Chapter 59: Unsettled

For three days after the song, Carol was fine.

That's what she told everyone. Mother, at breakfast. Aurelia, in the chapel. Thor, who came through the Concordia gate every morning to stand at the bottom of the north tower and glare at the sky. Faelan, who asked her in the court with his ledger open whether she had a new favorite thing now.

"I'm fine," said Carol. "My favorite thing is still the first snow."

And she smiled, and went on up the hundred and forty steps.

I knew she wasn't.

I don't always know things about Carol. People think twins share a head. We don't. But there's a place in the middle of me where I can always feel her, the way you can always feel where the sun is with your eyes shut. And for three days, that place felt like a window left open somewhere in a big house. Not a disaster. Just a draft. A cold that comes from a room you can't find.

Other people saw it too, once they started looking.

She flinched at breakfast on the second day, when Faelan called her name across the table to pass the honey. Just a little. Just her shoulders. Then she laughed, and passed the honey, and said, "Sorry. Would you say the rest of it? Just for a while?"

So for a while, everybody said the rest of it. Carol Grey, would you like more tea. Carol Grey, the Castellan says there's a letter. Mirelle thought it was a game and made it into a song, and Carol laughed at that too. But I saw her hands under the table.

She stopped making lights.

She's made little lights since she was a baby. Without thinking. When she's happy, or bored, or reading something good, they come off her fingers like sparks off a fire, small and pale blue, and drift around her head until they go out. Nobody notices anymore. Nobody's noticed for twenty years. Except that for three days there weren't any, and once I'd seen that, I couldn't stop seeing it.

And there was no frost on her windows.

Every morning since she was born, wherever Carol has slept, there has been frost on the glass. Ferns, and feathers, and stars. Helena says you can tell how Carol slept by the patterns: long smooth ones for good nights, little tight spirals for bad. For three mornings the eight windows in the north tower were clear.

And on the third night, at a quarter past one, Helena came down to the little kitchen for a glass of milk she would never admit to wanting, and found Carol sitting at the scrubbed table in the dark. In her nightgown and Ignatius's green coat. Not doing anything. Just sitting.

"I came down for a biscuit," said Carol.

Helena looked at her for a long moment. Then she lit the lamp, and put the honey biscuits on the table, and sat down across from her, and neither of them said anything until two.

Helena told me that the next morning, very quietly, while she was cutting the bread.

"She didn't eat the biscuit," she said.

* * *

So on the fourth day, I made a list.

I'm not proud of this. But I want to be honest about it, because it's the whole reason this chapter exists.

I sat up in the east-wall nook from five in the morning with a pencil and a sheet of Mary's good paper, and I wrote down every single thing I could think of that might help. I was very thorough. I've always been thorough when I'm frightened. Seraphina says I organize at things the way other people shout at them.

Elenos to sit up nights in the north tower and listen for anything coming.

Aurelia to teach Carol properly about name-singing, so it can't surprise her again.

Eleanor to cut a ward on the west window. Or all eight.

Benjamin's stone. Ask Selvane whether more of the Choir are on the seabed.

Carol to sleep in the twin-room again for a while. I could sleep on the floor.

Ask Rysa?

Ask Thesra about the sleeping. Thesra will know.

Talk to Dad about the Choir.

Talk to Carol about it. Properly. All of it.

It went on to the bottom of the page and halfway down the back. Seraphina came out at six with tea and little Uriah, and read it over my shoulder, and didn't say anything for a while.

"That's a very good list," she said at last.

"Thank you."

"Are you going to give it to her?"

"I'm going to go through it with her."

Seraphina looked at me. Little Uriah looked at me. They have exactly the same look, which is unfair.

"Garrick," said my wife. "Borrow?"

That's not how it goes. I'm the one who asks. I stared at her.

"I'm asking you something," she said. "Borrow a little patience. From me. Before you go up those stairs." She held out her hand.

I didn't take it. I wish I had.

"I'll be fine," I said, and folded up the list, and went up.

* * *

It went about as well as you'd expect.

Carol was sitting in the chair by the east window when I came in, with her knees up and a book open on them that she wasn't reading. The hollow one was in the top corner of the west window, in the sun, a little gray patch of fog no bigger than a cat. It had got a bit bigger since the song. Elenos said that meant it was warming up. It didn't do anything. It just lay against the glass with the light coming through it, and once in a while it shivered.

"Morning," I said.

"Morning, Garrick Grey."

She'd taken to saying everyone's whole name now too. I don't think she knew she was doing it.

I sat down on the end of her bed and got out the list.

I'll spare you most of it. I went through the whole thing, top to bottom, the way I'd go through a ward audit with Eleanor. I was very calm and very sensible and very, very thorough. I had reasons for everything. Elenos wouldn't mind sitting up. Aurelia had already offered. Eleanor said a window ward would take an afternoon. Thesra had a tea.

Carol listened to the whole thing without saying a word.

About halfway down the back of the page, I noticed that the air in the room had gone cold. Not frost-cold. The other kind.

