Chapter 518: The Point

Konrad sent round a sheet.

That’s how we knew it was time. Every year, about a month after the mothers come home from the beach in their hats, a sheet appears under every father’s door and every grandfather’s, in Konrad’s very neat hand, with the dates, and the arch times, and the train south from the Ister arch, and at the bottom, underlined twice:

Bring a coat. It is the sea.

And under that, in a different hand, Aurelius’s, smaller:

Taveth is not to bring the pot.

And under that, in a third hand, very large, Taveth’s:

Taveth is bringing the pot.

This is the third year of it. The fathers. The lodge on Ister, at the end of the long arm of rock in the southern sea, where nobody has ever built anything important. Halvane chose it the first year because of that. He said it was the only place on Ister where nobody would ask him anything.

He’s been to all three. He says nobody’s asked him anything once.

Mother didn’t have to go round. Konrad’s sheet does it. But she went round anyway, the last week, with the pot, to every father who’d gone quiet when the sheet came.

She went to the General first. He’d folded the sheet up very small and put it in his breast pocket, Luna says, and said nothing about it for a week.

“You’re going,” said Mother.

“There’s a war on, Dot.”

“There’s always a war on, Alaric.” She poured. “Sabeth’s expecting you. She told me at the beach.”

The General went very slightly pink.

“She said that?”

“She said,” said Mother, “that the pod comes round the point in the second week, and she’s kept the chair on her porch free, and she’d be very disappointed if a man who sits the way you sit didn’t come and sit in it.”

The General looked at his tea for a long time.

“Then I’d better go,” he said.

She went to Okafor last. Okafor isn’t a father. She doesn’t go. But she stands at her board and watches the fathers go every year with an expression Mother says is exactly the expression of somebody being left behind to mind the house.

“Will you be all right?” said Mother.

“I’ve got Gilgamesh,” said Okafor. “And Alexander. And Caesar and Aramaeis and Arcturus. And nine million.” She looked at her slate. “And the kits.”

“That’s not what I asked, love.”

Okafor looked at her for a long time.

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Go and tell your son to catch a fish.”

Thirty-eight of us this year. More than the first year. Brock came, because he’s a father now, and Saska made him. Rowan and Callum came again. Teva’s father came with a slate he swore he wouldn’t use and used on the train. Big Sigmund came with his twins, Ingrid and Tomas, who aren’t fathers but are very large and said they’d carry things.

Trevor and Sigmund wanted to come. My two. Married now, both of them, and not fathers yet.

“Next year,” said Konrad, at the arch, with his sheet. “Or the year after. When you’ve earned it.”

“What do we have to do?” said Sigmund.

Konrad looked at Liam. Liam looked at Rory. Rory looked at the porch door, which he couldn’t plane, because he was at the arch.

“You’ll know,” said Konrad.

The lodge is the same. It’s always the same. Wood and stone, long porches, a sea window and a wet-coat hook in every room. A long jetty with the boats tied up along it, and the bait-and-strong-tea hut at the end. The rock going out on three sides into a grey-green sea, very cold, very clear, with the wind always coming off it.

And at the very end of the rocks, past the lodge, a small stone house with a light in the window. And a porch. And a chair.

The General stood on the jetty the first evening, with his coat over his arm, looking at the light. He didn’t say anything.

Then he put the coat on. And walked down the rocks.

He didn’t come back till midnight.

Liam waited till the first fire.

He always does. He says news belongs to fires. He built it on the beach below the lodge, the way he does, with his hands, without a match, and we sat round it on the driftwood logs with the strong tea from the hut and Hearth sparkling that Dinraal brought, and the sea coming in very cold and very quiet behind us in the dark.

And Liam stood up.

He never stands up. Not at the fire. He sits at the end of a log with his elbows on his knees and talks to the flames.

He stood up, and everybody stopped talking.

“Anya’s expecting,” he said.

There was a silence. A very short one.

Then Rory put down the piece of driftwood he’d been turning in his hands since we sat down. And stood up too. And walked round the fire to his son. And put his arms round him.

Rory doesn’t do that. Liam told me once that his father has hugged him four times in his life. When he was born, which he doesn’t remember. When he came out of cadet training. When he married Anya. And when Cormac was born.

This was five.

