Chapter 229: Ignatius Feels Her

He told us at dawn.

He'd stood at the gap in the wall all night. I know because I stood with him for most of it, and Carol stood on his other side until she couldn't stand anymore and sat down against the stones with her bad arm in her lap, and in the end Lexander came and stood behind all three of us without saying anything, the way he does. Ignatius didn't move. He stood with his big hands at his sides and his face toward the gold tower, and every now and then his fingers closed, slowly, and opened again, the way you'd close your hand around something warm somebody's just put in it.

When the sun came up out of the sea behind us, he let his breath go.

"She's cold," said Ignatius.

* * *

He sat down on the wall. Carol got up and sat next to him and took his hand, and he let her, and for a while he just held on.

"I've been keeping it," he said. "Since Lanth. You know that. Every bit of fire I've got. I haven't lit a pipe. I haven't warmed my hands." He looked down at Carol's fingers in his. "I didn't know what for, exactly. I just knew I'd want it. That when I got close enough to her I'd want to have every bit there was."

"Last night," I said.

"Last night." He shut his eyes. "When you put your hand up, and she put hers up. It's fifteen miles. I've never reached fifteen miles in my life, Garrick. Not to anybody. Not even to her when she was small and had the fever and I was in the next room." His voice went rough. "But flame calls flame. That's the first thing there ever was. That's older than any of us. And her light was up, and your hand was up, and I was standing right beside you with everything I'd kept, and it—" He stopped. "It just went. The way a candle lights off another candle if you hold them close. I didn't send it. It went to her on its own. Out of me and across the water. Not all of it. A little. A coal's worth."

"Davren will have seen it," said Carol softly. "At the stone. A little red light beside hers."

"I expect so." He almost smiled. "And then it got there. And I could feel where it was. And I could feel her."

He was quiet so long that I thought he'd finished.

"She's cold," he said again.

* * *

"Not her hands," said Ignatius. "Not her face. Her fire. She was born of the first flame, same as me, and her fire's been as hot as mine since she was eleven. Hotter. She used to set the bed-curtains going in her sleep." He shook his head. "It's down to a coal. At the bottom of the grate. Banked so low you'd think it was out if you didn't know to look."

"Is she ill?" said Carol. "Is he—"

"No. No. Nobody's taking it from her. That's what I was afraid of, all this time. That he'd found some way. That's what he wants her for, isn't it? A child of the flame in his tower." His hands closed on Carol's. "It isn't him. She's spending it."

"On what?"

Ignatius looked at the city.

"Two things," he said. "I could feel two things. Like two strings going out of her, pulling. One of them goes down. Straight down. Down through the tower, under the city, under the harbor. A long way down, into the cold. Under the ice." He looked at me. "The rope."

"Draum," I said.

"One rope left. She's cutting it. She's been cutting it every night, a thread at a time, with her own fire, from the top of a tower fifteen miles away. Under the ice. Under the fleet. Where nobody can see." His jaw tightened. "That's the chopping I felt on the serpent road. All this time. She's nearly through."

"And the other?"

Ignatius didn't answer right away. He sat looking at the city for a long time. And then his eyes filled, and he let them.

"The other one goes down too," he said. "But not so far. Only down the tower. And across. Under the square. Into the cellars under the Hall of Hands."

Nobody said anything.

"It's winter," said Ignatius. "It's the coldest week of the year. And there are forty-one houses down there in the dark in their nightclothes. Old ones. Babies. On stone floors." He wiped his face with the back of his hand. "And every night since Thursday, she's been sending her fire down through the stone to keep them warm."

* * *

Carol put her face against his shoulder.

"Every night," said Ignatius. "All night. That's where it's going. Half to a god under the ice and half to forty-one families in a cellar. And she holds her light up for you at ten past nine on top of all that. Four minutes. Every night." He laughed, and it wasn't a laugh. "And the scullery girls say she won't eat. Liddy's slips. The Lady of the Flame sends back her tray. I thought it was pride. She's always been proud." He shook his head. "It isn't pride. She's got nothing to spare to eat with. Fire doesn't come from nowhere. Not even ours."

"She's doing what I did," said Carol into his coat. "Spending herself."

"She's doing what you did," said Ignatius. "Only nobody's counting her hairs."

