Chapter 511: Opening Night

The babies started coming in pairs.

Not everywhere. Not all at once. But Ruth Halloway keeps a sheet, the way Ingrid keeps a sheet, and the sheet is very long now, and at the bottom of every column, in her small square doctor’s hand, there’s a number that keeps going up.

“Twins,” she said, at the long table, and put the sheet down in front of Mother. “One birth in nine. On worlds that joined this year. It used to be one in eighty.”

Mother looked at the sheet.

“And the rest,” said Halloway. “Births up by a third. On Kessry. On Hesk’s Field. On every world the queens have started singing to again.” She turned the sheet over. On the back there was another column. Shorter. Underlined twice. “And this.”

Mother read it. She didn’t say anything for a while.

“How many?” I said.

“One child in forty,” said Halloway. “Born doing something. Not like us. Not Cinder. Not made. Just born. The way Corin was born humming and Genny’s two were born with snow in their hands.” She put her finger on the column. “On Kessry a little girl stopped every sound in her street for a day because her brother was shouting. On Ammet a boy floated off the roof of his grandmother’s house and couldn’t come down until his mother climbed up after him with a rope. On Tirr there are twins who keep opening a door into the sea under the town, and the sea keeps coming through, very politely, and going back.”

“Politely,” said Mother.

“The mayor wrote to me,” said Halloway. “He said that word. He said the sea’s very polite about it. He said the parents aren’t.”

That was the thing. The parents.

There are families on the new worlds who’ve never seen anyone do anything. Who heard about the Hedge on the old bands and saw the films and bought the soft ones, and thought that was all very well for a house on a hill a long way off. And then their daughter turned the bathwater to steam at two years old, or their son put his hand on the wall of the kitchen and the wall forgot it was a wall, and they didn’t know what to do.

Some of them were frightened of their own children.

That’s the part Halloway couldn’t stand. She told us at the long table, with her sheet, in the voice she uses for things she’s decided.

“I was twenty-three,” she said. “In Cinder. I took blood from children who could set the air on fire, and I wrote down numbers, and I sat with the ones who didn’t wake up. And every one of them was frightened, and every one of their parents was frightened, and nobody in that whole dome ever once taught a single child how to do the thing they could do without hurting themselves.” She folded the sheet. “I’m not doing that again. Not on a single world.”

“Then don’t,” said Abena.

Abena doesn’t say much at the long table. She’s Hana’s. She’s the one who breathes for people. For queens who’ve forgotten how. For miners with broken legs and Sorn-collared children and anyone who comes up out of the dark not knowing which way the air is. Halloway took her on as a doctor years ago, and she’s been on the ward beside her ever since, and Kwame says his sister has been holding other people’s breath for them since she could walk and has never once asked anyone to hold hers.

“Build them somewhere,” said Abena. “Somewhere they can’t hurt anyone. With a room for every kind of thing a child can do. And bring them there, and their mothers if their mothers want to come, and teach them. All of them. Every world.”

“A school,” said Mother.

“A house,” said Abena. “Where they can sleep. Where the parents can come every night through the arches and every Sunday for dinner. And where, if a child turns the bedroom into a lake at three in the morning, there’s somebody up, and the room was built to be a lake.”

Halloway looked at her for a long time.

“Yes,” she said.

They built it in the lake country north of Commonhold. I helped, and Dory, and Halvane’s people, and Kwame, who brought the water up under it so the whole thing sits on a spring. It took a season.

It’s long and low and made of the white stone from Kessry, which Vesk insisted on. It has a kitchen the size of Mother’s kitchen at the house, which was the first thing Mother asked about, and a dining hall with long tables, and a hundred and forty bedrooms, and then, all down one side, going away into the hill, the rooms.

A room for fire, lined with Kiln iron, three walls thick, with no window and a drain in the floor and Rory’s door at the end, which he planed himself, which opens onto a cold courtyard if the room gets too hot. Rory teaches in it two days a week. He says the first thing he teaches is how to put it out. The second is how to put it out again.

