Chapter 203: Flame Calls Flame

The coal woke me at four.

It doesn't hurt. It never has, not since the night on the quay when she put it there and closed my fingers over it. Most of the time I forget it's there, the way you forget a ring. But at four on Friday morning it was warm. Not hot. Warm, the way a cup is warm when somebody else has just been holding it.

I lay on my own side of the bed and looked at it. A grain of gold in the middle of my right palm, small as a seed. And around it, since yesterday afternoon, the thin pale ring Io had left when she healed my burn. Like a frame around a picture.

The grain wasn't in the middle of the ring anymore.

It was a hair off center. Toward the window.

I sat up. I turned my hand. The grain stayed where it was, a hair off center, and when I turned all the way around on the bed it slid, slowly, the way a bubble slides in a carpenter's level, until it was on the window side again.

West. The window faces west.

I got up and put on my boots and my coat and went to find Ignatius, because if my palm had woken up, I thought, his might have too.

* * *

He wasn't in his rooms. He wasn't in the little kitchen, though Helena was, putting the first bread in, and she pointed up with a floury finger without my having to ask.

So I went up. Past Carol's four rooms, to the top landing with the round window, to the broom cupboard that has never had a broom in it. Up the ladder at the back. Through the trapdoor, which groaned, the way it has groaned since we were five.

He was on the leads of the north tower roof, inside the ring of Davren's eight lightning rods, sitting cross-legged with a blanket around his shoulders and his face toward the west. Carol was asleep against his side under the other half of the blanket, her head on his shoulder, her mouth a little open. Her bad hand was still in its sling.

Ignatius didn't look around. "You felt it too."

"It woke me."

"It woke me at two." He held up his left hand. There was fire on his fingers. Not much. A thread of it, along the side of his first finger, small and gold and steady, and it was leaning. The way a candle flame leans in a draft. Except there wasn't any draft. "I didn't need your hand," he said. "That's the thing. On the east wall I needed your hand to find her. Last night I lay down and shut my eyes and she was just there. On her own. Like hearing your name said in another room."

"Your mother."

"I think so. Mother put her flame against yours yesterday, and yours has a bit of Sera's in it, and mine has a bit of Mother's in it, and—" He stopped. He's a healer, not a scholar; he doesn't like explaining things he can feel. "Fire's family," he said. "That's all. Once it's met itself it doesn't forget."

I sat down on his other side, the left side, the dark side, and then thought better of it and got up and went around and sat by Carol's feet, so that he was on my right where I could see him.

He noticed. He almost smiled. "Still?"

"Still."

We looked west together. The sky over the river was black, and then very dark blue at the bottom, and the stars were going out one at a time over the downs.

"She's moving," said Ignatius. "Since about midnight. Before that she was hardly moving at all, just drifting, all Wednesday, all Thursday. Then at midnight something changed and she started to go. Steady. She hasn't stopped once." He turned his hand a little and watched the thread of fire lean. "That way. A bit south of where the sun goes down."

"How far?"

"I don't know." He sounded tired. "It doesn't tell me that. It only tells me which way. Like a dog pulling on a lead in the dark. You know which way the dog wants to go. You don't know how far off the rabbit is."

I held out my palm beside his fingers. My grain of gold, a hair off center inside Io's ring. His thread of fire, leaning. They pointed the same way.

And I thought: a direction is a line.

From here it's a line. It goes out over the river and the downs and the coast and the sea, and she's somewhere on it, and we don't know where.

But from somewhere else it's a different line.

I've been learning harbors since the spring. Bram taught me, on the Westmere harbor wall, with a borrowed compass and a great deal of patience. If you take a bearing on a church spire from your boat, you're somewhere on that line. If you take a second bearing on a lighthouse, you're where the two lines cross. Every boy in Westmere can do it by the time he's nine. Bram made me do it eleven times before he let me stop.

"Ignatius."

"Mm."

"How fast can Thor get you to Westmere?"

He turned his head and looked at me for a long moment.

"Oh no," said Ignatius.

