Scarecrow

Hearth broke the hour.

Not the pulse. They’ve never broken the pulse. Three, a pause, one, every day, at the hour, since before Dory. Dot sends it from behind her soft door, and something on the other side of the silver sends it with her, and that’s all. A hand on a wall in the dark, so the other side knows it’s still there.

They broke the hour.

They called in the middle of the night.

Dot woke me.

She doesn’t, usually. She knows better. She has a rule about the porch shutter: she knocks once, and if I don’t come, she waits until morning. She’s had that rule since the first year in Scarecrow.

She knocked four times.

I came down the stairs in the dark and opened the kitchen door and she was on the porch with her rivers going so fast I couldn’t follow them. Not blue and gold. Not the colour she uses for Hearth. Something I’d never seen. White at the edges.

”Query,” she said. ”Does the operator—” She stopped. ”No. No query. Come.”

The relay was in the courtyard.

Dot keeps it behind her soft door, mostly. The little piece of silver on its cradle that holds the link without anyone’s hand on it. The one Enna built, from the thing I showed them on the eighth day, so Dinraal could stop holding it with his wrists.

She’d brought it out. It was on the courtyard stone. With the door open.

And it was full.

Not one line at a time. Not a picture building slowly from the top, the way they’ve always come, a square, a tower, a face, a room. The relay was pouring. Lines on top of lines. Shapes I couldn’t make out. Words in the old dictionary going past so fast they blurred.

”Asha,” said Dot. ”Talking too fast for the translator. She always does. But not like this.” Her rivers went very still for a moment. ”She is frightened.”

”What is she saying?”

”All of it at once,” said Dot. ”I am trying to slow it.”

Mother came down. In her dressing gown, with the dark blue ribbon. Andraste came down off the roof with Vessa on her chest, awake, facing the relay. Okafor came through the courtyard arch from the map room in her coat over her nightclothes, because Dot had sent for her too. And Garnet, with her board, because if anything ever comes through the relay Garnet draws it, and she’d heard Dot knock four times from the other side of the house.

And Corin. On his hands and knees. Down the stairs from the children’s room on his own. The way he did the morning Hearth came back. Across the courtyard. To the relay. And sat down beside it, very close.

Nobody moved him.

”Slower,” said Dot. Into the relay. In the old dictionary. ”Slower, Asha. One line. One word. We are here.”

The relay went quiet.

For a long time.

Then, one line at a time, the way it always used to come, a picture began.

Garnet drew it as it came.

I’ll write what it was. In order. The way Garnet drew it.

A ship.

Not one of ours. Not a Hand. Long and narrow and dark, with a shape at the front Garnet said looked like a hand closing. Hearth’s, I thought. Though they’d never shown us one before.

Under it, in the old dictionary, very slowly: Distress call. Eleven days ago. A world at our edge. Dinraal went.

Then a sky.

Full of fire.

Not Hand-light. Not the white sheets that came down on Imber. Something else. Something burning in long dark streaks across a red sky. And under it, on the ground, shapes. Tall. Thin. Garnet drew them as they came and then stopped, with her pen in the air, because the lines were coming very fast again and she couldn’t keep up.

”Ashen,” said Dot.

”What?”

”That is the word. Asha keeps sending it. The old dictionary does not have it. Isolde has added it.” A pause. ”Ashen. Isolde says: the ones Dinraal has fought all his life. His father’s war. His father’s father’s.” Another pause. ”Isolde says: Dinraal’s enemy. The oldest one.”

Garnet’s pen came down again.

She drew the Ashen.

Not well. She said so, after. She said the lines didn’t come through properly, they kept breaking, as if whoever was drawing them at the other end was shaking. She drew them tall and thin and dark against the fire, and she drew them in rows, and she drew them fighting.

And then she drew what they were fighting.

Nobody in the courtyard said anything.

I knew it before she’d finished.

Everyone did. Andraste did, with Vessa on her chest. Okafor did. Mother did. She’d been on that grey plain. She’d had a claw in her chest, stopped on Odra’s iron, under the coat she’d had since before I was born.

Bone-coloured. Six legs. Wings, long and thin and veined like glass. A head that was mostly mouth. A mouth that opened four ways.

Garnet drew it twice.

Then she put the pen down.

Her hand was shaking.

The relay kept coming.

Slower now. Asha had slowed herself. One line at a time.

They came out of the sky. Thousands. In pods.

The Ashen fought them. All day. All night. Three days.

