Chapter 62: A Tracker

Io's note came at seven the next morning, through the Westmere gate, in the Castellan's hand because the Castellan had insisted on carrying it.

Davren has been up all night. He says he wants the twins. Bring Carol. Leave the baby. Please. I.

Under it, in a different hand, small and slanting and in a great hurry:

And bring the big tuning fork from my workshop, the one on the left. NOT the one on the right. D.

And under that, in a third hand, very neat:

He means the one on the right. C.

* * *

Seraphina didn't come.

She decided that herself. I didn't ask her not to. I wouldn't have dared. She sat at the scrubbed table in the little kitchen with little Uriah in her lap, eating toast soldiers off her plate one at a time, and read Io's note twice, and handed it back to me.

"I'm not going near it again," she said. "Not till somebody tells me what it is." She looked down at the top of our son's head. "I don't trust my hand."

"You trusted it yesterday."

"Yesterday, Mother said my name." She gave little Uriah another toast soldier. "Go and find out who made it. Then come home and tell me. And then I'll decide what I think."

Ignatius was already at the end of the table, with a cup of tea and a book he wasn't reading, in the chair nearest the door. Helena had put the kettle on for the third time. And when I went out through the court, Fenrir was lying across the bottom of the east stair, the whole width of it, in wolf shape, with his head on his paws and his yellow eyes open.

He didn't look at me. He was looking at the gate.

"Thank you," I said.

Fenrir's ears moved. That was all. It was enough.

* * *

Carol was waiting for me at the gate with the tuning fork.

The one on the right. It was nearly as long as her arm, brass, with a heavy oak handle, and she was holding it the way you'd hold a dead fish.

"Do I want to know why he needs this?" she said.

"No," I said. "But he's going to tell us anyway."

"He's going to say do you see."

"At least nine times."

"I'll take that bet," said Carol. "Twelve."

* * *

Davren had been up all night, and it showed.

He was standing in the middle of the lower court of Westmere Hold in his shirtsleeves, in the cold, with his hair standing straight up on one side where he'd slept on it for perhaps ten minutes, and charcoal on his face, and an expression of such enormous happiness that I knew at once it was going to be a long day.

He'd built something.

The washtub was still on its trestles in the middle of the court, and the stone was still floating on its platter, covered with Benjamin's salt-white coat. But around the tub, on the flagstones, Davren had drawn a great chalk circle, twenty paces across, marked off all the way around in small neat lines, like the face of a clock with three hundred and sixty hours. Fixed to the edge of the platter, sticking out over the water, was a long thin brass needle, a foot and a half long, so that wherever the stone pointed, the needle pointed too, and you could read it off the chalk. Beside the tub stood a table with a slate, three lamps, a row of tuning forks from smallest to largest, a brass horn like a great twisted shell, and, for reasons nobody ever explained, a single boiled egg.

Cassia was sitting on an upturned crate beside the slate with a pencil, wrapped in two shawls, looking unimpressed.

"He's been like this since midnight," she said, before anyone could ask. "It's not as clever as he thinks. It's a compass with a needle on it. A child could have thought of it."

"You thought of it," said Davren.

"Yes," said Cassia. "It's obvious." But she went faintly pink at the ears.

My father was there, in his coat, with his frost hammer leaning against the wall where he could reach it and wouldn't have to. Lexander was beside him, enormous and gray-bearded and very still, with his plain black patch over his left eye and one of his ravens on his shoulder, watching the stone with the one eye he had left as if it were a chess piece that had moved on its own. Io was standing by the court gate, exactly where she'd stood yesterday, and no further in. Eleanor was on her knees beside the tub with her spectacles on the end of her nose and her bone-handled chisel in its cloth beside her, peering at the black surface of the stone through a glass. Benjamin was on his crate, mending the same net.

And the Castellan stood at the edge of the chalk circle, tall and gray and patient, with its metal hands folded in front of it.

"It asked to come," said Eleanor, without looking up. "I said it could."

"I wished to hear it," said the Castellan. "It is not mine. But it has been listening to my people. I would like to know what it has heard."

* * *

"Right," said Davren. He clapped his hands together and charcoal dust went up in a little cloud. "Right. Good. You're here. Do you see?"

"Not yet," said Carol.

"One," I said, under my breath.

Davren didn't hear. Davren, when he's working, hears almost nothing. He went to the tub and lifted Benjamin's coat off the stone, very gently, and folded it, and handed it back to Benjamin.

The brass needle swung at once. Away from the west. Around through the north. And stopped, quivering, pointing straight across the court at Carol and me.

Davren looked at the chalk mark under the needle and wrote a number on the slate. Then he wrote it again, larger, and underlined it.

