Chapter 474 Many Happy Returns

The toymakers came to ask permission.

I didn’t know they would. I don’t think anyone on Avalon did. Nobody asked me if they could make a soft one of me, or put me in a doorway on a red glass shore with forty surprised men in a ship beside me. Nobody asked Mother about the teapot. They just did it, and did it very well, and sent us one each in a gold box.

But for the queens, they asked.

Three of them came up the hill on a wet morning. Very tall, even for Aldri, in grey working robes with the hems turned up against the mud, holding their hands folded in front of them the way the Aldri do when they’ve come about something they think is serious. The one at the front was very old. The other two were younger and very nervous and kept looking at the garden wall.

They stood at the bottom of the porch steps. They wouldn’t come up. Mother asked them twice.

“We’ve come to see the queens,” said the old one. In our language, very carefully. “If they’ll see us. We’d like to ask them something.”

Dory took them down.

Not through the hollow; you can’t take an Aldri down the slope under the garden, it’s too low, they’d have to go on their hands. So Dory sat them on the garden wall instead, in a row, by Sefa’s terraces. And put her hand flat on the ground. And asked.

The Scarecrow queen came up through the bed of the gardener’s cutting.

She does that. She doesn’t break anything, coming up. The soil just moves out of her way and goes back after, like water round a stone. One moment there’s the cutting, and the bed, and the wet. The next there’s a great dark shape rising out of it, slow, as tall as the wall, with the rain running off her shell, and the old long folded legs, and her young clinging to her sides like burrs on a coat.

The two young toymakers fell off the wall.

The old one didn’t. She stood up. Very slowly. And put both her hands flat on her chest, the way Varra does for the Scarecrow queen, the way the Kasrai do.

They are tall, said the Scarecrow queen. Through Dory. Taller than the others.

“They’re Aldri,” said Dory. “From Ister. They make things.”

I know what they make, said the Scarecrow queen. There is a small one of me on the kitchen windowsill. Next to the stained glass. Next to the woman with the pot. A pause. The child with the green ears puts it in her pocket sometimes and takes it to bed. Then she puts it back before the woman sees.

“Gran knows,” said Dory.

I know she knows, said the Scarecrow queen. The child does not know she knows. It is very interesting to watch.

The old toymaker asked her question.

She asked it in Aldri first, and then in ours, because she wanted to be sure. She said the children of Ister had been asking for the queens for a long time. Not the small ones in the tray. Proper ones. Ones you could hold, and take to bed, and carry on the trains to the Hedge. She said the children loved the queens more than nearly anything, after the man in the doorway and his daughter, and that a great many of them had stood on Root on the three days, or had mothers who had, or grandmothers, and they would like to have them in their rooms.

She said she would not make one without asking. She said it wasn’t right. She said you can make a man without asking, because a man can say no afterwards, in a letter, and people will listen. But a queen can’t write letters.

I can speak through the child, said the Scarecrow queen.

“Yes,” said the old toymaker. “That’s why we came to the child.”

The Scarecrow queen didn’t answer for a long time.

Her young shifted on her sides. The rain ran off her. Sefa came out onto her top terrace in her shawl and stood very still, with her loose grey hair blowing, and watched.

What is a toy, said the Scarecrow queen. In the end. Exactly.

Dory thought about it.

“It’s something you hold,” said Dory. “When you’re small. So you’re not alone in the dark.”

Like the one the child from the salt sent, said the Scarecrow queen. To the warm new one.

“Like that.”

So the children would hold us, said the Scarecrow queen. In the dark. When they are small and afraid.

“Yes.”

Another long pause. Longer.

No one has ever held us, said the Scarecrow queen. We hold. That is what we are. A queen is the one who holds. A shift, very slight, in all those folded legs. I have never thought what it would be like to be the other thing.

She lowered her head. Slowly. Until it was level with the old toymaker’s. Close enough that the old woman’s grey robe moved in her breath.

Yes, said the Scarecrow queen. Make us.

Then: Make my young right, she said. There are thirty-one of them. Not thirty. Not forty. Thirty-one. The small one at the back of my left side is always forgotten. Do not forget her.

The old toymaker took out a very small Aldri pen and wrote it down.

