Chapter 145: Repelled

My father fell over at a quarter past one.

He'd been doing so well. That's what I keep thinking. He'd breathed fog over eighty miles of sea, lying flat on his back on the north pier, and got up again, and stood with his hands in his pockets while Loki told us the blue fleet was turning. He'd walked down the harbor steps to meet the red ship when Jörmungandr pushed her home with the blue knot on her bow. He'd stood beside Tamar and read the knot, and said quietly, "Yes. That's asking," and put his hand on the wood.

And then he'd turned around to walk back up the pier, and taken two steps, and folded up like a coat dropped on a chair.

* * *

Thor caught him. She was nearest. She got her arms under him before his head hit the stones, and knelt there on the end of the north pier with my father across her knees like a child, and looked up at the rest of us with an expression I'd never seen on her before.

"He's cold," she said.

Of course he was cold. He's winter. He's always a little cold. Carol and I used to put our feet on him in bed when we were small, in summer, to cool them off.

Not like this.

His face had gone the color of the frost on the pier. His lips were blue. There was frost in his eyebrows and on his eyelashes and along the edge of his jaw, and it wasn't melting, and his breath when it came didn't steam.

"He's spent it," said Loki very quietly. "All of it. The wave. The wall. The statues. The fog." He crouched down beside Thor and laid two fingers on my father's throat. "He's got nothing left to be warm with."

* * *

My mother came through the Hold gate at half past one.

I don't know who sent for her. Mary, I think. Mary had been on the pier since five. My mother came down the harbor steps fast, in her healer's apron with the sleeves rolled up, and she didn't run, because she never runs, but she didn't walk either. And she knelt down on the stones beside Thor and took my father's face in both her hands.

Her hands were warm. They're always warm. It's Aurelia's gift, the one she carries as saintess. I've seen her put her hands on a man with an arrow through him and hold him until the surgeon came.

She held my father's face for a long time.

"Uriah," she said. Not loud. The way she says it at breakfast. "Uriah. Come here."

His eyelids moved. The frost on his lashes cracked. He didn't open them.

"Mm," said my father.

"Did you lie down on a pier," said my mother, "and breathe out fog over eighty miles of sea, after holding up a wall of ice over a whole town, after not sleeping since Monday?"

A long pause.

"Somebody had to," said my father, without opening his eyes.

"Somebody," said my mother, "is going to bed."

* * *

They carried him up to Tamar's house, because it was nearest. Thor took his shoulders and Brannoc took his feet, Brannoc who'd come through with my mother and hadn't said a word, and four of Tamar's sailors walked in front clearing the snow off the steps. Aurethar lifted his head on the North Sands and watched them go all the way up the hill.

My mother didn't let go of his hand once.

I tried to follow. I got up. I got halfway along the north pier, with Loki's crooked coat around my shoulders and the world gone quiet on my left side, and my legs went, and I sat down on a bollard.

Carol sat down beside me.

"He'll be all right," she said.

"You don't know that."

"No," said Carol. "But Mother's got his face in her hands. I've never once seen anything get past that."

* * *

Vellis spoke at two.

Into every ear. All at once. The way he had on Saturday, when he'd come into the harbor on a red ship and declared a war. That big warm empty voice like a hall with nothing in it. I heard it in my right ear and felt it in my left, like a hum through a wall.

"Hear the Herald of the Imperium," said Vellis. "His Excellency the Regent, speaking for His Radiance, who is unwell, informs the Accord of Avarra that the Imperium withdraws from its waters."

All along the harbor, people stopped where they stood. Thor came out onto the step of Tamar's house. Loki stood up very slowly on the end of the pier, with the goat against his leg.

"His Excellency regrets the inconvenience," said Vellis. "His Excellency considers the matter of the Accord's harbors closed. His Excellency's fleet returns home."

A pause. One clean click, somewhere under the warm empty voice. A key turning.

"His Excellency thanks the Hushed for their service," said Vellis. "And recalls them."

