Chapter 4: The Fishing Table

The fishing table is not a table.

It is a boat. A long, flat-bottomed, badly painted boat that lives in a reed-roofed shed on the north shore of Greymere, the lake an hour's ride above the castle. The boat has four benches. Father has the stern. Lexander has the bow. Thor has the middle bench on the left, because it is the only one that doesn't creak when she sits on it. Loki has the middle bench on the right, and has been trying for nineteen years to work out how to make it creak when Thor sits on it.

Nobody remembers who first called it the fishing table. Mother thinks it was Io. Io says it was Mary, because Mary needed something to write in the household calendar, and Uriah, Lexander, Thor and Loki go to the lake and come back smelling of fish was too long for a single line.

It happens on the first rest-day of every month.

It has happened through two wars, one flood, three royal births, a dragon's moulting season and the week the north tower caught fire. Father missed it once, when Adriana was in labour with Mirelle. The other three went anyway, caught nothing, and came back and sat outside the birthing room with a bucket of empty water, because Loki said it was tradition.

It was not tradition. It became tradition.

I had never been invited.

None of us had. Not Carol, not Ignatius, not Roderic, not anyone. The fishing table was a closed court. It was the one place in two kingdoms where the King of Greykeep, the King of Concordia, the goddess of lightning and the god of mischief were not any of those things. They were four people in a bad boat who did not catch fish.

So when Father knocked on my door before dawn on the first rest-day of the month, with a rod over his shoulder and a look on his face I had never seen before, I assumed someone had died.

"Nobody's died," Father said.

"Then what?"

"Lexander's done his shoulder." Father handed me a second rod. "He can't row."

I looked at the rod.

"And you want me to row."

"I want you to row."

"Why not Loki?"

Father gave me a long, patient look. It was the look he gave petitioners who had asked whether the crown might simply pay for everything.

"Have you ever seen Loki row?"

I had not.

I suspected, thinking about it, that nobody had.

* * *

We rode up in the grey before sunrise. Father and I on horses, Lexander beside us with his left arm strapped across his chest and an expression of deep personal grievance. He'd hurt it, he said, lifting Seraphina's old cradle down from a high shelf for Io, who wanted to see whether it could be mended for little Uriah's visits to Concordia.

"It could not," Lexander said darkly. "It was full of wasps."

He is a big man, the King of Concordia. Bigger than Father, and broader, with grey in his beard now and a patch over one eye. He wears it plain. Io says he has owned eleven, and that the whole of Concordia once spent a week discussing a new one. When I was small I asked him what had happened to his eye, and he said a friend had taken it a long time ago so that he could remember something he had forgotten. I didn't understand. I thought it was a riddle.

It was not a riddle. I was twelve before anyone told me the rest. Lexander carries the memories of an old god from a world that ended, and it took the loss of an eye to wake them. The friend who took it was Loki.

They have been friends ever since.

I have never understood that. Lexander says I'm not meant to.

Thor and Loki were waiting at the shed.

They had come the way they always came, which was by not coming at all and then simply being there. Thor was sitting on the upturned boat with Mjölnir across her knees and her long braid over one shoulder, eating an apple. Loki was leaning against the shed wall with his arms folded and his eyes closed, looking as if he'd been asleep there for a hundred years.

Thor saw me and stopped chewing.

She looked at Father.

"No," she said.

"Lexander can't row."

"Then Loki rows."

Loki opened one eye.

"I am a god," he said, "of considerable antiquity, and my hands are not made for oars."

"Your hands are made for picking locks," said Thor.

"Exactly. Delicate work."

Thor looked at me again. I had known Thor all my life. She had sat on the nursery floor with Carol and let her pull sparks out of her braid. She had taught me to throw a punch when I was nine and then explained to Mother, very calmly, why I had needed to. She was family in every way that mattered.

She was looking at me now as if I were a stranger who had wandered into her house during supper.

"He rows," she said slowly. "He doesn't fish."

"Agreed," said Father.

"He doesn't talk."

"I can talk," I said.

"He doesn't talk," Thor repeated, "and he doesn't tell anyone what's said in this boat."

"Agreed."

"Not Carol. Not his wife. Not Mary."

"Especially not Mary," said Loki, without opening his eye.

They all looked at me.

I understood then that I was being let into something. Not just a boat. Something that had been the four of them, and only the four of them, for nineteen years, through everything.

"I won't tell anyone," I said.

Thor finished her apple. She threw the core into the reeds.

"Then get in," she said, "and row."

* * *

I promised I wouldn't tell what was said in the boat.

So I won't.

I'll tell you what happened instead, which is different, and which nobody made me promise anything about.

What happened first was that I discovered the boat leaked. Not badly. A steady seep along the third plank from the bow, which everyone else had apparently known about for nineteen years, because Lexander handed me a tin cup without being asked and said, "Every hundred strokes."

