Chapter 20: Lexander and Io

Lexander and Io had been at Greykeep for a week, and they had been very good.

That was the problem. They had been so good, for so long, that it had built up in them like water behind a dam.

They had sat at the long table in the great hall and said nothing. They had listened to Malachar's letter read aloud, every word of it, and said nothing. Lexander had split a solid oak table down the middle with the flat of his hand, and still he had said nothing, because Io had her fingers wrapped around his wrist and Mother had asked everyone, very particularly, to let the people who were asked do the answering. They had gone to the dinner in the inner court and eaten Helena's lamb and watched Severin Dask drink wine beside Loki, and they had smiled, and passed the bread, and said nothing.

On the evening after the dinner, they sent for us.

Not the household. Not Father. Us. Seraphina, and me, and little Uriah, by name, in a note in Io's handwriting that just said Come up. Both of you. Bring the boy. And underneath, in a different hand, heavier and more upright, Lexander had added: Please.

"Oh no," said Seraphina, when she read it.

"What?"

"He said please." She folded the note very small. "He only says please when he's about to do something enormous."

* * *

They were in the west tower. The Concordian rooms, everyone calls them, though nobody from Concordia has ever asked for them. They are just the rooms Lexander and Io always have when they come to Greykeep, three of them, round, one above the other, with tall windows looking out over the river toward the sunset. Io chose them the first time she came, years before I was born, because of the windows. Io chooses most things because of the windows.

The door was open. We went in.

Io was standing at the window with her back to us, very straight, in a long red dress, with her arms folded. The sun was going down over the river behind her and the light came through her hair and made it look as if it were burning, which, with Io, is not always a figure of speech.

Lexander was sitting at a table in the middle of the room. A small square table, with a board on it.

I knew the board. Everyone in the family knows it. It's an old game from Lexander's other life, the one before this one, when he was a god with ravens and a long gray cloak and a great many more enemies. A square board of dark wood, worn smooth, with a grid cut into it, and two sets of pieces: a small army of pale pieces around a single carved king in the center, and a larger army of dark pieces all around the edges, closing in. The king's table, he calls it. He taught me to play it when I was eight. I have never once beaten him.

He had the pieces set up. But not the way the game starts.

"Sit down," he said. "Please."

There it was again.

We sat. Seraphina on one side of the table, me on the other, little Uriah on her knee. Little Uriah immediately reached for the nearest pale piece, and Seraphina gently moved his hand away without looking, the way you do a thousand times a day with a child that age.

Lexander did not look up from the board.

He is a big man, Lexander. Not as big as Thor, but broad through the chest and shoulders, with a short gray beard and a plain black patch over his left eye, and a face that looks as if it has been out in a great deal of weather. Io says he has owned eleven eye patches over the years and lost ten of them. This one was new. I wondered, irrelevantly, what had happened to the last.

"This," he said, and put one finger on the board, "is Westmere."

A cluster of pale pieces at one edge.

"These," and he swept his hand along the opposite edge, where a long line of dark pieces stood in a row, "are sixty black ships."

He had counted them. I checked. Sixty.

"Concordia has forty ships of the line," Lexander said. "Lyradon has twelve. Greykeep has the river barges and whatever Tamar Vale can scrape together from Westmere harbor, which is not nothing. Aurethar will fly. Thor will come, she'll insist. Fenrir would come, if Loki asked him, and Loki will ask him, because Loki is angrier than he looks." He began moving pale pieces up the board, one by one, with a sharp little click each time. "We go at dawn. From the north, out of the sun, while they're sitting still. Aurethar first, to break their line. Then the ships. Then Thor." Click. Click. Click. "Whatever is on those decks that sings, we burn it before it gets the chance."

"Father," said Seraphina.

"I'm not finished." He moved a single pale piece out of the cluster at the center, carefully, and set it to one side. Off the board entirely. Beside his elbow.

A small pale piece. One of the defenders.

"And you," said Lexander, "go to Concordia. Tonight. With the boy." He tapped the piece. "Into the palace. The inner rooms, the ones with no windows. Thor's own guard on the doors, and Aurethar overhead, and your mother and me between you and anything that walks."

He looked up at last, for the first time since we came in. His one eye was very bright.

"Until it's done," he said.

* * *

I opened my mouth.

I want to say that I didn't. I want to say that I had learned something on the roof of the north tower, three nights ago, about stopping, and letting people answer for themselves. And I had. But Lexander had just taken my wife off the board and put her by his elbow, and my son with her, and said tonight, and the part of me that had folded the air in the great hall wanted very much to say something about it.

Seraphina put her foot on mine under the table.

Not hard. Just there. Just enough.

I closed my mouth.

"Lex," said Io, from the window, without turning around.

"I know."

"You haven't told her the rest."

"I was getting to it."

"Then get to it." Io turned. Her eyes were very bright too, and her mouth was set in a line I had seen only once before, on the day she found out the college roof was leaking onto the library. "Or I will."

