Chapter 84: Chains of a God

I've thought a great deal, since, about what Carol did next. About why it worked. And I think it comes down to this.

The ring was made to hold a god. Every link of it. Every word cut into the iron under the grass. Kessavel made it, and Kessavel has spent a thousand years learning exactly what gods are made of, and exactly how to lock each piece away. Lightning. Frost. Fire. Folds. Every borrowed thing. Every gift. He knew all of it. He'd built a door for every single one.

He hadn't built one for a girl who climbs things.

* * *

She let go of the lantern line with her right hand.

The chain jerked her at once, hard, down toward the black water, and her left hand slid on the cord, and Master Ashby cried out and hauled up above her with his soft old hands, and for a moment she hung there by one arm, with her feet scrabbling on the wet rim of the fountain.

Then she made her right hand into a fist.

And she didn't hit anybody with it.

She brought it down on the chain. On the link wound around her left wrist. Hard. The way you'd bring your fist down on a table when you've finally had enough of an argument. And the iron bit into the side of her hand, and she did it again, and the link grated against the stone rim of the fountain, and she did it again.

It didn't break. Of course it didn't. It was a god's chain, and she was a woman with a fist.

But it slid. A finger's width down her wrist. And then another. Because a chain wound around something is only as tight as the thing inside it is still, and Carol Grey has never once in her life been still when she didn't want to be.

* * *

What are you doing? I said through the middle. The stooped man still had my wrist. I couldn't get to her. Carol, what are you...

The roof, she said.

I didn't understand. And then I did.

The lightning rods. On the north tower. When she was twelve. She'd climbed them every night for six weeks, in the dark, in the wind, without any lightning at all to help her up, because the lightning only came at the top. All the way up, every night, hand over hand, on cold iron, with nothing but her own two hands and her own two feet and the wanting to be the tallest thing in the world.

Nobody lent her that. Nobody gave it to her. Nobody could lock it away.

It was just Carol.

* * *

She got her left wrist free. Half free. The link slid down over the heel of her hand and caught across her knuckles, and she twisted her hand sideways, the way you'd twist it out of a too-small glove, and it came out. Skinned. Bleeding along the back where the iron had dragged. But out.

And she reached up with both hands and took hold of the lantern line above Master Ashby's.

And she climbed.

* * *

Hand over hand. Up the line. Out of the fountain.

The line was strung from the fountain's iron post to a tall pole at the edge of the parade ground, sixty paces off, slanting up and away, with fifty paper lanterns hanging from it every arm's length like beads on a string. And my sister went up it the way she went up the lightning rods at twelve. Not fast. Not graceful. Hand over hand, with her knees hooked over the cord when her arms gave out, and the dark lanterns knocking against her face and tearing loose and falling, one after another, into the black water below.

The chain came with her.

It was still around her ankles. Still around her waist. And it pulled. Down, toward the well in the middle of the fountain, toward wherever it went. But she was going up. Out. Along the line, away from the middle, toward the edge of the ring. And every hand's width she climbed, the chain had to stretch to follow her. Away from the fountain. Away from the door it was trying to drag her through.

And the chain was a ring. Fixed at eleven places. Every link to the next, all the way around.

It couldn't stretch forever.

* * *

I saw it go tight.

All the way around the parade ground, the great black loop of iron that had been drawing in toward the fountain stopped drawing in. And started pulling out. Toward Carol. Toward the line she was climbing. The whole ring dragged sideways across the grass, all eleven fixed points straining, and at every one, the kneeling Hushed with their hands flat on the turf rocked forward, as if something had yanked them.

And Thor saw it too.

* * *

Thor had two Hushed on her. One around the waist, one with both hands on her right arm. She'd been fighting them for a minute and a half with no hammer and no lightning and no thunder, just the plain strength of a very large woman who has been fighting things since before there were kingdoms, and she hadn't got free.

She stopped fighting.

She just stopped. Stood still. Let them hold her.

And then she reached out with her free left hand, past the one on her arm, and took hold of the great black chain where it ran past her, dragging across the grass toward Carol.

And pulled.

Not toward herself. Away. Toward the edge of the ring. Toward Carol. Helping it stretch.

"Come on, then," said Thor, to the chain. Not loudly. "Come on. You want her? She's up there. Go and get her."

And the chain stretched another arm's length, and somewhere at the edge of the ring, one of the eleven kneeling Hushed was dragged forward onto his face in the grass.

* * *

My father saw it then.

He had one Hushed holding both his arms from behind. He'd been standing very still since it took him, the way he stands when he's counting. He stopped counting.

He walked forward.

Not fighting. Not pulling. He just walked, toward the chain, toward the place where it ran past him, dragging the Hushed behind him like a man dragging a sack of flour across a kitchen floor, step by step, with his face perfectly calm. And when he got to it, he couldn't take hold of it, because his arms were held. So he put his foot on it.

And leaned.

* * *

Ignatius had it next. And then Roderic, who had no Hushed on him at all because he'd gone around three of them while they were busy with Thor. And then Iselle, with her open hand. And then Master Ashby, who'd let go of the lantern line when Carol climbed past him and stood on the fountain rim for a moment with his hands hanging, and then jumped down into the shallow edge of the black water, up to his knees, and grabbed the chain where it came out of the fountain, and pushed.

