Scarecrow

The queen on Isselt called at dusk on the twelfth day.

Not to the eldest. Not first. To Dory. Straight to Dory, at the red glass, the way Thole’s queen spoke straight to me once, and Sallow’s. Dory says it was like someone saying her name in a crowded room, very close to her ear.

Please. There are so many.

Dory was up the thread before the listener on the windowsill had finished ringing. I went after her. I always go after her now. She’s faster than me, and I’ve stopped minding, but I haven’t stopped going.

Okafor’s post on Isselt sent its line while we were on the way. Dory heard it, the way she hears everything.

Not quiet. Not Refined. Not like them. Many.

Isselt is a long grey world, all plains and slow wide skies, a member world in good standing for two thousand years. It’s on the inner side of the Reach’s third arm, a long way past the Watch. It asked the Table nine days after I spoke from the kitchen. We have mothers too, was the second line of its letter. The first was its name.

It had a post. It had a listener. It didn’t have a battery yet; Marrach’s yards were three weeks behind.

We came down onto the plain in the last of the light, a mile from the town, where the queen was.

She was half out of the ground. On a frame. The way they always are. In a collar. Singing, the way they all sing on the frames, a high thin note that goes into your teeth.

And round her, in a ring, there were four hundred of them.

They’d come through holes. Twelve at once, Isselt’s post said afterwards, all round the town, with the listener ringing and ringing and nobody able to tell which one to run from.

I want to describe them properly, because it’s important, and because nobody in the Hedge had seen them before that night.

They weren’t Refined.

The Refined are very tall. Pale. Long white hair, white robes, faces like a knife. Their silver is on the outside, under the skin, bright and tarnished black at the edges, the way it is when it’s been held in for four thousand years and has given up trying to get home.

These were people.

Ordinary height. Ordinary faces. Some of them old, some of them young, some of them with their hair still in the braids they’d worn to the tithe office. They were dressed in grey, all the same, a long grey coat like a uniform someone had made in a hurry.

And their silver was on the outside too. Under the skin. But it wasn’t tarnished. It was bright. Very bright. New. And it was moving. You could see it, in the dusk. Going round and round under their skin, very fast, like something in a cell going from wall to wall.

Taken silver only knows where it was.

This silver knew exactly. And it wanted to go there more than anything I’ve ever seen want anything.

They came at us.

The Refined never came at us. Not once, not in the whole of the season of frames. The Refined stood round the queens, and I asked them to be air, and they were. They weren’t fighters. They were drinkers.

These came at us.

All four hundred. At once. Fast. Much faster than the Refined. Faster than anything I’ve seen move that wasn’t Dory. And they used the gifts. Every gift, the way the Refined do, from queens they’d been fed from: lift and storm and weight and fire. The plain went white with it. The air round us went to lightning. Somebody threw a boulder the size of the kitchen.

Dory caught it. She didn’t even look at it. She just held up her hand and it stopped in the air and she put it down on the grass, very gently, beside her.

I stood between her and them.

And I nearly did it. I want to be honest. I nearly asked them all to be air. All four hundred. It would have taken me less than a breath. They’d have felt nothing.

And then I looked at them properly. All the way down.

Under the silver, they were people.

Not people the way the Refined were people once, four thousand years ago, a long way back under everything. People now. A month ago. A week. There was still blood in them that knew it was blood. Bone that knew it was bone. Under the silver going round and round, there were hearts beating very fast, too fast, the way your heart beats when you’re more frightened than you’ve ever been in your life.

And in every one of them, at the back of the neck, under the skin, a collar.

Not the kind you can see. Not the thin black collar Lio wore, when she came to us. Something smaller. Something put in very deep. Something that didn’t hold the silver in.

Something that held them in. And made them come at us. And made them want to.

I’ve seen that before. I saw it on Lio, at the start. They made me want a door.

These had been made to want me.

“Dad,” said Dory, behind me. Very quietly. “Dad, they’re crying.”

They were. I hadn’t seen it, in the dusk, in the lightning. All four hundred of them, coming at us across the plain with the gifts going off round them like storms, and every one of them crying. Not making a sound. Just crying.

