Chapter 495: No Arch

The eighth meeting was at the river.

Not the Oseis’ house. They have a house, a good one, low and brown with a wide porch, at the end of the lane past Holdfast’s field, and Abena Osei keeps it so clean you could eat off the step. But Teva’s father had drawn a river on his third slate, very small, because he’d been told nine times about the fair where there wasn’t a stall, only a river, and Kwame Osei had won Abena a gold ribbon anyway. And Abena Osei saw the drawing, and laughed, and said if the man wanted a river he could have one.

So we went to the river.

The one below the north field, where it goes wide and slow round the bend before the kit bridge. Kwame Osei had been down there since dawn with Kwame, his grandson, digging. When we came down the path in the afternoon, there was a long flat shelf of earth along the bank, just above the water, smooth and dry, with a row of Rory’s benches on it and a great many blankets. The river went past it so close you could put your feet in.

“You dug a room,” said Teva’s father.

“We dug a bank,” said Kwame Osei. “The river did the rest.”

They count as Trevor’s grandparents through Hana, the same as all the others. Teva’s father didn’t even draw the arrow this time. He just wrote Oseis at the top of the slate and underlined it twice.

Great-grandmother Efua came down on Kwame’s arm. She’s very small now, and very straight, and she shouts at birds. She sat at the end of the front bench nearest the water and took off her shoes and put her feet in, and every few minutes a bird came down to the far bank and she shouted at it, and it went away.

Teva’s grandmother, who’d come on her stick, watched this for some time.

Then she took off her own shoes, very slowly, and sat down next to great-grandmother Efua, and put her feet in the river too.

The next bird that came, they both shouted at.

Nobody at the meeting has stopped talking about it since. Teva’s mother says the old woman hasn’t raised her voice in forty years. Teva’s grandmother says she’s been waiting forty years for a good enough reason.

The Osei way is that everyone brings something they made with their hands. Not cooked. Made. You put it on the blanket in the middle and you don’t say who it’s from, and at the end everybody takes something home that isn’t theirs.

Teva’s family hadn’t known. Nobody had told them. Hana went very pale when she realised, and started to say something, and Abena Osei put a hand on her arm.

“Watch,” she said.

Teva’s father stood up. He’s very tall. He went into the pocket of his long coat and took out a small grey thing and put it on the blanket. Then his wife did. Then Tovi. Then Teva’s grandmother, slowly, from the pocket of her dress, and Teva last.

They were birds. All of them. Small Aldri message-birds, the kind Tiri used to break so Corin would mend them. Every one of them made by hand, a different one from each of them. Teva’s father’s was perfect. Tovi’s was lopsided. Teva’s grandmother’s was very old, and worn smooth, and she said, when everyone looked at her, that it was the first one she’d ever made, as a girl, and she’d been carrying it for longer than any of them had been alive.

“How did you know?” said Hana.

“We didn’t,” said Teva’s father. “But it’s an Aldri meeting. You always bring a bird.” He looked at the blanket, at everything the Oseis and the Dasks had put there. The carved spoons and the woven bands and Ash’s small iron leaf. “It seems we both do the same thing. We just call it different.”

Kwame Osei laughed so hard he had to sit down in the river.

At the end, everybody took something. That’s the rule.

Great-grandmother Efua took Teva’s grandmother’s bird, the old worn one. Teva’s grandmother took a small clay cup great-grandmother Efua had made, a long time ago, on Earth, before the bubble, that’s been on the Oseis’ shelf for longer than Avalon has had a name.

They didn’t say anything to each other about it. They just sat with their feet in the water, holding each other’s things, and when the next bird came, they shouted at it together.

That’s eight. There’s one left.

Teva’s father has drawn it on the slate already. A circle with nothing in it. One place neither family has been. He says he doesn’t know where it is yet. He says he’s not worried. He says, at this rate, the families will have been everywhere by the end of the year, and they’ll have to find somewhere new.

I’ve just realised I never put Orsk down.

I’m sorry. It was the golden year, and there was so much, and I wrote about the arches and the towers and Long Summer and forgot the most important thing that happened that whole spring.

Orsk moved.

