Chapter 177: Strain

Teague came up the hill at seven on Thursday morning with the egg-woman's grandson, the two of them sharing the basket, and found a wolf asleep under the kitchen table.

Garth had changed back in the night, after Helena put the stinging stuff on his feet. He said it was easier to sleep as a wolf; the floor was less hard. He lay stretched along the warm flagstones in front of the stove with his bandaged forepaws crossed and his nose under the table, and when Teague came in he opened one yellow eye, looked at him, and closed it again.

Teague stood in the doorway with the egg basket for a long moment.

"There's a wolf," he said.

"Grenna's great-grandson," I said. "He ran from the marshes last night. Sit down. I need to ask you something."

Teague sat down, very carefully, on the bench as far from the stove as it went. Helena put porridge in front of him. He looked at it. He looked at me.

"It's about home," he said. "Isn't it."

* * *

I told him.

I told him the way I'd told Corvane, plainly, leaving nothing out. Grenna's forty wolves. Six nights, five now. The first hard frost and the priests' carts after it, going village to village along the Coln for the next sons. Knock first. Grenna wanting to go before the carts, to the doors my father had asked her to knock on, to tell the families what was coming and ask what they wanted done.

And the sea in the way. And three days of priest country on the other side of it. And me, who'd never been to the Coln in my life, and couldn't fold to a place I'd never stood.

"So you'd borrow it," said Teague slowly. "Off me. Like you did off the captain."

"Yes. If you'll lend it. You can say no."

He didn't answer for a long time. He sat with his big raw farmer's hands flat on either side of his porridge bowl and looked at them.

"It's not much of a place," he said at last. "Our village. Nine houses and the mill and the hives up the bank. You'd not think it was worth borrowing."

"It's yours," I said. "That's what makes it worth it."

* * *

Teague looked at me then, for a long moment, with his face going slowly red the way it always does.

"Can I come?" he said.

I'd known he'd ask. I'd half hoped he wouldn't.

"It's not safe."

"No. I know." He swallowed. "But they're my doors. Grenna's going to knock on them. My father's going to open one, in the dark, and there's going to be a wolf on the step." His voice cracked. "He'll have his axe, Garrick. He keeps it by the door for foxes. If there's a wolf on the step at night he'll come out swinging, and he'll not stop to be asked anything. Unless there's somebody with the wolf he knows."

I hadn't thought of that.

I should have. I'd been thinking about folds and frost and priests' carts and I hadn't thought for one moment about what it's like to be a beekeeper on the Coln opening your door at midnight with an axe in your hand and finding forty wolves in the lane.

"Boots," I said.

Teague let out a breath. Then he picked up his spoon.

"I'll lend it you," he said. "Home. When it's time. Take."

* * *

I went down to the gate after that, because my father was there, and because I'd been thinking about him all night on the road outside it.

He was on his stool. He'd been on it since six. There was a cup of tea on the stone beside him that had gone cold and a plate with a heel of bread on it, and Mary on a second stool with her book, and Faelan on the ground with his ledger. And outside the little door, through the bars, a line.

Not a long one, yet. But a line.

The miller's girl, Sukey, with today's flour, who'd been in yesterday and walked straight through the little door without stopping, grinning, as though she'd been let into a secret. Dickon Varley with the milk, the same. They didn't need asking anymore. The slate in the arch knew them.

But behind them, waiting, were the couriers.

* * *

There were five of them now. Three from yesterday and two more who'd come up the river road in the night.

I knew some of the badges. The Orselle merchants' guild, a blue glass bead on a cord. The bridge-and-river of Velden, sewn on a sleeve. A courier in the gray and silver of Belleren, which made me smile despite everything, because Belleren is Corvin's country, Queen Nerisse's, the ones who sent the Kethran gold back by barge with a note saying No, thank you. Our roads are fine.

And two I didn't know at first. A thin man in brown with the oak-and-plough of Tirrowmarch. And a woman in dark red, standing a little apart from the others, with a badge I had to look at twice before I placed it.

Amberlay.

