Scarecrow

I’ve heard a queen scream once before.

The first dawn. When I didn’t know anything, and turned sixty-one of the Teeming to salt. One of them was young, and screamed, and I’ve heard it every night since, for a moment, on the edge of sleep.

That was one scream. Short. Then it stopped.

This one didn’t stop.

Dory had her hands over her ears on the top step. It didn’t help. I put my hand on her shoulder and the moment I touched her I heard it too, through her, through the edge of the net, from very far away.

It wasn’t a word. Queens talk under words. This was under that. The sound a world would make if you cut it open and it was awake.

Under the garden wall, the Scarecrow queen lifted her head.

Under the house, in the hall, every queen on every ledge lifted hers.

And on Root, low in the east, I felt the eldest go very still.

Where? said the eldest. Through the ground. Through Dory. Very quiet. Child. Where is she?

“I don’t know,” said Dory. Her face was white and her eyes were black and wide. “Far. Past anything. Past where the Hungry came from. Past where I’ve ever reached.” She pressed her hands harder over her ears. “There’s a thread. Very thin. She’s holding it out. She’s holding it out to anyone.”

Then she has been doing it for a long time, said the eldest. To reach this far.

“Dad,” said Dory. “They’re cutting her.”

Mother was in the doorway. In her coat. With her hand still on the frame.

She looked at Dory. At me.

“Go on, then,” said Mother.

I’ll say how we went. Because I’ve never written it, and people ask.

I scatter. I’ve done it since I was small. Across the dark, all of me, every atom, let go and put back somewhere else. I used to have to know where. I used to have to see it, or have stood there.

I don’t now.

Dory had the thread. Very thin. Going out from the edge of the net into the dark, further than anything, to the queen at the other end of it who was holding it out to anyone.

So Dory took my hand. And we scattered up it.

It took about as long as a breath.

I don’t know how far it was. Tiamat tried to work it out afterward, from the stars, and gave up. She said the number didn’t mean anything, because nothing had ever gone that far that fast, so there wasn’t anything to compare it with.

She said: further than the Hungry came from. Further than the middle. Further than anywhere anyone on any of our worlds has ever had a name for.

I think about that sometimes. That my daughter and I went somewhere in a breath that nobody had a name for. And that a queen there had been holding a thread out to anyone, for a very long time, and we were the anyone.

We came out over a world I’d never seen.

Blue. Very blue. Seas, and white cloud, and under the cloud a great deal of green. A world like Root, almost. Old. You could tell it was old the way you can tell a person is: the mountains were worn down soft, and the rivers had had time to go wherever they liked.

And on the green, in the middle of the biggest continent, a scar.

Silver. Bright. Miles across. Like a wound with metal in it.

The screaming was coming from under it.

“There,” said Dory.

We went down.

I’ll write what we found. All of it. Mother says I leave the hard bits out, and this is the hardest bit I’ve got, and I’m not leaving it out.

It was a building. The scar. A building the size of a city, silver, flat, pressed down into the ground of the world like a hand pressed into bread. Spotless. Beautiful, if you didn’t know. Long white halls inside, with high windows and light coming in very clean, and floors so polished you could see your face.

And racks.

They went down the halls. Both sides. All the way. Further than I could see. Frames, very tall, silver, very well made. And on the frames, hung up the way you’d hang a coat to dry, the queens.

What was left of them.

They’d been opened. All the way. Every one. Laid open from end to end, carefully, like something being studied, and pinned flat to the frame. And taken from. Not eaten. Not burned. Taken from. Every bit of silver in them, all of it, down to the smallest thread. You could see where it had been, in the empty channels in them, grey, dry, like riverbeds in a drought.

They were dead. All of them.

There were hundreds.

Dory stopped in the doorway.

She didn’t say anything. She just stood there with Dusk in her hand and looked down the hall, with her black eyes, down into every one of them. Every queen on every frame. All the way to the end.

I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t look all the way in.”

“I already have,” said Dory.

The screaming was at the end of the hall.

We went down it. Between the racks. Our feet very loud on the polished floor.

