Chapter 41: Surtr's Feast

The invitation came on a sheet of iron.

Not paper. Iron. A thin square plate of it, about the size of a book, still faintly warm, with the words cut into it in letters as tall as my thumb and not quite straight, the way a very large hand writes when it's trying very hard to be small. It arrived by Lyradon raven on the morning after the Council, and the raven was so put out by the weight of it that it sat on the kitchen windowsill and glared at Helena until she gave it a whole crust.

Mary read it out at breakfast. She held it in both hands, because it was heavy.

To Greykeep. All of it.

Come to the bridge on the last day of the harvest. I am making a feast. Julian says I am allowed. Bring the small ones.

Surtr.

And underneath, smaller, in a different and much neater hand, scratched into the iron with what looked like the point of a chisel:

He has been practicing his letters for a month. Please come. Please praise the letters. J.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then my father put down his coffee, and reached across the table, and took the iron plate out of Mary's hands, and looked at it for a long time. He ran his thumb along the crooked letters.

"We'll go," he said.

* * *

You need to understand about Surtr.

When my father first came to this world, Surtr was the end of it. The fire giant from the old stories, the one who burns the world at the last day. He walked out of the mountains with an army of the dead and the angry behind him and burned everything he touched. Kingdoms. Cities. Forests. Lyradon's old king, Adriana's father, Roderic, who my brother is named for, died on the stone bridge over the river, holding it so the people behind him could get away. Julian was a boy then. He carries his father's helmet still, with nothing on it but one faint line of soot where Surtr's beacon touched it.

I don't know the whole of what happened at the end of that war. Nobody tells it all at once. I know it ended at a ford, in a burned forest, with the river steaming against Surtr's feet and the water running into the cracks of the glass he left behind. And I know that when the war was done, Surtr didn't go back into the mountains. He walked down the pass road to Lyradon, at a walk, alone, and stood at the end of King Roderic's broken bridge, and waited.

And Julian came out to meet him.

They don't tell anyone what they said to each other. Not Adriana, not Queen Mirelle, not my father. But every year since, on the same day, Surtr has walked down the pass road at a walk and met Julian at the bridge. They forged the new one together, iron and oak, Davren's design and Julian's handrails and Surtr's iron, and every year they argue about the handrails.

But he'd never made a feast. He'd never invited anyone to anything. In twenty years, he'd never once asked anyone to come to him.

That was what my father had been looking at, I think, running his thumb along those crooked iron letters. Not the feast.

The asking.

* * *

We went through the Lyradon gate on the last morning of the harvest, which was gold and cold and bright, all of us. Father and Mother and Adriana. Helena, with three baskets. Grandpa, grumbling, because he doesn't like gates. Carol and Ignatius. Roderic, with Iselle beside him in a new scarf, a dark blue one this time, which Caitlin had knitted in four days and which was, everyone agreed, significantly less terrible. Caitlin, with her blue book. Elenos and Faelan and little Mirelle. Seraphina, with little Uriah on her hip in his warmest coat, clutching his iron horse in one fist and his oak horse in the other.

And Moth.

Moth came on Carol's shoulder. It had decided that morning, without consulting anyone, that it was coming, and had settled on her collar like a speck of gray ash and refused to be moved. Carol didn't try very hard. Nobody's eyes slid off it now. Little Uriah pointed at it every few minutes and said "Moth," quite clearly, and every time, it went faintly gold.

Lyradon in harvest is the most beautiful place I know. A valley of fruit trees, terraced up the hillsides like a staircase for giants, every tree planted by Queen Mirelle for a family that came home after the war. In the last week of harvest the whole valley smells of apples and woodsmoke and cider, and the river runs down the middle of it under the long iron span of the new bridge.

We could smell the feast from the gate.

* * *

He'd built it on the meadow on the far side of the bridge, at the foot of the pass road. A table. One table, if you could call it that. It was a single plank of oak, as long as the bridge itself, set on iron trestles he'd forged for the purpose, and it ran all the way along the riverbank under the orchard trees. There were benches on both sides. Hundreds of people could have sat at it.

Hundreds of people were.

All of Lyradon had come. Every family Queen Mirelle had planted a tree for, and their children, and their grandmothers, and their dogs. Hanne, with three of her goats on ropes, who had refused to be left at home. Children everywhere, running up and down the length of the table and under it, shrieking. And at the far end of the meadow, where the pass road came down out of the hills, a long low wall of piled stone that hadn't been there in the spring, with fire in it.

Not wild fire. Banked fire. A forge-bed, forty feet long, made of river stones and iron grates, with the coals glowing red and steady along the whole length of it, and the air above it shimmering with heat. And over it, on great iron spits and racks and hooks, in the most extraordinary arrangement of chains and wheels and gears I've ever seen, there were roasting a dozen sides of beef, and twenty lambs, and more chickens than I could count, and long iron trays of potatoes and onions and apples, all turning slowly, all at once, all by themselves.

