Dame Valeria was waiting at the Academy gate the morning we left.
That had never happened before. I'd gone looking for her plenty of times: in the yard, in the armory, once, very foolishly, in the staff dining room. She'd never come looking for me.
She stood by the gatepost in the gray before sunrise with her arms folded and no wooden sword, which made her look oddly unfinished, like a statue someone had forgotten to give its spear. Felix and Ambrose stopped behind me. So did their escorts. So did mine.
"Lord Fabian."
"Dame Valeria."
She looked at me for a long moment. Not the way she looks at a stance she's about to correct. The other way. The way she'd looked at me on the Hollowcrown, across a dark meadow, when she'd said Hm and nothing else.
"I have a question for you," she said.
I waited.
"It'll keep till spring." She unfolded her arms. "Come back, and I'll ask it."
"Yes, Dame Valeria."
"Lady Marika."
Marika straightened like a struck bell. "Dame Valeria."
"Front."
"Yes, Dame Valeria."
Dame Valeria nodded once, at Marika, at Liesel, at Wren, and last of all, very briefly, at Pia, who was one step behind me with her crossbow and her new hood and Father's mittens tucked into her belt. Pia's mouth fell open. Dame Valeria had never once looked at her.
Then she turned and walked back toward the yard, and didn't look round.
"What was that?" said Felix, very quietly.
"I don't know," I said. Which was true. It just wasn't all of it.
The north gate of Sanctara is the oldest of the outer gates: low, thick, and black with age where the torches have smoked it for longer than anyone remembers. Beyond it the north road runs straight across the plain toward a line of hills that, on a clear morning, are just a darker blue than the sky.
The party was waiting in the square inside it.
Naomi and Hana on their horses. Two carts, one for food and tents and one for bottles, which was still mostly straw and empty crates. Felix's two knights, far apart. Ambrose's two escorts, close together, both looking at Ambrose the way you look at someone who has once walked into a pond while reading. And a dozen of the Queen's soldiers in crimson under mail, mounted, in two neat lines, with a captain at their head.
She was older than Naomi, with a face like a door that only opens for horses. Her hair, under the helmet, had been red once and was mostly gray now. She looked at us coming across the square, and at our escorts, and at Pia, and at Pia's crossbow, and I watched her count all of it without moving her lips.
"Captain Rufa," said Naomi. "My brother."
Captain Rufa saluted. "Lord Fabian."
"Captain."
"The Queen says the Marchioness commands." She said it as flatly as a list. "I have the horses, the carts, and twelve women who have never seen snow."
"Good," said Naomi.
Rufa's eyebrows went up a hair. "That they've never seen snow?"
"That you counted."
Rufa looked at Naomi for a moment. Then something happened at the corner of her mouth that, on another face, might have been the start of a smile, and was over before I could be sure.
"Marchioness," she said, and that was all, and that was enough.
Cordelia was at the gate.
She was on her warhorse, in full plate with her helmet under her arm, which nobody needed to see a princess off on a cold morning and which was, I realized, exactly the point. She'd ridden down from the palace in it so that everyone in the north square would see the First Princess at the gate, armored, and know whose Saint was leaving.
She didn't ride out to meet us. She waited until we came to her. Then she looked at Naomi, and at Hana, and at Marika, and at Liesel, one after another, the way she looks at a map before a battle. Last of all she looked at me.
I knew she wouldn't say much. She never does. She'd said Close to Naomi in her mother's rooms six days ago, and Stay once, a long time ago, when it was the only word that mattered.
"Go," said Cordelia.
Then she turned her horse aside and let us through.
The north road is straight for the first two days. Somebody built it that way a long time ago, with a ruler, and nobody since has had the nerve to bend it.
Naomi rode at the head of the column with Captain Rufa. I could hear them, now and then, when the wind came back down the line. It was the shortest conversation I'd ever heard two people keep up for a whole morning.
"Pace."
"Steady."
"Water?"
"Next village."
"Good."
They seemed very happy with each other.
