Waiting in the Garden

Laura stood in the middle of the torn grass. The lantern path left the glade between two banks of old hedge and bent away toward the heart of the Garden, and every lantern along it hung still on its hook. Past the last of them the dark ran on toward the pasture. Nothing moved in it. Nothing whispered. The quiet at her ear, where the voices had been, felt less like peace than like a room with the door left open.

The cold had gone out of her when Dawn’s light came through, and it hadn’t come back. What it had left behind was an ache, the kind that settles into a body after it has been folded smaller than it was built to go and then let out all at once. All three of her stood a little apart on the grass, not quite steady. The gauntlets were still on all six of her hands. She didn’t take them off.

Riley’s lips were moving. She was standing where she had stood when the fight ended, facing the dark past the lanterns, and she wasn’t speaking to anyone. Laura watched her for a while before she understood that Riley was counting, and then that she had come to the end of whatever she was counting toward, because Riley stopped, and shut her eyes for a second, and began again from the start.

The others had begun to drift in without deciding to. Sam came back from the front of the arc with Thrustworthy held low, the cobalt plate still on her and the corgi over her heart catching the lantern-light. Myra came in off the left end with the cane planted at every step, as if she no longer trusted the grass to stay where it was. Erin got up off her knees, slowly, with a hand on the turf to push herself up—the first time Laura had seen her need one. Out past where she had knelt, the last of the coils had sunk back into the turf, and the split ground they had come up through was already easing shut, a seam you could have walked across in daylight and never known had been open.

Emily hadn’t moved from Norah. She knelt in the grass with both hands flat on Norah’s ribs, and Norah lay with her eyes open, looking straight up at the lanterns, breathing deeply, one of the crystal sticks still closed in her fist.

Under the tree, Claire had her hand at her breastbone again. She was reading him—Laura didn’t have to ask to know it. She reached down the bond herself, for the tenth time or the fiftieth, and got what she always got now. Alive. Afraid. Here, and farther away than anything she had a word for, both at once.

She didn’t know what Claire was getting. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Then something came down the lantern path. It was not hurrying. It came around the bend under one lantern and then the next, at a pace that looked as if it would neither slow nor quicken for anything it found in front of it: a tall woman in white, a uniform resembling a nurse's, with a small gold badge on her breast that caught the light as she walked. Mildred – Service… has a favorite guest, after all. Her hair fell in heavy dark waves with a thread of violet through them, and her face was done, smoky at the eyes and crimson at the mouth, and entirely blank.

Every weapon in the glade came halfway up and stopped.

Mildred walked out of the hedges and looked at them. She looked at the torn turf and the half-closed ground, at Sam’s sword and Riley’s hair and the claws on Laura’s hands, at the woman lying in the grass with Emily bent over her. None of it made the smallest difference to her face. She might have been looking at a room that had been left untidy—by guests, and not the kind who would be asked back.

“I am sent from the Gentle Hearth,” the Mildred said. “By Doctor Hornblower. For the hurt, and with word.”

There was nothing in her voice at all.

“Just Norah.” Emily didn’t take her hands off Norah’s ribs. She had to clear her throat to go on. “She’s the only one. She got one straight through the shoulder, and she’s—she’s warming up, it’s getting better, I can feel it getting better. But she can’t get up yet. She hasn’t even talked.”

Mildred crossed the grass to them. She did not hurry for that, either. She stopped at Norah’s feet and looked down at her, for exactly as long as it took to see everything there was to see, and not a moment past it.

Norah’s free hand came up off the grass and found Emily’s wrist and closed around it.

“Norah,” Emily whispered. She looked down at the hand. “She can take you to Dinah. You’d be warm. You’d be—”

Norah’s grip tightened. Her head moved once against the turf, left and back. She did not look at Mildred.

Mildred watched the hand on Emily’s wrist, and turned back to the rest of them. “The Hearth held,” she said.

Somewhere in the grass behind Laura, Chloe made a small sound.

“The other seven came to the Hearth. They did not get through.” The Mildred’s tone was the one she might have used to read out a delivery. “Host Harper and her flesh-sharers, and Mistress Cummings and her Contestants, put them down between them. Every flesh-being on that side who was hurt is whole again. They are walking.”

The other seven. The half of the Fourteen that had never come down on this grass. Laura had wondered where they were once, at the very start, with the first of the ones who came here dropping over the lanterns at her, and then there hadn’t been room in her to wonder about anything. They had gone to the Hearth—to Marie, to Laura’s mother, and to every other woman in the Garden who could walk.

And Harper’s people had stood in front of them. And held.

Sam let Thrustworthy’s point down into the turf and leaned her whole weight on the hilt, and the plate settled around her with a sound like a sigh. “Good. Okay. That’s good. That’s the first good thing anybody’s said since the bell.”

Riley had turned around from the pasture. “Whole again,” she murmured. “You said whole again. So some of them got hurt.”

