Chapter 192: Choir in the Halls

It was coming out of the stones.

That was the first thing. Not from a room, not from a window, not from any one place where you could turn and look and say there. It came out of the walls of the kitchen garden and the chimneys of the kitchen and the slates of the bakehouse roof and the frozen earth under the cabbages, low and sweet and everywhere, the way the sea sounds inside a shell.

Singing.

No words. Or only one word, over and over, in a hundred voices, and the word was a name, and the name was different every time. I heard Helena, sung in an old man's voice, very gently, the way you'd call a child in for supper. I heard Faelan in a woman's, high and clear. I heard Mary. I heard Hob. I heard names I didn't know, the names of grooms and laundry girls and the boy who blacks the boots, two hundred and eleven of them, sung slowly one after another in voices that were warm and kind and patient and dead.

I knew what it was. I'd heard it once before, at Skellow, coming in off the sea in the fog with a whole village standing in the street with their lips moving.

The Hollow Choir.

Gods who'd refused Malachar twice and been taken by the Chained. Kessavel took their names, and what was left, the hollow shape where a god had been, was kept below decks on the black ships and let out to sing. To sing your name to you in the voice of someone you'd loved and lost, so sweetly, so patiently, until you answered. And if you answered wrong, if you only gave the first part, if you didn't know how to hold your own name, they took it, and there was one more voice in the Choir.

It was in my house. It was singing to everyone I loved.

I got up out of the cabbages.

* * *

I don't know how. My left hand was dead white and wouldn't close. My left eye was dark, and my right one swam. Blood was running out of my nose and into my mouth, and both my ears were full of it, so that the singing came to me thick and slow, like singing heard underwater. My knees didn't want me. I got up anyway, holding on to the bean poles, and stood swaying in the frozen garden, and the singing came out of the earth around my feet and said, very softly, in a voice I'd known since before I could talk:

Garrick.

Aurelia's voice. The voice she'd sung over my cradle. Just the one word, the first part, with the rest left off. The way the Choir had carried Carol's name north to Skellow, as Aurelia sang it over her cradle, with the Grey left off.

Garrick, it sang again. So kindly. Garrick. Come and rest. You've come such a long way.

And I had. And I was so tired. And it would have been so easy to say yes, to say only Garrick, to let the rest go.

But I'd just said my whole name to the dark over a lake three hundred miles long, and it was still in my mouth.

"Garrick Elias Grey," I said, out loud, through the blood. "I live here. I want to go in."

The singing in the earth stopped. Just around my feet. Just for a moment. Then it moved on, along the garden wall, toward the kitchen, singing someone else.

* * *

Caitlin was on the kitchen step.

She was in her nightgown and her blue coat and her boots without stockings, and she had her blue book open on her knee and a pencil in her hand, and she was counting. She didn't look up when I came out of the garden. She held up one finger, the way she does when she's in the middle of a number and you're not to speak, and her lips moved, and her pencil went down the page.

Then she looked up and saw me, and dropped the pencil.

"Garrick." Her face went white. "You're bleeding out of your ears."

"I folded from Westmere."

"That's three hundred miles."

"Three hundred and something."

"That's not possible."

"I know." I sat down on the step beside her because I couldn't not. "Count for me. What's here?"

Caitlin can count anything. It's her gift; Father says it's the god in her, coming out sideways. She can look at a field of sheep and tell you the number, and never once in her life has she been wrong. When we were children we used to test her with jars of beans. She'd look at the jar and say four hundred and twelve, and we'd tip them out on the table and count and it would be four hundred and twelve. Every time. She stopped letting us after a while. She said it was rude to make her prove it.

She picked up the pencil. She looked at the page.

"Forty-one voices," she said. "Singing. I counted them twice. They're everywhere at once, so it's hard, but it's forty-one." She swallowed. "Garrick, it's forty-one."

Forty-one. My father's number. Shearwater, in his first winter as king: forty-one people taken off a beach by black ships from the west, and thirty-four came home, and seven didn't. He never told anyone for twenty years. He carries it every day. Somebody knew that. Somebody had chosen it.

"What else?"

"Thirty-eight men. In black. They came up from the lower hall in a line and went everywhere. Some of them have names and some of them don't; I can count the ones that don't but it's horrible, it's like counting holes." She turned the page. "And one god. In a collar. With a chain going back from it down the stair into the dark, like a leash, and somebody on the other end that I can't count. I tried. There's nobody there to count. There's only the pulling."

