Chapter 199: Carol Holds Me

Mary says this is the middle of the book.

Not because of the page count. She says she can't tell yet how long the book will be, and nobody can, because nobody knows yet how it ends. She says it's the middle because of what happened on the east wall that night, and because everything in the book before it is one thing and everything after it is another, and the place where a thing turns into another thing is the middle, however many pages there are on either side.

I think she's right. She usually is.

So I want to tell it carefully.

* * *

We've always had a name for it, Carol and I. The place between us. When we were very small we called it the middle, because that's where it was: not in her, not in me, in the middle. When we were older Carol started calling it the twin-room, because she said it was more like a room than a place, a room with a door on each side, one hers, one mine. Most of the time I just think of it as the door.

It's always open. It's never once been shut, not since the first breath. It went muffled once, at the festival, the night they tried to take her, as if someone had put a hand over her mouth. It's been cold and it's been warm and it's been a long way off, a draft in a big house. But it's never been shut.

On Tuesday night on the east wall, with every other door in Greykeep standing open onto somewhere else, it was the only one I hadn't opened myself.

And Carol came through it.

* * *

She didn't come through it the way she usually does. Usually she comes through it the way you'd come into a room you've lived in all your life, without looking, without thinking, the way you put your hand out for the light on the stair in the dark.

This time she came through it like a woman running into a burning house.

I felt her. All of her, at once. Before she'd reached me on the wall, before her hands touched mine, she was already in the middle, in the twin-room, standing in the doorway on my side, and I felt her look around at what was in there.

It was me. Or what was left of me. Spread out thin across every door I'd opened. A bit of me in the sea off Westmere, boiling. A bit of me in the snowfield in Helena's oven. A bit of me in the lower market at Havenreach and in the Lyradon orchard and in Mary's drawer and in the bakehouse and in a hundred other places, and all of them going thinner, the way frost goes thinner on a window when the sun comes up.

And I felt Carol see it. And I felt what she felt.

I'll never be able to write that properly. I won't try. I'll only say I've never in my life felt anyone that frightened, and I've never in my life felt anyone so completely not care that they were frightened.

Then her hands closed on mine.

* * *

She took both of them. My left, the white one, the dead one, with our father's frost in it. My right, with the dark palm.

She held them hard. Her hands were cold. Not frost; she was just cold, from Thor and the sky and the long run along the wall barefoot. Ordinary cold. Human cold. And she stood in front of me on the east wall with the snow going up and the doors banging in the castle below and the sky boiling purple, and she looked at me, and she didn't say stop, and she didn't say come back, and she didn't say hold on.

She said: "Garrick Elias Grey."

My whole name. Every part of it. The way she's said it some mornings since the summer, since the Choir, when she was frightened of names and started saying everyone's whole one, just to be sure.

And then she said, very quietly, the thing Aurelia taught the whole household in the autumn on the long benches in the great hall, the thing two hundred and eleven people had said on the servants' stair on Friday night with the Choir in the walls:

"Your name's a rope. You hold one end." Her hands tightened. "I've got the other."

* * *

I felt her take it.

I don't know how else to say it. I'd been holding my own name all my life, the way everybody does, without thinking, the way you hold your own hand. And on the wall that night it had slipped. My father had asked me what it was and I hadn't been able to hear the question. The rope had gone slack in my hands and was sliding away from me into the dark, into all the open doors, into the sea.

And Carol caught the other end of it.

I felt the rope go taut. Like a line going taut when the fish takes it. All at once, the whole length of me, from the sea off Westmere to the snow in Helena's oven to the east wall, all of it, suddenly held. Pulled. Not hard. Just enough. Just enough to know there was something on the other end.

And I heard my father's question.

It had been there all along, coming from very far away, like a voice down a well. Garrick. What's your name? And now it came up the rope, the way a sound comes along a line pulled taut, the way you can hear someone tapping at the other end of a long iron pipe. Clear. Close. My father's voice, at my right ear, through the wind.

"Garrick. What's your name?"

"Garrick Elias Grey," I said.

My voice came out cracked and small and very far away. But it came out.

"Where do you live?" said my father.

"Here," I said. "Greykeep."

"What do you want?"

And Carol's hands on mine, and the rope taut, and my father's frostbitten hands on my arm.

"I want my wife home," I said.

* * *

That was the first thing.

That's what I want written down in the middle of the book. Not the sea. Not the doors. That. I want my wife home. I said it on the east wall in the storm with my sister holding the other end of my name, and it was the first thing I'd wanted since the arch closed in my face. Not I want her to be all right. Not I want the light back. Not I want to stop. I wanted her home. I wanted to go and get her. I wanted to stand on the deck of whatever ship she was on and say borrow? and hear her say take, and bring her back up the east stair barefoot in my old green coat and put her in her own window seat with a cup of tea that hadn't gone cold.

And the wanting was a thing I could hold on to. It was a place. It had a direction. West.

The doors in me started to close.

* * *

They didn't close on their own. Carol closed them.