Dinraal did not help the Ashen. Dinraal did not help the insects. Dinraal watched.

A long pause.

The insects ate the dead.

Theirs. The Ashen. Both.

They ate their own dead and the Ashen’s dead. While the fighting went on. Behind the line. Not stopping. Not looking. Eating.

Then more came out of the place where they had eaten.

Andraste made a sound.

Very low. In Hyrrani. I don’t know what it was. Vessa, on her chest, had turned her face to the relay and was very still.

The Ashen lost, said the relay. On the fourth day.

Dinraal brought the ship home.

Dinraal has not slept.

Dinraal says: we have fought the Ashen for longer than anyone remembers. Dinraal’s father fought them. Bahamut. Dinraal says the Ashen do not lose.

A long pause.

Dinraal says: they lost.

Then a new picture. One line at a time.

A room. The laboratory. The long table. The window over the field. And at the table, standing, with both hands flat on the wood the way Okafor stands at the head of the long table, a man.

Dinraal.

Garnet drew him very carefully. Very slowly. The tired eyes. The careful mouth. The way he held his head.

He didn’t look tired now.

He looked like Okafor, the morning after Orrin.

And under the picture, very slowly, in the old dictionary:

Dinraal says: Lucas, have you seen these?

I looked at Okafor.

Okafor looked at the picture for a long time.

”Tell him,” she said.

So I told him.

All of it. Through Dot. One line at a time, the way it always has to be. It took most of the night.

I told him about Kyria’s arch. The one Vessa came back from alone, three hundred years ago, and said it was hungry, and sealed. About the grey plain on the other side of it, scraped to the rock. The correctors with teeth marks in them. The Sorn iron eaten through with acid. The valley, and the heap, and the light going up.

I told him about more.

I told him I’d said hello into it. And nothing came back.

I told him about the black on their backs, doing nothing. The houses’ one weapon. Not working.

I told him about the towers on the far side of the ring going out, one at a time, from the edge in. About the breathing past the ring that Ilka hears every day. About the queens. About a whole world’s silver gone into the heap, so there was nothing left to find.

I told him what the Scarecrow queen said. The houses made us sing. These make us nothing.

I told him about Merrow. The pens. The black heat-things in the ground. The houses calling us and the Hungry to the same place, to see which of us was left. Thirty Hands, made heavy, dropped into the swarm, and the swarm eating them.

I told him what the Overseer said. A ledger that is losing does not care who it loses to.

And I told him what we called them.

The Hungry.

Vessa’s word. The only one anyone ever brought back.

The relay was quiet for a long time when I’d finished.

Dot said it was the longest it’s ever been quiet. Longer than the ninth night, when it stopped in the middle of a word.

Then, very slowly, one line at a time:

Dinraal says: we have never seen them before.

Dinraal says: the Ashen had. They knew what they were fighting. They were not surprised.

Dinraal says: the Ashen were frightened.

A pause.

Dinraal says: I have never seen the Ashen frightened.

Okafor took a slate out of her coat.

She always has one. She wrote on it. Very small. In the light from the relay.

Then she showed it to me.

Two fronts.

”The houses,” she said. Very quietly. ”Losing. On the far side of the ring.” She tapped the slate. ”And the Ashen. Losing. On the far side of wherever Hearth is.” She looked at the relay. ”The same thing. Eating both.”

”Then it’s bigger than we thought,” said Andraste.

”Everything’s bigger than we thought,” said Okafor. ”Every time. That’s the only thing I’ve learned in twenty years.” She put the slate away. ”If it’s eating the houses on one side, and the Ashen on another, and Hearth’s between them—”

She stopped.

”Then Hearth’s next,” said Mother. From the edge of the courtyard. Very calm. ”Or we are.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Okafor knelt down on the courtyard stone.

In front of the relay. The way she knelt the morning Hearth came back. Beside Corin, who was sitting very close to it, very still, with his hand out. Not touching. Near.

”Dot,” said Okafor. ”Tell them this.”

”Ready.”

”Tell them,” said Okafor, ”that we’ve been talking for nine days and then for a year through a piece of silver smaller than a fingernail. One line at a time. With clocks that don’t agree.” She put her hand flat on the stone beside the relay. ”Tell them it’s not enough any more.”

Dot sent it.

The relay was quiet.

Then:

Dinraal says: no.

Dinraal says: it is not.

A long pause.

Dinraal says: Lucas once asked me if my father knew the silver was never only ours. I said I did not think I would ever know.

