Liongate wore its grief quietly, the way a great house does, with the shutters drawn against a grey morning and the hearths banked low and the servants going soft-footed in the halls, and Lymas, who had wept himself through the night, sat by a cold window in the morning room and watched the rain come down over Liongate and did not feel much of anything at all.
The rain had come in before dawn and meant to stay. It fell straight and grey out of a sky with no shape to it, and it had turned the yard to a shine of wet stone and beaten the last leaves off the trees along the wall, so that the smallwood beyond looked thinner than it had the day before, scoured down toward winter. From the window Lymas could see the road where the grey rider had come in, and the road was empty now, running off north into the murk toward the place his grandfather had died, and would carry them all that way before long. He knew that without being told. A death in the high seat pulled the whole family north, and they would go, all of them, into the grey.
He had not slept much. The dream had come again, the one that came most nights now, the one he never spoke of: reddish sand and a white sky too bright to look at and the hot moving flank of a horse beneath him, and a voice he knew and could not place, hard and close, telling him to hold tight. He had woken with the grit-taste on his tongue and his heart going and the certainty, fading even as he reached for it, that the dream had been trying to tell him something, and that he did not want to know what.
Below in the yard the household went on with the slow business of a great house preparing to travel into grief. Men carried chests out into the rain and cursed it and carried them back. The wheelwright had been at work since before light, and the ring of his hammer came up through the wet air, steady and small. Lymas watched a stable boy lead the grey rider's spent horse across the yard, slow, the poor beast's head hanging, and thought of how hard a man must ride to kill a horse under him, and what news was worth a horse. Everything that morning seemed to move at the pace of the rain, as though the whole keep had agreed without speaking to do nothing quickly for a while.
Lymas heard footsteps in the doorway, even and unhurried. And he knew them without turning.
"You're up early," His father, Elyas, said.
"I couldn't sleep."
"Yeah!" His father came and stood by the window, looking out at the rainy weather, a tall man going grey at the temples with his face all weathered planes, and for a while he said nothing. Then Elyas reached down and drew a chair near and sat in it, so that his eyes came level with Lymas's, which he did not have to do and which Mayas had always said no one else in the family troubled to do, and that was a thing Lymas held onto. "You're grieving him," his father said. "And you barely knew him. And that is confusing you."
Lymas looked at him, surprised, because that was exactly the shape of the thing he had been turning over in the dark and had not had words for. He nodded and looked down.
"It's all right," Elyas said. "Your grandfather was a great man. He held the name of the Cherians very high for many years, and now it is time for him to rest," he paused, resting his hand on Lymas's shoulder. "A man grieving someone he does not know is the highest form of grief, and it says a lot about the grieving man. You knew him only by tales, and you've met him once or twice and were too young to remember it."
"Did you love him?" Lymas asked. It was the question he had wanted to ask for a day.
His father considered it honestly, which was another thing about him. He did not give easy answers to hard questions, or easy answer to easy questions, Lymas knew that much. "He was a hard man to love and easy to obey," Elyas said at last. "And for most of my life I let the obeying stand in for the loving, because the obeying was simpler and he never asked for more. I think I'm sorry for that now. A man finds out what a thing was worth to him on the morning it's gone, and not a morning sooner. Remember that, when you can. It would save you a great deal of what it didn't save me."
The door went, and Mayas came in out of the cold halls with rain still in his hair and the look of a man who has been up and doing since first light. He was nineteen and tall and easy in himself the way Lymas would never be in anything, and he crossed the room and gripped their father's shoulder once, hard, and then dropped into a crouch by Lymas's chair.
"There you are," Mayas said. "I looked in on you in the night and you were dead asleep and frowning at something. Bad dreams, little brother?"
"I don't remember," Lymas lied. He did not want to share his uneasy dreams.
"Best kind." Mayas tugged the blanket straighter over Lymas's knees, frowning at the cold of the room, and looked up at their father. "The household's near ready. We can be on the road by tomorrow if the rain lets the wagons move. The men are saying it won't."
