Chapter 30: Carol Reaches Out

Carol already knew when I got to the top of the north tower.

Of course she did. I'd been standing in the south solar looking at a gap in a row of wooden horses, and the room in me that has Carol's weather in it had gone so cold and so still that she must have felt it from the other side of the castle, the way you feel a door open somewhere downstairs in winter. By the time I'd climbed the hundred and forty steps to her room, she was sitting on the floor in the middle of it, in her old blue dressing gown, with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, waiting for me.

It was nearly midnight. All eight windows were black. Ignatius was asleep in the chair by the east one with a book open on his chest, and his hand hanging down to where hers would be if she were sitting beside him. She wasn't. She'd moved.

"Which one?" she said.

"Yours."

She closed her eyes.

I sat down on the floor across from her and told her the rest. Loki and the barrels. The blue cup and the coin. My own brown horse, standing on the cobbles facing the river with my name under its saddle. Grandpa laying out the whole basket on the hearthstone, row by row, and the one gap. I didn't make it gentle. Carol doesn't like things made gentle. She says it's just another way of deciding for someone what they can hold.

When I'd finished she sat very still for a long time.

Frost came up the windows. Slowly. From the sills, the way it does on the coldest mornings of midwinter, white fern-shapes climbing the black glass, all eight panes at once. Ignatius shivered in his sleep and pulled his coat closer without waking.

"It's been in the solar," said Carol at last.

"Loki thinks so."

"In Grandpa's basket. While Mother and Adriana moved us around the table. While I picked myself up and put you behind me." She opened her eyes. "It was in the room, Garrick. When I decided."

"Yes."

"It's been in every room." She looked around her own, at the eight frosted windows, at the round white walls Helena had once said had no corner anything could hide in. "Since the singing. Since before Severin came up the river. Every night something leaned in at the foot of my bed and asked me to say my name, and I thought it was the Choir. I thought it was the Choir, all the way across the sea." She laughed, a small hard laugh. "It wasn't across the sea. It was at the foot of the bed."

"We don't know that."

"I know it." She put her hand flat on the floor between us, palm down, and frost went out from under it in a circle, white and quick, across the boards. "It's still asking. It stopped asking out loud after I said no in the hall, but it's still asking. Every night. It just doesn't use words anymore." She looked at me. "And now it's got me in its pocket. A little gray horse with a white blaze. With my name under the saddle, in Mother's writing."

The frost reached my knees. I didn't move.

"I'm tired, Garrick," said Carol quietly. "I'm so tired of being asked."

* * *

She didn't say anything else for a long while. Neither did I. That's one of the things about being a twin. It isn't silence. It's just the two of you, thinking in the same room.

I knew what she was going to say before she said it. I could feel her coming up to it, through the bond, the way you feel weather coming. Not the cold. Something under the cold. Something with an edge on it.

"I want to look," she said.

"At what?"

"At him. At whoever it is that's been asking." She lifted her hand off the floor and the frost stopped spreading. "Everyone's been looking at me for months, Garrick. The Choir. Severin. The thing at the foot of my bed. The thing in the solar. Everybody looks at me and wants me and asks for me, and I just stand here and say no, and say no, and say no, and wait for the next one." She held up her hand in front of her face and looked at it, at the pale fingertips. "I'm the one in whom lightning sleeps. I've been standing still for so long I've forgotten I can move."

"Carol."

"I'm not going to do anything." She put her hand down. "I'm not going to go anywhere, or break anything, or open any doors. I just want to look. Once. For myself. The way you looked at the fleet from Aurethar's back." She met my eyes. "We kept the seeds. Of everything Varrick held. Every river and spring and tide. Meriel said the gods we mended can feel where we keep them. That they come to them when the work's too heavy." Her voice dropped. "Well, a river's a river, Garrick. On both sides of the sea. I think if I reached through the seeds far enough, I could find one that isn't ours."

I knew which river she meant. So did she.

"Iselle said not to," I said. "In this room. Don't try to take the river back. He'll know, and he'll ask."

"I'm not going to take it back. I'm not going to touch it." She shook her head. "I want to listen. That's all. I want to know if it's true. If he's really holding a whole river at the end of summer, so that a mill turns faster than it ever has, and a weaver thinks it's a blessing." She paused. "And I want to know if Iselle's mother is all right."

"You'd have to ask Iselle."

"Yes," said Carol. "I would."

She looked over at Ignatius, asleep in the chair by the east window, with his hand still hanging down toward the empty floor.

