Scarecrow

Ammet’s sun said Soon for six hundred and eleven mornings.

Wren counted every one. She wrote it under the count, by itself, with a line under it, every dawn. She never once missed. She never once wrote it any differently. Toby says she held her breath before it every morning, and every morning let it out when the word came, because Soon isn’t Now.

On the six hundred and twelfth morning, Ammet’s sun didn’t say Soon.

It said nothing at all.

Wren came into the kitchen. Not fast. Very slowly. She stood in the doorway with the slate in one hand and the chalk in the other, and she didn’t say anything for a long time.

Mother put the pot down.

“Wren, love.”

“It didn’t say anything,” said Wren. “Ammet’s. I said the count. Every star answered. Every one. A thousand and nine. And Ammet’s didn’t.” She looked at the slate. “There’s a gap. Where it should be.”

Dory was already standing up. Her glasses were off. She had the net open before Wren finished.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her eyes shut.

“It’s listening,” she said. “The sun. Ammet’s. It’s not saying anything because it’s listening.” She opened her eyes. “Dad. The eater’s close enough to hear.”

Bell came up the hill road with her slates in a bag. She’d run. Bell never runs.

She put the top slate down on the long table and put her finger on a number at the bottom.

“Nine days,” she said. “It’s been slow for a year. Slower than my sum. Looking. Now it’s sped up. Something’s pulling it.” She looked at Dot in the corner. “Bells?”

“Negative,” said Dot. “There are no bells on Ammet. This one has listened every night. There are none.” A pause. “But there were bells on Ammet for nine nights, once. The eater remembers the way.”

“Nine days,” said Okafor. In the doorway. With her slate. She was always in the doorway now. “Halvane.”

Halvane was under Ammet.

He’d been under Ammet for a year. Longer. Ilas stopped fetching him home at midnight about six months ago. She went to Ammet instead and lived in a hollow under the capital with him and made his tea and slept on a mat on the floor beside his drawings, and when the engineers asked her how long she’d stay, she said, “Until it goes, or until he does.”

He came up through Elin’s door into the kitchen an hour after Bell. Covered in red sand. Grey in the face. With Ilas holding his arm.

“Nine days,” said Okafor.

Halvane sat down on his bench. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

“The ninth engine isn’t finished,” he said.

Nine engines. At nine points round Ammet. Each the size of a city, deep under the sand. They all have to go at once. At exactly the same moment. If one goes a breath late, or doesn’t go, the other eight pull Ammet in eight directions and the ninth point holds, and the world tears.

Eight were finished. Tested. Waiting.

The ninth was on the eastern edge, under the hole in the sand where the east-dune town used to be. Where the Hungry ate everything above the ground. The ground there was wrong, Halvane said. Torn. Full of what the Hungry left. The engineers had been fighting it for a year.

“How long?” said Okafor.

“A month,” said Halvane. “If the ground lets us.”

“You have nine days.”

“I know,” said Halvane.

He put his face in his hands. Ilas put her hand on his back.

“Then the ninth point holds,” I said.

Everybody looked at me.

“If it can’t push,” I said, “it can hold. If the ninth engine can’t go, then the ninth point has to move anyway. With the others. At the same moment.” I looked at Halvane. “Somebody has to ask it to.”

Halvane looked up.

“Lucas,” he said. “It’s a ninth of a world.”

“I know.”

“You held Ammet’s sky for nine hours. You were bleeding from your eyes.”

“I know.”

“This is the ground,” said Halvane. “The whole eastern edge. A ninth of everything. All of it moving at once, at the speed of a world, in the same breath as eight engines, and if it’s a breath late—”

“Then I won’t be a breath late,” I said.

Nobody said anything.

Then Kwame, at the end of the long table, said, “Not on his own.”

Kwame’s done more for Ammet than anybody except Halvane. He dug every hollow. He asked the ground to remember being a sea floor so the Hungry couldn’t feel them. He’s been under Ammet with Halvane for a year, in the hollows, holding the ground still while they dug.

“I know that ground,” he said. “The eastern edge. I know where it’s torn. I know what it’ll do when it moves.” He looked at me. “You ask it to move. I’ll ask it to stay together while it does.”

“And the queen,” said Dory. “She’s asking the sand to be light. All of it. She’s been asking for a year. The eastern edge too.”