Liam stood very still with his father’s arms round him, in front of the fire, in front of everyone. Then he put his own arms round Rory. And they stood there.

“About time,” said Rory, into his shoulder. Very gruff. “Your mother’s been knitting since you told her.”

“I know, Dad.”

“She’s knitted nine.”

“Nine what?”

“She won’t say,” said Rory. “She just keeps knitting.”

Big Sigmund cried. He always does. He says it’s the wind off the sea. There was no wind.

Toby hummed something. Very low. Under the noise of everybody shouting and slapping Liam on the back. Something old. I didn’t know it. Wren told me later it was the song from the barracks, from the very first year, the one Sigmund pretended to snore through.

Kwame Osei raised his cup. He doesn’t say much. He raised his cup to Liam across the fire and said, “A whole sea,” which is what he says about everything he likes very much, and drank.

The General came back up the beach at midnight from the stone house at the end of the rocks, and found us all still at the fire, and Liam still standing, and asked what he’d missed.

“Anya’s expecting,” said Konrad.

The General stood at the edge of the firelight with his coat on and his hat in his hand. He looked at Liam for a long time.

“Good,” he said. “That’s very good.”

Then he sat down. On a log. Without being asked.

Halvane looked at him across the fire.

“Did she save you the chair?” he said.

“She did,” said the General.

The days at the lodge are always the same, and that’s the point of them.

Aurelius and Konrad went out in a boat together on the first morning and argued about the oars for an hour and didn’t catch anything, and came back very pleased with themselves. They do it every year. They say it’s the only hour in the year when nobody needs either of them to be right.

Teva’s father kept a slate of every fish anybody caught. Species, length, weight, time, who, and a column at the end headed Wanted it? with a tick or a cross. Kwame Osei looked at the slate on the second day and said the column was the only sensible thing on it. Teva’s father went pink and underlined it.

Dinraal and Brock sat on the end of the jetty in their armour, both of them, because neither would be the first to take it off, until Halvane came down and sat between them and said he’d heard that on Hearth a man who keeps his armour on by the sea is telling the sea he doesn’t trust it. Dinraal took his off very fast. Brock went iron by accident from laughing, and fell in, and had to be fished out by Big Sigmund’s twins.

Taveth made the soup. On the beach. In the pot he’d been told not to bring. It took four days, the way it always does, and on the fourth night he served it at the fire, and thirty-eight fathers ate it, and every one of them said it was wonderful.

Because that’s what you say.

And Halvane slept. That’s the thing nobody believes, every year, when we come home. Halvane, who’s been Speaker for longer than anybody can remember, who has never once in his life been somewhere nobody needed him, slept every afternoon at the lodge in a long chair on the porch with his hands folded and his mouth slightly open. Ilas says he’s never done it anywhere else. Not in three hundred years.

“Nobody asks me anything here,” he said, when I asked him about it. Then he looked at me. “Except you, just now.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Halvane. “It’s a very small question. I can sleep through it.”

He did.

Kwame Osei took me fishing on the second morning.

He does every year. He says I still don’t know how. He’s right.

We sat at the end of the jetty in the grey before the light with two rods and a tin of bait and the strong tea, and he didn’t say anything for an hour.

“Don’t ask it,” he said, at last. “You’re asking it.”

“I’m not asking anything.”

“You’re asking the fish to come,” said Kwame Osei. “I can feel it. The whole sea can feel it. You’re sitting there being very polite at the water.” He drank his tea. “Stop it. Just hold the rod.”

So I held the rod. And tried very hard not to ask anything.

It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I said that the first year. It’s still true.

An hour after that, Kwame Osei said, very quietly, “Lucas.”

I looked up.

He wasn’t looking at his line. He was looking at the sea. Out past the point. Where the deep channel runs.

The pod was coming round.

Nine of them. Then more. Like hills. Grey, with long white scars down their backs from very old things, and the water coming off them in sheets as they rose, and the sound of them breathing out, enormous, like the sea itself sighing.

And in the middle of them, swimming close beside a big grey mother, a calf. Not small. The size of the lodge.

I knew it.

It was the one. From the first year. The one in the net, that Liam and Big Sigmund went down into the dark water for, the one Toby hummed to. It was three years older and three times the size and it was swimming beside its mother, very close, and as the pod came round the point and past the end of the jetty, it turned its head.

