Chapter 48: Faelan and Mirelle

Adriana asked me on the stairs.

She asked properly, the way she always does, even with me, even at seven in the morning with her riding gloves already on and her hair pinned up for the gate. She and Mother were going to Lyradon for the day. Queen Mirelle was planting the last of the upper terraces before the frost, one tree for every family that hadn't come home from the war, and she'd asked her daughter to come and hold the lantern for the last row, the way she'd held it for the first.

"It'll be dark before we're back," said Adriana. "Helena has the kitchen. Roderic's at the college with Iselle. Caitlin's at the college with her books. Elenos has gone to Aurelia for the day, which he does, and doesn't explain, and I've stopped asking." She looked at me. "Faelan and Mirelle. From now until bedtime. Will you? You can say no."

"Where's Seraphina?" I said, which wasn't an answer, and Adriana raised one eyebrow by a very small amount, which in Adriana means a great deal.

"Concordia," she said. "With her sister. And your son. Io wants Thora to sleep for a week and has decided the only way to make her is to give her a baby to hold." She waited. "Garrick."

"Yes," I said. "Of course. Yes."

"Thank you." She pulled her other glove on. Then she paused, halfway down the stair, and looked back up at me.

"Faelan will want to interview you," she said. "Let him. And Mirelle will want to go to the map room. Let her do that too. And if either of them asks you a question you don't know the answer to," she said, "tell them so. They're both very good at knowing when you're making it up."

* * *

I should say who they are, my half-brother and half-sister, because I've written a great deal about other people's children in these pages and not very much about the two who live in the same house.

Faelan is ten. He has his mother's dark hair and his grandfather Roderic's chin, the same as his big brother, and a pair of enormous serious gray eyes that he turns on whatever he's looking at as though it has just said something remarkable. He's named for the river god who held the bridge, and for Ansel, who asked him his name when he was a day old and waited for an answer. He likes frogs, and beetles, and arguing with Elenos about frogs and beetles. And he likes gods.

Not the way everyone in Greykeep likes gods, the way you like the weather. Faelan collects them.

Mirelle is seven. She has red-brown hair that won't stay in its ribbons and a gap where her front tooth used to be, and she carries two names she takes very seriously: her grandmother's, the old queen who plants a tree for every family, and Hollis's, the old woman who lit the lamp at the edge of Varrick's wall. Every year, on the anniversary of the door, she goes down to the lower corridor under the infirmary with a taper and lights forty-three lamps, one for every hundred dead. This year she filled the corridor with smoke doing it, and burned her brother's hand, and nobody has ever once told her she shouldn't have. There's a lamp that burns down there all the time now.

She likes lamps. And roads. And anything at all that shows you which way to go.

They were waiting for me at the bottom of the east stair when I came down, side by side, already dressed, already fed, very obviously having been told to wait and very obviously not enjoying it.

Faelan was holding a book.

"Good morning," he said. "May I interview you?"

* * *

The book was a ledger. An old one, from Mary's cupboard, bound in green cloth with the corners worn through, and the first forty pages were somebody's accounts for the castle laundry in the year after the war, which Faelan had very carefully crossed out with a single line on each page, the way Mary does, so you can still read what was there.

After that, it was gods.

One to a page. Each page headed with a name, in Faelan's careful, enormous ten-year-old capitals. Under each name, the same three questions, in the same order, and the answers underneath in his own hand, word for word, the way the god had said them.

WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

WHAT DO YOU DO?

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING?

I turned the pages while he watched me, holding his breath.

BRANNOC. I hold the line. Standing still.

CORRA. I bring the autumn. The first cold morning, when you can see your breath and you don't mind.

THOR. Lightning and thunder and hitting things that deserve it. MY LITTLE SPARK (underlined three times) and also beer.

DAMAR. Stone. Finding things in it. When I ask a seam of gold where it's going and it tells me.

AURETHAR. (He stared at me.) (Then he said:) Sheep. Burned on the outside.

LOKI. Everything. Nothing. Being underestimated. (He said I had to write that last one down exactly.)

