Chapter 249 Sesh

She came to the passage on the first evening.

Not into it. To the edge of it. Where the agreed path ran from the courts to the city and opened onto the square by Toby's bench, and the young came up every evening at dusk to sit in the shadow and listen to the music.

The garrison had a perimeter. The handler had walked it on the first afternoon, with the ten Kethri three steps behind. Round the guest compound. Along the street to the edge of the square. Back. That was all. They didn't go further. The terms, Luna said, would have had something to say about that, and the handler seemed to know it.

But the edge of the square was the edge of the perimeter.

And the mouth of the passage was on the other side of the square.

And at dusk on Day 735, while Toby was tuning his fiddle and the young were coming up out of the dark to sit in their row, the tall Kethri with the pale stripe down her neck walked to the very edge of the perimeter, where the street met the square, and stopped.

And stood there.

And watched.

Toby saw her first.

He stopped tuning. He sat on his bench with the fiddle on his knee and looked across the square at her, the way you'd look at a deer at the edge of a field. Very still. So as not to startle it.

She didn't move.

Her long neck was bent forward in its curve. Her beak pointed, not at the ground the way it had pointed on the ramp, but across the square. At the passage. At the row of small dark shapes in the shadow of it.

At the young.

The collar round her neck caught the last of the light. The boss at the front, under her beak, where the sliver was.

Toby looked at me. I was on the porch of the kitchen, with Sera and a cup of Priya's tea.

What do I do? his face said.

I shrugged.

Play, I mouthed.

So he played.

He played the slow ones.

The way he always did, in the evenings, for the young. The low notes they liked best. The song he'd written for my birthday. The one he'd played for Lise.

The young hummed along. They always did now. Since Dory had taught them, on the porch steps, with the hollow-song. Since the night she'd hummed in time with Toby's fiddle and they'd followed her. They hummed along to everything.

The Kethri didn't move.

She stood at the edge of the perimeter with her beak pointed at the passage and listened. All of it. Every song. For an hour.

When Toby finished, and the young began to go back down into the dark, one by one, she turned her head.

And watched them go.

Every one. Until the last of them had disappeared into the shadow of the passage.

Then she turned, and walked back along the street to the guest compound.

She didn't look round.

She came back the next evening.

And the next. And the one after that.

Every dusk. Always to the same spot. The edge of the perimeter, where the street met the square. Always alone. The other nine stayed at the compound with the handler. Only she came.

Always for the music. Always for the young.

On the fourth evening, I went and stood beside her.

Not close. A few yards away. At the edge of the square, on our side of the line where the perimeter ended. Where she could see me without turning her head.

She saw me.

Her round dark eyes, set on either side of her beak, swivelled. Very slightly. The way a bird's do. One eye on me. One eye still on the passage.

She didn't move away.

So I stood there with her, and listened to Toby play, and watched the young hum in the shadow.

And I looked at her collar.

I'd been looking at collars for four days.

At the compound. On the street. Every time a Kethri walked past three steps behind the handler, I looked. I couldn't help it. The way I couldn't help looking at Dory's bones, or Mother's hands, or the Overseer's shell.

I knew the grey now. The weave of it. The fold.

And I knew the sliver inside.

Queen silver. Old. Dense. Wrapped in the grey like a stone in a ring. With a thread running out of it into the Kethri's spine, pulling, gently, all the time.

But this one was different.

I'd noticed it on the apron. I hadn't known what it was. I'd only known that when she stopped at the bottom of the ramp and turned her head toward the courts, the collar had pulled harder on her than on the others. Tightened. Like a lead on a dog that keeps stopping.

Now, standing beside her in the dusk, with the young humming in the shadow, I saw why.

The sliver in her collar was awake.

Not all the way. Not like a queen is awake. But more than the others.

The others were still. Silent. Wrapped so tight in the grey that whatever was left of them had stopped trying to do anything but be a leash.

Hers wasn't still.

It was humming.

Very faintly. So faintly that I only heard it because I was looking, and because I'd spent two years listening to queens. A sound under the sound. Inside the boss, inside the grey, inside the collar round her neck.

Five notes.

Low, and lower, and a step up, and two steps down.

