The Greykeep Chronicles

In Greykeep, you don’t celebrate the day you were born.

You celebrate the day Mary wrote you down.

Nobody decided this. It happened the way most things in Greykeep happen, which is that Mary did something carefully and precisely for long enough that it became a tradition. When I was born, she wrote my name in the household book an hour after Carol’s, because Carol came first and Mary does things in order. Then she drew a small line under both names. On the same day the next year, Helena baked a cake and put it in front of the line in the book, and said, ”There. Now they’ve been here a year.”

It has been name days ever since.

Little Uriah’s was on the first warm day of summer. Mary had written his name in the book a year before, in black ink, with the hour and the weather. Uriah. Son of Garrick and Seraphina. Loud.

She insists the last word was the weather.

Nobody believes her.

* * *

Helena started the cake at four in the morning.

She makes one cake a year for each name day in the family, and nobody else is allowed near it. Not Beatrice, who has run Greykeep’s kitchens for twenty-five years and has strong opinions about cake. Not Mother. Not me. The little kitchen is closed to everyone on the morning of a name day, and the kettle is on in the great kitchen instead. People make do.

I went down anyway, because I always do, and stood in the doorway.

Helena was at the table in an apron, with flour on her forearms to the elbow and her sleeves pinned back. There were six bowls in front of her and a sheet of paper covered in her own handwriting, propped against the kettle. She didn’t look up.

”Out,” she said.

”I just wanted to see.”

”You saw. Out.”

”What kind is it?”

”The kind I make.” She cracked an egg one-handed into a bowl without looking at it. ”Your mother asked me that every year until she was fourteen. Then she stopped asking and started guessing. She has never once been right.”

”What did you make for mine?”

Helena paused. Just for a moment. Her hands went still over the bowl.

”For your first,” she said, ”I made two. One for you and one for your sister. Exactly the same. You both put your faces in them at the same moment and neither of you ate a bite.” She went back to the eggs. ”Out, Garrick.”

I went out.

Behind me, I heard her start to hum.

* * *

They came through the gates all morning.

The Castellan announced every one of them. It refuses to stop announcing people on name days, Aurelia’s request notwithstanding. It says a name day is an occasion when a person is formally welcomed, and that the welcome should be complete. By noon it had been talking for three hours straight, from the gate chamber and the great hall and the courtyard all at once, in its patient, clear voice.

”King Lexander and Queen Io of Concordia. Prince Ignatius of Concordia. The goddess Thor. The god Loki.”

A pause.

”The god Loki has brought a goat.”

He had. He wouldn’t say why.

”Prince Julian and Princess Elowen of Lyradon. Prince Roddick of Lyradon. Queen Mirelle of Lyradon. Lady Cassia and Master Davren of Lyradon.” A pause. ”Prince Roddick is carrying an iron horse. The iron horse is warm.”

”The Lady Aurelia.”

”The goddess Meriel. The goddess Rysa. The goddess Thesra. The god Brannoc and the goddess Corra.”

A longer pause.

”The goddess Nyxa is already here. I do not know when she arrived.”

”Lady Mary and Lady Melody of Greykeep.” A pause. ”Lady Melody has kicked the courtyard door open. It was not locked.”

”Prince Roderic of Greykeep and Lyradon. Princess Caitlin of Greykeep.” A pause. ”Prince Roderic is alone.”

I looked up at that.

So did Adriana, across the courtyard, with Mirelle on her hip and Faelan at her elbow. She met my eyes. I shrugged. She raised her eyebrows a very small amount, which in Adriana means a great deal.

The Castellan went on.

”The god Ansel.”

Then, after a moment, three soft knocks from the gate chamber door, and the Castellan said, as it has said every time for seventeen years, ”Come in.”

* * *

The dragons came in the afternoon.

