Chapter 23: What Iselle Said

I was in Grandpa Garrick's workshop when Roderic found me, sanding horses.

It was nearly midnight. Grandpa had gone to bed at ten, the way he always does, leaving forty-one wooden horses lined up along the bench in a row like a cavalry squadron waiting for orders, every one of them needing its ears smoothed. I had said I'd finish them. I hadn't, really, wanted to finish them. I'd wanted somewhere to sit with my hands busy and not think about the chapel, and the candle at the end of the table, and the easiest door in the world.

The workshop is good for that. It's a long low room off the stable yard, warm from the stove, smelling of linseed oil and oak shavings and the pipe Grandpa isn't supposed to smoke. There are tools on every wall, hung in their outlines, and a window over the bench that looks out on nothing but the dark side of the stables. Nobody comes there at night.

Roderic came.

He didn't knock. He came in all at once, the way he comes into every room, and then stopped just inside the door with his hand still on the latch, as if he had only just realized where he was.

He looked terrible. His hair was standing up on one side. His good boots were wet to the ankle and there was river mud on the knees of his trousers. And his face was doing the thing it used to do when he was small and had broken something of Mother's and was trying to decide whether to confess or run away to sea.

"Garrick," he said.

"Rod." I put the horse down. "What happened? Are you hurt?"

"No. Yes. No." He shut the door behind him and leaned against it. "I need to tell you something. And I'm allowed to tell you. I want you to know that first. I asked. She said I could tell you." He swallowed. "Only you. Nobody else. Not yet."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"Iselle," I said.

He nodded. And then he slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor with his wet boots stuck out in front of him and his head back against the wood, and closed his eyes.

"Can I have one of those?" he said. "The horses. To hold. I think I need something to hold."

I gave him the one I'd been working on. A dark one, walnut, with a chipped tail. He turned it over and over in his hands and didn't look at it.

"Tell me," I said.

So he told me.

* * *

I'm going to write it down the way he told it, as near as I can. Not because I was there. I wasn't. But Roderic tells things the way he does everything else, all at once and from the middle, with his hands going and his voice getting faster, and when I try to tell it any other way it stops being true.

He went looking for her after supper.

He'd been thinking about it all day, since Caitlin said you should ask her, at the table, over the stew. He'd thought about it while he was supposed to be studying, and while he was supposed to be helping Melody take the lantern wires down, and while he was supposed to be listening to Ashby's letter about next term's reading. And after supper he'd gone up to the east wing to knock on her door and ask whether she wanted someone to show her around the college in the autumn. Just that. Nothing else. He'd practiced it on the stairs.

She wasn't there. Severin was, in the big guest room with the balcony, writing letters, and he looked up when Roderic knocked and said, very politely, that Iselle had gone for a walk, and that he thought she had gone toward the river.

"He smiled at me," Roderic said, on the workshop floor. "When he said it. Not a mean smile. Sort of... sad. Like he knew why I was asking, and he hoped I'd find her, and he was sorry about something."

So Roderic went down to the river.

He found her at the mill bridge. Not on it. Under it, on the flat rocks at the edge of the millrace where the water comes out from under the wheel and spreads out wide and shallow over the stones. The place we all used to go to catch crayfish when we were small. She had taken her shoes off and was sitting on the biggest rock with her feet in the water and her gray skirt bunched up over her knees, very still, looking at the current.

It was nearly dark. The mill wheel was stopped for the night. The only sound was the water.

He almost went away again. He said so. He stood on the bank with his practiced sentence in his mouth and thought, She came down here to be alone. She doesn't want me. She thinks I'm three too many.

And then he thought about Caitlin, and about me in the blue light of the inner court saying ask.

And he called down from the bank, "May I come down?"

Iselle didn't turn around for a long time.

"Yes," she said.

* * *

He climbed down onto the rocks. He sat on the next one over, not close, and took his boots off, because it seemed rude not to, and put his feet in the water. It was very cold. He said he nearly yelped and managed not to, and that it was the bravest thing he did all night.

He asked her about the college. The practiced sentence. Whether she'd want someone to show her where things were.

She said yes.

Just like that. Without looking at him. Yes. I think I would.

And then neither of them said anything for a long time, and the water went past, and the light went out of the sky over the mill.

"Can I ask you something?" Iselle said at last.

Roderic nearly fell off his rock. Nobody had told him she ever asked anyone anything.

"Yes," he said.

"Your brother told you to ask my name. At the dinner." She was looking at the water. "Why do you always do what people ask? Caitlin says you can't say no to anyone. She says it's a family joke."

