Chapter 9: Black Sails

Nobody slept much.

I know because I went down to the little kitchen at two in the morning, and Helena was still there, and so were eleven other people. Thor was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and Mjölnir across her knees. Lexander was at the rabbit-scarred table with a cup going cold in front of him. Ignatius and Carol were in the window seat, not talking. Mary sat in the corner with her book open and her pen in her hand, and she hadn't written anything.

Helena kept the kettle going until dawn.

At dawn, Father came to the door and said, "Map room," and we went.

* * *

The map room is at the top of the old west tower. It has one long table, a great many chairs, and a floor covered in maps. Not hanging on the walls. On the floor, laid edge to edge and pinned at the corners with whatever was nearest. The Castellan keeps them current. It adds new roads in fine black ink as Eleanor builds them, and crosses out the old ones in red, and when you walk across the room you walk across the whole of Avarra, every kingdom and gate and river from the northern passes to the southern sea.

The western edge of the floor ends at the coast.

Beyond the coast there is nothing. The Castellan once told me it had no information about anything past the outer shoals of Westmere, and had left the floor bare there rather than guess. It's just stone. Gray, unmarked, cold underfoot.

I'd never thought about it before. I thought about it that morning, standing on it.

We were fourteen in the room. Father and Mother and Adriana. Lexander and Io. Aurelia. Carol and Ignatius, Seraphina and me. Thor, who hadn't been asked and hadn't needed to be. Loki, who had simply been there when we arrived, in the window, as if he had been there all night. Mary, with her book. Tamar Vale, dried and fed and still pale under it. And the Castellan, standing at the end of the table where it always stands, very still, with the light in its eyes turned low.

Father took the letter out of his coat and laid it on the table.

In the morning light it looked smaller than it had the night before. A long folded sheet of black paper, heavy as cloth. The red wax seal, with the closed hand pressed into it.

Nobody touched it.

"Mary," said Father.

Mary got up.

She took a thin silver knife from her coat, the one she uses for opening every letter that comes to Greykeep and has used for twenty-seven years, and she slid it under the seal and lifted.

The wax didn't crack. It came away from the paper whole, clean, like a scab peeling off. Mary looked at it in her palm for a moment. Then she set it face down on the table, carefully, the way you'd set down something that might bite.

She unfolded the letter.

The writing was silver. Fine, upright, perfectly even, in a script I didn't know, with a second hand underneath in our own common tongue. The translation, I realized, had been done by someone who had learned our language very well and very recently. Every letter was correct. None of them looked comfortable.

Mary read it aloud.

* * *

To Uriah Grey, King of Greykeep, Keeper of the Crown, Lord of Havenreach and the Western Roads, from Severin Dask, Voice of His Radiance Malachar Ostrane: Emperor of Kethra, Lord of the Ostrane Imperium, Son of the Unnamed God, Who Holds.

Greeting.

His Radiance has heard, across the water, of the kingdom that took in the burned and the broken. Of the castle that woke. Of the King who walked into the house of the god of captivity and walked out again with the dead behind him. His Radiance was moved. His Radiance has not been moved in many years.

His Radiance has also heard of the King's children.

Of the twins who held the whole of a god's hoard when they were three years old, and gave it away. Of the King's daughter, Carol, in whom lightning sleeps. Of the King's son's wife, Seraphina of Concordia, who carries the First Flame.

His Radiance wishes to honor them.

I have come across the water to carry His Radiance's greetings to the house of Greykeep, and certain proposals of friendship between our peoples. I will speak them only to the King, and only in the King's own hall.

I ask that a gate be opened for me from Westmere.

I will wait.

Severin Dask.

* * *

Mary lowered the letter.

The room was very quiet.

I didn't look at Carol. I didn't need to. Through the bond I could feel her, very still and very cold, like a pond that has just frozen over. On my other side, Seraphina's hand had closed on the back of my chair.

Across the table, Io had gone white. Lexander put his hand over hers without looking at her.

Father didn't move at all.

"He knows their names," said Mother quietly.

"He knows a great deal," said Adriana.

"Who Holds," said Loki from the window. He hadn't turned round. "That's not a title. That's a boast."

Aurelia had picked up the wax seal from where Mary had set it down. She was turning it over in her fingers. On the back, where it had pressed against the paper, the wax was smooth and blank.

"Son of the Unnamed God," she said softly.

Nobody asked her what she meant. I think we were all afraid she'd tell us.

Father looked down at the letter for a long moment. Then at the bare gray stone of the floor beyond the coast, where the maps ran out.

"Castellan," he said. "Can a gate be opened for a man you don't know?"

