Scarecrow

I should say first that nobody was surprised. I want to be clear about that, because the story of a thing like this usually involves a revelation, something unforeseen, some arrangement of facts that nobody had anticipated. That is not this story. This family had been watching Corin and Tiri for twenty years with the collective patience of people who have seen a great many things and understood that the best of them take as long as they take. Kyria had been adding knots to a grey ribbon since they were children. Halvane had wept preemptively at three separate Fourses in anticipation of a wedding that hadn’t happened yet. Ilas had made a mental note at the second Fours, Aune told me once, and filed it somewhere reliable.

What happened this autumn was simply that two things arrived at the same time, which is how the best things usually arrive.

The news about Aune came on a Tuesday.

It came the way most news comes in this house: sideways, through someone who wasn’t trying to tell you. Halloway had been to see her — a routine visit, the kind Halloway makes for all of us every so often, with her bag and her list and her way of looking at you like she’s counting something — and she came back down the hill road with her coat buttoned up and her face arranged into the expression she uses when she is not going to say anything, which is a very specific face that all of us have learned to read.

She sat down at the kitchen table. Mother poured. Halloway did not say anything.

Risa, who was teaching Kesh to hold a weather front in one hand and a rainfall gradient in the other, lowered both. “Halloway,” she said.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You sat down.”

“I often sit down.”

“Not like that.”

There was a brief silence. The kitchen smelled of bread and the particular autumn-leaves smell that comes in through the window when the barley has been cut.

“She’ll say when she’s ready,” said Halloway.

Mother put down the teapot. She looked at Halloway the way she sometimes looks at all of us, the way that means she has already understood something and is simply waiting to hear the words said out loud.

“Oh, love,” she said.

Halloway did not confirm anything. She picked up her cup. She held it with both hands the way you do when you are very pleased about something and trying not to show it, which on Halloway looks almost identical to the way she looks when she is doing complicated arithmetic.

Sera came in from the garden where she had been supervising Ash and Goldie in a fire-practice that had gotten, by her description, quite educational. She stopped in the doorway, looked at the table, looked at Halloway, and said, “Oh. How early?”

“Sera,” said Halloway.

“I’ll take that as an answer.”

“You’ll take it as nothing, because I haven’t said anything.”

“She’s always nauseous in September,” said Sera, and went to the kettle with the air of someone doing a very ordinary thing.

Aune told us that evening, on the bottom step in the last of the light. She stood with her hands in her flight-coat pockets and said it plainly, the way she says most things, without preamble or apology, because that is Aune’s way with the important ones. She’s been in this family long enough to know that what matters doesn’t need ornament.

There was a moment of very still air.

Then Mother put her arms around her and said something quiet against her hair that none of us heard, and the step erupted.

The grandparents cried. This is the constant. Halvane cried; Ilas put both hands on Aune’s face. The General, who was sitting in the garden chair with Sabeth’s shoulder against his, stood up without ceremony and crossed the step and held Aune’s hands in his for a long moment. Rory planed a curl off the doorframe with a pocket knife he happened to have. Maura went to the kitchen to start something immediately, which is what Maura does.

Risa said, quietly, that this was wonderful, and Kesh went pink with the effort of not crying and then gave up and cried.

Sera waited. She has a gift for timing. When the first wave had passed and we were all standing around in the September air, warm with it, Aune still in the middle with Lucas beside her and her hand through his arm, Sera looked at me with her best expression — the one that means she is about to say something that she has been waiting her entire life to say — and said:

“Lucas Dask,” she said, “after everything. After all this time. You finally stopped waiting.”

Lucas went red. Aune laughed, startled out of it.

“It’s been twenty years,” said Sera.

“Sera,” said Risa.

“I’m only saying what everyone is thinking. He asks everything. He asked the whole Hedge. He asked the sky. He asked thirteen stars. He could not ask a single person to pass the bread without it becoming a whole thing. And yet here we are.”

“That will do,” said Mother, in the mild voice that means it very much will do, but she was not quite looking away from the garden when she said it.

Tiri, sitting on the step above Corin, buried her face in his shoulder. Corin looked at Sera with the particular expression of someone who has remembered that he is going to be asked to weigh in and has decided not to.

