Chapter 429 Which Way

They kept asking.

That was the first week. Two hundred and thirteen children on the long ward and in the beds Halloway had put up in the town hall under the garden wall, because the long ward wasn't big enough, and every one of them woke the same way. Every time. Eyes open, mouth moving, before they knew where they were.

Which way?

And whoever was sitting with them said nowhere. Ingrid's word. In whatever language Dot gave them. Two hundred and thirteen times a night, for a week.

By the second week, it was a hundred.

By the third, most of them woke up and looked at whoever was in the chair and didn't say anything at all.

Halloway says that's the best thing she's seen on the long ward since the arm.

The girl from the bottom shelf woke up asking something else.

Hana was in the chair. She'd been in the chair for nine days; she went home to sleep when Luna made her and came back before dawn. The girl opened her eyes on the ninth morning and looked at Hana and her mouth moved.

Not which way.

A word. Very soft. In a language that sounded, Hana says, like water going into sand.

Dot was quiet a long time.

"Water," said Dot. "She's asking for water."

Hana gave her a cup.

The girl didn't drink it.

She put her hand in it. The whole small hand, flat, into the cup. And held it there. And closed her eyes.

And the water in the cup rose up round her wrist.

Not spilled. Rose. Up out of the cup, very slowly, in a thin skin over the back of her hand and round her wrist, the way the air goes round Hana when she's tired. And stayed there.

Hana went very still.

"She's like me," said Hana. That night. On the roof. To all of us. "Like I was. Before the bleed. Before Lucas finished me." She looked at her hands. "Water. Only water. I used to do one sphere in the cistern and it gave me a nosebleed." She was quiet. "She did that with a cup, in a bed, after a box, and it didn't hurt her at all."

Nobody said anything.

"Her people live in it," said Hana. "She said. When she could. Not in the sea. In the air, when it's wet enough. They make it hold them." She looked out at the north field. "She's been in a box with nothing to hold for longer than she's been alive."

Her name is Suri.

She told Hana on the twelfth day. Through Dot. When Hana asked, the way we ask now. What would you like to be called?

Suri said the word, and then another one, longer, that Dot couldn't get into our letters. Her people's name for themselves. Dot says the nearest is the ones who hold the rain.

Ithel and Ione came to the long ward together.

Every day. In the afternoon, when the light comes in. They went from bed to bed. Not saying much. Ione doesn't, and Ithel says warm and not a lot else. But they'd stop at each bed. And the child in it would look at them.

At their throats. Where the collars had been.

And then at their own.

And Ione would put her hand there, flat. And take it away. And the child in the bed would do the same. Every time. All down the ward. As if that were a word.

Halloway says it is. She says she's watched it two hundred times and it's the same every time, and that she's going to write it in her notes as the first thing every one of them learned to say on Avalon.

I had one too. It's gone.

I didn't go to the long ward much the first week.

I couldn't. Not because of my nose; my nose was fine. Halloway checked. Hana checked. Mother checked, three times a day, without saying she was checking.

It was the building.

I kept feeling it.

At night, mostly. On the floor of the children's room by the heap. With my hand out over the four, not touching. Through the thread they made, the long way, the one that touched the room. It's still there. They didn't let it go when the room was empty. They just let it go thin again, the way it was before, and left it.

And at the end of it, very faint, the building.

It was lost.

Crane said it would be. Pull the wire and the building doesn't know where anything is. Every door the keys held. Every place the building went through them. Gone, all at once, when two hundred and thirteen children stopped holding and the wire came out of the wall.

The building didn't fall. It stood on the ice on One, black, going up into the grey with no top to it, bending the world.

But it didn't go anywhere any more.

And it didn't know what to do with what was standing on its doorstep.

"They've stopped," said Asha.

At the long table. The eighth morning. With Ilka's furthest ears on One, very faint, and Eve's spheres reading what came back.

"The lines," said Asha. "On the spokes. All of them." She didn't talk fast. "They've stopped walking."

Nobody said anything.

"The building's not taking them in," said Asha. "It can't. It doesn't know where to send what comes out. So the doors on the roof are shut." She put her hands flat on the table. "And the lines are standing on the ice. On every spoke. All the way out. Waiting to go in."

