Chapter 29: A Stranger God

I told Father about Hobb Kitto in the little kitchen, at six in the morning, with the kettle on.

He listened to all of it without interrupting. The gloves. The lantern. The coat folded at the Lockwarden's feet, and the name chalked on the boards. Severin's face in the stern of the boat. The hand lifted at sunset, palm out, toward the night shift. When I'd finished, he sat for a long time with his coffee going cold between his hands, looking at the rabbit-shaped scorch mark on the table.

"A kind man," he said at last.

"Yes."

"Who said good evening to the gulls." Father turned his cup a quarter turn. "I made that rule, Garrick. Nobody asks him anything. I thought that was enough. I thought, if nobody asks, the door stays shut." He shook his head slowly. "I didn't think about the people who don't think saying good evening counts as asking. I should have. This whole kingdom is full of them. I married one."

Helena put a plate of toast down in front of him, and a second one in front of me, and stood behind his chair with her hand on his shoulder for a moment. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.

Mary came in at a quarter past with her green book under her arm, and Father told her, and she opened the book and wrote. I saw what she wrote. She doesn't hide the page.

Hobb Kitto, of Westmere. Not come home.

And underneath, smaller:

To be found.

She closed the book. Nobody said anything else about it. There wasn't anything else to say yet.

* * *

Loki came to the kitchen door at half past seven.

He knocked. Three times. He always knocks now, ever since the morning of the goat, when Helena explained to him in a voice I'd never heard her use before what would happen to the next god who walked into her kitchen without knocking. He came in, and kissed Helena on the cheek, and took his own tin of pine-smoke tea down from the shelf where she lets him keep it, and made a cup, and sat down across from me, and didn't say anything for a whole minute.

That's how I knew something was wrong. Loki has never in his life not said anything for a whole minute.

"How was Westmere?" he said at last.

I told him. The short version. He listened with his chin on his hand and his eyes very still, and when I got to the coat he closed them.

"Yes," he said. "That's a door being opened. Very politely. From the other side." He opened his eyes. "Poor man. Poor kind stupid wonderful man." He drank some tea. "I'm sorry, Garrick. I am. But that's not why I came."

"Why did you come?"

He put the cup down.

"Come to market with me," he said. "This morning. Now." He looked at me across the table, and for once there wasn't any joke anywhere in his face. "Somebody's playing in my yard, and I'd like a witness."

* * *

He explained on the way down the hill.

"You remember the hall," he said. "The day before Severin arrived, when he knew the little one's first word. When the Castellan saw nobody, and I said it was something, and your great-great-grandmother started talking about small gods whose whole domain is not being noticed."

"I remember."

"Your father asked me to find it." Loki kicked a pebble down the cobbles ahead of us and watched it bounce. "So I've been looking. Eight weeks. Quietly. I'm very good at quietly, whatever Thor tells you. I've been through every corner of that castle. Every cellar, every attic, every chimney. I sat in the great hall all night, three nights running, staring at the east wall between the third and fourth windows until my eyes watered." He shrugged. "Nothing. Not a whisper. Whatever it was, it had gone."

"And now?"

"And now," said Loki, "it's back. Not in the castle. Down here." He waved a hand at the town below us, the roofs and the chimney smoke and the river shining at the bottom of the hill. "In my market."

"How do you know?"

He thought about it for a while. We had come down past the chandlers' steps by then, into the top of the lower market, where the streets stop being straight and start doing whatever they like. Eleanor gave up on the lower market years ago. She says it planned itself, and planned itself badly, and that she refuses to take responsibility for any street that turns back on itself three times in fifty yards.

"You know what I am," said Loki at last.

"God of mischief. Fire. The space between what you said and what you meant." I'd heard him say it at dinner. "Occasional mare."

"The mare was one time." He waved it off. "Mischief, Garrick. Tricks. I'm the god of tricks. Every trick anyone plays, anywhere in the world, I feel it. Not loudly. Like hearing someone laugh in the next room. A boy puts salt in his sister's sugar bowl in Lyradon, and I smile a little and don't know why. A merchant in Orselle sells a man a horse that's mostly paint, and I feel it here." He tapped his chest. "A little warm. A little pleased. That's what a trick is. It's a laugh waiting to happen. It's a door you leave open so that someone can walk through it and say, oh, you got me."

"And?"

