Chapter 450 What I'm Becoming

I keep thinking about how easy it was.

That's the thing I haven't been able to write. I've written the rest. The dying world. Lio's hands out flat, her nose and ears bleeding. Dory on her knees holding a planet's heart. Hana breathing my name up to me. Mother saying yes, love.

But not the easy part.

Nine grey ships, very high, over a world full of the Hungry. They'd watched a child break herself to pieces for them, and none of them came down. And I went up through the brown sky, and touched the first one, and it was sand.

All of it. At once. Without asking.

The second, I didn't bother with sand. I made it a sun.

The other seven turned to run, and Andraste says I didn't let them. I don't remember. I remember that it was easy. That they came apart under my hands the way wet paper comes apart. That there was no weight to it. That I didn't feel it in my nose or my hands or my chest. That it took less out of me than mending Tiri's bird takes out of Corin.

And then everything Hungry for a mile went white.

Andraste says it didn't go to salt. Didn't go to light. She says it was as if I'd asked every atom of it to forget it had ever been put together. Except I didn't ask.

And it was easy.

I sat on the porch steps the night after Lio woke and looked at my hands.

Hana sat beside me. She doesn't ask. She waits.

"It should have been hard," I said.

Hana didn't say anything.

"On Ostry I held the ground under twelve hills and it was hard. I felt it all day. On Tiel's moon, against her, holding one ship together, my nose bled." I turned my hands over. "And then on that world I took nine ships apart and a mile of the new ones, all at once, without thinking, and it was nothing. Like breathing out."

"You were angry," said Hana.

"I've been angry before."

"Not like that."

"No," I said. "But it shouldn't have been easy. Not that much. Not that fast." I looked at her. "Something's different."

Hana looked at my face for a long time. The way she does every evening.

"I know," she said. "I've been watching it for a year."

The queen called me the next morning.

The Scarecrow queen. Ours. The one at the garden wall, who came up out of the ground on the first morning with her young and has never gone far from us since. Who I told once, a long time ago, that I think of as my mother the way I think of Mother. She doesn't call me often. She doesn't need to; she hears everything, through the silver, under the house.

She called me down.

Come to the hollow, child, she said. Through the ground. At dawn, before the count. Come down. All the way. I want to look at you.

The hollow's under the garden. Under the wall, under the trees, where the ground goes down into the rock in a long slow slope, and opens out into the place she lives with her young. Very warm. Very dark, except where the light comes down in shafts through the roots. Her young everywhere, on every ledge, humming.

I went down on my own. Mother wanted to come; I asked her not to. Hana wanted to come; I asked her to wait at the top.

Dory came anyway.

She didn't ask. She was at the bottom of the slope when I got there, sitting on a ledge with Pebble beside her, in Dusk, waiting.

"She called me too," said Dory.

The queen was in the middle of the hollow. In the biggest shaft of light, the way she always is. Pale and vast and folded in on herself, her head on the stones, her plates rising and falling very slowly.

She lifted her head when I came in.

Closer, she said.

I went closer.

Closer, she said.

I stood in front of her. Close enough to touch.

Put your hand on me, said the queen. And keep it there. And let me look.

I put my hand on her.

On the plate at the side of her head, where I've put it a thousand times, where it's warm and very old and very smooth.

And she looked.

Not like Dory looks, with the net, from outside. Not like Halloway with her charts. Not like the hand over the middle reading Dory like a chart, every line.

Like a mother. Like Mother, when I was small and came in with a fever, putting her hand on my forehead and her other hand on my chest and just being still, and knowing.

She looked at all of it. Every atom.

It took a long time.

Then she called the others.

I felt her do it. Out through the silver, very far. Not to the queens of Avalon; they were already listening, all of them, every one under every city, the way they always are. Further.

To the old one. Avalon's own. The queen under everything, under the plains and the mountains and the seas, so big and so slow that I've only heard her speak a few times in my life. The one who made my lifting as strong as Mother's, a long time ago.

And to Root.

To the eldest. The first one. Who was there before anything.

They looked at me together. All three.

