Scarecrow

Isolde’s notebook was going wrong.

Not the writing. The gardens.

She’d shown me once, the week the city was made, page after page of every roof in New Hearth, what grew there and how and for whom. Moss for the old woman by the river. Fruit trees on the roof with the water. The small silver flower that only grows where it’s warm, that Ithel took his name from, on the roof of the house with the big kitchen.

She showed me again on the porch, five months on, with her feet up on Mother’s stool because Halloway said so, and her middle so large now she has to hold the notebook out to one side.

The same pages. With new marks in the margins.

Small. Very neat. In her own script.

”What do they mean?” I said.

Isolde didn’t answer at once.

”Not thriving,” she said.

There were a lot of them.

Not every roof. But most. Page after page, the little mark in the margin. The fruit trees that had flowered in the first month and then dropped the flowers and not set. The moss that had gone brown at the edges. The beds of Hearth’s herbs that came up green and stayed small, and smaller, and didn’t spread.

”I asked them to grow,” said Isolde. ”Every one. The night you made the roofs. And they grew.” She turned a page. ”And then they stopped.”

”Why?”

She looked at the north field for a long time.

”I don’t know,” she said. ”On Hearth they’d been growing in the same soil for thousands of years. It was alive.” She closed the notebook. ”This soil is very good. You brought it up from very deep. But it’s very new.” She put her hand flat on the cover. ”Nothing’s ever lived in it. Nothing’s ever died in it. Nothing’s ever been buried in it and come up again.”

She looked at me.

”It doesn’t know what a garden is,” said Isolde.

I didn’t know what to say.

I’d made a country. A river. Four hundred bridges. A window with a crack in the third pane. And it didn’t know what a garden was.

I said so.

Isolde put her hand on my arm.

”You made the house,” she said. ”Somebody else has to make it a home. That’s not yours to do. It never was.” She smiled a little. ”Your mother told me that. About the house on the rise.”

It was the gardener’s queen who heard.

I should say where she’s been. Because she’s been in the same place since the Hand, and she’s so small and so quiet that people forget her.

In the corner of our garden. Where the wall meets the house. Where Mother set the last gardener down in the moss, years ago now, after we brought them out of the fourth finger of the second Hand. The last of a small wet green world of gardeners, and the last of their queen, worn almost to nothing in a collar. A flower the size of Genny’s two hands cupped together. White inside, with a silver heart.

The last gardener curled round her. And the green spread from the corner along the wall, half its length now, and further, with small white flowers all through it.

She sings at dawn with the others. Very quietly. Like water.

And she listens.

She spoke at the dawn count.

Not to me. To Isolde. Through the silver. Which she’s never done; Genny says she’s never spoken to anyone but Genny, and only when Genny asks.

Isolde was on the bench at the foot of Konrad’s stool. With Ithel. She stopped in the middle of a sentence and put her hand on her middle and went very still, the way she goes when the baby kicks.

It wasn’t the baby.

”Lucas,” said Isolde. Very quietly. ”Something’s talking to me.”

I heard it too, once I listened. Very faint. The smallest voice on Avalon. Smaller than Kesh’s cloud.

So few, said the gardener’s queen.

Isolde didn’t move.

I hear them, said the gardener’s queen. Through you. Through the notebook. Through the silver in your hands when you write. A pause. So many gardens. And so few thriving. They are trying so hard.

”Yes,” said Isolde. Out loud. To nothing. To the corner of the garden, a long way up the hill.

It makes me sad, said the gardener’s queen.

And then, after a long time, very quietly:

May we come?

Genny explained it at breakfast.

She’s the one who listens to her; she was the one who held her in her cupped hands in the dark of the fourth finger. She sat at the long table in the kitchen with her tea going cold and her eyes on the window, toward the garden.

”She was a gardener’s queen,” said Genny. ”That’s what she said in the Hand. She was never big. She was never a mountain or a spire. Her whole world was gardens. Every one of them. Small. Wet. Green.” She turned her cup round. ”Her people went from garden to garden, all their lives. Tending. And she went with them. Under the soil. Telling it what it was for.”

”And then the Sorn,” said Mother.

