Scarecrow

Oya had said: let them come angry.

They came angry.

It was a market day. I remember that because Andraste had never been to one, and she’d asked to go, and we were standing in the square in the town under the garden wall at noon with Pip’s basket between us and Andraste holding a pear she’d paid for with a Hyrrani coin, which the woman at the stall had taken because she’d never been paid with anything so beautiful and wasn’t going to argue.

And the arch in the square went cold.

There were nineteen arches by then. On Avalon and off it. Doctor Bell and the Hyrrani had cut them as fast as the red stone could be quarried. One on the red glass. One in the courtyard of the house on the rise. One in the map room. One on the long ward, for Halloway. One in the square of the town under the garden wall, because Tally had asked.

And one on every world we’d been to that wanted one.

The shallow seas. On the stone platform, under the tower, beside Brock’s beans. Caddoc, on the salt, where the counting tower had been. The Vaeli hall on the north plain had two, because Teshka said a hall should never have only one way out.

And Ammaru.

In the clearing. Under the green trees. Where the black tree still stood, because Oya said they’d keep it, so nobody would forget.

Teshka’s two hundred had cut it with the Hyrrani on the twentieth day after the rain. Rain had sung it open the first time. The rain queen beside her, in her tray, greener every day.

That was the one that went cold.

Every arch on Avalon has a sound when it’s open. A hum. Very faint. The queen who sings it, and the place on the other side breathing through. You stop hearing it after a while, the way you stop hearing your own heart.

The arch in the square stopped humming.

So did every other arch on Avalon. At once. For one heartbeat.

And then all of them started again, together, very loud. And through every one of them, at once, in every square and courtyard and hall, came Teshka’s voice. Not through Dot. Through the stone.

They’re here.

Andraste dropped the pear.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. She turned round and put her hand on the arch in the square and the Scarecrow queen was singing it before Andraste’s palm was flat, because the Scarecrow queen hears everything, and the space inside the arch went from the square to grey forest in less than a breath.

And Andraste went through.

In her plain dark cloth. Barefoot. With nothing in her hands.

I went after her.

I’m going to write this in pieces. The way Garnet drew it. Because that’s the only way I can.

There are a great many pieces.

Ammaru. The clearing. Noon.

The sky.

Garnet’s first drawing. She came through the arch from the map room ninety seconds after Andraste, with her drawing board, and stood at the edge of the clearing and looked up, and drew it in four minutes, and sent it back through the arch to Okafor by hand with a Vaeli runner because Dot was busy.

It’s the whole sheet. All of it. Sky.

And in the sky, Hands.

Nine.

I’d fought Hands before. On the Hathri world. In the hollows. I folded one from the inside, once. Rowan and Callum wrote it on a laundry wall. But I’d never seen nine at once. Not even at the Teeming. Not even on seven-three-K.

They hung over Ammaru’s forest in a ring. Very high. Grey. Each one bigger than the house on the rise. With the light going round their edges wrong, the way it does round Sorn metal when there’s a great deal of it.

And under the ring, in the middle, something else.

Not a Hand. Not a carrier. Something I didn’t have a name for, and Dot didn’t either, and Ilka on the relay said the houses’ name for it was a word that meant the thing that teaches. A barge. Long and flat and black. Not Sorn grey. Black. All the way through.

Hanging over the clearing.

Over the green trees and the rain queen in her tray.

And dripping.

That’s what it looked like. From the ground. Dripping. Black. Long slow strings of it coming down off the barge’s underside, the way honey comes off a spoon, very slowly, toward the forest.

Where it touched a tree, the tree went black.

Not fast. Not the way the black went up the tallest tree on the first day. Slowly. Patiently. From the crown down. The way rain comes down a trunk.

They’re teaching the forest to be empty, said Ilka. On the relay. Very quietly. The whole world. One tree at a time. From the top.

They’re making it rain black.

Oya was in the clearing.

With Rain. And Dew and Brook and Puddle. And three thousand Sheln, all the town, standing on the forest floor round the rain queen’s tray, because that’s where they’d gone when the sky filled. To the queen. To sing.

