Chapter 223: Roderic Abroad

My brother was sick over the side of the Shrike eleven times between the sea-cave and Skerrick.

I know it was eleven because Tibby counted, from the top of the mast, out loud, in Kethran, and then in shore-speech so that Roderic would understand, and then, on the ninth, in our own tongue, which she had learned from Loki at some point during the night and pronounced like a goose. Nine. Roderic, hanging over the gunwale in the dark with his hair plastered to his forehead, lifted one hand and waved at her without looking up.

"He's never been on the sea," said Iselle, who was holding the back of his coat so he didn't go in. "Not once. Not before the serpent. He grew up in the hills. He said the biggest water he'd ever been out on before Westmere was the duck pond."

"The duck pond doesn't move," said Roderic, into the sea.

"It does if you throw bread in it."

"It doesn't move like this." He was sick again. "Ten."

"Ten," agreed Tibby, from the yard.

I'd known Roderic all his life. My father's son by Adriana, younger than me, with Adriana's dark hair and our father's jaw and a temper that brings clouds over the east wall and a heart like a hayloft, warm and too full and liable to catch fire. He'd been the boy who cried when the barn cat had kittens because they were so small. He'd been the boy who stood in front of a Kethran captain's knife and took it without thinking about it, because there was a girl behind him. He'd never in his life been anywhere he didn't know the shape of.

And here he was. In a black boat with a patched sail, in the dark, on a foreign sea, under cliffs he couldn't see, with a crew who didn't speak his language, on his way to the city of the man who'd held the girl he loved in a gold room for years.

Sick over the side. Eleven times.

He never once asked to go back.

* * *

Skerrick was a rock.

That's the only way to say it. A great black sea-stack, a quarter mile off the end of a long headland, sheer on every side, with the sea breaking white around its foot and gulls wheeling all around its top. There was a ruin on the top. Old gray walls. A tower with half its roof gone. And smoke. Thin smoke, from a dozen places, rising straight up in the still air of the morning.

"That's yours," I said to Brisa.

"That's nobody's," said Brisa Thale, at the tiller. "That's the point." She brought the Shrike around under the lee of the stack, where the sea was quieter, and in toward a black slot in the rock at the waterline that I wouldn't have seen if she hadn't been steering for it. "It was a watch-fort. Before the hand. The hand didn't want it. Nothing to hold. No harbor, no village, no fields, no road. Just a rock with a ruin on it fifteen miles from the city." She glanced at me. "Sixty of us live on it now. People who were on a list and didn't go. People who came back from the kitchens. A few who came back from the oars, which nobody does." Her sea-ice eyes went to Kessavel, at the back. "None of them have ever seen a god up close who wasn't wearing gray."

"Will they mind?"

"Yes," said Brisa. "They'll mind very much." She put the tiller over and the Shrike slid into the slot in the rock like a key into a lock, and the sea went quiet around us all at once. "I've told them you're crew. Mind you behave like crew."

* * *

There's a stair cut up through the inside of the rock from the sea-cave to the ruin at the top. Two hundred and twelve steps. Caitlin would have wanted to know. I counted for her.

Roderic did them on his hands and knees for the first fifty, because his legs still thought they were on the boat. Iselle walked behind him, one step down, the whole way, the way he always walks one step behind her. Nobody said anything about it. When he got to the top he stood up, swaying, gray-green, with his hair in his eyes, and looked around him.

The top of Skerrick is about the size of the inner court at home. Grass and thrift and old stones. The walls of the watch-fort, broken down to the height of a man's waist in most places, with sailcloth stretched across them for roofs. Fires. A well, which Brisa said went all the way down through the rock to fresh water, nobody knew how. Washing on lines between the walls, flapping. Goats. Chickens. A small boy sitting on a wall mending a net. And people.

They'd all come out to see. Sixty of them, give or take. Men and women and old people and half a dozen children, standing among the walls and the washing in the morning wind, and looking at us.

Not the way Kenna had looked at us, frightened. Not the way the harbor-folk had looked, with relief. These people looked at us the way you'd look at a storm coming in over the sea. Measuring it.

And every one of them, I saw, was looking at Kessavel. And then at Iselle.

* * *

Roderic said hello.

I don't know why he did it. I think it was nerves. I think he'd been sick eleven times and climbed two hundred and twelve steps on his hands and knees and was standing on top of a rock in front of sixty strangers who looked as though they'd quite like to throw him off it, and he couldn't bear the silence. So he took a breath and stepped forward, in front of all of us, red-faced and green-faced at once, and said, very carefully, in Kethran:

"Good morning. I am very glad to be here. I am a goat."

