Chapter 514: Hats

Corvan let go with one hand on the second Sunday.

Dory told me. She told me on the step that night, the way she tells me things now, without being asked, looking at the north field.

He’d got on the same horse. The badly painted one. He’d held the pole with both hands for the first three times round, very straight, looking ahead, the way he walks behind his father. Mother was underneath the carousel with one hand up, holding it, talking to Oona about the price of beans.

On the fourth time round he took his left hand off the pole.

Not all the way. He held it a little way off, Dory said, an inch, as if the pole might notice and be offended. And he kept it there for the whole of the fourth time round, and the fifth, and on the sixth he put it in his lap.

And then, Dory said, he laughed. Once. Very short. As if it had got out of him by accident.

“What did you do?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Dory. “I was on the deepback in front. I didn’t turn round.” She turned her Dusk glasses over in her hands. “I didn’t have to. I heard it.”

She didn’t say anything else. She went to bed.

He came the Sunday after that too. And the one after. Mother started making a separate loaf on Saturdays. She doesn’t say who it’s for.

It was a quiet season, mostly. As quiet as a war gets when nobody’s moving.

The Refined stayed back from the queen worlds. Ossery’s marsh stayed flat. On Hask, Wren says, the harvest was the biggest in the world’s record, and nobody on Hask could say why, except that the ground had been very soft that spring, and everybody’s grandmother had been saying thank you to it.

The Herald came every morning with the stars in the corner. The Ground dug. Kwame came home every ninth night covered in other worlds’ dirt and slept for a day. The Wall went up on Brannock, long and low and grey, half into the hill above the glass where Fell was. Varra tied her second knot. Okafor stood at her board.

And on Carrow the square kept sitting. And the scientists kept choosing. One a morning.

Okafor writes the number on her slate every day, under Forty. She doesn’t say anything about it. Nobody asks her to.

Then, one morning in the middle of the season, Mother came down to breakfast in a hat.

It was the hat from the resort. The wide straw one with the blue band that she came home through the Arch Hall in, two summers ago, and hasn’t worn since, and keeps on the hook behind the kitchen door next to the tea towel.

She put the pot down on the long table. She didn’t take the hat off.

Everybody looked at it. Nobody said anything.

“Well,” said Mother. “It’s that time.”

It’s been every year since the first one. The mothers’ getaway. Mother said it would be, the night she came home in the hat and tasted Taveth’s soup, and Mother doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.

Every year she goes round. In person. With the pot. She goes to every mother and every grandmother and asks.

This year it took her nine days, because there were more of them.

She went to Ingrid first. She always goes to Ingrid first. Ingrid said yes before Mother had finished pouring.

Maura said yes and then went and took Rory’s plane off the bench and hid it, which she’s done every year, so he’ll have to sit still for four days, and every year he finds it on the second day and planes the porch door anyway.

Kyria said yes. She didn’t argue this year. She just said yes, and then went very quiet, and then said, “Can I bring my good blade? Just to have it with me?”

“No, love,” said Mother.

“Just to look at.”

“No.”

Kyria thought about it. “The blunt one?”

Mother poured her another cup. “We’ll see.”

Teshka said yes very fast. She went pink. Saska says her grandmother has started asking, about a month before the getaway every year, whether it’s that time yet. In a voice, Saska says, like somebody very carefully asking about the weather.

Theron rows the cave boats at the end of the beach. He’s been rowing them for two years now. He’s had dinner with Teshka on a stone, the way they cook fish on Hyrran, every time she’s gone to the resort. And three times, Saska says, when she hasn’t.

Kyria says ridge-keepers don’t come down for anybody. She said it at the long table, last winter, quite crossly, as if somebody had broken a rule.

Teshka said, “He came down for the water.”

“He came down for you,” said Kyria.

Teshka didn’t say anything. She went pink again. She drank her tea.

The wives said yes. Risa put Kesh in charge of the weather again, and Kesh has promised there won’t be snow this time, and nobody believes her. Luna said yes and then spent a day writing the General a list. Sera said yes. Hana cried. She always cries. She says it’s nice to be asked. Andraste said yes when Kyrie said she’d hold the stick again.

Aune said yes.

It’s her first time going without wondering whether she should. The first year she went because Mother asked her, and she was new, and she sat at the end of the row in her long grey coat in thirty degrees and wouldn’t take it off. The second year she took the coat off on the third day.

