Scarecrow

The Scarecrow queen came up under Next Door on the ninth night after the children arrived.

Not up into it. Under it. She lives in the hollow under the garden, down the long slope into the rock with the roots coming through, and most evenings she comes up to the garden wall, the way she always has, and lays her head along the top of it and listens to the kitchen.

But Next Door is only the other side of the garden wall. And two thousand children were sleeping in it, and a great many of them, Dory says, were having the kind of dreams you have when you’ve seen a white ship come down on your town.

So the Scarecrow queen dug.

Very slowly. Very gently. Through the rock, from her hollow, under the garden wall, under the green, so slowly that nobody felt it. Until she was lying under the whole of Next Door. Under all nine houses and the jumping room and the green. In the dark. Very close.

And she hummed.

Mother heard it first. She was walking the covered paths between the houses at midnight with a lamp, the way Miss Pell said she would, the way Miss Pell did in Hall Three, and she stopped on the path outside the fourth house.

The ground was humming.

Very low. So low you couldn’t hear it, only feel it. In your feet. In your chest. The way she hummed to me the first night I ever heard her, in the field, when I was a boy and didn’t know what she was.

Mother stood on the path with her lamp for a long time.

Then she went into the fourth house. Into the long room where the little ones sleep, the youngest, from Fell and Callow and Harl. She stood in the doorway with the lamp.

Every one of them was asleep. Every one. For the first time since they came. Nobody crying. Nobody sitting up. Nobody calling out a name that wasn’t going to answer.

Mother came back up the hill road at dawn and sat down at the long table.

“She’s under them,” she said. “All of them. All night.”

“I know,” said Dory. “She asked me if she could. Last week.” She put her cup down. “She said she’d been listening to them through the wall. She said she couldn’t bear it.”

She’s there every night now. Under Next Door. Humming.

And in the day she comes up there too. Through the ground at the end of the green, where the drawing wall is. Her head, and one of her long arms, the way she comes up to the garden wall in the evenings. And the children come and sit round her.

Not all of them. Not at first. Some of them were very frightened. Some of them had seen the Hungry, and the Scarecrow queen is big and old and the colour of bark and has a great many legs, and to a child who’s seen the Hungry that’s enough.

She didn’t mind. She lay at the end of the green with her head on the grass and her eyes half closed and let them be frightened. And the ones who weren’t came and sat with her. And then a few more. And then a few more.

On the ninth day the little boy from Fell, the one who jumped first, walked up to her and put his hand flat on the side of her head.

She opened one eye.

He didn’t take his hand away.

There you are, she said. Very quietly. To him. The way Mother says it.

He looked at her for a long time. Then he sat down. Against her. With his back against the side of her head. And went to sleep.

Her young come too. Not the ones from the Drenn queen’s brood, the ones that carry. Her own. The Scarecrow queen’s. Small and grey and very curious, the size of dogs, with too many legs and a way of tilting their heads. They come up out of the ground at the end of the green and play.

They’re very good at the jumping room. Better than anybody. They go up the walls.

And at night, in the long rooms, they lie across the ends of the beds. On the children’s feet. The way young do. The way they’ve always done in our house, on the rug in front of the fire, in the heap.

Miss Pell objected. She said there should be a rule.

Mother said not about that. They argued for an hour. Mother won again.

Rue went on the twelfth day.

Mother took her. Through the gate in the garden wall, down the covered path, onto the green. Rue on her hip with the leaf and the horse. To the end of the green, by the drawing wall, where the Scarecrow queen’s head was lying on the grass with her eyes half closed and nine children asleep against her.

Rue looked at her for a long time.

The Scarecrow queen opened one eye. She looked at Rue.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. She just hummed. Very low. A little louder than before. So it came up through the grass, and through Mother’s feet, and up into Mother, and through Mother into Rue.

Mother says she felt Rue feel it. Felt her go still, the good kind, against her side.

Then Rue held out the horse.

Not up. Out. Towards the Scarecrow queen. At arm’s length. Very straight. The way Queenie holds out leaves.

The Scarecrow queen looked at the horse. The small stone horse with the badly painted saddle.

And very slowly, she put out one of her long arms. And laid the very tip of it on the grass. Just below the horse. Not touching it. Not touching Rue.

Rue looked at the tip of the arm for a long time.

Then she put the horse down on it.

The Scarecrow queen held it there. Very still. For as long as it takes to drink a cup of tea. Humming. Then she lifted the arm, very gently, and Rue took the horse back.

