Chapter 283 Three

They'd been whispering for days.

I'm not good at noticing things about people. Father was. He could walk into a room and know who'd been arguing and who wanted to go home and who'd had bad news and hadn't told anyone yet. I can see through a wall of Sorn grey to the queen asleep inside it. I can see every path of silver in a person and which way each one wants to grow. I can't see when the three people I love most in the world are planning something.

Risa says it's because I don't look. She says I listen to the silver and forget there's a face on the front of it.

She's probably right. She usually is.

But even I noticed this.

The way they stopped talking when I came into the kitchen. The way Luna closed her notebook, very casually, which Luna never does, because Luna never does anything casually. The way Sera smiled at me across the table in the mornings, with her feet up on a chair and her hand on her stomach, like she knew something I didn't. The way Risa sang to Dory on the porch at night and looked at me over the top of her head and didn't say anything at all.

And Liam.

Liam was worst. Liam couldn't keep a secret to save his life. He'd been in and out of the forge all week with a face like a boy who'd hidden a frog in somebody's bed and was waiting for the scream.

"What?" I said, on the third evening, when I caught him grinning at me over the anvil.

"Nothing," said Liam.

"Liam."

"Nothing. I'm grinning at the anvil." He grinned at the anvil. "It's a good anvil."

I let it go.

I should have known better. You never let anything go with a Calder.

It was the fourth evening when they came.

I was in the forge alone. Or I thought I was. Liam had said he was going home to Anja an hour before, and banged the door, and I'd heard his feet go off up the street. I was working on a hinge for the schoolroom door, which had been sticking since the rain. Not with the silver. With a hammer. Some things I still liked to do with my hands, slowly, the way Father did.

The door opened.

All three of them.

Sera first, because she always came through doors first. Twenty-six weeks now, and carrying it the way she carried everything, as if it were nobody's business but hers and she'd thank you not to mention it. Then Risa, with Dory asleep in the sling against her chest. Then Luna, last, with her notebook under her arm and the door closing very precisely behind her.

They stood in a line just inside the door.

Not side by side, exactly. Closer than that. Sera's hand was in Risa's. Luna's shoulder was against Sera's. They'd come up the street like that, I realised. Holding on.

I put down the hammer.

"What's happened?" I said. "Is it the Hand? Is it—"

"Nothing's happened," said Sera.

"Nobody's hurt," said Risa.

"The second Hand is quiet," said Luna. "The Sef are asleep. The Karst queen is singing to her young. The Hesk queen is lying on the plain with ten thousand Hesk round her and Rory sitting on her foot. I checked on my way." She took a breath. "Everything is fine. Sit down, Lucas."

I sat down. On the edge of the quench trough, because it was the nearest thing.

They didn't sit.

They looked at each other. The way they looked at each other across a map when they were working out who'd say what. The way I'd seen them look at each other a hundred times over a hundred plans, at a hundred kitchen tables, in a hundred places that weren't home yet.

Then Luna opened her notebook.

Of course she did.

"A long time ago," said Luna, "before we had a porch, or a house, or a city, or any of it, we sat on the dry side of a wall in the rain and made some rules."

I remembered.

The four of us, in a camp that wasn't Scarecrow yet, with the wind trying to turn the pages of Luna's book. The first house we hadn't built, drawn on a scrap of paper. The terms.

"No pretending," read Luna. "Wanting isn't a deadline. Say when it hurts."

"I remember."

"We've kept them," said Luna. "All three. For a long time now. Through the whole of it." She looked up. "We'd like to add one."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't have. My throat had done something.

Luna closed the notebook. She didn't need it. She'd only opened it because that was how Luna started things, the way other people clear their throats.

"We'd like to get married," she said.

The forge was very quiet.

"All of us," said Sera. "To you."

"And to each other," said Risa.

I'd thought about it.

Of course I'd thought about it. Under the tree, a week ago, watching Okafor tell Toby and Wren they were married because she'd decided Holt was right and it was quite straightforward. Watching Wren write Marsh, Toby in the back of her book. Watching Dov and Priya dance, before that, and Maura in the blue dress from her own wedding.

I'd thought about it, and then I'd stopped thinking about it, because I didn't know how to ask. Not one of them. All three. And I didn't know whether asking would make it into something smaller. A thing about me. The way the dome would make it a thing about me, if the dome ever heard. The Dask boy and his three girls.