Here. I'm here.

I didn't move.

The Kethri didn't move.

Toby, on his bench, was playing the low song, the one the young liked best. And the young in the shadow of the passage were humming it back. And under the young, from the deep, very faint, our queen was humming too. The way she always did. So the young would know where she was.

The hollow-song.

And the sliver in the collar was humming it too.

Along with them. In time. The way Dory had hummed in time with Toby's fiddle, before she was born.

As if it had heard the young singing, and remembered.

That night, I went to the garden wall.

The queen was already waiting. Her head lifted off the stones before I reached the gate.

You heard it, she said.

Yes.

In the tall one's collar.

Yes. I sat down with my back against the wall. It's singing. The hollow-song. In time with ours.

The queen was quiet for a long time.

I heard it the first evening, she said. When the tall one came to the edge of the square. I heard it under Toby's music. I thought I was mistaken. A pause. I listened the second evening. And the third.

Whose is it?

I do not know her, said the queen. She is not of this world. She is very old. Older than the old one on the mountain. Older than the Spire. Her voice was very low. She was a queen once. A great one. With a brood across a whole world.

I didn't say anything.

And now she is a sliver, said the queen. In a collar. Round the neck of a soldier who cannot fly. A long breath. And she has heard my young singing in the dusk. And she remembers what they are.

The queen lowered her head onto the stones.

And I felt it then. Through the stones. Through the soles of my feet. Not the sound like a mountain cracking. Not the stillness that went on.

Something else.

Grief.

The queen at our garden wall, who had grown under the old one's teaching until she could hear the whole of Avalon, grieving for a queen she'd never met, from a world she'd never seen, who'd been cut into slivers and wrapped in grey and put round the necks of her own world's children.

She is singing to my young, said the queen. Because she has no young left to sing to.

Dot built the translator.

It was Toby's idea. He'd been listening to the Kethri for a week. Not to the collars. To them. The clicks and whistles they made to each other in the compound, when they thought nobody was near. The sounds the handler made to them, through the collars, that made them turn their heads.

"It's a language," Toby said. "A real one. Not just orders. They talk to each other at night. Quietly. In the compound, after the handler's gone in." He frowned. "It's mostly clicks. The clicks are the words. The whistles are how you mean them. Like tone. A click with a rising whistle is a question. A click with a falling whistle is a fact. A click with no whistle at all is an order."

"This unit can record them," said Dot.

"I know. You have been. I've been listening to your recordings." Toby looked at her. "But I can't make them. My mouth can't do the clicks. Not fast enough."

Dot's lamps flickered.

"This unit's speaker can make any sound," she said. "This unit could make the clicks. If this unit knew what they meant."

So they sat in the listening room for four days, Toby and Dot, with every recording Dot had made of the Kethri in the compound. And Toby listened, and guessed, and Dot clicked back, and Toby said no, faster or no, the whistle goes up at the end, and slowly, very slowly, a list grew on the wall.

Yes. A single click, falling whistle.

No. Two clicks, no whistle.

Here. A click and a long low whistle.

Name. A click, a pause, a click.

Queen.

That one took them three days.

On Day 742, Dot rolled to the edge of the square at dusk.

Sesh was already there.

That was the first thing the translator confirmed. When the handler made the sound to the tall one with the pale stripe, the click and the whistle that Luna had heard on the first day, it meant something like the one with the mark. A designation. Not a name.

But when the other Kethri made it to each other at night, in the compound, it wasn't the same sound. It was softer. The click was shorter. The whistle went up, and then down, and then up again.

Sesh.

Dot rolled to a stop at the edge of our side of the line. A few yards from her.

Toby was on his bench. The young were in the shadow. The music had just begun.

Sesh's eye swivelled to Dot.

And Dot, very quietly, under the music, clicked.

Name.

Then a pause.

Then Dot. Not in clicks. In her own voice. The way she always said it.

Then name, again. With the whistle rising at the end.

A question.

Sesh went completely still.

Her long neck stopped its slight, constant sway. Her beak, pointed at the passage, didn't move. Her eyes didn't swivel.

For a long time, nothing happened at all.

Then, very slowly, her head turned.

