Chapter 170: The Wrong Boy

My father carried Roderic home to Greykeep on Saturday afternoon.

Not through the air. Not by the fast way. Through the gate in the lower court of the Westmere Hold, on foot, with Roderic in his arms wrapped in two blankets and a great deal of injured dignity, and my mother walking on one side and Adriana on the other, and Iselle one step behind, on Roderic's left, carrying his boots.

"I can walk," said Roderic, for the eleventh time.

"Yes," said my father. "Next week."

* * *

My mother had said he could go home if he went straight to bed and stayed there. Roderic agreed to the first half. He got as far as the bottom of the east stair at Greykeep, where the little kitchen is, with its garden door and the pear tree outside it and the blackbird on the step and the smell of bread, and said, very reasonably, that he'd been in bed for twelve days and would like to sit in a chair for one supper before he went back to it.

My mother looked at Adriana. Adriana looked at my mother.

"One supper," said my mother. "In the big chair. With your feet up. And if you so much as cough—"

"I won't cough."

"You will cough," said Adriana. "Everyone coughs. If you cough, you go up."

"I won't—"

He coughed.

My father put him in the big chair anyway, by the stove, with his feet on a stool and a cushion behind him, and nobody said anything about it.

* * *

I should say who was there. Because it matters, for what happened.

The little kitchen at Greykeep is not big. It has one long scrubbed table, and a bench down one side of it, and mismatched chairs down the other, and a rabbit-shaped scorch mark at one end where Carol put down a hot pan when she was six. It seats twelve if everyone is friendly and fourteen if some of them are small.

That night it had nineteen.

* * *

My father at the head of the table, in his socks. My mother on his left and Adriana on his right, the way they always sit, close enough that their shoulders touch. Grandpa at the foot, sanding the ear of a wooden horse, because Grandpa is always sanding the ear of a wooden horse. Helena at the stove with the spoon. Mary on the bench with her book open beside her plate, because Mary reads the day's pages aloud after supper every night now and has done since Harl, and nobody has ever asked her to stop.

Carol on the bench, with Ignatius beside her. Seraphina next to me, with our son on her knee, wearing more of his supper than he'd eaten. Caitlin with her blue book. Elenos and Faelan and Mirelle at the end of the bench, squeezed in so tight that Faelan had to eat with his elbows in. Wilm, who'd come with Mirelle, because Mirelle had decided Wilm was hers now and took him everywhere, the way she'd once taken a stray cat everywhere until it gave in.

Roderic in the big chair by the stove. Iselle on a stool beside him, on his left, because there was nowhere else for the stool to go, and that's what she said if anyone asked.

And at the end of the bench, by the garden door, with her long gray plait over her shoulder and her worn dark wooden shuttle in her lap, where she always keeps it, Saba.

Iselle's mother.

* * *

And one more. I nearly forgot her, which is exactly what she'd want.

Anwen had come up from the preserved district that afternoon with a bag of figs from the impossible tree for Helena, and stayed for supper, because Mary had asked her a question about punctuation on the stair and they hadn't finished arguing about it. She was sitting at the very end of the table, by the window, in her patched coat, eating soup and saying almost nothing.

The First Witness. At Helena's table. With a fig in her pocket.

* * *

It was a good supper. Helena had made the fish stew Saba likes, because Saba said once, the first week she came, that she'd like fish, mostly, and Helena has made fish every Saturday since. There was bread from the window rack. There was the end of a jar of plum jam that Faelan had been guarding all week. My son put his hand in the jam and then on Ignatius's sleeve and said "Jam," very clearly, in case anyone had missed it.

And after the stew, Mary opened her book, and read the day.

* * *

She read it the way she always does. In her small careful voice, every word, without hurrying. The open doors in the preserved district. Hesper's throat. Wilm's wrist. Iselle choosing to keep her mark, and Anwen saying ask any married woman. Liora saying oh, for heaven's sake, come in.

At the end, she read the guest lines. And then, because it was Saturday, and on Saturdays she reads the whole week's guest lines again from the beginning, she turned back the pages.

To Friday of the week before.

* * *

I knew what was on that page. So did everyone at the table. Mary had read it out on Friday night, a week ago, at Westmere, in Helena's other kitchen, with Roderic shouting corrections through the door.

Roderic knew too. I watched him remember, in the big chair by the stove, about a half a second before Mary got there. His face went from pale to pink to the color of the plum jam.

"Mary," he said. "Mary, you don't have to—"

Mary read it.

* * *

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.

* * *

Mary closed the book.

Nobody said anything.