"Good," he said. "That's what I hoped. Now. I want to show you something, and then I want to try some things, and I want everybody to do exactly as I say and not one thing more, because if you do one thing more, I won't know which thing it was that did it. Do you see?"

"Two," murmured Carol.

* * *

He started with ordinary fire.

He carried his three lamps around the chalk circle one at a time, then held a burning twist of straw right up against the tub. The needle stayed pointing at us.

"Not fire," said Davren. He wrote on the slate. "Not ordinary fire. Do you see? It doesn't care about fire. A compass doesn't care about iron in general, it cares about north. This doesn't care about fire. It cares about one fire."

"Three," said Carol.

Then he asked my father.

Davren asks everyone. He learned Rysa's rules from Cassia and never stopped using them, even on kings.

"Uriah," he said. "Would you do me a storm? A small one. Just here. Over the court."

My father looked up at the sky. A cloud came over the Hold, small and gray and tidy, and rained a little, very politely, inside the chalk circle and nowhere else. The stone didn't move. The needle went on pointing at me and Carol.

"Winter?"

Frost came up the sides of the washtub, white and feathery. The water in it began to skin over with ice around the edges of the platter. The stone didn't move.

"Thank you," said Davren, and wrote on the slate, and my father let the frost go.

Then Io.

She didn't come into the circle. She stood at the gate, and held out her hand, and let her fire come, soft and gold and low.

The needle moved.

Not much. A finger's width. It leaned away from Carol and me, toward the gate, toward Io's fire, the way it had leaned yesterday on the beach. And it stayed there, trembling, for as long as she held the fire up. When she closed her hand, it swung back to us.

Davren picked up the smallest tuning fork and struck it on the edge of the table, and held it to the brass horn, and listened. Then he put it down and picked up the next one, and the next, and the next, striking each one, listening to the stone through the horn, until the fourth one, and then he stopped and held very still.

"There," he said softly. "Do you hear it?"

I didn't, at first. Then I did. When the fork rang, the stone's hum changed. Not louder. Fuller. As if the stone and the fork were singing the same note, and had found each other.

"That's hers," said Davren. "That's the note of the First Flame. Do you see? The stone's tuned to it. Not exactly. Not to Io. To what she carries. To the Flame itself." He looked across the court. "That's why it leaned yesterday for Seraphina, and for you, Io, and less for you than for her, because yours is the healing side and hers is the other. It's tuned to the whole Flame, and she's carrying the half it hears best."

Io didn't say anything. She'd gone very still at the gate.

"And for the baby," said Davren, more quietly. "I'm sorry. Yes. For the baby most of all."

"Four," said Carol, but she didn't sound as if she were enjoying it anymore.

* * *

"But it's not pointing at Io," said Davren. "Is it?"

He tapped the slate with his pencil. The needle had swung back the moment Io closed her hand, and it was pointing, steady and patient, at the two of us. At Carol and me.

"Neither of you is carrying the Flame," said Davren. "Not really. Garrick's got a piece of it, from Seraphina, but it's small and banked. It leaned toward him yesterday for that. But that's not what it's pointing at now. It's been pointing at the two of you since I took the coat off, harder than it ever pointed at Io." He looked at us. "There's a second note. I heard it last night. I couldn't find the fork for it. I was hoping you'd tell me what it is."

Carol and I looked at each other.

I already knew. I think I'd known since the beach, since that small cold attention under my breastbone. But I didn't want to say it, because saying it would make it true.

"The seeds," said Carol.

* * *

When we were three, at the stream below Greykeep, Carol and I held every domain Varrick had stolen in twenty years of war. Rivers, and seasons, and roads, and harvests, and griefs, and hundreds of small gods' small precious things, all at once, in our two pairs of hands. And then we gave them back. Every one. To every god they'd been taken from.

Only we kept a little of each. We didn't mean to. That's what we are. Everything comes into us and stays. So under my breastbone, and under Carol's, there's a small warm weight we call the seeds. Half each. A pocket full of warm stones, Caitlin wrote once, except the stones are rivers. Every god we gave a domain back to can feel where the seeds are kept. It's why they come to us. It's why they're not alone.

And it's the one thing Malachar wants more than anything. A whole god, made out of pieces. And Carol and I are walking around with a piece of nearly everything.

"Let me," said Davren quietly. "May I? Just to hear it. Then you can put it away."

I looked at Carol. She nodded.

"Borrow?" I said to her, out of habit.

"They're as much yours as mine," said Carol. "Idiot."

We opened them.