This year, Tiri says, she packed a swimming costume. She’s never owned one. Aldri don’t swim; they sail. She went to the second city and bought it and came home and put it at the bottom of her bag under everything else and didn’t tell anybody.

Tiri told everybody.

Teva’s mother said yes, and Teva’s grandmother, who said she’d come back for the gull. Great-grandmother Efua said yes, on condition. The same condition. There had to be birds.

“There’s the gull,” said Mother.

“One gull,” said great-grandmother Efua, “is not birds. One gull is a gull.”

“It’s brought its friends now,” said Mother. “I’m told.”

Great-grandmother Efua considered this.

“Then I’ll have to shout at them,” she said. “Won’t I.”

And then Mother went to some new ones.

That’s what took the nine days. She went to all the mothers she’s met since the last time. All of them. In person.

Tamsin Oake, at the Herald. Who has three grown children on Dun Amar and grandchildren she hasn’t seen since the harvest went, and who said she couldn’t possibly, there was a paper to get out, every single morning.

“Vesk can get it out,” said Mother.

“Vesk is ninety-two.”

“Vesk,” said Mother, “got the Assize out every morning for sixty years. She can manage a paper for four days.”

Vesk, at the next desk, didn’t look up. She said, “Go, Tamsin.” And then, “Take a hat.”

She went to Hesper Daine on Brannock. Who has a son in the Ground and a daughter at the Wall and a husband who died on the first hill. Who listened to Mother with her arms folded across her chest and the cable over her shoulder, the way she carries it everywhere now.

“I don’t do holidays,” said Hesper Daine.

“Nobody does, love,” said Mother. “That’s the point.”

Hesper Daine looked at her for a long time.

“Is there water?” she said.

“A whole sea.”

“I’ve never seen a sea,” said Hesper Daine. “Brannock’s too high.”

Mother didn’t say anything. She just poured.

She went to Faro Dunn on Ossery, who has reeds in her hair and seven grandchildren and said yes immediately and asked if she could bring the reeds.

She went to Sabeth.

Sabeth isn’t a mother. She’s never had children. She lives in a small stone house at the very end of the rocks on Ister and studies the deepbacks, and she’s three hundred and something, and she has very old brass glasses, and she has supper with the General every ninth night, at our long table or hers.

Mother went to the stone house on her own. On Ister. On the train, a day south, with the pot.

The General doesn’t know what they said to each other. Nobody does. Mother was there all afternoon.

When she came back she put the pot down on the long table and said, “Sabeth’s coming.”

The General, who was at the end of the table with his tea, put his cup down very carefully.

“She’s not a mother,” he said.

“No, love,” said Mother. “She’s coming anyway.”

Fifty-three of them, this year. Mother counted. She didn’t put it on a sheet. She just knew.

They went on the first morning of the warm season, through the Arch Hall, in a long line, with hats.

The children stood on the platform and waved. The grandfathers stood behind the children with their arms folded and their faces very still, the way men’s faces go when they’ve just been left in charge of ninety-one children for four days and are trying not to think about it.

Mother was the last through the arch. She turned round at the very edge of it. She looked at all of us on the platform. Then at the General.

“Nap,” she said. “Two o’clock. By the kitchen clock.”

“Ma’am,” said the General.

And she went through.

I didn’t go. Fathers don’t. I stayed with the grandfathers and the children and Taveth’s pot, and what happened at the resort I’ve put together from what they told me afterwards. Which was a great deal, from some of them, and almost nothing from others.

The resort is the same. The long low white one at the very end of the southern coast’s beach, with Suri’s people’s gardens going down to the sand, and the long white chairs in a row, and the sand that doesn’t stick.

The young tray-man is still there. He’s not so young now. He saw Mother coming down the path in her hat on the first afternoon and put his tray down and came up the beach to meet her and took her bag.

“You remembered,” said Mother.

“You made me sit down and have a mimosa,” he said. “Nobody’s ever done that. I tell everybody.”

Mother looked at him for a long time.

“Have you eaten?” she said.

Mother sat down on the first afternoon.

Not the second. The first. That’s the thing everybody told me, all of them, every one, separately. Ingrid told me and Maura told me and Teshka told me and Kyria, of all people, told me, at the long table, with her hands round her cup, as if it were the most important thing that happened all four days.

