Chapter 99: Ansel Speaks

Ansel knocked on the door of the Westmere hall at first light.

The door was open. It had been propped open all night with a fish crate, so the gods sleeping on the benches could get air. He knocked anyway, three times, on the open door, and stood on the step and waited.

"Come in," said Aurelia, from the hearth.

He came in.

* * *

I should describe him, because people who've only heard of him get it wrong.

He looks about thirty. He has a plain, quiet face, the kind you'd pass in a market and not look at twice, and plain brown hair, and a plain brown coat. He always sits in the chair nearest the door. He always knocks. And at his side, very faint, where his hand hangs when he isn't using it, there's a little gold light. Not bright. About as bright as a lamp in a window seen from a long way down the road.

Carol and I have known him since we were six. He came back on a hall floor, in the middle of the last of the giving back, holding the only thing of his that had never been stolen, and he's sat in the chair nearest the door at every Council since.

He's spoken at perhaps three of them.

* * *

He didn't go to the long table. He stood in the middle of the floor, between the table and the benches, where Carol had stood at the harbor council, and Iselle had stood the day before last. And he waited until everyone was awake and sitting up and had a cup of Tamar's wife's tea, because he's polite.

Then he said:

"I'd like to tell you about the first time I reached for something that wasn't mine."

* * *

"I was young," said Ansel. "I don't know how young. Young for a god. I'd walked a very long way, in the cold, and I didn't know where I was going, and I didn't know my own name very well yet." He looked at his hands. "And I came to a house in a valley, at night. A small house. With a lamp in the window."

Halemar, on his bench, went very still.

"I'd never seen anything so warm," said Ansel. "I stood outside in the dark for a long time, looking at it. I wanted to go in. I wanted it so badly I could feel it in my teeth." He paused. "But I didn't know how to knock. Nobody had ever taught me. I didn't know that was a thing you could do. That you could stand at a door and ask, and somebody might say come in."

He was quiet for a moment.

"So I reached," he said. "Through the window. For the lamp."

* * *

"It burned me," said Ansel simply. "Of course it did. It wasn't mine. It was hers. The woman inside. She'd lit it for someone else entirely, someone who was coming home up that road, and it knew it wasn't for me." He turned his left hand over, the one with the faint gold light at its side. "I carried that burn for a thousand years."

"And while I was standing there in the dark, holding my burned hand, someone spoke to me."

The hall was very quiet.

"I never saw him," said Ansel. "I only heard him. A voice, very close, very warm, right at my ear. And he said: It's yours. All of it. The lamp. The house. The whole valley. It's yours if you reach far enough."

He looked up.

"So I did."

* * *

He told it plainly. He didn't make it dramatic, and he didn't make excuses.

He'd reached. For the lamp, and then for the house, and then for the valley, and then for the order of things in the valley, where people walked and where they slept and which doors they were allowed through. And then for the order of things everywhere. He'd become Othellos. He'd sat at the head of the old pantheon and decided where everything went. He'd built walls and cells and long gray halls, and a basin, and doors that opened only one way.

"I built cages," said Ansel. "I want to say that word. Not order. Not keeping. Cages. And I put people in them. Gods. Children. Anyone who was somewhere I hadn't decided they should be."

His eyes went down the long table.

"And I had help," he said. "I had a captain, who was worse than I was, and I didn't see it until it was much too late. And I had a builder."

* * *

Vaust didn't move.

He was in his borrowed chair at the long table, tall and narrow and gray, with his hands folded on the wood in front of him. He didn't move at all. But I felt him, through the room, the way you'd feel a door go suddenly cold under your hand.

"You built my doors, old friend," said Ansel gently. "Every one. Every shape. Every kind. I asked for them and you made them, beautifully, and I put them in the walls." He paused. "And then I put people on the other side of them."

Vaust looked at the table.

"You stop on every threshold," said Ansel. "You have for a thousand years. Rysa says you've never told anyone why." He waited a moment. "I think I know why. I think you stop because every time you come to a door, you remember that there might be someone on the other side who didn't want to go through it."

Nobody in the hall breathed.

Vaust's hands, on the table, had closed.

"You don't have to answer," said Ansel. "I'm not asking you to. I only wanted you to know that I know. And that it wasn't your fault. I asked. You built. The doors were never the wrong part." He looked at his own hands. "The wrong part was what I did with them."

* * *

"What happens to the ones who reach for what isn't theirs?" said Ansel.

He turned around slowly, so that he was speaking to the whole hall. The long table, and the benches, and the fish crates, and the windows full of Westmere faces.

"I'll tell you. Because nobody told me. Not the voice in the dark. He left that part out."

He held up his right hand. Open.

"You get it," he said.

The hall was silent.

"That's the terrible part. Not that you fail. You don't fail. If you reach far enough, and hard enough, and long enough, you get it. Everything you reached for. The lamp, the house, the valley, the world." He closed his hand, slowly, into a fist. "And then you have to hold it."

* * *

He stood there with his fist closed in front of him.