Mildred did not answer. She didn’t seem to think it needed one. Sam straightened off the sword. “Where are they now? The seven at the Hearth. Harper put them down. Put them down where?”

“They are not anywhere,” Mildred said.

Nobody said anything.

“They were polymorphed, but their bond with Nergal does not allow them this reprieve. They come back when he sends them back.” Mildred said it without arranging it, the way a clerk reads a figure off a form she did not fill in. “That is his to decide. There is no interval you can count on.”

Riley’s lips went still. Erin had come in far enough to stand at the edge of them, green and bare in the lantern-light, her arms folded tight across her chest. “Great. That’s great. So he’s just holding them. In his pocket. Until he feels like it.”

Under the tree, Claire had gone still.

It was not anything Mildred had said. Claire wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at nothing, at a point in the grass a yard in front of her knees, and her ears had gone down flat. Not the snap they made when something frightened her, but a slow folding, as if they had grown too heavy to hold up. Her eyes had filled. Laura watched a tear go down one cheek, and Claire didn’t lift a hand to it, didn’t seem to know it was there.

Marissa’s fingers moved against Claire’s arm, quick and small, and she whispered something. Claire’s free hand answered: two short movements, then a third. Marissa’s face changed. She drew her arm in tighter, around Claire and Liesa both, and didn’t say anything out loud.

Laura reached down the bond.

Alive. Afraid. Both at once. Whatever Claire had just been handed, it hadn’t come down as far as Laura. Nothing did anymore. She stood in the grass with the fear roaring in the bond like wind in a chimney, the same as it had since the bell, and remembered what it was like to have more than that, and whether Claire would have traded some of it tonight for less.

“There is more,” Mildred said.

She said it to the glade in general, and her voice changed. It didn’t soften. It went flatter still—into something with no inflection of her own left in it at all, as though she had set herself to one side in order to carry a thing across the grass exactly as it had been put into her hands.

“Doctor Hornblower’s words,” the Mildred said. “‘Tell them before one of them tries. While he is acting as the creditor’s agent, in pursuit of what the Law is owed, he cannot be harmed. Not by anyone. Not by anything any one of them is carrying. Not by anything they have, or anything Harper has. Tell them that first, before they find it out the hard way.’”

For a moment nobody moved. Sam’s hand had gone white around the hilt. At the far edge of them Sumiku stood with Hinode-no-Saku grounded beside her and all four of her hands still, and Emi stood at her shoulder with all six of hers folded, looking at Mildred with the calm of a woman who had stopped expecting good news some time ago and had found she could live without it.

Laura thought of Andy in the Hall, putting everything he had into that one blow, and the man not even rocking back on his heels.

“Of course he can’t,” Norah rasped.

It came up from the grass, flat and dry and a little hoarse—the first word out of her since she went down. She was still looking straight up at the lanterns. Emily made a sound somewhere between a laugh and something that wasn’t, and bent over her.

Sam went down on one knee beside them, plate and all, and the plate creaked at the joints. “Look who’s talking. Welcome back. You picked a hell of a line to come back on.”

“It was the right line.” Norah’s eyes moved at last, to Sam’s face and away. “Nothing else tonight’s gone the easy way. Why would he.”

Across the glade, Claire took her hand away from her breastbone. She wiped her face once, with the back of her wrist, as if she had just found out it was wet. Then she got up off the grass with the notebook already in her hand, and started toward them.

Marissa came after her. One of her hands trailed from Liesa’s shoulder as she got up, as if it hadn’t quite finished deciding to let go, and then it found Claire’s back and stayed there.

The rest of them made room without being asked. Claire didn’t write anything new. She stood in the middle of them in the lantern-light and leafed back through the notebook, past pages of her own small writing, past a sketch Laura caught only the corner of—until she came to a page she had written in the Archive, and she turned it around and held it up.

The letters were Claire’s careful block capitals, pressed into the paper hard enough to stand up on the other side of the page. She had gone over some of them twice.

WHERE THE LAW IS SILENT, THE EXECUTION IS TO BE GUIDED BY THE PRESENCE AND WILL OF THE ENFORCER.

Under it, smaller: Ereshkigal’s Law. Uncatalogued. Nobody has cited this.

Laura read it. Around her she watched the others read it, and most of their faces went back to the beginning of the line and read it through again, slower, the second time. Norah didn’t need to. Norah turned her head on the grass to look at it, just long enough to be sure it was the one she thought, and then looked back up at the lanterns.

The ones at the back couldn’t make it out. Liesa had half risen under the tree with the scroll clutched to her chest. Chloe was still sitting in the grass with Dawn against her. Katherine stood a little way off with Eden against her side.

Marissa read it to them. “‘Where the Law is silent, the execution is to be guided by the presence and will of the enforcer.’”

Under the tree, Liesa sat back down slowly with the scroll across her knees and her lips moving over the words a second time, trying them in English. Katherine didn’t move. Eden leaned into her, slow, with a roll of her hips—the only way her body would ever let her move toward anyone—and Katherine put her cheek down against the top of Eden’s head and kept it there.

