Chapter 36: Accused

We were still on the parade ground when the lightning came down.

Out of a clear sky. Out of nothing. One moment the morning was blue and still over the college roofs, with the fruit trees showing over the wall and the porter's bell clanging out of time, and the next there was a sound like the whole world being torn in half along a seam, and a white-gold line of fire stood between the sky and the college square, thick as a tree, too bright to look at.

It lasted less than a heartbeat. It felt like longer.

Then it was gone, and the thunder came after it, so loud I felt it in my teeth, rolling away over the roofs of Concordia toward the sea. Every window in the east range rattled in its frame. Every bird in the orchard went up at once. Ignatius had stopped dead beside me with his arm thrown up over his eyes.

"What..."

"Father," I said.

I knew it the way you know your own front door. I'd felt it before, when I was small, on the walls of Greykeep. I'd felt it a few times since, always from a distance, always when something had gone very wrong somewhere and he needed to be there before it went any wronger. Most people think of my father as a storm. They forget that a storm doesn't just sit over one place. It moves. It goes where it's needed, faster than any horse, faster than any gate.

My father can travel as a bolt of lightning. From one end of the sky to the other, in the space of a blink. He doesn't do it often. He says it's rude to arrive anywhere faster than the news that you're coming.

He'd done it now.

We ran the rest of the way.

* * *

He was standing in the middle of the college square when we came under the arch, beside the long stone fountain, with the grass scorched black in a ring around his boots and the air still crackling and stinking of thunder. His hair was standing straight up off his head. His coat was smoking gently at the hem. The six men in red coats were standing at the foot of the east range stair, ten paces from him, frozen in mid-stride the way men freeze when a bolt of lightning lands in front of them, and Captain Hesk was in front of them with his hand halfway to his sword and his face the color of porridge.

My father wasn't looking at Hesk. He was looking up at the east range. At the window under the eaves that faces the sunrise.

"Good morning, Captain," he said. Quite mildly.

"Your Majesty." Hesk's voice came out cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Your Majesty. I have His Majesty's order to..."

"I know. I was in the room." Father turned his head and looked at him. "A letter came to the palace gate twenty minutes ago. Sealed with gray wax and a thumb. No name on it. One line." He paused. "Garrick, Ignatius. You'll want to hear this."

We'd come up beside him. The grass was hot under my feet.

"Ask the Kethran girl what she keeps under her bed," said my father.

Nobody said anything.

"Lexander sent Captain Hesk to search the room," said Father. "He was right to. I'd have done the same. A king can't not look." He turned back to Hesk. "But I asked Lexander if I could come too. And he said yes. And I'm afraid I came a little faster than you, Captain."

"You did, sir," said Hesk faintly.

"So here's what's going to happen." Father put his hands in his smoking pockets. "We're going to go up those stairs. And we're going to knock on her door. And we're going to tell her who we are, and what we want, and why. And then we're going to ask her if we can come in." He looked at Hesk mildly. "And then, whatever she says, you'll do your duty. But you'll do it after she's been asked." He paused. "A door nobody asks about stays shut, Captain. That's my rule for the Lockwarden. But a girl nobody asks properly breaks. And I won't have that. Not in my friend's city. Not to a guest of my house."

Hesk looked at him for a long moment.

Then he took his hand off his sword.

"After you, Your Majesty," he said.

* * *

Iselle opened the door before we knocked.

She'd seen. Everyone in the college had seen. She stood in the doorway of her little whitewashed room with Caitlin behind her, and looked past me and Ignatius, past my smoking father, at Captain Hesk and the six red coats on the narrow stair behind him. Her face didn't do anything at all.

"My name is Uriah Grey," said my father. "This is Captain Merrit Hesk, of the Concordian guard. A letter came to the palace this morning that says you're hiding something under your bed. We'd like to look. You can say no." He paused. "If you say no, Captain Hesk will have to go and ask King Lexander for an order, and come back with it, and look anyway. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But you can still say no. And it'll still matter that you did."

Iselle looked at him for a long moment.

"Thank you," she said. "For telling me the truth about the no."

"You're welcome."

"Search," said Iselle. She stood aside. "There's nothing under my bed. There's never been anything under my bed. Look as long as you like."

Hesk went in with two of his men. The rest of us stood in the doorway. Caitlin had come to stand beside Iselle, very close, not touching her. I watched Hesk's men lift the thin mattress, and the frame, and look under it, and find nothing but dust and one of Iselle's stockings and a pencil.

