Chapter 16: Answers

Father opened his mouth.

I saw him do it. I was standing right behind Carol, and Father was right beside her, and I saw him draw breath and set his hands flat on the white cloth, the way he does before he says something that cannot be taken back. He was going to answer for her. Of course he was. He is her father, and he is the king, and a man had just stood in his hall and asked for his daughter as if she were a river crossing.

Carol put her hand on his arm.

She didn't look at him. She was still looking across the table at Severin. But her hand rested on Father's sleeve, light as a leaf, and Father stopped.

"May I?" she said.

Father looked at her hand. Then at her face. I watched it cost him. I watched every single thing in him that was a father and a king and a man who had once fought five men with a sword and a hammer for two strangers at a gate want to keep talking.

He closed his mouth. He took his hands off the cloth and folded them in his lap.

"It's yours," he said quietly.

Carol nodded. She took her hand back. Then she stood up.

She did it slowly. She pushed her chair back and rose, and stood at the table in her plain gray dress with the blue shawl around her shoulders and her braid down her back, and she looked at Severin Dask on the other side of the white cloth, and between them, in its open box, the circlet went on blooming frost.

Severin was still standing too. He had not sat down all morning. They looked at each other across the table, level, like two people meeting on a road.

"You asked me," Carol said, "if you could open the box. Yesterday you asked if I would come back. When you got off the barge, you asked a little girl at a butcher's stall for her name before you asked her anything else." She tilted her head slightly. "I noticed that. Everyone noticed that. You do it beautifully."

"Thank you, my lady."

"It's a rule in this house," Carol said. "Did you know that? Our nurse taught it to us before we could walk. Name. Want. Permission. You ask a person's name. Then you ask what they want. Then you ask if you may. And only then do you do anything at all." She looked down at the black letter, folded on the cloth. "You follow it perfectly. I don't think your emperor has ever heard of it."

Severin said nothing. But something in his face went very still.

"Every night since your ships started singing," Carol said, "something has come to the foot of my bed and asked me my name."

The whole hall went cold.

Not the cold of the circlet. A different cold. The cold of a dozen people all going still at once. I felt Mother's hand tighten on the edge of the table. I felt Ignatius, three chairs down, lean forward. On the west wall, Ansel opened his eyes.

And Severin Dask, for the first time since I had met him, looked surprised.

It was very small. A flicker. But I saw it, and Carol saw it, and I think it told her something, because she nodded slightly, as if he had answered a question she had not asked out loud.

"Not out loud," she said. "Not in words. It just wanted me to say it. To give it to it. Every night, for weeks. It never asked what I wanted. It never asked if it could. It didn't care about either of those. It only wanted the name, so it could hold on to it." She put one hand flat on the table, beside the open box. "So I didn't give it. Not once. And every night it got a little colder, because it didn't like being told no."

She looked down at the circlet. At the frost creeping across the white cloth toward her fingers.

"This is the same cold," she said. "I knew it the moment you opened the lid."

"My lady," said Severin, very quietly, "I didn't know."

"I believe you," said Carol. And I think she did. I think we all did. That was the strangest thing about that moment, and the thing I have thought about most since. "I don't think you know very much about what's behind you. I think you've been looking at your feet for a long time."

On the west wall, Ansel closed his eyes again. I don't know if anyone else saw.

Carol took a breath.

"So here is my answer," she said. "And I'll give it to you properly, the way we were taught, so there can't be any mistake. My name is Carol Grey. I am twenty-three. I live at the top of the north tower in my father's house, and I like it there, because the windows face every direction at once and I can see the weather coming. What I want is to stay. And you may not have me."

She put out one finger, and touched the pale circlet in its box.

Lightning came out of her.

Not a bolt. Nothing so loud. A thread of it, thin and white and branching, like a crack running through ice, from the tip of her finger down into the circlet. It ran around the whole thin band in one breath, crackling, and found the clear stone at the front, and went into it.

The stone cracked.

Clean through, with a sound like a tooth breaking. And the frost on the cloth stopped spreading, and shrank back, and went out, the way frost goes out on a window when the sun finally reaches it. The circlet lay in its box, dull and cold and ordinary. A thin ring of white metal with a broken stone in it. Nothing more.

