Chapter 55: The Gardener

Helena told everyone.

I found out afterward exactly how. She'd come down at four, the way she always does, and put the kettle on, and made the bread, and the two extra loaves. Then, at a quarter to six, before anybody else was up, she'd gone around the whole castle in her apron with a candle, knocking on doors. Every door. My father's and Mother's and Adriana's. Carol's, a hundred and forty steps up. Mary's. Aurelia's little room off the chapel. The gatehouse, where Brannoc and Corra were sleeping. She'd even sent one of the kitchen boys through the Concordia gate with a note for Thor, folded small, which the Castellan logged as Message. Helena Valewood. To the Lady Thor. Urgent, but quietly.

Every note said the same thing. Mary kept hers. She showed it to me later, in Helena's small, upright, kitchen-list hand.

There is a frightened person in my garden. He has been eating my bread for three weeks. I am going to take him a cup of tea at a quarter past nine. Come down to the garden after that, one at a time, and do NOT crowd him. Wear something warm. H.V.

Then she'd gone back to the kitchen and made the porridge as if nothing had happened.

Elenos and I were the only two people in Greykeep who didn't get a note. Elenos, because he'd told her. And me, because Helena said afterward that she knew perfectly well where I'd be at a quarter past nine, and it was on the wall beside my brother.

* * *

She walked across the frozen garden with her tray, between the cabbages and the bare raspberry canes, not fast, not slow, and stopped about six feet from the man in the brown cap, at the end of the leek bed.

He'd seen her coming. Of course he had. He'd gone completely still on his sack, with the trowel in one hand and an onion set in the other, the way a hare goes still in a field when the dog's shadow crosses it. He didn't look up at her. He looked at the onion.

Helena didn't come any closer. She set the tray down on the upturned wheelbarrow at the end of the bed, very carefully, so the cups didn't rattle. Then she stood with her hands folded over her apron.

"My name is Helena Valewood," she said.

Her voice carried in the cold still air. I could hear every word from the wall. So could Elenos, who'd gone so still beside me that I couldn't hear him breathe.

"I keep the kitchen in this house," said Helena. "I've kept it for twenty years. You've been eating my bread for three weeks. Tobias brings it down in his dinner pail, and you've been taking the crusts he doesn't want and putting them in your pocket and eating them in the potting shed at night." She paused. "They're not crusts. I've been cutting them thick on purpose since the second day."

The man in the brown cap didn't move. But I saw his hand, the one holding the onion, close very slowly.

"You've planted my onions upside down," said Helena. "Nine rows. Tobias will be very cross in the spring, and I'll let him be, because it'll do him good to be cross about something that isn't his knees." She looked at the leek bed. "And you've been watering my leeks with an empty can. And they've been the best-watered leeks in the kingdom."

Nothing.

"I've brought you a cup of tea," said Helena. "And some bread. Not crusts. Proper slices. With butter." She paused. "You can say no."

The man in the brown cap lifted his head.

He looked at her for the first time. At the small, straight woman in the apron with her hair pinned up and her hands folded, standing six feet away in the frost with a teapot on a wheelbarrow. He looked at her for a long, long time, with a face that I couldn't read at all from the wall. And then he looked at the tray.

"Why?" he said.

His voice was very low and very rough, as though he hadn't used it for a long time. It had long vowels in it, and soft consonants, the way Severin's had, the way Iselle's still does when she's tired. It was the first word I'd ever heard him say.

Helena considered the question.

"Because you're in my garden," she said. "And it's cold. And people in my garden get tea." She tilted her head, very slightly. "That's all. There isn't anything else. Nobody's going to ask you for anything you don't want to give."

The man stared at her.

"Everybody," he said slowly, "asks for something."

"I'm asking if you'd like a cup of tea," said Helena. "That's the whole question. There isn't another one hidden underneath it." She picked up the heavy blue teapot. "I'm going to pour it now. If you don't want it, you can leave it on the barrow, and I'll come back for the cup at noon. If you do, it's milk and one sugar, because that's how everyone in this house takes it until they tell me otherwise."

