Chapter 502: The Square

I said I’d put down what happened in the Reach after Senna read. I didn’t, last time. There was Velle, and the ring, and nine hundred and thirty-one queens, and I couldn’t fit anything else in.

So I’ll put it down now. It’s been a hundred days and more since she read. It hasn’t stopped.

They sat down.

That’s the first thing. That’s the thing Dory heard at midnight, at the red glass, with her hand flat, under all the quiet. Not one town, this time, or seventy towns on fourteen worlds. Everyone.

Not everyone everywhere. Mara Quell is very careful about that, and I’m going to be careful too. The Reach is very big. There are worlds in it where nobody heard Senna, because nobody listens to the old bands, and worlds where the Refined stood at the tithe office door the whole four hours and nobody dared. There are worlds that cheered. There are always worlds that cheer.

But Mattick went into eleven ports in the month after, on the edge and the third arm and two a long way in, and in every one of them, he says, the squares were full of people sitting down.

Not doing anything. Not shouting. Not waving anything. Just sitting. On the stones. In the morning, when the tithe offices open. All day. And going home at night, and coming back the next morning, and sitting down again.

“They’re not angry,” Mattick said, at the long table. He had his heavy hands flat. “That’s what I can’t get over. I’ve seen angry. I’ve seen ports burn. This isn’t that.” He thought about it. “It’s like they’ve all decided at once that they’re not going to stand up for him any more. And they’re just waiting for him to notice.”

The tithe offices are empty.

Not closed. The Refined won’t let them close. Open, with the clerks behind the counters and the ledgers on the desks and the white seal on the wall. And nobody comes in. Nobody pays. The ore ships sit in the docks with their holds full and nobody loads them, and the grain sits in the silos, and the Collective’s great white list of who owes what grows longer and longer every day with nobody to read it to.

Eluned Sabe has been watching. She has a clerk in Quenby’s old counting-house who still gets the Collective’s tithe returns, by an arrangement nobody’s ever asked her about, and every morning the clerk sends her the figures.

She brought them to the Table at the thirtieth dusk. She didn’t need her abacus. She just held up the sheet.

“Down by nine parts in ten,” she said. “In a month.”

Nobody at the Table said anything.

“In three thousand years,” said Eluned Sabe, “Quenby never once saw the tithe fall by more than one part in a hundred. Not in plague. Not in war. Not in the year the Hungry came over the third arm.” She put the sheet down on the glass. “They’re not paying. Nobody’s making them. Nobody can.”

She looked down the Table at Mother.

“You’d have liked my grandmother,” she said. “She always said the only thing that can stop a fine is somebody who doesn’t believe in it.”

Mother poured her a cup.

The Refined tried to stand them up.

They tried for nine days. On world after world. The way they did on the grain world, after the burnings. One at a time, by the arms, onto their feet.

And people sat down again.

They couldn’t burn them. They couldn’t stand them up. They couldn’t make them pay. There are more people in the Reach than there are Refined by more than anyone can count, and the Refined don’t fight, they drink, and they had no queens to drink.

On the tenth day, Mattick says, they stopped trying. On most worlds. They stood at the edges of the squares in their white and looked at the people sitting in the middle, and the people sat there and looked back.

On the twelfth day, a Refined on an ore world on the third arm took off his white robe, folded it, put it on the stones at the edge of the square, and walked away.

Nobody knows where he went.

Hen’s niece’s square sat down on the second morning.

Hen heard it on the long ward, on a band Ilka had set up for her by the bed, very low. The girl whose soft Mother they burned in the seed sack. Her square, on the grain world, where the fire had been, and where the town sat down the first time, after her father came home.

It sat down again. All of it. And this time, Hen says, the girl was at the front. Nine years old, on the stones, with her hands in her lap. And round her neck, on a very fine string, under her shirt, where you could only see it if you bent down, an iron cup.

Hen listened to the whole of it, all day, lying on the long ward with the band by her ear. When it got to dusk and the town got up and went home, she turned it off and lay there for a long time.

Then she asked Halloway if she could get up.

Halloway said not yet.

Hen said she’d like to sit down somewhere other than a bed, then, if that was all right. So Halloway let her. She sat on the floor of the long ward, by the window, with her back against the wall and her hands in her lap, all the next day, the way they were sitting on her world. Dovi sat with her. Then four more. Then most of the ward.

