Scarecrow

I asked our queen first.

At the top of the garden wall, in the morning, gold and silver in the light, with her young round her on the terraces. Where she always was. Near the house, where she could hear us.

I climbed up and sat down beside her on the warm stone. With my left hand in my lap. With its two dark fingers.

She looked at them for a long time.

Dory has been holding them, she said.

”Every afternoon. For a week.”

And they stay dark.

”Yes.”

Our queen didn’t say anything. She turned her great head and looked out over the town. At the long roads going out across the plain. At the rails. At the red glass by the landing field, where the heavy queen lay curled round a row of grey keepers and a very small green light and a forest queen still uncurling, a coil at a time, in the sun.

”They walked into me,” I said. ”One of them. Just one. It didn’t fight. It didn’t strike. It walked, and I was in the way, and where it touched me the silver went out.” I looked at my hand. ”There were two hundred on the fire world. There’ll be more next time. And there’ll be a next time. The houses know where we are now. They know what I am.”

Yes.

”I can fold them. I did. But I have to see them. I have to look. One at a time. And while I’m looking at one, the next one walks into Sera. Or Anja. Or Toby, on a rope, at the bottom of a hole.” I put my right hand over my left. ”I’m not enough. Not against that. Not the way I am.”

Our queen was quiet for a long time.

What are you asking? she said.

I didn’t answer at once.

”How do I get stronger,” I said. ”Not a little. Enough. Enough to stand in front of them on their ground and not be the one who goes cold.”

She didn’t answer.

She turned her head away from me, toward the north, toward the mountains past the canyon, where the old queen lay on her terrace in the sun. And she sang something.

Not to me. Out. Very low. Very far.

And from the red glass, after a moment, the heavy queen lifted her head.

And from the forest past the river, where the Kethri queen nested, something answered. And from the lakes. And from the salt flats in the west, very faint. And from under the hill where the Drenn queen had her hall, and from the coast, and from the deep water past the coast where the coral queen had gone back to her pools.

All of them. Every queen on Avalon. One after another. Answering.

Our queen listened to all of them. For a long time.

Then she turned back to me.

Go to the old one, she said. Tomorrow. At dawn. A pause. Bring Luna. And Risa. And Sera.

”Why them?”

Because they stood in front of you, said our queen. Every time. And the old one wishes to see them.

I told them at supper.

All three. At the kitchen table. With Mother at the end in Father’s chair, listening, and Hana with the twins on her knees, and the children round the table eating with their elbows on it because nobody had the energy that week to tell them not to.

Luna put her fork down.

”The old queen,” she said. ”On the mountain.”

”Yes.”

”She sleeps most days now. Our queen said so. She’s the oldest thing on Avalon.” Luna looked at me very steadily. ”What does she want with us?”

”I don’t know. I asked how to get stronger. Our queen sang to every queen on Avalon. They all answered. And then she said, bring Luna, and Risa, and Sera.”

Risa was looking at her plate. Small Sigmund was asleep against her shoulder, with a very small spark running round the edge of his ear, the way it did when he dreamed.

”Not Hana,” said Risa.

Hana looked up.

”Our queen said Hana’s is already growing,” I said. ”Since the twins. She said it’s still finding its shape and it should be left to find it.” I looked at Hana. ”She said she’d have asked you too, if it wasn’t.”

Hana considered this. Then she nodded. Once.

”That’s right,” she said. ”I can feel it. It’s not done.” She shifted Efua on her knee. ”Somebody has to stay home and make the porch smell of rain, anyway.”

Sera hadn’t said anything. She was looking at her hands on the table. Very still.

”Sera?”

”Every time,” said Sera. Quietly. ”That’s what she said? Because we stood in front of you every time?”

”Yes.”

Sera looked up.

”I didn’t stand in front of the keeper,” she said. ”On the fire world. I stood behind it. With my hands on it. And it went out anyway.” Her voice was very steady. ”If the old queen wants to give me something for standing in front, she’s got the wrong one.”

Nobody said anything.

Mother, at the end of the table, put down her cup.

”Go and tell her that,” she said. ”Tomorrow. At dawn. To her face.” She picked the cup up again. ”She spent four hundred years under a mountain. She’ll have heard worse.”

We went at dawn.

I carried them. The four of us. I asked the air and it held us and we went up off the porch in the grey before the sun with the house going small below, and Dory standing on the top step in her nightgown with Pebble, watching us go, and Mother behind her in the doorway with her hand on Dory’s shoulder.

