Chapter 493: Golden

Mother found the tea towel in the spring.

Oona brought it home from the coast. She’d been to the new resort at the bottom of the southern continent with Maura and Abena and a great many small children, for four days, and she came back brown and sandy and very pleased with herself, carrying a paper bag. She gave the bag to Mother at the long table, the way you’d give a present to someone you love and are slightly afraid of.

Mother took out the tea towel and unfolded it.

It was blue. It had a border of little gold cups all the way round. And in the middle, very large, there was a picture of the house on the rise, and in front of it, in a long row, all of us. Me. The five wives, and Aune. Every one of the children, in order of height. Kyria on the end with her blade. The General at the other end, looking stern. Mother in the middle, in her long brown coat, with her pot.

Across the top, in curly gold letters, it said:

THE ROYAL HOUSE OF THE HEDGE

Mother looked at it for a long time.

“Well,” she said. “They’ve got my coat right.”

Then she folded it up very neatly and put it in the drawer with the other tea towels, and she’s been drying the cups with it ever since. Every single day. She says if they’re going to put her on a tea towel, she’s going to make it work for a living.

I should say at the start that we’re not royal.

I’ve said it before. I said it on the night of the cities, when the Aldri first started calling the children the princes and princesses of Avalon. I said I make floors, and I meant it, and I still mean it. There’s no crown. Nobody in this house has ever sat on anything grander than one of Rory’s chairs. We do our own dishes. Mother does most of them, and she makes the rest of us do the others.

But I’ve stopped expecting anyone to listen.

The Hedge calls us the royal family now. Not in Commonhold, not at the Table, where Mother would never stand for it. Everywhere else. The tea towel came from a resort on the southern coast. There are mugs on Ister with the five wives on them, in a ring. There’s a plate on Marrach with Dory’s face on it, and a whole set of saucers with the children’s, and a jug on Sallow that’s meant to be me but looks like a nervous ferryman.

There’s a magazine on Quenby, Eluned Sabe told me, very seriously, at the Table, that does nothing but tell people what the Dasks have been doing. Every month. She brought one. On the front there’s a picture of Andraste carrying Kyrie up the ridge in the sling, taken from a very long way away, and across the bottom it says FIRST BLADE’S FIRST STEPS?

Kyrie walked months ago. Andraste was carrying her because it was raining.

“It sells,” said Eluned Sabe, “four million copies.”

“Every month?”

She moved one bead on her abacus. “Every month.”

That’s the thing about this year. I’ll try to explain it properly, because I think one day the children will want to know what it was like, and I’m not sure I’ll remember.

It was good.

I don’t mean it was easy. The frames didn’t stop. I’ll come to the frames. Velle didn’t go anywhere, and the regiment didn’t go anywhere, and Dory still hears the forge past the Watch on the bad nights, angry, hitting a thing.

But the Hedge, this year, started to be something. Not a lot of worlds holding hands in the dark. Something with a shape. Something that lit up at dusk, all at once, outwards from a table on a low rise.

Mother calls it the golden days. She doesn’t mean it the way the tea towels mean it.

“Golden days are the ones you only know were golden afterwards,” she says. “So I’m going to notice them now. While I’m in them. Somebody ought to.”

So I’m going to try to notice them too.

The first thing that happened was the posts.

Okafor did that.

I should say how it came about. When the General took the Defence of the Hedge at the Table, the first thing he did, before the ribbons, before the bases, was sit down with a sheet of squared paper and try to draw the whole of the Hedge’s army on one page. Every world. Every Standing. Every Wing. Every listening post and station and suit.

It took him three days. On the fourth day he came out of his plain rooms at the end of the long building, with the sheet in his hand, and walked across the north field to Okafor’s rooms by the recruitment ground, and knocked on the door, three short and one long, the way every door on Avalon is knocked on now.

Okafor opened it. Holt was at her table behind her, in his cap, with a cup, the way he usually is at that hour.

“Sergeant,” said the General.

“General.”

“I can’t do this.” He held up the sheet. “I can sit at the Table and argue for it. I can draw it. I can give the ribbons. I can’t be on four hundred worlds at once and know which ones are frightened.”