I didn't know she could do that. I'd known all our lives that she could choose where my folds come out. She's done it since we were babies; Mother has a story about it, about a toy horse I folded across the nursery when I was a few months old and Carol, without even looking up, put it down in her own cot instead of Mother's lap where I'd meant it to go. It's an odd thing to be able to do. Neither of us has ever understood it. It's just how we are. I open the door; she says where it goes.

That night she said where they all went.

I felt her do it. Standing in the twin-room with the rope of my name in her hands, she reached past me through every open fold, one after another, and said where it came out.

Here.

Mary's drawer. Carol reached through the fold that was open into Mary's drawer and said here, and the fold came out on the east wall, in the air between us, and folded shut on itself, and was gone.

Here. The lower market. The great hall doors swung closed on Havenreach and opened on the great hall again, just the great hall, and the market went back to being a mile away.

Here. Helena's oven. The snowfield went. The oven was an oven, cold and dark, with the morning's ashes in it.

Here. Here. Here. The bakehouse. The Lyradon orchard. Mary's office door, and the sea behind it, gone. Every one. Fast, now, one after another, faster than I could count, Carol saying here to each one and each one coming home and shutting like a door in a house when someone goes around at night checking the locks. Not slamming. Closing. Softly. With a small click at the end.

And with each one, a little bit of me came back.

Out of the snowfield. Out of the market. Out of the orchard. Back along the rope, back into the twin-room, back into me. I felt them come. Like feeling coming back into a foot that's gone to sleep: pins and needles, and then warmth, and then it's yours again.

* * *

The sea off Westmere was the last.

It was the biggest, and the furthest, and it had the most of me in it, and it had all of Seraphina's fire. Carol reached for it and I felt her hand burn.

She didn't let go. She hissed through her teeth and held on. The fold to Westmere was open in me like a wound, and through it the borrowed fire was still pouring out into the sea a mile past the outer shoals, boiling it, white, steam up past the stars. And Carol stood in the middle and put her hand through it, through the fire, into the boiling sea three hundred miles away.

And the sea froze.

Not all of it. She's not our father. She's said that herself, at Caldermouth, on the harbor wall. But she put her own cold through my fold, the snow off her fingers, the ferns she's made on my window every winter of my life, down the open fold into the boiling sea, and where her cold met Seraphina's fire the steam went up white in one great rolling cloud and the water under it went still. And then gray. And then, as the fire in it ran out, very slowly, the ordinary cold dark of the western sea at night.

And then my father reached past both of us.

I felt him. He'd been holding my arm all this time. He put his frostbitten hand over Carol's on the fold, the deep cold, the cold under his patience, the cold that had frozen every Kethran hull on the western sea from the map room two nights before, and between them, my father and my sister, they put the sea off Westmere back the way it had been.

Tamar's watch book:

10th hour and three quarters. It's stopped. Steam everywhere. Can't see the shoals. Smells of a kitchen. A seal has come up on the north pier and is lying there looking extremely offended. Dunmore says to leave it alone. I'm leaving it alone.

* * *

Carol said here to the fold to Westmere.

And it came out on the east wall, between us, and shut.

And the last of me came back up the rope, out of the sea, along three hundred miles of dark, and into the twin-room, and into me.

I was standing on the east wall of Greykeep. In my own body. All of it. My feet were on the stone. My sister's hands were on mine. My father's hand was on my arm. The snow had stopped going up. It hung in the air for a moment, everywhere, millions of flakes, perfectly still, as if the whole sky were holding its breath.

And then it came down. Properly. The way snow is supposed to. Slowly, straight down, out of a sky that wasn't purple anymore, just dark, just night, with clouds going thin and the stars coming through them, cold and sharp and very ordinary.

All over Greykeep, the doors were shut.

* * *

I looked down at my right hand.

It was still dark.

I'd known it would be. I'd known it was too far, past the edge, past the last islands. I'd known it in my head. But I'd hoped. And it was dark, and I looked at it, and I felt the crack in me shift, a little, the way ice shifts on a pond when you put your weight on it.

Carol felt it too. Her hands tightened.

And Ignatius took my hand.

He'd been standing behind Thor all this time on the wall. I hadn't seen him. Thor had put him down on his feet when she landed and he'd stood there in the storm with his hair on fire, quite calmly, putting it out with his own fingers a bit at a time, waiting. He's very good at waiting. You have to be, with Carol. He came forward now, past Thor, and he didn't say anything. He just took my right hand out of Carol's, very gently, and turned it over, palm up, and looked at the dark place in the middle of it.

Then he put his own palm down flat on mine.

Ignatius has the First Flame too. Not like her. Not the burning side. The other side, the healing side, the side their mother has, the warm side, the side that mends things. But it's the same fire. It came from the same place. They're brother and sister, and their fire knows itself, the way frost knows frost.

I felt it go into my palm. Warm. Gentle. Not much. Just enough.

And under it, in the middle of my palm, very far down, something answered.

