Chapter 473 Luka

Sorrel came down to breakfast holding me by the leg.

Not my leg. The other me. The soft one.

It came from Ister, the way everything does now. In a box with a gold ribbon, on the morning train through the arch, addressed in very careful Aldri letters to the girl with the green ears who chose Risa. Which is how the Aldri post finds people when they don’t know the name. It always arrives. Ilka says the Aldri post has never once failed to find anybody in eleven thousand years, which is more than the Assize can say.

Inside was a doll. About the size of Sorrel’s arm. Soft all over, made of something that felt like the inside of a cloud, with a long dark coat stitched on and silver wool hair that stuck up at the back. And two black eyes, sewn on very carefully, all black. No light behind them. It’s a soft one. You can’t sleep with light-up eyes.

It was me.

There was a note in the box, in our language, from the woman at the eating hall. The one with her son on the pilots’ wall. She said it was the first of a new line. She said they’d only made a thousand so far and they’d gone in an hour, and she’d held one back for the smallest Dask with ears, because she’d heard about the ears from Aune and liked the sound of them.

Sorrel hadn’t let go of it since.

“He’s called Lucas,” said Sorrel. At the long table. Holding it up so everyone could see.

“I know,” I said.

“Not you,” said Sorrel. “Him.” She looked at it, then at me, then at it again, the way you’d check a picture against the thing. “His nose is smaller.”

“Everyone’s nose is smaller,” said Dory. From the other end. Not looking up from her tea. “It’s a family thing. They’ll fix it in the next one. I had to tell them myself.”

I’d like to say the soft one was the only one. It wasn’t. By the end of that week there were four in the house.

Sorrel’s. Then Fen’s, which came two days later in the same kind of box, addressed to the smallest one who hums, so that Fen wouldn’t feel left out, which he wouldn’t have, he isn’t like that, but he cried anyway when he opened it, the quiet way he cries, and Hana held him a long time.

Then Linnet’s, which she found in the north field on the fence. Somebody from the Lantern arch had left it there, Luna thinks, a child from the line, as a thank you. It was damp from the dew and had a little red glass in its hand that someone had sewn in.

And then Mother’s.

Not one of me. One of her.

I should explain that.

The Aldri had made a soft one of Mother. The same size as mine. In her long brown coat. With grey wool hair pinned up the way she pins it, and a teapot. A small soft brown teapot, sewn to her hand, with a very small chip stitched into the spout in a lighter brown.

They’d called it Dot.

It came in its own box, addressed to Gran Dask, on the hill, and there was a note in it from Imre Oshan that said: They have made thirty thousand of these. They are all gone. I thought you should have one before it was too late. Please don’t be cross.

Mother looked at it for a long time.

“I don’t stand like that,” said Mother.

“You do,” said Oona. Who was lifting the real pot for her at the time. “Exactly like that, Gran. When you’re waiting for it to brew.”

Mother looked at the soft one again.

“I’m going to be cross,” said Mother. “Just a bit. For the look of it.” And she put it on the windowsill. Next to the little Scarecrow queen. Next to the chart with the oatmeal stain on it. Where the playset is.

The windowsill is getting full. Crane has offered to build a shelf. Mother has said there will be no shelf, a shelf is how it starts, and he’s to stop encouraging her.

Halvane came to the long table that week with a list.

He comes most mornings now, when there’s something to say. Ilas comes with him, slower, on her stick, and sits in the chair at the corner that’s become hers. Halvane doesn’t sit. He’s never sat at the long table once. Mother has stopped asking. She says he’s been standing for important things for eleven thousand years and he’s not going to start sitting on her account, and that’s fine, as long as he doesn’t loom over the bread.

He loomed over the bread.

“I have something to tell you,” said Halvane. “It’s about names.”

On Ister, when a child is born, the name goes into the long record.

It’s been kept since before they started running. Every name, of every Aldri child, every year, for longer than anyone on Avalon has had writing. Halvane says it’s how they know they’re still a people. You can be on the other side of the sky from your home, with nothing behind you but the dark, and if the names keep going into the record, you’re still Aldri. He says it was the one thing they never let go of, in all the running. They’d leave the furniture. They wouldn’t leave the record.

At the end of every year, the keepers of the record count the names. Which are most chosen. Which are rising. Which are new.

The keepers had sent their count to Halvane. A little early, he said. They’d thought he’d want to see.

He unrolled it on the long table. Between the jam and the honey.

“The most chosen name for an Aldri girl this year,” said Halvane, “is Dory.”

Dory put her cup down.

“Second,” said Halvane, “is Dot.”

Mother put the pot down.

“Third is Aune,” said Halvane, “which has never been in the first hundred before. Ever. Since the record began.” He looked across the table at Aune, who’d gone very still. “Fourth is Andraste. Fifth is Risa. The keepers would like it noted that Risa is not an Aldri sound at all and they don’t know how half the parents are spelling it.”

“There’s only one way to spell it,” said Risa.

“There are nine,” said Halvane. “In the record. This year.”

“How many,” said Dory. Very carefully. “How many Dorys.”

Halvane looked at the list.

“Eleven thousand, four hundred and six,” said Halvane.

I’ve never seen Dory like that.