At the end there was a room. Round, very high, with a window in the roof and the light coming down through it in a shaft like the one in the hall under our house. And in the middle of the room, in the light, on a frame bigger than all the others, the queen.

Alive.

Opened. Half of her. Pinned. With silver lines going out of her into the floor, into the walls, thin as hair, hundreds of them, drawing it out of her. Slowly. Carefully. You could see it going. Bright, along the lines, away.

She’d been screaming the whole time. For as long as it took to draw a thread out to anyone, from here to Avalon.

And round her, in the light, very calm, were the people doing it.

I’ll describe them once.

They were tall. Taller than the Aldri. Beautiful, the way a knife is. Pale, with long white hair, all of them, and long white robes, and faces that looked like they’d never been surprised by anything. Their hands were very long. Their eyes were very bright.

And they were full of silver.

Not the way we are. Not in the blood, quiet, like warm water. Their silver was on the outside. Under the skin, so close you could see it. In lines. Bright ones, all over them, like veins of light. Only the light was wrong. It had gone dark at the edges. Tarnished. The way silver goes when it’s been left in the wrong air too long. Black at the edges, and bright in the middle, and moving.

They were standing round the queen with their hands out. And the lines of silver coming out of her went into the floor and into the walls, and then came up out of the floor again, at their feet, and went into them.

They were drinking her.

They looked round when we came in.

All of them. At once. About forty. Not afraid. Not even surprised. They looked at us the way you’d look at a dog that had got into the house. Curious. A little annoyed.

One of them stepped forward. The tallest. With more silver in him than the others; so much his skin was almost all light, tarnished, moving.

“Ah,” he said. In a language I’d never heard. And I understood him anyway; the silver did it, the way it does with the queens. “Visitors. How unusual.”

He looked at Dory. At her black eyes.

His went very bright.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, look at that.” He took a step toward her. “Look at the silver in that one. Look how much.”

I’ll write what they called themselves. Because they told us. They were very proud of it.

The Refined.

They’d had silver once the way everyone does. A queen of their own, under their own world, long ago. They’d worked out how to take it out of her. Not the way the Sorn do, with collars and lines and voices. Directly. Out of the queen and into themselves. Every thread.

It made them strong. Stronger than anyone. It gave them gifts. Every gift a queen has, if you take enough of her: lift, and fire, and storm, and the hush. All of it. In one body. All at once.

So they took more. From the next queen. And the next.

They’d been doing it for longer than the Sorn had been Sorn, the tall one said. Very calmly. As if he were telling us about a family business. They’d emptied their own world first. Then the worlds round it. Then further out.

The queens they used up, they kept. On the frames. In the halls. He said it was respectful.

“And the people,” said Dory. Very quietly. “On the worlds where the queens were.”

The tall one looked at her as if she’d asked something very silly.

“Without a queen,” he said, “a world doesn’t keep its people very long.”

The queen on the frame screamed.

Not louder. Differently. She’d heard us. She’d heard Dory, through the thread, through the net, and she’d felt someone answer, for the first time in however long she’d been on that frame.

The sound she made was please.

The tall one turned his head toward her. Annoyed.

“Quiet,” he said.

And put his hand out. Flat. And she went quiet. All of her. The way things go quiet when Ingrid hushes them. Only Ingrid’s hush is a stillness so she can strike only what she means to.

This was just a hand over a mouth.

I’ve been angry. I’ve written it before. At the birthing world, when the nine Sorn ships watched Lio bleed and didn’t come down. At One, at the shelves. I’ve been angry enough to let a mile of the Hungry go white.

That was different. That was hot. That was something happening to me.

This was cold. This was something I chose.

“Dory,” I said. “Hold her.”

Dory didn’t ask who. She went to the frame. Straight past the tall one, who reached for her, and didn’t reach her, because she wasn’t where his hand went any more. She put both her hands on the queen. On the part of her that wasn’t opened. And held.

The silver lines going out of the queen into the floor stopped.

All of them. At once. Dory just asked them to. And they did.

