Scarecrow

They were fetched on a night with no wind.

I was there. I want that written down first. I was on the plateau, on Root, by the iron candle. Andraste was beside me with Holdfast point-down on the green ground and Kyrie asleep in the sling against her chest. Dory was sitting on the grass with her glasses off and her hand flat. Varra’s ring was at the foot of the plateau inside Crane’s wall, very quiet, in the dark.

We’d been there every night for a month. Waiting for something to come out of the cracks.

Nothing came out.

They went in.

Dory felt it first. She always does.

She sat up very straight on the grass. And her hand, flat on the ground, went white at the knuckles.

“Something’s opening,” said Dory.

“Where?” said Andraste.

“Down,” said Dory. “At the bottom. In the cracks. Where they are.” She closed her eyes. “It isn’t coming from her. It isn’t coming from anywhere I know.” Her voice went very thin. “It’s a door.”

I felt it a breath later.

I’ll try to say what it was like. It was like standing in a warm room in winter and feeling, very suddenly, a draught. From somewhere you didn’t know there was a gap. Cold, very thin, very steady. Coming up from underneath.

Not through the rock. Not through anything. Just there. A place at the very bottom of the eldest, in the old dark under everything, where there hadn’t been a place before. And through it, from very far away, the cold.

The eldest made a sound. Through the ground, through our feet.

Something is in me, said the eldest. That I did not let in.

Andraste lifted Holdfast.

She didn’t know what else to do. She told me afterwards. She said you lift your blade when something comes up the slope, even when you can’t see the slope, even when it’s under you.

Holdfast hummed. Not two notes. Not three. One. Very low. A note I’d never heard it make.

Kyrie woke up in the sling. And didn’t shout. She looked at Holdfast with her eyes wide open and put her small hand on the strap of the scabbard and held on.

“Can you close it?” I said. To the eldest. Out loud, the way I can now, on her ground.

She didn’t answer for a long time.

Yes, said the eldest.

“Then close it.”

No.

Andraste turned round.

Dory opened her eyes.

They want to go, said the eldest. Very slowly. Through all of us. They have been sitting by that place for a month. Waiting to be fetched. Now they are being fetched.

A pause.

I buried them so they would learn, said the eldest. I did not bury them so they could never leave. If I close the door now, with them sitting by it wanting to go through, I am not teaching them. The ground got very slightly colder. I am holding them. Against what they want. In the dark.

Another pause.

That is a frame, said the eldest. I know what a frame is. I will not make one.

Nobody said anything.

I thought about the Refined’s hall. The sixty dead queens on their racks, and Arreth in the middle, held there for four years against everything she wanted, because somebody had decided they knew better.

I thought about Mother at the long table, a long time ago, saying you don’t put a person on a frame for what’s walking in them.

“They’ll go to him,” said Dory. “To the Prime. They’ll give him everything. They’ll make him what they’ve promised.”

Yes, said the eldest.

“And you’ll let them.”

I will let them go, said the eldest. That is not the same as letting them win. A pause. You have taught me that. All of you. The difference between holding and holding on.

So we didn’t close it. None of us. We stood on the plateau in the dark and let the houses go.

I could feel them going. All of us could. Very slowly. One after another. Out of the cracks at the bottom of the eldest. Into the cold place. Into the door. The way water goes out of a basin when you pull the plug: not all at once, but steadily, a turning, a long falling away.

They didn’t look back. Dory says she listened for it, the whole time. For any of them to stop at the door and say anything. To her, or the eldest, or each other.

They didn’t.

They went through the door to the man in the long hall who talks to the walls. And the cold went with them. And then the door was gone. Not closed. Gone. As if it had never been there.

The cracks were empty.

Nearly.

Dory found them.

She was still sitting on the grass with her hand flat, listening down into the empty cracks, the way you listen in a house after everyone’s left, for the sound of the one you think might still be upstairs.

“Dad,” said Dory. Very quietly. “There’s someone.”

I put my hand down beside hers.

There was. Two. Very small. Pressed down into the very bottom of the deepest crack, as far from where the door had been as they could get. The way a child gets into the corner of a room when everyone else is going out of the door, and doesn’t want to be noticed, and doesn’t want to go.