They don’t use gates. Aurethar came first, low over the walls from the west, a long golden shape against the summer sky. He settled on the roof of the great hall with a rattle of tiles that brought Eleanor out into the courtyard with her spectacles on her forehead and her hands on her hips. Then the green from the river chapel, who had a name I couldn’t pronounce and who preferred to be called by her color. Then two more from the eastern hills whom I didn’t know, and who sat on the north wall and looked down at the courtyard full of people with polite, enormous interest.

Little Uriah, on Seraphina’s hip in the middle of the courtyard, looked up at the four dragons on the walls.

The four dragons looked down at him.

He pointed at Aurethar, with his whole arm, and shouted.

Aurethar, very slowly, lowered his great golden head down the side of the hall until it was level with the courtyard, and blew a long, warm, gentle breath across my son’s face. It smelled of hot stone and summer.

Little Uriah shut his eyes against it. Then he opened them, and laughed, a huge delighted shout of a laugh that bounced off every wall in the courtyard.

Aurethar’s eyes, as big as shields, crinkled at the corners.

”Acceptable,” he said, and raised his head again, and settled back onto the roof.

Eleanor gave up and went back inside.

* * *

We ate in the great hall with the doors open to the courtyard, so the dragons could see.

There were too many people for one table, so there were six, pushed together end to end until they ran the length of the hall. Nobody sat where they were supposed to. Mary had drawn up a seating plan and pinned it to the door, and Melody had taken it down within the first five minutes and folded it into a paper boat for Roddick. Mary pretended not to notice. I saw her write something in her book afterward, very small, with a faint expression of satisfaction, which I think was the plan for next year.

I sat between Seraphina and Carol, with little Uriah on my knee, and watched my family.

* * *

Roderic found me before the soup.

He slid onto the bench across from me with the look of a man reporting from a battlefield.

”I told them,” he said.

”All three?”

”All three. Wren at the river terraces, that evening. Talia on the headland, the next day. Imogen in the library.” He took a breath. ”I said I liked them very much. That I’d been saying yes to things I didn’t want because I didn’t know how to say no. And that I was sorry.”

”And?”

”Wren threw a glass of cider at me.”

”Fair.”

”Talia laughed for about a minute and said she’d only asked me to the headland because I was the only person at the college who could keep up with her horse.” He frowned. ”I’m still not sure if that was an insult.”

”And Imogen?”

Roderic went slightly pink.

”Imogen said that was all right,” he said, ”and asked if I still wanted to study together for rhetoric. Just study.” He paused. ”And I said yes.”

Across the table, Caitlin, who had not appeared to be listening, said without looking up from her plate, ”Told you.”

Roderic threw a bread roll at her. She caught it without looking and ate it.

Adriana, three seats down with Mirelle on her lap, met my eyes over Roderic’s head and smiled, very faintly, and went back to her soup.

* * *

There were gifts.

There are always gifts. On a name day the gifts are mostly for the parents, if we’re honest, because a one-year-old does not need anything except his mother, his porridge and an endless supply of things to put in his mouth. But people bring them anyway, and the giving is the point.

Grandpa Garrick had made a rocking horse. Dark oak, the same oak as the horse on the nursery shelf and the little one in my son’s fist, with a real horsehair tail and a saddle carved so finely you could see the stitching. Little Uriah was much too small for it. Grandpa Garrick said he’d grow.

Caitlin gave him a book. It was very small and bound in blue, and completely blank.

”For when he can write,” she said. ”So he can start his own record.” She glanced across the hall at Mary. ”Mary helped me choose the paper.”

Mary, at the far table, inclined her head with tremendous dignity. I’m fairly sure she was moved.

Julian set a small iron horse on the table. It glowed a faint, deep red.

”From Surtr,” he said. ”So the boys match. He said to tell you he asked the dwarves.”

Ignatius gave me a spoon.

It was an ordinary spoon. Silver, a little worn, stamped with the Concordian mark. He held it out to me across the table, entirely seriously, and I took it, entirely seriously. Then he held out a second one, much smaller, a baby’s spoon, and put it into little Uriah’s fist.