The Refined felt it. All forty. They felt it the way you’d feel a tap shut off in a house. They looked down at their feet, where the lines came up out of the floor into them. Nothing was coming up.

They looked at Dory.

And they stopped being annoyed.

They were strong. I want that written down, because it’s true, and because it matters for what came after.

They were the strongest thing I’ve ever fought. Stronger than the new ones on the birthing world. Stronger than the grey ones. Stronger, any one of them, than a whole Ashen ship. Every one of them had every gift a queen has, and they’d had them for longer than anyone’s been alive, and they knew how to use them.

The tall one lifted. The way Mother lifts. Only he didn’t lift the porch. He lifted the whole of the round room, floor and walls and window, all at once, off the world. And then he threw it at me.

Another one called a storm. Inside. Under the roof. Lightning like Risa’s, only black at the edges.

Another made the air go heavy, the way Okafor does. Another burned, as hot as Sera, hotter. Another hushed. At me. The way the tall one had hushed the queen. A hand over the mouth.

All at once. All forty. At me.

It didn’t matter.

I’m not proud of that. I’m not going to pretend I’m not. It’s just true.

The room they threw at me came apart in the air before it reached me. I didn’t ask it to; it just did, the way a wave comes apart on a rock. The lightning went round me. The weight didn’t find anything heavy enough to hold on to. The fire went into me and I gave it back to the air as light.

The hush didn’t work at all. It came at me like a hand. And the thing that’s in me now, that the ring saw, that the eldest calls a queen, looked at the hand and didn’t recognise it as anything that had a right to touch it.

The tall one stood in the middle of the floor where his room had been, with his hands still out.

For the first time, he looked surprised.

“What are you?” he said.

I didn’t answer him.

I looked at them. All forty. With my eyes black. Down into them.

Into the silver. The tarnished silver, under their skin, black at the edges. And under that, the bodies, and under that, how they were held together.

It wasn’t theirs. Any of it. That was the thing I saw. There was hardly any of them left in them. It was all queen. Hundreds of queens, thousands, taken and drunk and kept, all the way down. They were held together by what they’d stolen.

I didn’t let go of them.

I asked the silver.

Every thread of it. In every one of them. Every bit of every queen they’d ever drunk. I asked it, the way I ask the ground, the way the eldest taught me: would you mind coming out.

It didn’t mind.

It came out of them all at once. Like breath on a cold morning. Out of their skin, out of their eyes, out of their long white hands, in lines of light, very bright, not tarnished any more. Clean. Up. Into the air of the round room. Thousands of threads. Hundreds of thousands. All of it, all the queens, coming out of the people who’d taken them.

And the Refined, with nothing holding them together, came apart.

Not slowly. Not cruelly. I want that written down; I didn’t make it cruel. They were there, and then the silver was out of them, and then there wasn’t enough of them left to stay.

The tall one was last. He looked at me while it happened. With his bright eyes going dim.

He didn’t say anything.

Then he wasn’t there.

The silver hung in the air.

All of it. Over the round room. Over the halls and the racks and the frames. More silver than I’ve ever seen. More than in all of Avalon’s queens together. Bright, and turning slowly in the light from the window in the roof, the way dust turns in a sunbeam.

Dory looked up at it.

“Dad,” she said. Her voice had gone very small. “Whose is it?”

“Theirs,” I said. I looked down the hall. At the frames. “All of theirs.”

I couldn’t give it back to them. They were gone. The ones on the frames. Long gone, most of them; some of the frames were older than the Sorn.

But one of them wasn’t.

I gave her silver back first.

The queen on the big frame, in the shaft of light, with Dory’s hands on her. I found her threads in the air. Every one. I know a queen’s silver now the way Mother knows each of our voices in a crowd. I found hers, and asked them home. Into her. Back down the empty channels where they’d been drawn out. The way Lio’s silver went back in, as much as it would.

And then I closed her.

Slowly. One atom at a time. The way I took the collar off Lio. With my hands on her, and Dory’s hands beside mine, and my nose bleeding, and Dory’s.

It took a long time.

When it was done, she wasn’t open any more.

