Chapter 496: Long Lives

Kwame came home from Ister with mud on his knees and a look on his face that Hana saw from the top of the hill road.

She was on the porch. She’d been shelling beans. She stopped shelling, and put the bowl down, and stood up, and watched him all the way up the road from the red glass, the way she watches weather coming.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. Oh, lovely.”

“What?” I said.

“Look at him.”

I looked. It was Kwame. Tall, slow, broad in the shoulders like his grandfather, walking up the hill road with his hands in his pockets the way he always walks. A bit muddier than usual. He digs. He’s always muddy.

“He’s just walking,” I said.

Hana gave me the look she’s been giving me for years, the one that means I am a man who can see every atom in a mountain and still can’t see what’s in front of him.

“He’s walking like his grandfather,” she said. “The day his grandfather came back from the river with a gold ribbon there wasn’t a stall for.”

Her name is Oriel.

She’s Aldri. Third city. She maps the water under Ister. Not the rivers; the Aldri have known where the rivers are for eleven thousand years. The water under the rivers. The slow deep water that runs through the rock below the cities, so far down that it takes a team of Aldri engineers nine weeks with listening rods to find a single new spring, and they write it in a book that’s older than the long record, and they’re very proud of it.

Kwame went to Ister to learn how they do it. Halvane sent him. Ammet’s well had made the Ammet people very happy and Halvane thought Kwame ought to know how wells are supposed to be found, properly, before he went round finding them by accident.

So Kwame went to the water hall in the third city, which is one of the old long halls on the hill, and sat at the back with nine hundred other people from all over the Hedge, and listened to a very old Aldri teacher talk about listening rods for a whole morning. At the end of the morning the teacher asked if anybody had any questions.

Kwame put his hand up.

“Why don’t you just ask it?” he said.

The teacher didn’t know what to say. Nobody in the hall did.

Except a young Aldri woman at the front, with her grey hair tied back and a listening rod across her knees, who turned round in her seat and looked at Kwame for a long time, the way the Aldri look at you when they’re deciding whether you’re a fool.

“Ask it what?” she said.

“Where it wants to come up.”

“It doesn’t want anything,” said Oriel. “It’s water.”

Kwame thought about that. He thinks about everything. It’s very slow and very thorough and it drives Efua mad.

“Can I show you?” he said.

They went down into the deep wells under the third city. The old ones, the ones the Aldri engineers dug by hand before the running, that go down and down past the roots of the city into the warm dark. Oriel took him. She had her rod. She said she wanted to see him make a fool of himself where it was quiet.

At the bottom, Kwame put his hand flat on the rock.

He told me about it later. He said it was the quietest place he’d ever been, quieter than the north field at night. He said he could hear the deep water all round him, a long way off, going very slowly through the stone the way it’s gone for longer than there have been Aldri, and he said it wasn’t that it wanted anything, Oriel was right about that. It was that nobody had ever asked it where it would like to be. So it had never thought about it.

So he asked.

And under Oriel’s feet, in the rock at the bottom of the oldest well on Ister, a spring came up. Very small. Very clear. Very cold. Right where she was standing, so it went into her boots.

Oriel looked down at it.

“That took us nine weeks,” she said. “The last one. Nine weeks with the rods.”

“Sorry,” said Kwame.

“Don’t be sorry.” She was still looking at her boots. “Do it again.”

He did it again. Four times. Each time she told him where, and each time he asked, and each time the water came. Each time she wrote it down in the old book, very carefully, the way the Aldri have written every spring for eleven thousand years. And each time she wrote it, she wrote under it, very small, asked.

And then, on the fifth, she said, “No. Let me.”

She put her hand flat on the rock beside his. The way he did. And she asked.

Nothing happened. She’s Aldri. She’s not one of us. She doesn’t have it.

But Kwame says the water heard her. He says he felt it. Not come up. Just listen, for a moment, and think about it, the way you’d think about something somebody had said to you kindly, a long time after they’d gone.

“It heard you,” he said.

Oriel took her hand off the rock.

“You can’t know that.”

“I can,” said Kwame. “I’m sorry. I can.”

She looked at him for a long time, at the bottom of the oldest well on Ister, with her boots full of cold water.

“You’re very strange,” she said.

“Yes,” said Kwame. “Everybody says.”

“I didn’t say I minded,” said Oriel.

That was nine days ago. He’s been to Ister every day since.