Not her eye. Her whole head. On its long neck. Away from the passage. Toward Dot.

And her beak opened.

And she clicked.

Short. Then a whistle. Up, and down, and up.

Sesh.

Then a click, and a long low whistle.

Here.

Toby stopped playing.

He didn't mean to. His bow just stopped, in the middle of a note, and the young in the shadow went quiet, and the whole square went quiet with them.

Sesh didn't seem to notice.

She was looking at Dot. Her round dark eyes fixed on Dot's lamps. Her beak half open.

And then she clicked again.

A long string of them. Fast. Too fast for Dot to follow, at first. Dot's lamps flickered, and she clicked back, slowly, again, slower. And Sesh stopped. And started again. Slower. One click at a time. One whistle at a time.

Dot translated.

Very quietly. Under her breath. So that only I could hear, standing beside her.

"She says," said Dot, "her world had queens."

A click.

"Once."

A click. A whistle, falling.

"Nine."

Sesh kept going.

Slowly. Click by click. Dot translated each one as it came.

"She says she was a hatchling when the last one went quiet."

"She says the Sorn came before her mother's mother's mother. She says the queens sang the voice for the Sorn for a long time. Many lifetimes. And then, one by one, they stopped singing."

"She says when a queen stops singing, the Sorn cut her into pieces. Small pieces. And put the pieces in the collars. Because a piece of a queen still remembers how to pull."

Dot's lamps had gone very low.

"She says every Kethri soldier wears a piece of a queen of her world."

"She says they do not know which queen. They are not allowed to know."

"She says" Dot stopped.

"What?" I said.

Dot's lamps flickered.

"She says the piece in her collar has never sung before," Dot said. "Not once. Not in all the years she has worn it. Not on any world. Not in any war."

A pause.

"She says it began to sing on the first evening. When she came to the edge of this square. When she heard the small ones in the shadow."

Sesh clicked again. Very soft.

"She asks," said Dot, "what they are singing."

I looked at Sesh.

At her round dark eyes, fixed on Dot. At her long neck, bent forward in its curve. At the collar round it, grey and seamless, with the boss at the front, under her beak.

At the sliver inside.

Still humming. Five notes.

Here. I'm here.

"Tell her," I said to Dot, "it's the hollow-song. The queens sing it to their young. So the young always know where the queen is, even in the dark."

Dot clicked it. Slowly. Carefully. It took a long time; there were words Dot didn't have, and she had to go round them.

When she finished, Sesh didn't move.

Then, very slowly, she lifted one three-fingered hand. The claws on the end of it curved and dark.

And touched the boss on her collar. Under her beak. Where the sliver was.

And held her hand there.

She didn't click anything.

She didn't need to.

Pebble came out of the shadow.

I didn't see him start. One moment the young were in their row in the dark of the passage, silent, watching. The next, Pebble was out on the paving stones of the square, walking.

Toward Sesh.

Slowly. Carefully. Close to the ground. The way he'd walked up the porch steps the first time, to Risa. The way he'd walked through the courts to the Overseer.

He stopped in front of her.

Right at the edge of the perimeter. On our side of the line. Three feet from Sesh's taloned feet.

Sesh looked down at him.

Her collar tightened. I saw it. The thread from the sliver, pulling. Back. Three steps behind. Back.

She didn't move.

Pebble lifted one forelimb.

And tapped the ground.

Three. Two. One.

I see you.

The Overseer hadn't known what to say.

It had stood in the courts for so long, with Pebble tapping at it, that the young had begun to climb down off the walls and stand round in a ring. And then it had looked at the roof, and walked away.

Sesh didn't stand for long.

She looked down at Pebble. At the pale scar on his foreplate. At the small dark forelimb, raised.

Then, very slowly, against the pull of the collar, so that I could see the thread from the sliver go taut in her spine like a rope under strain, she bent her long neck all the way down.

Lower. Lower. Until her beak was level with Pebble's head.

And she lifted one foot. One long, taloned, backward-bending foot.

And tapped the ground.

Three times.

Then two.

Then one.

Nobody in the square breathed.

