Scarecrow

Two names.

Konrad read them at the dawn count himself, this time. Standing on his stool on the red glass, in his coat buttoned right for once, because Ingrid had done it for him on the porch before they came down.

”Morvane,” he said. ”Halcro.”

And put the sheet back in his coat.

Nobody said anything. There wasn’t anything to say. Everyone on the red glass knew what was on the front of that sheet, and what was on the back of it, and how much room was left at the bottom.

Not much.

Kesh was four days old.

She slept in a basket at the foot of the arch on the interceptor field every morning, because Risa wouldn’t have her anywhere else, and Risa stood over her with both clouds gone now except the grey one, and flew the wing with her eyes shut.

Small Sigmund sat beside the basket. Every morning. With his spark going round his ear. Guarding.

Dory checked her. Every morning. On her way to the north field. Before she put her hands on the arch.

And Ingrid sat on the bench by the arch with her thin hands in her lap and didn’t take her eyes off her granddaughter’s cloud.

It was very still. It was always very still, when Ingrid was near.

I’m her father. I should say that properly, here, now that there’s room.

I held her for a long time the first night. On the porch. After everyone had gone in. With Risa asleep against my shoulder and Kesh asleep against my chest and the cloud over her head no bigger than a thumbnail, leaning toward me.

She’s very small. She’s very serious. She looks at everyone as though she’s counting them. Halloway says she grows the ordinary way, so far, the slow way. Halloway says it’s too early to say.

I don’t mind. I’ve had quick ones. I’d like one slow one, for a while.

”Morvane,” said Wren.

On the long ward. With Rafe asleep on her chest. That afternoon, when the map room was full.

”I’ve been listening,” she said. Through the silver. Into all of us. ”Since Ostrel. Since Konrad read it.”

”And?” said Okafor.

Wren was quiet for a long time.

”Nine hundred and forty thousand,” she said. ”Two hundred and ten thousand under twelve. In nine towers. They live in them. The whole world lives in the towers, up on the plateau, because the ground’s no good.” A pause. ”And forty-one pieces.”

”Tally said forty-one,” said Okafor.

”Tally counted the towers,” said Wren. ”I’m counting the pieces. That’s different.” She was quiet again. ”They don’t sound like the others.”

The map room went very still.

”Every piece I’ve ever heard sings the note,” said Wren. ”The grey one. The one they make the children walk up ramps to. And under it, very quiet, the queen it came from. Trying not to. You can hear her trying.” Her voice didn’t change. ”These forty-one sing the note. And under it, there isn’t a queen trying not to.”

”What is there?” I said.

”Someone I’ve heard before,” said Wren. ”Once. Through you. When you went to Root and she spoke to all of us through the ground.”

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then the Scarecrow queen, through the silver, from the hollows under the garden, very quietly:

Ask her.

So I asked her.

The long way. Up the thread. To Root. Past the Wall and the ears and Tiamat’s station on her threads, down, through the hard sheets and the warm, to the heart of it, where the eldest queen lives.

I didn’t have to ask.

She already knew.

Mine, she said.

Not loud. She’s never loud. But I’ve never heard her sound like that. Not angry. Further down than angry.

Forty-one pieces of me. Cut before your houses had names. Before the Sorn were the Sorn. When I was young and did not know there was anything in the universe that would cut a mother into pieces to make her children walk. A pause. I felt them go. One after another. Over a long time. And then I stopped feeling them, and I thought they had stopped.

They haven’t, I said.

No, said the eldest. They have been singing. On a world I have never seen. In towers I have never seen. The note. With my voice under it. A pause. I have sung them a thousand false roads. Worlds that taste like me and are not. And all that time, on one world, there was a road that was true. A pause. That is why they have never stopped looking.

Okafor heard it. Everyone heard it. Through me.

Okafor put her chalk down.

”So the Hungry will come,” she said.

Everything that is hungry will come, said the eldest. They have been looking for me for longer than you have been a people. And there are forty-one pieces of me on one world, singing. A pause. They will not send a swarm. They will send all of it.

The long table didn’t say anything for a long time.

Crane did, in the end.

He was at the end, where he always sits now, with the spanner on the table in front of him and his collar gone and the pale line on his neck where it was. He doesn’t talk much at the long table. When he does, people stop.