"How many?" said Okafor.

Asha looked at Eve.

"More than came home from all the tithe worlds put together," said Eve. Very quietly. "Many times more."

"Standing," said Holt. From the end of the table. "On the ice."

"Yes."

"In the cold."

"Yes."

"For how long?"

Asha didn't answer.

Tavvan did. Through Dot. From the bench by the wall, where he sits with Holt's stick across his knees.

"Stock don't stop," he said. "Not on One. Not ever. The lines go in. That's what the spokes are for." He looked at his long hands. "There are no pens on the spokes. No halls. No fires. Nothing to keep them alive between the edge of the world and the doors." A pause. "They were never meant to stand there."

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then the Overseer spoke. From the doorway. With the dog.

The middle has heard One, it said. Every hour, since the room. Beside it, a word.

"Spoil," said Okafor.

Yes, said the Overseer.

They were going to do what they did to Thale.

What they did at Halcro, to their own yard, with forty Hands. What they did on Hyrran, in the cave, with the Ashen wave coming down through the mountain onto two hundred and eleven grey ones who'd started to remember.

The building was lost. The stock on the spokes couldn't go in. And the houses would rather have nothing than have it taken.

"Who," said Okafor. "Who spoils it."

The Ashen, said the Overseer. They are already moving. From where they were, over Hyrran, when the blade cut one of their ships. Its pale eyes went to the map. Toward One.

"How long?"

Days, said the Overseer. Not many.

"And the Hungry," said Asha. Very quietly.

Everyone looked at her.

"The front," said Asha. "The houses pulled it back. To ring the building. To guard the room." She looked at the silver map over the table. At the grey edge of it, where the far yard is. "Every grey ship that used to stand between the Hungry and everything else is standing round a building that doesn't know where it is."

She put her finger on the map. On the grey. Very far out.

"They've noticed," said Asha.

She showed us.

Through Ilka's ears. Through Eve's spheres, reading what came back. A shape on the map in the air, at the very edge, past the grey. Dark. Moving.

An arm.

Not the one that came for Hearth. Smaller than that. Still bigger than anything I had a word for.

Reaching for One.

"All three," said Okafor.

Nobody needed it explained.

The houses, with a building full of grey ones that didn't know which way. The Ashen, coming to spoil the stock so nobody else could have it. The Hungry, reaching through the gap where the front had been, for the biggest piece of food anyone had ever left out on the ice.

And between them, on the spokes, standing in the cold, more people than had come home from every tithe world put together.

Hana stood up.

She doesn't, at the long table. She sits at the end with the air going round her and doesn't say much. She stood up and put both hands flat on the wood.

"Her people," she said.

Nobody said anything.

"Suri's," said Hana. "The ones who hold the rain. They were on the spoke. I breathed for one of their children. Walking up." She didn't raise her voice. "They're standing on the ice now. In the cold. They live in wet air and they're standing on a dead world where it hasn't rained in longer than there have been houses."

She looked at the slate on the wall. At The lines. We come back., which Okafor copied up from the kitchen in her own hand, and under it, in Hana's, which nobody had copied, which Okafor had left because she said it was Hana's to write: Her people first.

"We said," said Hana.

Okafor looked at her for a long time.

Then she picked up the chalk.

"Everyone," she said.

I'm going to write how. Because it's the biggest thing we've ever done, and if I don't write it down nobody will believe it, and Konrad says somebody has to.

The long way first. Me and Dinraal. Again.

Then Dinraal's frame in the crevasse, the way he made it before. And Kyria's cutters toward it from the courtyard.

That was one door. For nine people, it was enough. For more people than had come home from every tithe world put together, it was nothing.

"More frames," said Okafor. "All along the spokes."

"I can make one at a time," said Dinraal. "And hold it. That's all."

"Then you'll teach others," said Okafor.

He did.

That was the first ten days. Dinraal on the plain past the canyon, by the bridge, with every one of Hearth's people whose silver had been finished. Showing them. One small path at a time, the way I showed him on the eighth day, a long time ago, through the relay. How to put your silver into the ground and send it up in two strands that hold their own shape and meet.

