Scarecrow

The forge stopped on the eleventh morning.

Dory heard it go. She was at the red glass with her hand flat, the way she sits every morning before the stars, and she said she’d got so used to it that she didn’t notice it until it wasn’t there. Striking and striking, far past the Watch, for weeks. Then nothing.

“Like when the rain stops,” she said, at breakfast, “and you only notice because the roof’s gone quiet.”

“Is that good?” said Corin.

Dory thought about it. She buttered her toast the whole way to the edges, which is what she does when she’s thinking, and Mother watched her do it and didn’t say anything about the butter.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It started again at noon. But it didn’t sound the same. It sounded like somebody hitting something because they were angry with it. Not because they were making it.”

She was right about that. We found out how right nine days later, when the Hesta came home.

Mattick brought her down onto the plateau in the evening, the way he always does, too fast and with a great deal of noise, so the barley on the north field lay down flat and then stood up again looking offended. He climbed out with a crate under one arm and his granddaughter under the other.

The crate was soft ones. It always is now. He takes them in full and brings them back with whatever the Word has been trading for, and this time it was barley seed from three worlds Wren has never heard of and a box of small iron bells from somewhere that makes small iron bells. Odra rang one and said it’d do.

The granddaughter went straight to Sorrel. They don’t say hello any more. They just look at each other’s wrists.

Mattick came up the hill to the long table. He doesn’t come up the hill unless there’s something. He sat down where Kesh had been sitting, and Kesh moved without being asked, which tells you what his face looked like.

“It’s not the word,” he said. “Before anyone asks. It’s not Now. He said to tell you that first.”

“Who did?” said Dory, very quietly.

“The boy.” Mattick put his heavy hand flat on the table. “He came to the port himself. In a long coat, at night, on foot, like nobody. Walked straight up the Hesta’s ramp. My first mate nearly put him over the side.” He shook his head. “He gave me this. He said it was too big for the band. He said, tell her it’s not the word. Tell her it’s read this first.”

It was a thin grey case, the kind the Collective uses for papers it doesn’t want to be papers. Dory opened it with her eyes, not her hands. She looked all the way down it first, the way she always does, to make sure nothing in it was waiting.

Nothing was. It was just paper.

That was almost worse.

We read it that night. Senna came, and Iolo, and Mara Quell with her spectacles. Okafor sat at the end with his slate. Halvane, Mira from Thole, Kyria. The Overseer came up from the river and sat by the stove, where he likes to sit, with his cup.

Lio came too. Nobody asked her to. She just came in and sat between Dory and Sefa and did her knot, and nobody told her to go to bed, because she’s old enough now that it isn’t anybody’s business, and because Dory looked at her once and moved her chair over.

There were three bundles in the case. A note from Corvan on top, folded twice, in his narrow hand. Then a thick sheaf of reports with a grey seal. Then a thin one with no seal at all.

Dory read the note out first.

“This isn’t the word. Not yet. But you should know what he’s doing, before he does it to anyone else. The reports are from the house past the port. The letters are his. I took them out of the grate before they caught. I don’t think he meant to burn them. I think he meant to stop being able to read them. C.”

She put it down.

“Then there’s a bit at the bottom,” she said. “On its own.”

“He’s not well. He doesn’t know I know. Nobody knows. I’m a step behind him all day. You see things a step behind.”

Sorrel wasn’t there. She was asleep. But I thought about her wrist all the same. C, and under it, Y.

The reports were the worst thing I have read in a long time, and I have read a great many things.

They’re not cruel, to look at. That’s what made them hard. They’re neat. Columns. Dates in the Collective’s count. A physician’s hand, very tidy, and then another one, less tidy, as it went on.

There was a house past Carrow’s big port with no windows. The Prime had it built in the spring. That was where the making went, after the houses gave it to him. That was the forge Dory heard.

And in the spring, twelve people went into it.

The reports don’t give their names. They call them Vessels. Vessel One to Vessel Twelve. Mara read that word out and then took her spectacles off and cleaned them, slowly, for a long time, and put them back on.

They were volunteers. The reports are very clear about that. Grown people from the Collective’s old families, men and women, the kind who’d stood near the Prime in the square their whole lives and wanted to stand nearer. They were told they would be made what I am. That they’d be the first. That the Collective would never again have to go cap in hand to a man on a hill.

