Scarecrow

The first letter came to Vesk on the third day after she asked.

Not on the Assessors’ band. On paper. Under the door of her house in the quarry town on Kessry, in the night, while she slept. Very short. Unsigned.

Traitor.

The second came the next night. Longer. It said what would happen to her if she ever spoke on any band again. It said it in some detail. Vesk read it out to Ferro Hale on the old band, very calmly, in the voice she’d used for sixty years in the white hall, and Ferro Hale stood by Ilka’s board with his hands at his sides and listened to all of it.

By the ninth day there were letters every night. Under her door. Nailed to the quarry gate. Scratched into the white stone of the street outside her house, very deep, so the morning sun would catch the letters.

And on the tenth day, somebody dropped a block of white stone the size of a cart off the top of the quarry face, onto the path where Vesk walks every morning to look at the cutting.

She’s ninety-one. She walks very slowly. That’s the only reason it missed. It came down three steps in front of her and broke into a thousand pieces across the path, and one of them broke her arm, and another cut her face.

She went home. She bound the arm herself. She sat down at her table.

And that night, on the old band, she said to Ferro Hale, in the same calm voice:

I’m still here. I’d like to stay here. But I don’t think they’re going to let me.

Tamsin Oake’s were worse. On Dun Amar, in the grain belt, under eleven thousand Refined in every granary, somebody had been told that she’d asked the Hedge to come. And somebody else had been told that if the Hedge came, the Refined would burn the harvest rather than let it go. Forty million people’s harvest.

So the letters to Tamsin weren’t from the Refined. They were from her own people. Some of them. The frightened ones.

You’ll starve us.

You’ve killed us all.

If you speak again we’ll give you to them ourselves.

She read every one. She kept every one. She told Ferro Hale she’d sat in the white hall for twenty years reading what she was given without thinking about it, and she wasn’t going to stop reading now just because it was about her.

Somebody put something in her well on the fourteenth night. She didn’t drink from it. Her dog did. The dog was very ill for three days and lived.

She told Ferro Hale that one too. She said it in a voice nobody had ever heard her use.

And Rhun Ettrick, on Ilith, had nobody on his side at all.

The Refined hated him because he’d asked. His own people hated him because he’d voted no, to keep the Prime, and they’d been made to dig the black stuff out of their own ground for nothing, every day, since the first night of protection, and they knew whose vote that was.

They didn’t send letters. They came to his house. On the twentieth night. Nine of them, with picks. Miners. Men he’d grown up with.

Rhun opened the door.

He didn’t run. He didn’t call anyone; there wasn’t anyone to call. He stood in his own doorway on Ilith, in the dark, with nine men with picks on his step, and said, Ferro Hale told us afterwards, because Rhun told him:

I know. I was wrong. If you want to, you can. I won’t stop you. But I’ve asked the Hedge to come for Ilith, and if I’m dead they won’t know who to talk to.

The nine men stood on his step for a very long time.

Then one of them, the oldest, put his pick down. And sat on the step.

The others went home. The old miner stayed on Rhun’s step all night. In the morning he was still there. Rhun brought him tea. They didn’t say anything to each other.

He’s been there every night since. Rhun says he still doesn’t know whether the old miner is guarding him or waiting for him.

“They’re going to be killed,” said Okafor. “All three. Not this week. Maybe not this month. But they are.”

She was at the long table. With her slate. With Ferro Hale, and Senna, and Dory, and me, and Aramaeis, who’s always at her left hand now.

“The Refined don’t need to do it themselves,” she said. “They just need to stand there while somebody frightened does it for them. That’s what they’re best at. Standing there.”

“Then we bring them out,” said Dory.

“Yes,” said Okafor. “All three. Together. Same night. If we take one, the others are dead by morning.”

She turned the slate round.

It wasn’t one sheet, this time. It was nine.

I’ll come back to Okafor’s nine sheets. I want to put down the other things first, because they happened in the same nine days, and because they matter.

