Chapter 509: The Case of the Queens

Senna said it would take nine days to prepare. It took eleven. She says that’s the first time in four hundred years she’s been late with a case, and she’s not sorry.

“He said every world cooperated,” she said, at the long table, on the night the Prime called the Protection of Queens a success. “He said the queens of the Reach are safe.” She put her cup down. “He said it on every band. To every world. With his own voice.”

“Nobody believed him,” said Iolo.

“Not believing isn’t knowing,” said Senna. “They don’t know what happens. Not really. They think a queen is a sort of mascot. Something under the ground that makes the barley grow a little better. Something you could hand over to the Refined, if you were frightened enough, and still have a world afterwards.” She looked down the table at Abena, who was sitting very quietly next to Hana with her hands round a cup. “We know what happens. We’ve seen it. They haven’t.”

She stood up.

“So we’re going to show them,” she said.

Senna, and Iolo, and Mara Quell. The three of them. The same three who stood in the Assize in front of the long white table and argued for me, a long time ago now, and won by sitting down.

And Ferro Hale. Who sat in the row behind the Prime for forty years and read what he was given on the steps in his careful voice and never once thought about it. He sat at the long table every night for eleven days with Senna’s papers in front of him and his own case beside them, and thought about it.

“It has to be evidence,” he said, on the second night. “Not testimony. Not stories. The Reach has been told stories by the white hall for three thousand years. They know what a story is.” He tapped his case. “It has to be the kind of thing the white hall would accept. Numbers. Measurements. Seals. Names. And people who know how to measure.”

“Scientists,” said Mara Quell.

“Scientists,” said Ferro Hale. “The best you have. And at least one of theirs.”

We had a great many. The best in the Hedge, some of them the best anywhere. And they’d all been teaching for a season at A Thousand Doors, which meant they’d all got very good at explaining things to people who didn’t know them yet.

Bell, for the numbers. Halloway, for the bodies. Asha, for what happens to energy in a world when the thing at the bottom of it stops singing. Tiamat, who has held stations round a world for longer than anyone has been alive and has watched, from orbit, what a world looks like on the day its queen is taken. Oriel, who maps the water under rivers, and who went to Marn on the sixth day with her rods and her old book, and to Tirr, and to three of the empty worlds on Ferro Hale’s list, and measured.

And one of theirs.

His name is Ambrose Kell.

I’d read his handwriting before I ever saw his face. The tidy hand, in the reports Corvan pulled out of the grate. The one that got less tidy as it went on. The physician in the house with no windows past Carrow’s port, who wrote down the Vessels, one to twelve, the cup to glass and the wall to sand and the jug of water from the air, and then the noses and the ears and the three who died. Who wrote at the bottom of the last page I have been asked not to write that I do not know why and then, underneath, smaller, They were promised.

He came through the Arch Hall on the fifth day. On his own. From Carrow, by way of nine ports and three of Mattick’s crates and a bootlace. Corvan had found him. Through the sisters’ houses. He’d been living in one of them since the day the Assize walked out.

He stood in the kitchen doorway with a grey case under his arm. Very thin. Very tired. With the kind of hands that have been washed so often they’ve gone pale.

Mother looked at him. She knew who he was. She’d read the reports too.

“You wrote it down,” she said. “The nine. What happened to them.”

“Yes.”

“Even when they told you not to.”

“Yes.” He looked at the floor. “Not all of it. I didn’t write all of it.”

“You wrote enough, love,” said Mother. “Sit down.”

It went out on the twelfth day.

Ilka opened every band. All of them, from her sixty dials in the back of the listening hall in Commonhold, the way she did for me, and for Senna’s reading. It took her an hour. When she turned round on her stool, Senna was standing in front of the picture-box with her papers, and behind her, at the long table they’d brought down from the Asking Room, the scientists sat in a row.

“They’ll all hear,” said Ilka.

“Good,” said Senna.

I’ll put down what they said. Not all of it. It took nine hours. Wren wrote it all down and Aurelius’s clerks copied it into a book bound in Kiln leather, and it’s on a shelf in Commonhold now with the others, and anyone can read it.

I’ll put down the parts I remember.

Senna began.

“The Prime of the Collective,” she said, “has told you that a queen can be taken from your world for safekeeping. That she can be carried to Velle and kept there, and that your world will go on without her.

