Chapter 158: Storming the Island

Kell Dunnet took us under the edge of the net at a quarter past five.

There wasn't much to it. A week ago, the lid had come down into the sea like a wall and gone on under the water, and the waves had gone under it and never come out. Now, where it met the sea at the mouth of the cave, it just stopped. Three hundred and twelve gray threads went up from the island into the dark and crossed somewhere overhead, and between them there was nothing at all. Just morning air, and the smell of weed, and the gannets starting to wake up on the cliffs.

Kell Dunnet shipped his oars and ducked his head, the way you do going under a low branch. We all ducked with him. Brannoc ducked last, and least, and grunted.

Nothing touched us.

"Huh," said Brannoc.

* * *

The cave was black. The landing was slick. The iron ring was cold enough to hurt. Kell Dunnet made the boat fast to it without a sound and held it steady while Iselle stepped out onto the weed, and Roderic stepped out behind her, one step back, on her left, with the tin lamp unlit in his hand.

Then the rest of us. Corran Hale. Ada. Grenna, on four feet, her claws clicking very softly on the stone. Brannoc, with his shield on his back. Me.

Nobody spoke. We'd agreed that the night before. Iselle had said that the stair would be listening, and that it listened for voices.

She stood in front of the black iron door with the closed fist on it and looked at it for a long moment. Her right hand was shaking. She held it out anyway, palm up, the faint gray mark on the inside of the wrist turned toward the door.

Then she turned around and looked at me.

I knew what she was asking. I'd seen her ask things that way before, without a word.

I held out my hand, open, the way I've done my whole life. You can say no.

She shook her head. Not no. Something else. Not you.

And she looked past me, at Roderic.

* * *

Roderic didn't move for a moment.

Then he put the lamp in his left hand, and reached out with his right, and put two fingers very lightly on the inside of her wrist, just above the mark. The way you'd check whether someone was still breathing.

Iselle closed her eyes.

Then she turned around and laid her wrist in the hollow under the iron fist.

* * *

The door knew her.

I felt it before I heard it. A kind of shiver went through the rock under my feet, and through the iron, and through the three hundred and twelve threads overhead, like a cat's back rippling when you touch it somewhere it doesn't expect. Every line of that door faced outward, toward us, toward the sea, every knuckle clenched against anybody who came from outside.

But she wasn't from outside. Not to the door. She'd been sworn at twelve. She'd been his for eight years, a little. And the door, which had been built very carefully by somebody who had never once imagined anyone might want to be on the inside of it and leave, swung open without a sound.

Iselle stepped through. Roderic stepped through behind her, one step back, on her left.

The door swung shut.

* * *

I stood on the landing with my hand flat on the cold black iron and listened.

My left ear was nearly all the way back by then. It was better than it had been in a week. I could hear the sea behind me, and Brannoc breathing, and Grenna's tail moving very slightly against the stone. And through the iron, faintly, footsteps going up.

Two sets. One light and even. One heavier, a half-beat behind.

I counted.

Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

A pause.

A long step.

Fourteen.

I breathed out. Behind me, Corran Hale breathed out too. I hadn't known he was counting. Then I looked around and saw Ada's lips moving, and Brannoc's, and realized all of us were.

Twenty. Twenty-one.

And then the footsteps stopped going up and came back down. Quickly. Two sets.

And the door opened from the inside.

* * *

It didn't swing. It went wide. Wider than a door that size should go, wide as a barn door, with a sound like a fist unclenching after it's been closed too long. Iselle stood on the bottom step with her right hand flat on the inside of the iron, and her face was white, and her eyes were very bright.

"His locks face out," she whispered. "I told you."

Behind her, Roderic was grinning like a lunatic.

"Twenty-one," he whispered. "We counted. Then we thought, we've got to come back down anyway. So we did."

"Did the stair hear you?"

"I don't think it knew what to do with us," said Iselle. "Nobody's ever come back down it."

* * *

So we went up. All of us. Forty steps in the dark, with no lamp, and Iselle counting under her breath in Kethran at the front, and every one of us stepping over the thirteenth.

Even Brannoc.

At the top, there was a landing, and a low ceiling of stone, and in the ceiling, a flat bronze door with a hand on it. Gray light came down around its edges. And smoke. And a voice above us, old and thin and very tired, saying words I'd heard once before from Green's back, a week ago, from a long way up.

I give my face to the hand.

And under it, ragged and hoarse and out of tune and absolutely stubborn, seventeen voices singing.

