Scarecrow

Holt made the plan for the knuckle in an afternoon.

Not on the kitchen table this time. Luna said she wasn’t having another table ruined. Holt drew it on the back of one of Wren’s old dawn-line sheets, small, with a stub of pencil, on his knee, in the map room under the big map, with the General standing over his shoulder and the rest of us round the walls.

It was a very simple plan. Holt said the best ones were.

”It opens when the Hand leaves the ground it was sent to,” he said. ”So the Hand doesn’t leave. It lowers.” He drew a line. ”She lowers the third finger. All the way down. Until the knuckle’s touching the plain. On our ground. And then Lucas opens it from the outside, before it opens itself.”

”Can she do that?” said Sera.

”I asked her,” I said. ”This morning. Through Dory.” I’d asked it the way Okafor had taught me to ask. Not will you. Can you, and do you want to. ”She said she’s never moved a finger on her own before. The handlers always moved them. She said she’d like to try.”

”And when it’s open,” said Holt, ”four hundred handlers come out onto a plain where they expected a city, and find every brood on Avalon standing round the knuckle in a ring, and the General’s wall behind the brood, and the rest of you behind the wall.”

”And then?”

Holt looked up from his pencil.

”And then they’ll be surprised,” he said. ”Okafor’s words.”

The General said nothing for a moment. Then: ”Three days.”

”Why three?”

”Because the families are waiting,” said the General, ”and every day we wait here is a day the Hands have to hear about what happened and start moving. And because Windsor needs two of them to get the first finger ready to carry three hundred and four people who’ve never been off the ground.” He looked at Luna. ”And because I want one day where nobody in this city is planning anything.”

Luna looked at her father for a long time.

”That’s not like you,” she said.

”No,” said the General. ”It’s like Okafor.”

We got the day before we got the plan.

Toby and Wren made sure of it.

They came up the street at supper. Both of them, together, which wasn’t unusual, because they went everywhere together now. Wren with her book under her arm. Toby with his fiddle on his back. They came up the porch steps where we were all eating, the four of us and Dory and Genny and Garnet and Pell, because Pell had decided our porch was where the twins ate supper and nobody had argued.

They didn’t sit down.

Wren stood at the top of the steps with her book under her arm and her chin up, very straight, the way she stood at the dawn window before she sent the numbers. Toby stood beside her. He wasn’t carrying anything. His hands were at his sides, open, the way they were when he was about to put up a wall.

”We’ve got something to say,” said Wren.

Everyone stopped eating.

Wren opened her mouth.

Then shut it.

Then looked at Toby.

Toby looked at her.

”You said you’d say it,” he said.

”I know I said I’d say it.”

”So say it.”

”I’m going to say it.” Wren’s chin came up further. ”I’m working out the order.”

”There isn’t an order. It’s two things.”

”There’s always an order, Toby.”

Garnet, at the end of the porch with her mouth full of bread, said very loudly: ”Are you having a baby?”

Wren went pink.

Not a little pink. All the way pink. Up from the collar of her coat to the roots of her hair, so fast it was like watching someone light a lamp.

Toby didn’t go pink. Toby went very still, and then very slowly started to smile, the way he smiled when a note came out right on the first try.

”Yes,” said Wren. To Garnet. With enormous dignity. ”Yes, we are. Thank you. That was the first thing.”

Nobody moved for a second.

Then everyone did.

Sera got there first. Of course she did. She was out of her chair before anyone else had put their bread down, twenty weeks and all, and had her arms round Wren so hard that Wren’s book fell out from under her arm and onto the porch. Then Risa, with Dory on her hip, who wrapped her free arm round both of them. Then Luna, who didn’t hug people as a rule, and who put her arms round all three of them anyway and held on.

Pell picked up Wren’s book.

She dusted it off. She held it out. And when Wren finally got an arm free to take it, Pell didn’t let go straight away.

”How far?” she said.