They were made the way Lio was made.

Lio didn’t say anything when Mara read that. She just stopped doing her knot, halfway, with the end in her fingers.

And it worked. That’s the thing. For a little while it worked.

On the third day, Vessel Three looked at a cup and it went to glass. On the fifth, Vessel Seven turned a wall in the yard to sand, all the way across, and the physician wrote success and underlined it twice. Vessel Nine lifted a cart. Vessel Twelve made water out of the air in a dry room, a whole jug of it, and drank it, and laughed.

The physician wrote that down too. Laughed.

Then the next lines started.

Vessel Three: bleeding from the nose following use. Self-limiting.

Vessel Seven: severe headache. Vomiting. Declined to stop.

Vessel Three: bleeding from the nose and ears. Not self-limiting.

Vessel Nine: unable to hold a cup. Tremor in both hands. States that the cup “won’t stay a cup.”

Vessel Twelve: states that the silver “is moving.” Physicians unable to confirm. Vessel insists it is moving. Vessel insists it is looking for something.

It went on for forty days. I won’t put it all down. The tidy hand got less tidy. The columns stopped being straight.

On the nineteenth day, the Prime came to the house and told them all to do it again, in front of him. All twelve. Every one of them did as they were told, because they’d been made to want to, and because he was standing there.

Vessel Three died that night.

Vessel Seven on the twenty-sixth day. Vessel Ten on the thirty-first.

By the fortieth, the nine who were left were in beds in the house with no windows, and three of them couldn’t remember the word for cup, and one of them couldn’t remember her own name, and the physician wrote, at the very bottom of the last page, in a hand that wasn’t tidy at all,

The body does not hold it. I do not know why. I have been asked not to write that I do not know why.

And then, under that, smaller,

They were promised.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Kesh broke it. She doesn’t like silences she hasn’t made herself. She said, “Well. Good.”

She said it hard, the way you’d throw a stone. And I understood it. Those were people who’d stood in the square and cheered while the Refined went out to put queens on frames. People who wanted to be made into a thing that could take Dory off this hill.

“Kesh,” said Dory.

That was all. Not loud. Just her name.

Kesh looked at her, and then at Lio, who had the end of her knot in her fingers and hadn’t moved, and Kesh went red right up into her hair, and said, “No. Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You did,” said Lio. “It’s all right. I’d have meant it too.”

She put the end of the knot down on the table.

“It’s your nose first,” she said. “Then your ears. Then it feels like your head is a door and someone’s leaning on it from the other side. That’s when you should stop. But you can’t stop. Because you were made to want to.” She looked at the reports. “Nine of them still want to. Lying in the beds. That’s the worst bit. You still want to.”

Sefa reached over and finished the knot for her. Lio let her. She hasn’t let anyone do that in a long time.

Then Dory opened the thin bundle. The one with no seal.

The Prime’s letters.

They were to the houses. His side only. The houses don’t write, they say, so there was no other side. He’d written to them anyway, the way a man writes to someone who isn’t going to write back. Pages of it. Some of them were scorched along one edge where Corvan pulled them out of the grate.

The first ones were angry in the way important men are angry. Short. The Vessels have failed. You will explain.

The next ones were longer. You gave me the making. You told me it would hold. It does not hold. You have given me a thing that comes apart in the hand.

Then: You are doing it on purpose.

He wrote that one three times, on three different days. Each time the letters were a little bigger.

You are spoiling it on purpose. You wish me to fail so that you can go back to her. I know what you are. I knew what you were when I let you in. Do not think I cannot tell when something is being held back from me.

And then one more, the last one. Shorter than all the others. Mara held it up to the lamp to read it, because the edge was burned and the ink had run.

If you are doing this to them, you are doing it to me.

Stop.

Under the letters, there was a last half-sheet in Corvan’s hand. Dory didn’t read it out. She read it to herself first, and then she gave it to me, and I read it, and then I gave it to Mother, because I couldn’t think who else ought to have it.

It said:

He bleeds. From the nose, in the mornings. He thinks no one knows. He has the cloths burned. I found one in the grate that didn’t catch. He holds his head at night, both hands, at the window. He can’t keep food down before noon. He won’t call the physicians. He won’t tell the Assessors. He won’t tell me. He walks the square anyway. Every first day. He’d walk it if it killed him.

