Chapter 155: Roderic's First Big Battle

Caitlin counted one thousand two hundred and three lines on the first night.

We'd brought the Knock out on Sunday afternoon, Tamar at the wheel on a stool with his ankle up on a coil of rope, threading her through the shoals around Harl like a needle through cloth. He knew every rock. He said his grandfather used to take him out there as a boy to look at the gannets, and every time they passed a rock his grandfather would tell him its name, and he'd never forgotten one.

We anchored a mile off the island, on the north side, out of bowshot, where the sea was deep and still. Close enough to see the fist black against the stars, and the faint gray shimmer of the lid over it. Far enough that nobody on the walls could see much more than a ship with a lamp in her stern.

And Caitlin sat on an upturned bucket in the bow with her blue book on her knees and a shaded lantern at her feet and looked at the lid.

All night. Without moving. I brought her tea at midnight and she didn't drink it. I brought her bread at three and she didn't eat it. At dawn she closed the book and stood up and stretched and said, "One thousand two hundred and three. There's more. A lot more. But I've found where they start." And then she ate the bread and drank the cold tea and went below and slept until noon.

* * *

On Monday night she counted two thousand and eleven.

And at two in the morning, the fist opened its thumb.

* * *

I was on the afterdeck when it happened. With my father. He'd been standing at the stern rail since sunset, beside the Castellan's lamp, looking at the island. He hadn't sat down. I don't think he'd sat down since Saturday.

The sound came across the water first. A grinding. Deep. Like a millstone turning over. And then the sea gate under the thumb opened, a black square in the black rock, and out of it, one after another, came ships.

Five of them. Blue sails. Gold hands. Low and fast. With their oars out and lamps hooded and something on their decks that glowed red through the hoods, like coals in a pot.

"Fire," said Tamar, from his stool at the wheel. Very quietly. "Fire pots. They mean to burn us."

* * *

My father didn't move.

I looked at him. His hands were on the stern rail. Open. Flat. I could see the frost starting at his fingertips, very faint, a white rime creeping out over the wood. He could freeze the sea between us and them in a breath. I'd seen him freeze the whole western sea. Five ships was nothing.

He didn't.

"Father—"

"Wait," said my father.

* * *

Siriel's elves were up on the rails before I'd turned around. Ten of them. Barefoot. Bows strung. Knees soft. Kell Dunnet behind them on the deck, saying nothing, ready.

"Rudders," said Siriel. "Oars. Fire pots. Nothing that breathes." She drew. "At the top of the roll."

The Knock rolled. Out. Out. Slowing.

Ten arrows went out into the dark at the top of the swing. And on the lead blue ship, a fire pot shattered on its own deck and went up in a sheet of orange, and men shouted, and buckets came, and the ship slewed sideways with its rudder pinned by an elven arrow.

The other four came on.

* * *

Roderic was at the bow. With Caitlin.

He'd been there all night. Both nights. Standing behind her bucket with his sword at his hip and his hand on the bow rail, not touching her, the way he stands behind Iselle's chair. Iselle wasn't on the Knock. She was at Westmere, resting, because on Friday morning she'd have to walk up the wrist stair under Kessavel's lid and open a door with her own hand, and my mother said she was to sleep until then if it killed her. So Roderic had come to stand behind Caitlin instead. Because she was his sister. Because she was counting, and couldn't look up, and somebody had to.

He'd drawn his sword. I saw it in the lantern light at the bow. The real one. Avarn's lessons. Shaking.

And the wind was coming up.

* * *

It came from nowhere. From a still, clear, star-filled night with the sea flat as a table. One moment nothing. The next, a gust. Hard. Warm. Out of the south, straight across the Knock's deck from the stern to the bow. The sails we'd furled snapped against their ties. The Castellan's lamp swung on its hook.

"That," said the little voice in the lamp, "is not weather. I know what weather is."

Another gust. Harder. The Knock heeled. The elves on the rail went to their knees, all ten at once, hands flat on the rail. Somebody's bow went over the side.

And the sea, which had been flat, began to rise.

* * *

"That's him," I said. "That's Roderic."

My brother's temper brings the weather. It always has. When he was small and lost his temper, it rained. When he was twelve and Faelan broke his model ship, the shutters blew in all down the east wing. He's spent his whole life learning to hold it. Breathing. Counting. Walking away.

He'd never been frightened like this.