And looked at us.

Liam was on the beach. He’d come down for a swim, he says. In the cold. He does it every morning at the lodge; he says it’s the only place he’s ever been where the water’s colder than him.

He was standing in the shallows, up to his knees, when the calf turned.

It came in.

Not all the way. It can’t. It’s too big. But it came in from the channel, over the shelf, into the shallower water, as far as it could, until it was lying in the grey-green sea about forty yards out from where Liam was standing. With its back out of the water. Breathing.

Liam stood very still.

Big Sigmund was on the porch of the lodge. He saw. He came down the steps and across the beach and into the water beside Liam, in his clothes.

The calf breathed out. A long, slow sound. Enormous.

Then it sang.

Toby was on the jetty with me and Kwame Osei. He stood up.

“That’s the calf song,” he said. “The one the mother sang. When it came up. When it breathed.” He was shaking. “It’s singing it back. To them. It’s singing them the song for when somebody comes up out of the dark and breathes.”

The calf sang for as long as it takes to drink a cup of tea. To Liam and Big Sigmund, standing up to their waists in the cold sea. Then its mother called from the channel. And it turned, very slowly, and went back over the shelf into the deep water, and the pod went on round the point and south, the way they go every year.

Liam and Big Sigmund stood in the sea for a long time after.

Then Big Sigmund said, “Well,” very loudly, and blew his nose on his sleeve, and said it was the wind.

Sabeth came up the beach at noon. With her brass glasses and her book. She’d seen it from her porch.

She went straight to Liam. He was sitting on a log by the dead fire, wrapped in a blanket, with his hands round a cup.

“In two hundred years,” she said, “I’ve never once heard a deepback sing to anything that wasn’t a deepback.” She sat down next to him on the log. She didn’t sit down for important things, Halvane said once. Not ever. Not in three hundred years. “I’ve written it down. Every word. Every note.” She looked at him over her glasses. “It’s going to take me the rest of my life to understand it. I’m very grateful.”

Liam looked at her.

“I’m going to be a father again,” he said. “In the spring.”

Sabeth looked at him for a long time. Then she looked out at the sea, where the pod had gone.

“Then it knew,” she said. “They always know. When somebody’s carrying.”

Rory didn’t plane anything all week.

He sat on the porch of the lodge in the long chair with Liam’s blanket over his knees and a piece of driftwood in his hands that he didn’t touch, and looked at the sea. Every day. All day. Maura had taken his plane again, of course. She’d hidden it in his own coat pocket, the inside one, and he’d known it was there all week and hadn’t taken it out.

On the last afternoon he called Liam over.

“Sit down,” he said.

Liam sat on the end of the long chair.

“I made the air burn,” said Rory. “In the war. In a trench. First one who ever did. Your mother was in the next trench over. She was the second.” He turned the driftwood over in his hands. “That’s how we met. Two people setting fire to the sky because we were told to.”

Liam didn’t say anything.

“Then we had you,” said Rory. “In a shelter, on the edge of the dome, with nothing. And Sera. And Pip. And you came out with fire in your hands, you and Sera, because of what they did to us.” He put the driftwood down. “I spent your whole life frightened you’d set fire to something you couldn’t put out. Like I did.”

“Dad—”

“You never did,” said Rory. “Not once. Not one time. Not in the war, not on Avalon, not anywhere.” He looked at his son. “I just wanted to say. Before this next one comes. You never did. You always put it out.”

Liam sat on the end of the long chair for a long time.

“You taught me,” he said.

“No,” said Rory. “I taught you to light it. Your mother taught you to put it out.” He almost smiled. “She’s very good at that.”

On the third night, Dot called.

Not Dot. A kit. The one Crane sent to the Isk post with the others, the week after Kessry. A small grey long-ward kit, very old, re-silvered in Hearth silver by Dory last year, that sits in the corner by Teth’s battery in the snow and listens.

It called the lodge. Through the old band. To the box Konrad brought, which he brings every year, and which nobody’s ever needed.

“Query,” it said. A very small voice. Much smaller than Dot’s. “Is Lucas Dask there?”

I was there. I took the box.

“This one is Isk,” said the kit. “This one heard the fold. On the grey band. Before. The way Dot taught.” A pause. “This one told Teth. Teth was ready.”

“What happened?”

