The first letter was about a summer house.
It was in somebody else's hand, round and generous, the hand of a lady who'd been taught to write invitations and had never stopped: ...my son had so hoped you might see the summer house in June... a most pleasant afternoon... every happiness in your future... Polite all the way down. You could have served it on a plate. The other four were the same: five ladies, five sons, five most pleasant afternoons.
Under them was the lesson book. Gray cloth, gone soft at the corners. The front of it was lessons, neat as a fence: the Eight, the kingdoms, the rivers of Octavia in order. Then one blank page. Then the same hand went on, and there were no lessons in it at all.
Small and straight, every letter the same height as the one beside it, as if somebody had measured. I'd seen that hand in the margins of my essays, my first month at the Academy. It had corrected my spelling of Fulgor three times.
Lady Amara's.
Since nobody will ask, it began, I will write it down. A teacher should always leave notes for whoever takes her class.
When I was eighteen, I heard a story about a water mage of Greymark. He married one woman. Only one. And when the tide came, he rode out beside her, and he died there with her.
I lay awake a week. Not for the dying. For the beside.
I stopped.
I didn't decide to. My eyes just wouldn't go on to the next line. I stood in the middle of the throne hall with a dead woman's book in my hands, and behind me I heard Hana make a very small sound.
She'd read it over my shoulder. Hana reads everything over everyone's shoulder.
"That's Father," she said.
Nobody answered her. Nobody needed to. Her face was already wet. Naomi's hand came down on her head, not heavy, just there, and stayed. Marika had gone very still, which is the most frightening thing Marika knows how to do.
"I should have told you what was on the first page," said the Queen quietly. "I'm sorry."
"Read it," said Naomi. Her voice was perfectly level. "All of it. Aloud."
So I did.
I spent ten years and every favor my family had on five introductions. Their mothers wrote very kindly afterward, every one. I have kept the letters. A teacher keeps her examples.
The next page was shorter.
Today, in the battle yard, I watched the Valcrest boy heal Lord Cassian's escort. It was the second time. The first time, I am told, he knelt in the stew to do it, and asked her name.
So it is true. They exist.
Just not for me.
I remembered the stew. Ilse's arm, and the smell, and kneeling, and asking her name because it was the only thing I could think of to say that wasn't about Cassian. I hadn't known it had gone anywhere after that. It had gone all the way up to the top of the mistresses' house, apparently, and into a drawer.
The page after that.
That night my door was locked. I lock it every night; I have since I was a girl. I turned round from the lamp, and it was standing by the window.
Black. A hood, and under the hood a veil, and above the veil only the eyes.
They were very calm.
I asked it to sit. I always ask. It did not sit.
Its voice was low. I have tried since to say whose voice it was like, and I cannot. Not a woman's. Not a man's. Not anyone's I have ever heard.
Beside me, Felix made a sound. Not a word. His spark snapped once off his cuff, loud in all that quiet, and he put his other hand flat over it as if he could hold it in.
Then the next.
It knew all five of them. It knew the summer house, and the teeth. It said: One good man... Just enough of them to keep the rest of you hoping. Hope is how they keep you kneeling.
Then it gave me a seed. Black, the size of a walnut, cold, and too heavy, as if there were more of it than showed. It said: Plant this inside the Academy. Somewhere no one will look. Somewhere it can grow.
I asked: Of what?
It said: Of what you already feel.
It is the only thing anyone has given me in ten years that did not ask to see my teeth.
One good man. I knew which one it meant. So did everybody in that hall with Valcrest for a name.
The last page was different. Same hand, same ink. But the lines had stopped being straight. They leaned down toward the right, every one of them, like a row of people who'd been standing too long.
I have stopped sleeping. I find I do not mind.
It said it would not come back. It said it would not need to.
It said I was not the first. It said it the way you would mention the weather.
I would have told anyone who asked. Nobody asked.
That was all. After it, the pages were empty to the end of the book. She never wrote another lesson.
I counted, because I didn't know what else to do with it. Five letters. Five lords. One visitor in a locked room, who didn't sit down.
And one good man, a long way back, who'd ridden out beside his wife.
"Last week," said the Queen, "a rider came from Septentria."
Septentria was a name on the big map in Lady Amara's classroom. Up in the top corner, north and west, past the edge of everything I'd ever needed to know about. Mountains, mostly, the way the map drew it. Snow. A very long way from anywhere I'd been.
"The Queen of Septentria has written to every crown she can reach," the Queen went on. She didn't take out the dispatch. She didn't need to; she said it the way she says anything she's read twice. "Septentria's Saint is dead. Lord Albin. Thirty-one years old. Blessed of Elysia at seventeen."
Thirty-one. Fourteen years of casting. He'd have been Red, I thought, or past it. More than I'd be for years. And it hadn't helped him at all.
"He was killed by his own escort," said the Queen. "In his chapel, at his morning prayers. With her sword. She had guarded him since he was twelve."
Nobody moved. Behind me, at the door, I heard Wren's boots shift on the stone, once, and go still.
"In the month before, she stopped sleeping. She smiled every morning, the same smile. Nobody thought anything of it. Why would they?" The Queen's voice didn't change at all. "And she told the keeper of their shrine that a guest came to her room at night, though her door was locked."
Felix had gone the color of the floor.
"The keeper wrote it down as tiredness," said the Queen. "Septentria took her alive. She hasn't said a word since. She hasn't stopped smiling."
"What's her name?" said Hana.
The Queen looked at her.
