A Lullaby With No Rules

By the spring, the Blood-Bloom had become a thing that old people told children about.

It was spoken of in the way that one speaks of a winter that has passed: with a kind of weary awe, and a tendency to exaggerate. Black petals, the grandmothers said, as big as your hand. In the wrist. In the throat. The children listened with round eyes and asked if they could see one, and were told, a little sharply, that they most certainly could not. A few were kept in jars at the Sanctum, in the new museum, with labels. Nobody was sure what to feel about them. They were so very small.

The Day of Names had lasted forty-one days.

It had finished in the square before the Sanctum on a morning in December, with a thin snow falling, and the last ledger of the last Hospice in the farthest corner of the Hollow had been carried up the steps by a one-eyed fire-mage and a boy of ten. They had read it together. It had taken twenty minutes. At the end of it, the bells had rung, and a quarter of a million people had stood in the snow with their hats off and said nothing, and then a man somewhere at the back had begun, quite quietly, to sing.

It had not been a hymn. It had not been any song that Isolde knew. It had been a plain, rough, unstudied thing, three notes and a long fall, the kind of tune that a person hums while doing the washing. She had looked up. She had seen the man, a farrier, with his hat in his fist, singing to the snow with his eyes shut. And she had heard, rising from beneath her boots, a deep warm hum come up to meet him, as of a creature that has been waiting a long time for somebody to start.

…

She lived now in a house on Orchard Row.

It was a tall narrow house of gray stone, with a bow window and a lilac bush and a door that stuck in wet weather. It had belonged to a man named Draycott. It had been shut up for three hundred and twelve years, by some quirk of the Sanctum's law of trusts, and held in perpetuity against his return; and when his return was finally recorded, in a very bewildered ledger by a very anxious clerk, it had been discovered that the rent had been paid every quarter-day since the Restoration out of a fund that nobody could trace. The roof leaked. The pipes had burst. A family of owls had taken up residence in the library. It was, Valerian said, the most beautiful building he had ever seen.

They had spent the winter making it habitable.

It was not a thing she had known she was good at. She had always supposed that she would be bad at houses. But it turned out that she had a gift for it: for knowing where a table should go, for which wall wanted a shelf, for the exact degree of mess that made a room feel lived in. She had painted the kitchen yellow. She had hung Odile's pot, a new one, a plain iron saucepan from Pilchard Row, over the stove, where it made a cheerful clang whenever anyone leaned against it. She had learned to cook. She was, by general agreement, dreadful. Her soup tasted of wet string. Linnet said it made her feel better about the Doors.

She had learned to sing, too. It was a good deal worse. She could not hold a note; she could not tell when she had lost one. But Valerian sat at the kitchen table in the evenings, in his spectacles, with a book on his knee, and listened to her with an expression of such unaffected pleasure that she could not bring herself to stop.

He had taken a chair at the Institute.

It had been Master Aldrow's idea. Master Aldrow, who was seventy-eight and had a tendency to weep when pleased, had come to the door of the house in January in a snow-sodden cloak and said that he had heard rumors, and that if it were true, if it were even a little bit true, then the Institute of Old Tongues begged the honor of a lecture. He had then sat down on the doorstep and wept. Valerian had given the lecture. He had given forty. He now gave two a week, on the Genealogies of the Fourteenth Dynasty, to a hall packed to the rafters with students who had no idea what an optative was and could not be persuaded to care. He wore a gray coat. He had a stoop. He had begun, to his enormous delight, to lose his spectacles.

He had also, last month, given her a small flat parcel wrapped in brown paper.

She had opened it at the kitchen table. Inside was a book, a thin one, bound in plain blue cloth. It was in the common tongue. It was a primer. It was A First Grammar of the Old Tongue, for Children, and on the flyleaf, in his tall upright crabbed hand, he had written:

For I.M.H. I am told that one may begin again. I am told it is very freeing. —V.

She had cried, a little. Then she had laughed. Then she had said that it was a perfectly ridiculous present, and that he was the most absurd man alive, and that she had no intention whatever of reading it. And she had read it every evening for a month.

She was on the verbs.

…

The hearth was a pleasant place at dusk.