"Rysa's rules," she said softly. "Name. Want. Permission." She smiled a little, for the first time. "I know what I want. I need to ask permission."

* * *

I fetched Iselle the next morning, through the Concordia gate, before her first lecture.

She came at once. She didn't ask why on the way. She'd seen my face. She walked beside me across the parade ground and under the arch and through the gate in her gray dress and Caitlin's terrible orange scarf, and the Castellan wrote Iselle, daughter of Saba. Inward. Concordia, and said "Good morning, Iselle," and she said "Good morning," and that was the only thing either of us said until we reached the top of the north tower.

Carol had dressed. She was standing at the west window with her back to the room and the frost all gone from the glass, and Ignatius was beside her with his arm around her waist. When we came in he squeezed her once, very lightly, and let go, and went to the door.

"I'll be on the stair," he said.

He kissed Iselle's hand on the way past, the way they do in Concordia. She looked startled. Then he was gone, and we heard him sit down on the top step outside, and the creak of the old wood as he settled in to wait.

Carol turned around.

I had wondered how she would say it. Carol isn't good at asking. Nobody in our family is, except Roderic, and he's too good at it. We were raised by a man who taught half the world to ask, and somehow the four of us grew up so busy making sure everyone else got asked properly that we never quite learned how to do it ourselves.

She did it properly.

"Iselle," she said. "My name is Carol Grey. I want to ask you something, and you can say no. If you say no, that's the end of it, and nobody will be angry, and I won't ask again."

Iselle stood very still in the middle of the round room.

"Ask," she said.

Carol told her. All of it. The horse. The thing at the foot of the bed. The seeds, and what they were, and what Meriel had said about them. What she wanted to do, and what she didn't want to do, and why. She didn't make it gentle, either. When she got to the river, Iselle's hands went to the ends of the orange scarf and held on.

"You said not to try to take it back," said Carol. "In this room. I won't. I won't touch it. I won't change anything. I just want to listen. And I won't do even that unless you say I can." She paused. "It's your river, Iselle. It's your mother's house. I'm asking."

Iselle didn't answer for a long time. She went to the south window and stood there looking out, toward the river and the hills and the far-off line of the sea, with her back to us. Her shoulders were very straight.

"Will he know?" she said at last.

"Maybe," said Carol. "If he's listening for me." She was quiet for a moment. "I think he's always listening for me."

"Then he'll know you were there."

"Yes. Probably."

"And he'll think I sent you."

Carol didn't answer that. Neither did I. There wasn't an answer that was both kind and true.

Iselle turned around.

"Don't go in the front," she said.

Carol looked at her.

"If you go," said Iselle. Her voice was very low and very steady. "Don't go in the front. Don't go in through the golden city, or the sea, or anywhere he'd look. Go the way you'd go to our house if you didn't want anyone in the street to see. The back way." She swallowed. "Our house is the last one on the lane, right on the water, with the mill race running under the back wall. My mother's loom is by the back window, over the race. She keeps the shutter open, even in winter, because she likes to hear the water while she weaves." Something moved across her face. "She says the river keeps time for her. So she doesn't have to count."

"The back way," said Carol softly.

"Find the mill race. Then find the window." Iselle let go of the scarf. "Listen. Don't touch. Don't speak. Don't let her know you're there. If he's holding the river, he'll be holding it from the top, from the mountains, where the snow comes down. Not from the bottom. Nobody ever thinks about the bottom of a river. Nobody thinks about a back window over a mill race." She took a breath. "That's my permission. Only that. Only listening, and only from the back."

"Thank you," said Carol.

"And Carol." Iselle's voice cracked, just very slightly, on the name. "If she's there. At the loom. Tell me if she's singing."

"Singing?"

"She sings when she weaves. Always. Old songs from the valley, about fish and rain and girls who marry the wrong boy. She can't weave without singing. She says the shuttle gets lost." Iselle looked down at her hands. "If she's singing, she's all right. If she's at the loom and she isn't singing..." She stopped. "Just tell me."

"I'll tell you," said Carol. "Whatever it is. Exactly as it is."

Iselle nodded once.

Then she went and sat down in the chair by the east window, Ignatius's chair, with her hands folded in her lap and her back very straight, facing the two of us, the way you'd sit in a room where a doctor was about to do something to someone you loved.

"I'll stay," she said. "If that's allowed."

"It's allowed," said Carol.

