Scarecrow

The Drenn queen came up the hill road at dawn.

She doesn’t come to Avalon. She lives on Earth now, in the north she sang back, under the first forest, the one she stopped to look at when it came up out of the ground. She’s left it three times since. Once for Root. Once to sing the ground soft for an engine. Once, quietly, to see Brannock’s three, after.

This was the fourth.

She came through the arch from Earth on the red glass in the dark, and walked up the hill road, and stopped at the end of the garden. All of her. Taller than the house. Grey and brown like old bark, and long, and the four arms folded against her sides with the blades laid flat, and her head very high, turning.

Under the garden, very deep, in her hollow, the Scarecrow queen hummed. The first one. The one who’s always lived under Scarecrow, who I learned to talk to before I learned anything else. She hummed once, low, the way she does when someone she knows has come to the door.

Mother was on the step with the first cup. She put it down.

Behind the Drenn queen, her young came up the hill road. One after another. Nine hundred of them, Wren counted later. Smaller than her, the size of a cart, grey and brown, with two arms each instead of four. They came up out of the dark into the garden and stood in rows among the beans and the cabbages, very still, with the dew on them.

Nobody moved.

Then the Drenn queen bent her head down. Down and down. Until her face was level with Mother’s on the step.

Brannock, she said. Her voice is high and clear, like wind across the top of a bottle. The small one. Who sang the high part.

“Yes,” said Mother.

She was cut, said the Drenn queen. On a frame. For two days. While her sisters sang to her.

“Yes, love,” said Mother. “We were too late.”

The Drenn queen didn’t say anything for a long time. Her young stood in the garden among the cabbages, perfectly still.

I was a keeper once, she said. For them. With the voice in me. I did what I was told. I cut things I was told to cut. I have never cut anything since that I was not asked to.

She unfolded one of her four arms. The blade on the end of it was as long as I am. It caught the first light.

I am asking now, she said. Me and mine. When they come for a queen again, we would like to be there.

Mother looked at the blade for a long time. Then at the nine hundred young among the beans.

“It’s not mine to say, love,” she said. “It’s yours. And theirs.” She looked at the young. “Have you asked them?”

The Drenn queen turned her head.

Nine hundred young, in rows, in the garden. All at once, without a sound, every one of them unfolded one arm. Two blades each. Eighteen hundred blades, very small and very bright, catching the light from the north field.

Yes, said the Drenn queen. I asked them.

She went to the others that night.

Not to us. To the queens. Dory heard it. She sat up in bed at midnight and came out onto the porch in her nightdress with the Dusk glasses in her hand and sat down on the step and didn’t say anything for an hour, and I sat with her.

The queens were talking.

All of them. Every queen in the Hedge, and the ones in the Reach, and the ones out past everything who’d asked for a box. Through the rock. Through the eldest. The way they spoke when the eldest called them all, the way they sang when they called Marn’s queen back by name. Every queen there is, at once, in the dark, deciding something.

“What are they saying?” I said.

Dory listened.

“The Drenn queen asked them,” she said. “She said: we have sung, and we have waited, and we have let them carry us off and cut us and said thank you to whoever came in time. She said: I will not wait any more. She said: me and mine are going to stand up.”

“And?”

Dory was quiet a long time.

“The eldest said nothing,” she said. “She let them talk. The heavy queen said yes straight away. She said she’d been waiting four hundred years for somebody to say it first. The marsh queen said yes. The Brannock three said yes, together, with the gap in the middle.”

She put her glasses on.

“And then one of the very old ones,” she said. “A very deep one. A long way off. Who never says anything. She said: we were made to hold things. Not to strike them.”

“What did the Drenn queen say?”

“She said: then hold them. Hold them very hard. Hold them so they cannot move.” Dory took a breath. “And the old one thought about it for a very long time. And then she laughed.”

“Queens laugh?”

“That one does,” said Dory. “Now.”

It was decided before dawn. Dory says it wasn’t a vote. Queens don’t vote. They just keep talking until it’s true.

The queens aren’t going to wait any more.

Not all of them can fight. Most of them can’t move. They’re under worlds, deep, a long way down, and they always will be. But they can do what they do. They can hold. They can sing. They can ask the ground and the sea and the weather, the way they always have, very gently, to keep things as they are.

