Felix was still there in the morning.
He'd fallen asleep sitting up, against the wall beside his mother's door, with his arms round his knees and his head tipped back against the plaster. The two guards stood over him exactly as they'd stood all night. One of them had put her cloak over him at some point. Neither of them would look at it.
Tullia came down the corridor at sunrise, alone, with the ring of keys at her waist and a lamp she didn't need. I heard her coming the whole length of the empty wing. By the time she reached the end, all six of our doors were open and all of us were standing in them.
She stopped in front of Felix and looked down at him.
"You'll catch cold," she said.
He woke at the sound of her voice, all at once, the way you wake when you're not sure where you are. He looked up at her. He didn't say anything.
"Up," said Tullia, quite gently. "We said the morning. It's the morning."
Then she turned and looked back along the corridor at us. At Cordelia in her mail. Marika with her hair still wild from the pillow. Wren. Liesel, a pace in front of my door, as if she'd decided that whatever came down that corridor would have to get past her first. And me.
I'd expected an argument about who could come in. I'd had answers ready, most of them Cordelia's.
"Bring them," said Tullia, to Felix. "Bring them all." Her eyes went over the four of them again, slowly, one by one, as if she were taking an inventory. "I'd like to see them."
She took one key off the ring, a long old iron one, and put it in the lock of the oak door with the eagle over it, and turned it.
The Queen of Bellonia's room was very large and very warm and full of morning.
The west window was open. Through it I could see the whole long green line of the Gloamwood on the far side of the fields, with the early mist still lying in the low places, and the sky pale above it. There was a writing table under the window, covered in maps, with a pen laid across them as if somebody had just put it down. There was a fire, built up high. There was a little table beside the bed, and on it a cup of tea gone cold, with its handle turned toward the bed.
And there was the bed.
She was smaller than I'd thought she'd be. I don't know why I'd thought anything. Felix is tall and loud and takes up a room; I suppose I'd expected his mother to take up a bed. She didn't. She lay very straight in the middle of it, under a coverlet the color of old wine, with her hands laid on top of it at her sides, exactly evenly, the way someone else had put them. Dark hair, gone thin and gray at the front, spread on the pillow. Felix's bones in her face. Felix's mouth, but quiet.
She was breathing. Slowly. You had to watch for it.
I looked at her the other way.
Her light was there. That was the first thing; I'd been more afraid than I'd let myself know that it wouldn't be. It was there, all the way round her, the thin frost-edge of a living person.
It was the wrong color.
Not red, the way the dying are red. Not the bright orange of a wound. Something lower and duller than both. An orange that had been orange for so long it had gone dim, like a coal that's been lying under its own ash all night and has forgotten it was ever a fire. And here and there along the edge of it, in four or five places, it thinned. Not to dark. To nothing. Small places, like cloth worn through at the elbow, where her light simply wasn't.
I'd never seen that before. Not on anyone.
I didn't know what it meant. I knew I didn't like it.
Felix had stopped just inside the door. He was looking at the bed. Then he looked at the window, and at the cold cup with its handle turned, and then back at his mother, and I watched him understand that she hadn't been the one to ask for the window to be opened.
He didn't say anything. He walked to the bed and knelt down beside it and took her hand, the near one, off the coverlet, and held it in both of his.
"Mother," he said. "It's me. I came."
Tullia closed the door behind us. Quietly. She stood with her back against it, her hands folded in front of her, and Gelio was at her left shoulder, the way he'd been at dinner, and he was looking at me.
Felix took the bottle out of his coat.
He did it without looking round at any of us. I don't think he'd have known how to look at us just then. He held it up to the light from the window, and the light went through the glass and lit the two words chalked on the side, a little smudged now from weeks against his chest. For her.
Inside it, my Blue. Ambrose's stillness. His spark. All of it corked up in the Academy's empty infirmary one evening, a long way from here, and carried every day since.
"Felix," I said. "It's weaker than my hand. It always is. If it—"
"I know."
