Chapter 404 The Slate

Mother recruited at breakfast.

Of course she did. Everything in this family happens in the kitchen at breakfast. Maura says it's because it's the only time everyone's in one room and nobody's flying anywhere. Now that Okafor had written EVERYONE. NOW. on the slate, it was the only time anyone was in one room at all.

So Mother used it.

The Mom Squad has a slate.

Kyria made it, the week of the weddings. She said if the Marshal could have one, the Mom Squad could have one too. It hangs on a nail by the kitchen door, under Garnet's drawing of Father and the copy of Dinraal at his window. It had five names on it, in five languages, one under the other.

Dorothy Dask. In Mother's hand.

Ingrid Friese. In Ingrid's, very thin.

Maura Calder. With a floury thumbprint beside it.

Kyria's name in Hyrrani. Teshka's in Vaeli.

Mother took it down off the nail at breakfast on the first morning after Vantle. And put it in the middle of the long table. Between the bread and the tea.

And looked across the table at Rhiannon.

Rhiannon had been at breakfast every morning since the arch with two faces opened. Nobody had invited her. She'd just come through it on the second morning with her basket, and sat down at the end of the long table beside Mother, and handed out bread to anyone who looked as if they'd been up all night, which was everyone.

She looked at the slate.

She couldn't read it. Not one word. Not ours, not Hyrrani, not Vaeli.

She didn't need to.

She looked at the five names. Then at the five of them. Mother at the head. Ingrid beside her, thin, with the air very still round her. Maura at the stove. Kyria with her first blade across her knees. Teshka by the door on her own two feet, in the grey armour that's hers.

Then at Mother.

Mother held out the chalk.

Rhiannon didn't take it straight away.

She said something. In her own language. Very quietly. To Mother.

Dot was on the porch. She translated it through the window. Very carefully.

"She says," said Dot, "she has only one."

The kitchen went very quiet.

"She says," said Dot. "One daughter. Isolde. Grown. Married. With a notebook." A pause. "She says she had one of her own and everyone else's. On Hearth. For a very long time." Another pause. "She says she has fed every child in the settlement. And every grown one who forgot to eat. And every soldier who came home from the edge and couldn't sit down. And the Chancellor, her husband, who forgets more than any of them." A pause. "She says one, grown, and everyone else's. She does not know if that counts."

Mother looked at her for a long time.

Then she looked round the table.

At Maura, at the stove, who has three children and fed a line of men at the Varran pass when the soup froze. At Kyria, who has three daughters and forty thousand soldiers who call her mother on the ridge. At Teshka, who has a granddaughter she'd step in front of the light for, and stood in rows for eleven generations with other people's children. At Ingrid, who was in a room with a band round her neck for longer than her children have been grown. At herself, last, in Father's chair, who had three, and lost one to the halls for years, and got him back.

"Rhiannon," said Mother. "Love."

Rhiannon looked at her.

"Not one of us," said Mother, "joined because of the children we had." She put her hand flat on the slate. "We joined because of the ones we went and got."

Dot translated it.

Rhiannon took the chalk.

She wrote her name under Teshka's. In her own script. Very small. Very neat. The script Isolde writes the notebook in.

And then she looked down the table. At me.

And said something very sharp.

"She says," said Dot, "you haven't eaten your eggs."

I ate my eggs.

Tiamat was harder.

She didn't come to breakfast. Tiamat doesn't come to anything that isn't a meeting. She'd been on the Wall since the night it was anchored, up the eldest's thread above Root, with forty of her people and Keir's young grey climbing toward her a hundred yards a night. She came down when Okafor called the long table, and went back up when it ended, and slept, Dinraal said, about as much as he did.

So Mother went to her.

Up the thread.

I didn't know until afterward. Nobody did. Mother doesn't fly. Mother doesn't climb. Mother doesn't like ladders. But she went through the arch on the north field onto Root on the second morning after Vantle, and walked to the foot of the eldest's thread in the stand of trees at the edge of the clearing, and put her hand on it.

And asked.

Yes, said the eldest queen. Before she'd finished. Mother says she sounded very amused.

