Chapter 381 The Ring

We left at dawn.

Old Son flashed three, and one, from the tower on the canyon rim. And Dot sent her pulse. And on the other side of the silver, in a room with a long table and a window over a field, someone sent it with her.

That was the last thing I felt on Avalon. Two pulses, side by side. Ours and theirs.

Then the ramps came up.

I'll write who stayed. Because it matters who stays.

The children stayed. All of them. Dory and Trevor and Ash and small Sigmund and Efua and Kwame and Elin and Goldie and Corin and Thessaly and Abena. On the long porch of the house on the rise, at dawn, in a row, with the grandparents behind them.

Not all the grandparents. The Mom Squad was going. All five. Mother had said so at the long table in a voice that ended the discussion before it began, and Okafor had written it on the slate without looking up.

But the grandfathers stayed.

The General, in his old uniform, with Elin on his hip frosting his collar. Rory, with Goldie. Konrad, who said he'd been to one war and was going to spend this one doing the thing nobody had let him do in the last one, which was stay home with the children. Kwame Osei, with Abena asleep against his chest and old Efua beside him with her stick. Taveth, who said he was good at nothing and that nothing was exactly what a grandfather should be good at while the grandmothers were away.

And Nan Vey. Who said she was too old for a war and too young to be a grandfather, and would iron.

Dory held the arch.

That was her job. Okafor gave it to her herself, on the porch, the night before, kneeling down in front of her the way she knelt on Tiel.

"There's no arch on the ring," said Okafor. "Not yet. We're going to make one. Kyria's people are going to cut it, the way the First Blades always have. Where they stand." She put her hand on Dory's shoulder. "And when they've cut it, someone has to hold this end open. From here. While forty-two worlds go through it."

"The queens hold the arches," said Dory.

"The queens will be singing," said Okafor. "All of them. All the way up the thread. To the ring. To every queen in every tower. They won't have anything left for the door." She looked at Dory. "I need someone who can hold a door while everyone else sings. And I don't know anyone else who can."

Dory looked at her for a long time.

Then she put her hand flat on the porch rail.

"I've got it," she said.

So she stood in the courtyard of the house on the rise. At dawn. With her hand on the arch. Eight and a half and looking fourteen, with Pebble at her feet and the Scarecrow queen's young in a ring round her. And Corin beside her, on the stone, because he'd crawled out of the grandfathers' arms and across the courtyard and sat down next to his sister and put his own hand flat on the arch beside hers.

Nobody moved him.

The old queen, under the house, lifted her great head. And didn't go to sleep.

Three days up the thread.

I won't write all of it. It was very quiet and very dark and very long. Every ship we had, in a line, with Ruan on the Meridian singing the rope at the front and every queen on Avalon singing it behind her, through the silver, so loud I could feel it in my teeth.

The Meridian. The Harness. The Long Legs. The Steady. The Marian, with Dennis at her heart and Brock at her door, saying weight on the left all the way. The Clare beside her. The Ground, with the heavy queen carrying it, and forty walking engines folded in its hold. The Scarecrow. The Open Hand. Every interceptor in Risa's wing, strapped to every hull.

And Hearth.

Not there. Not really. But on the second night, in the dark of the thread, Dot told me through the wood of the Meridian's map room that the relay in her side had pulsed. Once. At the hour. Exactly when it should have.

They were keeping it.

On the third day we came out of the rope.

I've tried to write what the ring looked like. Garnet's drawn it more times than anyone. I've looked at every drawing. None of them are it.

I'll try anyway.

A star. Small and white and very hot. And round it, so far out that the star was only a bright point in the middle, a ring.

Grey. All the way round. Sorn metal. So wide that if you stood on it you'd never see the edge. So long that light took most of an hour to go round it. And on it, everywhere, rising off it like grass off a field, towers.

Thousands.

Every one of them singing.

That was the thing. Not the size. Not the grey. The singing.

I'd heard the voice in its quiet places. I'd heard the tide queen singing everyone home and the rain queen singing the thank-you song and every queen on Avalon in the hall under the house on the rise. I'd heard queens in pieces in trays on the long ward, humming when Brock got a long word right.