* * *

I'd like to say I made a plan. What I made was a list, on the back of Seraphina's list, because it was the only paper in my coat. I said it out loud while I wrote it, and Carol woke up halfway through and listened to the rest with her eyes shut.

One bearing from here. One from somewhere else, as far away as we can get, at the same moment. Where they cross is where she is. Do it again three hours later. Where the second cross is, that's how far she's gone. Then we know which way and how fast.

"And then you know where she's going," said Carol, without opening her eyes.

"And then I know where she's going."

"You're not folding anywhere," said Carol.

"I'm not folding anywhere."

"I mean it, Garrick. I've got the other end of your name and I'm not letting go of it so you can fold to Harl to look at a compass."

"I'm staying here. I'm the bearing from here." I held up my palm. "This doesn't move. Ignatius moves."

Carol opened her eyes and looked at Ignatius.

"I was sick twice," said Ignatius. "Over a village."

"I know. I was there." She sat up and pushed her hair out of her face with her good hand. "I'll come with you. I'll hold your head."

* * *

My father was in the map room by six.

I don't know who told him. Probably the Castellan. Probably the Castellan heard me say Westmere on the north tower roof and went and stood in my father's doorway until he woke up; it does that. When I came up the hundred and twelve steps of the west tower with my list, he was already there, in his shirt, standing over the big table where Tamar's great-great-grandfather's chart lay unrolled, the brown-ink soundings and the stitch-crosses of the shoals. His hands were still bandaged from Tuesday night, both of them, wrapped to the wrist in Mother's clean linen. He can't hold a cup yet. He hasn't once mentioned it.

Mary was there too, with the green slate under her arm and the lamp, because he couldn't hold it. And Lexander, with his axe propped against the window, because the Concordian rooms are in the same tower and he says he doesn't sleep past five anymore, he's too old and there's too much to look at.

And Fenrir. Fenrir was lying under the table with his head on his paws and the white saddle-mark pale across his back, and on his back, asleep, curled up in the warm hollow behind the wolf's shoulders with his thumb in his mouth, was my son.

"He came up the stairs on Fenrir at half past five," said my father. "I didn't ask. Fenrir didn't explain."

Fenrir opened one yellow eye at me and closed it again. He'd put himself between the table and the west window. Between the boy and the sea. He does that now. Wherever the boy is in a room, Fenrir finds the side of him that faces the thing that's wrong, and he lies down there.

I told my father the list.

He listened to all of it with his bandaged hands flat on the chart. He didn't say anything until I'd finished. Then he said, "Show me your hand."

I showed him. The grain of gold, a hair off center.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he put one bandaged hand flat on the chart, right on Greykeep, where the river bends, and he looked up at me.

"Hm," said my father.

That's yes, from him. It's been yes since I was small.

* * *

It took an hour to get ready. Most of it was compasses.

Mary found the good one, the brass one in the walnut box that has sat on the map room mantel since before I was born, and she set it on the windowsill on the west side and lined up its lid with the lines Eleanor cut in the stone when she built the room. Then I put my right hand flat over it, palm up, and held it still, and Mary looked through her glass at the grain of gold in the ring and at the needle under it and wrote down the number.

"Two hundred and sixty-one," said Mary. "And a half. Hold still."

"I am holding still."

"You're breathing. Hold still more."

Down in Westmere, Tamar was getting the same sort of thing ready on the harbor wall: his own compass, the binnacle one off the pilot boat, set on the top step of the lighthouse where the lines are cut. Ignatius went through the Westmere gate with Carol at seven, looking very pale already, and Thor went with them, because the noon bearing had to be taken a long way north and nobody else could get him there fast enough.

"I won't drop him," said Thor in the lower hall, buckling on her belt. She has a braid down her back as thick as my wrist. "I've never dropped anybody."

"You dropped Loki in the river," said Carol.

"Loki asked me to."

"I did," said Loki, who was leaning in the arch to the hall with a cup of tea, not coming, just watching us go. "I wanted to see if I could be a fish on the way down. I nearly managed it."

Thor picked Ignatius up under one arm before he could say anything, the way you pick up a sack of flour, and walked through the Westmere arch with Carol behind her, and the arch closed, and Loki stood there sipping his tea.

