Chapter 197: The Empty Room

I didn't go up to our rooms until the sun was on the east wall.

I could have gone before. I'd stepped over Fenrir at the bottom of the east stair a little after half past five, with the boy asleep on my shoulder, and the stair was right there, and our rooms were at the top of it, where they've always been, on the east side of the old keep over the wall. Bedroom. The little sitting room with the window seat. The nursery, which used to be a linen cupboard and is the warmest room in Greykeep because the kitchen chimney runs up the back of it.

I didn't go up. I sat down on the bottom step instead, beside the wolf, with my son on my chest, and stayed there.

Mother came and sat on the step above me after she'd finished with Fenrir's shoulder. She didn't say anything. She put her hand on the back of my neck, the way she did when I was small and had a fever, and left it there. Loki was on the step above her. Somewhere along the passage Helena was putting the six copper kettles back in the kettle cupboard one at a time, and each time she set one on the shelf it rang, a soft high note, and then she'd stand for a moment before she went back for the next.

And I sat on the step and held my son and looked at the light in my right palm. Gold. Steady. The size of a coin.

At a quarter to seven the sun came up over the hills and in through the high window on the east stair and lay on the steps in a long pale stripe, and Mother said, quite gently, "Garrick. He'll want his own bed."

So I went up.

* * *

The door was open. She'd left it open when she ran down with him at midnight. She doesn't close doors behind her when she's in a hurry. Carol says she was born in a hurry, which isn't true; Io says it took two days.

I stood in the doorway.

It's a strange thing, a room somebody's just left. Not a room someone's gone away from, packed, tidied, the bed made and the curtains drawn. A room someone was in, and then wasn't. Everything is still in the middle of happening. Everything is still pointing at them.

The bed was unmade on her side and made on mine, because I hadn't slept in it; I'd been at Westmere on the Hold roof writing nothing in Tamar's watch book. Her pillow had the dent of her head still in it. The covers were thrown back in a long diagonal, all in one movement, the way you throw them back when a bell goes. One of her stockings was on the floor by the bed, inside out. The other one wasn't anywhere. She'd gone down barefoot.

Her boots were by the hearth. Side by side. Laced. She always does that, laces them before she takes them off so she can step straight into them in the morning, which every bootmaker in Concordia has told her ruins the leather. She's had the same pair for six years.

On the little table on her side of the bed was a cup of tea. Half drunk. Cold. With a skin on it. And beside the cup, face down, open, the book she'd been reading, a Concordian novel about a lighthouse keeper's daughter that she'd been reading since the summer and kept falling asleep over and starting again from the beginning because she'd forgotten what happened. A bookmark beside it, not in it. She never puts the bookmark in. She says it's tempting fate.

And on the bedpost at the foot, her side, the one she holds on to when she gets out of bed in the morning before she's properly awake, there was a small dark mark in the wood. A scorch. The shape of four fingers and a thumb. Not new; I knew it. She makes one every time she gets out of bed angry, and the bedpost is covered in them, layer on layer, years of them, all the mornings she's woken up cross with the world. But there was a new one on top. Fresh. Still smelling faintly of burned wood.

From last night. From when the bells went, and she grabbed the bedpost to swing herself out of bed, and she knew already, before her feet touched the floor, that something was in her house.

I put my own hand on it. The scorch was the shape of her hand exactly. My hand covered it.

It was still very slightly warm.

* * *

I put him down in his cot.

The nursery is small. It was a linen cupboard once, as I said, and there's still a row of hooks along one wall where the linen bags used to hang, and Seraphina uses them for his things: his little coats, his woolen hat with ears, the knitted horse Caitlin made, the bag of wooden spoons he likes to bang. The cot's against the chimney wall so it's warm. Grandpa built it, and his oak rocking horse stands by the window.

He didn't wake when I put him down. He turned over on his front with his knees under him and his bottom in the air, the way he sleeps, and put his thumb in his mouth. The hen cozy had come off on the stair; Loki had picked it up and was carrying it about with an air of great dignity. The wooden horse was still in his fist.