And they can stop being gentle.

The first world was called Ossery.

We didn’t know about it until it was over. Nobody did. Ossery’s a small wet world on the inside edge of the Reach, all marsh and reeds and long flat water, with a queen under the biggest marsh who’s a cousin of ours, Dory says, from the marsh queen’s line. The Refined came for her nine days after the queens decided. Three white ships. A frame. Nobody on Ossery asked anybody for help. They didn’t know they could.

The white ships came down over the big marsh at dusk.

The marsh opened.

That’s how Ossery’s First told it, afterwards, on the old band, to Senna. An old woman called Faro Dunn with reed in her hair and a voice like somebody who’d just seen something she’d be telling for the rest of her life.

The white ships came down low, she said. Over the water. With the frame hanging under the middle one. And the marsh opened under them. The whole marsh. Nine miles of it. The water went down into the ground in one breath, like a bath with the plug pulled, and then it came back up.

All at once. All of it. Nine miles of marsh water standing up out of the ground in a wall as tall as the sky, with the reeds still in it, and the fish, and the mud, and the light of the white ships shining green through it.

And then it came down.

On the ships.

Two of them went into the marsh and didn’t come up. The water closed over them and stayed closed, and the queen held it shut, Faro Dunn said, very hard, for a whole night. The marsh was perfectly flat in the morning. Not a ripple. You’d never have known.

The third got away. Half of it. The back half came apart in the water and the front half went up into the cloud with the frame still hanging off it, empty, swinging.

Faro Dunn said the people of Ossery came out of their stilt houses in the morning and stood on their landings and looked at the flat water for a long time.

Then a girl of about nine, the first child on Ossery ever to do so, said thank you out loud to the marsh.

And the marsh, Faro Dunn says, went very slightly warmer.

The second world was Skara Reach.

Not a Reach world. That’s just its name; it’s old, older than the Reach. A world of high stone and wind, with a queen in the air. A queen of wind, like Ingrid’s and Risa’s and Kesh’s, who lives in the weather itself and has never been on the ground.

The Refined didn’t know how to take a queen of wind. Nobody does. So they tried to take the people instead. Every child under twelve, the way they’d tried on Brannock. They said if the queen came down to the ground and onto the frame, they’d give the children back.

The queen of Skara Reach came down.

Not onto the frame.

There’s a recording of it. Skara Reach has always had long-band ears; it’s a relay world, between the arms. Somebody up a signal tower kept recording the whole time.

The Refined had six white ships on the ground in the great valley under the high stone, with the children of the valley towns being walked up into them in collars, in rows.

And the sky went black. Not dark. Black. In the middle of the day. And then it came down into the valley.

All the wind on Skara Reach. All of it, from every part of the world, at once, into one valley. The recording’s mostly noise. A roar like the whole world breathing in. And then, very clearly, in the middle of the roar, the sound of white ships being lifted off the ground.

Six of them. Lifted. Turned over. Put down again, upside down, very hard, on the high stone at the head of the valley. One after another. Like somebody putting cups away.

And the children in the rows, in their collars, stood perfectly still in the middle of all that wind, and not one of them moved. Not one hair on their heads moved. The queen held them. Inside the roar, in the very middle of the worst wind anyone has ever recorded, there were nine thousand children standing in perfectly still air.

The way Ingrid makes it still. The way the Hush does. Before she strikes.

Ingrid listened to the recording at the long table. All of it. With her eyes closed.

At the end she opened her eyes and said, “Oh, she’s very good,” in a voice I’ve never heard her use. And then she went to Skara Reach the next week, through Elin’s door, on her own, and stood on top of the high stone for a whole day, very still.

She won’t say what happened. Konrad says she came home windburned and very happy and slept for a day and a half.

The third world was Hask.

The Drenn queen was there.

Hask is in the Collective. Still. A grain world, very flat and gold, near the inner edge of the second arm, with a queen under the plains. Nobody on Hask asked for anything either. But the queens knew. The queen of Hask called to the others, the way they call now, when the Refined came down: They are here. They have a frame.

And the Drenn queen heard it, on Earth, under her forest. And came through the arch in the dark with her young, and up the hill road again.

And she went to Elin.