I stood in the hollow with my hand on the Scarecrow queen and felt three queens look at me. The one I call Mother, and the one under the whole of the world, and the one who woke before there was anything to wake to.

Dory came and stood beside me. And put her hand on the queen too.

They looked at her as well.

Yes, said the eldest. Very far away. Very slow. I see it.

What? I said.

You are changing, said the eldest.

I'll try to write what they said. It took most of the morning. The three of them, talking to each other through me, slowly, the way queens talk, and sometimes to me, and sometimes to Dory. I didn't understand all of it. Genny came down halfway through, because she understood that something was being said she'd want to hear, and sat on a ledge with her notebook, and wrote. I've read her notebook since.

This is what they said.

Your body is building itself, said the Scarecrow queen. All the time. It has been since you were small. Since your silver was finished.

Building what?

Better, said the old one, under everything. Very deep. Very slow. It looks at what is near it. And when something near it does a thing better than it can, it changes. To match.

I didn't say anything.

The Hyrrani skin, said the Scarecrow queen. You have stood beside them in every fight for years. Their skin turns a blade. Yours did not, once. A pause. Yours does now.

The Aldri eyes, said the old one. They see further in the dark than anything on this world. You have stood beside them for a year.

The Tallis, said the Scarecrow queen. The Kasrai. The walkers, who never tire. The ones who hold the rain. She shifted, very slightly, under my hand. Every people you have stood beside. Every one that did something better than you could. Your body looked. And learned. And changed itself.

That's why, said Dory. Very quietly. Beside me. That's why he always gets stronger.

Yes, said the eldest.

And me?

The eldest was quiet for a long time.

You too, she said. All of his. All of them that were made from him. You are doing it more slowly. You are young. But you are doing it.

Dory took her hand off the queen.

Then she put it back.

When does it stop? I said.

None of them answered straight away.

Then the old one said, very slowly, from under the whole of Avalon:

We do not think it does.

Halloway asked to scan me.

That afternoon. When I came up out of the hollow and told Mother, at the long table, with everyone there, because everyone's always there, and Genny read out her notebook.

Halloway didn't say anything until Genny had finished. Then she put her cup down.

"The ring," she said. "Today. Now. Before you go and do anything else to yourself."

"I'm not doing it to myself."

"I know you're not," said Halloway. "That's what frightens me."

The ring's the scanner I made her, a long time ago. In the long ward. A circle of grey and silver as tall as a man, that she can put someone inside and see all the way through. She's used it on Ione, and Ithel, and Lio, and every child that ever came out of a box or a line. She used it on Dory the week after she was born.

She'd never used it on me.

I don't know why. I never asked. I think she was afraid of what she'd see.

I stood in it.

The Aldri doctor stood beside Halloway with her little silver box, because Halloway asked her to, and because the Aldri box can see some things the ring can't. Mother stood at the end of the ward with Oona holding her coat. Hana stood beside the ring with her hand on its edge.

The ring hummed.

It took a long time.

Halloway didn't say anything when it was finished.

She looked at the screen. Then she looked at the Aldri doctor's box. Then she looked at the screen again.

Then she took her glasses off, which she never does, and rubbed her eyes, and put them back on.

"Sit down, Lucas," said Halloway.

I sat down.

On the end of a bed in the long ward. With Hana beside me. And Mother came down the ward with Oona and sat on the bed opposite, and Dory came in, and Okafor, who'd heard, and stood at the end of the bed with her arms folded.

Halloway sat down on a stool in front of me. With the chart.

"I'll tell you what it says," said Halloway. "And then I'll tell you what I think."

This is what it said.

"Your skin," said Halloway. "It's not skin. Not human skin. It looks like it. It feels like it, to touch. But it's—" She looked at the Aldri doctor.

"Layered," said the Aldri doctor. Through Dot. "Like Hyrrani skin. And something else under it. Like the plates of a queen, very fine." She looked at her box. "I don't think a Hyrrani blade would go through it. I don't think one of our weapons would."

Halloway nodded.

