Chapter 97: Full Council

The Council of the Accord has met in the Council Hall at Greykeep every time it has ever met. Forty chairs around a long oak table, in a plain stone room leaning on the chapel like a younger sister. No locks on the doors. Aurelia's wish.

It had never once met anywhere else.

"Then it will now," said Aurelia, in the little kitchen, the night she sent the summons. "She can't come inland. Not yet. Not for hours, in a room with no sea in it." She looked at the end of our table, where Helena had laid a place for Selvane every night that week anyway, in case. "So we'll go to her."

"Every god of the Accord," said my father slowly. "Through one arch. Into a fishing town."

"Tamar has a hall," said Aurelia. "He told me so himself. He said it holds half the town on a council day and the whole town at a wedding." She almost smiled. "I told him to plan for a wedding."

* * *

So that's how the Full Council of the Accord came to sit for the first time in its history in the great hall of Westmere Hold, on the benches where the fishwives sit, under the smoke-black rafters, with the sea going in and out below the windows.

They came all morning.

The Castellan logged every one of them through the Westmere arch, in its ledger voice, and I stood beside the brass plate and listened, because I wanted to hear the whole roll. I'd never heard it all at once before.

Brannoc. Outward. Westmere. Walking.

Corra. Outward. Westmere. A pause. With leaves.

Soren. Meriel. Outward. Westmere. Together.

Damar. Outward. Westmere. A longer pause. Carefully.

Thor. Outward. Westmere. Loudly.

Loki. A pause. Probably.

On and on. Faelan, with his ledger under his arm. Lorn, dripping. Imme, bouncing. Morning, the little crossroads lamp-god, carried through in a lantern by Ilyra. Kaedra and Tavros and Ishkar. Halemar of the ferries, who asked the Castellan very politely whether there was a toll. Vaust of thresholds, who stopped on the threshold of the arch for a long moment, as he always does, before he stepped through.

Forty chairs. And then the ones without chairs, the small gods, the new ones, the ones who come to watch. They kept coming. By noon the Castellan had stopped counting aloud and was only writing, very fast, in a voice like a pen scratching.

At a quarter past twelve it said, to me alone, very quietly:

"That is all of them. Every one. I have never logged them all before."

A pause.

"I should like it noted that I did."

* * *

Westmere had never seen anything like it.

The whole town was out. On the harbor wall, on the roofs of the net lofts, up the masts of the boats in the harbor. Goss had given up any pretense of checking the moorings and was standing at the top of the Hold steps in his blue coat with his ledger clutched to his chest, writing down every god who went past, in pencil, as fast as he could. Pim was on Wil's shoulders. Edric Vale sat on his bucket at the end of the wall, hat over his eyes, and every god who passed him said good afternoon, and he said good afternoon back, and caught nothing.

Thor stopped beside him.

"Anything?" she said.

"Not yet," said Edric.

"Good," said Thor, and sat down on the wall next to him, and stayed there until Aurelia sent Loki out to fetch her.

* * *

Tamar had done what Aurelia told him. He'd planned for a wedding.

Every bench in Westmere was in that hall. Every bench, and every stool, and three upturned fish crates, and the long table from the Hold kitchen down the middle with forty mismatched chairs around it, borrowed from forty houses, with a slip of paper on each one saying whose kitchen it had come from so it could go home again. Mistress Ostry had lent the rope to rig awnings over the windows. Callow, grumbling, had brought the barge lanterns.

Brannoc sat down in a chair with Widow Mabry, by the fish market written on the slip and looked at it for a long time.

"It's a good chair," he said finally, to no one in particular. And put his hands on the arms as if it were a wall.

* * *

We sat on the family bench by the door. We always do. My mother and Adriana, holding hands. Carol in her own blue coat, with Ignatius. Seraphina, with little Uriah asleep in her lap. Roderic. Caitlin, with her notebook. Elenos, with Sahrun beside him. Saba, at the end, very upright, with her shuttle in her lap and her eyes going from god to god as if she were counting threads.