It’s a very good horse, said the Scarecrow queen.

Rue put it away in the bag with the leaves.

Mother didn’t say anything. She stood on the green with Rue on her hip and cried, very quietly, and the Scarecrow queen hummed, and nine children slept against her side.

Pebble doesn’t go.

He’s the Scarecrow queen’s too. One of the very first of her young who ever came into our house. Nessa named him, when Risa was carrying Dory. Pebble, she said, very seriously, and it stuck. He used to lie against Risa’s stomach and chirr while Dory kicked.

He’s never left Dory. Not really. Not in all the years. He lay across her feet in the heap when she was small and he lies across them now, on the rug in the end room, when she sits up at night with her glasses off and the net open. He was at the bottom of the slope with her the day she went down to the Scarecrow queen in Dusk. He was at her heels on the plateau when the twelve came home.

And Ash. He’s always gone between the two of them. Dory and Ash. Sera’s Ash, who undoes collars. When Ash came home from Isselt with the made, after the sixty in nine minutes, she lay down on the rug in front of the stove and Pebble came in from the garden and lay down across her feet without being asked, and she cried for an hour into his side.

The other young go to Next Door now. Most of them. Pebble went once. To see. He stood at the end of the green for a long time looking at the children and the jumping room and his mother’s head on the grass.

Then he came back over the wall. And lay down across Dory’s feet.

Dory looked at him.

“You can go, you know,” she said. “If you want. They’d love you.”

Pebble put his head down on her ankle.

“He’s mine,” said Dory. To me. Very quietly. As if she’d only just noticed. “Isn’t he. He’s always been mine.”

“And Ash’s,” I said.

“And Ash’s,” said Dory.

Pebble chirred. Very low. The way he chirred against Risa’s stomach, before Dory was born.

Imre came up the hill road with a list.

She wants to write lives. Not stories, she says. Lives. Books. Proper ones. Long. The kind you sit down with. About the people who made the Hedge.

“The Asker was you,” she said. To me. At the long table. “And Cinder is your mother and father. People love them. But everybody keeps asking about the others.” She put the list down. “Who are they? Where did they come from? What were they before?”

I looked at the list.

Okafor.

The General.

Dinraal.

Tiamat.

Halloway. Ingrid. Kyria. Gilgamesh. Varra. Halvane.

And a few more, in smaller writing, with question marks.

“They’ll never agree,” I said.

“I know,” said Imre. “I’m going to ask them anyway.”

She asked the General first. At the long table. With Sabeth beside him, because Sabeth’s been beside him since she came for the winter, and the winter’s been going on for some time now and nobody’s said anything about when it’ll end.

The General listened to the whole thing very straight. Then he said no.

“I’m a soldier,” he said. “Soldiers don’t have lives. They have orders.”

Sabeth put her cup down.

“Alaric,” she said.

The General looked at her.

“You told me about the ice,” said Sabeth. “On my porch. On the first night. For three hours. About the first winter. About Luna’s mother’s song. About the man you carried for nine days who died on the tenth.” She looked at him over her brass glasses. “That was a life. It was the most interesting thing anybody’s told me in two hundred years. And I study deepbacks.”

The General didn’t say anything for a long time.

“She can come on Thursdays,” he said, at last. To Imre. Not looking at either of them. “In the afternoon. After the nap.”

Dinraal said yes immediately. Then Isolde said no, he couldn’t, because he’d say all the wrong things, and they had an argument at the long table that went on through two pots of tea, and in the end it was agreed that Imre could write Dinraal’s life on condition that Isolde read every page first.

“And took out the bits that weren’t true,” said Isolde.

“They’re all true,” said Dinraal.

“The bits that make you sound too modest, then,” said Isolde. “There’ll be a great many.”

On the first Thursday Dinraal talked for four hours. About Hearth. About the Ashen. About his armour, which can be anything he thinks of, and which he demonstrated at the long table by turning his left sleeve into a teapot, and then a smaller teapot, and then a cannon, which Mother made him put away.

Isolde sat next to him with her arms folded and said That’s not true nine times.

Imre wrote down all nine.

“Which ones weren’t true?” I asked her afterwards.

“None of them,” said Imre. “She just says it when he’s about to say something kind about himself.” She closed her notebook. “It’s the most useful thing anybody’s ever done for a biography.”

Tiamat said yes. And then said something nobody expected.