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

* * *

Iselle looked at Roderic. Roderic struck a match and lit the tin lamp.

Then he looked at the planks of the landing, and said, very quietly, in Kethran, the word I'd heard him practice on the north pier.

I am nobody.

Iselle's lips moved. I could see her counting.

Then she put her wrist up against the bronze hand in the ceiling, and pushed, and went up into the smoke.

* * *

I was right behind them. I'd promised my father I would be. I came up through the floor of the palm into a fog of brazier-smoke so thick I could taste it, with my eyes watering and my one good eye full of gray, and for a moment I couldn't see anything at all.

Then the smoke shifted, and I could.

The palm of the fist was a courtyard of black stone, maybe two hundred feet across. The four finger towers curled over it on one side, huge and dark. The thumb rose on the other side, over the sea gate. The walls went all the way around, with soldiers on them, a lot of them, leaning on their spears in the gray light the way people do at the very end of a night watch, yawning.

In the middle of the palm was the brazier. And on the far side of the brazier, kneeling on the stone in a ring, in sea boots and filthy ganseys, were seventeen fishermen. Their faces were bruised. Their hands were tied in front of them. And every single one of them was singing.

And between us and them, with his back to us, holding a book, stood an old man in gray.

* * *

He was smaller than I'd expected. Most people are. He was bent and thin and his hands shook on the book, and he was saying the words of the Great Oath in a voice that had said them so many times it didn't even hear itself anymore.

I give my voice to the hand.

Then he stopped, and frowned, and without turning around, he held out his left hand behind him.

"Boy," said Brother Ostrand, in Kethran. "The light. I can't see the page."

* * *

Roderic stepped forward. One step behind the priest, on his left. He held the tin lamp up at the height of the old man's shoulder, so it shone on the book.

"The light is here," he said. In Kethran. Perfectly.

"Hm," said Brother Ostrand. "You're new." He squinted at the page. "Where's the Carr boy?"

"Gone," said Roderic.

"Pity. He held it steady." The priest found his place with one shaking finger. Then he looked up from the book, out over the heads of the singing fishermen, and drew breath to go on.

And Iselle walked around the brazier and stood in front of him.

* * *

He knew her. I watched it happen. He'd been an oath-priest of the golden city for fifty years, and he'd sworn a thousand people at the dark of the moon, and somewhere in all that, a long time ago, he'd stood at the bottom of a stair while a frightened twelve-year-old girl with her father's eyes said I am nobody in front of him.

The book slid in his hands.

"Holy daughter," he whispered.

"No," said Iselle.

And then the old man's face changed. Not to fear. To something worse. To habit. To fifty years of knowing exactly what to do when something went wrong in the palm. He drew himself up, as straight as his back would let him, and opened his mouth, and I knew what he was going to say. Linus Carr had told us. Three hundred and eleven people in the dark of the finger towers were waiting for him to say it.

The hand—

"Let go," said Iselle.

* * *

She didn't shout it. She said it the way you'd say it to a child holding something hot. And she held out her open right hand, palm up, toward the old man.

Iselle's power is the opposite of her brother's. Malachar holds things. Iselle makes whatever is held let go.

The book fell out of Brother Ostrand's hands.

That was the first thing. It just slid out of his fingers and fell on the stone, open, face down. And the old man stood there with his mouth open and his hands still curled as if they were holding it.

And nothing came out of his mouth.

He tried. I watched him try. He'd said those words every day for fifty years. The hand closes. They'd worn a groove in him. And Iselle had reached into the groove, very gently, and made it let go of them. He stood there in front of her with his lips moving and no sound at all, looking for words that were simply not there anymore.

Then his knees gave out, and he sat down on the step of the brazier, very suddenly, the way old men do.

Brannoc walked over and stood in front of him. Not threatening. Just there. The way a wall is there.

Brother Ostrand looked up at him for a long moment. Then he put his face in his hands.

* * *

That was when the soldiers on the walls woke up.

Somebody shouted. Then somebody else. A horn went, high and cracked. Spears came off shoulders. Along the north wall, a dozen boys with bows were nocking arrows, fumbling, dropping them.

"The gate," said Iselle. "Garrick. Go."

I went.

* * *

Two hundred and twelve steps, Iselle had said, from the sea gate under the thumb to the edge of the palm. I'd never counted it. I'd only ever seen it on a page in Caitlin's blue book.

I ran it.