It's not a thing you can see. It's more like letting out a breath you've been holding for a long time. The seeds warmed under my ribs. I felt every one of them stir: Lorn's slow river, and Imme's bright spring, and Corra's first cold morning, and a mountain river's loud cold water, and a thousand small things whose names I don't even know. And beside me, in the twin-room, I felt Carol's half stir too, and reach for mine, the way they always do, like two halves of a song.

The needle swung so hard it hit the side of the tub with a sound like a bell.

It didn't point at me. It didn't point at Carol. It pointed exactly between us, at the empty air where our two halves met, and it shook there, the brass ringing faintly against the wood. And the hum of the stone rose. Not louder. Higher. Sharper. Hungrier. The sound a dog makes in its throat when it's found a scent.

Davren picked up the big tuning fork. The one on the right. He struck it on the edge of the tub, and the note it made went through the whole court like a struck bell, and the stone's hum climbed to meet it, and matched it, and the two of them sang together, the stone and the fork, so loud and so true that the frost on the washtub cracked.

"Close them," said Davren. "Please. Now."

We closed them.

The hum dropped. The needle sagged back, trembling, and pointed at us again, the ordinary way. But it didn't stop shaking for a long time.

Nobody said anything. Cassia had stopped writing. My father's hand had gone to his frost hammer without his knowing, and he took it away again.

"Two notes," said Davren at last, very quietly. "The First Flame. And the seeds. Together." He put the big fork down on the table. "It's a chord. Do you see? It's not tuned to a fire. It's not tuned to a god. It's tuned to a chord. Somebody made this thing to listen for the two things in the world he wants most." He looked at my father. "It's not an ear, Uriah. I was wrong about that, before. It's a tracker. It's a hound's nose with no hound behind it."

"Five," said Carol, very softly. She didn't smile.

* * *

"May I?" said the Castellan.

Everyone turned.

It had not moved from the edge of the chalk circle all morning. Now it took one step forward, and stopped, and waited. Its blank metal face was turned toward the stone.

"May I put my hand on it?" it said. "I will not take anything. I wish to read it. The way I read the plates on the gates. I have read every ward in Avarra. I would like to know who wrote this one."

Davren looked at my father. My father looked at Benjamin.

"Ask it," said Benjamin. "Not me. It's not mine either."

The Castellan bent its tall gray frame over the washtub. "I would like to put my hand on you," it said to the stone. "To read you. You may say no."

The stone hummed.

I don't know whether that was a yes. I think the Castellan decided it was. It put one metal hand, very lightly, flat on the black surface. And stood there, perfectly still, for a long time.

"There are two hands in it," it said at last.

"Two?" said Eleanor.

"The first is old. Very old. Older than this harbor. It is a listening for ships." The Castellan's voice was slow, as if it were reading aloud from something written very small. "It was made to hear boats coming home in the dark. Fishing boats. Little ones. To hear them while they were still far out, so that someone could light a lamp. It is a kind thing. It is lonely. It is the one that hears Benjamin sing."

"Selvane," said Benjamin. His voice cracked. "It's hers. It was always hers."

"And the second hand," said the Castellan, "is new. It is cut over the first. Through it. Like a new road cut through an old field." It paused. "It is cut in ward-writing."

Eleanor went white.

"Whose?" she said.

The Castellan turned its head and looked at her.

"Yours," it said.

* * *

It wasn't hers, of course. Not really. But Eleanor put her glass to the black stone and looked for a long time, and then sat back on her heels on the cold flagstones of the lower court with her chisel in her lap, and I'd never seen her look so old.

"It's my hand," she said. "My closing marks. My way of cutting a turn into a line, so the ward goes around a corner without losing its strength." She stopped. "It's mine. It's the way I wrote the Long Plan. Every line of it. Somebody's learned it off my plan and cut it into this."

"The copy," I said.

"The copy." Eleanor took her spectacles off and rubbed her eyes. "Teo's six nights in my archive. They didn't only want to know where my doors were. They wanted to learn how I write them." She put the spectacles back on. "Whoever cut this is good. Very good. Better than Wynn. Nearly as good as me." She said it without any pride at all. "And they've done it to make a poor lonely harbor-ear into a dog to hunt my family."

"Can you read who?" said my father.

"No," said Eleanor. "Only how." She looked at the Castellan. "Can you?"

"No," said the Castellan. "But it is cold. The second hand. It is very cold. Like the key in my chest." It took its hand off the stone. "And there is something else. Someone is listening at the other end of it. Not now. Not this moment. But often. They come and put their ear to it and listen, and go away again, and come back." It was quiet a moment. "I have been feeling it at night. In my own walls. I did not know what it was. I thought it was the wind."

A small, cold, patient attention.

