Chapter 68: Unicorn Sight

The Castellan woke me at a quarter past five.

It doesn't do that often. It doesn't come up the east stair at all, usually. It stays in the gate arch, or the lower hall, where the gates are. But that morning it was standing outside our bedroom door in the dark, tall and gray and patient, and when I opened the door in my nightshirt it looked down at me and said, very quietly, so as not to wake little Uriah:

"The herds have not come through."

I stood there blinking at it.

"The western herds," said the Castellan. "Aelune's. They come through the Orselle gate every year on the first frost after midwinter. Twenty winters. I have them in my ledger. They are always on time." It paused. "They were due at four. They are standing at the Orselle arch. I can feel them on the far side. Forty-one of them. Waiting." It paused again. "They will not come in."

"Have they asked?"

"Yes," said the Castellan. "And I have said yes. And the gate is open. And they will not come in." Its blank metal face turned toward the window, toward the west, toward a town on the coast a hundred miles away. "I do not understand it. I would like you to go and ask them why. They will speak to you. You carry the seeds."

* * *

The western herds have wintered in Lyradon every year since the war.

My father arranged it. During the war the unicorns cleansed the wells that Surtr's armies poisoned, and led refugees through forests where no soldier could follow, and sheltered children in their valleys. They lost a great many of their own doing it. And afterward, when the herds came out of the western woods thin and scarred and few, Queen Mirelle offered them the lower valleys of Lyradon for the winters, where the orchards are, and the frost comes late, and the grass under the apple trees stays green until the new year.

So every winter, on the first frost after midwinter, the western herds come down out of their forests to Orselle on the coast. They cross through the gate on the white-stone square at the top of the harbor steps, through the lower hall at Greykeep, and out through the Lyradon arch into the orchards. And every spring they go home the same way. Queen Mirelle has planted a whole row of apple trees for them that nobody else is allowed to pick. Grandpa made the gate on the orchard wall that they use, so it opens with a push of a nose.

Twenty winters. Never late.

I went down to the lower hall in my coat. Eleanor was already there, in her coat over her nightgown, with her spectacles and her chisel case and her glass. The Castellan had woken her too.

"I've been through every line on that plate twice since the autumn," she said, before I could say anything. "I cut the locked-name line into it myself. With Wynn holding the paste. It's sound. It's sound, Garrick."

"I know," I said. "Let's go and ask."

* * *

Orselle at dawn in winter is very beautiful.

It's a town of white stone, built all up the side of a steep hill over a deep harbor, with the houses stacked on top of one another like steps and every roof the same pale red. The gate stands at the very top, in a square paved with white stone, with a fountain in the middle and the lamp-seller's stall in one corner, shuttered at that hour. Below the square, the harbor steps go down and down and down, three hundred of them, to the quays and the glassmakers' row and the water.

That morning there was frost on everything. The white stone was whiter. The fountain had a skin of ice. And standing in the square, in a long loose half-circle, facing the shining arch of the gate, were the unicorns.

Forty-one of them. I counted.

I'd never seen so many together. I'd only ever seen two or three at a time, coming through the lower hall in the dark on their way to Lyradon, walking quickly and quietly with their heads down, the way you'd walk through someone else's house at night. Out here in the square, in the cold gray light, they were enormous. Taller than any horse. Slender and long-legged and very still, in every color of gray and white and silver, like a herd made out of fog and frost. Their breath smoked. Their horns caught the first light, long and spiraled and pale.

Some of them were very old. A few were very young. There were foals among the legs of the mares, pressed close, shivering.

And not one of them would go near the gate.

They stood twenty paces back from it, in a half-circle, with their heads high and their ears forward. The arch shone in front of them, open, the way a gate shines when both sides have asked. I could see the lower hall through it, the lamps and the arches and the Castellan standing patiently on the other side, waiting.

And the unicorns looked at it as if it were a well that someone had poisoned.

* * *

Aelune came out of the half-circle to meet us.

