Chapter 531: Still Here

The word she’d chosen was Still Here.

Sabeth told me that herself, on the morning before the wedding, sitting on the low wall of the keepers’ garden on Ister with her boots off and the gold-and-silver light coming through the trees. She’d been looking for a word for three hundred years, she said. She’d refused two good men because she couldn’t find one that was right, and she’d thought for a long time that she was the problem, that she simply didn’t have a word in her the way other people do, and then one longest night she was sitting on the wing porch with the General and she’d heard it.

“Not him saying it,” she said. “Just — it being true. That I was still there. That I was still myself. That I was still here, when I’d thought I might not be.”

She looked at her boots, sitting side by side on the wall.

“Three hundred years to find a word,” she said, “and it was only two of them.”

“The keepers say you don’t find it,” I said. “You hear it.”

“Yes,” said Sabeth. “I know that now.”

She put her boots back on. She’s not tall. She’s about the same height as Mother, with Sabeth’s particular quality of taking up exactly the space she means to and no more. Her hair has gone silver at the front, which she says happened in the war, and the rest is still dark. She’s been a First for a long time. She’s older than the Hedge. She has the particular quality, that old people sometimes have, of having been frightened by enough things that she isn’t frightened of much anymore.

She’d never been married. She told me that too. She’d been asked, twice, by two men she liked, and she’d said no, and they’d said they understood, and she’d carried that for a long time — the fact that they’d been gracious about it, which is somehow harder than if they hadn’t been.

“And the General,” she said. “He was married for nineteen years. To someone who died.”

“Luna’s mother,” I said.

“Yes.” She looked at the garden. The keepers had it in autumn colours — gold and rust and the particular dark red that Ister trees go in the cold. “I think he was frightened I’d feel like — like I was second. Like I was what was left.”

“Are you?”

“No,” said Sabeth. “I’m after. That’s different. I’m what comes after. And I’m very glad she was first, because she made him what he is now. And what he is now is what I’d like to marry.”

She looked at her hands.

“He said: a great many years I didn’t expect,” she said. “I know what that is. I didn’t expect them either. I thought the war would end me. I thought there wasn’t going to be any more of this. And then there was.” She looked up. “Still here,” she said. “Both of us.”

The wedding was in the afternoon, in the keepers’ garden, with the gold sky going pink at the edges and the floating mountains in the distance and the whole of Ister smelling of autumn.

The keepers married them. Nine of them, which is every keeper on Ister, because all nine asked to come. The General stood on the grey stone path in the garden in his good coat — the same one, let out twice, that he’s worn to every important occasion since before I was born — and Mother fixed his collar, because he hadn’t quite got it, and said, “There,” very quietly, and the General said, “Thank you, Dorothy,” and Mother’s chin wobbled for about half a second before she got it under control.

Sabeth came out of the small house where she’d stayed the night. She was wearing a coat the colour of Ister’s trees in autumn, and she had her hair down, and she was carrying the book. It’s her book — the deepback book, three hundred years of watching them in the channel, every dive and song and name she’s given them. She’s carrying it because it’s the most important thing she owns, and in the Ister custom you bring to your wedding the most important thing you own, so the other person can hold it for a moment and understand what they’re taking on.

The General looked at the book. He looked at it the way he looks at things when he’s decided something — carefully, completely, and from no distance at all.

He held out his hands.

She put the book in them.

He held it. He stood there in the gold-and-pink light with the autumn trees behind him and the nine keepers in a half-circle and two hundred and something people from the family on the garden benches, and he held her book the way you hold something that’s been someone else’s whole life.

Then he gave it back.

The keepers say the word three times. The first keeper said Still Here very quietly. The second said it a little louder. The third said it at full voice, the way a keeper’s voice carries — it went up into the gold sky and came back off the floating mountains, and I heard it on the bench, clearly, and Mother, next to me, closed her eyes.

Aurelius didn’t marry them. He’s done five now, and he said to Sabeth beforehand that he was at her disposal, but the keepers had it, and she said she knew, and thank you. What Aurelius did was stand in the back row of the garden with Konrad and cry very steadily throughout, which Konrad said afterwards was the most undignified he’d ever seen Aurelius in forty years.

“You cried too,” said Aurelius.

“Yes,” said Konrad. “But I was quiet about it.”

