The Greykeep Chronicles

Carol came down the hundred and forty steps of the north tower at twenty past six on Thursday morning, which she has not done willingly since she was nine.

I heard her coming. You always can. The north tower stair is stone, and it turns, and every sound on it goes around and around and comes out at the bottom bigger than it went in, so that a girl in soft boots coming down at a run sounds like a small cavalry charge. Helena heard it too. She looked up from the stove with the egg spoon in her hand and said, ”That’s Carol,” in the voice of a woman who has been cooking breakfast for this family since before Carol was born and knows exactly what it means when the wrong person is up early.

Then she put a second egg on.

Carol came into the little kitchen in her blue coat with her hair not done and the letter in her hand. Ignatius came behind her, carrying her boots, because she’d forgotten to put them on. She was barefoot on the flagstones. There was frost on the flagstones where she’d stepped, small white ferns, one for each foot, all the way from the door.

”Morning, Garrick Grey,” she said. She still says all of everyone’s name, some mornings, since the summer. ”I need you. And Father. And Eleanor, I suppose, because she’s here.”

”I’m always here,” said Eleanor from the window, with her egg.

”I know. I’m glad. Can you be here and not mind?”

”I’ve never minded anything in my life,” said Eleanor, and Helena laughed out loud at the stove.

* * *

My father came down at half past, from the gate, where he’d been since five. Somebody had told him. Somebody always tells him. I think it’s the Castellan; I think it says something into the walls of the gatehouse, the way it said Someone into its slate, and my father hears it in the stone the way you’d hear your name said in the next room.

He sat down at the kitchen table, which is scrubbed white and has a burn in one corner the shape of a duck, from when Carol was four. He didn’t say anything. He just sat down and looked at her, and waited.

Carol put the letter on the table.

”It’s from Caldermoor,” she said. ”The queen. Ottilie. It came Tuesday. I didn’t open it till last night because I knew it would be something, and I wanted one more day of it not being anything.” She smoothed it flat with both hands. ”Can I read it out? It’s easier.”

”It’s yours,” said my father.

So she read it.

To Carol Grey, at Greykeep, from Ottilie, Queen of Caldermoor, at Caldermouth.

I am an old woman and I have never written to a stranger to ask for anything, so I will do it badly. Forgive me.

Six days ago, thirty-one ships came up out of the west and anchored in a line across the mouth of my harbor. They are black, and their sails are marked with a closed hand. They have done nothing. They have not fired, or landed, or sent a boat, or a letter. They sit. They have sat for six days.

My fishermen cannot go out. Caldermouth is a fishing town. We have a harbor chain, but it broke in the storms last winter and we had not the money to mend it. We have a hundred and twelve soldiers, most of them older than I am. We have no gate to anywhere. We are a small country on a cold coast, and we have never been important to anybody, and I had thought that was a kind of safety. I see now that it was not.

One of my fishermen was caught out in the western sea on the day your father froze it. He walked home across the ice. He says he saw your father far off with one hand on the water. In Westmere afterward they told him the king has a daughter with snow in her hands, who makes little lights for frightened things. He has never forgotten it.

I have heard that at Greykeep you ask people. So I am asking. Will you come and stand on my harbor wall? I do not know what you would do there. I do not know what anyone could do. But I think they would see you.

You can say no. I am told that is how it is done.

Ottilie.

P.S. My fisherman’s name is Hob Tarrant. He asks to be remembered to you.

Carol stopped reading. She put the letter down.

Nobody said anything for a while. Helena took the eggs off. The kettle muttered to itself.

”I’ve never met him,” said Carol. ”Hob Tarrant. He walked home across Father’s ice, and somebody in Westmere told him about me, and he’s been carrying it around ever since.” She looked at her hands. ”He’ll have a dog. Fishermen always have a dog.”

”Do you want to go?” said my father.

He asked it the way he asks everything. Plainly. As if any answer would do.

”Yes,” said Carol.

* * *

I didn’t want her to.

I’ll put that down plainly too, because Mary says this book has to have the bad bits in it as well as the good ones or it’s only a book of wishes. I didn’t want her to go. Not because of Caldermoor. Because of us.

We’re twins. We were born on the same night in the same bed, and from the first breath there was a door between us, a door that’s always open, and most of my life I’ve been able to feel her on the other side of it the way you can feel someone in the next room without looking. When she’s happy it’s warm. When she’s frightened it’s cold. When she’s very far away it’s like a draft in a big house: you know the window’s open somewhere, you just can’t see which one.

