Chapter 221: Iselle, Home

The Shrike was the ugliest boat I've ever loved.

She was long and low and black, with a stubby mast and a patched brown sail and a hull so scarred and tarred and mended that you couldn't tell anymore what she'd been built from. She sat in the north cave under Kittering's mole, in black water, tied to an iron ring with a rope as thick as my arm. When I put Brisa's key in the sea-door at the back of the cave and turned it, the door swung open onto a little dark harbor inside the rock that nobody in Kittering, Ketty said, had known was there for sixty years.

"Brisa's great-grandmother found it," said Ketty. "In the white year. When she came to the coast with the one child she had left. That was Brisa's grandmother. They lived in it." She looked at the boat. "That's her boat. Brisa's grandmother's. She's been mended so many times there's no first plank left in her. Brisa says that doesn't matter. She says a boat is the shape, not the wood."

We went aboard at midnight on Monday.

Eleven of us and Brisa and Corrin and two of her people, a silent old man called Gant and a girl of eighteen called Tibby who could climb the mast faster than a cat. Fifteen on a boat that took twelve if they didn't mind being wet. We minded. We got wet anyway. Ossery sat in the very bow with his stick across his knees and the spray going straight through him, because he was still a little see-through, and said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He'd never been on water. He'd only ever pointed at it.

What's Left of Draum came with us, alongside, in the dark water, the way it had come all down the coast. Brisa looked at it over the side when we came out of the cave, for a long moment, without saying anything.

"That's a piece of the big sea," she said at last.

"Yes," I said.

"The big sea drowned my grandfather."

"I know," I said. "It's sorry. It's learned to ask. It asked a harbor god called Ebb if it could stay the night, and promised not to knock any boats. It hasn't." I looked at her. "You can tell it to go. It will."

Brisa Thale looked at the small cold shape in the water for a long time.

"It can stay," she said. "If it doesn't knock." And went aft to the tiller.

* * *

We sailed south all night under the cliffs, with no light at all.

I'd thought I knew dark. I didn't. It was the darkest night I've ever been out in. No moon. The stars hidden under a high gray haze. The cliffs on our left a blackness blacker than the sky, and the sea on our right just a sound and a cold on the face. Brisa didn't need light. She steered by the sound of the surf on the rocks and the smell of the wind and something in her hands on the tiller that I didn't understand and didn't ask about. Tibby sat on the yard at the top of the mast all night, watching, and twice called something down in a whisper, and twice Brisa put the tiller over and we slipped past something I never saw.

The glow was always there. Over the bow, low on the southern sky. Forty miles. Thirty-five. Brisa said we'd be at Holme by morning, thirty miles from the city, and we'd lie up there for the day because the Shrike couldn't move by daylight. Too many eyes on the coast that close in.

My arm hurt. It hurt the whole way. Io had re-dressed it at dusk and said it was clean and knitting, but it throbbed with every lift of the boat, and I couldn't use the hand. That left me with no hands at all. The left one white and dead and useless, and the right one bound up against my chest in Ketty's scarf with the coal glowing through the cloth and the fog curled up inside my fist.

"You look like a man who's been taken apart and put back together by somebody who didn't have the instructions," said Loki, sitting down beside me in the dark.

"Thank you."

"I mean it kindly." He leaned back against the gunwale. "Tomorrow night's midwinter."

"I know."

"Evelyn said your eye comes back at midwinter. And your hand." He was quiet. "Do you think it will? Here? So far from her well?"

I hadn't let myself think about it.

"I don't know," I said.

"No," said Loki. "Nor do I." He looked out at the black. "I'll tell you something, though. I've been a god a very long time. Promises like that don't care where you are. They care who made them." He nudged me with his shoulder. "And your mother doesn't make promises she can't keep. She's the only person I've ever met who's worse at it than me."

* * *

Holme was a market town.

That was the first thing I learned about it, at dawn, when the Shrike slid into a narrow inlet under a hanging wood and Gant threw a line around a tree and we lay there in the green shadow with the whole boat hidden in the overhang. And the second thing, an hour later, when the wind came around and brought the sound up the inlet from the town at its head.

Voices. Hundreds of them. Carts. A cow complaining. Somebody hammering. And over it all, faint and high, somebody singing.

Iselle sat up.

She'd been asleep in the bottom of the boat, against Roderic's shoulder, under a sail. She sat up so suddenly that she hit her head on the boom, and didn't notice. She was listening with her whole face.

"That's the wool song," she said.

Nobody understood.

"The wool song," said Iselle. "From the valley. The Ilvane. The one the women sing when they're carding." She was already getting up. "It's market day. Tuesday. The valley women bring the wool down to the coast on the Tuesday before midwinter, every year, they always have, and there's a stall at Holme, there was always a stall at Holme, my mother used to—" She stopped.

