Chapter 80: Festival of Lanterns

"We go," said Carol.

She said it before my father had finished asking. We were in the little kitchen, all of us who knew, at nine o'clock the night after the page asked about the festival: my father and Evelyn and Adriana, Iselle and Roderic, Loki on his backward chair, Ignatius, Seraphina with little Uriah asleep across her lap, and me. And Carol, on the end of the bench, with her chin on her knees, the way she sits when she's already decided something and is only waiting for everybody else to catch up.

"Carol," said my father.

"I know what he's doing," said Carol. "Loki said it. He's setting a table." She put her feet down on the floor. "So we go and sit at it. All of us. With the whole family and half the gods in Avarra and Thor in a cloak pretending to be a tall girl from the country." She looked around the kitchen. "I'm not going to stop dancing because he's laid out the plates. That's what he wants. He wants me to sit at the top of my tower and be afraid of lanterns." She looked at Iselle. "And if I don't go, he'll know the page has been lying. Won't he."

Iselle was quiet for a moment.

"Yes," she said. "He'll know."

"Then I go," said Carol. "And it's true. And we're ready."

My mother looked at my father. My father looked at the blue lamp in the window for a long time, counting, I think.

"Evelyn," he said at last. "What did you say, the night Severin came? About feeding him?"

"We don't stop being who we are because someone was rude in our hall," said my mother.

"Yes." My father nodded slowly. "Well. Somebody's being very rude in a college." He looked at Carol. "We go."

* * *

Iselle wrote the answer that night, at her desk, with Loki on the end of the bed and the slate in his hand. But she didn't use the slate. She looked at it, and gave it back to him, and wrote her own.

Yes. All three nights. All of them.

Every word true. Carol made sure of that.

The page was quiet for a long time. Then:

Good. Dance, little sister. I will be glad to see it.

Iselle read it twice. Then she folded it small and put it in the drawer under the gray horse and shut the drawer.

"I'm going to dance," she said, to nobody in particular. "I've never danced. Not once. Not in the golden city." She looked at her open hand. "He doesn't get to have that too."

* * *

I'll tell the first night the way it happened, as a festival. Because it was one. That's the thing I want to get right about that night, before anything else. Whatever was waiting at the edges of the nights that came after, the first one was a festival. The best one I've ever been to.

* * *

The Festival of Lanterns is the oldest thing the college at Concordia does. Older than the college, Io says; it was a soldiers' festival when the college was still a barracks and the parade ground was still for parading. At the end of the winter term, every student makes a lantern, and writes something inside it, and hangs it on the long lines strung across the old parade ground. Then for three nights they light them all at once, at dusk, and dance underneath until the last one goes out at dawn. And on the third night, at midnight, they cut the lines and let every lantern go up into the sky together.

What you write inside is a want. One thing. Nobody reads them. That's the rule. You fold the paper so the writing's on the inside, and you hang it, and you light it, and the want burns over everybody's heads for three nights where nobody can see it, and on the last night it goes up into the dark with all the others and doesn't come back.

"It's a soldier's custom," Io told me once. "They used to write the name of someone they wanted to see again. Before a campaign. Then the college made it softer. Now it's mostly I want to pass rhetoric and I want Master Ashby to fall in the fountain." She'd smiled. "But not all of them."

* * *

This year, the lanterns were blue.

That was Kip Marrow's doing. Or Master Avel's, really. After Orselle, after the six days and the three thousand names, the glassmaker had gone back to his workshop and blown lamps for a month without stopping. Small blue glass lamps with brass caps, like the one Kip left on Helena's step. He gave one to every person in the square. And then he had hundreds left over, and he didn't know what to do with them, and Kip, who now carries Orselle's bread to the college refectory twice a week, mentioned the festival.

So that year, every paper lantern on the old parade ground at Concordia had a little blue glass lamp inside it instead of a candle. Four hundred of them. Kip brought them through the Orselle gate in crates, on a handcart, three trips, with the Castellan saying "Kip Marrow. Yes. You may" each time, and once, on the third trip, "Mind the step," which it has never said to anybody.

