Scarecrow

I said I’d write all of it. So I will.

The second afternoon on Isca. The second night. Everyone on the Hill, fighting the way only they can. I’ve had to put it together afterward from what everyone told me, because I couldn’t see all of it; nobody could. I was on the east terrace most of that afternoon with my hands on the Hill, holding it, because after the valley stood up the rest of Isca wanted to know if it could too, and I had to keep telling it not yet.

So this is what they told me.

The sky.

Arcturus flew the wing.

Not the way Risa does. He told everyone that, afterward, over and over, as if he were afraid somebody would think he was claiming it. He can see every ship in the sky at once, every engine and every gun and every shield. He’s always been able to. What he’s never been able to do is make two of them do the same thing at the same time without shouting.

So he shouted.

Rowan says it was the loudest afternoon of his life. Forty interceptors and every one of Hearth’s long dark ships under the lid, with the Hands coming down again out of the grey, and Arcturus’s voice in every cockpit at once in two languages, one of them very badly.

”Left! Left! No. Your other left.”

And then, halfway through the afternoon, he stopped shouting.

Rowan says he went very quiet. Over the links. For a long time. And then he said, in our language, very carefully:

”I am going to do something. I have never done it. Please do not follow me.”

His wings opened.

The silver ones. Folded flat down his back since he came through the arch. They opened out over the Hill, very wide, wider than I’d ever seen them, and then wider than that, because Rhiannon was below him on the sixth terrace with her hand up and her crown burning.

And every feather was a gun.

Hearth’s silver can be anything. Isolde said that, in the valley. Most of us only think of the ones we were taught.

Arcturus had been taught to fly. And to see. So he thought of the only weapon a man like that would think of.

Every ship in the sky. All at once. Through his eyes.

He flew into the middle of the Hands.

Alone. Over the middle terraces. With his wings out so wide they were a silver ceiling over a whole terrace. And every feather on them turned, very fast, all together, and each one found a Hand. Not the nearest one. The right one. The one whose fire was about to come down on the shaft, or the old people on the fourth terrace, or Julius’s cloak.

And fired.

Two hundred feathers. Two hundred Hands. In one breath.

Not all of them came down. Hands are big. But every one of them turned. Away from the Hill. Burning. Into the grey.

He did it nine times that afternoon.

The ninth time, his wings didn’t fold back properly afterward. They hung off his back, very heavy, very dark at the edges, the way Tiamat’s went dark carrying the ship at Halcro. And he came down on the top terrace beside the arch and sat on the stone and couldn’t get up.

Rowan landed beside him. Got out of his interceptor. And sat down next to him.

”Commander says you’d be good,” said Rowan. ”She said it on the field. I heard her.”

Arcturus looked at him.

”She said,” said Rowan, ”you’d never be her. But you’d be good.”

Arcturus didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he put his hand on Rowan’s shoulder. And got up. And went back up into the sky.

The dragons.

Tiamat and Aramaeis held the north side all afternoon.

The north side of the Hill is the steepest. There aren’t many terraces on it; it drops away into a gorge with a river at the bottom, white water, very loud. The Hungry came up the gorge. Out of the forest on the far side. In ones and tens, then hundreds, then a black river of them going up the white one.

Two dragons came down the gorge to meet them.

I’ve seen Tiamat as a dragon a great many times now. On Corran, round the tower. On Ostrel, with the hill towns on her back. At Halcro, with a ship.

I’d never seen her think.

That’s what Aramaeis told me afterward. Through Isolde. He said his sister had been a dragon for a very long time, and that in all that time she had only ever thought of a dragon as a dragon. Wings and claws and fire. The way her silver remembered what she was.

And then, said Aramaeis, her son stood in a valley and thought of everything.

She opened her mouth.

And it wasn’t fire.

It was a barrel. Silver. Very long. Out of her throat. And then her jaws were the sides of something that I don’t know the name of, and the light came down it the way it came down Dinraal’s cannon, and went down the gorge.

The black river of the Hungry going up the white one went away. For a mile.

