Chapter 173: The Emperor's Face

Nobody breathed.

I don't mean that the way people mean it in stories. I mean that I listened, and for the space of perhaps four heartbeats there was no sound in the great hall at Greykeep but the fire settling in the hearth and the small dry tick of the loom's warp beam cooling. Forty people at the long tables, and not one of them breathing.

Then Grandpa put down his sandpaper.

It made a very small noise on the wood of the high table. Everyone heard it. And Saba, at the loom, with her hand still resting on the shuttle where she'd laid it down, turned on her stool and looked at the man made of light standing between the third and fourth windows.

She looked at him for a long time. The way she must look at a warp before she starts a cloth, to see if it's true.

"It isn't my house," she said.

"No," said Malachar. "But I wasn't asking about the house."

* * *

Saba looked past him then, down the length of the hall, to where my father was standing by the door in his socks.

My father didn't move. He didn't nod. He didn't say it's yours, though I could see him wanting to. He just stood there with my mother beside him and let Saba look, and after a moment she understood that nobody was going to answer for her, and turned back.

"You've been in my house nine years," she said. "Every night. Without asking."

"Yes."

"Did you know I knew?"

A pause. A long one.

"Not until tonight," said Malachar. "When you sang the last verse at me instead of past me."

Saba nodded slowly, as though that were the answer she'd expected and didn't much like.

"Then here's my answer," she said. "You may come in. As far as the loom. You'll sit on the floor, the way everyone sits at a loom in the valley, and you'll say what you came to say to my daughter, to her face, plainly, in words she can carry home. And when she asks you to go, you'll go." She picked up the shuttle. "That's what a guest is. You never were one. You can try it tonight."

The light that was Malachar stood very still.

"Those are your terms," he said.

"Those are my terms."

"I keep my terms," said Malachar. "Whatever else they say of me."

"I know you do," said Saba. "That was never the trouble. The trouble was you never asked anybody else's."

* * *

He came in.

I want to set down how, because I'd been braced for a lot of things, and none of them was that.

He didn't stride. He didn't float, the way I'd half expected, the way the gold had come across the floor. He walked, the six steps from the east wall to the loom, slowly, like a man walking into a room where he isn't sure of the floor. And when he got to the loom, he did what Saba had said. He sat down on the flagstones. Cross-legged, like a child, on the far side of the loom from Iselle, with the half-woven cloth hanging between them, river-colored, with the light coming through it from his side.

He had to look at her through the warp threads. Through the cloth her mother had started the year she was taken.

I don't think he'd planned that. I don't think Saba had either. But I saw Iselle see it, and I saw something in her face go very quiet.

* * *

And then, because he was sitting, and still, and close, and lit from inside, I saw his face properly for the first time.

I'd seen it before. On the deck of his flagship, a very ordinary face with the light coming out of it. On the steps in Cardle, turned down, tired, gray at the edges. I'd thought I knew what Malachar looked like.

I hadn't. Neither of those was it.

He was beautiful.

I don't know how else to put it. I don't mean handsome, though he was that. I mean the way the Ilvane is beautiful when it's high, or the way the north tower looks from the lower orchard in the evening with the last sun on it. Beautiful in a way that makes you want to stand closer. His face was all clean lines and gold, neither young nor old, and when he turned his head to look at Iselle through the threads, the light moved over it like water.

And I felt it. I want to be honest. I felt the room lean.

Not with our bodies. Not yet. With something underneath. Forty people at the long tables, and every one of them, without meaning to, without knowing it, turning a little toward the loom. The way plants on a windowsill turn toward the glass. Helena had stopped with the plum cake knife in her hand. Faelan, who'd been sent to bed and refused, had come out from behind the bench where he'd been hiding and was standing in the open with his mouth a little open. Even Roderic, in the big chair, with his knuckles white on the arms of it, had leaned forward.

It was warm. That was the worst of it. It was warm, like standing near a fire on a cold night, and you wanted to stay there, and you wanted him to look at you, and you wanted, very much, for him to be pleased.

I understood, then, how he'd held a whole country for three hundred years without anyone minding. Corvane had said it. Nobody starved. Nobody left. Nobody asked.

Why would you ask? It was so warm.

* * *

"Stop that," I said.

