Chapter 231: Three More Flashes

The first time she sent three flashes, I was standing on the wall at Greykeep, and she was a long way west of me across the sea, and I didn't know yet what they meant.

Three flashes, in the coal. Red. Quick. I'm working. Come and help.

That was before the Council and the Company and the serpent road. Before Lanth and Skerrick and the forty-one houses. I'd carried those three flashes across the sea in my head the whole way. I'd thought about them every night at ten past nine. I'd wondered, sometimes, on the bad nights, if I'd understood them right.

On Saturday, at noon, she sent three more.

* * *

Liddy had gone in on the last boat on Friday with no, thank you in her mouth, and come out on the first boat on Saturday with nothing in it at all.

"I told Nell," she said, before she was even up the mud slope. "Last night. On the kitchen stair. She went white, and then she went red, and then she took the tray up." She came in and sat down on a rinsing trough, which she'd never done, and put her red hands on her knees. "She was in there a long time. When she came out she said the lady had listened to all of it. The kettle. The fish scales. The song. No, thank you. All of it. Without saying anything."

"And then?" said Ignatius.

"And then she asked Nell what time it was. And Nell said, nearly ten. And the lady said—" Liddy stopped. "She said, tell him noon."

"Tell who?"

"Nell doesn't know. She said the lady didn't say. She just said, tell him noon, and went to the window." Liddy looked at me. "I thought it must be you."

* * *

We didn't know what it meant. Not one of us.

Ignatius thought it meant she'd give Malachar her answer at noon, when he came up with his gift. Carol thought so too. Iselle wasn't sure. Loki said, flatly, that a woman who says tell him noon and nothing else means for whoever she's telling to stand somewhere he can see at noon and keep his eyes open, and the rest of us were fools to think it meant anything more complicated than that.

So at noon, I stood in the gap in the west wall of the bleaching-shed with my eyes open.

Everyone did. Carol beside me. Ignatius with his big hands at his sides. Iselle and Roderic. Loki leaning on the doorpost with his arms folded, pretending not to care. Tobin crouched by my knee, in a coat Roderic had given him, with his big ears red from the cold. Ossery on his stick. Liddy, who'd missed the morning boat back on purpose and would have to wait for the noon one.

The sun was high and cold and white. The wall of the city stood up black out of the reeds. The water-gate, the laundry boats, the gulls. The roofs going up and up. And the gold tower over all of it, so bright in the noon light you could hardly look at it.

And the window at the top. One window. Facing east.

It was dark. In the day, the lamp wasn't lit.

"He'll be up there now," said Tobin, very low. He'd been counting the bells. "The noon bell's gone. He goes up the stair on the noon bell. Every day. It takes him the length of the bell."

We waited.

* * *

I learned afterward what happened in that room. Nell told Liddy, and Liddy told me, the next morning, standing in the shed with her hands shaking. I'll put it here, where it happened, because I want it told in order.

Malachar came up the stair on the noon bell. Not alone this time. Behind him, four priests in white, and behind them, a fifth, the Hand of Oaths himself, a tall gray-faced man with a silver hand on a chain around his neck. The Hand of Oaths carried a cushion. On the cushion was a crown.

Nell was on the stair. Nell is always on the stair.

The crown was red gold. It was made of flames, Nell said. Little gold flames all the way around, joined at the tips, and in each flame a ruby. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. She said that. She said it to Liddy three times.

Malachar went into the gold room and stood in front of Seraphina. The priests stood behind him. The Hand of Oaths held out the cushion.

And Malachar said, the Games are in fourteen days. I've brought you your gift early, so you'll have time to grow used to it.

And Seraphina looked at the crown on the cushion.

She looked at it for a long time, Nell said. The way you'd look at something somebody had made very carefully, with a great deal of skill, that you would never in your life put on your head.

Then she looked up at him.

"No," said Seraphina, "thank you."

* * *

Nell said nobody moved. Not the priests. Not the Hand of Oaths with his cushion. Not him.

