The Question

At the turn of the hour, the singing stopped.

It stopped all at once, in the middle of a note, and the silence that followed was so enormous that Isolde heard her own pulse in it like a drum. She stood at the foot of the seven steps with her hand in Valerian's. On her other side Brannoc held Wick by the shoulder. The hall was full of the white-robed figures, ranked to the walls, with their faces turned toward the dais and their hands folded and their eyes as blank as milk. They did not move. They did not breathe. It seemed to her that the whole room was listening.

The hostess stood on the topmost step, beside the black throne, with her hands clasped.

"Thank you for waiting," she said. "I know it is a trying thing. The waiting is always worse." She smiled with such gentleness that Isolde had to look away. "I will be quick. The throne asks of each guest a single question. You will come forward one at a time, and kneel, and hear it, and answer. No one will touch you. No one will hurry you. You may take as long as you like."

"And if I won't kneel?" said Brannoc.

"Then you may stand. It makes no difference to the throne." She tilted her head. "Master Rook, will you begin?"

The old man looked at Isolde.

"I'd rather go last," he said. "I'm a coward by profession."

"No you're not."

"I'm a retired fire-mage with one eye. It amounts to the same." He gave her a crooked grin that did not reach his face. Then he let go of Wick, and handed the boy to her, and squared his shoulders, and went up the steps alone.

…

He did not kneel.

He stood before the black throne, with his fists at his sides and his chin up, an old scarred bulldog of a man in a tattered coat, and the iron crown on its cushion seemed to lean toward him. There was no sound. There was no movement. But Isolde saw his face change, as if a hand had been laid on it. She heard, as clearly as if she were standing at his elbow, a voice that was not a voice, a dry, quiet, patient murmuring that seemed to come from the grain of the stone.

Brannoc Aldhelm Rook.

Will you forget everything to be free?

He stood very still.

"Everything?" said Brannoc.

Everything. The night on the river. Your brother's hand in yours. The fire that took the barge. Every night since. You would wake tomorrow a lighter man. You would not even know what you had been spared.

"And Tam?"

He would be gone from you as completely as if he had never been born.

"Aye. I thought so." The old man's voice was rough as a rasp. "That's the trick of it. You take the sting and you take the bee." He laughed, shortly, without humor. "I'll tell you something, you grinning lump of a chair. I've been drunk for four years on the thought of that river. I've had it in my mouth every morning like a dead tooth. And I've never once, not once, been sorry I had a brother."

Then you refuse?

"I do." He spat on the marble. "No. No, damn you. Not for all the quiet in the world."

The crown shivered on its cushion.

It did not fall. It did not break. But in the third rank of the singers, a square weathered woman in a belted white robe lifted her head, as if she had heard a name called a very long way off. Her lips moved. Isolde saw it. She saw the word shape on them, as faint as breath on a pane.

Rook.

Then her eyes went slack, and her head dropped, and she was a doll again.

Brannoc did not look round. He came down the steps with a face like a man who has been hit, and walked past Isolde without a word, and stood with his back to the hall and his shoulders shaking. Wick went to him. He did not say anything either. He took hold of the old man's belt in his small fist and held on.

…

They asked Wick next.

She had been afraid they would. She had said to the hostess, in a tone she hoped was cold, that he was ten years old and a child, and that it was monstrous to ask a child such a thing; and the hostess had looked at her with an expression of the deepest sympathy and said, I am so sorry. The throne makes no exceptions. Isolde had stood with her fists clenched. Valerian had put his hand on her shoulder. There was nothing, in the end, to do but let the boy go.

He went up the steps by himself, small and straight, with his hair standing on end.

She heard him answer.

It was very quick. The throne's murmur had hardly begun before he said, in a high clear furious voice: "No."

You have not heard the question.

"I don't care. It's no."

It is a very kind question. It will take away all the hurt. You would not remember the Company, or the bruise on your jaw, or the nights in the cellar. You would not remember being hungry. A pause. You would not remember the lady who sang.

His chin quivered.

"I know she wasn't real," said Wick. "I knew it in the hall. It was only a trick. But she was a good trick." His voice cracked. "She sang to me when nobody else did. I'm not giving that back. I'd sooner be cold."

You are ten years old.

"I know how old I am," said Wick. "I'm not stupid."

And he turned and stumped down the steps, wiping his face on his sleeve, and went and stood by Brannoc with his lip stuck out like a ledge. The hostess looked after him with a face of such strange, naked sorrow that Isolde, who had been ready to hate her, found her anger going out like water into sand.

