Chapter 207: The Company

The collar came off at ten past six on Tuesday morning.

I was there because Wynn asked me to be. He sent Faelan down to the little kitchen at half past five with a note on the back of a page torn out of his copybook, in the small careful hand he uses now, which is not the hand he used for the line under the plate. He's never once used that hand since.

Garrick. It's ready. I think. Will you come and hold the lamp. You can say no. W.

So I went up the narrow stair to the little room over the bakehouse, with the Castellan's shaded lamp in my right hand and the warm smell of Helena's first bread coming up through the floorboards.

It's a small room. One window, over the court. A bed, a chair, a table under the window that Wynn has covered in paper. Kessavel was sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands in his lap. He's very tall, and very thin now, and he sits the way a man sits who has spent a long time chained to a tower and hasn't yet remembered that he's allowed to lean back. The collar was still on him. Kethran iron, dull and black, a finger thick, with no seam and no lock, and the skin of his neck under it rubbed raw and healed and rubbed raw again.

Iselle was kneeling on the floor in front of him with her right hand open on her knee. Io sat on the chair, barefoot, with her hands folded and the Flame very small and warm along her knuckles, keeping the room the right temperature for mending. Wynn stood at the table with his glass in his eye and a sheet of paper in each hand, and his ears were red, the way they go when he hasn't slept.

And in the doorway behind me, Caldris. He'd come up without being asked. He spent a whole winter once taking bindings off two gods called Teren and Lethan, slowly, for weeks. He knows what it costs. He didn't come in. He stood on the threshold with his hands folded, the way he does when he intends to witness something and doesn't intend to interrupt it.

"Hold it there, please," said Wynn. "On his left. Where I can see the back of the collar."

I held the lamp.

"It's a line of oath-script," said Wynn. "Inside. Where it touches his skin. In the Lockwarden's hand. Old and cold." He looked at the paper. "I've been reading it backward for six days. I couldn't read it forward. It's written to be read forward only by the person it's binding, and they can't, because it's on the inside of their own neck." He swallowed. "So I read it backward. It took a long time. It's a promise. Kessavel's own. The oldest one he ever witnessed, turned around so it holds him instead of the other way."

"I know what it says," said Kessavel. His voice is very deep and very quiet, like a bell at the bottom of a well. "I made the first half of it. They made the rest."

"I know," said Wynn. "I'm sorry." He put down one sheet of paper. "Iselle. It's the third mark from the clasp-side. The one shaped like a hook. If that one lets go, the rest unwind."

Iselle looked up at Kessavel.

"You can say no," she said.

Kessavel looked at her for a long time with his deep-set eyes.

"Nobody," he said, "has said that to me in longer than anyone in this house has been alive."

"I know," said Iselle. "That's why I said it first."

He bent his head. Not much. Just enough.

Iselle put two fingers of her right hand on the collar, just below his ear, where Wynn's glass was pointing. Her hand used to close into a fist when she was frightened. She opens it on purpose a dozen times a day, like someone practicing a word. It was open now, flat, the fingers very gently against the iron, the way you'd touch the side of a sleeping horse.

She didn't pull. She never pulls. She's told me what it's like, once, on the north tower roof. Holding is a hand, she said. Every chain is a hand that's been told to close. I don't pry it open. I just ask it if it's tired.

"Are you tired?" said Iselle, to the collar, very softly.

And it was.

It made a sound like a harp string plucked a long way off. The hook-shaped mark Wynn had pointed to went pale, then gray, then wasn't there. And the rest of the line unwound. You could see it go, under the lamp, the cold old script coming loose letter by letter and going out like sparks off a blown coal. The iron went soft and gray as ash.

And then Io reached out from her chair and put her warm hand flat on the back of Kessavel's neck, under the collar, and the collar came apart in two pieces and fell into Iselle's lap.

Nobody moved.

Kessavel put his hand up to his throat. He touched the skin there. Raw and red and bare. His fingers shook.

"Oh," he said.

That's all. Just that. Then he put his face in his hands and leaned forward until his forehead was on his knees, and his shoulders shook, and nobody said anything at all. Io kept her hand on the back of his neck, and the warm side of the Flame went down into the raw skin and mended it, slowly, and it went from red to pink to pale.

In the doorway Caldris said, very quietly, "Witnessed. Freely undone. The oath goes back to whoever made the first half of it, whole, the right way around."