She’s held a net out across a whole battle. She’s looked down a man who wanted her for a wife because his father told him to and told him so to his face. She went white at the long table like someone had told her there was a hole in the floor.

“Eleven thousand,” said Dory.

“And four hundred and six,” said Halvane. “In one year. The keepers say it’s the most a single name has ever been chosen in one year. By a long way.” He paused. “The last name to come close was the name of the first Speaker. After the first jump. When we thought we’d saved ourselves.”

“I’m twenty-two,” said Dory.

“Yes,” said Halvane. “That’s very young to have eleven thousand namesakes. I’d get used to it. It’ll be more next year.”

Sorrel, on Dory’s lap, with the soft one of me under her arm, patted Dory’s hand.

“They’re all babies,” said Sorrel. Kindly. “They can’t do anything yet.”

“That’s not the point,” said Dory.

“What’s the point?” said Sorrel.

Dory opened her mouth. Closed it.

“I don’t know,” said Dory. “It’s a lot of people to be good for.”

Mother hadn’t said anything.

She’d put the pot down when Halvane said Dot, and she hadn’t picked it up again, which in this house is like a clock stopping. Oona looked at her. Then at the pot. Then lifted it, very carefully, and poured Ilas’s cup, because Ilas was next, and somebody had to.

“How many Dots,” said Mother. In the end.

“Nine thousand and twelve,” said Halvane.

Mother sat down. Very suddenly. In the chair Halvane won’t sit in.

“Dot isn’t even a name,” said Mother. “It’s what the matrons called me in the orphan halls, because Dorothy was too long to shout down a corridor. It’s a bit of a name. It’s what’s left of a name.”

“On Ister it’s a name now,” said Ilas. From the corner. Very gently. In her slow, careful voice. “It means a woman who pours.”

Mother looked at her.

“It didn’t mean anything before,” said Ilas. “It wasn’t a word. Now it is. The keepers put it in the long record with a meaning beside it, the way we do with new names. That’s the meaning they wrote.”

Mother didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she got up. And took the pot back from Oona. And poured.

Halvane’s cup. Even though he never drinks it standing. He held it anyway.

“Well,” said Mother. “I hope they all learn to warm the pot.”

The list went on. Halvane read the rest more quickly, because Mother had started pouring again, and when Mother’s pouring the morning has to move.

The most chosen name for an Aldri boy this year is Lucas.

I’d like to say I took that better than Dory. I didn’t. Ash says I went the colour of the tablecloth. Kesh asked how many and Halvane said seven thousand and a bit, and Kesh said that was fewer than Dory, and Dory said thank you, Kesh, in a voice that meant she was glad of anything at that point.

Then Halvane said there’d been forty-one Aldri boys named Holdfast.

Andraste stood up.

“Holdfast is a sword,” said Andraste.

“The keepers know that,” said Halvane. “They’ve written it in the meaning. A thing that doesn’t break.”

Andraste sat back down. She tried not to look pleased. It was the second time that month. She failed again.

Then Halvane rolled the list up. Then he unrolled the end of it again, as if he’d forgotten something, which Halvane never does, and looked very carefully at Corin.

“There’s one more,” said Halvane.

Corin was next to Tiri, where he always is. He went very still.

“Corin,” said Halvane. “Three hundred and eighteen.”

Corin went red to the ears.

“Why?” said Corin. “Nobody knows about me. I’m not in the comics. I’m just in the back.”

Tiri was looking at her hands.

“Tiri,” said Corin.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” said Tiri. Very fast. “I promised. I didn’t.”

“She didn’t,” said Halvane. “I did.”

Everybody looked at him.

“I’d been telling the bird story wrong,” said Halvane. “For three years. The one every Aldri child knows. I told it at every school on Ister, the way I’d heard it, with Lucas mending the lamp. And then my great-granddaughter told me, at the end of a very long evening, very cross, that it hadn’t been Lucas. It had been a small boy. On the long table. With his tongue between his teeth.” He looked at Corin. “So I went round all the schools again. And told it right.”

“You weren’t supposed to,” said Corin.

“No,” said Halvane. “But I’m very old, and I’d been telling it wrong, and I don’t like that.” He rolled up the list. “And it turns out a great many Aldri parents would like their sons to be the kind of boy who mends a thing quietly and doesn’t tell anybody.”

Corin put his face in his hands.

Tiri put her hand on his back. Very lightly. And didn’t say anything. And looked, I thought, very pleased.

Wren counted something that week too.

She’d been counting the soft ones. Not on purpose. She said she’d started by accident, at the dawn count, when she noticed the third child that morning come up the hill to the arch holding a soft one of me by the arm, and thought, that’s three, and then couldn’t stop.

She says it’s the same with everything she counts. You notice one, and then you’ve noticed it, and then you have to know how many.

She stopped on the fourth day. She said they’d gone past four hundred at the arches on Avalon alone, and she didn’t have enough of the morning left to count them and the people too, and the people were more important.

Then she told me where they’d come from.

It isn’t just Ister. That’s the thing.