”The houses know,” he said. ”They’ve always known where the pieces came from. That’s why there are forty-one on one world. You don’t scatter the best you’ve got. You put it all in one place and guard it.” He turned the spanner over. ”And they’ll know the Hungry are coming. They’ve been watching the Hungry follow false songs for a year.”

”So?” said Okafor.

”So they won’t let the pieces leave,” said Crane. ”Not to us. Not to them.” He looked down the table. At Aurelius. At Aramaeis. At me. ”They’ll burn the towers. Same as Thale. Correctors in the hearts of them, packed. The minute a piece comes out of its housing, the tower it’s in goes up.” A pause. ”With everyone in it.”

It is so, said the Overseer. From the doorway. Not in the room and not out of it, the way it always stands, with the dog against its legs. The middle has heard Morvane eleven times in four days. And beside it, every time, a word in the third line of the ledger.

”What word?” said Okafor.

Spoil, said the Overseer.

”Then we can’t touch the pieces,” said Okafor. ”Not till the towers are empty.”

”And we can’t empty the towers,” said Aurelius. Through Dot. Very gently. ”While forty-one pieces of the eldest are singing on top of them, and everything that is hungry is coming down out of the sky to find them.”

Okafor looked at him.

”We need them quiet,” said Aurelius. ”All of them. All at once. For as long as it takes nine hundred and forty thousand people to come down nine towers.” He spread his gentle hands. ”So that nothing that is hungry can hear them. So that the houses’ correctors can’t hear them leave.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Ingrid did.

”I’ll hush them,” said Ingrid.

She was at the end of the long table. Where she sits. Beside Konrad. With her thin hands in her lap.

Risa was at the other end. With Kesh asleep against her shoulder.

”No,” said Risa.

”I hushed six Hands,” said Ingrid. ”At Cassel.”

”And you fell,” said Risa. ”Out of the sky. I watched you. Lucas brought you down. I caught you.” Her voice was very level. The voice that means storms. ”Four days ago you flew home as lightning at the end of the wing and I had her standing up. You’re not doing it again.”

”It isn’t the same,” said Ingrid.

”Forty-one,” said Risa. ”Against six.”

”Six Hands didn’t want to be quiet,” said Ingrid. Very low. ”They were full of men who wanted to burn things. I had to hold every one of them down.” She looked at her daughter across the long table. ”These are pieces of a mother. Who has been singing a thing she hates, for longer than there have been Sorn. Who has been trying not to, the whole time.” A pause. ”You don’t have to hold someone like that down, Risa. You just have to tell her she’s allowed to stop.”

Risa didn’t say anything.

”It’s the easiest thing in the world,” said Ingrid. ”To hush someone who wants to be quiet.”

The eldest queen said, through me, very softly:

She is right.

”Then I’m coming,” said Konrad.

Everyone looked at him.

Konrad doesn’t go through arches. Konrad has never once, in all the time I’ve known him, been through an arch onto a world that was burning. He stands on his stool on the red glass at the dawn count and writes names on the back of a tithe sheet in the hand he used for thirty years in the Senate, signing directives he never looked up from. That’s what he does. That’s what he’s for.

He stood up.

”She held three hundred handlers at the Kesh ford,” said Konrad. ”Carrying our daughter. And I stood behind her with a slate and wrote the report and put my own name on it.” He didn’t look at anyone. He looked at Ingrid. ”And then I signed the room. And sat in an office for thirty years so nobody would ask.” He put his hat on. ”I’m not standing behind her with a slate this time. And I’m not in an office.”

Ingrid looked at him for a long time.

Then she put one thin hand out. And he took it.

”Fine,” said Risa. To both of them. To the whole table. Very quietly. With her face in Kesh’s hair. ”Fine.”

Mother didn’t say anything at the long table.

She said it on the porch. That night. With the slate on its nail by the kitchen door.

”Everyone,” said Mother. ”All of us.” And looked down the bench. At Maura, and Kyria, and Teshka, and Rhiannon with her basket, and Cleopatra, and Asha talking and Eve telling her to stop, and Tiamat down off the Wall again. And at Ingrid, at the end, with Konrad beside her on the step.

”If she’s going to stand in the middle and hush the sky,” said Mother, ”then the rest of us are going to stand round her.”

Nobody argued.

So we went to Morvane.

It’s a high world. Cold. A grey plateau a mile above a grey sea, with nothing growing on it but lichen, and wind all the time. And on the plateau, nine towers.

