The Greykeep Chronicles

I couldn’t sleep.

Nobody in Westmere could, really. The town was half empty and wholly awake. Every house that still had people in it had a lamp in the window, and every house that didn’t had a young copper phoenix on the chimney pot, keeping it warm. From the top of the harbor steps the whole town looked like a hearth somebody had banked for the night.

At four in the morning I gave up, picked up the oak sword, and went down to the water.

It was cracked. It had cracked on Tuesday, going through the third gate in a minute, a long split from the hilt halfway down the blade. Melody had offered to bind it. I’d said no. I don’t know why. I just put it under my arm, the way I’ve carried it since I was five. Blade back. Hilt forward. Never in your hand unless you mean it.

* * *

My father was on the end of the north pier.

Of course he was. Sitting on the stones with his back against the bollard, the Lockwarden’s key on the bollard above his head, his long legs out in front of him. Aurethar was asleep beside him, curled around the end of the pier like a cat around a stove, his chin on the stones and one great gold eyelid not quite shut. The sixty frost statues stood all along the harbor in the starlight, white and still, their chained fists out. The forty-six red ships rocked at their moorings with their sails hanging and their black chains loose on the bows.

Every so often Aurethar snored, and a little smoke came out, and the nearest statue steamed.

”You should be asleep,” said my father, without looking around.

”So should you.”

”I’m a god,” said my father. ”We don’t need to.”

”You told Mother last month you’d kill for a nap.”

”That,” said my father, ”was in confidence.” He moved over, though there was plenty of room, and I sat down beside him with the oak sword across my knees.

We sat for a while and watched the frozen wave out past the harbor mouth. It was melting in long green sheets. You could hear it, if you listened: a soft enormous dripping, like a whole cave thawing.

* * *

”He’s lost Westmere,” I said at last. ”And Draum. And Cindrel. And forty-six ships. And the dome.”

”Yes.”

”And three hundred Hushed.”

”Two hundred and sixty,” said my father. ”The netted ones and these. Nobody’s lost them. They’re just standing still for a bit.” He looked along the line of statues. ”I counted.”

”So what does he do?”

My father didn’t answer straight away. He picked a flake of frost off the stone and turned it over between his fingers until it melted.

”There’s nobody left to send,” he said. ”Draum’s behind a door. Cindrel’s at Greymere sitting on eggs. The fleet’s burned. The Herald’s a voice; he can’t carry anything.” He let the water drip off his fingers. ”When you’ve sent everything you have, and it’s all come back to you open, there’s only one thing left you can send.”

”Himself.”

”Himself.”

”He’s never been to Avarra,” I said. ”Iselle said. Not once. He reads it off the back of brass plates. He’s never stood on it.”

”I know,” said my father. ”That’s how I know he’s coming.” He looked west, at the dark water past the wave. ”A locksmith doesn’t go to the door himself until every key he’s got has broken in it.”

He looked down at the oak sword on my knees. At the crack.

”Avarn’ll make you another,” he said.

”I don’t want another.”

My father was quiet a moment.

”No,” he said. ”No, I didn’t either.”

I looked at him.

”Mine broke,” said my father. ”He gave me one too, you know. Twenty-two years ago. You were one. Not for a birthday. Just a Tuesday. He came into the yard at five in the morning with two of them under his arm and said, Uriah. Again. As if we’d done it before.” He smiled a little. ”We hadn’t. I carried it for a year and broke it on Thor’s hammer and wouldn’t let him make me a new one.” He tapped the crack, very gently, with one finger. ”Then I learned I could call the real one. And I never needed a wooden one again. But I kept the halves.” He looked at the water. ”They’re in the drawer of my desk. Your mother thinks they’re kindling.”

* * *

At half past five the frost statues rang.

All sixty of them, at once. Not loud. A thin high sound, like a wet finger around the rim of a glass, coming out of the chains on their wrists. Every padlocked fist along the harbor shivered inside its frost.

My father was on his feet before the sound stopped.

Aurethar opened both eyes.

Up the harbor, in the lower court of the Hold, I heard men shouting. The netted Hushed. Two hundred of them, lying tangled in the nets where Tamar’s sailors had wrapped them on Tuesday, and every one of them, Dunmore told me afterward, had sat up at the same moment and turned its face to the west.