Not one of us had a single power. Not one. Every god and half-god and borrowed gift on that parade ground was locked behind a door.

We were just people. Holding a chain. Pulling it the way it wanted to go, toward my sister, out of the middle, away from the door.

And the chain was a ring, fixed at eleven places.

And it couldn't stretch forever.

* * *

I heard it before I saw it.

A sound like the biggest bell in the world being struck very softly, once, with a padded hammer. Deep. Long. Coming up out of the ground.

One of the eleven anchor-links had pulled loose from the turf.

* * *

It came up out of the grass at the far side of the ring like a tooth coming out. A small piece of black iron the size of a hen's egg, with fist-letters cut into it, on the end of the great chain, trailing a clod of earth and roots. And the Hushed who'd been kneeling over it, holding it down with both his flat hands, went over backward onto the grass and lay there.

And the ring wasn't a ring anymore.

It was a chain with two ends.

What stands within is held. But there wasn't a within. Not quite. There was a gap. A hand's width. Between where the anchor had been and where it was now, lying on the grass on the end of the chain.

Through the middle, I felt Carol's door, which had been muffled all this time, flinch. Like a window rattling in its frame when a wind comes through a crack.

And outside the ring, on the far side, I saw Seraphina's tea cup go flying.

* * *

Seraphina had never come in.

I didn't know that until afterward. I'd seen a Hushed step in front of her, at the start, and I'd thought she was held like the rest of us. She wasn't. She'd looked at the white mask in front of her, and at the chain rising out of the grass, and at Carol on the fountain rim, and she'd understood something none of the rest of us had stopped long enough to understand.

If she walked in, she'd be locked like everyone else.

So she didn't walk in. She stood outside the ring with her tea in her hand, steaming harder and harder, and waited. Just outside the black iron, at the far side, where the chain was furthest from the fountain. Watching it. Waiting for it to be anything other than a ring.

And when the anchor came up out of the grass like a tooth, she threw her cup away and went for the gap.

* * *

The Hushed in front of her tried to hold her.

I want to be fair to him. He tried. He put out his chained hand and closed it on her arm, the way they'd closed on all of us, cold and heavy and certain.

Seraphina looked at his hand.

She didn't burn him. I want that written down too, because she could have, and he'd have deserved it, and she didn't. She just looked at the hand on her arm, and her eyes went the deep white-gold of the First Flame, the color nobody ever sees unless she means it, and the short chain wound around his fist went soft. Like candle wax on a hot stove. It ran off his fingers in black drops and spattered on the grass, and his hand, without it, was just a man's hand, and it opened.

He stepped back.

She went past him.

* * *

The loose anchor lay on the grass at the edge of the ring, on the end of the chain, with the earth still clinging to it. Seraphina knelt down beside it in her festival dress and her singed hem.

And put both her hands on it.

I felt it. Even through the locked doors inside me. Even through the muffle over the middle. I felt my wife's fire go into that iron the way the sun goes into a stone on a summer afternoon. Not a blaze. Not a burst. Just heat. White, and gold, and patient, and absolutely without end.

The First Flame is the part that cuts. That's what Io says. Ignatius got the half that heals, and Seraphina got the half that's sharp enough to go through stone. She turned the sand on Westmere's north shore to glass with it. She's never once, in all the years I've known her, used all of it at once.

She used all of it on that link.

It glowed. Red. Then orange. Then white. The fist-letters cut into it went bright, one after another, Here held, burning like little doors with fire behind them. And then they ran. The letters ran down the sides of the iron like tears and dripped off into the grass. And the link split, down the middle, with a sound like a tea cup cracking.

And the chain wasn't fixed at that end anymore. It was just a chain, lying on the grass, with its end in my wife's hands.

She didn't stop.

She stood up and took the end of it in both hands and walked. Along it. Into the ring, now that there wasn't one, holding the chain, link by link, hand over hand, the way Carol had climbed the lantern line. And every link she touched went white and split and fell off behind her into the grass in two smoking halves.

* * *

Everything came back at once.

I don't know how to describe it except that it was like being deaf for ten minutes and then having somebody take their hands off your ears in the middle of a thunderstorm. Every door inside me flew open at the same moment. The fold. My father's storm. Damar's stone. Aelune's seeing. Seraphina's flame, which I always carry a little of when she's near, so hot and close that my eyes watered.

And the middle.

The muffle came off the middle all at once, and my sister came through it like a wind through a house where every window's been flung open, and she was furious.

* * *

I folded.

Not far. Out of the stooped man's grip, which was easy now, the easiest thing in the world. One step sideways through nothing and I was standing behind him instead of in front of him, and he was holding nothing at all. His white mask turned, slowly, looking for me.

And above us, on the lantern line, Carol let go.

* * *

She dropped. Twelve feet, from the line to the grass. She didn't fall. She landed the way Thor lands, on both feet, knees bent, and the ground cracked under her in a little star, and the frost came out of her all at once in a white ring that went across the whole parade ground and froze every blade of grass stiff and silver.