And put the wall in, said the Scarecrow queen. This wall. With the old woman on the terraces. And the bed where the cutting is. That is where I am. If a child holds me, I would like them to know where I am.

“Sefa,” said Dory. Looking up at the top terrace. “She wants you in it.”

Sefa didn’t say anything for a while. Then she put her hand up to her own hair, the way she does when she’s thinking, and twisted a knot in it, and let it go.

“I’m very small,” said Sefa. “They’ll lose me.”

Then they can look for you, said the Scarecrow queen. The way the child with the green ears looks for me on the windowsill.

That was the first queen.

The toymakers went round all of them. It took two weeks. Dory took them through the arches to every queen who’d come to Root, and the ones who live under Avalon, and the ones on the Hedge who’d sent their young. She says it was the hardest job she’s ever done. Harder than the net. She says the queens had opinions.

The heavy queen insisted on being counted. She said the toymakers were to count every plate on her back, and if there were a single plate wrong she’d know, and she’d say, through Dory, at the long table, in front of everyone. The old toymaker counted them herself. She took a whole day. The heavy queen said she’d counted too, to check, and the old toymaker was right, and that was the first time anyone had ever been right about her plates, and she was satisfied.

The reed queen said: Mine. That’s all. She says it about everything. Dory says the toymakers took it as a yes.

The marsh queen wanted to be green. Not her own colour. Green. Like the dead world she sang back. She said it was the best thing she’d ever done and she’d like the children to know it, and if that meant she had to be the wrong colour on a shelf, she didn’t mind.

The coral queen said the children could only have her if they promised to put her in water sometimes. The toymakers made her out of something that doesn’t mind being wet. Wren says she’s already counted forty-two children on the morning trains carrying the coral queen in a jar.

And the old one, under Avalon, under everything, the planetary queen of this world, who the Scarecrow queen called the first time I went down the slope, and who has never once spoken to anyone but Dory and the queens, said only: Tell them the child with the salt hems was right.

Dory asked what she meant.

It is not how it works, said the old one. And it is how it works.

The toymakers didn’t make a figure of the old one. She said she didn’t need one. She said every child on Avalon was standing on her already, all the time, and if they wanted to hold her they could lie down on the grass.

Then the toymakers asked the eldest.

I went for that one. I wanted to see it.

Root. The plateau. The green ground at the top, where the iron candle is, the one Ash made, which has stood out there in every weather since the first birthday and never rusted, because Ash said it wouldn’t. The plains going away below it on every side. The southern range the Scarecrow queen put back, very tidy, over the place where the houses are.

The old toymaker stood on the edge of the plateau and looked down at all of it and didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said: “How do you make a toy of a world?”

Dory put her hand on the ground. And asked.

The eldest answered. You don’t hear her, the way you hear the others. You feel her. Through your feet, and up. The whole plateau gets very slightly warmer, and the grass leans, all of it, a little towards the middle.

You want to make me, said the eldest.

“If you’ll let them,” said Dory.

How big.

The old toymaker held her long Aldri hands apart. About the size of a melon. The big pale kind Maura grows by the Calder kitchen.

The eldest thought about it.

Smaller than me, said the eldest.

“Much,” said Dory.

Good, said the eldest. I would not like to be in a child’s room at my size. There would be no room for the child.

I’d like to say that was all. It wasn’t. The eldest has never been made before. Nobody’s ever even drawn her, Halvane says; the Aldri have very old pictures of her from very far away, a dot of light in a dark part of the sky, and that’s all anyone has ever had. So she had questions. And she asks a lot of questions, Dory says. She’s been alone so long she doesn’t know how anything works.

She asked if the toy would be round.

“Yes,” said Dory.

Am I round?

Dory looked at me.

“You’re round,” I said. Out loud. She hears me now, if I say things on her ground; she has since the three days. “I’ve seen you from outside. On the way in from the Hedge. You’re round, and you’re mostly green now, on this side, and there’s a white line of cloud along the southern range where the Scarecrow queen put it back. And the plains go gold in the evening.”

The eldest was quiet for a long time.

No one has ever told me what I look like, said the eldest.

Then she asked if they’d put the houses in.