I’ve had that draft before. I didn’t like it.

And it was the wrong week. That was the other thing. There was gold in the castle that someone had hidden, and a list in Eleanor’s pocket, and a lockdown at the gate, and my father on his stool asking the milk in every morning, and my left eye still dark until midwinter, and my son just walking. I wanted everyone I loved in one place where I could count them. I wanted the doors shut.

I didn’t say any of that. I said, ”Caldermoor’s a long way.”

”It’s on the western coast,” said Carol. ”Past Westmere. Five days’ ride. Or no days, if somebody folds us.”

She looked at me across the table.

She didn’t ask yet. I want that noted. She let me sit with it first. She’s always done that. When we were small and she wanted to borrow something, a toy, a coat, my half of a pear, she’d look at it first for a while so that I’d know she wanted it before she said so, and I’d have time to get used to the idea. It’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me, and she’s done it every day of my life.

”Ignatius,” said my father. ”Do you want to go?”

Ignatius had sat down beside her with her boots in his lap. He was putting the left one on her foot, which she was letting him do, which is how you can tell she was frightened, because she never lets anyone put her boots on.

”I go where she goes,” said Ignatius. ”That’s not the same as wanting to.” He laced the boot. ”But Caldermoor’s an old friend of my father’s. Concordia sent them grain in the bad year, and they sent us their whole herring catch the year after, and nobody asked for it back either way. If there are thirty-one Kethran ships sitting outside their harbor, Concordia ought to be on that wall.” He started on the right boot. ”And there’s a girl with snow coming off her fingers who’s going to be on it whatever I say. So yes. I want to go.”

Carol looked at him.

”You can say no,” she said.

”I know I can,” said Ignatius. ”I’m not.”

* * *

Then she asked me.

She turned all the way around on the bench, the way she did when we were six, so her knees were pointing at me, and she put her hands flat on the table, frost coming off them in little curls.

”Garrick Elias Grey,” she said. ”Will you fold us to Caldermouth? You can say no.”

I looked at her hands on the table. The frost was making ferns on the scrubbed wood, slowly, spreading, the way it does on a window on a cold night. She used to do that on my bedroom window when we were small, so I’d have something to look at when I couldn’t sleep.

”Will you come back?” I said.

”Yes.”

”When?”

”When the ships go.” She didn’t look away. ”I don’t know when that is. I don’t think anyone does.”

”Midwinter,” said my father quietly. ”Julian’s crowned at midwinter. Under Queen Mirelle’s first tree in the orchard. You’ll both want to be there.”

”Then before midwinter,” said Carol. ”I’ll be back before midwinter. Garrick’s eye comes back at midwinter. I want to be the first thing he sees with it.”

”That’s not fair,” I said.

”I know,” said Carol. ”I’m not being fair. I’m being your sister.” She waited. ”Will you?”

And I thought of Hob Tarrant, whoever he was, walking home across the frozen sea. And an old queen writing to a stranger for the first time in her life to ask for something, and doing it badly, and saying you can say no because she’d heard that was how it was done. And all the little fishing boats of Caldermouth tied up at the quay for six days, not going out, because there were black ships in the way.

It’s what we do now. We ask. And when we’re asked.

”Take,” I said.

Carol smiled. It wasn’t the warm one. It was the real one, the one underneath, the one I can always feel through the door even when I can’t see her face.

”Thank you,” she said.

* * *

We went at nine.

The whole family came down to the inner court, which we don’t usually do for a fold, because a fold’s nothing to look at; you’re here and then you’re not. But nobody said they were coming. They just came. Mary with her book. Helena with a parcel of food the size of a small dog. Mother with her hands in her sleeves. Adriana. Mirelle and Faelan and Caitlin in a row on the kitchen step. Roderic, very upright, who’s never been good at goodbyes and stands like a soldier to get through them, with Iselle beside him with one hand open on purpose. Grandpa with a wooden horse in his pocket, which he gave to Carol without saying anything, a gray one, and she put it inside her coat.

Seraphina came down last with our son on her hip.

She went straight to her brother. She didn’t say anything at first. She just stood in front of Ignatius and looked up at him, the way she does, chin up, the First Flame in her eyes going very small and bright, like a candle somebody’s cupped their hands around.

”Bring her back,” she said.

”I always do,” said Ignatius.

