Chapter 210: Mother's Blessing

We left from the north sands at Westmere at seven on Friday morning, at the bottom of the tide, with the whole of Greykeep standing on the beach behind us.

I hadn't asked them to come. I'd asked them not to, if I'm honest. I'd said at supper on Thursday that it would be easier to go from a quiet beach, and everybody at the table had nodded and agreed with me, and at half past six on Friday morning they came through the Hold gate anyway, all of them, in their coats and scarves and boots, carrying lanterns, and walked down the hill through the snow to the sands, and stood there.

Helena didn't come. Helena said goodbyes were for people who didn't expect to see each other again, and she'd see me in the kitchen. She stayed at Greykeep and made bread. I think that was the bravest thing anybody did that morning.

Everyone else came.

* * *

The tide was all the way out. The sands were flat and gray and wet for a mile, shining like a mirror in the half-light, with the black ribs of the old wreck sticking up out of them and the gulls all standing in rows facing the wind. Above the tide line, along the top of the beach, there were four little bare apple whips now, staked and tied with strips of cloth. Sel had planted the fourth one at dawn. She was standing beside it with Veyra, and she'd been crying, and she'd stopped, and she'd started again when she saw us.

On the headland above us, Dorian's beacon burned orange against the gray sky. And down the coast, south, as far as I could see, another one. And another beyond that. A line of fire down the whole of the shore, every headland, every point, lit.

"Every one," said Dorian, beside me. "From now until you're home. So there's a road back."

Out at the edge of the water, where the shallows started, there was a boat.

It wasn't a ship. It was a ferry. A long, wide, flat-bottomed ferry of old gray timber, the kind that carries carts and cattle across a river for a copper, with a rail around it and a long steering oar at the back and a little lantern on a pole at the front. It was much too big to be a river ferry and much too plain to be anything else. It sat in two feet of water without moving, as if it had always been there.

Halemar stood at the steering oar with his hat on, broad and brown and quiet.

"It's the one I've always had," he said, when he saw me looking. "The one I started with, before anybody built me a temple. Before Othellos." He put his hand on the oar. "It's never been past the far bank of anything. I thought it should see the edge of the world before I'm done."

* * *

Caldris did his part first, at the edge of the water. It didn't take long.

Selvane stood on the wet sand with her lamp in both hands, lit, and Caldris stood in front of her with his hands folded, and asked her the three questions again, very quietly, the same as in the Council Hall. Who holds your lamp. Will you take a no. Will you tell them after.

I do. Yes. Every one.

"Witnessed," said Caldris. He looked past her, out at the flat gray sea, to the west, and was quiet a moment, as if he were listening to something very far off. "The old line's awake," he said. "It knows you're coming. It's not angry." He looked back at her. "It's curious."

"So am I," said Selvane.

Caldris almost smiled.

* * *

Then Mother came down to the water.

She had her plain dark dress on, the one she wears in the infirmary, and her hair pinned up, and no gloves, though it was bitterly cold. Aurelia walked beside her as far as the edge of the wet sand, and then stopped, and let her go on alone.

Mother is Aurelia's saintess. She has been since before I was born. When she heals, it's Aurelia's light that comes out of her hands, gold and warm and smelling faintly of roses and clean linen, the same as Aurelia herself. But she doesn't use it lightly, and she doesn't use it for show. I've seen her mend a man's shattered leg with it in a tent at night, and I've seen her refuse to use it on a stubbed toe. She says the light isn't for making things not hurt. It's for making them able to heal.

She stood in front of the eleven of us at the edge of the sea, in a line, the way we'd stood in front of Nara the night before.

"I'm not going to make a speech," said Mother. "You know I don't. I'm going to put her light on you. All of you." She looked down the line. "It won't stop anyone hitting you. It won't stop the cold, Nara's done that. It won't make you strong. Thor would say you're strong enough." She paused. "What it does is go first. Ahead of you. Into every room you walk into over there. So that whoever's in that room, whatever they've done, the first thing that reaches them from Avarra isn't a sword or a fire or a fold." She folded her hands. "It's mercy. Aurelia's. Before anything else. That's what it's for."

She went down the line.

She started with Carol. She put both her hands on either side of Carol's face, the way she used to when we were small and feverish, and the gold came out of her palms, soft and warm, and went into Carol's face and down into her, and Carol shut her eyes and leaned into it, and her bad hand in its sling uncurled.

