Chapter 176: Lockdown

The milk didn't come on Wednesday morning.

That was the first thing. Not a messenger from Kethra, not a letter from a frightened king, not a golden light in a fireplace. Milk. Helena came up from the cold room at a quarter past five with the big brown jug empty in one hand and her face set, and put the jug down on the kitchen table in front of me as though it had personally offended her.

"Jos Varley's lad brings the milk," she said. "Every morning for six years. Jos's lad broke his arm on Saturday falling off the hayrick. So Jos sent his nephew." She folded her arms. "The nephew's never been up the hill before."

"Ah," I said.

"He's been standing at the outer gate since four with two churns on a handcart. The gate won't open for him. The Castellan won't speak to him. He's knocking." Helena looked at the empty jug. "I can hear him knocking from here, Garrick. A mile off. It's very polite knocking."

* * *

My father had said: Anyone new comes to me first, at the outer gate, in daylight, and I'll ask them in myself.

He'd meant it. I'd heard him mean it. But I don't think, standing in the great hall at midnight with his hands still shaking from opening them, he'd quite thought about the milk.

I went up to tell him. He was already awake, sitting on the edge of the bed in his shirt, with my mother asleep behind him and his boots in his hands.

"The milk," he said, before I'd opened my mouth.

"Jos Varley's nephew."

"I heard him." He put his boots on. "Fetch a stool. And Mary. And tell Helena to send down bread, because if Jos's nephew has been standing there since four he'll be hungry, and if he's the first, he won't be the last."

* * *

He wasn't the last.

I want to put down how many, because Mary counted, and Mary says if you're going to shut a door on people you should at least know how many you've shut it on.

Jos Varley's nephew, with the milk. A girl from the mill with the flour, because the miller's usual boy had gone to his grandmother's for a wedding. A new under-carter for the coal. Two masons Eleanor had sent for from Orselle to look at the crack in the south solar chimney. A boy with a basket of eggs whom nobody could account for at all, who turned out to be the egg-woman's grandson and had been sent up because the egg-woman's knees were bad in the cold. A courier from the college with a satchel of letters for Caitlin and Roderic and Iselle, who had been riding since midnight and was nearly asleep in the saddle. The new apprentice from the Lantern Street bathhouse, sent with a bill.

Eleven by seven o'clock. Twenty-six by nine. By noon, forty-three.

Every one of them standing outside the outer gate of Greykeep at the bottom of the hill in the cold, knocking. Not one of them had been in before. And the gate stayed shut, and the Castellan, who has known every face that's come up the hill for longer than anyone alive, simply didn't see them.

* * *

I went down with my father at a quarter to six, with a stool under my arm and Mary behind me with her book and Faelan behind her with his laundry ledger, uninvited, and Helena's bread in a basket on Faelan's other arm.

The outer gate at Greykeep is old. Older than the castle, some of it; the bottom stones are from whatever was there before. It's a pair of black oak leaves in an arch of gray stone, with a small door cut into the left leaf for people on foot. Usually it stands open from dawn to dark, and the Castellan watches it the way you'd watch a front door with one eye while you're doing something else.

That morning it was shut, and it felt shut. I don't know how else to say it. The air in front of it was thicker. Like the air in front of a held breath.

Jos Varley's nephew was sitting on one of his churns outside it with his arms around himself. He was about fourteen, sandy and pink-eared, with his uncle's big chin. When he saw us coming down the hill on the inside of the gate, through the bars of the little door, he stood up so fast he nearly knocked the churn over.

"I'm ever so sorry," he said, before anyone could say anything. "I knocked. I didn't know what else to do. Uncle Jos says if the milk's late Helena'll have his ears."

"She might," said my father. "I'd let her, if I were him." He put the stool down just inside the little door, and sat on it, and looked through the bars at the boy. "Good morning. I'm Uriah. I live here. What's your name?"

The boy stared at him.

"You're the king," he said.