”And then the Sorn used them up,” said Genny. ”A few at a time. Growing food for broods on world after world. Until there was only one.” She looked at the window. ”She hasn’t had a real garden since. Just a corner. Ours.” She paused. ”She says it’s a very good corner. She says she’d be glad to stay forever.”

”But,” said Mother.

”But there are four hundred thousand gardens in New Hearth,” said Genny, ”that don’t know what they’re for.”

Mother didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she got up from the table. And went out through the courtyard door. Into the garden.

I went after her.

She stood in the corner. Where the wall meets the house. Looking down at the green, half the length of the wall and further, and the small white flowers in it, and at the heart of it, in the moss, a mound the size of a large dog with two old wet eyes. And curled inside the curve of it, a flower.

Mother looked at them for a long time.

”Lucas made this field,” she said. Not to me. To them. ”Out of ash and glass.” She knelt down. Slowly. With one hand on the ground first. ”And when you came, I put you in it. Because Garnet said that’s where you go if you’re a gardener.”

The last gardener’s eyes moved to her.

”You’ve been very good to it,” said Mother. ”Better than I ever was. I can’t grow a radish.”

The last gardener put out a thread. Soft. Green. Fine as hair. And laid it across her palm.

The way it did in the Hand. The first time.

”Go on,” said Mother. Very quietly. ”Go and be useful. It’s what we’re for.”

I said I’d carry them.

Mother said no.

”I carried it out of the Hand,” she said. ”I’ll carry it to the next place.”

So she did.

Through the courtyard arch. Through the new arch on the plain beyond Thera. Across the bridges of New Hearth, which sang in the wind off the mountains. With the last gardener curled in her arms, very small against her chest, the way she held Dory. And Genny beside her, with the gardener’s queen in her cupped hands, closed up tight because it was early.

And behind them, half of Avalon.

Not because anyone asked. People just came. The way they come to everything.

The last gardener left something behind.

I didn’t see it until the next morning, when I went out to the corner of the garden by habit and found it empty. Except it wasn’t.

The green was still there. All along the wall. Half its length and more, with the small white flowers in it.

And in the corner, where the mound had been, where the moss was pressed flat in the shape of something the size of a large dog, a single new shoot. Green. Very fine. Already uncurling.

Mother saw it at breakfast through the kitchen window and didn’t say anything for a long time.

”It’s left us a cutting,” she said in the end. ”So the corner won’t forget.”

Isolde chose the roof.

The grey stone house on the hill in the old quarter. Bahamut’s house. With the silver roof, and the garden on top, and in the middle of the garden the mound where she’d planted the seed from the old tree on Hearth. Two small leaves, the last time I’d seen it.

She was up there already when Mother came up the stairs with the last gardener. Kneeling by the mound, very awkwardly, with Dinraal behind her holding her up by the elbows, which she was allowing because she had no choice.

Mother set the last gardener down in the soil beside the seed.

Genny opened her hands.

The gardener’s queen didn’t do anything for a while.

She sat in the soil where Genny had put her, a small closed flower, very still. Listening. The way she listened from the corner of our garden to every garden in New Hearth, through the silver in Isolde’s hands.

Then she opened.

Petal by petal. White inside. Silver at the heart.

And the roof smelled of rain.

The last gardener stretched.

I’d never seen it do that. In all the years in the corner of our garden, it never moved much; it lay in its curve round its queen and grew green from the edges of itself, very slowly, along the wall.

On Bahamut’s roof it stretched out every thread it had. All at once. Out of the moss of itself, soft, green, fine as hair, hundreds of them, going out across the soil of the roof garden in every direction. To the edges. Over the edges. Down the grey stone walls of the house to the street, and across the street, and up the walls of the next house.

To the next roof.

And the next.

And under the city, very quietly, the gardener’s queen sang.

Not loud. She’s never loud. But I felt it, standing on Bahamut’s roof with my hand on the stone. Down through the house. Down into the new soil I’d brought up from very deep under the western sea. Soil that had never had anything live in it, or die in it, or be buried in it and come up again.

She was telling it.

What it was for.

Every garden is a thousand small things, said the gardener’s queen. Through the silver. To the soil. To all of it. All turning toward the light. That is all a garden is. That is all you have to be.