Little Uriah looked at it.

Then he leaned forward and offered it back to Ignatius.

Ignatius took it. He held it for a moment. Then he gave it back again. My son took it, and shrieked with delight, and offered it back again, and Ignatius took it, and gave it back, and they did that eleven times while the whole table watched.

”Oh, no,” said Carol softly. ”There are going to be three generations of this.”

Loki had brought the goat.

He led it in on a red ribbon halfway through the meal and stood it in front of little Uriah’s chair. It was a small white goat with a black face and an expression of profound skepticism.

”A goat,” said Seraphina.

”A goat,” Loki agreed.

”For a one-year-old.”

”Every child,” said Loki, ”should have something that is entirely on his side.”

The goat looked at little Uriah. Little Uriah looked at the goat. Then the goat turned, walked down the length of the table, put its head over Mary’s shoulder, and began, thoughtfully, to eat the corner of her book.

Mary rose from her seat.

She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. She took the book out of the goat’s mouth, closed it, tucked it into her coat, and looked down at the goat with an expression that I have seen make kings sit down.

The goat backed away three steps.

Then it sat down.

Loki looked at Thor. Thor looked at Loki.

”Nineteen years,” said Thor, ”and that’s the first time I’ve seen anything you brought do as it’s told.”

* * *

The cake came in at sunset.

Helena carried it herself. She always does. She came down the length of the hall with it held in front of her in both hands, and the noise went out of the room as she passed, table by table, the way it does every time.

She set it down in front of little Uriah.

It was plum. Plum and honey and something dark and spiced underneath that I couldn’t name, in three layers, with a crust of sugar on top that caught the last of the light through the west windows and shone.

I’d guessed apple.

I’ve never once been right.

Little Uriah looked at the cake with an expression of complete awe. Then, before anyone could stop him, and nobody tried, he leaned forward and put his whole face in it.

The hall roared.

Helena stood back with her hands folded and watched him do it, with an expression I know very well and have never once been able to describe. Something between pride and grief and a woman watching a thing she started fifty years ago go on without her.

”Exactly like his father,” she said.

* * *

Afterward, when he’d been cleaned off, and while the hall was settling into the warm, slow, comfortable noise that comes at the end of a long meal, Rysa got up from her chair.

She came round the table to where Seraphina was holding little Uriah, and she knelt down on the floor in front of them, slowly, the way she knelt in front of us on the nursery floor when we were small. She didn’t say anything to Seraphina or to me. She looked only at my son.

The hall went quiet again.

Most of them knew what she was doing. Most of them had been children in Greykeep, or had raised children there, or had sat on the floor of the nursery in the years Rysa taught. It’s the oldest custom in the castle, older than the name days. Older than the kettle.

”Name?” said Rysa.

Little Uriah looked at her. He was much too young to answer that. He frowned at her, his grandfather’s frown, the one he gives tariffs.

Rysa smiled.

”Uriah,” she told him gently. ”Your name is Uriah. One day you’ll say it.” She held up one finger. ”Want?”

And my son, who had never in his life said a single word with a consonant in it, looked at her very seriously, and then at the ruins of the cake, and then back at her.

And said, loudly and with perfect clarity, ”Jam.”

There was a silence.

Then Io began to laugh, and put her face in her hands, and couldn’t stop. Mother was laughing too, the two of them leaning against each other. Carol had her hand over her mouth. Ignatius had gone very still, then grinned. Seraphina was laughing and crying at the same time and holding our son so tightly he squawked.

At the far table, Mary had already opened her book.

I watched her write it. One word, in black ink, underlined twice.

Rysa got to her feet with tears running down her face and patted little Uriah on the head. Io, still leaning against Mother, wiped her eyes and said it the way she’d said it over a breakfast table twenty-one years ago, about four other children:

”Excellent priorities,” she said.

* * *

Nobody went home.

