Scarecrow

Garnet found it by accident.

Not the tithe world. She’d been looking for the tithe world. Caddoc, the third circle on the list of sixty-four, salt flats and red rock and a people called the Caddi who’d paid the tithe for nine generations and had sent back, when Konrad’s letter reached them, two words through the relay that Dot said were the shortest answer any council had ever given.

Come quickly.

So Garnet went with the Meridian to draw it. And drew it. Salt and red rock and a single counting tower in the middle of a dry white plain.

And then she turned the Meridian’s window, because she always does, to draw whatever’s next to the thing she came for. Because nobody else ever draws that.

And Caddoc had a neighbour.

She drew it on a separate sheet. And sent it back through Dot. And under it, in her neat hand, she wrote:

This one isn’t on the list.

A world of mountains and iron-coloured seas, very close to Caddoc, so close they shared a sun and nearly shared a sky. Green in the valleys. Bright. Alive the way Avalon’s alive, and the way Ammaru’s going to be. With cities on the mountains, built of stone, with walls.

And round the cities, on every ridge and every coast and every high pass, something Garnet had drawn very carefully, with a pencil she’d sharpened four times.

Wrecks.

Sorn. Hundreds of them. Carriers and Hands and correctors’ landers and things none of us had names for. Old ones, grown over with green. Newer ones, still grey. All of them broken. Lying on the mountains where they’d come down and not gone up again.

Ilka says the houses have a number for this world too, Garnet wrote. It isn’t a tithe number. It’s a different kind.

Ilka says it means: do not land.

”How long?” said Okafor.

In the map room. With the sheet in front of her. With her hands flat on the table either side of it.

Ruan answered from the Meridian. ”The oldest wrecks are older than the Accord. Older than Earth’s first tithe. Dot thinks—” She stopped. ”Dot thinks a thousand years. Maybe more. The houses kept coming. Every few generations. They stopped about two hundred years ago.”

”Stopped?”

”Stopped,” said Ruan. ”They come to Caddoc for the tithe, and they go round the other way, and they don’t look at it.”

She paused. ”Ilka says one odd thing. The newest wrecks, the last ones before they stopped. They’re not lying the way the old ones lie. The old ones came down on the mountains facing the cities. These came down facing in.” Another pause. ”As if they weren’t attacking Hyrran at all. As if they were coming from further out, going somewhere else, and Hyrran was just in the road.”

Nobody said anything to that. Garnet wrote it in the margin of her sheet, very small, and went back to drawing the war machines.

Okafor looked at the wrecks on the mountains for a long time.

”Who lives there?” she said.

Ilka found out.

She listened. On the relay. For two days. And on the third day she sent back one sentence, and Dot read it out at the long table, and the General, who’d been drinking his tea, put it down.

They’re all women. Every voice I can hear. And they’re all soldiers.

They call their world Hyrran.

They call themselves the Hyrrani. Dot says it means the unbroken. And they’d been unbroken, Ilka said, for as long as anyone on that world could remember, because every time the houses came down out of the sky, the Hyrrani had met them on the mountains and broken them instead.

Not with silver. That was the thing that made Doctor Bell take both pairs of spectacles off at once.

They had a queen. A free one. The only free queen on any world Garnet had ever drawn that nobody had needed to rescue. She lived under the highest mountain on Hyrran in a hall the Hyrrani had cut for her out of the rock, and she sang, and the valleys were green, and the Hyrrani had silver, all of them, a little, the way everyone on a free queen’s world has a little.

But they hadn’t beaten the houses with silver.

”With iron,” said Doctor Bell. Very quietly. Looking at the sheet. At the war machines Garnet had drawn on the ridges, next to the wrecks. Great walking engines of iron and stone. Siege throwers. Guns longer than the Steady. ”With iron and stone and patience. A thousand years of it.” She put her spectacles back on. ”They’ve been at war longer than Earth’s had cities.”

”We’re going to Caddoc,” said Okafor. ”For the Caddi. Before the houses come down for them.” She put her hand on the first sheet. ”And while we’re there, someone’s going to go next door and say hello.”

”Konrad,” said Konrad.

Okafor looked at him.

”I’m the liaison,” said Konrad. ”I go next door. It’s what I’m for.”