”He’s pulling,” said my father softly. ”Their chains. All of them at once. Calling them home.” He set his hand flat on the stone of the pier, and I felt his winter go down into it and along it, quiet and enormous, into every statue on the harbor. ”And they’re not going.”

The ringing went on a long moment more. The statues didn’t move. Not an inch. Not a finger. My father’s frost held them exactly where they stood, and the chains on their wrists sang thinner and thinner, pulling against it, and then, all at once, went slack.

Somewhere up in the Hold, Tamar’s voice, hoarse, carrying all the way down the harbor: ”They’re in my harbor!”

Then Aurethar stood up.

* * *

I’d seen Aurethar angry. I’d seen him fly a whole fleet’s length in a breath, and swallow eleven pieces of a fire god like water going down a drain, and knock a chimney off the harbor office just by landing.

I’d never heard him make a sound like that.

It started low. Lower than the Hold. I felt it come up through the pier into my feet and my teeth before I heard it, a long, slow, deep note like a bell the size of a mountain being struck very gently, underground. And it went on. And on. All along the harbor, on the water, the thirteen other dragons lifted their heads from where they’d floated all night like enormous ducks, and one by one they answered him. The same note. Until the whole harbor was humming with it.

The phoenixes on the chimney pots woke up and went very still.

”Aurethar,” said my father quietly. ”What is it?”

Aurethar didn’t look at him. He was looking west. Out past the melting wave, out over the gray water, to where the sky was just beginning to lighten.

”Those,” said Aurethar, ”are ours.”

* * *

They came out of the dawn.

Eight dragons. In a line. Flying low over Draum’s water, and slowly, much too slowly, their great wings beating wrong, short and stiff, like birds with clipped feathers. And as they came closer I saw why. Their wings were chained. Wing to wing, tip to tip, each dragon to the next, with black links as thick as a man’s leg, so that not one of them could beat a stroke without all the others beating it too. They flew like one animal. Like a team of oxen yoked to a plow.

And their heads were hooded. Iron hoods. Riveted shut. No eyes.

From the last dragon in the line, a great chain ran down, taut as a bowstring, to the bow of a ship.

A white ship. Small. No sails. No oars. No crew that I could see. Just a narrow white hull, as clean as a new tooth, being pulled across the sea by eight blind dragons in a yoke.

”Three hundred years,” said Aurethar. His voice had gone very quiet, which was worse than the sound. ”When the islands went under. When the wall came over the mothers on their eggs. Eight of us went west to look. For survivors. For anything.” His great gold eye didn’t move from the line in the sky. ”They never came back. We thought the sea had them.”

He breathed out. Smoke. Not fire. Just smoke, in a long trembling line.

”That’s Sabrenne,” he said. ”At the front. The big one. With the gray on her chin.” His voice cracked. I hadn’t known a dragon’s voice could. ”When my wing was torn, she’s the one who taught me to fly crooked.”

* * *

The white ship came to the harbor mouth, and stopped.

It didn’t drop an anchor. It didn’t need one. It just stopped, exactly in the gap between the end of the north pier and the end of the south mole, as if it had run against a wall. Above it the eight chained dragons hung in the air, beating their stiff short beats all together, and the yoke-chain sang.

And a man walked up out of the hull and onto the bow.

* * *

I don’t know what I’d expected.

Something big, I suppose. Something like Draum, who was the sea standing up. Or Cindrel, who was a fire. Kessavel was the god of chains. I’d been fighting him for a year without ever seeing his face, and in my head he’d grown and grown until he was the size of the dome he’d put over Westmere.

He was a small man.

Not short, exactly. Just small. Neat. The way a good clerk is neat. Gray coat buttoned to the throat. Gray trousers, creased. Silver hair cut very short and close, as if he didn’t want it in the way. A thin clean-shaven face that might have been forty or might have been four thousand. He stood on the bow of his white ship with his feet together, the way you’d stand on a doorstep, and his hands at his sides.

Both closed.

Not fists. Not clenched. Just closed. Loosely. The way your hand closes when you’re asleep. As though he’d never once in his life thought to open them and didn’t know he could.