She said the emperor didn't change his face at all. She said that was the worst part. He just stood there with nothing on his face, looking at her, and the room went cold, the way a room goes cold when the door's been opened on winter.

And Seraphina walked past him.

Not to the window. To the door. Past the priests, past the Hand of Oaths, past the cushion and the crown. Out of the gold room, and onto the stair, where Nell was crouched with her hand over her mouth.

"Come on, Nell," Seraphina said. "I want some air."

And she went up.

* * *

There's a gallery at the top of the gold tower. Above the gold room. Tobin knew about it. An open walk all the way around the top of the tower, under the very peak, with a gold rail, where in the old days the priests went up at dawn on feast days to hold up the hand to the city. Nobody had been up there in years. The door to it was at the top of the stair, Nell said, and it had a bolt on it, and the bolt was rusted.

Seraphina put her hand on the bolt and it melted.

Nell said it ran down the door like candle wax, and the door swung open, and the wind came in, and the lady walked out onto the gallery in the noon sun in her plain dress and my old green coat, the one she steals, with her hair blowing, and stood at the gold rail on the east side of the tower.

Facing the market.

Facing the whole city.

Facing us.

* * *

We saw her come out.

I saw her come out. A quarter of a mile. A small dark shape at the very top of the gold, at the rail, against the white sky. Too small to see her face. I didn't need to see her face.

Ignatius made a sound.

"That's her," said Carol. "Garrick. That's her. She's outside."

And Seraphina lifted her hand.

* * *

Three flashes.

Red. In broad day. From the top of the gold tower, over the whole city, over the market at the foot of it and the Hall of Hands with the iron hand on its roof and every street and every roof and every window, so bright that it hurt to look at even from the reeds a quarter mile off. Not lamplight. Not coal. Her. The fire she'd been banking for two weeks in the coldest week of the year, and spending on a god under the ice and forty-one families in a cellar, and that her father had been pouring back into her for three nights.

I'm working. Come and help.

I knew it. I'd have known it anywhere. I'd carried it across the sea.

And then she did it again.

Three more. Red. I'm working. Come and help.

And again. Three more.

Nine flashes, in threes, in daylight, from the top of the emperor's tower. And then she put her hand down, and stood at the gold rail in the wind with her hair blowing, and looked down at the city.

* * *

And the city looked back.

I couldn't see it from the reeds. Loki could. He'd been in the market the day before and he knew exactly what it looked like at noon on a Saturday, and he went white and said, "Oh. Oh, that's very good. That's very, very good."

Later, Liddy told us. Nell had seen it from the gallery, crouched behind the lady at the rail. The whole market at the foot of the tower had stopped. Every stall. Every fishwife. Every child with a dead crab. Every priest in white with his unlit lamp. They'd all turned their faces up to the top of the gold at once, the way a field of flowers turns to the sun, and stood there with their mouths open.

They'd never seen anyone on the gallery. Not in their lives.

And then somebody in the market started humming.

Nell didn't know who. A woman at a fish stall, she thought. Or a child. Very low. And then somebody else. And then the whole market. Hundreds of people at the foot of the gold, humming my grandmother's kitchen song, with their faces turned up, under the priests' noses. Not singing the words. They didn't dare sing the words. But humming the tune, the way they'd hummed it at their stoves for a hundred years. And every one of them knowing, now, what the words were.

Mine, says the kettle.

The priests didn't know what it was. That's the thing. Nell said. They looked at each other in the market with their unlit lamps and didn't know what was happening. It was only a tune. It was only an old kitchen tune. You can't take a house to the Hall of Hands for humming.

* * *

She came back in. Nell said she stood at the rail until the noon boats went out through the water-gate, and then she turned around and walked back through the melted door and down the stair, past Nell, and into the gold room.

He was still there. Standing exactly where she'd left him. The priests were gone. The Hand of Oaths was gone. The cushion was on the floor.

She walked past him to the window and sat down in her chair and picked up the book she'd been reading.

