Chapter 508: For Safekeeping

The first thing the Prime did with the Reach was ask for its queens.

Not ask. He doesn’t. He told them.

It went out on every band on the ninth day after the Assize walked down the steps between two rows of Refined and didn’t come back. Read by nobody. There’s nobody left to read anything. Just his voice, very steady, very clear, from the white hall, where he sits now in the middle of the long table with nine empty chairs on either side of him.

The Protection of Queens.

He said the Reach was at war. He said the man on the hill had been stealing queens from member worlds in good standing. Taking them in the night. Hiding them on worlds no one could reach. He said nine hundred and thirty-one queens had vanished from Velle alone, where they’d been under the Reach’s own protection, and that the Assize, in its confusion, had done nothing.

He said that every world in the Reach that had a queen was now required, for her own safety, to give her into the care of the Refined. To be taken to Velle. Where his honoured friends would keep her safe until the war was over.

He gave them nine days.

Mara Quell took her spectacles off. She didn’t clean them.

“Nine hundred and thirty-one,” she said. “He said the number.”

“He’s telling them we took them,” said Kesh.

“He’s telling them he had them,” said Mara. “He just admitted, on every band in the Reach, that there were nine hundred and thirty-one queens on Velle. He’s been saying for a season that there was no ring.” She put her spectacles back on. “He doesn’t care any more. That’s what that means. He doesn’t care what anybody thinks he did.”

Senna, at the end of the long table, said very quietly, “Dictators don’t need to be believed. They just need to be obeyed.”

The two houses knew what it was. They told us that night.

“They cannot see,” said the first house. “Since Velle’s queen went. They are blind. They need a queen to see through. One. That is all.”

“And now they’ve asked for all of them,” said Dory.

“They have asked for all of them,” said the second house, “because if every world must give one, then one world will. One will be frightened enough. And the ones in Velle will take her down into the dark under the gardens and put her where Velle’s queen was, and see through her.” A pause. “And then they can open the door again. Anywhere. Any world she can feel.”

“Every queen can feel every queen,” said Dory.

“Yes.”

The Overseer had his cup. He’d picked it up again, after the night he put it down. He held it very carefully in both hands.

“How many worlds in the Reach have queens?” he said.

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

“More than are left in the Hedge,” said the first house. “Fewer than there used to be. A great many.”

They started calling the first night.

The queens. Not the worlds. The worlds were frightened; the worlds had nine days and a voice on every band and white ships already in their skies. The queens weren’t frightened. Not the way their people were.

They were angry.

The eldest had sung to every one of them, after Velle. You are not alone. If anything happens to you, call. And on the first night of the nine days, they started to call.

Dory heard them. At the red glass, with her hand flat. She came up the hill road at two in the morning in her nightgown and stood in the kitchen doorway and said, “Dad. Wake everyone.”

Forty-one, the first night.

Not all at once. One after another, very fast, from every part of the Reach, the way rain starts. A queen on a grain world on the third arm. A queen under an ore world in the middle. A queen in a sea, and one in a mountain, and one in a desert so dry that her world’s people live in the cracks of the rock. A queen under a city of nine million that has paid its tithe for two thousand years and has never once had a soft one on any bunk.

Every one of them saying the same thing.

They’re coming for me. In nine days. My people are frightened. Some of them want to give me up. I don’t want to go to Velle.

Please.

The Table met at three in the morning. It’s never done that. Mother poured anyway, in her nightgown, with her hair down, by the iron stove at the end, under the stars. Konrad said the names. He said them very fast. He’d never said them fast before.

Then Okafor stood up.

“We can’t go to forty-one worlds,” she said. “Not with the Hedge. Not in nine days. Every one of them is inside the Reach. Every one of them has white ships over it by now. If we go in with Wings and batteries and the Standing, we’re at war with every world we go to, and the people on them, and they haven’t done anything.” She looked at me. “You said that. At this Table. Before Velle.”

