Chapter 441 Love

Oona says love now.

Not the way you'd think. Not I love you. She says it the way Mother says it. At the end of things. To anyone.

Sit down, love.

Mind the step, love.

There you are, love, which is half Dory's and half Mother's and wholly hers, and which she says to the old ones coming off the arch on the red glass every morning, standing beside Mother at the bottom of it with her hair standing up off her head like a storm coming.

The old ones don't know what to make of her. A small pale-gold girl, five years old, in a long brown coat Maura made her exactly like Mother's, with the hem let down so far it touches her boots. Holding a cup. Saying love to people three times her height and twenty times her age.

They take the cup anyway.

I should write how it happened. It happened very fast.

The coat was first.

Oona held Mother's coat hem every day for six weeks, and at the end of six weeks Maura came up the hill with a parcel and said nothing about it and put it on the kitchen table. Inside was a coat. Brown. Long. With deep pockets and a collar that turns up, and a hem with a fold of cloth sewn into the inside of it, a hand wide, so it could be let down as she grew.

Exactly like Mother's. Exactly. Maura had measured Mother's while she slept in the porch chair.

Oona put it on.

Then she went and stood beside Mother at the stove, in the coat, with her hands in the pockets, exactly the way Mother stands.

Mother looked down at her.

She didn't say anything. She went very pink. Genny says she's never seen Mother go pink in her life.

Then the teapot.

Not lifting it. Carrying it. Mother gave her one. A small brown one from the back of the cupboard, the one Mother used when I was small, with a chip on the spout. Oona carries it everywhere. There's never anything in it. She holds it in both hands on the red glass in the mornings, and when Mother pours, Oona tips hers too, over the same cup, very seriously, as if she's helping.

Sometimes there's something in it. Abbe started putting a little tea in it, on the days she comes up from the rain valley. Just a little. So it pours.

Oona's never asked who did it. She just pours.

Then the step.

She sits where Mother sits. On the top step of the porch, at the left end, with her back against the post. When Mother's there, Oona's on the step beside her. When Mother isn't, Oona's in Mother's place.

Waiting. With her hands in her pockets.

Nobody else is allowed to sit there now. Not even Konrad. He tried once, on a hot afternoon, because it was the shady end. Oona came round the corner of the house with her teapot and stopped and looked at him.

Konrad moved.

And then the names.

She says them now. With Mother. Every night.

Not all of them. She doesn't know all of them yet. Mother's been saying them for longer than I've been alive. But Oona sits on the step beside her at the end of the night, in her coat, with the small teapot in her lap, and listens, and when Mother gets to one Oona knows, Oona says it too. A little behind. In the Tallis way, with the click at the end.

Trevor.

That's Father. Mother says him first, always. Oona says him second.

Then the ones Oona's learned. Ferrin. The nine Marrah, one at a time; Oona knows all nine. Tey's grandson's. Her own three, at the end, the Tallis ones, which Mother says in Tallis and Oona says in ours, because Ione taught her.

And then, last, something Mother never used to say.

"Goodnight, love," says Oona. To all of them.

Mother started saying it too.

"She's you," said Ingrid. On the bench in the garden. Watching them.

Mother and Oona were at the garden wall. With the queen. Mother had her hand flat on the queen's head the way she does in the mornings, and Oona had her hand flat on the queen's head beside it. Both of them with their eyes shut. Both of them in long brown coats. The same height, nearly, from the bench, because Oona was standing on the wall.

"She's five," said Mother. Not turning round.

"She's you at five," said Ingrid. "I've seen pictures."

"There aren't any pictures of me at five."

"Then she's what the pictures would have been," said Ingrid.

Mother didn't say anything.

But when she turned round to come back to the bench, she was smiling the way I've only seen her smile a few times in my whole life. On the red glass, the day she first came to Avalon and Dory ran to her. On the morning Ione wrote her own name on the front of the sheet. And now.

I asked her about it, on the porch, after.

"You like it," I said.

Mother looked at Oona, asleep on the step with her head in Mother's lap and the small teapot still in her hands.

"I was an orphan," said Mother. "Your father was an orphan. Nobody ever copied either of us. There wasn't anybody to copy." She put her hand on Oona's hair. "You lot didn't copy me. You were all too busy being yourselves. Which is right. Which is what I wanted." She was quiet. "But I never knew what it'd be like. Somebody small, standing exactly how I stand, because they want to."