Halvane came up the hill road with a box.

Not a big one. The size of a bread oven. Grey Kiln iron, with Thole lumen in a thin seam down every edge, and Aldri writing on the lid, very small. He put it on the long table, in front of me, and sat down on the bench, which he never used to do without being asked and now does every time.

“Open it,” he said.

I opened it.

Inside, in a nest of Sedge-woven packing, there were nine pieces. Each one about the size of a loaf. Each one different. Iron and lumen and something of Bell’s I didn’t know the name of. They fitted together. I could see how. Each one had a place on its edge where the next one went.

“It’s an engine,” said Halvane.

I looked at him.

“A small one. A tenth of an engine. The first tenth.” He put his hand on the lid. “There are nine hundred worlds that want to come. Nine thousand teams in the Reach in grey coats, digging. Every engine built by hand, in the ground, on the world, the way we built Ister’s and Thole’s and Sallow’s. Every one taking months. Every one the Refined could find, if they looked.”

“And this?”

“This,” said Halvane, “is built on Marrach. In the yards. And on Kiln, and in the second city, and under Thole. In pieces. Nine hundred pieces a day, by the spring. And carried into the Reach in crates of rabbits and barley and iron bells, a piece at a time, by Mattick and everyone like Mattick. And set up in the ground on whatever world needs it, by a team of nine, in nine days.”

He looked at the box for a long time.

“It goes together one way,” he said. “Only one. You can’t get it wrong. I made sure. It tells you, if you try. It’s very polite about it.”

I didn’t say anything for a while.

“Halvane,” I said. “It’s a kit.”

He looked at me.

“A long time ago,” I said, “they sent me to a planet nobody had ever been to, with a box. It built the first walls. It talked to me. The children called its voice Dot.” I put my hand on the lid next to his. “It came in a box like this.”

Halvane was quiet.

“I know,” he said. “I’ve seen it. In the museum. Under the glass.” He took his hand off the lid. “Where do you think I got the idea?”

The first modular engine went into the ground on a small grey world on the edge of the second arm on the thirty-first day. A team of nine. Nine days. The world jumped on the fortieth. Halvane says the next one will take eight.

Mira says the miners call them boxes. The engineers call them Halvane’s. The Aldri have a long word for them that means the thing you carry home in pieces.

The children on the edge worlds, Mattick says, have started calling them Dots.

And then the other worlds asked.

I didn’t expect this. Nobody did. Not the Reach. Not the Hedge. The others.

There are worlds out past the edge of everything. Beyond the Hedge, beyond the Reach, beyond the Watch on the other side. Worlds that were never members of anything. Worlds the Collective never wanted, and the Hedge never reached, and the Sorn never noticed. Very far out. Very quiet. Some of them have queens. Some of them don’t. Some of them, Mara Quell says, have never once spoken to anyone outside their own sky.

They heard Senna. On the old bands. The ones that go everywhere.

And they started to ask. Not to join. Not to come. Just for a box.

In case, the first one said. A world called Thorn, so far out past the third arm that Bell had to look it up. We’ve heard what happens to worlds when the Refined come. We’ve heard about the eaters and the stars. We don’t want to leave. We like it here. But if it comes to it, we’d like to be able to.

In case.

Forty-one, in nine days. Worlds from outside. Asking for an engine to put in the ground and not use.

The Table said yes. All forty-one. The Caddi grandmother said it was the first time she’d ever said yes to someone who wasn’t asking to come. She said she thought she liked it.

Halvane went very quiet when he heard. Then he went back to Ister, and the next morning there were two new lines in the yards on Marrach, and over the gate of each one, in Wren’s careful hand, a sign.

In case.

Imre Oshan came up the hill road on the twentieth day.

She doesn’t usually come to the house. She sends things. Soft ones, and comics, and drawings, with notes. But that morning she came up the hill road with a satchel under her arm, and stood in the kitchen doorway, and asked if Mother had a moment.

Mother had a moment. Mother always has a moment for Imre.

