Hawthorn is the only shrub the old Drúir gardeners never planted by an entrance. It takes a drop from everyone who passes, they say, and it does not forget who gave it.

From "Gardens and Hedges of the Deep Forests", the Déynáir library

Chapter 29

What We Carry

Fenris came down the stairs first.

It had its nose to the steps, the way it must have had it to my tracks in the rime all the way from the river. Its claws ticked on the wet stones, and then it was down and standing over Kalmin's feet, where Lynx was lying. Lynx didn't lift his head. The wolf sniffed at him once and then backed away a few steps and lay down on the stone floor with its nose on its paws, as if it knew exactly how far away you ought to lie.

Behind it came Haltora with a blue light in his hand. His scent reached me before his face did. Iron and night air and smouldering embers. It was the first time since the mountain that I could smell him, and I hadn't known you could be relieved to recognise your combat teacher by his smell.

He stopped at the foot of the stairs. His black eyes went from Retia with the burnt-down torch to Ahra with his back against the wall to Kalmin below him to me. I saw him count. This time he didn't start again.

"I promised to wake you," he said.

"I didn't sleep."

"No." He looked at my boots, which were still dark with river water, and at the blood that had dried under my nose. "I can see that."

He went over to Ahra and got down on his knees. It took time for such a big man, and his knees creaked against the stone. He pulled his thick combat robe off his shoulders and laid it over Kalmin, right up to the chin, and smoothed it out once across the chest with his broad, scarred hand.

"Retonk," he said.

Ahra looked up.

"We're taking him now. You walk beside him the whole way."

Ahra nodded. He didn't say anything. That was the strangest thing about him that morning: Ahra, who always filled a room with words, didn't have a single one left.

Then he opened his robe.

The raven lay inside, against his chest. Black and curled up, with one flight feather bent the wrong way. Ahra lifted it out with both hands and laid it in mine.

"It was lying by the wall," he said. His voice was hoarse, as if he hadn't used it since the mountain. "It was breathing. I couldn't leave it there."

It was lighter than I had thought. Under the feathers a heart was beating, fast and faint, like a finger tapping on a door far away. It smelt of dust and blood, and under that, so faintly that I had to put my nose right down into the feathers, of home.

Alôpex got up in my lap and put her nose to it. She held it there for a long time.

"It's still warm," she said.

"Nihil told me once it had been sitting in your window every week," said Ahra.

Haltora got up and came over to me. He looked down at the raven and at my palm beneath it, where the wreath of hawthorn sat white in the red. He didn't say anything about either.

"Mathson's asleep in the infirmary," he said. "The ermine is lying on his pillow and snaps at Solveig whenever he comes too close." He looked at me for a second longer. "Eat something."

Arcanus came down the stairs with his cut hand wrapped in a white cloth. He and Haltora lifted Kalmin between them, robe and all, and Ahra got up. He swayed, and Retia took his elbow, and he let her. Then he went up the stairs behind his brother.

I tucked the raven inside my jumper, against my skin, the way Ahra had carried it. It was cold. I kept a hand over it all the way up the stairs, and Alôpex walked so close to my leg that I could feel her with every step.

Maka came on the first ferry.

Edrin had sent word to Ahra's grandmother during the night. What it said, none of us knew. But when the ferry slid in towards the landing stage in the grey morning light, Maka was already standing at the rail, and he jumped across onto the gangplank before anyone had managed to tie up.

Ahra stood at the end of the landing stage. Retia and I stood back on the shore. It wasn't something we had agreed. We had just stopped there, both of us, as if the landing stage belonged to the Retonk family that morning and we had no right to walk out onto it.

The planks were white with rime. The sea smelt of seaweed and tar and cold, grey winter, and the gulls screamed above the ferry's funnel. Maka walked quickly out along the landing stage and then more slowly, and a few metres from Ahra he stopped. He looked at his little brother's face, and I saw him read all of it there. Then he put his arms round him and laid a hand on the back of his head and held it there.

Maka's scent was like Ahra's, only deeper. That morning it was muffled, like a sound behind a closed door.

The raven stirred under my jumper. A small, scratching movement against my stomach, and then nothing again.

Then a shadow fell across the landing stage.

The eagle came down from the mountain. I didn't know how long it had sat on the stone. All night. All morning. Now it came in over the castle in long, heavy glides, and it turned once above the ferry and then came so low over the landing stage that the gulls scattered.

Maka lifted his arm without thinking about it.

The eagle landed on it. Its talons went through his woollen sleeve, and I saw his face tighten, but he didn't lower his arm. It folded its wings and laid its head in against his shoulder, the same way Kalmin had laid his forehead against its head that night on the mountain. Maka stroked its back with two fingers. He said its name. Aquila.

