Chapter 476 Queenie

Hana had hers in a bed.

She’d said she would. On the red glass, the night of Kyrie, with her hand on her middle and the north wind of Hyrran still in her hair. Like a sensible person. She said it again every morning after that, at the long table, to nobody in particular, while Andraste sat across from her in the chair with arms with Kyrie shouting in a sling against her chest and Holdfast leaning on the table edge.

“A bed,” said Hana. “With a pillow. Indoors. Where the wind can’t get at it.”

“Very sensible,” said Andraste.

“I’m not having it on a mountain.”

“Nobody asked you to.”

“I’m just saying,” said Hana. “So it’s understood.”

Halloway said it was understood. Halloway said she’d never been so glad of anything in her life. Halloway said if one more wife of this house told her she’d like to give birth anywhere but a bed she was going to move to Ister and treat Aldri, who are very tall but very calm and have never once tried to have a baby on a ridge.

Aune said that wasn’t true. Aune said her great-great-aunt had had one in a fighter.

Halloway put her head on the long table.

It was raining when it started.

That’s Hana’s, the rain. The way Sera’s is the heat. Hana was born a girl who could hold water in the air, before she ever had silver, and she still can, and when the baby started coming, the sky over the hill knew before anybody did. It went soft and grey all at once in the middle of a bright afternoon and began to rain. Not hard. Very gently. Straight down. On the roof, and the garden wall, and the north field, and the long table under its awning, where we were eating bread.

Hana looked up.

“Oh,” said Hana. “Well. That’s that, then.”

She walked to her room. Upstairs. On her own feet, with Abena on one side of her and Abena Osei, her mother, on the other, and old Efua, her grandmother, coming up the stairs behind them very slowly, shouting at everyone to get out of the way, which nobody was in.

Andraste went up after them. With Kyrie in the sling and Holdfast on her back.

She stopped outside Hana’s door. And turned round. And put Holdfast point-down on the floorboards in front of her, with both hands on the crossguard, the way she stands on the ridge.

And stayed there.

“I said I’d guard it,” said Andraste. When I came up the stairs. “She guarded mine. On the shelf. I guard hers.” She looked at me. “You know where you go.”

“The bottom step.”

“The bottom step,” said Andraste. And then, because she’s Andraste: “It’s warmer than the shelf. You’ll be fine.”

I went down to the bottom step.

I’ll not describe it again. I’ve described it enough. Only that it was the same, and it was different, because it’s always different, because it’s always someone.

Kwame Osei came and sat beside me. Hana’s father. He’s a big slow quiet man, the way Rory is, but where Rory planes doors, Kwame digs. He made the hollows. All of them. The deep hall under the house, and the hollows under every city, and the warm place under the north field where the children went in the war. He sat beside me on the step and put his hands flat on the stone of it, the way he puts them on the ground when he’s listening to it. And didn’t say anything.

After a while I asked him what he could hear.

“Rain,” said Kwame Osei. “All the way down. She’s raining into the hill.” He tilted his head. “It’s going into the deep hall. Very gently. The ledges are getting wet.” A pause. “The queens’ young are drinking it.”

“Is that all right?”

“They’re very pleased,” said Kwame Osei. “They’ve never had a birth rained on them before.”

Taveth came through Kyria’s arch an hour later with the great iron pot on his back.

Nobody had told him. Ash had told him. Ash had run down to the Hyrran arch the moment the rain started, because she said someone had to, and she knew what Taveth was for.

He put the pot down on the porch. And Mother came out of the kitchen with her arms folded. And stood in front of the pot.

“I’ll make it,” said Mother.

Taveth looked at her.

“You said it’s the pot,” said Mother. “Forty years, and it’s the pot. I’d like to see that.”

Taveth stepped aside. Very slowly. With a look on his face I’d never seen on a Hyrrani man before, which Kyria told me afterwards was the look of a husband who has been waiting forty years for someone to try.

Mother made the soup.

In Taveth’s pot. On the porch. With everything exactly right. She took an hour over it. Oona stood beside her and lifted the pot when it got heavy, which it doesn’t. Mother put in the things she always puts in, the way she always puts them in, and tasted it, and frowned, and put in a bit more salt, and tasted it again.

Then she sat down on the porch step. Very suddenly. The way she does.

“It’s terrible,” said Mother.

Taveth was very pleased. He didn’t say anything. He’s good at that.

