Scarecrow

The first message came back on the second night.

The courier dock on the Meridian sent packets down with the supply drop to the landing field, sealed in a grey case with the General Staff’s stamp on the lid. Gareth brought it to the house in his arms like a loaf of bread, and put it on the kitchen table, and stood back.

”It’s for Luna,” he said. ”It says so. In very small letters. I didn’t open it.”

”You can’t open it,” Luna said. ”There are four people alive who can.”

”Well, I’m not one of them,” Gareth said, ”so that’s fine.”

The case opened for her. It had a lock that read the silver in her hand, which the General must have arranged before he left, because I’d never seen one like it. Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded once.

Columns of numbers.

Luna took out her own sheet, the one keyed to the date and the hour, and sat down at the table, and worked through it with her pen.

It took her eleven minutes.

I know, because I counted. So did Sera. So, I think, did the baby, under the garden, who had felt the case come up the street and had turned toward it and stayed turned the whole time.

When Luna finished, she put the pen down.

She didn’t read it out.

She looked at it for a long time, and then she turned it round on the table so the three of us could see.

Docked. Started. Got your message.

So am I.

That was all.

Luna folded it into quarters and put it inside her coat with the arrivals list.

”He’s started,” Sera said.

”He’s started,” said Luna.

”Started what?”

”Being stupid,” Luna said. ”In a careful order.”

After that, for a while, nothing happened.

I want to write that down properly, because it was so rare.

Nothing happened for six days.

The station came over on its tracks, night and afternoon, and did nothing. The courier case came down twice more with the supply drop, and both times Luna opened it and decoded the numbers and turned the page round so we could see, and both times it said much the same thing. Nothing yet. Still looking. Careful. The dawn count came, and the hello came down, and the thirty-one sang back for eleven seconds, and Dot said All names, and then everyone went to breakfast.

That was it.

Six days of ordinary.

I didn’t know what to do with it.

Wren told me to go to the schoolroom.

”You’re pacing,” she said, on the morning of Day 618.

”I’m not pacing.”

”You’ve walked past my window four times. I’m counting.”

”Everybody’s counting,” I said. ”It’s catching.”

Wren didn’t smile, but her eyes did.

”The schoolroom,” she said. ”Tessa’s taking the morning lesson. She asked if you’d come. The little ones want to know about the Teeming, and Tessa says she can’t explain it properly, because she’s only been able to hear them for four days.”

”Neither can I.”

”You can explain it better than anyone,” Wren said. ”You just don’t know you can. Go.”

So I went.

The schoolroom was the old supply store at the end of the second street, with the shelves taken out and the walls whitewashed and a window cut into the south side so the light came in all morning. Gareth had built the benches. Nessa had painted the door yellow. The drawings covered every wall, floor to ceiling, and spilled over onto the window frame, and two of them had been stuck to the ceiling, though nobody would admit how.

There were nineteen children.

Not all of them small. Scarecrow didn’t have many small children yet. The youngest was Ada Fen, who was five and had come down with her mother in the third wave. The oldest was Nessa, who was eleven and insisted she was only there to help, and who sat at the front with her hand up before anyone had asked anything.

Tessa was standing by the window, looking a little panicked.

”Thank goodness,” she said when I came in.

”I don’t know what to tell them.”

”Neither do I. That’s why you’re here.”

I sat down on the edge of the front bench. Nineteen faces turned toward me.

Nessa’s hand was still up.

”Yes, Nessa.”

”Is the baby a Teeming?”

The room went very quiet.

Tessa made a small noise.

I looked at Nessa. She was looking straight back at me with her chin up, the way she’d looked at the General when she told him not to try to get a lemon.

”Why do you ask?” I said.

”Because the queen calls her brood,” Nessa said. ”I heard her. Last week, in the courts. I can’t hear the queen, but Tessa told me what she said, and Pebble brought her a nursery stone, and the nursery stone is for hatchlings, and Dot says the baby speaks brood better than Dot does.” She took a breath. ”So is she?”

I thought about it.

I thought about it properly, because Nessa deserved that, and because I’d never been asked it so plainly before.

”No,” I said. ”She’s a person. Like you. Like me. She’s going to be born the way people are born, and she’ll have Risa’s hands, probably, and my eyes, maybe, and she’ll need feeding and changing and she’ll keep us all up at night.”

Nessa frowned. ”But.”

”But,” I said, ”she’s also brood. Both. At the same time.”