…

"Miss Hale," said the hostess.

Isolde went up.

It was seven steps. She counted them. She had her notebook clasped to her chest and a pot lid at her hip, and she knew that her knees were going to give way, so she walked the way she did at the Institute when she had to read aloud before the examiners: slowly, evenly, with her eyes on a point just above their heads.

The black throne rose before her.

She had thought it would feel old. It did not. It felt new, and clean, and expectant, like a stage that has just been swept, and the crown on its gray cushion had a dull gleam that made her think of a coin in a beggar's hand. She stopped a yard from it. She did not kneel.

Isolde Marguerite Hale.

It knew her name. Of course it knew. Everything in the Threshold knew her name. She stood and let it say it, and felt something cold and clever turn over behind the iron.

You are very tired.

"Yes," said Isolde.

You have been tired for twelve years. You have read in the dark to a girl who did not sleep. You have kept the lamp lit. You have done every voice. You have carried a thing no one asked you to carry, and you have never once put it down. The murmur was soft, almost tender. I do not blame you for being tired.

"Thank you."

Will you forget everything to be free?

She opened her mouth.

It was not the question she had been afraid of. That was the odd thing. She had prepared for something huge, something that would knock her flat: an offer of her mother alive, a bargain for Linnet's cure. She had her whole answer ready. She had rehearsed it on the white bed for six hours. But the throne asked nothing of the kind. It only asked her whether she wanted to stop hurting.

And she found, to her surprise, that she was crying.

"Would she be well?" said Isolde.

Who?

"My sister. If I said yes." Her voice shook. "Would she wake? Would she be out of the Hospice? Would the Bloom come out of her wrist?"

The throne was silent.

I can promise you freedom, it said, at last. I cannot promise you that.

"No."

I can promise you no pain.

"No. You can't, can you?" She laughed, wetly. "That's the thing. You'd take me. You'd take Linnet out of my head and leave her lying in a bed with the petals in her arm, and I wouldn't even know to be sorry. I'd stand here in a white robe, singing, for ever, and she'd die in a ward on Candle Street with nobody holding her hand." She wiped her face on her sleeve. "Is that what you're offering?"

It is what I have.

"Then I don't want it."

You have not considered—

"I've considered. I've done nothing else for twelve years." She drew breath. "You said I'm tired. I am. I'm so tired I could lie down on this carpet and not get up. And do you know what I thought, last night, lying on that bed? I thought: I could put it down. I could say yes, and put the whole weight down, and wake up light." Her chin trembled. "And then I thought: That's what they did to him."

To whom?

"To Valerian." She did not look round. "Somebody put it down. A long time ago. They took the thing that hurt and they locked it in a room and they walked away. And it's been sitting in the dark for three hundred years, getting worse." She looked at the crown. "That's what the sentence says. What is locked away cannot heal. It's not about a door. It's about you. It's about all of you. You can't make a thing better by shutting it up. You can only make it hungry."

The hall was utterly still.

"So no," said Isolde. "I won't be free. I'd rather be hurt and have her."

That is your answer?

"That's my answer."

Then you refuse.

"I refuse."

The crown rang.

…

It was a small sound, high and sweet, like a finger drawn round the rim of a glass. It rang once, and a crack ran across the iron band from one blunt point to the next. A single white petal drifted down from the dome and settled on the cushion. And Isolde, who had been braced for something terrible, felt instead a strange, light, tingling relief, as if a weight had been lifted from her chest that she had not known she was carrying.

She had not been freed. Quite the reverse. She remembered all of it. She remembered every wretched Tuesday of her life. But she remembered it without the sick dread that had lain under it, as if she had put her hand into a locked drawer she had been afraid of for years and found, to her astonishment, that it held only paper.

It's still there, she thought. All of it. It hurts. But it isn't a wall.

She went down the steps like a woman waking.

…

"Lord Draycott," said the hostess.

She had never used the title before. She said it as one says a name that has been held for a long time on the tongue, and her face as she turned to him was not the face of a hostess. It was grave and white, with tears standing in the lines. She looked at him as if she would rather have been anywhere else on earth.

Valerian let go of Isolde's hand.

He did not look at her. He walked up the seven steps with his back straight, bareheaded, in his shirt and long black coat, and stopped before the throne, and stood with his hands clasped behind him like a man at a court-martial. The light of the dome fell on his hair and showed the gray in it.