Hana knows. Abena Osei knows. Kwame Osei, who was told by Abena Osei, came up the hill specially to stand on the porch and grin at Kwame for a full minute without saying anything, and then went home again. Great-grandmother Efua knows, because great-grandmother Efua knows everything. She’s started shouting at birds in a slightly gentler voice, Efua says, which is how you can tell she’s pleased.

Efua is beside herself. They’re twins, she and Kwame. Eleven minutes. She’s been telling him for twenty years that he’ll never find anyone who can stand how long he takes to say things.

“She’s an Aldri,” Efua said, at the long table. “They live for five hundred years. She’s got time.”

Kwame went the colour of the north field after rain.

Oriel came to the long table on the tenth night. Mother poured for her. Oriel stood up, because the Aldri don’t sit for important things, and Mother looked at her over the pot and said, “Sit down, love, it’s only tea,” and Oriel sat.

She talked to Kwame about water for three hours. Nobody else at the table could follow a word of it. Teva, who’s been through all of this herself, sat at the other end with her gold ribbon, watching them, and every so often caught Trevor’s eye and grinned.

Quenby’s magazine had it on the front by the end of the month. They’d got a picture from somewhere of Kwame and Oriel on the steps of the water hall, from a very long way away.

PRINCE OF THE WELLS: A SPRING ROMANCE?

Kwame has asked Eluned Sabe whether there’s any law in the Hedge against magazines. Ash says she’s already asked. Ash says she’s starting a list.

It’s been a hard season, and I don’t want to pretend it wasn’t, just because there’s been some good in it.

The holes haven’t come back. Not yet. Dory’s been at the red glass every night since Hollen, with her hand flat, and sleeping in the day in the end room with the curtains drawn. The four who make doors are home. Elin’s at Luna’s, and Goldie’s at Sera’s, and Thessaly’s on the ridge, and Corin is with them all, in turn, the way he’s always been, the one who goes from house to house.

Twice, Thessaly felt something. Not a hole. The beginning of one. Like somebody putting their hand on the outside of a door, she says, to see if it’s locked. Both times, on Isk, near the post. Both times, before it opened, she reached out from the ridge, the way Elin did in the square, and leaned on it from this side.

Both times it went away.

Okafor writes every one of them down. Asha and Halvane and Bell are in the long room at the back of the engines hall on Ister with the lumen, trying to teach a stone to hear a question. Bell says she thinks she’s nearly got the sum. Bell’s said that before.

The Table hasn’t decided about Velle. Not yet. It’s met twice since Hollen. Both times, everyone stood on the grass until it was dark, and nobody said not yet, and nobody said now. The cup with Varrin’s knot in it sits at the end of the Table under Rory’s iron cover.

Okafor’s slate still says Now.

Corin went to Andraste on the fourth of the month and said he wanted to be engaged.

He’s eighteen. He looks older. All my children look older than they are, and Corin’s always looked older than any of them; he looked fifteen months old at nine weeks, and he’s looked older than his age ever since. He’s very tall now, like Andraste, and very quiet, like Andraste, and when he wants something, he asks for it once, very directly, and then waits.

He asked Andraste on the ridge, in the middle of the forms. He stopped, with his blade held the loose way, the first way, and said, “I want to ask Tiri. To be engaged. Properly. The Aldri way.”

Andraste finished the form she was doing. All of it. Then she put Holdfast down on the rock and looked at him.

“How long have you wanted to?”

“Since I was five.”

“Then why now?”

Corin was quiet for a moment.

“Because of the square,” he said. “On Hollen. I felt it open. I was here, on the ridge, and I felt it, and I couldn’t do anything, and Elin did, and I thought, Varrin had eleven knots and she still didn’t come home. And I don’t want to wait any more for a time when there isn’t anything to be frightened of.” He looked at his blade. “There isn’t going to be one.”

Andraste didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she picked Holdfast up again and went back into the forms.

“Ask your grandmother,” she said.

Kyria said yes before he’d finished asking. Then she made him do the forms all the way through, twice, and then she said yes again, properly, and then she said he’d have to ask Aune.

Corin knew that. Tiri’s Aune’s daughter. You ask the mother, on Ister. You ask the grandmother, and the great-grandmother, if they’re living, and on Ister they usually are. And then you ask the girl, last.

He went to Aune.

She was in the wing. The one Halvane built onto the house on the rise, for her and Tiri and Ilas. She was cleaning her flight robe, which she does when she’s thinking, the way Dory butters toast. She saw Corin in the doorway and stopped.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s today.”

“You knew?”

“I’ve known since you were five,” said Aune. “Everyone’s known since you were five. Ilas has had the dress put by for ten years.”

