Chapter 232: Lady Cerys's Letter

It came in a laundry basket.

Liddy brought it on the first boat on Sunday, and she didn't put it down on a rinsing trough the way she'd put down the bread. She carried it up the mud slope in both arms like it was a baby, and came in through the door of the bleaching-shed, and stood there holding it, and looked at Iselle.

Only at Iselle.

"This is for you," said Liddy. In Kethran, and then, slowly, in our language, so there'd be no mistake. "For you. Not him." She nodded at me without looking. "Nell said I was to put it in your hands and nobody else's."

Iselle had been sitting by Roderic on the floor with her knees drawn up. She stood. Very slowly.

It was an ordinary basket. Willow, gray with age, the handles worn smooth. Inside it, folded, there were sheets. Not the coarse gray palace linen the boats carried every morning. White sheets, very fine, so fine you could almost see through them. And on top of the sheets, a pillowslip. And sewn inside the hem of the pillowslip, Liddy said, in stitches so small she'd needed Nell's eyes to find them, was a letter.

"Those are her sheets," said Iselle.

Her voice had gone strange. She didn't take the basket. She just looked at it.

"I know those sheets," she said. "I used to fold them. When I went up to read to her. Every evening. She'd let me fold the sheets when the women brought them back, because she said I was the only one who did the corners properly." She put her hand over her mouth. "Nobody washes those sheets but the old women on the top floor. They've never gone out on a boat. Not in three hundred years."

"They did this morning," said Liddy.

* * *

Iselle took the pillowslip out of the basket with her fingers shaking and sat down on the floor with it in her lap. Carol knelt beside her and held the hem while Iselle unpicked the stitches with the point of Roderic's knife. It took a long time. The stitches were very small.

And then there was the letter. One sheet. Folded in four. The paper was thick and cream-colored and old, older than anything I'd seen in Kethra, with a deckled edge, as if it had been cut from the back of a book.

The ink was brown. The hand was small and very even and very beautiful, a scribe's hand, every letter shaped the way somebody shapes a thing they were taught to shape by their father at a table a long time ago.

Iselle looked at it for a long time before she read it.

"She taught me," she said. To nobody. "This hand. My letters. Every evening for two years at her table, before they put me in the room without the window. I write like this because of her." She touched the top line. "I haven't seen it since I was fourteen."

"Read it," said Roderic softly. He'd put his hand on her back. "Iselle. You don't have to. But if you want to."

She read it.

* * *

She read it in Kethran first, slowly, under her breath, to herself. And then she read it again, out loud, in our language, for us. She didn't stop once. Her voice didn't shake once. I don't know how.

My dear girl,

You did the corners properly. Nobody has since. I thought you should know that first.

I have heard the kettle is on. I did not know what it meant, and so I asked, and was told, and I have been thinking about it ever since. Room for one more. I have been in a room for one for three hundred years, and it had never once occurred to me to wonder whether there was room in it for anybody else, or whether there was room for me in any other.

Your Lady of the Flame came to see me yesterday. You will know her, I think, or know of her. She came out onto the gallery that goes around my glass at noon, in the middle of the day, which nobody has done in all the years I have been up here, and she held up her hand to the city, and I watched her do it from the inside of my glass, with the storm under my feet, and I could not breathe.

When she had finished she turned around and saw me. She looked at me through the glass for a long time. And then she came to the little door. You will remember the little door. The one with no handle on my side.

She knocked.

* * *

Iselle stopped, there. Not because her voice had gone. Because she had to look up.

She looked at me.

"Nobody knocks," she said. "Nobody ever knocks. Not on that door. He doesn't knock. He has a key. He just comes in." She swallowed. "I never knocked. I was twelve. I came up with the old women when they brought the sheets and I went in when they did."

She looked back down at the letter.

* * *

She knocked, read Iselle, and I did not know what to do, because nobody has ever knocked on that door, and so I went and stood by it, and after a while she said through it: I'm sorry to disturb you. My name is Seraphina. May I come in?

And I said I didn't know. I said, there's no handle on this side. And she said, are you sure?

I am not sure of very much, my dear. I have not been sure of anything since the day my son put a crown on his head and put me in a room of glass to keep me safe. But I put my hand where the handle would have been, if there had been one, and I pushed.

It opened.

It had never been locked. Not once. Not in three hundred years. He had never needed to lock it. He had only needed to never give me a reason to try it.

* * *

Nobody in the shed said anything. Iselle had stopped again. Her hand had gone flat on the letter.

Ignatius was sitting on his trough by the gap with his face very still. Loki, in the doorway, had stopped pretending not to listen. Tobin had both hands over his mouth.

Carol was crying without making a sound.

"Go on," I said. "Please."

