Masterless

Dinah didn’t slow down until she was close enough to touch the nearest of them. Then she stopped so hard her feet skidded in the grass, and for a moment she only stood there with her mouth open, breathing hard, her ears still pinned flat to her skull.

Her eyes went over all of them once, fast. Laura had seen Carol Cooper look at a kitchen that way after something crashed in it—not yet asking what had broken, only who was standing in the pieces. Then Dinah lifted one hand and began to count out loud.

“One. Two, three.” Her finger went to the nearest of Laura and jumped to Riley and Myra. “Four. Five.” Sam, Erin. It kept going down the ragged line and out into the grass behind it, to Chloe and Liesa and Claire, to Katherine with Eden still pressed into her side, to Marissa and the knot of six arms in Marissa’s arms. “Fifteen. Sixteen.”

Then she started again from the beginning, as if she didn’t trust the number the first time any more than Norah had. The second count came out the same. Laura could have told her it would. There was only one number that mattered in this glade, and it wasn’t on the grass.

Dinah let her hand drop. “Sixteen. Okay. Okay. Who’s hurt?”

“Nobody,” Norah said at once. “We’re fine.”

It came out too fast to be an answer, and Dinah didn’t treat it as one. She went straight past Norah and stopped in front of Erin, who still had the handgun down at her waist in both fists, muzzle to the turf, as if the Hall might come back if she let go of it. Dinah didn’t ask. She took Erin’s right wrist, peeled her fingers off the grip one at a time, and turned the hand over in the lantern light.

There was a line of dried blood across the first two knuckles, and a glitter of glass still caught in the second.

“Fine,” Dinah said, to nobody in particular. She picked the sliver out with her fingertips, quick and clean, and flicked it into the grass.

Erin looked down at her own hand as if somebody had just returned it to her. Then she let the gun go. It didn’t fall. It went back into nothing, the trick run in reverse, and her empty hands hung at her sides a moment before she seemed to remember they were hers. Beside her Norah let a breath out through her nose, and the steel sticks in her fists went the same way.

Dinah kept hold of Erin’s wrist a second longer than she needed to. “What happened up there?”

It was Sam who answered. She hadn’t put Thrustworthy away. She stood holding it point-down against the turf, both hands folded over the grip.

“Nergal came in through the doors for Laura,” Sam said. “Andy hit him. Andy’s gone.”

Sam stopped there—three things, set down flat one after another, and not a word past them. Laura listened to them land and found she was grateful. She did not think she could have stood to hear it told properly, with the dome and the glass and the funeral robes in it.

Dinah took it without flinching. Her ears came up off her skull by a fraction and went back down. “Gone,” she said quietly, and nodded, as if she were writing it on a chart. “Okay. I heard you.”

Then something in her face shifted, not toward grief but toward work. Her eyes had stopped moving over the whole group and had settled, Laura realized, on four of them: on Sam; on Erin, with her cut hand; on Norah; and on Sumiku, who had come up at Laura’s shoulder with her wings folded tight and the naginata held crossways in all four hands.

“Those things that came in with him,” Dinah said. “What did they do to you?”

Sam started to answer. Dinah shook her head.

“Not what you did to them. I can see you fought. What did they do to you?” Dinah looked from one face to the next. “You’re all standing like people who got hit and can’t find the bruise.”

Norah answered first, flatly, looking at nothing. “Once they got close,” Norah said, “the howling stopped being howling.” She swallowed. “There were voices under it. Telling me how I was going to die.”

Dinah didn’t move.

“Tomorrow,” Norah went on. “Him. His hand on the back of my neck. They took their time about that one, like they had all night.” Her jaw worked. “And before they finished they started a different one. Face down in a pool, with one of them kneeling on my back. Then another. At the bottom of a stairwell with my shoes gone, crawling.” She stopped. “I never got to the end of any of them. There wasn’t room. The next one was already there.”

Sumiku’s head came up, like a deer’s at a sound in the trees, and her eyes went to Norah and stayed there. Her wings twitched half open against her back and closed again. She didn’t say anything at first. Laura read it in the set of her shoulders before a single word came out.

Sumiku’s wings settled. “This one heard them also.” Her voice was low and almost perfectly even. “She believed they had come for her alone. She did not speak of them to anyone.” She looked down at the naginata. “But it was not only the words. With the words came something else. All four of this one’s hands forgot what they were holding.” A pause. “She has no name for what did that. It did not come from anything. There was nothing to look at.”

Erin had gone still. Her mouth twisted. “Mine too.” It came out rough, and she snorted once at herself, short and sharp, the way she did when something cost her. “Some of mine had dates on them. Eleven days, one of them said. In the dark, somewhere with no sun. Like it had counted.” She rubbed her cut knuckles with her thumb. “Some of them didn’t have dates at all.”

Sam shook her head. “None of mine were the same one twice.”

Norah’s head turned. “Mine either.”

“And none of mine were yours.” Sam wasn’t looking at any of them. Her eyes were on the long dim pasture past the lanterns. “Not the pool. Not the stairs. Mine were all—fitted. Like somebody had been measuring me for them for a week.” Her hands tightened on the handle until the knuckles went the kind of white that stays in the skin for a minute after you let go. “On my own sword, one of them, with Nergal stabbing it in my chest. It was very specific about how.”

Erin’s hand had closed over the cut knuckles. “They didn’t stop.”

“No,” said Sam. “Not once. Not the whole time.”

Dinah’s ears had gone flat again. “All four of you,” she said slowly. “Every one of you thinking it was only you.”

Sam let go of the handle with one hand. “It doesn’t matter what they said.”

She said it without any of the usual things in it. There was no joke waiting at the end of it, and Laura, who had almost never heard Sam let a moment like this go by, felt the absence like a missing stair.

