Chapter 126: Roderic Fights

I'd like to say I listened to my brother.

I didn't. Not at first. I'm the older one. Three years older, which Roderic says is nothing, except at breakfast, when it's apparently everything. I've spent twenty years being the one who goes first, the one who gets there, the one who folds into the middle of things and sorts them out. And my little brother was standing on a stair in his nightshirt with a fire poker, with six of Kessavel's Hushed around him, telling me to wait.

So I did what I always do.

I reached.

* * *

You have to understand how it works, for Carol and me. We don't take. We've never taken. When we were three we sat on a stone in a stream and gave back everything a god had stolen, and ever since then there's been a rule in us deeper than any rule our mothers taught. You ask. Borrow? And they answer. Take. And then it's ours, freely, and we keep it, because it was given.

It's the asking that makes it work. Not the word. The asking.

I opened my mouth on that stair to ask the nearest thing that could help me, which was the burning lamp on the floor, or the cold stone under my feet, or my father's frost on the window across from me, or anything at all.

And nothing came out.

Not quiet. Nothing. The word went into the held silence the way a stone goes into a well, and I never heard it land.

I tried again. I tried with my whole chest. Borrow?

Nothing.

And for the first time in my life, standing on a stair in Concordia with my brother's back above me, I understood that I'd never once in twenty years done anything without asking first. And I'd never once been in a place where I couldn't.

* * *

So I tried to fold.

Not out. In. Up. Past the two gray shapes on the landing below Roderic, onto the stair beside him, so that at least there'd be two of us.

I felt the fold open. And I felt my father's frost close over it like a hand over a cup.

Nothing leaves. Not through a window or over a wall or through a fold. Not while I'm holding it.

He'd meant them. He'd meant whatever was in the tower. But my father doesn't do things by halves, and a wall that only stops some folds is a wall with a gap in it. He'd let me in because I was going in. Now that I was in, I was in like everyone else. The whole college was a jar with the lid screwed down, and I was inside it.

I nearly laughed. I couldn't have heard it if I had.

I'll be very hard to get past, he'd said. Twenty minutes ago. I promise you that.

He'd kept his promise. Even to me.

* * *

The two Hushed on the landing had turned around.

They moved the way I remembered from the festival. No hurry. No sound, though that was the silence's doing as much as theirs. Gray coats, gray wrappings, white masks with no mouths. They came down the stair toward me side by side, one step at a time, with their hands held a little out from their sides, open.

A Hushed hand is open until it closes. And when it closes it doesn't open again. I'd learned that on the parade ground, on the night of the masks, with a stooped man's fingers around my wrist so cold they burned, and my own knuckles split from the only time I've ever hit anyone. It had hurt my hand. It hadn't hurt him at all.

I backed down a step. And another. And my heel touched the edge of the burning lamp, and I felt the heat on my ankle and couldn't hear the oil hiss.

Behind them, above them, my brother moved.

* * *

I want to get this right. Roderic's going to read it, and he'll tell me if I don't.

I have watched my brother do a great many things in twenty years. I've watched him fall off Grandpa's workshop roof, and off a horse called Biscuit, and off a wall in Lyradon into a fishpond in front of a visiting duke. I've watched him write a forty-line poem in high Lyradon meter and get it back from Caitlin with corrections. I've watched him sing under the wrong window. I've watched him knock over a whole tray of Helena's jam tarts reaching for a single one, and then apologize to the tarts.

I had never once watched him do anything well with his body except run.

He came down off the stair onto the landing behind those two Hushed as if the stair had been put there for him. Not fast. That was the strange thing. He wasn't fast. He just never stopped. The poker went out flat and low and took the first Hushed behind the knee, and while that one was folding, the poker was already coming back around, and the end of it touched the second one's wrist, lightly, the way you'd tap a man on the arm to tell him he'd dropped something. And the hand that was reaching for my brother's collar went past it and closed on air.

A Hushed hand closes. And it doesn't open. And that one had closed on nothing at all.

Roderic didn't look at it. He was already turning, already back up the two steps he'd come down, already in front of Iselle's door again, with the poker low and his bare feet set, before the four above him had come one step closer.

He looked down at me. Over his shoulder. And raised one eyebrow.

I knew that look. It's the look I give him across the breakfast table when he's said something stupid and I'm waiting for him to notice.

Not yet, said the eyebrow. Still not yet.

