Scarecrow

The Sorn went away.

That’s the only way I can write it. Not beaten. Not gone. Away. Out of sight, the way a man steps back from a window into a dark room, and you know he’s still in the house, and you don’t know which room.

Ilka noticed first. She always does.

The grey ships that had sat at the edge of the Watch for years, in a ring, watching Root, the way you’d watch a door you meant to come through one day: on the third morning after the calls went quiet, they weren’t there.

Not destroyed. Nobody had fought them. They’d just gone. In the night. All at once.

Then the Hands. The ones Tiamat’s stations had been tracking round the tithe worlds, burning ahead of the Hungry. Ilka’s ears lost them one by one over a week. Not burned out. Pulled back. Further and further, into the part of the dark where none of us has ever been.

Then the Ashen.

”Gone,” said Tiamat.

At the long table. In the map room. With her hand on the edge of it, very still, the way she stands when she’s measuring something none of the rest of us can see.

”Not hidden. My stations can find an Ashen ship behind a moon. I’ve done it for a thousand years.” She looked at the wall, where Garnet’s map of the houses’ ring was. ”There are no Ashen ships anywhere I can see. For the first time since before Dinraal was born.”

Dinraal didn’t say anything. He was standing behind his mother with Bahamut on his chest, asleep. He put his hand on the baby’s back.

The Overseer came in last.

He comes to the map room most days now, with the dog. He stands in the doorway. He doesn’t sit at the table. Okafor says he’s welcome to. He says he’d rather not, and nobody has ever made him explain.

”The houses,” said Okafor. Not unkindly. ”Have they said anything?”

The Overseer looked down at the dog for a long time.

”No,” he said. ”They’ve stopped talking to me.” He scratched the dog’s ear. ”They haven’t done that since the Accord. Not once. Not even when I was on the Meridian and they knew I’d stopped being theirs.” He looked up. ”They’re not angry. When they’re angry they say so. This is something else.”

”What?”

”I don’t know,” said the Overseer. ”I’ve never heard them be quiet. I don’t think they’ve ever had a reason.”

Okafor wrote it on the slate. One word.

QUIET.

And underneath, smaller:

A Sorn that stops is a Sorn planning.

Ithel said it in a different way.

He came into the map room at bedtime in his nightshirt, the way he does, and stood under the two thousand, eight hundred and six silver points over the long table, with his hand out palm up under one, and then another.

”They’re still there,” he said. ”The worlds. The lines. Everyone in them.” He looked at Dinraal. ”But the ships round them have all gone home.”

”Home where?”

Ithel looked up at the points for a long time.

”In,” he said. ”Toward the middle. Where I’ve never been.”

That was the Sorn.

It lasted. I want to write that, so nobody reading this thinks we woke up the next week and they were back. They weren’t. Not for a long time. Weeks became months. The Standing drilled on the north field every morning with nothing to stand against. Ilka listened to nothing. Okafor wrote QUIET again on a new slate when the first one wore away.

And the thing Dory felt, where the four hundred calls had been, kept coming.

Tiamat found it on the twentieth day.

Her stations have ears that go further than Ilka’s. She’d turned every one of them out past the Watch, toward the silence. And on the twentieth day, at dusk, her voice came into the house on the rise through the silver, very level.

”It’s turning.”

”Toward us?” said Okafor.

”Toward the edge of the Hedge,” said Tiamat. ”It’s not coming to Avalon. Not first.” A pause. ”It’s coming to the nearest world with people on it. That’s all it ever does.”

”Which?”

Tiamat told her.

Kyria stood up from the end of the table so fast her chair went over.

Caddoc.

Hyrran’s neighbour. So close they share a sun and nearly share a sky. A world of red rock and salt flats and the Caddi, who paid the tithe for nine generations and hid eleven thousand children in their salt mines once, and came up into the white light when we came.

The Caddi had dug since the Hedge started. They made the mines bigger and joined them up, until the whole salt plain had a second plain under it, just as wide, full of lamps. Every child on Caddoc slept down there now. Every grandmother had a lamp.

And it was coming.

”How long?” said Okafor.

”Four days,” said Tiamat. ”Maybe five.” She was quiet. ”Okafor. It’s not an arm.”

”What is it?”

”It’s what the arm was reaching for,” said Tiamat. ”All of it. The whole body. I’ve never seen it before. I didn’t know there was this much.”

Okafor stood very still for a moment.

Then she went to the slate, and rubbed out QUIET, and wrote CADDOC.

