Scarecrow

I left something out.

Not on purpose. I want to say that first. But I went back through this notebook the night after the forest city, on the porch, with the lamp, and read what I’d written about Wren’s count. Hearth. The tithe worlds. Isca. Halcro. The children from the pens. Earth. One.

And I added it up. The way Konrad would.

It came to about half.

”Five hundred million,” I said. ”Give or take. That’s everything I wrote down.”

Konrad was on the step below me with the sheet across his knees. He didn’t look up.

”And Wren said nine hundred and six.”

”Yes.”

”So there’s four hundred million people on Avalon who aren’t in your notebook,” said Konrad.

”Yes.”

He turned the sheet over. Then back. Then he looked at me over his glasses the way he looked at clerks, before, on Earth, when they brought him a column that didn’t close.

”A list with a hole in it,” said Konrad, ”is a lie with good handwriting.”

So I’ll write the hole.

It starts with Ilka. And a ship. And a week I spent in bed.

It was the week after Hearth.

After the nine stations and the nosebleed, when Hana put me to bed and sat on the end of it and said I’d be getting up when she said so and not before. I wrote some of that week down. Kesh and the sky. Ione choosing her name. The heap.

I didn’t write that on the fifth night, very late, Ilka Marrow came down off the Meridian in her flight jacket and knocked on the bedroom door.

Ilka doesn’t knock. She comes down off the Meridian when something’s wrong and stands in doorways, very white, until somebody notices her. So when she knocked, Hana got up.

”He’s not working,” said Hana.

”I know,” said Ilka. ”I’m not asking him to work. I’m asking him to listen to something.” She held up a small grey box with a wire coming out of it, the kind they had on Earth before anybody had silver. ”It came in on the old band. Not the thread. Not the voice. The radio.”

Hana looked at her. Then she stood aside.

I should say about the old band.

During the crossings from Earth, years ago, Odell asked if the dawn count could go out on the war band every morning. So the people still in the domes could hear it. So they’d know the number on the other side was going up, and get on the next ship. Okafor said yes. Somebody in the map room ran a wire from Konrad’s step to the transmitter on the tower, and every morning after that, Wren’s voice went out over Avalon and up and away into the dark.

Nobody ever switched it off.

Earth emptied. Odell came. The crossings stopped. And every morning, for years, the wire stayed where it was, and Wren said the number, and it went out. Past Earth. Past everything. At the speed radio goes, which is very fast and very slow at the same time, depending on how far you’re going.

Nobody thought about it. I didn’t.

Somebody else did.

Ilka put the box on the bed and turned it on.

It hissed. A long time. Then a voice came out of it. Not human. Low and round, with a click in the back of it, in a language I’d never heard. Dot came up the thread from the map room before anyone asked her to, the way she does, and put it into words in my head while it was still speaking.

This is the colony ship Third Patience. Of the Aun.

Six years ago, by our count, the eaters came to our sun. We had four worlds. We left all four. Forty-one ships left. We are nineteen now.

Three years ago we heard you.

A woman, every morning, saying a number. We did not know your language. We learned the numbers first, because numbers are the same everywhere. We listened to them every morning. They went up.

We have never heard a number go up. Not in six years. Not anywhere.

We followed it.

We are close now. We think. We have food for ninety days, and then less. We have nine million, four hundred thousand people on nineteen ships, and a third of them are children.

We ask for asylum.

If there is no room, we understand. We will go on. But we would like to know where the number is.

The box hissed.

Nobody in the bedroom said anything.

Hana had her hand over her mouth.

”How close?” I said.

”Eleven days out, at their speed,” said Ilka. ”Slower than light. Not by much. Toward the edge of the Watch.” She swallowed. ”Ruan could reach them in a morning. If someone said she could.”

”She can.”

Ilka didn’t move.

”There’s something else,” she said.

She turned the box over and pressed something on the back, and it played a different piece. Fainter. Older. A lot of noise in it.

—anyone on this band. Anyone. This is the Kett relay. They’re burning the moons. If anyone—

Then noise.

Then another one. A different voice. Different language. Dot didn’t even try. It was just someone saying the same three sounds, over and over, the way you call a name in a crowd.