"No," said Brisa Thale, from the stern, without looking up from the line she was splicing.

"I'm only going to listen."

"No," said Brisa. "You're the Emperor's sister. Your face is on a board in every square in Kethra with a price under it. Stolen by the Greys. Return her and be rewarded." She looked up. "There's a priest in Holme. There's always a priest on market day. And there's a hundred people who'd sell their own mother for what that board says you're worth."

I hadn't known about the boards. Nobody had told me. I looked at Iselle, and saw from her face that she had.

"I know," said Iselle. "I've known since Lanth. Kenna told me." Her right hand was closing, slowly, the way it does. She looked down at it and opened it on purpose. "I'm only going to listen. At the edge. With my hood up. For ten minutes." She looked at Brisa. "It's my mother's song. I haven't heard a valley woman sing it since I was twelve."

Brisa looked at her for a long moment.

"Then take him," she said, and jerked her chin at Roderic. "And him." At me. "He can't fold. He promised. And he can't fight with those hands. But he can talk a priest into a corner, Selvane says, and he's got that face that makes people tell him things." She went back to her splice. "Ten minutes. Hood up. Back by the second bell. If you're not, I'll come and get you, and you'll wish I hadn't."

* * *

Holme was built in a bowl at the head of the inlet, gray houses climbing three sides of it, and the market filled the bottom of the bowl. Stalls and carts and pens. Salt fish and turnips and pots and knives and cheeses wrapped in leaves. Thin winter sheep in hurdles. Geese. More people than I'd seen in one place in Kethra.

And nobody talking.

That's not true. They were talking. Prices. How much. Too much. That one. Not that one. But nobody was talking, the way people talk at a market at home, the shouting and the gossip and the jokes across the stalls. They bought and sold with their eyes down, in low voices, the way you'd buy and sell in a sickroom.

And on the side of the shrine at the top of the square, under its iron fist, there was a board.

It was a big one. Whitewashed. Painted on it, by somebody who couldn't paint well but had tried very hard, was a girl's face. Dark hair. Dark eyes. A little pointed chin. She was smiling, which Iselle never did in the city, I knew, because she'd told me. Underneath, in big black Kethran letters, and then again in shore-speech:

THE LADY ISELLE. SISTER OF HIS RADIANCE. STOLEN OVER THE SEA BY THE GREYS. RETURN HER AND BE HELD IN HIS HAND FOREVER.

Be held in his hand forever. That was the reward.

Iselle stood beside me at the edge of the square with her hood up and looked at it for a long time.

"I was twelve when they painted that," she said. "For the procession. When he brought me into the city. It's been in every square in Kethra since. They just change the words under it." She looked at the face. "I didn't look like that. I was crying when they painted it. They painted the smile on after."

Roderic didn't say anything. He moved half a step closer behind her.

Then the singing came again, from the other side of the square, and Iselle forgot the board.

* * *

The wool stall was at the far corner, by the pump. Three women behind it, with baskets of carded wool and bolts of plain undyed cloth stacked on a trestle. Two of them young. And one old. Very old. Bent nearly double, in a shawl the color of a river in spring, blue with gray in it, carding wool with hands like knotted roots, and singing. Not loud. Under her breath. The way you sing when your hands are busy and your heart's somewhere else.

Iselle stopped twenty feet away and didn't go any closer.

She stood at the edge of the crowd with her hood up and her hands at her sides and just listened. I could see her lips moving. She was singing it too, without any sound. Every word.

The old woman's song came to the end of a verse. And another. And then, in the third verse, she stopped. Not because the song had ended. Because she'd forgotten the next line. I saw her face go blank, and her hands slow on the carding combs, and her mouth open on nothing.

And Iselle, twenty feet away, with her hood up, sang it.

Not loud. Just the line. Six words. In the valley dialect, which nobody on the coast speaks, in a voice that had been taught that song under a loom by a woman who sang it with too many verses, every day of her childhood.

The old woman looked up.

She looked straight across the market, through the crowd, at the girl in the hood. And her knotted old hands stopped on the combs altogether.

"Who sang that?" she said. In the valley dialect. And then, louder, not in the dialect, in plain Kethran, in a cracked old voice that carried across the whole square: "Who knows the third verse? Nobody knows the third verse but the Ilvane women and Saba's—"

She stopped.

She was staring at Iselle. At the dark hair under the hood. At the little pointed chin. And I saw her eyes go, very slowly, up the side of the shrine to the whitewashed board with the painted smiling face. And come down again.

"Saba's Iselle," said the old woman.

Not loud. She didn't shout it. She said it the way you'd say the name of a child you've known since she was born, who you've just seen come in from a long way off, in the rain.

