Amara — Sanctara
I hadn't slept in six days.
Not because I couldn't. Because I didn't need to. Every time I closed my eyes, I could feel the garden.
It began the morning the pear leaves started to fall. A pull, low in my chest, the way you feel a door open somewhere in a house. Then, under the pull, the feelings. Not words. Two girls quarreling on the path: hot and sharp and sweet. A girl crying on the bench nobody sits on: a long, slow ache, thick as honey. The gardeners' tempers. A mistress's small, sour envy at supper. Every feeling that crossed that lawn went down into the dark under the grass, and I felt each one go, the way you'd feel water poured over your own hands.
And under all of them, the biggest, the oldest, the one it had started with: mine.
So I stopped going to class. I kept the curtains drawn. When Lady Severine knocked, I said "Unwell" through the door, and it wasn't even a lie. I didn't practice my smile anymore. There was no one to smile at.
On the sixth night I went down.
No shawl. No teaspoon. The grounds were empty, and the moon was nearly full. At the top of the oldest tower, the headmistress's candle burned in her window, as it always does.
Let it.
The four pear trees stood bare around the lawn, their branches held up against the sky like hands. The grass at the center was so green it was black, and wet, though it hadn't rained in a week. It gave under my bare feet like something breathing.
In the middle of the lawn, exactly where I'd knelt with my bent teaspoon, a stem had come up through the grass. Thin as a hair, black, no taller than my hand. And at its tip, one fruit.
It was small and round, no bigger than a cherry. Black, and so glossy that the moon lay on it in a single white point. Except that the moon didn't lie on it, not really. The light went into it, the way lamplight used to go into the seed in my drawer, and didn't come out.
I knelt and touched it.
The seed had been cold. This was warm.
And it beat. Faintly, against my fingertips. Like a pulse. Like a small heart.
I closed my hand around it, and the stem let go. It didn't break. It simply let go, as though it had been waiting for my hand and no one else's. A single drop of something dark ran down my wrist.
Of what you already feel, the figure in my room had said.
Holding it, I could feel everything that had gone into it. The quarrels. The tears. The tired, empty girls on the infirmary cots. Ten years of mine, folded small and hard in the middle of it all, like a stone in a fruit.
And something else, under everything, that wasn't anyone's. Something old and very calm, that had been waiting a great deal longer than ten years.
I could have eaten it there, on my knees, in the dark. Nobody would have seen.
That was exactly why I didn't.
I'd spent ten years being seen through. Five lords. One who wanted a fifth wife for his summer house. One who spoke only to my mother. One who asked to see my teeth. One who was kind until he learned what my house was worth. One who struck his escort across the face and turned back to me still smiling. Not one of them ever looked at me. And at eighteen I'd lain awake a whole week over a story about a water mage from the border who rode out beside his wife into the tide, and died there beside her. Not for the dying. For the beside.
The story had a name in it. Valcrest.
I had known whose son he was since the day he stood up in my classroom to introduce himself, because everyone else had stood. I had taught him the trade roads to Bellonia for weeks and never once let myself think about it.
I thought about it now.
No. Not here, in the dark, where nobody looks.
I would do it where everyone walks. In daylight. And for once in my life, every one of them would look.
I carried it back to my room in my closed hand and set it on my desk, on top of five polite letters from five lords' mothers. It sat there, black and warm, and beat.
I sat down to wait for the afternoon.
Fabian — Sanctara
It was an ordinary day. I want to say that first, because afterward everyone kept asking me whether there had been signs, and the truth is that there were signs every day for weeks and none of them looked like anything.
Lady Severine taught the trade roads again. Lady Amara's window was still dark. Dame Valeria knocked me down twice in the battle class. Ten in the infirmary, darkest first: six of them from fights, and every one of those six puzzled, and tired, and white all the way through.
Then the table by the window. Day Ten.
"Holds while held," said Ambrose, before I'd even sat down. He'd been thinking about it all through the trade roads; I could tell, because he'd turned the same page four times. He tapped the line in his notebook from Day One. Then he wrote under it, and turned it so I could read: Travels while held?
I looked at it. Then at him.
"If you're holding it," I said slowly, "and you walk—"
"Try."
We started the way we always did: a bowl of honey water, warmed and thinned, stilled under Ambrose's fingertip, and one White cast to check the count. Twenty-two, the same as yesterday. Then Ambrose lifted a sphere of it off the bowl on his palm, gold and trembling inside a ring of White light, and I cast 「Heal」 into it. White. One splash.
Ambrose stood up, very carefully, and walked.
Six paces. On the sixth, his foot caught the leg of a cot, the ring of light shivered, and the sphere dropped onto the floor with a wet slap. The light went out as it fell.
The infirmary mistress looked at her floor. Ambrose looked at the infirmary mistress.
"Mop," she said. "Corner."
He mopped. Then he came back and lifted another sphere, and I cast again, and this time he walked slowly and didn't look at anything but the light. To the door. Fourteen paces. Back. Twenty-eight.
The light stayed. All the way there, and all the way back, swimming in the honey, steady as a lantern.
He lowered it into the bowl, let go, and the light went out.
Ambrose sat down and wrote, and for once the letters were not quite straight.
Travels while held.
I realized I was holding my breath. So was Liesel. She'd come off the cot again, and was standing at my elbow with the bowl of honey water in both hands, and our fingers were touching on the rim, and neither of us had moved them.
She noticed at the same moment I did.
This time she didn't pull away. Neither did I.
We just stood there, holding the same bowl.