"And?"

Mother didn't answer straight away.

"It's the best thing that's happened to me in a long time," said Mother. "Don't tell your sisters."

Kesh learned to lift from Oona.

Not much. Kesh is Risa's; she's all sky. Her cloud does what she tells it and her storms come when she frowns. But she's three and a bit and looks six, and she follows Oona everywhere now, and Oona lifts everything, so Kesh tried.

She stood in the courtyard beside Oona with her hand out flat and frowned at a pebble.

It got wet.

Oona looked at the wet pebble for a while. Then she put her hand out beside Kesh's. Flat. And lifted it. A finger's width. And held it there, very still, so Kesh could see.

"Like that, love," said Oona.

Kesh frowned harder.

The pebble went up. A finger's width. Oona's and Kesh's together.

Then Kesh's cloud rained on it, very gently, out of sheer pleasure, and Oona lifted every drop off it, and they stood in the courtyard with a pebble and a little cloud of hanging rain between their two flat hands until Risa came out to see why it was so quiet.

Risa says it's the first time in Kesh's life anyone's kept up with her. Risa says she's very grateful, and that the courtyard is permanently damp now.

The old Tallis woman came up from the coast in the third month.

The one with her hair a hand high, who stood with Mother on the street of the first town with their palms flat. She came on the train on her own and walked up the hill and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

Oona was on the top step. In her coat. With her teapot.

The old woman looked at her for a long time. At the coat. At the hem, let down a fold already. At the teapot, and the way Oona was holding it, in both hands, exactly the way Mother holds hers.

Then she said something in Tallis.

Oona answered. In Tallis. And then, at the end, in ours: "Love."

The old woman's hair stood up even further. Dot says that's what it does when a Tallis laughs.

"She says," said Dot, "the child's lifting beside her family again. At the turn. She says that's all a Tallis needs." A pause. "She says the coat's very good, and she'd like one."

Maura made her one. Grey, not brown. The old woman wears it on the coast now, in the evenings, when the Tallis float their houses over the shallows. Nine other old Tallis have asked Maura since.

I didn't tell my sisters.

Genny knew anyway. Garnet drew it. It's on the kitchen wall now, next to the four hands over the porch step. Two long brown coats from behind, at the garden wall, one big and one small, both with a hand flat on the queen.

Mother pretends she hasn't seen it.

She stops in front of it every morning on her way to the stove.

And Corin.

I want to write about Corin and Mother, because it's been true for a long time and I've never put it down, and with Oona everywhere now someone might think it had stopped.

It hasn't.

Corin's nearly five. He looks eight or nine; they all grow fast. He's the most like me, of my sons. Everyone says so. Andraste says so; she says she knew on the ridge the night he was born, when he opened his eyes and looked at her and then looked past her at the sky, the way I do, as if checking it was still there.

But Mother doesn't say he's like me.

Mother says he's like Father.

She said it the day he was born. I can see so much of your father in him. She's said it since. Not often. Not where Corin can hear, usually. But I've watched her watch him. In the heap. At the long table. In the courtyard with a practice blade Kyria gave him, very serious, getting it wrong and trying again.

He does things Father did.

I didn't know that, at first. I didn't know what Father did, mostly; I was young, and then I was in the Project, and then he was gone. But Mother knew. And she'd see Corin do something and go very still.

The way he stands with his weight on one leg and his hand on the back of his neck when he's thinking.

The way he looks at a broken thing for a long time before he touches it. Then fixes it all at once.

The way he hums when he's working. Not a song. Two notes. Over and over. Low.

Father hummed two notes at the forge. Mother told me. I never knew.

She still holds him.

Every evening, if he lets her. And he always lets her. After supper, after the lift at the turn, before the names. Corin comes in from wherever he's been, Hyrran or the courtyard or Rory's workshop, with his practice blade and his bruises, and he climbs into Mother's lap in the big porch chair.

He's too big for it. His legs go over the arm, the way Dory's did after Caddoc. He does it anyway.

And Mother puts her arms round him and holds him. Not talking. Just holding. With her chin on top of his head.