"And for a week now," said Loki, "someone in Havenreach has been playing tricks. Dozens of them. Every day." He stopped at the corner of Tanner's Row and looked down the crooked street toward the river. "And I can't hear a single one of them laugh."

* * *

He showed me.

The elf weaver first. Her stall is halfway down Tanner's Row, under a long blue awning, with the bolts of silk stacked on shelves behind her in rows by color, the way she's stacked them every morning for thirty years. Fourth Canal blue at the top. Then the greens. Then the golds and the reds, and the plain undyed at the bottom. She knows to a thread where every bolt sits. She can reach behind her without looking and put her hand on any color you name.

"Ask her," said Loki.

So I asked her. Politely. Name first.

She looked at me down her long elvish nose, and then at Loki, and then at her shelves, and her mouth went thin.

"Every morning," she said. "For seven days. I come to open, and every bolt on the shelf has been moved." She held up her hand, the fingers spread. "This much. A hand's width. Every one. To the left." She put her hand down. "Nothing taken. Nothing spoiled. My locks untouched. I put them back. The next morning, the same." Her voice was quite level, but her ears had gone pink at the tips, which is how you know an elf is very angry. "I thought it was the Kethran silk woman. I went to her stall and told her so. She cried." The ears went pinker. "She has the same. Every bolt. A hand's width. To the left."

I looked at Loki. He didn't say anything. He just tipped his head toward the next stall.

The dwarf smith's lock was open.

The unpickable one. The one Loki picked for a silver piece eight weeks ago, which the smith had spent every evening since making more unpickable. It hung open on the hasp of his strongbox, with the shackle swung out, and the strongbox lid was up, and every coin in it was still there. Counted. Stacked. The stacks were each a hand's width from where he'd left them.

"Third morning," said the dwarf. He didn't look up from his anvil. He was hitting it harder than iron usually needs. "Third morning. Nothing gone. Not one copper." He hit the anvil again. "I'd rather it was gone. Gone, I understand."

Ansgar's awning had been moved a hand's width down the street. Not the frame. Just the cloth, slid along the rail, so that one end of the counter stood in the rain. His three daughters had moved it back four mornings running. Tova showed me, with great seriousness, the mark she'd scratched on the rail with her claw to show where it was supposed to be.

The chestnut boy's brazier, a hand's width from the wall.

The old woman on the corner had moved her stool back every day for a week.

The sign of the Lantern and Oar, down on the river quay, was hanging a hand's width to the left of its hook. The landlord had nailed it in place. The next morning the nails were in the wall where the sign should have been, and the sign was hanging, perfectly level, a hand's width to the left of them.

Everywhere we went, all through the crooked streets of the lower market, the same thing. Small. Exact. Harmless. A hand's width to the left. And everywhere we went, the people who'd been tricked were standing there with their arms folded, and their faces tight, and not one of them was laughing.

"You see?" said Loki quietly.

We were standing on the river quay by the salt sheds. The barges were in, and the cranes were creaking, and the river was running fast and brown below us.

"It's a trick," I said slowly. "But it isn't funny."

"It isn't meant to be funny." Loki was looking back up the hill at the market, with his hands in his pockets. "That's what's wrong with it. Every trick wants to be found out, Garrick. That's the whole joy of it. The best trick in the world is worth nothing if nobody ever knows you played it. You leave the salt in the sugar bowl, and then you wait by the door for your sister to make her tea, because the moment she spits it out and screams your name is the moment it was all for." He shook his head. "This isn't waiting by the door. This doesn't want to be found out at all. It's not playing with us. It's practicing on us."

"Practicing what?"

He didn't answer straight away.

"Do you remember the silk map?" he said. "On the floor of the map room. The one Severin brought."

I remembered. Black silk, silver thread, seed pearls for cities. The Castellan had laid it on the floor over the bare gray stone, edges trimmed so neatly, and it had fit perfectly. Except for one thing.

"Westmere," I said. "Silk Westmere was a hand's width north of stone Westmere."

"As if the two maps didn't quite agree about where we were." Loki turned and looked at me. "A hand's width, Garrick. A hand's width, every time. Somebody is moving the world a hand's width at a time, to see if anybody notices. And nobody does, not really, except to grumble and push it back. And in the morning they push it back again." He looked down at his own hand. "Do that long enough, and one morning you push something a hand's width, and nobody pushes it back. And then it just stays where you put it."

* * *

"Can you find it?" I said.