"The escort," said Hana. Her face was still wet. Her voice wasn't. "What's her name?"
"It doesn't say," said the Queen.
It gave his name, and his age, and the year he was blessed. It didn't give hers.
Hana took her notebook out of her sleeve. The new one. She opened it to a clean page and wrote something, and I didn't have to look to know what it was: the escort, Septentria, and a space after it, where a name would go when somebody found one.
"When I read 'though her door was locked,'" said the Queen, "I remembered a lesson book I had put away for being grief. I went and got it out again."
Liesel spoke first. Of course she did. She'd been filing the whole time; I'd watched her do it.
"Three locked doors," she said.
Everybody looked at her.
"Lady Amara's." She held up one finger. "The escort's, in Septentria." Two. Then she turned to Felix, and didn't hold up the third. She let him.
"My mother's," said Felix, in the short voice. "Tullia had the keys."
"Your mother remembers someone standing by her bed," said Liesel.
"Who didn't sit down." Felix looked at the book in my hand. "It did not sit. That's what your teacher wrote."
"Tullia," said Cordelia.
One word, the way she spends them, but everybody knew which words she meant. I don't know what it was. The last thing Felix's aunt had said in front of her sister's court, and none of us had believed her.
"I thought she was lying," said Felix. "I don't think she was."
Three kingdoms. Octavia, Bellonia, Septentria. One visitor, or one kind of visitor, walking through locked doors in all three, and standing, and never once sitting down.
The headmistress had said it, the first night she came back to the Academy. The demons are back. I'd thought, at the time, that it was the sort of thing very old women say at the end of very long journeys. Then she'd shown us a drawing, and told us someone had given Lady Amara what she ate. And I'd put that away with everything else I didn't want to think about, and gone on counting splashes.
I looked at Naomi.
She knew what I was asking. She always does. She looked back at me for a long moment, and then at the Queen, and then at me again.
"Your call," she said.
So I made it.
"Your Majesty," I said. "There's something the Crown doesn't know about me."
The Queen didn't move. She just waited, which with her is worse.
"When I look at people," I said, "I see a light in them. I have since my first month as a Saint. White when they're well. Yellow when something's a little wrong, then orange, then red. It's how I know who to heal first." I swallowed. "The Crown has my rank. It doesn't have that."
Liesel's hand found mine, low down by my side, where nobody but the Queen could see.
"Go on," said the Queen.
"When I cured Queen Aurelia, her light was wrong. Not just the poison. Something else. There were four or five places in it that were worn through. Thin. As if somebody had leaned on them, for a long time, with a great deal of patience." I didn't have a better word than that. "And there was something folded round the poison that didn't have a name."
Felix nodded, once. He'd heard me say it in Fulmara.
"And in the Gloamwood," I said, "the monsters don't have lights. They're holes. Places where the light just stops." I made myself say the rest. "I think it's the same thing. Not the same size. The same kind. I've thought so since the forest. I didn't say, because I couldn't prove it."
"And now?" said the Queen.
"Now there are three locked doors."
The Queen looked at me for a long time. Then at Liesel's hand in mine, which she'd seen, and didn't mention. Then at the book.
"The Crown," she said at last, "didn't hear that."
I opened my mouth.
"I did," said the Queen. "That will have to be enough for both of us."
She turned toward the empty throne, and back again.
"We have no proof," she said. "One lesson book, one dispatch, a sleeping woman's memory and a young man's eyes. If I said demons in this hall tomorrow, half the court would laugh, and the other half would start looking under their beds, and neither half would be any use to me." She folded her hands. "But something is walking through locked doors in three kingdoms. And every time, it has chosen—"
"Whoever's standing closest," said Liesel.
The Queen stopped.
"Lady Amara stood closest to the young lords. Every day, in her classroom," said Liesel. "Tullia stood closest to the throne. And the escort—" She didn't finish. She didn't have to.
"Escorts," said Cordelia.
That was her second word. It landed in that hall like something dropped from a height.
Every man in Octavia goes nowhere without at least two. That's the law. Two women at his shoulders, every hour he's outside his own walls, closer to him than anyone alive. Mine were right here. Liesel's hand was in mine. Wren was at the door with her back to it.
I didn't look round at Wren. I didn't need to. I knew exactly where she was.
"Then it'll have to come through ME," said Marika, much too loud.
And for once, nobody told her to say it quieter.
Lady Severine cleared her throat.
It was a very small sound. In that hall it was enough to turn every head.
"Your Majesty," she said. "The keeper is still waiting."
"Of course she is." The Queen let out a breath, which I had never once heard her do in that room. "The keeper of the great shrine has sent to the palace every morning since the dispatch came, Lord Fabian. Every morning, the same message. She asks for the Saint."
"What does she want?"
"She won't tell the Crown." The Queen's mouth went thin. "I imagine she wants to talk about women who heal. She has wanted to talk about that since Greymark."
Hana's pencil went still on her notebook. Marika looked at the ceiling. Liesel's fingers tightened round mine.
"Go tomorrow," said the Queen. "First bell. Take your escorts." She looked at the door, where Wren stood, and then at Liesel, and something went across her face that wasn't the Crown and wasn't quite Liesel's mother either. "Both of them."
"Noted," said Naomi.
I looked down at the book in my hands.
Five lords. Five mothers who'd written very kindly. Three locked doors in three kingdoms. One name nobody had written down.
And at the top of the city, under the dome of the great shrine, a goddess with her eyes shut, who in five hundred years had never once answered anybody.