Kessavel lifted his head.

"I don't want it back," he said hoarsely.

"Then put it down somewhere," said Caldris. "It's yours to put down. That's the difference."

* * *

Wynn sat down on the floor.

He didn't decide to. His knees went. He sat down hard on the bare boards beside Iselle with the paper still in his hand and the glass still in his eye, and I saw that he was shaking worse than Kessavel.

"I wrote one," he said. To nobody. To the floor. "A line like that. A line that turns a thing around so it holds the wrong way. On the plate. For them." He took the glass out of his eye. "And it took me four hours. And this took six days. Reading it backward. Six days to take one off." He looked at the two gray halves of the collar in Iselle's lap. "Is that how it always is? Four hours to put on and six days to take off?"

"Yes," said Caldris, from the doorway. "Always. That's why we're careful what we put on." He came into the room for the first time and looked down at Wynn. "And that's why the people who take them off are worth more than the people who put them on. Get up, Wynn Harlow. You've done good work. You've got a plate to cut."

Wynn looked up at him.

Then he got up.

* * *

Kessavel asked to see my father. So at seven I took him down the bakehouse stair and across the court in the snow, slowly, because he hadn't walked further than the window in a week. He kept touching his throat.

My father was in the little kitchen with his peeling hands around a cup of Helena's tea, which he can hold now, just. He looked up as we came in and saw Kessavel's bare neck, and put the cup down very carefully on the table, and stood up.

They looked at each other for a long time. The god of storms and winter, and the god who used to keep every oath in Kethra.

"Your grandson," said Kessavel. "On this floor. With a collar on. Like mine." He touched his throat again. "I knew it was being made. I didn't make it. But I knew." He didn't look away. "I came to say that."

My father was quiet.

"I know," he said. Then, after a while: "Sit down, Kessavel. Helena's made porridge. There's honey in it. You don't have to talk."

And Kessavel sat down at the end of the scrubbed table, and Helena put a bowl in front of him without a word, and he ate it, the whole bowl, slowly, with a spoon that looked like a toy in his hand. My son was on the floor against the kettle cupboard door with Fenrir, building something out of Grandpa's wooden blocks. He looked up at the big gray stranger, and the big gray stranger looked down at him.

"Fen," said my son, and pointed at the wolf, in case Kessavel didn't know.

"Yes," said Kessavel gravely. "I see him."

Fenrir didn't move. But he didn't growl either.

* * *

We chose the Company in the map room at nine.

I say we. My father was there, and Mother, and Carol, and Mary with the green slate. Lexander came up from the Concordian rooms with his axe and sat on the windowsill. But my father didn't say anything for the first hour. He'd told me on the stairs that he wasn't going to.

"It's your company," he said. "Your wife. Your road. I've chosen enough companies. You choose this one."

So I did.

I stood at the big table with Tamar's chart and the faint line running off the edge of it past the serpent, and Davren's latest gull-note pinned at the corner with the morning's bearing, and I thought about Brannoc and Caldris and the line down the middle of the sea. Guests. Not an army.

"Small," I said. "As small as it can be and still get there and back. If we go with fifty, we're an army no matter what we call ourselves."

"How small?" said Mother.

"Everybody who has to go," I said. "Nobody who only wants to."

Carol put her good hand on the table.

"I have to," she said. "I've got the other end of your name. If you fold out there and I'm not holding it, you come apart."

"Yes," I said. That one wasn't a question. Mary wrote her name on the slate.

Carol.

"Ignatius," I said. "Flame calls flame. He can feel her. On the far side, when we're close, he's the one who'll know which door she's behind." I looked at Lexander. "And Io. Because she's her mother, and because she can mend anything the cutting side breaks."

Lexander didn't say anything. He was waiting to be asked. He's a king and he's Odin and he could have just stood up, and he didn't, because it was my company.

"And you," I said. "Because she said yes to you before she said yes to anybody. Because you've been watching me lose at the king's table for fifteen years and you're going to see me find a way through. And because you'd give the other eye to learn the shape of that sea."

Lexander laughed. It filled the whole tower.

"Yes," said Lexander. "Obviously."

Ignatius. Io. Lexander.

"Selvane," I said. "She goes first. She asked to. She knocks."

Selvane.

"Loki," I said. "Because he's going anyway, and I'd rather know where he is. And because Jörmungandr's the road, and the road answers to his father."