"Your muscles," said Halloway. "Your bones. They're denser than they should be. Much. You weigh a third more than you did when I first examined you, and you haven't put on an ounce you can see." She turned a page. "Your heart's slower. Much slower. And stronger. I've never seen a heart like it."

"The Kasrai," said the Aldri doctor. "Their hearts."

"Your eyes," said Halloway. "We knew about your eyes. Since the cadet field. But there's more now. The back of them. The Aldri say it's like theirs. You'll be able to see in the dark nearly as well as you see in the day. You may already."

I didn't say anything. I'd noticed. I'd thought it was Dusk.

"Your ears," said Halloway. "Your nose. Everything." She put the chart down. "All of it's sharper. All of it's better than it was. All of it's better than anything human I've ever measured."

"How much?" said Okafor. From the end of the bed.

Halloway didn't answer straight away.

Then she said: "If you put him in front of a doctor on Earth, Maris. Before. With no name and no history." She looked at me. "And asked them what he was."

She swallowed.

"They wouldn't say human," said Halloway. "Not most of him. Not any more."

Nobody said anything.

Mother didn't move. Oona held her coat.

Hana put her hand on my back.

"And the flying," said the Aldri doctor. Very quietly. Because nobody else was saying anything. "His body moves the air differently now. Even standing still. The box can see it." She looked at me. "I think he could fly faster than our fighters, if he wanted to. I don't think he's tried."

I hadn't.

I did, the next morning. Off the north field, at dawn, straight up. Risa came with me as far as she could.

She couldn't keep up.

She's never not been able to keep up. She came down and stood on the north field with her hair on end and looked at me coming down after her, and didn't say anything for a long time, and then she went inside and didn't come out until supper.

At supper she sat down next to me at the long table. And put her hand on my arm. And left it there through the whole meal.

That night, on the roof, where she sits with her arms folded and her storm, she said it.

"I've always been the fast one," said Risa. "Since I was smaller than Kesh. The sky was mine. Nobody could follow." She was looking at the stars. "And you went up past me this morning like I was standing still."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," said Risa. "I'm not upset you're faster." She turned her head and looked at me. "I'm upset you didn't come back down for a long time. You went up so far I couldn't see you. And for a minute I thought—"

She stopped.

"I came back," I said.

"I know," said Risa. "Just don't go anywhere I can't see you without telling me first. That's all." She looked back at the sky. "That's the rule for Dory. It's the rule for you too now."

The others took it the way they take everything. Each of them their own way.

Luna went to the library under the long ward and came back with every book Earth ever had on what a human body is supposed to be, and sat with Halloway's chart beside them for three nights, and on the fourth night she closed the last one and came and found me on the porch and sat down and didn't say anything at all. She just held my hand. For an hour. With her cold fingers.

Sera got very warm, the way she does when she's frightened, and then very cross with herself for being frightened, and then made the whole house so warm that Mother had to open every window in the middle of winter.

Andraste looked at the line on Halloway's chart about my skin for a long time. Then she drew Holdfast and held it out to me, hilt first.

"Try," she said.

"Andraste."

"I want to know," said Andraste. "A First Blade should know what her husband can take."

I didn't try. She put Holdfast away. But she looked very pleased with something all evening, and Kyria says that on Hyrran, a husband whose skin turns a blade is considered a very good match indeed.

Hana didn't say anything.

She's been watching for a year. She already knew.

Halloway put Dory in the ring the next day.

Dory asked her to. She came down to the long ward at dawn in Dusk, with Lio holding her hand, and stood in front of Halloway's desk and said: "Me too."

Halloway looked at her for a long time. Then she stood up.

It took less time. Halloway said less on the chart. But the Aldri doctor looked at her box for a long time afterward, and then at Dory, and then put the box away.

"Your skin's starting," said Halloway. "Just. In places. The backs of your hands. Your shoulders." She turned a page. "Your heart's slower than it was last year. Your eyes, we know." She looked at Dory over her glasses. "It's what the queens said. The same as him. Slower."

Dory didn't say anything.

