Chapter 3: Lectures and Lovers

Adriana handed me the basket before I had finished saying good morning.

It was heavy. It was always heavy. I had been carrying Adriana's baskets to Roderic since he left for the college, and they weight as much a moose every single time.

"Bread," she said. "The rye he likes, not the white. Cheese. The pears from the south wall, because he says the pears in Concordia taste of nothing. Socks."

"He's twenty."

"He's twenty and he does not own a matching pair." She folded a cloth over the top. "There's a letter from my mother. There's a letter from me. There is honey cake for Caitlin, because she won't ask for it and she should have it anyway."

"Anything else?"

Adriana looked at me.

She has a way of looking at people that is very different from Helena's. Helena looks at you until you tell the truth. Adriana looks at you as if she already knows the truth and is waiting, kindly, to see whether you will be brave enough to say it out loud. It is a saintess's look. It is also, I think, a mother's.

"Find out how many," she said.

"How many what?"

"Girls."

I put the basket down.

"You want me to spy on my brother."

"I want you to visit your brother," Adriana said, "and to come home and tell me whether I need to write to anyone's mother." She tucked a loose corner of the cloth in. "Mirelle writes from Lyradon that a girl came to court asking after him. Cassia writes that two more have been seen at the river terraces in his company. I can count, Garrick. I would like a number."

I picked the basket up again.

I did not argue. Nobody argues with Adriana. Not because she raises her voice. In my whole life I have never once heard Adriana raise her voice. She has never needed to. She is the Saintess of Refusal, and when she decides something is not going to happen, it doesn't.

Which made it all the more remarkable that her eldest son had never refused anyone anything in his life.

* * *

Roderic was born the year the door turned white.

I don't remember it, of course. I was small. But I have heard Father tell it, and Mother, and Adriana. Adriana nursing him in the morning and seeing silver light rise around her fingers for the first time since the throne room. Roderic in his cradle under a blanket Helena had embroidered with very small horses, waking at the sound of laughter down the hall and adding his own opinion to it, loudly.

He has been adding his own opinion, loudly, ever since.

He is my half-brother. I have never once thought of him that way. He is simply my brother. He is a prince of Greykeep through Father and a prince of Lyradon through Adriana and her mother, Queen Mirelle, and he carries the name of the grandfather he never met, King Roderic, who died at Harrow Plain holding the line against Surtr. Mirelle cried the day he was named. Then she held him and said he had his grandfather's chin, and that the chin was a burden she would not wish on anyone, and she laughed through it.

He has the chin.

He also has the smile. That is the trouble.

The college sits on the eastern hill of Concordia, above the palace and below the observatory, in a cluster of pale stone buildings that used to be a barracks. Io turned it into a college the year after Concordia was founded. She said a city that had fought its way into existence should spend the next hundred years learning how not to have to. Lexander agreed, and gave it the barracks, and then had to build a new barracks, which he says was the most expensive sentence his wife ever spoke.

I found my brother in the courtyard.

I found him because I followed the laughter.

He was sitting on the rim of the fountain with his boots crossed at the ankle and his coat open, talking with his hands, and three young women were standing around him in a loose semicircle, laughing at whatever he was saying.

I stopped by the archway and watched.

I'm not proud of it. I was holding a basket full of socks. I had been sent to count.

One of them was small and dark-haired, in a scholar's grey gown, holding a stack of books against her chest like a shield. One was tall and red-haired and dressed for riding. The third was blonde and sharp-faced and wore the green of a Lyradon court family, and kept touching Roderic's sleeve as if checking it was still there.

None of them seemed to know about the other two.

All of them seemed to think they were the reason he was smiling.

Then Roderic saw me.

His face did something complicated. Delight, first, because he's always genuinely glad to see me, which is one of the most annoying things about him. Then alarm, as he saw the basket and understood who had sent it. Then, very fast, a sort of panicked arithmetic, as he realised that his eldest brother had been standing in an archway for an unknown length of time looking at three girls.

"Garrick!" he said. Much too loudly.

All three girls turned.

I raised the basket.

"Socks," I said.

* * *

He got rid of them very efficiently. I'll give him that.

The scholar was called Imogen, and she had a lecture to get to. The rider was called Talia, and she had a horse to see to. The girl in Lyradon green was called Wren Fennick, and she had nowhere to be at all, and only left when Roderic promised to see her at the river terraces at sunset.

She kissed his cheek on the way past.

Talia, already halfway across the courtyard, looked back at exactly the wrong moment and saw it.

Imogen, at the library steps, saw Talia see it.

Roderic closed his eyes.

"Three," I said.

"It's not what it looks like."