And Mother lifted herself.

She's lifted everything. Towers off rings. Streets full of people over arches. A great one of the Hungry the size of the long barn, by every atom, the way she lifted it on Vessa's world and dropped it on forty more.

She'd never lifted herself. Not once. Not in all the years since I finished her. She said it never seemed worth the bother when there were so many other things that needed lifting.

She lifted herself up the eldest's thread.

All the way. In her dark coat, with the iron under it. Past the place where Keir's young grey had climbed to in the night. Past Dinraal's strand. To the anchor. To the Wall. Where Tiamat was standing at the rim of the first ring of silver lace with her hands behind her back, looking out.

Tiamat turned round.

And saw an old woman in a dark coat hanging in the air beside the station, with a ribbon in her hair, holding a slate.

Mother told me what happened next. On the porch. With her tea. She said she'd tell it once and then never again, because it was Tiamat's and not hers.

"I held out the slate," said Mother. "And she looked at it for a long time. At the six names." She turned her cup. "And then she said, in our language, very slowly, because she's been learning: I have one. A son. Grown." Mother turned her cup again. "And he has never once in his life let me stand between him and anything."

"Dinraal."

"Dinraal," said Mother. "Bahamut's boy. And hers." She looked out at the plain. "She said: His father stood at the edge, and they rubbed him out. And then my son stood there. And I could not stand in front of him, because he would not let me." Mother was quiet. "So I built stations. And stood behind everyone else instead."

"What did you say?"

"I said I know, love," said Mother. "I said: I've seen him do it. On the plain at Vantle, with his hands in the ground." She put her cup down. "And then I said: how many people live on your nine stations?"

"How many?"

"Four hundred thousand," said Mother. "She said it without thinking. The way Wren says a number." Mother looked at the plain. "And then I said: who put every one of them there? Who decided where they'd sleep, and how much air, and what happens if a hull goes? Who's stayed awake on the rim every night since the Watch was signed so nobody else on this station has to?"

She was quiet for a moment.

"She didn't answer," said Mother. "She took the chalk."

Tiamat's name went on the slate in a script nobody on Avalon could read. Very straight. Very precise. The way she does everything.

And under it, in our language, in letters she'd taught herself from the dictionary in the night, one more word.

Stations.

Mother left it there. She said Tiamat was the only one of them who'd ever been asked to mother something that floated.

Isolde found out at supper.

She came through the arch with two faces with Dinraal and the First Weapon and her notebook, the way she does every evening now, and sat down at the long table in the kitchen, and saw the slate on its nail by the door.

Seven names.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked at Rhiannon. And at Mother. And said something to Dot.

"Isolde asks," said Dot, "how she can join."

Rhiannon, beside Mother, went very still.

Mother put her spoon down.

"Love," she said. "It's the Mom Squad."

"Isolde knows," said Dot.

"You have to be a mother. Or something very like one. That's the only rule. Rhiannon fed every child on Hearth. Tiamat holds four hundred thousand people in the sky." Mother looked at her very kindly. "You will be. I know you will. I heard you on the plain." She almost smiled. "Seven."

Isolde looked at her for a long time.

Then she looked at Dinraal. Across the table. Who was eating Maura's stew very carefully, as if it might be a trap.

Then back at the slate.

"Then I will join," she said, "as soon as I am."

Rhiannon put her hand over her mouth.

She didn't say anything. She looked at her daughter across the long table for a long time. Then she reached over, without looking, and put another piece of bread on Dinraal's plate.

Dinraal looked at it.

Then at his mother-in-law.

He ate it.

Dinraal stopped eating; Rhiannon gave him more bread.

Nobody said anything.

Risa, at the far end of the table, with both clouds over her head, put her hand over her mouth.

Isolde didn't look away from the slate.

"As soon as I am," she said again. Very calmly. "Leave a space."

Mother got up.

She took the slate off the nail. Very carefully. And brought it to the table. And under the seventh name, Tiamat's, with Stations under it, she drew a line. Short. Straight. With nothing on it.

And handed Isolde the slate.

