Chapter 467 The Assize

Halvane didn’t come alone.

He came up the hill at dawn on the thirtieth day, before the names, in his robe, very tall. And behind him, through the arch from Ister, onto the red glass, came three more Aldri I’d never seen.

Two women and a man. Very old, all of them, the way Halvane’s old: in the eyes and nowhere else. In long dark grey robes with nothing on them, the way the Prime’s coat had nothing on it. Each of them carrying a case. Plain. Grey. Very heavy, by the way they carried them.

“You said nobody protects him,” said Andraste. At the top of the porch steps. With Holdfast on its hook behind her by the door, where it had to stay.

“I said nobody with a weapon,” said Halvane. “These are worse.”

I’ll write who they were. Because they’d want it right, and because Imre Oshan got it right in her book, and I don’t want mine to be the one with mistakes in it.

Senna Thale. The eldest. Four hundred and something; she wouldn’t say. Very thin. Very still. With white in her grey hair and a voice so dry Mother said afterward you could have struck a match on it. She argued for Ister before the Sorn, once, a long time ago, before the Aldri gave up on arguing and learned to run. She lost. She said she’d been waiting three hundred years for a rematch.

Iolo Venn. The man. Young, for an Aldri; a hundred and ten. Tall and quick and smiling. He stood at the bottom of the porch steps and looked up at me with very bright eyes and said: “So you’re him. You’re shorter than the figure.”

Mara Quell. The third. Middle. Quiet. With a case twice as heavy as the others, which she wouldn’t let anyone carry. She does the numbers, Halvane said. All of them. She was the Aldri who worked out where the Hungry would come from, every time, for the seven jumps. She’d spent thirty days working out something else.

“They’ve been building the case,” said Halvane. “Since the voice came. Every day. Every night. In the deepest city, with the archives of eleven thousand years.” He looked at Okafor. “And with yours. Ithel’s list. Ilka’s. Ingrid’s sheets. Wren’s. The Overseer told them everything he knows. So did Oss, and the grandmother from Arreth.”

Senna Thale looked at me. Very dry.

“You were going to walk in there with a cup of tea and a list of names,” she said. “And tell the truth.”

“Yes.”

“Very admirable,” said Senna Thale. “They’d have hanged you by lunchtime.”

Then she looked past me. Up the steps. At Aune.

Aune was in the doorway. In her flight robe. She’d come to see us off. She’d been up all night counting; Wren’s sheet was on her knee with forty-one marks on it already.

“You,” said Senna Thale. “Halvane’s granddaughter. The pilot.”

“Yes,” said Aune.

“Get dressed,” said Senna Thale. “Not that. Something your grandmother would wear to a wedding. You’re coming.”

Nobody said anything.

Then everybody did.

Halvane put his hand up. Very slowly. Everyone stopped.

“I said no army,” said Halvane. “I meant it.”

“She’s not an army,” said Senna Thale. “She’s evidence.”

I’ll write what Senna Thale said, there at the bottom of the porch steps, at dawn, with the whole hill listening. Because it’s the first time anyone had explained to me what the case was, and I was the one being charged.

“The Prime offered three women as gifts,” said Senna Thale. “In return for a criminal charge disappearing. That is a crime. In every law the Reach has ever written. The Assize itself wrote it.” She looked at Aune. “Two of the three are married and will not be in the room. One of them is now married and will be. Standing beside the man she was offered away from.”

Aune didn’t move.

“You will not wear your flight robe,” said Senna Thale. “You will not look like a pilot. You will not look like anyone who has ever held a reef on one arm or landed a fighter in a town of strangers.” She looked at Aune very hard. “You will look like a woman who was shown to a man as a picture over the arm of his chair and called a gift. And you will stand close to your husband. And hold his hand. And look at him the way you look at him on the porch when you think nobody’s watching.”

Aune went the colour of the inside of a shell. All the way up her long neck.

“I don’t—”

“You do,” said Senna Thale. “Everyone on this hill has seen you. Your grandmother has been telling the whole of Ister for four years.” She turned to Halvane. “Don’t make her an army. Make her a wife. That’s worth more in that room than every blade on Hyrran.”

Andraste, at the top of the steps, said nothing for a long time.

Then she went inside. And came back out. With the white ribbon from the park, the one she’d given Aune at the wedding, that Aune had taken off for the flight robe.