The Aldri make them. The comics and the figures and the soft ones and the deluxe shore with the clear hull, and the dream rooms too. But they don’t stay on Ister. They go out through the arches on the trains, with the iron and the bread, every morning, to every world on the Hedge that has a rail station. Wren says there are crates of them on the morning trains now. She says she counted the crates, once, because she couldn’t help it. She says there were more crates of comics than there were of Odra’s iron.

I told Odra that, on Hyrran, at the forge, when I went over with Ash the next week.

Odra didn’t say anything for a long time. She put a blade in the water, very slowly, and watched it hiss.

“More than iron,” said Odra.

“Wren says.”

“Comics,” said Odra.

“And the soft ones.”

Odra took the blade out of the water and looked at it. Then she looked at Ash, at the next anvil, who was very carefully not laughing.

“The girl’s not wrong,” said Odra. “I’ve got one. My granddaughter brought it from the market. It’s on the shelf over the door.” She put the blade down. “It’s a very good coat. Whoever stitched it knew what they were doing.” She went back to the fire. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

Ash told everyone she said that.

Halvane told me the numbers on the train. He said Ister has only ever had a few things the rest of the sky wanted. The lamp, once. Their engines. Their long record. Their patience. He said for eleven thousand years they’ve been a people who made beautiful things very slowly for nobody but themselves, because there was nobody else to make them for, and they were always about to leave.

He said now the comics are the second biggest thing Ister sends out through the arches. After the bread flour. Ahead of the engines.

He said the keepers of the record were very upset about it. He said they’d always thought Ister would be remembered for its engines.

“What will it be remembered for?” I said.

Halvane thought about that. The slow Aldri way. Watching the arch go by.

“For drawing the teapot right,” said Halvane. “I think. If we’re lucky.”

I saw it myself the next week. On the Hedge.

Dory and I went out on a morning to Caddoc, because the salt-plain grandmothers had asked us to come and look at a crack in the second plain, the one under the salt, where the Caddi have their hollows. It wasn’t much of a crack. I asked it to be less of one and it was. And then, because it was market day in the hollows and because they asked, we stayed and walked about. The way Aune taught me. Like a person.

There were soft ones everywhere.

That’s what I want written down. Not the crack. The soft ones.

Caddi children, small and grey and quick, with the salt in their hair the way all Caddi have it, running through the lamp-lit hollows with soft ones of me under their arms. And of Dory, with her glasses. And of Andraste with a soft Holdfast. And of Dinraal, which was silver and very popular, and had little silver guns that weren’t guns at all, just stitching. And one small Caddi boy, sitting at the side of the market with his feet in a salt pool, with a soft one of Mother on his knee, giving it tea out of a shell.

He was very serious about it. He poured, and waited, and poured.

Dory stopped beside him for a long time.

“He’s warming the pot,” said Dory. Very quietly. “Look. He’s pouring the first bit away.”

He was.

The salt on them, though. That’s what I noticed. Every soft one in Caddoc had a line of white salt crusted along the bottom of the coat. Because that’s what happens to everything in the hollows. The salt gets into it.

On Lantern, they have red glass dust in the hems. Luna’s seen it. On Tiel, the grandmothers’ children carry theirs with moss on. On the walkers’ world, they’re all a bit flat, because they’ve been walked on, Wren says, by accident, by very big feet.

Wren says you can tell where a soft one’s from by what’s on its coat.

She says she’s started being able to tell where a child’s from, at the arches, before she asks. Just by looking at the hem of the doll.

On the walk back to the arch, a Caddi grandmother stopped me. Very old. Salt all down her. She’d been one of the ones who came to the red glass, on the thirty days, to visit.

She held up a soft one of me. It was very worn. The coat had been mended twice. The wool hair had nearly come off and been sewn back on, in a slightly different colour.

“My granddaughter’s,” said the grandmother. “She’s gone up to the second plain today. She left it with me to mind.” She turned it over in her hands. “She sleeps with it. Every night. Since the stars started going out.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“She says it’s in case they come,” said the grandmother. “The eaters. She says if you’ve got Lucas with you, they can’t eat your star.” She looked up at me. “I told her that’s not how it works.”

“No,” I said.

“She said it was how it worked for her,” said the grandmother.

She put it back in her apron.

“So I’m minding it,” said the grandmother. “Until she’s back.”

I told Bell that, when I got home. She was in the map room doing her sum again. The weekly one. About the cup of tea.

She stopped writing for a while.

“I can’t make it work that way,” said Bell. “I’d like to. I’ve tried. The numbers don’t care what you’re holding.”

“I know.”

“But I’d like to,” said Bell again. And went back to her sum.

The Collective found out about the soft ones that week too.

I don’t know how. Ilka says things leak into the Collective’s space the way water gets into the hollows on Caddoc; you can’t stop it, you can only notice how much. Some trader from the edge, maybe. Some ship from one of the banished worlds, before it was banished, with a child aboard carrying a doll.

Whatever it was, the voice came on every band. The grave one. The sorrowful man.

The Collective has become aware, it said, of the distribution of propaganda across member space. Images and likenesses of the man Lucas Dask, who killed four hundred and forty Collective citizens in a single moment. Presented as toys. Given to children.

A pause.

The possession of such items is now forbidden in all member worlds.

Imre Oshan came to the long table the next morning in a state.