"No," said the Castellan. "Not by me. A gate opens only when both sides ask. Westmere's side may ask on behalf of a traveler, if its steward vouches for him. Greykeep's side must then answer." The light in its eyes brightened a fraction. "I would not recognize him. I would not let him through until I did."

"Good," said Father.

He folded the letter.

"Nobody opens a gate for this man," he said. "Not yet. Not until we know what he is, and what he's come for, and what those ships are carrying." He looked round the table. "I want eyes on that fleet. Not soldiers. Eyes. Someone who can see, and listen, and come back fast."

He looked at me.

I knew he would. I'd known since he said eyes.

"Go with Tamar," said Father. "Through the Westmere gate. Look at those ships. Look at this man. Don't speak for me. Don't promise anything. Don't threaten anything." A pause. "Don't fold anything into the sea."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were thinking about it."

I had been. I'd been thinking about it since the gate chamber last night.

"Come back by dark," said Father. "And tell me what you saw."

Seraphina stood up.

"I'm going with him."

"No," said Father, Mother, Io and Lexander, all at once.

Seraphina looked round the table at all four of them. Her chin came up. The First Flame came up with it, a faint gold light under the skin of her throat and wrists that I've only ever seen when she's very angry or very frightened.

"My name," she said, "is in that letter."

"Yes," said Father gently. "That's why."

She held his eyes for a long moment.

Then she sat down, slowly, and the gold went back under her skin, and she put her hand on my arm. Her fingers were very hot.

"Come back by dark," she said.

"I will."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

I didn't know, then, how many times I'd have to say that in the time that followed. I didn't know how many times I'd mean it and not be able to keep it.

I only knew it was morning, and my son was asleep in the nursery with a spoon in his fist, and there were sixty ships off the coast of Westmere that no one had ever seen before.

* * *

Westmere Hold is the oldest castle I know that isn't Greykeep.

It's older than Concordia, older than the rebuilt halls of Lyradon. It was standing when the old kingdom of Greykeep ruled the whole western district, before the fall. It was a ruin for a long time after that. Then it belonged to House Harwick, which was worse.

Then Father came, and woke it.

I've heard the story so often I sometimes forget I wasn't there. Father walking into the citadel with fewer than a hundred defenders in the courtyard, and putting his hands on the stone, and feeling the old waterways deep underneath, and the Hold waking under his palms. Angry. It had been asleep a long time, and it had not liked what Harwick did while it slept.

Edric Vale was a captain in that courtyard. Afterward he became Westmere's steward under the Crown's charter, and he ran it for twenty years with ink on his thumb and mud on his boots and a ledger under his arm. Three winters ago he handed the ledger to Tamar, and went to live in a small house by the harbor wall, and took up fishing, badly.

He was waiting in Westmere's gate chamber when we came through.

He's an old man now. Gray-bearded, stooped a little, still broad in the shoulders. He looked at his son, in a clean coat buttoned to the throat again. Then he looked at me.

"Prince Garrick."

"Steward Vale."

"Not anymore." He held up his right hand. There was ink on the thumb. "Though I can't seem to get this off."

Tamar made a small noise.

"I told you to stay in the house, Father."

"You did," Edric agreed. "And then sixty ships sailed into my harbor and anchored outside my window, so I came up." He turned to the stair. "Come and look. The Hold has been restless since dusk. I want you to feel it."

* * *

I felt it before we reached the top of the stair.

Greykeep's stone is quiet. You can feel the Castellan in it if you know how, the way you feel someone breathing in the next room. Westmere's stone isn't like that. There's no Castellan here. Thor refused to let anyone make another one, years ago, and Father agreed. But the Hold has its own kind of waking, deep and slow and old, down where the waterways run.

That morning it was humming.

Not loudly. A low, steady thrum through the soles of my boots, the way a bell keeps sounding after you've stopped hearing it. When I put my hand flat on the wall at the top of the stair, the stone was faintly warm, and the hum came up into my palm and settled there, and something in me answered it.

The seeds.

They stirred in my chest the way they do by the stream at home. Except this wasn't like that. At the stream they shift like birds settling on a branch. Here they were shifting the way birds do before a storm, when the air goes heavy and every one of them knows something is coming that none of them can see.

I took my hand off the wall.

Edric was watching me.

"You feel it," he said.

"Yes."

"So does the Hold. It's been like that all night." He went to the parapet. "It doesn't like them."

* * *

The sea wall of Westmere Hold looks west, straight out across the bay.

I'd been there before, as a boy, on treaty days. I remembered the bay as wide and blue and full of fishing boats, with the outer shoals white with surf a mile out and nothing beyond them but water and sky, all the way to the edge of the world.

The fishing boats were gone. Every one of them had been pulled up onto the beach below the Hold and turned over.

And a mile out, just inside the white line of the shoals, were the ships.