He thinks they’re doing it to him too. I don’t know if they are.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to be sorry. I am.

C.

Mother read it twice. Then she folded it in half and put it under her cup, the way she does with a letter from someone she’s going to answer.

“That’s a son,” she said. “Whatever else he is.”

I didn’t sleep that night. I sat in the kitchen in the house on the rise, after everyone had gone, with the lamp turned down, and looked at my father’s wall.

I painted it again, you’ll remember, from memory, behind the stove. The squares. All the things the world is made of, in the order they come, the way Trevor did it on the wall of the house where I grew up, so I’d have something to look at while I ate my porridge. Bell added the breaking and the joining. The Aldri put in their nine. And at the very end there’s an empty square that Bell drew and Lio filled with a knot.

Dory came in at some point. I didn’t hear her. She’s quieter than I am now. She sat down at the other end of the bench and didn’t say anything for a while, and then she said, “You know why.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me anyway. I want to hear somebody say it out loud.”

So I did.

The thing is, it isn’t a mystery. Not to anyone who’s ever done it. It’s the simplest thing there is. It’s the first thing my father ever taught me, before the squares, before anything.

When I was four I asked him and Mother if there was water on the moon. They said no. So I looked at it, from my bedroom window, and there was.

I didn’t tell the moon to have water. I didn’t know you could tell things. I was four. I just wondered whether it’d mind, and it didn’t, and so it did.

My father spent the next six years making sure I never found out there was another way to do it.

“Everything’s made of them,” I said to Dory. “The little things holding hands. You’ve seen them. You saw them the first time and you cried.”

“I didn’t cry.”

“You cried a bit.”

“Lio cried. I was holding her.” She was smiling, though. “Go on.”

“They’re the bottom of everything. Every stone. Every star. Every one of us. There’s nothing underneath them to make them do anything. They were here before the first queen sang. They’ll be here after the last sun goes out.” I looked at the wall. “You don’t give orders to something like that. It’s older than orders. It’s older than anyone.”

“But you can,” said Dory. “If you’re made to. They’ve been doing it for four thousand years. The Refined. The houses. The collars.”

“You can. For a bit. Like you can shove a door shut on someone who’s trying to get out. You can lean on it. You can make it stay.” I put my hand flat on the bench. “But the door’s still a door, and the someone’s still pushing. And you’re the thing in between. Every time. All of it goes through you.”

Dory looked at her own hand.

“Nose first,” she said. “Then the ears.”

“Then your head’s the door.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“That’s why you get nosebleeds,” she said, at last. “Sometimes. When he does too much.”

“That’s different. That’s asking too much at once. Like carrying too many cups. You drop one, and then you put some down, and you’re all right.” I turned my hand over. “They’re not carrying cups. They’re holding a door against the whole world. And the whole world doesn’t get tired.”

Dory went up to the plateau before dawn, and I went with her, and so, it turned out, did Lio, who’d heard us go out and followed with her blanket round her shoulders.

The eldest was awake. She usually is, at that hour. The ground under the plateau was warm under our feet.

Dory asked her, through the deep sound, the thing I’d been thinking all night and couldn’t make into a question.

Why does it hold in me, and not in them?

The eldest didn’t answer straight away. Then the ground went warm all the way up to my knees, which is what it does when she’s going to say something she’s sure of. Dory carried it, very slowly, word by word.

“The silver in you was given.”

I knew that. Every gift, freely, she’d said to the Assize, in front of all of them. Every bit of silver in every person in that room came from a queen who gave it.

“Given silver knows where it is,” said the eldest. “It knows it is wanted. It knows it is home. When you ask it, it is asked by its home.”

“And taken silver?” said Lio.

The ground went cold under her. Not at her. Just cold, the way the eldest goes cold when she’s remembering something.

“Taken silver only knows where it was,” said the eldest. “It is not in a body. It is in a cell. It does not want to be anywhere except the place it was taken from. Every moment, it is trying to go home.”

Lio’s hands went to her collar. To the pale mark where the collar used to be.

“That is why they need the collars,” said the eldest. “The Refined. The grey ones. The made. Something must hold the silver in, or it leaves. And when it is held in, it pulls. All the time. On every part of the one it is held in.”

“The Refined don’t bleed,” said Dory.

