Scarecrow

Dinraal asked on the third morning.

On the porch. Where everyone asks me things. With a cup of Mother’s tea he’d been handed without asking for it, because that’s what happens on our porch, and the First Weapon lying across the top of the steps so that everyone coming up had to step over him, and nobody minded.

He’d been on Avalon for two days. Through the arch with two faces. Back and forth. Every hour, it felt like. To the long table and back to the laboratory. To Okafor’s map room and back to Tiamat, on her secure channel, who wanted to know everything and wrote it all down.

He hadn’t slept much. Isolde said so. Isolde said a great many things about Dinraal and sleep, through Dot, very calmly, while Dinraal pretended not to hear.

He put his cup down on the rail.

”I would like to see,” he said.

Dot translated it a breath behind, the way she does. But I didn’t need her. I understood him. Some of the old dictionary has stuck, after all these years.

”See what?”

”What you can do,” said Dinraal. He looked at me very steadily. The tired eyes. The careful mouth. ”You told me. Over the relay. One line at a time. The ice moon. The world on the other side of the arch.” He turned his wrist, and the silver bracelet on it caught the morning light. ”I have read every line Isolde wrote down. I have read them many times.” A pause. ”I would like to see it.”

I didn’t say anything for a while.

I don’t, usually, when people ask that. The Hyrrani queen asked it on the salt of Caddoc. Andraste asked it with three blades. Doctor Bell asked it with an atom. Every time someone asks what I can do, it ends with something I didn’t want to do.

Dinraal saw it on my face.

”And I will show you mine,” he said. ”What the silver does. On Hearth.” He held out his wrist. ”You taught it to hold its own shape. On the eighth day. You have never seen what it did after.”

”Not here,” said Okafor.

She was at the bottom of the steps. Stepping over the First Weapon. With a slate.

”Not on the porch. Not on the north field. Not anywhere with a house on it, or a child, or a bean.” She looked at me. ”I know what you can do, Dask. Somewhere empty.”

So we went to the plain past the canyon.

It’s the emptiest place on Avalon. Past the red glass, past the canyon rim where Old Son’s tower stands, past the place where the land drops away into the long grey valley that goes down for miles toward nothing. Red stone. Flat. Bare. No grass. No water. Nothing living for further than you can see.

Kwame Osei says it’s the bottom of an old sea. He says the hollows under it are the best on Avalon, because nothing’s ever been on top of them.

We went at noon.

Everyone came.

I don’t know why I thought they wouldn’t. It’s our family. Everyone comes to everything.

The Mom Squad, all five. The grandfathers. My wives. Twelve children. Genny and Garnet, with their husbands, five days married and still wearing some of the ribbons. Brock and Saska. Okafor, with her slate. Doctor Bell, with both pairs of spectacles and a notebook. Keir.

And Hearth.

Dinraal and Isolde. Asha, talking. Eve, telling her to stop. Enna, with her arms folded, standing next to Keir, who’d stopped pretending he didn’t want her there. Aramaeis, Tiamat’s brother, standing with his arms folded, with Crane beside him.

And Tiamat, who’d come through the arch for the first time that morning, because she’d said over the secure channel that she wasn’t going to watch this on a recording. A tall woman. Very straight. With grey in her hair and a way of looking at everything as if she was deciding where it would go on a map. Dot says she runs the orbital stations, and something else she won’t explain, and that everyone on Hearth stops talking when she does. She’s Dinraal’s mother. Bahamut’s widow. You can see it in the way they stand: both of them very straight, both of them looking at the edge of things.

And Rhiannon.

I’d heard about Rhiannon. Over the relay. Once. The time Hearth and Scarecrow ate a meal together, years ago, one line at a time, with tea at their end and supper at ours. Rhiannon had attended. And within fifteen minutes she’d worked out that several people on our side considered working through meals a reasonable habit, and her expression had changed, and Dinraal and Isolde had exchanged a glance.

Does she always know? I asked.

Yes.

From that far away?

Apparently.

She knew now. From the far side of the plain. She came through the arch with a basket on her arm, a beautiful, statuesque woman with very sharp eyes, and looked at me once. Just once.

”Have you eaten?” she said. Dot translated it. Very carefully.

”I had tea.”

Rhiannon looked at me for a long time.

Then she looked at Mother.

Mother looked back.

They didn’t say anything. They didn’t share a language. They didn’t need one.

Rhiannon handed me something out of the basket. Bread. Hearth’s. Dark and heavy, with seeds in it.