Aramaeis beside her did the same. Then something else. His tail. Long. Armoured. It came round, very slowly, and opened, all down its length, plate after plate, and every plate was a gun. He lay along the top of the gorge with his tail down the side of it and every plate firing, and nothing came up the north side of the Hill for four hours.

At dusk, Tiamat came up out of the gorge.

Slowly. With her silver very dark. She lay down on the top terrace beside the arch, as a dragon, too tired to change back, and put her great head down on the stone.

Mother came and sat beside her head.

She didn’t say anything. She put her hand on Tiamat’s silver, between the eyes, the way you’d put your hand on a horse.

Tiamat’s eye opened. Gold. With the silver round it.

”Nice boy,” said Tiamat. Very low. In our language. Out of a dragon’s mouth. ”Mine. Thinks of everything.”

”Yes,” said Mother.

The Mom Squad.

They were on the top terrace. Round the arch. Round the shaft. All ten.

They’d been there since dusk the first night. They were there all the second day. And they were there, the second night, when everything came at once.

Ingrid hushed Hands.

Not six. Not one at a time. Every Hand that came down through the lid over the top of the Hill, that afternoon and that night, she put her hand up to. Flat. Palm out. With Konrad’s hat on her head.

And it went quiet. Engines. Fire. Guns. All of it.

And fell.

And Okafor made it heavy.

I should say what Okafor does. I’ve said it before. She makes things heavy. That’s all. Halloway says it’s the simplest gift she’s ever seen and the most frightening.

A Hand that Ingrid had hushed fell out of the grey over the Hill. Dark. Silent. And Okafor, on the top terrace, beside the arch, with her chalk in her pocket, looked up at it.

And it got heavier.

Much heavier. A hundred times. A thousand. So heavy that it didn’t fall on the Hill, because it fell too fast to go anywhere but straight down, and straight down from where it was was the forest at the foot of the Hill, and it went into the forest so hard that Asha says her instruments measured it from the far side of the valley.

They did it all night. Ingrid hushing. Okafor making heavy. Without speaking. As if they’d drilled it.

They hadn’t. They’d never once worked together.

”I watched her at Merrow,” said Okafor, afterward. ”And at Cassel.” She shrugged. ”She doesn’t waste anything. Neither do I.”

Kyria and Teshka held the steps.

Back to back. With their blades. At the top of the last stair before the arch. And Teshka had her blade again; Garnet had gone down to the bottom terrace at dawn and fetched it, and given it back to her, and Teshka had looked at it for a long time and then kissed Garnet on the forehead, which nobody had ever seen her do.

Kyria and Teshka don’t fight like Andraste. Andraste is fast. Andraste is the fastest thing on Hyrran. Kyria and Teshka are old. Eleven generations of standing in rows, for Teshka. Forty thousand soldiers who call her mother, for Kyria. They don’t move fast. They don’t move much at all.

They don’t have to.

Asha says nothing that came up the last stair that night got within a blade’s length of either of them. She says she watched it on the instruments afterward and couldn’t see them move. She says they’d just be standing there, and then whatever had been coming up the stair wasn’t.

Cleopatra put her field over the old.

All of them. The million and three hundred thousand on the terraces. Not all at once; even Cleopatra can’t do that. A terrace at a time. Her necklace throwing a field over the whole of the fourth terrace, then the fifth, wherever the Hands were coming down, wherever the Hungry were coming over the walls. Very calm. Moving from terrace to terrace in her silver dress, with Rhiannon’s hand on her shoulder making it wider.

And when something came through the field anyway, her bracelets fired.

Very calm. Very precise. One shot. Every time.

”I have four children,” said Cleopatra afterward. When Asha asked her how she’d stayed so calm. ”Nothing that comes over a wall is louder than four children.”

Asha and Eve worked together.

They always do. Asha talks too fast and Eve tells her to stop. But that night Eve didn’t tell her to stop, because what Asha was saying was the shape of the lid.

Her instruments. In the air over the Hill. Reading everything. And one of the things they were reading, all night, was the Ashen wave over Isca. The lid. Where it was thick and where it was thin. Where the thousand Ashen ships were, very high, holding it.