North. Over the canyon. Over the place where the first Scarecrow had stood, a long time ago, at the edge of a field. Over the river. Toward the mountains.

The sun came up while we were flying. Over the edge of the plain. It turned the mountains pink, and then gold, and then their ordinary colour, grey and brown with snow on the tops.

And halfway up the tallest of them, on the south side, where the sun hit it all day, the terrace.

They were all there.

Not on the terrace. The terrace was hers. Round it. On the slopes. On the ledges above and below. In the air.

Our queen, gold and silver, on a ledge just below the terrace’s edge, with her great head resting on the stone. The heavy queen, who had never come to the mountain before, who had come up from the red glass in the night, Dot told us later, slowly, the whole way, and was lying now on the slope below like a fallen hill. The Kethri queen on the wind above us, wings out, not moving them. The Drenn queen. The marsh queen. The coral queen in a pool of seawater someone had carried up in the Pool’s tanks overnight and poured into a hollow in the rock. The red queen, and the blue, and the small green one from the wall. The forest queen, uncurled most of the way now, lying very carefully on a ledge where she could see everything. Even the reed queen, a small green light no bigger than a lamp, carried up by the heavy queen in the hollow under her jaw.

Every queen on Avalon.

And in the middle of them, on her terrace, the old queen.

Awake.

I set us down on the edge of the terrace.

The old queen didn’t lift her head. She lay along the whole length of the warm stone, grey and silver and very old, her plates dull with age, the way she’d lain when I brought Hana up here and we talked about silver listening to singing. Her eyes were open. Very pale. Very clear.

She looked at me.

You asked how to be stronger, she said.

”Yes.”

Why?

I’d thought about it all night. What I’d say. I’d had it ready.

I didn’t say any of it.

”Because I was late,” I said. ”On the fire world. And the keeper lay across its mother so she wouldn’t go out, and I couldn’t stop the black, and I couldn’t fold it, and I couldn’t ask it anything.” I stopped. ”And next time it won’t be a keeper lying across a queen. It’ll be one of them.” I didn’t look round at Luna and Risa and Sera. I didn’t have to. ”Or one of you.”

The old queen didn’t say anything.

”I’ve never asked for anything,” I said. ”From any of you. Not once. You’ve given me things. I know you have. I know what you did on this mountain when Mother couldn’t hold on any more. I know what our queen did when Dory came.” I looked at my hand. At the two dark fingers. ”But I never asked. Because it felt like it would be taking.”

And now?

”Now I’m asking,” I said. ”Because the correctors don’t ask anything. And I’d rather be the kind of thing that asks.”

The old queen was quiet for a very long time.

Then she lifted her head.

All the way. Off the warm stone. For the first time since I’d known her. She lifted her great old head on its long grey neck until it was higher than mine, higher than the edge of the terrace, and looked out over all the queens on the mountain.

And sang.

I don’t know what she sang. I couldn’t hear it. Not with my ears and not with my silver. It went past me. Out. To all of them.

And all of them answered.

Our queen, first. Then the heavy queen. Then the Kethri queen, from the air. Then the rest, one after another, faster and faster, until the whole mountain was singing, every queen on Avalon, a sound so big it wasn’t a sound any more, it was a place, and we were standing in the middle of it.

Then it stopped.

All at once.

And the old queen lowered her head. Not to the stone. To me.

Do you know, she said, how many times a queen has been asked that? By a human. By anything that was not a queen?

”No.”

Once, said the old queen. Today. She looked at me with her pale clear eyes. Every other thing that ever wanted more of us took it. The Sorn took it. They took us. They broke us into pieces and put the pieces in the backs of children’s necks. They made a voice out of us so they would not have to sing. A pause. You came under my mountain. You came under the ring. You came into the black. Every time, for us. And you have never once asked us for anything back.

She was very close now. Her great old head an arm’s length from my face.

So we will give it, she said. Not because you asked. Because you are the one who would have gone on without asking.

You first.

It came from all of them.

Not from the old queen. Not from our queen. From every queen on the mountain at once. I felt it come. Like the hello, the first time, when every silver in Scarecrow found mine. Like the day I heard everything. But not coming in through my ears or my silver or anything I had a name for.

Coming in through all of me.

It didn’t hurt.

