Chapter 443 Two Notes

Her name is Tiri.

The Aldri girl whose bird Corin mended in the courtyard. She's Halvane's great-granddaughter, it turns out, and eight in their years, which Halloway says are close enough to ours. She's a head and a half taller than Corin and very thin, with the long Aldri face and the pale skin that shimmers a little, like the inside of a shell. Her hair is grey, the way all theirs is, even the children's, and cut short.

She came back the next morning.

Through Kyria's arch from Ister, on her own, before the dawn count. She walked across the red glass and up the hill and into the courtyard, where Corin was doing his blade forms with the practice sword Kyria gave him, and stood at the edge of the courtyard with the silver bird on her shoulder.

And watched.

Corin didn't stop. He doesn't stop his forms for anyone. Kyria says that's the first thing a blade learns.

But he finished them. All of them. Slowly. And then put the practice sword down against the wall, and turned round, and looked at her.

She held out the bird.

It had a crack in one wing. A small one. New.

Corin looked at it. Then at her.

"Did you break it on purpose?" said Corin.

Tiri's shimmer went very bright. All over. Dot says that's what Aldri skin does when they're caught out.

"A little," said Tiri.

He mended it anyway.

Weight on one leg. Hand on the back of his neck. A long look. Then all at once.

Humming.

Tiri watched him do it with her whole face. Then she took the bird back, very carefully, and let it go, and it flew one circle round the courtyard and came back to her shoulder. And she said something in Aldri that Dot didn't translate.

Then she sat down on the courtyard step.

Corin sat down next to her.

That was the morning they started.

That evening, after the names, Corin climbed into Mother's lap the way he does. Too big for it. Legs over the arm.

Tiri was on the bottom step, then. Before she'd worked her way up. With her bird. She watched him climb into his grandmother's lap and go still, the way he only goes still there, and she looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked at Mother.

Mother looked back at her over the top of Corin's head.

"Come up, love," said Mother. "There's room."

There wasn't, really. Not on the chair. But Tiri came up the steps, very carefully, the way the Aldri move, and sat on the floor of the porch beside the chair with her back against it and her bird on her knee. And Mother put her free hand on Tiri's short grey hair.

Tiri's shimmer went very bright.

She went home through the arch that night walking backward, waving. She's done it every night since.

They've been together every day since.

Every day. She comes through the arch before the dawn count and goes home through it after the names on the porch, when Mother's said goodnight, love and Halvane's people come to the red glass to fetch her. In between, wherever Corin is, Tiri is.

The courtyard, for his forms. Rory's workshop, where Ash showed her the drawer with her name on it, and Tiri asked very seriously how you get a drawer, and Rory made her one the next day. Father's forge, the copy at the edge of the town, where Corin goes sometimes to sit and look at the anvil. The red glass in the mornings, beside Mother and Oona and the teapots. Hyrran, once a week, through Kyria's arch, where Corin and Thessaly learn the blade on the ridge and Tiri sits on a rock with her bird and watches every stroke.

Kyria let her. Kyria doesn't let anyone watch.

"She watches properly," said Kyria. When I asked. "Most people watch the blade. She watches him." She looked at me. "The feet. The breath. The way he stands before he starts." She almost smiled. "She'll know when he's tired before he does. That's worth having beside you."

And Corin goes to Ister.

I didn't know he was going to. Nobody asked me; nobody needs to. Andraste took him through the first time, with Thessaly, on Tiri's asking, because Tiri wanted to show him the engine under the deepest city.

Andraste told me about it afterward. She said Ister under the gold sky is very quiet, and very clean, and everything in it is lit from inside. She said the Aldri walk slowly through their own streets as if they're afraid of breaking something, which, she said, after eleven years of running, they probably are.

She said the engine under the deepest city was bigger than the ridge on Hyrran. She said Corin stood at the rail above it for a very long time with Tiri beside him, looking down, with his hand on the back of his neck, the way he does.

Then he said, "It's very lonely."

Tiri looked at him.

"The engine," said Corin. "It's been on its own a long time. Nobody's asked it anything. They just tell it where to go."

Andraste says Tiri didn't say anything. She says the Aldri engineer standing behind them went very still, and then took out her little silver box and wrote something down, and then put the box away and just looked at Corin for a while.

