Three days in bed is a very long time when you've already done twenty-one.
By the morning of the fourth day, I'd counted every crack in my ceiling. I'd learned which floorboards in the hall creaked when Hana was coming with soup (all of them; she wasn't sneaky about soup). I'd lost three games of cards to Marika, who cheated, and one to Naomi, who didn't need to.
So when Naomi finally said "Up," I was dressed before she finished the word.
The practice yard was cold and gray, with mist still lying on the last fields beyond the wall. The Gloamwood was a dark line at the edge of everything. Quiet. A normal quiet this time, with birds in it.
I drew my sword, the one Marika had shoved at me on the morning of my Welcoming Age, set my feet, and started.
One. Two. Three.
My arms remembered faster than the rest of me. By fifty, my shoulders burned. By a hundred, I was sweating. By two hundred, I'd stopped thinking about anything at all, which is the whole point.
At three hundred and twelve, someone said, "Your elbow drops on the left."
I didn't turn. "It does not."
"It does. Every fourth swing."
I swung. I watched my elbow. It dropped.
Traitor.
The princess was leaning on the fence with a blunted practice spear across her shoulders. Plain shirt with the sleeves shoved up, riding trousers, and hair that looked like it had lost a fight with her pillow.
"Good morning, Lord Fabian."
"Your Highness. How long have you been there?"
"Since a hundred and six."
"That's two hundred swings of watching."
"It's very relaxing," she said. "Like watching a mill wheel."
I finished. Five hundred. My arms felt like wet rope. When I lowered the sword, she pushed off the fence.
"Spar with me."
Naomi stood at the edge of the yard with her arms folded. She didn't say anything. One eyebrow said it for her.
"He's been out of bed for an hour!" Hana called from the kitchen door.
"Blunted," said the princess. "And I'll go easy."
"You'll go easy," I repeated.
"Very easy."
I'd heard that before. Usually right before I ended up on my back.
Naomi's eyebrow came down. "Spar," she said.
We squared off. I raised my sword. The princess settled the spear low, weight on her back foot, the butt end tucked under her arm.
Something in my stomach went oh.
She came in fast. A feint at my knee that wasn't a feint at all, then the butt of the spear swinging around from my blind side, and—
Sky.
I was on my back, looking at the sky.
"Easy," the princess said, from somewhere above me.
"That was easy?"
"You're still breathing, aren't you?"
I lay there for a second. Not because it hurt, though it did. Because my back knew that move. My back had met that move before. The low feint, the swing from the blind side, the sky.
"Again," I said.
Again. This time I saw the feint coming and didn't bite. I stepped in, feinted high the way Father used to laugh at, and cut low. My blade got within a hand's width of her ribs.
Then I was on my back again.
"Almost," she said.
I sat up.
"Your Highness. Is this how the royal knights are trained?"
She tilted her head. "Why?"
"Because there was a guard in your sister's escort who fought exactly like this. The low feint. The spear coming around from the other side. She put me on my back the same way. Twice."
"The royal knights," the princess said, "think this style is undignified. They've told me so. Many times. Loudly."
"Then where did you learn it?"
"Nowhere. I made it up in the stables when I was twelve. Mostly by hitting hay bales."
"Then how did Beth learn it?"
A pause.
"You remember her name," the princess said. There was something odd in her voice.
"She knocked me down twice. Of course I remember. Do you know her?"
"I know everyone in my sister's escort." She looked at her spear very carefully. "She's fine. She went home. She misses the honey cakes."
"Tell her she owes me a rematch."
The princess's mouth twitched. "I'll tell her."
"Maybe she learned it from you."
"Maybe," the princess said, "she learned it from exactly me."
I nodded. That made sense. A princess who hit hay bales in the stables. A guard who hung around stables. They'd probably practiced together for years. Beth was probably her best friend.
That's nice, I thought. Beth had a friend.
Behind me, Naomi made a small, pained noise, like someone stepping on a tack.
Healing hour went back to the estate gate that afternoon.
The line ran down the hill road and around the corner. Sigrid had her basket ready. Hana had her notebook. Wren stood on my left, humming her three notes, one hand on her sword.
