Beneath the old houses of the upper town in Tés Aváir lie apple cellars, limewashed white, because lime keeps the cold and takes on no smell from whatever is stored in it. Most of them were bricked up when the houses above changed hands. No one knows exactly how many there are. All anyone knows is that there are more cellars than houses.

"The House Book of the Upper Town", Tés Aváir city archives

Chapter 30

Room Left

We sailed back to Déynáir on Friday afternoon, Retia and I.

Ahra stayed in Tés Aváir two more days. The ferry was half empty. The sea was grey and heavy and smelt of seaweed and ice, and the wind came in from the north and found every gap in my robe. The letter lay in my inside pocket, folded round the strip, and I kept my hand over it most of the way, the way you keep a hand over your pocket in a crowd.

The castle was still almost empty. The room smelt of cold stone. Nihil lay on his bed with his back to me, pretending to be asleep, and the ermine lay curled up on his pillow.

On Saturday morning Nix was sitting at the foot of my bed.

I didn't know how long the cat had been sitting there. It sat completely still with its tail curled round its paws and its red eyes on me, and Alôpex lay at my neck, growling softly. Not really. Mostly to say she had seen it. In the other bed Nihil didn't open his eyes, but his hand closed around the blanket.

When I sat up, Nix jumped down onto the floor and walked to the door and looked back.

I put my boots on.

It walked ahead of me the whole way, over the seventh step from the top without putting a paw on it, and past the portrait that smelt of candles and parchment, without looking at it. I didn't look at it either. There was a name on the brass plate, and one day I would read it. Not that day. The light through the windows was white with frost.

The door stood ajar. It was young and ordinary, light oak with shiny hinges, as if someone had opened it for me and let it be as it was. Last time it had grown old under my hand.

I knocked anyway.

"Come in."

The office was the same. The candles had burnt low, and some of them had gone out, and there were little white lakes of hardened wax on the desk, as if no one had thought to change them for a long time. There were two cups of tea on the desk.

Edrin wasn't sitting behind it. He was standing at the window with his hands clasped behind his back.

His scent reached me before he turned. Candles and old parchment, and under it the room someone has just left. And something salty, faint, that had been there in November too. Back then I hadn't understood what it was.

Nix jumped up onto the desk and sat down between the two cups.

"Godrand," he said.

He said it to the window. Then he turned round.

It hit me somewhere under my breastbone, and I stood still until it had passed. Haltora had said it on the mountain, as an order, the way he shouted every surname across the circle in combat lessons. Edrin said it slowly, as if he had held it in his mouth for a long time and didn't know whether it would hold once it came out. It was his brother's name. It must have been his own as well.

"Sit down," he said. "If you want to."

Last time I hadn't sat down. I looked at the chair. Then I sat. It wasn't for his sake.

He pulled the other chair out from the wall and sat down opposite me, with no desk between us. He didn't know what to do with his hands. He put them on his knees. Then round the cup. Then on his knees again.

"Haltora has spoken to me," he said. "Several times. He doesn't shout. You know that."

"Yes."

"He's right." He looked down at his hands. "Four children went up the mountain that night because there wasn't a single adult you thought you could go to. That wasn't Haltora's fault. It wasn't yours." His thumb slid over the rim of the cup, back and forth, the way it had last time. "I kept silent. And my silence sent you up there without us."

I had thought it would feel like winning, if he ever said it. It felt like being right about something you would rather have been wrong about.

"I wasn't alone," I said.

"No." Something crossed his face. "You weren't. That's no credit to me."

I had carried the same four questions up the stairs as last time. Now I could only get one of them past my lips.

"Who killed my father?"

Edrin didn't close his eyes this time. He didn't look towards the window. He looked at me.

"I don't know," he said.

They were the same words as last time. Last time they had been the answer to when I would be strong enough. I had thought that was the only thing he didn't know.

"I have spent fifteen years trying to find out." He said it quietly and evenly, like a sum he had worked out many times. "I know where it happened. I know it was raining. I know who wasn't there. Who was, I don't know."

For two weeks I had thought his silence was a door he was holding shut against me. But behind this door there was nothing. There was only a room he had stood in alone for fifteen years, searching. That was worse. And it was easier, in a way I had no words for, and it annoyed me that it was easier.