At the bow, Roderic was standing with his sword out in front of him in both hands, pointing at the four blue ships coming at us out of the dark, and his whole face was white, and his hair was standing straight up, and the wind was pouring off him like water off a mill wheel. Every breath he took, it got worse. The swell was six feet. Eight. The Knock was rolling so hard Tamar had both arms around the wheel.

Out on the water, the blue ships were rolling too. Pitching. Their fire pots sliding. Their oars fouling. But they were still coming.

And the next gust was going to put the Knock on her side.

* * *

"Father," I said.

He was still at the stern rail. Still with his hands open on the wood. Still with the frost at his fingertips.

He was looking at Roderic.

"Wait," he said again. Very quietly. "He's not hurting anyone. Not yet."

"He's going to put us over."

"I know," said my father. His face didn't change. But I saw his hands. The frost had gone all the way to his wrists. Ready. "I'll catch it if he does. I'll catch all of it. I swear." He didn't take his eyes off Roderic. "But I'm not going to stop him. Not his first time. If I stop him, he'll think he can't."

He looked at me.

"You go," said my father.

* * *

I went.

Down the deck, which was going up and down like a horse jumping fences. Past the elves on their knees on the rail. Past Kell Dunnet, who'd grabbed a line and was hanging onto it with one hand and to the nearest elf with the other. Up to the bow, where Caitlin was sitting on her bucket with her blue book in her lap and her eyes on the lid over Harl, still counting, as if nothing was happening at all, and Roderic was standing behind her with his sword out and the storm coming off him.

I came up on his left. So he'd see me.

He didn't.

"Roderic," I said.

He didn't hear me. The wind was too loud. His eyes were on the blue ships. Wide. Fixed. The way a rabbit's eyes are fixed on a hawk.

So I did what Alistair taught me. I turned my head. I put my good eye on him. And I put my hand, open, on his shoulder. Where he could feel it.

"Roderic," I said. "Stand where I can see you."

* * *

He jumped. Like he'd been woken.

He looked at me. His eyes were enormous.

"I can't stop it," he said. His voice was cracking. "Garrick, I can't stop it, it's never been this big, I'm going to put us over, I'm going to put Caitlin over—"

"I know," I said. "You don't have to stop it."

"What—"

"Borrow?" I said.

* * *

He stared at me.

I've borrowed from nearly everyone I love. Carol. My father. Avarn. Loki. Iselle. Grenna. I'd never once borrowed from Roderic. I'd never needed to. He was my little brother. You don't borrow from your little brother. You give to him.

But I'd watched him all his life. I knew what his storms were made of. They weren't made of anger, whatever the servants said. They were made of feeling too much, with nowhere to put it.

And I had somewhere to put it.

"Let me have half," I said. "You keep half. We'll hold it together." I squeezed his shoulder. "You can say no."

Roderic looked at me. And at the blue ships. And at Caitlin, on her bucket, still counting, not looking up, with her hair whipping around her face.

"Take," said my brother.

* * *

It came into me like a river in flood.

I've held my father's winter. I've held Carol's lightning, and Surtr's fire in a cup of borrowed frost, and a wave as big as a mountain. I've never held anything like Roderic's storm. It wasn't big. It wasn't old. It was young. It was a thing that had never been let out properly in its life, and didn't know what it was for, and was terrified, and furious, and loved everyone on the deck of that ship so much it didn't know what to do.

It was my little brother. In weather.

I staggered. I'd have fallen if he hadn't grabbed my arm.

Garrick. Carol, in the middle. Very sharp. From the afterdeck, where she'd been sitting beside our father all night. Garrick, what is that? What did you just—

Roderic, I said. It's Roderic. It's too much. I can't steer it.

A pause. Half a breath.

Borrow? said my sister.

Take.

* * *

And then there were three of us holding it.

Me in the bow with Roderic's hand on my arm. Carol on the afterdeck, with her eyes shut and her hair standing up and her hands flat on the deck. And Roderic in between us, white-faced, holding the last third of his own storm in his own two hands like a boy holding the reins of a horse that's just stopped bolting.

And Carol knows weather. Carol's held storms since she was three. Eleven of them, once, in the sky over Westmere, Draum's held storms, and let them go one by one.

It's all pointing the wrong way, said Carol in the middle. It's going everywhere. He's pointing it at everything. Let me turn it.

So she turned it.

* * *

The wind swung.