I’d thought it would. Every time I’d ever been made more, it had hurt. The first night with the silver, in the dome, a long time ago. The day the old queen made what was in me as strong as Mother’s. The day I started hearing everything.

This didn’t.

It was like being filled with water from the bottom up. Slowly. Warm. Into every path I had. Into the paths I didn’t know I had. Into the two dark fingers on my left hand.

I felt them light.

Not seep. Not slowly, the way they’d come back under Dory’s hands. Light. All at once. Thumb, and finger. The silver came back into them like a lamp coming on in a window, and I made a sound I didn’t mean to make, and behind me I heard Sera say my name.

And then it kept going.

I’d always seen.

That was the thing about me. From the first day. I looked at something and saw what it was made of. Iron, and the carbon in it. Water, two numbers and one. Salt. I looked, and I saw, and what I saw I could change. That was all it had ever been. Looking.

I stopped needing to look.

I shut my eyes.

And I could feel the mountain.

Not see it. Feel it. Every grain of stone under my feet. The granite and the iron in it and the water in the cracks and the frost in the water. Down. All the way down. Into the root of it, where it went into the plain.

The terrace. The warm stone. The old queen lying on it, every plate, every scale, every slow beat of her very old heart.

Luna, behind me. Every part of her. The cold in her hands. The silver branching through her like frost on glass.

Risa, beside her. The storm in her. The charge, building and building in her, the way it built in the air before lightning.

Sera. The heat.

All of it. All at once. Without looking.

And I knew, the way you know you can lift your own hand, that anything I could feel, I could change.

I opened my eyes.

The old queen was watching me.

Again, she said.

And it kept going.

Past feeling. Into me. Into what I was made of. I could feel myself the way I felt the mountain. Every part. Every grain. Every piece of the silver and every piece of what it ran through, every number, held together because I was holding it together.

I’d never known I was holding it.

And I let go.

Luna said, afterward, that I went out like a breath on a cold morning.

One moment I was standing on the edge of the terrace with my eyes open and my hand lit. And the next I wasn’t. There was a shimmer in the air where I’d been. Like heat over a road. Silver, very faint. Spread out. Thinning.

Gone.

Sera screamed.

I wasn’t gone.

I was everywhere.

Not everywhere. Spread. Over the terrace, over the edge, over the slope, thin as mist. Every piece of me, apart. Every number, loose. And all of them still mine. I could feel every one. I could feel the sun on all of them at once. I could feel the old queen’s breath move through me like wind through a curtain.

And I could feel Sera. On her knees on the warm stone where I’d been standing. With her hands in the air. Grabbing at nothing.

I came back.

Not slowly. All at once. Every piece. From everywhere it had gone. To where she was.

I was kneeling in front of her when I was whole again. With my hands on her face.

”I’m here,” I said.

Sera hit me.

Not hard. Very hard, for Sera. In the chest. With both fists. And then she grabbed my shirt in both hands and held on and didn’t let go and said things into my collar that I’m not going to write down.

The old queen watched all of this. Very calmly.

He can scatter, she said. To nobody. To all of them. And come back. A pause. The correctors walk into what is in front of them. He does not have to be in front of them.

Luna was white to the lips.

”You could have told him,” she said. To the oldest thing on Avalon. ”Before.”

I did not know he would, said the old queen. We gave him more. He is the one who decided what more was. Her pale eyes went to Luna. You next.

Luna didn’t move at once.

She looked at me, on my knees on the stone with Sera holding on to my shirt. She looked at the old queen. She looked at all the queens on the mountain, on the ledges and the slopes and in the air.

Then she walked out into the middle of the terrace.

Very straight. In her long coat. With her arms at her sides. The way she walked to the head of the long table when the broods had been talking for an hour and someone had to say what they’d decided.

She didn’t say anything.

The queens sang.

The cold came up out of her like a tide.

I felt it. With all of me. Every grain of frost in every crack on the mountain turned toward her at once. The water in the air. The snow on the peaks. All of it, pulled. And Luna stood in the middle of the terrace with her eyes shut and let it come.

And it came onto her.

Not round her. Onto her. Over her hands first, and up her arms, white and clear, thickening, hardening, shaping itself. Over her shoulders. Down her back. Up her throat. Over her face, last, leaving her eyes.

She stood in the middle of the terrace in armour.

Ice. All of her. Clear as glass and white at the edges, shaped close, with the silver in her branching through it like frost through a window, so that you could see every path lit up inside the cold.