"...and then I thought, once you've had a few good nights, we could talk about it properly," I said. "All of it. What it felt like. So it doesn't..."

"Garrick," said Carol.

I stopped.

"Is that all of it?"

"Nearly. There's..."

"Give it to me."

I gave it to her. She read it through, slowly, from top to bottom, and then turned it over and read the back. Then she folded it in half, and in half again, very neatly, and handed it back to me.

"That's a very good list," she said.

"That's what Sera said."

"Sera's right. It's a very good list. Every single thing on it is sensible." She looked at me. Her eyes were very bright. "And if you say the word properly to me one more time, I'm going to put you out of that window, and the hollow one can have your bed."

"Carol..."

"I don't need a ward, Garrick." She stood up. Her book slid off her knees onto the floor and she didn't pick it up. "I don't need Elenos sitting up all night listening. I don't need lessons. I'm not broken. I'm not a gate that's come off its hinges. You can't audit me."

"I'm not trying to..."

"You are. You're trying to fix it. You've been trying to fix it since you came up the stairs on the first morning, I could feel you doing it through the floor." She turned away, toward the window. "And you can't. There's nothing to fix. That's what you don't..." She stopped. Put her hand flat against the glass. "Go away. Please. I love you. Go away."

I went.

I'm her brother. When Carol says please and go away in the same breath, you go.

* * *

I met Ignatius on the stairs.

About forty steps down, on the landing with the narrow slit window where you can see the orchard. He was coming up with a tray. Tea for two, a plate of toast, a pot of Helena's plum jam. And over his arm, folded, a long piece of heavy blue wool that I recognized after a moment.

Carol's shawl. The blue one she wore to my wedding. The fringe had been torn half off one end. It must have happened the morning of the song, when she leaned out of the north window.

He looked at my face. Then at the folded list in my hand.

"Ah," said Ignatius.

"She threw me out."

"I heard." He shifted the tray. "The stairs carry everything in this tower. You said properly eleven times. I counted."

"I was trying to help."

"I know you were." He didn't say it unkindly. Ignatius doesn't say things unkindly. He's the gentlest person I know, which is a strange thing to be when you carry the First Flame. "Come on."

"She said go away."

"She said go away to you. With a list." He went past me up the stairs. "Come and be useless with me. You don't have to say anything. In fact, it'd be better if you didn't."

* * *

Carol was still standing at the west window when we came in. She didn't turn around.

"I brought tea," said Ignatius. "And Garrick. Sorry. He was on the stairs looking like a kicked dog. You can throw him out again if you like."

Carol didn't say anything.

Ignatius put the tray down on the table by the bed. He poured two cups of tea and left one on the table where she could reach it if she wanted it, and didn't hand it to her. He put jam on a piece of toast and put that beside the tea. Then he sat down in the chair by the east window, the one he'd slept in for eleven nights now, and shook out the blue shawl over his knees, and took a needle and a reel of blue thread out of his pocket.

And he started to sew.

Badly. I want to be clear about that. Ignatius is a healer. He can close a wound with his hands so that you can't even see the scar. He has never in his life been able to sew. He held the needle as if it might bite him and stuck himself on the second stitch and said a word in Old Norse that he learned from Thor.

I sat down on the end of the bed, where I'd sat with my list. I didn't say anything. It was very difficult.

Carol stood at the window for a long time.

Then she said, without turning around, "That's not how you do a fringe."

"Isn't it?"

"No."

"Oh," said Ignatius, and went on doing it wrong.

* * *

It was a long time before anybody said anything else. Ten minutes. Maybe more. The sun moved across the floor. The hollow one in the corner of the west window shivered and settled. Ignatius sewed, and stuck himself, and said nothing, and drank his tea.

I've never sat so still in my life. Everything in me wanted to talk. To say it's all right, or you're safe now, or Carol, listen. To get the list back out. I sat on my hands.

And then Carol said, to the window:

"I leaned."

Ignatius went on sewing.

"At the end," said Carol. "Before Garrick heard what was missing. Before Dad came. I was sitting on the bed and it was singing, and it was so..." Her voice went thin. "And I leaned. Toward it. I felt myself do it. I wasn't going to go. I wasn't. But for a moment, just for a moment, I wanted to."

"Mm," said Ignatius.

"Do you know what it felt like?" She turned around at last. Her face was wet. "It felt like being nobody's. Just Carol. Nobody watching me. Nobody wondering what I'll take next, or what I'll break, or whether I'm going to be all right. Nobody needing me to be the most powerful anything. Just Carol, in a quiet room, with somebody else holding everything." She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. "That's what the Chained said, isn't it? Aurelia told us. When he asked them the first time. They wept, and they said at last." She was shaking. "I understand them. That's what I can't stand. I sat on that bed and I understood them."

I opened my mouth.

I had it all ready. But you didn't go.That's not the same.You're not like them.Carol, you sang it back, you shut the road, you won. It was all right there, a whole list of it, true and sensible and kind.