Its sun was eleven months away, the day Gath came to the Table, and the Thole miners went under the mountains the week after, and they dug the engine into the roots of the highest one, where the town at the very top of the staircase sits in the cloud. It took ten months. Bell’s sum had one month to spare. Halvane said it was the first time he’d ever built an engine in a place where he couldn’t breathe properly. Mira said her miners had never been so happy. She said it’s the cold. Thole miners like the cold. It reminds them of the deep.

Gath asked for one thing. That the mountains not move.

They didn’t. Not one stone. Halvane did it so carefully that the snow on the very top of the highest peak, the snow that’s been there since before the Collective had a name, didn’t so much as slide. Orsk went from a dying sun to a young warm one a long way inside the Watch, and every town on the staircase woke up the next morning to find their mountains exactly where they’d left them.

Just warmer.

Gath stood at the top of the town in the cloud, in nine layers of wool, and took off the top one.

That’s all he did. He took off one layer, and folded it, and put it on the step.

The whole of Orsk has been taking off one layer ever since. Gath says they’ll get down to five, eventually. He says five is plenty. He says nobody on Orsk has ever had fewer than nine in the whole of their history and they’re finding it very strange.

The soft Orsk Lucas comes in eight layers now. Imre says that’s accurate.

The older ones went on going to the borders.

In pairs. With a Standing. Where Okafor said and not where she said not, and home when she said. It’s been two months. It’s become a thing the Hedge expects, the way it expects the lights at dusk.

Ash and Kwame went to Ammet. Ash spent the whole of the first day at the post’s forge, which is very small, and by the end of it the post had a forge three times the size and the Ammet smiths were asking if she’d come back. Kwame dug a well. He didn’t mean to. He was just standing on the dune by the post and the sand asked him where the water was, and he told it, and now there’s a well.

Abena and Efua went to Pell’s Reach, to the bay where the ferry went down. Abena sat on the long ward in the town for nine days with the people who’d been pulled out of the water and were still frightened of it. Efua sat on the end of the jetty and shouted at the gulls, which made the children laugh, which Halloway says is a medicine, and has put on the chart.

Elin and Goldie went to Hollen, where the two queens came off the frames on the same night. They’d been asked for. Hollen’s First had seen them on a saucer and wanted to meet them in person. She said her granddaughter had a soft Elin and a soft Goldie and wouldn’t sleep without both, and she wanted to see whether the real ones were as small.

They’re not small. Elin’s taller than Luna now. The granddaughter was very disappointed.

And Kesh and Sigmund went to Isk again, because the Isk girl had asked for Trevor and Trevor was doing a meeting. Kesh made it snow glass over the post on the second night, by accident, and the Isk girl has asked Okafor in writing whether Kesh can be posted there permanently.

Okafor wrote back No.

The Isk girl wrote back Why not?

Okafor wrote back Because I said.

The Isk girl has pinned this to the wall of the post, next to Okafor’s line from the first night. Quiet.

The Refined haven’t come near any of them. Not once in two months.

They still come. But not where the children are. Not where the batteries are. They hit the gaps, the long empty reaches where a trade convoy has to cross between one arch and the next. They come in twos and threes, fast, and go.

They lost two more ships last month. Not ours. Theirs. A battery on Ammet, one volley, on the night Ash and Kwame were there. Teth says the Refined have started counting how many batteries there are on each world before they come. He says that’s how you know they’re frightened.

Quenby’s magazine had Ash on the front the next week, from a very long way away, with iron dust on her hands. PRINCESS OF THE FORGE. Ash has asked Eluned Sabe whether there’s any law in the Hedge against magazines. Eluned says there isn’t. Ash says there should be.

There’s a soft Trevor now, with a glass cup that lights up. There’s a soft Ash with a hammer. Imre wanted to do all of them and Hana told her not without asking each of them first, so Imre went round the whole house with a notebook. Sigmund said yes if the soft one had a bird. Kesh said yes if hers was frowning. Efua said yes if hers could shout. It can. It’s the loudest soft one in the Hedge. There are already complaints.

The keepers on Ister sent their half-year. Trevor has gone into the top ten for boys for the first time. There are nine thousand little Aldri boys called Trevor this year. There are four thousand girls called Ash.

And there are eleven called Kesh, which Kesh says is eleven too many, and which Risa says is exactly the right number, and won’t say why.

