Scarecrow

I held back on the first day.

I didn’t know I was doing it. I only knew afterward, on the plateau, in the dark, sitting beside Mother with the cup going cold in my hands, going back over the day the way you go over a road you’ve walked to see where you tripped.

The south wall. Forty of the unfinished. I’d been on the plateau when it broke. I’d gone the moment Dory said Dad. And I’d got there, and it had taken me as long as it takes a man to fly across a plain.

A man.

I’d flown like a man. Fast; faster than I’ve ever flown. But like a man. Because that’s what I’ve always been, and I’d never once asked my body whether it still was.

The eldest knew. Of course she did.

Late. When Mother had gone to sleep on the grass with her coat over her and her hand on the big teapot. When Luna was sitting at the edge with her knees up, watching the dark, and the others were asleep, and Dory was asleep against Risa with the net very small and quiet in her.

You held back, said the eldest. Through the ground. Only to me.

“I didn’t mean to.”

I know, she said. You did not know you could do otherwise. You have been a man so long you think it is the shape of you. The ground under me was very still. It is not the shape of you. Not now. It has not been for a long time. The ring told you so.

I didn’t say anything.

I ended worlds once, said the eldest. Before I learned. I told you. I did not tell you how I learned. A long quiet. I learned because a small thing I did not end asked me why I had not. And I did not know. And I had to find out.

“What did you find out?”

That the strength was never the question, said the eldest. Only what it was for. The ground warmed, a little, under my hands. You know what yours is for. You have always known. You are what goes where the wall breaks.

A pause.

Tomorrow, do not hold back, said the eldest. Hold on. They are not the same thing.

Hana was awake. I don’t know when she woke. She was lying on the grass a little way off with her eyes open, looking at me.

She’d heard. Not the eldest. Me.

“If you go too far,” said Hana. Very quietly. So as not to wake anyone. “I’ll breathe your name.”

“I know.”

“You’ll hear it,” said Hana. “Wherever you are. However fast.”

“I know.”

She closed her eyes again. She didn’t go back to sleep. Hana never does, when she’s said a thing like that. She lies there and keeps it.

Dory woke before the light.

She sat up against Risa and opened her black eyes and looked at me across the grass, and I knew she’d heard all of it. Through the net. In her sleep. She hears everything in her sleep now.

She got up and came over and sat beside me. The way she used to on the porch, when she was small and had a question too big for the house.

“The eldest asked me to stand beside her,” said Dory.

“Yes.”

“If I go with you, who holds the net?”

You do, said the eldest. Before I could answer. Out loud, this time; I felt everyone on the plateau stir. You hold it, child. Wherever you stand.

Dory looked down at the grass.

I asked you to come early so the ground would know your feet, said the eldest. It knows them now. It will know them wherever they are. In the air over Ister. Over Avalon’s hollows. On the far side of the sky. The plateau warmed under us. I will hold the net through you, wherever you go. And they will help.

And then, round the foot of the plateau, in the dark, I felt them. The queens. All of them. Lifting their heads.

We have always listened, said the Scarecrow queen. From the foot of the slope. It is the first thing a queen learns. Before she learns to sing.

Go with your father, said the heavy queen. From the Ground, high over us. We will hold the edges.

Dory didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I don’t fly,” she said. In the end. “I scatter.”

Then learn, said the eldest. You have until dawn.

She learned in about four minutes.

I’m not going to make more of it than it was. She stood at the edge of the plateau, with Dusk in her pocket and her black eyes open, and asked the air. The way I taught her to ask a stone. Not carry me. Would you mind if I didn’t fall.

And the air didn’t mind.

She went up about the height of the porch roof. Wobbled. Came down on the grass on her knees. Risa laughed. Dory glared at her. Went up again.

The third time she went up, she didn’t come down.

She hung there over the edge of the plateau in the grey before dawn, very still, with her hair going straight up off her head the way Oona’s does, and looked down at me.

“Oh,” said Dory.

I went up beside her.

“It’s easy,” she said. Very quietly. “Dad. Why is it easy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never known. It was always easy for me too.”

She looked down at the plains. At the white threads and the black in the middle and the queens round the plateau, and the Standing waking up in their lines.

“That’s the bit that scares me,” said Dory.

“Me too.”

“Good,” said Dory. “Keep being scared. So I know it’s all right to be.”

Mother was awake. On the grass, with her coat over her, looking up at us.

“Well,” said Mother. “Don’t stay up too late.”