I didn't say anything. I'd promised. Not about her. Not ever. I sat there with my hands flat on the table and my jaw locked and said nothing at all, and Carol, across the table, looked at me with an expression of such enormous sympathy that I nearly broke anyway.

Roderic had put his face in his hands.

Iselle, on her stool, hadn't moved. She was looking at the fire in the stove. Her face was perfectly still.

And at the end of the bench, by the garden door, Saba set down her shuttle on the table in front of her.

* * *

It was a small sound. Wood on wood. But everyone heard it.

Saba is very small. Iselle says she's like a wren, and she is: small and brown and quick, with a long gray plait and weaver's hands and a voice that's soft at the edges, the way Kethrans soften their s. She's been at Greykeep since she came across the mountains with my father and me. She sits in her own chair by the fire in the evenings, which Helena gave her the first night without being asked, and which nobody else has sat in since. She sings at Helena's loom in the weaving room with too many verses. She calls Iselle little fish.

She'd never once, in all that time, spoken up at supper.

She spoke up now.

* * *

"Little fish," she said. In Avarran. So everybody would understand.

Iselle turned her head.

"In the valley," said Saba, "where the mill is, we have a custom. When a girl's mother wants to know a thing, she doesn't ask in the bedroom, or on the stair, or under her breath at the loom. She asks at the table. At supper. In front of everyone who'll have to live with the answer." She folded her small hands on the table beside her shuttle. "So that it's said out loud. So that it's heard. So that nobody can say afterward that they didn't know."

She looked around the table. At my father, at the head of it. At Adriana, Roderic's mother. At my mother. At Helena at the stove with the spoon in her hand. At all of us.

"So I'm asking," said Saba. "Here. In front of his father, and his mother, and his other mother, and the lady of this kitchen, and all of you."

She turned back to her daughter.

"Iselle," she said. "Do you intend to marry him?"

* * *

The kitchen went absolutely silent.

Helena's spoon stopped in the pot. Grandpa's sandpaper stopped on the horse's ear. Faelan, at the end of the bench, very quietly took his pencil out of the spine of his ledger. My son, on Seraphina's knee, looked around at all the still faces with great interest and said, "Oh," which he'd learned that week.

In the big chair by the stove, Roderic had taken his face out of his hands. He was staring at Saba. Then at Iselle. He'd gone from plum-colored to white.

"Saba," he said. "Saba, I was going to ask her. I was going to ask her properly. When I could stand up. I had a whole—I was going to—"

"I know," said Saba. "It's in the book."

"Then why—"

"Because you've been lying in a bed for twelve days with a hole in you," said Saba, "telling the whole household and a book you're going to ask her, and telling everyone not to tell her. And she has sat beside that bed the whole time, hearing it read out every night at supper, being told not to know." She looked at him, not unkindly. "That's a very heavy thing to carry for someone, Roderic Grey. Knowing a thing you're not allowed to know. I thought I'd take it off her."

* * *

Roderic opened his mouth. Then shut it.

Then he looked at Iselle.

Iselle was sitting on her stool beside him, very straight, with her hands folded in her lap, and her right sleeve pulled down over the gray mark on the inside of her wrist that she'd chosen, the day before, to keep. She hadn't looked at Roderic. She was looking at her mother.

"Mama," she said. In Kethran. Very quietly. Then she stopped, and said it again in Avarran, because she knew the custom too, and the custom was that everyone should hear. "Mama. You knew."

"Little fish," said Saba. "I've known since the first letter you wrote me from the college, and spent a whole page on a boy who carried your books and didn't know what to do with his hands." She smiled. "You never wrote a whole page about anything. Not even the river."

* * *

Iselle looked down at her hands in her lap.

And then she did something I'll remember for the rest of my life.

She stood up. Off the stool. And she turned to face the table, to face all of us, my father at the head of it and Adriana and my mother and Helena with her spoon and Grandpa with his horse and the children squeezed onto the bench and Mary with her book and the First Witness at the end by the window with a fig in her pocket.

"Yes," said Iselle. "I do. I've intended to since the night of the dance at Concordia, when he stood behind my chair for four hours and never once sat down. I've been waiting for him to ask. I've been waiting a long time." She took a breath. "And I'm tired of waiting."

* * *

And she turned around, to the big chair by the stove, where my little brother was sitting with his feet on a stool and two blankets over his knees and a bandage under his shirt and his mouth open.

She held out her right hand to him. Palm up. Open. With the sleeve fallen back, and the light gray fist on the inside of her wrist showing, plain, in the firelight.

"Roderic Grey," said Iselle. "Will you marry me?"

And then, because she's lived in this house for a year, and she knows how things are said here:

"You can say no."

* * *

Roderic looked at her hand.

