Chapter 72: Mary and Melody

Wynn came back on Thursday, the way he'd said he would.

He came through the Lyradon arch at noon, with his pack on his back and his ears very red, and stopped in the lower hall in front of the Castellan, which said "Wynn Harlow. Yes. You may," the way it always does. And then Faelan, who had been sitting on the bottom step of the lower-hall stair since eleven with his ledger on his knees, stood up and said, very formally, "What is your favorite thing?"

Wynn looked at him for a long moment.

"Peppermints," he said. "And when Eleanor nods."

Faelan wrote it down. Wynn went up to the drafting room. And I went and found him there an hour later and said I was sorry to his face, properly, the whole thing, and he said "It's all right" again, and went pink, and we didn't talk about it any more. I liked him. I still do. I want that written down too.

But Eleanor was still frightened.

She didn't say so. She came down for her egg every morning again, and ate it standing up by the window, and drank her tea too hot. But I'd see her sometimes, in the afternoons, standing in the lower hall in front of the six arches with her hand flat on one of the plates and her eyes shut. Listening. The way I'd listened inside the Orselle fold. Feeling for that long cold leaning on the far side.

"A door with two faces," she said to me once, on the stairs. "Twenty years, Garrick. And I never thought of it." She shook her head. "I built every gate in Avarra, and I don't know how to stop somebody reading them backward."

It was Mary who answered her. At breakfast. Without looking up from her book.

"The old doors had the same trouble," said Mary.

* * *

Everybody at the scrubbed table stopped eating.

I don't think I'd ever heard Mary talk about the old doors. Not once. Not in my whole life. Mary doesn't talk about the empty years. None of us know very much about them. We know she and Melody were the last two attendants left in Greykeep when my father came. We know they kept the deed and the keys. We know there were three onions in the pantry and half a sack of oats and a jar nobody wanted to open. We know Melody kicked one of Lord Harwick's men into a thornbush on the day my father arrived, because my father tells that story every midwinter and Melody always pretends to be embarrassed and isn't.

That's all. That's all anyone knows. Mary keeps records of everything that has ever happened in Greykeep. But she's never once, in my hearing, said a word about the years before my father.

Eleanor put down her egg.

"What old doors?" she said.

Mary turned a page in her book.

"Greykeep's," she said. "Before the war. Before the fall. Before your gates." She dipped her pen. "Greykeep had doors that let people through from far away. Not like yours. Older. Smaller. Seven of them, in the lower hall, before it was a hall, when it was still the cistern." She wrote something. "They were read from the far side too. The keepers wrote it down."

Melody, beside her, had stopped eating her porridge. She put her spoon down very carefully.

"Mary," she said.

"She needs to know, Mel."

"I know." Melody looked at her. "I'm just saying your name."

Mary looked up from the book at last. At her wife. Something passed between them that I didn't understand and wasn't meant to.

Then Mary closed her book and looked across the table at Eleanor.

"Come up after breakfast," she said. "Both of you. You too, Garrick. I'll show you the keepers' books."

* * *

Mary and Melody's rooms are on the second floor of the old keep, above the south solar, at the end of a short passage with a window seat in it. I'd been in them a hundred times. Everybody has. Mary's office is the first room, with her desk under the window and Caitlin's little desk beside it, and shelves up to the ceiling, and every one of them full of books. Nine black Council books. Twenty-three blue household books, one for every year since my father came. Ledgers and letter-boxes and bundles of papers tied with string.

I'd thought that was everything.

It wasn't.

Mary went through the office and into the bedroom beyond it, where I'd never been. It was very small and very neat. A bed with a patchwork quilt. A washstand. A pair of red dwarf boots by the door, which Melody wears to breakfast and to bed and, as far as anyone knows, everywhere else. And at the foot of the bed, a trunk.

An old trunk. Very old. Dark wood, bound with iron, with the paint worn off the lid where hands had rubbed it for years. Mary knelt down in front of it and took a key from a ribbon around her neck. Not the iron key ring. A small brass one, worn smooth.

"Nobody's seen inside this but Mel and me," she said, without looking around. "Not your father. Not Aurelia." She turned the key. "I'm not hiding anything. It's just ours."

She lifted the lid.

* * *

There were books inside. Not many. A dozen, maybe. Old ones, much older than anything on the shelves in the office. Bound in leather gone brown and soft as cloth, with the corners worn soft and the spines cracked. Some had brass clasps. One was tied shut with a bit of faded red ribbon. They smelled of dust and old ink and, very faintly, of the cistern under the great hall.

And on top of them, a much newer one. Plain gray cloth, thin, with a pencil tied to it on a string.

Mary picked up the gray book first.

She held it for a moment in both hands without opening it. Then she held it out to Melody, not to us.