“The Refined have been holding it in for four thousand years. They are made of very little else now. There is not much left in them for it to pull on.” The cold went deeper. “These twelve were people.”

“Nine,” said Lio.

“Nine.”

Lio sat down on the warm ground with her blanket. She sat there for a while with her hand flat on the rock, the way she learned from us. Then she asked the question I’d been afraid she’d ask.

“Is it trying to go home in me?”

The eldest was quiet for a long time.

“It was,” she said. “He asked the collar off you. One piece at a time. You will remember.”

“I don’t. I was asleep.”

“He asked it. He did not tell it. And the silver in you was asked for the first time in its life. And it stopped. And it listened.” The ground went warm again. “And then you woke up, and you were held, and somebody did your knot. Every morning. And after a while it decided that you were somewhere it could stay.”

Lio didn’t say anything.

“It is not the same as given,” said the eldest. “It never will be. You know that. You cannot ask atoms to be what they have never been. But it is not trying to leave you, child. It has not tried to leave you for a long time. It likes the knot.”

Lio laughed. The second time I’ve heard it. It came out wet.

She put her forehead down on her knees, on the warm rock, and stayed there until the sun came over the southern range, gold on the peaks first, and down the slopes, and onto the plateau, and onto her.

The two houses had been listening.

We knew because the deepest crack hummed, very small, the two notes they’ve learned to make. The Overseer was there by then. He goes at dawn now, as well as dusk. He’d come up the long way, past Holdfast, with his cup.

“Good morning,” said the first house, through Dory. It still sounds surprised every time. As if it’s never sure the light will come.

“Good morning,” said the Overseer.

Then, without being asked, the second house said, “It never held.”

We all looked at the crack.

“The making. It never held. Not in the grey ones. Not in her.” A pause. “Not once. Not in all the time there have been houses. We made thousands. Millions. Every one came apart in the end, unless there was a collar. We always knew.”

“Did you tell him?” said Dory.

Silence. Then the first house.

“No.”

“We told him he would be what your father is,” said the second. “That is what he wanted to hear. We were very good at knowing what someone wanted to hear.” Another pause. “We are trying not to be good at that any more.”

The Overseer put his cup down on the rock.

“Is he right?” he said. “The man. Are they spoiling it on purpose?”

The two houses talked to each other. We heard that much, the two notes going back and forth, the way they used to talk before they learned to talk to anyone else.

“There is nothing to spoil,” said the first house, finally. “It cannot be done. Not with taken silver. Not by telling. The ones who went to him know that. They knew it when they gave it to him.”

“They are not spoiling it,” said the second. “They are letting him believe there is something to spoil. So that he keeps trying. So that he keeps asking them to try again.”

“And every time he asks,” said the first, “he lets them closer.”

Nobody said anything for a long time after that.

That’s the Sorn. That’s what they are. That’s what they always were. They didn’t have to spoil anything. They just had to let a frightened man think they were, and stand very close to him while he was frightened, and wait.

The Overseer picked his cup back up.

“Thank you,” he said to the crack. “For telling the truth. It’s harder than it looks.”

“Yes,” said the second house. “It is very hard. We would like to do it again tomorrow.”

Mother answered Corvan’s letter herself.

Not the reports. Not the Prime’s letters. Those went to Senna and Iolo and Mara, and Senna sat with them in the small room at the back of the kitchen for three days, and came out with her mouth very thin, and said, “Not yet. But when it’s yes, this goes with the rest.”

Mother answered the half-sheet. The one she’d kept under her cup.

She wrote it at the long table, after the honey cake, in her own hand, with Trevor’s old pen, the one with the bent nib. She didn’t show anyone. She folded it twice and gave it to Dory to lock by shape, and Dory did, without reading it, which is the only time I’ve known Dory not look all the way down something she was holding.

I asked Mother what she’d written, later, when we were doing the cups.

She dried a cup and put it on the shelf.

“I told him that a man who has the cloths burned is a man who’s frightened somebody’ll find them,” she said. “And that’s not the same as a man who doesn’t want to be found. And that he’s a good son for looking.” She dried another one. “And I told him to eat something before noon himself. He’s not the only one in that house who can’t keep breakfast down. I’d put money on it.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I’ve been a mother a long time, love. I can know that.”

Lio wanted to write too.