Then another.

”Since the stations,” said Ilka. Very quietly. ”Hearth brought nine stations with ears on them that hear further than anything we’ve got. I’ve had them listening to the Watch, the way Okafor said. Toward Root. Toward the Hungry.” She looked at the box. ”But they hear everything. And when I went back through it, the last three nights—”

”How many?”

”Forty-one,” said Ilka. ”That I can tell are people. That I can tell are asking.” She looked at me. ”I don’t know how long they’ve been asking. Some of them, it’s years. Some of them, the voice stops.”

I sat up.

Hana said my name. I didn’t lie down.

”Tell Ruan to go and get the Third Patience,” I said. ”Tonight.”

”Yes.”

”And tell the nine stations,” I said. ”And the Meridian. And your ears, all of them, the whole Watch. Tell them to stop listening only for the Hungry.” I looked at the box. ”Tell them to listen for anyone calling. Anyone. On anything. The radio, the thread, a bell, a song, three sounds over and over. Anyone asking.”

Ilka didn’t say anything.

”And answer them,” I said. ”Every one. Tell them where the number is.”

Okafor was in the doorway. I don’t know how long she’d been there. She sleeps in the chair in the map room some nights and she hears the thread the way Mother hears a kettle.

”That’s a lot of people, Lucas,” she said.

”Yes.”

”We don’t know how many.”

”No.”

She looked at me. Then at the box on the bed.

”Ninety days of food,” she said. ”And they followed Wren’s voice for three years because it went up.” She was quiet. ”All right.”

Mother came in behind her with the teapot. She’d heard too. Everyone hears everything in that house.

She didn’t say anything about the box. She looked at Hana, and at me sitting up when I shouldn’t have been, and poured a cup and put it in my hands.

”Drink that,” said Mother. ”Then lie down. They’ll still be coming in the morning.”

I did. She was right. They were.

Ruan brought the Third Patience in four days later.

Not just the Third Patience. All nineteen. She went out on the rope with the Meridian and sang it round them, the whole fleet, the way she sang it round our ships on the ring, and brought them in at once. She couldn’t speak for three days after. Ilka says she wasn’t sorry.

They came down onto the red glass in shuttles. Small, round, battered ones, patched with metal that didn’t match. All day. And walked down the ramps.

The Aun are short. Shorter than Mother. Broad, brown, with copper freckles all over and four fingers and very wide gold eyes. They walked down onto the red glass in families, carrying everything they owned in nets on their backs, and every one of them, when they got to the bottom of the ramp, stopped and looked up.

At the sky.

Then at the people waiting.

Then they kept walking.

The captain came down last. Of course he did. An old man, white-freckled, very bent, with a stick, and a younger woman holding his arm who turned out to be his granddaughter, and his navigator, and the person who’d learned our numbers first.

He walked across the red glass to the long table we’d carried out. Okafor was there. And Holt, and Mother, and Konrad with his sheet. And me, because Hana said I could stand for an hour and not a minute more.

He didn’t look at any of us.

He looked past us. Along the table. To where Wren was sitting on the end of it, with Rafe on her knee.

”He says,” said Dot. ”Is that her?”

Wren looked up.

”He says: the one who says the number.”

Wren put Rafe down. And stood up.

The old man let go of his granddaughter’s arm. And walked to her, very slowly, with the stick. And stood in front of her. And put his four-fingered hand flat on his own chest, and then held it out, palm up, toward her.

”He says,” said Dot, ”Amu. Captain of the Third Patience. He says they counted with you. Every morning. For three years.” A pause. ”He says he would like to know today’s number. So he can hear it say they’re in it.”

Wren told him.

I won’t write the number. It was a long time ago and it’s a lot bigger now. But she said it, in the voice that doesn’t break, and then she said, ”Give or take,” the way she always does.

And then she said: ”And nine million, four hundred thousand more.”

Amu stood very still.

Then he sat down. On the red glass. Very suddenly, the way old people do when their legs decide for them. His granddaughter went to catch him and didn’t need to. He was just sitting. Looking up at Wren.

He was crying.

So was Wren.

