Scarecrow

Rain packed her own bag.

Nobody asked her to. Nobody had ever asked Rain to do anything for herself; for fifteen thousand children in the town under the garden wall, being asked was still new, and doing things without being asked was newer. But on the morning we were to go, Mother came down the hill to the small wooden house with the orange walls and the round window at the top, and Rain was sitting on the floor under the window with a bag.

A cloth one. From the bakery. Maura gives them to everyone.

In it, Mother said, very carefully folded: a blanket. A cup. One of Pip’s loaves, wrapped in paper. A drawing Garnet had made of the round window with rain running down it. And a small flat stone from the edge of the seventh lake, grey, with a white line round it.

”What’s the stone for?” said Mother.

Dot asked.

For my grandmother, said Rain. From here. So she knows it’s real.

Okafor wrote the slate at dawn.

Konrad Friese. Liaison.

Dane. The one who received.

Brock Haddon.

The Mom Squad.

Genevieve Dask. Medics. The rain queen’s tray.

Halloway. Who was, as Okafor had said, still furious about the floor, and came anyway.

Garnet Dask. Maps.

Teshka. Two hundred Vaeli, on Keir’s wings. Which meant Saska.

The Vey twins. Picket. Callum flying second seat behind his brother, because his left hand could close now but couldn’t yet hold a stick through a turn, and Risa said if he wasn’t on the slate he’d stow away in the Steady’s hold, and she’d rather know where he was.

And Rain.

And then, at the bottom, after a long pause, Okafor wrote:

Lucas Dask.

She looked up at me.

”You weren’t going to put me on it,” I said.

”No,” said Okafor. ”Not for the fighting. Teshka has the fighting.” She put the pencil down. ”But it’s a dry world, Dask. Grey forests. A queen who hasn’t been home in longer than the Accord. And you can feel the moon now.” She looked at me for a long time. ”I’d like to know what you can feel on a world that’s been waiting for rain.”

The Steady carried us. With the coral queen singing the rope, because she’d asked to. She said she knew what it was to wait for water.

Genny carried the tray.

She wouldn’t let anyone else. She sat in the Steady’s medical bay the whole crossing, cross-legged on the floor, with the rain queen’s tray in her lap and her hand flat on the bay floor beside it. Not touching. Waiting. And Rain beside her. Humming the thank-you song every hour, very quietly, so the rain queen knew she was still there.

Brock sat across from them with his back to the wall. Not reading. Just there.

Saska sat beside him. A heartbeat ahead of everything. Very still. Which she isn’t, ever, except beside Brock.

Mother didn’t let go of Rain’s hand.

That’s the thing I’ll remember. From the moment Rain came out of the small wooden house with her bag to the moment we came down on Ammaru, Mother didn’t let go. On the long road. Across the red glass. Up the Steady’s ramp. In the medical bay. All night, while Rain slept against the wall with her head on Mother’s shoulder.

”You’ll get a cramp,” said Maura.

”I’ve had worse,” said Mother.

”You’ve had everything worse,” said Ingrid. ”That’s not the point.”

”No,” said Mother. ”The point is she’s never been taken anywhere by someone who was going to bring her back.” She looked down at Rain, asleep. ”I’m going to bring her back. Or bring her home. Whichever she wants. And either way, I’m going to be holding her hand when she decides.”

Maura and Ingrid looked at each other.

Then Maura sat down on Rain’s other side. And Ingrid on Mother’s. And the Mom Squad spent the whole of the crossing on the floor of the Steady’s medical bay, very uncomfortably, not letting go of anything.

Ammaru was grey.

I’d thought I knew what that would look like. Garnet had drawn it from Ilka’s relay, and from the old maps Konrad had found in the Council’s tithe ledgers, and Rain had told Dot about it, a little, in the evenings. Grey forests. A dry sky.

I didn’t know.

We came out of the rope over a world of trees.

Trees everywhere. All the way to the edge of the sky. Tall, very tall, taller than anything on Avalon, with trunks like towers and branches like the roofs of halls. Forest. One forest. Covering the whole world.

And all of it grey.

Not dead. I could feel that. Even from the Steady, high up, I could feel it. Not dead. Waiting. Every tree holding itself very still, the way the queens held themselves under the black. The leaves were grey because there’d been no water to make them green for longer than anyone could remember, and the trees had stopped trying, and gone quiet, and held on.

The rivers were dry. I could see their beds from the Steady’s windows. Wide and pale and cracked, winding through the grey forest like old scars.