And she poured. Two cups. One for him and one for her. And then, instead of holding his cup out to him, she sat down on the end of the wheelbarrow, with her own cup in both hands, and looked out across the garden at the pear tree, and drank her tea, and didn't look at him at all.

* * *

It took him a long time. I don't know how long. Long enough for the sun to come all the way up over the east wall and lay a long gold stripe across the frozen beds. Long enough for Elenos, beside me, to start breathing again. Long enough for the blackbird to come back down off the garden wall and sit on the handle of the barrow, a foot from Helena's elbow, and look at the bread.

Then the man in the brown cap put down his trowel.

He put down the onion set. He got up off his sack, slowly, stiffly, the way you'd get up if you'd been kneeling on frozen ground for a long time and hadn't noticed. He took two steps toward the wheelbarrow. He stopped. He looked at Helena, who was looking at the pear tree. Then he took the last step, and reached out one thick hand, and picked up the cup.

He held it in both hands, the way she was holding hers, as if he'd learned it from watching her just then.

Steam came up off it, into the cold.

And then more steam. Much more than there should have been. It rose out of the cup in a long soft column and didn't thin out in the cold air the way steam does, but went on rising, gray and soft, past his face and his brown cap and up, and up, until it was higher than the pear tree, and spreading, very slowly, into a small low cloud. A single gray cloud, no bigger than a cart, hanging in the clear blue sky over Helena's kitchen garden all on its own.

The man in the brown cap looked up at it. His face went white.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean... I'm holding it, I'm holding it, I'm sorry..."

"Don't," said Helena.

She still wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the pear tree. But her voice had gone very gentle, the way it goes for children with fevers in the middle of the night.

"Don't hold it," she said. "Not in my garden. Nobody holds anything in my garden that doesn't want to be held. That's the only rule I have out here, apart from not walking on the seedlings." She took a sip of her tea. "If you want to rain, rain. The leeks won't mind. Neither will I."

The man in the brown cap stared at her.

And then, very slowly, the way you let out a breath you've held for so long you've forgotten you're holding it, something in his shoulders let go.

It rained.

Just on the garden. Just out of that one small gray cloud. A soft, warm, gentle rain, the kind you get in late spring in the hills, that smells of earth and grass and growing things. It came down on the frozen beds and the frost melted under it in long dark streaks. It came down on the bare raspberry canes and the cabbages and the nine rows of upside-down onions. It came down on Helena's pinned hair and her apron and the heavy blue teapot and the plate of bread, and she didn't move. It came down on the blackbird on the handle of the barrow, and the blackbird fluffed up its feathers and tipped its head back and opened its beak, and sang.

And the man in the brown cap stood in the middle of Helena's kitchen garden with a cup of tea in his hands and his face turned up to his own rain, and wept.

Beside me on the wall, I felt Elenos take hold of my sleeve.

"That's his sound," he whispered. "That's all of it. That's what he sounds like when he isn't holding his breath."

It sounded like rain on a roof at night, when you're warm in bed and you don't have to go anywhere in the morning.

* * *

They came one at a time, the way Helena had asked.

My father first, at about half past nine, in his old gray socks with the darned heel and his boots unlaced over them and his coat over his nightshirt, because he'd been up since the note came and had been standing at the top of the garden steps for twenty minutes trying to decide whether he counted as crowding. He came down the steps very slowly, with his hands open and empty at his sides, and stopped at the edge of the rain.

The man in the brown cap saw him and went rigid again. Not with fear this time. Something else. He stared at my father the way Mirelle had stared at the silk map, the way you'd stare at something you'd known existed all your life but never thought you'd see.

My father didn't come any closer. He crouched down, right there at the edge of the warm rain, in the wet, in his socks, the way he'd crouched in the snow in front of Oskar Bell. So that he was lower than the man, not higher.

