Chapter 58: What It Sang

I folded us home so fast I left one of Thor's boot heels in Skellow.

She didn't notice. Neither did I, until afterward, when Bettany Cobb sent it up to the castle wrapped in a smoked-fish cloth with a note that said Yours, I think. Come back for the crab.

We came out in the kitchen garden beside the pear tree at twenty minutes to six. It was still dark. Helena was at the stove with the porridge pot, and the kettle was just starting to tick, and every window in the east wing had a candle in it.

And the song was already there.

It was over the castle. High up, where the sky was just starting to go gray over the eastern hills. Circling the north tower the way gulls circle the mast of a boat coming in, around and around and around, and so high and so clear that the frost on the pear tree was ringing with it. Very faintly. Like a glass when you run a wet finger around the rim.

Helena looked at me through the kitchen window. She didn't say anything. She just pointed up, with her wooden spoon, at the north tower.

I ran.

* * *

There are a hundred and forty steps up to Carol's room. When we were small we used to race, and she always won, because she'd borrow Thor's lightning on the landings. She said it wasn't cheating. It was asking the stairs to hurry.

I took them faster that morning than I've ever taken them.

And all the way up, the song came down to meet me.

I could hear it properly now. Out on the water at Skellow I'd heard it as Thor heard it, one long pure note rising into many. Here, inside the tower, with the stone carrying it, I could hear what it was.

It was a name.

People sing names all the time. Mothers do it, rocking babies. That's not what I mean.

When a god sings your name, they sing all of you.

Aurelia told us once, when we were small, that she sang our names over our cradles the night we were born. Mine and Carol's. And that it took her until morning, because when a god sings a name properly, they have to sing everything in it. Everything you are. Everything you might be. The color of your eyes, and the shape of your hands, and the first thing you'll ever be afraid of, and the last thing you'll ever forgive.

That's what was coming down the tower stairs.

Carol. All of her. Sung in a hundred borrowed voices that had finally learned to sing together. Her laugh. Her temper. The way she pushes her hair behind her ear when she's thinking. The little lights she makes when she's happy and doesn't know she's doing it. Blue, her old toy, that she still keeps in the drawer by her bed. Every frost she's ever drawn on a window. All of it, rising and falling, around and around the north tower in the gray dawn, so beautiful it hurt to breathe.

And underneath it, very quietly, something else.

Come home.

* * *

Carol's door was open.

Her room at the top of the north tower is round, with eight tall windows, one in every direction, the way Helena chose it for her in the summer, so that nothing could ever come at her from somewhere she couldn't see. Every one of those windows was ringing. I could see the glass shiver in the frames. Frost had grown across all eight of them in the night, the way it does when Carol dreams, and the song had drawn patterns in it: long, slow, curling lines, like the lines on a seashell, all pointing the same way.

West. Out over the sea.

Ignatius was standing in the middle of the room with his back to me. He had his hands half raised at his sides, and there was fire in them, low and red, just barely there, the way he holds it when he wants to be ready and doesn't want to frighten anyone. He didn't turn around when I came in. He was watching Carol.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed in her nightgown and his old green coat, with her bare feet on the cold floor and her hands folded in her lap. Her hair was down. Her face was wet. She was looking up at the west window with an expression I'd never seen on her before, and I've known her face since before I knew my own.

She looked like someone hearing their mother's voice after a very long time away.

"Carol," I said.

She didn't look at me. "Garrick," she said. "Listen."

"I am."

"No. Listen." Her voice was very quiet. "That's me. That's all of me. Nobody's ever..." She stopped. Swallowed. "Aurelia sang it once, when I was born. I don't remember. You can't remember. But I know it. I know it the way you know your own bed in the dark. And it's out there, and it's so..."

She didn't finish.

"Beautiful," said Ignatius quietly, without turning around. "She's been saying that for an hour."

"It is," said Carol. "It's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard." She drew a breath that shook. "And it wants me to go with it."

* * *

I went and sat down beside her on the bed.

I didn't touch her. Not yet. I just sat close, the way we used to sit in the twin-room when we were small and one of us had a bad dream, with our shoulders not quite touching. Close enough that she'd know I was there.

"Where?" I said.

"Out there." She tipped her head at the west window, at the long curling lines in the frost. "It's a road. Can you feel it? It's like one of your folds, only it isn't anybody's. It starts right there on the windowsill and it goes all the way out over the sea." She closed her eyes. "If I said yes, I'd just go. Along the song. I wouldn't even have to walk. It'd carry me, the way the sea carries a boat."

"Where does it end?"

Carol was quiet for a long moment.

"In a room," she said. "A gold room. With a man in it. Sitting very still, with his hands on his knees." She opened her eyes. "Holding the other end."