The chain was still around her ankles. Around her waist. Dead now, cold and heavy, with no oath left in it to pull. Just iron.

She bent down and took hold of it with her hands.

Her own hands. Skinned along the back of the left one, bleeding a little. And now, at last, every god in the room in them.

And she broke it.

Not with lightning. Not with frost. With her hands. The way Thor would. She took the link around her ankle between her two fists and pulled, and it stretched, and it went long and thin like taffy, and it snapped. And then the one at her waist. And she threw the pieces down on the frozen grass, and stood there, breathing hard, in Ignatius's old green coat with her paper mask hanging off one ear.

"You may not have me," she said.

To nobody. To the dark at the edge of the parade ground. To whoever was on the other side of the black water, listening.

"You may not."

* * *

The fountain closed.

The black water in the basin shuddered, and the well in the middle of it stopped turning, and filled in, the way a hole in wet sand fills in when the tide comes over it. And the black went out of the water, all at once, like ink washing out of a cloth. And it was just a fountain again. With clear water. And Master Ashby standing in it up to his knees, gray-faced, with his gold mask in his hand.

Eleven anchor-Hushed lay on the grass at eleven places around where the ring had been. They didn't move. They weren't dead; my mother went to every one of them afterward, and their hearts were beating, and their eyes under the white masks were open. They just lay there, like puppets with the strings cut. Like people who'd sworn every part of themselves to something, and the something had just been melted into the grass.

My father's lightning came down then.

Not on anybody. Around them. Around every one of the twenty-two Hushed still standing. A cage of it. White-gold. Twenty-two little cages of light, one around each white mask, out of a sky that was suddenly, completely, absolutely his again.

Twenty of them stopped, inside their cages, and stood very still.

Two didn't. Two had been nearer the east range arch than the rest, and they'd started moving the moment the anchor came up, and my father's lightning came down a heartbeat behind them, and they were already through the arch and into the dark.

And the stooped man was gone.

I turned around where I'd folded, behind him. And there was nobody there. Just the frozen grass, and the shape of his feet in it, going away fast toward the east range.

* * *

Ignatius reached Carol first.

He didn't say anything. He went down on his knees on the frozen grass in front of her and looked up at her, and held out his hands, palm up, not touching.

Carol looked down at him.

The fury was still in the middle, but it was going. Fading, the way a storm does. And under it, I could feel the thing that had been under it the whole time, the thing she hadn't let herself feel while she was climbing. She was shaking. All over. The way you shake after you've nearly fallen from somewhere very high.

"May I?" said Ignatius.

"Yes," said Carol.

He took her left hand. The skinned one. And turned it over, and looked at the back of it, at the scrape where the link had dragged. And then at her wrist.

And went very still.

* * *

I saw it too. Over his shoulder.

On the inside of her left wrist, where the chain had been wound tightest, there was a mark. Faint. Gray. Like a bruise that hadn't decided what color to be. The size of a coin.

The shape of a closed hand.

"It was trying," said Ignatius, very quietly. "While it held you. It was trying to lock your name."

Carol looked at it.

"Take it off," she said.

"It'll hurt."

"I know. Take it off."

Ignatius put his right hand over her wrist. And his fire came. Not his sister's fire, the sharp kind. His. The half of the First Flame that heals. Warm and gold and slow, like the light through a window at four in the afternoon. And he held it there, over the gray fist on my sister's wrist, for a long time. Long enough that I saw her jaw clench, and her eyes close. Long enough that I felt it through the middle, a deep slow burn like a splinter coming out.

When he took his hand away, the mark was gone. There was only her wrist. With a thin pink line across the back of her hand where the link had scraped, which he healed too, after, without being asked again, because she'd said yes the first time.

Then he looked up at her.

"Still?" he said.

Carol laughed. Wet and shaky and cracked, the laugh of somebody who's just climbed out of something very deep.

"Still," she said. And sat down on the frozen grass in front of him, all at once, as if her legs had decided for her, and put her forehead against his shoulder, and stayed there.

* * *

I don't know how long we stood there. Not long. A minute. Maybe less.

My father was walking toward the twenty cages of lightning. Thor was picking up her hammer from where it had fallen outside the ring, and turning it over in her hands, and looking at it as if she'd never seen it before. Seraphina was standing by the last cut link of the chain, breathing hard, with her hands still glowing white at the fingertips. Master Ashby was climbing out of the fountain. Roderic had both arms around Iselle.

And then Iselle pulled out of them.

She'd turned around. Toward the east range. Toward the steps, where Caitlin had been counting all night, with Kip beside her, and Loki.

Loki wasn't on the steps. Loki had come down into the ring with all the rest of us, when the anchor came up.

Caitlin was still there. With Kip. Alone. With her blue book open and her pencil in her hand, writing down what she'd seen, the way she always does, because somebody has to.

And coming up the east range steps toward her, fast, out of the dark of the arch, was a short stooped man in a white mask with his left shoulder lower than his right.

"Caitlin!" screamed Iselle.

And ran.