Chapter 98: Gods Arguing

They argued for eleven hours.

I'd like to say it was grand. That it was all great speeches under the smoke-black rafters, with the sea going in and out below the windows. Some of it was. But most of it was what arguing always is, whether you're a god or a fishwife or a boy in a net loft. People saying the same thing three times because they didn't think anyone had heard it the first time. People saying what they'd come to say whether or not it had anything to do with what the last person had said. People getting up for tea.

Tamar's wife made the tea. Four hundred cups, she said afterward. She counted.

* * *

Ilyra was still by the fire when we came in at first light. On her stool, with Selvane's hand in hers, exactly where she'd been when we left. I don't think she'd moved all night.

"Did you sleep?" I asked Selvane.

"Yes," said Selvane. She looked surprised. "All night. I haven't slept all night since before the first letter." She looked down at Ilyra's small gray hand around hers. "She wouldn't let go."

"I don't, usually," said Ilyra. "Not till the end." A pause. "This time there isn't one. So I'm not sure when I'm supposed to stop."

"Don't," said Selvane.

So she didn't.

* * *

Vaust spoke first again, because he'd asked the question, and Aurelia said a question gets to stand at the front of the line until it's answered.

He didn't say anything new. He said it better. There is a sea between us. He has never crossed it. Harbor-right for those who come; nothing more. And then he sat down, and Halemar of the ferries stood up.

* * *

Halemar is broad and slow and soft-spoken, with a ferryman's shoulders and a ferryman's patience, and he has never in his life, as far as anyone knows, been angry.

"I carry people across water," he said. "That's all I do. I've done it for longer than the Accord. Farmers to market. Brides to weddings. The dead, sometimes, to be buried on the other bank where their families are." He turned his broad hands over. "I've carried a great many people to a great many places. I've never once carried anyone to a war."

He looked down the table at my father.

"I'm not saying no," he said. "I don't know enough to say no. I'm saying I've never done it. And I'm frightened of what it would make me, to start."

He sat down.

I felt the hall go with him. Not far. But a little. Because he hadn't said not ours, the way Vaust had. He'd said I'm frightened, and that's harder to argue with.

* * *

Then Kaedra. Then two of the northern river gods, one after another, who were brothers and never agreed about anything except this. Then a little god of mill-ponds from the far side of the Varrow, who stood on his fish crate to be seen and said he didn't want anyone stripping his pond, thank you, and if keeping quiet was what kept the Emperor on his own side of the water then he'd keep very quiet indeed.

By ten o'clock I could feel it in the room like weather. The leaning. Not toward cruelty. Nobody in that hall wanted Selvane turned out. Nobody wanted the garden to stay a garden. They just wanted it to be somebody else's to fix.

And I understood them. That was the worst part. I'd felt it myself, on the sea tower. Three hundred and eleven. It's too big a number. You want to put it down.

* * *

Then Meriel stood up.

* * *

I've said she never speaks at Council. That's true. In all the years I've sat on the family bench, I'd never heard her voice there. She sits at the end of the long table with her gray veil down and her candles in front of her, and when something is decided she says "Heard," and that's all.

She'd put her veil back the day before, when Selvane said the third row. She hadn't put it down again.

She stood up now, slowly, a tall gray woman with a long, plain, tired face, and every candle in front of her went very still.

"I keep the mourning," she said.

Her voice was low and dry, like pages turning.

"I've kept it since before there was an Accord. Every god who has died in Avarra, I've stood beside at the end, and said heard, so that somebody had. I know what a death is. I know what it looks like. I know what it sounds like."

She looked down the long table, at Vaust.

"Those aren't dead," she said. "In the garden. The roses. Three hundred and eleven. I've listened all night. In my room in the harbor master's loft, with my candles. I've listened for them the way I listen for the dying." She shook her head slowly. "And there's nothing to mourn. They're not dying. They're held. Somebody has his hand over every eye that ever loved them, and they're standing in rows in a garden, waiting." She took a breath. "I will not mourn a goddess who is still standing up. I won't say heard over somebody who's waiting for a door."

"Then what will you do?" said Vaust quietly.

"I'll say what I came to say," said Meriel. "Go and get them."

And she sat down, and put her veil down, and every candle in front of her flared up at once, tall and white, like a room when the shutters are thrown open.

* * *

Soren stood up beside her.

Soren always sits beside Meriel. He's quieter even than she is, a gray-bearded god with a mended coat, and he usually smiles through Council as though everyone in the room were a relative he was glad to see.

He wasn't smiling now.

"Some of you remember the war," he said. "Twenty years of Varrick. He took things too. Not the way this one does. He tore them out. Domains, names, pieces of us." He looked down at his own hands. "I lost mine. So did half this table."

He glanced at my father, and then at Carol and me, on the bench by the door.

"And somebody gave them back," he said. "Two children. Three years old. Sitting on a hall floor. They didn't ask the Council first. They didn't know what a Council was. They just held out their hands and gave us back what was ours."

He looked at Vaust.