That’s the other thing about name days in Greykeep. The meal ends and the cake is gone and the gifts are opened, and everyone is supposed to go home, and nobody ever does. The hall empties slowly into the courtyard and the gardens and the terraces, and people sit in the long summer evening in twos and threes, and talk, and stay.

I sat on the terrace above the orchard with my son asleep on my chest.

He had fought sleep for an hour. He’d been passed from arm to arm the length of the hall, Queen Mirelle to Grandpa Garrick to Thor to Lexander, and had shouted ”Jam” at every one of them, with the enormous pride of a man who has discovered that words work. Then, somewhere between Lexander and me, the shouting stopped, and his head went down, and that was the end of it.

Seraphina sat beside me with her feet in my lap and her eyes closed.

Down in the orchard, Carol and Ignatius were walking slowly between the trees, not touching, close enough that they didn’t need to. Roderic was on the courtyard steps with Caitlin, arguing about something in a book. Elenos was sitting on the low wall at the far end of the terrace, alone, the way he likes, looking at nothing. Mirelle and Faelan had fallen asleep in a heap on a bench with Loki’s goat between them.

Fenrir had come back from the lower market the day after Carol gave him the bones. He’d been back twice since. Tonight he lay on the lawn below the terrace with his chin in the grass, and somebody had tied a strip of red cloth around one of his forelegs. I didn’t ask. I learned later it was the custom among the packs, for one who has been welcomed.

Aurelia came and sat down on the bench beside me.

She didn’t say anything at first. She looked at little Uriah, asleep on my chest with his fist closed around Ignatius’s spoon. Then she reached out and laid two fingers very lightly on the back of his small hand.

She went still.

Just for a moment. So briefly I might have imagined it. Her fingers stayed where they were, and something passed across her face. Not alarm. Something more like the expression Grandpa Garrick wears when he runs his thumb along a board and feels a grain he didn’t expect.

”He’s warm,” she said quietly.

”He’s been in the sun all day. And passed round like a parcel.”

”Mm.” She took her hand away. ”Yes. That’ll be it.”

She smiled at me. I believed her.

I’ve thought about that moment a great deal since.

* * *

The Castellan spoke at a little after ten.

Not from the gate chamber. From the stone of the terrace itself, right beside me, in a voice I had heard it use perhaps three times in my life. Quiet, and very clear, and without any pause in it at all.

”Westmere has asked,” it said. ”Steward Tamar Vale requests passage. He states that it cannot wait.”

Father was on his feet before it finished.

I hadn’t seen him get up. He’d been sitting at the far end of the terrace with Lexander, talking about nothing in particular in the way they do. And then he was standing, and Lexander was standing beside him, and the whole terrace had gone quiet.

”Answer,” Father said.

”Greykeep has answered.”

I gave little Uriah to Seraphina. She took him without a word. Her eyes were open now.

I went with Father.

* * *

Tamar Vale came through the gate into the chamber at a stumble.

He was soaked to the waist and white with salt above it. His boots squelched on the pale stone. He was a young man, a few years older than me, broad and serious, with his father Edric’s square jaw. I had known him all my life the way you know the heirs of the other houses, at feasts and councils and treaty days. I had never once seen him without his coat buttoned to the throat.

His coat was open now. There was seaweed caught on his sword belt.

He saw Father and dropped to one knee on the wet stone.

”Majesty.”

”Get up, Tamar.”

Tamar got up.

”Ships,” he said. ”Off Westmere. They came in at dusk, out of the west, with the sun behind them. We didn’t see them until they were inside the outer shoals.” His breath was ragged. ”Sixty. I counted. Sixty ships.”

Nobody said anything.

”Black sails,” Tamar said. ”All of them. No lights. Not a lantern on any deck. They anchored a mile out in a line across the whole of the bay, and they’ve just... sat there. Since dusk. Not moving. Not signaling. Nothing.”

”You went out to them,” Father said. It wasn’t a question.

”In a fishing boat. With four of my men. I wanted to see the hulls.” Tamar swallowed. ”They’re carved, Majesty. Every inch. Some kind of writing. I’ve never seen it before. And when you look away from it...”