“So she decides,” Laura said.

All three of her said it together, one voice.

“That was about edge cases, wasn't it? Anything the Law doesn’t cover,” Laura said, “Ereshkigal gets to decide. Whatever she wants. And it sticks. If she’s here.”

Claire nodded, and put the tip of her pen on the last line of it. Presence and will. She tapped presence twice. Then she added, but also: he is protected while collecting, and he has latitude in what he can do in the interest of collecting, unless he breaks a rule or Ereshkigal is here to supersede him.

Norah’s eyes were on the sky. “And she’s not here.” It came up from the grass flatter than Laura had ever heard her voice go. “That’s the whole shape of it,” Norah said. “Claire and I built half of this in the Archive. I’ve had it in my head ever since, going around. The only one who gets to rule on a thing the Law didn’t write down is Ereshkigal, and only if she’s standing here. In person. Right here.” She breathed out. “The only thing between us and her standing here is him. And now he can’t be touched while he’s doing the job. And he can spend those ghosts as many times as he wants. Send them, lose them, send them again.” Her fingers flexed on Emily’s wrist. “They’re not people to him. They never were.”

Nobody answered her right away. Laura looked down at Norah’s face in the lantern-light, still pale, and thought that she had never heard anything that reasonable sound so much like a door being shut.

“Then he will spend them,” Sumiku said, “and this one will cut them down. For as long as this one is standing.”

She said it simply, with no weight on any word of it, as though she were telling them where she meant to sit. She hadn’t moved from the edge of the group. The naginata stood upright beside her, and two of her four hands rested on it.

“And when you’re not standing,” Norah said, “he’ll still have them.”

Sumiku did not argue with that. She inclined her head, barely, as if Norah had told her something she already knew.

Laura couldn’t look at any more of it. She looked at Mildred instead. Mildred hadn’t left. She stood a little apart from them, at the edge of the lantern-light where she had stopped once the message was over, her hands folded in front of her, as if waiting to be dismissed and not expecting to be. Her face gave nothing—the only face in the glade that didn’t.

“Is my mother all right?” Laura asked. It came out of all three of her at once, small. Mildred turned her head.

“Sarah,” Laura said. “Sarah Williams. She lives down here. She—” She didn’t know how to finish that for a woman who must already know every resident of the Garden by name and by room. “Is she all right?”

Mildred looked at her. For the first time since she had walked out of the hedges, she looked at one of them for longer than it took to see what was there.

“She is not alone,” Mildred said, surprisingly softly. “Someone else will be with her soon.” She said nothing else. It was not an answer, and she didn’t offer it as one.

Laura stood there and couldn’t say anything back. It wasn’t what she had asked. She knew it wasn’t. And it was the first thing anyone had said to her since the bell that had been meant kindly. It had come not from any of the women who loved her, but from the one mouth in the glade she would never have looked to for it, and it went into her at a place where she had no guard up at all.

Not alone. She didn’t know who. She didn’t know if it meant Mildred, or a neighbor, or Marie, or Sandra, or something she hadn’t thought of. She stood in the lantern-light and held on to the two words and didn’t ask for any more of them, in case asking made them smaller. She felt her eyes go hot, all six of them, and blinked until they stopped.

Behind her, in the grass, Dawn made a small sound. “Oh,” She breathed. She had lifted her face out of Chloe’s sweater for the first time since she sat down. “Oh. That’s… good. That’s good, isn’t it? That she’s got—” She stopped. Her ears, flat since the light, came up a little way, and went down again. “That’s good.”

Chloe’s hand kept moving in slow circles on her back.

Myra had turned her face toward the middle of them. She stood still, the cane planted in front of her and both hands folded on the head of it. “It’s different,” Myra said. “Than an hour ago.”

Laura looked at her.

Myra’s fingers shifted on the head of the cane. “An hour ago everybody was afraid. Fear’s bright. It’s loud. It jumps around. I could feel all of you jumping, every time they came near.” Her voice had dropped. “It’s not like that anymore. It’s not fear, exactly. It’s all gone the same color. All of you. Flat and gray, and it isn’t moving, like—” She stopped, and tried again. “Like it’s lying down. I don’t like it. I liked the fear better.”

Myra’s head turned a fraction toward the edge of the light. “She’s static. She always is. And out there there’s nothing.” She meant the dark past the lanterns. “I’d feel them. I felt them in the shadows, before. There isn’t one of them anywhere.”

“We’re tired.” Chloe whispered it into Dawn’s hair. “That’s all it is. Right? We’re just tired.” Then she lifted her head and looked across at Myra. “Right?”

Myra did not answer her.

Laura looked around at the rest of them and tried to see what Myra could feel. She couldn’t, of course. What she could see was Sam back on her feet, leaning on a sword she hadn’t lifted in half an hour; Erin with her arms locked across her chest; Emily’s hands holding Norah's and not moving from them. Nobody was shaking anymore. They had done that already, all of them, some of them twice. What was left over was the part that came after, and Laura didn’t have a name for it either.