I don't remember most of it. I remember the black stone under my feet, wet with the night. I remember an arrow going past my left side, where I couldn't see it, so close I felt the wind of it in my hair, and Grenna's voice behind me, a snarl, and then a soldier on the wall yelping and dropping his bow because a small gray wolf with a scar band at her throat had come up the steps at him faster than he could think. I remember Corran Hale shouting something in mill-talk with both hands, and Ada beside him shouting it too.

And then the thumb tower was over me, black and huge, and under it, the sea gate.

* * *

It was a great slab of black iron, twice my height, set into the rock with a closed fist on it the size of a cartwheel. I'd seen it from outside, from Green's back. From outside, it had been every knuckle turned against me. Every line clenched. One hair harder than anything I could open.

From the inside, it was the back of a hand.

I put my palm flat against it.

There was nothing there. No knots. No lines facing me. Just the back of a closed hand, with all its strength turned the other way, toward the sea, guarding against everything that might come in and nothing at all that might want to go out.

His locks face out.

I didn't need to borrow from anybody. I didn't even need very much of my own. I just did what I've done since I was a boy, the only thing I've ever really been good at.

I opened it.

* * *

The gate went back like a hand unclenching, slowly, with a long grinding groan of iron on stone, and the morning came in.

And the sea outside was white.

* * *

My father had frozen it.

All of it. From the sea gate to the line of our ships a mile out, and wider, much wider, all the way around the north side of the island and down past the thumb toward the south. Flat, white, solid sea-ice, a foot thick at least, with a skin of frost on top that caught the first sun and burned pink. The twelve blue ships in the lee of the thumb were frozen into it to their waterlines, sitting perfectly still at their moorings, with their crews standing at the rails staring down at the ice as if it had personally betrayed them.

And across the ice, from the ships, walking, came everybody.

Thor first, because Thor is always first if Brannoc isn't, with Mjölnir over her shoulder, humming. Avarn beside her, with his sword sheathed. Siriel's elves in a long line, barefoot on the ice, bows strung and arrows on the string and not one of them drawn. Kethran sailors from the red ships. Marra. Sigrun with her ledger. Lisbet Fane. Bet Harker, very small and very bent, in her black shawl, walking faster than anyone. Wolves, dozens of them, in a gray wave over the white.

And in the middle of them, walking slowly, with frost going up his arms to the elbow and his face very calm, my father.

He'd said he'd rather walk.

* * *

He came through the gate and stopped beside me, and looked at me, once, up and down. Checking.

"Left side," he said.

"An arrow," I said. "It missed."

"Good." He looked past me into the palm. At Brannoc, standing over the old priest. At the fishermen, still on their knees, still singing, though some of them had stopped now and were just staring. At the soldiers on the walls, who had seen the ice, and the gods walking across it, and were standing very still with their spears in their hands.

Then he raised his right hand, and a wall of ice came up out of the black stone of the palm, clear as glass and ten feet high, between the finger towers and everybody else.

"There," said my father. "Now nobody has to hurry."

* * *

And then, from above us, from the top of the thumb tower, a voice said, "The hand closes."

* * *

It wasn't Brother Ostrand. Brother Ostrand was sitting on the brazier step with his face in his hands.

It was Kessavel's voice. I'd heard it through the slot in the wrist door, small and tired. This was louder. Much louder. It rang off the black walls of the palm like a bell. But it wasn't Kessavel's voice either. Not really. It was what Kessavel's voice would sound like if somebody else were using it. If somebody had put their hand through the chain at his throat and taken hold of whatever was on the other end, and squeezed.

I'd heard that voice once before, on the deck of a white ship, saying Take the child.

* * *

The finger towers opened.

Not the doors. The towers. Long narrow slits I hadn't seen in the black stone, all the way up all four of them, opening like eyes. And out of them, onto the stairs that went down the insides of the fingers into the palm, came the Hushed.

Three hundred and eleven of them. In gray. Faces blank. Moving all together, the way they'd moved in the golden city and at Westmere and on the white ship: not quickly, not slowly, the way a tide comes in. They came down the stairs of the four fingers and into the palm and walked up to my father's wall of ice and put their hands on it.

And pushed.

* * *

The wall held. Of course it held. My father's walls always hold. But there were three hundred and eleven of them, pressing, and the ice groaned, and my father's face went very still the way it does when he's holding something he could break if he wanted to and has decided not to.

"I can hold this," he said quietly. "I can hold this all day. But I can't hold it without hurting them if they keep pushing. And they'll keep pushing. He'll make them."

I looked up.