”Ten weeks,” said Wren. ”Edda says. She checked twice. Then she wrote of course in her green book.”

”Ten weeks,” said Pell. And then, very quietly, in a voice I’d never heard her use: ”Well. That’s uneventful.”

Wren laughed. It came out of her cracked.

I was still in my chair.

I hadn’t moved. I was looking at Toby.

He was standing at the top of the steps with his hands at his sides, watching four people hold his Wren, and his face was doing something I’d seen it do once before. The morning his mother sang four notes on another world and he played them back on his knees.

I got up.

I didn’t hug him. Toby didn’t like being hugged by people who weren’t Wren, mostly. I stood beside him. Shoulder to shoulder. Looking at the same thing he was looking at.

”Ten weeks,” I said.

”Ten weeks,” said Toby.

”You knew.”

”Three days.” His voice was very quiet. ”She told me on the north wall. Three nights ago. She said she’d been counting.” He swallowed. ”She always counts.”

”Are you all right?”

Toby didn’t answer for a long time.

”I can hear it,” he said.

I looked at him.

”The baby.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Wren. ”Not with my ears. The other way. The way I hear the deep, and the queens, and the hello. There’s a sound. Very small. Under her heart.” He swallowed. ”It’s the note under the first note of the old song. The one I play to carry. The one Sera’s baby hums.”

”The counter-note.”

”The counter-note,” said Toby. ”It’s been humming it. For three days.” His face did something complicated. ”Lucas. It’s mine. It’s humming my note.”

”That was the first thing,” said Wren.

She’d got free of Sera and Risa and Luna, eventually. She was standing at the top of the steps again with her book back under her arm and her hair coming loose and her face still pink. She looked at Toby.

”The second thing,” she said, ”is yours.”

Toby looked at her.

”You said you’d say it.”

”I said I’d say the first thing.”

”You didn’t, though. Garnet did.”

”Toby.”

Toby looked at the porch. At all of us. At Dory on Risa’s hip, checking him very brightly. At Pell with her hands folded. At Garnet with bread in both fists.

”We want to get married,” he said.

The porch went very quiet.

”Not now,” said Toby. Quickly. Before anyone could start hugging anyone again. ”Not this week. Not before—” He stopped. ”When my mum’s here.”

He looked at me.

”She’s coming,” he said. ”On the Hand. With the families. Okafor’s bringing her. I’m going to Earth to carry the hello so she can be counted the whole way, and then I’m coming back with her. And when she’s here—” He swallowed. ”When she’s standing on the glass. Under the queens. I want her to see it.”

”In the square,” said Wren. ”Like Dov and Priya. Under the tree.”

”With the fiddle,” said Toby. ”Somebody else’ll have to play it. I’ll be busy.” He almost smiled. ”Maybe Mum. She sings better than I play.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Risa, very quietly, said: ”Toby. You’re going to Earth.”

”Yes.”

”In three days. And Wren’s ten weeks.”

”Yes.”

Risa looked at Wren.

Wren’s chin came up.

”He’s going,” she said. ”I told him to. He tried to tell Okafor he’d stay. I said if he did I’d go up the stair myself and push him into the first finger.” She looked at Toby. ”His mother sang his name up the hello on Day 607. She made a whole ward quiet once so nobody would hear him crying. She’s going to be at our wedding. And he’s going to be the one who brings her.”

Toby didn’t say anything.

He put his hand out without looking, and Wren took it.

”She’s right,” he said. ”She’s always right. She counts.”

Liam and Anja found me in the forge that night.

I’d gone down after supper. I couldn’t sit still. Wren’s baby humming Toby’s note, Sera’s baby humming Toby’s note, Toby going to Earth in three days and coming back with his mother for a wedding under the tree. It was too much good at once. I needed to hit something. Iron was safest.

They came in without knocking. Liam never knocked. Anja usually made him, but she didn’t that night.

They sat down on the bench by the door. Both of them. Close.

