By noon, every person who worked for House Valcrest was standing in the great hall, staring at me.
That part wasn't new. People stare at me all the time. It's one of the perks of being a boy in Greymark.
What was new was the silence. Six guards and their captain, the head maid, every maid under her, and the stable girl, who still had straw in her hair. Nobody whispered. Nobody shuffled. Yesterday they'd been told "Later," and they'd all come to collect.
Naomi stood at the front of the hall in her navy tabard. Marika leaned against a pillar on her left. Hana stood on her right, hands folded over her apron, smiling like she was about to announce a wedding.
I stood beside Naomi and tried to look like someone worth gathering a whole household for.
"Yesterday, I told you 'Later,'" Naomi said.
She let that sit.
"It's later."
Somebody near the back swallowed loudly.
"At the Shrine of the Eight, my brother received the blessing of Elysia." Naomi's voice carried to every corner of the hall. "He is a Saint."
The silence broke.
Not loudly. It cracked, like ice on a pond. One of the maids pressed both hands over her mouth. The head maid sat down on a bench very suddenly, as if her knees had made the decision without her. The stable girl said, "By the Goddess," then looked horrified that she'd said it out loud.
The guard captain didn't say anything. She just went down on one knee. A heartbeat later, all six of her guards did the same.
"Oh, no," I said. "No, no. Please get up. Seriously."
They did not get up.
"They'll stand when they're done," Naomi said, without looking at me.
I was learning that being a Saint came with a lot of people kneeling at you, and nobody ever explained what you were supposed to do with your hands.
"He has two skills," Naomi went on. "「Heal」 and 「Cure」. Both have been reported to the Crown under our seal."
Two skills. I kept my face very still. Beside me, Marika studied the ceiling like it owed her money. Hana's smile didn't move a single inch, which was somehow the most suspicious thing in the room.
The captain lifted her head. "My lady. May we see it?"
Naomi glanced at me. I knew that look. It meant you decide, which was rare enough that I nearly checked the covenant to make sure she was feeling well.
"Sure," I said. "Does anyone have a cut? A small one. I'm new at this."
Every head in the room turned toward the stable girl.
She hid her hands behind her back.
"Show him," said the head maid, in the voice that has made everyone in this house wash behind their ears for as long as I can remember.
The stable girl shuffled forward and held out her palm. A rope burn ran across it, red and raw, the kind you get from a horse that disagrees with you about where it's going.
I took her hand as gently as I could. She went very still, like I was a wild bird that might fly off if she breathed.
Then I reached for 「Heal」.
It was right where 「Covenant」 had been, at the back of my mind. But it felt different. Smaller. Lighter. Like picking up a practice sword after a real one.
A circle of light spread across the floor between us.
White. Plain white, all the way through. No gold anywhere.
The pitcher in my chest barely tipped. A splash, not a pour. After last night, it felt like nothing at all.
So that's what the cheapest tier is supposed to cost.
The light sank into her palm. The red faded. The raw skin closed and smoothed over, and then it was simply gone, like a chalk mark wiped off a slate.
The stable girl stared at her hand. Then at me. Then at her hand again.
"It doesn't hurt," she whispered.
"That's the idea," I said.
That was when the head maid started crying. Then about half the maids. Then Hana, because Hana cries whenever anyone else does. It's practically a house rule.
Marika didn't cry. Marika said, "It's dusty in here," and walked out of the hall.
Later, in the corridor, I caught up with Naomi.
"You didn't tell them to keep it quiet."
"No."
"Why not?"
"The report's on the road. The Crown will know soon." She kept walking. "Greymark hears it from us. Not from gossip."
"So by supper—"
"The whole town."
She was wrong about that.
It only took until lunch.
Naomi made rules. Of course she did.
Healing would happen in the front courtyard, inside the gate, for one hour every afternoon. Inside, because outside the estate the Queen's law said I needed an escort of at least two, and Naomi's idea of "at least two" was six. Two guards would stand on either side of my table. Nobody touched the Young Master unless the Young Master touched them first. And the moment I felt dizzy, I stopped.
"How will you know if I'm dizzy?" I asked, mostly to be difficult.
All three of my sisters looked at me.
"Right," I said. "Forget I asked."
The first afternoon, the line stretched from the gate halfway down the hill.
Most of them were women from town, which shouldn't have surprised me, since most people anywhere are women. Farmhands with blistered palms. A blacksmith with a burn across her forearm, who apologized three times for "bothering a Saint with a little thing like this." A carpenter who'd put a chisel through her thumb that morning and walked straight up the hill without stopping the bleeding, because, as she put it, "Why waste a bandage?"