And he said, very quietly, in a voice Nell said she'd never heard and never wanted to hear again: You think you've won something.

And Seraphina turned a page and said, Not yet.

And he went down.

* * *

In the bleaching-shed, nobody said anything for a long time after she went in.

Ignatius was sitting on the floor in the gap with his back against the boards and both his hands over his face. Carol was beside him. Loki had sat down in the doorway and was laughing, softly, under his breath, the way a man laughs when he's watched someone do something so perfectly that there's nothing else to do.

I stood in the gap and looked at the top of the gold.

I'd thought, for two weeks, that I was coming to help her. That's what the flashes meant. That's what they'd always meant. Come and help. I'd crossed a sea for it.

And she'd just stood on top of his tower in the middle of the day and told his whole city the same thing.

I'm working. Come and help.

Not me. Them.

"She's calling it," said Carol quietly, from the floor. She was looking up at me. "Garrick. She's calling the rising. She heard about the fish scales last night, and she called it this morning, from the top of his tower, in front of everybody. She didn't even wait to tell us she would."

"She told us," I said. "Tell him noon."

* * *

The afternoon was very strange.

Liddy went back on the noon boat to find out what was happening, and came back on the four o'clock boat, which she never did, with her hair coming out of its kerchief.

"The priests are scrubbing the fish-steps," she said. "Somebody chalked thirty-five on them. Under the thirty-four. And then somebody chalked no thank you on the steps of the Hall of Hands. In big letters. Right under the iron hand. In daylight." She sat down. "Nobody saw who did it. There were five hundred people in the square and nobody saw. The priests asked every one of them. Every one said His." She almost laughed. "And then went off humming."

"They're not taking anybody?" said Carol.

"They can't," said Liddy. "Who would they take? For humming? The whole market was humming. The cook was humming. Two of the priests were humming. Nell heard them on the stair. They didn't know they were doing it." She pushed her hair back. "The Hand of Oaths has sent a crier around. It's on every corner. On the first day of the Year Games the Flame-Consort will be crowned in the arena before the city. That's all. Will be. As if she'd said yes."

"She said no thank you," said Iselle.

"Nobody in the city thinks she's going to be crowned," said Liddy. "Not now. Not after the gallery. They think—" She stopped.

"What do they think?"

Liddy looked at me.

"They think she's going to be there," she said slowly. "In the arena. On the first day of the Games. In front of him. And they think something's going to happen." She swallowed. "They don't know what. But every girl on every stair is saying it. Something's going to happen at the Games. And the kettle's on."

* * *

Tobin told us the rest that evening. I asked him to.

He'd been very quiet all afternoon. He sat on a trough with Roderic's coat around him and his knees drawn up, and listened to everything, and didn't speak. When the light started going I sat down beside him and asked him to tell me the first day of the Games. Everything. From the beginning. The way he'd practiced it every year since he was seven.

He told it in Kethran, slowly, with Iselle saying it after him, and Carol drawing it on a board with a stub of charcoal while he talked.

The arena is south of the Hall of Hands, at the foot of the city, a great bowl of white stone that holds every soul in the city, if they stand. On the first day, at dawn, the city goes in by every street at once. Every household. Nobody stays home on the first day; it's the one day the lists don't matter, because everybody's there. The emperor comes last, at noon, by the long stair from the palace, and sits in the gold box on the north side.

At noon the Hand of Oaths walks out into the middle of the arena floor. The sand. Alone. In white. With the silver hand on his chain.

And he asks the question. Once. Not to anybody. To all of them.

Whose are you?

And the whole city answers. Together. The Great Answer. One word.

"They practice it," said Tobin. "For weeks. That's what the priests are doing now, in the evenings. Every street. A priest stands at the corner with a lamp and asks, and the street answers together. So it'll be all one voice on the day. So nobody's late. So nobody's early. So nobody's alone." He was looking at his hands. "That's the thing about the Great Answer. You're never alone in it. That's why it works. You can't hear your own voice. Only everyone's."