Gilgamesh got it first. He reached over his shoulder and it was a frame, and he laughed.

Then Alexander, with his blades; he made eleven at once, small, in formation, and they all held.

Then Julius. Then Aurelius, whose frames were very wide and very steady and very gentle, the way he does everything. Then Tiamat and Aramaeis, whose frames were the size of a Hand.

Then Isolde.

She was thirty-three weeks and Halloway said absolutely not, and Isolde said she wasn't going to One, she was going to the plain past the canyon to learn something, and Halloway could come and stand next to her if she was worried. Halloway did. Isolde made a frame out of her leaves on the second try that held for nine minutes on its own after she let go.

"Bahamut helped," she said. With her hand on her middle. Nobody argued.

Holt planned the spokes.

Not Okafor. She gave it to him; she said a man who'd closed eight gates on Hyrran and held one knew more about where to put a door than she did. He sat at the long table every night for ten days with Asha's map in the air over him and Tavvan beside him, and Crane on his other side with his spanner, and laid the frames out one at a time.

"How far apart do the lines stand?" he asked Tavvan. The first night.

Tavvan thought about it.

"Close," he said. Through Dot. "Closer than you'd think. When they walk, they walk close, because the ones behind push. When they stop, they don't spread out." He put his long hand flat on the table. "They'll be standing the way they were walking. Touching. For the warmth."

"So a frame on a spoke," said Holt, "takes everyone within reach of it."

"If they'll go."

Holt looked at him.

"They've been walking toward a door for their whole lives," said Tavvan. "Some of them won't know there's another kind."

So Holt put a sweeper at every frame.

Not Tavvan; there's only one Tavvan. But there were three hundred and twelve of them on Avalon now, the old ones from the side passages, who'd swept the hall on One for longer than anyone could count and knew how the stock moved. Most of them couldn't walk far. Holt didn't need them to walk far.

"Stand at the frame," he told them. Through Dot. In the town hall under the garden wall, where the oldest of them were sleeping. "In your own coat. Without a collar. And when they come to it, let them see you."

One of the old sweepers said something.

"She says," said Dot, "they won't know her. Stock don't look at faces."

"They don't have to look at her face," said Holt. "They'll see her throat."

And Odra sent the smiths.

Forty of them. Hyrrani and Kiln, side by side, the way they work now in the deep forges under the ridge. With hammers. Not to fight; Odra said she wasn't sending smiths to fight anything, she'd lost enough of her people to stairs. To stand at the frames with Kyria's cutters, the way Hesk stands at every arch, so that if a frame started to fall there'd be someone there who knew how to hold a keystone.

Teel was one of them. Ossel another.

"And if the Ashen come down on the frames?" said Okafor.

"Then my smiths will know which way to run," said Odra. "They're not stupid. They're smiths."

Konrad asked to come.

At the long table, on the ninth night, when Holt had laid out the last of the frames. He stood up at the end of the table with the sheets in his hand.

"Somebody has to write it," said Konrad. "Who comes through. At the far end. Not at the red glass; Wren counts them at the red glass. At the frame. Where they decide." He put the sheets down. "I wasn't at the ford. I wasn't at either of my children. I was on Morvane with Ingrid and I was useful there." He looked at Okafor. "Put me at a frame. I'll write the names of everyone who'll tell me theirs."

Okafor looked at him for a long time.

"Konrad," she said. "You're old."

"So's Holt," said Konrad. "So's Odra. So's Tavvan. So's half of everyone going." He didn't sit down. "It's a war of old people, Maris. It always has been. We're the ones who remember what it was like before."

Ingrid didn't say anything.

She was at the end of the table where she always sits. With Ione beside her. She looked at her husband standing up, for a long time.

Then she put one thin hand out. And he took it.

"Same frame," said Ingrid.

"Same frame," said Konrad.

Hana taught Suri on the porch.

Every evening, the last ten days. With a basin of water between them on the boards. Hana hadn't done water, just water, since Edda's hut. Since Lucas finished her, and the water became air, and she stopped being a girl who could make one sphere in a cistern and get a nosebleed for it.