"I just—"
"I know," he said again, not unkindly. "Let me."
I let him.
He drew the cork with his teeth, the way he does everything, and held the open bottle over his mother's hands, his and hers together on the coverlet. And then, very quietly, so quietly I almost didn't hear it, he started to sing.
Not the miller's song. Something else. Something I'd never heard, slow, in Bellonian, the kind of tune you'd hum to a child who wouldn't settle. His spark ran down his arm, bright and quick, and into the glass, the way it had on that first evening when he'd learned that singing steadied it, and the light in the bottle stirred.
He tipped it.
The light came out the way it always does: blue and slow. It ran out over the lip of the glass and down onto his mother's hands, and over them, and over the coverlet, and I watched with both kinds of eyes and waited for it to go in.
It didn't go in.
I've watched a hundred bottles open. More. The light from a bottle goes into a person the way water goes into dry ground: it touches and then it's gone, soaked in, and the light round the person changes. Every time. That's what it's for.
This lay on her.
It lay on her hands and on the coverlet in a thin blue film, the way water lies on wax, and it didn't soak into anything. It beaded. It ran off her fingers in little bright drops onto the sheet. And her light, that low, dull orange with the worn-through places along its edge, didn't change at all. Not by a shade.
Then it faded. Not into her. Just out. The way a candle flame goes when you pinch it, there, and then not there.
The bottle was empty.
Felix had stopped singing. I don't know when. He knelt there with the empty bottle in one hand and his mother's hand in the other, and looked at her face, and waited for something, anything, a flicker, a breath that came a little faster.
Nothing.
"No," said Felix.
Just that. In the short voice.
I was already moving. I didn't decide to; my feet did it. Because that wasn't weaker. I know what weaker looks like. Weaker goes in and doesn't do enough. Weaker is a Green bottle on a wound that wanted Blue: the light soaks in, the wound shrinks, and then it stops. I've seen weaker a hundred times.
That hadn't gone in at all.
Behind me, by the door, Tullia said, "I'm so sorry, Felix."
She said it beautifully. Gently, and low, the way you'd say it to a child. I turned my head and looked at her, and her face was full of the right things, sorrow and patience and a kind of tired kindness.
Her hands were folded in front of her, quite still. She hadn't moved from the door at all. She hadn't come one step nearer the bed to look.
She hadn't needed to. She'd known.
I didn't know how she'd known. But I saw it in how still her hands were, the way you see a sum come out in somebody's face before they say the answer, and I knew it the way I know a color.
She'd known the bottle wouldn't work before Felix ever took it out of his coat.
I went round the bed to the far side, so that the bed was between me and the door, and knelt down across from Felix.
He looked up at me. His face was the face from the gatehouse roof, the one with nothing on the end of it.
"Felix," I said. "May I?"
I always ask. Naomi made sure of that, a long time ago, and the Queen made sure of it again, and somewhere along the way it stopped being a rule and started being the shape my hands are. You ask. Even when you know the answer. Even when the person can't give it, you ask the one who's standing nearest to them, who loves them most.
Felix looked at his mother, and then at me.
"Please," he said.
By the door, Tullia didn't say anything.
I noticed that afterward. At the time I only noticed that the room had gone very quiet, and that the fire was loud, and that Liesel had come round the bed behind me without my hearing her and was standing at my shoulder, close enough that I could feel her there without looking.
I put two fingers on the inside of Queen Aurelia's wrist, where Liesel puts hers on mine.
Her skin was cool and very dry. Her pulse was there, slow and faint, like someone knocking on a door a long way down a corridor.
I poured. Blue. Three splashes. 「Discern」.
It's not like seeing. It's more like being told something by someone who doesn't waste words, all at once, in the back of your head.
Poison.
Not sickness. Not fever, not anything that had grown in her by itself. Something that had been put into her, from outside, and had sat there ever since, quietly, doing what it was for.
Months.
