Chapter 146: Counting

The slate-gray dragon was lying apart from the others.

I noticed it at four in the morning, because I couldn't sleep. You don't, much, when half the world has gone quiet. I kept turning my head to hear things, and the turning woke me up. So I gave up, and put on Loki's coat, and went down to the North Sands in the dark to sit with the dragons, because dragons are warm and don't ask how you are.

They were all asleep along the tideline. The eight in their melting snow beds, and Aurethar's twelve beside them, like a row of great banked fires. Sabrenne with her chin on Aurethar's shoulder. Fenrir and Gorrow nose to nose. Green with her tail in the sea.

And the slate-gray one, a long way down the beach, by himself. Lying on his side, with his left wing half open over the sand, as though he'd meant to fold it and forgotten how.

He was smoking.

* * *

Not the way dragons smoke when they sleep. Aurethar snores and a little smoke comes out of his nose, and it smells of burned sheep and hot stone. This was different. This was coming out of his side. Out of the long black scorch on his left flank where he'd taken Sabrenne's fire on Wednesday, again and again, putting himself between her and the town. Thin gray smoke, rising in the cold air, from somewhere deep under the scales.

I sat down by his head.

His eye opened. It was the color of his scales, gray as old roof slate, and very tired. He'd never spoken to me. He'd never spoken to anyone, as far as I knew. On Tuesday, when the dragons ate the fire of Cindrel's forty-four pieces, he'd taken six of them and not said a word. Aurethar called him the gray one. Green called him him. That was all anybody had.

"Hello," I said. "Can I sit here?"

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he breathed out. Not fire. A dry, broken, whistling sound, like wind through a cracked window.

"Yes," said the slate-gray dragon.

* * *

It hurt him to talk. I could see it. Every word came out of him like something being pulled through a keyhole, scraped and thin, with that whistle under it. But he kept talking. As if he'd been saving it.

"Haven't," he said. "Twenty-two years."

"You haven't spoken in twenty-two years?"

"Couldn't." A long, rattling breath. "Glass. In the throat."

* * *

It came out slowly. In pieces. I'll put it together the way he gave it to me, but you should know it took most of an hour, with long silences, and that sometimes he stopped and shut his eyes and I thought he'd gone to sleep, and then he'd open them and go on.

The war. Twenty-two years ago. When Carol and I were babies and my father had only just learned to call the sword.

The north. A long valley between two ridges, where Othellos's army came down out of the passes with Surtr's fire behind them. A company of Greykeep soldiers holding the valley floor so the villages behind them could get away. Ward Company. Shields only. A gray-haired woman shouting orders. And an old captain in front, with a crown marked on the back of his left hand.

And the slate-gray dragon, up on the ridge, carrying the wounded out. He'd carried eleven. He was going back for a twelfth.

"Then the storm-king drew," he said.

The first time. The very first time my father ever called the lightning sword. In the valley. Because the giants were coming down the pass faster than the villages were emptying, and Surtr's fire was coming with them, and there was nothing else that would stop it.

"Valley went white," said the dragon. "Then glass."

The whole valley floor. Giants and fire and Othellos's army. Turned to glass in a breath.

And Ward Company had been standing on it.

* * *

"I came down on them," said the dragon.

He'd seen the sword start to come into my father's hand, up on the far ridge. He'd known what it was. Dragons know. And he'd dropped out of the sky onto the valley floor in front of Ward Company and lain down over them. Forty soldiers. Under one wing. And put his head down over the old captain with the crown on his hand. And when the white came, he breathed it in.

"All I could," he said. "So it wouldn't go under the wing."

I sat very still in the snow.

"Melted my throat," said the dragon. "Didn't matter. They were all right. Under there." A long rattling breath. "The old one. With the crown. He put his hand on my chest. Under the wing. In the dark. I could hear him. He said—" The eye closed. Opened. "He said, Steady, lad. Steady. You're doing fine."

A whistle that might have been a laugh.

"Nobody ever called me lad. I was nine hundred."

* * *

The smoke was coming faster from his side.

I put my hand on the scales over his chest, the way the old captain must have. They were hot. Too hot. And under them, deep down, something was wrong. Something that had been wrong for twenty-two years, I think, since the valley, and that Sabrenne's fire on Wednesday had found again and gone in through.