That was the first.

I’d like to say I was there for all the others. I wasn’t.

That’s the hole in the notebook.

The Third Patience came in on the fourth day after Ilka’s box. Not long after that we went to One for the first time. Then Hyrran. Then Kiln, and the room, and the spokes. Every night I wrote down the smaller thing, the one I was in the middle of, because that’s what this notebook has always been. And every morning, while I was on the ice or in the forges or in a crevasse with Dinraal’s frame, Ilka’s ears were listening. And somebody was answering.

And they came.

Ingrid kept the sheet.

Konrad had the worlds, on the front. He didn’t have room. So the morning after Amu sat down on the red glass, Ingrid got a fresh sheet out of the map room and sat on the step next to Konrad and wrote at the top, in very upright capitals, the way she was taught in school before the war: Came by themselves.

And every morning after that, she wrote who.

I’ve read it. All of it. It’s eleven sheets now, both sides, pinned together at the corner with a bit of wire Voss bent for her.

The Kett, from the relay that was calling about the moons. Ruan got there late. The moons were burned. But the relay was on a station between them with two million people on it who’d run there when the burning started, and Ruan sang the rope round the station and brought the whole thing.

A people with no name Dot could say, from a ship that was only calling three sounds over and over. There were six hundred and twelve of them. The three sounds were the name of a child who’d gone out of an airlock to fix something and not come back. They’d been calling her for two years. Hana went out to meet them. She sat with the mother for a long time.

Four ships of the Tal from the far side of the Hungry’s arm, who’d been running ahead of it for nine years with every world they stopped at eaten behind them.

A tithe world that had heard about the frames on One from someone who’d heard it from someone. They didn’t call on the radio. They called on the thread. Through a queen. She’d been in pieces in their Sorn tower and they’d put her back together themselves, with glue and wire, enough that she could sing one note. Genny went out to her. The queen is on Avalon now. She’s still mostly glue. She’s very proud of it.

That’s four. There are hundreds of names on Ingrid’s sheets.

I can’t write them all. I want to. I’ll write how many.

”Four hundred and three million,” said Ingrid. ”Give or take. Before One. That came by themselves.”

She said it on the porch, the night after Konrad and the hole, with the sheets in her lap.

”Where did they all go?” I said.

I was ashamed of asking. I should have known.

Ingrid didn’t look at me like I should have known. She just told me.

”Tents,” she said. ”From the stations. Hearth had stores of them, for if a station failed, silver that holds a shape. Tiamat gave every one she had. Then hollows. In the eastern hills.” She looked at me. ”You made the hollows.”

I had.

I’d forgotten. That’s the truth. I’d made them at night, between One and Hyrran and Kiln, when Okafor said more coming and I couldn’t sleep anyway. Long warm hollows in the eastern slopes, a hill at a time. Hana walked beside me and stopped me early every night. I’d come home and write about the smaller thing and go to sleep, and in the morning the hollows would be full.

That’s what Mother meant, on the porch, the first night of the cities. Not tents. Not hollows.

I’d thought she meant One.

She meant everyone.

I put it all in Konrad’s terms afterward, on the back of my own page. Because it helps.

Hearth: four hundred and twelve million. One: seventy-four million. Everyone else I carried: about fifteen. Everyone who came by themselves, because Wren’s number went up: four hundred and three million. Children born on Avalon since Earth: more than anyone’s counted, Halloway says, and she’s tried.

It closes.

Konrad read it over my shoulder and grunted. That’s as close as he gets to saying well done.

So that’s the hole.

The rest of this is after.

The calls didn’t stop when the cities were finished.

They got louder.

Ilka came down off the Meridian the week after the forest city with a slate instead of a box. She doesn’t bring the box any more. There’s too much to fit in it.

”They’re telling each other,” she said.

At the long table. With everyone there. She put the slate down in front of Okafor and didn’t sit.

”Not just hearing the dawn count. Hearing us answer. The ones we’ve brought in. They had friends. They had people they’d passed on the way. They’re going back out on the radio, on their own sets, from their new houses, and saying it.” She tapped the slate. ”Come. There’s room. The number goes up.”

