Chapter 26: New Student

Autumn came the way it always comes to Havenreach: all at once, on a Tuesday.

One day the river was warm and lazy and full of children, and the next there was a wind off the hills with an edge on it, and the pear tree outside the little kitchen had dropped half its leaves on the herb beds overnight, and Helena had brought out the heavy blue teapot that lives in the back of the cupboard from spring to harvest. Melody took the red boots off for the first time in a month, polished them, and put them on again.

And the college at Concordia opened its doors for the autumn term.

Iselle had been with us for six weeks by then. Long enough that Helena set a place for her at breakfast without being asked. Long enough that little Uriah held his arms up to her when she came into a room. Long enough that she had stopped knocking three times at the garden door and started just coming in, though she still paused on the step every morning first, for about the length of a breath, as if she were checking that the door was still there.

She did not talk much. She still watched every room as if she were memorizing the exits. But she had started reading in the window seat of Carol's top room in the afternoons, with her knees drawn up, the way Carol sits. And twice I had heard her laugh, out loud, in the kitchen, at something Roderic said, and then look surprised at herself.

She had not opened her mother's letter.

It lived in the pocket of her gray dress. I saw her touch it, sometimes, without seeming to know she was doing it. The way you touch a sore tooth with your tongue.

* * *

Ignatius and I took her through the gate on the first morning of term.

Father had asked who should go, and Iselle had thought about it for a long time, and then said, "Garrick. And Ignatius, if he wants to." Ignatius had said yes before she finished. He goes to Concordia most days anyway. It's his home as much as Greykeep is, and his parents' palace sits at the top of the hill above the college like a hen on a clutch of eggs.

Helena gave her a paper packet of honey biscuits at the kitchen door. She didn't say anything. She just put them in Iselle's hands and closed her fingers over them and went back to the stove.

Iselle stood on the step for a moment, holding them.

"Thank you," she said, to Helena's back.

"Eat them," said Helena. "They don't feed you properly at that college. I've told Io. She doesn't listen."

* * *

The lower hall was cold. It always is, in autumn, before the sun gets round to the high windows. The six arches stood in their row with their brass plates gleaming faintly, and the Castellan was waiting at the Concordia arch with its pen already in its hand, the way it always is when I come down, as if it has heard me on the stair since before I left my room.

It has counted every crossing I have ever made through that arch. Three thousand eight hundred and some. I lost track. It hasn't.

At the arch, Ignatius held out his hand to me without a word. I put a spoon in it. He put a wooden duck in mine. We have done that at the Concordia gate since we were two years old, and neither of us has ever been able to explain why, except that it means you have to come back to give it back.

Iselle watched us do it with a small frown between her eyebrows. She didn't ask. She was learning.

"Garrick Grey," said the Castellan, writing. "Outward. Concordia. Ignatius of Concordia, outward. Home." It turned its gray face to Iselle. "And..."

It stopped.

The pen stayed where it was, a hair above the page.

Iselle went very still.

"I do not have you," said the Castellan. Quite gently, for the Castellan. "I have been trying since the morning you came. I know what you are called. I cannot find you behind it." It paused. "I do not open my gates to people I cannot find."

The lower hall was very quiet. Somewhere far up the main stair, a door closed.

I had known this might happen. I had thought about it for weeks. I hadn't known what to do about it, and I had hoped, the way you hope about things you can't fix, that the Castellan would simply let it pass for a guest of the house.

It doesn't let things pass. That's the whole point of it.

"It's all right," I said to Iselle. "It does this. It did it to me when I was two. It won't let you through until it recognizes you. It's not saying you can't go. It's saying it doesn't know who's going."

Iselle didn't look at me. She was looking at the Castellan. Her hand had gone to the pocket of her dress, where the letter was.

"Iselle Ostrane," she said. Very quietly.

The Castellan did not move. "That is a name you are holding," it said. "Very tightly. With both hands. It is not the one underneath."

Iselle's face went white.

Ignatius stepped forward, very slightly. "Is there another way? A guest pass, or..."

"There is no other way," said the Castellan. "There is only the name."

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

Then I thought about Rysa's rules. Name. And about how a name isn't just what you're called. It's who gave it to you, and what they meant by it.

"Iselle," I said. "What did your mother call you? Not just the name. All of it. The way she'd say it if she were calling you in for supper."

She looked at me.

Something moved in her face. Something very old, and very far away, from a small town between two mountains in the far south of a continent I had only ever seen in black silk on a floor.

"Iselle, daughter of Saba," she said. Slowly, as if she were hearing it for the first time in years. "Saba who weaves. In the Ilvane valley, where the mill is." Her voice cracked. "Come in, Iselle. It's getting dark."

The Castellan's pen moved.

I watched it write, in that neat printed hand that looks like type.

Iselle, daughter of Saba. Of the Ilvane valley. Outward. Concordia.

Then it lifted its head and looked at her, with its blank gray face, for a long moment.

"There you are," said the Castellan.

And the Concordia arch folded open in front of us, soft as a page turning, and Iselle put her hand over her mouth and did not move for a long time.