I’ve never seen her in a state. She’s three hundred and two and she’s been the most famous writer on Ister since before my grandfather was born, and she has a long grey plait that doesn’t move when she talks, and she doesn’t get into states.

She was in one.

“They’ve banned it,” she said. “Volume eleven. And the figures. And the shore. They’ve banned the whole line.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry?” said Imre Oshan. “I’ve never been banned. Not in three hundred years. Not once. I wrote a very rude book about the Speaker before Halvane and he just sent me a note saying he’d enjoyed chapter four.” She sat down. She does sit, at the long table; Mother made her, the first week. “Lucas. Do you know what happens to a book when you ban it?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” said Imre Oshan. “I’ve never had one banned. But I’m told it’s wonderful.”

It was wonderful.

I’ll just say that. The shop on the plaza sold more copies of volume eleven in the next week than it had in the month before. Wren says the crates on the morning trains doubled. Aune says there’s a waiting list for the shore with the clear hull now, that goes round the plaza three times, and two of the people in it are from worlds inside the Collective, who came all the way out on ships that have no business being out this far, and asked very quietly for the deluxe model, and paid in a currency nobody on Ister had ever seen.

“Forbidden in all member worlds,” said Risa. At the long table. Reading it off Ilka’s slate. “That’s the best thing anyone’s ever done for us.”

“It isn’t funny,” said Hana.

“It is a bit,” said Risa.

Hana thought about it.

“It’s a bit,” said Hana.

All of that was the week. I’ve put it first because it happened first. But it’s not what the week was.

The week was Sera.

It started at the long table. Of course it did. Everything here does.

It was evening. The bread was out. Mother was pouring. Sera was at the end in the chair with arms, where Halloway put her, very round, with Ash on one side of her and Goldie on the other, and Goldie was telling her about the battle dream, again, about how she’d gone up the south wall in fire the way Sera did, and Sera was saying I know, love, you told me, and laughing.

And then she stopped laughing.

And put both her hands flat on the long table.

And the long table got warm.

That’s how you can tell, with Sera. Mother says. The other wives have their ways, and Halloway knows them all now, but with Sera it’s the heat. It goes out of her into whatever she’s touching. The first time, with Ash, it was the bedpost. The second time, with Goldie, it was the banister, and Rory had to make a new one.

This time it was the long table. The wood under her hands went warm, and then very warm, and then the honey in the pot nearest her started to run.

“Oh,” said Sera. “Right. Now, then.”

I’d like to say I was calm.

Sera says I was the opposite of calm. She says I stood up, and sat down, and stood up, and asked her if she was sure, three times, and then went to get Halloway and came back without her because I’d forgotten where the long ward was. Which I built. With my own hands. I asked every stone in it to be there.

Mother says the same.

Andraste went and got Halloway. She was quicker.

Halloway came up from the long ward with Abena behind her, and her sleeves already rolled up, and looked at the long table, and the honey, and Sera, and me.

“You,” said Halloway. “Out.”

“I’m—”

“Bottom step,” said Halloway. “You know where it is. You’ve sat on it enough times. Go and sit on it again.”

So I went and sat on the bottom step.

I’ll tell you what that’s like, because it’s the same every time, and I’d like it written down so that the next time I’ll know.

It’s cold. The stone of it. Even though I asked it to be warm when I built it, it’s the bottom of the long stair and the cold comes down the stair and settles there, and there’s nothing I can do about that, it’s just what stairs are. And it’s very hard. And you can hear everything that happens upstairs through it, and you can hear nothing, both at once.

Rory came and sat beside me.

He’s Sera’s father. A big quiet man, a builder, with hands like Kyria’s, only gentler. He’d brought a door with him. Not a whole door. The edge of one, off its hinges, from the end room by the garden wall, and a plane, and he sat on the step beside me and planed the same edge of it, very slowly, over and over, and didn’t say anything.

Maura says he did that with Liam, and with Sera, and with Pip. Every time. She says there isn’t a door in the Calder house that hasn’t been planed thinner than it ought to be, and you can tell which child it was by which door.

Then the smell came down the stair.

I knew it before I’d turned round. Everybody did. The children on the landing all lifted their heads at once, the way the furred ones do in the hollows when the wind changes.

Soup.

Bad soup.

Taveth was in the kitchen.

I’ll explain about Taveth.

He’s one of Kyria’s husbands. Kyria has six, and every one of them is good at something, the way everyone on Hyrran is good at something, at blades or forges or ice or the long ridge paths. Except Taveth. Taveth is good at nothing. He says so himself. He says it the way other people say they’re good at the forms. He says nothing is exactly what a grandfather should be good at while the grandmothers are away.

And when the drills started on Hyrran, before the war, he made soup.

Every day. In the big hollow under the ridge. In a great iron pot on a stove Maura had to show him how to keep from smoking. Very bad soup. Everyone said so. He made it anyway, and the children from the drills came down the ladder every morning and found it waiting.

He told Kyria why, once. I was there. He said: when they come down here for real, in the dark, with the sky gone and their mothers up top fighting, it’ll smell like this. And they’ll know. They’ll know it’s the place where the bad soup is. And they won’t be frightened, because they’ll have been here a hundred times before, and nothing bad ever happened here except the soup.