A room for sound, lined with Orsk wool a hand deep, so that nothing said in it ever gets out and nothing outside gets in. Toby teaches in it. He says the sound children are the loneliest, because they hear everything, and the first thing he does is show them what it’s like to hear nothing. Some of them cry. He says that’s all right. He did too.

A room for air with no ceiling at all, just the sky, and a net over it that Hana holds from wherever she is, so nobody floats off. Ingrid teaches in it. The Hush. She takes them up a foot at a time and won’t let anybody go higher than her shoulder until they can come down on their own.

A room for doors, where every door you open goes back into the same room. Elin built it. You can open a door in that room as many times as you like and you’ll never end up anywhere but the room. She says that’s the most important thing for a door child to learn. That a door has to go somewhere you mean.

A room for water that’s mostly water. Kwame teaches in that one, from the edge, with his trousers rolled up.

A room for the ground, with no floor, just the hill. A room for silver, with a single small pebble on a stand in the middle, and nothing else, and on the wall in Mother’s handwriting: Ask it first.

And a room for the ones nobody knows what to call yet. It’s empty. It’s very big. Halloway says that’s on purpose. She says it’ll fill up.

They called it the Lake House. The children call it Halloway’s.

A hundred and forty children came the first month. From thirty-one worlds. Some of them with their mothers, who stayed. Some of them with their fathers, who went home every night through the arch at the end of the dining hall and came back every morning before breakfast. Some on their own, very small, with a bag and a soft one and a letter pinned to their coat.

The girl from Kessry who stopped the sound in her street came on the first day. She’s six. She didn’t say anything the whole first week. Toby sat in the wool room with her every afternoon and didn’t say anything either.

On the eighth day she said Thank you in the wool room, very quietly, to nobody.

And Toby, who heard it, because he hears everything, said, You’re welcome, and went out and sat in the corridor for a while with his head against the wall.

The Tirr twins came on the second day. With a great deal of the sea.

They’re four. A boy and a girl. They opened a door in the middle of the dining hall at breakfast, by accident, because they were excited about the porridge, and about nine hundred gallons of very cold water from under Tirr came through it and went politely all over the floor.

Elin was there. She closed it with one hand without putting her cup down.

Then she knelt down in the water in front of the twins, who were both crying, and said, “That was a very good door. That was one of the best doors I’ve ever seen. Would you like to learn where it goes?”

They stopped crying.

Abena breathed the cold out of the room. Kwame put the sea back where it came from. Mother, who was there for the first week and won’t say she was checking, mopped. Everybody had porridge again.

The twins’ mother, Halloway says, sat on the dining hall bench afterwards and cried for an hour. Not because of the sea. Because nobody had shouted.

By the end of the season there were nine hundred children at the Lake House and a waiting list on two hundred worlds. Halloway is building a second one, on Hyrran, below the ridge, with Kyria’s grandmother’s iron for the fire room. Abena’s building a third on Ister.

Teva’s father, the engineer, the one who works on the dream rooms, came out on the third Sunday and walked all the way down the side of the hill, through every room, very slowly. At the end he said the empty room was the best thing he’d ever seen built. He said he’d like to put a dream room in every Lake House. So the children who couldn’t sleep could go somewhere.

Halloway said yes.

There are dream rooms on two hundred worlds now. Teva’s father put in the two hundredth on Ilith, the week before it jumped, so the miners could lie down and go and see where they were going before they went.

Rhun wrote from Konrad’s table. He said the old miner who sat on his step was the first one in. He went to the new sun, in the dream, and stood under it for an hour, and came out, and said, It’s all right. It’ll do.

Rhun says that’s the most anybody on Ilith has ever said about anything.

And the stories.

Imre says she’s never sold so many. The comics, the books, the films. The Asker is still on the great wall in the second city every night, and Mattick says on the edge worlds of the Reach they’ve worn the crates of it through. The Cinder soft ones still sell in pairs. Quenby sent us a copy of her magazine with Vesk on the cover, from a very long way away, from a world nobody had heard of until it asked for a box, in a language Bell had to look up. In that language, Bell says, the headline means The Woman Who Kept Writing.

Vesk had it framed. She hasn’t hung it yet. She says she doesn’t know where you’re supposed to hang yourself.