”You always do,” said Seraphina, ”because she always brings you back. Bring her back anyway.” She put up her free hand and touched his face, quickly, once, the way their mother does. ”And yourself. I’m only allowed one brother and I’ve got used to you.”

Then she put our son into Carol’s arms.

He looked at Carol. Carol looked at him. He put his hand flat on her cheek, the way he does with people he’s decided about, and held it there.

”Up,” he said.

”I’m going a long way up, little bird,” said Carol. ”Up the coast. And then I’m coming back down it.” She kissed the top of his head. ”Look after your father for me. He’s going to be cross for a week.”

”I’m not cross,” I said.

”You’re already cross,” said Carol, ”and we haven’t gone yet,” and handed him back to Seraphina.

* * *

Thor came across the court last of all, from the walls.

She had her hammer on her shoulder and her braid crackling faintly in the cold and she was eating an apple, and she stopped in front of Carol and finished the apple first, the core and all, and wiped her hand on her coat.

”Little one,” said Thor.

”I’m twenty-three,” said Carol.

”Little one,” said Thor again, with great dignity. ”You are taking my lightning to the sea.”

”Only a bit of it.”

”You are taking all of it. You always take all of it. You took all of it on the north tower stair when you were five to win races against your brother, and you never once gave it back.” Thor looked down at her. ”Good. Take it all. The sea is very big and very wet and does not care for small lightnings. Make yours large.” She put her great hand on top of Carol’s head, the way you’d bless a child, the way you’d measure one. ”If they shoot at you, you call me. Through your brother. He will hear and I will hear and I will come down that coast so fast the gulls will lose their feathers.”

”Thor. You’ve got to stay. You’re holding Greykeep with Father.”

”I can hold Greykeep and come down a coast,” said Thor. ”I am a god. It is what we are for.” She took her hand off Carol’s head. ”But you will not need me. You are your father’s daughter and my lightning’s thief and you have snow in your hands. Thirty-one ships.” She snorted. ”In my day it took sixty to frighten anybody.”

Then she turned to Ignatius and looked at him for a long time, the way she looks at people she’s thinking of hitting with a hammer, and Ignatius stood very still and let her.

”Keep her warm,” said Thor.

”She’s the snow,” said Ignatius.

”That is why,” said Thor, and went back up on the walls.

* * *

The Castellan logged them going. It came out of the gatehouse wall, which it doesn’t do in daylight much, and stood in the court beside the slate in the arch, and wrote on it in the narrow gray hand:

Carol Grey. Going. Asked to.

Ignatius of Concordia. Going. With her.

Garrick Grey. Going. And back.

Then it looked at Carol.

”I do not like it,” it said. ”When you are far. You are in all my walls, Carol Grey. You were born in them. When you are far the walls are cold in a way I cannot mend.”

”I’ll be back by midwinter,” said Carol.

”Yes,” said the Castellan. ”I have written it down.” And it wrote, under her name, small: Midwinter.

Then I took Carol’s right hand in my left, which is my blind side now, so she stood where I couldn’t see her. I didn’t need to. I’ve never needed to see Carol. Ignatius took her other hand. And I put my free hand into the air in front of me, into the fold I’d made a thousand times, and pulled.

* * *

Caldermouth is a town built on a cliff above a long gray bay, and the wind there comes straight off the western sea with nothing to stop it between there and Kethra.

We came out on the cliff top in it. It nearly knocked Ignatius over. It took Carol’s hair and pulled it straight out sideways like a flag, and it took my breath, and it smelled of salt and tar and cold and fish, and below us, a long way below, down a road that went back and forth across the cliff face like a stitch, was the town. Slate roofs. Smoke. A harbor shaped like a cupped hand, with the fishing boats tied up inside it in rows, dozens of them, bumping gently against each other, going nowhere.

And across the mouth of the bay, a mile out, the ships.

I counted them. Thirty-one. Black hulls, black masts, sails furled. On the side of every hull, painted in dark gold, a closed hand. They sat at anchor in a straight line from one headland to the other, evenly spaced, as neat as stitches, and they didn’t move. Gulls sat on the yards. Nothing else moved at all.

”Well,” said Ignatius after a long time. ”That’s very rude.”

The queen was waiting for us on the harbor wall.

I don’t know how she knew we’d come. Perhaps she’d been waiting every morning. She was very small and very old and wrapped in a fisherman’s oiled smock that came down past her knees, with a gray knitted hat pulled down over her ears and a walking stick made out of a ship’s oar cut down, and she stood at the end of the wall with her back to the town and her face to the ships, and when we came down the last of the cliff road she turned around and looked at us.

