Chapter 120: Seraphina Governs

I went to Lower Brook on the Tuesday, because my father had told me to.

It's a little place. Twenty cottages along a brook that runs into the river six miles below Havenreach, a mill, a smithy, a green with a goose on it that considers the green its own. I walked in from the river road at nine in the morning, on foot, in my plain coat with the castle buttons, and knocked three times on Hettie Ludd's door.

She opened it and looked at me for a long time.

"Prince Garrick," she said. "You'll be wanting tea."

* * *

My father was right. There were two cups on the dresser. Blue and white, a pair, with a chip out of the rim of one. She took the chipped one down for herself and the good one for me and didn't say anything about it, and I didn't either.

We sat at her table by the window, and through the window I could see the wall, and the pear tree hanging over it, heavy with fruit. And on the other side of the wall, a cottage with its shutters closed in the middle of a sunny morning.

"He hasn't opened them since the burying," said Hettie Ludd, following my eyes. "Three years. He comes out to throw my pears back. That's the only time I see him."

I drank my tea.

"Mistress Ludd," I said. "May I ask you something? You can say no."

"You can ask," said Hettie Ludd.

"Would you like me to knock on his door?"

She looked at the closed shutters for a long time.

"I'd like," she said at last, very quietly, "for somebody to have knocked three years ago."

* * *

I knocked on Amos Ferrer's door. Three times. He didn't answer. I knocked again. He didn't answer. I sat down on his doorstep, in the sun, under the pear tree, and waited.

After forty minutes, the door opened about an inch.

"What," said Amos Ferrer.

"Mistress Ludd's put the kettle on," I said. "There are two cups. One of them hasn't been used in three years." I stood up. "I don't know whose it was. But I think you might."

The door stayed open an inch for a long time.

Then it closed.

I went back to the river road. I didn't know if it had worked. I suppose I'll find out on Thursday. My father says you often don't.

* * *

I folded home at noon, and Helena met me in the kitchen passage with flour on her hands and her face set.

"Your wife's gone down to the lower market," she said. "Forty minutes ago. The weavers and the smiths. They've flooded the Fourth Canal."

"Flooded—"

"Your father's at Westmere. Your mother's in the infirmary with a breech birth. Carol's in Concordia. Adriana's at the Lyradon gate with the treaty clerks." Helena wiped her hands on her apron. "The Castellan asked for the household. Seraphina was the household. She gave me the baby and went."

I was already turning.

"Garrick," said Helena.

I stopped.

"She didn't ask for you," said Helena. "She asked for her boots."

* * *

I knew what that meant. Helena knew I knew.

I went anyway. I folded to the top of the lower market steps, where the old wool hall stands, where you can see right down the long slope of the market to the water. And I stayed there. On the steps. At the top.

On the hill.

* * *

You need to understand about the Fourth Canal.

Havenreach has five canals, cut off the river long before my father's time, to carry barges into the middle of the city. The first three are wide and deep and full of cargo. The fifth is mostly ducks. The fourth is narrow and clear and runs right through the lower market, under eleven little bridges, past the dye-houses and the forges and the bakeries, and it's the most famous water in the world.

Because of the blue.

Fourth Canal blue. The elven weavers have been dyeing silk in that water for three hundred years, in the long low dye-houses along the north bank. Something in it; the elves say it's the river stone, the dwarves say it's the elves being difficult. Nobody's ever matched it. Queens in Concordia wear it. Carol has a ribbon of it on her best shawl. The Accord's own banners are Fourth Canal blue.

And upstream of the dye-houses, on the south bank, there are the forges.

* * *

The dwarven smiths have been on the south bank since before I can remember. There were four forges when I was small. There are eleven now. And since the summer, since the fleet, since Tamar began building the new wall at Westmere, all eleven forges have been working day and night on Crown orders. Iron braces for the sea wall. Bolts. Gate hinges. Chain.

And every piece of hot iron that comes off an anvil goes into a quench trough. And every quench trough drains into the Fourth Canal.

And iron in the water, I found out that afternoon, turns blue silk gray.

* * *

From the top of the market steps, I could see all of it.

The canal had overflowed its banks at the fourth bridge, where somebody had dropped a dam of planks and sacks across it. Water was spreading across the cobbles of the lower market in a wide brown sheet, around the legs of stalls, into the doorways of shops, carrying cabbages. The stallholders had pulled back up the slope. And in the middle of the flood, on either side of the dam, two crowds.