Two houses.

They hadn’t gone.

The eldest felt them too.

She didn’t say anything at first. I felt her go down to them. All the way. Very slowly. The way Mother goes up the stairs at night to the room where one of the children has been crying and has stopped, to see if they’re asleep or just pretending.

Then the eldest spoke. To them. Not to us. But we heard it, because she let us.

You did not go.

It was a long time before they answered.

When they did, it wasn’t the voice. Not the old voice, the one that went out through the grey ships and the collars and the cracks. Something else. Smaller. Two small things, speaking very carefully, as if they’d never spoken in this shape before and weren’t sure it would hold.

No, said the two houses. Together. Then, after a while, one of them alone.

We listened.

Dory put her other hand down. Both hands flat. And her face went very still.

“They listened,” she said. To me. Not loudly. “All this time. All the years since the eldest buried them. The rest listened to her so they’d know what she was. So they’d know her weak places. So they could tell him.” She swallowed. “These two listened to her because they wanted to know what she was.”

She is not what we thought, said one of the two houses. Through the eldest. Through Dory. Very slowly. We thought a world was stock. We thought a queen was stock. We thought everything was stock, except us.

A pause.

She sang, said the other. Every morning. To the queens. To the children on the plains. To the man with the teapot’s mother. We were in her when she sang. We could not stop hearing it.

Another pause. Longer.

We would like to learn the song, said the first house. We do not know how. We have never learned anything we were not already made knowing. A pause. We would like to stay. And change. If she will let us.

Nobody on the plateau moved.

Andraste lowered Holdfast. Very slowly. Until the point was on the grass again. It stopped humming the one low note. It hummed two. The ordinary two.

Kyrie, in the sling, let go of the strap. And put her thumb in her mouth. And went back to sleep.

You may stay, said the eldest.

That’s all she said. She didn’t say I forgive you or I knew you would or good. She said you may stay. The way you’d say it to someone at the door of a house who’d asked if they could come in out of the cold.

The two houses didn’t say anything.

But Dory said the bottom of the crack got very slightly warmer.

Then they told us.

Not because anyone asked. That’s what I want written down. Nobody asked them anything. The eldest didn’t. Dory didn’t. I didn’t. We were all sitting on the plateau in the dark, not knowing what to ask, or whether we were allowed to.

They told us anyway.

They have gone to the Collective, said the first house. All the others. To the man.

He made a door for them, said the second. We heard them talk about it. For a month. They were very proud. A pause. He will be very glad. He has wanted them for a long time.

They will give him what he asked for, said the first. The making. The way to put us into a thing so it becomes more than it was. The way we made the grey ones. The way we tried to make the child. A pause. They have told him he will be what the man with the teapot’s son is.

He will not, said the second house. He will be what we are. With his face on.

Dory put her hand over her mouth.

There is more, said the first house.

They are not Sorn now, said the second.

“What?” said Dory.

The two houses were quiet for a long time. When they spoke again, it was both of them together, very slowly. Like something being said for the first time out loud that had been decided a long way down.

There was a law, they said. Older than the grey ones. Older than the collars. Older than any of us remember making. The houses hold. That is what we are. We hold the Sorn. We do not give the Sorn away. We do not sell what we are to anyone who is not Sorn. To do that is to stop being a house.

A pause.

They have gone to a man who is not Sorn, said the two houses, and given him what we are. To make him into something. For his use.

Another pause.

They are traitors, said the two houses. To the Sorn. To our race. To what we were made to be. We name them so. Here. In her. Out loud.

Somebody should, said the first. Alone. Very quietly. And there is nobody else left to.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I still don’t.

The Sorn have done terrible things. The grey ones. The collars. The middle. The houses made all of it. And now two of them were sitting at the bottom of a world that had buried them, saying that the rest had betrayed the Sorn by giving themselves away to a man who’d use them.

I thought about the Overseer. Who’s Sorn. Who stopped being what the houses wanted him to be a long time ago, because somebody gave him a cup of tea.

