Chapter 32: Roderic Tries Honesty

Roderic came into the little kitchen at a quarter to six the next morning like a man who had just been told the world was round.

I was at the table with my head in my hands. I'd had perhaps two hours of sleep in the window seat, and then the rocking horse, and then an hour of standing in the nursery doorway watching Seraphina kneel beside it. Helena had put a cup of tea in front of me without a word and gone back to the stove. She hadn't mentioned the horse. She didn't need to. She'd moved the jam pot on the shelf a hand's width to the right, so that it sat exactly where it ought to sit, and then she'd stood and looked at it for a moment with her mouth very thin.

Then the door banged open and my brother came in.

He hadn't slept either. That was obvious. His hair was standing up on one side, he was wearing yesterday's shirt with the buttons done up wrong, and there was ink on his fingers and grass on his knees. But he didn't look tired. He looked lit. He looked the way little Uriah looks when he's just discovered his own feet.

"Garrick," he said. "Garrick."

"Rod."

"I talked to her."

Helena turned around from the stove.

"Sit," she said. "Shirt. Buttons. Then talk."

Roderic looked down at his shirt, and redid the buttons, and sat. Helena put a cup in front of him and a plate of toast and stood behind his chair with her arms folded, which is how she listens to things she has decided are important.

"I talked to her," Roderic said again. Slower. As if he were making sure the words were real. "Iselle. Last night. For three hours." He looked at me with enormous eyes. "Garrick, I didn't do anything. I didn't bring anything. I didn't climb anything or jump off anything or carry anything. I just sat on a bench. And I talked to her. And she talked back." He put both his hands flat on the table. "Why didn't anyone tell me you could do that?"

I looked at him for a long time.

"Rod," I said. "Everybody told you. Every single day of your life."

"Well," said Roderic, "nobody told me properly."

Behind him, Helena made a very small sound that might, in anyone else, have been a laugh.

* * *

It came out in pieces, the way things always come out of Roderic. Not in order. With a great deal of waving.

It had been a bad ten days. I knew some of it already. Everyone in the castle knew some of it. Caitlin had been sending reports home through the gate every evening, in her small square hand, folded into the Castellan's letter-tray with For the family. Not urgent. Very funny. written on the outside.

After the roses, and the cider, and the mare eating the bouquet in the middle of the square, Roderic had decided that he'd simply chosen the wrong gesture. That was all. He'd been too small. He'd been too ordinary. Roses were what anybody brought anybody. Iselle was the Emperor's sister, she'd grown up in a golden city, she'd seen everything. What she needed was something nobody had ever done before.

So he'd tried everything nobody had ever done before.

He'd written her a poem. Forty lines, in the old high Lyradon meter his grandmother likes, about a river and a girl and a window. He'd slipped it under her door at midnight. In the morning it had come back under his door, with every line corrected in Caitlin's handwriting, the meter marked out in little ticks and crosses, and a note at the bottom: Iselle asked me to check the meter for you. She says the river part was nice.

He'd tried to serenade her. He'd borrowed a lute from a second-year from Orselle and learned three songs in two days and stood under the east range at ten at night and sung all three, quite well, he said, really quite well. Unfortunately he'd counted the windows from the wrong end. The window he'd been singing to belonged to Master Ashby, who had opened it after the second song and asked, with great courtesy, whether Prince Roderic would be attending tomorrow's lecture on the Unanswered Shore, or whether he intended to keep singing through it.

He'd tried to have Talia's mare carry a basket of Helena's honey biscuits across the square to Iselle's bench at four o'clock, with a ribbon on its bridle. The mare had carried the basket very nicely as far as the fountain. Then it had stopped, and eaten the biscuits, and then eaten the ribbon, and then stood in the fountain.

"She didn't laugh," said Roderic. "At any of it. Not once. She just looked at me. Every time. With that face. The one that doesn't do anything."

I knew the face. I didn't tell him I'd seen it stop doing nothing, under the arch to the east range, on the first morning of term, with the trunk between us.

"So yesterday," said Roderic, "I ran out."

"Of what?"

"Of things." He spread his hands. "Of tricks. Of ideas. Of things nobody had ever done before. I sat in my room at noon with Caitlin's list of everything I'd tried, which she'd written out for me, with dates, and the outcome of each one in a little column on the right..."

"Of course she had."

