Chapter 417 Stock

Konrad asked her at the dawn count.

That's how he does things now. On the stool. On the red glass. In front of everyone. Because he said he spent thirty years signing things in rooms where nobody could see, and he's not going to do anything important that way again.

He didn't tell anyone he was going to. Not even Ingrid. He just stood on his stool in his coat, buttoned right, with the sheets in his hands, and read the morning's names off the back the way he does. Quietly. To himself, mostly, and to whoever's listening.

And then he stopped.

And looked down at the bench at the foot of the stool. Where Ione was sitting. Holding onto the edge of it with one hand, the way she does still, outside, under a sky that doesn't stop. With the other hand in Ingrid's.

"Ione," said Konrad.

She looked up.

He got down off the stool.

He doesn't, usually. He got down once for Danel's mother. He got down very carefully, the way old men get off things, with Ingrid's hand on his arm. And knelt down on the red glass in front of the bench. With his knees cracking. In his good trousers, which Nan Vey irons.

So he was looking up at her.

"I'd like to write your name on the front," said Konrad.

Ione didn't say anything.

"Not the back," said Konrad. "The back is for everyone. Everyone who came home." He held up the first sheet. "The front is for the ones who are ours. I've never written anyone on the front. It's only ever had worlds on it." He turned it over. To the front. To the bottom, under Halcro, where there was still a little room. "I'd like to write: Ione Friese."

Ione looked at the sheet for a long time.

"It means you'd be ours," said Konrad. "Mine. And Ingrid's. Our daughter." His voice did something. "If you'd like. Only if you'd like." He looked at the sheet. "Lucas's mother has a rule. Never choose for them without asking."

"So I'm asking," said Konrad.

Nobody on the red glass said anything.

Ione looked at Konrad. On his knees. Then at Ingrid, beside her, with her hand in Ione's. Then at the sheet.

Then she said something. Very quietly. In the little of our language she has.

"Will you be in an office?"

Konrad didn't answer at once.

"No," he said. "Never again."

"Will she be in a room?" said Ione. Looking at Ingrid.

"No," said Ingrid.

"Will I?"

"Never," said Ingrid. And Konrad, at the same time.

Ione looked at the sheet again.

Then she let go of the edge of the bench. With the hand that was holding on. For the first time, outside, without anyone asking her to.

And held it out.

For the pen.

Konrad gave it to her.

And she wrote it. On the front of the sheet. Under Halcro. Very slowly. Very badly, because Ingrid had only been teaching her letters for three weeks, and the pen was too big, and her hand shook.

IONE

And then she gave the pen back to Konrad.

And he wrote the rest.

Friese.

Ingrid didn't say anything. She put her thin arm round Ione and pulled her in against her side and held her there. On the bench. On the red glass. With her face in Ione's hair.

Risa, at the edge of the interceptor field, with Kesh on her shoulder, shut her eyes.

And Kesh's cloud rained. Very gently. Warm. On her grandmother, and her grandfather, and her new aunt, who was seven.

Kesh frowned at it, afterward. As if she hadn't meant to.

"I've got a sister," said Risa. That night. On the porch. To me. Very quietly. With Kesh asleep against her. "I'm a grown woman with three children. And I've got a sister."

"You asked," I said. "When you were small. You told Dory. You asked and nobody heard."

Risa looked at me for a long time.

"She heard," said Risa. Looking at the window at the top of the stairs. Ione's window. Next to Ingrid and Konrad's. With a light in it, because Ione won't sleep in the dark yet. "In the box. She said. She used to listen to the other boxes. All singing." She put her face in Kesh's hair. "Maybe somebody always hears."

The boy went to Hearth.

New Hearth. In the west. Past the sea. To the house on the hill above the river, in the old quarter, with the grey stone and the silver roof and the garden on top with a small mound of new soil in the middle of it.

He'd been on the long ward since Halcro. In the bed by the window. With Dinraal in the chair beside him every night, with his silver hand on the blanket. And the First Weapon across his feet.

He hadn't said much. A few words. Dinraal's name. Warm. Ione's name, after she went up to the house on the rise, which he said every morning, looking at her empty bed, until Ingrid started bringing her down to the long ward to see him.