Andraste told me once she's never seen Corin sit still for anyone else. Not her. Not Kyria. Not me. He's the restless one, Andraste says. He moves all the time. He wakes in the night and checks the door the four made, in the middle of the heap, as if it might have gone somewhere.

But in Mother's lap he stops. Completely. Like a stone in a stream.

"She's holding someone," said Andraste. "Not him. Through him." She was very quiet. "I don't mind. He doesn't either. He knows."

"Knows what?"

"That he's the closest thing she's got," said Andraste. "He asked me about his grandfather last month. Trevor. He wanted to know what he was like." She looked at me. "I didn't know. I told him to ask his grandmother."

Thessaly doesn't mind either.

She's Corin's twin. They built each other, before they were born. She's the one who keeps the four's door open, when Corin makes it, the way she kept the one in Holdfast open. She's quieter than him, and stiller, and she sits on the step below Mother's chair most evenings and leans her head against Mother's knee while Corin's in the lap above her.

I asked her once if she minded. That Mother holds him and not her.

Thessaly looked at me as if I'd said something very stupid.

"She holds me," said Thessaly. "She holds me like Gran holds me. She holds him like she's holding Grandad." She shrugged. "It's different. Corin needs it more. He's the restless one." She put her head back against Mother's knee. "And I've got the knee."

He did.

I was on the porch. Oona was asleep on the step, in her coat. Corin was in Mother's lap, too big for it, with his chin against her shoulder.

"Gran," said Corin. "What was Grandad like?"

Mother didn't say anything for a long time.

She held him. And I watched her decide, the way she decides everything that matters, slowly and properly. What to give him. How much. Which bits.

"He was quiet," said Mother.

Corin waited.

"He didn't talk much. He worked. At the forge, all day. And when someone on our street had something broken, they brought it to him, and he looked at it for a very long time before he touched it." She put her chin on Corin's head. "And then he fixed it all at once. And handed it back. And never once let anyone pay."

"Like me," said Corin. Very quietly.

"Like you."

"Did he hum?"

Mother went very still.

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody," said Corin. "I just thought he might. I do."

Mother didn't answer straight away. I don't think she could.

"Two notes," she said in the end. "Low. Over and over. When he was working." She swallowed. "I used to hear it from the kitchen. All day. I knew he was all right as long as I could hear it."

Corin didn't say anything.

Then, very low, against her shoulder, he hummed.

Two notes.

I went inside.

It wasn't mine.

Oona woke on the step a while later, I'm told. Ingrid told me; she was in the garden. Oona woke and saw Corin in Mother's lap, in her chair, with Mother's arms round him, and Mother's eyes shut.

Ingrid said she thought there'd be trouble. Oona's very particular about the step and the coat and the teapot.

Oona looked at them for a long time.

Then she got up. Quietly. Took the blanket off the back of the porch couch. Lifted it, the Tallis way, with her hand out flat, across the porch. And let it down, very gently, over both of them.

Then she sat back down on her step. In her coat. With her teapot.

And waited.

Oona asked Mother about it the next night. On the step. After the names.

"Gran Dot," said Oona. "Trevor."

"Yes, love."

"You say him first."

"Always."

Oona thought about it. With her hand on the coat hem.

"Is he mine too?" she said. "Now?"

Mother didn't answer straight away. She never does.

Then she put her arm round Oona.

"He'd have said yes before you'd finished asking," said Mother. "He'd have been on this step with you every night. He'd have made you a teapot of your own, a proper one, at the forge, with no chip in it." She was quiet. "Yes, love. He's yours too."

Oona said his name again. Trevor. Very carefully. With the click.

Then, after a moment:

"Dad."

Mother didn't say anything else that night. She held Oona till the lamp went out.

Ash went to Rory's workshop the next morning and asked how you'd make a teapot out of metal. Rory said he'd never made one. Ash said Rory had better learn, then, because Grandad would have. She stayed and learned it with him.

It's on the porch now. Small, brown, iron, a bit lumpy. No chip in it. Oona uses it every morning.

That was the domestic part of the month. I'm writing it first because Mother says the domestic part is always first, and the rest is just what happens in between.

The rest happened on the fiftieth day.

A grey ship came drifting.