"I'll get Aurethar," I said. "I'll get my mother. She's a healer, she's—"

"No."

Very quiet.

"Stay," said the slate-gray dragon. "You ask things. I heard. On the beach. Asking the chained ones. Asking the fire god." The eye looked at me. "Nobody asked me. Twenty-two years. Couldn't answer anyway." A breath. "Ask me now."

I didn't know what he meant. And then I did.

"What's your name?" I said.

* * *

He was quiet so long I thought he'd gone.

"Ashlar," he said.

Stone. Cut square. The kind you build walls from. The gray kind, that lasts.

"Ashlar," I said.

"Yes." Something in his face eased. "Nobody's said it. Since the valley." He breathed. "Tell him. The old captain. Tell him I kept it. The wing. Tell him it was enough."

"I will."

"And tell the storm-king." The great gray eye moved, slowly, up the beach, toward the lights of Westmere, toward Tamar's house on the hill where my father was asleep under every quilt in the town. "It wasn't his fault. The sword. He had to. I'd have done it." A breath. "I watched him. After. Sitting on the glass. All night. With his hands open."

"I'll tell him."

"Good," said Ashlar.

And then, very softly, so softly I only heard it because I'd turned my good ear right down to his jaw:

"Steady, lad. You're doing fine."

I don't know if he was saying it to me, or remembering it. I think both.

The sun came up over the hills behind the Hold. It touched the beach. It touched the gray scales.

The smoke stopped.

* * *

Aurethar knew before he opened his eyes.

He lifted his head off Sabrenne's shoulder and looked down the beach, and he made the sound. The one he'd made on the north pier when the chained dragons came out of the west. Low. Lower than the Hold. A bell the size of a mountain struck very gently, underground. And one by one, all along the tideline, every dragon on the North Sands lifted its head and answered. Twenty of them. The same note. Until the whole beach was humming, and the sand under my hands was humming, and the sea was.

Sabrenne sang it too. Old as she was. Three days out of her chains.

* * *

They counted the dead at noon.

That's what we call it in Westmere. Not a funeral. That comes later, for each family, in their own way. The counting is the town's. You stand at the top of the harbor steps, where Goss read the names for the evacuation, and you read every name of everyone you've lost, out loud, so the whole town hears it at once. And somebody writes them down.

Goss read. His voice was back. Mine had only been borrowed.

Mary wrote. In the black book. She'd asked for that. She sat on a stool at the top of the steps with the book on her knees and her pen ready, and Melody stood beside her with the ink pot, and every time Goss read a name Mary wrote it, slowly, in full, and didn't look up until it was finished.

* * *

Thirty-one names from Westmere.

Sailors, most of them. Men and women from the Hold street, who'd stood with Tamar for fifty-two minutes on Tuesday morning with their hands open, against Hushed with chained fists, and not all of them had got up again. Two of the Hold watch. A ferryman who'd gone back for his dog. Old Mother Pettigrew from the top of the Ropewalk, who was ninety-one and had refused to leave her house when the evacuation came, and had sat in her window all through the burning, and been found on Wednesday in her chair with her knitting in her lap and a young copper phoenix asleep on her shoulder, keeping her warm.

Goss read every one. Mary wrote every one.

Then Goss stopped, and looked at the ledger, and looked at Mary.

"There's another page," he said.

* * *

Fourteen Kethran names.

Sailors from the red ships. The ones who hadn't come ashore on Tuesday night. Who'd been below decks when the fire came and hadn't got out in time. Their crewmates had given the names to Caitlin, and Caitlin had written them in her small careful hand on the last page of the harbor office ledger, and nobody had asked her to.

Goss looked at the page for a long moment.

"Read them," said Tamar, from the step below, on his crutch.

"They were the other side," somebody in the crowd said. Not loud. Just said it.

"They were in my harbor," said Tamar. "Read them."

So Goss read them. Fourteen names, in his great voice, over the harbor, in their own Kethran shapes, with the stresses in the wrong places because he didn't know how to say them, and the Kethran sailors standing at the back of the crowd in their borrowed blankets corrected him under their breath, every one, and he stopped and said each one again, properly, the way they said it.

And Mary wrote every one.