My father didn't sit with us. He never does at Council. He sat at the long table, in a chair borrowed from the harbor-master's own kitchen, with Goss on the slip, and Goss at the top of the steps outside nearly dropped his ledger when he heard.

Iselle wasn't on the bench either.

She was at the front of the hall, by the hearth, standing next to Selvane.

* * *

Selvane had a chair by the fire. Tamar's, from the sea tower. She was wrapped in Tamar's wife's knitted jersey and a blue-gray shawl that I'd last seen on Saba's loom, with Tessaly in its clay cup in her lap.

She wasn't thin today.

I want to say that clearly, because I've written so much about how thin she was. She wasn't. Not like the first day, nor the fourth morning. I could see the light of Tessaly through the clay of the cup, but I couldn't see anything through her. And beyond the windows, at the end of the north pier, unlit in the daylight, her little brass lamp sat on its bollard, and every so often Selvane's eyes went to it, and stayed there a moment, and came back.

Beside her, on a stool, very still, sat Ilyra.

* * *

Ilyra is the goddess of last vigils. She sits with the dying. She sat with Teo, at the end. She's small and gray and quiet, and wherever she sits down, people go very gentle around her, because they know what it usually means.

She'd come through the arch at nine, with Morning in his lantern, and set the lantern on the windowsill, and gone straight to Selvane and sat down on the floor beside her chair without asking anyone. And Selvane had looked at her for a long time and gone white.

"No," Iselle had said. Out loud. Before anyone else could say anything. "No. You can't have her."

And Ilyra had looked up at Iselle with her quiet gray eyes and said, gently:

"I know, child. I didn't come for that."

She turned to Selvane.

"I sit with the ones who are leaving," she said. "I've sat with a great many. When Aurelia's summons came, I felt you, on the coast, and I thought you might be one of them." She folded her small gray hands in her lap. "And then I came through the arch and looked at you, and you're not. You're not leaving at all." A pause. "But I've come all this way. So I'll sit with you anyway. For the other thing. The one I'm not usually asked to do. If you'll let me."

"What other thing?" said Selvane.

"Staying," said Ilyra. "I'd like to sit with somebody who's staying. Just once."

Selvane had held out her hand. And Ilyra had taken it. And they'd been sitting like that ever since, the harbor goddess and the goddess of last vigils, hand in hand by the fire, while the whole Accord came in through the door.

* * *

Aurelia stood up at one o'clock.

She didn't knock on the table. She never does. She just stood, by her chair at the head of the long table, in her plain gray dress with her shawl on her shoulders, and waited. And the hall went quiet around her, from the table outward, the way water goes still when the wind drops.

"Thank you for coming," she said. "All of you. I know it's far. I know it's strange. I know some of you have never seen the sea." She glanced at Damar, who was sitting very carefully in two chairs and looking at the windows with the expression of a mountain that has just been told about tides. "I asked you here because there's something you need to hear. Not from me. From her."

She turned toward the hearth.

"Selvane," she said. "Of the harbors. Of Tessaly and Westmere. Will you tell them?"

* * *

Selvane told it.

I won't write all of it again. I've written it once, and once was enough. The first asking, and the second. Kessavel. The stripping. The hands, the eyes. The Stillyard under the palace hill, and the three hundred and eleven gray roses, and the goddess of the first warm day of spring in the third row.

But I'll write what it was like to hear it in that hall.

Forty gods at a long table in borrowed chairs, and a hundred more along the walls and on the fish crates, and the whole of Westmere outside the windows with its face pressed to the glass. And a small brown woman by the fire in a fisherman's jersey, talking in her careful common tongue, not loudly, with her hand in Ilyra's.

When she got to the hand over the eyes, Corra put her own hand over her mouth.

When she got to the Stillyard, Lorn stopped dripping. All at once. I'd never seen him stop before. The floor around his chair simply went dry.

When she said three hundred and eleven, Faelan opened his ledger and wrote the number down and then sat looking at it with his pen in the air, as if he'd been asked to add up something that wouldn't stay still.

And when she said the third row, Meriel, the goddess of mourning, who never speaks at Council, who sits with her long gray veil down and her candles burning low and steady in front of her, put back her veil.