What happened second was Jörmungandr.

He was already in the lake when we pushed off. Or rather, part of him was. The World Serpent is too large to be entirely anywhere, and most of him, Loki told me, was asleep under the river road between Greykeep and Westmere, as usual. But some part of him had come up through the reeds at the north end of Greymere and was lying in the shallows with only his great head above the water, chin on the mud, golden eyes half-closed.

He looked like a dog that had been brought to a party against its will.

"He's sulking," Loki said.

"Why?"

"Because I asked him to come."

"Why did you ask him to come?"

Loki looked at me with an expression of great tenderness.

"Because he's my son," he said, "and he never goes anywhere."

Jörmungandr opened one golden eye the size of a cartwheel and looked at his father across the water.

"It's a lake," he said. His voice came up through the boat's planks rather than through the air. I felt it in my teeth. "There are no roads in a lake."

"There's a road round it," said Loki.

"That's not a road. That's a circle."

"You like circles."

"I like circles that go somewhere," said Jörmungandr, and closed the eye again.

Thor snorted into her bait tin.

What happened third was Fenrir.

He came down out of the pines on the west shore at about mid-morning, the size of a small house and grey as old snow, and lay down in the long grass above the waterline with a sigh I heard from the middle of the lake. He put his chin on his paws. He did not look at us. He looked at the grass.

I had grown up with Fenrir. I had ridden on his back as a child, and pulled his ears, and been carried home by the scruff after I fell asleep in the orchard. And I had always known, the way you know things as a child without being told, that there was something about grass he couldn't get enough of.

I was nearly grown before Father told me why. Fenrir had spent a very long time in a place with no grass in it. A place with walls, and a door that only opened from one side, and the sound of other prisoners going quiet one at a time through the stone. When he came out, Father said, the first thing he did was lie down in Greykeep's garden and put his face in the lawn and not move for a day and a half.

He still does it.

He was doing it now. He rolled onto his back in the grass with all four enormous legs in the air, like a puppy, and stayed there.

Loki watched him with an expression I had never seen on Loki's face before, and which I suspect he did not know was there.

Then he caught me looking, and it was gone, and he was Loki again.

"Row," he said. "The fish are on the far side."

They were not.

The fish, as far as I could tell over six hours, were nowhere. Father caught a weed. Thor caught a stick, and then the same stick again, and then accused the stick of following her. Lexander couldn't cast with one arm, so he sat in the bow with his good hand trailing in the water and talked, and the others answered, and I rowed and baled and kept my promise.

I'll tell you this much, because it's about me and not about them.

I learned that the boat is where they put things down.

All four of them carry more than anyone should. A kingdom each, or a god's memory, or a war nobody else remembers, or two sons who were lost to him for longer than anyone should be. They carry it everywhere. They carry it into council rooms and nurseries and battlefields, and they never set it down, because there's nowhere safe to set it.

Except here.

Once a month, for one morning, in a bad boat on a lake with no fish in it, they set it down on the floor between the benches and leave it there. Nobody picks it up. Nobody looks at it. Nobody asks.

They just fish.

Or fail to.

I didn't understand, until that morning, why I'd never been invited. I'd thought it was because I was too young, or because they wanted to be away from their children.

It was neither.

It was because I was one of the things they carried.

* * *

What happened fourth was the prank.

I should explain that Loki has been trying for nineteen years to make Thor's bench creak. Thor's bench is the only bench in the boat that doesn't creak. Thor has always said it's because she sits on it properly. Loki has always said that's absurd, and that the bench is enchanted, and that he'll break the enchantment if it takes him a thousand years.

This was, apparently, the year.

I didn't see him do it. Nobody ever sees Loki do anything. But at around noon, when Thor shifted her weight to recast, her bench gave a long, loud, deeply satisfying creak.

Everybody stopped.

Thor looked down at the bench.

Loki looked at the sky with an expression of complete innocence, which on Loki is the most incriminating face there is.

"Did you hear that?" Thor said.

"Hear what?" said Loki.

Thor shifted again.

Creeeeak.

Lexander began to laugh. It hurt his shoulder, and he laughed anyway, holding it.

Thor turned slowly toward Loki. Mjölnir was lying in the bottom of the boat. Her hand moved toward it.

Loki held up both palms. "Nineteen years," he said. "Nineteen years, Thor. You have to admit, it's very good work."

Thor opened her mouth.

The bench creaked again, all by itself.

Then it cracked.

It was not, it turned out, the enchantment Loki had broken. It was the bench. He had loosened the joints so it would creak, and nineteen years of Thor sitting on it properly had been the only thing holding it together. It split clean down the middle. Thor went straight through it. The third plank from the bow, which had been leaking gently for nineteen years, gave up entirely, and the lake came in.