Isolde looked at the empty line for a long time.

Then she took her pen out of her notebook. And in very small letters, at the far end of the line, so small you had to hold it to the lamp to see, she wrote one word in her own script.

Dot told me later what it was.

Soon.

Dinraal put his spoon down.

He looked at Isolde for a long time across the table. Then at the slate. Then at the space with Soon at the end of it.

Then at me.

His face did something very small. Very careful. A man doing arithmetic again. Only this time it wasn't about wives.

"Seven," he said. Very quietly.

"Seven," said Isolde.

Risa's clouds rained on the bread.

I found them in the courtyard, after. Dinraal and Isolde. By the arch with two faces. With the First Weapon lying across the doorway of it, so that anyone going to Hearth would have to step over him.

They weren't saying anything.

Dinraal was holding the notebook. Isolde's. The thick one. Open to the page where she'd written every one of my children's names, one line at a time, over all the years of the relay. Dory. Ash. Trevor. All of them. Every birthday. Every first word.

He was looking at the page after it.

It was blank.

"She's kept that page empty," said Dinraal. Through Dot. Very quietly. To me. Not looking up. "For years. I thought it was for more of yours."

Isolde didn't say anything. She put her hand on his arm.

"It isn't," said Dinraal.

"No," said Isolde.

He closed the notebook. Very carefully. And gave it back to her.

"I was afraid," he said. "All these years. Of the edge. Of standing there with a child behind me and the Ashen in front." He looked at the arch. At Hearth, on the other side of it. "My father stood there. With me behind him. And they rubbed him out."

Isolde took his hand.

"And now?" she said.

Dinraal looked at the porch. At the light in the kitchen window, where Mother was putting the slate back on its nail. At the seven names on it, and the line with Soon at the end.

"Now I've seen what stands behind them here," he said.

The children made the last one.

Mother didn't. Nobody did. It was Ash.

She came down the stairs after supper with her hinge face screwed up very seriously and her branches glowing up both arms, the little glass flames at the tips lit, and stood in front of the slate on its nail. And looked at it. For a long time.

Then she turned round.

"It's wrong," she said.

Everyone looked at her.

"There's someone missing," said Ash. In the voice she uses for explaining things to the dog. "She's a mom. She's Daddy's mom. Daddy said so. In the hall. In front of everyone." She folded her arms. "And she goes and gets them. She sang Ammaru open. She sang the forest. She sings every arch." She pointed at the slate. "She should be on it."

Nobody said anything.

Then small Sigmund, at the table, with his spark running round his ear, said, very loudly, the way he did on the long ward the night it started:

"Mom Squad."

To make sure it was official.

The Scarecrow queen came up from the hall under the house that night.

All the way up the long stair. Through the courtyard. Onto the porch of the house on the rise. Which she's never done. She's never come up onto the porch. She's too big. She put her great head up over the rail and the rest of her lay down on the grass below, all the way to the garden wall, silver and gold in the lamplight.

And looked at the slate.

Ash had taken it off the nail and propped it against the rail where she could see.

And under the seven names, and the line with Soon at the end of it, there was one more.

Not a name. Ash couldn't write the Scarecrow queen's name. Nobody can. Queens don't have names the way we do.

So Ash had drawn her.

Very badly. In chalk. A great shape with a long neck and a head, lying down. And beside it, very small, with its arms out, a scarecrow.

And underneath, in Ash's big careful letters, the way she writes on the windows: HONORY.

The Scarecrow queen looked at it for a very long time.

Mother came out onto the porch. In her dressing gown, with the dark blue ribbon. And stood beside the slate. And looked at the Scarecrow queen, with her great head over the rail.

"It's spelled wrong," said Mother.

Yes, said the Scarecrow queen.

"I'm not going to change it," said Mother.

No, said the Scarecrow queen. Nor am I.

They didn't say anything else.

Mother put her hand flat on the great face. And the Scarecrow queen closed her eyes. And they stayed there, the two of them, on the porch, in the lamplight, until the lamps went out.

That was the last quiet night.