The Prime saw the magazines. Of course he did.

Dory heard him, on the night Ash’s cover came out. She says it wasn’t loud. It was the opposite. The forge past the Watch stopped, the way it stopped once before, and in the quiet she could hear him. In his room. With the band on, very low. Somebody on it was describing Kesh’s glass cloud over Isk, a mile wide, and how it had hung there for an hour, glittering, while the Isk children stood underneath it.

Dory says he didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he said, to the room, very quietly, the same thing he said before, at the window.

It holds in them.

Not a question this time.

Dory says she’s heard a great many things in the dark past the Watch. Grey ones and Hands and the voice. The houses being glad. The forge. She says she’s never heard anything like what came after that.

He didn’t shout. He didn’t break anything. She says she could hear him sitting very still with his hands flat on his table, and under the stillness, something going round and round, very fast, like the engine of a ship that’s been told to go and can’t.

“He’s counting them,” she said. “All of them. Every one of us. By name.” She was quiet. “He knows all our names, Dad. Every one. Even Queenie’s.”

It came on Hollen.

The thirty-ninth day. Elin and Goldie’s ninth day there. Bright morning, a market day, the square full. The Standing at the post was a Kasrai woman called Varrin, with a rope of hair with eleven knots in it, which on Kasrai means eleven times she came down off the wall. Okafor chose her.

Dory was on the hill. At the red glass, with her hand flat. The way she sits every morning before the stars.

And she said, very suddenly, out loud, to no one,

“There’s a hole.”

I want to put down what she felt, the way she told it to me afterwards, because I think it’s the most important thing in all of this so far, and I want it right.

She said the net is like the surface of a pond. Every world in the Hedge, every thread, every queen. When an arch opens, it’s like putting your hand in the water. You feel the ripple. She’s felt ten thousand arches open and she could tell you which, and where, with her eyes closed.

But this wasn’t an arch.

This was like the pond had a hole in it. Not a hand going in. A place where there wasn’t any water, all at once, very small and very round. And then something coming up through the hole from underneath.

“On Hollen,” she said. “In the square.”

And she was gone, up the thread, scattered, before I’d got up.

I went after her. She’s faster than me now. She has been for years. I’ve stopped minding that too.

We were there in the time it takes to say it.

We weren’t first.

Elin and Goldie were first.

They’d felt it too. They make doors. They’ve been making doors since they were small, the four of them, Elin and Goldie and Corin and Thessaly, the ones the houses asked for in the terms. They know what a door feels like better than anyone in the Hedge except Dory. And this was a door. The wrong way round, opened from somewhere they couldn’t see, with nothing holding it at either end.

They were in the post when it opened. They were in the square before the first of them came through.

Six Refined. Out of the air, in the middle of the market, between a stall selling Hollen pears and a stall selling soft ones. Very tall, in their white, with the silver bright and black at the edges under their skin. No ship. No arch. No warning. Nothing for a battery to see. Just a small round hole in the bright morning, and them stepping out of it, one after another, as if they’d come through a door from the next room.

They came for the people. Not the post. Not the battery. The people in the square.

Varrin got between them and the first stall. She’s Kasrai. She had her door-blade out before the third one was through. She took the first two.

The third one took her.

I’ll say it plainly. I said I’d always say it plainly.

Varrin died in the square on Hollen with her door-blade in her hand, between the Refined and the pear stall. A Hollen man died next to her, who’d run at them with nothing. A woman who’d been selling soft ones. Two more, at the edge of the square, who were too slow.

Five. In the time it took Elin and Goldie to get from the post to the square.

Then Goldie got there.

Goldie is Sera’s. She’s got Sera’s red hair and Sera’s temper and she was the smallest of the four, always, the one who had to stand on a box to reach the door handle. She’s not small now. She came into the square at a run, with Elin a step behind her, and she didn’t stop, and she didn’t do anything with fire, which is what everyone expected.

She made a door.

Under them. Under all four of the Refined that were left, in one go, a flat round door in the stone of the square, exactly the size of the place they were standing. She didn’t ask it where to go. She didn’t need to. She’d felt where they came from. She could feel the other end of their hole, still open, a long way off, past the Watch.