In the end, Halloway said he could go.

"Where?" said Isolde. Very quietly. At the end of his bed.

Halloway looked at her over her spectacles.

"I think you know," said Halloway.

Isolde didn't ask him the way Konrad asked Ione.

She asked him the way they ask on Hearth. Dinraal told me afterward. He said on Hearth, when you want someone in your house, you don't ask them to come in. You show them where they'd sleep. And then you wait.

So they took him to the house. Through the new arch on the plain beyond Thera. Over the bridges, singing in the wind off the new mountains. Up the hill. Into the grey stone house with the silver roof. Up the stairs.

To a room on the second floor. At the back. Next to the room with the window.

With a bed in it. Small. With a silver blanket that Isolde had made out of her own leaves, very fine, very soft, that held its own shape. And a lamp, because Ione had told him about the lamp.

And on the wall over the bed, Garnet's drawing. The one she did of Dinraal from inside, looking out of his window, with Isolde in the garden planting a seed.

The boy stood in the doorway for a long time.

He didn't go in.

Dinraal waited. Isolde waited. The First Weapon lay down across the threshold, very small, with his chin on his paws, and waited too.

Then the boy said something.

In Hearth's language. Which he'd been learning from Dinraal on the long ward, a word at a time. He has more of Hearth's language than ours. He says it's because Dinraal's silver was in the walls of his ship, and it was warm, and he wanted to know what it was saying.

Isolde gave it to us afterward.

"He said," said Isolde. "Is the room in the walls?"

Dinraal didn't understand.

"In the ship," said Isolde. "His room was in the walls. In the bow. Black. Thick. He couldn't hear anything through it but you." She looked at her husband. "He wants to know if this one's like that."

Dinraal knelt down.

In the doorway. Beside the First Weapon. So he was looking at the boy, not down at him.

And put his silver hand on the wall. Beside the door. The grey stone of his mother's house, that I made from what he showed me.

And the silver went in.

Very fine. Like roots. Into the stone. Into every wall of the little room. Through it. Round it. All the way round. The way it went into the ship on the slip at Halcro, the night it burned, without his knowing why.

And the walls of the room went warm.

The boy felt it.

He went very still. Then he put his own small hand on the wall. On the grey stone. Where Dinraal's silver was, inside it.

And held it there.

"Warm," he said. In our language. The one word he always says.

And went in.

He chose his name a week later.

He'd been trying. Isolde says he asked her every day for a name, and every day she said you choose, and every day he said he didn't know any. He only knew the ones people had told him. And none of them were his.

So on the seventh day she gave him her notebook.

Her notebook. On Hearth, Isolde's notebook is the most anyone can trust anyone with. She gave it to a boy of five who'd been in a box. And showed him the pages. Every garden. Every roof. Every plant on Hearth, the old Hearth and the new one, in her very small writing, with drawings.

"Find a word you like," she said. "Any word."

He looked through it for a whole afternoon. In the garden on the roof. Beside the mound of soil where the seed was.

And then he put his finger on a word. On a page near the back. Under a drawing of a small plant with silver leaves that grows on the roof of the house with the big kitchen, where the family with nine children lives.

Isolde looked at it for a long time.

"It's a flower," she said. "On Hearth. It only grows where it's warm. It closes up at night and opens again in the morning."

The boy looked at her.

"It always opens again," said Isolde.

His name is Ithel.

Dinraal wrote it in the notebook. Under the drawing. In his own hand, which Isolde says nobody has ever seen in the notebook before, because nobody has ever been allowed.

Ithel. Ours.

He came to the house on the rise that night. With Isolde and Dinraal. For supper. Because Mother said so, and nobody says no to Mother about supper, not even Hearth.

And after supper, when the children went to the back room, Ione took his hand.

She didn't ask anyone. She doesn't ask for things; she's only ever asked for one. She just got up from the long table, and went round it, and took his hand, and walked him down the passage to the children's room. And the rest of us stood in the doorway and watched, because nobody could help it.

The heap was already made. On the rug. In the middle of the floor. Dory on the outside with her hand out, checking. Pebble across the bottom. The four in the middle, warm one side and cold the other.

Ione lay down at the edge of it. Where she sleeps now. Beside Dory.