“We are going to show you what happens to a world when its queen is taken against her will. We are not going to tell you a story. We are going to show you measurements. Some of them were made by the Assize itself, under its own seal. Some of them were made by people the Assize trained. Some of them were made by people who have never once had anything to do with the Hedge or the man on the hill, and who were paid by the Collective to make them.

“You may check every one. We will tell you how.”

She sat down. Bell stood up.

Bell did the numbers. She did them very simply. She said that’s the only way to do numbers that matter.

“Three thousand six hundred and twelve,” she said. “That’s how many queens the Refined have taken from member worlds, by the Assize’s own count, in its own book, under its own seal. We have the book. It came to us from an Assessor of forty years’ standing, who copied it in his own hand.

“Three thousand five hundred and ninety-eight of those worlds have nobody living on them now. Not one person. Not one animal. Not one blade of grass.

“Fourteen of them still have people. We have looked at every one. On every one of those fourteen, the queen was taken in the last nine years. And on every one, the people are leaving. Or ill. Or both.

“I’ve done this sum nine times. I’ve done it in every way I know how to do a sum. I’ve asked three mathematicians from the Collective’s own counting-houses on Quenby to do it, without telling them what it was for.

“It comes out the same every time.”

She sat down.

“It always comes out the same,” she said, very quietly, to the table. “That’s how you know it’s true.”

Halloway stood up next. She had her long list behind her, the one she’s kept since before Earth emptied. And a new chart beside it.

“This is Tirr,” she said. “A member world in good standing for nine hundred years. Its queen was taken by the Refined and left on a frame for eleven days. I came on the eleventh. I measured from then. The Collective’s own tithe office on Tirr measured the ten days before, for the harvest returns, and sent them to Quenby. We have those too.”

She showed them. Every line. The air. The water. The ground. The people. The day the queen came up out of the ground on the frame, and every day after, for eleven days. Everything going down. All at the same rate. All at once. Tirr has nobody on it now. Its queen hums under the red glass on Avalon, because there was nothing left on Tirr to go back to.

“Without a queen,” said Halloway, “a world doesn’t keep its people very long. That isn’t my sentence. A Refined said it to the man on the hill, the first time he ever met one. I’m saying it because I’ve measured it. It’s true.

“And here,” she said, and pointed at the second chart, “is Marn. A member world in good standing for a thousand years. The Refined cut its queen’s heart out on the first night. I came on the fifth day. This is the day she came back.”

The lines on the second chart, on the fourth day, stopped going down. And then, very slowly, all of them together, they started to go up.

“Same world,” said Halloway. “Same people. Same air. Same water. The only thing that changed,” she tapped the chart, “is that she was there.”

Asha talked for an hour. Eve didn’t stop her once. It was the most important hour Asha has ever talked for and Eve knew it.

She talked about what a queen is. Not what she looks like. What she does. How the silver runs through a world from her, all the way out, the way roots run through soil, and holds it. The water in its place. The air in its place. The ground in its place. How every living thing on a world with a queen is living inside her song, and has been since before there was anything living on it at all.

And what happens when the song stops.

She showed them. She had a measurement from orbit, from Tiamat’s stations, of a world on the edge of the Reach the day its queen was framed, forty years ago. Before and after. The colour of it. The heat. The way the clouds moved.

Before, the world was green and blue and moving.

After, nine days after, it was the colour of an old stone.

“That’s not a picture we made,” said Asha. Very slowly, for her. “That’s a picture the Collective’s own weather station made, on the moon of that world, forty years ago. We found it in the Assize’s book. Somebody sent it to the white hall. Somebody sealed it. And somebody put it away.”

Oriel spoke last of the Hedge’s scientists. She doesn’t like speaking. She stood up with her old book in her hands, the one older than the long record, and opened it at the page where she’d written Marn.

“I map water,” she said. “Under rivers. Where it goes, when nobody’s looking. It goes where the queen asks it to. Not on purpose. It just does. It’s been doing it since before the Aldri had a name.

“On Marn, on the sixth day, when the queen was coming back, I measured the water under the grass. All the way round.” She turned the page. “Here is where it was going. Towards the middle. Towards where she was coming back to. All of it. From every edge of the world. Like a crowd towards a door.

“And on Tirr.” She turned another page. “Here, after. Nowhere. It wasn’t going anywhere at all. It was just sitting in the ground. Waiting to be asked.

