Chapter 218 Two Peaks

I didn't want to leave Risa.

She knew it before I said anything. She was sitting up in bed when I woke, her back against the wall and three pillows behind her, with a bowl of Priya's porridge balanced on her stomach like a shelf.

"Don't," she said.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were about to say you'd stay."

"I was about to say good morning."

"Good morning. Go to the mountain."

I sat on the edge of the bed. Sera was still asleep on the far side, curled toward the wall with one arm flung over her head. Luna was already up. I could hear her in the other room, moving the way she moved when she was trying not to wake anyone: carefully, and too much.

"It's half a day," Risa said. "Keir's flying. You're not even carrying anything."

"I know."

"Then what?"

I looked at the curve under the bowl.

"She's twenty-eight weeks," I said.

"By size."

"By size."

"And by size she'll be twenty-eight and a half weeks when you get home." Risa took a spoonful of porridge. "Toby's here. Sera's here. Priya's here. Edda is apparently here, and has already come round once to tell me I'm sitting wrong. The queen is under the floor. My brother is somewhere outside pretending he isn't standing guard."

"Is he?"

"He's been on the porch since dawn. He thinks I don't know."

I laughed.

Risa put the spoon down.

"Lucas," she said. "Luna's father is going to stand in the room where they chained a queen and stamped his name on the door. Luna needs you there more than I need you here."

I knew she was right.

I didn't want her to be.

"I'll look before I go," I said.

"You can look."

I looked.

The baby was awake. She was always awake now, it seemed, or at least her silver was. It moved through her small body like water through a garden, steady and everywhere. Her lungs folded and unfolded, practising. Her heart ran clean and fast, the way Sigmund had described it. A wire with nothing in the way.

She noticed me.

Her silver turned. Found mine. Stayed.

"She's fine," I said.

"I know she's fine."

"I wanted to say it out loud."

Risa reached up and touched my face.

"Go," she said. "Come back. Tell me everything."

I kissed her. Then I kissed the top of her stomach, which I'd started doing without thinking about it, and which made Risa laugh every time.

On the porch, Sigmund was sitting on the step with his back very straight and his arms folded, looking at nothing.

"Morning," I said.

"Morning."

"You know she knows you're here."

"I know she knows." He didn't move. "Go to your mountain, Dask. I've got the door."

Keir flew.

That was the General's request, oddly. Luna had asked him whether he wanted me to carry us, and he'd said no. He'd said he wanted to see one of the aircraft he'd read about in the reports. The one that flew without anyone holding it up.

So Keir took the small aircraft out of its shed at the second hour, and Aster checked the systems with Vell watching, and the four of us climbed in.

The General sat in the seat behind Keir.

He watched everything. The controls. Aster's lights. The way Keir's hands moved on the stick, unhurried, sure. He didn't say anything until we were well clear of the city walls and turning east toward the twin peaks.

Then he said, "You built this."

"Keir designed it," I said. "With Aster. I made the parts."

The General looked at Aster.

Aster turned one small lamp toward him.

"I did the displays," Aster said. "And the door controls. So that anyone inside can open them without asking."

The General was quiet for a moment.

"That was in your statement," he said. "That you were kept in a room you couldn't open."

"Yes."

"And you designed the doors on this."

"Yes," Aster said. "I thought that would be useful."

The General looked out the window at the land going by below.

"It is," he said.

I'd flown over that country so many times I'd almost stopped seeing it.

The General hadn't.

He sat with his face close to the window for the whole flight and didn't speak. I watched him watching. The silver-green forests on the low slopes. The pale river splitting around its long island. The broken country where the ground fell away into gullies and caves. The tracks of a neighbouring brood across a valley floor, a line of small dark shapes moving together toward water.

He watched that line for a long time.

"They're carrying something," he said at last.

I looked.

"Young," I said. "That brood's moving its nursery. There was flooding last week in the lowlands. The queens asked each other for higher ground, and that one's going to a neighbour's chambers until it dries."

"They ask each other."

"Yes. They can refuse, too. They don't always share."

The General kept looking.

Luna was sitting beside me. She'd been looking at her father, not the window.

"Thirty-two years," she said quietly. "You fought them for thirty-two years. You've never seen them carry their children."

"No."