Ithel stood at the edge of the rug for a long time.

He'd never seen a heap. Isolde says on Hearth children sleep in their own beds, in their own rooms, with their own lamps. He'd only ever slept in a box. And then a bed by a window on the long ward. And then a room in a grey stone house with warm walls.

He looked at the heap. At all of them. Arms and legs everywhere.

Then Dory, asleep, reached out.

And checked him.

The way she checks everyone. A small hand on his ankle. There you are.

He lay down.

Next to Ione. At the edge. With Dory's hand still on his ankle.

And in the middle of the heap, asleep, the four made a door.

I felt it. Everyone in the doorway felt it, the ones who can. Isolde's hand went very tight on Dinraal's arm.

A small one. New. From the middle of the heap to the edge. Three feet. The same as the one they made for Ione.

And through it, very faintly, the four checked him too.

Ithel didn't wake up.

But in the morning, when Isolde went into the children's room, he was lying in the middle of the heap. Not at the edge. In the middle. With Corin's closed fist on his shoulder and the frost from Elin's eyelashes on his hair and Goldie's warm hand under his cheek, and Thessaly asleep across his feet the way the First Weapon sleeps.

Nobody had moved him. Nobody saw him move.

The four had brought him in.

But that was the morning. First there was the night.

When the house was quiet, and the children were asleep in the heap, and Dinraal was sitting on the floor of the children's room with his back to the wall and the First Weapon on his knees, watching his son sleep in the middle of twelve other children, Isolde went into the kitchen.

To the kitchen. Where the slate is. On its nail by the door. With ten names on it in ten languages, and HONORY at the bottom in Ash's big careful letters. And at the far end of the line under the ten names, so small you have to hold it to the lamp to see, one word in Isolde's own script.

Soon.

Mother was at the stove.

She didn't turn round. She never does. She said, "Love," the way she says it to everyone who comes into her kitchen at that hour. And then: "You've got something to put on my slate."

Isolde didn't ask how she knew.

Nobody ever does.

Mother took the slate down off the nail.

And handed it to her. And a piece of chalk.

And Isolde stood in the kitchen of the house on the rise and looked at the slate for a long time. At Dorothy Dask, in Mother's hand. At Ingrid Friese, very thin. At Maura's, and Kyria's, and Teshka's. At her own mother's. At Tiamat's, Dinraal's mother's, written very straight. At Cleopatra's and Asha's and Eve's.

At Soon.

Then she licked her thumb. And rubbed it out.

And wrote, in the same place, very small, in her own script:

Isolde.

And under it, smaller:

Ithel's.

Mother put the slate back on its nail.

Then she turned round from the stove. And looked at Isolde. And held out her arms.

Rhiannon came the next morning.

Through the arch from New Hearth. To the kitchen of the house on the rise. At dawn. With her basket. Because she said she'd heard her daughter was on the slate and she wanted to see it with her own eyes.

She saw it.

She stood in front of it for a long time. Rhiannon, queen of the succubi, one of the two most beautiful women in the universe, they say on Hearth. In her winged dress. With her crown. Looking at a piece of slate on a nail by a kitchen door, with her daughter's name on it in chalk.

She didn't say anything.

Then Maura came in with the bread.

Isolde was at the table. With Mother, and Maura, and Ingrid, and Ione, who comes down to the kitchen now at dawn because Ingrid does. With Ithel, who'd come in from the children's room with frost in his hair and sat down at the end of the table next to Ione without being asked, and they looked at each other, and didn't say anything, and were content.

Maura put the bread on the table.

And Isolde went white.

She didn't say anything. She looked at the bread. Maura's bread, that everyone on Avalon eats, that Isolde has eaten every morning she's been on Avalon since the arch with two faces. And went white. And put her hand over her mouth.

And got up very fast. And went out through the courtyard door.

Nobody said anything.

Then Rhiannon looked at Mother.

And Mother looked at Rhiannon.

They don't share a language. They didn't need one.

"She hasn't eaten," said Rhiannon. Through Dot. Very sharp. Rhiannon always knows who hasn't eaten. From across a plain. From the far side of a relay. "Three days. She hasn't eaten for three days. I knew it at the arch." She stood up. "I thought it was the boy. I thought she was worried for the boy."