She sent them back through it.

All four. They dropped, very suddenly, as if the square had stopped being there, and were gone.

And then Elin, behind her, did the thing nobody’s ever done. Not Dory. Not me.

She reached into their hole. The one they’d come out of. The round one in the air above the stalls, the wrong-way-round door with nothing holding it. And she shut it.

Not closed it. Shut it. From this side. The way you shut a door someone’s left open into a cold room.

Dory and I came out of the thread into the square a breath later.

There was nothing to do. Nothing at all. Just two of my daughters standing in the middle of a market square with their hands out, breathing very hard, and five people on the ground, and the soft ones from the stall scattered all over the stones round them, and a little girl with a soft Elin and a soft Goldie clutched to her chest, standing quite still between the stalls, looking at them.

Dory went to Varrin first. Then to the Hollen man, and the woman from the stall, and the others. She knelt by each of them, very quickly, the way Hana taught her when she was small, to see whether there was anything left to hold.

There wasn’t.

She stood up. She came back to Elin and Goldie and put her arms round both of them at once, and they all three stood there in the square.

“You were so fast,” said Dory.

“Not fast enough,” said Goldie. Her voice came out wrong. She was shaking. “Five, Dory. We felt it open. We were right there.”

“I know.”

“She was standing in front of the pears.”

“I know, love.”

Elin didn’t say anything. She was looking at the place in the air where the hole had been. Her hand was still half up, as if she was holding something shut.

“It’s still there,” she said, at last. “The other end. I can feel it. They’re on the other side, pushing.” She swallowed. “I can hold it. I think I can hold it as long as I want. But I don’t know where it goes.”

“Velle,” said Dory.

Elin looked at her.

“I followed it,” said Dory. “On the way up. I followed the hole. It goes to Velle.”

The little girl with the soft ones came across the square. She was Hollen’s First’s granddaughter. She’d been at the soft one stall when they came through, choosing a new one, with her grandmother’s money.

She stood in front of Goldie and held out the soft Goldie.

“You’re not small,” she said.

“No,” said Goldie.

“I thought you’d be small.”

Goldie knelt down. She was still shaking. She took the soft Goldie, very carefully, and looked at it. Red wool hair. A little round door sewn on the front.

“I used to be,” she said. “I used to have to stand on a box.”

The girl thought about that.

“Can you make them not come back?”

Goldie looked up at Elin. Elin, with her hand still half up in the air.

“We’re trying,” said Goldie.

Elin held it for nine hours.

We brought a chair into the square, and she sat in it, with her hand up, and held their door shut from our side. Hana came. Halloway came, and every one of her people, and they took the five away on Lantern hand-folders’ stretchers, very gently. The Hollen people came back into the square one at a time and picked up the soft ones from the stones and put them back on the stall, and then they stood round the edge of the square, very quietly, and watched Elin hold the door.

Luna came through the arch at noon. She didn’t say anything. She just pulled up a second chair and sat down next to her daughter and held her other hand.

At the ninth hour, Dory said, “They’ve stopped pushing.”

Elin let go.

Very slowly. The way you’d let go of a weight you weren’t sure would stay down.

It stayed.

She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes, and Luna put her arm round her, and Elin fell asleep, right there, in the middle of the square on Hollen, with the whole town standing round her, and nobody said anything at all.

The two houses told us what it was. We asked them that night, on the plateau. The Overseer came. So did Okafor, for the first time. She stood at the edge with her slate and didn’t say anything for the whole of it.

“It is the door,” said the first house.

“The one they wanted,” said the second. “A door that needs no arch. We told you. When we were still with them, they asked the man for it. For leaving.”

“They didn’t leave,” said Dory. “They came.”

“A door that goes out goes in,” said the first house. “It is the same door. It was always the same door. They knew that when they asked.”

“The man gave it to them,” said the second. “For the making. For Lio. He gave them the door.” Very quiet. “And now they have given it to the Refined.”

Okafor spoke for the first time.

“Can they open it anywhere?”

The two notes went back and forth for a long time.

“Anywhere they can see,” said the first house, finally. “From Velle. They are very deep in Velle’s queen. They are using her to see. Every world she can feel, they can open on.”

“How many worlds can she feel?”