The old toymaker went very still. Everyone knows about the houses. Imre Oshan wrote about them. Every child on Ister knows what’s under the southern range, buried deep, sitting in the eldest and listening.

“No,” said the old toymaker. In the end. Very quietly. “We didn’t think it was right.”

Good, said the eldest.

A pause.

They heard you, said the eldest. They are always listening now. They asked me what a toy was. I told them. Then they asked if there was going to be a toy of them.

“What did you say?” said Dory.

I said no, said the eldest. They were quiet for a long time. Then one of them said: good. A very long pause. The plateau got very slightly warmer. I think it was the first time one of them ever said good about something that was not for them.

Dory didn’t say anything.

Nor did I.

The old toymaker wrote it down with her very small pen. I don’t know why. I don’t think she knew either.

Yes, said the eldest, at the end. Make me. Make me round. Put the green in, and the gold in the evening, and the white line where my daughter put the mountains back. A pause. And put the iron candle in. I would like the children to know I have a birthday.

“When would you like it to come out?” said the old toymaker.

The eldest thought about that.

On my birthday, she said. If that can be done.

The old toymaker looked at Dory. Dory counted on her fingers.

“Forty-six days,” said Dory.

The old toymaker closed her eyes. The way the Aldri do when they’ve been asked for something very difficult and have already decided to do it anyway.

“It can be done,” she said.

So that was the forty-six days.

I’ll put down what else happened in them. Briefly. Some of it isn’t brief, but most of it is.

Luka got warmer.

Halloway says that’s normal for him. She’s had him on the slate since the first day and she says he’s had a quieter week than any Dask baby she’s ever had, and she’s had them all, and that the only trouble with him is he’s very hot to hold for more than a minute unless you’re Sera, or Mother, who says she’s held hotter things than him, she’s held a kettle. He sleeps on the red soft one from the eating hall and the old salt one from Caddoc, one each side. The salt one has gone a bit brown at the back, where he leans on it. Sera says it’s a love mark.

Sera’s up and about now. She’s been at the long table every morning since the fourth day, in the chair with arms, with Luka on a slate on her knees and a cloth on top, and Goldie and Ash fighting over who gets to hold him next, which is neither of them, because they can’t, he’s too hot, but they fight over it anyway. Rory has made a slate-holder for the long table. It’s very well made. He planed it four times.

Hana and Andraste are both very round. There are three chairs with arms at the long table now. Andraste sits in hers with Holdfast across her knees and says she doesn’t need it, every morning, and sits in it anyway.

Taveth got a soft one.

I want to put that down, because nobody saw it coming. Least of all Taveth.

Imre Oshan wrote about the soup. In the second book, the one she’s working on now. She came to the long table the morning after Luka was born and asked Mother about the stair, and the smell, and why, and Mother told her the whole thing, about the hollows on Hyrran and the drill children and the bad soup, and Imre wrote it all down. Then she sent the chapter to her publisher on Ister early, which she never does, because she said it was the best thing she’d heard in a year and she wanted somebody else to read it.

Somebody at the publisher’s read it to somebody at the toymakers.

Two weeks later a box came through Kyria’s arch to the big hollow on Hyrran, addressed to the grandfather who is good at nothing. Inside was a soft one. A tall Hyrrani man, with the long braid the husbands wear, holding a soft brown pot. With a soft brown spoon stitched to his other hand.

And a note from the toymakers. It said: For children who are frightened, so they know where the bad soup is.

Kyria says Taveth looked at it for a very long time. Then he went out onto the ridge, on his own, in the snow, and didn’t come back until it was dark.

When he came in he said: “That’s the first thing I’ve ever been good at.”

Kyria says she told him it wasn’t. She says she’s been married to him longer than most of the people on that ridge have been alive, and he’s been good at the same thing the whole time. It’s just that nobody but her ever made a soft one of it.

The soft Taveth sold out on Ister in a day. On the Hedge, Wren says, it sold out in less. Caddoc took the most. She says the salt children carry it into the hollows when the drills come round and sit it at the bottom of the ladder, so it’s there first.

Then the names.

The keepers of the long record sent another count. Halvane brought it to the long table. He said it was only the new names, since the last count, and only the ones that had never been in the record before. He said there’d never been so many new ones in such a short time since the record began.