"And the forty-one?" I said.

"After," said Tobin. "After the Great Answer. When the city's said it, all together, the Hand of Oaths has them brought out of the Hall onto the sand. In a ring. And he asks them, one at a time. In front of everyone. And they have to say it three times. Alone. With the whole city watching. And when they've said it three times, he puts the silver hand on their faces, and their voices go."

Nobody said anything.

"It has to be clean," said Tobin, very low. "The oath. That's what they teach us. If anybody in the ring says anything else, any other word, it breaks. For everybody in the ring. It has to be started again from the Great Answer. So they always do the Great Answer first. So everybody's already said it. So the ones in the ring hear the whole city say it before they do." He looked up at me, and his big ears were red, and his eyes were wet. "So they know they're alone."

* * *

Carol put down the charcoal.

She looked at the board for a long time. The bowl of the arena. The gold box on the north side. The little ring of forty-one marks on the sand. The single mark in the middle, the Hand of Oaths.

"They practice it," she said. "Every street. Every evening. Together."

"Yes."

"So it'll all be one voice on the day." She looked up at me. "Garrick. He's been teaching them for a thousand years to all say the same word at the same moment. He's been practicing them. Every street in the city is out there tonight learning to answer together."

I looked at the board.

"Then they'll be very good at it," I said.

Loki, in the doorway, started laughing again.

* * *

At ten past nine I stood in the gap and held up my hand.

The lamp came up in the window. And Ignatius opened his hands beside me, and the red went into it, half, steady.

And then she did it again.

Three flashes. Red. From the window this time, not the gallery. Quick.

And I didn't wait. I didn't think. I took the coal out of my pocket and held it up over my head in my left hand, the one with the silver and the gold in it, and I sent them back.

Three. Three. Three.

I know. I'm here. I'm coming.

And across the reeds, in the dark, at the foot of the city wall, somebody on the water-gate quay held up a candle. And then somebody on a laundry boat. And then, along the top of the wall, where there's never anybody at night, somebody else. And then the windows came up, the way they always came up, more than I could count, all over the lower city.

And under it all, so faint I thought at first I'd imagined it, coming across the water on the night wind off the city:

Humming.

* * *

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

Sel's twenty-seventh tree.

Noon, at the stone. Davren was there, the way he is at noon now, just in case, and he came running into the little kitchen so fast he fell over Fenrir. He said: three flashes. At her bearing. In the daytime. Three, and three more, and three more. Nine. He said they were so bright the stone went warm in his hands.

Uriah was at the table with the boy. He put down his spoon. He said: three? And Davren said: three and three and three. And Uriah said: that's not for Garrick. That's for everybody. And he laughed. Out loud. He laughed so long Helena had to bring him water. He said: she's done it. She's gone out on top of his tower in the middle of the day and called them out. Then he said: that's my son's wife. And then he said: that's my grandson's mother. He said it to the boy. The boy held up his hands and made his flame. Three times. Three little flames, one after another, gold with red at the bottom. Then he clapped.

Evelyn cried. She says she didn't.

9:10 p.m. at the stone. Three and three. Benjamin answered. His long light. Hers. And then three flashes from hers. And then three flashes from his. And then three and three and three. And Davren says the field of lights from the city came up so bright tonight that the stone hummed. Not glowed. Hummed. He put his ear to it. He says it was a tune.

Ten days since midwinter.

And under that, in the same hand as the rest, small and steady, only a little less steady than usual, the letters crowding together as if they'd been written quickly before the writer could change her mind:

Mary. I'd like it noted that I've written every page of this book since it started, and I've never once written one of these. It isn't my place. I write it down. That's what I'm for. I'd like it noted that tonight the stone hummed Helena's tune, and Uriah laughed until he cried, and the boy made three flames and clapped, and I put my pen down for the first time in this book because I couldn't see the page. I'd like it noted that I picked it back up. Somebody has to write it down. I'd like it noted that I'm very glad it's me.