And on my right stood the Second Princess of Octavia, spear across her shoulders, watching everything.
Watch. Learn what he can do. That's what her mother would want from her. That's what any queen would want.
Before the tide, I'd done seventeen a day. Everyone in Greymark knew it. Sigrid had announced it at the gate every afternoon like a town crier.
Seventeen was too many. Cordelia had noticed seventeen. The princess had probably heard it her first day here.
But if I stopped at eight again, like the day before the tide, the whole town would notice that instead.
The first patient was a girl with a burned hand. A White circle, a splash, and the skin closed pink and smooth.
"One," said Sigrid.
I kept going. A cut thumb. A farmer's cough, with 「Cure」. A toddler with a split lip, who screamed at the circle and then laughed at it.
"Eight," said Sigrid.
The princess hadn't said a word. She was just watching the circles. Plain White, every one.
"Nine."
"Ten."
I stopped.
The pitcher was still more than a third full. It sloshed every time I breathed. My hands wanted to keep going. The line still went around the corner.
"That's all for today," I said.
A murmur ran down the line.
"Ten?"
"He did seventeen before."
"Is he still sick?"
"He's still recovering," Hana said firmly. She'd had a title for four days and already had a voice to go with it. "Come back tomorrow."
The princess turned her head and looked at me. Not for long. Just one look, the same one she'd given her napkin horse.
"Your town says you used to do seventeen," she said.
"I'm still recovering."
"Mm," she said.
Hana wrote in her notebook. I saw the number: 10. Next to it, very small, a question mark.
That night, I sat on the edge of my bed with the door shut and one candle lit.
There was nothing to heal. That didn't matter. A cast is a cast, and the pitcher pays for it either way. I'd learned that from 「Cure」, on the field, when the Broodmother's venom kept coming back.
I held out my hand.
"Eleven."
A White circle opened on my palm, glowed, and sank into my own chest. It felt like being held by someone who'd forgotten why.
"Twelve."
"Thirteen."
"Fourteen."
By sixteen, the candle flame had started to swim.
"Seventeen."
The room tilted, gently, like a boat. Mild. Just dizzy.
I reached for one more splash and found the bottom.
Seventeen.
Exactly seventeen. The same as the night before the tide.
I sat very still.
I'd poured myself out on that field until I vomited blood. I'd gone so far past empty that my sisters had felt me go dim for three weeks. And some stubborn part of me had been hoping, just a little, that it would count for something. That if you smashed a pitcher hard enough, it would grow back bigger.
It hadn't.
One night's growth. The same tiny amount as any other night. Exactly what I'd have gotten from one dizzy afternoon at the gate.
So it doesn't matter how far you fall, I thought. Only that you fall.
Father's voice, from somewhere: You don't dig it deeper.
"I'm digging it a little, Father," I told the ceiling. "Just not any faster."
Down the hall, a door banged open.
"I CAN FEEL THAT!"
Footsteps. My door opened without a knock. Marika stood there in her nightclothes, her hair in one loose braid, holding a cup of warm milk.
"Hana made too much," she said.
"Hana's asleep."
"She made it in her sleep." Marika shoved the cup at me, looking very hard at my wardrobe. "Drink it. And stop doing whatever you're doing."
"I'm done."
"Good." She stopped in the doorway, one hand on the frame. "...Seventeen?"
"Seventeen."
She knew what it meant. All my sisters knew what it meant.
"Then stop falling so hard," she said, and left.
"Show me Greymark," the princess said the next morning.
Naomi was passing through the hall with a stack of letters. She didn't slow down. "Wren goes with you."
"I'm armed," the princess said. "Very armed. One princess, one spear. That's practically two."
"It's one."
"Then if my mother wants to punish anyone, tell her it was my idea."
Naomi stopped. She looked at the princess the way she looked at a map before a sweep. "Your mother," she said, "isn't the one who'd carry him home."
The princess opened her mouth. Then closed it.
"Wren," Naomi said. "Ten paces back."
So Wren came too. Ten paces back, as ordered. I always knew exactly where she was, because she hummed her three notes the whole way.
So I showed her Greymark. Or I tried to.