And under the forest. Under the dry rivers. Deep.

I felt it.

Water.

All of it. Every drop that had ever fallen on Ammaru. Not gone. Down. Very far down, under the roots, under the rock, in great dark lakes in the stone that the trees could just reach, if they stretched, if they held on.

That was how they’d lived. All this time. Reaching down.

The rain hadn’t gone anywhere.

It was waiting too.

”Lucas?” said Okafor. On the channel. From the map room on Avalon.

”It’s all here,” I said. ”The water. All of it. Under the ground. It went down when the queen was taken and it never came back up.”

”Can you bring it up?”

I thought about that for a long time.

”I could,” I said. ”I think. But it isn’t mine.” I looked down at the grey forest. ”It’s hers. She called it. Every evening. And it came.” I swallowed. ”If I bring it up, it’ll be water. If she does, it’ll be rain.”

Okafor didn’t say anything for a while.

”Then we’d better get her home,” she said.

The Sheln lived in the trees.

Rain’s people. That’s what they call themselves. Dot says it’s their word for the ones under the leaves. Not on the ground. Up. In the branches of the tallest trees, in houses built into the bark, with bridges between them, a hundred feet up, a thousand of them in every town, all the way through the grey forest.

Small. All of them. Like Rain. With long still hands and eyes the colour of wet leaves.

And very quiet.

That was what I noticed most, when the Steady came down. There was no sound in the forest. None. Not a bird. Not a voice. Not the wind, because there wasn’t any.

Just the Sheln. In the branches. Looking down at us.

And the tower.

Garnet had drawn it. From the relay. But a drawing isn’t the same.

It stood in the middle of the largest town, in a clearing where the trees had been cut down to make room for it. Sorn metal. Grey. Very tall. Taller than the trees. With nothing growing round it at all.

The counting tower, said Dot. Every tithe world has one.

It counts the children, said Konrad. Very quietly. He’d read the ledgers. All of them. Every birth. Every year. And sends the numbers up the thread. So the houses know how many to come down for.

”Is anyone in it?” said Okafor.

I felt for it.

”Yes,” I said. ”Eleven correctors. And something else. At the top. Like the voice. But smaller. Not a queen.” I swallowed. ”A made thing. That listens.”

”To what?”

”To everything,” I said. ”Every Sheln on Ammaru. It’s listening to all of them. All the time.”

It heard us.

Of course it did. It had heard the Steady come out of the rope. It had heard Rain humming. It had heard, I think, the rain queen in Genny’s lap, very faint, answering.

And it did what the houses had made it to do.

I felt it go.

Up the thread. A signal. Very fast. A single word in the houses’ language, that Dot heard and put into all of us before she could stop herself.

Unpaid.

And then a second thing. Not up the thread. Down. Into the forest. Out of the top of the counting tower, into the eleven correctors inside it.

Correct.

I’m going to write this the way Garnet would. Because I can’t write it any other way.

One.

The counting tower’s base. A door. Opening.

Eleven correctors coming out. With burned-dead silver at their throats.

Not toward us.

Toward the trees.

Two.

The nearest tree. The tallest in the town. With forty houses in its branches and bridges going out from it to every other tree in the clearing.

And the first corrector putting its hand on the trunk.

And the black going up.

I’ve thought since about why they went for the tree and not for us.

I know why. It’s the same reason they went for the children in the Cradle. The same reason they took the reef and not the platform. The houses don’t fight. Not if they can help it. They punish. They find the thing you came for and hurt it in front of you, so you’ll know, so everyone will know, what it costs to come.

They knew we’d come for the Sheln.

So they went for the Sheln.

Three.

The tree. Grey. Going black. From the root. Up. Very fast. The bark and the branches and the bridges.

And the houses in it.

And the Sheln in the houses.

I couldn’t stop it.

That’s the truth. I’ve written a great many things in these notebooks that are hard. This is the hardest.

I could feel the black going up the tree. Every atom. I could feel every Sheln in every house in its branches. Two hundred and four. And I reached for the corrector at the root with everything the queens gave me, the way I reached for the sixty in the Cradle, and found its burned-dead silver, and took it apart.

The black didn’t stop.

Because it wasn’t the corrector’s any more. It was in the tree. Taught. Going up. The way it went into the first row of children in the Cradle and became theirs.

And I couldn’t take it out of the tree without taking the tree apart.

And the Sheln were in the tree.

Ingrid moved first.