"Hold him," said Mother, very quietly.

"I always do," said Carol.

Ignatius. Mother had to reach up. "Keep your hair on," she said. "I mean it. I'm not sending Io a son with no eyebrows." He laughed, and the gold went into him, and the little flame on his finger went bright.

Io. They didn't say anything at all. Mother put her hands on Io's face and Io put hers over them, and they stood there for a moment, two healers, the warm side of the Flame and the gold of Aurelia, meeting, and the air around them smelled of roses and woodsmoke.

Lexander bent nearly double. "You'll lose at the king's table to the boy, over there," said Mother. "I want to hear about it."

"I never lose," said Lexander.

"You'll lose," said Mother, and blessed him.

Selvane, whose lamp flared gold when the light went into her. Iselle, whose right hand opened all on its own and stayed open. Roderic, who was Adriana's son and not Mother's, and whom Mother has loved exactly the same since the day he was born; she held his face a long time, and said, "One step behind her. Not one step in front. She'll tell you when she needs you in front," and Roderic went red and said, "Yes, Mother Evelyn."

Loki.

Loki stood very still when she stopped in front of him. I saw him almost step back. I've never seen Loki step back from anything.

"You don't have to," he said. "I'm not—it's not—I'm the god of mischief, Evelyn. Your light doesn't—"

"Hold still," said Mother.

She put her hands on his face. The gold went in. It went in slowly, the way warm water goes into a cold cup, and Loki shut his eyes, and his mouth opened a little, and nothing came out of it. Not a single word. For once in his life. When she took her hands away he stood there with his eyes still shut.

"Huh," said Loki at last, very softly. "So that's what that's like."

* * *

Kessavel was at the end. He always is.

He didn't brace this time. He'd learned, from Nara. He just stood there, very tall, with his hands in his pockets and his bare throat, and looked down at my mother, and waited.

Mother looked up at him for a long time.

"I know who you are," she said. "I know what you made, and who you made it for, and what it did. I've read every page of Mary's book. I know about the children's collar." She didn't look away. "I'm the boy's grandmother."

"Yes," said Kessavel.

"Bend down," said Mother.

He bent down.

She put her hands on either side of his face. And the gold went into him. Slowly. More slowly than anyone. It took a long time. I watched it go in, gold under the gray, and down his throat, where the collar used to be, where Io had mended the raw skin pink, and I watched the last of the mark there fade. The pale line around his throat where the iron had been for longer than anyone could count. It went soft, and paler, and then it was just skin. Just a man's neck. As if it had never been there.

Kessavel put his hand up and touched it.

"You did that," he said. He sounded as if he didn't understand.

"No," said Mother. "She did. I just carried it." She took her hands away. "Mercy goes first, Kessavel. Ahead of you. Even into that city. Especially into that city." She stepped back. "Now go and put down what you came to put down."

* * *

She came to me last.

Not at the end of the line. I was in the middle. But she'd gone past me, and done everyone else, and then she came back.

She didn't put her hands on my face. She took my left hand. My white one. The one with Adriana's silver no closed up in it.

"Your eye," she said, looking at my face. At the dark left side of it. "Midwinter. Not long now. Your hand the same." She turned my white hand over in both of hers. "I'm not going to mend them early. I can't. They're coming back the way they're meant to, in their own time, and if I hurry them they'll come back wrong." She held my hand. "So I'm not going to give you your eye. I'm going to give you something else."

She put her lips against the back of my dead hand, the way she used to kiss a bruise when I was four.

And the gold went in.

I didn't feel it. I couldn't. I can't feel anything in that hand. But I saw it. Gold under the white skin, spreading out from where she kissed it, up into my fingers and across my palm, and in the middle of my palm, under my fingers, Adriana's silver light flared, and the gold went around it like a ring around a stone. Gold and silver. Mercy and refusal. Both my mothers, in one hand.

"There," said Mother. "Now they're together. Her no and my mercy. That's how they work best. They always have." She closed my fingers over both. "You'll know when."

I couldn't say anything. I put my right arm around her and held on, and she let me, which she doesn't often, and she smelled of roses and linen and the infirmary, and her hair was coming down out of its pins.

"Go and get your wife," said Mother into my coat. "And bring Roderic back with all his fingers, or Adriana will never let me hear the end of it."