I hadn't meant to say it aloud. But it came out of me before I'd thought, and it came out loud, and every head in the hall turned toward me instead of toward the loom, and the warmth broke like a soap bubble.

Malachar looked up at me through the warp.

"Stop what?"

"Leaning on the room."

He frowned. It was the first ordinary expression I'd ever seen on his face, and it made him look, for a moment, like a man who'd been interrupted while he was thinking about something else.

"I'm not doing anything," he said.

"You are. Everyone's turned toward you like you're the window. Helena's holding a knife and she's forgotten it. My little brother's out of bed." I kept my voice level. My father taught me that: when someone's bigger than you, don't get louder, get steadier. "You're not even trying. I believe that. But you're doing it. And you agreed to sit on the floor like a guest. Guests don't lean on the room."

The hall was silent.

I watched his face. And I watched something go across it that I'd been told about and never seen, not on the flagship, not on the steps. Something hot and quick and very old, there and then gone, like a flame running up the edge of a page. His jaw tightened. The gold in his face went brighter for one moment, sharply, the way a fire jumps when you open the stove door.

Pride. Wounded. Three hundred years of nobody telling him to stop anything.

And then, very slowly, he looked down at his own hands, open on his knees. As though he'd never looked at them before. As though he were trying to see what they were doing.

The warmth went out of the room.

Not all at once. Like a tide going out. I felt forty people settle back on their benches. Helena looked down at the knife in her hand and put it on the table. Faelan blinked and looked around and saw where he was standing and went red.

"I didn't know," said Malachar quietly, to his hands, "that I did that."

"I know," I said. "Nobody ever told you."

He didn't answer. But he didn't lean again, either. Not once, all night. I watched.

* * *

Carol spoke next. I should have guessed she would.

She hadn't moved from the end of the high table. She was sitting very straight, with her hands folded in front of her and Ignatius beside her, and there was frost on the wood under her fingers. She'd been holding her cold back since the gold came out of the hearth. I could feel it in the room in me where her weather lives, pressed down hard and humming.

"Hello, Malachar," she said.

He turned his head.

It was the same thing she'd said to him on the deck of his flagship, with his hand a hand's width from her face and her holding it there. Hello, Malachar. The first time in three hundred years, Iselle said, that anyone but his mother had said his name to his face.

He flinched then, too. I saw it. A very small movement, at the eyes.

"Lady Carol," he said.

"Just Carol." She didn't unfold her hands. "I'm not going to hold you this time. You're sitting on the floor, and you asked, and Saba said yes. But I'm right here."

"I know where you are," said Malachar. Then, after a moment, something that might almost have been rueful: "I have always known where you are. It's never once done me any good."

* * *

Iselle hadn't said anything yet.

She was still sitting under the loom, on her side of it, with her back against the leg and her knees up and her hands open on them. Adriana was beside her. Roderic was six feet away in his chair. And her brother was on the other side of the cloth, looking at her through the threads.

"You said you'd tell me yourself," she said. In Kethran. Quietly.

"Yes."

"Then tell me."

He opened his mouth.

And I watched him not be able to.

I don't know how else to say it. I watched him start, three times. The first time he said, "When I heard—" and stopped. The second time he drew himself up, sitting there on the flagstones, and the gold came up in his face, and he said, in a voice like a bell, the voice he must have used from balconies: "Little sister, it gives me great joy to—" and then he stopped that too, because Iselle was looking at him through the threads with no expression at all, and it was very clear that she was not a balcony.

The third time he didn't say anything. He just sat there, with his hands open on his knees and the light in his face going up and down, like someone trying to find a word in a language they'd never learned.

* * *

It was Helena who helped him. Nobody else would have thought of it.

She came down from the high table with a plate. On the plate was a slice of plum cake. A thick one, the kind she cuts for people she thinks look underfed, which is most people. She walked down the hall with it, past the long tables, and nobody stopped her, because nobody ever stops Helena. And she bent down, with a small grunt, and set it on the flagstones beside Malachar, near his open hand.

He looked at it.

"I can't eat it," he said. "I'm not— This isn't—" He gestured at himself. At the light. "I'm not really here."

"I know," said Helena. "It's not for eating. It's for having." She straightened up, slowly, with a hand on the loom. "Nobody can talk properly with nothing in front of them. You'll find it easier now."