She went off the Steady’s ramp as lightning, the way she went down on the reef, and she didn’t go for the correctors. She went up. Up the tree. Faster than the black. A long blue line going up the grey trunk through the branches, past the houses, to the top.

And hushed it.

Not the note. There wasn’t a note. Something else. The black. She hushed the black. Ingrid stood at the top of the tallest tree in the town as lightning and made a silence so complete that for one heartbeat the black going up the trunk didn’t know where it was going.

One heartbeat.

That’s all she could give.

It was enough for Mother.

Four.

Mother. On the ground. At the foot of the tree. With both hands up.

Lifting.

Every house in the branches. All of them. At once. Off the tree. Into the air. Forty houses and the Sheln in them. Held in the air over the clearing by the strength of her mind, while the black went up the trunk underneath them and found nothing there.

She’d never lifted that much. Ingrid said. Not in the war. Not ever.

She held it for as long as it took the Vaeli to come down on Keir’s wings and carry every Sheln out of every house to the next tree.

Eleven minutes.

Saska and the Vaeli took the correctors.

I didn’t see most of it. I was at the foot of the black tree. With my hands on the trunk. Trying.

But I saw the end. Garnet drew it.

Five. The clearing. The counting tower. Ten correctors on the ground. And Saska standing over the last one with her training wraps torn and Brock behind her, iron to the shoulders, between her and the tower, the way he always stands, so nothing gets to her that she hasn’t seen a heartbeat ahead.

She didn’t need him to, Garnet wrote. She knew that. He knew that. He stood there anyway.

The tree died.

I’ll write that plainly. I couldn’t stop the black. It went up to the top where Ingrid had been and through every branch and every bridge, and when it was done the tallest tree in the town of the Sheln was black from root to crown, and there was nothing in it. Taught empty.

Forty houses hung in the air over the clearing and came down, very slowly, onto the dry forest floor, as Mother let them go.

One hundred and ninety-one Sheln came out of them.

Thirteen didn’t.

They’d been on the bridges. Between the trees. When the black came up. Mother couldn’t lift the bridges and the houses both. She tried. Maura said afterwards that she’d tried, and something in her had nearly broken, and Ingrid had come down off the top of the black tree as lightning and put both hands on her shoulders and said Dot, let go of the bridges, you can’t hold them, let go.

And she’d let go.

Mother sat down on the forest floor afterward and didn’t get up for a long time.

Rain sat beside her.

She’d been on the Steady’s ramp the whole time. With Genny. With the tray. Not running. Not crying. Just watching. With her bag in her arms.

She came down the ramp when it was over and walked across the clearing to where Mother was sitting, and sat down beside her, and took her hand.

Mother looked at her.

”I’m sorry,” she said. ”I’m so sorry, love. I couldn’t—”

Rain said something. In her language.

Dot didn’t translate it at first. Then she did.

You held them up.

The Sheln came down out of the trees.

Not quickly. Very slowly. Down the bark on ropes and ladders, onto the dry forest floor, into the clearing round the black tree. Hundreds. Then thousands. From every tree in the town. From the towns beyond it. Very quiet. With their long still hands.

They looked at the black tree.

They looked at the counting tower, with ten correctors on the ground in front of it and the Vaeli round it and Brock in front of the door.

They looked at us.

And then one of them came forward.

Old. Very old. Bent, the way the old ones on Avalon are bent until they’ve been there a year. With white in her long dark hair and her hands folded and her eyes the colour of wet leaves.

She stopped in front of Mother. And Rain.

And looked at Rain for a very long time.

Then she said a word.

Not Rain. A different one. A name. The one Rain had been given, before. Before the tithe. Before seven-three-K. Before the white room and the window and the rain on the glass.

Rain stood up.

She let go of Mother’s hand. For the first time since the small wooden house.

And walked to her grandmother.

I’m not going to write what happened next. Not all of it. It belongs to them.

I’ll write that Oya, Rain’s grandmother, knelt on the dry forest floor with her granddaughter in her arms and didn’t say anything for a long time. And that Rain took the stone out of her bag, the small grey one with the white line round it from the edge of the seventh lake, and put it in her grandmother’s hand.

So you know it’s real, she said.

And Oya held it.

And then three more came out of the crowd.

Small. Smaller than Rain. Running. The way children run when they’ve been told all their lives not to and have forgotten, for one moment, everything they’ve been told.

Rain’s sisters.