Okafor looked at the slate.

”How many calling?”

”Last week,” said Ilka, ”four hundred and ten.” A pause. ”This week, nine hundred.”

The Hungry were moving. That was part of it. The arm that went past Hearth hadn’t stopped. Tiamat’s people tracked it out past the edge of the Watch, and it was eating its way through a part of the dark where a lot of people lived. And the Sorn were burning ahead of it, the way they burned Imber, so there’d be nothing left for it to eat. So there was nothing left for anyone.

Peoples ran. Of course they did. Anyone would.

And now they knew where to run to.

Wren’s arrivals at the dawn count went from thousands to hundreds of thousands. Then, one morning near the end of the first month after the forest city, past a million. In a day.

She said it in the same voice. She always does.

Konrad wrote it. Ingrid wrote who.

So I built.

I want to put this part short, because I wrote the trains and the bones last time, and it’s the same again, only further.

Hana came. Every day. She looked at my face every evening, and we stopped when she said.

Wren listened. Keir drew. Enna drew rail. Odra and Ossel’s people sent iron. Hearth’s people gave silver until Tiamat said nobody was to give any more strands for a month, and then gave her own.

And the new ones built with me.

That was the difference. I didn’t make the bones first and wait for people to walk in. They were already there, in the tents and the hollows, with their hands and their tools and their own ideas about what a house was. Voss’s sheds were full every day. Miss Pell had nine schools before the cities round them had roofs.

The Aun asked for a coast. So they could watch the shuttles come in, Amu said. So they’d see everyone else arrive the way they had. I made them a long curve of shore south of Thera with cliffs behind it, and they built their city into the cliffs themselves, in tiers, with every window facing the sky over the sea. Amu sits at the top in the evenings with his stick across his knees and watches the shuttles come down.

His granddaughter is the navigator for the Meridian now. Ruan asked for her.

My nose bled once. Hana saw it first.

We stopped for a week. Kesh rained on the porch.

And then Okafor said the word.

She wrote it on the slate at the long table, at dawn, before anyone was up. In the chalk. In capitals, which she never uses.

STANDING.

I came down for tea and found it and stood there with the cup going cold.

Then she came in from the map room with her coat over her arm and looked at me looking at it.

”An army,” she said. ”A real one. That stays.”

We’d always had fighters. Everyone knows that. The interceptors. Risa’s wing. Andraste’s Hyrrani, though they’re Hyrran’s and not ours. The Mom Squad, who are nobody’s and everybody’s. Holt’s crews. The hundred thousand in uniforms on the four bases since Earth, who mostly stood on walls.

And whoever had silver and said yes, when it was time.

”That’s how we’ve fought every fight,” said Okafor. ”Everyone who can, when it’s time.” She put the coat on the back of a chair. ”It worked when we were three million. It worked when we were thirty.” She looked at the slate. ”We’re a billion, near enough. And the Hungry are coming this way, and the Sorn are burning everything in front of them. And every week we’re bringing in another world of people with nothing, who’ll be the first thing anybody comes for.”

She looked at me.

”I’m not having everyone who can, when it’s time. Not any more. I want people who are ready before it’s time. Every day. Whether there’s a fight or not.”

”Standing,” I said.

”Standing,” said Okafor.

She opened the hall on the north field the next week. Not a hall, really. A long table under an awning, with Holt at one end and the General at the other, in his old uniform with every medal, and a slate.

She thought she’d get a few thousand.

The line went to the river.

I went out on the second morning to look. Hana came, because she goes where I go now when I’m building, and I was supposed to be building.

The line went down the north field and past the interceptors and out across the plain toward the river, and it didn’t end where I could see. People from every city on the train lines. Earth people. Hearth people, which surprised me, until Isolde told me half of Hearth had been waiting to be asked. Tithe-world people with the marks of collars on their throats. Aun, short and freckled, with nets on their backs.

And the Kasrai.

I should write about the Kasrai.

They came in on Ilka’s sixth week of listening, before One. I didn’t meet them then. I was on the ice. Ingrid’s sheet says nine hundred and four thousand, in one fleet of heavy grey ships that came in without being sung, under their own engines, very slowly, with every ship damaged in the same places.