Isolde, kneeling by the mound, put both her hands over her mouth.

Because those were Rhiannon’s words. That Isolde said in the long valley on Isca, with ten thousand of her leaves in the air. Mother taught me to garden. She said a garden is a thousand small things, all turning toward the light.

The gardener’s queen had heard her say it. Through the silver. And kept it.

It took three days.

The green went out from Bahamut’s roof the way the Hungry went across a world, if the Hungry were kind. Roof to roof. Street by street. Down the old quarter to the river and across the bridges and up the other side into the new quarter where the houses are white.

Wherever it went, things woke up.

That’s the only way to say it. Not grew; Isolde had made them grow, the first night. Woke. The fruit trees that had dropped their flowers flowered again, and this time set. The moss on the old woman’s roof by the river went green to the edges and then over them, down the wall, and she leaned out of her window and shouted something in Hearth’s language that Dinraal wouldn’t translate.

The herbs on the roof with the big kitchen spread. The silver flowers that only grow where it’s warm opened every morning and closed every night, and every morning there were more.

And the other queens came.

I didn’t ask them. I don’t think anyone did. I think they heard the gardener’s queen singing under New Hearth, the smallest voice on Avalon, and came the way people come to everything here.

Through the silver. Through every arch and every thread. From every hollow and ledge and pool and spire on Avalon.

Our queen, from the roots by the far wall, the oldest on Avalon, older than the house. The Scarecrow queen, under the trees, with her young round her in a ring. The heavy queen and the coral queen and the ash queen and the moss queen, who came louder than the rest, Genny said, because she’d always wanted to meet the gardener’s and had never been sure she’d be welcome.

The queens of the peoples we brought home. The Ulu, from Hana’s pool, cold and shimmering. The Sef, from her red shelf on the rim, who sent her beam across the sea for the first time to lie along the river of New Hearth in the afternoons. The Nivi, from the General’s mountain, ringing. The Karst, from the dark, very low.

And the queen of Isca. From under the new Tor Isca. Still unfolding, still small, still singing very quietly the way she sang under her Hill for longer than there’s been a Hill. She came too.

None of them came in person. Queens don’t, much. They sang.

Into the soil of New Hearth. Under the gardener’s queen. Giving her a little each. The way they gave to her once, in Genny’s hands, in the dark of the fourth finger, when she was a sliver worn almost to nothing.

She was the smallest piece of the smallest queen of the smallest world, our queen said to me afterward. From the roots by the far wall. And we gave to her. And she grew.

A pause.

Now she gives back. That is what it is for.

On the third evening, Isolde went up onto the roof with the notebook.

On her own. Dinraal let her; she’d told him that if he held her elbows one more time she’d put him in the river. She sat down by the mound in the middle of the garden, slowly, and opened the notebook on what was left of her lap, and turned to the first page.

And began rubbing out the little marks in the margins.

One at a time. Roof by roof. All the way through.

It took her until dark.

When she’d finished, she closed the notebook and sat there for a long time. With the gardener’s queen beside her in the soil, closing for the night. And the last gardener’s threads all round her across the roof. And in front of her, in the middle of the mound, the seed from Bahamut’s tree.

Not two leaves any more.

A sapling. Knee-high. With a straight thin stem and a dozen leaves, pale, silver-green at the backs, turning very slightly in the wind off the mountains. Toward the house on the rise, a long way east.

Dinraal came up the stairs.

He didn’t hold her elbows. He sat down beside her on the soil of the roof. With his silver hands on his knees. And looked at the sapling for a long time.

Isolde leaned against his shoulder.

”He planted it,” said Dinraal. In our language. His own words. Slowly. ”The spring my mother told him. He never saw it flower.”

”I know.”

”He never saw me,” said Dinraal.

Isolde didn’t say anything.

She took his hand. His silver one. And put it flat on her middle.

And the baby kicked.

Dinraal didn’t move.

He sat on Bahamut’s roof in the dark with his hand on his wife and his son kicking under it and the sapling from his father’s tree turning in the wind in front of him, and didn’t move at all.