"What did you think they were doing? When they moved like that?"

The General was quiet for a long time.

"Massing," he said. "We called it massing. When they moved in lines toward somewhere. We'd mark it on the map and send artillery."

Luna didn't say anything.

Neither did I.

Keir, at the controls, adjusted our heading very slightly so that we passed well clear of the line of small dark shapes, and didn't cast our shadow over them.

The twin peaks came up out of the haze like a pair of shoulders.

The lower one first, broad and dark, with the long scar of the old service road still visible along its southern face. Then the higher one behind it, pale stone and snow. And between them, on the western shoulder, the terrace I'd opened for the queen the day she walked out.

She was on it.

I hadn't expected that. She usually stayed inside, in the chamber she'd remade as her home, where the water ran along its old path and the youngest rested in the hollow beneath where the control platform had been.

But this morning she was outside.

The whole of her, in the sunlight. Her plates catching the light along their repaired edges. Her new silver bright in the gaps between them. And around her feet, moving and climbing and chasing each other along the edge of the terrace, her young.

Thirty-one.

They were larger now. Not by much, but enough that I noticed. When we'd brought them home from Scarecrow they'd been small enough for an attendant to carry three at once. Now the biggest of them was half the size of an adult worker.

Keir brought us down on the landing ground below the terrace.

The General didn't get out straight away.

He sat in his seat with his hands on his knees and looked up through the window at the queen. All of her. The way he'd looked at our queen the day before, at the bottom of the broad passage. Only this time there was no passage. No walls. Just a mountain and a queen and the sky.

"How large," he said.

"Larger than ours," I said. "She's old. Older than any of the queens near Scarecrow. She was a planetary queen before they caught her."

"She was here when they built it?"

"She was here first," Luna said. "They built the prison around her."

The General closed his eyes for a moment.

Then he opened the door himself, before Aster could, and stepped down onto the stone.

The mountain queen didn't come down to meet him.

She waited.

I'd spoken to her the night before, through our queen. I'd asked whether she would let Luna's father stand in her chamber. Whether she'd let him see the place where she'd been chained.

She'd been quiet for a long time.

Then she'd said, Let him walk up.

So he walked up.

Up the stair I'd cut from the landing ground to the terrace, between walls I'd shaped, past the place where the old service door had been. He went slowly. I didn't think it was the climb. He was a man who'd walked the northern front for three years.

I thought he was counting.

Every step. Every young one he passed, small dark shapes stopping their play to watch him. Every stone.

At the top of the stair, the queen lowered her head.

Not far. Just enough that her attention fell on him the way a shadow falls when a cloud crosses the sun.

Father of Luna, she said.

Dot wasn't with us. She'd stayed home with Risa. So I translated. I'd gotten better at it. Better at finding the words for the parts of her that weren't words.

"Yes," the General said.

Your name was on my door.

"Yes."

Did you come to take it down?

The General looked at her.

I watched him decide not to say yes too quickly. I watched him wonder whether that was what she wanted, and then stop trying to guess, and answer true instead.

"I came to see it," he said. "If you'll let me. I don't know yet what I'll do after."

The queen considered him for a long time.

Come, she said.

And she turned, and went back into the mountain, and the General followed her.

I'd stood in her chamber before.

I'd stood there the first time, when it was still full of grey machines and Sorn housings, when she'd lain pinned beneath the arrays with her silver drawn out of her through narrow channels and forced into patterns meant to hurt other queens' children. I'd stood there when I took the restraints off one at a time, with her permission. I'd stood there the night after, when she'd chosen to sleep in the restored chamber rather than out on the terrace, because leaving a prison was one thing and getting your home back was another.

It looked different now.

She'd done most of it herself. The pools had their old rims back, smooth and curved. The water ran in its own channel again, the one it had worn long before the station existed. The walls had been reshaped where she'd remembered their shape, and left as they were where she hadn't. Light came in from the terrace and lay along the floor in long pale bars.

The machines were gone.

All but one.

She'd kept one restraint housing. A single grey curved piece, as tall as the General, the one that had enclosed the joint of her rear left limb. I'd turned the others to ordinary stone and she'd let me. This one she'd asked me to leave as it was.

It stood against the far wall, near the water. Not hidden. Not displayed. Just there.