"The men say that every time it rains." Elyas stood, and the moment of quiet went out of the room with the standing, and something heavier came in to fill its place. He drew a folded parchment from inside his coat, and Lymas saw that the wax on it was not the grey of the Three Steps. It was a deep blue, stamped with a sigil Lymas did not know, and his father held it a moment as though it weighed more than paper should.
"This came an hour behind the rider," he said. "From Starshade." He turned it in his fingers. "The Council has set the day. The marriage is set to go forward at the capital, before the winter closes the roads. They want the whole of the tribelands there to see it done. Tuggards, Kulks, Cherians, all of them, under one roof, watching a Cherian and a Kulk wed and the old quarrel buried with the rice." He looked at Mayas as he said it, and there was something careful in the look, Lymas noticed. "It means we don't go north and then home, son. We go north to bury your grandfather, and then on west to Starshade, for you."
The wedding came into the room and sat down among them, bright and strange in all the grey. Lymas watched his brother's face do a complicated thing, glad and not glad at once, the way a face. His brother rarely showed his feelings through expression, he was more a man of actions.
"A'mna," Mayas said, as if trying the name in his mouth. He had met the Kulk girl twice, at the signings, under the eyes of both tribes, and had told Lymas she was clever and proud and had laughed at exactly one of his jokes and pretended she hadn't. "Well. At least she's not dull." He tried to make it light and could not quite, and gave it up. "Everyone smiling at everyone with their hands near their knives, that's what a tribeland wedding is. Father says it'll keep the peace at least another ten years," he addressed Lymas with the last note.
"It will," Elyas said, "if it's done right, and seen to be done right, by every man who matters. That's why the whole world's invited. A peace nobody watches is a peace nobody keeps." He put the parchment away. "It's a great thing you're doing, son. I know it doesn't feel like a great thing. It feels like being spent. But you're buying something with it that armies couldn't buy, and there's an honor in that your grandfather would have understood before any of us." He laid a hand on his elder son's shoulder a moment. "I don't like it in the least, but I'm proud of you for it. I don't say that to you enough."
Mayas looked down, pleased and embarrassed, and covered it by getting to his feet. "Tell me that after I've stood through a Kulk wedding feast. Three days of it, they say. I'll have earned every word."
Lymas listened to the two of them and said nothing and turned the whole of it over in the quiet way he turned everything. A wedding to buy peace. His brother spent like coin to keep three great tribes from one another's throats, and the whole tribelands called to watch the spending and call it an honor. He did not understand the grown world's faith in it, that you could stop men hating by standing a Cherian and a Kulk side by side under a roof and saying words over them. Hate did not seem to him a thing that words got hold of. But his father believed it, and his father was the wisest man he knew, and so Lymas folded his doubt away.
When their father had gone out to see to the wagons, Mayas stayed, and crouched again by the chair, and looked at Lymas with the easy attention he gave nobody else.
"You'll be near me the whole road," Mayas said. "And at the Steps. The cousins will be there, the whole biting pack of them, Edal's girls and the rest, and they're worse than they were. Stay where I can see you and I won't let them at you." He grinned. "And at the wedding you'll sit at the high table with the family, in front of every Sid in the tribelands, and look so grand and grave they'll think you're the one getting married, and I'll be the forgotten one. How's that?"
Lymas smiled, because Mayas wanted him to, and because it was hard not to. "They'll think you're my servant," he joked.
"They will. I'll fetch your cup and everything." Mayas stood, ruffled Lymas's hair, and then went to the door, and there he paused and looked back, and for a moment the easy manner thinned and Lymas saw something underneath it that he did not often see in his brother, something young and unsure. "It's a strange thing, little brother," Mayas said, "to be the rope they tie two angry houses together with. You spend your whole life being someone, and then one morning you wake up being a knot." He shook it off and the grin came back over it like a cloak. "Sleep tonight. Real sleep. We've a long grey way to go." And he was gone.
Lymas sat alone by the window and watched the rain fall over outside in the city of Liongate. He remembered what he felt in the smallwood with his friends, and he remembered his dreams. He was unsure whether they were related to each other, and whether to call those dreams nightmares. His mind juggled with what happened and the dream and his grandfather's death and even the wedding, everything came back and forth in his mind, and through it all, he thought, without knowing why, that he did not want to go to Starshade at all.