Scarecrow

Halloway didn’t argue.

I’d like that written down, because she used to. The first time, with the twins, she argued for an hour on the red glass and lost. The second time, with Vessa, she argued for ten minutes and lost faster. This time she came up the hill from the long ward at a run, with Abena behind her carrying the bag, and her sleeves already rolled up, and she found Andraste standing on the glass by the Root arch with one hand on her middle and Holdfast in the other, humming its three notes.

And she said: ”The ridge.”

”The ridge,” said Andraste.

Halloway closed her eyes.

”On Hyrran,” said Andraste, ”a First Blade gives birth standing up. On the ridge. In the wind. With a blade in her hand.” She breathed. Slowly. The way Hana taught her. ”You know that. You’ve been up there three times.”

”I know that,” said Halloway. ”I’ve got the frostbite to prove it.” She opened her eyes. ”I was hoping, just once, you’d want a bed.”

”No you weren’t,” said Andraste.

Halloway looked at her for a long moment.

”No,” said Halloway. ”I wasn’t.”

Kyria came through the arch.

She’d been on Root. At the birthday. She’d gone back to the plains to see the Kasrai off, and Dory had found her and brought her the long way round, and she came through the arch onto the red glass in her armour, with her old blade on her back and her braid down her back, and looked at her daughter. And at Holdfast, humming. And at Halloway.

”Fourth time,” said Kyria.

”Fourth time,” said Halloway.

”She’s wanted it since she was six,” said Kyria. To me. As if I didn’t know. She tells me every time. ”She used to practise. In the snow. Standing up, holding a stick, shouting. Everyone on the ridge thought she was mad. I said she was a First Blade’s daughter.” She came across the glass and put her hand on Andraste’s shoulder. ”And now look. Four.”

”Four,” said Andraste. ”One at a time, this time. Like a sensible person.”

Hana said she’d guard the door.

She’d come down the hill behind Halloway, slowly, because she’s nearly as round as Andraste now and the hill’s steep. She stood at the edge of the red glass with one hand on her own middle and the other on Fen’s head, and listened, and didn’t say anything. The way Hana doesn’t, until she does.

”I’ll guard the door,” said Hana.

Everyone looked at her.

”She guarded mine,” said Hana. To Halloway. ”With Abena. I asked her to, on the roof, years ago, and she stood outside my door all night with a sword and didn’t let anyone in who wasn’t meant to be there. She said nobody on Hyrran had ever asked her to guard a door for a birth before. Only for a battle. She said this would be harder.” Hana breathed. Slowly. ”Three times she’s been up that ridge, and three times I’ve been on the porch with the others, waiting. It’s my turn. I’ll keep the air still round her, so the wind doesn’t get in where it shouldn’t. And I’ll breathe for her.”

”You’re due yourself,” said Halloway.

”I know,” said Hana. ”So I’ll be very careful.”

Halloway looked at Hana for a long time. Then at Andraste. Then at Kyria, in her armour, with the snow from Root’s plains still melting on her shoulders.

Then she rolled her sleeves down. And rolled them back up. And turned round to Abena.

”Get the cold kit,” said Halloway. ”And the furs. All of them. And the big lamp.” A pause. ”And tell Mother Dask to put the kettle on. And then bring the kettle.”

”You say that every time,” said Andraste.

”And every time,” said Halloway, ”I’m glad of the kettle.”

We went through Kyria’s arch an hour later.

All of us. Kyria went first, the way she does, and then Andraste with Holdfast, walking, because she said she’d walk to the ridge or she’d be carried to it over her own dead body, and nobody was going to carry her, and nobody did. Hana beside her. Halloway and Abena with the bags. Then the wives. Luna, Sera with Luka wrapped in furs on his warm slate, Risa, and Aune, who’d never seen a Hyrrani birth, because she married into this house after Vessa, and who had asked Andraste on the red glass, very carefully, whether she was allowed to come.

Andraste had looked at her for a long moment.