There was a silence on top of Skerrick that I'll remember for the rest of my life.

Then, from the top of the stair behind us, Tibby made a sound like a kettle boiling over.

Roderic turned around and looked at her.

"You said," he said, slowly, in our tongue, "that was good morning, I am very glad to be here, I am a friend."

"I did say that," said Tibby. She had both hands over her mouth. "I did. I said friend. Only the word for friend and the word for goat are very, very close, and you've got it the wrong way around, and I didn't think you'd say it, I thought you'd practice it on me first—"

And Iselle laughed.

Not a smile. Not the small careful thing she does at home when someone's said something she likes. She laughed. Out loud. On top of Skerrick, in front of sixty people who'd all seen her face on a board in every square in Kethra. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on a wall, with her hand over her face, shaking, and couldn't stop.

I'd never heard her do that. Not once. Not at home. Not ever.

Roderic stood there, red to his ears, looking at her. And then his face did something I'd never seen it do either. Something slow and bewildered and enormous, like a man who has just found out that the most beautiful sound in the world was in his pocket the whole time.

He turned back to the sixty people.

"I am a goat," he said again, in Kethran, very gravely. "I'm sorry. I'm very sick. I came on a boat." He put his hand on his chest. "But I am glad to be here. That part was right."

Somewhere near the back, an old man started to laugh. Then a woman. Then the small boy on the wall with the net. And then quite a lot of them, all over the top of the rock, a laugh going around among the walls and the washing like wind, and I watched the faces change. Not all of them. But a lot.

Brisa Thale, at the top of the stair, didn't laugh. She looked at Roderic for a long time with her sea-ice eyes. Then at Iselle, still shaking on her wall.

"Well," she said. "That's one way."

* * *

Not everyone laughed.

I'd seen her while it was happening, and I'd seen that she didn't. A woman of about fifty, at the edge of the crowd, by the well. Big and square, in a stained apron, with forearms like a baker's and a face like a closed door. She hadn't laughed at Roderic. She hadn't looked at Roderic at all.

She was looking at Iselle.

When the laughing had died down, and people had started to come forward, slowly, to look at us properly, and Selvane had been recognized by three different people at once and was being embraced by an old man in a knitted cap who was crying, the woman by the well walked across the grass.

Not fast. Straight. To the wall where Iselle was sitting.

She stopped in front of her. Iselle looked up, still with the end of the laugh on her face.

And the woman spat.

Not at her. On the grass at her feet. Deliberately. And said something in Kethran, low and hard, that I didn't understand, and didn't need to.

Iselle's face went white.

The laugh went out of it all at once, like a candle pinched. She didn't move. She just sat on the wall and looked up at the woman, and her right hand, which had been open in her lap since Holme, started very slowly to close.

"She said," said Kessavel, behind me, very quietly, "His blood. She said: you've got his blood in you, you've got his face, my son went to the oars on your brother's word and you sit there laughing."

* * *

Roderic was already moving.

I saw him do it. He didn't run. He didn't shout. He just walked, three steps, across the grass, and stopped between the woman and Iselle. Not touching either of them. Just there. In the way. With his back to Iselle and his face to the woman, gray-green and swaying a little still, with his hair in his eyes.

He didn't say anything. He didn't know the words.

And over the top of Skerrick, out of a clear blue winter sky, the clouds came.

I felt them before I saw them. A pressure in the air. A darkness at the edge of the light. I looked up and there they were, coming in from nowhere, from all sides at once, gray and low and heavy, the way they come over the east wall at home when Roderic's lost his temper, piling up over the ruin and the washing lines and the goats, so fast that the people on the grass started to look up and put their hands out and back away.

And it rained.

A short, hard, furious squall. Straight down. On the top of Skerrick and nowhere else. I could see the sun shining on the sea beyond the edge of the rock, all the way to the horizon, and on top of the rock it was pouring. On the fires. On the goats. On sixty people. On the woman with the forearms, who stood there in it with the rain running down her face and didn't move.

And on all the washing.

It lasted perhaps a minute. Then Roderic, standing in it, soaked, with his hair flat to his head, looked up, and saw what he'd done, and saw the washing on the lines, sodden, dripping, sixty people's shirts and shifts and stockings and smallclothes all hanging there wetter than when they'd come out of the tub.

And he said, in our own tongue, loudly, with absolute sincerity, to the washing:

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean you."

The clouds stopped.

They didn't drift off. They just stopped, all at once, the way a sob stops when you catch it, and thinned, and went, and the sun came back out on the top of Skerrick on sixty dripping people and a lot of very wet goats.

