The Queen's answer was waiting for us at the gray house.
It had come up the hill by palace rider while we were coming down it, and Hana had put it on the hall table under the salt cellar so it wouldn't blow away. Crimson seal. One fold. Liesel broke it standing in the doorway with her boots still on.
She read it. She turned it over, in case there was more on the back. There wasn't.
She held it out to me.
Yes.
And underneath, smaller, in the same hand:
Three steps.
"How does she know about the steps?" said Liesel.
"She always knows about the steps."
Behind us on the porch, Pia had gone very still. Then she said, in a hushed voice I'd later learn she kept for very old pages, "The Queen wrote about me?"
"She wrote about the steps."
"I'm in the steps." Her eyes were shining. "That counts."
Then my sisters came, all at once, the way they do.
Marika came down the stairs three at a time, stopped dead on the last one, and looked Pia up and down. The braid. The robes. The satchel. The blanket roll. She looked longest at what was strapped across Pia's back.
"Is that a CROSSBOW?"
"Yes."
"Can you hit anything with it?"
"Anything that holds still for one breath," said Pia. "Most things that don't."
"I LIKE her," Marika told the house at large.
Hana came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. She smiled at Pia, warmly, the way she smiles at everybody, and then her eyes dropped to the little book in Pia's hand. Pia had been writing in it all the way down through the city. Walking. Three steps behind. I don't know how she didn't fall over.
Hana's smile didn't move. Something behind it did.
Naomi came last, from the reading room, with a pen still in her hand. She stopped in the hall and looked at Pia for a long count, the way she looks at a horse somebody wants to sell her.
And for the first time since first bell, Pia stopped talking.
"Why him?" said Naomi.
Pia opened her mouth. I think she had an answer ready, a long one, with references. Then she looked at Naomi's face and put it away.
"Because Lord Albin was the only Saint alive in my whole life," she said. "I've read everything anyone ever wrote about him. I was going to go to Septentria one day and just look at him. Once. From the back of a crowd." She swallowed. "And now there's one Saint left anywhere I can reach, and something's hunting them. So."
Naomi looked at her a moment longer.
"Three steps," she said, and went back into the reading room.
We went in. Liesel on my left. And Pia, very smartly, stepped up on my right.
Wren was already standing in it.
I hadn't seen her move. I never do. Pia looked at Wren. Wren looked at nothing in particular. Pia went back to three steps.
That was the first time. By supper I'd counted nine.
Cordelia came to supper. She came in without knocking, the way she does now, sat down next to Marika, looked once at Pia, and then at Liesel.
"Shrine," said Liesel.
Cordelia nodded, as if that explained everything. Possibly it did.
Pia talked through supper. I don't mean she talked a great deal during supper. I mean she started when the soup came and didn't stop, except to eat, and sometimes not then. She had her little book open beside her bowl, and every so often she wrote in it without looking down.
"Day one," she said, writing. "The Saint ate two helpings of stew."
"Three," said Hana.
Pia looked up. "I counted two."
"He hid one under the bread."
Everybody looked at my bread. I had, in fact, hidden one under the bread. Pia crossed out the two and wrote a three, and Hana went back to ladling with the air of a woman who has won something and doesn't intend to mention it.
Then it was the Saints.
Pia knew all of them. Every Saint since the founding, and a great many before it who might not have existed, and she told us about them in order, with dates. Saint Lucan of the Marshes, who cured fevers by breathing on them.
"I can't do that," I said.
"You haven't tried."
The Saint of Three Rivers, whose name was lost, who walked across a flood without getting his ankles wet.
"My ankles get wet in puddles," I said.
"That's not what the song says."
Every Saint who has ever lived, according to a page Pia had read when she was nine and believed absolutely, could see in the dark.
"I walked into the door frame last night," I said.
"Twice," said Liesel.
Pia frowned at her book, as if it had let her down. Then she brightened, which with Pia takes about one breath, and put down her spoon, and leaned in.
"There's one page," she said. "The oldest one in the shrine. Older than the founding. Half of it's burned; it came out of the war in somebody's coat. The High Keeper says it's a poem. I think it's a record." She closed her eyes and said it from memory, in that hushed voice again.