”How can you be both?”

”How can Pebble be your friend and the queen’s son?”

Nessa opened her mouth. Closed it again.

”Being in a brood isn’t what you are,” I said. ”It’s who you belong to. The queens have decided she belongs to them. Not instead of us. As well as us.” I looked round at the nineteen faces. ”It’s like having a lot of aunts. Very large aunts. With a lot of legs.”

Ada Fen, at the back, laughed so hard she fell off the bench.

After that, it got easier.

They asked about everything. Whether the young had names. (Some of them did now. Nessa had been busy.) Whether the queens slept. (Yes, but only one at a time, so somebody was always listening.) Whether the young went to school. (Sort of. The attendants taught them, in the lower courts, and the lessons were mostly about where it was safe to walk and which stones were good to climb.)

Whether I could hear them right now.

”Yes,” I said.

”What are they saying?”

I listened.

The courts were a long way away, on the far side of the city. But I could feel them. I always could. The warm hum of the queen in her chamber. The attendants moving through the passages. And the young, in the lower court, tumbling over each other the way they did every morning.

And one of them, a little apart from the others, standing very still by the wall. Facing toward our house.

”Pebble’s waiting,” I said.

”For what?”

”For Risa. She hasn’t come to the courts this morning. She’s too tired today.” I listened harder. ”He’s asking the others if they know where she is.”

”Do they?”

”No.” I paused. ”He’s asking the baby.”

Nineteen children leaned forward.

I felt it go. A small bright pulse from the lower court, through the stone and the earth and the faceted walls of the quiet room, through the gap shaped like Risa’s voice.

And I felt the answer come back.

Slow. Warm. Sleepy.

”What did she say?” Nessa whispered.

I smiled.

”She said, Mother is resting. Come tomorrow.”

Nessa sat back on the bench with an expression on her face I’d never seen before. It took me a moment to recognise it.

It was awe.

”She can’t even talk yet,” Nessa said. ”Not real talking.”

”No,” I said. ”Not to us. Not yet.”

Toby’s music evenings had started in the summer.

Before the station. Before the General. Before the baby was anything but a thing Risa wouldn’t let anyone mention. Toby had found an old fiddle in the third-wave cargo, with two strings missing and a crack down the back, and Gareth had glued the crack and Dov had carved new pegs, and Toby had sat on the bench by the meeting passage one evening and played a song nobody had ever heard.

Then he’d played it again the next evening.

By the end of the week, there’d been twenty people on the bench.

By the end of the summer, the Teeming had started coming too.

Not into the city. They didn’t do that. But the meeting passage, the long low tunnel where the agreed path ran from the courts to the houses, opened onto the square by Toby’s bench, and the attendants had started bringing the young to the mouth of it in the evenings, to sit just inside the shadow and listen.

Toby said they liked the low notes best.

On the evening of Day 619, Risa came.

She hadn’t been in weeks. The walk from the house was too far, and the bench was too hard, and the evenings were getting cold. But she’d slept most of the day, and woken restless, and said she wanted to hear Toby play.

So Liam carried a chair.

Gareth’s chair, from the porch, the big one with the high back. Liam carried it all the way from our house to the square on his back, like a pack, and set it down in the best spot, and then stood behind it with his arms folded and glared at anyone who looked like they might stand in front.

Sera said he was being ridiculous.

Liam said he was being supportive.

Risa lowered herself into the chair with a long sigh and put her feet up on a crate that Dov had brought, and pulled the blanket over the curve of her stomach, and closed her eyes.

”Play something slow,” she said.

Toby played something slow.

The young came out of the passage after the second song.

They didn’t usually. They usually stayed in the shadow. But that night Pebble came first, slowly, carefully, along the edge of the square, keeping close to the wall. Then two more. Then five.

They came to Risa’s chair.

Pebble pressed his head against her stomach. The others crowded round. Not touching. Just close. Their small flat heads turned toward the curve under the blanket, the way they turned toward the queen in the courts.

The baby woke.

I felt her come up. Bright. Glad. She found Pebble at once, the way she always did. Then the others, one by one, by their patterns. I felt her name them. Not in words. In the shapes the brood used for each other, which I was only just beginning to understand.

Then she found Toby’s music.

She went very still.

Toby was playing low. Long slow notes, the ones the young liked best. And the baby, listening, did something none of us had ever felt her do.

She hummed.

