Chapter 367 Cold and Warm

Luna's daughter came first, on a night so cold the seventh lake froze from the edges in.

Nobody else's fault. Hers. Luna said afterward she'd felt it start just after supper, and gone to the kitchen window, and opened it, and stood there with her hand on the frame and the night coming in, and thought: not yet. And the baby had thought, quite clearly, yes.

So the lake froze.

I was at the long table in the town under the garden wall when it started. Building a staircase for the Vaeli children, who wanted one they could climb up the outside of the long hall without anyone's permission. I felt it. Not the way you'd feel a message, or a call on the channel. The way I feel everything now.

The whole of Avalon went one degree colder.

Every atom of it. All at once. From the porch outward.

I put the staircase down and scattered.

I came back together in the kitchen.

Mother was already there. Of course she was. In her apron, with the kettle on, as if she'd known it was going to be tonight before anyone else did. Maura was there, with her sleeves rolled up and her hands already warm. The General was in the doorway with his arms folded and his face very white, and Trevor asleep on his shoulder, frosting the General's collar in a small perfect circle.

And Sera.

That was the thing. Sera was there too. On the bench under the window. With one hand on her own middle and the other in Luna's. Luna was standing at the open window with frost going up the wall from her fingers, and Sera was holding her other hand, and where they touched, there was steam.

"You're not supposed to be standing," said Maura.

"I'm not going to lie down," said Luna. "If I lie down she'll freeze the bed."

"She's going to freeze the bed anyway."

"Then I'll freeze it standing up," said Luna.

I've been there for every one of my children.

Dory, in the old house, with the queens singing. Trevor, in the first winter in the crooked house. Ash. Small Sigmund. Kwame and his sister, both at once, with Hana holding the water in the room warm and still.

I'd never felt one the way I felt Elin.

Because I'd never been able to feel the atoms of the room before. Not like this. Not every one. And I stood in the kitchen of the crooked house and felt my daughter coming, and felt every atom she touched go still. Not frozen. Still. The way Luna makes things still. The way snow is still.

She wasn't cold the way the black is cold.

She was cold the way morning is.

She was born just before midnight.

On the kitchen floor, in the end. Because the floor was the only thing in the kitchen that wasn't already ice. With Luna on her knees and Maura's warm hands under her and Mother holding the lamp and Sera holding Luna's hand so tight that the steam filled the whole room, and the General outside the door with Trevor, and Risa and Hana on the stairs with Dory between them.

And me.

On the floor beside Luna. With my hands flat on the boards. Feeling every atom of the kitchen. Holding them still enough that nothing broke.

She came out cold.

Not crying. Looking. With her eyes already open. Pale blue, with the silver ring round them very bright. And frost on her eyelashes. And her fists closed.

The whole kitchen was white.

Every surface. The table. The kettle. Mother's lamp. The window frame. Ice, in fern patterns, all the way up the walls and across the ceiling, so fine you could see the light through it.

Except where Sera was.

"Hello," said Luna.

To the baby. On her knees on the kitchen floor. Very quietly. With her cold hands round her.

The baby looked at her.

And the frost on the walls went soft. Not melting. Just softer. The way snow goes soft when the sun comes out on it.

"Elin," said Luna. "Her name's Elin." She looked at me. "We decided. Didn't we."

"We decided."

"Elin," said Mother. From behind the lamp. Very softly. "After no one."

"After no one," said Luna. "Just her."

The General came in.

He didn't ask. He came in when Elin was nine minutes old and the frost on the walls was still soft, and he knelt down on the kitchen floor in his good trousers, with Trevor still asleep on his shoulder, and looked at his granddaughter for a long time.

"Luna," he said. Eventually. "Your mother would have—"

He stopped.

Luna put Elin in his arms.

He hadn't been expecting it. I saw his face. He'd never been expecting it, not once, not for Trevor either. Every time it happened to him like the first time.

He held her very carefully. With his big hands. With Trevor on his other shoulder.

And Elin, who'd frosted everything in the kitchen including the kettle, looked up at her grandfather's face.

And didn't frost him at all.

Sera's started an hour later.

I should have expected it. Everyone said afterward that they should have expected it. Luna and Sera had done everything together for a year and a half. They'd got pregnant in the same month. They'd stood in front of the porch on the same evening and told us. They'd sat on one blanket on the plain at the twins' birthday with their hands on their middles, one cold, one warm, and I'd knelt in front of them and said it to both hearts.