* * *

I stood up.

I didn't decide to. I was standing before I knew it, and I knew what I was going to say, and I said it.

"We go tonight."

They looked at me. Carol lifted her head.

"Not in two days. Tonight," I said. "To the bleaching-shed. By the reed path." I turned to Ignatius. "How close do you have to be?"

He understood me. I saw him understand.

"Closer," he said. "Closer than this. Fifteen miles, I can give her a coal's worth, once, when the lights are up. If I were close enough to see her window—" He stopped. "I could keep her lit. Every night. I could carry half of it. Whatever she's carrying, I could carry half."

"Then we go tonight."

"Brisa—" said Carol.

"I'll tell Brisa." I was already turning toward the well. "It isn't a god winning anything. It's a father keeping his daughter warm. She let you plant a ford for that. She'll let him."

* * *

Brisa let him.

She didn't say anything for a long time when I told her. She was by the fish crates, the way she always is in the morning, and she put down her knife and listened to the whole of it, about the cellars and the stone floors and the fire going down through the tower, and when I got to the part about the babies she looked away out to sea.

"Every night," she said.

"Since Thursday."

"And still holding the light." Brisa Thale shook her head slowly. "I've hated her. Did you know that, boy? Since she came. The emperor's flame. The gold lady in the tower. We all hated her. Every list-runner on this rock. We thought she was the new thing he'd got to frighten us with." She picked up the knife again and looked at it. "She's been sitting on top of his whole city keeping forty-one of ours from freezing. With her own fire. While we hated her."

"She'd have expected it," I said. "She wouldn't mind."

"I'd mind," said Brisa. She put the knife down. "Go. Take the old man. Take whoever you need. I'll hold the rock." And then, gruffly, not looking at me: "Tell her somebody on Skerrick's sorry."

* * *

We went at dusk. Seven of us.

Carol and me. Ignatius. Iselle and Roderic. Loki, who announced he was coming in the tone of a man who'd already packed. And Ossery, because it was his path and he wanted to walk it. Io stayed with Kessavel and the book and the sixty, and kissed Carol's silver streak before we went, which made Carol cry, which made Io cry. Lexander was already gone, two nights now, into the streets behind the lit windows.

We took the Shrike's little boat across to the headland, and Gant brought her back. And then we walked.

Down the headland lane to Skerrick Cross, where Ossery stopped and put his hand on his own stone, face up in the grass at the corner of the four ways where I'd laid it, and it lit silver under his palm like a lamp somebody had been waiting to light. Down to the river. Over his ford, which was a real ford now, a pale gravel bar across the dark water that I'd swear hadn't been there a week before. And then not south along the open bank, where Annis and I had gone, but down into the reeds.

* * *

I don't know how to tell the reed path.

It wasn't a path. Not the way you'd think of one. There was no track, no beaten earth. The reeds were taller than Ignatius and so thick you couldn't see a hand in front of your face, and the water was all around us, black and still, and the ground underfoot was mud and roots and nothing you'd trust. If you'd tried to walk into those reeds on your own you'd have been lost in ten steps and drowned in twenty.

But Ossery went first, with his stick. And wherever he put the end of it down, the ground was there.

Not stone. Not gravel. Just ground. Firm, under the mud, the width of a boot. And as soon as his stick had touched it, and he'd stepped on it, a little silver light came up out of the mud where he'd stepped, faint, and stayed there for the next one behind him to see. And the next. And the next. A line of tiny silver footprints going away into the dark through the reeds, just bright enough to follow.

"It's a crossing," said Ossery, very quietly, ahead of me. "It goes through." I could hear that he was smiling. "Nobody's walked it in a hundred years. It's been waiting. It's very glad."

We walked all night in single file. Ossery, then me, then Carol with her hand on my shoulder, then Ignatius, then Iselle with Roderic on her left, then Loki at the back, who complained the whole way in a whisper about the mud on his boots and didn't tell a single lie about it.

* * *

At Kell Ford we came out of the reeds for a little, where the river widens at the bleaching grounds, and crossed the bottom of the lane in the dark.

And there was somebody sitting at the cross.