Tiamat found it. One of hers, at the edge of the Watch, toward where the grey ships had been fighting the body. A single grey ship, very damaged, holed along one side by something that wasn't Ashen and wasn't ours. Drifting. Not under power. Turning very slowly, end over end, out past Root, where the eldest's song goes.

"It's alive," said Tiamat. "Inside. Something's alive."

Dory put her hand flat on the long table.

The net went out. Further than Caddoc. Further than the four hundred calls. To the edge of the Watch, where the ship was turning.

She was quiet for a long time.

"Six hundred," she said. "In it. New ones." She swallowed. "Just under. All of them. The voice is in them, but it's very faint. The ship's broken. It can't hear the middle properly."

"Can they hear us?" said Okafor.

Dory looked at her.

"I don't know," she said. "Nobody's tried."

Okafor went to the slate.

GRANDMOTHERS CALL THEM HOME.

She'd been standing in front of it for months. Every morning. With the chalk.

She turned round.

"Konrad," she said. "The names."

It took a day.

Dory went through the ship on the net. Very carefully. One at a time. Not deep; she didn't need to go deep, they were just under. She felt for the way each of them was standing, inside the grey, the way she felt the walker and Wend and Ouse's grandson. And told Konrad.

And Konrad went through the sheets.

Two hundred and twelve thousand names, by then. Every one with the thing their people do. Konrad and Ingrid and Genny and Garnet and Ione and half the house on the floor of the map room with sheets everywhere, matching. A lean toward a river. A sway like a deck. A hand to the head where the hair would have been.

By midnight they had a hundred and forty.

A hundred and forty out of six hundred, whose grandmother or grandfather was on Avalon. On an end-room step. Pouring the first cup.

They came up the hill in the night. All hundred and forty of the old ones. Called by train, by Dot, by Kesh's cloud raining on the right door, by the queens singing. Up the road from the red glass in the dark with their cups and their sticks and their blankets, to the arch.

Okafor stood at the bottom of it.

"It's a broken ship," she said. "In the dark, past Root. There's six hundred grey ones in it and the houses are still in them, a bit. Some of them will try to kill you." She looked down the line. "You don't have to go."

Nobody moved.

Then Abbe walked past her. Ninety-five. With her cup. And stood in front of the arch, and looked back at Okafor, and said something.

"She says," said Dot, "Holt goes first. She knows that. She says after Holt."

Holt went first.

Of course he did. Crane moved him out on the board at midnight and wrote back by dawn beside him and stood at the board all night.

Then the Standing. Varra and the Kasrai, two hundred of them, to hold the corridors. Andraste with Holdfast, which hums toward grey ones, so we'd know where they were. Me, in the ship's metal, holding it together. Dory, holding the arch from the red glass, with Halloway at her wrist.

And Mother.

And the hundred and forty.

Oona didn't go. Mother said no. Oona sat on the top step in her coat with her teapot and didn't argue. Mother said that was worse than arguing.

I'll write it the way it went.

The inside of a grey ship is very dark and very cold and smells of nothing. The corridors are tall, for grey ones. We came through the arch into the middle of one, Holt first with a lamp, and the Kasrai spread out ahead and behind, and Holdfast started humming at once.

They were everywhere.

Standing in the corridors. In rows, against the walls, the way they stand in the ships between fights. Six hundred. Very still. Swaying, some of them, very small.

The voice came out of them as soon as we were through.

Very faint. Broken. Like a voice through a bad wire.

World—

—breaker.

Stock—

Some of them moved.

The Kasrai held the corridors. Andraste held the end. I held the ship. It was broken all along one side and trying to come apart, and if it came apart we'd all be in the dark past Root with nothing round us.

And the old ones walked into the corridors.

One at a time. With Dory on the net from the red glass, telling Dot, and Dot telling each one where to go. Third corridor. Left wall. Sixth from the end.

And they went. Past the Kasrai. In the dark, with a lamp each, with their cups and their sticks, to the one Dory said was theirs.

And stood in front of them.

And did the thing.

A grandmother from the sea-cliff world, swaying. A grandfather from the river towers, leaning, not touching, toward a river that wasn't there. Aske, Wend's father, with a cup, pouring the first one out on the grey floor of the ship. Tey, from the terraces, twisting a knot into her own long hair in front of a granddaughter who didn't have any.

