The Greykeep Chronicles

Carol found me the way she always did, which was by not looking.

I was in the stable yard checking a horse’s shoe that did not need checking. I liked horses. I had liked them since before I could say the word. Grandpa Garrick said my first carved horse had been chewed half to splinters before I was two, and that he had made me another, and I had chewed that one too, and he had given up and made it from oak.

The oak one was still on a shelf in the old nursery.

It had tooth marks.

”You’re hiding,” Carol said from behind me.

”I’m working.”

”You’re holding a hoof that Hob shod yesterday.”

I put the hoof down. The horse looked relieved.

My sister stood in the stable doorway with the sun behind her, in a grey riding coat she had stolen from Mother and never returned. Her hair was pulled back in the plain knot she wore when she intended to go somewhere and did not intend to be stopped on the way. There was a faint crackle in the air around her. There usually was. Thor said it had been there since the day Carol touched her braid as a baby and a spark jumped between them, and that it had never entirely gone away.

People who didn’t know us said we looked alike.

People who did said we didn’t, and then couldn’t explain why they kept mixing us up from behind.

”Father let me go early,” I said.

”Father let you go early because I asked him to.”

”Why?”

”Because I’m going to Concordia, and you’re coming with me.”

”Am I?”

She tilted her head. It was Helena’s look. She had it far better than I did.

”Seraphina’s in the infirmary with Mother all afternoon,” Carol said. ”Grandpa Garrick has little Uriah and a cradle rocker that squeaks. You’ve read every grain tariff on the continent. And you haven’t been out of this castle for anything that wasn’t a lesson in three weeks.”

I opened my mouth.

”Mary told me,” Carol said. ”It’s in the book.”

It probably was.

I went to Concordia.

* * *

The gate chamber sits in the western wing, under a vaulted roof Eleanor Stonehand rebuilt the year I was born. The floor is pale stone inlaid with lines that look decorative until you’ve seen them wake. A small shrine to the Keeper of Roads stands beside the arch, the way one stands beside every gate in Avarra. Someone had left a candle burning in it that morning. Someone always did.

The Castellan was waiting.

It stood where it always stood, just inside the boundary line, tall and grey and patient, its metal hands folded. The light in its eyes brightened when it saw us.

”Princess Carol. Prince Garrick.”

”Good afternoon,” Carol said.

”Destination?”

”Concordia.”

”Purpose?”

”Visiting.”

The Castellan considered this. It always considered it, even though we had made this crossing more times than anyone could count. Mary probably could. That was not the point.

”Concordia has been asked,” the Castellan said. ”Concordia has not yet answered.”

The lines in the floor brightened faintly on our side.

Nothing happened on the other.

Carol rocked onto her toes.

I took one step toward the boundary line.

A metal hand appeared in front of my chest. It didn’t touch me. It didn’t need to.

”Not until recognition is complete,” said the Castellan.

Carol made a noise that was very nearly a laugh.

”I’m twenty-three,” I told it.

”Yes.”

”I have been through this gate perhaps four thousand times.”

”Three thousand, eight hundred and twelve,” said the Castellan. ”Not counting the crossings you attempted at the age of two.”

”How many of those were there?”

”Many.”

The hand stayed where it was.

I had been stopped by that hand before I could walk properly. It was one of my earliest memories. The cool grey metal, the light in the eyes, and the patient voice telling me not yet while everything in me wanted to run toward the friends on the other side. I had been furious. I had been two. I had tried to fold around the hand and found that I couldn’t, that the Castellan’s boundary was the one place in Greykeep my folds would not open, and I had sat down on the floor and wept with the pure outrage of a child discovering that the world had rules.

Mother says that was the day I learned the word no could apply to me.

Helena says I am still learning it.

The lines on Concordia’s side brightened.

Greykeep answered.

The arch filled with pale, steady light, and the road between the two cities settled into place like a held breath let out.

”Recognition complete,” said the Castellan, and withdrew its hand.

Mary’s line was still painted on the wall beside the arch, small and neat in the black ink she used for permanent records. It had been there twenty years.

Authorized domestic transit between the royal households of Greykeep and Concordia.

Beneath it, in different handwriting, someone had written friends.

Mary erased it every few years.

It always came back.

We stepped through.

* * *

Ignatius was waiting on the other side.

He always was. I don’t know how he knew. Carol said he could feel the gate wake the way you feel someone standing behind you, and he said that was nonsense, and then he was always there anyway.