Tiamat, from the ninth station. Very level.

“It’s moving,” she said. “All of it. All three.”

The body came at all three worlds at once on the second morning.

It had learned. Okafor said so afterward, at the long table. It had come at Root on the first day with most of itself and lost the diggers to the ground and the edge of itself to the threads, and it had sat there all night breathing, and it had learned.

So it split. Not into arms. Into three. A body for each world. Each as big as the sky over it.

“Root,” said Dory. Out loud. Into the net. In the air beside me. Very steady. “Ister. Avalon. All of it at once.” A breath. “It’s not trying to get to her any more. It’s trying to make us choose.”

“Then we don’t,” said Okafor. From the long table. “Whoever’s nearest.”

“Dad,” said Dory.

“I know.”

We went.

I’ll try to write what it was like. I don’t know if I can. Hana says I should try, and that if I can’t, I should write that I couldn’t. So.

I didn’t hold back.

The south end of Root’s plains first. Where the wall broke yesterday. The body was coming down on it again, the new ones dropping out of its underside in sheets, and the unfinished were standing there in their borrowed suits in the same place, because Varra had asked them if they wanted to move and they’d said no.

I thought about being there.

And I was there.

I don’t mean I flew fast. I’d flown fast the day before. I mean I thought about the south end of the plains, and between that thought and the next one, I was over it, and the air behind me was screaming. Tiamat says from the ninth station I wasn’t a shape. I was a line. White. From the plateau to the south wall, drawn faster than the eye could follow.

The ring was right. Halloway was right. The thing I’d been carrying round in me for years, the thing that kept taking a bit of every people I met and keeping it, the queens’ gift, all of it, wasn’t waiting to be asked. It had been waiting for me to stop pretending it wasn’t there.

I stopped pretending.

There were a hundred and twelve of the new ones coming down on the south wall.

I counted. Afterward. Crane had it on the board.

I didn’t ask them anything. I didn’t need to ask. I looked at them, all of them, at once, with my eyes black, down into every plate and every mouth and every cell of every one, down to the bottom where things stop being things. And I saw how they were held together. And I let go of it for them.

They didn’t turn to salt. They didn’t burn. They were there, and then they weren’t, and the air where they’d been rushed in to fill the space with a sound like a door slamming a hundred and twelve times at once.

The unfinished looked up.

The tall one, the one who’d held his hand out to me. He looked up at me in the air over the wall. And put his hand on his chest. And held it out.

I didn’t have time to hold mine out back. I was already somewhere else.

Dory was beside me.

Not behind. Beside. I hadn’t waited for her and she hadn’t needed me to. She’d followed the line I drew through the air the way you’d follow someone down a lit corridor. And she was there, at the south wall, in the air with her hair straight up and her black eyes open, and she looked at the body coming down over the far plains behind the new ones.

And turned a mile of it to salt.

One breath. The way she did on Caddoc. Only on Caddoc she’d had to stand still and gather it, and it had taken everything, and her nose had bled for an hour. Here she didn’t stop moving. She looked, and a mile of the body went white, all along its underside, every flier and digger and plated thing in it frozen in the shape of what it had been, and then it fell. A mile of salt, falling out of the sky over Root’s plains like snow.

And she put her hand up.

And Risa, on the plateau, behind the Mom Squad, said yes before Dory had even asked. And the lightning came down through Dory’s hand. Not one bolt. Not a column. A net. Lightning, spreading out from her hand across the underside of the body like cracks across ice, and everywhere the cracks went, the body came apart along them.

She looked at me. Across the air.

“Again,” said Dory.

We went to Ister.

I don’t know how far Ister is from Root. Tiamat could tell you. Halvane could tell you in his numbers and Bell could tell you in hers. It’s far. It’s a whole world’s road round the sun away. I’d crossed it in Aldri ships in an hour.

I thought about Ister, and it took about as long as it takes to draw a breath.

Dory was a breath behind me. She said so, when we came out over Ister’s gold sky. Out of breath.

“Dad,” she said. “I can’t keep up.”

“You just did.”

“Barely.”

“That’s what keeping up is,” I said. “Your mother says so. Every morning.”

The body over Ister was the smallest of the three. Smaller than yesterday’s arm. But Ister had lost a station already, and the other eight were firing, and their white lines were going into the dark and the dark was closing round them, and the Aldri fighters were going along its edge the way they do, and it was coming down. On the squares. Where a third of the Standing was.

