We held for three days.
That's all holding is, it turns out. Not a battle. Not a charge across a meadow with a war cry. Holding is standing at a barricade in the cold while nothing happens, and then standing there some more, and doing it again tomorrow, and knowing the whole time that the nothing is the thing you're waiting for to end.
The marshal changed the watch at dawn and at dusk. Rufa's women kept their end. The scouts went out along the shore road on their plateau ponies every morning and came back every evening, and every evening the report was the same.
"Still at Crossholm, Marshal. Still standing."
"Facing?"
"South."
I stood at the gap in the barricade every day, and looked at whatever came down the road from the plateau. Not much came, now. A shepherd with three sheep and a frostbitten hand. Two old sisters from a hill croft no one had remembered to knock on. A boy who had walked from the far side of the lake on his own, without shoes, and didn't say a word to anybody for a whole day, and then told Hana his name very quietly while she was wrapping his feet. All of them white under 「Eyes」. All of them clean.
And every evening, I went into the old toll house and sat down on the bench beside the first.
She was always sitting when I came in. She'd decided that, the first night, and she never once stood up while I was in the room. Her son came up the switchback with Hana every afternoon and sat in her lap by the hearth for as long as the marshal allowed, which was an hour, and then went down again with Hana, holding her hand, not crying, which I think was worse.
Blue 「Cure」. Three splashes. The knot shrank, and held, and when I closed the circle the roots came creeping back.
But not as far.
On the second evening I thought I was imagining it. On the third, Ambrose measured it, as near as I could describe it to him, and wrote it down under the first two, and looked at the three lines for a long time.
"Less," he said.
"Less," I said.
Not gone. Not even close. Her light was still fighting, behind my circle, and every evening it was fighting a little harder because it had had a day's rest from the roots. It wasn't a cure. It wasn't the thing in Ambrose's notebook, Not kill. Pull. Find how. It was only slower.
But slower, every day, was another day.
Vera stood on the barricade.
She'd asked Rufa on the first morning, and Rufa had looked at her for a long moment and then put her at the far end of the women's line, between her own two watchers, with a spear. Not a sword. A spear, the long kind, the kind you hold a line with. Vera took it without a word and stood with it the way she must have stood behind Albin for nineteen years: straight, still, eyes outward, watching everything.
She didn't speak to me much. She spoke to Liesel, sometimes. In the evenings, when the watch changed, I'd see the two of them standing together by a brazier, not talking, two escorts off duty, watching the same dark.
On the third evening she came and found me at the gap.
"Lord Fabian."
"Vera."
She didn't flinch at her name anymore. Not much.
"When you find it," she said. She was looking north, not at me. "The way to pull it out. The thing in your friend's notebook." A pause. "I want to be there. When you go to Crossholm. When you go to Stonemere." Her hands tightened on the spear. "Marta will open the door to me. She always did. She'll open it, and smile, and ask me in. I want to be the one standing at her door when you come."
I looked at her for a long time.
"I don't know how yet," I said. "I don't know if I'll ever know."
"I know," said Vera. "I'm asking anyway."
Rufa, three yards away by the brazier, said without turning round: "Not today."
Vera almost smiled. Not the smile. A different one, small and crooked and tired, the first I'd seen on her that was her own.
"Not today," she agreed.
The bond came on the third night, the way it always does, after supper.
(Cordelia,) said Naomi. (Day three. Holding.)
Cordelia's candle, far to the south, turned toward us. I could feel her listening. She always is.
(Did you eat?) said Hana. Not to me. To Cordelia.
There was a pause. A long one, for Cordelia. I felt her candle go very still, as if it had been caught at something.
Then her one word for the day.
(No.)
(Go and eat,) said Hana, gently, decided, the way she says it to me.
A longer pause.
And then, from a palace on a hill a long way south, the faint warm sense of a candle getting up out of a chair, and going, slowly, toward a door.
Marika, beside the brazier with Felix's head on her shoulder again, laughed out loud, once, and then pretended very hard that she hadn't.