* * *

Caitlin met him on the third trip.

I know, because I was there, carrying the other end of the last crate up the college steps. And Caitlin came out of the east range with her blue book under her arm and a list of who was hanging which line of lanterns, and walked straight into the handcart.

Kip caught the crate. Caitlin caught the book. Neither of them caught the list, which blew across the parade ground and into the fountain.

"I'm so sorry," said Kip.

"No," said Caitlin. "It's my fault. I wasn't looking. I was counting. I'm always counting." She looked at the fountain. "That was the list."

"I'll get it," said Kip, and went and got it, out of the fountain, with his sleeve wet to the elbow, and brought it back, dripping, and held it out to her.

Caitlin looked at it. Then at him. Kip Marrow is not very tall, and not very anything, really. He has a quiet brown face and a careful way of standing, and the thin white line on his wrist where the brand cracked and healed. He was holding a wet list out to my sister as if it were something important he'd been asked to carry.

"It's ruined," said Caitlin.

"I'm sorry," said Kip again.

"No, it's fine, it's..." Caitlin stopped. "I know it by heart anyway. I always do. I only write them down so other people can see them."

"Oh," said Kip. "That's clever."

And my sister, who has a list for everything and an answer for everything and has corrected the meter of Roderic's poems since she was twelve, went pink from her collar to her hairline and didn't say anything at all.

* * *

She talked about him at supper. Not to anyone. Just in the air, the way Caitlin talks when she's thinking out loud. He brought four hundred lamps. Three trips. He said it was clever. He went into the fountain for the list. He didn't even ask what was on it. And then she went quiet, and opened her blue book, and wrote something on a fresh page, and looked at it, and crossed it out, and wrote it again.

Roderic, across the table, watched her do it with an expression of such enormous, delighted, brotherly glee that Adriana had to put her hand on his arm.

"Don't," said Adriana quietly.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Your face was."

"It's my face. It does what it wants."

"Rod," said Iselle, beside him, very softly. "She let you be awful about me for months. And she never once said anything."

Roderic looked at her.

Then he looked at Caitlin, bent over her blue book with her ears pink, and his face did something complicated, and settled, and he went back to his soup.

"You're right," he said. "I'll be awful later. In private."

"Thank you," said Iselle.

* * *

Iselle made her lantern in her room, at the desk, with the drawer shut.

I wasn't there for that part either; she told me later. She said she sat for a long time with the square of blue paper and the pen, and couldn't think of a single want. Not one. Not because she didn't have any. Because she'd spent nine years learning that wanting things was a door other people could use.

Then she thought about her mother at the loom, singing too many verses. And about the bench at four. And the little kitchen at night, and the step by the garden door, which she still checks every morning to see if it's there. And she found she had a great many wants, after all, and she'd only been afraid to look at them.

She wrote one. She folded it in half, with the writing on the inside, the way you're supposed to. And she didn't tell anyone what it was.

* * *

We came down through the big Concordia gate at sunset. All of us.

I don't think the gate square had ever seen anything like it. My father and both my mothers, arm in arm, which they never do in public because it makes the Concordian aunts cluck. Grandpa in his good waistcoat. Faelan and Mirelle, Mirelle with her silver lamp-scissors on their ribbon because there were going to be four hundred lamps and she wasn't going to miss the chance. Roderic and Caitlin. Elenos, who'd walked down from Aurelia's and said he'd come "to see what people want." Carol and Ignatius. Seraphina and me, and little Uriah on my shoulders with both fists in my hair, saying "Up" at everything.

And all around us, if you knew where to look, the others.

Thor was in a brown wool cloak with the hood up, pretending to be a tall girl from the country, which nobody believed for a moment, because she was a head taller than anybody on the parade ground and her braid kept crackling. Loki was a juggler by the fountain, with seven apples and a hat on the ground for coins, and he was getting a great many coins. Fenrir lay across the college gate like a large gray dog, and students kept stopping to scratch his ears, and he let them, and his yellow eyes never once stopped moving.