“I did.”

“So what do we do?”

I didn’t answer straight away.

Then Dory did.

“We go,” she said. “Not the Hedge. Us. The way we went to Isselt. Up the thread. To the queens. Not to the worlds. Not to the people. Just to her. And we stand next to her when the Refined come.”

“Forty-one,” said Okafor. “You and your father. Forty-one worlds.”

“Not just us,” said Dory.

She looked down the Table.

At the end of the bench, by the stove, where they’d sat up when Dory woke the house, there were twenty people in their nightclothes. Every one of them who’d sat on the long bench in the north field. Every one who’d learned the squares and Hello and asking and moving and lifting and scattering, and their mother’s.

Small Holt was asleep against Genny. He woke up when everybody looked at him.

“What?” he said, very loudly.

It took the Table until dawn.

Not because anybody said no. Nobody said no. The Caddi grandmother didn’t say anything at all for most of it. Then, as the first light came over the southern range, she put her cup down and said, “Yes. Good,” and the walker made the sound, and that was that.

Okafor made the rules. On one sheet. She says that’s how you know it’ll work.

In pairs. At least one who’s been to a frame before.

You stand next to the queen. You don’t go to the cities. You don’t go to the Reach Guard. You don’t go to anyone who isn’t standing over her with a collar in their hand.

You ask the silver first. Always. Before anything else. Like at Isselt.

You go home when I say. All of you. Every one.

And if you’re too late, you come home anyway.

She wrote that last one, and then crossed it out, and then wrote it again.

I’ll put down who went where. Dory made the list, at the long table, at dawn, with Okafor. Every queen. Every pair. Mara Quell checked every world against Ferro Hale’s case so we’d know what the Refined had done there before.

Dory and I didn’t pair. We were the ones who’d go wherever it went wrong.

Trevor and Teva went together. Teva doesn’t have it. She went anyway. She said she’d be the one who said good morning to the queen, so that the queen would know they were the right ones. Okafor looked at her for a long time and wrote her name down.

Sigmund and Kesh. Ash and Kwame. Elin and Goldie, who make doors, together, because they’ve always been together. Corin and Thessaly, who make doors too. Abena and Efua. Vessa with Andraste. Lio with Sefa, who doesn’t have it either, and who said the same thing Teva did, and who Okafor wrote down too.

Small Holt and Genny. Pell and Garnet. Oona with Mother, which nobody argued with, because nobody argues with Mother.

And the Holders, and Hearth, and the wives. Dinraal and Isolde. Gilgamesh with his axe. Rhiannon, Tiamat, Aramaeis. Luna. Risa. Sera. Hana. Kyria. Aune and Tiri, in a Ceren, to a queen in a sea who’d said she was very deep and might need someone who could go down a long way.

Forty-one queens. Forty-one pairs. Some of us went twice.

Queenie and Kyrie and Luka didn’t go. They’re five. They sat on the porch with the General and Sabeth, who’d come for supper and stayed, and with Taveth, who made soup, and they watched the sky.

I’m not going to put down all forty-one. I can’t. They took nine days, and Okafor has every one of them on a sheet, and Konrad has every one of them on his wall, and the Kiln-leather books in Commonhold will have them all in the end.

I’ll put down some.

Trevor and Teva went to a queen under a lake, on a cool green world on the third arm called Arrow. On the fourth day, the Refined came. Nine of them. Out of a white ship that came down onto the shore of the lake at dawn.

They came down to the water with a frame. And found a man standing on the shore with a glass cup in his hand, and an Aldri woman beside him with a gold ribbon on her wrist.

The Refined stopped.

Teva walked down to the edge of the water. She knelt. She put her hand flat on the surface of the lake, very gently, the way Orra does.

“Good morning,” she said. To the queen. Out loud. So the Refined could hear.

And the lake, Trevor says, went warm. All the way across. Every inch of it.