And on the deepest city. Where the engine was.

Halvane was there. In the heart of the city. In front of the engine. He’d said he’d stay with Ister, and he had. Dory said so: “Halvane’s in the engine room. He’s not moving.”

I didn’t let it get near him.

I’m not going to describe what I did over Ister. It was the same thing. Bigger. I went along the whole underside of the body over Ister, from one side of the gold sky to the other, faster than anything Halvane’s people have ever built, and wherever I went, it stopped being there. Dory came behind me with the salt and the lightning. The eight stations kept firing. Aune’s fighters, the ones on Ister, went through the holes we made.

It took about an hour.

At the end of it, the sky over Ister was gold again. With a lot of salt in it, coming down slowly over the squares like the first snow on the north field.

Halvane came out of the engine room onto the steps of the deepest city. And looked up.

He didn’t say anything. He just stood there with his long hands open at his sides and the salt coming down on his face.

Then he bowed. All the way. To Dory.

Dory went very red. You could see it from the sky.

We didn’t stay. We didn’t need to. Dory had the net, and Ister was in it, and the Standing in the squares was in it, and the stations.

“Avalon,” said Dory. “North. Ingrid’s holding it. She’s been holding it for an hour.” A breath. “Dad, she’s tired.”

On the plateau, and then all over Root’s plains, and then on Ister and on Avalon too, my wives and the Mom Squad and Hearth fought together.

I wasn’t with them. That was the point. Okafor’s point. I’m what goes where the wall breaks, and they were the wall, and a wall that moves is the most dangerous thing there is.

I’ll write what they told me, and what Crane had on the board. They stayed together. All day. Not one of them alone for a moment.

Dinraal at the front. In his armour, with the First Weapon enormous beside him, wings out and the cannon on his back firing so steadily that Isolde says it sounded like a clock. Dinraal doesn’t think of the weapons he was taught. He thinks of everything. On the second morning he thought of something I’ve never seen: a gun the length of a station, made of all his silver at once, lying along the air over the plateau. He fired it once. It went through the body over Root from one side to the other, the way his cannon went through the Ashen lid at Isca, and out into the dark beyond, and the dark round the hole it made didn’t close.

Isolde beside him. With her leaves. Thousands of them, out over the plains, each one unfolding into a gun and firing and folding up again. She kept the notebook going, all day, on her knee, in the air. She says it helps.

Luna made the roads. Ice, across the sky, from one fight to the next, so the rest of them could run on air. Sera came down them burning. As hot as a dying star; the hottest thing on Root. She doesn’t say sorry any more when she burns. Bree taught her that.

Hana took the air out of things. Whole swathes of the fliers, in the sky over the south plains: there was air in them, and then there wasn’t, and they fell. And all day, without stopping, she breathed for the Standing. Every one in the lines who was struggling. A little breath, from a long way off.

Andraste with Holdfast. In front of all of them, on Luna’s roads, with the one white ribbon on the hilt. Cutting.

Risa called the lightning. Every time Dory asked for it, and every time she didn’t. She never once let go of the storm.

And Hearth. All of them.

Aurelius with his shield up over the plateau. Gentle; he’s always gentle. The shield was the size of the plateau, and nothing came through it all day.

Rhiannon in her winged dress, behind him, with her crown lit. Giving to everyone. Every one of Hearth’s silver went further for her being there, and so did everyone’s. Sera says her fire felt like it had someone behind it. Luna says her ice didn’t crack once. Rhiannon didn’t fight. She doesn’t. She made everyone else more.

Gilgamesh with his axe, and then his sword, and then a spear as long as a walking engine, and then the axe again, as if he couldn’t decide which he liked best. He brought bread. On the second morning. In a crate nobody asked for. He ate it between swings.

Alexander, with his hundreds of floating blades round him in formation, moving like a flock of birds. Julius with his cloak gone into a field and his short sword gone into light. Discipline. He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to.

Aramaeis, the dragonkin General, in his full silver, which remembers what he is. A dragon. Over the plains, the size of the Long Legs, breathing light. Tiamat, his sister, came down from the ninth station in the afternoon for an hour, the same, and the two of them went across the underside of the body together like the sun going across a field.

Arcturus with his silver wings, linked to every ship there was. Calling them. Every Hearth ship, every Aldri fighter, every ship with a queen in her heart. Left. Up. Now. Like Rowan calls Callum’s turns.