But it was a market in Kethra. And nobody had said anybody's name out loud in that square in a hundred years.

Every head turned.

* * *

I've thought a great deal since about what I should have done.

I could have folded. Right there. Taken Iselle and Roderic and folded us out of the square and down the inlet to the boat in one stiff step, curtain or no curtain. It would have hurt. It would have broken my promise to Brisa. It would have worked.

I didn't, because I didn't have time to decide anything. The square went silent all at once, the way the Throat had gone silent, the way a whole room goes silent when somebody drops a plate. And in the silence I heard, from the top of the square, from the door of the shrine under the board, a voice say a single word. Sharp. In Kethran.

A priest. Gray robe. Lamp. Standing in the shrine door, looking down the square, straight at the wool stall. Straight at us.

He lifted the lamp.

And Iselle, beside me, took her hood down.

* * *

I'll remember that for the rest of my life. I think Roderic will remember it for longer.

She didn't run. She didn't hide. She put both hands up and pushed her hood back off her hair and stood there, in the middle of the market at Holme, in front of a hundred people and a priest with a lamp and her own painted face on a board, with her chin up, the way I've seen her stand in the Council Hall at home. The way I saw her stand the first night she told the Castellan her real name.

"My name is Iselle," she said. Out loud. In Kethran, so that everyone in that square would understand it. "Daughter of Saba, who weaves. Of the Ilvane valley, where the mill is." Her voice shook and she didn't let it stop her. "I wasn't stolen. I left. I asked to go. I'm not his. I'm mine."

The priest's lamp came up all the way.

And Iselle opened her right hand.

* * *

I'd seen her do it before. Small. A knot on a parcel. A collar on a god. Selvane's fist on her harbors, finger by finger. I'd never seen her do it like this.

She didn't touch anything. She just held her hand out, open, palm up, at her side. And everything in that market that was being held let go.

Every hurdle on every sheep pen fell open. Every tether on every goat and every cow and every mule slid loose. The latches on the crates of geese. The knots on the sacks. The straps on the carts. The pegs on the stalls. The cords on the bundled wool. All of it, all at once, the way a fist opens when you finally stop clenching it. And a hundred sheep and forty goats and a cartload of geese and two cows and three mules and somebody's very large pig came out into the square at once, in every direction, bleating and honking and bellowing, straight through the crowd.

The priest's lamp was still up. Its light was shining straight at Iselle.

Nobody was looking at it.

You can't look at one girl in a market when a pig the size of a pony is coming at you through the turnips. Everybody in that square was looking at the animals. Or at their feet. Or at their own stall coming apart around them. The lamp shone on Iselle, and nobody saw her, and the priest stood in his shrine door with his lamp up and his mouth open and a goat eating the hem of his robe.

"Now," said Roderic.

He picked her up.

I'd never seen him do that before either. He just picked her up, the way you'd pick up a child out of a road, with one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and she put her open hand around his neck, and he ran.

I ran after them. With no hands. Through a market full of sheep.

* * *

We nearly made it out clean.

It was the old woman who stopped us. At the corner of the square, by the pump, by the wool stall, which had come apart into a drift of carded wool across the cobbles like snow. She was standing in it, in her river-colored shawl, with her knotted hands out.

Roderic stopped. He didn't put Iselle down. But he stopped, because Iselle said wait, and he always stops when she says wait.

The old woman reached up with both hands and touched Iselle's face. The way the walnut-faced woman had touched Carol's, at Dunnock. As if it were a bird's egg.

"Saba's Iselle," she said. In the dialect. "You're grown."

"Mother Wendle," said Iselle. Her voice broke on it. "You used to give me wool to play with. Under the loom."

"I did," said the old woman. "I did." She was crying. "Your mother. Is she—"

"She's safe," said Iselle. "Over the sea. In a house where nobody owns anybody. She brings bread to the harbor every morning so the fishermen eat properly. She still sings at the loom. All the verses." She was crying too. "She sings the third verse."

The old woman made a sound I'll never forget.

Then she stepped back, and took her hands away, and looked over her shoulder at the priest in the shrine door, who had got the goat off his robe and was coming down the steps with his lamp.

"Go," said Mother Wendle of the Ilvane. "Go on, child. Run. I'll sing him the third verse. All of it." Her old face set like a stone. "Let him try and hold that."

And she turned around in the drift of wool, and faced the priest coming down the square, and began to sing. Loud. At the top of her cracked old voice. The wool song, the third verse, the one nobody knows but the Ilvane women. In the middle of a market in Kethra where nobody had sung out loud in a hundred years.

The two young women at the stall behind her looked at each other.

And started singing too.