Okafor took the sheet. She looked at it a long time, the way she used to look at our drills, all those years ago, on the training field, when she knew every one of our names and which of us would cry at night.

“No,” she said. “You can’t.”

“You can,” said the General.

So that’s how it went. The General has the Defence, at the Table, in the Cabinet, with the Purse and the Seams and the Law. And Okafor has the armies. All of them. General of the Armies of the Hedge, it says on the paper the Table gave her, and she’s the first person ever to have it, and she says she’ll be the last, because she intends to keep it until she’s too old to stand up, and then she’ll keep it sitting down.

Holt says she cried, when the Table said yes. Okafor says she didn’t.

Holt says she did. Holt says he’s known her since before any of us were born and he knows what it looks like when Maris Okafor isn’t crying.

She put a post on every world.

Every one. Not a base. Not the big ones on Marrach and Thole and Isk; those were the General’s, and they’re for when something comes. A post. A small one. A few rooms and a listening dish and a door with Kiln iron on it, and a Standing in a grey suit, on every single world that’s ever asked the Table.

There are four hundred and twelve now.

Okafor chose every one of the Standing herself. She sat in a room at the top of the long hall in Commonhold, the one the General gave her, with Mara Quell’s lists on one side and Kyria on the other, for a month. She read every name. She asked every one of them three questions. Mara won’t tell me what the questions were. She says I’d only try to answer them.

The posts aren’t for fighting. Okafor says if a post ever has to fight, she’s already got it wrong. They’re for knowing. Every morning, every post on every world sends one line to her room in Commonhold. Quiet. Or Not quiet, and what. Every morning she reads all four hundred and twelve, before she has her tea.

On Caddoc, the Standing at the post is a boy from Tiel who’s nineteen and very serious. He writes to his mother every week. His mother told Wenna, at the Table, that he writes mostly about the salt, and how it gets in everything, and how the Caddi children come and sit on the step of the post in the evenings with their soft ones and ask him questions about Avalon until it gets dark.

“What does he tell them?” said Wenna.

“He tells them it’s a long way,” said his mother. “And that it’s not as far as it used to be.”

Halloway didn’t want hers.

The Table gave it to her anyway. Surgeon General of the Hedge, which means every hospital, every doctor, every Aldri healer and Tirr nurse and Lantern hand-folder on every world that’s asked. It means the long list she’s kept since before Earth emptied, the one with every gift and every illness and every person who ever got better.

She stood at the Table when they gave it to her and said, “I don’t wear uniforms.”

“Nobody’s asking you to,” said Konrad.

“And I’m not giving up the ward.”

“Nobody’s asking you to do that either.”

“And I’ll want a room in Commonhold with a window, and I’ll want my long list on the wall of it, and I’ll want an arch to every hospital on every world that I can walk through myself without asking anyone.”

Konrad looked down the Table at Halvane, who has the Works. Halvane looked at Dory. Dory nodded.

“Done,” said Konrad.

Halloway sat down.

“Then I’ll do it,” she said. “But I’m still going to call it the ward.”

She does. It’s the biggest thing in the Hedge, the thing she does now, bigger than the armies, bigger than the Purse. She has hospitals on two hundred worlds. And every one of them, when you ask the people who work there what it is, they say: the ward.

I promised I’d tell you about Ister.

You’ll remember the old Aldri schools. The long halls on the hill above the second city, older than the cities themselves, where Halvane learned engines and Ilas learned whatever Ilas learned, before the running. Tiri started going there in the winters. A few of the Hedge children went with her. A few more the year after.

This year, it was millions.

I don’t know how else to say it. Wren counts them. She says there have been eleven million so far this year, through the arches into Ister, to learn. From every world in the Hedge. Not just the young ones. Grown people. Grandparents. Thole miners who want to know how lumen goes into an engine. Kiln smiths who want to know why the Aldri iron holds an edge and theirs doesn’t, and Aldri smiths who want to know the other way round. Sedge weavers who want to know what a loom could be if it had an engine in it. Walkers, who are too big for the chairs, so the Aldri built them a hall with no chairs at all and a floor of warm stone.

