Chapter 171: Mercy

The phoenix came down on the east wall a little before five on Sunday morning, and it came down badly.

It was the young copper one. The one who'd told us about the Hearth Isles and said I'm only two as though it were an apology. It hit the parapet beside my nook, skidded, caught itself with one foot on the edge of the drop and the other in my teacup, and stood there with its wings half open, breathing hard. Its feathers were dull. The color of a pan left on the stove too long.

Seraphina was beside me with our son asleep on her shoulder. She put her free hand out, flat, and the phoenix walked onto it and sat, and the dullness went out of it a little at a time, the way a coal comes back when you breathe on it.

"How far?" I said.

"All of it. Since yesterday at sunset. I didn't stop." It looked at my cup. "I'm sorry about your tea."

"I don't need it. Tell me."

* * *

On Tuesday evening, when the eleven blue ships sailed out of Westmere with sixty-one farm boys and Helena's bread aboard, Teague Pelham had stood beside me on the north quay and said, They'll be sworn. They chose it, and my father had said, That's the only thing that makes it bearable.

I'd agreed with him. I still do.

But that night I'd gone to Ashenne in the dune grass on the North Sands and asked whether one of hers would follow the ships home. Not to do anything. Just to see.

"You can say no," I'd said.

"Which one of mine would you like?"

"The one who wants to go."

The copper one had wanted to go.

* * *

"They didn't let them into the harbor," it said.

It talked fast, the way Elenos talks when he's frightened and doesn't want anyone to know. The ships had made the Kethran coast yesterday afternoon. Not at the quays where the priests count men off ships. At Cardle, the harbor town below the golden city, because the Regent's word had come out to meet them in a rowboat with a closed fist painted on the bow.

"The priests on the harbor wall waved them onto the beach. Below some long houses with nets hanging out of the windows."

"The net-lofts," I said. Corvane had married a woman from the street behind them.

"They made the men get off and counted them and asked if they'd won." The phoenix's feathers lifted and settled. "They said no. They're farmers. They're very bad liars. Then a priest read something off a paper with a fist on it. There was one word he said over and over, and the people on the wall made a noise every time. Like when you drop something and you knew it would break."

It said the word. Badly, in a two-year-old's mouth, but I knew it. Corvane had used it on Wednesday, telling me about the old laws. The ones nobody had used in two hundred years, because in the days when the hand was closed nobody ever came home beaten.

It means mercy.

It isn't.

* * *

"All of it," I said. "Don't leave anything out because you think I won't like it."

The priests had taken the nets out of the net-loft windows. Cardle's own nets. They'd walked the sixty-one down to the low-water line in rows and tied them into the nets and tied the nets to the old iron mooring posts there. Then they'd lit a brazier on the dry sand and put irons in it.

"They took the first row up to the fire. Eleven. One at a time. They made them say something and put the iron on their throats. I flew lower. I thought I could stop it." Its voice went very small. "I'm not big enough to stop anything. I thought if I came back, you would be."

"The tide?"

"All the way out when I left. They're standing on dry sand with weed on it." It looked east, where the sky was going gray over the forest. "It'll turn soon. That's the mercy. They don't do anything. They just let the sea."

Seraphina had gone very still. The stone under her free hand had gone dark in a ring a foot across.

"That's Malachar's law," she said.

"It's in his name," I said. "It isn't his. He's sitting on the steps."

* * *

My father came up the east stair three minutes later in his shirtsleeves. He listened to the phoenix tell it again without interrupting. Then he stood with his hands on the parapet and looked east for so long I thought he wouldn't say anything.

"If you go, it's started," he said. "Not Westmere. Not Harl. Kethra. Their beach, under their city. Grenna's wolves. Corvane. Everything I've been saving. It all starts this morning."

"It started when they read the paper," I said. "I'm just going to answer it."

He turned and looked at me the way he did when I was nine and told him I'd folded the cat onto the chapel roof on purpose, and was sorry about the cat but not about the folding.