Not out loud. She couldn’t. But her silver hummed. Low and steady, under Risa’s skin, in time with the fiddle. Matching the notes.

Pebble went still.

Then Pebble hummed too. The low chirring sound the young made when they were content, the one they made against their mother’s plates.

Then the next young. And the next. All five of them, crowded round Risa’s chair, humming in time with the baby, who was humming in time with Toby.

Toby heard it.

He didn’t stop. He was too good for that. But his eyes went wide over the top of the fiddle, and he looked at Risa, and at the young, and at me, and kept playing.

Slower.

Lower.

The humming followed him.

Nobody in the square said a word. Not Liam, behind the chair. Not Gareth, or Dov, or Wren with her list, or Holt on the far bench with his hands open on his knees. Not the forty-odd people who’d come out in the cold to hear Toby play.

They just listened.

When the song ended, the humming stopped.

All at once. Together. The baby and the young and the last long note of the fiddle, all fading into the cold evening at exactly the same moment.

There was a very long silence.

Then Holt, on the far bench, said, very quietly:

”Well, I’ll be damned.”

Toby came to the house afterward.

He sat on the porch steps with the fiddle across his knees and stared at nothing for a while.

”She kept time,” he said.

”I know.”

”She’s not born. She kept time. She followed the tempo when I slowed down.” He turned the fiddle over in his hands. ”I’ve played with people who couldn’t do that.”

”She’s been listening to you through Risa for weeks,” I said. ”And to the queen. And to the hello every morning. She’s been listening to everything.”

”And the young followed her.” Toby looked up. ”Not me. Her. I could feel it. When I slowed down, she slowed down, and then they slowed down. She was leading them.”

I didn’t say anything.

Toby was quiet for a long moment.

”The queen said she’s the youngest of the brood,” he said. ”And the young always know where the youngest is.”

”Yes.”

”I don’t think that’s why they follow her.” Toby looked at the fiddle. ”I think they follow her because she’s the one who knows how.”

On Day 620, the four of us talked about names.

Not on purpose. Sera started it, in the quiet room, sitting on the floor with her back against the faceted wall and her boots off.

”We have to call her something,” she said. ”Eventually. Liam’s started calling her Bean.”

”Liam calls everything Bean,” Luna said.

”He called Sigmund Bean once. Sigmund nearly set him on fire.”

Risa, on the bench, laughed and then winced and put her hand to her side.

”I’m not calling her Bean,” she said.

”Then what?”

Nobody answered.

I’d thought about it. Of course I had. Late at night, on the top step, listening to her silver turn. But every name I tried felt like something I was putting on her from outside, like a coat that didn’t fit, and she was so much herself already.

”The queens have a name for her,” Luna said slowly.

We all looked at her.

”Dot told me. The brood-pattern they use. When they talk about her to each other.” Luna turned her pen over in her fingers. ”It doesn’t translate. Dot says it’s something like the small bright one who came from outside the hollow. But it’s one shape, not a sentence.”

”That’s not a name,” Sera said. ”That’s a description.”

”All names start as descriptions,” said Luna. ”Somebody was the first Windsor once. Somebody had to look at them and decide.”

Sera opened her mouth to argue, and closed it again.

Risa had gone quiet.

She was lying with both hands on her stomach, very still, the way she lay when she was listening to weather.

”She doesn’t want one yet,” she said at last.

”How do you know?”

”I asked her.” Risa didn’t open her eyes. ”Just now. In my head. I said, do you want a name? And she” Risa stopped, and smiled, a small private smile. ”She showed me her face. The way she knows it. Not what she looks like. What she is. Bright, and quick, and very sure.” Her smile widened. ”I think she’s going to tell us. When she’s out. When she’s seen us.”

Sera looked at me.

”Can she do that?”

”I don’t know,” I said. ”I don’t know anything she can’t do, yet.”

Luna wrote something in her notebook.

I leaned over to see.

Name: pending. Her decision.

”Fair,” said Sera.

Dov asked Priya on Day 621.

He didn’t make a speech. Dov didn’t make speeches. He’d been one of the first wave’s walking wounded, a carpenter’s son from the outer domes, and his feet had been ruined on the long march to the canyon, and he’d spent four months walking on the sides of them and never once complained. When I’d fixed them, in the spring, he’d stood up and walked across the medical building and back and then sat down and cried, and then got up and gone straight back to the workshop because there was a door to finish.