The next part happened quickly.

Father froze the water coming through the hole before it reached his knees. Lexander grabbed the bait tin with his one good arm, because priorities are priorities. Thor came up out of the wreckage of her bench soaked to the waist, with Mjölnir in one hand and a stick in the other. It was the same stick.

And I folded.

It was a small fold. Just the inside of the boat, the bit below the benches, and the place in the lake two yards off the port side. I opened them to each other for one breath, and every drop of water in the bottom of the boat went out over the side in a single grey sheet. Then I let the fold go.

The boat sat level on the lake. Father's ice plugged the hole. The fish, wherever they were, went on not being caught.

Everybody looked at me.

"I'm not supposed to talk," I said.

Thor began to laugh.

She stood in the middle of the boat with her hammer in one hand and her stick in the other, dripping from the waist down, and she laughed until she had to sit down on what was left of her bench. It didn't creak. There wasn't enough of it left to creak.

Loki was still holding up his palms.

"In my defence," he said, "it did creak."

On the west shore, Fenrir had rolled over onto his front and was watching us with his ears pricked. In the shallows, Jörmungandr had opened both golden eyes.

"Was that a road?" he asked. "Just then? That felt like a road."

"It was a fold," I said.

The World Serpent considered this for a long moment.

"Do it again," he said.

I did it again. I folded a short, pointless road across the corner of the lake, from the reeds to the shore, and Jörmungandr slid his great head along it, and came out on the other side looking very slightly less offended by the whole morning.

Loki watched him.

Then he looked at me. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.

We rowed in at mid-afternoon.

We had caught nothing.

Fenrir had eaten it anyway. I don't know how. When we hauled the boat up into the shed, he was lying in the grass beside the empty bucket with a contented expression and three fish tails sticking out of the side of his mouth, and nobody, not Thor, not Father, not even Loki, could work out where he had found them.

"He always does that," Lexander said, as if this explained everything.

I suppose, by the standards of the fishing table, it did.

* * *

There is another table.

Nobody calls it anything. It doesn't have a calendar line. Mary refuses to record it, on the grounds that nobody has ever told her when it happens. But on the first rest-day of every month, while the fishing table is on the lake, Mother and Adriana and Io sit in the south solar with the windows open and a pot of tea that Helena is not allowed to make, and for one afternoon they are not queens or saintesses or first-flame healers either.

I had always assumed it was a coincidence.

I rode back through the castle gate smelling of lake and fish and wet wool, and the first thing I saw was Io leaning out of the south solar window.

She looked at me. Then at Father behind me. Then back at me.

"They let you in," she said.

It was not a question.

"Lexander's shoulder," I said.

"Mm." She smiled. Seraphina has her smile, and I have never once been able to argue with it. "Did you catch anything?"

"No."

"Did Fenrir eat it anyway?"

"Yes."

Io turned her head and said something into the room behind her, and I heard Mother laugh, and Adriana's quieter laugh after it. Then Io looked back down at me, and the smile went somewhere more careful.

"Garrick," she said. "Before you go and wash. Have you seen the younger three?"

"Not since this morning."

"Neither have we," said Io. "That's the trouble."

* * *

The Castellan found them. It always does.

"Prince Elenos, Prince Faelan and Princess Mirelle," it said from the stone of the solar wall, a moment after Mother asked it. "The lower corridor beneath the infirmary."

The three women stood up at the same time.

I understood why a moment later. Everyone in Greykeep knows the lower corridor beneath the infirmary. It is the corridor where the door in the wall used to be. Where a frightened boy once sat on a stool every night and counted names. Where the Keeper of Roads spoke through the floor, before Varrick's wall came down.

There is no door there now. Just stone. But people still go down sometimes, to sit, and to say names, and to leave a light.

"Are they hurt?" Adriana asked.

"Prince Faelan has burned his hand," said the Castellan. "Not severely. Princess Mirelle is lighting lamps. There are forty-three lamps. The corridor has filled with smoke. Prince Elenos is sitting on the floor."

"Doing what?" said Mother.

The Castellan paused.

"Listening," it said.

* * *

The smoke met us at the top of the stairs.

It wasn't thick yet, just enough to sting, but the corridor below was bright with lamplight and the air above it shimmered with heat. I could hear coughing, and a small, determined voice saying, "Just one more. Just one more, Faelan, hold it steady," and a slightly older voice saying, "I am holding it steady, it's hot."

Io went down first.

She didn't hurry. She walked down into the smoke the way I've seen her walk into a burning building in Concordia, as if it were a room she'd been invited into. At the bottom of the stairs she held out one hand, palm up, and every flame in the corridor bent toward her.

All forty-three of them.

