Queen Stellara was waiting at the head of the east tower stair before the first bell, in a gray cloak over the blue gown, with no circlet and no chancellor.
"I'm coming with you," she said.
Naomi looked at her. I watched her think about saying no to a queen in her own palace and decide it wasn't worth the breath.
"Behind him," said Naomi. "Not in front."
"Behind him," said the queen.
She'd brought the jailer. A broad woman with a ring of keys on her belt and the patient, flattened face of someone who has spent a long time carrying bread down stairs to people who don't say thank you. She looked at me the way the sergeant at the border had looked at me: checking.
"Majesty," she said. "Every morning she says it. To me. To the bread. Every morning."
"I know," said Queen Stellara.
"I just wanted him to know. Before he goes down." The jailer turned to me. "She doesn't mean anything by it, my lord. It's just the word she's got."
I looked at her. Then, because it was the first thing I'd decided this morning, before I'd even opened my eyes, I said: "May I?"
The jailer blinked at my hand.
"Her Majesty asked me to," I said. "Everyone who goes down there. Everyone who's been near her. It doesn't hurt."
The jailer looked at the queen. The queen nodded. The jailer held out a hand like a shovel, and I took it, and opened 「Discern」 under my palm. Small, blue, flat. Three splashes.
An old burn. The back of the hand. Thirty years.
Nothing else.
"A kitchen fire?" I said. "When you were young?"
She stared at me. "Pot of fat," she said. "I was eleven." Then, slower: "How did—"
"Nothing else in you," I said. "Just the burn."
She looked at her own hand for a long moment as if she'd never seen it before. Behind me, Pia's pen scratched once. Checking.
The east tower stair goes down a long way.
The palace is built into the mountain, and below the palace there's more mountain, and somebody a long time ago had cut steps down into it, narrow and steep and turning, with a rope along the wall for a rail and a torch in an iron bracket every twenty steps. It got colder as we went. Not the dry cold of the pass. A wet stone cold that came out of the walls.
Marika went first, of course. Then the jailer with her keys. Then me, with Liesel on my left and Wren on my right, close enough that their shoulders touched mine on the turns. Then the queen. Then Pia, one step behind the queen, with her book held against her chest and her lips moving, counting the stairs. I could hear her.
At a hundred and forty she stopped counting.
The stair ended in a short passage with three doors in it, iron-banded, and a single torch at the far end. Two of the doors stood open on empty cells. The third was shut.
The jailer stopped in front of it with the key in her hand.
And from the other side of the door, before anyone had knocked, before the key had touched the lock, a voice said, clearly, pleasantly, as if greeting someone it had been expecting for a long time:
"Saint."
The jailer unlocked the door and lit the torch inside it from the one in the passage, and stood back.
Marika went in first. Of course she did. She went in with her hand on her sword and her shoulders square and stopped one step inside, between the door and the corner, and stood there.
Nothing happened.
I went in after her.
The cell was small. Stone on every side, stone overhead, damp in the corners. A pallet on the floor, a blanket, a water jug, a bucket. No window. Nothing on the walls except the marks where water had run down them for a very long time.
She was sitting on the pallet in the far corner, her back to the wall, her knees drawn up and her hands folded on them.
Older than I'd imagined. Somewhere near forty, perhaps. Thin, the way people get when they eat because the bread is put in front of them and not because they're hungry. Her hair had been cut short, roughly, close to the skull. She was wearing a plain gray shift and a pair of soldier's boots without laces. Her hands, folded on her knees, were a swordswoman's hands: broad across the knuckles, scarred white across the palms.
And she was smiling.
The same at both corners. Pleasant, and even, and perfectly still, the way Tacita had smiled on the great stair the morning her knee dipped. The way Hedda had smiled with a cup of milk in her hand.
Under 「Eyes」 her light was white. Whole and clean and white, all the way through. It always is. That's the worst of it. 「Eyes」 can't see this kind of touch. Only 「Discern」 can.
