Chapter 57: The Hollow Choir

For a week after Ithren, nobody in Greykeep went to sleep easily.

You'd lie down and feel yourself starting to drift, and then some part of you would sit up and say, wait, is that mine?

Seraphina said my name out loud every night before she closed her eyes. Then she made me say hers. Then she put her cold feet on me.

Ignatius slept in the chair by Carol's east window again, all seven nights, though nobody asked him to.

Sahrun shut his round window for two nights. On the third, he opened it again. "He's decided it's his window," said Helena, cutting bread. "Good."

And Thor didn't sleep at all.

She came through the Concordia gate every morning at five and walked the castle walls, all the way around, twice, with her hammer on her shoulder and her braid crackling in the cold. Then she came back at noon and did it again.

"She's cross," said Carol, on the fourth morning, watching her from the east-wall nook with a cup of tea held in both hands. "She's crosser than I've ever seen her."

"With Ithren?"

"With herself." Carol blew on her tea. "She slept through it. Helena's kettle did more than she did."

* * *

On the eighth morning, at a quarter to five, Damar came up through the kitchen garden.

I mean that exactly. Helena was in the little kitchen with her taper, about to light the stove, and she heard the flagstones outside the garden door shift. Then a sound like a cart full of gravel being slowly tipped out. And when she opened the door, there was the god of earth and stone, standing in the middle of her herb beds in the dark, brushing soil off his shoulders.

He'd come all the way from the coast underground. He says roads are for people who don't know where the rock goes.

Helena looked at him. Then she looked at the thyme.

"You've put your foot in my thyme," she said.

Damar looked down. He moved his foot.

"Tea," said Helena. "Then you can tell me why. Then you can tell the King."

So it was at the scrubbed table, with tea in his great gray hand and soil still in his beard, that Damar told us. My father had come down in his coat. I'd heard the gravel sound through the copper pipes. Thor came in through the garden door at five and stopped dead.

"Something's walking," said Damar.

His voice is so low you feel it through the bench. The cups on Helena's rack chimed very faintly when he spoke.

"Walking where?" said my father.

"On the bottom of the sea." Damar turned his cup in his hands. "I've been listening since the Council. Westmere down to Orselle and back, every night." He was quiet a moment. "Nine days ago, something started walking on it. Out past the shoals. Coming from the west."

Nobody said anything.

"It's not heavy," said Damar. "No heavier than a man. Lighter. And it doesn't walk right. It doesn't touch the bottom properly. It's like..." He frowned. "It's like listening to someone wearing someone else's boots. The steps are wrong. They're the wrong size for what's in them."

"Where is it now?" said Thor.

"It came ashore an hour ago," said Damar. "At Skellow."

* * *

Skellow is a fishing village about a day's ride south of Westmere, where the cliffs come down to a little shingle cove. Thirty houses, a slipway, a chapel with a bell, and a lot of very stubborn people. I'd been there once as a boy, with Mary, buying smoked fish. I remembered gulls, and a woman who called me "my handsome," and the smell.

"I'm going," said Thor.

She was already standing. Her braid was crackling. The cups on the rack were chiming again, and this time it wasn't Damar.

"Thor," said my father.

"I slept, Uriah." She didn't shout. It was worse than shouting. "I slept in Concordia in a soft bed with my boots off while a Chained goddess sat on the end of a frightened storm's bed in your house and breathed on everyone I love. A wolf and a snake and a kettle did my job." She took a breath. "I'm going to Skellow. I'm going to look. That's all. Looking is watching. You said watch."

My father looked at her for a long moment.

Then he looked at me.

"Garrick," he said. "Can you get her there?"

I could. I'd been to Skellow, once, as a boy, and a fold doesn't need much more than that. A place you remember. The smell of it.

"Yes."

"Then go with her." My father stood up. "Look. Don't throw anything. Don't give him a single thing to throw." He paused at the door. "And if it's one of the eleven, or one of the twelve, or one of anything... ask first."

"I always ask," said Thor.

"You asked Surtr's giant whether he'd like his teeth back one at a time or all at once," said my father.

"That's still asking," said Thor.

* * *

I went up to tell Seraphina.

She was awake, sitting up in bed with little Uriah asleep on her chest, his mouth open, one fist wound tight in her hair. She looked at my face and knew most of it before I said anything.

"Skellow," I said. "Something came ashore. Thor and I are going to look."

"Just look?"

"Just look."

She was quiet a moment. Then she held out her free hand, the way she always does, palm up.

"Borrow?" I said.

"Take," said Seraphina.

It doesn't change anything. I've had her folding since before I could walk, and I'll have it until I die. But I ask every time. It was hers first.