"He'll be sick," said Loki. "But he'll be sick in the right direction."

* * *

Nine o'clock.

The bells. The Castellan rang the chapel bell in Greykeep and the same moment, the very same moment, the harbor bell in Westmere rang too, because Tamar had told the Westmere bell-ringer to ring it when he heard ours down the gate, and the gate carries sound as well as people. Ignatius heard it on the harbor wall. I heard it in the map room. Mary looked at my hand.

"Two hundred and sixty-two."

She'd moved. In the two hours since Mary's first reading, she'd moved half a mark south.

Ten minutes later a gull came up the hundred and twelve steps. It wasn't a gull. It was a slip of folded paper on a gull, and Tamar had tied it on with fishing line, and the gull was very offended and wanted a crust. Fenrir lifted his head and looked at it and the gull reconsidered its position. Mary gave it a crust. The note said, in Tamar's square hand:

Westmere lighthouse step, 9 o'clock bell. Ignatius says: 255. He says it's right. He says he'll be fine. He isn't. T.

Lexander drew the lines, because my father couldn't hold a pencil.

He's very good at it. He's drawn every sea Concordia sails, and some it doesn't, and his hand on the rule is as steady as his hand on an axe. He laid the long brass rule on Tamar's chart from Greykeep, at two hundred and sixty-two, and drew a line west across the downs and the coast and out onto the sea, past Westmere, past Harl, past the shoals, out to where the soundings stop and the brown ink stops and the paper is just paper.

Then he laid the rule from Westmere, at two hundred and fifty-five. And drew.

The two lines went out across the empty paper side by side, very close together, so close you'd think they'd never meet.

And then, a long way out, almost at the edge of the chart, they did.

Nobody said anything.

Lexander put his pencil down very carefully on the table and looked at the little cross where the two lines met, a long way out on the empty paper.

"How far?" said my father.

Lexander measured it with the dividers. He did it twice. My father said "Again," and he did it a third time, and didn't argue, which I've never seen him do.

"From the last islands," said Lexander, "a hundred and ninety miles. Give or take thirty. The lines are too close to be sure." He looked up at me with his one eye. "But she's there, Garrick. Somewhere about there. On a real sea, in a real place, at nine o'clock this morning."

I put my finger on the cross.

It's just a cross. Pencil, on old paper. It's nothing. It's the most anything I've ever touched.

My son woke up on Fenrir's back and looked at me, and at my finger on the chart, and sat up, and climbed down off the wolf and came around the table leg and put his hand on the chart next to mine. He can just reach. He had to stand on his toes.

He looked at me.

"Coming," said my son.

"Yes," I said. "Coming."

Fenrir got up and came and stood behind him, so the boy's back was against the wolf's chest, and lay down again there, with his head on his paws, facing the window. Between the boy and the sea.

* * *

My father hadn't said anything since the cross. He'd just looked at it, for a long time, the way he looks at weather coming.

Then he put his bandaged hand on the chart, flat, over the last islands.

"My ice stops here," said Uriah.

I didn't know that. I knew he'd frozen every Kethran hull on the western sea on Saturday morning from this very room, every one except hers, because she'd asked first. I knew he held them still, all the way out. I didn't know he could feel where it ended.

"I can feel all of it," said Uriah. "Every ship I'm holding. Like holding a whole fistful of stones at once. You know where every stone is." He moved his hand, slowly, along the edge of the islands. "And here, there's nothing. Here's where my ice stops, and I can't feel past it." He was quiet. "She went past here at about eleven on Tuesday night. I felt her ship go by. The only one moving. I let her through." He looked at the cross. "I'd have liked to go with her."

"I know."

"I'm not going to," said Uriah. "Not yet. Not until you're mended. We agreed." He looked at me. "But I want you to know, Garrick, that I have not been asleep since Saturday. Not properly. I lie down and I hold every one of those ships still and I think about my grandson on that kitchen floor with an iron collar on, and I think about her on that ship. And every hour I don't go, I hold the ice a little harder."

"Are you hurting them?"