I hadn't seen Amberlay's colors at Greykeep in a long time. Not since the autumn, when the Kethran coin came, and Amberlay kept its chest, and stopped answering Queen Nerisse's letters.

* * *

My father asked them one at a time, the way he'd asked Dickon Varley. Name. Home. What do you want.

The Orselle courier was a young woman called Juniper Ashery, with a merchant's sharp eyes and salt in her hair. What she wanted, she said, very politely and very fast, was to know when the gates under Greykeep would open again. Because Orselle and Greymere share an arch in the lower hall, and half of Orselle's glass and all of its lamp oil comes through that arch to Havenreach and the river, and the arch had been shut since Tuesday midnight, and there were forty crates of blue glass sitting in a warehouse on the Orselle side going nowhere, and the guild would like very much to know whose problem that was.

"Mine," said my father.

She blinked. I think she'd expected an argument.

"It's mine," he said again. "I shut it. I had reasons; I'll tell you them if you want, but they won't move your glass. I'm sorry about the glass." He looked at her. "What would you like me to do?"

Juniper Ashery opened her mouth. Then she shut it.

"Nobody's ever asked me that," she said. "I'm a courier. I carry the complaint. I don't usually get asked what I'd like."

"You're the one standing at my gate," said my father. "So I'm asking you."

* * *

The Velden courier wanted to know the same thing, more kindly. Velden's new bridge, the seven-arched one built with Kethran gold, had made Velden a market town in a year; the bridge needed the Greykeep gates to be worth anything; and Velden's king, who had once said that Greykeep sent advice for twenty years and a Kethran sent a bridge, wanted to say, through his courier, that he'd been wrong about that, and also that he'd like the gates open.

Tirrowmarch's courier wanted to know about the lie.

"The lie at the empty rock," he said, reading from a paper in a flat careful voice. "Blackstack. My king asks whether it is true that Greykeep made the Kethran fleet see a thing that was not there. He asks whether a house that will lie to an enemy will lie to a friend. He asks to be told plainly." He folded the paper. "That's the message. I'm sorry, sir. He's my king."

"Don't be sorry," said my father. "It's a fair question." He thought for a moment. "Tell him yes. We did. Loki did, for us, because I asked him to, to save Westmere. And tell him a house that lies to an enemy is a house that's been driven to it, and that he should come and ask me to my face if he wants to know whether I'd lie to him. I'll be on this stool."

The Belleren courier, an old man with a gray beard who'd clearly been doing this for longer than I'd been alive, wanted nothing at all except to deliver a basket of Belleren pears for Melody and a letter from Corvin, and to say that Queen Nerisse sent her regards and would like to know if anyone at Greykeep needed anything, and that Belleren's roads were still fine.

My father laughed for the first time that day.

* * *

The Amberlay courier was last.

She waited until all the others had been asked. She didn't push forward. She stood a little apart, in her dark red, with her hands folded in front of her and her face perfectly still, and when my father finally turned his stool to face her, she didn't come any closer to the bars.

"Name?" said my father.

"Odile," said the woman. "Of Amberlay. Courier to the council."

"What do you want, Odile?"

"I don't want anything," she said. "I carry a question. The council's, not mine." She took a paper out of her sleeve, but she didn't read from it; she'd clearly learned it by heart. "On Sunday last, Greykeep went into Kethra. Into Cardle, under the golden city. The war that had been at Westmere and on Harl is now on Kethran soil. The council of Amberlay asks: who was asked?"

* * *

My father didn't answer straight away.

I watched him. I watched him take the question in, and turn it over, and find that it was a good one. He's never been able to pretend a question isn't good when it is. It's one of the things I love about him and one of the things that makes him a very bad king, by most people's measure.

"Go on," he said. "There's more."

"Amberlay lost half its men in the first war," said Odile. "In your war, King Uriah, against the old powers. Amberlay was asked then. We came. We were thanked. We buried them. We were promised it would not happen again in our lifetimes." She didn't look at the paper. She didn't need to. "Now there is a second war, and it began on a beach in Kethra on a Sunday morning, and Amberlay heard of it from a fish-seller. The council asks: whose war is this? And when did Greykeep ask its friends whether they wished to be in it?"