* * *

My father was standing at the very edge of the sand, where the wet sand meets the first of the water. As far as he could go.

He can't go further than the ground. He told me that on Monday. Every ship he's holding, he's holding from here. If he steps off Avarra, the ice is half.

He stood there in his coat with his peeling hands at his sides, at the very last inch of dry land that would hold him, and watched me walk out across the wet sand toward the ferry.

I stopped beside him.

We didn't say anything. We'd said it all on the east wall at two in the morning. I'd said I'll bring her. He'd said I know.

He looked at me.

"Hm," said my father.

"Hm," I said.

He put his hand on the back of my neck, one more time. Then he took it away and put it in his pocket, and I knew without looking that it had closed around his half of the boy's collar.

* * *

Thor had my son.

She was standing back from the water's edge, out of the wet, with the boy on her shoulders, his small fists wound into her red-gold braid like reins. He was in his knitted hat with the ears and three scarves, and he was looking at everything with enormous dark eyes. At the ferry. At the gulls. At the beacon on the headland. At me.

Thora stood beside them with her raven.

And on the wet sand at Thor's feet, between them and the sea, lay Fenrir.

He was lying the way Grandpa carved him. Chin on his paws. Facing out to sea. The white saddle-mark pale across his back in the gray light. He'd walked down from the Hold beside the boy and lain down there when Thor stopped, and he hadn't moved since.

I didn't go back to them. I'd said goodbye in the kitchen, at nine, with the boy's hand on the palm-coal. If I went back, I wouldn't get on the boat.

Want it all the way, Adriana had said. And say no on top.

I wanted to go back. I didn't.

But as I put my hand on the ferry's rail, my son shouted.

It carried across the whole beach, over the gulls, over the sea. High and clear and furious, the way his mother shouts.

"COMING!"

Every single person on that beach turned and looked at him.

He was sitting bolt upright on Thor's shoulders with one fist in her braid and the other hand stuck straight out in front of him, pointing at me. At the boat. At the sea. At the west.

"Coming," he said again, quieter, and nodded, very firmly, as if that settled it.

Thor's face did something I've never seen it do.

On the sand at her feet, Fenrir lifted his head and howled.

Not loud. Not a hunting howl. Low and long and steady, one note, out over the flat gray water, the way Grandpa says wolves howl when one of the pack is going somewhere far and the rest are staying. So it knows where to come back to.

I got on the boat.

* * *

Halemar pushed off at ten past seven.

He didn't pole. He didn't row. He just leaned on the long steering oar, once, and the ferry slid off the sand into the deep water as if the sea had been waiting for it, and turned its blunt bow west, and went.

We stood at the back rail, all of us, and watched the beach go. The crowd of them on the gray sand. The lanterns. Sel's four little trees. Thor with the boy on her shoulders, and the wolf at her feet with his head still up. Mother with her hand on my father's back. Adriana beside them. Caitlin with her blue book open already, writing. Mirelle holding Sella's hand, waving with the other one so hard her whole body moved. Faelan with the ledger. Elenos, not waving, just watching, the way he does.

My father didn't wave. He stood at the very edge of the water, at the last inch of Avarra, with his hands in his pockets, and watched us go, and didn't move.

He was still standing there when the beach was too far away to see faces. He was still standing there when it was a line of gray with little lights on it. He was still standing there, I know, when it was gone.

* * *

Halemar's water is the stretch between Westmere and the last islands. One day and one night. He knows every rock of it, he said, and he does. The ferry went steady and flat across the gray winter sea as if it were crossing a millpond, and the wind, which should have been in our faces from the west, wasn't. It was behind us. All day.

"That's your father," said Halemar, when I noticed. "He asked it nicely."

All day the beacons went with us down the coast, one after another, on every headland, until the coast curved away north and the last of them was a point of orange on the edge of the world behind us.

Nobody said much. Io and Ignatius sat together in the bow with their feet up on Mother's satchel, which I'd been told to carry and which they'd taken off me within an hour. Lexander stood at the front rail all day with both ravens on his shoulders, looking west with his one eye, and sent one raven back at noon with a message I didn't see. Iselle and Roderic sat on the deck with their backs against a crate and her hand open in his. Loki lay flat on his back on the bare timbers with his hat over his face and didn't make a single joke for six hours, which frightened Carol more than anything else that day.