Ister’s always been the cleverest world anyone knows. That’s not new. What’s new is that they’re teaching.

The Aldri waited eleven thousand years for someone to ask, Ilas said once. Ilas meant something else when she said it. But it’s true of the schools too. For eleven thousand years the Aldri kept everything they knew in the keepers’ vaults and the long halls and the old books, and nobody came, because nobody could.

Now everyone comes.

Halvane took me to see the engines hall in the autumn. It’s the oldest of them, long and narrow and high, with windows down one side. It used to have forty Aldri students in it, Halvane says, in a good year. It had nine hundred the day we went. Every bench full. People on the floor. An Orsk scholar in nine layers of wool taking notes at the front, very slowly, in the walker’s tongue. A Lantern girl with folded hands asking the old Aldri teacher a question he couldn’t answer, and the teacher sitting down very suddenly, and saying, “Nobody’s asked me that in four hundred years,” and then, “Nobody’s ever asked me that,” and then, “Come back tomorrow, I’ll find out.”

Halvane stood at the back of the hall with his hands behind him.

“I used to sit there,” he said, pointing at a bench by the third window. “When I was small. I used to think I’d be the last one.”

A Caddi boy was sitting there now, with his soft Lucas on the bench beside him, drawing an engine on a slate. He’d got it wrong. The Aldri girl next to him was showing him where.

Halvane watched them for a long time.

“I was wrong,” he said.

And they don’t just learn. That’s what Halvane says is the remarkable thing. They take it home.

The Thole miner who learned how lumen goes into an engine went home and built one, a small one, for the pumps in the deep galleries, and now Thole’s galleries don’t flood. The Kiln smiths learned the Aldri iron and the Aldri smiths learned Kiln’s three-short-one-long, and between them they made a blade that Kyria tested on the ridge for a week and then wouldn’t give back. The Sedge weavers’ looms have engines in them now. Sallow has boats that go upriver without oars. Orra won’t use one. She says the river would think she’d gone soft.

Lantern has lamps that don’t need lighting.

Ebb told the Table about that. She said they’d had a meeting about it in every town, because a Lantern lamp is meant to be lit by hand, every evening, by the youngest in the house, and that’s how the town knows everyone’s home. And in the end they decided to keep the lighting. They just made the new lamps so they can’t light themselves unless somebody touches them first.

“It’s the asking,” said Ebb. “We wanted to keep the asking.”

The arches never close now.

That’s the other thing. That’s the thing, really, under all the rest.

There used to be nine arches between Avalon and Ister, and one at Tiel, and one at Lantern, and the ones Dory held when she needed them. Now there’s a hall in Commonhold, the Arch Hall, on the north side of the grass, that Marrach built and Halvane filled. Long and white and very high, like the engines hall on Ister but a hundred times the size. And down both sides of it, all the way, there are arches.

Four hundred and twelve of them. One to every world.

They never close. Day or night. You walk in from the grass with your bag and your soft one, and you find the world you want written over the arch in Wren’s careful hand, and you walk through, and you’re there. Sallow. Thole. Isk. Marrach. Orsk, in the snow. Caddoc, in the salt.

Crane runs them. Of course he does. He’s got a board, at the far end of the hall, the way he had a board at the red glass for the trains, and Holt sits with him, and between them they know where every person in the Hedge is going and what time they’ll get there.

“It’s the trains,” Crane said, when I asked how he does it. “It’s just the trains with no track.”

Holt says it’s nothing like the trains. Holt says the trains used to run late. These are never late. Crane says that’s because he’s got better at it.

Dory made the arches stay open. All four hundred and twelve, all the time. She asked them, the first night, standing in the middle of the hall, very quietly, and they said yes, and they’ve been yes ever since. She says they don’t need holding any more. She says they like it. She says an arch that’s always open is an arch that’s always being walked through, and an arch that’s always being walked through gets to know a great many people, and that’s all an arch has ever wanted.

I asked her how she knew that.

“I asked,” she said.

So people travel.