I was there for that bit. In the garden, at midnight, with Elin, who’d been woken up. The Drenn queen and her nine hundred young were standing in the beans.

“Hask,” said Elin. She was in her coat over her nightdress. “You want a door to Hask.”

Yes, said the Drenn queen.

Elin looked at her. At all nine hundred. Then she looked at me.

“Okafor’s going to kill me,” she said.

I asked you, said the Drenn queen. Not her. It is for you to say.

Elin thought about it for about as long as it takes to drink a cup of tea.

Then she put both hands up.

“All right,” she said. “But I’m coming too. I want to see.”

So I’ll put down what I saw.

Hask at night is flat and gold to the edge of the world. The grain was high. Harvest time. There were four white ships on the ground in the middle of the biggest field, with their lights on, and a frame standing up between them in the grain like a scaffold. The Refined had dug down. There was a shaft in the middle of the field, square, very neat, going straight down into the dark.

They were bringing her up.

You could see her at the bottom of the shaft. Far down. A glow. Pale gold, like the grain. Coming up very slowly on chains.

The door opened at the edge of the field. The Drenn queen went through it.

She doesn’t run. I hadn’t known that. She’s too big to run. She walks. But she walks very fast, and the grain parted round her like water, and her young came through the door behind her and spread out on both sides in the dark, nine hundred of them, low, in the grain, so all you could see was the grain moving.

The Refined didn’t see them until they were at the ships.

The made were there. Of course they were. In a ring round the frame, with their white lances. They turned round when the grain started moving.

The young went through them.

I’d never seen a brood fight. I’d seen them take down fliers at Root, from a long way off, in the dark. I’d never seen them close. They move together. All of them, like one thing. Like the Kasrai, but faster, and lower, and without any sound at all. They went into the ring of the made from nine sides at once and the blades came out, two on each, very small and very bright, and the made went down.

Not killed. That was the thing. Not one. The young went for the collars. Under, and up, and the collar came off and fell in the grain, and the made soldier went down on its knees, and the young were already past it, to the next one.

Two hundred of the made, in a ring. All on their knees in the grain in less time than it takes to say it. And all their collars in the grain beside them, cut.

Dory, beside me, at the door, made a sound.

“They’re waking up,” she said. “Dad. Some of them. They’re waking up.”

The grey ones came out of the white ships.

And the Drenn queen met them.

I’m going to put this down very plainly, the way I put down Brannock.

There were forty grey ones. They came out of the ships in a line, tall and grey and identical, and walked towards her through the grain, not hurrying. They don’t hurry. They’ve never had to. Nothing’s ever been able to stop them except Holdfast, and Holdfast was on Avalon.

The Drenn queen unfolded all four arms.

She was a keeper once. For them. With their voice in her. She knows what they are. She knows what they’re made of. She knows, Dory says, exactly where.

She went through the line of forty in one movement. Not fast. Very deliberate. Four arms, four blades, each one going to a particular place on a particular grey one, the way you’d put four pins in a map. And the grey ones came apart. Not like with Holdfast, in pieces. They came apart along lines. Neatly. The way the thing with the collar took Tiel’s moon apart. The way they were made.

She’d been told, once, where the lines were. So she could keep them. She’d remembered.

Forty grey ones lay in the grain in pieces. Very neat pieces. None of them got up.

The Drenn queen folded her arms.

The Refined were at the top of the shaft. Nine of them. In white robes. Standing by the chains. They’d stopped bringing the queen up.

The Drenn queen walked to the edge of the shaft and looked down at them.

They didn’t run. Refined never do. The tallest one looked up at her, very calm, with his hands folded in his sleeves.

“Keeper,” he said. “You will come back to us. You were made for us.”

The Drenn queen bent her head down to him. Down and down. Until her face was level with his.

No, she said. I was asked.

And then she put one blade, very gently, under each of the chains. And cut them.

The queen of Hask went back down. Slowly. Into the dark. Glowing gold.

And when she got to the bottom of the shaft, she closed it.

Not the shaft. The ground. All of it. All round the four white ships and the frame and the nine Refined at the top of the shaft. The ground of Hask, which is soft and deep and gold and full of grain, went soft. Softer than the ramp on Brannock. Like water.