Of course it was the same night.

Sera said afterward that her daughter had felt her sister arrive, and the cold, and the frost on the walls. And had decided, very firmly, that she wasn't having any of it.

So the kitchen got warm.

Not slowly.

The frost on the walls went from soft to water to steam in less than a minute. The windows ran. The kettle, which had been frozen solid, boiled. Mother put down her lamp because the handle was too hot to hold. And Sera, on the bench under the window, still holding Luna's hand, went very slightly gold at the edges.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, no. Not now."

"Yes now," said Maura. Already rolling up her sleeves again.

"Mum, I'm on fire."

"You've been on fire since you were four," said Maura. "Lie down."

"If I lie down I'll burn the bench."

"Then burn it lying down," said Maura.

Rory came.

He'd been at the bakery. He'd felt it from the bakery, he said, a mile away; every oven in the place had gone out at once, and then lit again, all by themselves, hotter than he'd ever had them. And he'd known.

He came through the kitchen door at a run in his flour-white apron and stopped and looked at the steam.

"Is it—"

"Yes," said Maura.

"Both?"

"Both," said Mother. "Elin's here. With her grandfather. In the hall." She nodded at the door. "Sera's next."

Rory looked at his daughter. On the bench. Gold at the edges. With Luna, who'd only just given birth an hour before on the kitchen floor, sitting beside her on the bench now, with Elin's cold still on her hands, holding Sera's.

"Luna," he said. "You should be lying down."

"So should she," said Luna. "We're doing it together."

Marigold came just before two in the morning.

Warm.

She came out with her eyes shut and her mouth open and roaring. Gold. Not burning. Glowing, a little, the way a coal glows when you blow on it. With the silver ring round her eyes when she opened them, very bright, the colour of the inside of Rory's ovens.

The whole kitchen was hot. Not dangerous. Summer. Like the afternoon on the plain when the wheat is ready and nobody can do anything but lie in the shade.

Except where Luna was.

"Goldie," said Sera. Holding her. Crying. Laughing. Both. "Marigold. Goldie for short." She looked at me. "We decided."

"We decided."

"After your father's marigolds," said Sera. To me. "Not after him. After the marigolds. You told me. He kept them on the windowsill in the old house. Every year. Even the years nothing else grew." She looked at Mother. "Didn't he."

Mother couldn't say anything.

She just nodded.

Rory knelt down on the kitchen floor in his apron and put his hand very gently on his granddaughter's head.

She stopped roaring.

And looked at him.

So I had two daughters on one night.

One cold. One warm.

And the strangest thing happened. Garnet drew it, because she'd come up the hill at three in the morning with her drawing board when Genny woke her, and stood in the kitchen door.

Luna put Elin down on the kitchen table. On a towel. Very carefully. And Sera put Goldie down beside her.

Elin, who'd frosted the whole kitchen.

Goldie, who'd boiled it.

They lay side by side on the towel and looked at each other. Neither of them could see much yet. Babies can't. But they looked.

And the kitchen, which had been winter and then summer, went—

Spring.

Not cold. Not hot. Just the temperature of an April morning on the plain with the windows open. Mild. Soft. With a smell, very faintly, of rain.

Every atom of it.

I felt it settle.

Three. That's Garnet's drawing. Two sisters. One towel. April.

She wrote under it: They balance. Mother says that's what sisters are for.

The grandparents didn't go home.

That's the thing I want to write about next. Because they didn't. Not that night. Not the next day. Not for a week.

The General moved into the crooked house.

Not officially. He just didn't leave. He slept in the chair in the hall with Elin on his chest, because Elin slept best on someone who didn't mind being cold, and the General said he'd spent eleven winters in the north passes in the war and a baby was nothing. He got up in the night when she woke. Before Luna. Before anyone. He walked her up and down the hall in the dark, very slowly, humming something he wouldn't tell anyone the name of.

Mother told me. In the morning. Over the kettle.

"It's what Luna's mother used to sing," she said. "In the war. On the transports. I heard her once."

"He's never told Luna that."

"No," said Mother. "He's telling Elin."

Rory and Maura took the other half of the house.