The Refined looked at each other. Then at Trevor. Then at his cup.

Trevor didn’t do anything. He didn’t ask anything. He just held up the cup, the way he held it up in front of the keepers, so the dawn came through it.

The Refined got back in their ship and left.

Small Holt went with Genny to a queen in a desert. A dry red world called Sesk, where the people live in the cracks of the rock and the queen lives very deep, under all of it, in the only water there is.

The Refined came on the sixth day. Forty of them. A great many. They came out of the white ships onto the red rock, very tall, very quiet, and walked towards the crack where the queen’s people go down to the water.

Small Holt stood in front of the crack.

He’s eleven. His hair stands straight up. He was very frightened. Genny says he was shaking.

And he did the thing his mother taught him on the plateau. The foot. The small space round you, in every direction, where you can do anything, as hard as you like. He did it all at once, very fast, with nothing getting out, and the red rock under his feet in a circle a foot wide went to glass.

And then he shouted.

Not at the Refined. At their silver. The way Mother says he shouted at his cup on the first day in the north field. Very loudly. Very clearly. Out over the red rock at all forty of them at once.

“WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO HOME?”

Genny says it was the loudest thing she’s ever heard. She says it went off the rocks for miles. She says the people of Sesk heard it in the cracks, all the way down, and came up to see.

And the silver said yes.

Not all of it. Not all forty. He’s eleven. But nine of them. Nine Refined, on the red rock of Sesk, stopped, very suddenly, and stood very still, and something silver went up out of them, and away, and they came apart. Not cruelly. Very quietly. Like the forty on Ysse’s world.

The other thirty-one ran.

Small Holt sat down on the glass. Genny sat down with him. He put his head on her shoulder.

“I asked,” he said. Not loudly. “I asked like you’re supposed to.”

“I know, love.”

“They came apart.”

“I know.”

He didn’t say anything else for a long time. Then he said, very quietly, the third time in his life, “I’m sorry,” to the place on the red rock where the nine had been.

Genny says she held him until the sun went down.

Pell went with Garnet to a world called Lisk, where the queen is very small and lives under a village. The Refined came on the fifth day, only four of them, because it’s a very small world and they didn’t think it needed more.

Pell had drawn them. All four. The night before. She’d sat at the edge of the village with her pencils and Garnet beside her, and drawn four Refined, very carefully, the way she draws everything, and folded the paper into her pocket.

When they came, she took it out. She unfolded it. She put her hand on it, flat, the way Garnet taught her.

And the four drawings on the paper stood up. Off the page. Grey, and thin, and made of paper, with pencil lines on them. Exactly the size of the four real ones. And walked across the village square towards the four Refined.

The four Refined stopped.

They looked at the four paper Refined. The paper Refined looked back. Nobody did anything for a very long time.

Then the paper ones held out their hands, and in each of their hands, there was a small paper bird.

The real Refined got back in their ship.

Garnet laughed so hard she had to sit down. Pell didn’t. Pell folded the four paper Refined back onto the paper, very carefully, and put them in her pocket, and the paper bird on her shoulder sang.

Lio went with Sefa to a queen on an ore world in the middle of the Reach, a long way in, where the people had been told, every day for the whole of their lives, that the man on the hill was coming for them.

The Refined came on the seventh day. Nine of them. With a frame.

And so did the people.

Lio says that’s what she’ll remember. The people of the ore world, coming up out of the mine-heads in their hundreds, in their ore-dust, with their picks, to stand round the queen. Not to stop the Refined. To hand her over. Because they’d been told to, every day of their lives, and they were frightened, and they had children, and the Prime had given them nine days.

They stood in a ring round the place where the queen was. And looked at Lio. And Sefa.

And Lio, who was made by the Sorn to want a door, who had a collar asked off her by a man she was made to want to kill, who has the warm pebble in her pocket and the knot she does every morning and Corvan’s two lines folded very small, walked into the middle of the ring.

