Chapter 89: Iselle Healed

Aurelia came at dawn.

She came the way she always does. Walking. Barefoot, up the long hill from the Concordia gate square, in the gray before sunrise, with the hem of her plain dress dark from the road and a shepherd's blanket still around her shoulders, because the baby on the high moors had needed it and its mother had insisted she take it with her when she left. She smelled of peat smoke and sheep and the cold. She'd walked all night.

She stopped at the infirmary door and asked whether she could come in.

Io opened it herself. She'd been up all night too. She looked at Aurelia, at the blanket and the bare feet and the tiredness in her face, and didn't say anything. She just stood aside.

* * *

I was there. So were most of us.

My mother and Adriana, in the two hard chairs by the window. Carol and Ignatius, on the floor against the wall, Carol with her head on his shoulder, half asleep. Caitlin, curled up at the foot of the bed with her blue book under her cheek, fully asleep. Kip, who'd come up from the cells at midnight when Abel Sennet finally fell asleep, standing by the door with his hands behind his back. Loki, on the windowsill, not making jokes. Mary, in her hard chair, with her book.

And Roderic. In the chair beside the bed, where he'd been for two nights. With Iselle's right hand held in both of his, against his chest.

Still closed.

* * *

Iselle was awake.

She'd woken at four and asked for water, and Roderic had held the cup, and she'd drunk it, and said her name, and asked what time it was, and whether Caitlin was all right, and whether Kip was all right, and whether the man from the steps was all right. Roderic had told her about Abel Sennet. All of it. Shearwater, and the blue boat, and Davy, and my father on the floor. And Iselle had listened, with her face very still, and when he'd finished, she'd said, "Good," and closed her eyes.

Now she opened them and looked at Aurelia in the doorway.

"I know you," she said. Her voice was thin. "You were at the feast. On the bridge. You laughed at Surtr's letters."

"I did," said Aurelia. "The R was backward. It was the best thing I'd seen all year." She came to the end of the bed. "May I sit with you, Iselle? I've come to see what that chain left. You can say no."

Iselle looked at her for a long time.

"Yes," she said.

* * *

Aurelia didn't touch her. Not at first.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, very carefully, so that it hardly moved. And she looked at Iselle's face. And then at her right hand, held in both of Roderic's against his chest. And then, for a long time, at the place over Iselle's heart, where the black fist lay under the white linen of the infirmary nightgown.

"Ignatius was right," she said at last. "It's a lock. Not a wound. And it's half-shut. On your name."

"Can you open it?" said Roderic. His voice cracked.

Aurelia looked at him.

"No," she said.

* * *

The room went very quiet.

"I could break it," said Aurelia. "I could put my hand on it and break that lock into a thousand pieces. I'm strong enough. I've been strong enough for a very long time." She looked down at the black shape under the linen. "But it's shut on her name. And if I break a lock that's shut on somebody's name, I break whatever's inside it, too. That's how they're made. That's the cruelty of them." She looked at Iselle. "She'd wake up whole, and healed, and not quite herself. A little less Iselle than she was. Forever."

Nobody said anything.

"No," said Iselle quietly. "Not that."

"No," said Aurelia. "Not that."

* * *

"Then what?" said Carol, from the floor. She was awake now. Sitting up. Her hand on Ignatius's sleeve.

Aurelia looked at her. And then at the closed hand against Roderic's chest.

"A lock that's shut on your name," she said, "can only be opened by the one whose name it is. From the inside. That's the other half of how they're made. The half Kessavel forgets, because it's never once happened in Kethra. Nobody there has ever had anything to open it with." She turned back to Iselle. "You held your name while the chain was taking it. With nothing. With your bare voice. That's why it's only half-shut." She nodded at the closed hand. "And your hand closed with it. That's the lock's shape, on the outside. A fist. That's what it looks like when it's done."

Iselle looked down at her own hand, in Roderic's.

"So if I open my hand," she said slowly.

"If you open your hand," said Aurelia, "you open the lock."

"I can't." Iselle's voice wobbled. "I've tried. All night. Every time I wake up. It won't. It's like stone."

"I know," said Aurelia. "I can't open it for you. Nobody can. Not your Roderic. Not me." She held out her own hand, palm up, on the blanket between them. "But I can hold the door while you do."

* * *

I don't know how to tell what happened next. I've tried three times. Mary says I should just say what I saw, and stop trying to say what it felt like, because what it felt like doesn't go into words, and everybody who was there knows anyway.

So this is what I saw.

* * *

Iselle took her right hand out of Roderic's.