They went down every evening. It was a short walk from Orchard Row, across the Sanctum green, through the postern that the Order had left unlocked, and down the old crypt stair. There was a lamp at every turning now. A sister of the Chapter, new to the habit, sat at a desk by the door and wrote down the names of whoever went in. There were always a few. A woman with a basket of bread. A boy with a wooden horse. An old man who came to sit by the fire and tell the Hunger about his wife. It did not mind. It listened to them all.

Isolde came at the turn of the light. She always did. She stood at the hob and said, "It's dusk," and the coals brightened, and a warm low voice said her name. Then she sat down on the bench with her feet to the fire and her primer on her knee, and they talked.

It had learned a great deal.

It spoke, now, in the common tongue as well as the old. It spoke in a strange, soft, musical way, with an odd habit of ending its sentences on a rising note, like a person who is not quite sure he's allowed. It asked questions. It had a great many. What was a hat? What was rain? Why did people put salt on bread? It was, she thought, rather like having a child, if a child could eat the world and had been careful to say sorry.

"Is it spring?" it said, that evening.

"Almost. The crocuses are up."

"I've not seen a crocus."

"I'll bring you one."

"Would it live?"

"It'd die in a day. But you'd have seen it."

"That's all right," said the Hunger, comfortably. "Most things die in a day, if you look at them closely enough."

…

Linnet came down at six, with her cap on the back of her head and a satchel of books banging against her hip.

She was sixteen and a half. She had grown two inches since December and filled out, and her hair had come back in a thick brown crop like a boy's. She had a smudge of ink on her chin, a hole in her stocking, and a look of heavy, ferocious concentration. She had started at the Institute in January, in the first-year common course, on a scholarship founded by Master Aldrow out of what he described as his own spite. She was, according to her tutors, the most promising student in a decade. She was, according to Linnet, miserable.

"They want me to do declensions," she said, flinging herself on the bench. "Declensions. For a language nobody speaks."

"It's a very useful language."

"It's a very dead language."

"So were the Fourth-Century Rolls."

"I'm not learning those either." She dug into her satchel. "I've something to show you. It's not for the Institute. It's for the hearth. I've been working on it for ages." She hesitated. She had gone pink. "You can say if it's terrible."

"I never say that."

"You always say that."

"I say interesting."

"That's the same thing." She drew out a folded paper, rather grubby, and unfolded it on her knee. It was covered in pencil, and crossings-out, and little scribbled notes in the margin. "It's a song. For the Hunger. I thought it ought to have one. Everyone else has got a lullaby. The Redhand have a march, and the Lanterns have a hymn. And the Day of Names has that farrier one. But he hasn't got his own."

"Hasn't he?" said the Hunger, interested.

"No. And it's not fair." She drew a breath. "I tried to do it properly. You know. Rhymes. Scansion. All the rules, from the primer, the way Valerian says. And it came out dreadful. It had the stresses in the wrong places. It sounded like an obituary." She glared at the paper. "So I did it again. Without."

"Without what?"

"Rules," said Linnet.

She sang it.

…

It was a little song.

It had four lines, and a tune like a pebble skipped across a pond. She sang it in her husky untrained voice, a little off-key, with her cap crooked and her eyes on the paper. It had no meter that Isolde could name. It had no rhyme. It had, so far as she could tell, no structure whatever. It rose and fell where it liked. It ended in the middle of a thought.

Nobody has to be good tonight.

Nobody has to be quiet.

If you're sad, you can come in. If you're loud, you can come in.

There's a fire. There's a door. It's a house.

There was a silence.

The fire popped. A coal settled. Somewhere overhead a bell rang the hour, thin and far away. Linnet lowered the paper. She looked at it for a moment, and then, quite suddenly, at her sister, with a look of such naked apprehension that Isolde's chest hurt.

"It's rubbish, isn't it."

"No."

"It doesn't scan."

"No."

"It's got no—"

"Linnet," said Isolde. "It's the best thing I have ever heard."

"You're just saying that."

"I'm not."

"You are, you're—"

"Sing it again," said the Hunger.

Its voice was very small. It had gone soft and gold and shaky, like a bell struck in a distant room. The coals had brightened. They glowed with a deep slow glow, and from the heart of them a thread of dark rose and lifted and wound itself, quite gently, round the girl's shoulders like a shawl.

"Please," it said. "Sing it again. It's the first song I've ever had."

Linnet looked at it.