Selvane sat at the very front, under the little lantern on its pole, with her own lamp in her lap, looking at the water ahead.

Kessavel sat at the back. On the stern, behind Halemar, with his long legs drawn up, where nobody on the shore would have been able to see him. He'd stayed there since we pushed off, looking back, not forward. Back toward the beach long after it was gone.

At three o'clock, the coal in my palm went hot, cold, hot, cold, hot. A pause. Hot, cold, hot.

Three. And three.

I held up my hand so everyone could see. They all stopped what they were doing.

And then I waited. And far behind us, in a washtub in a court in Westmere Hold, a seven-year-old girl touched her finger to a wick, and Benjamin held Sella's lamp up over the stone and covered it and uncovered it, ten long.

I couldn't see it. I knew it was happening. I felt the stone hear it.

And the coal in my palm answered, quick, three.

I saw.

"Mirelle," said Carol, and smiled for the first time all day.

* * *

The sun went down behind the sea ahead of us, red and huge, straight into the place where Seraphina was, and then it was dark. Halemar lit the lantern on the pole with his fingers, and it burned small and yellow, the kind of light that tells another boat you're there.

I went back to the stern.

Kessavel was still sitting there, looking back at the dark. There was nothing to see. No beach. No beacons. Only the black water and the faint white line of our wake going away behind us into nothing.

I sat down beside him. He moved his long legs to make room. Behind us, Halemar leaned on his oar and hummed something under his breath, very low, something old.

"He shouted," said Kessavel after a long time. "The boy. On the beach."

"He does that. His mother does too."

"I heard him." Kessavel looked down at his hands. "I was sitting where he couldn't see me. On purpose. And he shouted coming, and it went right across the water to the back of the boat, where I was, and I heard it." He was quiet. "I kept the oaths of a whole country for longer than anybody can count. Every promise anybody made. I could feel each one, the way you feel your own heartbeat." He turned his hands over. "I never felt one like that. A child on a beach. Shouting it at the sea. As if the sea had to do as it was told."

"It's the first oath he's ever made," I said. "Caldris says it counts."

"It counts," said Kessavel. "I felt it go out over the water." He looked at me. "It's still going. It'll go all the way."

* * *

We reached the last islands at dawn on Saturday.

There are seven of them, low and black and bare, scattered across the sea like stones somebody dropped. Nothing grows on them. Seals lie on the rocks. Beyond them, westward, the sea goes on with nothing in it at all.

I knew this place. Not with my eyes. With my palm. This was where the coal had gone dark for one breath, on the Tuesday night I broke. The edge. Where the sea gets so wide and so empty that even fire gets lonely.

Halemar brought the ferry into the lee of the last island, the westernmost, and let the steering oar go, and the ferry stopped dead in the water as if it had come up against a bank.

"That's mine," he said quietly. "As far as it goes." He looked west, at the empty sea beyond the island, and something went over his broad brown face that I've never seen on a god's face before. Not fear. Longing, maybe. "I can feel the edge of it. Right there. Past that rock. Like the far bank of a river I've never seen." He sat down on the stern beside the oar. "I'll wait here. I said I would. However long."

"It might be a long time."

"I'm a ferryman," said Halemar. "Waiting on the near bank is most of the job."

* * *

Loki stood up and went to the bow and took his hat off.

"Son," he said. Not loudly. Out over the water.

The sea went flat around the island. The seals on the rocks lifted their heads, all at once, and then slid off into the water and were gone.

And Jörmungandr came up.

Not his head this time. His back. A great gray-green ridge of him rising out of the sea beside the ferry, wet and shining, scaled like a roof, and going on and on in both directions, east past the island and west into the empty sea, further than I could see either way. Then it curved. It came around the ferry in a slow huge loop, and then another, below that, and another, until the ferry was sitting in the middle of a great ring of serpent, and the water inside the ring went perfectly still.

And then the head came up, at the far side of the ring, and the gold eyes looked at us.

"Good morning," said Jörmungandr. I felt it in the boards under my boots. "Are you ready?"

"How does it work?" said Roderic. He'd asked everybody all week. Nobody had known.

"Like this," said the serpent.

And the water inside the ring went down.

