Scarecrow

Sallow went on the lowest day of the river.

Orra rowed out that morning the way she always does. Same boat, same oars, same landing girl in the bow with her soft Dot, same slow brown water. The grey survey ship hadn’t come back since the morning it hung over the widest river and the engine went quiet. Asha’s little post past Sallow’s star had heard nothing for nine days. Aune and her four were still on the far side of the moon, watching.

Halvane was on the landing. Bell was on the landing. Brom’s mother was on the landing with her blue hand flat on the planks. The five thousand were under the river, singing, the way they’ve sung every night since they came, and the fish had come to listen the way they always do, and they hung there in the brown water in their thousands with their mouths open.

Dory and I stood at the end of the landing, where Halvane sat with his legs over the water the first day.

“Now?” said Orra, from the boat.

She’d been told the night before. All of it. The engine under the riverbed, and the song, and the queen under the widest river who had listened to her people talking in their boats for longer than they’ve had boats. Dory told her, on the landing, sitting on the planks with a cup. Orra had listened all the way through without saying anything. Then she’d poured her cup into the river, slowly, so the river would know.

“She’s been there the whole time?” she said.

“The whole time.”

“Listening to us.”

“Every night.”

Orra had looked at the water for a long time. Then she’d said, “Well, I hope we were interesting,” and gone home to bed. Wren says that’s the most Sallow thing anyone’s ever said.

So in the morning she was in the boat, and the landing girl was in the bow, and Dory put her hand on the planks and asked.

The river went still. Not quiet. Still. Every ripple on it, all the way to both banks, stopped where it was, as if somebody had told it a secret.

Then the song under the river got louder, and the five thousand sang it, and the queen under the widest river sang it with them, and the landing girl in the bow sang it too, without knowing any of the words, and Sallow went.

There wasn’t a sound. Lantern made a sound. Thole made a sound like the whole world taking a breath. Sallow didn’t. Halvane had done it properly this time, not by the width of a breath, and the river just slid, very gently, from one sun to another, the way Orra’s boat comes into the landing.

The sky went from Sallow’s pale old white to gold.

The new sun is on our side of the Watch, a long way in, two arches past Tiel. Warm and yellow and not very old. Bell chose it nine months ago and checked it nine times.

The landing girl looked up at it and said, “Oh,” very softly. And then, because she’s nine and because she’s from Sallow, she said, “Is it always going to be this hot?”

“Yes,” said Orra. “Get used to it.”

Then Orra did a thing I don’t think anyone had told her to do. She took the cup out from under her seat, the one she uses for landings. She leaned over the side of the boat, filled it from the river, and poured it slowly back in.

“There,” she said, to the water. “You’re somewhere warm.”

Dory said the river under the boat went warm all the way to the bottom. She said the queen under the widest river didn’t say anything at all, for a long time. And then she said, very quietly, the way you’d say it if you’d waited your whole long life and never thought it would happen,

Again, please.

So Orra poured another one.

The eater came to Sallow’s old sun on the day Bell said it would. Not a day sooner. Nobody had pulled it. It took the sun the way they always do, slowly, from the edge in, and there was nothing round it. Nothing at all. Just an empty place where a slow brown world used to go round.

Asha’s post heard the Collective’s survey ship come back eleven days after. It hung in the dark where Sallow used to be for a whole day. Then it went home.

We don’t know what it said when it got there. But the soft ferry-woman in the brown boat went on sale the same week. Imre Oshan had had her ready for months. The card on her says She came early. Forty thousand went in the first three days.

Orra’s been sent one. She keeps it on the landing, on the post where she ties up. She says it’s a terrible likeness. She says her nose isn’t that big. Her nose is exactly that big.

The Collective spoke on the twentieth day after Sallow.

It came on every band at once. All of them, even the old ones that only Ilka and the Ister listeners still keep open. Dory heard it before the band did, the way she does. She came into the kitchen with her hand still flat from the glass and said, “They’re going to say something. All of them. All together.”

It was the Assize. The white hall, the long table, the Assessors in a row, the Prime in the middle. He looked younger than he did in the square. He looked very well. He looked like a man who doesn’t bleed in the mornings.

He read it himself.

The Collective of the Bright Reach, he said, was proud, after long and careful talks, to welcome into its family a new people. An ancient people. A people who had been wronged, and hunted, and driven into the dark by the man on the hill. A people whose great age and wisdom would add lustre to the Reach for ten thousand years.