They sat at the long table. Imre took a great many letters out of her satchel and put them on the table in front of Mother. Piles of them. From every world in the Hedge. From the edge worlds of the Reach, in crates of rabbits. Some of them in very large handwriting.

“They want you,” said Imre.

Mother looked at her.

“Not now,” said Imre. “Then. Before. When you were young.” She touched the pile. “Everybody knows you now. Everybody knows the long table and the pot and the tea towel. Everybody’s seen Maelis Orr sit down very suddenly in the film. But nobody knows where you came from. The halls. The war. How you and he—” She stopped. “And him. Everybody wants to know about him.”

“Who?”

“Trevor,” said Imre. “The man who made the man who asks stars to be steps.”

Mother didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Most of it isn’t nice,” she said, at last.

“I know.”

“There are people in it who did things. People who are still here. People at this table, some nights.” Mother looked at her cup. “I’m not going to tell it if it means saying things about them they haven’t agreed to.”

“Then ask them,” said Imre.

Mother looked at her.

“That’s what this house does,” said Imre, quite gently. “Isn’t it. You ask.”

So Mother asked.

She went to all of them. The ones who were there. In the dome. In Cinder. In the war, and after.

Ruth Halloway, who was the youngest doctor in the program, twenty-three, who took blood and wrote numbers on charts and sat with the ones who didn’t wake up. Who went on to treat the thirty-one families every week for nineteen years, inside the dome, and knew what normal was. Who was in the room when Mother woke.

Okafor, who was one of the three hundred and eleven. Who went out through the locks with the rest of them inside seventy-two hours.

Maura and Rory. Who were fire, the first Cinder subjects to make the air burn, and met in a trench with the sky on fire over them.

Ingrid. The Hush. Who was in the war with Mother, and was one of the very few who could keep up with her.

And Halvard Crane.

Mother went to Crane last.

He was at the Arch Hall. At his board, at the far end, the way he always is. Holt was beside him. Mother came down the long white hall between the arches with her pot under her arm and stopped in front of the board, and Crane looked up, and saw her, and went very still.

He knew. Before she said anything.

“Imre wants to tell it,” said Mother. “The halls. Cinder. The war. Directive Nine.” She put the pot down on the edge of his board. “Trevor. Outside. The ridge. Your canisters.”

Crane didn’t say anything.

“The list,” said Mother.

Crane looked at his board for a long time. All the arches. All the worlds. Every person in the Hedge, going somewhere, and him knowing where.

“Tell it,” he said.

“Halvard—”

“All of it, Dot.” He looked up at her. He’s very old now. Older than Mother. He doesn’t have the silver, the grandparents’ silver, the thing my children do without knowing they do it. He has a cane, and a voice that’s gone soft and hoarse, and eyes that have looked at boards and lists for a very long time.

“I drew up the list,” he said. “The Retention list. Who’d stay inside. I left Trevor off it because I was frightened of him. I left you off it because you’d never have come without him, and I never asked you. I was right. I never asked.” He put his hand flat on the board. “And then I spent nineteen years sending canisters out over the ridge. Too few. Too late. Not enough to make up for any of it.”

“You gave me one,” said Mother. “At the end. On your own authority.”

“One,” said Crane. “After nineteen years.”

Mother didn’t say anything.

“Tell it true,” said Crane. “Put my name in. Put the list in. Put in that I was frightened. If it makes people hate me, then they should. I’ve hated me for longer than any of them will have time to.” He looked at her. “It’s the only thing I can give him, Dot. The truth. He’d want it told straight. He never did anything any other way.”

Mother told me about it that night, on the porch. She’d been down to the river below the north field, on her own, for most of the evening. She came back and sat on the step below me, the way Dory does.

“He cried,” she said. “Halvard. At his board. In front of Holt.”

“What did Holt do?”

“Holt put his hand on his shoulder and didn’t say anything,” said Mother. “And then he went and got him a cup of tea. And then they both sat at the board for an hour not saying anything, the two of them.” She was quiet. “That’s how men say they’re sorry, love. They sit next to each other at a board.”