"No," said Mother.

Rhiannon looked at her.

"I was sick for three months with Lucas," said Mother. Very calmly. Pouring tea. "Couldn't look at bread. Trevor had to eat it in the garden."

Rhiannon sat down.

Very suddenly.

Halloway came up from the long ward at noon. With her bag. And took Isolde into the little room off the kitchen, and shut the door, and was in there for a long time.

When she came out she looked at all of us over her spectacles. Everyone was in the kitchen by then. Dinraal, who'd come through the arch from New Hearth at a run. Tiamat, down off the Wall. Rhiannon. Aurelius, very quiet, at the end of the table. Mother. Ithel, holding Ione's hand under the table.

"Ten weeks," said Halloway. "The ordinary way." She took off her spectacles. And rubbed her eyes. And put them back on. "Nine months. Each. That's what she said. On the roof. I was told."

"Sixty-three," said Luna. From the doorway. Very quietly. "Months."

Dinraal didn't say anything.

He went into the little room off the kitchen. And shut the door.

And the First Weapon lay down across it on the outside. Very small. With his crown on.

And didn't let anyone in for an hour.

Tiamat sat at the kitchen table of the house on the rise with her hands flat on the wood.

Very straight. The way she sits. The way she stands. Looking at the edge of things.

"Grandmother," she said. In our language. Very carefully. Trying the word.

Mother put a cup of tea in front of her.

"Twice," said Mother. "You've got Ithel too."

Tiamat looked at the tea for a long time.

Then she picked it up. And her hands weren't quite steady.

So that was the first half of the month. Two children who were keys, with names, with houses, with people who'd stand between their beds. And a baby coming the ordinary way, in a grey stone house with a silver roof on a hill above a river that was a day old and a world away from where it used to be.

I want to leave it there. I want to stop writing here. I've thought about it.

But there's the second half.

Ithel remembered.

It came out slowly. The way everything comes out of the children who were in boxes. A little at a time. At night. To whoever's sitting by the bed.

Ione remembered one place. The far yard. Over and over. Because she was a key that held one door, to one place, the place she'd been. That's what a key is. That's all it can do.

Ithel wasn't like that.

"He remembers worlds," said Isolde.

At the long table. In the map room. Three weeks after the notebook. With Dinraal beside her, and Ithel on her knee, because he won't sit anywhere else when there are a lot of people, and the First Weapon under the table on her feet.

"Not one," said Isolde. "Many." She put her hand on the boy's head. "He says they took him everywhere. First. Before they ever asked him which way. So he'd have been."

Okafor didn't say anything.

"He was a different kind of key," said Isolde. "He says. Ione could hold one door. He could hold a door to anywhere he'd been." She looked down at him. "So they took him to as many places as they could. Over and over. For as long as he can remember. So he'd know the way to all of them."

"How many?" said Okafor.

Isolde looked at Ithel.

Ithel looked at the map on the wall. At Okafor's slate. At the grey edge of it, and the small square door, and Isca past it at the very edge, where the slate ran out.

And said something. In Hearth's language.

Isolde's voice went.

"He says," she said. "Your wall isn't big enough."

Garnet drew them.

She's the only one who could. Garnet draws everything. She drew Teshka forty-one times on Isca, carrying old people up the steps. She drew Dinraal at his window from inside.

She sat with Ithel every afternoon for three weeks. In the garden on the roof of the grey stone house in New Hearth. Beside the mound of soil where the seed was. With her pencils. And Ithel told her worlds. In Hearth's language, with Isolde giving it to her. One at a time.

And Garnet drew them.

A red world with two suns, where the people were tall and thin and walked in long lines between the towers with their heads down.

A world of water, all of it, with towns built on rafts the size of countries, and the people on them small and furred and quick, with collars.

A cold world with nothing on it but one city, under a dome, and inside the dome, rows.

A world of forests so tall the light never reached the ground, and in the dark at the bottom of the trees, people who'd never seen the light at all, working.

A world where the people had wings, and the wings were tied.

Hundreds.

Then more than hundreds.