They were singing.

The thank-you song. Very low. Very soft. While the black came down out of the sky onto the green trees.

And the rain queen was singing back.

And it was raining. Still. Soft and warm. Falling on everything at once. On the Sheln. On the trees. On the black.

It didn’t stop the black.

But where the rain fell on it, the black went slower.

Teshka’s two hundred were round the clearing. In a ring. Facing out. The way the Vaeli stood in the yards of the Barrow for eleven generations, except that this time they’d chosen it.

Saska was at the front.

Of course she was.

And Brock was behind her.

He’d been on Ammaru for the week. Not on the slate. Not on rotation. He’d come through the arch from the long ward on the first evening it opened, because Genny was there with the rain queen and Saska was there with Teshka, and he said someone had to stand at the door.

He was standing at it now. Iron. All of him. From his boots to his hair. Grey. With the rain running off him.

Two.

The arch. In the clearing. Red stone, green with moss already.

And through it, coming.

Everyone came.

That’s the thing I want to write down. Because it’s the first time it happened. The first time anything like it happened. In the whole of the war.

Everyone came through the door.

Okafor first. Out of the arch from the map room at a walk, with her slate under her arm and her coat buttoned, and stopped in the clearing and looked up at the nine Hands and the black barge for a long time.

Then she put the slate down on the forest floor. Very carefully. Against a root.

And unbuttoned her coat.

”Right,” she said.

Then the Hyrrani.

Not twelve. Not two thousand. Through the arch from the ridge on Hyrran, where Andraste’s mother had put her hand on the stone the moment Teshka’s voice came through it, and every Hyrrani on the mountains had turned round.

They came through at a run. In iron. With blades. Forty abreast, because the arch is wide and Doctor Bell cut it that way on purpose. And kept coming. And coming. For eleven minutes. Into the grey forest and the green forest and the black. Into the clearing and out of it, up into the trees, onto the high branches, the way the Sheln live, because Kyria had told them on the ridge, the enemy is above; go up.

And behind the soldiers, the engines.

The walking engines of Hyrran. Through the arch. One at a time, because they’re very big and the arch is only just big enough, and the Hyrrani driving them had to fold the great iron legs to get them through and unfold them on the other side. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Stepping out into the clearing on long iron legs, very tall, taller than the trees, with the long Hyrrani guns on their backs swinging up. Toward the sky.

Toward the Hands.

And last, when the engines were through, Kyria.

Andraste’s mother. White-haired. In the old iron of the First Blade she’d been for thirty years, before her daughter took it from her in a fight. With a long blade on her back that she didn’t draw. She stepped out of the arch into the clearing and looked round once, at the trees and the black coming down them, and then at the three figures at the edge of the clearing.

And went to them.

Then Avalon.

Risa’s wing came through the arch on the red glass. Not in interceptors. The interceptors don’t fit through arches; they came through the rope from orbit with the Meridian, eight minutes behind, with Ruan singing it so hard Ilka said afterward she nearly lost her voice. But Risa didn’t wait for the interceptors.

Risa came through the arch as lightning.

And behind her, the Vaeli who throw themselves forty feet. On Keir’s wings. Two thousand. Out of the arch and up. Into the sky over Ammaru in a long blue line with Risa at the front of it.

And the Vey twins came out of the rope with the interceptors eight minutes later, Rowan first, Callum last, both hands on the stick.

Luna came through.

Six weeks after Elin. Nobody had asked her to come. Okafor hadn’t put her on any slate; she’d had a baby on the kitchen floor six weeks before. She came anyway. Through the courtyard arch of the house on the rise, with Elin left in the General’s arms on the porch, and the General shouting after her, and Luna not listening.

She came out into the clearing in ice armour.

I’d never seen her wear it in a fight. The queens gave it to her after the correctors, the night before the far queen. She’d worn it once, on the plain, to show us. White and blue and very fine, like frost on a window, from her throat to her feet. With a blade of ice in one hand.

She looked up at the black barge.

And put her ice blade down on the forest floor, very carefully, beside Okafor’s slate.

And held up both hands.

