Chapter 74: Bought Loyalties

"Gold," said Seraphina, "is the most honest metal there is."

She was sitting cross-legged on our bed at six in the morning, in her nightgown, with the Kethran coin in the palm of her hand. Mary had taken it out of her desk drawer the night before and given it to me without a word, the way she'd hand over a key. Little Uriah was asleep across the bottom of the bed with one foot in my ribs.

"Honest," I said.

"It forgets everything except the fire." She turned the coin over. Closed hand. Mirror. Her own face, small and gold and thoughtful. "Iron remembers the hammer. Glass remembers the breath. Gold only remembers what it was melted in. And it never stops wanting to go back." She closed her fingers around it. "Every coin poured in the same fire leans toward every other one. The way my flame leaned toward the stone on the north sands. Only gentler. Like cousins."

"You can follow it."

"I can follow it." She opened her hand. The coin was glowing, very faintly, the deep white-gold of her own flame, and the light of it wasn't still. It was leaning. East and a little south, toward the river country. "Twelve thousand cousins. All asking after each other." She looked up at me. "That's a lot of gold to be lonely."

Little Uriah sat up, still mostly asleep, looked at the glowing coin, and said, "Mine."

"No," said Seraphina. "Not even a little bit."

"No," agreed Uriah, very pleased with the word, and lay back down.

* * *

My father saw us off from the lower hall.

He didn't give us a speech. He gave us three things, which is how he does it when it matters.

"Ask," he said. "Every door. Every king. Don't walk in anywhere you haven't been let in."

"Yes."

"Don't shout at anybody for being poor."

"No."

"And find out how he knew." He put his hand on my shoulder. "That's the one I want. Not the gold. The knowing."

Helena put a packet of honey biscuits in my coat. Little Uriah stood on the stair with her, holding her apron, and said "Ma" and "Da" and "bird," which is most of his opinions about anything, and then "No," firmly, at the gate, as if he'd decided it was for the best.

The Castellan said, "Garrick Grey. Seraphina Grey. Yes. You may." And then, after a pause, which it almost never does: "Come back with the knowing."

* * *

Velden was first, because the coin leaned that way hardest.

I'd never been. It's a small kingdom on the south bank of the great river below Belleren, mostly orchards and water meadows and one long main road that runs down to the river and used to stop there. For six years, it had stopped there. Now it didn't.

The bridge was beautiful. I want to say that, because Corvin said it and he was right. Seven arches of pale river stone, low and wide, with a little stone seat cut into every pier so you could sit and watch the water. Carts were going over it. A boy was fishing off the third arch. Two old women had stopped in the middle with their market baskets and were talking, the way people talk on a bridge they're glad to have.

Seraphina stood at the end of it with the coin in her hand and her eyes half shut.

"It's everywhere," she said.

"In the bridge?"

"In the town." She opened her eyes. "It's not in a chest. It's spent. Every bit of it. It's in the masons' houses and the quarry and the bakery and the inn. It's in the smith's strongbox. There's a little of it in that boy's pocket." She nodded at the fisher on the third arch. "His father hauled stone. He got two coins for his name day."

We stood and watched the bridge for a while.

"It did good," said Seraphina. Quietly. As if she didn't want it to be true and was saying it anyway because it was.

"I know."

"I hate that."

"I know," I said. "So does Father. That's why he said not to shout."

* * *

We asked at the gate of the king's house, which is a large farmhouse with a wall around it, and were let in, and asked again at the door, and were let in again. King Osmund of Velden met us in his own kitchen. He was a broad, sunburnt man of about sixty with mud on his boots and a steward's ledger under his arm, and he looked at the two of us in his kitchen doorway, the son of the storm and the princess of fire, and his face went through several things very quickly and ended up somewhere near ashamed.

"I wondered when," he said.

"May we come in?" I said.

He blinked. Then he laughed, short and surprised. "You're already in."

"We're in your doorway," said Seraphina. "That's not the same."

King Osmund looked at her for a long moment.

