Chapter 42: Gone by Morning

Iselle asked if she could come to Westmere.

She asked my father, at breakfast, three days after the feast, with Roderic sitting beside her pretending very hard not to be listening. She asked properly. Name, want, permission. She'd been in our house long enough by then to have stopped being surprised that it worked.

"I have a letter," she said. "For my mother. The Kethran house in Concordia is closed now, since Teo. There's no one there to send it." She looked down at the folded square of paper in her hands, sealed with plain gray wax and the small whorls of her own thumb. "Severin has always carried them. Since I was twelve. He's never once opened one." She swallowed. "I'd like to give it to him myself. On his ship. If I'm allowed."

My father looked at her for a long moment over his coffee.

"You're allowed," he said. "Garrick's going this afternoon. He's to tell Tamar about the Council." He paused. "Would you like company?"

"Garrick's company," said Iselle.

"And mine," said Roderic, before anyone could stop him.

Iselle looked at him sideways. Roderic went slowly pink, starting at the collar.

"If that's all right," he added. "I mean. If you'd like. You can say no."

Iselle studied him for a long moment with that face of hers, the one that doesn't do anything. I've learned since that it isn't that it doesn't do anything. It's that it does everything very quietly, so that you have to watch closely to see it.

I watched. I saw it.

"Yes," she said. "I'd like that."

Roderic didn't say anything for the rest of breakfast. He didn't need to. He ate four pieces of toast without noticing he was eating them, and Helena, at the stove, didn't say anything either, but she put a fifth on his plate.

* * *

Westmere in late autumn is gray and wild and beautiful. The wind comes in off the open sea with nothing in its way for a thousand miles, and the gulls ride it, and the fishing boats come home early with their sails reefed, and the whole bay is white-capped from the harbor wall to the edge of the world.

Except for the three black ships. Inside the mole, a stone's throw from the north pier, riding at anchor on water that was perfectly, unnaturally flat.

I'd told Tamar everything in the harbor office, with the door shut, while Iselle and Roderic waited on the wall outside. Teo. The brand. Kessavel. Aurelia breaking the oath in the gate. The Council's vote. Caitlin's drawing of the mark, which he looked at for a long time and then pinned to the wall above his desk, beside Father's old rule and his own new one. Nobody speaks to the ships.

"Hobb," he said, when I'd finished. Very quietly. "Do you think...?"

"I don't know," I said. "I'm sorry. I don't know."

He nodded. He didn't say anything else. Hobb Kitto had been gone for more than three weeks by then. Mother Kitto still sat on her herring barrel at the top of Rope Street every evening, looking down at the harbor. Tamar went up and sat with her sometimes. He didn't tell me that. Dunmore did.

Then he put on his steward's coat and rowed the three of us out to the near ship himself.

* * *

Severin was waiting at the rail.

He looked older. That was the first thing I noticed. It had been three weeks since I'd seen him in the stern of the boat with Hobb's coat in his hands, and he looked as though it had been three years. The lean face was thinner. The gray at his temples had spread. He still wore the long gray coat, and the black gloves, and the dark-gold ring with the closed hand on it outside the glove. But he held himself differently. Like a man who has been carrying something heavy for a long time, and has only just noticed how heavy it is.

He saw Iselle in the boat, and something went across his face that I'd never seen there before.

"Iselle," he said.

She stood up in the boat, carefully, with Roderic's hand under her elbow, and held up the folded letter.

"For my mother," she said. "If you'll still carry it."

Severin looked at the letter. Then at her. Then, for the first time since I'd known him, he did something he hadn't planned.

He took off his gloves.

Both of them. He pulled them off finger by finger and put them in the pocket of his gray coat, and then he leaned down over the rail with his bare hands, and took the letter from her, very carefully, the way you'd take something that might break.

"I'll carry it," he said. "Exactly as given. As always." He held it against his chest. "Iselle. May I say something to you? You can say no."

Iselle went very still in the boat.

I watched her decide. It took a long time. Roderic's hand stayed under her elbow the whole time, not holding, just there.

"Yes," she said.

Severin looked down at her from the rail of the black ship, with the gray sky behind him and the letter held against his coat.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Nobody in the boat moved.