He carried no key. Not one. I noticed that, because I was looking for one. It was a long time before Iselle told me why. A locksmith never carries the key, Garrick. If he did, somebody might ask him for it.

* * *

”Uriah Grey,” said Kessavel.

He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. His voice came across the harbor the way Vellis’s had, into every ear at once. But Vellis’s voice had been big and warm and empty, like a hall. Kessavel’s was small and exact and dry. Like a key turning in a lock that’s been very well oiled. One clean click, and then nothing.

”I am Kessavel,” he said. ”I have not come to your country before. I will not stay long.”

My father walked to the very end of the north pier and stood there, beside the bollard, with the Lockwarden’s key at his elbow. He didn’t call the hammer. His hands were open at his sides.

”You haven’t asked to come in,” said my father.

”No,” said Kessavel. ”I don’t.”

* * *

”I’ll be brief,” said Kessavel. ”I hold the golden city. I hold the Throne of Hands. I hold an old woman in a glass room who asks everyone who comes through the door if it’s time yet.” He said it exactly the same way he’d said everything else. Like reading an inventory. ”Give me the whole one. The child. Your son. Before noon. And I will give you all of it.”

Nobody on the harbor breathed.

”Cerys,” said Kessavel, ”returned to Malachar, unharmed. Malachar returned to his throne. The Regent dissolved. The chains taken off every Hushed on this harbor, and every Hushed in Kethra, and every Hushed who has ever stood outside a door in the night.” He paused. One click. ”Every link I have ever laid, opened. For one small boy, who will be very well kept, and never cold, and never hungry, and never once afraid.”

He looked at my father.

”You can save more people with one word this morning,” said Kessavel, ”than you have saved in your whole life. That is not a threat. I have simply done the sums.”

* * *

It was very quiet.

I want to say I wasn’t tempted. I want to say nobody on that harbor was. But I’d stood in the cellar under the Hold and heard the Hushed’s chains singing. I’d met Marra, who swore her face and her voice away at twelve so a friend wouldn’t be alone at night. I’d seen the stooped man open his hands and weep. Every Hushed who ever stood outside a door in the night.

And I’d seen my baby brother asleep with his fist around Marra’s finger.

My father didn’t look tempted. My father didn’t look anything. He just stood on the end of the pier with his hands open, looking at the small gray man on the white ship, and the frost came out from under his boots.

Not fast. Not a ripple. Just a slow, white, spreading bloom, over the stones of the pier, down the steps, out onto the water. The water didn’t freeze. It just went white on top, like milk skinning over. Out and out, across the whole harbor, toward the white ship, until it reached the hull and stopped there, a hand’s breadth from the clean white bow. Exactly as far as he intended.

”No,” said my father.

* * *

Just that. No speech. Nothing about the sums.

And then, behind me, Carol said it too. She’d come down the harbor steps barefoot in her nightgown with Ignatius’s coat on over it and her hair everywhere, and she walked straight down the north pier past me and stood at our father’s shoulder.

”No,” said Carol.

And from the harbor office, hoarse, leaning on a crutch in the doorway with his ankle strapped and the red-bearded sailor holding him up: ”No. Harbor’s closed to you.”

And from the south mole, Selvane, very small, with her lamp: ”No.”

And Aurethar, from somewhere so deep inside his chest it shook the water: ”No.”

* * *

Kessavel didn’t seem to mind.

”Then I’ll take him,” he said. ”It will cost more. I had hoped not to spend it.” He looked up, at the eight chained dragons hanging over his ship. ”I have very little left to spend. You’ve seen to that. But I have these.”

My father raised his right hand.

Not to strike. Just raised it, a little, in front of him, palm up, fingers open. And something came into it.

I’d never seen it. Only heard it, in the war stories Avarn told me in the yard when I was eight, and in Avarn’s voice going quiet when he told them. But I knew what it was. The air in my father’s open hand went white. Then gold. A shape, beginning. The length of a man’s arm. Too bright to look at. And the air all around the harbor went tight and dry and prickling, the way it does on the top of the north tower right before the rods ring, and every hair on my arms stood straight up, and all down the harbor the phoenixes on the chimney pots flattened themselves to the bricks.