Then Tiri took him home. To her house, in a tower near the top of the city, with a window onto the gold. Her mother was there, and her grandmother, very old, and on a shelf by the window, a lamp. Old. Older than the towers. Broken.

He came back with his eyes very wide and didn't say anything at supper. Then, after the names, on the porch, he climbed into Mother's lap and said, into her shoulder:

"Gran. They make everything with machines."

"I know, love."

"Even the small things," said Corin. "Even the things you could just ask." He was quiet. "Tiri says they've been trying to ask things for a thousand years. She says they never learned how. So they built machines instead."

"And?"

"I showed her," said Corin. "I fixed a lamp. In her house. It was broken and her mother was going to send it to a machine." He shifted in Mother's lap. "Her mother cried."

Mother put her chin on his head.

"Why do you think she cried?"

Corin thought about it for a long time.

"Because it was her grandmother's lamp," he said. "And the machine would have made it new. And I made it the same."

Tiri goes to Miss Pell's school now. The one in the middle of the town, with no walls. There are nine Aldri children in it, and a great many of everybody else, and Miss Pell says it's the best year she's had since the walkers' school started walking.

The Aldri children had never been to a school without machines in it. On Ister they learn from the air, Tiri says; the lit air in the towers tells you things if you ask it. On the first morning they sat in Miss Pell's open circle under the tree and waited for the air to start.

It didn't.

Miss Pell sat down on the grass in front of them.

"Each other," said Miss Pell. "That's the lesson. That's always the lesson."

Tiri put her hand up. Very politely. "How do you learn that without a machine?"

"You sit next to someone," said Miss Pell, "and find out what they know that you don't."

Tiri looked round the circle. Then she got up and went and sat next to Corin.

Miss Pell says that's the fastest anyone's ever understood the first lesson.

She's good with Oona. Thessaly's right about that.

Oona doesn't let many people near Mother's step. Tiri sat on the bottom step, the first week, three steps down from Oona's place, and didn't come any closer, and didn't say anything, and every day she sat one step higher. On the fourth day she was on the step below Oona's.

Oona looked at her for a long time.

Then she held out the small iron teapot. Empty.

Tiri didn't know what it was for. Nobody had told her. She took it, very carefully, and held it the way Oona holds it, in both hands, and tipped it over nothing.

Oona nodded.

That was all. But Tiri sits on the step below Oona's every evening now, at the names, and Kesh sits on the step below that, and the three of them make a sort of ladder down from Mother's place, very solemn, in a row.

The Aldri are very beautiful.

I should write that, because everyone on Avalon has noticed and nobody quite says it. They're very tall and very thin and they move slowly, the way the tall ones by the river move, and their skin shimmers in the light like the inside of a shell. The women especially. Tiri's mother, Aune, is a pilot on the nearest station, and when she comes down through the arch to fetch Tiri in the evenings, in her long grey flight robe, half the Standing's line on the north field forgets what it was doing.

Rhiannon noticed.

Rhiannon is the queen of the succubi, and she and Isolde have been called the most beautiful women in the universe for longer than anyone can remember, and Rhiannon takes it very seriously. She stood on the porch the first evening Tiri's mother came up the hill and watched her come all the way, with her arms folded.

"Well," said Rhiannon. Very quietly. To Isolde, beside her. "That's new."

"Mother," said Isolde.

"I'm only saying," said Rhiannon. "It's been a very long time since anybody walked up a hill like that who wasn't one of us."

Then she went down the steps and introduced herself, very graciously, and the two of them talked for an hour about the old Hearth and the old Ister, and by the end Rhiannon had invited her to dinner.

Isolde says that's the most frightening thing she's ever seen her mother do.

The dinner happened. In New Hearth, at the grey stone house with the silver roof. Tiri's mother came. Her name is Aune. Rhiannon cooked, which nobody knew she could do, and Tiamat sat at the end of the table very straight and asked Aune nine questions about the stations' guns, and Isolde sat with Bahamut on her knee and watched her mother and Aune talk about lamps and old worlds and children until it was dark.

At the end of it Rhiannon walked Aune to the door.

"I've been the most beautiful woman in every room I've been in for a thousand years," said Rhiannon. Quite cheerfully. "It's very restful to share."

Aune's shimmer went very bright.

