Chapter 77: Roderic's Dilemma

I was awake anyway.

Little Uriah was cutting a tooth. His fourth. He'd decided, sometime around eleven, that the only place in the world he could bear to be was on my shoulder, walking, and only if I hummed Grandpa's goat song, and only the verse about the goat on the roof. So I'd been walking the sitting room for an hour and a quarter, from the door to the window seat and back, humming about the goat on the roof, while Seraphina slept in the next room with one arm flung across my side of the bed as if I were still in it.

At ten past midnight, someone knocked on the door.

Three times.

I stopped walking. Little Uriah said "Da" into my neck, crossly, because the humming had stopped.

Three knocks is how my family says it's someone who'll wait. Loki started it. Faelan does it. I taught it to Roderic when he was eleven, the winter he decided knocking once was rude and knocking twice was nagging. Nobody in Greykeep knocks three times at midnight unless they mean it.

"It's open," I said.

It was Roderic.

He stood in the doorway in his good coat, with the collar still turned up from the cold in the lower hall, and his hair on end the way it goes when he's been pushing his hands through it. He looked at me, and at little Uriah on my shoulder, and at the clock on the mantel, and his face did a complicated thing.

"Sorry," he said. "I didn't... I'll come back."

"Rod."

"It's late. He's awake. I'll come back."

"Rod," I said. "Come in. Shut the door. I'm walking a baby around a room and humming about a goat. You can't possibly make my night worse."

He almost smiled. Then he came in and shut the door and stood just inside it, with his hands at his sides.

His hands were empty.

I noticed that. I don't know why. Roderic's hands are never empty. When he was small, he carried things everywhere. Sticks, stones, a wooden sword, a frog once, for most of a summer. When he grew up, it was books and lutes and roses and baskets of honey biscuits for a girl who never asked for them. He stopped doing that this winter, on purpose. But even now, he usually has something. A pencil. An apple. His hands in his pockets, holding something in there.

Not tonight. Tonight they just hung at his sides as if he'd forgotten what they were for.

* * *

"Sit down," I said.

He sat on the window seat. I kept walking, because little Uriah objected loudly whenever I stopped. Door, window. Window, door. Goat on the roof.

Roderic watched me do three lengths of the room without saying anything.

Then he said, "Does it hurt him?"

"The tooth? Yes. Evelyn says it feels like having a stone pushed up through your gum very slowly for a week."

"Can't you take it away? You could borrow Mother's... your mother's... you could borrow healing."

"I could," I said. "I did, the first night. Seraphina asked me not to do it every night."

"Why?"

"Because he has to learn that things hurt, and then they stop. And somebody walks you around the room while they're hurting. And that's what it's like." I patted little Uriah's back. "She says if I take every tooth away, he'll grow up thinking nothing should ever hurt. And then the first thing that does will frighten him half to death."

Roderic looked at little Uriah for a long time.

"That's very sensible," he said.

"I know. I hate it."

He did smile then. Barely. It was the thing Seraphina had said on the east wall, the first week, about waiting for Carol. That's very sensible. I hate it. It's become a sort of family saying. Faelan says it about vegetables.

Then the smile went away again, and he looked down at his empty hands, and didn't say anything else for a long time.

* * *

At half past twelve, little Uriah fell asleep.

All at once, the way babies do. One minute he was grizzling into my collar, and the next he'd gone heavy and warm and boneless, with his mouth open and one fist wound into my shirt.

I carried him through to the nursery. It's the warmest room in our rooms, against the kitchen chimney. It was a linen cupboard once; Helena chose it. I laid him in the cradle under Carol's little light, which hangs on its silver thread and never goes out, and unwound his fist from my shirt one finger at a time, and stood there for a moment making sure he'd stay asleep.

When I came back, Roderic was standing at the window with his forehead against the cold glass.

"We could go out," I said. "To the nook. If you'd rather. Nobody can hear anything out there but the river."

He turned around.

"Yes," he said. "Please."

* * *

The east-wall nook is mine and Seraphina's in the mornings. At night, it's anybody's. It's a little stone bench built into the thickness of the wall, under an overhang, just big enough for two people if they're friendly. You can see the whole river from it, and the lights of Havenreach, and the north tower if you lean out, with Carol's eight windows at the top.

They were dark. All eight. Carol goes to bed early in the winter. She says the dark comes up the tower stairs faster than she does.

Roderic sat down on the bench and looked up at those dark windows for a long time.

I sat beside him. It was cold. The kind of late-winter cold that has stopped trying to freeze you and is just waiting to see if you'll go inside. Our breath went up white together.