I knew her at once. Everybody in my family knows her, from my father's stories. She was the first of the unicorns to come to Greykeep in the war. The color of the sky just before dawn, pale gray going to white at the mane, with a long, smooth, spiraled horn like a twist of moonlight. And on her left shoulder, a long pale scar, very old now, where something with claws had caught her the year before Varrick fell.

She stopped in front of Eleanor and me and looked at us for a long moment with her dark eyes.

"Garrick Grey," she said.

Her voice is low and clear, and it surprises you every time, because she doesn't move her mouth. It just comes, the way warmth comes from a fire.

"Aelune," I said. "Of the western herds. The Castellan says you won't come in. It sent me to ask why."

"It is right to ask," said Aelune. "It has always been a good door. Twenty winters. We have never been afraid of it." She turned her head and looked at the shining arch. "We are afraid of it now."

"Why?"

"Because it is poisoned," said Aelune.

Beside me, Eleanor made a small sound.

"It isn't," she said. "I'm sorry. It isn't. I've read every line of that plate. I cut half of them myself. The closing mark is mine. The name-knot is mine. The locked-name line is mine. There's nothing on it that isn't mine." She swallowed. "I'd know. I'd know."

Aelune looked at her. Not unkindly.

"You are Eleanor," she said. "Who built the city. Who writes the doors."

"Yes."

"Then you would know what is on it," said Aelune. "We do not see what is on it. We see what is underneath."

* * *

I'd never really understood about unicorns until that morning.

Everybody knows they can cleanse water. My father tells the story of the poisoned wells every midwinter. How the unicorns came down to the wells that Surtr's armies had fouled, and lowered their horns into the water, and the water came clean. What I'd never understood was how. I thought it was like Aurelia's healing. Something warm going in, making things better.

It isn't. Aelune explained it to me on the white stone of the square, with the frost on her mane.

"We do not make it clean," she said. "We see. That is all a horn is. A way of seeing. We see what is wrong in the water, the thing that should not be there, the thing hiding under the clear. And once we have seen it, it cannot hide anymore. It comes up. And then it can be taken out." She lowered her head a little, so that the long horn caught the light. "Poison wants to be unseen. That is what poison is. Something that hides in a thing that looks clean, and waits. We look at it. That is all. It cannot bear to be looked at."

"And you can see it in the gate," I said.

"Under the gate," said Aelune. "Under the writing. Under the good woman's marks." She turned her head toward the shining arch. "It is like oil under ice. Dark. Spreading. Very thin. Waiting." Her nostrils flared. "And cold. So cold. Like a chain left out in the snow."

Behind her, in the half-circle, one of the foals made a small frightened sound and pressed itself against its mother's legs.

I felt Eleanor go very still beside me.

"Show me," she said.

Her voice wasn't quite steady.

"Please," she added. "Will you show me? I can't see it. I've looked and looked, and I can't see it. If it's there, I need to see it. It's my door."

Aelune looked at her for a long moment.

"You asked," she said. "Yes."

* * *

She walked to the gate alone.

It was the bravest thing I've ever seen an animal do, and I've seen Fenrir face a goddess on a dark stair. Every line of her body said she didn't want to. Her ears were flat. Her tail was clamped. The frost on her mane trembled. Behind her, forty unicorns stood absolutely still and watched her go, and the oldest of them, a great slate-dark stallion with a broken horn, made a low sound in his chest like a warning.

She walked up to the shining arch until she was close enough to touch it.

The gate plate is set into the right-hand pillar of the arch, at about the height of a man's chest. A square of dark stone, a hand and a half across, salt-crusted at the edges from the sea wind, with Eleanor's ward-writing cut into it in fine pale lines. Her closing mark, held, the right way around. Her name-knot. And the new locked-name line underneath, cut in the autumn, still sharp and fresh.

Aelune looked at it for a long time.

Then she turned her head and looked at Eleanor.

"May I touch your door?" she said.

"Yes," said Eleanor. "Please."

And Aelune lowered her long pale horn, very slowly, and touched the tip of it to the center of the plate.

* * *

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the frost on the plate went black.

Not all at once. It started at the point of the horn and spread outward in a slow ring, like ink dropped into water. The thin white rime that had grown on the stone in the night went gray, then dark, then black as soot, in a widening circle. And under it, through it, the plate began to show something.

