Five.
The splashes went the way they'd gone since the first one: fast, one on the heels of the last, with nothing in between long enough to call a breath. Nine days east, on the wall I grew up on, my sister was reaching into me with both hands.
Four.
I'd always thought of my pitcher as something I poured. My hand on the handle, my wrist deciding how much. I'd never once wondered what it would be like to be the pitcher instead, sitting very still on the edge of a bed while somebody else did the pouring.
It's like being emptied. There isn't a cleverer way to say it.
Three.
Liesel's hand had gone white around mine. She was trying to breathe quietly, as if breathing carried. It doesn't. Only words carry. We'd both had that explained to us tonight, in the worst way there is.
Two.
Marika's candle blazed in my chest. Under it, deeper than her heartbeat, in the place I'd only been able to feel since my circle came up blue, there was something I'd never felt from her before.
Not fear. Marika gets frightened like anybody. She just shouts at it until it leaves.
This was her refusing.
One.
Then she reached again, and nothing came.
I felt it. A hand closing at the bottom of me, sure of what it would find, and finding nothing. No splash left me. Nine days away, no circle opened over whoever was lying on those stones.
That's wrong, I thought, stupidly. There's one left. I counted.
I had. I'd counted splashes.
I hadn't counted words.
Where, and How many, and I've got the stairs. Every one of them had come out of the same pitcher, a drop at a time, before the first splash ever left it. There had been one splash at the bottom, and the words had taken the edge off it, and a splash with the edge off isn't a splash. A White cast costs one. Not most of one.
「Borrowed Light」 won't take me past empty. We'd found that out in a sitting room, with four circles opening over nothing and Marika and Hana arguing about the right way to do it, until my pitcher ran dry and nobody's would open at all. It had been a rule, that afternoon. A thing to be careful about.
She reached again.
Nothing.
Again.
I've felt a lot through the bond. Burns, and cuts, and fevers, and a heart going like a drum on a wall at midnight. I'd never felt anything as bad as this: somebody I love reaching into me for help, over and over, and finding the bottom.
For an hour I'd kept my mouth shut, because every word I said would be a drop she couldn't have.
It wasn't true anymore.
There was nothing left in me she could have. What lay at the bottom of the pitcher wasn't a splash. It was a few drops. Enough for a word or two, and nothing else in the world.
I'd been keeping quiet so that she would have more. There wasn't any more. My silence wasn't saving her anything now. The only person it was still saving was me.
(I'm here,) I said.
Two words. I felt them go, two drops scraped off the very bottom.
I waited for Naomi to say Quiet.
She didn't. Out on the dark road, her candle stayed exactly as it was, and after a moment I understood why. Telling me to be quiet would have cost me a drop too.
Marika didn't answer. But under her candle, the thing that had been refusing turned. Toward me. The way you turn your head when someone says your name across a crowded room.
It stayed turned for a breath.
Then it went back to whoever she was kneeling beside.
She stopped reaching. I felt her hands go still. They didn't leave. She stayed exactly where she was, holding on to someone with nothing in her hands but her hands, and she didn't reach into me again.
Some time later, I don't know how long, something under her candle went very quiet. Not the way a fire goes out. The way a room goes quiet when a door closes, and you realize you're the only one left in it.
I didn't know who it was.
I knew when.
"Fabian."
Liesel said it out loud, very low. Out loud was free. It was the only thing in the room that was.
"It's empty," I said.
"All of it?"
"Almost. There's a bit at the bottom. Not enough for a splash."
She was quiet for a moment. "So you spent it on that."
"...Yes."
"Good," said Liesel.
She said it the way she says everything she means: flat, certain, as if she'd checked it against something first. I didn't ask what. I wasn't sure I could stand to hear it.
Down in the second ring, Hana was crying. I could feel it in her candle, the small, steady shake of someone doing it with a hand over her mouth so that nobody in the house would hear.
"Hana," I said, out loud, to someone who couldn't hear it.
"I know," said Liesel. "I can feel her too."
The door to the escorts' room opened.
Wren stood in it with her spear already in her hand. She sleeps lighter than anyone I've ever met; she'd probably heard Liesel's breathing change through the wall an hour ago and spent that hour deciding whether it was her business. She looked at Liesel. She looked at me. She looked at our hands.
Then she hummed three notes, slow, rising at the end, like a question.
"The riders," she said.
"Yes."
"Greymark."
"Yes."
