The Crowning Hall

The singing did not stop when they came in. That was the first wrong thing.

A hundred voices, perhaps more, rose and fell under a dome of painted gold, in a long sweet unbroken chord, and not one of them faltered at the sight of strangers. Isolde stood on a carpet of white velvet, inside a doorway as tall as a tree, and felt the sound go through her like warm water. It was lovely. It was so lovely that her eyes stung. It had the grave, tender, swelling beauty of a sung mass in a great church on the night before a feast, and it was sung to nobody. It was sung to the empty air.

"Don't listen," said Valerian, very low. "Count the pillars."

"What?"

"Count them. It does not matter what. Occupy your mind."

She counted. There were twenty-four, in two rows of twelve, of white veined marble, each with a gilt capital and a banner of white silk hanging from it. The banners were blank. The floor between them was a mosaic of pale gold and ivory, laid in a great spiral that drew the eye toward the far end of the hall, where seven shallow steps led up to a dais, and on the dais stood a throne.

It was carved of black stone. It was the only dark thing in the place. It had a high straight back and plain arms, worn smooth by hands, and on its seat, on a cushion of dove-gray velvet, lay a crown of iron.

She knew the crown. She did not know how. It was simple, a narrow band with five blunt points, like a child's drawing of a king's. It looked exactly like something a tired man might put on to be done with it.

"Who sits there?" said Brannoc.

"Nobody," said Valerian. "Yet."

…

They walked the length of the hall, between the singers.

She saw them properly then, for the first time. They stood in ranks along the walls, in long white robes, with their hands folded and their faces lifted, and their mouths opening and closing on the sweet endless note. Men and women. Old and young. A few were hardly more than children. Their faces were serene. They were smooth, mild, and empty as new plates, and each pair of eyes had a look in it that she could not at first name, a kind of blank bright patience, like the eyes of a very good dog who has been told to wait.

"Isolde," said Brannoc.

He had stopped before a tall woman in the third rank. She was perhaps forty, sturdy, with a square weathered face, and her white robe was belted with a length of red-dyed cord. Round her left wrist, above the hand, ran a stain of old rust-colored ink.

"She's Redhand," said the old man. "She's one of Ketch Morrow's. I knew her. Her name was Dora. She used to cheat at dice."

The woman went on singing.

"Dora," said Brannoc.

She did not turn her head.

"Dora. It's Rook. It's old Brannoc." His voice was rough. He took her by the sleeve and shook her gently. She swayed and righted herself like a doll. "Do you not know me? Have you gone and lost your wits?"

The woman's mouth moved on the song. Her eyes slid across his face without touching it.

And Isolde saw, with a lurch of her stomach, that a little further along the rank, in the fifth row, a young man stood in the same white robe with a tin lantern pin still stuck through the wool at his shoulder. And beyond him a girl in a drover's coat. And a Stray in a long black cloak whose face she half-remembered from the Crossing. And beyond them, row on row on row, a hundred and a hundred of the lost, the Strays who had come into the Threshold in nine Cycles or ten, who had walked its Doors and read its rhymes and come to this hall at last, and stood here, singing, with all that they were gone out of their faces like a tide.

"They said yes," said Isolde.

"Yes to what?"

"I don't know. Whatever it is. Whatever Door Twelve asks." She heard her own voice go thin. "They said it. And they forgot."

Brannoc let go of the sleeve.

He stood there for a moment with his face set. Then, in a voice she had not heard from him before, a flat dry whisper, he said: "I'd rather the knife."

…

The herald came out from behind a pillar.

She was dressed in white and silver, with a silver chain at her throat and a great curved key of old pale metal hanging from her belt. She walked slowly. She carried herself like a woman who has had a great deal of practice at being calm, with her shoulders back and her chin level, and she had a long plain kindly face, with deep lines at the corners of the eyes, and a mouth made for comfort.

Isolde knew that face. She had never seen it. She had seen it described, in the broken order of a dream, by a man in the dark of a glass aviary, who had said, A woman with a key. She was crying. She was kind to me.

She looked at Valerian.

He had gone white to the lips. He stood quite still, with his bare hands open at his sides, and his eyes fixed on the woman's face with a look so naked, so hungry and so appalled, that she almost put out a hand to cover them.

