The Hollow Crown of Aethrun: The Pilgrim of The Long Road

Wind struck the skiff before the oars had finished their stroke. Salt grit peppered Wicker's sleeve, and the faint silver lantern hooked above the prow swayed hard enough to throw its bean of light across the low stone markers of the causeway. Beyond that causeway, the shrine of Keth-Var crouched on a jut of weather-bleached rock, its peaked roof furred with moss, its single bell green with verdigris and hung from a beam so ancient the wood had gone the color of bone marrow. Somewhere down the cliff, the sea battered the rock in long, patient rolls.

Wicker stepped onto the causeway. The landing stones were worn to shallow bowls by centuries of knees. A pilgrim's tread, he thought, and almost smiled. He had counted those bowls once, in a year he chose not to remember, and the count had come to three thousand four hundred and twelve, not counting the marks of children.

The village was behind them now, a smear of smoke and lantern-light beyond the headland. Mara had stayed with the skiff, one hand on the gunwale, her jaw set in that way he had come to recognize as the shape her face made when she was unwilling to argue and unwilling to agree. She had asked him, once, in a voice kept deliberately mild, whether the shrine was truly necessary. He had answered that every road worth walking bends past a shrine. She had given him a look that suggested she knew when she was being managed and chose, for the moment, to permit it.

He did not blame her. He had been managing people since before her grandmother's grandmother was weaned.

The bell of Keth-Var had no rope. That was its first peculiarity, and Wicker had made a study of peculiarities in his long tenure among the drowned stones. The bell hung at the correct height for a man of average reach, and the shrine keeper, whoever he or she was, rang it with a wooden mallet kept in a niche beneath the altar. Tonight the mallet was absent. The niche was empty, the dust around it undisturbed.

Wicker laid a hand on the cold lip of the bell. The metal was slick with condensation. In the cleft above the altar, a votive lamp had been left to gutter; its flame leaned sideways in the draft, and the small puddle of oil beneath it trembled each time the sea struck the cliff.

He drew his cloak tighter and turned toward the rear of the shrine, where a low arch opened into a flagged chamber. Offerings lay upon the altar: a coil of braided rope, a folded shirt of undyed wool, a wooden cup brimming with dark wine, a string of river pearls, and a folded paper weighted with a river stone. Each was labeled in a careful clerk's hand, each name a life measured out in years offered for a year of favor. Keth-Var was old in that commerce. Pilgrims came from the inland farms and the salt villages alike, bartering years of themselves for a single answered prayer. The shrine keeper kept no record. The shrine keeper had never, in living memory, been seen.

From the flagged chamber came a sound like the shifting of a garment. Wicker stopped.

"Son of the Hollow Crown," said a woman's voice, low and certain.

He knew the title. He had not heard it spoken in decades. It had been given to him by a man he had loved and served in the long-ago years, and he had thought, with the comfortable certainty of the very old, that it had died with the man who coined it. Yet the syllables reached him now with the weight of a thing unbroken.

"Madam," he said, and inclined his head.

She stepped from behind the altar into the thin lamplight. A traveling cloak, dark and heavy with road dust, fell to her ankles. The hood was pulled low. When she raised it, the lamplight found a face that was not young and not old, the bones of it sharp, the mouth drawn in a line that spoke of long acquaintance with grief. Her eyes were the color of sea ice in winter.

"My name is Ireleth," she said, and her voice held the cadence of the old court, the slight lift on certain vowels that Wicker had last heard in the great hall of the Smith-King's palace in the years before the sea took it. "I have followed you from the reed-light village on the marsh."

"I am honored," said Wicker. The words came out gently, almost amused. He had not been honored in any genuine sense for thirty years. He had been tolerated, mostly, and once he had been pelted with fish heads, an incident he preferred not to dwell upon. "You must have walked a long road."

"I have walked longer ones." She did not smile. "I have walked until the soles of my boots gave out and I walked further on the bones of my feet. I am here because you are here, and because there is no one else left to ask."

The lamp guttered. Somewhere down the cliff a tern screamed, the sound thin and silver, torn by wind.

