Rufa pulled the nails out of the crate herself, one by one, with the claw of a hammer, and laid them in a row on the coach house floor as if she'd be asked to count them later.
Then she stepped back and let me look.
The coach house was cold and dim, smelling of straw and leather and horse, with one lamp hung on a nail above the crate. Naomi stood at the door. Liesel at my left, Wren at my right, Marika between me and the crate as if the crate might stand up. Ambrose on his knees beside it with his thread. Felix behind him, because Felix goes where Ambrose goes, now, the way Pia goes where I go.
Pia herself was outside. Liesel had put her there. One step outside the door, with the door open, where she could see me and nothing in that crate could see her.
In the straw: the jar, with its lid pressed down. And round it, loose, the twelve from the bowl at Crossholm.
Under 「Eyes」, thirteen holes.
I'd seen them before. A plum-sized hole in the old woman's cloth. A dozen in a bowl on a fisherwoman's table. I knew what they looked like.
They didn't look like that anymore.
They were bigger. Not much. The width of a fingernail, maybe, all the way round, the way Ambrose's thread had said. But bigger. And they weren't round anymore, quite. Each of them had a kind of edge to it now, under 「Eyes」, a ragged rim where the dark met the dim light of the coach house, and the rim wasn't still. It moved. Very slowly. The way the edge of a puddle moves on a cold night when the ice is coming in from the sides.
"Well?" said Naomi.
"They're growing," I said. "All of them."
Ambrose had his thread round the second fruit already, the first of the loose ones. He knotted it and held it up to the lamp and looked at it, and wrote a number in his notebook, and went on to the next. He didn't say anything. His hands, I noticed, were very careful not to touch the skins.
"How?" said Felix. "They're picked. They're not on a tree. There's nothing for them to grow out of."
I didn't answer. I didn't know.
I knelt down beside the crate.
"Fabian," said Liesel.
"I'm not going to touch it."
"You're kneeling next to it."
"I'm going to try something."
Liesel looked at Naomi over my head. I didn't see what passed between them. I didn't need to. Naomi didn't say no.
I held my hand out flat over the jar, a hand's breadth above the lid, not touching. And I opened Blue 「Cure」 under it.
Three splashes. The deepest purge I had. The circle came up wide and blue in the dim coach house, and the light went down from it through the glass into the black thing in the jar.
And went into nothing.
Not the way it had gone into the fisherwoman, where the knot had shrunk and the roots drawn back until the circle closed. Nothing happened at all. The light went down into the hole and the hole took it the way a well takes a dropped stone, and there was no bottom, and no sound, and nothing changed.
I held it until my arm began to shake. Then I closed it.
Under 「Eyes」, the hole sat in its jar exactly as before. The rim moved, very slowly, the way it had moved before.
"Nothing," I said.
"Nothing?" said Felix.
"Nothing at all."
I sat back on my heels in the straw. I looked at it for a long time. And slowly, the way you put a thing together when you've had all the pieces for days and only just thought to put them side by side, I understood why.
"It's not a body," I said.
They looked at me.
"「Cure」 works in a body. It goes into the light of someone who's alive and pushes the wrong thing out of it. In the woman at Crossholm, her own light pushed with it. That's why the knot shrank. Her light was still fighting it, under all that calm, and my circle gave it something to fight with." I looked at the jar. "This hasn't got any light in it. There's nothing in there for 「Cure」 to push with. It's just the seed. Nothing else."
Nobody said anything.
"So I can't kill it out here," I said. "And in them, I can only slow it. I can't—"
I stopped.
Because that was the wrong way round. I'd been asking the wrong question ever since Crossholm. How do I kill it. As if it were a fever, or a poison, or the dark thing in Amara that we'd burned out by the roots.
It wasn't any of those. It was something that had been planted. Something that grew.
"Ambrose," I said.
He looked up from his thread.
"If something's growing in the ground," I said slowly, "and you can't kill it where it is, what do you do?"
Ambrose considered this from several sides, the way he does. He looked at the jar. He looked at me.
"Pull it," he said.
"Out of them," I said. "Not kill it in them. Pull it out. Before it blooms. Roots and all."
The coach house was very quiet. A horse shifted in the stall behind us.
"Like a splinter," said Felix, slowly.