She went back up the hall to the stove end and picked up her knife again and started cutting more cake for everyone else, as though nothing had happened.

Malachar looked at the slice of cake on the plate on the floor beside him for a long time.

I remembered Kessavel, on the thumb tower on Harl, with his hands full of chain and his mouth open for bread. Nobody has ever fed me. In my whole life.

I wondered if anybody had ever fed Malachar. I didn't think so. I thought he'd been the one doing the feeding, for three hundred years. Bread at the same price in Cardle for two hundred of them.

* * *

"I listened to your mother," he said.

It came out quite differently from the other three tries. Low. Plain. Not to the room. To Iselle, through the threads.

"After they brought you to the palace. You were twelve. You didn't cry. Not once, the whole first winter; the old lamp-woman told me. I thought that meant you were content." His hand moved, very slightly, toward the plate, and stopped. "And then one night I passed your door, and you were singing. Under your breath. A song I didn't know. Something about a mill. And I wanted to know where it came from. So I went and looked."

Iselle didn't move.

"It came from a house at the end of a lane, by a river. A woman at a loom. I listened for a while. It was—" He stopped. Started again. "The palace is very quiet. It's always been very quiet. Everyone in it is waiting for me to want something. Nobody sings. Your mother sang every night as though no one in the world were listening, and it was the only warm thing I'd heard in three hundred years that I hadn't made myself."

He looked at the plum cake.

"I should have asked," he said. "I know that now. I didn't know it then. I didn't know you were meant to ask for things like that. I thought if you could hear a thing, it was yours to hear."

* * *

"And the page," said Iselle.

Her voice hadn't changed. But her hands had. They'd closed on her knees.

"The Ilvane is low this week," she said. "Your mother will have noticed. She sings slower when the mill is slow." She said it in his voice. Not mocking. Exactly. The way you'd say a thing you'd had by heart for a long time because it had been put there by force. "Four in the morning. In my room at the college. You wrote that to me so I'd know you could reach her. So I'd know you were listening to her. So I'd do what you wanted."

The gold in his face went very still.

"Yes," said Malachar.

"Did you know it was the worst thing anyone has ever done to me?"

A long, long silence.

I saw the pride come up in him again. Hot and quick. I saw his shoulders begin to straighten and his chin begin to lift, the beginning of a man about to explain why a thing had been necessary. I'd heard him do it on the flagship. You will understand, in time.

And then I saw him look at the cloth hanging between them. The river-colored cloth, half woven, that her mother had stopped weaving the day she was taken and started again two days ago in my house.

His shoulders came down.

"No," he said. "I didn't know. I thought it was a small thing. A few words. I thought—" He stopped. "I've been told tonight that I lean on rooms without knowing it. I think I have been leaning on you since you were twelve. I'm sorry."

* * *

The hall didn't move.

I'm not sure anyone in it had ever expected to hear those two words in that voice. I'm not sure Malachar had expected to say them. He looked, for a moment, almost frightened. As though he'd stepped off the edge of a stair in the dark and found there was one more step than he'd thought.

Iselle looked at him through the threads for a very long time.

"I'm not forgiving you," she said at last. "Not tonight. Maybe not ever. I don't know yet."

"No," said Malachar. "I wouldn't, either."

"But I'm going to remember that you said it. Here. In front of my mother."

"Yes."

"And I'm going to tell you something good now. Because I asked Garrick to tell you, and he did, and you came all this way to hear it from me. So you can carry it home." Her hands opened again, slowly, on her knees. "I'm getting married. In the spring, when the river's high. To Roderic. He's sitting in that chair because he's not allowed to stand up, and he keeps standing up anyway. He's the best person I've ever met. I asked him first. And I'm happy."

She said it in Kethran. Then she said it again in our words, for the room.

I'm happy.

* * *

Malachar turned his head and looked at Roderic.

Roderic looked back.

I'll say this for my brother. He'd taken a knife in the ribs two weeks before, and he was sitting in a chair with a blanket over his knees in front of the man who'd ruled half the world for three hundred years. And he didn't look away. He didn't lean, either. He just sat there with his hands on the arms of the chair and his face very red, and looked back.