Wicker folded his hands inside his sleeves. "I am an old man who keeps bad histories, madam. I am not a remedy."

"You are a remedy that has not yet tried itself," said Ireleth. She had the manner of one accustomed to being answered; she had the manner of one accustomed to not being answered well. "You are said to remember every drowned name. You are said to have walked the Mirror-Mire when it was still a court of mirrors and not a field of reeds. You are said to have held the hand of the Smith-King in his last hour, and to have refused the crown that was offered you afterward."

"Rumors," said Wicker. "The marsh people are kind to me."

"They are not kind. They are afraid of you. There is a difference." She stepped closer. The lamp caught the edge of her jaw, a small scar running into the line of her hair. "I am the last of my line, the line of the drowned nobles. My sister walked into the tide when I was a girl. My mother followed her within a year. I was raised in the house of an aunt who taught me to say the names of the dead each night before sleep, so that I would not forget what we had cost the sea."

"I remember the houses," said Wicker. His voice was careful now. "I remember the names."

"Then speak mine." She laid a hand on the altar, palm flat against the stone. "Speak it, and let me hear what the keeper of the drowned stones remembers of Ireleth of the Salt Court."

He looked at her. She looked at him. Between them, the lamp burned on, a small brave thing.

"Ireleth," he said, "daughter of Halren, sister to Lirel who walked into the water, niece of Osvet who taught you the names of the dead. Your line held the western marches in the old compact, and your house paid its due to the sea in full when the bargain fell due. You are the last. I remember you, and I grieve for the line."

She did not weep. He had not expected her to. Instead she nodded once, as if the words had been a coin she had been holding out, waiting for the world to honor.

"Then you know why I am here," she said.

"I know why many come to the shrines," said Wicker. "They come to bargain. They leave a year, or three, or seven, and they hope for a mercy in return. The shrine is silent. The keeper does not answer. They go home richer in the knowledge that the silence is older than their grievance."

"I am not here for the shrine," said Ireleth. "I am here for you. The keeper will not speak. You will."

The lamp guttered again, more violently, and the wind off the sea carried a spray that tasted of iron. The tern had gone quiet. In the brief hush, Wicker heard the skiff shift at its mooring, and beneath that, the small restless sound of Mara's hand against the gunwale, a tapping he knew well. She was impatient. She was also listening. He hoped she was listening.

"Madam," he said, "you have walked a long road and you have paid in your own way. Sit. The bench by the rear wall is dry, and the wind is less cruel there. I will hear what you have come to ask, and I will answer as I am able. I will not promise more, because I have learned, in my long tenure, that promises are the most expensive coin in any realm."

Ireleth did not sit. She drew the cloak tighter at her throat, and in the gesture Wicker saw, for a moment, the memory of a court he had served in his youth: the measured folds of cloth, the precise economy of movement, the way courtiers of the old order were taught to keep their hands in view at all times, lest the wind steal a ring or a secret.

"You kept the histories," she said. "You kept them when the burning came. You walked out of the Smith-King's palace with the books sewn into the lining of your coat, and you took them to the drowned places where the soldiers could not follow. You are the only one left who can read the script the court used before the script was changed."

"I can read it," said Wicker.

"Then read me this." She reached into the folds of her cloak and produced a folded paper, old and soft, the edges crumbling. She did not hand it to him. She held it between two fingers, as if weighing it. "This was found sewn into the hem of my sister's dress when the tide brought her home. She walked into the water in the year of the small storms. I was nine years old. My aunt kept this paper in a box of black wood for the rest of her life. When she died, I burned the box. I kept the paper. I have carried it for thirty-one years."

"What is it?" asked Wicker.

"A song," said Ireleth. "Or the bones of a song. The words are in the old court script. My aunt could read them. She would not tell me what they said. She said only that the song was the reason the Hollow Crown sat on the brow of the Smith-King, and that the song, if it were finished, would take it off again."

Wicker was quiet for a long moment. The lamp steadied. The sea struck the cliff in two long rolls, and the shrine's bell rang faintly, though there was no wind strong enough to move it.

He held out his hand.

"Not yet," said Ireleth. "First you will answer a question. The girl on the skiff. The fisherman's daughter. Why is she with you?"