And sat down.

On the ground. Over the queen. With her hands in her lap.

“I’m not going to stop you,” she said. To the people. “I can’t. There are too many of you. I’m just going to sit here. You’ll have to stand me up.”

Sefa sat down next to her.

The people of the ore world stood there for a long time.

Then a woman at the front, with ore-dust on her face and a child on her hip, put the child down, and sat down too.

Lio says that by the time the Refined got to the ring, there were four hundred people sitting in it. Round the queen. Back to knees. The way they sat round Corvan in the square on Carrow.

The Refined couldn’t reach her.

They stood at the edge of the ring for an hour. Then they went back to their ship.

Lio didn’t move until dark. When she got up, the woman with the ore-dust on her face came and put something in her hand. A small iron cup on a string. A morning.

“My girl’s,” said the woman. “She’d want you to have it.”

Lio wears it now. Next to the pebble.

Aune and Tiri went down.

The queen in the sea was on a world called Ollan, which is almost all ocean, and she lives at the very bottom of it, in a trench so deep that no light has ever reached it. The Refined couldn’t get to her. Not with a frame. They’d tried, Ferro Hale’s case says, three times in a thousand years, and given up. This time they’d brought a ship that could go down. A white one, long and thin, built for the deep, that Tavish Orne says Marrach laid the keel of eleven years ago and never knew what it was for.

Aune took the Ceren down after it. Tiri beside her. Into the dark. Further than any Ceren has ever been. The hull creaked the whole way, Tiri says. Aune talked to it, very quietly, the way her people talk to their ships, and it held.

At the bottom, in the trench, in the dark, they found the white ship. Settled on the floor of the sea beside the queen, with its lights on, and a long arm reaching out of it towards her with a collar on the end.

Tiri asked the arm if it would mind letting go.

She doesn’t have it. Tiri. She’s not one of us. She can’t ask anything.

But she asked anyway, out loud, in the Ceren, in the dark, the way she’s watched Corin do it for most of her life. And the queen at the bottom of the trench heard her ask. And the queen did it for her.

The arm let go. The collar fell into the dark. And the long white ship’s lights went out, one after another, very slowly, and it lifted off the floor of the sea and went back up, very fast, without looking back.

Tiri says the queen hummed to them all the way up. She says it was the first time a queen has ever done anything for her. She says she cried most of the way to the surface and Aune let her.

Dory and I went to the city of nine million.

It was the eighth day. It was where it went worst, apart from Marn. The queen lives under a city called Ostrum, very old, very big, in good standing for two thousand years, on a world that’s never once had a soft one on any bunk. Its people had been told about the man on the hill every day of their lives. They believed it. They had every reason to.

The Refined came with a hundred. More than anywhere else. And the people of Ostrum were on their side.

Not fighting. Just there. Lining the streets. Hundreds of thousands. Watching the Refined walk down the great avenue to the place in the old square where the queen comes nearest the surface, with a frame, and a collar, and nine days of being told she’d be safe.

And watching us.

Dory and I came down in the old square. Out of the thread. In the middle of all of it. Without coats. Bright. So they’d see us.

The Refined stopped.

The people of Ostrum stopped.

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

Then I did what Okafor’s sheet says. I asked the silver first. All hundred of them, one at a time, the way I did on Isselt. Would you like to go home?

Some of it said yes. Not all. Forty-one. And forty-one Refined, in the old square of Ostrum, in front of hundreds of thousands of people, stood very still, and something silver went up out of them, and away, and they came apart. Quietly. The way I’d promised the Reach on every band they would.

The other fifty-nine didn’t run.

They put down the frame. They put down the collar. And they sat down. In the square. On the stones. With their hands in their laps.

I don’t know why. Nobody does. Mattick thinks it’s the first time in four thousand years that a Refined has ever been told no by something that asked first.

And the people of Ostrum, all down the great avenue, very slowly, starting at the back, sat down too.