“I’d like it to be about Bahamut,” she said. “Mostly. Not me.” She looked at her hands. “Dinraal never knew his father. He died before Dinraal was born. Everybody on Hearth knows the name. Nobody knows who he was.” She looked at Imre. “I’m the only one left who does.”

Imre put her pen down.

“Then it’ll be about both of you,” she said. “It has to be. You can’t write one without the other. Not if you knew him that well.”

Tiamat looked at her for a long time.

“No,” she said. “I suppose you can’t.”

Okafor said no.

Imre asked her at the board in the Arch Hall. Okafor didn’t look up from her slate.

“No,” she said.

“Everybody’s asking,” said Imre. “The Herald gets nine hundred letters a week. About you. Children write to you. They want to know what you were before.”

“I wasn’t anything before,” said Okafor. “I was a girl in a trench with a ball. And then I was a face somebody put back together. And then I was out through the locks with three hundred and ten others. And then I was this.” She wrote something. “There’s no book in that.”

Imre didn’t say anything for a while.

“Ennis would read it,” she said.

Okafor’s chalk stopped.

She stood very still at the board for a long time. With her back to Imre.

“Thursdays,” she said. “After the General.” She didn’t turn round. “I’ll tell you nothing.”

“That’s all right,” said Imre. “I’ll write it down anyway.”

So it’s Thursdays now. At the long table. One after another. Imre with her notebook and her pen and a pot of Mother’s tea.

The General in the afternoon, after the nap, very straight, with Sabeth beside him.

Okafor after him. Saying nothing. For an hour. And then, on the third Thursday, saying, out of nowhere, “Rory’s ball was red. Not leather. Rubber. He’d found it in a ditch,” and then nothing for another hour.

Imre wrote it down.

And the Hungry came more often.

They’d always come. On One, at the very beginning. At Caddoc. At Root. On Ammet. But they’d come the way weather comes. Not on purpose. Not every week.

Now it’s every week.

Dot finds bells. Every week. In the wells and the mine shafts and the hollows and the empty places under worlds where nobody listens. Dory goes down and takes them out. Sometimes before they ring. Sometimes not.

When they’ve rung, the Hungry come.

A moon off Kiln. Then a farming world on the third arm called Stell. Then Hesk’s Field again, in the old shafts, where Dory found ninety and missed four. Then a small world past Brannock with no name that nobody lived on except a queen and her young, and the Drenn queen’s brood carried the young out unseen while the Hungry came down on the empty plains.

Then Thole. In the blue. Under the mountain where Halvane’s Workshop is.

Thole was the worst.

The bells were under the mountain. In the old lumen workings, a mile down, under the Workshop. Ninety-one of them. Dot heard them the night they went in and Dory went down at dawn and took sixty out before the first one rang. Then the rest rang. All at once. Thirty-one queens’ worth of screaming, coming up through the blue rock, under the place where Halvane’s people think of the terrible things first.

The swarm came out of the blue sky at noon. Thole’s sky is very blue. You could see every one of them against it.

And Halvane opened the Workshop doors.

He’d been building things for fetching. For a year. Under the mountain. With Bell and Toby and Rory’s planers.

They came out of the doors in a line. Not ships. Not suits. Things nobody had a name for yet. Low and wide and very fast, Aldri gold and Thole lumen and Kiln iron, with a sound like Toby humming at the bottom of his range.

They didn’t shoot. Not at first. They went out under the swarm, very low, over the blue fields, in nine directions. And wherever one went, the ground behind it opened. A hollow. In a breath. The whole way down. Deep enough. Kwame’s design. Built into a machine.

The people of Thole’s farms went down into them as they opened. A hollow every hundred yards, all across the blue plains, as fast as the Hungry came.

Halvane stood on the mountain above the Workshop doors and watched them go. Mira Tannock beside him.

“You said you’d build things that fetch people,” said Mira.

“This one fetches the ground,” said Halvane. “And the people fetch themselves.”

Then the Standing came down out of Elin’s doors and the Kethri came down out of the blue sky with their spears, and I went up, and it was the same as every other time. Nine hours. The air heavy. The green coming down like rain. Gilgamesh in the middle of it with Hesper Daine at his back.

Thole lost a town on the eastern edge. Nobody in it. Every hollow held.

Halvane went back into the Workshop that night and didn’t come out for nine days. Ilas went and fetched him. She says he’d drawn a hundred more.