”Eat,” she said. ”Then you can show us.”

I ate.

Mother, behind me, made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

Dinraal went first.

He walked out into the middle of the plain. Alone. Onto the bare red stone. With the First Weapon a few steps behind him, very low, watching.

And held up his wrists.

I’d seen his silver before. Over the relay. In pictures. Bracelets, on both wrists. Plain. Bright. His father’s. Bahamut’s. That had collapsed if he stopped holding it, before I showed him on the eighth day where the leash was and how to finish one small path so it could hold its own shape.

I’d never seen it move.

It came off his wrists like water.

Not falling. Rising. A strand of it, very thin, lifting off the right bracelet into the air above his hand. Curving. Dividing. Three branches. Then nine. Then too many to count, very fine, spreading out over his head like the roots of something growing upward.

And then they closed.

Round him. All of them. At once. And he was in armour.

Not like Andraste’s. Not like Odra’s. Not iron, worked very fine, like the scales of something. It was silver. All of it. Seamless. From his throat to his feet. It moved when he moved, the way skin moves. And it was alive. I could feel it. Every atom. Listening to him. Waiting for him to ask.

Kyria, beside Mother, said something in Hyrrani under her breath.

Andraste said afterward it was the word for perfect. That nobody on Hyrran had used it about armour in three hundred years.

Then he asked it for a blade.

And it came. Out of the armour at his right wrist. Long. Curved. Silver. In the time it takes to breathe in.

Then a shield. Out of the left. Round. Wide.

Then he let both go. And they went back into the armour like water into sand.

He pointed one hand toward the sky, and his arm became a massive cannon, and launched a huge salvo of rounds that exploded above the plain.

He lowered his arm and the cannon melted back into his bracers.

Then he put both hands down. Flat. On the red stone.

And the silver went into the ground.

I felt it. Through the stone. Spreading. Not deep. Very wide. Very fine. Like roots. Out from his hands in every direction, across the plain, under our feet, under Mother’s, under the children’s.

And then I felt it listen.

Not to Dinraal. To the plain. To us. To the heat of the sun on the stone. To the faint hum of the hollows far below. To every footstep. To the heartbeats of everyone standing there, coming up through the soles of their feet into the silver.

Asha, behind me, was talking very fast. Dot gave me a little of it.

”She says this is new,” said Dot. ”Since the eighth day. Since the relay. She says they found it after.” A pause. ”She says it was never armour. Not really. Armour was only the first thing it was ever asked to be.”

Dinraal stood up.

The silver came back out of the ground. Back up his arms. Back into the armour.

And then he turned. Toward the canyon. The long grey valley, a mile across, falling away for miles toward nothing.

And held out his right hand.

A strand left it.

One. Thin. Bright. Out over the edge of the canyon. Into the air. Across.

And then another beside it. And another. Weaving. Very fast. Out over the drop. A mile of air with nothing under it. Silver crossing it like a spider crossing a doorway.

And when the first strand touched the far side, he let go.

It stayed.

That was the thing. That was what he’d wanted me to see. I understood it the moment I felt it.

A bridge. Across the canyon. A mile long. Silver. Fine as lace and wide enough for a cart. Hanging over the drop in the noon light with nothing holding it up.

Not Dinraal. He’d let go. He was standing on the edge with his hands at his sides and the bracelets back on his wrists, and the bridge was still there.

Holding its own shape.

”You showed me,” said Dinraal. Turning round. To me. Through Dot. ”On the eighth day. One small path. On material that wasn’t inside anyone. So it could hold.” He looked at the bridge. ”We built a relay with it. And then we learned. All these years.” He looked at me. ”Hulls. Bridges. Drives. Whole stations. Tiamat’s orbital stations are held together with it.” A pause. ”It holds because you showed us how.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

Isolde walked out onto the bridge.

On her own. With her notebook. A little way. Over the drop. And looked down, for a long time, at a mile of nothing under her feet.

Then she held up her own wrists. She has bracelets too. I hadn’t known.

And the silver came off them, very gently. And spread out along the bridge on either side of her. And grew.

Not strands. Leaves. Small and bright and silver. Climbing the edges of the bridge like ivy up a wall. All the way across.

She came back off the bridge and closed her notebook.

”Gardens,” said Dot. ”She says: she always asks about gardens first. So she grows them where she goes.”

Then it was my turn.

I didn’t know where to start.