And the Mom Squad, in the middle of all of it.

Mother lifting. Wherever anything fell, she caught it, the way she did yesterday. Only today she wasn’t on the plateau. She was on Luna’s roads with the rest of them, going from fight to fight in her long brown coat, with her hands out, and wherever she went, the new ones came off the ground. A hundred feet up. All their legs going. And then she dropped them, on each other, and Maura glassed them where they landed.

Cleopatra’s field over the Hyrrani. Asha’s instruments, floating, reading everything, talking too fast. Eve telling her to stop. Eve’s spheres going out after everything Asha read.

Teshka beside Kyria, at the front of the Hyrrani, carrying Hyrrani who’d fallen back up the slope with one arm and cutting with the other.

Kyria with her first blade. Cutting doors in the sky so the others could step through from one fight to the next.

Okafor, at the long table on Avalon, made one of the new ones heavy. From there. Through Dory. Through the net. Crane says it fell through the green ground on the east plain so far that the eldest had to bring it back up again, in pieces, a long time later.

Okafor didn’t get up. She just put her hand flat on the table, and somewhere very far away, something got very heavy.

And the queens.

I’ll write the queens properly. Because they asked me to, after. Not for themselves. For the people who’ll come later and won’t know.

Everyone says the queens can break mountains and carry worlds. People say it like it’s a saying. Like strong as an ox.

It isn’t a saying.

The Scarecrow queen broke a mountain.

There’s a range at the far south edge of Root’s plains. Old, very high, with snow on it. The body came down over it on the second morning, because it thought it could come round behind the south wall that way, behind the unfinished, where the wall didn’t go.

The Scarecrow queen put her head down on the plains, at the foot of the plateau, and sang down.

And the range broke.

Not fell. Broke. From the bottom. All of it, all at once, the whole range, the snow and the stone and the roots of it, came up out of Root like a wave comes up out of the sea, and turned over, and came down on the body. On the part of it that had come over the range. Mile after mile.

When the dust settled, there wasn’t a range there any more. There was a plain. A new one. Very flat, very white with the snow, and under it, a whole arm of the Hungry that would never come up again.

The Scarecrow queen lifted her head.

I will put it back, she said. To the eldest. After.

I know you will, said the eldest. You were always tidy.

The heavy queen, in the Ground, made a part of the body heavy.

Not one of the new ones. Not a swarm. A part. A piece of the body over Root as big as Avalon’s smaller moon. All of it, all at once, so heavy that it pulled in on itself, every flier and digger and plated thing in it crushed into every other, smaller and smaller, until it was a ball. Black. The size of a house.

Then she let it go.

It fell into Root’s far moon. The empty one, with nobody on it. And went in. And didn’t come out the other side. Tiamat says it’s still in there. Tiamat says the moon’s a little heavier now, and will be forever, and nobody minds.

The coral queen called the water.

There’s sea under Root’s plains. Deep. Under the green, under the rock, where nobody had ever been. She called it up. All of it. On the east plain, where the body came down thickest after the range broke. A wall of water as high as the plateau, coming up out of the ground. Only it wasn’t water by the time it reached the Hungry. It was coral. Growing. Faster than anything grows. Through them. Round them. Into every mouth and under every plate.

When it stopped growing, there was a reef on the east plain of Root. A mile long. With the body of the Hungry inside it.

It’s still there. The children want to go and see it.

The ash queen, grey and gold, put out the fire.

That’s all she did. I didn’t understand it till after.

When Sera came down the ice roads burning, and Dinraal’s long gun went through the sky, and Aramaeis breathed his light, and Dory’s lightning came down in nets over the plains, the plains caught fire. Root’s green. Under the fight. The whole south half of the plains, burning.

The ash queen put it out. All of it. The fire went into her, the way rain goes into a field, and she took it down into the ground. Where nothing could be hurt by it. And the next time one of the new ones came down on the south plains, the ground under it was hot. Not burning. Hot. The way a forge is hot. And the new one went into it, slowly, like a foot into mud, and the ash queen closed the ground over it, and the fire she’d taken down did the rest.

The moss queen grew.

Over the walking engines’ legs, where they stood on the plains, so that when the new ones came against them, the moss held the engines up. Over the Standing’s lines, so the soldiers had something soft to fall on. Over every hole the fight made in Root’s green, so that by the afternoon the plains under the fight were greener than they’d been at dawn.