“Four of us,” Sam said. “Four of us who should have been able to hold a line. That’s what we were for tonight.” Her voice didn’t rise. “We didn’t hold it for thirty seconds. And it wasn’t the deaths. I could have stood there and listened to a list of ways to die all night. A list is just a list.” She shook her head once. “It was what came in underneath them. That… fear. There was nothing to brace against. You can’t brace for something that doesn’t come from anywhere.”

“And the ones we could reach, we couldn’t touch,” Norah said.

Everyone turned to her.

“I went in with my sticks. Steel.” Norah held up her empty hands and looked at them. “Both of them went straight through the first one I hit, and the second, like swinging at fog. Nothing. Not a mark.” Her mouth tightened. “But the one Sam opened with that sword came apart before the swing was even finished. Rags and wind. I watched it happen from about four feet away.”

Nobody said what that meant. Laura saw it land on Sam’s face and saw Sam decline to pick it up, and she let it lie where it was too. It was a fact, and there was no room tonight to turn it over.

Dinah’s eyes went to the sword under Sam’s hands and stayed there a second too long. “Okay,” she said. “Noted.” It was barely above a murmur. “I’m noting everything.”

“No.”

It came out of Laura before she knew she was going to say it, all three voices at once, and it was louder than she meant. Every head in the glade turned. She didn’t care.

“No,” Laura said again. “You don’t get to make that yours, Sam. None of you do.” Her voice wanted to shake and she didn’t let it. “You stood in front of me. All four of you stood in front of me while something told you how you were going to die, over and over, and you stayed there. You don’t get to call that not holding.”

Sam looked at her for a long moment. Then her mouth moved, not quite a smile.

“I’m not making it mine,” Sam said. “I’m making it true. There’s a difference, and you know there is, and I’m going to need it later.” She let out a breath. “That’s not guilt, Laura. That’s a note.”

Laura shook her heads. “Not good enough, Sam. You stood when everything screamed at you to run. You deserve more than that.”

Dinah had stopped moving.

She had been in motion since the moment she came around the bend on the lantern path—counting, checking, picking glass out of knuckles—and now all of that simply stopped. She stood in the middle of the glade with her hands at her sides and her tail gone still behind her, and for the first time since she’d arrived she looked less like a doctor than like someone who had been handed something heavy on the way down and told to carry it carefully.

“They have names,” Dinah said.

The glade went quiet in a new way.

“The Fourteen.” Dinah said the next part slowly, placing each syllable. “The Erbeššerā Uballû.” She wet her lips. “The Howling Ones. Nergal's original harem.”

Laura didn’t ask her how she knew. She wanted to, and she didn’t. There was no room left in her for the answer, and she had a feeling there wouldn’t be room in it for anything good.

“Fourteen,” Sam said.

Laura had been holding one question since the grass came up under her feet. She had held it through the counting and the glass and the whispers and the name, like a breath held under water, and now there was nothing left between her and it.

“Where is he?” All three of her said it, one voice. It came out smaller than she meant it to.

She knew the answer before Dinah opened her mouth. It was already there in Dinah’s face, in the way her eyes went to Laura and did not slide away. Laura asked anyway. Not asking would have meant she had already decided what the answer was, and she was not going to do that on this grass, in front of all of them, with the bond still humming its one high note in her chest.

Dinah turned to her. For a second she didn’t answer, and Laura watched her decide not to soften it.

“I don’t know,” Dinah said.

“Dinah—” Laura began.

“I don’t know, Laura, and I can’t know.” Dinah’s voice stayed level, but the stub of her tail had clamped down hard against her back. “A Mildred had me by the arm before the bell finished ringing. I didn’t see the doors open. I didn’t see anybody come through them. One second I was at a table with a glass in my hand and the next I was down here, and nobody has come down from that Hall since. Not a word. Not Mildred. Nothing.” She spread her empty hands. “Whatever happened up there after the bell, you know more about it than I do.”

Laura reached for him again. She couldn’t stop herself. It came back the way it had every time—here, and farther than anything, both at once, and under it the one high note of his fear holding steady at the top—and it told her nothing she could stand on.

“Then none of us know,” Riley said.

She said it flatly, looking at the grass. If she had any hope hidden anywhere that someone in this Garden knew, it would have kept that sentence behind her teeth.

Chloe had come up beside her at some point without Laura seeing her move. She didn’t say anything. She slid her hand into Riley’s, and Riley’s fingers closed on it hard enough to whiten the knuckles, and neither of them looked down.

Myra had turned her face toward Dinah and kept it there. Her ears were forward. Her tails had gone still. “Somebody sent you,” she said.

Dinah looked at her.

“You came down that path carrying something. You still are. It’s all over you, a color like—” Myra stopped, frowned. “Like somebody holding a cup too full to walk with. So somebody gave you something to bring us.” She tilted her head. “If you don’t know where he is, does whoever gave it to you?”

“Somebody gave me something,” Dinah said, “and I’m getting to it. Where he is isn’t in it.” She held Myra’s blind gaze without blinking. “I asked a lot of questions, Myra. Believe me, I asked. Everything I have came to me down here, and none of it is where Andy is.”

Myra’s ears went back. She didn’t press again. Laura felt her sister let it go, not because she had been answered but because there was nothing left in Dinah to find.

Dinah let out a long breath. She looked around the glade once more, at all of them, and seemed to set the first thing down and pick up the next.

“Here’s what I can give you,” Dinah said. “You’re not alone down here. There are guests in the Garden tonight.”

Nobody spoke. Laura thought of the Hall emptying from the edges inward, glasses hanging in the air, a cello standing up by itself for as long as it took to fall.

“Harper,” Dinah said. “Harper and her wives. Her children, Winter and Summer. And Mona Cummings, with the guests from her harem.” She jerked her chin toward the far side of the Garden, somewhere past the lanterns. “When everybody else went home, they didn’t. Harper wanted to fight, to help you and Andy. Arabella asked her to come here instead.”