"You could have said," I said. "Last time."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you?"

Nix walked across the desk and pressed its head against his wrist, and this time he didn't touch the cat. "Because 'I don't know' is the hardest thing an adult can say to a child," he said. "And you weren't a child. You had just told me so."

I could feel the letter against my chest through my jumper. My boy. I could have taken it out and laid it on the desk between the cups. I didn't. It was the first thing I had ever kept to myself in that office, and it didn't feel good, and it didn't feel wrong either.

"I'm not asking you to forgive me," he said.

"Good," I said.

It came out faster than I had meant it to. I looked down at the white wreath in my palm and tried to find something truer.

"I don't know if I can," I said.

"Neither do I." He nodded, slowly, as if we had agreed on something. "We can both not know for a little while yet."

He got up and went round behind the desk and pulled out a drawer. It creaked. He stood for a while with his hand down in it without taking anything out, and I saw his shoulders rise and fall, once, the way you take a breath before you walk into cold water.

Then he took out a picture. It was lying face down. He came back and sat down and held it between his hands on his knees.

"I've taken this out of that drawer many times," he said. "And put it back every time. I thought it was safest there." He looked down at the back of it. "I suppose it was mostly me it was safest for."

He held it out.

I didn't take it straight away. I thought, very clearly: if I turn it over, I can't turn it back. Then I took it.

It was on thick paper, worn soft at the corners. It smelt of drawer. Of wood and paper and candle wax and something that had lain in the dark a long time.

I turned it over.

Two people. The picture was drawn in brown ink, with no colours, only brown and white and the yellow of the paper, and it had been drawn outside by some water, and the wind had hold of them both. He was laughing. Not into the picture but out of it, at something or someone to the left of whoever had drawn it. His hair was in his eyes, and he was standing with his weight on one leg, the way Haltora had told me at least twenty times you shouldn't stand. His hand was on her back.

She wasn't laughing. She was looking straight into the picture. Straight at me. Her hair had blown across one cheek and she hadn't bothered to push it away, and on her shoulder sat a raven.

I looked at the raven for a long time, because it was easier than looking at her. It was smaller, or younger. But it was the same one. I knew it, the way I had known it in the cellar with it in my hands.

Then I looked at her.

I had thought I would recognise something. I didn't. She was a stranger, a young woman I had never seen, with a mouth that was a little crooked on one side, as if she was about to say something that wasn't nice, and a gaze that didn't give way. And then, without my being able to say where it was, she wasn't a stranger any more. It was something about the corner of her mouth. Something I had seen every morning in the bathroom mirror at Fjordly without knowing what I was looking at.

I hadn't even had a picture of anyone I was related to.

"Mum," I said.

It wasn't to Edrin. It just came out, low, into the quiet office. "My mother" I had said before. That was something you said about someone. This was something you said to someone, and I had never had anyone to say it to.

Edrin got up and went over to the window and stood with his back to me. He did it quietly, the way you leave a room without walking out of it.

I sat with the picture in both hands, holding it by the edges with my thumbs so I didn't touch their faces. Alôpex had jumped up into my lap. She put her nose down to the picture and sniffed, and then she looked up at me.

"It smells of him," she said, and turned her head towards Edrin's back by the window. "And of drawer."

"Yes."

"Not of her."

"No," I said. "It's just a picture."

It was that too. It was more than I had had in fifteen years.

When I stood up, Edrin turned round. He took a step towards me and raised his hand, as if he was going to put it on my shoulder. It stayed there in the air. I saw it. He saw that I saw it, and then he put it on the edge of the desk instead and stayed standing like that, with his fingers spread out over the wood.

"Thank you," I said. It was the only thing I had, and I meant it, and it wasn't the same as the other thing.

"Godrand," he said again, as I stood in the doorway. Not to say anything more. Just to say it.

I went down the stairs with the picture under my jumper next to the letter. It was getting crowded in there.

School started again on Monday.

The dining hall was full for the first time since the holiday, and it was too loud. All the voices at once, cutlery on plates, benches scraping, and it smelt of porridge and warm bread and wet robes drying by the fireplaces. I had got used to the silence. It took me a whole bowl of porridge to get unused to it.