"No," he said slowly. "No, I suppose it isn't. Yes. Come in. Sit down. There's tea, if my wife's left any."

* * *

He told us all of it. He didn't make us ask twice.

The chest had come in the autumn, at night, on a river barge, with a merchant who said he'd come from Orselle. Four thousand coins and the note. For your roads. He'd sat up with it for three nights. On the fourth morning, he'd gone down to the river and looked at the stumps of the old bridge, and at the ferry, and at the line of carts waiting to cross, and at a woman trying to get a cow into a boat. And he'd gone back up to the house and sent for the masons.

"I'd asked the Council," he said. "Six years ago. When it went down. They said next spring." He turned his teacup around on the table. "I asked again the next year. Next spring. And the year after that." He looked at me. "I'm not blaming your father. I know what's on that list. I know there were bigger things. Belleren's river wall. The dragons' grazing in the north. That plague in the hill towns. I know. But it's very hard to stand on a riverbank for six years being told next spring."

"I'm sorry," I said.

He looked surprised.

"I'm not saying it so you'll feel better," I said. "I'm saying it because it's true. Nobody should have had to wait six years for a bridge."

King Osmund was quiet for a while.

"I said something at the river fair," he said at last. "About Greykeep. About advice and bridges."

"We heard."

"I meant it when I said it." He rubbed his face. "I'm less sure now."

"Why?" said Seraphina.

He got up without answering, went to a dresser by the window, opened a drawer, and took out a letter. Black paper. Silver script. A careful common-tongue translation underneath. He laid it on the table between us.

"Because of this," he said. "It came a fortnight ago."

* * *

It was very short. It was very polite. It was the smallest thing in the world.

To His Majesty of Velden, with the warmest regard of a friend across the sea. We hear the bridge is finished and is very fine. We are glad. We wonder only whether Velden might find it convenient, this spring, not to send its chair to the Council at Greykeep. A small thing. Velden has so much to do at home. There is no need to answer.

No name. No seal. A closed hand drawn at the bottom in silver ink, so small you'd have missed it.

Seraphina read it twice. I watched the tea in her cup begin to steam harder.

"There it is," I said. "The second asking."

"It's nothing," said King Osmund. "That's what I keep telling myself. It's nothing. It's one chair out of forty. Velden's chair. A farmer-king who mends his own fences and says three words a session." He put his hands flat on the table. "And I've been sitting up with it every night for a fortnight, the way I sat up with the chest. Because I've spent his gold. Every coin. It's in my bridge. And he's never asked me for anything. And now he has. And it's so small." He looked at me. "How do you say no to something that small? When you've spent the gold?"

"You can say no," I said.

"Can I?"

"Yes."

He looked at me for a long moment. I think he wanted me to tell him it would cost him nothing. It might not be nothing. I didn't say that it would be.

"It's your chair," I said instead. "Not his. Not ours. Nobody gets to tell you whether to sit in it. Not him. Not my father either." I pushed the letter back across the table toward him. "But if you come, I think you should say what you said at the river fair. Out loud. In the Council. Six years for a bridge. They need to hear it. We need to hear it."

King Osmund looked down at the letter.

Then he folded it, very carefully, and put it in his coat.

"I'll bring this too," he said. "And read it out. And let the forty of them look at the bottom of it." He almost smiled. "Three words a session. I think I can manage a few more."

* * *

On the way out, at his gate, I asked him the thing my father wanted.

"The merchant," I said. "The one who brought the chest. Did he say how he knew about the bridge?"

King Osmund thought about it.

"He didn't need to say," he said. "He knew all of it. How long it had been down. What the ferryman charges. That I'd asked the Council three times." He frowned. "I remember that. He said three times. I remember thinking it was odd, because I'd only ever told the Council."

* * *

Tirrowmarch was the opposite.

The coin leaned north, up into the hills, and when we got there, it leaned straight at the king's chapel and stopped. Seraphina stood in the chapel door with the coin glowing in her hand and said, "It's all here. Every one. Nobody's touched it."

