For a moment, nothing happened.
She swallowed. She stood in the middle of the black-green lawn with her hand still open, and the crowd stood around the edge and held its breath, and somewhere a girl laughed, high and thin, the way you laugh when you don't want something to be real.
Then the air changed.
I don't have a better word for it. It got heavier. Colder. It pressed on my ears the way the air does before a storm, and it smelled of crushed leaves and wet earth and something under them, sweet and spoiled, like fruit left too long in a bowl. The hair stood up along my arms. Beside me, Wren's hand went to her sword. Wren never touches her sword unless she means it.
Lady Amara bent forward, as though someone had struck her in the stomach.
And her light went out.
Not the way a light goes out when someone dies. I've seen that. This was different. It went out like a door closing. One moment there was a dull, tired yellow standing in the middle of the lawn, and the next, where Lady Amara stood, my eyes couldn't see anything at all.
Then she straightened up, and I didn't need my eyes to see her.
Two horns were pushing up through her loose hair at the temples, curving back over her head, black and glossy as the cherry had been. Her left hand had gone dark, and the dark was climbing her arm, and out of it things were growing: stems, green so deep it was nearly black, thick with thorns. They grew as I watched. They coiled up her arm and over her shoulder and around her waist, the way the ivy climbs the dining hall wall, only fast, alive, tightening. A tendril crept up the side of her throat and lay along her cheek like a hand.
Her bare feet had sunk into the lawn. And the lawn moved.
Not just the lawn. Under the gravel paths, under every path that met in that garden, all of them, the ground heaved, as though something underneath had taken a breath.
She opened her eyes. They were black all the way across.
The first vine came up under the gardeners.
It burst out of the gravel as thick as my arm, thorned from end to end, and the gardener with the watering can was thrown into the nearest pear tree and didn't get up. Then they were everywhere: under the path to the dining hall, under the path to the classrooms, under the path where three girls had stopped to watch, lashing up out of the ground where everyone walks.
The ring of people around the garden broke all at once, like a dropped plate.
Liesel had me by the collar before I could move. She threw me back behind her so hard my feet left the ground, and her spear was already up. A vine came at us across the gravel, and she cut it in half without even looking at it properly, the way you'd swat a fly, and Wren cut the next one, and then we were three paces back with my shoulders against the wall of the residence and both of them in front of me.
"Eyes front!" Lady Severine's voice cut through the screaming like a bell. "Walk. Do not run. To the dining hall, walk!"
"WEAPONS!" That was Dame Valeria, across the yard. "Battle class, to me! Real steel. Now!"
And I looked.
I couldn't help it. It's what I am. All around the garden, lights. Dozens of them, scattered across the gravel and the grass and the paths, every color I know. Yellow, where someone had been knocked down. Orange, where the thorns had gone in. Red, here and there, bright and frightening.
And a few, in the first moments, closest to the middle of the lawn, that went out before I could even move.
I counted. I always count.
I'm not going to write the number down.
I had six splashes left.
(Big Sis.)
I didn't have to say it loudly. It's never loud. It's just there, in the chest, where the candles are.
(The Academy. The garden. Something's wrong. Come.)
(Coming,) said Naomi. No question. No pause.
(ALREADY RUNNING,) said Marika.
(Fabian, are you hurt?)
(Not yet, Hana.)
The fourth candle, the one right in front of me with a spear in her hands, said nothing. She'd heard every word.
The gardener in the pear tree was red. Not the bright red of a cut that will close; the deep, dull red of something broken inside. She was lying in the fork of the lowest branch where the vine had thrown her, fifteen paces out across the gravel, and the vines were still moving between us.
"Liesel. I need to get to her."
"No."
"She's red."
Liesel looked at the pear tree. She looked at the vines. Her jaw set.
"Wren," she said. "Him. Don't let go of him." And she went.
She went across that gravel the way she'd gone across the battle yard after a fireball, and the vines came up at her, and she broke them. Not cut. Broke. She caught one in her free hand and snapped it like kindling and threw the pieces away, and plucked the gardener out of the tree as if she weighed nothing, and came back with her over one shoulder, and laid her down at my feet.
Green 「Heal」. Two splashes. The red faded to orange, then yellow. The gardener breathed, and coughed, and opened her eyes.
Four left.
Then fire went past my ear.
It was Blue, and very hot, and it hit a vine that had come over the residence wall behind us and turned it to ash in the air. I turned around.
Lord Cassian Ardane stood on the residence steps in his shirtsleeves, with his copper hair in his eyes and ash on his hands from the battle yard. Ilse and his other escort were behind him with their swords drawn.
He looked at me. He looked at the garden. He looked at the thing in the middle of it, with horns, that had been Lady Amara.
"Well," he said. "That's not on the board either."