"My name is Uriah Grey," he said. "This is my house. I'm the weather here. Storms, and winter." He paused. "You're welcome in it. As long as you like."

The man in the brown cap made a sound. I couldn't tell what kind.

"You know what I am," he said.

"I felt you come over the hills about three weeks ago," said my father. "I felt it the way you feel a change in the air before a front comes in. I thought it was the season turning." He shook his head slowly. "I should have known. I'm sorry. I should have come and found you myself."

"You'd have taken me back," said the man. His voice cracked. "That's what storms do, when they find another storm. They take it in. Make it bigger. Make it theirs."

"Not here," said my father simply. "Not in this house. Not ever." He looked up at the small gray cloud, raining softly on Helena's cabbages. "That's yours. I wouldn't touch it if you asked me to. Not without asking you back."

* * *

Thor came through the Concordia gate a little before ten, in her riding boots and her old leather jerkin with her hammer over her shoulder and her red-gold braid already lifting and crackling, because nobody in the history of the world has ever successfully told Thor to arrive quietly. But she'd read Helena's note. She stopped at the top of the garden steps, and looked down, and saw the man in the brown cap standing in his rain with his face turned up, and I saw her face change.

She came down the steps. Slowly, for Thor. She stopped at the edge of the rain beside my father, and looked at the stranger, and then very deliberately put her hammer down on the wet ground behind her and took two steps away from it.

"High plateaus," she said. Not a question. "You're one of the eleven."

The man in the brown cap looked at her. He looked at the hammer on the ground. He looked back at her.

"Yes," he said.

Thor's jaw worked. Her eyes had gone very bright.

"When I heard," she said, "in the summer, at that table, that there were eleven storms held in towers in that city to light the streets, I set my hammer down so hard the table jumped. I said nobody holds a storm. That it's weather. That it doesn't belong to anyone. Not even me." Her voice shook. "I've thought about you every night since. All eleven of you. In those towers. Having your lightning drawn off to light someone's streets."

The man stared at her.

"You thought about us?" he said.

"Every night," said Thor. Her braid was crackling and lifting off her back, and she didn't seem to notice. "I'm the god of thunder. You're my family. Do you understand? Every storm that ever broke over a mountain is my family." She took a breath. "And nobody is ever, ever going to hold you again. Not while I've got a hammer to put down on the ground."

The man in the brown cap stood in his rain and looked at Thor for a long time.

Then he said, very quietly, "I've forgotten my name."

* * *

It was Elenos who answered.

I hadn't even noticed him go. One moment he was beside me on the wall, holding my sleeve. The next he was at the bottom of the garden steps, in his hand-me-down coat, walking across the wet beds toward the little crowd at the end of the leek bed. Nobody stopped him. I'm not sure anybody saw him until he was standing right at the edge of the rain, at Helena's elbow, a thin dark-eyed boy of thirteen with his hands in his pockets.

The man in the brown cap looked down at him.

"You're the one on the wall," he said.

"Yes," said Elenos. "My name's Elenos. I've been listening to you for three days." He tilted his head. "You don't have to remember your name all at once. That's not how it works. It comes back in pieces. I've seen it happen." He paused. "Where did you rain? Before the city. Before they held you. Where was it?"

The man in the brown cap was quiet for a long time.

"The high plateaus," he said slowly. "In the south of Kethra. Where the grass goes on forever and there aren't any trees. The shepherds there..." He stopped. Something moved across his face, very far down, like a fish under ice. "The shepherds there used to sit out on the hills in the afternoons. In summer. When it had been dry all day and the grass was crackling. And they'd watch the valley to the west. Because that's where I came from. Every afternoon. Up the valley. You could smell me before you could see me. They used to stand up and say..."

He stopped.

"What did they say?" said Elenos softly.

The man in the brown cap closed his eyes. The warm rain was running down his face from under the edge of his cap, and I couldn't tell any longer which of it was rain.

"Sahrun," he said.