* * *

We sat on the floor in the middle of the room, facing each other, cross-legged, the way we used to sit in the nursery when Rysa made us practice. Carol held out her hands. I took them.

Her fingers were like ice. They always are now. I held on.

"Don't let go," she said.

"I won't."

"Whatever happens. Even if I tell you to." She looked at me. "Especially if I tell you to."

"I won't let go, Carol."

She closed her eyes. After a moment, I closed mine.

* * *

I don't know how to explain the seeds to anyone who doesn't have them. I've tried. Caitlin made me try for an hour once, for her notebook, and in the end she wrote down like a pocket full of warm stones, except the stones are rivers and sighed and said it would have to do.

When we were three years old, at the stream below the castle, Carol and I held everything Varrick had taken. Every domain he'd torn out of every god he'd ever beaten. Rivers and harvests and hearths and tides and the turning of the year. We held all of it for one long terrible afternoon, and then we gave it back, piece by piece, to everyone it belonged to. Name, want, permission. And when it was done, without either of us meaning to, we'd each kept a little. Not much. A seed of each thing. A grain of river. A spark of hearth. A breath of tide.

They live in my chest. Somewhere under the breastbone, in the dark. Most days I don't think about them. But when I go looking, they're there, every one, small and warm, and if I hold one of them in my mind and lean on it very gently, I can feel the thing it came from. Wherever it is. However far.

Carol went for the rivers. I felt her do it, through her hands. I went with her.

At first it was only ours. Lorn, the River Varrow, big and slow and patient, rolling down through the farm country under the autumn rain. Little Imme, the Hallow Spring, bright and quick, running inside him all the way to the sea like a laugh inside a long sentence. Our own river at the foot of the hill, brown and fast, carrying salt barges up from Westmere. A hundred rivers. A thousand. Threads of moving water laid across the whole of Avarra like veins in a hand, and every one of them, when we touched its seed, turned toward us a little, the way a sleeping dog lifts its head when it hears your step, and knew us, and went back to its work.

Then the coast. Then the sea.

The sea is very big. This was the whole of it at once, cold and green and endless, and it didn't turn toward us at all. Nobody holds the sea. Not even Draum. He only holds a piece of it, flat, under the ships.

We went west. A long way west. Carol knew how. I don't know how she knew how. I just held on to her hands and followed.

And then, on the far side of the sea, there were rivers again.

But they didn't turn toward us.

That was the first thing I felt, and it was the worst. In Avarra, every river knows it's a river. You touch its seed and it says yes, here, me. These rivers didn't say anything. They ran, the way rivers run. They carried water down to the sea. But when Carol touched them, gently, through the seeds, there was nobody there to lift its head. It was like walking down a street where every house has its lights on and smoke in the chimney, and knocking on every door, and nobody ever answering. Because nobody's home. Because somebody came and took whoever lived there, and put them on a shelf, and left the lamps burning so the neighbors wouldn't notice.

The held, I thought. His granary.

I felt Carol's hands tighten in mine.

She went south. Along the coast, then inland, up a long brown river into high, dry country, then up a smaller one into the mountains. I could feel her counting, the way you count streets in a town you've only been told about. Two mountains. A valley between. A mill.

And there it was.

The Ilvane.

You couldn't have missed it. Even through the seeds, even from the far side of the sea, it was the loudest thing I've ever felt. Every other river in that country was a quiet, empty, running house. This one was full. Too full. Brimming. Bursting at its banks at the end of summer, in a dry country, in a year when it should have been a trickle. I felt the weight of it, the pressure, like a held breath that's been held far too long. All the snow of the spring, all the rain of the autumn, everything that should have run down and away to the sea weeks and months ago, still there, stacked up in the mountains above the valley, pressing down. Not allowed to go.

And at the top of it, up in the high snow where the river began, I felt a hand.

Not a real hand. Not a god, even. I don't know what it was. A grip. Closed. Like a fist around the throat of the river, up in the mountains, holding it. Patiently. Without any effort at all. The way you'd hold a bird you hadn't decided what to do with yet.

Carol didn't go near it. Don't go in the front. She went down instead. Down the river, through the brimming weight of it, all the way down the valley, past the fields and the orchards and the stone bridge, down to the bottom, where the town was. A small town. A lane of houses along the water. The last house on the lane.

The mill race, running under the back wall. Running fast. Too fast. Water roaring through the narrow stone channel so hard that the old mill wheel beside it was turning faster than it was ever built to turn, groaning on its axle, shedding spray.