* * *

The statues rang.

All sixty of them. Along the harbor. The same thin high sound as the morning before, like a wet finger around the rim of a glass. Every chained fist inside its frost shivered.

But yesterday my father had put his hand flat on the stone, and sent his winter down into every one of them, and held them.

My father was lying in Tamar's back bedroom with my mother holding his hand, and he was as cold as a stone and twice as still, and there was nothing left in him to hold anything with.

The frost on the first statue cracked.

* * *

I watched it go. I couldn't do anything else. A long white split, from the crown of the head down the back, like an eggshell, and the frost fell away in plates, and the man inside it took a step.

Then the next one. And the next. All along the harbor, the white shells cracking and falling, and sixty Hushed in gray, with their faces blank and their chained fists out, stepping out of my father's frost as if they'd never been in it, and turning, every one of them, to face the sea.

And walking toward it.

Up in the lower court of the Hold, someone began to shout. Then a lot of people. The two hundred netted Hushed had got to their feet, all at once, inside their nets, and they were walking too. Dragging the nets. Dragging the lead weights. Dragging the sailors who threw themselves on the nets to hold them. Out of the court. Down the hill. Toward the harbor.

Toward the water.

"Recalls them," said Loki. He'd gone white. "They're not sending ships for them. They don't need to. They're just going to walk them home."

"Across the sea?"

"Under it," said Loki.

* * *

I got up off the bollard.

I don't know how. I'd tell you it was courage, but it wasn't. It was the same thing that gets you out of bed when the baby cries. You don't decide. You're just up.

The first of the sixty reached the edge of the north pier while I was still getting my balance. A young man. Younger than me. Gray clothes, blank face, chained fist out in front of him. He didn't look down at the water. He just walked off the edge.

Selvane caught him.

She was on the south mole, with her lamp up, and the water under him went still and hard as a floor, and he stood on it. And kept walking. Out across the harbor on the flat still water, toward the harbor mouth, toward the open sea, where Selvane's hold on the water ended.

"I can't hold it all," Selvane called. Her voice shook. "Not the whole sea! Garrick, I can't—"

* * *

Iselle had told me how the Hushed open.

In the stair at Concordia, the first time, with Roderic fighting and the seven of them in a ring around me. They don't open for force. They don't open for lightning; my father's bolt couldn't touch Kessavel's lock. They open for their names. Spoken close. By someone who knows them. Marra had kept seven names in her head for eight years, standing outside Iselle's door at night, and I'd said them on the stair, and seven hands had opened.

I didn't know these names. Not one. Not sixty. Not two hundred and sixty.

But somebody did.

* * *

I turned around and looked up the harbor.

At the forty-six red ships, sitting at their moorings with their sails hanging and their black chains loose on their bows. And at what was on the quayside below them.

Kethran sailors. Eleven hundred of them. The crews of the red ships. The ones who'd been below decks on Tuesday when Kessavel chained a piece of a burning god to every bow, and hidden in the holds while their ships burned over their heads, and come ashore on Tuesday night when the fire was out, in ones and twos, asking Tamar for harbor-right. Eleven hundred young men and women from the river towns and the hill farms and the valleys of Kethra. Sitting on the quayside in Westmere in borrowed blankets, eating Helena's bread, watching the Hushed walk past them to the sea.

Every Hushed in Kethra came from somewhere. Every one had a mother. A village. A street.

"Tamar," I said.

He was in the harbor office door on his crutch. He looked at me.

"I need your voice," I said. "And I need you to say yes."

"Yes," said Tamar.

* * *

I borrowed Goss's voice. I'd borrowed it on Thursday, a week ago, reading three thousand and ninety-one names off a ledger at the top of the harbor steps, and I'd kept it, the way I keep everything. Goss has the biggest voice in Westmere. When he reads names on the steps, they hear him on the North Sands.

"Kethrans," I said.

It went the length of the harbor. Every head on the quayside came up.