She looked at me. Her eyes were very calm.
"Saint," she said.
"Yes," I said.
I crossed the cell and knelt on the stone in front of her, so our faces were level. Liesel came with me and stood at my left shoulder. Wren stood at my right. Behind me I heard the queen come in, and stop, and stand very still by the door, and Pia's step come one step after hers.
"May I?" I said, and held out my hand.
The smile didn't change. But she unfolded her hands from her knees and put one of them in mine, palm up, without hesitating at all.
"You ask," she said. Her voice was low and pleasant and a little hoarse, as if it hadn't been used for much but one word in a long time. "They said you ask. The guards. They talk on the stair at night, when they think I'm asleep. They said the Saint in the south asks everybody." Her fingers rested in mine. "Ask, then."
I opened 「Discern」 under her palm. Small, blue, flat.
Old cuts, on both palms. A blade's work. Many years.
And under it, through all of her, the way it had been through Tacita, through Hedda:
A demon's touch. Two hundred and twelve nights.
I didn't let go of her hand. I didn't let my face move. I counted it, because I count things: seven months. Seven months, and a little more.
Behind me, very quietly, Queen Stellara said, "That's before."
"Yes," I said, without turning round. "Long before."
The woman on the pallet smiled at me.
"He was so thin," she said.
Nobody had asked her anything. She said it anyway, pleasantly, the way you'd remark on the weather.
"Every autumn. He'd ride out round the lake in the sickness season with his saddlebags full, and come back in the first snow with them empty, and every year there was a little less of him inside his coat." The smile didn't move. "He'd heal a whole village and then sit on his horse afterward with his hands shaking, and smile at me, and say, Next one. He knew every door by name. He'd ride into Stonemere and lean down off his horse and say, Marta, how's that cough, as if he'd only been gone a day. Fourteen autumns. I rode one step behind him for nineteen years, and I watched the plateau eat him a little more every one."
Nobody spoke. At my left shoulder, Liesel had gone very still.
"Last winter he caught it himself," said the woman. "The cough. He'd given everything he had away in the last village, and there was nothing left in him to keep it out. I sat up with him eleven nights." Her fingers lay quiet in mine. "On the twelfth day he got up and asked for his maps. For the spring. For the autumn after."
The torch hissed. Somewhere far above us, a bell was ringing for the second hour.
"I begged him," she said. "On my knees, in his chamber. I said, let someone else go. I said, it will kill you. He laughed. He said, There isn't anyone else. He said, That's what I'm for." She tilted her head. "He was right. There wasn't anyone else."
I heard Pia's breath catch behind the queen.
"Something came to my room," she said. "In the spring. My door was locked. It stood by the window. It didn't sit." A small, pleasant frown, as if she were trying to remember a recipe. "It didn't ask me anything, at first. It just agreed with me."
The smile stayed exactly where it was.
"It said, He'll go north again. It said, It will kill him. Slowly. And you'll have to watch. It said, Somebody ought to stop him." She looked at me with her very calm eyes. "Everybody else told me I was tired. It was the only one who said I was right."
I looked at the hand in mine. The white scars across the palm. Nineteen years of keeping a Saint safe from everything on every road on the plateau, except the one thing she couldn't put a blade between him and.
I didn't have anything to heal. Her light was white. Her body was thin and cold and nothing worse. There wasn't a single thing in her I could close or purge or mend.
I'd come all this way to do one thing. So I did it.
"What's your name?" I said.
She looked at me. The smile didn't move at all.
"Vera," she said. Pleasantly. Easily. As if I'd asked her the time.
I waited for it. For the smile to stop, and the shoulders to drop, and the breath to go out of her the way it had gone out of Hedda in the grass. I held out my other hand to her, open, the way I had to Hedda.
She looked at it. She didn't take it.
"Vera," she said again, and went on smiling.
