Chapter 28: The Watched Ships

Father sends me to Westmere every eighth day.

It isn't an order, exactly. Father doesn't give me orders, the way he doesn't give anyone orders unless the building is on fire. He just says, at breakfast, "Is it Westmere today?" and I say yes, and he says, "Give Tamar my best. And look," and I go.

And look. That's the whole of it. Tamar Vale has eyes, and a harbor watch, and a steward's ledger he keeps as carefully as Mary keeps hers, and he sends a letter through the gate every evening that the Castellan files under Westmere, ships, nothing. But Father wants someone from the family to stand on the harbor wall once a week and look at the three black ships with his own eyes, and I'm the one who can fold home from the coast if something goes wrong. So it's me.

I went on a gray morning at the very end of the first week of Iselle's term, two days after Caitlin's notebook, with the Castellan's new line still sitting in my head like a stone in a shoe. To be found.

"Garrick Grey," said the Castellan, at the Westmere arch. "Outward. Westmere." It wrote. Then it paused, with its pen over the page. "Look carefully."

It had never said that before. I looked at it.

"I will," I said.

* * *

Westmere Hold isn't like Greykeep. It doesn't stand up. It doesn't write in a ledger, or know your name, or have opinions about the doors. It's older and lower and wetter, a great squat ring of salt-stained stone built half into the harbor, with channels running under it where the sea comes in and out twice a day. Whatever's awake in it lives down there, in the water. You can't talk to it. But if you stand still in the lower court where the gate comes out, you can feel it humming in the stones under your boots, low and steady, like a cat that's decided to tolerate you.

That morning it was humming the way a cat hums when there's a dog in the yard.

Tamar was waiting for me at the top of the water stair. He's a few years older than me, broad in the shoulders, with his father's square jaw and his mother's patience, and he always looks as if he's been up since before dawn because he always has been. He had his steward's coat on and his watch book under his arm. He shook my hand.

"You're early," he said.

"The Castellan told me to look carefully."

Tamar's face changed, very slightly. "Did it."

"Is something wrong?"

He didn't answer straight away. He turned and walked me out along the top of the harbor wall instead, the way we always go, with the wind coming off the water and the gulls wheeling and shrieking overhead, and the whole wide gray bay of Westmere spread out to our left. The fishing boats were out. The salt pans along the shore were steaming in the cold. The long stone arm of the mole curved out into the bay and back again, like a hand cupped around the harbor to keep it safe.

And inside the hand, a stone's throw from the end of the town pier, the three black ships.

They hadn't moved. They never move. Eight weeks they had sat there, ever since the morning the other fifty-seven went west on their string, three long low black hulls riding at anchor in a row, with their green-and-white merchant pennants snapping in the wind and their black sails furled and the pale script on their hulls crawling at the edge of your sight if you looked at it too long.

But they weren't the same as they'd been at the start. That was the thing nobody tells you about frightening things. If they stay long enough, they get ordinary.

There were sailors on deck now, in plain brown and gray, coiling ropes and hanging washing between the masts. Somebody on the near ship was frying fish again. A small boat was rowing out from the pier with sacks of flour and a basket of onions. Two Westmere children were sitting on the end of the pier with their legs dangling, throwing bread to a gull, and nobody was shouting at them to come away.

"The market likes them," said Tamar. "That's the worst of it. They pay in good silver, and they never haggle, and they bought every onion in the town last week and then asked very politely where they could buy more." He shook his head. "Old Mother Kitto sold them her whole winter store of pickled herring and came up the hill to tell me they were the best customers she'd had in forty years."

"And Severin?"

"Reads." Tamar pointed with his chin. "There. See?"

I saw. On the stern deck of the near ship, under a little gray awning, a lean figure in a long gray coat sat in a chair with his legs crossed and a book on his knee. As I watched, he turned a page.

"Every morning at seven," said Tamar, "he comes up on deck and lifts his hand to the harbor wall. To me, if I'm here. To whoever's on watch if I'm not. Then he sits down and reads until dark." He opened his watch book and showed me: 7th hour. S.D. on deck. Hand raised. Fifty-six days of it. "He's asked to come ashore four times. I gave him leave every time. He went where he said, and came back before dark, and told me afterward what he'd said to everyone. Word for word, as far as I could tell." He closed the book. "I don't know what to do with a man like that."

"Nobody does," I said. "Father says he's the most honest dangerous man he's ever met."

"Your father's right."

We walked on. And then we stopped, the way we always stopped, at the place on the wall where you can see the bow of the middle ship straight on.

He was still there.

The Lockwarden. Tall, and bare-headed, and gray, standing at the very point of the bow with his hands at his sides and his face toward the town, exactly as he'd been standing the morning the fleet left. In eight weeks I had never once seen him move. Not to eat, not to sit, not to turn his head. The rain ran off him. The gulls wouldn't land within ten yards of him. The one small link of black iron on his left wrist caught the light when the sun came out, and that was the only part of him that ever looked alive.