He’d carved Priya a bird, months ago. A small wooden sparrow. She kept it on the shelf in the medical building, by the window.

This time he carved something else.

He brought it to the kitchen at breakfast, while Priya was serving porridge. He waited in the queue like everyone else. When he got to the front, he held out his bowl, and Priya filled it, and then he put something on the counter beside the pot.

A ring.

Wood. Pale and very smooth, carved from the heart of one of the canyon pines that Gareth had felled for the schoolroom benches. So fine you could almost see the light through it. And around the outside, so small you had to hold it close to see, a pattern of tiny birds. Sparrows. Wing to wing, all the way round.

Priya looked at it.

Dov looked at his porridge.

”I’ll make a better one,” he said. ”When we get metal. If you want. But I wanted this one first.”

Priya didn’t say anything.

The kitchen had gone very quiet. Nessa, behind the counter, had both hands over her mouth.

Priya picked up the ring.

She held it up to the window, where the light came through. She turned it round, slowly, all the way, looking at every one of the sparrows.

Then she put it on.

Then she came round the counter, still holding the porridge ladle, and kissed Dov so hard he dropped his bowl.

The kitchen erupted.

Nessa screamed. Liam, at the long table, stood up on the bench and started clapping. Gareth banged his spoon on the table. Holt, who’d been reading a supply list in the corner, put it down and said, ”About time,” loudly enough that everybody heard.

Dov stood in the middle of it all with porridge on his boots and Priya’s arms round his neck and an expression on his face like a man who’d walked across a room on new feet.

I felt the baby wake.

She always woke for noise. The kitchen was a long way from the garden, but it didn’t matter. She felt the whole city at once now, the way Juno did. Every bright thread of silver. Every warm thread of the young.

And she felt this.

Forty people in a kitchen, all feeling the same thing at once. Glad. Loud. Bright.

I felt her turn toward it. Curious. Then pleased. Then something I couldn’t name, until I realised it was the shape she’d made for Pebble’s nursery stone.

Thank you.

Not to anyone in particular.

Just to all of it.

Risa wanted to see the ring.

Priya brought it to the quiet room that afternoon. She’d stopped crying, mostly. She sat on the floor by the bench and held out her hand, and Risa took it and turned it to the light from the steps, and looked at all the sparrows.

”It’s beautiful,” Risa said.

”He carved it in the workshop at night,” Priya said. ”For a month. He told me. He kept starting again because the birds weren’t right.”

”They look right.”

”They’re perfect,” Priya said. She looked at the ring for a long time. Then she looked at Risa’s stomach.

She was on the delivery team. Edda, and Priya, and Toby. And me, in the corner.

”How are you?” she said. ”Really.”

Risa thought about it.

”Heavy,” she said. ”Tired. She’s very low now. Edda says she’s dropped.” She shifted on the cushions. ”She’s not kicking as much. She’s run out of room. But she’s not still. She’s never still. She just” Risa paused. ”She’s waiting. I can feel it. Like weather before it turns.”

Priya nodded slowly.

”Thirty-seven weeks by size,” she said. ”Edda says she’s ready.”

”I know.”

”Edda says any day.”

”Edda’s been saying any day for a week.”

”Edda’s never wrong,” Priya said. ”She’s just early.”

Risa laughed.

That evening, the queen came to the wall.

Not to the courts. To the wall at the edge of our garden, where the agreed path ended and the city began. She’d never done that. She’d never come so far up out of the deep. She was too big for the passages. She’d had to come through the meeting tunnel, the long one, the one Toby played by, slowly, her plates scraping the stone on both sides.

Half the city came out to see.

She didn’t come over the wall. She stopped at the edge of it. She lowered her great head until it rested on the stones, right at the boundary, the way she’d lowered it in the courts the day Pebble first climbed into Risa’s lap.

And she waited.

I went out to her.

You came up, I said.

She is close, the queen said. I wished to be close also.

How close?

The queen was quiet for a long moment.

Do you feel the way she is listening?

I did. I’d been feeling it all afternoon. The baby wasn’t reaching. Not toward the city, or the courts, or the station. She was turned inward. Still. Bright, but still. Like a held breath.

She has stopped counting, the queen said. She has stopped reaching. She is gathering herself. All her silver, drawn in, the way a young one gathers itself before the first climb out of the hollow.

Is she frightened?

No. The queen’s voice was very warm. She is ready. She is only waiting to be sure that you are.

