Chapter 162: At His Side

Helena tried to make Iselle go to bed at ten o'clock on Monday night.

She did it the way she does everything. She came into the little room off the kitchen with a lamp and a clean nightgown over her arm and a cup of warm milk with honey in it, and set the milk down on the table by Iselle's elbow, and said, "There's a bed made up for you in the blue room upstairs. The sheets are aired. Drink that, and go up."

Iselle was sitting in the chair by Roderic's bed. She'd been sitting in it since Sabrenne brought him in. She had his left hand in both of hers on the blanket, and she hadn't let go of it once.

"Thank you," said Iselle. "No."

* * *

Nobody says no to Helena.

I don't mean that nobody is allowed to. I mean that nobody does. It doesn't occur to them. My father is a god of storms and winter who froze the western sea with one hand, and when Helena tells him to take his boots off in the kitchen, he takes his boots off in the kitchen. Thor once tried to bring Mjölnir to the supper table, and Helena looked at her, and Thor put it in the umbrella stand by the back door, where it has lived ever since at mealtimes.

I was sitting on the floor in the corner, with my back against the wall and Roderic's storm on my shoulders. I watched Helena look at Iselle.

Iselle looked back.

"He might wake up in the night," said Iselle. "If he wakes up, I want to be the first thing he sees. I know that's not sensible. I know you'll be up at four anyway, and you'd hear him. But I want to be the first thing." She paused. "I'm sorry. I know it's your kitchen."

Helena didn't say anything for a long moment.

Then she went out. And came back five minutes later with Grandpa, who was carrying a folding cot from the attic under one arm, and a quilt, and a pillow. He set the cot up beside the chair without a word, very quietly, so it didn't creak, and put the quilt on it, and went out again.

Helena put the nightgown on the cot.

"The milk is for drinking," she said. "Not for looking at." And she went back to her stove.

* * *

Iselle didn't use the cot. Not that night. But she drank the milk.

* * *

The fever came on Tuesday.

Evelyn had said it would. She'd said it on the threshold at Harl with Roderic's blood on her hands, and she'd said it again on the north pier, and she said it a third time on Tuesday morning when she came down from the blue room, where she'd slept four hours, and put her hand on his forehead.

"There it is," she said quietly.

He was hot. Not very hot, at first. Just a flush on his face and a dampness at his hairline and a restlessness in his hands. By noon he was hotter. By evening he was talking.

Not to us. To people who weren't there.

* * *

Most of it was nonsense. Fever talk. He talked to Avarn about his feet. He talked to Faelan about a model ship, and apologized for something, I don't know what. He asked several times, quite clearly and politely, whether anybody had seen his left boot.

And then, a little after midnight, he started speaking Kethran.

I didn't understand most of it. My Kethran is still bad. But I understood one phrase, because I'd heard him practice it on the north pier with a tin lamp in his hand until it stopped sounding like him.

I am nobody.

He said it very quietly, with his eyes shut, turning his head on the pillow. And then again. And then again, faster, and his hand tightened in Iselle's, and the lamp on the table flickered, and outside, very faintly, I heard the wind come up off the sea.

I felt it too. On my shoulders. Under my ribs. His storm, that I'd been carrying since noon on Monday, stirring. Waking up. Wanting to go back to him.

* * *

"Roderic," said Iselle.

She'd been sitting in the chair for thirty hours. She'd slept perhaps three of them, with her head down on the blanket beside his hand. Her face was gray and her eyes were very tired, and her voice was perfectly steady.

"Roderic. Say your name."

I am nobody, said Roderic in Kethran.

"No," said Iselle. "That's the word for the priests. You don't say it to me. Say your name."

He turned his head toward her. His eyes didn't open.

"Roderic," he said. Very faintly. In Avarran.

"All of it."

"Roderic Grey."

"Good," said Iselle. And she bent forward until her forehead was resting against the back of his hand on the blanket, and I heard her start to count, in Kethran, under her breath. Not steps. Breaths. His.

The wind dropped.

* * *

She counted his breaths all night.