"I don't know what's ours and what isn't," he said. "I've never known where the edges go. I just know that there's a light in a window, and someone on the road, and it's always seemed to me that the whole of everything is that they get home." He put his hand on Meriel's shoulder. "Three hundred and eleven people are on the road. I'd like to light the window."

* * *

The hall was very quiet after that.

And into the quiet, Kaedra said, not unkindly, from halfway down the table:

"It's a beautiful thing to want. But can it even be done?"

* * *

Everybody turned to look at her.

"I'm not asking whether we should," said Kaedra. "Meriel's answered that, I think. I'm asking whether we can. He holds a sea. He holds four hundred harbors and three hundred gods and a city with eleven towers. He has a god who can stand the ocean up like a wall." She spread her hands. "We're a Council of farmers' gods and river gods and gods of ferries and fences and first frosts. What do we have that's bigger than that?"

Nobody answered.

And then my father stood up.

* * *

I've written a great deal about my father in these pages. I've written about his socks and his darned heels, and how he counts to a thousand when he's angry, and how he rows badly. I've written about him being kind. I've written about him being tired.

I haven't written enough about what he is.

He didn't say anything. He didn't look at Kaedra. He walked down the length of the long table, past the forty borrowed chairs, to the big window at the far end of the hall, the one that looks straight out over the harbor and the north pier and the outer shoals and the whole gray western sea.

And he put one hand flat on the glass.

* * *

It got cold.

Not the hall. The sea.

I felt it start at the glass and go out, the way you'd feel a breath go out of you on a frosty morning. Over the harbor first. The water in the harbor went still, and then gray, and then white, and the boats at their moorings creaked once as the ice came up around them and then stopped creaking. Out past the harbor wall. Out past the end of the north pier, past Pim's lamp, past the line where the shallows drop away. Out over the outer shoals, a mile off, where the waves break white even in summer; and they stopped breaking. They stood up, white and curled, in the act of breaking, and froze there, every one of them, a mile of breakers turned to glass.

And it kept going.

I felt it go. Two miles. Five. Out past anywhere I'd ever felt before, out past the edge of what I'd thought was the edge, the whole western sea going still and white and silent under my father's hand, as far as the curve of the world, and further.

In the hall, nobody breathed.

Outside on the harbor wall, Edric Vale, on his bucket, looked down at the line going into the ice at his feet. He reeled in, very slowly. The hook came up out of a neat little round hole in the ice, with a frozen sprat on it.

He looked at it. Then he put it in his basket.

* * *

My father took his hand off the glass.

It went back. All of it. Not with a crack, not with a roar. Just softly, like a held breath let go. The shoals broke, and the breakers fell, and the harbor went from white to gray to green, and the boats creaked again at their moorings, and the whole western sea was moving again, as if nothing had happened.

He turned around.

"I've never done that before," he said mildly. "I didn't want to. It's rude." He looked at Kaedra. "But you asked an honest question. I thought it deserved an honest answer."

Kaedra's mouth was open.

"Draum can stand the sea up," said my father. "I know. He'll have felt that. All the way across." He looked out of the window, at the water, moving again. "He'll know now that if he stands it up, I'll lay it back down."

* * *

Thor was laughing. Silently, with her face in her hands, and her braid throwing sparks.

Loki, backward on his borrowed chair, said, to nobody in particular, "Well, I'm convinced."

But Kaedra wasn't finished. To her credit, she wasn't finished. She closed her mouth and swallowed and said:

"The sea is one thing, King Uriah. With respect. The sea is weather. You're weather." She looked at him steadily. "Malachar isn't weather. He's holding. Holding is what he is. And I don't think there's a god in this hall, even you, who can open his hand."

My father looked at her for a long time.

Then he looked at the family bench.

At Carol and me.

* * *

"Garrick," he said. "You've stood in the iron room with him. You've felt him. All the way down." He paused. "Tell her what you felt."

Every head in the hall turned.

I stood up.

I didn't want to. I'd promised Seraphina I'd let the Council be the Council. But my father had asked, in front of everyone, and you don't say no to a question asked like that.

"Garrick Elias Grey," I said. "Of Greykeep."

I looked at Kaedra.

"He's deep," I said. "Deeper than anything I'd ever felt. Like putting your hand in the sea at night and finding out how far down it goes." I took a breath. "That was the first night. In the iron room. I felt how small I was."

I held up my hands. The gray at the fingertips had faded a little since the iron room, but not much.

"The second time," I said, "I ended his links. Seraphina and I. With our hands. They didn't melt; they stopped being. And I felt him, on the other side of the world, flinch." I paused. "And last night I stood in this hall and felt every god of the Accord at once. All of you. Every chair. Every crate. And I could feel him too, a long way off. At the edge of it. And for the first time…" I didn't know how to say it, so I just said it. "For the first time he didn't feel bigger than me."

Nobody said anything.

"I'm not saying that to boast," I said. "I'm saying it because you asked if it can be done. I think it can. I think he thinks so too. I think that's why he's never once crossed the sea."

* * *

Carol stood up beside me.

