Chapter 12: Setting the Hall

Mother and Adriana planned the summit the way other people plan a wedding.

They took over the south solar on the tenth morning of the barge, and by noon nobody else was allowed in without knocking. There was a plan of the great hall spread across the big table, drawn by Eleanor years ago and weighted at the corners with teacups. There were lists. There was Mary, at the end of the table with her book open, writing down every decision the moment it was made, so that nobody could unmake it later by pretending they had been misunderstood.

And there were horses.

Grandpa Garrick's wooden horses, I mean. He has carved hundreds over the years, and at some point most of them have ended up in the south solar, in a basket by the hearth, for children to play with. Mother had tipped out the basket and was using them for people. Each horse had a slip of paper tucked under its saddle with a name on it, and she and Adriana were moving them around the plan of the hall like generals.

I was there because Mother had sent for me. I stood by the door and tried to look useful.

"He'll expect a throne," Mother said. She pushed the horse marked Uriah up onto the dais. "So we give him one."

"No," said Adriana. She pushed it straight back down again. "We give him a table. A long one. Uriah at the head, on the same floor as everyone else. Let him sit across from a man who doesn't need to be higher than him."

"That's very noble, love, and he'll read it as weakness."

"Then he's a fool, and we'll know it in the first hour."

"He isn't a fool. He knew about the jam."

Adriana opened her mouth. Closed it. Picked up the horse again and turned it over in her fingers.

They looked at each other across the table, the way they do. I have watched my mother and Adriana look at each other across tables my whole life, and I still could not tell you exactly what passes between them. Mother is all edges and quickness, and Adriana is the stillest person I know, and between the two of them there is something like a conversation in a language the rest of us were never taught. Father says it took them years to learn it. He says he still only understands about one word in three.

"The throne stays on the dais," Adriana said at last. "Empty. Uriah sits at the table in front of it. With his back to it."

Mother considered that.

"So Severin has to look past him to see it," she said slowly.

"And every time he looks at it, he sees that Uriah isn't in it."

"You're a terrible woman."

"I learned from you."

Mary wrote it down.

* * *

They went through everything.

Where the table would stand. Which doors would be open, and which would be shut, and which would be shut but not locked, so that the shutting was a choice and not a precaution. How many lamps. Morning, the lamp-god, had volunteered to sit in the big chandelier for the whole audience, and Mother had to explain very kindly that we did not want the chandelier to be looking at anyone.

"I wouldn't look," said Morning, from the windowsill, where he had been sitting all morning with his knees drawn up. "I'd just be bright."

"You'd be bright at him."

Morning considered this. "Yes," he admitted.

Who would sit, and who would stand, and who would not be there at all.

That was the hard part.

"No gods at the table," Mother said. "None. This is a family receiving a guest. If he wants to speak to the Council, he can ask for the Council, and we'll see how he likes forty chairs in a circle with no head to any of them."

"Loki will want to be there."

"Loki always wants to be there."

"He'll come anyway," said Adriana. "As a draft. Or a cat. Or a cup."

Mother sighed. "Then he can come as a cupbearer, and pour the wine, and keep his mouth shut, and if he says one word I will have Thor sit on him."

Mary wrote that down too, word for word. I suspect she was enjoying herself.

Aurethar would stand by the great doors in his human shape. Ansel would knock, and announce, because Ansel knocks three times on every door he has ever walked through, and Severin Dask might as well get used to it. The Castellan would be in the hall, but would not announce Severin, because the Castellan had made it very clear that it would not say a name it did not recognize, and nobody was going to argue with it about that.

Helena came in to talk about food, and was gone again in four minutes, having agreed to everything and decided nothing would have any jam in it at all.

Then there was the question of Carol and Seraphina.

Mother picked up two horses from the corner of the plan. A gray one, for Carol. A little red one, for Seraphina. She held them in her palm and looked at them for a while.

"We could keep them out of it," she said. "Uriah would. If I let him. Lexander would lock Seraphina in a tower and stand in front of the door with an axe."

"Seraphina would cut the tower in half," said Adriana.

