Chapter 153: The Island

"Gannet Rock," said Tamar.

He had the chart spread across the long table in the harbor office, held down at the corners with Eleanor's brass weights. Old. Yellow. Drawn by his grandfather's grandfather, with the soundings in brown ink and the shoals marked in little crosses like stitches. His finger was on a speck out past the shoals, north and west, a day's sail. So small it barely had a shape.

"That's what we call it," he said. "On the old charts it's Harl. There's a ruined light on the top that nobody's lit in a hundred years. Nobody lands there. There's nothing to land for. Gannets and rock and a lot of wind."

"Somebody's landed," I said.

Tamar didn't answer that. He looked down at the speck on the chart for a long time.

"Three boats out of Sallow Point went missing a month ago," he said quietly. "In the blow before the fleet came. Seventeen men. We thought the sea had them." He looked up. "Sallow Point's the last village before the shoals. Their boats fish right up to the edge of them. Right up to Harl."

* * *

There was an old woman sitting on the bench by the door.

I'd seen her on the end of the north pier every day for a week. Small and bent, in a black shawl, with hands like knotted rope. She'd come ashore off the red ships with everyone else on Tuesday night, which made no sense, because she wasn't Kethran. And she'd sat on the pier and looked at faces. Every face. Every Hushed, every sailor. And yesterday, when the wolves were finding names on Jörmungandr's back, she'd found one for somebody else's daughter, and gone back to looking.

"Bet Harker," said Tamar, seeing me look. "From Sallow Point. Her boy Davy had one of the three boats." He was quiet a moment. "She took a rowboat out to the shoals the week after, on her own, looking. The red ships picked her up. She's been aboard one of them since. She told the Kethran crews about Davy every day for a month. That's how they knew to bring her ashore."

Bet Harker looked up at me from the bench. Her eyes were very pale and very steady.

"He's on that rock," she said. "I can feel it. Like you feel weather in a bad knee." She folded her rope hands in her lap. "I'd like somebody to go and look."

* * *

We went at dawn on Friday.

Not many of us. My father said it had to be quiet. Looking, not fighting. Green, because she'd carried me before and said she wasn't letting anyone else do it now, not after the fuss she'd gone to. Calder, the magpie, with Carol on his neck, because Carol said if anyone was going to make clouds to hide in it was going to be her. And Siriel.

Siriel was the hard part.

"You want me," said Siriel, very slowly, "to sit on a dragon."

"Elven eyes," I said. "You can see further than anyone. I've only got one."

"Dragons," said Siriel, "move."

"I know."

"A great deal more than ships."

"I know."

She looked at Green for a long time. Green looked back, and lowered her shoulder, and said, very kindly, "Knees, dear."

Siriel took off her boots.

* * *

She sat behind me on Green's shoulder with her bare feet tucked against the scales and her arms around my waist, holding on with a grip like tree roots. She didn't say anything at all for the first hour. I could feel her breathing behind me, very slow and very careful, the way elves breathe when they've decided not to be frightened.

Carol went up ahead on Calder, into the gray morning, and pulled the clouds down around us. Not a storm. Just a low, thick, ordinary sea-fog of cloud, the kind that lies over the shoals most mornings in autumn. We flew inside it, Green and Calder, wingtip to wingtip, north and west over the water, and nobody looking up from below would have seen anything but weather.

Two more miles, said Carol, in the middle. I can feel it. There's something on the sea ahead that doesn't move when the waves do.

Can you hide us all the way in?

Watch me, said my sister.

* * *

Green came out of the bottom of the cloud very slowly, just enough to see.

And there it was.

* * *

Harl had been a rock. A gray hump of granite in the sea, a mile across, with white gannets thick on every ledge and the stump of an old stone lighthouse on the top. I'd seen it on Tamar's chart. I knew what it should have been.

It wasn't that anymore.

It was a fist.