And over the new ones. Where they came down. Very fast. Very thick. Up their legs and over their plates and into their mouths, until they couldn’t move, and then until they couldn’t breathe, and then until they were hills. Green ones. With small white flowers on them.

The reed queen, riding on her back, still small, sang the reeds up out of the moss. Round the hills. Very high. Very sharp. One of the fliers came down on her. Straight at her, out of the sky, the way they dive. She didn’t move. She just sang a little louder.

It came down on a reed as tall as a tree. And stayed there.

The reed queen looked up at it. Very small. Very pleased with herself.

Mine, said the reed queen. The moss queen says she’s been saying it ever since.

Our queen, from the roots, the oldest one under the house, held a moon.

The body tried to take one. On the second morning. Root’s nearest moon, the one the brightest thread goes up to, where the Aldri put an engine in, just in case. The body went round it, the whole north part of the body, and closed on it like a hand closing on an apple, and pulled.

You could see the thread go tight. White. Humming. Pulling Root’s sky out of shape.

Our queen from the roots put her head down. At the foot of the plateau. Beside the Scarecrow queen.

And held.

The moon didn’t move. The thread didn’t break. The body pulled on that moon for an hour, all of the north part of it, and our queen held it there, in its place in the sky, the way Mother holds the porch up at the turn. Not straining. Not hurrying. Holding.

Until the body let go.

Then she lifted her head. And hummed. The note she hums at night through the floor of my room.

I heard it from the far side of the sky.

The first queen did the cleverest thing anyone did all day.

But I’ll write that when it comes. It comes with the Sorn.

The Sorn came in the afternoon.

The Overseer said they’d wait for whatever was left. For everyone to be tired.

They didn’t wait long.

Dory said it first. In the air over Root’s east plain, where the reef was. Very fast.

“Grey ships. Coming in. Root, the far side. Hands with them. A lot.” A breath. “And Ashen. Dad. The Ashen are here.”

I’d never seen so many.

The finished grey ones came out from behind the body in a long line. Not swaying. Never swaying again; those were the ones the houses had taken the whole stock to make. Thousands of grey ships. With the Hands round them, the old Sorn ships, the way the Hands have come over every world I’ve ever seen taken.

And behind them, very high, the Ashen.

A thousand ships. More. The way they came over Isca. Holding the sky. And under them, coming down, slow, the Ashen wave.

They thought we were tired.

We were. Holt was so grey on the first evening that Hana checked him twice. Ingrid had been holding the north of Avalon for hours. Dory’s nose had bled twice already since dawn, and Risa had nothing left of her sleeve.

But the Overseer was right about the other thing too.

They’d never waited for anyone with a teapot.

The Hands came first.

They came the way Hands always come. Across the dark. Not through it; across it, the way a stone skips across water, from one side of the sky to the other without going through the middle. That’s how they’ve always come over worlds before anyone could get ready. It’s how they came over Ebbery at dusk.

The first queen knows how a Hand crosses the dark. She taught Aster. A long time ago, in the hollow, she showed her; it was the first thing she ever taught anyone.

So when the Hands crossed, on the second afternoon, toward Root, toward the plateau, toward her mother, the first queen put her head down to the ground.

And moved the other side.

I don’t know how else to say it. A Hand crosses the dark from here to there. It knows where there is. The first queen moved where there was. Just a little. Just enough.

So every Hand that crossed the dark toward Root, on the second afternoon, came out of the crossing in the middle of the body of the Hungry.

I saw it happen. From the air over the east plain.

The Hands vanished from the edge of the sky. All of them. And a moment later, all along the body of the Hungry, there were Hands. Inside it. Hundreds of them. Coming out of the dark into the middle of the thing they’d been using for twenty years to clear the worlds before them.

The body ate them.

It didn’t take long.

The first queen lifted her head. And looked at me. Across the sky.

She was a good student, said the first queen. Aster. Tell her. Her lights will go up.

The grey ships came in anyway.

The Overseer was on the far edge of the green, with Holt, with the cap off. He saw them coming. He said afterward he’d known every one. Their shapes. How they’d turn.

He told Dory. Dory told everyone. Every turn every grey ship was going to make, said out loud on the net before it made it, in the Overseer’s voice, very quiet, through Dory’s.

“That one goes left. That one goes under. That one’s going for the plateau. They always go for the plateau.”

Aune’s fighters were there before the grey ships got anywhere. Every time.

And the Ashen wave came down.

Over Root. Over the far plains, where the body was. Over the queens round the plateau. Over the plateau itself.