Isolde says they're friends now. She says it's more frightening than the dinner.

Mother noticed something else.

She told me on the porch. Late. After the names. After Tiri's mother had come to the red glass and Tiri had gone home through the arch, walking backward for the first few steps, the way she always does, waving at the porch.

Corin was asleep in the heap. Oona was asleep on the step with her teapot.

"She's sweet on him," said Mother.

I looked at her.

"Tiri," said Mother. "Sweet on Corin." She poured herself the last of the pot. "She broke her bird on purpose the second morning so she'd have a reason to come back. She told him so. She's broken it four times since. He's mended it every time."

"They're children."

"I know they're children," said Mother. "She's eight and he's five. I'm not saying anything else. I'm saying she's sweet on him." She drank the tea. "The way children are. She saves him the end of the step. She learned the two notes."

"The two notes?"

"She hums them," said Mother. "When he's doing his forms. Under her breath. So he's got them even when he's working too hard to hum himself." She put the cup down. "Your father used to say you can tell everything about someone by what they do while you're not looking."

I hadn't heard Tiri hum. I listened, the next day, in the courtyard.

She was on the step with her bird. Corin was at his forms. And under the sound of the practice sword and the wind and Oona and Kesh somewhere making it rain, very low, very quiet:

Two notes.

Over and over.

Corin hasn't noticed. Of course he hasn't. He's five. He thinks she's his friend, and she is. She's his best one. He tells her everything. He mends her bird every time she breaks it and never once asks her why it keeps breaking.

Thessaly's noticed. Thessaly notices everything.

"She likes him," said Thessaly, to me, in the courtyard. Very matter-of-fact. Leaning against the wall with her own practice blade. "She likes him like Gran likes Grandad."

"Thessaly."

"I'm not saying it to him," said Thessaly. "He'd just be embarrassed and go and mend something." She watched them. Corin at his forms, Tiri on the step, humming. "I don't mind. She watches properly. Kyria said." She shrugged. "And she's nice to Oona."

That's the highest thing Thessaly says about anyone.

Andraste's noticed too.

She said so at the long table, very calmly, with Holdfast across the back of her chair.

"On Hyrran," said Andraste, "when a child is sweet on the First Blade's son, the grandmothers start a ribbon."

Everyone looked at her.

"Not for anything," said Andraste. "Not yet. Not for years. It's just a ribbon. A plain one. They tie a knot in it every year, until the children are old enough to decide whether it means anything." She looked at Mother. "Most of them end up meaning nothing. Friends. That's fine. That's what most of them are for."

"And the rest?"

Andraste looked at me. Then at the white ribbon on Holdfast's hilt. The second one. The first, the one I won her the night under the stars, is still on her grandmother's blade, under the ice on One.

"The rest end up on a blade," said Andraste.

Kyria started one. Of course she did.

Plain grey. Hyrrani wool. She tied the first knot in it at the long table that night, and then put it in the drawer in the kitchen where Mother keeps the string, and didn't say anything else about it.

Mother looked at the drawer for a long time.

Then she went back to the stove.

We called home three hundred and twelve more that summer.

Two broken grey ships, drifting out of the fight past the Watch with the voice gone faint in them, the way the first one was. Tiamat found them. And this time we didn't have to wait for Kyria to cut through the dark to them along Dory's net, because the Aldri have ships that cross between stars in a breath, and Halvane said they'd be honoured.

So the old went out in Aldri ships. Holt first, still. Abbe after Holt. A hundred and sixty old ones to the first broken ship, and a hundred and fifty-two to the second, with Konrad's sheets and the thing their people do. And Dory on the net from the red glass, and me in the hull, and Mother in the corridors, holding.

Three hundred and twelve came home.

The houses let go of the rest again, both times. Nine hundred and forty more, standing on the north field now with the four hundred and sixty, swaying, with nobody in them but themselves. Mother and Oona pour for all of them every morning. Fourteen hundred cups. Tiri helps now, and Kesh, and half the old ones from the waiting step. It takes until nearly noon.

Okafor rubbed out 140 on the slate.

She wrote 452.

Then, under More, very small: Faster.

That was the summer. Mostly.

I'm writing it first because Mother says the summer always goes first, and the rest is just weather.

The weather came at the end of it.