"...and I looked at it, and I thought, that's it. That's every idea I've got. I've got nothing left." He looked down at his toast. "And I thought about going home. Through the gate. Just for a while. Until term ended. Because I couldn't think of a single other thing to do, and I couldn't stand the idea of her looking at me with that face again." He was quiet for a moment. "And then I thought, well. There's one thing I haven't tried."

"What?"

Roderic looked up at me. He looked, for a moment, very young, and very surprised at himself.

"Nothing," he said. "I hadn't tried doing nothing. I hadn't tried just going and sitting down."

* * *

So at four o'clock he had gone and sat down.

Iselle's bench, in the corner of the square, the one that gets the sun. She was there, with a book, and her feet tucked up, and Caitlin's terrible orange scarf. He hadn't brought anything. He'd made himself leave his hands empty. He'd stood at the edge of the square for ten minutes trying to think of something to carry, and in the end he'd put his hands in his pockets so they couldn't pick anything up, and walked across, and stopped in front of the bench.

"She looked up," said Roderic. "With the face. And she said, What is it this time? Like that. Very tired. Like she was bracing for a goat."

"What did you say?"

"I said nothing. I mean, I said nothing. I said, Nothing. It isn't anything this time. Can I sit down?" He rubbed the back of his neck. "And she looked at me for a long time. And then she moved her book. About a hand's width. And I sat."

I didn't let my face do anything at a hand's width. Helena's hand, on the back of Roderic's chair, went very still for a moment, and then went on.

"And then I didn't say anything," said Roderic. "For a really long time. Garrick, it was terrible. You know me. I don't not say things. I sat there and I could feel all the things I usually say piling up behind my teeth, all the jokes and the compliments and the have I told you about the time I jumped off the mill bridge, and I just. Didn't. And she read her book. And the sun went down a bit. And a pigeon walked past. And then..."

He stopped.

"And then?"

"And then I said the true thing." He looked down at the table. "I didn't mean to. It just came out. Because there wasn't anything else in front of it anymore."

"What was the true thing?"

Roderic was quiet for a moment.

"I said, I don't know how to talk to you," he said. "I said, Everybody else, I just say yes to. Whatever they want. That's all I know how to do. Someone wants me to carry their books, I carry their books. Someone wants me to ride the south road, I ride the south road. Someone wants me to jump off a bridge, I'm already in the air. I've been saying yes to everybody since I could talk, and everybody likes me, and I don't think any of them have the faintest idea who I am, because I don't either." He swallowed. "I said, You're the only person I've ever met who doesn't want anything from me. And I don't know what to do with that. So I've been trying to give you everything, and you keep handing it back, and I've run out of things."

Helena's arms had come unfolded behind his chair.

"What did she say?"

"Nothing. For ages." Roderic turned his cup around. "And then she closed her book. And she said, That's the first true thing you've said to me." He looked up. "And then she said, Ask me something. Not to be kind. Not to be charming. Ask me something you actually want to know."

"And?"

"And I asked her what fish soup is like in the Ilvane valley." He laughed, a little helplessly. "I don't know why. It was the first thing in my head. Caitlin's always going on about the refectory fish soup and how Iselle hates it. So I asked her what fish soup was supposed to be like. At home. Properly."

"And?"

"And she told me, Garrick." He leaned forward. "For half an hour. About river fish, and the herbs her mother grows on the windowsill, and how you're not supposed to stir it, you're supposed to shake the pot, because stirring breaks the fish. And then that turned into her mother's windowsill, and then her mother's loom, and then the songs her mother sings, and then the mill, and the bridge, and the boy next door who used to throw frogs at her, and how she put one down the back of his shirt when she was nine and he never threw another." His face was shining. "And I just listened. I didn't say anything clever. I didn't try to make her laugh. I just asked the next thing. Whatever I actually wanted to know next. And she kept answering."

"For three hours."

"Until the lamps came on. Until the porter came out and rang the bell and told us the gate was closing." He sat back. "And then right at the end, when we were standing up, she asked me something."

He went quiet.

"What did she ask?" said Helena. It was the first thing she'd said since Buttons.

Roderic looked at her.

"She asked what I want," he said. "Not what anyone wanted from me. What I wanted." He shook his head slowly. "And I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. Because nobody's ever asked me that. Not once. Not like that. Everyone asks me for things. Nobody's ever asked me what." He was quiet for a moment. "And I stood there in the square with my mouth open, and she looked at me, and she said, That's all right. Nobody asked me either, until I came here. You can tell me when you know."