* * *

She sat with me all afternoon, read Iselle. She told me about her son, who is very small and lights fires, and about her husband, who is outside the walls in a shed among the reeds and holds up his hand to her every night at ten past nine. She told me about a kitchen across the sea, and a kettle, and a woman with a spoon who fed people who had no voices. She told me what the girls on the stairs are singing. She sang it for me. I am afraid I cried a great deal, which I have not done since I was a girl.

She told me about you. That you are free. That you were in a market with your hood down and said a word I had never once heard anyone say in this city, and that it was your own name. That you have a young man who rains when he is in love or cross, and who stands on your left.

I have thought about you every evening since you stopped coming, my dear. Every evening at the hour you used to come up the stair with your book. I asked him where you had gone and he said, not yet, Mother, and I did not ask again. I should have. I should have asked every night. I am sorry.

* * *

Roderic had his face in Iselle's hair. She didn't seem to notice. She kept reading.

I asked her what she wanted. Your Lady of the Flame. I asked her the way you would ask any guest. And she said: I want what you want. And I said, I don't know what I want. Nobody has asked me in three hundred years. And she said: then I'll ask. What do you want, Cerys?

And I told her.

I want to see my river. I cannot remember what color it is in spring. I know it was a color. I know I used to sit on the bank with my father's ink on my fingers and look at it. I cannot remember the color.

And I want to put my son down. Or rather, I want him to put me down. I have asked him every night for three hundred years whether it is time yet, and every night he says not yet, Mother, and I have let him say it. I have been a jewel in a case for him. I have been the one thing he never had to ask for. And I think if he is ever going to learn how to ask for anything, he will have to learn it from me first.

* * *

So this is what I am going to do, read Iselle, and I would like you to tell your friends, and the Lady's husband among the reeds, and the girls on the stairs, so that somebody knows.

On the night before the Games, when my son comes up at midnight and sits on the floor with his head under my hand, I will ask him whether it is time yet. And he will say, not yet, Mother.

And I will say: yes, it is.

And in the morning I will walk down from my room. Through the little door. By my own feet. Down the stair and out of the palace and through the streets with everyone else, the way your Lady says everyone goes in on the first day. To the arena. I do not know the way. Somebody will have to show me. I have not walked in a street since the morning of the first crown.

And when they bring the forty-one houses out onto the sand, I am going to go and stand with them.

I am going to stand in the ring. With the others. In front of my son and his whole city. And when the Hand of Oaths comes around the ring to me, and asks me whose I am, I am going to answer him.

I find I am very frightened. I have never been so frightened in my life, not even the day the god came into my father's house. I would like someone to stand beside me. If it isn't too much to ask.

I would like it to be you.

* * *

Your Lady is at my elbow as I write this, Iselle read. She says I should tell you she has been eating, and that her father is to stop worrying. She says she will put a word at the bottom. I have given her the pen.

With all my love, my dear, and with your corners, which nobody does properly,

Cerys.

Who was a scribe's daughter, in a small town on a river. Who would like it noted that she has finished something at last.

* * *

And under that, in a different hand. Quick and slanting and impatient, going up the page at the end of the line, a hand I would know anywhere, a hand I'd found on notes on my pillow more mornings than I can count.

Garrick. She's real. She's kind. She knocked back. She's coming. So am I. Tell Papa I'm eating. Tell Carol I'm sorry about her hair. Tell the girl with the rain-god I'm coming to the wedding, and I mean it. I love you. Keep your hand up. S.

* * *

Iselle put the letter down in her lap.

She sat very still for a long time. Nobody spoke. Roderic held her. Carol held her hand. And then, at last, Iselle bent over the letter with her face in her hands and cried the way I'd never seen her cry, not in Holme, not on Skerrick, not at any point since she first walked into Greykeep and Father said she could stay. Long, and loud, and like something that had been held a very long time and had just been put down.

Roderic held on. Outside the shed, over the reeds, out of a clear sky, it began to rain. Very gently. On the shed roof, on the mud, on the water, and nowhere else.

Nobody said anything about it. Nobody needed to.

* * *

When she could, Iselle sat up and wiped her face with both hands and looked at me.

"I'm going to stand beside her," she said.

"You've got the priests' house," I said. "Aldric. The door only the sworn can open."

"I know."

"That's the same morning, Iselle. That's dawn on the first day. Tobin says the priests' house empties into the arena by the Hall stair, all together, at dawn."

"I know." Her chin came up. "Aldric first. At dawn. I'll open the door, and get him out, and bring him with me. Into the arena. With everybody else. And then I'll stand beside her in the ring." She looked down at the letter. "She taught me to read. She taught me to write my own name, and I didn't know what it meant until your father's house. She sat at her table every evening for two years and let me fold her corners. She's never once asked anyone for anything." Her voice cracked. "She asked me."

I looked at her. At Roderic beside her, with his hand on her back and his eyes wet and the rain still coming down on the roof over our heads.