She put the flight robe down.

“Ask, then,” she said.

So he asked.

Aune didn’t answer straight away. She sat down on the end of the bed, with her long grey hair over her shoulder, and looked at him. Not like the Aldri look at you when they’re deciding if you’re a fool. The other way. The way they look at something they’ve decided about a long time ago and are just checking.

“Her father was the worst in training,” she said. “And the best by the end. He was always laughing. He was never still. He held the north side for eight hours and fifty minutes and the engine jumped ten minutes later without him.” She was quiet. “Tiri has his hands.”

“I know.”

“We thought we had time,” said Aune. “We never married. We thought there’d be time. The Aldri always think there’s time. We live so long.”

She stood up.

“Yes,” she said. “Ask Ilas. Ask Halvane. And then go and ask her, before anybody thinks there’s time.”

Ilas said yes. She was in the chair by the lamp that Corin mended, the one that’s never gone out since. She looked at him over the top of it for a long time and said, “I decided at nine. She decided at seven and a half. She says eight. She’s wrong.” Then she said, “Yes.”

Halvane said yes in the engines hall, standing up, with nine hundred people from all over the Hedge watching, because Corin went to find him there in the middle of a lesson and asked him in front of all of them, without thinking about it. Halvane said yes and then sat down very suddenly on the edge of the teacher’s bench and had to be given water.

The nine hundred stood up. The Aldri do that, for important things. The rest of the Hedge did it too, because the Aldri were doing it. A walker at the back made the sound like a mountain clearing its throat.

That’s how half of Ister knew before Tiri did.

Ash made the ring.

She made Trevor’s, for Teva, at Odra’s forge. Ridge iron and Aldri silver, and Odra told it you’ll do. Corin went to her on Hyrran and asked her for one too.

“What do you want it to be?” said Ash.

Corin thought about it.

“A bird,” he said. “Broken. Mended.”

Ash looked at him for a long time. Then she went to the forge.

She didn’t strike it. She can’t help it any more; since the morning the iron was the shape before she touched it, she doesn’t strike things, she just asks them. Odra stands at the back of the forge and watches her do it, every time, with her arms folded, and every time says, “You’ll do,” in the voice nobody else has ever heard her use.

The ring is very small. Ridge iron, dark, almost black. A bird, with its wings round the finger, so the tips of them meet at the front. And across one wing, a line of Aldri silver, very fine, like a crack that’s been mended. Like the crack in every message-bird Tiri ever broke on purpose so that Corin would have to mend it.

Odra looked at it for a long time.

“That’s the best thing anyone’s ever made at this forge,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone I said so.”

Ash told everyone.

By the end of the week, every jeweller in the second city had a window full of small iron birds with silver cracks across one wing. Imre Oshan says the soft Corin is coming with a bird that comes apart and goes back together, and a little needle and thread in the box, so children can mend it themselves. The keepers on Ister say there were two hundred little Aldri girls named Tiri in the week after Halvane sat down in the engines hall, which is more than were named Tiri in the whole of the last century. Tiri says she’s going to have to change her name. Ilas says she can’t, because it’s on the long record now, and the long record doesn’t take things back.

I’ll come to Tiri. I want to put down the other thing first. Because it happened the same week, and because I didn’t know it was happening until afterwards, and because I think it’s the most important conversation anyone’s had in this house in a long time, and I wasn’t in it.

Dory told me about it later. And Ash. Separately. They told it the same way.

It was on the roof. Late. Dory was up because Dory’s always up now, at night. Ash had come back from Hyrran with Corin’s ring finished, and couldn’t sleep, and climbed up to find her.

They sat on one of Rory’s benches with a blanket over both of them and watched Commonhold. It was very late, so the lights were low. The Arch Hall was still glowing on the north side of the grass, a long soft white line. It never goes out.

Ash said, after a while, “Corin’s going to marry Tiri.”

“He’s been going to marry Tiri since he was five.”

“I know. But now he is.” Ash pulled the blanket up. “And Trevor’s going to marry Teva. And Kwame’s walking around Ister with water in his boots.”

Dory laughed.

“And I keep thinking,” said Ash, “about what happens after.”

Dory didn’t say anything. She knew what Ash meant. Dory always knows what people mean. That’s the hard thing about Dory, sometimes.

“Halloway’s sheet,” said Ash. “The one she did. About how long everyone lives now. Two hundred and thirty, for us, with the silver. Hyrrani three hundred. Kasrai more.” She looked at her hands. Iron dust in the creases, the way it always is. “Except it isn’t for us, is it, Dory. Not really. Not for any of us. Not for you and Dad.”