I'd told them once, on that wet wall, that I wouldn't introduce any of them as something smaller because it made the explanation easier.

I hadn't known how to ask without doing exactly that.

So they'd done it instead.

"We talked about it," said Sera. "For days. You'll have noticed."

"I noticed."

"Liam told you."

"Liam grinned at an anvil."

Sera made a sound that was nearly a laugh. "That's Liam telling you."

"We didn't want it to be you asking us," said Risa. Quietly. Her hand on Dory's back. "Not because you wouldn't have. Because if you'd asked, it would have been three yeses to you. And it isn't that. It's never been that." She looked at Sera, and then at Luna. "I love you, Lucas. But I love them too. Not because of you. Not through you. Them."

"I'd like to be married to Risa," said Luna. Very straight. Every word right, like reading off a slate. "And to Sera. As well as to you. Not as a part of something that's yours. As a thing in its own right." She swallowed. "That's what we decided."

"Three of us decided," said Sera. "And now we're asking the fourth."

There was a sound behind the forge.

Behind the big bellows, in the gap between the wall and the coal store, where there wasn't room for a grown man to stand.

A grown man was standing there.

"Oh, say yes," said Liam, in an agonised whisper.

All four of us turned and looked at him.

He was wedged in sideways, with coal dust on one side of his face and his arms pinned to his chest, and he looked like a boy who'd been caught with the frog.

"You went home," I said.

"I banged the door," said Liam. "And walked up the street. And walked back down it on my toes. Anja helped." He tried to shrug and couldn't. "She's outside the window."

There was a pause.

"Hello," said Anja, from outside the window.

Sera put her face in her free hand.

Risa was laughing. Silently, so as not to wake Dory. Her whole body shaking with it.

Luna looked at Liam for a long moment.

"Calder," she said.

"Ma'am."

"Get out from behind the bellows."

"I can't," said Liam. "I'm stuck. I've been stuck for twenty minutes. I couldn't say anything because of the moment." He looked at me. "Say yes, Dask, and then somebody please get me out of the wall."

I said yes.

I'd like to say I said it well. I'd like to say I stood up off the quench trough and said something Father would have said, or Holt, something short and true that Luna could write in her notebook and keep.

I didn't. I said, "Yes. All of it. Yes. I didn't know how to ask. I'm sorry I didn't know how to ask. Yes," and something about the terms, and something about the wall in the rain, and then I stopped trying to say anything, because Sera had crossed the forge and put her arms round my neck, belly first, and Risa had come in on my other side with Dory squashed between us and still asleep, and Luna—

Luna didn't hug people.

She came and stood in front of me with her notebook clutched against her chest. And then she put the notebook down on the anvil. Very carefully. Square with the edge.

And put her arms round all three of us.

"For the record," said Liam, from inside the wall, a while later, "that's the best proposal I've ever seen."

"You've seen one," said Sera, into my shoulder.

"I've seen two. Mine to Anja was worse." He thought about it. "I asked her to supper. She thought I meant supper."

"I did think you meant supper," said Anja, through the window.

"I meant supper forever."

"You didn't say forever. You said are you hungry."

I got him out of the wall in the end. I didn't need to touch it. I listened to the stone and asked it, very politely, to be an inch further left, and it was, and Liam fell out sideways onto the forge floor in a cloud of coal dust and lay there looking at the ceiling.

"Thank you," he said. "Congratulations. Ow."

There were rings.

I hadn't known. They'd made them in secret, over four days, which was what the whispering had been. In the forge, at night, while I slept. Liam had kept watch at the door and helped where they let him, which wasn't much.

Four of them.

Plain. Not silver. Not gold. Iron. Ordinary iron, from the scrap box, the iron everything in Scarecrow was made of before it was made of anything better.

Sera had heated it. Her own fire, the Calder fire, white at the centre, held small and steady in her cupped hands the way she'd learned to hold it, so that it did exactly what she wanted and not one thing more.

Risa had joined it. Her lightning, so fine you couldn't see it. A single seam on each ring, welded from the inside, so that the iron had no beginning and no end.

Luna had quenched it. Water from the deep under Scarecrow, cold as the bottom of the canyon, so that the iron would hold its shape for good.

"Every ring has all three of us in it," said Sera. "Fire, and lightning, and water."

"And you put the shape in," said Risa.

"Me?"