I know, because I was there. I didn't sleep either. I sat in the corner with my back against the wall and his storm on my shoulders, and listened to her count. One. Two. Three. All the way up into the hundreds and the thousands, very softly, in Kethran, without stopping. Every time his breathing caught, or quickened, or went shallow and frightening, her voice didn't change. It just kept going. One more. One more. One more.

Count, little one. If you're counting, you're still in there.

She'd told him that on the north pier. The thing the old lamp-woman had whispered to her on the stairs when she was twelve. I don't think she was counting so that she'd stay in there, this time.

I think she was counting so that he would.

* * *

My father came at two.

He took the night watch, from two until five. He'd done it for all of us, when we were small and ill. I remember it. Waking up in the dark with a fever and finding him sitting there in the chair by the bed, very still, with his big hand flat on the back of my neck, cool as snow.

He didn't ask Iselle to move. He brought a stool from the kitchen and sat on the other side of the bed and put his hand on the back of Roderic's neck, and that was all.

Roderic's breathing eased under his hand. You could hear it.

"Better," said Iselle, between numbers.

"He likes the cold," said my father quietly. "When he was little. When he had a fever, he'd crawl out of bed and lie on the flagstones in the kitchen with his face on the floor. Helena used to find him there at four in the morning, fast asleep, with a cat on his back." He was quiet for a moment. "I used to sit with him like this until it broke. Every time."

Iselle looked at him over the bed.

"Did it always break?" she said.

"Always," said my father.

* * *

They sat there together for a long time, on either side of him, without talking. Iselle counting. My father with his hand on Roderic's neck. Roderic between them, breathing.

Then, at about three, Roderic opened his eyes.

Not all the way. Just a little. Enough to see. He looked at Iselle for a long moment. Then he turned his head on the pillow, very slowly, and looked at my father.

"You froze him," he said. Very faintly. "The man. I saw. Just before I sat down."

"Yes," said my father.

"Is he dead?"

"No."

Roderic looked at him for a while.

"Why not?" he said.

* * *

My father didn't answer straight away.

"I wanted to," he said at last. Very quietly. I'd never heard him say anything like that before. Not once in my whole life. "I want you to know that. I wanted to more than I've ever wanted anything. I had him under my hand. It would have been the easiest thing I did all week. Easier than the sea." He was quiet. "It was the hardest thing I've ever done, not doing it."

"Then why didn't you?"

"Because you stepped in front of her," said my father. "So that nobody would get hurt. That's why you did it. I watched you. You didn't step in to hurt him. You stepped in so she wouldn't be." He moved his thumb, very slightly, on the back of Roderic's neck. "I wasn't going to make you a liar."

Roderic closed his eyes.

"Oh," he said. And then, after a while, so softly I almost didn't hear it: "Thank you."

He went back to sleep. Iselle went back to counting. My father didn't move.

* * *

The fever broke at dawn on Wednesday.

I felt it go before anybody said anything. The storm on my shoulders, which had been stirring all night like an animal in a too-small box, suddenly went quiet. Not asleep. Just quiet. Waiting. The way a dog waits by the door when it hears its own person coming up the path.

Roderic's face was wet. The flush had gone out of it. His breathing was slow and deep and even.

Evelyn came down from the blue room at six and put her hand on his forehead and closed her eyes.

"There," she said. "That's done."

Iselle stopped counting.

She'd been counting for thirty hours. She stopped in the middle of a number. She didn't say what the number was. She just stopped, and put her head down on the blanket beside his hand, and was asleep before anybody could say anything.

My father lifted her, very carefully, without waking her, and laid her on Grandpa's cot, and put the quilt over her. Then he put Helena's clean nightgown, still folded, on the end of the cot by her feet.

"She'll want it when she wakes," he said. "And Helena will want to know it was used."

* * *

That was Wednesday.

I'll tell you what happened after that, because it's the part I'm least proud of, and it's the part Roderic says he'll remember longest.

* * *

I've teased Roderic his whole life.