“Get the Overseer,” I said.

Dory went for him. Through the Root arch, onto the red glass, up the hill. He was awake. He said afterwards he’d been awake all night. He said he’d felt them go. He said he’d felt the whole of them go out through the bottom of the world like a tide, and he’d sat on the step of his house by the river and held his cup and not been able to drink it.

He came through the arch with Dory. He’s not young. He walked up the plateau slowly, on the green ground, past Varra’s ring, past Andraste with Holdfast, to the iron candle.

And knelt down.

And put his hand flat on the grass.

I’ll say what the Overseer is, for anyone who reads this and doesn’t know.

He was an officer of the Sorn. A long time ago. He kept the ledgers. He knew what went into the middle and what came out grey. He knew where the stock went. He knew everything, the way officers know things, without ever once going to see.

The houses tried a collar on him once. It didn’t take.

He came to us. In the end. Through everything. And sat at the long table, and Mother put a cup in his hands. And he’s lived by the river on Avalon since, in a small house with a step, and kept a different kind of ledger. Names, now. Not numbers.

He’s never once spoken to the houses since they were buried. He said they never spoke to him either. Not as anything. He said in all his years as a Sorn officer, the houses never said a word to him that wasn’t an order.

He knelt on the green ground with his hand flat.

The two houses at the bottom of the crack went very still.

We know you, said the first house. Through the eldest. Through Dory, who was kneeling beside him with her hand on his. You kept the ledgers. On One. And before.

“I did,” said the Overseer.

You did not take the collar.

“No.”

We tried, said the second house. It slid off. We did not understand why. We thought it was a fault in you.

“It wasn’t a fault,” said the Overseer.

A long silence.

No, said the second house. We know that now.

I don’t know everything they said. The Overseer asked us to go a little way off, after the first part. To the edge of the plateau. He said some things should be said between Sorn without anyone else listening, and Dory said she’d stay but she’d try very hard not to hear, and he said that was fair.

So I stood at the edge of the plateau with Andraste and Kyrie and Varra and watched an old Sorn officer kneel on the green ground by an iron candle in the dark, with his hand flat on the grass, talking very quietly to two houses at the bottom of a world.

He was there until dawn.

He told me some of it afterwards. On the red glass. When Dory brought him back through, grey with tiredness, and Mother met him at the arch with a cup, because Mother always knows.

He said they’d asked him what it was like. Being Sorn, out here. On Avalon. In a house by a river. With a step.

He said he’d told them.

He said he told them about Mother’s tea, and the first cup, and how he hadn’t known what to do with it. About the grey ones who sway now, and the one who married a Kiln smith. About keeping a ledger of names instead of numbers. About Holt putting his cap on him at the front on Root. About sitting with the swaying ones in the mornings, and learning to say good morning, and how long that took.

“They asked how long,” said the Overseer. Holding his cup. “To learn good morning.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Four years,” said the Overseer. “Before I meant it.”

He drank his tea. All of it. For the first time since the night began.

“They said they’d wait,” he said.

Then he told me the other thing.

He said, at the very end, as the light was coming up on the plains, the first house had asked him a question. Very quietly. Just to him.

It had asked him if he thought they were still Sorn. Now. After naming the others traitors. After choosing to stay in a world that buried them.

“What did you say?”

The Overseer looked at his empty cup for a long time.

“I said I didn’t know,” said the Overseer. “I said I’d been asking myself the same question ever since the first cup.” He held the cup out. Mother filled it. “And I said that most mornings, now, the answer I come up with is: yes. Just a different kind.”

He drank.

“They said they’d like to be that kind,” said the Overseer.

The eldest told Dory something later that morning. After the Overseer had gone home to his step by the river to sleep.

She said she’d been thinking about something she’d said, a long time ago. On her birthday. When the houses asked if everyone gets one, even them.

She’d said: You will have a birthday on the day one of you first gives something away. Something of yours. To someone who is not you. Freely.

They gave something away tonight, said the eldest. The two. Freely. To me. To all of you. Nobody asked them. Nobody made them.

“What did they give?” said Dory.