Not the chairs. The kitchen. Maura cooked every meal for a week and Rory baked every loaf in the crooked house's oven, which he'd always said was too small and badly made and that he'd never bake in, and he baked in it every morning, and Goldie slept in a basket by the oven door in the warm.

Pip's basket. The iron one. That keeps things warm.

"She doesn't need it to keep her warm," said Pip. "She's the warmest thing in the house."

"It's not for her," said Rory. "It's for the house. So she doesn't have to do all of it herself."

Pip looked at her niece in the iron basket. Glowing very faintly. Asleep.

"That's the nicest thing you've ever made," she said.

"I made it for you," said Rory.

"I know," said Pip. "That's why."

And Ingrid came.

Every afternoon. As lightning. Down out of the sky onto the porch in a long blue line, and back into a small grey woman in a flight jacket two sizes too big, and in through the kitchen door with something in her hands. A blanket. A rattle Konrad had carved, badly. A book.

"She's not your granddaughter," Konrad said. On the third day. On the porch. Very carefully.

"Neither of them are," said Ingrid. "Risa's are. Sigmund's are. These are Dot's." She sat down in the chair beside Mother's. "And Dot's are mine. That's how it works." She looked at Konrad. "You'd know that if you'd been there the first time."

Konrad didn't say anything for a long time.

Then he went into the kitchen. And came out with Elin. Very carefully. The way he'd held the pen. And sat down on the step. And held her.

She frosted his sleeve. Just a little.

He didn't move.

"She likes you," said Ingrid.

"She's freezing my arm."

"That's how she likes people," said Luna. From the window. "She froze me first."

And Okafor came.

On the fourth evening. Up the long road on foot, because she said the Marshal of Avalon could walk up a hill like anyone else. She stood in the kitchen doorway in her coat and looked at the iron basket for a long time.

She didn't pick them up. Okafor doesn't pick up babies. She says she drops them; she's never dropped one, but she says she would.

She put two fingers on the edge of the basket instead.

And very slightly, very carefully, made it lighter. So that it rocked. Once. On its own. Like something on water.

Elin and Goldie, asleep, didn't wake.

"There," said Okafor.

Then she took the black slate out of her inside pocket. And wrote two lines at the bottom of the left column. And put it away again without showing anyone.

Mother told me later that she'd seen it over Okafor's shoulder.

Elin. Goldie. Born.

"Not a rescue," I said.

"No," said Mother. "But she counts them anyway."

And Nan Vey ironed every blanket in the house.

Twice.

And Dory met them.

Not that night. Mother sent everyone to bed at four, and for once everyone went. But the next morning, early, before anyone else was up except the General in the hall with Elin on his chest, Dory came down the stairs in her nightgown with Pebble behind her and stood in the kitchen doorway.

I was at the table. I hadn't gone to bed. I'd sat in the kitchen all night feeling the two of them breathe in the iron basket by the oven. Every atom. Cold and warm. Side by side.

Dory looked at the basket for a long time.

"Two," she said.

"Two."

"I knew," said Dory. "Last month. I felt them. When I was holding the house." She came in. Very quietly. And knelt down by the basket. And didn't touch it. The way Genny taught her. Hand flat on the floor beside it. "I didn't say. I thought you'd want them to be a surprise."

"They were."

"Good," said Dory.

She stayed there. Kneeling on the kitchen floor with her hand flat on the boards. And I felt her hold. Not hard. Not the way she held the door for eleven hours on seven-three-K. Just a little. The way you'd put a hand round a candle flame in a draught.

And Elin and Goldie, asleep, both moved at once. Toward her.

"They know me," said Dory.

"Yes."

"I'm the oldest," said Dory. Very seriously. "Of all of us. So I hold." She looked up at me with her silver-ringed eyes. "That's what the oldest does. Grandma says. She says you held Aunt Genny and Aunt Garnet up when they were little. Before you could hardly walk yourself."

I don't remember that. Mother says a great many things to Dory that aren't true. They're always the right things.

"That's right," I said.

Risa came down next. With small Sigmund on her hip and a very small cloud over his head, raining on nothing. Then Hana, with Efua and Kwame, both of them awake and both of them staring at the basket as if it had been put there to annoy them personally.

"Two more," said Risa. Sitting down at the table. "Two. On one night."