Ignatius put his hand on my arm.

Not hard. He didn't even look at me. He just put his hand on my arm and left it there, warm, the way you'd put your hand on a kettle lid to stop it rattling.

I shut my mouth.

"I know," said Ignatius.

Carol stared at him.

"I know you leaned," he said. "I was standing right there. I saw you do it." He put the needle down on the shawl. "I was frightened out of my mind."

"Then why didn't you say anything?"

"Because you said you were only listening. And I believed you." He looked at her steadily. "So I stood there. And I was frightened. And I didn't go anywhere."

"That's all?"

"That's all I've got," said Ignatius. "I'm not going to tell you it didn't count. It counted. You leaned. You understood them. You might again. I don't know." He picked the needle back up. "But you're here. And I'm here. And the tea's getting cold, and I'm making a mess of your shawl."

Carol looked at him for a very long time.

Then she came across the room, and sat down on the floor by his chair, with her back against his knees, and put her face in the blue wool of her own shawl, and cried.

Not loudly. Carol doesn't cry loudly. Just for a long time.

Ignatius didn't stop her. He didn't put his arms around her or tell her to hush or say there, there. He just put one hand on the top of her head, very lightly. And with the other hand, very slowly and very badly, he went on sewing the fringe back onto the shawl over her shoulder.

I sat on the end of the bed and watched him, and something in me that had been clenched for four days let go.

* * *

After a while, Carol sat up. She wiped her face on the shawl. Then she looked at what Ignatius had done to the fringe, and made a disgusted noise, and took the needle away from him.

"Give me that. You're putting it on backward."

"Am I?"

"You know you are." She bit off the thread. Started picking out his stitches with her fingernail, frowning. "You've been doing it backward on purpose since you came in."

Ignatius didn't say anything. But he smiled, just a little, at the window.

And off the ends of Carol's fingers, as she picked the stitches out, small and pale and blue, came a little light. It drifted up past her ear. Then another. They floated up toward the ceiling and went around the room, slowly, the way they always used to, the way nobody had noticed for twenty years.

One of them drifted over to the west window and hung there, beside the hollow one, for a long moment. The little gray fog stirred. It didn't do anything else. But Elenos told me later that its sound was louder that afternoon than it had ever been.

I went down the hundred and forty steps without saying goodbye. Nobody needed me to.

* * *

Ignatius found me in the east-wall nook an hour later. He sat down beside me and handed me a piece of toast with plum jam on it, which he'd brought down in his pocket for reasons I didn't ask about.

"How did you know?" I said.

He thought about it. Ignatius always thinks before he answers. It drives Seraphina mad.

"My mother," he said at last. "When I was nine, I healed my first broken arm. A stable boy in Concordia. I put my hands on it and closed it, and it knit, and I was so proud I couldn't see straight. And he went on crying." Ignatius looked out over the wall at the town. "I couldn't understand it. I'd fixed it. There was nothing left to fix. So I kept trying. More fire. More healing. And he kept crying, and I got more and more frightened, and Mother came and took my hands off him and said, Iggy. He's not crying because it's broken. He's crying because it hurt. You can't heal that. You can only stay while it stops."

He was quiet a moment.

"The First Flame's a healing fire," he said. "Most people forget that. It's very good at closing things. It's no good at all at the other part. The staying part. You have to learn that yourself. It took me years." He glanced at me. "You've got my fire, you know. Since we were two. You've had it longer than you've had your own name. But I don't think you can borrow the staying part. I think everybody has to grow that one on their own."

I didn't say anything for a long time.

"Brannoc says there are two kinds of holding," I said at last.

"Does he?"

"The kind where you keep something. And the kind where you just don't let go while it gets where it's going." I turned the toast over in my hands. "I've been doing the first kind. For four days. I've been trying to keep her safe from herself."

"I know," said Ignatius. "So has everyone. She's very tired of it." He stood up and brushed off his knees. "She'll be all right. Not tomorrow. Maybe not this winter. But she'll be all right. She just has to be allowed to not be, for a while, first."

He went off along the wall toward the gatehouse, to tell Brannoc, I think, that the fringe was back on.

I sat and ate the toast.

* * *

That night, I went to bed early.

Seraphina was sitting up with a book. She didn't ask how it had gone. She'd felt the list come back down the stairs unopened. Everyone in the castle probably had.

I lay down beside her and looked at the ceiling for a while.

"Sera," I said.

"Mm."

"Borrow?" I held out my hand. "A little patience. If you've still got any."

She looked at my hand for a long moment. Then she put her book down, and put her hand in mine, and held it.

"Take," she said. "There's plenty. I've been saving it up for twenty years, waiting for you to ask."

In the morning, there was frost on all eight windows of the north tower.

Long, smooth ferns, Helena said. And in the corner of the west window, around a little patch of gray fog that had gotten a bit bigger in the night, a pattern nobody had ever seen there before. A ring of small stars, very close together, as if somebody had drawn them there to keep it warm.