Then he said something in Hearth’s language. Very quietly. To Isolde.

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she said one word.

Dot was on the porch of the house on the rise, a world away. She heard it through the silver, the way she hears everything. And she told me, at the dawn count, very carefully, because she said it was the kind of word that should only be said once and she wanted to get it right.

”He asked her,” said Dot, ”if they could call him Bahamut.”

A pause.

”She said: yes.”

Tiamat heard at the dawn count.

She was on the red glass, down off the Wall for the morning, standing very straight at the edge of the interceptor field the way she does. Watching Risa fly the wing, with Kesh in the basket at Risa’s feet frowning at every turn.

Dot told her.

Tiamat didn’t say anything.

She stood there. On the red glass. Very straight. Looking at the edge of things.

And then she turned round, and walked to the courtyard arch, and through it, and across the plain beyond Thera, and through the arch to New Hearth, and across the bridges, and up the hill to the old quarter, to the grey stone house with the silver roof. Up the stairs. To the roof.

Isolde was there. By the sapling. With the notebook.

Tiamat stood at the top of the stairs.

I wasn’t there. Isolde told me. Afterward, on the porch, with her feet up.

She said Tiamat stood at the top of the stairs for a long time and didn’t come out onto the roof.

Then she did.

And knelt down. In the soil. Very straight. Beside the sapling from the tree her husband planted the spring she told him she was carrying.

And put her hand on Isolde’s middle.

”He would have been,” said Tiamat. In our language. Very slowly. Isolde says it was the most words in our language she’d ever heard her say at once. ”He would have been so glad. To be a name. Instead of a line.”

”What did she mean?” I asked Isolde. ”A line?”

Isolde looked at her notebook for a long time.

”Dinraal found his father one line at a time,” she said. ”From what other people had rubbed out. Every record on Hearth that had him in it. Every line said what he was for.” She put her hand on her middle. ”That’s all Bahamut ever was, for Dinraal. Lines. In other people’s writing.”

She looked east. Toward the house on the rise.

”Now he’ll be somebody we say every day,” said Isolde. ”At the table. On the stairs. In the garden.” She smiled. ”Bahamut, eat your breakfast. Bahamut, leave the gardener alone. Bahamut, your brother’s looking for you.”

Ithel heard the name that afternoon.

Isolde told him on the roof. By the sapling. With the gardener’s queen open beside them in the sun.

He thought about it very seriously. The way Ione thinks. The way all the children who were in boxes think. Then he put his hand on Isolde’s middle and waited.

The baby kicked.

”Bahamut,” said Ithel. Trying it.

Kick.

Ithel nodded, as if that settled it.

”Warm,” he said.

Rhiannon ate a pear on the fifth morning.

That doesn’t sound like much. I want to say why it is.

Rhiannon feeds everyone. That’s what she does; it’s what Mother says she’s for, the way Mother is for the porch. She knows who hasn’t eaten from across a plain. She came through the arch with two faces on the second morning with a basket and has never once, since, come through any door on Avalon without it.

Nobody had ever seen her eat anything that didn’t come out of a kitchen she’d cooked in herself.

Dot says it’s a Hearth thing. Dot says that on Hearth, the old one, a queen of the succubi only eats what comes out of her own kitchen or her own garden, because she has to know where everything she gives comes from, and she can’t give what she hasn’t tasted. And her garden was on Hearth. And Hearth is gone.

Six months. Rhiannon had been feeding four hundred and twelve million people out of a basket, and eating bread she’d baked herself from flour that came from Avalon’s fields, and nothing else.

On the fifth morning after the gardener came, the pear tree on the roof of the house with the big kitchen, the one with nine children, set fruit.

Rhiannon was there before the family was awake.

She stood on their roof in the dawn in her winged dress with the basket on her arm and looked at the pears for a long time. Small. Green-gold. The pears of Hearth, that she’d grown on her own roof for longer than Isolde had been alive.

She picked one.

And ate it. Standing on someone else’s roof, in the wind off the new mountains, with juice on her chin.

Aurelius found her there. He’d woken and she wasn’t beside him, and he knew where she’d be, he says, because there was only one place in New Hearth she could have gone at dawn.