I didn’t ask them to be air.

I asked the silver.

Not all of it at once. I couldn’t. There were too many and it was moving too fast. One at a time. As fast as I could. I looked at the first one, a man with a grey beard and a tithe clerk’s ink on his fingers, and I looked all the way down to the silver going round under his skin, and I asked it, very quietly, the way Halvane’s battery asks, the way Lio’s note asked:

Would you like to go home?

And it said yes.

It went out of him all at once, like a breath. Silver, very bright, up out of his skin into the dusk, and away, a long way, back towards wherever it had been taken from. And the man stopped. In the middle of the plain. And stood there, in his grey coat, with his tithe clerk’s hands. And then he fell down on the grass.

I didn’t know if he was alive. I didn’t stop to look. I went to the next one.

I asked three hundred and eleven of them. One at a time. Dory says it took me nine minutes. It felt like a year.

Dory held the rest. The ones I hadn’t got to yet. She held them still, in the air, very gently, the way she held the boulder, all of them at once, so they couldn’t come at us and couldn’t hurt themselves. She held eighty-nine people in the air above the plain on Isselt for nine minutes, with lightning going off out of them, and the whole time she was talking to them. Very quietly. I couldn’t hear what. She says she was telling them their names. She’d looked all the way down every one and found their names and she was saying them, over and over, so they’d remember they had them.

And then I asked the eighty-nine. And Dory put them down.

And then she went to the queen.

The queen of Isselt came off the frame the way they all do. Dory opened the collar. Dory asked the frame to let go. The queen went back down into her ground, very slowly, and the high thin note stopped, and the plain went quiet.

She’s alive. Queens don’t die. Not if you get there at all. And we got there.

I’m putting that first, because it’s true, and because the next part is hard.

Of the four hundred, two hundred and sixty-three were alive.

The rest weren’t. The silver went out of them and there wasn’t enough left behind it to go on. Some of them had been made longer ago than the others. Some of them had been fed from more queens. Some of them, Halloway says, had just been more frightened, and their hearts had been going too fast for too long.

I asked the silver to go home, and it went, and they came apart. Not cruelly. Not the way I’d said, on every band, about anything that came up my mother’s hill road. Like the forty in the hall on Ysse’s world, the first Refined I ever met. They just stopped.

A hundred and thirty-seven.

I knew some of them would. I knew it when I started. I did it anyway, because the other thing would have been all four hundred, in less than a breath, and none of them would have had a chance to stand there afterwards in the grass, in their grey coats, alive, not knowing where they were.

I’ve thought about it every night since. I’ll go on thinking about it. That’s the right way round, Hana says. I’m not sure. I don’t think there is a right way round for this.

We brought them through the arch. All two hundred and sixty-three. Isselt’s post had a small arch, and Halloway’s ward had it open before the last of the silver was gone, and they came through onto the plain on Avalon in the dark, carried and walking and crawling, and Halloway’s people met them with blankets.

Mother was there. She’d come down the hill road in her long brown coat with her pot as soon as Dory sent word. She went along the lines of them in the dark with a cup, the way she did with Tirr, and she asked every one of them their name.

They didn’t all know. Not straight away.

Dory did. She went with Mother. And when someone couldn’t remember, Dory said it, very quietly, and they looked at her, and then they could.

The first one who could talk properly was a woman called Hen.

She’s from the grain world. The one where the girl’s father was taken for nine days. Hen is the girl’s aunt. She’d had a soft Mother too. Her own. Under her pillow, for three years, since the first ones came in Mattick’s crates.

They found it in the second search. The one after the burnings.

“Second time,” she said. She was sitting on the grass by the arch with a blanket round her and a cup of Mother’s tea in both hands. Her hands were still shaking. “They said second time, you lose your standing. And then they said, there’s another way. To keep your standing. You can serve.” She looked at the cup. “They said we’d serve the Reach. They said we’d be protecting it. From the man on the hill.”

“Did you go?” said Mother.

“They didn’t ask,” said Hen. “They said it was the other way. They said there wasn’t a first way any more.”