* * *

We ran down the inlet path under the hanging wood with the sound of it following us. Three women singing. Then four. Then, I swear, faintly, as we got farther away, more than that. I don't know how many. I didn't stop to count. Caitlin would have.

Brisa was standing in the bow of the Shrike with a crossbow when we came crashing down through the trees. She looked at Roderic, carrying Iselle. She looked at me, with no hands, covered in carded wool. She looked up the inlet toward the town, where the singing was.

"Ten minutes," she said.

"I know," I said.

"Hood up."

"I know."

"Back by the second bell."

"It hasn't rung yet," said Iselle, from Roderic's arms. "Listen."

We listened. Up at the head of the inlet, in the town, a bell was ringing. The second bell. Right on time.

Brisa Thale looked at her for a long moment. Then she put the crossbow down.

"Get in," she said. "We're leaving. Daylight or not." She went aft to the tiller. "Gant, cast off. Tibby, up the mast. And somebody pick that wool off him before he catches fire."

* * *

We lay up the rest of that day in a sea-cave three miles south, with the Shrike inside it and the tide going out, and nobody said very much.

Iselle sat in the bow with Roderic. Not talking. Her right hand was open in her lap. I don't think it had closed since Holme. Every so often she looked at it, as if she were surprised to see it still there.

At dusk I went and sat down beside them.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I should have stopped you taking the hood down."

"You couldn't have," said Iselle.

"I know. I'm still sorry."

She looked at her hand.

"I've been afraid of that board since I was twelve," she said. "Every time I came into a square in the city, there it was. That face. With the smile they painted on. And the words under it. Sister of His Radiance." She turned her hand over. "Today I stood under it and said my own name. Out loud. In front of everyone. And then I let go of everything in the square." She was quiet. "I didn't know I could do that. All at once. Everything."

"Neither did I," said Roderic quietly.

"You picked me up," said Iselle. Not to me. To him. "You've never picked me up."

"You've never needed picking up," said Roderic. "Today you did."

She looked at him for a long time. Then she put her open hand on his face.

I got up and went to the other end of the boat.

* * *

At ten past nine the coal flashed. Three and three.

Carol had unwound Ketty's scarf from my right arm so I could hold my hand up. It hurt. I held it up anyway, toward the glow, which was huge now, a great white dome over the southern sky like the light from a city on fire, except that it was cold. Thirty miles.

I sent three. I'm all right. Then ten. Coming.

And then I held it up, open, for as long as I could stand it. For the people with the candles. For Mother Wendle, singing the third verse at a priest in the market at Holme. For whoever else had started singing behind her.

When I let my arm down, Carol was looking at the sky.

"Garrick," she said. "It's midnight soon."

"I know."

"It's midwinter."

"I know."

She took my white hand in her good one and held it. She didn't say anything else. Neither did I.

We sat in the bow of the Shrike in the mouth of the sea-cave and waited for midnight.

* * *

From Mary's book. Tuesday. Midwinter's eve. Mary's hand, small and steady, and in places not very steady at all:

Sel's sixteenth tree. She planted it at noon instead of dawn. She said the ground asked her to wait till the sun was as high as it was going to get. She said tomorrow it starts coming back.

Tuesday morning, at her loom in the window over the quay at Westmere, Saba stopped singing in the middle of the wool song. In the middle of the third verse. She put her hands flat on the warp and said: somebody else is singing it. Over there. A lot of somebodies. Then she started again from the beginning and sang every verse, louder than anyone has ever heard her, and the whole quay stopped to listen. Tamar says even the gulls stopped.

9:10 p.m. at the stone. Three and three. Mirelle lit the lamp. Benjamin answered. Then three and ten from the nearer bearing. Then the long light. Two minutes and a half. Davren didn't write anything down. He just watched it.

Evelyn came down to the little kitchen at eleven in her cloak. She said: I'm going to sit up with the boy. Helena put the kettle on without being asked. Uriah came in from the nook and sat on the floor by the basket with his back against the cupboard. Fenrir lay across the door. Nobody said why. Nobody needed to.

It is a quarter to midnight. I am going to stop writing and watch.

Midwinter.

And under that, in a hand that is very small and very upright, the letters a little rounded, as if the writer learned them late and has been careful with them ever since, every line keeping time like a shuttle going back and forth:

Saba. Who weaves. Of the Ilvane valley, where the mill is, and of Westmere now, where the bread is. I'd like it noted that I heard my daughter say her name today in a market on the other side of the sea. I don't know how. I heard it through the loom, the way I used to hear the river. I'd like it noted that she said she was hers. I'd like it noted that I have been waiting to hear her say that since the day they took her, and I never told anybody, because I didn't think I would. I'd like it noted that I sang the whole song after, every verse, and I didn't stop for anybody. Not even the gulls.