”You’re a wife of the house,” said Andraste. ”Of course you come. You have to kneel.”

”Kneel where?”

”You’ll see,” said Andraste.

And the children. Some of them. Corin and Thessaly, who were born on that ridge themselves, and who said they’d go through the arch on their own if they weren’t let, and Corin can, so they were let. Vessa, who was born there too, very quiet, holding Corin’s hand. Tiri, because Corin was going. And Teo, who chose Andraste, and who said a son of the house goes where his mother is, and Andraste said that was Hyrrani and he was right.

The others went with Mother to the big hollow under the ridge. Where the drills used to be. Where Taveth was waiting, with the great iron pot.

I’ll say what the ridge is like at night. I’ve been up it in the dark three times before this, every time like this, and it doesn’t get to be an ordinary place. I don’t think it’s meant to.

It’s very high. That’s the first thing. The ridge on Hyrran is the spine of the whole world, Andraste says, and the place where the First Blades stand is near the top of it. A long flat shelf of black rock, as wide as the long table is long, with the iron sea far below on one side, very dark, moving, and the snowfields going away for ever on the other. There’s nothing over it. Just sky. Hyrran’s sky at night has a great many stars, and the wind comes along the ridge from the north like something that’s been running for a very long time and has nowhere else to go.

There’s an old post at the end of the shelf. Iron. As tall as Andraste. Very worn, at about the height of a hand.

”That’s where we hold,” said Kyria. She says it every time too. She put her own hand on it. On the worn place. ”Every First Blade who’s had a child on the ridge. My mother. Her mother. Me, with Andraste. Andraste with the twins, and with Vessa. You put your blade in your right hand and the post in your left and you stand.” She took her hand away. ”Four hundred years of hands. And now four of hers.”

The Hyrrani came.

They always do. Nobody sends for them. But you can see the ridge from all the forges in the valley, and someone sees the big lamp go up the path, and Kyria’s lamp beside it, and knows what that means.

So they came up the long ridge path behind us in the dark, very quietly. Hundreds of them. With torches. Smiths with their scarred arms, and blade-women, and old men, and children. And they stood along the path below the shelf in a long line, all the way down, in the snow, with the torches. And didn’t come any further.

”They don’t come up,” said Kyria. ”They stand where the First Blade can see them. So she knows the ridge is with her.”

Odra was at the front of them. With her short white hair, and her bare scarred arms in the cold, because Odra says she hasn’t been cold since she was forty. She nodded to Andraste. Andraste nodded back.

That was the one thing that was new. Some of the children in the line had soft ones. Of Andraste. In the torch-light. With little soft Holdfasts stitched to their hands, held up, so she’d see.

She saw. She told me afterwards that was the first time she’d nearly sat down on the ridge.

Kyria’s husbands were at the bottom of the shelf. Where the path comes up onto it. All six of them, in a row. With Taveth at the end, who’d come up from the hollow when the soup was going and left Mother to watch it, which he said she’d been wanting to do for years, so he’d let her.

That’s where the husbands wait, on Hyrran. At the bottom of the shelf. Where they can hear and can’t see. It’s my place too, on the ridge. The bottom step at home, and this, here.

”Go on,” said Kyria. ”You know where.”

So I went and stood with the husbands of the First Blade’s mother at the bottom of the shelf, in the snow, in the dark, with the wind coming along the spine of the world, and waited. The fourth time.

It’s colder than the bottom step. A great deal colder. I write that down every time, and every time it’s true.

Taveth handed me a bowl.

I don’t know where he got it. He hadn’t brought the pot up. He always carries a bowl and a flask on a birth night, in his coat, against his chest, to keep them warm, in case. He said a husband who’s good at nothing should at least be good at being ready.

It was terrible.

”Good,” said Taveth. When he saw my face.

The other five husbands of Kyria’s looked at me. Very tall Hyrrani men, with their braids, and their arms folded, and their faces like the ridge.

”You said it was wonderful,” said one of them. The oldest. ”Didn’t you. Out loud. In front of everyone. Every time.”