There were sixty-one pages of them. Some of them I didn't even know. A little god of a bend in the river below Havenreach, who Faelan had found by sitting on the bank for three days and asking the water every hour. A god of lost buttons, who'd turned out to live in the back of the laundry cupboard and whose favorite thing was being found, actually, for once.

The sixty-second page said MOTH, and under it, in a slightly different ink, as if he'd come back to it several times:

WHAT IS YOUR NAME? Moth. (Carol named it. It said yes.)

WHAT DO YOU DO? (It didn't say. It flew around my head three times.)

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING? (It landed on my nose. I think it means being looked at.)

I looked up. Faelan was watching me with his enormous gray eyes.

"That's a good answer," I said.

"I think so too." He took the book back and turned to the next page. It was blank, except for the heading, which he'd already written.

GARRICK.

"You're a god," he said. "Everyone says so. Aurelia says you're every god in the room. So you have to be in the book." He uncapped a pen. "What is your name?"

"You know my name."

"I have to ask," said Faelan seriously. "It's the rule. Rysa says. If you don't ask, it doesn't count."

So I told him my name. Garrick Grey. He wrote it down, slowly, in his enormous capitals.

"What do you do?"

I opened my mouth, and then shut it again.

Because what do I do? I fold, but that's Seraphina's first. I hold frost, but that's my father's. Everything I can do, somebody else could do first. It's never bothered me before. It bothered me a little, sitting on the bottom stair with my half-brother's pen hovering over his ledger.

"I borrow," I said at last. "I'm near people, and I keep a little of what they are. And when I need it, I ask if I can use it. And mostly they say yes."

Faelan wrote that down. I BORROW. Then he looked at it for a long time.

"That's like a library," he said.

"I suppose it is."

"Libraries are good," said Faelan firmly, and wrote it underneath: (Like a library. Libraries are good.) Then he looked up again. "What's your favorite thing?"

I thought about it.

"Being asked first," I said.

Faelan looked at me. Then he bent over the page and wrote it down, very carefully, and underlined it, and then, after a moment's thought, he drew a small lopsided horse in the corner, with a chipped ear.

"That's you," he said. "Like Grandpa's horse. Carol said."

* * *

Mirelle had been standing on the step above us through all of this with her arms folded and her chin up, waiting with tremendous patience and making sure everyone knew it.

"Now," she said, when Faelan finally closed the book. "Map room."

The map room is at the top of the old west tower. A hundred and twelve steps. Mirelle went up them two at a time, with her ribbons coming out, and was at the top by the time Faelan and I were at the sixtieth, and was standing in the middle of the floor when we came in, turning slowly around with her arms out, the way some children stand in the first snow.

The whole floor is maps. Every road on the continent of Avarra is painted on that stone, and the Castellan keeps it current: new roads in black, old ones crossed out in red. And west of Westmere, where the floor used to be bare gray stone with nothing on it at all, there's Severin's silk map now, trimmed to fit and laid down flat, sitting a hand's width north of where it ought to be, as if the two maps didn't entirely agree about where we were.

Mirelle had been up here eleven times since the Castellan put it down. Mary has it written in her book. She went straight to the edge of it and knelt down, and put her nose almost on the silk.

"Look," she said, without looking up. "Garrick. Look at the roads."

* * *

I knelt down beside her.

I'd looked at that map a hundred times. Iselle had walked out onto it one evening and stood on the place where her mother's house would be, and after a while Roderic had gone out and stood next to her. But I'd never put my nose on it.

Up close, the silk was beautiful. It was woven, not painted. Every road was a thread. Gray for the small ones, gold for the great ones, and they ran across the cream-colored silk the way veins run across the back of a hand. Rivers in blue. Mountains in brown knots. And in the middle of the great western bay, a little gold city, no bigger than my thumbnail, worked in so many tiny stitches that it shone.

"Look where they go," said Mirelle.

I looked.

Every road went to the city.

Every one. From the high plateaus, from the salt marshes, from every little town and crossroads woven into that silk. They bent and joined and doubled back, and in the end every single one of them came down into the great western bay, and into the little gold city, and stopped.

"There aren't any roads that go out," said Mirelle.