The Houses of the Deep, he called them.

The Sorn.

He said they were a protected people now. That any harm done to a house would be harm done to the Collective. He said that, in gratitude for their friendship, the Assize had given the Houses a home: the inner world of Velle, in the heart of the Reach, among the gardens. And that the citizens of Velle had been honoured, honoured, to make room.

He said the Houses would be given a regiment of the Refined, for their protection. To go where they wished. To do as they asked.

Then he smiled. And all down the long white table, the Assessors smiled with him, one after another, like lamps being lit in the wrong order.

The band went quiet.

Nobody in the kitchen said anything. Mother put the kettle on, which is what she does when she wants to stop her hands doing anything else.

It was Kesh who said it, in the end.

“How many people live on Velle?”

Mara Quell knew. Mara Quell always knows. She looked it up anyway, on the old list, so she’d be sure.

“Lived,” she said. “About three million.”

“Where did they go?”

Mara took her spectacles off.

“It doesn’t say.”

The two houses had heard it. Through the eldest, who hears everything that comes in on a band that touches her, which is all of them.

We went up to the plateau that night. The Overseer came, with his cup. He doesn’t miss dusk now, and it was nearly dusk.

“Good evening,” said the first house. It’s learning evening as well as morning. It says evening a little more carefully, as if it’s afraid it might be wrong about the dark coming. It never is.

“Good evening,” said the Overseer. Then: “You heard.”

“We heard.”

“Velle.”

The two notes went back and forth, the way they do when they’re talking to each other first.

“It is a good world,” said the second house. “Old. Deep. Very warm under the gardens. We knew it a long time ago. We wanted it a long time ago.”

“And the queen?” said Dory.

The deepest crack went quiet.

“She is there,” said the first house, finally. “Under the gardens. They are in her rock now. All of them. All the ones who went. Very close.”

“Will they hurt her?”

“Not yet,” said the second. “They are very good at not yet.”

“And the regiment?”

That one, the first house answered at once.

“They will be told,” it said. “Every day. What to do. Where to go. Which queen.” A pause. “The Refined have never been told anything by anyone but themselves. They will not like it. They will do it anyway. Because the man said so.”

“And because the voice is in him,” said Dory.

The two houses didn’t answer that. They don’t, when it’s true and they wish it wasn’t.

The Overseer drank from his cup. It was cold by then. He didn’t seem to mind.

“Thank you,” he said. “For telling us.”

“Good evening,” said the first house again, because it had run out of other things it knew how to say, and because it was still evening, and because, Dory says, it wanted to be sure he knew it meant it.

Mattick came back the next week, with a crate of iron bells sold and a band-thin packet tied to the bottom of an empty one with Sorrel’s bootlace.

Corvan. Not the word. Just a line.

Four of the nine asked. It went. They’re alive. They can’t do anything at all. They cry a great deal. He had the other five moved somewhere I can’t find. I read hers to them myself. Tell her. C.

Dory read it to Lio on Sefa’s terrace, in the late sun.

Lio didn’t say anything. She took the paper and read it herself, twice, the way she reads everything twice now. Then she folded it very small and put it in her pocket, next to the place the warm pebble used to be before she gave it to the houses.

“Four,” she said.

“Four.”

“He read it to them himself.”

“He did.”

Lio looked down the hill a long time.

“I’d like to meet him,” she said. “When it’s over. Whatever over is.”

Sorrel’s wrist now says C, and Y, and a small round pebble, and under the pebble a 4.

I’ll tell you about the frames now. I’ve put it off long enough.

It started a week after Velle. One queen. Then two in the same month. Then they stopped coming one at a time.

The Collective has always taken queens. You’ll know that. Three thousand six hundred and twelve, Mara Quell counted for the Assize, and that was only the ones in the Collective’s own books. The Refined took them slowly, over thousands of years, a few at a time, and kept the empty ones on frames because it’s respectful.

They aren’t slow any more.

The regiment goes where it’s told. It’s told every day. And every day the Houses of the Deep send it somewhere new: a world on the edge of the Reach, a world in good standing that’s been in good standing for three thousand years, a world that’s never done anything but pay its tithe and keep its head down. The ships come out of the dark. The Refined come down. And the queen under that world comes up into the light on a frame, in a collar, with something already drinking.