The heir of Concordia was tall and broad and calm in the way some fires are calm, the deep kind that burns for hours without needing to be fed. He had his father’s height and his mother’s patience. He had his father’s habit of watching a room before he spoke in it. Unlike his father, he had both eyes, and he used them mostly to look at my sister.

He looked at her now.

Then he looked at me, and reached into his coat, and held out a spoon.

I took it.

It was a perfectly ordinary spoon. Silver, a little worn, stamped with the Concordian royal mark on the handle. I had a drawer full of them at home. He had a drawer full of mine.

We had been doing this since before we could talk. Mary had a whole section of the book about it.

I reached into my own pocket and handed him the wooden duck.

Ignatius looked at it.

”Grandpa Garrick’s?”

”Little Uriah’s. He’ll want it back.”

”Then he can come and get it.” Ignatius put the duck in his coat, entirely seriously, and turned to Carol. ”You came.”

”I said I would.”

”You say a great many things.”

”And I do most of them.”

He smiled. It wasn’t large. It didn’t need to be.

”Meriel’s at the harbor chapel,” he said. ”She’s doing a naming at three. She asked if you’d come.”

Carol went still for half a breath.

Then she nodded.

I looked between them.

”A naming,” I said.

”A dockworker,” Ignatius said. ”Old man. No family left. He died two nights ago.” He paused. ”Meriel says there’s nobody to say his name but her.”

”And?”

Carol answered.

”And she asked for us,” she said. ”Both of us. Because of what we kept.”

* * *

Concordia does not look like Havenreach.

Havenreach grew. It started as shelters beneath Greykeep’s walls and spread outward the way water spreads, filling whatever space was there, and every few years Eleanor would stand on a tower with her spectacles pushed up into her hair and sigh at it.

Concordia was decided.

It was built by people who had won a war and wanted something better than what they’d won it from, and it shows. The streets are straight. The squares are where squares should be. The palace sits at the center on its hill with the harbor spread out below it like a skirt, and the whole city slopes gently down to the water so that rain runs where it ought to.

Carol says Concordia looks like Mary’s handwriting.

She means it as a compliment. Mary has never been sure.

We walked down through the market toward the harbor. People nodded to Ignatius. Some of them nodded to Carol, who came often enough to be recognised. A few looked at me and then looked again, trying to work out which of Greykeep’s princes I was, and settled on a polite bow that would do for any of them.

Above the palace, a long golden shape lay stretched along the roof ridge in the sun.

”Aurethar’s asleep,” I said.

”Aurethar is pretending to be asleep,” Ignatius said. ”He’s watching the harbor. There’s a ship in from the south he doesn’t like.”

”What’s wrong with it?”

”He says it’s ugly.”

”Is it?”

Ignatius considered the ship.

”Yes,” he said.

The harbor chapel stood at the end of the old quay, a small grey building that had been a customs house before Concordia had customs. Inside it was plain. White walls, a scrubbed wooden floor, a few benches. On the far wall someone had painted a woman holding a lantern up over a road. Beneath her, a row of small lamps burned on a shelf, one for every name spoken in that room that year.

There were a lot of lamps.

Meriel was waiting.

She was slender and pale, with silver hair under a grey veil that moved sometimes when there was no wind. She had been a goddess of mourning rites for longer than Greykeep had stood. Not death, she had told me once, when I was very small and had asked her whether she was the one who made people die. Not grief either. The rites. The words and the acts by which the dead are named, grieved, and laid to rest, so that death does not become disappearance.

I had not understood the difference at five.

I understood it better now.

On a trestle in front of her lay a man under a plain linen sheet. Only his face showed. He was old. His face was brown and creased from a lifetime of salt wind, and his hands, folded on his chest over the sheet, were enormous and knotted at every joint.

”His name was Joss Hadley,” Meriel said. ”He worked this quay for fifty-one years. He had a wife, Agnes, who died eleven years ago. They had no children. His brother went to sea in his youth and did not come back.” Her veil stirred. ”He had friends. They are mostly dead. The last of them died in the spring.”

”There’s no one?” I asked.

”There is me,” Meriel said. ”And there are you.”

She looked at Carol and me together.

”When Varrick fell,” she said, ”my domain went into you, with all the others. You were three. I remember. I was a long way off and very weak and I felt you holding it.” Her voice was quiet and precise. ”It was the strangest thing. Two small children, holding the whole of my work in their hands, and not dropping any of it.”

Carol didn’t say anything.

Neither did I.

”You gave it back,” Meriel said. ”It took you most of four years to find me and mend what had been broken, but you did. And you kept a little.”

”A seed,” Carol said.

”A seed.” Meriel nodded. ”I’ve never asked you why.”