* * *

I don't know how else to say it. From above, that's what it was. A fortress, black, built right into the rock, so that you couldn't tell where the granite stopped and the walls began. And it was shaped like a hand. Closed. A great black palm of a courtyard in the middle, and around it, curled over it, four long towers lying along the rock like fingers folded down. And at the front, where the island faced the sea, a fifth tower, thicker and shorter, standing up on its own and bent across the gate like a thumb.

A closed fist. A mile across. Sitting in the sea.

"Oh," said Green, very quietly.

Behind me, Siriel's grip on my waist went so tight I couldn't breathe.

* * *

"Count," I said. Not loud. "Please. Everything you can see."

Siriel leaned out past my shoulder. I felt her settle. Felt her knees, against the scales, go soft, the way Kell Dunnet had taught her. And her breathing went slow, slower, the way it does when she draws a bow.

"Ships," she said. "Twelve. In the lee of the thumb. Blue sails, gold hand. Furled." A pause. "From the fleet that turned."

So not all of them had gone home.

"Soldiers on the walls. Not Hushed. Ordinary. Two hundred, perhaps a little more. Spears. Some bows. They are bored." Another pause. "Hushed. In the fingers. In the towers. I can see them through the arrow-slits. Standing. Not moving. A great many. Three hundred. More. They don't need light. They are standing in the dark."

Burned hair and cold iron. Grenna had been right.

"And the palm," said Siriel.

She stopped.

* * *

"What's in the palm?"

Siriel didn't answer for a moment. When she did, her voice was very flat. The way elves talk when they don't want you to hear what they're feeling.

"A ring of men," she said. "On their knees. On the stones. Around a brazier. Seventeen." A breath. "In fishermen's clothes. Ganseys. Sea boots. One of them has red hair." Another breath. "There is a man in gray standing over them. A priest. With a book. And beside the brazier, irons. Heating."

Seventeen.

Three boats out of Sallow Point. Davy Harker.

"They're not Hushed yet," I said.

"No," said Siriel. "Their faces are their own. They are frightened. One of them is praying. One of them is singing, I think. His mouth is moving like a song." She was quiet. "They are being taught. The priest reads from the book, and they say it after him. I can read the priest's mouth." A long pause. "I give my face to the hand. I give my voice to the hand."

The Great Oath. The one Marra swore at twelve. The one that took her voice.

* * *

"How long?" I said. "Iselle said it takes time. You learn it first. You say it a hundred times. Then they swear you."

"I don't know," said Siriel. "I am an archer. I don't know oaths."

Dark of the moon, said Carol, in the middle.

I looked up. Calder was hanging in the bottom of the cloud thirty yards off, and Carol was looking down at the fist with her face very white.

Iselle told me once, she said. When I asked about Marra. They swear at the dark of the moon. Always. Because there's no light to see your own face by. That's the last thing you're meant to see. Nothing.

I counted. I didn't need to. The moon had been a thin old crescent over the North Sands last night, low in the east before dawn.

Nine days.

* * *

I was listening.

I didn't mean to. It's just what I do now, since the eye. Turn my head. Put the left ear to the wind. Listen. It had been coming back all week, slowly, filling from the bottom like my mother said, and out there over the sea with the wind coming up off the rock it was better than it had been on the pier.

And I heard it.

Siriel was right. One of the men in the ring was singing. Very low. Under the priest's voice. Not the oath. Something else. A fishing song. The kind they sing in Westmere when they're hauling, with a pull on every fourth beat.

Haul away for Sallow, boys. Haul away for home.

He was singing it under his breath while the priest read the oath. To keep from saying the oath. I'd have bet my other eye on it.

"Red hair?" I said. "The singer?"

Siriel was quiet a moment.

"Yes," she said.

* * *

That was when the fist noticed us.

I don't know what did it. Maybe Green came too low. Maybe the singer looked up. Maybe it was always going to. But down in the palm of the courtyard, the priest in gray stopped reading, and lifted his head, and looked straight up at the bottom of Carol's cloud.

And from the top of the thumb tower, a thread went up.