She came to me with it the morning after the plateau. A piece of paper folded very small. She didn’t give it to me. She held it.

“For the nine,” she said.

I didn’t say anything for a moment, and she saw me not say it, and stood up straighter.

“I know who they are,” she said. “I know what they wanted. They wanted to be made into something that could take Dory.” She swallowed. “So did I. They made me want a door. I wanted it, Lucas. I’d have gone through it. You didn’t stop and ask whether I’d deserved it before you asked the collar off me.”

“No.”

“Then I’m not going to either.”

She unfolded the paper. Her writing’s still very round. Sefa says it’s because she learned it late and she learned it happy.

If you’re one of the nine: it hurts because it isn’t yours. It was taken from somebody. It wants to go home. That’s what it’s doing when it moves. It’s not broken. It’s trying to leave.

You can let it. Don’t tell it anything. Just ask it if it would like to go.

It might say yes.

They made me too. — Lio

I read it twice.

“If they let it go,” I said, “they won’t be able to do anything any more. Not the cups. Not the walls. Nothing.”

“Good,” said Lio. “Then they won’t die.”

I didn’t know that. I said so. I told her about the forty in the hall on Ysse’s world, the first Refined I ever met, and how I asked the stolen silver out of them, and how it came out clean, and how they came apart.

“They were made of it,” Lio said. “The eldest said. There wasn’t anything else left. These were people forty days ago.” She held the paper out to me. “Please.”

I took it to the long table. I didn’t want to decide it on my own. You’ll know by now I don’t decide very much on my own any more, and the hill’s better for it.

It took most of an evening.

Kesh didn’t like it, and said so, and then said she didn’t know why she didn’t like it, which is very like Kesh. Mira from Thole said that if those nine had been made a year ago, they’d have been on the ships that came to warn her world against being helped, and that she didn’t see why she should be kind to them, and then she sat for a while with Lio’s paper in her hands, the blue in the creases and said, “But I don’t see why I shouldn’t, either,” and passed it on.

Senna said it gave nothing away. Not the eldest, not Root, not anything the Prime could use. Iolo agreed and then made a joke about legal advice for the recently dissolved that nobody laughed at, so he laughed for us.

Kyria held it longest. She read it, and read it again, and then she said a word in old Hyrrani that I’m learning is the word for holding and not the word for holding on.

“She’s right,” Kyria said. “She’s telling them how to let go. That’s the hardest one. I learned it this year.”

The Overseer didn’t say anything. He was by the stove. He just put his hand on his chest.

Okafor wrote it on the slate.

All right.

Dory locked it by shape under Mother’s letter, in the same fold. And under that she put one line of her own, the same one she sent the first time he wrote to her, before Lure, before any of it.

Thank you. Are you safe?

Mattick took it out on the Hesta the next night, in a crate of soft ones. Sorrel tied it to the bottom of the crate herself with a bootlace. She says that’s where nobody ever looks.

I should say that the rest of the hill did not stop while all this went on. It never does. That’s the thing I love most about it, and on some nights the thing I find hardest.

The sixth wedding meeting was at Konrad and Ingrid’s.

They count as Trevor’s grandparents through Risa, the same as Kyria counts through Andraste, and nobody on Teva’s side even blinked at that any more. Teva’s father had drawn a second arrow on his slate. He says he’s going to need a third slate.

Konrad and Ingrid live in the narrow house at the bottom of the hill road, the one with the blue door, and Konrad’s sheets are on every wall. All of them. Avalon. Home. All. at the top of the oldest, going yellow now, pinned with Voss’s wire. Came by themselves, eleven sheets of it, then more. Still out, with its lines crossed through one by one and Home written beside them in Ingrid’s hand.

Teva’s family came in and stopped in the doorway, all of them at once, and looked.

“Those are people,” said Teva’s grandmother.

“All of them,” said Konrad. “I don’t know what else you’d keep on a wall.”

Teva’s grandmother went along the sheets very slowly, with one finger not quite touching, all the way round the room, while Ingrid made the tea. It took her most of an hour. Nobody hurried her. Konrad stood behind her the whole way, the way he stood behind Mother at the long table the first day she started saying the names out loud.

When she got to the end, she turned round.

“Where are we?” she said.