Luka was the first. Eleven hundred, now. Halvane says the keepers have stopped asking Aune how to spell it.

Then Taveth. Two hundred and six.

Then Rory. Four hundred and nine. Rory says he doesn’t know why, he hasn’t done anything, it was the other one who made the soup. Halvane said the keepers wrote, in the meaning, a man who planes the door, because Imre Oshan put that in the chapter too. Maura laughed so hard she had to sit down in the chair with arms, and Andraste had to give it up for her, and didn’t mind.

And then, at the end, Halvane looked at the list for a long time and said there had been a family in the second city who had tried to name their daughter Scarecrow.

“Scarecrow,” said Mother.

“After the queen,” said Halvane. “They were very serious about it. They went to the keepers three times.”

“And?” said Kesh.

“The keepers said no,” said Halvane. “They said it wasn’t a name. They said it was a thing in a field. So the family went to Imre Oshan, and Imre Oshan wrote to me, and I went to the keepers myself, which I haven’t done in four hundred years.” He rolled up the list. “And we came to an agreement.”

“What agreement?”

“The nearest Aldri word for the Scarecrow queen,” said Halvane, “is garden. You know that. So the keepers put her in as Garden. With the meaning beside it.” A pause. “The meaning is: one who keeps the thing that grows. And stands where the birds can see her.”

Mother didn’t say anything.

She got up and went to the windowsill and looked at the small Scarecrow queen. Next to the soft Dot. Next to the glass with the oatmeal stain on it.

“Your father would have liked that,” said Mother. To me. Not turning round. “Stands where the birds can see her. He always said that was the point. Not to frighten them. Just so they’d know someone was there.”

There have been forty-one baby Gardens on Ister since. Halvane says that’s quite a lot, for a word that wasn’t a name a month ago.

And every morning, I asked the stars.

I’ve been doing it since Caddoc. Every morning, at the arch, before the count. I go down the Hedge one star at a time, all the ones with people under them, and ask if anything’s come near.

Every morning, they say: Not yet.

Some of them say it very briefly. Caddoc’s says it the way the Caddi say everything, in two words, and gets on with its day. The Lantern star says it slowly, very thoughtfully, as if it’s checked twice. Tiel’s star likes to tell me about the weather on Tiel while it’s at it, which I’ve told it it doesn’t have to, but I think it’s lonely, and I’ve stopped minding.

Not yet, they say. Down the whole Hedge. Every morning.

Wren asked me once what it sounds like. All of them at once.

I said: like a lot of people saying goodnight from different rooms.

She said she’d like to count them sometime. I said she’d have to get up even earlier than the count. She said she’d think about it. Then she came the next morning, in the dark, with her slate, and stood beside me at the arch while I asked, and counted every one, on her fingers, as I said the names out loud.

“Two hundred and eighty-one,” said Wren. At the end. “All saying not yet.”

She wrote it down. At the top of the slate. Above the dawn count.

She does it every morning now.

Forty-five days. Forty-four. The way days go.

Ister made the toys. The whole planet stopped for the last week, Aune says, or near enough. Every toymaker on Ister and half the people who weren’t. Aune says she went past the old toymaker’s workshop in the third city on her way to see Ilas and there was a line of people outside it all the way down the street, not waiting to buy anything, just waiting to help. People who’d never made a toy in their lives. Pilots. Engineers from the lamp. An old man from the long record with ink on his hands who said he’d been waiting three hundred years for something worth doing with them.

Isar Thenn was in the line. Aune says. He’d stopped filming for a week. He said he couldn’t play a man who asks things of the world, if he hadn’t helped ask something himself.

She says he was very bad at stitching.

She says he kept at it.

The day before the eldest’s birthday, the boxes came.

There were two playsets. And the line. A whole line. Aune read it off the side of the first box at the long table: The Queens. All New.

There were the queens on their own first. Not thumb-sized like the tray. Proper ones. Soft ones, the size of a cat, with their young stitched on, in the cloud-stuff, so you could hold them in the dark. The heavy queen with every plate right. The coral queen, who doesn’t mind being wet. The marsh queen, green. The reed queen, who had a tiny tag sewn into her side, in Aldri and in ours, that said Mine.