The Standing went to every one. Gilgamesh at the front. Hesper Daine behind him with her cable. Varra and the Kasrai. Kyria. Andraste with Holdfast. The Kethri, in the air, with their long spears. The light-benders, who stand three breaths to the left of where you see them, and who the Hungry can’t find. The Drenn queen and her young, unseen, carrying.

And me. Holding the sky, when it needed holding.

We held. Every time. Kwame’s hollows held every time. Not one broke.

But the Standing’s rope is getting very long. Varra’s had to start another. Nine hundred and forty since Ammet. A Kethri wing of nineteen on Stell, all at once, when a swarm came up under them out of a ravine. Eleven of the light-benders on Hesk’s Field, who were seen, in the end, because there were too many Hungry to bend the light round. A boy from the Wall, Cormac’s age, on the moon off Kiln.

Cormac carried him back. Liam says Cormac hasn’t talked about it. Rory planed the porch door for two days.

Okafor stood at the board in the Arch Hall after Thole. All night.

In the morning she came up the hill road and stood in the kitchen doorway. Corvan was at the long table. He comes most mornings.

“How many more bells?” she said. To nobody.

Dot, in her corner, said: “This one does not know. This one finds more every week. They have been cutting queens for a very long time.”

“And every one they hang is a world,” said Okafor. “Every week. One world. One swarm.” She looked at her slate. “And one day there’ll be two in the same week. And then three.”

Corvan put his cup down.

“He wants you to be everywhere,” he said. “All the time. Until you can’t. That’s all it is. He doesn’t need to win. He just needs you to get tired.”

Okafor looked at him for a long time.

“Then we don’t get tired,” she said.

That was the morning Corvan decided.

He didn’t tell anybody. Not even Lio. He went down the hill road after breakfast and through the Arch Hall and up to the room at the top where the old band is, where Senna speaks every morning.

Senna speaks every morning. She has since the first broadcast. In her plain voice. On every old band. The stars, from Wren. What happened yesterday, from the Herald. What the Prime said last night, and what’s true.

She was getting ready. Ferro Hale was there, and Ilka at the board.

Corvan stood in the doorway.

“Can I speak?” he said. “This morning. After you.”

Senna looked at him for a long time.

“What will you say?”

“That I’m not dead,” said Corvan.

Senna didn’t say yes straight away. She went and found Okafor, who was still at the board. Okafor came up. And Lio, who’d heard from Sefa, who’d heard from Ilka. And Dory.

Corvan stood in the middle of the band room with all of them looking at him.

“He buried me,” he said. “On the steps of the white hall. With nothing in the box. He read my name out and didn’t look at the coffin.” He looked at the board. “And then he told everybody the coward’s daughters killed me. And he’s been saying it ever since. Every time he wants them to hate you. They killed my son.* Every night.*”

“We know,” said Okafor.

“Three hundred billion people believe him,” said Corvan. “Some of them. Enough of them.” He looked at Dory. “I’ve been hiding at the bottom of your hill for years now. I shell beans. I go on the carousel. I watch Stile. And every night he uses me.” He stopped. “I’d like him to stop being able to.”

“It’ll put you in danger,” said Okafor. “Every Refined in the Collective will know you’re here. Every scientist. Him. They’ll know exactly where you are.”

“They already know,” said Corvan. “He knows. He’s always known. He just didn’t want anyone else to.”

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Lio said, “I’ll stand next to you.”

And Dory said, “So will I.”

Senna went first. The way she does every morning. In her plain voice. The stars. Nine hundred and ninety-seven. Ammet’s Soon. What happened on Thole. What the Prime said. What’s true.

Then she said:

“There is somebody here who would like to say something.”

And she stepped back from the board.

Corvan stepped up.

He stood very straight. The way his father stands. And then he noticed he was doing it, and Dory says she felt him notice, and he let his shoulders go. And put his hands on the board. And spoke.

“My name is Corvan,” he said. “I’m the Prime’s son. Some of you will have seen my funeral.”

He stopped.

“I’m not dead.”

Ilka says the old band went silent. Every one. On every world. For a breath. Not just ours. All of them. As if every box in the Collective had been turned off at once.

Then it came back. A noise like nothing she’s ever heard on it. Like a whole galaxy breathing in.