There's a thing Father says. He says it doesn't matter what you'd rather do. It matters what's yours to do. And some things are yours whether you'd rather or not, and you know them because they ask you by name.

"Then that's yours," I said. "Both of it. Aldric at dawn and Cerys in the ring." I turned to Roderic. "And you—"

"Left," said Roderic. He hadn't let me finish. "On her left. The whole way. The priests' house and the stair and the arena and the ring." He wiped his face with his sleeve. "And if anybody tries to put a silver hand on either of them, they'll have to get it past me first. I've said that before. I meant it then. I mean it more now."

* * *

Jory came up the reed path at dusk.

He was one of the Skerrick boys, fifteen, all knees and elbows, who'd been on the oars for a year before Brisa got him off a galley. Ossery felt him coming a mile off and went out to the edge of the reeds to meet him, and he came out of the dark along the line of silver footprints with mud to his thighs and a grin on his face so wide it was nearly the whole face.

"Coln," he said, before he'd even got his breath. In Kethran. Tobin tried to put it into our language and was too excited to manage, and Iselle put it right. "Annis is at Coln. She sent me. Coln's singing."

"Singing?"

"Every stove." Jory sat down on the mud slope and laughed. "She went into the bakery the first morning and sang it to the baker. Both lines. The baker's eighty. She was at the second milestone in the white year. She stood in the bakery with flour on her hands and cried and sang it back. And by night the whole town had it. Every kitchen. Every stove. They don't sing it loud. But they sing it." He pulled something out of his shirt. A heel of bread. "She sent you this. The baker made it. She says it's Coln bread. She says it's the first loaf Coln's baked for itself since the white year."

He held it out to me.

I took it. It was still a little warm, somehow, after a whole day on a boy's chest in the reeds.

"And Selvane's at Holme," said Jory. "A fishing boat came in. Mother Wendle's singing it on the quay with a fourth line on. And Dunnock. And Kittering. Hew's lit the old lamp on the north pier in the daytime. And the galley-towns." He grinned again. "Dace says there's a galley-master at Ferrow's Reach who heard it and sat down on his own deck and wouldn't get up."

"And Kessavel?"

Jory's grin went softer.

"Sixty-three," he said. "Sixty-three names, beside the faces. People keep coming up the stair to the rock. From all down the coast. With a name. And he finds the face in his book and writes the name beside it. Every one." He looked at the bread in my hand. "Brisa says to tell you he's started sleeping again. A little. She says he writes a name and then he sleeps for an hour and then he writes another."

* * *

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

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

And then, above it, at the very top of the tower, inside the ring of the gallery where Seraphina had stood at noon the day before, another light.

Small. White. Pale. Not like a lamp. Like a candle burning inside a glass, inside a room with no shadows, very high up, where a light had never once been seen from the city in three hundred years.

It didn't flash. It didn't do anything. It just burned there, at the very top of the gold, beside the red one below it. Small and steady. Somebody holding a candle up to the glass, from the inside, for the first time.

Iselle stood beside me in the gap with the letter against her chest and looked at it.

"That's her," she said. "That's Cerys."

And in the lower city, the candles came up. And somewhere far off along the wall, very faint, somebody was humming.

* * *

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

Sel's twenty-eighth tree. Sel asked Aurelia who it should be for. Aurelia said: Cerys. She said she's thought about her every day since the night Iselle told us. A woman in a glass room who can't remember the color of her river in spring. Aurelia planted it with Sel, by the stream, where it runs out of the orchard. She said if it's going to be for Cerys it ought to be able to see water.

Noon: nothing at the stone. Davren says he's glad. He says he couldn't have stood it two days running.

9:10 p.m. at the stone. His long light. Hers. Ignatius's red beside hers. And then Davren made a sound. He says there's a new one. Very high. Above hers. White. Small. Not moving. He says it's the first light he's ever seen at that bearing that isn't one of ours.

Uriah came and looked. He looked at it a long time. Then he said: Cerys. Davren said: how do you know? Uriah said: because I asked Iselle once whether the door of the glass room opened from the inside, and she didn't know. He said: it does. Somebody's opened it. And then he said: oh, good girl. Evelyn said: Iselle? He said: Seraphina. And Iselle. And the old woman. All of them. Good girls, every one.

He sat with the boy at bedtime and told him there was a lady in a glass tower who was going to see a river. The boy said: river. It's his new word.

Eleven days since midwinter.

And under that, in a hand that is upright and old-fashioned and very clear, with long loops on the tall letters, the hand of somebody who learned to write a long time ago and still writes the way she was taught:

Aurelia. I'd like it noted that we planted Cerys's tree by the water, and that the stream was running clear, with a little green in it where the moss grows on the stones. I'd like it noted that I don't know what color her river is in spring. I'd like it noted that ours is that color today, and if she ever comes, I'll show her.