Every head in the glade turned toward the far side of the Garden, as if Harper might be standing just past the last lantern. There was nothing there but the lanterns and the long dim grass. But Laura felt something go through the household anyway, a loosening, the first thing all night that felt like it might hold weight.

Erin’s head came up. “Harper.” It came out of her like the one word she had room for, and then Erin said more. “Harper’s down here. Right now.” Her cut hand had closed. “Then—”

“Let me finish,” Dinah said, not unkindly. “Because you’re about to get your hopes up, and I need you to hear the rest first.”

Erin shut her mouth.

“They didn’t just get to stay because they asked. There was a deal. Either Ms. E or Harper made it for them.” Dinah said the name the way you pick up something you’ve cut yourself on before, carefully, by the edges. “Whichever one it was, she went to Arabella herself and negotiated it, term by term. So here are the terms.” She held up one finger. “They can hold the Gentle Hearth, protect the guests. Defend it. Keep things out of it.” A second finger. “They can give you support, in words only, but no real advice.” She lowered her hand. “And that’s the list. That’s the whole list. Nothing else.”

For a moment nobody seemed to understand what she had said. Then Laura saw Norah understand it.

“Support,” Norah said. She said it the way she said a number she didn’t believe, and her chin came up.

“There’s a queen down here with four of her wives.” Norah spread her hands. “There’s Mona with three of her own harem. And they’re allowed to—what, bring us a blanket? Hold our hands while something drags one of us off by the hair?” Her voice didn’t rise, but it got precise, a little too precise. “I have read a lot of bad contracts. That is the worst clause I have ever heard in my life.” She turned half away and back. “Who sits across from someone and negotiates exactly how much help is too much? Who writes that down and signs it?”

“I didn’t write it,” Dinah said.

“I know you didn’t—” Norah began.

“I didn’t write it, and I’m not going to stand here and tell you it’s fair.” Dinah’s ears had gone flat and stayed there. “I’m telling you what it is. That’s all I can do with it. You can hate it. I’d hate it too. It’s still what it is.”

Norah looked at her for a long moment and then, barely, nodded. It wasn’t agreement. It was the nod of someone who had just been told a price and had decided not to waste breath haggling it.

Dinah drew herself up. Something in her posture changed again, the way it had before she gave them the name, and Laura felt it before she understood it: the heaviest thing was still in her hands.

Dinah wet her lips. “One more. And this one isn’t mine. It’s Arabella’s. She told me to tell you, and she told me to use her words, not mine. It may explain that clause. So these are hers.”

She said it plainly and carefully, as if she were reading it off a card and was afraid of getting it wrong.

“‘Tell them this is the Sixth Challenge.’”

The glade went so quiet Laura could hear the lanterns ticking on their hooks.

Then Sam made a sound, not quite a laugh.

“She told me,” Sam said. Her voice was flat. “She told me and Liesa. Weeks ago.” Behind her, Liesa had come up close and laid a hand flat between Sam’s shoulder blades, her hips still moving in that slow sway she could not stop even now, and Sam leaned back into the hand without looking round. “She said the wedding would be after Erin’s date night. She said it would be combined with the Sixth.” Sam’s hands had gone tight on the grip again. “She didn’t say it would be this. Nobody said it would be this.”

Laura stood there and let it come into her.

She didn’t sit down. She didn’t reach for anyone. All three of her stayed exactly where they were on the grass, and she took it standing, the way she had learned to take things in her father’s house, without letting her face move, because moving gave him something. A Challenge. The dome, the glass, the howling, Nergal’s flat eyes finding her across the Hall—all of it had been happening inside something that had rules, and a start, and an end. Somewhere, someone was watching it like a game.

“Then somebody’s keeping score, and there are rules,” Laura said.

Her voice came out perfectly steady, and she hated it. She wondered, for one second, what a Challenge like this one did to whoever lost it. Then she made herself stop wondering, because she already had a guess, and the guess had her own name at the top of it.

Behind her, she heard the household take it. She didn’t turn around to see how. Dinah stood still.

Her eyes went to Eden. Eden lived down here. She walked these lantern paths every day, and she had not moved from Katherine’s side since the grass came up under them. Dinah crossed to her and set a hand on her bare shoulder, and Eden leaned into it, slow and full-bodied, the only way she had of leaning into anything. Dinah left the hand there a moment. Then she turned back to the rest of them.

“Erin knows where my clinic is,” Dinah said. “So does Claire. So does Chloe. And Eden and Emily.” She looked at each of them in turn, and each of them, in turn, nodded. “If anybody gets hurt tonight—if anybody so much as turns an ankle—that’s where they come. I’ll be there, or I’ll be on my way back to it.” Her ears came up, slowly, and stayed up. “I’m not going anywhere. This is my Garden.”

Emily nodded before Dinah had finished. She had lived on these paths once, long before the wedding, and she knew the way to that clinic like she knew the palm of her hand.

Sam held her eyes. Then she lifted Thrustworthy an inch off the turf and set it down again, which from Sam was as good as a salute. “Good,” Sam said. “Somebody should be.”

Dinah nodded once, and neither of them said anything more.

For a while after that, nobody said anything at all.

The lanterns ticked. Out in the pasture, the large unseen thing that had been grazing when they landed went on grazing, and the smell of cut grass lay over everything like a blanket someone had thrown over a bed without smoothing it. Laura stood in it with all three of her and could not think of a single thing to do with her hands.

It was Dawn who moved first.

She was still in her wedding dress, and she reached into nothing, and came back out with a roll wrapped in a linen napkin, the kind the Mildreds had piled into baskets on every table at lunch. She must have tucked it away for later. She crossed to Chloe, folded Chloe’s fingers around it, and held them closed there with both hands.