Dot gave us their names afterward, in our language. The way she’d given us Rain’s. Dew, the oldest of the three. Brook, the middle one. And the smallest, who couldn’t have been more than four, who’d been born after Rain was taken and had never met her and ran at her anyway, as hard as she could, because her sisters were running.

Puddle.

”Puddle,” said Ingrid. Later. On the Steady’s ramp. With her arm round Mother.

”Dot says it’s a very good name on Ammaru,” said Maura. ”She says a puddle is the best thing there is. It means it rained.”

”It hasn’t rained in four generations.”

”No,” said Maura. ”But they keep naming children for it. So it knows they’re still waiting.”

The grandmother told us.

That evening. In the clearing. Under the grey trees. With the whole town on the forest floor round her, because nobody wanted to go back up into the branches with the black tree standing over them. Through Dot.

That the rain queen had lived on the high hill at the centre of the world, a very long time ago, before her grandmother’s grandmother. That every evening the Sheln had sung to her, and she’d sung to the sky, and the rain had come. Every evening. Soft and warm. Falling on everything at once.

That one day the ones from the thread had come down and taken her.

That the rain had stopped the next evening. And had never come back.

That the counting tower had been built the year after. And the first tithe taken the year after that.

We sing anyway, said Oya. Every evening. So the rain knows we’re still waiting. Our grandmothers told us: one day, someone will bring it back.

She looked at Rain. Asleep now, in her arms, with Puddle asleep on top of her and Dew and Brook asleep on either side.

We didn’t think it would be her.

Genny brought the tray down at dusk.

Off the Steady. Across the clearing. Very slowly. In both arms. With Halloway on one side and Brock on the other and Rain, awake again, walking in front.

The Sheln stood up.

All of them. All at once. Thousands. On the dry forest floor.

They didn’t know what was in the tray. Not yet. Nobody had told them. Rain had wanted to wait until dusk. That’s when we sing, she’d said. That’s when she’ll know it’s us.

Genny knelt down in the middle of the clearing. And put the tray on the ground. And took her hands away.

The rain queen lay in her pieces. Broken. Green at the edges, a little more than when we’d left Avalon. Not whole. Not for a long time yet.

But home.

Rain sang first.

Alone. In the middle of the clearing. With her long still hand flat on the ground beside the tray.

The thank-you song. Very low. Very soft. Like water running off a roof.

And the rain queen sang it back.

Out loud. Everyone in the clearing heard it. Every Sheln. Thousands of them. Who’d sung that song every evening of their lives to a sky that never answered.

And something answered.

Oya sang next.

Then Dew and Brook and Puddle, who were too young to know why.

Then everyone.

I’ve heard a great many songs since I came to Avalon. The queens singing along the silver. The Hathri singing to the ground. The Lir children shouting run to each other on the boats. Fifteen thousand children on the red glass, unsung, learning to hum.

I’ve never heard anything like the Sheln singing the thank-you song to their queen, in a clearing in a grey forest, with a black tree standing over them, at dusk.

I felt it go out.

From the clearing. Through the forest. Every Sheln in every tree in every town on Ammaru heard it and sang too. All at once. The whole world. Like a breath going out.

And down.

Into the ground. Into the roots. Into the rock.

To the dark lakes under the forest.

I felt the water hear it.

I can’t write that better than that. I’ve tried. I’ve sat with this page for a long time.

I felt the water hear it. Every drop that had ever fallen on Ammaru, waiting for four generations in the dark under the stone. And it knew the song. It had always known it. It had been falling to that song for longer than the Sheln could remember.

And it started to come up.

Not because I asked it. I didn’t ask it. I didn’t touch it. I just felt it. Coming up through the rock. Through the roots. Up the trunks of every grey tree on Ammaru, all at once, the way water goes up a tree, into the leaves.

Into the air.

It got very dark.

Not night. Clouds. Coming together over the clearing, over the forest, over the whole of the world. Out of nothing. Out of the trees breathing out.

The Sheln stopped singing.

All of them. At once. Looking up.

The rain queen didn’t stop.

She sang on her own. In her tray. In pieces. Very small. Very tired. Louder than she’d ever sung anything.

And the first drop fell.

On Rain.

On her face. Turned up. With her eyes closed.

And then on Oya. And Puddle. And Mother, standing at the edge of the clearing with her hand over her mouth. And Genny on her knees by the tray, with volume fourteen inside her coat. And Brock, with his hands flat on the cover through the cloth. And Saska beside him, who didn’t see it coming, Garnet said, not a heartbeat ahead, not at all, because she’d never seen rain before and didn’t know what it was going to be.

