Chapter 64: Loki's Game

Loki knocked on my door at six the next morning. Three times. Then he waited, the way Helena had taught him after the morning of the goat.

"Come in," I said.

He came in with two cups of tea, one of which was his own pine-smoke tea and the other of which was Helena's ordinary kind, for me, which I took to mean that he'd already been to the little kitchen and asked. Seraphina, still in bed with little Uriah asleep on her chest, looked at him over the blanket.

"It's six o'clock," she said.

"I know," said Loki cheerfully. "Lying's mostly carpentry. You start early, you measure everything twice, and you don't let anybody see it till it's finished." He handed me the tea. "Map room. Bring your sister's permission. And your folding. And your patience, if Seraphina will lend you some."

Seraphina considered him.

"Borrow?" I said to her.

"Take," said Seraphina. "Bring him back by supper. Both of you."

* * *

The map room is at the top of the old west tower, a hundred and twelve steps up, a long high room with windows on three sides and maps on the floor. The Castellan keeps them. New roads in black, old ones crossed out in red, rivers in blue, every gate in Avarra marked with a small silver circle. West of Westmere, where the floor used to be bare gray stone because nobody had ever mapped the sea, Severin's silk map of Kethra lies over the flags now, black and silver, with its seed-pearl cities and its golden capital on the great western bay.

Loki walked out into the middle of the floor in his socks, between Avarra and Kethra, and turned slowly around.

"Right," he said. "First rule of lying. Where."

* * *

It took us all morning to choose.

It had to be somewhere with nobody in it. That was Carol's rule, and Loki took it more seriously than I'd ever seen him take anything. Not an island with shepherds. Not a fishing rock with a hut on it. Not a mountaintop with goats. He went over the whole western sea on his hands and knees, with a lamp, and his nose a hand's width from the floor, muttering, and every time I pointed to something he said, "Who lives there?" and every time, somebody did.

In the end it was Mirelle who found it.

She'd come up the hundred and twelve steps at about eleven, with her silver scissors on their ribbon around her neck, because she'd heard there was something happening in the map room and she has visited the map room more than anybody in the castle except the Castellan. She stood in the doorway for a moment and watched Loki crawling across the sea.

"What are you looking for?" she said.

"Nowhere," said Loki, without looking up. "I'm looking for nowhere, and it's very hard to find, because everywhere I look it turns out to be somewhere."

Mirelle thought about this. Then she walked out across the gray stone in her stockings, past Westmere, past the outer shoals, out into the part of the floor where the Castellan's careful blue lines of the Avarran sea stopped, and Severin's black silk hadn't quite begun. And she crouched down and put one small finger on a dot. A very small dot. Black ink, almost nothing, on bare stone, with a tiny word beside it in the Castellan's square hand.

"There," she said. "It hasn't got a lamp."

Loki crawled over and looked.

Blackstack, it said.

"It's a rock," said Mirelle. "Grandpa told me. It's in the sea where there's nothing else. It came up out of the water when he was a boy, all hot, and smoking. Nothing lives on it. The birds won't even land. He says it's still too new." She looked at the dot with deep disapproval. "It hasn't got a lamp, or a road, or a name except the one somebody gave it from a boat. Nobody goes there. Nobody's ever gone there."

Loki looked at her for a long moment.

"Mirelle Hollis Grey," he said solemnly. "You've found nowhere."

Mirelle went pink and pleased and tried not to look it.

* * *

We checked, of course. Carol's rule.

Damar came up through the floor of the lower hall at noon, because Loki asked him, and listened to the rock from four hundred miles away with his hand flat on the flagstones and his eyes shut. "Young," he said at last. "Very young. Still warm in the middle. Nothing in it. Nothing on it. It doesn't even have moss." He opened his eyes. "It'd like to be visited, though. It's lonely. Rocks that new always are."

Serevan sent word from the aeries by a young phoenix with a singed tail, who stood on the map-room windowsill for exactly as long as it took to say, very formally, "No bird nests on Blackstack. The stone remembers being fire. We do not land where the ground remembers," and then left.

And Jörmungandr, when Loki went down to the river and asked him, said in his voice like planks creaking that he'd been past Blackstack once, a hundred years ago, in the dark, and there'd been nothing there then but steam, and nothing since but the wind, and would we like him to take us? Because it was a very long way, and there wasn't a road, and he'd be happy to be one.

"Yes," said Loki. "Please. Thank you. Yes."

Jörmungandr was so pleased that the river went up two inches.