Io, at the gate, closed her eyes.

* * *

It was Seraphina's idea, in the end, though she wasn't there.

We argued for an hour. Eleanor wanted to cut the new tuning out entirely. She could do it, she said. She knew her own hand. She could unwrite every line of it and leave Selvane's old harbor-ear clean underneath. Lexander wanted to leave it exactly as it was and feed it lies, let whoever was listening hear what we wanted them to hear, for as long as we liked. Davren wanted to keep it and study it, because, he said, a tracker's a road, and every road goes both ways, and if somebody had made it listen for us, he could make it listen for them.

Benjamin didn't want anything done to it at all that would hurt the old part.

And my father listened to all of it and didn't say anything, and then turned to me.

"What did Seraphina say?" he said. "This morning."

I thought about it.

"She said go and find out who made it," I said. "And then come home and tell her. And then she'd decide what she thought." I paused. "And yesterday. When she didn't cut it. She said the hard part is having it and not using it."

My father nodded slowly.

"Then we don't cut it," he said. "And we don't use it. Not yet." He looked at Eleanor. "Can you shut the new part? Not unwrite it. Just close it. A door. From our side. So whoever's listening at the other end hears nothing. And so we can open it again, if we ever need to."

Eleanor thought about it.

"Yes," she said. "A closing mark. Held. The right way around." Something came back into her face. "My own mark. In my own hand. On their copy of it."

"And the old part?"

"Stays open," said Eleanor. "I won't touch it. It's not mine to touch."

"Davren keeps it," said my father. "Here, with Benjamin. And studies it as much as he likes. And if he ever learns to turn it around," he looked at Davren, "he comes to the Council and asks before he does."

"Of course," said Davren. He looked faintly hurt that anyone would think otherwise.

"Six," said Carol, under her breath, though Davren hadn't said anything. I think she just wanted to.

* * *

Eleanor cut it at noon.

She knelt beside the washtub with her bone-handled chisel and a little pot of black paste, and she asked the stone first. And then she cut one small mark into the wooden rim of the platter, right where the brass needle was fixed. Her closing mark. The one on every gate in Avarra. Held, the right way around. She cut it slowly, with her lips moving, the way she does every plate, and painted it with the black paste with the eyelash brush, and blew on it, and sat back.

The needle swung.

Not toward us. Not toward anything. It swung, slowly, all the way around, back through the north, and settled. West. A little south. Toward the golden city. Toward whatever the old part of it had always been lonely for.

And the hum changed.

It dropped. It softened. It went from that high, sharp, hungry note to something low and warm and quiet, like a kettle that's been taken off the boil. And the whole of Westmere Hold, all around us, hummed along with it, the way Benjamin says it does on good nights.

Benjamin put his hand on the rim of the tub. He started to sing the soldiers' song, very low.

And out of the stone, faint and far away, a woman's voice hummed it back.

She didn't sing words. She never has. But at the end of the verse, she stopped humming, and said, quite clearly, in the long vowels and soft consonants of Kethra, five words. Benjamin's face did something I'll remember for the rest of my life.

"What did she say?" said Carol.

Benjamin swallowed.

"She said, Someone's stopped listening. Thank you." He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "And then she said, It was so cold."

* * *

Mary wrote it that night.

The stone at Westmere. Two hands. One old and kind: Selvane's, for boats coming home. One new and cold, cut through it in E.S.'s own ward-hand, learned from the copy: tuned to the First Flame and to the seeds. A tracker. Someone listened at the other end.

Closed from our side at noon. Held, the right way around. Davren keeps it. Selvane says thank you.

And under it, in Davren's slanting hand, because he'd come back to Greykeep for supper and Mary had let him have the pen:

It is a road. Every listening thing is a road. One day I will walk this one backward. With permission. D.

I went up to bed at ten and told Seraphina all of it. She listened to the whole thing without saying a word, with little Uriah asleep between us and his arms flung up over his head.

"So it's shut," she said at last.

"From our side."

"And somebody made it to find our son."

"And Carol. And me. And you."

She was quiet for a long time.

"Good," she said finally. "Then they've told us something. They want the Flame and the seeds. Together." She looked down at little Uriah. "Then they're going to have to come through all of us to get them. And we'll know they're coming, because Davren will be listening the other way."

She lay down, and pulled the blanket up over the three of us, and was asleep in five minutes. Seraphina can do that. She decides what she thinks, and then she sleeps.

I lay awake a long time, listening to the castle breathe, and to my son breathe, and somewhere very far off, past the hills, past the sea, past the closed mark on the rim of a wooden platter, to nothing at all.

Which was, for the first time in months, exactly what I wanted to hear.