Naomi received Felix in the front room of the gray house, in her navy coat, with her sword lying on the table beside the teapot.
Nobody had asked her to put it there. Nobody had asked her to move it, either.
Felix bowed very deeply. "Marchioness Valcrest. I've heard so much about you."
"From whom?"
"...Everyone at the gate."
"Sit," said Naomi.
Felix sat. Liesel and I sat. Wren stayed in the hall with Felix's two escorts, where the three of them could stand in silence at one another, which I think all three of them preferred. Hana came in with a plum cake still warm from the oven, set it down in front of Felix, gave him the biggest slice, and sat down at the end of the table looking anxious on his behalf.
Marika was hiding.
She'd told me in her letter she was very good at it. She was on the stairs, just past the doorway, and I could see both of her boots.
Naomi poured the tea herself. Then she sat back, folded her hands, and looked at Felix.
That was all she did.
Felix talked. He talked about the house, which he said was the most sensible house he'd seen in Octavia. He talked about the plum cake, which he said was the best thing he'd eaten since my honey cakes, and Hana went pink. He talked about the road, and the dust, and the very small cheese. He asked whether the sword on the table was for him, and laughed, and nobody laughed with him.
Naomi didn't say anything. She just watched him, the way she watches the Gloamwood from the wall: patiently, without blinking, as though she has all the time in the world and it does not.
I'd never seen Felix run out of words. It took Naomi four minutes. I counted.
The room went quiet. Felix picked up his tea and put it down again without drinking any.
Then Naomi held out her hand across the table.
Felix looked at it. He took it.
There was a snap, sharp and bright, the cat-in-winter snap I'd felt at the gate. Felix flinched. Naomi didn't. Not even her fingers.
"Sorry," said Felix, letting go. "It does that when I'm—"
"Excited?" said Naomi.
"...Yes."
"No," said Naomi. "You're not."
On the table, a teaspoon gave a small, high tink as a spark jumped to it, and was still.
Naomi picked up her cup. "My brother wants your spark in his tins. Why do you want to give it?"
"I'm very generous," said Felix, and grinned.
Naomi waited.
"Curiosity?" he tried.
Naomi waited.
Felix looked down at the plum cake, and at Hana, who was looking at him the way she looks at anyone who hasn't eaten enough. Then at me. Then at nothing in particular.
"Because there's someone a month's ride from here," he said quietly, "and everything I could send her goes bad on the road."
Nobody said anything. Hana's hand went to her mouth.
Their Queen is unwell, I'm told.
Naomi looked at him for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice wasn't any softer. It was only quieter.
"How long have you been holding it up?"
Felix's grin stayed where it was. Everything under it went very still.
"Holding what?"
"Whatever it is."
He didn't answer. After a moment the grin came back properly, slower than usual, the way you pick something heavy back up when you've only set it down to change hands.
"A while," said Felix.
"Noted," said Naomi.
She set down her cup.
"You can touch the tin."
"Thank you, Marchioness."
"Every tin comes back."
"Every tin."
"And my brother comes back from every room he goes into with you."
"...Yes, Marchioness."
"If he doesn't," said Naomi, "Bellonia won't be far enough."
Felix looked at the sword beside the teapot. Then at Naomi.
"I believe you," he said.
"Good."
There was a thump on the stairs, and Marika came around the doorway at full speed, as though she'd been waiting for exactly this moment and had run out of patience slightly before it.
"He's STILL a prince from BELLONIA," she announced.
"Marika," said Naomi.
"I was hiding."
"You were on the stairs."
"Strategically." Marika planted herself in front of Felix with her arms folded. "Do you like goats?"
Felix blinked up at her. "...Is that a test?"
"Everything is a test."
Felix laughed. It was a real one, I think; it came out of him before the grin could get there first. The thread of yellow in his light didn't move. But his shoulders did, a little, like someone had loosened a strap.
On the way out, while Felix was at the door being told about General in great detail, Naomi spoke in my chest.
(He's carrying someone,) she said. (I know the weight.)
(I know,) I said.
(Watch him.) A pause. (Not for what he might do to you. For what it's doing to him.)
The ring started with a spear.
Liesel snapped one in battle class two days later, the way she snaps one most weeks. It broke clean across the middle with a crack like a branch in a frost, and she held up the two halves and looked at Dame Valeria.
"It was an old spear," said Liesel.
"Hm," said Dame Valeria.
After class, while Liesel was at the trough, I went and asked for the pieces.
Dame Valeria looked at me. Then at the two halves of the spear in her hands. Then, across the yard, at Liesel, washing her face. She looked back at me for a long moment, without any expression at all.
"Hm," she said, and gave them to me.
I'm almost sure Dame Valeria knows everything. She just doesn't see why she should say so.
The tassel started with a parcel from the second ring, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, with a note from Hana in it.
Navy for us. Blue for her. I matched it to the ribbon from your letter. Braid it tight; spears pull. Don't let her see the parcel. Hana.
Inside were two skeins of thread. One was the deep navy of every Valcrest coat I've ever owned. The other was the exact blue of the ribbon Liesel wore to lunch. Hana had never seen that ribbon. All she had was my letter, which said blue, like the sky above the inner wall just before sunset. I don't know how she does it.
The only trouble was time.
Liesel is my escort. She is beside me from the moment I wake up until the moment I close my door at night, and when I close my door, she is on the other side of the wall, in the escorts' room, eight feet away. There's no part of the day she isn't in.
Except the part where she's asleep.
So I worked at night.
I'd sit on the edge of my bed with my pool full and undrained, the lamp turned low, and wait. Through the wall, Liesel's candle would flicker in my chest the way it always does when she's awake. Then, slowly, it would settle, low and steady.