"You tell it," she said. "You were always better at the telling. I only write it down."

Melody took the gray book. She sat down on the end of the bed, in her nightgown and her red boots, because she'd come straight up from breakfast, and opened the book on her knees. And her long rabbit's ears, which usually stand straight up, went slowly down until they lay flat along her hair.

"This is the empty book," she said.

* * *

"We were fourteen," said Melody. "When the last steward died. Both of us. Mary was a few months older. She'd tell you that herself."

"I would," said Mary.

"There were eleven of us then. Attendants. Girls and boys, mostly, and old Hollen who did the stables, and Ardith, the last steward, who'd been keeping Greykeep since before any of us were born." Melody turned a page. "The castle was already empty. The kings were long gone. The court was gone. The war was everywhere. There was nobody left to serve. Just the deed, and the keys, and the doors, and Ardith saying every morning that somebody would come back one day and it'd better be ready when they did."

She ran her finger down the page.

"And then Ardith died. In the winter. In her chair, by the gatehouse fire. And the others started to go. One at a time. Some went home, if they had a home. Some went to the war. Some just went in the night and didn't say. Some were driven off by Harwick's men, near the end." She turned another page. "And then it was the two of us."

"How long?" said Eleanor quietly.

Melody looked at Mary.

"Six years," said Mary. "Four months. Eleven days."

Nobody said anything.

"Mary wrote it all down," said Melody. She held up the gray book. "Every day. From the day Ardith died to the day your father came up the road. The first page is just her name." She turned back to it and showed us. In a much younger Mary's handwriting, rounder and less sure, but already Mary's: Ardith. Died in her chair. We sat with her.

And under it, the next day: Buried Ardith by the oldest apple tree. Waited.

And the next: Waited. Weather fair.

* * *

Melody turned the pages slowly. I read them over her shoulder. Eleanor read them over the other one.

Waited. Rain.

Waited. Mel mended the gatehouse roof. Fell off. Not hurt.

Waited. Nine onions left.

Lord Harwick's steward came. Asked for the deed. Said no. Mel kicked him.

Waited. Weather fair.

Page after page. Year after year. Two girls, alone in a castle built for five hundred, with a deed and a ring of keys and a pantry going empty, waiting for somebody who had never been promised to come.

"Why?" I said. I didn't mean to. It just came out. "Why did you stay?"

Melody looked up at me.

"Because Ardith said someone would come," she said simply. "And somebody had to keep the doors."

* * *

"That's what I want to show you," said Mary.

She leaned over the trunk and lifted out one of the old books. The one tied with the faded red ribbon. She untied it, very carefully, and opened it on the lid of the trunk where we could all see.

It was a ledger. Old. Very old. The handwriting in it changed every few dozen pages, different hands, different inks, going back and back. The first pages were so faded you could hardly read them.

"The keepers' book," said Mary. "Greykeep's. Every steward wrote in it. Ardith was the last. It goes back nearly three hundred years." She turned the pages. "It's mostly accounts. Grain. Candles. Who was ill. But here and there..." She stopped at a page and put her finger on it. "Here and there they wrote about the doors."

Eleanor bent over the page with her glass.

I read it with her. Old handwriting, cramped and brown.

The seventh door was read again from the far side in the night. We felt it. The keeper of that door had gone to the harvest and it stood empty three days. A door that stands empty is a quiet door. A quiet door can be read.

Eleanor went very still.

Mary turned the page.

Remedy, as my mother taught me and hers taught her. No door to stand empty. Each door to have its keeper, who lives beside it and speaks to it every morning and every night. A kept door is never quiet. A door that is spoken to cannot be read from the far side, for the speaking fills it as water fills a cup, and there is no room in it for a stranger to lean.

And under that, in a different hand, later, smaller:

Say good morning to your door.

* * *

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Eleanor read it three times. I watched her lips move. Then she took her glass away from her eye and sat back on her heels on the floor of Mary and Melody's small neat bedroom, and looked at Mary.

"How long have you known this?" she said.

"Since I was nine," said Mary. "Ardith taught us both. She made us read the keepers' book out loud, every winter, start to finish. It took weeks." She closed the ledger. "And we did it. When it was just the two of us. Every morning. Every night. Every door in Greykeep. We walked the whole castle, both of us, and said good morning to every door, and good night." She looked at Melody. "Mel said it to the ones that stuck. Then she kicked them."

"They like it," said Melody. "Being kicked. When they're sticking. It's a sort of good morning too."

"Every door?" said Eleanor.

"Every one," said Mary. "Four hundred and twelve. Six years. Twice a day." She almost smiled. "And nobody ever got in. Lord Harwick's men tried. Every month, near the end. They tried the postern. They tried the cellar doors. They tried picking the lock on the old cistern gate with a lockpick from Orselle." She shook her head. "Not one of them ever opened. Not one."