She lay on the frame in the light, enormous, scarred, very still. Breathing.

Dory took the pins out. All of them. With her hands. One at a time. She didn’t use the silver. She said she wanted to do it with her hands.

The queen opened her eyes.

You came, she said.

The same words. The eldest said them, on the plateau, when her daughters came. I’ve thought about that a lot.

You came, said the queen. I held it out for so long. To anyone.

“I know,” said Dory. Her face was wet. “I heard. I’m sorry it took so long.”

It took the time it took, said the queen. You came.

Her name is Ysse. That’s the nearest I can write it. It means something like the one who holds the shore. Her world is called something like it too. She’s been under it, she says, since before the mountains wore down.

She’s planetary. Like the eldest. Like Avalon’s old one. She can’t be carried. She is her world. The Refined had come down on her and cut into her through the ground, right down into her, and built the hall over the wound, and pinned her to it.

She’d been on the frame for nine years.

The rest of the silver was still in the air.

I didn’t know what to do with it. I asked Ysse.

Bring it down, she said. Into me. I will hold it. I will sing to it. It does not know where it is. She was quiet. It was taken from my sisters. I will keep it for them.

So I brought it down. All of it. Into her. Through the wound, which wasn’t a wound any more. Every thread of every queen the Refined had ever taken, all the way down into the ground of her world.

And Ysse sang.

I’ve heard a lot of queens sing. I’ve heard the eldest. I’d never heard a queen sing to the silver of her dead sisters. I’m not going to try and write it.

Dory held my hand.

Then we took the building down.

All of it. The halls, and the racks, and the frames. Every one. I didn’t let it go to nothing; I asked it back into stone, and Dory asked the stone back into the ground, and Ysse took it, the way the ground takes a fallen tree. And the queens on the frames, what was left of them, we laid down. Every one. Gently. On the green, in rows, the way Mother taught me.

It took two days.

Ysse sang the whole time.

There were people.

Not many. Dory found them on the second day. Under the hills at the edge of the green, where the mountains were worn down soft. In the deep. In caves. A few thousand. Small, brown, with very large ears, and very quiet, the way people are who’ve lived nine years under the ground with something over their heads drinking their mother.

They came up into the light very slowly.

They looked at the green where the building had been. At the rows. At the place in the middle, where the wound had been, which was just ground now, with the grass beginning to come back over it.

And then they felt her. Under them. Singing.

The oldest of them, a woman so old her ears had gone white, knelt down on the grass. And put her hands flat on it.

The way Mother does.

We cut an arch.

Not Kyria’s way; we didn’t have Kyria. Dory’s way. She took hold of the thread, the one Ysse had held out to anyone for nine years, and made it wide. From Ysse’s green to the red glass. Wide enough for a person.

“It’ll stay,” said Dory. To the old woman with the white ears. “As long as you want it. You can come through. Or we can. Whenever. If anyone ever comes again, you only have to hold it out.”

The old woman looked at the arch for a long time.

Then she walked to it. And through it. And came out on the red glass, at the dawn count, in front of Nan Vey with her iron and Wren on the step and Mother with the cups.

Mother poured.

The old woman poured the first one out on the glass. Without being asked. Nobody had ever told her.

Wren wrote it down. One more world.

We came home through the arch behind her.

The queens knew. Before we’d said anything. Every one of them, under every city, had heard Ysse sing to her sisters’ silver, the way they’d heard her scream. When we came out on the red glass, the glass was warm all the way across, from one edge to the other, the way it gets when every queen under the town is lying close up under it.

The Scarecrow queen came up through it. In front of the arch. In the early light.

She looked at Dory for a long time.

How many? she said.

Dory told her. The number. She’d counted, on the second day, laying them down in rows. I hadn’t been able to. She had.

The Scarecrow queen didn’t say anything. She put her head down on the glass in front of Dory’s feet. And all through the town, under every street, I felt the others do the same.

Mother said the number that night. At the end of the names. Not as a number. She said: and the sisters on Ithre, every one, who Ysse is keeping now.

The eldest, on Root, sang back. Longer than she ever has.

