Chapter 14: A Court of Strangers

The great hall had been set by eight in the morning, and by nine I had walked around it four times.

It looked exactly the way Mother and Adriana had built it out of wooden horses. The long oak table from the lower refectory had been carried up and set lengthwise down the middle of the floor, with a plain white cloth on it and nothing else, not even flowers. Eleven chairs on our side. One on the other. Behind Father's chair, at the head, the dais, and on the dais the throne, empty, with the morning light from the high windows falling across the seat.

Father had looked at it for a while, when he first came in.

"I've never liked that chair," he said.

"That's why it works," said Adriana.

The doors were shut. Not locked. The great doors at the end of the hall, the little service door by the kitchen passage, the side door to the chapel court: all of them closed, and all of them with the bar left up, so that anyone could have opened them with one hand. Mother had been very particular about that. Shut is a choice, she had said. Locked is a fear.

Aurethar stood beside the great doors in his human shape, in his dark clothes and spotless boots, with his hands clasped behind his back. He had been standing there since seven. He had not moved. I am not sure he had blinked.

The Castellan stood against the west wall, opposite the windows, very still. Mary sat at a little desk of her own at the foot of our side of the table, with her book open and three pens laid out in a row. Not the silver one.

And Loki stood by the sideboard, in a plain servant's coat that was exactly one shade too fine to be a real servant's coat, with a jug of wine in one hand and an expression of enormous, wounded virtue.

"I can't say anything?" he had asked, for the fourth time, while the table was being laid.

"Not one word," said Mother.

"What if he speaks to me directly?"

"Then you pour him some wine."

"What if he asks me a question?"

"Then you pour him some more wine."

Loki had looked to Father for support. Father had become very interested in the grain of the table.

* * *

We took our places a little before ten.

Father at the head. Carol on his right hand, Seraphina on his left, the gray horse and the red horse exactly where Adriana had set them down. Mother beside Carol. Adriana beside Seraphina. Then Lexander and Io, and Ignatius, and Roderic, who had been told that if he so much as touched the hilt of the Kethran sword during the audience he would be sent to help Helena peel onions for a week. Elenos and Caitlin had been allowed to stay because they had promised to say nothing at all, and Caitlin had brought her own little blue book to write in, which Mary had pretended not to notice.

I did not sit.

I stood behind Carol's chair, a little to one side, with my hands loose at my sides. Where the lopsided brown horse had been. Nobody had told me to stand there. Nobody needed to.

Under the edge of the table, where the cloth hung down and no one could see, Carol's hand came back and found mine.

It was cold. Not as cold as it had been in the map room. But cold, the way the stones of the north stair are cold in the hour before dawn. I held on to it. After a moment, I felt Ignatius lean very slightly toward her on the other side of Mother, the way you lean toward a fire, and I knew he was doing what he could from there.

On the far side of the table, the one empty chair waited.

At ten exactly, someone knocked on the great doors.

Three times.

Aurethar opened them.

* * *

Ansel came in first. He walked a few steps into the hall and stopped and turned, and said, in his mild clear voice, "Severin Dask, envoy of Kethra, a guest of this house," and then he went and sat in a chair beside the Castellan against the west wall, where he could see everything, and folded his hands in his lap.

Severin came in after him.

He had changed his coat. It was still gray, still plain, but it was a finer gray, with a high collar and a single row of dark buttons, and he had polished the ring on his gloved hand until it gleamed. Iselle came a pace behind him and to his left, with the long flat leather case under her arm.

He came three steps into the hall and stopped.

I watched him take it in. The long plain table. The white cloth. The family sitting at it, all on the same level, with the king at the head in an ordinary chair. And behind the king, on its dais, with the sun across it, the empty throne.

He looked at the throne for a long moment.

Then he looked at Father. At Father in his ordinary chair, with his back to the throne, not looking at it at all.

And the corner of Severin's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The look a man gives a good move on a chessboard, made by an opponent he had not expected to be any good.

"Ah," he said softly.

That was all. Then he came forward, unhurried, down the length of the hall, and stopped beside the one empty chair, and bowed. First to Father. Then, separately, and exactly as deeply, to Mother. Then, separately, and exactly as deeply, to Adriana.