Not away. Down. It sank, slowly, the whole circle of it, as if somebody had pulled a plug, and the coils of the serpent rose up around it like walls. And the ferry sank with the water, gently, down and down, until we were sitting in the bottom of a great round well of gray-green scales with the sky a circle of white far above us, and the walls of the well were Jörmungandr, and they were dry, and warm, and the sea was on the other side of them.

Nobody said anything.

Then the far wall of the well opened. Not opened. Unwound. One coil sliding back from the next, the way a rope unwinds from a capstan, and beyond it, there was a passage. Round. Tall enough for a man on horseback. Walled and floored and roofed with serpent. Going down, very gently, and west. Into the dark under the sea.

"There," said Jörmungandr. "That's the road. It's me. It goes as far as I go." The gold eye at the top of the well blinked slowly. "I've never been anyone's road before. Be patient with me if I'm bumpy."

Halemar put out his big brown hand and held the ferry steady against the scaled wall while we climbed off.

Selvane went first. That was the agreement. She stepped off the ferry onto the floor of the passage with her lamp held up in front of her, and the light of it went ahead of her into the dark, gold and small and steady, and lit the scales of the serpent's inside wall so they shone like wet slate.

Then Carol, holding my right hand. Then me.

I looked back once.

Halemar standing in his ferry at the bottom of the well with his hat in his hands. The circle of white sky far above. And beyond it, behind it, though I couldn't see it, a day and a night of gray sea and a line of beacons and a beach with four apple trees and a man standing on the very last inch of dry land with his hand in his pocket.

The door you go out by, the Castellan had written, and the door you come in by. They are the same door.

I turned around. Selvane's lamp was going on ahead into the dark.

"Coming," I said, to nobody. To the coal. To the west.

And the coal in my palm, warm and small and steady, didn't flash. Didn't answer. Just leaned, a hair off center in Io's pale ring, toward the dark at the end of the road.

And Jörmungandr closed the well over our heads, very gently, the way you'd close a hand around a moth to carry it outside, and dived.

* * *

From Mary's book. Friday. Mary's hand, and the ink is blotted in two places, and she hasn't tried to fix it:

7 a.m. the north sands. Everyone came. Helena didn't. She made bread. She says she'll see him in the kitchen.

Sel's fourth tree. Dorian's beacons lit the whole length of the coast.

Halemar's ferry: the first one he ever had, before anyone built him a temple. It has never been past the far bank of anything.

Caldris witnessed Selvane at the water. The old line is awake. It is curious.

Evelyn put Aurelia's light on all eleven. Mercy goes first. Carol: hold him. Ignatius: keep your hair on. Lexander: you'll lose to the boy. Roderic: one step behind her. Loki: hold still. Loki said nothing at all, and then: so that's what that's like.

Kessavel. I'm the boy's grandmother. Bend down. The mark on his throat is gone. She did it. I just carried it. Now go and put down what you came to put down.

Garrick last. She kissed his white hand. Gold around Adriana's silver. Her no and my mercy. Bring Roderic back with all his fingers.

Uriah at the last inch of dry land. Hm. Hm.

The boy on Thor's shoulders shouted COMING across the whole beach. Pointed west. Fenrir howled, once, low. Garrick did not turn back.

7:10. Halemar pushed off. The wind turned behind them. Uriah asked it nicely.

Uriah stood at the edge of the water until 11. Evelyn's hand on his back the whole time. Then he came home and sat in the little kitchen with the boy on his knee and the boat on the table, and didn't say anything, and Helena didn't make him.

3 p.m. at the stone. Three and three. Mirelle lit Sella's lamp. Benjamin answered. Caitlin wrote it: I saw.

Caitlin's count, Friday: eleven marks. Home column empty.

And under that, in a hand that's small and sharp and very fast, the hand of someone who writes notes on infirmary slates all day and has no patience for flourishes:

Evelyn Grey. I'd like it noted that I did not cry on the beach. I'd like it noted that this is not true and Mary may cross it out. I'd like it noted that I put Aurelia's light on eleven people this morning, and that ten of them stood still for it, and one of them was Loki, and that he stood stillest of all. I'd like it noted that I kissed my son's hand the way I did when he was four, and that he let me, and that he's twenty-three. And I'd like it noted that my husband is sitting in the kitchen with his grandson on his knee, not saying anything, and that I have my hand on his back, and that I am not going to take it off until that boat comes home.