I stood on the plain with everyone behind me. My family. Hearth. Okafor with her slate. And I thought about what Andraste said on the salt, the first time. A First Blade who will not strike cannot protect. And what Okafor said in the map room. You’re the most effective weapon anyone could ever hope to have. And what the houses said on Merrow. World-breaker. Make it white.

And I thought: I don’t want to show them a weapon.

So I started small.

I knelt down and put my hand on the red stone.

And felt it.

All of it. Every atom. The plain. The old sea-bottom under it. The hard sheets, laid down like pages. The hollows Kwame Osei had dug, and the warm, and Hana’s air going round. Further. The grey-black rock. The roots of the mountains. The heart of Avalon, red and soft and turning slowly in the dark, the way all worlds do.

I told them what I felt. Out loud. In order. Down to the heart.

Asha stopped talking.

Then I asked the stone in front of me to be something else.

A square yard. Red stone. And then not. Glass. Clear. Then sand, running through my fingers. Then salt, white. Then iron. Then silver. Then back to red stone, exactly as it was, every atom where it had been, as if nothing had happened.

Enna, beside Keir, unfolded her arms.

Then I lifted.

Not a cup. Not a child. The plain.

A piece of it. Out in the middle, where Dinraal had stood. The size of the house on the rise. I asked it to come up, and it did, all of it, in one piece, out of the ground, red stone and old sea-bottom and the roots of nothing, a hundred feet in the air over the hole it had left. Turning, very slowly, in the noon light. Dripping sand.

And I put it back.

Exactly. Every grain.

Then I let go of myself.

And scattered.

And came back together on the far side of the canyon. At the end of Dinraal’s bridge. A mile away. In one breath.

And waved.

And scattered again. And came back on the plain. Beside Mother.

The First Weapon, who’d been watching all of it with his chin on his short front paws, lifted his head and looked at me for a long time.

Then I did the last thing.

I hadn’t meant to. I’d meant to stop at the scattering. But Dinraal had shown me his bridge, and his armour, and the silver going into the ground and listening. He’d shown me everything his father left him and everything they’d learned. And it seemed wrong to stop.

So I looked up.

Past the noon sky. Past the blue. Up to where the sky goes dark, very high, where Avalon’s thin outer air ends and there’s nothing.

And found the smallest atoms there. The lightest. A great many of them. Thin and cold and scattered.

And held them.

And pressed them. Together. Very gently. The way Doctor Bell taught me on the porch. The way the sun does it. Not with weight. With asking.

A light came on in the sky.

Very small. Very high. A point of white, at noon, beside the sun.

And grew.

Not much. I didn’t let it. I held it very carefully, very far up, where it couldn’t touch anything, and let it be the size of a seed, and then a coin, and then a plate, bright and white and hot and very far away.

A second sun. Over the plain past the canyon. At noon.

I held it there for as long as it takes to say the names on the porch.

And let it go.

And it went out. All at once. And the sky was blue again.

Nobody on the plain said anything for a very long time.

Then Tiamat spoke.

She’d been standing at the back. Very straight. With her hands clasped behind her. Watching the way she watches everything. As if deciding where it would go on a map.

She said something in her own language. Very quietly. To Dinraal.

Dot translated it a breath behind. Very carefully.

”Tiamat says,” said Dot. ”The universe should be very glad he was raised to be a nice boy.”

Everyone looked at her.

Tiamat didn’t look away. She was looking at me.

”Even-keeled,” said Dot. Translating. ”Patient. Kind. Asks before he does anything. Puts things back where they were.” A pause. ”Tiamat says: if he were angry. If he were spiteful. If he had been raised by people who were cruel to him, or told him what he was for, and he had believed them—”

Tiamat stopped.

Then she said the last part herself. In our language. Very slowly. She’d been learning it from the dictionary, Isolde said. All night.

”He could end everything,” said Tiamat. ”All of it. Every star.” She looked at the place in the sky where the second sun had been. ”He could have ended it today. And it would have been easy.”

She looked across the plain. At Dinraal, at the edge of the canyon, beside his bridge.

”I had one too,” she said. Very quietly. ”With Bahamut. Who could do a great deal.” She didn’t look away from her son. ”I know what it costs. To make one who asks.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Mother stood up.

She’d been sitting on a folding chair Konrad had carried. At the front. With the dark blue ribbon in her hair and the grey Vaeli ribbon beside it, and Isolde’s sprig of something grey-green and fragrant beside that. With her hands in her lap.

She stood up. And walked across the plain. To Tiamat. A tall woman, very straight, who runs orbital stations and something she won’t explain and makes everyone on Hearth stop talking.