Garnet ran out of paper on the ninth day. Keir brought her more. She ran out of that. Odra's smiths made her slates. She filled them. Asha came with her instruments, and Ithel described where each one was, as well as a boy of five can describe where a world is, which is better than you'd think, Asha says, because he'd held a door to every one of them, and a door knows exactly where it goes. And Asha's instruments put them on a map.

In the air. Over the long table. Silver.

Going out past the edge of Okafor's slate. Past the grey. Past the small square door. Past Isca.

Further than anything.

"Thousands," said Asha.

She didn't talk fast. She hasn't talked fast since Hearth.

"Two thousand, eight hundred and six," said Asha. "That he remembers. That he can place." She looked at the map in the air. Silver points, very many, going out and out into the dark. "He says there were more. Before he could remember."

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Crane did. Of course.

"All the houses'," he said. Very quietly. With his hand on his spanner. "Every one."

"Yes," said Isolde. "He says every world he went to had people in collars." She put her arm round Ithel. "He says he thought that's what people were. Something with a collar. Until the long ward. Until Dinraal."

The Sorn.

I should say this properly. Because I've been saying the houses for as long as I've been writing this, and the Sorn as if it were the same thing, and it is, and it isn't.

The houses are what we see. The Hands. The towers. The tithe ships. The men in the sortings with their slates, and the men in chairs with keys. Konrad was one, once. Crane was one. The Overseer, in the doorway, with the dog against its legs, was the one who asked the questions for them.

The Sorn are what the houses are for.

Nobody on Avalon has ever seen one. Not the way we've seen a Hand. They don't come down. They send. They sit, the Overseer says, at the far end of every line in the ledger, very far off, where the ledger ends, and they've sat there longer than anyone has a word for.

And everything the houses have ever taken has gone to them.

And there were two thousand eight hundred and six worlds on Asha's map. In the air over the long table. Every one of them with people on it in collars.

That's what the Sorn have.

That's what they've always had.

Peoples. Thousands of them. Kept. Bred. Worked. Tithed. The way the houses kept us, on Earth, before the Accord broke. The way they kept Orrin and Imber and Vantle and Halcro. Every one of those worlds on Konrad's sheet, every world we ever took home, was one world. One. Out of thousands.

"Stock," said the Overseer.

From the doorway. With the dog. Not in the room and not out of it.

Everyone looked at it.

That is the word, it said. In the ledger. Under ours. Under lost. Under with. Its pale eyes went to the silver map in the air. Stock. For a very long time I did not understand it. I thought it meant what the houses have. Goods. Ships. Towers.

It looked at Ithel. On Isolde's knee.

It means them, said the Overseer. All of them. All the peoples the Sorn keep. That is the stock.

Ithel said something then.

In Hearth's language. Very quietly. To Isolde. And Isolde went very still, and asked him something, and he said it again.

Then she gave it to us.

"He says," said Isolde. "He saw them. On one of the worlds. The ones in the dark ships."

The Ashen.

"He says it was a grey world," said Isolde. "With a building on it. One building. Black. Very big. Bigger than a city." She held Ithel very close. "He says they took him there four times. In the box. To hold the door. And the last time, the door opened onto a field in front of the building, and the box was open, and he saw."

"Saw what?" said Okafor.

Isolde asked him.

Ithel told her.

"Lines," said Isolde. "Of people. From the stock. All different. Tall ones, and small ones, and furred ones, and ones with wings. Walking into the building. With collars." Her voice was very level. "And beside the building, the dark ships. The Ashen. Standing beside the Hands. Together."

"And?" said Okafor.

"And out of the other side of the building," said Isolde, "came Sorn."

Nobody moved.

"He says they weren't the same," said Isolde. "What came out. Not what went in. All the same as each other. Tall. Grey." She stopped. "He says they didn't have collars. He says they didn't need them."

"And then?" said Okafor. Very quietly.

"And then they got on the Hands," said Isolde. "And the Hands went outward. To the far yard. To the front." She looked at the map in the air. At the grey edge of it. "He says the ship he was on went after them, once. To hold the door. And he saw them fight."

"Fight what?"

"The Hungry," said Isolde.

A pause.

"He says they didn't lose," said Isolde.

The long table didn't say anything for a very long time.

Then Dinraal spoke. In our language. His own words. Slowly.

