Chapter 11: What Aurethar Saw

Aurethar does not carry passengers.

Everyone knows this. It is one of the first things you learn about him, along with the fact that he prefers his meat burned on the outside and that he will not, under any circumstances, demonstrate. He has carried supplies. He has carried the wounded, twice, in the war, and has never once spoken of it. He carried a whole wagon of roof slates up to the chapel the summer the old roof came down, because Eleanor asked him, and Eleanor is the only person in the kingdom he is a little afraid of.

He has never carried a rider.

So when Father said at breakfast, on the eighth morning of the barge, that someone ought to go and look at the fleet properly, and that Aurethar had offered, and that I was going with him, the whole table went quiet.

"On him?" said Roderic.

"On him," said Father.

"On his back?"

"That is generally where riders go."

Roderic put down his fork. "I asked him once if I could ride him. I was nine. He looked at me until I went away."

"He looked at me until I cried," said Caitlin. "I was six. I still think about it."

"He was right," said Grandpa Garrick, from the far end of the table, without looking up from his eggs. "You'd have fallen off."

The thing is, I knew why. Father didn't have to explain it, and he didn't. Eleven days ago I had folded from Westmere to Greykeep in one long stretch, the farthest I have ever gone, and I had come out of it on my hands and knees on the map-room floor with my nose bleeding and the whole world tilting sideways. I could not do that again. Not for a week, maybe not for a month. But I could still do short folds. A hundred yards. A quarter mile, if I had to. Enough to get a dragon out of the way of something, if something came at him.

Aurethar had worked that out before anyone. Aurethar works most things out before anyone. He had come to Father the night before, Mother said, and stood in the study doorway with his hands behind his back, and said: "If they have something that can strike me from below, I want a folder on my back. Garrick will do." And then he had left, before Father could say thank you.

Garrick will do. From Aurethar, that is practically a sonnet.

* * *

Seraphina walked me to the terrace.

She had little Uriah on her hip, and he had a wooden spoon in his fist, and he was hitting her shoulder with it in a slow, contented rhythm, the way some people hum. She did not seem to notice. She was looking at me the way she does when she is trying to decide whether to be angry.

"I should be going," she said.

"I know."

"I can fold too."

"I know."

"Better than you, over short distances."

"I know that too. You remind me about once a week."

She did not smile. "He wrote my name, Garrick. In that letter. Who carries the First Flame. Like a description in a shop catalog." She shifted little Uriah to her other hip. The spoon kept going. "If someone is going to look at those ships, it should be the person they're asking about."

"That's exactly why it shouldn't be," I said. "You heard Father. Nobody they named goes anywhere near them. Not you, not Carol."

"Father isn't my father."

"No. Yours said the same thing, louder, and then broke a chair."

That got her. The corner of her mouth went, just slightly. Lexander had broken a chair. It had been a very old chair and he had been very sorry about it afterward and had spent the evening in Grandpa Garrick's workshop fixing it, with his eye patch pushed up on his forehead and glue on his beard.

"Fine," Seraphina said. "Go. Look. Come back."

"That's the plan."

"No, listen." She took my collar with her free hand, and for a moment I felt the heat in her palm, the edge of what she carries, the thing that can cut stone. She keeps it banked so low that most people never know it's there. I always know. "Come back. Not on your knees. Not bleeding. If something goes wrong out there, you don't do anything brave. You fold home and let the dragon sort himself out."

"I'm fairly sure he'd want me to."

"Then we all agree." She kissed me. Little Uriah hit me on the ear with the spoon.

"Jam," he said, conversationally.

"Not now," we both told him.

* * *

Aurethar was waiting in the lower court, in his human shape, looking at a harness.

It had been made overnight. Perrin and the harness maker from the lower market had sat up with lamps and a great deal of leather, and argued, and measured a dragon who would not stand still to be measured, and what they had produced was a broad flat saddle with a high back and two loops for the knees and a long strap that went around my waist and clipped to a ring.

Aurethar looked at it the way a cat looks at a bath.

"It will chafe," he said.

"It's padded," said Perrin.

"It will chafe me."

"It's very well padded."

Aurethar is tall in his human shape, taller than Father, with close gold hair and golden eyes and a scatter of gold scales on the backs of his hands, like a rash that will not go away. He wears plain dark clothes and boots that have never once been muddy, which I have never understood. He turned his eyes on me.

