Scarecrow

Small Holt put snow on the red moon.

He’s eleven. He’s Genny’s. Dark hair that stands straight up whatever anybody does to it, and a voice that’s been too loud since the day he was born, when he shouted at the whole long ward until Mother said There you are and he stopped. He was named for Holt, old Holt, Ezra, because Genny was very afraid and Holt said that’s why.

He was on the roof of Genny’s house in Thera, at night, with Callum, looking at the moons. The big pale one, where the warm queen from Velle is holding the ground open so people can live there in nine years instead of thirty. And the small red one, where the cold queen went into the ice and started singing before she was all the way under.

“Is she lonely?” said small Holt. “Up there? On her own?”

Callum said he didn’t know. Callum said she’d asked for somewhere very cold and very quiet.

Small Holt looked at the red moon for a long time.

“She’d like snow,” he said. “I bet she would. Proper snow. Not just ice.”

And then, Callum says, very quietly, without shouting at all, which is the only time anybody can remember small Holt doing anything quietly, he said, “Would you like some?”

And the next morning, when the sun came up over Thera, the small red moon of Avalon had gone white.

Genny came up the hill road at a run. With small Holt by the hand, and Callum behind, and Garnet behind him, and Rowan, and Pell, who’s Garnet’s, and ten, and who’d been at Genny’s for the night.

Genny didn’t knock. She came straight in through the kitchen door and stood there in the middle of the kitchen, out of breath, with her son’s hand in hers, and looked at me.

“He did it to the moon,” she said.

I looked at small Holt. He was looking at the floor. Not frightened. Pleased, and trying very hard not to look pleased, because his mother was clearly upset.

I looked at him all the way down. I didn’t mean to. I just did.

And it was there. The silver. Not the way it’s in Genny, close and fierce, reaching a foot in every direction from her and no further. Not the way it’s in Garnet, waiting at the tips of her fingers for her to touch something. Further. Everywhere. Out past his skin, past the kitchen, past the hill, all the way out to wherever he looked.

The way it’s in me.

“Lucas,” said Genny. Very quietly. “That’s your thing. Isn’t it. What he’s got. That’s what you’ve got.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t—” She stopped. “Garnet and I never could. Not like that. We could do a foot. We could do what we touched. We never once thought—”

“I know.”

“He put snow on a moon, Lucas. At eleven.”

“I put a lake on one at four,” I said. “From my bedroom.”

Genny always wanted to hear that story when she was young. She sat down very suddenly on the bottom step, which is where everybody sits in this house when they’ve had a shock, and put her face in her hands.

Mother put the kettle on.

Pell had it too. Of course she did. Garnet’s daughter. Ten, very quiet, all elbows and dark eyes, drawing all the time, the way her mother does.

She’d been drawing on Genny’s kitchen table that morning, while everybody was looking at the moon. A bird. A small one, on a scrap of paper, in pencil.

And when she finished it, she’d looked at it, the way Garnet looks at a drawing when it’s done, and thought, I wish you were real.

It was on her shoulder. Grey and small and made of paper, very thin, with pencil lines on its wings. It turned its head and looked at me when I looked at it.

“It won’t go away,” said Pell. “I asked it to go back on the paper. It doesn’t want to.”

Garnet was sitting next to Genny on the bottom step by then. She laughed. She didn’t mean to. It came out of her like it comes out of Dory, all at once, and she put her hand over her mouth.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. It’s just. It’s a very good bird, Pell.”

They asked us after breakfast.

Not Genny and Garnet. The children. Small Holt and Pell. They stood in front of the long table, side by side, with the paper bird on Pell’s shoulder, and small Holt said it, because small Holt says everything, very loudly.

“Will you teach us?”

He looked at me. Then at Dory, who’d come down from the end room in her nightgown because she’d heard the moon go white, from the glass, before anyone else.

“Both of you,” said small Holt. “Properly. The way Granddad taught him. So we know what we’re doing it to.”

Pell said, very quietly, “So I can put the bird back when it wants to go.”

Dory and I went up on the roof that night. To one of Rory’s benches, with a blanket and a pot, the way we do.

“We’ve never taught any of them,” Dory said. “Not properly. Have we.”

I didn’t say anything for a while.