* * *

The one with the closed hand stood up off its knee. It looked at the fist it had made. It couldn't open it. It turned, very slowly, and came back up the stair toward my brother with its other hand held out.

And the four above came down.

And Roderic went to meet them.

* * *

I don't know how long it lasted. There was no bell to count by. There was no sound at all. There was just the lamp burning on the floor at my feet and throwing everything up the walls huge and gold and flickering, my brother's shadow and their shadows, so that half of what I saw I saw on the stone above them, like a puppet play.

He didn't hit them. Not really. Not to hurt. You can't hurt a Hushed; he knew that as well as I did. He'd been on the parade ground too. What he did was make them close their hands on the wrong things. A poker tip on a wrist. A shoulder that wasn't where it had been. The newel post. The stair rail, twice. Each time one of them reached for him, the reach found something that wasn't him, and the hand closed on it, and stayed closed. By the time I got up the stair past the knee-folded one, two of the four above had one fist each locked shut around nothing, and one had its right hand clamped on the oak handrail so tight it couldn't let go, and was standing there tugging at it, silently, like a dog on a short rope.

It wasn't fighting. It was something better.

It was knowing. Knowing what they'd do before they did it. Knowing where a hand would go, and making sure that when it got there, he wasn't.

My little brother. Who apologizes to laundry.

* * *

I got to him. I got onto the landing beside him, between him and the stair going down, with my back against his back. And I felt him startle, just slightly, because he hadn't heard me come.

And then I felt him laugh. Through his shoulder blades. No sound. Just the laugh going through him into me.

I turned my head. He turned his. And his face was the face I'd seen on the stair when I folded in: calm and very bright and very sure. And under it, so far under it you'd have to be his brother to see, he was absolutely terrified.

Good. So was I.

* * *

I couldn't ask anything for help. But I've always been able to watch.

That's what mimicry is, under all the gods and borrowing. It's watching. It's seeing how a thing is done so closely that your hands learn it before your head does. Carol says I watched Grandpa sand a horse's ear for an hour when I was four and then did it perfectly the first time, and cried because he'd made it look hard and it wasn't.

I'd been watching my brother for maybe a minute. I'd seen the poker go flat. I'd seen him step off the line of a reach instead of back from it. I'd seen how he never once looked at a hand, only at shoulders.

I can't fight. I've never had to. When you can fold anywhere in the world and borrow the sea, you never learn what to do with your feet.

But I wanted it. I wanted it the way I'd wanted that horse's ear.

So I did the only asking I had left.

I held out my left hand behind me, open, palm up, low by my hip, where he'd feel it brush his.

He felt it. I felt him go still.

And then my brother, who has watched Carol and me say Borrow? and Take across the breakfast table his entire life, who knows exactly what an open hand means in our house, nodded. Once. I felt it through his back.

Take.

* * *

It came into me like a song you already know.

Not his power. Roderic's power is his temper and the weather it brings, clouds over the east wall when he's cross, rain on the leeks when he's sad. That wasn't what he gave me. He gave me something smaller and harder, and much more his own.

He gave me how he stood.

Where the weight goes on the stair. The way you keep the poker low so it can go anywhere. The way you watch the shoulder, never the hand. The way you breathe out when they reach. And underneath all of it, worn into it like a path worn into grass, a hundred cold mornings. A practice yard. Frost on the cobbles. And a voice, a dry old voice I'd never heard, saying the same thing again and again, patiently, every morning, until it went in.

Again. You're not good. You're patient. Again.

I knew then where my brother had been every morning at five o'clock since the festival. And why he'd come in to breakfast red-faced and starving and said he'd been walking.

* * *

There was a long brass candle-snuffer in the niche by Caitlin's door. They keep them on every landing at the college, for the stair lamps. I picked it up.

It wasn't a poker. It didn't matter. My brother's hands had learned the shape of a long thing held low, and now so had mine.

The knee-folded one came up the last step toward my side of the landing. It reached for my throat.

I didn't look at its hand. I looked at its shoulder. I breathed out. And I wasn't where it reached. The snuffer's brass cap touched the inside of its elbow, lightly, and its hand went past me and closed on the iron ring of Caitlin's door handle.

And stayed there.

I felt Roderic feel it, through his back. That laugh again. No sound.

Again, said the dry old voice in my brother's memory, which was now in mine. Again.

* * *

We held that landing for a long time.