The lightning sword. Halfway called. The one he’s drawn twice in his life, both in the war. The first time, a whole valley in the north went to glass.

It hung there in his palm, half made, crackling.

And on the bow of the white ship, for the first time, Kessavel took a step back.

* * *

”Not yet,” said my father quietly. To himself, I think. Or to the sword.

He closed his fingers on nothing, gently, and the light went out of his hand, and the air came loose again.

But Kessavel had seen it. Everyone had seen it. And Kessavel stood one step further back on his own bow than he had been, and didn’t seem to know it.

* * *

Here’s the thing about my gift.

Everyone thinks it’s borrowing. It isn’t, really. Borrowing is what comes after. My gift is watching. I watch, and I see how a thing is done, and then I can do it. Avarn’s stance. Goss’s voice. Marra’s mill-talk in half an hour. I’ve watched people since before I could walk. It’s the one thing I’ve never once stopped doing.

So while my father was looking at Kessavel’s eyes, and Carol was looking at the dragons, and everyone else on the harbor was looking at the light going out in my father’s hand, I was looking at Kessavel’s throat.

Because when he stepped back, his collar moved.

And under it, against the skin, there was a chain.

* * *

Thin. Thinner than a hair. Gray, like ash, or old snow, or nothing at all. It came out from under the buttoned collar of his gray coat and went up, taut, into the air above his head, and away. East. Over the harbor. Over the town. Over the hills. Into nowhere. It was so fine I’d never have seen it if the sword’s light hadn’t caught it, for one moment, like a spider’s thread in a window.

And when Kessavel had said the whole one, I realized, thinking back, his voice had changed. Just on those three words. Gone flat and cold and even, like frost on a pane. Like letters that won’t stay still.

Kessavel holds my throne, Malachar had said, on the deck of his flagship. And Kessavel is not the one holding Kessavel.

* * *

I stood up.

I walked to the end of the pier, past Carol, and stood beside my father. I put the cracked oak sword under my arm. Blade back. Hilt forward.

”Kessavel,” I said.

He looked at me. For the first time. Gray eyes, very pale, very tired, behind the neatness.

”The borrower,” said Kessavel. ”The one who asks.”

”Who’s holding yours?” I said.

* * *

He didn’t move. Not at all. Not a hair.

But his right hand came up off his side. Slowly. Without his seeming to know it. And went to his collar. And touched it. The way you touch a bruise to see if it still hurts.

”Nobody holds me,” said Kessavel. ”I hold.”

”There’s a chain on your neck,” I said. ”It goes east. It’s thinner than a hair and it’s pulled so tight I can hear it.” I could. Now that I’d seen it, I could. A thin high note, under everything, like a wet finger on a glass. ”Every time you said the whole one, it pulled. Those weren’t your words.”

The harbor was very quiet.

”You never put a chain on yourself,” I said. ”Locksmiths don’t. Somebody put that on you. A long time ago.” I swallowed. ”Like you did to them.” I looked up. At the eight hooded dragons. At Sabrenne at the front, with the gray on her chin. ”Like you did to Cindrel.”

* * *

Kessavel’s face did something.

I don’t know how to describe it. It wasn’t much. A small man in a gray coat, standing on the bow of a white ship. But for one moment his thin neat face went loose, the way a hand goes loose when you’ve held it shut so long you’ve forgotten it was ever shut and somebody touches your wrist. His pale eyes went very wide. His lips parted.

I asked him what I’d asked Cindrel. The only thing I really know how to ask.

”Kessavel,” I said. ”Do you want to stop?”

”I—” said Kessavel.

And it was a different voice. Not a key in a lock. Something smaller. Hoarser. A voice that hadn’t been used in a very long time.

”I don’t—”

* * *

The chain on his throat snapped taut.

I heard it. Everyone did. A sound like a harp string drawn up two octaves in a breath. Kessavel’s head jerked back. His hand fell from his collar. And when he looked at me again his face was smooth and neat and gray again, and his eyes were pale, and cold, and something was looking out of them that was not him at all.

”Take the child,” said Kessavel’s mouth, in a voice like frost on a window, and letters that wouldn’t stay still.

He lifted his closed right hand.

And closed it.