"Your Majesty," he said. "Your Majesties. Thank you for receiving me."

"You're welcome in this house," said Father. "Sit down, Envoy. You've come a long way."

Severin sat.

Iselle did not. She stood behind his chair, one pace back and a little to the left, with the leather case held against her chest. Exactly where I was standing behind Carol. On the other side of the table, facing me.

Our eyes met over the heads of everyone between us.

Her face did nothing at all.

* * *

Loki poured the wine.

He did it beautifully. He came around the end of the table with the jug, silent as a draft, and filled Father's cup and Mother's and Adriana's, and then went around to the far side and filled Severin's, with a little flourish at the end, a twist of the wrist that left not a single drop on the cloth. Then he stepped back and stood with the jug held against his chest and his eyes lowered, the picture of a perfect servant.

Severin picked up the cup. He looked into it.

It was water.

I saw it from where I stood. Clear as a spring, in a cup that had been filled from a jug of red wine. On our side of the table, every cup was red.

Severin looked at the water for a moment. Then he lifted it, and drank, a long, unhurried swallow, and set it down again.

"Thank you," he said, and turned in his chair to look at Loki. "That's exactly what I needed. May I ask your name?"

Loki opened his mouth.

Mother looked at him.

Loki closed his mouth.

He stood there, with the jug, and I watched it happen on his face: the most talkative god in the history of the world, being asked his name by a stranger in a hall full of people, and not allowed to answer. It was like watching someone try to swallow a live fish. His eyebrows went up. His mouth went thin. His ears, I swear, went slightly pink.

Then he bowed. A deep, elaborate, ridiculous bow, with the jug held out to one side, that said more than any name could have.

Severin watched it with grave attention.

"A man under orders," he said. "I understand perfectly. I have been one for a long time."

Loki retreated to the sideboard. Down the table, Io made a very small noise into her cup and Lexander put his hand on her knee.

* * *

"You'll forgive me," Father said, "if I don't make speeches. I'm not good at them. My wives write the good ones, and they've told me not to try today."

"I'd heard that," said Severin.

"I'm sure you had." Father folded his hands on the white cloth. "You've come a long way to talk to me, Envoy. You asked for a gate, and I said no, and you came up a river for fifteen days instead, and you didn't complain about it once, as far as I can tell. So I'll listen. As long as you like. But I want to know who I'm listening to." He looked at Severin directly. "Tell me about your emperor."

Severin was quiet for a moment.

Then he turned his head, very slightly, and said, "Iselle."

She came forward. She set the leather case on the table at Severin's elbow and undid the two brass clasps, and lifted out a long roll of black silk, and unrolled it down the white cloth between us.

It was a map.

It was the most beautiful map I have ever seen, and I grew up in a castle with a map for a floor. Black silk, so dark it was almost blue, and on it, in silver thread so fine you could only see it when the light moved, a coastline. A whole continent. Rivers like veins. Mountains stitched in raised knots. Cities marked with tiny seed pearls, dozens of them, and roads running between them in hair-thin lines, and at the far western edge, a great bay with a city on it that had been worked in gold.

On the right-hand edge of the silk, at the very end, there was a scatter of tiny silver islands. And past those, the outline of a stretch of coast that I knew. That I had flown over on Aurethar's back eight days before.

Westmere. The shoals. The salt pans. Stitched in silver, very small, at the very edge of the map, as if it were an afterthought.

All the bare gray stone on our map-room floor, all that blank space west of the shoals where Father's mapmakers had never been, was on this table. Filled in.

"Kethra," said Severin.

* * *

He talked for a long time.

He was very good. I have to say that, because it's true, and because I promised myself when I started writing this down that I would tell the truth even when I didn't like it. He did not make speeches either. He talked the way a teacher talks to students he respects, quietly, plainly, leaning forward sometimes to touch the map.

Kethra was old, he said. Older than Avarra's kingdoms. A continent of rivers and high plateaus, and for a thousand years it had been a continent of wars. Forty kingdoms, sixty, a hundred, depending on the century. City against city, river against river. Gods against gods. He touched the seed-pearl cities one after another as he named them, and some of the names he said with a small sad weight, as if he had known people there.