"Davren," said my father. It wasn't a question.

It was Davren. Lyradon's engineer, who came to Greykeep years ago with a fever and got better by taking every mechanism in the castle to pieces. He was standing at the far end of the forge-bed in a leather apron, sweating, with soot to the elbows and a look of perfect, radiant happiness on his face, adjusting something with a wrench. The whole forty feet of spits and racks were turning on one long shaft, driven by a little waterwheel he'd set in the mill race at the edge of the meadow, and every rack turned at a slightly different speed, and every one of them was exactly right.

"It's a grill," he said, when we came up to him. "The best grill ever built. Surtr does the heat. I do the turning. The chickens turn faster than the beef. Different gears. Do you see? Garrick. Do you see?"

"I see," I said.

"Nobody ever sees." Davren wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and left a long black streak. "Cassia says it's a very complicated way of cooking a chicken."

"It is a very complicated way of cooking a chicken," said Cassia, coming up behind him with a basket of bread on her hip.

Princess Cassia of Lyradon, Adriana's sister, is the only person I've ever met who is never, under any circumstances, impressed. She's tall and dark and dry as autumn leaves, and nobody has ever once heard her say anything nice about any of his inventions to his face. She looked at the forty feet of turning spits and chains and gears and waterwheels, and the twenty lambs and the dozen sides of beef going around in perfect time, and sniffed.

"A man could just put a chicken in an oven," she said.

"An oven doesn't turn, Cassia."

"Chickens don't need to turn. Chickens need to be cooked." She handed me a loaf of bread. "He's been sleeping in the workshop for six weeks. He talks to the gears. He named the big one after me."

"Because it's the most important one," said Davren. "Everything else turns because of it."

Cassia looked at him for a moment.

Then she turned around and walked away very quickly with her basket, and I saw her ears go pink as she went, all the way to the tips.

"She thinks it's wonderful," Davren told me happily, going back to his wrench. "She told my mother. She just doesn't tell me."

* * *

Surtr was sitting at the end of the table.

I hadn't seen him at first. That sounds impossible. Surtr is twelve feet tall sitting down. He's made of something like dark stone with fire running in the cracks, the way lava runs under a crust, and his eyes are two coals, and when he breathes, the air in front of him ripples. You'd think you couldn't miss him.

But he was sitting so still, at the very end of the long oak table, nearest the forge-bed, with his enormous hands folded in front of him, that I'd taken him for part of the wall of piled stone. He was looking down the whole length of the table at all those people. Hundreds of them. All of Lyradon. Farmers and millers and children and goats.

He'd made himself cooler. I could feel it from fifty feet away. The fire in his cracks was banked down to a dull red glow, the way you'd bank a hearth before bed, and the grass around his feet wasn't even scorched. He'd done it for them. So that the children could run past him without being burned.

He didn't look like the end of the world. He looked like a very large man at his own party, who wasn't sure anybody was going to talk to him.

Julian was standing beside him. Julian is quiet, with a carpenter's hands and his father's chin, and he doesn't say much, but he had one hand resting on Surtr's enormous shoulder, very lightly, the way you'd rest your hand on a friend's arm at a funeral. When he saw us coming across the meadow, he lifted the other hand.

My father went straight to them. Not to Julian. To Surtr.

He stopped in front of him. He had to tip his head back a long way to look up.

"I got your letter," said my father.

Surtr looked down at him. The coals of his eyes flickered.

"Was it right?" he said. His voice was like a forge door opening. Deep and slow and hot. "The letters. Julian says the R was backward."

"The R was a little backward," my father admitted. He took the iron plate out from under his arm, where he'd been carrying it since breakfast. He'd brought it with him. He held it up. "But I could read every word of it. And it's the best invitation I've ever had. I'm going to hang it in the lower hall, by the gates, where everyone who comes through can see it."

Surtr went very still.

Then the fire in the cracks of his face came up, slowly, from a dull banked red to a deep bright gold, all over, like a hearth when someone blows on it, and the grass around his feet began very gently to smoke.

"Surtr," said Julian, mildly.

The gold went down again. Quickly. Like someone hiding a smile behind a hand.

"Sorry," said Surtr.

* * *

I watched the whole of Greykeep go to him, then, one after another, the way you'd go to a host at a feast. Mother, who said the table was magnificent. Adriana, who'd lost her father on the old bridge, and who stood in front of Surtr for a long moment without saying anything, and then reached up and laid her palm flat against his great stone knee, and left it there for a breath, and took it away. Helena, who handed him one of her baskets and said, "Honey cake. For after. You'll want to keep it away from the heat," and Surtr held the basket in both enormous hands, very carefully, at arm's length from his own chest, as if it were made of glass.