Ister’s long record had nine new names in a month. Four girls called Vesk. Two boys called Rhun. One called Bess, after the shoemender, which Bess, when she was told, by letter, in Carrow’s old quarter, read twice and then put in the window of her shop for everybody to see.

And two babies called Abena, which nobody told Abena about, until Kwame did, at the long table, and she put down her fork and went outside for a while.

But the thing nobody expected was the plays.

The second city on Ister has always had a stage. Maelis Orr has been on it for three hundred and eighty years. Isar Thenn was on it before he was on the great wall. The Aldri go to the theatre the way we go to the river, Halvane says, because they’ve spent eleven thousand years running and you can’t take a field with you but you can take a story.

And since the Hedge, the second city has gone mad for plays.

There’s one about the General, on the ice, called The Man Who Sleeps Standing Up, which Luna went to see with him and said was very accurate, and the General went red and said it was not. There’s one about Kyria and the soup, called Four Days, which is a comedy, and which Taveth went to twice and laughed so hard at the second time he had to be helped out. There’s one about the ninth meeting at the top of Orsk, which everybody says is very sad. There are three about Mother. She hasn’t been to any of them. She says she knows how they end.

And then, this season, there were two nobody expected.

The first one was about Halvane.

It’s called The Engine Boy. It’s written by a young Aldri playwright called Sennet Vaile, who’s only sixty and has never written anything before. It’s about Halvane when he was young. Before he was the Speaker. Before anyone thought he’d be anything at all.

Nobody on Ister knew she was writing it. Halvane certainly didn’t. He found out when Ilas brought home a paper from the second city with the poster on the front.

A boy. Tall and thin, with grey hair cut short and a spanner too big for him. Standing on top of an engine the size of a house, in the dark, with his arms out.

Halvane looked at the poster for a long time.

“That’s not me,” he said.

“It is,” said Ilas. “I told her.”

So we went.

All of us. The way we go to everything. Mother and the grandparents, and Halvane and Ilas, and Aune and Tiri and Corin, and Dory and Lio and Sefa, and Okafor, who said she wasn’t coming and then came. And me.

The theatre in the second city is old. Older than any building we have. It has a stage at the bottom of a long bowl, and the Aldri don’t sit, because they don’t sit for important things, so there are no seats at all. Just the bowl, and four thousand Aldri standing in it, very tall, shimmering slightly, in the dark.

They’d made a space for us at the front. With a bench. Somebody had carried a bench from somewhere, for the people who sit.

Halvane looked at the bench. Then at the four thousand people standing.

Then he sat down on it. Next to Mother.

There was a sound from the whole bowl. Very soft. Four thousand Aldri all breathing in.

I won’t put down all of it. It’s long. Aldri plays are long; they go on until they’ve finished, Ilas says, not until people are tired.

But it’s about a boy born on a station between jumps. In the dark, very far out, when Ister was running. Whose mother was a pilot and whose father fixed engines, and who never once in his whole childhood stood on ground that wasn’t moving.

He wanted to build something that would stay. That’s the whole play. Every scene. He kept building small things in the station and they kept getting left behind when the station moved. A bird out of wire. A garden in a box. A lamp. And every time Ister jumped, something got left, and the boy stood at the window and watched it go.

And then a girl. Nine years old. Very small, very fierce, with her hair loose. Who came down to the engine deck where she wasn’t allowed, and found the boy crying over a wire bird, and told him he was very silly and she was going to marry him.

There was a laugh from the whole bowl. Four thousand people laughing at once, very quietly.

Ilas, next to me on the bench, with her hands folded, didn’t move at all.

“Did you?” I whispered. “At nine?”

“Yes,” said Ilas. “He took a hundred and three years to notice.”

The end of the play is the boy as a young man. On top of the great engine under Ister. The first one. The real one. Just finished. And the order comes to jump, and he puts his hand on the engine, and Ister goes, and for the first time in his life, nothing gets left behind.

Because he built the thing that takes everything with it.

The actor playing him stood on top of the engine with his arms out, in the dark, exactly like the poster. And the lamp came up behind him, Ister’s gold, the whole sky.

And the bowl was silent. Four thousand people, standing, silent.