Not cruelly. I hope not cruelly. But constantly. I'm three years older than him and I'm his big brother and that's what you do. When he was six I told him the Castellan could read his mind and was writing down everything he thought, and he didn't speak for a whole afternoon. When he was twelve I put a frog in his boot every morning for a week. When he was fifteen and grew four inches in a summer and his voice went, I called him the bell tower for a year.

And when Iselle came, I teased him about Iselle.

Of course I did. Everyone did. But I did it the most. The shawl he carried for her for a month. The way he stood behind her chair at council. The way he went red, every time, right up to the hair, if anybody so much as said her name in the same breath as his. Carol told me to stop. Seraphina told me to stop. I didn't stop. It was the best thing that had happened to me in years, watching my little brother fall in love and try to pretend he hadn't.

* * *

On Wednesday afternoon, when he woke up properly, Iselle was asleep on the cot beside him with her hand hanging down off the edge of it, and his own hand had found its way over the side of the bed to hold it.

He looked at me, in the corner. Then at their two hands. Then back at me.

And went red. Right up to the hair. Waiting for it.

I didn't say anything.

* * *

He waited a long time. Then he said, very warily, "Garrick?"

"Mm?"

"Aren't you going to—"

"Going to what?"

He looked at me with deep suspicion. Then at our two hands again. Then he went even redder and looked at the ceiling.

"Nothing," he said.

* * *

I didn't say anything on Thursday either.

On Thursday Iselle woke up at eleven and put on Helena's nightgown and came down to the kitchen in it for the first time in four days, and ate two bowls of porridge standing at the stove while Helena watched with enormous satisfaction, and then went straight back to the little room and sat down in the chair and took his hand again. I didn't say anything about that.

On Thursday afternoon, Roderic asked Iselle to read to him, and she read him a book of Kethran sea stories in her low, even voice, translating as she went, and stopped every few pages to correct his pronunciation when he tried to say the hard words after her, and he got every one of them wrong on purpose, I'm almost sure, so she'd have to say them again. I didn't say anything about that, either.

On Thursday evening, I heard him say, very quietly, when he thought I'd gone out: "You stayed the whole time."

And her say: "Where else would I be?"

I didn't say anything about that. I didn't even let them know I'd heard it. I went out to the kitchen and stood at the back door for a long time looking at the sea.

* * *

By Friday, Roderic was frightened.

"Garrick," he said. It was the middle of the afternoon. Iselle had gone up to the blue room at last, at Evelyn's order, to sleep in a real bed for three hours. I was in the corner where I always was.

"Mm?"

"You haven't said anything."

"About what?"

"About anything." He was propped up on three pillows. He had more color in his face than he'd had all week. He looked at me with real alarm. "You haven't said one word. Not about the shawl. Not about the chair. Not about her hand, or the cot, or the stories, or the—" He stopped, and went red, and pressed on. "It's been five days. You always say something. You've said something every single day since she got here. Every day for a year."

"Have I?"

"Yes!" He stared at me. "Am I dying? Is that it? Has Evelyn told you something she hasn't told me?"

* * *

I looked at him for a long time.

My little brother. Propped up on three pillows with a hole under his ribs that had nearly killed him, that would leave a scar the length of my hand, that he'd got stepping into the space between the girl he loved and a knife, without thinking, because he'd been practicing for a week where to stand.

And I couldn't.

That's the only way I can put it. I opened my mouth to say something. Something about the shawl. Something stupid, the way I always did. And I couldn't. It wasn't funny anymore. It hadn't been funny since noon on Monday, when I heard the steel come out of the sleeve on my blind side.

"You're not dying," I said.

"Then why—"

"Because I heard it," I said. "On Monday. I didn't see it. I heard you step in front of her." I stopped. "I'm not going to tease you about her anymore, Roderic. Not about her. Not ever. I don't think I can."

* * *

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, "That's the most frightening thing that's happened to me all year."

"More frightening than the knife?"

"The knife was very quick," said Roderic. "This has been five days."

I laughed. I didn't mean to. It came out of me all at once, the first time I'd laughed since Monday, and it hurt my chest, and the storm on my shoulders shifted, very slightly, like somebody turning over in their sleep.