I’d seen towers on tithe worlds before. Corran had towers. Ebbery had three. These were different. These were cities. Each one a mile high, built of grey stone and black metal, wider at the bottom than the north field, narrowing all the way up into the cloud. With windows. Thousands of windows. Lights in all of them.

And at the very top of every tower, in the cloud, where you couldn’t see it, singing.

I heard it before I’d finished coming back together.

On the plateau. In the wind. Between the third tower and the fourth, where Wren had said the ground was flattest. The note. The grey one. Coming down out of the cloud from nine places at once.

And under it.

Her.

The eldest. Young. Younger than I’d ever heard her. Singing the thing she hated, in a voice she’d had before there were Sorn, forty-one times over, from the tops of nine towers into the sky.

I put my hand on the plateau and found Avalon. The long way.

”Here,” I said.

Kyria’s cutters cut the arch.

And every queen on Avalon sang it open.

And Roan came through first. With his hands already out. And put them flat on the frame. And held.

Hesk behind him. With her hammer. And her cup of tea, which she put down by his foot without being asked.

Then Ingrid.

She came through walking. Not as lightning. In her coat, with Konrad beside her holding her arm, the way a man holds his wife’s arm on ice.

She walked out onto the plateau. Into the middle of the nine towers. Where the wind was worst. And stopped.

And looked up. At the cloud. At the tops of the towers, where the singing was.

The rest of the Mom Squad came through behind her. All nine. And stood round her. In a ring. Mother. Maura. Kyria with her blade. Teshka. Rhiannon with her crown and her wings folded and her basket, because she won’t go anywhere without the basket. Cleopatra with her necklace already throwing a field over the whole ring. Asha’s instruments, in the air over them, reading the towers. Eve’s spheres. And Tiamat, still in her woman’s shape, very straight, at Ingrid’s back.

And Konrad. Inside the ring. Beside his wife. Holding her up.

Ingrid put her hand out.

The way she put it out at the Kesh ford, I think. In front of three hundred. Carrying Risa. With nobody beside her.

Not toward the towers. Not toward the cloud. Just out. Flat. Palm down. As if she were laying it on the head of a child who couldn’t sleep.

And said something.

I didn’t hear what. Nobody did. Konrad says it wasn’t a word. Konrad says it was the sound you make in a dark room at night to tell somebody it’s all right, they can stop now, you’re there.

And the wind stopped.

All of it. Across the whole plateau. At once. The way it stops just before a storm. The way the air goes still.

The lichen stopped moving. The grey sea a mile below stopped making a sound. The lights in the thousands of windows of nine towers stopped flickering.

And at the tops of the towers, in the cloud, one after another, forty-one pieces of the eldest queen stopped singing.

I felt them stop.

Not like the note being cut. Not like a housing breaking. Like somebody who’s been holding their breath for longer than there have been houses, letting it out.

Very slowly.

All forty-one.

And a long way off, at the heart of Root, the eldest queen made a sound.

I don’t have a word for it. Neither does Dot. Dot says there isn’t one in any of the languages she has, and she has all of them.

Wren says it was the sound Ingrid made when Risa said here comes the Hush.

”Now,” said Ingrid. Very quietly. Without taking her hand down. ”Go now. I can’t hold the wind forever.”

We went.

The people came first. The way they always do.

Down the towers. Nine hundred and forty thousand people, coming down the insides of nine towers a mile high, down stairs and ramps and lifts that Okafor’s people had held open, out of the great doors at the bottom onto the plateau, and across it, walking fast, holding on. Toward the arch. Toward Roan with his hands on it.

Luna’s ice roads from every door. Bree walking the last of every line with her ribbon of fire round the slow ones. Hearth’s three at the foot of the fourth tower, where the plateau narrowed. Sigmund going up every tower beside Tally, with his hands out, holding the hearts of anyone who’d gone grey from the note, keeping them going until they could be carried down.

And Tally and I went up the insides of the towers for the pieces.

Not yet.

That was the whole plan. The whole of it. Okafor had said it a hundred times at the long table and Crane had said it a hundred more and I’d said it to myself on the plateau with the eldest under me, singing in forty-one places.

Don’t touch the pieces until the towers are empty.

Because Crane was right. Of course he was.

I found the first corrector in the third tower.

Halfway up. In the heart of it. Where the black metal comes together inside the stone and goes up toward the top. Packed into the core, the way they packed Thale. Grey. Old. Patient. Wired, with very fine wire, up through the core of the tower to the housing at the top where four pieces of the eldest were.