The Ashen wave ends things. That’s all it does. It ended the Hungry over Isca. It ended the grey ones in the cave on Hyrran. It ended Holdfast’s first test, nearly. It came down over Root slowly, the way it always comes, like dusk coming down a valley, and wherever it touched, things stopped.

It touched the body of the Hungry first. And the body stopped, where it touched.

And then it came on. Toward the queens.

I was over the east plain.

I thought about the plateau, and I was there. In front of the wave. Between it and the Scarecrow queen.

And so was Andraste. With Holdfast. On Luna’s last road, at the edge of the plateau, with the one white ribbon on the hilt and Corin’s door open in the middle of the blade.

And so was Dinraal. With the long gun.

And so was Dory.

Andraste put Holdfast up into the wave.

The way she did on Hyrran. The way Corin made it to do. The wave hit the blade and went through the door in the middle of it, and came out somewhere else, and Andraste says she doesn’t know where, and Corin says he doesn’t either, only that it’s away.

It took a lot of the wave. Not all of it. The wave’s as wide as the sky.

Dinraal fired the long gun up through what was left. Into the Ashen ships. A hole in the wave you could have put the plateau through. And out the other side, and into the nearest Ashen ship. And the Ashen ship came apart, very slowly, high over Root, like a cloud coming apart in the wind.

And I went up through the hole.

I’d never been near an Ashen ship. Nobody has. Not and come back. Not till Andraste cut one in half on Hyrran with Holdfast.

I went up through the hole Dinraal’s gun made in the wave, faster than the wave could close. And came out above it. Among them. A thousand Ashen ships, more, high over Root, holding the wave.

I looked at them. All of them. With my eyes black.

Down into them. Into whatever they’re made of. It isn’t like anything. It isn’t the grey and it isn’t the silver and it isn’t iron or stone or anything on Grandad’s wall. It’s like the place in the middle where the hand is. Like nothing that’s been made to look like something.

But it was held together. Everything is.

I let go of it for them.

Not all at once. I couldn’t. There were too many and they were too strange, and every one was like learning a new language from the first word.

But one. And then the next. And the next. Faster. Each one easier than the last, because each one taught me the next, the way Bell’s wall taught me iron and then silver and then the empty square at the end.

They didn’t come apart slowly, like the one Dinraal hit. They went. Like the new ones over the south wall. There, and then a space, and the air rushing in.

Ten. Fifty. A hundred.

The wave over Root began to thin.

And Dory came up after me.

Through the same hole. Out of breath. With her nose bleeding and her black eyes open and her hair straight up. She looked at the Ashen ships. And at me.

“Dad,” she said. “Show me.”

I didn’t have time to show her. So I just did it. Next to her. Slowly, for once. One ship. So she could see.

She watched.

And then she did the next one.

We did it together. For an hour. Over Root, among the Ashen ships, with the wave thinning under us and the queens singing under that and Dinraal’s long gun coming up through the holes. Over Ister, after; they’d put a lid on Ister’s gold sky, the way they did over Isca, and the Aldri stations couldn’t fire through it, and we took the lid off. Over Avalon, last. Over the north. Where Ingrid had been holding for hours.

I’ll write Avalon properly. Because of where the children were.

The Ashen came over Avalon on the second afternoon with the rest. Over the north. Down toward the hollows. The arm of the body that had come round the sun the long way on the first day was still there, over the north, above the clouds, where Ingrid had kept it all night. And the Ashen came down over it, and the Hands with them, and the grey ships, all at once.

And in the hall under the house on the rise, Vessa woke up.

Trevor told me. She sat up in the heap. Between Corin and Thessaly. And turned.

Not east, toward Root. North. Toward the Ashen.

She hasn’t turned toward them in two years.

Trevor says Corin woke up when she turned. And looked at her. And took her hand. And hummed, very quietly. Two notes.

Vessa kept turning. North. But she held Corin’s hand.

Ingrid was over the hollows. Still. She’d been there since Tiamat said it’s here, the day before. She’d hushed the arm. She’d held it. All night. And when the Ashen came down over the north on the second afternoon, she was the first thing they met. The way the arm had met her.

She hushed them.

She says she doesn’t know if it worked. She says the Ashen wave doesn’t make a sound for her to stop. But she says, for a moment, over the north of Avalon, the wave stopped coming down.

Just for a moment.

Long enough.