“And the Ground,” said Kwame. “All nine thousand. Under the eastern edge. In the hollows. Holding.”

Halvane looked round the long table. At all of us. For a long time.

“It’s never been done,” he said. “A world moved by eight engines and a man.”

“It’s never been done with a queen asking the sand to be light either,” said Mother. She put a cup in front of him. “Drink that. Then go and finish what you can.”

Nine days.

I’ll put them down quickly. They went quickly.

The people of Ammet went down into the hollows on the first day. All nine hundred million. Not because of the Hungry this time. Because when a world moves, the sky does very strange things, and the sand does stranger ones, and Kwame said it was better if everybody was underneath it.

They went down with their bags and their soft ones and their bowls. The drill bells rang. They went down in order, little ones first. Saffa Rennick went down last, with her soup bowl, after she’d walked every street of the capital to check nobody was left.

The Soon went down together. All nine. In their team coats. They’d been due to play Kessry that week. They took the ball with them.

The Drenn queen’s young went through every town on the second day. Unseen. Carrying anybody who’d been missed. Nine hundred and eleven people. An old man asleep in a cellar. A family who thought it was a drill. A girl of four, hiding under a bed with a soft Saelle, because the drill bell frightened her.

The Drenn queen herself stood on the highest dune above the capital and looked east. Toward the sun.

She stood there for nine days.

The Standing went to the edges. In case anything came with the eater. Gilgamesh with Hesper Daine. Varra and the Kasrai. The Kethri in the air. Every kit on every post on Ammet listening for the fold.

Nothing came.

Dot says the Prime knew. She says she heard him on the grey band on the third night, very faint, under his voice. She says he was waiting. She says he wanted Ammet to tear, and didn’t want to be seen to help it.

Halvane didn’t sleep. Not for nine days. Ilas sat in the hollow beside him and made the tea and didn’t tell him to.

On the sixth day they got the ninth engine to half. It would push. A little. Not enough. Not on its own.

“Half,” said Halvane. Standing in the dark at the bottom of the eastern edge, under the hole where the town was, with his hands on the engine. “Half is better than nothing.”

“Half is a great deal better than nothing,” said Kwame. “It’s half.”

Ammet’s queen came up on the eighth night.

Not all of her. She’s never come all the way out of the sand. Her head, and her shoulders, red-brown like the dunes, on the dune by the capital, beside the Drenn queen.

She’d been asking the sand for a year. Every day a little more. To be light. To be ready. To come.

It’s very surprised, she said. The sand. It’s never been asked to go anywhere. It’s always just been here.

Will it come? I said.

It’s very fond of me, said the queen of Ammet. It’ll come.

She looked east. At her sun. Very low, very red, in the dusk. Getting smaller.

It’s stopped talking to me, she said. My sun. It talked to me every morning for as long as I’ve been here. Not words. Just warm. She was quiet. It’s stopped.

It’s listening, I said. To what’s coming.

The queen of Ammet didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then I’ll talk to it, she said. Tonight. All night. So it isn’t alone.

She did. Dory heard her. All night. A long low sound, through the sand and up into the sky, to the sun. Not words. Just warm.

Mother sat on the porch with me on the eighth night. On Avalon. Before I went.

She didn’t say anything about Ammet. She didn’t say be careful. She’s never once said be careful. She says it’s a waste of breath, telling somebody to be careful who’s going to do the thing anyway.

She had her mending. Rue was asleep upstairs between Oona and the empty place. The kettle was on.

“Your father moved a mountain once,” she said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“Not a big one. A small one. On the ridge. Outside. It was in the way of the wind, and the wind was bringing the gas, and you were two and coughing.” She pulled a thread through. “He went out in the night and lay down on it. On his back. With his hands flat. And asked it to move a little to the left.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It took him all night,” said Mother. “He came back at dawn with his nose bleeding and his hands raw and he said, it’s only a little one, Dot, it’s only a little to the left. And he went to bed.” She bit the thread off. “And the wind went round it after that. For the rest of the time we were on the ridge. And you stopped coughing.”

She put the mending down.

“You lie down the way he did,” she said. “On your back. With your hands flat. I’ve seen you do it in the field since you were four. You’ve never once seen him do it.” She looked at me. “I don’t know where you learned it.”

“Neither do I,” I said.