"No." He looked at the ships he couldn't see, under his hand, out on the sea. "Not one. They're cold and they're bored and they're eating their stores. That's all." He was quiet. "I used to ask. I used to ask everybody everything. I'll ask again someday. But not them, and not now." He took his hand off the chart. "Find her. And then we'll all go."

* * *

Noon was harder.

Noon had to be a long way north. Thor had taken Ignatius to Harl, to the top of the ruined lighthouse, because Harl is the farthest out of anywhere that's ours, a day's sail north-west of Westmere, and a line from Harl would cross a line from Greykeep at a proper angle instead of nearly side by side.

There's no bell on Harl. There's the old lighthouse, unlit for a hundred years, and a great many gannets, and Brannoc.

So we used the sun. Tamar had said that, through the gate, when I asked: "Noon's noon, Garrick. When the shadow's shortest, that's noon. On Harl or in Greykeep or anywhere. The sun doesn't lie." There's a few minutes' difference between Harl and here, he said, because Harl is further west and the sun gets there later, and he told me exactly how many, and Mary wrote it down. It was near enough, he said, for a sea that size.

So at noon, by the shadow of the iron rod Mary stood in a pot of sand on the windowsill, I held my hand still over the compass.

"Two hundred and sixty-three," said Mary.

Another half mark south, in three hours. Moving. Steadily. Moving away.

And at seven minutes past noon, by the shadow on Harl, Ignatius on top of the lighthouse with Carol holding the back of his coat so he didn't fall off it, and Brannoc holding the compass, and the gannets yelling, and Thor standing at the bottom of the tower being very offended that she'd been asked not to help, Ignatius took his.

Thor brought the number back herself. The whole way. From Harl to Westmere and through the gate and up the hundred and twelve steps, in under an hour, which isn't possible, and she wasn't even breathing hard. She came into the map room with her braid full of salt and slapped a piece of slate down on the table that said in Carol's hand:

228. Ig sick 3 times. Once on Thor. He says sorry. C.

"He did say sorry," said Thor. "Very nicely. I'm still offended."

Lexander drew the lines again.

From Greykeep. From Harl. Out across the shoals and the soundings and the place where the brown ink stops, and out onto the empty paper.

These two met at a good fat angle, the way Bram always said they should. A clean cross, not a long thin one. Lexander measured it three times without being told.

"Two hundred and twenty miles past the last islands," he said. "Give or take ten." He put the dividers down. "She's gone thirty miles since nine."

"Thirty miles in three hours," said my father.

"Ten miles an hour."

The room went very quiet.

Lexander went to the window and looked down at the smoke from the bakehouse chimney, leaning hard toward the east.

"The wind's from the west," said Lexander. "It has been since Wednesday. Steady." He looked back at me with his one eye. "She's going straight into it. At ten miles an hour. All day."

I've been on boats. I learned harbors all spring. I know what ten miles an hour into the wind means.

It means nothing on that ship is using the wind.

"Rowed?" said my father.

"Nobody rows that long," said Lexander. "Not at that speed. Not all night and all day."

"Pulled," said Loki, from the doorway.

We all looked at him. He hadn't come up the stairs. He was just there, leaning in the doorframe, with his teacup, the way he's just there sometimes.

"Since midnight," said Loki. "Something picked up a rope at midnight. Something under the water, pulling. Something big, on a rope." He looked at the cross on the chart, the far one, for a long moment, and something went across his face that I've only seen on it two or three times in my life. "I've been a ship," he said. "Ships know when they're being pulled. They hate it." He drank his tea. "She'll know too. She won't like it."

* * *

At ten past one, Ignatius felt her flare.

I wasn't with him. He was still on Harl, lying on the floor of Brannoc's hut with his feet up on a lobster pot, being looked after by Carol and two gannets. But I felt it too. In my palm. The grain of gold in Io's pale ring went suddenly hot, hot like a spark off a forge, so hot I yelped and Fenrir was up on his feet under the table before I'd finished yelping, all his hackles up, standing over the boy.

And then it went back. Warm. Small. Steady.

But for a breath it had been big.