* * *

"Iselle," said Aurelia, when Selvane had finished.

Iselle stepped forward.

I watched her do it. I watched her hands at her sides, open, and I watched them close, very slightly, the way they still do when she's frightened, and I watched her open them again. On purpose.

She'd asked Roderic, that morning, on the sea-tower stair, whether she should. Whether it was right. Whether the Council would want to hear anything from Malachar's sister. And Roderic had said, That's not the question. The question is whether you want to say it. And she'd thought about it for a long time and said, Yes.

"My name is Iselle," she said. "Daughter of Saba, who weaves. Of the Ilvane valley, where the mill is."

On the family bench, Saba's hands went still on her shuttle.

"My brother is Malachar Ostrane," said Iselle. "Same father. Different mother." She took a breath. "Some of you know that. Some of you have said so. In corridors. Where you thought I couldn't hear." She didn't look at anyone in particular. "That's all right. I'd say it too."

The hall was very quiet.

"He holds," said Iselle. "You've heard what that means now. All of it." She held up her right hand, palm out, open, so the whole table could see it. "I'm the other way around."

* * *

She didn't explain it well. She wasn't trying to. She just told them what had happened. The sea tower. The fist on the blanket. The fingers, one at a time. Tessaly, and the lamp lighting itself, and the Westmere Hold beginning to hum. The bootlace, afterward, and three hours' sleep in a chair.

"It isn't big," she said. "Not yet. I don't know if it will ever be big. I can open one hand and then I can't open a shoelace." She looked at Selvane, at the little light in the cup. "But I opened one. And when it opened, a girl in Tessaly put bread on the bollard again. So I know it's real."

Somebody along the wall, one of the small gods I didn't know, said, quite loudly, in astonishment: "Malachar's sister?"

Iselle turned her head and looked at him.

"Iselle," she said. "Daughter of Saba."

The small god went red to the roots of his hair and sat down on his fish crate.

* * *

I wasn't going to speak. I want that noted. I'd promised Seraphina, on the east wall, that I'd let the Council be the Council.

But I was sitting on that bench, in that hall, with every god of the Accord in front of me, and something was happening that I hadn't expected and couldn't stop.

I could feel them.

Not the way I used to. I used to feel the god next to me. The one whose hand I'd taken, whose power I'd borrowed. One at a time, like candles you light one from another.

Now I could feel all of them. At once. Every chair. Every fish crate. Brannoc's stubborn stone patience and Corra's leaf-smoke and Lorn's slow river and Imme's quick bright spring. Thor's thunder, all the way from her seat by the window, like a dog asleep by a fire with one ear up. Faelan's careful columns of numbers. Morning's little steady flame in his lantern on the sill. A hundred and forty gods, and every one of them was in the room with me, not across it, and I could have told you, with my eyes shut, which of them was frightened and which was angry and which was trying very hard to find a reason why none of this was their business.

It was like standing in a field at night and suddenly hearing every cricket.

I put my hand on the bench to steady myself. Seraphina's hand came down over mine without her looking at me.

"Garrick," she said, under her breath. "Breathe."

I breathed.

* * *

"Questions," said Aurelia.

And Vaust stood up.

* * *

Vaust of thresholds is tall and narrow, like a doorway. He wears a gray coat and keeps his hands behind his back, and he stops on every threshold he comes to, always, for a breath, before he steps over. Rysa says he's done it for two thousand years and has never once explained why.

He didn't stop now. He stood straight up out of his borrowed chair and looked down the long table at Aurelia, and spoke in a dry, careful voice.

"I'm very sorry," he said. "For the harbor goddess. Truly. For the garden. For all of it." He paused. "I'd like to ask a question, and I'd like nobody to mistake it for unkindness."

"Ask," said Aurelia.

"Why is this ours?"

* * *

Nobody said anything.

"There is a sea between us and Kethra," said Vaust. "A very wide one. He has never crossed it. In three hundred years, he has never once come himself. His ships came, and sat, and went home. His gold came, and some of it was sent back. His chain came, and it failed." He looked at my sister. "The Princess told him no. He heard her. He stopped speaking." His eyes went to Selvane. "And then he did a cruel thing, to someone of his own, on his own side of the water, because he could no longer reach us."

