The Greykeep Chronicles

Alistair came down to the yard at five.

I didn’t think he would. I thought Eliza would win. Eliza usually wins. But at ten to five on Saturday morning, when I came out of the kitchen door into the tilt yard at Greykeep with my breath smoking and the stars still out, there was a lantern coming down the stair from the old gatehouse on the east wall. Slowly. One step at a time. And behind the lantern, Eliza, in her guard coat, with her jaw set. And on her arm, in a coat that had been made for a much bigger man a long time ago, with a stick in one hand and his old wooden sword under the other arm, Alistair Kale.

Under the arm. Blade back. Hilt forward.

I stood in the middle of the yard and watched him come all the way down, and I didn’t help, because Eliza’s face said not to.

* * *

Avarn was already there. He’s always already there. Plain shirt, sleeves rolled, standing at the far end of the yard by the water trough with his arms folded, as if he’d grown there in the night.

He watched Alistair cross the yard. He didn’t say anything until Alistair had stopped, and leaned on his stick, and got his breath.

”Captain,” said Avarn.

”Master,” said Alistair.

They looked at each other for a while. Two very old men, one of whom isn’t a man at all and has never been old and never will be, and one of whom is eighty-four and three weeks from being eighty-five. I don’t know what passed between them. Twenty-two years of five o’clocks, I suppose. Twenty-two years of a god teaching in a yard and a soldier watching from a window.

”You’re on his left,” said Avarn.

”I’m on his left,” said Alistair.

”Good,” said Avarn. ”Then I’ll take his right.” He looked at me. ”Garrick. Where’s your sword?”

”Broken.”

”Then you haven’t got one,” said Avarn. ”Hands.”

* * *

I won’t tell you all of it. It wasn’t very interesting to watch. Mostly it was me getting hit.

Avarn came at me from the right with an empty hand, and I watched him, and turned him, the way he’s taught me since I was five. And then something tapped me on the left shoulder. Wood. And I hadn’t seen it and hadn’t heard it, and I flinched, and Avarn’s hand was on my chest.

”Again,” said Avarn.

Again. Avarn from the right. Tap on the left.

”Again.”

Again. And again. And I started turning my head. Like Alistair said. You’ve got a neck. Use it. Watch Avarn, turn, catch the shape of the old man on my left out of the corner of my good eye, turn back. It’s slower. Everything is slower. But on the eleventh time I turned my head before the tap, and caught the end of Alistair’s wooden sword in my open hand, and held it.

Alistair looked at me down the length of it. His good eye. His clouded one.

”Hm,” said Alistair.

”Again,” said Avarn. But he was nearly smiling.

* * *

At six the sun came up over the east wall, and I noticed there was someone at the window above the kitchen.

My father. In a quilt. With my mother behind him, her hand on his shoulder. They’d come home through the Hold gate the night before, late, after the counting, because my mother said he’d sleep better in his own bed and Tamar needed his back. He was still pale. But he was standing up. And when I looked up, he lifted his hand. Open.

Alistair saw it. He looked up at the window for a long moment. Then he lifted his own hand, the old crowned one, off the head of his stick. Open.

”He’s late,” said Alistair. ”He was always late.”

”He’s been ill,” said Eliza.

”He was late before he was ill,” said Alistair. ”He was late in the war.” He turned back to me. ”Again.”

* * *

At seven Eliza took him back up the stair. It took twenty minutes. At the top he turned around, on the step outside the round room, and looked down at me in the yard.

”Tomorrow,” he said.

”You will not,” said Eliza.

”Not yet,” said Alistair, and went in.

* * *

My grandmother had set up the kettle by eight.

Not a kettle. The kettle. The great copper one from the Greykeep kitchen, the size of a small horse trough, that lives on its own hook over the big hearth and only comes down for harvest and midwinter and weddings. Four kitchen boys and Roderic had carried it through the Hold gate on poles. And Grandpa Garrick had carried the hook it hangs on, on his shoulder, because he said he wasn’t trusting anyone else with it, and grumbled the whole way through the gate.

”A gate,” said my grandfather, coming out into the Westmere end of it with the iron hook on his shoulder and sawdust in his beard, ”is a road you can’t feel under your boots. Which means it isn’t a road. It’s a rumor.” He set the hook down on the cobbles of the Hold’s lower court with a clang. ”And I don’t hold with rumors.”

”You came through it,” said my grandmother.

”Under protest.”

”You always come through it under protest.”

”Then it’s always been under protest,” said my grandfather, ”and I’d like it noted.”