And the sky.

The sky was my father's. I could feel it. Clear and high and very still, the stars coming out one by one over the palace hill, without a breath of wind to stir the lantern lines. Not a single cloud from one horizon to the other. He'd made it that way, quietly, before we came through, and he was holding it. If anything at all came across that sky that night, my father would know before it had gone a mile.

"It's a lovely evening," said Io, meeting us at the foot of the steps with her shoes already off.

"Isn't it," said my father.

* * *

At dusk, the students lit the lanterns.

They do it all at once. There's a bell, and on the bell, four hundred people reach up with four hundred tapers. Mirelle had been allowed one, as a guest, and she stood on Roderic's shoulders to reach.

And the whole parade ground went blue.

I don't know how to describe it properly. I've seen lightning from the inside and the First Flame from closer than anybody alive, and I've never seen anything like four hundred little blue glass lamps lighting all at once inside four hundred paper lanterns on lines across an old parade ground at dusk. It was like standing under water. Under clear deep water, with the light coming down through it. Everybody's faces went soft and blue and young. Even Grandpa's.

Somebody near the fountain started playing a fiddle. Then a pipe. Then a drum.

And everybody started to dance.

* * *

Roderic asked Iselle properly.

I saw it. Everybody saw it. He didn't bring her anything. He didn't bow, or make a speech, or quote a poem in high Lyradon meter. He walked across the blue grass to where she was standing by the east range steps in her blue scarf, with her hand open at her side, and stopped in front of her, and said:

"I'd like to dance with you. I know you've never done it. I'll teach you if you want, or we can just stand in the middle and sway, or we can not. You can say no."

Iselle looked at him for a long moment.

"I'll step on your feet," she said.

"I've been stepped on by Thor," said Roderic. "At a wedding. On purpose."

Iselle laughed. Out loud. In front of the whole college.

And then she held out her hand. Her right hand. Open.

* * *

He taught her the Lyradon step. It's the simplest of all the old dances; Adriana says it was made for shepherds' festivals, so that people who'd been on a hill all summer could remember it after one cup of cider. Three steps forward, turn, three back. Roderic counted it under his breath. Iselle stepped on his feet twice, and then four times, and then stopped stepping on them, and then stopped looking at them, and then, somewhere about the tenth turn, stopped counting.

I watched them from the other side of the lantern lines. Under all that blue light, with her scarf flying out when she turned and her face lifted, she didn't look like anybody's little sister. She didn't look like anybody's anything. She looked like a girl at a festival, dancing.

Adriana was standing next to me. She didn't say anything. She just put her hand over her mouth and kept it there.

* * *

Caitlin asked Kip.

That surprised everybody but me. I'd seen her write his name in her blue book three times and cross it out twice. Caitlin makes decisions the way she makes lists: slowly, carefully, and then all at once.

Kip was standing by the handcart at the edge of the parade ground, where he'd been all evening, watching the lamps he'd carried. Not dancing. Not with anybody. Just watching the blue light with that careful look he has, as if he still wasn't quite sure he was allowed to be wherever he was.

Caitlin went and stood in front of him with her blue book under her arm.

"I'm Caitlin," she said. "Caitlin Asta Grey. You fished my list out of the fountain. I'd like to dance with you. You can say no."

Kip looked at her.

"I don't know how," he said.

"Neither does Iselle," said Caitlin. "Roderic's counting for her. I'll count for you. I'm very good at counting."

Kip looked at the dancers for a long moment. Then back at her.

"Yes," he said.

She did count. Out loud. The whole time. One, two, three, turn. And Kip, who has swept the square at Orselle every morning since the gate shut on him and says good morning to it like he means it, danced the Lyradon step with my sister very slowly and very seriously, with his eyes on her face and his feet going exactly where she said.