Konrad went to the drawer. He had a new sheet already. He’d started it the day after the first meeting, he said. He’d just been waiting to ask.

At the top it said, in his heavy square letters,

Teva’s people.

And under that there was nothing.

“I didn’t want to write it,” he said. “I thought you’d want to. It’s your line.”

Teva’s grandmother took the pen. She looked at the sheet a long time. Then she wrote, in very small Aldri letters, which Halvane translated for us later,

Stopped running.

Ingrid pinned it next to Avalon. Home. All. with Voss’s wire. Not anywhere else. Right next to it.

Then Teva’s youngest cousin fell off a chair and started howling, and Ingrid hushed him without even looking round, the way she’s hushed babies and crowds and whole spokes of frightened people in her time, a breath at a time. He stopped mid-howl and looked astonished. Teva’s mother looked astonished too.

“Can you teach me that?” she said.

“No,” said Ingrid. “But I can teach you to make the tea strong enough that you don’t need it.”

Big Sigmund came in at the end with Jessa and the twins, and scowled at everybody, and shook Teva’s father’s hand very hard, and told Trevor he was making a terrible mistake, and then sat down next to Teva and spent the rest of the evening telling her every embarrassing thing Trevor had done since he was two. Teva laughed until she cried. Trevor sat with his head on the table.

Risa says that’s how her family says welcome. She says Sigmund said it to her the day I married her, and she didn’t speak to him for a month, and it was the best month of her life.

Luna says the General has asked if there’ll be a seventh meeting he could go to. Just to sit at the back.

There’s no rule against it. Teva’s father has drawn him a small chair on the slate.

Sallow’s engine finished on the thirty-eighth day. Halvane had said forty. He came up the hill to tell us himself, which he never does, and sat down on the bench by the kitchen door before anyone asked him to, which he never used to do either.

“Two days early,” he said. “I’ve never been early in my life.”

“How does it feel?” said Mother.

He thought about it.

“Like I’ve been rude,” he said. “I’m not sure to whom.”

Bell’s sum hasn’t moved. It’s counting down exactly as fast as it always was, and not one day faster. The eater is coming towards Sallow’s sun at the speed it was always coming. Nobody’s pulled it. The Collective still doesn’t know there’s anything under the river except fish.

Orra rowed Halvane out over the place where the engine is, the evening it finished, so he could see it. You can’t see it. That’s the point. He looked down into the brown water a long time anyway, and Orra let him, and then she rowed him back and charged him for the trip. He paid her. She says he’s the first Aldri who ever has.

The jump’s set for when the river is lowest. Before the eater. Comfortably before. Bell has done the sum nine times and she says she’s happy with it, and Bell has only ever said that once before in her life, so we believe her.

The landing girl has been learning the song. All of it now. She sings it in the boat when Orra rows her out. She still thinks it’s the river.

Orra says nobody’s told her it isn’t. Orra says nobody’s going to.

There was a soft one at the Hedge Table this month that I want to put down, because it’s the best one yet.

Gath came back from Orsk with a delegation of nine, every one of them in nine layers of wool, and every one of them with a soft one tied to their belt like a lantern. Gath’s own is the soft Taveth, still. The others had a soft Dory, two soft Dots, a soft Kyria with her blade sewn on so it can’t come off, a soft Mother with her pot, a soft Overseer’s cup, and three that I didn’t recognise at all.

They were Orsk’s own. Small and round and wool all over, with a face on the front.

“What are they?” said Corin.

Gath untied one and put it in his hand. It was me.

Not the Aldri me. Not the cadet me, or the man in the arch. A small round woolly person with two black stitches for eyes, sitting down with its legs out in front of it, with a hand flat on its knee.

“The one who sits in the dirt,” said Gath, through the walker. “At the first morning. Happy.” He pointed at Tam Orrin, who’d come up the hill with the film people, and who went bright red. “He told the Table. We made it that week. There are eleven thousand now. The children on the lowest step want them all.”

Tam asked if he could have one. Gath gave him the one from his belt.

Halvane says it’s the first piece of merchandise made of me that I didn’t have to approve, because it’s not merchandise, it’s a thank-you. Imre Oshan says she’s going to make an Aldri one anyway, because the Aldri children have seen it and want it. The toymakers in the third city sent a polite note asking Orsk if they could. Orsk sent a polite note back saying yes, but only if the wool comes from Orsk. So now there’s a wool trade.