“Eat that,” Dawn said.

It was the first ordinary sentence anybody had said since the grass came up under them, the kind of sentence that gets said in kitchens, and Laura felt it go through the glade like a window opening in a hot room.

Chloe looked down at the roll. “Dawn, I’m— you should have it, if you—”

Dawn didn’t let go. “Chloe.”

“Okay.” Chloe’s mouth wobbled and then steadied. “Okay. I’ll eat it.” She unwrapped a corner of the napkin, looked at the bread for a long second, and took a small bite, and Dawn’s ears, which had been straight up since the Hall, came down about an inch.

Laura reached again. She had promised herself she wouldn’t, and she did anyway, as you keep pressing a bruise to see whether it still hurts.

“It’s still doing it,” Laura said. All three of her, one voice, low. “Here, and farther than anything. Both. The same as before.” She swallowed. “I keep reaching harder and it doesn’t… it’s stopped changing anything. It’s like knocking on a door and hearing the knock come back from both sides.”

Riley’s hair had lifted off her shoulders again, just barely. “Mine too. Same answer. It won’t pick one.”

Myra had turned toward Laura, and her ears had come up off her hair. “The silver’s still in you,” Myra said. “Right through you. Same as the first time I ever felt you.” She hesitated. “That’s all I’ve got. It’s there. I can’t tell you anything else about it. I wish I could.”

It was not an answer, only a fact, and Laura could feel the whole glade wanting more from it and getting nothing. But it was there, and she held on to that the way she had held on to the word alive.

“Mine works.”

Dawn said it quietly. She was still standing by Chloe, one hand on Chloe’s arm, and she wasn’t looking at anybody.

“That’s the thing,” Dawn said. “Mine’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. He needs help. It’s been telling me since the floor changed under us. Over and over.” Her ears had gone flat against her head. “It doesn’t stop. I’ve been pushing it down since we got here, because I can’t do anything with it. It just keeps saying he needs help.”

“Oh, Dawn,” Marissa whispered. She still had Emi in her arms, all six of Emi’s hands knotted in the back of her dress. “This whole time?”

Dawn nodded, once.

Across the glade, Erin had stopped moving. Laura saw it happen. Erin had been standing with her cut hand folded into the other, and now both hands came apart and hung at her sides, and she turned her head slowly toward Dawn as if Dawn had said something in a language she only half knew.

“Say that again,” Erin said. “He needs help.”

Dawn’s ears went flatter. “He needs help.”

Erin’s hands closed. “Then why am I still here?”

Nobody answered. Erin looked down at herself, at her own feet in the grass, as if she expected them to be somewhere else. “Whenever he needs me,” Erin said, “I’m just there. I don’t decide. It doesn’t ask me. It has never once missed.” Her voice had gone flat, the way it did when something was about to crack underneath it. “He needs help, and I’m standing in a field.” She pressed the heel of her hand into her breastbone. “It hasn’t taken me. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it hasn’t.” With her feet still in the grass, she looked like a woman who had reached for the banister in the dark and found the wall.

Laura had turned at the first word, and she hadn’t looked away from Erin since. “I don’t know either,” she said. “But if it ever does tug at you, you go. You don’t wait for any of us, and you don’t stop to check we’re all right. You go. Sam and I got the bond.” Erin’s jaw worked. Then she nodded, once, and folded her arms across her chest.

Claire had been kneeling on the grass since they landed, and at some point Liesa had got up and gone to Sam and Claire had stayed where she was. Her ears were still flat to her skull. Her hand was still pressed to her breastbone, just below the collar of her dress, the way it had been since the first moment on the grass. Now she took it away. She got to her feet with the notebook already open, and wrote, and turned the page around to face them.

He’s afraid. Not for himself. For us.

Laura’s breath caught. She had felt the fear. She had felt nothing else, all night. Claire’s bond carried more than hers now, however. Claire’s pen kept moving.

Confused. Dread. Horror.

She stopped. Her pen hovered. Then she wrote one more word and held it up without looking at it herself.

Grief.

Nobody asked what for. Laura didn’t want to know what for. She tried not to wonder whom, and could not tell whether she was managing it. Then Claire’s ears came straight up.

It happened all at once, both of them snapping upright, and her tail lifted off the grass behind her. She bent over the notebook and wrote fast, pressing so hard the pen scratched.

Wait. Surprised. Just now. A lot.

She looked up at them, eyes wide and faintly glowing, then back down, and wrote more slowly.

Relief. And trust. Careful trust.

“Trust who?” Norah said. Claire shook her head and wrote.

I don’t know.

Laura reached for him herself, hard, as fast as she could. What came back was what always came back now: where he was, which was nowhere and here, and how afraid. Whatever had surprised him, the bond hadn’t carried it down to her. It carried almost nothing anymore.

Claire stood looking at her own page for a moment. Then she turned to a fresh one and wrote for longer, and turned it around, and this time she didn’t hold it up to the whole glade. She held it toward Sam.

What happens to the bond now? The harem one. If he’s wherever he is.

In Marissa’s arms, Emi lifted her face.

“I didn’t even—” Emi said. “I’ve been thinking about him. I didn’t even think about that one.” One of her hands came loose from Marissa’s dress and pressed flat against her own chest.

Laura looked at Emi. “Part of it’s already covered,” she said. “I’m the Consort. That makes me a backup carrier on the bond by default. I have been since the day Arabella made me one.” She shrugged.

Norah nodded slowly. “Okay. So that’s it.”

“It’s not the only one.” Sam said it to Claire, and then she looked up. “He came to me this morning,” Sam said. “Before any of it. He asked me to carry it if anything ever cut him off from you.” She rolled the handle of Thrustworthy under her palm. Liesa had gone still with her hand on Sam’s back.

