The Greykeep Chronicles

Eleanor didn’t go down the list.

But it turned out she didn’t have to. Everyone else did it for her.

I don’t know how it got out. Nobody does. Eleanor told me, in her drafting room, with the door shut. I told nobody but Seraphina. Mary wrote it in the black book, and the black book lives on Mary’s desk, and nobody reads the black book but Mary and my father. But Greykeep is an old castle with copper pipes running through every wall and a hundred and forty steps that carry every sound, and Caitlin hears everything about four minutes after it happens. And somewhere between the drafting room and the little kitchen, two words got loose and went through the whole house like a draft under a door.

Someone taught.

By the end of the week, everyone in Greykeep was watching everyone else.

* * *

It started small. That’s the thing about it. It always does.

The kitchen boys stopped talking when Sahrun came down the kitchen stair in the mornings. Just for a moment. Just until he’d got his cup of tea and gone out to the garden. Sahrun’s Kethran. He came over the hills from the golden city. He’d been held. Nobody said any of that out loud. They just stopped talking, and then started again when the garden door shut behind him, a little too loudly.

On the third morning, Sahrun didn’t come down at all. Helena took his tea up to the round room at the top of the kitchen stair herself, and came back down with her mouth set in a line, and said nothing. But that afternoon, for the first time since he’d said his name in the garden, it didn’t rain on the leeks.

* * *

At the college, people started watching Iselle.

Roderic told me. Not the students, he said, not mostly. They’d known her all term. They liked her. But the other people. The ones who came through the Concordia gate to sell things in the college yard, and the porters, and a few of the masters who’d never quite forgiven Io for letting a Kethran girl into the east range. People who’d heard, somehow, that there was Kethran writing under a gate. That a Kethran oath had been sitting in the stone at Orselle for three years. And that a Kethran girl had been the one who could read it.

”Nobody says anything,” said Roderic. He was in the east-wall nook with me at seven in the morning, which he never is, with his hands wrapped around a cup of tea he wasn’t drinking. ”That’s the worst part. They just look at her. In the refectory. On the stairs. In the library. Master Ashby asked her, in front of the whole lecture, whether she’d always been able to read oath-script, or whether she’d learned it recently.” His jaw was tight. ”She said since she was seven. Everybody in the golden city learns it at seven. She said it very politely. And then she went back to her room and didn’t come out for supper.”

”Is she all right?”

”She’s closing her hand again,” said Roderic. ”All the time. She’d nearly stopped.” He put the cup down. ”And Caitlin...”

He stopped.

”What about Caitlin?”

Roderic didn’t say anything for a while.

”Caitlin’s been checking,” he said at last. Very quietly. ”On her. Not unkindly. Caitlin’s never unkind. But she’s Iselle’s guide for the term, and she’s Mary’s apprentice, and she writes everything down. And I found her list.” He looked at me. ”In her blue book. A page with Iselle’s name at the top, and every place Iselle’s been since the autumn. Every gate crossing. Every letter. With dates.”

* * *

I don’t think I’d ever seen Roderic angry before. Not properly. Not the way he was that afternoon, in the south solar, when Caitlin came in with her blue book under her arm and found him waiting for her.

I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was in the window seat with Faelan, helping him with a sum, and they didn’t see us. By the time they did, it was too late to leave.

”You made a list,” said Roderic.

Caitlin stopped dead. She looked at his face, and then at the blue book under her arm, and went red to the roots of her hair.

”It’s not what you...”

”It’s exactly what I think. I saw it, Cait. Every gate she’s crossed. Every letter she’s sent. Like she’s... like she’s a suspect.” Roderic’s voice cracked on the word. ”She’s been here since the summer. She’s eaten Helena’s porridge every morning. She read the oath for Eleanor. She sat on the cold stone in Orselle for six days so Kip could unsay it. And you’re keeping a list on her.”

”I keep lists on everyone,” said Caitlin. Her voice was shaking. ”That’s what I do. That’s what Mary taught me. You write it down so that if anybody ever asks, you can show them it’s not true. I was writing it down so that when people started saying things about her, I could prove...”

”Prove what? That she’s not a spy?”

”Yes!”

”She shouldn’t have to prove it!” Roderic was almost shouting now. ”That’s the whole point! That’s what he does! That’s what they did to her in the golden city, her whole life. Watched her. Wrote down where she went. Made her prove she was good every single day. And she came here. She came here because here was supposed to be different.” His voice broke completely. ”And you’ve got a list.”