The truth, said the eldest. About the others. About where they went. About what they are now. A pause. That was theirs. It was the only thing they had left that was theirs. They gave it away.

Another pause.

Today is their birthday, said the eldest.

So we had a birthday.

On Root. That evening. On the plateau. By the iron candle and the small round planet in its silver ring.

Ash made two candles. Iron. Very small. She made them at Odra’s forge in an afternoon and brought them through the Hyrran arch still warm. She said Odra had asked what they were for, and when Ash told her, Odra had stood very still for a long time and then said strike them twice, three-short-one-long, so they’d know somebody meant it.

Mother baked. A small cake. Nobody knew what houses would like, so Mother said she’d make the kind she makes for anyone who’s had a hard year and doesn’t know what they like yet. Plain. Warm. Honey on the top.

We put it on the green ground. By the iron candle. With two small iron candles in it.

The Overseer lit them.

The houses can’t see a cake. They can’t taste it. They’re at the bottom of a world. Dory told them what it was anyway. She told them about the candles, and the honey, and Ash at Odra’s forge, and Mother saying plain and warm for anyone who’s had a hard year.

The two houses didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then one of them asked, very carefully, through the eldest, through Dory: What do we do?

“You make a wish,” said Dory.

We have never wished, said the house. We do not know how.

“Nobody does, the first time,” said Dory. “You just think about something you’d like. That you haven’t got. And you don’t tell anyone.”

The two houses were quiet for a very long time.

Then Dory blew the candles out.

Small Holt was there. Genny’s son. Holding Genny’s hand. He asked what they wished for. Very loud. The way he does at every birthday on the plateau.

Genny said you’re not supposed to ask.

The two houses told him anyway.

They said they’d wished to learn good morning.

Not to say it. They said they could already say it; it’s just words. They’d wished to learn it. The way the Overseer had. However long it took.

The Overseer, standing at the back by Varra’s ring, put both his hands flat on his chest. The Kasrai way.

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t, I think.

The other things. Quickly.

The cracks at the bottom of the eldest are closed now. All of them but one. She closed them in the morning, very gently, the way you’d close a door on an empty room. She left the deepest one open. The one where the two are. She says it’s not to keep them. She says it’s so they can see out.

Okafor’s slate has a new word. She wrote it at the long table when we came home, and looked at it for a long time, and didn’t rub it out.

Two.

Wren wrote it at the top of the slate at the dawn count. Under Root is listening. Under The houses are waiting, which she crossed out, very neatly, with one line.

The houses: gone. Except two.

And then, under that, smaller:

Two: staying.

The Overseer goes to Root every evening now. At dusk. He kneels on the green ground by the iron candle and puts his hand flat and talks to the two houses. For an hour. Sometimes more. Dory goes with him, because they can’t hear each other without her. She says she tries very hard not to listen. She says she mostly manages.

She says last night the first house said good morning to him. At dusk.

The Overseer told it that was the wrong time of day.

The house said it knew. It said it was practising.

Lio went on the fourth evening.

She asked. At the long table, at breakfast, out of the doorway where she stands. Very quietly. She asked the Overseer if she could come with him to Root that night.

The Overseer put his cup down.

“Do you know what they are?” he said.

“I know what they made,” said Lio.

Nobody at the long table said anything. Sefa, in her chair by the door, put her old hand up to her own hair and tied a knot in it.

“Yes,” said the Overseer. “Come.”

So Lio knelt on the green ground by the iron candle with the Overseer on one side of her and Dory on the other. And put her hand flat. The way she’s seen us do it, all her life here.

The two houses went very still when they felt her.

Dory says she could feel them knowing. She says it was like watching someone in a doorway see a face they’ve only ever seen in a drawing.

The Marrah child, said the first house. Very quietly.

“Lio,” said Lio.

A pause.

Lio, said the first house. As if it were trying the word. As if it had never once thought of her as having one.

“Did you make me?” said Lio. “You two. Were you there?”

The houses didn’t answer for a long time.

We were there, said the second house. We were two of the ones who decided how. Where the silver went. Which threads. What you would want. A pause. We made you want a door.