"You had Sigmund in a thunderstorm," said Hana. "On the roof."

"That was one," said Risa. "And it was a very small thunderstorm." She looked at the basket. At Elin and Goldie, side by side, with the kitchen at April round them. "How are we going to fit eight of them on the porch?"

"We'll build a bigger porch," I said.

"You'll build a bigger porch," said Risa. "And then there'll be nine." She put her chin in her hand. And looked at the basket for a long time. "Lucas."

"Yes?"

"They're beautiful."

"Yes."

"I'm going to cry," said Risa, "and if you tell anyone I'll make it rain in your boots."

Small Sigmund's cloud rained a little harder.

Hana put her hand on Risa's back. And Kwame, on her knee, looked at the basket, and said his word. The only word he'll say at the long table; the one that everyone agreed counts.

"There," said Kwame.

Genny wrote them both down.

In volume fourteen. With Father's pen. On the first page of a new section she'd headed, in her small neat hand, Brood: Dask.

"We're not a brood," I said.

"You are now," said Genny. "Everyone else's is in here. The forest queen's. The sorting queen's. The Hathri. The Lir." She turned the page toward me. "Dory, Trevor, Ash, small Sigmund, Efua and Kwame, Elin, Goldie." She looked at me. "Eight. Who can all do things nobody can explain. Bell's measuring them. Doctor Bell, I mean. Not the tray." She wrote something. "If I don't write them down, nobody will."

"Is that what you think we are?" I said. "A brood?"

Genny looked at me for a long time.

"I think the queens think so," she said. "And I think they're right."

I'm going to write about Rain now.

Because it was the week after. And because it was Elin and Goldie, in the end, that made it happen. Though neither of them knew.

Rain came up the hill on the ninth day.

On her own. From the town under the garden wall. Which she'd never left on her own before. She'd been to the porch, with Tally and Moon, on the nights everyone came. And to the long ward with Genny. But never on her own. Never up the long road with nobody beside her.

She came because of the smell.

That's what she told Dot. When Dot asked her, very gently, through the wood of the porch rail, what she was doing there.

It smelled like home, Rain said. From the town. The whole way up. Since the night the babies came.

Garnet had written it. On the drawing. April. A smell, very faintly, of rain.

When Elin and Goldie lay side by side, the kitchen had gone to spring. And it had stayed. Not just the kitchen. The house. The porch. The garden. A little more each day, as the two of them slept beside each other in the iron basket by the oven, which is where they slept now, together, because they'd both cried when they were apart.

And on the ninth morning the whole of the long road smelled of rain.

Not rain falling. The smell before. The one that comes up off warm ground when the clouds are about to break.

Rain had smelled it from the town under the garden wall.

And come to find it.

Mother brought her into the kitchen.

To the basket. By the oven. With Elin and Goldie asleep in it side by side.

Rain looked at them for a long time.

She's very small, Rain. Smaller than Dory, though she's older. With hands that are very long and very still, and eyes the colour of wet leaves, and a way of standing in a room as if she's waiting for something to fall on her. Soft. Not hard.

She said something. In her own language. Very quiet.

Dot translated.

They're making the weather. Together. The way the old songs say.

"What old songs?" said Mother.

Rain didn't answer. She was looking at the babies.

Then she started to hum.

I was in the hall. I heard it.

It wasn't a song I knew. It wasn't any song I'd heard on Avalon, and I've heard nearly every one now; the Hathri, the Lir, the Vaeli, the Kethri, the queens. It was very low and very soft and it went up and down like water running off a roof.

And somewhere a mile away, on the long ward, in a tray at the end of the third row, something hummed back.

Genny felt it.

She was on the long ward. With Callum, who was there every afternoon now, with his hand on the stone beside the rain queen's tray, the way she'd taught him. With Brock across from them reading to Bell. With Saska saying the long words.

And the rain queen hummed.

Not once. Not faintly. The way she'd hummed for Callum on the fourth night. Louder. Longer. And again. And again.

Callum took his hand away from the stone.

"That's not me," he said. "I'm not doing anything."

"No," said Genny. On her feet. With volume fourteen. "Someone's singing to her."

They came up the hill at a run.

Genny first. With Callum behind her, and Brock, and Saska, a heartbeat ahead of all of them and somehow still behind Genny because Genny was the one who knew where they were going.