Thor went back for Ignatius. He made her stop at the Westmere lighthouse step on the way so he could take the three o'clock bearing, because he insisted, and Tamar sent the number up by gull. They came through the Westmere gate at half past three and I met them in the lower hall, and Ignatius was white and green and had sick on his boots, and he caught my arm before I could say anything.

"She used it," he said. "At ten past one. The cutting side. Big." His fingers were tight on my sleeve. "Garrick, I felt her cut something. Something big and old and hard. Like when she was nine and cut the horse trough. Like that but more."

"Is she hurt?"

"No." He let go of my arm. He laughed. It came out of him in a cough, as if it surprised him. "No. She's not hurt. She's—" He shook his head. "She's pleased with herself. She's furious and she's pleased with herself. She's exactly like she was at nine, standing over that trough with her fists clenched and her hair up, waiting for someone to tell her off."

Behind me, Io had come down the stairs.

She'd been with Wynn and Iselle and Kessavel in the little room over the bakehouse since six, working on the collar, and she had soot on her hands again. She'd felt it too. I could see that on her face. Not as clearly as Ignatius. Not as clearly as my palm. But a mother knows, the way you know your child has fallen over in the next room before you hear the crying.

She looked at Ignatius, at his boots, at his green face.

And then she went straight to him, and put her hands on either side of his face, the warm side of the Flame coming out of them, and he leaned into it the way a tired horse leans into a stable wall.

"She cut something," said Ignatius into his mother's hands.

"I know, darling," said Io. "I felt it." She smiled. It was the first time I'd seen her smile since she came through the arch. "That's my girl."

* * *

That three o'clock bearing was the last one. Ignatius from the Westmere lighthouse step, since Harl was too far to get to again, and me from the map room. He shouldn't have done it. He'd already been sick five times. He said he'd rather be sick a sixth time than not know, and his mother said that was the most like his father he'd ever sounded, and Lexander said thank you.

The two lines met again, long and thin, a long way out.

Two hundred and fifty miles past the last islands. Give or take thirty.

Thirty miles in three hours. Again. Ten miles an hour. Again.

Lexander drew a straight line through all three crosses with the long brass rule. It went through all of them, nearly, the way a line goes through stones in a stream. And then he kept going. He drew it on past the third cross, faint, out across the empty paper, all the way to the edge of Tamar's chart, where the old paper is brown and soft and the great-great-grandfather has drawn a little curly sea-serpent and written underneath it, very small, Here we stopp'd.

The line went off the edge.

Past the serpent. Off the paper. Onto the table.

"Two more days," said Lexander, "at that speed, and she's off any chart we have." He put down the rule. "Off any chart anybody has."

My father stood at my right shoulder with his bandaged hands at his sides and looked at the serpent for a long time.

"Then we draw the chart," said Lexander.

He said it the way he says again at the king's table.

* * *

Davren came at six.

I didn't send for him. Eleanor did. She'd been at the arch all day with her glass, and when she heard what we were doing she sent a peppermint and a note through the Lyradon arch, and Davren came through it twenty minutes later with Cassia behind him and a canvas bag of tools on his shoulder, and walked up the hundred and twelve steps without stopping, and stood over the chart.

He's not a talker, Davren. He says things the way he'd describe a bearing that's going. He looked at the three crosses and the faint line running off the edge of the paper for a full minute, and then he said, "You did that with two men and a thunder goddess."

"And a gull," said Mary.

"And a gull." He put his finger on Greykeep. Then on Westmere. Then on Harl. "Three places. Two readers. A bell, the sun, a bird." He shook his head slowly. "And it worked. That's very good, Garrick. That's very good work." He looked up at me. "And it's going to stop working in two days, when she's too far out for the lines to cross at any angle that means anything. You know that."

"I know that."

"Hm," said Davren. He got that from my father, I think, or my father got it from him. He was quiet for a long time, and Cassia stood beside him with her hand on his back and didn't hurry him, because nobody who knows Davren ever does.

"The stone," he said at last.

Everybody looked at him.