Mira says that’s how the Hedge works. Somebody makes a soft one, and six months later there’s a trade route.

The long record says the same thing, in its own way. The keepers sent their half-year count up the hill, the way they do now. Dory’s still first, over twelve thousand since the new year. Dot’s second, over ten. Luka’s still entered as see first entry. There are nineteen new Gaths, which I think is the first time an Aldri child has ever been named after somebody from the Hedge, and there are four little girls called Lio, which Lio went very quiet about, and then went down the hill to Sefa’s terrace and stayed there until dark.

And there’s one that Halvane brought up specially to show us, because the keepers had to sit on it for a week.

A family in the second city had a son in the spring, and asked to name him Cup.

The keepers didn’t know what to do. Halvane went to them himself. In the end they entered him as the one somebody gave something to, which in old Aldri is a single word, and it’s very short, and it’s very old, and nobody had used it in four thousand years.

The Overseer laughed so hard he had to put his own cup down.

Isar Thenn filmed the rope scene in the river under the kit bridge. At night. Holt stood on the bank the whole time with his cap off.

They did it nine times. On the ninth, Isar came up out of the black water with his hand flat on the shoulder of the boy playing Holt, and didn’t say anything, and the boy didn’t either, and the director didn’t call anything for a long time.

Holt walked down into the water up to his knees, after, and put his own hand on Isar’s shoulder.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the half.”

Isar’s going to stay on Avalon another month. He says he hasn’t finished learning the hill. Mother says nobody ever has.

On the twenty-second night, Dory came and found me on the roof.

Hana was there already. She often is. She’d brought a blanket and the small pot and three cups, because she knew Dory was coming before Dory did. Hana always knows.

“I heard him,” said Dory.

She sat down between us. She didn’t need to say who.

“Not the voice,” she said. “Not the houses. Him. I was listening for the forge, the way I do. And there was something underneath it, very small. Like when you can hear someone breathing on the other side of a wall.” She took the cup Hana gave her. “He was holding his head. I could hear him doing it. Both hands. At a window.”

“Did he know you were there?”

“No. He doesn’t know how to know. He was never taught.” She drank. “He was saying something. Over and over. Not to the houses. To himself.”

“What?”

Dory looked out at the dark, past the north field, past the hill, past all of it.

“It holds in him. Why does it hold in him.”

Hana put her hand on my back. She didn’t say anything. She just put it there.

I thought about the Prime in the square, the first day of the year, with Corvan a step behind and the lamps going out on either side of him. Younger. Every step going further than it should. And all the time the silver they’d put in him pulling, pulling, every moment, on every part of him, trying to go home. And him walking anyway. He’d walk it if it killed him, Corvan said.

I know a good many things about that man. I know what he did at the Assize. I know what he wanted to do to my daughter, and to Aune, and to Rhiannon and Isolde. I know about the nineteen worlds marked Directed, and Thole, marked Openly.

And I sat on the roof with my wife’s hand on my back and my daughter’s shoulder against mine, and I was sorry for him.

I’m not proud of that. I’m not ashamed of it either. It’s just true.

“He’ll think it’s me,” I said. “He’ll think I’ve got something he can take.”

“He already thinks that,” said Hana. “He’s thought that since the Assize.”

“He’ll want the queens.”

“He’s always wanted the queens.”

“He’ll want them to give it. Freely. And you can’t make anyone give anything freely. So he’ll take more of them, trying. He’ll put them on frames and ask and ask, and they won’t, because you can’t ask that way, and he’ll take more.”

Hana was quiet.

“Then we’ll go and get them,” she said.

That’s all. That’s Hana. She’s been saying the true thing in the fewest words and then pouring the tea.

Dory leaned her head on my shoulder. She’s as tall as her mother now. She still fits there.

“Dad,” she said. “When I was little. When I asked the moon for the pancake.”

I’d forgotten that. She was three. She asked the moon to be a pancake, and it very politely didn’t, and she cried, and Risa had to explain that the moon was busy.

“It said no,” said Dory. “I remember. It said no and it was kind about it.”

“It was.”

“The Prime’s never been told no by something kind,” she said. “Not once. Not in his whole life.” She closed her eyes. “That’s the saddest thing I know.”