Then one of them knelt and put his hand flat on the boards under the window, and pressed. And one of the boards moved.

It came up easily. Too easily. As if it had been lifted a great many times before, or very recently. Hesk knelt beside his man and reached into the gap underneath, and felt around, and went still.

He brought out a bundle.

It was wrapped in orange wool. Bright, cheap, uneven orange wool, knitted in a pattern somebody had made up herself and got wrong three times.

Caitlin made a sound like she'd been hit.

Hesk unwrapped it, slowly, on the floor of that little whitewashed room, with the morning sun coming in through the east window. And there, lying in the folds of the terrible orange scarf, catching the light, were two small things of gold.

Two clasps. Each one shaped like a little flame.

It would be lying in the ash like a pair of little stars.

Iselle didn't move. She didn't speak. She stood in her own doorway and looked at the two gold flames in the orange wool, and all the color went out of her face at once, the way the color goes out of the sky just before a storm.

"I have never," she said, very quietly, "seen those in my life."

Nobody answered her.

Behind me, I heard Caitlin start, very softly, to cry.

* * *

They held it in the small council room, an hour later. Not a trial. Lexander was very clear about that. Concordia doesn't try people in small rooms. Just a gathering of everyone who had a right to be there, around a table, with the door shut but not locked, the way Evelyn taught us. Shut is a choice. Locked is a fear.

Lexander at the head, with his one eye on the two gold clasps lying on their bed of orange wool in front of him. Io at his right hand, very upright, very still, her healer's hands folded on the green letter-book from the Kethran house. My father at his left, with his hair still standing up and a faint smell of thunder coming off him. Captain Hesk by the door. Ignatius and me. Caitlin, with her blue book open in front of her and her face blotched and her pen in her hand.

And Iselle, at the foot of the table, alone, with her hands folded and her back very straight.

Lexander asked her everything. I'll say that for him. He didn't shout, and he didn't threaten, and he didn't make her wait. He asked her, slowly, one question at a time, the same questions I'd asked her that morning, and a dozen more, and she answered every one. The harbor. The letter. The wax. The scarf. The road past the kitchen gate. She answered in the same steady voice every time, and she never changed a word of it, and she never once looked away from his eye.

"And the clasps," said Lexander at last.

"I've never seen them."

"They were under your floor."

"Yes."

"Wrapped in your scarf."

"Caitlin's scarf." Iselle's voice didn't change. "That I lost. On the bench. Two days ago. In front of the whole college."

"Who knew about the loose board?"

"I didn't." She held his eye. "I've lived in that room for two weeks. I've never lifted a single board. I didn't know any of them lifted."

Lexander was quiet for a long time.

"I believe you," he said at last. Quietly. "I want you to know that, Iselle. As a man. I believe you." He put his hand flat on the table beside the clasps. "But I'm also a king. And as a king I've got a locked room, and a fire made of my wife's own Flame, and nine books that four hundred years of her family died to keep. And the only things I've got back are under your floor, wrapped in your scarf, and the letter that told me where to look was sealed with your kind of wax." He looked at her. "Tell me what you'd do. If you were me."

Iselle was quiet for a moment.

"I'd lock me up," she said. "If I were you." Her voice was perfectly level. "Somewhere without windows. Where I couldn't see anything coming." She looked down at her folded hands. "That's what my brother would do."

Nobody said anything.

And then the door banged open, and Roderic came in.

* * *

He'd run. All the way from the far end of the college, from the lecture hall where Master Ashby had been halfway through the Unanswered Shore when one of the second-years came in and whispered in his ear. He was out of breath and there was chalk on his sleeve and his hair was everywhere. He came through the door so fast he nearly knocked Captain Hesk over, and stopped at the foot of the table, beside Iselle, and looked around at all of us.

"No," he said.

Lexander looked at him. "Roderic."

"No. Uncle Lexander, no. She didn't. She didn't." He was breathing hard. "She was with me two nights ago, on that bench, for three hours, and she took that scarf off and put it down beside her because the sun was warm, and I saw her do it, I was sitting right there, and when we got up she forgot it, and I forgot it, and if anyone's to blame for that scarf being anywhere it's me..."

"Roderic," said my father. Gently.