“And are you going to tell it?”

Mother looked out at the north field. At the new river Kwame Osei dug, going round the house in the dark.

“Yes,” she said. “All of it. Halloway said yes. Okafor said yes. Maura and Rory and Ingrid said yes. Halvard said yes and cried.” She put her hands in her lap. “Your father would want it told. He’d want people to know what they did to us. Not so they’d hate anyone. So they’d know.”

“And the bit about the man who came to the ridge?”

Mother went very still.

“That too,” she said, after a while. “Everybody already knows that bit. It’s in the files. It’s what made the Council frightened.” She looked at her hands. “They should know why he did it. They should know what the man said to him first.”

She’s never told me what the man said. Not in all the years since she gave me the files. I didn’t ask.

She went to bed.

Now. Okafor’s nine sheets.

It was three rescues. Same night. Three worlds, all under protection, all with hundreds of white ships in the sky and the Refined at every door and nobody permitted to ask.

And then, on the ninth sheet, at the bottom, in her square sergeant’s hand, a fourth.

Carrow. C.

I looked at her.

“While we’re in there,” said Okafor. “Every Refined ship in the Reach is going to be looking at three worlds at once. Kessry, Dun Amar, Ilith. Every eye. For one night.” She tapped the ninth sheet. “Nobody will be looking at somebody’s sister’s house on Carrow.”

Lio was at the long table. She’d been sitting next to Sefa, very still, with her knot, the whole time. She looked up when Okafor said Carrow.

“Can I go?” she said.

Okafor looked at her for a long time.

“Yes,” she said. “You and Dory and Sefa. Nobody else.” She turned the sheet round so Lio could see it. “I wrote your name down three days ago. I was waiting for you to ask.”

I’ll put down how it went. It went the way Okafor’s plans go when there are nine sheets. Very carefully. Very quickly. All at once.

On Kessry, the quarry world, the white stone world, Gilgamesh and Kyria and Teshka went in at midnight through a door Elin held from the edge of the Hedge. In quiet coats. Vesk was at her table, with her arm bound, waiting, the way Ferro Hale had told her to be.

She wouldn’t leave without the quarry.

That was the thing nobody had planned for. She said she’d asked the Hedge for Kessry, not for herself, and she wasn’t going through any door unless Kessry could come too.

Gilgamesh looked at her for a long time. Then he took a small grey box out of his coat. The size of a loaf. Iron and lumen.

“The first tenth,” he said. “Of Kessry’s engine. The other nine are in Mattick’s crates in your quarry store, under the iron bells. They’ve been there a week. Your quarrymen have been building it in the dark.”

Vesk looked at the box. Then at Gilgamesh.

“In nine days,” said Gilgamesh, “Kessry goes. With everyone on it. Quietly. Under the Refined’s noses. But you won’t be here to see it, because you’ll be dead by then, if you stay. And then who’ll tell them where they’re going?”

Vesk sat at her table, with her arm bound, for a very long time.

Then she stood up.

“Give me nine days’ worth of letters,” she said. “I’ll write to every quarry from wherever you’re taking me.”

On Dun Amar, the grain belt, forty million people and eleven thousand Refined, Andraste and Luna and Hana went in through a door Goldie held. Tamsin Oake was in her kitchen with the letters in a pile on the table, all of them, the frightened ones, and her dog asleep under it.

She came. She brought the letters. She brought the dog. Hana carried the dog, because the dog was still weak from the well, and Hana breathed for it, a little, all the way through the door.

Tamsin says she wants to answer every letter. One at a time. From Avalon. She says the people who wrote them were frightened, and she understands frightened, and she’s going to tell every one of them, by name, that she’s sorry they were frightened, and that she’s still going to ask.

She’s started. She’s written four hundred so far. Ferro Hale helps her with the stamps.

On Ilith, the metal world, Dinraal and Aramaeis and Caesar went in through a door Thessaly held.

