Chapter 181: Knock First

Monday was quiet. So was Tuesday, until dark.

I don't mean nothing happened. Things happened. Eleanor and Aldren brought the Lyradon arch out on the quay at Havenreach on Monday afternoon, the first of the six, two days before they'd promised, and Queen Mirelle's bakers came through it with Thursday's bread a week late and sold it off the barrow at the Lantern and Oar for half price, stale, to a queue that went up the hill. Odile wrote from Amberlay to say the school door had new hinges. Garth went home to the marshes on his healed feet, and the young wolves of the packs, Grenna said, were insufferable about it. The milk came, and the flour, and the eggs.

But it was quiet the way the air is quiet before snow. Everyone felt it. Helena baked twice as much bread as we needed and didn't say why. My mother counted the bandages in the infirmary three times. Carol sat in the north tower with the window open and her hands in her lap and frost growing on the sill.

And in Cardle, the copper phoenix said, a man sat on the fourth step of the palace with his hands closed on his knees, and looked north, and didn't move.

* * *

On Tuesday at dusk I went down to the North Sands.

The pack was waiting in the dune grass. Forty of them. I'd seen Grenna's people before, by daylight, as men and women, and I'd seen them as wolves at night running the long shore between Westmere and the marshes. I'd never seen forty of them sitting still in the dusk in rows, waiting, with their yellow eyes all turned the same way.

Grenna was at the front, in her gray cloak, with her stick. She'd stay as she was for the crossing, she said. Old bones fold better on two legs.

Teague was beside her, in his Westmere boots a size too big, with a lantern he hadn't lit and his face white.

And beside Teague, which I had not expected, was my father.

* * *

"No," I said.

"Yes," said my father.

"You're on the gate."

"Your mother's on the gate. And Mary. And Carol, if anyone new comes after dark and needs frightening." He had his old coat on, the one from the hook by the stair, and his hands in the pockets. "I asked Grenna for the wolves, Garrick. On Monday last, on this sand. You're carrying them. But I asked." He looked at the forty pairs of yellow eyes in the grass. "I'm not going to send them into priest country and sit at home on a stool."

"It's not safe."

"No," agreed my father. "That's why I'm coming."

Grenna laughed, a short dry bark that was more wolf than woman.

"Let him come, Garrick Grey," she said. "He stood beside me once before, when I had a collar on and he didn't. I'd like to see what he's like when neither of us has."

* * *

I turned to Teague.

He was holding his unlit lantern in both hands, very tightly. His big raw knuckles were white.

"Teague Pelham," I said. "Of the bee villages on the Coln. It's time. Will you lend me your home?"

He looked at me. Then he set the lantern down on the sand, carefully, and held out his hand.

"Take," he said.

* * *

It was smaller than Corvane's.

That's the first thing I noticed. Corvane's Cardle had come into me enormous: thirty-one years of streets, a whole town, a whole city on a hill above it. Teague's home was nine houses. A lane. A mill with a slow wheel on a brown river. A bank above the mill with the hives on it, in a row, under little straw hats. A kitchen with a low beam you had to duck under and a chair by the fire with the stuffing coming out of one arm, where his father sat in the evenings. A step outside the door, worn in the middle. An axe in the corner behind it.

And the smell. Honey and wax and woodsmoke and wet straw. The smell of the bee villages, that Teague had carried with him onto a Kethran ship and across the sea and into the net lofts at Westmere and up the hill to my father's kitchen, without knowing he still had it.

"It's not much," said Teague, very low.

"It's everything," I said. "Hold on."

* * *

Seven folds, seven at a time, and the last with Grenna and Teague and my father.

We came out on the lane in the dark behind the mill, exactly where Teague's memory put us, by the wall where he used to sit as a boy and throw sticks in the race. It was very cold. Much colder than the North Sands. The sky was clear and enormous and full of stars, and there was a smell in the air I knew from the hills above Greykeep: the smell of frost coming.

"Tonight," said Grenna, lifting her face. "After midnight. Before dawn." She looked at the forty wolves in the lane, gray shapes in the starlight. "The carts come the morning after the first hard frost. That's tomorrow. So we knock tonight."

She turned to them.

"Eleven villages along this river," she said. "Two to each, and three to the big ones. You know the houses. You've smelled them since the summer, the ones that lost sons and the ones with sons left. Go to the doors with sons left. Knock. Sit on the step. When the door opens, change, and ask. Name, and home, and want." She paused. "And tell them the truth. That the carts come tomorrow. That they can come north with us tonight, or stay. That nobody will make them. That either is theirs." Her yellow eyes went along the rows. "And if they come out with an axe, sit still and let them. Nobody bites. Not tonight. Not one of you. Knock first."