"I'm sorry for the river," said Severin. "I'm sorry for the golden city, and the rooms with no windows, and the tutors who were never allowed to answer your questions. I'm sorry I came to your mother's house when you were twelve and took you away from her loom. I'm sorry I sent you to the river at the mill to be asked, the first time, so that he'd know you'd say no, and could ask the second time." His voice didn't shake. It was very steady and very quiet, the way it always is. But his bare hands, on the letter, weren't. "I told your brother it was what I was for. Carrying things. Exactly as given. I told myself it was all I was." He looked at her. "It wasn't all I was. It was only all I let myself be. And you paid for it."

Iselle didn't say anything. She stood very straight in the rocking boat with her new blue scarf blowing in the wind off the sea.

"You don't have to forgive me," said Severin. "I'm not asking you to. I just wanted you to hear it. From me. Before..." He stopped. He looked away, out across the flat black water toward the middle ship, and the tall gray figure on its bow. "Before."

"Before what?" I said.

Severin didn't answer me. He looked back down at Iselle.

"Your mother is well," he said. "She sings at the loom. I've heard her." He paused. "I hope she has your letter by midwinter."

And then he put his bare hand flat on the rail of the ship, the way you'd put your hand on a friend's shoulder, and turned, and walked away across the deck toward his little gray awning, and didn't look back.

* * *

We stayed the night at Westmere. Tamar asked us to. He didn't say why. He didn't have to. I'd seen his face when Severin said before.

Tamar's house is at the top of the town, behind the Hold, with a long window over the harbor. His wife gave us supper. Edric came up from the wall with a fish he'd actually caught, for once, and was so astonished about it that he told the story four times. Iselle laughed at the third telling. Roderic laughed at all four, but mostly, I think, because Iselle had.

Afterward, the two of them went and sat in the window seat and looked out at the harbor in the dark. I sat at the table with Tamar and Edric and pretended to listen to the fish story a fifth time.

I wasn't listening to the fish story.

"You're cold," Roderic said. Quietly. To Iselle. I don't think he knew I could hear.

"A little."

He didn't do anything. That was the thing. A month ago, Roderic would have leapt up and fetched every blanket in the house and his own coat and a cup of something hot and a footstool, all at once, and dropped half of it. He didn't move.

"Would you like my coat?" he said.

Iselle turned her head and looked at him.

"Yes," she said. "Thank you."

He took it off and put it around her shoulders, over the blue scarf, and then he sat back down on his own side of the window seat and didn't do anything else. And Iselle pulled his coat closer around herself, and looked back out of the window at the harbor, and after a while, so slowly I almost didn't see it, she let her shoulder lean against his.

He didn't move for an hour. I don't think he breathed.

Edric caught my eye across the table, over his fish. He didn't say anything. He just raised his eyebrows, very slightly, and went back to his story.

* * *

I woke before dawn, in the little room under Tamar's roof, because the Hold had stopped humming.

I'd stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat. Westmere Hold has hummed in the stones under the town since before anyone can remember. Low, steady, warm, like a cat that has decided to tolerate you. Since the black ships came, it had hummed the other way, the way a cat hums when there's a dog in the yard. But it had never once stopped.

It had stopped.

I lay in the dark and listened to the silence, and then I got up and went to the window.

The harbor was gray. Not black, the way water is at night. Gray, the first faint gray before dawn, when the sky over the sea starts to come apart from the water. The mole curved out into the bay and back again, a long dark arm. The north pier ran out from the town, with the lanterns of Tamar's double watch still burning at the end of it. The fishing boats rocked at their moorings. Everything was exactly where it should be.

Except that inside the mole, a stone's throw from the north pier, where for nearly three months there had been three long low black ships riding at anchor on water as flat as glass, there was nothing.

Nothing at all. Just the harbor. Gray water, moving the way water is supposed to move, slapping against the pilings of the pier, lifting the fishing boats and letting them down again.

They were gone.

* * *

By the time I got down to the harbor wall, half the town was there.

Nobody had seen them go. Nobody had heard them. Tamar's double watch had been on the north pier all night, six men with lanterns and cudgels, and not one of them had looked away from the ships for more than a heartbeat. Dunmore swore it on his mother. Every one of them swore it. One moment the three black ships had been there, black against the black water, with the tall gray figure on the bow of the middle one. And then a sea-mist had come in, very thin, just before dawn, the kind that comes in on autumn mornings off the open sea and is gone again in the time it takes to boil a kettle.

And when the mist lifted, the ships were gone.