* * *

Then she looked up at me.

"Garrick," she said. "There's one more. Isn't there."

I hadn't told her. I hadn't told anyone. But Mary always knows.

"He told me his name," I said. "This morning. Nobody else knew it."

Mary held out the pen.

"Then you'd better spell it," she said.

So I took it, and I knelt on the top step of the harbor at Westmere beside Mary's stool, and I wrote it at the bottom of the page in Mary's black book. In my own hand. As carefully as I've ever written anything.

Ashlar.

And Goss, who had read forty-five names that day and whose great voice had gone hoarse doing it, looked at what I'd written, and drew in his breath, and read it out over the harbor so loud that they heard it on the North Sands.

Every dragon on the beach lifted its head.

* * *

My father came down at one o'clock.

He shouldn't have. My mother said so. Thor said so. Brannoc didn't say anything, which is how Brannoc says so. My father came anyway, down the hill from Tamar's house and along the harbor and down onto the North Sands, wrapped in a quilt, very slowly, leaning on Thor's arm on one side and my mother's on the other, with the frost still faint in his eyebrows.

He didn't say anything until he got to the place where Ashlar was lying.

Then he stood there. A long time. Looking at the slate-gray scales. At the black scorch on the left flank. At the old silver-white scarring around the jaw and the throat, that I hadn't noticed in the dark and could see now in the daylight. Glass scarring. Twenty-two years old.

"I didn't know," said my father. "I never knew which one it was."

* * *

"I drew the sword," he said quietly. "The first time. In the north. And when the light went out, there was a dragon lying on the glass in front of Ward Company. Gray. With his wing over all of them. And when he lifted it, they came out from under it, forty of them, and not one hurt." He swallowed. "And the dragon got up and flew away. And I never saw which way he went. And I asked everyone. For years. Aurethar didn't know. Nobody knew. A gray dragon. There are a great many gray dragons." His voice cracked. "I sat on the glass all night. I didn't know what else to do."

"He knew," I said. "He watched you. All night."

My father looked at me.

"He asked me to tell you something," I said. "He said it wasn't your fault. The sword. He said you had to. He said he'd have done it." I swallowed. "He said he watched you sitting on the glass. With your hands open."

* * *

My father let go of Thor's arm. And my mother's.

And he knelt down in the sand. In the quilt. Slowly, because his legs weren't working very well. And then he bowed. All the way. The way he's only ever bowed to Aurethar. Forehead to the sand, beside Ashlar's great gray head.

He stayed there a long time.

When he got up, his face was wet, and there was sand on his forehead, and my mother brushed it off with her thumb without saying anything.

"Ashlar," said my father. As if trying it. "Ashlar." He looked at me. "Thank you. For asking him."

* * *

Eliza came through the Hold gate at two.

I hadn't seen her in ten days. Nobody had. Since the night the gray-wax fold came out of the hidden pocket in Malachar's letter, with give me the whole one written inside it in that cold, moving hand, Eliza Ward had been standing on the nursery stair at Greykeep. With the Guard. Day and night. Sleeping in a chair on the landing, in shifts, two hours at a time. Because somebody wanted my baby brother, and she was the captain of the Guard, and she didn't care who it was.

She came down onto the North Sands in her plain gray guard coat with her sword at her hip, and her short white hair standing up where she'd run her hand through it, and her broad shoulders squared the way they always are. She was seventy-six. She didn't look it. Nobody in Havenreach does, quite. The wards do that.

She looked at the dragons. She looked at my father, in the quilt. She looked at me, at my left eye.

Then she looked at Ashlar.

And she stopped walking.

* * *

"Gray," she said. Very quietly. "Gray as slate."

"Eliza—" said my father.

"The north valley. Under the wing. I was there." She didn't take her eyes off him. "I was at the back of the company. With the bows. When the white came. I had my face in the dirt and a dragon's wing over my back and I could hear it breathing in the fire, breathing it in, and it sounded like a forge, and the heat came through the wing, and nobody screamed." She swallowed. "Alistair had his hand on its chest. Right at the front. He talked to it the whole time. I could hear him."

"Steady, lad," I said.

Eliza turned and looked at me.

"He told me," I said. "This morning. Before he died. He said nobody had ever called him lad. He was nine hundred."