"Forever," he said. "Because the moment you let go, it'll all go back to where it belongs. So you can't let go. Not for a second. Not to rest. Not to sleep. Not to pick up anything else, not a cup of tea, not a child, not the hand of somebody who loves you." His fist was shaking. "Your hand closes. And it can never open again. And everything you ever reached for is in it, and you can't feel any of it anymore, because you're holding it too tight."

"That's what happens," said Ansel. "You become a closed hand. That's all. Nothing else. Just a hand, closed, holding everything, forever, feeling nothing."

He looked at his fist.

"I held for a thousand years," he said. "And at the very end, in my own basin, holding the worst thing I'd ever made so that some people could get out a door, I remembered my name. And I opened my hand. And it was the first thing I'd felt in a thousand years." His voice was very quiet. "It hurt. It hurt more than the lamp. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me."

He opened his fist.

The little gold light at his side flickered, and steadied.

* * *

"Malachar," said Ansel, "is a closed hand."

He said it without any anger at all. The way you'd say it was raining.

"I know it. I know it the way you'd know your own face in a stranger's. He's been holding for three hundred years. A sea. A city. Four hundred harbors. Three hundred and eleven gods in a garden. He can't let go of any of it. He can't. Not because he's cruel. Because he's tired, and he's frightened, and if he opens his hand even a little, he'll feel how heavy it all is, and how long he's been carrying it, and how alone." He paused. "That's why he wanted the Princess. Not to rule beside him. To hold it for him. So he could rest. So that somebody else's hand could close instead of his."

Carol, beside me, had gone very still.

"I know that," said Ansel, "because it's what I wanted too. At the end. I'd have given anything for someone to come and hold it for me." He looked across the hall at her. "I'm glad you said no. I wish someone had said no to me."

* * *

"There's one more thing," said Ansel.

He turned, slowly, and looked at Aurelia.

Aurelia's face did something careful. She'd known this was coming. I could see it.

"The voice in the dark," said Ansel. "The one at my ear, outside the window. It's yours if you reach far enough." He hesitated. "I thought for a long time it was my captain. He whispered to me later. A great deal. I thought it had always been him." He shook his head. "It wasn't. I know that now. The first voice was older. Warmer. And I never saw his face, but I saw his hand, once, reaching past me in the dark toward the lamp, as if to show me how."

He held up his own hand. Closed. Knuckles white.

"Like that," he said.

The hall had gone utterly silent.

"I've seen that hand since," said Ansel quietly. "On a red wax seal, on a blank page, that came back to Aurelia across the sea, years ago. And on the bottom of every letter the Emperor of Kethra has ever sent to this Council. Who Holds." He lowered his hand. "I think the voice that taught me to reach taught him too. I think it taught him first. I'd stake my name on it. And I don't stake my name lightly anymore. I only just got it back."

* * *

Iselle was white to the lips.

I felt her, on the family bench where she'd come to sit beside Roderic and her mother, the way you'd feel somebody step back from the edge of a roof. Same father. She'd said it in this hall two days ago. She knew exactly whose hand Ansel was describing, even if she'd never seen it. Even if her mother had spent her whole childhood making sure she never would.

Ansel saw it too. He turned and looked at her, very gently.

"Not you," he said.

Iselle stared at him.

"I've watched you for two days," said Ansel. "I've watched your hands. They close when you're frightened. And then you open them. On purpose. Every time." He smiled, for the first time that morning. It changed his whole plain face. "You're not the closed hand, child. You're the other one. I'd know. I spent a thousand years wishing I'd met you."

Iselle put her face in her hands. Not closing them. Just resting her face in them, open.

Saba put her arm around her.

* * *

"Ansel," said Aurelia, very quietly. "The name."

"I don't remember it," said Ansel. "I never knew it."

"Good," said Aurelia. "Not yet."

He nodded, as if that were the answer he'd expected.

* * *

Then he turned to me.

I hadn't expected it. I'd been sitting on the bench feeling the room, the way I'd been doing for three days now, all those gods like crickets in a field, and Ansel's little gold light among them, steady as a lamp. And then he turned around and looked straight at me, and the room went quiet in my head as if somebody had shut a window.

"Garrick Elias Grey," he said.

"Yes."

"You're going to be the biggest thing in every room you walk into," said Ansel. "For the rest of your life. You know that, I think. You've felt it these three days."

"Yes," I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant.

"And on the night the Emperor spoke to your sister in the iron room, he offered you a throne. Somewhere big enough." He paused. "And something in you leaned."

I didn't ask how he knew. Mary's book, maybe. Or maybe he just knew, the way you know your own face in a stranger's.

"Yes," I said. "It did."

* * *

"That's not a crime," said Ansel. "Everybody leans. I leaned for a thousand years. The question isn't whether you lean." He looked at me steadily. "I've watched you since you were six. I've watched what you do when you meet a god. You hold out your hand, and you say Borrow?, and you wait. And if they say no, you put your hand down." He smiled again, a little. "Do you know how rare that is? In something your size? To ask, and wait, and take no for an answer?"

I didn't say anything.