She drank some tea. She spilled most of it.

“They took us to Velle,” she said. “All of us. Every household that had been found twice. From every world. Thousands.”

She told us about Velle. All of it. Over the next three days, on the long ward, with Halloway beside her and Okafor at the end of the bed with her slate. And the others told us too, the ones who could, one after another, and it was all the same.

Velle is very beautiful. That’s the first thing they all said. Gardens everywhere. Warm. The people of Velle are gone, the three million who were honoured to make room, and nobody knows where. The houses are in the ground, under the gardens. You can hear them, Hen said, all the time, very low, like a crowd of people talking in the next room.

And in the middle of Velle, in the biggest garden, where Velle’s people used to have their great hall, there’s a ring.

Very big. Iron and silver and something black. Hen said it’s taller than the tallest of the glass towers on our eastern plain. You can see it from every part of Velle, standing up out of the gardens like a great empty door with nothing in it.

And all round the ring, on frames, there are queens.

“How many?” said Okafor.

Hen looked at her.

“I didn’t count,” she said. “I couldn’t. I tried.” She closed her eyes. “They go all the way round. And then there’s another ring of them, further out. And another.”

Okafor didn’t write that down. She just sat with the slate on her knees.

“They’re singing,” said Hen. “All of them. The thin one. The one the queen on Isselt was singing. All the time. Day and night. It goes into your teeth.” She opened her eyes. “And the ring hums when they sing. Like it’s listening.”

The two houses told us the rest. That night, on the plateau, with the Overseer and Okafor and Dory and Lio. Lio asked to come. Nobody said no.

“It is the door,” said the first house. “The big one. The one the man asked for.”

“The queens are holding it,” said the second. “A small door needs one queen to see through. A big door needs many to hold it open. As many as there are.” A pause. “That is what they meant when they said they would need more.”

“And the people?” said Dory.

The two notes went back and forth for a long time.

“They are for the ship,” said the first house, at last. “A ship needs a regiment. The Refined are not enough any more. There are not enough of them, and they do not fight. So the ones in Velle are making more.”

“From the people who had the toys,” said Lio.

“From the people who were found twice,” said the second house. “The man made the law. The ones in Velle told him what to do with the people the law found. He was very glad. He said it was fitting.”

Lio didn’t say anything for a long time. She was sitting on the warm ground with her hand flat, the way she learned from us.

“They made me want a door,” she said, at last. “And they made those people want Lucas.”

“Yes,” said the first house.

“It’s the same thing.”

“It is the same making,” said the second house. “The one we gave the man. For you. He asked for it so that he could be what your father is. It did not work on him. So he gave it back to the ones in Velle, and said, use it on them instead.”

Okafor stood up.

She’d been sitting on a stone at the edge of the plateau the whole time, with her slate, the way she always sits up here. She stood up and walked to the middle of the plateau, to the deepest crack, where the two houses can see out, and she looked down into it.

“How long?” she said. “Before the door’s finished?”

“We do not know,” said the first house.

“Guess.”

The two notes went back and forth. Very fast.

“Not this season,” said the second house. “Not the next. They are very good at not yet. But they are not as good at it as they were. The man is hurrying them.”

“Because of what I said,” I said.

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

Okafor looked at me. Then she took out her slate and wrote something under Now and Velle and Avalon and Sallow. The seventh., and turned it round so I could see.

The ring. The queens. 263 home. 137 not.

And under that:

They were people.

The children of the Hedge heard about the ward. Of course they did. Quenby printed it, and the posts talked, and the Word goes both ways.

By the end of the first week there were soft ones on every bed. Not from Imre. From the children. They came through the Arch Hall in boxes and sacks and bundles, from every world, with notes tied on. A soft Mother from Caddoc, with salt in its hem. A soft Taveth from Isk. A soft battery from a boy on Ammet that said I heard you when Hen squeezed it, and made her laugh for the first time since the plain.

One of the two hundred and sixty-three was a young man called Dovi, from an ore ship, about Kwame’s age. When Halloway’s people took his grey coat off him on the plain, a rabbit fell out of the lining. One of Imre’s. Plain grey wool. He’d had it sewn in there since the search. They’d never found it.