"Yes. That as well. What's your name?"

* * *

His name was Dickon Varley. He was from the farm at Ash Bottom, three miles down the river. He wanted, when my father asked him, to deliver the milk and go home and have his breakfast, and he'd quite like to see a dragon one day if it wasn't too much trouble, though he understood if it was.

My father looked at him for a moment. Then he turned his head and spoke to the air, quite quietly.

"Castellan. This is Dickon Varley, Jos's nephew, from Ash Bottom. He's brought the milk. He'd like to come in and go home again and see a dragon one day. I've asked him in. Will you know him, from now on?"

The air in front of the gate changed. I felt it. Like a hand that had been pressed flat against a door turning over, palm up.

The little door swung open.

Dickon Varley stood very still on the other side of it with his mouth open. Then he picked up the handles of his cart and pushed it through, very carefully, as though the ground might not hold him.

On the inside of the gate, where there'd been nothing a moment before, a small square of slate had appeared on the stone, set flush into the arch. On it, in the Castellan's small neat chalk:

Dickon Varley. Ash Bottom. Milk. Dragon, one day.

* * *

That was how it went, all day.

My father sat on his stool just inside the little door, with his back to Greykeep and his face to the hill, and asked. Name. Home. What do you want. Every one of them. The girl from the mill, whose name was Sukey and who wanted to be a miller herself one day, not a miller's girl. The coal carter, who wanted his dinner. Eleanor's masons from Orselle, brothers, who wanted very much to look at the south solar chimney, because they had heard that Eleanor Stonehand had built it herself and that it had a crack, and they were looking forward to telling people about the crack for the rest of their lives.

Mary wrote them all down. Faelan wrote them down too, in his laundry ledger, under a new heading he'd ruled across a clean page in green ink: NEW PEOPLE. Helena's bread went to whoever had been waiting longest.

And after each one, my father turned his head and spoke to the air. I've asked them in. Will you know them?

And each time, the slate in the arch got one line longer.

* * *

I stayed by him until noon. Then I went back up the hill, because I couldn't stop thinking, and my father had told me once that if I was going to think that hard I should do it somewhere I wouldn't frighten the horses.

I went to the east wall. My nook. From up there you can see the whole of Greykeep laid out below you, the towers and the courts and the roofs of the lower town beyond the walls, and the river, and the road coming up the hill to the outer gate a mile off. And I sat there and looked at it.

All the doors were shut.

I'd known that. I'd heard them shut at midnight. But in the daylight you could see it. The stable arch, that always stands open so the horses can look out. The garden door in the little kitchen, with the pear tree outside it, that Helena props open with a flatiron so the blackbird can come in. The lower hall gates. The gate to the Lyradon arch. All of them shut, and the whole of Greykeep sitting on its hill in the cold, shut up tight, like—

Like a fist.

I'd thought it the night before, on the wall with Seraphina, and put it away. I took it out again now and looked at it in the light.

A house with every door shut, that only lets in the people it's already holding, and holds them, and doesn't let anything new come near. Where the price of bread never changes. Where nobody ever leaves.

Corvane had said it. Nobody starved. Nobody left. Nobody asked. We thought that was peace.

* * *

My father came up at two. He didn't say anything. He just climbed the east stair, slowly, the way he does now when he's tired, and sat down in my nook beside me, and looked out at what I was looking at.

"Fifty-eight," he said after a while. "So far. Mary's counting."

"I know."

"The Lyradon arch is shut. Mirelle's bakers came through at ten with the bread for Thursday and couldn't get in. They've never been through this way; it's always been the old ones. They waited an hour and went back. Wynn came through after them on his own and knocked at the arch and asked to speak to me, and the Castellan let him in because Wynn's been in a hundred times, and he gave me a note from Mirelle." He took it out of his shirt. "Dear Uriah. Is everyone all right. Love, M. P.S. The bread is on the other side of the arch. It will be stale by Friday. That is your problem."