"Draum," said Tamar. He was standing on the wall beside me, in his shirt, without his coat, with his watch book open in his hand and nothing written in it. "Aurelia told the Council. The god who holds the water flat under the fleet. He could take them out on a tide nobody else could feel."

"Or the Lockwarden," said Edric, beside him. "Opening a door in the sea."

"Or both," I said.

We stood on the wall and looked at the empty water for a long time. The Hold under our feet was silent. Not angry. Not humming the dog-in-the-yard hum. Just silent, the way a cat goes silent after the dog has gone over the fence, and it isn't quite sure yet whether it's coming back.

Iselle was standing a little way along the wall, with Roderic's coat still around her shoulders. She hadn't said anything. She was looking at the place where the near ship had been. Where Severin's little gray awning had stood on the stern deck, with his chair and his book and his brass pot of bitter tea.

"He knew," she said, when I came and stood beside her. "Yesterday. When he said before. He knew they were going."

"I think so."

"He took my letter." She held the edges of Roderic's coat together at her throat. "He took off his gloves." She was quiet for a long moment. "He's never done that. In seven years. Not once."

I didn't say anything.

"He said he was sorry," said Iselle. Very quietly. As if she were trying the words out to see if they fit. "Nobody from the golden city has ever said that to me. Not once. Not about anything." She looked out at the gray water. "I don't know what to do with it."

"You don't have to do anything with it," I said. "You can just keep it. Until you know."

She looked at me sideways.

"That's what Roderic said," she said. "Last night. In the window." Something moved at the corner of her mouth. "He said, you don't have to know what you want yet. You can just keep it until you do." She pulled the coat a little tighter. "I think he got it from you."

"He got it from Helena," I said. "Everybody gets everything from Helena, eventually."

* * *

It was Dunmore who saw the boat.

He shouted from the end of the north pier, an old man's cracked roar that carried all the way along the harbor wall over the noise of the gulls and the wind. We all turned. He was pointing out past the end of the pier, into the gray water of the harbor where the ships had been.

There was a boat there.

A small one. A ship's dinghy, black-tarred, with no mast and no sail and nobody at the oars. Drifting very slowly in on the morning tide, turning a little as it came, the way an empty boat turns.

Except it wasn't empty.

Tamar was already running. So was I. So was half the town, down the wall and out along the tarred boards of the north pier, with Dunmore at the end of it already up to his knees in the shallows by the pilings, reaching. He caught the dinghy's bow line as it came in, and hauled, and the little boat bumped gently against the pier, and we all looked down into it.

There was a man asleep in the bottom of it.

A big man. A very big man, with shoulders like a door and hands like shovels, curled up on his side in the bottom of the little black boat with his knees drawn up, the way children sleep. He was wearing a long gray coat. Much too long for him, even for him. It came down past his boots and was buttoned all the way to the throat, and the sleeves came down over his enormous hands.

He had a sailor's cap on his head. A knitted one, black, pulled down over his ears.

Nobody said anything.

Then Dunmore made a sound I've never heard a man make before, and went down into the boat on his old knees, and took the sleeping man by the shoulders and shook him.

"Hobb," he said. "Hobb. Hobb, lad. Hobb."

Hobb Kitto opened his eyes.

He looked up at Dunmore. Then past him, at the half of Westmere crowded along the pier above, staring down. Then at the gray morning sky, with the gulls wheeling in it.

"Oh," he said. "Morning, Dunmore."

* * *

He was all right. That was the first thing, and the most important, and nobody could quite believe it. He was thinner. He was very tired. He'd lost the gloves he'd never had in the first place, and the long gray coat smelled of salt and tar and something like iron. But he was all right. He wasn't hurt. He wasn't branded. Aurelia came through the Westmere gate within the hour, because Tamar sent for her, and put her hands on him and looked at him for a long time and then sat back on her heels and smiled.

"He's well," she said. "He's just Hobb."

"I've always been just Hobb," said Hobb, puzzled.

They took him up Rope Street to the narrow house with the blue door and the herring barrels outside it. Mother Kitto was sitting on her barrel. She'd been sitting on it, Tamar told me later, every morning and every evening for twenty-four days. She saw him coming up the hill in the middle of half the town, in his long gray coat and a black sailor's cap, and she didn't get up. She didn't move at all. She just sat there on her barrel with her hands in her lap and watched him come all the way up the street until he was standing in front of her.

"You're late," she said.

"Sorry, Ma."

