The Greykeep Chronicles

”No guards,” Seraphina said.

”No guards,” Carol agreed.

”No crowns, no rings, no seals, no anything with a crest on it.”

”Nothing with a crest on it.”

They both looked at me.

I took off my signet ring and put it on the table.

”And the coat,” said Seraphina.

”What’s wrong with the coat?”

”It’s got silver buttons.”

”It’s my plainest coat.”

”It’s got silver buttons, Garrick,” said my sister, ”with a castle on every one of them.”

I looked down. It did.

I had never noticed. I had been wearing this coat for three years, and I had genuinely believed it was plain.

Seraphina went to the wardrobe and came back with a brown wool coat I didn’t recognise. It had wooden buttons and a patch on one elbow and it smelled faintly of pine shavings.

”Where did you get that?”

”Your grandfather.”

”He gave you his coat?”

”He gave me his old coat,” said Seraphina, ”for exactly this purpose, about a year ago, and told me I’d need it eventually because you have no idea what you look like.”

I put on the coat. It was too big in the shoulders and too short in the sleeves, and it was the most comfortable thing I’d ever worn.

Carol walked once around me, inspecting.

”He still looks like a prince,” she said.

”He always looks like a prince,” said Seraphina. ”It’s the way he stands.”

”How do I stand?”

”Like someone’s about to bring you a petition,” said Carol.

I tried to stand differently. Both of them laughed at me, and we went out by the kitchen gate before anyone could stop us, and nobody did, because Helena saw us go and only raised her cup.

* * *

The lower market sits in the old town, in the bowl of streets that grew up beneath Greykeep’s walls when the castle was the only safe place for a hundred miles. Everything else in Havenreach has been planned since. Eleanor saw to that. The lower market was never planned at all, and Eleanor gave up trying in the second year and said it could keep its own counsel. The streets go where they like. The stalls go where the streets let them.

It was a market day, and it was full.

I had been to the lower market a hundred times. I had never been to it like this. Without guards, without a herald going ahead, without people stepping back to make a path and bowing as I went by. I had always thought of it as a place I passed through.

It turned out to be a place you get pushed through, at the speed of the slowest cart, with somebody’s elbow in your ribs and a woman shouting the price of onions directly into your ear.

Seraphina loved it. She walked with her arm through mine and her face turned up, taking in everything. Carol walked a step ahead, and people kept glancing at her and frowning faintly, trying to place her, because the air around my sister has crackled her whole life and she can’t turn it off. A small boy reached out and touched her sleeve as she went past. He got a tiny spark off it, and he looked at his fingers and then at her with an expression of absolute delight.

Carol winked at him.

He ran off shrieking to tell his mother.

”So much for disguises,” I said.

”You’re the one in disguise,” said Carol. ”I’m just out.”

We went past the elven weavers’ row, where the silks hung in long bright banners from poles overhead and moved in the wind like water. One stall sold a pale blue silk so fine it was nearly transparent. The weaver behind it was tall and silver-haired, and when she saw Seraphina looking she smiled and said, ”Fourth Canal blue. The dyer upstream and I have come to an arrangement.”

I kept my head down.

We went past the dwarven smiths, where the air rang with hammers and smelled of hot iron and coal. A smith with a beard braided into three forks was showing a crowd a lock no key could open except its own, and offering a silver piece to anyone who could pick it. Two people were trying. A third, I noticed, was a slender man in a green coat leaning against a post at the back of the crowd with his arms folded, watching with an expression of polite boredom.

The slender man saw me looking and raised one eyebrow.

It was Loki.

Of course it was.

He put a finger to his lips. Then he unfolded himself from the post, walked through the crowd to the smith’s table, picked up the lock, looked at it for a moment, and handed it back open.

The smith stared at it.

Loki held out his hand for the silver piece, received it, bowed to the crowd, and walked off into the market whistling. By the time I looked for him again he was gone.

”Was that...” Seraphina began.

”Yes.”

”Does he do that often?”

”I suspect,” said Carol, ”that the lower market is how Loki pays for things.”

* * *

The butchers’ street was at the bottom of the hill, where the drains ran. That had been Eleanor’s one victory over the lower market, and she was very proud of it.

The largest stall belonged to a werewolf.

His name was Ansgar. I knew it because it was painted over the stall in big red letters, ANSGAR & DAUGHTERS, MEAT HONEST AND FAIR, and because his daughters were working the counter beside him. All three of them were broad and quick and gray-eyed, and all three of them had the faint wolfish look about the jaw that people in Havenreach have stopped commenting on.