On the hook nearest the cot was her shawl. Not the one Helena had wrapped him in for the kettle cupboard; that was Helena's own. This was Seraphina's. The gray one with the red border, the one she puts around her shoulders to feed him in the night. It smelled of her. Of smoke and oranges and the warm milk smell that's been on everything she owns since he was born.

I took it down off the hook and stood there holding it.

Then I put it in the cot, folded, against the side where his face was, so that he'd smell it when he woke.

* * *

I sat down in the window seat in the sitting room.

It's her seat. It's always been her seat; the cushion is shaped to her. It looks east, over the wall, over the river and the long slope down to Havenreach and the quay, and on a clear morning you can see the three small lights at the arches go out one by one as the sun comes up and the Castellan doesn't need to keep them burning anymore.

It was a clear morning. Cold and bright and very still. Frost on everything, my father's frost, hard and plain, all over the court below and the roofs and the wall. I watched the lights go out at the quay. One. Two. Three.

I didn't want to sit in her seat. I didn't want to sit anywhere. But my legs had stopped, and it was the nearest thing.

There were things in the window seat with me. There always are. Seraphina keeps things in window seats the way magpies keep things in nests. A half-finished letter to her mother, in her fast slanting hand, which I didn't read. A comb. Three of our son's wooden spoons. A pear, gone soft. And a small bundle of papers tied with string, which I'd never seen before, and which I wouldn't have opened, except that the top one had my name on it.

Not a letter. A list. In her hand. Headed For G., if I'm ever away.

I sat and looked at it for a long time before I untied the string.

* * *

It wasn't long. It was the kind of list Mary makes. Practical. Each line on its own, numbered, in the hurried slanting hand she uses for things she doesn't want to think about too hard while she's writing them.

1. He has porridge with honey, not sugar. Sugar makes him wild. Helena knows but she forgets when he looks at her.

2. He won't sleep without something that smells of me. The gray shawl. If it's being washed, the blue one. Not the green coat. That's yours and he knows it.

3. When he has a bad dream he wants up, not milk. Up and walking. To the window. He likes to look at the lights on the quay.

4. He'll try to go to Fenrir every morning. Let him.

5. Don't let him near the stockpot.

6. Rub his gums with the clove oil in the blue bottle in the nursery cupboard. NOT the brown bottle. The brown bottle is for your father's knee.

7. Talk to him. Not baby talk. He hates baby talk. He looks at you as though you've gone strange. Tell him things. Tell him what you did today. He likes your voice best when you're explaining something badly.

8. If he says Ma, tell him I'm coming. Don't tell him I'm gone. Say coming.

9. Eat. You forget. You always forget when you're worried. Sit down at the table in the little kitchen and let Helena feed you, and let her watch you do it, because she needs that as much as you do.

10. Sleep in the bed. Not the window seat. Not the nook. The bed. On your own side. Leave mine. I'll want it back.

And at the bottom, under the numbers, smaller, a little crooked, as if she'd written it last and quickly before she could change her mind:

I made this the night after the gold. I don't know why. I just wanted it to exist. Don't be cross that I thought of it. I'm not going anywhere. But if I ever do, it'll be because I chose to, and I'll be coming back. You know that. You've always known it. S.

* * *

The night after the gold.

Nine days ago. The night after we found Corvin's coin standing on its edge in Mary's drawer and the purse behind Eleanor's plate. I'd sat up in the nook all night watching the court, and she'd sat up in the window seat with a candle, writing, and I'd thought she was writing to her mother.

She'd known. Not this, not Wynn, not the arch. But she'd known something was coming into our house, and she'd sat up in her window seat and written down how to look after our son if she had to go and meet it.

I sat with the list in my hands, in her seat, with her cold tea on the table in the next room and her boots by the hearth, and for the first time since the cabbages I cried.

Not much. Not for long. My son was asleep in the next room and I didn't want to wake him. I cried the way you cry when you're very tired and something kind has been done for you that you didn't deserve, with my face in her list, holding it so it didn't get wet.

And while I was doing it, the cup on the table by the bed moved.

* * *

I heard it. A small scrape, porcelain on wood. I looked up through the open door into the bedroom.

The cup of cold tea was an inch to the left of where it had been. On its saucer. Still, now.

I looked at it.