And a path of ice went up from the clearing into the sky. Straight up. Through the rain. White and blue. A mile. Two miles. Toward the black barge.

”Somebody’s going to have to walk up that,” she said. ”I’m not doing it on my own.”

Sera came through behind her.

Burning.

Not gold at the edges. Not glowing. Burning. Living flame, all of her, the way the queens made her. Lighter than air. She came out of the arch in the clearing already a foot off the ground, white-gold, so bright the Sheln covered their eyes. With Goldie left with Rory on the porch of the house on the rise. With Rory shouting after her too.

She didn’t listen either.

She went up Luna’s ice path without touching it. Fire, going up through rain. And where she went, the strings of black coming down off the barge burned. Not out. They don’t burn out. But they burned back. Up. Toward the barge. Away from the trees.

Hana came through.

Not burning. Not ice. Just Hana. In her ordinary clothes. With Efua and Kwame left in Mother’s arms.

She came out of the arch into the clearing and stopped. And looked round at the three thousand Sheln standing round the rain queen, singing. At Oya. At Rain and her sisters.

And she knelt down. In the wet. And put her hand flat on the forest floor.

And every Sheln in the clearing took a breath. At once.

I felt it. Every atom. Oxygen. Clean and full and sweet, more than the air had, more than anyone in that clearing had breathed since the black started coming down. Hana was giving it to them. All three thousand. So they could keep singing.

So the rain wouldn’t stop.

And the Mom Squad came through.

All three. Together. Out of the arch from the long ward, where they’d been with Halloway. Mother in front.

She didn’t look up at the Hands. She didn’t look at the barge. She looked at the trees. At the black coming down them, very slowly, from the crowns. At the green underneath. At the houses of the Sheln in the branches, empty now, because everyone was in the clearing.

And at the bridges.

”Ingrid,” she said.

”I know,” said Ingrid.

”Maura.”

”I know, love.”

And Mother put both hands up.

And started to lift.

Not houses. Not this time.

The black.

She reached up into the crowns of the nearest trees, where the black was coming down, and took hold of it. Not with her hands. With her mind. The way she’d held forty houses in the air over the tallest tree for eleven minutes. And she lifted.

Off the trees.

Up.

The black didn’t want to come. It never does. It goes into things and becomes theirs. But it had only just touched these trees. Only the crowns. Only for a minute. It hadn’t finished becoming theirs yet.

And Mother pulled it off them.

Like a sheet off a bed.

Ingrid went up as lightning. Into the crowns. Where Mother had pulled the black away. And hushed the place it had been, so the trees didn’t remember. So they didn’t know they’d been touched.

And Maura put her hands on the trunks below. One at a time. Warm. And the green came back up into the leaves Mother had uncovered.

Three of them.

Mother. Ingrid. Maura.

And then four.

Because Kyria came across the clearing and stood beside Mother at the foot of the next tree and watched her lift the black off its crown. And said something in Hyrrani.

Dot told Mother. She asks what she can carry.

Mother didn’t look away from the tree.

”The bridges,” she said. ”When I lift the black off the crowns, it falls. Somewhere. It needs to fall somewhere that isn’t a bridge or a Sheln or another tree.” She swallowed. ”I couldn’t hold the bridges last time.”

Kyria looked up at the bridges. Long and thin and swaying, from tree to tree, a hundred feet up, with the black dripping toward them.

Then she drew the long blade off her back.

And went up the nearest tree. Barefoot. Like a cat. Like a woman who’d fought the houses on the mountains of Hyrran for thirty years and had never once been on the ground when it mattered.

And every time Mother lifted the black off a crown and it fell, Kyria was there. On the bridge. Under it. With the flat of her blade. Turning it. Away from the bridges. Away from the trees. Down into the dry riverbed at the edge of the clearing, where nothing grew yet and nothing would mind.

Four of them.

Working through the forest. Tree by tree. While the rest of us fought.

Three.

Garnet’s third drawing. The clearing from above. She’d flown up using her power to a height where she could see it to draw it.

The arch. The Sheln, singing, round the queen. Hana kneeling. The walking engines. The Vaeli ring. Brock at the door.