”It is not one wave,” said Asha. Talking very fast. ”It is a thousand. Joined. Every ship holding the edges of the ones beside it. Like hands.”

”So?” said Eve.

”So if one lets go,” said Asha, ”the ones beside it have to hold more.”

Eve looked at her for a long time.

Then Eve’s spheres went up.

Eve’s spheres are support. That’s what she calls herself. Support class. Sensors. Relays. Medical scanners. Repair. She’s never thought of herself as anything else.

That night, she thought of something else.

Forty spheres went up off her mantle into the dark. Very high. Up. Toward the lid. Small. Silver. And when they got near it, very near, near enough that the lid began to end them, every one of them became something else.

Asha says she doesn’t know what. Asha says it wasn’t in any book on Hearth.

But one of the thousand Ashen ships holding the lid, very high, over the west side of Isca, let go.

The lid didn’t break.

The ones beside it held more. The way Asha said.

But for a moment, over the west side of Isca, it was thinner.

And Asha wrote it down.

Maura fed everyone.

All night. On the top terrace. From her eleven pockets, and then from Gilgamesh’s crate, and then from the gardens of the Hill, because Merrit showed her which of the green things the people of Isca eat. She went from terrace to terrace, from the steps to the walls to the arch, with Rhiannon beside her with her basket, and every single person on Tor Isca who was fighting ate something that night.

Maura says that’s not fighting.

Mother says it’s the only kind there is.

And Mother.

Mother lifted the Hill.

Not all of it. She can’t do that. Not yet, she says.

But near midnight, on the second night, a Hand got through. Through Ingrid’s hush and Okafor’s heavy and Arcturus’s feathers and Cleopatra’s field. Over the fifth terrace, very low, with its fire already falling.

And under it, on the fifth terrace, nine hundred old people in a garden.

Mother lifted the garden.

The whole terrace. The stone of it, the soil, the plants, the water channel, the benches, the nine hundred people on them. Up. Off the Hill. Very fast. Fifty feet. A hundred. A whole terrace of Tor Isca, hanging in the air over the Hill in the dark, with the people on it holding onto the benches.

And the Hand’s fire came down where the garden had been.

On bare rock.

Then Mother put it back.

Very gently. The way Tiamat put the ship down. As if it were full of eggs.

It was.

She sat down after. On the top terrace. Very suddenly. Beside Tiamat’s head.

Merrit sat down beside her. A hundred and four. With her basket.

”I’ve never been surprised,” said Merrit, through Isolde, ”in a hundred and four years. Until your son.” She looked at the fifth terrace, back where it belonged. ”And now you.”

”He gets it from me,” said Mother.

The terraces.

Brock held the west stair.

Iron. All of him. The way he is when he means it. With Saska half a step ahead, the way she always is, because Saska says somebody has to go first and it isn’t going to be him.

The west stair is the narrowest on the Hill. Two people wide. It goes up the west side from the forest in a long straight line, and when the Hungry came up the west side that night they came up it, because it was the only way.

Brock stood at the top of it.

And they came.

He didn’t hit them. Brock doesn’t, much. He just stood. Iron. And they hit him. And broke.

Saska hit them. Saska’s quick. Saska’s very quick. She went down the stair half a step ahead of him, the whole night, and anything that got past her broke on Brock.

At three in the morning, something big came up the west stair. Bigger than the rest. Asha says the Hungry had learned on Isca, the way the queen said; they’d learned to come as one, and sometimes when they came as one, they came as one thing.

It came up the stair.

Saska went down it.

And it caught her.

Brock moved.

I’ve known Brock a long time. I’ve seen him iron a thousand times. He stands. That’s what he does. He’s the thing everything breaks on.

He moved.

Down the stair. Very fast. Iron. Faster than anyone had ever seen him move, Saska says, and she was the one in the thing’s grip, so she’d know. Down three steps. Five. Ten. And put his iron hands into the thing that had her.

And pulled it apart.