And then on everything.

Soft. Steady. Warm.

Falling on everything at once.

It rained all night.

Nobody went inside. There wasn’t an inside, not on the forest floor, and nobody wanted one. The Sheln stood in the clearing with their faces turned up and their hands open and let it rain on them. The old ones cried. The children laughed. Puddle found a puddle, the first one she’d ever seen, in the dry riverbed at the edge of the clearing, and sat down in it, and refused to get out.

Callum sat on the Steady’s ramp with his brother and let the rain fall on his left hand. Opening it. Closing it. Opening it again.

Konrad stood very still in the middle of the clearing in his coat, which Nan Vey had ironed, and which was ruined, and didn’t care.

And Dane, at the foot of the Steady’s ramp, said to nobody in particular: ”I received it.”

I asked him later what he meant.

”The rain,” he said. ”I was standing under it. And I didn’t do anything to deserve it. And I was glad.” He looked at his hands. ”It’s the first thing I’ve ever received that I’m not sorry for.”

In the morning, the leaves were green.

Not all of them. Not yet. But the ones at the very tops of the trees, where the rain had fallen first. Green. A green I’d never seen. Garnet said she didn’t have a pencil for it.

The rivers were running.

Not full. A little. Down the middle of the cracked pale beds, winding through the forest. But running.

And the rain queen in her tray, in the middle of the clearing, with the water pooled round her, was green to the middle of every piece.

Genny wrote it down. Kneeling in the wet. With Father’s pen. Which works in the rain, because Father made it, and I made it again.

Rain queen. Home. Ammaru. Green to the middle. Halloway says faster than the ash queen by a year.

And under it:

She doesn’t want to come back to the long ward. I asked. She said no.

And under that, smaller:

I’ll miss her.

Okafor came through on the channel at noon.

”The counting tower,” she said.

”It’s still there,” I said. ”The made thing at the top. It’s still listening.”

”Has it sent anything else?”

”No. Just the two words. Unpaid. Correct.” I looked at the tower, standing very tall and grey over the clearing in the rain, with nothing growing round it. ”It’ll send more. When they answer.”

”They’ll answer,” said Okafor. ”They’ll come down for twice as many children as they’ve ever taken. And when they don’t find a signer, or a pen, or a single child in a line, they’ll do to every tree on Ammaru what they did to the one in the clearing.” She was quiet for a while. ”Unless someone’s there.”

”Teshka,” I said.

”Teshka’s asked,” said Okafor. ”Two hundred Vaeli. To stay. Until the queen’s whole. Until the Sheln decide what they want.” A pause. ”She says her people have stood guard over other people’s children for eleven generations because they were told to. She says she’d like to find out what it feels like to do it because she’s chosen to.”

”And the tower?”

Okafor didn’t answer for a long time.

”That’s not mine to decide,” she said. ”Ask the grandmother.”

So I asked Oya.

In the rain. In the clearing. With Rain beside her, and Puddle on her hip, wet through and refusing to be dry.

What does the tower do, said Oya, if you take it apart?

”It stops listening,” I said. ”The houses won’t hear Ammaru any more. They won’t know how many children. They won’t know anything.”

And then?

”And then they’ll come anyway. Sooner. Angrier. Because they can’t hear.”

Oya looked at the tower for a long time.

It has listened to us for four generations, she said. Every birth. Every death. Every child it counted and sent up the thread. She put her hand on Rain’s head. It listened to this one being born. And then it counted her.

She looked at me.

Take it apart, she said. Let them come angry. We’ve been quiet long enough.

So I took it apart.

Not all at once. Not the way I took the sixty correctors in the Cradle. Slowly. Asking. Every atom of it. From the top, where the made thing was, down.

The made thing didn’t want to go. It wasn’t alive. Not the way the voice is alive. But it was made to listen, and it had listened to Ammaru for four generations, and it didn’t want to stop.

I asked it anyway.

And it stopped.

And the tower came down. Not falling. Going soft. The Sorn metal folding in on itself like a tent with the poles taken out, down and down, until there was a heap of grey on the forest floor in the middle of the clearing.

The Sheln looked at it.

Then Puddle got down off her grandmother’s hip, and walked across the clearing in the rain to the heap of grey, and stood on top of it.

And jumped up and down.

And everyone laughed. All of them. All at once. The first time, Oya said, that anyone in that clearing had laughed out loud in her whole life.

We left on the fourth day.