Luna cried. Of course she did. She put her head on Risa’s shoulder at the moment Sabeth said the word, which was a good moment to do it, because Risa had already started. Hana passed the handkerchief. Andraste and Sera were composed, which surprised me. Aune was not, which didn’t. Halvane had Ilas’s hand in both of his.

Lumi was on Teva’s lap in the front row. When the word went up into the sky she looked up at it, the way she looks at things — straight and open and from the beginning — and then she said good, which is her word for things that are as they should be.

She’s said it nine times now. It’s always right.

Teva’s grandmother was the one who poured.

There was a brief argument about this. Mother had views. Teva’s grandmother had views. The keepers had a view, which was that the eldest is the eldest and that is that. Mother said she knew perfectly well the eldest was the eldest, she just thought she should be standing closer to the pot. Teva’s grandmother said she was welcome to stand wherever she liked as long as she did it on the other side of the table.

They compromised. Teva’s grandmother poured. Mother handed out the cups, one by one, to everyone who’d come.

There were a lot of cups.

The families had come, all of them. Liam and Anya with Rory and Isla and Cormac and tiny Aoife, who set fire to nothing, possibly because Anya had spoken to her very seriously before the ceremony about the importance of this occasion, and possibly because Rory had hidden all the nearest candles beforehand, and possibly because Cormac, home from the Wall in his cadet coat with the flame-scar still fading on his forearm, was standing next to her and had a hand on her shoulder. Big Sigmund with Jessa and Ingrid and Tomas. Aurelius and his books. Kyria and Taveth, with Kyrie sitting very straight in her good coat and her hair up in the Hyrrani way, the way the blade-apprentices wear it, and Andraste’s hand briefly on her shoulder before Kyrie stood to greet the General with the Hyrrani welcome, hands open, which the General answered correctly, which made Kyrie’s face do something complicated and glad.

Vessa was there. She’s twenty-two now and she works with Halloway on the ward, mostly the long ward, the cases that need a particular kind of patience, and she’d come from Avalon in her ward coat and changed on the boat. Corin was with Tiri — Tiri who’d sailed the Lumi from Ister to Caul and back and who was sitting with her arm through Corin’s looking out at the garden with the particular quiet expression she has, like someone who is very happy and has decided not to announce it. I noticed Corin’s hand on her arm and I noticed the way neither of them was making anything of it. I didn’t say anything. Lio would tell me when there was something to tell.

Ash was there. Black-eyed, since the last hall, since the hundred and fourth collar. She’s quieter than she was. She can see the knots in things, she said, and once you can see them it’s hard to look at anything without seeing them. She was sitting next to Okafor and they weren’t talking, just sitting, two people who are comfortable in silence, which is a thing you have to earn with Okafor.

Dory was there with Corvan, in a row of chairs near the front. The glass bird was in her pocket. I know because she told me, the morning before, with the particular slightly embarrassed quality she has when she’s decided to trust someone with something. “He gave it to me at the Fours,” she said. “I carry it. I think — I think I want to carry it for a while. Before anything else.” I told her that was sensible. She said she didn’t want to be sensible, she just wanted to be right.

The Firsts had come. Fifty-three of them, plus Jory Fenwick of Onsey who’d run all the way and arrived slightly out of breath. Hanne Brisk had Pell Jorad beside her. He’s been on Caul a month now, in the room with the window, and he’s teaching himself to climb a real stile in Hanne’s field, and the Herald has been running his letters from the cliff above the Hazy Field every other morning under the heading Still Learning, which Luka edits.

Dinraal came in his armour without the neck-piece, which is the most dressed-down Dinraal gets. Aramaeis was with Tiamat, who had a flower in her hair, which I tried not to react to. The Drenn queen came and stood behind the garden wall the way she stands behind things, present and accounted for but not, as she says, one for benches.

The General’s hand was shaking when he took the cup. Sabeth saw it. She put her hand over his, very briefly, and the shaking stopped.

Okafor was there. She stood at the back of the garden in a quiet coat, not the uniform, with Ennis’s slate in her hand that said Good, which she hadn’t turned over. She stayed to the end. She stayed through the supper and through the toasts and through Halvane’s speech, which was forty minutes and contained at least nine things that made Ilas put her face in her hands. She stayed while people drifted off to the Ister houses and the night came down warm over the garden.