And then, very slowly, from the back, they started to sit down.

Not all at once. A few. Then more. Then the whole bowl. Four thousand Aldri, who don’t sit for important things, sitting down in the dark on the old stone, the way Carrow sits, the way everybody does now.

Halvane, on the bench, didn’t move. He had his hand on his knee. His shoulders were shaking.

Ilas took his other hand.

“You see,” she said. “I told her.”

Afterwards, in the street outside, Sennet Vaile came out to find him. She was very young, for an Aldri, and very frightened.

Halvane stood up. He’s a head and a half taller than she is. She looked as though she’d have liked to disappear into the stones.

“I never built a garden in a box,” he said.

“No, Speaker.”

“I built two,” said Halvane. “The first one was terrible.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Write another.”

Imre made a soft one of the engine boy. Grey hair and a spanner too big for him. Tiri bought the first one and gave it to Halvane, and he keeps it on his table, next to the soft Dot.

They sold out in a day on Ister. Ilas bought nine. She won’t say who for.

The second play was about Aune.

It’s called North Side.

It’s about the youngest pilot ever to hold a station on Ister. Who flew on the north side the day Ceren held it. Who led four thousand fighters at Root on the second day. Whose mother and father went into the dark before one of the jumps, when she was very small, and who was raised by the Speaker and his wife, and called the Speaker’s daughter, and never corrected anyone.

It’s about Ceren, too. Tiri’s father. Whose name is on the wall under the oldest part of Ister.

Aune didn’t want to go.

She told me so on the porch, three nights before it opened, very quietly, with her knees up and her hands round them the way Tiri sits.

“There’s a statue,” she said. “In the second city. Of me. In my flight robe with my hair blown back. I’ve never been to see it. I don’t want to see it.” She looked at her hands. “That’s not me either. I’m not a statue. I’m a woman who was very frightened and flew anyway, and came home, and Ceren didn’t.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t want to watch somebody be brave about it,” said Aune. “In front of four thousand people. I don’t want to watch Ceren die on a stage.”

“Then don’t,” I said.

She looked at me.

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” I said. “You never have. That’s the whole point of you.”

But Tiri went.

Tiri went with Corin, and Ilas, and Halvane, on the second night. And came home through the courtyard arch very late, with her eyes very bright, and went straight to her mother’s room, and sat on the end of her bed in the dark, and told her about it. All of it. Every scene.

I heard some of it through the wall. I didn’t mean to.

The pilot in the play wasn’t brave, Tiri said. That was the thing. She was frightened the whole time. She was frightened when they put her on the north side and she was frightened when Ceren went down and she was frightened at Root, all four thousand of them behind her, and she was frightened when she came home and had a baby on her own. And she flew anyway. Every time. Frightened.

“And at the end,” said Tiri, “she goes to the statue.”

Aune didn’t say anything.

“At night. On her own. And she looks at it. And she says—” Tiri stopped. “She says, That’s not me. And then she sits down at the bottom of it. And she stays there all night. And in the morning a little girl comes and sits next to her and asks if she’s the pilot, and she says no, she’s just somebody’s mum.”

It was quiet through the wall for a long time.

“Who wrote it?” said Aune.

“Sennet Vaile,” said Tiri. “The one who wrote Great-Grandfather’s.”

“How did she know?”

“She asked me,” said Tiri. “Last winter. I told her.” A pause. “I’m sorry. I should have asked you first.”

Another long quiet.

“No,” said Aune, very softly. “You shouldn’t. I’d have said no.”

Aune went on the last night. On her own. She wouldn’t let anyone come.

She didn’t come home until morning. When she did, she came up through the courtyard arch and into the kitchen, where Mother was pouring, and sat down at the long table, and Mother put a cup in front of her without asking.

“I went to the statue,” said Aune.

Mother didn’t say anything.

“Afterwards. In the dark.” Aune put her hands round the cup. “I sat at the bottom of it. All night. Like in the play.” She almost laughed. “It’s very uncomfortable. They should have made it lower.”

“And?” said Mother.

“And in the morning a little girl came,” said Aune. “From the second city. With a soft one of me under her arm. In the flight robe. And she asked if I was the pilot.”