Riley had not stopped counting. Laura had watched her lips move through all of it: through the Hearth and the message, through Norah and the notebook, through her mother. Now they stopped.

“That’s twice,” Riley said.

She said it flatly. She said everything flatly now.

Riley’s eyes didn’t leave the path. “A quarter of an hour, and then another one. Nothing’s come up the path. Nothing’s come out of the pasture. I thought if I counted, I’d know when. There isn’t a when. I keep getting to the end and starting over, and I’m not getting anywhere. It’s just a number that doesn’t mean anything.” Her hair drew in closer around her shoulders. “It doesn’t have a bottom.”

Laura reached down the bond, because it was the only other number she had. Alive. Afraid. Both at once.

And then, under that, something she hadn’t felt all night. The fear was there, the same flat roar that had filled the bond since the bell. Except that it wasn’t the same. It had come down. Not far. A notch, the kind of difference you can hear in the hiss of a radio before you can hear any voice in it.

She held still and checked it again. It stayed where it was.

She didn’t trust it. She was tired past the ends of her fingers, and she had been listening down that bond so hard and for so long that she could have imagined anything in it. It could be him. It could just as easily be the bond thinning further, going the way everything else in it had gone, until one day even the fear wouldn’t get through and there would be nothing left in it at all. She didn’t know which. She didn’t know how she would ever tell the difference.

“Then we stop counting,” Laura said to Riley. “We stop waiting on the path. Nobody’s going to tell us when.”

Riley looked at her for a long moment and did not argue.

Claire hadn’t written a word since Marissa read her notebook out. She had stood through all of it with the notebook held against her chest and her hand back at her breastbone, and her eyes had gone somewhere a long way off—and then they had come back.

Now she turned to a clean page.

She wrote one word on it, in front of all of them, in the same hard capitals. She pressed so hard on the last stroke that the pen went through the paper. Then she held it up.

OVERREACH.

The word stood on the page in the lantern-light, torn through at the end.

For a moment nobody said anything to it. Laura read it once and felt it go into her and find nothing to catch on. She knew it—they all did. It had been sitting on Claire’s pages ever since Andy’s visions, with a question mark after it. In the Banquet Hall, the afternoon Andy told them all eight of the fragments one after another, it had come at the very end, the one thing he couldn’t put a picture to. Laura had put it away with the rest of that afternoon, in a place she didn’t have to look at.

Sam looked at it for a long time. Then she let go of the sword entirely, and it stood up out of the turf on its own.

“Okay,” Sam said. “What’s that for?”

Claire drew a breath through her nose. But it was Erin who answered.

“It’s the one he said,” Erin muttered. “In the trance.” She hadn’t unfolded her arms, and her eyes stayed on the page instead of on any of them. “We spent an afternoon on it. Up at the Arches. Him and me. We sat on the stones and went around and around it and got nowhere. We thought it was the veiled woman’s thing. Or something to do with the beach. We never got further than that.” Erin’s jaw worked, as if she were chewing on the end of that afternoon and couldn’t get it to go down. “I don’t know why he said it. I still don’t.”

Claire turned back a page and wrote, fast, and turned it around. The veiled woman. The keeper of the door. She put debts of overreach in their own column. She wrote again. Not with debts of action. A separate line in the ledger. And again, slower, underlining as she went. A thing done past what you were sent to do is counted differently from the thing you were sent to do.

Laura read it twice. She thought of the veiled woman as Andy had told her, faceless, standing at a door that went nowhere and talking about debts like a bookkeeper at the end of a bad year. Ledgers and columns. Every time any of them had tried to think about the Law, it had turned into accounting, and every time it turned into accounting Laura had felt herself turn into a figure in a book she would never be allowed to read.

“A column,” Norah said from the grass. “Good. A column’s a weapon.”

Claire’s pen had already moved on. Laura watched her write the next thing. It came slower than the others. Halfway along the line Claire stopped, and her free hand came up off the page and went to her breastbone and pressed there, and something happened in her face.

Claire’s mouth set. Her ears came up and held there, level — steady rather than pricked in alarm — and for a moment something in her face settled. As if something had been decided. Not by her, Laura was almost sure.

If he goes past what he was sent for, what makes him untouchable might go with it.

She underlined might. Under it, in smaller letters:

And what’s left standing there is a man.

Laura looked at the last word and couldn’t look away from it. Man. Not the Law walking. Not a thing Andy’s best blow had broken against like water. A man, with a man’s weight, standing on a man’s legs, who could be knocked off them.

“A man can be cut,” Sumiku said.

Sumiku said it without heat. She stood at the edge of the group with Hinode-no-Saku upright beside her and her wings folded close against her back. “This one has cut a great many things tonight that were not men. A man is easier.”

Sam didn’t say anything. But Laura saw her eyes go to Thrustworthy, standing up out of the turf beside her, and stay there. The first of the eight fragments had been Sam’s: Sam with that sword in both hands, in a ruined square somewhere, and a bearded man in front of her. All of them had heard it in the Banquet Hall. None of them had said a word about it since, least of all Sam.