Grandpa, who'd carved the oak handrails on the first bridge with Julian, and who argues with Surtr about them every year by letter, looked up at him and said, "Those rails are still a quarter-inch too high on the north side," and Surtr said, "They are exactly right," and they glared at each other with deep satisfaction and then Grandpa sat down next to him.

And then Roddick came.

Julian's boy is three, and solid, and very serious, with his father's chin and his mother's dark eyes, and he had been running up and down under the table with the other children since before we arrived. He came out from under it now, right at Surtr's feet, with grass in his hair and a half-eaten plum in his fist, and stood looking up.

A long way up.

Surtr looked down at him.

The whole end of the table went quiet. I saw Elowen, Roddick's mother, half-rise from her bench. I saw Julian's hand tighten, very slightly, on Surtr's shoulder.

"Up," said Roddick.

Nobody moved.

"Up," said Roddick again, in the tone of a person who has said a perfectly clear thing and doesn't understand why it isn't happening yet. He held his arms up. The plum dripped down his sleeve.

Surtr looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked at Julian.

He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. I saw it in the coals of his eyes, very clearly. The same look I'd felt on my own face in the kitchen, the morning Seraphina first handed me our son. Am I allowed?

Julian looked back at him. Then at Elowen. Elowen was standing all the way up now, very pale, with her hands pressed together.

She looked at Surtr for a long time.

Then she nodded.

Surtr bent down. Very slowly. So slowly that it took a long time for his great stone hands to come all the way down to the grass. I felt the heat go out of him as he did it. Not all of it. Just enough. The red in his cracks went down and down until it was the faint warm glow of a hearthstone the morning after a fire, the kind of warm you'd put your bare feet on in winter. He held out both hands, flat, palms up, on the grass, like two great stone steps.

Roddick climbed into them without the slightest hesitation, plum and all.

And Surtr lifted him up. Up past his own chest. Up past his face. Up, and up, until he could set him down, very gently, sitting on his shoulder, with his small legs hanging down on either side of that enormous dark neck, twelve feet in the air, above the whole of Lyradon.

Roddick looked down at the meadow. At the long table, and the hundreds of people at it, and the forge-bed and the turning spits and the river and the bridge and the orchards climbing the hills. At the whole valley, gold and red in the last of the harvest light.

He took a bite of his plum.

"Big," he said, with deep approval.

The whole meadow laughed. All of it. All of Lyradon, at once, the way people laugh when something has been very tight for a long time and suddenly isn't. I saw Elowen sit down and put her face in her hands and laugh into them. I saw Julian close his eyes. I saw Adriana turn her head away and wipe her face with the back of her wrist, very quickly, so nobody would see.

And I saw Surtr's face. Twelve feet up, with a three-year-old boy on his shoulder dripping plum juice down his neck.

The fire in his cracks came up gold again. All of it. Every crack. And this time, Julian didn't say anything at all.

* * *

We ate until the sun went down behind the pass, and then we went on eating.

Davren's chickens were, everyone agreed, the best chickens ever cooked by anyone, and he was so pleased he had to go and stand by his waterwheel for a while. Cassia ate three helpings without saying a word about them, and then went and stood by the waterwheel too, beside him, and when she thought nobody was looking, she leaned her head on his shoulder. Hanne's goats got into the apples. Elenos and Faelan and little Mirelle and about forty Lyradon children played a game under the table that seemed to involve everybody's ankles. Little Uriah fell asleep in Seraphina's lap with a chicken bone in one hand and his iron horse in the other, and woke up, and demanded to go on Surtr's other shoulder, and was given it, and fell asleep again up there, sitting opposite Roddick, with one small hand holding on to Surtr's ear.

Nobody tried to take him down. Surtr didn't move for an hour.

When the lanterns came out, I went to find Iselle.

She was sitting a little apart from the table, on the riverbank under one of Queen Mirelle's pear trees, with her knees drawn up and her new blue scarf around her neck. Roderic had gone to get her a cup of cider. She was looking at Surtr. She'd been looking at him on and off all evening, I'd noticed. Not frightened. Just looking, the way you look at a thing you don't understand and very much want to.

I sat down beside her.

"Ask me," she said. "You want to."

"What are you thinking about?"

She didn't answer straight away. She watched Surtr, at the far end of the table in the lantern light, with two sleeping boys on his shoulders and Grandpa beside him explaining, with a great deal of gesturing, what was wrong with the north rail of the bridge.