Lexander looked down at the board.

"If they come for her," he said, quietly, "anyway. After we've burned the ships. If he sends someone else, the way Severin said. Someone less patient." He put his finger on the little pale piece by his elbow. "Then she doesn't stay in Concordia. She goes further. There are places I remember, from the other life. Places that aren't on any map. Places I could hide a child where no god who ever lived could find her." He looked up at Io. "We've talked about it."

"We have," said Io.

"We'd go with her. Both of us. For as long as it took."

The room was very quiet.

Little Uriah, who did not understand a word of it, reached out again and got his fist around one of the dark pieces, and put it in his mouth, and looked enormously pleased with himself.

Seraphina did not take it away from him this time.

She was looking at the little pale piece by her father's elbow.

* * *

"Is that me?" Seraphina said.

Lexander blinked. "What?"

"That piece. By your elbow." She nodded at it. "Is that me?"

"It's..." He looked down at it, as if he had only just noticed what he had done. "It's a way of thinking about it. That's all. It's how I think. You know how I think."

"I do," said Seraphina. "I've watched you think on that board my whole life. I used to sit under the table while you played Aurethar, and listen to the pieces click, and know what kind of mood you were in by how hard you put them down." She shifted little Uriah on her knee. He was still gnawing on the dark piece. She let him. "You put me down very gently just now. I noticed."

"Sera..."

"May I?" she said. And she held out her hand, palm up, over the table.

Lexander looked at her hand. Then at her face. Then, slowly, as if he were not entirely sure why he was doing it, he picked up the little pale piece from beside his elbow and put it in her palm.

She closed her fingers around it.

Then she put it in the pocket of her dress.

"There," she said. "I'm not on your board anymore."

Nobody said anything.

"I'm not on his," Seraphina said. "I made that very clear. I cut a table in half to make it clear. I'm not going to stand in a room and let a man I've never met decide where my fire goes." She looked at her father. "So I'm not going to let you do it either."

"That's not..." Lexander's voice came out rough. "Sera, that is not the same thing."

"I know it's not. I know you love me. I know he doesn't. I know you'd put yourself between me and anything that walks, and I know he'd put a collar on me and call it a house." She leaned forward. "But you sat there and moved me off the board without asking. Into a room with no windows. With my son. Tonight." Her voice didn't rise. It got quieter, the way Father's does. "You talked about me the whole time I was sitting right here. You and Mother. She goes to Concordia. She goes further. We've talked about it. You talked about it. Did either of you think to talk about it with me?"

Io, at the window, had gone very still.

"You raised me on Rysa's rules," Seraphina said. "Both of you. You sat in the nursery and watched her teach them to us. Name. Want. Permission." She put her hand flat on the board, among the pieces. "You never asked me what I want."

Lexander's jaw worked. He did not say anything.

"Ask me," said Seraphina.

The sun had nearly gone. The room was going red and gold, and then gray at the edges, and the pieces on the board threw long shadows across the grid.

"What do you want?" Lexander said. Hoarsely. Like a man who has never in two lifetimes had to ask that question of anyone.

"I want to stay here," said Seraphina. "In my husband's house. In our rooms, with the window that looks over the east wall, where we eat breakfast. I want my son to grow up in the same castle where I grew up, with his great-grandmother's kettle on every morning, and his great-grandfather carving him horses, and a Castellan who knows his name. I want to go on living the way I've lived. And if anyone comes for me, I want to be standing in my own doorway when they knock. Not hiding in a room with no windows on the other side of the world, waiting for someone else to tell me it's safe to come out."

She took a breath.

"And I want you to burn those ships," she said, "if they need burning. But I want the Council to decide that. All forty chairs. Not you, at a little table, with your one eye and your old game, because you're frightened for me. Because if you do it that way, Father, then you've done exactly what he does. You've decided. For everyone. Alone."

Lexander sat back in his chair as if she had struck him.

* * *

For a long moment, nobody moved.

Then, from the window, Io laughed.

It was not a happy sound. It cracked in the middle, and came out half a sob, and she put the back of her hand against her mouth to stop it. But it was a laugh. I heard it.

"Oh, she's mine," Io said. "Lex. Lex, look at her. She's mine."

"She's mine too," said Lexander, very quietly.

"She's hers," said Io. She came away from the window, across the round room, and knelt down beside Seraphina's chair, in her long red dress, on the bare floor, and took Seraphina's face in both her hands. "That's what she's telling us. She's hers. And I knew that. I've always known that. I just..." Her voice went. She shook her head. "I just forgot. For a week. I was so frightened, I forgot."

"I know, Mother."

"I burned a siege tower once," said Io, "because it was in the way of my sunset."

"I know, Mother. Everyone knows."

"I would burn every ship on the western sea for you. Every one. I'd do it tonight. I'd do it alone, if your father wouldn't come." Io's thumbs moved on Seraphina's cheeks, wiping at something. "But I'd ask you first. From now on. I promise. I'll ask you first."