I'll write what came after quickly. Not because it didn't matter. Because there was so much of it, and so little time between, that it comes back to me fast. A world a day. Then two. Then ten.

Corran.

The first day of ten. Konrad read the names out at the dawn count. Ten. From the sheet. Corran, Siskel, Ebbery, and seven more. And beside each one, in his neat hand, the number of towers Tally had counted. And beside each tower, the pieces.

Ten arches at once. From the north field. Kyria's cutters had cut them in the night, ten in a row, like the doors of a long hall. And every queen on Avalon sang them, and Dory held all ten with her silver net so bright up her arms that Halloway stood beside her the whole time with her hand on Dory's wrist, counting.

And Corin asked them all to stay.

And Thessaly gave.

The new Mom Squad went to Corran.

All seven. Mother at the front. Ingrid, Maura, Kyria, Teshka. Rhiannon with her basket. And Tiamat, down off the Wall for the first time in days, in her own silver. Scaled, very fine, from her throat to her wrists. Dot says on Hearth they say Tiamat's silver remembers what she is.

And the Scarecrow queen sang their arch.

Herself. Just theirs. Out of the ten. Dory said she asked to.

Corran's a city world. Towers of stone, very tall, very close, with bridges between them. Eight hundred thousand people. The council said yes before Ysolt had finished speaking. And the people came down the towers and across the bridges and through the arch, walking fast, holding on.

And then the pods came down.

And then the Hands, with the Ashen round them.

The Mom Squad held the bridges.

Mother lifted the falling ones. Ingrid hushed the Hands. Maura warmed the ones who'd gone cold from the Ashen wave, where it touched the edge of the crowd. Kyria and Teshka stood back to back on the last bridge with their blades and didn't let anything past.

And Tiamat stood at the top of the tallest tower and talked to the sky.

Not as a woman, for long.

I didn't see it. Ingrid did, from high, and told me after, very calmly, the way Ingrid tells everything. She said Tiamat's silver went out from her all at once on the top of the tower, the way Dinraal's does when it becomes armour. And kept going. Wings. Horns. A long armoured tail curled round the top of the tower. Scales, silver, all over.

A dragon. On the tallest tower of Corran. With her eyes gone brilliant silver.

Ingrid said the Hungry coming down out of the overcast turned away from that tower. Every one. She said it was the first time she'd ever seen them turn from anything that wasn't the Ashen.

And from the top of it, with the dragon's voice, Tiamat talked to the sky.

Not the wing. The sky. She'd brought forty of her people down off the Wall, in silver, and spread them across the tops of every tower on Corran, and she talked to all forty at once the way Risa talks to the wing. Left. Higher. Now. Hold. And they held silver between the towers, nets of it, so that when the Hungry came down out of the overcast they came down into the nets, and the nets held, and the Hands' fire burned them there instead of on the bridges.

And Rhiannon found the children.

That's what Rhiannon does. That's what Dinraal meant when he said does she always know? and Isolde said yes.

She knows when someone's hungry. When someone's tired. When someone hasn't eaten, or slept, or sat down. From a long way off. From the other side of the plain. From the far end of a world.

She stood at the foot of the arch on Corran with her basket and shut her eyes.

And said something. Very sharp. In her own language. Pointing.

Dot was on the Meridian. She gave it to the whole squad through the silver.

"Rhiannon says: the old tower. The east one. The cellar. Forty. Nobody's fed them since yesterday. They're hiding."

Nobody had told us there was a cellar.

Nobody on Corran had counted forty children in it. They'd been sent down there by someone when the pods came the first time, a week before, and nobody had come back for them, and they'd stayed. Quiet. In the dark. The way children do, when they've been told to.

Teshka went. With Kyria. Down the east tower, through the Ashen wave where it was coming over the edge of the bridges, into the cellar.

And brought out forty.

And Rhiannon met every one of them at the foot of the arch. And gave every one of them bread.

The arch nearly went, on Corran.

Near the end. When the last of the bridges were coming across and the Ashen came round the far towers, low, toward it. The way they'd turn on Tarrow's Reach a week later. Not for the smith, that time. For the arch itself. The dark wave going out ahead of them across the stone, straight at the red-grey frame with the water pattern in it.