I should explain. I’ve never written it down properly, and I think one day the children’s children will want to know.

Dory and I aren’t getting older. Not much. Not the way anyone else does.

Halloway checks us every year, with the ring, and puts us on the chart, and every year the chart says nearly the same thing as the year before. A line here. A grey hair there, which goes silver, like the rest. Dory looks about twenty-five and has for years. I look about forty, Halloway says, if you’re being generous, and she’s never once been generous. She says she has a theory, and when I ask her what it is she says she’s not saying it out loud until she’s sure, and then she looks at me over her spectacles the way she did when she first said they wouldn’t say human.

My wives have a different theory.

Luna says I don’t get older, I just get more handsome every year, and that it’s very inconvenient. Risa says it’s worse than inconvenient, it’s a problem, and she’s been meaning to raise it with somebody. Sera says it’s the only reason there are sixteen children in this house. Hana says that’s not fair, there are plenty of other reasons, and then can’t think of any. Andraste says nothing at all, and goes very slightly pink, which on Hyrran is a very long speech.

Aune says the Aldri age very slowly too, and that she has no complaints, and that she would like it noted that she arrived late and has some catching up to do.

I’ve asked them all, at one time or another, to stop saying it in front of the children. They’ve all, at one time or another, said no.

The eldest says it plainly. She says we’re becoming what she is. Slowly. A long way off, but on the way. She says queens don’t end. She said it the way you’d tell someone the sun was coming up.

And the children have it. All of them. It’s in them the way it’s in us. They’ve only started using it this year, but it’s always been there, under everything, the silver that was given. Halloway’s chart says they’re not getting older either, now. Not past a certain point. Ash is twenty-seven and has looked twenty-five for two years. Trevor has looked twenty-four since he was twenty-two.

So Ash was right. It isn’t two hundred and thirty years, for us. Nobody knows what it is.

“I don’t mind for me,” said Ash. “I don’t think I mind. I don’t know what it’d be like to mind.” She was quiet. “But I keep thinking. If I married someone. A Kiln smith, or one of Odra’s, or somebody from Marrach with burned forearms. And I loved them. And they got old. And I didn’t.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

“And I’d have to watch,” said Ash. “Every year. Them getting older, and me sitting at the forge looking twenty-five. And then one morning they wouldn’t wake up, and I’d still be twenty-five, and I’d have to go on being twenty-five for—” She stopped. “For however long it is. For ever, maybe. Without them.”

“I know,” said Dory.

“Do you think about it?”

Dory was quiet for a very long time.

“Every night,” she said. “At the glass. When there’s nothing on the net. I think about it every night.” She looked out at the Arch Hall. “I’ve never let anyone close enough to have to think about it about. That’s why. I think. I’ve never said that out loud before.”

“Dory.”

“I know.”

“You’re twenty-seven.”

“I know.” She pulled the blanket round her. “I’m going to be twenty-seven for a very long time, Ash. So are you.”

They went to Aune.

Not that night. The next morning, early, when Aune was coming back from the dawn flight, in her long grey flight robe, with her hair blown all over the place. They met her at the bottom of the wing steps. Dory said, “Can we ask you something?” and Aune looked at the pair of them, and at their faces, and said, “Inside. Not on the steps.”

She made them tea. Aldri tea, which is very pale and tastes of nothing very much and which Mother says isn’t tea at all. They sat in the wing with Ilas asleep in her chair by the lamp, and Ash asked it. All of it. The way she’d asked Dory on the roof.

Aune listened all the way through without saying anything.

Then she put her cup down.

“The Aldri live five hundred years,” she said. “Some of us more. Ilas is two hundred now, and she says she’s only just getting started, and I believe her.” She looked at Ash. “Halvane is older than anyone will tell you. Isar Thenn has been the most famous actor on Ister for a hundred and forty years and he’s still not tired of it. Maelis Orr has been on the stage for three hundred and eighty.”

Ash didn’t say anything.

“I’m not saying it’s for ever,” said Aune. “Nobody knows what for ever is. Not even the eldest, and she’s the oldest thing there is. But five hundred years is a long time to love somebody. And the Aldri are very good at it. We decide once, and then we don’t change our minds.” She picked her cup up again. “And we’re very handsome. I’m only saying.”

Dory laughed. She didn’t mean to. It came out of her very suddenly, the way it does, and Ash laughed too, and Ilas woke up in her chair by the lamp and said, very clearly, “She’s right, you know,” and went back to sleep.