Not broke. Pulled. With his hands. Like a man tearing a loaf.

And caught Saska as she fell.

He carried her up the stair. Iron. With her in his arms. And put her down on the top step. Very carefully.

She had a cut on her head. Nothing else. She looked up at him.

”You moved,” said Saska.

Brock didn’t say anything. He doesn’t, much. He sat down on the step beside her, iron, and put his iron hand on her hair.

Then he went back to standing.

Roan held the shafts.

Not Julius’s. Julius held his; nobody could have taken it from him. The other ones. The eleven smaller shafts that went down into the Hill toward the queen from every side. The Hands had found them on the second day. They came down on the terraces and their house men went for the shafts with their cutting tools, because the shafts went down to the queen and the queen was what they’d come for.

Roan went into the shafts.

One after another. And put his hands on the walls.

And the walls held. And kept holding after he let go. And when the house men came down the shafts with their fire and their cutting tools, the walls of the shafts didn’t burn and didn’t cut and didn’t come down.

But the roofs did.

Roan let them. In eleven shafts. He held the walls and let the roofs go, all at once, on whatever was coming down.

And then held the roofs, after, where they’d fallen. So nothing would ever get through them again.

And Bree went with him.

Into every shaft. Behind him. With her ribbon of fire very long, because there was a lot of dark in the shafts and she said she didn’t like it. And when the Hungry came into the shafts after the house men, they found Bree.

And her fire.

Which can’t burn anything with a heartbeat.

The Hungry don’t have heartbeats.

Bree told me that afterward. On the top terrace. With ash all over her apron.

”I didn’t know,” she said. ”Before. I didn’t know what it would do to them.” She looked at her hands. At the ribbon round her wrist. ”I thought maybe it wouldn’t do anything. Because it can’t burn anything.”

”And?” I said.

Bree looked down the Hill. At the shafts. At the black that came up out of them, still, very slowly, in the dark.

”It can’t burn anything living,” said Bree. ”That’s all. That’s all Halloway said.” She was quiet. ”They’re not living. Not the way we are.”

The middle.

Gilgamesh found a gun.

I’d better explain that. Gilgamesh has every weapon on his back. Swords and axes and spears and hammers and bows. He reaches over his shoulder and it’s the right one. He’s always been like that.

But he’s very old. His silver looks ancient. And Dinraal says every weapon Gilgamesh ever reaches for is one that was old when Hearth was young.

On the second afternoon, after the valley, Dinraal sat down beside him on the steepest terrace, where Gilgamesh had held the shaft for nine hours, and showed him something.

Dinraal’s silver. On his arm. Becoming, very slowly, the rotary gun from the valley. The turning barrels. The three silver legs. So Gilgamesh could see.

Gilgamesh looked at it for a long time.

Then he reached over his shoulder.

Alexander says it was the happiest he’d ever seen him.

On the second night. On the steepest terrace. With the Hands coming down and the Hungry coming up and Gilgamesh standing at the top of the shaft with every weapon there had ever been on his back and a few new ones.

He’d reach over his shoulder. And it would be a sword. And then a gun. A long one, very old-looking, silver, with a stock like a spear-shaft. And then the turning barrels from the valley. And then a hammer. And then something Dinraal says he’d never seen before, that Gilgamesh must have thought of himself, on the spot, a silver thing like a crossbow the size of a cart that fired a bolt that turned into nine bolts in the air.

And he laughed.

Out loud. The whole night. On the steepest terrace. Gilgamesh, who’s older than anything, who carries crates nobody asked for, who never once in his life looked down at what he was holding.

He laughed every time.

Alexander’s blades became guns.

Four hundred of them. Then more. In formation over the middle of the Hill, the long silver lines, turning all together like starlings. And now every one of them firing.

And Julius.

Julius came up.

At dawn on the third day. Out of the shaft. For the first time since dusk on the first night.

He’d been at the bottom the whole time. Two nights. A day. With his cloak across it. With his short sword. Saying the one word.

He came up the steps very slowly. With his cloak hanging off his shoulders, very dark. With his sword in his hand, which had been an energy blade all night, Asha says, and was a short sword again now.