Dory felt it. On Avalon. Holding ten.

"It's going to close," she said. Very white. With Halloway's hand on her wrist. "The wave's in the stone. I can't hold it through that."

And on the Avalon side, the Scarecrow queen lifted her head off the grass of the north field.

She sang it wider.

Not louder. Wider. The way you'd open your arms. The arch on Corran had been the width of a bridge, wide enough for four people at once, and the Scarecrow queen sang it until it was the width of the street at the bottom of the tower. Then the width of the square. Red-grey stone, growing, on both sides, with the water pattern running all through it.

So that when the Ashen wave reached it, it reached the edge. Not the middle.

And the edge went black, and smoked, and held.

And the middle, where the last of the bridges were coming down, stayed open.

Mother was the last through. She always is. She turned round at the foot of the arch on the Avalon side, on the north field, with the grey of Corran on her coat, and looked up at the Scarecrow queen.

The Scarecrow queen had put her head down. Very tired. With her eyes half shut.

Mother put her hand on her face.

"Honorary," she said. Very quietly. "That's the word."

Spelled wrong, said the Scarecrow queen.

"Yes," said Mother. "Ash will be thrilled."

CORRAN. 800,000.

Through: 791,406.

And forty.

Konrad wrote that last line separately. Under the number. He said they deserved their own.

Siskel.

The same day. Through the second arch.

We were late.

Not late the way we'd been late to Orrin. Not a night late. An hour.

When Kyria's cutters came through the arch onto Siskel, the Hands were already over it. With the Ashen. And the Hungry were already down. All three. At once. Over a world of long green valleys and small towns and a sea.

And the Ashen wave had already gone across the biggest of the towns.

I won't write what it looked like.

Brock was there. He went iron in front of the arch and stood there for six hours while the Ashen wave came at it four times, and the Hands' fire came at it twice, and the Hungry came at it more times than anyone could count. Saska was half a step ahead of him the whole time. He came home with his arms black to the shoulder and didn't say anything for two days.

Sigmund held hearts. Four thousand of them. In the long field outside the town, where the wave had touched the edge of it, where people had gone grey and still and weren't dead yet. He held every one of them steady while Halloway's people carried them through. Most of them came home.

Not all.

SISKEL. 1,400,000.

Through: 611,290.

Konrad didn't write anything beside it.

He sat on his stool on the red glass after the last of them came through, and put the sheet on his knee, and looked at the number for a long time. And then folded it up and put it away.

The General stood beside him. With his hand on Konrad's shoulder.

Neither of them said anything.

Saska sat with Brock on the north field that night.

On the grass. Where she runs at him every morning. Where Brock planted his mother's beans at the wedding, which were up now, in rows, knee-high. With his arms black to the shoulder from the Ashen wave, and Maura's hands on them, one after the other, warming.

Maura said it would take a while.

Brock didn't say anything. He hadn't since Siskel.

Saska didn't run at him. She sat beside him. Very still. Which Teshka says she never does.

"I saw it," she said. Eventually. "Half a step ahead. Every time it came. The wave." She was looking at the beans. "I saw where it would touch you."

"I know."

"I couldn't stop it," said Saska. "I can see where things will be. I can't move them." She put her hand on his black arm. Very lightly, so it wouldn't hurt. "So I stood where it would touch you first."

Brock turned his head.

"Every time?"

"Every time."

He looked at her for a long time. At her arms. Grey, a little, at the elbows. Where the wave had touched her first, half a step ahead of him, four times.

Then he put his black arm round her. Very carefully.

And Maura, without a word, moved her hands from Brock's arm to Saska's.

Ebbery.

The third arch. The same day.

All.

Every one. Every child, every grown-up, every old man and woman. Every one of the seven pieces of queen in Ebbery's three towers. The Hands came over Ebbery at dusk, with the Ashen round them, and there was nobody left on it.

Tally put the seven pieces on the floor of the long ward that night. In a row. Beside the Merrow queen and the four from Vantle and the five spaces.