Lio didn’t say anything.

We are sorry, said the first house.

Dory says she’d never heard a house say that. She says she didn’t know they could. She says it came out very slowly, the way the first good morning comes out, as if the words were heavy and there was no practice for lifting them.

Lio knelt there for a long time.

Then she said: “I stopped wanting the door.”

How? said the second house. Very fast. As if it badly wanted to know.

“My grandmother ties a knot in my hair,” said Lio. “Every morning. Since I came. Very slowly. And I do mine too fast. And she does it again, for me.” Her hand on the grass was very steady. “After a while, you don’t need a door. You’ve got somewhere to be in the mornings.”

The houses were quiet.

We do not have hair, said the first house. Very seriously.

Lio laughed. Out loud. On the plateau. The Overseer says it’s the first time he’s ever heard her laugh.

“No,” said Lio. “But you’ve got mornings now. Every day. She sings.” She stood up. “And the Overseer comes. And I can come too. Sometimes.” She looked down at the green ground. “If you want. I can tell you good morning. And you can practise on me. I’m the one you made. I’m probably the right one to practise on.”

The houses didn’t answer for a long time.

Then the second one said: Good morning, Lio.

At dusk. The wrong time of day.

Lio said good morning back.

Sefa was waiting at the arch when they came home. On her stick. In the dark. She’d come down the hill on her own, which she isn’t meant to do any more.

She didn’t say anything. She put her hand up to Lio’s hair, in the light from the arch, and found the knot she’d tied that morning, and checked it.

It was still there.

“Good,” said Sefa.

Kyria came to the long table the next morning. In her armour. She sat down next to Andraste and didn’t say anything for a while.

Then she said: “She didn’t close the door.”

“No,” said Andraste.

“On the ridge,” said Kyria, “we’d have closed it. We’d have stood in the gap with every blade on the shelf and not let one of them through.”

“I know,” said Andraste. “I had Holdfast up.”

“And you didn’t use it.”

“She said no,” said Andraste. “It’s her. They were in her. She said she wouldn’t make a frame.” Andraste looked down at Kyrie, in her high chair, banging her small blunt blade on the tray. “I stood there with Holdfast up and listened to a world tell me the difference between holding something and holding on to it.”

Kyria didn’t say anything for a long time.

“There’s an old Hyrrani word,” said Kyria. “For the first. And another for the second. We’ve always used the same blade for both.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” said Andraste.

Kyria looked at her daughter for a long time. Then at her granddaughter, banging her blade on the tray.

“Maybe,” said Kyria. “Teach her both words. When she’s older. Teach her they’re different.” She stood up. “I never learned that. Not till today.”

Okafor called the long table that night. Halvane came through from Sallow. Varra from Root. Crane, Asha, Bell.

Okafor didn’t write anything on her slate at first. She just held it.

“They’re with him now,” she said. “All of them but two. And they gave him Root before they went. Where it is. Everything.” She put the slate down. “The eldest’s not hiding anything in her any more. And she’s still in the same place.”

“She won’t move,” said Dory. “I asked. She said a world that’s been alone as long as she was doesn’t run from the first people who come to the door. Even the wrong people.”

“Then we stay,” said Varra. “The Standing stays. The ring stays.”

“The wall stays,” said Crane. “I’ll double it.”

“The stations,” said Halvane. “Root has six now. I’ll send six more. From Ister. Built for this.”

Okafor looked round the table for a long time.

Then she wrote one word on her slate. And didn’t rub it out.

Stay.

And Dory felt the others arrive.

Two days after. In the night. She sat up in the heap with Sorrel, the way she does, and Mother was there, the way she is.

“They’re there,” said Dory. “Far away. Further than the Watch. In the Collective. All of them. In one place.” She closed her eyes. “It’s very loud. I could never hear them from here before. Not past the eldest. Now there’s nothing in the way.”

“What are they doing, love?” said Mother.

Dory listened for a long time.

“Being glad,” said Dory. “That’s all I can tell. They’re very glad. And something’s very glad with them.” She opened her eyes. “Something with a face on.”

