Before anybody read anything, I healed the horse.
She'd earned it. She'd carried the Queen's answer from Sanctara faster than anything has a right to, and she stood in the hole with her head hanging and her sides going like a bellows, and her light was orange all the way down both forelegs, where everything that holds a horse together had been asked for more than it had.
"My lord—" said the rider.
"One moment," I said, and put my hand on the mare's near foreleg, above the knee, the way I'd put it on a carpenter's.
I didn't know whether it would work. As far as I knew, nobody had ever tried. But the line in my head said beasts of the field, and if Elysia was going to show me a thing hurting, I didn't think she meant me to just stand there and look at it.
I poured. Green. The circle opened under four hooves instead of two feet, which looked strange, and the mare flinched and blew hard through her nose, and then the orange went out of both legs at once, up from the hooves like water draining out of a trough, until her light was the plain tired white of a horse that only needed a meal and a week off.
She lifted her head. Then she shoved her nose into my chest, hard enough to sit me down on my stool.
"Well," said Liesel. "Now you know."
"Next he'll be doing the goat," said Hildegard, from her barrel.
Somewhere in the yard, General bleated, as if he'd heard.
Cordelia didn't open the case until the war room door was shut. Then she broke the seal, read the whole thing through once without any expression at all, and held it out across the table to Naomi.
"You read," she said. "More words."
Naomi took it. She read it aloud the way she reads everything aloud, as if it were a list of supplies.
"By order of the Crown. Lord Fabian Valcrest of Greymark, Saint of Elysia, is entered in the Crown's records at Blue, from this date."
Marika made a noise. Hana's pencil stopped and started again.
"The light seen on the wall of Greymark was the Saint's. The Crown has said so, and has nothing to add."
I looked at Hana. Hana looked at her notebook. It was true, every word of it; the light was mine. It was only that it wasn't everything.
"The First Princess will go to Fulmara under the white and the crowned star, to return the Throne's Fire and his companion to Bellonia, and to treat for peace with whoever holds the Bellonian throne when she arrives. She will take with her the Crown's physician, who is an envoy of this Crown in every respect, and will be treated as one."
Naomi paused.
"She will go by a road of her own choosing, at an hour of her own choosing, and she will not be hurried by anyone."
She put the paper down on the painted map.
"That's all."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"She didn't know," said Felix slowly. "About the letter. My aunt's. The rider left Sanctara before Corvus ever got here."
"Didn't need to," said Cordelia.
"Whoever holds the Bellonian throne when she arrives," said Liesel quietly. She was looking at the paper, not at anyone. "That's my mother hoping. That's what it looks like when she does it."
Felix looked at her, and for a moment he didn't seem to know what to do with his face.
"The Crown's PHYSICIAN?" said Marika.
"That's me," I said.
"I KNOW it's you."
I didn't open mine in the war room. I don't entirely know why. It was small, and sealed in the Queen's own crimson, not the Crown's, and it felt like the kind of thing you open somewhere quiet.
I opened it on the gatehouse stair, halfway up, with my back against the cold stone and Liesel sitting two steps above me, because she'd followed me and I hadn't told her not to.
It was short. Her letters always are.
Lord Fabian,
The Crown has known you were Blue since you sat at my table. As of today, the Crown also says so. It is late.
Late is not false.
If you cross, you will cross as an envoy of this Crown and as nothing else, whatever they choose to call you on the other side. If anyone there wants you, they will have to want all of Octavia. Make sure they understand what a great deal that is to want.
Please come back.
Theodora R.
I read it twice. The second time, I stopped at the last line.
Liesel leaned down over my shoulder. She has never once in her life pretended she wasn't reading something she was reading.
"She crossed something out," she said.
"I can see that."
"She never crosses anything out." Liesel took the letter out of my hands, quite gently, and held it up to the last of the light from the arrow slit, tilting it until the stroke through the word went thin enough to read underneath. "She writes it again. On a clean sheet. From the top. I've watched her do it four times over one sentence to the Duchess of—" She stopped.
She'd read it.
"Please," said Liesel. Her voice had gone odd.
She looked at the word a long time. Then she gave the letter back to me, and folded her hands in her lap, and looked at the stair below her feet.
"She could have written it again," she said. "On a clean sheet. She always does." She was quiet for a moment. "She didn't."
I looked at the line: one word struck through, and the two words after it standing on their own, and the Queen of Octavia choosing, for once, to let somebody see the draft.
I folded it up very carefully and put it inside my shirt.
Naomi was on the roof when I came up the rest of the stair. Standing, not sitting, with her hands behind her back, looking at the fire at the bend.
Liesel stopped two steps below the top and stayed there.
"The rider came," I said.
"I know."
"So I'm asking."
Naomi didn't turn round at once. Down at the bend, a thin figure got up from beside the fire and walked a little way out onto the road, the way he did every night, and stood there.
"Go," said Naomi.
One word. I'd been braced for a great many more than that, and for a moment I didn't know what to do with only one.