Dory sat in the kitchen afterward. On the floor. With her back against the warm wall behind the stove, where Grandad’s table is painted. She hadn’t sat on the floor since she was small.

Mother sat down beside her. Her knees; she doesn’t, much.

“They hung them up,” said Dory. “Gran. They hung them up like coats.”

“I know, love.”

“And they were proud of it.” Dory pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “He said it was respectful.”

Mother didn’t say anything. She put her arm round her.

“I wanted to,” said Dory. Very quietly. “When he said that. I wanted to do what Dad did. Before Dad did it.” She took her hands away from her eyes. Black. Wet. “I’d have liked it. That’s the bit. I’d have liked it, Gran.”

“Yes,” said Mother. “You would.”

Dory looked at her.

“Your grandfather put his fist through the wall of the old house once,” said Mother. “When the letter came that said none of us could ever go back inside the cities. Not him, not me, not you children, not ever. He told me afterward he’d liked it. The wall going.” She patted Dory’s knee. “He fixed the wall the next day. Painted it. He painted a bird over the place, so he’d remember.”

“What did he want to remember?”

“That he’d liked it,” said Mother. “And that he’d fixed it anyway.”

Dory didn’t say anything for a long time.

“You held her,” said Mother. “Your father did the other bit. You held her. Nine years she’d been holding out to anyone, and you were the one that took hold.” She got up, slowly, with a hand on the stove. “That’s the bit I’d paint a bird over.”

Ysse calls through the arch every morning now. At dawn. At the count.

She doesn’t say anything. She just hums. Under the red glass. One long note, from very far away, from a world nobody had a name for until she gave it one.

Wren writes it down. Every morning. She says it’s the first time anyone’s been counted by a sound. She says it counts. Nobody on Avalon has ever argued with Wren about what counts, and nobody’s going to start now. Konrad put Ithre on the front of the sheet.

Mother pours a cup out for her. Every morning. At the arch.

“So she knows someone’s there,” said Mother. “Nine years is a long time to hold something out.”

I didn’t sleep that night.

I sat on the porch. Thinking about how easy it had been. I’ve thought it before. After Lio. After the Ashen. I’d thought, on the third day of the body, that I’d felt the bottom of what I could do.

I hadn’t. I hadn’t even been close.

Forty of them. The strongest things I’ve ever fought. Every gift a queen has, all of them, in each one. And I’d asked the silver out of them like asking a stone if it would mind being a step.

Hana came out and sat beside me.

“I didn’t need to call you back,” she said.

“No.”

“You didn’t go anywhere.”

“No,” I said. “That’s the bit that frightens me.”

Hana didn’t say anything for a long time.

“It should,” she said. In the end. “Keep it.” She leaned on my shoulder. “That’s the bit I’ll call you back with, if I ever have to. The bit that’s frightened.”

The ship came on the third evening.

Tiamat saw it first. From the ninth station.

“Ship,” she said. Over the silver. Very level. “Edge of the Watch. One. Not Sorn. Not Ashen. Not anything I know.” A pause. “It’s calling.”

It was white. That’s what Ilka said, on the Meridian, when she got it on the Aldri ears and put it through to the map room. White, and long, and very plain, with no guns that she could see, sitting at the very edge of the Watch, where the grey ships used to sit. Not coming in.

Calling.

Okafor put it through to the long table. Through the silver. So everyone could hear.

It was a voice. A woman’s, I think. Very clear, very formal, in a language none of us knew, that the silver turned into ours as it came.

“To the world that calls itself Avalon,” said the voice. “This is the Assize of the Bright Reach. We have come under the law of the Reach.”

Okafor looked at me down the long table.

“Three days ago, on the world called Ithre,” said the voice, “forty members of the House of the Refined, citizens of the Reach in good standing, were killed. The Assize has examined the place. The evidence is clear.”

A pause.

“The one responsible is a man of your world. Lucas Dask.”

Everyone at the table looked at me. Mother didn’t. She was pouring.