He came out of the shaft onto the terrace and stood there and looked at the grey of the lid for a long time.

Then he said something. In his own language.

Isolde gave it to us.

”He says: she is small enough now. She told him. Through the rock.” Isolde’s voice went. ”He says: she said thank you. She said she heard him the whole time.”

The queen of Isca was folded.

And the lid was still closed.

We stood on the top terrace of Tor Isca at the dawn that wasn’t. All of us. Every one of us who could still stand. With the arch beside us, whole, open, with nothing in it. With the Hands very high under the lid, going round, waiting. With the Hungry at the walls. With the old on every terrace.

And the queen, folded, at the bottom of the shaft, very small.

Ready to be carried.

And nowhere to carry her.

”Asha,” said Okafor.

Asha was very tired. Her instruments were very low over the Hill now. But she didn’t talk fast.

”The west,” said Asha. ”Where Eve’s spheres went. Where one let go.” She pointed. Up. At nothing. At grey. ”It’s thinner there. They never filled it all the way in.”

”Thin enough?”

Asha looked at Dinraal.

”Not one,” said Dinraal. In our language. His own words. The first I’d ever heard him say in ours. Slowly. Very carefully. The way Mother taught Isolde, and Isolde taught him.

”Not one gun,” said Dinraal. ”All.”

I didn’t understand at first.

Then Hearth’s silver began to move.

All of it. Every suit on the Hill. Dinraal and Isolde. Gilgamesh and Alexander and Julius. Aurelius, with his dome still up over the top terrace. Rhiannon. Cleopatra. Asha and Eve. Arcturus, with his wings hanging. Tiamat and Aramaeis, as dragons, on the top terrace. And the First Weapon, a corgi, very small, at Dinraal’s heel.

The silver came off them.

Not all of it; they kept enough to be armour. But a strand of each of them, going up. Off their wrists. Off their shoulders. Off Tiamat’s scales and Arcturus’s feathers and the First Weapon’s small crown. Up into the air over the top terrace. Very thin. Very bright.

Joining.

Hearth’s silver can copy itself. That’s in every book. It can be anything you can think of.

Nobody on Hearth had ever thought of one thing, all of them, together.

It made a barrel.

Over the top of Tor Isca. Pointing west. Up. At the place where Asha said the lid was thin. Longer than Dinraal’s cannon in the valley. Longer than a Hand. Longer than anything. Every strand of Hearth’s silver on Isca, joined, in one long bright line going up into the grey, with the people it came from standing round the bottom of it holding on.

And Rhiannon, under it, put both her hands up.

And her crown burned so bright it lit the whole Hill.

”Lucas,” said Okafor.

I knew.

I put my hands on the stone of the top terrace. On the Hill. On Isca. And got ready to reach.

It fired.

I’m not going to try to describe the sound. Isolde says there isn’t a word for it on Hearth. She says they’ll have to make one.

It went up. West. Into the thin place.

And through.

And on the other side of the lid—

Lightning.

Coming down.

I felt it before I saw it. Through the hole. Through the thread. Through the long way. Something coming down the thread from the far end, very fast, faster than anything, the way Ingrid comes home through an arch at the end of the wing.

Not from the arch.

From the thread.

Down it. All the way. From Avalon. From the red glass. Through the long way, past the edge of everything, past the grey on Okafor’s map, to Isca.

To the hole Hearth had made.

Risa.

She’d been standing on the red glass for two days. With her hands out.

I found out afterward. From Dory, and Wren, and Konrad, and everyone on Avalon who’d watched her do it. She’d stood at the arch with Kesh at her feet and Vessa on her chest and her hands out, palms up, toward the sky. For two days. Not sleeping. Not sitting down.

Holding the other end.

Every bit of lightning she had. Every storm. Every spark. Gathered in her hands, on the red glass, waiting. For someone on the other side of the lid to make a hole.

Because Risa has never in her life let anyone stay on the other side of an arch.

And when I touched the thread for one breath, in the valley, on the second morning, she’d felt where I was.