Mother picked up her cup.

“Ask it what it is first,” she said. “He always did.”

On the ninth morning I went down to the eastern edge.

Kwame was already there. And the Ground, nine thousand of them, in every hollow under the eastern edge, with their hands on the walls. Halvane at the half-engine. Bell at the board in the capital with the other eight engines and a clock that Teva’s father made, which counts in breaths.

Dory was on the dune with the two queens. She had the net open. All of it. Every engine. Every hollow. Every person on Ammet. Nine hundred million. She was holding all of them.

“When you’re ready,” she said. In my ear. Through the net. “I’ll count. Bell will count. You go on nine.”

“All right.”

I lay down on the ground.

At the bottom of the eastern edge. In the dark. Under the hole where the town was. On my back. With my hands flat on the torn red rock. The way I used to lie on the field on Avalon when I was a boy and listen to the Scarecrow queen.

And I asked.

Not yet. Not to move. Not yet.

First I asked it what it was.

That’s the thing I learned on the first planet, before anything else. Before the wall. Before the kit. Before Mother came. You have to ask a thing what it is before you ask it to be anything else.

So I asked the eastern edge of Ammet what it was.

It told me.

It was sand. A great deal of sand. Red, and old, and very fond of its queen. And under the sand, rock. Old seabed, Kwame’s old seabed, remembering. And through the rock, torn places. Where the Hungry had been. Where they’d eaten everything above, and their acid had gone down into the cracks and stayed, and the rock didn’t know what it was any more in those places. It was frightened.

I asked the torn places, very gently, what they’d like to be.

They didn’t know.

So I told them what they’d been. Before. Sea floor. Old and heavy and quiet. Sand above. A town above that, with a well and a market and an old couple on a step at the end of the last street holding hands.

Oh, said the torn places. Very small. Yes. That.

And Kwame, beside me, felt them remember. And asked them to hold on to each other. And they did.

“Lucas,” said Dory. “It’s here.”

I couldn’t see it. I was at the bottom of a hollow under the eastern edge of a world with my eyes shut and my hands on the rock.

Dory saw it. She told me afterwards. She said she’ll never stop seeing it.

The eater came out of the dark beyond Ammet’s sun in the first light. Very slowly. Bigger than the sun. Much bigger. A shape you couldn’t see the edges of. Dark, the way the deep is dark, with a faint light moving along it, like weather in a very large sky.

It stopped.

Bell said it would. It always does. It stops, and it looks for what it was lured with. The bells. The queen being cut. The scream.

It looked for nine breaths.

There was nothing.

On the dune, the queen of Ammet was still talking to her sun. Very low. Very warm. Not screaming. Nothing like screaming.

Dory says the eater turned. Very slightly. Toward the dune. Toward the queen. As if it had heard something it didn’t understand.

And then it went on. Toward the sun.

“Nine,” said Dory.

I asked the eastern edge of Ammet to come with me.

All of it. All at once. A ninth of a world. Every grain of red sand, every stone of old seabed, every torn and frightened place, every hollow full of people with soup bowls. To move. To go. In the same breath as eight engines on the other side of the world, and half an engine under my back, and nine thousand of the Ground with their hands on the walls, and a queen asking the sand to be light.

It came.

I don’t remember the moving. I remember the asking. And then I remember a sound like the whole world breathing in.

Dory says it was the sand. All of it. On every dune on Ammet. Lifting. Very slightly. Into the air. Just for a breath. A red haze over the whole world, because the queen had asked it to be light and it was very, very light, and it wanted to come.

And then Ammet went.

Not tearing. Bell’s clock counted the breath. All nine points went in it. Eight engines and half an engine and a man on his back in the dark and Kwame next to him holding the torn places together.

Ammet went the way Sallow went. Properly. Silently. One world, one piece, through the dark, very fast, to a young yellow sun on the Hedge side of the Watch, three arches past Sallow’s. Bell chose it a year ago. She checked it every week since. Ninety-one times.

Dory held all nine hundred million the whole way.

Nobody fell. Nobody was left. Nothing tore.

On Avalon, Okafor stood at her board in the Arch Hall for the whole of the ninth morning.

She couldn’t do anything. That’s what Holt says. She’d done everything there was to do. She stood at the board with her slate under her arm and watched the post lights on Ammet, nine of them, one for each point, and Bell’s clock on a band from the capital counting breaths.