We don’t know what the Prime wants with them. Not exactly. The two houses think he’s looking for one that’ll give. Freely. The way the eldest said. Silver that knows where it is. He thinks if he takes enough of them, one of them will love him.

That’s what Dory thinks, anyway. Dory says that’s the only way she can make it make sense.

The queens call the eldest. Every one of them, now. They’ve all heard. Thole’s queen called first, and every queen since has known that you can.

And when they call, we go.

Dory and I. Up the thread, the two of us, scattered, the way Dory first did it on the twelve hills. Sometimes with Andraste and Kyria behind us. Sometimes with Aune and the new Cerens coming through the arch after. Most of the time, just the two of us, because by the time anyone else is ready to come, it’s over.

I won’t tell you all of them. There’ve been too many, and they run together, the way the bad nights in the early years run together, and I’d get the order wrong.

But I’ll tell you some.

On Ammet, which is a world of red dunes and very deep wells, the regiment had a queen half out of the sand when we came down. Twelve Refined round her, in their white, and the frame already up, and the collar already on. Dory asked the collar open. I asked the twelve Refined to be air.

That’s all. I asked the air they were standing in if it wouldn’t mind being all there was, and it didn’t mind, and so it was. There was nothing left of them. Not even the white.

I want to be honest about that. I don’t feel anything about it, when it’s happening. I feel it afterwards. Hana says that’s the right way round.

On Pell’s Reach, which isn’t named after Juno whatever she says, they had the queen all the way out and on the frame, singing in the collar, and the people of Pell’s Reach were standing round the edge of the square in their thousands with their hands over their mouths. Not one of them had known she was there. Dory took her down. The people came across the square one at a time, very slowly, to touch the frame where she’d been. An old man put his hand on the ground where she’d gone back in and kept it there until the sun went down.

On Isk, a cold world all mountains, there were forty of them. The regiment came in force, because Isk is near the edge of the Hedge and they wanted to be seen doing it. Forty Refined, and six ships. I stood in the snow and asked the six ships to stop being anything, the way I did at the Watch, and then I asked the forty, and Dory got the queen down, and an Isk girl with a soft Taveth tied to her rucksack came out of the snow and said, very matter-of-fact, “You’re him.”

“I am.”

“You’re smaller.”

Everybody says that. I’ve stopped minding.

And on Tirr, we were late.

I want to be careful about Tirr. I want to put it down right.

Tirr’s queen called on a night when we were already on Ammet. Dory heard her, on the way back down the thread, and turned straight round, and I went with her, and we were there in the time it takes to say it.

It wasn’t fast enough.

The queen had been on the frame eleven days. The regiment had come and gone. The Refined had drunk what they wanted and left her up there in the collar, singing, the way they leave all of them, because it’s respectful, and gone home.

And Tirr had been eleven days without her.

“Without a queen,” the Refined told me once, at the beginning, “a world doesn’t keep its people very long.”

It hadn’t.

The air was wrong. The water was wrong. The ground had gone thin, Dory said, as if it had stopped believing in itself. The people of Tirr had been trying to leave for ten days. Some of them had ships. Most of them didn’t.

Dory got the queen down. She’s alive. Queens don’t die, not if you get there at all, and we got there. She’s under the red glass now, on Avalon, with Arreth and Ysse and the others, and she hums.

But a great many of Tirr’s people didn’t wait for us. They couldn’t. And a great many of the ones who’d stayed were too ill by the eleventh day to stand.

We brought out everyone we could. Hana came. Halloway came, and every one of her people, and they worked through the arch for nine days without sleeping. Odra’s smiths built stretchers out of Tirr’s own iron in the square.

It wasn’t enough. It was a great deal, and it wasn’t enough.

I said I’d put it down right, so I’ll say it. Tirr had a little over a million people when the regiment came. About four hundred thousand came through the arch.

Mother came down to the plain the night we brought the last of them. She went along the lines of beds with her small iron pot and she said every name the Tirr people would tell her. All night. She didn’t stop. Wren came behind her with the slate and wrote them down. All of them, the ones who’d come and the ones who hadn’t. She said the Tirr people should have both.

Konrad started a new sheet. At the top it says Tirr. Under it there are two columns. He hasn’t finished writing either.

That’s how it’s been since Velle. That’s what the Houses of the Deep are for.

Dory sleeps in her clothes now, more nights than not. So do I. Mother keeps two plates warm on the back of the stove at every meal, with a cloth over them, and she’s stopped asking when we’ll be in. She just puts them there.

