Chapter 33: The Library Fire

Carol was sitting on the floor of her room with her hands in her lap, holding them.

That was the first thing I saw when I came through the door at the top of the hundred and forty steps, out of breath, with Seraphina's handprint still burning on my chest. Not holding something. Holding them. Her own hands. The right one wrapped tight around the left, knuckles white, the way you'd hold a dog by the collar when there's a cat in the yard.

She looked up at me. She didn't seem surprised.

"You too," she said.

It wasn't a question. Nothing between Carol and me ever really is.

I shut the door and sat down on the floor across from her, the way we'd sat three nights before, and told her. The kitchen. The cups. Mother's eyes sliding off me like water off a window. Little Uriah's Da. My own name, said out loud, and the room slamming back into place around me like a door.

She listened all the way through without letting go of her hands.

"How long?" she said, when I'd finished.

"Since the quay, I think. I just didn't notice." I laughed. It didn't come out right. "That's sort of the point of it."

"Five days." She nodded slowly. "I've had mine four."

"Show me."

She didn't want to. I could feel her not wanting to, through the bond, like a held breath. But she let go of her left hand, very carefully, one finger at a time, and held it out over the floor between us, palm down.

There was a candle on the sill behind her, in a brass stick. It had been burning when I came in. I'd noticed it without noticing it, the way you notice candles.

Carol turned her hand over. Slowly. And closed it. Not tight. Just a little. The way you'd close your fingers around something small you didn't want to drop.

The candle flame stopped.

It didn't go out. It just stopped. It stood up off the wick in a little perfect teardrop of yellow, and didn't flicker, and didn't sway, and didn't move, the way a flame in a painting doesn't move. The thin thread of smoke above it hung in the air like a hair. The wax that had been running down the side of the candle stopped halfway down, in a bead, and stayed there.

Carol opened her hand.

The flame flickered. The smoke drifted. The bead of wax ran down and hit the brass.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

"The kettle," said Carol at last. "On the first morning. Ignatius made tea. I picked up the cup and I thought, I wish this would stay hot, the way you do. And it did. For an hour. It never cooled down. Not a degree. Not until I put it down and let go." She looked at her hands. "The curtains, the next day. There was a draft and I didn't want them moving, and they stopped. Mid-swing. Just hung there, sideways, in the air. Ignatius saw. I told him it was a trick of the light." Her voice dropped. "Yesterday a sparrow came to the sill. And I thought how pretty it was, and I wished it would stay a moment. And it did. In the middle of a hop. With its wings half open." She closed her eyes. "Only for a heartbeat. I let go as soon as I felt it. It flew off. It was all right." She opened them again. "It was all right, Garrick."

I didn't say anything.

"My hands were warm," said Carol. "Do you remember? After the hall. After I broke the stone in the circlet and told Severin not anymore. The cold went out of them. They were warm for weeks." She looked down. "They've been cold again since the river. And I thought it was just the fright. But it isn't. It's this." She turned her hand over in front of her, and I watched her not close it. "It's holding. That's what it is. That's all it is. I stood next to the thing at the top of that river, and it touched me, and now I can hold anything I want, for as long as I want. A flame. A cup of tea. A bird." She swallowed. "A river."

"Carol."

"That's why I've been sitting on them." She laughed, the small hard laugh. "I'm frightened to want anything. Every time I like something, I feel my fingers start to close."

* * *

We sat there on the floor for a long time.

I'd always known, in the way you know things you've never had to look at, that what Carol and I are is dangerous. Rysa knew. Aurelia knew. That's why we had the rules before we could read. But I'd always thought of it the way you think of a river behind your house. Deep. Something to be careful near. Something that could drown somebody else.

I'd never once thought it could drown us.

"We keep everything," said Carol quietly. "Everything we're near. We always have. We never get to choose."

"We chose once."

She looked up.

"Three nights ago," I said. "With little Uriah. In the nursery." I told her. The fire under the ash, warmer than anything, coming up out of him to meet me. Up. How easy it would have been. How it had wanted to come in, the way everything always comes in. And how I'd asked him, and he'd said jam, and I'd said no. Not to him. To it. To the mimicry. To the whole of what we are.

"And it stayed out," I said. "It went back down in him, like a dog lying down by a door. I didn't keep it. I didn't keep it, Carol."

She was staring at me.

"You said no to it," she said slowly. "To the keeping."

"I think so."

"Nobody's ever said no to the keeping. We've never said no to it. We didn't know you could." She sat up straight. Her hands came apart in her lap, and I saw her notice, and not put them back together. "If you can say no to it coming in..."

