The first time I tried to pull a seed out of a person, her son was holding her hand.
That part was my idea. It was the only part I was sure of, which isn't saying much, because I wasn't sure of anything else.
I'd sat up most of the night after Liesel wrote in my notebook, turning back through it to every touch I'd ever seen let go. There weren't many. A queen in a bed in Fulmara, her hand closing round mine. Tacita at two in the morning, when Cassian finally asked her name. Hedda in her meadow. Vera on the stone floor of a cell, reaching for Liesel.
A different key every time. But always the same door. Somebody held on, and the one being held reached back.
A seed isn't a touch. I knew that. Ambrose knew it better.
"Seed," he said, when I told him over breakfast. "Not touch."
"I know."
"Different thing."
"I know. I want to try anyway."
He looked at me over his porridge for a while. Then he took out his notebook, turned to a clean page and wrote the date at the top of it, which is how Ambrose says yes.
So I moved her evening to the afternoon. When Hana came up the last turn of the switchback with the boy, I was already on the bench in the toll house, and the first was already sitting.
She was always sitting. Five days, and she'd never once stood up while I was in the room.
The boy climbed into her lap the way he did every day, without asking, and put his cold face in her neck. The guard on the stool by the door kept her eyes on her own boots. Hana stood by the hearth with her hands folded, the way she stands when she's decided not to fuss.
"Saint," said the first. She'd started calling me that on the third night. I hadn't had the heart to stop her.
"I want to try something different today," I said. "It might not do anything at all."
"Will it hurt him?"
It was the first thing she asked. Every time. Before will it hurt, before will it work.
"No. He doesn't have to do anything." I looked at the boy. "You just have to hold on to your mother. Can you do that?"
He lifted his face out of her neck and gave me a look of deep scorn, the kind only very small people can manage.
"I always hold on," he said.
"I know. Today, hold on harder."
He thought about it. Then he took a fistful of her shawl in one hand and her fingers in the other, and held on so hard his knuckles went white.
"And you," I said to her. "Hold on to him. Not just with your hands. I mean—" I stopped. There isn't a word for it in any book I've read, and Pia has read all of them.
"Reach for him," said Hana quietly, from the hearth. "The way you would if he were falling."
The first looked at Hana. Then down at the top of the boy's head.
"He's not the one falling," she said.
Nobody answered that. Nobody could.
She shut her eyes, and bent her head over him, and held on.
I opened Blue 「Cure」.
Three splashes. The circle came up wide and blue under my hand against her side, and the light went in, and under 「Eyes」 the small dark knot below her ribs began to shrink, the way it did every day. The fine roots drew back toward it. Her own light came in behind mine, pushing. It had had a whole day's rest. It pushed hard.
And this time, I thought, something else pushed with it.
The roots drew in. Further. Further than I'd ever—
No. As far as they always went. Right up to the knot, and not a hair past it. And the knot sat there under her ribs, small and dark and perfectly patient, the way a stone sits in a stream while all the water goes round it.
I held the circle open until my arm shook. I held it past that. I was waiting for the thing I'd felt in Fulmara, the moment a block lets go and there's suddenly nothing left to push against.
It didn't come.
I closed the circle. Then I laid my palm flat against her side and opened a second one, small and flat and blue, its edge showing between my fingers. 「Discern」. Three more.
A demon's seed. Seven nights. Growing.
The same three words it had given every eater in Crossholm, with only the number changed.
Six splashes. I counted them, because I wanted to know exactly what it had cost me to learn nothing.
Under 「Eyes」, the roots began to creep out again.
The boy was still holding on, his eyes screwed shut. After a while he opened one.
"Is Mama better?"
The first opened her eyes and looked at me over his head. I didn't say anything. She understood me exactly.
"Slower," she told him, and smoothed his hair down. "Slower is a day."
They were my words. I'd said them to her on the first night, on this bench. I hadn't known she'd kept them.
Hana turned round to see to the fire, which didn't need seeing to. When she turned back her eyes were wet, and she was smiling at the boy as if nothing in the world were wrong, which is a thing Hana can do and I have never once managed.
Ambrose was waiting outside the door in the cold. He never asks to come in.
I told him. The knot. The roots: how far in, how far back out by the time I'd counted to a hundred. The same as yesterday. Not a hair less.
He wrote it down. Then, under it, two words I'd watched him write a hundred times on a windowsill in the Academy infirmary, about bottles that wouldn't hold.
Result: no.
I'd never seen him write them about a person before.
Liesel was leaning on the wall beside the door, spear on her shoulder. Pia stood exactly one step behind me with her notebook shut against her chest. Nobody had let her in, and she hadn't asked.