"You will not talk while we are flying," he said.

"All right."

"You will not lean. If you need to lean, I will tell you. You will not hold my neck. You will hold the saddle. If you are sick, you will be sick to the left."

"Why the left?"

"Because I said so."

"All right."

"If I say fold, you fold. Both of us. Anywhere. Do not ask me where. Do not think about it. Just go."

"All right."

He looked at me a moment longer. Then he said, more quietly, "You have never ridden anything bigger than a horse."

"No."

"It is not like a horse."

"I didn't think it would be."

"No," Aurethar said. "Nobody does."

He walked out into the middle of the court, where the flagstones are widest, and everyone who had been pretending not to watch stopped pretending. Mary and Melody were on the steps. Carol was at an upper window. Helena had come out of the kitchen with flour to her elbows and a dish towel over one shoulder. The Castellan stood by the gate, very still, the way it stands when it is paying attention.

Aurethar became a dragon.

I have seen it many times. It does not get less. One moment there is a tall man in dark clothes, and the next there is a great deal of gold, more than the eye wants to accept, scale over scale like the inside of a furnace, and wings that fill the court from wall to wall, and a long neck that curves down until a head the size of a cart is level with mine, and an eye like a lamp regards me with total, patient contempt.

He lowered one shoulder.

Perrin and the harness maker went up with the saddle and spent what felt like an hour buckling things while Aurethar breathed slow hot breaths through his nose and stared at the opposite wall. Then they came down, and Perrin gave me a leg up, and I climbed, and sat, and put my knees in the loops and clipped the strap to the ring.

It was warm. That was the first thing. Like sitting on a stove that had been banked for the night.

"Comfortable?" called Perrin.

Aurethar answered for me. He spread his wings, and the wind of it knocked Helena's dish towel off her shoulder, and he went up.

* * *

It is not like a horse.

A horse moves under you. A dragon moves around you. The first beat of his wings dropped my stomach into my boots and the second put it somewhere behind my ears, and by the third the castle was a toy below us, and the river was a ribbon, and the whole valley of Havenreach was laid out like the map-room floor, only green, and moving, and very, very far down.

I held the saddle. I did not lean. I did not talk.

I am not sure I could have.

He flew west along the river, high enough that the barges were seeds and the towns were coins. The wind was so loud I stopped hearing it after a while, the way you stop hearing rain on a roof. His back was warm under me, and every so often I felt the long muscles of his shoulders gather and release, gather and release, slow as breathing. After the first hour I stopped clutching the saddle quite so hard. After the second I started to look.

There is no way to describe it that does not sound like a child describing it. I have folded across the kingdom more times than I can count. I know where everything is. But folding is like turning a page: you are here and then you are there, and the in-between is folded away where you never see it.

From Aurethar's back, I saw all of the in-between.

I saw a man plowing a field with two white oxen. The man stopped dead and stared up at us, and his oxen did not, because oxen do not care about anything.

And somewhere in the low farm country, a little more than halfway to Havenreach, I saw the barge.

It was easy to find once I knew to look. The oldest, slowest thing on the river, low in the water, with a gray square on its deck where the awning was. I could not see anyone under it. We were much too high. But Aurethar's head turned, very slightly, as we passed over, and his eye stayed on it for a long moment before he looked away.

He did not go down. That was not what we had come for.

After that came the locks at Brannock Falls, with barges stacked up below them like loaves on a tray, and then the marshes, where the river spreads out and goes soft and silver before the coast, and herons lifted out of them in long gray lines.

* * *

We reached the coast in the early afternoon.

Westmere from above is a small, tidy, stubborn town, all salt pans and gray roofs and a harbor wall shaped like a crooked arm. I could feel the Hold before I could see it, the way I had the first time: a warm deep hum in the old waterways under the streets, like a cat purring in the next room. It knew me. It did not like what was out on the water, and I could feel it not liking it, the way you can feel someone in a room holding very still.

On the harbor wall, a tiny figure was waving both arms. Tamar. And a little way down from him, a smaller figure sitting with a fishing line, who did not wave, and did not look up. Edric. Fishing badly, I assumed.

Then we were past the wall and over the water, and I saw the fleet.

I had seen it before, from the beach, at dusk, with the sound of the singing in my teeth. I had thought I knew what it looked like.

From above, in daylight, it was worse.