All at once. Like a door being shut. It had been blowing across the Knock from her stern, putting her over. Now it came from directly behind us. A long, hard, steady wind out of the north, off the open sea, straight past the Knock's bow, straight across the water, straight into the faces of the four blue ships.

The Knock came upright. Tamar, at the wheel, let out a breath that was half a laugh. The elves on the rail got their knees back under them. Kell Dunnet let go of his line.

And out on the water the four blue ships stopped.

Not because they wanted to. Because a wind out of the north had come off the open sea and was pushing on their sails and their hulls and their oars like a hand pressing a door shut. Their oars dug and churned and found nothing. Their bows came around. Slowly. All four. And the wind pushed them, steadily, gently, back. Back the way they'd come. Back toward the lee of the thumb.

And then the rain came.

Not a storm. Just rain. Warm, heavy, straight-down summer rain, out of a clear sky, falling on four blue ships and nowhere else. On their decks. On their fire pots. On every coal under every hood. Hissing. Steaming. Going out.

Roderic, beside me, stared at it.

"Did I do that?" he said.

"We did that," I said. "You made it. Carol pointed it. I held it." I swallowed. "The rain's all yours, though. I didn't do the rain."

He looked at me.

"I didn't want to hurt them," said Roderic. "I just wanted them to stop."

"I know," I said. "So did the rain."

* * *

That was when the boy went over the side.

The last of the four blue ships, coming around in the wind, took a sea across her deck. Not a big one. Big enough. A shape went over her rail in the lantern light and into the black water between her and us, and didn't come up.

I heard Roderic's breath stop.

Then he let go of my arm and went over the bow.

* * *

I don't remember deciding to follow him. I remember the cold. I remember the black water closing over my head and my left side going dark and silent the way it does now, and kicking up, and surfacing, and not being able to see anything at all.

And then a light. White. Under me.

Frost.

My father's frost. A plate of it, flat and wide, coming up under me out of the sea like a raft. And another one beside it. And Roderic on his hands and knees on the second one, soaking, with his hair plastered to his head, holding a boy by the collar of his blue coat.

A boy. Fifteen, maybe. Thin. A Kethran conscript. Coughing up sea water and shaking so hard his teeth rattled.

On the Knock's afterdeck, a mile of black sea away it felt like, though it was only twenty yards, my father was leaning over the stern rail with both hands out, open, palms down, and frost pouring off them into the water. Holding us up.

He hadn't stopped Roderic.

But he'd caught him.

* * *

The boy's name was Linus Carr.

He sat in the Knock's little stern cabin in a blanket with a cup of Helena's soup that had been in a stone jar since Westmere and was still, somehow, warm, and stared at us all. At Roderic, still dripping, who'd given the boy his own coat. At me. At Carol, who'd come down the companionway and sat on the end of the bunk. At my father, who stood in the doorway with his arms folded, and the frost still faint in his eyebrows.

He'd been on the island since the fleet turned. He'd been a farm boy in the Ash valley before that. He'd never been to sea in his life until a month ago.

"I can't go back," he said. In Kethran. Carol translated. "If I go back, they'll swear me. They swear the ones who fall in. They say if the sea didn't want you, you belong to the hand." He looked at Roderic. "You jumped in."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Roderic looked at him for a long moment. He's not good at explaining things. He's twenty. He'd just held a storm for the first time in his life.

"You fell," said Roderic. "I was the closest."

* * *

Linus Carr told us things after that. Not because we asked. Because he wanted to.

The priest's name was Brother Ostrand. He was very old. He'd sworn a thousand people at the dark of the moon and he'd do these seventeen too and then go back to the golden city for the winter. He didn't like the island. Nobody liked the island. The soldiers called it the Knuckle.

The fishermen in the palm had stopped saying the oath. All of them. Not just the red-haired one. He'd started singing, the first night, and by the third night all seventeen were singing it. Haul away for Sallow. Over and over. Under the priest's voice. The priest had them beaten. They kept singing. The priest had them put in the cold. They kept singing. The soldiers on the walls had started humming it on watch. Nobody knew how to stop it.

"And him," said Linus Carr.

He looked up at the little window of the cabin, toward the island.

"The one on the thumb. The small gray one. He doesn't come down. He doesn't sleep. He stands up there all night with his hand at his throat. The priests are afraid of him." He swallowed. "Two nights ago Brother Ostrand went up to ask him if the fishermen should be put in irons, for the singing. I was on the stair. I heard."