She did it for Suri.

One sphere. Out of the basin. Very slowly. Turning in the air between them in the evening light.

Suri watched it for a long time.

Then she put her hand in the basin. And her own came up. Smaller. Wobbling. Turning the wrong way.

They held them up next to each other. Hana's and Suri's. Two small spheres of water over the porch of the house on the rise.

"Mine used to wobble," said Hana. "Exactly like that. Everyone said it was wrong."

Suri looked at her.

"It wasn't," said Hana. "It was just mine."

On the last evening, Suri made it rain.

Not much. Not like Kesh. A small grey cloud, out of the basin, the size of two hands cupped together, that went up off the porch and over the garden and stopped over the corner where the wall meets the house.

Over the cutting the last gardener left. And the white bud beside it.

And rained.

Very gently. For about a minute.

The bud opened.

Hana didn't say anything. She sat on the porch with her hand over her mouth and watched a girl from a people who hold the rain make it rain on a flower from a people who are gone, in the corner of a field I made out of ash and glass.

Then she went inside and didn't come out until morning.

By the tenth day there were forty of Hearth's people who could make a frame and hold it.

And forty of Kyria's cutters to cut toward each one.

And every queen on Avalon to sing them.

"And the far end," said Okafor. "Who holds the far end of forty doors?"

Nobody answered.

Then Risa did.

"Me," she said. "And Rowan. And Callum. And the wing."

Okafor looked at her.

"I held one for two days with my hands out," said Risa. "I held one on One from the red glass for nine hours." She folded her arms. "I've been teaching Rowan since Isca. Callum since his arm came out of the bandages. Every pilot in the wing can feel a thread now. Arcturus can feel all of them at once." She looked at Arcturus, at the end of the table, who nodded very seriously. "Forty pilots. Forty frames. Forty threads."

"And you?"

"I hold all of theirs," said Risa.

Kesh frowned at her.

From the basket by the stove. Where she'd been listening to the whole thing.

Her cloud went grey. Small. Turning.

Risa looked at her daughter.

"No," said Risa. "You're nine months old."

Kesh frowned harder.

"Not this time," said Risa. "Next time. When you can say yes."

Ingrid didn't hush the cloud.

She looked at it for a long time from her chair at the end of the table. Then she looked at Ione, sitting beside her, who was looking at Kesh too.

Ione got up. And went to the basket by the stove. And put her hand on Kesh's head, under the cloud. Flat.

"She's allowed to want to," said Ione. To Risa. Very calmly. "That's different from being asked."

Risa looked at her sister for a long time.

"Yes," she said. "It is."

And Kesh's cloud stopped turning.

The four didn't know anything about it.

Mother made sure. Nobody said One in the children's room. Nobody said frames. The four slept in the middle of the heap with Ithel among them and Ione and Suri at the edge, because Suri had come up from the long ward on the fifteenth day and lain down beside Ione without being asked, the way Ione lay down beside Dory the first night.

The four slept.

And the thread they'd made went out from the middle of the heap, the long way, very thin, to a building on the ice that didn't know where it was.

And stayed there.

Mother sat in the doorway every night and watched them sleep and didn't say anything.

Dinraal had to go. Everyone knew it. He's the only one who's done the long way with me and come back together; his silver is the only silver that remembers me in the dark between things. Without him, there's no first frame, and without the first frame, there's nothing for the other thirty-nine to cut toward.

Isolde was thirty-three weeks.

He didn't say anything about it at the long table. He went home to New Hearth on the sixteenth night, across the bridges, up the hill, up the stairs to the room at the back with the window, where Isolde was sitting with her feet up on a stool and the notebook on what was left of her lap and Ithel asleep on the floor beside her.

I wasn't there. Isolde told me afterward.

He stood in the doorway and didn't come in.

Isolde didn't look up from the notebook.

"Go," she said.

"I said I'd be here," said Dinraal. "I said eight beds."

"You'll be here," said Isolde. "Halloway says four weeks. Maybe five. He's in no hurry; he's like you." She turned a page. "You'll be back in two."

"And if I'm not?"

Isolde put the notebook down.