"Because she is the heir to the line you would pull down," said Wicker, and his voice was not kind. "Because she does not yet know what she is, and when she knows, she will have to choose. Because I was a coward once, and I let a man I loved die on a throne that should never have been built, and I have been making a different kind of coward's bargain ever since. She is my penance. She is also, perhaps, my hope. Both of those things are true at once."

Ireleth looked at him. The lamplight caught the scar at her hairline and the faint salt crusting at the corners of her eyes, as if she had been walking into the wind for a long time and had not bothered to wipe it away.

"Give me your word," she said, "that when she knows, you will not choose for her."

"That is not mine to give," said Wicker. "She is not a parcel to be promised. But I will give you this: I will not lie to her. I will not keep from her what she has a right to know. And when she asks me what I would have her do, I will tell her the truth, which is that I do not know."

The lamp guttered. Ireleth stood very still. Then she nodded, once, and the gesture held the weight of a treaty.

"Then read," she said, and placed the folded paper in his outstretched hand.

The paper was lighter than he had expected, and softer, as if the sea had not so much rotted it as gentled it. The fold marks were deep, pressed by the hand of a girl who had walked into the tide carrying the answer to a question she had not known how to ask. He unfolded it carefully, the way he had been taught to unfold old things in the long-ago library, with the flat of the palm and the breath held.

The script was the old court hand. He had not seen it written by a living hand in forty years. The letters rose and fell in the patient, decorative manner of the Smith-King's chancery, the kind of penmanship taught to the daughters of noble houses in the years before the sea began to rise.

He read.

The first line was a name: the Hollow Crown, set down in the formal phrasing of the court catalog.

The second line was a title: the Singer of the First Verse.

The third line was a price: a voice, given freely, in a year of storm.

The fourth line was a promise: that what was taken would, in time, be asked for again.

He looked up. The lamp had gone out. The shrine stood in darkness but for the thin silver of the causeway lantern and the distant smear of the village's hearth-light.

"Madam," he said, and his voice came out smaller than he wished. "This is not a song. This is the receipt for the bargain that put the Hollow Crown on the Smith-King's brow in the year of the small storms."

"Yes," said Ireleth.

"And your sister carried it into the tide."

"Yes."

"And the tide did not take it."

"No."

Wicker folded the paper with great care. He slid it into the inside breast of his coat, where the lining had once held the histories of a fallen court, and where, for thirty years, it had held nothing but a small linen square and a stub of pencil.

"Then I will read the rest of it by daylight," he said, "when the ink will not betray me. And when I have read it, I will tell you what I have learned, and I will tell the girl on the skiff what she has a right to know, and we will all of us decide, together, what is to be done with a receipt that the sea refused to swallow."

Ireleth inclined her head. The wind off the cliff struck the shrine, and the bell rang faintly, though there was no wind strong enough to move it.

Outside, on the causeway, a figure in a salt-stained coat stood with one hand on the mooring rope, listening to the silence between two people she had not yet met, and weighing, in the private scales of her own stubborn heart, whether to step forward into the lamplight or wait for the dawn to bring her an answer she had not yet asked for.

Mara did not wait for the dawn. She stepped forward onto the flagstones with the soft, deliberate tread of someone who had spent her girlhood on a wet pier, and the salt-stiff hem of her coat brushed the moorings as she passed. Her boots left dark prints on the pale stones, and the lantern, swinging on its chain, threw her shadow long behind her like a road she had not yet decided to walk.

"Madam," she said, and stopped at the threshold of the shrine, for the figure within had turned at the sound of her footfall, and the two women regarded each other across the small distance with the wary attention of people who had been, in different ways, broken by the same sea.

Ireleth did not move. She stood with her shoulder against the old doorpost, and the faded gilt on her cuff caught the light, and her face, which had been composed for Wicker's sake, loosened at the sight of the fisherman's daughter and became something rawer, something almost tender, before the habitual hardness returned. She took in the wet hem, the salt stains at the collar, the mud of the causeway on the soles, and the way the girl's jaw was set, and she read in that set of the jaw the whole of the inheritance the girl had not asked for and would not, she suspected, refuse.