“It’s the pot,” said Mother. Staring at it. “It really is the pot. How can it be the pot. It’s a pot.”

“I don’t know,” said Taveth. “My mother’s mother had it from her mother. It’s always been terrible. We think the first woman who owned it was very angry about something, and it remembers.”

Mother looked at the pot for a long time.

“I’m going to find out,” said Mother.

“Everybody says that,” said Taveth.

The children came down the stair one by one. For the soup. Because of the smell. And every one of them said it was wonderful. And Mother, sitting on the porch step with the ladle, who’d made it, said thank you, love, to each one, very faintly, like someone who has been personally betrayed by a pot.

Kwame and Efua came last. Hana’s two eldest. The twins. They sat on the step above me, one each side, the way Ash and Goldie had for Sera. Very quiet. They’re the ones who get quiet, Hana’s, when they’re frightened. Kwame because he’s like his grandfather, and Efua because she’s like her great-grandmother, except that old Efua shouts, and young Efua goes still, which old Efua says is the same thing pointing the other way.

They didn’t say the soup was wonderful. They said it was terrible. Very solemnly. Both at once.

Mother laughed so hard she nearly dropped the ladle.

“Oh, good,” said Mother. “Somebody’s honest.”

It rained all afternoon. And into the evening.

The sound of it, from the bottom step. The roof, and the window, and the long table’s awning, and the deep hall under us, and the north field, and the river. Kwame Osei said it was the gentlest rain he’d ever heard. He said Hana had always rained gently, since she was a baby herself, and that the first time she’d rained on purpose she’d been four and had wanted to water her mother’s tomatoes and had got the whole street instead and apologised to every house.

“She’s still apologising,” said Kwame Osei. “Listen to it. She’s raining like she’s sorry for the bother.”

I listened. He was right.

Upstairs, there was no shouting. That’s not Hana’s way. There was Halloway’s voice, short and clear. There was Abena Osei, Hana’s mother, saying something over and over in the old language of their people, which is a breath-song, Kwame Osei says, a thing you sing for someone who has to breathe through something hard. And old Efua, every so often, very loud, telling someone to get out of the way, which nobody was in.

And there was Abena. Hana’s daughter. Breathing.

You could hear it all the way down the stair. Slow. Steady. In and out. She’d been breathing for her mother since the rain started. Hana had asked her to. Months ago. On the roof. When it comes. My girl. Breathe for me. And Abena had said yes, and gone very straight, and then gone down to the long ward and asked Halloway to teach her everything there was to know about it, so she’d do it right.

She did it right. Halloway told me afterwards. She said she’d never heard anyone breathe for someone so well, and she’d heard Hana.

Then the rain stopped.

All at once. The way the swearing stopped, with Sera. The roof went quiet. The awning. The window. And the air in the house, all the way down the stair, went sweet. The way Hana once told me it did when Kwame was born. Like the air after a storm, when everything’s been washed.

Kwame Osei took his hands off the step.

“Ah,” said Kwame Osei. Very softly. “There.”

And then nothing. For a moment.

No cry.

I’ve written that I’ve heard a good many first cries. I have. I was waiting for one. Every child on the stair was waiting for one, with their bowls. Mother on the porch step with the ladle. Taveth with his hands in his sleeves. Andraste at the top of the stair, outside the door, with Holdfast.

There was no cry.

I was up the stairs before I’d decided to be. Andraste didn’t stop me. She looked at me as I came past and her face was very calm and her hands were white on the crossguard.

The baby was fine.

I’d like that said first. Halloway said it first, before I was through the door. She said she’s fine, she’s breathing, she’s fine, three times, the way she does when she can see on someone’s face that they need to hear it three times.

She was fine.

She was very small, and very dark, darker than Kwame and Efua were, darker than Hana, the colour of the rich earth in the north field after it’s rained. She was lying on Hana’s chest. In the bed. Under the window, where the evening light was coming in, gold, now the rain had gone.

She wasn’t crying because she was looking.

Her eyes were open.

That’s not usual. Halloway says new babies don’t open their eyes much, the first day, and when they do they can’t see more than a hand’s width, and everything’s a blur. This one’s eyes were wide open. And she was looking. Not at Hana. Not at the light. At the ceiling. At the wall. At Halloway’s hand. At the cup on the windowsill. At the rain on the glass. Moving from one thing to the next, very slowly, very carefully, the way Elin read every name on the shore in the dream room.

And they were black.

All black.