Then the carts, with Hana riding beside the food cart and checking the soup pot's lashing every mile, and Ambrose sitting in the bottle cart on a crate of straw with a book open on his knees, being driven, which he said was the most efficient use of a journey he'd ever heard of. His two escorts rode on either side of the cart and watched him as if he might read himself off the back of it.
Then me. Marika out in front, alone, where she could see everything coming and nothing could come at me without going through her first. Liesel on my left. Wren on my right. Felix and his knights a little way behind, far apart.
And Pia.
Pia had been on a horse twice in her life. Both times, she told us, it had been the horse's idea. Captain Rufa had looked at her once in the north square and given her the oldest, broadest, calmest mare in the Crown's stables, a brown animal shaped roughly like a barrel with a mane, who walked as if she'd seen everything the world had to offer and been unimpressed by most of it.
But Pia didn't know how close one step was on a horse.
For the first mile she kept riding up so close behind me that her mare's nose bumped my horse's tail, and my horse put its ears back. Then she'd notice and pull up, too hard, and fall twenty yards behind, and her face would go white, and she'd kick the barrel into a trot, bouncing, crossbow clattering, and bump my horse's tail again.
At the third bump, Liesel looked back.
"One length," she said.
Pia stared at her. "That's not a step."
"Horses don't take steps. They take lengths." Liesel pointed with her chin at the gap between my horse's tail and the barrel's nose. "One. That much. No more, no less."
Pia looked at the gap as if it were a line in one of her books she intended to learn by heart. She pulled the mare back. She judged it. She pulled back a little more.
One length.
She held it the rest of the morning. I didn't have to look round to know; I could hear the barrel's hoofbeats exactly where they belonged, steady as a clock. When we stopped at noon to water the horses, she got down, very stiffly, and took out her book and wrote something and underlined it twice.
I didn't need to see it. One length.
In the afternoon the wind came round to the north and turned cold. Real cold, the kind with an edge on it, coming straight off those blue hills and the white tops behind them that I could just see now if I looked hard.
Felix rode up past me.
He did it casually, the way Felix does everything he's not supposed to, with one hand on the reins and the other in his pocket, and by the time Liesel had opened her mouth he was already alongside Marika, out in front.
Marika didn't turn her head. "BACK."
"I'm Kindled now," said Felix. "I'm stronger. That's practically front."
"You are NOT front. I am front."
"Then I'm beside front."
"There's no SUCH THING as beside front."
"There is now. I'm in it." He shivered, a little, as the wind came over the road. "Look at me. Beside front."
Marika's head came round.
I saw it, from behind. I don't think she knew I could see it. Her hand went to her chest, under the collarbone, very quickly, the way you'd touch a pocket to check something was still there. And then her face did a whole argument with itself, start to finish, in about a breath.
She'd felt him shiver. Of course she had. What presses on you, I will feel.
She yanked her scarf off, the long red one Hana had knitted her three winters ago, and threw it at his face.
"It's COLD," she said. "Don't get SICK. Fabian has enough to DO."
Felix peeled the scarf off his face and looked at it. Then he wound it round his neck, twice, slowly.
"It's warm," he said.
"It's NOT warm. It's a SCARF."
"It smells like—"
"Don't you FINISH that."
"—horse," said Felix, innocently. "I was going to say horse."
Marika faced front so hard that her mare sidestepped. Her ears had gone pink right through, and it wasn't the wind.
Felix fell back to his place behind me, scarf and all, without being told twice, which I think annoyed her even more. He caught my eye as he passed.
"Not a word," he said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
On my left, Liesel was looking straight ahead at the road. Her mouth was perfectly still. Her shoulders weren't.
We camped the first night in a fallow field beside a stream, with the hills a little closer and a little bluer than they'd been that morning.
Captain Rufa's women had the tents up before I'd got down off my horse. They did it the way Hana makes bread, without seeming to think about it, everyone knowing which rope was hers. Rufa walked the lines once with her hands behind her back and said nothing to anyone, which I gathered was praise.
One of her soldiers was walking wrong. A tall girl, not much older than Marika, holding herself very carefully and pretending she wasn't.
"Captain," I said.
Rufa looked where I was looking. "Saddle sore," she said. "First long ride. She'll toughen."