The line at the gate had gone very quiet. Juniper Ashery was looking at her shoes. The Belleren courier had put down his basket of pears.

My father opened his mouth.

"It's mine," I said.

* * *

Everyone turned.

I'd been standing behind my father's stool, in the shadow of the arch, where I'd been since I came down. I stepped forward now into the light from the little door, so Odile could see me through the bars.

"I'm Garrick Grey," I said. "It's my war. Or it's mine that it started. I went into Cardle on Sunday morning. My father told me if I went, it would start, and I said it already had, and I went." I looked at her. "Nobody asked Amberlay. Nobody asked anybody. There were sixty-one farm boys tied in nets at the low-water line with the tide coming in, and I had about two hours, and I spent them borrowing a town off a prisoner and asking my father to hold the sea. I didn't spend any of them asking Amberlay."

Odile's face didn't change. But her folded hands did, a little.

"So you admit it," she said.

"Yes," I said. "You're right. I didn't ask you. I'd do the same again tomorrow, with the same two hours. But you're right that I didn't ask." I took a breath. "So I'm asking now. Late. I'm sorry it's late. What does Amberlay want?"

* * *

Odile looked at me through the bars for a long time.

I knew what she was seeing. A man not much older than her, with one eye dark, who'd just said a thing that kings don't usually say at their own gates in front of five other kingdoms' couriers.

"The council didn't give me an answer to that," she said at last, slowly. "It didn't think you'd ask."

"What do you think it would say?"

She was quiet for a moment longer.

"To be left out of it," said Odile. "I think Amberlay would like very much to be left out of it." She looked down at her folded hands. "We have nine hundred widows still, from the first war. We've just got the barley back. A man came last autumn and left a chest of gold in the forecourt and didn't ask for anything, and the council spent it on seed and roofs and a school, and nobody came back for it, and nobody's asked for anything since." She looked up. "Amberlay would like to be left alone. By you. By Kethra. By all of it."

"Has Kethra asked you for anything?" said my father, very quietly. "Since the gold?"

Odile's face closed.

"I'm a courier, sir," she said. "I carry the council's questions. I don't carry its letters."

* * *

My father looked at her for a long, long time.

Then he nodded slowly, as though she'd answered something he'd already known.

"Thank you, Odile," he said. "Tell your council this, from me. Tell them my son's right. He didn't ask, and he should have, and he's sorry it's late. Tell them I'm asking now, through you, what they want, and that you think it's to be left out of it, and that if that's what they want, then I'll leave them out of it." He paused. "And tell them that a chest of gold with no asking in it is the most expensive thing in the world. Queen Nerisse said that. Tell them I'd like to know, when they're ready to tell me, what it's costing them."

Odile looked at him for a moment.

"I'll tell them," she said.

She turned and walked away down the hill without another word. She didn't come in. She hadn't asked to.

* * *

The others came in after that, one at a time. Juniper Ashery, who wanted her glass moved. The Velden courier, who wanted his bridge to be worth something. The Tirrowmarch man, who wanted to go home and tell his king what the king of Greykeep had said about the lie, and who looked as though he wasn't sure his king would believe him. The Belleren courier with his pears.

My father asked each of them in. The slate in the arch got five lines longer.

Then he sat on his stool and looked at nothing for a while.

"That's a court wavering," he said, to nobody in particular.

"Amberlay?"

"Amberlay." He picked up the cold tea and looked at it and put it down again. "They've had nothing asked of them since the gold. Nothing at all. And they've stopped answering Nerisse. And now they want to be left out." He shook his head. "When you want to be left out of a war that's already started, Garrick, it's usually because somebody's offered to leave you out of it. For a price. And you haven't decided yet whether to pay."

* * *

Eleanor came down to the gate at noon, with salt still in her hair from Harl and a roll of paper under her arm and Aldren behind her carrying a second one.