"The humming stone. In the lower court at Westmere Hold. Eleanor and I said it was an ear. It is. It's been an ear since Damar carried it up out of the harbor, and it's been listening toward them the whole time, all the way out." He tapped the far edge of the chart. "Out there. Past where we stopped. It's been hearing things out there since the day it came ashore that nothing else can hear. That's what it's for."

"And?"

"And an ear can turn its head." Davren looked at Ignatius, who was asleep on the window seat with his head in Carol's lap and sick on his boots. "If it can hear them, it can hear her. I'm sure of it. If it knows what to listen for." He picked up his bag. "I'll need him. When he's slept. He's the one who knows what she sounds like." He looked at my palm. "And you. And your mother-in-law, if she'll come."

"You can turn it?"

"I can try," said Davren. "I've never tried anything like it." He put his bag over his shoulder. "But I'd rather try than watch that line go off the edge of the table."

Lexander laughed. He put his big hand on Davren's shoulder.

"Again," said Lexander.

* * *

My father sent me to bed at nine.

He didn't say it like that. He came and stood in the map room door with his bandaged hands and said, "Garrick, what's the third thing on her list?"

The list. Seraphina's list. For G., if I'm ever away. I had it in my coat. I didn't need to look.

"Sleep," I said. "On your own side. Not in the middle."

"Hm," said Uriah.

So I went.

My son was asleep in the cot at the foot of our bed, with Fenrir across the doorway, the white saddle-mark pale in the dark. The wolf lifted his head as I came in and looked at me, and then looked past me, out the window, west, and put his head down again with his nose pointing at the sea. Keeping watch, for both of us.

I lay down on my own side of the bed. Not in the middle.

I held up my right hand in the dark.

The grain of gold sat a hair off center in Io's pale ring, toward the window, toward the west, toward a cross on a chart and then past it, past the serpent, past the edge.

Warm. Small. Steady. Ten miles an hour into the wind, and furious, and pleased with herself.

"I know where you are," I told it. "Give or take thirty."

It didn't answer. It doesn't. But I like to think it got a little warmer.

* * *

From Mary's book. Friday. Mary's hand, small and very neat, with numbers down the margin like a sum:

4 a.m. Garrick's light is off center in the ring. It points west. Ignatius can feel her on his own now, since Io came. He says fire is family. Once it has met itself it doesn't forget.

Garrick's plan: a line from here, a line from somewhere else, where they cross is where she is. Bram taught him this.

9 o'clock bell. Greykeep 262. Westmere 255. 190 miles past the last islands, give or take 30.

The boy put his hand on the chart beside his father's and said: Coming.

Uriah's ice stops at the last islands. He felt her ship go past on Tuesday. He let her through. He has not slept properly since Saturday. He has not hurt anyone. He says: find her and then we'll all go.

Noon by the shadow. Greykeep 263. Harl 228. 220 miles past the islands, give or take 10. Thirty miles in three hours, into the wind. She drifted Wednesday and Thursday. Since midnight she goes ten miles an hour. Loki says she is being pulled. He says she won't like it.

1:10. She used the cutting side. Big. Garrick yelped. Fenrir stood over the boy. Ignatius says she cut something old and hard and she is pleased with herself. Io says: that's my girl.

3 o'clock. 250 miles. Ten miles an hour again. The line goes off Tamar's chart past the serpent. HERE WE STOPP'D. Lexander says: then we draw the chart.

6 o'clock. Davren. The stone is an ear. It can turn its head. He needs Ignatius, Garrick and Io.

Ignatius was sick six times today. Thor kept count. One was on Thor.

9 o'clock. Uriah sent Garrick to bed. Own side. Lexander drew every line today because Uriah's hands are bandaged. Uriah said: again. Lexander did not argue.

And under that, in a round warm hand that slopes a little uphill, as if the writer were leaning back in a chair:

Ignatius of Concordia. I'd like it noted that I was sick six times today, once on a goddess, and that I'd do it sixty. I'd like it noted that my sister has been cross with me every single day of my life since she could walk, and that I've felt it every single day, and that I never once in my life thought I'd be so glad to feel it from two hundred and fifty miles away. Keep being cross, Sera. I'm listening. We all are.