Pebble didn't move. Sesh didn't move. They stood there at the edge of the perimeter, the small dark Teeming with the scar on his plate and the tall feathered soldier with her neck bent all the way down, and looked at each other.

Then the sliver in Sesh's collar hummed.

Louder than before. Loud enough that I didn't have to be looking to hear it. Loud enough that Toby, on his bench, heard it, and his face went white.

Five notes.

Here. I'm here.

And Pebble hummed it back.

And the young in the shadow of the passage hummed it back.

And from the deep, under all of it, our queen hummed it back.

And the collar on Sesh's neck pulled. Hard. All at once. The thread from the sliver snapping taut, back, back, three steps behind. I saw her flinch. Saw her neck jerk. Saw her head come up, away from Pebble, against her will.

She turned.

She walked back along the street toward the compound. Three steps behind nobody. Her neck bent forward. Her beak pointed at the ground.

She didn't look round.

But all the way back to the compound, under the sound of her talons on the paving, the sliver in her collar kept humming.

The ring had grown while we weren't looking.

I only noticed because Holt called me to the map room on Day 739, between Sesh's third evening and her fourth, and pointed up.

The map had changed. Luna had been adding to it every night, the way she added to everything. More small circles along the red line. More names in her careful hand.

"Count them," said Holt.

I counted.

Twenty-three.

"Nine more since the storm," said Luna, from the end of the table. "The relays coming down did it. Every brood that was under a relay's voice, the moment it went quiet, could hear the ring for the first time." She touched one of the new circles, far to the north, past the white mountains. "That one's the last. She came in this morning."

I looked at the name.

The Northern Hollow.

I knew it. Everyone in Scarecrow who'd been here in the second winter knew it. The brood in the high passes north of the white mountains, whose queen had refused our guide passage when we'd tried to get the third wave's stragglers through before the snow. Who'd sent back a single word, through our queen, that Dot had translated as No. And meant it. And we'd had to go the long way round, three weeks through the ice, and lost two people to the cold.

"She refused us," I said.

"She did," said Luna. "She was under a relay. One of Lantern's eleven small ones, on a ridge above her hollow. Every time she tried to answer anyone, the voice was in her head telling her not to." She closed her notebook. "The broods near her tore it down the week after the storm. She's been listening to the ring ever since. She said she wanted to be sure before she spoke."

"And?"

"And this morning she spoke," said Luna. "Through our queen. To me. She asked me to write something down." She opened the notebook again and turned it round.

In Luna's hand, under the Northern Hollow's name:

I said no to the ones who came through my passes in the snow. I did not know if it was my voice or the other one. I am sorry for the two who were lost. I am in this.

I read it three times.

"Twenty-three," said Holt quietly, looking up at the map. "Out of how many?"

"The queen thinks there are forty on Avalon," said Luna. "Maybe more. In places nobody's been."

"Then we're past halfway," said Holt.

That night, Dory hummed.

Risa told me in the morning. She'd been in the quiet room with her, the way she always was at dusk now, while Sesh stood at the edge of the square and Toby played.

"The queen was humming," Risa said. "Like always. So the young would know where she was. And Dory was awake, listening." She shifted Dory on her hip. "And then the queen did something different. I felt it. Through the walls. She stopped humming to the young, and started humming to something else. Out. Toward the square. Toward the compound."

"Toward Sesh."

"Toward the sliver," said Risa. "And Dory felt her do it." She looked down at Dory, who was looking back with her silver-ringed eyes, very solemn. "And she started humming too. Not to us. Not to the young. Through the queen. Out. Toward the same place." Risa's voice dropped. "Five notes. Here. I'm here. To a piece of a queen from another world, wrapped in grey round the neck of a soldier."

I didn't say anything.

"She counted it," said Risa. "Lucas. I felt her. She counted it. The way she counts everyone." She swallowed. "She doesn't know what it is. She doesn't know about Kethri or collars or worlds with nine queens. She only knows it's brood, and it's singing, and it's alone."

Dory reached out a small hand and grabbed my finger.

"So she counted it," said Risa.

On the evening of Day 742, after Sesh had gone back along the street with the sliver humming, I found the three of them on the porch.