Hana says I’ve lost weight. Risa says Dory has. Luna says the pair of us look like a set of soft ones somebody’s left out in the rain.

Corin asked me, one night when I came in late and sat down by the stove without taking my coat off, whether I was cross.

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“You’ve got your cross face.”

“That’s my tired face.”

He thought about it.

“They’re the same face,” he said.

He’s not wrong. He climbed into my lap, which he’s much too big for now, and went to sleep there, and I sat with him until the fire went down, and that helped more than anything has helped in a long time.

The worlds know.

That’s the thing that’s changed most, this season. Not the frames. The worlds.

Every world in the Reach heard the Prime say the Houses of the Deep. Every one of them knows what the Sorn are. They know what happened on One, because a thing like that doesn’t stay in one place. The room under the building, the twelve spokes, the collars. The Word’s gone out from Mattick’s ramp to three hundred worlds. And they’ve watched, this season, while the regiment went to world after world in good standing and came home with a queen.

So they’ve started to leave.

Not one at a time. Not quietly, the way Sallow did, at night under a river. They leave in daylight, on every band, with their names on it.

Ammet left the week after we brought its queen down. Pell’s Reach the month after. Isk asked the Table to have them before we’d even got back to the arch, and the Isk girl with the soft Taveth came to the Table with her grandfather to do the asking.

And then the big ones started to come.

I’d never heard of Marrach before this year. I’m not sure why. It’s the biggest shipbuilding world in the Reach. Nine hundred million people, and yards round the whole of its equator, and every white ship the Refined ever sent to the Watch had a keel laid on Marrach.

They came to the Table in the spring. Three of them. A woman from the yards with burned forearms, like the Kiln smith’s. A young man who carried their papers. And Tavish Orne, who is the First of Marrach’s yard-guilds, and who is the most persuasive man I have ever met in my life, including Iolo, and including the Prime.

He doesn’t look persuasive. He looks like somebody’s uncle. He’s round and bald and he wears a coat with too many pockets, and he speaks slowly, and he never once raises his voice.

He sat down at the Table where Mira put him, between the walker’s stone and the Kiln smith, and he looked down the length of it, at the glass Dory made and the river of lumen down the middle and Ithre’s stone, and he said,

“It’s beautiful. I’d like to build you a city round it.”

Then he waited.

He wasn’t the only one. Quenby came the same month. Quenby is the counting-house of the Reach, or it was. Every tithe from every world for three thousand years went through Quenby’s books. Their First is a tall, thin, grey woman called Eluned Sabe, who doesn’t smile, and who brought nothing to the Table but a small brass abacus, which she set down in front of her and didn’t touch for the whole of the first meeting.

At the second meeting, she touched it.

“You have,” she said, “three hundred and nine worlds now. Or you will, by the end of the year.”

Mara Quell checked. She was right. She’s always right, Mara says, which is very annoying.

“You have no money,” said Eluned Sabe. “You trade lumen for engines and soft ones for barley and Sallow’s fish for Kiln’s iron, and Mattick carries it all in one ship and does the sums in his head.” She moved one bead on the abacus. “He is very good at it. He will not live for ever. Nor will his ship.”

Mattick, at the end of the Table, said, “Here, now.”

“You have no one who decides,” she went on. “You have a Table that meets at dusk every thirty days, with a pot of tea. You decide everything there. Every world. Every engine. Every arch.” Another bead. “In a year, you will have so many worlds that it will take you thirty days to say all their names, and you will never get to the tea.”

Mother, at the stove at the end, said, “I’ll still get to the tea, love.”

Eluned Sabe looked at her for a long moment. Then, for the first time anyone had seen, she smiled. Just a little.

“I believe you will,” she said. “But the rest of us won’t.”

It took four Tables.

Tavish Orne and Eluned Sabe talked, and they were right, mostly, and everyone knew they were right, and nobody liked it.

The Hedge needed someone to decide things between Tables. It needed money that meant the same on Sallow as on Kiln. It needed a place, a real place, that wasn’t a low rise on the eastern plain with a pot. It needed an army that was an army, not the Standing and the Wings and Kyria, and whoever was on the ridge that day. It needed ranks and orders and bases and a General.

It had a General. That was the easy bit.

The Caddi grandmother didn’t like any of it. She said so at every Table, in the same words.

“We were people who asked. Now we’re going to be a thing with a capital.”

“You can be both,” said Tavish Orne.