“This morning,” Liesa said slowly. “Is why you held him so long. After the toast.”

Sam didn’t answer that. She didn’t have to. Liesa’s hand stayed where it was.

“He did the same with me.” Erin said it flatly, to nobody. Her arms had folded across her chest. “Under his breath, in the middle of our dance this afternoon.” She let out a breath through her nose.

Laura stood in the middle of it and put it together, and it came together so fast and so cleanly that for a second she thought she might be sick. “He didn’t do that twice by accident,” Laura said.

They turned to her. All of them. She didn’t notice yet that they did.

“He asked Sam this morning. He asked Erin this afternoon. He already had me.” Laura’s voice was almost steady, and she hated that too. “He knew something was coming to take him out of the way. He knew, or at least feared it, and he set three of us down to hold it so that whatever happened, somebody would still be holding it.” She stopped. “And one of the three of us is me. The one they came for.”

The household answered that all at once, and nobody decided to. It came out of all of them together, a dozen voices overlapping, no two saying the same thing, and Laura caught pieces of it without being able to say whose voice had which piece—“Of course he did,” and “That idiot,” and “He suspected,” and a sound that wasn’t a word at all. Then it ran out like a wave running back off sand, and left the glade quieter than before.

“Laura,” Myra said. She said it without any particular weight, lightly, like a remark about the weather. “I can feel where every person in this glade is pointed,” Myra said. “Right now. It’s sharper down here than it’s ever been. There are so many of us.” Her head tilted, as if she were listening to something. “All of it’s aimed at one place.” She didn’t point. “It’s you,” Myra said.

All three of her turned at once to look behind her, as if Myra might have meant someone standing there, and there was nobody behind her but Sumiku, with her wings folded and her naginata held level in all four hands and her glowing eyes fixed on Laura’s face, like everyone else’s.

“Me,” Laura said.

It was not a question but something she had stepped on in the dark.

“No,” Laura said. “No. I can’t—” The three of her were still. Only her voice moved. “I can’t find my own husband. I have been reaching for him since we got here and I can’t find him. I have never been this scared in my life. Not in the river. Not ever.” She heard her voice climb and let it. “It should be Sam. It should be Erin. Not me. Not tonight.”

“No,” Sam said.

There was no joke in it anywhere. Laura waited for one and it didn’t come.

“I don’t want it,” Sam said. “I’ve never wanted it. I’ve said so before, to people who asked me a lot more nicely than you’re asking now, and I meant it every time.” She lifted Thrustworthy off the turf and walked, and stopped at the right side of the nearest of Laura, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. “This is where I’m going to be. Right here. That’s the job.”

Laura shook her head, all three of her at once. “Sam, you’re the one with the sword. You always have a plan. You—”

Sam didn’t even turn her head. “I’ve got your back. You do the rest.”

“Laura.” It was Erin. She hadn’t moved from where she stood, arms still folded, and she didn’t raise her voice at all. Of everyone in the glade she sounded the most like herself.

“You’ve been doing it since we landed,” Erin said. “Nobody asked you to. Nobody had to.” Her eyes didn’t leave Laura’s face. “You said he was alive and every one of us turned around. You told Sam she didn’t get to call it not holding, and she stopped. You asked Dinah the only question anybody on this grass wanted asked. You told me to go if Andy calls me.” She shrugged, barely. “I’ve been watching it for ten minutes.”

“I—” Laura said, and that was as far as it went.

She stood there with all three of her mouths half open and nothing in any of them, and she understood that she had lost, and she had not even been allowed to finish arguing.

The howling came across the glade before she could find anything else to say.

It came from somewhere up and away, a long rising note that bent in the middle and did not stop. It was farther off than the Dance Hall had been. It was not as far off as it had been a minute ago. Out in the pasture, the grazing thing stopped grazing.

Every head turned toward it.

Dinah’s ears had gone flat against her skull. “That’s them,” Dinah said. “The Howling Ones.” She didn’t look away from the sound. “They’re coming down here.”

Nobody moved. The lanterns went on ticking on their hooks, and under the small sound of them the howl came on. Sumiku was the first to answer her, and she did it without turning around.

She hadn’t moved from her place behind Laura. Her wings had lifted a little off her back at the first note of the howl, and now they held there, half open, like a hawk’s on a fence post before it decides. Her eyes were on the dark above the far lanterns, where the sound was coming from, and they did not leave it.

“This one hears them,” Sumiku said. “She will be here when they arrive.”

Sam was already moving.

She didn’t wait to be agreed with. She went through the glade with Thrustworthy low in one hand, pointing with the other, and her voice had gone short and flat and certain, the voice she had used to run the scavenger hunt, with every joke taken out of it.

“Chloe, Liesa, Claire, Emily. Back there, by the big tree. Marissa, you’ve got Emi. Dawn, Katherine, Eden, with them.” Sam didn’t look to see if anybody went. “Norah, you’re on my left. Sumiku, right. Riley, Myra—with Laura. Stay on her. Erin—”

“Stop,” Dinah said.

She said it loudly enough to cut straight across Sam, and Sam stopped.

Dinah held up both hands. “Listen to me. Just for a second, and then you can do whatever you want.” She pointed back along the lantern path, the way she had come. “The Gentle Hearth. It’s at the very heart of the Garden. White stone, open beams, a fire in the middle that hasn’t gone out in as long as anybody down here can remember. It’s the deepest room we’ve got.” She took a breath. “And I’m not offering it because it has walls. Those things will go through walls. I’m offering it because it’s the one place Harper and her wives and Mona and her people were asked to hold. Specifically. Everybody else down here who could walk is already in there. Marie’s there.” Her eyes went briefly to Myra and back. “It’s the only defended ground in the whole Garden. Anybody who isn’t fighting, that’s where you should be.”