I'd never heard anything like the ring.

Thousands of queens. In pieces. In towers. All of them singing at once, the same song, the one the houses taught, very loud and very tired and very crowded. The way a room sounds when there are too many people in it and nobody can leave.

Ilka, on the Meridian's relay, put both hands over her ears.

"It's worse," she said. "Than from far away. It's so much worse."

And under the singing, the children.

I felt them. Every atom. I couldn't help it; I can feel the moon, and the ring was closer than the moon. In the towers. Under the queens. Rows and rows and rows of them, the way they'd been in the white rooms on seven-three-K and the Cradle and the holds under the Barrow.

Grey.

Not dead. Not taught empty. Grey. The way the washing on Tiel was grey. Faded. As if something had been very slowly taking the colour out of them for a very long time.

Ilka was right.

There were millions.

Okafor stood at the front of the Meridian's map room with the slate.

She looked out at the ring for a long time.

Then she said, very quietly, "Ilka. Which tower?"

We couldn't take the ring.

Okafor had said that at the long table, on the first day of the thirty. Nobody can take the ring. It's too big. There aren't enough of us, there'll never be enough of us. Forty-two worlds is a great deal, and the ring is more than forty-two worlds.

So we weren't going to take the ring.

We were going to take one place on it. One. Long enough to cut an arch. And then hold the arch. And then bring everyone through it, and take the children out through it, one tower at a time, for as long as we could hold it.

That was the plan.

That was all of the plan.

"There," said Ilka.

She put her finger on Garnet's sheet. On the near side of the ring. On a cluster of towers no different from any other, as far as I could see, except that Ilka said the children under them were the newest. The four. Tiel and the other three. And the sixty-nine Lir who'd gone on from the Barrow before we got there. And the three hundred and eighty from the reef.

"They're not grey yet," said Ilka. "Not all the way. They came last."

Okafor looked at the place on the sheet.

"Then that's where we stand," she said.

The houses saw us at the eleventh minute.

I'll write it the way Garnet drew it. She was on the Meridian, at the forward window, with her board, and Rowan was in an interceptor strapped to the Meridian's hull with Callum behind him in the second seat, and she drew it so fast her pencil broke three times and Ilka handed her new ones without looking.

One.

The ring. Close now. The cluster of towers Ilka chose. And the ground round them, the grey Sorn metal of the ring itself.

Opening.

Doors. All along it. Thousands of them. Very small from where I was. And out of every door, correctors.

So many I stopped trying to draw them one at a time and drew them as a colour. Like a tide coming in.

Two.

The towers. All of them. Turning.

Not moving. Turning. The way a sunflower turns. Every tower in the cluster turning its singing toward us. All at once.

And the singing changing.

I felt it change.

Every queen in every tower. The song the houses taught them. Very loud. Very tired. Turning from whatever it had been singing toward us.

And becoming the note.

Not to the children. To us. To everyone on every ship. Thousands of queens in pieces, singing the note the houses use to make a child walk up a ramp holding hands. At all of us at once.

I felt it go into me.

I felt it go into everyone.

Risa's wing was the first thing it hit. The interceptors, strapped to the hulls, waiting to launch. I felt every pilot in every cockpit go very still. The way the children on the reef went still. Hands on the controls. Not moving.

And then the Steady. And the Marian. And the Clare. And the walking engines folded in the Ground's hold, and the forty thousand Hyrrani beside them.

And me.

I've had the note in me before. On seven-three-K. In the Cradle. It's very small and very cold, and it doesn't hurt, which is the worst thing about it. It just goes in. And sits there. And very patiently starts telling you that you don't want anything.

I stood on the deck of the Meridian with thousands of queens singing it into me and felt myself start to agree.

Ingrid hushed it.

Not the way she hushed the reef, or a continent with Risa. Further. Harder. She went out of the Harness as lightning, a long blue line in the dark between the ships and the ring, and put herself between us and the towers, all of her, as wide as she could make herself.

And made it so there was nothing to hear.

Not the singing. Not the note. Nothing. A silence as wide as the fleet. As wide as she could stretch it.

It wasn't wide enough. I felt the edges of it. Felt the note pressing on it from every side, thousands of queens, pushing.