“Dad,” said Dory. Over Ister, with the lid coming apart round us. “Avalon. Ingrid. Now.”

I thought about the house on the rise.

I came out over the north of Avalon with Dory a breath behind me, and the first thing I saw was Ingrid.

In the air. Over the town. Over the hall. With her arms out. With the Ashen wave over her, very close, stopped, and the Hands behind it, and the grey ships, and the arm of the body over all of it. And Callum beside her, with Rowan calling the turns, and the Avalon third of the Standing on every roof on the north side firing up, and the Aldri stations round Avalon firing, and none of it enough.

And Ingrid holding the wave. Alone.

Not alone. Konrad says he was on the step the whole time with the sheet, writing. He says he wrote her name over and over down the margin, the way he wrote still out, so she’d know someone was.

She saw me come.

She didn’t say anything. She just let her arms down. Very slowly. The way you put down something heavy when someone takes the other end.

I took it.

I’m not going to write all of it. It was the same as Root. And Ister. Bigger, because it was home, and because I could feel the hall under the house and every child in it, and Vessa turning, and Corin humming.

I’ll say that Dory and I went up through the wave together. And the Ashen over Avalon went the way the ones over Root had gone. Faster. Because we’d learned.

I’ll say that the Hands over Avalon tried to cross the dark away from us, when they saw what was happening, and came out of their crossing in the middle of the arm. Because the first queen had followed us. Through the net. From Root. And moved the other side again.

I’ll say that the grey ships over Avalon turned to go, and Aune’s fighters were in front of them before they turned, because the Overseer had told Dory which way they’d go.

And I’ll say that the arm, the one that had come round the sun the long way, the one Ingrid had held above the clouds for a day and a night, came apart over the north of Avalon in the late afternoon in a net of lightning and a mile of salt and a great deal of nothing at all, and fell into the northern sea.

It never got lower than the clouds.

Ingrid came down on the porch.

She just sat down. On the top step. On the left end, where Oona sits. Oona moved over for her without being asked.

Konrad came up the steps from wherever he’d been and sat down beside her. With the sheet. He didn’t say anything. He just put it on her knee so she could see. Her name. All the way down the margin. Two hundred and eleven times.

Ingrid looked at it for a long time.

“You missed one,” she said. Pointing. A space between two of them.

“You’d stopped the wave,” said Konrad. “I was watching.”

In the hall under the house, Vessa stopped turning.

Trevor says she turned back. East. Toward Root. Toward us. And closed her eyes. And went back to sleep holding Corin’s hand.

Corin kept humming.

We went back to Root at dusk.

The body was still there. Smaller. A lot smaller; Tiamat says a third of what came over the edge of the Watch is salt or nothing or under a new plain or inside a moon or inside a reef. But still there. Over the far side of Root. Breathing. Still enough of it to cover the sky from one side to the other.

The grey ships had pulled back. Behind it. Fewer. The Hands were gone; all of them. The Ashen were gone too. Not gone. Pulled back. Tiamat counted. Four hundred and nine Ashen ships, high, very far off, at the edge of the Watch. Out of reach.

For now.

Crane’s board, at dusk. I’ll write it short.

On Ister, three hundred and six of the Standing, and nineteen Aldri fighters. On Root, seven hundred and forty of the Standing, and thirty Kasrai, and a hundred and eighty Hyrrani, and nine smiths who were inside the leg of a walking engine when the new ones brought it down on the east plain, before the coral queen’s reef reached it. Tavvan was on its knee. He got off. The smiths didn’t.

On Avalon, eleven of the Standing on the north roofs. And four of Callum’s patrol.

Not one of the hollows. Not one child.

Not one queen.

Crane put the markers out. All of them. He’s going to need another board.

I came down on the plateau last.

Everyone was there. My wives. Dinraal and Isolde. The Mom Squad. Hearth. Gilgamesh, eating. Holt sitting on the grass with the Overseer and the dog, and the cap between them on the grass, upside down, like a bowl.

Dory came down a breath behind me. And her legs went.

Risa caught her. Of course. She’d been waiting at the edge of the plateau with her arms out since Dory left it at dawn. Dory went down into her and stayed there.

“Mum,” said Dory. Into Risa’s shoulder. Very muffled. “I’m saying.”

“I know you are,” said Risa.

“I’m saying it was easy,” said Dory. “It was so easy.”

Risa held her.