The town had a rule about him. Father's rule, carried by Tamar, nailed to the door of the harbor office and read out at the fish market and the chapel and the Saltwife tavern on the quay. Nobody asks him anything. Not his name. Not what he wants. Not whether he'd like a cup of tea or a blanket or a word. A door that nobody asks about stays shut.

"It's the not-asking that's hard," said Tamar quietly, looking at him. "You'd think it'd be easy. Just don't talk to the man. But you have no idea how much a town wants to ask. Every child in Westmere has dared every other child to shout something at him. Every fishwife on the quay has an opinion about whether he's cold. The priest wanted to bless him. I had to stop old Dunmore on the night shift from rowing out with a bowl of soup." He was quiet for a moment. "People are kind, Garrick. That's the trouble. It's a kind town. And kind people want to ask."

I looked at the gray figure on the bow.

"What's happened, Tamar?"

Tamar didn't take his eyes off the ship.

"Hobb Kitto didn't come home last night," he said.

* * *

Hobb Kitto was twenty-six years old and worked the night shift on the north pier, which is the pier nearest the ships.

Tamar told me about him as we walked down to it. Mother Kitto's youngest. The herring woman's son. A big, slow, cheerful man with hands like shovels who had been unloading boats on the Westmere quay since he was fourteen, and who knew the name of every sailor, every fishwife, every cat and every gull that came within a mile of the harbor. He couldn't read much. He could count anything. He had never been late for a shift in twelve years, or missed one, or left one early.

"He was on the tally board last night," said Tamar. "The Kethran lighters were bringing in grain. They come in after dark, two or three boats a night, and our men unload them onto the pier, and Hobb counts the sacks and chalks them up. Dunmore was foreman. Six men on the shift." He stopped at the head of the north pier. "At the third bell Dunmore went up to the harbor office for the lamp oil. When he came back, the other five were still working the far end, and Hobb wasn't at the board."

"Nobody saw him go?"

"Nobody saw anything."

The north pier is long and old and black with tar, with a little roofed shed at the end where they keep the tally board and the hooks. It was quiet in the morning. A few men were sitting on the bollards near the shore end, smoking, not talking, looking at their boots. One of them was very old and very broad, with a white beard and a knitted cap, and when he saw Tamar he got up.

"Steward."

"Dunmore. This is Garrick Grey. The king's son."

Dunmore looked at me. He had small, red-rimmed, sleepless eyes in a face like a walnut.

"You'll find him?" he said.

"I'll look," I said. It was the only honest thing I could say.

He took us down the pier.

The tally board was still there, propped on its easel by the shed, with its chalk on a string. Hobb's tally ran down it in neat bundles of five, four strokes and a line across, row after row, sacks of Kethran grain. The last bundle had only three strokes in it. The chalk was hanging by its string, swinging very slightly in the wind.

On the bollard next to the board, someone had folded a pair of heavy leather work gloves. Neatly. One on top of the other. The way you fold gloves when you're putting them down for a minute and you mean to come back for them.

And beside the gloves, a lantern. Still lit. Burned very low, guttering in the morning light, but lit.

"Nobody's touched them," said Dunmore. "Steward said not to."

"Hobb always takes his gloves off to do the chalk," said one of the other men, from behind us. "Can't hold the chalk in them. Big hands."

I stood and looked at the gloves for a long time.

Then I looked up.

From the end of the north pier, the bow of the middle black ship was perhaps forty yards away across the water. You could see the gray figure on it very clearly from there. Clearer than from the wall. You could see the shape of his face, and the folds of his long gray coat, and the black iron link on his wrist.

He was looking straight at the tally board. Straight at the gloves.

Of course he was. He was always looking at the town. And the tally board was the nearest piece of the town to him there was.

"Did Hobb ever talk to him?" I said.

Nobody answered.

I turned around. The five men of the night shift were standing behind Dunmore, in a little knot, not looking at me. Dunmore was looking at his boots.

"He'd say good evening," said Dunmore at last, very low.

Tamar went very still beside me.

"Every night," said Dunmore. "When he came on shift. He'd come down the pier and he'd lift his hand to the man on the ship and say Evening. Same as he'd say it to anyone. Same as he'd say it to the gulls. He said it to the gulls, Steward. Every night of his life." He looked up, and his old red eyes were wet. "The rule said don't ask. It didn't say don't say good evening. Hobb said good evening wasn't asking. It was just manners. He said a man standing out there in the cold all night with nobody saying a word to him, it wasn't right. It wasn't how we do things in Westmere."

"Did the man ever answer?"

The night shift looked at each other.

"Last week," said one of them. A young one, thin, with a burned hand. "Tuesday, maybe. Hobb said Evening, like always. And the man on the ship said Evening back."