Ignatius made a sound, low in his throat. The fire in his hands went from red to white.

"I'm not going," said Carol. Quickly. To him, not to me. "Iggy. I'm not. I'm only listening."

"I know," said Ignatius. He didn't turn around. "I know you're not. I'm just going to stand here anyway. If that's all right."

"It's all right."

"Good."

The song went around the tower again. The windows rang. The frost lines deepened, curling west, west, west.

Carol, it sang. Carol. Carol. Come home.

And Carol, sitting on the edge of her bed with her hands in her lap, closed her eyes and leaned her head, just very slightly, toward the window.

* * *

The thunder came from right outside the east window.

Not loud. My father had never once in his life arrived anywhere loudly when one of his children was frightened. Just a soft white-gold flash, and a smell of rain, and then he was standing on the narrow stone ledge outside the window in his socks, knocking on the glass with one knuckle.

Ignatius opened it for him. He climbed in over the sill.

"Sorry," he said. "Stairs seemed slow."

He looked at Carol. Then at me. Then at the frost on the eight windows, all curling west. Then he went down on one knee in front of the bed, so that his face was lower than hers, and didn't say anything at all.

Carol opened her eyes.

"Dad," she said. "It's my name."

"I know, sweetheart. I can hear it."

"It's so..."

"I know."

And then the room filled up with morning.

That's the only way I can describe how Aurelia comes, when she comes in a hurry. Gold light, all at once, from no window in particular, the way the sun comes into a sickroom on the day the fever breaks. The smell of roses and clean linen. And then she was standing by the west window, in her plain white dress, with her hand flat on the ringing glass.

She stood like that for a long time, listening.

Then she turned around, and I saw her face, and I've never seen her look like that. Not angry. Aurelia doesn't get angry. She forgives people for a living. But there was something in her face like a mother who's just found her child's drawing torn out of a book and pinned up on someone else's wall.

"That's mine," she said quietly.

"What?" said my father.

"The song." Aurelia looked at the frost. "That's the song I sang over Carol the night she was born. Every note of it. I sang it until the sun came up." She closed her eyes. "I'd know it anywhere. It's the only one I ever sang twice. Once for her. Once for Garrick, in the other cradle, right after."

"Then how..." Ignatius's voice cracked. "How has he got it?"

Aurelia was quiet a moment.

"Carol," she said gently. "In your dream. When you held his hand still. When you told him your name."

Carol went white.

"You didn't do anything wrong," said Aurelia, at once. "Hear me. Nothing. You held a man's hand still when he was trying to take hold of the whole world, and you told him he may not, and he couldn't. That was one of the bravest things anyone in this family has ever done." She came and knelt beside my father, so that the goddess of forgiveness and the god of storms were both on their knees on Carol's floor. "But a hand is a door, sweetheart. Both ways. When you held his, for one moment, he held yours. And when you said your name to him, you said it the way gods say their names. All of it. Because that's what you are."

"He heard it," said Carol. Barely a whisper.

"He heard it. And he's been listening to it ever since. Every night. In his gold room. Learning it." Aurelia's mouth tightened. "He can't sing it himself. He isn't a whole god. Half of him is a man, and men can't sing names like this. So he taught it to something that has no voice of its own to get in the way. Something hollow. And he sent it across the sea to stand outside your window and sing you home."

Nobody said anything.

The song went around the tower. The windows shivered. Carol, it sang. Carol. Come home.

"Which of them held my hand," I said.

They all looked at me.

"The fourth question. On Iselle's black page." I swallowed. "He wanted to know which of us held his hand. Iselle lied to him. And Ithren didn't tell him, because she didn't know. And Dad told her to tell him that if he wanted to know, he could come and ask at the door." I looked up at the frost. "So he didn't ask. He sang the name he'd heard."

"It's my song," said Aurelia. "Of course something in her answered."

* * *

I sat on the bed beside my sister, and listened.

I'd heard everything in it, all the way up a hundred and forty steps. But I hadn't heard what wasn't in it.

It took me a long time. I had to listen through it three times, all the way around the tower and back. And then I heard it, the way you hear a step missing on a stair you've climbed every day of your life, when your foot comes down on nothing.

"Carol," I said. "Listen to the end."

"What?"

"The end of it. Where it stops, before it goes around again." I turned on the bed to face her. "Listen to where it stops."

She listened.

Carol, sang the song. All of her, rising and falling, every note of everything she is.

And then it stopped. And went around again.

Carol.

Stop.

Carol.