Liesa had come out from under the tree, the scroll rolled tight in one fist. She stood a little behind Sam’s shoulder. “But how do you make him go past?” Liesa said. “You goad a thing that is angry. He is not angry. He is not even in a hurry. In the Hall he was—” She searched for the word in English and didn’t like what she found. “Bored, almost. Polite. How do you goad a thing like that?”

Laura remembered him coming down the Hall. He hadn’t hurried once—he had walked the length of it at the pace of a man crossing his own garden, and the lights along his way had gone out one after another as he passed them, as if they were bowing. He had stopped to drag a bare hand along a fallen shard of the dome’s glass and hadn’t so much as looked at his palm afterward. Nothing in that Hall had been able to hurry him. Nothing had even made him raise his voice.

“Insult his mother,” Sam said.

Chloe let out half a breath that might have been the start of a laugh. It didn’t get any further. Nobody else even tried, and Sam hadn’t expected anybody to. She dragged an armored hand down over her face, and the plate grated on itself at the wrist.

“No. Sorry. Okay.” She took a breath and let it out. “You don’t goad him. He doesn’t do angry. He does patient. He walked into that Hall like he had all night and all of next week. So you don’t push on him. Pushing’s what he’s built for, you just bounce off.” She was working it out as she went, and Laura could see her working it, one hand opening and closing at her side. “You find the thing he can’t leave alone. And you put it where he can reach it.”

She stopped. Her face changed, and Laura knew before she opened her mouth again what she was going to say, because Sam had never once let a thing go unsaid just because it was going to hurt.

At the edge of the light the Mildred still stood with her hands folded. Nobody had dismissed her. Nobody had so much as glanced at her since she delivered her message. If she heard any of this, and she must have heard all of it, it went nowhere near her face.

“I’d rather not be the one to say this,” Marissa admitted.

They all turned toward her. She was standing just behind Claire with one hand resting flat on Claire’s back, and she didn’t seem to know she had put it there. Her voice was barely above a whisper, the kind that would have been lost in any room with more than two people talking in it, and in that quiet it carried anyway.

“I really would rather it wasn’t me,” Marissa said. “I—okay.” She took a breath. “In the Hall. When he came in. He was there for Laura, he said so. But before he said anything at all, he stopped on her.” Her eyes went to Laura and away. “On all three of her.”

Laura did not move. She remembered it. She had been standing in the middle of the Hall with her fear pinned at the very top of the bond, where it couldn’t climb any higher, and he had looked at her. Three, where the tablet names one. She had heard the words and felt nothing new, because there had been nowhere new for the fear to go. She had not thought about his face. She had not let herself.

Marissa’s hand moved on Claire’s back, a small circle, and stopped. “I know what it looks like when someone looks at you. All the different ways. I've felt it on my skin, more than once. And he didn’t look at her like she was a debt. He stopped. And he looked. He went from one of her to the next, and the next, and back again, and he took his time about it.” She swallowed. “I’ve been thinking about that since the Hall. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

“He came for her, though,” Chloe ventured. Her voice came up from the grass, gentle, almost apologetic, and her arms were still around Dawn. “Wouldn’t he look? I mean—isn’t that just him looking at the thing he came for?”

“Not like that.” Marissa said it more firmly than she had said anything all night, and then seemed to hear herself and pull back. “He looked at the others too. When he wanted to. At Myra, at Riley. He looked at them like he was reading a list.” Her fingers shifted on Claire’s back. “He looked at Laura like— I don’t know. Like a man looks at a thing he’d forgotten he used to collect.” She stopped, and started again, lower. “It’s in Claire’s transcripts. The Tales. Abi-Eshu, the first Master in Dilmun. He had a twin fetish. He was given a pair of twins. Alla and Anna. And then he took the rest of his own harem and made them into pairs as well. Himself. Every one of them.”

Alla and Anna.

“Seven matched pairs,” Marissa went on. “That’s what came through the doors of the Hall tonight.”

Nobody spoke.

“We all read it,” Marissa said. “I know we did. And I think every one of us put it down to leftovers. It was a season that ended seven thousand years ago. He died. He’s been whatever he’s been since. Why would a thing like that last?” Her voice had dropped until it was hardly there. “Then he stopped on Laura, and I couldn’t do anything with it. An hour ago it was just a thing I’d seen. There was nowhere for it to go.” Her eyes went to the notebook in Claire’s hands, to the torn word. “Now there’s that.”

Claire had turned the notebook back to herself while Marissa talked.

Laura watched her pen go down to the paper and stop there. She watched Claire’s face as Claire got to the end of Marissa’s thought, somewhere out ahead of Marissa, at the place Marissa had been walking toward and hadn’t said out loud. Claire’s ears went back. Her tail, which had been lying still in the grass, went once across it behind her, hard.