Ennis was there.

Nobody had brought him. He’d come down from Next Door at dawn on his own and stood behind her. Very straight. Hands behind his back. Slate under his arm. She didn’t send him away.

When Bell’s clock reached nine, all nine lights went out at once. That’s what they do when a world moves. The posts go with it. For a breath there’s nothing.

Then all nine came back on. At once. From somewhere else.

Okafor didn’t move.

Ennis, behind her, took his slate out from under his arm. And wrote on it. And held it up.

Holt says Okafor looked at it for a long time. Then she wrote on her own. And held it up next to his.

Both slates said the same word.

Home.

I woke up on the dune.

Not the bottom of the hollow. The dune. Somebody had carried me up. One of the Drenn queen’s young, Dory said later, unseen, the moment Ammet stopped. It put me down very gently on the red sand at the top of the dune by the capital and went away before anybody saw it.

I was lying on my back. Looking up.

At a sun. A new one. Young and yellow and very bright, in a blue sky. Ammet’s sky had never been blue. It had always been red. Now it was blue, very pale, with red haze still settling out of it.

Ammet’s queen was beside me. Her head and shoulders out of the sand. Looking up at the new sun.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

It’s very bright, she said at last.

Yes.

I don’t know it.

No, I said. Not yet.

The queen of Ammet looked at the new sun for a long time.

I’ll talk to it, she said. Tonight. So it knows who we are.

Halvane came up out of the hollow under the eastern edge at noon.

He came up the steps very slowly, with Ilas holding his arm, and Kwame behind him holding the other one. He was covered in red sand. His hands were shaking. He walked up the dune to where I was lying, and the two queens, and Dory sitting with her knees up and her eyes shut, still holding everybody.

He stood at the top of the dune and looked up at the blue sky.

Then he sat down.

On the sand. Not on a bench. There wasn’t one. He sat down on the red sand of Ammet in the new yellow light like a man whose legs had stopped asking him first.

“Eight engines,” he said. “And half an engine. And a man on his back. And a boy holding the ground together. And a queen talking to the sand.” He looked at his hands. “Eleven thousand years. Every world we ever moved. I never once thought you could do it like that.”

Ilas sat down next to him. She took his hand.

“Nobody did,” she said. “That’s why it worked.”

Halvane put his head on her shoulder. In front of everybody. On the dune. The Speaker of Ister. And cried.

The people came up at dusk.

Not all at once. The drill bells rang the other way, the way they’d practised, the come-up way, and the little ones came first, the way they’d gone down. Up the steps of every hollow on Ammet. Into the evening.

And looked up.

Ammet’s sky has always been red. Every child on Ammet has only ever seen it red. They came up out of the hollows into the dusk and the sky was blue, going to violet, with one very bright young star going down in the west, and they stopped on the top step, every one, and looked.

Saffa Rennick came up last. With her soup bowl. She’d been at the bottom of the capital’s hollow for nine days with the grandfathers and the pots. She stood on the top step for a long time with the bowl in her hands and looked at the sky.

Then she turned round and looked at the dune. Where we were. Where the two queens were, and Halvane with his head on Ilas’s shoulder, and me on my back on the sand.

She walked up the dune. All the way up. With the bowl.

She stopped in front of me. She looked down at me for a long time.

Then she held out the bowl.

There was soup in it. Taveth’s. Terrible. Still warm. She’d carried it up from the bottom of the hollow.

“You’ll want feeding,” she said.

I don’t know where she got that from. I’ve never heard anybody but Mother say it.

I ate the soup. All of it. It was terrible. It was wonderful.

Dory didn’t let go of the net until after dark.

She’d been holding nine hundred million people since dawn. Since before dawn. Every one. Through the move and after, through the coming up, through the blue sky. She sat on the dune with her knees up and her eyes shut and didn’t let go of any of them, not one, until the last one was up the steps and home.

Corvan came through Elin’s door at dusk. Nobody sent for him. He came up the dune with a cup in each hand. He’d been at the Arch Hall all day, Lio said, standing behind Okafor and Ennis, watching the lights.

He didn’t say anything. He sat down on the sand a little way off from her. Not touching. He put one of the cups down on the sand between them.

Dory didn’t open her eyes.