A vine came out of the gravel at Ilse's feet and wrapped her ankle. Before she could even cry out, Cassian threw again, a thin, narrow line of Blue no wider than a finger, and the vine burned through a hand's width from her boot. Her boot didn't even scorch.
I'd never seen him do anything small before.
"Get behind me," Cassian told her.
Ilse stared at him.
"Behind me, I said."
She got behind him.
The second young lord came out of the residence a moment later, at a walk. I knew him by sight, though I'd never spoken to him: a big, quiet young lord with sandy hair and a face like a closed gate, from Cassian's year. He looked at the garden for about as long as it takes to read a short sentence.
Then he raised one hand, and a Blue circle opened in front of his palm, and out of it, pale and clear as glass, a wall of light unfolded across the whole front of the residence, from the corner of the building to the edge of the gravel.
A vine hit it and stopped dead.
"Benedict Tegan," he said to me, as if we were being introduced at supper. "Aegira." He nodded at the wall. "Wounded behind it."
And the battle class started dragging people behind it.
They came one after another: girls with thorn gashes, girls with broken arms, a mistress with a broken leg carried by two first-years. The infirmary mistress was suddenly there with her sleeves rolled up and her arms full of bandages, kneeling among them, sorting them with one look the way I do. Darkest first.
I looked at all those lights and at the four splashes in my chest.
And beyond the wall, at the far side of the garden, there was a girl pinned against the dining hall steps by a vine across her middle. Red. Thirty paces away, with the whole garden between us.
I couldn't reach her. Liesel couldn't carry me there, not through that.
"Travels," said Ambrose, at my shoulder.
I turned. He was pale and very calm, with his notebook stuffed in his coat and a jug in his hand. Hana's well water. He'd carried it all the way from the infirmary.
"Untested," I said.
"Test."
He poured water into his palm and lifted it into a sphere the size of a plum. I cast into it. Green, two splashes, because White only closes the small things, and that girl was red.
Two left.
Ambrose looked at Benedict. Benedict looked at the girl on the steps, and moved his hand, and the wall of light bent outward, stretching into a long glass passage across the gravel, with the vines hammering against its sides.
Ambrose walked down it.
Not fast. He walked the way he'd walked across the infirmary with the honey: slowly, looking at nothing but the light, while the vines beat on the glass around him and his escorts walked on either side with their swords out. Thirty paces. He knelt beside the girl, and lowered the green sphere onto the wound across her middle, and let go.
The water broke over her.
And the light went in.
I saw it from thirty paces away. Her red faded to orange, to yellow. She gasped and put both hands on her stomach, where the blood had been, and looked down at it.
Ambrose stayed kneeling there for a moment. Then he looked back down the glass passage at me.
"...Extraordinarily," he said.
It wasn't enough.
I knew it the way you know weather. Dame Valeria had the battle class in a line across the classroom path, real steel in their hands, cutting vines as fast as they came. Cassian was burning them. Benedict's wall held. And still, in the middle of the garden, the thing that had been Lady Amara was getting bigger.
Not taller. Thicker. The vines around her had become a coat, then a cage, then something like a tree with a woman in the middle of it. Her horns had grown another hand's width. And every time someone screamed, every time a girl cried out or a mistress shouted in fear, the vines around her pulsed, the way the cherry had pulsed in her palm.
She was eating it. All of it. The fear in that garden was feeding her, the way the quarrels and the tears had fed the seed.
This was going to be long.
I had two splashes left. After those, there was only what lies below empty, and I knew exactly what that was. I'd been there. Dizziness. A headache. A hammer in time with my heartbeat. My nose bleeding. Blood in my mouth. And then nothing, for twenty-one days.
Last time, I'd woken up. Nobody had promised me that twice.
"Wren," said Liesel. "Stay with him."
She was turning toward Valeria's line, toward the garden, with her spear in her hand and her jaw set, and I knew that look. She was going in.
I caught her sleeve.
It was what she'd done to me, at the edge of the lawn. I don't think I meant to copy her. My hand just did it.
"Not now, Saint—"
"Yes," I said. "Now."
She turned back. Her face was smeared with something green, and there was a thorn scratch across her cheek already closing on its own, and her eyes were the exact color of the gown she'd worn to the ball.
I had planned to say it a hundred different ways. On the wall. In the kitchen. Over bread. None of them were in a garden full of thorns with a horned woman in the middle of it. But I had just watched what ten years of not saying something does to a person. I wasn't going to keep this one another hour.
"I like you," I said.
She went very still.
"Not like the cook. Not like Wren, or Ambrose, or anyone else on that list I gave your mother. I like you." My voice was shaking. I let it. "It was never the stairs. Not on the wall, not at the ball, not any of the times I said it. It was you, every time."