Halloway put it on the chart. She didn’t know what else to call it, so she wrote solidarity, and then crossed it out, and wrote sitting.

And then they sat down in Carrow.

I didn’t expect that. Nobody did. Carrow is the Prime’s own world. The great house, the Assize, the white hall, the square where he walks on the first day of every year with the lamps going out on either side of him. Carrow’s people have cheered him on the steps for three generations, Mattick says. Carrow is the one world in the whole of the Reach you’d have said would never sit down.

On the forty-first day, by Carrow’s clock, it was the first day of the month. The day the Prime walks the square.

He hadn’t walked it since I spoke from the kitchen. Not once. Dory says he’s been in the great house the whole time, in a different room every night, with his back to the wall.

But that morning, he came out.

Dory heard all of it. She was at the red glass, with her hand flat, and I was beside her, and she told me as it happened, the way she does.

He came out of the great house in the white. Very young-looking. Very straight. With the Assessors behind him in their row and Corvan a step behind them. He went down the great steps, the ones the whole Reach has seen on every band, and he walked out into the square.

The square was full.

Thousands. Tens of thousands. Carrow’s own people, who’d cheered him on the steps every year of his life. All the way across it, from the steps to the far side, and down every street that opens off it, as far as Dory could feel.

All of them sitting down.

Not one of them looked up. Not one of them cheered. They didn’t shout. They didn’t move. They sat on the stones of the square of Carrow, under the bright morning, and didn’t look at him.

The Prime stopped at the bottom of the steps.

Dory says he stood there for a very long time.

And then he started to walk.

He walked the square.

Through them. All the way across. The path he’s walked every first day of the year since he took the white, from the bottom of the steps to the fountain in the middle and round it and back. They’d left the path. That’s what Dory says broke her. They hadn’t sat on the path. They’d sat on either side of it, close, so close their knees were at the edge of the stones he walked on, and they’d left him exactly enough room to walk, and not one inch more.

And as he passed each one, they didn’t look at him. They looked at the ground.

And the lamps went out on either side of him, the way they’ve gone out for three years now, unasked. One after another, all the way along the path, as he went.

But nobody turned them back on.

He got to the fountain. He went round it. He came back.

At the bottom of the steps, Dory says, he stopped again. And turned round. And looked out at all of them, sitting in the dark of their own square in the bright morning, with every lamp out.

And he said something. Not on any band. Just out loud, to the square.

Dory heard it.

“Stand up.”

Nobody stood up.

He said it again. Louder.

“Stand. Up.”

Nobody stood up.

And then a very old woman, at the front, right at the edge of his path, with her hands folded in her lap, said, quite clearly, in the silence, so that everyone in the front of the square could hear her:

“No.”

Dory took her hand off the glass.

She sat back. She looked at me. She was crying a bit. She didn’t wipe it.

“He’s never been told no,” she said. “Do you remember? I said it. On the roof. He’s never once been told no by something kind.”

“I remember.”

“She was kind,” said Dory. “Dad. She was very kind about it. She said it the way Mother says it.” She put her hand back on the glass, very slowly. “She said it like she was sorry for him.”

He went back up the steps. Into the great house. The doors shut.

The square didn’t move. Not until dusk. Then, at dusk, one after another, very quietly, Carrow’s people got up off the stones and went home. And the next morning they came back, and sat down again.

They’ve done it every morning since.

The Assize said it was all forgery.

On the third day after Senna read, an Assessor stood on the steps and read a short statement from a white sheet. Not the thin one with the careful voice; another one, older, heavier. He said the documents read on the old bands by the so-called Hedge were forgeries, made in the workshops of the man on the hill, to deceive the citizens of the Reach. He said there had never been a river world on the third arm. He said there had never been a ring on Velle.

He didn’t say why the ring wasn’t there any more.

He didn’t say what the Assize would do about the people sitting in the squares.

He read it, and rolled up the sheet, and went back into the white hall. And nobody in the Reach believed a word of it, Mattick says, including, he thinks, the Assessor.

And on the ninth day, the thin one came to us.

I didn’t recognise him at first. He came through the Arch Hall with a long grey case under his arm, in an ordinary coat, not the white, and stood at the edge of the grass by the Table at dusk with his hat in his hands.

It was Mother who knew him. She looked at him across the grass while she was pouring, and put the pot down, and said, “You read it.”