"Come home for breakfast," she said.

"I will."

"Bring Thor. She's not eating."

* * *

I opened the fold in the kitchen garden, beside the pear tree. Thor stepped through first, with her hammer in her hand. I followed.

And we came out on the shingle at Skellow, at a quarter past five on a winter morning, into fog.

* * *

It was the thickest fog I've ever seen.

So thick that when I held my hand out, my fingers went soft at the ends. I could hear the sea dragging at the shingle, and gulls complaining, and smell salt and tar and old fish, exactly the way I remembered it.

And I could hear singing.

It came and went with the waves, as though the sea were humming under its breath. Voices, a great many of them, high and low, rising and falling. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard, and it made the hair on my arms stand up.

"Thor," I said.

"I hear it."

She stood beside me on the shingle with her hammer held low. Her braid wasn't crackling anymore. It had gone very still, the way a dog goes still when it hears something in the dark that it doesn't like.

"That's not a god," she said quietly. "That's a lot of gods. Or bits of them."

We went up the beach toward the village.

* * *

Skellow was awake. All of it.

Every door on the little harbor street was open. Every window had a lamp in it, which in a fishing village before dawn is either a wedding or a drowning. And every single person who lived there, from old men in nightshirts to small children in their mothers' shawls, was standing in the street in the fog, with their backs to the houses, looking toward the sea.

Not moving. Not talking. Just standing. Listening.

There was a woman at the top of the slipway. Very old and very square, built like a mooring post, in a man's oilskin and a knitted cap pulled down to her eyebrows. She had a boathook in both hands, held across her body like a quarterstaff. She was the only person in the village facing the other way.

Facing her own neighbors. As though she were holding them back.

She saw Thor first. Most people see Thor first. Then she saw me.

"My handsome," she said. "You came back. You were this high." She held her hand out flat at about the height of a lobster pot, without letting go of the boathook. "Bought two smoked haddock and a pound of mackerel and a very small crab you said you were going to keep as a pet."

I stared at her.

"I'm Bettany Cobb," she said. "I've been waiting an hour for somebody from that castle to notice something was wrong, and I'm very glad it's you, because the Lady with the hammer frightens the life out of me." She jerked her head at the street behind her. "Listen. Look at them. Listen to them."

I looked.

Everyone in the street had their mouths slightly open, their lips moving, the way your lips move when you're trying to remember a song you used to know.

"It started an hour ago," said Bettany Cobb. "I was up. I'm always up. I heard it out in the fog, out on the water, singing. And then it started singing names." Her square old face was very hard. "Our names. Mine. My husband's, who drowned off the Skerries thirty-one years ago. Every name in this village. In the voices of people we loved. My mother. My husband. My little sister. Singing them very softly, out on the water, like they were calling us in for supper." She tightened her hands on the boathook. "And everybody got out of bed and came down here to listen. Everybody but me."

"Why not you?" said Thor.

Bettany Cobb looked at her.

"Because my husband couldn't sing," she said. "Not a note. Never in his life. Thirty years married, and he couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. And that thing out there was singing my name in his voice, beautifully." She shook her head once. "So I knew it wasn't him. And if it wasn't him, it wasn't anyone."

* * *

"Where's it now?" I said.

"Out there." She pointed with the end of the boathook, out past the slipway into the fog. "In the shallows. It's been coming in and going out with the waves for an hour. It won't come up on the shingle. I think it doesn't like the shingle." She hesitated, and for the first time, something in her face cracked. "And my grandson's in the water."

"What?"

"Dinny. My grandson. He's fifteen." Her voice stayed very level. Fishing people are like that. "He went down the slip twenty minutes ago, while I was holding the others back. He's in up to his knees. I shouted. He didn't turn around. I can't go after him and hold this lot back at the same time. And if I let go of them..." She looked at her neighbors, all standing in the street in their nightclothes with their lips moving. "They'll all go in."

Thor was already going down the slipway.

I went after her.

* * *

The fog was thicker on the water. Wet, and gray, and cold enough to hurt my teeth. The slipway was slick with weed. At the bottom, the sea came sliding up the stone and went sliding back, and the singing came with it, louder now. So much louder. A whole choir of it, coming in with every wave and going out again, a hundred voices, soft and kind and longing.

And now I could hear the names.

I could hear them the way you hear your own name across a crowded room. Bettany. Dinny. Agnes. Tom. Little Ruth. Over and over, a whole village of names, sung so tenderly it made my chest ache. And in among them, coming in on the wave and going out again, very faint, I heard something that stopped my heart.

Garrick.

In Mary's voice. The way she used to say it when I was small and she was calling me in from the court.