I saw him from a long way off, because the stone was shining. Kell Ford cross, where Annis Penner had knelt and asked. The floor of the shrine was still up, the flag still leaning against the wall where the priests had left it, and the stone underneath was face down and glowing silver around its edges, steady, like water at night. And somebody was sitting on the step of the shrine beside it, with his arms around his knees, in his shirt.

Thin face. Big ears.

He stood up when he saw us, fast, the way you stand up when you've been caught somewhere you oughtn't to be. And then he saw me, and he stopped.

"You," he said, in Kethran. "You stood on it."

"I did," I said. Iselle said it after me.

He looked at us. Seven of us, muddy to the knees, coming out of the reeds in the dark behind an old man with a stick whose footprints were shining. He looked at Ossery for a long time.

"That's him," he said. "Isn't it. The one it's talking about. When it talks."

"Yes," said Ossery, gently. "I'm sorry. I'm afraid I do go on."

* * *

His name was Tobin. He'd been given to the priests when he was seven, off the spring list from a village inland that he couldn't remember the name of anymore. He'd been eleven years in the Hall of Hands, carrying lamps and learning the oath and sweeping floors.

He'd been sitting at the cross for three days.

"I didn't know where to go," he said. Iselle said it in ours, very low. "So I came back here. It's the only place I've ever known where I was." He looked at the stone. "Somebody leaves bread. Every morning. On the step. I don't know who."

"A big woman," I said. "With forearms like a baker's."

He looked at me.

"She said I'd want bread," he said slowly. "That night. I heard her." His face did something complicated. "Nobody ever said what I'd want before."

Carol stepped forward. She held out her good hand to him, the way she'd held it out to Ossery on the wall.

"We're going to the water-gate," she said. Iselle put it into Kethran. "To the old bleaching-shed. You can come with us, if you want. Or you can stay here. Or you can go anywhere you like." She paused. "Nobody'll ask you whose you are."

Tobin looked at her hand for a long time.

"I know the Hall," he said at last. Very quietly. "I know where everything is. I know where they're keeping them. The forty-one. I carried the lamps down." He swallowed. "I know how the Games go. The first day. Who asks the question, and when, and what they practice. I've practiced it every year since I was seven."

Then he took Carol's hand.

"I'd like to come," he said.

* * *

The bleaching-shed was a long low barn of gray boards on stilts at the edge of the reeds, half fallen in at one end, with the river gone away from it and a slope of dry mud where the water used to come up to its door. Nobody had used it since the river moved, Ossery said. The rinsing troughs inside were full of dead leaves and the drying racks hung crooked from the beams.

But it had a roof, mostly. And a door that shut. And through the gaps in its west wall, across a quarter mile of reed and water, you could see the city.

Not a crown on its side anymore. Not a glow on the sky. The wall itself, black and sheer, with no gate in it anywhere. The water-gate at the bottom, low and arched, with the laundry boats tied up beside it. And above the wall, all the roofs going up and up, and over them, so close now that I had to tip my head back, the gold tower.

There was a window at the top. One window. Facing east. Facing us.

There was a light in it.

Ignatius stood in the gap in the boards and looked up at that window for a long time. Then he sat down on an upturned trough, very slowly, the way a big man sits down when his knees have gone.

"There she is," he said.

* * *

Liddy came at dawn.

She came on the first laundry boat out of the water-gate, sitting on a pile of sheets with three other women, and when the boat came level with the shed she stood up and stepped off it into the shallows, up to her knees, without a word, and the boat went on without her. She waded up the dry mud slope with her skirts in her red chapped hands.

When she saw me in the doorway she stopped.

"Rain-god's brother," she said. In our language. She'd been learning it off Brisa's woman, she told me later, just the few words. "You came."

"I said I nearly did once," I said. "And didn't. This time I did."

She looked past me into the shed. At Carol, with her silver streak. At Ignatius, on his trough, with his big hands open on his knees. At Tobin, in his shirt, who went white when he saw her and then red.

"I know him," said Liddy. "He carried the lamps." She looked at him for a moment, and then she nodded once, as if she'd decided something, and turned back to me. "I can come every morning. Off the first boat. Back on the last. Nobody counts laundry." She took a breath. "Tell me what to tell her."

I'd thought about it all night in the reeds. I'd thought about it for a week.