* * *

"Second rule of lying," said Loki, in the afternoon, sitting cross-legged on the silk map with Kethra all around him like a dark garden. "Make it as small as you possibly can."

"Small?"

"The smallest lie that does the job. Not one word more." He held up a finger. "Everybody gets this wrong. They think a good lie is a big beautiful thing, with a story, and characters, and a reason for everything. It isn't. Every word you add is another word somebody can check. Every bit of story is a door left open for the truth to walk through." He put the finger down. "The best lies are nearly all true. And the true parts do the work."

"So what's true here?"

"You," said Loki. "You're true. Your seeds are true. Your bit of Seraphina's fire is true. You'll be standing on a real rock, in the real sea, ringing with the real thing." He tilted his head. "Only one thing in the whole picture is a lie."

"Carol," I said.

"Carol," said Loki. "And even she's mostly true, if we do it right. We'll use her real half. Her real shape. All we're lying about is where she is." He smiled. "That's not a big lie. That's a very small, very careful one. That's a lie with its shoes off."

* * *

The third rule of lying, Loki said, was that it should be something the other person wants to believe.

"He's been listening at a closed door for a week," said Loki. "He knows it's been closed. He's been sitting on the other side of it wondering why. And then one night it opens for an hour, and what does he hear?" He spread his hands. "The two of you. Together. A long way from your castle. A long way from your father. Out in the middle of the sea on a bare rock with nobody to hold your hands." He shrugged. "He'll want that to be true. He's wanted it since the summer. He'll tell himself every reason why it must be. That you've gone looking for something. That you've fallen out with your father. That the Council's sent you somewhere, and you're alone." He drank his tea. "I won't have to tell him a single thing. He'll do all the work himself."

"That's horrible," I said.

"Yes," said Loki. "That's why it works."

* * *

We built her on the second day.

I'm going to try to explain how, but I'm not sure I can, because half of it was mine and half of it was Loki's, and the two halves only made sense together.

My half was the fold.

A fold is a door. That's all it is, really. You take two places and you pin them together, and whatever's on one side can step through to the other. Usually I make them flat, like a door in a wall, or a page in a book. But a fold can be any shape you like, if you hold it carefully enough. I've made them shaped like cups, to carry water. Like boxes, to carry Helena's pies to Concordia without letting them get cold. When I was eight I made one shaped like a horse, for Mirelle's lamp, and Mary made me unmake it because it frightened the cook.

So I made one shaped like Carol.

Not her face. Not her hands. Just her shape. Her height, a little shorter than mine. The way she stands, with her weight on her left foot and her shoulders back. The space she takes up in a room. A hollow in the air, pinned open, about the size and shape of my sister, with nothing in it but the far side of nowhere.

Loki walked all the way around it three times, very slowly, in his socks.

"Good," he said. "That's good. That's very good, actually. You've done that before."

"Not a person."

"Close enough." He stopped in front of it. "Now my half. Borrow?"

I looked at him.

Loki has never once, in all the years I've known him, held out his hand to me and said that. He doesn't like being borrowed from. I think it reminds him of chains.

"Are you sure?"

"No," said Loki. "Take."

* * *

I'd had it since I was a baby, of course. Everything comes in. But I'd never used Loki's part before. Not once. It never seemed polite.

It's very strange. It's not like folding, or fire, or winter. It's more like a coat you can put on and take off, except the coat is somebody else, and you don't so much wear it as let it hang on you, a little crooked, so that people see the coat first and never look underneath. That's how Loki wears his own names, the Castellan says. A little crooked. All of them fit. None of them are quite on straight.

I took that, and I hung it on the fold. Very carefully. Like hanging a coat on a hook.

And then we needed Carol.

* * *

She came up the hundred and twelve steps at four o'clock, in her own blue coat, with Ignatius two steps behind her, because she'd asked him to come and he'd said yes before she finished asking. She stopped in the map-room doorway.

The fold was standing in the middle of the floor, on the silk sea of Kethra, with Loki's crooked coat hung on it. You couldn't see it, exactly. You could see where it was, the way you can see heat over a summer road. A shimmer. A shape. A girl-sized, girl-shaped absence, standing with its weight on its left foot and its shoulders back.

Carol looked at it for a long time.

"It looks like the one in my window," she said.

I hadn't thought of that. But she was right. A shape with nothing in it. A face-shaped space where a face should be. Just like the hollow god at Skellow, standing on the water.

"It's not anyone," I said. "That's the point. It's just a shape. It hasn't got a name."

