2. The Mask Is Taken and the Women in Grey Know Nothing About It

2. The Mask Is Taken and the Women in Grey Know Nothing About It

The apprentice shouldered his pack. The taste of angelica was still in his mouth, and the smell of his master's death still in his nose. He took a last look around the tiny room, now clean and empty, and set off through the corridors of the Court of Guardians, with his feet turned toward the West Passage. His name, which we have not had occasion to learn, for Pell herself never bothered, was Kew.

He did not precisely want to leave Grey Tower. A titheling from the southern cloisters, Kew had only ever known Grey. Its granite walls, its slate roofs, and the five-pointed crown of the tower itself, were all part of his blood in a way he could only define by going away. However, that self-knowledge was not why he had dressed in traveling robes and tied on his master's soft boots. Hawthorn's last words to him had been Tell Black it's coming . Her last words, when she should have been swearing him in to the office of Guardian. Kew was obedient to her wishes, when he would rather have stayed.

Nobody in Grey thought much of the Guardians. Like every other position, the office was respected for its age if nothing else, but since the Guardians had not been needed in generations, hardly anyone remembered what they were for or why they were for it. Unlike the women in grey, the Guardians served no function in ordinary life, except to take a tithe of the cloisters' produce and stand at the mother's side for certain antiquated ceremonies. And so everyone believed that a Guardian could be anyone and come from anywhere. They ignored the long, careful apprenticeship. They knew nothing of the Bestiaries, the rites, the rhymes. With Kew gone, the stern old mother would either appoint a Guardian from among the citizens of Grey or she would let the office lapse, as so much else in the heart of the palace had lapsed into dust and cobwebs over the long, long eras.

Kew should have replaced the old woman. He should have become the next Hawthorn, seventy-fourth holder of that title. His name should have changed; he should not still have his child's nonsense name, but the flower-name that was the right of a Grey official. He should, he could, he must . Why hadn't Hawthorn confirmed him? Why had she trained him his whole life, only to turn him into a South-damned messenger ? They had birds for messengers, or people in the outer districts to send, or the rampart horns to blow. Guardians had something better to do. A Guardian is sworn to protect, she'd said at least once a day all the time he'd known her.

In her case, that meant eating a lot of ortolan, belching ferociously, and drilling Kew on fighting forms and pushing him page by page through dusty archives, but she'd been ready to leap into battle if necessary. When some children from Madrona's cloisters had bullied him, she sent them home with bruises the size of dinner plates. He had loved her. Under his tunic he had the amulet he had made her ten years ago, a simple circle of copper etched with an eye "to watch over her," crusted now with verdigris. She had never taken it off. She had loved him. Then she had denied him his name.

He passed cell after cell dug into the walls of massive stone: the living places of the Hawthorns. They had been numerous, once. Now he was the only one. The roofs here had partly fallen, and the watery early-summer sun threw puddles of light on the rough floor. There was a faint drone: the women singing as they went up-tower. Mice scattered at his approach, their mandibles clicking in alarm. It was cool in these damp halls.

When the prickly one, Yarrow, had asked him if he was ready to be the next Guardian on her way to handle Hawthorn's body, he had quivered with rage and been unable to speak. He was ready. Why hadn't the old woman known that? Before the rage passed, it transmuted into fear: of the journey he must now undertake from the palace's cold heart to its distant center.

There was no time to lose. Not because he knew how much time there was: precisely because he did not know. It could be now, it could be later. But Hawthorn had made him promise. Before anything else, tell Black it's coming . And a Guardian, or a Guardian's apprentice, who could not keep their word—? Such a person did not deserve their name. He would not deserve even the no-name of Kew if he broke this promise. He would not deserve it if he delayed even one day.

The Court of the Guardians came to an end where the cells turned into a hall. To go to Black, he would simply head north, and there would be the West Passage. Easy. But . Black Tower would not believe him, surely. Hawthorn had been there once or twice, but that was in her youth, long before Kew was even born. The Ladies of Black would have no idea who he was. He needed proof. The steel of the Guardians would have done, but that holy weapon was forbidden to an unnamed apprentice. But there was something else.

Kew turned south. The halls disgorged him into the courtyard at the foot of the tower. Grey House loomed to his right, all steep roofs and warty turrets and broken windows. To the left was the broad, high gate of the West Passage. Ahead, the dry grass and trees were interrupted where Grey Tower thrust upward from the worn flagstones. Unlike the cloisters and the huge gloomy house, the tower seemed to have grown where it stood. The courses of large, unpolished stones were uneven and random, shifted out of place here and there as if the tower had been shaken. The few windows were small and dark: they looked on storerooms, each holding items of unknown age and obscure purpose. The tower narrowed suddenly about two-thirds of the way up, and this slim neck rose seventy or eighty feet before widening into the turreted top. At night, Grey Tower looked very much like a half-buried person wearing a five-pointed crown. According to Hawthorn, there was an ancient, sacred reason for this. For reasons of her own, she never told Kew what it was, and she rarely took him inside when she attended to the strange ceremonies Guardians held in the mossy atrium. But, like everyone else, Kew had heard of the Room of Masks, and he knew that was where the Guardian's mask would be, and besides the steel, it was the only thing a Lady of Black Tower would recognize as belonging to the Guardian of the West Passage.