"So," said Ireleth. "You are the one he has been waiting for."

Mara's chin lifted a fraction. "I am no one's waiting."

"No," Ireleth agreed, and her mouth twitched at the corner with something that was not quite a smile. "You are not. You are a fisherman's daughter from a village that was drowned in your mother's time, and you have come to stand on a causeway that should not exist, in front of a shrine that should not be standing, to be given a receipt by a queen in exile who has, for thirty years, been pretending to be a washer of dead men's shirts. You are no one's waiting. You are, however, very much in the way of something that has been waiting for a very long time."

Wicker, who had been folding the receipt into the breast of his coat, paused with his hand at his lapel, and his pale eyes moved from one woman to the other with the expression of a man who had spent decades reading the moods of courts and was now reading, instead, the moods of two women on a cliff, and finding them considerably less predictable.

"Girls," he said mildly. "There is no need for the stagecraft. The tide will not be impressed."

"There is every need," said Ireleth, without looking at him. "She has come here to take a thing from me. She should at least know the cost of the taking."

"I have come here to learn the truth," said Mara. "I have not said I will take anything."

"You have not said you will refuse, either."

The wind from the cliff slipped between them, cold and tasting of brine, and the lantern swung on its chain with a small metallic complaint. Somewhere down the slope a sheep coughed in the dark, and the sound was absurdly domestic against the strangeness of the hour.

Ireleth studied the girl for another moment, and then she exhaled, a long breath that seemed to empty her of something she had been holding since before the fisherman's daughter had been born, and she stepped back from the doorpost and gestured inward.

"Stand where I can see you," she said. "Both of you. I am tired of telling this story to the dark."

They went in, and the shrine received them in its small, salt-sweet silence. Ireleth lowered herself onto the stone bench, arranging her skirts with the absent precision of a woman who had once worn them with great deliberation, and Mara sat on the upturned crate, and Wicker took his place against the wall, and the three of them arranged themselves in the lamplight like the figures on the old coins, the queen on her seat, the scribe at his reading, and the daughter with nothing in her hands.

"You wished to know who I am," said Ireleth. "You shall. I am Ireleth of the line of Aethrun, sister to the ninth voice of the Coral Court, and once, before the Hollow Crown was hollowed, queen of the Sky-Court in the city that stood above the sea before the sea came up to take it."

Mara's hands, which had been resting on her knees, went still. Wicker, behind her, made a small sound in his throat that might have been recognition, or might have been the sound of a man who had suspected a thing for a very long time and was hearing it confirmed by the only person alive who could confirm it.

"Sky-Court," said Mara carefully. "I have heard the name."

"You have heard the name of a court that has not been seen in the sky for three hundred years," said Ireleth. "Which is what I am about to tell you."

She leaned forward, and the lamplight carved the lines of her face into something older than the woman who wore them.

"The Sky-Court of Aethrun was the second of the high courts, and the most proud. We kept the old songs, and the old songs kept us, and we held, in our treasury, a crown that had been sung into being by the first voice of the line, in the year the world was still soft. The crown was not metal, and it was not jewel. It was a song, bound into a circlet of white gold, and as long as the queen who wore it could hold the melody in her throat, the court stood above the tide, and the tide did not dare to rise against it."

Her hands, which had been folded in her lap, tightened on each other.

"I was young," she said, "and I had been taught that the song was a duty, as the reef-light is a duty to the keepers of the reef, and I had been told that when I was called I would sing it, as my mother had sung it, and her mother before her. I was called. I went up into the singing chamber. The crown was set on my brow."

She paused.

"And I could not sing it."

Wicker's hand, which had been resting on his breast over the receipt, lifted a fraction, then settled again. Mara said nothing. The wind outside had dropped, and the silence inside was of a kind that has weight.

"The song," said Ireleth, "was not a song of praise. It was not a song of joy. It was a song of command, and the thing it commanded was the sea, and the price of the commanding was that the singer must love the thing commanded more than she loved her own life, and must give herself, in the singing, to the holding of the tide. I did not love the sea. I loved my sisters in the court. I loved the city. I loved the man I had promised to marry, who was a smith of the lower town, and had no part in the singing."