He sat there. For an hour. While the sky went from violet to dark and the new stars came out, stars none of us had ever seen, over Ammet’s new sky. He didn’t say anything. He drank his tea. The other cup went cold.

At about the time the last child came up the last step on the far side of Ammet, Dory let go.

I felt it. Everybody on the dune did. Like a held breath going out of the whole world.

She opened her eyes. She looked at the cold cup on the sand. Then at Corvan.

“It’s cold,” she said.

“I know,” said Corvan. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Dory looked at him for a long time.

Then she leaned sideways. Very slowly. Until her head was on his shoulder. And closed her eyes again.

Corvan went completely still. He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. He sat on the dune on Ammet under stars nobody had seen before with Dory asleep on his shoulder and the cold cup on the sand, and didn’t move a single muscle until Mother came through Elin’s door at midnight with a blanket.

Mother put the blanket over both of them. She didn’t say anything either.

She went back through the door. On Avalon, she put the kettle on.

Wren was on the porch at dawn the next morning on Avalon. With her slate. The way she is every morning.

She said the count.

The stars answered. Not yet. A thousand and nine of them, and one more, very bright and very young and very surprised, from a sun on the Hedge side of the Watch that had never had a world before and suddenly had one with nine hundred million people on it and a red-brown queen talking to it all night.

Not yet, it said. Very carefully. As if it had just learned the words.

Wren wrote it.

And then she waited. Because there was one more.

It came from a long way off. From the dark beyond the edge of the first arm, where Ammet used to be.

Very faint. Very red. Very low.

Not Not yet. Not Soon. Not anything Wren had ever heard a star say.

Thank you.

Then it went out.

Wren didn’t move for a long time.

Toby was on the porch with her. He’d come out at the first light. He’d known, he says. He’d heard the count change in the night. He stood next to her and didn’t say anything.

Then Wren picked up the chalk.

She wrote the count. A thousand and ten. And under it, where Ammet’s Soon had been for six hundred and eleven mornings, she wrote what the old sun said. In her careful hand. By itself.

Thank you.

And then she drew a line under it. And another. And then she put the chalk down and sat down on the porch step and cried, and Toby sat down next to her and put his arm round her, and they sat there while the light came up over the north field.

It’s the first star that’s gone out where any of us could hear it.

It’s the first one that said goodbye.

The Prime came on the band that night. He said a Hedge world had been lost to the eaters. He said the coward on his hill had failed again. He said Ammet’s sun was gone and the Collective grieved.

He didn’t say anything about Ammet. Because Ammet wasn’t gone. And everyone listening knew it, because Senna had said so that morning on the old band, in her plain voice, before he spoke. Ammet has moved. Nine hundred million. All of them. The old sun said thank you.

Ferro Hale says it’s the first time anyone’s ever heard the Prime say something on the band that every single person listening already knew wasn’t true.

Dot, on the grey band, under his voice, said she heard the thing in him go very quiet for a long time after.

Quenby’s cover was the dune. Somebody took it from the capital at dusk. Two queens, very large, red-brown and black, against a blue sky with one young yellow star. A tall Aldri man sitting on the sand with his head on an old woman’s shoulder. A man on his back. A girl with her knees up and her eyes shut. And a broad dusty woman walking up the dune toward them with a bowl.

The headline was two words. Wren chose them. Eluned Sabe asked her to.

Thank you.

It went a very long way away. Further than anything. Bell found a copy, nine months later, on a world past everything that had asked for a box in case. It was pinned to the door of a hollow somebody had dug. Underneath, somebody had written, in a language Bell had to look up: We have a box too. We’ll be all right.

Imre made a soft Ammet queen. Red-brown. With sand inside, that pours very slowly from one end to the other when you tip her, like an hourglass. It takes nine breaths. Everybody on Ammet has one. Halvane has one on his table, next to the engine boy.

I slept for nine days. Mother says I didn’t. Mother says I woke up every morning and drank a cup of tea and went back to sleep. I don’t remember any of it.

When I woke up properly, on the tenth day, Liam was sitting on the end of my bed.

He had a bundle in his arms.

“She came last night,” he said. “While you were asleep. Anya said not to wake you. I said you’d want to know.” He turned the bundle round. “You’d want to know.”

She was very small. Red-faced. With a great deal of dark hair, and a very cross expression, and her fist up by her face.