”They’re soldiers,” said Okafor. ”Every one of them. For a thousand years.”

”Then they’ll understand someone who’s been on the wrong side of a war,” said Konrad, ”and changed sides.” He folded his hands. ”I’d like to try.”

So Konrad went next door.

That’s where this begins. Not with me. With Konrad Friese, in his coat, which Nan Vey had re-ironed after Ammaru, going down the ramp of the Long Legs onto a mountain on Hyrran with Dane on one side and Ingrid on the other, happening to be there.

While the rest of us went to Caddoc.

Caddoc went quickly.

I’ll write that, because it doesn’t always, and Genny says to write both. The Caddi had said come quickly, and we did, and when the Harness and the Steady came out of the rope over the white salt plain, the Caddi had already done half of it.

They’d taken the children out of the towns. All of them. Every child on Caddoc. In the night, when the counting tower couldn’t see well. Down into the old salt mines under the red rock, deep, where the Caddi had hidden from the dry season for nine generations. Eleven thousand children in the dark under the mountains, with their grandmothers, waiting.

The counting tower had noticed at dawn.

The correctors had come out at noon.

We came out of the rope at twelve minutes past.

Twelve minutes.

The correctors had gone into the first mine. Of the nine. The nearest one to the tower.

They’d gone in nine minutes before.

Saska and the Vaeli went down after them. Brock went down after Saska. Okafor stood at the mouth of the mine with her hand up and made the rock round the entrance so heavy it couldn’t fall, because the correctors had started bringing it down.

I took the tower.

All of it. At once. The way I took the sixty in the Cradle, but bigger. The made thing at the top and the eleven correctors left inside and every atom of grey Sorn metal from the root to the sky. I didn’t ask this time. I didn’t have nine minutes to ask.

It came down in one breath.

The first mine had four hundred children in it.

Three hundred and forty came out.

Saska carried the last of them. Up the shaft. With her training wraps torn and blood on her hands that wasn’t hers. And Brock behind her, iron to the shoulders, with two more on his back and his face very white.

She put the child down at the mouth of the mine, in Halloway’s arms, and turned round and looked at the dark.

And didn’t move. For a long time.

Brock stood beside her. Not touching. Not saying anything.

After a while she said, very quietly, ”I saw it. A heartbeat ahead. I saw where it was going to be.” She looked at her hands. ”A heartbeat isn’t very long.”

”No,” said Brock.

”Sixty.”

”I know.”

She leaned against him. Just slightly. Iron. Warm from the sun.

He stayed very still.

The other eight mines didn’t have correctors in them.

Ten thousand six hundred children came up out of the salt mines of Caddoc into the white light. With their grandmothers. And the counting tower lying flat on the salt plain like a cut rope.

Left column. Right column.

Okafor wrote both.

Konrad came back from Hyrran at dusk.

On the Long Legs. With Dane and Ingrid. And with someone else.

She came down the ramp first. Before Konrad. Before anyone. Onto the white salt of Caddoc, in the red evening light, with the broken counting tower behind her and ten thousand children and their grandmothers in the camps along the edge of the plain, and Okafor and me and the whole of the Harness at the foot of its ramp.

She was very tall.

Taller than Teshka. In armour that wasn’t Sorn and wasn’t Earth. Dark iron, worked very fine, like the scales of something, from the throat to the knee. With a long blade on her back and another at her hip and a third, a short one, in her boot. With her black hair cut very short, the way Okafor’s is, and a scar through her lip, and eyes the colour of the iron seas Garnet had drawn.

She looked across the salt at all of us.

At Okafor. For a long time.

Then at me.

And stopped looking.

”Her name,” said Konrad. Coming down the ramp behind her. Very carefully. Very white. With Ingrid’s hand under his elbow. ”Is Andraste. She’s the queen of Hyrran.” He swallowed. ”Not like ours. Not a silver queen. Their silver queen lives under the mountain. Andraste is—” He looked at Dot’s word for it, which Dot had given him on the ramp. ”The First Blade. The one who rules. Because nobody on Hyrran can beat her.”

”How long has nobody been able to beat her?” said Okafor.

”Twenty-two years,” said Konrad. ”She took it at seventeen. From her mother. In a fight.” He paused. ”Her mother is alive. She asked me to say that particularly.”