“In my defence,” said Lucas.

“There is no defence,” said Sera pleasantly. “There is only: eventually.“

Halvane laughed so hard Ilas patted his back.

The nine meetings had been running since the spring.

For those unfamiliar — which I am not, having sat through the first six — an Aldri betrothal runs through nine formal meetings between the families, spread over months, usually a year or more. Teva’s father had brought three slates with nine circles marked in a row, with a small bird in each corner. The first meeting had been in the wing at Ilas’s chair by the lamp Corin mended, as intended, and Ilas had talked for most of it, as expected. The subsequent eight meetings had happened across kitchens and porches and, once, the bottom of Halvane’s river boat when it rained very suddenly, with Halvane saying “well, we’re all staying down here then” and the slates getting wet.

We were on the seventh.

The news about Aune changed something in the timing that I will not pretend to understand fully. What I know is that after the step, after Halloway had given everyone her careful second assessment and Rory had finished his doorframe and Mother had sat with Aune for a long time in the kitchen with the lights on and the door open, Corin did something very simple.

He went up the hill to Kyria.

He was up there for a long time. I don’t know what they said. Kyria doesn’t tell stories about her own conversations; she says the words that need saying and keeps the ones that don’t, which is a First Blade’s habit and also just Kyria’s. When Corin came back down he was carrying the grey Hyrrani wool ribbon. It had ten knots in it.

He hadn’t untied the bow. He’d added to it.

“The tenth one,” said Tiri, when she saw it.

“She said it was for being ready. Not for saying it. For being ready.”

Tiri took it. She held it a long time. The ribbon is old now — Kyria started it when Corin was barely five and Tiri eight, and the wool has a particular softness from years of being handled and kept and carefully not worn. Tiri tied it on her wrist herself, as she has done since the tenth meeting first began.

“We’ve got two more meetings to finish,” she said.

“I know,” said Corin.

“Ilas will want to do them properly.”

“Ilas can have the whole month,” said Corin. “I’m not in a hurry. I know where you live.”

Tiri shimmered once — the particular Aldri shimmer that means happiness has got above the waterline — and leaned against him on the step.

“Good,” she said.

The last two meetings happened in a fortnight. This was not Corin’s doing.

It was Ilas’s.

Ilas, who is Halvane’s wife and Aune’s grandmother and Tiri’s great-grandmother, who decided on Halvane at nine years old and married him at a hundred and twelve, who has the patience of geology when she wants to and the efficiency of a demolition when she doesn’t, who sat through the first six meetings talking the whole time about the proper order of things — Ilas put down her cup at the eighth meeting, looked around the table, and said: “We’ll finish the ninth on Thursday. The families have already said yes. I said yes twenty years ago. These two have said yes since they were children. The only thing that hasn’t happened is the word.”

Teva’s father started to say something about the proper form.

“Thursday,” said Ilas.

Teva’s father looked at his slate. He made a small mark. “Thursday,” he said.

The ninth meeting was on Thursday.

The eighth meeting had been at Maura and Rory’s workshop on Avalon. Rory had made a bench for the occasion, specifically for the occasion, out of the same wood as Corin’s workbench at home, and had brought it down in the cart without saying anything about it. Teva’s father had run a hand along the grain and nodded once, the way he nods at things that have been made with the right intention. The slates had three circles left.

The ninth meeting was at Halvane and Ilas’s table on Ister, with both families present and the window open so the orchard came in. Ilas had made eleven things, which is what she does for important occasions; we ate for three hours. Teva’s father filled in the last circle on his slate and tapped it twice. Corin looked at Tiri. Tiri looked at Corin. Halvane began crying somewhat ahead of schedule. Ilas crossed off the last bird from the corner of the slate and put it in her good drawer, which is where she puts things she intends to keep.

We did it on Ister. The keepers’ garden, because that is where it felt right; Corin had asked the garden lights to hum two notes when he was not yet six and they had done it ever since, and nobody had ever been able to explain it. Teva’s grandmother came down from the wing with a walking stick and three layers, and sat in the best chair with her boots on the grass, and said the garden smelled right.