And looked at him. For a long time. In the doorway of the room he'd never been able to go into, because it was going to be a nursery and his father never had one.

"Then your mother will be here," said Isolde. "And mine. And yours will be in the chair by the window and mine will be bringing me pears I don't want, and Ithel will be on the floor saying warm." She held out her hand. "Bahamut won't be alone. Not for one minute. Not like you were."

Dinraal came in.

Tiamat came down off the Wall the next morning and didn't go back.

She moved into the grey stone house on the hill. Into the room at the front, with the view of the river. She didn't ask. She arrived with one bag and Bahamut's drawing of a dragon, the bad one off her station wall, and hung it in the nursery over the cot.

And sat in the chair by the window. Very straight. Looking at the edge of things.

"Somebody should be here who remembers him," she said. To Isolde. In our language, carefully. "The first one. When the second one comes."

Tavvan was going. Of course he was.

He sat on the bench by the map-room wall on the eighteenth night with Holt's stick across his knees and said so, through Dot, before anyone could ask. He said he'd stood at the end of the sweepers' tunnel and watched the lines go up the ramps for forty years and he wasn't going to watch them stand on the ice and die without walking out to them.

Holt didn't argue.

He went to the peg by the map-room door, where his coat hangs. The old one. The one he gave Tavvan in the crevasse and Saska at the west gate and got back both times. And took it down.

And held it out.

Tavvan looked at it.

"It's cold there," said Holt. "You know that better than anyone."

"It's yours," said Tavvan.

"It keeps coming back," said Holt. "Take it. It'll come back again."

Andraste sat on the roof the last night with Holdfast across her knees.

It was humming.

Not loud. Not toward the grey ones; there aren't any grey ones on Avalon. Toward the east, very faint, the way it hummed the first night on the ridge after Kyria gave it to her. Toward something very far away that it could hear and nobody else could.

"It knows where we're going," said Andraste. To Vessa, on her chest. "It's been pointing all week."

Vessa turned. East.

Then back to her mother. And frowned.

"I know," said Andraste. "I'll breathe properly this time. No collars." She put her hand on her daughter's head. "This time I don't have to pretend I'm not what I am."

Mother was on the porch when I came down off the roof.

With the teapot. In Father's chair. Looking out at the dark of the north field.

I sat down on the step.

She didn't say anything for a long time.

"You won't bring them all," she said. In the end.

"No."

"You know that."

"Yes."

"Good," said Mother. "Then you won't stop when you can't." She poured tea into a cup and held it out. "Bring as many as there's time for. Every one there's time for. And then come home."

I took the cup.

"Your father burned the field once," said Mother. "To save something. He didn't save all of it." She looked at the dark. "He saved enough that it grew back."

On the eighteenth day, Asha said the Ashen were two days from One.

On the nineteenth, Eve said the arm was three.

On the nineteenth night, I went to the children's room.

Suri was awake.

At the edge of the heap. Beside Ione, who was asleep. Lying on her side with her eyes open and her hand in a cup of water Hana had left by her pillow, because Halloway said it helped her sleep and it did.

She looked at me.

I sat down on the floor.

She took her hand out of the cup. The water came with it, the thin skin of it, round her wrist. She held it up. Toward me.

Then she said something. Very soft. Like water going into sand.

Dot was on the porch. Through the window. She gave it to me.

"She says," said Dot, "it's not raining there."

I didn't say anything.

"She says her mother taught her," said Dot, "that when it's not raining, you hold what you've got. And you give it to whoever's thirstiest." A pause. "She says her mother will be giving it away. On the ice. To whoever's next to her."

Suri held her wrist out, with the water round it.

"She says," said Dot, "please take it to her."

I didn't know how.

I put out my hand. And Suri put hers in it. And the water went off her wrist and onto mine. A thin skin. Cool. Holding.

It stayed there.

All night. All the next morning. When I went down to the red glass at dawn with Dinraal, and the forty frames' worth of Hearth's people and Kyria's cutters and the wing on the field in their line and Risa standing at the arch with her hands at her sides and Kesh in the basket at her feet, frowning.

It was still there. Round my wrist. Cool.

Hana saw it.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she put her own hand over it.

