Chapter 70: Eleanor's Fear

Eleanor didn't come down to breakfast for three days after Orselle.

That had never happened. In my whole life. Eleanor Stonehand comes down to the little kitchen at half past six every morning, in her coat, with her spectacles on and her hair the color of iron filings pinned up any old way, and eats one boiled egg and two slices of bread standing up by the window, and drinks her tea too hot, and goes back up to her drafting room above the chapel before anyone else is properly awake. Helena sets her egg on to boil at twenty past six without being asked. She's done it for twenty years.

For three mornings the egg went cold in its cup on the windowsill.

On the fourth morning Helena took it up herself, on a tray, with the tea, and came back down ten minutes later with the tray still full, and put it on the scrubbed table in front of me.

"She asked for you," said Helena. "Take this up. Make her eat the egg." She looked at me. "And Garrick. Whatever she says to you up there. Don't try to fix it."

* * *

Eleanor's drafting room is at the top of a narrow stair behind the chapel, a long low room under the roof with three dormer windows looking out over Havenreach. It's the room where the city was drawn. Every street, every square, every bridge and canal and drain, every one of the thirty-one gates. All of it started here, on the long drafting table under the middle window, on paper held flat with brass weights shaped like little animals that Grandpa made her the first year.

It smells of ink and cut stone and peppermints. There are rolls of paper everywhere, in racks and on shelves and leaning in corners. There are bits of stone on every windowsill, sample pieces, each with a line or two of ward-writing cut into it for practice. There's a stove that's never quite warm enough, and a chair by it that she's never once been seen to sit in.

She was sitting in it when I came in.

She had her coat on, and her spectacles pushed up into her hair, and her hands folded in her lap, and she was looking at the stove. On the drafting table behind her, held flat by every brass animal she owned, was the Long Plan. The master sheet. All thirty-one gates in their great ring, each one joined by its fine line to the dark hub in the middle, and every ward sentence and closing mark written in the margins in her tiny hand. The one Teo copied.

"Garrick," she said, without looking around. "Thank you for coming up."

"Helena sent an egg."

"Helena always sends an egg." She almost smiled. "Put it on the table. I'll eat it in a minute." She didn't move. "Sit down. Please. I need to tell somebody, and I can't tell your father yet, because he'll try to make me feel better. And I don't want to feel better. I want to think."

I put the tray on the end of the drafting table, carefully, so as not to touch the Long Plan. And I sat down on a stool by the stove. And I didn't say anything.

It was very difficult.

* * *

"Three years," said Eleanor at last.

I waited.

"Kip wiped that plate every week for three years," she said. "Three years. That's what everyone's been saying. Three years of names, three years of a cold black bottle, three years under my eye." She looked at the stove. "Do you know when Teo copied the Long Plan?"

"This summer."

"This summer. Six nights. In my archive." She turned her head at last and looked at me. "This summer, Garrick. And Kip started wiping that plate three years ago."

I didn't understand, at first.

Then I did.

"They didn't learn it from the copy," I said slowly.

"No." Eleanor's hands tightened in her lap. "Whoever wrote that oath into the Orselle plate didn't need the copy. They'd already learned it. Three years ago. More. Long enough before that to design an oath that curls under every single letter of my Orselle plate, every stroke, every turn, every knot, so close that I read it twice with my own glass and never saw it." She took a breath. "You don't do that from a copy. You don't do it from a drawing. You do it from knowing. From having stood in front of that plate, and read it, line by line, with your lips moving, until you knew it as well as I do."

She looked back at the stove.

"Whoever did this knew my gates as well as I do," she said. "And there aren't very many people in the world who do."

* * *

She got up then, finally, and went to the drafting table. She stood looking down at the Long Plan with her hands flat on either side of it, the way you'd stand over the bed of somebody very ill.

"There are two kinds of people who could," she said. "That's what I've been sitting here working out, for three days. Only two."

"Who?"

"The first," said Eleanor, "is whoever's on the other side of the door."

She put one finger on the Thistlemoor gate, at the top of the ring. The bakery.

"The Lockwarden's key," she said. "My closing mark, cut the right way around. My name-knot for the bow. Made by somebody who'd read every plate I ever cut, from the other side. From inside the doors. Looking out." She moved her finger around the ring, slowly, from gate to gate. "A gate's a door with two handles. Both sides must ask. That was the whole idea. The whole thing I built. Nothing comes through unless both sides say yes." Her finger stopped. "But a door with two handles has two faces, Garrick. And anyone standing on the far side, with their hand on the far handle, can read the near side. Backward. Patiently. For years. Every time it opens." She took her finger away. "I never thought of that. Twenty years. I never once thought of that."

"And the second kind?"

Eleanor didn't answer for a long time.