”What does she want?” said Okafor.

Konrad looked at Andraste. Andraste was still looking at me.

”She heard about the Barrow,” said Konrad. ”And the reef. And the shallow seas. The Hyrrani listen too. To the houses. They’ve been listening for a thousand years so they’d know when the next ships were coming.” He took a breath. ”She heard about a boy who takes Sorn towers apart with his hands. Who took sixty correctors apart in a heartbeat. Whom the houses call—” He stopped.

”Call what?” said Okafor.

”Dot says the closest word is world-breaker,” said Konrad. ”It’s what the houses call Lucas. In their own channels. Ilka’s heard it.” He looked at me. ”Andraste heard it too.”

Andraste spoke.

For the first time. In her own language. Low. Very clear. To me.

Dot put it into all of us.

On Hyrran, nothing is spoken of before it is fought for. Not peace. Not war. Not trade. Not a name. If you wish to speak with the Hyrrani, First Blade of Avalon, you will first show me what you are.

A pause.

Fight me.

Okafor didn’t say anything.

I looked at her. She looked back.

”It’s your name she said,” said Okafor. ”Not mine.”

”I’m not the First Blade of anything.”

”You are to her,” said Okafor. She folded her arms. ”Konrad?”

”It’s real,” said Konrad. Very quietly. ”On Hyrran it’s—everything. Every decision. Every council. Every marriage. Every alliance. They fight first. Not to the death. Not usually. To the yield.” He looked at me. ”She’s not insulting you, Lucas. On Hyrran, asking someone to fight you is the highest respect there is. It means you think they might be worth losing to.”

”And if I say no?”

”Then we go home,” said Konrad. ”And the Hyrrani go back to their mountains and their wrecks. And we never speak to them again.” He paused. ”And we never find out what a thousand years of not losing to the houses could teach us.”

I looked at Andraste.

She was waiting. Very still. The way the Vaeli stand in rows, except that nobody had ever taught Andraste to stand still. She’d decided to.

”Not to the death,” I said.

Dot told her.

Something happened at the corner of Andraste’s scarred mouth.

To the yield, she said. Whose, we will see.

We fought on the salt plain at dawn.

Okafor said it had to be somewhere with nothing in it. In case. The way Doctor Bell said about the moon. Not the camps. Not the mines. The white flat salt beside the broken counting tower, with the Caddi watching from the edge of the plain and the Hyrrani watching from the Long Legs’ ramp, because Andraste had brought twelve of her own with her, in iron, very tall, who’d stood all night at the foot of the ramp and hadn’t moved.

Mother watched from the Harness.

With her arms folded. Very tight.

”Don’t you dare,” she said to me. That morning. On the ramp. Before I went down. ”Don’t you dare get hurt.”

”It’s to the yield, Mother.”

”I’ve been in a war,” said Mother. ”Nobody yields until they’re hurt.” She took my face in both her hands. ”So be the one who isn’t.”

Andraste drew the long blade.

Off her back. In one movement. Very slowly, so I’d see it. Dark iron, like her armour. Longer than I am tall. With a pattern in the steel like water running.

She held it in both hands. Pointed down. At the salt.

Then she came at me.

I’ve fought a great many things.

Correctors. Hands. The black. The voice, once, in its quiet places. Saska’s half-step, on the north field, the morning Brock let me try. I’d never fought a person who’d done nothing else for her whole life. Who’d been born for it on a world that had been born for it. Who’d killed Sorn on the mountains of Hyrran since before she could read.

She was very fast.

Not Saska’s fast. Saska sees where you’ll be. Andraste didn’t need to. She’d been in so many fights that she just knew. The way you know where your own hand is in the dark.

The blade came at my neck before I’d finished seeing her move.

I didn’t scatter.

I could have. I could have come apart like a breath and let the blade go through nothing and come back together behind her. But Konrad had said what she was asking. Show me what you are.

And I’m not someone who runs.

So I put my hand up.

And felt the blade. Every atom of it. The iron, folded and folded again, a thousand times, by someone who’d spent their whole life getting it right. And the water pattern in it, which wasn’t water, which was the way the folds lay. And the edge, very fine, sharper than anything Earth ever made.