I watched her hear it. I watched it go across her face, slowly, like the light going across a field when a cloud moves off the sun. Her hands came apart in her lap. Her back straightened. And the wet, faraway, homesick look went out of her eyes, all at once, and something came into them instead that I knew very well, because I've been on the wrong end of it since we were three.

"He's left it off," said Carol.

"Yes."

"He's left us off." Her voice was getting louder. "That's not my name. That's not my name. My name doesn't stop at Carol. It's never stopped at Carol. Aurelia didn't stop at Carol." She looked at Aurelia. "Did you?"

"No," said Aurelia. "I sang you all the way to the end."

"He took the Grey off," said Carol. "He took my family off. He wants me to be a Carol who isn't anybody's. So I'll fit in his room." She stood up. She was shaking, and it wasn't fear anymore. "So I'll be his."

The fire in Ignatius's hands went out. He didn't need it.

My father, still on one knee, looked up at her, and I saw him start to smile.

"Well," he said. "What do you want to do about it?"

* * *

Carol thought about it.

That's the thing about my sister that people outside the family never understand. She has a temper like a summer storm, but she always, always thinks first. Rysa taught us that. Name. Want. Permission. You don't get to skip to the end just because you're cross.

"I want everybody," she said at last. "I want him to hear it with everybody."

Then she went to the north window and opened it.

The cold came in. So did the song, so loud now that Aurelia put her hand up against it. And down below, a hundred and forty steps down, in the inner court in the gray dawn, I saw that nobody in Greykeep had stayed in bed.

They were all there. Every one of them. Standing in the court in their coats and nightclothes, looking up at the north tower. My mother, with her hair in its night braid. Adriana, with her arm around Mirelle. Faelan in his nightshirt with his ledger under his arm. Elenos, a little apart, with his head tilted, listening. Roderic and Iselle together, her blue scarf around her head. Grandpa in his workshop apron, because he'd been up since four. Mary and Melody. Seraphina, with little Uriah in a shawl on her hip. Sahrun, barefoot, with a little cloud over his head that wasn't raining yet. Brannoc and Corra in the gatehouse door. Thor, one boot heel short, with her hammer on her shoulder. Fenrir lying across the bottom step of the north tower, the whole width of it, the way he'd lie across a doorway. Helena at the kitchen door with the porridge spoon still in her hand.

And the Castellan, standing in the middle of the court, with its metal face turned up to the window.

Carol leaned out over the sill.

"Everybody," she called down. Her voice carried in the cold. "It's Carol. I want to ask you something. You can say no."

Nobody said no.

"It's singing my name," she said. "Only it's leaving the end off. I want it to hear the end." She took a breath. "Would you sing it? My whole name? As loud as you like? It doesn't have to be good. It just has to be all of it."

There was a short silence in the court.

Then Faelan opened his mouth and bellowed, at the top of his ten-year-old lungs, completely tuneless, "CAROL GREY!"

And everybody started laughing.

And then everybody started singing.

* * *

It was the worst singing I have ever heard in my life.

I want that written down somewhere. Mary wouldn't put it in the book, so I'm putting it here. It was dreadful. Grandpa sang it to the tune of his goat song, which has no fixed verses and no fixed tune either. Mirelle sang it with a whistle in the middle where her front tooth is missing. Brannoc sang it as if he were shouting orders across a battlefield. Thor sang it the way she sings in the mead hall at Concordia, which is to say loudest. The Castellan sang it in one perfectly flat note, like a bell that only knows one thing, over and over: CAROL GREY. CAROL GREY. CAROL GREY. Helena didn't sing at all. She just went back inside and put the kettle on, and when it boiled it whistled up through the copper pipes into every room in the east wing, which is as close to singing as Helena gets.

My mother sang it in her clear, dry voice, the one she uses to read aloud. Adriana sang it in Lyradon court style, with trills. Roderic sang it badly and loudly, and Iselle, beside him, didn't sing at first. She just stood very still with her blue scarf around her head, looking up at the tower.

And then she sang it too.

Quietly. In Kethran. Carol Grey, with the long vowels and the soft consonants, in the language of the man on the other end of the song. Malachar's own sister, standing in Greykeep's court, singing my sister's whole name back across the sea at him.

Seraphina sang it with little Uriah bouncing on her hip, and little Uriah, who can say about four words, shouted "Ca!" every time she got to the first part, and that was perhaps the best of all of it.

Sahrun didn't know the words. So he made thunder, very softly, under everything, like a drum.

And up in the tower, my father stood up, and sang it in a voice I've only ever heard him use at the stream on Varrick's anniversary. Ignatius sang it. I sang it. Aurelia sang it the way gods sing names, the way she must have sung it over the cradle twenty-three years ago, all the way to the end.

Carol Grey.

A hundred voices. A whole castle. None of them borrowed.