And all round the edge of the clearing, very small, four figures going from tree to tree. One with her hands up. One lightning. One with her hands on the bark. And one up on the bridges, with a long blade.

Under it Garnet wrote: The Mom Squad. Ash named them. She was right. There are more of them than there were this morning.

And Dory.

Nobody brought Dory. Nobody ever brings Dory. She came through the courtyard arch of the house on the rise holding Pebble’s collar, with the Scarecrow queen’s young streaming out behind her, and Pebble’s brood, and the heavy queen’s, and she stood beside the arch in the clearing on Ammaru and put her hand flat on the red stone.

And held it.

Open. So the queens on Avalon didn’t have to sing it any more. So they could sing something else.

”Go on,” she said. To the Scarecrow queen. Through the stone. ”I’ve got the door. You sing the forest.”

And the Scarecrow queen did.

And every queen on Avalon, in the great hall under the house on the rise, sang with her. Down the thread. Through the arch. Into the rain queen’s tray. Into the three thousand Sheln.

Into the rain.

I’ve heard it said since that the battle of Ammaru was won by the Hyrrani engines. Or by Risa’s wing. Or by Okafor.

It wasn’t. It was won by a song.

But the song needed a great many people to hold the door while it was sung.

The Hands moved.

All nine. At once. The way they always do; the way the houses do everything. Together. Without warning. The ring over Ammaru tightening. And from every one of them, down, toward the clearing, the light.

I’ve written about Hand-light before. It doesn’t burn. It corrects. It goes into things and makes them what the houses say they should be. Grey. Empty. Still.

Nine Hands. Nine columns of it. Coming down through the rain onto the clearing.

Onto the Sheln.

The Hyrrani engines fired.

All forty. At once.

I’d never heard anything like it. Not the Kethri wind. Not Risa’s thunder. A sound like a mountain falling off a mountain. Forty long iron guns, a thousand years in the making, and out of every one a shot that didn’t go straight but curved, very slightly, the way a thrown stone curves, up through the rain.

Into the light.

And the light broke.

Doctor Bell tried to explain it to me afterward. On the porch. With both pairs of spectacles off. She said the Hyrrani had learned, over a thousand years, that Hand-light isn’t light. That it’s song. A very old and very cruel song that the houses taught their ships. And that a song can be interrupted. If you hit it at exactly the right note with exactly the right weight.

”They’ve spent a thousand years,” she said, ”learning the note.” She put her spectacles back on. ”And then building guns that sing it.”

The light broke above the clearing.

Nine columns. Shattered. Into nothing. Into rain.

And Andraste, standing at the front of the walking engines in her plain dark cloth with her bare feet in the wet, raised her empty hand.

And forty thousand Hyrrani in the trees of Ammaru struck their blades on their shields.

And the Hands stopped.

For one heartbeat.

That was when Risa hit them.

Four.

The sky. A long blue line, from the edge of the drawing to the nearest Hand. And then two thousand smaller blue lines behind it, very fine, like a comb.

And the Hand. With the long blue line going through it.

Through.

I’ve seen Risa do a great many things. I’ve seen her hush a continent with her mother. I’ve seen her come down on a corrector as a bolt and leave nothing but a hole in the ground. I’ve seen her rain on a hill behind the crooked house so softly that small Sigmund put his face up and laughed.

I’d never seen her go through a Hand.

She went in at the front and out at the back. As lightning. All of her. And where she’d been, the Hand was open. A long hole. Burning blue at the edges. All the way through it.

And through the hole, behind her, two thousand Vaeli on Keir’s wings. Into the Hand. A heartbeat ahead of everything inside it.

It didn’t come down. Not then.

But it stopped singing.

The Meridian came out of the rope eight minutes after we did. With the interceptors. With Ruan singing it so hard she couldn’t speak for two days. With the Vey twins first out of the bay, Rowan first and Callum last, and the whole of Risa’s wing behind them.

They went for the Hands that were still singing.

Rowan said afterward it was the easiest flying he’d ever done. They weren’t looking at us, he said. They were looking down. At the clearing. At the song. They couldn’t stop looking at it.