At the edge of Laura’s sight, Myra’s tails, which had been held rigid since the Hall, came down half an inch and stayed there.

Riley’s head had come round the other way, toward the path Dinah had pointed down, and it stayed there.

“JJ,” Riley said. It came out too fast and too thin, nothing like the flat voice she kept for bad news, and her hair had lifted off her shoulders all at once.

Laura didn’t need to ask how she knew. Whatever had gone wrong with Riley’s sense of Andy tonight, it still had JJ.

“He’s in there too.” Riley wasn’t asking anybody. “He’s been over there the whole time. He hasn’t moved. I could feel him the whole time, and I let him—” She stopped. Started again. “They’re coming down here. And he’s over there, and he isn’t with me.”

“Riley.” Dinah turned to her, and her voice dropped into the level one she had used over Erin’s knuckles. “He’s all right. He’s in the Hearth, with three of the Garden Mildreds.”

“Mildred,” Riley said.

“Mildred.” Dinah didn’t soften it. “I asked her whether she’d fight for the Hearth if it came to that. She wouldn’t say. She never says.” One ear flicked. “I asked about him, too, and that one she answered. Her words: ‘No one takes the new flesh-thing but his spawner.’” Her mouth went crooked. “Spawner’s you, in case that wasn’t clear.”

Riley’s hands had closed at her sides. “I don’t know what she is,” Riley said. “Nobody does. I don’t know what she’d do if something came through a wall for him.”

Chloe answered her from beside Dawn, with Dawn’s hand still on her arm, and she sounded almost apologetic about it. “I know it’s weird,” Chloe said. “I know. She sent me that awful little figure, for mine, and I kept it, and I don’t even know why I kept it.” She looked at Riley. “But with JJ? I’d trust her. I don’t know why. I just would.”

Riley looked at her for a long moment and said nothing, which from Riley was not agreement. But her hair came down most of the way to her shoulders, and when she turned back toward the far lanterns, she turned all the way.

Nobody moved toward the path.

Laura didn’t either. It was the safest place in the Garden, and she believed Dinah about that, and she was also the one thing in the Garden they were coming for. Whatever she carried into that room of white stone, she would be carrying straight to Marie, and to JJ, and to everyone else in there who could walk. She didn’t say it. Nobody was going anywhere anyway.

Dawn let go of Chloe’s arm and turned to face Dinah properly. Her ears were up, and her chin was up with them.

“Thank you,” Dawn said. “We’re not going. You knew we weren’t before you asked.”

Katherine had been standing at the back of the glade with Eden against her side since they landed. Now she stepped away from Eden and planted both feet in the grass, square, a little apart, as though the ground might pitch under her. She reached out to her left and took Dawn’s hand. She reached out to her right, and Emi, who had slipped out of Marissa’s arms at the first note of the howl, was there, and Katherine took her hand too.

Then she didn’t move at all.

She stood there naked in the lantern light between the two of them, holding on, and looked at Dinah, and waited. It was not a protest and not a plea. It was an answer, given in the only language she had, and nobody in the glade needed it translated.

Dinah looked at her for a long moment. “Okay,” Dinah said quietly. “I hear you, Katherine.” She looked at the rest of them, one after another, and whatever she found in their faces made her ears go flat. “Okay. I’m done asking.”

“Thank you for asking,” Laura said. She meant it. Then she went back to where she had stopped as though nothing had happened.

Behind the line that was starting to form, Chloe and Liesa and Emily had drawn in close together near the trunk of the big tree, and Marissa, who had let Emi go without seeming to notice, had an arm around Liesa’s waist now instead. Claire and Eden stood with them, Claire with one hand pressed back against her breastbone, Eden almost too straight, her hair falling to her ankles.

Norah reached into the air beside her hip and brought out her escrima sticks.

They were the same pair she had carried into the Hall: steel, battered, a little dull at the ends, the grips wrapped in tape gone the kind of gray that only comes from a great many sweaty palms. She settled one in each hand and looked at them, and her mouth went thin.

“These went straight through them upstairs,” Norah said. Flat. Not asking anybody for anything. “Both of them. Every time. Didn’t do a thing.”

Then she set her feet anyway, shoulder-width, heels dug into the turf. They were the heels she had worn to the wedding, and she had never once in Laura’s memory looked less steady in them than anyone else did in sneakers. The transformation that made her need them made her better in them, not worse; she could run in them, fight in them, cross sand in them. She rolled her shoulders once and brought the useless sticks up into a guard, because standing there with empty hands was worse.

“This one’s weapon is Hinode-no-Saku,” Sumiku said. Two of her four hands moved on the shaft of the naginata, turning it a few degrees so that the lantern light ran down the blade. “Amaterasu-no-Ōkami put it into this one’s hands herself.” A pause. “It is not an ordinary weapon.”

Riley let out a slow breath. “I believe you,” she said.

Sam went still. Laura watched it happen on her face: Norah’s sticks, going through nothing; Thrustworthy, opening one of them like a sheet; Sumiku’s voice saying not ordinary. She put it together out loud, slowly, as if she were setting down pieces on a table to see whether they made a shape.

Her eyes went to Norah’s hands. “Norah’s went through them. Sam's didn’t. And Sumiku's isn’t ordinary.” She looked at Thrustworthy, and then up, around the glade, at all of them. “So. Whose weapon here isn’t ordinary?”

She thought of a plain wooden box with a tag tied to its lid.

Erin answered her without a word at first. Laura hadn’t noticed the handgun come back. It must have come back at the first note of the howl—it was in Erin’s hands now, held low and level the way she had held it all night. Erin looked down at it. Then she opened her hand, and the gun was gone—back into nothing, the trick run in reverse for the second time tonight—and she didn’t reach after it.