The whole family came. That is the constant, now. When something is important, the whole family comes, and the whole family has become a thing that takes some time to arrive, what with the grandparents and the children and the queens who sometimes follow the grandparents and the Scarecrow queen who has started showing up at the edge of significant events, humming something, and the Caddi grandmother who sent a bag of stones by message-bird with a note that said “for carrying home,” and the Drenn queen, who Okafor said would be standing at the far edge of the garden with her two remaining young behind the wall, which she was. Okafor stood near her, in a quiet coat, with her hands folded.

Dinraal came without his neck-piece for the second time. He sat in the fourth row with Isolde and held her hand. He is very large to be sitting in a garden chair and the chair was visibly concerned, but it held.

Dory was there with Corvan. The glass bird was in her pocket; I could tell because she kept her hand near it the way you keep your hand near something you are not ready to put down yet. Corvan sat beside her with the particular stillness he has when he is very happy and doesn’t want to do anything that might disturb it. He’d brought Pebble, who was asleep under their chairs with his chin on Dory’s boot.

Ash was at the back in a dark coat, standing rather than sitting, the way Ash stands at gatherings now — always with a view of the whole, never quite in the middle of anything, watching the shape of things. He’d come from Odra’s the day before and still smelled slightly of the forge. He watched Corin and Tiri the whole time with the expression of someone who is adding something up and finding it comes out right.

Luka sat between Risa and Luna in the third row, very upright, in his good shirt, holding very still in the way he holds still when he is paying careful attention. He is old enough now to understand what a wedding is; he watched Corin and Tiri with enormous seriousness, and when the word was said the first time he looked at Risa and whispered something, and Risa kissed the top of his head.

Kyrie was in the fourth row with her stick across her lap, as she often is now, with Vessa beside her. They were talking quietly before it started, the way they always are, and then Vessa took her hand when the keepers opened the book and held it through the whole ceremony. Kyrie let her.

Queenie was in the front row beside Mother. She didn’t say anything through the whole of it, but at the end, when the word went up, she looked at something past the garden gate with her wide Queenie-look, the one that means she can see the shape of something the rest of us can’t, and then nodded once, and was satisfied.

The keepers married them, as keepers do — with the book and the word and the three sayings that go up into the sky. The word had been chosen for a long time. It was not a secret; Corin had told me once, quietly, the summer before the Fours, that he’d known what it was since the lamp on Halvane’s first visit, the one he’d mended. He’d heard it humming when he held the case. He’d waited until Tiri heard it too, which she had, standing next to him at the bench with her hands in her pockets, and that was when they’d written it down.

The word was TOGETHER.

Which is not a subtle word, as words go. It is not a Hyrrani word or an Aldri word or anything old; it is just a word from an ordinary kitchen on Ister that two children learned before they had any idea what they were learning. The keepers said it three times and both of them said it back and the garden said nothing at all except the sound of everything breathing.

Kyria stood at the edge of the gathering in her First Blade’s coat with the grey wool ribbon on her wrist — she’d worn it every year since she made it, Corin told me, though she’d never said so — and watched with the expression she saves for things she decided very early.

Corin in his good coat, slightly too formal for him. The collar was straight because Andraste had fixed it twice on the way up the hill and then Tiri had fixed it a third time at the gate and said, “Stay,” and Andraste had laughed and said she’d been saying that since he was two.

Tiri in Aldri white, with Aune’s flight-pin on the shoulder — borrowed, Aune said, for the morning, “and don’t bend it” — and the ribbon tied on her left wrist where she’d worn it every important day since she was fifteen.

They held hands the whole time. Even during the parts where you don’t have to.

There is a Hyrrani custom at weddings. After the word is said, the eldest grandmother present gives the new couple something small — a stone, a seed, a piece of iron. It represents the marriage already in progress, the life already lived alongside someone before the ceremony happened to arrive. Kyria came forward when the keepers stepped back. She reached into her coat pocket and brought out the smallest thing: a chip of iron from Odra’s oldest forge, the same iron she’d made Holdfast from, the iron from the ridge her grandmother had first dug.

She put it in Corin’s palm. He closed his hand around it.