She tied it on Aune’s wrist again.

“Hold his hand,” said Andraste. “Since I can’t hold Holdfast.”

So we were seven.

Halvane, with his three. Me. Dory. The Overseer and Holt. Imre Oshan with her pen. And Aune, in the pale shimmering dress Ilas kept a hundred and fifty years, with her long grey hair down, and the white ribbon on her wrist.

Mother poured. For all of us. Eleven cups, counting the three litigators, who’d never had Avalon tea and didn’t know what to do with it. Iolo Venn poured the first one out on the glass without being told.

Of course he did.

Then Mother gave me the two cups. One for me. One for the first person in that room who looked like they needed it.

And the white ship took us.

I’m not going to write the journey. It was white, and long, and very plain, and we didn’t know where we were going. Bell was right. Dory sat by a window the whole time with her black eyes open, looking out at nothing, listening. She said afterward she could hear Mother pouring the whole way. Very faint. At the count. Every morning.

It took two days.

The Assize sits on a world nobody has seen.

That’s what Oss said. That’s what everyone said. I’ll say it now, because I’ve seen it. It’s grey. All of it. A grey world, very old, very flat, with a grey sky and no sun anyone could see, the light coming from everywhere and nowhere, the way the light in the white ship did.

And on it, the hall.

I’ll describe it once.

It’s the biggest room I’ve ever been in. Bigger than the hall under the house on the rise. Bigger than the eldest’s plateau. A room so big it has weather at the top of it, very far up, clouds drifting under the roof.

Seats. Going up and back. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. All of them full. Every people in the Reach. I didn’t know half of them. Tall and small and many-armed and furred and scaled and shimmering, and all of them very quiet, and all of them looking at the floor in the middle of the hall where we were.

The far hall, Oss called it. Where Ithre sat at the very end behind a thousand others.

I looked for the end. I couldn’t see it.

At the front, very high, nine seats. Very plain. The Assessors. Nine of them, very old, of nine different peoples, in grey robes like the Prime’s coat. The one in the middle was a woman. Very tall, very thin, with no hair and very pale eyes.

When she spoke, it was the voice. The one from every band.

And beside the nine, a little lower, one more seat. A plain grey chair. By a window.

The Prime was in it.

He didn’t look at me. He was looking at Dory. Corvan was standing behind his chair.

“Lucas Dask,” said the voice. “Halvane of Ister. You have come.”

“We have,” said Halvane.

“You were not summoned with advocates,” said the voice.

Senna Thale stood up.

“The summons,” said Senna Thale, very dry, “said they could bring whom they wished. They wished to bring us.” She put her grey case on the floor. “Unless the Assize has changed its own law since it was read out on every band in the Reach. In which case I’d like to see the amendment.”

There was a sound in the hall. Very far up. Very quiet. Hundreds of thousands of people, all breathing in at once.

“Proceed,” said the voice.

It took nineteen days.

I’m going to write it the way it went, in order, short. Imre Oshan has the long version. It’s three hundred pages. She wrote every word. I’ve read it twice.

The first three days were the Sorn.

Mara Quell did those. With her heavy case. She opened it on the floor of the hall and took out the archives of eleven thousand years, and Ithel’s list, and Ilka’s, and Ingrid’s sheets, and laid them out one by one, and said what they were.

Who the Sorn were. Where they came from. The houses, at the middle, talking, deciding which worlds to take. The Hands, crossing the dark before anyone could get ready. The collars. The lines. The making. Two hundred days a child.

Two thousand eight hundred and six worlds. Every one of them named. Every one numbered. How many people had been on them, before, by the oldest records the Aldri had. How many were in the collars when the doors opened. How many had been taken in. How many had died.

The numbers took a whole day.

She read every one. Very quietly. Without stopping.

Then she did the Ashen.

What they were. What they did; the wave, that ends things. And what they’d traded. Mara Quell had it from the Overseer, in his own words: the Ashen were given the Sorn’s stock, every species, to do with as they liked. In return they showed the Sorn how to make the stock into stronger Sorn. Faster. Better at fighting the Hungry.

“The Ashen were not a people the Sorn conquered,” said Mara Quell. “They were partners. In the making.” She put a sheet down on the floor. “Every grey one made after the trade was made with Ashen help. Every child in every line on every one of these worlds.” She touched Ithel’s list. “That is who the defendants are charged with erasing.”