She said it the way you'd point out that a cat has five legs.

"Look. They all go in. Like water down a drain. That one goes in, and that one, and that one." She ran her finger along the threads without quite touching the silk, one after another, all the way down to the bay. "Roads are supposed to go both ways. That's what roads are for. You go to the city, and then you come home. But you couldn't come home from there. Not on these. There's no road back."

Faelan had knelt down on her other side. He was frowning at the silk with his enormous gray eyes.

"Like a room with no doors," he said.

I looked at him sharply. He hadn't been in the Council Hall. But there's no keeping anything from children in Greykeep, and certainly not from Faelan, who sits on the bottom stair and listens to everything.

"Yes," I said. "Like that."

"Except," said Mirelle.

She'd gone very still. She'd put her nose so close to the silk that her breath was moving the threads, and her finger was pointing, very carefully, at something on the far left-hand edge of the city. Not on the bay side. On the coast side. Where the gold stitches of the city stopped and the cream of the silk began.

"Except that one," she said.

I bent down until my cheek was nearly on the floor.

It was a thread. Just one. So fine it was hardly there. Not gold, and not gray, but a very pale silver-blue, almost the same color as the silk around it, so that you'd never have seen it standing up. You'd never have seen it kneeling. You'd have had to be seven, with your nose on the floor, and in love with roads.

It came out of the little gold city on the west side. It went out. Away from the bay. Along the coast, north, in a long faint wandering line, past two little river mouths and a headland, and ended, a good hand's length away, at a tiny harbor right on the very edge of the silk. And at the end of it, so small it was hardly more than a knot, there was one single stitch of yellow.

"That's a lamp," said Mirelle.

"How do you know?"

She looked up at me as if I'd asked how she knew the sky was up.

"Because that's what you put at the end of a road," she said. "When somebody's waiting. You put a lamp. Like Hollis did. Like Grandmother did on the terraces. Like I did in the corridor." She looked back down at the tiny yellow stitch. "Somebody put a road out. Just one. And a lamp at the end of it. And they made it the same color as the silk so nobody'd see it."

"Except you," said Faelan.

"Except me," said Mirelle, with enormous satisfaction.

* * *

The Castellan came when I called it. It always does. It came up the hundred and twelve steps of the west tower with a sound like a slow bell, and stood in the doorway of the map room, and bent its great iron head, and looked where Mirelle was pointing.

It looked for a very long time.

"I did not see that," it said at last.

I'd never heard it say that before. Not once. Not in twenty-three years.

"I laid this map on my floor," it said slowly. "I trimmed its edges. I have walked across it every morning for twelve weeks. I did not see that road." It turned its head and looked at Mirelle. "Princess Mirelle Hollis Grey. Seven years of age. You saw it."

"I like roads," said Mirelle.

"Yes," said the Castellan. "I know." It bent down further. One great iron finger came down, very slowly, and stopped a hair's breadth above the tiny yellow stitch at the end of the silver-blue thread. "This map was given for the floor. I told the King, when I laid it, that I thought it was the map its giver wished us to have." It paused. "I did not understand, then, what I meant."

"Severin made it," I said. "Or had it made."

"Envoy Severin Dask brought it," said the Castellan. "In his own hands. He did not give it to a servant to carry. I remember." It straightened up. "He also said, when he gave it, that it was a good map. I wrote that down. I did not know why he wished us to know it was good." It looked down at the silk. "Now I think I do."

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Someone should tell Father," said Faelan.

"Someone will," I said. "Tonight. When he's back from Concordia. He went through at noon."

"Can I tell him?" said Mirelle.

"It's your road," I said. "Of course you can."

She sat back on her heels with her ribbons hanging down over her ears and her nose red from the cold stone floor, and smiled at me with the gap where her front tooth should have been, the widest smile I've ever seen on anyone.

* * *

We had lunch in the little kitchen. Helena made the children eat their crusts and made me eat mine, and asked what we'd done all morning, and Mirelle told her about the road, all of it, three times, with her mouth full, and Helena listened to all three times as if it were the first.

Then Faelan interviewed Helena.

