Chapter 202: Lexander and Io

The Castellan lit the lamps on the quay on Wednesday night for the first time in five days.

I saw them from the nook. Three small steady lights at the bottom of the long slope, where the arches stand in a row along the wall where the boats tie up. Lyradon. The southern towns. Concordia. I'd watched them go out at dawn on Saturday morning from Seraphina's window seat, one, two, three, and they hadn't come back. The Castellan hadn't trusted its eyes. Now it could see again, and at a quarter to ten on Wednesday night they came on, one after another, the way they used to, and I sat in the nook with the blanket over my knees and the grain of gold in my palm and watched them for a long time.

"It'll open them in the morning," said my father. He'd come up with two cups, the way he does, and sat on the step below me, on my right. His hands were still in Mother's linen but they weren't black anymore; they were the color of a bad bruise, going yellow at the edges. "Concordia first. It asked me. I said yes."

"Concordia first," I said.

"They'll be on the other side of it," said my father. "Waiting. They've been waiting since Saturday. Ignatius sent a bird."

I knew. I'd been not thinking about it all day.

"What do I say to them?"

My father drank his tea.

"I don't know," he said. "I've never had to. You'll find out when you're standing there." He put his bruised hand on my knee. "Stand where they can see you."

* * *

The Concordia arch opened at six on Thursday morning.

I was on the quay. So was my father, and Carol, and Ignatius, and Thor, who said she was there in case anyone needed lifting, and Loki, who didn't say why he was there and didn't need to. Eleanor came down at half past five with her glass and read the Concordia plate twice in the dark, lips moving, and nodded, and stepped back. The Castellan was standing beside the arch, eight feet of gray stone, very still, the way it stands at the gate.

At six exactly it put its hand flat on the plate.

Concordia, it said. I can see who is on the other side. A pause. You may come in.

And the arch opened, and they came through.

* * *

Lexander first.

I've known Seraphina's father all my life. He's big, bigger than my father, broad through the shoulders the way old oaks are broad, with a short gray beard and a plain black patch over his left eye. He's been the king of Concordia since before I was born, and before that he was something else, something very old, a god with one eye who hung on a tree for nine nights to learn what the runes meant and came down knowing. He has those memories still. Most of the time you can't tell. He plays the king's table with me on winter evenings, the old board with the pale defenders around the carved king and the dark attackers at the edges, and he's taught me since I was eight, and I've never once beaten him.

He came out of the Concordia arch onto the quay at Havenreach in a black coat with frost on the shoulders and his axe on his back, which he hasn't carried openly since the war, and he stopped.

He looked at me.

It's a strange thing to be looked at by a man with one eye when you've only got one yourself. We stood there on the quay, the two of us, each with our left eye dark, and looked at each other with the one we had left.

He didn't say anything. He looked at my right hand. I held it up, palm out, the way I'd held it up for my father in the lower hall. The grain of gold in the middle of it, so small you had to come close.

Lexander came close.

He bent and looked at it with his one eye for a long time. Then he straightened up, and his face did something I'd never seen it do in my life, and he put his great arms around me and held on, on the quay in the dark, with his axe on his back and the frost on his shoulders and my father standing beside us.

* * *

Io came out of the arch behind him, and the quay got warm.

That's the only way I can say it. It was the middle of winter and six in the morning and there was frost on every stone of the quay from my father's cold, white, hard, the way it had been since Saturday. And Io stepped out of the Concordia arch, and the frost on the stones in front of her went to water, and then to steam, and then to dry stone, in a widening ring around her feet, the way snow goes off a roof in spring, all at once.

She's small. Seraphina's small too; she gets it from her mother. Io was queen of Dinar once, before she married Lexander, and she has the First Flame the way Ignatius has it, the warm side, the side that heals. She's mended half the soldiers of two wars with her hands. Her hair is red and it moves the way Seraphina's moves when the Flame is up, as if she were standing under water, and her eyes are Seraphina's eyes exactly. I've never been able to look at her for long without seeing my wife.

She was wearing a long red dress, and a traveling cloak over it, and no gloves. Her hands were bare. And there was fire on them.

Not much. Not the way it comes off Seraphina when she's angry. A little, along the backs of her fingers, the way it had come off Ignatius's in the little kitchen. Small and gold and restless, moving, going here and there along her skin, looking for something.

She didn't come to me.