"Can I ask you something?" said Roderic.

"Yes."

"About when we were children."

That wasn't what I'd expected. "All right."

"When I was seven," said Roderic, "and Caitlin broke your mother's blue bowl. The one from Lyradon, with the birds. And she made all of us promise not to tell. Me and you and Carol and Elenos. And Elenos was only four, so he didn't really understand, but he promised anyway." He was still looking at the north tower. "Did you tell?"

I thought about it.

"No," I said. "Mother found out herself. She knew in about four minutes. She found the pieces in the woodbox."

"But you didn't tell."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it was only a bowl," I said. "And Caitlin was frightened. And Mother would have forgiven her anyway. And it was Caitlin's to tell, not mine." I looked at him. "Why?"

Roderic didn't answer that.

He pushed his hands through his hair. Then he put them back in his lap and looked at them.

"Did you ever keep one you shouldn't have?" he said. "A promise. One where you knew, keeping it, something bad might happen. And you kept it anyway, because you'd said."

* * *

I knew then.

Not what it was. I didn't know anything about a black page, or wet ink, or a mill that sings slower when the river is low. I didn't know any of that for another day. But I knew it wasn't a bowl. And I knew, from the way he'd looked at Carol's dark windows before he asked, that it was something that sat very near her.

And I knew one more thing. From his empty hands, and the bench at four, and the fifth piece of toast Helena had put on his plate two nights running without saying anything.

I knew whose promise it was.

I didn't say so. I want to be honest about that. Everything in me wanted to say so. It's Iselle, isn't it. What's happened. Is she all right. Is Carol in danger. Tell me. Tell me now. I could feel the words lined up behind my teeth like people at a gate.

But Ignatius has been teaching me all winter, the way he teaches Carol. Very patiently, mostly by example, and usually while doing something else with his hands. And the thing he's been teaching is this: when somebody comes to you carrying something, the worst thing you can do is grab it. Even if you're stronger. Especially if you're stronger. Because then they have nothing in their hands at all, and they'll never come to you with anything again.

So I didn't grab it.

I answered the question he'd asked instead.

* * *

"Once," I said. "When I was twelve."

Roderic turned to look at me.

"Carol had found out she could climb the lightning rods," I said. "On the north tower roof. The ones Davren put up after the third strike. She'd go up the broom cupboard and the ladder and out through the trapdoor at night, and climb right to the top of the tallest one, and hold on with one hand, and wait for the storms to come in off the river. She said it felt like being the tallest thing in the world." I looked up at the tower. You can just see the tips of the rods from the nook, black against the sky. "She made me promise not to tell. Swore me on the twin-room. That's the worst kind of promise there is, for us."

"And you kept it."

"For about six weeks. And then one night, there was a storm, a real one, and she went up, and the rod she was on took a strike while she was holding it. She was fine. She's Carol. The lightning went straight through her like water through a pipe. But it threw her off, and she landed on the leads, and broke her wrist." I flexed my own left wrist without meaning to. I'd felt it break. Through the twin-room. In bed, across the castle. "And she lay out there on the roof in the rain and wouldn't call anybody, because she'd have to say what she'd been doing."

"What did you do?"

"I went and got Father."

Roderic was quiet.

"She didn't speak to me for three days," I said. "Not one word. Not out loud and not in the middle. She shut her door on me. It was the first time she'd ever done it on purpose. The whole of me was cold for three days, like a house with a window broken somewhere you can't find."

"And then?"

"And then she came and found me in Grandpa's workshop," I said, "with her arm in a sling. And she sat on the bench and watched me sand horses for an hour. And then she said, You were right. And I'd have been angry with you if you hadn't, too. Only that would have been forever."

Roderic looked down at his hands.

"And you still did it," he said. "Knowing she'd shut the door."

"Yes."

"How did you know? That it was the right one to break?"

I thought about that for a long time. The river went past below us, very quietly, black and silver.

"I didn't," I said. "I still don't, really. I just knew which one I could live with."

* * *

Roderic didn't say anything for a long time.

I waited. It was very cold. I thought about going in for blankets and didn't, because I was afraid if I got up, he'd get up too, and go back down the east stair, and carry whatever it was back to Concordia with him, and sit with it alone.

So I sat. And waited. And watched him not say it.

It was Seraphina who brought the blankets in the end.

I didn't hear her come. She's quieter than anyone has a right to be, for someone who's mostly fire. She was just there, at the end of the wall walk, in her nightgown and my old coat, with two blankets over one arm and two cups of tea in her other hand, stacked one on top of the other the way she carries them every morning.