* * *

They put it in the lower court of the Hold. Where the netted Hushed had lain for two days. Where Tamar’s sailors had wrapped them up and held on. My grandfather built a hearth for it out of the Hold’s old paving stones in forty minutes, with his spectacles on the end of his nose and his pipe, which he isn’t supposed to smoke, in the corner of his mouth, unlit, because my grandmother was watching. Then he built trestles. Then benches. Then more benches. By ten there were benches for three hundred all around the court, and he’d started on a roof.

And my grandmother lit the fire, and filled the kettle, and tied on her apron, and took the long wooden spoon off her belt, and looked out at the lower court of the Westmere Hold the way a general looks at a battlefield.

”Right,” said Lady Helena Valewood. ”Who’s hungry?”

* * *

Everyone was hungry.

That was the first thing. Westmere had been eating Helena’s bread and soup through the Hold gate for a week, but bread through a gate isn’t the same as a kettle in the court. You could smell it from the harbor. Onions and barley and mutton and thyme, and the bread she’d brought through warm in baskets under cloths. By eleven the court was full, and the benches were full, and people were sitting on the steps and the wall and the old mounting block.

Westmere people. Sailors from the Hold street with their arms in slings and their heads in bandages. The red-bearded sailor with his strapped collarbone and his boy. Tamar, on his crutch, with his ankle up on a bucket, and his wife beside him with a ladle of her own, because she said she wasn’t going to sit in her own town and be fed by somebody else’s grandmother without helping.

Kethran sailors. A thousand of them. In borrowed blankets.

And the freed Hushed.

* * *

That was the second thing.

The freed ones weren’t eating.

Two hundred and fifty-one of them, with their own faces back, and their own names back, and their hands open. Sitting on the benches with bowls of my grandmother’s soup in front of them. Not touching it.

”They don’t feel it,” said Iselle quietly. She was standing beside me at the edge of the court. ”The oath. They swore to feel nothing but what it told them. Not cold. Not tired. Not hungry.” She swallowed. ”They’ve been opened. But the feeling doesn’t come back at once. It’s like a foot that’s gone to sleep. They can see the soup. They know they ought to want it. They just don’t.”

Ada was sitting at the end of a bench with Marra, with a bowl in front of her, looking at it the way you’d look at a picture of soup.

* * *

My grandmother saw it before Iselle had finished talking.

She came down the court with the long spoon in her hand, between the benches, past the sailors and the Kethrans, until she was standing in front of the freed Hushed. All two hundred and fifty-one of them. A small, round, white-haired woman in an apron, with flour on her elbows.

”You don’t feel hungry,” she said.

They looked at her. Some of them shook their heads.

”No,” said my grandmother. ”Well. That’s all right. That’ll come back. Feelings come back. I’ve seen it.” She looked along the benches, at every one of them. ”But until it does, you’ll eat because I said so. Every bowl. Every crust. Not because you want to. Because Helena Valewood has fed two kings and a duke and a god or three and a great many soldiers who didn’t feel like eating either, and every one of them ate when I told them to, and every one of them was glad afterward.” She pointed the spoon. ”So. Eat.”

There was a long pause.

Then Corran Hale, the man from Tessing with the bad leg, picked up his spoon. And looked at it. And put it in the soup. And ate.

And his daughter, beside him, in her cook’s apron, burst into tears.

* * *

They didn’t all eat. Not at once. But I watched it go along the benches like a fire going along a fuse. One spoon. Then another. Then six. My grandmother walking up and down between them with the long wooden spoon, saying Good. That’s it. And the bread. Bread too. Like a sergeant. Like a mother.

Ada didn’t. Ada sat and looked at her bowl.

So I went and sat down beside her. On her left. Without thinking. And then I realized what I’d done, and I moved around to her right, so she’d be on my good side, and she watched me do it and her eyebrows went up.

Why did you move? she signed.

Can’t see on that side, I signed back. Or hear. Since Wednesday.

She looked at my eye for a long moment.

Did it hurt?

Yes.

She looked at her soup.

I can’t feel it, she signed. I know I’m supposed to.

* * *

My gift is watching. I watch, and then I can do it. And it goes the other way, too, sometimes. If you let somebody watch you. If you do it slowly enough.

So I picked up my own bowl, and turned so she could see me properly, and ate. Slowly. One spoon. The way you’d show a child. And I let her watch. I let her see me taste it. I let her see me close my eyes on the second spoonful, because my grandmother’s mutton and barley is the best thing in the world and I’d forgotten, this last week, that I was hungry too.

Ada watched me.

Then she picked up her spoon. And put it in the soup. And put it in her mouth.

And stopped.

And her face did something. Very small. Something that hadn’t been done with it in a long time.

Oh, she signed, with her free hand. Open. Oh. It’s warm.

* * *

Mary and Melody arrived at noon with a basket of pears and every story in the world.