Caitlin stood very still in the middle of the south solar with her blue book under her arm, and her face crumpled. She didn’t cry. Caitlin almost never cries. She just stood there, looking at her brother, with her mouth working.

Then she turned around and walked out.

Roderic stood in the middle of the room for a long moment. Then he sat down very suddenly on the arm of a chair and put his face in his hands.

On the window seat beside me, Faelan had stopped doing his sum. He was holding his pencil very tightly, looking at the door Caitlin had gone through. And then, slowly, he looked down at his own book on his knees. Not the sum book. The other one. The green laundry ledger.

He closed it, very quietly. And put his hand flat on top of it.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

* * *

It wasn’t only Roderic and Caitlin.

Thor and Loki didn’t speak for two days. I never found out exactly what started it. Something at the Council table, Mary said, something about the lie at Blackstack, and whether a god who’d lie to a keyhole might lie to anyone. Thor said something she shouldn’t have, about the god of lies, and Loki laughed in the way he laughs when he isn’t laughing at all, and walked out, and didn’t come back to Greykeep, and didn’t send any messages. And Thor stomped around the walls at five every morning looking like thunder, and wouldn’t tell anyone what she’d said.

At Westmere, Tamar told me that two of Dunmore’s crew had refused to unload a Kethran grain lighter, because who knew what was in the sacks. And that somebody had painted a closed fist on the door of the Kethran trade house on the quay, in black, in the night. And that Hobb Kitto had gone down with a bucket of whitewash at dawn and painted over it without saying a word to anyone. But it had still been there for the whole of one night.

And in Orselle, Kip Marrow said nothing at all, because he’s not the kind of person who would. But Eleanor heard from the lamp-seller that people had stopped buying bread from the stall where he bought his. And that some of the children who’d watched him scrape the plate for six days had started crossing the square when they saw him coming.

* * *

And I was watching Wynn.

I want to write that down, because it’s true, and because I’m ashamed of it.

I didn’t mean to. I told myself I wasn’t. But every time I went up to Eleanor’s drafting room that week, and he was there, bent over Iselle’s little book with his lips moving, I found myself looking at his hands. At the ink on his cuffs. At the way he read each line twice. And thinking, in a small cold voice somewhere at the back of my head that didn’t sound like me at all, the way she teaches everybody to read.

He looked up once and caught me at it.

He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me for a moment, with his quick thin face very still, and then looked back down at the book. And his ears went red. And the next time I came up, he wasn’t there.

”He’s gone home for a few days,” said Eleanor, without looking up from her practice stone. ”To his mother’s. Down the coast. He said he needed to see his sisters.” She cut a line. Then she put the chisel down. ”He asked if he’d done something wrong. I said no.” She looked at me over her spectacles. ”Had he?”

I didn’t answer.

Eleanor looked at me for a long time. Then she picked up the chisel again.

”I’m not going down the list, Garrick,” she said quietly. ”I told you that. I meant it.” She cut another line. ”I’d thank you not to do it for me.”

* * *

Helena noticed first. Of course she did.

On the seventh morning she was standing at the stove when I came down, with the porridge pot, and she didn’t turn around. She just stood there, stirring, listening to the stairs.

”Listen,” she said.

I listened.

Feet on the east stair. My mother’s. Adriana’s, lighter. Mary’s, quick. Grandpa’s slippers. The kitchen stair, empty; Sahrun wasn’t coming down again. The tower stair, slow; Carol, coming down a hundred and forty steps on her own because Ignatius had gone to Concordia to find out what had happened between his sister and Loki.

”I’ve listened to this house come down to breakfast for twenty years,” said Helena. ”I can tell how everyone slept from the sound on the stairs. I can tell who’s quarreled. I can tell who’s in love.” She stirred the porridge. ”For a week, this house has been coming down the stairs like strangers. Everyone listening to everyone else. Nobody coming down together.” She turned around at last and looked at me. ”I don’t like it. It’s not my house.”

”What do we do?”

Helena looked at me for a long moment. Then she took the pot off the heat.

”I don’t know,” she said. ”That’s not my part. I’m the kettle.” She wiped her hands on her apron. ”But I know who to ask.”