"Good," said Carol quietly. "Don't give it one."

"I won't."

"And it doesn't speak."

"It doesn't speak."

She nodded slowly. Then she took off her blue coat, and handed it to Ignatius, and walked out across the silk to stand in front of the fold, close enough to touch it, and held out her hand to me.

"How much do you need?"

"Just once," I said. "Just open your half, for one breath. Toward it. Like you were opening it toward me. It'll take the shape of it. Like a footprint in snow." I swallowed. "It'll stay until it melts. Two days. Maybe three. And then it'll come back to you. All of it."

"You promised."

"I promised."

Carol looked at the fold. Then she looked back at Ignatius, standing in the doorway with her coat over his arm.

"It's all right," he said. "I'm here."

So she did it.

* * *

I felt it go out of her. Through the twin-room, the way I always feel it. Her half of the seeds, warm and bright, all the rivers and seasons and small gods' small things that she's carried since we were three, opening like a hand. Reaching. The way it always reaches for mine.

Only this time it reached for the fold.

And the fold caught it.

The shimmer filled. Not with Carol. With the shape of her half. Like a footprint filling with water. For one breath, the girl-shaped space in the middle of the map room stood there brimming with something warm and many-colored and alive, rivers and frost and first snow and the first cold morning you don't mind, and Loki's crooked coat settled over all of it like a cloak.

Carol closed her half.

The fold stayed full.

She stepped back, very fast, two steps, three, until she bumped into Ignatius. He put his arm around her. She was white. She stood there looking at the shimmering thing in the middle of the floor, with her half of the seeds pressed into it like a hand into wet clay, and I felt her shiver all the way through the twin-room.

"That's horrible," she said.

"I know."

"It feels like me. Standing over there. Without me in it."

"I know." I did. I could feel it too. That was the worst part. When I opened my own half, just a little, just to test, my seeds reached for the fold the way they always reach for Carol's. And the fold reached back. And for a moment I couldn't have told you, with my eyes shut, which of them was my sister.

Loki was watching Carol. He wasn't smiling at all.

"Thank you," he said. Very seriously. "I know what that cost. I won't waste it."

* * *

We tested it that evening.

Not on the stone. The stone was at Westmere, with Eleanor's closing mark on it, and nobody wanted to open the door one second earlier than we had to. So we tested it on the only things we had that could hear the seeds and the shape of a person.

The Castellan came up the hundred and twelve steps and stood in the doorway, and looked at the fold for a very long time.

"That is not Carol Grey," it said at last.

"No," said Loki. "Can you tell how?"

"Her name does not fit it." The Castellan tilted its head. "It is a coat. On a hook. A very good coat. It is the shape of her, and it has her warmth in it. If I were not looking for her name, I would think it was her." It paused. "But I am always looking for her name. That is what I am for."

"Good," said Loki. "Nobody on the other end of that stone knows her name the way you do. Thank you."

Elenos came up after supper and sat on the floor of the map room for a long time with his head on one side.

"It sounds like her," he said at last. "Ice ticking on a window. That's Carol's sound." He was quiet a moment. "But there's no window behind it. There's no room. It's just the ticking."

And then Seraphina came up, last of all, with little Uriah on her hip. She wasn't going to. She said so on the stairs. But she wanted to see it, and she wanted him to see it, because, she said, he'd have to know the difference one day.

Little Uriah looked at the shimmer in the middle of the floor.

He held out both his hands toward it, the way he holds them out to Carol every morning at breakfast. "Ca!" he said happily.

Then he stopped.

He looked at it for a long moment, very seriously, with his hands still out. And then he took his hands back, and put them both on his mother's collar, and turned his face away into her shoulder.

"No," said little Uriah, into her neck. Very clearly. "No Ca."

That was his seventh word. Mary has it in the book.

Loki laughed out loud. It was the first time he'd laughed all day.

"Babies always know," he said. "That's why I never tried to fool one. Not once in a thousand years." He looked at the fold, and then at me, and he was still smiling, but it was the small sad smile again. "It's good enough for a keyhole, Garrick. It's not good enough for anybody who loves her. That's exactly the right kind of lie."

* * *

We did it on the third night.

Jörmungandr took us. Loki and Thor and me, and the fold, folded up very small and carried inside my coat like a letter. He came up the river after dark and lay along the bank below the castle with his great gold head on the water-steps, and we climbed onto his back, behind his head, where the scales are wide and flat and warm. And he went.