He looked at her.

“The toys,” said Mother. “On the steps. You read the paper about the toys. The burning. The children.”

“Yes,” said the thin man.

“And now you’re here.”

“Yes.”

Mother looked at him for a long time. Then she picked the pot up again.

“Sit down, love,” she said. “You look like you’ve been standing up for a very long time.”

His name is Ferro Hale. He was an Assessor of the Bright Reach for forty years. He sat in the white hall in the row behind the Prime, and he read what he was given on the steps, in his careful voice, and he never once said anything that wasn’t on the paper.

He resigned on the eighth day after Senna read. He was the first. He says there have been eleven since.

He sat on the bench by the stove, next to Mother, where Hen sat. He didn’t drink the tea. He held it.

“I read the toys,” he said. “I read it on the steps. I was given it in the morning and I read it at noon. I didn’t think about it. I never thought about anything I read.” He looked at the cup. “And then a man in your kitchen read for four hours, and I sat in my rooms on Carrow and listened to every word, and at the end he said he killed a world for a bowl of rice, and I thought about the boy. The one with the soft Dory. The one they made put it back in the fire.”

Nobody at the Table said anything.

“I read that,” said Ferro Hale. “I read the paper that did that to him. In my careful voice.”

He put the cup down.

“I’ve brought something,” he said.

It was the Assize’s own records.

Not the Prime’s letters. Those came from Corvan. These were the Assize. Forty years of them, in the long grey case, copied by hand at night in his rooms, a little every night, since the day the first frame was mentioned in the white hall.

Every sanctioned study. Every world in good standing where the Refined had gone, with the Assize’s seal, to do their careful, patient, necessary work for the good of every world. Every queen they took. Every frame. Every name of every world. Signed. Sealed. In the Assize’s own hand.

He’d been copying them for nine years. He says he didn’t know why, when he started. He says he just thought somebody ought to.

Senna took the case. She opened it on the Table, on the glass, and looked at the first sheet for a long time.

“It’s the seal,” she said, very quietly. “It’s their own seal. On every one.” She looked up at him. “They can’t say this is forgery. It’s in their own book.”

“No,” said Ferro Hale. “They can’t.”

He picked up his cup again. This time he drank it.

“I’d like it read,” he said. “All of it. In whatever voice you like. Just not mine.”

Senna’s reading it now. A little every day. Not four hours at once, the way she read Corvan’s. An hour, at noon by Carrow’s clock, every day, the way the old woman’s people sit in the square every morning. One world at a time. Name, date, seal, queen.

She’s been reading for forty days. Ferro Hale says she’s got about four hundred to go.

Quenby’s magazine had Senna on the front this month. For the first time, it wasn’t a Dask. A woman in a plain grey coat, at a plain table, with a stack of papers, reading. From a very long way away.

THE READER.

Imre’s made a soft Senna. With a stack of tiny papers that come out of her hands. Senna says she’s never been so embarrassed in her life. Iolo has bought nine.

The children on the Collective side started saying it.

Not on the bands. Under their breath. In the tithe queues, behind their mothers, when the Refined walked past. Mattick heard it on four worlds in a week. Very small voices, very quiet, very firm.

No.

Just that. The way the old woman said it. Mattick says on one ore world he heard a whole row of children in a queue say it at once, very softly, when a Refined went past them, and the Refined stopped, and looked down the row, and didn’t know which one to look at, and walked on.

Imre wanted to make a soft one of the old woman in the square. Mother said no. Mother said nobody knows her name and nobody should, and that a woman who says no to the Prime of the Reach in her own square ought to be left to go home and have her supper in peace. Imre made a soft cup instead, an ordinary one, plain and white, with one word stitched very small on the bottom where only a child would look.

It’s the bestselling thing on the Collective’s edge this month. Mattick can’t get enough of them in. He says they don’t even hide them any more. He says the children leave them on the counter at the tithe office, upside down, so the clerk can read the bottom.

Some of the queens went home this month.

The nine hundred and thirty-one. The ones from Velle. They stayed on Root for forty days after the nine, singing with the eldest, getting strong. Then, one at a time, they started to go.

Not all of them had homes to go to. Mara Quell checked every one against Ferro Hale’s case, against the Assize’s own list. Six hundred and four of them came from worlds the Refined had already emptied, years ago, where nobody was left living. Their worlds are still there. Rock and sea and sky. But nobody’s on them, and a queen alone on an empty world, the eldest says, is a very lonely thing.