The last butterflies of Hawthorn's funeral were still streaming away from the tower when Kew entered it. He saw the women and the girl coming down the ramp and ducked into a storeroom to watch them go past. There was the tall mother, the spines on her head and back poking through her ragged wimple and robe. There was the short woman of simple flesh, her face lined with laughter. And there was the tiny girl with the twiggy hair who had given him angelica in the corridor. Pell, he thought she was called. They'd met now and then, but apprentices had little time to speak, and they were not friends. She probably didn't even know his name.

Kew moved away from the door and his foot hit something hard. The room was full of waist-high effigies. Each of them was veiled with grey linen; the oldest could be told from the decayed shreds that clung to them. At the base of each was written the name YARROW. There were perhaps sixty or seventy of them. Though their eyes were all hidden, Kew felt them staring.

Pell left the tower, while the women went on to the Room of Masks, singing. After the funeral, the mask had to be cleaned and returned with proper ceremonies. Would they ever stop that dirge? The Yarrow statues were making his neck prickle. It would be so satisfying to smash one.

At last their song ended. From his vantage point, Kew could see the tower entrance. The two women trudged out, one eating nuts, the other scratching under her wimple. He slipped across the atrium to the Room. The stones of its corbel-arched door were carved into grieving faces; the keystone had the form of a veiled head. Through the moss and mud of the atrium, a path had been worn by the passing of the women year after year. All other chambers of the tower were disused.

The Room was long and fan-shaped: small at its entrance, but widening toward the outer wall, so that the whole place felt like a trick of perspective, like a stage in one of the mystery dramas that entertainers from Blue occasionally put on in the house. From floor to shadowy ceiling, shelves lined the room. Blank stone cylinders filled them, and onto each cylinder was tied a mask. There were several hundred of them, one for each named office in the cloisters of Grey, from the Yarrows, Arnicas, and Foxgloves of the house to the Madronas and Jasmines of the outermost districts. An irregular lattice pierced the far wall, pouring in cold sunlight over the ranks of masks. Under the lattice, an uneven dais held four granite plinths, and upon each plinth was a marble head. One held the jasper mask of the tutors, who taught the law. One held the slate mask of the mothers, who upheld the law. One held the oaken mask of the doctors, who cared for followers of the law. And the last held the serpentine mask of the Guardians, who protected followers of the law.

It was broken. The women had lashed it together with twine passed through the two eyeholes, then left it at the head's base. Tears stung Kew's eyes. How could they break it? How dare they take so little care? Their whole purpose was to care!

Hawthorn had always said the women in grey wouldn't piss on you if they saw you on fire, but Kew had believed it was professional jealousy speaking. Grey Tower's crumbling administration still squabbled over favor and privilege as if a Lady remained to grant them, and there were deep, ancient feuds between many of the offices. Most of them were petty at best. Hawthorn's had seemed petty, too, but never in all his apprenticeship had Kew encountered such sacrilegious incompetence. Whatever the women in grey deserved for this, he'd give it to them.

He wrapped the mask in a handkerchief and put it in his pack. The halves scraped past each other with a sickening noise and a sensation that made his hands cramp. Once it was safe, he took a last look around the room. Most of the masks were coated in decades of dust: Hawthorn had once told him that Grey currently housed at most a couple hundred people, and many of those were no-names like Kew. Unless they were apprenticed, they would never achieve a name, and if they were not named, they went to their deaths unmasked.

Kew had expected to go to his funeral with the mask he now carried. But now he never would, unless he could get to Black Tower and deliver Hawthorn's message. They would use their authority to name him, and he would become Hawthorn and defend the palace against the Beast, and die with honor after all.

He went back into the corridors, keeping his face to the north, and soon came through a low oaken door into the side of the West Passage. Easy, he'd thought, but his foot hesitated on the cracked threshold. In the quiet, his heartbeat almost shook the stones.

This postern was called Hawthorn's Sally: on its lintel were three scratches from a battle in the Apple Era, eroded but still deep. This was the last entrance to the Passage on the Blackward side of things. If he hadn't taken this path, the tricky nature of Grey would have shunted him here and there until he ended up at the Passage's beginning, and that would have meant a long journey through Yellow and into North knew what before looping back to Black.

Above him were battlements and ivy. Across a paved chasm, he faced the far wall of the Passage, high and solid, battlemented and ramparted and towered. Along the lower courses of stone were parallel striations: more scratches, increasing in size as they got farther from Grey, until they stopped abruptly at the edge of sight, and there the paving stones were stained, even after so many centuries. It was exactly as Hawthorn's book Campanula depicted it, except the catapults atop the towers had rotted into spikes of crumbly wood and rusted iron rings, and where smoke had blackened the walls, it had faded. There was not a stone, not a bit of mortar, not a window, not a beam that was not named, that had no history.

A songbird flitted overhead, and the vast silence of the Passage swallowed it up. This place was too somber for song. There were bones in the walls and blood in the floor. Kew swallowed. No ink, no tempera, no gesso or gold leaf had prepared him for this.

A warm wind stirred the ivy. Its dry leaves rattled. A mason bee burrowed into some mortar. In one direction lay Yellow Tower, peering over the top of Grey like a hawk, and in the other lay Black Tower's misty head. It was approximately one day's journey, if the books were correct.

If he kept moving, with Grey always at his back, he should have no trouble at all. He would have no trouble. This was his place. Hawthorns had fought and died here for as long as here had been. He was not a Hawthorn yet, but this was the way to that name. Kew stepped into the Passage and started walking.