I'd never thought of Helena as being someone you'd put in a book of gods. Neither had Helena. She stood at the stove with a wooden spoon in her hand and looked at him down her nose for a long moment.

"I'm not a god, Faelan," she said.

"I know," said Faelan. "But I'm putting you in anyway. In the back. There's a section." He showed her. At the very back of the ledger, after a great many blank pages, there was a new heading in his enormous capitals: PEOPLE WHO ARE NEARLY. Under it, so far, there were three names. GRANDPA. MARY. THE CASTELLAN (it doesn't know if it is one. Nobody has asked it. I am going to.)

Helena looked at the page for a long time. Then she put down her wooden spoon.

"Go on, then," she said.

"What is your name?"

"Helena Valewood."

"What do you do?"

Helena thought about it.

"I put the kettle on," she said.

Faelan wrote it down without a flicker. I PUT THE KETTLE ON.

"What's your favorite thing?"

Helena looked around her kitchen. At the scrubbed table with the scars on it from twenty years of children. At the window, and the pear tree, and the blackbird on the garden wall. At the heavy blue teapot, and the bread cooling on the rack, and Mirelle with crumbs on her chin, and me.

"When you all come down," she said. "In the morning. One after another. And I can tell from the sound on the stairs how everyone slept."

Faelan wrote that down too. It took him a long time. When he'd finished, he looked at it, and then at her, and then he got up off the bench and went around the table and put his arms around her waist, very briefly, with his face in her apron, and then let go and went back to his place and picked up his pen as if nothing had happened.

Helena picked up her wooden spoon. She turned back to the stove. She didn't say anything.

But the bread that night, Seraphina said afterward, was the best bread she had ever eaten in her life.

* * *

In the afternoon, Faelan interviewed the Castellan.

He'd been working up to it all day. In the end he went down to the lower hall a little after four, with the green ledger under his arm and Mirelle and me behind him, and stood in front of the Castellan where it stands by the Lyradon arch, and looked up. And up. And up.

"May I interview you?" he said. "You can say no."

The Castellan looked down at him for a long moment.

"No one has asked me that," it said. "Yes."

Faelan uncapped his pen.

"What is your name?"

"Castellan," said the Castellan. Then it paused, which it almost never does. "That is what I do. Not who I am. I do not know if there is a difference. I have not been asked before."

Faelan wrote it all down. Every word.

"What do you do?"

"I keep," said the Castellan. "The gates. The ledgers. The map. The names. Who has come in. Who has gone out. Who has not yet come home." It turned its iron head, very slightly, toward the Westmere arch at the far end of the hall. "Hobb Kitto. Twenty-four nights. I kept his name in the ledger with a mark beside it until he came back. Then I took the mark away."

Faelan wrote that down too. Then he looked up, and asked the question I'd been waiting for him to ask all day.

"Are you a god?"

The lower hall was very quiet. The high lamps hummed at each end of the vault. Mirelle, beside me, had stopped fidgeting.

The Castellan was silent for so long that I began to think it wasn't going to answer.

"I do not know," it said at last. "I was made. Gods are not made. But I was made a very long time ago, and I have kept this house for a very long time, and in that time a great many people have thanked me. Every child who has been stopped at a gate and then let through. Every steward. Every midwife." It paused. "I do not know what thanks does, when it is given to something for a long time. Aurelia would know. I have not asked her."

"You could," said Faelan.

"Yes," said the Castellan. "I could." It seemed to think about that. "I think I would like to know."

Faelan wrote, in his enormous careful capitals: I DO NOT KNOW. I THINK I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW. Then, underneath, in smaller letters: (Ask Aurelia.)

"Last one," he said. "What's your favorite thing?"

That one, the Castellan answered at once.

"When someone comes through a gate," it said, "and I know them. Before they say their name. When I know who they are, and they know that I know." It turned its head and looked down at Faelan, and then at Mirelle, and then at me. "Prince Faelan Ansel Grey. Princess Mirelle Hollis Grey. Prince Garrick Grey. I know you."

Faelan closed the ledger. He held it against his chest for a moment. Then he moved the Castellan's page, very carefully, from the back section into the front, among the gods, between Brannoc and Corra.