Two brothers, back to back, in front of two doors, with a poker and a candle-snuffer, against six of the oath-sworn of the god of locks. Making them close their hands on handrails and door rings and newel posts and air. Never hurting them. Never being where they reached.

But every time a hand closed on the wrong thing, the Hushed it belonged to still had another hand. And they still didn't tire. And we did.

I felt Roderic's breathing go ragged through his back. I felt my own arms start to shake. The one with its hand stuck on the rail had worked out that it could still lean, and it leaned its whole weight against the oak until the rail began to bend away from the wall, slowly, silently, the wooden pegs coming out of the plaster one by one.

We were going to lose. Not quickly. But we were.

And still my brother held up one finger behind his back, where only I'd feel it.

Not yet.

Not yet for WHAT? I wanted to shout. And couldn't. And didn't need to, because just then Caitlin's door, the one with the Hushed's fist still locked on its handle, opened.

* * *

It opened inward. The Hushed holding the ring went with it, staggering, a step into the dark room, and then stopped, because there wasn't much more door to follow.

And there was my sister.

Caitlin Asta Grey. Nineteen. In her flannel nightgown and the terrible orange scarf she knitted at fourteen and has been trying to give away ever since. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor just inside her own doorway, where she must have been sitting the entire time, in the dark. A Hushed was holding her door handle above her head, and she didn't look at it once.

She was looking past us. Up the stair. And she was counting.

* * *

I could see her lips move. No sound. And her fingers. She counts on her fingers when it matters, Caitlin, the way a child does, though she can count anything in the world without them. She says the fingers are for being sure.

She was counting the stair.

I knew it, because I could see her eyes going up it, step by step. From the lamp burning at the turn below, past us on the landing, up the flight to the bell room under the roof, where the four had come down from. Her lips moving. Her fingers folding down and coming up and folding down.

Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.

She got to the top. And she stopped.

And she held up one more finger, and frowned at it.

* * *

If there's ever a thirty-eighth, she'd written in Mary's book that morning, I'll know.

I looked up the stair where she was looking.

And I saw it. Now that I knew to look. Near the top, just below the bell-room door, there was one step that the lamplight didn't quite land on. It wasn't dark. It wasn't anything you'd notice. It was just a step slightly less there than the others. The way the corner of your eye goes gray when you're very tired.

And there was a Hushed kneeling on it.

A fifth one above. I hadn't seen it. Not one of the six. A seventh, small and still, kneeling on the step that wasn't, with both its hands pressed flat on the stone in front of it. Not reaching. Not moving. Holding.

Holding the silence.

That was where it came from. All of it. The bell that didn't ring, the voice that went down the well. It was that small gray shape on a step that shouldn't be there, kneeling like the eleven had knelt at the anchors on the parade ground, with its hands down flat, keeping the whole tower quiet.

And the step it knelt on, I understood suddenly, was how they'd come in. Not through a window. Not over a wall. A step that came from somewhere else, put into a stair that had thirty-seven, so that anyone who knew it was there could step off it onto the thirty-seventh and be inside. My father's frost had come down over a college with seven of them already in it, and the door they'd come through folded up inside the stair like a pocket.

They weren't trying to leave. They'd never been going to leave. They'd been going to take Iselle back down that step.

And my brother had been standing in front of her door, waiting for his sister to notice the stairs.

* * *

Caitlin counted again.

Slowly this time. I watched her lips. Her finger going down for each step. From the bottom. One. Two. Three. All the way up past us, all the way to the top, past the gray kneeling shape, and I watched her eyes not stop when they got there, not even pause, go straight past that less-there step as if it simply weren't in the world.

Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.

And she folded the last finger down, firmly, the way you close a ledger.

Thirty-seven, her lips said. I counted it twice. It has thirty-seven.

My sister is never wrong when she counts. Not once. Not in her life. Faelan's ledger always balances, and Mirelle lights lamps without a taper, and Caitlin counts. That's all. It never looked like very much, beside the lightning and the frost.

The stair agreed with her.

* * *

The thirty-eighth step went away.

Not with a crack. Not with a flash. It just stopped being counted. And a thing that isn't counted, on a stair Caitlin Grey has counted twice, isn't there.

The small gray shape that had been kneeling on it dropped. Straight down. About the height of one step. It landed on the thirty-seventh on its knees, and its hands came up off the stone in surprise.

And the sound came back.

* * *

All of it. All at once.