When I found her she was sitting on the low wall with her boots off, in the same place Sabeth had sat that morning.

“All right?” I said.

“Yes,” said Okafor. She looked at the garden, empty now, with the last of the candles burning.

“He asked me first,” she said. “The General. If I’d mind. If she came to Avalon.” She was quiet for a moment. “I told him I’d mind very much if she didn’t.”

I didn’t say anything.

“She’s good for him,” said Okafor. “He worries less when she’s there. He still worries. But he worries about the right things.”

She put her boots back on.

“Also,” she said, “she is three hundred years old and has never once been afraid of anything I’ve said, which I find I appreciate enormously.”

Sigmund told us at supper.

He didn’t mean to tell us at supper. He meant to tell us quietly, to Mother first, and then Risa, and work outward from there in a sensible and orderly fashion. This plan lasted until Tovi, sitting across from him with her cup of Ister apple-wine that she hadn’t touched, said, to Risa, as if it was a small thing, “I keep going off wine. Is that normal?”

Risa put her cup down.

She looked at Tovi. She looked at Sigmund. She looked at Tovi again.

“Sig,” said Risa.

Sigmund went the particular colour he goes when something is entirely known.

“We were going to tell you after,” he said.

“When after?” said Risa.

“*After the wedding. After the—”

“After when?”

Luna was already standing up. She didn’t say anything. She went round the table and she took Sigmund’s face in both hands and held it for a moment and then said, very quietly, “My boy.”

Sigmund made a very small sound.

“Sorry,” said Risa. “I know you wanted to — I’m sorry.” She wasn’t crying yet, but it was close.

“No,” said Sigmund. “*It’s all right. We just found out last week. We didn’t know how—”

“I didn’t know either,” said Tovi, “until the wine. The wine was the first sign.”

Sera leaned across and took Tovi’s hand and didn’t say anything, which is Sera’s way, and Tovi looked at her and her eyes went bright and she smiled the kind of smile that happens when something you’ve been carefully not feeling too strongly about turns out to be the realest thing in the room.

Tova told me afterwards — not Tovi, her mother Teva — that Tovi and Sigmund had been trying for a year and a half and that she’d been very good about not saying anything to anyone and that the last three months she’d had to sit on her hands every other morning not to.

“I am not a person,” said Teva, “who sits on her hands.”

The General heard it from two tables over. He stood up. He’s not given to standing up at the wrong moment, but he stood up and looked at Sigmund — just looked at him, across the supper table on a warm autumn evening in Ister with the gold sky going dark — and Sigmund looked back, and the General said nothing at all, which was perfect.

Rory hugged Sigmund. His seventh hug of his life.

“We’re counting,” said Liam.

“I know we’re counting,” said Rory.

Maura went very quiet and then said she needed to check something in her bag and didn’t come back for ten minutes, by which time everyone understood that she’d been standing in the corridor of the Ister house knitting something very fast.

The fathers’ lodge trip was the following week, as it always is in the autumn.

This year the new guests were Sigmund — Konrad’s invitation finally accepted, as it had to be, Rory said, because a man who is about to be a father cannot in good conscience decline — and Davo, who is Pip’s husband now, and who came with a tin of Aun honey cakes for the long journey, which lasted until Aurelius found the tin.

“Those were for the trip,” said Davo.

“Yes,” said Aurelius. “And now you’ve made it.”

The Ister lodge is on the headland above the channel, in the stone house with the fire that Sabeth’s research station left behind when she moved her base of operations to Avalon’s wing. It has a narrow dock and a jetty and very cold water and not enough hot water for the number of people who want it, which Rory and Konrad have argued about every year and have never actually fixed.

Halvane slept every afternoon. He always does, here, he says, because nobody asks him anything. This year Ilas came for the first day and left on the second, and Halvane’s sleeping improved immediately.

The deepback calf came over the shelf on the second morning. It’s not a calf anymore — it’s been three years and it’s lodge-sized itself now — but it comes every year to the shallows, to Liam and Big Sigmund who first sang back to it, and this year it stayed longer, surfacing every few minutes, which Davo watched from the end of the dock with his hands in his pockets and his coat blowing.

“They know,” said Liam.

“Know what?”

“When somebody’s carrying.” Liam looked out at the water. “Sabeth said. They always know.”