She didn't ask anything. She didn't even look at Roderic's face. She put a blanket around his shoulders, and then one around mine, and put a cup in each of our hands. The tea was far too hot. It always is, when she's made it. She doesn't use the kettle.

Then she put her hand on the top of my head, very briefly, the way you'd check a loaf to see if it was done.

"He's asleep," she said. "I'll hear him if he wakes."

And she went back in.

Roderic looked at the cup in his hands for a long time. The steam went up between us.

"She didn't ask," he said.

"No."

"She knew something was wrong. And she didn't ask."

"She'll ask me in the morning," I said. "If I want her to. That's the arrangement."

He held the cup in both hands, the way Edric holds his on the harbor wall, to warm them. And for the first time that night, his hands weren't empty.

He's very like my father, Roderic. More than any of us. Not to look at; he's got Adriana's face, and her Lyradon coloring, and he'll never be as tall. But inside. He's got Father's terrible need to make things all right for everybody, the need that made Father walk into Greykeep twenty years ago with a crown he didn't want, because somebody had to. He's spent his whole life trying to fix things. Bringing things. Doing things. Carrying things to people whether they've asked or not.

And this winter, for a girl with a closed hand, he's been learning not to.

I watched him sit there, on the cold bench, with his hands around the cup, not fixing it. Not doing anything. Not grabbing.

I think it was the hardest thing I've ever watched anybody do.

* * *

At last he said, without looking at me, "Can I ask you about the middle?"

"The twin-room?"

"Yes." He pushed his hands through his hair again. "I've never understood it. Not really. Carol tried to explain it to me once, when I was about nine. She said it was like a room in a house where two people live, and you both have a door into it, and you can both be in it at once. And I said, so it's a kitchen, and she laughed so hard she fell off the hay bale."

"That's not a bad way of putting it."

"But you said she shut her door. When you were twelve." He turned and looked at me properly for the first time since we'd come out. "So you can shut yours."

"Yes."

"And when you do... does she know?"

I was quiet.

"She knows it's shut," I said slowly. "She feels the draft. The way you feel it when somebody opens the front door downstairs in winter. She knows something's behind it." I looked at him. "She doesn't know what."

"Not ever?"

"Not unless I open it again and show her."

Roderic looked at me for a very long moment.

"Have you ever done it?" he said. "Shut it on purpose. On her. Not because you were frightened. Not because you were angry. Just... because you were keeping something. That wasn't yours to give her yet."

"No," I said. "Never."

"Not once? In twenty-three years?"

"Not once."

He nodded slowly. As if that was the answer he'd been afraid of.

And then he looked away from me. Up. At the north tower. At the eight dark windows at the top, and the black tips of the lightning rods against the sky, and the little round window on the top landing where the broom cupboard is that has never held a broom.

He didn't say anything else.

He didn't have to.

* * *

I understood, sitting there on the cold stone bench with the river going by, what he'd come up the east stair at midnight to ask me.

He hadn't come to tell me something. He couldn't. He'd made a promise, and he's Roderic, and he'd rather freeze on a wall all night than break it behind somebody's back.

He'd come to find out whether he could tell me. Whether there was anywhere, in the whole of Greykeep, he could put this thing down for a moment without it going straight up a hundred and forty steps to the top of the north tower, where it would get up and put its coat on and go to a river in a valley between two mountains, and stand in it, alone, holding it open with both hands.

He was asking me whether I could shut my door on my sister.

And he couldn't ask it out loud, because if he did, he'd have to say why. And the why was the thing he'd promised.

So he'd asked it the only way he could. By asking about bowls, and lightning rods, and kitchens. By looking at her windows.

I sat beside my brother on the east wall, at one o'clock in the morning, in the cold, and looked at those windows too. And I thought about the draft. About what it would feel like to her, waking up in the dark at the top of the tower, to find that for the first time in our whole lives, on purpose, without fear or anger, I'd closed my side of the middle and left her on the other side of it.

I thought about her sitting on Grandpa's bench with her arm in a sling, saying only that would have been forever.

And then I thought about a river.

Roderic didn't look at me. He kept looking up at the tower, with the tea going cold in his hands, waiting. The way Rysa taught all of us to wait, when we've asked. Not pushing. Not saying it again. Leaving room for the other person to say no.

Below us, the river went on going by, and the cold sat with us, and up in the nursery behind the kitchen chimney, my son turned over in his sleep under Carol's little light.

I opened my mouth to answer him.