The wolves went.

They went the way water goes through a gap in a wall. All at once and without a sound, up the lane and over the fields and along the dark river in every direction, gray shapes and then nothing, and the lane was empty except for an old woman with a stick, a farm boy with a lantern, and two Greys.

"And us?" said my father.

Grenna looked at Teague.

"This one," she said, "is his."

* * *

Teague's father's house was the last on the lane, by the hives.

There was a light in the window. Low. A lamp turned down, the way you leave one for someone who might come home late. Teague stopped in the lane outside it and stood looking at it for so long that I thought he wasn't going to move at all.

"He leaves it lit," he said. "Every night. Since I went. Tobyn wrote me that. In a letter they read out to us on the ship, before they took the letters away." His voice cracked. "He leaves it lit in case."

"Go on," said my father quietly.

Teague went up the path. He didn't knock straight away. He stood on the worn step with his lantern in his hand, unlit, and looked at the door.

Then Grenna went past him.

She didn't change. She didn't need to. She went up onto the step beside him, a small old woman in a gray cloak, and lifted her blackthorn stick, and knocked on the door with the end of it. Three times. Slow.

So the person inside knows it's someone who'll wait.

* * *

The door opened very fast.

He had the axe. Teague had been right about that. A big man, bigger than Teague, with the same raw hands and the same sandy hair gone mostly gray, in his nightshirt with a coat thrown over it, with the axe held across his body in both fists. Behind him, at the foot of the ladder to the loft, a boy of fourteen in his shirt, white-faced, with a poker.

The big man looked at Grenna. At her yellow eyes in the light from the door, and her long teeth, and the old white scar band around her throat. And he lifted the axe.

"Da," said Teague.

* * *

I'll remember the big man's face for the rest of my life.

He didn't drop the axe. I think he'd forgotten he was holding it. He just stood there in the doorway with it lifted, looking past Grenna at the boy on the step behind her. At his son. In Westmere boots a size too big, with an unlit lantern, two years older and a stone heavier and with his face crumpling.

"Teague?" he said.

"Da. It's me. I came home."

The axe came down. Slowly. The big man lowered it until the head rested on the floor, and leaned it against the doorframe, very carefully, the way you'd put down something you were afraid might break.

Then he stepped down off his own doorstep and put his arms around his son, lantern and all, and held on.

Behind him, the boy with the poker dropped it, and came running.

* * *

We stood in the lane, my father and Grenna and I, and didn't say anything for a long time.

It's a strange thing to watch. Three people holding on to each other on a doorstep at midnight in the frost. You want to look away and you can't. My father had his hands in his coat pockets and was looking at the hives on the bank above the house, very hard, as though they were the most interesting thing he'd ever seen.

Grenna was leaning on her stick. Her eyes were bright.

"That's why you knock," she said, very low. "So they open the door."

* * *

His name was Ambrose Pelham. He told us so himself, at his own kitchen table, under the low beam, with a pot of tea he'd made with shaking hands and a honeycomb on a plate that nobody touched. Teague asked him, the way he'd seen my father ask. What's your name, Da? As though he didn't know. And Ambrose Pelham looked at his son for a long moment and said, "Ambrose. You know that." And then: "Nobody's asked me that in thirty years."

Tobyn sat on the floor by his brother's chair with his shoulder against Teague's knee and wouldn't move.

Grenna told it. All of it. The carts tomorrow. The frost tonight. The wolves at every door with sons left along the Coln. The north, if they wanted it. Staying, if they wanted that. Nobody to make them.

Ambrose Pelham listened to all of it without a word.

"And if we stay," he said at last, "they take Tobyn."

"Yes," said Grenna.

"And if we go, they take somebody else's."

"Maybe," said Grenna. "Unless the somebody else's goes too. That's what my people are asking, at every door, tonight. If enough go, there's nobody left to take."

* * *

"What do you want, Da?" said Teague.

His father looked at him.

"I want my boys," said Ambrose Pelham. "Both of them. Here. In this house. With the bees." His big hands were flat on the table. "That's all I've ever wanted. And I can't have that. Not with the carts. So I'll take the next thing." He looked at Tobyn on the floor. "My boys. Both of them. Anywhere."

"Then come north," said Teague.

"And the bees?"

* * *

Nobody said anything.