He stood at the top of the stairs and didn’t say anything.

She turned round.

And held out the rest of the pear.

He took it. And ate it. The Chancellor of Hearth, on the roof of a house with nine children asleep under it, eating half a pear.

Then he took the basket off her arm. Gently. And put it down on the soil.

”Sit,” said Aurelius. Through Dot. Very quietly. ”Just once. Let someone bring you something.”

He brought her pears all morning. From every roof in the old quarter that had them. She sat on the soil by the basket and ate them, one after another, very slowly, and didn’t say anything.

The family with nine children woke up and came up the stairs and found the queen of the succubi sitting on their roof with pear juice on her dress and the Chancellor bringing her more.

The eldest of the nine went back down without a word.

And came back up with bread.

The old woman with the moss came up the hill that evening.

Nobody’s ever seen her leave her roof. Dinraal says she’s been on it since before he was born; he says on Hearth, the old one, children used to dare each other to knock on her door and run.

She came up the hill to the grey stone house with the silver roof on two sticks. And knocked. And when Dinraal opened the door, very surprised, she put something in his hands without a word.

A jar. Of soil.

Dark. Very dark. With threads of green through it, fine as hair, and the smell of rain.

Then she said something very sharp in Hearth’s language and went back down the hill on her two sticks.

”What did she say?” I asked. On the porch. The next night.

Dinraal looked at the jar on the table between us for a long time.

”She said,” he said slowly, ”it is from her roof. From the moss. The first soil in New Hearth that knows what it is.” He turned the jar in his silver hands. ”She said a child should be born near soil that knows what it is. She said every child on Hearth was. She said she wasn’t going to have Bahamut’s grandson be the first who wasn’t.”

He put the jar down.

”And then she said I put the drain on the wrong side too,” said Dinraal.

Isolde laughed so hard she had to hold her middle with both hands.

Bahamut kicked.

Dinraal looked at the jar for a while longer. Then he got up and took it upstairs, and I heard him go along the landing and open a door. The room at the back, next to the window. The one that’s going to be the nursery, that Isolde’s been filling with things for weeks and Dinraal hasn’t been able to go into.

He was in there a long time.

When he came down, the jar was gone. Isolde says he put it on the sill. In the nursery. Under the window. Where the light comes in first thing, so the soil would know what morning was.

It’s still there. Isolde waters it. Something green has already come up in it that nobody planted.

Merrit came over the sea on the ninth day.

From the new Tor Isca, south of Thera, where she lives on the top terrace and has never, as far as anyone knows, gone further than the bottom of her own Hill. She’s a hundred and four. She came through three arches and across a bridge that sang at her, on Mother’s arm, and stood in a street in the old quarter of New Hearth and looked up at the green going over the edges of every roof.

”She’s here,” said Merrit. Through Isolde, who has some Iscan now, from the siege. ”I can feel her. Like my queen, under my Hill. Only smaller.”

”She’s very small,” said Isolde.

Merrit nodded. ”Mine was too. When I carried her down the shaft.” She held up her hands. Cupped. ”The size of a plum.”

She looked up at the roofs for a long time.

”Mine sends something,” said Merrit. ”She asked me to bring it. She said a queen should never be the only one of her kind on a world. She said she was, for a very long time, and she’d not wish it on anyone.”

She opened her hands.

In them, very small, a seed. Grey and gold. Warm.

”She grew it,” said Merrit. ”Under the Hill. It’s not a queen. It’s for the soil.” She held it out to Isolde. ”She said: so the little one has a neighbour.”

Isolde planted it on Bahamut’s roof. Beside the gardener’s queen. Where the last gardener’s threads met.

The gardener’s queen opened very wide that night and didn’t close until dawn.

Ione counted at breakfast every morning, the whole time.

I want to put that here too. Because while all of it was happening, the roofs and the pears and the jar of soil and the name, she sat at the long table in the kitchen of the house on the rise every morning with her eyes closed, and counted.

Two hundred and twelve, she’d say. And open her eyes. And eat her bread.

Every morning. The same number.

Konrad wrote it on the back of the sheet each time. In a column of its own. Under And the room, underlined twice.

212. 212. 212.