The kit was quiet for a long time.

“Twelve,” it said. “Twelve came through. In the square, where the girl lives. The one with the glass stone. At night.” A pause. “Teth’s battery was already turned. Because this one told him. Eleven breaths before.”

“And?”

“Nine are on the ground in the snow,” said the kit. “Teth says they will not get up. Three folded away again. With—”

It stopped.

“With what?”

“With two children,” said the kit. “From the square. Teth could not reach them. He was at the battery.” A pause. “The girl with the glass stone is not one of them. Teth carried her into the post himself. She is in the corner with this one. She is holding the stone.”

I went. Of course I did. I was halfway out of the door before the kit had finished.

Konrad stopped me.

He put his hand on my arm. On the porch of the lodge, in the dark, with the sea behind him. He’s not strong. He’s never been strong. He’s a man with a sheet. He put his hand on my arm and I stopped.

“Okafor’s there,” he said. “She’ll have been there before the kit finished calling.” He didn’t let go. “Gilgamesh will be there. Dory will be there. The kits heard it. The battery was turned. Eleven breaths.”

“Two children,” I said.

“I know,” said Konrad. “And Dory will be up the thread after them before you’ve got your coat on.” He looked at me. “You built all of it, Lucas. The Hedge. The arches. The posts. The kits. All of it. So that it would work without you.” He took his hand away. “Let it.”

I stood on the porch for a long time.

Then I went to the box and called Dory. She was already gone. Okafor answered from the Isk post.

“She’s up the thread,” said Okafor. “With Elin and Kwame. The fold leaves a mark, Dot says. For a while. Like a door that’s just been shut.” A pause. “Go back to your fire, Cadet. That’s an order.”

I didn’t go back to the fire. I sat on the end of the jetty in the dark with the box in my lap. All night.

Kwame Osei came and sat next to me at about two. He didn’t say anything. He brought two rods. He baited both and handed me one.

“Hold it,” he said. “Don’t ask anything.”

I held it.

At dawn the box said, in Dory’s voice, very tired: “Both. Both of them. On a ship on the far side of the second arm. Asleep. Not rooted yet. We were in time.” A long breath. “Dad. We were in time.”

I put the box down on the jetty.

And my line went taut.

It was a fish. Silver. As long as my arm. It came up out of the grey-green water in the first light and hung on the end of the line, and I didn’t ask it anything. I didn’t do anything. I just held the rod.

Kwame Osei looked at it.

“That one wanted it,” he said. “Not you. It.”

“I know,” I said.

I put it back. I always do.

At the last fire Konrad stood up with his sheet and proposed next year. Aurelius seconded. Everybody said yes. Taveth offered to make the soup next year instead of bringing it, and thirty-eight voices said no.

Then Konrad looked down the fire at Trevor’s empty place, and Sigmund’s. The places they’d have sat, if they’d come.

“Next year,” he said, “I’d like to propose that Lucas’s two come.”

Everybody looked at him.

“They’ve earned it,” said Konrad. “Trevor sat with fifty-two people on Varrel. And Sigmund made a bird into a yes.” He sat down. “That’s what you have to do. Sit with somebody. Or make something that was wrong into something that’s right. That’s how you know.”

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Rory said, “Seconded,” very gruffly.

And Liam said, “Thirded,” which isn’t a word.

The General walked down the rocks on the last night. Late. To the stone house at the end.

He came back at dawn. We were all on the jetty with our coats and our bags, waiting for the boat. He came up the rocks very slowly, with his hat in his hand. And he stopped in front of all of us.

“I’ve asked her,” he said.

Nobody moved.

“To come to Avalon,” said the General. “For the winter. When the pod’s gone south and there’s nothing to watch. To stay in the wing. Near Luna and the children.” He looked at his hat. “Near me.”

“And?” said Konrad.

The General looked back down the rocks. At the stone house. At the light in the window. At a tall woman in a long grey coat, standing on her porch, with her brass glasses, watching.

“She said she’d have to ask the deepbacks,” he said.

There was a long silence.

“And?” said Konrad again. Everybody else was too frightened to.

The General put his hat on.

“They said yes,” he said. “Apparently.”

Mother was at the arch when we came home. With the pot. And Rue on her hip.

Rue saw all thirty-eight of us come through the arch at once, all men, all tall, all coming very fast through a door. I saw her see it. I saw her go stiff.