Rhun Ettrick was on his doorstep. With the old miner. Who’d been sitting there every night for three weeks.

Rhun wouldn’t leave without him.

The old miner wouldn’t leave at all.

“I’m staying,” the old miner said. To Dinraal. To all of them. In the dark, on the step, with his pick across his knees. “Somebody’s got to tell them he was taken. Not run. Taken. By people who came for him.” He looked at Rhun. “So they’ll know somebody came.”

Rhun stood in his own doorway for a long time.

Then he knelt down on the step, in front of the old miner. And took off his Assessor’s ring, the one he’s worn since he took the white, and put it in the old miner’s hand.

“Then tell them that,” said Rhun. “Tell them I was wrong, and I asked anyway, and somebody came.”

The old miner closed his hand on the ring.

Rhun went through the door.

The old miner sat on the step all night. In the morning, Ferro Hale says, the whole of Rhun’s street on Ilith came out and sat down with him.

And on Carrow, at dusk, in somebody’s sister’s house, Lio knocked on a door.

I wasn’t there. Dory was. And Sefa. And Lio. Lio’s told it to me once, at the long table, very quietly, and then said she wasn’t going to tell it again. Dory’s told it to me twice. So I’ll put it down the way Dory tells it.

The sisters’ houses are in the old quarter of Carrow, behind the square. Small and narrow, with doors that open straight onto the street, and lamps in the windows that nobody’s let the Refined put out. Corvan’s been moved every night for most of a year. A different house. A different sister. Somebody’s grandmother, somebody’s aunt, somebody’s cousin who sat on the stones of the square every morning and went home every dusk.

That night it was a woman called Bess, who mends shoes.

Lio knocked. Three short and one long. The way every door on Avalon is knocked on.

Bess opened the door. She looked at Lio. At the collar mark, pale, on Lio’s neck. At Sefa beside her. At Dory, behind them, in the quiet coat, so she was only very faint, like a lamp with a cloth over it.

Bess didn’t say anything. She stepped back from the door.

He was at the table. In an ordinary coat. Shelling beans.

He’s thin. Dory says thinner than at the Assize, and younger-looking than she remembered, and older. He had a bowl in front of him, and a heap of pods, and he was shelling them with his fingernail, very badly.

He looked up.

Lio stood in the doorway.

Dory says nobody said anything for a very long time. Corvan, at the table, with a bean pod in his hand. Lio, in the doorway, with the iron cup on a string round her neck, the morning the woman on the ore world gave her, and the warm pebble beside it, and the two lines he wrote about the four and the nine, folded very small.

Then Lio said:

“Thumb along the seam. Not your fingernail.”

Corvan looked at the bean pod. Then at her.

“That’s what she wrote,” he said. “Your grandmother. In her letter.”

“She’s not my grandmother.”

“I know,” said Corvan. “She said she was anyway. In the letter. She said she’d be mine too, if I wanted.”

Lio didn’t say anything.

Then she came across the room and sat down at the table opposite him. And picked up a pod. And opened it with her thumb, along the seam, the way Mother does, and put the beans in his bowl.

“Like that,” she said.

They went out through the square at dawn. That was Okafor’s plan, on the ninth sheet. Not a door from Bess’s kitchen. Doors can be felt, and the houses are blind but they’re listening.

The square.

Where Carrow’s people sit every morning, from the steps to the fountain and down every street. Where the old woman sits at the front with her hands folded. Where Corvan sat down, and a hundred people closed round him, back to knees.

They walked into the square at first light. Bess, and Corvan, and Lio, and Sefa, and Dory faint as a lamp under a cloth. And sat down. At the front. Next to the old woman.

The old woman looked at Corvan. Then at Lio. For a long time.

Then she reached out and took Corvan’s hand. The way she did the first time. And then, with her other hand, she took Lio’s.

And Carrow sat round them.

Hundreds. Then thousands. Close. Back to knees. So close you couldn’t see the front of the square at all.