Then she did the Reach.

That was the day the hall went very quiet.

“Of the two thousand eight hundred and six worlds,” said Mara Quell, “nine hundred and twelve are listed in the Reach’s own records. By name. As within its jurisdiction.”

She put the records down on the floor. The Collective’s own. Somebody on Ister had found them, very old, in the archives, from the time before the Aldri stopped talking to anyone.

“Four hundred and six of them paid tithe,” said Mara Quell. “To the Collective. For an average of three hundred years each. In return for the protection of the Assize.”

She looked up. At the nine. At the Prime in his chair by the window.

“Not one of them,” said Mara Quell, “ever received aid.”

Nobody in the hall said anything.

“They asked,” said Mara Quell. “Every one. When the Hands came. We have the requests. We have them because the Collective kept them. In its own archive. Marked received.” She laid them down. One at a time. Four hundred and six. “Received. Received. Received.”

On the third day, the Overseer stood up.

In Holt’s cap. With the dog sitting at his feet, very straight, the way the General sits.

Holt stood up beside him. At the front. At the very front of the floor, in front of the nine, in front of hundreds of thousands of people. And took his own cap off. And held it in both hands in front of his chest.

And didn’t say anything at all.

“I am Sorn,” said the Overseer.

The hall made a sound. Very far up.

“I was made,” said the Overseer. “In the middle. From a child of a world I don’t remember. I sat in a room at the edge of the houses my whole life and listened to them decide which worlds to take next. I know every word they said. I’ll tell you all of them, if you want. In order.”

He took Holt’s cap off. Turned it round in his hands.

“The charge says the Sorn were erased,” said the Overseer. “I’m here. I wasn’t.” He looked up at the nine. “Nobody erased me. Somebody gave me a cup of tea.”

“The houses—” said the voice.

“The houses are under a world called Root,” said the Overseer. “Alive. Talking. Inside a very old queen who has promised to keep them until they learn better.” He put the cap back on. “I can hear them from here, if I listen. Very far down. They’re still talking. Nobody is answering. That’s not erasure. That’s the first time in their lives anyone’s ever made them listen.”

“And the grey ones,” said the Overseer. “The finished ones. Millions. The charge says they fell silent and failed.”

He looked down at the dog. Then up.

“They’re swaying,” said the Overseer. “A woman called Dorothy Dask sits with them every morning. After the names. With a cup. A great many of them have come back. More every year.” He looked at me. “One of them married a smith from Kiln last spring. I was at the wedding.”

Then Senna Thale stood up and said:

“The defendants are charged with the erasure of the Sorn. The Assize has now heard from a Sorn.” She looked at the nine. “Would the Assize like to hear from any more? There are several hundred thousand of them on Avalon. They’d be delighted to come. Most of them have never been asked anything in their lives.”

The next six days were the queens.

Iolo Venn did those.

He was cocky. Imre Oshan says so in her book. She says it like it’s a compliment.

He walked out into the middle of the floor of the biggest room I’ve ever been in, a hundred and ten, young for an Aldri, with his hands in the pockets of his grey robe. And looked round at hundreds of thousands of people. And smiled.

“My client,” said Iolo Venn, “is charged with murdering fifty-two citizens of the Collective in good standing. On Ithre. And on Arreth.” He looked up at the nine. “We don’t dispute it. He killed them. He’d do it again. He said so, on every band. Very rude of him. I’d have advised against.”

The hall made a sound.

“So let’s talk about who they were,” said Iolo Venn. “And what they were doing. And to whom.”

He started with the queens.

Not the dead ones. The living. He called them as witnesses.

He couldn’t bring them; they can’t come to a hall. But Dory could bring their voices. Up the thread. From very far. Every queen in the Hedge who’d agree to be heard.

They all agreed.

I’ll write what it was like. Because it’s the thing I’ll remember from the whole nineteen days.

The biggest room in the Reach, with weather at the top of it. Hundreds of thousands of people from every people anyone has a name for. Silent.

And then, through Dory, standing in the middle of the floor with Dusk off and her black eyes open and her hands out, the queens.

The Scarecrow queen first. Very calm. From the garden wall. I have lived under one town for longer than its oldest house has stood. I give it what it needs. I have never once been asked to.

The heavy queen. I carried a world’s children home. On my back. In my heart. They were frightened. I sang to them so they would sleep.