They came into the kitchen.

Rain was still humming. By the basket. With Mother beside her.

And Genny stood in the doorway with the brood book under her arm and her chest going up and down and looked at Rain.

"Where did you learn that?" she said.

Dot asked her. Gently. Through the wood.

And Rain told her.

Her grandmother had sung it. In her world. To the rain. Every evening, when it came. Everyone's grandmother sang it. Everyone's grandmother's grandmother. It was the song you sang to the rain to say thank you for coming.

But it doesn't come any more, said Rain. Not since before my grandmother. It's dry now. The forests are grey. Grandmother said the rain went away because someone took it. And we sing anyway. So it knows we're still waiting.

Nobody in the kitchen said anything.

My sisters sing it, said Rain. Every night. Three of them. They're too young to know why.

Genny sat down on the kitchen floor.

Right there. In the doorway. With volume fourteen in her lap. And opened it. And went back. Not to the Dask section. To the beginning of volume twelve. And then further, to a page she'd copied from volume eleven, about the nine queens in the trays.

A queen of rain. Not storms. Rain. Soft and steady and warm, on a world that had been all forest and all rain and all green, a very long time ago, before the houses.

Her pieces had been in a box on a shelf on Level Sixty-two for thirty years. Given to the Council as a token.

Genny looked up at Rain.

"Someone took it," she said.

I knelt down beside Rain.

"Would you sing it again?" I said. "Just once. While I listen."

Dot told her. Rain looked at me with her wet-leaf eyes for a long time.

Then she sang it again.

And I listened. Not with my ears. With everything. The way I feel the moon. The way I felt the heart of a tired atom on the grey stone.

I followed it.

Out of the kitchen. Down the long road. Into the long ward. Into the tray at the end of the third row, where the rain queen lay in her pieces, broken grey, the ones that had come out of the box on Level Sixty-two. And I felt her hear it. And I felt her answer. And in the answer, very faint, very far down, under thirty years in a box and longer than that before—

The same song.

The same water running off the same roof.

She knew it.

She'd taught it.

"She's yours," I said. To Rain. Very quietly. "The queen in the tray. On the long ward. She's your world's."

Dot told her.

Rain didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she said one word. In her own language. And Dot didn't translate it. Dot said afterward that it wasn't a word you could translate. It was the word you say when the rain comes back.

We took her to the long ward.

All of us. Mother and me and Genny and Callum and Brock and Saska. And Garnet with her drawing board, and Luna and Sera, who weren't supposed to be out of bed, and came anyway, with Elin and Goldie in the iron basket between them.

And Rain knelt down by the tray at the end of the third row.

She didn't touch it. Genny told her not to, through Dot. You put your hand down near them and wait. So Rain put her long still hand flat on the stone beside the tray.

And sang.

I'm going to let Genny write what happened.

Because she did. That night. In volume fourteen. On a page of its own. And she let me copy it.

Rain queen. Long ward, third row, end.

Rain (the child) sang her the thank-you song. The one for the rain coming. From Rain's world. Which the rain queen taught them. Before the houses took her and broke her and gave her pieces to the Council as a token and put the rest of her in the voice.

Rain sang it three times.

The third time, the rain queen sang it back. Out loud. Everyone heard. Not humming. Singing.

Callum cried. I'm writing that. He'll forgive me.

Then Elin and Goldie woke up in the basket. Both at once. And looked at the tray.

And it rained.

In the long ward. Indoors. From the ceiling. Very soft. Very warm. On everything. On the trays and the floor and Bell and Brock's book and all of us.

Halloway's going to be furious about the floor.

Rain stood up in it with her face turned up and her eyes closed and didn't say anything at all.

That's what Genny wrote.

She didn't write the rest. So I will.

She didn't write that she was standing in the rain too, with her face turned up, and volume fourteen held against her chest under her coat to keep it dry, and Brock behind her with his hands flat on the cover, iron, to make sure.

She didn't write that Callum, kneeling by the tray with his grey hand on the stone and the rain running down his face, closed his left hand.

All of it. Every finger.

For the first time since the reef.

Halloway was furious about the floor.

She came in the next morning and stood in the doorway of the long ward and looked at the water on the stone and the wet trays and Bell's tray, which had a small puddle in it that Bell seemed to be enjoying, and said several things Genny wouldn't write down.