"Marika goes in front," she said. "Liesel and Wren at your back. You stay inside Cordelia's riders, and when Cordelia says stop, you stop, and when she says run—"
"I run."
"The last time I told you to run, you ran straight at Cordelia."
"She was poisoned. And you didn't say which way."
"Away, Fabian." Naomi didn't turn round. "It always means away."
"Away," I agreed.
She made a sound that, in anyone else, I'd have called a laugh.
"And you?" I said.
I already knew. I'd known since the night in the war room when she looked east for too long. But I wanted to hear her say it, and I think she knew that too.
"Greymark has no gate," said Naomi. "There's a road through the forest that wasn't there a month ago, and a man at the bend who knows the way down it, and his mistress knows it too. Somebody has to stand in the hole."
"And Hana?"
"Hana has nine girls and a stone with names on it." She was quiet a moment. "And somebody has to count."
She turned round then, and looked at me in the last of the light, the way she used to look at me when I was small and had done something she was going to have to explain to Father. Then she put her hand on my head, the way she does. Not heavy. Just there.
"Every night after supper," she said. "It's cheap now."
We left two days later, at dawn.
Cordelia had chosen the hour. She'd chosen everything else too, in about forty words spread over two days: twelve of the Crown's riders, the crowned star on one lance and the white on another, two remounts each, food for ten days though the road was meant to take six, and the last day's twelve bottles packed in straw in Marika's saddlebags, because Marika's saddlebags were the ones least likely to fall off anything.
Cinna rode in the middle of the riders with his hands bound in front of him and his reins tied to a knight's saddle, looking around at the morning with the mild interest of a man being taken on an outing. Gelio rode behind him, bound the same way, looking at nothing. Or rather, at one thing. I'd stopped checking which.
The whole hole was full of people who'd come to watch us go.
Hildegard was on her barrel. She'd been there before dawn; I don't think she'd slept. She looked the riders over the way she must once have looked over Mother's, and then she looked at Cinna.
"Throne's Fire," she said.
Cinna inclined his head, as well as a man can with his hands tied to somebody else's saddle. "Dame Hildegard."
She pointed with her sword at the new gate, which now had four oak beams standing and a fifth lying ready on the trestles.
"Come back and look at it when it's done," she said. "Then try it."
Cinna looked at the gate for a long moment. Then, for the first time since we'd taken him, he laughed out loud.
Hana came down the line of horses with a basket, the way she came down the line of patients at the estate gate when I was small, putting things into people's hands. Bread. Salve. A clean bandage for each of the Crown's riders, who took them as if they'd been handed something holy. When she got to me she didn't give me bread. She gave me a notebook, small, new, with a soft cover and a pencil tied to it with string.
"Every one," she said. "Every name, if they'll tell you. If they won't, write what they looked like." She closed my fingers round it. "I'll add them up when you're home."
I couldn't say anything, so I nodded. She reached up and straightened my collar, the way she does, and stepped back to stand beside Naomi.
Dame Constance stood at Marika's stirrup with her arms folded.
"Don't fall off anything," she said.
Marika's ears went pink. "I don't FALL OFF THINGS."
"The north stair."
"The north stair fell off ME."
Constance considered that, decided it was fair, and stepped back.
Ambrose stood by the well with his hands behind his back and General leaning on his leg. He didn't say goodbye. He came over to my horse at the last moment and looked up at me, and at Felix beside me, and at the place under Felix's coat.
"If it works," he said. "How. Exactly."
"And if it doesn't?"
Ambrose thought about it seriously.
"Then why. Carefully," he said, and went back to the well.
Naomi didn't come to my stirrup. She stood in the middle of the hole, where the gate used to be, with Hana on one side of her and Hildegard behind her on the barrel. Her hands were behind her back. She'd already said everything she was going to say, on the roof, two nights ago, and she isn't someone who says things twice.
Cordelia lifted her hand. The riders moved.
We went out through the hole at a walk, across the last fields, past the old green stripes and the new black ones, past the oak with the owl in it and the hedge where the fox lived, down the road toward the bend. In the north field, the hare sat up to watch us go.
At the bend, Corvus's keepers were already mounted, in their ring, with Corvus in the middle. The captain with the scarred eyebrow looked at Cordelia, and Cordelia looked at her, and something was settled between them without anyone saying it; and then the ring moved forward and fell in at the head of our column, so that Corvus rode first of all of us, into the trees.
I turned round in the saddle, once.
Greymark sat on its rise above the fields with the morning on its walls. The hole in the wall was very small from here. There were two lights standing in it that I'd have known anywhere, and a crowd of smaller ones, and on a barrel, one very stubborn one.
Naomi, in my chest: (Here.)
Half a drop.
(Here,) I said.
Then the branches closed over the road, and it was evening under them, though it was barely morning, and the lights of small things in the undergrowth went still all around us as the column passed.
At the head of the column, Corvus turned in his saddle and looked back down the line of riders. Not at Felix, this time. At me.
"Stay on the road," he said.
Four words. Eleven, in all.
He turned forward again, and his keepers closed round him, and we rode into the Gloamwood.