"Like a weed," said Ambrose. He put his notebook down on his knee, which he never does. "Roots break. If you pull and a root breaks, it grows back from what's left." He looked at me. "You'd have to see every root."
"I can see every root."
"Then you'd need something to hold them all at once." Ambrose's eyes went somewhere far off, behind his face, the way they go when he's worked out the beginning of something and not the end. "Something small enough. Something precise enough. Something that takes hold of all of it and doesn't let go."
"I haven't got anything like that," I said.
"No," said Ambrose. "Not yet."
He picked up his notebook again and wrote one line in it. I could read it upside down.
Not kill. Pull. Find how.
It wasn't an answer. I didn't have an answer. I didn't have anything at Blue that could do it, and I didn't know what would.
But for the first time since a fisherwoman had looked at me with fond pity across a bowl of plums, I had the right question.
Rufa nailed the crate shut again, every nail back in its own hole, in order. The sentry came back to the door. And we went out into the cold, where Pia was standing exactly one step outside it, with her book shut and her face very white, and she didn't ask, and I didn't tell her.
Not yet.
The south shore came down the switchback that afternoon.
The marshal had built her line at the top, where the road came up over the edge of the plateau: a barricade of carts and timber across the road, soldiers in blue behind it, fires in braziers. Nobody comes down it who hasn't been looked at. She'd said it at the council table, and when she said it she'd looked at me.
So I stood at the barricade and looked.
They came along the plateau road in a long ragged line from the north and west: the people of Crossholm and the five villages with pencil crosses, the ones who hadn't eaten. Carts piled with bedding and pots. Old women on ponies. Children on their mothers' backs. A cow, once, which Rufa's women had to talk round the barricade one hoof at a time. They'd left at night, most of them, on the word of a reeve knocking on their doors, and they had the faces of people who had walked out of their own houses without looking back because they didn't dare.
One at a time they came to the gap in the barricade, and one at a time I looked at them under 「Eyes」.
White. White. Yellow, a cough, I'd see to her below. White. Orange, a child with a frostbitten foot; Liesel carried him past and I healed it as she went. White. White.
No knots. Not in any of them. Not for hours.
The reeve of Crossholm came through near the end of the afternoon, walking beside a pony with an old woman on it. She'd been walking for two days. Her chain of office was gone, and her face had gone gray under the red.
She stopped at the gap and looked at me, and waited for me to look at her, the way they all did.
White. Clean.
"Go on down," I said. "There's soup at the bottom."
She didn't go on down. She stood there, holding the pony's bridle.
"My sister wouldn't come," she said. "I knocked on her door. Twice. She opened it and smiled at me and said she'd never been so well in her life, and asked me in for a plum." Her hand tightened on the bridle. "I left her there. Standing in the door. With her hands folded."
Hana was beside me. I hadn't heard her come up from the shrine. She had the blue notebook in her hand.
"What's your sister's name?" said Hana.
The reeve looked at her. "Mila," she said.
Hana opened the notebook and turned it round and held it out. The reeve looked down at the page. At the eleven names from Crossholm, in Hana's small round hand. The third one down.
Mila.
"She's already on it," said Hana. "I asked her at the door. The first day."
The reeve stared at the name for a long time.
"What is this?"
"The ones we're going to find," said Hana.
The reeve looked up at her. Then she nodded, once, very hard, the way you nod when you can't trust your voice to do it for you. And went on down the switchback with the pony, and didn't look back up the mountain at all.
The second-to-last cart had a woman walking beside it with a little boy on her hip.
She came to the gap. I looked.
The boy was white. Clean.
The woman wasn't.
Low under her ribs, small, so small I nearly missed it in the failing light, a knot of dark. And going out from it, so fine they were hardly there at all, a few thin roots.
She saw my face change. I don't know what it looked like. She saw it, and she went white herself, a different kind of white, and her arm tightened round the boy.
"Please," she said.
"When?" I said. Quietly.
She didn't pretend. I'll always remember that she didn't pretend.
"Three nights ago," she said. "My mother's in the third house. She kept bringing them. She kept saying, you look so tired, you look so tired." Her voice cracked. "And I was. And I thought, just one, just to see, she looks so well. And then the reeve came knocking and said what you'd said, and I—" She stopped. "Please. Take him. He didn't have any. I swear he didn't have any. Please just take him down."