Slowly. He let it go. I saw what it cost him; he'd been holding it for two nights. But she lifted it out of his hands, and he let her, and put his own hands in his lap, and didn't reach for it again.

She laid it on the blanket. Next to Aurelia's open palm. Not touching. Her fist, white at the knuckles, with the dried blood still dark between the fingers where her nails had cut her palm.

And Aurelia's hand began to glow.

Not brightly. Not the way Ignatius's fire glows, gold and warm. This was different. It was the light you see sometimes on a winter morning, very early, when the snow has stopped in the night and everything is white and quiet and the sun hasn't come up yet but the sky knows it's coming. A gray light that's already turning into something else. It came up out of Aurelia's palm and lay on the blanket around Iselle's fist like a pool of still water.

It didn't touch the fist. It just held still around it.

"There," said Aurelia. "The door's held. Nothing can shut it while I've got it. Nothing can rush you. Take as long as you need." She looked at Iselle. "One finger at a time. The way you practice."

* * *

Iselle looked at her fist for a long time.

Then she said, very quietly, "My name is Iselle."

And her thumb moved.

Not much. A hair's width. The joint at the base of it, where it had been clenched across her knuckles for two nights, loosened. Just barely. The way the ice goes off Greymere in spring. First a bead of water. Then a crack.

Under the linen over her heart, the black fist flickered.

* * *

"Daughter of Saba," said Iselle. "Who weaves."

Her thumb came free. All the way. It lay open on the blanket, in Aurelia's gray light, with the half-moon marks of her own nails pressed into the skin beneath it.

Her first finger moved.

"Of the Ilvane valley," said Iselle. Her voice shook. "Where the mill is. Where she sings at the loom. Too many verses."

The first finger opened. Then the second. They came up off her palm slowly, stiffly, like the fingers of someone very old, or very cold. And under the white linen, the black fist was fading. Going gray. Then brown. Then the color of an old bruise.

Two fingers left. The third. The little one.

Iselle was crying now. Not loudly. The tears just came down her face and dripped off her chin onto the blanket, and she didn't wipe them, because her left hand was holding the edge of the bed and her right hand was busy.

"I am not," she said. And stopped. And tried again. "I am not what he made me for."

The third finger opened.

* * *

One left.

The little one. The one Rysa counts last. Name. Want. Permission. Stop. And then, last of all, the smallest finger, the one everybody always forgets.

Friend.

Iselle looked at it. Curled against her palm. The last one, still shut.

And then she turned her head on the pillow, and looked at Roderic, sitting in the chair beside the bed with his empty hands in his lap.

"Rod," she said. "Do you remember the lantern?"

Roderic couldn't speak. He nodded.

"I said I'd tell you one day what I wrote in it," said Iselle. "Not that day. One day."

"You don't have to..."

"I want to," said Iselle. "Now. It's what's left." She looked back at her hand. At the last finger. "I didn't know what to write. I sat at my desk for an hour. I'd never written down a want in my life. I didn't think I had any. And then I thought about my mother. And the bench. And the little kitchen at night. And the step by the garden door that I check every morning to see if it's still there." She swallowed. "And I wrote one. And I folded it in half and hung it up and lit it, and it burned for three nights, and on the third night the lines were cut and it should have gone up into the sky with all the others and been gone forever."

She looked at the last finger.

"I wrote I want to stay," said Iselle.

And her little finger opened.

* * *

That's all. That's what I saw.

Her hand lay open on the blanket in Aurelia's gray light. All five fingers. Palm up. With the nail marks and the dried blood and the lines of her own palm, all there, all hers. Open.

And under the white linen over her heart, there was nothing at all. Just Iselle. Breathing.

Aurelia's light went out, slowly, like a lamp being turned down. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment longer, very still. And then she bowed her head, and I saw how tired she was. She'd walked all night from a birth on the high moors, and held a door open on a girl's name for as long as it took, and she was so tired her hands were shaking.

She looked up at Iselle and smiled.

"There you are," she said.

* * *

Roderic didn't take Iselle's hand.

He looked at it, lying open on the blanket. And I saw him want to. I saw everything in him want to reach out and take it and hold it, the way he'd been holding it for two nights. And he didn't. He put his hands flat on his knees and kept them there.

Iselle looked at him.

Then she lifted her open hand off the blanket, slowly, stiffly, the fingers still not quite working properly. And held it out to him. Palm up.

"May I?" she said.

Roderic made a sound I've never heard him make before, and took it.

* * *

My father came at noon.