Kesh laughed until she fell off the bench. Teo was sitting on it.

The first playset was the garden wall.

Our garden wall. The whole long stretch of it, from the gate to the corner, in grey stone that felt like grey stone. The bed of the gardener’s cutting, with the cutting in it. Sefa’s three little open-door terraces, one above the other, with a very small Sefa on the top one in her shawl, with her loose grey hair, and her hand up to it, as if she were about to tie a knot.

And beside the wall, coming up through the bed, with the soil pushed up round her the way it is when she comes: the Scarecrow queen.

As tall as the wall. Dark-shelled. With her long folded legs. And her young on her sides.

Thirty-one of them.

Fen counted. Of course he did. Under his breath, with the low hum. He counted them twice, and then went round to the back of her left side with his very small careful fingers and found one more, very small, half-hidden, at the back.

“That’s the one who always gets forgotten,” said Fen. “They didn’t forget her.”

You could press the wall, by the gate, and the Scarecrow queen rose up out of the bed. Slowly. With a soft sound like earth moving. And then went down again.

You could press Sefa’s terrace, and the small Sefa’s hand moved, and twisted a knot in her hair.

Sefa came up from her terraces to see it. Mother fetched her. She stood at the long table, very small, very bent, holding onto Mother’s arm, and looked at the very small Sefa on the very small top terrace for a long time.

“They didn’t lose me,” said Sefa.

“No,” said Mother.

Sefa pressed her own terrace. The small hand moved. Twisted. Let go.

Lio was beside her. Holding Sefa’s other arm. Lio’s thirteen now and taller than Sefa by a head, and she still can’t do her own knot very well, and she still practises. She watched the small Sefa do it.

“That’s how you do it,” said Lio. Very quietly. “Isn’t it, Gran. I always do it too fast.”

“You always do it too fast,” said Sefa. And put her hand up to Lio’s hair. And did it for her. Slowly. The way she has every morning since Lio could stand.

The second box was round.

It was the size of a melon.

Aune lifted it out of its gold petals with both hands. It was heavier than it looked, the way the real thing is. And she set it in the middle of the long table, between the teapot and the bread, and everyone stood up. Even Halvane, who was already standing, stood up more.

It was Root.

It was the eldest.

I’ll say what it was like. I’ve looked at it a lot since.

It was round. That first. And green on one side, deep green, with the plains going gold where the evening would be. And on the other side, where she hasn’t grown back yet, it was the old colour, the grey and the dark, the way she was before, when she was alone. They’d put that in too. They hadn’t hidden it. They’d just put the green coming over it, at the edges, like morning.

There was a white line of cloud along the southern range.

There was the plateau, very small, near the middle of the green. With the green ground on top. And on the ground, the size of a grain of rice, an iron candle.

And there was a teapot. Even smaller. Next to it.

Mother saw the teapot and sat down. Very suddenly. The way she does.

There was a ring that went round it.

A thin silver ring, on a stand, that the planet sat inside. And on the ring, one by one, very small, all the way round: the queens. Every queen who’d come to Root on the three days. Standing round her. Not facing out. Not pressing in. Just there.

You could turn the ring. And they went round her. Slowly. Like the queens did on the first birthday. Like a dance.

And if you pressed the plateau, very gently, with one finger, every thread under the green lit up white. All at once. Very fine, very bright, going down into her from every queen on the ring.

And she sang.

Not the real song. You can’t put the real song in anything. Dory says the real song is the size of the sky. But someone had tried. Very small, very far, the way the sound of the people walking home came out of the shore. A long, low, slow sound, under everything, that you felt in the wood of the long table more than you heard.

Dory put her hand flat on the table.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

“She sang that on the second day,” said Dory. “When the queens pressed in. I thought nobody heard it but me.”

“Imre Oshan asked you,” said Aune. “To sing it. At the long table. In the second year. Do you remember?”

Dory thought.

“I hummed it,” said Dory. “For about a minute. I didn’t think she was writing it down.”

“She’s always writing it down,” said Mother.

The next morning was the eldest’s birthday.