"Yes," he said. "All right."

"I can't fold there. I've never been."

"No." He was already pulling his old coat off the hook by the stair door. "But you know someone who has. And he asked to be asked." He shrugged into the coat. "I'm coming. Somebody's going to have to hold the sea."

* * *

The strongroom at the bottom of the Westmere Hold's north stair isn't a cell anymore. Corvane had a proper bed now, and a chair with a cushion that said SIT in crooked green thread. Faelan, I think.

Brannoc woke on his stool outside the door when I came down, looked at my face, and took the key off his belt without a word.

Corvane was on the edge of the bed in his shirt, practicing picking up a spoon with his left hand. Thumb and two fingers. There was a small pile of dropped spoons by his boot. He looked at me, and at my father behind me in his coat, and something went out of his face and something else came into it.

"It's started," he said.

"Not yet. It starts when you say yes."

I told him plainly, the way the phoenix had told me. When I said the word, he closed his eyes. When I said the net-lofts, he opened them.

"Whose nets?"

"They took them out of the windows."

"Then they're ours." He looked down at his hand. "Every family in Cardle ties its nets with the same knot. My father's knot. It tightens when it's wet." He laughed once, not a laugh at all. "So the fish can't get out."

"I've never stood on that beach," I said. "I don't know its shape. You do." I held out my hand. Open. "Borrow?"

He didn't take my hand. He put his left one in it, the three-fingered one, and said in Kethran, the way you'd say it to your son if your son asked to borrow your boat:

"Take."

* * *

I've borrowed a lot of things. Carol's holding. My father's cold. Iselle's let go. A little of Kessavel's strength out of his smallest finger.

I'd never borrowed a place.

It came into me through his hand and it was enormous. Not the beach. The beach was the smallest part. It was thirty-one years of walking the same street in the dark before dawn. Tar and wet hemp and fish scales and his mother's bread. The sound the shingle made where it turned to sand. Which mooring post leaned. Which net-loft had the green shutter. The place on the harbor wall where his father sat mending, and the place beside it where Corvane had sat at six with a shuttle too big for his hands, learning the knot. I could have tied it with my eyes shut.

And above all of it, at the top of the hill, filling the sky: the golden city. The palace. The steps.

"Oh," I said.

"Yes," said Corvane. "It's very beautiful. I walked past it every morning for forty years and forgot." He took his hand back. "I'm coming."

"You can say no."

"I've said yes. I'd like to keep it."

* * *

Teague was waiting at the top of the north stair in his shirt and bare feet, with his hair standing up on one side.

"Some of them are from the Coln," he said, before anyone spoke. "They know my face. They don't know yours. If you're cutting them out of something, they'll fight you. They won't fight me."

"It's not safe," said my father.

"No, sir. I know. You asked me what I wanted, Tuesday. I'm getting better at it."

My father looked at Teague's big raw farmer's hands, and then at his bare feet.

"Boots," he said.

* * *

Five of us. My father. Corvane. Teague, in Westmere boots a size too big. Brannoc, who didn't ask, because Brannoc never asks; he took his axe off the wall and stood behind me. And me.

"Stand where I can see you," I said. "On my right."

My left eye is still dark. Evelyn says midwinter. On Harl a man with an oath-knife nearly killed Roderic on that side. I wasn't going to do that again.

I closed my eyes, found the shingle and the green shutter and the leaning post, and folded.

* * *

Cardle.

Sea cold, the wet kind that gets into your coat. Dawn coming up behind us over the water, gray going pink, every shadow a hundred feet long.

And silence.

The whole town was on the harbor wall. Hundreds of people, shoulder to shoulder in coats and shawls, hands at their sides. Children stood in front of their parents with their parents' hands on their shoulders, and the hands were holding them still.