It wasn't Maka's. It just had nowhere else to land.

It didn't fly back to the mountain.

We took Kalmin by boat to Tés Aváir the next day.

He lay on the deck in white linen, and Ahra sat by his head the whole crossing. Retia stood in the stern with Fulmen on her shoulder, looking at the wake. At the quay she went home to her mother. I went with the Retonk family. No one asked whether I wanted to. Ahra's father just took my bag from me and carried it along with his own.

The grandmother's house was tall and narrow and made of grey stone, in a street so old that the cobbles had been worn round. Inside, it smelt of people. Bark and honey in many layers, some fresh, some so old they had almost turned to stone. Everyone who had ever lived there. And in the hall by the stairs, faintly, dry oak bark and ink. I stood still in the doorway and didn't know what to do with myself.

The plates from the Winter Solstice dinner were still on the dining table. No one had cleared them.

Ahra's mother showed me up to the attic. She was small and fair-haired, and Ahra had her hands, the long fingers that always had to be holding on to something. She smelt of sage and rainwater and warm wool. Her eyes were red, and she didn't try to hide it.

The bed was made. White linen, a folded wool blanket at the foot, and a dried sprig of lavender on the pillow.

"It's been ready for ten days," she said.

She bent down and smoothed the blanket out, even though it was already smooth. Her hand stayed on it.

"Ahra's sleeping in the room next door," she said. "He doesn't want to sleep alone. He won't say so."

At supper the plates from the solstice were finally cleared. It was Ahra's father who did it. He got up in the middle of the meal, as if he had only just seen them, and started carrying them out to the kitchen, two at a time, and he didn't use a spell. I got up and took a tea towel. He washed, and I dried. The water was too hot, and the steam rose into his face, and he didn't say anything, and neither did I. Out in the sitting room the grandmother sat watching us through the doorway. When the last plate was on the shelf, he laid a wet hand on my shoulder for a moment and went back to the table.

It was the first thing in that house I could help with. It wasn't much. I held on to the tea towel for a long time afterwards.

When I had gone up, Ahra's mother followed me with a basket. There was a warm stone at the bottom of it, wrapped in a piece of linen. She put it on the floor by my bed and looked at me, and then at the bulge under my jumper. She didn't ask what kind of bird it was. She just laid a hand on the edge of the basket, the way she had laid it on the blanket, and went back downstairs.

Kalmin was buried the next morning, in the garden behind the house.

The garden was long and narrow and surrounded by a high wall, and there were trees in it. Old trees, with bark so thick and furrowed that you could have laid your hand in the grooves. A tree for each of those who had come before. The ground was hard with frost, and Ahra's grandmother, who did everything with spells, dug with a spade. She didn't let anyone take it from her.

They laid him down in the linen. No coffin. The grandmother pressed an acorn into the loose earth over his chest, and then they knelt round the grave, all of them, and laid their hands flat on the earth. Ahra. Maka with Aquila on his shoulder. The father. The mother. The grandmother. Lynx lay by Ahra's leg.

I stood up by the wall with Alôpex pressed against my leg.

There was a tree for each of those who had come before, and I had an empty wall and two feathers. It was the ugliest thought I had ever had, and I had it at a grave. I was ashamed of it. That didn't make it go away.

Ahra's mother turned her head and looked at me. Then she moved a hand's breadth to the side, so there was a gap between her and Ahra, and she reached a hand up towards me.

I went down and knelt in the gap. The earth was ice cold and wet through my trousers. I had nothing to give. I knew that. The scents had come back one by one since the cellar. Where my Dherak used to hum, it was still quiet. I put my hand on the earth anyway, the one with the mark, and the cold made the thorns prickle.

Under our fingers something stirred. A pale green shoot pushed up through the frozen earth, slowly, a hand high, with two leaves that unfolded like hands opening. It wasn't me. I knew perfectly well it wasn't me.

Ahra's shoulder was against mine. He let it stay there.

Surain came that same afternoon.

I smelt him through the window before I saw him. Wet earth and animal fur and old metal, and the fire that had gone out long ago. He stood outside the gate in the garden wall in his brown robe and didn't come in.

I went down with the basket. Alôpex ran ahead and sat in the gateway and looked up at him, and he nodded to her, the same way he nodded to people.

"I don't go into a house that is grieving," he said. "Not without being invited."

He lifted the cloth off the basket. The raven lay on the warm stone with its eyes closed. Surain picked it up with both hands, slowly, and it lay still in them. He laid his thumb on its breast and held it there. Then he lifted its head with one finger, and it opened one eye, and he looked into it for a long time.