I put the hammer down.

”You’ve got the face,” I said to Liam.

”What face?”

”The one you had the night you asked Anja to supper.” I looked at him. ”The one where you’ve decided something and you’re going to say it whether anyone wants to hear it or not.”

Liam grinned.

Anja didn’t. Anja looked at her hands.

Anja Bell had been alone at F-22 when we found her. Alone, with an ankle folded wrong under her and her water nearly out and a mirror she kept polishing every dawn in case anyone ever answered. She’d kept a box of letters. She’d been twenty-one. She was twenty-two now, and her ankle had healed straight, slowly, the way I’d promised it would, and she’d been with Liam since the night he asked her to supper and she said yes.

She was the quietest person I knew who wasn’t Juno.

”We want a baby,” said Liam.

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then I said, ”I thought you might.”

”You did not.”

”I did. You’ve been looking at Dory the way Rory looks at a good fire.”

Liam laughed. Then stopped.

”Not now,” he said. ”I’m going to Earth. In three days. With the General and Luna and Toby.” He looked at Anja. ”I’m not going to leave her on her own and pregnant while I’m eleven light-years away carrying people up a gantry.”

”I’ve been on my own before,” said Anja. Very quietly. To her hands.

”I know you have,” said Liam. ”That’s why.”

Anja looked up at him.

Something passed between them that wasn’t for me. I looked at the anvil.

”When I’m back,” said Liam. ”When Mum and Dad are here. When Dad’s had a look at what I can do and told me it’s not bad for a boy who grew up by a heat plant.” His voice changed. ”When Mum’s met her. Properly. Not on the hello. With her hands.” He swallowed. ”Mum’s going to want to hold her face. She does that. With flour on.”

”I know,” I said. ”She did it to me.”

”She’s going to do it to Anja for about an hour.”

Anja almost smiled.

”So we wanted to tell you,” said Liam. ”Before. In case.” He stopped.

”In case what?”

Liam didn’t answer.

Anja did.

”In case the knuckle,” she said. ”In case something goes wrong in three days, and he doesn’t get to Earth at all.” Her voice was very steady. ”I want somebody to know. That we decided. That we wanted it.” She looked at me. ”So it’s true even if.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then I said, ”Nothing’s going to go wrong.”

”You don’t know that.”

”No,” I said. ”But there are four hundred of them, and they’ve been sealed in a knuckle since before the Hand came down, and they think they’re going to take a city.” I picked the hammer up again. ”And Liam’s going to be on the plain, laughing, throwing fire at them. And his sister’s going to be standing behind him burning like a sun. And when he’s finished, he’s going to go to Earth and come back with Rory and Maura, and Maura’s going to hold your face with flour on it for an hour.” I looked at Anja. ”And then you’re going to have a baby that sets fire to things.”

Anja looked at me.

Then she laughed. Out loud. The first time I’d ever heard her do it.

”Good,” she said.

Sesh came for me the next morning.

Not at the porch. At the forge, at first light, before the dawn. She’d never come to the forge. It was too low for her, and too hot, and too full of things she said smelled like the Sorn. She stood outside the door with her long neck bent to look in, and her wings folded tight against her back, and clicked.

Dot was with me. Dot was always with me at dawn now.

”She says the youngest queen is dreaming,” said Dot.

I put the hammer down.

”She says she can feel it,” said Dot. ”Since the collar came off. Since the sliver went into the stone. She says it was asleep, and now it is dreaming.” A pause. Sesh clicked again, longer. ”She says it is dreaming about having a body.”

The queen at the garden wall knew already.

Of course she did. They were in her hollow. On her east wall. Among her young. She’d been listening to them every night.

Not only the youngest, she said, when I came down to the wall with Sesh behind me and Dot at my side. All of them. Every sliver from every collar. They were asleep when Genny put them in the stones. They are not asleep now. They are remembering.

Remembering what?

Themselves, said the queen.

I didn’t understand.