Below the wall the beach ran out a very long way, flat and gray, and at the bottom of it, where the sand was dark and strung with weed, stood the iron mooring posts. Tied to every post, a net. In every net, a man, standing in the first of the water.

Fifty. I counted. I've been around Caitlin too long.

The tide had turned. Cardle's beach is flat, and a flat beach floods slowly, a long silver edge sliding up the sand an inch at a time. It was at their ankles. In an hour it would be at their chests.

Up on the dry sand below the net-lofts, six priests in gray stood around the brazier holding lamps, though it was light enough that nobody needed lamps. Behind them stood eleven men in farm clothes, not tied to anything. They didn't need to be. They had fresh gray marks on their throats under the ear, raw at the edges, and their faces were empty in the way I'd learned on Harl.

Along the tideline stood about forty soldiers with spears. Young. Most of them looking at their feet.

"Uriah," I said.

My father was already walking.

* * *

I've seen my father hold the sea twice before. The wave over Malachar's fleet. Draum's sea, falling. Both times it was enormous, and afterward he fell down and Evelyn wouldn't let anyone in for a day.

This was different. He walked down the beach in his old coat, past the end of the soldiers' line, who stared and didn't stop him, past the brazier and the priests and the eleven, all the way down to where the silver edge was sliding up over the weed. He crouched the way he crouches by the stream at Greykeep to look at minnows, and put his hand flat on the water.

He didn't freeze it.

He asked it to stop.

I felt it go out from him through the soles of my boots, cool and quiet, like a hand on a shoulder. And the sea stopped. The silver edge stopped sliding. The little waves at the men's ankles stopped lapping. All the way to the horizon the water went flat and bright as a sheet of tin, and the only sound on the whole beach was a gull, far off, complaining.

On the harbor wall, one person gasped.

Then everyone turned and looked at us.

* * *

The priest with the tallest lamp came down the beach toward me. Old, thin, a long gray face like a horse's, the closed fist in gold thread on his chest, the paper in his other hand with its red wax seal.

He held it up.

"By the word of Him Who Holds," he said in Kethran, loud enough for the wall, "the beaten are returned to the sea. It is his law. It is his mercy. You will stand aside."

I looked up the hill.

You can see it from the beach. Cardle is built at the bottom of a slope that goes up and up in terraces and white walls and gardens to the golden city, and at the top of the city is the palace, and in front of the palace is a square, and in the square are the steps.

And on the steps, so small my good eye could barely make him out, sat a man with his hands on his knees.

"He's up there," I said. "Has anyone asked him?"

The priest's face didn't change. His hand on the paper did. Just a little.

"His Radiance is unwell, and resting."

"Then this isn't his word. It's somebody else's with his name on it. I've met the somebody else. He hasn't got a face either." I raised my voice. On a still sea, sound carries. "Those men are going home. All of them. Including the eleven. You can stand aside, or you can watch. That's what everyone in this town has been doing all night. You'll fit right in."

* * *

He lifted his lamp.

Lamps matter to the priests. They swear by them and in front of them; on Harl the lamp boys carried them up and down the stairs so one was always burning wherever an oath might need saying. Linus Carr taught me that.

So I folded it. Not him. The flame. Then the five others, one after another, quick, the way you pinch out candles at the end of an evening, and dropped all six into the brazier. The coals went brighter for a moment. The irons hissed.

Six priests stood on Cardle beach in the dawn holding empty lamps.

"I'm not taking anything from you," I said. "I'm putting it back."

* * *

Then I walked down the line of soldiers.

Near the end was one with a sunburned neck and very big ears, holding his spear as though somebody had asked him to mind it. I stopped in front of him.

"What's your name?"

He stared at me. The same look as always. A man looking for a coat in a dark cupboard.

"Pask," he said finally. "Sir."

"Where's home, Pask?"

"Up the river. Holm. My father's got pigs."

"What do you want?"

He looked at his spear. At the priests with their empty lamps. At the men in the nets, standing in still silver water. For a long time at the eleven, with their raw throats.