Seraphina put her arms around her mother's neck.

Little Uriah, squashed between them, took the dark piece out of his mouth, considered the situation, and said, with great firmness:

"Jam."

Io let go of Seraphina and burst out laughing properly, the real way, the way that makes windows rattle, and took little Uriah off Seraphina's lap and held him up in the last of the red light from the window.

"Yes," she told him. "Yes, you're quite right. Jam. That's the only sensible thing anybody's said in this room all evening."

At the table, Lexander had not moved.

He was looking down at the board. At the gap in the pale pieces where Seraphina's little piece had been. At the long line of dark pieces on the far edge, and his own small army, halfway up the board toward them, frozen mid-attack.

Then, very slowly, one piece at a time, he began to put them all back where they had started.

* * *

Io took Seraphina and little Uriah down to the kitchen. "To find him some actual jam," she said, "and then Helena and I are going to have a very long cup of tea, and nobody is invited." She paused in the doorway and looked back at Lexander, and then at me. "Either of you."

So I stayed.

Lexander finished putting the pieces back. It took a long time. He did it carefully, each one in its proper square, the dark army around the edge and the pale army around the center and the king in the middle of everything, in his little carved crown. When he was done, he sat looking at it.

The sun was gone. The room was gray. Somebody should have lit the lamps. Nobody did.

"She's right," Lexander said at last.

I didn't say anything.

"She's right, and I knew she was right while I was doing it. That's the worst part." He rubbed his face with one big hand. "I could feel it. Moving the pieces. That old feeling, from the other life. When you can see the whole board, every piece, every move, and you know exactly what needs to be done, and you do it, and you don't ask anyone, because why would you? You're the one who can see." He was quiet for a moment. "I gave an eye for that, once. To see everything. It's a very expensive way of learning to stop looking at people."

I had never heard him talk about the other life like that. Not plainly. He jokes about it sometimes, about the ravens, and the cloak, and the time he hung on a tree for nine days, which he says was not as interesting as people think. He does not usually talk about what it cost.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

He looked up.

"The god," I said. "The one they won't name. Malachar's father." I hesitated. "Ansel knows who it is. He won't say. Not in the great hall. And you've got the memories. From before."

Lexander was quiet for a long time.

"I don't know his name," he said finally. "I want to be clear about that. I don't. But I think I know what he is."

He reached out and touched the edge of the board. Not a piece. The wood around them, worn smooth by two lifetimes of hands.

"In the other life," he said, "there were feasts. Long ones. In a great hall with a roof of shields. Everyone came. Every god, every hero, every fool with a story to tell. And there was always someone at the very end of the table. Right at the end, by the door, where the firelight doesn't quite reach. Nobody ever invited him. Nobody ever saw him come in. But he was always there."

The back of my neck went cold.

"He never ate," said Lexander. "He never drank. He never said anything. He just sat there, at the end of the bench, and watched. And wanted. You could feel it. Like a draft under a door. Every cup that went past him, every plate, every beautiful thing, every person who laughed. He wanted all of it. Not to use. Not to enjoy. Just to have. To hold." Lexander's one eye was very far away. "We never let him in. Not properly. We never gave him a seat at the table. We never gave him a name. We thought that if we didn't name him, he couldn't take anything. That he'd stay at the end of the bench forever and never come any closer."

He looked down at the board.

"I've been thinking," he said, "that that might have been a mistake."

"Why?"

"Because a thing with no name," said Lexander, "can't be told no."

We sat there in the gray room for a long time.

* * *

When I finally got up to go, Lexander stopped me.

"Garrick."

I turned.

He picked up the king piece from the center of the board. The little carved one, with the crown. He held it out to me.

"For the boy," he said. "When he's old enough. Or now, if he wants to chew on it. It's survived worse."

I took it. It was warm from the room, and smooth, and older than anything I own.

"You know how the game works," Lexander said. "The king doesn't move far. He can't. He's not strong enough to fight his way out alone. All the other pieces move. The whole game is them, moving, to keep him safe." He looked at me with his one eye. "I've played it ten thousand times, in two lives. And I have always, always played it that way. Everyone else moving. For the one in the middle."

He sat back.

"Your wife just told me the king can walk," he said. "On her own feet. Into her own doorway. And I don't know how to play that game. I've never seen it played."

"Neither have I," I said.

"No." Lexander almost smiled. "But I think we're going to have to learn."

I went down to the kitchen. Io and Helena were at the scrubbed table with a teapot between them and their heads close together, and they did not look up. Seraphina was at the stove with little Uriah, who had jam on his face, his hands, his hair, and one ear.

I gave him the king.

He looked at it very seriously. Turned it over. Felt the little crown with his sticky thumb.

Then he put it carefully on the table, standing up, all by itself. And stood back from it, holding on to his mother's skirt, and looked at it as if he were waiting to see where it would go.