She was quiet for a while. Then she turned her head. North. Toward the mountain. And I felt her call.

Old one.

The mountain queen came down the thread the way she always came. Slow and vast and tired, like a mountain leaning in at a window. And this time, I felt something else come with her. From the other side. From the plain. From the Hand, a mile out, where the first queen lay at the bottom of ten thousand folds.

She’d heard too.

Three queens. On one thread. All looking at me.

A queen, said the old one slowly, is not her body.

I waited.

A queen is her silver, said the old one. Her body is what the silver makes, to hold itself. To sing with. To bear young. A pause, very long. When the Sorn cut a queen, they cut her body. They take her silver in pieces. They put the pieces in collars. They think that is the end of her.

It isn’t?

It is the end of her body, said the old one. It is not the end of her. Another pause. Each sliver remembers. Not all of her. A piece. The way a field remembers a hedge. The way your friend’s father’s body remembered the arms they took.

I went very still.

Rory, I said. I grew his arms back. From the shape his body remembered. From the shape his children carried.

Yes, said the old one.

And Sesh’s wings.

Yes.

You’re telling me I could grow a queen back. From a sliver.

No, said the old one. Not you. You change. You grow. But a queen is not grown the way an arm is grown. A queen must be sung back. A pause. By other queens. Who give her silver of their own. Who remember for her the parts the sliver has forgotten. Her attention shifted, very slightly, toward me. And by someone who can make a body for the silver to come home to. Someone who can listen to what the sliver remembers, and grow it.

Me.

You, said the old one. And the girl who asks stones. And the child who waits.

I sat down on the stones of the garden.

I didn’t decide to. My legs did. The way they had on the wall above the wheat, when the General told me about Article Fourteen.

How many? I said. How many could come back?

The three queens were quiet.

Then the first queen, from the bottom of the Hand, spoke. Slowly. Every word right. In our words, the ones she’d learned from fourteen days of the hello.

Every one, she said, whose silver is not lost.

Every collar in your hollow. Every collar in my second finger and my third. Every sliver the Sorn ever cut and kept. A pause. Every band. Every seed.

Every seed.

Voss’s seed. Round her neck. A sliver of a dead queen, on a chain, for twenty years, that she’d thought was jewellery.

Crane’s band.

The Sorn kept every piece, said the first queen. They always keep every piece. They think it is funny. Another pause. They did not think anyone would ever sing the pieces back.

Sesh was standing behind me.

I hadn’t heard her come so close. She was very quiet, for something eight feet tall. She stood at the edge of the garden with her wings folded and her long neck bent and her eye on me.

She’d felt it. All of it. She didn’t have the kind of silver that heard words, but she’d felt the three queens on the thread and felt me sit down on the stones, and she knew.

She clicked. Very softly.

Dot didn’t translate it. Dot didn’t need to.

I turned round.

”The youngest queen,” I said. ”The one who sang to the hatchlings. The one in your collar.” I swallowed. ”They’re saying she can come back.”

Sesh didn’t move.

”Not just her,” I said. ”All of them. The queens from your world. All the ones in the collars.” I stopped. ”Dot. How many queens did the ten slivers come from?”

Dot was quiet for a moment. Counting.

”Nine,” she said. ”This unit counted nine on the night the handler pulled. Ten slivers. Two from one queen.” A pause. ”Sesh says her world had seven.”

”Then two of them aren’t from her world.”

”No,” said Dot. ”This unit does not know where they are from.”

From worlds the tall ones never knew, said our queen, very quietly. The Sorn put them in Kethri collars. Because a collar is a collar. Because they had pieces to spare.

Sesh clicked again. Longer.

”She says,” said Dot, ”then they will be strangers when they wake.”

”Yes.”

”She says the Kethri know what that is.” A pause. ”She says they will not wake among strangers. She says they will wake among Kethri. And the Kethri will be kind.”

We sang the youngest queen back that afternoon.