Nobody said anything.

Then the old man in the knitted cap, the one who'd been crying on Selvane, said in Kethran, very slowly, in a voice of the purest wonder: "He apologized to the washing."

* * *

I'd like to say everyone laughed again. They didn't. It wasn't that kind of moment.

But the woman with the forearms didn't spit again.

She stood in front of my brother with the rain dripping off her chin and looked at him for a long time. At his soaked hair. At his face, gray-green and stubborn and ashamed of himself all at once. At the way he was standing, with his feet planted and his hands open at his sides and his whole body between her and the girl on the wall. Not fighting. Not threatening. Just there, the way a wall is there.

"You're not a god," she said at last. In shore-speech. Roughly. "Gods don't say sorry to washing."

"I'm half," said Roderic. "Maybe. My father is. I'm not very good at it." He swallowed. "I'm sorry about your son."

The woman's face did something.

"You don't know anything about my son."

"No," said Roderic. "I'd like to. What's his name?"

She stared at him.

Behind him, on the wall, Iselle had stopped closing her hand. It was halfway. She was looking at the back of Roderic's head as if it were something she'd never seen before.

"Jem," said the woman. Very low. It came out as if it had been dragged. "Jem Penner. Sixteen. Two years ago. On the list from Coln, the spring list. He went to the oars." Her jaw worked. "That was her brother's list. Her brother's priests. Her brother's ships."

"Yes," said Roderic. "It was." He didn't move. "It wasn't her. She was in a gold room in the city with a new lock on the door every year. She was twelve when he put her in it. She's never once been let out without someone holding her arm." His voice shook and he didn't let it stop him, the way Iselle's hadn't, in the market. "She ran away. Across the sea. And now she's come back. Here. To the place where everybody knows her face. To go back into his city, and into his priests' house, through a door that only opens for the people he's sworn, to fetch out a boy called Aldric who's sixteen and likes boats. Because his father asked." He took a breath. "That's what she's doing. That's why she's here. Not because of whose blood she's got. Because of what she does with it."

The woman looked past him. At Iselle.

Iselle looked back at her.

"And Jem," said Roderic. "Jem Penner. Sixteen. He's on a ship in the ice, off our coast. My father's holding it still. Nobody's drowning him. A girl called Caitlin's counted every oar on every ship, so she'll know which one is his, and a man called Tamar goes around them every morning in a boat asking the men their names." He held out his hand to the woman. Open. The way Iselle does. "When we bring them home, we'll bring Jem. I'll make sure. I'll go and find him myself. I promise."

The woman with the forearms looked at his open hand for a long time.

Then she looked at Iselle again. At her face. At her hand, half-closed on the wall.

"His face," she said, roughly. "You've got his face."

"I know," said Iselle. She stood up off the wall. Her voice was very quiet. "I'm sorry. I didn't choose it. I'm trying to do something better with it than he did."

The woman stood there a moment longer.

Then she turned around and went back to the well, and picked up her bucket, and started to draw water, with her back to all of us. And didn't say anything else.

But she didn't spit.

* * *

Iselle came and stood beside Roderic. Close. Not touching. And then, slowly, she opened her right hand the rest of the way, all the way, and took his.

"You apologized to the washing," she said.

"It was very wet."

"It was very wet because of you."

"I know." He looked at her. Soaked, still, and green, and red to the ears. "I didn't mean to. I just looked at her looking at you and it came."

"I know," said Iselle. "It always does. It came over the east wall the first night I was at Greykeep, when your father said I could stay. You said it was the weather." She was very close to him now. "It wasn't the weather."

"No," said Roderic. "It never is."

I went away to look at the goats.

* * *

That night, on Skerrick, by one of the fires inside the broken walls, with the sailcloth roof flapping overhead and Brisa's sixty all around us eating fish stew out of anything they could find, Roderic came and sat down beside me.

He'd stopped being green. He'd eaten two bowls of stew and a heel of bread and drunk something out of Ketty's flask that made his eyes water. He sat with his knees up and his arms around them, looking into the fire, the way he used to sit on the kitchen step at home when he was eight and something was bothering him.

"Garrick," he said.

"Yes."

"I don't know how to do any of this." He said it quite calmly. As if it were a thing about the weather. "I can't sail. I can't speak the language. I can't fight; I've never been in a fight, I only stood in front of one once and got stabbed. I can't fold, I can't burn things, I can't make fog or open locks or ask harbors questions. I'm sick on boats. I told sixty people I was a goat." He looked into the fire. "And I made it rain on all their washing."

"You did."