On the nineteenth morning she closed her eyes and was quiet much longer than usual, and Ingrid’s hand went very still on the table next to hers.

Then Ione opened her eyes.

”Two hundred and twelve,” she said.

And Ingrid breathed out, and Konrad wrote it, and Okafor, who’d been standing in the kitchen doorway every morning for nineteen days pretending she’d come down for tea, went back up the stairs to the map room.

She hasn’t said what the plan is. Not yet. Not to anyone but Holt and Crane and the Overseer and Asha, at the long table, very late, every night.

But she’s had Keir and Enna in the map room twice. And Odra came through from Hyrran with drawings rolled under her arm and went up the stairs without stopping for tea, which Mother noticed.

And on the nineteenth night, when I went up to the map room to say goodnight, there was a new line on the slate under The room. Before any more stop.

Just one word.

Kiln.

Genny went over on the twentieth evening.

On her own. She doesn’t go anywhere on her own much; she and Garnet go everywhere together, and when they’re apart, Garnet says, it’s like watching someone walk with one shoe. But she went across the plain and through the arch and over the bridges to the grey stone house in the old quarter, and up the stairs, and out onto Bahamut’s roof. And sat down by the gardener’s queen in the last of the light.

I know because Isolde was there. In the window below, with the notebook. She heard most of it.

”You’re happy,” said Genny. Out loud. Not a question.

The gardener’s queen didn’t answer at once.

Then: Yes.

Genny didn’t say anything for a while. She put her hands in her lap. Cupped, Isolde says. Without meaning to. The way she held her in the dark of the fourth finger, when she was a grey spark rising out of a collar.

”I used to come and sit by the wall,” said Genny. ”In the evenings. When I couldn’t sleep. You never said anything. You just closed up for the night, and I’d sit there until you had.”

I know, said the gardener’s queen. I could hear you.

”It was nice,” said Genny. ”Knowing you were there.”

The gardener’s queen was quiet for a long time.

You held me, she said. In the dark. When there was nothing left of me but the sliver, and I’d been round its middle so long I didn’t know how to be anywhere else. A pause. You asked me where I wanted to go. Nobody had ever asked me. Not since my people. Not since the gardens.

Genny didn’t say anything.

You can come here, said the gardener’s queen. Any evening. And sit. And I’ll close up for the night, and you can stay until I have.

A pause.

And the corner isn’t empty, she said. The last one left a cutting. And the cutting is growing a bud. I asked it to.

Genny sat on the roof until the gardener’s queen had closed for the night.

Then she went home.

And the next evening Garnet went with her. And sat on the roof beside her and drew the gardener’s queen closing, petal by petal, in the last of the light, while Genny sat with her hands in her lap. And that drawing hangs in the kitchen of the house on the rise now, by the door, beside Father, and Dinraal at his window, and the slate.

I went back to the corner of our garden that night. Late. The way I go to the children’s room.

The shoot the last gardener left was taller. Green. Very fine. Uncurling.

And next to it, very small, closed up tight for the night, a bud.

White.

Days 4779–4801. Rain on the Roofs.

Isolde’s notebook: most of New Hearth’s gardens marked not thriving; the soil is new and doesn’t know what a garden is. The gardener’s queen heard through the silver in her hands: so few; they are trying so hard; may we come? Mother knelt in Trevor’s bed: go and be useful, it’s what we’re for. She carried the last gardener; Genny carried the queen. On Bahamut’s roof the gardener stretched every thread and the queen told the soil what it was for: a thousand small things turning toward the light. Three days, roof to roof. Every queen on Avalon sang under New Hearth and gave a little, the way they gave to her once. Isolde rubbed out every mark. The sapling is knee-high. Dinraal asked; she said yes: Bahamut. Tiamat knelt in the soil: a name instead of a line. Ithel: warm. The old woman brought a jar of her soil. Rhiannon ate a pear on someone else’s roof; Aurelius brought her more. Merrit brought a seed from the queen of Isca: so the little one has a neighbour. Ione counted 212 every morning. A new word on Okafor’s slate: Kiln. Genny sat on the roof until the queen had closed. The gardener left a cutting in our corner, and a bud.