Kessavel. On his chain. Being walked.

"Where's everyone?"

"Father and Thor are in the great hall. That's where most of the men went; Father froze the doors behind them so they can't come out any further, and now Thor's in there with them." Caitlin almost smiled. It wasn't a smile. "It's very loud in there."

"Mother?"

"In the solar, with Adriana and the little ones, and Iselle. Roderic's at the solar door with his sword. Iselle's freeing things. I don't know what. Things keep getting let go of in there." She turned another page. "Mary's on the servants' stair. With the green ledger. You'll see."

"Seraphina?"

Caitlin's pencil stopped.

"She gave the baby to Helena," she said. "On the east stair. She kissed him, and gave him to Helena, and said, Take him somewhere nobody looks. And then she went down."

"Down where?"

"To the lower hall." Caitlin looked at me. "Where they're coming from. Garrick, the Castellan can't shut that arch. Something's holding it open from this side. She said if the Castellan couldn't shut it she'd burn it shut. She went down the main stair with the Flame coming off her like a house on fire and none of the men in black would go near her." Caitlin's voice shook. "She told me to stay here and count. She said somebody had to know how many."

"And my son?"

"Helena's got him." Caitlin closed the book. "I'm not allowed to say where. Helena said not to tell anyone. She said even Garrick." She looked at me. "She said you'd know anyway."

I did. Tea. A small dark place that smelled very strongly of tea, and a wolf lying across the door.

"Fenrir's with them," I said.

"Fenrir was in the Concordian rooms with Loki when the bells went," said Caitlin. "He went through the door without opening it. Loki says there's a wolf-shaped hole in it now. He didn't go to Loki. He didn't go to the hall. He went straight to the east stair, past Thor, past everybody, and when Helena took the baby, he went with her." She almost smiled again. This time it nearly was one. "He didn't even look back at his father. Loki says he's never been so proud of anything in his life."

* * *

I went in through the kitchen.

It was dark, the fire banked, the big stockpot back on its hook. The singing was very loud in there. It was coming out of the hearth, out of the copper pans, out of the flagstones. And in the middle of the floor, in the dark, where Helena usually stands at the table kneading, there was something standing.

I want to set down exactly what it looked like, because people ask and I've never been able to tell them properly.

It looked like nothing. Like a hole. Like the place where someone had been standing a moment ago, after they've gone, the dent left in the air. You couldn't see it so much as see where it wasn't. It had a shape, roughly, the shape of a tall woman with her head a little on one side, listening, but the shape was made of absence, the way a doorway is made of absence. And out of it, very softly, came the singing.

It was singing Helena's name. In a man's voice. Old and gentle and Concordian. I didn't know whose. I've thought since it might have been her father's.

It turned toward me. It didn't have a face to turn. It turned anyway.

Garrick, it sang. In Aurelia's voice. In my cradle voice.

I stood in front of it in Helena's kitchen, with blood on my face and one hand dead, and I didn't fold it, and I didn't burn it, and I didn't freeze it. I could have. I think I could have done any of those things. But I'd seen the hollow at Skellow up close afterward, and Aurelia had told us what they were. They were gods. They'd been gods, every one of them, small gods of wells and crossroads and harbors and first frosts, and they'd said no to Malachar twice, and this was what had been done to them for it. They weren't the enemy. They were what the enemy did.

"My name's Garrick Elias Grey," I said. "I live here. I want my family safe." I took a breath. "What was yours?"

The singing stopped.

The hole in the shape of a woman stood very still in the dark kitchen. And for a moment, for a heartbeat, I thought I saw something in it. Not a face. A color. A gray-green, like the water in a deep well with the light coming down into it. And a smell. Wet stone and moss and cold, clean water.

Then it was gone, and the hollow was a hollow again.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Not tonight. But we'll come for you. All of you. My father's promised. Every name Kessavel ever took." I stepped aside, out of the doorway. "Go on. Nobody here will answer you wrong."

It went past me. It didn't touch me. It went out through the kitchen door into the court, singing, someone else's name now, Hob, in a woman's voice, and I heard, from somewhere up in the dark of the servants' quarters, Hob's own voice, cracked and old and steady, say:

"Hob Marley. Forty years in the stables. I live here. I want my knees to stop hurting and I want you out of my house."

And the singing stopped there too.

* * *

The servants' stair at Greykeep goes up from the back of the kitchen passage, narrow and steep and turning, all the way to the attics under the roof of the south range, and every landing has a door off it to a corridor of rooms where the household sleeps.