Nothing had changed. I didn't need 「Discern」 to tell me. It was still there.
I'd been so sure. Amara, Tacita, Hedda: every one of them unseen, unasked, and every time the thing had fed on that, and every time, asking had been the way out. I'd ridden eleven days believing it. I'd kept a space in a notebook for it.
But it doesn't feed on being unasked. It feeds on whatever is already there. Those were only the ones I'd met first.
And what was in Vera wasn't a name nobody had asked for. It was nineteen years of watching someone she loved pour himself out, and not being able to stop him.
Liesel knelt down beside me.
She didn't ask. She didn't look at me. She knelt on the wet stone at my left, close enough that our shoulders touched, and looked at Vera the way one escort looks at another across a crowded hall, when both of them are watching the same door.
"I know," said Liesel.
Vera's eyes moved to her.
"I walk at his left," said Liesel. "I have since he was seventeen." Her voice didn't shake. Liesel's never does, when what she's saying is true. "I've watched him pour until there's nothing left in him. I've watched him go three below empty in a queen's bedroom with his hands still open. I've watched him come off a wall after a tide so white I thought he'd break, and the first thing he asked was how many." She didn't look at me. "Every time, I want to stop him. Every time, I can't. Nobody can."
Vera's smile didn't move. But her eyes did.
"Then what do you do?" said Vera. It wasn't pleasant anymore. It was very quiet.
"You stand next to him," said Liesel. "That's all. That's the whole of the job. You can't stop them. You can only stand next to them while they do it, and catch them after." She held out her hand between them, palm up. "You did that for nineteen years. That wasn't nothing."
Vera looked at Liesel's hand for a long time.
Then her free hand came up off her knee, slowly, as if it weighed a great deal, and reached across the space between them, and closed round Liesel's, and held on.
I felt it go.
Not with 「Eyes」. Her light was white before, and it was white after, and 「Eyes」 never saw any difference. I felt it through the hand still lying in mine, the way you hear someone beside you in the dark finally let out a breath they've been holding: the way I'd felt it with Hedda in the grass, and watched it happen to Tacita in the passage with Cassian's hand in hers. Something that had been holding her let go, all at once, and wasn't there anymore.
The smile went. Not all at once; it went still first, the way water goes still before it freezes, and then it simply wasn't there, and the face underneath was one I'd never seen. Puzzled. Very tired. Older than the smile.
Her shoulders dropped.
She made a sound. Very small. Not a word. And then she looked down at the two hands holding hers, Liesel's and mine, and I watched her remember.
"The chapel," she said.
Not to me. To our hands.
"The morning prayers. He always went alone. I always stood at the door." Her voice had changed. The pleasant evenness was gone out of it, and what was left was rough and low and shaking. "I went in. I don't remember deciding to. I remember the floor. The candles. He was kneeling. He heard my boots and he turned round, and he looked up at me, and he said—"
She stopped.
I held on. I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything in the world to say.
"He said Vera?" she whispered.
The cell was very quiet.
"He was asking if I was all right," said Vera. "He saw my face, and he knew something was wrong before I did, and he asked me if I was all right." Her face broke. "He'd been sick all winter, and he still asked. The last thing. The last thing he ever—"
She didn't finish. She bent forward over our hands until her forehead was nearly on them, and the sound that came out of her then was the worst sound I have ever heard a person make, and I have sat with a great many people while they died.
I held on.
That was all I could do. That was the whole of it. Her light was white. Her hands were whole. There wasn't a single thing in her that 「Heal」 or 「Cure」 or anything Elysia had ever given me could reach. What was wrong with Vera had happened in a chapel at the end of the summer, with a sword, and the thing that had made her do it was gone, and the man was still dead, and I couldn't heal that. Nobody could. I could only kneel on the stone floor and hold on while she found out.
Somebody else knelt down.