The ships went down into it very slowly. Upright. Their lights still on. The frame tipped over into the grain and went under.

The nine Refined stood at the edge of the shaft as it closed and sank to their knees in gold soil. Then their waists. Then their chests.

The Drenn queen stood over them and watched. Her young came and stood round her in the grain. Two hundred made soldiers knelt in the field without their collars, some of them crying. Dory was walking among them, very slowly, with her hand on their heads, one at a time.

The tallest Refined, sunk to his chest, looked up at the Drenn queen.

Ask, she said. Ask her. She might.

He didn’t.

The ground of Hask closed over the nine of them. Very gently. Like a blanket.

In the morning there was a field of gold grain, high, ready for harvest, perfectly flat, from one edge of the world to the other. With a door at the edge of it, and a very large queen standing beside it, and nine hundred young, and two hundred people sitting in the grain who’d been the made, being given tea.

Mother had come through at dawn with the pot.

One of them was a boy.

Dory found him. Near the back of the two hundred, sitting in the grain on his own with his knees up and his collar lying beside him, cut clean through. Fifteen, perhaps. Thin. With the white of the made still in his face, going, slowly, like frost off a window.

He looked up when Dory’s hand came down on his head.

“Carrow,” he said. His voice was very hoarse. “I was on Carrow. In the square. They pointed at me.”

Dory knelt down in the grain.

“You’re the one who sang,” she said. “So high the fountain shook.”

He looked at her for a long time. Then he started to cry. Not loudly. Like somebody who’d forgotten how and was finding out again.

“I don’t know if I still can,” he said.

His name is Joss Asher. He’s from Carrow’s old quarter, three streets from Bess’s shop. He was the first one they chose. The first morning of the war. They took him up into the white ship and put him in a room and he doesn’t remember anything after that until Dory’s hand.

Halloway kept him on the ward nine days. On the tenth he asked if he could go somewhere.

“Brannock,” he said. “The paper said. The small queen. Who sang the high part.”

Halloway looked at him for a long time. Then she sent for Corin.

We went with him. Me and Dory and Corin, who held the door. Down the shaft under the second hill, where Kwame had made steps now, very carefully, with a rail. To the bottom, where the small queen of Brannock had been, and wasn’t any more. Where the rock was still cut.

Joss Asher stood at the bottom of the shaft in the dark for a long time.

Then he opened his mouth.

I don’t know how to put down what it sounded like. Dory says there isn’t a way. Very high. Higher than I knew a person could go. Thin and clear and going up and up, like a wet finger round the rim of a glass.

And from very far off, through the rock, from under the first hill and the third and the fourth, Brannock’s three queens heard it.

They stopped.

Then, very slowly, they started to sing. The low part. The middle. All three. Underneath him. Around the high part. Where the gap had been.

Joss Asher sang until his voice went. Then he sat down at the bottom of the shaft with his back against the cut rock and cried, and Dory sat beside him, and above us, all over Brannock, Tolland Rusk told us afterwards, people came out of their doors in the snow and stood very still and listened.

He goes back every week. He’s not a queen. He knows he isn’t. He says he’s only borrowing the part until it grows back.

The three queens of Brannock wait for him. Every week, Dory says. They start a little before he gets there. As if they’ve been practising.

Okafor didn’t kill Elin.

She stood in the garden when we came back, with her slate, very still, and looked at Elin for a long time. Then at the Drenn queen. Then at the two hundred made soldiers coming through the door behind us, without collars, holding onto each other.

“You didn’t ask me,” she said to Elin.

“No, General.”

“Good,” said Okafor. “It wasn’t mine.”

She turned to the Drenn queen. And put her hand on her chest. The way Varra does.

Then she wrote on her slate. Under Ground.

Queens.

The Prime said nothing. Nothing at all. For nine days. He didn’t come on the band. Ferro Hale says that’s never happened before, not once in all the years.

On the tenth day the Refined pulled back from every queen world in the Reach.

Not all the way. Not forever. But they pulled back. The frames went up into the white ships and the white ships went up into the sky, and on forty worlds that had been watching their queens be dug for, the digging stopped.

And we knew about all of it. Everybody did. Within a day.

Because of the Herald.

It started at Konrad’s table. Of course it did.