Everyone. Everywhere. All the time. Wren’s count, which she does every morning now, after the stars, says nine hundred million people went through the Arch Hall this year. Some of them twice. Some of them every day. There’s a woman from Kiln who works in a bakery on Sallow and goes home every night for her supper. There’s a family from Tiel who’ve been to every world in the Hedge, every one, and keep a soft one from each of them on a shelf, four hundred and twelve, and the youngest one has started on the second shelf.

And when they travel, they bring things home. Ideas, mostly. A Marrach crane on Thole. A Thole pump on Sallow. A Sallow boat on Lantern’s lakes. An Ister engine in everything.

Mara Quell says the Hedge has gone further in one year than most of the Collective’s worlds went in a thousand. She showed me the numbers. She says she checked them nine times. She says they’re not numbers. She says they’re people, walking through arches, carrying things in their bags, and the numbers are just where the people were standing when she counted them.

And a great many of them come here.

I didn’t expect that.

I should have. I know what Avalon is. I know it’s where the Hedge started, and where the Table is, and where the red glass is, and where the queens hum under it. I know there’s a house on a rise with a long table in it that half the Hedge has seen in the footage on the great wall.

But I didn’t expect them to come to see it.

They came. Not to the house. Mother wouldn’t have it, and nobody has to be told twice about Mother. But to Avalon. To the plain, and the red glass, and the grass round the Table. To Thera, and the rain valley, and the forest city in the east, and New Hearth across the singing bridge.

And the Aldri engineers, who had built Commonhold in a season and found they liked it, looked at all those people coming through the Arch Hall with their bags and their soft ones and nowhere to sit, and went to Halvane, and asked.

Halvane came to me.

“They want to build,” he said. “Everywhere. Every continent. They’ve drawn it. It’s very large.” He paused. “It’s very, very large. I’ve said they have to ask you first. They’ll want you for the floors.”

“What do they want to build?”

He took a breath.

“Everything,” he said.

They built everything.

I’ll put it down the way Wren did, on the back of the slate, because there’s no other way to get it all in.

On the eastern plain, past Commonhold, a city of towers. Tall and white and very thin, made of Dory’s glass where the walls should be, so that at dusk, when Commonhold’s lights go out in rings from the Table, the towers catch it and pass it on, all the way to the edge of the plain. The tallest of them is nine hundred feet. Kesh flew to the top on the first day and sat there with her legs over the edge until Risa came up in the lift and fetched her down. Risa then sat there herself for an hour. She says the view is very good. She says she wasn’t going to say so in front of Kesh.

On the southern continent, on the warm coast, resorts. Long low white houses all along the sea, and gardens Suri’s people water, and a beach made of sand I made, very fine and very pale, because the Aldri asked for sand that wouldn’t stick to anyone. That’s where Oona got the tea towel. That’s where half the Hedge goes when it’s tired now. The Tirr people go there. Halloway sends them. She says it’s on the chart.

On the western continent, past New Hearth, the museums. One for every world in the Hedge, all in a long curve along the cliffs, each one built by its own people. Thole’s goes underground and lights blue. Sallow’s is half underwater. Orsk’s is wool. The walkers’ has nothing in it at all, only a very large stone, and if you sit with it long enough, the walker who keeps it says, you’ll know what it’s for.

And in the middle of the curve there’s a museum of Avalon. The Aldri wanted to put the long table in it. Mother said she was still using it. They put a copy in instead, which Rory made, exactly, down to the oatmeal stain. People queue for an hour to sit at it. There’s a pot at one end. There’s always somebody pouring.

They wanted the first kit too. The one that built the first walls on the first day, that spoke in a voice the children used to call Dot. The kit’s still working, so they couldn’t have that. They got the shell it came down in. It’s in there now, under glass, very small and old and grey, with all the scratches on it. The children from every world in the Hedge stand in front of it with their soft ones and look at it for a long time and don’t say anything. It’s the smallest thing in the whole museum. It’s the thing they look at longest.

And in the north, past the rain valley, on a high wide plain between two rivers, there’s the park.

I’m going to describe the park, because Corin made me promise.