Wren knows about 「Covenant」. She knows I can feel where my sisters are, and what their bodies are doing, from any distance. She doesn't know anything more than that, and she's never once asked. I watched her build what she could out of what she had: Lady Marika at Greymark, the riders at the bend, and my face.
"Lady Marika?"
"On her feet," I said. It was true. It was all I had that was true and that I could give her. "She hasn't stopped moving all night."
Wren nodded once. Then, very quietly: "Mother's roof."
Her mother lives in Greymark, in a house whose roof leaks, which costs less than one pheasant at the Gilded Lark. I knew that much. I didn't know anything else.
"I know," I said.
"Sit down, Wren," said Liesel.
"Door."
Wren crossed the room, put her back against the door to the hall and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor with her spear across her knees. If anything came through that door before morning, it would have to come through her. Nothing was going to. She knew that. She sat there anyway.
The rest of the night was candles.
Marika's moved along the wall, stopped, moved again. Once, in the darkest part, there was a sting along her left forearm, sharp and shallow, and every muscle in me went tight at once. Wren's head came up.
"A cut," I said. "A small one."
It was gone within the hour. Regeneration doesn't need a pitcher. It's the one thing I ever gave them that nobody can drink dry.
Naomi's candle was moving too. Not the slow sway of a horse walking in the dark. Faster than that, and steady, and it didn't stop. Naomi doesn't ride at night. She has told every one of us, more than once, that a horse with a broken leg gets you home slower than a horse that waits for morning.
She wasn't waiting for morning.
"Talk to me," Liesel said, sometime after that. "Out loud. It's free."
"About what?"
"Anything. The wall."
I looked at the dark window. "Naomi used to walk me along the top of it when I was small," I said. "Holding both my hands, so I could see over. Marika walked behind us the whole way, telling her she was doing it wrong."
"Was she?"
"Probably. She held my hands too high. My arms went numb. She's never once admitted it."
"I'm telling her you said that."
"You can't. It'd cost me a drop."
"I'll write it down," said Liesel. "In a letter. She likes letters."
It was the first time all night either of us had nearly smiled. It didn't last.
"My mother said it, you know," Liesel said after a while. "An army that wants to be seen."
"I know. I was there."
"I keep hearing it in her voice." She frowned at the dark. "It's very annoying."
"Nine days," I said. "For a rider to bring her this."
"Eight, if she's good. Seven, if she changes horses in every town and doesn't care who she has to shout at." Liesel spent more of her childhood in the royal stables than in the palace; she knows exactly how fast news can be made to go. "My mother will read about tonight a week from now. Over breakfast."
Neither of us said the rest. By then, whatever that army had come to make us look away from would be finished.
The window over the garden went from black to gray.
Marika's candle stopped.
Not stopped moving. Stopped the way a body stops when it has been standing all night and finally, finally sits down. I felt her back meet something hard. I felt her legs fold. Her heart, which had been going like hoofbeats since midnight, slowed, and kept slowing.
"She sat down," I said.
Wren lifted her head from her knees. "Over?"
"...I think so."
Then, in my chest, so quietly that if the room had been any less silent I'd have missed it:
(They've gone.)
Marika. Her first words since midnight.
(Back into the trees,) she said. (Before it was even light.)
Out on the road, Naomi's candle slowed for the first time all night.
(One sentence,) said Naomi. (Marika. Then ink.)
There was a pause long enough that I thought Marika wasn't going to manage it. Then she took a breath I could feel all the way from Greymark, and went.
(The wall held, and nobody got over it, and they went back into the trees before it was light like they'd only come to be LOOKED at, and Sirius and Dame Constance held the bend all night, and Hildegard's furious because nobody even tried her gate, and I—)
She stopped.
The pitcher had run out somewhere around LOOKED. Everything after that came from under the bottom, a drop at a time, paid the way a cast past empty is paid. The room tipped, very slightly, and set itself straight again. A headache came up behind my eyes, knocked once, and left. 「Mercy of Elysia」 doesn't stop it coming. It just never lets it stay.
Beside me, Liesel's breath caught. She'd felt the room tip too, from inside me.
I didn't care. I was listening to the space after and I.
I knew what went in it. I'd felt every reach.
(...That was one sentence,) said Marika, very small.
Nobody argued.
(Noted,) said Naomi.
It sounded like a sword going back into its sheath, slowly, in tired hands. And then, after a moment, four more words, which I'd have paid for twice over:
(Ink can wait. Sleep.)