They were all on the stair.

Every landing. Every step. Two hundred and eleven of them, in their nightclothes and blankets and boots, packed in so tight you couldn't have got a cat between them, standing pressed together on the stone with their hands joined, up and up and up the whole turning height of the stair into the dark. Grooms and laundry girls and kitchen boys and the dairy girl and old Ellen and Nettie and Agathe, holding hands, the two of them, side by side, the girl who'd been accused and the woman who'd accused her. Perkin with his spectacles on crooked. The boy who blacks the boots. Ned Toller, who'd been sworn to Kethra once and voided, with his mam's shawl around his shoulders.

And at the very top, on the last landing, under the lamp, stood Mary.

She had the green ledger open in both arms. The household book. The one she writes us all into on the day we come, so that the day is our name day forever after, so that we know we were written down. She was reading from it. Out loud. Not loud. Just clearly, the way she reads everything, every word given its full weight.

"Nettie Cole," Mary read. "Written last spring. Kitchen. Came from Fern Ford with one boot, and saved all summer for new ones."

"Nettie Cole," said Nettie, on the stair, holding Agathe's hand. "I live here. I want to sleep."

"Agathe Brisk. Written the first winter. Scullery. Brought her own scrubbing brushes and has never let anyone else use them."

"Agathe Brisk," said Agathe. "I live here." A pause. "I want to say sorry to Nettie properly. Not on a stair."

"Hob Marley," read Mary. "Written the second summer..."

All the way down the list. Every name. Every one of them answering. And the singing came up the stair from below, from the kitchen passage, from the hollows drifting in the dark, sweet and patient and in a hundred dead voices, Ellen, Perkin, Ned, Ned, come and rest, and every time it reached a name, the name was already being said back to it, whole, by the person it belonged to, with a place and a want on the end like a knot on a thread.

You can't take a name from someone who's holding it. Aurelia taught us that, all those lessons in the autumn, the whole household in the great hall on the long benches, learning to sing their own names back. Your name is a rope. Hold both ends.

They were holding both ends. All of them. On the stair in the dark.

Mary saw me.

She didn't stop reading. She read the next name, and the answer came, and then she looked down the stair at me over all those heads, and I saw her see the blood and the white hand and the dark eye, and something went across her face that I've never seen on Mary's face, and she put it away.

"Garrick Elias Grey," she read, out of the book, without looking at the page. "Written an hour after his sister. Folded my pens into the coal scuttle at two. Has never once in his life come home by the door."

"Garrick Elias Grey," I said, from the bottom of the stair. "I live here. I want to find my wife."

"Then go and find her," said Mary, and turned the page, and read the next name.

* * *

The great hall was frozen shut.

The big doors at the top of the main stair, the oak ones, sixteen feet high, were white with frost from top to bottom, two feet thick, the ice bulging out of the doorframe like a loaf rising out of its tin. My father's frost. I'd know it anywhere. It's the first thing I ever borrowed, out of his hand, before I could walk.

Through it, muffled, came the noise. Thor's noise, mostly. Thor fights the way other people sing in the bath: loudly, happily, and with no sense at all of whether anyone else is trying to sleep. There was the crack of lightning, and the long rolling boom after it that made the frost on the doors shiver, and shouting in Kethran, and Thor's voice over all of it, enormous and delighted, roaring something about beer.

I put my good hand on the frost.

My father felt me. He always does. The frost went soft under my palm, just there, a hand's width, the way it does when he lets you in, and then a crack opened in it, top to bottom, just wide enough, and I went sideways through it into the hall.

It looked like a battle. It wasn't, quite.

There were thirty or so of them, the men in black, with the closed hand on their shoulders. Most of them were frozen. Not dead; frozen in place, to the knees, to the waist, some of them to the shoulders, standing in the great hall in a field of my father's ice like men wading in a white river. A few were still loose, at the far end by the dais, and Thor was among them with her hammer, not hitting anyone very hard, mostly just picking them up and putting them down again somewhere else, the way you'd tidy a room. Lightning walked in the rafters. The banners were smoking.

And my father was standing in the middle of the hall with one hand out, palm down, and the frost running out of it across the floor like water out of a jug.

He wasn't even breathing hard. He never does. He looked exactly the way he looks at the gate on his stool in the morning, asking the milk in.

He turned his head and saw me.