“It’s only a gun,” Erin said. She said it flatly, and it cost her something, and she didn’t let it show.

“And these are only sticks,” Norah said, and lifted her own useless pair an inch, and let them drop again.

Emi came forward. She didn’t say anything at all. She let go of Katherine’s hand, gently, and crossed the grass to Norah with two of her six hands held out in front of her, and in those two hands were two escrima sticks.

They were the length of Norah’s steel ones—near enough—and they sat in Emi’s palms at the same angle, with the same weight to them. But they were not steel. They were clear, like glass, and there was light inside them, faint and moving, like the last of a sunset seen through water. When Emi held them out, the light slid down their length and pooled at the ends.

Norah stared at them. Then, slowly, she let her steel pair drop onto the grass, and took the new ones. She turned them over. She turned them back. She let the weight settle into her wrists, and her eyebrows went up.

Norah shook her head slowly. “They’re the same. The weight, the balance—they’re exactly the same as mine.” She swung one, short and tight, and the light inside it followed the swing a half second behind, as if it had to catch up. “Emi. Where did these come from?”

Emi’s hands folded, two by two by two, in front of her.

“The Forest.” Emi’s voice was soft and even. “It provides, sometimes.” She looked at the sticks in Norah’s hands, not at Norah. “I’ll go and talk to it after this. See whether it can give any more.” A small pause. “That will take a little time.”

Sam nodded. “Then when there’s a minute, do that. I’ll take anything it gives you. As many as it’ll give.” Emi nodded, once, and went back to Katherine, and Katherine’s hand found hers again without either of them looking.

Riley had been quiet through all of it. Now she said, “My hair works on them.”

Every head turned. She said it carefully. Laura could hear her choosing each word the way she chose every word, knowing none of them could be anything but true.

“Upstairs,” Riley said. “When I was standing over Laura. One of them came for her face, and I put my hair into it.” Her hair lifted off her shoulders as she said it, a dozen dark ropes of it stirring at once. “It took hold. Not the way that sword took hold, not for long. But it caught. It didn’t go through. They felt it.” She was quiet a moment. “It was like closing my hand on cold water and having the water stay. I watched the thing feel it.”

Nobody said anything. It was the first thing all night that had come back from the Hall with good news in it. Sam looked at her. Then she nodded, slowly, the way a person nods at a number that has finally come out right after a long column of arithmetic.

“Okay,” Sam said. “Then you’re on the line too. The sword, the naginata, Norah’s new pair, your hair.” She looked around the glade. “That’s more than we had five minutes ago.”

It was Myra who spoke next, and it was the last thing any of them expected. “I have one too,” Myra said.

Laura turned to her, all three of her at once. “You have one? Since when?”

Myra held out her right hand, palm up, the way she did at the breakfast table when she wanted someone to pass her the salt and didn’t want to fuss about which direction it was in. The white cane came to it. It didn’t come out of nothing the way Norah’s sticks had. It was simply in her hand, as if it had been there all along and the rest of them had failed to notice, and her fingers closed around it without any searching.

“Arabella made it,” Myra said. “Out of three gifts from three different Hosts and Contestants, merged into this one thing.” She turned it once in her grip, and the lantern light slid down its length. “I haven’t needed it to get around in a long time. I carry it for other people, so they don’t worry.” One corner of her mouth went up. “But I can swing it like a staff. And if it’s hers, it isn’t ordinary.”

Erin snorted, short and sharp. “You’ve been bringing a weapon to breakfast.”

“Every day,” said Myra.

Laura found that her own hands had gone still at her sides. She thought of the box again, the plain one with the tag tied to its lid, and this time she knew why.

“I have something too,” Laura said. “It’s going to take me a moment to get to it.”

Sam nodded at her. “Take your moment. Nobody’s going anywhere without you.”

Laura closed her eyes. She brought herself in. The two farther of her came walking in toward the nearest, and then there was the moment where she stopped being three and had to be one, and that hurt. It was like being folded along creases that did not want to be there. Her jaw set. Her breath stopped halfway in and stayed there. There was only one of her standing on the grass, and one of her was so much less room than she was used to that for a second she couldn’t find the edges of herself.

She let the breath out.

Then she reached into the air at her side and brought out Shar’s gauntlets.

They were heavier than they looked, soft dark leather that laced to the elbow, and along the back of each hand ran a row of long curved blades that caught the lantern light and held it. They had been made for someone smaller than Andy—for her, Laura had understood from the first day he put them in her hands. She pulled them on and laced them, the blades clicking softly together as she worked.

Then she let go.

She came apart the way she always came apart, easily, gratefully, like a held breath going out. The two of her stepped away from the one, and she was three again, and each of the three held up her hands in the lantern light to look.

All six gauntlets. All six hands.

She had been almost sure. She had merged twice already that day, in the Sunroom for the makeup, and on the hill, to take the seventh ring, and had split back out of it with makeup on each face and the ring on every one of her left hands. But a ring was a small thing, and these were not, and she hadn’t known until now whether the rule held for something with blades on it.

It held.

“Shar sent them weeks ago.” She flexed the fingers of the nearest right hand, and the blades glittered. “She said I would know what to do with them when it mattered.”

Riley was looking at the blades. “Whoever Shar is,” she said slowly, “I’m starting to like her more and more.”

“There’s something else.” Laura hesitated, then made herself say it plainly. “I’ve got part of what he has. Command’s in there. Weaker than his.” She looked at Sam, then at Sumiku. “It won’t hold them, not something that belongs to Nergal. A breath, maybe, and that’s all it’ll be good for.” She swallowed. “But a breath is long enough to leave one of them open. For you. Or for her.”

“A breath’s plenty,” Sam said. “Give me a breath and I’ll do the rest.”

Sumiku inclined her head a little, without taking her eyes off the dark. “This one needs less than a breath,” she said.