The body came looking for Ister.

Not all of it. Tiamat says the body doesn't do anything all at once, except eat. But a piece of it. An arm. The way an arm came for Hearth. It came out from where the body had been round Ister's old star, where it had been closing its hand on an egg and found the egg gone.

It came very slowly. Searching. Tiamat watched it on the wall for nine days, turning, tasting the dark, the way a blind thing feels for something it's dropped.

On the tenth day it turned toward Avalon's sun.

"It can't have followed the line," said Halvane. At the long table. Very still. "Nothing can follow the line."

"It didn't," said Tiamat. "It's not following anything. It's looking." She was quiet. "It knows Ister's somewhere. It's looking everywhere. And our sun's bright, and there's a billion people round it, and they all have silver in them, and that's what it eats."

Nobody said anything.

"It'll find us," said Tiamat. "Not because of Ister. Because of us. It would have found us anyway, one day."

Okafor stood up.

"Then it finds us ready," she said.

Six days.

Halvane brought the stations round from Ister's side of the sun, three of them, slowly, so they'd be between the arm and Avalon when it came. Risa took the wing up every morning with the Aldri fighters and came down every night with her hair on end. Varra chose her forty and they went up in the silver ships screaming the wall-song on the first day, just to see if they could, and Varra stood on the north field with her arms folded and pretended she hadn't heard.

The hollows were made ready on every world in the Hedge. Kwame dug more. Maura warmed them. The grandmothers carried blankets down.

Tiri came every day, the same as before. Corin did his forms in the courtyard. She sat on the step and hummed.

On the fifth night, Aune came up the hill to fetch her, in her flight robe, and stood at the bottom of the steps, and didn't say anything for a while.

Then she said, to Mother, very quietly: "I'm at the front. Tomorrow. Or the day after."

Mother looked at her.

"I know, love," said Mother.

"If I don't—" said Aune.

"You will," said Mother. "And if you don't, she's got a step here. For as long as she wants it."

Aune looked at her for a long time. Then she took Tiri home.

I'll put it short, because it was short. That's the thing I want written.

The arm came into Avalon's sky on the sixteenth day.

Far out. Past the outermost world in our sun's path, where nothing lives. Tiamat's stations saw it first, and then Ilka's ears, and then the queens felt it, all of them at once, and the whole of Avalon went quiet the way it does: every grandmother and child to the hollows, every smith to an arch, every end room shut with somebody on the step inside it.

And the Standing went up.

Not on foot. Not this time.

In Aldri fighters. Four hundred of them, silver and sharp, off the north field without a sound, with the Standing's pilots in them. Risa's wing beside them in the interceptors. Tiri's mother at the front of the Aldri, in her long grey flight robe, with Risa on her left.

And above all of it, coming round from the far side of the sun where Ister goes, the Aldri stations.

Three of them. Very big. Silver. Turning.

Crane had them all on his board.

I didn't know he would. The board is for trains. But he'd come down to the north field the night before, with his spanner, and asked Okafor, very formally, whether anyone was keeping track of who went up and when they were meant to come back.

Okafor looked at him for a long time.

"Nobody's ever kept a board for a fight, Hal."

"No, ma'am," said Crane. "That's why so many of them don't come back."

So there were four hundred and twenty-two small markers on a new board in his room at the red glass end of the line, that morning, all moved out. Holt sat on the stool by the window with him and didn't say anything at all.

The arm came on.

It filled the sky past the outermost world. Brown and black and moving, a mile across, then a hundred, then more. Ilka says the sound of it on her ears was like every insect on every world at once, the way it was on Caddoc.

The stations fired.

I didn't see it. I was in the ground, on Avalon, holding everything, the way I do. But Dory saw it. She was on the red glass with her net out, and Halloway at her wrist, and Mother beside her, and Oona.

She says the first station fired once.

One light. White, very thin, from the station to the arm. Not long. Not like her lightning on Caddoc, staying and sweeping. One light, and then it was gone.

And where it had gone through the arm, there was nothing.

Not salt. Not fire. Nothing. A clean hole through the middle of the arm, as wide as a world, and the arm on either side of it turning and turning, as if it didn't know which half it was.

Then the second station fired.

Then the third.

The Standing went into the halves.