Dinraal says: I would like to stand in the same room as the person who asked.

Okafor looked at me.

”A meeting,” she said.

”Yes.”

”Not through this.” She touched the relay, very lightly. ”In a room. Face to face.” She looked at the picture of Dinraal on Garnet’s board. ”With the clocks agreeing.”

”We don’t know where they are,” I said. ”We never have. Asha stripped the coordinates. Every picture. Every time.” I looked at the relay. ”We don’t know how far. We don’t know which way. We don’t know if far means anything, between us.”

”Then we don’t go to them,” said Okafor.

She stood up. And turned round.

”Kyria,” she said.

Kyria was at the edge of the courtyard.

I don’t know when she’d come. She hadn’t been there when the relay started. She was there now, in her mended iron, with her first blade across her back, standing beside Mother with her arms folded.

”An arch,” she said. Before Okafor could ask. ”To somewhere nobody knows the way to.”

”Yes.”

Kyria didn’t say anything for a long time.

”A First Blade cuts where she stands,” she said. ”We have always cut where we stand. Our feet on the stone. Our cutters round us.” She looked at the relay. ”And the far end opens because someone stands there. Someone who belongs to the place.”

”Dinraal belongs to it.”

”Yes,” said Kyria. ”And he can stand. But he cannot cut. He has no cutters. He is not a First Blade.” She looked at Andraste. ”And no First Blade can stand on a world she cannot reach.”

”Then it can’t be done,” said Okafor.

Kyria didn’t answer.

She was looking at Corin.

He was still sitting by the relay. Very close. With his hand out. Not touching. The way he did the morning Hearth came back, when he came down the stairs on his hands and knees at seven weeks old and put his hand near it and it answered him. Three. A pause. One. Not because he asked. Because he was there. Because he has the same silver I do, and the same silver Dinraal does.

He was looking at the relay with Father’s eyes. Working out how it was made.

And beside him, very quietly, without anyone seeing her come down the stairs, Thessaly.

Holding his other hand.

”They made a door,” said Kyria. Very low. To Okafor. To everyone. ”On the ridge. The night they were born. Before they had names.” She looked at the two of them. ”The first thing they ever did with their father’s gift. Together. He asked the stone. She gave him what he asked for. And the stone grew a door. Home.”

Andraste had gone very still.

”He asks,” said Kyria. ”Everything. Everyone. All the time. Things nobody understands.” She unfolded her arms. ”And the relay answers him. Because it’s the same silver. His and Dinraal’s.”

She looked at Okafor.

”My cutters cut this end,” she said. ”Here. In the courtyard. Where I stand.” She put her hand on her first blade. ”Dinraal stands at the other end. Where he belongs.” She looked at Corin. ”And the boy asks the stone on Hearth for a door. Through the relay. Through the same silver.”

”And Thessaly gives it to him,” said Andraste. Very quietly.

”And Thessaly gives it to him,” said Kyria.

Mother crossed the courtyard.

Slowly. In her dressing gown. To where Corin and Thessaly were sitting by the relay. And knelt down behind them. And put one hand on each of their backs.

The way she sits behind Dory on the long ward. Holding her while she holds.

”Love,” she said. To Corin. Very quietly. ”Can you ask it?”

Corin didn’t look round.

He was looking at the relay.

Then he looked up. At the picture on Garnet’s board. At Dinraal at the long table with his hands flat on the wood.

And he asked.

I felt it go.

Not out. Not up the thread. Through. Into the little piece of silver on its cradle, the one Enna built, the one that holds itself without anyone’s hand on it. Down it. Along it. The same way the pulse goes at the hour. The same way Hearth’s pictures come, one line at a time.

A question. Very small. Bright. From a boy who’s never been able to tell anyone what he wants.

And at the other end, very far, in a room I’d never see, with a window over a field, something heard it.

Asha says, said the relay. Very fast. Asha says something in the silver just asked the floor.

Asha says: the floor is listening.

”Now,” said Kyria.

Her cutters were already there.

Twelve of them. Through the courtyard arch from the guest wing, in the dark, with their tools. They must have been waiting. Kyria must have sent for them the moment she came into the courtyard, before Okafor said anything. Before anyone did.

They came in a ring round Kyria where she stood. In the middle of the courtyard. Beside the relay. Beside Mother and Corin and Thessaly. With her feet planted on the stone.

And began to cut.

I’ve watched them cut arches on the ring and on Ammaru and on Imber and on Orrin. On a hill and in a square and in a cave. Never in the courtyard of my own house. Never in the middle of the night. Never toward somewhere nobody knew the way to.