Kyrie said the second word on the twenty-ninth morning.

Andraste was doing the forms on the plateau in the first light, the way she does, with Kyrie in the sling with her small blunt blade. And Kyrie was holding it the loose way, the first way, the holding way. And then, Andraste says, she tightened her fingers on it, very small fists, and said the other word. The holding on one.

And then she let go of it. On purpose. And watched it fall onto the warm rock, and laughed.

Kyria was there. She picked up the blade and gave it back. Kyrie took it the loose way again.

“Holding,” said Kyrie. The first word.

Kyria sat down on the rock very suddenly.

Andraste says her mother didn’t say anything for the rest of the forms. She just sat there with her hand flat on the rock next to the place the blade fell, and when the sun came over the range, she said, very quietly, in old Hyrrani, the right way round.

No word from Corvan. Not Now, not anything. Mattick’s not due back for a month.

Dory says the forge is still going. Angry. Hitting a thing, not making it.

But on the last night, she says, it stopped for a while. Nearly an hour. And in the quiet, a long way past the Watch, in a house with no windows, she thinks she heard something she’s never heard from inside the Collective before.

She says it was very small. Like a cup being put down on a table, carefully, by someone whose hands were shaking.

And then, she thinks, something going home.

She can’t be sure. She says she won’t say it was, until she’s sure.

Lio sleeps with the warm pebble still. She’s had it since her first week on the hill. She took it up to the plateau on the last morning and put it down on the rock, next to the deepest crack, where the two houses can see out.

“For you to look at,” she told them. “It was the first thing I ever asked. It said yes.”

The houses hummed, the two notes. Dory says they were looking at it until the sun came up.

Sorrel’s wrist still says C and Y.

She’s added a small round thing under it. She says it’s a pebble. She says it’s for later.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Two hundred and eighty-eight. Sallow’s star, in its old slow voice. Orsk’s, thin and cold and very high up.

Wren wrote it at the top of the slate, the way she does.

Under it she wrote, in her careful hand,

Sallow: ready.

The nine: asked.

Days 10007–10031. Telling.

The forge Dory heard past the Watch stopped on the eleventh morning, then started again, angry. Mattick brought Corvan’s case (not the word, “read this first”): the physicians’ reports from the house with no windows past Carrow’s port, where twelve volunteers from the Collective’s old families, the Vessels, were made the way Lio was made, to be what I am. It worked, for days: a cup to glass, a wall to sand, a cart, a jug of water from the air. Then the nosebleeds, the ears, the headaches, the vomiting, hands that couldn’t hold a cup. The Prime made them do it in front of him on the nineteenth day. Three died; nine are left in beds. The physician: the body does not hold it; I have been asked not to write that I do not know why; they were promised. The Prime’s letters to the houses: you are doing it on purpose (three times); if you are doing this to them, you are doing it to me. Corvan: he bleeds in the mornings, has the cloths burned, holds his head at the window, can’t eat before noon, tells no one, walks the square anyway; I don’t know if I’m supposed to be sorry; I am. Mother: that’s a son. Kesh said good, then didn’t mean it; Lio: nose first, then ears, then your head’s a door; you still want to. At my father’s wall I told Dory: telling atoms isn’t asking, and they’re the bottom of everything and older than orders; you can lean on the door, but the whole world doesn’t get tired. The eldest: given silver knows where it is; taken silver only knows where it was, and is always trying to go home; Lio’s stopped trying long ago, because it likes the knot. The two houses: it never held, not once; the ones who went to him aren’t spoiling it, they’re letting him believe there’s something to spoil, so he keeps asking, and lets them closer. Mother answered Corvan; Lio wrote to the nine: it isn’t yours, ask it if it would like to go; the table said all right; Dory added: are you safe? The sixth meeting at Konrad and Ingrid’s: Teva’s people, stopped running, pinned beside Avalon. Home. All. Sallow’s engine done two days early; the jump is set for the low river. Orsk’s woolly me sitting in the dirt; nineteen Gaths, four Lios, and a boy named for a cup. On the roof Dory heard the Prime: why does it hold in him. I was sorry for him. Hana: then we’ll go and get them. Kyrie said holding on, let go, and laughed. On the last night, maybe, a cup set down carefully, and something going home. Two hundred and eighty-eight. Sallow: ready. The nine: asked.