She opened her eyes. And looked at her hands.

And put one of them out. Palm down. Toward the edge of the terrace.

And a blade grew out of it.

Long. Clear. Thin as paper at the edge. She held it out at arm’s length and looked at it.

Then she opened her hand. And it went to water. And fell.

She closed her hand. And there was a spear in it. Then an axe. Then a long thin needle no thicker than a hair, that she turned in the light for a moment, considering, before she let it go.

”Oh,” said Luna. Very quietly.

Then she looked at the far side of the canyon. A long way off. Across empty air. A mile, at least, to the next ridge.

And took a step off the edge of the terrace.

Sera let go of my shirt.

I was on my feet before Luna’s foot came down. I didn’t need to be.

Her foot came down on ice.

A path. Grown out of the air under her as she stepped. Clear and thin and very straight, curving out from the edge of the terrace over the canyon, toward the far ridge. She took another step. And it grew. And another. And then she wasn’t stepping. She was sliding. Very fast. The path growing ahead of her and melting behind her, faster and faster, a line of white across the empty air, and Luna on it, in her armour, going away from us so fast that in the time it took me to breathe in she was at the far ridge.

She turned round. On the far ridge. A small white shape, a mile away. And came back.

Faster.

She stopped at the edge of the terrace in a spray of frost. The path behind her shattered and fell into the canyon like a dropped glass.

The armour went to water. All of it. At once. And ran off her onto the stone.

And Luna stood there in her long coat, soaked to the skin, with her hair plastered to her face, and laughed.

I’d never heard her laugh like that. Not once. Not in the dome. Not on Avalon. Not ever.

You next, said the old queen. To Risa.

Risa didn’t walk out into the middle of the terrace.

She was already there. She’d been standing beside Luna’s puddle with her arms folded and her chin up and a very small cloud over her head, the way she’d stood on the porch the day small Sigmund was born and told everyone she was perfectly fine.

The queens sang.

And the cloud over Risa’s head went black.

I felt the charge.

All of it. In every grain of the air on the mountain. Pulling toward her. Building. The way it builds before a storm, all afternoon, until the hair stands up on your arms. Except it wasn’t afternoon. It was a few seconds. And it wasn’t the hair on my arms. It was every number in the air between me and her.

Risa’s feet left the stone.

She didn’t jump. She didn’t push off. She rose. Straight up. With her arms still folded. Into the black cloud over her head, and through it, and above it, until she was hanging in the clear air over the terrace with the storm under her feet like a floor.

She looked down at us.

And unfolded her arms.

The first bolt hit the far ridge.

Where Luna had stood a minute before. A white line from Risa’s hand to the rock, so bright I saw it through my eyelids, and the sound came a half-second later and hit the whole mountain like a fist. Every queen on the slopes flinched. The Kethri queen went up fifty feet on the wind and came down again, slowly, with her wings very wide.

The ridge was smoking.

Risa looked at it. Then at her hand.

Then she clapped.

Once. Both hands together. In front of her.

And the sound that came out of it wasn’t a clap. It was thunder. Rolling. Out from between her hands in a ring. It went over the terrace and knocked Sera off her feet and me back a step and threw the water of Luna’s puddle up in a sheet, and it went on down the slopes, and across the canyon, and hit the far ridge where the lightning had hit, and the smoking rock there broke in half and slid.

Silence.

Then the echoes. Coming back off every mountain for miles.

”Sorry,” said Risa. From the air. Not sounding sorry in the slightest.

And went.

Not flew. Went. She was hanging in the air over the terrace, and then there was a line of white from where she’d been to the far ridge, and she was on the far ridge. Standing on the broken rock. In the same instant. With her hair standing straight up off her head and a smell of burnt air coming across the canyon.

She looked back at us. A mile away.

And came back the same way. A line of white. And she was standing beside me on the terrace with her hair still standing up, and every hair on my arms standing up with it.

”Oh,” said Risa. Very softly.

She looked at Luna. Soaked to the skin.

Luna looked at her.

And they both started laughing. And couldn’t stop.

You, said the old queen. To Sera.

Sera didn’t move.

She was on her knees still. Where the thunder had put her. On the warm stone. With her hands flat on it.

She looked up at the old queen.