She didn't need to leave any spaces for Ebbery.

Ebbery belonged to Hearth's three.

That's what everyone called them, by the end of the second day. Not Dinraal's people. Not Tiamat's. Three men who'd come through the arch with two faces on the first morning with nothing but their silver and a crate nobody had asked for, which Gilgamesh was carrying, because Gilgamesh, Dinraal said, has never once in his life walked into a room without carrying something nobody asked for.

Gilgamesh. Alexander. Julius, whom everyone on Avalon calls Caesar within a day, because Garnet drew him in a laurel wreath and it stuck.

Dinraal said they'd stood at the edge with him longer than anyone. Against the Ashen. Since before he was married. He said he'd trust them with Isolde's notebook, which on Hearth is the most anyone can say.

Okafor gave them Ebbery on the first day because she had nobody else left to give it to.

They took four hundred Hyrrani and nine of Odra's smiths and Tally's bag for the pieces. And the eight hundred thousand people of Ebbery and all seven pieces of queen were through the arch before the Hands came over at dusk.

Okafor gave them another world the next morning. And the next.

By the ninth day they'd been to six. All six came home. Every one.

I asked Dinraal how.

He thought about it for a long time.

"Gilgamesh carries," he said. "Anything. Anyone. Before anyone asks. And his silver carries every weapon there is: swords, spears, axes, bows, hammers. Whatever the moment needs, it's already on his back." He held up one finger. "Alexander goes first. Always. Before anyone's ready. With a hundred blades of silver flying behind him in formation, going exactly where he thinks them." Another. "And Julius holds. Caesar, you'd say. Shield and discipline. While Julius is standing on a line, the line doesn't move." He put his hand down. "Three of them. Carry, go, hold. And they've never once disagreed about which of those matters most."

Okafor wrote them on the wall. Under the three circles.

HEARTH'S THREE. SIX OF SIX.

Then she rubbed out the six and wrote seven, because Konrad had just come in with the next one.

And seven more, the same day.

And ten the next.

And ten the next.

Okafor didn't plan it alone, by then.

The map room had two new chairs. Either side of hers, at the head of the long table.

Aramaeis in one. Tiamat's brother. The dragonkin General, Dinraal calls him, when he wants to annoy him. With Crane on his other side with the spanner. Who'd been a soldier in an army that wrote him down as dead before he'd finished living, and knew exactly what an army's careful words meant, and said so, every time Okafor wrote one on the wall.

And in the other, Aurelius.

Isolde's father. Rhiannon's husband. The Chancellor of Hearth. A gentle man, with a gentle face, who'd come through the arch with two faces on the second day of ten and sat down at the long table and said, through Dot, where can I be useful?, the way Voss said it on Earth, years ago. Who laughed easily. Who listened to Okafor for a whole morning without speaking, and then, at noon, said one sentence, very quietly, that changed the order of the next four worlds on Konrad's sheet.

Okafor looked at him for a long time after he said it.

"You've done this before," she said.

"Yes," said Aurelius. Through Dot. "Not this. But this." He looked at the three circles on the wall. "A Chancellor spends his life deciding who goes where first. And knowing that whatever he decides, someone is last."

Okafor didn't say anything.

She moved her chair, very slightly. So it was closer to his.

I'll write the numbers, because Konrad would want me to. And because Mother says when it's very bad, count the babies; and when it's very, very bad, count everyone, so they know someone was counting.

In nine days, thirty-one worlds.

Twenty-two of them, nearly all.

Six of them, more than half.

Three of them, late.

And on Konrad's sheet, at the end of the ninth day, twelve names left.

And the Hungry were learning.

The eldest queen said it first. Through the ground. On the eighth night.

They are not coming the same way, she said.

"What do you mean?"

They have always come one way, she said. A swarm. A road. Following the taste of me. A pause. Since Vantle, they come many ways. Many swarms. Smaller. Faster. To many worlds at once.

Ilka said the same thing at the dawn count. The breathing's split. It's not facing one way any more. It's facing everywhere.