She did not say anything for a moment. Then she sat up, and cleared her throat, and put the paper down. She took a breath. And she sang it again, a little louder, with her chin up and her voice cracking, and this time the Hunger sang with her. It did not know the tune. It made up a harmony as it went, a low warm drone in the old language, so simple and so sure that it sounded as though it had always been there.

Isolde sat on the bench, with her primer in her lap and the firelight on her face, and listened.

Nobody has to be good tonight.

She thought of a girl in a narrow bed, with a candle, saying you took ages. She thought of a pot lid on a shelf. She thought of a man in a gray coat sitting on an upper step with his spectacles on his forehead, waiting for her to come up the stair. She thought: I can't read the Old Tongue. She thought: I can't read a word.

She found that she understood every syllable.

…

He found her there at seven.

He came down the steps with his coat over his arm and his hair on end, as he always did, as a man who has been interrupted in the middle of something. He had an armful of papers. He had a smudge of chalk on his sleeve. He stopped at the bottom of the stair, in the glow of the hearth, and stood looking at the three of them: the girl on the bench with her cap awry, the older woman with her primer, the small flame at the heart of the fire, humming. He did not speak. He only stood there, and smiled, and the light went across his face and showed the silver in his hair.

"You're late," said Isolde.

"I was giving a lecture."

"You said you'd be back at six."

"I said I'd be free at six." He crossed the vault. "I was not informed that I would be required to answer nineteen questions about the optative. One of them concerned a footnote. It was a very bad footnote."

"You wrote the footnote."

"I know. I am deeply ashamed." He sat down beside her. He took her hand. "What are we singing?"

"Nobody has to be good tonight," said Linnet.

"Ah." His eyes brightened. "That is a very good beginning."

"It's the whole thing."

"Then it is a very good ending, too," said Valerian gravely. "I have found that they are often the same."

Linnet beamed.

He listened to it, through. He listened with his head bent and his hand tight in Isolde's, and when it was over he was silent for some time. Then he said, quite softly, "I should have liked to hear that, once. In the room." And Isolde, who had been holding her breath, let it out, and put her head on his shoulder, and said, "I know."

"We'll sing it again tomorrow," said the Hunger. "All of us."

"Every night?"

"If you like."

"Every night," said Linnet. "I'll write another verse."

…

They were going up the stair when it knocked.

It was a small sound. It was so small that she very nearly missed it. She had one foot on the bottom step, and her hand on the rail, and Linnet already halfway up with the satchel banging, and she heard it quite clearly, behind her, in the vault: a single knuckle on stone.

Tap.

She stopped.

Valerian had stopped too. He stood at her shoulder, with his hand under her elbow, and she felt the whole of him go still. They turned together, slowly, and looked back across the crypt.

The hearth burned. The coals glowed red and gold in the dark, and the Hunger, small and warm, sat in the heart of them, listening. It did not look frightened. It looked puzzled. It had its head cocked to one side, as a dog's does at a distant sound.

"That isn't me," it said.

Tap. Tap.

It came from the wall behind the hearth. It came from the old gray masonry that Dora Mallow had laid in November, a solid wall of ancient stone, two feet thick, with the crypt's foundation on the other side. There was nothing there. There had never been anything. But Isolde saw, as she watched, that the stone had begun to change. A shadow was gathering on it, a thin dark rectangle, taller than a child and narrower than a man; and in the middle of the rectangle, at about the height of her heart, something small and bright had begun to glimmer.

It was a number.

It was cut in the stone, in tiny, careful, gilded figures, as a name is cut on a door.

14.

"Oh no," said Valerian, faintly.

"Someone's crying," said the Hunger.

It had risen from the coals. It stood in the flame, a tall soft shape of warm dark, with its face turned toward the wall, and for the first time since she had known it, it seemed to Isolde that it looked afraid. It said, slowly, in a small clear wondering voice, in the language that she could not read, the only thing it knew how to say to the dark.

"Hello?"

On the other side of the wall, very faintly, someone knocked again.

And Isolde Marguerite Hale, who had read to the end of thirteen rhymes, and given away a language, and lost a kingdom, and found a sister, and been loved, stood in the crypt of the Sanctum with her hand on the rail, and heard the sound of a stranger asking to be let in.

She took her foot off the stair.

"Well," she said. "I'd better put the kettle on."