Nobody said anything.

"Just the once," said the young one. "Just Evening. Soft, like. You could barely hear it over the water. Hobb was pleased as anything. Said he knew there was someone in there. Said nobody could stand out in the cold that long and not be glad of a bit of company." He swallowed. "And then a couple of nights ago, on the break, he said to me... he said, you think he's cold, up there? And I said, Hobb, the rule. And he said he knew the rule. He said he wasn't going to ask him. He was only asking me."

The wind came across the water.

On the bow of the middle ship, the Lockwarden stood with his hands at his sides and looked at the gloves.

* * *

Mother Kitto lives at the top of Rope Street in a narrow house that smells of salt and vinegar and fish, with a blue door and a row of herring barrels outside it. She was sitting on one of the barrels when we came up the hill, in her apron, with her hands in her lap, looking down the street toward the harbor. She didn't get up. She knew Tamar. She looked at me, and knew who I was, the way people in the far towns always do, from the coat or the hair or the way the steward walks beside me.

"You'll want his room," she said.

"Only if you'll let us," I said.

She looked at me a while longer. Then she nodded at the blue door.

Hobb's room was at the top of the house, under the roof, very small and very tidy. A bed. A chair. A shelf with a few things on it: a carved gull, a tin whistle, a jar of buttons, a child's slate with his name chalked on it in big careful capitals, HOBB, as if someone had once written it for him to copy and he had never had the heart to rub it out.

On the hook behind the door hung a heavy wool coat. A good one. Thick, oiled, dark blue, with horn buttons. The kind of coat a dockworker saves for half a year to buy, to wear on the night shift in the winter, out on the end of a pier in the wind.

The hook beside it was empty.

"He had two," said Mother Kitto from the doorway. Her voice was very steady. "His good one and his old one. Brown. Patched at the elbows. I told him a hundred times to throw it out." She looked at the empty hook. "He took the old one with him last night. Over his arm. I saw him go down the street with it. I said, Hobb, it's not that cold, what do you want with two coats? And he said..."

She stopped.

"He said it wasn't for him," she said.

* * *

Tamar rowed us out himself.

We didn't have to discuss it. The rule was that nobody asks the man on the bow anything. Nobody had ever made a rule about asking Severin Dask things. Father had said, the morning Severin left Greykeep, if you have a question, ask him. He'll answer it, or he'll tell you he can't. That's more than most.

Severin was waiting at the rail of the near ship when we came alongside. He had put his book down. He had seen us on the north pier, I suppose, and then at the top of Rope Street, and then coming back down again, and he had understood all of it, the way he always seems to understand all of it, a little ahead of everyone else.

"Steward," he said. "Garrick." He looked at our faces. "Someone's missing."

"Hobb Kitto," said Tamar. "Night shift. North pier. He went off the tally board at the third bell and hasn't been seen since."

"The big man," said Severin. "With the gloves. Who says good evening." He closed his eyes for a moment. "Yes. I know him. Everyone on this ship knows him. He sold my cook four barrels of his mother's herring and wouldn't take a tip." He opened his eyes. "Ask me what you came to ask me, Garrick. I'll answer if I can."

"Did he come aboard last night?"

"I don't know." He said it plainly, without hurry. "I go below at the second bell. I read for an hour and I sleep. My crew stand an anchor watch on the stern, not the bow. Nobody stands watch on the bow of that ship." He didn't look at the middle ship. He didn't have to. "Nobody needs to."

"Can you ask your crew?"

"I already have. At first light, when I saw your Dunmore standing on the pier looking at a pair of gloves." He gave a very small, tired smile. "Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything. I believe them. They're merchant sailors from the Orrin coast. They're more frightened of him than you are."

"Can you go and look?" I said. "At the middle ship. At the bow."

Severin was quiet for a moment.

"Yes," he said. "That I can do."

* * *

We waited in the boat while a sailor rowed him across. We watched him go up the rope ladder, slowly, and walk forward along the deck in his long gray coat until he stood a few paces behind the Lockwarden. The two gray figures, the one that moved and the one that didn't.

He stood there for a while. Then he bent down and picked something up off the deck, and stood for a while longer, looking at the boards.

Then he spoke.

I couldn't hear what he said. It was too far, and the wind was wrong. But I could see him say it. A short question, very polite, the way he says everything. His head a little to one side.

The Lockwarden didn't turn.

Severin waited. Then he said it again. Slower.

Nothing.

Even from thirty yards, across the water, I saw Severin's shoulders change. I'd seen him stand in Father's hall and be told no by a king, and a queen, and my wife, and my sister, and a small werewolf girl who wanted to know if he was the bad man. I had never once seen him look like that. Like a man who has put his foot on a stair he's climbed ten thousand times in the dark and found it isn't there.

He came back down the ladder much faster than he'd gone up.