And under it:

Everyone.

I’ll write who went, because Andraste says the children should know.

The Hyrrani. All of them who could hold iron, because if Caddoc fell, Hyrran was next, across a sky you could almost touch. Kyria in front with her first blade. Andraste with Holdfast.

The Standing. Okafor had a hundred thousand ready. Varra’s Kasrai first, because Varra said so.

Hearth. Gilgamesh and Alexander and Julius. Aurelius with his dome. Cleopatra with her field. Tiamat’s people in every ship that could carry a gun.

Risa’s wing. The Vey twins, Rowan flying, Callum calling the turns.

The Mom Squad. All of them. Even Isolde, with Bahamut left with Rhiannon for the first time, which Isolde says was the hardest thing she’s done since Hearth.

My wives. Dinraal. Me.

And Dory.

She didn’t ask this time.

She came into the kitchen the night Okafor wrote CADDOC, and stood at the slate, and read it. Then she read the line under Sixteen. Her line.

Dory: the net. When she says.

She turned round. All three of her mothers were at the table. Luna and Sera and Risa. And me. And Mother at the stove. And Ingrid in the corner chair, with Ione asleep on her.

”I’m saying,” said Dory.

Nobody argued.

Luna started to. I saw her start. And then she looked at Dory standing by the slate, a head taller than her, with the knife on her belt and two knots on the strap, and she stopped.

”Same as Ostry,” said Risa. ”I’m at your back.”

”Same as Ostry,” said Dory.

”And the net,” said Sera. ”You hold the arches. That’s what you’re for, on Caddoc. Getting them out from under the salt.”

”Yes,” said Dory.

She meant it, I think. When she said it.

We went through on the fourth morning.

Caddoc was red at dawn. It always is. The salt plain goes from red to pink to white as the sun comes up, and the broken counting tower stands in the middle of it, where it’s stood since the day we took Caddoc back. Nobody’s knocked it down. The Caddi say they want to remember.

The sky was clear.

For about an hour.

Then it came over the eastern rim.

I don’t know how to write it. I’ve seen the Hungry before. I went through the sealed arch on Hyrran with Andraste and the Mom Squad and saw what they’d done to a world. I’ve seen the arm that went past Hearth, on Tiamat’s screens, bigger than a sun.

This was the body.

It came over the rim like weather. Like the edge of a storm so big you can’t see the top of it. Black and brown and moving, a sound like every insect on every world at once. It didn’t fill the sky. It was the sky, the eastern half, and then more than half, coming.

Under the salt, the Caddi were already going.

Twelve arches. Kyria’s cutters had cut them in the night, down in the second plain, among the lamps. Dory was holding them. Standing on the salt above the deepest hollow, with Halloway at her wrist and her net running down through the rock to every arch at once, bright as it was on Ostry.

Grandmothers and children, through to Avalon. To Hyrran, under the ridge, to Odra’s halls.

It takes a long time to move a people.

Especially the Caddi. They don’t leave things. Every family came to the arches with their lamps, still lit, and every grandmother had to be talked out of going back for something. A pot. A blanket. A box of salt from the first mine her grandmother dug, which she’d been keeping for her granddaughter’s wedding. Dory let every one of them go back for the thing, if it was close. She could feel where everything was. She told them which way, and how far, and when to turn round and come back, and every one of them came back.

The Hungry didn’t wait.

They came down on the plain.

Not all of them. Even the body can’t land all at once. The front of it. Winged, clawed, the size of horses, the size of houses, spitting fire and acid on the salt. They hit the ground in a wave that went across the plain from the eastern rim toward the counting tower, and they started to dig.

They knew where the people were. They always know.

The Hyrrani met them on the salt.

The Standing behind the Hyrrani, in rings, round every place the hollows came near the surface. The Kasrai in front, with Varra. Two hundred years of holding a wall against exactly this. They didn’t even look surprised. They set their feet and drew their blades.

Hearth from the air. Gilgamesh’s weapons. Alexander’s hundred blades in formation.

Risa above it all, in the storm she’d brought with her, holding the wing’s threads.

And us.

I’ll put us short, because I’ve written how we fight before.

The six of us and Dinraal and Isolde, together, the way we did on Isca. Luna’s ice under everyone’s feet. Sera burning, so hot the salt turned to glass where she walked. Hana taking the air out from in front of them so the fliers fell. Andraste with Holdfast, which goes through the Hungry the way it goes through anything. Risa’s lightning. Dinraal and Isolde with Hearth’s silver making whatever they needed, guns, cannons, things I don’t have names for.