And the song outside the window started to fail.

* * *

I heard it happen. We all did.

It tried to keep going around. Carol, it sang, Carol, come home. But every time it got to the place where it stopped, there was a whole castle there already, singing the rest. Grey. Like a wall. Like a door with too many hands on the inside of it. It went thin. It wavered. It began, very faintly, to lose its way, the way the hollow god's voice had wavered on the water at Skellow when it tried to take hold of Thor.

Because you can't hold a name that too many people are holding.

Carol had only twenty-three years of people saying hers. But she had us.

The frost lines on the eight windows began to soften. Then to run.

And then Carol did something I didn't expect.

She leaned out of the north window into the cold, with the whole castle singing below her, and she sang.

I'd never heard her do it before. I didn't know she could. But of course she could. She's been around Aurelia since the night she was born, and whatever is in Aurelia came into her the way the cold comes in through an open door, whether either of them liked it or not. She just hadn't ever needed it.

She sang her own name the way a god sings it.

All of it. Every note of everything she is. Her laugh and her temper and the frost and Blue and the little lights. And Ignatius in the chair by her east window. And me, in the other cradle. And our father on one knee, and Aurelia by the west window, and a hundred and forty steps of family down to a court full of terrible singers, and Fenrir lying across the doorway, and Helena's kettle. All the way to the end.

Carol Grey.

And then, at the very end of it, so quietly I almost didn't hear, she sang one more line. Not to us. Out over the sea. West, down the long curling road of the song, toward a gold room and a man sitting very still with his hands on his knees.

My name is Carol Grey. You may not.

The road shut.

I felt it go, the way you feel a door close in another part of the house. The song stopped. All at once, everywhere, the way it had stopped at Skellow when I took the boy out of the water. The eight windows went quiet. The frost on them was just frost again, ordinary, the kind that grows on any window on a cold morning.

Down in the court, the singing stopped too, ragged, one voice at a time. Faelan was last, of course. "...GREY," he finished, alone, and then looked around, and went red, and Mirelle laughed so hard she sat down on the cobbles.

* * *

The hollow god was on the windowsill.

What was left of it. Not much. A little gray drift of fog, no bigger than a cat, lying in the corner of the west window's sill against the glass, with the morning sun just starting to come through it. It wasn't singing. It wasn't doing anything. It just lay there, very small, shivering slightly, the way fog does when the sun finds it.

Carol knelt down in front of the sill.

"Hello," she said.

The fog didn't move.

"I know you haven't got a name," said Carol gently. "Garrick told me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry somebody took it." She was quiet a moment. "You sang mine beautifully, you know. You sang it better than anybody's ever sung anything. It just wasn't yours to sing, and it wasn't his to send."

The fog shivered.

"What do you want?" said Carol.

For a long time, nothing. Then, very faintly, so faintly I wasn't sure afterward that I'd heard it, one voice came out of the fog. Not a borrowed one. Not Mary's, or Thor's, or anybody's from Skellow. A small, thin, cracked voice, like a bell that's been left out in the weather.

"Warm," it said.

Carol looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked back over her shoulder at the rest of us: my father, and Aurelia, and Ignatius, and me.

"Can it stay?" she said. "Here? In my window? Just until it's warm?" She turned back to the fog. "Only if you want to. You can say no."

The fog didn't say no.

It drifted, very slowly, up off the sill, and settled into the top corner of the west window, where the sun was coming through the glass. And it stayed there.

* * *

Elenos came up the hundred and forty steps an hour later, after porridge, to listen to it. He sat on the end of Carol's bed for a long time with his head on one side.

"It's got a sound," he said at last. "Underneath. It's very small."

"What is it?" said Carol.

Elenos listened a while longer.

"A lamp," he said. "Somebody lighting a lamp. In a window. A long way off." He looked at Carol. "I think it was something to do with lamps. Before."

Carol didn't say anything. She just looked at the little gray fog in the corner of her window, catching the sun.

* * *

Mary wrote it at noon.

The Hollow Choir. One came ashore at Skellow and sang the village toward the sea. Thor and Garrick. No one taken; Dinny Cobb, 15, wet. It carried Carol's name north, as Aurelia sang it at her cradle, with the Grey left off. The castle sang the rest. Carol sang it back. The road shut.

The hollow one is in the west window of the north tower. It wants to be warm.

Under it, Carol wrote, in her own hand:

Carol Grey. All the way to the end.

And in the green laundry ledger, on a new page, in very careful capitals:

WHAT IS YOUR NAME? — NOT YET.

WHAT DO YOU DO? — SOMETHING WITH LAMPS (ELENOS).

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING? — WARM.