And then she looked at Oona.

Oona was standing next to Mother. She’d come to meet us too. She’s been everywhere Mother’s been, the whole week, Mother says. Every room. Every walk. The whole time we were gone.

Oona held out her hand. Not to take Rue’s. Just held it out. Open. Flat. In the air.

And Rue let go of the apron.

And put her hand in Oona’s.

Nobody on the platform said anything. Thirty-eight men, home from the sea, with their bags. And not one of them said a word.

Rue held Oona’s hand for as long as it takes to drink a cup of tea. Very tight. Looking at all of us. Then she let go, and took the apron again.

Oona looked at her empty hand for a long time. Then she looked at Mother.

Mother was crying into the tea towel. She’d brought it to the arch specially. She said she had a feeling.

Dory told it at the long table that night. All of it. With Elin on one side and Kwame on the other, both of them still grey with tiredness.

The fold leaves a mark. Dot was right. Not a door, not a thread, not anything any of us had ever followed before. More like the smell a room has after somebody’s left it. Dory stood in the square on Isk in the snow with her glasses off and Teth’s nine Refined lying round her, and she put her hand out into the air where the three had gone, and she could feel it. Faint. Going a long way off. Very fast.

“It’s like following a sneeze,” said Elin. “She’ll tell you it isn’t. It is.”

Kwame couldn’t feel it at all. But he could feel the ground at the other end, once Dory found it. A ship’s deck is a kind of ground, he says. It was very surprised to be asked anything.

So Dory followed the sneeze. And Elin made a door where it ended. And Kwame asked the deck of a white ship on the far side of the second arm to open, very politely, under two small children asleep in a white room with no beds yet. Just blankets. On the floor. Waiting.

“They hadn’t started,” said Dory. “No roots. No grey. They’d only just got them there. They were waiting for somebody.” She put her hands round her cup. “A scientist. One of the small pale ones. He was in the room when the floor opened.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing,” said Dory. “He looked at us. He wrote something on his slate. Then he folded away.” She drank her tea. “He didn’t even try to stop us. He just wrote it down.”

The two children are a brother and sister. Seven and four. From the square on Isk, the same square as the girl with the glass stone. Their grandmother came to the Isk post in the snow at dawn, Okafor says, and stood outside the door for an hour because she didn’t think she was allowed in. Teth went out and carried her in. The way he carried the girl.

The girl with the glass stone is called Linnet. She’s nine now. She sat in the corner of the post all night with the kit, holding the stone Trevor made her, and the soft Taveth she showed me the first year, the one she told was smaller than the real one. When the two children came through Elin’s door, she was the first one to them. She gave the little one the soft Taveth.

“It’s for when you’re frightened,” she said. “So you know where the bad soup is.”

Taveth heard that, at the long table, when Dory told it. He didn’t say anything. He went out on the porch and stood there for a long time.

Linnet’s grandfather came to the post too. In the morning. The one who got one of the first commendations on the grass before the Table, for carrying her forty miles through the snow on his back when the Refined first came to Isk. He’s very old now. He walked to the post through the square, past the nine white shapes in the snow that Teth’s battery had put there, and didn’t look at them once.

He found Linnet in the corner with the kit. He sat down on the floor next to her. He didn’t say anything. He put his hand flat on the floor beside the kit. On the boards. Next to its grey shell.

Teth says he kept it there until the kit said, very quietly, “Query. Is this unit being thanked?”

“Yes,” said Linnet’s grandfather.

“Logged,” said the kit.

Okafor wrote on her slate. Under Through and Anywhere.

Eleven breaths.

She showed it to Dot. Dot’s colours came up, all five.

“The Isk unit,” said Dot. “Designation 2-7-L. Long-ward. Very old. It was afraid it would not hear in time.” A pause. “It asked this one, the night before, whether it was good enough.”

“What did you tell it?” said Okafor.

“This one said: nobody is good enough. You listen anyway.” A pause. “Logged.”

Mother told me about the week. Later. On the step, with the stars coming out, and Rue asleep upstairs between her and the empty place where Oona would be in a minute.