I looked at the boy again. White. All the way through.
"He's clean," I said.
She made a sound I don't have a word for.
The marshal was at my shoulder. I hadn't heard her come either. She looked at the woman, and at me, and her closed-gate face didn't move.
"Saint?"
"She's eaten," I said. "Three nights. It's small."
The marshal's hand moved to her sword hilt. Not to draw. Just to rest there.
"Then she doesn't come down," said the marshal.
"No," I said. "Not into the city." I looked at Naomi, who had come up behind the marshal, silent, the way she arrives. "But she doesn't stay up here, either."
Naomi looked at me for a long moment.
"A room," said Naomi. "With a door that locks from outside. A guard who doesn't eat anything she's given. The old toll house, there, at the top of the road."
"And every day," I said, "I come and slow it."
The woman stared at me. "Slow it?"
"I can't take it out," I said. "Not yet. But I can slow it. Every day. And every day I slow it is a day I've got to find out how."
She looked at me. Then at the boy on her hip. Then she put him down, very carefully, on the frozen road, and held his hand out to Hana, and Hana took it.
"What's your name?" said Hana.
She told her.
Hana wrote it down. Not on the other list. On a new page of its own, after all the others. Just the one name, at the top of a clean page, with a great deal of white underneath it.
I saw what she'd written over it, as a heading. Two words.
The first.
The marshal's scouts came back at dusk.
They'd been out along the shore road all day, two of them on plateau ponies, as far as they dared. One of them was a girl no older than Marika, and she reported to the marshal at the barricade in a flat, careful voice, looking at a point somewhere over the marshal's shoulder the whole time.
"Stonemere's gone, Marshal."
I heard someone behind me draw in a breath. I didn't need to look round to know who.
"Gone how?"
"Gone with them. The line from the north came down the shore yesterday. Stonemere came out to meet it." The scout swallowed. "They were standing on the spit when the line came by. All of them. Like they'd been waiting. Then they just walked out and joined the end of it. Like a family joining a procession."
"Horns?"
"Some." A pause. "The ones at the back. The new ones. You could see them coming through." Another pause. "There was a little round one, in a brown shawl. Right at the end. She was—" The scout stopped.
"She was what?"
"Smiling, Marshal. Waving. At nobody."
Behind me, Vera made no sound at all.
I turned round. She was standing between Rufa's two women at the edge of the brazier light, very straight, the way escorts stand, with her hands at her sides. She wasn't crying. Her face had gone past that, somewhere I couldn't follow.
Liesel was already beside her. Not holding her. Just there.
"And now?" said the marshal. "Where's the line now?"
"Crossholm, Marshal." The scout's voice went careful again. "They've stopped at Crossholm. In the street. With the eleven who stayed." She swallowed. "They're not doing anything. They're just standing. All of them. In the street, in the snow. Facing south."
Nobody said anything.
"Waiting," said Naomi.
"For what?" said the marshal.
Naomi looked north, past the barricade, past the braziers, into the dark coming down over the white country.
"For the eleven," she said. "To ripen."
I slowed her that night, in the old toll house at the top of the road.
It was one room of rough stone with a hearth, a bench, a pallet, and a door with a new bar on the outside of it, and one of the marshal's soldiers sitting on a stool beside the door with a spear across her knees and her own bread in her pocket. The woman was sitting on the bench when I came in, with her hands pressed together between her knees, and she stood up so fast she nearly fell.
She stood. I noticed. And then, very deliberately, she sat back down.
"I'm not going to stand," she said. Her voice shook. "I heard what the scout said. About them standing. I'm going to sit."
"Good," I said, and sat down on the bench beside her, so she wouldn't be the only one.
Blue 「Cure」. Three splashes. Under 「Eyes」, the small dark knot under her ribs shrank, and the few thin roots drew back toward it, and the knot stopped, and held, the way it always did. I held the circle open until my arm shook. Then I closed it.
The roots crept out again.
Slower than they'd crept out of the fisherwoman in Crossholm. I was sure of it this time. Her own light was fighting it, behind the circle. Three nights isn't long enough for it to have stopped.
"Did it work?" she said.
"It's slower," I said.