Roderic smiled. Just a little.

"There," he said. "That's better."

* * *

"Garrick," he said, after a while.

"Mm?"

"Can I have it back now?"

I knew what he meant. I'd been waiting for him to ask.

"Are you sure?"

"It's mine," said Roderic. "It's been heavy on you for five days. I can feel it on you from here. Adriana said I could. When I was ready." He held out his hand to me from the bed. Open. "I'm ready."

* * *

I went over and sat on the edge of his bed and took his hand.

And I gave it back.

All of it. The wind and the black sky and the sideways freezing rain. The pain with nowhere to go. It had been five days. It wasn't the same storm anymore. It had gone quiet, sitting on my shoulders all that time, waiting for him. It had softened. I felt it go out of me and into him, and I felt him take it, carefully, the way you'd take a baby that's been passed to you asleep.

And outside the little window of the room off the kitchen, out of a clear blue afternoon sky, very gently, it began to rain.

* * *

Only over the kitchen.

Only over the roof of the house, and the little yard behind it, and Helena's herb bed by the back door. A warm, soft, straight-down rain, the kind that comes in spring. It drummed very lightly on the roof slates and ran down the window. Everywhere else, all down the harbor and out over the sea, the sun was shining.

Helena opened the back door and looked up at it for a long moment, with a dish towel in her hands.

"Well," she said. "That'll save me watering the parsley."

And she went back to her stove.

* * *

Brannoc went out to Harl that evening, as he'd gone every evening since the island fell, with a loaf of bread and a can of tea, and climbed the hundred and six steps to the top of the thumb. Kessavel was still there. Still sitting against the parapet with both hands at his throat, holding the thread. Brannoc fed him the bread, a piece at a time, and held the tea for him while he drank, and then sat beside him on the parapet until it was dark. Neither of them said anything. Brannoc says neither of them ever does.

I asked Brannoc why he went.

"He's holding something," said Brannoc. "So somebody has to hold the bread."

* * *

Mary's book. Friday night. Written at Westmere, in the little room off the kitchen, with Seraphina sitting on the end of the bed and little Uriah asleep on Roderic's feet, because he'd said Up very firmly and nobody could think of a reason why not.

Monday night. Helena told Iselle to go to bed. Iselle said no. Grandpa brought the cot from the attic. Iselle drank the milk.

Tuesday. Fever. Roderic talked about his left boot. Then in Kethran. He said I am nobody. Iselle said that's the word for the priests, you don't say it to me. Say your name. He said Roderic Grey.

Iselle counted his breaths all night. In Kethran. Thirty hours.

2 a.m. Uriah took the watch. Hand on the back of Roderic's neck. Roderic used to sleep on the kitchen flagstones with a fever. With a cat.

Roderic asked why Uriah didn't kill the man. Uriah said he wanted to more than anything. He said it was the hardest thing he ever did. He said you stepped in so nobody would get hurt. I wasn't going to make you a liar.

Wednesday dawn. The fever broke. Iselle stopped counting in the middle of a number and fell asleep. Uriah put her on the cot.

Garrick has not teased Roderic once since Monday. Not about the shawl or the chair or her hand or the cot or the stories. Roderic asked if he was dying. Garrick said no. He said I heard it. I'm not going to tease you about her anymore. Not ever.

Roderic asked for his storm back. Garrick gave it back. It rained only over the kitchen. Helena says it saved her watering the parsley.

Brannoc feeds Kessavel every evening. He says somebody has to hold the bread.

And under that, in a big, untidy, forward-leaning hand, a good deal shakier than usual, the letters crowding each other as though they'd all decided to lean on one another for support:

Roderic Grey. I'd like it noted that Garrick hasn't teased me once in five days, and that it's the most frightening thing that's happened to me this year, including the knife. And that Iselle stayed the whole time. And that when I asked her why, she said where else would I be. And that I'm going to marry her, if she'll have me, and I haven't asked her yet, so nobody tell her. Especially not Garrick. Although I suppose he won't, now.