The coral queen. The ash queen. The moss queen, and the reed queen, very small, who said: Mine, about something, and the hall laughed, very far up, for the first time in nine days.

The marsh queen, from the Long Legs. I sang a dead world green last week. With two of my sisters. Because a small girl asked where her father was from.

The first queen. I taught a machine how a Hand crosses the dark. She was a very good student.

And the eldest.

The eldest didn’t say much.

She said: I ended worlds once. Before I learned. I spent longer than there have been days learning not to. Then a woman poured a cup of tea out on my plateau. No one had ever poured for me.

She said: The silver in every one of you, in this room, came from a queen. Every gift. Every one. Freely. We do not ask for anything back. We never have.

She said: The Refined took it. From my daughters. On frames. And drank it. And called it respectful.

And then she didn’t say anything else. For a long time.

The hall was so quiet you could hear the clouds moving at the top of it.

Then Iolo Venn put his hands back in his pockets.

“That’s who they were killing,” he said.

Mara Quell did the next part. With the numbers.

Every world in the Reach’s own records where a queen had died. When. How. And what happened after.

“A world without its queen,” said Mara Quell, “does not keep its people long.” She looked at the Prime. “Those are the words of a Refined. To my client. On Ithre. We have them on record. I’d like to thank him for the phrasing; it saved me a page.”

Then she laid it out.

The Refined had been working for the Collective for four thousand years. Mara Quell found their seal in the Collective’s own archive, the first one, very old. And every world they’d gone to under it since. Every queen they’d taken.

Three thousand six hundred and twelve.

And every world, after. Every one. By the Reach’s own census.

“Three thousand five hundred and ninety-eight of those worlds,” said Mara Quell, “have no one living on them now.”

The hall didn’t make a sound at all.

“My client killed fifty-two Refined,” said Iolo Venn. Very quietly, for once. Not smiling. “The Refined, under the seal of this Collective, have ended three thousand five hundred and ninety-eight worlds.” He looked up at the nine. “He didn’t think of that. When he killed them. He didn’t know. He was just angry about the queen in front of him.”

He took his hands out of his pockets.

“I’d like the Assize to think of it,” said Iolo Venn.

And then he was cocky again.

He looked at me. Standing in the middle of the floor with Aune’s hand in mine and the two cups, one empty, one not.

“The Assize should also know,” said Iolo Venn, “that if it finds my client guilty, there is not a jail in the Reach that could keep him anywhere he didn’t want to be.”

The hall made a sound. Bigger.

“That isn’t a threat,” said Iolo Venn. “It’s a fact. The Assize has the reports. Every one. It knows what he can do. He took eleven pieces out of something the size of a star and it didn’t notice. He asked a hemisphere of a dead world to let go of forty years of poison, and it did, in six days.” He smiled. “He could have done anything he liked to those fifty-two. Anything. For as long as he liked. They were drinking a queen alive in front of him.”

He looked at the Prime. For the first time.

“He asked the silver out of them,” said Iolo Venn. “Very politely. And they came apart. Without pain. Without one moment of undue suffering. When he could, very easily, have given them a great deal.” He turned back to the nine. “The Assize may call that murder if it likes. I’d call it the most restraint anyone in this hall has ever seen.”

Senna Thale, at the side of the floor, said very dryly, not quite under her breath: “Iolo.”

“Sorry,” said Iolo Venn. He wasn’t.

The tenth day was Ithel’s list.

I read it.

I’d promised. I stood in the middle of the floor and read every name. Two thousand eight hundred and six worlds. And the numbers. And at the bottom, Ithel’s line.

They say the Sorn were erased. These are the people the Sorn erased. Every one of them came home.

It took all day.

The Assessors let me. Nobody stopped me. Senna Thale said afterward that was when she knew we’d be all right; she said a court that lets a man read two thousand eight hundred names without interrupting him has already started to listen.

When I finished, I folded it up. And put it back in my coat.

And the hall, very far up, very quietly, all of it, did something I didn’t expect.

They breathed out.

The eleventh day was the offer.

Senna Thale did that one. Herself. She stood up very slowly, four hundred and something, very thin, very dry, and said:

“The defence would like to play a recording.”

The Prime, in his chair by the window, looked up.

I didn’t know.