But inside it, for a moment, we could move.

And Hana.

Hana was on the Harness. With the Mom Squad. She'd said she was coming and nobody had argued; there's no arguing with Hana when she's quiet about something.

She put her hand flat on the deck of the Harness and breathed.

For all of us.

I felt it. Every atom. Oxygen. Clean and full and sweet. Not into the air. Into us. Through the silver. Into every pilot in every cockpit and every Hyrrani in the Ground's hold and every Vaeli on Keir's wings, the way she'd breathed for the Sheln in the clearing on Ammaru so they'd keep singing.

So we'd keep moving.

Between Ingrid's silence and Hana's breath, the fleet woke up.

Three.

The interceptors. Off the hulls. All of them. At once. A spray of small bright lines.

And Risa at the front of them. Not in an interceptor. Lightning.

Going for the towers.

She didn't go through a Hand this time. There weren't any Hands. Just towers.

She went into the first one.

Not through. Into. And I felt her stop, in the middle of it, in the middle of the queen in pieces that was singing the note at us. And put her hands on the queen. As lightning.

And hush her.

The way her mother does. The way Ingrid taught her, on the plain, the year after Ward Nine.

The tower stopped singing.

Four.

Luna's path. Out from the Harness*. White and blue. Across the dark. To the ring. Landing on the grey between the towers like a bridge.*

And on it, the Vaeli. On foot. Running. A heartbeat ahead.

And Saska at the front.

And Brock behind her.

The correctors met them at the end of Luna's path.

I'm not going to write all of it. I've written the correctors before. On the reef. In the Cradle. On Ammaru. They're always the same. They walk. They don't stop. Where they touch, things go black.

The Vaeli don't stop either.

Two thousand of them, coming off the end of Luna's ice onto the grey of the ring, a heartbeat ahead of everything, with the gifts the houses put in them for eleven generations to fight for the houses. Making the air hard as a door. Throwing themselves forty feet. Turning blades with their skin.

And Brock in front.

Not in front of the Vaeli. In front of the Hyrrani.

Because the Hyrrani came next.

Not soldiers. Not engines. Not yet. Twelve women in plain grey cloth, with tools I'd never seen, very old, worn smooth with use. Off the end of Luna's path behind the Vaeli. Across the grey. To a place Kyria had chosen from the Ground's window, a flat open space between three towers, where the metal of the ring was thick and old and quiet.

Stonecutters. The ones who cut the arches.

Kyria was with them.

They knelt down on the grey Sorn metal of the ring in the middle of the battle. And started to cut.

Brock stood in front of them.

Iron. All of him. From his boots to his hair. Between twelve kneeling women and the correctors. With his arms out. The way a scarecrow stands in a field.

He didn't move.

Five.

Garnet drew this one very carefully. It's on the wall of the map room now. Next to the one of Okafor and the barge.

Brock. On the ring. Iron. Arms out. And behind him, very small, twelve women kneeling, cutting.

And in front of him, the tide. The colour Garnet drew the correctors as.

And beside him, half a step ahead, always half a step ahead, Saska. With Teshka's blade.

Under it Garnet wrote: He's good at standing in rivers.

It took four hours to cut the arch.

Four hours.

I don't know how to write four hours. Genny's tried. It's in volume sixteen, which she started on the Meridian on the second day of the thread, and it's eleven pages, and she says it isn't enough.

I'll write some of it.

Okafor stood on the Meridian's forward deck with both hands up and held the ring.

The part of it round the cutters. Heavy. So heavy the correctors coming up out of the doors in the grey moved like they were walking through mud. So heavy the towers round the cutting place leaned, very slightly, inward, toward the weight, so that their singing went into the metal instead of into us.

She held it for four hours.

She didn't sit down.

Sera burned.

All of her. Living flame. Up from the Scarecrow into the space over the cutting place. Burning the black where it came out of the correctors before it could reach the ground. Not out. It doesn't burn out. Back. Up. Away from the twelve kneeling women and Brock and the Vaeli.

She burned so hot that the grey metal of the ring under her went soft and bright and the Hyrrani cutters had to work round the edges of it. She burned for four hours.