Carol took her finger away. A last spark jumped from it to the table and died.

And in the room inside me where my sister lives, the door that had been open for weeks swung shut. All at once. I felt it like a held breath let go. The cold went out of the room. Just went, the way the frost had gone, and left behind it something warm and clear and very, very tired.

Carol sat down.

Under the table, very slightly, her hand was shaking. I put mine on her shoulder. She covered it with her own. Her fingers were warm.

Across the table, Severin was looking at the broken stone.

"In whom lightning sleeps," he said softly, almost to himself.

"Not anymore," said Carol.

At the foot of the table, Mary picked up her pen.

She dipped it. She found her place on the page, below the blot of ink in the middle of the unfinished word, and she wrote one line, in her small neat hand, and set the pen down again. I could not see what she had written from where I stood. I asked her, later. She showed me.

Asked. Declined. By her own mouth.

* * *

Father waited until Mary had put her pen down.

Then he stood up. Not quickly. He pushed his ordinary chair back from the table, so that it scraped on the stones, and stood in front of the empty throne with the sun across it behind him, and looked at Severin Dask.

He did not put his hands on the table this time. He let them hang at his sides.

"My daughter has answered for herself," he said. "Now I'll answer for the crown, because that's my job, and I'd like to do it before I lose my temper, which I'm told I'm not supposed to do in front of guests."

"I understand, Your Majesty."

"I don't think you do. But you're about to." Father looked down at the black letter on the cloth. "Your emperor says we're alike. Two men who built something by asking. He's right, in a way. I did ask. I asked the village what it needed, and it needed a well, so I fixed the well. I asked the elves what they wanted, and they wanted to be left alone, so I left them alone. I asked the wolves, and that took eleven days and a lot of shouting, but I asked." He was quiet for a moment. "And every single time, Envoy, when they said no, I stopped."

Severin said nothing.

"That's the part your emperor left out," Father said. "Not asking. Anybody can ask. Asking is easy. The hard part is hearing no, and stopping, and going home, and leaving them be. I've had to do it more times than I can count. It's the only thing I know about being a king that's worth anything." He put one finger on the black letter. "He says he's never had to ask anyone a third time. I believe him. I don't think he's ever stopped after the second."

"No," said Severin quietly. "He hasn't."

"Then we're not alike." Father took his finger off the letter. "Here's my answer, for Greykeep and for the Accord. We'll trade with Kethra. Gladly. Your grain for our wool, your silk for our iron, whatever's fair. Your ships are welcome in Westmere, so long as they move when the harbormaster asks them to, which they haven't yet. Your people are welcome in our markets. Your children are welcome in our schools, and if any of them want to buy honest meat from a wolf, Ansgar's open six days a week." He paused. "That's friendship. That's what it costs. Nothing."

"And the gates?"

"The gates belong to the people who walk through them. Not to me. I'm not going to carry them across the sea for anyone who sends a collar ahead of himself." Father's voice did not rise. It got quieter. "My kingdom is not a dowry, Envoy. My daughters are not coin. I don't sell what I don't own, and I don't own them. Nobody does. Tell him that."

* * *

Severin was quiet for a long time.

Then he turned his head, slowly, and looked at Seraphina.

She had not moved. Her hands were still in her lap. The cloth in front of her was brown now in a long smudge, and the air above her place at the table wavered faintly, the way air wavers over a road in high summer. She was looking at the black collar in its box.

"There is still the Lady Seraphina," Severin said. "His Radiance asked two things."

Father's jaw went tight. "I've told you..."

"You've told me the crown's answer, Your Majesty. And the Lady Carol has given me hers. I'm grateful for both." Severin did not look away from Seraphina. "But I was sent to ask each of them. I must hear each of them answer. If I go home with one answer for two questions, he'll send someone else to ask the second. Someone less patient than me." He paused. "I'd rather it were finished here."

I think, of everything he said in that hall, that was the only thing that sounded like a warning instead of a courtesy. I think he meant it to.