The word came out of him with the sound of rain arriving across a long dry field all at once. I felt it under my breastbone, in the place where I keep my father's winter and Thor's thunder, like a bell.

"Sahrun's coming," he said. "That's what they said. Standing up on the hills with their crooks. Here comes Sahrun. And then they'd take their hats off." He opened his eyes. "So the rain would get in their hair."

He looked down at Elenos.

"Sahrun," he said again, wonderingly, as though he'd found something in his coat pocket that he'd lost a long time ago. "My name is Sahrun."

"Hello, Sahrun," said Elenos.

And Thor, standing beside my father at the edge of the rain, put both her hands over her face.

* * *

Carol came down last.

She'd been at the top of the garden steps, I think, the whole time. With Ignatius a step behind her. Waiting her turn, the way Helena's note said. And when Sahrun said his name, and Thor put her hands over her face, Carol came down the steps alone and across the wet garden in her blue coat, and stopped at the edge of the rain.

Sahrun looked at her, and went very still.

Not afraid. I'd seen him afraid, and this wasn't it. This was the way you go still when you've walked a very long way to find something, and you turn a corner, and there it is, and you're suddenly not sure you were right to come.

"It's you," he said.

"My name is Carol Grey," said Carol.

"It's you." He took a step toward her, out of the edge of his own rain, and then stopped himself. "I felt it. In the tower. In the city. Eleven of us, in eleven towers, with his hand around all of us, the way it's been for two hundred years. And one night, before dawn, the hand went still." His voice shook. "Not loose. He didn't let go. Something took hold of his wrist. Something held him. For one breath." He swallowed. "And in that breath, I let go of the tower."

Nobody said anything. The rain went on falling, very softly, on the leeks.

"I didn't think," said Sahrun. "I didn't decide. I just... fell. Out of the tower. Out of the city. Into the sea, the way rain falls. And when his hand came back, I wasn't where he'd left me anymore. I was mist. On the water. Drifting north." He looked at his own hands. "I drifted for days. Thin. Holding myself so small he couldn't feel me. I came ashore at a fishing town in the fog and stole a coat off a line and walked inland, and every night I followed the place where it had come from. The thing that held his hand. I could feel it, still. Like a lamp a long way off." He looked up at her. "It brought me here. To this garden. Under your tower."

Carol didn't say anything.

"I've been here three weeks," said Sahrun. "Every night, I looked up at your window. Every night I thought, tomorrow I'll go up and knock. And every morning I lost my nerve, and planted onions instead." He almost laughed. "I don't know how to plant onions. I've never planted anything. I rain on things. That's all I know how to do."

"Why did you come?" said Carol gently. "What do you want?"

Sahrun looked at her for a long time.

"I wanted to ask you," he said slowly, "to hold me."

The whole garden went still.

"Because you're stronger than he is," said Sahrun. "You held him. And I don't know how to be anything but held. Two hundred years. I don't know how to be weather anymore. I don't know where to go or when to stop or what to do when the wind changes. And I thought, if someone's going to hold me, I'd rather it was the one who made him stop. I'd rather it was someone kind." His voice broke. "Please. I'll be good. I'll light anything you want. I'll stay wherever you put me."

* * *

I saw Carol's hands, at her sides.

I saw them go cold. Just for a moment. The tips of her fingers going pale, the way they'd gone that night when she came down the tower. The holding, rising in her, the way it always rises when somebody wants to be kept. So easy. So quiet. Everything safe and still and held.

And I saw her decide.

She took a breath. And her fingers went warm again.

"No," said Carol.

Sahrun flinched as if she'd struck him.

"No," said Carol again, very gently. "I'm sorry. I won't hold you." She took a step forward, into the edge of his rain, so that it fell on her hair and her blue coat and ran down her face. "Not because I don't want to help. Because I do." She held out her hand, palm up. Open. "There are two kinds of holding. Brannoc taught my brother, and my brother taught me. There's the kind that keeps you. And there's the kind that holds a door open, so you can go through it."