In the hollow. In front of the east wall, where the ten small round cups the Overseer had folded sat in a row between our queen’s sleeping young. Our queen at her full height at the far end, with her plates raised. The mountain queen on the thread from the north. The first queen on the thread from the Hand. Both of them there, not in their bodies, but all of their attention, so heavy in the hollow that the air felt thick.

Sesh at the front. Lying on the floor, the way she’d lain when I took her collar off. Long neck flat on the stone. Eye open.

The other nine Kethri behind her. Close. Necks touching.

Genny beside me. Garnet beside Genny, holding Sesh’s three-fingered hand, because Garnet had held it the first time and said someone ought to and nobody had ever told her to stop.

Risa with Dory.

The Overseer on the north shelf. Not close. Holding its bread.

And Toby at the passage mouth with his fiddle. Not to carry the hello. The queens didn’t need it carried. To carry this.

”Ready?” I said.

Genny put her hand on the stone of the first cup. The youngest queen’s. She listened.

”She’s awake,” said Genny. Very quietly. ”She’s been awake for days. She’s dreaming she’s singing to hatchlings.” She swallowed. ”She knows we’re here.”

Then we begin, said the old one.

Toby played one note.

Not the first note of the old song. Not the counter-note. A note I’d never heard him play. High. Clear. Thin as a feather. I didn’t know where he’d got it from until afterward, when he told me: from Sesh. From the call she’d made in the hollow the morning her collar came off. The first Kethri call any of us had ever heard. He’d been carrying it in his head ever since.

The queens took it.

All three. Our queen, and the old one, and the first queen at the bottom of the Hand. They took Toby’s note and sang it, and as they sang it they gave.

I felt them give.

Silver. Their own. Not much from each. A little. The way you’d give a little of your own blood to someone who’d lost too much. Our queen’s, warm and quick. The old one’s, slow and heavy as stone. The first queen’s, so old and deep it was like the bottom of the sea. All three, together, pouring down the note Toby was playing into the small round cup on the east wall.

Into the sliver.

And the sliver remembered.

I felt it. Felt it wake all the way, the way Dory woke at the hello, all at once. Felt it reach for the silver the queens were giving it, and take it, and turn it over, and recognise it. Not as its own. As queen. As the same kind of thing it was. As the parts of itself it had forgotten, held up in front of it by three strangers who’d never met it, so that it could see what it had been.

And it started to grow.

Not a body. Not yet. A shape. A shape in the silver. Small and fine and feathered, branching out from the sliver the way Sesh’s silver branched along her bones. The shape of a queen. A very young one. The shape the sliver remembered.

”Now,” said Genny. ”Lucas. Now.”

I didn’t change anything.

That was the thing I understood, in the hollow, with my hands out in front of me and the shape in the silver growing in the cup. The old one had said a body for the silver to come home to. Not a body I’d make. A body the silver would come home to. Like a house you’d lived in once and forgotten, and someone rebuilt it from your memory of it, exactly the way it had been.

So I listened.

To the shape. To every branch of it. To where each feather had been, and what each bone had been, and how big she’d been when the Sorn cut her. What colour. What shape her eyes were. How she’d sung.

And I grew it.

Exactly. The way I’d grown Rory’s arms from the ghost of the path his body remembered. The way I’d grown Sesh’s wings. Bone first, hollow and light, out from the sliver at the centre. Then the rest. Then feathers. Not grey, like the Kethri. Pale. Almost white. And at the tips, as they came in, the same deep bright copper as Sesh’s wings. Like the edge of a fire.

She was very small.

No bigger than a cat. Curled in the bottom of the Overseer’s small round cup on the east wall of the hollow, between two of our queen’s sleeping young, with her pale feathered head tucked under a pale feathered wing.

And then she wasn’t curled.

She lifted her head.

She had eyes like Sesh’s. Dark and round and set on either side of a small curved beak. She looked at the hollow. At the shelves of young. At the three queens whose attention filled the air.