And they did come down for real. And it did smell like that. And they weren’t frightened, Kyria says. Not the way they’d have been.

So now, wherever there are frightened children in this family, Taveth makes soup.

He’d come through Kyria’s arch an hour after Halloway sent me down. Nobody had told him. Ash had told him. Ash tells everyone everything. He’d brought the great iron pot on his back, and gone into Mother’s kitchen without a word, and Mother had let him, which she lets nobody do, not ever, and stood behind him with her arms folded, watching, the way she does every time, trying to see what he does wrong.

She’s never seen it. She says he does nothing wrong. He uses the same things everyone uses. It’s still terrible. Every time. She can’t explain it, and it bothers her more than nearly anything.

He came out with the pot. He put it on the bottom step, next to me. And handed me a bowl.

It was terrible.

“Good,” said Taveth. When he saw my face. “It’s meant to be.”

The children came down the stair one at a time.

Nobody called them. They came because of the smell. The way the drill children used to come down the ladder on Hyrran. Every child in the house, with their bowls, and every one of them said it was wonderful, because that’s what you say to Taveth. Nobody remembers who started it. It started in the big hollow, Kyria says, with the drill children, and it stuck, and it came up through the arch with the pot.

Dory first, still. With Sorrel, asleep on her shoulder, holding the soft one of me by the leg. She sat on the step above me and ate her soup and said it was wonderful, Grandad, and Taveth, who isn’t her grandfather by blood or by anything, said thank you, little one.

Then Trevor and Elin. Then Kesh, who ate two bowls and said it was the best one yet, which is a lie she’s told every time since she was four. Then Kwame and Efua, side by side. Then Thessaly and Corin, who are Kyria’s by blood, and so Taveth’s, by Hyrrani counting, and who said it was wonderful in Hyrrani, which made Taveth look very pleased. Then Tiri behind them, who’d never had it before, and took one spoonful, and went a very pale grey, and said it was wonderful anyway, in our language, carefully, the way she’d heard the others say it.

Then Teo. Then Linnet, with her frost-scales very pale, because she was frightened, and Luna came down with her and held her two smaller hands.

Then Fen. Who sat down on the step right next to me, on the cold part, and leaned on my arm with the soft one of me on his knee, and didn’t say anything at all, and ate his soup very slowly with the low hum going.

Then Goldie and Ash. Sera’s two. Who were frightened the most, because it was their mother. They sat down one each side of Rory, their grandfather, with his plane and his door. And ate their soup. And said it was wonderful. And then Goldie burst into tears and said it was the worst soup she’d ever had and she loved it.

Rory put down the plane and put his arm round her.

Taveth looked at the stair. All of it. Every child in the house on it, with a bowl, not frightened. Or not as frightened. Sitting where the smell was.

“There,” said Taveth. To nobody. “That’s what it’s for.”

Maura was upstairs. With Halloway and Abena and Hana and Mother; Mother had left the kitchen to Taveth, which she will never do again, she says, and also, she says, she would do again tomorrow. Maura came down once, very late, to the top of the stair. And looked down at us all. Every child in the house on the long stair with a bowl of terrible soup, and her husband at the bottom with his arm round her granddaughter and a door across his knees, and me on the cold step with my head in my hands.

“She’s fine,” said Maura. “She’s swearing.”

“Is that good?” said Kesh.

“With Sera,” said Maura, “it’s the best thing there is. When she stops swearing, you worry.” She looked at the door on Rory’s knees. “And you can stop planing that, it’s thin enough.”

Rory looked at the door.

He went on planing it.

“She thinks I don’t know she knows,” said Rory. When Maura had gone. Very quietly. To me. “About the doors. Forty years. She’s never once said.”

“She just said.”

“She did,” said Rory. He looked surprised. Then he looked pleased. Then he went back to planing.

It was nearly dawn when the swearing stopped.

Every child on the stair heard it stop. All at once. We all looked up.

And then something else instead.

I don’t know how to write a first cry. I’ve heard a good many of them now and I still don’t. It’s the smallest sound there is and it fills everything. It came down the long stair and into the stone of the bottom step and up through my hands.

I was up the stairs before I’d decided to be.

Halloway was at the top. She didn’t tell me to go back down. She stepped out of the way.

He was very small and very red and very warm.

That’s Sera’s, the warm. Halloway had him on a slate. Not a blanket. A slate, warm from the kitchen hearth, with a cloth on it, because the first two blankets she’d tried had gone brown at the edges, and Mother had warned her.

Sera was propped up on every pillow in the house, with her hair stuck to her face and her eyes very bright. Mother on one side. Maura on the other. Hana at the end of the bed, breathing slowly for all of them, with her hand on her own middle. And Abena beside her, very straight, with her face set the way Halloway’s goes, a doctor’s face, and her cheeks wet.

“Boy,” said Sera. “Before you ask. I’m fine. He’s fine. You can stop looking like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’ve been on the bottom step all night eating Taveth’s soup,” said Sera. “I could smell it from here. Halloway opened the window.”

He has Sera’s hair. Already. A great deal of it. The Calder red, and sticking up at the back.