And Abena and Efua went to a world called Marn.

I want to put Marn down very carefully. I promised I always would.

Marn is a world of long grass and very wide skies, in good standing for a thousand years, a long way in on the second arm. Its queen lives under the grass, everywhere, all at once, spread thin through the roots of the whole world like water through a cloth. She’d called on the first night. They’re coming for me. My people want to give me up.

Abena and Efua went on the third day.

The Refined had come on the first.

They didn’t wait for the nine days. On Marn, they didn’t wait at all. Ferro Hale’s case says why. Marn was the world the Refined took a queen from first, two thousand years ago, at the very beginning of the frames. Marn’s people still have a word for the Refined that nobody on any other world uses. The Refined have never forgotten that.

So they came on the first night. Before Marn’s people could decide anything. Forty of them. And they didn’t bring a frame. They didn’t need one. They’d been told, the two houses say, by the ones in Velle, that this one wasn’t for seeing through. This one was for showing the others what happens.

They dug.

All through the long grass. In a great circle, a mile across. Down into the roots, where she was. And they cut.

Abena and Efua came down onto the grass of Marn on the morning of the third day.

There was a great deal of the queen left. Queens are very big. She was spread through the whole of the world, all the way round. But the mile they’d cut had been the middle of her. Her heart, Abena says. The place where all the rest of her came together.

The Refined were gone. They’d done what they’d come for, and left.

And the grass of Marn was going grey. From the middle outwards. Very slowly. A great grey circle spreading out from the place where they’d dug, through the long green grass, towards the edges of the world.

Abena knelt down in the middle of it.

She tried. I want to say that. She tried for nine hours.

She did everything Hana taught her. Everything Halloway taught her on the long ward. Everything she knows. She put her hands into the cut roots and breathed for the queen of Marn, the two little squares, holding hands, put back where they belonged. Over and over. Into the grey. Efua held her up when she couldn’t kneel any more.

And the queen of Marn talked to her.

Abena says it was very quiet. Very slow. Like someone speaking from the far end of a long hall.

Thank you. You came. I didn’t think anyone would.

It’s all right. It doesn’t hurt now.

Tell my people I’m sorry. Tell them it wasn’t them. They wanted to keep me. They just didn’t know how.

Tell her. The one who sang. Tell her I heard.

And then she said one more thing. Very quietly.

Say my name. Somebody. So I’m not just gone.

And she told Abena her name.

It’s very long. It’s in the old tongue of Marn, which nobody in the Hedge speaks. Abena got it wrong the first time and the queen said it again, very slowly, and Abena got it wrong the second time, and the queen said it again.

The third time, Abena said it right.

And the queen of Marn stopped talking.

Abena didn’t take her hands out of the roots.

She told us afterwards that she knew. She could feel her going. The way you feel somebody’s hand go slack in yours. The grey was coming up through the roots under her fingers, very slowly, and there was nothing under it any more. No hum. No warmth. Just roots, and grass, and a very long name.

So she said it.

Out loud. Into the cut. The way Mother says names at the long table every morning. So the queen of Marn wouldn’t be just gone.

And then she said it again.

And Efua, holding her up, who’d heard it three times and has a memory like great-grandmother Efua’s, said it with her.

Dory heard them.

She was at the red glass on Avalon with her hand flat, the way she’d been for three days, listening to forty-one queens. And she heard one of them go quiet. And under the quiet, very small, very far, two voices saying a name.

She didn’t come and get me. She didn’t have time. She did the only thing she could think of.

She said it too.

Into the net. Into the thread. To the eldest. Very clearly, the way Abena was saying it, every syllable of it, the long old name in the old tongue of Marn.

And the eldest heard.

The eldest has been singing since before there were queens. She sang the first of them. She’s sung to every one of them since, all the way down every thread, for longer than anyone can count. She sang you are not alone to every queen near the Reach, after Velle, and call, and someone will come.