"You're the one who listens to iron. You know what it wants to be." She held out her palm. Four plain grey rings, a little rough, a little uneven, the sort of thing you'd make by hand in a forge at night with no one to show you. "We'd like you to finish them. Not make them. Finish them."

I took them.

I listened.

Four rings of ordinary iron, heated and joined and quenched. And in each one, very faint, the way silver remembers, I could feel them. Sera's heat, still in the grain. Risa's charge, in the seam. Luna's cold, all the way through.

I didn't change much. I smoothed the inside of each one, so it wouldn't catch. I evened the edges. I let each ring decide how wide it wanted to be.

And I didn't polish them. I left them grey.

"Iron," I said. "Like the scarecrows."

Luna's face did the thing it did.

"I know," she said. "That was the point."

We told the queen at dawn.

On the red glass, the four of us, with Dory. Before the hello. Before anyone else was up but the kits and the Overseer at the passage mouth with its bread.

Our queen was at the garden wall, where she always was, at her full height, with her head laid on the stones and her great eye half open. She'd been watching us cross the square. She watched everything.

You are early, she said.

"We've come to tell you something," I said.

I know, said the queen. The small one told me in the night. She was very loud about it.

Dory, on Risa's hip, looked pleased with herself.

Of course she had. Dory had been asleep in the forge, squashed between three people and her father, all of us so full of it that it must have poured off us like heat off a kiln. And Dory checked. Always. Every person she touched, every time. She'd have felt it in her sleep, all of it, and taken it to the wall in the night, because the queen was where she took everything.

"Then you know," said Risa.

I know you are going to be joined, said the queen. All four. As the young of a brood are joined. A pause. I do not know the word you have for it.

"Married," said Luna.

Married, said the queen. Carefully. Getting it right. I will remember.

Then Sera asked the question she'd been carrying all night.

I'd felt her carrying it. Lying awake beside me in the dark with her hand on her stomach and her baby humming Toby's note under it, very faint, the way it always did now. Not asleep. Thinking.

"The children," said Sera. "Ours. Dory, and this one." Her hand on her stomach. "And any more."

Yes.

"They'll have three mothers," said Sera. "Not one. Three. Risa, and me, and Luna. Every one of them. It doesn't matter who carries them." She looked at Risa. At Luna. "We decided that too. Dory's mine. This one's Risa's. When Luna has one, it'll be ours."

"When," said Luna. Very quietly. "Not yet. When the plan's done."

"When," agreed Sera.

The queen was quiet for a long time.

"You told me once," said Sera, "that among the great ones, a young one was of her mother's brood. Always. That it didn't change."

I did.

"So I want to know." Sera's voice was very steady, which meant it wasn't. "What are they to you? If they've got three mothers. Does it break something? In how you see them?"

The queen lifted her head off the wall.

Slowly. All the way up, to her full height, with the morning coming up behind her over the rim and catching the edges of her plates. And she looked down at the four of us on the red glass, and at Dory, and at Sera's stomach, for a long, long time.

Then she sang.

Not to us. Out. Down the thread to the mountain. Out to the Hands on the plain. Up to the spine-queen in the Meridian. To the youngest of the Kethri, asleep on Sesh's shoulder at the edge of the glass, who woke and lifted her small feathered head. And further. To the Hesk queen in her shell of shells. To the Ulu queen drifting in Hana's pool. To the Karst queen in the dark.

And they answered.

One after another. All of them. I felt it come back down the threads into our queen like water into a basin. The old one, slow and heavy. The first queen, deep as her sea. The second. The spine-queen with her new pieces. The youngest, very small and very bright.

I asked my sisters, said our queen.

Among the great ones, a young one had one mother. Always. One queen. One brood. A pause. But I have never known a young one with three. I have never known a young one born to a brood that had more than one queen in it. There was never such a brood. Not on this world. Not on any world my sisters know.

So we have decided.

Sera's hand had gone white on her stomach.

A young one of yours, said the queen, will have three mothers who carry. Who hold. Who teach. Who are theirs first, before anyone. As the small one is yours first.

And it will have us.

She lowered her great head until it was level with Sera's. Until her eye, enormous and dark, was very close.

Not as mothers, said the queen. You are their mothers. We would not take that. But there is a word. Among the young, in the courts. For a queen who is not your mother but who is still yours. Who sings to you. Who checks you in the morning. Who would come for you if you were lost.