It’s called Long Summer, because the Aldri asked the Hedge children what to call it, all of them, through the posts, and that was the one that came back the most. It’s the size of a city. It’s bigger than some cities. It has nine lakes and a mountain the Aldri built on purpose and a railway that goes all the way round it that Crane drew.

It has rides.

There’s one called The Thread, which is a long silver car that goes through the dark very fast, with lights, and at the end of it you come out somewhere completely different from where you went in, and everyone screams. Dory went on it with Lio and Sefa on the first day. She came out laughing so hard she had to sit down. She says it’s nothing like the thread. She says the real thread is much quieter. She went on it nine more times.

There’s one called The Ridge, which goes up a very steep hill very slowly and then comes down it much faster than any Hyrrani would ever come down a ridge. Andraste won’t go on it. She says she’s not having children see her come down a ridge faster than she’d let them.

Kyria went on it. Eleven times. She came off the last one with her hair all over the place and said, very seriously, “It needs a blade at the bottom,” and the Aldri engineers went away and had a long meeting about it.

There’s a Lantern Shore you can walk through, with the red glass under your feet and the arch at the end, and forty Refined made of white cloth and wire who look very surprised when you go past. The children shout at them. The Refined look more surprised.

There’s a ferry on the biggest lake. Orra came and taught the ferrymen. She charges them.

And everywhere, all over the park, there are soft ones. Every ride. Every stall. You can win them, you can buy them, the Aldri give them to the very small children at the gate. There’s a soft Lucas on the gate itself, as tall as a house, sitting down, with his legs out in front of him and his hand on his knee, the way Orsk made him. Children climb on him. The Aldri say that’s what he’s for.

I went to see it. Once. With Corin and Oona and Luka and Queenie and Kyrie and all the little ones, on a day the park was shut so nobody would mind.

I stood in front of the soft me on the gate for a long time.

“You’re smaller,” said Corin.

The Asker came out in the summer.

I’ll only say a little about it, because everyone already knows. It opened on the great wall in the second city’s plaza on a warm night, and a million people came, and they made a path, the way they did for the first footage, and I walked down it with Mother on my arm and the five wives and Aune behind us, and I was very nervous.

It’s very good.

Isar Thenn is better than me at being me. He does the sitting in the dirt exactly. He does the long table. When Maelis Orr sits down suddenly as Mother, the whole plaza laughs, the way wind goes over grass, and Mother, next to me, laughed with them.

When it got to the end, to the arch on the Lantern Shore, Isar standing in the red-glass doorway with the people going past him, nine hours not moving, the plaza went quiet. All million of them.

And when it finished, nobody clapped.

They sat down. All of them. On the ground, in the plaza, the whole million, very slowly, one after another, like a field of barley lying down in the wind. And they stayed there, sitting, on the warm stones, for a long time.

Imre Oshan was next to me. She was crying.

“They’re sitting,” she said. “Lucas. They’re all sitting down.”

The reviews were all one line. Iolo read them out, every morning, the way he read the Collective’s. He didn’t do any voices. He didn’t need to.

From Ister: We sat down.

From Thole: We sat down.

From Sallow: We sat down in the boat.

Light of the Reach is still showing on every Collective band every first day. Mattick says they’ve started showing it twice.

The Senate was Konrad’s idea.

No. That’s not right. The Senate was Tavish Orne’s idea, and Eluned Sabe’s, and the Caddi grandmother hated it, and Konrad was the one who made it so she didn’t.

It went like this. The Hedge has four hundred and twelve worlds now. The Table meets at dusk every thirty days, and every world has a seat, and Mother pours. But four hundred and twelve worlds is a great many seats, even for Rory, and the Table is the size it is, and Mira said it was never to have a roof over it or anything built round it.

So who decides the things that take longer than an evening?

Tavish Orne said a senate. Eluned Sabe said a senate with a vote. The Caddi grandmother said a senate was what the Collective had. Konrad, who was a senator on Earth for a long time before he ever came to Avalon, sat at the end of the Table with his sheets and listened to all of it.

Then he stood up.