"Yes. Well." Mother smiled, but not much. "He put their names in his letter, Adriana. In black and silver. As if they were items in a ledger. I want them as far away from that man as this castle can put them."

Adriana was quiet for a moment.

Then she reached across the table and took the two horses out of Mother's hand, very gently, and set them down on the plan. At the table. One on either side of Father.

"If we hide them," she said, "he'll think they're ours to hide."

The room was very still.

I have heard people say that Adriana is the Saintess of Refusal and not know what they mean by it. They think it means she says no. It doesn't. Anyone can say no. What Adriana does is look at a thing that has been decided for someone else, without them, and quietly put it back in their hands.

Mother looked at the two little horses on the plan for a long time.

"They'd want to be there," she said at last.

"They'd want to be asked," said Adriana.

So they asked.

* * *

Seraphina said yes before the question was finished.

Carol took longer.

She came down to the solar when Mother sent for her, and stood by the door next to me, and listened while Mother explained. She was wearing a heavy blue wool shawl, though the solar was warm and the sun was full on the windows, and she held it closed at her throat with one hand.

"I said I'd answer them myself," she said, when Mother had finished. "I meant it. I'll be there."

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

"You don't have to decide now."

"I've decided." Carol looked at the plan. At the little gray horse beside Father. "Where's Garrick?"

Mother blinked. She looked down at the plan. I had no horse. Nobody had thought to give me one.

Carol went to the hearth, and knelt by the empty basket, and felt around in the bottom of it until she came up with one last horse that had rolled into the corner. A plain brown one, a little lopsided, with one ear chipped off. One of the first Grandpa ever made.

She brought it back to the table, and set it down. Not beside her. Behind her.

"There," she said. "That's where he goes."

She did not look at me. I did not need her to.

Mary wrote it down.

When Carol had gone back upstairs, Adriana sat for a while with her hands folded on the edge of the table, looking at the door she had gone out of.

"Her hands were cold," she said.

"It's a cold tower," said Mother.

"No," said Adriana. "It isn't."

* * *

Eleanor took four days to go around the kingdom.

She went through every gate. Not around them, not past them. Through them, and then back, and then on to the next, carrying a leather roll of chisels and a little brass hammer and a jar of something black and sticky that she would not name and that smelled faintly of pine and burned hair. Wynn Harlow came with her, carrying the ledger of plates, and I came because Father asked me to, and because the gates are the nearest thing I have to a trade.

I can feel them. I always could. Mother says that when I was very small I used to stand in the lower hall and lean toward the arches the way plants lean toward a window. A gate is a fold that someone has pinned open, and I know folds the way Helena knows bread. I could tell you which ones were tight and which ones were tired, and which ones had been used too much that month, and which one in the far corner had a slight wobble in it that nobody else could feel and that has been there since before I was born.

So I walked with Eleanor, and when she put her hand on a plate and said, "Well?", I told her.

At every gate, she did the same thing.

First she cleaned the plate, slowly, with a soft cloth and her own breath, until the brass shone. Then she found the closing mark, the last mark she ever cuts, the one that means held, and she put her chisel to it and went over it again. Deeper. Every line. She worked with her spectacles pushed up on her forehead and her nose almost touching the metal, and her hands, which shake a little now when she pours tea, did not shake at all.

Then, underneath the closing mark, she cut something new.

It took her a long time. It was small, and very intricate, and the first time I saw it I could not make sense of it at all. It looked like a knot. Like three or four different letters that had been tied around each other and pulled tight.

"What is it?" I asked, at the second gate, in Lyradon, with the smell of the orchards coming through the arch.

"My name," said Eleanor.

I stared at it.

"Ward-writing has a grammar," she said, not looking up. "Most people never learn it. They learn the shapes and think that's the whole of it. But a ward is a sentence, Garrick, and every sentence needs someone to say it. Until now I've always left that part out. I thought it was vain." She blew brass dust off the plate. "A ward that doesn't know who wrote it will take an answer from anyone who knows the words. A ward that knows its author will only take an answer from her."

"Name first," I said, without thinking.