She took the name.

And she sang it.

Not to Marn. To all of them. Every queen. Down every thread at once. The nine hundred and thirty-one from Velle, on their new worlds. The forty in the Reach, under their own ground, with the Refined in the sky. Thole’s, and Sallow’s under the widest river, and Ysse and Arreth on Ister, and the Scarecrow queen in her mountains, and the cold small one under the snow on the red moon, and the warm one holding open the pale moon, and Velle’s, and every queen in the Hedge and every queen in the Reach who’d ever heard the eldest sing.

She sang them a name.

And every one of them sang it back.

I felt it. I was on the porch, with Queenie on my knee. The whole of Avalon hummed. The red glass. The plain. The hill. Under my feet, and up through the boards of the porch, and into the back of my teeth. Every queen in the Hedge and the Reach, singing one name, all at once, down every thread, into Marn.

Queenie sat up on my knee. Her black eyes went all the way open.

“Somebody’s being called,” she said. “Everybody’s calling her.”

And on Marn, in the middle of the cut, with her hands in the grey roots, Abena felt it come.

She says it came up from underneath. From everywhere. From every root in the whole of the world, all the way round, from the very edges of the grass where the grey hadn’t reached yet. Every bit of the queen of Marn that was still there. Spread thin through the whole of her world, a long way from her heart. Hearing her name.

Being called.

And coming.

Back towards the middle. Through the roots. Towards the place where her heart had been and wasn’t any more. All of her, from everywhere, the way water goes downhill. Towards the name.

Towards Abena’s hands.

“Breathe,” said Efua. “Abena. Breathe for her. Now.”

Abena breathed.

Everything Hana taught her. Everything Halloway taught her. Everything she knows. Into the roots. Two little squares, holding hands, put back where they belonged.

And this time there was something under her hands to take it.

It took the rest of the day. And the night. Abena never took her hands out of the roots. Efua never let go of her. Dory said the name into the net every hour, and the eldest sang it, and every queen sang it back, and on Marn, very slowly, the queen came home to the middle of herself from every edge of her world.

At dawn on the fourth day, the grass round Abena’s hands went green.

Just there. Just a little. A circle the size of a cup.

Then the size of a table. Then a room. Then, very slowly, all through the fourth day and the fifth and the sixth, outwards. Through the mile-wide cut. Through the grey. All the way out, the way the grey had gone, only backwards. Green coming up through grey from the middle of Marn to its edges.

On the ninth day, there wasn’t any grey left at all.

The queen of Marn is smaller now. Halloway says so; Halloway came on the fifth day with her people and put the queen on the chart, the first queen Halloway’s ever charted. She’s lost the middle of herself. The part the Refined cut. That doesn’t come back. She’s spread thinner than she was, through the roots, and it’ll be a long time before she’s what she was before.

But she’s there. Under all of it. Humming.

And she has a new heart. Not the old one. Halloway can’t explain it and doesn’t try. It’s where the old one was. It’s the size of the place where Abena’s hands were. And Abena says it feels, when you put your hand on the grass there, exactly like somebody saying a name.

Marn’s people came home.

Most of them had gone already. The grey had frightened them, and the Arch Hall had opened, and Halloway’s ward had six million through to Avalon and Isselt and Hollen and Thole and Sallow before the grass started to turn back. Orra had asked for nine thousand, because she said a world with a river can always use people who know about grass.

They went home on the tenth day. All of them. Through every arch at once. Back onto the long green grass of Marn, under the wide skies.

Orra says nine of the nine thousand asked to stay. She says they’d like to learn about rivers. She says she’s charging them.

Abena came home on the eleventh day. Efua brought her. She was carrying her, Efua says, most of the way, at the end. Abena hadn’t slept since the third day.

Hana was at the arch.

Abena didn’t say anything. She walked straight into her mother’s arms and stayed there. In the middle of the Arch Hall. With everyone going past. For a very long time.