And Okafor.

I’ve left Okafor till now because I don’t know how to write what she did. I’ve asked Garnet. Garnet drew it six times and threw five of them away.

The sixth one is on the wall of the map room now.

Five.

Okafor. In the clearing. Small. In her coat, unbuttoned. With both hands up.

And over her, the barge.

Coming down.

She made it heavy.

Not a little. Not the way she made the two carriers on seven-three-K too heavy to leave. She made the black barge, the thing that teaches, the long flat dripping black thing hanging over the clearing, so heavy that it fell out of the sky.

But not onto the clearing.

She turned it.

I don’t know how. Neither does she. She told me afterward, on the porch, very tired, that she’d never turned anything before. Only lifted it, or dropped it. But she said she looked up at the barge coming down on the Sheln and the rain queen and three thousand people singing, and something in her went no, and the barge went sideways.

Very slowly. Very heavy. Like a ship in a storm.

Away from the clearing. Over the forest. Toward the edge of the world, where the trees stop and the cliffs go down to the dry seabed that’s been dry for four generations and is filling now, slowly, with the rain.

And down.

Into the dry sea.

Heavy.

So heavy that the ground shook all the way to the clearing and the Sheln stopped singing for one breath. So heavy that when it hit, it didn’t stop at the seabed. It went into it. And kept going.

Down.

Okafor held it there. With both hands up. In the clearing. Heavier and heavier. Until it was so far down in the rock under the dry sea that nothing it dripped would ever reach a tree again.

Then she let go.

And sat down very suddenly on the forest floor.

Beside her slate.

That left me.

I’d been at the arch. With Dory. Since the beginning. Holding the clearing. The way I hold a kitchen when a baby’s being born. Every atom of it. The ground. The trees. The three thousand Sheln. The rain queen in her tray.

Keeping it still. While everyone else fought.

I hadn’t done anything else.

I want to write that, because I think it’s important. Nine Hands and a barge came down on Ammaru, and I didn’t fold anything or scatter anywhere or take anything apart. I held the clearing. That was all. So the song wouldn’t break.

But when Okafor sat down, the Hands were still there.

Six of them.

Risa had opened two and the Vaeli were inside them. Rowan and Callum and the wing had broken the singing in a third. But six were still up there. In a ring. Singing. And they’d stopped looking at the clearing.

They were looking at Okafor.

I looked up at them.

I could feel every one. Every atom. All six. Every corrector inside them. Every piece of burned-dead silver. Every engine. Every heart of every atom in every one of them, very small, very tight, held.

And I knew what I could do.

I’d done it on the salt plain of Caddoc. A second sun. Once. Far out.

These weren’t far out.

These were six Hands full of correctors who’d just tried to teach a whole world to be empty. And if I let go of the hearts of their atoms all at once, there wouldn’t be six Hands any more. There wouldn’t be anything. And the houses would hear it. All of them. On every world. And they’d never come down on anyone again without wondering if I was there.

I felt myself go small.

Smaller than small. Down. Into the hearts. The way I’d gone on the moon. The way I’d gone on the salt.

Further.

A hand on my shoulder.

Andraste.

She’d come back from the engines. Barefoot. Through the clearing. Through the rain. And she was standing behind me at the arch with her hand on my shoulder, flat, the way she’d put it on my chest on the salt.

She didn’t say anything.

She didn’t need to.

I felt her there. Every atom. Holding. Not me. The door. The door I go down through, when I go small.

The fifth wife guards the door.

I stopped.

”Not here,” she said. In our language. Very quietly. In my ear. ”Not over the forest. Not over the rain.” Her hand didn’t move. ”You told me. Not on anyone. Ever.”

”They tried to—”

”I know what they tried,” said Andraste. ”I saw it.” She turned me round. By the shoulder. So I was facing her and not the sky. ”Look at me. Not them.”

I looked at her.

”You don’t need to be a world-breaker,” she said. ”Not today. Today you need to be the boy who asks.”

So I asked.

Not the hearts. Not the small places. Not the sun.

The Hands.