And me in the ground. Holding the roof of the second plain up so they couldn’t dig through it, as long as I could.

We held the middle. For most of the morning.

Everyone else held the rest.

I didn’t see most of it. I’ve had it told to me since, by everyone, at the long table, over a lot of evenings. I’ll put down what I can.

Mother stood at the broken counting tower with the Mom Squad round her and lifted. Not slopes this time; there aren’t slopes on a salt plain. She lifted the salt. Great slabs of it, out of the plain, the size of houses, and dropped them on whatever was digging. Maura stood beside her and made the slabs so hot on the way down that they were glass when they landed. Kyria and Teshka went out in front of the two of them, back to back, the way they did on the spoke, and nothing got past.

Ingrid was in the air. Not with the wing. On her own, high, where the fliers came over. She doesn’t do it much any more. She did it on Caddoc. Konrad stood on the red glass on Avalon, at the arch, with the sheet, and watched the sky through it the whole day, and Mother says he didn’t write a single name until she came home.

Gilgamesh held the counting tower’s west side alone for an hour with an axe that came out of his silver and a second axe that was older than Hyrran’s wars. He stopped once, at noon, and ate a piece of bread, standing up, in the middle of it. Alexander said afterward it was the most frightening thing he’d seen all day. Not the Hungry. Gilgamesh eating.

Aurelius put his dome over the deepest hollow’s main arch and stood under it with his hands up, and the Hungry broke on it in waves, and didn’t get through, and didn’t get through, and didn’t. He’s not young. Isolde stood beside her father the whole time with her silver made into something long and bright, killing whatever slid down the side of the dome. She didn’t take her eyes off him once.

And Varra.

The Kasrai held the north ring, round the second-biggest hollow, where the swarm came down after the east. Varra in front. Thirty-one knots in her rope by the end of the day, Andraste says, which she tied that night, with her teeth. She never once took a step back. Andraste says the Kasrai have a word for that, and it’s the same word as wall.

They came through in the east.

There was a hollow out under the eastern rim. Not the deepest. Not the biggest. An old salt mine the Caddi had joined up last, with four thousand people in it and an arch Dory was holding at the far end. The front of the swarm came down right on top of it, over the rim, before the Standing could get a ring round it. And they dug.

I felt the roof go. I was holding the middle. I couldn’t reach.

Dory felt it go too.

She let go of the net.

Not dropped it. She’d learned from Ostry. She handed it. To the smiths. Odra’s smiths had stood at every arch since the Hedge started, day and night, with a hammer. Dory reached down through the rock to every one of them and put the arches into their hands. Hold this.

And then she was gone from the place she was standing.

Scattered.

The way I scatter. All of her into pieces, and across the plain faster than anything, and back together again on the eastern rim. Above the hollow. Where the Hungry were coming up out of the hole they’d dug, with what they’d found.

I didn’t see what she saw. I’m glad.

I saw what she did.

She put her hand out.

And the eastern rim of Caddoc went white.

Salt.

All of it. Every one of them on the rim. Every one coming up out of the hole. Every one in the air over it, for a mile. More than a mile. In one breath, every atom of every one of them asked to be something else, and answered, and was. They didn’t fall. There wasn’t time to fall. They were salt in the shape of what they’d been, for a moment, wings out, mouths open.

Then the wind came off the rim.

And they blew away.

The rim was quiet.

I could see it from the middle of the plain. A white scar along the whole eastern edge of Caddoc, where there’d been a swarm. White on red. Like frost.

And Dory standing in the middle of it.

Then she looked up.

At the body. Still coming over the rim. Still half the sky.

And Risa’s storm, above it, which Risa had been holding all morning, went very still.

Risa told me afterward. She said she felt Dory reach into her storm. Not take it. Ask. The way Dory asks for everything, the way she checks. Can I?

And Risa, who’d never let anyone into her storm in her life, not even Kesh, said yes.

The lightning came down out of Risa’s storm into the body of the Hungry.

Not a bolt. I’ve seen Risa’s bolts. I’ve seen Ingrid’s. This was a column. As wide as a river. White, and then whiter than white, the colour that the second sun was on this same salt plain, years ago, when I made one. It went down into the middle of the swarm coming over the rim and stayed, and moved, and swept, from one end of the eastern sky to the other.

The sound came after. It knocked the Hyrrani off their feet a mile away.