She looked at the back of her hand for a long time. Then she took Dusk off and looked at it again, the way only she and I can look, all the way down.

"It's Hyrrani," she said. "Some of it. And some of it's—" She frowned. "I don't know. Something I've never stood beside."

"Caddoc," said Halloway. "You stood on the rim for an hour with the Hungry coming at you."

Dory went very still.

"No," said the Aldri doctor. Quickly. "Not theirs. I checked that first." She looked at her box. "It's something that doesn't break. Something very old. I don't know what."

Dory looked at her hand.

"Gran," she said. Very quietly. "It's Gran's step. I've been sitting on it."

Nobody laughed. I don't think she meant it as a joke. I think she meant the house on the rise, and the porch, and the stone under all of it that I asked up out of the ground a long time ago, that the queens sing to every night.

I don't know if she's right. Neither does Halloway.

Halloway wrote it down anyway.

That night I went back down to the hollow.

On my own this time. Dory didn't come. Hana waited at the top. Mother made me a cup of tea and put it in my hands at the door and said, drink it, love, whatever she says, and I took it down with me and drank it in the dark with the queen's young humming round me.

The Scarecrow queen lifted her head.

You are frightened, she said.

"Yes."

Of what?

I thought about it.

"Of what I'm becoming," I said. "Halloway says I'm not human any more. Not most of me. And it's not stopping. And on that world I took nine ships apart and it was easy." I put the cup down on the stones. "I don't know what I am."

The queen was quiet for a long time.

Then the eldest spoke. From Root. Very far.

You are becoming one of us, said the eldest.

I didn't understand.

A queen, said the eldest. Not in shape. Not in size. In what you are. A pause. We are not only what we are born. We are everything we have ever sung to. Every world. Every people. We take a little of each into ourselves, and we keep it, and we give it back. That is what a queen is.

Your body is doing that, said the Scarecrow queen. It has been since you were small. You stand beside a people and it takes the best of them into itself and keeps it.

And gives it back, said the old one. Very deep. Every time you mend. Every time you build. You give it back.

"But I'm not a queen," I said. "I'm a man. I've got a mother. I've got wives. I've got children."

So have I, said the Scarecrow queen.

I didn't say anything.

A queen is the one who holds, said the eldest. That is all. The one under everything, holding it up. You have done that your whole life. You did it on Ostry. You did it under Tiel's sky. You did it on your knees on a dying world, with your daughter.

A pause.

The easy part frightens you, said the eldest. It should. When a queen is angry, worlds end. I ended many, once. A long time ago. Before I learned.

What did you learn?

That being able to end something is not a reason to, said the eldest. You know that already. You came down. When the girl breathed your name, you came down.

I sat in the dark for a long time.

"Will Dory?" I said. "The others? Corin, Thessaly, all of them?"

Yes, said the Scarecrow queen. More slowly. But yes.

"And Lio?"

Lio is not yours by blood, said the old one. But her silver was finished the way yours is. We do not know. We will watch.

Then the Scarecrow queen said something else. Something I'd never heard any queen say. And Genny, when I told her the next morning, sat down very suddenly at the long table and wrote it down so fast her pen tore the page.

Every gift, said the queen, is ours.

I didn't understand.

The silver in all of you, said the queen. In every person on every world who has it. It gives each of you something. Lifting. Fire. Ice. The storm. The rain. The weight. The hush. A pause. You have always wondered where they come from. Why one child gets fire and another the storm.

They come from us, said the eldest.

Every gift a person's silver gives them, said the Scarecrow queen, is something a queen can do. Somewhere. On some world. The queen of that world's silver.

Your mother lifts, said the old one. Because her silver came from a queen who lifts. A small one, very far away, who holds a whole world of floating stone up over a sea of fire, and has for longer than your people have had fire.

The Tallis, I said. They lift like her.

Their silver grew from hers, said the Scarecrow queen. A long time ago. A seed, carried on the wind between worlds. They never had a queen of their own. They had her, very far off, and did not know.

They went through all of them. Genny wrote every one.