"It is," said Roderic. "Sort of. It's true, though. I can't. I've never been able to. My mother is the Saintess of Refusal and I can't refuse a little girl who wants me to carry her goat." He shrugged. "Grandmother Mirelle says it skips a generation. She says she couldn't do it either until she was forty."

Iselle was quiet.

"I can't either," she said.

Roderic looked at her.

"Not to everyone," she said. "Just to him."

He didn't have to ask who.

* * *

"My name is Iselle Ostrane," she said.

On the workshop floor, Roderic's hands had stopped moving on the little walnut horse. I had stopped breathing.

"Ostrane," I said.

"That's what she said. Ostrane." He looked up at me. "Like the emperor. Like the empire. Garrick, she's his sister."

I sat down on Grandpa's stool. Very slowly.

"Half-sister," said Roderic. "That's what she said. Same father. Different mothers." He swallowed. "The same father. The one nobody says."

* * *

She told it to him the way you tell something you have never told anyone and have been rehearsing in your head for years, all in a flat, quiet voice, without stopping, looking at the water.

Her mother was a weaver. In a river valley in the far south of Kethra, a long way from the golden city, in a small town between two mountains. Iselle described it, and I knew it. I knew exactly where it was. I had watched her look at it on the silk in the map room, a little cluster of seed pearls along a thin silver river, far from the gold.

A god came down to that river, one spring, twenty years ago. Her mother never said much about it. Only that he had been very beautiful, and very cold, and had looked at her as if she were something on a shelf in a shop. And that he did not stay.

"She called me Iselle," said Iselle, on the rock, in the dark. "After her own mother. She never called me anything else. She never told me who my father was. She said it didn't matter. That I was hers, and that was all."

Then, when Iselle was twelve, a man in a gray coat came to the valley.

"Severin," I said.

Roderic nodded. "She said he was very kind. He sat in her mother's kitchen and drank her mother's tea and asked her mother's name before he asked anything else. And then he said that the Emperor had learned he had a sister. And that the Emperor would like very much to meet her. And that he was asking."

"Asking," I said.

"Her mother said no."

The workshop was very quiet. Out in the stable, one of the horses shifted in its stall.

"He went away," said Roderic. "Severin. He thanked her for the tea, and he went away. And three weeks later he came back. And this time he didn't ask for Iselle at all. He said that His Radiance had heard the valley's mill was failing. And that the river had been low for two summers. And that His Radiance only wanted to help. To send engineers. To share the work." Roderic's voice cracked. "Just a small thing. Just help with the river."

"The second asking," I said.

"Her mother said yes." Roderic looked down at the horse in his hands. "And six months later, Iselle was in the golden city. And she doesn't really remember how. She said it was like... like waking up somewhere and not being able to remember the road. Everyone was so kind. Everyone was so kind, all the time. And she had beautiful rooms, and tutors, and dresses, and he came to see her every week, the Emperor, her brother, and he was kind too. He was so kind to her, Garrick. She said that over and over. He was always kind to me."

"And her mother?"

"Still in the valley. The mill works now. The river's been full every summer for eight years. He holds it." Roderic's hands tightened on the horse. "Iselle hasn't seen her since. She writes. Her mother writes back. The letters come through Severin."

* * *

"She's afraid," said Roderic.

He said it very quietly. He had stopped turning the horse over. He was just holding it, in both hands, in his lap.

"That's what she wanted me to understand. Not the name. Not the Emperor. That she's afraid." He looked up at me. "He sent her here with Severin. He sent her to the college. And she says he's never told her what for. He never does, until it's time. He just... asks. Go with Severin, little sister. Learn what they'll teach you. I'll tell you the rest when it's time. And she's always said yes. Every time. Since she was twelve."

"What's she afraid of?"

Roderic was quiet for a long moment.

"Of failing him," he said. "Of being asked to do something, when it's time, and not doing it."

"What happens if she doesn't?"

"That's what I asked." Roderic's voice went very small. "And she said, Nothing. Nothing happens to me. That's the frightening part." He took a breath. "She said he's never angry. Never. Not once. Not with her, not with anyone. If you say no, he just smiles. And then he asks again. Small. And not you, next time. Someone near you. Someone you love. Something they need." He looked down at the little horse. "And she said, My mother's valley has a full river and a working mill, and he holds both of them. And if I say no to him, he won't ask me again. He'll ask the river."

The stove ticked. The forty-one horses stood in their row along the bench.

"That's why she wanted the window," Roderic said. "At the college. She told me. In the golden city, her rooms don't have windows. They're beautiful. Painted ceilings, and silk on the walls, and a fountain. But no windows." He swallowed hard. "She said she wanted to be able to see the weather coming. Like Carol."