I reached up. Every atom. All six. And did what I do. What I’ve always done. What I did the first day, with the first door.

I asked them.

Would you like to stop?

I don’t know if Hands can want things.

Keir told me once that the old Hands, the ones who changed sides, like the Steady, had wanted to for a very long time before anyone asked. That the metal remembers. That the song the houses teach their ships isn’t the only song the ships know.

I don’t know if that’s true of every Hand.

I know that I asked six Hands over Ammaru if they’d like to stop. And I asked them the way I’d ask a door. Politely. Patiently. As if there was nothing in the world that couldn’t come back if you were patient enough with it.

The way Maura does.

And Ruan, on the Meridian, high over the forest, started singing the rope. Not to go anywhere. Just to sing it. So the Hands could hear what a ship sounded like when it was singing for someone.

And the queens sang with her. All of them. Every one on Avalon. Through the arch. Through Dory’s hand.

And the rain queen sang the thank-you song.

Two of them stopped.

I’ll write that plainly. Not six. Two.

Two of the six Hands over Ammaru went quiet. Their light went out. The song the houses taught them stopped. And they hung there, very still, very high, grey. The way the Steady hung over the shallow seas the first time, waiting to be told what to do.

The other four didn’t.

They turned. All at once. Together. The way the houses do everything. And went up. Toward the thread. Fast.

Running.

Risa went after them.

And Rowan and Callum and the wing. And I let them. I didn’t stop any of it. I stood at the arch with Andraste’s hand on my shoulder and Dory’s on the stone and felt the four Hands go up through the sky of Ammaru with the wing behind them, and felt Risa go through the last of them as lightning, front to back, and felt it come apart, very slowly, the way the carrier came apart on the reef.

Three got away.

Up the thread. Back to the houses. To tell them.

Six.

Garnet’s last drawing. From Luna’s ice path. The whole sky over Ammaru.

Two Hands. Grey. Still. Hanging over the forest.

One Hand, open, with Vaeli in it.

One Hand coming apart.

And three very small grey shapes at the very top of the sheet, at the edge of the paper, going.

And under all of it, raining.

Under it Garnet wrote: Three got away. Okafor says that’s the point. She says someone has to go home and tell them.

It cost.

It always does. Genny wrote it all down, that night, in the clearing, in the rain, with Father’s pen.

A Sheln town on the eastern edge of the forest, eleven miles from the clearing, where the barge had been first, before the clearing. Before anyone knew. Black. All of it. Two hundred and six. The Mom Squad got there at dusk, and Mother lifted, and Ingrid hushed, and Maura warmed. And they brought back a hundred and forty. The rest had been under the black too long.

Thirty-one Hyrrani. On the branches. When the Hand-light came down, before the engines broke it.

Nine Vaeli. Inside the first Hand Risa opened.

Four of Risa’s wing.

And it very nearly cost Teshka.

Teshka was at the door.

She’d been at the front of the ring of two hundred. The way Saska was. Facing out. And when the Hand-light came down, before the engines broke it, one column came down not on the clearing but on the ring, because the houses saw the Vaeli and remembered them. Remembered eleven generations of them standing in the yards.

Teshka saw it coming. A heartbeat ahead.

She threw Saska. Forty feet. Into the clearing. Into Brock.

And stood where Saska had been.

And the light came down on her.

The engines broke it. A heartbeat later. All nine columns. But a heartbeat is a long time for Hand-light. It had already gone into her. From the shoulders down. Grey. Going still. The way the black goes into a tree.

She was still standing when it broke.

She stood there in the rain, at the front of the ring, grey to the waist, with her blade in her hand, and didn’t fall. Because Vaeli don’t. Not in front of anyone. Not for eleven generations.

Then she fell.

The Mom Squad got to her first.

They were at the tree nearest the ring, the four of them, and Mother saw her go down and turned round with both hands still up and lifted. Not the black off a tree. The light out of Teshka. Off her. The way she’d pulled the black off the crowns like a sheet off a bed.

It didn’t come easily. Hand-light doesn’t. It had been in her for a heartbeat and it had already started to become hers.