Davo looked at the deepback surfacing in the shallows forty yards out.

“I haven’t told Pip yet,” he said. “I mean, that it came. That it—”

“Tell her,” said Liam. “She’ll want to know.”

The deepback went down. The water closed over it, smooth and cold.

“Liam,” said Davo. “How do you—” He stopped. “How do you know what to do. When they come.”

Liam thought about it.

“You don’t,” he said. “You just stay near them. And you do the thing you can do, and somebody else does the thing you can’t, and then you stay near them.”

Davo looked at the channel.

“All right,” he said.

Konrad, who had been fishing behind them and failing to catch anything, wrote in the fish slate in the column marked Wanted it? the word No. Then he drew a line through it and wrote Yes instead.

“You didn’t catch anything,” said Big Sigmund.

“I know what I mean,” said Konrad.

Rory found Davo teaching himself to tie sailor’s knots on the jetty that afternoon. He’d borrowed a piece of rope from the dock and was working through them one at a time from a small book, and he had the focus he brings to anything practical — Davo is good with his hands, all four fingers of each of them, and the rope went where he put it.

“Pip’s?” said Rory, sitting down beside him.

“She’s been showing me. On the train runs. When we’re going through the long tunnels with nothing to see.” He finished the knot, pulled it tight, undid it. “She says if I learn twenty I can try the boats.”

“How many have you got?”

“Seven.”

Rory looked at the knot.

“She’ll make you do it again,” said Rory. “That one. It’s right but it’s not clean.”

“I know,” said Davo. “She always knows.”

He undid it and started again. The deepback surfaced again, further out, and blew, and went down.

“Rory,” he said, while his hands worked. “When Maura—” He stopped.

“It’s frightening,” said Rory. “Every time. Even the third and the fourth time. It doesn’t go.”

“How do you—”

“You breathe. You do the thing you can. You let her do the thing you can’t.” Rory watched the knot forming. “And you remember that she’s the one doing the work, so if you need to be frightened, you do it quietly.”

Davo tied the knot. Clean, this time. He looked at it.

“I haven’t told Pip yet,” he said. “That the deepback came.”

“She’ll want to know,” said Rory.

“I know,” said Davo. “I want to tell her myself. On the train. In a tunnel.”

Rory looked at him for a moment.

“All right,” said Rory.

He got up, and left the rope with him, and went to tell Liam he’d need to plane something small.

The war didn’t stop for the wedding, which is the nature of wars. Okafor’s sheets kept coming through the band, and two of them were waiting for her when she came back from Ister, and she read them on the dock before the boat left, standing in her coat with the morning light flat on the water.

Dot told me what they said. Three more bells found — not hung yet, just placed, in a dry valley on a world called Sann, inner second arm — by the fold, not the door. The kits were watching. They heard it eleven breaths early. The bells were gone before anyone came, taken back by whatever put them there, which Dot says is new behaviour. They’ve been watching the Hedge watch them.

“They’re learning us,” said Dot. “The way we learned them.”

She was in the pack on my back. I could feel her turning in it.

“How long?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Dot. “Until he’s ready. Until the voice says go.”

The voice in the Prime. The thing the Sorn houses put in him, that speaks through him, that uses him. Corvan knows it. He’s heard it his whole life. He came off the boat from Ister and read Okafor’s sheets on the dock beside her, standing shoulder to shoulder with his hands in his pockets, and when he was done he said nothing for a moment.

“Still coming,” said Okafor.

“Yes,” said Corvan. “But not yet.”

“What does it want first?”

He thought about it.

“I think,” he said, “it wants us to know it’s watching. It wants us to know it can go anywhere. So that when it moves, we’re already frightened.”

“I’m already frightened,” said Okafor.

“I know,” said Corvan. “But you don’t act frightened. That’s different.”

Okafor turned her slate over in her hands.

“How long have you known it,” she said. Not a question.

“My whole life,” said Corvan. “It was in the house. It was in the air. It spoke to the walls before it spoke to him, and then it spoke through him, and you couldn’t—” He stopped. “After a while you couldn’t tell where the voice started and he ended. That’s what it does. It settles.”

He looked at the channel. The water was very still.

“Is that what it wants with the Hedge?” said Okafor.