Kessavel was standing at the parapet of the thumb tower, right above the gate. Right above me. His hand was at his throat, at his collar, and his whole body was rigid, and his mouth was open, and the voice that wasn't his was coming out of it.

The hand closes. The hand closes. The hand closes.

* * *

I've thought about that moment a lot since. What I could have done. I could have borrowed from my father, or Thor, or Carol through the middle, and gone up the thumb tower and done something. I didn't have a sword. I'd broken it on Sabrenne's lock. But I had Loki's coat, and the Lockwarden's key in my pocket, and a great many people who'd have said Take.

I didn't do any of that.

I did what I'd done on the white ship.

* * *

"Kessavel," I said.

I didn't shout it. I just said it, the way you'd say someone's name across a kitchen. I don't know how he heard me over the voice. But his head came around, slowly, jerkily, like somebody turning against a hand that was holding his chin. And his eyes found me, down at the foot of his tower, in the open gate, with the white sea behind me.

"You said come back when we're coming," I said. "We came."

The voice went on. The hand closes.

"So I'm asking you here," I said. "Do you want to stop?"

* * *

For a moment nothing happened.

Then Kessavel's other hand came up. Slowly. Shaking. It came up to his throat, beside the first one, and closed around the chain there. Around the hair-thin thread that went away east to whatever was holding the other end.

And held on.

Not pulling. Not breaking it. I don't think he could have. Just holding it. The way he'd held the first line of his own lid all night so Caitlin could pull the rest out clean. The way you'd hold a rope taut so the person on the other end can't reel any more of it in.

The voice stopped.

In the middle of a word. The hand cl—

And then there was silence in the palm of the fist. Silence on the walls. Silence on the white sea outside. Three hundred and eleven people in gray stood against my father's wall with their palms flat on the ice, and didn't push.

* * *

"Yes," said Kessavel.

His own voice. Small. Hoarse. Coming down from the top of his tower like something dropped.

Then his knees went, and he sat down hard on the parapet with both hands around his throat, and bowed his head over them, and didn't move again.

I don't know what it cost him. I don't think I'll ever know. But I saw the thread at his throat go taut, all the way east, so taut it hummed, and somewhere very far away, something on the other end of it pulled, hard, the way it had pulled him away from us once before.

And this time, he didn't go.

* * *

"Now," said my father quietly. "Now nobody has to hurry."

* * *

It took all day.

I'm not going to write all of it down here. Mary has most of it. Sigrun has the rest, in her ledger, every name in her best handwriting. But I'll write down how it went, because I want to remember.

My father kept the wall. He let it down a little at a time, a section at a time, a few feet wide, and at each gap, somebody stood. Corran Hale stood at the first one with Brede Oller beside him, signing in mill-talk with both hands. Marra stood at the second, walking slowly along the line of gray faces, looking for anyone she'd stood next to in the golden city. The wolves went along the wall, one by one, smelling, and Sigrun walked behind them with her ledger open, and every time a wolf stopped and lifted its head and said a word, Kilns. Pine pitch. Bees. Salt, Sigrun turned the pages, and found it, and read out a name.

And sometimes the name was right.

* * *

The first one was a woman of about forty, on the second finger's stair, gray-haired, with a burn scar on the back of her right hand. Ulla smelled her and said flax, and a mill-race, and rosemary, and Sigrun ran her finger down three pages and stopped.

"Annick," she said. "Annick Dole. From the linen mills at Brennet. Her sister came to the north pier on Tuesday. Her sister said she always had rosemary in her pocket, for the smell of the mill."

The woman stood there with her hand flat on the ice.

"Annick," said Sigrun again. "Your sister's name is Maudie. She's at Westmere. She's waiting for you."

And Annick Dole's padlock slid out of the oath-shadow at her throat and fell on the stone and broke, and she took her hand off the ice and looked at it, at the burn scar on the back of it, as if she'd never seen it before.

Out on the Knock, a mile away, Carol said through the middle, very softly, Caitlin says that's one. Three hundred and ten.

* * *

By noon, it was forty.

By sunset, ninety-seven.

Ninety-seven names. Ninety-seven padlocks broken on the black stone of the palm. Ninety-seven people sitting in the lee of the thumb tower wrapped in blankets from the red ships, eating Helena's bread that Green had brought out at noon in two great baskets, because I'd told them to, and because they'd watched me eat first.

And two hundred and fourteen still standing at my father's wall. Quiet now. Not pushing. Hands on the ice. Waiting.

"Tomorrow," said my father. "And the day after. And as long as it takes."

He hadn't sat down all day.