"That is what the Ashen got," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

"We asked," said Dinraal. "When the Ashen came beside the Hands. At Vantle. We asked: what do the Ashen get? Nobody knew." He looked at the map. "I said the Ashen have wanted Hearth for as long as there has been a Hearth. And I said I did not think it was that."

He put his silver hand flat on the table.

"It was that," said Dinraal. "Not Hearth. Not one world. All of them. The stock." His voice was very steady. "The Sorn gave the Ashen their peoples. Thousands of worlds of them. To take from. Whenever they want." He looked at the silver points in the air. "And in return, the Ashen showed the Sorn what to do with what was left."

"How to make Sorn," said Crane.

Very quietly. He'd gone white to the lips. The way Konrad went white, at the long table, when the houses said the terms.

"Out of anything," said Crane. "Out of anyone." He looked at his hands. "The Sorn were losing. To the Hungry. For a long time. The black never worked. We knew that. That's why they made an alliance with the only ones whose weapon did." He swallowed. "But it wasn't the weapon. The weapon was just how the Ashen got in the door."

He looked at the map.

"They taught the Sorn how to make more of themselves," said Crane. "Stronger. Out of the stock. And the new ones can fight the Hungry."

"Almost on even ground," said Asha. Very quietly. "If what he saw is true. Almost even."

Nobody said anything.

"For the first time," said Asha. "Since before there were houses."

Okafor stood up.

She went to the slate. Where the map is, with Garnet's three circles. The heroes. The houses and the Ashen. The Hungry. And looked at it for a long time.

Then she picked up the chalk.

And in the middle circle, the houses and the Ashen, she drew another line. Very small. Down into it. Like a root.

And at the bottom of the line, she wrote:

Stock.

"Konrad," said Okafor. Without turning round.

Konrad was at the end of the long table. With Ingrid. With Ione on his knee, who'd been listening to all of it with her hand at her throat.

"The far yard," said Okafor. "Every tithe. Every child the houses ever took outward. Before we started taking them back." She didn't turn round. "Halcro. The pens. The ships with the keys in the bow." A pause. "What did the report say? The one the Overseer had?"

Konrad didn't need to look.

"More tithe," he said. Very quietly. "Faster. For the far yard."

Okafor didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she put the chalk down. Very carefully. On the edge of the slate.

And turned round.

And looked at the small square door at the edge of the map. With 1,960 beside it.

And then at Ithel, on Isolde's knee. Who'd seen a black building on a grey world with lines going in, and something else coming out.

She didn't say it.

Nobody did.

But I watched every face at the long table understand it at the same time. Dinraal's. Isolde's. Crane's, already white. Ingrid's, with her arm round Ione. Konrad's. Mother's, at the end of the table, very still.

The one thousand, nine hundred and sixty.

Outward.

To the far yard.

To the stock.

"How long," said Mother. Very quietly. To no one. "How long does it take? In the building?"

Isolde asked Ithel.

Ithel didn't know. He was five. He'd been in a box. He'd seen it once, through an open lid, from a field.

But he said something else.

And Isolde gave it to us. And her voice didn't go, this time. It went very hard. The way Rhiannon's goes.

"He says the children went in last," said Isolde. "Always. After everyone else."

A pause.

"He says because they take the longest."

Nobody said anything.

Then Mother stood up.

She didn't say anything either. She went out of the map room. Down the stairs. Into the kitchen.

And I heard her take the slate down off its nail.

Days 4645–4688. Stock.

Konrad knelt on the red glass and asked. Ione wrote her own name on the front of the sheet, badly; he wrote Friese. Risa: I've got a sister. Dinraal's silver went into the walls of the little room and Ithel said warm and went in. He chose a word from the notebook: a flower that always opens again. Isolde rubbed out Soon and wrote Isolde, Ithel's. Then Maura's bread, and she went white; ten weeks, the ordinary way. Tiamat: grandmother. Twice. Ithel remembers 2,806 worlds, every one with people in collars. The Overseer: stock. The Ashen got the stock, and showed the Sorn how to make Sorn out of it, strong enough to fight the Hungry almost evenly. Okafor drew a root under the middle circle. More tithe, faster, for the far yard. The children go in last, because they take the longest. Mother took the slate down.