The Aldri fighters and Risa's wing. Risa's lightning. Tiri's mother at the front, very fast, very low. Rowan flying, Callum calling the turns. Forty of Varra's Kasrai in Aldri fighters, screaming the Kasrai wall-song the whole way down, Andraste says, which nobody had told them they could do in a fighter and which apparently works.

Risa told me afterward what it was like, up there. She doesn't usually. She says the sky's hers, and what happens in it is between her and the sky.

She told me this one.

She said the Aldri fighters don't fly like anything she's ever flown with. She said they don't turn; they stop, and then go somewhere else. She said Aune flew at the front of them like someone who'd been doing it for a hundred years, which she has, nearly; Aldri live a long time. She said the first time Risa's lightning came down into the halves of the arm, Aune's fighter was already out of the way of it, a heartbeat before, as if she'd known exactly where Risa was going to put it.

"Like Saska," said Risa. "Like the half-step. Except it's the machine. The machine knows where the lightning's going."

"Does that frighten you?"

Risa thought about it.

"No," she said. "It means I can put it anywhere. And nobody of ours is ever going to be under it."

It took four hours.

Wren counted them back.

Every fighter. Every interceptor. Every pilot, through the silver, as they came down onto the north field, one at a time, in the dusk.

"Four hundred and nine," said Wren. "Of four hundred and twenty-two."

Thirteen.

Nine from the Standing. Two of Varra's. Two of the Aldri pilots.

Not Tiri's mother.

That's the first time anything's come into Avalon's sky and gone again.

I want to write that. Not just Avalon. Every world in the Hedge, every world we've ever stood on, the Hungry have come and we've held, or we haven't, or we've been late. This time the arm came into our sky, and the stations fired, and four hundred and twenty-two of ours went up to meet it. And it was gone.

Thirteen.

Varra tied two knots on the north field at dusk, with her teeth. Okafor stood beside her. Halvane stood on her other side, very tall, and said the names of his two, in Aldri, very quietly.

And then he did something I didn't expect.

He took a cup out of his robe. One of Mother's. She'd given it to him on the red glass, the first day.

He poured it out on the grass. All of it.

Corin and Tiri watched it all from the porch.

They weren't meant to. They were meant to be in the hollows with the other children. But Tiri's mother was at the front of the Aldri fighters, and Tiri wouldn't go down, and Corin said if Tiri wasn't going down he wasn't either, and Mother looked at the two of them in the doorway of the hollow under the house and let them come up.

She stood on the porch with them for four hours. With Oona holding her coat, and Kesh's cloud raining very gently on all of them.

Tiri didn't cry. She watched the sky. With her bird on her shoulder and her shimmer gone very dim, the way it goes when an Aldri is frightened.

Corin sat on the step beside her.

He didn't say anything. He's five. He doesn't know what to say to someone whose mother is in the sky.

He hummed.

Two notes. Low. Over and over. For four hours.

Mother told me afterward. She said about the second hour Tiri started humming with him.

She said about the third hour Tiri put her hand out on the step between them, not looking at him, and Corin put his hand on hers, not looking at her either.

She said that's how they stayed. Until Wren said four hundred and nine, and Tiri's mother's name came down through the silver, and Tiri's shimmer came back all at once, so bright it lit the porch.

Crane moved four hundred and nine markers back on his board, one at a time, as Wren said them.

He didn't move the other thirteen. He left them where they were. Out. On the board, at the edge, where the sky is.

Holt asked him, very quietly, if he was going to take them down.

"No, sir," said Crane. "You told me what a timetable's for. So you know when they're meant to come back." He looked at the thirteen. "They're meant to. They just haven't."

He's left them there. They're still on the board.

Dory held the red glass the whole four hours. Not an arch; there wasn't one. The net. Out, through the sky, to every one of the four hundred and twenty-two, so that if any of them went down she'd know at once, and know where, and the Aldri could go and get them.

She found three that way. Out in the dark past the outermost world. Their fighters broken, their air going. Dory said there and Tiamat's people went, and brought them back.

She says she felt the thirteen go. One at a time. Like lamps going out at the far end of a street.

She didn't stop holding the rest.

Tiri's mother came up the hill in the dark.

Still in her flight robe. Very tired. She came up the steps and Tiri went into her arms so hard they both nearly went over.