"There were famines," he said. "Every generation. The rivers would flood in one valley and fail in the next, and the kingdoms would starve each other rather than share. And then, a little more than three hundred years ago, there was a child."

He turned the map, gently, so that the golden city on the great western bay faced Father.

"His mother was a mortal woman. Her name was Cerys. She was a scribe's daughter in a small river town, and she was nobody, and one spring a god came down to the river and saw her, and wanted her." He said the word plainly. Not with any weight. As if it were the most natural verb in the world. "The god did not stay. Gods rarely do. But he left her a son."

"Which god?" said Mother.

Severin turned his head and looked at her.

"In Kethra," he said, "we do not say."

"Why not?"

"Because he has asked us not to." Severin smiled slightly. "His Radiance calls himself the Son of the Unnamed God. It is one of his titles. You will have seen it in my letter."

"I saw it," said Mother.

Nobody else said anything. Down at the end of the table, Mary's pen had stopped moving. On the west wall, Ansel sat perfectly still with his hands folded, looking at the map, and I could not see his face.

"The boy's name was Malachar," Severin went on. "He grew up in that river town. He grew up hungry, like everyone. And when he was seventeen, the river failed, and the town was going to starve, and the neighboring kingdom had grain and would not sell it." He touched a seed pearl near the golden city. "So he went to the neighboring kingdom, alone, and asked them for it. And they said no."

"And?" said Father.

"And he asked them again," said Severin. "And they gave it to him."

He let that sit for a moment.

"He has never asked for anything a third time," Severin said. "In three hundred years. He has never needed to."

Under the table, Carol's fingers tightened on mine. I felt the cold in them go up, all at once, like a draft from an opened door.

"He united Kethra in forty years," Severin said. "Not by conquest. Not mostly. Kingdom by kingdom, city by city, he asked. Some said yes the first time. Most said yes the second. Those who said no..." He moved one gloved hand, very slightly, over the silk. "Those cities are not on the map anymore. I won't pretend otherwise. You'd find out, and you'd be right never to trust me again."

"That's honest," said Father.

"I try to be. It saves time." Severin sat back. "There has not been a famine in Kethra in two hundred and sixty years. Not one. The rivers are shared. The roads are safe. A child born in the poorest river town on that map will eat every day of her life, and learn to read, and never see a soldier come down her street in anger. That is what he built. That is what he holds. He has never let go of any of it." He spread his hands on the black silk. "His Radiance Malachar Ostrane, Emperor of Kethra, Lord of the Ostrane Imperium, Son of the Unnamed God. Who Holds."

The hall was very quiet.

Then Father said, mildly, "And he's sent you a long way across the sea to talk to a man who keeps his throne behind him. Why?"

Severin looked at him for a long moment.

"Because," he said, "for the first time in three hundred years, there is something he wants that he does not already hold."

* * *

"Then tell me what it is," said Father.

Severin did not answer at once. He looked down at the map, at the golden city on its bay, and smoothed a fold in the silk with two fingers, slowly, the way you might smooth a child's hair.

"Not today," he said.

Down the table, Lexander made a low sound in his chest. Io's hand closed on his arm.

"You came fifteen days up a river," Father said, "to tell me not today?"

"I came fifteen days up a river so that you would know who was asking." Severin lifted his eyes. "You asked me who you were listening to. I've told you. That was today. Tomorrow, if you'll have me back in this hall, I'll tell you what he asks. In front of everyone he asks it of." He did not look at Carol. He did not look at Seraphina. He was very careful not to look at either of them, and that was worse than if he had. "I would rather they heard it from me, plainly, with you sitting beside them, than from a letter. Or from a rumor in the market. Or from me, today, before they've had one more night of not knowing."

Mother set her cup down on the cloth. It made a very small sound.

"You'll tell us now," she said.

"If Your Majesty insists, I will." Severin inclined his head to her. "I am a guest. I'll do as I'm asked. But I'd ask you one kindness, in return for fifteen days on a salt barge. Let it wait for morning."

Mother's mouth went thin. She looked at Father. Father looked at the table.

And Adriana, on Seraphina's far side, very quietly, turned her head and looked down the table at Carol.

She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. She only looked, the way she does, and waited, and the whole hall seemed to wait with her. It was not Father's to decide. It was not Mother's. Adriana had seen to that with a wooden horse in the south solar.