The first year it took Mother until the second afternoon to stop wanting to get up. The second year it took until the evening of the first day.

This year she walked down the beach in her hat, and found her chair, the third from the end, the same one, and sat down in it. And put her feet up. And took the mimosa the tray-man gave her. And put her hat over her face.

And didn’t move for three hours.

Ingrid says she sat in the chair next to her and watched her, the whole three hours, without saying anything. She says she’s known Mother since the war. She says she’s never once seen her be still for three hours. She says Mother breathed very slowly, under the hat, the whole time, the way people breathe when they’re finally asleep.

At the end of the three hours Mother took the hat off her face and looked at the sea.

“Well,” she said. “That’s very nice.”

Hesper Daine saw the sea.

She came down the path from the resort after everybody else, the first afternoon, with her cable over her shoulder, because she wouldn’t leave it. And she got to the top of the dunes. And she stopped.

Maura was there. She saw it. She said Hesper Daine stood at the top of the dune for a long time, with the cable over her shoulder and the wind in her hair, looking at the sea. Just looking. Not moving.

Then she put the cable down. On the sand. And walked down the dune and across the beach and into the sea. In her boots. In her clothes. Up to her waist.

And stood there.

Maura went in after her. Not all the way. To her knees. She stood a little way off and didn’t say anything.

After a long time Hesper Daine said, without turning round, “My husband always said he’d take me to see the sea.” A wave came in and went past her and back out. “There’s no sea on Brannock. We were saving for it. He said when the mine had paid out, we’d go through the arch, the two of us, and see it.”

Maura didn’t say anything.

“Then he went up the first hill,” said Hesper Daine. “With his rifle. And didn’t come down.”

The sea came in and went out.

“He’d have liked it,” said Hesper Daine. “It’s very big.”

Maura says she went and stood next to her then, in the sea, up to her waist, in her own clothes. And they stood there together until the light went.

Then Hesper Daine came out and picked up her cable and went and sat in a white chair and had a mimosa.

She left the cable on the sand on the second day. And the third. On the fourth day she didn’t bring it down at all.

The mud baths. Every year somebody does something in the mud baths that nobody ever lets them forget.

The first year it was Eve putting a handful of mud on Asha’s head to stop her lecturing. The second year, I’m told, it was Rhiannon, who went in wearing the huge sunglasses and lost them and had to be helped to find them by nine people, and nobody would tell me why that was funny except that it was.

This year it was Aune.

She came down to the mud pools on the second morning in the swimming costume. The one she bought in the second city and hid at the bottom of her bag. It’s grey. Like her hair. Like Tiri’s.

All the wives were already in the pools. They stopped talking.

Aune stood at the edge of the long stone pool of warm mud in the swimming costume with her long grey hair down her back and her arms crossed in front of her, very straight, very tall, very pink, the way Aldri go pink, a sort of shimmer.

“I’ve never done this,” she said.

“We know, love,” said Risa. “Get in.”

Aune got in.

And sank. All the way. Aldri don’t float, it turns out. Or not in mud. She went down into the warm mud to her chin, very slowly, with an expression of enormous surprise, and the wives laughed so hard Luna had to be held up by Sera, and Hana cried, and Andraste went under the mud on purpose so nobody would see her face.

Aune didn’t laugh. Not at first. She sat in the mud up to her chin with her grey hair spread out on the top of it, and looked at all of them.

Then she said, very seriously, “Is it meant to be this warm?”

And then she laughed too. Andraste says it’s the first time she’s ever heard Aune laugh like that. Out loud. All the way.

Imre’s got a soft one of it, apparently. Not for sale. Andraste commissioned it. She won’t say who for.

Kyria brought the blunt blade.

Mother said we’ll see, and on the morning they went, Kyria came through the arch with the blunt ridge-iron blade wrapped up in a towel under her arm and an expression daring anybody to mention it.

Nobody did.

She didn’t take it out of the towel for the first two days. On the third morning, very early, before anyone was up, Teshka says, Kyria went down to the very edge of the sea, where the sand’s hard, and unwrapped it. And did the forms. Alone. At dawn. With the sea coming in round her feet.

Theron was there. In his boat. Waiting for the tide to take the cave boats out.

He watched her the whole time. All the forms. He didn’t say anything.