And I asked it.

Would you like to be sand?

It hit my hand as sand.

Fine. Dark. Grey-black. Like the sand on the beach at the seventh lake. It poured over my fingers and down my arm and onto the white salt, very softly, a whole long blade of it, and Andraste stood there with her two hands closed round nothing but the hilt.

She looked at it.

She didn’t look at me. She looked at the hilt in her hands.

Then she dropped it. And drew the second blade from her hip. And came again.

Sand.

The third from her boot.

Sand.

She stood very still on the salt plain with her hands empty.

The twelve on the ramp of the Long Legs hadn’t moved. But I could feel them. Every atom. Their hands had gone to their own blades. All twelve. At once.

Andraste said something without looking round.

Their hands came away.

Then she looked at me.

And reached up, very slowly, to the throat of her armour. To a clasp there. Dark iron. And undid it.

And the armour came off. In one piece. Like a shell. And she stood on the salt in plain dark cloth underneath, with her arms bare, scarred from the shoulder to the wrist. A thousand fights. More.

She dropped the armour on the salt.

And put up her hands. Empty. In fists.

Again, she said.

I didn’t want to hit her.

I’ll be honest about that. I’ve never wanted to hit anyone who wasn’t trying to hurt someone else. Andraste wasn’t. She was trying to find out what I was.

So I didn’t hit her.

She hit me.

Three times. Very fast. In the ribs, the jaw, the chest. Hard enough that I went back across the salt and felt it, really felt it, for the first time since the queens gave me more. She was the strongest person I’d ever been hit by. Stronger than Saska. She’d been hitting things that tried to kill her people for twenty-two years.

I got up.

The way Brock got up on the ridge road.

”I’m not going to hit you,” I said.

Dot told her.

Andraste looked at me for a long time.

Then you have not shown me what you are, she said. You have shown me what you will not do. She lowered her fists. Just a little. On Hyrran, that is not the same thing. A First Blade who will not strike is a First Blade who cannot protect.

I thought about that for a long time. Standing on the salt. With my jaw aching.

She wasn’t wrong.

That was the thing. She wasn’t wrong. The houses don’t stop because you won’t hit them. They stop because they can’t win. A thousand broken ships on the mountains of Hyrran said so.

And I knew what I could do.

I’d known since the moon. Since the porch. Since Doctor Bell sat in the chair beside mine and asked me if I’d ever tried to split an atom, and Okafor said, you know what else it is.

I’d said I wouldn’t.

I still won’t. Not on anyone.

But Andraste wasn’t asking me to use it on anyone. She was asking me what I was.

I looked up.

At Caddoc’s sky. Red with dawn. And past it. To the edge, where the air ran out. And past that.

Caddoc has a moon. Two. The smaller one is a ball of ice, very far out, very cold, with nothing on it and nothing near it. Garnet had drawn it. Ruan had checked it. Nothing lives there. Nothing ever has.

I could feel it.

Every atom.

”Okafor,” I said. On the channel. Very quietly.

”I know what you’re going to ask,” said Okafor.

”The small moon. The ice one. There’s nothing on it.”

”I know,” said Okafor. ”Ruan’s looking. She’s checked it twice.” A long pause. ”Dask. Once. Far out. And not because she asked. Because you’ve decided she needs to see it to understand who she’s dealing with.” Another pause. ”And because the houses will hear about it. And they should.”

”Yes.”

”Then once,” said Okafor.

I didn’t need Hana.

I should write that, because it’s the part that frightened Doctor Bell most when I told her afterward. On the porch, a month before, it had taken Hana drawing the hydrogen out of the air and Okafor making the space heavy and me holding. Three of us. For a sun the size of a seed.

On the salt of Caddoc, I reached up past the sky to a moon of ice I could feel in every atom, and found the smallest atoms there, in the ice, more of them than there are grains of salt on the plain. And held them. And pressed them. With nothing but my own asking. The way the sun presses. Not with its weight.

With mine.

I don’t know when that happened. When I got heavy enough to do what the sun does. The queens don’t know either.

I’m not going to write how. I’ve thought about it and I won’t. Not here. Not anywhere.

I’ll write what it looked like.

A second sun came up over Caddoc.