Waiting for the pieces to move.

Crane was beside me. With his spanner. He’d come up the stairs with me without being asked, because he said nobody alive knew house correctors better than the man they’d put in the collar to look after them.

He looked at it for a long time.

”There’s one in every tower,” he said. ”Same place. Same wire.” He put his hand on the black metal. Very lightly. ”It doesn’t care if the tower’s empty. It cares if the pieces go.”

”Can you stop it?” I said.

”Not this one,” said Crane. ”Not in time. Not nine.” He looked up the core. Toward the housing. ”But it’s only listening for one thing. It’s listening for them to move.”

I looked at him.

”So don’t move them,” said Crane. ”Not until it can’t hear.”

I understood.

I put my hand on the black metal of the tower’s core.

And asked it.

Not to stop. Not to let the corrector go. I can’t argue with what the houses build; they build it not to listen. But a tower isn’t a corrector. A tower is stone and black metal, standing up a mile into the cloud on a cold world, and it’s been standing up for longer than anyone in it has been alive.

And it was tired.

I could feel it. Every atom of it. Holding up nine hundred floors and a hundred thousand people and the weight of the cloud, and four pieces of a queen at the top singing a thing she hated.

I asked it to hold still.

Very still. After everyone was out. So still that when Tally put her hand on the housing at the top and asked the metal to let the pieces go, and they came out of the housing into her bag, the wire running down the core of the tower wouldn’t feel them move. Wouldn’t feel anything. Would think nothing had changed at all.

The tower said yes.

It’s the easiest thing in the world, Ingrid says. To hush something that wants to be quiet.

So we did that.

Nine towers. One after another. Tally and Crane and me. As the people came down out of each tower and the last of them went out of the great doors at the bottom, I put my hand on the core and asked the tower to hold its breath. And Crane checked the wire. And Tally went up to the top in the lift Okafor’s people had held for us, into the cloud, into the still air Ingrid had made, and put her hand on the housing.

And the pieces came out into her bag.

And the correctors didn’t hear.

Third tower: four pieces. Fourth: five. Second: six. First: three.

Then the Hungry came.

Not from the far yard. Not in pods.

From everywhere.

Vessa didn’t turn for them. Vessa only turns for the Ashen. But the Wall did. Tiamat’s people on the orbital stations round Root, a long way off, and the ears, all of them, every listening station the Watch has, at once.

And Tiamat, in the ring round Ingrid on the plateau, put her head up.

”All of it,” she said. Through Dot. Very quietly. ”The eldest was right. They aren’t sending a swarm.”

The sky over Morvane went dark.

Not cloud. Not Ashen. Hungry. Coming down out of the high dark over the plateau from every direction at once, more of them than I’d ever seen in one place, more than at Merrow, more than on the world I broke. Not falling. Searching. Turning in great slow circles over the nine towers, very high, the way gulls turn over water when they’ve lost a shoal.

They couldn’t hear the pieces.

Ingrid had them hushed. All forty-one. Still. Quiet. And the whole of everything hungry in the universe had come to Morvane to find them, and when it got there, there was nothing to find.

But they knew it was here somewhere.

So they came down to look.

Aramaeis went up.

I hadn’t known he was on Morvane. He’s a General. He plans. He sits at the long table with Okafor and Aurelius and moves things. He’d come through the arch behind the Hyrrani and stood at the back, in his silver, very still, looking exactly like his sister.

Then he wasn’t.

The silver went out over him the way it goes out over Tiamat. Wings. Horns. Scales. A long armoured tail. Bigger than her, I think. Darker.

And Tiamat beside him, out of the ring, all at once.

Two dragons.

They went up off the plateau into the dark together, very fast, and turned, and came back round the tops of the towers in a long silver circle, side by side. And everything hungry that came down near them, burned.

The wing went up after them. Risa flying it with her eyes shut from the interceptor field on Avalon, with Kesh’s basket at her feet. Arcturus beside her with his visor down, and every one of Hearth’s ships.

Callum and Rowan. And the forty.

No Ingrid at the front this time. Ingrid was on the plateau with her hand out.

And Aurelius raised his shield.

He’d come. Of course he had. After Ostrel nobody would have stopped him. He stood beside the arch, beside Roan, and put his shield up, and it grew.