"I'm no use. Here. I'm no use at all."

I looked at my brother. At his face in the firelight. At his hands, around his knees, still a little blue at the fingertips from the cold.

"You stood between Iselle and that woman," I said. "Without a word. Without knowing the language. Without anything. And you got her to tell you her son's name."

He didn't say anything.

"Nobody else on this rock could have done that. Not me. Not Lexander. Not Brisa. We'd all have done something. Said something. Argued. You just stood there." I nudged him with my shoulder. "That's the use. That's the whole use. You stand in front of things. It's what you're for. It's what our father's for. It's what you did with Corvane's knife."

Roderic was quiet for a long time.

"When we go into the city," he said at last. "To the priests' house. For Aldric. She's the only one who can open the door. The mark on her wrist. She kept it, for that. For him." He swallowed. "I'm going in with her."

"I know."

"I don't know how to do anything in there. I'll be no use. I won't understand what anyone says. I'll probably say I'm a goat again."

"I know."

"I'm going anyway." He looked at me. "One step behind her. On her left. The whole way. And if anybody puts a hand on her, they'll have to get it past me first." He looked back at the fire. "That's all I've got. I wanted you to know. In case you were thinking of telling me to stay on the rock."

"I wasn't," I said.

"Good," said Roderic. And then, after a while: "I'd like Aldric at the wedding. In the spring. When the river's high. I told Corvane." He smiled a little, into the fire. "He said he'd like that. He said a boy who likes boats should see a river come up."

"He should," I said.

We sat there a long time. Across the fire, Iselle was sitting with the woman with the forearms. Not talking. Just sitting. The woman had brought her a bowl of stew. I don't know when. I didn't see it happen. But there it was, in Iselle's open hands.

* * *

At ten past nine, on top of Skerrick, I held up my right hand toward the city.

It was very close now. Fifteen miles. You could see it from the top of the rock, not just the glow but the city itself, if you knew where to look: a smudge of white light along the edge of the sea to the south, with towers in it, like a crown lying on its side. And in the middle of it, taller than the rest, something gold.

The coal flashed. Three and three.

I sent three and ten. And then I held it up, open. And she held hers. Steady. From the gold.

All around me, on the top of Skerrick, sixty people had stopped eating and were looking at my hand. And then south. At the city. At the gold tower. Some of them had seen it from the rock every night for weeks, the red light at ten past nine. They'd known the time. They hadn't known who.

They knew now.

Nobody said anything. But down by the well, the woman with the forearms picked up a stub of candle from the edge of the fire, and lit it, and held it up, toward the south. For as long as I held up mine.

And then the old man in the knitted cap did. And then Tibby, on the wall. And then Corrin. And then the small boy with the net.

I didn't count. Caitlin would have. But I stood on top of Skerrick with my hand held up toward the city, and both my eyes open, and watched the little lights come up around me in the dark one after another among the broken walls, until there were more than I could see.

* * *

From Mary's book. Thursday. Mary's hand, small and steady:

Sel's eighteenth tree.

The boy lit his flame again at breakfast, without being asked, and toasted his bread on it. Helena took the bread away and gave him a new piece and told him that in this house we use the range. He looked at her for a long time and then lit the range. From across the kitchen. Helena sat down. She has not said anything about it since.

Uriah laughed for a full minute.

Thursday, about nine in the morning: out of a clear sky, it rained on the east wall. Hard. For one minute. Only on the east wall, and on the washing in the drying yard below it. Then it stopped. Adriana went out and looked at the sky for a long time and said: oh, Roddy. Then she came in and said she didn't want to talk about it. Then she smiled for the rest of the day.

9:10 p.m. at the stone. Three and three. Mirelle lit the lamp. Benjamin answered. Three and ten. The two long lights. And then, Davren says, the stone did something new. It went on glowing. Not from her bearing and not from his. From all around his. Dozens of tiny lights. He says it looked like a field of candles seen from very far away.

Two days since midwinter.

And under that, in big uneven capitals, one of them backward, in green ink that is almost certainly not his own:

FAELAN GREY. ID LIKE IT NOTED THAT MY BROTHER RODERIC MADE IT RAIN ON THE WASHING AGAIN. MOTHER SAYS HE ALWAYS DOES WHEN HES IN LOVE OR CROSS AND THAT THIS TIME IT WAS BOTH. ID LIKE IT NOTED THAT I HAVE PUT HIM IN MY LEDGER UNDER FAVORITE THINGS AND WRITTEN WASHING. ID LIKE IT NOTED THAT THE WASHING DOESNT MIND. I ASKED IT.