”I didn’t stand in front,” she said. ”On the fire world. I stood behind it. With my hands on it. And I gave it everything I had and it went out anyway.” Her voice was very steady. ”You’ve got the wrong one. I can’t stop the black. Nothing I’ve got can stop the black.”

The old queen looked at her for a long time.

You stood behind it, she said. With your hands on it. While the black came up its back. A pause. Why?

Sera didn’t answer.

Because there was nothing else to do, said the old queen. And you did not stop. When it did not work. You did not stop. Her great old head came down. Very close to Sera’s. That is standing in front, child. That is all standing in front has ever been.

The queens sang.

And Sera caught fire.

Not her clothes. Not her hair. Her.

From the inside. All at once. The heat that was always in her, that she carried every day the way other people carry a coat, came up through her and out of her and was her. Her skin went orange, then white. Her hair went up like a torch. Her eyes went gold, then white, then something past white that I couldn’t look at.

She stood up.

And she wasn’t standing on the stone. The stone under her had gone soft. Running. Glowing red around her feet. And she lifted one foot, and then the other, and they didn’t come down again.

She was rising.

Not like Risa, on the storm. Not like me, asking the air. Light. As if she weighed nothing. As if she was the hot air over a fire, going up because that’s what it does. Up off the terrace. Into the morning. A woman made of flame, hanging in the sky over the mountain, with the air round her rippling so hard the whole valley behind her bent.

She looked down at her hands.

And then she looked at me.

And I felt what she was holding.

I can’t describe it properly. I’ve tried. Genny made me try three times, for the brood book.

It was heat. But not like any heat I’d ever felt. Not the forge. Not the fire world. It was heat folded in on itself. Packed. More and more of it in less and less space, in the cup of her two hands, a small white point no bigger than a cherry, so bright that the morning went dark round it, and every grain of the air I could feel between me and it was trying to get away.

It was the inside of a star at the moment it stops being a star.

She was holding it in her hands.

”Sera,” I said.

Very quietly. Very steadily. The way you say someone’s name when they’re holding something you don’t want them to drop.

She looked at me. With her white-gold eyes.

And very carefully, a little at a time, she let it go out.

Not threw it. Not dropped it. Let it go out. The way she let the heat out of a horseshoe. The point in her hands dimmed. Gold. Orange. Red. Nothing.

And Sera came down.

Slowly. As if she was a feather. Onto the stone that wasn’t stone any more, that was glass now, a great smooth puddle of it the width of the terrace, still glowing at the edges. And the flame went out of her, from the edges in, the way it went out of the coals in the forge at the end of the night, until she was standing on the glass in her clothes, which hadn’t burned, with her hair down her back, which hadn’t burned, looking at her hands.

”I could have,” she said.

Nobody said anything.

”I could have dropped it,” said Sera. ”And there wouldn’t have been a mountain.” She looked at the old queen. ”Why would you give anyone that?”

Because you let it go out, said the old queen.

And then the old queen put her head down.

All the way. On the warm stone, beside the glass. And shut her eyes.

And didn’t open them.

”No,” said Luna.

She was across the terrace before anyone else moved. On her knees beside the old queen’s head. With her hands on the dull old plates.

”No, no—”

She is sleeping, said our queen. From her ledge. Very faint. Only sleeping.

I looked at our queen.

Her head was down on the stone too. Her eyes were half shut. Her gold and silver had gone dim, the way the reed queen’s light had gone dim in Mother’s hands.

I looked down the slope. At the heavy queen, lying like a fallen hill. Her eyes were shut. At the Kethri queen, who had come down out of the air and was lying on a ledge with her great wings spread out flat over the rock, not moving. At the coral queen, sunk to the bottom of her pool. At the Drenn queen. At all of them.

All of them were lying down.

All of them had their eyes shut.

We gave, said our queen. Very faint. It is not taken back. It is not nothing. A pause. We must rest now. For some days. Do not ask us to sing. Another pause. Fainter. Do not ask us for the rope.

And she shut her eyes.

Every queen on Avalon slept for six days.

Okafor stood in the map room on the first evening with Garnet’s sheet under her hands and said, very quietly, ”No ropes.”

”No ropes,” I said.

”No crossings. No teams. No ships out. Not for six days.” She looked at the sheet. At the seven black circles with their white dots. At the green dot. At the place in the middle where Garnet had left room. ”Neve’s out. On the second black world. With the heavy young and the Harness.” She looked at me. ”She went out three days ago. Before. With the Drenn queen singing her down.” A pause. ”Who sings her home?”