They’d been fighting the Hungry for two hundred years.

On their own. On their own world. They held it. For two hundred years, with walls and fire and every child learning the blade before letters, and they held it. And then the Sorn came, and the Ashen with them, the way they came to Isca, and burned the walls from behind.

The Kasrai who were left got into the ships and went.

They’re tall. Grey-gold, with ridged brows and long hands that have two thumbs each. They wear their hair in a single rope down the back, and the rope has knots in it, one for every fight. The old ones’ ropes go to the ground.

They’d been living in the eastern hollows. They hadn’t asked for anything. Ingrid says they’re the only people on her sheets who never asked for anything, not once.

They’d been waiting to be asked.

There were thirty thousand of them in the line on the first morning. Okafor’s slate says so. Every one of them over sixteen and under eighty, armed, in whatever was left of their armour, standing very straight in a line that went to the river.

At the front of them, when I got there, a very old woman with a rope that went past her heels and was tied up round her waist so she wouldn’t tread on it.

She was arguing with Okafor.

”She says,” said Dot. ”Who do they swear to?”

Okafor looked at her.

”Avalon,” said Okafor.

The old woman said something short.

”She says Avalon is a field,” said Dot. ”She says you can’t swear to a field.”

”To the Standing, then.”

”She says the Standing is a word you wrote on a slate this week.”

Okafor’s mouth went into its line.

”To me, then,” she said. ”If it has to be someone.”

The old woman looked at her for a long time. Not unkindly.

”She says,” said Dot. Carefully. ”You are a sergeant. She says she knows a sergeant when she sees one, she was one for forty years, and a sergeant is the best thing there is.” A pause. ”She says you don’t swear to a sergeant. A sergeant swears with you.”

Okafor didn’t say anything to that.

I think it was the first time in twenty years anyone had told her what a sergeant was and got it right.

The old woman’s name was Varra. Ingrid’s sheet has her. She was first blade of the last wall on the Kasrai world, for the last eleven years of the two hundred. The knots in her rope go back to before her grandmother.

She turned away from Okafor.

And looked down the north field. At the people standing in the line. At the interceptors. At the house on the rise.

At me.

”She says,” said Dot. ”That one.”

I said no.

Not to her. Not then. I didn’t say anything then. I walked back up the hill with Hana and went into the kitchen and sat down at the long table and said it there. To the room. Which was full, because it always is.

”No.”

”Nobody’s asked you anything yet,” said Mother. She was at the stove.

”They’re going to.”

”Yes,” said Mother. ”They are.”

I want to be honest about why.

It wasn’t modesty. Hana says it’s never modesty with me; she says it’s that I’m frightened of the wrong things. Maybe she’s right. But I’d stood in front of desks on Earth where people decided what I was for. I’d seen the Overseer’s ledger. I’d been in the building on One where something decided which ones went in last.

I didn’t want to be the one in the chair.

That’s all. I don’t want to decide what everyone is for. I make floors.

”You’d be terrible at it,” said Andraste.

She was at the end of the table with Vessa on her lap and Holdfast across the back of her chair. She said it the way she says the weather.

”Thank you.”

”That’s why they want you,” said Andraste.

I looked at her.

”On Hyrran,” said Andraste, ”the First Blade is the one who would rather not. Always. My mother didn’t want it. Her mother didn’t. You give it to someone who wants it and in a year they have a chair.” She bounced Vessa. ”Varra knows that. She’s been a first blade. She’s looking for someone who doesn’t want a chair.”

”It’s already too late, anyway,” said Corin.

He was under the table. With Thessaly. They’d been under there the whole time, the four, building something out of spoons. I hadn’t seen them.

”Too late for what?” I said.

Corin came out from under the table and stood up, with a spoon in his hand, very seriously. He’s the one who looks most like me. Mother says he looks like Father.

”They call us it,” said Corin. ”On the train.”

”Call you what?”

Thessaly came out after him. And then Goldie, and Elin, with frost on her sleeves.