The four of them who used to sit in the white hall in a row reading what they were given. Vesk and Tamsin and Rhun, and Ferro Hale, at Konrad’s kitchen table every evening, writing letters. Hundreds. To Kessry and Dun Amar and Ilith and Carrow and everywhere.

And one evening Tamsin put her pen down.

“We’re writing the same letter,” she said. “Four hundred times a night. To four hundred people. All saying the same thing.” She looked round the table. “What if we wrote it once. And sent it to everybody.”

The first Herald was one sheet. Both sides. Konrad printed it on the old press in the Arch Hall that Crane uses for the timetables. Nine thousand copies. Mattick took a thousand into the Reach under the rabbits. The rest went out through the arches in the morning.

It had the stars on the front. Wren’s count. Every day. In the top corner, in her careful hand, copied. Seven hundred and forty-one, the first morning, and under it Not yet.

It had what Senna said on the band that morning, word for word. It had what the Prime said the night before, word for word, so you could see the difference. It had a list of every world that joined the Hedge that week. It had Ingrid’s sheet: who’d come home. It had a column of letters, from anyone, about anything, edited by Tamsin, who answered every single one in pencil in the margin.

And on the back it had a small drawing by Imre. Different every day. The first one was the old woman in Carrow’s square, with her hands folded.

Nine thousand the first morning.

Ninety thousand the second week.

A million by the end of the month. Nine million by the end of the season. Every world in the Hedge. The edge worlds of the Reach, under the rabbits, then under the barley, then simply carried in by people walking through the arches with it under their arms. Out past everything, to the worlds that asked for a box.

Tamsin edits. Vesk writes the front, every day, in the voice she used for sixty years in the white hall. Rhun does the worlds, the long lists, who’s joined and who’s jumped and who’s dug a hollow. Ferro Hale does the law. Every word the Prime says, set against every word the Assize ever wrote.

They had to move out of Konrad’s kitchen. They’ve got a whole floor of the Arch Hall now, and nine presses, and three hundred people, and a printing yard on Marrach where Tavish Orne’s yard-guilds print the Reach edition at night.

Konrad still lets them use the kitchen table on Sundays. He says it’s where the Herald lives. The rest is just where it gets made.

The worlds read it out.

That’s the thing nobody expected. On the worlds where most people can’t read the Hedge’s letters yet, somebody reads it. Out loud. In the square, in the morning, before everybody sits down. On Hesk’s Field it’s read by an old miner from a cart. On Hyrran Kyria’s grandmother’s cousin reads it on the ridge. On Carrow, Mattick says, it’s read every morning by the old woman at the front of the square, very slowly, with her hands folded on top of it, while the grey ones stand round the edges and listen.

They haven’t stopped her. Nobody knows why.

Dory says she thinks the scientists are reading it too.

Everybody knows everything now. That’s how Ferro Hale put it. He said for three thousand years in the white hall, the most powerful thing anyone ever did was decide what nobody else would hear.

He said the Herald has taken that away from the Prime. He said that’s worth more than any number of white ships.

The Prime called the Herald the coward’s rag, on the band, the first time he came back after Hask.

Tamsin printed that on the front the next morning, word for word, in a box. Under it, in smaller letters: Subscriptions this week: 2,104,000.

Quenby, the magazine, sent a very long letter to the Herald about whether there was room in the Hedge for two of them. Eluned Sabe signed it. Vesk printed it in full. Then underneath, in her own hand, very small: There is room in the Hedge for everybody. That is the point of the Hedge.

Quenby’s next cover was the Herald’s first front page. Framed. With the stars in the corner. The headline was The Paper Everybody Reads.

It went a very long way away.

And everyone was learning things.

That was the other part of that season. Not just the Herald. Everything. As if, Mother said, the whole Hedge had woken up one morning and realised it didn’t know enough and got up and went to find out.

Halvane opened A Thousand Doors on forty worlds.

Not the whole university. That’s still on Ister, with its hall where I teach the squares, and Bell’s mathematics, and Oriel’s water under the rivers. But a door of it. A college. On Hesk’s Field and Marrach and Kiln and Thole and Hyrran, and Kessry in its new cold sun, and Brannock, under the three hills, and thirty-three more.

Each one with an arch to the hall on Ister. So a student on Brannock can go to Bell’s lectures in the morning and be home for lunch.