* * *

In the end it wasn’t any of us. It was Faelan.

* * *

Mirelle found it.

She’d gone to Faelan’s room after lunch to borrow his good pencil, which she does without asking because she’s seven and a half and he’s her brother and that’s what brothers are for. And the green laundry ledger was on his bed. And it was open.

Not at the front. Not at the gods. Not at PEOPLE WHO ARE NEARLY, where Grandpa and Mary and the Castellan and Helena are. Further back than that. At a new page, near the end, that had never been there before.

There was a heading on it, in Faelan’s very careful capitals.

PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE.

And under it, three names.

ISELLE (KETHRAN).

SAHRUN (KETHRAN, WAS HELD).

WYNN (TAUGHT BY ELEANOR).

Mirelle stood looking at it for a long time.

Then she sat down on the end of her brother’s bed and cried. Loudly. The way she hasn’t cried since she was four and dropped her lamp-scissors down the well. And Adriana came running, and then my father, and then Faelan himself, from the stables, and stopped in the doorway with straw in his hair and saw his sister crying over his ledger, and saw the page it was open at, and went white.

* * *

I wasn’t there for most of what happened next. Adriana took both of them into her own rooms and shut the door, and my father stood outside it for an hour, not going in, because she’d asked him not to.

But I was there at the end. Because when Adriana opened the door, Faelan was standing behind her with his ledger in his arms and his face blotched red from crying, and he looked straight past his mother and his father, at me.

”Garrick,” he said. ”Will you get Rysa? Please. I don’t know how to ask her. But I need her.”

* * *

Rysa came that evening.

She comes very quietly. She always has. A small round woman with gray hair in a bun and a faded blue dress, and a faded blue drawstring bag over her arm, lumpy with toys that nobody’s ever seen her take out except once. She walked into the south solar where we were all waiting, the whole family, every one of us, because my father had asked us all to come. And she looked around the room at all of us. At Roderic, on one side of the hearth, not looking at Caitlin, on the other. At Thor, by the window, alone. At me. At Carol and Ignatius, who’d come back from Concordia with no news. At my mother, and Adriana, and Mirelle on her lap. At Faelan, standing in the middle of the rug, holding his ledger.

Rysa looked at all of us for a long time.

Then she said, ”Well. Somebody’s forgotten the last one.”

Nobody said anything.

”Name,” said Rysa. She held up one finger. ”Want.” Two. ”Permission.” Three. ”Stop.” Four. She looked at all of us over her fingers. ”And?”

”Friend,” said Faelan. Very small.

”Friend,” said Rysa. She put her hand down. ”Everybody always forgets that one. Every child I’ve ever taught. They learn the first four, because the first four are about keeping yourself safe. And they forget the fifth, because it’s the only one that’s about the other person.” She sat down, very slowly, on the hard chair by the door, the one nobody ever uses, and put her blue bag on her knee. ”Do you remember how it goes, Faelan?”

Faelan swallowed.

”You ask,” he said. ”You don’t say you’re my friend. You ask. Friend? Like a question. And they can say yes, or they can say no.” He looked down at his ledger. ”And you have to ask first. Before you know. You don’t wait till you’re sure. You ask so you can find out.”

”Yes,” said Rysa.

”I didn’t ask,” said Faelan. His voice wobbled. ”I wrote them down. In the might be. Because everybody was... everybody in the house was looking at people. And I thought, if everybody’s looking, I should write it down, like Mary does. In case.” He held the ledger tighter. ”But I never asked them. Not one. I just wrote their names under might be and didn’t ask.”

Rysa didn’t say anything. She just waited.

Faelan stood in the middle of the rug for a long time. Then he opened the ledger. He turned past all the gods, past PEOPLE WHO ARE NEARLY, to the page near the end. PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE. And he took hold of it at the top, very carefully, the way Mary takes a spoiled page out of a ledger, and tore it out.

Mirelle stopped crying.

* * *

”I’m going to go and ask them,” said Faelan. He folded the page in half, and in half again, very small. ”All three. Friend? And if they say yes, I’m going to put them in the front. Where the gods are. Because that’s where people go when you’ve asked them properly.” He looked up at Rysa. ”Is that right?”

Rysa opened her faded blue bag.