"The arches," she said, before anyone could ask. "I heard. Orselle's glass. Velden's bridge. Mirelle's bread." She unrolled the paper across my father's knees, on top of his cold tea. It was her old plan of the lower hall, the one with the six gate arches drawn down one side of the long vault, in her own hand, with notes all down the margins in Aldren's. "I can't open them. You said nobody new through any door, and those arches are doors, and I'm not going to argue with you about it today."

"Thank you," said my father.

"Don't thank me yet." She put her finger on the plan. "I can't open them. But I can move them."

My father looked at her.

"The far ends stay where they are," said Eleanor. "Lyradon, Orselle, Concordia, wherever. But the near ends come out of Greykeep. Out of the lower hall. Out through the wall." She ran her finger down from the lower hall, under the castle, down the hill, all the way to the river. "To the quay. The Lantern and Oar. Outside your walls. Outside your gate. Anyone new can come through from Orselle with forty crates of blue glass and step out on the quay at Havenreach and never set foot in Greykeep at all."

* * *

It was so simple I laughed out loud.

"Can you do that?" said my father.

"No," said Eleanor. "Not on my own. It's six arches and a mile of hill and the river, and I'd have to unpin every one and carry the near end down under the ground and re-pin it in new stone without letting the far end come loose." She looked sideways at Aldren. "He says I'd rush it."

"She'd rush it," said Aldren. "She'd have the Lyradon arch through by Saturday and the Orselle one would come out in the river."

"Then you'll do it together," said my father.

Eleanor and Aldren looked at each other.

"A week," said Aldren. "If she waits for the mortar."

"Five days," said Eleanor.

"A week."

"Six days," said Eleanor, "and I'll wait for the mortar on two of them, and you'll stop saying so."

Aldren's mouth twitched. "Six days. And I'll stop saying so on Tuesday."

* * *

My mother came down to the gate at three.

She didn't say anything at first. She just came through the little door and stood beside my father's stool with her healer's apron on and her hands in her pockets, and looked at him.

He'd been there since six. He'd asked sixty-one people their names since then; Mary had counted. He'd taken five couriers from five kingdoms, and one of them had asked him a question he couldn't answer properly and had walked away down the hill. He'd eaten the heel of a loaf and drunk half a cup of cold tea. And there were two more people in the line outside, and the light was beginning to go.

"Uriah," said my mother.

"I'm all right."

"You're not," said my mother. "You're gray. Your hands are cold; I can see it from here. You've been sitting in a draft on a stone for nine hours asking strangers what they want and you haven't once asked yourself." She took one hand out of her pocket. "I'm asking you now. What do you want?"

My father looked up at her.

"To keep the house safe," he said.

"That's what you're doing. I asked what you want."

He was quiet for a long time.

"To sit down somewhere that isn't a stool," he said at last. "And to let somebody else ask for a bit." He looked at me. "But I said I'd ask them myself. Anyone new. It's my rule."

* * *

"Then change it," I said.

He looked at me.

"Not the rule," I said. "Just the myself. You made the rule so nobody gets into this house by a road you can't see. That's the point of it. That's what matters." I crouched down beside the stool so I was looking up at him. "Ask the Castellan if it'll know the people I ask in. Or Mother. Or Carol. Or Mary, she's asked everyone their names for years; she's better at it than any of us. We all ask the same three questions. We all mean them. You don't have to be the only door."

My father looked at me for a long time.

"You sat on the road all night," he said, "rather than ask the Castellan to let one wolf in on your word."

"Yes. Because it was your rule, and you hadn't changed it. I'm asking you to change it now." I held out my hand to him. Open. "You can say no."

He looked at my hand. Then at my mother. Then he laughed, a short tired sound, and put his own hand in mine, and let me pull him up off the stool.

"Castellan," he said, to the air. "My son's going to sit here for a while. He asks the same questions I do. Will you know the ones he asks in?"

A pause.

Yes, said the slate in the arch. And then, after a moment, in smaller letters: Thank you. I was worried about you too.