I don’t know how to explain Mary and Melody to anyone who hasn’t met them. They were the last two keepers of Greykeep when my father found it, before he was king, before any of us. They kept the keys and the deed and the ledgers for years with nobody to keep them for. They’ve been married nearly as long as I’ve been alive. Mary writes everything down. Melody kicks people.

They sat down on the end of a bench in the middle of the court, with three hundred wounded and tired and frightened people around them, and Mary opened her ledger, and Melody leaned back against the wall and folded her arms, and said, very loudly:

”Has anyone here ever heard about the time the King of Greykeep put out a burning barn by using it incorrectly?”

* * *

Everybody had heard about it. Nobody in that court had ever heard it from Melody.

It took twenty minutes. Melody did all the voices. She did my father, very young and very earnest, explaining to a burning barn what he wanted it to do. She did the barn. She did Eliza, arriving in the middle, with her sword drawn, staring at him. You extinguished a burning barn while using it incorrectly? She did Mary writing it down. She did a cow.

By the end of it the Westmere sailors were laughing so hard one of them fell off the mounting block. The Kethran sailors didn’t understand half of it, and were laughing anyway, because the Westmere sailors were. Tamar had his face in his hands. Eliza, who’d come through at noon to make sure Alistair had gone back to bed, was standing at the gate of the court with her arms folded and her face like stone, saying I did not say it like that, and Melody said You did, I was there, and Mary said She did, I wrote it down, and held up the ledger.

And on the benches, among the freed Hushed, somebody laughed.

* * *

Not loud. Not long. A short surprised sound, like a cough. Like something falling over in another room.

It was Ada.

She had her hand over her mouth and her eyes very wide, as though she’d done something she wasn’t allowed to do. Marra was staring at her. Then Marra laughed too. No sound. Marra still has no voice. But her shoulders shook, and she put her face in her hands.

And then the man beside them. And the woman beside him. Not because the story was funny, I think. I don’t think it was the story at all. I think it was that everyone around them was laughing, and they’d been standing outside doors in the dark for years, and they’d forgotten what it sounded like, and they’d just remembered.

Melody saw. Melody sees everything. She didn’t stop. She went straight on into the one about Thor and the dovecote, which is worse.

* * *

My father came through the Hold gate at two o’clock.

On his own feet. Without the quilt. Pale still, and moving slowly, and with my mother three steps behind him with an expression that said she’d lost an argument and intended to win the next one. He stood in the gateway of the lower court and looked at it. The kettle. The benches. Three hundred people eating. Melody doing the voices.

And my grandmother, with the long wooden spoon, came down the court and stood in front of him.

My father is the King of Greykeep. He’s frozen the western sea. He held up a wall of ice over a whole town on Wednesday with one hand. He is very, very tall.

My grandmother is about as high as his chest.

”Sit,” said my grandmother.

He sat.

* * *

She fed him. Two bowls. Standing over him with the spoon. And when he’d finished she put a sack of potatoes down beside him on the bench and a knife in his hand.

”You can peel,” she said. ”Since you’re up.”

So the King of Greykeep sat on a bench in the lower court of the Westmere Hold and peeled potatoes. Beside me. On my right. And neither of us said anything for a while. We just peeled. He’s very bad at it. So am I. We’d never once peeled a potato together in our lives, and we were both bad at it in exactly the same way, too thick, taking half the potato off with the skin. My grandmother came past and looked at the pile of peelings and closed her eyes and said nothing.

”Alistair was in the yard,” my father said, after a while.

”I saw you at the window.”

”He lifted his hand.” My father put a potato in the bucket. Most of it. ”He’s never done that. Not in twenty-two years. He watches every morning. I see the lamp. I’ve never once seen his hand.” He was quiet a moment. ”He’s blind in that eye, isn’t he?”

I looked at him.

”I’m not as unobservant as he thinks,” said my father. ”I just know when to pretend.” He picked up another potato. ”Don’t tell him.”

* * *

At three he went out to the nine.

I watched him go. Down the harbor steps, along the north pier, out to the very end, where the Lockwarden’s key used to sit on the bollard. Out in the harbor mouth, very slowly, Jörmungandr was going around. A long green-black back, wider than a road, turning in a great slow circle in the gray water. And on his back, walking, in a line, nine gray figures with their chained fists out.

Nobody knew their names.

My father didn’t stop at the end of the pier. He stepped off it. Onto the water. One round plate of frost under his boot, the size of a doormat. Then another. Not much. He didn’t have much yet. And he walked out across the harbor mouth until he reached the serpent’s back, and stepped onto it, and fell in beside the last of the nine, a tall thin man with a gray hood and a blank face.

And walked with him.

* * *

They went all the way around. The whole circle. It took most of an hour. Nine Hushed and the King of Greykeep, walking on the back of the world serpent, around and around the harbor mouth at Westmere, in the afternoon light.