He undid the seam on its back, on the long ward, in front of Halloway, very carefully, with shaking fingers. Inside was a very small soft me, sitting down, with my hand on my knee.

He held it for a long time.

“They never found it,” he said. “Not the first time or the second. It was in there the whole time. On the plain. When I was coming at you.”

He looked at it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. To the soft one. Not to me.

Halloway put him on the chart. She says she doesn’t know what to call it. She says she’s calling it rabbit.

Corin and Tiri had their first meeting that same week. Nobody wanted to put it off. Mother said that if we stopped doing the good things every time something terrible happened, we’d never do anything good again, and she wasn’t having it.

It was in the wing. At Ilas’s chair, by the lamp Corin mended, the one that’s never gone out. Both families crowded into the little room and sat on the floor and the bed and the windowsill, and Ilas talked.

The whole time. Exactly as she’d said she would. She talked about the day she decided about Halvane, when she was nine. And the hundred and three years she waited. And the day Tiri was born, and the day Ceren didn’t come back, and the day a small boy from Avalon mended her lamp with his hands and hummed while he did it and she looked at him and thought, oh. That one.

“I knew before she did,” said Ilas. “She says eight. I say seven and a half. I’m right because I’m older.”

Tiri, on the windowsill, didn’t argue. Corin, on the floor at Ilas’s feet, didn’t either.

At the end, Ilas reached out and put her old hand on Corin’s head, the way Ceren put his hands on Tiri’s when she was three.

“Good,” she said. “That’s one.”

Teva’s father, at the back, drew a small bird in the first circle.

The Table met at dusk on the thirtieth day. Everyone came. The Cabinet. The Senate. The Firsts. They filled the grass all the way back to the edge of Commonhold, and Mother poured.

Konrad said the names. All four hundred and thirty-seven worlds. Then Isselt’s queen, who was alive. Then the hundred and thirty-seven, one after another, every name Dory had found. It took a long time. Nobody hurried him.

Then Hen stood up.

She’d asked to. Halloway had said she shouldn’t, and she’d said she was going to, and Halloway had looked at her for a long time and then walked her to the Table herself. She stood at the end, by the stove, by Varrin’s cup under its iron cover and the line from Ammet and the small grey soft Mother that somebody left there.

“My name is Hen,” she said. “I’m from a grain world on the third arm. I had a soft one of her.”

She pointed at Mother.

“They found it twice. So they took me to Velle and put silver in me that wanted to go home and something in the back of my neck that wanted to kill the man who sits at the end of that bench.”

She pointed at me.

“I came across the plain at him with lightning coming out of my hands. I was crying. I couldn’t stop either of them. The lightning or the crying.” Her voice went, for a moment. She waited until it came back. “And he stopped, and he looked at me, and he asked the silver if it would like to go home. He asked it. In the middle of all that. Like it mattered what it wanted.

“I’m alive because he asked. A hundred and thirty-seven of us aren’t, and I know that, and he knows that, and he’s going to know it for the rest of his life. I can see it on him. He’s sitting there now knowing it.

“There are thousands more. In Velle. Right now. Being made. People who had a soft one under their pillow. People who sat down in the square. They’re making them into the thing that’s going to come through that door. And they’ll be crying too.”

She looked down the length of the Table. At the glass and the lumen and Ithre’s stone.

“Please,” she said. “Do something before they’re finished.”

Then she sat down. On the end of the bench, next to Mother. And Mother put an arm round her and poured her a cup.

Nobody said not yet.

Nobody said now either. The Table doesn’t decide things in one night that it can decide in two. Mira said that, very quietly, and the Caddi grandmother said I know, and the walker made the sound like a mountain clearing its throat.

But Okafor stood up, the second time ever, and said, “I’ll have a plan by the next dusk,” and sat down again.

And everyone on the grass heard her.

I sat on the bottom step that night. Late. Everyone else had gone up.

Lio came and sat next to me. She doesn’t usually. She’s not a sitter-next-to. She sits on her own, or with Sefa, and does her knot. But she came and sat on the step next to me and didn’t say anything for a while, and did her knot.