Gray. Thin. Like ash. Like the ones that had run from Kessavel's fist to the dragons' hoods. It went straight up into the sky above the island, and spread, and I felt it spread. The way I'd felt the dome over Westmere close, a week and a half ago, from the inside. A lock. Coming down over the whole rock like a lid on a pot.

"Up," said Green, and went up, so fast Siriel's arms nearly cracked my ribs.

* * *

We came out of the top of the cloud into the sun. Calder came up beside us. Below us, through a gap in Carol's fog, I could see the fist, and over it, faint, gray, shimmering, a dome. Closing. Edges coming in from all sides like ice on a pond.

And on the top of the thumb tower, standing at the very edge, looking up at us, a small figure.

Gray coat. Buttoned to the throat. Silver hair cut very short. Hands at his sides. Closed.

He didn't lift his hand. He didn't send a chain. He didn't do anything at all. He just stood on the top of his tower and looked up at us, two dragons in the sky, for a long moment.

Then he put his hand to his collar.

And turned his back. And walked away, down into the tower, and the dome closed over the rock behind him, and he was gone.

* * *

"That was him," said Green. "Wasn't it. The small gray one."

"Yes."

"He saw us."

"Yes."

"And he let us go."

I didn't answer that. I didn't know how. I sat on Green's shoulder with Siriel holding onto my waist and Carol's clouds blowing away below us, and thought about a small gray man on a white ship who'd said I don't— and then been pulled up into the sky by his own throat.

He saw us, Garrick, said Carol in the middle. He could have done anything.

I know.

Why didn't he?

I don't know, I said. I don't think he knows either.

* * *

We were back on the North Sands by noon.

My father was waiting on the end of the north pier. He'd seen us come in from a long way out. He listened to all of it without saying a word. The fist. The twelve blue ships. The two hundred soldiers and the three hundred Hushed. The seventeen in the palm. The priest. The irons. The dark of the moon. The singer. The dome. Kessavel on the thumb tower, turning away.

When I'd finished, he stood looking out to the northwest for a long time.

"I'll look," he said.

And he went.

* * *

As lightning. The first time since he fell. One white-gold bolt out of the clear noon sky over Westmere, gone northwest over the sea, so fast the thunder came after he'd already vanished. We stood on the end of the pier and waited.

Four minutes.

Then he came back. Down out of the sky in a crack of light onto the end of the north pier, in exactly the spot he'd left from, and stood there smoking, with his hair on end, and his face gray.

"Same as Westmere," he said. "The same lock. I hit it as hard as I could." He looked at his hands. They were shaking. "It rang. Like a bell. It didn't even crack."

"You shouldn't have tried," said my mother, who'd come down the pier at a run when she heard the thunder. "Not yet. Not after—"

"I know," said my father. "I had to see." He looked at me. "It's built for me. Like the dome was. He's learned exactly how hard I can hit, and he's made it one hair harder." He let out a breath. "I can't go through it."

* * *

We met in the harbor office that night.

All of us. My father and my mother. Carol and Ignatius. Iselle and Roderic. Eleanor with her peppermints. Davren. Thor, leaning in the doorway with her hammer. Loki on the windowsill. Siriel, with her boots back on. Grenna, on the bench by the door, beside Bet Harker. Tamar, with his ankle on the crate. And Caitlin in the corner, with her ledger, ruling columns.

I'd drawn it. On the back of Tamar's grandfather's chart, in charcoal, because Davren lent me his. The fist. The palm courtyard. The four finger towers curled over it. The thumb across the gate.

I put it on the table under the lamp.

Iselle looked at it and went white.

* * *

"I know it," she said.

Everybody looked at her.

"I know that shape." Her voice was very small. "He builds them all the same. All of Kessavel's houses. The Temple of Oaths in the golden city. The oath-house at Ambry, on the river. The one at the Narrows. They're all hands. All closed." She put her finger on the palm. "The swearing's always in the palm. The fingers are where the Hushed stand. The thumb is where he stands, when he's there. And the gate's under the thumb, so everything that goes in or out goes under him."