Nobody answered.

We practised.

There was nothing else to do. On the plain, past the edge of the town, where there was nothing to break.

Luna made ice paths from the landing field to the north lakes and back before breakfast. Every morning. Faster every time. She came back soaked, and laughing, and on the fourth morning she came back dry, because she’d worked out how to let the armour go to frost instead of water, and it blew off her like snow.

Risa broke things. She said it was the only way to learn how much. She broke a dead tree, and a boulder the size of a house, and on the third day, by accident, the top off a hill that nobody had a name for, and the farmers in Carver sent a Kethri down the line with a note that said we heard that, and Risa wrote back sorry, and didn’t mean it.

Sera didn’t practise the star.

She practised the other thing. Going up. Light as hot air. She’d go up off the forge roof in the evening and hang over the town, a small figure of flame against the dark, and come down again so gently she didn’t disturb the ash in the forge. She said she’d hold the star once a day. For one second. Out on the plain. With nobody within a mile. To remember how small it was, so she’d never forget how much.

And I scattered.

Over and over. Out on the plain. Until I could go and come back without thinking. Until I could go and be in two places, a hand here and a hand there, and come back. Until I could close my eyes and feel the whole of the plain, every blade of grass, every grain of red glass, every bird, and reach out to any one of them without looking and change it.

On the fifth day I folded a stone a mile away. With my eyes shut. Without ever having seen it.

I didn’t need to look any more.

The children watched.

From the edge of the plain. Every day. Mother brought them down after lunch, all of them, on a blanket, with a basket, and sat with them and watched us break things. She said they might as well see what their parents could do before they found out the hard way.

It turned out they’d find out the easy way.

Trevor went first.

On the second afternoon. Luna had come back from the lakes on her path and let it shatter, and Trevor, who was sitting on the edge of the blanket with frost spreading round him the way it always did, stood up. And looked at the place where the path had been. And took a step forward.

His foot came down on ice.

A very small path. Very thin. A few feet long. Out across the grass. He took three steps on it, very seriously, with his arms out, and then it ran out and he sat down hard on the grass.

He looked up at Luna.

Luna looked at him for a long time.

Then she knelt down and held out her arms, and he got up and walked to her across the grass, and on every step a little more frost came up under his feet, and by the time he reached her he was walking on ice.

Ash caught fire on the third day.

Just her hands. At the forge. Sitting on her upturned bucket explaining something to the old brown dog. She was waving her hands while she explained it, the way she always did, and in the middle of a sentence they went orange. All the way round. A small clean flame, from wrist to fingertip.

She stopped explaining.

She looked at her hands. Then at the dog. Then at Sera, at the anvil.

”Mama,” she said. Very calmly. ”My hands are doing the thing.”

Sera put her tongs down.

She crouched in front of Ash, and held out her own hands, and let them go to flame too. And Ash put her burning hands in Sera’s burning hands, and they sat there in the forge, the two of them, holding hands, on fire. And Sera showed her how to let it go out.

The dog didn’t move. The dog had seen worse.

Small Sigmund made thunder in his sleep.

Very small thunder. In his cot. On the fourth night. It woke the whole house and set Kwame crying and knocked a cup off the windowsill, and Risa stood over the cot with her hair on end, looking down at her son, who was asleep with a very small cloud over him, smiling.

”That’s mine,” she said. To nobody. Very proud.

Kwame made a stone float.

On the fifth day. On the blanket. He was holding it, a smooth river stone from Sera’s barrow, turning it over in his small hands the way he turned everything over. And then he wasn’t holding it. It was hanging in the air in front of his face. Turning slowly.

He looked at it.

He didn’t look surprised. Kwame never looked surprised. He looked at it the way he looked at everything. Calmly. Considering.

Then he looked at me.

And I felt him do it. Not see. Feel. The way I felt things now. Every grain of the stone. Every number in it. Held. By a boy who wasn’t old enough to say more than a handful of words.

Efua, beside him, put out her hand flat and held the air still round it. So it wouldn’t fall.

Hana sat on the edge of the blanket with her hand over her mouth.

And Dory.

Dory didn’t do anything for five days.

She watched. On the blanket. With Pebble. With her chin on her knees. She watched Luna’s paths and Risa’s lightning and Sera going up over the forge roof and me going out like a breath and coming back. She watched Trevor and Ash and small Sigmund and Kwame and Efua. Every day. Very seriously.