Something went through me, cold and quiet, at that. Nobody ever asked me. Severin, in the stern of a rowing boat, looking down at his own gloved hands.

"And then," said Roderic, "she laughed."

"At you?"

"No." He frowned, trying to get it right. "With me, I think. She said, You look like a fish someone's stirred. And she laughed. Out loud. In the square. And Garrick..." He put both hands over his face, and then took them away again, and he was grinning like a fool. "It's the best sound I've ever heard. I'd go off the mill bridge every day for the rest of my life to hear it again. Except I don't have to. That's the thing. That's what I found out. I don't have to jump off anything. I just have to sit down, and shut up, and ask her something true."

He looked from me to Helena and back again, with his whole face lit up like a lamp.

"You just ask them," he said. "And then you listen. Why did nobody tell me?"

Helena put her hand on top of his head, and left it there for a moment, the way she used to when he was small.

"They did, Roderic," she said. "You just had to run out of everything else first."

* * *

The rest of the family came in over the next half hour, the way they do, and Roderic told it all again to each of them.

Adriana first, in her dressing gown, who listened to the whole thing standing in the doorway with one hand over her mouth, and then crossed the kitchen and kissed her son on the forehead and said, "Oh, Roderic," in a voice that made him go pink to the ears. Then Caitlin, through the gate from Concordia with her blue book, who had of course already heard it all from Iselle at breakfast and had written it down, and corrected three details in Roderic's version as he went. Then Elenos and Faelan, arguing about a beetle. Then Mother, sharp and dry and half awake, who listened to the end and said, "Well. It only took twenty years," and sat down and reached for the teapot.

I sat at the end of the table with my tea and watched them, and felt, for the first time in days, something in my chest loosen a little. My brother had sat on a bench and told the truth and been laughed with. That was a good thing. That was the kind of thing that ought to happen in this house. Whatever was moving rocking horses in the night, it couldn't move that.

Helena set out the cups.

She does it every morning without thinking. She doesn't count. She just knows. One for each person at the table, and one extra for whoever's about to come through the door, because somebody always is. She went down the table setting them out in a row, click, click, click. Adriana. Roderic. Caitlin. Mother. Elenos. Faelan. One extra at the end.

She went past me.

Not rudely. Not on purpose. She just went past me, the way you go past a chair against the wall. Her hand set Mother's cup down on one side of me and Elenos's on the other, and there was a space in front of me where a cup should have been, and she didn't look at it, and she didn't stop, and she went back to the stove.

I looked at the space on the table.

I thought, she's tired. Everyone's tired. She was up at six with our tea, and she saw the rocking horse, and she's thinking about the jam pot.

Then Adriana, at the other end of the table, looked up from Roderic and said, "Has anyone seen Garrick this morning? I wanted to ask him about the horse."

The table went on talking. Nobody answered her. Not because they were ignoring her. Because they didn't know. Mother glanced around the kitchen, vaguely, the way you glance around a room for your spectacles when they're on your head. Her eyes went across me. Over me. Past me. They didn't stop.

"He was here a minute ago," said Roderic, frowning. "Wasn't he? I was telling him about the soup." He looked down the table. Straight at my end. At me. "I could've sworn he was..."

His eyes slid off.

I watched it happen. I'd seen it happen to my own eyes, on the quay, by the third barrel. One moment he was looking at me, and the next he was looking at the window behind me, at the gray morning, at a crow on the wall, and his face had gone faintly puzzled, the way your face goes when you walk into a room and forget why. And then he turned back to Adriana and said, "I'll find him after," and picked up his toast.

I sat very still at the end of the table, in front of the space where my cup should have been.

* * *

I should explain something, here. Something I didn't explain properly before, because I'd never needed to think about it properly before.

When I told Seraphina, in the window seat, that we become whoever we're standing next to, that was true. But it was only half of it. It was the half we like to say out loud.

The other half is this: we don't give it back.

Carol has Thor's lightning. She's had it since she was a baby. Thor lives in Concordia, and goes months without coming through the gate, and Carol can still call down a storm out of a clear sky on any day of the week, with Thor a hundred miles away. I have Seraphina's fire. I have Father's frost. I have Aurelia's light, and Mother's healing, and Rysa's patience, and a little of every god that ever leaned over our cradle or sat at our table or fought beside us at the stream. We stood near them once, and now we have it. All of it. As well as they do. Forever. Near them or not.