"There was a Saint who kept candles, and they were not wax. While his candles burned, he knew where each one stood. And none of them were ever lost in the dark."
My spoon stopped halfway to my mouth.
I wasn't the only one. Marika had a mouthful of bread and stopped chewing it. Hana's ladle stopped over the pot. Naomi's knife stopped on her plate without a sound, which is harder than it looks. Cordelia studied the ceiling. And the back of my neck went cold, because I'd heard something very like that before, by candlelight, in the headmistress's study, from a woman whose family had kept their Saint out of the Records on purpose.
Liesel went on eating.
"Nobody believes it," said Pia. "It's only half a page." She opened her eyes and looked straight at me. "Do you have candles, Saint?"
The whole table was very quiet.
Liesel finished her mouthful. She took a sip of water. She set her cup down.
"He has four in his room," she said. "One of them smokes."
All perfectly true. I do. One does.
"Not those," said Pia.
"Those are the ones he has."
Pia looked at Liesel for a long moment. Then she looked back at me, and something in her face went soft and very earnest, which was much worse than the shouting.
"If you ever do," she said, "I'd be a very good candle. I don't flicker."
"No," said Liesel.
"You haven't even—"
"No."
Marika put her head down on the table and laughed until Cordelia had to pat her on the back.
Pia did not want to go to bed.
Pia wanted to sleep across my doorway, on her blanket roll, with her crossbow, because that was what escorts did in the Third Book of the Saints, chapter nine, and she could show us the page.
"You're not an escort," said Liesel.
"I'm a very dedicated volunteer."
Marika stood up, walked round the table, picked Pia up under one arm the way she'd carry a sack of oats, blanket roll and all, and walked out with her.
"BED," we heard, from the stairs.
"But the Third Book—"
"The Third Book can sleep across a DOORWAY if it wants to."
A door shut. Then a chair scraped, out on the landing, and creaked as somebody large and determined sat down in it.
Marika came back down a long while later, when the sounds from the guest room had turned into breathing, and the breathing had turned into a small, steady, outraged snore.
"She sleeps with the crossbow," Marika reported. "I LIKE her."
"You said."
"I'm saying it AGAIN."
Then Hana shut the kitchen door, and Naomi turned the lamp up, and it was the henhouse.
It had been a long time since we'd all been in one kitchen. Naomi at the head of the table with her hands flat on the wood. Hana beside her. Marika on the bench with her boots on it. Cordelia in the corner where she could see the door. Liesel next to me. And Wren at the door itself, with her back to it, which is where Wren is in every room I've ever been in.
I told them.
I told them about the candle for Lord Albin, and saying and the escort because I didn't have her name. I told them about the voice in the air, not in my chest, and following it round the ring, past fire and water and the great shield, and stopping in front of Elysia. I told them exactly what she'd said. Both sentences. I said them slowly.
The demons are moving.
They are hunting my light.
Nobody said anything at all.
Naomi had gone white the first time Elysia answered me, at the altar in Greymark, with Odile's silver bowl still rolling on the floor. She went white again now. The same white, exactly, as though it hadn't been months. As though it were the same morning.
Hana's tears were already running. She didn't wipe them. She never does.
"She TALKED?" said Marika. "Out LOUD? She's never—in five hundred YEARS—"
"Oh, no," said Cordelia, very quietly, from the corner.
That was all Cordelia said. It was enough. It was exactly the right two words, and I don't think anyone else in Octavia would have found them.
I didn't tell them about the gray. About Elysia looking a little grayer afterward, maybe, if it wasn't just the light. I didn't know what it meant. I'd only frighten Hana, and there wasn't anything any of us could do about it tonight.
Instead I told them the lines.
The new one under 「Discern」: What the dark has touched, you will know by its name. The one under 「Covenant」: Those you hold cannot be stirred.
"The window," said Liesel, very softly. "That's what I felt. Somebody shutting it."
And the last one. The name.
"「Kindle」," I said. "Each who carries your candle may light one more. All of the shelter. Half of the warmth. The light is yours. The vow is theirs."
I watched them work it out. Hana first, because Hana always gets to people first. Then Liesel. Then Naomi, slowly, all the way through, the way she reads a contract.
"One each," said Naomi.
"One each. For now."