”Yes,” I said.

He nodded. Very slowly.

”We all do,” he said. ”Forty years. He doesn’t know.”

”I know,” said Taveth. Not looking round. ”I’ve always known. That’s why it’s wonderful.”

I couldn’t see the shelf. That’s the point of where they put you. But I could hear.

I could hear the wind change. That was Hana. The wind that had been coming along the ridge from the north for as long as anybody had been alive went round the shelf instead. Not stopped. Hana says you can’t stop that wind; nobody can. She just asked it to go round. It went round, on both sides of the shelf, and met again past the post, and went on. And in the middle of it, on the black rock, in a space the size of the long table, the air went still.

I could hear Halloway. Saying things. Short, clear things, the way she does. Breathe. Good. Again. Abena, the lamp. Breathe.

I could hear Abena saying breathe back. Very steadily. Her mother’s voice, nearly.

I could hear Holdfast.

Three notes. Over and over. The two it always hums, and the third, the new one, higher. It never did that for Vessa; Holdfast wasn’t made yet for the twins. Andraste says she’d never heard it either, not once, not in all the years she’s carried it. She says it sounded like a question.

And I could hear Andraste.

She didn’t scream. I want that written down too, because it isn’t what you’d think. She didn’t scream once.

She shouted.

At the wind, I think. At the dark. At the iron sea a long way down. Hyrrani words I don’t know, very loud, very strong, over and over, the way you’d shout at something coming up the slope at you. She shouted all night. Kyria says it’s the old ridge-call, the one the First Blades shout when the line is breaking and they’re telling it not to. She says Andraste was shouting it at the pain. She says the pain didn’t listen, the way pain doesn’t, but Andraste wasn’t shouting so it would listen. She was shouting so it would know she was there.

All along the ridge path below, in the snow, the Hyrrani with their torches shouted it back.

Not loudly. Very low. All of them together. Hundreds of them, in the dark, under her. Every time she shouted it, they answered.

The husbands beside me answered too. Taveth loudest of all, and worst, because he’s good at nothing, including the ridge-call. Nobody minded.

I didn’t know the words. I said them anyway. As near as I could.

It was nearly dawn.

Hyrran’s dawn comes up out of the iron sea. The sea goes grey first, and then silver, and then the light comes along the ridge from the east, very fast, all at once, the way the Aldri jump.

Andraste shouted the ridge-call once more. Louder than all the others. The loudest thing I’ve ever heard come out of a person.

And then something else shouted with her.

Very small. Very loud. From the shelf. Into the wind.

Not crying. I’ve heard a good many first cries now. This wasn’t one. It was a shout. A furious one. As if someone very small had arrived on the top of the world in the middle of the night in the cold and wanted it understood immediately that she objected to all of it.

The husbands stopped answering.

The Hyrrani on the ridge path stopped answering.

Kyria’s oldest husband said a word in Hyrrani, very quietly, under his breath. Taveth told me later it was the word for the ridge itself. He said it’s what you say, on Hyrran, when you hear a thing you’ll never forget.

Then the light came along the ridge out of the sea, all at once, gold and silver, and every torch on the path went pale in it, and from the top of the shelf, Kyria’s voice:

”Lucas. Up.”

I went up.

Andraste was standing.

Still. With her back against the old iron post, and her left hand on it, on the worn place, where four hundred years of hands had held. With Holdfast in her right. Point down on the black rock. Humming three notes very quietly.

And against her chest, inside her coat, wrapped in Kyria’s own fur, with Halloway’s hand under her and Hana’s still air round the both of them like a cupped hand round a match: the girl.

She was very red. She was still shouting. She’d got one hand out of the fur somehow, the way babies get hands out of things, and it was closed. Very tight. Round a fold of Andraste’s coat, right by the strap where Holdfast’s scabbard hangs.

”She’s fine,” said Halloway. Before I asked. She looked like she’d been up all night on a mountain, which she had, and furious, which she was, and very, very happy, which she was trying to hide and couldn’t. ”Andraste’s fine. Everyone’s fine. I’m never doing that again.”