“It wasn’t easy,” said Risa. “Your nose bled four times. I counted.” She put her hand on the back of Dory’s head. “It was easy for the bit of you that’s a queen. The rest of you is my daughter, and it was very hard for her.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

Then she laughed. Into Risa’s shoulder. Very tired.

“That’s a Gran thing to say,” said Dory.

“I know,” said Risa. “I’ve been practising.”

Mother poured.

The first cup out on the green ground for the eldest. The second for Dory, who was still in Risa’s arms and drank it there. Then everyone.

She looked at me over the pot when she got to me.

“Well,” said Mother. “Was that you not holding back?”

“Yes.”

She poured my cup. Very full.

“Hm,” said Mother. “Your father would’ve liked to see that.”

“He’d have said I was showing off.”

“Yes,” said Mother. “And then he’d have asked you to do it again, slowly, so he could see how.”

At the turn, Mother looked west.

Dory didn’t have to tell her this time. She knew.

On Avalon, at the top of the hill, on the porch where Ingrid was still sitting with Konrad’s sheet on her knee, a small girl in a long brown coat put her hands flat on the boards.

And lifted it.

The whole porch. A finger’s width. With Ingrid on it, and Konrad, and the sheet.

Ingrid told me after. She said she’d never once in her life been lifted by anyone. She said it felt like being a cup in someone’s hand.

“There she is,” said Mother.

I sat at the edge of the plateau when the others were asleep. With Dory, who wasn’t asleep, and wasn’t in Risa’s arms any more, and was sitting beside me with her knees up the way Mother sits, looking at the dark over the far side of Root.

“It’ll come again tomorrow,” said Dory.

“Yes.”

“And the four hundred and nine.”

“Yes.”

“And the grey ones.”

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a while.

“Same time tomorrow, then,” said Dory.

I looked at her. Seventeen and a half. Looking twenty. With her black eyes open and her nose finally stopped and her hair, for once, lying down.

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“I know,” said Dory. She leaned on my shoulder. “I’m saying.”

Day 7043. Everywhere.

I held back on the first day and didn’t know it. The eldest: don’t hold back; hold on; they’re not the same. Hana: if you go too far, I’ll breathe your name. Dory: if I go with you, who holds the net? You do, wherever you stand; we have always listened. She learned to fly in four minutes: would you mind if I didn’t fall. Why is it easy? Keep being scared, so I know it’s all right. Mother: don’t stay up too late. It split into three, to make us choose; Okafor: then we don’t. I thought about the south wall and I was there; Tiamat says I was a line. A hundred and twelve, let go. The tall one held his hand out. Dory: a mile of salt, and Risa’s lightning in a net; again. Ister in a breath; Halvane in the engine room; it was gold again by the end, and he bowed to Dory. The wall that moved: Dinraal’s long gun, Isolde’s leaves and notebook, Luna’s roads, Sera burning, Hana breathing, Andraste cutting, Risa’s storm; Aurelius’s shield, Rhiannon making everyone more, Gilgamesh eating, Alexander’s flock, Julius, Aramaeis and Tiamat like the sun across a field, Arcturus calling. Mother on the roads, lifting; Maura glassing; Okafor made one heavy from the long table. The Scarecrow queen broke a mountain range and turned it over: I’ll put it back; you were always tidy. The heavy queen crushed a piece the size of a moon into a house and dropped it into the empty moon. The coral queen called the sea under Root and grew a reef through them. The ash queen took the fire down and cooked them in it. The moss queen made them hills with white flowers; the reed queen: mine. Our queen from the roots held a moon for an hour. The first queen moved the other side, and every Hand came out inside the body; Aster was a good student; tell her. The Overseer called every grey turn through Dory. The Ashen wave: Holdfast took it through Corin’s door; Dinraal shot a hole; I went up through it and let them go, one and the next, each one teaching me the next; Dory: show me. Isca’s lid off Ister. Vessa turned north for the first time in two years, and held Corin’s hand. Ingrid held the wave alone till we came; Konrad wrote her name two hundred and eleven times; you missed one. The arm fell into the northern sea; it never got lower than the clouds. A third of it gone; four hundred and nine Ashen at the edge; the Hands all gone. Crane needs another board; no hollows, no children, no queens. Dory: it was so easy; Risa: easy for the queen, hard for my daughter; that’s a Gran thing to say. Mother: your father would’ve asked you to do it again, slowly. Oona lifted the porch with Ingrid on it: like being a cup in someone’s hand. Same time tomorrow. I’m saying.