The bell. That was first. The east-tower bell overhead, which had been held mid-swing for I don't know how long, finished ringing the half hour so late and so hard that it sounded like the whole tower had been hit with a hammer. And the river under the college walls. And wind in the frost. And the lamp roaring on the floor below. And my own breath. And Roderic's, sawing. And from somewhere outside, very far off and very clear, across the river, across the roofs, a single great voice I'd have known at the bottom of the sea:

"GARRICK!"

My father. Who had been holding the whole college in his one raised hand for however long this had been, with no way to know whether either of his sons was alive.

And my brother, beside me, shouted the first sound he'd been able to make in all that time.

It was not a word that I'm going to write down. Mary will read this.

And the stairwell filled with weather.

* * *

Clouds. Indoors. Right up the tower from the turn of the stair to the bell, gray and churning, with rain in them, hard, cold rain on the Hushed and the stairs and us. Roderic's temper, which had been held in that silence all along like everything else, came out of him all at once. Thunder under the roof. The lamp hissed out. Then lightning, small and white and furious, jumped from the bell to the handrail and lit the whole stairwell for one moment like noon.

In that moment I saw everything. Six Hushed on the landing and the stairs, each with one fist locked on something. One more on the top step, on its knees, looking at its own empty hands. My sister on the floor of her room. My brother beside me, soaked, shaking, magnificent.

And I could talk.

* * *

I could ask.

I turned to the door behind us. Iselle's door. The one my brother had been standing in front of the whole time. I knocked on it, three times. Because you do.

"Iselle," I said. My voice sounded enormous. "It's Garrick. Borrow?"

The door opened.

She was standing just inside it in the dark, in her nightgown, barefoot like the rest of us. Her lamp was on the sill behind her, unlit. Not knocked over, not broken. Put out. Neatly. With the snuffer cap still beside it.

Later she told me. When the stair went quiet, before any of them had come down, she heard the silence come up the tower like water. And she knew exactly what it was, because she'd grown up in palaces full of Hushed. And she couldn't call out, and she couldn't run, and she couldn't open a window, because that's the first thing anyone would watch.

So she'd put out her lamp.

So that I can see it from outside, she'd said to me, months ago. So I know which one's mine.

She'd known I always looked for it. She'd known I'd be on the wall.

* * *

"Take," said Iselle.

She held out both her hands to me, open.

And I took what Iselle has, which isn't a domain, which isn't anything any god ever gave her. It's what she was born with, on a winter night in her mother's house in a valley in Kethra, when a god with a closed hand bent over her and she gripped his finger, and his whole hand opened, and he ran.

It's opening.

* * *

I turned around with it in my hands.

Seven Hushed. Seven closed fists, locked on a rail, on a door ring, on a newel post, on air. Seven people who had sworn their faces and their voices to the god of locks in a temple I've never seen, before the first link, and never opened their hands again for anything except to close them.

I didn't fight them. I'd done enough of that. I just did what Iselle does.

I opened my hands. Both of them. All the way. And I let what she'd given me go out of them, the way you'd let out a breath you've been holding.

And all down the stair, every closed hand opened.

* * *

The one on the rail let go of the oak, and the rail swung loose on its last peg and hung there dripping. The one on Caitlin's door ring let go and stood swaying in her doorway. The others let go of air. And the small one on the thirty-seventh step, the one that had been holding the silence, looked down at its hands, open, palms up, rain running off its fingertips, as if it had never seen them before.

None of them reached for us again.

I don't think they could remember how. A Hushed hand is open until it closes, and then it never opens. Nobody had told them what to do with one that had.

They stood on the stair in my brother's rain with their hands open in front of them like people waiting to be given something.

* * *

Thor came up the stair from the courtyard about four seconds later, three steps at a time, with her hammer in one hand and a walnut in the other, roaring. She saw the landing and stopped so hard her braid swung around and slapped her own face.

"Oh," said Thor. She looked at the seven open-handed Hushed, at the bent rail, at Roderic. At me with a candle-snuffer. At Caitlin on the floor. "Oh, well done."

Then she cracked the walnut in her fist, because she'd been holding it the whole time and didn't know what else to do with it.

* * *

My father came a minute after her.

He came the long way, up the stair from the courtyard door, because he couldn't fold, and in the end he'd had to let go of the frost to come at all. I heard it go. All over the college, all at once, a long sliding roar like snow coming off a barn roof, every slate and window frame letting go of the white at the same moment. Then shouting from the dormitories as two hundred students woke at once. And Master Ashby, somewhere on the floor below in a nightcap, saying very loudly to no one, "Is there a thirty-eighth? Because I should like it noted that I have always said there was something wrong with that stair!"