She stood up then. She stood up and put both her hands on either side of his big face and pulled it down to hers, and held it, and didn't say anything at all for a long time. And half the town stood in the street and looked anywhere else, and the gulls went around and around overhead, and the wind came up off the sea.

* * *

He told it in Mother Kitto's kitchen, later, with a bowl of soup in front of him that he kept forgetting to eat. He told it the way he tells everything. Slowly, cheerfully, out of order, with a great deal of explaining about things that didn't matter and none at all about things that did.

He'd rowed out, that night, with his old brown coat. He'd stood up in the little boat under the bow of the middle ship, and looked up at the tall gray figure standing there in the dark, and said, Evening. You must be cold up there. I've brought you a coat.

And the man on the bow had looked down at him.

"He asked me what I wanted," said Hobb. "That's what he does, I think. You ask him something, and he asks you something back. Only he asked it so kind. Like nobody'd ever asked him to ask before." He frowned at his soup. "And I said I didn't want anything. Just to know he wasn't cold. And he said..." Hobb stopped. "He said nobody had ever said that to him. In all the long time. He said everybody who'd ever asked him anything wanted a door opened." He looked up. "And then he asked if I'd stay a while. Just to talk. Because he hadn't talked to anyone who didn't want anything in a very long time."

"And you said yes," said Tamar quietly.

"Well, of course I did." Hobb looked surprised. "He was lonely. You could see it a mile off. You don't leave a man like that on his own." He took a spoonful of soup, finally. "He took me down below. Nice little cabin. Lamp. Bunk. Food twice a day, not bad, bit heavy on the pickled fish. And every evening he'd come down and sit on the end of the bunk and say evening, and I'd say evening, and we'd talk. About nothing much. Gulls. My mum's herring. What the sea's like in the winter. He didn't know much about anything ordinary. He'd never had a mum. He didn't know what herring tasted like." Hobb shook his head. "Twenty-four nights."

"Did he let you leave?" I said. "If you'd asked?"

Hobb thought about it.

"I didn't ask," he said slowly. "I should have, shouldn't I? Ma'd have been worried." He looked at his mother, standing at the stove with her back to him. "Sorry, Ma." He turned back to me. "But I don't think he'd have known how to say yes. I think he'd forgotten. I think..." He frowned. "I think nobody'd ever asked him for anything back. Just took. Opened. So he didn't know what to do when someone wanted to stay."

"And last night?"

"Last night he came down like always," said Hobb. "And sat on the end of the bunk. And said evening. And then he said, They're taking the ships home. You can't come. You have to go home now." Hobb's big face went soft. "And then he gave me his coat. This one. Said it was fair, since I'd given him mine, and he'd had to give mine back. And a cap, for the cold." He touched the black cap, still on his head. "And he put me in the little boat, and he said, Thank you for asking if I was cold. Nobody ever has. And then I fell asleep." He picked up his spoon again. "And then Dunmore was shaking me."

Nobody said anything in the little kitchen for a long time.

"He let you go," said Tamar at last.

"Course he did," said Hobb, with his mouth full. "He's not a bad man. He's just lonely."

* * *

He remembered one more thing on my way out.

I was at the blue door, with Iselle and Roderic behind me on the step, when Hobb called down the hall after me, with his soup in his hand.

"Prince Garrick! I nearly forgot. He said to tell the steward. When they were going." He frowned, getting it right. "He said, We've left something in the harbor. For listening. He said the steward should know. In case it was rude not to say."

I went back down Rope Street to the harbor very fast.

And when I got to the end of the north pier, where the middle ship had been, I didn't need anyone to tell me where to look.

I've kept a great many gods' gifts in my life. Most of them I never think about. But I kept a little of Damar's, when I was a baby, when he walked the hills above Greykeep for a year listening to the stone. And standing on the end of that pier, with my hand flat on the wet tarred piling, I could hear it.

Down in the dark water. Under the place where the middle ship had ridden at anchor for three months. Sunk in the mud at the bottom of Westmere harbor.

A stone.

Not a stone from our hills. Not a stone from anywhere I knew. Black, and smooth, and round as an egg, and about the size of a man's head. And humming. Low and steady, the way the Hold used to hum, before it went silent. As if it had taken the Hold's place. As if it were listening to the whole harbor, and the whole town, and every boat and every voice and every footstep on every pier.

And far under the humming, so faint I could barely feel it through the wood, a direction. A pull. Like the needle of a compass.

Pointing west.