”Yes you are,” said Kyria.

”Yes I am,” said Halloway. ”But I’m going to complain about it.”

I’ll say what Andraste said. When I got to her. When I put my hand on the girl’s head, very gently, the first time.

”Did you hear her?” said Andraste.

”The whole ridge heard her.”

”She shouted it,” said Andraste. ”The call. Did you hear? She came out and she shouted it back.” Her voice wasn’t steady. Andraste’s voice is always steady. It wasn’t steady at all. ”She doesn’t know it yet. She can’t know it. But she shouted it.”

”I heard,” I said.

Andraste looked down at her.

”Good,” said Andraste. Very quietly. To the girl. ”That’s right. That’s how you tell it you’re there.”

Then they knelt.

All of them. On the black rock, in the gold light, with the wind going round them. The way the Hyrrani do it. Luna and Sera and Risa and Hana. Hana slowly, very carefully, with Halloway’s hand on her elbow and Halloway’s face saying if you have yours here too I will never forgive any of you. Sera with Luka in his furs against her, very warm, so the snow round her knees went to water.

And Aune.

She’d been standing at the edge of the shelf all night. Very straight. The way the Aldri stand for important things. She’d watched everything and said nothing, and when the others went down onto their knees in a ring round Andraste and the post, Aune didn’t know what to do. I saw it on her face. The Aldri don’t kneel. Not for anything. Halvane has knelt once in eleven thousand years, Aune says, and that was to the eldest.

Andraste looked at her.

”A wife of the house,” said Andraste.

Aune looked at the ring. At the gap in it. Between Risa and Hana. Where they’d left a space.

She came across the shelf and knelt in it.

Slowly. The way the Aldri do everything. As if it were very important.

”On Hyrran,” said Kyria, ”the First Blade names her children with every wife and husband of the house kneeling round her. So the children know, from the first day, that they have more than one mother.” She looked down at the ring. Five women, kneeling, in the snow, at dawn. And Teo, who’d come up behind them, and knelt at the end without being asked, with his four arms folded. And Corin and Thessaly, beside him. And Vessa, kneeling between them with her face turned to her mother, very still. And Tiri, behind Corin, standing, because she’s Aldri, and then, after a long moment, kneeling.

”This child has six,” said Kyria. ”That’s the most any First Blade’s child has ever had.” A pause. ”She’s going to be very difficult to win an argument with.”

Andraste named her.

On the ridge. At the post. With the sun coming up out of the iron sea and the Hyrrani on the long path below with their torches gone pale, and Odra at the front of them, and the husbands at the bottom of the shelf, and me beside her, with my hand on the girl’s head.

”The girl,” said Andraste, ”is Kyrie.”

Kyria didn’t move.

She’d been standing behind the ring, very straight, in her armour, with her old blade on her back. Her face didn’t change. Kyria’s face doesn’t. It’s the ridge’s face. It didn’t change at all.

”After my mother,” said Andraste. Not looking round. Looking at the girl. ”Who taught me the forms in the snow when I was six. Who never once let me win. Who stood behind me at Holdfast’s forging and at my wedding and on the plateau and every time it mattered.” She breathed. Slowly. ”Who was the best First Blade the ridge has had in four hundred years. Until me.”

Somebody on the ridge path laughed. Very quietly. Odra, I think.

”Kyrie,” said Andraste. ”Not Kyria. Her own. A little different. So she knows she’s named for someone and she gets to be someone too.”

Kyria still didn’t move.

Then she came round the ring. Very slowly. Her armour making the small sounds it makes. And knelt.

Kyria knelt. On the ridge. In front of her daughter at the post.

I’ve never seen it. Nobody has. The husbands at the bottom of the shelf all took a step forward at the same time, without meaning to, like men watching a mountain sit down. Taveth told me afterwards he’d been married to her for longer than most of the people on that ridge had been alive and he’d never once seen her knees touch the ground.