Her fist was smoking. Very slightly.

“She set fire to the blanket,” said Liam. “Twice. In the first hour.” He looked at her. His face was doing the thing it did at the concert, looking at Rory. “Rory put it out. Both times. He’s not left her side. He says he’s on duty.”

“What’s her name?”

Liam looked at her for a long time.

“Aoife,” he said. “After nobody. Anya just liked it. It means bright.” He touched the smoking fist with one finger. “Seemed fair.”

I went down to see her that afternoon. To Liam and Anya’s.

Rory was in the chair by the cradle. Liam’s Rory. Sixteen. Very tall. Asleep sitting up, with one hand hanging over the side of the cradle, palm up, about an inch above the blanket.

Isla was on the floor by the chair. Also asleep. With her back against his knees and the red scarf round her neck.

Anya was in the doorway. She put her finger to her lips.

“He hasn’t moved for two days,” she whispered. “Every time she smokes, his hand goes down. He doesn’t even wake up. It just goes down and puts it out and comes back up.”

As I watched, Aoife’s fist twitched in her sleep. A very small thread of smoke went up.

Rory’s hand went down. Touched the blanket. The smoke stopped. The hand came back up. He didn’t open his eyes.

Isla, against his knees, smiled in her sleep.

“He asked for a sister,” said Anya, very quietly. “Someone to set fire to things with.” She looked at her son. “I don’t think he knew he’d spend all his time putting her out.”

Maura’s nine knitted things were for Aoife. Some of them.

One was a blanket. Fireproof. Odra spun the wool through Kiln iron at Maura’s request, very fine. One was a hat, for the racer, which Liam wears in the Run, which has nothing to do with the racer at all and which he wears anyway. One was the red scarf, for Isla, which Isla wears every day, in all weathers, even in the fire room. One was very small and round and grey, and Maura gave it to Rue, who took it, and put it in the bag with the leaves and the horse, and nobody knows what it is, and Maura won’t say.

The other five, Maura says, are for later.

The leagues:

The Soon played their first game on Ammet in the new sun the week after the move. Against Kessry. On a diamond the Ground dug out of the springy sand by the capital, with stiles Rory sent through Elin’s door. Saffa Rennick threw the first ball, from the stand, with her soup bowl in her other hand. The Soon lost, nine to two. Nobody on Ammet cared at all. The whole capital came out to watch under a blue sky, and when the Soon climbed their first stile, the whole of Ammet breathed in. Toby says it was the biggest breath he’s ever heard.

In Stile, the long season’s started again. The Hill have lost two and won one. Caul’s Haze haven’t lost at all. Brannock’s Fell won in the snow again; Hesper Daine threw, and Gilgamesh was in the stand, and he stood up.

In Ring, Myre’s Long Hall Wanderers are favourites again. The Commonhold Gales have a second Next Door player now. A boy. Seven. He’s tiny. He can’t reach the hoop. Kesh says he’s the best at getting in the way she’s ever seen.

In Ridge, the new season’s started. Kyrie’s grown. She scored twice in the first game. Okafor asked for the score once, and then wrote it down.

In the Long Way, Halvane’s new Aldri ship, the one he built to beat the Kethri, still isn’t finished. He says it’s because he was moving a world. The Kethri say they’ll wait.

In the Run, Liam’s racer finished eighth. Out of nine. He’s very pleased. He says it’s an improvement. Aoife slept through it in Anya’s arms, smoking slightly.

And the Fours: Caul’s Hazy Field is being got ready. Next summer. Hanne Brisk says they’re building stands for six million.

The stars said Not yet this morning. A thousand and ten. Ammet’s new sun said it very carefully, still practising.

And the old one, out past the first arm, said nothing. It’s gone.

Wren wrote the count. And under it, by itself, where Soon used to be:

Thank you.

And under that:

Ammet: home.

Aoife: bright.

Days 12873–12931. Thank You.

The eater came nine days early and the ninth engine was only half built, so I lay under Ammet’s torn eastern edge and asked it to remember what it had been, while Kwame held it together and the queen asked the sand to be light. Ammet went whole to a young yellow sun, and its old sun said Thank you and went out, the first star to say goodbye. Liam and Anya’s daughter Aoife was born, setting fire to her blanket twice.