“Nobody killed me,” said Corvan. “The Hedge didn’t take me. I asked. I asked them to come and get me. From Carrow. From the sisters’ houses. Where the women hid me for most of a year, who the scientists took afterwards.” His voice didn’t shake. “Forty of them. Because they hid me. Bess, who mends shoes. Who’s asleep under Velle right now, dreaming about it.”

He stopped.

“My father buried an empty box,” he said. “Because it was easier than saying I’d left. Because he’d rather tell you somebody killed me than tell you I didn’t want to be his son any more.”

Lio, beside him, had her hand on his back.

“I’m on Avalon,” said Corvan. “In a narrow house at the bottom of a hill. Everybody knows where. I’m not hiding any more.” He looked at the board. “I shell beans. Badly. I go to Stile. I’ve been on a carousel. With both hands off.”

Then, very quietly:

“Father. I know you’re listening. I know you always listen to this band, even though you tell everybody not to.”

He stopped. For a long time.

“I’m not dead. You can stop saying it now.”

He stepped back from the board.

Nobody in the band room said anything.

Corvan stood very still with his hands at his sides. Then his knees went. Not all the way. Just enough that Lio had to take his arm. Dory took the other one.

They walked him out of the band room and down the stairs of the Arch Hall and out onto the red glass, the three of them, and sat him down on it. In the morning sun. He sat with his knees up and his head down between them.

“I said it,” he said. Into his knees. “I actually said it.”

“Yes,” said Lio.

“He’ll have heard.”

“Yes,” said Dory.

Corvan didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I thought I’d feel better,” he said.

“Do you?”

He thought about it. Very seriously. The way he thinks about everything.

“No,” he said. “But I feel like me.” He lifted his head. “I didn’t know those were different.”

Mother came down the hill road at noon with the pot. She’d heard it on the box in the kitchen. Everybody had. She sat down on the red glass next to him and poured him a cup and didn’t say anything about it at all.

“You’ll want feeding,” she said.

He did.

The Prime didn’t come on the band that night.

Or the next. Or the next. Nine nights. The second time ever.

On the tenth night he came on. With the light behind him. And talked about the Hungry, and the coward on his hill, and the Hedge’s war machines under its stolen mountain. He didn’t say my son. He didn’t say Corvan. He never has since.

Dot listened on the grey band, under his voice, the whole time.

“Query,” she said afterwards. In the kitchen. To nobody. “Can a voice in a man be angry?”

“Was it?” said Dory.

“This one has never heard anything on that band before,” said Dot, “that sounded like it wanted to break something.”

The Herald put it on the front. Not a headline. Just what he said. All of it. Every word. Vesk set it herself. In the middle of the page, with nothing round it.

Under it, very small, in a box, Tamsin printed one line.

Letters to Corvan, care of the Herald, will be delivered.

Nine thousand came the first week. From every world. From the Collective, under the rabbits, more than from anywhere. He reads every one. At Konrad’s table. On Sundays. With Lio and Sefa and the Assessors.

Most of them just say Welcome back.

And Dory and Corvan went to the fair.

It’s the harvest fair. At Commonhold, at the end of the warm season, on the green under the rings. It’s been every year since Commonhold was built. Stalls from every world. Kiln bread and Hyrrani iron and Thole lumen and Ister glass and Caddi salt-sweets that nobody else can eat. A Stile diamond for children. A Ring hoop on a pole. The Run’s racers, on show, with their makers standing next to them looking proud and slightly burnt. Liam’s, for instance.

They went on the first evening. The two of them. On their own.

Not on their own, quite. Pebble went too. He walked between them, a little behind, with his head tilted. Dory says he’s never let her go anywhere with Corvan without him. She says he’s making up his mind.

They were seen.

Of course they were. Everybody on Avalon was there, and half of everywhere else, and everybody knows Dory, and since the band everybody knows Corvan’s face.

They were seen at the Kiln bread stall, where Corvan bought two rolls, and paid with the right fair this time, and got the right change, and was very pleased with himself. They were seen at the Ring hoop, where Corvan threw nine balls and got none of them through, and Dory threw one, without asking it, and got it through, and Corvan stood with his mouth open. They were seen at the Ister glass stall, where Corvan looked at a small glass bird for a very long time and then didn’t buy it.

They were seen on the bench by the lake. In the dusk. With Pebble lying across both their feet.

Then the next week. And the week after.

The Stile final at the Hill. Corvan in the stand, three rows back, next to Dory, shouting at the stile-caller with Trevor. The concert on Thrane, in the great hall, when Saelle went home to sing in it, and asked for a hundred people from the Hedge, and Dory and Corvan were two of them. The carousel, every Sunday. Corvan rides with no hands now. Dory says he still looks terrified. He does it anyway.