I knew the word. I'd heard Dory use it, the first day of her life, reaching down the thread for Mother. A brood-word. An aunt. A grandmother. Someone of the brood, who held you, who wasn't the one who bore you.

That word, said the queen. All of us. Every queen who sings at dawn. That is what we will be to them.

Brood mothers.

Sera didn't say anything.

She put her forehead against the queen's plate. Just for a moment. The way Genny put her hand on the stone in the garden. Then she stepped back and wiped her face with the heel of her hand and said, "Right. Good. Thank you," in her most Calder voice, and turned round and walked very fast back across the glass toward the house, so nobody would see her crying.

Risa went after her.

Luna stayed.

She stood on the red glass with her notebook under her arm and looked up at the queen for a long time.

"I won't carry first," said Luna. "I might not carry at all for a long time. There's a war."

Yes.

"Will they be mine? Even so? If I don't carry them?"

The queen looked at her.

Daughter of the cold one, she said. You held the young of this whole city in your hands on the plain, at the knuckle, behind a wall your father made. You did not carry any of them. You held them. They are yours.

Luna stood very straight.

Windsors don't. That's what she always said.

She did anyway. Just a little. On the red glass at dawn, with the queen's head lowered beside her and the first sun on her face.

I didn't write that in the notebook. She'd have crossed it out.

Then we had to tell everyone else.

That was harder.

Not because anyone would mind. Nobody in Scarecrow would mind. Scarecrow had known about the four of us for longer than it had been called Scarecrow. Holt had watched us build the house with one shared room in it and said nothing except that the porch was too narrow, which it was.

But there were people here now who hadn't been here then.

Parents.

Sera told hers first.

She wanted to do it alone. She went down the street to the Calders' house at the edge of the square, with her hand on her stomach and her jaw set, and I sat on our porch steps and waited and tried very hard not to listen, and failed, because Rory Calder was not a quiet man and the Calder house did not have thick walls.

I heard Maura first. One sound. The sound she'd made on the ridge.

Oh, love.

Then nothing for a long time.

Then Rory.

"Sera," he said. Not loud. For once, not loud. "I've got to ask you something."

"Ask."

"Who's walking you?"

A pause.

"I'd like it to be you," said Sera. "If you want."

Another pause. Much longer.

"I stood behind your mother at the gate," said Rory. "In the snow. With your brother in her coat, four months old, and he couldn't breathe, and she was on her knees in front of a man with a clipboard, and I couldn't do anything. They'd taken my fire at the first gate. I'd had the biggest fire on the northern line and I couldn't do one single thing." His voice was very rough. "And then you came along, behind that wall. And I've been walking behind you your whole life, Sera. Behind you and Liam. Tending a heat plant by hand. Not able to do anything."

"Dad."

"I'd like to walk beside you," said Rory. "Just the once. If that's all right."

I got up off the steps and went inside and shut the door, because some things you don't listen to even when you can.

Luna told the General in the map room.

I wasn't there. Nobody was. She came back an hour later with her face very composed and her notebook very straight under her arm, and sat down at our kitchen table, and opened it, and closed it again.

"Well?" said Risa.

"He asked if I'd thought about it carefully," said Luna.

"And?"

"I said I'd thought about it for a very long time. I said I'd thought about it every day since a wall in the rain. I said I'd drafted it four times." She paused. "He asked to see the drafts."

"Did you show him?"

"Yes."

"Luna."

"He read all four," said Luna. "In order. He didn't say anything. Then he gave them back. Then he said—" She stopped. She looked at the table. "He said, The fourth one's the best. You put them first."

Nobody said anything.

"And then he asked if he could walk me," said Luna. "Before I'd asked him. He said, You'll want someone who can stand very straight for a long time. I've had practice."

Sera reached across the table and took her hand.

Luna let her.

Mother was in our garden, with Dory.

She'd taken Dory off Risa's hands at breakfast without asking, the way she did every morning now, and carried her out to the wall where the queen was, and sat on the stone bench Genny liked with Dory on her lap, and the two of them were looking at the queen and the queen was looking back at them. That was most of what Mother did, in the mornings. Look at things. She said she had a great deal of looking to catch up on.

I went out to her alone.

She didn't look round. She knew it was me. She'd always known.

"Sit down, love," she said.

I sat.

"They've asked you," said Mother.