I couldn't sleep that night, so I wrote.
I sat on a crate by Rufa's brazier, at the end of the barricade, with Hana's small notebook open on my knee and a stub of pencil that Pia had given me, because Pia always has a spare pencil. Liesel sat on the crate beside me, close enough that I could feel her candle without reaching for it. Wren stood behind us, watching the dark. And one step from my elbow, on the frozen ground with her back against a cart wheel and Father's mittens on, Pia, asleep at last, with her own book clutched to her chest.
I turned the pages first. All of them. From the beginning.
Tacita. At the top of a page, in my hand, from a night in the Academy.
Under it, the long space I'd left for a woman in a cell in the snow. Not a space anymore. Vera.
Then the next page. Six names from the Long Meadow. Dagny, Solveig, Berit, Maren, Elinor, Beatrix. I read every one. I always do.
Then I turned to a clean page, and wrote at the top of it, the way Hana would:
The north.
And under it, everything I'd counted.
Twelve villages, at least. Seven quiet. Two risen, and Stonemere gone with them. A valley that was attacked. Five that were well, and aren't.
Thirteen fruits, nailed in a crate, growing. Nobody ate them.
Forty-four names on Hana's other list. Clara first. Mila. Tam. Marta.
The first, in the toll house. Three days slowed. Less each night. Not enough.
More than a hundred Blue bottles made on the road. Thirteen used. Every one of them somebody I didn't have to reach in time.
Pool, forty-four.
I stopped. I looked at that last line for a long time.
Forty-four. I'd been forty-two in the infirmary at the Academy, five days home from the Hollowcrown, watching Felix sing to a row of bottles on a windowsill. Two more splashes since, in more than a month of hitting empty every night. And in that month I'd seen a fisherwoman smile at me over a bowl of plums, and a baby with a knot under its ribs, and a whole village walk out along a spit of shingle to join the end of a line of people with horns coming through their hair.
I'd healed everyone I could reach.
And I'd counted, very carefully, every one I couldn't.
Liesel was reading over my shoulder. She doesn't ask. She never has.
"You've left something out," she said.
"What?"
She reached over and took the pencil out of my fingers, the way she'd taken Pia's pen in Hana's kitchen, and under the last line, in her own square, plain hand, she wrote:
Not kill. Pull. Find how.
Then she gave me back the pencil.
"That's not a count," I said.
"No," said Liesel. "It's the only line on the page that isn't."
I looked at it. Ambrose's words, in Liesel's writing, under all my numbers.
Then I looked at the rest of the notebook. The pages after that one.
They were empty. All of them. A great many white pages, more than I'd ever filled, waiting.
The scouts came in at first light on the fourth day, as they always did.
"Still at Crossholm, Marshal."
"Facing?"
"South." The girl who was no older than Marika hesitated. "The eleven, Marshal. The ones who stayed. Their hands have gone black."
The marshal didn't say anything. Neither did anyone on the barricade. Down the line, at the far end, Vera's hands tightened on her spear.
I stood at the gap, with Liesel on my left and Wren on my right and Marika in front of me, and Pia one step behind, awake now, with her hood buttoned under her chin. I looked north, the way the queen had looked north, the way the reeve had, and the innkeeper at the crossroads, and an old woman at a ford with an empty white cloth in her apron.
There was nothing to see. Only the white country going away under the dawn, and the wind, and the long lake a gray glint at the edge of everything.
Somewhere out there, a hundred people were standing in the snow, waiting to ripen.
And somewhere a great deal farther away, in a place I had never seen, something was waiting for them.
I didn't know how to pull a seed out of a person by the roots. I didn't have a skill for it, or a circle, or a tier. I didn't have anything but a question, and a notebook with a great many empty pages, and a woman in a toll house whose roots crept back a little less every night.
I closed the book, and put it in my coat, and went to slow her again.
Not yet, I thought.
But soon.