And children. So many children. Scraped knees, split lips, and one girl who'd fallen out of a tree and wanted it fixed fast so she could climb back up before her mother found out.
Some of them weren't hurt at all. They just wanted to look at me.
I let them. It's not like I could stop them.
「Heal」 took a splash each time. Plain white circle, soft light, skin knitting itself back together. Somewhere around the ninth person, I stopped flinching when the circle appeared. Somewhere around the eleventh, the courtyard began to lean.
Hana appeared at my elbow before I'd even finished noticing.
"That's enough for today."
"I can do one more—"
"That's enough for today," she repeated, in exactly the same gentle voice, and I knew I'd lost.
The second day, a woman carried her little daughter up the line, flushed and coughing, with a fever that had hung on for three days. I reached for 「Cure」 for the first time. It felt like 「Heal」's quieter twin: the same plain white circle, the same small splash. The light sank into the girl's chest, and I felt something inside her loosen, like a knot coming undone.
By the time her mother carried her back down the hill, she was asking for bread.
Eleven people the first day. Twelve by the third. By the end of the second week, I could get through fourteen before the courtyard tilted.
I figured I was getting better at it.
Spells don't get cheaper with practice. I knew that. Everyone knows that. I just didn't think about it very hard. I was busy.
Because not everyone who climbed that hill had a scraped knee.
On the fourth day, an old woman came up the line leaning on a cane. She walked like every step was an argument she'd been having for years. When she reached my table, she didn't sit down. She saluted.
Not the quick salute the guards gave Naomi. An old one. Fist over the heart, slow and careful.
"Young Master," she said. "I rode with your mother."
I didn't know what to say to that. So I said, "Please, sit."
She did, with a grunt. Then she pulled up the leg of her trousers, and I saw her knee.
It wasn't a wound. Not anymore. It was what a wound becomes after ten years: thick, twisted scar, and the joint underneath sitting wrong, like someone had taken it apart and put it back together from memory.
"Last tide," she said, as casually as if she were mentioning the weather. "Same day as your parents. I was luckier."
My throat went tight. I reached for 「Heal」 anyway.
The circle came. The light sank into the scar.
And nothing happened.
I tried again. Same plain circle. Same splash from the pitcher. Same nothing. The light went in and simply stopped, the way water stops at a dam.
"It's all right," she said.
"It isn't." It came out sharper than I meant. "Give me a second. Let me try—"
"Young Master." She put her hand over mine. Her palm was as rough as Naomi's. "I didn't climb this hill expecting a miracle. I climbed it to see Erika's boy."
She wasn't the only one who left the way she came.
Over those two weeks, I met a farmer whose hand had healed crooked after a fall, so her fingers wouldn't close anymore. A grandmother with a cough that had lived in her chest since winter. A weaver whose eyes had been going cloudy for years.
「Heal」 couldn't touch old wounds. 「Cure」 eased the grandmother's cough for an afternoon, but by evening it was back, like a fire I'd only stamped on instead of putting out.
White tier closes small wounds and chases out small sicknesses. That's all it does. It's the beginning.
I hated that it was only the beginning.
The old knight stopped by my table once more on her way out. She leaned on her cane and looked at me for a long moment.
"Come find me when you're stronger, Young Master," she said. "I'm not going anywhere." She tapped her knee. "Can't. Not on this."
Then she laughed, saluted again, and limped down the hill.
I kept going that afternoon until Hana took my hands off the table herself.
News travels fast in Greymark. It travels faster when it's about a boy.
By the end of the first week, the neighboring counties knew. By the end of the second, I was fairly sure the monsters in the Gloamwood had heard.
Marriage proposals used to arrive in a trickle. Now they came in sacks.
"File them," Naomi told the head maid every morning.
"Near the fireplace, my lady?"
"Near the fireplace."
By the second week, the fireplace in Naomi's study had become less of a fireplace and more of a paper fort. Hana suggested, very gently, that we might need a second fireplace. Naomi said she'd consider it. I'm still not sure she was joking.
Then the visitors started coming in person.
The first was a viscountess from the west, with a carriage full of gifts and two daughters in their best armor. Naomi met them at the gate. She didn't open it.
"Countess Valcrest! We've come to pay our respects to the young Saint—"
"No."
"We've traveled four days—"
"Then you'll want to start back before dark."
That was the whole conversation. I know because I watched it from my window. I wasn't allowed any closer to the gate during visiting hours, which Naomi had declared did not exist.