He stopped.

I felt Carol arrive at the chamber door behind me before I saw her. Through the bond, the way you feel a draught. Ignatius was with her.

”It moves,” said Carol quietly.

Tamar turned and stared at her.

”How did you know that?”

Carol didn’t answer. She was looking at me.

I thought of an old sailor in the Lantern and Oar, whom nobody had believed.

”They sent a boat ashore,” Tamar went on, turning back to Father. ”One boat. An hour ago. A man in a gray coat stepped out onto the beach, and handed my sergeant a letter, and got back in the boat without a word.” He reached into his coat. His hand was shaking with cold. ”It’s addressed to the King of Greykeep. Only to the King of Greykeep. He said those words exactly. My sergeant said he smiled when he said them.”

He held it out.

It was a long folded sheet of heavy black paper, the kind I’d never seen used for anything. Sealed with red wax.

Father took it.

He didn’t open it. He turned it over in his hands, and looked at the seal.

I looked at it too.

I already knew what it would be. I think I’d known since the Council Hall, since an old sailor said they were singing, since a cone of fish went cold in my sister’s lap on a warm spring evening. I’d known, and I’d put it away and not looked at it, because it was name-day season and the orchard was in leaf and my son had just said his first word.

A hand.

Seen from the back, the fingers closed tightly around something that couldn’t be seen. Pressed so carefully into the wax that the knuckles showed white.

”And the banner,” Tamar said. ”On the largest ship. In the middle of the line. We saw it when the moon came up.” He looked at the seal in Father’s hand. ”That.”

* * *

Aurelia had come down the stairs behind Carol. I don’t know when. She was standing in the doorway of the gate chamber in her white robe, with the light of the corridor behind her.

She looked at the seal in Father’s hand.

She closed her eyes.

”It’s time,” she said.

Nobody asked what she meant. I knew. So did Carol. I felt her hand find mine, and it was cold, colder than the stone floor, and I held on.

Father looked at the letter for a long moment more.

Then he put it, unopened, into his coat.

”Tamar,” he said. ”Go and get dry. The Castellan will show you to a room. There’s food in the great hall, and cake, if Helena hasn’t put it away.” He laid a hand on the young steward’s shoulder. ”You did well. Your father will be proud.”

Tamar looked at him.

”Aren’t you going to read it, Majesty?”

”In the morning,” said Father. ”In the council chamber. With my wife, and Adriana, and Lexander, and Aurelia, and my children.” He looked at me. ”Tonight is my grandson’s name day. Whatever is in this letter has waited across a whole ocean. It can wait until the sun comes up.”

It was the bravest thing I have ever seen him do. I didn’t understand that until much later.

* * *

I went back up to the terrace.

Seraphina was there with little Uriah, still asleep. Most of the others had gone to the edge of the terrace and were standing at the parapet, looking west, though there was nothing to see from here but the dark line of the hills and the stars. Nobody was talking.

Elenos was still sitting alone on the low wall at the end.

I went and stood beside him.

He didn’t look at me. He was looking west, like everyone else.

”It’s the sea,” he said quietly. ”Isn’t it.”

I didn’t answer.

”I dreamed it,” said my little brother. ”In the spring. I told Mother. The sea came up the stairs.” He drew his knees up to his chest. ”Everyone said it was a long way off.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. I didn’t have anything to say to him. He didn’t need me to.

Below us, in the back of the east wing, a single square of warm yellow light came on. The little kitchen.

Helena, putting the kettle on.

It was nearly midnight. She’d been on her feet since four in the morning. She’d baked a cake and carried it the length of the great hall and watched her great-grandson put his face in it. She didn’t need to be awake. Nobody had asked her.

But there were people in this castle who wouldn’t sleep tonight.

So she’d put the kettle on.

One by one, without anyone deciding it, the people on the terrace turned away from the parapet and went down the stairs toward the light.