Then I'd knock very softly on the escorts' room door, and Wren would come out with her knife.
I'd asked her the morning after Hana's parcel came. I'd told her what I wanted to make, and why, and she'd listened without a word, and at the end she'd said, "Away from you."
"What?"
"You carve away from you," said Wren. "Always. Or you'll be the one who needs healing."
She was a strict teacher. I hadn't expected that. She sat cross-legged on the floor of my sitting room with the lamp between us and corrected me in two or three words at a time, never more.
"Slower."
"With the grain."
"That's your thumb."
It was my thumb. I wrapped it in Hana's handkerchief instead of healing it, because the board in every hall still says what it says, and because I suspected Wren would think less of me if I didn't.
The spear shaft was ash wood, pale and hard. Wren showed me how to saw a short piece off the broken end, how to bore through the middle of it with a heated awl, how to shave the outside round, a sliver at a time. It was slow. It took four nights before it looked like anything at all, and on the fifth I nearly split it and had to start again from the other half.
When my hands got too tired to hold the knife, I braided.
Navy, blue, navy. Tight, because spears pull. I'd never braided anything in my life; Marika used to braid my hair when I was small, until I was big enough to run away from her. But my hands are good at doing small things carefully. It's most of what healing is.
Navy, blue, navy.
I kept thinking about the yard. Liesel with her spear, a flash of blue and navy at the head of it every time she turned. Liesel at the trough with water dripping off her nose, saying Are you asking me? Liesel in the pie shop with her mouth full, laughing so hard every knight in the room turned around. Seven, she'd said.
Navy, blue, navy.
"You're smiling," said Wren.
I looked up. She'd stopped sharpening her knife and was watching me across the lamp.
"I'm not."
"At string."
"It's not string, it's—"
"Usual," said Wren, and went back to her knife.
I'm fairly sure that's the first joke Wren has ever made. I'm fairly sure she'll deny it.
By the seventh night, the ring was round.
It was the wrong size. I knew that the moment Wren slid it onto her own finger to check the shape and it went all the way down without stopping. Wren's hands are smaller than Liesel's. Liesel's hands snap spears.
"How big?" said Wren.
"I don't know."
Wren looked at me. I looked at the ring.
I couldn't ask. I couldn't measure her while she slept, because Liesel sleeps like a knight, with one hand near her spear, and I'm fond of my arms. I couldn't ask my sisters in the henhouse, because Liesel lives in the henhouse too.
So I wrote to Hana again. Her answer came back the next evening, four words long, which for Hana is practically silence.
Hold her hand. Count.
The next afternoon, walking back from the infirmary in the long gold light, I held Liesel's hand.
I'd never done it on purpose before. In the garden I'd caught her sleeve because the world was ending. On the wall, she'd only ever caught her hairpin. This was a path between two buildings on an ordinary day, with girls going past on every side, and I took her hand because I wanted to, and because Hana told me to.
Liesel stopped walking.
She looked down at our hands. Then at me. Her candle in my chest went from a flame on a windy night to a flame in a gale.
"...What are you doing?"
"Holding your hand."
"In front of everyone."
"Yes."
Two first-years walked straight into each other. Somewhere behind us, I heard Wren hum, very quietly, and then stop, as though she'd decided this wasn't the moment.
Liesel started walking again. She didn't let go.
I counted. You can count a hand without looking at it, if you're careful: the width of her knuckles under my thumb, the place where her ring finger met her palm, the hard little ridge of callus at the base of each finger from a lifetime of spears. I ran my thumb across them, slowly, one at a time, the way Wren had taught me to feel for the grain.
"You're moving your lips," said Liesel.
"No, I'm not."
"You're counting my hand."
"...I count everything."
She looked at me sideways for a long moment, with the red climbing out of her collar. Then she looked straight ahead and held on tighter, which made it harder to count and was much better anyway.
That night, with her candle low and steady through the wall, I took the ring back to the knife and made it right.
It was nearly midnight when I finished. I was turning it in the lamplight, looking for rough places, when the candle in my chest flickered.
Once. Twice. Then it flared, the way it does when she wakes up.
"Fabian?"
Through the wall. Sleepy.
I have never moved so fast in my life, including the battle. The ring went under my pillow. The tassel went under the ring. The knife went to Wren, who caught it without looking and began, at once, to sharpen it, as though she'd been sharpening it for an hour and had a great deal more sharpening still to do.
The escorts' room door opened. Liesel stood in it, in her nightdress, with her hair everywhere and her spear in one hand, because Liesel sleeps like a knight.
She looked at Wren, sharpening. She looked at me, sitting very straight on the edge of my bed with my hands folded in my lap. She looked at my pillow, which I'm fairly sure was not as flat as a pillow ought to be.
"What are you two doing?"
"Sharpening," said Wren.
"Counting," I said.
"At midnight?"
"I count everything."
Liesel looked at the pillow again. Then she yawned, enormously, the way only a person who is really still asleep can yawn.
"Usual," she said, and went back to bed.
I waited until her candle had gone all the way down again, low and steady. Then I let out a breath I'd been holding long enough to count to forty.
Wren stopped sharpening. She held out her hand, and I gave her the ring, and she turned it in the lamplight for a long time without a word. She slid it onto her own finger. It stopped halfway, at exactly the place where Liesel's knuckle would be wider.
She gave it back.
"Don't take long," said Wren.
Everyone in my life over a certain age has said that to me eventually. Wren isn't over a certain age. She said it anyway.
For once, I agreed with all of them.