When it stopped, there was a hole in the sky.

A clean hole, through the body of the Hungry, all the way to the blue. You could see Hyrran through it, across the gap, very small, green.

And Dory did it again.

I’m not going to write all of it.

She did it for an hour. On the eastern rim. Salt and lightning. Salt for anything that came down near her, near the hollow, near the four thousand. Lightning for the sky. She went along the rim, scattering and coming back together and scattering again, and wherever she stood the Hungry turned white and blew away, and wherever she looked the sky came down on them.

The Hyrrani stopped fighting to watch. Andraste told me. A whole line of them, on the salt below the rim, with their blades down, looking up.

Varra didn’t stop. Varra has watched two hundred years of walls. She kept fighting. But Andraste says she looked up once, at the girl on the rim with the knife on her belt, and her face did something Andraste has never seen a Kasrai face do.

I could feel Dory’s heart the whole time.

I didn’t look at it. It wasn’t mine. I didn’t have to look. It was so loud.

It wasn’t frightened.

That’s what I want to write. That’s the thing.

On Ostry, on the first hill, holding twelve arches, her heart was very fast and it didn’t slow, and it was frightened, all day, the right way. The way you’re frightened when you’re holding something you might drop.

On the rim of Caddoc it was fast too.

But it wasn’t frightened at all.

It was happy.

The body turned in the second hour.

I don’t know if it can be frightened. I don’t think so. I think it’s just hungry, and it went where there was food and found the food was turning it to salt, and the sky was falling on it, and it went somewhere else. Over the rim. Back the way it came. Out past Caddoc’s sky, toward the dark where the four hundred calls had been.

Not gone. Tiamat says it’s still out there. Smaller. Not much smaller.

But off Caddoc.

Wren counted.

Every hollow. Every arch. All of the second plain, and everyone who’d gone through to Avalon and to Hyrran, and everyone still under the salt with their lamps who’d decided to stay, because it was their salt.

”Every one,” said Wren. ”In the deep hollows. Every child.”

A pause.

”The eastern hollow,” said Wren. ”Four thousand and twelve. Three thousand, three hundred and six came through Dory’s arch, before the roof went, and after.”

Seven hundred and six.

In the eastern hollow. Under the rim. Where the swarm came down first and dug, before anyone could get a ring round it. Before Dory got there.

She was very fast. She wasn’t fast enough. Nobody would have been.

And the Standing lost three hundred and forty. The Hyrrani, nine hundred and twelve. Hearth, sixty. The wing lost two interceptors. Rowan flew the second-to-last one home on a single engine with Callum calling the turns, the way he always does, and they landed on the red glass sideways, and Nan Vey was waiting at the edge of the field and said you’ll do before they’d got the canopy open.

Varra tied knots all night.

Mother found me afterward. On the salt. While Wren was still counting.

She didn’t say anything about the seven hundred and six. She knew I knew. She stood beside me and looked at the eastern rim, white along its whole length, where the wind was still moving the salt about in little drifts.

”She liked it,” said Mother.

I didn’t say anything.

”I could see it from the tower,” said Mother. ”Her face. The same face your father had, the one time I ever saw him angry. I won’t tell you what about. It was a long time ago and the man deserved it.” She was quiet. ”He looked like that. While it was happening. And then he came home and sat on the step with his hands shaking and wouldn’t let me touch them till they stopped.”

”What did you do?”

”I sat on the step,” said Mother. ”Till they stopped.” She looked at me. ”That’s all you can do, Lucas. You can’t take it out of them. It’s in them. It was in him and it’s in you and it’s in her, and it was in Ingrid so much they locked her up for it.” She picked a little salt off her sleeve. ”You sit on the step. And you don’t go in the house till they do.”

The Caddi grandmothers came up out of the salt at dusk.

Not all of them. Most had gone through the arches with the children. But some had stayed, the way the grandmothers on Tiel stayed with the washing, because it was their salt and their lamps and they’d dug the second plain with their own hands. Two hundred of them, maybe, in the deep hollows, all day, with the roof held up over them and the sound of it coming down through the rock.

They came up the long ramps from the mines with their lamps still lit, though it wasn’t dark yet, and stood on the plain and looked at the eastern rim.

At the white.

One of them walked out toward it. Very old. Very small. The Caddi are small, and red-brown like their rock, and the old ones go nearly white at the edges, like the salt. She walked all the way to the foot of the rim, where Dory was still standing in the drifts, and stopped, and looked up at her.