"You're going to carry more than any god who has ever lived," said Ansel. "More than me. More than him. And you'll be able to carry it, all of it, for one reason, and only one." He stepped toward the bench. "Because you don't close your hand on it. Because every single thing you carry, you were given. Asked for, and given. You don't hold any of it. It stays with you because it wants to."

He stopped in front of me.

"So knock," he said. "When you're the biggest thing in the room. Especially then. Knock anyway. Every door. Every time. Even when it's already open."

And he reached out, very carefully, and knocked three times on the wood of the family bench, beside my hand.

"Like that," he said.

* * *

He went back to the middle of the floor.

"That's all," he said, to the hall. "I've told you what happens. I'm not going to tell you what to do about it. That isn't mine." He looked at Vaust. "But I'll say this, because Vaust asked a question two days ago and nobody has answered it yet. Why is this ours?"

Vaust looked up.

"It's ours," said Ansel, "because I started it. Long before any of you sat in these chairs. I stood outside a window and reached, and a voice told me I could, and I believed it, and the thing that whispered to me went on whispering. To others. Across the sea." He spread his open hands. "Everything that's been done to Selvane, and to the three hundred and eleven, and to the four hundred harbors, was done by a closed hand. And the first closed hand in this world was mine."

He looked around at them all.

"So it's mine," he said. "And if it's mine, it's this Council's. Because you took me back. On a hall floor, when I was holding nothing but my name. You took me back and gave me a chair by the door." His voice cracked, very slightly. "That's what I'm asking for. Not a war. I'm asking you to do for them what you did for me."

And he went and sat down in the chair nearest the door, and folded his hands, and didn't say anything else at all.

* * *

For a long time nobody moved.

Then Vaust stood up.

* * *

He didn't go to the middle of the floor. He stood beside his borrowed chair, tall and narrow and gray, with his hands behind his back, and looked down the long table at Ansel for a long time.

"There was a girl," he said at last. "In the fourth year of the cells. I made a door for the east hall. A good door. Oak and iron, with a plate that would only open from one side. I was proud of it." He swallowed. "The first person they put through it was a girl of about fourteen. She held on to the frame. With both hands. And looked at me. Because I was standing there, admiring the hinges." His voice was very dry. "She didn't say anything. She just looked at me."

The hall was utterly silent.

"That's why," said Vaust. "Since you asked, Ansel. Every threshold. I stop and I look for her."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I asked two days ago why this was ours," he said. "I've been answered. More than once. Meriel answered. Soren answered. The King answered, and the Princess, and the Prince, and the child." A faint, dry twist of his mouth. "Thor answered, at some length, in the yard last night." He looked at Ansel. "And you've answered. With the one answer I can't argue with."

He took his hands from behind his back.

"I'd like to build a door the right way around," said Vaust. "Just once. Before I'm done. One that opens from the inside."

And he sat down.

* * *

Aurelia stood up.

She looked older than I'd ever seen her. And younger, somehow, at the same time. She looked down the long table at Ansel, in his chair by the door, and something passed between them that I wasn't meant to see, and I looked away.

"Thank you," she said. To him. Then, to the hall: "I think we're ready. I think we've heard what we needed to hear." She glanced at the windows, where the morning sun was coming in gold over the rope awnings. "We'll vote at noon tomorrow. Every chair. Every crate. And Mary will write down every name."

Mary, at the end of the long table, already had her pen in her hand.

* * *

I went out on the harbor wall afterward. I needed air. I needed to not feel a hundred and forty gods for a while.

Edric was on his bucket. He moved his basket over without looking up.

"Big morning," he said.

"Yes."

"Heard some of it through the window." He reeled in, looked at the empty hook, cast again. "That fellow by the door. The quiet one." He was quiet himself for a while. "Knew a sergeant like him once, in the war. Had done terrible things. Knew it. Spent the rest of his life making tea for the new recruits and telling them which officers to watch." He watched the float. "Best man in the company, by the end."

I sat on the wall beside him for a long time. I didn't feel the gods at all. Just the sea, and the wind, and the little steady light on the end of the north pier, unlit in the daytime, waiting for Pim.

* * *

Mary wrote it at noon, at the long table, with Ansel's chair by the door still warm.

Ansel knocked on an open door. Aurelia said: come in.

He told us about the first time he reached. A house in a valley. A lamp in the window. He did not know how to knock. It burned him.

A voice said: it's yours if you reach far enough. He reached.

What happens to those who reach for what isn't theirs: you get it. And then you have to hold it. Forever. You become a closed hand.

Malachar is a closed hand.

The voice that taught Ansel to reach had a closed hand. Knuckles white. Ansel thinks it taught Malachar first. He would stake his name on it. Aurelia: not yet.

Ansel to Iselle: You're not the closed hand. You're the other one.

Ansel to Garrick: knock anyway. Every door. Even when it's already open.

Vaust told us about the girl at the door. He said: I'd like to build a door the right way around.

The vote is at noon tomorrow.

And under that, in a plain, careful hand, very upright, the hand of somebody who had learned his letters a very long time ago and then had to learn them again:

Ansel. Who knocks.