Halvane calls them the satellites. The students call them the Doors. The Aldri have a long word that Ilas says means the places where you can learn something without having to leave home first. Halvane says that’s the most important part. He says the Aldri spent eleven thousand years having to leave everywhere before they could learn anything.

He went to every opening. Forty of them. In forty days. He made a speech at each one. Ilas says it was the same speech every time and it was very short.

“Ask things,” he said. “That’s all. That’s the whole of it. Ask.”

Then he sat down. On a bench. Every time. In front of everybody.

Halloway is teaching nine thousand people to be doctors.

Nine thousand. At the Lake House and the ward and the hall on Ister and nineteen of the satellite Doors. She teaches them all herself, through the arches, in rotation. She says she can’t stop. She says every time she looks at her sheet there’s another world with no doctor on it, and another queen who’s been cut, and another child born doing something nobody understands.

Abena teaches with her. And Hana, and Ruth’s old nurses from the dome, the ones who are left. And the healers of every people in the Hedge, who’ve come to the ward to learn how we do it and stayed to teach how they do it, until nobody’s quite sure any more which way it goes.

Halloway made a rule. She wrote it on the wall of the ward. Wren copied it to every Door.

Sit with the ones who don’t wake up.

Nine thousand students have read it. Halloway says most of them don’t understand it yet. She says they will.

And Okafor and the General want a college.

They came to the long table on the last night of the season. Together. Which they don’t do. They’re always at the board at different ends, or on the field at different ends, or in the Arch Hall corridor walking in opposite directions.

They sat down. Side by side. On the bench. The General sat very straight. Okafor sat with her slate in her lap.

“We’ve got nine million,” said Okafor. “In the Standing. The Wings. The Lines. The Ground. Nine million and rising.”

“And not enough people to lead them,” said the General.

“Brannock,” said Okafor. “We had Gilgamesh at the north door and Varra at the east and Andraste and Kyria. And under them, nobody. Nobody who’d been taught. People doing their best. Six hundred Kasrai died on the east slope because nobody under Varra knew to move them off it when the white ships came.”

She didn’t say it as if it was somebody else’s fault. She said it as if it was hers.

“We want to teach them,” said the General. “Officers. Properly. The way we were taught.” He stopped. “Better than we were taught.”

“Where?” said Mother.

The General looked at Okafor. Okafor looked at her slate.

“Brannock,” said the General. “Above Fell. On the glass, where the east slope was.” He put his hands flat on the table. “Tolland Rusk has offered us the hill. It’s the coldest place I’ve stood in years. And the place we learned the most about what we didn’t know.”

Okafor turned her slate round. On it there was a drawing. A building. Long and low and grey, half into the hill, with a field in front of it and a single tall mast.

And at the top, in her square sergeant’s hand, a name.

The Wall.

“Because that’s what they’ll be,” she said. “When they come out.”

Mother looked at it for a long time.

“It’ll need a kitchen,” she said.

“Ma’am,” said the General.

They start digging on Brannock next month. Kwame’s Ground. The first hundred officers will come in the spring. Gilgamesh is teaching the first year. Varra is teaching the second. She’s tied a new rope. She says she wants to start it with something that isn’t a knot for the dead.

So the first knot on Varra’s new rope is for the Wall.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Seven hundred and ninety. Hask’s said it from the gold plains, low and warm and very satisfied. Ossery’s said it from under the flat water. And Skara Reach’s didn’t say it at all, Wren says. Skara Reach’s star whistled.

Wren wrote the count at the top of the slate. The Herald will have it by breakfast.

And under it:

Queens: standing.

Herald: nine million.

Wall: digging.

Days 11816–11990. The Herald.

The Drenn queen and her nine hundred young asked to fight, and the queens stopped being gentle: Ossery’s marsh drowned two white ships, Skara Reach’s wind turned six over while the children stood in still air, and on Hask the Drenn queen cut forty grey ones apart and freed two hundred of the made before the ground closed over the Refined. The Refined pulled back from every queen world. The Assessors started the Herald at Konrad’s table, and nine million read it. Halvane opened forty satellite Doors, Halloway took on nine thousand students, and Okafor and the General began the Wall on Brannock.