"It looks like three."

"It is three," he admitted. "But not the way it looks."

"How does it look?"

"Like I've been courting three girls at once."

"Have you?"

He opened his eyes. He looked so honestly miserable that I nearly felt sorry for him.

Nearly.

"I never asked any of them," he said. "That's the thing, Garrick. I never asked. Imogen sat next to me in rhetoric and asked if I wanted to study together, and I said yes, because it would have been rude to say no. Talia asked me to ride out to the headland with her, and I said yes, because I like the headland. Wren's mother is a friend of Grandmother Mirelle's and Wren asked if I'd walk her to the terraces the first week, and I said yes, because..."

He trailed off.

"Because it would have been rude to say no," I said.

"Because it would have been rude to say no."

I sat down on the fountain beside him and put the basket between us.

"Your mother," I said, "is the Saintess of Refusal."

"I know who my mother is."

"She once refused a god so hard he stopped being a door."

"I know."

"And you can't tell a girl you'd rather not walk her to the river."

Roderic put his face in his hands.

"It skips a generation," he said, muffled. "Grandmother Mirelle says so. She says she couldn't refuse anyone either until she was forty, and then she refused an entire army, and it was very satisfying."

I patted his shoulder.

Then I opened the basket and gave him his socks.

* * *

Caitlin was in the history lecture.

Roderic said this as if it were a warning.

"Which lecture?" I asked.

"Ashby's. The Varrick War. Third term." He chewed a pear from the south wall with an expression of deep spiritual relief. "She's been sitting in the front row every day for six weeks taking notes. She hasn't said a word. Everyone in the hall is terrified of her."

"Why?"

"Because she keeps writing things down every time he says something, and then underlining them." Roderic swallowed. "Twice."

I went to the history lecture.

The hall was an old drill room with a vaulted ceiling and long benches stepped up from a low platform. It was nearly full. Nobody looked twice at me as I came in at the back. I was wearing a plain coat and carrying a basket, and I suppose I looked like someone's older brother come to deliver socks, which is exactly what I was.

I took a seat on the top bench, in the corner.

Caitlin was in the front row.

I would have known her anywhere. She sat very straight, which she got from Helena, with her dark hair in a single plait down her back, which she got from Mother. She had a stack of paper in front of her and a pen in her hand, and the students on either side of her had left a careful gap, as if she might be catching.

She is named for Father's grandmother. The first Caitlin went through a passage in the dark, carrying the child who would become Father's father, while her husband held a door shut behind her. Father told us that story when we were old enough to hear it. Caitlin was nine. She asked for the passage to be drawn on a map, and when nobody could draw it, she went to Mary and asked for every record that mentioned it.

Mary gave her a desk.

She has had one in Mary's office ever since.

Master Orrin Ashby came in on the stroke of the hour. He was a lean man of about fifty in a scholar's black gown, with a neat grey beard and the voice of someone who has given the same lecture so many times he could do it asleep, and occasionally does. He set his notes on the lectern, looked out over the hall, and smiled with genuine pleasure.

He loved his subject. You could see it. That was what made what happened next so unfortunate.

"Today," he said, "we come to the throne room."

Caitlin's pen lifted.

"You will recall," Ashby said, "that the old king of Greykeep had held the door beneath his throne for two hundred and twenty-two years. That the god of captivity had kept the dead behind it for a thousand. And that on the day of reckoning, King Uriah Grey and his companions entered the ruined throne room to face him."

So far, so good. Caitlin's pen stayed up.

"The castle's steward, a man of great loyalty known as the Castellan," Ashby went on, "stood guard at the doors..."

The pen came down.

Scratch, scratch.

A student two seats from Caitlin flinched.

"...and Queen Adriana, then a young saintess, raised her silver light against the door. The light struck the stone like thunder. The door shattered in a great storm of radiance, and the dead poured forth..."

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Underline.

Underline.

Ashby glanced down at the front row. Then he glanced again. He had, I think, been noticing that pen for six weeks.

He pressed on bravely.

"And here," he said, warming to it, "we come to my favourite part of the whole history. Because standing in that throne room, at the very end, were the King's own children. The twins. Carol and Garrick Grey, three years old, the children who would one day take Varrick's power into themselves and give it back to the gods. And it is recorded that as the dead walked free, the twins stepped forward together and addressed the hall..."

Caitlin put her pen down.

She raised her hand.

The whole hall went quiet. In six weeks, I gathered, she had never raised her hand.

Ashby looked at it the way a man looks at a cart coming down a hill toward him.

"Yes," he said. "Miss..."

"Grey," said Caitlin.

A ripple went through the benches.