“It’s been done since before the word,” said Kyria. “I’m only saying so.”

Tiri took his hand, with the iron inside it. She stood on her toes and kissed Kyria’s cheek, which startled Kyria into something very close to a smile.

Aune stood at the edge with her arms crossed and her face completely unguarded, which is rare for Aune even now. She watched Kyria step back, and Halvane still crying, and Ilas with her hand through Halvane’s arm, and something in her face went very still. The particular stillness of someone who has looked at a thing they love and understood that they will carry it forever.

She caught me watching her.

“Don’t,” she said, in Aldri.

“I’m not doing anything,” I said.

“You’re being very quiet,” she said, “which is what you do.”

She looked back at the garden, at Corin and Tiri and the iron in Corin’s closed hand, and after a moment she said: “My mother said, when I married you, that she had waited her whole life to hear an engine say something true. The Ceren says something true. That’s why I named it what I named it. This —” She stopped. “This is also something true.”

“Yes,” I said.

She uncrossed her arms and leaned her shoulder against mine. This is Aune’s version of saying something out loud. She says a great deal this way.

“Spring,” she said, eventually.

“Spring,” I said.

Halvane cried all the way through. Ilas held his hand.

“A hundred years I waited,” he said.

“A hundred and three,” said Ilas.

“A hundred and three I waited for you, and then a hundred more for this.”

“It’s worth it,” said Ilas. “It’s always worth it.”

The word went up into the gold Ister sky for the third time and stayed there.

There is a photograph on Mother’s windowsill now, next to the bells and the stone horse and the soft ones and the small clay cup from the Caddi hall. In it, Corin and Tiri are standing in the garden with their hands still joined, looking at each other and not at the camera. The light is the particular afternoon gold of Ister in autumn. Behind them you can see Halvane and Ilas, and beyond them the garden gate, and beyond the gate the hills. Tiri’s shimmer shows in the photograph — it does, sometimes, in certain lights — a soft silver-white like the edge of a lamp’s circle.

Mother put it there herself. She spent a long time deciding exactly where.

“He looks like his father,” she said.

She meant it the right way.

The wedding supper was in the eating hall and then in the garden and then, as these things go, everywhere, with Teva’s grandmother keeping her chair and presiding over it all with the authority of someone who has lived for two hundred years and has decided that the purpose of two hundred years is to sit in a chair and watch things go right.

Rory made the bench with the right wood. That is the thing I keep coming back to. He’d made it without being asked, in his workshop on Avalon, and brought it down in a cart, and placed it in the garden near the wall where the light would fall on it in the afternoon. I noticed it properly after supper, when the children had quieted down and most of the grandparents were in various states of well-fed stillness. It had two seats, and the wood was the same grain as Corin’s bench at home, the bench Rory had made when Corin was three. Same source, same hands, same grain. Twenty-odd years between them.

I sat on it for a while, next to Tiri, while she talked with Kyrie about Ridge technique and demonstrated something with her arm that made Kyrie ask her to do it again.

The long record keeper came to the garden that evening — not Jory Fenwick this time but his assistant, a young woman named Reth with a very precise handwriting and a small notebook, who asked the names for the record and the word and the date, and wrote everything with that complete attention the keepers have that makes you feel, for a moment, that the thing you’re saying has always been true and is only now being written down.

Reth asked Tiri: “The word.”

“Together,” said Tiri.

Reth wrote it.

The long record now has a Dask-house wedding page. Corin and Tiri are the first entry.

In the evening, when the children were in various stages of exhaustion in the garden and the grandparents had colonised all the best chairs and Rory had, somehow, found something to plane even here, Sera sat beside me on the low wall with her cup of tea and looked out at the gathering.

Luka was asleep against the General’s side. Kyrie had her stick across her lap and was talking to Tiri with the particular Hyrrani attention that means she is deciding whether this person is good enough, which in Kyrie’s case means she has already decided yes and is now just memorising. Ash and Corin were at the garden table with Dory, who was holding a cup of something hot and watching the sky in the way she does when she is not quite there and not quite somewhere else. The Scarecrow queen’s hum came from beyond the wall, low and comfortable. The sept across the orchard was lit.