"Why?" said Okafor.

Nobody knew.

Then Crane said, very quietly, from the table: "Because they found out there's more than one thing fighting them."

And the Ashen were learning.

On the ninth day, at Tarrow's Reach, the Ashen didn't go for the arch.

They went for the smith.

I didn't see it. I was on another world. Through another arch. Dory told me. She was holding it. She felt it go.

The Ashen wave came across the field toward the arch at Tarrow's Reach, the way it does. And our people held it, the way they do. Dinraal's silver in the ground. Hyrrani in front. And the wave stopped, and smoked, and held.

And then, very fast, very low, one Ashen ship came round the side of the field. Not toward the people. Not toward the arch.

Toward the woman standing beside it with a hammer.

Her name was Brannagh.

One of Odra's new smiths. From Hyrran. Twenty-two. She'd been at the forges under the ridge since the first week of the Hedge, and she'd asked for an arch on the front, and Odra had given her one.

She brought the arch down.

Before the Ashen ship reached her. Before anything came through that shouldn't. She saw it coming and she knew what it was for, and she swung her hammer at the keystone with the people of Tarrow's Reach still coming through, and Dory felt the arch close in her hands like a door slamming.

Two hundred people were still on the other side.

So was Brannagh.

Vessa had known.

Andraste told me, on the roof, late. With her daughter on her chest, awake, facing sideways.

"She turned," said Andraste. "In the middle of the afternoon. While you were on another world and Dory was holding nine arches." She put her hand on Vessa's back. "Not out. Sideways. The way she turns for the Ashen. And then she turned again. Toward one arch. Out of the nine."

"Tarrow's Reach."

"Yes." Andraste was very quiet. "A minute before the ship came round the side of the field. I felt her do it. And I didn't know what it meant." She looked out past the lake. "I do now."

I didn't say anything.

"She can hear them," said Andraste. "When nobody else can. Not the eldest. Not the ears. Not Ilka." She put her face down against Vessa's head. "She's a baby. She's a few weeks old. And she can hear the Ashen coming a minute before they come."

"Andraste—"

"I know," said Andraste. "Okafor wrote it on the wall. Not on duty." She didn't lift her head. "But Brannagh was twenty-two. And two hundred people were on the other side of that arch." She was very still. "And next time Vessa turns, I'm going to tell someone."

Kyria said her name on the north field that night.

And the two hundred.

All of them. Kwame Osei had the count. He gave it to Kyria without being asked, on a slip of paper, and she read every name on it. Very slowly. In the dark.

Then she went to Odra. At the forges. And they stood together at the deepest forge for a long time.

When Kyria came back she said Odra was going to send two smiths to every arch on the front now. Back to back. Like Teshka and her.

"So the Ashen have to go for two," said Kyria. "And one of them can always swing."

Okafor put a new line on the wall that night.

Under the three circles. Under EVERYONE. NOW.

They're learning what we are.

And under it, very small:

So are we.

On the tenth morning, three more names went on the slate.

Cleopatra came first.

I'd never met her. She came through the arch with two faces with Hearth's three, on the second day, and went straight out to the worlds, and I never saw her on Avalon until the tenth morning, when she came into the kitchen of the house on the rise with ash on her coat and stood in front of the slate on its nail.

She's tall. Very calm. With a voice Dot says carries further than anyone's on Hearth, without her ever raising it. Dinraal says that on Hearth, when Cleopatra says stop, things stop. People, and fights, and once, he said, a ship.

She'd been at Siskel. At the edge of the long field, where the wave had touched it, beside Sigmund, while he held four thousand hearts. She'd stood between the field and the Ashen for six hours, with the field from her necklace thrown wide across the edge of it, saying stop.

And things had.

She looked at the slate for a long time.

Then she looked at Mother. And said something.

"She says," said Dot. "She has four." A pause. "On Hearth. Grown, mostly. The youngest is still at home on Hearth, very cross that she wasn't allowed to come." A pause. "She says she would like to go and get some more."

Mother held out the chalk.

Asha and Eve came together.