She went past Lexander and past me and past my father and walked down the quay to the end of it, to the edge, where the river meets the harbor and you can see, on a clear morning, a long way down the water toward the sea. And she stood there with her back to us and her bare hands at her sides with the fire moving on them, and looked west.

The frost went off the whole end of the quay. The puddles on it steamed. A gull that had been sitting on a bollard near her got up and flew away, very fast.

Nobody went near her.

* * *

Thora came through last.

Seraphina's sister. The youngest of the three, named for Thor. She's nineteen, small and fierce and very blonde, with her mother's eyes and her father's habit of being right about things before anyone else has noticed them. She had her long braid down her back and a raven on her shoulder, one of her father's two, the one that likes her best.

She stood in the arch and looked at all of us. At her father with his arms around me. At her mother at the end of the quay. At my father. At Carol and Ignatius.

Then she walked straight past all of us, across the quay and up the long hill road toward the castle in the dark, without a word, so fast the raven had to hold on with both feet.

"Where's she going?" said Carol.

Ignatius watched her go.

"To the boy," he said. "She'll have asked the birds where he is. They'll have told her." He almost smiled. "She's been asking about him every day since he was born. Seraphina wrote to her about him every week while she was away on the Council's business. She kept every letter in a box."

* * *

I want to try and put down what grief looks like in people who are made of fire. Because I'd never seen it before, and I hope I never see it again, and someone ought to know.

My father grieves cold. He goes still and quiet and the frost comes up the windows, and he holds it, all of it, deep down at the bottom of the well, and nobody knows but the people who can feel the cold.

Io grieved like a fire looking for something to burn.

All day Thursday it went through Greykeep. Not her; she hardly moved from the end of the quay all morning, and then from the window of the Concordian rooms in the west tower all afternoon, looking west. But her fire went everywhere. It went out of her the way heat goes out of an oven when you open the door, and it went looking.

Every candle in the chapel lit at once at ten in the morning, though nobody was there, and burned down to the stubs in an hour. Helena's bread burned in the oven at eleven, all of it, both batches, though she'd only had it in for a quarter of an hour and she's never burned a loaf in her life. Every hearth in the castle roared up the chimney as if someone had thrown oil on it. The frost on the court went, all of it, my father's frost, and the cobbles steamed. The water in the inner court well got warm. The ice on the north tower rods melted and dripped. Mary said the ink in her pen went thin and runny and she had to stop writing.

It was looking for fuel. That's what Mother said, at noon, in the little kitchen, with the burned bread on the table and Helena white with fury. It's looking for something to burn and there's nothing here it's allowed to.

"What would it burn," said Helena, "if it was allowed?"

Mother didn't answer.

I knew. We all knew. There was one person in Greykeep that Io's fire was looking for. He was in the little room over the bakehouse with Kessavel and Iselle and a lamp, working on a collar.

And the bakehouse, since nine in the morning, had been getting very warm.

* * *

Lexander didn't burn anything.

Lexander went down to the lower hall at noon and stood in front of the Greymere arch, the new one, one plate, one name, and read the slate beside it. Seraphina Grey, of Concordia. Going. Asked to. To bring them home. He stood there for an hour. I know because I sat on the cistern steps at the back of the hall and watched him and counted.

He didn't move. He didn't say anything. He stood with his axe on his back and his one eye on the slate, and at one o'clock he put his hand flat on it, the way Eleanor had, the way you'd put your hand on someone's shoulder.

Then he turned around and saw me.

"You let her go," he said.

"She asked."

"I know she asked. I can read." He looked at the slate again. "Asked to." His voice was very deep and very quiet; there's an echo in it sometimes, as if it were coming from further down than a man's voice should. "She asked me once, when she was six. If she could climb the mast of my flagship. I said no. She climbed it anyway, at night, in her nightgown, and I found her at the top in the morning asleep in the crow's nest with the lookout's coat over her." He was quiet for a moment. "The next time she asked me anything, I said yes. I've said yes to everything she's asked me since. It saves time."

"I said yes too."

"I know you did." Lexander looked at me. "I'm not angry with you, Garrick. I want to be. I came through that arch wanting to be. I've been wanting to be since Ignatius's bird came on Saturday. It would be very much easier." He touched the slate again. "But I raised her. I know exactly what she looks like when she's decided. And I know that if you'd said no, she'd have gone anyway, and never forgiven either of you."

He came across the hall to the cistern steps and sat down beside me, heavily, the way big men sit.