“Nobody ever has been.”

“Nobody ever had this table.”

She looked at him a long time.

Mira was the one who settled it. She put her hand on the slab of lumen in the Table’s top, the piece she cut beside Hesk’s pick, and said,

“Hesk said the day we stop being fair is the day we start being them. He didn’t say we couldn’t have money. He didn’t say we couldn’t have a city. He’d have liked a city. He’d have wanted a pub in it.” She looked at Tavish Orne. “Build your city. But the Table stays where it is. Out in the open. Nobody builds a roof over it. Nobody builds a head on it. Every world still asks here. Every decision still comes back here. Your cabinet sits round it with the rest of us, and Mother pours, and if we don’t like what your cabinet’s done, we say so, at dusk, and it undoes it.”

Tavish Orne thought about it. For a long time.

“Done,” he said.

The walker made the sound like a mountain clearing its throat. I know.

The Caddi grandmother said, “Yes. Good,” the way she does, and then she said, “Six was two too many,” which nobody understood, and then Kyria laughed, and then everyone did.

They called it Commonhold.

Tavish Orne wanted something grand. Eluned Sabe wanted something short. The walker didn’t want anything; the walkers don’t name places, they just know where they are. Oss from Ithre wanted to call it after Ysse, and Ysse, under the red glass, said no, very firmly, through Dory, and that was the end of that.

It was Brom who named it, in the end. Mira’s grandson. He’s older now. He was at the Table with a soft Lucas and a soft Dory tied to his belt, the way he’s carried them since the seventh shaft. He listened to all of it for three Tables, and at the fourth he put his hand up, which nobody does at the Table, and said,

“It’s not anyone’s. It’s everyone’s. Like the Table. Like the common on Thole where you put the carts.”

Eluned Sabe moved one bead.

“Commonhold,” she said.

It’s on the eastern plain, past the Lenn-woven houses, on every side of the low rise where the Table is. The Table is in the middle of it, under the sky. Nothing over it. Nothing near it, for a long way round, except grass. You walk out of the streets onto the grass, and the city stops, and there’s the Table, on its rise, with its iron stove at one end, the way it always was.

Rory says that was the hardest thing to build. The not-building.

The rest of it, Marrach built. Their yards came through the arch in their thousands, with their burned forearms and their enormous cranes, and they built a city on the plain the way they build ships. Long and white and very fast. Halvane did the engines that run it. I did the stone, where they asked me, and the glass, and once, when the foundations of the eastern hall went soft in the spring rain, the ground. Thole sent lumen for the streets, so that at dusk, when the Table’s river lights, every street in Commonhold lights with it, all at once, outwards from the Table like the rings on a pond.

Kiln made the doors. All of them. Iron, struck on Odra’s anvil, three short and one long. If you knock on any door in Commonhold, that’s how it sounds.

Rory made the benches. There are a great many benches. He says a city without enough benches is just a place people walk through.

The Lenn wove the roofs. The Sedge wove the mats. The walkers carried the stones that were too big for Marrach’s cranes, and there were a few, and Marrach was very quiet about that afterwards.

Tavish Orne stood at the edge of the grass, the evening the last street was lit, and looked back at the Table on its rise and the lumen going out in rings from it, and didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I’ve built nine thousand ships,” he said, at last. “I’ve never built anything that wanted people to sit down.”

The money’s called the fair.

Eluned Sabe wanted a word nobody could argue about, and Mira said, “One price for everyone. A fair one,” and that was that. A fair. Two fairs. Mattick hates it. He says he’s spent his whole life being told things were fair by people who were lying, and now he’s going to have to hand them over the counter.

Quenby prints the notes, with a thread of Thole’s lumen through every one, so you can hold it up at dusk and see it’s real. Kiln strikes the coins.

Mother had one rule about the coins, and it was the only thing she said at any of the four Tables, apart from the tea.

“Nobody’s face on the money.”

Tavish Orne said that every world in the Reach has the Prime’s face on its money, and that a currency needs something people know.

“Then put something they know on it,” said Mother. “Not someone.”

So the coins have things. The smallest one, the one children get, has a cup on it. The Overseer’s cup, though nobody says so. The next one has a soft one, sitting down with its legs out, from Orsk. The next has a teapot handle. The next has a pick, Hesk’s, for Thole. The biggest one has the Table, from above, with no head and both ends the same.