Risa in Gareth's chair, asleep. Properly asleep, for once, with her head tipped back and her mouth a little open. Sera on the top step, with her back against Risa's shins and her head resting on Risa's knee. Also asleep.

Luna in the doorway, with a blanket.

She looked at me. Put a finger to her lips.

Then she came out, very quietly, and spread the blanket over both of them at once, tucking one end round Risa's shoulders and the other round Sera's, so that they were under it together. Sera murmured something and turned her face against Risa's knee. Risa's hand, in her sleep, came down and settled in Sera's hair.

Luna stood back and looked at them.

Then she sat down on the step beside Sera and leaned her head against the post, close enough that her shoulder touched Sera's, and closed her eyes too.

I sat on the boards with Dory in the basket beside me and didn't wake any of them.

Days 735–742. Sesh.

The garrison's perimeter runs round the guest compound, along the street, to the edge of the square. The mouth of the passage is on the other side. On Day 735 the tall Kethri with the pale stripe walked to the very edge and stood there for an hour, beak pointed at the young in the shadow, while Toby played. She watched every one of them go back down. Then she walked back without looking round. Every dusk since. Always alone.

On the fourth evening I stood a few yards from her. One eye swivelled to me, one stayed on the passage. She didn't move away.

The sliver in her collar is different. Awake, more than the others. Humming. Five notes: low, lower, a step up, two steps down. The hollow-song, in time with the young, the way Dory hummed with Toby's fiddle before she was born.

The queen heard it the first evening and thought she was mistaken. She doesn't know her. Not of this world. Older than the old one, older than the Spire. A great queen once, with a brood across a whole world. Now a sliver round the neck of a soldier who can't fly. "She is singing to my young because she has no young left to sing to." I felt the queen grieve through the stones.

Toby and Dot built a translator in the listening room. Clicks are words, whistles are meaning: rising for a question, falling for a fact, none for an order. Yes. No. Here. Name. "Queen" took three days. The handler calls her "the one with the mark." The other Kethri, at night, call her Sesh.

The ring is twenty-three now, nine more since the storm. Every brood under a relay could hear the ring the moment it went quiet. The last came in this morning: the Northern Hollow, who refused our guide passage in the second winter, so we went three weeks through the ice and lost two people to the cold. She was under one of the small relays; every time she tried to answer, the voice was in her head. "I said no to the ones who came through my passes in the snow. I did not know if it was my voice or the other one. I am sorry for the two who were lost. I am in this." The queen thinks there are forty on Avalon. Holt: past halfway.

Dory hummed through the queen toward the sliver in Sesh's collar. She doesn't know about Kethri or collars. She only knows it's brood, and singing, and alone. So she counted it.

Day 742. Dot clicked "name," said "Dot," then "name?" Sesh turned her whole head and answered: Sesh. Here.

Her world had queens. Nine. She was a hatchling when the last went quiet. The Sorn came before her mother's mother's mother. The queens sang the voice for many lifetimes, then one by one stopped, and when a queen stops singing the Sorn cut her into pieces and put the pieces in collars, because a piece of a queen still remembers how to pull. Every Kethri soldier wears a piece of a queen of her world. They aren't allowed to know which.

The piece in hers has never sung before. Not once, on any world, in any war. It began on the first evening, at the edge of this square, when she heard the small ones in the shadow. She asked what they were singing. I told her: the hollow-song, so the young always know where the queen is, even in the dark. She touched the boss on her collar and held her hand there.

Pebble walked out of the shadow and stopped three feet from her talons. Her collar pulled: back. She didn't move. Three, two, one. I see you.

The Overseer didn't know what to say. Sesh bent her neck all the way down against the pull, the thread taut in her spine like a rope under strain, until her beak was level with his head, and tapped the ground with one taloned foot. Three. Two. One.

The sliver hummed loud enough for Toby to hear. Pebble hummed back, then the young, then the queen from the deep. The collar yanked her head up. She walked back to the compound, beak to the ground, without looking round.

The sliver hummed all the way.

Later, Risa and Sera asleep on the porch, Sera's head on Risa's knee. Luna spread one blanket over both, then sat against the post with her shoulder against Sera's and closed her eyes. I didn't wake any of them.