Not dark. Not brown, the way new babies’ eyes can be, nearly black, so you can’t see where the middle stops. Black. The whites. The silver rings, where she’d have had them. All of it. The way mine went on the cadet field, when the gas came, and Luna said all of it. The way Father’s went, before I was born, that Crane saw. The way Dory’s went, in the long hall, with Corin’s comb in her fist.

Black eyes. On the first day. In a bed.

Nobody’s ever been born with them.

Hana was looking at me.

She was very tired. Her hair was stuck to her face, the way Sera’s had been, and her hands were shaking, and her mother was still singing the breath-song, very quietly, with one hand on her forehead. And old Efua was sitting in the corner on the only chair, saying nothing at all, for once, with her mouth open.

“Lucas,” said Hana.

“I know.”

“She’s—”

“I know,” I said. “I can see.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. Very carefully. And looked at our daughter. And she stopped looking at the cup on the windowsill.

And looked at me.

I’ll try to write it.

I know what it’s like to look at someone with black eyes. I’ve done it for most of my life now. You see them, all the way down. Every thread. Every small bright piece of them holding hands with the next. It’s how I know when Mother’s tired before she does, and when one of the children is going to be sick a day before it starts. It’s how I knew the Refined in the ship. You see everything.

I’d never had it done back to me by someone a quarter of an hour old.

She looked at me. All the way down. I felt her do it. Not like Dory does, who looks at you like reading a letter she’s read before and loves. Not like the eldest, who looks at you like weather. Like someone opening a door into a room full of things they’ve never seen, and not knowing the names of anything, and not being frightened of any of it. Just looking. And looking. And going further in.

She got to the silver.

I felt her get there. To the place at the bottom, where Dory says it isn’t element forty-seven any more, it’s something else, something that sings back to the queens.

And she stopped. Very still. On Hana’s chest.

And smiled.

Halloway says babies don’t smile on the first day. She says it’s wind.

It wasn’t wind.

The light hurt her, after that. Not much. But I saw it. When the gold came through the window and caught her full in the face, she shut her eyes tight and turned her head into Hana and made a small unhappy sound, the first sound she’d made at all.

I knew that sound. I made it myself, after the cadet field, until Okafor gave me Dusk.

“It’s too bright,” I said. “For her. It’s too much. She’s seeing all of it, and the light’s in all of it, and it’s too much.”

Halloway looked at me.

“What did you have?” said Halloway. “When it happened to you?”

“Glasses,” I said. “Dark ones. My father made them. Out of an old pair, and soot.”

So I made her some.

I want this written down carefully. Because I didn’t ask anything.

I could have. I could have asked a piece of the window to be dark glass in the shape of two very small circles, and it would have, in a breath. I could have asked silver to make a frame. I’ve done harder things before breakfast.

I didn’t. I went down to the kitchen. In the evening. With the rain-washed air coming in through the door and Taveth’s terrible pot still on the porch. And I found an old pair of Mother’s reading glasses, the ones she lost three years ago and found in the flour bin last spring, and took the lenses out, very carefully, with a knife. And I held them over the lamp, one after the other, the way Father did, the way Okafor told me he did, turning them slowly, until the soot came up on them, black and even. And I cut down the frame with Rory’s smallest saw, and bent the arms with my hands, and wrapped them in a strip of soft cloth from Mother’s mending basket, so they wouldn’t hurt.

It took me three hours.

They’re not very good. One lens is darker than the other. The frame is a bit crooked. Mother watched me do the whole thing from the kitchen door with her arms folded and didn’t say a word, and when I was finished she came over and took them out of my hands and looked at them for a long time.

“That’s how he did it,” said Mother. “Exactly how.”

“I know. Okafor told me.”

“I watched him,” said Mother. “At this table. Well, a table like it. In the farmhouse. He sat up all night with the lamp. I said, Trevor, you could ask the soot to just be there, and he said yes, Dot, but then I wouldn’t have made them.”

She gave them back to me.

“Go on, then,” said Mother.

I took them upstairs.

Hana was sitting up now. With the baby in her arms. And Abena beside her, very straight, still breathing slowly without meaning to, the way you do when you’ve done it for hours. And Abena Osei. And old Efua, who’d got her voice back and was telling everyone how she’d known all along, which she hadn’t.

I put the glasses on her. Very gently. They were much too big. They slid down her nose at once. Hana laughed and pushed them back up with one finger.

The baby opened her eyes.