Tamar had said sixty. I counted them anyway. I counted them twice. Sixty, in a single line, stem to stern, across the whole mouth of the bay. They were long and low and narrow, built for speed, with high curved prows. Their sails were furled, but you could see from the bundled cloth on the yards that the sails were black. The hulls were black too. Not painted. The wood itself was black, the dense dark kind that doesn't grow anywhere in Avarra.

There was nobody on deck. Not a single figure. Not on any of them.

No smoke. No flags, except one.

In the middle of the line was a ship larger than the others, half again as long, with three masts instead of two. From the top of its tallest mast hung a long black banner, hanging straight down in the still morning air. I couldn't see the device on it from the wall.

I didn't need to.

"Here," said Edric, and put a spyglass into my hand.

I looked.

The closest ship jumped toward me through the glass, so near I felt I could have touched its rail. The hull was carved. Tamar had been right. Every inch of the black wood, from the waterline to the rail, was covered in lines of writing, cut deep and filled with something pale that caught the light. I didn't know the script. It looked a little like the ward-writing on Greykeep's gates, and a little like nothing I'd ever seen.

I held the glass steady and looked straight at one line of it.

It was just carving.

Then I let my eye drift a little to the left, to the next line down.

And at the edge of my sight, the line I'd just been reading moved.

Not much. A small crawling shift, the way a word swims when you're very tired. When I snapped my eye back, it was still. Just carving. Exactly as it had been.

I lowered the glass.

My hands were cold.

"You saw it," said Tamar.

"I saw it."

"The men won't look at them anymore. Not through the glass. Not since last night." He looked out at the line of black ships. "Two of them say they hear something after dark. Coming across the water."

"What sort of something?"

Tamar didn't answer. He looked at his father.

Edric was leaning on the parapet with both forearms, looking out at the fleet with the calm, patient expression of a man who has been afraid many times in his life and has learned to do it quietly.

"Singing," he said.

I thought of an old sailor in the Lantern and Oar. No crew on deck. Not a soul. But something on those ships was singing.

"I served Harwick once," Edric said, after a while. "Before your father. Did you know that?"

"I knew."

"Ten years I took his coin. I knew what he was. I told myself I was keeping the peace. That someone had to keep order in Westmere, and better me than worse." He didn't look at me. "Do you know what I learned, in those ten years?"

I waited.

"That when a man comes to you with a great deal of power," said Edric Vale, "and smiles, and says friendship, he has already decided what your friendship is going to cost. He just hasn't told you yet." He nodded out at the sixty black ships. "Those are not the ships of a man who's come to ask."

* * *

The envoy had made camp on the beach.

You couldn't call it more than that. A square gray awning on four poles, set up just above the tideline below the Hold, with a rug spread underneath it and a single folding chair. Beside the chair stood a low table with a brass pot on it, and a cup. A small boat was drawn up on the sand behind, with two oarsmen sitting in it, motionless, facing out to sea.

The man in the chair had been sitting there since dawn, Tamar said. He hadn't moved except to pour himself tea.

"Don't go down," said Tamar.

"Father said look."

"Father said look at the ships."

"He said look at the man, too."

Tamar looked at his own father. Edric shrugged.

"He's the prince," said Edric. "And he's right."

Tamar came with me anyway. So did four of his guards, in Westmere green, who walked a careful pace behind us all the way down the long stone stair from the Hold to the beach and across the sand. I didn't ask them to. I didn't tell them not to.

The man under the awning watched us come the whole way.

When we were twenty paces off, he stood.

* * *

Severin Dask was not what I'd expected.

I'd expected someone tall, I think. Someone grand, in robes, with rings on every finger and the cold arrogant face of a villain in one of Ashby's lectures. Instead he was an ordinary-sized man of perhaps forty-five, lean, with close-cut dark hair going gray at the temples and a narrow, intelligent, rather tired face. He wore a long gray coat, very plain, buttoned high. Black gloves. No sword. No jewels at all, except a single ring on the third finger of his left hand, worn outside the glove.

A closed hand, in dark gold.

He smiled when he saw me. It was a good smile. Warm, a little rueful, the smile of a man who knows exactly how strange this all must look and is sorry for it.

I didn't trust it at all.

"Prince Garrick," he said, and bowed.

It was a perfect bow. Not too deep, not too shallow. The bow of a man who has studied exactly how deep a bow should be for the heir to a kingdom he has never visited, and has practiced it until it looks natural. His voice was quiet and very clear, with an accent I'd never heard. Every vowel a little longer than ours, every consonant a little softer.

"You know who I am," I said.

"I know who all of you are," said Severin Dask. "It is my work to know." He gestured at the chair. "Please. Sit. I have only the one, I'm afraid. I didn't expect company. I'll stand."