"You are welcome," said the herald, in a warm, rich, level voice. "You are very welcome. You have come so far. I wish you could know how glad we are."

"Who are you?" said Isolde.

"I am the Door's hostess." She smiled. It was a smile of enormous tenderness. "I take whatever shape is easiest. I find that it puts people at their ease." She turned her gaze to Valerian, and her eyes brimmed. "Does it? Does it, my dear?"

His lips parted. He shaped a name. Isolde watched it begin in his mouth and watched it fail, a smooth blank round hole where something should have been. He swallowed.

"Do not," said Valerian, hoarsely. "Do not wear her."

"But I thought you would like to see her."

"I do not know her."

"No." The woman's voice softened. "That is rather the point."

…

She told them the rule herself.

She did it kindly, standing at the foot of the dais with her hands folded, in the voice of a nurse explaining a procedure. She had no need of a rhyme. The rhyme was on the banners, she said; she had only to look.

Isolde looked up.

The silk had changed. Where it had hung blank it now bore two stanzas, stitched in silver, in letters that glimmered.

If you are asked to be free of pain,

Mind what you leave to be free again.

Take the crown, and take the throne;

Take the quiet, and walk alone.

I. T.

It.

"It," said Isolde, and the whole sentence stood up in her head, complete to the last word but one, like the frame of a house. What is locked away cannot heal until someone stays to call it—

She did not finish the thought. It was not a thought she wanted to finish in this room.

"You will be asked a question," said the hostess. "Once. It will be asked of each of you, in turn, in the throne's hearing. It is a very simple question. You may answer yes, or you may answer no, or you may refuse to answer, though I do not advise it." She smiled sadly. "You will find it kinder than you expect."

"And if we say yes?" said Brannoc.

"Then you will be free."

"Free of what?"

"Of everything that hurts."

She nodded toward the ranks of singers, and Isolde saw, with horror, the pride in that nod.

"Look at them," said the hostess. "Look how peaceful they are. There is no one in the Threshold happier. They are not afraid. They are not grieving. They do not wake in the night with the faces of the dead before them. They have laid it down." She sighed. "They did not feel the cost, you see. That is the great mercy. They never knew what they had given."

"They've given themselves," said Isolde.

"They have been relieved of themselves. It is not the same."

"It is exactly the same."

"You are very young," said the woman, gently, "to be so sure."

…

They did not ask the Question that day.

Isolde had thought they would. She had braced herself for it, with her knees locked and her jaw set, in the white hall with the golden dome. But the hostess only smiled and bowed, and said that the throne preferred its guests rested, and that she would send for them at the turn of the hour; and a door opened in the paneling to show a suite of rooms with lamps lit and a table laid.

It was a trap, Isolde thought. It was an ordinary trap, of the kind in which the walls of the jaws are lined with velvet. But there was nothing to do about it. The rhyme said Mind what you leave, and not one word about running, and every door they tried gave back on the same golden hall. So they went in. And they ate, because Brannoc said that a man who did not eat before a battle was a fool, and they sat afterward around a long table in a small gilded room, looking at nothing.

Wick fell asleep over his plate. Brannoc carried him to a couch and tucked a cloak round him and stood a long moment looking down. Then he came back and sat heavily and put his face in his hands.

"I keep thinking of the lad," he said, to the table. "Of what he'd say, if they asked him. A boy of ten. With his mam's voice singing in his head."

"He wouldn't," said Isolde.

"You can't know that."

"He wouldn't. He's fought too hard to hold on to it." She tried to believe it. "He's a stubborn child."

"Aye. So was I." He lifted his head. His one eye was red-rimmed. "My brother Tam. I told you. He was a better man than me. I was supposed to be minding him. And I've thought, more nights than I'll own to, that if I could put it down, if I could be free of that one night, the whole thing, I'd give a year of my life for it. A year of anything. And I've never done it, because I'd not have him gone. Not even gone out of my head." He drew a long shaky breath. "But I'll tell you the truth. I've never been so near."

"You wouldn't say yes."

"I don't know that."

"I do," said Isolde.

"You've known me nine days."

"I've known Odile," said Isolde, very quietly, "who was seventeen and carried a pot lid." She put her hand on the tin at her side. "She said, If you're not a doll, I'll thank you to go away. She said it to a thing she couldn't see, in the dark, with her knees knocking. She didn't say yes then. She wouldn't have said yes here. And you traveled with her. And she taught you something."