"Is slower good?"
"Slower is a day," I said. "Every day I come up here and do this is one more day for me to find the other thing."
She looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded, and folded her hands in her lap, and stayed sitting down.
When I came out, Ambrose was standing outside the toll house door with his notebook, in the cold. He didn't ask to come in. He just wrote down what I told him: the size of the knot, as near as I could say it, and the roots, and how far they'd drawn back, and how far they'd crept out again by the time I'd counted to a hundred.
Then he wrote the date under it, and drew a line, and left the rest of the page empty.
"Tomorrow," said Ambrose.
"Tomorrow," I said.
The barricade at night was a row of braziers in the dark.
The marshal had soldiers on it in two watches, wrapped to the eyes, stamping their feet. Rufa's women had taken one end of it without being asked, because Rufa had looked at the barricade once and said "That end," and that was that. Beyond the braziers the plateau went away north into nothing at all. No lights on it anywhere. No moon. Just the wind, and the dark, and somewhere out there, a day's ride away, a street full of people standing in the snow.
The queen came up at midnight.
She came on foot, up the last turn of the switchback, in her gray cloak, with two guards behind her and a basket on her arm. Nobody had told the marshal she was coming. The marshal turned round from the barricade and saw her and, for the first and only time I ever saw it, the marshal's closed-gate face fell open.
"Majesty—"
"Bread," said Queen Stellara, and handed her the basket. "From the palace kitchens. Lady Hana's recipe, I'm told." She looked along the barricade, at the braziers and the soldiers and the dark beyond them. "I wanted to see it."
She didn't stay long. She walked the length of the barricade once, slowly, and said something to every soldier on it, and I don't know what. Then she stood for a while at the very middle of it, by the gap, and looked north into the dark, turning her ring, with nobody saying anything to her at all.
Then she went back down.
Felix was sitting by Rufa's brazier with his knees drawn up and Marika's red scarf round his face to the eyes, shivering so hard I could hear his teeth from three yards away.
Marika was standing behind him, at the barricade, being Front. Her back was very straight. Her jaw was very tight. She was not looking at him so hard that the not-looking had a sort of shape to it.
I watched her last about a quarter of an hour.
Then she turned round, stamped across to the brazier, and sat down on the frozen ground beside him, hard, so close that her shoulder knocked into his and her whole side was pressed against his.
Felix's teeth stopped chattering out of pure surprise.
"Don't," said Marika, staring straight ahead into the fire, "SAY anything."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"I'm not COLD. YOU'RE cold. I can FEEL it. All NIGHT. Every time you shiver I have to FEEL it, and it's driving me OUT of my MIND, so I'm going to sit HERE until you STOP."
Felix was quiet for a moment.
"That's very tactical," he said.
"It IS tactical."
"I know. I said that."
She didn't move away. Neither did he. After a while, Felix stopped shivering, and after a while longer I saw his head go down, very slowly, until it was resting on the top of hers. She didn't move. Her ears, in the brazier light, were the exact color of the scarf.
I looked away. It wasn't mine to look at.
Liesel found me at the gap in the barricade, looking north.
She didn't say anything. She just reached up and pulled my hood up over my head, the way you'd do it for a child who'd forgotten, and tied the strings under my chin, slowly, her fingers cold against my jaw. Then she left her hands there a moment longer than tying strings takes.
"You'll be no use to anybody with a frozen head," she said.
"I know."
"You never know. That's why I do it."
She stood at my left, the way she always does. Wren at my right. And one step behind me, in a gray wool hood and my father's mittens, Pia.
We stood there for a long time, looking at the dark.
"The page," said Pia, at last. Very quietly. "The half one. I'm not allowed to read it aloud. But I can say the last line, I think. It's only a line."
I didn't say anything. She took that as a yes.
"And none of them were ever lost in the dark," said Pia.
The wind came down off the plateau and went through all of us. Somewhere along the barricade, a soldier coughed. Out past the braziers, there was nothing at all.
"We're not lost," I said.
"No," said Pia.
She was quiet for a while. Then she stepped up, one step, until she was standing right beside me, the way she had on the cart in the tide on the Long Meadow. She didn't look at me. She looked north, with me, into the dark.
"But it's going to be very dark," she said.