"Wound," said Ambrose. "Next."
I let go of the bowl first. I'm not proud of it. I took out my penknife.
"Saint," said Liesel.
"It's a thumb."
"It's your thumb."
I pricked it anyway. A bead of red came up. Ambrose lifted a third sphere, and I cast into it, Green this time, two splashes, to give us the best chance. The honey turned the color of new leaves with the sun through them. Ambrose stood, and turned, and began, very slowly, to carry it across the table toward my hand.
Five splashes. Six left.
The sphere was a hand's width from my thumb when the shouting started outside.
Ambrose's head came up. The ring of light around the sphere shivered, and the sphere fell, and the green light went out against the table like a candle knocked over.
Nobody even looked at it.
"Lady Amara!" someone was calling outside. "Lady Amara, wait—"
I was at the window before I'd decided to be. Liesel was there before me.
The afternoon classes had just let out. It was the busiest hour of the day: every path full of girls going to supper, mistresses crossing to the dining hall, escorts two paces behind their lords. And down the middle of the main path from the mistresses' house, through all of it, walked Lady Amara.
She was barefoot.
Her dove-gray gown was creased as if she'd slept in it, or hadn't slept at all. Her honey-brown hair was out of its braid and loose down her back. She walked neither fast nor slow, looking straight ahead, with her right hand closed in a fist and held against her chest.
The infirmary mistress was already at the door. I went after her. Liesel came after me, and Wren after Liesel, and Ambrose after all of us, with his notebook still in his hand and his two escorts behind him.
Outside, people were stopping.
"Lady Amara?" A girl from the battle class stepped into the path, uncertain. "My lady, are you well?"
Lady Amara walked around her as though she were a post.
"Amara, dear." One of the older mistresses hurried alongside her, holding up her own skirts. "Amara, your feet. Where are your shoes? Come inside, you're not well, come and sit—"
No answer. Not a word. Not a glance.
She walked past the dining hall. Girls fell silent as she passed and turned to watch her go. Somebody laughed nervously and stopped. Somebody else said, "Is she sleepwalking?" and nobody answered that either.
Dame Valeria came across the battle yard at a run and put a hand on her shoulder.
"Lady Amara. Stop."
Lady Amara didn't stop. And Dame Valeria, who could knock me flat with one finger, simply slid off her, the way a hand slides off a wall. She stood on the path afterward, looking at her own palm.
Then Lady Severine was there, from nowhere, faster than anyone running. She stepped directly into the path, spectacles flashing.
"Lady Amara," she said. "Look at me."
For the first time, Lady Amara's face changed. Something moved at the corner of her mouth. But she didn't stop, and she didn't answer, and when she was a single step away, Lady Severine moved aside. I don't think she meant to. I think she simply found that she had.
Lady Severine turned and looked up at the oldest tower.
I looked too. At the top window, small and very straight, the headmistress stood with a candle held out in front of her. Even from the path I could see the flame. It wasn't leaning toward the garden anymore.
It was lying flat.
I looked back at Lady Amara and looked at her light, the way I do with anyone who's unwell.
Her light was yellow. Deep, dull yellow, all through: the yellow of someone who hasn't slept or eaten in days. That was all. There was nothing else wrong with her that I could see.
Whatever was wrong with her, my eyes couldn't see it.
She walked on, past the residence, past the last of the classrooms, and onto the gravel path that led into the garden at the heart of the grounds. The crowd followed her at a distance, the way a crowd follows a fire.
The pear trees stood bare around the lawn.
She walked straight across the grass, to the very middle, where it was so green it was black.
And stopped.
The crowd stopped at the edge of the lawn, where the gravel paths meet the grass, the way water stops at the lip of a bowl. Nobody stepped onto it. Girls, mistresses, escorts, the two gardeners in their brown aprons with their watering cans: all of us standing in a ring around the bare pear trees, looking in.
Everyone who walked across that garden every day without looking at it was looking at it now.
Lady Amara turned slowly and looked back at all of us.
And she smiled.
I had seen Lady Amara's smile every morning for weeks: warm, exact, always the same. This was not that smile. This one reached her eyes. It went all the way up and lit them from inside, and it was the most frightening thing I have ever seen on a human face, because it was real.
"There," she said. Her voice was soft and clear and didn't need raising, the same voice that had taught us the trade roads. "There you all are."
Nobody answered her.
Her eyes went around the ring, from face to face, and stopped on mine.
I don't know why I stepped forward. I'm a healer, and her light was yellow, and I had six splashes left. Six is more than enough for someone who hasn't eaten in days. That's the only reason I have.
"Lady Amara," I said. "You're unwell. You haven't eaten. Let me—"
Liesel's hand closed on my sleeve. "Saint."
Lady Amara looked at me for a long moment. Then at Liesel's hand on my sleeve. Something in her face went very gentle, and very sad.
"You would," she said. "Wouldn't you. You'd heal me. Right here, in front of everyone." She tilted her head. "Your father rode out beside his wife. You'd ride out beside her."
My father? I didn't understand. How did she—
"That's the cruelest part," said Lady Amara quietly. "That you're real."
She opened her right hand.
In her palm lay something small and round and black, so glossy that the afternoon light went into it and didn't come out. A cherry. Except that no cherry I had ever seen beat, faintly, like a heart.
High in the tower window, the headmistress's candle went out.
"Look at me," said Lady Amara, to all of us. "Everyone. Just this once."
She put the black cherry in her mouth and bit down.
And everyone looked.