Which is my fault. Mother says it’s always my fault, the sticking up.

He opened his eyes once. Very briefly. They were brown. Then he closed them again and got a bit warmer and went to sleep on his slate like a loaf.

“Well,” said Mother. Very softly. “There you are, love.”

The name.

Sera said it at the dawn count. She’d told me first, upstairs, and I’d said yes before she’d finished, and then she wouldn’t let Halloway carry him down the long stair to the arch, she wanted to do it herself, and Halloway said absolutely not, and Sera said she’d carried him for nine months and she could carry him down one stair, and in the end Andraste carried Sera and Sera carried him, which nobody had thought of, and which Andraste said was the strangest thing she’d ever carried, and she’d carried Holdfast through a wall.

Wren was at the arch. Counting. With her slate. She saw us coming and stopped.

Everyone stopped.

“He’s called Luka,” said Sera.

I didn’t know.

I want that written down. She’d told me the name upstairs, and I’d said yes before she’d finished, the way you do. But she’d said it very fast, with Hana breathing beside her and Mother pouring something and the window open for the soup, and I’d heard Luka and thought it was a name. Just a name. A good one.

I hadn’t heard what it was.

“After his father,” said Sera. To Wren. To the count. To everyone. “Obviously. Who else.”

I’ll say what I said. It wasn’t much.

“You could have had anyone,” I said. “Your father’s name. Liam’s. Anyone on the wall.”

“Liam had Dad’s name already,” said Sera. “Years ago. He’s got a Rory. He sets fire to the bread bin.” Which is true. Liam’s boy. Rory the second, they called him, when he was small, until he set fire to a very small part of Liam’s ceiling, and after that everyone just called him Rory and stood further back. “And I didn’t want anyone on the wall.”

She looked down at him in her arms. Red and warm and asleep.

“I wanted the one on the bottom step,” said Sera. “Every time. With his head in his hands. Not knowing what to do with himself. Eating Taveth’s soup and saying it’s wonderful.” She looked at me. “I’ve watched you sit on that step for every one of them. Every single one. You’ve never once not been there.” A pause. “That’s who I want him named after.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

Andraste, who was still carrying her, shifted Sera in her arms. “He’s crying,” said Andraste. Meaning me.

“I know,” said Sera. “Let him.”

Wren wrote it down.

Luka, she wrote, on the slate, under the dawn count. Then she looked at it for a while. And at me. And she didn’t write anything beside it. She said afterwards she’d thought about it, small Lucas, the way we do, small Sigmund and small Holt. And she’d decided against it. She said he was going to be his own size. She said she could tell.

Rory, at the back, with his door under his arm, said it was a very good name. He said it was the best name he’d ever heard for a boy who was going to be that warm. He said he was glad it wasn’t his; he’d have had to plane every door in the house.

Taveth, behind him, with the empty pot, said nothing at all. He’s good at that, too. He just went back up the hill to the kitchen and made more soup.

It was terrible. Everyone said it was wonderful. That time, Mother says, a few of them meant it.

By the evening, Ister knew.

I don’t know how. Nobody told them. Halvane says that’s not quite true; he says Ilas told the woman at the eating hall, and the woman at the eating hall told her sister at the comic shop, and her sister told the keepers of the long record, who weren’t even supposed to be told about babies from other worlds, but who wrote it down anyway, on a separate page, with a note.

Luka Dask, the note says. Halvane read it to us. Of Avalon. Son of Sera, who burns, and Lucas, who asks. Named for his father, who was there.

And then, under it, in another hand:

Meaning: a boy who is warm.

There was a box by morning.

On the first train. Gold ribbon. Addressed in very careful Aldri letters to the new one, on the hill, who is warm.

Inside was a soft one.

Not of me. Not of Mother. A very small one, the size of a hand, made of the cloud-stuff, in red. With a little stitched slate under it. And a note from the woman at the eating hall, in our language, which she must have had someone write for her, because her spelling is worse than Kesh’s:

We made this one last night. Just one. Not for the shops. It won’t burn. We tested it.

Halloway put it on the slate next to him. He slept on it all day.

Sera cried. She says it’s the hormones. Maura says it isn’t, and she’s known Sera longer than anybody, and it’s the kindness, it always gets her, and has done since she was four and Liam gave her half a biscuit.

Then the rest of Ister found out, and the boxes didn’t stop.

I’ll just put down some of them. Wren’s counting them. She says she’ll give me the number when she’s finished, and she doesn’t know when that will be.

A soft one of Sera, with stitched flames on her sleeves that were actually very good. A tiny comic, hand-drawn, with gold leaf on it, called The Warm One, volume one, from a girl in the second city who said she was going to draw the rest of him as he grew up and send them every year, and would that be all right. Twelve Aldri baby shirts, all fire-proof, from a factory on the edge of the lamp that makes flight suits. A letter from Isar Thenn, which said congratulations, and that he’d been practising the face I make when I’m worried, and he thought he’d nearly got it, and could he come and watch me on a bottom step sometime, for research.

I said no.

Risa said yes.

A letter from Maelis Orr to Mother, which said that she had been studying the way Mother pours and had now poured four thousand cups of practice tea and would like to know, very respectfully, whether the second pour is meant to be the same height as the first or slightly lower. Mother wrote back four pages.