"She'll toughen faster if it isn't bleeding."
Rufa looked at me for a moment the way she'd looked at Pia's crossbow in the square: as if I were something she hadn't been told about and would need to add to a list.
"My women don't need the Saint for blisters, my lord."
"Your women can't ride two weeks on that one."
A pause. Then: "Corporal."
The tall girl came over, scarlet to the ears. It took one White circle and about four breaths, and when she walked back to her tent she walked like a person again. Rufa watched her go.
"Thank you, my lord," she said, as if the words were a coin she didn't spend often.
Then the bottles.
Ambrose had them ready before supper, six in a row on the tailboard of the bottle cart, filled from the stream and wiped dry. He'd brought a small knife for the corks, which I hadn't seen before.
"Blue," he said, looking at me.
"Blue."
He put his fingertip to the first bottle. The coin-sized White circle opened under it and the water went still. I put my hand over his and opened mine.
Blue. Wider than the Green I'd poured every morning at the Academy. Three splashes out of the pitcher, and the light went down into the held water and sat there, and it was a different color than I was used to seeing in a bottle: deep and clear, like looking into a well at noon.
「Heal」, for the first three. 「Cure」 for the next three.
"Felix," said Ambrose.
Felix sang. He was still wearing the scarf. The spark went down into the first bottle and the water flashed once, bluer than any flash I'd seen from it, and went still. Ambrose corked it. Then he took the little knife and cut one notch in the top of the cork.
"Heal," he said. "One."
The fourth bottle, the first Cure, he cut twice.
"Cure. Two."
Simple. Anybody could read it in the dark, by touch, with their hands shaking. I hadn't thought of that. Ambrose had thought of it, probably weeks ago, and then said nothing until the first night it mattered.
Pia was watching from the fire, one length away, with her book on her knees. When the Blue circle opened under my hand the first time, her pen stopped.
"Checking?" she said.
"No," I said. "Pouring."
She looked at the circle a moment longer. Then she wrote that down, too, in a new column.
Six bottles. Three with one notch, three with two. Eighteen splashes. Ambrose laid them in the straw in the bottle cart like eggs and covered them with a horse blanket, and the cart, which that morning had been mostly empty crates, had six bottles in it. It didn't look like much.
"It will," said Ambrose, who'd seen me looking. Then he took out his notebook and wrote, Day one. Six Blue. H3, C3. Felix: scarf. And underlined nothing, because Ambrose doesn't need to.
Hana had soup on the fire. Of course she did.
I ate. I could feel Pia watching me eat from one length away. When I'd finished she wrote something, and then got up and walked round behind me, and I heard her lift one of my boots where I'd set them by the fire, and tip it, and set it down again.
"Three helpings?" said Hana.
"Three," said Pia, sitting down again. "I checked his boots."
Hana looked at her for a long moment with an expression I can only describe as the face of a woman who has just found the apprentice she's been waiting for her whole life.
Pia read her entry out, because Hana asked her to.
"'Day one. Six bottles. Blue, not Checking; Pouring. He sang the miller's song. He skipped one. Lady Marika didn't say anything.'" Pia turned the page. "'Lady Marika was not wearing her scarf.'"
On the other side of the fire, Marika stood up, said "I'm going to check the HORSES," and went to check the horses, who had been checked twice.
Felix, who was wearing the scarf, became very interested in his soup.
Later, with the fire low and Rufa's sentries walking the edge of the light, I sat with my back against a cart wheel and felt the candles.
All four of them close. Naomi by Rufa's tent, still talking in single words about tomorrow. Hana by the fire. Marika out by the horse lines, still. Liesel beside me.
And Cordelia, a day's ride south and getting farther every hour, a candle on a hill above a white city.
(Cordelia,) said Naomi, on the bond. (Day one.)
A long pause. Cordelia was in the palace, and it was late, and she'd have been listening all day, the way she always is.
(Here,) said Cordelia.
That was all. It was enough. It meant every one of the things it didn't say.
Then I drained.
Not as much as at the Academy. Eighteen into the bottles, one for the corporal, and the rest into my hands, and when it was gone I sat in the dark with the empty pitcher and noticed something I'd half expected and still wasn't ready for.