"My cousin's in the nets," he said. "Third post. Wat. They told us to stand here so nobody'd cut him loose. I've been standing here all night." His voice cracked. "I don't want to stand here."

"Then don't."

He looked at me as if I'd spoken no language at all.

Then he put his spear down on the sand, carefully, the way you put down something that isn't yours, and walked into the still water toward the third post. None of the soldiers stopped him.

The one next to him put his spear down too.

After that it went quite fast.

* * *

The nets were the hard part.

Corvane had been right. The priests had soaked the nets before tying them, and the cord was tarred hemp as thick as a finger, and the soldiers' belt knives slid off it. Pask was sawing at his cousin's net with a knife that wouldn't have cut bread, crying, and his cousin was saying Pask, it's all right, it's all right, and it wasn't.

I could have folded the nets. But folding a net with a man inside it is like folding a coat with someone still wearing it, and I wasn't sure enough to try it fifty times.

Corvane walked into the water.

He took hold of the nearest net with his left hand and found the knot by feel, the way a man finds his own front door in the dark, and started to work it. His hand shook. The cord was swollen and tarred, and he had three fingers on the wrong hand, and he'd been learning to pick up a spoon that morning.

It took him four minutes. The net fell away. The big freckled farm boy inside it stared at him as if he'd seen a ghost.

"You don't pull," said Corvane, to nobody. "You push the bight back the way it came. My father showed me." He moved to the next post and looked at my father, crouched at the edge of the still sea. "Fifty. Four minutes each. Can he hold it that long?"

"Yes," said my father, without looking up.

"Then I'll do it."

* * *

He didn't have to.

I was watching the wall, so I saw it start. An old woman, very small and bent, in a black shawl, at the end nearest the net-lofts. She went down the steps one at a time, holding the rail. She crossed the shingle and walked past the brazier and the priests without looking at them, and none of them said anything to her. She walked down the long gray beach into the still water in her black skirts, went to the second post, took hold of the net with both hands, and started on the knot.

She had all ten fingers. She'd been tying that knot for seventy years. It took her forty seconds.

Behind her, somebody else started down the steps.

Then a lot of people did.

* * *

I won't forget it. The whole of Cardle coming down off its harbor wall in the dawn. Old men and young women and boys and grandmothers, net-menders every one of them, walking past the priests as though the priests were posts, into the sea my father was holding still for them, putting their hands on their own knots.

Nobody said anything. Fifty nets and a hundred pairs of hands and the sound of wet cord sliding through itself, and in ten minutes it was done.

A woman with gray-streaked hair and a fisherman's knitted shawl untied the last one, two posts from Corvane. When the net fell she straightened up and looked along the line at him. He'd stopped working. He stood in the water to his shins with his three-fingered hand at his side, looking back.

"Jessamy," he said.

She waded over, not hurrying, and picked up his hand in both of hers and looked at the stumps.

"Who did this?"

"I did. I held a knife where I shouldn't have. A boy got in the way."

"Did the boy live?"

"Yes. He's getting married."

She looked at the hand a long time. Then at him.

"Aldric," she said.

"I know where he is. They're going to fetch him." Corvane's voice went. "I'm going to help. I've been asked."

Jessamy laid his hand against his chest and held it there with hers over it.

"Then go and do it," she said. "And bring him home. And then come back and tell me how you came to be standing in my sea with a king holding it still for you, because I'd very much like to hear it." She let go. "Not now. Now I've got nets to hang."

She went back up the beach with the others, gathering the wet nets over her arm, and didn't look back. Corvane watched her all the way to the net-lofts. Then he came and stood on my right and said nothing at all.

* * *

Teague walked along the row of the eleven by the brazier, looking into each face the way Sigrun does. He stopped at the seventh.

A red-faced boy. I remembered him from Tuesday at the table on the north quay, with Mary's green ledger. From Tessing; a widowed mother, barley. I'll take the oath if they make me.