She wrote one word and turned the page, not to the circle, but to Marissa alone. Laura could see it anyway, from the nearest of her.

Laura.

It was underlined twice. The second line had gone through the paper. “I know,” Marissa murmured. “I know.”

“Just say it,” Laura said. “Or I will.” They looked at her. All three of her looked back at them, and she didn’t let any of her look away. “The Law lets him take my life,” she said. “That’s what he’s owed. That’s the whole of what it lets him do. It doesn’t let him do one other thing to me.” She heard her voice go steady, as it went when there was nowhere left for it to shake to. “So anything he does to me that isn’t that has already gone past his warrant.”

“That’s true,” Riley said. She looked at Laura, and her hair drew in close around her shoulders like a coat pulled tight. “That’s true,” Riley repeated, “and I hate it. I hate it and it’s still true.”

Myra had moved closer to Riley without seeming to notice she was doing it, and one of her tails had come around behind Riley’s legs and stayed there.

Claire turned to a clean page and wrote for a long time.

When she turned it around, the writing was smaller than before and as even as print, which was how she wrote when she was copying something down exactly. Laura knew what it was before she had read three words of it. They all did. They had sat in the Banquet Hall before the wedding and heard Andy tell every fragment, one after another, and this was the one none of them had said aloud since.

Two of Laura. Two other women with her, blurred. Nobody could make them out. All four bound. Reaching for each other across a gap they can’t cross. A bearded man. He opens their wounds. Again and again, carefully. He’s working at the space between the two Lauras. As if he’s looking for a seam in it.

Nobody moved.

Laura stood in the middle of the torn grass and read the two Lauras, and felt the space between her own bodies as though a hand had been laid flat in it. Twenty feet, at most—she had never once thought of it as a space. It was just where she was.

“It’s us.” Myra’s voice was so low it hardly reached them. The cane was planted in front of her and her hands were folded on the head of it, and they had gone white across the knuckles. “The other two. It’s Riley and me.” Myra didn’t turn toward anyone. “I’ve known since the Banquet Hall. I felt it when he said it, all the way through. I didn’t say, because saying it wasn’t going to change a thing.” Her voice caught and steadied. “It was us.”

Laura couldn’t look at Myra, so she looked at Claire. And saw Claire’s ears come straight up.

It happened all at once. Both ears snapped upright and her tail lifted clear of the grass, and her eyes, which had been down on the page, came up and went wide, lit faintly from behind. Her lips parted. She wasn’t looking at any of them. She was looking past the lanterns into nothing, the way a person looks up at a night sky that turns out to have ten times more stars in it than she was told. Nothing in the glade could have put that on her face. Nothing anybody had said. Laura had been standing right there and had heard all of it.

It lasted three breaths, perhaps four. Then Claire looked down at her notebook again, and her hand went back to her breastbone, and she wrote.

None of the eight are fixed. They’re branches. All of them. Seeing a thing isn’t the thing happening, and they may not happen exactly as Andy saw them.

“I was there when he saw it,” Erin said. She hadn’t spoken much since she told them about the Arches, and her face was still wet. “I was holding onto him. I watched his face the whole time.” She looked at Claire’s page, then away from it. “It didn’t look like a branch.”

Laura reached down the bond, because Claire’s face was still in front of her eyes. Alive. Afraid. Both at once. But the fear had come down again. Not a notch this time. Further than that. She could feel the shape of it, and the shape was smaller than it had been while Riley was counting, and it wasn’t coming back up. She stayed on it, and stayed on it, and it held.

She didn’t know what that was. She didn’t know what had come up into Claire’s face out of nowhere, either, or whether the two things were one thing. She held them both and said nothing, in case saying it out loud made either of them go away.

“There was another one,” Dawn said.

She was still sitting in the grass in Chloe’s arms, but she had lifted her head all the way now, and her ears were up and turned toward them. “Another fragment. The one nobody’s saying. Here, in the Garden. A gathering.” Her voice wobbled, and held. “All of us. All of us except Laura, and Myra, and Riley.”

She looked around the glade: at the lanterns, and the torn grass, and the big tree with its roots in the turf.

Laura watched the others do the same. It went around the circle without anyone meaning it to. Sam looked at the tree. Chloe looked at the lanterns. Emily looked up from Norah at the women standing around her, one after another, as if she were counting who was there, and then her eyes came to Myra, and Riley, and Laura, and stayed.

“We’re standing in it,” Dawn said. “Right now. This is it. This is here, if they go alone.”

“Is here.” Liesa’s face had gone still, though her hips hadn’t; they never did. The scroll hung forgotten from her fist. “Is this garden,” Liesa said. “Is this.”

Nobody answered her. There wasn’t anything in the glade to answer her with.

Laura let the quiet run until she could trust her voice. The lanterns hung still on their hooks, and past them the path ran empty into the dark, and she stood there with Dawn’s words in her ears and found that they hadn’t frightened her the way she’d expected. She had been frightened for so long tonight that there was nowhere left in her for a new fear to stand. What came instead was not courage, but something simpler: the kind of calm a person gets on the far side of a decision she hasn’t told anyone about yet.