* * *

I sat on the stool until dark. Two more people: a carter's widow from the lower town come to ask about work in the laundry, and a boy with a letter for Roderic from the college that turned out to be from Master Ashby and to contain only the words Stay in bed.

Then I folded to the North Sands.

I'm allowed to leave. The rule is about who comes in.

* * *

Grenna was waiting for me at the edge of the dune grass, where the phoenixes roost, in her long gray cloak, leaning on her blackthorn stick. The old wide scar around her throat was white in the dusk. Behind her, in the grass, I could see eyes. A great many eyes. Yellow, all of them, very still.

"Garrick Grey," she said. "Garth made it."

"He made it. He's asleep under Helena's table. His feet are better."

"I know," said Grenna. "I can smell your kitchen on you. Plum cake." She tilted her head. "You sat on the road with him."

"Yes."

"He told the pack. By wind, last night." Her very long teeth showed, briefly. "You'll have a great many friends among the young ones now. They think sitting on a road all night with a wolf is the finest thing a king's son can do. I didn't tell them it's mostly just cold."

* * *

I stood in front of her on the sand, the way you stand in front of someone you're about to ask for something that matters.

"Grenna," I said. "Mother of the packs. I'm Garrick Grey, of Greykeep, and I'm going to carry you across the sea to the bee villages on the Coln, if you'll let me. In five nights. With forty of yours, and Teague Pelham, who keeps bees there and has lent me his home. To knock on the doors before the priests' carts come. And ask the families what they want." I took a breath. "It isn't safe. It's priest country, and it's a long way from the sea, and I can't promise I'll get everyone home. You can say no."

Grenna looked at me for a long time in the dusk. Behind her the yellow eyes in the grass didn't move.

"Your father asked me for the wolves," she said. "On Monday. And I said yes."

"I know."

"But he couldn't carry us. You can. So I wanted to hear it from the one with his hands on the going." She leaned on her stick. "And you've said it properly. Name, and what, and where, and that it isn't safe, and that I can say no." Her teeth showed again. "That's more than anyone said to me the last time I went to war. The last time, somebody put a collar on my neck and pointed."

She lifted her free hand and touched, briefly, the old white scar around her throat.

"Yes," said Grenna. "I'll go. We'll all go. Five nights. Knock first."

* * *

From Mary's book, Thursday:

Teague says it's not much of a place. Nine houses and the mill and the hives up the bank. Garrick said: It's yours. That's what makes it worth it. Teague said: Take. He's coming. His father keeps an axe by the door for foxes.

Five couriers at the gate. Orselle wants her glass moved. Velden wants his bridge to be worth something. Tirrowmarch asked about the lie. Uriah said: Tell him yes. Belleren brought pears for Melody and says their roads are still fine.

Amberlay asked: Who was asked? Garrick said: It's mine. I didn't ask you. I'm asking now. What does Amberlay want? Odile said: To be left out of it.

Uriah asked if Kethra had asked Amberlay for anything since the gold. Odile said she doesn't carry the council's letters. Uriah says that's a court wavering.

Eleanor and Aldren are moving the gate arches down to the quay. Six days. Aldren will stop saying so on Tuesday.

Evelyn asked Uriah what he wants. He said: To let somebody else ask for a bit. Garrick asked the Castellan. The Castellan said yes. And: I was worried about you too.

Master Ashby wrote to Roderic: Stay in bed.

Grenna said yes. Five nights. Knock first.

And under that, in a quick, sharp, slanting merchant's hand, with all the figures in the margin squared off neatly as though for an account:

Juniper Ashery, courier to the merchants' guild of Orselle. I'd like it noted that I came up this hill to complain about forty crates of blue glass. That the king said it was his problem before I'd finished. That he asked me what I'd like him to do, and I didn't know, because nobody's asked me that in nine years of carrying other people's complaints. That I've thought about it all the way down the hill. And that what I'd like is to come back in six days and see the arch come out on the quay, because I've never seen a door moved, and I'd like to be able to say I was there.