I couldn’t hear what he said. It was too far, and on the wrong side. But I could see his mouth moving. All the way around. Talking. The whole time. To nine people who couldn’t answer and didn’t know he was there.

I asked him afterward.

”I told them about Greykeep,” said my father. ”The kitchen. The yard. The fountain. The library. Mary’s book. Your grandmother’s kettle. Alistair’s window.” He was quiet a moment. ”I told them there’s a room for each of them, when they stop walking. And a name, when somebody finds it. And soup.”

”They can’t hear you.”

”I know,” said my father. ”I told them anyway. Somebody should.” He looked out at the harbor mouth, where Jörmungandr was going around again. ”I’ll go out again tomorrow. And the day after. Until somebody knows.”

* * *

At four my grandfather finished the roof.

Then he sat down on the end of a bench with his pipe, still unlit, and a basket on his knees, and a knife, and a block of oak. And began to carve.

I knew what he was doing before I saw the first one. He’d done it all my life. In the solar at Greykeep, by the hearth, there’s a basket of wooden horses. Hundreds. Little dark-oak horses no longer than your finger, one for everyone in the family and everyone the family’s ever taken in, with a slip of paper folded under each saddle with a name on it. When I was small I used to take them all out and line them up on the hearth rug and count them.

He’d made one for my baby brother the day he was born.

* * *

By sundown he’d made forty. He didn’t stop. He sat on his bench in the lower court of the Hold with his spectacles on the end of his nose and carved, and Caitlin sat beside him with her ledger of names, and every time he finished a horse she wrote a name on a slip of paper, small and careful, and folded it, and tucked it under the saddle, and set the horse on the bench between them. A long row of little oak horses. Corran Hale. Davi Marsh. Lisbet Fane. Tomas Pell.

”Two hundred and fifty-one,” said my grandfather, not looking up. ”I’ll have them done by Tuesday. My hands aren’t what they were.”

”Two hundred and sixty,” said Caitlin quietly.

My grandfather stopped carving.

He looked out across the court. Through the gate. Down the hill. At the harbor mouth, where a long dark shape was going around and around in the dusk, with nine small gray figures walking on its back.

”Two hundred and sixty,” he agreed. And picked up the next block. ”Nine with no slips yet. For when.”

* * *

At dusk he gave Ada hers.

She’d been sitting with Marra all afternoon, signing, eating. She’d had three bowls. My grandmother had stood over every one. When my grandfather came along the bench with the little oak horse in his hand, she looked up at him, and then at the horse, and then at me.

What is it? she signed.

”It’s a horse,” said my grandfather, who doesn’t know mill-talk and didn’t need to. ”Everyone in this family has one. There’s a basket by the fire at Greykeep. When you come, it’ll go in with the others.” He turned it over and showed her the slip of paper under the saddle, with her name on it in Caitlin’s hand. ”There. So it doesn’t get lost.”

Ada held it in her open hand for a long time.

Then she closed her fingers around it. Gently. Not a fist. Just holding.

And signed, with her other hand, very slowly: Thank you.

My grandfather didn’t know the sign. But he knew what it was.

”You’re welcome,” he said, and went back to his bench, and picked up his knife.

* * *

Mary’s book. Saturday. Written on the end of a bench in the lower court of the Westmere Hold, by lantern light, with Melody’s head on her shoulder, asleep.

Saturday. 5 a.m. Alistair came down to the yard. On Garrick’s left. Avarn on his right. Hands only. Garrick caught Alistair’s sword on the eleventh try. Uriah at the window. Alistair lifted his hand to him. First time in 22 years.

8 o’clock. Helena’s kettle. The big one. Garrick Valewood carried the hook through the gate under protest. He built a hearth, trestles, benches for 300 and a roof.

The freed Hushed can’t feel hunger yet. Helena told them to eat because she said so. Corran Hale ate first. His daughter cried.

Ada watched Garrick eat. Then she ate. She said it’s warm.

Noon. Melody told the barn story. Eliza says she didn’t say it like that. She did. I wrote it down. Ada laughed. Then all of them.

2 o’clock. Uriah. Helena told him to sit. He sat. He and Garrick peeled potatoes. Badly. Identically.

3 o’clock. Uriah walked around the harbor mouth on Jörmungandr’s back with the nine. Talking. All the way around. He says somebody should.

Garrick Valewood has carved 40 horses. 260 to go. 9 with no slips yet. For when.

And under that, in a big, slow, blocky hand, a carpenter’s hand, with a fleck of oak shaving stuck in the ink and a faint ring where a cold pipe had been set down on the page:

Garrick Valewood. I’d like it noted that a gate is still a rumor. Two hundred and sixty horses. I’ll want more oak.