* * *

Eliza didn't cry. I've never seen Eliza cry. She made a sound like a sword going back into its sheath, short and hard, and turned away and looked at the sea for a while.

Then she turned back.

"His name," she said.

"Ashlar."

"Ashlar." She nodded once. Filed it. The way she files everything. "Alistair has to be told."

"He asked me to tell him," I said. "He said: tell the old captain I kept the wing. Tell him it was enough."

Eliza looked at me for a long moment.

"Then you'll come," she said. "Now. He's eighty-five in three weeks and he pretends he isn't and he'll want to hear it from the one who was there." She paused. "And I want to see his face when you tell him. I've been telling him for twenty-two years that dragon was a she. Just to annoy him."

* * *

I couldn't fold. So we went through the Hold gate like ordinary people, and came out in the lower hall at Greykeep, under the six gates, and walked.

Alistair Kale lives in the old gatehouse on the east wall. The Castellan gave it to him when he stopped being captain, which he says he never did. One round room at the top of a stair, with a bed and a chair and a stove, and a window that looks straight down onto the tilt yard. The yard where Avarn has kept five o'clock for twenty-two years.

I'd known Alistair all my life. I hadn't known, until I was standing in his doorway with Eliza, that he'd been watching. Every morning. From that window. Me, from five to ten, with my oak sword. And the empty yard after, for thirteen years. And me again, these last weeks, coming back.

"He sees everything from up here," Eliza said, at the foot of the stair. "He'll tell you he doesn't."

* * *

He was in the chair by the window.

Smaller than I remembered. Everyone gets smaller, at eighty-five. Thin white hair, cut short, soldier-short. A blanket over his knees. And across the blanket, where another old man might have had a book or a cat, a wooden sword. Old. Dark with handling. Notched along one edge where somebody had struck it, years ago, very hard, with something that wasn't wood.

On the back of his left hand, on the thin old skin, the crown mark. Faded. Still there.

He looked up when we came in. He looked at Eliza first. He always does.

"You've left the stair," he said.

"Rhenna has it."

"Rhenna's twenty-six."

"Rhenna's forty," said Eliza. "You've been saying twenty-six for fourteen years."

Then he looked at me. At my face. At my eye. And something in his own face went very still and very sharp, the way a hawk goes still on a fence post.

"Something's dead," said Alistair Kale.

* * *

I told him.

I sat on the end of his bed, because there was nowhere else, and told him everything Ashlar had told me. The valley. The wing. The white. Breathing it in. The glass in his throat, and twenty-two years without a word. Sabrenne's fire on Wednesday, finding the old wound. The beach at dawn. His name.

And what he'd asked me to say.

"He said: tell the old captain I kept the wing," I said. "Tell him it was enough."

Alistair didn't say anything.

He sat in his chair by the window with the wooden sword across his knees and his old hands flat on it, and looked out at the tilt yard, and didn't say anything at all for a very long time.

"And he said you called him lad," I said. "And nobody ever had. He was nine hundred."

* * *

Alistair laughed.

It surprised all three of us. A short, cracked, wet bark of a laugh, and then his face crumpled up like paper and his shoulders shook, and Eliza crossed the room in two strides and put her hand on the back of his neck and left it there.

"Nine hundred," said Alistair. "Nine hundred. And I called him lad. In the dark. Because he was shaking." He wiped his eyes with the back of his crowned hand. "He was shaking all over, the whole time, under there. Like a boy on his first watch. I thought he was young. I thought he was frightened." He looked up at Eliza. "He was trying not to let the heat through."

"I know," said Eliza.

"It was a he," said Alistair. "I told you. Twenty-two years."

"You told me," said Eliza.

"I was right."

"You were right," said Eliza. She didn't take her hand off his neck. "Don't let it go to your head. There's not room."

* * *

He was quiet again after that. For a while. Then he looked at me again. Properly. At the left side of my face.

"Which?" he said.

"Left eye. Left ear."

"Since?"

"Wednesday. And yesterday."

Alistair nodded. Slowly. Then he picked up the wooden sword off his knees, and put the point on the floor, and leaned on it, and stood up. It took a while. Eliza didn't help him. She knew better.