* * *

Bet Harker found her son at about ten in the morning.

I want to put that down, separately, because it was the best thing I saw all day, and because nobody else will write it the way it happened.

The fishermen were still on their knees by the brazier when she came through the gate. Somebody had cut their hands free, Kell Dunnet, I think, but they hadn't got up. They'd been on their knees for two weeks, in the cold, being beaten for singing, and I don't think they quite believed yet that they were allowed to stand.

Davy Harker was at the end of the ring. Red-haired. Big. Both his eyes blacked. Still singing, very hoarsely, the same line over and over, as if he'd forgotten how to stop.

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

Bet Harker walked straight across the palm to him and stood in front of him. She came up to about his shoulder, kneeling.

"You stubborn boy," she said.

He stopped singing.

"I get it from you," said Davy Harker.

And then he put his face in his mother's black shawl, and she put her knotted hands on his red hair, and neither of them said anything else for a long time.

* * *

In the evening, when the light was going, I went and stood at the foot of the thumb tower and looked up.

Kessavel was still there. He hadn't moved all day. He was sitting on the parapet with his back against the stone and both hands at his throat, holding the thread, and his head bowed. I couldn't tell if he was asleep.

Nobody had gone up. My father had said not to. "He's holding a rope," he'd said. "You don't tap someone on the shoulder while they're holding a rope."

But as I stood there, Kessavel lifted his head and looked down at me.

"Garrick Grey," he said. Very quietly. His own voice.

"Yes."

"You opened my gate today."

"Yes."

"You shouldn't have done it today," said Kessavel. "Tomorrow is the dark of the moon."

"I know," I said. "That's when they swear."

"No," said Kessavel. "That's what the priests think." He closed his eyes. "That's not what the dark of the moon is for. Not on this island. Not in these waters." He was quiet for so long I thought he'd fallen asleep. Then: "Ask the old god of the drowned islands. Ask Draum. Ask him what this rock was built on top of." His hands tightened on the thread. "And ask him why he's been knocking."

* * *

Mary's book. Friday night. Written at Westmere, at a table in the harbor office, by lamplight, with Linus Carr beside her reading over her shoulder and correcting her Kethran, and Caitlin's numbers coming through the middle from Carol every hour, and Carol's own words between them.

5:15 a.m. Kell Dunnet took the boat under the net. Nothing touched them.

Iselle put her wrist in the door. She looked at Roderic first. He put two fingers on her wrist. The door opened for her. They went up 21 steps and came back down and opened it from inside. It went as wide as a barn. Nobody had ever come back down it before.

Everyone stepped over the 13th. Even Brannoc.

Roderic held the lamp for Brother Ostrand. He said the light is here. Perfectly. Ostrand asked where the Carr boy was. (Linus says to write here that he's fine.)

Ostrand knew Iselle. He tried to say the hand closes. Iselle said let go. The book fell. The words fell out too. He sat down on the step. Brannoc stood in front of him. Nobody hurt him.

Garrick ran 212 steps to the sea gate. An arrow missed his blind side. Grenna got the archer. Not badly. He opened the gate from inside. It's just the back of a hand from inside.

Uriah froze the sea. All of it. The twelve blue ships are stuck in the ice. Everybody walked across.

Uriah made a wall between the Hushed and everybody else. He said now nobody has to hurry.

Kessavel said the hand closes but it wasn't his voice. It was the one from the white ship. The Hushed came out and pushed on the wall.

Garrick asked Kessavel, do you want to stop. Kessavel took hold of his chain with both hands and held it. The voice stopped. He said yes. He's still holding it. He didn't get pulled away this time.

97 names. First was Annick Dole, from the linen mills at Brennet. Her sister Maudie is here. Maudie is crying in the kitchen. Helena says she can.

214 still at the wall. Not pushing. Caitlin says 214 lines.

Bet Harker found Davy. She said you stubborn boy. He said I get it from you.

All 17 fishermen are alive. All 17 never swore.

Kessavel says tomorrow is the dark of the moon. He says ask Draum what the island was built on top of. He says ask him why he's been knocking.

And under that, in a big, rough, square hand, the letters pressed so hard into the page that they came through on the other side, with a smear of tar at one corner:

Davy Harker, of Sallow Point. I'd like it noted that I sang it four hundred and eleven times. I counted, after the first day, because it was something to do. And that all seventeen of us sang it, and the soldiers on the walls hummed it, and we never said a word of their oath, not one. And that my mother is sitting next to me while I write this, and says to put down that she's not crying. So I've put it down.