Within a few breaths Marika's candle went slow and heavy, the way it does when she falls asleep sitting up and refuses, afterward, to admit she ever closed her eyes. Naomi's started moving again, faster than before.
I looked at Wren, still against the door.
"Wren. Nobody came over the wall."
She looked back at me for a long time. She knows what 「Covenant」 carries. She knows it doesn't carry that.
"...Not asking," she said.
"Thank you."
She put her forehead down on her knees, and her shoulders let go of something they'd been holding since midnight.
Liesel got up and went to the window. Down in the little walled garden, the residence guard was changing at the door. Somewhere beyond the wall a cart went by with its wheels complaining. An ordinary morning in Sanctara, starting up as if nothing had happened anywhere.
"My mother has to hear this today," said Liesel.
"A rider—"
"A rider brings her something to read about." She didn't turn around. "Today she could still do something about it. If the army that matters is somewhere else, she needs to start looking for it this morning. Not next week."
"She'll ask how you know."
"Yes."
"And you don't lie to your mother."
"No." She turned around then. Her face was gray with the night, and very steady. "The trouble with never lying to your mother is that, sooner or later, she asks a question you can't answer with half the truth."
I thought of the reading room at home, on the day of my blessing. Naomi telling me what happens to a house that lies to the Crown about a blessing. Titles stripped. Possibly worse. Not for me. For whoever had hidden it.
For whoever had sent the report.
Someone knocked on the hall door.
Wren was on her feet before the second knock, spear up. She opened the door the width of a hand.
Felix stood in the hall holding a kettle. Behind him, at the top of the stairs, his two knights of the Crown stood very straight and studied the wall with great interest, the way people do when they've promised not to listen to something.
"I'm not singing," Felix said. "You can tell the knights. They've been praying for it."
Then he saw past Wren. Me on the bed, Liesel at the window, the spear in Wren's hand. His grin didn't fall off all at once. It went the way a wave goes back down a beach, a little at a time, until there was only wet sand.
"'So that when it starts, I'm here,'" he said. "You said that." He lifted the kettle an inch, as if it explained something. "I came down to see if you were."
Wren looked at me. I nodded. She let him in and shut the door on the knights.
"It started," I said.
Felix stood very still in the middle of my room.
"When?"
"Last night."
"How do you—"
"Next question," I said.
He stared at me.
It's his. Everyone at the Academy knows it's his. It's what he says, with a grin, every time somebody asks him about home. I'd never said it in my life. I said it now because it was the most honest thing I had: there was an answer, and I couldn't give it to him.
"...That's mine," said Felix.
"I know."
A spark snapped off his fingers onto the kettle's handle, loud in the quiet room. He didn't look at it. He didn't say Excited.
I noticed that. I think everyone in the room did.
"Your sister," he said. "The one at Greymark."
"Alive."
He shut his eyes for a moment. "...Good."
He set the kettle down on my desk, very carefully, like someone putting down a thing he'd forgotten he was holding, and sat in my desk chair without being asked.
"How many?"
"Three or four hundred. Torches. Ladders. Your house's banner." I told him the rest, because there was no reason not to. "They never tried the gate. They went back into the trees before it was light."
Felix looked at the kettle for a long moment.
"Then it isn't the army," he said.
No joke on the end. Short sentences. With Felix, that's how you know.
"My mother said—" Liesel began.
"My aunt doesn't spend four hundred spears to take a wall," said Felix. "She spends them to make you look at one." He looked up at me. "In the throne hall, you told your Queen I'm not a knife. You were right. Neither is that." He tipped his head east, toward a wall none of us could see. "Whatever you can see isn't the knife."
Nobody said anything.
Out east, my sister was asleep sitting up against the wall I learned to walk on, with somebody's blood drying on her hands that my light hadn't been able to keep in. On a road in the gray, Naomi was riding toward her and not waiting for anything. And a quarter of an hour from here, in a palace with a floor like still water, the Queen of Octavia was about to sit down to an ordinary breakfast, nine days behind a war.
I stood up. The room tipped, filed its complaint, and settled.
"Liesel," I said. "I need to see your mother."
She already had her spear. The tassel swung against the shaft, navy and blue.
"She'll ask how you know," she said.
"I know."
"And?"
I didn't have an answer. That was the true one, and Liesel only ever wants the true one.
"And I'll tell her something true," I said. "I'll work out how much on the way."
It was nine days to Greymark, and a quarter of an hour to the palace.
I'd never been so afraid of the short road.