All along the corridors. In the dark. A hundred and forty old people. Calling.

The voice got louder.

It came out of all six hundred. Stock. Return. Return. And some of them that weren't being called moved, all at once, along the corridors toward the old ones.

The Kasrai met them.

I won't write it. It was in the dark. There were six hundred and two hundred, and the grey ones get up.

Mother was in the middle corridor.

I saw her. Through the metal. Standing in the dark with her lamp and her teapot, not calling anyone; she hasn't got anyone in a grey ship. Holding.

Holding the corridor. Lifting. Every grey one that came down it toward the old ones, she lifted off the floor and held, a finger's width, two, so their feet couldn't reach anything, and they hung there in the dark, turning, with the voice coming out of them, until a Kasrai got to them.

She held forty at once, at one point. In a corridor of a broken ship in the dark past Root.

She's not young. She's younger than she was.

Then they started coming back.

I felt the first one go. Through the metal. A grey one in the third corridor, in front of a grandmother from the sea-cliff world, stopped swaying in the voice's rhythm and started swaying in hers.

I couldn't get to him. I was holding the ship.

Dory got to him.

From the red glass. On the net. Through the arch, and the corridors, and the dark. She asked his heart. And it answered.

Then the next.

Then the next.

Dory on the red glass with Halloway's hand on her wrist, counting, and her net so bright it lit the whole field, reaching through an arch into a broken ship in the dark and finding one heart at a time. Each one just under. Each one with someone old in front of them doing the thing.

Halloway says she did ninety-one in two hours. Halloway says she stopped Dory at ninety-one. She says Dory didn't want to stop and stopped anyway.

I did the rest.

Forty-nine. With my hand on their backs. In the corridors. In the dark. The Kasrai held the ship's sides for me; Andraste says that's not a thing you can do, but they did it anyway, a ring of them with their backs against the broken hull and their arms locked, and I took my hands out of the metal and went down the corridors to the ones Dory couldn't reach.

Hand on the back.

Help the heart catch it.

A hundred and forty.

We were in the ship for nine hours.

At the end of it, the voice stopped.

All at once. Like a wire cut. The ship was still broken, still turning, still in the dark past Root. And four hundred and sixty grey ones stood in the corridors, very still, with nobody in them any more but whoever was underneath.

Not called. Not anyone's.

Just standing.

Dory found it. On the net. Afterward.

The houses had let go of them.

"Why?" said Okafor. At dawn, on the red glass. With the hundred and forty coming through the arch on the arms of the old ones who'd called them. Holding hands. Crying. Pouring cups out on the glass.

"Because they were losing them," said Dory. She was sitting on the glass with Mother beside her. Very white. "One at a time. To grandmothers." She swallowed. "The houses didn't want to lose the rest. So they just let go. Of all of them. The voice went out."

"And the four hundred and sixty?"

Dory looked at the arch.

"They're still there," she said. "In the ship. Standing. Nobody in them but them." She looked at Okafor. "Not grey any more. Not anyone. Just—" She stopped. "Just under. With nothing on top."

We brought them home.

All four hundred and sixty. The Kasrai walked them through the arch one at a time, very gently, the way Varra says the Kasrai walk the old off a wall. They didn't fight. They didn't do anything. They walked where they were walked and stood where they were stood, on the red glass, in the dawn, very tall, very grey.

Swaying.

Every one of them a little differently.

Halloway went through all four hundred and sixty on the red glass that morning.

One at a time. With Tavvan beside her, on his stool, the way he sat with Ferrin's three. She listened to their hearts and looked in their eyes and wrote in her chart, and when she'd done all of them she put the chart down and sat on the glass.

"They're fine," said Halloway. "Physically. Hungry. Cold. Fine." She rubbed her eyes. "There's nobody driving."

"Can they be called?"

"If someone knows their names," said Halloway. "Or what their people do. Same as the others." She looked at them. Four hundred and sixty, standing in rows on the red glass, swaying, each a little differently. "But nobody on Avalon does. Dory checked. Konrad checked. Their grandmothers are still on stock worlds we haven't reached. Or gone in. Or gone."

Nobody said anything.

"So they wait," said Halloway.