"No." Roderic turned to him. "No, Father. I'm sorry. I'm not going to be quiet. I'm always quiet when people tell me to be. I always do what people tell me." He swallowed. "Not this time."

Captain Hesk stepped forward from the door. Not roughly. He put one hand on Roderic's arm.

"Your Highness," he said. "Please. Step back from the prisoner."

I watched my brother's face.

I've watched Roderic's face my whole life. I've watched it every time somebody asked him for something. Carry my books. Ride the south road. Jump off the bridge. Step back. I've watched that look go across it, the look of a man who would rather cut off his own hand than disappoint the person in front of him, and then I've watched him say yes. Every time. Since he could talk. He told us so himself, in the kitchen, with his buttons done up wrong. I've been saying yes to everybody since I could talk.

The look went across his face.

And then something else came up behind it. Something I'd never seen there before.

"No," said Roderic.

He didn't shout it. He didn't push Hesk's hand away. He just said it, quietly, and stayed exactly where he was, beside Iselle, at the foot of the table.

"She isn't a prisoner," he said. "She's a student at this college. She's a guest of this city. And she's my..." He stopped. Went red. Went on anyway. "She's my friend. And I'm not stepping back from her. You can ask me again. You can ask me a hundred times. I'm still going to say no."

Captain Hesk looked at him for a long moment. Then at Lexander.

Lexander was looking at Roderic with an expression I couldn't read.

"First time, is it?" he said.

Roderic swallowed. "Sir?"

"First time you've ever said no to anyone." Lexander's one eye didn't leave his face. "I've known you since the day you were born, boy. I've never once heard you say it."

"Yes, sir," said Roderic. His voice shook. "First time."

At the foot of the table, very slowly, Iselle turned her head and looked at him.

She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. But I saw her face, and I'll never forget it. It was the face of someone who has been the easiest door in the world for her whole life, and has just watched someone stand in front of it.

Lexander let out a long breath. He lifted one hand, and Hesk let go of Roderic's arm and stepped back to the door.

"All right," said Lexander. "All right." He rubbed his eye. "Nobody's a prisoner. Not yet. Sit down, Roderic, before you fall down. You can stand next to her sitting down." He looked down the table. "Caitlin."

Caitlin jumped.

"You've been writing this whole time," said Lexander. "You've been looking at that letter-book since it came in. You've been looking at the note." He nodded at the folded scrap of paper lying on the table beside the clasps, still with its blot of gray wax. "Io says you correct things. She says when you find a mistake, you write down what's wrong, and what's right, and how you know." He leaned forward. "So tell me. Did she do it?"

Every head at the table turned to look at my little sister.

Caitlin looked at Iselle. Then at Roderic, standing beside her. Then down at her blue book, at the page she'd been writing on, covered in her small square hand. Her pen was shaking.

"I don't know," she said.

Roderic made a sound. "Cait..."

"I don't know." Caitlin's voice cracked, and she pushed through it. "I want to say no. I want to say it more than anything. But I haven't got it yet. I've got the letter-book and the note and the wax and the scarf, and something's wrong with them, I can feel something's wrong, but I can't see what it is yet. And I'm not going to say no just because I want it to be no." She was crying again, and she didn't stop writing. "Give me the note. And the book. And tonight. Please. I'll know by morning. Or I'll know I can't know." She looked at Iselle. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I won't lie for you. Not even for you."

Iselle looked at her for a long moment.

"I know," she said. "I'd stop trusting you if you did."

* * *

"Then the question," said Io, "is where she sleeps tonight."

It was the first thing she'd said since we came in. Everyone turned to her. She was still sitting very straight, with her hands folded on the green letter-book, and her face was tired and gray, the way faces go when they've been up all night looking at ash.

"Not the college," she said. "Not with a loose board under her bed that someone else knew about before she did. Whoever put those clasps there knows that room. They've been in it. They could go in it again." She looked at Lexander. "And not under guard in the palace. Not in the inner rooms. I won't put her somewhere without a window. I promised her a window."

"Then where?" said Lexander.

My father leaned forward.

"Greykeep," he said. "The north tower. Carol's room." He looked down the table at Iselle. "Round. Eight windows. One in every direction. Helena says there isn't a corner in it where anything could hide." He paused. "There's a Castellan at the gate that won't let anyone through it it doesn't know. And there's my daughter, who's been asked for more times than anyone alive, and who knows exactly how that feels." He folded his hands. "That's not a prison, Lexander. That's a house. She'd be my guest. Under my roof. And if anyone wants to ask her anything, they'll ask her in front of me."