And looked up at her.

”Trevor and I raised him right,” said Mother.

Tiamat looked down at her for a long time.

”Yes,” she said. In her own language. And then, in ours, very slowly: ”Yes. You did.”

Mother nodded.

”He was a very difficult baby,” she said. ”Up all night. Every night. Taking the cot apart in the dark and putting it back together wrong before he could walk.” She folded her hands. ”Trevor taught him at the forge. Lead into gold, which was easy. Sand into bread, which was hard. And he never once told him why it mattered, because the words got stuck in him like a filter with ash in it.” Her voice didn’t change at all. ”So every night, after the children were asleep, Trevor stood between their beds and said it. Out loud. So that it was said.” She looked at Tiamat. ”And then they took him to the halls, and told him what he was for, every day, for years. And he’d already heard the other thing. Every night. From his father.” She looked down at her hands. ”And I made sure, every day I could, that he remembered it.”

She looked at me. Across the plain.

”And he listened,” said Mother. ”He always listens. That’s the whole trick of it.”

Tiamat didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she did something Dot says nobody on Hearth has ever seen her do.

She bowed. To Mother. Very low.

Rhiannon had the babies by then.

I don’t know how it happened. One minute the children were behind us on the plain, with the grandfathers, watching the sky. The next, Rhiannon had Abena on one hip and Vessa in the crook of her other arm and was talking to both of them in her own language, very firmly, as if they’d been working through a meal.

And Isolde had Elin and Goldie. One on each knee. Sitting on the red stone. With the air round the three of them going soft and smelling of rain, because Elin and Goldie had decided they liked her and were making it April.

And Tiamat, when she straightened up from bowing to Mother, found Thessaly on the plain at her feet. Looking up at her. With grey eyes.

Tiamat looked down.

Thessaly held up her arms.

Tiamat, who runs the orbital stations of Hearth and makes everyone stop talking, bent down very slowly, as if she wasn’t sure how it was done. And picked her up.

And Thessaly put her small hand flat on Tiamat’s face. The way Corin does. The way she gives him things.

And gave her something.

I don’t know what. Tiamat went very still. And then her face did something I don’t think it had done in a long time.

They didn’t give them back.

Not for the rest of the afternoon. They went through all twelve. One after another. Rhiannon and Isolde and Tiamat. Passing them between them on the red stone. Efua, shouting. Kwame, watching. Small Sigmund, with his cloud. Ash, who explained to Isolde very clearly, in the voice she uses for the dog, how the little glass flames at the ends of her branches worked. Trevor, with frost. Dory, who let Rhiannon hold her hand and checked her and said there you are and made Rhiannon cry.

And Corin.

Who climbed into Isolde’s lap on his own. With his weight on the back foot. And looked at her for a long time. Carefully. With Father’s eyes.

And didn’t ask her for anything.

He said hello.

Isolde looked at him for a long time.

Then she looked at Dinraal. On the edge of the canyon. Beside his bridge. With the First Weapon at his feet.

”Seven,” she said.

Dot translated it. Very carefully.

Dinraal turned round.

”Seven what?”

”Children,” said Isolde. She didn’t take her eyes off him. ”I’ve decided. Seven.” She put her hand on Corin’s head. ”I’ve been deciding for a long time. All the years of the relay. Every time Lucas said their names on the porch and Dot sent them one line at a time and I wrote them in my notebook.” She held up the notebook. Thick. Thicker than the one I remembered. ”I have every one. Dory. Ash. Trevor. All of them. Every birthday. Every first word.” She closed it. ”And now I’ve held them.” She looked at Dinraal. ”Seven.”

Dinraal didn’t say anything for a very long time.

Then he looked at me.

I knew what he was looking at.

Not me. Behind me. On the red stone. Where my wives were sitting in a row the way they sit on the roof. Luna, with frost on her fingers. Sera, very warm. Risa, with both clouds over her head. Hana, breathing for everyone without anyone noticing. Andraste, at the end, with her blade across her knees and her hand on her middle.

Five.

Dinraal looked at them. And then at me. And then at them again.

And his face did something. Very small. Very careful. A man doing arithmetic.

”No,” said Isolde.

Very firmly. From the red stone. With Corin in her lap.

Dinraal turned round.

”I didn’t say anything.”

”You were counting,” said Isolde. ”I watched you count.” She pointed at him with her notebook. ”Don’t get any ideas.”