They haven’t always stopped. Werewolves fought for Surtr, in the war. They ran ahead of his night columns, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. There are people in this city who remember that, and who still cross the street when they see a werewolf, and who will tell you exactly why if you ask.

The werewolves joined the peace eight years ago. Father and Aurelia and the old wolf-mother who spoke for the packs sat in a tent on the northern border for eleven days, and at the end of it the packs signed the Accord, and a lot of people were very angry about it, on both sides.

Ansgar opened his stall the following spring. He was the first.

For a year almost nobody bought from him.

The second year, Helena started sending Beatrice’s kitchen boys down for the castle’s meat. She didn’t make an announcement. She just did it, every week, and paid on time, and complained loudly about the quality of the shanks when she thought they deserved it.

By the third year Ansgar had a queue.

He had a queue now. Carol joined it.

When she reached the front, Ansgar looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked past her at me, in my grandfather’s coat, and at Seraphina, and back at Carol. His nose twitched, very slightly.

Werewolves, it turns out, do not care about disguises.

”Princess,” he said quietly.

”Two pounds of the lamb,” said Carol. ”And whatever bones you’re throwing out. We have a wolf at home who’ll want them.”

Ansgar’s eyebrows went up.

”Fenrir?”

”Fenrir.”

One of his daughters dropped a cleaver.

Ansgar wrapped the lamb himself. He wrapped the bones separately, in a much bigger bundle than I’m certain he’d been planning to throw out, and tied it with twine, and when Carol tried to pay he pushed the coins back across the counter with one broad finger.

”Tell him,” he said, ”they’re from the packs.”

Carol looked at him for a moment.

Then she nodded, and put the coins back in her purse, and took the bundle, and said, ”I’ll tell him.”

We walked on.

”He knows who Fenrir is,” I said quietly.

”Every wolf in Avarra knows who Fenrir is,” said Carol. ”I think they’ve been waiting twenty years for him to come down to the market.” She hefted the bundle. ”Maybe this’ll do it.”

* * *

We found Mary and Melody at the ribbon-seller’s.

Or rather, Melody found us. She came round the corner of the stall with an armful of something and stopped dead, and her long brown ears went straight up, and she pointed at me.

”That,” she said, ”is Garrick Valewood’s coat.”

Mary came round the stall behind her.

She looked at the coat. She looked at me. She looked at Seraphina and Carol. I watched her take in, one by one, the absence of guards, the absence of my ring, the bundle of bones under Carol’s arm, and the fact that it was the middle of a market day and three members of the royal family were standing at a ribbon stall in the lower market without having told anyone where they were going.

Her hand went toward her coat. Toward the inside pocket, where the book lives.

Melody put her hand on Mary’s wrist.

”No,” she said.

Mary’s hand stopped.

”It’s our day,” said Melody. ”You promised. No records.”

Mary looked at the inside of her coat for a long moment with the expression of a woman being asked to give up breathing.

Then she took her hand away.

”No records,” she said.

”Thank you.”

”I’m remembering it, though.”

”That’s allowed.”

* * *

They have been married for nineteen years.

I was four at the wedding. I don’t remember much. I remember that it was in the great hall, and that the hall was full of lanterns. Blue glass ones that had come from somewhere by the sea, and that I wasn’t allowed to touch. I remember that Melody wore white and Mary wore gray, and that at one point the doors to the hall stuck and Melody kicked them open. Everyone cheered, though I’m fairly certain it wasn’t part of the ceremony.

And I remember a prince.

He was tall and solemn and from somewhere east, and he had courted Mary once, long before, when she was the castle’s steward and he had come to Greykeep with his mother’s delegation. Mary had told him, very kindly, no. He had apparently taken it very well. And when the invitations went out for the wedding, he came, and sat in the second row, and wept openly through the whole thing. Afterward he danced with Melody three times and told everyone who would listen that he had never been so happy to have lost.

Melody still writes to him at midwinter.

Mary, I know for a fact, has a page about him in the book. She will not tell anyone what it says.

The ceremony itself was very short, Mother says, because Mary had written it and Mary does not believe in unnecessary words. They promised to keep each other the way they had kept the castle in the empty years. Through every winter. With whatever was in the pantry. Until someone came.

Then Mary went straight to her book and wrote: Married Melody. Weather fair.

I’ve seen the page. It’s the only line on it.

* * *

”Every year,” Melody explained, ”we come to the lower market. And each of us buys the other one thing. And then we go home and Mary pretends she hasn’t written it down.”

”I don’t write it down,” said Mary.

”She writes it down the next morning.”

”That’s a different day.”

Melody showed us what she’d bought. It was a new book.