She put out one finger.

The girl, Kyrie, still shouting a bit, very red, let go of Andraste’s coat. And took it.

Very tight.

Kyria looked at the small hand round her finger for a long time.

”On Hyrran,” said Kyria, ”we don’t name a child for the living.” Her voice was very low. ”It’s bad luck. It means you’re waiting for the old one to go.”

”I know,” said Andraste.

”It’s never been done,” said Kyria. ”Not on the ridge. Not once.”

”It has now,” said Andraste. ”I’m the First Blade. It’s a rule.”

Kyria looked at her daughter. Then back at the hand round her finger.

Her face changed.

I’m not going to write how. Kyria wouldn’t like it. I’ll only say that Halloway, who has seen everything, looked away. And Odra, on the path below, turned round to face the iron sea for a while. And Taveth, at the bottom of the shelf, put his hands over his face.

And then Kyria said something to the girl in Hyrrani. Very old Hyrrani, the kind nobody uses now except on the ridge. Andraste told me later what it was. She said it’s what the First Blade’s mother says to a First Blade’s daughter, the morning she’s born.

She said: You’ll want my blade. You can have it when you can take it.

The girl shouted at her.

Kyria laughed. Out loud. On the ridge.

Nobody had ever heard that either.

We came down the ridge in the full morning.

All the Hyrrani on the long path stood aside to let us through. Andraste walked. She wouldn’t be carried, the way she’d said, and she walked down the ridge path with Kyrie inside her coat and Holdfast on her back, and as she passed, every one of them touched their chest, the way the Kasrai do for the queens. Odra last, at the bottom, with her scarred arm across her chest and her face very fierce.

”That’s a loud one,” said Odra.

”Yes,” said Andraste.

”Good,” said Odra. ”The forges like a loud one. They’ll make her a blade before she can walk.”

”They’ll wait,” said Andraste. ”She’ll ask.”

The big hollow under the ridge smelled of bad soup.

Every child who’d come through the arch had been down there all night with Mother, and the great iron pot, and none of them had been frightened, or not very. Mother had kept the soup going exactly the way Taveth told her to. She said she’d done everything right and it had still come out terrible, and she’d finally seen it for herself, and she still couldn’t tell how.

”It’s not the soup,” said Taveth. Coming down the ladder behind us. ”It’s the pot. It’s always been the pot.”

Mother looked at him.

”Forty years,” said Mother.

”Forty years,” said Taveth. Very pleased. ”Don’t tell anyone.”

Sorrel was asleep on Dory’s lap with the soft Scarecrow queen she wasn’t supposed to have. She woke up when we came in and looked at Kyrie, inside Andraste’s coat, still shouting a bit, and said: ”She’s very loud.”

”She’s a First Blade’s daughter,” said Thessaly. Who is one herself, and has always been quiet, and seemed very pleased with her sister for not being.

”Is she going to be a First Blade?” said Fen.

Andraste sat down. Finally. On a bench by the pot. And Kyria sat down beside her, which she also never does, and they both looked at the girl.

”If she wants,” said Andraste. ”If she can take it.”

”She’ll want,” said Kyria.

Then the news went out. The way it does now.

By noon, Ister knew. I don’t know how. Halvane says Aune told Ilas, through the arch, and Ilas told the woman at the eating hall, and the woman at the eating hall told everyone, which is what she’s for. By evening, the keepers of the long record had put it on its own page. Halvane read it to us at the long table the next morning, with Kyrie asleep at last in a basket by Andraste’s chair, because a First Blade brings her children to the long table so they grow up knowing what one sounds like.

Kyrie Dask, the page says. Of Avalon, and of the ridge. Daughter of Andraste, who holds, and Lucas, who asks. Born standing, in the wind. Named for her grandmother, who is living.

And then, under it, in the other hand, the meaning:

One who is named for someone and gets to be someone too.

Andraste said she hadn’t told anyone she’d said that. Aune said she’d told Ilas. Ilas said she’d told the woman at the eating hall. So that was that.