She said something. Dot was tired; it came through slowly.

”She says,” said Dot, ”they could see it. From below. Through the cracks in the roof. Where the light came in.” A pause. ”She says the sky opened. She says she’s lived under the salt with a lamp her whole life, because of the tithe, and then because of the Hedge. She says it’s the first time she’s ever seen the sky open.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

”She says thank you,” said Dot. ”She says she’s sorry about the eastern hollow. She says her sister was in it.”

Dory came down off the rim then. All the way down. And knelt in the salt in front of the old woman, so that they were the same height.

The old woman put her hand on Dory’s face. Both sides. Very gently. The way Mother does.

Then she went back to her lamp.

Dory came home through the arch on the red glass last of all.

Not because she meant to. She stayed on the rim after the body turned. Standing in the white, in the salt that had been the Hungry, with the wind blowing it round her boots. She didn’t move. Risa went up to her in the end. And stood beside her. And they came down together.

She walked across the red glass without saying anything. Past Wren. Past Okafor. Past me.

Up the hill. Into the house. Into the children’s room.

She didn’t lie down in the heap. She sat in the corner. Against the wall. With her knees up and her arms round them and the knife on her belt.

I went in after a while.

I sat down on the floor next to her. Not too close.

The heap was asleep. Kesh in her basket. Corin with his fist closed. Trevor wasn’t asleep; Trevor’s never asleep when Dory isn’t. He was lying on his side in the middle of the heap with his eyes open, watching her.

”I liked it,” said Dory.

Very quietly. Looking at her knees.

”I know,” I said.

”No,” said Dory. ”You don’t.” She turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were very bright. ”I liked it. All of it. The salt. The sky. I liked it more than anything I’ve ever done.” She swallowed. ”More than the arches. More than Ostry. More than checking.”

I didn’t say anything.

”When they went white,” said Dory. ”When I put my hand out and asked and they all just—went. All of them. At once. Because I said.” Her voice shook. ”I wanted to do it again. I wanted to do it to all of it. The whole sky. I wanted to go over the rim after it and keep going.”

She put her face on her knees.

”Dad,” she said. Into her knees. ”What am I?”

I told her about the first dawn.

I’ve never told her. I’ve never told any of them. It’s in this notebook, a long way back, and it’s in the queens’ memory, and it’s in every brood on Avalon, who all know and never say.

The first dawn the Teeming came to the rim of the canyon. When I was young and frightened and didn’t know what they were. When they came up over the edge trying to stop the tower from blasting a frequency that hurt the queens, and I put my hand out, and asked.

Sixty-one of them.

Salt.

They’d been coming to stop the sound hurting their mother. That’s what I found out afterward. They might not even have tried to hurt me, they cut my leg after I salted them. And I turned them to salt because I could, and because I was frightened, and because nobody had ever told me what that was for.

Dory lifted her head.

”Sixty-one,” she said.

”I don’t know their names,” I said. ”I asked the queen once. She said they didn’t have the kind I could say.” I looked at the heap. ”I say the number. On the porch. After Mother’s names. Sixty-one.”

Dory looked at me.

”Did you like it?” she said.

I’d never been asked.

I thought about it. In the dark, with the heap breathing, and Trevor’s eyes open in the middle of it.

”No,” I said. ”I was too frightened to like anything.” I looked at her. ”But later. On the ring. On Isca. Other places. Sometimes. Yes.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

”It’s very big,” I said. ”What we can do. It’s the biggest thing there is. And a part of you knows how big it is when you do it, and a part of you likes being that big. That’s not wrong. It’s just true.” I was quiet. ”It’s what you do next that matters. That’s the whole of it.”

”What did you do next?”

”I was alone, me and Dot. We built more walls, and one day, I was in the forge and they came through the floor, and hurt me. Dot drove them away,” I said. ”After that, we learned about each other, and I was sad that I had hurt them. Now I ask, and talk things through. Every time. To the porch. To Gran, to our Queen, to Okafor and Liam and your mothers.” I looked at her. ”You came home too. You stood on that rim with all of it in your hand, and you wanted to go over after it. And you didn’t. You came down with your mother.”

”She came and got me.”

”Yes,” I said. ”And you came. At some point in your life, you will understand that no one can MAKE us do anything we don’t want to do. The things we can do, we may be the most powerful humans that have ever lived. It’s even more important that we listen and ask and talk things out because of that. My dad told me about a superhero he read about when he was a kid. That superhero could do all sorts of crazy things, and was very powerful. He learned from that comic, that having the power to do great things also came with the responsibility to be just and protect those that can’t protect themselves.”