She was right. We hadn’t. Not the way my father taught me. When my children were small, I taught them the squares, a little, at the kitchen wall, when they asked. Dory taught Lio, after the collar, because there was nobody else who could. But the rest of them came into it the way Dad came into it, at breakfast, with a cup going to glass. Without anyone telling them anything. Frightened and angry and finding out by accident what they’d been able to do all their lives.

“They taught themselves,” I said. “Mostly.”

“That’s not good enough,” said Dory. “Not for this. Not if Holt can put snow on a moon by asking nicely.” She pulled the blanket round her. “What if he’d asked it something else? What if he’d been angry with it?”

I knew what she meant. I’ve known since I was four.

“Then we’ll teach them,” I said. “All of them. Properly. From the beginning.”

“All of them?”

“All of them. The little ones and the grown ones. Holt and Pell. Mine. Every one. Even the ones who think they know already.” I looked at her. “Even Kesh.”

Dory laughed.

“Kesh is going to hate it,” she said.

“Kesh is going to be very good at it,” I said, “and hate it.”

We made the plan that night. On the roof. On the back of one of Wren’s old slates, with a stub of chalk Dory found in her pocket, by the light of Commonhold coming out in rings from the Table.

Dory wrote it. She has better handwriting than me. She always has.

It’s still on the slate. It’s on the kitchen windowsill now, next to the Scarecrow queen and the listener, where everybody can see it. I’ll copy it out.

1. The squares.

What everything is. Every one. In order. What it likes. Who it holds hands with. Grandad’s wall.

2. Hello.

Before you ask anything. Before you change anything. Just say hello to it. Find out what it is. (Queenie.)

3. Asking.

Ask it to be something else. Small things first. A cup. A leaf. Only ask. Never tell. If it says no, it means no.

4. Moving.

Moving things without touching them. (Grandma.)

5. Lifting.

Lifting yourself. Two ways. Moving yourself, like moving a cup. Or asking the air to hold you up. Both. Learn both. One of them will be tired one day when you need it.

6. Scattering.

Last. Only when you’re ready. Only with Dad or me there. Every time.

7. Your mother’s.

Whatever she’s got. She’ll teach you.

Under it, Dory wrote one more line. She didn’t number it.

And always come home for supper.

We started the next week. In the north field, below the house, where Kwame digs. Every morning, after breakfast, until noon.

All of them came. Every Dask child, from Dory down to Queenie and Kyrie and Luka, who are five now. Lio, who says she’s a Dask whatever the long record says. Oona, who has Mother’s gift and nobody else’s and came anyway, in her long brown coat, with her small chipped teapot. Small Holt and Pell. And Tiri, who doesn’t have any of it at all and came because Corin was there, and sat at the edge of the field drawing birds for Pell to practise on.

Twenty of them, in a field, on a bench Rory brought down specially, very long.

I stood at the front. I didn’t know what to say.

Then I remembered my father, at the kitchen table, when I was four, the morning after the moon. He didn’t say anything clever. He just put a cup of milk in front of me, and pointed at the wall, at the first square, and said, That one’s in the milk. Do you want to know what it’s called?

So I pointed at the first square, on the wall Dory had painted on a big board at the front of the field, and said:

“That one’s in all of you. Do you want to know what it’s called?”

And twenty people, from five years old to twenty-nine, said yes.

The squares took a month.

I’d done them all in one night at A Thousand Doors, in front of forty thousand people. That was different. That was showing them. This was teaching. One square a morning, sometimes two, and every one of them had to find it themselves. In a stone. In the grass. In the water Kwame brought up. In each other.

Kesh hated it. She sat at the end of the bench with her arms folded, exactly like her mother, and said she knew all of it already. Then on the ninth morning I asked her which square was the one that made her lightning go, and she opened her mouth to say, and stopped.

She didn’t know. She’d been doing it since she was small. She’d never once asked what it was made of.

She didn’t fold her arms after that. She sat at the front.

Queenie taught Hello.

She’s five. She stood at the front of the north field on the bench, because she’s very small, with her black eyes, all the way black, and a leaf in her hand. And nineteen people who are all bigger than her sat in the grass and listened.

“You don’t ask it anything,” she said. “You just say hello. And then you look at it. Not all the way down. Just at it.” She held up the leaf. “It’s green. It’s got lines. It’s a bit wet.”

Corin said, “That’s all?”