* * *

"Why me?" I said at last. "Why did she say you could tell me? Only me?"

Roderic almost smiled.

"I asked her that," he said. "At the end. When she'd finished, and we'd been sitting there a long time, and I said, Can I tell anyone? I won't if you don't want me to. I'll never tell anyone. But I'd like to tell my brother." He turned the little horse over once more. "And she thought about it for ages. And then she said, The one who held his hand up on the roof? And I said yes. And she said..."

He stopped.

"What?"

"She said, He asked me something without saying a word. Nobody had done that before. You can tell him." Roderic looked at me. "Only him. Not yet the others. Let him decide what to do with it. He'll ask me first."

I didn't say anything for a while.

Then I stood up off Grandpa's stool, and put the half-sanded horse back on the bench in its place in the row, and held out my hand to Roderic to pull him up off the floor.

"Come on," I said.

"Where?"

"She said I'd ask her first," I said. "So I'm going to ask her."

* * *

The east wing was dark. All of it. Every window but one.

We went up the guest stair in our socks, carrying our boots, the way we used to sneak back in from the river when we were children. The passage at the top was long and quiet and hung with old tapestries that move a little when you walk past them, as if they are breathing. The big door at the end, Severin's room, the one with the balcony, was shut. A thin line of lamplight showed underneath it.

Iselle's room was the one before it. A smaller door. No light under it at all.

I stood in front of it for a long moment. Roderic stood behind me, holding both pairs of boots, not saying anything.

Then I lifted my hand and knocked.

Three times.

I didn't decide to. I want that written down too. My hand just did it, the way Ansel's does, and I heard the three soft knocks go into the dark wood and the silence on the other side, and I thought: So that's why he does it. So the person inside knows it's someone who'll wait.

I waited.

The door opened.

She was still dressed. Gray skirt, the hem still damp from the river. Bare feet. Her short dark hair was pushed back behind her ears, and her face, in the light from the single candle Roderic held up behind me, was very pale and very tired and, for once, not doing nothing. It was doing a great many things at once, and she was not trying to stop it.

She looked at me. Then past me, at Roderic. Then back.

"My name is Garrick," I said. "You know that. But I'm saying it anyway. Because that's how we start."

She didn't move.

"Roderic told me," I said. "What you told him. All of it. Thank you for letting him."

Something moved in her throat.

"I'd like to tell my father," I said. "Not the whole house. Not the Council. Not yet. Just him. Because he's the only one who can do anything about your mother's river, and I don't think he'll do anything about it without asking you first." I took a breath. "May I?"

Iselle looked at me for a very long time.

"What will he do?" she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if she had been crying, or not speaking, or both.

"I don't know," I said. "I honestly don't. But I know what he won't do. He won't decide for you. Nobody in this house is going to hold anything that doesn't want holding. Not you. Not your mother. Not a river." I paused. "He'll come and ask you. That's all I can promise. He'll ask."

She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, they were wet, and she didn't wipe them.

"Yes," she said. "Tell him."

"Thank you."

"Ask him to come himself. Tomorrow. Not in the hall." She glanced, very briefly, down the passage toward the line of lamplight under Severin's door. "Somewhere with a window."

"I will."

She started to close the door. Then she stopped, with it half shut, and looked at me through the gap.

"Garrick," she said. "There's something Roderic doesn't know. I didn't tell him." She hesitated. "Severin sent me to the river tonight. At supper. He said, Go and walk by the water, Iselle. It's a fine evening. Someone may come looking for you." She looked at Roderic. "He knew you'd come. He wanted you to find me."

Roderic made a small sound.

"Why?" I said.

"I don't know," said Iselle. "I've known him eight years. I've never known why he does anything." She looked down the passage again. "But he's never once sent me anywhere I was safe before."

She closed the door.

* * *

We stood there in the dark passage for a while. Roderic with his armful of boots. Me with my hand still half raised, as if I might knock again.

Then I turned and looked at the end of the passage. At the big door. At the thin line of lamplight underneath it, steady and yellow.

He was awake. Of course he was awake.

For a moment I thought about walking down there, and knocking three times, and asking him. Why. What are you. Whose name are you wearing.

But it was past midnight, and I had promised a frightened girl that I would ask my father before anyone else, and I had learned something on the roof of the north tower about promises and about stopping.

So I didn't.

I took my boots from Roderic, and we went back down the guest stair in our socks, the way we used to when we were small. And behind us, at the end of the passage, the line of light under Severin Dask's door went out.

As if he had been waiting to hear us go.