Beside her stood a big weathered man in a red cap. There was a terrier inside his coat. It looked at Carol and wagged.

”Hob Tarrant,” said Carol.

The big man took his cap off. His face went through several things at once.

”You came,” he said.

”You asked to be remembered,” said Carol. ”I didn’t know you yet. So I came to do it properly.” She looked at his coat. ”You’ve got a dog.”

”Terrier,” said Hob Tarrant. ”Frightened of everything. Gulls. The sea. Me.” The dog put its nose out and looked at Carol, and she lifted one finger and a little blue light came off it and hung in the air in front of the dog’s nose, and the dog looked at the light, and stopped shaking. Hob Tarrant laughed, and his eyes were wet, and the dog licked his chin.

The queen looked Carol up and down. She took her time about it.

”You’re smaller than I thought,” said Queen Ottilie.

”So are you, Your Majesty.”

”Hm,” said the queen. It sounded exactly like my father. She looked at Ignatius. ”Concordia. Lexander’s boy. You’ve his chin.” Then she looked at me, and stopped. ”And you’re the one who folds. They say you’re the one who came and fetched forty prisoners off a beach in Kethra in the time it takes to boil an egg.”

”Sixty-one,” I said. ”And it took longer than an egg.”

”Hm,” said the queen again. She leaned on her oar. ”Are you staying?”

”No, ma’am. I’m going home.”

”Good,” said Ottilie. ”Somebody should.” And she turned back to the ships.

* * *

I stood on the harbor wall at Caldermouth for nearly an hour. I want to set down what I saw, because I’ve been over it since.

The ships didn’t move. Not once. Not a boat lowered, not a flag run up, not a man on deck that I could see from the wall, though the light was flat and gray and my eye’s not what it was. They sat across the bay in their line, and the tide came in under them and they swung on their anchors all together, all thirty-one, slowly, like weathervanes, and then were still again.

”What are they waiting for?” said Ignatius.

Nobody knew.

”They’re not waiting,” said Carol. She was standing at the very end of the wall, at the edge, with the wind pulling her hair, looking out. ”Waiting’s when you want something to happen. They don’t want anything to happen. They want everyone to look at them.”

I looked at her.

”Like a man standing in a doorway,” said Carol. ”So you’ll look at him. And not at the door.”

There was a moment then. I’ll be honest about it. A moment when something in me went cold and still, the way the fold goes still in the air before it opens. A man standing in a doorway. I thought of Greykeep. I thought of the gate. I thought of my father on his stool, and my son in Seraphina’s arms, and the coin lying flat on the sill.

Then I thought: the coin’s flat. Thor’s on the walls. The Castellan knows every name. Father froze the western sea with one hand. Nobody new comes in without being asked.

And there were thirty-one Kethran warships across the mouth of a fishing town with a broken harbor chain and a hundred and twelve old soldiers. That wasn’t a coat on a hook. That was real. Whatever else it was, it was real, and Hob Tarrant’s boat was tied up at the quay below me with its nets dry for six days.

”Maybe,” I said. ”But the boats still can’t go out.”

”No,” said Carol. ”They can’t.” She turned around. ”So I’ll stand here and they can look at me. And while they’re looking at me, the boats will go out.”

”How?”

She smiled. It was the real one.

”Garrick,” she said. ”Go home. Hold your side of the door. I’ve got mine.”

* * *

I went home.

But not right away. I stood on the cliff top first, at the top of the road, where we’d come out, with the wind in my face, and watched.

Carol walked to the end of the harbor wall and stood there in her blue coat with the gray wooden horse in her pocket, and Ignatius stood beside her, a little behind, on her left, the way I stand on my father’s right. And she put out both her hands toward the mouth of the bay. Not toward the ships. Toward the water in front of them.

And the sea froze.

Not all of it. She’s not our father. She can’t freeze a whole sea with one hand, not yet, though Aurelia says one day she’ll do more than that. But she froze the mouth of the harbor. A wall of ice came up out of the gray water between the headlands, a quarter mile inside the line of ships, clear as glass and green at the heart, twenty feet high, then thirty, then forty, with the sea slopping against the far side of it and spray freezing to it as it fell, building it higher. From the cliff top it looked like a great glass door had been shut across the bay.

Behind it, in the cupped hand of the harbor, the water went flat and still as a pond.