Quenby put them on the cover. Not on purpose. Somebody took a picture at the fair, at the bench by the lake, from a long way off. Dory and Corvan sitting with a space between them, not touching, looking at the water. And Pebble lying across both their feet.

The headline was just a question mark.

Dory was furious. Mother wasn’t.

“They didn’t say anything, love,” said Mother. “It’s just a picture of a bench.”

“It’s a picture of me,” said Dory. “On a bench. With him.”

“Yes,” said Mother. “Well. You were.”

I asked Dory. Once. On the step. I said I wasn’t going to and then I did.

She didn’t answer for a long time. She had her glasses in her lap. Pebble was across her feet.

“I don’t know, Dad,” she said. “I still don’t know.”

She looked at the north field.

“He bought the glass bird,” she said. “The next day. He went back on his own. He hasn’t given it to me.” She turned the glasses over. “He keeps it on his windowsill. In the narrow house. He looks at it every morning.”

“How do you know?”

“Lio told me,” said Dory. “She thought I should know.” She put her glasses on. “I think he’s waiting until he knows what it’s for.”

She went to bed. Pebble went with her.

Imre’s soft Drenn queen came out the same month.

It’s black. Smooth. With four arms that fold, and two more that come out of the sides if you press, and a long tail that’s soft along its whole length but has a row of felt blades down it that you can feel in the dark.

And it’s in a box. A black box. And when you open the box it’s empty.

Then, after three breaths, you see it.

Imre won’t say how she did it. Bell won’t say either. Dory thinks it’s something the light-benders showed them.

It’s sold more than anything Imre’s ever made. More than the soft Dot. More than the first Cinder pair. More than Saelle. Mattick says on the edge worlds of the Reach children carry them in the dark, and when the Refined come through the square they hold the box shut very tight and don’t open it until they’ve gone.

The Drenn queen saw one. In the garden. A Next Door girl had brought it to show her.

She bent her head down. Down and down. And looked at the small black box in the girl’s hands for a long time.

The girl opened it.

Three breaths.

The Drenn queen made a sound nobody’s ever heard her make. Wren says it was a laugh. High and clear. Like wind across the top of a bottle that’s very pleased with itself.

She got the tail right, she said.

The leagues, for Toby:

The Hill won the Stile final. Against Caul’s Haze. Nine to seven, at the Hill, in front of nine thousand people on Rory’s stand and the north-field grass. Sigmund threw the last ball. Corvan was in the stand. Rue was in Mother’s lap and breathed in. Caul’s Hanne Brisk came down onto the field afterwards and shook Sigmund’s hand and said the Haze would be back next year, and Sigmund said he’d be waiting at the first stile.

In Ring, the Commonhold Gales lost the final to Myre’s Long Hall Wanderers by one basket. The Next Door girl passed the ball nine times in the last quarter. Kesh cried. It didn’t rain. Everybody was very proud of her.

In Ridge, the Ridge-Ends finished last. Kyrie says next year. Kyria says next year. Okafor wrote Next year on her slate and showed it to Kyrie.

In the Long Way, the subcommittee said the Kethri could fly it. Toby said the crowd breathed in. The Kethri won. By a great deal. Halvane says next year the Aldri will be ready for them. He’s building something.

And in the Run, Liam’s racer finished a race. For the first time. Ninth out of nine. It didn’t catch fire.

Anya’s still expecting. Liam says it’s a draw.

The stars said Not yet this morning.

One thousand.

Wren stood on the porch for a long time before she wrote it. Toby says she held her breath. Before. He heard it.

Then she wrote it. At the top of the slate. In her careful hand. 1,000. And under it, by itself, Ammet’s:

Soon.

And under that:

Corvan: not dead.

Pebble: Dory’s.

The Hill.

Days 12689–12872. Not Dead.

The Scarecrow queen dug under Next Door to hum the orphans to sleep, while Pebble stayed with Dory and Ash. Imre began her Thursday lives of the General, Okafor, Dinraal and Tiamat, the bells kept coming and the Hungry with them, and the Standing’s rope grew long. Corvan went on Senna’s morning band to tell the Collective he wasn’t dead, and he and Dory were seen together at the harvest fair and after; the soft Drenn queen outsold everything, and the stars reached one thousand.