Then she said, “You asked them.”

“Yes.”

“You could have just. The other way. The air.”

“Yes.”

“A hundred and thirty-seven,” said Lio.

“I know.”

She finished the knot. She looked at it.

“When you asked the collar off me,” she said, “you didn’t know if I’d come apart. Did you.”

I didn’t answer straight away.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“You did it anyway.”

“Yes.”

Lio nodded. She put the knot in her pocket, where she keeps Corvan’s line about the four.

“Then that’s what you do,” she said. “You ask. Even when you don’t know. That’s what the asking is.” She stood up. “Somebody has to be the one who asks. Even when it goes wrong. Otherwise there’s only telling.”

She went up to bed.

I sat on the step until the stars said Not yet.

Mother came down at some point. I didn’t hear her. She put a blanket round my shoulders and a cup on the step beside me and didn’t say anything at all. She sat on the stair above me with her hand on the back of my head, the way she did when I was small and couldn’t sleep and my father was out on the filter, until the light came.

Mattick came in on the thirty-third day. The Hesta in a convoy of three, Sorrel’s crooked blue Wing on the nose. There was a packet tied to the bottom of a crate of rabbits with a bootlace.

Dory looked at it on the plain, before Mattick had got the crate off the ramp. She didn’t open it. She didn’t need to.

She came up the hill road with it in her hand, very slowly, and stood in the kitchen doorway, and held it out, and everyone at the long table went quiet.

Sorrel was at the table. She looked at the packet. Then at her wrist. C. Y. The pebble. The four. All the names.

“Is it,” said Sorrel.

Dory nodded.

She opened it at the long table, with everyone there. Senna and Iolo and Mara Quell. Okafor. Halvane. Mira. Kyria. Orra, who’d come from Sallow with her cup. The Overseer, by the stove. Lio, between Dory and Sefa. Mother at the end, with the pot.

There wasn’t a letter inside. No bundle. No old papers from the long room.

Just one piece of paper, folded once, in his narrow hand.

One word.

Now.

Sorrel let out a breath I think she’d been holding for two years.

Then she picked up the pen by the bread, the one Mother leaves there every morning, and under the C and the Y and the pebble and the four, at the very bottom of her wrist, below all the names, she drew a line.

And under the line, very small:

N.

Senna went to the small room at the back of the kitchen. She came back with Rory’s box, the one with Dory’s lock on it that only opens by shape. Dory opened it. Senna took out everything.

The Vessels. The Prime’s letters to the houses, scorched along one edge. Corvan’s half-sheet. Lure. The nineteen, with Thole at the bottom, Openly. The Sallow letter. I should like to eat them in my own garden before I am old.

And Hen. Senna had sat with Hen on the long ward for two days and written down everything she said. And the names of the hundred and thirty-seven.

Senna laid them out on the long table, in order, the way she lays out a case.

“Sallow first,” she said. “Then the nineteen. Then Lure. Then the Vessels, then the letters, then Velle. Then Hen. Then the names.” She looked at Orra. “If you’ll let me.”

Orra looked at the Sallow letter for a long time.

“Read it out,” she said. “All of it. The bit about the garden. The bit about before he’s old.” She put her cup down on the table, next to it. “Let them hear what he wanted it for.”

Ilka opened every band.

She did it from her board, in the room at the back of the listening hall in Commonhold, the sixty dials and the old Ister headset. It took her an hour. When she’d finished, she turned round on her stool and looked at Senna, who was standing by the picture-box with the papers in her hands, and said, the same thing she said to me,

“They’ll all hear.”

“Good,” said Senna.

She read it out at noon by Carrow’s clock, the hour the Prime used to walk the square, every word. It took her four hours. She didn’t stop. She read the Sallow letter first, all of it, in her clear plain advocate’s voice, and when she got to the end, to before I am old, she stopped for a moment, and looked up into the picture, and said,

“He killed a world for a bowl of rice. The rice wouldn’t grow. He has a bed of mud in his garden that he looks at in the dark.”

And then she read the rest.