So the eldest asked the Hedge.

Konrad read it out at the Table, on the thirtieth dusk, at the end of the names. Every world in the Hedge that didn’t have a queen of its own. And there are a great many; most of the Hedge’s worlds have never had one, the way Ister never did until Arreth. Every one of them, if they wanted, could ask.

Two hundred and nine asked in the first dusk.

The Caddi grandmother said yes, good two hundred and nine times. She had to stop for tea in the middle.

And two of them, the eldest said, asked to go somewhere nobody expected. A small cold one, very pale, who’d been on the outermost ring at Velle, who asked through Dory whether there was anywhere very cold and very quiet where nobody had ever lived.

Genny’s been looking for a cold-loving queen for Avalon’s red moon for years.

She cried. Then she took the small cold queen through an arch to the red moon herself, in a suit, with Garnet, and they put her down in the ice, very gently, and she went in.

Genny says she started singing before she was all the way under.

And the other, a big warm one from the second ring, asked for the big pale moon, where the Aldri machines have been working for years to make it a place people can live. She said she’d like to help. She said she’d been made to hold a door for a year and she’d like to hold something open that was meant to be opened.

Halvane says the pale moon’s thirty years have become nine. He went up and stood on it, in a suit, with his hand on the ground, and came down and didn’t say anything for a whole day.

The holes stopped.

I should have said that first. It’s the best thing that’s happened. Since the night on Velle, not one listener has rung. Not on the borders, not on Ammet, not in Hollen’s square where they call it Varrin, not on the windowsill by the Scarecrow queen. Okafor reads her four hundred and fifty-two lines every morning before her tea, and every one of them, every morning, since Velle, has said the same word.

Quiet.

The two houses told us why.

“They cannot see,” said the first house, on the plateau, at dawn. After good morning. “They used Velle’s queen to see. Every world she could feel, they could open on. Now she is gone.”

“So they’re blind,” said Dory.

“They are blind,” said the second house. “And they have nothing to hold. And they are very angry.” A pause. “They are trying to find another queen to see through. One that will not be missed.”

“Will they?”

The two notes went back and forth.

“Not easily,” said the first house. “Every queen near the Reach heard the eldest sing. Every one knows to call.” A pause. “The ones in Velle know that too. They felt it go past.”

Okafor, at the edge of the plateau with her slate, wrote something down. Then she said, very quietly, to the crack,

“And the people? The ones in the halls? The ones being made?”

The houses didn’t answer for a long time.

“They are still there,” said the second house. “Asleep. Most of them. The making stopped when the queens left. There is nothing to put into them. They are not made and not unmade. They are waiting.”

“For what?”

“For the ones in Velle to decide what to do with them,” said the first house. “The ones in Velle have not decided yet.”

Dory was very still.

“I told them we’d come back,” she said.

“We know,” said the second house. “We heard you. So did the ones in Velle.”

Dovi told me about the halls. I asked him. Mother said ask, so I asked.

He was on the long ward still, sitting by the window with Hen, where they sit now. He’d been in the halls for nine days before they made him. He remembers it the way you remember being very ill.

“You sleep,” he said. “All the time. They make you. And while you sleep, you dream.” He looked at his hands. “They make you dream about you. Over and over. Your face. Your hill. Your mother’s kitchen. They make you dream that you’re coming for us. That you’ve come to take our children away. That you’re going to turn our worlds to salt.”

I didn’t say anything.

“By the time they wake you up and put the silver in,” said Dovi, “you already want to. You’ve been wanting to for days. In your sleep.” He was quiet for a while. “The ones who are still there. Who weren’t made yet. They’re still dreaming. Every night. The same dream.”

“Even with the making stopped?”

“The houses don’t need the queens for the dream,” said Dovi. “Just for the silver.” He looked out of the window, at the plain, at the red glass and the hill. “If you leave them long enough, they won’t need the silver either. They’ll just be the dream.”

Hen put her hand on his arm.

“Ask him the other thing,” she said. “The thing you came to ask.”

So I did. I asked them which. The halls, or Corvan.

Dovi didn’t answer. Hen looked at me for a long time.