“That’s all,” said Queenie. “Then it knows you’re nice. Then you can ask.”

Trevor tried it with his glass cup. He held it up, and said hello, and looked at it. Just at it. He said afterwards it was the first time since breakfast, the morning it went to glass, that he’d looked at it without seeing all the way down. He said it was just a cup. He said it was very beautiful.

Ash tried it with a bar of Kiln iron. She said hello. She looked at it. Then she started crying, very suddenly, and couldn’t stop, and said it was the iron, it was so tired, nobody had ever said hello to it before, it had been hit for three hundred years.

Queenie went and patted Ash’s arm.

“Leaf,” she said.

The cold queen on the red moon sang back.

Dory heard it, the first morning of the lessons, at the glass, before she came down to the field. Very small. Very far. Very cold and very clear, the way a bell sounds across snow.

She came down to the north field and found small Holt on the long bench, and knelt in front of him, and said, “She says thank you.”

Small Holt didn’t say anything. For once.

“She says nobody’s ever given her snow before,” said Dory. “She says she’d been on the frame so long she’d forgotten what it felt like. She says she’s lying in it now. Under it. Singing. She says it’s the softest thing she’s ever been under.”

Small Holt went very red. Then he looked up at the sky, where you can’t see the moons in the daytime, and said, very quietly, the second time in his life he’s said anything quietly,

“You’re welcome.”

Genny says he’s been going up on the roof every night since, to look at it. Small and white, now, instead of red. She says he waves.

Asking was Dory’s. She’s better at it than I am. She always has been. She taught them the way she taught Lio. One cup, one morning. A cup of water, to ice, and back. A leaf, to glass, and back. A pebble, to gold, which they all liked, and back, which some of them liked less.

She made them ask out loud, at first. Would you mind? Every time. She said you can stop saying it out loud later. You never stop asking.

Pell asked her paper bird if it would like to go back on the paper.

It said no.

Pell looked at Dory.

“Then it doesn’t have to,” said Dory. “That’s what asking is. Sometimes it says no.”

The paper bird lives on Pell’s shoulder. It’s been there for two months. It goes to sleep in her hair at night. Garnet’s drawn it nine times.

Moving was Mother’s.

She didn’t want to. She said she was too old to teach anything. She said she’d moved a few cups in her time and that was all. Genny said that wasn’t true. Genny said that in the first war, Mother moved a Teeming the size of a house off a road outside the bubble and set it down in a field so gently it went to sleep. Mother said she didn’t remember that. Genny said she did.

So Mother came down to the north field in her long brown coat and stood at the front with her pot.

“All right,” she said. “Pick up a cup.”

Twenty people looked at their cups.

“Not with your hands, love,” said Mother.

She showed them. She looked at the pot in her hands, and it went up out of her hands, very slowly, and turned once in the air, and came down again on the bench beside her. She didn’t look like she was doing anything at all. She looked like a woman who’d put her pot down.

“That’s all it is,” she said. “You don’t push it. You don’t pull it. You just think, that’s where it goes. And it goes.”

Oona was best. Of course she was. She has Mother’s gift and nothing else, and she’s been watching Mother do it every day since she was five. She lifted every cup on the bench at once and set them all down in a row without spilling one.

Mother looked at her for a long time.

“There you are, love,” she said.

Small Holt was worst. He shouted at his cup. It went straight up into the sky and didn’t come down for an hour. Mother said that was all right. Mother said Lucas did that with a boot once, when he was six, and it came down on the neighbour’s roof, and his father had to go and get it.

I’d forgotten that. I’m not sure it’s true. Mother says it is.

Lifting was the one they’d all been waiting for.

I did the first way. Moving yourself, the way you’d move a cup. It’s how I learned, after the queens made my own moving as strong as Mother’s, a long time ago. You think that’s where I go, and you go. It’s very fast. It’s very tiring, if you do it for long.

Dory did the second. Asking the air.

She stood in the middle of the north field and said, out loud, so they’d all hear, “Would you mind holding me up for a bit?”

And the air did.

It didn’t lift her. It just held her. She went up off the grass, very slowly, the way a leaf comes off a tree in no wind at all, and hung there, a foot up, smiling, with her hands open.

“It’s not moving,” she said. “It’s being held. The air’s very kind. It’s holding up everything already. Birds. Clouds. Your breath. It’s very happy to hold one more.”