Goldie, on the porch of the house on the rise, Rory said afterward, glowed so bright the whole time that nobody could look at her.

Luna held the paths.

Out from every ship. Across the dark. To the ring. So the Vaeli could run and the Hyrrani could come and the wounded could go back. Dozens of them. Hundreds. White and blue. She stood on the deck of the Harness in her ice armour with both hands up and held every path at once.

On the porch of the house on the rise, the General said afterward, Elin frosted every window in the house. From the inside.

And the Mom Squad.

They didn't wait for the arch.

They went down Luna's path from the Harness in the second hour. All five. Mother at the front. Ingrid beside her, out of the silence she'd been holding over the fleet; Hana had taken it over, Hana and Risa together, breath and hush, so Ingrid could go. Maura. Kyria, from the cutters, when Teshka called her. Teshka.

Across the grey. Past Brock. Past the Vaeli. Past the twelve kneeling women.

To the nearest tower.

There was a door at the bottom of it. Grey. Sealed.

Mother put her hand on it and lifted.

Not the door. The tower. Mother lifted the whole tower off the ring. Not far. A hand's width. Enough that the seal at the bottom of the door broke and the door fell open.

And inside, under the queen in pieces singing at the top, in the dark, in rows—

The children from Tiel.

I know because Mother told me. Afterward. On the Harness. With her hands in her lap, shaking.

She said she knew them because of the shirts.

She'd folded every one of them. On the riverbank on Tiel. Six hundred and eleven. With Nan Vey ironing and Wenna handing them over. She knew the sizes. She knew the shapes. She knew which ones had a darn at the elbow and which had a button missing.

And the first child in the first row under the first tower, very small, very still, not grey yet, not all the way, was wearing the shirt that matched the one with the missing button.

Mother knelt down in front of him.

And took the note out of him. The way she does. Like a splinter. Very slowly, so it didn't break.

And Maura put her hands on him after. So the place it had been would be warm.

And he looked up.

At Mother. At Maura. At Ingrid and Kyria and Teshka standing over them.

And said a word in a language none of them knew.

Kyria, who'd been practising every language she could find since the wedding, knew it. She'd learned it from Wenna. On the long porch. In the evenings.

"Grandmother," she said. Very quietly. "He said grandmother."

They carried them out.

Not through the arch. There wasn't an arch yet. Down Luna's paths, to the Harness, one at a time, two at a time. The Mom Squad and the Vaeli who could be spared and anyone else who could carry. While Brock stood in front of the cutters and Okafor held the ring heavy and Sera burned and Risa went from tower to tower hushing the queens one at a time.

Four hundred and eleven. From the first tower.

The Harness was full by the third hour.

And me.

I should write what I did. Genny says I always leave myself out of the hard parts and put myself into the ones where I'm holding something, and that it isn't honest.

So.

In the second hour, Andraste took me down Luna's path. Not to the cutters. To the tower Risa had hushed first. The one that had stopped singing.

"You're not holding anything," said Andraste. At the bottom of the path. On the grey. With her blade out and her back to me and the tide of correctors breaking on the Vaeli fifty yards off. "Okafor is holding the ring. Dory is holding the door. Ingrid and Hana are holding the fleet." She didn't look round. "You're doing what you do. Go and do it. I'll guard the door."

So I went into the tower.

It was hollow. All the way up. Grey walls, very smooth, going up into the dark. And at the top, so far up I couldn't see it, the queen.

Not a queen. Pieces of one. The way the voice was made, and the nine trays. Broken and set into the metal at the top of the tower, very carefully, so that every piece sang the same note and none of them knew they'd ever been anything else.

Risa had hushed her. She wasn't singing the note any more. She wasn't singing anything. She was just very quiet, the way the rain queen was quiet in her tray for a month before she'd hum for anyone.

I put my hand flat on the wall of the tower.

And said hello.

She didn't answer.

She didn't know how. Nobody had ever said it to her. The houses taught her the note, and the note is the only thing they taught her, and when Risa took it away there wasn't anything left.

So I asked her what she was.