And she’d waited.

She came down the thread as lightning.

And hit the lid from the outside.

Exactly where Hearth’s cannon hit it from the inside.

The lid broke.

Not a hole. Not a crack. The whole of it. From the west, where Hearth and Risa met it from both sides at once, outward, in a great white spreading ring, very fast. Across the sky. Every ship of the thousand, very high, holding the edge of the ones beside it like hands, and the ones beside them, and the ones beside them.

Letting go.

All at once.

And the sky came back.

Pale. Blue. Dawn. With two small moons in it.

And the arch filled.

The red glass. The interceptor field. Dory, with her hands on the frame. Every queen on Avalon singing. Konrad on his stool. Wren on the long ward, with Rafe, sitting up very straight, already counting.

And Risa, standing in the middle of it. With nothing left in her hands.

She didn’t come through the arch.

She didn’t have to. She’d already come. She was on the top terrace of Tor Isca, beside me, on her knees on the stone, with the last of the lightning going out of her.

She looked up at me.

”You’re late,” said Risa.

”I was holding a planet.”

”I know,” said Risa. ”So was I.”

The Ashen went.

All of them. The thousand. Very high, over Isca, in the pale dawn. They didn’t come down. They didn’t turn on the arch. They went up, very fast, into the blue, the way they’d come, and were gone.

Vessa didn’t turn again. On Avalon. On Dory’s chest now, because Risa had given her to Dory before she went down the thread.

Andraste says Vessa slept for a day.

The Hands went after them.

The ones that were left. Forty-one, Asha says. Up. Into the blue. Following the Ashen. Because there was no lid now, and no terms that would keep them safe from what was on the Hill.

And the Hungry—

The Hungry were still at the walls.

They had nowhere to go either.

Risa stood up.

Very slowly. On the top terrace. With Ingrid on one side of her, who’d come across the terrace when she saw her daughter come down the thread, with Konrad’s hat still on. And Mother on the other.

She looked at the wing. In the sky over the Hill. Forty interceptors and every one of Hearth’s ships. And Arcturus, with his wings hanging off his back.

She shut her eyes.

Arcturus, she said. Into the silver. Which was back now. Thank you. I’ve got them.

And Arcturus came down out of the sky and sat on the top terrace beside Tiamat’s head and didn’t get up again for a long time.

Risa flew the wing.

Over the walls. With her eyes shut. Forty interceptors and every ship of Hearth’s, all at once, the way only Risa can. And everything on the Hill went to the walls with them. Everyone. The Hyrrani and the Mom Squad and Hearth and the house on the rise. And the Hungry at the walls of Tor Isca, with no lid over them and nowhere left to go.

It took until noon.

Then we went home.

The old first. The way they always do, on Isca, at the end; they go down the Hill when they’re old. Except this time they went up. One million, three hundred and seventy-eight thousand, two hundred and six. Up the steps. Through the arch. Onto the red glass. Into Maura’s arms, who’d gone through ahead of them to be there.

Then the wing. Then the Hyrrani. Then Hearth.

And then Julius went down the shaft one more time.

He came up with Merrit.

She’d asked. On the top terrace. When Okafor said someone would have to go down and carry the queen.

”I’m the eldest,” said Merrit. Through Isolde. ”Of the Hill. Of all the terraces.” She looked at the shaft. ”All my life she was under me and I didn’t know. I’d like to carry her once.”

So Julius carried Merrit down the shaft, because she’s a hundred and four. And at the bottom, in the warm, in the dark, where he’d stood for two nights, Merrit knelt down.

And picked up the queen of Isca.

She was the size of a plum.

Merrit says. Warm. Smooth. Grey and gold, like the ash queen on Avalon, but darker. Very heavy for her size. Singing. Very quietly. The way she’d sung under the Hill for longer than there had been a Hill.

Merrit held her in both hands. In her lap. All the way up the shaft. With Julius carrying both of them.

And through the arch.

The last of us through was Roan.