They all tried. Every one. Both ways.

By the end of the second week, there were twenty people in the air above the north field every morning. Some of them moving themselves, very fast, in great loops, the way Kesh does, and Sigmund, and small Holt, who shouted the whole time. Some of them being held, very slow, very still, the way Dory is. Abena, and Elin, and Queenie, who went up about as high as the garden wall and sat there in the air with her leaf, looking at it, very content.

Kyrie went up with her stick. And her soft Andraste on her back. She did the forms. In the air. A foot off the grass. Holding, holding on, letting go, and the stick turning once over in the air and coming down into her hand the other way round.

Andraste was watching from the edge of the field. She sat down on the grass very suddenly and didn’t get up for some time.

Lio was the one I watched, on the lifting days.

Her silver isn’t given. It was taken, from somebody, a long time ago, and put into her with a collar, and when I asked the collar off her it stayed, because it had nowhere else to go, and after a long time it decided that she was somewhere it could stay. The eldest says it likes the knot. But it isn’t the same as ours. It never will be.

She could always move herself. The Sorn made her able to. But she’d never once asked the air.

She stood in the middle of the north field on the eleventh morning, after everyone else had gone up, and closed her eyes. Sefa was at the edge of the field. I saw her put her hand over her mouth.

“Would you mind,” said Lio, out loud, very quietly, “holding me up? For a bit?”

Nothing happened.

She stood there. With her eyes closed. She didn’t ask again. She just waited, the way Dory taught her, the way you wait when you’ve asked somebody something and you don’t know if they’ll say yes.

And then, very slowly, the way a leaf comes off a tree in no wind at all, she went up.

A foot. No more. She opened her eyes. She looked down at the grass a foot below her feet, and then at Dory, and then at Sefa, at the edge of the field, with her hand over her mouth.

“It said yes,” said Lio.

“It said yes,” said Dory.

“To me.”

“To you.”

She stayed up there a long time. She didn’t go any higher. She didn’t need to. And when she came down, she walked straight across the north field to Sefa and put her arms round her, and didn’t say anything at all.

Scattering we did last. One at a time. With Dory and me both there, every time, the way the slate says.

It’s the hardest one. You let yourself go. Every part of you. All the little things holding hands that are you, you let them all go at once, and trust them to come back. And they do. They always do, if you’ve asked them right. But the first time, there’s a moment, Dory says, when you don’t know.

Trevor went first. He’s the eldest after Dory. He stood in the middle of the field with his glass cup in his pocket and closed his eyes and let go.

He was gone.

For about as long as it takes to say good morning.

And then he was there again. On the other side of the field. Standing in front of Teva, who’d been watching from the hedge with her gold ribbon on her wrist, and who said, very calmly, “Oh. Hello,” and then put her arms round him and didn’t let go for a long time.

“Where did you go?” said Kesh.

“I don’t know,” said Trevor. “Everywhere. Nowhere.” He looked at Teva. “I thought about where I wanted to be. And I was there.”

Dory looked at me. I knew what she was thinking. It’s the same thing I thought, the first time.

He’d gone to the person he loved. Without being told to. That’s where you go, when you scatter. If you’re lucky. If you’ve been taught by somebody who loved you.

They all scattered, in the end. Every one who was old enough. We didn’t let the five-year-olds; Dory said not till they’re ten, and wrote it on the slate. Small Holt went straight to Genny’s kitchen in Thera and frightened the life out of her. Pell went to Garnet’s drawing table and came back with her paper bird still on her shoulder, which Dory says is very difficult and she isn’t sure how Pell did it.

Kesh went to the top of the tallest glass tower on the plain and sat there, the way she did on the first day it was built.

Ash went to Odra’s forge. Odra was there. Odra didn’t even look up from the anvil.

“You’ll do,” she said.

And then Your mother’s.

Sera took Ash and Goldie and Luka to the river below the north field, where it goes wide and slow round the bend before the kit bridge. She stood in the shallows and went to flame. All of her. Living fire, the way the queens gave it to her, so hot the river steamed round her ankles. And she said, “It’s not burning. Burning’s what fire does when nobody’s asked it anything. This is fire being asked to be warm.”