“What did you say?”

Aune looked at her cup.

“I said yes,” she said. “I said yes, I was. And I was frightened the whole time. And I’d go again.”

Mother sat down next to her. And didn’t say anything. And they drank their tea.

Quenby put the statue on her next cover. With a small woman in a plain coat sitting at the bottom of it, in the early light, with a little girl beside her. Somebody had taken it from a window across the square.

It went a very long way away. Bell found a copy of it on a world past the third arm, eight weeks later, being used as a poster in a school.

Aune keeps one in a drawer. She hasn’t framed it either.

Meanwhile the Cinder film.

Imre’s writing it, the way she wrote The Asker. It’s further along than anybody expected, because everybody she asked said yes, and because Crane, when she came to his board with her first page, read it all the way through standing up, and then gave her nineteen boxes of his own notes from the dome, and the Retention list, the real one, the paper one, with his handwriting on it.

The actors came in the spring. The way Isar Thenn came for The Asker. To watch.

A young actress from Marrach called Peri Lune plays Mother. She’s twenty. She’s very small. She came up the hill road on the first morning, and stood in the kitchen doorway, and Mother looked at her and put the pot down.

“Oh,” said Mother. “Oh, love. You’re the right size.”

Peri Lune has been in the kitchen every morning since. She doesn’t pour. She watches. She says she’s learning how to stand when nobody’s looking at you. She says Mother does it differently from anyone she’s ever seen. She says Mother stands like somebody who’s been told to leave and decided not to.

A tall dark man from the second city called Dane Ostry plays Trevor. He’s not Aldri. He’s from one of the Hedge worlds in the first ring, a stage actor, very quiet. He can’t watch Trevor. Nobody can.

So he watches me.

He’s been on the porch every evening for a month. He sits on the step below me, the way Dory does, and doesn’t say anything, and watches me look at the north field. Mother says that’s right. Mother says I look at the north field exactly the way Trevor looked at the ridge.

Last week he asked me one question. Only one.

“What was his voice like?”

I said I didn’t know. I said I was very small. I said I only remember one thing he ever said to me, and I wasn’t going to tell him what it was.

Dane Ostry nodded. Then he went in and asked Mother.

And Mother, Dane Ostry told me afterwards, put the pot down and closed her eyes and said it.

All of it. Something Trevor said once, on the ridge, a long time ago. In his voice. Mother can do his voice. I never knew that.

Dane Ostry won’t tell me what it was. He says it’s in the film.

The woman playing Halloway, at twenty-three, comes to the Lake House. She stands in the corner of the fire room while Rory teaches, and watches Halloway walk down the corridor in the evenings with her sheet. She says Halloway walks like somebody counting.

The man playing Crane comes to the Arch Hall every day and sits at the far end of the board with Holt. He’s a big warm man from Kiln, and he can’t do the cane yet. Crane’s teaching him. Crane says it’s the first time in his life anyone’s ever asked him how he walks.

And the young woman playing Okafor, one of the three hundred and eleven, going out through the locks, has been following Okafor for a week.

Okafor hasn’t spoken to her once.

On the eighth day Okafor turned round in the long corridor of the Arch Hall, and looked at the girl, and said, “You’re doing it wrong.”

“Doing what wrong, General?”

“You’re walking like you’re brave,” said Okafor. “I wasn’t. I was barely more than a girl with a new face and a bag, and they were putting us out through the locks, and I was terrified.” She turned back round. “Walk like you’re carrying something. You’ll get it.”

And Okafor’s army got bigger again.

It was the Cinder soft ones, Gilgamesh thinks. Or the plays. Or Kessry jumping, and Ilith jumping, and Dun Amar, all forty million, going last month in the night with three of Halvane’s big boxes under the grain. Or the Assessors at Konrad’s table, writing letters. Or just the queens, singing, and all the babies coming in pairs.

Whatever it was, the volunteers came.

A hundred thousand in the first week. A million by the end of the month. Then three. Then nine. From every world in the Hedge, and the new ones, and the edge worlds of the Reach, coming through the arches with their bags and their soft ones and asking where to stand.

Okafor took a fortnight with her slate. She came out with forty sheets.