“I’m going to use something.” It was Chloe. She had come a few steps out from under the big tree, away from Liesa and Emily and Dawn and Marissa, and she was standing on the grass in the dress she had worn to the wedding. She reached out, and brought her hand back out holding something else.

It was a sweater. Nothing more than that: a plain knit sweater, soft and a little shapeless, the color of oatmeal, the kind of thing you find folded at the bottom of a drawer the first cold morning of the year. Chloe looked at it for a second as if she were checking that it was the right one. Then she pulled it on over her head, over the dress, and tugged the hem down, and pushed the sleeves up her forearms.

Chloe let out a breath that was almost a laugh. She smoothed the front of the sweater down with both hands. “It’s the Coat of Courage,” Chloe said. “J sent it to me in the fan mail.” Her voice was steady, and Laura could hear how much work that was. “It only does one thing. It makes me braver than I actually am.” She looked up at them. “So that’s where I’m going to be, right back there, and I’m not going anywhere.”

Dawn nodded, firm. “Then keep it on all night. Don’t take it off for anything.”

Chloe nodded, and went back to the tree, and stood there with her arms folded across the oatmeal-colored wool as if it were holding her up. Maybe it was.

Erin moved next.

She hadn’t said anything since the gun went away. She had been standing a little apart from the rest of them with her hands empty and her jaw working, and Laura had watched the stubbornness build in her the way she had watched it build a hundred times—over a card game, over a conversation, over whose turn it was to be right—until there was no room in Erin for anything else. She didn’t want to stand here with nothing. She wasn’t going to.

She reached into the air and brought out a small cloth pouch, tied at the neck with string.

“Erin?” Sam said.

Erin didn’t look around. “Give me a second.”

She walked the front of the line with it, once, from one end to the other. As she went she worked the string loose, and put her hand into the pouch, and scattered what was in it across the ground ahead of them in a wide, careful arc. Seeds. Laura heard them pattering down on the grass like the first drops of a rain that hadn’t decided yet.

At the far end of the arc Erin stopped. She folded the pouch into her fist. Then she went down on one knee at the edge of the grass, her green skin gone gold where the lantern light touched it, and put her free hand flat on the ground.

She spoke to it. Not to them.

“Okay,” Erin said to the grass. “You don’t know me well. I know.” Her voice was low and flat and absolutely stubborn. “I’m asking anyway. Help me hold them.”

For a second nothing happened at all. Then Myra drew in a sharp breath.

“Oh,” Myra said. “Erin, it’s lighting up, all of it, out to where you walked.” Her face had turned toward the arc, and her ears were straight up. “It’s all green.”

The grass around Erin leaned toward her.

There was no wind. There hadn’t been any wind in the glade all night. The grass leaned anyway, every blade of it, in toward the place where her hand lay flat on the ground, and the low shrubs at the edge of the lanterns leaned with it, slowly, as if they had all turned at once to listen to someone speaking softly. And along the whole length of the arc she had walked, the ground broke open. It broke in a hundred places at once, little dark splits in the turf, and out of every one of them something green came pushing up into the lantern light.

Erin looked up. Her face was wet, and she didn’t seem to have noticed.

“It’s answering,” Erin said. “The Garden. It’s answering me.” She laughed once, a raw, startled sound. “I never asked it anything before, not once, and I never even thought to ask.” She looked down at her own hand on the ground, at the grass bending around it. “It’s been listening the whole time.”

“Is it going to hold them?” Norah asked.

“I don’t know.” Erin pressed her hand flatter against the ground, and the grass pressed in around it. “It’s going to try.”

“Then keep it talking,” Sam said. Her voice had gone rough. “Keep it talking as long as it’ll talk.”

Dinah was already moving. She had stood at the edge of the glade through all of it, watching, and now she turned toward the dark beyond the lanterns, toward the long grass of the pasture and whatever was lying in it.

“I’m going out to the Amber Pastures,” Dinah said. “There are people in the grass out there who can’t run. Somebody has to lead them to the Hearth.” She looked back at them once more. “Anybody who gets hurt—Erin, Claire, Chloe, Eden, Emily, you know where. Bring them to me. I’ll be there or on my way back to it.”

Laura thought of her mother. She didn’t know where Sarah was. Out there in the grass, or in the Hearth with Marie. She knew Dinah her her, so she let herself hope, just that far and no further, that wherever her mother was, she was all right. She lifted a hand. “Go on. Watch yourself out there.”

Dinah nodded, then left at a run, the way she had come, and the lanterns swung on their hooks behind her as she passed. At the edge of the group Eden stood watching her go until the dark took her.

Sam turned back to the line. She didn’t make a speech. She looked at each of them, one after another, and set Thrustworthy up in front of her in both hands.

“Nobody gets taken,” Sam said. “That’s the plan.”

The household answered her all at once. It came from the line and from behind it, from the tree and the grass and the dark, a dozen voices that didn’t wait for one another and didn’t match—“Nobody,” and “Nobody gets taken,” and “Yeah,” and a sound from somewhere at the back that was only breath. Laura did not say it. She opened her mouths to, and found she could not make it come out as anything but a wish, and closed them again.

Then the line formed.

Sumiku’s wings came up and spread wide behind her, and the naginata came level in all four hands. Norah set her feet in the heels she had worn to the wedding, and the crystal sticks came up in front of her with the light moving in them. Riley’s hair lifted off her shoulders and divided itself into a dozen thick dark locks that hung in the air around her like the roots of a tree turned upside down. Myra brought the white cane up in both hands and held it across her body like a staff. Erin stood up out of the grass with the Garden still bending toward her, the new green along the arc already knee-high and climbing.

Laura was still closing the line, the last of her stepping into place beside Sam with the claws coming up, when the howling came down through the lantern-light on top of them.