Mother had baked for a week, the way she does. Maura helped, and Abbe, and every grandmother on every arch. Taveth came through Kyria’s arch with the great iron pot, unasked, and Mother didn’t let him in the kitchen this time. She stood in the door of it with her arms folded. He made the soup on the porch instead. It was terrible. It smelled like the hollows. Every child on the hill came down to it, and nobody was frightened of anything.

We went through the arch at dawn. After the count. After Wren had written two hundred and eighty-one, all saying not yet at the top of the slate.

Everyone. The queens went first, the way they always do. And stood round the plateau in the ring. Every one of them. The Scarecrow queen at the front, with all thirty-one. The heavy queen. The coral queen, wet. The marsh queen, who was not green, and didn’t mind. The reed queen.

And behind them, on the plains, more people than I’ve ever seen on Root. Not the Standing. Not an army. Families. The Kasrai with their children. The Hyrrani. The Caddi, with salt on their hems, and soft ones under their arms. Lantern people. Tiel grandmothers with their moss. The walkers, very carefully, at the back, so as not to step on anyone.

And Aldri. Thousands of Aldri. All very tall. All standing.

Wren said she’d count them later. She never has.

Mother put the first cake on the green ground at the top of the plateau. By the iron candle. And lit it.

Then Dory put the planet down beside it.

She set it on the grass very carefully, in its silver ring, with all the queens on the ring facing in. And stood back.

The eldest didn’t say anything for a long time.

The plateau got warmer. Very slightly. The grass leaned. All of it. Towards the middle. Towards the small round green thing on its stand.

Is that me, said the eldest.

“That’s you,” said Dory.

From outside.

“From outside.”

A very long pause. The queens on the plains didn’t move. Nobody moved. The Aldri didn’t sit, because the Aldri don’t sit for important things, and nothing in the history of anything had ever been more important to them than this.

Hold it up, said the eldest. Please. Where my eyes would be. If I had eyes.

Dory looked at me.

I didn’t know where that was. Nobody did. So Dory just lifted it, in its silver ring, with both hands, up over her head, as high as she could, into the morning, and turned round slowly, all the way round, so that every part of the plateau could see it, and every part of the plains, and every queen.

The eldest made a sound.

Not a word. Not the song. Something else. Something that went through the ground under every one of us, under every family on the plains, through every Aldri foot and every Caddi foot and every walker’s very big foot, and up.

Dory says it was the sound you make when you see yourself for the first time and you’re not what you thought.

She says it was a good sound.

I’m green, said the eldest.

“Mostly,” said Dory. “On this side.”

I’m green, said the eldest again. As if she were trying the word. I was not green for a very long time. I did not know I had become it. You cannot see yourself from inside. You only feel what grows.

A pause.

They put the dark in too, she said. The side that is not green yet.

“They didn’t want to hide it,” said Dory.

No, said the eldest. Good. It is me as well. It is the part I am still growing over. Another pause. Longer. I would like to keep this. If I may. Here. By the candle.

“It’s yours,” said Dory. “It’s your present. Happy birthday.”

Happy birthday, said the eldest. Very slowly. As if that were a word to try too.

She made her wish. Dory blew the candle out. Small Holt asked what she wished for, very loud, holding Genny’s hand, the way he did from her hip the first time, and every time since; he’s done it every year. Genny said you’re not supposed to ask.

The eldest told him anyway. She does every year. She says she never had anyone to not tell before, so she doesn’t see the point.

I wished, said the eldest, that every child who holds a small one of me tonight will know I am holding them back.

Dory said it out loud, for everyone. On the plateau and down the plains.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then a small Caddi girl, very near the front, with salt in her hair and a new soft one of me under her arm with a bigger nose, said, very loudly, to the whole of Root: “She is.”

The rest of the day was cake.

Mother poured. For every queen in the ring, and the plains, and the Aldri, and the walkers, very carefully, from the top of the plateau down, and Abbe refilled the pot from the rain valley arch nine times. Taveth’s pot went round the plains and came back empty. Every child said it was wonderful. Halvane drank his cup standing. Ilas drank hers sitting, in a chair Rory had carried through the arch for her, which he’d planed twice on the way.

The houses, under the southern range, were quiet all day. The eldest said they were listening. She said that, at the end, when the light was going gold on the plains, one of them asked her what a birthday was.