Since before the winter. Since a dinner in a long hall with an eagle over the hearth. I knew that the way you know the date. 「Discern」 doesn't tell you who. It never tells you who. But it tells you when, and I'd heard Felix tell the story of when.
And then, underneath the poison, wrapped round it, something else.
Newer. Much newer. Two weeks, near enough.
Not poison. I knew the shape of poison now; this wasn't that. Not sickness. Not an old wound, not any kind of wound. I reached for a word for it, and there wasn't one. 「Discern」 had nothing to call it. It just sat there in the back of my head, the knowing, with a blank in the middle of it where the name should have been, like a word on the tip of your tongue in a language you've never learned.
Whatever it was, it was holding the poison in. Folded round it, the way you'd fold a cloth round a stone.
I'd felt that shape once already this morning. On the coverlet. Lying in a thin blue film over her hands, refusing to go in.
I opened my mouth to say so.
"Gelio," said Tullia.
She didn't raise her voice. She said it the way you'd say the name of a servant you wanted to bring the next course.
The floor went white.
It came from the door in a line, a long white line drawn across the floorboards as if by a finger, round the end of the bed and under my knees, and the cold came up through my legs so fast that I didn't feel it as cold. I felt it as stopping. My knees stopped. Then my shins, my feet, frozen to the boards where I knelt. A thin skin of frost ran up my coat to the waist and held there, white and hard and glittering, and the boards creaked under the weight of the ice.
My hand wasn't on the Queen's wrist anymore. The frost had come up my arm last of all, and it had come in between my fingers and her skin like a wedge going into green wood, and lifted, very gently, and stopped. My hand hung a finger's width above her wrist, in a glove of ice, and I couldn't close the gap. I strained, and the ice didn't give a hair. Gelio had been very careful. He hadn't touched her at all.
Liesel moved. I felt her move behind me, fast, and then I heard her stop, because a second line had gone out across the floor behind her and taken her boots to the ankle, and she pulled against it and the ice held.
"Don't," said Tullia. "Princess Elisabeth. Please don't. He'll hold, but he won't be gentle, and I'd rather he were gentle."
At the far side of the room Marika had her hand on her sword and her boots frozen to the floor, and her face was the color of a forge. Cordelia hadn't moved at all. She was standing exactly where she'd been standing, with her hands at her sides, looking at Tullia, and the ice had come up to her ankles and stopped there as if it had thought better of it. Wren had gone so still I couldn't tell where she was until I looked.
Felix was on his feet. His spark was running all down both arms, white and blue and snapping, and his face—
"Felix," said Tullia. "Sit down."
He didn't sit down. But he didn't throw, either. Because behind his aunt, the door had opened.
Petronius stood in it, big and slow, filling it, with his hands open at his sides. The stone of the doorframe round him had changed. It had grown, somehow, inward, so that the doorway was narrower than it had been a moment ago, just wide enough for one man.
And behind Petronius, in the corridor, with his keepers round him and his left hand at his side, Corvus.
He was looking past all of us. Past Tullia and Gelio and Petronius and the ice. At Felix.
Tullia hadn't moved from the door. She stood with her back to Petronius as if he were a wall, and her hands still folded in front of her, and she looked across the bed at me, frozen to the floor at the knees with my hand a finger's width from her sister's wrist.
"In Bellonia, Saint," she said pleasantly, "a man's blessing belongs to the throne. I did tell you. And you are an envoy of Octavia; your princess told me so. An envoy's person is sacred. I'd never touch it."
She tilted her head, very slightly, toward my hand, hanging in its ice above Aurelia's wrist.
"But an envoy who lays hands on the Queen of Bellonia, in her own bed, without the leave of her throne, is not an envoy anymore. He's a man who's done a thing."
I looked at Felix. Felix was looking at his aunt, and I watched him understand it a breath before I did.
"I asked," I said.
"You did," Tullia agreed. "I heard you. It was very sweet."
She smiled at me then, the small exact smile, the one that comes when a sum comes out.
"You asked my nephew, Saint," she said. "You didn't ask the throne."