The General stopped when he saw it.

"Why did she keep that?" he asked me quietly.

I asked her.

She answered him directly.

The oldest of the cradle queens kept her scars, she said. So that the young would remember. I am not as old as she was. I kept one.

The General walked over to it.

He didn't touch it. He stood in front of it, close enough to read the Sorn marks along its upper edge, the same sequence Holt had first named in Scarecrow's map room.

Then he looked lower.

Below the Sorn marks, small, stamped into the grey alloy by some human hand long after the housing itself had been made, there was a plate.

A maintenance tag.

Most of it was numbers. Serial codes. A date of last inspection.

And at the bottom, in the same heavy type as the directive at the lake:

MAINTAINED UNDER STANDING AUTHORITY. AVALON COMMAND.

The General read it.

He read it again.

He stood in front of it for a very long time.

Luna came and stood beside him. Not touching. Close.

"I didn't know it was there," she said. "The plate. I didn't see it before."

"Neither did I," I said.

The queen said, I saw it. Every time they came to tighten it. I saw them read the plate before they turned the bolts. As if it gave them permission.

I translated.

The General's hands were at his sides.

They were shaking.

Not much. Just a little. The first time I'd ever seen them do anything except rest exactly where he put them.

He turned to the queen.

"May I take it?" he said. "The plate. Not the housing. Only the plate."

The queen considered.

It is yours, she said. Your name. Take it.

He looked at me.

I didn't move. It wasn't mine to do.

He reached into his pocket and took out a small folding knife, old, worn, an officer's knife from a long time ago. He opened it and worked the point under the edge of the plate. It was fixed with four small rivets. He worked each one free slowly, carefully, not damaging the housing beneath, the way Toren worked a hinge.

When the last one came out, the plate came away in his hand.

He held it for a moment.

Then he put it in his breast pocket, over his heart, and buttoned the pocket shut.

He turned to the queen and bowed again.

Not as deep as yesterday. But deep enough.

What will you do with it? she asked.

"Keep it," the General said. "Where I can see it. Every time someone asks me to sign something."

The queen was quiet.

Then she said, That is a good use for a scar.

He asked to see the hollow.

I'd told him about it the night before, and he'd remembered. The shallow place beneath the old control platform, worn smooth by long use, where the youngest of her brood had once rested before the station builders filled it with rubble and laid a floor across it for their machines.

She took us there.

The floor was gone. I'd taken it up the morning after we freed her. The hollow was open again, pale stone curving down into the earth, and she'd widened it herself, the first change to her home she'd made since getting it back.

It wasn't empty.

Four of her young were in it, curled together in a loose heap. Asleep, or nearly. One of them lifted its head when we came near, looked at us for a moment with the round dark curiosity of something very small and very safe, and put its head back down.

The General stopped at the edge.

He didn't say anything.

He just looked at the four small bodies in the hollow, and the smooth stone under them, and the place where the floor had been.

I knew he'd seen the photograph. The one Dot had taken the morning I lifted the rubble out. The empty hollow. He'd sat in the receiving room for half an hour looking at it, the first day, without turning the page.

He was seeing it full now.

"They put a floor over this," he said. His voice was very quiet. "To set the machines on."

Yes.

"They didn't need to destroy it. They just needed somewhere flat."

Yes.

The General knelt down.

Not all the way. One knee, on the stone, at the edge of the hollow, the way a man kneels to look at something closer. The young one who'd lifted its head before lifted it again.

The General held very still.

The young one looked at him for a long moment.

Then it reached out one small forelimb and tapped the stone, once, between them.

I'd learned that tap. Dot had taught it to me in the courts at Scarecrow, beside the thirteen's attendants. It meant I see you. Or something like it. A greeting from someone who wasn't sure yet whether you were safe.

"What does that mean?" the General said, very softly.

I told him.

He looked at the young one.

Then he lifted one hand, slowly, and laid it flat on the stone. Not reaching toward it. Just there, at the edge of the hollow, where the young one could see it.

"Tell it I see it too," he said.

I asked the queen.

She answered with something I felt rather than heard. Warmth. And something like surprise.

Then she tapped the stone herself, gently, with the tip of one great forelimb, beside the General's hand.

The young one tapped back.