The stone came up.

The courtyard stone. Red-grey. Avalon’s. Out of the ground in front of Kyria’s feet. And they worked it. Fast. Faster than I’d ever seen. And it rose, and became an arch, with the water pattern in it.

And stood there. Closed. Its far end nowhere.

Waiting.

Dinraal is standing, said the relay. In the laboratory. By the window. Where the floor is listening.

Isolde says: he has his hands on it.

Thessaly gave Corin what he asked for.

I felt that go too. Small. Quiet. The way it always goes, between them. From her to him. Like a picture passed under a table. The thing he needs to finish the question.

And Corin asked the floor on Hearth for a door.

Andraste says it took eleven minutes.

She was counting. On Hyrran they count arches the way Halloway counts births. She stood at the edge of the courtyard with Vessa on her chest and counted, and Vessa watched the relay the whole time, facing it, very still.

Eleven minutes.

The same as between Corin and Thessaly. On the ridge. The night they were born.

Asha says the floor is growing, said the relay.

Asha says it is stone. Our stone. Coming up. In front of Dinraal’s feet.

Asha says it has a pattern in it.

Isolde says: water.

And the arch in the courtyard opened.

Not onto the ridge. Not onto the red glass or the long ward or the map room.

Onto a room.

A long table. A window. Through the window, dark, and the faint shape of a field under stars that weren’t ours. Lamps on the walls. People. A great many of them. Standing very still on the other side of the arch, looking through it.

Asha, at the front, with her hands over her mouth. Eve beside her, with one finger raised, as if about to say stop, and not saying it. Enna with her arms folded. Aramaeis by the window, Dinraal’s uncle, with his sister’s straight back and his arms folded, leaning forward.

Isolde. With a notebook. Thicker than the one I remembered.

And in the middle, standing where the arch had grown, in front of a new arch of grey stone on the laboratory floor with the water pattern in it, with his hands still flat on it, Dinraal.

And at his feet, filling precisely the part of the doorway where anyone would have needed to stand, the First Weapon. A corgi. Small, and solid, and very serious, in a little collar of silver with a crown on it. With his head lifted. Looking at me.

Nobody moved.

Not on our side. Not on theirs. Two rooms, on two worlds nobody knew the way between, with an arch between them, and everyone in both standing very still.

The clocks agreed.

I could feel it. Through the arch. Through the silver. Whatever had been wrong, whatever Asha had always said, whatever had stopped the link in the middle of a word on the ninth night. Through the arch, it was the same hour on both sides.

Dinraal took his hands off the stone.

He looked at me for a long time. Through the arch. Not a picture. Not one line at a time. His face. The tired eyes. The careful mouth.

Then he looked down. At Corin. Sitting by the relay with Thessaly’s hand in his and Mother’s hands on both their backs.

And Dinraal knelt.

On his side of the arch. On the laboratory floor. So his face was level with my son’s.

He said something.

I didn’t understand it. Not his language. Dot was very quiet. She didn’t translate it. I don’t think she needed to.

Corin did.

He looked at Dinraal through the arch for a long time. Carefully. With Father’s eyes.

And then he did something he’s never done. Not once. Not to me, not to Andraste, not to Mother, not to Thessaly.

He didn’t ask for anything.

He said hello.

Nobody went through that night.

Okafor said so. Very quietly. Standing at the edge of the courtyard in her coat over her nightclothes, with the arch open in front of her onto a room on a world nobody knew the way to.

”Not like this,” she said. ”Not in the dark. Not in our nightclothes. Not with half of us asleep.” She looked through the arch at Dinraal, still kneeling. ”In the morning. At the long table. Properly.”

Dot sent it.

Dinraal stood up. And looked at Okafor through the arch for a long time.

Then he nodded. Once. The way Okafor nods.

Dinraal says: in the morning, said the relay. Isolde says: she is right. Isolde says: Lucas should rest.

Andraste laughed. Very quietly. Like a door falling off its hinges.

”Even from there,” she said. ”Even now.”

Hesk stood at the arch all night.

Nobody asked her. She came through the courtyard arch from the guest wing with her hammer an hour after it opened, and looked at the new arch, and looked at the keystone, and went away. And came back with Odra’s packing, the thing from under the mountain that Kyria still won’t name. And cut two holes either side of the keystone. And packed them.

Then she set her hammer down on the courtyard stone.