"Because you were living beside them," said Eleanor slowly.

"Because we said good morning," said Mary.

* * *

Eleanor didn't say anything for a while.

Then she put her face in her hands and laughed. Not unhappily. The short cracked startled laugh from the drafting room, the one she'd forgotten she still had.

"Twenty years," she said through her fingers. "Twenty years I've been cutting the cleverest wards I know into the hardest stone I can find. Closing marks and name-knots and locked-name lines. Every one of them read twice, with my lips moving." She took her hands away. "And the answer was in a trunk at the end of Mary's bed the whole time. Say good morning to your door."

"You never asked," said Mary.

"No," said Eleanor. "I never did." She looked at the ledger. "I'm asking now."

* * *

So that's what we did.

It took the rest of the winter, and I think it will take the rest of my life, because it's the kind of thing that never really finishes. But Eleanor added a fourth thing to her three. Unicorns twice a year. Oath-script on every plate. More apprentices, not fewer. And now a keeper for every gate.

Not a guard. Not a soldier. A keeper. Someone who lives beside it, and says good morning to it, and good night.

Some of the gates already had one. They just didn't know it.

Kip Marrow at Orselle, who'd been sweeping the square every morning since the autumn. When Eleanor went and asked him, he said he'd been saying good morning to the gate since the day it shut on him, because it seemed rude not to, and he'd felt silly doing it, and could he please keep doing it now that it was official.

Corrie Bell at the bakery in Thistlemoor, whose gate is in her back room, who said she'd talk to it while the bread proved if Eleanor thought it would help. And Oskar, who's six, who said he'd say good night to it, because he's always up for water anyway.

The shepherds at the sheep-fold in the far east, who'd taken their hats off to it every morning for years, just because. Hobb Kitto at Westmere, in his gray coat, who already said evening to everything that would stand still for it. A grandmother in Lyradon who lived across the square from the market gate and had been leaving a crust on its step every night since it was cut, for luck.

Thirty-one gates. Thirty-one keepers, by the end of winter. Mary wrote every one of their names down, in a new book, with a gray cloth cover just like the empty book. And Melody went around to every single one of them, with Eleanor, and showed them how to do it properly. How to put your hand flat on the plate. How to say good morning like you mean it.

And what to do when it sticks.

I went with them to Orselle for that one. Melody stood in the white-stone square in her red dwarf boots, with Kip beside her looking very serious and holding his broom like a spear, and explained it to him the way you'd explain bread to someone who'd never baked.

"You put your hand on it," she said. "Flat. Like this. And you say good morning. Out loud. Not in your head. Doors can't hear in your head." She patted the plate. "And if it's slow to open, or it sounds wrong, or it's sulking, you don't hit it. You don't shout at it. You ask it what's the matter. And then, if it still won't, you kick it." She demonstrated, very gently, on the pillar, with the toe of one red boot. "Just there. Low down. Not hard. The way you'd nudge a friend who's fallen asleep at the table."

Kip looked at the pillar. Then at her boots.

"Does it work?" he said.

"Six years," said Melody. "Four hundred and twelve doors. Not one of them ever opened for anyone they didn't want to." She patted the plate again. "Good morning, Orselle."

And Kip, very red, put his hand flat on the plate beside hers, and said it too.

* * *

And the cold leaning stopped.

Not all at once. But Eleanor stood in the lower hall every afternoon that winter, with her hand on the plates and her eyes shut, listening. And one by one, as each gate got its keeper, she stopped feeling it. The far side went quiet. Not empty. Full. The way a room is full when someone you love is in it, even if they're asleep.

The Castellan noticed too. It said so, in its own way. In its ledger, at the end of the winter, under the last of the thirty-one names, it wrote in its square metal hand:

All doors kept. None quiet.

* * *

On the last page of the empty book, the one in the gray cloth with the pencil on a string, there are only two entries.

I saw them, that morning in Mary and Melody's bedroom, when Melody turned to the end before she closed it. The second-to-last entry is the same as nearly all the others.

Waited. Weather fair.

And the last one, in Mary's round young hand, with the pencil pressed so hard it nearly went through the paper:

He came. Storm and winter, like she said. Asked if we were safe before he asked about the deed. Mel kicked a man into a thornbush. We are not waiting anymore.

Melody closed the book. She held it on her knees for a moment, with her long ears lying flat. Then she gave it back to Mary.

Mary put it back in the trunk, on top of the keepers' books, where it had been. And locked it. And put the little brass key back on its ribbon around her neck.

And then she went back into her office, and sat down at her desk under the window, and opened her black book, and dipped her pen, and wrote.

I saw what she wrote, because she let me.

Showed Eleanor the keepers' book. Say good morning to your door.

Weather fair.