"...then maybe we can say no to it staying," I said.

We looked at each other.

"Name," said Carol, very softly. "Want. Permission. Stop."

"Stop's the one we never practiced," I said. "Not on ourselves."

"Then we start." She held out both her hands, open, palms up, across the floor between us. Warm or cold, I couldn't tell. "Every morning. Before anything else. You say my name, and I say yours. Out loud. So we can't stop being noticed. So we can't start holding." She looked at me. "And if you ever see me closing my hand on something that isn't mine to keep, you say stop. And I'll stop. Whatever it is. Even if I don't want to."

"Especially if you don't want to."

"Especially then." She almost smiled. "And the same for you. If you start to go thin at the edges. If I can't find you at the table. I'll say your name until you come back."

I took her hands.

"Carol Grey," I said.

"Garrick Grey."

Behind her, on the sill, the candle flame flickered and swayed and burned down, the way candles are supposed to.

* * *

The bell rang in Concordia a little after nine that night.

We heard it in Greykeep. Everyone did. The big bronze bell in the palace tower, the one they ring for fires and for nothing else, came through the Concordia gate as clearly as if it were hanging in our own lower hall. The Castellan stood up from its ledger and turned its head toward the arch and said, quite calmly, "Fire," and wrote it down. And then Ignatius came through the gate at a run, with his sleeves pushed up and soot on his face, and saw me at the foot of the stair, and didn't stop running.

"The archive," he said. "The Ember Room. Come on."

I went. I didn't think. Seraphina was behind me, with little Uriah handed off to Helena so fast I didn't see it happen. The Castellan wrote us through without a word. Concordia's side of the gate was full of smoke and running feet and shouting, palace guards in their red coats with buckets, a line of them passing water hand to hand down a long stone corridor I'd walked a thousand times and didn't recognize in the smoke.

The Ember Room is under the old palace, two floors down, in the oldest part of Concordia, where the walls are so thick you could sleep in the windows. Io brought it with her from Dinar, when she married Lexander, all of it: four hundred years of records, packed into cedar chests and carried over the mountains on mules. Every bearer of the First Flame who ever lived, as far back as anyone had written them down. Their names, and their births, and their deaths, and what they could do, and what it cost them. Healers and burners. Queens and beggars. Io's own name, near the end of the last book. Ignatius's under it, and Seraphina's, in Io's own hand.

I'd been down there once, as a boy, with Seraphina, when she was showing off. I remembered a low round room lined with cedar shelves, and a long table, and a smell like warm wood and old paper and something else, something like the air just after lightning. Io keeps it locked. She keeps the key on a chain around her neck.

The door was standing open.

And the fire behind it was white.

* * *

I've seen a lot of fire in my life. I married into the First Flame. I've seen Seraphina cut a stone wall in half with a line of it no thicker than a thread, and Ignatius warm a frozen man back to life with his bare hands, and Serevan the phoenix come down out of the sky burning in every color there is. But I'd never seen fire like that.

It wasn't big. That was the strange thing. It filled one corner of the room, one set of shelves at the far end, and it didn't spread. It didn't need to. It burned straight up, white at the heart and gold at the edges, without any smoke of its own, without any sound. The smoke that filled the corridor came from everything around it, the cedar and the paper and the plaster of the ceiling beginning to scorch. The fire itself was silent. It stood in the corner like a tall, still, burning figure, and the guards' water hit it and turned to steam before it touched anything at all.

Lexander was there, in his shirtsleeves, with an axe, his one eye red from the smoke. Io was beside him with her hands up and her face set, pushing against it, and I could feel what she was doing even from the door: the healing side of the Flame, the gentle side, reaching into the white fire and trying to talk it down, the way you'd talk down a frightened horse.

It wasn't listening.

"It won't go out," Io said, without turning around. Her voice was very calm. That's how I knew how frightened she was. "It's not ordinary fire. It's ours. It's Flame. It won't answer me." She took a breath. "Ignatius."

Ignatius was already beside her, hands up. Seraphina pushed past me and stood at her mother's other shoulder. The three of them, the three bearers of the First Flame in Concordia, stood in a row in front of that silent white fire with their hands raised, and I felt them reach into it together, gentle and kind and sharp, all three sides of it at once.

The fire leaned toward them. Just a little. Like something that recognized them.

And then went on burning.

"It's been lit," said Seraphina, through her teeth. "Somebody lit it. With Flame. And told it to stay lit." She was white to the lips. "It doesn't care what we say. It's already been told."

Lexander lifted the axe. "Then I'll take the shelves out from under it."