"It's alive," he said.

"It's hers," I said. It wasn't a question. I didn't want it to be a question.

Surain looked at me over the bird. "Yes."

Something in my chest settled, like a stone that finally reaches the bottom.

"When it was hit," he said, "she felt it." He lifted one hand from the raven and laid it flat against his own chest, just below the collarbone. "Here. Like a blow. That's how it is with an Amícûs."

I thought of the chamber. Of the raven hitting the wall and lying still. Somewhere, far away, a woman I had never seen had sat down in the middle of whatever she was doing, with her hand on her chest.

"Can she feel it now?"

"She can feel that it's alive." He tucked it in under his robe, close to his body. "That's enough for her tonight."

"Where is she?"

Surain didn't answer. He took my hand, the one with the mark, and turned it palm upwards. He looked at the wreath of hawthorn. His thumb was rough and warm, and it didn't touch the mark. Then he closed my hand again with his own, one finger at a time.

"You're searching too hard, boy. What you're looking for finds you when you stop looking."

It was exactly the kind of answer that makes you want to hit a grown-up. It was also exactly what had happened in the cellar under the north tower. I had leant against the wrong wall.

Surain nodded to me, as if he had heard all of it. Then he walked off down the street with the raven under his robe, and the frost crunched under his shoes.

Retia came in the evening.

She stood in the gateway with frost in her hair and a dark coat I hadn't seen before, and she looked as if she had been walking up and down outside the wall for a while before she knocked. I noticed the coat. I also noticed that I noticed it, and that it probably wasn't what you were supposed to be thinking about the evening after a funeral. I thought it anyway.

Ahra and I were sitting on the stone bench by the wall with a lantern between us. The little tree stood ten steps away in the dark, and the earth around it was still dark and loose. Ahra had a cup of tea in his hands that had gone cold long ago. He hadn't drunk from it.

Retia didn't sit down. She stood in front of us with her hands in her coat pockets. Her scent of salt wind and cold stone and wild roses was there, and under it something bitter, the same thing I had sensed behind the oak tree on the mountain.

"My father was on the mountain," she said.

Ahra looked down into his tea. "I know."

"No. You know the Thief King's men were there." Her voice was flat and firm, the voice she used when something was true and hurt. "I'm saying it was my father. I was standing twenty metres from him. His men were there when..." She stopped. Her hands clenched in her pockets; I could see it in the fabric. "The last man. The one who came in at the end. I don't know who he was. I don't know if he was one of Dad's."

I could still smell him if I closed my eyes. Dry chalk and apples that had lain too long. Not burnt wood and ash. I didn't say it. I didn't know what it meant, and it didn't change the fact that her father had stood at the stone.

"I can't say sorry for him," said Retia. "I've tried the whole way here. It's not mine to say."

Ahra didn't say anything for a long time. His fingers were wrapped round the cup. He didn't look at her, and he didn't say it was all right. It wasn't.

But he stayed sitting there.

Retia stood a little longer. Then she nodded, once, more to herself than to us, and went out through the gate. I heard her footsteps fade away down the street.

The lantern hummed. Ahra turned the cup a quarter turn in his hands.

"The first evening," he said. "The one you saw at the end of the corridor. With the fair hair."

"Yes."

"It was him. I knew straight away." He looked down into the cold tea. "And then I said it was probably just an older student."

"You said it too quickly."

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. It was just a breath through his nose. "I said everything too quickly back then." He ran his thumb along the rim of the cup. "I thought I was looking after him."

I didn't say anything. I knew what it was like to be looked after like that. I didn't know what it was like to be the one doing it.

"What he said," said Ahra. "At the end."

"You don't have to."

"I know." He put the cup down on the bench between us. "I'm not going to, either."

"No."

And it was different. I felt it sitting in my chest while we sat there in the cold looking at the little tree. Hanne's silence had been about me. What she kept quiet about was mine, and she had kept it from me for thirteen years. This wasn't mine. It was the last thing Ahra had of his brother that no one else had, and it should stay with him.

I went to the bank the next day. Ahra came with me. He didn't say why, and I didn't ask.

At home by the fjord it was Christmas Eve. At Fjordly there would be a tree in the common room with the same woven paper hearts as every year, and after the rice pudding Hanne would have pretended not to know that the almond was in my bowl. It had been, every year since I was little. In the council's system the field after my name was probably empty again, and Hanne would have had a letter, which she read at the kitchen table and put in the drawer without a word to anyone. Here it was just a Tuesday, three days after the solstice. The streets were grey and wet, and the dwarves in the bank were working the way they worked every other day.