“All of them,” said the second house. “Every queen can feel every queen. That is what queens are.”

Okafor didn’t say anything for a while. Then she wrote one word on her slate, and showed it to nobody, and put it away.

The batteries can’t see a door. They’re for ships. The posts can hear a ship coming from a long way off. They can’t hear a hole.

Dory can. She felt it before it opened. A breath before. Maybe two.

Elin and Goldie can. And Corin, and Thessaly. The four who make doors. They felt it on Hollen at the same moment Dory did. Corin felt it on the ridge on Hyrran, with Kyria, in the middle of the forms. He dropped his blade. Kyria says that’s the first time.

So that’s the Hedge’s early warning now. Five people. Dory, and four of the youngest Dasks, and every one of them has to sleep.

Okafor knows that. She sat at the long table that night, very late, after everyone had gone to bed except Mother and me. She had her slate and her tea and she didn’t drink the tea.

“I need a way to hear a hole,” she said. “That isn’t one of your children.”

“Asha,” I said. “And Halvane. And Bell.”

“I’ve asked them.” She turned her cup round on the table. “They’ve said they’ll try. They’ve said it’ll take a long time. They’ve said lumen might do it, because lumen remembers being asked, and a door is a question.” She looked at the slate. “A long time is a long time, Cadet.”

“I know.”

“Until then,” said Okafor, “your daughter sleeps in the day and sits at the glass all night, and four children who make doors don’t go to the borders any more. They go where they can feel the most. They go home.” She put her cup down. “Varrin had eleven knots. I chose her because she’d come down off the wall eleven times. She didn’t come down the twelfth.”

Mother poured her more tea. Okafor still didn’t drink it.

“I chose her,” she said.

“I know, love,” said Mother.

The word on Okafor’s slate was Now.

I saw it the next morning, when she came up the hill to the long table early and put the slate down by the pot. She didn’t hide it. I think she wanted me to see.

Not Not yet. Not But soon. Just Now, in her square sergeant’s hand, and under it a list.

Every world in the Hedge with a battery. Every world without one. Every post, every Standing, every Wing. And at the very bottom, one more line, that she’d written and crossed out and written again.

Velle.

The Table met at dusk on the thirtieth day. Everyone came. The Cabinet, the Senate, the Firsts of every world that could get there through the Arch Hall, which was all of them. They stood on the grass round the Table in their thousands, all the way back to the edge of Commonhold, and nobody said anything until Mother had poured.

Konrad said the names. All four hundred and nineteen.

Then he said one more. Hollen. And under it, five names, which the Hollen First had given him. And then, last, Varrin, and her eleven knots.

Then he sat down.

Okafor stood up. She’d never once stood up at the Table. She stood with her slate under her arm.

“They’ve found a door,” she said. “It goes from Velle to anywhere. They opened it on Hollen. They’ll open it again. Next time, those children won’t be in the square. Next time there won’t be anyone who can feel it.” She looked down the Table. “I’ve been told not yet for a year. I’ve said not yet myself. I was right to.”

She put the slate on the Table. On the glass Dory made, beside the river of lumen.

“It isn’t not yet any more,” she said.

The Table didn’t decide that night. It’s the Table. It never decides anything in one night that it can decide in two.

But nobody said not yet.

The Caddi grandmother didn’t say anything at all. She sat with her hands folded, and her cup in front of her, and when the walker made the sound like a mountain clearing its throat, she said, very quietly,

“I know.”

Varrin went home to the Kasrai on the third day.

They came for her themselves, through the Arch Hall, forty of them, tall and grey-gold, with their ropes of hair down their backs. They don’t carry their dead. They walk beside them. So Halloway’s people carried her, on the Lantern stretcher, and the forty Kasrai walked on either side, very slowly, all the way across the grass from the Arch Hall to the Table and then back again, because Varrin had sat at the Table once, on the day she was chosen, and they wanted her to pass it.

Mother was at the Table. She’d been there since dawn. When they came past, she stood up and poured a cup and put it on the end of the Table, by the stove, where Varrin had sat. Nobody had told her where Varrin had sat. She knew.

The Kasrai stopped.