The ships lay inside the outer shoals in their long dark row, sixty of them, black wood and furled black sails, perfectly still. And that was the first wrong thing: they were perfectly still. The sea out there is never calm. There was a stiff breeze and a chop on the water, and every gull in the bay was having trouble with the wind. But the ships did not rock. Not one of them. They sat on the moving water like ornaments set down on a cloth.

The second wrong thing was that the water around them did not reflect them. I looked for a long time to be sure. Where the sun struck their hulls, there should have been dark shapes in the sea beside them. There was only the gray-green chop, running right up to the black wood as if nothing were there at all.

The third wrong thing was the gulls.

There were hundreds of them over the bay. Not one landed on the fleet. Not on a mast, not on a rail. They swung wide around it, every one, the way water swings around a rock.

Aurethar dropped lower.

I felt him do it, felt the great shoulders change their angle, and I wanted very much to say something, and I remembered I was not allowed to. We came down in a long slow curve until we were perhaps a hundred feet above the water and sliding along the line of ships, close enough that I could see the grain of the black wood and the carving on the hulls.

The script.

I had only glimpsed it before, by dusk. Now it was full daylight and it was right there, beneath me, running in long pale-filled lines from bow to stern on every ship. Curling, angular letters, deeply cut. And I knew them. Not what they said, but what they were. I had grown up with letters like that. Every gate in the kingdom has a brass plate beside it, and every plate is covered in lines like those, cut by Eleanor's own hand, and when I was small I used to trace them with my finger while Mother talked to the gatekeepers, and I used to think they were the prettiest writing in the world.

Ward-writing.

Or something so close to ward-writing that my eye could not tell the difference.

I fumbled inside my coat for the little notebook I always carry and the stub of pencil, and with the wind tearing at the pages I started copying what I could. A line. Half a line. My hand was shaking, and the letters came out crooked, and I kept going.

Then the line I was copying moved.

It did not crawl, the way it had at the edge of my sight from the beach. It moved. The whole row of letters along the nearest hull slid, smooth as oil, and rearranged itself, and then the next ship's did the same, and the next, a ripple running down the length of the fleet just ahead of us, keeping pace with Aurethar's shadow on the water.

It was reading us.

I knew it the way you know someone is looking at the back of your neck. The letters were turning to face us like flowers turning toward the sun. They were writing us down.

Aurethar knew it too. He made a sound I had never heard from him, low in his chest, and then he was climbing. Hard. Straight up, wings hammering, the sea dropping away so fast my ears popped and my vision went gray at the edges, up and up until the fleet was a dark scratch on the water and the shoals were a white necklace around it and the whole bay was the size of a dinner plate.

He leveled off. He turned in a slow, wide circle.

And from up there, at last, I saw what he had seen.

From the beach, the ships had looked like a line. From a hundred feet, they had looked like a line. But from up here, the line was not straight. It bent. It hooked back on itself at one end and doubled, and kinked twice in the middle, and ended in a short hard stroke, as precise as if someone had drawn it with a pen.

Sixty ships. One letter.

A single enormous character of the same script, written on the face of the sea, a mile off Westmere, pointed at the shore.

I copied that too. My hand was steadier for it. There was only the one.

* * *

The sun was going down by the time we turned for home.

I knew what that meant before it began. So did he. I felt him gather himself, the way you brace for a cold wave, and then out of the dark bay behind us the singing started.

It was fainter up here. Far fainter than it had been on the beach. But it was the same: no words, only a long low swell of sound like a hundred voices humming one note, and inside it, underneath it, the hands. The wanting. It came up through the air and found me, and the seed of power in my chest flinched the way it had before, and I thought of Carol on her north-tower stair with frost on the glass, and I gripped the saddle so hard my fingers hurt.

Aurethar's wings faltered.

Only once. One missed beat, one lurch, my stomach rising. I had my hand already turning, the fold half-made, and then he caught the air again, and flew on, and did not drop.

We flew a long way in silence after that. The singing faded behind us. The marshes went from silver to black. The first stars came out over the river.

Somewhere over the farmland, he spoke. His voice came up through his whole body, so that I felt it more than heard it.

"It asked me what I wanted."

I was not supposed to talk. I talked anyway. "What did you tell it?"

There was a long pause, full of wind.

"A sheep," Aurethar said. "Burned on the outside. And to go home."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead down on the warm gold of his back, and he made a noise that might have been offended and might, possibly, have been something else.