Lines.

Not Eleanor's lines. Hers were still there, fine and pale and clean, sitting on the surface of the stone exactly where she'd cut them. But under them, in the stone itself, as if the stone had gone clear like water and you were looking down into it, there were others. Thin. Black. Glinting, very faintly, like wet iron. Crawling back and forth under Eleanor's marks in tight close rows, curling around every one of her letters and under every line and through the middle of her name-knot, like roots growing under a garden path.

Writing. Spiked and narrow and closed in on itself, every letter shaped like a fist.

The air in the square went cold. Not winter cold. The other kind. I felt it go down my back like a hand.

Aelune lifted her horn.

The black writing didn't fade. It stayed. Lying under Eleanor's marks in the stone, dark and crawling and plain as day, now that something had looked at it.

It cannot bear to be looked at.

* * *

Eleanor didn't say anything for a long time.

She went up to the plate. She knelt down on the frosted white stone in front of it, in her coat over her nightgown, and put her glass to her eye, and looked. Very close. So close her nose nearly touched the stone. Her lips were moving, the way they always do when she reads a plate.

"That isn't mine," she said at last. Very quietly.

"No," said Aelune.

"It's under mine. It's under it. Somebody cut this first. Before I cut the locked-name line. Before the audit." She moved the glass along the rows of black writing. "No. Not cut. It's not cut. It's..." She stopped. "It's grown. It's in the stone. Like a stain that's soaked in." She took the glass away from her eye. Her face was white. "I'd never have seen it. Not in a hundred years. I read this plate, Garrick. Twice. In the autumn. With Wynn. With the Castellan's hand on the arch. It was under my eye the whole time."

"Whose is it?"

"I don't know." She said it like someone admitting to something shameful. "I don't know the hand. It isn't any writing I've ever learned. It isn't Kethran script, not the ordinary kind. Iselle's taught me some of that." She looked at it again. "It's older. And it's angry. Look at the letters. Every one of them is closed."

* * *

It was Kip Marrow who told us how it got there.

He came up the harbor steps at seven, two at a time, sandy-haired and sunburnt even in winter, with a porter's strap over his shoulder and a loaf of bread in his hand for the unicorns. He's been coming to the square every morning since the autumn, since the day the gate shut on him and Aurelia took his brand away and he got his name back. He says he likes to see the gate open and know it's letting him through. He works for Master Avel the glassmaker still, carrying crates, but he's made himself the gate's keeper too, without anybody asking. He sweeps the square. He scrapes the salt off the plate. He feeds the unicorns when they come through.

He stopped at the top of the steps and stared at the plate. At the black writing crawling under Eleanor's marks. At the frost gone to soot.

And all the color went out of his face.

"I know that," he said.

Everyone turned.

"I know that. I've seen it." Kip walked forward slowly, as if he were walking toward something that might bite. "Not like that. Not black. But I've... I've felt it." He stopped beside Eleanor and looked down at the plate. His hand went to his wrist, to the place where the brand had been. "When I was Porter. Before. When I had the... the link."

"Kip," I said. "What did you do?"

"I wiped it," said Kip.

He said it very quietly.

"Every week," he said. "For three years. A man off one of the grain ships gave me a bottle. Little black bottle. And a cloth. And he told me to come up here on the last night of every week, after the lamp-seller had gone home, and wet the cloth from the bottle, and wipe the plate. Just wipe it. Like I was cleaning the salt off." He swallowed. "And I did. Every week. Three years. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know anything. I didn't have a name. I was Porter, and Porter did what he was told." He looked at the black writing. "It smelled of nothing. The stuff in the bottle. Nothing at all. And it was always cold. Colder than it should've been. Even in summer."

Nobody said anything.

"I thought it was polish," said Kip. His voice cracked. "I thought I was cleaning it. I used to think it was the one nice thing they had me do. Making the gate shine."

* * *

Aelune turned her head and looked at him.