At the end of the third dance, she stopped counting. He didn't notice for half a turn.

Then he did, and he went red, and so did she, and neither of them stopped.

* * *

And I danced with my wife.

Badly.

I want that written down too. I'm the son of a storm god. I can borrow any power from any god who'll lend it to me and use it exactly as well as they do. I've folded myself from one side of Avarra to the other in a breath. I can hear stone, and talk to dragons, and walk through the First Flame.

I cannot dance.

I never could. Carol got all of it. When we were small and Grandpa played the fiddle in the south solar on winter nights, Carol danced like a leaf on a stream, and I danced like a man carrying a ladder through a doorway. Nothing's changed.

"Borrow?" I said, hopefully, to Seraphina, when I'd trodden on her hem for the second time.

She looked at me under the blue light. Her hair was coming down. Her eyes were very bright.

"No," she said. "You're going to dance badly with me. In front of everyone. All night."

"That's very sensible," I said. "I hate it."

"I know," said Seraphina, and put her arms around my neck.

So I danced badly with my wife all night under four hundred blue lamps. I trod on her hem until it singed, very faintly, where she was trying not to laugh. I turned the wrong way in the Lyradon step every single time and walked into Thor, who said "Sorry, ma'am" in her country-girl voice and nearly fell over laughing. And at some point, I don't know when, Seraphina stopped trying to make me dance properly and just leaned her head on my chest, and we stood in the middle of all of it and swayed, the way Roderic had told Iselle you could, and didn't do any steps at all.

That was the best part.

* * *

Carol danced with Ignatius. I'll tell that in its own place. It needs one.

* * *

The lanterns burned all night.

Around midnight, the fiddler's fingers gave out, and a student with a flute took over, and the dancing slowed, and people sat down on the grass under the blue lines in twos and threes and talked. Little Uriah fell asleep on Evelyn's lap on the college steps, with Mirelle asleep against Evelyn's other side, the lamp-scissors still in her hand. Grandpa told the goat song to a ring of first-years, all the verses, including two I'd never heard. Loki put away his apples and sat on the edge of the fountain with Fenrir's head in his lap.

Once, a little after one, I saw Loki stop. Just for a moment. He lifted his head and looked past the last line of lanterns, out at the dark at the edge of the parade ground, where the light ended and the old barracks wall began. He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked down again and went on scratching Fenrir's ears.

I looked too. There was nothing there. Just the wall, and the dark, and the night.

My father's sky stayed clear and still all the way to the dawn.

* * *

At dawn, the lanterns go out by themselves. Kip's lamps did too, one by one, all across the parade ground, the blue light going gray, then gold as the sun came up over the palace hill.

Iselle and Roderic were sitting on the bench at four, which isn't at four in the morning, but nobody said anything. Her head was on his shoulder. She was watching her lantern on the line above them, the last one in its row still burning.

"Do you want to know what I wrote?" she said.

Roderic looked up at the lantern.

"Only if you want to tell me," he said.

Iselle watched the little blue lamp go gray, and then go out.

"One day," she said. "Not today. But one day." She lifted her head off his shoulder and looked at him. "Is that all right?"

"Yes," said Roderic. "That's all right."

And she put her head back down.

* * *

Mary wrote it the next day. She'd been there all night too, in a chair at the edge of the parade ground with Melody, who danced every dance with every first-year who asked her and several who didn't.

The Festival of Lanterns. The first night. Four hundred blue lamps from Orselle. Kip Marrow carried them. Three trips. The Castellan said Mind the step.

Iselle danced. Roderic asked her properly. She stepped on his feet six times and then stopped.

Caitlin asked Kip Marrow. She counted. Then she stopped counting.

Garrick danced badly with Seraphina all night. Her hem is singed.

Uriah held the sky clear until dawn. Nothing came across it.

Loki looked at the barracks wall once, a little after one.

And under that, in very small writing, in Melody's hand, because she'd asked for the pen:

Everyone danced. Weather fair. Two nights more.