Not Liesel. Liesel was already there, on her knees at my left with Vera's hand in hers, not letting go. This was someone in a gray cloak over a blue gown, kneeling on the wet stone of her own cellar in front of the woman who'd killed her Saint.
Queen Stellara reached out, and put her hand on Vera's bent head. Not heavily. Just there.
"Vera," she said.
The first time. I heard it. Twenty years under her roof, and the first time.
Vera went still under her hand. Then she cried harder, which I think was right.
It was a long time before anyone said anything else.
When she could hold her head up again, I asked her, "May I?" one more time, and she gave me her hand without looking at it, and I opened 「Discern」 under it.
Old cuts, on both palms. A blade's work. Many years.
Nothing else. Nothing at all.
"It's gone," I said.
Vera looked at me with her red eyes. "And he's still dead."
"Yes," I said.
I didn't say anything else. I wasn't going to lie to her. Nobody had told her the truth about anything for seven months, including herself.
She nodded slowly, as if that were the first thing anyone had said to her in a long time that she could put her weight on.
"Vera," said the queen, still kneeling. Her voice was very low. "The thing that came to your room. Did it want anything from you?"
Vera was quiet for a moment.
"The road," she said.
I felt Liesel go still at my shoulder.
"It came back," said Vera. "Not every night. Often. It stood by the window and asked about the autumn. Which villages were hardest on him. Which ones kept him longest. Which ones loved him so much they'd never let him leave early." She looked at her hands. "And I told it. Every road. Every door. I thought it was helping me find a way to keep him home." She stopped. "It was the only one who ever agreed with me."
Queen Stellara's hand had gone very still on Vera's head.
"Did it say why?" I said.
"It said somebody would have to go, after." Vera's voice was flat. "I didn't know what it meant. After. I asked it, after what. It didn't answer. It just smiled." Her mouth twisted. "I understood in the chapel."
Nobody said anything. The torch hissed in its bracket.
"The north," said Vera suddenly. She looked up at the queen. "Majesty. The north. Is it—"
The queen didn't answer for a moment.
"Seven villages have stopped writing to me," she said.
Vera closed her eyes.
"Which seven?"
The queen named them. One after another, quietly, the way you'd name the dead. I didn't know any of the names. Vera did. I watched her mouth move with every one of them, a half breath ahead of the queen's, the way you'd say along with a prayer you'd said every morning for nineteen years.
When the queen stopped, Vera opened her eyes.
"The first seven," she said. "Every autumn. He always went to those first." Her voice cracked. "Because they loved him best."
The queen got up off the floor at last, slowly, stiff from the cold stone, and stood looking down at Vera for a long time.
"Let me go north," said Vera, from the pallet. "I know every road he took. Every door. Every name."
"You killed my Saint," said Queen Stellara.
"Yes."
The word just sat there in the cold.
The queen turned her ring round on her finger, once, and twice, and stopped.
"Not today," she said. Then, to the jailer at the door, in a different voice entirely, a queen's voice: "Bring her up. A room with a window. A guard on the door, and a chair inside the room for the guard, and a fire."
The jailer stared at her. "Majesty."
"And something to eat that isn't bread."
"Majesty," said the jailer again, and this time it sounded different.
On the way up the long stair, a hundred and forty steps that Pia didn't count this time, I took Hana's small notebook out of my coat. I'd carried it all autumn. I opened it to Tacita's name, and the long space I'd left under it the night she said it, for a woman in a cell in the snow whose name nobody had written down. I'd looked at that space every night since.
I wrote: Vera.
Just that. It didn't need anything else.
One step behind me, Pia's pen scratched in her own book. She underlined it. Twice.
I couldn't heal what had happened in that chapel. Nobody could; I knew that going down the stair, and I knew it better coming up. But the space in the book wasn't empty anymore, and the name in it was one she'd said herself.
And somewhere north of us, past the long lake, at seven doors that had loved Albin best, something had asked its way there first.