She looked at me then. Over the top of the spectacles that were not on her nose.

"Rysa's rules," she said. "Yes. That woman should have been an architect."

Behind us, Wynn wrote in the ledger: Lyradon. Second gate. Signed.

* * *

It went on like that.

Lyradon, and the long valley of fruit trees, and Queen Mirelle coming down from the terraces with soil on her knees to ask if we needed anything, and Eleanor saying no, thank you without looking up. The two southern gates, in the old Concordian border towns. Greymere, where the arch stands right on the lake shore and the water laps at its foot. Orselle, where the plate was salt-crusted and Eleanor said several words I will not write down.

At every gate, the closing mark. At every gate, the knot of her name.

Wynn carried the ledger and the jar and the chisels, and passed them to her before she asked, and wrote everything down in his neat clerk's hand. He was good. He was genuinely, quietly good, the kind of assistant you stop noticing because he is always already where you need him to be. At Greymere, Eleanor let him cut the first two lines of the closing mark himself, while she watched, and he did it so cleanly that she nodded. Once. Which from Eleanor is a medal.

He asked a lot of questions. I didn't think anything of it. Apprentices ask questions. It's how you can tell they're apprentices.

"Why not the hall gates first?" he asked, on the third day. "They're the ones that matter most."

"Every gate matters most," said Eleanor. "To somebody."

"But Westmere..."

"Westmere last," Eleanor said. "By my own hand. With the Hold watching."

Wynn nodded, and wrote it down.

* * *

While we were out, the Castellan walked the great hall.

It did it every night after the household was asleep. Helena told me, because Helena is always awake when everyone else is asleep. She would come out of the little kitchen with her candle at two in the morning and see it through the great doors, walking very slowly along the walls with one metal hand flat against the stones. Every stone. Floor to as high as it could reach. Then the floor itself, on its knees, with its gray head bent low as if it were listening to something under the flagstones.

It did that for four nights.

On the fifth morning, when we came back through the Westmere gate with the brass dust still on our sleeves and Eleanor's name freshly cut beneath the closing mark, the Castellan was waiting for us in the lower hall.

It does not wait for people. It always knows where they are, and it goes to them, or it doesn't. It does not stand by an arch with its hands folded, watching the place where you will come through.

It was doing that.

"I have walked the great hall," it said, when we had stepped through. "I have touched every stone in it. Four times."

"And?" said Eleanor.

"There is a place I cannot see."

None of us said anything.

"It is near the east wall," the Castellan went on, in exactly its usual voice, level and precise. "Between the third window and the fourth. I have touched it nine times. Each time, I know that I have touched it. And each time, I cannot remember what it was." It paused. "I do not forget things."

"No," said Eleanor quietly. "You don't."

"I have written down where it is," said the Castellan. "So that I will not forget the place, even if I forget the thing. I have written it down nine times."

It held out a sheet of paper.

On it, in that neat printed hand, nine times, one under the other, were the same words.

East wall. Between the third and fourth windows. Something.

Eleanor took the paper and looked at it for a long time.

Then she folded it, very carefully, and put it in the inside pocket of her coat, next to the key of the drawer where my notebook from the sea was locked, and turned to Wynn.

"Go home," she said. "Get some sleep. You've done well."

He went.

Later, I would think a great deal about the fact that she said that. That she meant it. That it was true.

* * *

Carol was in the map room.

She had been there every evening that week. I knew because I had been there every evening too, and so had she, and neither of us had said anything about it. She sat on the floor by the river with her back against the leg of the big chart table and her knees pulled up under the blue shawl, and she watched the line of gray marks the way you watch a pot that you know is going to boil.

There were fourteen of them now. The newest was past the farmland and into the long wooded reach below Havenreach, where the river narrows and the old towpath runs under the trees.

I sat down beside her. Not close. Close enough.

We are twins. People always want to know what that's like, and I have never been able to tell them, because I have never known anything else. The best I can do is this: there is a room in me that has always had Carol in it. Not her thoughts. Nothing so tidy. Just the weather in her. If she is happy, it is sunny in there. If she is angry, I feel the pressure drop. When we were small and she fell out of the apple tree in the lower orchard, I was on the other side of the castle, and I sat down on the floor in the middle of a lesson and started crying before anyone told me.