The very first fair ever struck, Eluned Sabe gave to Orra. For the first ferry-crossing in Commonhold’s history, which was across the new ornamental lake by the eastern hall, which is forty feet wide.

Orra took it. Then she charged Eluned Sabe three fairs for the crossing.

Eluned Sabe paid.

The Cabinet sits at the Table with everybody else. They’re the first ones there and the last ones to leave, and they don’t get better chairs. Rory made sure.

Konrad is the Speaker for the Worlds. He says it’s because he’s the only one who’s ever been a senator and come out of it with his sheets. He keeps the list of every world in the Hedge, the way he keeps everything, and he says every name at the start of every Table, and so far he’s still got to the tea.

Eluned Sabe has the Purse. Mira has the Seams, which is everything that’s dug, grown, caught or cut, at one fair price. Halvane has the Works. He says he’s never been in charge of anything that wasn’t an engine and he’s finding it very restful.

Senna has the Law. Mara Quell has the Records, which is the thing she’s been doing anyway and now gets a room for. Tavish Orne has Trade.

And the General has the Defence of the Hedge.

He accepted it in his plain rooms at the end of the long building, standing up, with his tin box on the table. He didn’t make a speech. He said, “Thank you,” and then he sat down and took out a sheet of squared paper and started to draw the bases.

That’s the other thing that’s grown, this season. Not just the city. The Hedge’s army.

We didn’t have one, really. We had the Standing, which is whoever’s good with a door-blade posted on the Hedge worlds that asked for them. We had the Wings, which is Aune and the Cerens and the new fighter. We had Kyria on the ridge, and Andraste, and the listening ring, and the stations round every world, and the suits.

Now it has ranks.

The General drew them on squared paper over a week, and then he took them to Kyria, because there’s no one alive who knows more about who should stand where, and they argued for two days on the ridge, and came down with something they were both nearly happy with. Plain words. Standing for the ones on the ground. Wing for the ones in the air. And over them Post and Watch and Line, and over those Holder, and over everything, First, which is Kyria’s, and which isn’t a rank anyone else will ever hold while she’s alive, she says, and she intends to be alive for a very long time.

There are new bases. One on every Hedge world that wants one, which is most of them. A big one on Marrach, in the yards. A deep one on Thole, in the third shaft, lit blue. A wet one on Sallow under the new warm sun, with Orra charging the garrison to row them to it. A tall one on Isk, in the snow.

The listening ring has two hundred more posts. The new fighter’s being built in Marrach’s yards now as well as in the second city, so there are three times as many, and Aune’s had to learn to be in charge of people, which she says is much harder than flying and much less fun.

And the General wants ribbons.

He came to me about the ribbons on the porch one evening, with a sheet of squared paper.

“Commendations,” he said. “An army needs them. Not for the ones who give them. For the ones who get them. So they know somebody saw.”

I said that seemed right.

“I don’t know anything about ribbons,” said the General. “I’ve had a great many of them. I never once chose one.”

So he went to Andraste.

Andraste knows more about ribbons than anyone on Avalon. She’s tied them on Aune’s wrist and taken them back. She’s had one for the park and one for the ridge and one for every new count. She sat with the General on the steps of the long building for a whole afternoon, with a box of every ribbon Maura had, and they went through them one at a time, very seriously.

“Not white,” said Andraste. “White is for when you’re giving something back.”

The General wrote that down.

“Red is for the ones who held when they should have run.” She tied a red one on his wrist, to show him. “Grey with a knot is for a new count. Every knot is one more thing you counted. Gold is for the ones who carried.”

“Carried what?”

Andraste looked at him.

“Anyone,” she said.

The General wrote that down too.

He gave out the first ones a fortnight later, on the grass in front of the Table, with the whole of Commonhold watching. Not to anybody important. Not to anybody in the Cabinet. To a Tirr nurse who’d carried children through the arch for nine days. To the Thole miner who first put her hand on the rock under Sallow’s river. To the Isk girl’s grandfather, who’d walked forty miles through the snow to the place where we came down, with the girl on his back, so they’d be the first to ask. And to Orra, red, for rowing out every single morning under a Collective survey ship like there was nothing under the river but fish.

Orra wears it on her oar.

He offered me a rank.

I said no. He knew I would. He had a second sheet of squared paper ready.

“You never finished training,” he said. “At the beginning. The program. You never sat the last test.”

That’s true. I’d forgotten. There wasn’t time. There was a planet, and then there were a great many other things.