“And on three of the worlds in the Assize’s book with nobody living on them.” She turned three more pages. “Here. And here. And here. The same. Still. For a thousand years. Waiting.”

She closed the book.

“Nobody’s ever going to ask it,” she said. “That’s what happens. That’s all that happens. The water waits, and nobody comes.”

And then Ambrose Kell stood up.

He didn’t have papers. He had his grey case, but he didn’t open it. He stood at the end of the long table, in front of the picture-box, very thin, with his pale hands at his sides.

“My name is Ambrose Kell,” he said. “I was a physician of the Collective of the Bright Reach for thirty-one years. I was paid by the Assize. I was trained by the Assize. Eleven years ago, I was sent to a world called Fennic, on the second arm, to measure what happened to its people after its queen was taken by the Refined.

“I was told it was a sanctioned study.

“I measured for three years. I watched every person on Fennic go. I wrote down every one. I sent my measurements to the white hall. I was told they’d been received. I was given a commendation.

“And then I was sent to a house with no windows past the port on Carrow, and told to measure twelve people who’d been given silver taken from queens. And I watched nine of them begin to come apart. And I was asked not to write that I didn’t know why.”

He stopped. For a long time.

“I know why now,” he said. “I didn’t then. I do now. It’s the same reason. It’s the only reason. The silver wants to go home. To her. Everything on a world wants to be where she is. And when she’s taken, it all comes apart, slowly, every person and every blade of grass, because it’s all trying to follow her, and it can’t.

“I measured that on Fennic for three years and wrote it down and sent it to the white hall and was given a commendation for it.”

He opened the grey case. There was one thing in it. A thin white sheet, with a seal on it. The Assize’s.

“This is my commendation,” said Ambrose Kell. “For the study of Fennic. It says I did careful, patient, necessary work for the good of every world.”

He put it on the long table. In front of the picture-box. Where everyone in the Reach could see it.

“I’d like to give it back,” he said.

And he sat down.

Nobody said anything for a long time. In the hall. On any band.

Then Senna stood up. And said one more thing.

“If the Refined come to your world,” she said, “and ask for your queen, for safekeeping, you now know what you are being asked for. You are being asked for your world. All of it. Everyone on it. Your children’s children.

“You are not obliged to give it.

“And you are not alone.”

She sat down. Ilka closed the bands.

They came the next morning.

The worlds. Not one at a time. Not a few, the way they’ve come since the Word went out from Mattick’s ramp. Mara Quell had a list on the long table by noon, and by dusk she’d started a second one, and by the end of the third day she’d stopped writing names and started writing numbers, because there wasn’t time to write the names.

Two hundred and nine in three days.

Then four hundred.

Then nine hundred.

Member worlds in good standing. Edge worlds and grain worlds and ore worlds and the deep worlds in the middle of the Reach, closer to Carrow than to the Watch. Worlds that had sat in their squares for a season and heard Senna read and heard the Sallow letter and watched the Assize walk down the steps between two rows of Refined. Worlds that had a queen, and worlds that didn’t. Worlds with nine million people, and worlds with nine hundred.

Every one of them asking.

We’d like to come.

The Table couldn’t say yes fast enough. Not in the old way. Not with Konrad saying every name and Mother pouring and the Caddi grandmother saying yes, good nine hundred times.

So Aurelius did it the new way. He went to the Asking Room, which he built for exactly this, and filled it with every clerk in Commonhold, and every world that asked got a clerk of its own, and a desk, and a window, and someone whose only job was to listen to what that world needed and write it down. The Table met every dusk instead of every thirtieth. The Senate sat every day. The Caddi grandmother said yes, good until she lost her voice, and then she nodded, and that counted.

Konrad says he’s going to need a longer wall.

The trouble was where they were.

Inside the Reach. All of them. Deep inside, some of them. Surrounded by worlds that hadn’t asked yet, and by the white ships, and by the Refined, who’d been told by the Prime that every world in the Reach was in his care now.

You can’t be in the Hedge if you’re in the middle of the Reach. Not safely. Not with the door being built under the gardens of Velle, and the houses listening for a queen to see through.

So they had to move.

Halvane stood up at the Table on the fourth dusk. He doesn’t stand at the Table. He’s from Ister, and the Aldri sit for everything except the most important things, and he hadn’t stood at the Table since the night Thole jumped.