And Dory, who’d woken when Corin went down the stairs and had been sitting at the top of them the whole time, came down with a cup of tea.

Hesk didn’t drink it.

She put it on the stone by her foot.

On the other side of the arch, very late, when most of the people in the laboratory had gone to sleep, a young woman from Hearth came and stood on her side, and looked at Hesk for a long time. And then at the cup of tea.

Then she went away. And came back. With a cup of something of her own.

And put it on the laboratory floor by her own foot. On her side. Exactly opposite.

Hesk looked at it.

She didn’t say anything. She doesn’t speak a word of anything but Hyrrani.

But in the morning, both cups were still there. Cold. Untouched. One on each side of the arch.

The long table met at dawn.

Everyone. Forty-one worlds through every arch. Hyrran. The four lost ones. Ammaru. Imber and Orrin and Thera, at the end, with Ysolt and Tamsa. Crane at the table with his spanner. The Overseer in the doorway with the dog. Voss with her pen.

And at the head of it, beside Okafor, an empty chair.

Dinraal came through at the hour.

Not into the courtyard. Okafor had asked Kyria, and Kyria had asked Corin, and Corin had asked the arch, and the arch in the courtyard had shown the laboratory on one side and, on its other face, very slowly, the map room. So you could step from Hearth’s floor straight to the long table.

Kyria said she’d never seen an arch do that. She said First Blades had been cutting arches for a thousand years and no arch had ever had two faces.

Corin said nothing. He was asleep on Andraste’s lap at the end of the table. Thessaly was asleep on his.

Dinraal stepped through.

With the bracelets on his wrists. Silver. The father’s silver. Bahamut’s. That had collapsed if he stopped holding it, until I showed him on the eighth day where the leash was.

And the First Weapon behind him. Who came through the arch with his head low and his short legs very deliberate, and stopped in the doorway of the map room beside the Overseer, and filled precisely the part of it where anyone would have needed to stand.

The Overseer looked at him.

The First Weapon looked back.

Then the dog, Garnet’s old dog, who leans on the Overseer’s legs, went across the doorway and sniffed the First Weapon’s nose. And the First Weapon allowed it. And lay down. And the dog lay down against him.

The Overseer didn’t say anything. But it bowed its long grey head. The way it does when the children sing.

Isolde came after. With her notebook. And Asha, talking. And Eve, telling her to stop. And Enna, with her arms folded, who walked through the arch into the map room and looked round it once and went straight to where Keir was sitting with his drawings and said something to him that Dot didn’t translate.

Keir went red.

”She says,” said Dot. Very carefully. ”The load path on your second aircraft. Still wrong.”

”I fixed it,” said Keir. ”Years ago. I fixed it.”

Enna said something else.

”She says she knows,” said Dot. ”She says she’s been wanting to tell you in person that she knows.”

Keir stared at her.

Enna almost smiled.

Then she sat down next to him. Without being asked. And pulled his drawings across the table toward her.

Isolde didn’t sit down.

She stopped in the doorway of the map room, beside the First Weapon and the Overseer and the dog, with her notebook against her chest. And looked out of the long window behind Okafor. At the plain. At the house on the rise, and the town under the garden wall, and the green of the north field where the beans Brock planted at the wedding were already up.

And asked Dot a question.

Dot turned to Mother.

”Isolde asks,” said Dot, ”whether the garden is far.”

Mother looked at her for a long time.

Then she got up out of Father’s chair. Slowly. And crossed the map room, past forty-one worlds at the long table. And held out her hand.

”Not far, love,” she said. ”Come and see.”

Isolde took it.

They didn’t come back for two hours. Okafor didn’t wait. When they came back, Isolde had soil on her knees and a bean pod in her notebook, pressed flat between the pages, and Mother had a sprig of something grey-green and very fragrant in her hair beside the dark blue ribbon that nobody on Avalon had ever seen before. Isolde had brought it through the arch in her pocket.

”From her garden,” said Dot. ”Isolde says: so there is something of Hearth growing here. In case the clocks stop agreeing.”

Risa found Isolde at the break. At the window. And took something very small out of her pocket, folded many times, faded. And unfolded it.

A bird. In a nest. One line at a time.

Isolde looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked at the two clouds over Risa’s head. The big one, and the little one, white, flickering.

And laughed. And put her hand over her mouth. And said something to Dot.

”Isolde says,” said Dot. ”She will need to send another one.”

Aramaeis came last.