And above it, a back window. With the shutter open.

We listened.

I'll remember it for the rest of my life. The roar of the race. The groan of the wheel. The click and thump of a loom, very steady, a little old-fashioned, the treadles going down and up, down and up. And over the top of it, faint, and thin, and a little out of tune, a woman's voice.

Singing.

An old song. I didn't know the words. They were in Kethran. But I knew the tune. It was the same tune, near enough, that Helena sings in the kitchen in the mornings when she thinks nobody's listening. About fish, maybe. Or rain. Or a girl who married the wrong boy. It went up at the end of every line, like a question, and then came down again, like someone deciding not to worry about the answer.

I felt Carol let out her breath, very slowly, through her hands.

She's singing.

We listened for a long time. Longer than we should have. Just to a woman at her window, all alone at the bottom of a river that was being held by the throat, singing about fish.

That's why we didn't feel it coming.

* * *

It was cold.

Not Carol's cold. Carol's cold is clean, like the first hard frost, like snow on a bright morning. This was something else. This was the cold of a cellar where something has been kept too long. It came down the river from the top, from the grip in the mountains, not fast, not angry, just steadily, the way water comes down a slope. It came down through the brimming weight of the Ilvane, and past the bridge and the orchards and the fields, and down the lane, and into the mill race under the back window.

And it touched Carol's hand.

Not her real hand. Her real hand was in mine, on the floor of the north tower, half a world away. Her other hand. The one she'd put out through the seeds to listen. It touched that, very lightly, the way you'd touch the back of someone's hand at a dinner table to get their attention without anyone else seeing.

I felt it. Through her. Through the bond. Like a finger of ice laid along the inside of my own wrist.

And I felt it know her.

It didn't ask. That was the thing. Every other time, in the hall, at the foot of the bed, in the singing across the water, it had asked. Say your name. Say your name. This time it didn't ask anything. It didn't need to. It touched her through the seeds, the way the gods we mended touch them when the work is too heavy, and it knew where we kept them.

And then it closed.

Not on her. Around her. Gently. A hand's width away. Like fingers curling, very slowly, around something on a shelf.

Carol made a sound. Not a word. Her hands jerked in mine, hard, pulling away, and she said, "Let go—"

I didn't let go.

I held on so tight I felt the bones in her fingers. I held on the way I've held on to her since before either of us could talk, since the night we were born, since the stream. I didn't think. I just pulled. Back. Home. The whole long way at once, the way I fold a corridor short. I folded half the world.

And we were on the floor of the north tower.

* * *

Carol was lying on her back with her eyes open, breathing hard. I was on my knees beside her, still holding both her hands. My nose was bleeding. I didn't notice until it dripped onto her sleeve.

Every one of the eight windows had gone white. Not frost. Solid ice, an inch thick, sealing every pane from sill to top, so that the light in the room came through gray and dim and strange, like light at the bottom of a river.

The door burst open. Ignatius was there. Then he was on the floor beside her with his hands on her face, and the warmth came off him in a wave, and the ice on the east window cracked from top to bottom with a sound like a bell.

Iselle hadn't moved from her chair. Her face was white. Her hands were still folded in her lap, very tight.

Carol looked up at her.

"She's singing," said Carol.

Iselle made a sound I'd never heard a person make before, and put both her hands over her mouth.

"At the loom," said Carol. "By the back window. With the shutter open. She's well, Iselle. She's singing. Something about fish. It goes up at the end, like a question." She was crying. I don't think she knew. "She's singing."

Iselle got up out of the chair, and crossed the room, and knelt down on the cold floor, and put her arms around my sister, and held her, and for a long time nobody in the room said anything at all.

Later, much later, when Iselle had gone back down through the gate with Ignatius walking her, and Helena had come up a hundred and forty steps with tea and honey biscuits and a look that dared anyone to explain, Carol sat on the end of her bed with a blanket around her shoulders and her hands wrapped around a cup she wasn't drinking.

"It didn't ask," she said. Very quietly. To me. "Every other time, it asked. This time it didn't need to."

"I know. I felt it."

"Meriel said the gods we mended can feel where we keep the seeds. So they can find them when the work's too heavy. So they're not alone." She looked down into her tea. "I reached out through the seeds, Garrick. Across the whole sea. And it felt them. It felt where I keep them."

She looked up at me.

"He knows where they are now," said Carol. "He knows the way in."