It turned out she didn't need much showing.
"The bakery with the blue door has the best honey cakes," she said, before I'd even opened my mouth.
"How did you know that?"
"...Lucky guess."
The baker's wife came out wiping her hands on her apron, took one look at the princess, and beamed.
"Helmet girl!"
The princess went very still.
"Six honey cakes," the baker's wife went on happily, "on that bench, right there, one after the other, with the helmet on! Never seen anything like it. How did you even chew?"
"I think," the princess said carefully, "you must mean someone else."
The baker's wife peered at her. "Same appetite."
"It's a very common appetite. In the capital."
I looked between them.
Someone had eaten six honey cakes in full armor, on a public bench, with her helmet on. I'd never been to Sanctara. But between that and a princess who learned to fight by beating up hay bales, I was starting to form an opinion of it.
"Is that a capital thing?" I asked. "Eating with your helmet on?"
The princess closed her eyes for a moment.
"Yes," she said. "Very fashionable."
Strange place, I thought. Sanctara.
It went on like that all morning.
She knew which street led to the shrine before I pointed. She knew the bucket at the square's well was cracked. She waved at the ribbon seller like an old friend, and the ribbon seller called, "Back again!" and the princess called back, "First time!" very loudly.
Thorough, obviously. Capital people probably studied maps of everywhere before they visited. Cordelia had been thorough too.
At the town gate, she stopped.
The healing post was gone. The braziers on the wall were cold. Past the gate, the fields were still black in long stripes where the silk had burned.
She stood exactly where I'd stood that night. Then she looked out at the field.
"You went that way," she said quietly. "With your nose bleeding. Toward Cor."
"Did Her Highness tell you that?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"She said you went past the gate," the princess said. "She didn't say which side of the gate."
Something cold walked down my back.
I'd heard that before. Not as a saying. In a voice. In the dark. Right next to me.
"Where did you—" I started.
"Saint," she said. Then she caught herself. "Lord Fabian. Should we go back? You look pale."
I thought about it.
Saint. The whole escort had called me that, all twenty-one of them. It was probably what people in the capital called every healer.
And "which side of the gate" was probably a saying too. Royal guards had long rides to fill. They probably had a lot of sayings.
"Must be a capital thing," I said.
The princess looked at me with an expression I'd never seen on anyone's face before. A little like Naomi during my hunger strike. A little like Marika the day the bedpost broke.
"Must be," she said, through her teeth.
It went on like that for days.
She called me Saint three more times and corrected herself three more times. She asked if my back still remembered her spear "from before," and I said of course it did, from the first morning. She knew the gray mare's name. She asked whether Agnes still lost the "not past midnight" argument.
And every time, I found a perfectly good reason. Capital people talked like that. Capital people knew things. Capital people were, apparently, very strange.
"She's trying very hard," Hana said one evening, watching the princess stomp off across the yard. I'd just explained, kindly, that lots of people in the capital probably hated their full names too.
"Trying at what?"
Hana looked at me for a long moment. Then she patted my head, which is Naomi's job.
"Growing boy," she said. Sadly.
Three nights before we were due to leave, I was lying in bed, staring at the same crack in the ceiling and thinking about Sanctara.
Knock, knock.
I knew that knock.
Not the person. The knock. Soft, a little hesitant, at an hour when the whole house should have been asleep.
The last time someone knocked on my door this late, it had been Hana in her night robe, with a shawl around her shoulders and a candle in both hands. Then Marika. Then Naomi. One after another, each of them hoping to be first.
By morning, I'd been bound to three people for the rest of my life.
I got up. I opened the door.
The princess stood in the hall with a candle in one hand.
She wore a long white night robe with a shawl pulled around her shoulders. Her hair was even worse than usual. Her feet were bare, and she kept shifting from one to the other on the cold stone, like she'd been standing there a while, working up to it.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
Then I looked at the night robe. The shawl. The candle. Then back at her face.
Oh no, I thought. Is it the night robe? Is it always the night robe?
"Saint," she said.
And this time, she didn't correct herself.
Whoever comes later can get in line, I'd said, the night my sisters knocked.
Nobody had ever come later.
Until now.