Far out. Very small at first. A point of white in the red dawn, where the ice moon had been.

And then not small.

It filled a quarter of the sky. White. So white that the salt plain went from red to white in an instant and every shadow on Caddoc pointed the same way, away from it. So bright that the Caddi at the edge of the plain covered their eyes, and the twelve Hyrrani on the ramp of the Long Legs covered theirs, and Mother on the Harness turned her face into Maura’s shoulder.

Andraste didn’t cover hers.

She stood on the salt in plain dark cloth with her arms bare and looked straight at it.

It lasted about as long as a breath.

And then it was gone.

And the ice moon was gone with it.

There was no sound. Not for a long time. Not until the light had finished going and the sky was red again and the salt was red again and every shadow on Caddoc had come back to where it belonged.

Then, very far away, so faint you could almost miss it, a sound like a door closing in another house.

That was all.

I sat down on the salt.

I hadn’t meant to. My legs did it. I was shaking. All of me. Every atom. Not because it hurt. It didn’t hurt. Because I’d felt it. Every bit of what had been held in all those small hearts, all at once, going out.

And I’d felt how much more there was.

On every moon. On every world. In me.

Andraste walked across the salt.

Slowly. Barefoot, I noticed then; she’d taken her boots off with the armour. And knelt down in front of me. On the salt. Close.

She looked at my face for a long time.

Then she put her hand flat on my chest. Over my heart. The way the queens do when they’re listening.

You are shaking, she said.

”Yes.”

Because you could do it again.

”Yes.”

And you will not.

”Not on anyone. Ever.”

But you could.

”Yes.”

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she said something Dot took a long time to translate. Dot said afterward that it was very old. An old form. That nobody on Hyrran had said it out loud in her grandmother’s lifetime.

I yield.

The twelve on the ramp knelt.

All at once. On the iron of the Long Legs’ ramp, very loudly.

And the Caddi at the edge of the plain, who didn’t know what any of it meant, knelt too. Because the tall women in iron had.

And Andraste, on her knees on the salt in front of me with her hand still flat on my chest, smiled.

For the first time.

The scar through her lip pulled it crooked. She didn’t seem to mind.

That should have been the end.

That was what Konrad said. On the Harness. That afternoon. With his head in his hands.

”That should have been the end,” he said. ”She yields. We talk. Treaties. Exchange of envoys. Maybe a trade agreement. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked. I’ve read every page of the Hyrrani forms Dot could find, all night, and that’s how it works.”

”So what happened?” said Risa.

On the channel. From Avalon. From the porch. With small Sigmund in her lap and a cloud over both of them.

Konrad looked at me.

I looked at the floor.

”She proposed,” said Konrad.

I’ll write it the way it happened. Because Genny says to write things the way they happened, and Garnet drew it, and there’s no point pretending.

Andraste took her hand off my chest. And sat back on her heels on the salt. And said, through Dot, very clearly, so everyone on the plain could hear:

On Hyrran, when two First Blades meet, and one yields, the bond between their peoples is sealed in one of two ways.

In blood. If the yielded First Blade’s people will not accept the yield.

Or in marriage.

A pause.

My people will accept the yield. I have shown them a second sun. They will accept anything. She looked at me with her iron-sea eyes. So I ask for the other.

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Andraste went on.

Hyrran has never been bound to another world. Not in a thousand years. We have fought alone. We have won alone. We have buried our dead alone on our mountains beside the ships of the houses. She looked at the broken counting tower lying on the salt. We are tired of alone. And you are the first we have met who did not need us to win.

Bind your world to mine. Through me. And the Hyrrani will fight beside Avalon until the houses are as broken as their ships.

A longer pause.

And then something that made Konrad, at the foot of the Long Legs’ ramp, close his eyes.

And give me your children. So that Hyrran’s next First Blades are world-breakers too.

Mother told me afterward that she’d never seen my face go that colour.

Garnet drew it. I’ve asked her not to show anyone. She’s shown everyone.

”You can’t just—” I said. On the salt. To Andraste. ”That’s not— I’m already married. I have four wives.”

Dot told her.

Andraste considered this.