He'd been at Shearwater since dawn. Edric had taken him up the coast road at first light to the shingle where a blue boat with an eye painted on the bow was drawn up above the tide line, and a man of thirty with two little girls was mending nets. My father hasn't told anyone what was said on that shingle. Not yet. He came into the infirmary with sand on his boots and his eyes red, and he sat down in the chair Roderic gave him, and he looked at Iselle sitting up in bed with her right hand open on the blanket.

He didn't say anything about the shingle. He said, "Iselle. I need to tell you something. It's hard. You can tell me to wait."

Iselle looked at him.

"Is it about the man from the steps?" she said. "What he was carrying?"

My father was quiet for a moment.

"Yes," he said.

"Then tell me now," said Iselle. "I'd rather know."

* * *

So he told her.

The black page in Abel Sennet's coat. The porter's hand that unswore. The sister who lies. Close both. And the short broken chain on its white cloth in the lower hall, which Wynn had read with Eleanor, and which didn't say carried like the one that went around Carol. What is held is closed. What is closed is ended.

Iselle listened without moving. Her open hand lay on the blanket. I watched it the whole time. It didn't close.

When he'd finished, she was quiet for a long time.

"He wanted me dead," she said at last.

"Yes," said my father.

"Not carried. Not kept. Not brought home." She looked at her hand. "Ended."

"Yes."

Iselle nodded slowly.

"He's never once said my name," she said. "Did you know that? Not in nine years. Not in one season report. Not on one page. It's always little sister. As if I didn't have one." She looked up at my father. "I used to think that meant he was being kind. That it was a sort of pet name. And then I thought it meant he didn't care what my name was." She looked at Aurelia, asleep now in the hard chair by the window, with the shepherd's blanket around her. "I think now it was because he knew. That if he ever wrote my name, he'd be admitting I had one. And a person with a name can say no."

* * *

"Then he can't close it," said Iselle. "Can he. Not now. Not ever again. Because I opened it myself."

"No," said my father. "He can't."

"But he'll keep trying."

"Yes. His people will. The ones still on this side of the sea. They'll try for you, and for Kip." My father's voice was very steady. "So I'm going to ask you something. You can say no."

"Ask."

"Come and live at Greykeep," said my father. "Not forever. Not unless you want to. Until this is over. Behind the Castellan, who has never once in twenty years let anybody through a door they shouldn't have come through. In a room of your own." He paused. "You can choose the room."

Iselle looked at him for a long time.

"One with a window," she said. "On the west. So I can see the weather coming."

"Yes."

"And Kip?"

"Kip's already said yes," said my father. "He asked the Castellan himself, last night. He said he'd keep the Orselle gate in the mornings, and come home at dusk. The Castellan said yes, you may, and then mine, again." He almost smiled. "Kip went red."

* * *

"And there's one more thing," said Iselle.

She looked down at her open hand. Then up at my father again. And there was something in her face I'd seen there once before, in the little kitchen, the night she called him Uriah for the first time.

"You said, once," she said. "In the little kitchen. If you want my help with the river, you'll ask, and I'll come. And if you never ask, I'll never come."

"I did."

"I'm asking," said Iselle. "Not about the river. About my mother. He knows her singing. He knows the mill. He knows everything she does every morning, because he's been listening." Her voice shook, very slightly. "Will you go to her? Yourself? And tell her what's happened, and ask her if she'd like to come here? To Greykeep. With me." She lifted her chin. "She can say no. She probably will. She's never left the valley in her life. But I want her asked. Properly. By you."

My father didn't count. Not this time. He didn't need to.

"Yes," he said. "Tomorrow. I'll go myself."

Iselle let out her breath.

And then she did something I've never seen her do. She laughed. Out loud. Not the cracked laugh. A real one. Startled, and wet, and very young.

"She'll make you take your boots off," she said. "At the door. She's very strict about the floor."

"I'll take them off," said my father.

* * *

Mary wrote it that evening. In the infirmary, in her hard chair, while Iselle slept with her right hand open on the pillow and Roderic asleep in the chair beside her, not holding it.

Aurelia came at dawn. Barefoot, from the high moors. She could have broken the lock and did not, because it would have broken a little of Iselle with it.

She held the door. Iselle opened her own hand. One finger at a time. Her name. Her mother. Her valley. Not what he made her for.

The last finger: she told Roderic her lantern. I want to stay.

The lock is gone.

Uriah told her about the page and the chain. Close both. What is closed is ended. Her hand did not close.

She will live at Greykeep, in a room with a west window. Kip too.

She asked Uriah to go to her mother. He will go tomorrow. He will take his boots off.

And under that, in a small, careful, rather stiff hand, as if the fingers holding the pen hadn't quite remembered how yet:

Iselle. Daughter of Saba, who weaves. Weather fair.