From somewhere behind me, without my having seen him come in, Loki said, "That's the nicest thing anyone's said about me in a century."

Loki. Jörmungandr.

I stopped.

"Iselle," I said.

Nobody said anything.

"I don't want to ask her," I said. "That's the truth. She was taken into that city when she was twelve, and she got out, and she's never been back, and everything in it was built to hold her. I'd rather she never saw it again." I looked at the chart. "But she frees things. And Mags and Clemmie and Goldie are over there, and so is every god on every shelf in every cellar, and none of them can be asked properly while they're chained. She's the only one who can make the chains tired. And she speaks the language and she knows the streets." I put my hand flat on the chart. "So I'll ask her. And she can say no. And if she says no, I'll be glad."

"She won't say no," said Carol.

"I know," I said. "That's why I hate asking."

And from the map room door, Iselle said, "Then don't hate it. Just ask."

She'd come up the hundred and twelve steps without any of us hearing. Roderic was behind her on the stair, a step down, the way he always is, so he's not crowding her.

I looked at her.

"Iselle," I said. "Will you come? You can say no."

"Yes," said Iselle.

She said it the way you'd say it about bread. Then she looked at Roderic, behind her on the stair.

"You can say no," she told him.

"No," said Roderic. "I mean, yes. I mean, I'm not saying no." He went red. He's twenty. "I'm coming."

"I know," said Iselle, and opened her right hand and took his.

Iselle. Roderic.

"And Kessavel," I said.

Everybody looked at me.

"That was the job," I said. "Last week, in the kitchen, when we decided about Wynn. Take the collar off, so the god who makes chains comes with us without one on. It's off. So I'll ask him." I looked at my father. "He's Kethran. He doesn't need leave over there. It's his shore. He knows every oath in that city, because he used to keep them. And Malachar made him hold the other end of the first chain." I was quiet a moment. "I think he'd like to go and put it down."

My father looked at me for a long time.

"Ask him," he said.

* * *

Kessavel was still in the little kitchen. He was drying cups for Helena. She hadn't asked him to. He'd just stood up when he finished his porridge and picked up a cloth, and she'd let him, because Helena knows when a person needs their hands busy more than they need a rest.

I asked him at the table, with my son on the floor between us and Fenrir lying against the kettle cupboard door.

"You can say no," I said. "You've only had your neck back for three hours."

Kessavel put down the cup he was drying, and the cloth.

"I swore the oldest oath on that shore," he said slowly. "With my own hand. For a man who said hold this. I held it longer than I can count." He looked down at his hands. "I'd like to go back and put it down in front of him. Where he can see me do it."

"Then come."

"Yes," said Kessavel.

And then he looked at my son on the floor, and something went across his face, and he said, "But I'll sit at the back of the boat. Where he can't see me from the shore, when you leave. I don't want the last thing he sees to be the one who knew about the collar."

"He won't remember," I said.

"I will," said Kessavel.

Kessavel.

* * *

That made ten. Eleven, with Jörmungandr, who isn't a person so much as a road.

Mary read the list back from the slate at noon in the map room, with everybody there.

Garrick. Carol. Ignatius. Io. Lexander. Selvane. Loki. Iselle. Roderic. Kessavel. And the road.

"That's not small," said Thor, from the door. She'd come up to listen and she'd been standing there with her arms folded and her braid crackling for an hour, waiting for her name, and it hadn't come.

"It is for a sea," I said.

"I'm not on it."

"No."

Thor looked at me. Her eyes were very bright, and not with lightning.

"Why," she said.

"Because if Father's holding every ship on the sea, somebody has to hold everything else," I said. "Because if something comes over the wall while we're gone, I want it to meet you. And because my son's going to be on the kitchen floor every day without his mother or his father, and I want the loudest, strongest, most offended person in the whole world sitting at the top of the stair." I didn't look away. "You can say no."

Thor was quiet for a long time.

"That's a terrible reason," she said thickly. "That's the worst reason anyone's ever given me."

"I know."

"I'm staying," said Thor. "I want it written down that I think it's a terrible idea."

"I write it every time," said Mary.

* * *

My father spoke at last when the others had gone down to dinner and it was only the two of us in the map room, with the winter light going gray in the west windows.

He put his hand in his coat pocket and took something out and put it on the table on top of Tamar's chart.