That’s the truth. I didn’t know until Senna Thale told me, the night before, in the plain white room they gave us to sleep in. Halvane hadn’t told me either.

He’d been in the room. With the Prime. On the white ship, at the edge of the Watch, when the Prime said what he wanted. Halvane had been standing beside me in his robe with his long hands folded the whole time.

And in one of his long hands, very small, an Aldri listener. The kind they put on the stations to hear the Hungry breathe. No bigger than a seed.

“I’m very old,” said Halvane. When I asked him why he hadn’t told me. “I’ve been in a great many rooms with people who wanted things. I always bring something to remember them by.”

Senna Thale played it.

In the biggest room in the Reach. To every Assessor. To the Prime. To hundreds of thousands of people from every people anyone has a name for.

His voice. Very clear. Very pleasant. From his chair by the window.

The charges can go away. The Assize is mine; it does what the Collective needs.

And then: My son would like a wife.

And then the three faces in the air. Senna Thale had those too; Dory had remembered them exactly, and the Aldri had made them again from her memory, and they came up over the floor of the hall in the light. Rhiannon. Isolde. Aune.

I’d like them. As my companions. At the centre. You understand.

Concubines. If you need a word.

Is not married. Which makes her the simplest of the three.

The hall didn’t make any sound at all.

Then Senna Thale looked at Aune.

Aune was standing beside me. Where she’d stood for eleven days. In Ilas’s dress, with her long grey hair down, and the white ribbon on her wrist, and her hand in mine. She hadn’t let go once. She’d done exactly what Senna Thale said. She’d looked at me the way she looks at me on the porch when she thinks nobody’s watching, and everyone in the hall had watched her do it, for eleven days.

And she hadn’t said a word.

Now she did.

She didn’t let go of my hand. She just turned. Very slowly. And looked up at the Prime in his chair. A long way up.

“I was a picture,” said Aune.

Very quietly. The whole hall heard.

“Over the arm of your chair. In the light. You turned it off when you’d finished looking.” She held my hand tighter. “I didn’t know you were looking. I was on a reef on Root with my arm hurt, a long way away, and I didn’t know there was a man in a white room who’d decided I was the simplest of the three.”

The Prime didn’t move.

“I’ve flown for Ister for forty years,” said Aune. “I held the north side. I’ve buried pilots. I was going to marry one, and he’s on our wall now.” She stopped. “And you looked at me and saw something to put on a shelf. At the centre. With the others.”

She looked at Rhiannon’s face. Isolde’s. Her own.

“I felt dirty,” said Aune. “When I heard. I went home and washed and it didn’t come off. For days. I’d never felt like that in my life. Like I was a thing someone could be given.” Her voice didn’t change. It never does. “I was going to walk into your white room so you’d leave the other two alone. Because I wasn’t married. Because I was simple.”

She looked at me.

“He married me instead,” said Aune. “Because I wanted him to. Because I’d wanted him to for four years. Not because of you.”

She looked back at the Prime.

“You don’t get to have made that happen,” said Aune. “I’d like that on the record. You didn’t make it. You just made it faster.”

The middle Assessor didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she looked at the Prime.

He was still in his chair. Very still. Corvan behind him, very pale.

“Prime Vael,” said the voice.

He didn’t answer.

The Assize adjourned that afternoon.

When it sat again, on the twelfth morning, the voice said:

The charges against the defendants are postponed. The Assize will examine the conduct of the Prime of the Collective, under its own law, concerning the offer recorded. Until that examination is concluded, no warrant will issue. The defendants are free to go.

A pause.

The Assize thanks the advocates of Ister.

Senna Thale, at the side of the floor, said very dryly: “It only took three hundred years.”

It wasn’t over. I know that. Senna Thale said so, that night, very clearly, in the white room. Postponed isn’t dropped. An examination isn’t a verdict. The Prime is still the Prime. The Collective is still the Collective, millions of worlds, trillions of people, very loud.

But for the first time in nineteen days, everyone in that hall had heard the other thing.

On the way out, someone stopped us.

At the very back of the far hall. So far back I’d never seen it, all nineteen days. The seats there were very small and very plain and very old, and the people in them were from worlds I’d never heard of. Small worlds. Poor ones. The ones that sit at the end behind a thousand others and get to stand up once every hundred years.

One of them stood up. As we went past. A very old man, very small, with grey skin and his hands folded.