I can't tell you about the road. There isn't a road. That's the point of him. He went down the river and out past Westmere and out past the shoals and out into the dark, and the sea opened in front of him and closed behind him, and the stars went over, and somewhere a very long way out, past where any map in the castle had any lines on it at all, the water went warm and the air smelled of sulfur, and there it was.

Blackstack.

It was smaller than I'd imagined. A black tooth sticking up out of the sea, maybe a hundred feet tall, steep and raw and broken, with steam still coming up out of the cracks in it, and the waves breaking white all around its foot. Nothing grew on it. Nothing moved on it. It was the loneliest place I've ever been.

Damar was right. It wanted to be visited. I could feel it, faintly, through the bit of Damar I carry. A very young rock, in the middle of a very old sea, with nobody ever coming.

"Hello," I said to it, when Jörmungandr put us down on its one flat ledge. "Sorry. We won't be long."

Thor climbed to the very top, which was not easy, and stood there with her hammer on her shoulder and her red-gold braid blowing out sideways in the wind, looking extremely threatening at nothing at all. She'd asked to. Nobody had the heart to say no.

At midnight, four hundred miles behind us at Westmere, Benjamin sang one verse of the soldiers' song to the stone, and asked Selvane, very politely, whether we could borrow her ear for an hour. And Selvane hummed yes. And Eleanor, kneeling beside the washtub with her chisel, opened her own closing mark from our side.

I felt it open. All that way. A draft, from very far off. A door in another room.

I unfolded the fold beside me on the black ledge, and the girl-shaped shimmer stood up out of my coat and stood beside me in the wind, with Carol's half pressed into it, and Loki's crooked coat over it, and its weight on its left foot.

And I opened my half.

Our seeds reached for each other. Mine for hers. Hers, which wasn't hers, for mine. And between us, out on a black rock in the empty sea, two halves of a song that was very nearly true began to ring.

* * *

It came about a quarter of an hour later.

I felt it the way I'd felt it on the beach. Small. Cold. Patient. A long way off, and then, suddenly, not so far. Like somebody who's been sitting in a dark room for a week with their ear against a closed door, and hears the latch go.

The attention arrived.

It stopped. It went very, very still. And I felt it listen. Not to the fold. To us. To two notes, ringing together, out where no notes had any business to be. It listened for a long time. Longer than I could stand. I kept my eyes shut and my seeds open and I didn't think about Carol, safe in the lower hall with Damar and Seraphina and the baby, under four hundred feet of stone that doesn't carry fire. I didn't think about anything. I just rang.

And then, very slowly, I felt the attention lean.

The way the needle had leaned at Westmere. The way Seraphina's flame had leaned on the beach. Hungry. Wanting. Telling itself, just as Loki said it would, every reason in the world why this had to be true.

Loki, sitting on the rock beside me with his knees drawn up, didn't say a word. But I heard him breathe out, very softly, through his nose. The way you breathe out when a fish takes the hook.

* * *

At one o'clock, Eleanor closed the door.

I felt that too. The draft stopped. The far-off room went quiet. The cold attention was cut off in the middle of leaning, like a candle when you shut a window.

I closed my half. The fold beside me went thin and wavering, the way a footprint goes at the edges when the snow starts to melt, and I folded it up, very gently, and put it back inside my coat. In two days, maybe three, what was left of Carol's half in it would go home to her. All of it. I'd promised.

Thor climbed down from the top of Blackstack with her braid full of salt.

"Well?" she said.

"He heard," said Loki. He was looking west. "He heard, and he wanted it, and he believed it." He stood up and stretched, like a cat after a long nap in the sun, and for the first time in three days he looked entirely like himself. "Now he'll come and look. And he'll find a lonely little rock with nothing on it but steam."

"And then?"

"And then he'll wonder." Loki grinned. "And wondering is very, very bad for people like him. It means they've stopped being certain."

Jörmungandr took us home. It was nearly dawn when we came up the river, and Helena had the kettle on, and Carol was sitting at the scrubbed table in her nightgown and Ignatius's green coat, with a cup of tea in her hands, waiting.

She didn't ask how it went. She just looked at me.

"Two days," I said. "Maybe three. And it all comes home."

"All of it," said Carol.

"All of it."

She nodded, and drank her tea, and pushed the honey biscuits across the table to Loki without being asked.

Loki looked at them for a long moment. Then he took one. Very carefully. As though nobody had ever pushed a plate of anything across a table to him before.

"Thank you," he said.