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

"The college courier got in," said my father. "Caitlin has her letters. There are three more couriers at the gate now from three different kingdoms who heard about last night, gods know how, and want to know what's happening. They've written it down very formally." He sighed. "I've told them tomorrow. They don't like it."

He looked at me.

"Go on," he said. "Say it. You've been sitting up here for two hours not saying it."

* * *

"We're doing what he does," I said.

My father didn't answer straight away.

"Look at it," I said. "Every door shut. Nobody new. Only the ones we already hold. If you're not in, you're out, and you stand in the cold and knock until someone decides you're worth opening for." I pointed down at the road. "That's what Kethra is. That's what Corvane said it was like. Bread at the same price for two hundred years and nobody ever leaving. We've done it to ourselves in one night."

"Have we?" said my father.

"Haven't we?"

He was quiet for a long moment, looking down the hill at the gate.

"What did he do," said my father, "when someone knocked?"

I opened my mouth. Then I shut it.

"He didn't let them knock," said my father. "Did he. That's the whole of it. That's what Iselle's afraid of, still. A knock. Because in Kethra nobody knocks. The doors are shut or they're open, and nobody asks which, because the asking would be the insult." He turned his head and looked at me. "We've shut the doors. Yes. I did that. I'd do it again tonight; there's a man on a step looking north with his hands closed and I won't have him in my house by a road I can't see. But I'm sitting at the gate. Every day. And anyone who knocks gets asked."

"And if they say something you don't like?"

"Then I'll say no," said my father. "Properly. To their face. You taught a three-hundred-year-old emperor that last night, on my floor. It's the other half of asking." He looked back down the hill. "A fist doesn't have a door in it, Garrick. That's the difference. We've got a door. It's shut, and there's an old man on a stool behind it. But it's a door."

* * *

I thought about that for a long time after he'd gone back down.

He was right. I knew he was right. But I'd been sitting up there for two hours looking at it, and I'd seen something else as well, and I hadn't said it, because I wasn't sure.

It was this. My father had sat on a stool at the gate since a quarter to six that morning. He'd asked fifty-eight people their names. He'd be there again tomorrow, and the day after, and every day until he decided it was safe to open the gates again, and the couriers from the kingdoms would keep coming, more of them every day, and he'd sit there and ask every one of them.

He was the door.

And he was getting tired. I'd watched him climb the stair.

* * *

The trouble came after dark. I'd half known it would.

It was a little after nine. I was in the little kitchen with Seraphina and our son and Helena, and the bread for tomorrow rising under its cloths on the table, when the Castellan's lamp by the garden door turned itself up very bright, very suddenly, and the chalk on the slate beside it wrote:

Outer gate. Someone new. I do not know him. He is not knocking. He is lying down.

I was out of the door before I'd finished reading it.

* * *

It was a wolf.

I saw him from fifty yards off, coming down the hill at a run in the dark with a lantern. A big rangy gray shape lying full length on the frozen road outside the little door, with his muzzle on his forepaws and his flanks going in and out like bellows. He'd run a long way. You could see it. There was frost in his coat, and blood on one of his forefeet where the road had cut it, and his tongue was out.

He lifted his head when he heard me coming. His eyes were yellow in the lantern light. Young. Very young.

He looked at me through the bars of the little door.

And then he changed. I'd seen Grenna's people do it before, on the North Sands, but never so close and never so tired. It wasn't quick. It was like watching someone take off a heavy coat in the cold, one arm at a time. When it was done there was a boy lying on the road where the wolf had been, about sixteen, long and thin and brown, with a shock of gray hair and bare feet bleeding on the frozen road, wearing nothing but a pair of old canvas trousers and a gray cloak pinned at the throat with a bone pin.

He got up on one elbow.