”Princes,” said Thessaly. ”And princesses. Of Avalon.” She looked at me as if I should have known. ”The tall ones bowed to Trevor yesterday. And a Kasrai girl gave Dory a knife and called her princess and Dory kept it.”

I looked at Mother.

Mother put a plate of bread on the table and didn’t look at me at all.

”How long?” I said.

”Since the cities,” said Mother. ”Maybe before. You were on the ice.”

Dory came in from the courtyard with the knife.

It was very small and very sharp, in a sheath of grey-gold leather with one knot tied on the end of the strap. She put it on the table in front of me, carefully, the way she puts everything down, checking it.

”She said it’s for my first fight,” said Dory. ”She said Kasrai children get one when they’re six. I’m older than six, so she said I was late.” She looked at me. ”She said I’m the eldest, so it’s mine first, and then I’m supposed to make sure everyone else gets one.”

”Who said?”

”Varra’s great-granddaughter,” said Dory. ”She’s nine. She’s got four knots.”

I looked at the knife.

”Dory,” I said. ”You’re not a princess.”

Dory looked at me the way Risa looks at me.

”I know,” she said. ”I’m Dory.” She picked up the knife. ”But they need somebody to call it. Mom says.” She put the knife in her belt. ”It doesn’t hurt anything.”

And went back out to the courtyard.

Risa was in the doorway with Kesh on her hip. She’d heard all of it.

”Mom says,” I said.

”Mom says,” said Risa. She didn’t apologise. She came in and sat down next to me and put Kesh in my lap. Kesh frowned at the knife-shaped space on the table where the knife had been.

”Lucas,” said Risa. ”Nine hundred million people came to a place because they heard a woman say a number every morning. They don’t have a world. Most of them don’t have anyone who was in charge of them before who wasn’t the Sorn.” She looked at me. ”They want a face. That’s all. Something to point at and say that’s ours.”

”They’ve got the Scarecrow.”

”Yes,” said Risa. ”And who do you think they think the Scarecrow is?”

I didn’t have an answer to that.

I went out to the field.

Not the north field. The one in the garden, with the rows I made straight the way Father always made them.

The scarecrow’s still in the middle of it. Not the ship. The one I built, with Father’s old coat on it, brown and patched at the elbows, and its neck bare. Arms out over the rows, the way they always are.

I stood in front of it until the light started going.

Konrad came down after me.

He doesn’t come down to the field. His knees, he says. He came down anyway, very slowly, with the sheet under his arm, and stood beside me and looked at the Scarecrow.

”I wrote the Accord,” said Konrad. After a while.

”I know.”

”I wrote it at a table,” said Konrad. ”There were a lot of us at it. Good men, most of us. Clever. We talked for days about what was best for everyone, and nobody at the table had ever been one of the everyone.” He looked at the sheet under his arm. ”That’s what a table does, Lucas. It’s very good at deciding for people. It’s very bad at standing in front of them.”

He didn’t say anything else for a while.

”They don’t want you to decide what they’re for,” said Konrad. ”They decide that. Free the world, the world names its own. You said that. It’s on Okafor’s slate.” He nodded at the field. ”They want somebody standing in front of them with his arms out. When something comes.”

”That’s not a king,” I said.

”No,” said Konrad. ”It’s better. But they haven’t got another word for it yet.” He turned to go back up the hill. ”Give them time. They’ll find one. They found one for Wren.”

Okafor held the first muster of the Standing on the north field nine days later.

Six hundred thousand. Okafor’s slate. From every city on Avalon, and Hearth, and the tithe worlds, and the Aun, and the Kett from the station. Thirty thousand Kasrai at the front of it, in a block, with Varra in front of them.

The General had them in lines. Holt had them in companies, with a captain from each people, and a sergeant from each company who reported to Okafor and nobody else. Andraste and Kyria had been teaching the blade lines for a week. Gilgamesh had been teaching them the axe, and how to eat bread after, which he says is half of it.

I stood on the porch of the house on the rise and watched. I wasn’t going to go down.

Mother came out with the teapot.

She poured a cup. She didn’t hand it to me. She put it on the rail.