Valerian Draycott, said the throne.

"Yes."

Will you forget everything to be free?

He was silent for a long time.

Isolde did not breathe. She could see only his back. She could see the tension in it, the fine hard line of shoulder and spine, and the fingers locked behind him, white to the knuckle. She could not hear what the throne said to him. She heard only his side, and it was very quiet.

"Everything," said Valerian.

A pause.

"The Doors."

A pause.

"The cold. The Hunger. The—" His voice caught, and steadied. "The thing in the room. Yes. I should be rid of it, you say. I should walk out of that hall tomorrow with nothing at my back."

Silence.

"And the others."

Isolde's nails dug into her palms.

"I see." His head bowed. "That is the price, then. And what you do not say is that it would be the only price. One does not give up three hundred years for a bad bargain. One gives them up for a good one. For a fair one. One is asked to choose between a very great pain and a very great love, and told that they are the same thing." He drew breath. "And they are."

He turned his head.

He looked at her. Across seven steps and the whole width of the white hall he looked at her, with the light on his face, and his gray eyes were wet and wide and quite clear. He was not asking. He was not apologizing. He looked at her as a man looks at the one fixed thing in a storm.

"I have been a very long time without feeling anything," said Valerian. "I thought I was good at it."

Then he faced the throne again.

"No," he said.

It was not loud. It rang like a struck bell.

"I will not forget her. I will not forget anyone. I do not know what I am, and I do not know what I have done, and I am told the rest of it is worse. I would rather have it. All of it. I would rather know every dreadful thing I am, and have this, than be nothing and have peace." His voice rose. "I would rather carry it until it kills me. And if that is the cost of the sentence, I will pay it, and I will thank you for the bill."

The crown shattered.

…

It came apart in the air like a flight of frightened birds. Each shard flew up, shining, and turned to a white petal, and a thousand petals fell together in a slow bright blizzard across the hall. The black throne cracked from seat to crest. The banners fluttered down. And the singers, the hundred and a hundred of the blank-eyed lost, lifted their faces into the falling white, and for the span of a single held breath every one of them looked like a person.

Isolde saw it. She saw Dora of the Redhand put out a hand to catch a petal, and turn it over in her palm, and stare at it with a slow dawning bewilderment, like someone waking from a long sleep in a room she doesn't know. She saw the Lantern boy's mouth shape a word. She saw a gray-haired woman begin to weep.

Then the white closed over them, and they were gone, and the hall was empty.

The hostess still stood on the dais.

She had not moved. She stood among the petals, with her long plain kindly face lifted and her hands clasped, and the tears were running down it freely. She looked at Valerian. She looked at the broken throne. She looked, last of all, at Isolde, and her mouth curved in a small trembling smile that did not belong to any Door.

"Thank you," she said.

It was not the hostess's voice. It was lower, rougher, and very tired. It was the voice of a woman who has spent a long time pretending.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry. We had no other way."

And she was gone, too, with the petals, and the hall rang like a bell struck once and let alone.

…

"Door Twelve is passed," said the pleasant voice, from the vanished dome. "One remains."

"Two," said the other, very softly.

Valerian came down the steps.

He walked as if he were carrying something that might spill. At the bottom, he stopped in front of Isolde, and she saw that he was shaking. Not with fear. With something wilder, brighter, a sort of dizzy astonishment, like a man who has stepped off a cliff and found, to his stupefaction, that he can fly.

"I said no," he said.

"I heard."

"I did not lie."

"I know."

"It did not hurt." He looked at his wrist. The thread lay quiet round the bone. "Nothing burned. It was true all the way through." He looked up. "Isolde, it was true."

She did not say anything. She had no words. She put her arms round his neck and held on, and he held on to her, there in the middle of the ruined hall with Brannoc scrubbing his eye with his sleeve and Wick, with great dignity, pretending not to see.

When she lifted her head, the far wall was gone.

In its place a stair went down.

It was a plain one, narrow, of old gray stone, worn in the middle of each tread by many feet. It led into a darkness that was not the ordinary dark. This was thicker. It breathed. At the bottom, far below, she could see a gleam of something that was not light: a line, a rectangle, a shape so black that it made the dark around it look pale.

She had seen it in a dream. She had seen it in a whitewashed room, with a chain across it, and a candle burning on a table.

"The thirteenth," said Valerian.

His hand had found hers. It was shaking, and it was warm.

"It is the door that should not exist," he said. "And I think that it is waiting for us."