And in the middle of them, very quietly, under the stones, where nobody could see it and the houses wouldn’t feel it under all those people, Corin, on the ridge on Hyrran, a very long way off, who’d been waiting all night with his hand half up, opened a door. Very small. Just big enough.

And when the square of Carrow got up at dusk and went home in a thousand directions, there was nobody at the front where Corvan had been. Or Lio. Or Sefa. Or Dory.

The old woman sat there a little longer than everybody else. On her own. With her hands in her lap.

Then she went home and had her supper.

They came through onto the plateau on Avalon. Corin was there, with his hand still up, shaking. Mother was there, with her pot. Everyone was there.

Corvan stood on the plateau in his ordinary coat and looked round. At the house on the rise, and the north field, and the river, and the hill road going down to the red glass. At Commonhold, starting to light in rings from the Table. At all of us.

At Mother.

Mother came across the plateau to him. She stopped in front of him. She looked up at him, a long way, because he’s very tall and she’s very small.

Then she took his face in her hands, the way she does.

“There you are, love,” she said. “You’ll want feeding.”

Corvan didn’t say anything at all. He couldn’t. Dory says he just stood there on the plateau with Mother’s hands on his face, and cried, without making a sound, the way people do who’ve been told for their whole lives not to.

Lio stood next to him. She didn’t touch him. She just stood there. Close.

The two houses, in the deepest crack, said good evening. Very surprised. As if they hadn’t been sure the dark would come, and here it was, and somebody new had come with it.

Vesk and Tamsin and Rhun are in the narrow houses at the bottom of the hill road, next to Konrad and Ingrid. Aurelius found them the houses. Ferro Hale visits every day. They sit at Konrad’s kitchen table in the evenings, the four of them who used to sit in the white hall in a row and read what they were given, and write letters. To Kessry and Dun Amar and Ilith. Hundreds. Every night.

Kessry jumped on the ninth day after Vesk left. The quarrymen built the box in the dark under the iron bells and put it in the ground under the white stone, and the whole world went, very quietly, the way Sallow went, to a cold bright sun on our side of the Watch. Vesk was on the red glass when Dory told her. She sat down on it. Ninety-one, with her arm in a sling, on the red glass, crying.

Dun Amar and Ilith are next. Forty million and nine million. Halvane says it’ll take more than one box. He says he’s making bigger ones.

Imre made them soft ones. Of course she did. She waited until they were safe. She said she wouldn’t make anybody a soft one who might not live to see it.

A soft Vesk, very small and very straight, with her arm in a sling and a quill. A soft Tamsin, with a pile of tiny letters and a very small soft dog. A soft Rhun, with a ring that comes off, and a very small soft old miner who sits on a step that comes in the box.

They sold well. Very well. Quenby says the soft Rhun sold best, which nobody expected. Eluned Sabe says she isn’t surprised. She says people like the ones who were wrong and asked anyway. She says there’s more of them than you’d think.

And Imre made one more line, the same month. With Mother’s say-so. And Crane’s. And Halloway’s and Okafor’s and all of them.

Cinder.

A young Dot. Nineteen, perhaps. Very small, very fierce, in a war coat too big for her, with her hand up. And a young Trevor beside her, tall and thin and dark-eyed, with Trevor Dask’s eyes. The ones Ezra Holt laughed at in my face, the first week, on a planet nobody had been to. Everybody says they’re mine. With a notebook in his pocket. And a very small pot of paint.

Imre made forty thousand. They sold out in a day.

She made four hundred thousand. They sold out in a week.

Mattick took nine crates of them into the Reach and came back with none and a list of nine hundred more orders. He says on the edge worlds the children call them the first ones. He says they ask for them in pairs. Never one without the other.

Mother has one of each on the windowsill. By the Scarecrow queen, and the listener, and the slate with Dory’s lessons on. Side by side.