Over the arch. Over the line of people crossing the plateau. Over the ring of the Mom Squad round Ingrid. Wider. Higher. Rhiannon in the ring put her hand up, not looking, and it went brighter and wider still. Until it was over all nine towers. Over the whole plateau.

A dome of silver light a mile high, with nine grey towers standing up inside it, and the dark of everything hungry turning on the outside of it, looking for something it couldn’t hear.

Fifth tower. Seven pieces.

Sixth. Four.

Seventh. Five.

Then the Ashen.

Vessa turned. On Avalon. On Andraste’s chest at the arch, beside Risa and Kesh’s basket.

Ashen, said Andraste. Into all of us. Morvane. Now.

And then, very quietly:

They’re not coming for the arch.

They came out of the dark over the plateau low and fast with no lights on them, round the edge of Aurelius’s dome. A hundred of them. More.

And their wave went out ahead of them.

Not at the dome. Not at the arch. Not at the line of people.

At the Hungry.

I’d seen it on Vantle. The Ashen wave doesn’t burn the Hungry. It ends them. And the swarm goes round.

On Morvane the swarm didn’t go round. It couldn’t. It had come to find forty-one pieces of the eldest and it wasn’t leaving without them, and the Ashen came through it like a scythe through a field, and everything hungry that was turning over the plateau turned on the Ashen instead.

And the sky over the dome went black with it. And silver. And the dark of the Ashen wave. All three sides at once. The thing we drilled for.

Except this time we weren’t in it.

We were under the dome. Hushed. Quiet. With Ingrid’s hand out and Aurelius’s shield up and nine towers holding their breath.

And the two of them, the houses’ new friends and the oldest hungry thing there is, tearing each other apart over our heads.

”Don’t look up,” said Okafor. Through the silver. Very calm. ”Keep walking.”

So we kept walking.

Eighth tower. Four pieces.

That’s thirty-eight.

The ninth tower was the far one. At the edge of the plateau, where it drops away a mile to the grey sea. The oldest. The tallest. The one Wren said had three pieces in it, right at the top.

And the one with the most people still inside.

Because it was the farthest from the arch. Because the people at the top of it had the longest way down. And because the lifts in the ninth tower were old, and two of them had stopped.

I was in the eighth tower when it happened.

With my hand on the core. With Crane beside me. With Tally coming down in the lift from the top with four pieces in her bag.

And I felt it.

The ninth tower. A mile away. Across the plateau. The core of it. Holding its breath, the way I’d asked the others to, except I hadn’t asked it yet. I hadn’t got there. And there were still eleven thousand people coming down its stairs.

And then the ninth tower’s core went bright.

The houses hadn’t only put correctors in the hearts of the towers.

They’d put a man.

Crane found out afterward. From the Overseer. From the middle, from the third line of the ledger, from a word that had been written beside Morvane that nobody had read in time.

A house man. In the ninth tower. On the top floor, under the housing. With a lamp and a chair and a key. Who had been told, if the pieces went quiet, to turn the key anyway.

He’d been told the Hungry were coming. He’d been told the heroes were coming. He’d been told the pieces would be taken, by one side or the other, and that the houses would rather have ashes than lose them.

He’d sat in his chair under the housing and listened to forty-one pieces of the eldest stop singing, one after another, all over the plateau.

And turned the key.

The ninth tower burned from the core.

I don’t know how to write it. I’ve tried. I’ve tried for three nights.

It went up from the inside. Not like Thale; Thale burned from the ground up and the people had time to see it coming. The ninth tower burned from the heart of it, from the core, from the black metal in the middle, outward, through every floor at once.

And there were eleven thousand people on the stairs.

I went.

As fast as I’ve ever gone. Scattered. Across the plateau. Through the dome. Into the core of the ninth tower and came back together in the fire, with my hand on the black metal, asking it to stop.

It couldn’t hear me. The corrector was too loud. The houses build them not to listen.

So I asked the stone instead.

The stone round the stairs. The great stone stairs going down the inside of the ninth tower, a mile of them, with people on them. I asked it to hold. To hold the fire off the stairs. To be cold.

It tried.

Bree was already there.

She’d come running across the plateau from the end of the last line with her ribbon of fire streaming behind her before anyone could stop her. She went in through the great doors at the bottom. Into the fire. And up.

She isn’t afraid of fire. She never has been. Not since the gate.

And hers can’t burn anything living.