"They're walking them home under the sea. They'll drown. They don't feel it. They don't know." I swallowed. "They open for their names. Spoken close. By someone who knows them. If you come from a village where somebody was taken to the Temple of Oaths, if you've got a brother, a sister, a neighbor, a girl you were sweet on, a boy who used to sit behind you at the dame school, who went to the Temple and swore and never came home—"

I stopped. My voice cracked even in Goss's throat.

"Then look at their faces. As they go past you. Please. And if you know one, say their name."

* * *

Nobody moved.

Eleven hundred Kethran sailors, sitting on the quayside, staring at me. And past them, through them, between them, the Hushed walking. Gray. Blank. Chained fists out. Toward the water.

Then a girl stood up.

Seventeen, maybe. Thin. A cook's apron over her sailor's slops. She was staring at one of the Hushed coming down the quay toward her. A man. Tall. Gray-haired at the temples. Walking with a little hitch in his step, as though one leg had been broken once and set badly.

"Da?" said the girl.

The Hushed didn't stop. Didn't turn. Didn't look at her.

She ran at him. She put herself right in front of him and put both hands flat on his chest and he walked into her and kept walking and pushed her backward down the quay, step by step, and she didn't let go.

"Corran," she said. "Corran Hale. From Tessing. On the Ash river. You went to swear when I was four because they said they'd let Mam off the tithe. Your name's Corran Hale. You used to carry me on your shoulders to the fair. Corran Hale, Corran Hale, Corran Hale—"

He stopped.

His fist was against her shoulder. It shook. And then, slowly, finger by finger, the way the stooped man's had in the old cells under Concordia, it opened.

The padlock fell off it onto the quay with a clank.

* * *

After that I don't think I had to say anything at all.

They went. All of them. Eleven hundred Kethran sailors, off the quayside and down the harbor steps and along the north pier and out onto the frozen edges of the harbor, among the walking Hushed, staring into their faces. Shouting names. Some of them, the first time, were wrong. Some of them were right.

Davi! Davi Marsh, from the tannery at Orr!

Lisbet! It's me, it's Aunt Wenna!

That's Pell's boy. Isn't it? Isn't that Pell's boy, from the mill race? Tomas! Tomas Pell!

And fists opened. All along the harbor. One here. Three there. A whole knot of them by the harbor office, where six sailors from the same village had found four of their own, and stood around them shouting their names over and over like you'd shout into a well, until every one of those four gray chained hands opened, and four padlocks fell on the cobbles, and the four Hushed stopped walking, and stood there, blinking, and one of them sat down very suddenly in the snow and began to cry, because he could. Because he'd sworn his face away, and his face had come back, and the first thing it did was cry.

* * *

Iselle came through the Hold gate at half past two with Marra and Roderic.

Marra went straight down into the netted Hushed coming out of the lower court, without a word. She can't talk. She swore her voice at twelve and it hasn't come back yet. But she'd stood among the Hushed for eight years, outside doors, at night. She knew their faces. Not their names, most of them. But their faces.

She'd take a sailor by the sleeve. Point. Sign, in mill-talk, fast and furious: That one. Sunward valley. He talked in his sleep about a red dog.

And the sailor would stare. And then run.

Iselle didn't do anything but walk among them with her hands open and her face wet. The Hushed walked around her. They always do. She's the one they were sent to stand outside the door of. Even with their faces gone, I think something in them remembered.

Roderic carried her shawl, and stood where she could see him.

* * *

By four o'clock, two hundred and forty-eight padlocks lay on the cobbles of Westmere.

I know, because Caitlin counted them. She'd come through with Iselle and found a ledger in the harbor office and sat down on the step and ruled columns in it, as she does, and every time a padlock fell she made a mark, and every time a name was shouted that worked she wrote it down. Corran Hale. Davi Marsh. Lisbet Fane. Tomas Pell. Two hundred and forty-eight names, in Caitlin's small careful hand, down four pages.

Twelve were still walking.

* * *

Twelve whose faces nobody knew.