"Garrick Grey," he said. He was panting. "I'm Grenna's great-grandson. She sent me. I've got a message." He looked at the shut gate, and the thick held air in front of it, and something went across his young face that I recognized, because I'd seen it on Dickon Varley at a quarter to six that morning. "It won't open. I knocked with my head. Then I didn't have anything left to knock with, so I lay down."

* * *

My father had said: in daylight.

He'd said it for a reason. I knew the reason. A man made of light had come into our house by the fire at nine o'clock at night, and you can't see a stranger's face properly in the dark. You can't see if they're a stranger at all.

It was nine o'clock at night. And there was a boy on the road with bleeding feet, and frost in his hair, who said he was Grenna's great-grandson, whom I had never seen before in my life.

I could have gone up and woken my father. He'd been on his stool since a quarter to six. He'd only gone to bed an hour ago. I'd watched him climb the stair.

I could have asked the Castellan to let him in on my word. I think it would have, if I'd asked hard enough. But my father had made the rule, and he'd made it last night with his hands shaking, and the first time it got hard was not the time for me to go around it.

* * *

"What's your name?" I said.

The boy blinked at me through the bars.

"Garth," he said.

"Where's home, Garth?"

"The marshes. Behind Westmere. The packs." He was shivering now that he'd stopped running. "I'm Ulla's cousin. Her father's sister's boy. I've never been this far inland before. I came by the river road. Grenna said run, so I ran."

"What do you want?"

"To give you the message," said Garth. "And then to lie down somewhere that isn't a road."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"I can't let you in," I said. "Not tonight. My father's rule. Anyone new comes in by daylight, and he asks them himself. It isn't mine to break." I put the lantern down on the ground. "But I can come out."

* * *

The little door in the outer gate opens from the inside without anyone's leave, if you live there. It always has.

I went out through it, and shut it behind me, and stood on the frozen road on the outside of my own gate in the dark. The air on that side was ordinary. Cold. It smelled of frost and the river and wet wolf.

I took off my coat and put it around Garth's shoulders. Then I sat down beside him on the road with my back against the gate, the way Roderic sat outside Iselle's door at the college once, for three hours, so she'd know there was someone there.

"Give me the message," I said. "And then I'll sit with you until it's light, and my father will come down, and he'll ask you in properly. And you can lie down in the kitchen by the stove. Helena will put something on your feet that stings."

Garth looked at me sideways out of his yellow eyes for a long time.

"Grenna said you'd do something like that," he said.

* * *

The message was this.

The nights were long enough. Grenna had smelled it in the wind on Monday, the night my father came down to the North Sands to ask her. The packs were ready. Forty wolves, the oldest and the steadiest and the ones with the best noses, and Grenna herself at the front of them.

But Kethra is across the sea. Wolves can swim a river. They can't swim to Kethra. And the bee villages on the Coln are three days inland from the nearest harbor, on foot, through country full of priests.

"She says you fold," said Garth. "She says you folded into Cardle by borrowing it off a captain. She says there's a boy at Westmere who keeps bees, who comes from the villages we want." He shivered under my coat. "She says, would you ask him. If he'd let you borrow it. His home. So you could carry us there."

I sat very still on the frozen road.

"And she says," said Garth, "she'd like to be asked too. Properly. By the one who'll be carrying us. Not by your father. By you. She says your father asked her for the wolves. But you're the one who'll take us across. So she'd like you to ask her for the going."

* * *

I didn't answer for a long time.

Overhead the stars were very bright. Down the hill, the river was making the sound it makes in the cold, low and steady. Behind me, through the oak of the gate, I could feel Greykeep holding its breath. And beside me, under my coat, a boy who'd run from the marshes behind Westmere to my door on bare feet because his great-grandmother said run.

"When?" I said.

"Six nights," said Garth. "Grenna says. The priests' carts go to the Coln villages after the first hard frost, for the next sons. She smelled the frost coming too. Six nights, and then it'll be on the ground over there." He looked at me. "She says before the carts. She says knock first."