At Sesh.

Lying on the floor in front of her. Long neck flat on the stone. Eye open.

The youngest queen of the Kethri world looked at the hatchling she’d sung to through a collar for a whole lifetime. Who wasn’t a hatchling any more. Who was eight feet tall and had copper-tipped wings and a bare neck where the collar used to be.

And she sang.

Not the voice. Not crying. Her own song. Thin and high and clear. The note Toby had been playing. The note Sesh had called in the hollow. The note, I understood then, that the youngest queen had been singing to the hatchlings on her world, every evening, before the Hand came.

Sesh made a sound.

Not a click. Not a call. Something I didn’t have a word for. Something that came up out of the bottom of her and filled the hollow and went up the passage and out into the square, where every brood in Scarecrow heard it and went still.

The other nine Kethri made it too.

All of them. At once.

And the youngest queen, very small, very new, with copper at the tips of her feathers, climbed out of the Overseer’s cup on the east wall, and hopped down onto the floor of the hollow, and walked across the stone on two small feathered feet to where Sesh lay.

And pressed her head against Sesh’s beak.

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

Garnet was crying. Genny was crying. Risa was crying with Dory on her hip, and Dory wasn’t crying, Dory was reaching for the youngest queen with both hands and her silver turned all the way toward her, checking, checking, checking.

There you are. There you are. There you are.

And the youngest queen turned her head, and looked at Dory.

And checked her back.

The Overseer was the last to move.

It came down off the north shelf. Slowly. All its long grey limbs. It came across the floor of the hollow. Not close. It stopped a body’s length from Sesh, and the youngest queen, and Garnet holding Sesh’s hand.

It looked at the cup on the east wall. Empty now.

”It made that,” it said.

”Yes,” I said.

”To keep her safe. Inside. The second kind of door.”

”Yes.”

The Overseer’s mirror tilted toward the youngest queen. Small and pale and feathered, with her head pressed against Sesh’s beak.

”The Sorn cut her,” it said. ”It knows. It was in the vat. It was made from what the Sorn are made from. It was made to keep doors shut on things like her.” A long pause. ”It did not know they could come back.”

”Neither did I,” I said.

The Overseer was quiet for a long time.

Then it bent down. Folding. All the way. Until its mirror was level with the floor of the hollow.

And it held out the bread.

Toward the youngest queen. Not close. Just held it out. The way Garnet had left it every morning on the stone at the passage mouth. So you know somebody thought about you this morning.

The youngest queen looked at it.

Then at the Overseer.

Then she hopped across the stone, two small feathered steps, and pecked the bread. Once. Very precisely. A small neat hole in the middle of it.

And hopped back to Sesh.

The Overseer looked at the bread for a long time. At the small neat hole.

”It has been eaten,” it said.

”A bit,” said Garnet.

”It has never been eaten before,” said the Overseer.

And it didn’t put it down.

Days 795–797. News.

Holt drew the knuckle plan on the back of an old dawn-line sheet. It opens when the Hand leaves the ground it was sent to, so the Hand doesn’t leave: it lowers the third finger until the knuckle touches the plain, and I open it from outside before it opens itself. I asked the queen: can you, and do you want to? She’s never moved a finger herself; the handlers always did. She’d like to try. Every brood in a ring, the General’s wall behind, the rest of us behind the wall. Three days: the families are waiting, Luna needs two to ready the first finger for three hundred and four people, and the General wants one day where nobody plans anything. Luna: that’s not like you. ”It’s like Okafor.”

Supper on the porch. Toby and Wren at the top of the steps, Wren working out the order. Garnet, mouth full: ”Are you having a baby?” Wren went pink all the way. ”Yes. Thank you. That was the first thing.” Sera got there first, twenty weeks and all; Wren’s book fell. Risa, then Luna, who doesn’t hug people. Pell picked up the book: how far? Ten weeks; Edda wrote of course. ”Well. That’s uneventful.”