"The flame-consort," he said, "is an honored place in Kethra. I'd like the lady to understand that. It is not a servant's place, or a prisoner's. She would have her own house, at the heart of the golden city. She would be tended, and protected, and never cold. Her fire would be kept safe for a thousand years. Her husband could visit whenever..."

That was when I nearly lost it.

I had held on through the collar. Through the letter. Through her husband may visit, read aloud in Malachar's heavy upright words. I had held on because Carol's hand had been on my wrist, and because I had promised Seraphina I would let Carol go first, and because Father had said before I lose my temper and I had thought, if he can hold it, so can I.

But Severin said her husband could visit, in his own soft voice, to my wife's face, with my son upstairs asleep in his cot, and something in me came loose.

The air folded.

I didn't decide to do it. It was just there. The whole hall bent around me, the way a reflection bends in a spoon, and the nine feet between me and Severin Dask went soft and thin and short, and I could feel exactly where he was standing, and how easy it would be to be there instead of here. My hands were already up. I don't know what I meant to do with them.

"Garrick."

It wasn't Carol this time. It was Seraphina.

She didn't shout. She didn't even turn her head. She said my name in a perfectly ordinary voice, the voice she uses at breakfast, and the fold went out of the air so fast I staggered.

"He's asking me," she said. "Not you."

I stood there with my hands still half raised and my heart going like a drum and the whole family looking at me. Mother. Adriana. Father, standing in front of the empty throne. Lexander, with his split table. Roderic, with his hand an inch from the hilt of a sword he wasn't supposed to touch.

I put my hands down.

It was the hardest thing I have ever done. Harder than the long fold from Westmere. Harder than anything. I put my hands down and stepped back behind Carol's chair, where the lopsided brown horse had been, and stood there, and breathed.

Carol reached back and took my wrist again. Warm, now. Very steady.

"Thank you," Seraphina said, still not looking at me. Then she stood up.

* * *

"Do you know what the First Flame is, Envoy?" Seraphina said.

Severin inclined his head. "The oldest fire in the world, my lady. The fire that was lit before there were gods to light it."

"That's what the stories say." She looked down at the collar. "Do you know that it split? When it came into the world again. It didn't come into one person. It came into two. My brother and me."

Down the table, Ignatius had gone very still.

"He got the half that heals," Seraphina said. "He can put his hands on you and close a wound, or warm a frozen child, or keep an old man's heart going for one more winter. He's very good at it. Everyone loves him for it." She smiled slightly, without looking at Ignatius. "They should."

"And you, my lady?"

"I got the other half."

She lifted her right hand off the table and turned it over, palm up, and looked at it, the way you look at a tool you know very well.

"Your emperor wants a fire to keep at the heart of his empire," she said. "Tended. Safe. Never going out. That's a hearth. That's a lamp. That's my brother, if anything." She closed her hand. "I'm not a hearth. I don't keep. I cut."

She looked up at Mary.

"Mary. The rest of the gifts. They're in the lesser hall?"

"On the long table," said Mary. "All of them."

"Has everything been written down?"

Mary looked at her for a moment. Then she understood, and I watched her understand, and something in her face that had been closed all morning opened, just a little.

"Every item," said Mary. "With the time."

"Good," said Seraphina.

She picked up the black collar in its box. She held it out flat in front of her, carefully, like something hot. And she walked out of the great hall.

* * *

We all followed her. I don't think anyone decided to. Father, and Mother, and Adriana. Lexander and Io. Carol, holding on to my arm. Roderic and Elenos and Caitlin with her blue book. Ansel, and Loki, still with his jug. Aurethar, from the doors. And Severin Dask, with Iselle a pace behind him, because Seraphina had looked back at him once from the doorway and said, "You'll want to see this, so you can tell him," and he had come.

The lesser hall is down the north passage, a long narrow room with a low ceiling and tall windows down one side. The gift table ran nearly the whole length of it, a trestle of old dark oak covered in black silk, and on it, laid out in a neat row exactly as Mary and I had left them, were the gifts of Kethra.

The gray book with no title on its spine. The two bolts of black silk for the two queens. The silver pen. The clockwork bird. The Kethran sword, too heavy, in its sheath. The box of bitter tea. The empty space at the end where the two small boxes had been.