She drew a breath that shuddered at the edges.

"I opened my mouth, and the song came out, but it came out wrong. I sang, and the crown heard me, and the crown rejected me. It sang, instead, a song of its own, a thin, high, grieving note, and the sea heard that note, and rose."

Mara's lips parted, but she did not speak. The lantern swung, and the shadow of the bell moved on the wall like a hand reaching for something it could not quite touch.

"I was taken down from the chamber by my sisters, and the crown was taken from my brow, and I was given the choice that the line of Aethrun gives to its failures. I could be drowned in the singing pool, beneath the court, and be remembered as a queen who had fallen. Or I could be put upon a skiff, with a single oar and a single loaf, and be rowed out beyond the reef, and be remembered as a queen who had refused."

Her voice, which had been smooth and intense, roughened at the last.

"I chose the skiff. I rowed until I could not see the city. I ate the loaf. I drifted. I was taken up, at dawn, by a fisher-boat out of a village I will not name, whose crew said nothing of where they had found me, and I came ashore, and I have not been back upon the water since, and I have not sung, and I have not worn a crown, and I have not, in thirty years, spoken the name of the court I was born to, until tonight."

She looked, then, at Mara, and her gaze was direct, and tired, and almost unbearably honest.

"Your village," she said. "The one that was drowned."

Mara nodded, once.

"It was not I who drowned it," said Ireleth. "I had lost the crown. The court fell to my younger sister, who could sing the song but could not love the man she had been given to love, and the bargain was broken in a different way, and the sea took the city, and the city took the villages along the coast, and your mother's village was among them. The receipt that Wicker has in his coat is the bargain my sister made, in the year of the small storms, with the thing that sits beneath the Hollow Crown, and she put the Smith-King's brow beneath it because the Smith-King had been her lover, and she thought she could love him enough to make the song hold."

She turned, then, to Wicker, and the look in her eyes was the look of a woman who has set down a weight she has carried for a long time and does not yet trust the ground beneath her feet.

"Read it," she said. "Read the receipt, and tell me whether the Smith-King knew what he was wearing, when they set the Hollow Crown upon his head, and tell me whether my sister knew what she was doing when she bargained for it, and tell me, if you can, whether the song that the crown is now singing, the song that is drowning the villages one by one, is the song I refused to sing, or the song my sister failed to sing, or some third song that none of us, in our pride, ever thought to ask the sea to teach us."

Wicker's hand went to the breast of his coat, and rested there, and did not draw out the paper.

"It is a receipt," he said, in his dry and papery voice, "for the borrowing of a song. And the song is borrowed from a thing that does not forgive."

"Then we have not much time," said Ireleth, "to teach the sea a new borrower."

Wicker drew the folded paper from his coat at last, and the room seemed to lean toward it the way the drowned lean toward the last light at the edge of the world. Mara felt the air change against her cheeks, tasted salt where salt should not have been, and heard, or thought she heard, a sound like a great wheel turning slowly beneath the floorboards of the cottage. Ireleth had gone very still, her fingers laced together at her waist, her knuckles white as the bones of gulls.

The receipt was older than Wicker. Older, perhaps, than the cottage, though the cottage was old. The paper was the brown of fish-guts left in the sun, and the ink was the black of the deep places where light has never been, and the hand that had written it had been a hand that did not tremble, for it had been certain of what it did. Wicker held it between two fingers, at arm's length, as a man might hold a coal that has not quite gone out, and he read.

"A song," he said, and his voice had lost its theatrical pause. "A song borrowed from the thing that sings beneath the Hollow Crown. A song that was to be sung by a woman of the blood of the first sister, in exchange for the lifting of a curse that had already fallen, which is to say in exchange for nothing at all, since what is paid after the due is not a price but a bribe. The song was to be sung back into the Crown, and the Crown was to be worn by a king worthy of it, and the worthy king was to walk the long road to the place where the bargain was made, and sing the sea back into its bed. So much is written, and so much is true."

He lowered the paper, and his eyes found Mara, and Mara saw that the fear in them was not for himself.