"It did not know what to do with that," he said.

"No," I said. "I don't suppose it did."

* * *

We came down into the lower court a little before midnight.

Every lamp in the castle was lit. Seraphina was on the steps, alone, with her arms folded, and she did not move until I had unclipped the strap and slid down the warm gold shoulder and stood on the flagstones, on my feet, not bleeding. Then she came down the steps and put her hands on my face and looked at me for a long time.

"Not on your knees," she said.

"Not on my knees."

"Good." She looked past me at Aurethar. "Thank you for bringing him back."

The dragon regarded her with one enormous eye. Then he lowered his head, very slightly, which from him is a bow.

Helena had a sheep roasting in the big hearth in the outer kitchen. Nobody had told her to. Nobody ever has to tell Helena anything. It was burned on the outside, and Aurethar, in his human shape again with his clothes somehow spotless, ate most of it standing up, without a word, while Perrin examined the saddle for chafe marks and found none and was smug about it for a week.

* * *

Eleanor came at seven the next morning.

She is older now than she was in the stories Father tells, and her hair has gone the color of iron filings, but she still wears the same steel spectacles, and she still walks into a room as if she were about to measure it. She did not say good morning. She held out her hand, and I gave her the notebook.

We were in her drafting room above the chapel, which smells of ink and cut stone and the peppermints she keeps in a jar on the windowsill. Wynn Harlow was there too, her junior ward-keeper, a thin quick young man with ink-stained cuffs and a habit of standing too close to whatever Eleanor was looking at. He had brought the tea. He hovered with it.

Eleanor turned the pages slowly. She weighted the notebook flat at the corners with four brass weights, the way she does with plans, and bent over it until her nose was almost touching my crooked pencil lines.

She did not speak for a long time.

"Well?" said Father, from the doorway.

"Your son has terrible handwriting," Eleanor said.

"I was on a dragon."

"That is an explanation, not an excuse." She turned another page. Then she said, in a different voice, "It isn't like ward-writing, Garrick. It is ward-writing. Look." She put her finger beside one of my lines. "That's a binding stroke. That's a threshold mark. That's the hook I use to tie a ward into running water, and I invented that hook, Uriah, the year we warded the Westmere gate, because nothing else would hold in salt."

Father came into the room.

"You're sure."

"I have been writing these letters since before your children were born. I would know my own hand in the dark." She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. "Except it's not my hand. It's backward. Not mirrored. Backward. As if someone learned it by reading my plates from the other side of the door."

Wynn set the tea down very carefully.

Eleanor turned to the last page. The single letter. Sixty ships, one stroke, drawn across the whole page in my steadier hand.

She went very still.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Every ward I've ever made ends with one mark," she said quietly. "The closing mark. It's the last thing I cut on every brass plate in this kingdom. It means held. It means: what is on this side of the door belongs to this side of the door." She put her finger on the page, on the long hook and the double kink and the short hard stroke at the end. "This is that mark. Written the other way around."

"Meaning?"

Eleanor looked up at Father.

"Meaning given," she said. "It's what a ward reads as permission."

Nobody said anything.

Outside, the chapel bell rang the quarter hour. Somewhere below, little Uriah was shouting something at someone, cheerful and wordless.

"It's not finished," Eleanor said at last. "A mark like that on its own is just a shape. It would need to be answered. From this side. Somebody here would have to cut the other half."

"Who could do that?" said Father.

Eleanor put her spectacles back on.

"Me," she said. "Or anyone I've taught."

Wynn Harlow had gone pale. "Mistress, nobody would..."

"No," said Eleanor. "Nobody would. Make a fair copy of all of this for the archive, Wynn. Every line. Then bring me the notebook back, and I'll lock it up."

He made the copy that afternoon. It was beautiful work. He has a much better hand than I do.

* * *

That evening I went up to the map room.

The Castellan had been there before me. There was a new gray mark on the river, the ninth, a little farther into the farmland, a little closer to the brass tower that stands for Havenreach.

I found the stick of gray chalk on the windowsill where it keeps it. I knelt by the coast, just off the little brass star of Westmere, inside the line of the shoals, and as carefully as I could, I drew the letter. The hook, the double kink, the short hard stroke.

Then I sat back on my heels and looked at the whole floor.

A line of small gray marks, coming up the river toward us.

And at the far end of it, waiting on the sea, one gray word that wanted an answer.