When she’d finished, he rowed a little closer. And said, from the boat, in old Hyrrani, very quietly, something Teshka wouldn’t translate for me.

Kyria went red. Teshka says she’s never seen Kyria go red. Not in all the years. Kyria went red to the tips of her ridges and wrapped the blade back up in the towel and walked up the beach very fast and didn’t come down to the sea again till the afternoon.

I asked Teshka what he’d said.

Teshka looked at me for a long time.

“He said,” she said, “that the last time he’d seen the forms done like that, at the sea’s edge, at dawn, it was by Kyria’s grandmother. When he was a boy. On the coast below the ridge, before the hollows.” She looked at her tea. “He said she did them exactly the same. He said he’d been waiting sixty years to see it again.”

“Why did she go red?”

“Because he called her by her grandmother’s name,” said Teshka. “By mistake. And then corrected himself.” She almost smiled. “Kyria’s grandmother was a very great First Blade. Nobody’s ever said Kyria was like her. Not once. Not to her face.”

Great-grandmother Efua and Teva’s grandmother went to the end of the beach on the first afternoon, the way they did the first year, and sat with their feet in the sea, and looked for the gull.

It came. On the first afternoon.

It’s not young now. It’s a big grey gull with a bent foot. It landed on the sand a little way off and looked at them. And then it walked over, very slowly, the way it does, with the bent foot, and stood in front of them.

Great-grandmother Efua had bread.

And then, Teva’s grandmother says, it called. Very loud. And four other gulls came down out of the sky and landed on the sand behind it. Young ones. With straight feet. Standing in a row.

Great-grandmother Efua looked at the five gulls for a long time.

“You’ve brought your children,” she said.

The big gull looked at her.

Great-grandmother Efua broke the bread into five pieces. Very carefully. And threw one to each.

“They can stay,” she said. “All of them. But if you bring any more I’ll shout.”

On the third night, by Sera’s fire on the beach, they talked.

They always talk on the third night. It’s when people say things. The first year Mother told them about the beach Trevor had promised her. The second year, Ingrid says, Kyria told them about the first time she held Andraste. This year, nobody had planned anything.

It was Tamsin Oake who started it. She’d had two mimosas, and she wasn’t used to it, and she said, looking at the fire, “How do you do it?”

They looked at her.

“Any of it,” said Tamsin. “All of you. Every morning. Knowing there’s a war. Knowing the scientists are choosing one a day on Carrow. Knowing the white ships are up there. How do you get up and pour the tea and send them off to school?”

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Hesper Daine said, “You don’t know how. You just do it.” She looked at the fire. “You get up. And you pour the tea. Because if you don’t, they’ll know. And they’ll be frightened.”

“And then the day after,” said Maura, “you do it again.”

“And the day after that,” said Ingrid.

Mother didn’t say anything. She was sitting at the end of the log with her hat in her lap.

Then Sabeth spoke. Very quietly. She hadn’t said a word all evening. She was sitting a little way back from the fire, in her brass glasses, the way she always sits, a little way back from things.

“I’ve never had children,” she said. “I’ve watched the deepbacks for two hundred years. The mothers. Every year they bring the calves down the channel, past the point, past my house. And every year something’s there. Something that wants the calves. A net. A shark. A storm.” She took her glasses off. “And every year the mothers bring them anyway. Because the channel is where the food is. And the calves have to eat.”

She put her glasses back on.

“I used to think they were very brave,” she said. “The deepback mothers. Now I think they just know where the food is.” She looked round the fire. At all of them. “I didn’t know, before. That people did it too. I didn’t know anybody I could ask.”

Mother reached over. And took Sabeth’s hand.

“You know us now, love,” she said.

Teshka had dinner on the stone with Theron on the last night. She always does.

She came back very late. Later than the other years. Saska wasn’t there to ask her, so Maura did, because Maura was sitting up by the embers of Sera’s fire with Hesper Daine, neither of them able to sleep.

Teshka sat down on the log. She didn’t say anything for a long time.

“He asked me to go up the ridge,” she said.

Maura waited.

“The high ridge. On Hyrran. Above the hollows. Where he kept the watch for forty years.” Teshka looked at her hands. “He hasn’t been back. Not once. Not since he came down. He says he couldn’t. He says he stood up there so long he forgot there was anything else, and when he came down and saw the sea he was frightened that if he went back up he’d forget again.”