On the north side, the elves. Weavers and dyers, tall and pale, in their long aprons stained to the elbow with blue. On the south side, the dwarves. Smiths and strikers, short and broad, in their leather, with their arms folded and soot to the shoulder.

Between them, ankle-deep in the canal water, a girl in a blue apron and a boy in a leather one, both about fourteen, both crying, both being held back by the collar by their own side.

And in front of the whole thing, standing on the fourth bridge with her boots in the flood, my wife.

* * *

Every single person in that market was looking at her.

I could see it from the steps. The way the crowds had gone quiet around her. The way the people up the slope were watching her hands. The way the dwarves on the south bank had taken a half-step back, all together, without meaning to.

They know what she is. Everyone in Havenreach does. The princess from Concordia who carries the First Flame. Not the healing side, which is her brother's. The other side. The one that cuts stone. They've all heard the story about the siege tower her mother burned because it blocked the sunset. They've all heard, I'm sure, some story about Seraphina, true or not.

And she was standing on a bridge between two angry crowds with her hands in her coat pockets.

Deep in her pockets. All the way to the wrist.

Power's the easy part, her mother told her, the night before our wedding. The hard part is having it and not using it. Every day. For the rest of your life.

I've never once seen her take her hands out of her pockets in a crowd.

* * *

"Who's in charge?" said Seraphina.

She didn't raise her voice. She has a clear voice; it carries over water.

Nobody answered for a moment. Then, on the north bank, a tall elf woman stepped forward. Silver-haired, straight-backed, with blue to her elbows. "I am Mistress Ithrel," she said. "Of the weavers' hall."

On the south bank, a dwarf. Gray-bearded, broad as a door, with a burn scar across one forearm. "Bodvar," he said. "Master of the forges."

"Thank you," said Seraphina. "Would you both come and stand on this bridge with me, please?" She looked from one to the other. "You can say no. But I'd rather do this standing in the same place."

* * *

They came. Slowly. Mistress Ithrel from the north end, Master Bodvar from the south. They stopped on the bridge with Seraphina between them and an exact arm's length on either side.

I thought of Hettie Ludd and Amos Ferrer, and nearly laughed, and didn't.

"Now," said Seraphina. "Before anybody tells me whose fault it is. Who are those two?"

She nodded down at the canal. At the crying girl and the crying boy, standing in the water on either side of the dam.

Mistress Ithrel's mouth tightened. "Orla," she said. "My apprentice."

"Hosk," said Master Bodvar. "Mine."

"May I talk to them first?" said Seraphina. "Before you."

* * *

That was the first thing I saw her do that I'd never have thought of.

I'd have started with the masters. Everyone would. That's where the guild seals are, and the grievances, and the forty years of resentment. My father would have, I think.

Seraphina climbed down off the bridge into the canal.

Into the flood. In her boots. Up to her shins in brown water. And she waded to the middle, where the two apprentices were standing, and crouched down so her face was level with theirs, with her hands still in her pockets.

"Hello," she said. "I'm Seraphina. What happened?"

* * *

It came out of both of them at once, in pieces, the way things come out of fourteen-year-olds when someone finally asks.

Orla had been sent to fetch the morning's silk from the rinse. And it had come out gray. Not blue. Gray. Forty bolts of it. The Crown's order: cloaks for the Westmere watch, for the new men on Tamar's wall. Three weeks of dyeing. Gone. And she'd seen the quench water coming down from the forges, rust-red in the morning light, and she'd been so angry she'd taken a pail of dye and run up the bank and poured it straight into the nearest quench trough.

And Hosk had been at the trough. And the dye had hit hot iron and gone up in a cloud of blue steam, and the bolts he'd been quenching had come out streaked blue as a jay. Twenty sea-wall braces. Crown order. For Tamar's wall.

And Hosk had been so angry he'd dragged planks across the canal to stop the dye-house water coming back past the forges.

And the canal had backed up.

And here we all were.

* * *

Seraphina listened to all of it. She didn't interrupt once.

When they'd finished, she was quiet for a moment.

"Cloaks for the Westmere watch," she said to Orla. "For Tamar's new men on the wall."

Orla nodded, sniffing.

"And braces for the Westmere wall," she said to Hosk. "For Tamar's new wall."

Hosk nodded.

Seraphina stood up. She looked up at the bridge, at the two masters standing an arm's length apart above her.

"Mistress Ithrel," she said. "Master Bodvar. Who are you working for?"