The storm, Ingrid's and Risa's and Kesh's: a queen on a world of wind, who sings in thunder. The ice, Luna's: a queen in a world of ice so deep she's never seen her own sky. The fire, Sera's: a queen in the heart of a world so close to its sun that the rock runs like water. The weight, Okafor's: the same thing the heavy queen does, our own, who drove the Ground under the black on Earth and holds it up as if it weighs nothing. The rain, Hana's and Suri's: the rain queen.

The hush.

Ingrid's, I said.

A queen who is very old, said the eldest. Older than nearly all of them. Who learned, long ago, that before you strike, you make everything still. So you strike only what you mean to.

Genny asked about the rest. Later, when I told her. She went down to the hollow herself the next night with her notebook, and sat on a ledge, and asked the Scarecrow queen every gift she could think of, one at a time. She came up at dawn with the notebook full.

Saska's half-step: a queen on a world where everything falls, all the time, who sees a heartbeat ahead where every stone will land, so her young are never under it.

Brock's iron: a queen who grew in the iron at the heart of a world, and became it, and nothing has ever been able to move her.

Hana's breath, the little things, hydrogen and oxygen: the rain queen's grandmother, who made the first air on a world that had none.

Dory's net: the eldest's own. The first one, who has listened to every one of her children at once since before there were days.

Thessaly, holding doors open. Corin, making them. Elin and Goldie, who make them with him: the Scarecrow queen didn't answer that one for a long time. Then she said there was a queen who stood between two worlds once, a very long time ago, and held the way open while her young went through, and never closed it, and isn't there any more.

Genny wrote that one down very carefully.

Then she closed the notebook and sat on the ledge in the hollow with her hand on her middle, very still. She hasn't told anyone yet. I don't think she knows I noticed. She'll tell Mother first, the way she should.

"And mine?" I said. "The atoms. All of it."

The queens were quiet for a long time.

Yours is ours, said the Scarecrow queen. All of ours.

Every queen can ask the ground, said the eldest. That is the first thing a queen learns. Before singing. Before anything. To ask the world she is in to be what it would like to be.

A pause.

You were given that, said the eldest. The first gift. The one every queen has. And your body has been taking the rest, one people at a time, ever since.

That is why we did not know what you were turning into, said the Scarecrow queen. For so long. We had never seen it before.

Now we know, said the eldest.

I came up out of the hollow at midnight.

Hana was at the top of the slope. Mother was behind her with the teapot, and Oona asleep against Mother's legs, and Dory at the garden wall in Dusk, and the queen's head coming up over the stones behind me.

I didn't say anything.

I sat down on Mother's step. Which she let me. And Mother sat on the one below me, the way she did for Dory once, and poured.

"Well?" said Mother.

"They say I'm becoming a queen," I said.

Mother looked at me for a long time.

Then she looked at the queen's head over the garden wall. And at Oona asleep against her legs. And at the house on the rise behind us, and the porch, and the long table through the window, and the heap, and every child in it.

"Well, love," said Mother. "You've been holding everything up since you were four." She handed me the cup. "About time someone noticed."

Mother didn't go in. She sat on the step below me for a long time after the cup was empty.

"Halloway says you've stopped wearing out," she said. In the end. "She said it to me years ago. About me. And Ingrid. And everyone here who's old." She looked at her hands. "You're not just not wearing out. You're getting more."

"Yes."

Mother was quiet.

"You'll be here a long time, love," she said. "Longer than me."

I didn't say anything. I'd thought it. In the hollow, in the dark, with the cup. I hadn't let myself finish thinking it.

"That's all right," said Mother. Very firmly. "That's how it's meant to go. Children are meant to be here after." She put her hand on my knee. "Just you remember to say the names. Every night. Your father's first. And mine, when it's time. And everyone's."

"Mother."

"I'm not going anywhere for a long while," said Mother. "Halloway's very pleased with my knees." She stood up. And put her hand on my head, the way she did when I was small. "But a queen ought to know whose names she's saying. That's all. Goodnight, love."

She went in.

Oona, asleep on the step, didn't wake. I picked her up and carried her in to the heap.