The General didn't move his hand for a long time.

Luna asked to talk with her father alone on the terrace.

She asked me first. Quietly, while he was still kneeling at the hollow. She said she didn't know what she wanted to say yet, but she knew she didn't want to say it in front of anyone, even me.

"Even you," she said. "Especially you, maybe. I don't know. I don't want to watch your face while I say it."

"All right."

"I'll tell you after. Some of it."

"You don't have to."

"I know." She took my hand for a moment and squeezed it. "I want to."

So I went down to the landing ground and sat with Keir in the shade of the aircraft's wing.

Keir had brought a flask of Priya's tea. He poured me a cup without asking and handed it over.

We sat for a while without speaking. Above us, on the terrace, I could see two small figures standing near the edge, looking out toward the far peaks. Not close together. Not far apart.

"She'll be all right," Keir said.

"I know."

"You don't look like you know."

I drank the tea.

"Dane came to my bench last night," Keir said after a while.

I looked at him.

"He brought a part for the aircraft. A bearing. He said he'd made it himself, from one of your stock bars, on Toren's lathe. It's not very good." Keir turned his cup in his hands. "It's not bad either. I put it in."

"That's good."

"I don't know if it's good." Keir looked up at the terrace. "I've been thinking about what the General said yesterday. To the mother. I don't know if I'd have stopped it. I keep thinking about what Dane would say if someone asked him that."

"What do you think he'd say?"

Keir was quiet for a long time.

"I think he'd lie," he said. "I think he'd say yes. Because that's what you're supposed to say." He drank. "The General didn't lie. I didn't expect that."

"Neither did I."

"It made me think maybe Dane could stop lying too. If someone gave him enough time."

He put his cup down on the stone beside him.

"I'm not saying I'm ready," he said. "I'm just saying I put the bearing in."

Luna came down after an hour.

Her father stayed on the terrace. He was sitting now, on a low ledge near the edge, with the mountain queen's young around him at a careful distance. Two of them had crept close enough to touch his boot. He was very carefully not moving his feet.

Luna sat down beside me in the shade of the wing.

Keir picked up his flask and went to check something on the far side of the aircraft that probably didn't need checking.

Luna leaned against me.

She didn't say anything for a while.

Then she said, "He asked if I wanted him to resign."

I waited.

"Command, I mean. Avalon Command. He said he'd give it up if I asked. He said he'd stay here, on Avalon, if I wanted. He'd find something useful to do."

"What did you say?"

"I said no." Luna's voice was steady. "I said, stay where you can do some good. Stay where you can read what they put in front of you. If you resign, Crane puts someone in your chair who signs everything." She paused. "I said if he wanted to be useful, the most useful place he could be was the room he'd spent eight years pretending not to be in."

"What did he say?"

"He said I sounded like his own commanding officer from the front. The one he was most afraid of." Luna's mouth moved slightly. "I think it was a compliment."

"I think it was."

She was quiet again.

"He told me about Mother," she said. "Her last days. I was nine. I don't remember much. He said she kept asking about the parades. Whether there'd be one on the anniversary. She wanted to see the flags from the window." Luna's hand found mine on the stone. "He said he almost told her then. On the last day. That there was nothing to celebrate. That we'd lost."

"Did he?"

"No." Luna shook her head. "He said he sat by the bed and told her yes, there'd be a parade, and the flags would be beautiful. And she smiled and fell asleep." Luna swallowed. "He said that was the last lie he told her. And the only one he isn't sorry for."

I put my arm around her.

She leaned into me and didn't cry. She'd done her crying. Yesterday, under the cloud. The night at the lake.

This was something else.

"And then he asked me if I was happy," she said.

"What did you say?"

Luna turned her head and looked at me.

"I said yes," she said. "I said I live in a house with three people I love and a bird on a shelf, and in five weeks there'll be a baby who kicks when I'm worried. I said I count everyone at night and they're all still there in the morning. I said I'd never been happy before Avalon, not once, and I hadn't known."

I didn't say anything.

I couldn't.

"He cried," Luna said. "Again. Twice in three days. He said Windsors aren't supposed to." She almost smiled. "I told him I'd been doing it a lot lately and it didn't seem to hurt."

Up on the terrace, the General was still sitting on his ledge.