"I'm not sure that's right," I said.

"It's my book," said Faelan.

* * *

We went to the lamp at dusk, because Mirelle wanted to.

It burns at the bottom of a short flight of steps off the lower corridor, under the infirmary, in the place where the door used to be. Varrick's door. The one my father and Adriana and Aurelia and the rest refused together at the end of the war, when I was three. Now there's nothing there but a plain stone wall, and a little iron bracket, and a lamp. Mirelle tends it. Nobody asked her to. She checks the oil every evening and trims the wick, and if she's ill, Faelan does it.

She checked the oil. She trimmed the wick with a little pair of silver scissors she keeps on a ribbon around her neck for nothing else. The flame went up, clear and steady, and lit the stone wall gold.

Then she stood back, and folded her hands, and said, very quietly, "Good evening."

Faelan, beside her, had gone very still. He was holding his ledger against his chest with both arms.

"Who's she talking to?" I whispered.

"The Keeper of Roads," whispered Faelan. "She comes here sometimes. Elenos hears her. Mirelle doesn't, but she says good evening anyway, in case." He swallowed. "She's the only god I haven't got. In the book. Because she never says anything to me."

And then, very faintly, so faintly that afterward I wasn't sure I hadn't imagined it, I heard footsteps.

Not on the stair. Not in the corridor. Somewhere just beyond the stone wall, where the door used to be. Slow, soft footsteps, the way someone walks on a long road at the end of a long day. They came closer, and stopped. And the flame of Mirelle's lamp leaned, very slightly, toward the wall, the way a candle leans toward an open door.

I didn't say anything. Neither did Faelan. Neither did Mirelle, who couldn't hear it, but who had seen the flame lean and had gone pink with joy to the roots of her red-brown hair.

Faelan opened his ledger. His hands were shaking. He turned to the first blank page and, without being told, without being asked, wrote the heading in his enormous capitals.

THE KEEPER OF ROADS.

Then he looked up at the wall.

"May I interview you?" he said, in a very small voice. "You can say no."

The flame stood quite still.

Then, very faint, from somewhere beyond the stone, so soft it might have been the air moving in the old cellars, a woman's voice. Tired, and kind, and a long way off. I've never heard anything like it before or since.

Name. Want. Permission.

That's very good, Faelan.

Ask.

He asked. I won't write down what she said. It's in the book. It's the only page in the book that Faelan doesn't show anybody, and I promised him, when he showed me, that I'd never tell. But I'll say this much. He asked her the third question last, the way he always does. What is your favorite thing? And she answered without any pause at all.

And when Faelan had written it down, he turned and looked at his little sister, standing beside her lamp with her silver scissors on their ribbon and her hands still folded, and his face did something I'd never seen it do before.

"Mirelle," he said. "She says it's you."

* * *

My father came home from Concordia at nine, and Adriana and Mother from Lyradon at a quarter to ten, smelling of cold earth and lantern smoke, with mud to their knees.

They found us in the little kitchen. I was in Helena's chair by the stove, which nobody is allowed to sit in, which Helena had put me in herself before she went up to bed. Faelan was asleep against my left side with the green ledger still clutched to his chest. Mirelle was asleep on my lap, with her silver scissors in her fist and her ribbons entirely gone.

Adriana stood in the doorway and looked at us for a long moment. Then she came across the kitchen in her muddy boots and knelt down beside the chair, and looked at her two children asleep on me, and then at me.

"Well?" she said quietly.

"Faelan has sixty-five gods now," I said. "Mirelle found a road out of the golden city."

Adriana looked at me.

"I beg your pardon?"

So I told her. And my father, in the doorway behind her, with his coat still on and his hair still standing up from the lightning, listened to every word. When I got to the silver-blue thread, and the tiny harbor, and the single yellow stitch, his face changed.

"Show me," he said.

"In the morning," I said. "She wants to tell you herself. She made me promise."

My father looked at his youngest daughter, asleep on my knees, with her mouth open and her scissors in her fist and soot, somehow, on her nose again.

"Seven," he said, very softly. "Seven years old."

"And a half," said Mirelle, without opening her eyes.