He let go of the frame. Hesk swung her hammer at the keystone. And the arch on Tor Isca stood for three minutes on its own, long enough for Roan to walk backward through it with his hands out.

And then it came down.

On the top terrace of a world at the edge of everything. Where nobody lives any more. With a long valley of glass to the east of it, very beautiful. And the gardens on every terrace. And the water still coming down the channels from the top.

Behind him.

Wren counted.

She’d been counting since the lid broke. From the long ward. With Rafe on her chest. In the voice that doesn’t break.

”Three million, five hundred and eighty-seven thousand, two hundred and six,” said Wren. At the dawn count, the next morning, on the red glass, with Konrad on his stool beside her. ”Of three million, six hundred thousand.”

”Twelve thousand, seven hundred and ninety-four,” said Wren. ”On the Hill.”

”Six hundred and forty of the Hyrrani. Twenty-one of Hearth’s. Four of the wing. One of Odra’s smiths.”

A pause.

”Everyone else,” said Wren, ”is home.”

I want to say that again. Because I’ve written a lot of numbers in this book that didn’t end like that.

Everyone else was home.

Andraste, with the long cut down her arm that she finally let Halloway look at, and that Halloway looked at and said a great many things about. Luna and Sera and Hana. Mother. All ten of the Mom Squad. Hearth’s three. Dinraal and Isolde. Tiamat, who changed back from a dragon on the red glass and lay on it as a woman for an hour with Rhiannon’s hand on her forehead. Arcturus, with his wings in a sling. Brock and Saska, with the cut on her head. Bree and Roan, who went to their mother at the edge of the north field, and stood in front of her, and she put her hand on both their faces. Okafor. Kyria and Teshka. Merrit.

And the queen of Isca, the size of a plum, in Merrit’s lap.

The eldest asked for her.

That night. From the heart of Root. Very quietly.

Bring her to me, she said. Or—

And then she stopped.

No, said the eldest. Not to me. She has been alone a long time. She went further than any of my daughters, to be safe. A pause. Put her where she will be safest.

Merrit looked at the plum in her lap for a long time.

Then she looked at me.

So I made a hill.

On Avalon. To the south of Thera, where the land is flat and green and there was nothing. One night. The way I made the ground for Thera, and for Shell. I asked the ground to come up, very slowly. Round. Soft. Old-looking, the way the hills of Isca are old.

And I asked it to make terraces. All the way round. From the bottom to the top.

And a shaft. Going down. Into the warm.

And water. Coming down from the top in channels in the stone.

And stopped.

They built the gardens themselves.

Merrit carried her down.

Not Julius this time. Merrit said she’d go on her own feet. A hundred and four. Down the new shaft into the new hill, slowly, a step at a time, with Mother behind her in case, and the queen of Isca in both her hands.

And at the bottom, in the warm, she knelt down.

And put her in the ground.

She sang.

Not loud. She doesn’t have to be loud any more. Very quietly. Under the new hill. The way she sang for longer than there have been houses. And every queen on Avalon answered. And the eldest, a long way off, at the heart of Root.

And under the new hill, very slowly, she began to unfold.

They call it Tor Isca. The same name. The Hill.

Merrit lives on the top terrace. Of course she does. And when people ask her where she’s from, she says the Hill, and when they ask which one, she says, there’s only ever been one. It just moved.

Days 4605–4608. Hands Out.

Arcturus shouted, then went quiet; every feather was a gun. Tiamat thought of everything. Ingrid hushed, Okafor made heavy; neither wastes anything. Kyria and Teshka didn’t seem to move. Cleopatra: nothing is louder than four children. Eve’s spheres made one let go. Maura fed everyone. Mother lifted the fifth terrace. Brock moved. Roan let the roofs go. Bree’s fire can’t burn anything living; they aren’t. Gilgamesh found a gun and laughed. Julius came up: she’s small enough; she heard him the whole time. Not one gun, said Dinraal. All. Risa had held the other end for two days with her hands out. The lid broke. 3,587,206 of 3,600,000; everyone else is home. Merrit carried the queen, the size of a plum. I made a hill. There’s only ever been one.