Behind the soot, in the gold light, black. Looking at me again. And not shutting them.

She didn’t make the unhappy sound. She looked at the light through the soot for a long moment. Then at the window. Then at Hana’s face. Then back at me.

And went to sleep.

“Well,” said old Efua. From the chair. Very loud. “She’s got your eyes. Poor thing.”

“Your grandfather’s eyes,” said Mother. From the door. Very soft. She’d come up behind me. “Your other grandfather. Mine. There you are, love.”

Dory came that night. Late. She’d been on Root with the eldest; she’d felt it from there, she said, the moment the rain stopped. She said she’d been in the middle of a sentence and stopped, and the eldest had said go, and she’d come.

She stood at the foot of Hana’s bed and looked at her sister for a long time.

“She’s seeing everything,” said Dory.

“Yes.”

“On the first day,” said Dory. “I was sixteen. You were older than that. So was Grandad.” She shook her head. “She’s not going to have to find out. She’s not going to have to break anything to get there. She’s just there.” Her voice went odd. “She’s never going to have a day where she looks at something and it’s just a thing.”

“Is that bad?” said Hana. Very quietly.

Dory thought about it.

“No,” said Dory. “It’s just different. I’ll teach her.” She came round the bed. “Someone taught me. I’ll teach her. How to look at a thing and let it be just a thing, sometimes. For a rest.” She looked at the glasses, crooked, too big, on the small dark face. “Did Dad make those?”

“With soot,” said Hana.

Dory touched them. Very lightly. The way she’d touch something very old.

“Of course he did,” said Dory.

Hana couldn’t sleep that night. Neither could I.

We didn’t go up on the roof. She wasn’t allowed; Halloway said if she saw Hana on the slates within a week she’d chain the trapdoor. So we sat up in the bed instead, the two of us, with Queenie asleep between us in her crooked glasses, and the window open, and the washed air coming in.

“She’s going to see everything,” said Hana. Very quietly. “Isn’t she.”

“Yes.”

“When someone’s ill. Before they know. When they’re frightened and pretending not to be. When they’re sad.” She looked down at the small dark face. “You see all of that. I’ve watched you. You know when Mother’s tired before she sits down. You knew Fen was going to be sick a whole day before he was.”

“Yes.”

“Does it hurt?” said Hana. “Seeing it all? All the time?”

I thought about that. I’ve never been asked it. Not straight out. Not by someone who’d have to watch their daughter do it.

“It did,” I said. “At first. Before I knew what to do with it. It was too much, and I didn’t know you could look away.” I put my hand next to Queenie’s, on the blanket. Not touching. “Then someone taught me you could. That you could look at a person and just see their face. If you wanted. If they needed you to.”

“Who?”

“You,” I said. “Years ago. When I was looking at everyone all the way down, all the time, because I was frightened of missing something. You told me to stop. You said people don’t want to be read. They want to be looked at.”

Hana was quiet.

“I don’t remember saying that,” said Hana.

“I do.”

She put her hand over mine. On the blanket. Next to Queenie’s.

“Then I’ll say it to her,” said Hana. “When she’s old enough. And Dory will. And you will.” A pause. “And she’ll look at us all the way down anyway, because she’s ours, and she’ll know we’re not frightened of it.”

Queenie, between us, opened her eyes. Behind the soot. Black. And looked up at both of us for a long moment.

Then closed them again. And went on sleeping.

In the morning, her brother and sister came to meet her properly.

Kwame and Efua. Who’d said the soup was terrible. They came in together, the way they do everything, and stood at the side of the bed, and looked at their new sister in her glasses for a long time without saying anything.

Then Kwame said: “Can she see inside me?”

“Yes,” said Hana.

“All the way?”

“All the way.”

Kwame thought about that. He’s very like his grandfather. He thinks about things the way Kwame Osei listens to the ground.

“Good,” said Kwame. In the end. “Then she’ll know I’m going to be a good brother. I don’t have to tell her.”

Efua didn’t say anything at all. She went very still, the way she does, the way old Efua says is the same as shouting pointing the other way. Then she bent down and kissed the top of Queenie’s head, just above the glasses.

Queenie opened her eyes. Looked at Efua. All the way.

And smiled again.

“That’s twice,” said Halloway. From the door. “It’s still wind.”

Nobody believed her. I don’t think she believed herself.

The name.