Then Dory asked the other thing. The thing I didn’t know she’d been wanting to ask for years.

“Why did you marry Dad?”

Aune looked at her.

“You could have married anyone,” said Dory. “On Ister. Anyone at all. You’re Aune.”

She said it the way the Hedge says it. Aune. Not the name. The thing.

Aune was quiet for a while. Then she put her cup down on the low table, very carefully, and folded her hands in her lap.

“Yes,” she said. “I could.”

I’ll put down what she said. Dory put it down for me, word for word, afterwards, on the back of one of Wren’s slates, because she said I’d want it exactly. She was right.

“I’m the Speaker’s daughter,” said Aune. “His granddaughter, really. But he raised me, he and Ilas, after my mother and father went into the dark before one of the jumps, the way Ceren did. On Ister they call me the Speaker’s daughter, and he’s never once corrected them, and nor have I.

“I was the youngest pilot ever to hold a station. I flew at the north side the day Ceren held it, and I came back and he didn’t. I led four thousand fighters at Root. Four thousand. On the second day, when everyone stood up. There are songs about it on Ister. There’s a children’s game. There’s a statue in the second city of me in my flight robe, with my hair blown out behind me, that I have never once gone to look at because I’d have to stand next to it.

“And I’m very beautiful. I know that. I’ve been told it every day of my life, by everyone, since I was small. Ilas says I was the most beautiful baby the third city had seen in a hundred years. On Ister, that counts for something.”

She looked at Dory.

“I could have had any man on Ister. Any of them. I’m not being proud. It’s just true. There were men who waited outside the wing of the Speaker’s house every evening for years in case I came out. There was one who wrote me a poem every day for eleven years. Some of them were very handsome. Some of them were heroes too. One of them was Isar Thenn.”

Ash put her tea down. “Isar Thenn?”

“He was very young,” said Aune. “It was a long time ago. He’s never forgiven me.” She smiled a little. “He’s playing your father now. I think that’s his revenge.”

“And then,” said Aune, “your father came through the arch.

“The first time. With you, Dory. You were young. And he came onto the station, and everybody on the station stood up, the way we do, because he was the man who asks stars to be steps, and we’d all heard of him, and the youngest children on Ister already had drawings of him on their walls.

“And he looked round at all of us standing up, and he looked very embarrassed, and he said, Oh, please don’t.

“And then he saw me. And I was standing there in my flight robe, with my hair down, and everybody on the station was watching to see what he’d do, because everybody always watches to see what a man will do the first time he sees me.

“And he said, Hello. Are you the pilot? Is that your ship? It’s very good. Can you show me how the engine sits?”

Aune laughed. Very softly.

“That’s all. He wasn’t impressed by me. Not the robe. Not the hair. Not the Speaker. Not any of it. He didn’t know I’d held a station, and when he found out, he said, That’s brilliant, how did you do it, and then he asked about the engine again. He wanted to know how the engine sat.

“He talked to me like I was anybody. Like I was a pilot with a good ship. Nobody had ever done that. Not once in my whole life. Not since I was born.”

She looked down at her hands.

“I decided at my first arch,” she said. “Ilas knew. My whole squadron knew. I knew for a long time that he had five wives and that he’d never once look at me the way the men outside the wing looked at me. And I didn’t want him to. That was the point. I wanted somebody who’d ask how the engine sat.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Ilas was asleep in her chair. The lamp Corin mended was burning very steadily, the way it always does.

Then Ash said, “Does he know? That that’s why?”

“No,” said Aune. “I’ve never told him. He’d be embarrassed.” She picked up her cup. “You can tell him, if you like. He’ll go red. It’s very good when he goes red.”

They told me. That evening. In the kitchen. Both of them, at once, the way Dory and Ash have told me things since they were small, finishing each other’s sentences.

I went red.

Aune came in from the wing halfway through, saw my face, and laughed so hard she had to sit down on the bottom step.

I don’t remember any of it. Not the way she tells it. I remember the station, and everybody standing up, and being embarrassed. I remember a pilot with long grey hair showing me how an engine sat, and it was a very good engine. I don’t remember thinking anything about her hair at all.

That, Aune says, is exactly the point.

And then Dory said, at the end, when the others had gone up, and it was just the two of us in the kitchen,

“She’s right, though. Isn’t she. About time.”

“About what?”