Ashby closed his eyes very briefly.

"Miss Grey," he said. "Of course. Please."

Caitlin stood. She did not look at her notes. She didn't need to.

"With respect, Master Ashby," she said, "the Castellan is not a man. It's a construct. It's grey, it's about eight feet tall, and it has metal hands. It was stopping my brother from running through the Concordia gate before he could walk. It still does."

Someone laughed and turned it into a cough.

"The door didn't shatter," Caitlin went on. "Nothing struck it like thunder. My stepmother's light went into the stone, and the stone stopped being a door. It turned white, the same white as the floor around it. You can stand on the place now. It's just floor. There's a lamp on it."

Ashby opened his mouth.

"And the dead didn't pour forth," said Caitlin. "They walked. Toward a lamp. The Keeper of Roads was holding it. Nobody was pouring anywhere. My father describes it as the quietest thing he has ever heard."

She paused.

"And my brother and sister didn't address the hall," she said. "They weren't in the throne room at all. They were in the nursery with their grandmother. They were three."

The silence went on.

Ashby looked at her for a long moment. To his very great credit, he did not look angry. He looked like a man who had just been told that his favourite painting was hung upside down, and was trying to decide whether it was better that way.

"Miss Grey," he said. "May I ask your source?"

"Mary's records," said Caitlin. "The Greykeep household record, kept in her own hand from the first day. And my father, and my mother, and my stepmother, and my grandmother, who was there."

"The Greykeep household record," said Ashby slowly, "has never been made available to scholars."

"No," Caitlin agreed. "But I have a desk in Mary's office."

Ashby took his spectacles off and polished them.

Then he put them back on and looked up, past her, along the stepped benches, all the way to the back of the hall.

I realised, too late, that he'd seen me come in.

"Then perhaps," he said, "we might settle the last point directly. Since we appear to have a witness."

Two hundred heads turned.

Caitlin turned with them. She saw me. Her face did nothing at all, which in Caitlin means she was very surprised and would be cross about it later.

I considered pretending to be someone else.

I was holding a basket with honey cake in it. It wasn't going to work.

"Prince Garrick," said Ashby, with a little bow. "Welcome to the college. Is it true? Did you and your sister address the hall?"

I stood up.

"I don't remember much of that day," I said honestly. "I was three."

"But?"

"But I'm fairly sure I didn't give a speech." I thought about it. "I believe I bit someone."

The hall broke.

It went from silence to laughter all at once, the way a dam goes, and it took a long time to stop. Students were wiping their eyes. Someone in the middle row was banging the bench. Down at the front, Caitlin had sat back down and put her face in her hand, but her shoulders were shaking.

Ashby was laughing hardest of all.

When he could speak again, he crossed something out in his notes with a firm, decisive stroke. Then he looked down at my sister.

"Miss Grey," he said. "Would you be willing to stay after the lecture? I think I would like to know what else I have wrong."

Caitlin lowered her hand from her face.

For the first time in six weeks, according to Roderic, she smiled in that hall.

"I've made a list," she said.

* * *

She was cross about it later, as predicted.

We sat on the low wall at the edge of the college grounds, where the hill drops away toward the harbor and you can see all of Concordia laid out below like a map Mary drew. Roderic had gone to find something to drink. Caitlin had the honey cake on her knee and hadn't touched it.

"You could have told me you were coming," she said.

"Adriana sent me this morning."

"You could have sat somewhere I'd see you."

"I did sit somewhere you'd see me. You just didn't look."

"I was working."

"You were underlining."

She looked at me sideways.

"Six weeks," she said. "I sat in that front row for six weeks and didn't say a word. Do you know why?"

"Because you're terrifying?"

"Because I was making a list." She took a folded sheaf of paper out of her sleeve. It was thick. "Mary says you never correct a record one line at a time. You wait until you've found every mistake, and then you correct them all at once, in order, with sources. Otherwise people think you're being difficult, and they stop listening by the third one."

I looked at the sheaf.

"How many?"

"Forty-one."

"Forty-one mistakes."

"Forty-one so far. He's only reached the throne room." She tucked the list back into her sleeve. "I was going to give it to him at the end of term. Properly. With references. And then my brother walked in with a basket and told two hundred people he bit someone."

"It went well, though."

"It went well," she admitted. "He wants to see the whole list. He wants to come to Greykeep and ask Mary whether he can read the record." She frowned. "Mary's going to say no."

"Mary's going to say no," I agreed.

"And then she's going to say yes, in a year, with conditions."

"Seven conditions."

"Nine," Caitlin said. "She'll want him to wear gloves."