He looked at it for a very long time. I don't think he was deciding. I think he was trying to remember how to breathe.

"No," he said.

The kitchen stopped.

"No—I mean—" Roderic went scarlet. He struggled up in the chair, and the blankets fell off his knees, and my mother half rose from her seat and Adriana put a hand on her arm and she sat down again. "No, I mean, I don't—I mean I don't say no, I mean I—I was going to ask you, I had it all—I was going to stand up, I was going to—"

"Then ask," said Iselle.

She hadn't lowered her hand.

* * *

And Roderic, who'd been told by his mother and my mother and Helena and every healer in Westmere that he was not to stand up under any circumstances for at least another week, stood up.

He did it very slowly. With one hand on the arm of the chair and the other pressed against his side. His face went white with it, and I saw my mother's knuckles go white on the edge of the table, and I saw my father, at the head of it, put his hand flat on the scrubbed wood and not move. Not to help. Not to stop him. Just there. Holding the table.

Roderic stood up beside the big chair in his shirt and his socks, swaying a little. And he took Iselle's open hand in his.

"Iselle," he said. "Iselle of the Ilvane valley, where the mill is. Daughter of Saba, who weaves." He swallowed. "Will you marry me?"

And then, because he's lived in this house his whole life:

"You can say no."

* * *

"Yes," said Iselle.

* * *

At the end of the table, by the window, the First Witness put down her soup spoon.

"I witness it," said Anwen.

* * *

And then the kitchen came apart.

Not loudly. That's not how our kitchen comes apart. Mirelle burst into tears, because Mirelle always bursts into tears at anything, and Wilm, beside her, patted her on the head very seriously, the way you'd pat a dog. Faelan wrote it down so fast his pencil broke, and Elenos handed him another one without looking. Caitlin said "Finally," to nobody, and wrote that down too.

Grandpa put down his wooden horse.

Helena put down her spoon. She came around the end of the table, and took Iselle's face between her two hands, and kissed her once on the forehead, hard, the way she kisses us on our birthdays. Then she went back to the stove and stirred the pot, which didn't need stirring, with her back to everyone.

Carol was crying. So was Seraphina. So, I found, was I.

* * *

Adriana got up from the table.

She went around it, slowly, past my father, past Grandpa, to the big chair by the stove, where her son was still standing, swaying, holding Iselle's hand. She looked at him for a long moment. Then at Iselle.

"Sit down," she said to Roderic. "Before you fall."

He sat down.

Adriana knelt beside the chair. She took Iselle's free hand. And for a moment, faintly, I saw the silver come up around her fingers, the way it had on the sand around Mirelle's castle. Settling over Iselle's hand like a glove. And sinking in.

"What was that?" said Iselle.

"A refusal," said Adriana.

"Of what?"

"Of anyone," said Adriana, very quietly, "ever taking you from this house without your asking." She looked up at Iselle. "You're ours now, Iselle. Not because anyone's holding you. Because you said so. Out loud. At the table. In front of everyone." She glanced at the end of the table. "And it's witnessed."

* * *

My father hadn't moved.

He was still sitting at the head of the table with his hand flat on the scrubbed wood. Holding it. He'd been holding it, I think, since Roderic stood up. My mother put her hand over his.

"You can let go now," she said.

He looked down at their two hands. And let go of the table. And laughed, very softly, the way he does when something he's been holding for a long time has turned out to be all right after all.

"I was going to ask her mother," he said. "Properly. For him. When he could walk. I'd thought about it." He looked down the table at Saba. "I'd been working out what to say."

"I know," said Saba. "I've been working out how to make sure you didn't have to." She picked up her shuttle off the table. "In the valley, the girl's mother asks. Not the boy's father. That's the custom."

"That's a good custom," said my father.

"It is," said Saba. "We've had it a long time. Since before the god came up the valley." She turned the shuttle over in her fingers. "He never asked my mother anything. He never asked anyone. I've always thought that was the first thing wrong with him."

* * *

"When?" said Mary.

Everyone looked at her. She had her pen in her hand.

"For the book," said Mary. "When?"

Iselle looked at Roderic, sitting in the big chair with her hand still in his and his face still white and the happiest I have ever seen it.

"After we fetch Aldric," said Iselle.

Roderic looked up at her.

"Corvane's son," said Iselle. "In the priests' house. In the golden city." She looked at her wrist. "I kept the mark for that. I'm going to use it for that. And when he's out, and home, and somebody's asked him what he wants, then I'd like to be married." She looked at her mother. "In spring. When the river's high."

"When the river's high," said Saba, and smiled. "That's when it's always been done."

"And I want my brother to know," said Iselle.

The kitchen went very quiet again.