Risa laughed so hard her clouds rained on Andraste.

Andraste didn’t mind. She was laughing too. Like a door falling off its hinges. With her hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t wake Vessa, who was in Rhiannon’s arms anyway and wide awake.

Sera set a small patch of the plain on fire. Luna put it out. Hana breathed.

”It’s a lot of work,” said Luna. To Isolde. Very kindly. Across the red stone. Through Dot. ”Five. It’s a great deal of work. For him.”

”I know,” said Isolde.

”He has to say all our names in order every night.”

”I’ve read,” said Isolde. ”Every night. In the notebook.” She looked at Dinraal. ”He can’t even remember to eat.”

Rhiannon, holding Vessa, said something very sharp in her own language.

Dinraal looked at his boots.

Keir and Enna were on the bridge.

In the middle of it. A half a mile out over the drop. On their knees. With their heads together over the silver lace where it was thinnest, and Keir’s drawings spread out on it, weighted with Enna’s tools, and the wind off the canyon trying to take them.

They’d been there an hour. Arguing.

I couldn’t hear what about. Dot said it was the load path. Dot said it was always the load path, with those two.

When I came out onto the bridge to tell them it was nearly dusk, Enna looked up at me. And said something, very sharp, to Keir. And Keir laughed. The way he laughed on the porch, years ago, when he drew the Open Hand on the floor of the workshop and stood back and saw it.

”She says,” said Dot. ”He can grow the grey in this pattern. On the hulls. Over Odra’s stone. A second skin. That holds its own shape if the first one’s eaten.” A pause. ”She says the Hungry would have to eat through two kinds of ship to get to anyone.”

Keir was already drawing.

Enna watched him for a long time.

Then she put her finger on his drawing. On one line. And moved it.

”She says,” said Dot, ”that one’s wrong.”

”I know,” said Keir. Not looking up. ”I was going to fix it.”

”She says she knows,” said Dot. ”She says she was wanting to be the one who told you.”

Okafor hadn’t written anything all afternoon.

I noticed it on the walk to the bridge. She had her slate. She always has her slate. And it was blank. She’d stood at the edge of the plain the whole time, through the armour and the bridge and the second sun and Tiamat bowing, with the chalk in her hand, and hadn’t written a word.

Doctor Bell had filled nine pages.

”What are you going to put down?” I said. To Okafor. Quietly.

She looked at the blank slate for a long time.

”I was going to write what you can do,” she said. ”For the Hedge. Capabilities. The way I write everyone’s.” She turned the slate over. ”And then Tiamat said what she said. And your mother said what she said.” She looked up at the sky where the second sun had been. ”And I realised I’ve never once written down what anyone can do, Dask. Not really. Not in twenty years.” She put the chalk in her pocket. ”I write down what they will do. Who they are. Whether they’ll go.”

She held up the slate. Blank.

”That’s what goes on yours,” she said. ”Nothing. Because I already know.”

Aramaeis was the last to leave the plain.

He sat on a stone at the edge of it with Crane beside him for a long time after everyone else had started toward the bridge. Looking at the place where the second sun had been. Not saying anything.

I went back for him.

”An army,” he said. When I got there. Through Dot, very slowly. ”Wrote me down as dead before I had finished living. Because they had decided what I was for, and I had stopped being it.” He looked at the empty sky. ”If they had had you—” He stopped.

”They didn’t.”

”No,” said Aramaeis. ”Your mother had you.” He put his hand on Crane’s arm. Crane let him. ”And this one sat on a bench for years so everyone would know what he had done.” He looked at me. ”It is a very strange army you have here, Lucas. Full of people who know what it costs.”

He walked to the bridge beside me. A soldier’s walk. He’s Tiamat’s brother; it shows.

Crane walked beside it. With his spanner in his pocket. Not saying anything either.

We walked back across the plain at dusk.

Over Dinraal’s bridge. A mile of silver lace over the drop, with Isolde’s leaves climbing the edges. Nobody had asked it to stay. It just had. It’s still there. Kwame Osei says he’s going to put a road on it.

Mother walked beside Tiamat. Neither of them said anything. Rhiannon walked behind them with Abena asleep on her shoulder and a basket of empty bread-cloths on her arm, and every few steps she looked at me to make sure I wasn’t skipping supper.

Dinraal walked with me. At the back. With the First Weapon between us.

He didn’t say anything until we were across.

Then he stopped. At the end of the bridge. On our side.