Ahra sat next to me. He had come on the last ferry on Sunday evening and had gone straight to his room without saying much. He ate a little. It was more than yesterday.

Retia sat opposite us with her tea between both hands, as always.

Then Will stood up.

He was sitting in the middle of the bench with Marcus and the rest of team thirteen, where he had sat all December. He picked up his plate and his cup and said something to Marcus, who nodded without looking up. Then he walked. Down along the bench, past his own team, and his steps got a little shorter the closer he came to the end.

Nihil was sitting where he always sat. At the far end of the bench, where the light from the windows didn't quite reach. He had sat there since the island, alone, a little way from the other two, because he couldn't look them in the eye. Will had been on the island. I don't think he understood why Nihil was ashamed. They had let Nihil out of the infirmary the day after the solstice, and he was still pale and sat with his back against the wall. In his sleeve the ermine was asleep, only the black tip of her tail sticking out. She hadn't been further away from him than that since the mountain.

Will put his plate down opposite his brother and sat down.

A couple of people from the year looked up. Will didn't look at them. He looked at Nihil, and I could see his hand round the cup, and that it wasn't quite steady.

Nihil stopped eating. He looked at his brother for a long moment. Then he pushed the bread basket a few centimetres across the table towards Will and went on eating.

Will took a piece of bread. He didn't smile his easy smile. He just sat there.

Something settled in my jaw. I knew it. It was the same old thing, the one that came when other people had something I didn't, and I knew perfectly well how stupid it was. Next to me sat Ahra, who had had two brothers ten days ago, stirring his porridge. I took a spoonful and chewed it, even though porridge isn't something you chew, and waited for it to pass. It passed. Not completely.

Nihil raised his head. His blue eyes went across the hall and found me, the way they had found me in the doorway the day the holiday began. He nodded. A short nod. The same as after the duel.

I nodded back.

When he walked past us on his way out, with Will half a step behind him, he stopped. Alôpex was sitting on the bench next to me, and he looked down at her, and she looked up at him and didn't growl. He smelt of winter wind and bare iron, and there wasn't as much cold in it as there had been.

"Combat tomorrow," he said. "Next time."

That was all he said. He just looked at the fox a little too long. In his sleeve, just below the stitched knot of Gistónu, the ermine opened one black eye and closed it again. Then he went.

"Next time," I said to his back.

Retia looked at me over the rim of her cup. "What was that?"

"I think that was Nihil being nice," I said.

Ahra made a sound into his porridge. It wasn't a laugh. But it was closer than yesterday.

On the last day of the year I woke before it was light.

Nihil's bed was empty and the blanket folded. I got dressed in the dark and went down.

The lawn was white with frost and crunched under my boots, and the air was so cold it stung inside my nose. Above the east towers the sky was grey, with a thin yellow stripe right down at the edge. The river lay black under the mist.

It was two metres wide. Maybe less. The ice along the edges had grown in towards the middle from both sides, and there was only a narrow strip of black, slow water left between them. It smelt of stone and winter and of something that had come a long way down from the north.

Ahra was standing on the bank, and Lynx sat at his feet looking at the water with obvious distrust. Retia was sitting on a stone with Fulmen on her knee. A little way off from both of them, with his arms crossed and his shoulders hunched up round his ears, stood Nihil. The ermine had her head out of his sleeve and was falling asleep.

None of them had said anything to me about it. I hadn't said anything to any of them.

"Morning," said Retia.

"What are you doing here?"

"Same as you." She got up and brushed the frost off her trousers. "It's tradition."

"For the bravest," said Nihil. "I'm mostly here because I couldn't sleep."

The first time I crossed that river, it had been more than a hundred metres wide, and I had walked on top of it. Alone, while fifty people walked along the bottom beneath me and looked up through the water. I had never found out why it held me. I stood at the edge looking down into the black water and wondered whether it would do it again.

I didn't try. On top I had been alone. I had tried that.

Retia went first.

She pulled off her boots and stood them side by side on the bank, and she rolled her trousers up over her knees and walked out onto the ice along the edge and down into the water without stopping. I heard her suck in a breath through her teeth, the same half-strangled gasp as the first morning she had come into the river with me and asked how cold it was. She hadn't been in the water since the attack. I knew it, and she knew I knew it, and neither of us said it. She stood in the middle with the water up to her thighs and her arms out to the sides, and turned round.