It was already coming back.
Faster than at the Academy, where I'd had only two of them close. With four of them within a bowshot, the pitcher came back up the way a pond fills in the rain: not one stream but several, all at once. By morning it would be full long before the sun came up. Seventeen hours, maybe, empty to full. I'd have to count it properly tomorrow.
Liesel leaned her shoulder against mine. Not her hand. Her whole weight, warm and tired, the way you lean on a wall you trust to be there.
"You're counting," she said.
"A little."
"Count tomorrow."
I didn't. I sat there with her shoulder on mine and the pitcher filling, and listened to Pia's pen scratch by the fire, and to Marika out by the horses, telling a horse something in a low furious voice that I didn't need to hear to understand.
The road stopped being straight on the third day.
It started climbing, gently at first, into the first of the blue hills, which close up turned out to be brown and green and cut with stone walls and full of sheep. The white tops behind them were higher now. You didn't have to look hard anymore. They were simply there, at the end of every view, the way the sea is at the end of every street in a harbor town.
Twelve bottles in the cart by then. Six notched once, six notched twice. Pia's column of Pouring was catching up with her column of Checking.
That afternoon we came to a waystation at a crossroads: a long low inn with a stable yard and a well, where the north road met a smaller road coming down out of the hills from the west. The kind of place carters stop.
There were no carts in the yard.
Naomi noticed first. I watched her notice. She didn't say anything; she just looked at the empty yard, and at the stable with its doors open and only two horses in it, and at the well with no queue, and then she looked at Rufa, and Rufa looked back.
The innkeeper came out wiping her hands. She was broad and gray and had the face of somebody who'd been expecting customers for a month and had stopped believing in them.
"Rooms?" she said, looking at all of us. "I've got rooms. I've got nothing but rooms."
"Where are the carts?" said Naomi.
The innkeeper stopped wiping her hands.
"That's the question, isn't it," she said. "Wool comes down that road every week from Septentria. Wool and cheese and those little black-faced sheep they keep. Every week since my mother's time. Every week, even in snow." She looked up the west road, into the hills. "Nothing's come down it in a month."
"Snow?" said Rufa.
"Not yet. Not down here."
"Sickness," said Naomi.
It wasn't a question. The innkeeper looked at her sharply.
"There's always sickness up there in the autumn," she said. "Fevers. The cough. The wool carters bring it down with them sometimes, and I keep a pot of willow bark on for them." She stopped. "The last one who came down, a month back, she said it was bad this year. Worse than she'd ever seen. Then she said something else."
She looked at me, then. At the escorts round me, and at Pia, one length behind. I saw her understand what I was, and I saw her decide to say it anyway.
"She said the sick were getting better," said the innkeeper. "All on their own. Whole houses of them. Up out of bed and laughing."
Nobody said anything.
"That's good news," said Felix, carefully. "Isn't it?"
"That's what I said to her." The innkeeper folded her cloth into a square, and then into a smaller square. "She said I hadn't seen their eyes."
The yard was very quiet. One of the two horses in the stable shifted and blew.
"What about their eyes?" I said.
"She wouldn't say." The innkeeper looked up the west road again. "She paid for her supper and didn't finish it, and in the morning she took her cart south instead of home. Said she had a cousin down by the river. Said she'd go and see her for a while." She shook her head. "She'd never mentioned a cousin before. Not in twenty years."
Behind me, I heard Pia's pen stop.
Naomi looked at Rufa. Rufa looked at Naomi.
"Rooms," said Naomi. "For tonight. All of them."
The innkeeper blinked. Then something in her face eased, just a little, the way a knot eases when someone finally pulls on the right end.
"All of them," she said. "Yes, my lady."
She went in to light the fires. We stood in the empty yard a while longer, and I looked up the west road into the hills, the way she had, the way she'd probably been looking every evening for a month.
Up out of bed and laughing.
I've healed a great many people. I know what it looks like when someone gets better. I know what it costs, and who pays it, and how long it takes.
Nobody gets better all on their own. Not whole houses of them. Not all at once.
Not without somebody paying.