She told it.

It was quiet for a very long time.

Then it said: Does everyone have one?

Everyone, said the eldest.

Even us?

The eldest didn’t answer that. She told Dory she didn’t know yet. She said she’d have to think about it. She said she’d never been asked a question by them before that wasn’t about themselves.

She said it was, she thought, the best present she’d had all day.

We came home at dusk. Through the arch to the red glass. Everyone tired, and full of cake, and full of terrible soup. The children asleep on whoever was carrying them. Sorrel on Dory, with the soft Scarecrow queen she’d taken off the windowsill and wasn’t supposed to have. Fen on Hana’s hip, as far as he could go, which isn’t far now.

Andraste was last through. She’d stood on the plateau all day. Halloway had told her not to. She’d said a Hyrrani doesn’t sit on a birthday. Halloway had said that wasn’t a Hyrrani rule. Andraste had said it was now.

She came through the arch onto the red glass with Holdfast in her hand and stopped.

Very still.

Holdfast was humming. The two notes. The way it does. And then a third.

It’s never done three.

Andraste looked down at it. Then at me.

“Lucas,” said Andraste. Very calmly. In the voice she uses on the ridge when something’s coming up the slope. “Get Halloway. And get my mother. Through the arch. Now.”

She put her hand on her middle.

“The girl for the ridge,” said Andraste, “has decided she’d like a birthday too.”

Days 9182–9228. Many Happy Returns.

The toymakers came up the hill on a wet morning to ask the queens, because a man can say no in a letter and a queen can’t. Dory sat them on the garden wall; the Scarecrow queen came up through the cutting’s bed; the young ones fell off. What is a toy? Something you hold when you’re small so you’re not alone in the dark. No one has ever held us. We hold. Yes. Make us. Thirty-one young, and don’t forget the small one at the back of my left side; put the wall in, and the old woman on the terraces. Sefa: they’ll lose me. Then they can look for you. Two weeks round the queens: the heavy queen’s plates counted right for the first time; the reed queen: mine; the marsh queen wants to be green; the coral queen in jars on the trains; the old one: the child with the salt hems was right; it is not how it works, and it is how it works; lie down on the grass. The eldest: smaller than me; good, there’d be no room for the child. Am I round? No one has ever told me what I look like. Not the houses; good; and one of them said good about something not for them. Out on my birthday; forty-six days; it can be done. Luka on two soft ones, the salt one browning; Rory’s slate-holder, planed four times; three chairs with arms. Imre Oshan wrote the soup, and the toymakers made a soft Taveth with a pot, for children who are frightened, so they know where the bad soup is. Taveth on the ridge till dark: the first thing I’ve ever been good at. Kyria: all these years, the same thing. New names: Luka 1,100, Taveth 206, Rory 409 (a man who planes the door); the family who wanted Scarecrow; Halvane went to the keepers; Garden: one who keeps the thing that grows and stands where the birds can see her. Mother: your father would have liked that. Every morning at the arch, the stars: not yet; Caddoc’s in two words, Lantern’s thoughtfully, Tiel’s with the weather; Wren counts them: two hundred and eighty-one, all saying not yet. Ister helped make them; Isar Thenn stitched badly and kept at it. The Queens, all new: soft queens the size of a cat; the reed queen’s tag says Mine. The garden wall: the Scarecrow queen rises from the bed; thirty-one young, and Fen found the forgotten one; Sefa ties a knot; they didn’t lose me; Lio: I always do it too fast. The eldest: a melon-sized Root, green coming over the dark like morning, the white line on the southern range, the iron candle and the teapot; the queens on a ring; press the plateau and the threads light and she sings what Dory hummed once. Her birthday: families on the plains, Caddi and Lantern and Tiel and walkers and thousands of Aldri standing. Hold it up where my eyes would be. I’m green. They put the dark in too; it’s the part I’m still growing over; keep it by the candle. Her wish: every child who holds a small one of me tonight will know I am holding them back. The Caddi girl: she is. A house asked what a birthday was. Does everyone have one? Even us? Holdfast hummed a third note on the red glass. Andraste: get Halloway, get my mother; the girl for the ridge would like a birthday too.