Not what she was singing. What she was. Before. Before the houses, before the tower, before the pieces. The way I asked the Hands over Ammaru what they'd like to sing instead.

And I waited.

A long time. Andraste outside the door with her blade. The battle going on. Okafor holding the ring. And me, inside a hollow tower, with my hand on the wall, waiting for a queen in pieces to remember.

She remembered moss.

That's all. Not a name. Not a world. Moss. Green and soft and wet, on stone, in a place where it rained a great deal and nobody ever came. That was what she'd been, once, before she was pieces. A queen of a world where moss grew on everything.

She sang it to me.

Very faintly. One line. The shape of moss on stone.

And the walls of the tower, where my hand was, went green.

Not much. A hand's width. Soft. Wet. Moss, on Sorn metal, in a tower on the ring.

I came out of the tower in the third hour with green on my hand.

Andraste looked at it.

"One," she said.

"One," I said.

"There are thousands."

"I know."

She looked at the green on my hand for a long time. Then she looked up at the towers round us. All of them. Singing. Crowded. Turned toward us.

"Then you'd better keep going," she said.

I went into the next one.

It cost.

It always does. Genny wrote it all down, on the Meridian, through all four hours, and I'll write it the way she did.

Thirty-one Vaeli at the end of Luna's path, before the cutters had their first line in the grey. Nine of Risa's wing, whose interceptors were too close to the towers when they turned. Two of the twelve cutters. Kyria knelt beside each of them, in the middle of the cutting, and put her hand on their faces, and went back to cutting.

Rowan and Callum's interceptor took a corrector's black across the left wing in the second hour. Rowan flew it back to the Meridian on one wing with Callum calling the turns from the second seat, last, the way he always does. They walked away from it. Garnet didn't stop drawing until she'd seen them come up the ramp.

And Brock.

Brock didn't fall. He didn't move. He stood iron for four hours in front of twelve women, and the black came at him over and over, and he let it hit the iron and slide off.

Except once.

In the third hour, one came at Saska. A heartbeat ahead, she saw it. A heartbeat wasn't enough; there were three of them. And Brock moved. For the first time in three hours. Half a step. Into it.

His left arm went black to the elbow.

He didn't make a sound. He stepped back into his place in front of the cutters. And stood there, iron, with one arm black, until the arch was cut.

Maura found him afterward, on the Harness. She put her hands on the arm. And it came back. Slowly. To the wrist.

"The hand will take a while," she said.

"That's all right," said Brock. "I've got another one."

Saska, beside him, didn't say anything at all. She just held the other one.

At the end of the fourth hour, Kyria stood up.

From the cutting place. On the grey. With her old tools in her hands and her knees bleeding where she'd knelt on the ring for four hours. And looked down at what the twelve of them had made.

An arch.

Red-grey. Not Sorn metal. They'd brought the stone with them, in the Ground's hold, from the highest mountain on Hyrran, and set it into the ring, and cut it there, with the water pattern in it, very fine.

Standing on the ring. In the middle of the battle. Between three towers.

Kyria put her hand on it.

And looked up. At the Meridian. At me.

There was no queen to sing it.

All the queens were singing. Every queen on Avalon, every one in the hall under the house on the rise, the old queen and the Scarecrow queen and the heavy queen and every one, singing the rope and the ring and the towers, singing not still, singing the young-going-out song, singing everything they had into the silver so that the note couldn't take us.

There was nothing left for the door.

So the door sang itself.

I felt it.

From a very long way off. Down the thread. Three days. Through the silver. From the courtyard of the house on the rise, at noon, Avalon time, with the sun on the red stone.

Two small hands. Flat on an arch.

One of them Dory's.

One of them Corin's.

Dory holding. The way she holds everything. The house and the town and the porch and as much of Avalon as she can reach. Holding the courtyard arch open, the Avalon end of it, the way Okafor asked her to.

And Corin beside her.

Asking.

The way he asks everyone. The way he asked me on the ridge, and Konrad, and Wenna, and the old queen. Reaching out with what he is, every atom, very small. Not asking the arch to open. He doesn't know how to ask that. He's seven weeks old.

Asking it to stay.