The ones who came from the east never reached the gate at all. Marika patrolled the east road, and Marika had a gift for escorting visitors. Somehow every carriage she escorted took the long way around the county, past every muddy ford and broken bridge in Greymark, and ended up back at the border by nightfall.
"Did they get lost?" I asked her once.
"The roads are confusing," Marika said. "Somebody should really fix them."
"You patrol them every day."
"And they're still confusing. Think about that."
Hana handled the ones who slipped through. She'd meet them in the front parlor with tea, cake, and the warmest smile in the kingdom, and then she'd talk. About the weather. About the harvest. About every fever I'd had as a child, in loving detail. Two hours later, they'd stumble out to their carriages feeling like they'd been tucked into bed, and somehow they'd never get around to asking to see me.
She was terrifying. I loved her very much.
The strangest part was watching the three of them work together. They never signaled each other. Never sent a maid running with a message. Naomi would glance toward the east road, and Marika would already be riding out. A carriage would come around the bend, and Hana would already be putting the kettle on.
The guards started whispering that my sisters could read each other's minds.
They couldn't. Not exactly.
But they always knew where the other two were standing.
Then, on the twelfth day, the southern baroness came.
Everyone in the house remembered her letter. Her daughter could carry a plow horse on each shoulder.
She'd brought the daughter.
She'd also brought, I can only assume for demonstration purposes, a plow horse.
This time, all three of my sisters went to the gate. Marika had come in from the road for it; she said she wouldn't miss it for the world. Hana had even carried a tray of tea out to the gate, which I'd never once seen her do.
"Countess Valcrest!" The baroness swept a hand toward her daughter. "As promised in my letter!"
The daughter was a tall, broad-shouldered young knight with a sunburned nose, and she looked like she wanted the ground to open up and swallow her.
"Mother," she said. "Please."
"Go on, dear."
The daughter closed her eyes for a moment, like someone who'd lost this exact argument every day since she could walk. She walked over to the plow horse, crouched, and stood up with it across her shoulders.
The horse didn't struggle. It just looked resigned, like this had happened before.
From my window, I heard Marika say, "Huh. Only one."
"The other one's lame," the daughter said, red to the ears. "Mother wanted me to borrow one from a village on the way. I said no."
Naomi looked at the horse. Then at the daughter. Then at the baroness.
"Impressive," she said.
The baroness beamed.
"No," said Naomi.
The daughter set the horse down very carefully, patted its neck, and turned to Marika. "Sorry. Truly. Do you, um. Need anyone on the east road? I'd honestly rather patrol."
Marika considered her for a long moment.
"Write to me," she said. "Not to him. To me."
The daughter's face lit up brighter than it had all day.
The Crown's answer came on a gray morning, almost three weeks after our rider left.
I felt it before I saw it. Naomi's candle, steady in my chest, moving from her study toward the gate faster than she ever walked. Marika's, already turning back from the east road. Hana's, going still, as if she'd set down whatever she was holding.
By the time I reached the gate, a royal courier was handing Naomi a letter. The seal on it wasn't ours. It was the Crown's.
The courier didn't stay. She bowed, mounted, and rode back the way she'd come.
Naomi didn't open the letter at the gate. She didn't open it in the hall, either. She walked straight to the reading room, waited until all four of us were inside, and shut the door.
Then she broke the seal and read.
I watched her face. Naomi's face doesn't do much, as a rule. But I've had ten years of practice reading it, and I saw her eyes stop halfway down the page and go back to the top.
"Well?" Marika demanded. "Are we being executed or not?"
"Marika," Hana hissed.
"What? It's a reasonable question."
Naomi lowered the letter.
"Her Majesty has received our report," she said. "She is 'deeply gladdened that Elysia has blessed a son of Greymark.'"
"That's good," I said. "Right? That sounds good."
"She is sending someone to Greymark to witness the blessing with her own eyes."
"Who?" Hana asked.
Naomi looked at me.
"The First Princess."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Then Marika said, very quietly, "You can't file that one near the fireplace."
"I know," said Naomi.
"It's not a proposal," I said. "It says 'witness.' She's coming to watch me heal some scraped knees."
Marika gave me a look. "Royals don't ride all the way to the border to watch things."
I looked at Naomi, waiting for her to tell Marika she was wrong.
She didn't.
Hana's hand found mine. Hers was cold again. I didn't need the covenant to know it, but I felt it anyway: three candles in my chest, all burning a little too bright.
A princess was coming to see the Saint of Greymark.
All we had to do was make sure that was all she saw.