“We can move them,” he said. “All of them. Every world that wants to come. We’ve done it before. Ister. Thole. Lantern. Sallow. Orsk.”

“Five,” said Okafor. “You’ve moved five. Over years. With the best engineers in the Hedge and the best miners in the Hedge working on each one.”

“Yes,” said Halvane.

“There are nine hundred, Halvane.”

Halvane looked at her. Then he turned round and looked across the grass. At the mountain on Ister you can’t see from Avalon. At A Thousand Doors. At the nine hundred thousand people who came through its gates on the first day and every day since.

“Then it’s a good thing,” he said, “that I’ve spent a season teaching nine hundred thousand people how.”

They went the next week.

All of them. The ones who’d learned engines in the engines hall at A Thousand Doors. The ones who’d learned lumen from the Thole girl who asked the question nobody had ever asked. The ones who’d learned how stone sits from me, on the wall at the top of the mountain, and how a door holds from Corin and Elin and Goldie and Thessaly in a hall on the third terrace. The ones who’d learned from Keir every ship that ever went wrong.

And the miners. Mira’s. Thole’s. The ones who’d gone under Sallow’s river and Orsk’s mountains, and trained every Hedge miner who’d ask, in the deep galleries under Thole, by the light of the lumen, for a season. Thole miners and Kiln miners and Sedge and Caddi and Isk and Ammet miners, with picks and lamps and the hand-on-the-rock that Brom’s mother taught them.

Nine thousand teams. Halvane counted. Ten to every world, and more to the big ones.

Through the Arch Hall. Through the posts. Into the Reach. Quietly. In coats. Some of them in grey coats, the way the two hundred and sixty-three went into the halls on Velle, because nobody looks at a grey coat.

To dig.

The first one moved on the twenty-ninth day.

A small world. A grain world on the third arm, called Hesk’s Field, which renamed itself the morning it asked, after the miner who died at the back of the gallery on Thole. Thirty thousand people. A small quiet queen under the wheat. A team of nine from A Thousand Doors and thirty miners from Thole and Kiln.

It went in the night. Very quietly. The way Sallow went. To a warm young sun on our side of the Watch, three arches from Thole, that Bell chose and checked nine times.

In the morning, its people came out of their houses and looked up at a new sun. And then they sat down. All of them. In the wheat. Not because anyone told them to. Because that’s what you do now, on the worlds of the Reach, when something has happened that’s too big to stand up for.

Mira from Thole went to see them. She stood in the wheat with the thirty thousand, on Hesk’s Field, under the new sun, with her blue hand flat on the ground.

She didn’t say anything. She just stood there.

Then she sat down too.

Quenby had Ambrose Kell on the front that month. Not a picture of him. A picture of the white sheet he put on the long table, with the Assize’s seal on it, from a very long way away. Underneath, in plain letters: GIVEN BACK.

Eluned Sabe says it sold eleven million. She says it’s the first cover in Quenby’s history that people bought two of, one to keep and one to leave on a tithe counter.

And on the edge worlds, Mattick says, the children have started chalking something new on the walls of the tithe sheds, under Bright beside you and No. Three words, very small, at the height a child can reach.

We have one.

Meaning a queen. Meaning: we know now. Meaning: you can’t have her.

Imre wanted to make something for it. Mother said no. Mother said some things are just for walls.

There’ll be more. Halvane says nine a week, by the spring. Then more. He says he doesn’t know how many, in the end. He says it depends how many the Prime lets go.

Because the Prime noticed.

Of course he did.

He couldn’t stop them asking. He couldn’t stop them sitting. He couldn’t stop nine thousand teams of engineers and miners going into the Reach in grey coats with picks, because nobody looks at a grey coat.

So he did what he could.

He took the ones he needed.

Dory heard it go out. Not on every band. Not in his voice. On the Refined’s own band, the one they use for orders, very quiet, very fast.

Protection.

Not of queens this time. Of worlds. Thirty-one of them. Every world in the Reach that has something the Collective can’t do without. The crystal worlds of the second arm, where the stone the white ships are built round comes from. The great grain belt of the middle, that feeds Carrow and Velle and every inner world. The metal worlds on the edge of the third arm, where the silver-black thing that wasn’t iron or silver in the ring on Velle comes from, the thing Dory and I couldn’t name.