She took out, very slowly, a small wooden spinning top. Painted red and blue, mostly worn. The same one she’d set down between four children on a nursery floor twenty-one years ago, the day she taught us Friend. And she held it out to Faelan.

”Take it with you,” she said. ”When you ask. It’s for holding. It helps.”

Faelan took it.

And then my father stood up, by the fire, and looked around the room.

”He’s ten,” he said quietly. ”And he’s going to go and ask three people Friend? tonight.” He looked at Roderic. At Caitlin. At Thor. At me. ”I wonder how many of the rest of us are going to.”

* * *

Faelan went to Sahrun first.

Up the kitchen stair to the round room at the top, where the window was shut again. He knocked three times, the way Loki does, and waited. Sahrun opened the door. And Faelan stood there in the doorway with the spinning top in one hand and his ledger in the other and said, very formally:

”My name’s Faelan Ansel Grey. I’m ten. I wrote your name down somewhere it shouldn’t have been, and I’m sorry. I want to ask you something. You can say no.” He took a breath. ”Friend?”

Sahrun looked down at him for a long time.

Then he crouched, the way my father does, so that his face was lower than Faelan’s. And it began, very softly, to rain on the windowsill behind him.

”Yes,” said Sahrun.

* * *

He went to Iselle at the college next, through the Concordia gate, with Roderic carrying him the last bit up the east range stairs because it was nearly nine. And Iselle opened her door with her right hand closed into a fist, and listened to the whole thing, the name and the sorry and the Friend?, and opened her hand. On purpose. Slowly. And held it out. And Faelan put the spinning top in it, for holding, the way Rysa said.

”Yes,” said Iselle.

And then Roderic, standing behind Faelan in the corridor, said, ”Iselle. Caitlin’s downstairs. In the yard. She came through the gate with us. She wants to ask you something too. She’s been crying for an hour. Will you come down?”

And Iselle looked at him for a moment. Then she put on her coat and her blue scarf and came down.

I don’t know what Caitlin said to her in the college yard. Neither does Roderic; he stood at the top of the steps and didn’t listen, which was very hard for him. But when they came back up, Caitlin’s blue book was under Iselle’s arm. And on the first page of it, where Caitlin had written Iselle’s name at the top of a list, there was a new line in Iselle’s own small neat hand:

Asked. Friend. Yes.

* * *

He couldn’t ask Wynn. Wynn was three days down the coast, at his mother’s.

So Faelan wrote him a letter instead, in his very careful capitals, and asked Eleanor to send it with the next coast courier. I saw it before it went. It said:

DEAR WYNN. MY NAME IS FAELAN ANSEL GREY. I AM TEN. I WROTE YOUR NAME DOWN WHERE IT SHOULD NOT BE AND I AM SORRY. I TORE IT OUT. YOU CAN SAY NO. FRIEND?

PS. ELEANOR SAYS YOU LIKE PEPPERMINTS. I HAVE PUT ONE IN.

And under it, because I’d asked Faelan whether I could, and he’d said yes, I wrote a line of my own.

I’m sorry too. G.

* * *

Thor found Loki at the end of the east wall at midnight. I know because I was in the nook with Seraphina and we saw it. She walked along the wall with her hammer on her shoulder, the way she does every morning, and stopped in front of him, and put the hammer down. On the stone. And stepped away from it.

We couldn’t hear what she said. But after a while, Loki laughed. The real laugh. And Thor sneezed, because he’d brought his tea.

* * *

And Wynn’s letter came back four days later, with the coast courier, in his thin quick hand, on a sheet of cheap paper that smelled faintly of fish and his mother’s kitchen.

Dear Faelan. Yes. Thank you for asking. Nobody’s ever asked me that before. I’m coming back on Thursday. Tell Eleanor I’ve been practicing. W.

PS. Tell Garrick it’s all right.

Faelan put him in the front of the ledger that night. Between Corra and the god of lost buttons. With the three questions.

WHAT IS YOUR NAME? — WYNN HARLOW.

WHAT DO YOU DO? — THE DOORS. WITH ELEANOR.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING? — (I WILL ASK HIM ON THURSDAY.)

* * *

Mary wrote it at the end of the week.

The house watched itself for a week. It was not a good week.

Faelan tore out a page and asked three people Friend. All said yes.

Then everyone else asked too.

And Helena, at the stove the next morning, stood listening to the sound on the stairs, and smiled, and put the kettle on.