"Whoever we choose can't be stirred. By whatever it is."
"That's what it says."
"And it costs you five."
"It's my light."
Naomi took her hands off the table and folded them, which is what she does instead of standing up.
"Then here are the rules," she said. "In private. Never where anyone can see a circle open under one of our hands. On a full pitcher. Liesel in the room. And whoever means to kindle somebody tells me first." She looked round the table at each of us in turn, ending with Marika, and stayed on Marika a moment longer than on anybody else. "It can't be broken, and it won't end. Choose like that."
"Noted," said Hana, in Naomi's voice, and Marika snorted, and for one breath the kitchen was just a kitchen again.
Then Naomi said, "Who's first?"
"Me," said Liesel.
She didn't say who. She didn't have to. She just turned round on the bench, and looked at the door.
Wren was standing where she always stands. Back to the wood. Eyes on the room. She'd been in every room I'd been in since the road out of Greymark, and in most of them nobody had looked at her once.
Everybody was looking at her now.
Wren didn't look at Liesel. She looked at Naomi. Wren is a Valcrest guard; she was a Valcrest guard before she was ever mine, and my lady has only ever meant one person.
Naomi looked back at her for a moment. Then she nodded, once.
"Go on," she said.
Liesel got up and crossed the kitchen and stood in front of Wren. They're nearly of a height. They've shared the escorts' room since the Academy, and I've never once heard either of them complain about the other, which, if you knew either of them, you would understand is a kind of miracle.
"You've stood on his right every day since the road," said Liesel. "You've never asked anything for it. You've never even said you were tired." She took a breath. "And now there's something walking through locked doors that picks whoever's standing closest. You're always standing closest."
Wren said nothing.
"So I want something standing beside you," said Liesel. "For once."
Wren tilted her head, very slightly. With Wren, that's a whole question.
"Yes," said Liesel. "I'm sure."
She looked back at me. I nodded. I'd checked an hour ago, the way Naomi taught me: a full pitcher, thirty-eight, all of it sitting there waiting.
Liesel held out her hand, palm down, over the place where Wren's heart was.
I felt it go. Five splashes, out of my pitcher, all at once, the way they go for 「Covenant」. But they didn't go into anybody I was holding. They went down my side of the bond to Liesel, the way the light goes when she draws it to heal. And under her hand, a circle opened.
White. Small. With one thin thread of gold running round it.
One. Not five.
Liesel's lips moved. She was reading something, the way I read the vow the first time, off the inside of my own head.
"By the light I carry," said Liesel, "I kindle yours. What would stir you will find no hold. What presses on you, I will feel. It cannot be broken, and it will not end." Her voice went very low. "Will you take it?"
The circle waited.
Wren looked at the circle. Then at Liesel. Then, just for a moment, past her, at me.
"Already am," said Wren.
The circle took.
I watched the gold thread lift off the edge and sink into Wren's chest, the way it sank into each of my sisters, a lifetime ago, back in Greymark. Wren's eyes widened, very slightly. Then her face did something I had never seen it do in all the months I'd known her.
She smiled. Properly. All the way.
And she hummed four notes.
The rare one. The fourth. I could count on one hand the times I'd heard it.
I reached for her then, without meaning to. Down the bond, the way I reach for the candles. And there was nothing there. Not a candle. Not a spark. Like putting your hand out on a dark stair for a rail that isn't there.
Which was right. She wasn't mine to feel.
"Liesel?" I said.
Liesel had her hand pressed flat over her own heart. Her eyes were very bright.
"She's there," she said. "She's small. Like a spark you've only just struck and haven't let go of." She laughed, a short wet sound. "She's very warm."
Wren went back to the door. She put her back to it. She looked at the room, the way she always does.
She was standing about an inch closer to Liesel than before. I counted.
There was a scrape, on the bench.
Marika had stood up so fast she'd knocked her own boots off it. She was looking round the kitchen with an expression I knew very well, the expression of a woman who has had an idea and is about to be stopped from having it and has decided to have it anyway.
"My turn," said Marika.
"Tomorrow," said Naomi.
"Tomorrow," Marika agreed. "I know EXACTLY who."
She smiled. It frightened me more than anything Elysia had said all day.