Thirty-one worlds. Under protection.

The white ships came down over all of them in one night. Not two or three. Hundreds. The Refined came down into the cities and the mines and the farms and the ports and stood at every door. Not doing anything. Just standing. And the Reach Guard on every one of those worlds was told it was no longer needed, and was sent home, and sat down in its own squares with the people it used to keep in order.

And every world under protection was told that it was not permitted to ask. Not the Table. Not the Hedge. Not anyone.

And that if it did, the Refined would know.

“It’s not protection,” said Senna, at the long table. “It’s an occupation. He’s taken them. All thirty-one. He’s just using a nicer word.”

“He’s always used a nicer word,” said Ferro Hale. He was looking at the list Mara Quell had made of the thirty-one. Very carefully. Down every name. “Sanctioned. Study. Safekeeping. Protection.”

He stopped. At one name. Then at another. Then at a third.

He put his finger on the first.

“Kessry,” he said. “That’s Vesk’s.”

The Assize has nine Assessors. Had. The nine who walked down the steps between the Refined at dusk on the forty-first day and didn’t come back.

They didn’t go anywhere. Ferro Hale says that’s the thing nobody understood. The Prime didn’t put them anywhere. He just let them walk out. Out of the white hall, out of the square, out of Carrow. And they went home. To their own worlds. The way you’d go home after a very long day.

Vesk is from Kessry. One of the crystal worlds on the second arm. She was born there. Her people have cut the white stone there for nine hundred years.

And the second name Ferro Hale’s finger stopped on was Dun Amar. In the grain belt. The home of Assessor Tamsin Oake, who voted with Vesk, and who Ferro Hale says sat beside him in the white hall for twenty years and never once said anything that wasn’t on the paper either.

And the third was Ilith. A metal world, on the edge of the third arm. Where the black stuff that wasn’t iron or silver comes out of the ground. The home of Rhun Ettrick, who was the youngest of the nine, and who voted against suspending the Prime, Ferro Hale says. One of the two.

“Rhun voted no,” said Ferro Hale. “He told me, once, years ago, he’d always vote with the Prime. He said Ilith couldn’t afford for him not to.”

He looked at the list for a long time.

“They’ve taken Ilith anyway,” he said.

The message came three nights later.

Not on Mattick’s band. Not on the thin one Corvan uses, locked by shape. On an old one. A very old one. Ilka had to go to her sixty dials and find it. Ferro Hale knew which one. It’s the band the Assize uses to talk to itself. Assessor to Assessor. Very private. Very old. Nobody had used it since the white hall emptied.

It was three voices. One after another.

Ferro Hale stood by Ilka’s board with his hands at his sides and listened to all three, very still, without saying anything. When it finished he asked Ilka to play it again.

I’ll put it down.

This is Vesk, of Kessry. Formerly of the white hall. Ferro, if you’re there, I hope you’re well. I hope you’ve had something to eat.

The Refined are in the quarries. They’ve been here nine days. They stand at every door. They’ve told us we may not ask. They don’t know we know how. We do. We heard the woman read. We heard the physician. We heard the numbers.

My people want to come. All of them. I’ve asked every quarry. Every one said yes.

We can’t ask the Table. They’d know. So I’m asking you. Old friend. On our band. Where they don’t listen.

Please.

This is Tamsin Oake. Dun Amar. The grain belt.

There are forty million of us. There are eleven thousand Refined. They’re in every granary. They’re counting the harvest. They say it all belongs to Carrow now. Every grain.

We sat down in the fields. They stood over us. They didn’t stand us up. They just counted.

Ferro, you always said the paper wasn’t the law. That somebody had to be behind it. I never said anything. I’m saying something now.

We’d like to come.

Rhun Ettrick. Ilith.

I voted no. I want you to know that I know that. I voted to keep him. I thought if I kept him, he’d keep Ilith.

He took it anyway. The first night. They’re in the mines. They’re taking everything out of the ground. The black stuff. All of it. As fast as they can. They’re not counting. They’re just taking. My people are in the shafts with picks, being made to dig it out for them.

I was wrong. I’m sorry. I don’t expect anyone to forgive me for it.

But there are nine million people on Ilith. And none of them voted.

Please come.

Ferro Hale turned round.

He looked at the long table. At Senna and Iolo and Mara Quell. At Okafor, who’d come up the hill road when Ilka sent word. At Halvane. At Mother, at the end, with the pot.