“I think so,” said Corvan. “He wants what it wants. He always has. And what it wants is to settle. Into something. And then it and the something are the same thing, and you can’t tell the difference.”

Okafor looked at her slate.

“Not in my Hedge,” she said.

“No,” said Corvan. “I know.”

I found Mother at the end of the supper, sitting alone at the far end of the garden table with her cup in both hands, looking at the gold sky going dark.

She does this sometimes. Sits at the edge of things when they’re very good, to get a proper look.

“All right?” I said.

“Yes,” said Mother. She was quiet for a moment. “I keep thinking about the word.”

“Still here.”

“Yes.” She turned the cup in her hands. “We weren’t, for a long time. Me and your father. We weren’t still here. We were in a corridor with nine feet of sky. And then we were and we didn’t quite know what that meant.” She looked up at the dark coming in over the mountains. “I think about him. At things like this. I think — he’d have liked it. He’d have liked the word.”

I sat down next to her.

“He’d have liked the General,” I said.

“Oh, enormously,” said Mother. “They’d have argued about everything. It would have been wonderful.” She smiled. “And he’d have liked Sabeth. He liked quiet people who weren’t quiet because they had nothing to say.”

I took her hand. She let me.

“Do you know what your father would have said,” she said, “if he’d seen all this?”

“What?”

“He’d have said: I told you.”

She stood up, and straightened her coat, and went back to pour the last cups.

Ilya Cord left the ward.

Halloway let her go after two months. Her voice is coming back slowly — it’s low and rough and nothing like what it was, and she says she’d rather have it this way, rough, than have it back smooth and high and belonging to a girl on the ice. The girl on the ice is Saelle’s friend. The woman whose voice sounds like something that’s been a long time away is Ilya Cord.

She’s living in the small house at the back of the orchard. Luka helped her find it — he knew it was empty, the way Luka knows all the quiet corners of Avalon. It has a window that looks out over the orchard toward the north field, and Ilya sits in it every morning with her tea, watching the apples.

Saelle comes every day. They’ve started singing again — not performing, just singing, in the kitchen, with the door open, the way they must have done on the ice, which I imagine is very cold and very beautiful and nothing like a kitchen on Avalon.

They’re working on something new. I heard it once, through the orchard wall, in the evening when the apples were still on the trees. I didn’t stop. It’s not mine to stop for yet. But I heard it, and it was the fourth one, and it was different — not the ice, not waiting, but something past the waiting, something that knows the person is already close.

Luka heard them through the window and wouldn’t tell me what it was. He said it was the fourth one but different, and that I’d hear it when it was ready.

“How long?” I asked.

He thought about it with the particular quality he has now — not a small boy anymore, eleven and careful with words, the way careful-with-words people go when they learn what words are for.

“When it wants to be,” he said.

Bess has been making Ilya a pair of shoes. She measured her feet on the ward on a Tuesday, and she’s been working on them in the evenings in the small room at the top of the stairs while Rue holds the thread. She says she works better when there’s something to work toward. Rue says the number of the Count every evening when she brings the thread, as if Bess needs to know. Bess says she doesn’t mind knowing.

“Two hundred and forty-three,” said Rue, the other evening.

“That’s a lot of mornings,” said Bess.

“Yes,” said Rue. She held the thread. It didn’t pull.

The Scarecrow queen came to the garden wall the evening we got back from Ister. She comes most evenings. This time she was humming something — not one of the nine, not Saelle’s, something older, something with no words in it, the way the queens hum to themselves when they’re not talking to anyone.

Genny heard it from the Next Door garden and came out to the wall, and the two of them stood on opposite sides for a while, the queen humming and Genny not saying anything, which is Genny’s particular gift. Then Garnet came out too, and the queen’s humming shifted slightly, the way it does when it’s aware of something else.

“She changed the note,” said Garnet. “Just then. When I came out.”

“She does that,” said Genny. “She’s playing.”

The Scarecrow queen turned her head slightly, the way she does when she’s heard something correctly.

“Is it a game?” said Garnet.

The queen went back to her humming. It was neither a yes nor a no, which is about as close to teasing as a queen gets.

Miss Pell was at the Next Door gate with Maura and Ingrid when I came past. The autumn term had started, which meant new children, and the new children this year included a small girl from Myre called Tress who had been in one of the halls and who didn’t like ceilings. Miss Pell said she was doing very well, which Miss Pell says about all the children, and which is both true and strategically deployed.