Corin asked the next morning.

At breakfast. In front of everyone. With his hand on the back of his neck, the way he does.

"Am I going to be a queen?"

Everyone stopped eating.

I looked at him. Seven, looking eleven, with Father's face, with his practice sword across his knees.

"The queens think so," I said. "One day. A long way off."

Corin thought about it for a long time.

"Will I still have to do my forms?"

Kyria, at the end of the table, said: "Yes."

Corin nodded. As if that settled it. And went back to his porridge.

Tiri, beside him, shimmered.

Kesh asked after him. With her cloud for a hat.

"Can queens make it rain?"

"Some of them," I said.

"Then I already am one," said Kesh. And made it rain on the porridge.

Lio didn't ask anything.

She sat at the long table with her warm pebble in her hands and looked at me for a long time. Then she looked at Dory. Then at the wall behind the stove, at Grandad's squares, at the knot she drew in the last one.

Then she got down and went out to the garden wall, to the Scarecrow queen. And stood in front of her head with her hand out flat. The way Oona did, the first morning.

The queen made the sound she only makes at her own young.

Lio stood there a long time. Then she came back in and sat down and ate her breakfast and didn't say anything about it.

Dory says she asked the queen if she'd be one too. Dory says the queen said we will watch. Dory says Lio said that was all right, she'd watch too.

Halvane came up the hill on the third evening.

He'd heard. All the Aldri had. He stood at the bottom of the porch steps, very tall, very still, the way they stand for important things, and looked up at me for a long time.

"We have a word," said Halvane. "In our oldest books. For a thing that changes itself to be better than what it was, every time it sees something better. And never stops."

"What is it?"

Halvane thought about it.

"It doesn't translate," he said. "The nearest is: garden." He almost smiled. "We spent eleven thousand years building machines to make ourselves better. And you're just growing."

Okafor wrote one line on the slate.

Under They have one. Under She has a grandmother. Under Love, still, in Mother's hand.

So do we.

Ingrid came out to the porch the night Genny read the list at the long table. She'd been very quiet all evening, with the silver-grey ribbon on her wrist and Konrad beside her.

She sat down on the step beside me.

"A very old queen," said Ingrid. "Who makes everything still before she strikes. So she strikes only what she means to." She looked at her hands. "That's what Genny said the queen said. About the Hush."

"Yes."

"I didn't know it was for that," said Ingrid. Very quietly. "All those years. The ford. The war. I thought the stillness was just what came before. The bit you had to get through to get to the lightning." She turned the ribbon round her wrist. "I didn't know it was the point."

She didn't say anything else for a long time.

Then she got up and went back in to Konrad. And Mother told me in the morning that Ingrid had sat at the long table till dawn with Genny's notebook open at that page, reading it over and over, with her hand flat on the wood.

Not hushing anything. Just still.

Days 6800–6833. What I'm Becoming.

It was easy, on that world. Nine ships, and a mile of the new ones, and no weight at all. Hana: I've been watching it for a year. The Scarecrow queen called me down to the hollow and put her hand on everything, the way Mother does with a fever. She called the old one under Avalon, and the eldest on Root. My body has been building itself since my silver was finished; whenever a people beside me does something better, it changes to match. Hyrrani skin. Aldri eyes. Kasrai hearts. The old one: we do not think it stops. Dory too; all of them, more slowly. Halloway put me in the ring: they wouldn't say human, Maris, not most of him, not any more. I flew off the north field and Risa couldn't keep up. The eldest: you are becoming one of us; a queen is the one who holds; being able to end something is not a reason to. Every gift is ours: Mother's lift from a queen who holds stone over fire, the storm from a queen of wind, the hush from a very old queen who makes everything still before she strikes. Mine is the first gift, the one every queen has: to ask the ground; and the rest one people at a time. Dory in the ring: it's starting, more slowly. Risa: that's the rule for you too now. Corin: will I still have to do my forms? Kyria: yes. Halvane: the nearest word is garden. Okafor: So do we. Mother: you've been holding everything up since you were four. About time someone noticed.