They'd made him.

"Ned," said Teague. "Ned Toller. It's me. Teague. We were on the same ship."

Ned looked at him with nothing in his face. The mark on his throat was still weeping.

"He can't talk," I said. "Not after. Only one name."

"I know." Teague put his big hand on Ned's shoulder, very lightly. "It's all right. You don't have to. There's a lady with her feet in a fountain who's going to sort this out." He looked at me. "Isn't there?"

"Yes. There is."

Then Teague did what I should have thought of. He went down the row and said every one of their names. All eleven. He'd been three days on a ship with them and learned their names, because that's what you do when you've just found out what yours is worth.

None of them answered. But the fourth, a short dark one, turned his head when Teague said his name. Just a little. Toward the sound.

* * *

It took ten folds to get them home. Seven at a time, the most I can carry with one eye. The fifty went to the lower court of the Westmere Hold, under the Castellan's lamp. Brannoc went first to catch them; by the third fold Helena was there with bread, and by the fifth Sigrun had her ledger on a barrel and Mary had the green one, writing down names.

I took the eleven last, with Teague, straight to the top of Havenreach's eastern stair and down the white road to the warm fountain behind the fig tree. Anwen was sitting on its edge with her feet in the water. She looked at the eleven standing on the warm stone, and put down her fig.

"Ah," she said. "Recent."

"This morning."

"Then they'll remember not being asked very clearly. That makes it easier." She dried her feet on her skirt. "Leave them with me. Go and do whatever it is you've still got on your face."

I didn't know I had anything on my face.

"You're going back," said Anwen. "It's all over you. Go on."

* * *

When I folded back to Cardle, the beach was empty.

The priests had gone up the hill in a line with their empty lamps, Corvane said. The soldiers had mostly gone home; Pask had taken his cousin up the river to the pigs. The nets were back in the net-loft windows. You'd never have known.

My father was still crouched at the water's edge with his hand on it.

"You can let go," I said.

"I was waiting for you. In case you wanted it still a bit longer." He lifted his hand. The silver edge began, very gently, to slide up the sand again, as though it had only paused to think. He stood up, and his knees cracked. "There. That wasn't so bad. I'll want my supper."

Corvane was sitting on the harbor wall where the old woman had stood, his back against the stones. His father's place, I think. He was looking up the hill.

"He's still there," he said.

The small figure on the steps, in front of the doors that wouldn't open. He hadn't moved all morning. He hadn't moved, Corvane said, in a month.

"I made a promise," I said. "At supper."

"You'll want to go alone," said my father.

"Yes. Will you wait?"

"I've been waiting all morning." He sat down on the wall next to Corvane and folded his arms. "I'm very good at it now."

* * *

I walked up the hill. I couldn't fold; Corvane's city was all from the outside, from the bottom, looking up. So I walked, up steep streets between white walls, past windows whose faces went away when I looked, through terraced gardens, past a gate guard who looked at me and looked away. Nobody stopped me. I don't think anybody knew how.

The square in front of the palace was wide and white and empty. The steps went up the far side to a pair of gold doors three times my height, closed. On the fourth step from the bottom sat Malachar.

He was in plain gray clothes, a little dusty. No crown, no chain. His hands lay open on his knees, palms up, and they'd been that way so long they looked set there. His face was the same as on the deck of his flagship. A very ordinary face, with the light coming out of it. Less of it now. Like a lamp somebody had turned down.

He didn't look at me. He looked at the doors.

I sat down on the fourth step beside him. Not close. My mother's distance.

We sat there a while.

* * *

"You stopped my sea," he said at last. His voice was hoarse, as if he hadn't used it.

"My father did."

"Your father." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Of course." A long pause. "Who were they? In the nets."

"Farm boys. From the Coln and Tessing and Holm. Barley and pigs and bees."

"Ah." Then, after a while: "I never asked them anything either."