That's why Aurelia says we're the most powerful gods there are. Not because we can borrow. Because we keep.

It's why I still ask Seraphina, Borrow?, every time I warm the teapot with her fire, when I could just do it. Not because I need her near. Because it was hers first. Because the only thing that makes what we are bearable, the only thing that keeps us from being the most terrible thing in any room, is that we ask before we use.

But the keeping isn't ours to choose. It never has been. We don't decide what we take. We just stand next to a god, and it comes in, the way the cold comes in through an open door.

And five days ago, I had crouched on the cobbles of the river quay, at dusk, a hand's width from a god whose whole domain is not being noticed. I'd walked backward to it with my eyes shut. I'd knelt beside it. I'd stayed there, breathing, while Loki felt along the stones for Helena's blue cup.

I hadn't asked. It hadn't offered.

It had come in anyway.

* * *

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the tea in the pot to go cold. Long enough for Elenos and Faelan to finish their beetle argument and start one about a frog. Nobody looked at me. Nobody passed me the toast. Mother reached right across in front of me for the butter, and her sleeve brushed my hand, and she didn't notice that either.

It was the loneliest I have ever been in my life. And it was the easiest thing I've ever done.

That was what frightened me. Not that it was happening. That it was so easy. I wasn't doing anything. I wasn't trying. It was just there, the way Seraphina's fire is just there when I reach for it. All I had to do was sit still, and keep quiet, and not want anyone to look at me, and nobody would. Not ever. I could get up and walk out of the kitchen and out of the castle and down the hill and out into the world, and nobody would stop me, and nobody would ask, and after a while nobody would remember that there had ever been anyone there to ask about.

Nobody's noticed it for so long that it's forgotten how to be noticed.

Then Seraphina came in, with little Uriah on her hip.

She didn't see me either. I watched her eyes go across the table, looking for me, and go past, and come back, puzzled, and go past again.

But little Uriah did.

He didn't look for me. He didn't need to. He turned his head on her shoulder, the moment they came through the door, and looked straight down the length of the table, past Mother and Elenos and the empty place and the cold teapot, and found me. Right at the end. As if I were the only thing in the room. As if there had never been anything in the way at all.

His whole face opened.

"Da," he said.

Seraphina stopped.

She looked down at him. Then where he was looking. And I saw her eyes start to slide, the way everyone's had, and I saw her stop them. Saw her set her jaw and hold them there, on me, through whatever was pushing at them, the way she'd hold a blade still against stone. Her face went very white.

"Garrick?" she said.

I opened my mouth. I didn't know how to make it stop. I didn't know where it was in me, the way I know where her fire is, or Carol's lightning. It was everywhere and nowhere, like a draft.

So I did the only thing I could think of. The first thing. The thing Rysa taught us in the nursery before we could read.

"My name is Garrick Grey," I said. Out loud. To the whole table.

And the room noticed me.

It was like a door slamming. Every head at the table turned at once. Mother jumped so hard she knocked her cup over. Roderic said "Where did you come from?" Elenos dropped his toast. Over at the stove, Helena turned around with the kettle in her hand, and stared at me, at the empty place on the table in front of me, at the space where she hadn't set a cup, and for the first time in my whole life I saw my grandmother look afraid.

"How long have you been sitting there?" she said.

"Since before Roderic came in," I said.

Nobody said anything.

Seraphina crossed the kitchen in three strides, with little Uriah on her hip, and put her free hand flat against my chest, over my heart, hard, as if she were holding me in place. Her hand was shaking.

"Say it again," she said.

"My name is Garrick Grey."

"Again."

"My name is Garrick Grey."

Little Uriah reached down from her hip and grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled, hard, very pleased with himself, and said "Da" again, in the tone of someone who had known all along and couldn't understand what all the fuss was about.

Seraphina didn't take her hand off my chest.

"Carol," she said. Very quietly. To me. Not a question.

And I knew she was right. Whatever I had kept from the quay, crouched on the cobbles for a few minutes, Carol had stood in that river, a hand's width from the thing that holds, for a great deal longer. And the windows had gone to ice. An inch thick. Held.

We don't give it back. We never have.

I stood up so fast my chair went over, and I didn't wait to fold. I ran for the north tower.