Halvane told the keepers of the long record. Not everything. Just that two who could have left, hadn’t. And that they’d had a birthday.

The keepers asked what to write. They said the long record is for names, and the two have no names. Halvane said that was true. He said they could leave a space.

So there’s a page in the vault on Ister now, next to the one with no name that says the one who holds us. It has two spaces on it, side by side. Empty. Waiting.

And under them, the meaning, in the keepers’ hand:

Two who stayed, and are learning good morning.

Corvan hasn’t sent his word.

Sorrel still has the C. on her wrist. So does Fen. So does Lio, now, very small, on the inside, where she thinks nobody sees.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Two hundred and eighty-seven.

Days 9938–9961. Two.

They were fetched on a night with no wind. Andraste with Holdfast, Kyrie in the sling, Dory’s hand flat, Varra’s ring inside the wall. Something opening at the bottom, in the cracks; not from her; a door. Like a draught in a warm room from a gap you didn’t know was there. The eldest: something is in me that I did not let in. Holdfast hummed one low note I’d never heard; Kyrie held the strap and didn’t shout. Can you close it? Yes. Then close it. No. I buried them so they would learn, not so they could never leave; if I close it with them wanting to go, I am holding them against what they want, in the dark; that is a frame; I will not make one. I will let them go; that is not the same as letting them win; the difference between holding and holding on. They went like water from a basin, and didn’t look back, and the door was gone, not closed. Nearly. Dory: there’s someone. Two, pressed into the bottom of the deepest crack, as far from the door as they could get. You did not go. No. We listened. These two listened to know what she was. She sang every morning and we could not stop hearing it; we would like to learn the song; we would like to stay and change. Holdfast went back to two notes; Kyrie slept. You may stay; the bottom of the crack got warmer. Nobody asked, and they told us: they’ve gone to the Collective, to the man; he made them a door; they’ll give him the making; they’ve told him he’ll be what the teapot’s son is; he will not; he will be what we are with his face on. The oldest law: the houses hold; they do not give the Sorn away to anyone not Sorn; to do it is to stop being a house. They are traitors, to the Sorn, to our race; we name them so, here, out loud; somebody should, and there is nobody else left to. Get the Overseer. He’d felt them go like a tide and couldn’t drink his cup. On his knees by the iron candle: we know you; you did not take the collar; it was not a fault; we know that now. Sorn to Sorn until dawn. What is it like, out here? Mother’s first cup, the swaying ones, the Kiln smith’s wedding, a ledger of names, Holt’s cap; four years before I meant good morning; they said they’d wait. Are we still Sorn? I’ve asked myself ever since the first cup; most mornings yes, a different kind; they’d like to be that kind. The eldest: they gave something away freely, the truth, the only thing left that was theirs; today is their birthday. Ash’s two small iron candles, struck twice at Odra’s word; Mother’s plain warm cake with honey, for anyone who’s had a hard year; the Overseer lit them; what do we do? Make a wish; we have never wished. Small Holt asked; they told him: to learn good morning, however long it takes. The Overseer’s hands on his chest. The cracks closed but the deepest, so they can see out. Okafor: Two. Wren crossed out The houses are waiting: The houses: gone, except two; Two: staying. The Overseer goes every dusk; the first house said good morning at dusk; wrong time; it’s practising. Lio went: did you make me? We were two who decided how; we made you want a door; we are sorry, the first time a house has said it. I stopped wanting the door; my grandmother ties a knot every morning; we do not have hair; she laughed; practise on me, I’m the one you made; good morning, Lio, at dusk. Sefa at the arch checked the knot: good. Kyria: on the ridge we’d have closed it; one blade for holding and holding on; teach her both words, they’re different; I never learned that till today. Halvane told the keepers; a page with two empty spaces, waiting: two who stayed, and are learning good morning. Okafor: they gave him Root; she won’t run from the first people who come to the door, even the wrong ones; the Standing stays; Crane will double the wall; Halvane six more stations; Stay. Two days later Dory heard the others arrive, very loud now with nothing in the way: being glad, and something very glad with them, something with a face on. Two hundred and eighty-seven.