He didn’t say anything to me. He said it to Mara Quell. He’d seen her lay the requests down on the floor, all four hundred and six. Received, received, received.

“Ours was one of them,” he said. “My grandmother sent it. When the Hands came. We had three hundred years of tithe paid.” He looked at her. “I’ve never known if anyone read it.”

Mara Quell didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then she opened her heavy case. Right there, at the back of the far hall. And went through it, page by page, very carefully, until she found it. And took it out. And gave it to him.

“I read it,” said Mara Quell.

He held it in both hands for a long time.

I sent a message home on the second day.

I should have written that first. Mother says so. But I’ll write it here, because it’s where it fits.

On the second day, after the first sitting, in the plain white room, I asked the Assessors’ people for a band home. They gave it to me. Very far, very thin, crackling, the way the old war band crackles.

I didn’t have much to say. I said it to Okafor, at the long table, because that’s where she’d be.

“It’s Lucas,” I said. “We’re all right. All of us. It’s going to take a while.”

A long pause. The band crackling.

Then Okafor’s voice. Very far. Very level.

“Good,” said Okafor. “I’ll tell them.”

And then, very quietly, just before it cut out: “Your mother says drink your tea.”

I gave the other cup to Holt.

On the nineteenth day. At the end. When it was done, and the Assize had stood up, and the hundreds of thousands of people were going out of the hall very slowly, the way crowds go. Holt was still standing at the front of the floor where he’d stood every day for nineteen days, with his cap in his hands, not saying anything.

His knees had gone. He wouldn’t sit down. Halloway told him to sit down whenever he could and stand up when it mattered, and he’d decided it mattered every day.

I put the cup in his hands.

It was cold. It had been cold for nineteen days.

Holt drank it anyway. All of it.

“Your mother,” said Holt. “Makes a terrible cold cup of tea.”

“I know.”

“Best I’ve ever had,” said Holt.

And put his cap back on.

Days 8943–8964. The Assize.

Halvane brought three: Senna Thale, four hundred and something, who lost to the Sorn once and has waited three hundred years for a rematch; Iolo Venn, a hundred and ten: you’re shorter than the figure; Mara Quell, who does the numbers. You’d have been hanged by lunchtime. Senna to Aune: get dressed; you’re not an army, you’re evidence; a wife; look at him the way you do on the porch. Andraste tied the white ribbon back on: hold his hand since I can’t hold Holdfast. Iolo poured the first cup out unasked. Two days on the white ship; Dory heard Mother pouring all the way. A grey world, a hall with weather at the top, hundreds of thousands of every people, nine Assessors, the voice in the middle, and the Prime by a window. Senna: they wished to bring us; show me the amendment. Nineteen days. Mara Quell on the Sorn: 2,806 worlds, every number, a whole day; the Ashen were partners in the making; 912 in the Reach’s own records, 406 paid tithe for three hundred years, every request for aid marked received, received, received. The Overseer: I’m Sorn; nobody erased me; somebody gave me a cup; the houses are alive and listening for the first time; the grey ones are swaying, and one married a smith from Kiln. Holt at the front with his cap off, every day, saying nothing. Iolo on the queens, called through Dory: the Scarecrow queen, the heavy queen, the reed queen’s mine, the marsh queen singing a dead world green, the first queen’s good student, and the eldest: every gift in this room came from a queen, freely. The Refined: 3,612 queens in four thousand years; 3,598 worlds with no one left. He didn’t know. I’d like the Assize to think of it. No jail could keep him anywhere he didn’t want to be; he asked the silver out without one moment of undue suffering; the most restraint in this hall. Iolo. Sorry. I read Ithel’s list all day, and the hall breathed out. Halvane’s seed-sized listener: I always bring something to remember them by. The recording; the three faces; the simplest of the three. Aune: I was a picture over the arm of your chair; I felt dirty; I washed and it didn’t come off; he married me because I wanted him to; you didn’t make it, you just made it faster. Postponed; the Prime to be examined under the Assize’s own law; no warrant; free to go. Senna: it only took three hundred years. At the very back of the far hall an old man asked if anyone had read his grandmother’s request; Mara Quell found it and gave it to him: I read it. On the second day I told Okafor: we’re all right; it’s going to take a while. Your mother says drink your tea. The second cup went to Holt on the nineteenth day, cold: terrible; best I’ve ever had.