"How did you—"

"Dory," said Mother. "She told the queen in the night. Very loudly. She told me at breakfast. Also very loudly." She smoothed Dory's hair. "And you've been walking about since yesterday with your face doing something your father's used to do. The day before he asked me."

I didn't say anything for a while.

"You and Father," I said at last. "You didn't have anyone. When you got married. Did you?"

Mother's hands went still on Dory's back.

"No," she said. "We didn't. We came out of the halls with nothing. Nobody to tell. Nobody to walk me. Nobody to stand behind him." She was quiet. "We got married in front of a clerk who had a cold, with the clerk's cold for a witness. Your father held my hand the whole time so I wouldn't shake." A pause. "I wasn't shaking. He did it anyway."

"Mother—"

"Your children," said Mother, "are going to have three mothers. And a grandmother who'll want to hold every one of them. And two aunts who'll argue about everything. And Calders, who'll feed them till they can't move. And a General who'll teach them to stand up straight." She looked at the queen. "And all of those."

The queen at the wall looked back at her.

Brood mothers, it said. Into both of us. Very gently. For the small ones.

Mother didn't flinch.

Not this time. Not even a little. She looked at the great plated head an arm's length from her own, and Dory on her lap reaching for it with both hands, and for a long moment she didn't say anything at all.

"Thank you," she said. To the queen. Very quietly. "For mine."

Then she turned to me.

"I'd like to talk to Luna," said Mother. "On her own."

"Why Luna?"

"Because Luna," said Mother, "is the one who's frightened I'll mind." She looked at me. "Isn't she."

I thought about a wall in the rain. Would your mother hate me? For making her son's life more complicated.

"Yes," I said.

"Then send her out," said Mother. "And go and help Liam with something. He's been standing at your gate for ten minutes trying to look like he isn't."

He had.

I don't know what Mother said to Luna. Neither of them ever told me. Luna went out into the garden with her notebook and came back in forty minutes later without it. Mother had it. Mother kept it till supper, and gave it back at the table without a word, and Luna took it and put it in her lap and didn't open it for the rest of the meal.

When I looked later, there was a new line under the terms. Not in Luna's writing. In a careful, rounded hand I'd known all my life.

Nobody here is smaller than anybody else.

Risa went to the guest house last.

On her own, with Dory. She didn't tell anyone she was going. I only knew because I felt Dory go, the way I always felt Dory, a small bright light moving down the street toward the north end of the city where the guest houses were.

I didn't follow.

But I felt it, through Dory. Not words. The shape of it.

The door of the guest house opening. A narrow grey man, very composed, in a dark coat, with a cane he didn't need. Standing very still in the doorway. Looking at his daughter. At the baby on her hip.

There you are, said Dory. The way she always did.

He didn't step back. He didn't step forward. He stood there.

Ask me again, Risa had told him, at the bottom of our porch steps, a long time ago, when you've stopped signing first.

He hadn't signed anything since. Not since the terms were voided. Not one thing. When the Senate men came to the gantry on Earth with an order that had his name on it, Sigmund had said he's in a guest house on Avalon and hasn't signed anything, and that had been true.

I felt Risa decide.

It took her a long time. Dory waited. Dory was good at waiting, when it mattered.

Then Risa held her out.

Not with words. With her arms. The way Mother had held hers out at the bottom of the palm.

I felt Senator Friese take his granddaughter. Very carefully. As if she might break. As if he might. I felt Dory check him, all of him, every path, every thing he'd done, every name he'd signed under first. And I felt her decide too, the way she always decided, the way the queens did, the way Genny did with stone.

There you are.

He held her for a long time.

When Risa came home, she sat down on the porch steps beside me and leaned her head on my shoulder and didn't say anything for a while.

"Sigmund's walking me," she said at last. "I asked him this morning. He went green and said yes and then went and threw up behind the tower, like Toby."

"And your father?"

"He asked if he could come," said Risa. "To the back. He said he'd stand at the very back and not say anything."

"What did you say?"

Risa watched the street. Jessa was going past, with Sigmund beside her, trying to look as though he'd just happened to be walking the same way.

"I said he could stand where he liked," said Risa. "As long as he doesn't sign anything."

Okafor found us that evening.

All four of us, on the porch, with Dory asleep across Risa and Luna's knees and Sera with her feet up on the rail and her hand on the top of her stomach, where the baby was humming Toby's note very loudly, and Liam and Anja on the bottom step pretending they weren't listening.