“Lucas Dask is charged with the murder of forty citizens of the Reach,” said the voice. “He is to come to the edge of your system, alone, within three days, and surrender himself to the Assize for judgement. If he does not, the Reach will come for him.”

The voice stopped.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

“Ithre,” said Dory. In the end. Very quietly. “That’s Ysse’s world. That’s what they call it.” She looked at the silver on the table, where the voice had come from. “Citizens in good standing. They were drinking her.”

“I know,” I said.

“They hung up hundreds of queens.”

“I know.”

Okafor put her hands flat on the long table.

“It’s a law,” she said. “Somewhere. That says that’s all right.” She looked at me. “A law big enough to have a name and a white ship and a voice that sounds like that.” A pause. “There’s a lot of it, Lucas. Whatever the Reach is. There’s a lot of it.”

“I know.”

“What do you want to say to them?”

I thought about it.

I thought about the frames. And the hall. And Ysse, pinned in the light for nine years, holding a thread out to anyone. And the old woman with the white ears pouring out a cup on the red glass without being told.

And I thought about my children. All of them. Asleep in the heap under the house, on a quiet night, in the fourth year.

Mother put a cup in front of me.

“Drink that first,” said Mother.

I drank it.

Then I put my hand on the silver on the long table. The way Okafor does. So it would go out to the white ship at the edge of the Watch.

“This is Lucas Dask,” I said. “I killed them. I’d do it again.”

A pause.

“If you want me,” I said, “come and get me.”

The silver went quiet.

Okafor looked at me for a long time.

Then she got up. And went into the kitchen. To the slate on the wall, where it still said Quiet, small, in the middle, the way it had said for four years.

She wiped it off.

She didn’t write anything. She just stood there with the chalk in her hand, in front of the black.

“Well,” said Mother. From the stove. Not turning round. “That didn’t last.”

“No,” said Okafor.

“It never does,” said Mother. “Sit down. I’ll make more.”

Days 8526–8531. The Refined.

Someone’s screaming. Not a word; under that. The eldest: where is she? Past anywhere I’ve reached; there’s a thread; she’s holding it out to anyone. They’re cutting her. Mother: go on, then. Dory took my hand and we scattered up the thread in a breath, somewhere nobody has a name for. A blue world, old, with a silver scar. Halls of racks, and hundreds of queens opened and pinned and taken from, every thread. Don’t look all the way in. I already have. At the end, alive, half opened, the silver drawn out of her in lines into the people round her: tall, white-haired, beautiful like a knife, their silver on the outside and tarnished. Look at the silver in that one. The Refined. They emptied their own queen first; they keep the used ones on frames because it’s respectful; without a queen a world doesn’t keep its people long. Please. Quiet: a hand over a mouth. That was cold; I chose it. Dory, hold her; she stopped the lines. Forty of them with every gift, the strongest I’ve fought, and it didn’t matter. What are you? I asked the silver if it would mind coming out, and it didn’t, and they came apart, not cruelly. Whose is it? All of theirs. I gave hers back and closed her, one atom at a time; Dory took the pins out with her hands. You came. Ysse, who holds the shore; nine years on the frame. Bring it down into me; I will keep it for my sisters. We laid the queens in rows; two days; she sang. A few thousand under the soft hills; the oldest put her hands flat on the grass. Dory made the thread an arch to the red glass; she poured the first cup out without being told; one more world. The glass was warm from edge to edge; the queens put their heads down. Dory on the kitchen floor: I’d have liked it. Your grandfather painted a bird over the wall he broke, to remember he’d liked it and fixed it anyway. You held her; that’s the bit I’d paint a bird over. Ysse hums under the glass at every count. Hana: I didn’t need to call you back. That’s the bit that frightens me. It should; keep it. The third evening, a white ship at the edge of the Watch: the Assize of the Bright Reach; forty citizens in good standing; Lucas Dask charged with murder; come alone in three days or the Reach will come for him. Okafor: there’s a lot of it, whatever it is. Mother: drink that first. I killed them; I’d do it again; if you want me, come and get me. Okafor wiped Quiet off the slate. Mother: that didn’t last. It never does. Sit down; I’ll make more.