"I gave an eye once," he said, "a long time ago, in another life, to learn the shape of the world. I'd give the other one, now, this morning, to learn the shape of the sea past the last islands." He looked at my right hand, lying open on my knee with the grain of gold in it. "The ravens can't go there. I sent them on Sunday. They came back on Tuesday half dead. Nothing that flies crosses that sea."

"I know."

"Then how do we follow her?"

I looked at the light in my palm.

"I don't know yet," I said. "But I'm going to. When I'm mended. With all of us." I closed my hand. "Carol promised. As long as it takes and not one day longer."

Lexander looked at me for a long time with his one eye.

"Then I'll wait," he said. "I'm very bad at it. Ask anyone. But I'll wait." He put his great hand on the back of my neck, the way my mother does. "And in the meantime, you'll play me at the king's table. Tonight. In the Concordian rooms. Because I need to beat somebody at something and it may as well be you."

* * *

At three o'clock the bakehouse roof started to smoke.

I was in the court. I saw it. A thin gray thread going up off the slates, and then another, and the snow on the bakehouse roof going to water and running off the eaves in a sheet. Inside, through the little window over the oven, I could see the lamp in the room upstairs, where Iselle and Wynn had been sitting with Kessavel since nine in the morning, bent over the collar on his neck, Iselle's hands on it and Wynn reading the cold line inside it a hair at a time with Eleanor's glass.

The window cracked. Just one pane. With a sound like ice.

Io was standing in the middle of the inner court.

I hadn't seen her come. She was standing on the cobbles in her red dress with her bare hands at her sides and the fire running along them, and she was looking up at the bakehouse window. At the lamp. At the shape of a thin young man with ink on his cuffs bent over a collar.

Her face was very calm. That was the worst of it. Seraphina's face, exactly, the face she makes when she's decided something and there's no point at all in arguing.

The cobbles around her feet were starting to glow.

* * *

I went to her.

I don't know if it was brave. I think it was mostly that nobody else was nearer. My father was at the gate. Lexander was in the lower hall. Ignatius was on the walls with Carol. Thor was in the little kitchen with Thora and my son and Fenrir; Thora had found them there at seven that morning and sat down on the flagstones with her back against the kettle cupboard door and the boy in her lap and the wolf along her other side, and Helena had let her, and nobody had moved any of them since except to bring them toast.

I went across the court to Io, and I stood in front of her. Between her and the bakehouse. On her right, where she'd see me if she looked; not that she had a dark eye, but it's a habit now, the whole house has it. And I held up my right hand.

"Io," I said.

She didn't look at me. She was looking past me, at the window.

"He opened the door," said Io. Very quietly. "He wrote the line. He told them about the lamps. He brought the chain through for my daughter's fire." The cobbles under her feet were red now. "And then she went after his mother."

"Yes."

"And you've kept him."

"The house kept him. Everyone. He's working on Kessavel's collar. With Iselle. So that when we go after her, the god who makes chains can come without one on."

"I don't care about Kessavel's collar," said Io.

The bakehouse window cracked again. Another pane.

And I did the only thing I could think of. I took her hand.

* * *

Her hand was so hot it hurt. I don't mean that the way people mean it about a cup of tea. I mean it burned me. I felt the skin go on my palm, my right palm, all around the little grain of gold in the middle of it, and I didn't let go.

I turned her hand over in mine, palm up, the way Ignatius had turned mine over on the east wall. And I put my palm on hers. The grain of gold against her skin.

"Here," I said. "She left it. So I'd know."

Io looked down.

She looked at our two hands, palm to palm, with the fire going off hers and the burn coming up on mine. And I felt her feel it. The little grain of gold in my palm, so small you'd need to hold it close to your eye. Her daughter's flame. The same fire as her own. It came from the same place.

Flame calls flame.

Io went very still.

The fire on the backs of her fingers stopped moving. It stopped looking. All of it, all the restless gold that had been going through Greykeep since six in the morning, lighting the candles and burning the bread and warming the well and cracking the bakehouse window, all of it stopped, all at once, and turned, and came back to her, the way a dog comes back when someone it loves whistles. Back into her hands. Back into the one place in all of Greykeep where her daughter was.

The grain of gold in my palm.

"Oh," said Io.

Her voice cracked right down the middle.