There are four new Wings. There’s a new Line on every world past the second ring. There are posts on the new worlds and batteries on every moon and a second Standing, which Gilgamesh asked Alexander to lead, and Alexander said yes and then went very quiet for a day.

And there’s a rule. Okafor wrote it at the top of the first sheet, in her square sergeant’s hand, and had Wren copy it onto the wall of every post in the Hedge.

Nobody fights who isn’t asked. Nobody’s asked who can’t say no.

Halvane came to the long table at the end of the month. With a box.

Not a small one this time. He put a slate down instead. A drawing. A building. Very long, very low, under a mountain.

“Okafor’s asked me,” he said. “For things. For the army. Machines. Weapons. Ships that can’t be seen. Batteries that can see a door. Coats that do more than the coats do.” He looked at the drawing. “She says the Prime is building. She says she’d like us to be building faster.”

“And?” I said.

“And I’ve said yes.”

He sat down. On the bench. Without being asked. He does that every time now.

“We ran for eleven thousand years,” he said. “We built engines to carry worlds and fighters to keep the dark off them and we never built a single thing to go and get anyone.” He put his hand flat on the drawing. “I’d like to build some things that go and get people.”

It’s under the old mountain on Thole, in the blue. Mira Tannock gave him the mountain. She said there’s more lumen under it than anybody will ever need, and she’d rather it went into something that fetched people than something that ran.

Halvane calls it the Workshop. The engineers call it Halvane’s. The Aldri have a long word for it that Ilas says means the place where we think of the terrible things first, so nobody else has to.

Bell’s there three days a week. Toby’s there one. Rory’s sent two of his best planers. Halvane sleeps there, some nights, on a bench, and Ilas goes and fetches him home.

On the door, in Wren’s hand, there’s a sign. Halvane asked for it.

For fetching.

The Prime said something about it, of course.

He always does. On every band, with the light behind him. He said the Hedge was arming. He said the coward on his hill was building war machines under a stolen mountain. He said every Collective world should look to its sky.

And then, at the end, he said something else. Something nobody expected.

He said his son was dead.

He said Corvan had been killed. In a Hedge raid. On Carrow. He said the coward’s daughters had come in the night in their invisible coats and taken his son and killed him, and the Collective would hold a day of grief.

They held it. Nine days later. On the great steps of the white hall, with the white ships overhead and a grey coffin with nothing in it, and the Prime standing at the top of the steps, very still, with his hands behind his back.

He didn’t say anything at the funeral. He didn’t cry. He just stood there.

Corvan watched it.

He was in the narrow house at the bottom of the hill road, next to the Assessors, which Aurelius found for him. Lio was with him. And Sefa. And Mother, who’d brought soup and wouldn’t leave.

He watched the whole thing. His own funeral. Two hours, on the old band, in Konrad’s front room.

At the end he turned it off.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, to nobody, to the dark screen:

“He didn’t look at the coffin. Not once.”

Mother put her hand on the back of his neck.

“He never looked at me either,” said Corvan. “So I suppose that’s fair.”

“It isn’t,” said Mother. “None of it’s fair, love. Eat your soup.”

He ate his soup.

Three days after that he came up the hill road. On his own. Early. Before the stars.

Dory was on the porch, on the step below mine, with her Dusk glasses in her lap.

He stood at the bottom of the steps for a long time. He’s very tall. Taller than me. He stood with his hands behind his back, the way his father stands, and then he noticed he was doing it, and took them out, and didn’t know what to do with them, and put them in his pockets.

“Dory,” he said.

She looked at him.

“You said I didn’t even like you,” said Corvan. “At the Assize. You said I only wanted you because he told me to. So he’d look at me.” He stopped. “You were right.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know you,” said Corvan. “I’ve never known you. I only ever knew what he said about you.” He took one hand out of his pocket and looked at it. “I’d like to. Know you. If that’s all right. Not for him. He’s—” He stopped again. “He’s busy being sad about a box with nothing in it.”

He looked up at her.

“Would you come to the park,” he said. “Today. With me. Lio says there’s a carousel.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d like that put down. I sat on the step above them both and looked at the north field and didn’t say a single word, and it was the hardest thing I’ve done since the river.