* * *

The college stands at the bottom of the hill in Concordia, below the palace, on the far side of the old parade ground.

It was a barracks once. You can still tell, if you know where to look: the long low ranges of buildings set in a square, the iron rings in the outer walls where horses used to be tied, the arch over the main gate that still has a crossed-swords badge carved into the keystone, mostly worn away. Io had the badge left there on purpose. She says it's good for students to walk under something every morning that reminds them what the building used to be for.

But that's all that's left of it. Everything else, Io changed.

She knocked windows through every wall. Big ones, tall ones, so many that the masons told her the walls would fall down, and she told them to build better walls, and they did. She tore out the drill yard in the middle and planted it with fruit trees and benches and a long stone fountain that runs the length of the square. She turned the armory into the library and the officers' mess into a refectory where the food, according to Helena, is not adequate. And every room, every single one, from the lecture halls to the smallest student cell under the eaves, has a window.

Iselle stopped under the arch and looked up at it all for a long time.

The square was full of students. It was the first morning of term and they were everywhere, carrying trunks and books and each other's bags, shouting across the fountain, sitting on the benches under the fruit trees eating apples off the branches. Most of them were from Concordia, or Lyradon, or the river towns. A few were from farther away. Some of them stopped to look at the three of us as we came through the gate. Ignatius is known there. They waved to him.

Nobody looked at Iselle twice. She was just a girl with a trunk, in a gray dress, on the first day of term.

I saw her notice that. I saw her shoulders come down, very slightly, for the first time since the lower hall.

* * *

Io was waiting for us at the door of the west range, in her red dress, with her arms folded and a list in one hand.

"There you are," she said. "Come on. I'll show you your room. You can change it if you don't like it. Nobody here has to keep a room they don't like."

The room was at the top of the west range, under the eaves. Small, whitewashed, with a narrow bed and a desk and a chair and a shelf for books, and a window. A big one, taking up most of the far wall, looking west over the roofs of the town toward the hills and the long blue line of the sea beyond them.

Iselle went to it and stood there.

She stood there for a long time. Io and Ignatius and I waited in the doorway. Nobody said anything.

"Is it all right?" said Io, at last. Gently.

Iselle didn't turn around.

"It faces west," she said.

"It does. Toward the sea. I thought you might like to..."

"May I have one that faces east?"

Io stopped.

Iselle turned around. Her face was very pale. But it was very steady.

"I've been looking west my whole life," she said. "Toward the golden city. Toward him. Every window I've ever had, if I've had one, faced that way." She swallowed. "I'd like to see the sun come up. Just for a while. If that's allowed."

Io looked at her for a long moment.

Then she unfolded her arms, and crossed the little room in two strides, and took Iselle's face in both hands, the way she had taken Seraphina's in the west tower.

"Everything's allowed," said Io. "That's the whole point of this place." She let go. "East range. Top floor. There's one that looks straight over the orchard at the sunrise. I was saving it for someone who'd want it." She paused. "I think I was saving it for you."

* * *

Roderic arrived while we were moving the trunk.

I should explain that Roderic had been at the college since dawn. He had come through the gate an hour before us, on his own, with a bunch of late roses from the castle garden that he had picked himself and wrapped in a page of his own lecture notes, and he had been waiting in the main square for us for an hour, getting more nervous by the minute, and telling everyone who passed that he was meeting someone.

He saw us crossing the square with the trunk, Ignatius at one end and me at the other and Iselle walking beside us, and he came at us across the fountain at a run, holding the roses out in front of him like a lance.

"Iselle! I said I'd show you where things were. At the river. You said yes. I've got a plan, I've done a list, we start at the library and then..."

And that was when the three of them found him.

I don't know how it happened. I've thought about it a great deal since, and I still don't know. It was as if they had all been waiting at different corners of the square, the way cats wait at different corners of a room when someone opens a tin of fish. Imogen came out of the library with an armful of books. Talia came through the stable arch leading her gray mare. And Wren Fennick came down the steps of the refectory with a cup of cider in her hand, which I personally felt was a bad sign, given her history.

They all saw Roderic. They all saw the roses. They all saw who the roses were pointed at.

They all arrived at the same time.

"Roderic," said Imogen. "You said you'd help me carry these to the east range."

"Roderic," said Talia, from the saddle. "You said you'd ride the south road with me at noon. You promised."

"Roderic," said Wren Fennick, very sweetly, and lifted her cup of cider.

Roderic looked at the three of them. Then at Iselle. Then at the roses in his hand. And I watched it happen on his face, the way it has happened on his face his whole life: the absolute inability to refuse anyone anything, colliding with four people asking for four different things at once.

"I..." said Roderic. "Yes. I mean. I did say. I can do all of... if we..."

Wren's cider went over his head.

Not all of it. About half. It ran down his hair and off the end of his nose and into the roses, which drooped. Talia's mare took one look at the situation and calmly ate the other half of the bunch out of his hand. Imogen dropped three books on his foot, not quite by accident.

Roderic stood in the middle of the main square of the college on the first morning of term, dripping cider, holding a fistful of chewed stems, with a dent in his boot.