Half of an iron collar. Small. Child-sized. Bitten clean through by a wolf.

He's carried both halves in his pocket every day since the night in the kettle cupboard. I've seen his hand go to them a hundred times, when he's angry and holding it in.

"Take this one," said my father. "I'll keep the other."

I looked at it.

"Somebody over there made this," he said. "For my grandson. Somebody measured his neck." His voice was very level. "I'm not asking you to do anything with it. I'm not asking you to throw it in anyone's face. I just want somebody on that shore to see it. And to know whose son carried it there." He pushed it across the chart to me with one finger. "And when you come home, put it back in my hand. Both halves, together. That's how I'll know it's done."

I picked it up. It was cold, and very light, and the edges where Fenrir bit it were bright.

I put it in my pocket with the list and the shell.

* * *

That evening Loki called his son up out of the sea.

We went down to the north sands below Westmere Hold at low tide, all of us who were going, and the ones who weren't but couldn't stay away. The beacon was still burning on the headland above us, where Dorian lit it last night. Along the top of the sands, above the tide line, Sel had planted the first tree. A little bare apple whip, no taller than my son, staked and tied with a strip of her own sleeve. She'd planted it at dawn. She'd cried while she did it.

Loki walked down to the edge of the water in his dark coat with the silver buckles and stood there with his hands in his pockets, and said, not loudly, "Son."

The sea went flat for a mile.

Then something came up under it. You couldn't see it. You could see the water move over it, the way a blanket moves when somebody turns over underneath, a long slow swell coming in toward the sands, longer than the harbor, longer than the north sands, longer than anything has a right to be. And then a head came up out of the shallows. Gray-green and huge and gentle, with water pouring off it, and two gold eyes as big as cartwheels.

Jörmungandr looked down at us.

"Father," he said. I felt it in my boots more than I heard it. "You called."

"I did," said Loki. "I've got a question. You can say no."

The great gold eyes blinked, slowly. One. Then the other.

"Nobody's ever asked me," said Jörmungandr, "whether I could say no."

"Well," said Loki, "I'm asking now. There's a girl on the other side of the sea. Past the line. Somebody wants to fetch her home. They need a road. There isn't one." He paused. "Would you be it?"

Jörmungandr looked at all of us for a long time. Down the line of us on the wet sand. Carol. Ignatius. Io. Lexander with his axe. Selvane with her lamp. Iselle and Roderic, holding hands. Kessavel at the very back, tall and gray, with his hand at his bare throat. Me.

"Past the line," said the serpent slowly. "I've swum along it. Up and down. For a thousand years. I've never once crossed it." He blinked. "Nobody asked me to. And nobody gave me leave."

"I'll give it," said Selvane. She stepped down to the edge of the water with her lamp. "When we reach it. I'll knock. And if they say yes, you can go through."

The serpent looked at the little brass lamp for a long time.

"I remember that lamp," he said. "On the far pier. Before. It used to be the only light on that whole coast that wasn't afraid of me." He lowered his huge head until his chin was nearly on the sand, and his gold eye was level with her. "Yes. I'll be the road. Under the water, where the winds can't stop you and the ice can't hold you and nothing flies. I'll go long and you'll ride."

"How long?" said Lexander.

"To the line?" said Jörmungandr. "Two days. Past it?" The gold eye moved to me. "That depends on how far he can fold at the far end. I can carry you across the sea. I can't carry you up the stairs."

"A mile," I said. "Today."

I'd done it at four that afternoon, with Carol, from the Hold gate to the end of the north pier and back, two times. A mile each way. I came out whole. The crack in me held.

"Then you'll do," said the serpent. "By the time we're there you'll do ten."

"Friday," said Carol, beside me. "He'll be ready Friday. I can feel it. The other end's nearly light."

* * *

There was one name nobody had said all day.

I said it that night in the little kitchen, at ten o'clock, when everyone else had gone to bed. Loki was sitting backward on Helena's chair by the fire with a cup of his pine-smoke tea. Helena was banking the range. My son was asleep in the basket by the kettle cupboard, the one Grandpa made, with his thumb in his mouth and his knitted hat over one eye.

And Fenrir was lying across the front of the basket, between the boy and the room.

"Loki," I said. "You said he'd decide."

"I did."

"Has he?"

Loki looked at his son for a long time over the rim of his cup.