It was beautiful. Dark green leather, the color of deep forest, with a strap and a brass clasp and Mary’s initial pressed into the cover very small in the corner. The pages inside were thick and cream-colored and completely empty.

Mary took it and turned it over in her hands. She didn’t say anything for a while.

”How many is that?” Carol asked.

”Nineteen,” said Melody. ”She fills one a year. Exactly one. Down to the last page. Even when there’s not enough happening.”

”There’s always enough happening,” said Mary.

”Last year she wrote down the weather for the last three weeks of winter, in very small handwriting, so it would reach the end.”

”It was significant weather.”

”It snowed.”

”Significantly.”

Mary tucked the new book into her coat, beside the old one, and I saw her hand rest on it for a moment longer than it needed to.

Then she reached into the ribbon-seller’s basket and drew out what she’d bought for Melody.

It was a pair of boots.

They were extraordinary boots. Dark red leather, laced to the knee, with heavy soles and a steel cap at each toe that caught the light. Dwarf-made, from the look of the stitching.

Melody’s ears went straight up again.

”Mary.”

”Your old ones have holes.”

”My old ones are broken in.”

”Your old ones,” said Mary, ”kicked a mercenary through a door last spring, and the door did not survive, and neither, in the end, did the boot.” She held them out. ”These have steel in the toe. The smith says they’ll go through oak.”

Melody took the boots.

She held them against her chest for a moment, the way Mary had held the book.

”You got me boots for kicking things,” she said.

”You kick things,” said Mary. ”It’s one of the things I like best about you.”

There was a short silence.

Carol made a small noise and looked away. Seraphina’s hand tightened on my arm. The ribbon-seller, an old woman who must have seen this every year for nineteen years, wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron and pretended she was sneezing.

Then Melody sat down on an upturned crate, pulled off her old boots, and put the new ones on right there in the middle of the lower market. She laced them all the way up. She stood. She walked three steps in a circle, tested her weight, and kicked a loose cobble clean across the street and into the side of a rain barrel, where it stuck.

The barrel rang like a bell.

Half the street turned to look.

Melody looked at the barrel. Then she looked at Mary, and her whole face lit up.

”They’re perfect,” she said.

Mary, who does not believe in unnecessary words, didn’t say anything.

She just took Melody’s hand. They walked off together into the market, a cat-eared woman in grey with two books in her coat and a rabbit-eared woman in red boots, the last two people who stayed when Greykeep was empty, and the crowd closed behind them.

Tied to one of Melody’s ears, I noticed as they went, was a faded white ribbon.

The ribbon-seller saw me looking.

”Naming day,” she said. ”Twenty-odd years back, when they voted for the city’s name. I sold ribbons in four colours. Grey for Greyhaven. Blue for Havenreach. Brown for Stonecross. White for Our Place.” She smiled. ”Most people threw theirs out after the vote. She’s worn that one every anniversary since.”

”Our Place came second,” I said.

”It did,” said the old woman. ”Not to her.”

* * *

The river quay sits at the very bottom of the lower market, where the old town meets the water.

Havenreach isn’t on the sea. People from other kingdoms forget that, because it’s so large. It sits on the river below Greykeep, two weeks’ sail from the coast, and everything that comes from the sea comes up the river to it on barges. Salt from Westmere. Glass and lamp oil from Orselle. Dried fish from places I’d only seen on Mary’s maps.

The barges come in at the quay, and the men who sail them drink at the Lantern and Oar, a long low taproom with its door open to the water and its benches set out on the cobbles.

Seraphina wanted fried fish.

We sat on a bench outside the Lantern and Oar with three paper cones and watched a salt barge from Westmere unloading. The men carried the sacks up the gangplank two at a time, with a dwarf at the top of it counting them off on a slate. Behind us, inside the taproom, someone was telling a story loudly enough for the whole quay to hear.

I didn’t listen at first.

Then someone laughed, and the storyteller said, ”Laugh all you like. I saw them,” in a voice that made me turn round.

He was an old sailor. Not a river man. You can tell the difference if you grow up near barges. River men are broad and slow and careful. This one was thin as a rope and burned dark by a sun that doesn’t shine on rivers, and he had a deep-water man’s way of standing, legs apart, as if the floor might tip. He’d come upriver with the salt, I guessed. Someone had bought him a drink to hear his story, and he was earning it.

”Three weeks west of Westmere,” he said. ”Past the last of the fishing grounds. Past where the maps stop. We were blown out there by the spring gales, the Saltwife and two other boats, and for nine days we didn’t see land.”

”So you were lost,” someone said.

”We were lost,” the old sailor agreed. ”I’ll say that. And on the ninth night we saw them.”