The thirty-one ships sat on the far side of the glass. They didn’t move. I don’t think they could have, if they’d wanted to, without coming up against forty feet of ice. And on the near side, safe as a duck pond, in the shelter of it, the fishing boats of Caldermouth began, one by one, to untie.

Hob Tarrant’s went first. I saw the red cap.

Then Carol put her hands down, and turned around on the wall, and looked straight up the cliff at me, though I was half a mile away and the light was bad and she couldn’t possibly have seen me. And she lifted one hand, and a little blue light came off her fingers and hung in the gray air, the way they did when we were small.

I lifted my hand back. And then I folded home.

* * *

The draft started that afternoon.

I felt it at about three, in the drafting room, where I’d gone to help Eleanor with the Greymere plate that was going down to the quay next week. A window left open somewhere in a big house. Not frightening. Just there. The cold of her being so far away, coming through the door between us.

Eleanor saw me feel it. She put down her glass.

”She’s all right?”

”She’s all right. She’s just far.”

”Hm,” said Eleanor. Then she said, ”I asked Hedge this morning. While you were gone.”

”Is he all right?”

”He’s nearly blind. He’s been sitting alone in his room in Orselle all autumn because he can’t see to read and he didn’t want to be a bother to anyone. His daughter’s in Velden. He hasn’t told her.” Eleanor picked up the glass again and bent over the plate. ”He wants somebody to read to him. That’s all. Just somebody to read to him in the evenings.” She read the line in front of her twice, lips moving. ”I’ve asked Bettrys if she’ll go. She said yes before I’d finished. Three left.”

”The twins tomorrow.”

”The twins tomorrow.” She was quiet. ”And then the one I’m surest of.”

The draft blew through me. I let it.

* * *

That night there was frost on my window.

I was in the nook with the coin on the sill, lying flat, and my tea, and the court dark and white below. At about eleven the window began to frost from the bottom up, slowly, the way the scrubbed table had that morning under Carol’s hands. Ferns. Small white ferns, growing up the glass, curling, spreading. Her frost. I’d know it anywhere. I’ve been looking at it on my windows all my life.

It grew all the way to the top of the pane and stopped.

And in the middle of it, in the clear glass that the ferns had grown around and left, there were four letters, cut out of the frost as neatly as Eleanor’s chalk on a stone:

HELD.

I sat and looked at it for a long time. Then I put my hand flat on the glass, over the letters, the way you’d put your hand on someone’s shoulder. The cold went into my palm and up my arm and through the door between us, and on the other side of the door, very far away, on a harbor wall on a cold coast, I felt her feel it.

Then I took my hand away and there was a print of it in the frost, around the word, and I left it there.

The coin lay flat. The court was quiet. Down the hill the three small lights burned at the quay arches.

I went to bed and didn’t sleep much. But I wasn’t cross. Not by then.

* * *

From Mary’s book, Thursday. In the margin, small, a drawing of a wall of ice across a bay, and in front of it a row of tiny boats, and on the end of a harbor wall two very small figures, one with its hair blowing sideways:

Thursday. Gray and windy.

Carol had a letter from Queen Ottilie of Caldermoor. Thirty-one Kethran ships have been sitting outside Caldermouth for six days. They do nothing. The fishing boats can’t go out. The queen asked. She said you can say no, she’s heard that’s how it’s done.

Carol said yes. Ignatius said he goes where she goes, and also yes.

Garrick folded them at nine. The whole family came down to the court. Nobody said they were coming. Grandpa gave Carol a gray horse. Seraphina told Ignatius to bring her back anyway. Little Uriah said Up.

Thor told Carol to take all her lightning. Thor said in her day it took sixty ships to frighten anybody.

The Castellan wrote: Carol Grey. Going. Asked to. And under it: Midwinter.

Carol froze the harbor mouth. A wall of ice forty feet high. The boats went out behind it. Hob Tarrant first (red cap, terrier).

Eleanor asked Hedge. He wants to be read to. Bettrys will go. Three left.

Frost on Garrick’s window at eleven. It says HELD.

Coin flat.

And under that, in enormous capitals, written in something that is not ink, that has scorched very slightly into the page, so that the letters are a little brown at the edges and smell faintly of a storm:

THOR. THUNDER. ALSO BEER. I WOULD LIKE IT NOTED THAT THE LITTLE ONE HAS TAKEN ALL MY LIGHTNING AGAIN AND I AM GLAD. THAT THIRTY-ONE SHIPS IS NOT VERY MANY. THAT I AM ON THE WALLS. AYE.