Then he set the cup down on the hearth and got up and went over and crouched down in front of the wolf. Not close. A respectful distance, the way you'd crouch in front of somebody else's dog. The firelight was on both their faces. They have the same eyes, I realized. I'd never seen it before.

"Fen," said Loki softly. "They're going over the sea. A long way. To fetch the boy's mother home. I'm going. Your brother's going. You can come." He was quiet. "You can say no."

Fenrir looked at his father.

Then he got up. Slowly. All of him, the great gray length of him, with the white saddle-mark pale across his back where he took the boiling stockpot for the boy two weeks ago and never once flinched.

He turned around three times, the way dogs do.

And lay down again, in exactly the same place. Across the front of the basket. Between the boy and the room. With his chin on the edge of the wicker, close enough that the boy's breath stirred the fur on his nose.

He didn't look at Loki again.

Loki stayed crouched there a long time.

"That's an answer," he said at last. His voice wasn't quite steady. "He's never chosen anything before. In all his life. They chose for him. Chains. Caves. Cages. Fights." He stood up. "He's never once chosen a thing and lain down next to it."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I know you wanted him with you."

"Sorry?" Loki laughed. It cracked in the middle. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. "I've waited a thousand years for that wolf to want something more than he wanted to bite it." He picked up his tea. "Don't you dare be sorry."

From the range, Helena said, without turning around, "He's allowed."

Fenrir's tail moved once on the floor. That's all.

And in the basket, without waking up, my son said, "Fen," and put his hand out through the wicker, and found the wolf's ear, and held on.

* * *

From Mary's book. Tuesday. Mary's hand, small and straight, and at the bottom of the page a list, ruled, with a line beside each name:

6:10 a.m. The little room over the bakehouse. Wynn read the line in Kessavel's collar backward for six days. Iselle asked the collar if it was tired. It was. Io put her hand under it and it fell in two. Kessavel said: Oh. Caldris witnessed it: freely undone. The oath goes back to whoever made the first half, the right way around. Kessavel: I don't want it back. Caldris: then put it down somewhere. It's yours to put down.

Wynn: four hours to put one on, six days to take one off. Caldris: always. That's why the people who take them off are worth more. Get up, Wynn Harlow. You've got a plate to cut.

Kessavel to Uriah in the little kitchen: I knew the boy's collar was being made. I came to say that. Uriah: Sit down. There's honey in the porridge. You don't have to talk. Kessavel dried cups.

The Company. Garrick chose it. Uriah said nothing for an hour. Small. Everybody who has to go. Nobody who only wants to.

Thor: I'm not on it. Garrick: somebody has to hold everything else, and sit at the top of the stair. Thor: that's the worst reason anyone's ever given me. I'm staying. I want it written down that I think it's a terrible idea. I write it every time.

Uriah gave Garrick half the boy's collar. Show it to somebody over there. Put both halves back in my hand when you come home.

North sands. Sel's first tree, staked with her own sleeve. Loki called. Jörmungandr came. Nobody's ever asked me whether I could say no. Selvane: I'll knock. He remembers her lamp: the only light on that coast that wasn't afraid of him. Two days to the line. Garrick folds a mile today. Carol: Friday.

10 p.m. Loki asked Fenrir. Fenrir turned around three times and lay down again across the boy's basket. Loki: he's never chosen anything before. Helena: he's allowed. The boy held the wolf's ear in his sleep.

THE COMPANY

Garrick Grey — to fetch his wife

Carol Grey — the other end of his name

Ignatius of Concordia — flame calls flame

Io of Concordia — to mend what the cutting side breaks

Lexander of Concordia — because she said yes to him first

Selvane of the harbors — to knock

Loki — because he's going anyway

Jörmungandr — the road

Iselle — to make the chains tired

Roderic Grey — because she's going

Kessavel — to put it down

Staying: Fenrir. By choice.

And under that, in a square hand that presses too hard, the letters very upright, like a boy standing to attention:

Roderic Grey. I'd like it noted that I said no when I meant yes, in front of my father and my brother and the King of Concordia and a goddess of harbors, and went red to the ears, and Iselle took my hand anyway. I'd like it noted that I'm the youngest in the Company and the only one with no power at all, unless you count a sword and very loud feelings. I'd like it noted that I don't mind. Somebody has to carry the bags. And somebody has to stand one step down the stair, so she knows there's someone behind her.