”Your father,” said Mother, ”never wanted to be anything. Not the one who knew the most. Not the one people went to. He just wanted the work done.” She looked down at the north field. ”And every time something broke on our street, the whole street came to the forge door. Because they knew he’d be the one who went out to it. Every time. In the cold, in the dark, with his tools and his eyes and fixed it.”

She picked the cup back up and drank it herself.

”He never said yes to it,” said Mother. ”He just never once stayed in the house.”

I went down.

I walked down the hill and across the north field between the lines, with Hana behind me. Six hundred thousand people went very quiet. I could feel every heart on the field. I could have counted them. Wren was counting them, from the table under the awning.

I walked to the front. To Varra.

She was standing very straight, with her rope tied up round her waist and her blade on her back and her hands at her sides. She watched me come all the way.

When I stopped in front of her, she knelt.

Not low. On one knee, with the blade still on her back and her head up, looking at me. The way the Kasrai kneel, Andraste told me afterward, to someone they’re going to stand in front of.

And behind her, thirty thousand Kasrai knelt with her.

And then the rest of the field. Not all at once. Not because anyone told them. A line at a time, back to the river, the way the wind goes over wheat.

I didn’t know what to do.

So I knelt too.

On one knee, in front of her, on the grass of the north field, so our eyes were level. The way Father used to kneel in the street over a broken pipe, so he could see it properly.

Varra looked at me for a long time.

Then she said something. Very quietly. Just to me.

Dot didn’t translate it. Dot doesn’t, sometimes, when she thinks it should be heard first and understood after.

So I asked Andraste, afterward. What it meant.

Andraste told me. She said it’s an old Kasrai thing. What the wall says, at the end, when the first blade comes down off it to stand in front of them.

Now we are the same height.

Then Varra stood up. And held out her hand. With two thumbs. And pulled me up with it, which she shouldn’t have been able to do at her age, and did.

And six hundred thousand people stood up behind her.

And Kesh, in Risa’s arms up on the porch, frowned at all of it and made it rain. Very gently. On the whole north field. The way Suri taught her.

Nobody moved out of it.

I’m not a king.

I want that written down. Konrad can put it on the front of the sheet if he likes.

But Varra’s great-granddaughter, the one with four knots, came up the hill the next morning with a knife for Trevor, and one for Ash, and one for small Sigmund, and Efua and Kwame and Abena, and one each for the four, and one for Vessa. And one, very small, with no edge on it at all, for Kesh. Dory went with her to every one of them and made sure.

Varra sent the last one up herself. Wrapped in a cloth, with a knot tied in the corner.

It was for me.

There’s one knot on the strap. Andraste says that’s for the north field. Andraste says the Kasrai don’t count knots for winning. They count them for the times you came down off the wall.

People still call them it. The children. On the trains, and in the cities, and in the long line by the river that’s still there every morning, waiting to join the Standing.

I’ve stopped minding as much as I did.

Dory says it doesn’t hurt anything. Dory’s usually right.

Wren said the number at the dawn count this morning. Like every morning.

It went out over the old band, on Konrad’s wire, up off the tower and away into the dark. Somewhere out there, people are hearing it who’ll hear it again in three years, and follow it.

I listened to her say it.

”One billion,” said Wren. ”And six hundred and eleven thousand. Give or take.”

A pause.

”Every one of them has a door,” said Wren. ”And there are nine hundred more calling.”

Konrad wrote it.

On the front. Under Avalon. Home. All.

And Ingrid, on the step next to him, wrote who.

Days 5073–5191. Asylum.

The hole in the notebook: four hundred and three million came by themselves, because Wren’s dawn count went out on the old band for years and the number went up. The first was the Third Patience, nineteen ships of the Aun; Amu sat down on the red glass and cried. I told Ilka, the Meridian, the nine stations and the Watch to listen for anyone asking, and answer. Tents, then hollows; Ingrid kept the sheet: Came by themselves. Now nine hundred calling a week. Okafor wrote STANDING. The line went to the river. Varra of the Kasrai: you don’t swear to a sergeant; that one. The children are princes and princesses on the train; Dory kept the knife. Konrad: a table is very bad at standing in front of people. Mother: he never once stayed in the house. I knelt so we were the same height. One knot. A billion.