"Come on, Godrand," she said.

She said it the way she said everything, fast and without thinking about it. Like a name you've said a hundred times. She had never said it before.

I pulled off my boots.

The water took my feet, then my shins, then my knees, and it hurt the way it always hurt, everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. The bottom was slippery and stony, and the current pulled gently at my legs towards the south, towards the sea. The mark on my palm began to burn the moment it went under, as if someone had lit it. I didn't clench my hand. I let it hang down in the water and burn.

Four. Hold. Six.

Behind me there was a splash. Ahra came out beside me without having rolled anything up, and his trousers went dark all the way to his waist. He put a hand on my shoulder, mostly to keep his balance, I thought. It stayed there, even after he had found it.

Nihil came last. He walked into the water as if he were angry with it, and he swore quietly and at length, a word in Anglîsh I had never heard before. The ermine climbed out of his sleeve before the water reached her and ran along the bank beside him, a white streak in the white, and jumped across the strip where it was narrowest and sat down on the far bank and looked back at us.

"How cold is it?" said Nihil through his teeth.

"Very," said Retia and I at the same time.

Lynx cleared the whole strip in one leap and shook his paws one after another on the other side and looked back at us as if we were the stupidest animals he had ever met. Alôpex swam across with her nose held high and her ears flat.

Ahra laughed.

It wasn't loud. It was the small, hiccupping laugh he made when something got to be too much, and it got out of him before he could hold it back. He heard it himself. The hand on my shoulder tightened. Then he let it be.

I hadn't heard it since the mountain.

We stood in the middle of the river, up to our thighs in the coldest water in Anglia, and none of us went on straight away. My legs had stopped hurting and had moved on to not really being there.

I stopped counting and listened for the water. It was there. The old, slow current beneath the current, the one that came down from the mountain in the north and ran under the castle and out here. Ten days ago it had carried a red thread from my nose away to the south. It had run beneath the cellar where Ahra came up the stairs. Water remembers, Maka had said. If that was true, I thought, then it remembered this as well. Four people and a few animals in the cold, at the same time. And under my breastbone, where my Dherak used to hum, something stirred. A couple of beats, faint, like a fly waking on a windowsill in January. Then it was quiet again.

Retia stood facing the far bank with the wind in her hair. She smelt of salt wind and cold stone and wild roses, and the bitter note from the mountain was still there, faint, underneath it all. I found myself thinking of the conker in the bowl in her mother's hall. And of a scent of dry chalk and apples that wasn't burnt wood and ash. I hadn't said anything about either of them. I stood half a metre from her in the river and knew that I hadn't, and I didn't say it there either. "But we don't. Not any more," she had said, in front of the fire, the day Ahra came back. I remembered it perfectly well.

"I can't feel my feet," said Nihil.

"Then walk," said Retia.

We walked.

The far bank was steep and slick with ice. Retia got up first and turned and reached a hand down, and I took it. Her fingers were ice-cold and gritty. Behind me Ahra got hold of Nihil's sleeve, and Nihil let him.

Then we stood there, all four of us, on the wrong side of the river with bare feet in the frost and steam rising off our wet legs. The sun came up over the east towers and struck the ice, and everything turned yellow and white at once.

"We'll have to go back again," said Nihil. "Our boots are over there."

Retia looked at him. Then she started to laugh, and it was the open laugh, the one from the first morning, and Nihil looked away, and for a moment he came very close to smiling.

Haltora didn't put us against each other in combat. He set Nihil and me to strike at a wooden post each for the whole lesson and walked past us with his hands behind his back and a face that said nothing. Next time wasn't that day.

That evening Ahra knocked. He still smelt faintly of stone and cold water from the river, and Lynx came in before him and lay down on my pillow as if it were his. Nihil lay on his bed with a book. He looked up and then down again.

Ahra sat down on the edge of my bed with the map in his hand. The mattress sank under him. Retia's pencil map on the back of the week's menu, with Ahra's red lines, rolled up and gone soft at the edges from all those evenings on the floor of the First-Year Room.