And from Hyrran: a very small blade. From Kyria. The size of my finger. Iron from the ridge. Blunt, completely, because it’s for a baby. With a note in Kyria’s very short hand:

He’s not mine by blood. Doesn’t matter. He’ll learn the forms when he can stand. Taveth says the soup was terrible. Good. Kyria.

She’d heard about the stair. From Taveth. And from Ash, who’d already told her everything else.

The last box came on the third day. Late. On the evening train, which doesn’t usually carry post.

It had no name on it at all. Just: Avalon. In very careful letters. Not Aldri ones. The letters of the small worlds.

Wren brought it up the hill herself.

Inside was a soft one of me. Very old. Very worn. The coat had been mended twice. The wool hair had nearly come off and been sewn back on in a slightly different colour, and there was a line of white salt crusted along the bottom of the coat.

And a note. In the careful letters. In our language, which someone had helped with.

My granny says you have a new baby. She says I should give him mine, because I’m big now and he isn’t and he hasn’t got one yet. She says the eaters can’t get you if you’ve got Lucas. I know that’s not how it works. But it’s how it worked for me. Please give it to him. From Caddoc.

There was no name. Only a small drawing at the bottom. A star. With a little figure beside it, in a long coat, holding up its hand.

I didn’t read it out at the long table.

I read it upstairs. To Sera. With Luka asleep on his slate between us, on the red soft one, very warm.

Sera read it twice. Then she took the old soft one of me, the salt one, very gently, and put it on the slate beside him. On the other side. So he had one each side.

He didn’t wake up. He got a bit warmer. That’s all.

“Is it true?” said Sera. “What she said? That the eaters can’t get you, if you’ve got one?”

“No,” I said. “Bell says the numbers don’t care.”

Sera looked at the salt one. At its mended coat.

“It’s true for her, though,” said Sera.

“It’s true for her,” I said.

Sera put her hand on Luka’s back. Very lightly. The way Mother does with the grey ones.

“Then you’d better make it true for everyone,” said Sera. “Hadn’t you.”

I went to Caddoc the next morning.

Before the count. On my own. I didn’t scatter; I took the arch, and the train, and walked the last bit down into the hollows the ordinary way, down the long ladders through the salt, because I wanted to arrive like a person and not like a weather.

The grandmother was in the market. Minding a stall of salt-glass. She saw me coming down the last ladder and put her hand on her apron, where the soft one had been, the first time, and wasn’t now.

“She’s at the pool,” said the grandmother. Before I’d asked. “She goes every morning. Where the boy pours for Gran.”

She was about Sorrel’s age. Small and grey and quick, with the salt in her hair the way all Caddi have it. Sitting on the edge of the salt pool next to the boy with the soft Dot, who was pouring, and waiting, and pouring the first bit away.

She didn’t have anything under her arm. That’s what I saw first. All the other children in the hollows had something. She had her hands in her lap.

She looked up and saw me. And went very still.

“You got it,” she said. In the careful letters of the small worlds, out loud. “The one I sent.”

“I got it,” I said. “He’s sleeping on it. He’s called Luka. He’s very warm, and he doesn’t burn it, and he hasn’t let go of it since.”

She thought about that.

“Good,” she said. Very seriously. “He needs it more. He’s new.”

I sat down on the edge of the pool. The salt was cold through my coat. The boy with the soft Dot poured me some tea, out of a shell, which was water, and I drank it, and said it was wonderful, and he looked very pleased.

“Your granny told me what you said,” I said. To the girl. “About the eaters. That they can’t get you if you’ve got Lucas.”

She looked at her hands.

“I know it’s not how it works,” she said. “Granny says.”

“Bell says that too,” I said. “Bell’s very clever. She does sums about it. She says the numbers don’t care what you’re holding.”

The girl nodded. She’d known. She’d written it in her note. She just hadn’t wanted to be the one to say it out loud.

“But Bell’s sums are about the dolls,” I said.

She looked up.

“It’s not the doll,” I said. “The doll was only ever minding the place. It’s me. That’s what you meant, isn’t it? Not the coat. Me.”

She nodded. Very slowly.

“Then it’s true,” I said.

I’ll put down exactly what I said next, because I meant it, and because I want it in my own notebook and not only in Imre Oshan’s.

“The eaters can’t hurt you,” I said, “if I’m around. And I’m around. I’m around Caddoc. I’m around your star. I’m around every star on the Hedge with somebody under it who’s frightened, and there are a lot of them, and I know where every one is, because a girl at the edge of everything sent me a doll to tell me.” I looked at her. “If one comes for your star, I’ll be there before it gets here. I’ve done it before. With bigger things. I’m very fast.”

“Faster than the eaters?”

“Much faster,” I said. “Dory’s faster still. And she’s around too. And so’s my mother, with the teapot. And she’s the most frightening of all of us.”

The boy with the soft Dot looked down at his doll.

“Is she?”

“Ask anyone,” I said.

The girl didn’t say anything for a long time. She looked at the pool. At the lamps of the hollows in it. At the salt.

“So I don’t need a soft one,” she said. In the end.