They leaned. They didn't go out. They just leaned, like flowers turning toward a window, and the heat came off the air and gathered in her palm in a small, bright, steady ball, and the smoke thinned and cleared and was gone.

The First Flame does not only burn. Io taught me that when I was four.

In the lamplight, the three of them looked up at us.

Mirelle stood in the middle of the corridor with a taper in her hand and soot on her nose. She has her grandmother's name and Hollis's, and she has taken both of them very seriously since she was old enough to be told what they meant. Faelan stood beside her with a lamp in one hand and the other hand tucked into his armpit, trying to look as though it didn't hurt. Elenos sat on the floor against the wall with his knees drawn up, perfectly still, with his eyes closed.

There were lamps everywhere. On the floor, on the ledges, on every flat surface the corridor had. Clay lamps from the kitchens, brass ones from the chapel, a glass one I was fairly sure came from Mary's office. They ran the whole length of the corridor in a long, uneven, glowing line, all the way to the blank stretch of wall where the door used to be.

"Mirelle," said Adriana.

She didn't say it loudly. Adriana never does.

Mirelle's chin came up.

"I'm not done," she said.

Mother went straight to Faelan, took his burned hand in both of hers, and held it. Aurelia's light rose under her fingers, gold and gentle, and I watched my half-brother's face go from pinched to astonished to sheepish in the space of three breaths.

Adriana knelt down in front of Mirelle.

She didn't take the taper away. I expected her to. I think Mirelle expected her to. Instead she knelt in the soot in her good dress and looked at her daughter.

"Tell me," she said.

Mirelle's chin wobbled. Just once.

"Grandmother Mirelle told me about the shelters," she said. "On the roads. The lamps. How the dead walk past them and stop and look at them, and that's how they know which way to go." She held up the taper. "And Hesketh keeps three. And Morwen Tull's shelter has one. And there's one in Anwen's old window. But there isn't one here." She pointed at the wall. "And this is where they came out. This is where they started. And nobody lit a lamp for them here."

Nobody said anything.

"So I'm lighting them," Mirelle said. "One for every hundred. Faelan was helping. Elenos was counting." Her voice cracked. "I'm only at forty-three."

Adriana looked at the lamps for a long moment.

Then she looked at Io.

Io looked at Mother.

Something passed between the three of them that I could not read. I've since decided it was the thing that happens at their table, the one Mary doesn't record. Three women who have each lost more than they talk about, reaching a decision without saying a word.

"Forty-three is a great many," Adriana said gently.

"It's not enough."

"No," Adriana agreed. "It isn't. It never will be. There were too many." She held out her hand. "So we'll keep one. Here. Always. We'll ask the Castellan to watch it, the way he watches the throne room. And every year, on this day, you can come down and light the rest."

Mirelle looked at the hand.

She looked at the long line of lamps.

Then she put the taper in her mother's hand, and burst into tears, and Adriana gathered her up, soot and all.

Io closed her fingers. Forty-two of the lamps went out. One, the one nearest the wall, stayed lit, small and steady.

"That one," Io said.

"I will watch it," said the Castellan from the stone.

* * *

Elenos hadn't moved.

While the others were busy, I went and sat down on the floor beside him, and waited.

He's the youngest of Mother's children. People forget him. I don't mean that cruelly; I mean that he lets them. He's quiet in a family where nobody else is, and he notices things, and he keeps what he notices to himself until it comes out sideways at supper. Helena says he's the only one of us who takes after her properly, and that it will get him into trouble one day.

He opened his eyes.

"You were listening," I said.

"Mm."

"To what?"

He was quiet for a while.

"The Castellan said I was listening," he said eventually. "I heard it say it. Through the stone."

"Were you?"

He nodded.

"She was here," Elenos said. "Just for a moment. When Mirelle lit the fortieth one." He looked at the wall where the door had been. "I didn't see her. I just heard. Like someone very far away at the end of a road."

I went very still.

He didn't look at me. He looked at the one lamp still burning by the wall.

"She said thank you," he said. "For the lamps."

"That's good."

"And then she said something else."

I waited.

"She said she was glad," said Elenos slowly, "because she was going to be busy."

Nobody else heard him. Mirelle was crying into Adriana's shoulder. Faelan was showing Mother his healed hand. Io was standing at the bottom of the stairs with a ball of gathered flame in her palm, looking at the one remaining lamp.

I looked at my little brother.

He looked back at me with Helena's eyes, calm and very clear.

"What did she mean?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. It was the truth.

Elenos nodded, as if he had expected that. Then he got up, dusted off his knees, and went to help Faelan carry the forty-two cold lamps back to the kitchens.

I stayed on the floor a while longer, looking at the light.

That night I didn't tell anyone what was said in the boat. I'd promised.

I didn't tell anyone what Elenos said in the corridor either. Nobody had made me promise that.

I'm still not sure why I kept it.