51. Yarrow and Peregrine Have a Chat They Are Joined by Others

51. Yarrow and Peregrine Have a Chat; They Are Joined by Others

Tertius ambled along the bridge. For some reason, many people here had privileges. Not just wine, but a honey-cake for a sullen woman in a half-ruined tower, a pouch of red stones for a half-ruined man in a sullen house, and so on. And every one had their ritual greeting and presentation, delivered in dialogue with Peregrine, to varying degrees of enthusiasm.

But in between these, Yarrow and Peregrine got to talk. It was nice just talking to someone. No lessons to be learned, no expectations, just words allowed to be words. The butler had seen the entire palace, except Grey itself, and knew so many people by name that Yarrow wondered (but did not ask) how he managed to apply the right name to the right person. (Perhaps it was like remembering herbs.) He had been to Yellow often, of course, but he had also seen the grand decaying hulk of the Carnelian Room; he had taken in the view from the Eightfold Wall; he had dined with the Order of Botanists in their aerie. And he had seen the sea.

"What's it like?" said Yarrow eagerly. "Is it really infinite water?"

Peregrine shrugged. "From the shore you can only glimpse a little of it. Then if you go up Red to the Star Chamber you can see that the water is a long blue finger touching the palace. Scholars call it a bay. But it's just a finger of the hand that's the wide sea that nobody knows the end of. But of course, just because nobody knows the end doesn't mean there isn't one."

"And that's where ships come in."

"Yes, from the outer fiefs, where they speak strange and dress stranger. Incense comes from there, and fruit that needs richer soil than the palace provides. I've never been that far myself. Nobody leaves here that I ever heard of. Only ships from the fiefs come and go, and their sailors make a sign with their hands when they step onto the docks."

"Are there more people in the world besides us?" said Yarrow. The question was strange in her mouth. For all she knew, the palace was the world: a stage for which the sea and mountains were a bit of backdrop. But Arnica believed there was a wider world. It was bewildering to think so. Some place far away from the palace, farther even than the fiefs, who, after all, belonged to the palace, tied to it by a long loop of the outermost wall.

"Nobody knows," Peregrine said with a shrug. "Doesn't much matter, does it?"

In a sense, he was right. The palace was self-sufficient. Nobody came and nobody went. It was what it was; the existence of anything else had no bearing on that.

But to think of the palace, fading day by day even before the Beast's imminent arrival—to think of it destroyed, unremembered and unmourned, that was unbearable. She said as much to Peregrine, who laughed.

"What a perfect Mother of Grey you are," he said. "To think of the world in terms of whether it'll mourn us. Now, Yarrow, I'm about to speak a piece of heresy, and I wouldn't dare except that we're good friends. It would not be a tragedy for the palace to end. It would not be sad for us to pass away unremembered. What would their memorial to us read? Here Lies Dust."

"Things have happened here!" said Yarrow. "The stories, the songs. Era after era of people living and dying, the Ladies, all the struggles and deeds—those are us. They make us up. Wouldn't it be horrible for that to vanish? We're not what we once were, but we once—we once were something."

Peregrine cocked his head and squinted one eye. "We were something because we tell ourselves we were. But we can't even agree on what we were. Do you know what happened on, say, the Night of Bones?"

Yarrow opened her mouth to say Yes, of course, but then she remembered that the tale Old Yarrow had told her was just one of eighty-five.

"Neither do I," said Peregrine, when she was left silent. "I joined the Butlers to travel and hear stories, and all the stories I heard pointed their finger at another story and said That's a lie . So now I hear them, but I don't believe them."

"To travel ?" said Yarrow. Getting her to leave Grey had taken a threat to her very existence, and even then it was a reluctant choice. Every step out of Grey had brought some new horror. Even after her conversation with Arnica, it was impossible to imagine someone doing it willingly.

Peregrine laughed. "Well, also I wanted to stay a man. If I'd completed my apprenticeship to the Master of Privileges I'd've been moved to womanhood, and I didn't want that."