“I’m not going to tell you,” she said. “That’s yours.” She put her hand flat on the floor beside her, where she sits. “But I’ll tell you what I’d want, if I was still in there. I’d want somebody to come. I wouldn’t care how long it took. I’d just want to know somebody was coming.” She paused. “And he’ll be wanting the same.”

Okafor’s slate says Velle: the halls. Under it, a number. Mara Quell got it from Ferro Hale’s case, from the Assize’s own record of the households found twice. Fourteen thousand, two hundred and six.

Under that, Okafor has written nothing yet. She says she’s thinking. She says she’s thinking about how you bring fourteen thousand people out of a place quietly when there’s no great song to be quiet under.

She says she’ll have something by the next dusk. She’s said that for three dusks.

I want to put the good things down too, because Mother says, and because there have been good things.

Kwame had his first meeting. In the deep city on Ister, under the third city, at Oriel’s grandmother’s house, which is at the bottom of a well.

Not a well. A house in a well. A round stone house built down the inside of the oldest shaft on Ister, all the way round, nine floors of it, with the water at the bottom and the sky at the top, very small and very gold, a coin a long way up. The Aldri of the deep city have lived there since before the running. Oriel was born there.

Oriel’s family is very large. Oriel did warn him. Every floor of the well house had somebody on it who wanted to show Kwame their spring. There are nine floors. There are forty-one springs.

He asked every one of them. Very politely. Would you like to come up? And every one did, a little, into the stone basins the deep-city Aldri have kept for them since before the long record.

At the bottom, Oriel’s grandmother, who is the oldest person in the deep city and has never once been to the top of her own well, looked at the forty-one basins filling all the way up the inside of her house, and at Kwame, very tall and very slow and very muddy, standing at the bottom with his hand on the stone.

“He’ll do,” she said.

Kwame says that’s what Odra says. Kwame says it must be a thing old women say everywhere.

Teva’s father drew a small well in the first circle of Kwame’s slate. With forty-one tiny dots.

Corin and Tiri had their second meeting on the ridge, with Kyria, who made everybody do the forms first, including Tiri’s family, including Ilas, who did them sitting down in her chair with a stick and said afterwards it was the most fun she’d had in a hundred years.

Morning is at one hundred and twenty-seven. Mother checks it every day. Teva’s started bringing her the slate at breakfast so she doesn’t have to get up.

Dory’s line, the small one underneath, is at one hundred and twenty-seven too.

She hasn’t said anything about it. Not to me. Not to Teva. She just changes it every morning, very small, in her own hand, and then sits at the glass.

I asked her once, very carefully, whether she’d noticed anything yet.

She looked at me for a long time.

“I’ve noticed I’m counting,” she said.

And then Corvan’s line came.

It came the way they all come. The Hesta, in a convoy of three. A crate of rabbits. A bootlace on the bottom. Dory looked all the way down it on the plain before she touched it.

It was very short.

He’s sealed the long room. He’s had every clerk and servant and guard in the great house questioned, one at a time, by the Refined, in the room with no windows past the port. Some of them haven’t come back.

He knows the Sallow letter was in the long room. He knows only nine people had a key.

He hasn’t questioned me.

He looks at me at supper. That’s all. He’s never looked at me at supper before. He doesn’t say anything. He just looks.

I don’t know how long I’ve got.

I’m not sorry. I want you to know that. I’m not sorry about any of it.

C.

Sorrel read it over Dory’s shoulder. She didn’t say anything. She went and got the pen from beside the bread, and under the N at the bottom of her wrist, she wrote a very small question mark.

Then she rubbed it out. And wrote it again.

Lio asked for the line. Dory gave it to her. She read it twice, the way she reads everything twice.

“I said I wanted to meet him,” she said. “When it was over.”

“I know.”

“It’s not going to be over, is it,” said Lio. “Not in time.” She folded the line very small. “He read mine to them. To the nine. Himself.”

She didn’t give it back. She put it in her pocket, with the other one, the one about the four.

Okafor came up the hill road that night. Late. Mother let her in.

She didn’t sit at the long table. She stood in the kitchen doorway, the way she does when she’s going to say something she’s decided.

“I’ve got the halls,” she said. “I think. It’s not good. But I’ve got something.” She looked at me. “And I’ve got him, if he wants it. A way out. If Mattick can get close enough.”

“Both?”