She looked up at the little gray cloud over the garden, raining softly on all of us.

"I'm not going to keep you," she said. "But if he ever reaches for you again, across that sea, the way he reached for me, I'll hold his hand still. As long as it takes. So you can go wherever you want." She smiled at him, a little crookedly, with the rain running down her face. "Even if it's only to the far end of Helena's garden to put the onions in the right way up."

Sahrun stared at her open hand.

He didn't take it. Not straight away. He looked at it for a long time, the way the blackbird had looked at the crumb on his palm. Then, very slowly, he reached out one thick, cold, rain-wet hand and laid it on top of hers. Not holding. Just there.

"I don't know how to be weather anymore," he said again. Very quietly.

"Then you'll learn," said Carol. "Thor will teach you. And my father. And there's a shepherd in the hills above Lyradon who sits out every afternoon in summer and complains that it never rains when he wants it to." She squeezed his hand very gently, and let it go. "And until then, Helena's leeks need you."

* * *

He stayed.

Not in the potting shed. Helena wouldn't hear of it. She gave him the little room at the top of the kitchen stair, the one with the round window that looks west, and a pair of boots that fit, and a coat with sleeves long enough. My father wrote to Benjamin at Westmere that afternoon, and Benjamin blew the shell that night, and three nights later he came through the gate with word from Selvane. That one of the eleven towers in the golden city had gone dark. On the west side. Before dawn, nearly a month ago. That they'd been trying to light it again ever since, and couldn't. That the people in the streets beneath it had started calling that quarter the quiet.

"He'll know," said Mary, when Benjamin told us. "That one got away. He'll know where."

"Let him," said my father.

Faelan interviewed Sahrun the next morning, at the scrubbed table in the little kitchen, with the green ledger open and his pen ready and his enormous gray eyes very solemn. Sahrun sat across from him in his new coat and answered every question slowly and seriously, as if it were the most important thing anyone had ever asked him. Which, I suppose, it might have been.

WHAT IS YOUR NAME? SAHRUN.

WHAT DO YOU DO? I AM THE RAIN THAT COMES UP THE VALLEY IN THE AFTERNOON, WHEN IT HAS BEEN DRY ALL DAY.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING?

Sahrun thought about that one for a very long time. Long enough for Helena to put a second cup of tea in front of him, and for the blackbird to come and sit on the windowsill outside the garden door, and look in.

"When they take their hats off," he said at last. "The shepherds. So the rain gets in their hair."

Faelan wrote it down. Then he looked at it, and then up at Sahrun, and then, very carefully, he added a line underneath in smaller letters.

(He is learning to be weather again. Thor is teaching him. Also Tobias, about onions.)

* * *

Old Tobias came up from the town that afternoon to see about his leek bed, and found the new under-gardener on his knees in it, in his new boots, with a trowel held the right way around, digging up nine rows of onion sets one at a time and turning every one of them the right way up.

Tobias stood at the end of the bed for a long time with his hands on his bad knees.

"Who told you?" he said at last.

"Elenos," said Sahrun, without looking up. "He's been watching me for three days. He says I've been planting them on their heads." He held up an onion set, studying it. "He says the pointed end goes at the top. Like a hat."

Tobias grunted.

"Well," he said. "He's right." He lowered himself down onto an upturned bucket, very carefully, with a hiss for his knees, and watched for a while in silence. Then: "Your watering's good, mind. Best-watered leeks I've had in forty years."

Sahrun stopped digging.

He looked up at the old man on the bucket. And then, slowly, very slightly, he smiled. The first time I'd seen him smile.

And over Helena's kitchen garden, in the cold clear afternoon, out of a sky with nothing in it but one small gray cloud, it began very softly to rain.

Up on the terrace wall, my youngest brother sat with his knees drawn up and his chin on them, listening, and didn't say anything at all.

He didn't need to. For once, everybody could hear it.