Chapter 320: What Does That Mean?

He had meant it as a gift. A foolish one. A thing for a child who wasn’t yet born, carved by a man who had decided, with the vast absurd certainty of the very clever and very young, that it would be a girl. He remembered sitting by the fire in the cottage Elara kept on the edge of the temple grounds, working the little knife, and her teasing him gently for the lump of wood on his knee.

What is it for?

She’ll have it when she’s older.

And if it’s a boy?

It isn’t a boy.

You can’t know that.

I do. And he’d looked up, and seen her smile, and thought: I will never be this happy again.

He touched the rough wood with one fingertip.

She had taken the finished one. He had found out later. Not the block, which he’d kept, but the first dragon, the small perfect one he’d made as a trial. She had slipped it into her bundle the night she ran. He had always taken it as an insult, or an accusation. A theft. He had spent years hating her for it.

Tonight he thought: she kept it.

She took it, and she kept it, for eighteen years.

He thought of how they had met.

It had not been in the library, though he’d told the priests it was, years afterward, because it made a tidier story. It had been in the infirmary, in his thirty-first winter at Valorhold, when a fever had put him on his back for nine days. He had been proud, and wretched, and sure he was too busy to be ill. He had refused to be parted from his books, and so a young healer had been sent to take them away.

She had come in with a tray, and a lamp, and a look of patient exasperation.

You are supposed to be asleep, she’d said.

I’m checking the footnotes.

You have a temperature of a hundred and one and you are checking the footnotes.

One of them is wrong.

I am sure it is. She had set down the tray, with great calm, and taken the book from his hands. And I’m sure it will still be wrong tomorrow.

He had stared at her.

She was small and brisk and sunburned, with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a streak of something green on one cheek. Her hair was escaping its pins. She had a stubborn chin. She was looking at him as though he were a particularly foolish child, and he had been so startled, after a month of respectful silence, to be looked at that way, that he’d burst out laughing.

It had come out of him as a bark, loud and cracked and utterly undignified.

There, she’d said, and her whole face had changed. That’s better. You laugh like a man who’s been caught.

Caught at what?

At being a person.

She had stayed until the lamp burned down. She had told him about her mother’s herb garden, and a goat called Barley, and her own spelling, which she said was so bad that the words fell off the ends of the lines. He hadn’t read a single page that night. He hadn’t wanted to.

By morning he had known, with a clarity that frightened him, that he would never again be able to think of the library without thinking of her.

He had been right.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes.

Declining, he thought. On schedule.

It would not lie flat. It would not lie flat, however he turned it, and for the first time in eighteen years, a small cold voice somewhere deep in him said very distinctly: you have been a fool.

He sat down on the cot.

The candle guttered. Rain whispered at the window. He thought of Carrick’s voice saying not yet, and of Ormund’s hand, light and dry, resting on his arm.

Declining. On schedule.

What does that mean?

He turned the thought over, and over, and it would not lie flat. It kept catching on something sharp. He pushed it away, and it came back.

It’s nothing. It’s illness. It’s years.

He’s trying to reach her. For me. He said so.

I’ll see her. I’ll see her face. I’ll tell her. I’ll explain everything, all of it, and she’ll understand, in time. She always understood, in the end.

He picked up the block of pearwood.

It was light and smooth and a little cold. He held it in both hands, as one holds a small animal, and looked at the rough unfinished horn. After a moment he reached for the old knife. The blade was dull. He set it against the wood, and it didn’t bite.

His hands were shaking.

He put it down again, and sat there in the candlelight, with the block cupped in his palms and the rain falling.

I’m sorry, he thought, to no one at all.

I’m so sorry, Elara.

I only wanted you to be safe.

***

In the Lantern Room, the bowl had gone dark.

The six grey men had gone. Tavish had gone. Only one figure stood at the stone table in the cold light of the seven lamps, with his hands folded and his pale eyes on the empty water.

High Priest Ormund looked, for a long while, at nothing.

He was not thinking. He did not think, in the ordinary way. He was only listening, as he had listened for four hundred years, to the long quiet pulse of the world, the slow tide of old magic running under all things like a river under ice. And in the last few days, that tide had been changing. A thread had begun to tighten, far to the north. It was thin as a hair. It sang.

She’s waking, he thought.

She is waking, and they are claiming her, and the mask is almost gone.

It is as it was written.

He did not smile. He had not smiled in a very long time. But something in the cold blue of his eyes moved, faintly, like the surface of a deep lake under a passing wind.

A door opened behind him.

"Your Grace," said Tavish.

"Yes."

"The man is still in the bowl. Lord Carrick wishes to know whether you have further instructions."