It moved again. Not slid. It wasn't there, and then it was there, an inch further on, the way a thing moves when you fold it. The tea in it didn't even ripple.

I hadn't done it. I want that clear. I hadn't touched it, or reached for it, or thought about it. I'd been crying into a list. It had just gone, by itself, the way a sneeze goes, an inch to the left through a fold I hadn't made.

I looked down at my hands.

My left was still white, numb to the wrist. My right had the light in it, gold and steady. And between them, in the air in front of me, where I was holding the list, the air was doing something. Shimmering. The way it does over a road in summer. The way it does in the doorway of a fold, just before it opens.

I put the list down very carefully on the window seat.

The shimmer stayed.

I said, out loud, quietly, the way you'd talk to a horse that's frightened: "No. Not now."

The shimmer went away.

The cup stayed an inch to the left.

* * *

My father came up at eight with a tray.

Helena had sent it. Two eggs and bread and honey and tea, and a small dish of porridge for the boy, with honey, not sugar; she hadn't forgotten. He carried it in himself, which he never does, and put it on the table in the sitting room, and then he looked at me in the window seat with the list on my knee and the shimmer gone and my face what it was.

He didn't say anything about my face. He sat down on the end of the window seat and looked out of the window with me.

The frost on the court was beginning to go where the sun touched it. Steam was coming up off the cobbles in long slow threads. Down on the warm strip by the kitchen wall, where the bread-oven chimney runs, Fenrir had come back out and was lying in the sun with his white saddle shining and his shoulder healed and his nose on his paws, facing the east stair door. Loki was sitting on the kitchen step with the hen cozy on his knee.

"Eat," said my father.

"I'm not hungry."

"Number nine," said my father.

I looked at him.

"She showed me," he said. "The night after the gold. She came and found me at the gate at five in the morning before anyone else was up and sat on the cobbles beside my stool and showed it to me. She asked me if it was a stupid thing to have done." He looked out of the window. "I said no. I said it was the most sensible thing anyone in this house had done all week. She asked me not to tell you." He was quiet a moment. "I'm telling you now because she's not here to tell you herself, and because you haven't eaten since Westmere, and because I'm your father and I'm allowed to break a promise to my daughter-in-law if it means my son eats an egg."

I ate the egg.

He watched me do it, the way Helena would have. Then he poured the tea and gave me a cup and took one himself, and we sat in the window seat together and drank it, and didn't say anything for a long time.

* * *

"The cup moved," I said at last.

My father looked at me.

"The one by the bed. Her tea. It moved an inch. By itself. I didn't do it." I turned my own cup in my hands. "There was a fold in the air. Here. In front of me. I didn't make it. It just came."

My father put his cup down.

"How long?"

"A few seconds. I told it no and it went."

"Has it happened before?"

"No. Never." I looked at my hands. "I've never once in my life folded something I didn't mean to fold. Not since I was two. Not even asleep."

My father was quiet for a long while. He looked out of the window, at the court and the frost and the wolf in the sun. Then he looked at me again, and there was something in his face I'd only seen a few times in my life, and never directed at me. The look he has when he's watching weather come in over the hills and working out how long before it gets here.

"You folded three hundred and twelve miles last night," he said. "In one. Into a castle that was shut against you. Davren measured it this morning on the map-room floor with a string; he's been up there since six, crawling about on his knees, and he says it can't be done and he's going to measure it again." He paused. "And then you broke a Kethran chain with my frost and her fire. And then you gave a piece of the fold away. The first thing. The thing that's yours."

"She asked."

"I know she asked. I'm not saying you were wrong." He put his hand on my knee. "I'm saying you're a cup with a crack in it, Garrick. You've been poured out and filled up and poured out again all night, and then you gave a piece of the cup away, and now there's a crack. And things are going to come through it. Not because you want them to. Because that's what cracks do."

"How do I stop it?"

"You don't, yet," said my father. "Not on your own. You hold on, and you don't fight it, and you tell me every time it happens." He squeezed my knee. "And Carol's coming home."

I looked up.