Sallow heard it in the boats.

Orra told me afterwards. She said every town on every river rowed out into the middle of the water at noon, the way they did for the vote, every boat on the world, and tied up to each other, side by side, hundreds of boats in every bend, so they could all hear the one band that the landing post was playing. And they sat in their boats in the warm gold light under the new sun and listened to Senna read what the Prime had written about their fish and their rice.

Nobody said anything, Orra said. Not one person, on the whole of Sallow, the whole four hours.

And when Senna got to the end of the Sallow letter, to before I am old, every person in every boat on every river leaned over the side, at the same moment, without anyone telling them to, and put their hand flat on the water.

The queen under the widest river said nothing at all, Dory says. She was listening to them. She’d waited longer than they’ve had boats to be listened to like that.

Orra poured her a cup anyway.

I don’t know what it was like in the Reach, that day. I wasn’t there. I can tell you what Mattick told us, and what Corvan wrote afterwards, and what Dory heard. I’ll put it down next time. I can’t put it down tonight.

Tonight I’ll just put down what Dory said, at the red glass, at about midnight, with her hand flat.

“Dad.”

“Yes.”

“Listen.”

I listened.

Past the Watch. Past the edge worlds and the grain worlds and the ore worlds. Past the middle of the Reach. All the way in.

Every band in the Collective had gone quiet. Every one. Nobody talking. Nobody reading anything. Nobody saying the Reach was grateful.

And under the quiet, very faint, on world after world, all the way in, Dory said, the sound of people sitting down.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and thirty-seven. Isselt’s said it very quietly, the way you’d say it to someone in a bed on a ward.

At the top of the slate, Wren wrote the count.

And under it:

Isselt: 263 home. 137 not.

Now.

Morning: 34.

Days 10894–10941. Made.

Isselt’s queen called straight to Dory: please, there are so many. Four hundred round her frame, not Refined but people, a month ago, in hurried grey coats, silver bright and new and moving under the skin, and a collar put in deep at the back of the neck that made them want me. They came at us with every gift; Dory caught a boulder the size of the kitchen. I nearly asked them to be air. Then I looked all the way down and they were crying. I asked the silver, one at a time, would you like to go home; three hundred and eleven in nine minutes, while Dory held eighty-nine in the air saying their names; then the rest. The queen lives. Two hundred and sixty-three lived; a hundred and thirty-seven came apart. Mother and Dory gave them their names back on the plain. Hen, the grain-world girl’s aunt, found twice with a soft Mother: there wasn’t a first way any more; they took us to Velle. Velle: gardens, the people gone, the houses talking under the ground, and in the great garden a ring taller than our towers, ringed by queens on frames, ring after ring, all singing the thin note, the ring humming as if it listens. The houses: the queens hold the big door open, that’s the more; the people are for the ship; the same making he was given for Lio, which didn’t work on him, so he gave it back: use it on them. Okafor’s slate: they were people. The Hedge’s children sent soft ones for every bed on the ward; a soft battery made Hen laugh; Dovi from an ore ship had one of Imre’s rabbits sewn in his grey coat the whole time, with a small me inside, and said sorry to it; Halloway calls it rabbit. Corin and Tiri’s first meeting was at Ilas’s chair, and she talked the whole time: oh, that one; seven and a half, because I’m older; good, that’s one. Hen at the Table: he asked it, like it mattered what it wanted; there are thousands more; please, do something before they’re finished. Nobody said not yet; Okafor: a plan by the next dusk. Lio on the step: you didn’t know if I’d come apart either; somebody has to be the one who asks, even when it goes wrong, otherwise there’s only telling. Corvan: Now. Sorrel drew a line and wrote N. Senna laid it all out, Sallow first; Orra: read the bit about before he’s old. Ilka opened every band and Senna read for four hours: he killed a world for a bowl of rice. Sallow tied every boat together in every bend to listen, and at before I am old, every hand on the world went flat on the water; Orra poured a cup anyway. At midnight every band in the Collective was quiet, and under the quiet, on world after world, the sound of people sitting down. Isselt: 263 home, 137 not. Now. Morning: 34.