One of the young had climbed onto his boot.

He was looking down at it with an expression I had never once seen on his face, in all the footage, in all the briefings, in all the years.

He looked like a man being given something he didn't deserve, and trying very hard not to drop it.

The mountain queen asked to speak to me before we left.

Just me. She asked Luna to wait by the aircraft, very politely, and Luna went.

I climbed back up to the terrace. The General had come down by then. The young had gone back to their play, chasing each other along the edge of the stone.

The queen lowered her head.

Your queen tells me, she said, that the young one in your mate is whole.

"Yes."

Building herself.

"Yes."

Faster than your kind build.

"Yes."

She was quiet for a while.

Then she showed me something. The way our queen had shown me, two nights ago, the memory of the great queens' young being born. Only this was older. Clearer. Something she'd seen herself, not been told.

A hollow, deep under stone. A great queen above it. A young one in it, newly born, its silver already whole and bright.

And then the young one woke.

All at once. Its silver lit like a lamp in a dark room, and reached, and kept reaching. Toward its mother. Toward the brood. Toward the other queens beyond the stone, and beyond them, and beyond them. Toward everything at once, every voice and every current and every living silver in reach.

And it was frightened.

I felt it in the memory. A newborn hearing the whole world at once and not knowing which part of it was safe.

Then the great queen above it went quiet.

Not silent. Quiet. She held her own enormous silver very still, very steady, and folded it around the young one like a hand around a candle flame. Shutting out the world. Leaving only herself. Only the hollow.

The young one stopped reaching.

It settled.

It slept.

The whole-born wake all at once, the mountain queen said. They reach for everything. If no one holds the world quiet for them in the first days, they are hurt by it. Some are frightened so badly they do not stop reaching. Their silver burns.

I couldn't speak for a moment.

"How long?" I said at last. "How long does someone have to hold it?"

Until she learns that she can choose what to hear. A few days. Sometimes more. A pause. Your mate cannot do it alone. Her silver is whole, but it is not large enough. Nor yours. You know how to change things. You do not yet know how to be still.

"Then who?"

Your queen, the mountain queen said. And I, if she asks. And the one who makes sound and silence.

Toby.

Between us, she said, we can make a hollow for her. Somewhere the world cannot reach until she is ready for it.

I stood on the terrace with the wind in my hair and the young chasing each other at the edge of the stone, and thought about a small bright silver turning toward my hand every time I came near. Finding me. Staying.

Reaching.

"Thank you," I said.

Do not thank me yet, the queen said. Thank me when she sleeps.

We flew home in the long afternoon light.

The General sat behind Keir again, with his hand resting over his breast pocket where the plate was. He didn't look out the window this time. He looked at Luna, sitting beside me, with her head on my shoulder and her eyes closed.

She wasn't asleep. I could tell. But she let him think she was.

Halfway home, he said quietly, to no one, "I've never been on a flight that nobody was afraid of."

Keir glanced back at him.

"You get used to it," Keir said.

"I'm not sure I want to."

Keir turned back to the controls.

"No," he said after a moment. "Probably better not to."

Risa was on the porch when we landed.

She'd moved the chair Gareth made out from the little room, and was sitting in it with her feet up on the step and a blanket over her knees, though the evening was warm. Sigmund was still on the other end of the step. He looked like he hadn't moved all day. He probably hadn't.

Sera came out of the house when she heard the aircraft.

I walked up the path and sat down on the step at Risa's feet.

"Tell me everything," Risa said.

So I told her.

Not everything. Not all at once. The plate on the housing. The General taking it with his own knife and putting it over his heart. The young one tapping the stone at the edge of the hollow, and the General's hand flat beside it. Luna on the terrace with her father, asking him to stay in the room.

Then I told her about the mountain queen's warning.

Risa listened without interrupting.

When I was done, she put both hands on her stomach and was quiet for a long time.

"She's going to hear everything," she said at last.

"Maybe. At first."

"Every queen. Every brood. Every person in the city."

"If nobody holds it quiet."

"And it'll frighten her."

"Yes."

Risa looked down at her stomach.

The baby kicked.

"Then we make her a quiet room," Risa said. "A real one. Not just a curtain. Somewhere the world can't get in until she wants it to."

"The queens said they'd help."