"Twelve hives," said Ambrose Pelham. "My father's, and his father's. You can't move bees in winter. They're asleep. They cluster. You move a hive in the cold, you break the cluster, and they die." He looked at the window, toward the bank. "I can't leave them. They'd starve without someone to feed them through the spring. And I can't take them. They'd die on the road." He looked at Teague. "So I'll stay. You take Tobyn. I'll stay with the bees, and when the carts come I'll tell them both my boys are gone."

"Da—"

"It's all right," said Ambrose Pelham. "I've had a good life. I've had you back for an hour. That's more than most of us on this river get."

* * *

My father leaned forward.

He'd been quiet the whole time, at the end of the table, with his hands around a cup of tea he hadn't drunk. He's good at being quiet in other people's kitchens. He says it's the most important thing a king can learn.

"Master Pelham," he said. "May I ask you something about bees?"

Ambrose Pelham looked at him. I don't think he knew who my father was. Nobody had told him; Grenna had just said this is Uriah, and he'd nodded and poured him tea.

"Ask," he said.

"What kills them," said my father, "when you move them in winter? Is it the moving? Or the cold getting in when the cluster breaks?"

Ambrose Pelham frowned. "The cold. Mostly. You jolt the hive, the cluster loosens, the cold gets in between them before they can close up again. Ten minutes, and they're done."

"And if the cold didn't get in?"

"It always gets in. It's winter."

My father smiled. It was the smile he has when he's about to do something he enjoys.

"Not if I'm holding it," he said.

* * *

I should explain my father, for anyone reading this who doesn't know.

He's cold. That's what he is. It's the gift that came to him, a long time ago, before I was born. He held a whole sea still at Cardle not two weeks ago by asking it. He stood on a wave over Malachar's fleet for a night and a day. Cold does what he tells it, mostly, because he asks it nicely and it's known him a long time.

And if cold does what he tells it, then cold can also be told to stay out.

* * *

We moved the hives at three in the morning, in the frost.

My father went up the bank first, in the starlight, and stood among the twelve hives under their little straw hats, and put his hands out, palms down, a foot above them. And the frost that was coming down out of that enormous clear sky, the first hard frost of the year, the one the carts were waiting for, stopped. In a ring around the hives, about ten feet across. Outside the ring the grass went white and stiff and glittering. Inside it the grass stayed green and soft, and the air was still, and the hives sat in it as though it were a summer night.

"There," said my father. "That's the cold out. Now we just need it to stay out while you move them."

Ambrose Pelham was standing at the edge of the ring with his mouth open.

"Who are you?" he said.

"Uriah," said my father. "I live in the north. My son's going to carry your bees there, and I'm going to keep them warm. Garrick?"

* * *

I'd folded a great many things. Wolves and farm boys and nets and a sea. I'd never folded twelve beehives full of sleeping bees with a man standing among them holding off the frost with his hands.

It was the most careful fold I've ever made.

I took my father and the ring of warm air and the twelve hives inside it all at once, the way you'd lift a tray with the tea things on it without spilling. Ambrose Pelham said afterward that he felt the bank tilt very slightly under his feet, like a boat. And then we were in the lower orchard at Greykeep, under the old apple trees, in the dark, with the frost thick on the grass outside the ring and the hives sitting inside it exactly as they'd sat on the bank above the Coln, in a row, under their straw hats.

Not one of them had moved an inch.

My father stood among them with his hands still out.

"Now," he said. "Somebody wake Helena. She promised Teague she'd find him bees. I think she'll be very annoyed to find out she doesn't have to."

* * *

The carts came at dawn.

Not to Teague's village. To the next one downriver, a place called Ellery with fourteen houses. The first hard frost was on the ground everywhere along the Coln except one ten-foot ring of green grass on a bank above a mill, where twelve hives had been, and the carts came on it the way Grenna had said they would, two of them, with a priest in each and a driver and a list.

They came up the lane at Ellery at first light and stopped at the first house on the list.

And the door was open. And the house was empty. The fire was out and the beds were stripped and there was a loaf on the table with a knife beside it, as though someone had meant to come back for it and thought better of it.

The second house was the same. And the third.

* * *

Grenna told us about it afterward, because she'd stayed. She'd sat on a wall at the end of the lane at Ellery in her gray cloak, with her stick across her knees, and watched the priests go from house to house with their list.

Every house with a son left on it was empty. Every one. Along the whole length of the Coln, eleven villages, a hundred and forty doors. Grenna's wolves had knocked on every one of them in the night, and sat on every step, and changed, and asked. And when the door opened, and the question was asked, what do you want, a hundred and twelve of them had said: north. Tonight. All of us.