”We didn’t know,” I said. ”At first. We just didn’t want to forget.”

”I know.”

She turned back to the trestle.

”A naming needs two voices,” she said. ”One to speak the name, and one to answer it. The first is mine. The second has always been family. A wife. A son. A friend who drank with him for forty years. Someone who carries a piece of the man.” She paused. ”When there is no one left to answer, I answer myself. It works. But it is lonely, and it is thin, and the road is long for someone who leaves with only one voice behind him.”

I looked at the lamps on the shelf.

There were a great many lamps.

”You carry a piece of the rite,” Meriel said. ”So the rite will hear you as kin. If you’re willing.”

Carol stepped forward first. She always did.

I followed.

I had never done this. I had grown a seed back into its domain before, under Aurelia’s eye, and it had always felt like reaching into my chest for something heavy. This was not like that. This was like remembering a word I had always known.

The seed of Meriel’s domain sat in me, small and grey and quiet. When I touched it, it unfolded just a little.

And I knew him.

Not everything. A few things. The smell of tar on a hot day. The weight of a rope coiled over a shoulder. A woman laughing at him from a doorway with flour on her hands. A night fifty years ago when he’d stood at the end of this quay and watched a ship’s lights disappear and waited for them to come back.

They hadn’t.

He had kept waiting a long time anyway.

Beside me, Carol drew a sharp breath. She had felt it too.

Meriel lifted her hands.

”Joss Hadley,” she said.

Her voice filled the little chapel without rising at all.

”Joss Hadley,” Carol answered.

”Joss Hadley,” I said.

Something shifted. I can’t describe it better than that. It was the feeling of a door you hadn’t known was open closing softly behind someone who had finally gone through it.

Meriel lit a lamp and set it at the end of the row.

”He’s walking,” she said. ”The Keeper has him.” She looked at the painted woman on the wall, with her lantern over her road. ”He waited a long time for a ship. I don’t think he’ll mind a walk.”

We stood there for a while.

Then Carol wiped her eyes on Mother’s stolen sleeve, and I discovered I needed to do the same, and Ignatius, who had stood by the door the whole time without saying a word, handed each of us a handkerchief.

Of course he’d brought two.

”Thank you,” Meriel said. She touched Carol’s hand. Then, after a moment, mine. Her fingers were cool and dry. ”Since you gave my work back, I have not once had to answer my own call. Somebody always comes. Did you know that?”

”No,” I said.

”The seeds,” she said. ”Everyone you mended can feel where you keep them. When the work is too heavy, we know where to go.” Her veil moved. ”You didn’t keep them to remember us, Garrick. You kept them so that we wouldn’t be alone.”

I had nothing to say to that.

I said nothing.

Meriel smiled very slightly, as if that were the correct answer, and turned back to her lamps.

* * *

We sat on the harbor wall afterward and watched the ugly ship unload.

It really was ugly. Its hull had been patched in three different colours of timber and its figurehead had lost its nose. Aurethar had stopped pretending to sleep and was openly glaring at it from the palace roof. Two dock clerks were trying very hard not to look up at him.

Ignatius had gone to fetch something to eat. Carol and I sat with our legs over the water, the way we had sat on every wall in two kingdoms since we were old enough to climb them.

I could feel her through the bond.

I always can, a little. Like warmth from the next room. Most of the time neither of us mentions it, the way you don’t mention that you can hear your own heartbeat. But after the chapel it was louder than usual, and so was mine, and for a while we just let it be loud.

”He waited for the ship,” Carol said at last.

”I know.”

”Fifty years.”

”I know.”

She was quiet a moment.

”I think he knew it wasn’t coming back,” she said. ”After the first few. I think he kept waiting because it was the last thing he had of his brother. If he stopped, there’d be nothing.”

I thought about the stone by the stream.

I thought about Helena’s kettle, put on every morning for twenty years because there had once been a morning when it was the only thing she could fix.

”People keep things,” I said.

”People keep things,” Carol agreed.

Ignatius came back with three paper cones of fried fish and sat down on my sister’s other side. He handed one to her and one to me. He kept the third and did not eat it, because he was watching Carol eat hers, which was something I had seen him do for twenty years and which still made me want to fold him into the harbor on principle.

I ate my fish.

It was very good fish.

”Mother asked me again,” Ignatius said eventually.

Carol didn’t look up. ”Asked you what?”

”You know what.”

”I want to hear you say it.”

He sighed. ”Whether we intend to marry.”

”And what did you tell her?”

”What I always tell her.”

”Which is?”

”That she should ask you.”