She found them on the stairs. The ones coming down through the smoke. The ones who’d stopped. The ones who’d sat down. And her ribbon went out round them. Gold. Wrapping them. The way it wrapped the girl and her brother on Ostrel.

And the house fire came down the stairs at them, and met Bree’s fire, wrapped round them.

And couldn’t get in.

I don’t know why. Asha doesn’t know why. Asha says she’s been trying to work it out for three days and can’t, and won’t stop talking about it, and Eve has stopped telling her to stop. Asha says it might be that there’s only so much room round a person for fire, and if Bree’s is already there, and Bree’s won’t burn them, then there’s nowhere for anything else to go.

Bree says she doesn’t know. Bree says she just thought, not these ones.

Roan held the stairs.

He’d let go of the arch. Hesk had taken it; Hesk said afterward she’d never held a whole arch on her own before and didn’t intend to do it again. He came across the plateau behind his sister and into the ninth tower and put his hands on the great stone stairs at the bottom.

And they held.

Up through the fire. A mile of stairs. Every one of them. While the floors round them came down, the stairs stood. And kept standing after he let go.

They brought out eight thousand, nine hundred and six.

Bree and Roan and me. And Tiamat, who came down out of the dark and put her long silver body round the top of the ninth tower the way she put it round the tower on Corran, and the people at the very top came out onto her back. And Rhiannon, who went in at the third floor through a window with her wings folded and came out with forty children in her arms and round her and on her back and holding her dress.

Eight thousand, nine hundred and six.

Of eleven thousand.

Wren counted.

She didn’t say the number out loud. Not at first. She said it to me. Only to me. Very quietly. Through the silver. While I was still in the core with my hand on the stone.

”Two thousand and ninety-four,” said Wren. ”Six hundred and twelve under twelve.” A pause. ”They were on the top floors. The ones who had the longest way down.”

I didn’t say anything.

”And three,” said Wren. ”At the top. In the housing. Under the man with the key.”

Three pieces of the eldest.

Burned. In the housing at the top of the ninth tower. In the fire the houses made rather than let her go.

And the man with the key. Wren counted him too. She counts everyone.

Ingrid felt them go.

She was on the plateau with her hand out. Hushing forty-one. And then thirty-eight.

Konrad says she didn’t flinch. Konrad says she stood there with her hand out over the ring of the Mom Squad and the wind still stopped all across the plateau and the tower burning at the edge of it, and her face didn’t move at all.

And then, very quietly, under the hush, so only Konrad could hear, she said:

”I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Three times.

And at the heart of Root, a long way off, the eldest queen said:

No.

Not you.

The last of the people came out of the ninth tower at dusk.

The last line across the plateau. Through Aurelius’s dome. Past the ring of the Mom Squad round Ingrid. Past the arch, where Hesk stood alone with both hands on the frame and her hammer at her feet, and Roan came back and put his hands beside hers. Through.

Wren counted them all.

”Nine hundred and thirty-seven thousand, nine hundred and six,” she said. Out loud. Into all of us. In the voice that doesn’t break. ”Of nine hundred and forty thousand.”

”And thirty-eight pieces,” said Tally. Into the silver. From the plateau. With her bag. ”Of forty-one.”

Over our heads, the Hungry and the Ashen were still tearing at each other.

The dark of the Ashen wave, coming through the swarm. The swarm coming down on the Ashen. Aramaeis and Tiamat, very high, on the edge of it, burning anything that came near the dome.

Neither of them won. Neither of them ever wins.

But neither of them came down.

”Now,” said Okafor. ”Everyone. Home.”

Ingrid took her hand down last.

After the last of the Hyrrani. After Hearth’s three. After Bree and Roan and Tally with the bag. After me. She stood in the middle of the ring with her hand out until there was nobody on the plateau but the Mom Squad and Aurelius and the arch.

Then she took it down.

And the wind came back.

All of it. At once. Screaming across the plateau. And in the dark above the dome, everything hungry in the universe heard the plateau come back to life, and came down.

She didn’t fall.

Konrad says she meant to. Konrad says her knees went and he felt them go. But Mother was on one side of her before they’d finished going, and Maura on the other, and Kyria and Teshka behind, and they didn’t carry her. They walked her. Through the arch. The way you walk someone home from a long shift. One on each side.

And Konrad behind, with his hat in his hand.