“This was good,” said Sera.

“It was,” I said.

She was quiet for a while. The kind of quiet Sera does when she’s deciding whether to be funny or just right, which are, in her case, usually the same thing.

“I’m glad about Aune,” she said, finally. Not the joke version. The real one.

“I know.”

“Twenty years ago I didn’t know what this would be. What it would look like in the end. I had one child and you had the wrong colour eyes and Mother had a teapot and we didn’t know if any of it would hold.”

The garden was very full.

“It held,” I said.

“It held,” said Sera. She leaned her shoulder against mine, briefly, the way she has since the children were small. “Now stop waiting for things and have a few more.”

“Sera,” I said.

“I’m not talking about you,” she said, perfectly pleasantly. “I’m talking to the garden.”

The garden did not respond. The Scarecrow queen hummed one note lower, which was as close as a queen gets to laughing.

Imre, it turned out, had been ready for some time.

The soft Corin had been in development since the proposal. Imre does not wait for certainty; she waits for the right shape. The soft Corin had Corin’s coat and Corin’s hair — which stands up at the front in a way nobody has ever been able to manage — and when you held it you could feel the small hum built into the chest, two notes, the ones he always uses. It had sold out in an hour on the morning the wedding announcement went on the band. The soft Tiri had Aldri white and a ribbon on the left wrist with ten knots and a shimmer worked into the fabric at the edge of the sleeves — Imre had found someone, Quenby said, who could stitch the shimmer. She wouldn’t say who. The soft ones holding hands were offered only as a pair. The card said: They decided at eight. They were right.

Quenby ran the Hyrrani cover from somewhere far away. It showed Kyria tying the last knot in the grey ribbon, done in the painting style the Hyrrani use for their oldest stories, with the mountains in the background and the ridge and the torchlight. She had the full title across the bottom: THE TENTH KNOT: KYRIA WAITED TOO. You could not see Kyria’s face but you could see her hands. Those who know Kyria said the hands were absolutely right.

The long record reported the wedding in the usual style, three lines, in the Dask section. Reth’s handwriting. The word written without ceremony, the way all the words in the long record are written — as if they have always been there.

The league news: the Hill hold their lead, three ahead of the Brannock Fell at the halfway point; Sigmund threw one hundred and twelve last Tuesday, which is a week record, and Tovi was at the stile arch making a sound that Rory said was “professional but heartfelt.” Pim has been moved up a ring bracket, which the Ring says is unusual for his age and which Kesh says is completely expected; she has started taking him to extra practice on Tuesdays after school, and he runs the whole way there. Kyrie added the ridge walk to her conditioning, up and down twice a day, and her last score was thirty-one — four more than her opening Fours score. The Lumi has its sails up for the winter circuit and Tiri’s already on the ropes. Liam came second in the last Run circuit, which is the highest he’s placed, and rang us from the finish with his hands shaking; Aoife set something on fire at the warm-up stage, which is Aoife. Maura says she needs longer mittens.

Pell Jorad’s Tuesday column this week: a paragraph about learning to climb a stile without thinking about it. “The day it stopped being a thing I was doing and started being a thing I was just doing — I cannot explain it. It was a very ordinary morning. I climbed over and I didn’t count my hands.”

He added, at the end of the column, a line about the wedding — not ours, not the word or the ceremony, only: “I heard the garden lights are humming. I haven’t been to Ister yet. I think I’d like to.” Hanne wrote back on the band and said there were always beds, and the grass field was open if he wanted to practise. Pell wrote back: “That is the kindest sentence.”

The fathers went to the lodge, as they do. The annual trip ran the week after the wedding, which made it, this year, its own kind of celebration. Konrad brought good things in a hamper. Rory brought the driftwood he had been turning in his mind since the ceremony. Aurelius brought eleven books and read three and a half before Liam pointed out that the whole point of the lodge was to not do anything, and Aurelius said he wasn’t doing anything, he was reading, which is not the same thing, and Liam said it was very much the same thing to everyone watching him, and the conversation went on for two mornings over coffee on the dock.