"Roderic told me," she said. "On the way through the gate. Who he was. What he did." She turned the hem of her scarf over in her fingers. "He burned whole cities, Garrick. He killed Adriana's father. On that bridge. Right there." She nodded at the long iron span in the dark, with Julian's oak handrails catching the lantern light. "And now he's sitting at a table with all of them. Holding their children. And they're letting him."

"Yes."

"How?"

I thought about how to answer that honestly.

"I don't know all of it," I said. "Nobody does, except him and Julian. They've never told." I looked at the bridge. "But I know he came down the pass road alone. At a walk. After the war. And stood at the end of the broken bridge, and waited. And I know Julian came out." I paused. "I think somebody asked him something, Iselle. Out there on the bridge. I think somebody asked him, for the first time in his whole long life, what he actually wanted. And he didn't know. And Julian waited while he found out."

Iselle was very quiet for a long time.

"My brother," she said at last. Very low. "Do you think...?"

She didn't finish. She didn't have to.

Before I could answer, a shadow fell across the grass in front of us, and the air went warm.

Surtr had got up.

He'd come down the length of the meadow so quietly I hadn't heard him. He had the two boys still on his shoulders, both asleep, Roddick slumped against the side of his head and little Uriah still holding his ear. He stopped a little way off from us, under the pear tree, and very slowly, very carefully, so as not to wake them, he lowered himself down until he was sitting on the riverbank too, with his enormous knees drawn up, the way Iselle's were.

He looked at Iselle with his coal eyes.

"You are Malachar's sister," he said. His voice was very quiet, for him. Like a forge with the door almost shut.

Iselle went very still. "Yes."

"Julian told me." He was quiet for a moment. "May I tell you something? You can say no."

Iselle looked at him for a long time. I watched her decide.

"Yes," she said.

Surtr looked down at his own great hands, folded on his knees, glowing faintly in the dark.

"I was the end of the world," he said. "That was my name, for a long time. That was all I was. Everybody told me so. The gods told me. The old stories told me. The fire told me. And so I was. I went where the stories said, and I burned what the stories said, and I didn't ask myself if it was what I wanted, because nobody had ever asked me, and I didn't know it was a thing you could ask." He was quiet. "I thought there was only one ending. And I was it."

The river ran by in the dark. On his shoulder, little Uriah sighed in his sleep and tightened his grip on Surtr's ear.

"Then the war ended," said Surtr. "And I was standing at the end of the bridge I had broken. And a boy came out. A boy whose father I had killed, on that bridge. And he stood in front of me, and he was very frightened, and he asked me what I wanted to do next." He turned his great head and looked at Iselle. "Not what I was for. Not what the stories said. What I wanted."

"What did you say?" said Iselle. Barely a whisper.

"Nothing," said Surtr. "For a long time. I didn't know." The fire in his cracks flickered. "And he waited. He sat down on the broken stones and waited. All night. Until I knew."

"What was it?"

Surtr looked down the long meadow, at the iron table in the lantern light, at all of Lyradon eating and laughing and drinking cider in the dark, at Davren and Cassia by the waterwheel, at Grandpa arguing with Julian about the rails.

"This," he said. "It took me twenty years. But it was this."

Iselle didn't say anything. I saw her hands, in her lap, holding the end of her scarf very tightly.

"Your brother has never been asked," said Surtr. "I can see it. I can see it in the ships, and the singing, and the chains. He is the end of something, and everybody has told him so, and he believes them." He was quiet a long time. "He will try again. And again. He will try something else, and when that fails, he will try something else after that, because he does not know there is any other thing to do. That is what you do when you are the end of the world. You keep ending."

"Then what do we do?" said Iselle.

Surtr turned his coal eyes on me. Then back on her.

"You keep winning," he said simply. "Every time. Kindly. Without burning anything you don't have to. And you keep the door open. And one day, when he has tried everything, and every one of them has failed, and he is standing at the end of something he broke, with nothing left to try..." He looked down at the sleeping boys on his shoulders. "Somebody walks out to meet him. And asks."

The river ran by in the dark. Up at the table, someone started a song, and the whole of Lyradon took it up, badly and happily, in the lantern light.

Iselle looked at Surtr for a long time.

Then, very slowly, she reached out, and laid her hand flat against the warm stone of his knee, the way Adriana had, and left it there.

"Thank you," she said. "For asking if you could tell me."

The fire in Surtr's cracks came up gold. Just a little. Just around the edges.

"You're welcome," he said.

Roderic came back down the meadow with two cups of cider, and stopped dead at the sight of the three of us sitting under the pear tree with a fire giant, and then, very carefully, without spilling anything, sat down on the grass on Iselle's other side, and handed her a cup, and didn't say a word.

I think it was the bravest thing I've ever seen him do.