Hana told me the next morning. And then told everyone at the long table. And then went down to the garden wall, on her own feet, slowly, with the baby in her arms in her crooked glasses, and Abena on one side of her and Andraste on the other, and the whole house following, and stood by the bed of the gardener’s cutting.

And put her hand on the ground.

She can’t speak to the queens. Not the way Dory does. None of the wives can. But Dory was beside her, and Dory put her hand down too, next to Hana’s. And asked.

The Scarecrow queen came up through the bed.

Slowly. With the soil moving out of her way like water round a stone. With her young on her sides, all thirty-one, the forgotten one at the back of her left side. The rain from the day before still running off her shell.

She lowered her head. All the way down. Until it was level with the baby in Hana’s arms.

The baby opened her eyes.

I don’t know what she saw. Dory says she saw everything. All the way down. Into the Scarecrow queen. Into the place where she holds. Dory says no one’s ever looked at a queen like that before, with black eyes, on the second day of their life, not knowing any names for anything, and not being frightened.

The Scarecrow queen was very still.

She is looking at me, said the Scarecrow queen. Through Dory. All the way.

“Yes,” said Dory.

No one has ever looked all the way, said the Scarecrow queen. Not even you. You look kindly. And you stop where it would be rude. A pause. She does not know where it would be rude. She is just looking.

“Is that all right?”

A very long pause. The young on her sides shifted, all at once, like leaves.

Yes, said the Scarecrow queen. It is the first time I have been seen.

“Her name,” said Hana, “is Queenie.”

Nobody said anything.

“After the queens,” said Hana. To the Scarecrow queen. Through Dory, though she didn’t need Dory for that part. “All of you. You came to Root when the eldest asked. You held the thread under every one of us for three days and three nights. You held my husband when he went too far. You held the hall when the ledges were empty. You held my children in the dark.” She breathed. Slowly. “Nobody’s ever been named for you. Halvane told me. In eleven thousand years, not on Ister, not anywhere. There are Dorys and Dots and Lucases and Lukas and Gardens. But nobody’s ever been named for the ones who hold.”

She looked down at the baby.

“So she is,” said Hana.

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

Then she did something none of us had seen. She put her head down on the ground. Flat. Beside Hana’s feet. The way she put it beside Mother’s on Root on the last night, when she said you’re a long way from the garden wall.

And the ground under the garden began to sing.

Not loudly. You felt it more than heard it. Through your feet and up. And then it wasn’t just under the garden. It was under the hill. Under the house, and the north field, and the river, and the town. Under everything. It went out through Avalon like rain going into soil. Every queen who lives under this world, answering.

And then, through Dory, from very far away, from the east, from the place where Root is, low and very bright: the eldest.

Queenie, said the eldest. I heard.

“She’s named for you,” said Dory. “For all of you.”

I know, said the eldest. A pause. The longest yet. Tell her mother that no one has ever named a child for us. Tell her mother that we will hold this one. Every day of her life. Wherever she goes. Not because we must.

Dory told her.

Hana was crying. Quietly. The way she does. It started to rain again over the garden. Very gently. Like she was sorry for the bother.

Queenie slept through all of it. In her crooked glasses. With the rain on them.

The houses heard too.

The eldest told Dory, a day later, on Root. She said the houses had been listening, the way they always are now, buried in her under the southern range. She said when the queens sang, all of them, under every world, the houses had gone very quiet. And then one of them had asked her what the singing was for.

She’d told it: a child. Named for us.

It had been quiet a long time. Then it had asked: Will anyone ever name a child for us?

The eldest said she’d told it the truth. She’d said: Not for what you were.

It had been quiet for a very long time after that. Then it had said: For what we could be?

And the eldest said she’d decided. About the birthday. The question from her own birthday, that she’d been thinking about for weeks.

She’d told the houses: You will have a birthday on the day one of you first gives something away. Something of yours. To someone who is not you. Freely. That will be the day.

The houses had gone quiet.

The eldest says they’ve been quiet ever since. She says she can feel them thinking. She says she’s never felt them think before; they used to only want.

The other things. The way I do.

Ister knew by noon. Of course. The long record has a page.

Queenie Dask, it says. Of Avalon. Daughter of Hana, who breathes, and Lucas, who asks. Born in a bed, in the rain, with her eyes already open. Named for the ones who hold.

The meaning, in the other hand: One who was seen by the queens, and saw them.