“You don’t need one,” I said. “But you can have one.” And I took it out of my coat. A new one. From the shop on the plaza. The woman at the eating hall had held it back for me without being asked, the evening before, when she heard where I was going, and put it in my hand at the arch, and said I wasn’t to pay for it, not ever, and I’d said I knew.

It had a bigger nose. They’d fixed it, at last. Dory was going to be unbearable.

The girl took it. Very carefully. With both hands. And turned it round. And looked at its face for a long time.

“It’s not as good as the real one,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Nobody’s nose is.”

She laughed. The first time. A small Caddi laugh, like salt cracking in the sun.

Then she put it under her arm. Like all the other children in the hollows. And held it there.

I went back up the ladders. The grandmother was waiting at the top of the market. She didn’t say anything. She just put her salt-white hand on my arm, for a moment, the way Mother does.

At the arch, I asked Caddoc’s star to let me know if anything ever came near it.

It said it would.

I asked the next one. And the next. All the way down the Hedge. Every star with someone under it. It took most of the morning, and I was late for the count, and Wren had to wait, and didn’t mind.

Bell says the numbers don’t care what you’re holding.

I said I’d hold all of it, then. And see what the numbers had to say about that.

Bell said she’d do the sum.

The other things. Quickly. The way I do.

Lantern’s engine is three weeks ahead. Halvane says that’s the first time an Aldri engine has ever been ahead of anything.

No word from Corvan. Ilka listens every night.

Bell’s sum is still the same. One cup alone. Two with Dory pulling. She says she’s going to keep doing it until it changes, and Crane says that’s what Bell has always been like, since the first day he met her, and it’s why he’d trust her sum over anyone’s.

The Collective is still considering its response. Ilka says it’s been considering it for a long time now. She says that either means it’s very afraid or very busy, and she’d like to know which.

Seven hundred and twelve Aldri babies have been named Luka this week. Halvane says the keepers had to ask Aune how to spell it. Halvane says the keepers are going to have to start a new page.

Hana and Andraste are both very round now. Halloway says the chair with arms, for both of them. There’s only one chair with arms. Rory’s making another. Andraste says she doesn’t need one. Halloway says she does. Rory’s making two.

Days 9162–9181. Luka.

Sorrel came down holding me by the leg: the first soft ones, a thousand gone in an hour, held back by the woman at the eating hall for the girl with green ears; his nose is smaller. Fen’s came for the smallest one who hums; Linnet’s was left on the north fence with red glass sewn in its hand. Then Dot: thirty thousand, all gone; Mother: I don’t stand like that; Oona: you do; on the windowsill, and there will be no shelf. Halvane brought the long record’s count: girls, Dory first (11,406), Dot second (9,012), Aune third, never in the first hundred before, Andraste, Risa (nine spellings). Dory: it’s a lot of people to be good for. Ilas: Dot’s in the record now; it means a woman who pours. Mother: I hope they all learn to warm the pot. Boys: Lucas, seven thousand and a bit; forty-one Holdfasts; three hundred and eighteen Corins, because Halvane went round all the schools and told the bird story right. Wren counted soft ones at the arches until she had to stop. More crates of comics than iron on the morning trains; Odra has one over her door and says the coat’s well stitched. Comics are Ister’s second biggest export, after flour, ahead of engines; Halvane: remembered for drawing the teapot right. Caddoc: soft ones everywhere, salt on the hems; a boy pouring the first bit away for a soft Gran; the grandmother minding a worn one: if you’ve got Lucas they can’t eat your star. Bell: the numbers don’t care what you’re holding. The Collective forbade the whole line in member worlds; Imre Oshan’s never been banned; sales doubled; buyers came out from inside. Risa: best thing anyone’s ever done for us. Hana: it’s a bit. Sera: the long table went warm and the honey ran. Halloway: bottom step, again. Rory planed a door, the way he did for Liam, Sera and Pip. Then the smell: Taveth, who’s good at nothing, came through Kyria’s arch with the great iron pot, so the stair would smell like the place where the bad soup is; every child came down and said it was wonderful; Tiri went grey and said it anyway; Goldie: the worst I’ve ever had, and I love it. Taveth: that’s what it’s for. Maura: she’s swearing; when she stops, you worry; and stop planing that. A boy, the Calder red, warm, on a slate. Andraste carried Sera who carried him to the count. He’s called Luka, after his father. Liam had Rory already, the one who sets fire to the bread bin. Sera: I wanted the one on the bottom step; you’ve never once not been there. Andraste: he’s crying. Let him. Wren didn’t write small; he’ll be his own size. The long record: named for his father, who was there; a boy who is warm. The eating hall’s one red soft one: it won’t burn, we tested it. Kyria’s blunt blade: Taveth says the soup was terrible; good. Last, from Caddoc, with no name: the salt one, mended twice; it’s how it worked for me. Sera: then you’d better make it true for everyone. At the salt pool: the doll was only ever minding the place; it’s me; the eaters can’t hurt you if I’m around, and I’m around. A new one with a bigger nose: it’s not as good as the real one; nobody’s nose is. She laughed like salt cracking. I asked Caddoc’s star to tell me if anything came near, and the next, all down the Hedge. Bell said she’d do the sum.