* * *

Above the white ship, every chain on the eight dragons drew tight at once.

They screamed. All of them. The iron hoods rang with it. The yoke jerked, and their chained wings snapped open all together, wide, wider than wings should go, and the great lead chain to the white ship’s bow fell away loose, and the eight of them turned in the air as one animal and dove.

Not at us. Over us. Over the harbor and the frost statues and the forty-six red ships and the roofs of Westmere, low, so low the wind of them took slates off the harbor office. East. Toward the hills. Toward the Hold gate.

Toward Greykeep. And a nursery. And a small boy asleep with his fist shut.

And behind them, out of eight hooded mouths that couldn’t see where they were going, came fire.

* * *

Aurethar went up off the pier so hard the stones cracked under him.

The thirteen came up off the water after him, all at once, in a storm of spray, gold and green and copper and slate and the black-and-white magpie, and the harbor rocked with the wind of them. My father’s frost bloom shattered into a thousand white plates under the waves. The Lockwarden’s key spun on the bollard and I caught it without thinking and put it in my pocket.

”Don’t hurt them!” Aurethar’s voice, going up, bell-deep, to his own. ”They can’t see! Don’t you dare hurt one of them!”

And my father turned to the town, and lifted his hand, and the hammer was in it.

The wall.

He brought it down on the end of the north pier, and the frost went out from it, not as a ripple this time but as a wall. Up. Straight up the face of the town, over the rooftops, faster than the dragons, a sheet of white ice standing up out of every chimney and gutter and street in Westmere like a cliff, thirty feet, fifty, a hundred, curving over like a wave. The chained dragons’ fire hit it and went up it in sheets of gold and steam and didn’t come through.

The young phoenixes on the chimney pots, on the inside of it, didn’t even have to move.

* * *

”Garrick,” said Carol beside me.

She had both hands flat on the frozen stone. Her hair was standing up all over her head. The sky over the harbor was going dark, fast, from clear dawn to iron, the way it does when she’s very angry and not saying so.

”It’s like the Hushed,” she said. ”Isn’t it. Their wings. The hoods. It’s all the same lock.”

”It’s all the same lock,” I said.

”Closed fists,” said Carol.

”Closed fists.”

And I’d opened seven of those in a stairwell in Concordia, with Iselle’s opening, which I’d borrowed and kept. Seven fists, on seven people, standing in a ring around me close enough to touch.

Not eight dragons, chained wing to wing, going a hundred miles an hour over the roofs of Westmere with a hundred feet of my father’s ice between them and me.

On the bow of the white ship, Kessavel stood very still with his closed fist raised, and the thin gray chain on his throat sang.

* * *

I took the oak sword out from under my arm.

I held it in my hand.

Never in your hand unless you mean it.

”Carol,” I said. ”I need a dragon.”

* * *

Mary’s book. Wednesday. She wrote it in Tamar’s kitchen, by the stove, at seven in the morning, by the light of my father’s ice, with the windows going gold and white and gold again as the fire hit the outside of the wall.

Wednesday. 5:30. The statues rang. Kessavel pulling all their chains at once, calling them home. They didn’t go. Uriah held them. Tamar shouted from the Hold.

Dawn: eight dragons out of the west, chained wing to wing, hooded in iron, pulling a white ship. Aurethar says they are ours. They went west when the islands sank, to look. Sabrenne at the front. She taught him to fly crooked.

Kessavel himself. First time on our side of the sea. He did not ask to come in. He is a small gray man. He doesn’t carry a key.

He asked for little Uriah. He offered everything for him. Uriah said no. Carol said no. Tamar said no. Selvane said no. Aurethar said no.

Uriah called the sword. Halfway. Then put it back. Kessavel stepped back.

Garrick saw a chain on Kessavel’s neck. Thin. Going east. He asked who was holding it. He asked if he wanted to stop. Kessavel said I don’t. Then something else said Take the child.

7 o’clock: the dragons came over the town with fire. Uriah put a wall of ice over all of Westmere. Garrick has the sword in his hand.

And under that, in a big square hand pressed so hard into the paper the pen went through in two places, with the T crossed twice:

Tamar. Harbor’s closed to him. I’d like it noted I said so first. Well. Third.