”My father,” he said. Through Dot. Very quietly. ”Bahamut. He could do things too. Not what you can. But a great deal.” He looked at the bracelets on his wrists. ”They told him what he was for. Every day. For years. And he believed them.” He was quiet. ”I found him one line at a time. From what other people had rubbed out. And every line said the same thing. What he was for.”

I didn’t say anything.

”Your father,” said Dinraal. ”Stood between your beds. Every night.” He looked at Mother, ahead of us, walking beside Tiamat in the dusk. ”Nobody stood between his.”

He put his hand on the bridge. On the silver. On the leaves Isolde had grown.

”Seven,” he said. Very quietly. Almost to himself. ”I will stand between seven beds.”

The First Weapon leaned against his leg.

And on the bridge behind us, in the last of the light, Isolde’s silver leaves turned, very slowly, all together, toward the house on the rise.

Mother and Rhiannon made supper.

Together. In the kitchen of the house on the rise. Without a word of each other’s language. Maura tried to help and was given a bowl and told, by both of them at once in two different languages with the same face, to sit down.

Maura sat down.

They made Hearth’s bread and our stew. Rhiannon tasted the stew and added something from her basket. Mother tasted it and added something from the shelf. Rhiannon tasted it again and nodded. Mother tasted it again and nodded. Then they stood at the stove side by side with their arms folded in exactly the same way, watching the pot, and didn’t say anything for a long time.

”She says,” said Dot, very quietly, from the doorway, ”that you are the first person she has ever met who knew he had skipped lunch before she did.”

Mother didn’t look away from the pot.

”Tell her I’ve had a lot of practice,” she said.

My wives took Isolde onto the roof.

All five. After supper. Up the ladder from the children’s room. Where Andraste sits at night. With their backs against the chimney, and Isolde in the middle, and her notebook on her knees, and Vessa on Andraste’s chest facing out.

I wasn’t invited. Risa said so, very firmly, at the bottom of the ladder.

So I sat on the porch. And heard most of it anyway, because Risa’s voice carries when she’s laughing, and she laughed a great deal.

”Seven,” said Sera. ”That’s not so many.”

”It’s two more than five,” said Luna.

”It’s a lot more than five if you’re the one doing it,” said Hana.

”They come very fast,” said Andraste. ”Mine do. Ten weeks. Twenty-six, for this one, but only because she was waiting.”

”Ours won’t,” said Isolde. Through Dot, who’d gone up the ladder too, very carefully, because Dot doesn’t like ladders. ”Ours will come the ordinary way. Nine months. Each.” She paused. ”That’s sixty-three months.”

The roof was quiet.

”Over five years,” said Luna. Doing the sums. ”If you don’t stop.”

”I don’t intend to stop,” said Isolde.

Risa laughed so hard her clouds rained on everyone.

Later, when it was quieter, I heard Andraste.

”He counted us,” she said. ”On the plain. I saw him.”

”Yes,” said Isolde.

”You told him not to get ideas.”

”Yes.”

Andraste was quiet for a moment.

”On Hyrran,” she said, ”a First Blade who has stood at the edge alone for a very long time gets ideas about everything. Because he has never had enough of anything. Not people. Not rest. Not someone beside him.” She shifted Vessa on her chest. ”It isn’t five wives he wants. It’s not being the only one awake.”

Isolde didn’t answer for a long time.

”I know,” she said. ”That’s why I want seven.”

Days 4508–4509. Show Me.

Dinraal asked to see; he’d show me his. Okafor: somewhere empty. The plain past the canyon. Rhiannon knew I hadn’t eaten from across the plain. Dinraal’s silver rose off his wrists into armour, blade, shield; went into the ground and listened; then a bridge across the canyon, a mile of silver lace that held after he let go, because I showed him one small path on the eighth day. Isolde grew leaves on it. I felt down to the heart, turned stone to glass and back, lifted a house-sized piece of plain and put it back, scattered across the canyon, and made a second sun at noon the size of a plate. Tiamat: the universe should be glad he was raised to be a nice boy; he could end every star. Mother: Trevor and I raised him right; Father stood between our beds every night. Tiamat bowed. Okafor wrote nothing on my slate: I already know. Aramaeis: a strange army, full of people who know what it costs. Rhiannon, Isolde and Tiamat held all twelve. Isolde: seven. Dinraal counted my wives; Isolde: don’t get any ideas. Mother and Rhiannon made supper with the same face. On the roof: sixty-three months; it isn’t five wives he wants, it’s not being the only one awake. Dinraal: I will stand between seven beds.