Tiamat’s brother. Dinraal’s uncle. The dragonkin General, Dinraal calls him, when he wants to make him scowl. Very straight, the way Tiamat is, with a soldier’s walk and Asha on one side of him and Eve on the other. He came through the arch and stopped in the map room and looked round it for a long time. At the long table. At the forty-one worlds. At the wall behind Okafor, where the chalk said HEDGE and THEY ARE FIGHTING TOO and ORRIN and Not again and TIRAN. ALL. and the small empty circle with a question mark, past the edge of the map.

Then he looked at Crane.

At the table. With his spanner on the corner of his slate. With the pale band of skin at his throat where the collar was.

Neither of them said anything.

Aramaeis went and sat down beside him.

They didn’t speak all morning. Not one word. They don’t share a language. Dot didn’t translate anything between them, because there wasn’t anything to translate.

But at one point, when Okafor was explaining Merrow, and the pens, and the ledger, and the two lines, ours and lost, Crane wrote something on his slate. Very small. And turned it, a little, so Aramaeis could see.

Three words. In our language.

Recovery. Assurance. Allocation.

Aramaeis looked at it for a long time.

Then he took Crane’s pen. And under it, very slowly, in a script I didn’t know, wrote three words of his own.

Crane looked at them.

He couldn’t read them. Nobody at our end could.

He didn’t need to.

Okafor told them all of it.

The Hedge. One, the ears, and the one at the wall. Two, the doors, a keystone on every arch and a smith beside it. Three, the sky, the young grey learning Odra’s black stone. Four, the hollows, Kwame Osei’s, with Hana’s air and Maura’s warm and Taveth’s bad soup at the bottom. Five.

”Not one person,” said Okafor. And looked at Dinraal. ”Everyone else.”

Dinraal didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he looked down the long table. At forty-one worlds. At Kyria, with her first blade across her knees. At Mother, at the end, in Father’s chair, which somebody had carried in from the porch. At me.

He said something. In his own language. To Okafor.

Isolde, beside him, wrote it in her notebook. And then wrote it again, underneath, in the old dictionary. And slid the notebook across the table to Dot.

Dot read it out.

”Dinraal says: Hearth has fought alone for as long as there has been a Hearth.”

”Dinraal says: his father fought alone. Under banners nobody remembers. For people who rubbed out the lists.”

”Dinraal says: he has stood at the edge of everything for a long time, facing out.”

A pause.

”Dinraal says: he would like someone to stand beside him.”

Okafor looked at him for a long time.

Then she took the chalk.

And on the wall, under HEDGE, past the forty-one worlds and Hyrran and the four lost ones and Ammaru and Thera, she wrote one more name.

HEARTH.

And beside it, very small: Two fronts. One hedge.

Hesk took her cup of tea back that evening.

Cold. Untouched. From her side of the arch. And on the other side, the young woman from Hearth took hers.

Then they looked at each other. Through the arch. For a long time.

And Hesk, who doesn’t speak a word of anything but Hyrrani, bent down and set her cup on the young woman’s side.

And the young woman from Hearth set hers on Hesk’s.

Dory, at the top of the stairs, saw it. And came down. With two more cups.

She set one beside Hesk and one beside the young woman from Hearth. And then sat down on the courtyard stone between them, right in the arch, with Pebble at her feet, half on Avalon and half on Hearth.

Nobody moved her either.

Days 4505–4507. The Same Door.

Hearth broke the hour: Dot knocked four times. Asha too fast, frightened. A distress call at their edge; Dinraal went; the Ashen, his father’s enemy, his father’s father’s, fighting things out of the sky in pods. Garnet drew them twice. They ate the dead, theirs and the Ashen’s, behind the line, not stopping, and more came out. The Ashen lost; Dinraal says the Ashen do not lose. I told him all of it: Vessa’s arch, Merrow, the queens, the Hungry. Dinraal: the Ashen were frightened. Okafor: two fronts; it’s not enough any more. Dinraal: I’d like to stand in the same room as the person who asked. Kyria’s cutters cut this end in the courtyard; Dinraal stood at the other; Corin asked the floor on Hearth through the relay and Thessaly gave it. Eleven minutes. The clocks agreed. Dinraal knelt. Corin said hello. Hesk stood the night; a girl from Hearth set a cup opposite hers. At the long table the arch had two faces. Enna told Keir she knew he’d fixed it. Aramaeis sat by Crane and wrote three words of his own. Dinraal: he would like someone to stand beside him. Okafor wrote HEARTH under HEDGE: two fronts, one hedge.