Oona had been with them every hour. Not touching. Never touching. Just there. At the stove and the long table and the garden and the step. When Mother went to lift the carousel on the Sunday, Oona lifted the other side, and Rue sat on the bench and watched the whole thing go up into the air with her two people underneath it, holding it, and Mother says she watched Oona the whole time. Not the carousel. Oona.

On the fourth day Oona took her to the plane tree by the garden wall. The one Queenie gets the leaves from. Mother came too, of course, with the apron. Oona stood under the tree and looked up.

Then she lifted. Not the tree. Herself. A foot. Two feet. The way Mother does when she’s reaching a high shelf. Up into the lowest branches, slowly, with her hands out. And she picked a leaf. The biggest one she could find. And came down.

And held it out to Rue. By the very end of the stem. The way Queenie does.

Rue took it.

“She’d been watching Queenie,” said Mother. “Oona. All week. Learning how Queenie does it.” She looked at the north field. “She learns everything by watching. She always has. She learned me by watching.”

“And the arch?” I said. “Her hand?”

Mother didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I didn’t know she’d do that,” she said. “Oona. Hold it out. I didn’t tell her to.” She turned her cup round in her hands. “I think she knew it had to be in front of all of you. All the men. All at once. Coming through a door.” She looked at me. “So Rue would know. That even then. Even with all of that coming at her. There was a hand that wasn’t the doorway.”

Liam went straight home to Anya. He didn’t stop for tea.

The General went to the wing to tell Luna.

She was in the courtyard with Elin, who’d only just slept off Isk. The General stood in the courtyard gate with his bag still in his hand and his hat still on, and Luna looked up and saw his face, and stood up very slowly.

“Dad?”

“Sabeth’s coming,” he said. “For the winter. If that’s all right.”

Luna didn’t say anything. She came across the courtyard. She’s the only one of us who’s never once been frightened of him. Not when she was small, not on the ice, not ever. She came across the courtyard and took the hat off his head, and held it, and looked at him.

“You asked her,” she said.

“I asked her.”

“You.”

“Me,” said the General. “I sat down first. On her porch. In her chair. And then I asked.”

Luna cried. She doesn’t, much. Trevor came out of the wing and stood next to her and held her hand, the way he did the night Sabeth first came to supper, and the General stood in his own courtyard without his hat, very straight, and let his daughter cry on him.

“Mum would have liked her,” said Luna, into his coat.

“Yes,” said the General. “I think she would.” He put his hand on the back of her head. “I asked her that too. In my head. Before I asked Sabeth.”

“What did she say?”

The General looked over Luna’s head at the north field for a long time.

“She said, about time, Alaric,” he said.

Corvan came up the hill road that night, after Dory had told it. He’d heard on the Herald’s evening sheet. He stood in the kitchen door.

“Isk,” he said. “He went for Isk. With the fold.”

“Yes, love,” said Mother.

“It’s a small world. A long way out. On the edge.” Corvan looked at the long table. At all of us. “He’s practising. Kessry and then Isk. Further in each time. Closer.” He stopped. “He’s wanted this house since the day you spoke from that stove. He’s never once said it. But I know. I’ve watched him look at it on the band. Every night.”

Nobody said anything.

“He’ll come here,” said Corvan. “Not soon. But he’ll come.”

Okafor, at the end of the table, didn’t look up from her slate.

“Then we’ll hear him eleven breaths early,” she said. “And the kettle will be on.”

I went up the hill road with Mother and Rue and Oona. Slowly. The way you walk with someone very small.

At the top Mother stopped and looked at me.

“Did you catch anything?” she said.

“One,” I said. “It wanted it. Not me.”

Mother nodded. As if that was the most sensible thing she’d ever heard.

“Put the kettle on,” she said.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Nine hundred and eight. One of them, Wren says, from Isk, said it twice. Once for each.

Wren wrote the count. And under it:

Thirty-eight fathers: sat down.

Isk: two home. In time.

Rue: Oona’s hand. Once.

Days 12205–12248. The Point.

At the lodge Liam told the fathers Anya was expecting, Rory hugged him a fifth time, and the deepback calf from the net came in and sang the breathing song back to him and Big Sigmund. Isk’s kit heard the fold eleven breaths early, so Teth’s battery stopped nine Refined, and Dory brought both stolen children home in time while Konrad kept me at the lodge. The General asked Sabeth to winter on Avalon, and at the arch Rue took Oona’s hand.