"You've been inside one?" said my father quietly.

"I was sworn in one," said Iselle. "Not the Great Oath. I was too valuable for that. A small one. When I was twelve. That I'd never leave the palace without leave." She looked at her own right hand on the table. It had started to close. She opened it, very deliberately, finger by finger. "I walked from the thumb to the palm and back. I counted every step. I didn't know why I was counting. I think I knew I'd need it one day."

Roderic, behind her chair, put his hand on her shoulder.

"And," said Iselle, very quietly, "there's a door. In every one. That isn't on any plan. That the priests use to come and go when they don't want to walk under the thumb." She looked up at my father. "I know where it is."

* * *

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Bet Harker, on the bench by the door, unfolded her rope hands from her lap and stood up.

"Nine days," she said. "Is it."

"Nine days," said my father.

"Then you'd best start planning," said Bet Harker. "My Davy's red-haired and can't hold a tune in a bucket and he's sitting in that fist singing Haul Away for Sallow at a priest to keep his own mouth shut." She looked around the room at all of us. Kings and gods and dragons' friends and a goddess with a hammer. "He won't keep it up nine days. Nobody could. He's a fisherman. Not a saint."

My father looked at her for a long time.

"No," he said. "But I've heard of men who held a street for fifty-two minutes with their hands open." He glanced at Tamar. "Fishermen, mostly." He looked back at Bet Harker. "We'll be there before he stops singing, Mrs. Harker. You have my word."

And Roderic, behind Iselle's chair, said, "I'm going."

* * *

Every head turned.

My brother Roderic is twenty. He's Adriana's son, and Lyradon's prince as well as Greykeep's, and he's spent the last month learning the sword from Avarn and standing behind Iselle's chair. His temper brings weather. He's never been in a battle. Not a real one.

He didn't say it loudly. He just said it.

"I'm going," said Roderic. "When you go. Wherever the door is." He didn't look at my father. He looked at Iselle. "She's going to have to walk under that thumb again. To show us where it is. I'm not letting her do it on her own."

Iselle turned in her chair and looked up at him. Her right hand, on the table, was wide open.

My father didn't say anything. He looked across the room at Adriana, who'd come in at the back while Bet Harker was talking and was standing in the doorway with her arms folded.

Adriana looked at her son for a long time.

Then she looked at me.

And I understood what the look meant. I think I'd always known I would, one day. It meant: You're his big brother. Stand where he can see you.

I nodded.

* * *

Mary's book. Friday. Written in the harbor office at Westmere, late, by lamplight, on the back of a list of rivets, because the black book was full to the last page and the new one hadn't come through the gate yet.

Friday. Dawn. Garrick on Green with Siriel behind him, barefoot. Carol on Calder, making cloud. Green told Siriel knees, dear.

Harl. Gannet Rock. It's a fist. A mile across. Black. Four fingers, a thumb across the gate. 12 blue ships that didn't go home. 200 soldiers. 300 Hushed standing in the dark in the fingers.

In the palm, 17 fishermen from Sallow Point on their knees around a brazier. A priest. Irons. They're learning the Great Oath. Dark of the moon. 9 days.

One of them has red hair and is singing Haul Away for Sallow under his breath so he doesn't have to say the oath. Garrick heard it with his left ear. Bet Harker says that's her Davy.

Kessavel on the thumb tower. He saw them. He touched his collar. He turned his back and let them go.

Uriah went as lightning to look. Same lock as Westmere. One hair harder than he can hit. He came back shaking. Evelyn is not speaking to him.

Iselle knows the shape. They're all hands. She was sworn in one at twelve. She counted every step. There's a door.

Uriah gave Bet Harker his word.

Roderic says he's going. Adriana looked at Garrick.

And under that, in a hand that was barely a hand at all, crabbed and shaking and enormous, pressed into the back of the rivet list with a pencil held like a gutting knife, by someone who had clearly never once in her life been asked to write her name in a book:

Bet Harker. Sallow Point. My boy is on that rock. I'd like it noted that I'm coming too.