“She sits outside for lessons,” said Miss Pell. “We’ve moved three desks into the garden. The others prefer it.”

“In autumn?” I said.

“Blankets,” said Miss Pell.

Rue has been going to Next Door three mornings a week. She still doesn’t come inside. She sits on the step by the gate and Oona sits with her and sometimes the other children come out to the step and sometimes they don’t, and Rue doesn’t mind either way. She’s started answering when the other children talk to her. Not much — a word, sometimes two. But Miss Pell says that’s how it goes: a word, then two, then one morning you have a conversation and you can’t remember when it changed.

He’d asked Corvan, before he started writing publicly, whether there were things he shouldn’t say. Corvan thought about it and said there were things it would be kind not to say, and things that would put people at risk, and those were the same list. Pell said he understood the difference. Corvan said he believed him.

Hanne had shown him the orchard and the Scarecrow queen’s field and the east gate and the small library and the dock. Pell had stood at the dock for a long time, looking at the water. He’d said, quietly, that he hadn’t known there were places like this. Hanne hadn’t said anything, because Hanne is very good at knowing when not to. Some things you don’t need to explain if you let them stand long enough.

Pell Jorad sent a letter to the Herald from Caul. His letters run every week now, Tuesdays. He’s been teaching himself Stile on Hanne’s grass field, and his knees are in a state, and he still can’t climb a stile without thinking about it.

“But I keep thinking about it,” he wrote. “That’s the part I didn’t expect. I thought I was afraid of it. I’m not afraid. I think about it. I climb it badly and I climb it again. I had no idea that this is what a game is.”

The Herald ran the letter under a soft one he’d been given — the Before, grey, round. In the picture he’s holding it up with both hands, sitting on the grass in Hanne’s field with his knees muddy and the stile behind him and the Hazy Field going gold in the autumn light.

Imre said it was the cover.

Quenby said she’d been holding the shot for a week.

“How,” said Imre.

“From a very long way away,” said Quenby.

The leagues, before the Long Season ends:

Stile — the Hill came home to a reception. Nine thousand people from the hill met them at the arch, with Brann Harrow in the front and the small practice diamond the children have put up in the field behind the town, with a stile the same height as the Carrow one. Sigmund threw the last Long Season game and the Hill finished first overall, which has never happened since the league started. The Haze are second. Hanne says back next year. Sigmund says waiting at the first stile.

Ring — the Gales won the season. Pim scored thirty-nine goals, which is the most any eight-year-old has ever scored in a season, and the other eight-year-olds on Myre and Onsey have started practising Ring in their school halls, which the Herald has been following in a series Luka edits under the title Thirty-Nine.

Ridge — the Ridge-Ends missed the final by one game. Kyrie scored twenty-four overall, still the youngest top scorer in four hundred years of records. Okafor has the record on her board. It’s the only record she keeps of anything other than threats and targets, which Ennis pointed out, and which Okafor said was because those were different and this was Kyrie.

Long Way — the Lumi beat the Kethri twice more before the season closed. Tiri says she’s going to sail the Kasrai straits in the dark next year, which Halvane says is impossible. Ilas says Halvane should perhaps not use that word within Tiri’s hearing.

Run — Liam finished fourth overall. He says if Aoife doesn’t set fire to anything next season he’s got a real chance at the board. Anya says she’s spoken to Aoife. Rory says the problem is that Aoife’s accuracy is improving.

The new Count stands at two hundred and fifty-one, pegged by Rue on the porch each morning. She says the number and puts the peg in and goes inside for breakfast. She’s added a word since the Fours. She says the number and then she says again, every morning, one word, like a promise kept.

The stars said Not yet this morning. A thousand and a hundred and nine.

The General: married. (Still here.) / Tovi: going off wine. / Rue: again.

Days 13352–13487. Still Here.

The General and Sabeth married in the keepers’ garden on Ister in the autumn, with the word she’d had since the longest night. Sigmund announced Tovi’s pregnancy at the supper table when she mentioned she’d gone off wine. The fathers came to the lodge, and the deepback came to Davo. And Ilya Cord left the ward and went to live in the house by the orchard, where Saelle comes every day and they sing in the kitchen with the door open.