That made sense, at least. These switches were not uncommon. Ban had been tithed to the girls in grey partly because if she'd stayed with her parents, she would grow up to be a boy.

"Surely," Yarrow said, returning to the more interesting topic, "surely the different tellings of a story have some threads in common."

"They do, but I've not got so much time on my hands that I can sort them all to find the truest." He took another handful of leaves to chew. "Think: our stories are about ourselves. That's why we care about them. That's how we understand them. If we vanish, who will be left to understand and care?"

The earth itself will remember us, Yarrow wanted to say. We've written our story on it with walls and towers.

But that was a glib response, irrelevant and untrue.

"They may not understand," she said, "but if the worst happens—if someone else finds our ruins, they will care."

Peregrine shrugged.

The sun was near the zenith when Tertius came to the last house on the bridge, where a woman was owed a swatch of yellow flannel. While she and Peregrine transacted their business, a crash got Yarrow's attention. At the head of the bridge, back the way they had come, a contraption of glass and steel had just fallen over: a lantern. A small person was struggling out of it.

Yarrow shimmied down the rope ladder and ran to help. The person had rabbit ears and wore an undyed linen cotehardie with a black hood: exactly like the dead beekeepers from the Passage. Perhaps this was a survivor. They certainly looked beat-up enough for it.

"I'm trying to find Hawthorn," they said. "How do you get to Grey?"

"Hush a moment," said Yarrow. Their arm was sprained or something—oh for an apothecary!—but she had nothing to immobilize it with, so she unpinned her wimple and tied it into a sling. Cold air filtered through her bound-back hair, and her free twigs curled up toward the wintry sun.

"Hawthorn?" said the rabbit-eared person, when she finished.

"Hawthorn?" said Yarrow. "I saw her this morning. As for Grey, well, I'm headed there myself but I couldn't possibly tell you the way. Just come with us."

And so Frin was added to Tertius's passengers. As the hollowman climbed slowly up the West Passage stairs, he told Yarrow much of what had transpired: Hawthorn's stay with the beekeepers, the trek through Black, the downfall of Willow. Yarrow was shocked. Peregrine took it in stride.

"It was just a matter of time, little Mother," he said in response to her surprised questions. "The fall of a dynasty always starts with small wars around the base of the tower. We could all see it coming. If not in our lifetimes, then in the lifetimes of our children."

Yarrow was not reassured. The central authority of the palace, lost or at best weakened, right in a time of emergency? When the Beast came, whatever happened next was up to the people of Grey. As it had always been. Only now it was very hard to be confident about that. They stood alone. Hawthorn was young and inexperienced, Yarrow herself scarcely less so. And the people of Grey, who were they? Two girls, an old servant, some half-starved farmers and craftspeople. She thought obscurely of the apes scattered throughout Yellow, munching butterflies, the flower on the train, the frogs in their pools, Roe's body in its poor grave of twigs, and the scattered Ladyless people of Blue. She thought of Peregrine, solid and green beside her, tendons shifting in his neck as he turned to spit into the snow, and Frin, exhausted, ragged, determined. Fragile, all of them, compared to this great evil, this Lady-eater. She twined her fingers together, sick with fear. Grey was no bulwark for these people now.

But Hawthorn might be wrong. The earth had quaked before. The fighting around Black might have broken the wheel. It could be any number of things. She recited the parts of birthwort to herself. By the time she got to the calyx, she was calmer. It might still be all right.

Tertius crested the canyon wall, and there before her was the small, homely tower. After the dreadful sickness of Yellow and the hideous emptiness of Blue, Grey was warm and welcoming, despite the snow and wind. There was still a ways to go, and the snow had destroyed so much, but Yarrow was home .

Then there, in the middle of the Passage, was Hawthorn. She had changed into the green, sleeved overgown of the Guardians, she carried the steel, and she looked very, very angry.

"What's the song?" she said. "Tell me about the song!"