Then she saw the rain queen's tray.

The pieces weren't grey.

Not all of them. Not yet. But at the edges, very faint, the colour was coming back. The way the ash queen's had come back. Green. The green of something that grows where it rains.

Halloway didn't say anything else about the floor.

Okafor came that afternoon.

She stood on the long ward and looked at the rain queen's tray for a long time.

Then she looked at Rain. Who hadn't left. Who'd slept on the floor by the tray all night with Tally and Moon on one side and Genny on the other.

Then she went back to the map room and took out the slate. Not the black one. The long-table one.

And turned it over to the page that said Hollow, and under it, Not yet, and under that, Every world that pays. First.

And under that she wrote:

Rain's world.

"The houses want double," she said. That night. At the long table. With all of us round it. "From Rain's world. In two years." She looked at the slate. "It's been nineteen months."

Nobody said anything.

"Five months," said Okafor. "Before they come down for twice as many children as they've ever taken." She put her hand flat on Garnet's sheet. On the small circle near the edge, on a line far from the ninth. "I'm not waiting five months. I'm not waiting for them to come down. I'm not going to be late by an hour."

"What are you going to do?" said Konrad.

Okafor looked at him.

"I'm going to send you," she said. "And Dane. And Brock. And the Mom Squad. And Garnet, to draw it." She looked down the table. "And Rain."

Mother put her cup down.

"She's a child," she said.

"Yes," said Okafor. "And it's her world. And she's the only one who knows the song." She looked at Mother. "Mrs. Dask. I've seen what happens when we come down on a world nobody on it trusts. The Barrow. The reef. They fight us because they don't know why we're there." She folded her hands. "Rain's world won't fight a child who comes home singing the thank-you song."

Mother looked at her for a long time.

"I'm going," she said. "With her. The whole way. My hand in hers."

"Yes," said Okafor. "I'd assumed."

"And the rain queen?" said Genny.

From the end of the table. With volume fourteen.

Okafor looked at her.

"She's not whole," said Genny. "She won't be for months. Maybe longer. The ash queen took a year." She put her hand flat on the book. "But she's singing. And they've been waiting. Rain said. For longer than her grandmother. They sing every night so the rain knows they're still waiting."

"What are you asking, Dask?"

"I'm asking if we can take her," said Genny. "Not whole. In her tray. Home." She swallowed. "So she can hear them."

Okafor didn't say anything for a very long time.

Then she wrote something on the slate.

Genevieve Dask. The rain queen's tray. Medics.

"Halloway will want to come," she said.

"Halloway's furious about the floor," said Genny.

"Halloway," said Okafor, "has been furious about floors for as long as I've known her." She almost smiled. "She'll still want to come."

I said it that night.

On the porch. In order.

Which took longer than ever. Because there were two more of them now. In the iron basket between Luna's chair and Sera's. Asleep. Side by side. Making the night smell, very faintly, of rain.

When I got to them, I knelt down.

And said it.

Elin frosted my fingertip. Goldie warmed it again. Neither of them woke up.

Rain was on the porch rail. Between Tally and Moon. She'd come up the hill again on her own. She said she'd keep coming. Until we went.

I said it to her too.

She didn't understand the words. Dot didn't translate them. Dot said some things you didn't.

But Rain looked at me with her wet-leaf eyes.

And hummed the first line of the thank-you song.

Just the first line.

And the General, in the kitchen door, with his bottle, said, very quietly: "It's going to rain."

It didn't. Not that night.

But it smelled like it might.

Days 3821–3850. Cold and Warm.

Elin came first, before midnight: the lake froze and the kitchen went white, and she didn't frost the General. Goldie came at two: the kettle boiled and Sera went gold, and Rory's ovens lit themselves a mile away. Side by side on one towel the kitchen went to April. The grandparents didn't go home; the General hums Luna's mother's song to Elin. Genny opened a section: Brood: Dask. Then Rain smelled her world from the town under the garden wall and came up the hill alone, and sang the thank-you song, and the rain queen in the tray sang it back, because she'd taught it. It rained on the long ward. Callum closed his hand. The rain queen's edges are going green. Okafor: Rain's world, before the double tithe. Rain goes home singing. Mother holds her hand. Genny carries the tray.