"I held his hand still," she said. "In a dream. A hand's width from my face. He'd never been held by anything in his life, and I held him, and he looked at his own hand the way you'd look at a dog that had just spoken." She put her hand in mine. "And then I told him no, and he flinched. Garrick felt it. I felt it too."

She looked at Kaedra.

"You asked what we have that's bigger than him," she said. "I don't think it's me. Or Garrick. Not on our own." She squeezed my hand. "I think it's this."

* * *

Aurelia stood up.

"I sat by their cradle," she said. "Every night of their first year. Some of you know that." She looked down the long table. "I'll tell you what I didn't tell anyone, then. Not even their parents. I didn't sit there because they were fragile. I sat there because they were the two strongest things I had ever felt in my life, and they were six days old, and somebody needed to be in the room who wasn't afraid of them." She turned and looked at us. "They're stronger than him. They have been since the cradle. They're stronger than any god this world has had. And they're still growing."

My mother, on the bench, had both hands over her mouth.

* * *

And that was when little Uriah woke up.

He'd been asleep in Seraphina's lap through all of it. Through the eleven hours, and the four hundred cups of tea, and the sea freezing to the curve of the world. He woke up now, in the silence after Aurelia, the way babies do, all at once, with his face very red and very offended at having been asleep while things were happening.

He looked around the hall.

Then he looked at Thor, who was sitting nearest, with her red-gold braid still throwing the occasional spark onto Tamar's floor.

He reached out a fat hand and grabbed the end of it.

* * *

The spark went up his arm.

I saw it. Everybody saw it. A little crackling thread of Thor's thunder, running up from the end of her braid into his fist and along his arm to his shoulder, the way it goes along the lightning rods on Carol's roof. And he didn't cry. He laughed. And let go of the braid. And held up his fist, and opened it, and there was a tiny blue-white crackle of thunder dancing in his palm.

Thor stopped laughing.

"Little spark," she said. Very softly. Not to Carol, this time.

And then, while she was still staring, and while the thunder was still crackling in his hand, the crackle went white-gold. Seraphina's color. The First Flame, a little thread of it, curling up out of the middle of his palm and wrapping itself around the blue thunder like a vine around a post.

And the two of them, the borrowed thunder and the fire he was born with, went together. Into one small, steady, white-gold-and-blue light, sitting in the hand of a baby who wasn't yet a year old.

Seraphina's breath went out of her.

I didn't breathe at all.

Because I know what that is. I've done it all my life. You touch a god, and what they are goes into you, and stays.

He'd borrowed.

* * *

"Oh," said my father. Very quietly.

Aurelia had sat down. She was looking at little Uriah with the strangest expression I've ever seen on her face. Not fear. Something much older than fear.

"He has all of you," she said. "Doesn't he." She looked at Seraphina. At me. "All of both of you. Everything his father is, and everything his mother is." A pause. "And it's only just started."

Little Uriah, oblivious, put his fist in his mouth.

The light went out. It didn't hurt him. Nothing like that ever has. He just took it back in, the way you'd swallow a word you'd been about to say, and looked very pleased with himself, and said, loudly, to the whole Full Council of the Accord:

"No."

It was his favorite word.

* * *

The hall didn't vote that night.

Aurelia didn't ask them to. She stood up, after a long time, when the light was going out of the windows, and said only:

"We've heard each other. I don't think anyone here is the same as they were at first light. I'd like everyone to sleep on it." She paused. "And there's one more who's asked to speak. Who almost never asks to. He asked me this afternoon, while the King was at the window." She looked down the table. "He'd like the morning."

Every head turned.

At the far end of the long table, in a borrowed chair with the baker's, on Rope Lane on its slip, a quiet, plain man in a brown coat sat with his hands folded. The god who was once called Othellos, and before that, and again now, Ansel.

He didn't say anything. He just knocked on the table in front of him.

Three times.

* * *

Mary wrote it at midnight, in the Westmere hall, by Callow's lanterns. Little Uriah was asleep on Saba's lap beside her. Saba had asked if she might hold him, and Seraphina had said yes, and Saba hadn't put him down since.

Eleven hours. Four hundred cups of tea. Tamar's wife counted.

Halemar: I have never carried anyone to a war. I'm frightened of what it would make me.

Meriel spoke. She said: I will not mourn a goddess who is still standing up. Go and get them. Her candles flared.

Soren: three hundred and eleven people are on the road. I'd like to light the window.

Kaedra: can it even be done?

Uriah put his hand on the window and froze the western sea as far as the curve of the world. Then he let it go. He said: it's rude. Edric caught a frozen sprat.

Garrick: for the first time, he didn't feel bigger than me. Carol: I think it's this. She was holding his hand.

Aurelia: they are stronger than him. Stronger than any god this world has had. They're still growing.

Little Uriah took Thor's thunder from the end of her braid, and put his mother's fire around it. He has both of them. All of both of them. Aurelia says it has only just started.

He said: No.

Ansel will speak in the morning.

And under that, in Thor's hand, enormous, pressing so hard the pen went through the page:

MY LITTLE SPARK. THE OTHER ONE.