“So,” said the General.

He wrote something on the sheet and gave it to me.

Dask, L. Cadet.

“It’s the only rank I can give you,” he said, “that you can’t refuse. You’ve already got it.”

Luna laughed so hard she had to sit down on the steps. Toby, when he heard, sent a card that just said, Cadet, with a small drawing of me doing push-ups. Juno sent one that said about time.

Imre Oshan has asked if she can make a Cadet Lucas figure with the General’s paper in his hand. The General said yes, but only if the paper says Cadet and not anything grander. She’s sending him the first one.

The Collective noticed all of this. I don’t know how they couldn’t.

Commonhold’s lights are on every band at dusk now. The fair’s taken in every Hedge port and two hundred Collective ones that are pretending they don’t. Every child on every Hedge world has a soft one, and half the children on the Collective’s edge worlds have one hidden in a shaft or a cupboard or under a bunk.

So the Collective did the only thing it could think of.

It made its own.

The first Prime figure came out of the Assize’s workshops on Carrow at midwinter. Mattick brought one back. He put it on the long table, very carefully, without saying anything, and stepped back.

It’s quite tall. It’s white. It stands up very straight with its arms at its sides, and it doesn’t bend. Anywhere. Not the arms, not the legs, not the neck. It comes with a little white Assize behind it, all in a row. If you press a button on its back, it says, in a voice like a man reading a list, The Reach is grateful.

That’s all it says.

Corin pressed the button nine times. Then he looked up and said, “Grateful for what?”

Nobody knew.

Kesh tried to make it sit down. It can’t sit down. It’s not built to. Oona tried to give it a cup of tea, and the cup fell off, because its hands don’t open.

“Poor thing,” said Mother, and put it on the windowsill, by the Scarecrow queen.

The comic was worse.

It’s called The Steward of the Reach, and it’s forty pages, and in all forty pages the Prime stands at the front of a white hall and explains things. On page thirty-one, a world full of ungrateful people asks him for help, and he explains to them why it would be better for everyone if they didn’t need it, and they thank him.

Iolo read the whole thing aloud at the long table, in a voice, and by the end of it Senna had her head on the table and Mara Quell had taken her spectacles off and Halvane, who never laughs, was making a small high noise like a kettle.

The Aldri children wouldn’t take it, even for nothing. The keepers at the third city put a box of them by the gate and by the end of the month the box was full of leaves.

And then there was the film.

They’d heard about ours. Of course they had. The Asker’s still being finished on Ister, but the footage from the great wall in the second city went out on every band, and everyone in the Reach has seen it, on the Collective side as well, in back rooms, with the sound down.

So they hurried. They wanted theirs out first.

The Collective’s film is called Light of the Reach. The life of the Prime, from his birth in the great house on Carrow to the Assize. Four hours and ten minutes long.

They showed it on every band, for free, on a first day, at the hour the Prime walks the square.

We watched it. All of us, on the great wall, in the kitchen. Isar Thenn came, and Maelis Orr, and Tam Orrin, and the film people. I think they thought it was research.

I won’t tell you about all four hours and ten minutes. I’m not sure I could. I fell asleep twice. Corin fell asleep in the first twenty minutes and woke up two hours later and said, “Is he still talking?” and he was.

The Prime is played by a very handsome man with a very deep voice who never once looks at anyone. Corvan is played by a man who must be fifty, as a boy of ten. There are no other children in it. There’s no Mother. There’s no mother at all. There’s no one who ever says no to him, and no one who ever pours him anything, and at the end, on the steps of the Assize, he looks out at a great crowd of people in white, and they all cheer, at exactly the same moment, like a machine.

Isar Thenn watched it all the way through with his hands in his lap, and when it finished, he was quiet for a long time.

“That’s a man who’s never been told he’s loved,” he said. “They made a whole film about him and nobody in it loves him.”

Maelis Orr said, “They didn’t even give him a cup,” and Tam Orrin, who plays me at nineteen and has sat through a great many rushes, said, “It’s very long,” which I think was the kindest thing anyone said about it all night.

The reviews came in from all over. Not from the Collective’s own critics; those all said it was the greatest film ever made, in the same words, like the cheering at the end. From everywhere else.

Iolo collected them. He reads one aloud every morning at breakfast, now, the way Wren reads the stars.

From Ister: Four hours. Nobody sits down. Not even once.