Dory looked at him for a very long time. She had the net open. I could feel her doing it. Very gently, the way she does with queens. Looking at what he was. All of it.

Then she put her Dusk glasses on.

“All right,” she said. “But I’m not going on the sky ride. And you’re buying the bread rolls.”

I’ll put down what Dory told me. She told me that night, on the step. Not all of it. Some.

They went to the park. The most visited place on Avalon. It was a Sunday, so Mother and Oona and small Holt were lifting the carousel, and Corvan stood and watched the whole carousel go up into the air with Mother underneath it holding it up with one hand, and he sat down on the grass.

“She does that every week,” said Dory.

“Every week?”

“Every Sunday.”

Corvan looked at the carousel for a long time. Then he said, “In the white hall there’s a man whose only job is to carry the Prime’s cup. He’s carried it for forty years. He’s never once been allowed to drink out of it.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know why I said that,” said Corvan.

“Yes, you do,” said Dory.

They went on the carousel. Dory rode a wooden deepback. Corvan rode a soft-one horse that a child had painted on the side of, in very bright colours, badly. He rode it very seriously, Dory said, with both hands on the pole, as if he’d been told the whole thing might stop and he’d be in trouble.

They went in the dream room. Dory let him choose. He chose Carrow’s square at dawn, empty, before anybody comes. He stood in the middle of it in the dream for a long time.

Then he said, “Can you make it full?”

And Dory made it full. Everybody. Sitting. From the steps to the fountain and down every street. The old woman at the front with her hands folded.

He sat down at the front. Next to the old woman. In the dream.

They stayed there a long time.

They didn’t go on the sky ride. Corvan bought the bread rolls. He’d never bought anything in his life; Dory had to show him how. He gave the girl at the stall a whole mark for two rolls and she tried to give him change and he didn’t know what change was and Dory said he went red to his ears.

At the end they sat on the bench by the gate, with the bread rolls, and watched the lamp come up over the lake.

“Thank you,” said Corvan.

“What for?”

“Not saying anything kind,” he said. “Everybody here keeps saying kind things. I don’t know what to do with them. You didn’t say any.”

Dory ate her bread roll.

“I’ll say one,” she said. “Just one. Then you have to go home.”

He waited.

“You were very bad on the horse,” said Dory. “You held on like it was going to throw you off. It’s a carousel. It goes round. That’s all it does.” She brushed the crumbs off her coat. “Next week you’re going to let go with one hand.”

He walked her to the bottom of the hill road. Then he went home to the narrow house and she came up the steps and sat down on the step below me.

She sat there for a long time with the Dusk glasses in her lap.

“Well?” I said. I hadn’t meant to say anything. It got out.

Dory looked at the north field.

“He’s very sad,” she said. “All the way down. Further than I’ve ever felt anybody. Further than the houses.” She turned the glasses over. “And right at the bottom there’s somebody very small who’s never once been asked anything.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know, Dad,” said Dory. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s anything.” She put her glasses on. “But he’s coming next Sunday. And he’s going to let go with one hand.”

She went to bed.

I sat on the step a long time after.

Mother came out with a cup and put it next to me and sat down on the step below, where Dory had been.

“Well?” she said.

“He’s coming next Sunday,” I said.

Mother looked at the north field.

“Good,” she said. “I’ll make more bread.”

The stars said Not yet this morning. Seven hundred and one. Ilith’s said it from its new sun, and Dun Amar’s, very low and warm, like grain.

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

And under it:

Lake House: 900.

Twins: a great many.

C: next Sunday.

Days 11529–11702. Opening Night.

Twins and births rose on every singing world, and one child in forty was born doing something, so Halloway and Abena built the Lake House, with a room for every kind of child. The second city staged Sennet Vaile’s plays: The Engine Boy, where four thousand Aldri sat down for Halvane, and North Side, after which Aune finally sat at the foot of her own statue. The Cinder actors came to watch, Okafor’s army grew by millions, and Halvane opened the Workshop under Thole, “for fetching.” The Prime buried an empty coffin with his son’s name on it; Corvan took Dory to the park.