* * *

It was so small I almost didn't feel it. A pinprick. A spark. The smallest coal at the bottom of a grate in the coldest hour of the night, when you've almost given up on the fire and then you blow on it and there's one red point, still there, under the ash.

Ignatius lifted his hand.

And in the middle of my palm, there it was. A grain of light. Gold. Smaller than a poppy seed. So small you'd need to hold it close to your eye to see it. But gold. Steady. Lit.

"She's there," said Ignatius. Quietly. His voice was rough from the smoke. "I can feel her, through it. Through my own. Flame calls flame." He looked at the tiny gold point in my palm. "She's a very long way away. Further than I've ever felt anyone. But she's there." He almost smiled. "And she's furious with somebody. I can feel that too. Somebody on that ship is having a very bad night."

I looked at the light.

I looked at it for a long time. Carol had my other hand. My father had my arm. Thor stood behind us all, huge, with her hammer, and the lightning going down out of her braid at last, and the snow falling on her shoulders.

"It's lit," I said.

"It's lit," said Ignatius.

"It's lit," said Carol, and put her forehead against my shoulder, and started to cry.

* * *

We sat on the east wall until morning, Carol and I.

Everyone else went in. My father went down to have Mother see to his hands, which were black to the wrists and which he hadn't mentioned once. Thor went down to the little kitchen to eat everything in it; Helena says she ate a ham. Ignatius went to find Loki, because his hair was still smoking a bit and Loki is the only person he trusts to tell him honestly how bad it looks.

Carol and I sat in the nook with a blanket over both of us, the way we did when we were small and couldn't sleep, shoulder to shoulder, and didn't say much.

"You came early," I said, after a while.

"Thor came early. I just held on." She was quiet. "She flew me over the downs so fast my eyelashes froze. Ignatius was sick twice. Into the sky. Over a village. I hope nobody was underneath."

"Thank you."

"Don't." She put her head on my shoulder. "Don't thank me. It's the middle. You don't thank somebody for being in the middle. It's where they are."

The snow was still falling. Down on the warm strip by the kitchen wall, Fenrir was lying in the snow that melted before it touched him, and he'd come out of the little kitchen, which meant the boy was awake. A moment later the kitchen door opened and Helena came out with him on her hip in the gray shawl with the red border.

He saw us on the wall. He saw Carol.

He put out his hand toward her, across the court, across the snow, all the way up.

"Coming!" he said. Very loud. Very pleased with himself. His fourth word.

Carol laughed. It came out of her all at once, through the crying, the real laugh, the one I can feel in the middle even when I can't hear it.

"Came," she called down to him. "I came, little bird. I'm here."

* * *

At dawn, with the sun coming up over the hills and the frost on the court going pink, she took my right hand again and turned it over and looked at the grain of gold in it.

"You're going to go and get her," said Carol.

It wasn't a question.

"Yes," I said.

"Not tomorrow. Not on your own. Not cracked."

"No."

"With all of us."

"With all of us," I said. "If they'll come. I'll ask."

"They'll come," said Carol. "I'll come. Ignatius will come; she's his sister. Thor will come because she'll be offended if you don't ask her. Loki will come because he's been a ship." She closed my fingers over the light, gently, the way you'd close a hand over a moth to carry it outside. "But you're going to mend first. You're going to let Father and me hold the other end until you can hold it yourself again. And then we'll go."

"How long?"

"As long as it takes," said Carol. "And not one day longer. I promise."

She's never once broken a promise to me. Not in twenty-three years. Not since the first breath.

I believed her.

* * *

From Mary's book. Tuesday into Wednesday. At the top of the page, in Mary's small straight hand, underlined twice:

The middle.

And under it:

10:20 p.m. Carol came along the east wall and took Garrick's hands. She said his whole name. She said: your name's a rope, you hold one end, I've got the other.

Uriah asked him his name, and he answered. Garrick Elias Grey. Here. I want my wife home.

Carol closed every fold. She said "here" to each one and it came home. Mary's drawer. The market. The oven. The orchard. All of them. The sea off Westmere last. She put her hand through the fire to do it. It's burned. She says it's fine.

Carol and Uriah froze the boiling sea between them. Tamar reports a seal on the north pier, offended.

All the doors are shut. The snow came down the right way.

Ignatius put his palm on Garrick's palm. The light is there. Very small. Lit. Flame calls flame. She is very far away and furious with somebody.

Uriah's hands are black to the wrists. He did not mention it. Evelyn is mending them.

Little Uriah said Coming. Carol said Came.

And under that, in a hand that's quick and clear and rather beautiful, every letter joined to the next as if it couldn't bear to let go of it, with a small fern of frost drawn very finely in the margin beside it:

Carol Clara Grey. I'd like it noted that I was asked once, a long time ago, by something at the foot of my bed, what my name was, and I didn't answer. And that tonight I was asked to hold the other end of my brother's, and I didn't even wait to be asked. And that he's going to go and get her. And that so am I.