Garrick. Garrick Grey. Come in now, love. It's cold.

"It isn't her," said Thor beside me, without looking around. She'd heard it too. She'd heard something. Her jaw was set like a stone. "It isn't anyone. Say your name."

"Garrick Grey," I said.

It helped. Thank Carol, it helped.

The boy was there in the shallows. About twenty feet out. Up to his knees, then his thighs as a wave came in, then his knees again as it went out. Thin, fifteen, in a nightshirt and a fisherman's jersey, with his arms hanging by his sides and his face turned out into the fog. His lips were moving.

"Yes," he was saying. "Yes. I'm coming. Yes."

And out beyond him, in the fog, something was standing on the water.

* * *

I've tried to describe it for Mary's book, and for Faelan's ledger, and every time I get it wrong.

It was taller than Thor. It stood on the surface of the sea as if the sea were a floor, out where the fog was thickest, with the waves going in and out under it. It was shaped like a person the way a coat hanging in a dark hallway is shaped like a person. A head. Long arms. A robe that went down to the water and became the water. I think it was made of the fog. Or the fog was made of it.

And where its face should have been, there was nothing.

Not darkness. Not a hole. Just nothing. As if someone had taken a face away very carefully and left the space where it used to be, still shaped like a face.

It was singing. All those voices were coming out of that nothing.

It held out its long gray arms to the boy. And the boy took a step toward it, into deeper water.

"Dinny," it sang, in a woman's voice, warm and low and loving. "Dinny, my darling. Come here and let me hold you."

Thor said something in Old Norse that I'm not going to write down.

Then she lifted her hammer.

* * *

No god had fought a god on Avarra for twenty years.

Not since the stream below Greykeep, when Carol and I were three and Varrick fell. My father made a whole Council so that nobody would ever have to again.

I've thought about that a great deal since. That it was Thor who broke it. And that she broke it for a boy she'd never met, in a nightshirt, in the cold sea, saying yes.

She didn't throw the hammer. She brought it down on the water.

And the lightning came out of the sky.

Not one bolt. Thirty. A white-blue cage of it slamming down all around the gray thing, so that for one blinding instant the whole cove was lit up like noon. The sea boiled where the bolts went in. The thunder came a heartbeat later, so loud I felt it in my back teeth, and every gull in Skellow went up off the roofs at once, screaming.

And the lightning went straight through it.

It didn't hurt it. I don't think it could hurt it. The bolts went through that gray robe the way a stone goes through fog, and the thing came apart into gray tatters, and the tatters drifted for a moment in the air, and then drifted back together again.

And then it sang the thunder back.

In Thor's voice.

Every bolt. Every crack and rumble. Coming out of that empty space where its face should have been, in a voice I'd known my whole life, the voice that calls my sister my little spark. It sang her own thunder at her, sweetly, like a lullaby. Like a mockery of one.

Thor went white.

"Thor," it sang. "Thor. Thor. Thor."

It reached for her. I saw it reach. Not with its arms. With the singing. I could feel it the way you feel a draft, the way you feel somebody's eyes on the back of your neck, reaching for the place where her name sat inside her.

And it couldn't hold it.

The singing went thin and wavering, like a child trying to lift something far too heavy. You can't hollow out Thor. Her name is in every farmhouse that ever hung a hammer over the door, every sailor who ever looked up at a storm and said it. It's held by too many people.

The thing let go. It drew back across the water, rippling.

And it turned toward the boy.

* * *

I didn't decide to fold. I was just suddenly doing it.

A little fold, the smallest I'd ever made. One end in the water beside Dinny Cobb's knees. The other on the slipway beside me. I opened it under him the way you'd slide a tray under a cake, and he dropped through it and landed on the weedy stone at my feet, sitting down hard, soaking wet, with his mouth still open.

"Yes," he said. To nobody. And then his eyes cleared, and he looked down at himself, and at the slipway, and up at me, and said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, "Why am I wet?"

The singing stopped.

All of it. All at once. Every voice. The whole choir.

And the thing turned its face toward me.

* * *

I've been around gods since they leaned over my cradle and sparked. Every god I've ever been near has something in them that comes into me whether I like it or not, the way cold comes in through an open door. A power. A shape. A way of doing things. It's never once failed. Not with anyone.

It came for me across the water. The empty face. The long gray arms.

And the thing in me that has always reached, without asking, since I was born, reached for it.

There was nothing there.

I don't mean it was weak, or small, or hidden. I mean that for the first time in my life I reached into a god and there was nothing to borrow. No power. No name. No shape. Only a hole, cold and hungry and enormous, shaped exactly like the god who used to be there. Like a house that's been emptied to the walls. Even the singing wasn't its own. Every one of those voices was something it had picked up somewhere, the way a gull picks up anything shiny on a beach.