"The ice at Caldermouth," he said. "Her ships. They're frozen now; I froze them. The fishermen can go out and come in as they like. There's nothing for her to hold. She'll have felt that last night, the moment it happened. She'll have felt you, too. All of it." He looked out of the window. "She'll be on her way already. With Ignatius. Five days' ride, or no days, if somebody folds them, and there's nobody to fold them now but you. So five days. Less, if Ignatius has anything to do with it."

* * *

He was right. He usually is.

At nine o'clock, while my son was eating his porridge on my knee in the window seat and getting most of it on Seraphina's cushion, there was frost on the window.

Not my father's. Ferns. Small white ferns, coming up the glass from the bottom, curling, spreading, slowly, the way the table had frosted under her hands on Thursday morning. My son stopped eating and looked at it with his spoon in the air.

The ferns grew to the top of the pane and stopped. And in the clear glass in the middle, cut out of the frost as neatly as Eleanor's chalk, there were six letters:

COMING.

My son put out his hand, sticky with honey, and put it flat on the glass under the word, the way he puts it on the wolf's nose.

"Ma?" he said.

I looked at the word in the frost. I looked at the light in my palm. I thought about number eight.

If he says Ma, tell him I'm coming. Don't tell him I'm gone. Say coming.

"That's your aunt Carol," I said. "She's coming home. And Ma's coming too. Ma's gone to fetch a little girl called Goldie, who walked to the dog first, the way you did. And then she's coming home. She's coming." I put my hand over his on the glass. The light in my palm lay against the back of his small sticky hand. "Coming."

"Coming," said my son.

It was his fourth word. Up. Ma. Fen. And now coming. He said it very clearly, the way he says everything he's decided about, as though he were signing his name to it. Then he took his hand off the glass and went back to his porridge.

* * *

That night I slept in the bed. On my own side. I left hers.

I did everything on the list. He had porridge with honey. He had the gray shawl. When he woke at two with a bad dream I took him up and walked him to the window in the nursery and showed him the dark where the lights on the quay had been, and told him the Castellan would light them again soon, and explained badly why, and he liked it. At bedtime, before that, I'd carried him down to the warm strip and he'd put his hand on Fenrir's nose and said Fen, and I'd put my hand beside his, the one with the light in it, and said Fen for her.

And at three in the morning, lying on my own side of the bed with the covers on hers still thrown back in a long diagonal the way she'd left them, and her cold cup of tea still on the table, an inch to the left, I felt the crack in me open.

Not much. Just a little. Like a door in a big house swinging open in a draft.

And through it, very far away, very faint, I heard the sea.

Not the sea outside Westmere. Not the sea anywhere I'd been. A sea I'd never heard, a long slow heavy western sea with no land in it, going on forever, and somewhere on it, very small, a ship, and a light.

Then the door swung shut again.

I lay there in the dark and looked at the light in my palm until it was morning.

* * *

From Mary's book. Saturday into Sunday. The hand is Mary's, ordinary again, the size it usually is:

Garrick went up to their rooms at a quarter to seven. Evelyn sent him. He'll want his own bed.

Everything just as she left it. Her side of the bed thrown back. One stocking. Boots by the hearth, laced. Tea, cold. The lighthouse book, face down. A new scorch on the bedpost, on top of all the old ones. Still warm.

In the window seat: a list. For G., if I'm ever away. Ten things. She wrote it the night after the gold. She showed it to Uriah at five in the morning and asked him not to tell. He told.

Garrick ate an egg. Number nine.

A cup moved by itself, an inch, through a fold Garrick did not make. Uriah says: a crack. Hold on. Tell me every time.

Frost on the sitting-room window at nine: COMING. Carol and Ignatius are on their way from Caldermouth.

Little Uriah's fourth word: coming.

The light in Garrick's palm is lit.

And under that, in a hand that's quick and slanting and impatient, the hand of the list in the window seat, written, Mary says, on a page she'd left blank at the back of the book a long time ago and asked Mary to copy forward if it was ever needed. Mary copied it forward that Sunday. She says it's the only guest line in the book written in advance:

Seraphina Grey, of Concordia. I'd like it noted that if you're reading this, I've gone somewhere I chose to go. That I'm coming back. That he has honey, not sugar. And that Garrick should eat.