Then she walked toward him across the frosted square. Slowly. Ears forward now, not back. Kip stood very still. He was shaking. I don't think he knew whether she was going to touch him or turn away from him, and I don't think he knew which would be worse.

She stopped in front of him and lowered her head.

"Your wrist," she said. "May I?"

Kip looked at her. Then, very slowly, he held out his arm, and pushed back his sleeve.

The place where the brand had been was pale and smooth now. Aurelia had taken it in the autumn. There was nothing to see. But Aelune lowered her long horn and touched it, very gently, to the inside of his wrist.

Kip gasped.

Something came up out of his skin. I saw it. A tiny thread of black, thin as a hair, curling up out of the place where the link had been burned, like the last wisp of smoke from a pinched-out candle. It hung in the cold air for a moment. Then it simply went away. As if it couldn't bear to be looked at either.

"There," said Aelune. "That was the last of it. It was very small. It was hiding." She lifted her head. "It is gone now."

Kip stared at his wrist. Then at her. And then, to everyone's surprise including his own, he put both arms around the unicorn's long pale neck and held on, and cried into her frosted mane like a little boy, in the middle of the white-stone square at the top of Orselle, with forty unicorns and Eleanor and me and the lamp-seller, just opening her shutters, all watching.

Aelune let him. She stood very still with her head lowered and let him hold on as long as he liked.

"You did not know," she said. "Not knowing is not the same as doing. You have been feeding us bread every winter. You did not know. It is gone now."

* * *

The herds didn't go through the gate. Of course they didn't. Eleanor wouldn't have let them if they'd wanted to.

So I folded them.

I asked first. Aelune went back to the half-circle and spoke to the herd, very low, in whatever language unicorns use among themselves, and the old slate stallion with the broken horn objected for a long time, and in the end it was the foals who decided. The smallest of them walked out of the herd on its shaking legs and came and stood in front of me and looked up at me, and Aelune said, "She says your door feels like a road. She says she can feel the ground under it." So I opened one, wide and high and flat, from the white-stone square at Orselle straight to the bottom of Queen Mirelle's orchard in Lyradon, where the frost comes late and the grass stays green under the apple trees.

They went through one at a time. Forty-one of them. The foals first, with their mothers. Then the old ones. And last of all, Aelune, who stopped in the middle of the fold, with one hoof on the white stone of Orselle and one on the green grass of Lyradon, and turned her head and looked back at Eleanor.

Eleanor was still kneeling in front of the plate with her glass. She hadn't moved.

"You will take it out," said Aelune. It wasn't a question.

"Every line," said Eleanor, without looking around. "By hand. If it takes me all winter."

"Good," said Aelune. "Then in the spring, we will come home through your door again."

And she went through, and I closed the fold behind her.

* * *

I stayed with Eleanor all that day, in the frost, in the square. Kip brought us bread and hot soup from the harbor and wouldn't take any money. The lamp-seller brought us a brazier. Eleanor closed the Orselle gate from both sides, the first gate she'd closed in twenty years, and sent word to the Castellan, and sat in front of the plate with her glass and her chisel and her little lamp and didn't get up.

At sunset she finally sat back on her heels.

"It goes all the way down," she said.

"What does?"

"The writing. It's not just on the surface. It's in the stone all the way through. Like roots." She took her spectacles off and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Three years of somebody's cold black bottle. It's soaked right into the plate. Into the arch. Maybe into the ground under the square." She put her spectacles back on. "I'm going to have to take it out a letter at a time. And I need to know whose hand it is. Before I start. Because if I don't know what it says, I don't know what it does. And if I don't know what it does..."

She didn't finish.

She didn't have to. Thirty other gates. Thirty other plates. Thirty other places where somebody with a cold black bottle might have knelt down on the last night of every week and wiped.

"I'll ask Iselle," I said. "She's been reading Kethran since she was four."

"Ask her," said Eleanor. "And ask the Castellan to come. And Aelune, in the spring." She looked at the black writing in the plate for a long moment. "And ask your father whether the unicorns would mind very much walking every gate in Avarra with me, one at a time, this winter. Just to look."

She bent back over the plate.

"Because I can't see it," she said quietly. "And they can."