(Fabian?) Hana's voice, in my chest. (Your heart—)
Of course. A racing heart carries. Three sisters on horseback and one princess with her sleeve in my hand could all feel it going like a drum.
(It's not the stairs,) I said, on the bond. All four of them heard.
(...OH,) said Marika.
(Gate,) said Naomi. (Thirty breaths.)
Out loud, I said, "Your mother asked me to think about it. I did. But this isn't her answer. Nobody told me to say it. It's mine."
Liesel's lips parted.
"Don't," I said quickly. "Don't answer. Not now."
"Saint—"
"You don't need to answer now." I heard myself say it, and realized I sounded exactly like her mother, and found I didn't care. "Answer me after. When this is over. Then I'll know you're coming back to tell me."
She stared at me. She had gone red to the collar, under the green.
"And this," I said, and put my hand flat on her breastplate, over her heart, and cast.
「Vigor」. Green. Two splashes.
The circle opened under my palm, and I felt the tiredness go out of her: the afternoon, the vines, the running, the tree, all of it, drained away like water out of a basin. She drew a breath that went all the way down.
Zero.
Liesel looked at my hand on her chest. Then at me. Something in her face broke open and was put back together, very fast, harder than before.
"After," she said. Her voice was rough. "You'd better be awake for it."
Then she turned and went into the garden, and the vines that came up to meet her didn't last long enough to touch the ground again.
I heard them before I saw them. Hooves on stone, coming up through the Academy gate at a full gallop, and the gate guards shouting, and nobody stopping them.
Three candles, coming closer in my chest. Bright and fast and steady.
Marika was off her horse before it had finished stopping. I saw her hit the gravel at a run with her sword already out, and then I didn't see her properly again for a while, because she went into the vines the way she goes into everything. The battle class had a vine as thick as a barrel wrapped around three girls at the end of their line, and Marika went through it like a thrown knife through a curtain, and the three girls fell out of it onto the grass, and Marika was already somewhere else.
One of the girls sat up and stared after her.
"Who," she said, "is that?"
"His sister," said someone.
"Which one?"
Hana came straight to the wall. She didn't run, quite. She walked very fast, in full plate, with her warhammer in one hand and the salve tin on her belt, and when a vine came over the top of Benedict's wall and dropped toward the wounded behind it, she put up her bare hand and caught it.
It was as thick as her arm and covered in thorns. She closed her fist around it anyway. Then she pulled, and the vine came up out of the gravel behind the wall, all of it, roots and all, with a sound like a sheet tearing, and she threw it over her shoulder onto the path and knelt down beside the nearest girl.
"Who's next?" said Hana. Her palm was already closing.
The infirmary mistress looked at her. She looked at the infirmary mistress.
"Her," said the mistress, and pointed, and Hana went.
And Naomi walked into the garden.
She didn't run either. Naomi never runs. She walked across the gravel, through Dame Valeria's line, past the place where the gardeners had been standing an hour ago, in full plate with the long navy cape behind her, at exactly the pace she walks to the war room. Her sword was in her hand, but she didn't seem to be thinking about it.
"Marchioness—" Dame Valeria began.
A vine came up out of the lawn in front of Naomi. Not a thin one. It was as thick as a man's waist, black-green and thorned, and it came up out of the ground and swung at her the way a tree would swing if a tree could.
She raised her left arm.
The vine hit her vambrace and stopped. The gravel cracked under her boots. She didn't move back a single step.
Then she took hold of it with her left hand, and pulled.
The whole garden moved. The vine tore up out of the lawn in a long, ripping line, roots and earth and gravel spraying, and far out in the middle, the thing that had been Lady Amara lurched in its cage of thorns as though something had been pulled out of it.
And for the first time since she'd eaten the cherry, it turned its head. Its black eyes found my sister.
Everybody saw it. Every girl on Valeria's line. Lady Severine at the dining hall door. Cassian, with fire in both hands. I saw Liesel stop at the edge of the lawn with her spear half-raised and look at Naomi the way she looks at Dame Valeria in the battle yard: like someone who has just found a wall she isn't sure she can break.
"She's as strong as the princess," said a girl near me, very quietly.
Dame Valeria didn't take her eyes off my sister.
"Stronger," she said. "...Hm."
Cassian looked at me over his shoulder, with Blue fire in his hands and ash in his hair.
"Your family," he said, "is terrifying."
"Yes," I said.
In the middle of the garden, the vines gathered themselves. All of them, at once. They drew back from Valeria's line and from Marika and from the wall, and coiled, thick and black and thorned, around the thing at the center, and then came for Naomi, every one of them together, like a wave.
(Stay behind the wall,) said Naomi, on the bond.
Out loud, to the thing in the garden, she said only:
"No."