“I’ve sat in a senate,” he said. “A real one. Under a dome. For a long time.” He put his hand flat on the top of the Table. “It wasn’t the senate that was wrong. It was that nobody in it had ever been asked anything by anyone. They were given seats. Not chosen. They were sent by the cities to stand in front of the people and keep them back.” He looked at the Caddi grandmother. “So we’ll have one that’s chosen. Every senator, by every person on their world. Not by the First. Not by the Table. By the people. And if they don’t like who they’ve sent, they can send someone else.”

“And the Table?” said the Caddi grandmother.

“The Table stays,” said Konrad. “The Table’s where the worlds ask. The Senate’s where they argue about what to do with the answer. And at dusk, every thirty days, it all comes back here, and if the Table doesn’t like it, the Table says so.”

The Caddi grandmother thought about it.

“Who gets to vote?” she said.

“Everyone.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone old enough to be asked.”

She thought about it a while longer.

“Yes,” she said. “Good.”

They voted in the autumn. Every world. Every person.

I don’t think anybody who saw it will forget it. I won’t.

On Sallow they voted by boat. Every town rowed out to the widest river, in every boat on the world, and dropped a stone in a basket for the one they wanted, and the baskets were rowed to Orra’s landing, and Orra counted them. She charged nobody. She said it was the only thing she’d ever done for free and she wanted to see what it felt like.

On Thole they voted in the shafts. Every miner went down to the face and put a mark on the rock with a pick, the way they mark a new seam. It took three days. The young miner who strikes the pick at the top of the third shaft every morning, by Hesk, struck it once for every hundred votes, and the sound went across the whole of Thole, and people came out of the houses to listen.

The walkers voted by standing. All of them, in the clearing on their world, very still, round the one they wanted. It took a long time, because walkers are very slow to stand still. It took a day. Nobody minded.

On Caddoc, salt-glass ballots, one each, that you drop in a pool, and the one you wanted is the one the pool goes clear for.

On Ister, a long line round the third city’s plaza, twice. Nobody went to the front.

On Avalon, Mother voted at the school at the bottom of the hill road, in her long brown coat, with Oona holding her hand. She put her paper in the box. She came out and stood on the step.

“I’ve never done that,” she said. “Not once. Not in the whole of my life.”

She was a weapon, in the cities, before they put her out of them. Weapons didn’t vote. And outside the bubble, after, nobody did. Not her, not my father, not anyone.

Oona held her hand very tightly, all the way up the hill.

Somebody put my name down.

On Avalon, for the Senate. I don’t know who. Mara Quell says she knows, and won’t tell me. Twenty-one million people put my name on their paper without being asked to, and I hadn’t even agreed to stand.

I went to Konrad.

“Take it off,” I said.

“It’s not on anything,” said Konrad. “They wrote it on. You can’t take off what’s not there.”

“I make floors.”

“I know.”

“I’m not standing for anything.”

“I know that too.” He put his pen down. “You don’t have to. They’re not asking you to stand. They’re saying they would have.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I still don’t.

In the end, Avalon sent nine senators, and none of them were me, and one of them was Toby. He didn’t stand either. Mara Marsh put his name down. She says she’d been waiting to do it for most of her life and she’s not sorry. Toby says he’s going to be very bad at it. Juno says he’s going to be very good at it and he knows it and that’s why he’s frightened.

He’s the youngest cadet. He was the one who cried every night in training. He’s going to sit in the Senate of the Hedge.

Okafor sent him a card. It said Cadet, with a drawing of push-ups. He’s pinned it to the wall of his new room in Commonhold.

The Senate meets in a long hall on the south side of the grass. It has nine hundred seats, and a dome, which Konrad asked for specially, and a window in the top of the dome so that the light comes down in the middle of the floor.

On the first day, when all of them were there, from every world, in every kind of coat and wool and blue hand and folded hand, Konrad stood up in the light in the middle of the floor and said every world’s name. All four hundred and twelve. It took most of the morning. Nobody hurried him.

When he’d finished, the Caddi grandmother, who’d been sent by Caddoc and hadn’t wanted to be, stood up from her seat in the front row and walked out of the hall, across the grass, to the Table on its rise.

Everybody followed her.