The other twenty-eight had stayed. Grenna's people hadn't argued. They'd said it was theirs, and gone to the next door. But twenty-eight families who stay, along a river where a hundred and twelve have gone in one night, are not twenty-eight families on their own anymore. They're twenty-eight families who watched their neighbors choose. Grenna said that when the priests came to their doors in the morning with the list, every one of the twenty-eight was standing on its own step with the door open behind it and its sons beside it, saying no.

"Not all of them," said Grenna. "Not to begin with. But once three or four had said it, the rest found they could."

* * *

The priests had no soldiers. They'd never needed them. In two hundred years nobody on the Coln had ever said no to a cart.

They turned the carts around at noon and went back the way they'd come, with the list empty.

* * *

It took me most of Wednesday to carry them all home.

Four hundred and nine people, in the end, from a hundred and twelve houses. Old women and babies and farm boys and their sisters and their fathers. Dogs. A goat. Two cows, which were difficult. Seven at a time, sixty folds, from a field above the Coln where Grenna's wolves had gathered them in the frost, to the white road in the preserved district at Havenreach, where Liora and Soren and Elianor on Ilyen's arm were waiting at the open doors with blankets, and Anwen sat on the edge of the warm fountain with her feet in it and asked every single one of them their name.

The district had said yes to seven hundred and twenty-six. It said yes to four hundred and nine more without anybody asking twice. Liora said she'd stopped counting the doors. They just kept opening.

* * *

I folded the last seven at dusk, and then I went up the hill to Greykeep and down through the courts to the lower orchard, because I wanted to see.

There was a light in the orchard. A lamp, turned low, on a stool among the apple trees. And a ring of green grass ten feet across in the white frost, and twelve hives in a row under their straw hats, and my father sitting on an upturned bucket at the edge of the ring with his hands held out, palms down, over the nearest hive. He'd been there since three in the morning. He'd let my mother bring him soup at noon.

Ambrose Pelham was sitting on another bucket beside him. They were talking about bees.

"You'll want a windbreak on the north side," Ambrose Pelham was saying. "Hurdles. Hazel, if you have it. They don't like wind."

"We've hazel in the lower wood," said my father. "I'll have it cut tomorrow."

"And they'll want feeding come the spring. Sugar and water. Not too much."

"Helena will want to do that," said my father. "You'll have to stop her overdoing it. She overdoes everything she feeds."

Ambrose Pelham laughed. I'd never heard him laugh. It was a big, startled, rusty sound, like a gate that hasn't been opened in a long time.

On the other side of the ring, sitting together on the frozen grass with their backs against the trunk of the oldest apple tree, Teague and Tobyn were asleep, leaning on each other.

* * *

From Mary's book, Monday to Wednesday:

Monday. The Lyradon arch came out on the quay, the first of the six. Mirelle's bakers sold Thursday's bread at the Lantern and Oar for half price. Garth went home. Quiet.

Tuesday. Quiet until dark. Uriah went with the wolves. He said: I asked them. I'm not going to sit at home on a stool.

Teague said: Take. It's nine houses and a mill and twelve hives.

Grenna said: Nobody bites. Knock first.

Teague's father keeps a lamp lit every night in case. Grenna knocked three times with her stick. He opened the door with the axe. Teague said: Da.

Ambrose Pelham. Nobody's asked him his name in thirty years. Tobyn, fourteen, had a poker.

He said he'd stay with the bees. You can't move bees in winter. Uriah said: Not if I'm holding it.

Uriah held the first hard frost off twelve hives in a ring ten feet across. Garrick folded the ring. Twelve hives in the lower orchard. Not one moved an inch.

Wednesday. The carts came to Ellery at dawn. Every house on the list was empty. A hundred and twelve families said north. Twenty-eight stayed and stood on their own steps with their sons and said no. The carts went back at noon with the list empty.

Four hundred and nine to the preserved district. Sixty folds. Two cows. Anwen asked every name.

Uriah has been sitting on a bucket by the hives since three in the morning. Ambrose Pelham laughed.

And under that, in a hand that had clearly not held a pen in a very long time, big and slow and very careful, each letter shaped like something built rather than written:

Ambrose Pelham, beekeeper, of the bee villages on the Coln, lately. I'd like it noted that I left the lamp lit every night for two years and somebody came. That I opened the door with an axe and put it down. That I've kept bees for forty years and never seen a king hold the frost off a hive with his hands, and I don't expect I'll see it again, and I'm glad I did. And that both my boys are asleep under an apple tree, and I'm going to sit here until they wake up.