The whole square had stopped to watch.

Iselle looked at him for a long, long moment.

Her face did nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was the most nothing I had ever seen it do.

"I'll find the library myself," she said. "Thank you."

And she picked up one end of her own trunk, and nodded to me to pick up the other, and walked away across the square without looking back.

Behind us, I heard Ignatius say, very kindly, "Rod. Rod, here. Take my handkerchief."

And behind him, faintly, Roderic said, "She didn't even laugh."

He was wrong about that. I was carrying the other end of the trunk. I saw her face as we went under the arch to the east range, where nobody else could see it.

She was laughing so hard she couldn't breathe.

* * *

Caitlin found us in the east range an hour later.

She came up the stair two at a time with her blue book under her arm and a sheet of paper in her hand and an expression of terrible satisfaction, and knocked on the open door of Iselle's new room, which looked straight out over the orchard toward the morning, exactly as Io had promised.

"Aunt Io's assigned me," Caitlin announced. "As your guide. For the term. I'm to show you where everything is, and sit with you in Ashby's lectures, and tell you which tutors are worth listening to and which ones just like the sound of their own voices." She held up the sheet of paper. "I've made a list."

Iselle looked at her from the window. "Of the tutors?"

"Of everything. Where the library keeps the books nobody's supposed to read. Which bench in the square gets the sun at four. Which cook in the refectory will give you a second helping if you ask her about her grandson." Caitlin consulted the sheet. "Also a short guide to the four people at this college who will try to be your friend because you're interesting and new, and the two who will actually mean it."

"Which two?"

"Me," said Caitlin. "And Imogen, once she's forgiven you for Roderic. Which won't take long. She's not really in love with him. She just likes being asked to carry books."

Iselle looked at her for a long moment.

"Why you?" she said. "Why did the queen pick you?"

Caitlin thought about it. Caitlin always thinks about things before she answers them. She's the only person in our family who does it every single time.

"Because I correct things," she said at last. "Aunt Io knows. When I find a mistake in a book, or a record, or a lecture, I don't just say so. I write down what's wrong, and what's right instead, and how I know. With sources. All at once. Mary taught me." She shrugged. "I think Aunt Io thought you might want someone around who always tells the truth and always shows you where she got it."

Iselle didn't say anything for a while.

"Yes," she said. "I think I might."

"Good." Caitlin came in and sat down on the end of the narrow bed as if she had been sitting on it for years. "First lesson. Ashby's lecture on the Unanswered Shore is tomorrow at ten. He's going to say that nobody knows anything about the lands across the western sea." She looked at Iselle with frank interest. "I'd like you to sit in the front row and correct him. Will you?"

And Iselle, for the second time that day, laughed out loud.

* * *

We left her there at dusk. Caitlin was still sitting on the end of the bed, and the two of them had the list spread out on the coverlet between them, and Caitlin was explaining something about the refectory cook's grandson with great seriousness while Iselle ate one of Helena's honey biscuits and listened.

At the door of the east range, Ignatius gave me back my spoon. I gave him back his duck.

"Go on," he said. "I'll walk her down to the refectory at supper. Make sure she eats." He looked back up at the lit window under the eaves. "Helena will ask."

"Helena will ask," I agreed.

I was halfway across the dark square, under the fruit trees, heading for the gate, when I heard running feet behind me.

It was Iselle. She had come down the stair without her shoes. She had something in her hand.

The letter.

It was open.

She stopped in front of me, under the trees, breathing hard, in the last of the light. Her face was very strange. Not frightened. Not quite. Puzzled, and holding very still, the way you hold still when you think you've heard something in the dark.

"I read it," she said. "At the window. The east one. I said I would, when I had a window. So I did."

"Is she all right?"

"Yes. She's well. She says she's well." Iselle looked down at the letter. "She says the weaving's going well, and the neighbors are kind, and she misses me, and she hopes they're feeding me." Something almost like a smile. "She always says that."

"Then what is it?"

Iselle held the letter out to me, and pointed to one line, near the end. Her finger was shaking slightly.

I read it in the last of the light, under the apple trees. Her mother's handwriting was small and careful and plain, the hand of someone who learned to write late and is proud of it.

The river is very high this year. Higher than I have ever seen it. The Emperor's engineers came in the spring to look at it and said it is a great blessing, and that we are very lucky. The mill has never turned so fast.

I looked up at her.

"Garrick," said Iselle. Very quietly. "The letter's dated the end of summer. In the Ilvane valley, the snow melts in the spring. The river's high in the spring. By the end of summer it's always low. Every year. My whole life." She looked down at the line again. "It's never high at the end of summer. Not once."

"Unless someone's holding it," I said.

Iselle didn't answer.

She didn't need to.

We stood there in the dark under the fruit trees, with the lit windows of the college all around us, every one of them, and the sound of the long stone fountain running down the middle of the square. And I thought about a river in a small valley between two mountains, on the far side of the sea, running higher and higher, at the wrong time of year, while a mill turned faster than it ever had.

And a woman at a loom, who thought it was a blessing.

And a man who never asks a third time.