Carol laughed. It made the air crackle faintly around her, the way it did when she was pleased.

I looked between them. I had heard this conversation from the outside a dozen times. I’d never asked about it directly. It hadn’t seemed like mine to ask.

Today, for some reason, it did.

”Why don’t you?” I said.

They both looked at me.

”Marry,” I said. ”You’ve been together since before either of you could spell it. Everyone knows. Io knows. Mother knows. Mary has a page.”

”Mary has three pages,” Ignatius said.

”So why not?”

Carol looked out at the water for a while before she answered.

”Do you remember Rysa?” she said.

”Of course I remember Rysa.”

”Do you remember what she taught us? On the nursery floor, with the toys between us?”

I did. Everyone who had been a child in Greykeep in those years remembered. Rysa had sat with the four of us until we could say it in our sleep.

”Name,” I said. ”Want. Permission. Stop.”

”And friend,” Ignatius said quietly. ”She added friend.”

”Every morning,” Carol said, ”he asks.”

I waited.

”Not out loud, always. Sometimes it’s just the way he waits at the gate. Sometimes it’s a spoon.” She smiled a little. ”But every morning he asks, and every morning I get to say yes. And every morning, I’m choosing it.”

”You’d still choose it if you were married.”

”Maybe.” She turned the paper cone in her fingers. ”But if I married the heir of Concordia, I’d be Concordia’s. That’s how it works, Garrick. I’d be its queen. I’d belong to its walls and its council and its treaties, and every ambassador who walked into the palace would look at me and see a thing that was settled.”

”Is that so bad?”

”For you and Sera? No. You two decided over jam when you were two.” She bumped my shoulder with hers. ”For me...”

She stopped.

I felt it through the bond before she said it. Something old and quiet, older than either of us could remember properly. Something from the day the door opened in our chests and the whole world came pouring in.

”I held a hundred gods once,” Carol said. ”So did you. We were three, and everything Varrick had kept came into us at once, all the things he’d locked up and hoarded and wouldn’t let go of. I felt what it was like to be kept. All of it at once.”

The crackle had gone out of the air.

”I don’t ever want to be kept,” my sister said. ”Not by anyone. Not even by him.”

Ignatius didn’t flinch. I think he had heard this before. I think he had been the first to hear it.

”And I don’t want to keep her,” he said. ”I’d rather be asked.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

Out on the quay, a dock clerk finally gave up and looked straight up at Aurethar, who looked straight back. The clerk went pale and walked very quickly in the other direction.

”That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, ”and I want you both to stop.”

Carol laughed so hard she nearly dropped her fish in the harbor.

Ignatius caught it.

Of course he did.

* * *

We went home at dusk.

Ignatius walked us to the gate. At the arch he reached into his coat and gave me back the wooden duck, and I gave him back his spoon, and that was apparently the correct way to end a visit, because we had been doing it since we were two.

Carol kissed him on the cheek.

He asked, without saying anything, whether she would come tomorrow.

She said yes, without saying anything either.

I looked away to give them the moment, and found myself looking at the little shrine to the Keeper of Roads beside the arch. Someone on the Concordian side had lit a lamp in it too. Of course they had. Every gate in Avarra has one.

I thought about Joss Hadley, walking.

Greykeep asked. Concordia answered. The road between the cities settled into place.

On our side, the Castellan was waiting.

”Princess Carol,” it said. ”Prince Garrick. Welcome home.”

”Recognition complete?” Carol asked.

”Recognition complete.”

It let us in.

We went to the nursery before anything else. Neither of us said why. Seraphina was in the rocking chair with little Uriah asleep against her, and she raised her eyebrows at the two of us coming in red-eyed and smelling of fried fish, and decided not to ask.

Carol went to the cradle.

She lifted one hand, and a small light gathered in her palm. Soft and white, about the size of a plum. She held it there a moment, then reached up and hung it in the air above the cradle, where it stayed, turning gently, as if someone had tied it to the ceiling with a thread.

She used to do that when we were small. She hung one over the nursery door every night for a year, and nobody could make her stop, and eventually nobody wanted to.

”What’s that for?” Seraphina whispered.

Carol looked down at her nephew.

”So he’s never alone in the dark,” she said.

Then she kissed the top of his head, and touched my shoulder on her way out, and went up to her tower.

Seraphina looked at me.

”Long day?” she said.

I sat down on the floor beside the rocking chair and put my head against her knee.

”Good day,” I said.

Above the cradle, Carol’s light turned slowly in the dark, and my son slept under it, and somewhere a long way off, an old man who had waited fifty years for a ship walked on down the road toward a lamp.