“Everybody thinking there’s time.” She was turning a cup round in her hands, the way she does. “The Aldri think there’s time because they live so long. And we think there’s time because we’re not going to stop. And Ceren thought there was time. And Varrin had eleven knots.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m going to think about it,” said Dory. “Not tonight. But I’m going to think about it.”

That’s the first time she’s ever said that. In twenty-seven years.

I’m putting it down so I’ll remember she said it.

Corin asked Tiri at the red glass, at first light, because the Aldri do important things at first light.

He didn’t tell anyone he was going to. He didn’t need to. Everybody knew. Half of Ister had known for a week, since Halvane had to sit down in the engines hall. By the time the sun came up over the southern range, there were more people standing on the red glass than there had been on the night Lantern moved. All quietly. All standing, because the Aldri stand for important things, and everybody else stood because the Aldri were standing.

Tiri came out of the Ister arch from her term at the old schools, in her long grey coat, with her hair blown all over the place, exactly like her mother. She saw everyone standing there. She saw Corin, in the middle of the red glass, on his own.

She stopped.

And then she reached into the pocket of her flight robe, and took out a message-bird. A small grey Aldri one. And she broke it. Very deliberately, in front of everyone. Snapped one wing clean off, and held the two pieces out to him in her open hands.

Corin went to her across the red glass. He took the pieces. He put them together in his hands and held them, and hummed, the way he’s mended every one of them since he was five, and when he opened his hands, the bird was whole, with a line of silver across the wing where it had broken.

Then he gave it back to her. With the ring sitting on its back.

Tiri looked at the bird. And at the ring. And at the line of silver across the ring’s iron wing, exactly the same as the line across the bird’s.

“I decided at eight,” she said.

“Ilas says seven and a half.”

“Ilas is wrong.”

She put the ring on.

Nobody on the red glass made a sound. Not one of them. The whole of the plain was standing there in the first light in perfect silence. And then the bird on Tiri’s palm opened its mended wing, and flew up off her hand, very high, over all of them, right up past the top of the Ister arch.

“Now he’s seen it,” said Tiri, very quietly.

Aune, standing at the edge with Ilas on her arm, put her face in her hands.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and twenty. One more, from a small world past Isk that left last week; Wren says its star said it shyly, as if it wasn’t sure it was allowed.

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

And under it:

Kwame: asked.

Corin: asked.

Dory: thinking.

Days 10669–10724. Long Lives.

Kwame came home walking like his grandfather (Hana: oh, no; oh, lovely). Oriel of the third city maps the water under the rivers; nine weeks with the rods for one spring. He asked her teacher, why don’t you just ask it? At the bottom of the oldest well a spring came up into her boots; she wrote asked under every one; on the fifth she put her hand on the rock, and the water heard her. You’re very strange; I didn’t say I minded. PRINCE OF THE WELLS (Ash is starting a list). The holes haven’t come back; Thessaly leaned on two beginnings near Isk from the ridge; Bell’s nearly got the sum; the Table hasn’t decided about Velle, and Okafor’s slate still says Now. Corin, eighteen, asked Andraste in the forms: because of the square; there isn’t going to be a time without anything to be frightened of. Ask your grandmother. Kyria said yes twice. Aune: it’s today; we thought we had time; ask her before anybody thinks there’s time. Ilas: seven and a half. Halvane said yes in front of nine hundred and had to sit down. Ash made the ring without striking it: a ridge-iron bird, wings meeting, a mended line of Aldri silver across one; Odra: the best thing ever made at this forge, don’t tell anyone; Ash told everyone. On the roof Ash asked Dory about after: we’re not getting older, and anyone we marry will. (I’m not ageing much either; my wives say I just get more handsome every year, and that’s why there are sixteen children.) Dory: every night, at the glass; I’ve never let anyone close enough. Aune: the Aldri live five hundred years; we decide once; and we’re very handsome. Ilas: she’s right, you know. Why did you marry Dad? Aune: the Speaker’s daughter, raised by Halvane and Ilas; the youngest pilot to hold a station; four thousand at Root; a statue she won’t stand next to; very beautiful, any man on Ister, Isar Thenn among them. And I came onto the station and said oh, please don’t, and asked how the engine sat. He talked to me like I was anybody. I went red; I don’t remember her hair; that’s the point. Dory: everybody thinks there’s time; I’m going to think about it. At first light on the red glass Tiri broke a bird; Corin mended it, with the ring on its back; I decided at eight; the bird flew over the arch: now he’s seen it. Four hundred and twenty. Kwame: asked. Corin: asked. Dory: thinking.