"The Smith-King," Wicker said, "knew. Not the whole of it. He knew that the Crown was heavy, and that the Crown sang, and that to wear it was to be wed to a duty he could not name. He knew because he had been a smith, and a smith can tell when a thing has been forged to hold a weight it was not meant to hold. He did not know whose song the Crown was waiting for. He did not know that the song had been bargained for in his name, by a woman who loved him, in a year when the sea was taking the villages one by one and the court was too proud to send help."

He turned the paper over, as if a man might turn over a stone to see what crawled beneath it.

"Your sister," he said to Ireleth, and his voice softened, for he had been young once, and he had been in love once, and the paper was not only a receipt but a relic of a kind of courage that does not survive the century that names it. "Your sister knew. She knew that the song she had bargained for was not her own to sing, and that the Crown would not accept a song that had not been paid for in the blood of the singer. She knew, and she bargained anyway, because the sea was at the door and the court would not answer, and a woman who has nothing but her own throat will use it, if she is brave enough, or desperate enough, or both."

He set the paper down on the table, and the sound it made was the sound of a leaf falling in a wood where no wind moves.

"What she did not know," he said, "and what the Smith-King did not know, and what I did not know until I read the margins of this thing in the twentieth year of my exile, was that the song the Crown is singing now is not the song that was bargained for. The song that was bargained for was a song of return. A song of the sea drawing back from the long road, and the villages rising, and the drowned walking out of the water in their Sunday clothes, and the bells in the drowned bell-towers ringing of their own accord, and the children of the drowned villages finding their mothers in the markets of the drowned city. That song would have undone the curse. That song would have cost the singer her voice, and her name, and the use of her hands, and the color of her hair, and the memory of every kiss she had ever been given. The singer would have walked into the sea at the end of it, and the sea would have closed over her, and the Crown would have rung like a bell that has found its clapper, and the world would have been as it was before the bargain was broken."

He stopped, and the cottage was so quiet that Mara could hear the gulls on the cliff, and the gulls were far below, and their cries were thin as thread.

"The song that is being sung now," he said, "is not a song of return. It is a song of completion. The Crown has grown tired of waiting for a singer who will pay the price, and so it has begun to sing the song that was meant to be sung only after the return was done. It is singing the villages down one by one, because the villages are the notes of the song, and the long road is the staff, and the drowned city is the final bar. When the last village is gone, and the last of the long road is under water, and the drowned city has risen to the place where the bargain was made, then the Crown will have sung its own completion, and there will be no need for a singer at all."

Ireleth made a sound that was not a word. It was the sound a woman makes when she has been carrying a stone in her chest for thirty years and someone has at last told her the name of the stone, and the name is worse than the weight.

"My sister," she said, "would have sung the song."

"Yes," said Wicker. "If she had lived. If the court had not sent men to silence her before she could open her mouth. She would have sung, and the sea would have taken her, and the villages would have risen, and the world would have been saved, and no one would have remembered her name."

Mara stepped forward. She did not know why she stepped forward. She only knew that the paper on the table was a paper that concerned her mother's village, and her mother's name, and the year she was born, which was the year after the year of the small storms, which was the year the sea came and did not go back. She stepped forward, and her shadow fell across the receipt, and the ink in the receipt seemed to lean toward her shadow the way a flame leans toward the wind.

"What about me?" she said.

Wicker looked at her, and the look in his eyes was the look of a man who has set a match to a long fuse and is only now beginning to count the paces to the powder.

"You," he said, "are the receipt's due."

Ireleth turned on him with a ferocity that made the candle flame bow.

"You will not have her," she said. "I did not bring her here to be a payment. I brought her here to be a witness. I brought her here because the court failed my sister, and the court failed the Smith-King, and the court has failed every village on this coast for thirty years, and I will not have the only child of my sister's line fed to a song that was never meant to be sung."

"I am not feeding her to anything," said Wicker, and his voice was gentle, and his eyes were not. "I am telling her what she is. The receipt names the singer as a woman of the blood of the first sister. Mara is the daughter of a woman of the blood of the first sister, by way of your sister, by way of your mother, by way of the long road of women who have refused to forget the song. The Crown has been calling her since she was born. The sea has been calling her since she was born. Every village the Crown has taken since she came of age has been a note in the song that has been trying to draw her to the long road."