Four, she said. Good. A First Blade should have many. My mother had six husbands. A pause. I will be the fifth. I do not mind being fifth. On Hyrran the fifth wife is the one who guards the door.

”That’s not how it—”

Is it not?

I stopped.

Because I didn’t actually know how it worked. Not anywhere except on Avalon, in the crooked house, where it had worked because Luna and Sera and Risa had decided it would, and then the three of them had asked Hana, and then the four of them had asked me. In that order. Not the other way round.

”It’s not mine to decide,” I said.

Andraste looked at me for a very long time.

Whose is it?

Okafor brought it to the long table.

That night. On Avalon. After the Harness came home with ten thousand nine hundred and forty Caddi children and their grandmothers, and the Long Legs came home behind it with Konrad and Dane and Ingrid and Andraste and her twelve, because Okafor said if the Hyrrani wanted to talk about binding worlds they could do it at a table like everyone else.

Andraste stood at the end of the long table. In her iron. Very tall. With her twelve behind her. Looking round the map room at Garnet’s sheets on the walls, and the wrecks drawn on her own mountains, and the sixty-four tithe worlds, and the red trace going up from the reef.

Doctor Bell told her what the Hyrrani had that Avalon didn’t.

Doctor Bell had been up all night with the twelve. On the Long Legs’ ramp. With her slate. Asking about the walking engines and the siege throwers and the guns longer than the Steady. About a thousand years of war. Every battle. Every landing. Every way the houses had ever tried to take Hyrran and every way the Hyrrani had broken them.

”Forty thousand soldiers,” she said. At the long table. With both pairs of spectacles on. ”Standing. Today. Every one of them trained since childhood. Three hundred walking engines. Siege works. Foundries. An iron industry older than Earth’s.” She took her spectacles off. ”And they know how the houses fight. Not the way we know it. Not from three years of being hit. From a thousand years of hitting back.” She looked at Okafor. ”Marshal, they’ve won. Every time. For a thousand years. Nobody else alive can say that.”

Okafor didn’t say anything for a long time.

”I know what it would mean,” she said. ”For the war.” She looked at the map. ”It would mean the war might end. In my lifetime.” She put her hand flat on the table. ”I know that.”

Then she looked at me.

”And I’m not going to decide it.”

Nobody said anything.

”I’m Marshal,” said Okafor. ”I decide where people go. Who fights. Who comes home first. I’ve decided who lives and who doesn’t for three years and I’ll keep deciding it until this is over.” She looked at Andraste, at the end of the table. Then back at me. ”But I don’t decide who someone marries. And I don’t decide who someone has children with. Not for an alliance. Not for forty thousand soldiers. Not for the end of the war.”

She took her hand off the table.

”That’s yours, Dask. And your family’s.” She looked at Andraste. ”The Hyrrani will have their answer when the Dasks have one. Not before.”

Andraste looked at her for a long time.

Then she bowed. Very slightly. To Okafor.

On Hyrran, she said, we would call you First Blade too.

”On Avalon,” said Okafor, ”we’d call me Marshal. And I’d like you to stop calling the boy a world-breaker at my table.” She stood up. ”He’s not a weapon. He’s Lucas. Ask anyone.”

So we went home.

To the crooked house. To the porch. Where the whole family was. Because the whole family always is, now, when something’s happened; nobody organises it; you come up the long road and they’re there.

Mother in Father’s chair. Ingrid and Maura on the steps. The General in the kitchen door. Rory. Konrad on the bottom step with his head in his hands still. Genny and Garnet on the rail. Pip. Liam and Anja. The children asleep in a heap on the big rug in the hall with Dory in the middle, holding.

And my wives.

Luna at the kitchen window, with Elin. Sera on the bench, with Goldie. Risa on the top step with her chin on her knees and small Sigmund asleep against her and a cloud over both of them. Hana in the big chair with Efua and Kwame.

All four of them looking at me.

I sat down on the top step.

Beside Risa.

And told them all of it. The salt plain. The three blades that turned to sand. The second sun. I yield. And what Andraste asked for after. All of it. In Andraste’s words, as near as Dot could give them. Bind your world to mine. Through me. And the rest.

So that Hyrran’s next First Blades are world-breakers too.

Nobody on the porch said anything.