"What did he say?" said my father. Very quietly.

"He asked what they were singing," said Linus Carr. "And Brother Ostrand told him. And then he didn't say anything for a long time. And then he said, Leave them."

* * *

Nobody said anything in the little cabin for a while.

My father looked at me. I looked at Carol. Carol looked at the window.

"Leave them," said my father softly.

"That's all," said Linus Carr. "That's all he said. Brother Ostrand was very angry. But he left them."

* * *

Caitlin came down the companionway at dawn.

She hadn't moved from her bucket all night. Not when the fire ships came. Not when the storm came. Not when Roderic and I went over the bow. She'd sat in the bow with her blue book in her lap and her eyes on the lid and counted, through all of it, and not once looked up.

She came into the cabin and looked at Roderic, wet and shivering in a borrowed blanket, and at Linus Carr in Roderic's coat, and at the rest of us.

"Two thousand and eleven," she said. "Tonight." She sat down on the end of the bunk beside Carol. "I didn't look up. I'm sorry. I couldn't. If I'd looked up I'd have lost my place."

"I know," said Roderic.

"I knew you were there," said Caitlin. She looked at him. "Behind me. I could hear you breathing. Even when the wind was loud." She put her hand on his wet knee. "That's why I didn't have to look up."

Roderic's face did something. And then he put his head down on his knees and cried, the way you cry after you've been more frightened than you knew you could be and it's over. And Caitlin left her hand where it was. And Carol put her arm around his shoulders. And my father, in the doorway, unfolded his arms and came in and knelt down on the cabin floor in front of his son and put his hand on the back of his neck and didn't say anything at all.

* * *

Later, on deck, in the gray dawn, with the island black against the east and the lid shimmering over it, my father stood beside me at the rail.

"I didn't help him," he said. "Not with the storm."

"I know."

"Do you know why?"

I thought about it.

"Because he didn't need you," I said. "He needed his brother."

My father looked at me for a long time.

"Yes," he said. "That's it exactly." He looked out at the island. "I couldn't be his brother. I can only ever be his father. And there are some things a father can't hold for you. Not because he isn't strong enough. Because if he does, you'll never find out that you are."

He put his hand on my shoulder. On the right side.

"You held half a storm tonight," he said. "And then went over the side after him into the sea without thinking."

"So did you," I said. "You held us both up."

"That's different," said my father. "That's my job."

* * *

Mary's book. Tuesday. Written at Westmere, at noon, from what Carol told her through the gate, and what Tamar told her when the Knock came in for water, and what Linus Carr told her in Kethran with Iselle translating, sitting on the end of the north pier with a blanket around him and Roderic's coat still on.

Sunday night. Caitlin counted 1,203 lines. Monday night, 2,011.

Monday, 2 a.m. The thumb opened. Five blue ships with fire pots. Siriel's elves pinned one rudder. Four came on.

Uriah didn't freeze the sea. He said wait. He said he wouldn't stop Roderic his first time.

Roderic was frightened. The wind came off him. The sea came up. The Castellan said that is not weather.

Garrick went to the bow and said stand where I can see you. Garrick asked Roderic Borrow. Roderic said Take. Carol asked Garrick Borrow. Garrick said Take. Three of them held it. Carol turned the wind north. It pushed the four ships back into the lee of the thumb. Then rain, only on them, on all their fire pots. Roderic made the rain.

A boy went over the side of the last blue ship. Roderic went over the bow after him. Garrick went after Roderic. Uriah caught them all on frost.

The boy is Linus Carr, 15, from the Ash valley. He says the soldiers call the island the Knuckle. He says all seventeen fishermen are singing Haul Away for Sallow now. The soldiers hum it on watch. He says Kessavel doesn't sleep. He says the priest asked if the fishermen should be put in irons for singing, and Kessavel asked what they were singing, and then he said Leave them.

Caitlin didn't look up once. She says she could hear Roderic breathing behind her.

Uriah says some things a father can't hold for you, or you'll never find out that you can.

And under that, in a big, untidy, forward-leaning hand, the letters crowding each other as though they were all in a hurry to get somewhere, with a small wet blot in the corner where something had dripped from a sleeve:

Roderic Grey. I'd like it noted that I was frightened the whole time, and I went anyway, and I'm still frightened, and I'm going again on Friday.