"I've been trying all morning." Loki gave a short laugh with no fun in it. "Here. Try yourself. It's over there."

He pointed. Up the quay, toward the corner by the Lantern and Oar, where the salt sheds made a little three-sided yard full of barrels and crates and coils of rope. There was nothing there. Some barrels. A cat on a crate. A gull on a bollard.

"Where?"

"There. By the third barrel from the left. Look at it."

I looked.

I looked at the third barrel from the left. I really did. I fixed my eyes on it and held them there.

And then I was looking at the gull.

I didn't decide to look at the gull. I don't remember my eyes moving. One moment I was looking at the barrel, and the next I was looking at the gull on the bollard, watching it preen under one wing, thinking how very white it was, and that Hobb Kitto used to say good evening to the gulls. And I couldn't for the life of me remember why I had stopped looking at the barrel.

I looked back. I made myself look back. The barrel. The space beside it.

The cat. I was looking at the cat.

"Yes," said Loki softly, beside me. "That's what it does to me, too."

I put my hand over my eyes. My heart was going very fast.

"The Castellan," I said. "The east wall. Between the third and fourth windows. It touched it nine times and couldn't remember it."

"It's not hiding," said Loki. "Nothing's hiding. You could walk over there and trip over it. It's just that nobody ever does. Nobody ever notices. That's its whole domain, Garrick. Not invisibility. Invisibility is a trick, and tricks I can see. This is something else. This is being overlooked. Being the thing at the edge of the room that nobody thinks to ask about." His mouth twisted. "Do you know how old a god like that has to be? To be that good at it? Nobody's noticed it for so long that it's forgotten how to be noticed."

"Did it come with Severin?"

"I think it came before Severin. I think it came first, and sat in our hall, and listened. That's how he knew the little one's first word." Loki rubbed his face. "And I think, when he left, it didn't."

"It didn't knock," I said.

Loki looked at me sharply.

"No," he said. "It didn't. And that's the part that frightens me." He looked back toward the barrels, and away again almost at once, as if his eyes had been pushed. "Every god who comes into this kingdom knocks. That's the rule. Your great-great-grandmother's rule, older than any of us. Thor knocks. Aurethar knocks. The packs knock. I knock." He paused. "Mostly. Even the Lockwarden, poor thing, stands outside the gate and waits. That's what he is. He'd never dream of going in without being asked."

"But this one came in."

"This one came in," said Loki, "without anyone noticing a door had been opened at all."

* * *

We sat on an upturned crate at the end of the quay for a while, saying nothing, watching the barges.

"What do we do?" I said at last.

"I've been thinking about that." Loki had a coin in his fingers, a silver piece, and he was walking it over his knuckles and back again without looking at it, the way he does when he's thinking hard. "Your father's rule for the Lockwarden is a good rule. Nobody asks him anything. A door nobody asks about stays shut." The coin went over and back. "But this one's already through the door. It's inside. Not-asking won't send it out again. And it isn't going to come and introduce itself."

"So?"

"So." Loki caught the coin. "Somebody has to go first."

I looked at him.

"Name," he said. "Want. Permission. Stop. Friend." He counted them off on his fingers, one by one, the way Rysa taught me in the nursery, the way I'd taught it to half the family since. "Your rules, Garrick. Your little friend's rules. Name first. Always name first. Before you do anything else, you ask who it is." He turned the coin over. "I'm not going to ask it what it wants. That's the Lockwarden's door, and I've seen what's on the other side of it. I'm not asking for anything. I'm not offering anything. I'm just going to tell it who I am, and ask who it is. That's all."

"And if it doesn't answer?"

"Then it doesn't answer." He shrugged. "Then at least it knows that somebody noticed. Which, for a thing like that, might be the most frightening news it's had in a thousand years."

I didn't like it. I said so.

"Good," said Loki. "Neither do I. That's how you know it's the right size of idea."

* * *

He couldn't look at the place. Neither could I. So he did it the way you'd cross a dark room you know well: with his eyes shut.

He stood at the corner of the salt sheds with his back to the yard. He closed his eyes. Then he walked backward, very slowly, counting under his breath, one hand out behind him, until his fingers touched the first barrel. Then the second. Then the third. And there he stopped, and crouched, still with his eyes shut, and put down on the cobbles beside the third barrel the things he'd brought down from Helena's kitchen in his coat pocket.