"Retia gave it back to me," he said. "Yesterday."

He rolled it out over my knees. Retia's grey corridors in pencil, and the red ones, all our routes, all the little crosses. The line from the north tower down through the cellar that stopped at a wall.

It didn't stop any more. From the wall a new line went on. It was red like the others, but it wasn't straight. It went in small jerks beneath the castle's foundations and towards the north, and it had no crosses. It had been drawn by a hand that had had nothing to draw from. Only the remembering.

"You drew it yourself," I said.

"It wasn't on the map." He shrugged. It looked as if it hurt. "We're going to find them all. We promised."

"Why are you giving it to me?"

"Put it up." He looked at the wall above my bed and not at me. "Then we can see what's missing."

Then he put his hand in his pocket and took out something else. He held it for a moment before he handed it to me.

A feather. Long and dark brown, almost black at the tip, and pale and golden down by the shaft. It was three times as long as the raven's.

"Aquila dropped it on the ferry," he said. "The day we took him across. Maka picked it up. He said you were to have it." He was quiet for a moment. "He didn't say why."

I took it. It was light and stiff, and it had a scent. Faint, so faint I had to hold it up to my face. Dry oak bark and ink.

It was the same scent as in the hallway by the stairs in Tés Aváir. The same as in the cellar, when there was no one under it any more. The bird had flown for help, and the help had come too late. The feather knew nothing about that. It just smelt of him.

Ahra couldn't smell it. I knew that. He sat half a metre from me looking at my hands, and he couldn't tell that his brother was in the room.

"Do you want it?" I said.

"No." He got up. "I've got what he said."

He went back to his own room, and Lynx jumped down from my pillow and followed him. In the other bed Nihil turned his face to the wall.

Retia's note was in my history book, where it had been since the day after the bank.

Fulmen had delivered it to the window at the Retonk house. It said: "Mum says you're to come tomorrow evening. So do I. R."

It was the first letter anyone my own age had ever written to me. I had read the second sentence more times than the first.

The room was dark. Nihil was breathing slowly and evenly, and I didn't know whether he was asleep. The moon hung low over the river and cast a cold light in through the window and across the wall above my bed. White limewash, and two black feathers that had been there since November.

I pulled the last pins out of the collar of my robe.

The picture I put under the feathers, in the middle. I put it up crooked the first time and had to take it down again, and Alôpex lifted her head from the pillow and looked at me. The map I put to the right, rolled out, with Ahra's crooked line at the bottom. The eagle feather next to the two raven feathers. It was too big and too brown and didn't fit, and that was probably the point. Retia's note down in the corner, where I could see it when I was lying down.

The letter I didn't put up. It lay in my inside pocket, folded round the strip with the golden characters, and that was where it would stay. I still couldn't read the strip. The swords lay under the bed now, my own with the white line and the other one. They were still swords and nothing else.

I sat back on my heels and looked.

It took up less room than I had thought. Three feathers, a picture, a map and a note on a whole wall. There was more white limewash than there were things. There was room above the picture and room beside the map, and a whole empty stretch right out in the corner by the window.

I lay down. Alôpex curled in against my neck, cold at the nose and warm everywhere else.

There was a raven on the windowsill.

I hadn't heard it come. It sat outside the glass with the moon behind it, black against the blue, and it was looking in. I sat up slowly. I looked for the bent flight feather, but it had its wings folded tight against its body, and it was too dark to see. It looked at me. Then it looked at the wall above my head, for a long time, as if it was checking what had been added.

"Is it her?" I said to Alôpex.

She lifted her nose towards the window and sniffed. "The glass is in the way," she said.

The raven didn't open its beak. No feather fell onto the sill this time. It just sat there a little longer, and then it lifted off with a single silent wingbeat and was gone, out over the river.

In the other bed Nihil lay completely still. I still don't know whether he saw it.

I stayed sitting up, looking at the wall. The picture was only a pale square in the dark. I couldn't see their faces. I knew where they were.

Ahra had a tree for each of those who had come before. I had a wall with room left, and a letter that said "live", and a name that two people had said aloud to me in four days, each in their own way.

I had never had a family to go home to. Now I had a family to find.