"Tell her we're at the door," I said. "Tell her that her father's here. Tell her he can feel her, and he knows. About the cellars. And the rope." I swallowed. "Tell her she doesn't have to carry it alone anymore. Tell her—"

I stopped.

"Tell her the kettle's on," said Carol, from behind me.

Liddy looked at her. Then she smiled, the first time I'd seen her smile, a quick small smile that went right up into her tired eyes.

"She'll know what that means," said Liddy. "Every girl in the palace knows what that means now."

* * *

That night at ten past nine I stood in the gap in the west wall of the bleaching-shed and sent three and ten, and held up my hand.

The light came up in the window at the top of the gold tower. Not fifteen miles off now. A quarter of a mile. I could see it was a lamp. I could see the shape of the window around it.

I could see a shape in the window.

Beside me, Ignatius stood up off his trough. He didn't hold up his hand. He didn't do anything I could see. He just stood in the gap with his face turned up toward that window, and opened both his hands at his sides, palms out.

And the red light in the tower window flared.

Not hers. Hers was there, steady, the way it always was. But beside it, close beside it, inside it almost, another red, warmer, deeper, the color of coals at the bottom of a forge. Growing. Not a coal's worth. Not a spark. Steady and growing and pouring in, the way a fire grows when somebody who knows what they're doing kneels down and puts their whole breath into it.

Ignatius was shaking. His hands were shaking. His face was wet. He didn't stop.

"Not all of it," said Carol sharply. "Ignatius. Not all of it. Half."

"Half," said Ignatius, through his teeth. "I know. I know. Half. I'm her father. I'm not a fool."

And then the light in the window did something it had never done.

It moved.

It came closer to the glass. As if the person holding it had stepped right up to the window, right up, and put her hand flat on it.

And Ignatius made a sound I'd never heard a man make, and sat down on the boards.

"What?" I said. "What is it?"

He couldn't speak for a moment. He sat in the gap with his big hands over his face, and Carol knelt beside him and held his shoulders.

"She said—" said Ignatius. "Through it. Through the fire. She's never—not since she was small—"

"What did she say?"

He took his hands away from his face.

"Papa," said Ignatius. "She said Papa. And then she said, stay there."

* * *

From Mary's book. Wednesday. Mary's hand, small and steady:

Sel's twenty-fourth tree.

The boy was cold all day. Not ill. Evelyn checked him three times. No fever. Just cold. His hands cold, his feet cold, and he wouldn't make his flame at breakfast. He tried. He held out his hands over his porridge and nothing came, and he looked at his hands, and then he looked at Uriah, and then he cried. He hasn't cried like that since before midwinter.

Fenrir lay on him. All of him. All afternoon. Under the kitchen table, on the rug, the whole great gray length of him curled around the boy like a wall, with his chin over the boy's legs, and wouldn't move for anyone. Not for Helena. Not for Uriah. Helena put a blanket over both of them and left them there.

At 9:10 the boy sat up out of the middle of the wolf, all at once, with his face turned to the south window.

And he laughed. And held out both his hands. And the flame came. Bigger than it's ever been. Not gold, this time. Gold with red at the bottom of it, deep red, like the bottom of a forge.

Uriah said: Ignatius. Evelyn said: what? Uriah said: that's Ignatius's fire. In the boy's hands. He's put it into her, and she's warm enough again to reach him. Then he went out into the court in the snow without his coat and stood there till Evelyn fetched him in.

9:10 p.m. at the stone. His long light. Hers. And beside hers, Davren says, the red one again. Only not small, tonight. Very big. Very close to hers. And then, at the end, hers went brighter than he has ever seen it, all at once, as if someone had opened a door on a fire.

Eight days since midwinter.

And under that, in big capitals, mostly level, one backward, in green ink:

FENRIR. FAELAN WROTE IT FOR HIM. HE WOULD LIKE IT NOTED THAT THE BOY WAS COLD AND HE DID NOT KNOW WHY AND HE LAY ON HIM ALL DAY BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT YOU DO. HE WOULD LIKE IT NOTED THAT AT TEN PAST NINE THE BOY GOT WARM ALL AT ONCE. HE WOULD LIKE IT NOTED THAT HE IS NOT GETTING UP ANYWAY. (I ASKED HIM IF HE MEANT TONIGHT. HE MEANT AT ALL.)