From Sallow: I have rowed across the widest river four times in less time than it takes this man to finish a sentence.

From Thole: There is more light in our seventh shaft.

From Orsk, through the walker, Gath’s own words: He does not sit in the dirt.

And from a child on one of the edge worlds who’d watched it in a cupboard with her soft Dot, sent to the Table on a scrap of paper inside a crate of iron bells,

I felt sorry for him. Nobody gave him anything.

Iolo didn’t read that one in a voice. He read it in his own, very quietly, and then he gave it to Mother, and she put it under her cup.

The figures haven’t sold. Mattick says Carrow’s workshops made four hundred thousand and he’s seen fewer than a hundred go. The comic’s being given away free with the tithe papers and people are using it to light their stoves. Light of the Reach is being shown on every band, every first day, over and over, because the Assize says it’s very popular, and nobody’s watching it.

The footage of The Asker is still on the great wall in the second city’s plaza every evening. There’s already a line for the opening, and the opening isn’t for months. The soft ferry-woman’s sold out again.

And the Cadet Lucas figure came out last week, with the General’s paper in its hand. It sits down. Imre made sure. It sits down with its legs out in front of it and its hand flat on its knee, the way Orsk made it. When you press its back, it doesn’t say anything at all.

The General has one on his table, next to his tin box.

On the last night of the season, Dory and I came back down the thread from a world called Hollen, where the regiment had two queens on frames at once for the first time, and we were in time for both of them.

We came out of the arch on the plain. It was dusk. Commonhold’s lights were coming on, all at once, outwards from the Table, in rings, the way they do.

Dory stopped on the grass.

“Listen,” she said.

I listened. There’s a great deal to hear in Commonhold at dusk now. Kiln’s doors, three short and one long. Rory’s benches creaking. Children on the grass. The fair being taken at every stall on every street. Mother’s kettle, at the end of the Table, just starting to go.

And under all of it, very far away, past the Watch, past Carrow, past everything, the forge.

Still angry. Still hitting a thing.

“He’s watching it too,” Dory said. “The lights. I think he watches every night. From a window.”

“Can you hear him?”

“A bit.” She was quiet. “He’s holding his head.”

Then she sighed, and leaned on me, and we walked across the grass to the Table, where Mother had two plates waiting under a cloth, and Konrad was saying the names, and had nearly got to the tea.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Three hundred and two. Sallow’s star is new, gold and warm and very pleased with itself. Tirr’s says it in a voice like someone who’s been crying and has stopped.

Wren wrote it at the top of the slate, the way she does. Then, under it, the way she’s started to now:

Commonhold: lit.

Hollen: both.

Days 10032–10168. Commonhold.

Sallow went on the lowest day of the river without a sound, to a warm yellow sun two arches past Tiel; Orra, told the night before (I hope we were interesting), poured the river into the river: you’re somewhere warm. The queen: again, please. The eater took the empty place. The soft ferry-woman went on sale: her nose is exactly that big. The Assize welcomed the Sorn as the Houses of the Deep, a protected people, gave them Velle among the inner gardens (three million citizens honoured to make room; it doesn’t say where they went) and a regiment of the Refined to do as they asked. The two houses: they’re in Velle’s queen’s rock, very good at not yet; the regiment will be told every day. Corvan: four of the nine asked, it went, they’re alive. Then the frames came faster: Ammet, Pell’s Reach, Isk (you’re smaller), Hollen, two at once; I asked the Refined to be air. On Tirr we were late: eleven days on the frame; the queen lives under the red glass; four hundred thousand of a million came through. Mother said every name, both columns. The worlds left in daylight. Marrach’s Tavish Orne wanted to build a city round the Table; Quenby’s Eluned Sabe moved a bead: no money, no one deciding, too many names to get to the tea. Mira: build it, but no roof and no head on the Table. Brom named it Commonhold. The money is the fair: no faces, Mother said; a cup, a soft one, a handle, a pick, the Table. A Cabinet sits at the Table with everyone. Ranks from the General and Kyria; new bases; ribbons from Andraste: red for holding, gold for carrying anyone. I am Cadet Dask, L. The Collective’s Prime figure doesn’t bend and says the Reach is grateful; the comic lights stoves; Light of the Reach is four hours and ten minutes and nobody in it loves him. A child in a cupboard: nobody gave him anything. Dory hears him watching our lights, holding his head. Three hundred and two. Commonhold: lit. Hollen: both.