"It didn't work," I said.
"No," said Liesel.
"For a moment I thought—"
"I know. I saw your face." She pushed off the wall. "Then that's one thing it isn't."
"That's not much."
"It's one more than yesterday." She tipped her head at Ambrose. "He'll want a list."
Ambrose turned his notebook round so we could see. Under Result: no., in his narrow hand, he'd already started one. It had a single line.
- Holding.
Behind me, I heard Pia's pencil.
"What are you writing?" I said, without turning round.
"I've started a new column," said Pia.
"What's it called?"
A pause.
"Isn't."
Queen Stellara came up the switchback at dusk, and this time the marshal had been told.
They'd put a table in the marshal's tent behind the barricade: a map of the plateau held flat with four stones, a lamp, and a brazier that warmed exactly the air above it and nothing else. The marshal stood at one end. Naomi stood at the other, because Naomi doesn't sit at war tables; she stands behind them. Rufa was just inside the flap. Liesel at my left. And in the middle, in her gray cloak, Stellara, turning the seven-star ring round and round with her thumb.
"The scouts," she said.
"Black to the wrist, Majesty," said the marshal. "All eleven. Still standing. Still facing south."
Stellara turned to me. "How long?"
"I don't know," I said. It was a sentence I'd been saying a great deal lately. "Days. Not weeks."
"Then they come in days," said Naomi.
"And we hold the top of the road," said the marshal.
"With what we have." Stellara's thumb stopped on the ring. "And with what I've sent for."
Naomi waited. Naomi is the best person I know at waiting for the next sentence. People always give it to her.
"Riders went out at dawn," said Stellara. "To every house in Septentria that holds a blessing of mine. Every blessed man who can sit a horse is coming here."
The marshal's closed-gate face didn't move. But she said "Majesty," just the one word, very low, and for a moment it sounded like a door being tried from the other side.
"I know," said Stellara. "My council told me for an hour this morning. What the register says. What every mother in Septentria will say. What happened the last time a queen sent her men to stand on a line." She looked down at the map. "I had a Saint. We kept him safe for nineteen years, and somebody killed him at his prayers anyway." She looked up. "Keeping them safe didn't keep him."
Nobody said anything to that.
I thought about it, though. About the Queen's law at home: no man outside his estate with fewer than two escorts. About Naomi, who always brings six. About being seventeen and not allowed to hold a tent peg. And about a queen who couldn't stop turning her ring, sending every man she had up a mountain to stand behind a row of carts.
Two other men were up here already, of course. One of them sang to bottles and the other measured knots with thread. One had asked to come, and the other I'd asked for. Nobody had sent riders.
"Among the eaters," said Naomi. "Any men?"
Everyone looked at me.
"One," I said. "That I've seen. Tam. The grandfather at Crossholm."
Stellara went still. Not just the ring. All of her.
"Tam of Crossholm," she said.
"You know him?"
"I know his name. It's in the register." She said it slowly, the way you say something you've only just put together. "He served the Crown a long time. Longer than I've been alive. And then he asked to go home."
"Blessed," said Naomi.
"Yes."
The brazier ticked. Outside, somewhere along the barricade, a soldier was stamping her feet against the cold.
"What does it do to a blessing?" said the marshal. "The seed. In a man."
They were all looking at me again.
"I don't know," I said.
"Then nobody does," said Liesel. Not unkindly. Just true.
"Then we plan as if he still has it," said Naomi. "What was it?"
"I'll have the register sent up," said Stellara.
Naomi nodded once and looked down at the map, and I could see her doing it already: putting an old man somewhere on that road with a blessing nobody could name, and working out what he would cost.
Then she looked at me.
"Fabian. Your day."
I knew what she meant. "Eighteen into the bottles. Six at the toll house. Whatever the gap needs. What's left, I drain."
"Six," said Naomi.
"Six."
"Not seven."
"Not seven."
She held my eyes a moment longer. She knew. I found out later she'd been standing by the toll house that afternoon, long enough to see my face when I came out. She knew the six had bought me nothing but a line in a notebook.
She gave me the six anyway.
"When they come," said Naomi, "we count again."
Liesel didn't say anything. But her shoulder came against mine, not by accident, and stayed there until the end of the meeting.
The second afternoon, Hana held her while she held the boy.
Hana sat down on her other side and put both arms round both of them at once. The boy said "Ow," and then, after some thought, "No, that's all right." The first leaned her head on Hana's shoulder and shut her eyes, and for a moment the three of them looked like a painting of something I didn't have a name for.
Blue 「Cure」. 「Discern」.