Not all of us. Teshka stayed, with two hundred Vaeli. Halloway stayed, for a month, she said, for the queen; and to look at the Sheln, all of them, because she’d never seen a people who’d lived four generations on water from under the ground and she wanted to know what it had done to them. Genny stayed too. For the first week. She said someone had to write down the queen getting better, every day, and Halloway’s handwriting was terrible.

Brock stayed with Genny.

Saska stayed with Brock.

”Of course,” said Garnet. Drawing it.

And Rain.

On the fourth morning, Mother went to find her.

In the rain. Which hadn’t stopped. Which wasn’t going to, Oya said; not in the evenings, not ever again. Under the tree where Oya’s house was, which was green now three-quarters of the way down.

Rain was sitting on a root. With her sisters. With her bag.

She stood up when she saw Mother.

Mother knelt down in front of her. In the wet. And held out her hand.

”Whichever you want, love,” she said. ”I said I’d be holding your hand when you decided. I’m holding it.”

Rain took it.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. She looked at her sisters. At Oya, in the doorway of the house in the tree, very still. At the rain falling on everything.

Then she said something in her language.

Dot translated it. Very gently.

I want to stay here. With my grandmother. Where it rains.

A pause.

But I want to come and see the round window. Sometimes. With Dew and Brook and Puddle. So they can see where I was. And Tally and Moon. And you.

Mother didn’t say anything for a while.

Then she said, ”Yes. Whenever you like. The window will be there.” She held Rain’s hand very tightly. ”So will I.”

She gave Mother the bag.

The cloth one, from the bakery. Empty now, except for one thing.

Garnet’s drawing. Of the round window with rain running down it.

For Tally, said Rain. So she knows I found it.

I said it on the Steady. That night. Going home.

To everyone on board. In order. Konrad and Dane. Callum and Rowan. Garnet. Ingrid and Maura.

And Mother. Last. Sitting on the floor of the medical bay where Rain had slept, with the empty cloth bag in her lap, and her hand open on her knee, as if she was still holding something.

I sat down beside her.

And said it.

And then I took her hand. The open one.

”I couldn’t hold the bridges,” she said. Very quietly.

”I know.”

”Thirteen.”

”I know. I couldn’t stop the black.”

Mother looked at me.

”You took the tower apart,” she said. ”And Puddle jumped on it.” She held my hand. ”And it’s raining on Ammaru.” She closed her eyes. ”Both. Okafor says. Write both down.”

”I will.”

”Twice,” said Mother.

Mother gave Tally the drawing the next morning.

In the town under the garden wall. In the small wooden house with the orange walls, which was empty now, with the round window at the top and the morning light coming through it and no rain on the glass.

Tally was on the floor under the window. With Moon. Waiting. She’d been waiting since the Steady came out of the rope over the red glass at midnight; Wren said she hadn’t slept.

Mother knelt down and gave it to her.

Tally looked at it for a long time. The round window. The rain running down. Garnet’s lines, very fine.

Then she turned it over.

On the back, in small square marks that weren’t Tally’s, that none of us had seen Rain make, very careful, very new, was one word. In our letters. The way Tally had written it on the first page of the notebook on seven-three-K, under First child. Put out her hand.

Rain.

And under it, smaller, a second word. Spelled wrong. The way you spell a word you’ve only ever heard said on a porch at night, by someone going down a rail in order.

Love.

Tally didn’t say anything.

She got up. And went to the wall under the round window. And took a nail out of her pocket, because Tally always has a nail in her pocket, and pinned the drawing there. Where the rain used to run down the glass.

Moon stood beside her and looked at it.

”Window,” said Moon. Pointing.

”Both,” said Tally.

Days 3851–3866. The Thank-You Song.

Rain packed her own bag, with a stone from the seventh lake for her grandmother. Mother held her hand from the orange house to Ammaru. A grey forest over the whole world, waiting; the water all still there, deep under the roots. The counting tower heard us and said two words, unpaid and correct, and the correctors went for the tallest tree. I couldn’t stop the black. Ingrid hushed it for one heartbeat; Mother lifted forty houses off the tree and held them eleven minutes; she couldn’t hold the bridges too: thirteen. Oya knew Rain’s old name. Dew, Brook, Puddle. At dusk Genny put the tray down and the Sheln sang the thank-you song and the water heard it and it rained, all night, on everything. The queen stays home. Oya: take the tower apart; Puddle jumped on it. Teshka and two hundred Vaeli stay by choice. Rain stays where it rains, and will come to see the window.