They always do. Asha talking too fast. Eve telling her to stop. They came up from the laboratory through the arch with two faces, where they'd been keeping every ear on every rock at the edge of Root tied to the eldest for nine days and nights, and they stood in front of the slate.

Asha talked for a long time.

Eve let her, for once.

When Asha finished, Dot was quiet for a while.

"Asha says," said Dot, "that she and Eve have kept the relay running since before Dory was born. Every hour. Every pulse. Every night it was silent, they sent it anyway. In case." A pause. "She says if that isn't what a mother does, she doesn't know what is."

Eve said something. Very short.

"Eve says," said Dot, "also she has two. And Asha has one. And they'd like that written down too."

Mother laughed. And held out the chalk.

Ten names.

And a line with Soon at the end of it. And a drawing of a queen, spelled wrong.

The Mom Squad sat on the porch at the end of the tenth day.

Ten of them. In a row. On the bench and the chairs and the steps. Mother in Father's chair, with her ribbons. Ingrid. Maura with the teapot. Kyria with her first blade. Teshka on her own two feet, then sitting, because even Teshka sits down sometimes. Rhiannon with her basket, empty. Cleopatra, very calm. Asha, talking, and Eve beside her. Tiamat at the end, very straight, down off the Wall for one night, in her own scaled silver, with ash on it from Corran and Siskel and seven other worlds.

And the space.

At the end of the bench. Where nobody sat. Where Isolde will.

And on the grass below the rail, all the way to the garden wall, silver and gold, with her great head on the porch boards beside Mother's feet, the honorary one.

Spelled wrong.

They didn't say anything for a long time.

Then Rhiannon, very quietly, said something in her own language. To all of them.

Dot translated it. From the window.

"She says," said Dot. "Has everyone eaten?"

Nobody had.

Maura got up.

She came back with ten bowls. And then an eleventh, which she put down at the end of the bench in the empty space, very carefully, as if someone might be along for it soon.

And then she took a whole loaf of bread out to the grass, and put it down in front of the Scarecrow queen's great face.

The Scarecrow queen looked at it for a long time.

Then she breathed on it, very gently, and the crust went brown and warm. As if it had just come out of the oven.

Tiamat ate first. Without being told. Rhiannon watched her do it with her sharp eyes and didn't say anything at all, which Dinraal said afterward was the highest praise Rhiannon had ever given anyone on Hearth.

Days 4520–4531. The Slate.

Mother recruited at breakfast. Rhiannon: one daughter, Isolde, and everyone else's. Mother: not one of us joined because of the children we had; we joined because of the ones we went and got. Mother lifted herself up the eldest's thread to the Wall for Tiamat, Dinraal's mother, who could never stand in front of her son: four hundred thousand on nine stations; who put every one of them there? Tiamat wrote Stations. Isolde: I'll join as soon as I am; leave a space; Soon. Dinraal stopped eating; Rhiannon gave him more bread. Ash: she's Daddy's mom; she should be on it. Small Sigmund: Mom Squad. The Scarecrow queen came onto the porch: HONORY, spelled wrong; nobody's changing it. Dinraal: now I've seen what stands behind them here. Then ten arches a day. Corran: Tiamat a silver dragon on the tallest tower, and the Hungry turned away; Rhiannon found forty in a cellar. Siskel: an hour late; 611,290 of 1.4 million; Brock iron six hours; Saska stood where the wave would touch him first, every time. Ebbery: all; Hearth's three, Gilgamesh carrying every weapon, Alexander first with a hundred blades, Julius holding the line; six of six, then seven. Aurelius and Aramaeis at Okafor's side. Thirty-one worlds in nine days; twelve left. The Hungry split into many swarms. The Ashen went for a smith; Brannagh brought the arch down with two hundred still on the far side. Vessa turned toward that arch a minute before. Two smiths at every arch now. They're learning what we are. So are we. The Scarecrow queen sang Corran's arch wider so the wave hit the edge. Cleopatra, who says stop, and Asha and Eve, who kept the relay every night, signed: ten names. Has everyone eaten? Maura set an eleventh bowl.