On the sixth morning, she stood up.

And walked out onto the plain. To where I was standing. And looked up at me.

”Papa,” she said. ”Can I try?”

”Try what?”

”All of it,” said Dory.

I should have said no.

Mother, on the blanket, half stood up. Luna turned round on her ice path. Risa came down out of the air in a crackle.

I didn’t say no.

Because Dory had never once asked to try anything. She’d just done things. Held the house still the morning she was born. Held my arm open for a week. Held, and held, and held, and never asked if she could.

She was asking.

”Try,” I said.

She did it in order.

The way she did everything. Oldest to youngest. Me first.

She shut her eyes. And I felt her feel the plain. All of it. Every blade of grass. Every grain. Every bird. The way I did. Exactly the way I did. And she reached out, without looking, and a stone a mile off turned to glass.

Then she went out like a breath.

A shimmer in the air. Silver. Spread thin. And then back. Standing exactly where she’d been, with her eyes still shut. Like she’d blinked.

Then Luna’s. Armour. Clear ice, all over her small body, with her silver branching through it. A blade, very small, very sharp. A path, out across the grass and back.

Then Risa’s. Up off the ground on a storm. A bolt, into the dead tree Risa had already broken. A line of white, from where she was to the far end of the plain, and back.

Then Sera’s.

She caught fire. All of her. A small girl made of flame, rising off the plain, light as hot air.

And then she held out her hands.

And I felt it begin. The heat, folding in. Packing tight. The star.

”Dory,” said Sera.

Dory opened her eyes. In the air. Burning.

She looked at the small white point beginning in her hands. Very seriously. The way she looked at everything.

Then she let it go out.

On her own. Before anyone asked her twice. The way Sera had on the mountain. Gold, orange, red, nothing. And she came down, slowly, like a feather, and the flame went out of her from the edges in, and she landed on the grass in front of me in her nightgown with her hair down her back.

And then she did Hana’s. The air round all of us went to rain. And Mother’s. She held. The whole plain went still. Every blade of grass. Every bird in the air, hanging. Every one of us. For one breath.

And let go.

Nobody said anything.

Dory looked up at me. Very pale. Very tired. With her silver ring round her eyes brighter than I’d ever seen it.

”I didn’t do the star,” she said. ”I started it. I let it go out.”

”I know.”

”It was very small,” said Dory. ”And it wanted to be bigger.” She considered this. ”I didn’t let it.”

”I know,” I said.

Dory nodded.

”Good,” she said. ”Can I have breakfast now?”

I said it that night.

On the porch. Oldest to youngest. With Dory asleep in Mother’s lap before I got anywhere near her turn, and Ash asleep against Sera with her hands very carefully not on fire, and Trevor asleep on the blanket in a ring of frost, and small Sigmund asleep under a very small cloud.

With my left hand on the rail. With all five fingers lit.

When I’d finished, I went up on Father’s roof.

And shut my eyes.

And felt.

Not heard. Not listened. Felt. The way I felt the plain. Out. Along the threads. Past the worlds. To the second black world on Garnet’s sheet, where Neve Ashworth had gone down with the heavy young and the Harness nine days ago, singing down on the Drenn queen’s rope, before the queens lay down on the mountain.

I could feel the Harness. On the black. With her ramp down.

I could feel the heavy young. Deep. Very deep. In a long hole in the black. Pressing.

I could feel Neve. At the edge of the hole. Very tired. Very steady.

And I could feel, coming across the black toward her from the edge of the world, a long dark ring. Closing.

I opened my eyes.

On the mountain, very far, every queen on Avalon was still asleep.

Days 2761–2767. More.

I asked our queen how to be stronger; every queen on Avalon met on the old one’s mountain, and the old queen said only one thing has ever asked them, today. Now I feel where everything is without looking, and change anything I feel; my dark fingers lit; and I can scatter into atoms and come back. Sera hit me. Luna wears ice, grows blades, runs on paths of it across a canyon, and laughed. Risa flies, goes as lightning, throws bolts, claps thunder. Sera burns, rises light as hot air, and can hold a star in her hands; she let it go out. Then every queen lay down for six days: no ropes. The children have all of it; Dory has everything, and let the star go out on her own. Neve’s on the second black world. The correctors are closing. The queens are still asleep.