For more than two weeks, ever since the night of the frost on her stair, that room had been cold.

Not empty. She was still there. But it was the cold you feel in a house where someone has left a door open somewhere, and you can't find which one.

"You're doing it again," Carol said, without looking at me.

"Doing what?"

"Feeling at me."

"I can't help it."

"I know." She pulled the shawl tighter. "I don't mind. I just know when you're doing it."

We sat for a while. Down in the courtyard, someone was laughing. Roderic, by the sound of it, and Faelan, and a crash of something wooden falling over.

"Carol."

"Don't."

"I haven't asked anything yet."

"You were going to." She rested her chin on her knees. "You were going to ask what's wrong. And I'm going to say nothing. And you're going to know I'm lying. And then we'll both feel worse."

"So something's wrong."

She didn't answer.

I looked at her hands, where they held the shawl closed. Her fingertips were pale. Not white, not frozen. Just pale, the way your hands go when you have been outside too long in early spring and haven't noticed.

There was a little rime of frost on the floor beside her. On the blue stone of the river. Right next to the newest gray mark.

"Carol," I said. "Is it him?"

"I don't know what it is," she said. "That's the truth. I don't know. If I knew, I'd tell you." She turned her head and looked at me at last, and her eyes were very clear and very tired. "I'll tell you when I know. I promise. But not before. Because if I say it out loud before I know what it is, it'll be... bigger. It'll be real in a way it isn't yet. Do you understand?"

I did. That's the worst part. I did.

"All right," I said.

"Thank you."

The door opened.

Ignatius came in with a tray. Three cups of tea and a plate of the little honey biscuits Helena makes when she thinks people are not eating enough. He did not say anything. He set the tray down on the floor between us, and sat down on Carol's other side, and held out his hands.

She looked at them for a moment. Then she put hers into them.

I watched the warmth go into her. You can see it, with Ignatius, if you know where to look. A faint gold under the skin, like light through a curtain, moving from his palms into hers and up through her wrists.

Her fingertips stayed pale.

Ignatius frowned. Just slightly. He held on a little longer, and the gold got a little brighter, and nothing changed.

"It's not a cold you can fix," Carol said gently. "It's not in me. It's... on me. Like weather."

"I can still hold your hands," said Ignatius.

"Yes," said Carol. "You can do that."

So he did.

* * *

The Castellan came just after the lamps were lit.

It never comes in the evening. The marks are a morning thing; it draws them before breakfast, from the night's reports, and then leaves the river alone until the next day. But a pigeon had come in at dusk from the lock at the foot of the wooded reach, and the barge had made better time than anyone expected.

It did not seem surprised to find the three of us on the floor. It nodded to each of us in turn, and took the gray chalk from the windowsill, and knelt by the river.

It found the place. A long way past that morning's mark. Up through the wooded reach, past the old towpath, right to the last bend before the town, where the river turns under the bluff and you can see the lights of Havenreach and the towers of the castle above it for the first time.

It drew the mark there.

Fifteen.

Then it stayed on its knees for a moment, looking at the line. All of it. From the little brass star at Westmere, through the marshes and the farmland and the woods, every day of it laid out in gray, curving toward us like a hand reaching across a table.

"Tomorrow," it said. "Before noon. If the wind holds."

"I know," said Carol.

The Castellan turned its head and looked at her.

It looked at her for a long time. Long enough that Ignatius's hands tightened around hers. Long enough that I felt, in the cold room inside me where my sister lives, something shift. Like a curtain moving in a draft.

Then it stood up, and put the chalk back on the windowsill exactly where it had found it, and went out.

Carol did not let go of Ignatius's hands.

None of us drank the tea. It went cold on the tray between us, and the lamps burned down, and we sat on the floor of the map room and watched the river, and the gray line, and the frost spreading very slowly across the blue stone toward the bend where tomorrow would come ashore.