King Garran of Tirrowmarch was a thin, tired man about my father's age, with a patched coat and very good manners and no horse. He met us in his chapel because that's where he'd been sitting when we asked at the door. The chest was in front of the altar, under a white cloth, like something laid out for a funeral.

"I couldn't send it back," he said. "And I couldn't spend it. So I put it here." He looked at the cloth. "I thought the gods might tell me what to do with it. They haven't yet."

"You wrote to Queen Nerisse," I said. "About the lie."

He went red.

"I did," he said. "I'm sorry. That was badly done. I was frightened, and I wanted somebody else to be frightened with me." He folded his hands. "But I'd like to know. If you'll tell me. Is it true? Did Greykeep's Council vote to deceive the emperor?"

I could have said a great many things. I could have explained. I said the true one first.

"Yes."

King Garran closed his eyes.

"Thirty-four to six," I said. "My sister asked for it. Kethra had a stone that could find her anywhere in the world, and we made it find an empty rock in the sea instead. Her rule was that it had to be nowhere with a living soul on it. So nobody else would be hurt by it." I sat down on the bench across from him, so that I was lower than he was. "We lied to a stone to keep my sister in her own bed. I'd do it again. I'd tell you about it again, too."

He opened his eyes and looked at me for a long time.

"You'd tell me," he said slowly. "That's the difference, isn't it."

"I hope so."

"The note said for your roads," said King Garran. "I haven't got any roads. I've got one, and it's mostly mud. But I sold my horse last winter to buy seed, and somehow the man who brought that chest knew it. He stood in my yard and said how sorry he was about the horse." He looked at the cloth over the chest. "I've never told anybody about the horse. I was ashamed. I only put it in my letter to the Council. When I asked for seed."

Seraphina, by the door, went very still.

"Who brought it?" I said.

"A merchant. He said from Orselle. But he had salt-burned hands, like a sailor's, and he smelled of grain." King Garran frowned. "He said he'd come up from the coast. Off the grain ships."

* * *

He asked us to take the chest.

Not to Greykeep. He didn't want that either. He asked us to take it back down to the coast and leave it on the dock it had come from, with a note in his own hand. We said yes. He wrote it at the altar on the back of a hymn sheet.

No, thank you. I would rather have been asked.

Then he walked us to his gate, in his patched coat, and stopped there, and said, "Will you tell your father something for me?"

"Yes."

"Tell him I'll be in my chair in the spring," said King Garran. "And that I'd still like the seed."

* * *

Amberlay didn't want to see us.

That's not quite right. Amberlay didn't want to see anybody. The castle gate was shut, and the guard on it said the queen was receiving no one, and he said it in the voice of a man who'd been saying it all winter and was tired of the taste of it.

So we didn't go in. My father said, don't walk in anywhere you haven't been let in, and I'd said yes.

We went down into the town instead.

Seraphina followed the coin. It didn't lean toward the castle at all. It went out in every direction at once, thin, like light through a cracked shutter. Down narrow lanes. Into small houses with shut doors and smoke coming out of the chimneys.

"Fuel," said Seraphina, standing in the lane with her eyes shut. "And bread. And shoes. A little in every house on this street." She opened her eyes. "Garrick. Every house on this street is a widow's."

We stood in the lane and looked at the chimneys.

That was where Queen Isaude found us. She came down from the castle on foot, without a guard, in a plain gray cloak, a tall woman with her hair cut short. She stopped at the end of the lane and looked at us.

"My guard tells me the princess of fire is standing in Widows' Row," she said. "I came to ask what she intends to burn."

"Nothing," said Seraphina. "I'm only listening to it."

Queen Isaude came a little nearer.

"Half my men didn't come back from your father's war," she said to me. Not angrily. Just very tired. "I sent them because the Council asked. And afterward, I asked the Council for pensions for their wives. And they said..."

"Next spring," I said.