Afterword
Thank you so much for reading The Fruit They Were Promised, Volume 8 of Fabian and His Three Sisters: The Hidden Saint of House Valcrest.
If Volume 7 was about the people nobody asked, Volume 8 was about the people nobody came for. Village after village on the road north said the same word to Fabian before they said anything else: nobody. Nobody came. Nobody answered. And into that silence walked two hooded figures with a basket of black fruit and one lie, told very kindly: You don't need a Saint. You can heal yourself. The worst thing about it, to me, is that it was almost true. They did get up out of bed. They did stop coughing. They were well, and calm, and smiling, right up until they weren't.
This was the first volume where Fabian met something he couldn't heal. Not because it was too strong for his circle, but because there was nothing in it for his circle to reach. He spent the whole road north asking how do I kill it, and it took a jar in a coach house and a boy with a notebook to show him he'd been asking the wrong question. He hasn't got the answer. He hasn't got a skill for it, or a tier. He has a question, and a woman in a toll house whose roots creep back a little less every night. For now, that's what hope looks like in Septentria.
It was Vera's volume, too. I knew she was coming from the moment a queen wrote that her Saint's escort was taken alive, still smiling. I didn't know until I wrote the cell that asking her name wouldn't be enough, or that it would be Liesel, escort to escort, who'd kneel down on the stone and tell her the only thing that was true: You can't stop them. You can only stand next to them while they do it, and catch them after. Vera is on the barricade now, with a spear. She has a great deal to answer for. She's going to stay alive and answer for it.
And it was Marika's, again, though she will tell you it was tactics. A vow said in a stable. A verse skipped every time it comes round, for the rest of somebody's life. A scarf thrown at a face, and then not taken back. It's YOUR scarf NOW. (Felix intends to remember that sentence until he dies.)
Hana started a new list this volume. Not the dead. The other one. Forty-four names, and one more on a page of its own, headed The first. Fabian wrote them down too. So did I.
Volume 8 ends on a barricade at the top of a mountain road, with a line of people standing in a village street in the snow, facing south, waiting for eleven more of their neighbors to ripen. Thirteen fruits are growing in a nailed crate that nobody has touched. Somewhere far away, a seat carved with horns is still empty, and the woman who stands at its right hand has said soon. Fabian has said it too, from the other side. All of it is waiting in Volume 9.
If you enjoyed this volume, I'd be truly grateful for your support. A comment, a rating, or adding the novel to your library helps the story find more readers, and it tells me you want to know what happens next. I read every comment, even when I can't reply to them all.
Thank you for coming north with me. Keep your coat on. I'll see you at the barricade in Volume 9.
Bonus: Everyone at the Barricade Says Thank You
Pia: "Thank you all SO much for reading! I wrote everything down. I needed a second book."
Liesel: "One length."
Pia: "We're not on HORSES."
Liesel: "Habit."
Hana (on the bond): (Did everyone eat?)
Cordelia (on the bond): (Eating.)
Marika: "That's her word for the DAY, and she's using it on SOUP—"
Cordelia (on the bond): (Bonus.)
Felix: "Mine now."
Marika: "It's a SCARF."
Felix: "It's MY scarf."
Marika: "That's what I SAID."
Felix: "I know. I just like hearing it."
Ambrose: "Pull."
Rufa: "Snow."
Queen Stellara: "The bad song is still very popular here."
Pia: "There are five now."
Fabian: "...Five?"
Pia: "One's about the scarf."
Marika: "WHAT."
Vera: "...Thank you for reading."
Pia: "She said THANK YOU. I'm writing it down."
Rufa: "Two of mine on her. Still."
Dame Valeria (from a very long way south): "It'll keep till spring."
Wren: (hums three notes, the fond ones)
Pia: "She LIKES me."
Wren: "...Maybe."
Pia: (drops her book)
Naomi: "Volume 9."
Fabian: "Is it going to be cold?"
Liesel: "Item thirteen."
Marika: "And before ANYONE asks, General STILL HAS THE YARD."
Naomi: "Noted."