And Aurelius last, with his shield up, until the very end, when Roan stepped back from the frame and Hesk swung her hammer at the keystone and the arch stood for three minutes on its own, long enough for the Chancellor of Hearth to walk backward through it with his dome still up and the whole of everything hungry coming down on the other side.

Then it fell.

On Morvane. Behind him.

Kesh was asleep in her basket at the foot of the arch on the interceptor field.

Risa was standing over her. With her eyes open now. With the wing coming down onto the field round her, forty of them, and Wren counting, and Arcturus pushing his visor up and sitting down on the red glass very suddenly with his wings folded.

And Ingrid came through the arch with Mother and Maura holding her up.

And Kesh’s cloud, which had been rumbling a little all afternoon, which Risa said had been flickering and restless and wouldn’t settle since the moment her grandmother went through the arch, went very still.

Ingrid sat down on the bench beside the basket.

She didn’t say anything. She put one thin hand out. Very slowly. And laid it on her granddaughter’s head.

And Kesh, asleep, put up one small fist and took hold of Ingrid’s finger.

Risa sat down on the other side of the basket.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

”Three,” said Ingrid. In the end.

”I know,” said Risa.

”And two thousand.”

”I know.”

Ingrid looked at the baby holding her finger.

”I held the wind for nine towers,” she said. ”I could have held it for ten. I could have held it for a hundred.” Her voice was very low. ”It wasn’t the wind. It was a man in a chair with a key.”

”It’s always a man in a chair,” said Konrad. From behind them. Very quietly. ”I know. I was one. I signed your room from one.”

The pieces went to the long ward.

Thirty-eight of them. In Tally’s bag. Into the old tray, with the others, the ones that hum when Brock gets a long word right.

They didn’t hum.

They were quiet. Very quiet. The way Ingrid had left them. Thirty-eight small grey pieces of the eldest queen, lying very still in a tray on the long ward, not singing anything at all, for the first time in longer than there have been houses.

Then, that night, very late, from the heart of Root, through every arch and every thread between, the eldest queen sang.

Not to us.

To them.

I was on the long ward. So was Wren. So was Tally, asleep in a chair beside the tray with her bag on her knee. So was Ingrid, who’d come down from the porch in her coat without telling anyone, with Konrad behind her, because she said she wanted to see them.

I didn’t understand the song. It wasn’t for me. It was very old and very low and very quiet, and it went on for a long time.

And in the tray, very slowly, one after another, thirty-eight pieces answered.

Not the note.

Something else. Something I’d never heard in any piece of any queen on any tithe world. Something young.

Wren says it was the eldest’s voice. Her own. The one she had before. The one they cut out of her.

Coming home.

Ingrid stood at the foot of the tray and listened for a long time.

Then she put her hand out. Flat. Palm down. Over the tray. The way she held it over the plateau.

And didn’t hush them.

She just held it there. Very lightly. The way you hold your hand over a child who’s finally asleep. To feel them breathing.

Konrad wrote it on the sheet the next morning.

Morvane. Home. And beside it, very small: Ingrid.

And under it: Ninth tower. 2,094. Three.

And under that, in a hand that wasn’t his, a hand nobody on Avalon had ever seen, that Dot says isn’t writing at all, it’s just the shape a song leaves when it goes through ink, something nobody could read.

Dot read it.

”Not her fault,” said Dot. ”Not his. Theirs.”

One name left.

Halcro.

Nearest the far yard. Nearest everything.

Okafor stood at the long table and looked at it on Konrad’s sheet for a long time.

”Everyone,” she said. ”All of it. Everything we’ve got.” She put the chalk down. ”And after Halcro, there’s nothing left on the sheet.”

”After Halcro,” said Aurelius, very gently, ”there is the far yard.”

Nobody said anything.

Days 4566–4571. The Quiet Before.

Kesh, four days old, in a basket at the arch. Wren: the forty-one pieces on Morvane were the eldest’s. Crane: the houses will burn the towers if the pieces move. Ingrid: it’s easy to hush someone who wants to be quiet. Konrad: I’m not in an office now. The Mom Squad stood round her and the wind stopped. The towers held their breath and the correctors didn’t hear. Everything hungry came, and the Ashen came through it, and nobody came down. A man in a chair with a key: the ninth tower. Bree’s fire round the stairs; Roan held them. 937,906 of 940,000. 2,094. Thirty-eight of forty-one. The eldest sang to them and they answered in her own voice. One name left.