I didn't know what to say to that. I still don't.

"I didn't come about them," I said. "I came because I promised your sister."

He went completely still. Not the stillness of a man sitting on a step for a month. The kind Carol had seen on his face when she said his name to him on the deck of his flagship.

"Iselle," he said.

"She's going to be married. In the spring, when the river's high. She wanted you told. She said somebody should tell you something good."

His hands on his knees closed. Just a little. Not fists. The way your hands close when you're cold.

"To whom?"

"Roderic. My brother."

"The one who took the knife."

"Yes."

A long silence. Far below, the sea was coming in.

"Is he kind?" said Malachar.

I thought of Roderic in the big chair in the little kitchen with his feet up, forbidden to stand, and Iselle with her open hand held out. No — I mean —

"He stood up," I said.

Malachar turned his head and looked at me for the first time. Gold eyes with the light behind them. Very old, very tired, and for one moment, I think, surprised.

"Did he ask her?"

"She asked first."

The thing at the corner of his mouth happened again. Not a smile. The place a smile would be, if he'd ever practiced.

"Good," said Malachar. "Then he'll do."

* * *

I stood up. My knees ached from the stone.

"The doors won't open for you," I said. "Will they?"

"Not yet."

"Then come away. You don't have to sit here."

"I do," said Malachar. "It's the only thing I've ever done that nobody made me do." He closed his eyes. "Go home, Garrick Grey. Your father's waiting."

I went down one step. Two.

"Garrick Grey."

I stopped. He hadn't opened his eyes. His hands had opened again on his knees.

"Tell her—" he said, and stopped. "No. I'll tell her myself."

"How? You can't leave."

"There are other ways to be in a room," said Malachar, "than walking into it."

* * *

My father was on the harbor wall with Corvane, arms folded, exactly where I'd left him. The tide was halfway up the beach, ordinary, at its own pace.

"Well?"

"I told him. He said, Good, then he'll do."

My father looked up the hill a long moment. "And?"

"And he said he'd tell her himself."

My father uncrossed his arms and stood up. He looked at Corvane, and Corvane looked back, and I watched something pass between two men who'd spent their lives in the shadow of the same hand.

"Home," said my father. "Now. I want a word with the Castellan."

* * *

From Mary's book, that evening, in the green ink she keeps for Sundays:

Sunday. The copper phoenix came back. It's only two. It said sorry about Garrick's tea.

The blue ships didn't go to the quays. They went to Cardle beach, under the golden city. A priest read a paper with a fist on it. The word means mercy. It isn't.

Garrick asked to borrow Corvane's town. Corvane said take.

Uriah held the sea still on Cardle beach all morning. Not freezing. Asking. He says it wasn't so bad and he'd like his supper. He's had two.

Garrick put the priests' lamps back in their fire.

A soldier called Pask put his spear down first. Then all of them.

An old woman came down off the harbor wall and untied the second net. Then all of Cardle did. Nobody said anything.

Fifty home to Westmere, names in the green ledger. Eleven sworn on the beach, gone to Anwen. She says recent is easier. The fourth one turned his head when Teague said his name. Ned Toller of Tessing is the seventh. Teague is sitting with him.

Corvane's wife is called Jessamy. She said bring him home.

Garrick sat on the steps beside Malachar and told him about Iselle. Malachar said good, then he'll do. Iselle cried. Roderic got up. He's not allowed to get up.

Malachar also said he'd tell her himself. Uriah has asked the Castellan to watch every door.

And under that, in a big, careful farmer's hand, every letter pressed so hard it came through the other side of the page:

Teague Pelham, of the bee villages on the Coln. I'd like it noted that I went back. That I knew all eleven names, because we were three days on the same ship and I'd only just found out what names are worth. That the fourth one turned his head. And that I said I wanted to go, and nobody told me I couldn't, they only told me to put my boots on, and I'm going to remember that for the rest of my life.