They'd walked all the way out to the harbor mouth. Out on Selvane's still water, past the end of the north pier, past where the white ship had gone down, to the very edge of where her hold on the sea ended. Selvane was on her knees on the south mole with her lamp held up in both hands and her whole body shaking, holding the water under twelve pairs of walking feet.

Twelve. In a ragged line. Walking slowly and steadily toward the open sea, where the water was nobody's and would let them go straight down.

Nobody on that whole harbor knew them. Not one sailor. Not Marra. Not Iselle. They'd been taken too young, or from too far away, or from villages that had sent nobody to sea. Or there was nobody left in their village to send.

I walked out to them.

* * *

I couldn't fold. I couldn't fold a teacup. But Selvane's water held under me the same as it held under them, and I walked out across the harbor mouth on the flat still sea, with Loki's coat flapping, and my left side quiet and gray, and I caught up with the last one in the line.

A girl. Small. Fourteen, perhaps, or she'd been fourteen when she swore. Her hair under the gray hood was the color of wheat. She walked with her chained fist out and her face blank and her eyes on nothing.

I didn't know her name. I couldn't say it.

So I didn't say anything.

I put my hands up in front of her, where she'd see them if she could see anything. And I signed. In mill-talk. The way Marra had taught me in the old cells under Concordia in half an hour, watching her hands. The way Corrick the miller taught his daughter and Iselle in the Ilvane valley, where the mills are so loud nobody can hear, and every word ends with the fist opening, because millers don't keep their hands closed.

Your name?

* * *

Nothing.

She walked into me. Pushed me back. Step. Step.

I signed it again. Your name? My fist closing on the question, then opening at the end. Like a door.

And on the third time, she stopped.

Her face didn't change. Her eyes didn't change. But her chained hand, out in front of her, shook. And the fingers moved. Inside the padlock. Inside the fist. The way your fingers move in your sleep when you're dreaming of something you used to do every day.

She was signing.

Inside her own locked fist, with no room to do it in, a girl who'd sworn her face and voice away was signing in mill-talk. Because that's what she'd spoken, before she had any other words. Because she was from the Ilvane valley, from a mill on the river where it was too loud to hear yourself think, and her hands had never forgotten.

A—

The fist opened.

It had to. Every mill-talk word ends with the fist opening. That's the whole of the grammar. She signed the first letter of her name, and her hand opened at the end of it, the way it always had, the way it had since she was born, and the padlock fell off into the sea.

Ada, she signed. Open hand. Ada.

* * *

Then she looked at me. Really looked. For the first time. With her own face. Pale. Freckled. Fourteen.

And she signed, very slowly, with a hand that had been closed for years: Who are you?

Garrick, I signed back. Friend of Marra's.

Her eyes filled. Marra Corrick? From the big mill?

Yes.

She's here?

I pointed back across the water. To the north pier. Where Marra was already running.

* * *

Of the twelve, two more were from Ilvane. I found them by signing at every one of them, one after another, walking backward across the still sea with my hands up in front of their faces. Your name? Your name? Your name? The third one, a boy, opened on the second try. The seventh, a woman much older, opened on the first, and wept.

Nine more didn't.

Nine, who didn't know mill-talk. Who didn't know anyone in Westmere. Who had nobody in all of Kethra, as far as anyone could tell, who'd ever come to look for them.

They reached the edge of Selvane's water.

And Selvane, on her knees on the mole, made a sound like a rope fraying, and her lamp went down to a coal.

* * *

I've got them, said Jörmungandr.

He came up under them. Under all nine. Out of the open sea, just past the line where the still water ended. A long green-black back, wider than a road, rising out of the gray waves exactly where their next step would land. And they stepped onto it. And kept walking.

And he let them.

They can walk on me, he said. Through the water, through the stones, through my teeth. Very calm. I'm very long. I go all the way around. If they want to walk home under the sea, they can walk on my back instead. They'll walk for a very long time before they get to the end of me. A pause. And I'll go slowly. And I'll stay near the top. Where it's light.