Halvane says there were eight hundred and forty Aldri girls named Queenie by the end of the week. He says it’s the fastest any name has ever gone into the record, faster than Dory. He says the keepers wrote to Imre Oshan to ask if it was really a name, and Imre wrote back: It is now.

And on Ister, by the end of the week, there were babies in dark glasses.

I’d like to put that down because I can’t believe it. Aune says it started in the second city. Some mother read the long record, and read the part about the eyes, and the soot, and put a pair of tinted glasses on her baby to go to the market. And then everyone did. Tiny dark glasses, on Aldri babies, all over the plaza. Not for any reason. Their eyes are fine. Just because.

Halloway was outraged. She wrote to the eating hall woman, who she’s never met, and told her to tell the second city to stop it at once, the babies need to see their mothers’ faces. The eating hall woman wrote back and said she’d passed it on, and that the second city had said thank you, they’d take them off indoors.

The toymakers wrote to Hana. Very respectfully. About a soft Queenie. Hana said yes, on one condition: that the glasses be crooked. One lens darker than the other. She said if they were going to make her daughter, they’d make her right.

Queenie’s glasses still slide down her nose. Hana pushes them back up with one finger, a hundred times a day, without looking. Andraste says it’s the most Hana thing she’s ever seen. Hana says the most Andraste thing is that Kyrie won’t sleep without a sword, and Andraste says that’s just sense.

Kyrie and Queenie sleep in the same room now. Mostly. Kyrie shouts. Queenie looks at her. In the dark, through her glasses, at everything Kyrie is, all the way down. And Kyrie stops shouting. Every time. Halloway says she doesn’t know why. Andraste says Kyrie’s never been looked at like that, and she’s thinking about it.

Luka sleeps through both of them. Very warm. Between his two soft ones.

Three babies in the house. Halloway has made a chart. She says she needs one.

Mother has been trying to make good soup in Taveth’s pot every evening since. She hasn’t managed it. Taveth comes through the arch every few days to see how she’s getting on. He says he’s never been happier.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Wren wrote it at the top of the slate. Two hundred and eighty-one.

The houses are thinking.

Days 9247–9268. Queenie.

Hana, every morning: a bed, indoors, like a sensible person. Halloway: never so glad. Aune: her great-great-aunt had one in a fighter. It started with rain on a bright afternoon: oh, well, that’s that, then. Abena and Abena Osei and old Efua up the stairs; Andraste outside the door with Holdfast point-down: she guarded mine; you know where you go; it’s warmer than the shelf. Kwame Osei on the bottom step, hands on the stone: she’s raining into the hill; the queens’ young are drinking it; she rains like she’s sorry for the bother. Mother made the soup in Taveth’s pot, exactly right, and it was terrible: it really is the pot. Taveth: the first woman who owned it was very angry, and it remembers. Kwame and Efua said the soup was terrible; somebody’s honest. Abena breathed for her mother all afternoon; Halloway had never heard it done so well. The rain stopped; the air went sweet; no cry. She was fine. She wasn’t crying because she was looking: black eyes, all black, on the first day, in a bed; nobody’s ever been born with them. She looked at me all the way down and got to the silver and smiled; it wasn’t wind. The light hurt her. I didn’t ask anything: Mother’s old reading glasses from the flour bin, the lamp, the soot, Rory’s smallest saw, three hours; one lens darker. Mother: that’s how he did it; then I wouldn’t have made them. She opened her eyes behind the soot and went to sleep. Old Efua: she’s got your eyes, poor thing. Mother: your grandfather’s eyes. Dory: she’ll never have a day where a thing is just a thing; I’ll teach her how, sometimes, for a rest. At the garden wall, the Scarecrow queen bent to her and was looked at all the way: it is the first time I have been seen. Her name is Queenie, after the ones who hold; nobody’s ever been named for you. The Scarecrow queen put her head on the ground and every queen under Avalon sang. The eldest: we will hold this one, every day of her life, not because we must. It rained again, gently. The houses asked: will anyone ever name a child for us? Not for what you were. For what we could be? The eldest decided: your birthday is the day one of you first gives something of yours away, freely, to someone not you. They are thinking. The long record: born in a bed, in the rain, with her eyes already open; one who was seen by the queens, and saw them; 840 Queenies. Babies in dark glasses on the plaza; Halloway outraged; indoors, then. The soft Queenie’s glasses are crooked, because Hana said so. Kyrie shouts; Queenie looks at her; Kyrie stops. Three babies; Halloway’s chart. Mother still can’t make the pot behave.