Okafor came up the steps with her slate.

She stood at the top and looked at us. At the four of us. At the four plain iron rings on four hands, which we hadn't taken off since the forge, because none of us had wanted to.

"Holt tells me," said Okafor, "that this is also quite straightforward."

"Ma'am," said Luna.

"I have now married two people," said Okafor. "I'm informed that four is the same thing, twice." She looked at her slate. She didn't write anything on it. "Under the tree?"

"Under the tree," said Sera.

"When?"

We looked at each other.

We hadn't decided. We'd decided everything else. We hadn't decided that.

"The Sef are still in their sand," said Luna slowly. "In the second Hand. And the others in the far holds that we haven't reached yet. And the queens in their collars." She looked out at the plain, where the two Hands lay with their fingers folded, and the Hesk queen's kiln-glow showed faintly through the dusk. "I don't want to stand under a tree while there's anybody still in a collar on that plain."

Okafor looked at her for a long time.

"No," she said. "Neither would I."

She tucked her slate under her arm.

"The day after the last collar in the second Hand comes off," said Okafor. "Under the tree. I'll do it." She turned to go. Then turned back. "Dask."

"Ma'am."

"I've known each of these three since they were cadets in my training hall," said Okafor. "Windsor ran my drills better than my instructors did. Calder set my training hall on fire. Friese reported four violations of the mess regulations in her first week, all of them correctly." She paused. "Don't make me sorry."

"No, ma'am."

"Good," said Okafor, and went down the steps.

At the bottom, without turning round, she said: "Congratulations." And then, to Liam, who had made a noise: "Calder, get out from under that step."

He hadn't been under the step. He was now. He'd tried to get under it when she looked at him.

That night, in our room, in the house we'd drawn on a scrap of paper on a wet wall a long time ago and then built, with the one shared room in it and the small room for the baby that was Dory's now and would have to be bigger, the four of us lay in the dark and didn't sleep.

Sera on her side, with her stomach between us. Risa on my other side, with Dory in the cot beside her where she could put a hand on her. Luna at the end, as always, with the blanket she'd been accused of stealing a long time ago and had never, as far as anyone could tell, given back.

"Lucas," said Sera. Very quietly.

"Mm."

"Give me your hand."

She put it on her stomach.

The baby was awake. I could feel her. A thread of whole silver, very small and very bright, humming Toby's note under my palm. She'd been humming it since she was smaller than my thumb. She'd hummed it when the voice came from the sky. She'd hummed it at the knuckle, and on the battlefield, and at the wedding under the tree.

She was humming something else now.

Not Toby's note. Not just. Under it, very faint, three more. One warm, like a kiln. One sharp and bright, like a spark in dry air. One cold and clear, like water at the bottom of the canyon.

And under all of them, very far away and very deep, the queens. Every one who sang at dawn. Humming back.

"Can you hear that?" said Sera.

"Yes."

"That's us," said Sera. "That's all of us. She's learning all of us."

Risa reached across me in the dark and put her hand over mine. Then Luna, from the end, without a word. Three hands and mine, on Sera's stomach, on four iron rings.

There you are, said Dory, in her sleep. To all of us. There you are. There you are. There you are.

Days 827–830. Three.

They'd been whispering for days. Luna closed her notebook casually, which she never does. Sera smiled across breakfast like she knew something. Liam grinned at an anvil and said it was a good anvil. Risa says I listen to the silver and forget there's a face on the front.

Fourth evening, the forge, a hinge for the schoolroom door. All three came in together, Sera first, Risa with Dory asleep in the sling, Luna last, holding on to each other up the street. Nothing's happened; nobody's hurt; the Hesk queen is lying on the plain with Rory sitting on her foot. Sit down. Luna opened her notebook: a long time ago, on the dry side of a wall in the rain, we made rules. No pretending. Wanting isn't a deadline. Say when it hurts. We've kept them. We'd like to add one. We'd like to get married. To you, said Sera. And to each other, said Risa.

I'd thought about it under the tree and stopped, because I didn't know how to ask all three without making it something smaller, a thing about me. So they asked. Risa: if you'd asked it would have been three yeses to you, and it isn't that; I love them too, not through you. Them. Luna: married to Risa and to Sera as well as to you, a thing in its own right. Three of us decided; now we're asking the fourth.