Their eldest, a man with so many knots in his rope that it went down past his knees, came to the Table and looked at the cup for a long time. Then he took a knife from his belt and cut the last knot off Varrin’s rope, very carefully, and put it in the cup.

“Eleven times she came down off the wall,” he said. “This is the twelfth. She does not have to come down from this one.”

He left it there. The cup’s still on the end of the Table, with the knot in it. Rory made a small iron cover for it so the rain doesn’t get in. Nobody sits in that place now. Nobody’s said they shouldn’t. Nobody does.

The Hollen man who ran at them with nothing was called Perren. He was a pear-seller’s brother. The woman with the soft ones was called Issa, and she’d made half of them herself, by hand, in the evenings. The two at the edge of the square were an old couple called Brann and Tolly, who’d come to market together every week for sixty years and were too slow because Tolly wouldn’t leave without Brann.

Mother said all five names at the long table that night. Then she said them again in the morning. She says she’ll say them every morning for a year, after the names she says to the three grey ones, and all the others she says. She says the list’s getting long. She says that’s the point of a list.

Konrad has a sheet. At the top it says Hollen. He’s left a lot of room under it.

Elin slept for two days.

When she woke up, the first thing she asked was whether the door had stayed shut. Dory said yes. The second thing she asked was for tea. The third was whether she could go back to Hollen.

“Not yet,” said Luna.

Elin looked at her mother for a long time.

“Everybody keeps saying that,” she said.

Goldie hasn’t slept much. She’s been on the bottom step with Sera most nights, very late, not saying anything. Sera says she keeps her hands open on her knees. Sera says she knows what that means, because she used to do it, after the fires. It’s so you know your hands are still yours.

The Hollen First’s granddaughter sent a letter. In very large writing. Sefa read it to Goldie on the step.

Dear Goldie. You are not small. I have a box for standing on if you want it. Love from Hollen.

Goldie laughed. The first time since the square. Sera says it came out wet.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and nineteen. Hollen’s said it the way you’d say something through your teeth.

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

And under it, Varrin’s name. And her eleven knots, drawn small. And then the five, from Hollen.

And then, under all of them, a line Wren has never written before.

Not quiet.

Days 10611–10668. No Arch.

The eighth meeting was at the river: Kwame Osei and Kwame dug a bank; great-grandmother Efua and Teva’s grandmother put their feet in and shouted at birds together. The Osei rule is that everyone brings a thing they made; Teva’s family brought birds, because it’s an Aldri meeting and you always bring a bird, and Kwame Osei sat down in the river laughing. The old women swapped a worn bird and a clay cup from Earth before the bubble. One meeting left: one place neither family has been. I’d never put Orsk down: it moved in the golden spring, ten months under the mountains with one to spare, and not one stone or flake of snow moved; Gath took off one layer. The older ones went on to the borders: Ash’s forge and Kwame’s well on Ammet, Abena’s ward and Efua’s gulls on Pell’s Reach, Elin and Goldie asked for on Hollen (not small), Kesh’s glass snow on Isk (Okafor: because I said). Soft Trevor with a cup, Ash with a hammer, Efua’s soft one shouts. Nine thousand Trevors and eleven Kesh. The Prime heard about the glass cloud: it holds in them, not a question; he knows all our names, even Queenie’s. On Hollen’s market morning Dory felt a hole in the net: no ship, no arch, nothing for a battery. Six Refined stepped out of the air. Varrin, Kasrai, eleven knots, took two and died in front of the pears, with Perren, Issa, and Brann and Tolly; the Kasrai cut her last knot into Mother’s cup on the Table, the twelfth wall she doesn’t have to come down from. Goldie made a door under the other four and sent them back. Elin did the thing nobody has: she shut their door from this side, and held it for nine hours in a chair in the square with Luna beside her. It goes to Velle. The two houses: the door that needs no arch, the one the man gave them; a door that goes out goes in; they see through Velle’s queen, and every queen can feel every queen. Only Dory and the four door-makers can feel a hole; Okafor needs a way that isn’t my children; lumen might, because a door is a question. Okafor’s slate: Now, and at the bottom, Velle. At the Table nobody said not yet; the Caddi grandmother: I know. The Hollen girl to Goldie: you are not small; I have a box for standing on. Four hundred and nineteen. Not quiet.