"She isn't his own," said Iselle.

"Forgive me," said Vaust. "To someone of Kethra's." He turned back to the table. "I keep thresholds. That is my whole craft. I know better than any god at this table what happens when you step over one that isn't yours. What follows you back." He spread his long hands. "If we take in every god he strips, he will strip more, to see how many we'll take. If we send the twins across the water to open his garden, he will send the sea to us. The oracle says so. If we go, the sea stands up."

He looked around at the forty chairs.

"I'm not saying turn her out. Harbor-right is harbor-right. She's here; she stays. I'm saying: let that be the end of it. Let the Accord be the Accord, on this side of the water, and let Kethra be Kethra. We are not the whole world's door-wardens."

He sat down.

* * *

And I felt it.

Through the room. Through every chair. The thing I'd been feeling all along, in the frightened ones, the ones trying to find a reason. It moved. Toward him. Not all of them. Not even most. But more than I'd have liked. Kaedra. Halemar. Two of the river gods from the north. Half the small gods along the far wall. A dozen. Twenty. It went through the hall like a draft under a door, and I felt every one of them lean, very slightly, toward that tall gray voice saying not ours.

Thor was on her feet before anyone could stop her.

"Not ours?" she said. The red-gold braid down her back was crackling. "Not ours, you bloodless—"

"Thor," said Aurelia.

"I'm agreeing with nobody," said Thor. "Loudly."

Meriel had stood up too, on the other side of the table, with her veil still back and her candles guttering. And Soren, beside her. And somewhere along the wall, somebody began to shout.

* * *

Aurelia let it run for exactly a count of ten. I counted. I think she did too.

Then she said, not loudly, "Sit down."

And they did. All of them. Even Thor, eventually, with her arms folded and her braid still spitting sparks onto the floor of the Westmere hall, where Tamar's wife would find scorch marks for years.

"We'll hear everyone," said Aurelia. "Everyone who wants to speak. Every chair. Every crate. However long it takes." She looked at Vaust, not unkindly. "You asked an honest question. It deserves honest answers. More than one." She glanced at the windows, where the light was starting to go. "Tomorrow. At first light. In this hall. Nobody leaves Westmere tonight who doesn't want to."

* * *

Nobody did.

Westmere put up a hundred and forty gods that night. In spare rooms and lofts and net sheds and the back rooms of the harbor inn. Goss took in Halemar and Damar, who didn't fit through his door and slept in the yard. Mistress Ostry took in Corra and Kaedra and said afterward she'd never had better company. Pim made Morning a bed in a pie dish on her windowsill.

And Ilyra stayed in the sea tower. On the stool by the cot. Holding Selvane's hand all night, while she slept.

"Still here?" Selvane said once, about three in the morning, half awake.

"Still here," said Ilyra. "And so are you."

* * *

Mary wrote it at midnight in the Westmere hall, by the light of Callow's barge lanterns, at the end of the long table, in Brannoc's borrowed chair.

The Full Council met at Westmere. The first time it has ever met anywhere but Greykeep. The Castellan logged every god of the Accord through the arch and asked that it be noted.

It is noted.

Selvane told it all. Lorn stopped dripping. Meriel put back her veil.

Iselle said: I'm the other way around. A small god said: Malachar's sister? She said: Iselle, daughter of Saba.

Garrick felt every god in the hall at once. A hundred and forty. Seraphina told him to breathe.

Vaust asked: why is this ours? He said: we are not the whole world's door-wardens. Some of the Council leaned toward him. Garrick felt them do it.

Thor was not allowed to finish her sentence.

Ilyra came to sit vigil with Selvane. She said: you're not leaving. She said: I'd like to sit with somebody who's staying. Just once.

Tomorrow, at first light, everyone speaks.

And under that, in the morning, in a small, careful gray hand nobody in the family had seen before, that could only have been Ilyra's:

She is staying. I have checked.