From behind the bellows, wedged sideways in coal dust: oh, say yes. Liam banged the door, walked up the street, walked back on his toes; Anja helped. Hello, said Anja, through the window. He'd been stuck twenty minutes and couldn't speak because of the moment. I said yes, badly, all of it, sorry I didn't know how to ask. Sera's arms round my neck, belly first; Risa with Dory squashed between us; Luna, who doesn't hug, put her notebook square on the anvil and held all three. Liam: best proposal I've ever seen. Mine was worse; I said are you hungry. I asked the stone to move an inch and he fell out.

Four iron rings from the scrap box, made in secret at night: Sera's fire, Risa's lightning in a single seam with no beginning and no end, Luna's water from the deep to quench. We'd like you to finish them, not make them. I smoothed the insides and let each decide how wide. I left them grey. Iron, like the scarecrows. That was the point.

Dawn at the wall. The queen already knew; Dory told her in the night, very loudly. Married, said the queen, carefully. I will remember. Sera: they'll have three mothers, Risa and me and Luna, whoever carries; Dory's mine, this one's Risa's, when Luna has one it'll be ours. When, said Luna, when the plan's done. You said a young one is of her mother's brood, always. Does three break something? The queen sang out to every queen: the old one, the first and second, the spine-queen, the youngest of the Kethri, the Hesk, the Ulu, the Karst. There was never a brood with more than one queen, on any world. So we have decided. Three mothers who carry, hold, teach; theirs first. And us: not as mothers, we would not take that; the brood-word for a queen who is not your mother but still yours, who sings to you and checks you in the morning and would come for you if you were lost. Every queen who sings at dawn. Brood mothers. Sera put her forehead to the plate, said right, good, thank you, and walked fast so nobody would see. Luna: will they be mine if I don't carry? Daughter of the cold one, you held the young of this whole city at the knuckle; you did not carry them; they are yours. Windsors don't. She did, a little. I didn't write it down.

Sera to the Calders. Maura: oh, love. Rory: who's walking you? You, if you want. I stood behind your mother at the gate in the snow with Liam in her coat, my fire taken, and couldn't do one thing; I've walked behind you your whole life. I'd like to walk beside you, just the once. I went in and shut the door.

Luna to the General in the map room. He read all four drafts in order: the fourth's the best, you put them first. Then asked to walk her before she asked: you'll want someone who can stand very straight for a long time; I've had practice.

Mother on Genny's bench with Dory, looking; she has a lot of looking to catch up on. Dory told her at breakfast. You and Father didn't have anyone. No. Out of the halls with nothing; a clerk with a cold, and the cold for a witness; your father held my hand so I wouldn't shake; I wasn't; he did it anyway. Your children will have three mothers, a grandmother, two aunts who argue, Calders, a General, and all of those. The queen: brood mothers, for the small ones. She didn't flinch. Thank you, for mine. Then: send Luna out, she's the one frightened I'll mind. Forty minutes; Mother kept the notebook till supper. A new line under the terms in her careful rounded hand, the hand I've known all my life: Nobody here is smaller than anybody else.

Risa to the guest house with Dory, alone. Through Dory I felt the door open, Friese very still. Ask me again when you've stopped signing first. He hasn't signed anything since the terms were voided. Risa held her out with her arms. He took her as if she might break, or he might. Dory checked him, all of it, and decided. There you are. Sigmund's walking her; he went green and threw up behind the tower like Toby. Her father asked to stand at the very back. Wherever he likes, as long as he doesn't sign anything.

Okafor on the porch, four iron rings on four hands. Holt says this is also straightforward; four is two, twice. Under the tree. When? Luna: not while anybody's still in a collar on that plain; the Sef in their sand, the far holds. Neither would I. The day after the last collar in the second Hand comes off; I'll do it. Windsor ran my drills better than my instructors; Calder set my training hall on fire; Friese reported four mess violations her first week, all correctly. Don't make me sorry. Congratulations. Calder, get out from under that step.

Night, the room we drew on the wet wall. Sera put my hand on her stomach. Toby's note, and under it three more: one warm like a kiln, one sharp like a spark in dry air, one cold like water at the bottom of the canyon. And under them, far and deep, the queens humming back. That's us. She's learning all of us. Risa's hand over mine, then Luna's from the end. Dory, asleep: there you are, there you are, there you are.