There were three hundred and six Aldri girls named Kyrie by the end of the week.

There were a hundred and ten named Kyria. Halvane says the keepers were very confused and had to write to Imre Oshan to ask which was right. Imre Oshan wrote back and said both. She said one was the grandmother and one was the girl and the parents were entitled to choose whichever they wanted to be like.

The keepers say most of the Kyrias are from families with a lot of daughters. They say, in the meaning, that it’s for a girl who’ll need to win the arguments.

The toymakers sent a letter to the ridge.

To Kyria. Very respectfully. Asking permission. They’d learned, from the queens, that you ask. They said the children of Ister had been asking for a soft one of her for a long time, since the comics, and now there was a granddaughter named after her, and they’d like to make one, if she’d let them.

Kyria wrote back. Taveth carried it down to the arch. It was one line.

Only if it weighs what it should.

The toymakers wrote again and asked what she meant.

Kyria wrote back: A Hyrrani blade weighs what it weighs. If you give a child a soft one of me with a soft blade that weighs nothing, they’ll think a blade weighs nothing. Put iron in the handle.

So the soft Kyria has iron in the handle of her blade.

Only a little. A finger’s worth. Enough that when a child picks her up, they feel it, and say oh, and hold her more carefully.

Halloway tried to ban it from the long ward. She said you can’t give babies a toy with iron in it. Kyria said Hyrrani babies have had iron in their hands since the first one was born on the ridge. Halloway said this was Avalon. Kyria said Avalon would learn.

There’s one in the long ward now. On the shelf. Halloway pretends she doesn’t know who put it there.

That night, on the roof, Andraste couldn’t sleep.

Neither could I. Kyrie could, at last, in her basket by the chimney, with Holdfast leaning against the end of it, humming two notes. The others had gone down. It was just the two of us on the slates, with Avalon’s stars over us, which are not Hyrran’s, and the long table’s lamp still lit below.

”My mother had me alone,” said Andraste.

I didn’t say anything. I waited. You do, with Andraste. She tells you things the way she cuts: once, and all the way through.

”On the shelf,” said Andraste. ”At the post. In the wind. Her mother had died the winter before. Her wives were on the eastern pass, holding it; there was a war on, there’s nearly always been a war on. The ridge path was empty. Nobody came up with torches. Nobody shouted the call back.” She looked at the basket. ”She told me once. Only once. She said she shouted it all night, and the only thing that answered was the wind.”

”I didn’t know.”

”Nobody knows,” said Andraste. ”She doesn’t tell it. She told me when I was twelve, after I lost my first trial, because I was crying, and she said a First Blade cries once and then gets up. And then she told me about the post. And then she said: so you’ll know that whatever happens to you, it’s been worse, and someone got up.”

She was quiet for a long time.

”Every time, I think it’ll be like that,” said Andraste. ”Four times now. I never say so. I go up the path and I think, this time it’ll be the wind. That’s what I get ready for.” She breathed out. ”And every time the path fills up. And tonight Hana sent the wind round. And six of you knelt. And my mother knelt.”

”And laughed.”

”And laughed.” Andraste put her hand over her eyes. ”She’s never laughed in my life, Lucas. Not like that. Not on the ridge.”

I put my arm round her. She let me. She doesn’t always.

”I hope Kyrie wants it,” said Andraste. Into my shoulder. ”The blade. The ridge. All of it.” A pause. ”I hope she wants it more than I did. I hope she wants it so much she can’t think about anything else, and she takes it off me in a fair fight when I’m old, and she’s better than both of us.”

”And if she doesn’t want it?”

Andraste thought about that.

”Then she can make pots,” said Andraste. ”And I’ll say they’re wonderful.”

In the basket, Kyrie stirred. Holdfast hummed its third note, once. She went quiet.

The other things. The way I do.