* * *

Neither of them answered.

"Because it sounds to me," said Seraphina, quite pleasantly, "as if you're both working for the same man. On the same wall. In the same war. And one of you is making the cloaks for the men who'll stand on it, and the other is making the iron that'll hold it up." She tilted her head. "And you've spent the morning flooding a market to stop each other doing it."

The whole lower market had gone completely silent.

"I'm not saying it's nobody's fault," said Seraphina. "It's a lot of people's fault, and some of it's old, and I'd like to hear all of it. Properly. Sitting down. With tea." She looked at the flooded cobbles. "But first I'd like the canal back where it goes. Would anyone help me?"

* * *

And she took her hands out of her pockets.

I heard the whole crowd breathe in.

But there was no fire. There was nothing in her hands at all. She bent down and took hold of the nearest plank in Hosk's dam, the top one, a long wet beam of oak, and started to pull.

It didn't move. It was wedged hard against the sacks below, and it was very heavy, and she's not large.

She pulled anyway.

* * *

Hosk got there first. Of course he did; he'd put it there. He grabbed the other end of the plank without a word. And then Orla, on Seraphina's side, small and furious and soaked. And then, after a long moment, Master Bodvar came down off the bridge into the water, slowly, like a boulder rolling, and put his great scarred hands on the second plank.

And Mistress Ithrel stood alone on the bridge for a very long time.

Then she hitched up her long blue apron and climbed down into the canal.

* * *

It took them an hour. All of them. By the end, there must have been forty people in the water. Weavers and smiths. Ansgar's daughters from the butchers' row. The baker from Rope Lane who I'd let keep his ovens, and his chandler. Two of the dwarven strikers carrying sacks on their shoulders with two elven dyers walking behind them holding the corners so the sacks wouldn't split. Hosk and Orla carrying one plank between them, arguing about which way to turn it, and then turning it the same way.

And in the middle of it, my wife, soaked to the waist, with brown canal water in her hair and her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her bare hands, her First Flame hands, the hands half of Havenreach was frightened of, black to the wrist with canal mud.

The water went down. The canal found its banks again. The cabbages were rescued.

And the lower market cheered. Not loudly. The way people cheer when something they were afraid of has turned into something they did together. A sort of ragged, surprised, relieved noise, going up the slope like a wave.

I was cheering too. On the steps. I didn't notice until I stopped.

* * *

They settled it at the Lantern and Oar, at the long table by the river window, with tea. I watched through the window from the quay. I still didn't go in. She hadn't asked.

But Hosk told me most of it afterward, and Orla told me the rest, and they didn't contradict each other once, which I think was the most remarkable thing that happened in Havenreach that day.

Seraphina didn't decide anything for them. That was the second thing I'd never have thought of. She asked questions until they'd decided it themselves.

How long does the quench water take to clear, going down the canal? Bodvar didn't know. Ithrel did; she'd been watching it for three hundred years. Three hours, at the summer flow. Two in autumn.

When do the dyers need the clearest water? The morning, said Ithrel; the blue takes best when the water's cold. When do the forges run hottest? The afternoon, said Bodvar, when the coal's been banked all morning and the iron's at its best.

So the forges could quench from noon until night. And the dyers could rinse from dawn until noon. And the water would have the whole night to clear between.

"Who tells everyone when it's noon?" said Seraphina.

There was a pause.

"There's a bell," said Orla, very quietly. "On the river chapel. Nobody's rung it in years."

"Why not?"

"There's a dragon on it," said Hosk.

* * *

That was the third thing.

I watched her walk out of the Lantern and Oar, across the quay, past me without a glance, and up the chapel steps, and around to the foot of the old bell tower. A tall narrow tower of river stone, with a green dragon wrapped around the top of it like a cat around a chimney pot. It had been there since before I was born. It watched the west. It never moved, except to breathe. Children dared each other to throw pebbles at it, and nobody ever had.

Seraphina stood at the foot of the tower and looked up.

"Excuse me," she said. Not loudly. Her clear voice, going up. "I'm Seraphina. I'm sorry to wake you. May I ask you something? You can say no."

* * *

The dragon opened one eye.

It was the color of the Fourth Canal at dawn, before the dye goes in. It looked down at her for a long time.

"You asked," it said. A voice like a heavy door swinging on old hinges. "Nobody asks. They throw pebbles."

"I'm sorry about the pebbles."

"They are children." The eye half-closed. "Ask."