Carol's hand was so cold in mine that it hurt.

"Tomorrow," Carol said.

Her voice was perfectly steady. She was looking straight across the table at Severin Dask, and her chin was up, and I do not think anybody but me and Ignatius knew what it cost her.

"Tomorrow," she said again. "In this hall. I'll be here."

Seraphina, on Father's other side, said nothing at all. She only put both her hands flat on the white cloth in front of her, and the cloth under her palms began, very faintly, to smell of scorching.

Severin looked at Carol for a long moment.

Then he stood, and bowed to her. Not to Father, not to the queens. To her. As deeply as he had bowed to anyone.

"Thank you, my lady," he said. "Tomorrow."

* * *

He left the map.

"For your floor," he said to Father, as Iselle closed the empty case. "I'm told you have a room where the west is bare stone. It seems a pity."

Father said nothing. On the west wall, the Castellan did not move at all.

Then Severin turned and walked back down the length of the hall toward the great doors, unhurried, with Iselle a pace behind him. The sunlight came slanting through the high east windows across his path, one bright bar after another, and he walked through them, light and shade, light and shade, past the first window, the second, the third.

Between the third window and the fourth, he lifted his right hand and laid it against the wall.

Only for a moment. Lightly. In passing. The way you touch a friend's shoulder in a crowded room, to say I see you, I'm here, don't get up. He didn't stop walking. He didn't look at the wall. His gloved fingers and the gold ring brushed the stone and came away again, and he walked on into the next bar of sunlight, and the next, and out through the great doors, which Aurethar closed behind him.

I stared at the place where his hand had been.

And I could not see it.

I don't know how else to put it. I was looking at the wall. I could see the third window, and I could see the fourth. I could see the stones. I could see where the plaster had been patched, years ago, when I was small. But there was a place between the two windows where my eyes simply did not want to go, the way your tongue doesn't want to touch a sore tooth, and every time I made them go there, I found myself looking, a moment later, at something else. The window. The floor. The back of Mary's chair.

I made myself look three times. I could not tell you, now, what I saw.

* * *

The hall emptied slowly. Mother and Adriana went out together, without a word, already walking fast. Father sat at the table for a long time, with the black silk map spread in front of him, not touching it. Seraphina's handprints were scorched into the white cloth, two of them, perfectly clear, every finger. Carol went up to the north tower and Ignatius went with her.

Loki said, "Water," to nobody in particular, in a voice of profound satisfaction, and went to find something stronger.

I found Ansel still sitting in his chair against the west wall, with his hands folded.

"You wanted to see how he stepped off a boat," I said. "Yesterday. You never said why."

Ansel looked up at me. His face was as mild as ever. Only his eyes were tired.

"A man who has come to take something," he said, "looks at the door. Always. Where it is, how it opens, who's standing in it. He looks at the door before he looks at anything else."

"And Severin?"

"Severin looked at his feet." Ansel was quiet for a moment. "That is what a man does when he has been sent. He looks at the ground he's been told to stand on. He has been doing it for a very long time, I think. Long enough that he no longer remembers that he could step somewhere else."

I thought about that.

"The Unnamed God," I said. "Malachar's father. You know who it is."

Ansel did not answer.

"You do. In the Council Hall, you said a god of wanting once told you the lamp was yours if you reached far enough. That's him, isn't it?"

Ansel looked past me. Down the length of the hall. To the east wall, and the third window, and the fourth, and the place between them where neither of us could look.

"Not in this room," he said softly.

He stood up, and touched my shoulder, and went out.

I stayed. I don't know why. The sun moved across the floor, and the light from the high windows slid off the table and onto the stones, and the black silk map lay there on the white cloth with Kethra stitched across it in silver, all those seed-pearl cities, all those shared rivers, every one of them held.

When I finally turned to go, the Castellan was standing in front of the east wall.

It was standing very close, between the third window and the fourth, with its metal hand flat against the stone, exactly where Severin's had been. Its gray head was bowed, as if it were listening.

In its other hand it held a sheet of paper and a pencil.

I watched it write, slowly, in that neat printed hand, at the bottom of a fresh copy of a list I already knew by heart.

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

Ten.