Seraphina set the collar down in that space, at the very end of the table.

Then she walked back to the other end, near the door, and turned to face the whole length of it.

She stood there for a moment. Just looking. The light from the tall windows lay across the black silk in long bars, light and shade, the way it had lain across Severin's path in the great hall. Behind me, nobody breathed.

Then she lifted her right hand, and pointed one finger at the near end of the table, and drew a line.

That was all it looked like. A woman drawing a line in the air with one finger, unhurried, from where she stood to the far wall. But where her finger went, a thread of fire went with it. Not red. Not orange. A white so bright it was almost gold, thin as a hair, perfectly straight, and it did not flicker at all.

It went down the middle of the table like a knife going through butter.

Through the black silk. Through the old oak. Through the gray book, from its spine to its blank last chapter. Through the two bolts of silk for the two queens. Through the silver pen, which parted with a tiny chime, and the clockwork bird, which gave one startled chirp and was quiet. Through the sword, sheath and steel and all, without even slowing. Through the box of tea.

Through the collar.

The black iron did not melt. It did not glow or sag or run. It simply came apart, the way a loaf comes apart under a bread knife, into two clean halves, each one still covered in its backward script, each one still perfect, and harmless, and finished.

The line reached the far wall and stopped. It did not mark the wall.

Seraphina lowered her hand.

For one long heartbeat, the table stood there exactly as it had been. Then, with a sound like a long tired sigh, the two halves of it leaned away from each other and fell, one to the left and one to the right, and everything on them slid off onto the stones with a clatter of halved things. Half a book. Half a bird. Half a sword. Two halves of a black iron collar, rocking gently on the floor and then lying still.

There was no fire. Not one spark. The edges of everything were smooth and dark and only very slightly warm. The whole room smelled of cedar and hot iron and something sharp and clean, like the air after lightning.

Seraphina turned around and looked at Severin Dask.

"That's my answer," she said. "He may visit."

* * *

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Severin stood in the doorway of the lesser hall and looked at the ruin of his emperor's gifts. His face did not change. But he looked at every piece of it, slowly, one thing at a time, the way he had looked at the market. As if he meant to remember it later. As if he would need to describe it exactly.

Then he crossed the room and bent down, and picked up half of the gray book.

He turned it over in his gloved hands. It had been cut cleanly down the middle, through every page, so that each line of the history of the Ostrane Imperium now ended halfway across, in the middle of a word. He turned to the back, to the last chapter. To the heading, cut in half, and the forty blank pages under it, cut in half.

He looked at them for a while.

Behind him, by the door, Iselle made a sound.

It was very small. She put her hand over her mouth at once, and her face went back to nothing so quickly that I almost thought I had imagined it. But I hadn't. I know what I heard. It was the sound a person makes when they have been holding a laugh in for a very long time and it gets out by accident, one breath of it, before they can stop it.

Severin did not turn around. But I saw his shoulders move, very slightly. As if he had heard it too, and had decided not to have.

He closed the half-book and tucked it under his arm.

"I'll carry your answers," he said. "All three of them. Exactly as given." He looked at Father. "He will ask again, Your Majesty. I want you to understand that. I've never known him not to."

"Then we'll answer again," said Father.

Severin looked at him for a long moment. Then he bowed, not as deeply as before. A short, tired bow, from one man to another.

"Yes," he said. "I expect you will."

He walked out. Iselle followed him. At the door she glanced back, once, at the two halves of the collar on the floor, and then at Seraphina, and then she was gone.

Seraphina stood very straight in the middle of the lesser hall until their footsteps had faded all the way down the north passage.

Then she turned around, and walked straight into me, and put her face in my shoulder, and shook.

I held on. I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say. She was laughing, I think. Or crying. Or both. Her skin was so hot it hurt to touch, and I held on anyway, and after a while it cooled, and she was just my wife, and very tired, and I was holding her up.

Over her shoulder, I saw Mary.

She had knelt down among the halved things on the floor with her book open on her knee, and she was writing. Steadily. One item after another, in her small neat hand, exactly as she had written them the night they came.

Only now, beside every one, there was a second word.

Halved.