But only a heartbeat.

Ingrid came down as lightning and hushed the place it had been, so Teshka’s body didn’t remember being told to be still. And Maura knelt in the wet and put both hands flat on her chest and warmed. Slowly. The way you warm bread dough left by an open window. As if there’s nothing in the world that can’t come back if you’re patient enough with it.

And Kyria stood over the four of them with her long blade out. Facing the sky. In case.

Saska was there by then.

She’d come out of Brock’s arms and across the clearing faster than anyone has ever crossed anything, and she was on her knees in the rain beside her grandmother with both hands on her face, and she couldn’t see. That was the thing she said afterward. That for the first time in her life she couldn’t see a heartbeat ahead. Not anything. Not whether Teshka would breathe.

”I can’t see,” she kept saying. ”I can’t see.”

Brock knelt down behind her. Iron. And put his hands on her shoulders. And didn’t say anything at all.

Teshka breathed.

At the eleventh minute. Maura said afterward it was eleven minutes; Maura counts. The grey went back from the waist to the hips to the knees. And Teshka opened her eyes in the rain, and looked up at Maura’s face, and at Mother’s, and at Ingrid’s, and at Kyria standing over all of them with a blade in her hand.

And then at Saska.

”I threw you,” she said.

”I know,” said Saska.

”Into him.” Teshka looked past her at Brock. ”I saw him catch you. A heartbeat ahead. Before I threw.” She closed her eyes again. ”So I threw.”

Saska put her forehead down on her grandmother’s chest and didn’t say anything for a long time.

Her legs are still grey.

From the knee down. Maura goes to her every evening, the way she went to Callum, and puts her hands on them, and the grey goes back a little more each time. Maura says not gone. Taught to be still. She says Teshka will walk by the spring, and fight by the summer, and that Teshka has told her very firmly it had better be sooner.

The Hyrrani buried their dead on Ammaru.

Kyria asked Oya if they could. On the edge of the clearing. Under the green trees. The way they bury their dead on Hyrran, on the mountains, beside the wrecks of what killed them.

Oya said yes.

And then Oya said: Under the first tree that comes back. So they’re under the rain.

So they did.

Teshka came to the burying.

Carried. On a litter the Vaeli made out of branches. With Saska on one side and Brock on the other. She sat up on it at the edge of the graves and watched the Hyrrani put thirty-one of their own into the wet ground, and the Vaeli put nine of theirs beside them.

When it was done, Kyria came and stood beside the litter.

The two of them looked at each other for a long time. Two old women. Very tall. With scars. One who’d been First Blade of a world that had never been taken. One who’d stood in the yards of the Barrow for sixty years so her grandchildren would live.

Kyria said something in Hyrrani.

Teshka answered in Vaeli.

Neither of them understood a word. Dot didn’t translate. Dot said afterward she didn’t need to; she said it was very clearly the same thing, twice.

It was Mother who asked them.

On the fourth night. In the clearing. Under the rain. With the Mom Squad sitting round a fire Sera had lit that wouldn’t go out in the wet, and Teshka on her litter beside it, and Kyria sitting on a root with her long blade across her knees.

Mother looked at the two of them for a long time.

”We were three,” she said. ”Ingrid and Maura and me. Ash named us.” She turned her cup in her hands. ”Today we were five.”

Kyria didn’t say anything. Teshka didn’t either.

”You both came to the trees,” said Mother. ”Nobody asked you. Kyria, you went up the bridges with a blade. Teshka—” She stopped. ”Teshka, you threw your granddaughter to someone you knew would catch her. And stood where she’d been.” She put her cup down. ”That’s what we do. That’s all we do, really. We go where the children are and stand in the way.”

Ingrid, beside her, said, ”She’s asking you to join.”

”I’m getting to it,” said Mother.

”You’re taking forever,” said Ingrid. ”They’re both very old. One of them can’t walk.”

”Ingrid.”

Maura laughed. And then Kyria did, like a door falling off its hinges. And Teshka, on her litter, with her grey legs under a Sheln blanket, made a sound nobody on Avalon had ever heard her make, which Saska said afterward was her grandmother laughing for the first time since the Cradle opened.