Then Tiri's mother looked over Tiri's head at Corin. Still on the step. Still humming, very quietly, because he'd forgotten to stop.

She didn't say anything to him. Not then.

She looked at Mother.

Mother looked back.

And something went between them that I didn't understand and Mother wouldn't explain afterward. Just a look. Two women on a porch, one very old and one very tall, over the heads of two children.

Aune came up the hill again the next evening. Not to fetch Tiri. To see Mother.

They sat on the porch, the two of them, in the last of the light. Mother on her step. Aune on the bench, very tall, folded up like a heron, in her flight robe. Oona on Mother's other side with her teapot. I was in the kitchen. Everyone hears everything.

"She talked about him the whole time I was up there," said Aune. "In my head. On the silver. Every hour. He's humming, Mother. He's still humming." She smiled. "Four hours."

"He's a good boy," said Mother.

"On Ister," said Aune, "when a girl talks about a boy like that, the grandmothers say: the shimmer's chosen." She looked at her hands. "They say it as a joke. Mostly."

Mother didn't say anything for a while.

"On Avalon," she said, "we say: they're children. Let them be." She poured Aune a cup. "They'll find out what it is in their own time. Friends, probably. That's what it mostly is." She held it out. "And if it's ever something else, they'll be the ones who decide. Not us."

Aune took the cup.

She looked at it. She'd seen. She tipped it out on the boards, very slowly, for the thirteen.

Then Mother poured the second.

"Hyrran ties a ribbon," said Mother. "Did you know? One knot a year. It doesn't mean anything. It just keeps count."

Aune laughed. Her shimmer came up, very bright, in the dusk.

"Then let it keep count," she said.

Halvane came up later. When Aune had taken Tiri home. He stood at the bottom of the porch steps, very tall, the way he stands, and looked at me on the rail.

"Two of mine," he said. "Thirteen of yours."

"Yes."

"On Ister we would have lost a station," said Halvane. "Fighting an arm that size alone. Nine thousand, like before. Or more." He looked up at the sky. At the lamp, low in the east. "We were always alone. We built everything so we would not need anyone." He was quiet. "It was not enough. It was never going to be enough."

He took out the cup Mother gave him. And looked at it.

"Today was enough," said Halvane.

Kyria tied the second knot in the ribbon that night.

She didn't say why. It wasn't a year.

Mother didn't ask.

In the morning, Tiri came through the arch before the dawn count, the same as always. With her bird on her shoulder.

It had a crack in one wing.

Corin was in the courtyard doing his forms. He finished them. All of them. Slowly. Then he put the practice sword against the wall and turned round and held out his hand for the bird, without saying anything, and mended it, humming.

He still hasn't asked her why it keeps breaking.

Thessaly, on the wall above them, rolled her eyes so hard I heard it from the kitchen. Mother, at the stove, didn't turn round. But she was smiling.

Days 5964–6071. Two Notes.

Tiri: Halvane's great-granddaughter, eight, a head and a half taller than Corin. She broke her bird on purpose the second morning so she'd have a reason to come back; he mended it; she's broken it four times since. Inseparable: the courtyard, Rory's workshop, the forge, the ridge on Hyrran, where Kyria lets her watch because she watches properly. Corin mended Tiri's great-grandmother's lamp on Ister and her mother cried, because the machine would have made it new. The Aldri are very beautiful; Rhiannon: that's new; she invited Tiri's mother to dinner. Mother: she's sweet on him. She learned the two notes. Thessaly: like Gran likes Grandad. Andraste: on Hyrran the grandmothers start a ribbon. Tiri sits on the step below Oona's; Oona gave her the teapot. Rhiannon: it's very restful to share. Three hundred and twelve more called home; Okafor wrote Faster. Kyria tied the first knot. The arm came looking for Ister and found Avalon ready: three stations, one shot each; four hundred and twenty-two went up in Aldri fighters and interceptors; four hours; thirteen didn't come back; Crane left their markers out. Halvane poured out the first cup. Corin hummed on the porch for four hours and Tiri hummed with him and they held hands on the step without looking. Aune: the shimmer's chosen. Mother: they're children, let them be; if it's ever something else, they'll decide. Halvane: today was enough. Kyria tied the second knot. It wasn't a year.