“And he wants to go back,” said Maura.

“He wants to show me,” said Teshka. “Where he stood. He says there’s a stone up there with forty years of his feet worn into it. He says he’s never shown anyone.” She stopped. “He says if I’m there he won’t forget.”

Hesper Daine, on the other side of the embers, made a small sound. Maura says she thinks it was a laugh. She says it was the first one she’d heard from her.

“Are you going?” said Maura.

Teshka looked at the sea for a long time. It was very dark. The tide was coming in.

“Saska’s going to be insufferable,” she said.

“Yes,” said Maura.

“Kyria’s going to be worse.”

“Yes.”

Teshka stood up. She brushed the sand off her coat.

“I’m going,” she said. And went to bed.

Mother didn’t go to bed on the last night.

Ingrid told me. She woke very late and Mother’s bed was empty, so she went down to the beach, and Mother was there. At the edge of the sea. Not sitting. Walking. Slowly. Up and down the hard sand in her bare feet, with her hat in her hand.

Sabeth was with her.

Ingrid didn’t go down. She stood at the top of the dune and watched them walk, the two of them, very small and very tall, Mother’s head about level with Sabeth’s elbow, up the beach and back, up the beach and back, for an hour. Talking. Ingrid couldn’t hear what.

She asked Mother the next morning, at breakfast, before the arch.

Mother poured her a cup.

“I told her about Alaric,” she said. “About the war. About how he’s always the one standing at the door so the rest of us can sleep. About how he hasn’t sat down in forty years. Not properly. Not once. Not since Luna’s mother.” She put the pot down. “Until the night he came back from Ister and sat in the porch chair till light.”

Ingrid didn’t say anything.

“She didn’t know,” said Mother. “She didn’t know what she’d done. She thought he was just a quiet man who liked soup.” Mother looked at the sea through the window. “I thought somebody ought to tell her.”

“What did she say?”

Mother almost smiled.

“She cried,” said Mother. “And then she asked me how he takes his tea.”

The grandfathers did well.

I’ll say that for them. Better than the first year. Konrad had a sheet again, and it was wrong by noon again, but he’d expected that this time and had a second sheet ready. Aurelius had a third.

The General’s naps worked. Two o’clock by the kitchen clock. Ninety-one children, in the yard, on Rory’s blankets, in rows by height. Nap. Every one of them asleep within a minute. Holt says it’s still because his voice is so boring. The General says it’s command presence. They’ve had the argument every year. They enjoy it.

Rory found his plane on the second day. It was in the flour bin. He planed the porch door. Maura knew he would. She’d left a note in the flour bin. It said I knew you would.

Taveth made the soup. The grandfathers he’d taught helped. Nine pots on the porch, because Mother had barred the kitchen before she left, and every pot was terrible, and every child said it was wonderful.

And on the third morning, very early, I came down and found Kyrie in the yard.

She’s small. She was born on the ridge, like all Andraste’s, and she’s growing fast, the way all of ours do, but she’s still small. She was in the yard in her nightdress, in the grey light before the stars, with a stick.

And the soft Andraste. Propped up against the water butt. Watching.

She was doing the forms.

Not well. She’s very small. The stick’s nearly as long as she is. She kept getting the third form wrong and starting again from the first, very seriously, with her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. But she’d got the loose grip. That’s the first thing, Kyria says. The loose grip. Before any of the rest. And Kyrie had it.

Gilgamesh was there. I hadn’t seen him. He was standing at the gate of the north field with his arms folded and his left arm still a little stiff from Brannock, watching her.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t help. He just watched.

When she’d got to the end of the fourth form without going wrong, for the first time, she stopped. And looked at the soft Andraste. And then, very solemnly, she bowed to it.

Then she saw Gilgamesh.

She looked at him for a long time. Very small, in her nightdress, with her stick. He’s the biggest person on Avalon. He’s the size of a door.

“I’m holding it,” she said. “The stick. While Mama’s away. I said I would.”

Gilgamesh unfolded his arms. And then he did something I’ve never seen him do.

He knelt down. In the yard. On one knee. So he was nearly her height. Nearly.

“Then hold it,” he said. “First Blade.”

Kyrie went very pink. Just like her grandmother. And then she went back to the beginning. And did all four forms again.