"The weavers and the smiths need to know when it's noon," said Seraphina. "Every day. So the weavers can stop, and the smiths can start, and nobody floods the market. The bell under you is the only one the whole lower town can hear." She paused. "Would you ring it? At noon? Just once a day. You can say no."

The dragon was silent for a long time.

"Every day," it said.

"Every day."

"That is a great deal of asking."

"I know," said Seraphina. "I'll come and ask again. Every day, if you like. Or someone will. Orla's offered. And Hosk." She looked up at it. "They said they'd bring you something. They weren't sure what dragons like."

The eye opened fully.

"Pears," said the dragon.

* * *

I laughed. Out loud, on the quay. I couldn't help it.

Seraphina didn't turn around. But I saw her shoulders shake.

And at the top of the river chapel bell tower, very slowly, the great green dragon uncurled one claw from around the stone, and reached down into the belfry, and set its claw against the old bronze bell.

And rang it.

* * *

It was twenty past four in the afternoon. It wasn't noon at all. I don't think the dragon cared.

The sound went out over the whole lower town. Deep and slow and enormous, rolling down the canals and over the rooftops and across the river, the first time anyone in Havenreach under the age of thirty had ever heard it. Stallholders stopped. Barges stopped. Children came running out of doorways. Up in the forges, the strikers set down their hammers. In the dye-houses, the weavers came out onto the bank with their blue arms and looked up.

And on the chapel steps, at the foot of the tower, my wife stood soaked to the waist with mud to the elbows and her hands open at her sides, looking up at a dragon that had decided to ring a bell for her.

* * *

By sunset it was all over Havenreach.

The princess went into the canal. That was how they told it in the taprooms. Not the princess settled the guilds, or the princess judged the flood. The princess went into the canal. Up to her waist. Pulled the planks out with her own hands. And then she asked the dragon, and the dragon rang the bell.

And they stopped calling her the Concordian princess. I noticed it the very next morning, at the bread stalls. They called her ours.

* * *

I found her at the bottom of the chapel steps, after the bell, sitting on the bottom step with her boots off, pouring canal water out of them.

"You were on the hill," she said, without looking up.

"I was on the steps."

"Same thing." She upended the other boot. "You didn't come down."

"You didn't ask."

She looked up at me then. Her face was muddy and her hair was full of canal and she was smiling the way she smiles when she's done something difficult and isn't yet sure it was right.

"Thank you," she said. "For not coming down."

I sat down next to her on the step. Not touching. Close.

"You took your hands out of your pockets," I said.

"I did."

"I've never seen you do that. In a crowd."

"I know." She looked at her hands. Black to the wrist with mud, and nothing else. No fire. No light. Just hands. "They were all so frightened of what I might do with them. I thought: I'll show them what I'll actually do with them." She shrugged. "Pull a plank out of a canal. It's not very impressive."

"It's the most impressive thing I've ever seen."

"You've seen me cut stone."

"I know," I said. "This was more."

* * *

She leaned against me, then. Muddy and soaked and smelling of canal.

"Garrick."

"Yes?"

"Your father's going to give me the Tuesdays," she said. "Isn't he. Like your Thursdays."

"Probably."

"I think I'd like that." She closed her eyes. "I think I'd like it very much."

Up at the top of the bell tower, the green dragon had curled back around the stone and closed its eyes. But I could have sworn the end of its tail was twitching, very slightly. The way a cat's does, when it's pleased with itself and doesn't want you to know.

* * *

Mary's book. That night.

Garrick went to Lower Brook. Two cups. He knocked on Amos Ferrer's door. It opened an inch, and then closed. We'll see.

The weavers and the smiths flooded the Fourth Canal. Iron in the quench water turned forty bolts of blue gray. Orla poured dye in the smiths' trough. Hosk dammed the canal.

Both orders were for Tamar's wall. Seraphina asked them who they were working for.

She went into the canal. Up to her waist. Took her hands out of her pockets. Pulled out the first plank. Forty people followed her in.

At the Lantern and Oar: dyers dawn to noon, forges noon to night. Ithrel knew the water clears in three hours.

Seraphina asked the green dragon on the river chapel tower to ring the bell at noon. It said: Pears. Then it rang the bell. At twenty past four.

Havenreach says: ours.

Garrick stayed on the steps. She thanked him for it.

And under that, in a fine, quick, upright hand, with a faint smudge of canal mud on the edge of the page where her thumb had rested:

Seraphina. I asked. Everyone came in. Even the dragon.