When the boat bumped against ours, he didn't climb back onto his own ship. He sat in the stern with his hands on his knees, and he held out to me what he had picked up off the deck.

It was a coat.

Brown wool. Old. Patched at both elbows with squares of darker cloth, in big, uneven, careful stitches, the way a man sews who has very large hands and has never been taught but wants to do it properly anyway. Folded neatly into a square. The way you'd fold a coat to give it to someone.

Tamar made a sound in his throat.

"It was at his feet," said Severin. His voice was quite level. Only his hands weren't. "On the deck. Right under his feet, where nobody on the shore could see it, below the rail." He looked at me. "And there's writing."

"Writing?"

"Chalk. On the deck boards, beside it." He reached into his coat, and took out his little notebook and a pencil, and drew it for me on a clean page, very carefully, the way a man does who has spent his whole life copying things exactly. Four letters. Curling, angular, running the right way around. Their way around.

I knew the letters now. Caitlin had made me a fair copy of her alphabet, the morning after the Castellan, on a single folded sheet, with the sounds written beside each one in her small square hand, and I'd carried it in my coat pocket ever since. I took it out. My fingers were cold. I held it beside Severin's page in the wind, and found them one by one.

A breath. A round sound. A hard sound. The same hard sound again.

"Hobb," I said.

Nobody answered me.

It wasn't a message. That was the worst of it. It wasn't help, or I'm here, or tell my mother. It was just his name. Written down neatly and left on the boards beside his coat. The way the Castellan writes your name in the ledger when you go through its gate. The way a clerk at a customs house writes down a sack of grain.

Received.

"Who wrote it?" said Tamar. "Him?"

"He doesn't write," said Severin. "I've never seen him hold a pen. I've never seen him hold anything." He looked down at the brown coat in my hands. "I asked him where the man was. The man who brought him this. I'm permitted to ask him things. I'm the only one aboard who is." He was quiet for a moment. "He's always answered me. Twenty-two years, Garrick. Every question. Politely. Truthfully. That's what he is. That's how he works." He looked across at the middle ship. "He didn't answer."

"What would he have said?" I said. "To Hobb. If Hobb asked him. If Hobb rowed out last night with his old coat over his arm and stood under the bow and asked him if he was cold, and if he wanted anything. What would he have said?"

Severin looked at me for a long time.

"The truth," he said. "He'd have told him exactly what he wanted. He always does. Politely. That's what makes it work. Nobody ever lies to a kind man who asks." He shook his head, slowly. "And then your Hobb would have tried to give it to him. Because that's what kind men do, when they ask someone what they want."

"What does he want?"

And Severin Dask, who had told my father everything he could tell him, word for word, as far as any of us could ever tell, looked down at his own gloved hands in the stern of the boat.

"I don't know," he said. "In twenty-two years, I've never once asked him."

* * *

Tamar put a new rule on the harbor office door before dark.

Nobody speaks to the ships. Not a question. Not a greeting. Not good evening. Not a word.

He nailed it up himself, under Father's old one, with the hammer from the harbor office drawer, and stood back and looked at it, and I watched him hate every word of it. It wasn't how they did things in Westmere.

We gave the coat back to Mother Kitto. She took it in both hands and held it against her chest and didn't say anything at all. Tamar doubled the watch and sent a rider up the coast road to every fishing village between Westmere and the marshes. Has anyone seen a big man in a work shirt, with no coat. I don't think either of us expected an answer.

Edric was on the harbor wall when I left. He was sitting in his usual place, with his line in the water and his hat over his eyes, and he hadn't caught anything, and he didn't look as if he'd been trying.

"Hobb used to say good evening to the gulls," he said, as I went past. He didn't look up. "Did they tell you that?"

"They told me."

"Every night. Never missed one." Edric reeled his line in a little, and let it out again. "The gulls never answered him. He didn't mind. He said it wasn't about whether they answered." He was quiet for a moment. "Seems to me something finally did."

I stood beside him on the wall, in the last of the light, and looked out across the harbor at the three black ships.

The sun was going down behind them. Out past the mole, the sea was turning copper, and the gulls were wheeling home, and down on the north pier the new night shift was coming on: Dunmore and four men, and three more of Tamar's watch with lanterns and cudgels, walking out along the tarred boards in a tight knot with their eyes on their feet. Nobody lifted a hand. Nobody said good evening. The only sound was their boots on the wood and the slap of the water under the pier.

And on the bow of the middle ship, for the first time in eight weeks, the Lockwarden moved.

Not much. Hardly at all. If I hadn't been looking straight at him, I wouldn't have seen it.

He lifted one hand. Slowly. Palm out, toward the north pier, toward the men coming on shift.

The way a man lifts his hand when he's saying good evening.

Nobody on the pier looked up. Nobody answered.

He held it there until the sun was gone.