"Father, it'll go up the wall..."

I looked at the fire. Then at my own hands.

Borrow? I thought. To my father. Who was in Greykeep, on the far side of a gate, asleep in his socks, and couldn't hear me.

I knew what he'd say. I've known what he'd say to that question since I was three.

Take.

So I took.

I've had my father's winter in me for as long as I can remember. Not the storm. The other half. The frost hammer. The cold that comes down off the mountains in the last week of the year and stops the river in a single night. I'd used it before, a little, to cool tea, to freeze a pond for skating when Faelan was small. I'd never used it like this.

I walked past Io and Lexander and the three of them with their hands raised, and I put both my own hands out flat toward that white burning corner, and I poured.

It wasn't like Carol's frost. Carol's frost climbs. Father's cold doesn't climb. It falls. It came down out of me like a winter night coming down on a valley, all at once, heavy and dark and absolute, and the air in the Ember Room went from blazing to bitter in the space of one breath. The guards' buckets froze in their hands. The water on the floor went white. The ceiling cracked with cold. And the white fire in the corner, the fire that wouldn't listen to the First Flame, that had been told to stay lit, met my father's winter, and bent.

It didn't go out. Not at first. It fought. I felt it fight. It had been told to burn, and it wanted to burn, and it pushed back against the cold like a living thing, and for a long, long moment we stood there, the fire and I, pushing.

Then Seraphina put her hand flat between my shoulder blades.

I don't know what she did. I've never asked. I think she just reminded the fire who I was married to.

It went out.

Not with a hiss. Not with smoke. It just stopped, all at once, the way a voice stops in the middle of a word, and the corner of the Ember Room was dark, and frozen, and full of black ash.

* * *

Nobody said anything for a while.

The guards stood in the doorway with their frozen buckets. Lexander lowered the axe. Io put her hand on the cracked plaster of the wall and leaned on it, breathing hard. Ignatius had his arm around Seraphina. My hands were shaking. They were so cold I couldn't feel them.

"Thank you," said Io, at last. Very quietly. "Garrick. Thank you."

"I asked," I said. It came out a little stupid. "I asked Father. In my head. He'd have said yes."

Io looked at me. Something moved in her face. Then she nodded, once, the way she does when someone has said something she wants to remember.

"Yes," she said. "He would."

The rest of the room was almost untouched. That was the strangest thing about it. The long table, the cedar shelves on three walls, the old chests from Dinar, the lamps: scorched, smoke-blackened, wet, but whole. The fire had burned in one corner, on one set of shelves, and nowhere else. As if it had been aimed.

Io crossed the room to that corner.

She stood in front of the shelves, or what was left of them. Black, crumbling wood, coated in frost. And on them, and under them, on the frozen floor, a great soft heap of ash, gray-white and fine as flour, with here and there a curl of something that might once have been a page.

She didn't touch it. She just stood and looked.

"What was there?" said Lexander.

Io didn't answer for a long moment.

"The lineage," she said. "The books of the line. Not the histories. Not the stories. Just the names." Her voice was very steady. "Who carried the Flame. Who they were born to. Who they passed it on to. Every bearer, back to the very first one, in an unbroken line. Nine books. The oldest is older than Dinar." She looked down at the ash. "That's how you find a bearer. That's the only way. You follow the line. You look at who carried it last, and who they loved, and who their children were. And you know where to look next."

Seraphina had gone very still in Ignatius's arm.

"Mother," she said. "The last book."

Io closed her eyes.

"I wrote in it two months ago," she said. "The morning after the phoenix. When Serevan bowed to the ground in front of him, and said the fire knows him." Her hand had gone to the chain around her neck, to the key that hadn't kept anyone out. "I came down here that night, and I sat at that table, and I opened the last book, and I wrote his name. Under Seraphina's. In my own hand. The way my mother wrote mine."

Uriah Grey. Son of Seraphina, daughter of Io. Greykeep.

She didn't have to say it. I could see it. I could see her writing it, by lamplight, alone, with her careful healer's hands.

"And now it's ash," said Lexander slowly.

"Now it's ash." Io opened her eyes. "Every name in every book. Back to the first." She looked at the heap on the frozen floor. "Somebody came into my locked room, with a fire that wouldn't listen to me, and burned the line."

Seraphina turned and looked at me over her brother's arm.

I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking it too. I'd felt it in the nursery, three nights before, banked under the ash, warmer than anything, older than both their fires. What if I'm just the one who was carrying it last?

You don't burn a list of names unless you're afraid somebody else will read it.

Or unless you've already read it, and you want to be the only one who has.