All nine hundred of them, and Konrad, and all the people who’d come to watch, out of the hall and across the grass. And at the Table, Mother was waiting with the pot, because it was dusk, and it was the thirtieth day.

She poured for the Caddi grandmother first.

“There you are, love,” she said.

I said I’d come to the frames.

They didn’t stop. They haven’t. The regiment goes where the houses tell it, and the houses tell it every day, and the Prime walks the square every first day with his face very young and the lamps going out on either side of him.

But it’s different now.

Okafor’s posts hear them coming. Four hundred and twelve posts and the listening ring, and every morning the lines come in to her room, quiet or not quiet, and now, when it’s not quiet, she knows before the ships do. Before the frame’s up. Sometimes before the regiment’s left Velle.

And the queens call earlier, because they know we’ll come. And Dory and I go up the thread the way we always have, but we’re not alone any more. There’s a Standing on the ground before we get there, with the people already moving. There’s a Wing in the sky. Halloway’s ward has an arch open before the first child is hurt.

We were in time for every one of them this year. Every one.

That’s never happened before. Not once, since the beginning.

I said that to Okafor, at the Table, one dusk. She was sitting with her tea and her four hundred and twelve lines in her lap, the way she sits with them every evening now, reading them again.

“Every one,” I said.

“This year,” she said.

She didn’t look up.

“Next year, they’ll know we’re quicker. So they’ll be quicker.” She turned a page. “Don’t get used to it, Cadet.”

Trevor and Teva had the seventh meeting at Maura and Rory’s, in the workshop.

They count as Trevor’s grandparents through Sera, the same as all the others, and Teva’s father had to start his third slate. Rory cleared the whole workshop for it. Every bench, every chair, every half-made door. He put them all outside on the grass in a long row, and the meeting sat on them, and Rory sat in the doorway of the empty workshop and planed a piece of wood the whole afternoon, very slowly, into curls.

The General came. He’d asked if there’d be a seventh meeting he could sit at the back of, and Teva’s father had drawn him a small chair on the slate. Rory made it real. A small plain chair at the very end of the row, a little apart from the others.

The General sat on it all afternoon and didn’t say a word.

At the end, when everybody was getting up, Teva went down the row and sat on the grass next to his chair. She didn’t say anything either. They sat there together for a long time, the General and the girl my son is going to marry, looking at the north field.

Then the General took something out of his pocket and gave it to her. A ribbon. Gold.

“For the ones who carried,” he said. “Andraste said. Anyone.”

Teva looked at it.

“I haven’t carried anyone,” she said.

“You will,” said the General. “You’ll be carrying him for the rest of your life. He’s very like his father. I’m giving it to you in advance.”

Teva tied it on her wrist. She hasn’t taken it off.

Quenby’s magazine had a picture of it on the front the next month. Taken from a very long way away. ROYAL WEDDING: GENERAL’S BLESSING?

Mother put that one in the drawer with the tea towel.

On the last night of the year, the whole family went up on the roof.

All of us. It’s a big roof, and Rory’s been putting more benches on it for years, a few at a time, so there’s room. The five wives, and Aune. Mother and Oona. Kyria and Andraste, with Kyrie between them. Hana with Queenie. Sera with Luka. Trevor and Teva, with her gold ribbon. Dory, in her clothes, because she’d only just come down the thread. Lio and Sefa. Kesh on the very edge, with her legs over. Corin in my lap, much too big for it.

And we watched Commonhold light.

It goes from the Table, at dusk, in rings. Every street, outwards, all at once. And then the towers on the plain catch it and pass it on. And then the trains, Crane’s trains, running out from Commonhold to every city on Avalon, light up one after another along their lines, like somebody running along a string with a candle. And then, very far off, faint, on every continent, all the new cities, one after another, until the whole of Avalon is lit.

The Arch Hall is the last to light. All four hundred and twelve arches at once, very soft. You can see it from the roof. A long white line on the north side of the grass, glowing.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Mother said, “Well. I noticed.”

“Noticed what?” said Corin, half asleep.

“That it was golden,” said Mother. “While we were in it. Somebody had to.”