Goldie got it in a day. She’s always had Sera’s temper. Ash got it in a week; she says it’s the same as the forge, except you’re the iron. Luka is five, and touched the river, and it went warm all the way to the kit bridge, and he laughed, and Sera picked him up out of the water and held him and didn’t say anything for a long time.

Andraste took Corin and Thessaly and Vessa and Kyrie to the ridge on Hyrran. With Holdfast. With Kyria. Andraste doesn’t have silver the way the rest of us do; she has the ridge, and the blade, and the thing Hyrrani have that nobody else has, the way of standing on a ridge in a storm and not moving. She taught them that. Every morning. In a row. Oldest to youngest. Corin and Thessaly and Vessa with their blades, and Kyrie with her stick, and Kyria at the end of the row, saying the right way round every time the stick came down.

Risa took Dory and Sigmund and Kesh up into her storm. All four of them as lightning, across the whole sky above the north field, so bright that the Aldri in the glass towers on the plain came out onto their balconies to watch. Dory can do it already. Dory can do everything. She went anyway. She says it’s different with your mother.

Luna took Trevor and Elin onto the river and froze it, and walked them down it on paths of ice, all the way to the sea at Thera, a hundred miles, in an afternoon, in armour she made out of the air. Elin made a path of her own on the way back, very straight, and Luna stopped and looked at it, and said, “That’s better than mine,” and Elin went red.

Hana took Kwame and Efua and Abena and Queenie to the well at the bottom of the garden. And she taught them breath. Not water. The thing under water. The two little squares that make it, that hold hands so tightly they’re nearly the same thing, and that every living thing needs. She showed them how to give it. To someone who can’t breathe. To a queen who’s forgotten how. To a child pulled out of a bay. Abena already knew. Abena learned it on the long ward. Hana taught her anyway. She said there’s knowing and there’s being taught by your mother, and they’re different, and Abena should have both.

And Queenie sat on the edge of the well, with her leaf, and her black eyes all the way open, and watched her mother give breath to a bird that had flown into the kitchen window that morning and couldn’t get up. The bird got up. It flew away. Queenie watched it all the way to the orchard.

“Leaf,” she said, to her mother.

Hana cried. Hana cries at everything now. She says she’s earned it.

Genny took small Holt to the plateau. And taught him the thing she’s best at. The foot. The small space round you, every direction, where you can do anything, as hard as you like. She said he’s got everything now, everything out to the edge of the sky, and that’s wonderful, and one day he’ll need to know how to do it all in a very small space, very fast, without anything getting out. She said that’s what she learned in the bubble, when she was nine and I’d gone, and there was nobody left to ask. She said it’s what kept people alive.

Small Holt practised it all morning. Very quietly. He didn’t shout once.

Garnet took Pell to her drawing table. And taught her what Garnet knows, which is touch. That some things you don’t look at. Some things you have to put your hand on. And when Pell put her hand on the paper bird on her shoulder, it went very still, and then, very softly, it began to sing.

Garnet says it’s singing her drawing. The one of Pell as a baby. It’s the first thing Garnet ever drew of her.

Aune doesn’t have any children of her own with me yet. She says that’s after Corin and Tiri. She says she’s waiting.

But on the last day of the lessons, she came down to the north field in her flight robe, with her hair blown everywhere, and stood at the front of the long bench, and said:

“Who wants to learn the other kind of flying?”

Twenty hands went up.

She takes them up in a Ceren, two at a time, every afternoon. She says she’s never had so many students. She says small Holt shouts the whole way up and the whole way down and that it’s the best sound she’s ever heard in a cockpit.

Quenby had the north field on the front, from a very long way away. Twenty people in the air at once above a field of grass, some of them very fast and some very slow, and one very small one sitting a foot above the garden wall with a leaf. THE SCHOOL ON THE HILL.

Imre’s made a soft paper bird. It’s grey, with pencil lines drawn on its wings, and it clips onto your shoulder. Pell says it’s not as good as hers. Pell’s is right; it isn’t. It’s sold out anyway. There’s a snow-globe, too, of a small white moon, with a very small queen lying in the bottom of it under the snow. When you shake it, it plays a single note, very clear, like a bell across snow. Small Holt has nine. He gives them away.

The keepers sent word that there are three hundred little Aldri boys called Holt this year. Old Holt, Ezra, heard, and went down to the river below the north field, and sat on the bank with his cap off for most of the afternoon. He says he never thought anybody would name anything after him except Genny, and that was only because she was frightened.