She looks at them every morning. Before she pours.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Six hundred and forty-two. Kessry’s said it from its new cold sun, very clear, like a chisel on white stone. And forty-one others, from very far out, past everything, said something Wren has never heard a star say before.

Not Not yet.

In case.

At the top of the slate, the way she does, Wren wrote the count.

And under it:

Three: home.

C: home.

Cinder: told.

Days 11469–11528. Cinder.

Traitor under Vesk’s door, then letters nailed and scratched in the white stone, then a cart-sized block off the quarry face that missed her by three steps at ninety-one and broke her arm: I’m still here; I don’t think they’re going to let me. Tamsin’s letters came from her own frightened people (you’ll starve us); somebody poisoned her well and the dog lived. Nine miners with picks came to Rhun’s door; I was wrong, but if I’m dead they won’t know who to talk to; the oldest sat on the step, and every night since. Okafor: they’ll be killed, all three; same night or the others are dead by morning; nine sheets. Halvane brought a box the size of a bread oven: the first tenth of an engine, nine pieces that go together only one way and tell you politely; built on Marrach and Kiln and in the second city and under Thole, carried in Mattick’s crates, set up by nine in nine days; it’s a kit, I said; where do you think I got the idea; the first went in on the thirty-first day; the children call them Dots. Forty-one worlds from beyond everything asked for a box, not to come, in case; the Caddi grandmother liked saying yes to that; two new lines on Marrach under a sign, In case. Imre brought letters: they want you, before; and him, the man who made the man who asks stars to be steps. Mother: most of it isn’t nice; Imre: then ask them. Ruth Halloway, twenty-three, the youngest doctor in Cinder, then nineteen years of the thirty-one families; Okafor, one of the three hundred and eleven; Maura and Rory, fire, a trench; Ingrid, the Hush; and Halvard Crane at his board: tell it, all of it, Dot; I drew up the Retention list, left Trevor off because I was frightened of him, left you off and never asked; nineteen years of canisters, too few, too late; if it makes people hate me, they should; it’s the only thing I can give him; he cried and Holt brought tea and they sat an hour at the board. Mother on the step: your father would want it told, not so they’d hate, so they’d know; and the man who came to the ridge too, and what he said first. Okafor’s ninth sheet: Carrow. C. While every eye is on three worlds; Lio: can I go; I wrote your name three days ago, waiting for you to ask. Kessry: Vesk wouldn’t leave without her quarry; Gilgamesh: the other nine pieces are under the iron bells and your quarrymen are building it in the dark; give me nine days’ letters. Dun Amar: Tamsin brought the letters and the dog, Hana breathing for it through Goldie’s door; four hundred answers so far. Ilith: the old miner stayed to tell them he was taken, not run; Rhun knelt and gave him his ring: tell them I was wrong and asked anyway and somebody came; the street sat with him in the morning. Carrow: Lio knocked three short and one long at Bess the shoemender’s; Corvan shelling beans with his fingernail; thumb along the seam; she said she’d be my grandmother too, if I wanted; Lio shelled one into his bowl: like that. At dawn they sat at the front of the square, the old woman took his hand and Lio’s, Carrow closed round them, and Corin on the ridge opened a small door under the stones. On the plateau Mother took his face: there you are, love, you’ll want feeding; he cried without a sound; Lio stood close; the houses said good evening, surprised. The four who sat in the white hall write letters at Konrad’s table every night; Kessry jumped on the ninth day to a cold bright sun, and Vesk sat on the red glass and cried. Soft ones once they were safe: Vesk with a sling, Tamsin with letters and a dog, Rhun with a ring that comes off and the old miner on his step (sold best: people like the ones who were wrong and asked anyway); and Cinder, young Dot fierce in a war coat too big and young Trevor with Trevor Dask’s eyes, a notebook and a pot of paint, forty thousand in a day, four hundred thousand in a week, the first ones, always in pairs; Mother has one of each on the windowsill. Six hundred and forty-two; forty-one stars from beyond everything said, for the first time, In case. Three: home. C: home. Cinder: told.