Dory was leaning on my shoulder. She was very tired. She’d been on three worlds that day. She had her eyes closed.

“Can you hear him?” I said, very quietly, so nobody else would.

She didn’t open her eyes.

“He’s watching,” she said. “From his window. The same as every night.” She was quiet for a while. “He’s not holding his head, tonight.”

“Is that good?”

“No,” said Dory. “He’s holding something else. Something small.” She frowned, without opening her eyes. “It’s one of ours. The Cadet one. With the paper in its hand.”

Nobody else was listening. Mother was pointing out the Arch Hall to Oona. Corin was asleep.

“He’s been holding it all night,” Dory said. “He’s not looking at the lights any more. He’s looking at it.”

“What does he feel?”

She was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I thought she’d fallen asleep.

“He hates it,” she said. “All of it. The Table. The arches. The lights. Every soft one on every bunk on every world. Every person who sat down in the plaza. He hates that they sat down.” She opened her eyes, then, and looked at me. “But he hates you most, Dad. More than all the rest of it together. He’s hated you since the Assize. Since before. Since the first time somebody in the square said your name and smiled.”

“I know.”

“No,” said Dory. “You don’t. Not like this. It isn’t the frightened kind any more. It used to be. It isn’t now.” She looked back out at the lights. “It’s the kind that’s decided.”

Then she flinched. Very small. The way you do when you hear something break in another room.

“He closed his hand,” she said.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and twelve, the same as the arches. Wren says it’s the first time the two numbers have ever been the same. She says she’s not going to write down what she thinks that means, because she doesn’t know.

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

And under it:

Every one.

This year.

Days 10169–10531. Golden.

Oona brought Mother a tea towel from the southern coast: THE ROYAL HOUSE OF THE HEDGE, all of us in a row; they got her coat right; she dries the cups with it. We’re not royal; I make floors; the Hedge calls us so anyway (mugs, a Dory plate on Marrach, a jug that looks like a nervous ferryman; Quenby’s magazine, four million a month). Mother: golden days are the ones you only know afterwards, so she’ll notice them now. The General couldn’t be on four hundred worlds; he knocked on Okafor’s door; Sergeant Maris Okafor became General of the Armies of the Hedge (Holt says she cried), and put a post with a Standing on every world, four hundred and twelve, one line every morning, quiet or not. Halloway became Surgeon General (no uniform, keeps the ward, an arch to every hospital); she still calls it the ward. Eleven million came to Ister’s old schools this year; nine hundred in the engines hall; a Lantern girl asked a question no one ever had; Halvane: I was wrong. They took it home: Thole’s pumps, a blade Kyria won’t give back, Lantern lamps that won’t light unless touched (we wanted to keep the asking). The Arch Hall in Commonhold: four hundred and twelve arches, never closed, Crane’s board (the trains with no track); Dory asked them, and an open arch gets to know people. Nine hundred million went through. The Aldri built everything: glass towers on the plain (nine hundred feet; Kesh, then Risa); resorts on the southern coast; a curve of museums past New Hearth, each built by its own world, the copy of the long table and the old kit under glass; Long Summer, the park, The Thread and The Ridge and the Lantern Shore and the soft me on the gate (you’re smaller). The Asker opened, and a million people sat down. Konrad made the Senate one that’s chosen by everyone old enough to be asked; Sallow voted by boat and stone, Thole by pick on the rock, the walkers by standing, Caddoc by salt-glass, Ister in a line nobody jumped; Mother voted for the first time in her life. Twenty-one million wrote my name; Konrad: they’re saying they would have. Toby is a senator. On the first day Konrad said every name, and the Caddi grandmother walked out to the Table, and everyone followed, and Mother poured. We were in time for every frame this year; Okafor: this year; don’t get used to it, Cadet. The seventh meeting at Rory and Maura’s; the General’s small chair; a gold ribbon for Teva, in advance. On the roof, the whole of Avalon lit; Mother: I noticed. Dory: he’s holding the Cadet figure; he hates all of it, the Table, the arches, the people who sat down, and me most of all; not the frightened kind any more; the kind that’s decided; he closed his hand. Four hundred and twelve. Every one. This year.