like it noted that the boy told me to open my hand, and I did, and I'm four thousand years old, and I'd never once thought of it.