"Oh, she's angry," said Io. "She's so angry. She's furious with somebody." And she laughed. It came out of her like a sob. "That's my girl. That's my girl. She's on a ship somewhere at the end of the world and she's furious with somebody and they have no idea what's coming." She was crying now, and laughing, both at once, with her hand on mine. "Oh, Garrick. She's alive. I can feel her. She's alive and she's so cross."

The cobbles stopped glowing. The steam stopped. Up in the bakehouse window, the lamp went on burning, steady, ordinary, and nothing else happened to the glass.

Io put her other hand over both of ours and stood there in the middle of the inner court and cried into them.

* * *

Later, when she'd stopped, she looked at my palm. At the burn around the grain of gold. It was a bad burn; I could see that now. Red and white and blistered, in a ring, like the ring of frost that comes up around my feet when I fold.

"I did that," said Io.

"It's all right."

"It isn't. I'm a healer. I've never once in my life burned anyone I didn't mean to." She put her fingers on the burn, very lightly, and the warm side of the Flame came out of them, the side that mends, the side Ignatius has, and the burn went cool, and then it was skin again. All except a thin pale ring, around the grain of gold, like a frame around a picture. She looked at it. "I'll leave that," she said. "So you remember to hold her up to the light."

Then she looked up at the bakehouse window.

The lamp. The shape at the table, bent over a collar.

"I'm going to go up there," said Io.

I didn't move out of her way.

"Not to burn him," said Io. She almost smiled. It was Seraphina's smile, the real one. "I'm going to go and sit with them. With Iselle and the boy and the god in the collar. Because there's a line of cold old writing around someone's throat, and I've been mending things all my life, and I've never once seen anything that needed mending more." She put her hand on my arm, the way you'd move someone gently out of a doorway. "And because my daughter went after his mother. Which means his mother is under my daughter's care. Which means he is under mine."

And she walked across the court to the bakehouse door and went in and up the stairs, and the bakehouse roof stopped smoking, and that night Helena's bread came out of the oven perfectly.

* * *

I played Lexander at the king's table that night in the Concordian rooms. Three round rooms stacked in the west tower, with tall windows over the river toward the sunset; Io chose them for the windows. She chooses most things for the windows.

He beat me three times. He was very pleased about it.

At midnight Io came in from the bakehouse with soot on her hands and sat down in the window and looked west, and didn't burn anything.

And at the end of the third game, with my king surrounded in the middle of the board by his dark pieces, Lexander leaned back and looked at me with his one eye and said, "You'll find a way. Across that sea. Where nothing flies."

"How do you know?"

"Because I've been watching you play this game since you were eight," said Lexander, "and you've never once beaten me. But you've never once stopped trying to find a way through, either. Not in fifteen years. You lose and you set the board up again." He started putting the pieces back. "That's not a gift. That's a habit. It's better than a gift."

He set up the board.

"Again," said Lexander.

* * *

From Mary's book. Thursday. Mary's hand, steady. The ink is thin and pale for the first half of the page and then goes back to normal:

6 a.m. The Castellan opened the Concordia arch. It can see. It said: you may come in.

Lexander, with his axe. He held Garrick on the quay. Io, and the frost went off the quay in a ring. She stood at the end and looked west. Thora, with a raven, went straight up the hill to the boy. She is on the kitchen floor against the kettle cupboard door with him and Fenrir. Helena allowed it.

All day Io's fire went through the castle looking for something to burn. The chapel candles. Two batches of bread. The well. My ink. The bakehouse roof.

Lexander stood an hour in front of the slate. He said: I'd give the other eye to learn the shape of that sea. The ravens can't go there.

3 p.m. Io in the court, looking up at the bakehouse window. Garrick stood in front of her. He put his palm on hers. Flame calls flame. She said: Oh, she's angry. That's my girl.

Io burned his hand. She healed it. She left a pale ring around the light. So you remember to hold her up to the light.

Io went up to the bakehouse room to sit with Iselle and Wynn and Kessavel. She says: his mother is under my daughter's care. So he is under mine.

The bread came out right tonight.

Lexander beat Garrick three times at the king's table. He says: again.

And under that, in a hand that's large and slanting and very old-fashioned, every capital letter shaped like a rune, the ink pressed so hard into the page that it shows through on the other side:

Lexander of Concordia. I'd like it noted that my daughter climbed the mast of my flagship at six years old after I said no, and I found her at the top in the morning asleep in the crow's nest. That I have said yes to her ever since. That I came through the arch this morning wanting to be angry with the man who said yes to her too. That I couldn't. And that he still hasn't beaten me. But he will.