She finally broke off a piece of the honey cake and ate it, and for a moment, with her face turned to the harbor and the wind pulling at her plait, she looked so much like Mother at twenty that it caught in my chest.

She was the one we nearly didn't have. I'm not supposed to know that. Mother doesn't talk about it. But Mary's book is very thorough, and I learned to read early, and there's a page in it from the year Carol and I were two. The page says that Mother had asked a god whether it was safe to want one more child, and that Io told her to stop asking gods whether she was allowed to want one.

Caitlin came not long after the throne room, a few months behind Roderic.

She has been asking questions nobody else thinks to ask ever since.

"What's Ashby teaching next term?" I said.

"The western sea." Caitlin swallowed her cake. "He calls it The Unanswered Shore. It's everything anyone knows about the lands on the far side."

"That sounds interesting."

"It's going to be a very short term," she said. "Nobody knows anything. There are sailors' stories, and a few old maps that disagree with each other, and Aurelia once said the gods over there never answered when the Accord wrote to them. That's all. He's padding it out with a unit on shipbuilding."

I thought about that. A whole continent, and nobody knew anything.

It didn't seem important at the time.

* * *

Roderic came back with three cups of cider and an expression of doom.

"Wren sent a note," he said. "She says she's looking forward to sunset. She's underlined looking forward."

"Twice?" Caitlin asked.

"Three times."

Caitlin made a small noise of professional respect.

Roderic sat down heavily on my other side and handed out the cider. He looked at the harbor. He looked at the sky, which was already beginning to turn gold. He looked at me.

"How did you know?" he said.

"Know what?"

"With Seraphina. How did you know she was the one? Not just someone you liked. The one."

I drank some cider and thought about it.

I wanted to give him something wise. He was my younger brother and he'd asked me a real question, and I could feel how badly he wanted a real answer. But the honest truth is that I never knew it the way people mean when they ask that. I don't remember not knowing it.

"We said 'jam' at the same time," I said.

Roderic stared at me.

"That," he said, "is not helpful."

"It's the most helpful thing he's ever said," said Caitlin.

We both looked at her.

She was looking at the harbor.

"Rysa's rules," she said. "Name. Want. Permission. You two learned them on the nursery floor, before I was born. I learned them from Mother." She turned the cup in her hands. "Everyone always talks about the third one. Permission. Asking. Don't take what isn't yours. That's the one the grown-ups care about."

"It's an important one," I said.

"It is. But it's third." She looked at Roderic. "Want comes second. Before permission. You have to know what you want before you can ask for it, or give it, or say no to it." She paused. "Garrick and Seraphina knew what they wanted when they were two. They both wanted jam. They both said so. That's the whole trick."

Roderic was quiet for a long moment.

"You're saying I don't know what I want."

"I'm saying you've never once asked yourself," said Caitlin. "You just ask everyone else what they want, and then you give it to them, because you can't bear for anyone to be disappointed." Her voice softened, very slightly. "It's a nice thing about you, Roderic. It's also why there are three of them."

Roderic looked down at his cider.

The sun touched the top of the harbor wall. Somewhere down at the river terraces, a girl in Lyradon green was waiting.

"I don't want to walk her to the river," he said finally, very quietly.

It sounded like it hurt.

It also sounded, for the first time all day, like the truth.

"Then that's a start," I said.

He sat a moment more. Then he put the cup down on the wall, stood up, straightened his coat, and looked at the two of us with the expression of a man walking toward a very small war.

"If I'm not back by dark," he said, "tell Mother I loved her."

"She'll want a number," I said.

He didn't ask what I meant. He just went.

Caitlin watched him go down the hill.

"He'll say yes to something else instead," she said. "He'll tell her he doesn't want to walk to the river, and then she'll ask him to dinner, and he'll say yes."

"Probably."

"It'll take him years."

"Probably."

She finished the honey cake.

"Tell Adriana thank you for this," she said. "And tell her I didn't ask for it."

* * *

I went home at dusk.

The Castellan recognised me. Mary's line was on the wall with friends written beneath it again. Greykeep smelled of bread and woodsmoke, and somewhere above me, in the nursery, my son was shouting at someone about something.

Adriana was waiting in the corridor outside the family rooms. She didn't ask. She just looked at me.

"Three," I said.

She closed her eyes briefly.

"Does he want any of them?"

"No."

"Does he know that?"

I thought about my brother walking down a hill toward a girl in green.

"As of about an hour ago," I said.

Adriana opened her eyes.

She smiled, and for a moment the silver of her old light seemed to move faintly behind it, though I'm sure it was only the lamps.

"Then he's learning," she said. "Good."

She took the empty basket from me and went to write to her mother.