"Next spring." She looked at the chimneys. "For five springs. And then a man came off the grain ships with a chest and said for your roads. And I gave it to them. Every coin. The roads can wait. They've waited this long." She turned to me. "I haven't answered Nerisse's letters because I'm ashamed. Not of what I did. Of being glad of it."

Seraphina did something then I didn't expect. She went over to the nearest door and knocked on it, and when an old woman opened it, she asked, very politely, whether she might warm her hands. And the old woman, who clearly had no idea who she was, said yes, and Seraphina stood in the doorway and put her hands out toward the little fire on the hearth, and the fire, which had been a thin, careful, coin-bought fire, quietly doubled.

"It'll burn all winter now," said Seraphina. "Without wood. You can say no."

The old woman looked at the fire. Then at Seraphina. Then she said, "Don't be silly, dear. Come in and have some tea."

We were in Widows' Row until dark. Twenty-six houses. Seraphina asked at every door.

At the end of the lane, Queen Isaude said, "That wasn't Kethran gold."

"No," said Seraphina. "It was asked."

The queen looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, "I'll write to Nerisse tonight."

* * *

We came home through the lower hall after midnight. The Castellan said "Garrick Grey. Seraphina Grey. Yes. You may," and then, quietly, "And the knowing?"

"Mary's," I said. "I think."

Mary was still at her desk. She usually is. I told her what King Osmund had said, and King Garran, and Queen Isaude, and she didn't write any of it down. She just got up, without a word, and went to her shelves and took down the nine black Council books, one after the other, and laid them open across her desk and Caitlin's little desk and the floor.

It took her an hour. She didn't need us. We sat on the window seat in the passage with our shoulders together and watched her through the door, running her finger down the pages.

Then she came out with one book in her arms.

"The petition list," she said. "Every court that's asked the Council for something and been told next spring. We read it aloud at the start of every session, so nobody's forgotten. We copy it to every member court afterward. And every season, the Council sends it down the coast with the grain ships, so the river towns know what's been asked." She opened it on her knees. "Belleren. River wall. Velden. Bridge. Tirrowmarch. Seed. And the king's letter about the horse, copied in full, because that's how we copy them. Amberlay. Widows' pensions." She looked up. "Every chest went to a court on this list. And nowhere else."

Nobody said anything.

"Somebody here is choosing," said Seraphina softly. "He doesn't need anybody. We wrote it down for him."

"We wrote it down so nobody would be forgotten," said Mary. Her voice was very even. Her ears were not. "And we sent it out on the grain ships so everybody would know. That's what it's for." She closed the book. "Someone on the grain ships has been reading it the other way."

* * *

The grain ships all call at Westmere. Every one. It's the only deep harbor on that coast.

So in the morning I went to see Tamar, on the sea tower, and told him. Salt-burned hands. Smelled of grain. Came up off the ships. Knew what the petition list said.

Tamar listened to all of it with his watch book open on his knee. When I'd finished, he didn't say anything for a long time. He looked down off the tower at the end of the harbor wall, where an old man in a battered hat was sitting on an upturned bucket with a fishing line, not catching anything.

"You should ask my father," Tamar said at last.

"About the grain ships?"

"About being bought." Tamar closed the watch book. "He knows what it looks like from the inside. He was, once." He looked at me. "He's never told your father. He'll tell you, if you ask him properly."

* * *

Mary wrote it that night.

Garrick and Seraphina followed the gold. Gold remembers its fire; Seraphina says it leans toward its cousins.

Velden: spent, on the bridge. A second letter came. Do not send your chair. King Osmund will come and read it aloud.

Tirrowmarch: unspent, under a cloth. Sent back from the dock. "I would rather have been asked." He would still like the seed.

Amberlay: given to the widows. Seraphina asked at twenty-six doors. The queen will write to Nerisse.

The knowing is ours. The petition list. Every court told next spring. Read the other way, off the grain ships.

And under that, in a hand I didn't expect, my father's. He'd come up after supper and asked for the pen.

Next spring is now. U.