And Corvan sent a line. Still sitting. A different sister’s house tonight. Somebody’s grandson asked me if I could fly. I said no. He looked very disappointed. Tell them to learn properly. Dory read it out to the whole north field, at the end of a morning. Twenty people in the grass. Nobody said anything for a while.

Then small Holt said, very loudly, “We are.”

The two hundred and sixty-eight are still in the last hall on Velle. Hen still says their names every morning. Dory says she’s taught the twenty that too. To say them. Every morning, at the end of the lessons, before they go home for lunch. All two hundred and sixty-eight, in turn, round the long bench, one name each, round and round.

So that’s twenty more people saying them.

Mother came down to the north field on the last morning, after Aune. She stood at the back with her pot and looked at them all, on the long bench, in a row. Twenty of them. From five years old to twenty-nine.

Then she looked at the slate. On the board at the front, where Dory had copied it out large.

And always come home for supper.

“Well,” said Mother. “That’s the important one.”

Mother checked the slate at breakfast this morning, the way she does. Before she poured.

Morning: 357.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she put the pot down and counted on her fingers, very slowly, under her breath, the way she used to count the days until my father came home from the filter.

“Eight,” she said.

Teva, at the other end of the long table, went pink. Trevor put his glass cup down very carefully, as if it might break, which it can’t.

Dory didn’t say anything. But I saw her look at the small line, the one under Morning, the one in her own hand. The same number.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and seventy-five. Four new ones. Wren says one of them said it in a voice like a child who’s just put snow on a moon and is trying not to look pleased.

At the top of the slate, the way she does, Wren wrote the count.

And under it:

Holt: snow.

Pell: a bird.

Twenty: taught.

Morning: 357.

Days 11181–11270. Lessons.

Small Holt, eleven, Genny’s, asked the red moon if its lonely cold queen would like snow, and by morning it was white; Genny ran up the hill road: that’s yours, what he’s got; I put a lake on one at four. Pell, ten, Garnet’s, wished a pencil bird real and it wouldn’t go back. They asked us to teach them properly, the way Uncle Lucas’s dad did. On the roof Dory said we never taught any of them; they taught themselves, frightened, by accident; that’s not good enough. We wrote it on one of Wren’s slates by Commonhold’s light: the squares; hello (Queenie); asking, never telling; moving (Grandma); lifting, two ways; scattering, last, only with one of us there; your mother’s; and always come home for supper. Twenty in the north field on Rory’s long bench, five to twenty-nine, Lio and Oona and small Holt and Pell, Tiri drawing birds at the edge. That one’s in all of you; do you want to know what it’s called? Kesh didn’t know which square made her lightning, and sat at the front after. Queenie taught hello; Trevor’s cup was just a cup and very beautiful; Ash cried for tired iron. Dory taught asking; Pell’s bird said no, so it stays. Mother taught moving (a Teeming the size of a house off a road outside the bubble, she says she doesn’t remember); Oona lifted every cup; small Holt’s went up for an hour, like my boot. Lifting: moving yourself, or asking the air, which is happy to hold one more; Kyrie did the forms a foot off the grass and Andraste sat down. Scattering: Trevor went to Teva (oh, hello); you go where you love, if you were taught by somebody who loved you; not till ten; Ash to Odra (you’ll do). Then their mothers: Sera’s fire asked to be warm, Luka warmed the river to the kit bridge; Andraste’s ridge, in a row; Risa’s lightning, all four; Luna’s ice paths to Thera, Elin’s straighter; Hana’s breath, a bird at the well, Queenie: leaf; Genny taught Holt the foot, and he didn’t shout once; Garnet taught Pell touch, and the bird sang her baby drawing. Aune taught the other kind of flying. Lio asked the air, and waited, and it said yes, to her; she went to Sefa. The cold queen on the red moon said thank you for the snow; small Holt said you’re welcome, quietly, and waves at the white moon every night. Three hundred Holts; old Holt on the riverbank with his cap off. Corvan: tell them to learn properly; small Holt: we are. The twenty say the two hundred and sixty-eight at the end of every lesson. Mother: that’s the important one. Morning: eight days left. Four hundred and seventy-five. Holt: snow. Pell: a bird. Twenty: taught. Morning: 357.