Ahra sat down on the bench outside the bank, the same bench we had sat on in November. Lynx lay down across his feet.

"I'll wait here," he said.

The gate was low and made of old oak. The inscription sat above the door, in the same place as last time.

Cave. Nunquam solus es.

Beware. You are never alone. In November I had read it as a threat, something lurking inside the walls. Now I stood in the cold street and thought of Ahra in the dark under the mountain with a lynx walking ahead of him. Of Ahra's mother moving a hand's breadth to the side. Of a woman who had sat down with her hand on her chest. It could be read both ways. That morning I read it as a promise.

Alôpex came in with me. The room was low and warm as before, and her claws ticked on the stone floor.

The dwarf at the wooden counter looked up when I put the key down in front of him. He looked at Alôpex without blinking. He took the key up between two thick fingers and weighed it in his hand. Then he nodded and got up.

The door became ancient again, cracked and dark, and the air inside was the same cold, dry air of metal and dust and leather that has lain in the dark for a long time. The pile of sealed papers lay in the corner where it had lain before. I dug them out from under the coins with fingers that wouldn't stop shaking.

There were seven. All with the black wax seal. All yellowed and the same age, with wax that had gone grey at the edges. I broke the seals one by one, and they crackled like dry bark. Six of them were written in the same golden characters as on the spines of the black books on the shelf next to me. I couldn't read a single one of them. They were the same characters as in the margin of the book Nihil had found, the ones he hadn't been able to read either.

The seventh was folded twice. When I opened it, it smelt faintly of home, and underneath that of dried flowers, and I didn't know why it made me think of the windowsill at Fjordly.

"My boy. I will find you when you are big enough to find me. Until then: live."

That was all it said. No signature. It didn't need one.

I have read it so many times since then that the paper has gone soft at the folds.

Inside the fold lay a strip of paper, no wider than two fingers. There was one line on it, written in the same hand and the same ink as the letter. But the characters were the golden characters from the spines of the books. It was as if she had switched language in the middle of a sentence, to a language she knew I couldn't read yet.

I stood for a long time with the letter in one hand and the strip in the other.

It had been lying here the whole time. It had been lying here that day in November, when I took what I needed from the pile and walked backwards out of the door. She had written "live", and I had gone up a mountain.

I put them both inside my jumper, where the raven had lain, and went out.

The dwarf took the key out of the door and gave it back to me. He held on to it a moment too long.

"It hasn't been sleeping," he said.

"What?"

"Your vault. The key slept for fifteen winters. The vault didn't." He sat down behind the counter again. "Every year something has been put in over this counter. Coins, mostly."

"Who?"

The dwarf looked at me with his dark, appraising eyes. "We don't ask."

Outside, Ahra was still sitting on the bench with Lynx across his feet. He looked up at me and then at my hand, which lay flat over my jumper.

"Did you find anything?" he said.

"Yes," I said. "Something I can't read yet."

Arvia had invited me to supper on my last evening in Tés Aváir.

The garden in front of the house was still withered, but someone had swept the leaves off the path. The door stood ajar, and warm air came out, and the smell of freshly baked bread and warm linen and something simmering. I stepped into the hall and closed the door behind me. The hall smelt of lavender and warm wood, the way it always had, and the tiles were wet from my boots. I stayed standing on them, because I could hear Retia's voice from the kitchen.

"Mum. I have to tell you something about Dad."

The kitchen door stood half open. I could see Arvia at the table with her hands in a dough. Her hands stopped. Then she wiped them on her apron, slowly, first one and then the other, and sat down.

Retia sat down opposite her. She began to tell her. I didn't hear all of it, and I didn't try to. I heard "Niram." I heard "the mountain." I heard that her voice didn't break. Arvia didn't ask anything. I didn't know whether it was because she knew, or because she couldn't.

Cajis was sitting on the stairs with a book in her lap that she wasn't reading. She looked at me. Then she looked at the bowl.

It stood on a small chest of drawers just inside the door, a flat wooden bowl. The bowl they had put conkers in when Retia was little. A few steps further down the hall the empty hook hung above the pale rectangle on the wall.

There was one in it now. Shiny and brown and smooth, with no dust on it.

Retia's own lay on the windowsill in her and Vessa's room. It had lain there since November.

I bent over the bowl. Salt water and cold stone, faint, almost gone under dark Dherak and an old bitterness. The same scent as by the stone on the mountain.

In the kitchen Retia said her father's name out loud to her mother again. Out in the hall I stood with his conker in front of me and didn't know which of them I should tell first.