When she did, she didn't look at me. She looked at the Long Plan.

"The ones I taught," she said.

* * *

I'd known she would say it. I think I'd known since the square at Orselle, when she put her face in her hands. But hearing it was different.

"Fourteen," said Eleanor. "In twenty years. Fourteen apprentices. I took my first the year after the stream, a girl from Lyradon called Bettrys with the steadiest hand I've ever seen. She cuts plates for the river towns now. I took my last twelve years ago." She didn't say his name. She didn't have to. "Every one of them stood in front of my plates for years. Every one of them read my hand until they could read it in their sleep. I taught them to. I taught them to read every line twice, with their lips moving, because that's how you catch mistakes." She pressed her lips together. "Every one of them knows my gates as well as I do. That's what I made them for."

"Eleanor..."

"I'm not accusing anyone." She said it sharply. Then, more quietly: "I'm not. Do you understand? I've been sitting in that chair for three days, not accusing anyone. It's the hardest thing I've ever done." She turned around at last and looked at me. Her eyes were very tired behind her spectacles. "Because I know what I'd become, if I started. I'd go down the list. Bettrys. Calum. Old Hedge, who's nearly blind now. Twins from Concordia who both married bakers. All fourteen. And I'd look at each one and think, was it you? And I'd watch them. I'd read their letters. I'd check their cuts behind their backs. I'd make them prove it wasn't them." Her voice dropped. "And that's what he does. That's all he does. He holds people under suspicion until they're so tired of being watched that they'll do anything to make it stop. I won't. I won't do it to my own people. I won't."

She sat down on the edge of the drafting table, very suddenly, as if her legs had given out.

"But somebody did this," she said. "Somebody knew my gates. And I'm frightened, Garrick. I've never been frightened of my own work before. Not once. I'm frightened of it now."

* * *

I didn't say anything for a while. I thought about Ignatius on the north-tower stairs, with the toast and the blue shawl. Come and be useless with me.

So I didn't say it'll be all right, or it was probably the Lockwarden, or you can't blame yourself. I didn't make her a list.

I got up and went to the end of the drafting table and picked up Helena's tray, and brought it to her, and held it out.

"Eat the egg," I said. "Helena said."

Eleanor looked at the egg for a long moment. Then she laughed. Not much. A short, cracked, startled laugh, like somebody who's forgotten they still could. And she took the egg off the tray, and cracked it on the edge of the drafting table, and peeled it, and ate it standing up by the window, the way she always does.

"I'm not going to say it'll be all right," I said, while she ate.

"Good."

"I'm not going to say anything. I just wanted to tell you that I'm not."

"I know," said Eleanor, with her mouth full. "Ignatius has been teaching you. Your sister told me." She swallowed. "It's very annoying. You used to be much easier to argue with."

* * *

Then she asked me to do something.

"You feel the gates," she said. "From inside. You told me, on the audit. A fold someone's pinned open. Like a book held open at one page by a stone."

"Yes."

"When you're inside one. Can you feel who's read it?"

I thought about it. I'd never tried.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe. If I asked it."

"Would you try?" said Eleanor. "Orselle. Not to find out who. I don't want to know who. Not yet. Just to find out how. Whether it was from the far side, or the near one." She put her hands flat on the drafting table. "If it's the far side, then it's the Lockwarden, or somebody like him, and it's my doors that need mending. If it's the near side..."

She didn't finish.

* * *

So that afternoon I went to Orselle.

Kip was in the square, sweeping. He waved. The plate shone in the pale winter sun, Eleanor's new cuts sharp and clean, and the little line of oath-script at the bottom with the breathing gaps in it. Nothing held here.

I asked the gate. I put my hand flat on the right-hand pillar, the way the Castellan does, and I said, out loud, feeling foolish, "May I?" And the gate didn't say anything, because gates don't. But it was open, and both sides had asked, and I stepped into the shining arch, and stopped in the middle of it. In the fold. Between Orselle and the lower hall at Greykeep. Where it's very quiet and smells of nothing.

And I listened. The way Elenos listens. The way Damar listens to stone.

It took a long time.

But in the end, I felt them. Faint. Very faint. Like the marks a finger leaves on a windowpane, that you can only see when you breathe on the glass.

Readings.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. Every time anybody had ever stood in front of that plate and looked at it, really looked, the gate had kept a little of it, the way a book keeps a crease where it was held open. Most of them were nothing. A glance. A traveler, a child, a merchant checking the gate was lit. Kip, every morning, scraping off the salt, which felt like being swept.

And under those, two others.

* * *

The first was cold.