"Stand up," said Alistair.

I stood up.

He came around me. Slowly. On my left side. Where I couldn't see him and couldn't hear him. And I lost him. Just like that. One moment an old man with a stick, the next nothing, a gray blank where he'd been.

Something tapped me on the left shoulder. Lightly. Wood.

"You stopped watching me," said Alistair.

* * *

"I can't see you," I said.

"No." He came back around into my right eye. "Nor can I. Not on that side. Eleven years." He tapped his own left eye with one finger. It was a little clouded, I saw now. Milky at the center, like a window in winter. "Eliza knows. Avarn knows, I expect. Avarn knows everything that happens in that yard. Nobody else."

I stared at him.

"Your father hasn't noticed," said Alistair. "Which tells you he hasn't been looking. Which is as it should be. He's a king. He's got better things to look at than an old man's eye."

"How do you—"

"Turn your head," said Alistair. "That's the first thing. Everyone forgets. You've got a neck. Use it." He tapped my left shoulder again with the sword. "Second thing. Put something you trust on your blind side. A wall. A tree. A person." He looked at Eliza. "Twenty-four years, I've kept her on my left. She thinks it's because I like her."

"It's because you like me," said Eliza.

"It's both," said Alistair. "That's the third thing."

* * *

He sat down again. Heavily. With the wooden sword across his knees.

"Your father learned on this," he said. "Close work. The year Avarn was teaching him the long sword in the mornings, I had him in the afternoons with this. Hit him every time he looked at his own weapon instead of me." He ran his thumb along the notch in the edge. "He hit me back once. Just the once. With the real one. By accident. That's what the notch is."

"He never told me that."

"He wouldn't," said Alistair. "He was very sorry. He was sorry for a week." A dry little smile. "I'd have given you this, you know. When I heard you'd broken Avarn's. I thought about it all night."

"I don't want another one," I said.

"I know," said Alistair. "That's why I'm not giving it to you. And because Avarn would never speak to me again." He looked out of the window at the tilt yard. "Five o'clock, he still keeps?"

"Five o'clock."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow."

Alistair nodded.

"Then I'll be down," he said. "On your left."

* * *

"You will not," said Eliza, "be going down to the yard at five o'clock in the morning. At eighty-four."

"Eighty-five."

"Not yet," said Eliza.

And Alistair Kale looked up at her, over his clouded eye and his good one, with his crowned hand on the sword, and smiled like a boy.

"Not yet," he agreed.

* * *

I left them there. In the round room on the east wall, with the window open onto the yard and the stove going. Eliza in the doorway. Alistair in his chair. On the stair going down, I heard her say something quietly that I didn't catch, because it was on my left. And I heard him answer.

"Steady, lass," said Alistair. "You're doing fine."

* * *

Mary's book. Friday. She wrote it in the library at Greykeep, late, with the lamp low, having come home through the Hold gate with the book under her arm and sat down without taking her coat off.

Friday. Dawn. The slate-gray dragon died on the North Sands. Garrick was with him. He spoke. First time in 22 years. Glass in his throat from the north valley, from Uriah's sword, the first time. He lay over Ward Company and breathed in the white so it wouldn't go under the wing. Sabrenne's fire found the old wound.

His name was Ashlar. He told Garrick. Nobody else knew.

Noon. The counting. 31 from Westmere. Mother Pettigrew, 91, with a phoenix on her shoulder. 14 from the red ships; Tamar said read them; Goss read them; the Kethrans corrected him; he said each one again properly. And Ashlar. Garrick wrote it himself.

Uriah came down in a quilt and bowed all the way. Garrick told him it wasn't his fault. Ashlar said so.

Eliza came off the nursery stair for the first time in ten days.

Alistair. Garrick told him. He laughed and then he cried. It was a he. He was right.

Alistair has been blind in his left eye eleven years. He says he'll be in the yard at five tomorrow. On Garrick's left.

And under that, in a square, upright, careful hand, a soldier's hand, the hand of someone who learned his letters writing duty rosters and never once let a line slope, with a crown pressed into the corner of the page in faded ink where the back of his left hand had rested while he wrote:

Alistair Kale. Last sworn captain of the old Greykeep Guard. Ashlar. I'd like it noted that I was right.