Dory put her face back on her knees.

But she put her hand out. Sideways. On the floor between us. And I put mine on it.

We sat like that for a long time.

Risa came in near midnight.

She sat down on Dory’s other side. On the floor. And didn’t say anything at first. Then she reached up and took hold of the end of Dory’s hair, the way she did when Dory was very small and wouldn’t sleep, and turned it round her finger.

”I like it too,” said Risa.

Dory went very still.

”Every time,” said Risa. ”Every bolt. Since I was smaller than you. There’s a moment, right when it comes down, when you’re the biggest thing in the sky, and the whole world goes white, and it’s yours.” She turned the hair. ”I’ve never told anyone that. Not your father. Not your grandmother.”

”Then why are you telling me?”

”Because somebody should have told me,” said Risa. ”When I was twelve.” She let go of the hair. ”I’d have been a lot less frightened of myself.”

In the morning, Ingrid took Dory up.

Not to fly. To the roof. Of the house on the rise. They sat on the ridge tiles in the early light, with Kesh’s little cloud raining on the garden below them, and talked for a long time. I didn’t listen. It wasn’t mine.

Risa told me afterward some of what her mother said. Because Dory told Risa.

Ingrid was the one the lightning came from. Risa’s and big Sigmund’s, and now Dory’s, and Kesh’s. She fought in the first war. Mother says she was the most frightening thing on the field, and Mother was on that field too.

Ingrid told Dory she’d liked it. In the war. More than Risa does. More than Dory. The reports called Konrad the Storm, because his name went on them, and she let him have it. The men at the Kesh ford called her the Hush, behind her back, for the moment before the lightning when everything goes still. She said she’d loved being the Hush so much that after the war was over she didn’t know how to be anything else. She stopped coming home, for a while, in her head. Even when she was in the house.

She said that’s why the ones who knew were so frightened of her, after the Act. Why they wanted her to renounce, and put her in Ward Nine when she wouldn’t, with a band on her neck. She said they weren’t wrong to be frightened. They were wrong about what to do with it.

She said she’d never told Konrad how much she liked it. She thinks he guessed. She thinks it’s part of why he signed.

She said: don’t go so far you can’t hear your grandmother calling.

Dory came down off the roof at breakfast and went to the slate.

She stood there with the chalk for a while. In front of everyone.

Then she wrote, under her line. Under Dory: the net. When she says.

Small. In her own hand.

Not unless it has its hands round one of my mothers.

Okafor looked at it.

It’s her line. Okafor’s. She said it to me on the Meridian years ago, before the sealed arch on Hyrran. You don’t turn anything to salt unless it has its hands round one of your mothers. I’d never told Dory. I don’t know where she heard it. Everyone hears everything in that house.

”That’s a good rule,” said Okafor, in the end.

”It’s yours,” said Dory.

”It’s yours now,” said Okafor.

Then Dory sat down at the long table, between Mother and Ingrid, and ate four pieces of bread, and went through the whole kitchen with the net, one at a time.

There you are.

There you are.

There you are.

The Sorn are still quiet.

It’s been two months now. The houses don’t speak. The ships are gone. Ithel stands under his points at bedtime and says they’re all still there, the worlds and the lines, and the ships have all gone in toward the middle, where he’s never been.

And the body of the Hungry is out past Caddoc, turning.

Okafor doesn’t write QUIET any more. She’s written something else.

WHERE?

Nobody’s answered it.

Days 5263–5326. Salt.

The Sorn went away: grey ships off the Watch, the Hands pulled in, no Ashen anywhere Tiamat can see. The houses stopped talking to the Overseer. Ithel: the ships have gone home, toward the middle. Okafor: a Sorn that stops is a Sorn planning. Then the body of the Hungry came to Caddoc. Everyone went. Dory said so. She held twelve arches under the salt, then handed them to the smiths when the eastern hollow went, and scattered to the rim. A mile of them to salt in a breath. She asked Risa’s storm, and Risa let her: a column of lightning that put a hole through the sky to Hyrran. An hour. The body turned. Seven hundred and six in the eastern hollow; 340 of the Standing; 912 Hyrrani; 60 of Hearth. Dory: I liked it. What am I? I told her about the sixty-one. Risa: I like it too. Ingrid: don’t go so far you can’t hear your grandmother calling. Dory wrote Okafor’s rule under her line. WHERE?