And the arch on the ring, the new one, the one Kyria's people had cut in four hours under fire with their knees bleeding, heard him.

And the arch in the children's room. The little one. That he and Thessaly made on the ridge. That opens for four people without a queen singing it.

It heard him too.

And Thessaly, asleep in the grandfathers' heap on the long porch, woke up. And gave her brother what he was asking for. The way she always does. Quietly. Without anyone noticing.

And the arch on the ring opened.

Onto the courtyard of the house on the rise.

Six.

Garnet's last drawing from the ring. She drew it from the Meridian's window with her board on her knees and her hand shaking so badly Ilka had to hold the board still.

The arch. On the grey. Between three towers. Open.

And through it, very small, very bright: a courtyard. Red stone. Sunlight.

Two children. One with her hand on the arch. One with his hand beside hers.

And behind them, coming through, forty-two worlds.

They came through for two hours.

The Hyrrani. All forty thousand, through the arch on Avalon, from the arches on Hyrran, through the courtyard of the house on the rise, past Dory and Corin, and out onto the ring. With the walking engines, the ones that hadn't fitted in the Ground, three hundred of them, folding their great iron legs to get through and unfolding them on the grey.

The Vaeli. All of them who hadn't come on the ships. With Keir's wings.

The Lir, from the shallow seas. With Iselle at the front.

The Sheln. With Oya. And Rain, beside her, singing the thank-you song.

The Caddi. The terrace people. The Hessan, blind and soft and small, who'd dug for the houses for so long they'd forgotten there was a surface, and who walked out onto the ring and put their hands on the grey and said, through Dot, that they could hear the children underneath it, and started to dig.

Every world.

And the grandmothers.

Wenna came through last.

With sixteen hundred grandmothers behind her. From the four. From the town under the garden wall. Old women with long necks and grey fur and six fingers, and some of them so small they came up to Pip's shoulder.

With bags.

Full of shirts.

I'm going to stop there.

Not because it ended. It didn't end. It's still going on, as I write this, on the Meridian, in the dark, with the arch open on the ring and the grandmothers going into the towers one at a time, with the shirts, and the Mom Squad beside them, and the children coming out.

I'm stopping because Garnet's at the forward window. And she's stopped drawing.

I went to her.

She was looking past the ring. Past the cluster of towers where we stood. Past the near side, where the towers were all singing, all crowded, all turned toward us now.

To the far side.

Where the towers are dark.

"Lucas," she said. Very quietly. "Look."

I looked.

On the far side of the ring, very far off, so far the towers were only grey marks against the dark, one of them went out.

Not dark. It was already dark. Out. The way a lamp goes out. As if something had been very faintly there, the last tiny bit of something, and then wasn't.

And then the one beside it.

And then the one beside that.

"Is that us?" said Garnet. "Did we do that?"

"No," I said.

"The houses?"

I didn't answer.

I could feel it. Every atom. The way I feel the moon. Very far off, on the far side of the ring, where the lamps had been moved to face home. Something that wasn't the houses and wasn't us and wasn't the quiet the Scarecrow queen heard in the field under Father's scarecrow, but was the edge of it. The very edge.

And on the near side, all round us, every tower on the ring that was still singing went, for one breath, very slightly quieter.

Listening.

Days 4159–4162. The Ring.

The grandfathers kept the children. Dory held the courtyard arch, and Corin sat down beside her. Three days up the thread. A ring round a white star, thousands of towers of queens in pieces, millions of children going grey. The towers turned and sang the note at all of us; Ingrid hushed it as wide as she could, Hana breathed for everyone, and the fleet woke. Risa hushed the towers one by one. Brock stood iron in front of twelve Hyrrani cutters for four hours with Saska half a step ahead. Okafor held the ring heavy, Sera burned, Luna held every path. I went into a hushed tower and asked a queen in pieces what she was; she remembered moss, and the wall went green under my hand. Brock's arm went black to the elbow for Saska. Mother lifted a tower and found the shirt with the missing button. No queen left to sing the arch, so Corin asked it to stay, and Thessaly gave him what he asked, and it opened on our courtyard. Forty-two worlds came through. Wenna last, with shirts. On the far side, a tower went out. Then another.