Toby: she told him on the north wall three nights ago. She always counts. He can hear it under her heart: the counter-note, his note, the one he plays to carry, the one Sera’s baby hums. ”It’s humming my note.”

The second thing was Toby’s: we want to get married, when my mum’s here. He’ll carry the hello to Earth so she’s counted the whole way and bring her back. In the square under the tree like Dov and Priya; somebody else plays, maybe his mother. Risa: you’re going in three days and she’s ten weeks. Wren: he tried to tell Okafor he’d stay; she’d push him into the first finger herself. His mother sang his name up the hello on Day 607 and made a ward quiet so nobody would hear him crying; he’ll be the one who brings her. ”She’s always right. She counts.”

The forge that night. Liam had the face from the night he asked Anja to supper. Anja Bell: alone at F-22 with a folded ankle, a mirror she polished every dawn, a box of letters; twenty-two now, ankle straight. ”We want a baby.” Not yet: he won’t leave her alone and pregnant eleven light-years away. When he’s back, when Rory’s seen what he can do, when Maura has held Anja’s face with flour on it for an hour. Anja: we wanted somebody to know we decided, in case the knuckle, so it’s true even if. Nothing’s going to go wrong; then a baby that sets fire to things. She laughed out loud, the first time I’ve heard it. ”Good.”

Dawn, Sesh at the forge door: the youngest queen is dreaming about having a body. The queen at the wall: all of them, every sliver, remembering themselves. She called the old one, and the first queen came from the Hand on the same thread. A queen is not her body; a queen is her silver. The Sorn cut the body, take the silver in pieces, think it’s the end. Each sliver remembers a piece, the way a field remembers a hedge, the way Rory’s body remembered his arms. Not grown like an arm: sung back, by other queens who give silver of their own and remember for her what she’s forgotten, and someone who can make a body for the silver to come home to. You, the girl who asks stones, and the child who waits.

How many? The first queen: every one whose silver is not lost. Every collar in the hollow and in her second and third fingers. Every band. Every seed. The Sorn keep every piece; they think it is funny. They did not think anyone would sing the pieces back.

Dot: the ten slivers came from nine queens, two from one queen. Sesh’s world had seven. Two are from worlds the tall ones never knew; a collar is a collar and the Sorn had pieces to spare. Sesh: then they’ll wake among strangers. The Kethri know what that is. They’ll wake among Kethri, and the Kethri will be kind.

Afternoon, the hollow. Our queen at full height; the old one and the first queen on threads, the air thick. Sesh on the floor, the nine behind her, Garnet holding her hand. Genny: she’s awake, dreaming she’s singing to hatchlings; she knows we’re here. Toby played a note I’d never heard, high and thin as a feather: Sesh’s first call, carried in his head since. The three queens sang it and gave a little silver each, warm, heavy as stone, deep as the sea. The sliver recognised it as queen, as what it had forgotten, and grew a shape: small, fine, feathered. Not a body I’d make. A body for the silver to come home to. I listened and grew it exactly: hollow bones, pale near-white feathers, copper tips like Sesh’s. The size of a cat, head under her wing.

She lifted her head, eyes like Sesh’s, and looked at the hatchling she’d sung to through a collar all her life, eight feet tall now, bare-necked, copper-winged, and sang her own song: the note the youngest queen sang to hatchlings every evening before the Hand came. Sesh made a sound I have no word for, and the nine with her. The youngest queen hopped down and walked to Sesh and pressed her head against Sesh’s beak. Dory checked her over and over. She turned and checked Dory back.

The Overseer came down off the north shelf, not close. It made that cup, the second kind of door. It was made to keep doors shut on things like her; it did not know they could come back. It held out the bread. She hopped two steps and pecked a small neat hole in it, and hopped back to Sesh. ”It has been eaten.” ”A bit.” ”It has never been eaten before.” It didn’t put it down.