"Good." She looked up at me. "And Toby."

"And Toby."

Sigmund, on the other end of the step, cleared his throat.

"I can feel currents," he said. "Not as well as Risa. But I can feel them. If something's reaching her that shouldn't, I'll know."

Risa looked at her brother.

"You're going to sit outside the quiet room for three days," she said.

"Probably."

"You're going to be useless."

"Probably," Sigmund said. "I'll be useless outside the door. Lucas can be useless in the corner."

Sera laughed so suddenly she had to sit down.

Toby measured Risa before bed.

Twenty-eight and a half weeks. Exactly what she'd said that morning.

He wrote it in the book. Then he sat back on his heels and looked at Risa's stomach for a while without speaking.

"A quiet room," he said, when I told him. "For a newborn who can hear everything."

"The mountain queen says the whole-born wake all at once."

"And reach."

"And reach."

Toby closed his eyes.

I thought he might be remembering. The night the Meridian passed over and the whole green lifted to the sky, and he'd heard both names like standing between two bells, and his heart had slowed until it nearly stopped. The night I held it and squeezed it once a second for forty-one minutes.

He'd been reaching too, that night. Hearing too much. Not knowing which part of it was safe.

He opened his eyes.

"I can do that," he said. "I know how to make a wall that sound can't get through. I know how to make a room quiet. I've been doing it all my life."

"The queens will help. They can hold the silver part."

"Then I'll hold the rest." Toby looked at Risa. "Nobody held it quiet for me. I had to learn by myself, in a gray room, inside a wall, with your hand on my chest so I'd remember my own heart." He swallowed. "She won't have to."

Risa reached out and put her hand on his.

"Thank you," she said.

Toby went very red, the way he always did when anyone thanked him, and said, "I'm going to need a better room than the little room, though. It has a window. Windows are terrible for sound."

"Gareth put a screen up," Sera said.

"For draughts. Not for sound."

"Then build her a better room," Luna said from the doorway.

We all turned.

She'd come back from walking her father to the guest house. She stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame and her face tired and calm.

"Somewhere under the house," she said. "Between us and the queen. Close enough for the queens to reach. Far enough from the street that Liam's voice doesn't carry."

"Liam's voice carries everywhere," Sera said.

"Then deeper," said Luna.

Day 603. Two peaks.

Flew the General and Luna to the mountain in Keir's aircraft. Aster showed him the door controls it designed, so that anyone inside can open them without asking. Over the broken country he saw a brood carrying its young to a neighbour's chambers. He said they used to call that "massing" and send artillery.

The mountain queen was on her terrace with her thirty-one young, all larger now. She let him walk up. She asked whether he'd come to take his name off her door. He said he'd come to see it first.

She has kept one restraint housing as a scar, so the young remember. On it was a maintenance plate: MAINTAINED UNDER STANDING AUTHORITY. AVALON COMMAND. She saw the workers read it every time before they turned the bolts. He asked to take the plate and she said it was his. He removed it with his own knife and put it in his breast pocket. He'll keep it where he can see it whenever someone asks him to sign something. She said that is a good use for a scar.

At the restored hollow, a young one tapped the stone at him: I see you. He laid his hand flat beside it. The queen tapped too. The young one tapped back.

Luna talked with him alone on the terrace. He offered to resign; she told him to stay in the room and read what he's given. He told her about her mother's last day, and the last lie he told her, the only one he isn't sorry for. He asked if she was happy. She said yes. He cried again.

Dane made a bearing for Keir's aircraft. Keir put it in. He says he isn't ready, he's just saying.

The mountain queen's warning: whole-born young wake all at once and reach for everything. If no one holds the world quiet for them in the first days, it frightens them, and some never stop reaching. Risa's silver and mine aren't enough to hold it, and I don't yet know how to be still. Our queen, the mountain queen and Toby together can make a hollow for her.

Risa: then we make her a quiet room. Toby says nobody held it quiet for him, and she won't have to learn alone. Luna says build it under the house, between us and the queen. Deeper than Liam's voice carries.

Baby: twenty-eight and a half weeks by size. Sigmund guarded the porch all day and will apparently guard the quiet room's door for three days, uselessly. I'm assigned to the corner.

"Thank me when she sleeps."