"Then why," said Mara, and her voice was very steady, for she had learned steadiness from the sea, "has the Crown not taken my village? Why has it gone around us, year after year, and taken the villages on either side, and left ours standing like a tooth in an old man's mouth?"

Wicker smiled, and the smile was the saddest thing Mara had ever seen on a human face.

"Because," he said, "the Crown is waiting for you to choose. The villages it has taken were the villages of those who had no claim on the song. They were collateral. They were the interest on the debt. Your village was the principal. And the Crown will not spend the principal until the principal has been offered freely, or taken by force, and force, in this matter, would break the song."

Ireleth made the sound again, and this time it was closer to a word, and the word was the name of a sister who had been silenced in a year when the court still believed that silence was a kind of safety.

"Then we leave," she said. "We take her from this coast. We take her inland, beyond the reach of the long road, beyond the reach of the tide, beyond the reach of the Crown. My sister died for the refusal to be silent. I will not have her niece die for the refusal to be deaf."

"And if we go," said Wicker, "the Crown will sing the song anyway. It will sing it with Mara's absence for a harmony, and the harmony will be the sound of a voice that should have been there and was not, and the sea will take the rest of the coast, and the long road will be under water by the winter, and the drowned city will rise, and the Crown will complete itself, and there will be no one left to remember that there was ever a song that could have undone the bargain."

He looked at Mara, and Mara looked at him, and between them the receipt lay on the table, and the ink in the receipt was drying, or seemed to be drying, though the ink had been dry for thirty years.

"There is a third song," said Wicker. "I said there was not, when I spoke to you in the cottage, because I was afraid. There is a third song. It is not the song of return, and it is not the song of completion. It is the song that was never written into the receipt, because the woman who bargained for it did not know it would be needed, and the thing she bargained with did not know it would be sung. It is the song of the refusal. The song that says: I will not be your singer, and I will not be your silence, and I will not be your collateral. I will stand on the long road, and I will open my mouth, and I will sing a song that is not the song you bargained for, and the Crown will have to choose whether to listen."

He paused, and the pause was the longest of his life.

"But the song of the refusal must be sung by a singer who is willing to be the last note," he said. "And the last note, in this kind of song, is a note that does not end. The singer does not die, but she does not come back either. She stands on the long road, and she sings, and the Crown listens, and the sea listens, and the villages rise, and the drowned walk out of the water, and the bells ring, and the singer stands there, and the singer is still standing there, and she will be standing there when the last of us has forgotten her name."

Mara heard her mother's voice, then, though her mother had been dead for twenty years. Her mother had said, when the sea first began to rise, that there were worse things than drowning, and one of them was the refusal to drown when the drowning was what the world had asked of you. Her mother had not said it as a counsel. She had said it as a weather report. The sea was coming, and the sea would have its due, and the only question was whether you would stand in the door and meet it or run down the long road and hope it passed you by.

Mara had been running down the long road for twenty years.

She looked at Ireleth, and Ireleth's face was a country she had never been to and could not find her way through. She looked at Wicker, and Wicker's face was the face of a man who had been waiting at the end of a long road for a very long time, and was tired of waiting, and was not sure, now that the waiting was done, that he had been waiting for the right thing.

She looked at the receipt, and the receipt looked back at her, or seemed to, the way a hole in a wall seems to look at the man who has fallen into it.

"I will go to the long road," she said. "I will sing the third song. And if I am the last note, then I am the last note."

Ireleth opened her mouth to speak, and Wicker raised a hand, and the hand was a quiet hand, the hand of a man who has learned when to let a thing be done that cannot be undone.

Mara picked up the receipt, and folded it, and put it into the pocket of her coat where it lay against her heart, and the paper was warm, and the ink was warm, and the warmth was not the warmth of a thing that had been carried close to a living body. It was the warmth of a thing that had been waiting, for thirty years, to be carried close to a living body, and had at last been allowed to.