And at the very bottom of the hole, the hunger.

I've never felt anything like it. I hope I never do again. It wasn't wicked. It wasn't cruel. It was just want. Want, with nothing left to want with. It wanted a name the way a drowning man wants air.

It wanted mine.

"Garrick," it sang, in Mary's voice. "Garrick Grey."

"Yes," I said. "That's mine."

And I held on to it.

* * *

Then I did the only thing I could think of.

I borrowed my father's winter.

I'd never used it that way before. I'd never had to. I took it the way he'd take it, all at once and without any fuss, and I breathed out. And all around Skellow cove, every drop of that thick gray fog froze.

The whole fog bank went white and stiff in a single heartbeat, a whole cove of hanging frost glittering like a chandelier. Then it fell, a soft hissing rain of rime, onto the shingle and the boats and the sea and Bettany Cobb's knitted cap.

And the gray thing fell with it.

It came apart into frost. It drifted down onto the water and lay there, a pale scum of ice spread across the waves, rising and falling.

Thor came and stood beside me. She was breathing hard. Her hair had come half out of its braid. She lifted her hammer.

"Don't," I said.

"Garrick..."

"Dad said ask first."

"It hasn't got a name to ask."

"I know." I looked at the frost on the water. It was already moving. Drawing together very slowly, the way mercury does on a plate. Rising off the waves in thin gray threads, as the cold sea warmed it. "That's what it wants."

The frost rose. The fog came back, thin, out over the water. And out of it, very slowly, the gray thing stood up again.

Smaller now. Much smaller. Hardly taller than Faelan. It stood on the water a little way out, swaying, with its long arms hanging by its sides and its empty face turned toward us, and it didn't sing.

So I asked.

"What's your name?" I said.

The way Rysa taught us. The first rule. Name.

It was quiet for a long time. The waves went in and out under it. Behind me, I heard Bettany Cobb's boots on the slipway, and her grandson's voice saying, "Gran," and her saying, "Hush."

Then it tried to answer.

All of its voices tried, one after another. A man's. A girl's. Thor's. Mary's. Each of them started a name, and stopped, like someone going through a drawer full of keys for a lock it couldn't find anymore. None of them fit. None of them were its own.

"I'm sorry," I said. I meant it. "What do you want?"

And the thing stopped trying.

It stood very still on the water. And then it did something I didn't understand. It lifted its empty face up, away from us, away from the village, toward the north. Up the coast. As though it had heard something a long way off.

And it sang.

* * *

It wasn't like before. It wasn't a hundred stolen voices calling people in for supper.

It was one note. Just one. Long and clear and so high and pure that it rang off the cliffs and the water and the frost on the boats, and I felt it in my chest the way you feel a bell. And then another note under it. And another. And another. All its borrowed voices, every one, together for the first time, not taking turns, not fighting. Singing one thing.

And as it sang, it came apart.

Not the way it had come apart in the lightning, or in the frost. Gently. From the edges inward, like a cloud on a summer afternoon. The long gray arms first, and then the robe where it met the water, and then the shoulders, and the head, and the empty place where its face had been. Until there was nothing standing on the sea at all. Only the song, hanging in the air above the water where it had been.

Then the song rose.

It went up off the water like smoke up a chimney, and the last of the fog went with it. Then it turned, the way geese turn in autumn, and went away north along the coast, fainter and higher, until I couldn't tell anymore whether I was hearing it or remembering it.

Behind us, in the village, somebody started crying. Then somebody laughed. Then a child said, very loudly, "Mam, why are we in the street?" and a door banged, and a dog started barking, and Skellow woke up.

Thor stood beside me on the frosted slipway with her hammer hanging from her hand, looking north.

Her face had gone a color I'd never seen it go. Not white. Gray. Like the fog.

"Thor?"

"That was a name," she said.

"What?"

"That song. At the end." She didn't look at me. She was still watching the sky where it had gone. "That wasn't a god singing. That was a god singing a name. The way we do. The way Aurelia sang yours over your cradle, and Odin sang mine." She swallowed. "We only sing them like that for one reason, little brother. When we're calling someone home."

I looked north. Up the coast. Past the headland, past Westmere, past the long brown hills.

I knew what was up there. I think I'd known since the first note. Somewhere in the middle of me, in the place where I can always feel where she is, the way you can always feel where the sun is with your eyes shut, something had gone very cold and very still.

North of Skellow there is a castle on a hill, with a tower on its north side, and a round room at the top of the tower, a hundred and forty steps up, with eight tall windows, one in every direction.

The song was going there.