I thought about Teague Pelham, at Greykeep's kitchen table on Monday morning, with two bowls of porridge in front of him. I want my brother not to be taken.

I thought about Tobyn Pelham, fourteen, whom I had never met, in a house in the bee villages on the Coln with his father, keeping bees, waiting for the priests' cart and the first hard frost.

"Tell her yes," I said. "No. Don't tell her. I'll tell her. Tomorrow. Myself. On the North Sands, to her face." I looked at Garth. "But I'll ask Teague first. It's his home. It's his to lend."

Garth nodded slowly.

"She said you'd say that too," he said.

* * *

We sat there until dawn.

It was a long time. It was very cold. Garth fell asleep after midnight against my shoulder, under my coat, with his bleeding feet tucked up under him and his gray hair full of frost. I didn't sleep. I watched the stars wheel over and thought about bees.

At some point, I don't know when, the little door in the gate behind me opened very quietly, and Helena came out with a blanket and a hot brick wrapped in flannel and a cup of tea, and put the blanket over both of us and the brick under Garth's feet and the tea in my hands, and went back in without a word.

At some point after that, Seraphina came out and sat down on my other side. She didn't say anything either. She just put her hand flat on the frozen road between us, and after a while the road under us wasn't frozen anymore. It was warm. Like a hearthstone.

And a little before six, when the sky over the forest was just beginning to go gray, I heard the little door open again behind me, and slow footsteps on the stone, and the scrape of a stool being set down.

"Good morning," said my father, through the bars. His voice was rough with sleep. "Helena says there's a wolf on my doorstep. And my son. And my son's wife. Have you been out there all night?"

"Yes."

"You could have woken me."

"It was your rule," I said. "I didn't want to go around it. So I went out instead."

My father was quiet for a moment.

"That's the right answer," he said. "I'm not sure I'd have thought of it." Then, more gently, to the boy waking up blinking against my shoulder: "Good morning. I'm Uriah. I live here. What's your name?"

* * *

From Mary's book, Wednesday and Thursday. Mary has ruled a line across the page between them, very straight:

Wednesday. The milk didn't come. Jos Varley's nephew, Dickon, of Ash Bottom, knocked at the outer gate from four o'clock. Uriah sat on a stool inside the little door from a quarter to six and asked him in. The Castellan made a slate. Dickon would like to see a dragon one day.

Fifty-eight new people by dark. Uriah asked every one. Faelan has a new page called NEW PEOPLE.

Mirelle's bakers couldn't get through the Lyradon arch. Mirelle says the bread is Uriah's problem.

Three couriers from three kingdoms. Uriah said tomorrow. They don't like it.

Garrick said: We're doing what he does. Uriah said: A fist doesn't have a door in it. We've got a door. It's shut, and there's an old man on a stool behind it. But it's a door.

Nine o'clock. A wolf lay down at the outer gate. Garth, Grenna's great-grandson. He knocked with his head until he couldn't.

Garrick didn't let him in. Garrick went out. He sat with him on the road all night under his coat.

Grenna says six nights. Before the carts. Knock first. She would like to be asked for the going, by the one who'll carry them.

Thursday. Uriah came down at six and asked Garth in. Helena put something on his feet that stings.

And under that, in a hand that isn't a hand at all, because the guest who signed the book that morning had never learned to write, but had asked to sign it anyway: the print of a long narrow foot, in ink, pressed down hard, with five toes and the faint mark of a claw at the end of each one where the change hadn't quite finished going back. And beside it, in Mary's own hand, small and careful, because he'd asked her to write it for him and she'd said she would if he told her the words exactly:

Garth, of the packs, the marshes behind Westmere. He'd like it noted that he ran all the way. That the gate wouldn't open, and he understood why, and wasn't angry. That Garrick Grey came out instead of letting him in, and sat on the road all night, and didn't sleep. And that his feet hurt very much this morning and Helena says that means they're getting better.