Somebody took a picture from the dunes on the second afternoon. Fifty-three white chairs in a row, fifty-three hats, and at the end of the row, a very small woman with a hat over her face and a mimosa going warm in her hand.

Quenby put it on the cover. From a very long way away. The headline was Fifty-Three Hats. Bell found one on a world past the third arm, three weeks later, propped up in the window of a shop that sells nothing but hats.

Imre made a soft Hesper Daine that month. With a cable over her shoulder that comes off. In the box there’s a tiny strip of blue cloth, folded small, that you can lay down beside her. It’s meant to be the sea.

On Ister, Halvane says, four babies were entered in the long record that season under the name Sabeth. Sabeth went very quiet when she was told. Then she asked the keepers what it meant. They told her it means the one at the end of the rocks, who watches the mothers come.

She asked them to change it. They wouldn’t.

And on the fourth night, Lio came up the hill road.

She’d been with Corvan. She goes most evenings now. Sefa goes too. The three of them sit in his narrow house at the bottom of the hill road and read the Herald and argue about it.

She came in through the kitchen door very fast. Her face was white. She had the Herald in her hand.

“Where’s Dory?” she said.

“Asleep,” I said. “What is it?”

She put the Herald down on the long table in front of me. And put her finger on a column. Rhun’s column, on page two, the worlds. A small piece. Nine lines.

On a Collective world called Senn, on the second arm, a Refined had walked through the wall of a house. Not a door. The wall. And taken a child. And walked back out through the wall on the other side.

And on a world called Orl, two days later, another Refined had picked up a cart with nine people in it, with one hand, without touching it.

And on a third world, nobody would say which, one had stopped all the sound in a square for an hour. Every sound. Like the girl from Kessry at the Lake House.

Lio stood at the long table with her finger on the column.

“Those are gifts,” she said. “Those are people’s gifts. Somebody’s. Somebody they took.” She looked at me. “That’s what they did to me. In the rooms. When I was small. They put things into me that weren’t mine.” Her finger was shaking. “They’re doing it again. To the Refined. With the scientists. With what they took from me.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Corvan says his father traded for it,” said Lio. “He heard it in the white hall, before we brought him out. Something he gave the houses. And what he got back was the research. The research that made me.” She took her finger off the Herald. “And now they’re making Refined out of it. With gifts in them. Stolen gifts.”

She sat down on the bench very suddenly.

“Corvan says he knows the one who walks through walls,” she said. “He says he knows the gift. There was a woman on Carrow who could walk through walls when she was frightened. They took her out of the square on the fifth morning.”

I woke Dory.

She came down in her nightdress and read Rhun’s nine lines standing up, with her glasses off. Then she put the paper down and opened the net, very wide, all the way out, past the Watch, past everything, the way she does when she’s looking for a queen who’s screaming.

She stood in the kitchen with her eyes shut for a long time.

“There’s someone,” she said. “On Senn. Inside one of the Refined. Very small. Very far down.” She opened her eyes. “A woman. She’s asleep. She’s dreaming about a door.”

Mother came home the next morning.

She came through the Arch Hall last, the way she always does. In the hat. With the pot, which she never used. Brown from the sun, with her sleeves rolled up, and sand still in the turn-ups of her trousers.

She took one look at my face.

Then she took the hat off. And hung it on the hook behind the kitchen door. Next to the tea towel.

“Tell me,” she said. “While I put the kettle on.”

The stars said Not yet this morning. Eight hundred and twenty-two. One of them, Wren says, from a long white chair, with a hat over its face. One from a cold high world with no sea, that said it very quietly, like somebody who’s just seen something very big for the first time.

Wren wrote the count at the top of the slate.

And under it:

Fifty-three mothers: sat down. Mother: three hours.

Ninety-one children: fed. (Badly.)

Senn. Orl. Gifts.

Days 11991–12067. Hats.

Corvan let go with one hand. Mother took fifty-three mothers to the beach, and this time she sat down on the first afternoon. Hesper Daine saw the sea, Aune sank in the mud and laughed, Theron called Kyria by her grandmother’s name, and Sabeth learned she could ask. Kyrie held the stick and Gilgamesh knelt to her. Then the Herald reported Refined on Senn and Orl using stolen gifts, and Lio knew they were made from the research that made her.