He didn't say anything. He looked at me, the whole of me, the way he looks at people, one long look from my boots to my eyes. The blood. The hand. The eye. I watched him see it all and put it somewhere, carefully, the way Mary had.

Then he took his other hand, the one that wasn't holding thirty men in ice, and put it on my face.

"You came the whole way," he said.

"In one."

"Hm," said my father.

That was all. That's all he said about it, that night or ever, hm, and I've had it written into this book in ink because it's the best thing anyone's ever said to me.

* * *

"They want the east range," he said. His hand was still on my face; his voice was quiet and very fast, the voice he uses when there isn't time for the other one. "Every one of them went for the east stair. Not the treasury. Not the archive. Not the solar. The east range. Our rooms. Your rooms." He looked at me. "They want Seraphina. Or the boy. Or both."

"Seraphina's gone down to the lower hall."

"I know. I couldn't stop her. I didn't try." He took his hand away from my face and put it back out over the ice, where a Kethran at the edge of the white was trying to chip himself free with the hilt of his sword, and the ice came up another foot and the man stopped trying. "The arch is held open from this side. The Castellan can't shut it. Whoever opened it put a line of oath-script on the plate, and Kessavel's chain is through the arch, holding it, like a wedge in a door. And something on the other side is pulling the chain." He looked at me. "She's gone to burn the chain."

"Then I'm going."

"Yes," said my father. "Go." He looked at my hand. "Can you?"

"I folded three hundred miles."

"That's not what I asked."

"No," I said. "I don't know. I'm going anyway."

My father looked at me for a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and turned back to the hall, to the ice and the men in black and Thor in the rafters with lightning in her hair, and said, without looking around, the thing he's said to me every time I've ever gone through a door in my life:

"Stand where she can see you."

* * *

I went back out through the crack in the frost and along the gallery to the east stair.

It's the quickest way down. The east stair comes down from our rooms past the gallery to the bottom of the east range, and at the bottom of it is the little kitchen, Helena's own kitchen, the one with the garden door and the pear tree outside and the scrubbed table with the burn shaped like a duck, where she puts Eleanor's egg on at twenty past six every morning and has for twenty years. And past the little kitchen, a few steps along the passage, is the head of the back stair, which goes down past the old cellars to the lower hall.

I was at the bottom of the east stair. I was going down. I had my good hand on the wall and my eyes on the head of the back stair, on the dark at the bottom of it, on the lower hall where my wife had gone with the Flame coming off her like a house on fire.

And from the little kitchen, through its half-open door, on my left, my blind side, I heard a sound I've known all my life.

A mallet. Grandpa's workshop mallet. The big beechwood one with the handle worn pale where his hand goes, that he's used on every horse he ever carved and every joint he ever drove. I'd know the sound of it anywhere. It's the sound of my whole childhood. It's the sound of something being made to fit.

It wasn't hitting wood.

And under it, low, a sound I'd never heard before in my life, though I'd heard it described. A wolf. Growling. Not loud. Very low, very deep, and very steady, the way the Hold hums at Westmere when something's wrong, the way the ground hums before an earthquake. A sound like a wall deciding not to move.

And over both of them, Helena's voice. Not shouting. Helena never shouts. Clear and flat and absolutely certain, the voice she uses on the butcher when the meat's been short, the voice of a woman who has been running this kitchen since before I was born and does not intend to stop tonight:

"Not one step further. Not one. This is my kitchen."

I stood in the passage between the two doors.

Down was Seraphina.

Left was my son.

* * *

From Mary's book. Saturday. The hand is steadier here, though still small. Mary says she wrote this page last of that night's pages, after everything, when she could read her own handwriting again:

Saturday, 12:10 a.m. or thereabouts. The Choir in every wall.

I read the household from the green ledger on the servants' stair. Two hundred and eleven names. I read them twice. Nobody answered wrong. Not one.

Agathe held Nettie's hand. Hob told the Choir to get out of his house.

Caitlin counted from the kitchen step. Forty-one voices. Thirty-eight men. One god on a chain.

Forty-one. Someone chose that.

Uriah froze the great hall. Thor tidied it.

Garrick came in from the cabbages. Uriah said: Hm.

And in the margin, very small, in pencil, in Caitlin's round careful hand with the numbers written out in full the way she's always done since she was little:

Caitlin Grey. Forty-one. I counted twice. I'd like it noted that I was told to stay and count, and I stayed, and I counted, and I didn't once go down the stair after her, though I wanted to more than anything.