“We’re doing it anyway,” Laura said.

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to; nobody else was saying anything.

“He sends them back whenever he likes,” Laura said. “Riley’s right. There’s no counting it. We could stand here all night watching the path, and all day tomorrow, and they’d come the minute we sat down. And every time they come, they come through here.” She looked at the lanterns, and past them, to where the Garden went on in the dark. “The women who live down here didn’t sign up for any of this. Not the Hearth, not this grass, not us. They need to be left alone. They need those things to stop coming through their home.”

All three of her turned, then, toward Riley, and toward Myra beside her.

“You two,” Laura said. “The thing you told me yesterday. Your idea.” She held both of them with her eyes. “Are you still planning it?”

“It’s still there,” Riley said.

Myra lifted her face, as if the question had been a hand laid on her shoulder.

“The three of us go up,” Myra said.

She said it as if she’d had it ready for days, and Laura understood, listening, that she had.

“Out of the Garden. Up into the open. We don’t have to go looking for him. He came into the Hall for Laura, and he’ll come for her anywhere she’s standing. He’s there for her, and he won’t pretend he isn’t.” Myra’s hands tightened on the head of the cane. “And then I offer myself. And Riley offers herself. And he’s standing there with the three of us in front of him, all three of us offering ourselves, but he can only take one, by the rule, and he has to choose.” She let her breath go. “A man choosing between three isn’t collecting one.”

For a moment it hung there in the lantern-light.

“Or,” Sam said, “he doesn’t choose.” She said it roughly. “He’s got his hands on Laura. The Law says he can take her life, and it doesn’t say one word about what he can’t do to her first.” Sam didn’t look away from Myra. “You put her in front of a man who looks at her the way Marissa just told us he looks at her, and we’re betting everything on the idea that when he goes too far, it’ll be the kind of too far that saves her. It might not be. It might just be too far.”

“And the other one,” Norah said. Her eyes were open again. Her voice was quieter than Sam’s, and colder. “You two offer yourselves,” Norah said, to the lanterns, not to Myra or Riley, “and you mean it, because it’s no good unless you mean it. A life laid down freely, by someone with standing, who knows what she’s giving. That’s his rule. He said it out loud in the Hall.” She let that sit. “So he’s allowed to say yes. He takes one of you instead. The debt’s paid. He walks away clean, and the rest of us get a hole where one of you used to be.”

Riley’s hair pulled in tight around her shoulders. Myra did not move at all.

“I know,” Laura said. “Both of those. I know.”

It came out of all three of her together, and quieter than she meant.

“Someone with standing,” Riley said to Norah. “Myra and I have standing. Our offers would be the same. He couldn’t pick between us. And Arabella said that a willing sacrifice overrides the original debt, so as long as we both offer ourselves, he can’t take Laura either. He has to force one of us to give up, or both of us if he wants her. If Marissa is right, he will want her.”

Sam shook her head. Laura grimaced. “It's a big risk. I know what it costs. I’m not asking anybody to like it. I don’t like it.” She looked from Sam to Norah and back. “I just don’t have anything better. If somebody does, say it now.”

Nobody did.

Laura felt it go around the circle without landing anywhere. Sam’s jaw was set, and Norah had shut her eyes again, and Chloe’s hand had stopped moving on Dawn’s back. Nobody said yes, and nobody said no. They stood in the torn grass and said nothing at all, and it was worse than an argument, because an argument would at least have been going somewhere.

Claire’s tail was lashing.

Laura had been watching Claire on and off all night without meaning to, and it took her a moment to understand what was wrong with what she saw. Claire’s ears were pinned flat back against her hair, and her tail went across the grass behind her and back again, hard enough to hear. The line of her jaw stood out in the lantern-light, and the hand at her breastbone had closed into a fist. It looked like fury—and it didn’t match anything in the circle. Everyone else standing in that grass was frightened, or exhausted, or both at once. Claire looked like a woman who wanted to hit something and hadn’t yet found it.

She opened the notebook, and wrote, and turned it around.

It’s him.

She let them read it. Then she turned it back to herself and wrote again, fast, and held that up too, and kept going, a page at a time, as fast as the pen would let her.

His fear has come down. A long way. Since we landed here it’s been coming down, and it hasn’t stopped. It isn’t calm. Don’t think it’s calm. Sorrow first. A lot of it. It’s been under everything since before Mildred came. Then set. Resolve. Like he’s decided something and isn’t going to undecide it. Then something I don’t have a good word for. Wonder, maybe. Like he’s looking at something enormous. And now angry. Very angry. It’s hot, and it’s still going.

She stopped and looked at what she’d written. Then she added one more line under all of it and underlined it once, cleanly.

He isn’t lost. He’s doing something.

Laura reached down the bond. Alive. Both at once. And afraid, still, because he would always be afraid for them. But the fear had come down so far that for the first time since the bell she could feel the edges of it; it had a shape now, and the shape was small enough to hold.