A demon's seed. Eight nights. Growing.
Outside, Ambrose wrote it down. Result: no. And under 1. Holding, a second line.
- Two holding.
The scouts came in at dusk.
"Still at Crossholm, Marshal. Still standing."
"Facing?"
"South." The scout who was no older than Marika hesitated. "Black to the elbow now, Marshal. All eleven."
When I looked in on her that night, the first asked me what she asked every time.
"My mother?"
"Still at Crossholm," I said.
She nodded. She'd stopped asking the question after that one. I think she knew I'd stopped being able to answer it.
After supper, on the bond, I told Cordelia. I hadn't meant to. It came out anyway.
(Two tries,) I said. (Two things it isn't. Nothing works.)
A long quiet, far to the south. Then I felt Cordelia's candle turn toward me, all of it at once, the way it does when she's decided where to spend her word for the day.
(Again.)
That was all.
(She means TRY it again,) said Marika. (Not, you know. AGAIN again. Like it's a bad thing that's happening AGAIN. She means—)
(Marika,) said Naomi.
(I'm EXPLAINING.)
(He understood.)
I had.
The third afternoon, it was her idea.
"It came in because I said yes," she said. She was sitting very straight on the bench with the boy in her lap, and she'd plainly been thinking about it all night. "My mother held one out, and I said yes. Just one. To see." She looked at me. "So I'll say no. Out loud. While you do it."
I thought about Ambrose's list. Two lines in it. I didn't have a third.
"All right," I said.
Blue 「Cure」. The circle came up, and the light went in, and the first laid her own hand flat over the place under her ribs where she couldn't see anything and I could see everything, and said "No," very clearly, to her own body.
"No. No. No."
After a while the boy said it with her, because he thought it was a game. "No. No."
The knot shrank. The roots drew in. They stopped where they always stopped.
A demon's seed. Nine nights. Growing.
She'd seen it in my face before I closed the circle. She was getting good at my face.
"Did I do it wrong?" she said.
"No."
"Then why didn't—"
"I don't know," I said. "But it isn't you. Whatever it is, it isn't something you did wrong."
She looked at me for a long time over the boy's head.
"You say I don't know a great deal," she said, "for a Saint."
"I know."
"The songs never say it."
"The songs," I said, "have never been up here."
Outside, Ambrose added a line to the list.
- No.
"Three things it isn't," said Liesel, outside the door.
"Eighteen splashes," I said.
"Six a thing." She shrugged her spear higher on her shoulder. "I've paid more for worse lunches."
Pia didn't say anything. But I heard her pencil, three short strokes, and I knew which column they went in.
The light was going by the time we came back along the barricade.
Felix and Ambrose were waiting by Rufa's brazier with the last bottle of the day. I poured my three splashes into it, and Ambrose put his finger over the neck and half shut his eyes, and Felix sang to it. A verse a bottle, these days. He sang it the way he sings everything, as if the bottle had asked for it specially. His lips were going blue at the corners.
Marika was on watch at the barricade behind him, being Front, very straight, very busy not looking.
She lasted until the end of the verse. Then she reached back without turning round, took the end of the red scarf where it hung off his shoulder, and wound it twice more round his neck, tight enough to make him cough.
"You're making the BOTTLES shiver," she said, to the plateau.
"That's not how bottles work."
"It's how THESE ones work."
Her ears were the color of the scarf. Felix, very wisely, went back to singing.
That was when I heard the horses.
Hooves on the frozen road below the last turn of the switchback. More than a few. Then the soldiers along the barricade going quiet, one after another down the line, the way they hadn't even gone quiet for the queen.
They came up out of the dusk in Septentrian blue. Escorts first, riding close. Then more escorts. And in the middle of each knot of riders, someone they were all riding round: taller, or older, or younger, the one point every other horse on that road had been arranged to keep from harm.
Wren, at my right, hummed three slow notes. The questioning ones.
"Men," breathed Pia, one step behind me.
I counted them. I count everything. I'm not going to write the number down, because it isn't the kind of number anybody writes down, in Septentria or anywhere else. It was more than I'd expected. It was fewer than a kingdom should ever have to send.
"Should I write it down?" whispered Pia.
"No," said Liesel and I, at the same time.
At the front of the nearest knot, a young man pushed his hood back and looked up at the barricade. At the braziers, and the soldiers, and the dark past them. Then he found me in the line, and looked at me the way you look at the only other one of you in a room.
I lifted a hand. After a moment, so did he.
Septentria had sent its men up the mountain to hold the road.
A day's ride north, in a village street in the snow, with his hands black to the elbow, it had one already standing on the other side.