Nine Hushed, with their chained fists out, walking in a line along the back of the world serpent, in the late afternoon, very slowly, around and around the harbor mouth at Westmere.

Not drowning. Not opened. Not home.

Just walking.

Until somebody knows their names, said Jörmungandr. I don't mind. I like company. Nobody ever walks on me.

* * *

I got back to the pier, somehow. Marra and Ada were sitting on the stones at the end of it, signing at each other so fast I couldn't follow, both of them crying. Caitlin was writing down Ada's name. And the other two. Two hundred and fifty-one.

Loki came and stood beside me. He was watching his son go around and around the harbor mouth with nine gray figures walking on his back. His face was very strange.

"He offered," said Loki. "Nobody asked him. He just offered." He swallowed. "He's never done that before."

"He's never been out of the lake before."

"No," said Loki. "No, I suppose not."

* * *

At dusk I went up to Tamar's house.

My father was in the back bedroom, in Tamar's bed, under every quilt in Westmere. My mother was sitting on the edge of the bed with his hand in both of hers. Brannoc was standing against the wall by the door, with his arms folded, the way he stands at the Hold gate, not saying anything. Carol was asleep in the chair in the corner.

My father's face was a little less white. The frost on his eyelashes had melted. There was a little steam, now, when he breathed.

He opened his eyes when I came in. Just a crack.

"Did they turn?" he said.

"They turned. All the way home."

"Good." His eyes went shut again. "The statues?"

I told him. All of it. Vellis. The recall. The frost cracking. Corran Hale and his daughter on the quay. The sailors. Marra. Caitlin's columns. Ada, signing inside her own fist. The nine on Jörmungandr's back.

He listened with his eyes shut. When I'd finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"I let go of them," he said.

"You fell over."

"I let go of them," said my father, "and the town caught them." He opened his eyes again and looked at me. "Eleven hundred Kethran sailors and a girl with a ledger and a serpent who's never been out of a lake. And you, signing at them on the water with no ears." He smiled. Very tired. "That's what I'd hoped. That's all I've ever hoped. That if I ever let go of anything, somebody would be standing there."

His hand turned over in my mother's hands. Palm up.

"Tell Tamar thank you," he said. "For the bed."

And he went to sleep.

* * *

Mary's book. Thursday. Written in Tamar's kitchen at midnight, by the stove, with Helena's soup going and the house full of Kethrans, because Tamar's wife had said anyone with nowhere to go could come in, and two hundred and fifty-one people had come in with them.

Thursday. 1:15. Uriah fell. On the north pier. Cold all through. Thor caught him. Evelyn came at 1:30 and took his face in her hands and said Come here. He's in Tamar's bed. He's spent everything.

2 o'clock. Vellis in every ear. The Imperium withdraws. The Regent thanks the Hushed for their service and recalls them.

The frost cracked. All 260 Hushed walked toward the sea to go home under it.

Garrick asked the Kethran sailors from the red ships to look at their faces. A girl knew her da. Corran Hale, from Tessing. His hand opened.

Then all of them. Shouting names. Marra knew their faces. Caitlin counted. 248 padlocks by 4 o'clock.

Garrick walked out on Selvane's water and signed in mill talk. A girl called Ada opened her own hand inside the lock. Then two more.

Nine left. Nobody knew them. Jörmungandr came up under them. They are walking on his back around the harbor mouth. He says until somebody knows their names. He says he doesn't mind.

Uriah says the town caught them.

The Imperium has pulled back. All of it. Kessavel, the Regent's fleet, the Hushed. It cost them everything they brought. It cost us Uriah's warmth and Garrick's ear and eye and Selvane's lamp down to a coal. Evelyn says the eye and ear might come back. She says she'll know in a week.

And under that, in a hand that is very small and very square and pressed very hard, with each letter made separately, as though the person writing it had only just learned which way around they went, and had to think about every one:

Ada. I am Ada. I'd like it noted.