"I'll stand too."

"Of course." He didn't seem offended. He lifted the brass pot. "Tea? It's from home. It's very dark and rather bitter. I'm told people in Avarra find it strange."

I thought of Helena's kitchen, and the kettle, and the black leaf she gives anyone who needs to be useful.

"No," I said. "Thank you."

"Of course," he said again, and poured himself a cup, and stood holding it.

* * *

"My father received your letter," I said.

"I'm glad."

"He's read it."

"I'm gladder."

"He sent me to hear what you want."

Severin Dask looked at me over the rim of his cup for a long moment. His eyes were dark gray, very steady, and older than the rest of his face.

"No," he said gently. "He didn't."

I said nothing.

"Your father sent you to look," said Severin. "At the ships. At me. He sent you because you can fold space and be home by dark, and because you're his heir and it's time you learned to stand in front of a stranger and keep your face still. And because he wanted to know if I'd try to speak to you instead of him." He sipped. "I won't. I'll speak only to the King, in the King's own hall. As I said."

"Then why come down to the beach at all?"

"So that you could look at me." He spread his free hand, the one with the ring. "Here I am. Look. Tell him what you see."

I looked.

I'm not sure what I saw. A tired, intelligent man on a beach a very long way from home, drinking bitter tea out of a brass cup. Courteous. Patient. Utterly sure of himself, the way only someone is sure who has never once in his life been told no and meant it.

And underneath all that, something I couldn't name, that made the seeds in my chest go still and cold and quiet, like birds when a hawk's shadow crosses the field.

"May I say one thing, Highness?" said Severin. "Not as business. Only as a guest."

I didn't answer. He took that as yes.

"I'm told," he said, "that your son had his name day yesterday."

The sand was very quiet under my feet.

Behind me, I heard one of Tamar's guards shift his grip on his spear.

"Please give him my congratulations," said Severin Dask. He smiled again, the warm rueful smile. "I'm told his first word was jam. That seems to me a boy with excellent priorities."

* * *

I don't remember walking back up the beach.

I remember Tamar's hand on my arm, very firm, the whole way up the stair. I remember the stone of the Hold humming under my boots, louder than before. I remember standing at the top of the sea wall with my hands flat on the parapet, breathing, and not trusting myself to do anything else.

It had been less than a day.

Less than a day since my son said his first word in the great hall of Greykeep, with only family and friends and gods to hear it. And this man, sitting on a beach a hundred miles away beside a fleet that had arrived out of nowhere at dusk, knew it.

Knew the word. Knew what Io had said after it.

Someone had been in the hall.

Or something.

"Garrick," Edric Vale said quietly.

I looked up.

The sun was going down. The whole western sky had gone red and gold behind the line of black ships, and they sat dark and silent against it like teeth.

And as the bottom edge of the sun touched the sea, the singing began.

It came across the water low and slow, so low at first I thought it was the Hold humming under me. Then it rose. Not words. Not a tune I could follow. A long, wide, layered sound, many voices together, coming from sixty ships with nobody on their decks. It filled the bay. It came up the beach and up the stair and up the walls of Westmere Hold and into the stone, and the stone answered it with a deep shudder that I felt in my teeth.

The seeds in my chest didn't stir this time.

They flinched.

All of them, all at once, every small kept piece of every god Carol and I ever held. They flinched away from that sound the way you flinch away from a hand raised to strike.

And a hundred miles away, across half of Avarra, through the bond, I felt my sister flinch with them.

* * *

I folded home.

I didn't go back through the gate. I didn't say goodbye to Tamar or Edric properly. I took one breath on the wall of Westmere Hold, and folded, and took the next breath on the flagstones of Greykeep's inner court, with the evening bells ringing and the smell of bread coming out of Beatrice's kitchens.

It was the longest fold I'd ever made. It left me on my knees.

The Castellan's voice came out of the stone beside me, very quiet.

"Prince Garrick. Welcome home." A pause. "You did not use a gate."

"No."

"Are you hurt?"

"No." I got to my feet. My legs were shaking. "Where's my father?"

"The map room. With the Lady Aurelia."

I started for the west tower.

"Prince Garrick," said the Castellan.

I stopped.

"Your sister is in the north tower," it said. "She went there at sunset. She has not come down." Another pause. "There is frost on her windows."

I stood in the middle of the court with the bells ringing over me.

Then I went to the map room, because Father had told me to come back and tell him what I saw. And I told him.

I told him about the ships, and the writing that moved, and the man in the gray coat with the closed hand on his finger. And I told him the last thing. I watched his face, and saw nothing change on it at all. That's how I knew it was the worst thing I could have said.

"He knew about the jam," I said.