And it went a little thicker.

The red glass was full at dawn.

Not with people going. With people waiting to go. Forty teams, in forty rows across the interceptor field, the way Holt laid them out on the map. At the front of each one, one of Hearth's people who could make a frame, and one of Kyria's cutters, and a smith with a hammer, and an old sweeper in her own coat with no collar. And behind them, everyone else.

The Hyrrani, forty thousand, split forty ways, a thousand to a frame. The Mom Squad, all eleven, Isolde included, because she said she was standing on the red glass and nobody was going to stop her; at the twelfth frame, Mother's, which Holt put nearest the building, because Mother said so. Hearth's three, one each at the three frames nearest the Ashen. The wing on the field behind, forty interceptors, every pilot with a thread in their hands that Risa had taught them to feel.

Konrad and Ingrid at the thirty-first frame. With the sheets. With a pen.

And at the back of the field, on the long ward, sitting up in bed, with Rafe on her chest and Rhiannon's hand on her arm and Wren's other hand flat on the blanket: Wren. Who'd count them. Every one. Through forty doors at once.

She said she didn't know if she could.

She said she'd find out.

Halloway walked down the rows with her bag.

She didn't say anything to anyone. She stopped at every frame and looked at the person who'd be making it, over her spectacles, for a long time. And then went on to the next.

At the last row, she stopped in front of me.

"Your nose," she said.

"It's fine."

"It's fine now," said Halloway. "It won't be fine at the end of today." She took off her spectacles. And rubbed her eyes. And put them back on. "When it starts, you tell Hana. And when Hana says stop, you stop. Whatever's in front of you."

"Halloway—"

"Whatever's in front of you," said Halloway. "I've been patching you up since the Program floors. I'd like to keep doing it."

She went back up the hill to the long ward.

Hana watched her go. Then she took my hand. The one with Suri's water round the wrist.

"I'll tell you," she said. "Before you notice. I always know first."

"I know you do."

"And when I say stop," said Hana, "you'll be angry with me. You'll want one more." She didn't let go. "Be angry. Stop anyway."

We went the long way at dawn.

Dinraal's silver remembered everything, the way it does. This is Lucas. This is the water round his wrist. This is Suri's.

The crevasse was the same. Blue-black. Very cold. The grey very high overhead.

But the sky wasn't.

I climbed out first. Dinraal's frame was going up behind me, up the walls, two strands, holding, and I didn't wait for it. I went up the ice the way he taught me with his silver claws on the first night, except I don't have silver claws, so I asked the ice to make steps, and it did.

And lay flat at the top.

And looked.

The spokes were full.

All of them. From the edge of the world to the foot of the building. Lines, standing. Not walking. Millions. On the grey-white roads of light across the ice, in the cold, in every direction, as far as I could see.

Some of them were sitting down.

Some of them were lying down.

Some of them weren't moving at all.

And above them, very high, coming in from the far edge of the grey, dark specks. Hundreds. No lights. Coming down.

The Ashen.

And beyond the Ashen, beyond the edge of the sky where the front used to be, very far out, filling the whole of that side of the grey like a hand closing—

The arm.

I put my wrist down on the ice. With the water round it. Suri's.

And reached back. The long way. For Avalon.

Risa, I said. Now.

Days 4837–4857. Which Way.

Two hundred and thirteen woke asking which way; by the third week most of them didn't. Suri asked for water, and it rose round her wrist: the ones who hold the rain. Ione and Ithel went bed to bed: I had one too; it's gone. The building is lost; the doors on the roof are shut; the lines have stopped on the spokes, standing on the ice with nowhere to go. Spoil. The Ashen are coming to do it; the front's gone, and an arm is reaching through the gap. Hana stood up: her people; we said. Okafor: everyone. Dinraal taught forty of Hearth to make frames; Isolde's held nine minutes; Bahamut helped. Risa: forty pilots, forty threads; I'll hold theirs. Ione: she's allowed to want to; that's different from being asked. Suri: it's not raining there; please take it to her. The water stayed round my wrist. At the top of the crevasse: millions, standing, sitting, lying down. The Ashen coming down. The arm beyond. Risa. Now.