”Yes,” said Kyria. In our language. Which she’d been practising with Dot every night since the wedding, and had never used. ”Yes. I will be in the Mom Squad.”

”So will I,” said Teshka. ”When I can walk.”

”You’ll come before you can walk,” said Maura. ”I’ll carry you.”

”I’ll carry her,” said Kyria. ”I’ve carried heavier.”

Teshka looked at her.

”No, you haven’t,” she said.

Ash was told the next morning. Through the arch. By Dory.

She was very pleased. She said she’d always known there’d be more of them. She said she was going to have to think of a new name.

She’s been thinking for a week. She hasn’t found one. She says Mom Squad is still the right name; she says it doesn’t matter how many there are, they’re all somebody’s mother.

The two Hands stayed.

Over Ammaru. Grey. Still. For four days.

On the fifth day one of them came down. Very slowly. Into the clearing. And opened its long ramp onto the wet forest floor. And there was nobody on it. Nothing. No correctors. They’d gone out of it, the Vaeli said, when it stopped singing; gone out and fallen, because a corrector in a Hand that won’t sing is nothing.

Just an empty ramp. Grey. In the rain.

Waiting.

Dennis Haddon walked up it.

He’d come through the arch from the long ward on the second day, because Brock was there, and he’d stayed. And on the fifth day he walked up the ramp of an empty Hand into the dark and came out again ten minutes later and said, to nobody in particular:

”She’ll need moving.”

And Okafor, sitting on the forest floor beside her slate, where she’d been sitting since she put a barge into the rock under a dry sea, looked up at him for a long time.

”Yes,” she said. ”She will.”

The rain didn’t stop.

That’s the last thing. The black came down and the Hands came down and the light came down and the barge came down. And the Sheln kept singing the thank-you song. All of it. The whole time. Three thousand of them, in the clearing, with Hana’s breath in them.

And the rain didn’t stop.

Oya said it was the first time in all the songs of Ammaru that the rain had come during a war. She said her grandmother’s grandmother had a song about it. About a day the rain would come while the sky was full of enemies, and would not stop, because the people would not stop singing.

She said nobody had ever believed it.

She sang it for us. On the last night. In the clearing. Under the black tree they’re keeping, and the green ones, and the two Hands hanging grey and still over the forest.

Rain sang it with her.

Puddle sat in a puddle and sang too.

I said it that night.

In the clearing on Ammaru. In order. To everyone who’d come through the door.

It took until dawn.

When I got to Saska, she was asleep. Against Brock. Beside her grandmother’s litter. With one hand on Teshka’s arm, so she’d know in her sleep if anything changed.

I said it anyway. Quietly. So she’d hear it in her sleep.

Then I said it to Teshka. And to Kyria, on her root, with her blade across her knees. Both of them. Mom Squad.

Kyria looked at me.

”Shorter than I expected,” she said. In our language. ”For a world-breaker.”

”So I’ve heard,” I said.

Brock looked up at me.

”Twice,” he said.

So I said it twice.

Days 3926–3940. Angry.

They came to Ammaru: nine Hands and a black barge that teaches, raining black on the forest from the top. Teshka’s voice through every arch: they’re here. Everyone came through the door: Okafor, forty thousand Hyrrani and forty walking engines, Risa’s wing as lightning, Luna’s path, Sera burning, Hana giving three thousand Sheln breath so they’d keep singing, the Mom Squad pulling the black off the trees, Dory holding the arch so the queens could sing. The engines broke the Hand-light. Risa went through a Hand. Okafor turned the barge into the rock under the dry sea. I nearly went small over the forest; Andraste’s hand on my shoulder: be the boy who asks. Two Hands stopped. Three got away. 66 Sheln, 31 Hyrrani, 9 Vaeli, 4 of the wing. Teshka threw Saska into Brock and took the light; the Mom Squad brought her back in eleven minutes. Her legs are grey to the knee; Maura says not gone. Kyria guarded the bridges. Mother asked; both said yes. The Mom Squad is five. The rain didn’t stop.