Kyrie sleeps only if Holdfast is in the room. Andraste found that out on the first night home, when she put Holdfast on its hook in the hall and Kyrie woke up and shouted until she brought it back. Now it leans against the end of the basket. It hums. Two notes, mostly. Sometimes the third. Kyrie goes quiet when it does. Andraste says she’s listening to it the way she’ll listen to her own blade one day. Halloway says she’s a baby and it’s a noise.

They’re both right, I think.

She already turns her head when Kyria comes into a room. Every time. Before anyone’s said Kyria’s name. Mother says she knows the sound of the armour. Kyria says she knows the sound of a First Blade.

Luka is very hot and very quiet and sleeps between his two soft ones. Kyrie is very loud and sleeps beside a sword. Halloway says she’s never had two more different babies in one house, and she’s waiting to see what Hana’s will be, any day now, and she doesn’t want to guess.

Hana says she’s going to have hers in a bed. Like a sensible person. Andraste says that’s fine; she’ll still guard the door.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Two hundred and eighty-one. Wren wrote it at the top of the slate.

The eldest is still thinking about the houses’ question. Dory asked her yesterday. She said she’s never had to decide whether someone deserves a birthday before. She said she’d like to get it right.

No word from Corvan.

The Collective is still considering.

And I’ve started a new list. At the back of the notebook. I don’t know what it’s for yet. It just says, at the top: Kyrie. And under it, one line.

Shouted the ridge-call at the wind on the morning she was born.

I think there’ll be a lot more lines.

Days 9228–9246. Kyrie.

Holdfast hummed three notes on the red glass. Halloway didn’t argue this time: the ridge; I was hoping, just once, you’d want a bed; no you weren’t. Kyria: fourth time; she’s wanted it since she was six. Andraste: one at a time, this time. Hana: she guarded my door with Abena all night; it’s my turn; I’ll keep the air still and breathe for her. Halloway: the cold kit, the furs, the big lamp, and bring the kettle. Aune asked if she might come; a wife of the house; you have to kneel. The ridge at night: the shelf, the iron sea, two moons, the north wind, the old iron post with four hundred years of hands on it, and four of hers. The Hyrrani came up the path, as they always do, with torches and stood where she could see them; Odra at the front; children holding up soft Andrastes. The husbands wait at the bottom of the shelf; colder than the bottom step. Taveth’s bowl from inside his coat; the oldest husband: we all say it’s wonderful, forty years; Taveth: I’ve always known; that’s why it’s wonderful. Hana sent the wind round. Andraste didn’t scream; she shouted the ridge-call all night, and the whole path answered, low. At dawn, out of the iron sea, something very small shouted with her. Up: Andraste standing at the post, Holdfast in her right hand, the girl in Kyria’s fur with her fist in her mother’s coat by the scabbard strap. Halloway: I’m never doing that again; yes I am; I’ll complain about it. She shouted the call back. The wives knelt; Aune, who has never knelt, knelt in the gap they’d left. Teo knelt; Corin, Thessaly, Vessa; Tiri, standing, then kneeling. Kyria: six; the most any First Blade’s child has had; she’ll be difficult to win an argument with. The girl is Kyrie: after my mother; not Kyria; her own, so she knows she’s named for someone and gets to be someone too. Kyria knelt; she took Kyria’s finger; we don’t name for the living; it’s never been done; it has now; I’m the First Blade. You’ll want my blade. You can have it when you can take it. The girl shouted; Kyria laughed out loud on the ridge. Odra: a loud one; the forges like a loud one; they’ll wait; she’ll ask. Taveth to Mother: it’s not the soup, it’s the pot; forty years; don’t tell anyone. The long record: born standing, in the wind; named for her grandmother, who is living; one who is named for someone and gets to be someone too. 306 Kyries, 110 Kyrias, for girls who’ll need to win the arguments. The soft Kyria has iron in the blade’s handle, because a blade weighs what it weighs; there’s one in the long ward. Kyrie sleeps only with Holdfast in the room; she turns her head before anyone says Kyria’s name. A new list at the back of the notebook: Kyrie. Shouted the ridge-call at the wind on the morning she was born.