Then she said, into Hana’s shoulder, “I thought I couldn’t.”

“I know, love.”

“She went. Mum. She went, and I felt her go, and I kept saying her name anyway.”

“I know.”

“And everybody said it with me.”

Hana held her. She didn’t say anything else. She just held her, and breathed. Very slowly. In and out. Until Abena was breathing with her, and then until Abena was asleep, standing up, in the middle of the Arch Hall, on her mother’s shoulder.

Hana carried her home. Kwame and Efua walked on either side.

Mother learned the name.

Abena told it to her, on the long ward, when she woke up. It took Abena once to say it right, this time. It took Mother four.

Mother says it every morning now. Not in the list. Not with Varrin and the five from Hollen and the grey ones and the boy of six and all the ones we didn’t get to. Before them. On its own. First thing, at the stove, before the kettle.

Not because she’s gone. Because she isn’t.

“It’s a good name,” says Mother. “Somebody should keep saying it. In case she ever wants to hear it.”

Konrad has a sheet. At the top it says her name. Under it, in his heavy square letters, it says Called. Came back.

The eldest sang for a whole day. The ground on the plateau went warm all the way down. And in the deepest crack, at dawn, after the first house said good morning to the Overseer, the second house said something it’s never said before.

“We have never once called anyone back,” it said. “Not in all the time there have been houses. We did not know it could be done.”

“Nor did we,” said the Overseer.

“We would like to learn,” said the first house.

That was Marn.

The others held too.

Forty-one of the forty-one. Every one of them is still under her own world. Some with Refined still in the sky above her, waiting. Some with the Refined gone home. Some with their own people sitting on them, in rings, back to knees, the way they sat round Lio on the ore world.

Mara Quell says forty-one queens called, and forty-one are home. She says she checked nine times. She says she doesn’t need to check again.

The Prime said nothing. On no band. For nine days.

On the tenth, the last of his nine, he said the Protection of Queens was a success. He said every world in the Reach had cooperated fully with the Refined. He said the queens of the Reach were safe.

Nobody believed him. Not even, Mattick thinks, the Refined.

The good things. Mother says. I’ll put them down.

The General and Sabeth write to each other. Every day. He sends a letter through the Arch Hall every morning, on the General’s squared paper, folded twice, and she sends one back every evening, on very thin Aldri paper, with drawings of deepbacks in the margins. Luna says she found her father reading one of them at the long table at midnight, and he put it away very fast and said it was about the sign for the point.

It is about the sign for the point. Luna read it. It’s also about other things.

Teshka goes to the southern coast every week now. She says it’s for the sea air. Theron rows her into the caves, the ones that are still open, and they don’t say very much, Teshka says, and that’s the best part. Saska says her grandmother has started humming. Saska says she’s never once heard her grandmother hum.

Kwame had his second meeting, at the bottom of Oriel’s aunt’s well, which is under the second city and has eleven springs, all of which came up. Corin and Tiri had their third, at Halvane’s engines hall, where Halvane taught everybody how the engine sits, and Aune laughed so hard she had to go outside.

And Imre has made a soft Tiamat, with her wings spread, that comes with a very small soft cave and a very small soft rock that lifts up off it. The rock says I can’t do this all day when you lift it. Mother says she’s never said that in her life. Every one of the forty-one mothers says she said it twice.

On the last night, Dory and I sat at the red glass. Late. With our hands flat.

All four hundred and eighty-three worlds of the Hedge. Quiet. All forty queens in the Reach, home, under their own worlds, humming.

And past all of it, past the Watch, a long way in, under the gardens of Velle.

The houses.

“They’re quiet,” said Dory. “They’re never quiet.”

“Blind?”

“Still blind.” She was very still. “But listening. Very hard. Like someone who’s put their ear to a wall.”

“For what?”

Dory didn’t answer for a long time.