Liam and Big Sigmund fished. The deepback came over the shelf to them on the second night. This always happens now — the deepback have settled on Liam and Big Sigmund as their people at the lodge — and nobody finds it unusual anymore except for Davo, who is still new enough to be astonished.

Davo had news of his own to carry. He sat on the dock the second morning and told Rory, quietly, that Pip was expecting again, and Rory put down his rod and held his son-in-law by the shoulder for a long time without saying anything, which is Rory saying everything.

Young Sigmund asked Liam, at some point on the third day, what it had been like when Sera was expecting for the first time. Liam thought about it for a long time. He poured a cup of coffee and held it.

“I didn’t sleep,” he said. “For about a month. I kept thinking I’d done it wrong somehow. That I’d missed something, or said the wrong thing, or that I should have been a different kind of person already.”

Young Sigmund nodded.

“And then she was born,” said Liam, “and I found out you don’t need to have done it right before. You just need to do it right after.”

The deepback surfaced once at dusk and Davo watched them for a long time from the end of the dock with his hands in his pockets and his book closed beside him.

Halloway came in the morning after the wedding, the way she does, with her bag and her list. She sat at the kitchen table. Mother poured.

“She’s well,” said Halloway. She meant Aune.

“I know,” said Mother.

“Early days yet.”

“I know,” said Mother again, in the voice that means she knows but is going to hope completely regardless.

Halloway made a mark on her list. She looked at it, then at Mother, and then said, in the considering way she has: “It’ll be spring.”

Mother put down the teapot and folded her hands around her cup.

“Spring,” she said.

“If everything goes as it should.”

“It will,” said Mother.

It was not a question. It was not a prediction either, in the ordinary sense. It was the kind of thing you say when you have lived long enough and seen enough of the world’s particular mercy that you understand the difference between faith and foolishness, and know which one to keep.

Halloway looked at her list. She made another mark.

“Spring,” she said, and picked up her cup.

The Scarecrow queen hummed all three days. Genny said she’d been out in the orchard before dawn on the morning of the ceremony, standing under the last of the apple trees and humming toward the garden wall with the particular patience she brings to things she has decided matter. When the word went up for the third time, Genny said, the humming stopped. Just for a moment. Then it started again, different — not the two notes, something new, something with more space in it. Genny couldn’t describe it. She said it was like the sound a door makes when it’s open and you’re not closing it.

Rue went to Next Door the morning after and sat on the step with Oona and three of the other children and told them the word. She’d been at the wedding — Mother had brought her — and she’d sat very still through the whole ceremony with Oona’s hand in hers, watching the garden with her wide careful eyes. She didn’t say anything until the word went up, and then she said it very quietly to herself, testing the shape of it. Together. The way she is starting to do with important things: try them once, quietly, to see if they fit.

Oona told me she said it twice on the step the next morning, to no one in particular.

Corvan sent a word by message-bird the day of the wedding. It said: The Hedge is very full this morning. / Congratulations. / Well done, all of you. Dory read it and folded it and put it in her coat pocket with the glass bird.

No bells found this week. Okafor’s slate still says Now. She stood at the back of the garden in her quiet coat and watched the word go up and after the ceremony she went to Corin and said something very briefly and he nodded, and that was all. She came back to the wall and stood with the Drenn queen’s young for a while, neither of them talking.

Rue’s count this morning: two hundred and ninety-four. She said it to Bess as usual while Bess was holding the thread for the left shoe and not looking up. The number has got large enough now that Bess sometimes asks her to say it twice, not because she didn’t hear but because she likes the sound of it said twice.

“Two hundred and ninety-four,” said Rue.

“That’s a lot of mornings,” said Bess.

“Yes,” said Rue.

The stars said Not yet this morning. 1,109. N.

The stars: not yet. / Corin: married. / Aune: spring.

Days 13488–13544. The Tenth Knot.

The month that Aune told us and Corin and Tiri finished their nine meetings and said their word in the keepers’ garden on Ister. The word was together — not a ceremony word, just the first word that was true for all of it. Kyria wore the grey ribbon on her wrist all day. Halvane cried from the opening bell. Halloway says spring for the baby, and Mother says it will go as it should, which is as close as she ever gets to demanding the universe cooperate.