Earlier, while Riley counted, she had felt it drop a notch and hadn’t trusted it. She trusted it now.

“It’s still telling me he needs help,” Dawn blurted. She had come up onto her knees out of Chloe’s lap, both hands flat in the grass. “It hasn’t stopped once. It’s still going, right now.” Her ears came all the way up and stayed there. “So whatever he’s doing, he’s not done. It’s not enough yet. He still needs us for it.”

“I might be able to look for him.” Emi said it calmly, as though she had only now figured if out. She had come in from Sumiku’s side without anybody noticing and stood at the edge of the circle with all six of her hands folded in front of her.

“Through the Forest,” Emi said. “The Forest of Beginnings. It’s mine. It’s my dream, and dreams bridge places, like his Gift allowed Katherine to touch him when he still couldn't get her out. I can go in, and I can go looking, sort of. Like I did with Laura, in the Garden of Glass. Or with Marissa, when she dreamed.” She tilted her head. “I can’t find him on my own, though. I’d need a bearing. And Laura cannot be it, if she's going up.” She looked at Claire. “But Claire’s got one.” And at Dawn. “And Dawn’s thing, for a second one. Two lines, and I go where they cross.” Then her eyes went to Marissa, and softened. “And Marissa. Because she’s been inside one of those with me before, and she knows what it’s like, and she won’t let me stay in too long.”

Marissa’s face did something complicated and then went still. “Okay.” It was hardly a breath, from Marissa. “Yes. Okay.”

“Mine still hasn’t gone off.” Erin said it to nobody in particular. Her arms had come unfolded at last, and her hands hung at her sides. “It’s supposed to put me next to him the second he needs me. He’s needed somebody since the bell. It hasn’t fired once.” She looked at the grass between her feet. “I’ve stopped waiting for it.”

Laura stood in the middle of them and found that she was already thinking about going up.

Not about whether. About how long. How long three women could stand in front of a man like that and keep him choosing. How long it took to walk into a forest and follow two lines to the place where they crossed. They were going to find him. Claire and Dawn and Emi, with Marissa holding the door, were going to find him, and when they did, he was going to find a way to stop this. She knew it the way she knew where each of her hands was. He was out there somewhere, afraid for them and grieving and furious and doing something about all of it, and all the three of them had to do was give him the time.

Whether she would be standing up there when he came wasn’t part of the question. She noticed that, and let it go.

It didn’t occur to her to ask herself how she was so sure.

Sam pulled Thrustworthy out of the turf.

“Okay,” Sam said. “Four parts. I’m saying it once, and then we’re doing it.” She held up one armored finger. “Laura, Myra, Riley. You go up and you stall him. You keep him choosing as long as you can, and get him to overreach, if you can. The longer you draw it out, the more likely he is to get frustrated. That makes it riskier for you, but for him too.”

Sam put up a second finger. “Claire, Dawn, Emi. You find Andy. Through the Forest. Marissa goes in with you, and Marissa brings you back out.”

Sam’s third finger went up. “Me, Sumiku, Erin. Norah, if you can stand—”

Sumiku inclined her head, the same small motion she’d given Norah earlier—not agreement exactly, since she needed none, but acknowledgment that she’d been seen.

“I’ll stand,” Norah said from the grass.

“—Norah,” Sam went on. “We stay out of his eye, as close as he’ll let us get. We stay low. We don’t draw his attention. And the second he goes past his warrant, the second he’s just a man, we hit him with everything we’ve got.”

The fourth finger. “Everybody else goes up behind the three of them. Katherine up front.” Sam’s eyes found her across the glade. “Her bare hands work on those things. Nobody else’s hands do.” She looked around the circle once more. “Backup. You stay back unless they come back. And if he takes one of those three, you don’t let him have the other two.”

She lowered her hand, as if she were setting the whole of it down in the grass for them to pick up.

Nobody argued with any of the four.

It didn’t break up all at once. Chloe helped Dawn to her feet and kept an arm around her once she was up. Emily bent low over Norah, and Norah let go of her wrist at last and let Emily take her hand instead. Under the tree, Katherine had turned her head at her own name and stood with Eden against her side, and after a moment she nodded, once, to nobody but Sam. Liesa was rolling the scroll up again, slowly and carefully, as though it might still be needed. At the edge of the lantern-light the Mildred stood where she had stood all along, her hands folded, her face giving nothing. Nobody dismissed her. Nobody went to.

Riley and Myra came and stood beside Laura without saying anything, one at her left shoulder and one at her right, where they had stood on the line. Laura had not asked to stand aside. She knew it was wasted breath, and she loved them for it, even though deep inside, she didn't fully believe she deserved it.

Laura reached down the bond once more.

He was still afraid. He was still right here and farther away than anything, both at once. But he was less afraid than he had been all night, and under the fear something was moving, and she couldn’t read it, and Claire could.

She didn’t need to read it.