“For whichever one gives up first,” she said.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Four hundred and eighty-three. No new ones. Wren says they all said it very warmly this morning, the way you’d say it to someone who’s been very ill and has just sat up.

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

And under it, the name of the queen of Marn, in the old tongue, the way Abena said it. Wren had made her say it nine times, so she’d get it right. Not small. As big as the count.

And under that:

Forty-one: home.

One: called back.

Days 11353–11410. For Safekeeping.

On the ninth day after the Assize walked out, the Prime, alone at the long white table with nine empty chairs either side, decreed the Protection of Queens: every world in the Reach to give its queen to the Refined for safekeeping on Velle, in nine days; he even said nine hundred and thirty-one; Mara: he doesn’t care what anybody thinks he did; Senna: dictators only need to be obeyed. The houses: they’re blind and need one queen to see through; if every world must give one, one world will. That night forty-one queens called the eldest, angry, not frightened: please. The Table met at three in the morning; Mother poured in her nightgown; Okafor: we can’t go to forty-one worlds with the Hedge; Dory: not the Hedge, us, to the queens, not the worlds, and stand next to her; and the twenty from the north field woke at the end of the bench (what?). The Caddi grandmother at dawn: yes, good. Okafor’s sheet: in pairs; stand by the queen; ask the silver first; go home when I say; and if you’re too late, come home anyway, crossed out and written again. Forty-one pairs: Teva and Sefa went though they don’t have it; the five-year-olds watched from the porch with the General and Sabeth and Taveth’s soup. On Arrow, Teva said good morning to the queen under the lake, it went warm, and Trevor held up his cup, and the nine Refined left. On Sesk small Holt did his mother’s foot, glassed the red rock, and shouted would you like to go home, and nine came apart, and thirty-one ran; I asked like you’re supposed to; I’m sorry, the third time. On Ollan, Aune took the Ceren to the bottom of the deepest trench, and Tiri, who doesn’t have it, asked the long white ship’s arm to let go, and the queen did it for her. In Ostrum, nine million, never a soft one, I asked a hundred Refined, forty-one went home, and fifty-nine put down the frame and sat on the stones, and the city sat with them. On Lisk Pell’s four drawn Refined stood off the page holding paper birds and the four real ones left. On an ore world in the middle the people came up from the mines to give their queen up; Lio sat down on her, you’ll have to stand me up; four hundred sat with her, back to knees; a woman gave her her daughter’s morning. And Marn, long grass, wide skies, the first world the Refined ever took from: they came the first night, without a frame, to show the others; they cut her heart, a mile across; Abena breathed for her, Efua holding her up; say my name, so I’m not just gone; Abena got it right the third time and felt her go, and kept saying it anyway, and Efua with her. Dory heard and said it into the net, and the eldest took the name and sang it to every queen, and every queen sang it back into Marn (Queenie on my knee: everybody’s calling her); and from every edge of her world the queen came back towards her name, towards Abena’s hands; breathe, Efua said; at dawn on the fourth day a circle of green the size of a cup, and by the ninth no grey left. Smaller now, a new heart where Abena’s hands were, that feels like someone saying a name. Six million went home through every arch; nine stayed on Sallow to learn rivers. Abena asleep standing on Hana’s shoulder in the Arch Hall: everybody said it with me. Mother says the name first, on its own, because she isn’t gone; Konrad: Called. Came back. The houses: we have never once called anyone back; we would like to learn. Forty-one home; on the tenth day the Prime called it a success. The General and Sabeth write every day (it’s about the sign for the point; also other things); Teshka goes to the southern coast weekly and has started humming; Kwame’s second meeting, eleven springs; Corin and Tiri’s third at the engines hall; a soft Tiamat with a cave and a rock that says I can’t do this all day. At the glass the houses were quiet, ear to the wall, waiting for whichever one gives up first. Four hundred and eighty-three, warmly. Her name, as big as the count. Forty-one: home. One: called back.