"Malachar," said Iselle. Clearly. At the table. In front of everyone. "Sitting on the steps of his own palace, with the doors shut. I want somebody to go and tell him. That his sister is getting married. That nobody held her, and nobody gave her away, and she asked the boy herself, at supper, and he said yes." She swallowed. "Somebody should tell him something good. Nobody has. Not in three hundred years."

* * *

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

"I'll tell him," I said.

Everyone looked at me.

"When we go," I said. "For Aldric. I'll go up the hill to the palace steps, and I'll sit down beside him, and I'll tell him." I looked at Iselle. "If you'd like."

Iselle looked at me for a long time.

"Yes," she said. "I'd like that very much."

* * *

Later, much later, when the children had gone to bed and my son was asleep on Seraphina's shoulder and Saba had gone up with Iselle, both of them talking very fast in Kethran on the stair, and then, very softly, Saba singing the old valley song about the girl who married the wrong boy, every one of its far too many verses, except that somewhere around the turn of the stair she changed the last one, and Iselle laughed, and Roderic had finally, finally been carried up to bed by my father and put down in it and told to stay there on pain of Helena, I sat in the little kitchen with Carol and the end of the plum jam.

"You didn't say anything," said Carol. "The whole time. Not one word."

"I promised."

"I know you did." She looked at me for a long moment. "It was the bravest thing I've ever seen you do. And I watched you fold the sea."

I didn't say anything.

"You could say something now," said Carol. "To me. I won't tell."

I thought about it. About my little brother standing up beside the big chair in his socks with a hole in his side, swaying, holding her hand. About him saying you can say no. About her saying yes.

"He stood up," I said.

"He did."

"He wasn't supposed to stand up for a week."

"No."

"That's all," I said. "That's the only thing I'd ever have said. He stood up."

Carol smiled, and took the jam spoon away from me, and licked it.

"That's not teasing," she said. "That's just true."

* * *

Mary's book. Saturday. Written at the little kitchen table at Greykeep, at nearly midnight, with Faelan's broken pencil beside the inkwell and the First Witness reading over her shoulder for the second time that day and, for once, not disagreeing with a single comma.

Afternoon. Uriah carried Roderic home to Greykeep. Iselle carried his boots. Roderic said I can walk eleven times. Uriah said next week.

Supper in the little kitchen. Twenty. Fish stew for Saba. Anwen came with figs and stayed.

After the day's pages, Saturday, so the week's guest lines again. Roderic's from last Friday. I'm going to marry her if she'll have me. Nobody tell her. Roderic said Mary you don't have to. Mary did.

Garrick said nothing. Carol says it was the bravest thing she's ever seen him do.

Saba put down her shuttle. She said in the valley a mother asks at the table, in front of everyone who'll have to live with the answer, so it's heard. She asked: Iselle, do you intend to marry him?

She said she'd known since Iselle's first letter from the college, a whole page about a boy who carried her books. Iselle never wrote a whole page about anything. Not even the river.

Iselle stood up. She said yes. Since the dance at Concordia. She said she's been waiting a long time for him to ask and she's tired of waiting.

She held out her open hand to Roderic. Roderic Grey, will you marry me? You can say no.

Roderic said No. Then I mean I don't say no. Then he stood up. He's not allowed to stand up for a week. He took her hand. Iselle of the Ilvane valley, where the mill is, daughter of Saba who weaves. Will you marry me? You can say no.

Iselle said yes.

Anwen said I witness it.

Caitlin said finally.

Helena kissed Iselle on the forehead and stirred the pot that didn't need stirring.

Adriana gave Iselle a refusal. Of anyone ever taking her from this house without her asking.

Uriah let go of the table. He'd been working out what to say to Saba. Saba said in the valley the girl's mother asks. Saba says the god never asked anyone anything, and that was the first thing wrong with him.

When: after we fetch Aldric. In spring, when the river's high.

Iselle wants her brother told. Malachar. Somebody should tell him something good. Garrick said he'll go up the hill and sit on the steps beside him and tell him.

Garrick told Carol afterward the only thing he'd have said is: he stood up.

And under that, two lines. The first in a small, careful, upright hand, the letters set close together as though they were afraid of taking up too much room on the page, the hand of a girl who was taught to write by a scribe's daughter in a room made of glass:

Iselle. I'd like it noted that I asked first. And that he said no, and then yes, and then stood up, and that I'm keeping all three.

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, much shakier than usual, with a long wobbling line at the end where the writer had clearly been made to lie back down before he'd finished:

Roderic Grey. I'd like it noted that I was going to ask HER. And that I'm not sorry at all. And that Garrick still hasn't said anything to tease me.