“Not both at once,” said Okafor. “I haven’t got enough. Not enough doors, not enough coats, not enough quiet.” She put her slate down on the long table. “I need you to tell me which.”

I looked at the slate.

Velle: the halls. 14,206.

And under it, in her square sergeant’s hand, very small:

C.

I didn’t answer her that night.

I’m not going to pretend I did. I sat at the long table with Mother and Okafor and the slate until nearly dawn, and I didn’t answer.

Mother didn’t say anything either. She poured. She sat. At about four in the morning she put her hand on mine on the table, the way she did the night I answered the Prime, and left it there.

“You don’t have to choose tonight, love,” she said.

“He might not have long.”

“I know.”

“And they’re asleep. Fourteen thousand of them. Waiting for somebody to decide what to do with them.”

“I know.”

“Which one?” I said. “Which one do I tell her?”

Mother was quiet for a long time.

“Ask them,” she said. “Both. Ask him. Ask her, the old woman in the square. Ask Hen. Ask Lio.” She squeezed my hand. “You’ve spent your whole life asking stars to be steps, love. You can ask people what they want.”

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and sixty-one. Nine more, since Ferro Hale began to be read. Wren says one of them said it very clearly, like an old woman at the front of a square.

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

And under it:

Carrow: sitting.

The halls: waiting.

C: ?

Morning: 127.

Days 10996–11040. The Square.

After Senna read, they sat down: not everywhere, Mara says, but in every square Mattick saw, morning after morning, not angry; they’ve decided not to stand up for him any more and they’re waiting for him to notice. The tithe offices stand open and empty; Eluned’s figures are down nine parts in ten in a month, never more than one in a hundred in three thousand years; only somebody who doesn’t believe in it can stop a fine. The Refined tried to stand them up for nine days, then stopped; on the twelfth a Refined folded his white robe on the stones and walked away. Hen’s niece sat at the front of her square with an iron cup under her shirt, and Hen and the long ward sat on the floor by the window; Halloway wrote sitting. Then Carrow sat. On the first of the month the Prime came out for the first time since the kitchen and walked his path through tens of thousands sitting with their knees at the edge of it, looking at the ground, the lamps going out and nobody turning them on. At the steps he said stand up, twice; an old woman at the front said no, kindly, like Mother, like she was sorry for him. Carrow sits every morning now. The Assize called it all forgery. Ferro Hale, the thin Assessor who read the toys, resigned, the first of twelve, and came through the Arch Hall with forty years of the Assize’s own sealed records of every sanctioned study, copied by hand at night for nine years; Mother: sit down, love, you look like you’ve been standing a very long time; read it, just not in my voice. Senna reads an hour a day at noon; THE READER; a soft Senna with papers (Iolo bought nine). Not one listener has rung since Velle: the houses in Velle are blind without Velle’s queen, with nothing to hold, angry, looking for a queen nobody will miss, and every queen knows to call. The Collective’s children say it under their breath in the tithe queues: no; a plain white soft cup with one word on the bottom, left upside down on the tithe counters. Six hundred and four of the Velle queens had no one left at home; two hundred and nine Hedge worlds asked for one in a dusk; a small cold queen went into the ice of the red moon with Genny and Garnet, singing before she was under, and a big warm one went to the pale moon to hold something open that was meant to be opened; thirty years became nine. The made in the halls are not made and not unmade, waiting, fourteen thousand two hundred and six; the Velle houses heard Dory’s promise. Kwame’s first meeting was in the house down the inside of the oldest well, nine floors, forty-one springs that all came up; Oriel’s grandmother: he’ll do. Corin and Tiri’s second on the ridge, Ilas doing the forms in her chair. Morning: 127; Dory’s small line too: I’ve noticed I’m counting. Corvan: he’s sealed the long room and questioned everyone with a key, some haven’t come back; he looks at me at supper; I’m not sorry. Sorrel wrote a question mark and rubbed it out and wrote it again. Dovi: in the halls they make you dream of me coming for your children, and if they’re left long enough they’ll just be the dream. Hen: I’m not going to tell you, that’s yours; I’d want to know somebody was coming, and so will he. Okafor: the halls or him, not both, not enough doors or coats or quiet; tell me which. Mother: ask them, both; you can ask people what they want. Four hundred and sixty-one. Carrow: sitting. The halls: waiting. C: ? Morning: 127.