And then my father was on the landing.

He didn't say anything. He looked at the Hushed, all of them, one after another, the way he'd look at weather. Then he raised his hand, and white-gold light came down around each of the seven, a cage of lightning each, the same as on the parade ground. Neat and quiet and absolute. And not one of them so much as touched the bars. They just stood inside them with their open hands.

Then he looked at Caitlin. At Iselle. At me.

And last, at Roderic.

* * *

Roderic was sitting on the top step of the landing with the poker across his knees, soaked to the skin, his storm raining itself out above him in a little gray cloud under the ceiling. There was a long shallow cut across the back of his left hand where a mask edge had caught it, and his knuckles were bleeding, and he was shaking so hard I could hear his teeth.

My father sat down next to him. On the wet step. In his shirt and his bare frozen feet.

"You stood in front," he said.

Roderic laughed. It came out cracked. "That's your job."

"I was busy," said my father.

"I noticed," said Roderic. "The whole college is a different color."

My father put his arm around him and pulled him in, rain and blood and poker and all, until my brother's head was on his shoulder. And Roderic stopped shaking. Not all at once. But he stopped.

"Who taught you?" said my father, after a while. Quietly. Not angry. Wondering.

Roderic's eyes were shut. "Avarn," he said. "After the festival. I hit one of them on the parade ground and it didn't do anything. And Garrick hit one and it hurt his hand. So I went and asked Avarn if he'd teach me how to stand in front of somebody without hitting anyone." He breathed out. "He said I could say no to the lessons. If they were too early. I said I wouldn't." A pause. "They're very early."

"Is he good?" said my father.

"He says I'm not good." Roderic opened one eye. "He says I'm patient. He says that's better."

* * *

My father looked at me over Roderic's head.

"And you," he said.

"I didn't do much," I said. "I held a candle-snuffer."

"You held a landing," said my father. "And then you ended it."

"Iselle ended it," I said. "I just asked."

My father looked at me for a long time. Then at Iselle, in her doorway, with her open hands and her put-out lamp. Then back at me. I thought of the palace wall, an hour ago, and the stone in the stream, and the end of it wouldn't be mine.

"Yes," said my father. "That's what I meant."

* * *

Caitlin was still sitting on the floor of her room.

I went and sat down beside her, in the doorway, on the cold boards. She was holding up her ten fingers in front of her, looking at them.

"Thirty-seven," she said. "I counted it four times now. It's thirty-seven."

"I know," I said.

"I couldn't count it out loud," she said. "I've never counted anything that mattered without saying it out loud." Her voice was very small and very steady. "I didn't know if it would work."

"It worked."

"I know it worked." She put her hands down in her lap. "Roderic told me at supper. On the first night. He said, If anything ever comes up that stair, I'll stand in front of her door, and you count. He said, Don't come out. Don't help me. Just count. However long it takes." She looked up at me. "It took a very long time, Garrick. I had to be sure."

"You were sure."

"I'm always sure." She wiped her nose on the end of the orange scarf. "That's what's so awful about it."

I put my arm around her. She let me.

Across the landing my brother was asleep on my father's shoulder, with the poker still across his knees. And above him, the last of his little storm rained itself out under the bell, softly, and was gone.

* * *

Mary's book. Two days later, in Greykeep, after we'd all come home through the Concordia gate in a long untidy line, and Helena had put Roderic in the chair by the stove and fed him until he begged.

Wednesday, very early. Concordia, college east tower. Seven Hushed, taken. All seven alive. The seventh was kneeling on a step that isn't there anymore.

The college was frozen for twenty-two minutes. Uriah held it with one hand. He says it was more like an hour.

Roderic held the stair. Garrick held it with him. Caitlin counted it. Iselle put her lamp out on purpose, and then opened her hands.

Master Ashby has measured the stair. He has asked for it in writing that there were always thirty-seven.

Roderic has a cut on his left hand. Aurelia offered. He said he'd like to keep it a while.

And under that, in a hand nobody in our house had ever seen before, narrow and upright and a little old-fashioned, very neat, like a man who learned to write by copying the inscriptions on swords:

Avarn. He is not good. He is patient. Tell him five o'clock tomorrow, as usual. Tell his brother he may come too, if he asks.