The old man's face worked.

"Damn the child," he said, thickly. "She did."

…

She did not sleep.

She lay on a broad white bed in a room hung with silver, with her notebook open on her chest, and stared at the ceiling. Somewhere beyond the wall the singing went on. It was faint and sweet. It had a way of getting into the bones of her head, and whenever it did, she thought of Linnet, and the voice in the hall, and the lamp that the figure had not carried.

Will you be free of pain?

She thought: I know what they'll ask me.

She thought of Tuesday, and the floor at the foot of the bed, and the black petal in the wrist. She thought of her father in the back of the shop, with the bottle, saying that it was no use. She thought of her mother's voice, saying her name once, in the dark, nine days before the end. She thought of how it would be, to wake tomorrow and not know any of it. To walk into a room and not hear the clock. To be as light as a leaf.

She thought: And Linnet?

Would she remember Linnet?

She did not know. She did not know whether the Question would take Linnet too. She did not know whether it would take only the pain, the way the market had taken a year, or whether it would take the root along with the flower. It would be a very easy thing to say yes to, if one did not think it through. It would be easy for a tired person who had been tired a very long time.

Read to the end, she thought. Read to the end.

There was a knock at the door.

…

It was Valerian.

He stood on the threshold with his hands at his sides, in his shirtsleeves, without his coat, and she saw at once that he had not slept either. His hair was on end. His face was drawn and fine. In the lamplight he looked younger than she had ever seen him, and more frightened.

"May I come in?"

"Yes."

He closed the door softly behind him. He did not come further. He stood with his shoulders against the panel, looking at her across the width of the silver room.

"I have been walking about the hall," he said. "The hostess walks with me. She is very pleasant. She has asked me three times if I am comfortable." A short humorless breath. "She has her hands. She has the way of folding her hands. I have been trying to find the name, and I think that I almost have it, and then it is not there."

"I'm sorry."

"I do not wish you to be sorry. I wish to tell you something." He stopped. His bandaged wrist was held stiffly at his side. "The Question. When it is asked. I find that I know what I will be asked."

"Do you?"

"They will not ask me whether I wish to forget the Doors," said Valerian. "That would be easy. I should say yes to that at once. I would forget the Doors, and the Hunger, and the cold. I would forget my whole long life, with a glad heart." He met her eyes. "They will ask whether I wish to forget you."

She sat up.

"I think that is the shape of it. I think it is the only shape that could catch me. A man who has nothing to lose cannot be tempted. They have to give me something to lose." He was very pale. "And I am afraid. I am afraid that at the moment of asking I will be so tired, and so ashamed, and so certain that I am the thing that will hurt you in the end, that I will say yes. For your sake. To spare you. To take the knife out of the room."

"Valerian—"

"I wished to say it to you now," he said, "while I am still myself. So that if it should come to it, and I should falter, you would know that it was not a lie. That it was the thing I was most afraid of, and that I told you. That I tried."

She was across the room before she knew it.

She stood in front of him, a head shorter, in her stockinged feet, and took hold of his shirtfront with both hands, and shook him.

"Don't you dare."

"Isolde—"

"Don't you dare say yes for my sake." She was crying. "I don't want to be spared. I don't want to be remembered by a man who doesn't remember me. If you take me out of your head to keep me safe, I'll be dead anyway, and you'll be standing there singing in a white sheet with your eyes like a dinner plate. Do you understand? That isn't mercy. That's theft."

"It is a form of love."

"It's a form of cowardice," said Isolde. "And you promised not to lie to me."

He closed his eyes.

She waited. She felt him breathe in, slowly, and let it out. She felt the long slender body under her hands go from rigid to merely taut, and then, bit by bit, to something that was not quite yielding but was at least listening.

"Say no," said Isolde. "Whatever they ask. Say no, and let me be the one that's frightened."

"That is a great deal to ask."

"I know."

"I am not certain I can."

"You don't have to be certain," said Isolde. "You only have to say it."

He opened his eyes.

Then he bent his forehead to hers, and stood like that for a long while, and said nothing at all. And somewhere under the floor, in the warm and golden dark, a hundred voices that had forgotten their own names went on singing for a king who never came.