”Saw what?”

”Ships.”

He let that sit.

”Black sails,” he said. ”Forty, fifty of them. More. All in a line, going the other way, west, into the dark. No lights on any of them. Not a lantern. Not a pipe. And the hulls...”

He stopped.

”What about the hulls, Sorley?” said the man who’d bought the drink. He was grinning. He’d clearly heard this before.

Old Sorley didn’t grin back.

”Carved,” he said. ”Every inch of them. Writing. Like nothing I ever saw. And when you looked straight at it, it was just carving. But when you looked away, at the corner of your eye...” He made a small motion with two fingers, a crawling motion. ”It moved.”

The taproom laughed.

Not unkindly. Sailors’ tales are a kind of currency on the quay, and this one was good value. Someone called for another round for Sorley Pike and his ghost ships. Someone else asked whether the ghost ships had been crewed by mermaids, and whether the mermaids had been pretty. The old sailor sat back with his cup and let them laugh. He’d been laughed at before. You could see it.

But he said one more thing. Quietly, to nobody in particular, as the noise rose around him.

”And they were singing.”

I almost missed it.

”No crew on deck. Not a soul. But something on those ships was singing. All of them together. Low. You felt it more than heard it.” He drank. ”I haven’t slept right since.”

Nobody heard him except me.

And Carol.

I felt it before I saw it. Through the bond, like a door closing somewhere in the house. The crackle in the air around my sister went out.

I turned my head.

Carol was sitting very still on the bench with her paper cone of fish in her lap, untouched, looking at the old sailor. Her face was perfectly calm. But the hand holding the cone had gone pale at the knuckles, and on the back of it, very faint, so faint I’d have thought it was a trick of the light off the river, there was frost.

”Carol,” I said quietly.

She blinked. The frost was gone. The crackle came back into the air, all at once, as if nothing had happened.

”Mm?”

”Are you all right?”

”I’m fine,” she said. ”Someone walked over my grave.” She looked down at her fish. ”It’s gone cold.”

It had. The cone of fish in her lap was cold as if it had been sitting out all night. Seraphina’s was still hot in her hand. Mine was still hot in mine.

Carol stood up, threw hers to the gulls on the quay, and smiled at us.

”Home?” she said.

We went home.

Above the quay, on the bell tower of the old river chapel, a green dragon lay coiled around the bell housing in the last of the sun with its eyes closed and its tail hanging down over the clock face. It had been asleep there all afternoon, I’d noticed, the way they often are in the lower town, where the roofs hold the heat.

As we passed under it, it opened one eye.

It wasn’t looking at us. It was looking west, down the river, toward the sea.

It kept looking that way until we turned the corner and I lost sight of it.

* * *

We came in by the kitchen gate at sunset.

Helena was in the little kitchen with the kettle on. She looked at the three of us coming in, at the brown coat and the bundle and our faces, and raised her cup again, exactly as she had when we left.

”Good market?” she said.

”Good market,” said Seraphina, and kissed her cheek.

Carol went out into the garden with the bundle of bones.

I followed, because I wanted to see.

Fenrir was lying on the lawn below the east wing, where he lies most evenings, with his chin in the grass. He lifted his head as Carol came toward him. She knelt in front of him and put the bundle down and untied the twine, and he looked at the bones for a long moment without moving.

”They’re from the packs,” Carol said. ”Ansgar sent them. The butcher in the lower market. He said to tell you they’re from the packs.”

Fenrir didn’t move.

Then, very slowly, he put his great grey nose down into the bundle, and breathed in.

He stayed like that for a long time.

When he lifted his head again, his eyes had changed. I can’t describe it better than that. They looked, for a moment, like Loki’s had looked on the lake, watching his son roll in the grass. The look of someone who has just been handed something he didn’t know he was allowed to want.

He didn’t eat the bones.

He picked up the whole bundle in his jaws, very gently, and got to his feet, and walked away across the lawn toward the gate.

We watched him go.

”Where’s he going?” I said.

Carol was smiling.

A moment later the Castellan’s voice came quietly from the garden wall.

”Fenrir has left the castle,” it said. ”On foot. Destination, the lower market. The butchers’ street.” A pause. ”He is carrying the bones.”

Carol laughed, and stood, and brushed the grass off her knees.

”Told you,” she said. ”Twenty years. They’ve been waiting.”

She went in.

I stayed in the garden a while longer, watching the last light go off the top of the west tower, and thinking about a cone of fish gone cold in my sister’s lap on a warm spring evening.

And about an old sailor who hadn’t slept right since.

And about a dragon on a bell tower, looking west.