Very cold. And very long. It wasn't a reading so much as a leaning. As if somebody had stood on the far side of the door, inside the fold, pressed right up against the back of the plate, and read it backward, slowly, letter by letter, over years. Patient. Careful. I knew that cold. I'd felt it in the Castellan's chest, around the key. I'd felt it, a little, on the beach at Skellow.

The Lockwarden. Or somebody like him. Reading Eleanor's doors from the other side.

That was the one we'd expected.

The second wasn't cold at all.

It was on the near side. In the square. In front of the plate, where a person would stand. It wasn't long, like the cold one. It was lots of little readings, layered one over another, over a long time. Careful. Warm. Thorough. Every line read twice. I could almost feel the lips moving.

The way Eleanor reads.

The way Eleanor teaches everybody to read.

I stood in the middle of the fold for a long time, with my hand on nothing, feeling it. Trying to find anything else in it. A name. A shape. Anything.

There wasn't anything. Just somebody who'd been taught very well, standing in front of the Orselle plate many times, over a long time, reading it the way they'd been taught.

Which could have been any of the fourteen. Which could have been an apprentice on an ordinary audit, doing exactly what they were supposed to. Which could have been nothing at all.

I stepped out of the fold onto the white stone of the square. Kip looked up from his broom.

"All right?" he said.

"Yes," I said. I wasn't.

* * *

I told Eleanor that evening, in the drafting room. Both of them. The cold one and the warm one.

She listened without saying anything. When I finished, she was quiet for a very long time.

"Both," she said at last.

"Both. But the warm one could be anyone. Anyone you've taught. Doing their job."

"I know." She took her spectacles off and cleaned them on her sleeve, very slowly, the way she does when she's deciding something. "It could. That's the worst thing about it. It could be nothing. It could be Bettrys on the river-town audit, eight years ago. It could be Calum. It could be me. I read that plate twice in the autumn with my lips moving." She put her spectacles back on. "Or it could be somebody who learned my hand so well that they could teach it to a cold black bottle."

She looked at the Long Plan for a long time.

"I won't go down the list," she said. "I've decided. I'm not going to make fourteen people prove they didn't. That's his way, not mine." She took a breath. "But I'm going to do three things."

"What?"

She counted them off on her fingers, the way Mary does.

"One. Twice a year, every spring and every autumn, the unicorns walk every gate. Every one. With me. Aelune's already said yes." She folded down a finger. "Two. Every gate gets a line of oath-script on it, the way Orselle has, with the breathing gaps. Nothing held here. Iselle's going to teach me. And Wynn." She folded down another. "Three. I'm going to teach more people. Not fewer. More. I'm going to take two new apprentices in the spring, and two the spring after that. Because the answer to someone using what I taught isn't to stop teaching." She folded down the last finger and looked at her fist. Then she opened it again, on purpose, the way Iselle does. "It's to teach so many people, so well, that nobody can ever hide anything under my doors again without somebody noticing."

I looked at her for a long time.

"That's very brave," I said.

"It's very frightening," said Eleanor. "That's not the same thing. But your father always says it usually is, when it's worth doing."

* * *

My father came up the stair at nine, with a pot of tea and two cups, because Helena had sent him. He sat with Eleanor by the stove for an hour, and I don't know what they said, because I left. But when I passed the bottom of the chapel stair on my way to bed, I could hear her laughing.

And I passed the drafting-room door again at midnight, because I'd left my coat up there, and I stopped in the doorway without going in.

Eleanor was at the long drafting table, under the lamp, with her glass and a block of practice stone. And across the table from her, bent over Iselle's little black book of oath-script and a sheet of paper covered in careful, closed, fist-shaped letters, with ink on his cuffs and his lips moving as he read each line twice, was Wynn.

He'd come up at ten, he'd told Eleanor, to start learning. So he'd see it the next time.

As I watched, Eleanor reached across the table without looking up from her own work and put a peppermint down by his elbow. Wynn didn't look up either. He just took it, and put it in his mouth, and went on reading, with his lips moving.

I stood in the doorway for a moment. Then I went away quietly, without my coat.

I've thought about that a great deal since. The lamp, and the two of them bent over the table, and the peppermint, and his lips moving.

I liked him. I want to write that down again. I liked him very much.

* * *

Mary wrote it at breakfast, the next morning, while Eleanor ate her boiled egg standing up by the window.

Eleanor's fear: whoever did this knew her gates as well as she does. Learned before the copy. Two readings in the Orselle fold: one cold, from the far side; one warm, from the near side, as she teaches.

She will not go down the list.

Unicorns, spring and autumn. Oath-script on every plate: Nothing held here. Two new apprentices in spring. More, not fewer.

And under it, in Eleanor's own tiny hand, because she'd asked Mary for the pen and Mary had given it to her:

It's boring, and it's slow, and every bit of it matters.