”Well,” said Mother. Eventually. From Father’s chair. Very drily. ”I did tell you not to get hurt.”

Ingrid put her face in her hands. Maura started to laugh and stopped herself.

Risa didn’t laugh.

She looked at me. With her chin on her knees.

”What do you want?” she said.

I didn’t answer straight away.

I thought about it. I’d been thinking about it since the salt plain. All the way home on the Harness. All the way up the long road.

I thought about forty thousand soldiers who’d never lost. And three hundred walking engines. And the Caddi children who came up out of the mines, and the sixty who didn’t. And Okafor’s black slate, and how much longer the right column would get if the war went on another twenty years. And how much shorter, if it didn’t.

And I thought about Andraste. Kneeling on the salt with her hand on my chest. You are shaking. She’d seen that. She’d seen it before anyone. And she hadn’t been afraid of it. And she hadn’t wanted it to stop.

And I thought about the crooked house. And the four of them. And how it had worked, every time, because they’d decided first, and asked me after. Not the other way round.

”I don’t know what I want,” I said. ”I know I’m not going to say yes to it on my own.” I looked at them. At all four. ”I said that to Hana’s question. Before. On this porch. If the three of you are all right with it. I meant it then.” I swallowed. ”It’s four of you now. I mean it more.”

”So if we say yes,” said Luna. From the window. Very quietly. With Elin frosting the glass beside her.

”Then yes.”

”And if we say no?” said Sera.

”Then no. And Okafor sends Konrad back to Hyrran to find another way. And we find out if there is one.” I looked at her. ”There might be. Konrad’s very good.”

”And if one of us says no,” said Hana. Very gently. From the big chair. ”And three say yes?”

I looked at her.

”Then no,” I said. ”It’s all four. Or it’s nobody. That’s how we did it last time.” I looked at Risa. ”That’s how you three did it. With Hana. I’m not going to do it any other way.”

The four of them looked at each other.

That’s all. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t need to. I’ve seen them do it a hundred times. At the long table. On the porch. In the kitchen at three in the morning with a baby boiling the kettle. The four of them looking at each other across a room, and something going between them that I’ve never once been able to follow, not even now, when I can feel every atom of every one of them.

Then Risa stood up.

With small Sigmund on her hip.

”We’ll tell you,” she said. ”Not tonight.” She looked at the other three. ”We need to meet her first. Without you.”

”Without me?”

”Without you,” said Risa. ”You’ve already been proposed to. You’ve had your turn.” She looked at Luna. Luna nodded. At Sera. Sera nodded. At Hana. Hana smiled, very slightly, and nodded. ”Tomorrow. Here. On the porch. The four of us and her.” She looked back at me. ”You can go and build something.”

”What should I build?”

”I don’t know,” said Risa. ”A bigger porch.”

Mother laughed.

Properly. Out loud. In Father’s chair. For a long time. Until Ingrid and Maura were laughing too, and the General in the kitchen door, and Pip, and even Konrad on the bottom step, with his head still in his hands.

Garnet drew it.

Lucas, being sent away to build a porch, she wrote under it. While four women decide whether to marry him to a fifth.

And under that, smaller:

Genny says this is the most Dask thing that has ever happened.

I said it that night.

On the porch. In order. Which takes a very long time now.

When I got to the four of them, I said it to each. Separately. Luna. Sera. Risa. Hana. And then to all four at once.

Risa kissed me.

”Go to bed,” she said. ”Tomorrow you’re building a porch.”

Days 3867–3880. The Unbroken.

Garnet looked next door from Caddoc and found Hyrran: green valleys, a free queen under the mountain, and a thousand years of Sorn wrecks on every ridge. The Hyrrani, the unbroken, all women, all soldiers, who won with iron and patience. The Caddi hid eleven thousand children in the salt mines; we were twelve minutes late to the first: sixty. I took the tower in one breath. Konrad went next door and came back with Andraste, the First Blade, who said: fight me. Three blades to sand. She took off her armour and hit me three times and said a First Blade who will not strike cannot protect. So once, far out, on an ice moon with nothing on it: a second sun. I yield. Then: bind your worlds through me; give me world-breakers. Okafor: not mine to decide. I said all four or no one. Risa: we’ll meet her first. Without you. Go and build a porch.