They wait on the north field now. Beside the Standing's line. Okafor had tents put up, and Kwame dug hollows, and Maura warmed them. They eat when they're given food. They sleep when it's dark. They stand at the edge of the field in the day and sway and watch the Standing drill.

Tavvan sits with them. He says he's used to it.

Mother goes down in the mornings with the teapot. She doesn't know any of their names. She doesn't say any words to them.

She pours a cup for each one. Four hundred and sixty cups. It takes all morning; Oona helps, with the small teapot. And every one of them, when she holds it out, takes it. And holds it until it's cold.

And Mother says, to every one: "There you are, love."

Dory says it's the first thing that's made the swaying change.

Konrad has a new sheet.

Called home. At the top. And under it, a hundred and forty names, each with a grandmother's or a grandfather's beside it.

And under that, a space.

Four hundred and sixty lines. With nothing on them yet.

He says you always leave the space.

Okafor wrote it on the slate the next morning. Under GRANDMOTHERS CALL THEM HOME. Small.

140.

She looked at it for a while. Then she went to the map room and stood in front of the wall where Tiamat puts the edge of the Watch.

"Every broken ship," said Okafor. To Tiamat, through the silver. "Every one that drifts out of the fight with the voice gone faint. I want to know where it is before it's stopped turning."

"There'll be a lot," said Tiamat. "They're losing a lot of ships to the body."

"Good," said Okafor. Then: "Not good. You know what I mean."

"I know," said Tiamat. "I've already told my stations."

Okafor went back to the kitchen. And picked up the chalk. And under 140, she wrote one more word.

More.

Mother came up the hill at dawn with the teapot. Very tired. She'd been holding a corridor all night.

Oona was on the top step. In her coat. With her teapot. She hadn't moved.

She stood up when Mother came up the steps.

And held out her teapot. With something in it. Abbe hadn't been there. Nobody had.

Mother looked at it.

"Who put tea in it, love?" said Mother.

"Me," said Oona. "I lifted the big one. And poured." She held it out. "It's cold. Sorry. You were a long time."

Mother sat down on the top step.

And took the small teapot. And poured the cold tea into her own cup. And drank it. All of it.

"It's perfect," said Mother.

Oona looked at her very carefully, the way Mother looks at people when she's deciding if they mean it.

Then she sat down on the step beside her. In her coat. And put her hand on the hem of Mother's.

"Next time," said Oona, "I'll keep it warm."

"How?"

Oona thought about it.

"I'll ask Maura," she said.

Mother laughed. The first time all night. Down on the north field, where the four hundred and sixty were standing in their rows with their cold cups, one or two of them turned their heads at the sound.

Corin came out after a while. In his nightshirt, with his practice blade. He'd been awake all night too; Andraste says he checked the door in the middle of the heap every hour.

He climbed into Mother's lap.

Oona sat on the step beside them, in her coat, with her hand on the hem of Mother's.

And Mother held both of them, on the top step of the porch, in the early sun, with her eyes shut.

And Corin hummed.

Two notes. Low.

Days 5782–5890. Love.

Oona says love now, to everyone. Maura made her a coat exactly like Mother's, with a hand-wide hem. A small chipped teapot; Abbe puts a little tea in it. The step is hers; Konrad moved. She says the names a little behind, and goodnight, love; Mother says it too now. Ingrid: she's what the pictures would have been. Mother: the best thing in a long time; don't tell your sisters. Corin in her lap every evening, too big for it, still as a stone in a stream. He asked what Grandad was like. Two notes, low, when he was working. Corin hummed them. Oona woke and lifted the blanket over both of them. Thessaly: I've got the knee. The old Tallis woman asked Maura for a coat. Is he mine too? Yes. Dad. Ash made her an iron teapot with no chip. Kesh learned to lift a wet pebble from Oona. A grey ship drifting past Root, six hundred just under, the voice faint. A hundred and forty names. Holt first; Abbe after Holt. Mother held a corridor; forty at once. Dory ninety-one from the red glass; I did forty-nine. The houses let go of the rest: four hundred and sixty with nobody in them but themselves. Called home. Konrad left the space. Mother pours four hundred and sixty cups each morning: there you are, love. Okafor: 140. More. Oona lifted the big teapot and poured: it's cold, sorry, you were a long time. It's perfect.