I stood at the wall with my hand on the queen’s great head and didn’t say anything for a long time.

Behind me, I could feel the house. Sera, on the porch, with her arms wrapped round herself. Luna in the doorway with the arrivals list. Liam and Toby and Sigmund at the gate. Edda, who’d come up the street at a brisk walk the moment the queen surfaced, and was now standing at the top of the garden steps with her bag in her hand.

And below them all, in the faceted dark, Risa. Awake. Hands on her stomach. Listening.

Are you? the queen said gently. Ready?

I thought about it.

I thought about the first day Risa had told me, in the canyon, with her arms folded and her chin up and her voice daring me to say the wrong thing. I thought about the quiet room, and the gap shaped like her voice, and the baby’s silver turning toward me every time I came down the steps. I thought about Pebble and the nursery stone. About careful. About thirty-six, all names. About forager, and comes back, and Toby’s fiddle in the cold square with five young humming in time.

I thought about my father. Who’d left the city behind with a pregnant wife. Not knowing what to do, and reading books he found in a destroyed clinic to find out. About delivering me himself, with no help. How terrified he must have been. That gave me strength, knowing he did it alone. 

Yes, I said.

The queen hummed. Low. Content.

Then she will know it, she said.

She knew it.

At four in the morning on Day 622, an hour before the dawn count, Risa called my name from the quiet room.

Not loudly. She didn’t need to. I was already awake. I’d been sitting on the top step of the garden stairs since midnight, with my back against the doorframe, listening.

I heard her say it, and I felt the baby’s silver move, all of it at once. Not out, but down. Turning, settling, gathering, the way the queen had said. Like a young one at the lip of the hollow, about to climb.

”Lucas,” Risa said again, from the dark. Quite calm. ”I think she’s decided.”

I was already on the stairs.

Behind me, I heard Sera’s feet hit the bedroom floor. Luna’s voice, sharp and clear, saying ”Edda” to someone. The front door. Running.

Outside, at the edge of the garden, the queen lifted her head from the wall.

And from far away, through her, I felt the mountain queen wake on her terrace. And the queen of the Lantern brood, and the Hollow, and the First Garden, and the Spire. One after another, across the whole of Avalon. Waking. Turning. Every queen on the world, all at once, turning toward one small house in Scarecrow.

And beginning, very gently, to hold the world quiet.

Days 617–622. Ordinary weeks.

First message back through the numbers: ”Docked. Started. Got your message. So am I.” Then two more: nothing yet, still looking, careful. Six days of nothing happening. I didn’t know what to do with it.

Wren sent me to the schoolroom. Nineteen children. Nessa: is the baby a Teeming? I said no. She’s a person, and she’s also brood. Being in a brood isn’t what you are, it’s who you belong to. Like a lot of very large aunts with a lot of legs. Ada Fen fell off the bench.

Pebble asked the baby where Risa was. She answered: Mother is resting, come tomorrow. Nessa looked at me with awe.

Toby’s music evening. Liam carried Gareth’s chair across the city on his back. The young came out of the passage to Risa. The baby hummed in time with Toby’s fiddle, silver under the skin, and the young hummed with her. When Toby slowed down, she slowed down, and they followed her. Holt: ”Well, I’ll be damned.” Toby: they follow her because she’s the one who knows how.

We talked about names. Liam calls her Bean. The queens call her by a brood-shape Dot says means something like the small bright one from outside the hollow. Risa asked her; she showed Risa her face, what she is, not what she looks like. Risa thinks she’ll tell us herself once she’s seen us. Luna wrote: Name, pending. Her decision.

Dov asked Priya at breakfast with a wooden ring, canyon pine, sparrows all the way round. He started it again and again for a month because the birds weren’t right. She put it on and kissed him so hard he dropped his porridge. Holt: ”About time.” The baby felt the whole kitchen being glad at once and said thank you to all of it.

Thirty-seven weeks by size. She’s dropped. Priya says Edda’s never wrong, just early.

The queen came up through the meeting tunnel to the wall at the edge of our garden. She has never come so far. The baby has stopped counting and reaching. She’s gathering all her silver in, like a young one before the first climb out of the hollow. She isn’t frightened. She was waiting to be sure I was ready.

I said yes.

Day 622, four in the morning. Risa, from the dark, quite calm: ”I think she’s decided.”

Every queen on Avalon is awake.

They’re holding the world quiet.