"You took a knife," said Malachar. "For her."

"I didn't think about it," said Roderic. "I just stood in front of it."

"And you said no to her. And then yes. And then you stood up."

Roderic went, if possible, redder. "Somebody told you that."

"Your brother did. On my steps." Malachar was quiet for a moment. "He said it as though it were the whole answer to my question. I've been thinking about it for two days. I think it might be."

Roderic didn't know what to say to that. I could see him not knowing. So he said the only thing Roderic ever says when he doesn't know what to say, which is the truth.

"I'd like you at the wedding," he said. "If she wants. It's up to her. But I'd like it."

The hall went silent all over again.

Iselle turned her head and looked at Roderic with an expression I'd never seen on her before. Then she looked back through the cloth at her brother.

"Ask me in the spring," she said.

* * *

He didn't answer straight away.

He sat there, on my flagstones, in front of my sister-to-be and her mother's loom, with a slice of Helena's plum cake by his hand that he couldn't eat. And the light in him did something I hadn't seen before. It softened. Not dimmer. Softer. Like a lamp when someone sets a cloth shade over it.

"I will," he said. "In the spring."

And then, because he'd been sitting still and looking at one person for so long, I think he forgot himself, for just a moment. I think it was the most at ease he'd been in three hundred years. And he lifted his head, and for the first time since he'd come out of the fire, he looked around the room.

He looked at the long tables, at the forty people on the benches. At Grandpa, with his wooden horse. At Helena, with her knife. At my father by the door, and my mother beside him. At Carol, with frost under her folded hands. At me.

His eyes came on down the high table, along the hearth.

And stopped.

* * *

Seraphina was sitting on the bench by the hearth, where she'd been all night. Her hand had come off the stone a long time ago. Our son was in her arms.

He'd been asleep. He'd been asleep since the plum cake, warm and heavy, with his face in her neck. But he wasn't asleep now. He'd woken, I don't know when, and turned his head, and he was looking down the hall at the light by the loom with his eyes very wide and very dark, the way he'd looked at the shuttle going back and forth over his head that morning.

And he'd put out one hand toward it. The way he puts out his hand toward anything he wants. Fingers spread. Reaching.

There was light in his palm.

Not much. A tiny thing. A spark, no bigger than a seed, sitting in the middle of his small open hand like a coal that somebody had breathed on.

Malachar stopped breathing. I don't know if a man made of light can breathe. But I saw him stop.

And Seraphina, without looking down, without moving anything but her free hand, very slowly closed her fingers over our son's.

* * *

From Mary's book, that night. The pages are crowded, and there are two blots, and in one place she's pressed so hard the nib went through:

Saba said: You may come in. As far as the loom. You'll sit on the floor, and say what you came to say to her face, plainly. And when she asks you to go, you'll go. That's what a guest is.

He said he keeps his terms. Saba said that was never the trouble.

He sat on the floor on the other side of the loom. He had to look at Iselle through the cloth.

He is very beautiful. Everyone leaned. Garrick said: Stop that. He said: Stop what? Garrick said: Leaning on the room. He didn't know he did it. He stopped.

Carol said Hello, Malachar.

He tried three times to say it and couldn't. Helena brought him plum cake on a plate. He can't eat it. She said it isn't for eating, it's for having.

He said he listened to Saba because she was the only warm thing he'd heard in three hundred years he hadn't made himself.

Iselle asked if he knew the page was the worst thing anyone ever did to her. He said no. He said sorry.

Iselle said she's not forgiving him. Maybe not ever. But she'll remember he said it.

Iselle said: I'm happy. In Kethran and then in ours.

Roderic asked him to the wedding. Iselle said: Ask me in the spring. He said he would.

Then he looked around the room for the first time.

Then he saw the baby's hand.

And under that, in a big, round, slow hand, every letter made separately, the way you'd write if you'd learned on flour sacks and grocery lists and never had much use for anything else:

Helena, who cooks. I'd like it noted that I cut him a slice of plum cake and he couldn't eat it and I put it down beside him anyway. That he looked at it the whole time he was talking. That I've fed this whole family and half of Westmere and three gods and a dragon, and he's the first one I've ever fed who didn't know what the plate was for. And that it's still there on the floor by the loom, and nobody's to move it.