At me.

“They’re asking,” he said. “Not for themselves. For their worlds.” He was quiet for a moment. “I sat next to all three of them for twenty years. Not one of them ever asked anyone for anything.”

Mother poured him a cup. He didn’t drink it. He held it.

“Rhun voted no,” he said again. “He voted to keep him.”

“I know, love,” said Mother.

“He’s asking anyway.”

“That’s the bravest kind,” said Mother. “The ones who were wrong, and ask anyway.”

Okafor took out her slate.

Under Now, and Velle, and Avalon, and Reach, she wrote three more words, one under the other, in her square sergeant’s hand.

Kessry. Dun Amar. Ilith.

And then, beside them, small:

Asked.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Five hundred and ninety-one. A hundred and eight more than nine days ago, and that’s only the ones that have finished asking. Wren says they said it all at once, so loudly that she had to put her hands over her ears, the way you would if a whole hall stood up.

Hesk’s Field’s star said it from its new place, three arches from Thole. Mira says it said it in a voice like somebody setting down a pick.

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

And under it:

The Case of the Queens: read.

Hesk’s Field: moved.

Thirty-one: taken.

Three: asked.

Days 11411–11468. The Case of the Queens.

Senna: not believing isn’t knowing; they think a queen is a mascot; we’ll show them. Eleven days, her first late case in four hundred years. Ferro Hale: evidence, not stories; numbers, seals, names, and people who know how to measure, and at least one of theirs. Ambrose Kell, the tidy hand in the Vessels’ reports, came through the Arch Hall from one of Corvan’s sisters’ houses with a grey case; Mother: you wrote enough, love, sit down. Ilka opened every band; nine hours. Bell: three thousand six hundred and twelve taken by the Assize’s own sealed count; three thousand five hundred and ninety-eight with nobody living on them; fourteen with people, all taken in nine years, all leaving or ill; Quenby’s own mathematicians got the same; it always comes out the same, that’s how you know. Halloway’s charts: Tirr, everything going down for eleven days, nobody left now; Marn, going down, and then on the fourth day all of it going up together, because she was there. Asha’s hour, uninterrupted: the queen’s song holds a world; the Collective’s own moon station picture of a world forty years ago, green and blue and moving, and nine days later the colour of an old stone, sealed and put away. Oriel’s book: on Marn the water ran to the middle like a crowd to a door; on Tirr and three empty worlds it just waits, and nobody’s ever going to ask it. Kell: thirty-one years a physician of the Collective; three years measuring every person on Fennic go, a sanctioned study; then the twelve; I know why now: everything on a world wants to be where she is; and he laid his commendation on the table and gave it back. Senna: you are being asked for your world; you are not obliged; you are not alone. Two hundred and nine in three days, then four hundred, then nine hundred; Aurelius’s Asking Room gave each a clerk; the Table met every dusk; the Caddi grandmother nodded when her voice went. Halvane stood: nine hundred worlds, and I’ve spent a season teaching nine hundred thousand how. Nine thousand teams, engineers from A Thousand Doors and miners trained under Thole, into the Reach in grey coats with picks. On the twenty-ninth day Hesk’s Field, a grain world that renamed itself the morning it asked, moved in the night to a warm sun three arches from Thole, and its thirty thousand sat in the wheat, and Mira sat with them. The Prime took the thirty-one he needs under protection: the crystal worlds, the grain belt, the metal worlds where the black stuff in the ring comes from; hundreds of white ships, the Refined at every door, the Reach Guard sent home, no world permitted to ask. Senna: an occupation with a nicer word; Ferro Hale: sanctioned, study, safekeeping, protection. Three of the nine Assessors went home to three of the thirty-one: Vesk of Kessry’s quarries, Tamsin Oake of Dun Amar’s forty million in the grain belt, Rhun Ettrick of Ilith, who voted no to keep him, to keep Ilith, and lost it anyway. On the Assize’s own old band: I hope you’ve had something to eat; we’d like to come; I was wrong; none of them voted; please come. Mother: the ones who were wrong and ask anyway are the bravest kind. Okafor: Kessry. Dun Amar. Ilith. Asked. Five hundred and ninety-one, so loud Wren covered her ears. The Case of the Queens: read. Hesk’s Field: moved. Thirty-one: taken. Three: asked.