A cup of his own pine-smoke tea, in one of Helena's good blue cups, which she had lent him on the strict understanding that it would come back.

And a slip of paper, weighted with the silver piece.

I'd watched him write it at the kitchen table, before we came down. Five words, in his long sloping hand.

Loki, son of Laufey. Yours?

He walked forward again, out of the yard, still with his eyes shut, until I took his elbow and told him he could open them. When he did, he was very pale.

"It was right there," he said. "I felt it. Right beside my hand. Like standing next to someone in the dark." He swallowed. "It didn't move. It just... let me be there."

We went back up the hill. We didn't say much.

* * *

We came down again at dusk.

The quay was emptying. The cranes had stopped. The lamps were coming on in the windows of the Lantern and Oar, and the river had gone dark and smooth and quiet, the way it does in the evening. Loki stood at the corner of the salt sheds and closed his eyes again, and turned around, and walked backward into the yard, counting barrels with his fingers. One. Two. Three.

He crouched. He felt along the cobbles with his hand.

Then he went very still.

"Garrick," he said, without opening his eyes. "Come and tell me what's here. I can't look."

So I closed my eyes too, and walked backward along his voice, and crouched beside him, and opened my eyes, and looked down at the cobbles at my feet, not at the barrel, not at the place, just at the ground. Fast. Before my eyes could be pushed anywhere else.

Helena's blue cup was there. Empty. Every drop of the tea had been drunk. It had been set down again, very neatly, a hand's width to the left of where Loki had left it.

The silver piece was there. A hand's width to the left.

The paper was gone.

And in the place where the paper had been, standing on the cobbles all by itself, facing the river, was a little wooden horse.

I knew it before I picked it up. I'd have known it in the dark. Plain brown. Lopsided. One ear chipped, where Grandpa Garrick's knife had slipped forty years ago on one of the very first horses he ever carved. It lives in the basket by the hearth in the south solar, with all the others, and it has a name slip tucked under its saddle in Evelyn's handwriting, and the name on the slip is mine.

I turned it over in my hands. The slip was still there.

Garrick.

"That's an answer," said Loki very quietly, beside me. His eyes were open now. He was looking at the horse, not at the place. "That's not its name. But that's an answer." He let out a long breath. "It's been in the solar. Garrick. It's been in your grandfather's basket. It sat by the hearth and watched your mother and Adriana set out the hall with wooden horses, and it listened to every word."

"Why give me mine?"

"I don't know." He shook his head slowly. "I asked who it was. It told me who you were." He looked at me. "Maybe that's all it knows how to say. Maybe it's been unnoticed so long it hasn't got a name to give anyone, so it gave back the only one it was sure of."

Or maybe, I thought, holding the little brown horse with its chipped ear, it was saying something else entirely. I know which one is you.

* * *

We went straight up to the south solar. We didn't stop at the kitchen. Loki took the stairs two at a time.

Grandpa was there, in his chair by the fire, with his feet up and little Uriah asleep on his chest and the basket of horses at his elbow, the way he is most evenings. He looked up when we came in, and saw our faces, and didn't say anything. He just moved little Uriah very gently over to one arm and held out his free hand.

I put the brown horse in it.

He turned it over and looked at the chipped ear. Then he looked at the basket.

"Where'd you find this?"

"On the quay," I said. "By the salt sheds."

Grandpa didn't ask anything else. He put the horse on the arm of his chair and reached into the basket and began, slowly, with his one free hand, to take the horses out and stand them in rows on the hearthstone. Hundreds of them. Grays and browns and blacks and reds, big ones and little ones, the first crooked ones from forty years ago and the fine ones from last winter. Each with its slip of paper under the saddle. Each with a name.

It took him a long time. Loki and I stood and watched and didn't help. You don't help Grandpa with the horses.

When the basket was empty he sat back and looked at the rows for a long while, with the fire popping and little Uriah breathing softly against his shoulder.

"There's one gone," he said.

He didn't need to say which one. I'd seen it was missing the moment the rows were complete. I'd have seen it in the dark, the way I'd have seen my own.

A little gray horse, with a white blaze. The one Mother and Adriana had set at Father's right hand in the plan of the great hall, the morning they staged the audience. The one Carol had picked up off the table, and turned over in her hands, and set down again with mine behind it, not in front.

Its slip of paper had been in Evelyn's handwriting, too.

Carol.