Lexander looked at him for a long time across the table.

"You'd stand for her," he said.

"I'd stand for her," said my father. "The way you'd stand for mine."

Lexander looked down at the gold clasps. Then at Io. Something passed between them, the way it does between people who've been married long enough to stop needing words for things.

"All right," said Lexander. "Greykeep. Until Caitlin's had her night." He looked down the table. "If the girl agrees."

Every head turned to Iselle.

She sat at the foot of the table with her hands folded, very still, with Roderic standing beside her chair. She didn't answer straight away. She looked at my father for a long moment, the way she'd looked at him in Carol's eight-windowed room on the morning she told him who she was.

"You're asking me," she said.

"I'm asking you," said Father.

"I could say no."

"You could say no. And then we'd think of somewhere else. Together." He held her eyes. "But I'd like you to say yes. Because Carol would like the company. And because I don't think you should be alone tonight, and I don't think you want to be."

Iselle closed her eyes.

"Yes," she said.

* * *

The Castellan wrote her in at a quarter past noon.

She came through the Concordia gate between my father and Roderic, with Caitlin's ruined orange scarf left behind on the council table and her little green primer clutched against her chest, and the Castellan looked up from its ledger and looked at her for a long, long moment.

Then it bent its head and wrote.

I looked at the page afterward. I always do. It's a habit I've never broken.

Iselle, daughter of Saba. Inward. Concordia. Asked.

And underneath, after a moment, smaller:

Guest of the house.

Iselle saw it too. She stood in front of the ledger for a long time, reading it upside down, the way she'd learned to read Eleanor's letters on the gates. Then she said, "Thank you," to the Castellan, very quietly, and the Castellan said, "You are welcome, Iselle," and she went up the hundred and forty steps to my sister's room with Roderic carrying her trunk, and didn't look back.

* * *

I found my father in the lower hall afterward, by the Westmere arch, looking at the map of the gates painted on the wall.

He had his hands in his pockets. The smell of thunder had mostly gone off him. He didn't turn around when I came up beside him.

"There's something I didn't say," I said. "In the council room."

"I know. I saw you not say it." He kept looking at the map. "Go on."

So I told him. Odo. The narrow hall of the Kethran house, and the man standing against the wall like a coat-stand, with his sleeves pulled down over his hands. I watched her as far as the turn. The touch at the door. One cold, dry, careful touch. And the cold in it. Not Carol's cold, or his. The other kind.

Father didn't say anything for a long time.

"The same as the river," he said at last.

"The same."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure."

He was quiet for a while longer, looking at the painted line on the wall that runs west from Greykeep, through the Westmere arch, to the sea.

"Then nobody asks Odo anything," he said. "Not yet. Not you. Not Lexander. Not Hesk." He turned his head and looked at me. "A man like that answers a question by opening a door. You've seen what comes through it." He looked back at the map. "We watch him. We let Caitlin have her night. And in the morning, if she's found what I think she'll find, we ask him all at once. Properly. With everyone in the room."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight," said my father, "I'm going to Westmere. I want to look at that man on the bow myself."

"Now?"

"Now." He took his hands out of his pockets. "Tell your mother I'll be back for supper."

And he was gone.

There wasn't a door. There wasn't a fold. There was just a sound like the world tearing along a seam, and a line of white-gold light that went straight out through the Westmere arch and away to the west, so bright it left a green shadow on the inside of my eyelids, and the smell of thunder, and a little ring of scorched flagstones on the floor of the lower hall where my father had been standing.

The Castellan looked up from its ledger. Then it bent its head and wrote.

Uriah Grey. Outward. Westmere. By the fast way.

* * *

I went up to Mary's office at midnight, because I couldn't sleep, and because there was a light under the door.

Caitlin was there. At her little desk in the corner, the one she's had since she was nine, under the window, with every lamp in the room lit and gathered around her. The green letter-book from the Kethran house lay open on one side of her. The anonymous note, with its blot of gray wax, lay on the other. In front of her, her blue book, open, and her own fair-copy alphabet, and three of Mary's folders of Eleanor's plates, and a hand mirror.

She'd been crying again, at some point. She wasn't now. She had the look on her face she gets when a column finally adds up.

She heard me in the doorway and didn't turn around.

"Garrick," she said. "Come and look at this."