Amara — Sanctara
They say I walked out of five introductions.
That part is true. Every girl in my class knows it. Not one of them has ever asked why.
I was eighteen the year the story came up the road from the border.
A water mage of Greymark, the story went, had married one woman. Only one, in a kingdom where a man may marry as many women as will have him. And when the tide bell rang, he hadn't stayed behind the wall, the way men do. He'd ridden out beside her. They had died there together, in the same field.
The court called it a tragedy. The girls I knew called it a waste of a perfectly good man.
I didn't call it anything. I lay awake for a week.
Not for the dying. For the beside.
I wanted that. I wanted a man who would stand next to me instead of behind a line of women. One wife, one husband, and whatever came, the two of us facing it.
So I did what women in Octavia do. I asked.
My mother's cousin knew a countess. The countess knew a duchess's secretary. I spent every favor my family had, and a few it didn't, and over the next ten years I was introduced to five lords.
The first already had four wives and wanted a fifth for his summer house. He said so as if it were a compliment.
The second spoke only to my mother. In two hours, he never once said my name.
The third asked me to smile, then asked me to smile wider, so he could see my teeth.
The fourth was kind for exactly as long as it took him to learn my house's income.
The fifth was handsome, and soft-spoken, and laughed in the right places. Then his escort poured his wine a little too slowly, and he struck her across the face without even turning his head, and turned back to me, still smiling, as if I hadn't seen.
I walked out. I walked out of all five.
That is the part everyone knows.
What nobody knows is that somewhere around the fourth, I stopped hoping. And somewhere around the fifth, something else began to grow in the place where the hoping had been. Something small. Something I never let myself look at.
I became a class mistress instead. I teach girls their letters and their histories and the names of the Eight. I smile at them, because none of this is their fault. And when a young lord sits down on a cushioned chair at the front of my classroom, I smile at him too, exactly the same, so that nobody can see the difference.
Then, this morning, I watched a boy heal the girl who had been trying to beat him.
He walked across the sand to her. Nobody told him to. He knelt, put his hands on her broken wrist, and spent one more splash, past a count that should have been impossible, on the wrong side.
"I said I would," he told her.
I was on my feet before I knew it. I couldn't remember how my face was supposed to look when something impossible happened.
So he was real. The kind of man I'd lain awake over at eighteen. The water mage's son. He existed, he was seventeen, and he was sitting on the sand of a battle yard beside a princess, and none of it, not one moment of it, had ever been anywhere near meant for me.
I had always thought the worst thing would be finding out that men like that didn't exist.
It wasn't.
That night, in my rooms at the top of the mistresses' house, I stood at the window for a long time and didn't light the lamp.
When I turned around, someone was standing in the corner.
Black boots. Black clothes. A black hood, and beneath it a black veil wrapped close, so that nothing showed at all except a pair of eyes. They were very calm.
I didn't scream. I still don't know why. Perhaps some part of me had been waiting.
"You saw him today," said the figure. The voice was low and unhurried. I couldn't have told you anything else about it.
"...Who are you?"
"Someone who saw you see him." The eyes didn't move. "One good man. There is always one, somewhere. Just enough of them to keep the rest of you hoping." A pause. "Hope is how they keep you kneeling."
I should have called the guard. My hand was on the bell rope. It stayed there.
The figure held out a gloved hand. On the palm lay something small and black, smooth as a river stone, about the size of a walnut. It didn't shine. It seemed to drink what little light came in through the window.
"Plant this inside the Academy," said the figure. "Somewhere no one will look. Somewhere it can grow."
"What is it?"
"A seed."
"Of what?"
The eyes held mine for a long moment.
"Of what you already feel."
I took it. I don't remember deciding to. My hand simply opened, and then it was in my palm, cold, and far heavier than anything that small should be.
When I looked up, the corner was empty. The door was still locked. The window was still shut.
I stood there for a long time.
Then I opened the drawer of my writing desk, where I keep the five polite letters that five lords' mothers sent after I walked out, and I laid the seed among them, and closed the drawer.
In the dark glass of the window, I practiced my smile until it came back.
It always does.
It has never once reached my eyes.
Liesel — Sanctara
Mother had said "the palace," and she had said "tonight," and in my family that is more than enough to know it won't be the throne room.
It was the small sitting room at the top of the east tower. The one with the bad painting of a horse over the fireplace. The one I hid in when I was nine to get out of a dancing lesson, and the one Mother has never once admitted she chose that painting for.
There were no guards inside. No secretary in the corner. No crown, either: it was sitting on the side table beside the teapot, like an ordinary hat somebody had taken off.
Mother was in a chair by the fire with her shoes off.
Cordelia stood by the window, out of armor, in a plain shirt and trousers, which always looks wrong to me, like a sword without its scabbard.
And that was all. The three of us.
"Sit down, Liesel," said Mother.
Liesel. Not Elisabeth. I sat.
"Hands."
I held them out.
She took them in hers and turned them over, palms up, in the firelight. This morning they'd been burned raw. Everyone in the battle yard had seen it.
Now they were smooth. Not a mark. Not even pink.
Mother ran her thumbs very gently over both palms, the way she used to check me for splinters after the stables.
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Did it hurt this morning?"
"...Yes," I said. "Then it didn't."
She nodded slowly, as if that were a perfectly reasonable answer, and didn't let go of my hands.
On the ride up the hill, I'd worked out what I was going to do. I would say only true things. I'm very good at true. And where I couldn't say a true thing, I would say that I couldn't. I was not going to lie to my mother in a room with a bad painting of a horse in it.
"I'm not asking as the Queen," Mother said. "If I were asking as the Queen, there would be a secretary in that corner, and you would be standing. Tonight I'm only asking for me."
"All right."
"Did you know? About Lord Fabian. That he could spend fifteen."
"Yes."
"Since when?"
"Since Greymark."
"Is fifteen all of it?"
I thought about the number he'd told me in Greymark, by candlelight. I thought about him counting through the wall every night since.
"That one isn't mine to tell you, Mother," I said. "It's his."
I knew that was an answer too. So did she. Mother is very good at pushing; she can do it with one eyebrow. I waited for the eyebrow.
It didn't come.
"Is it dangerous to him?" she said instead.
"Only when he does it badly." I swallowed. "He did it badly in the tide."
"I was there," said Cordelia quietly, from the window.
Mother glanced at her, then back at me. "And how does one stop him doing it badly?"
"Someone makes him eat breakfast," I said. "There's a page about it. His sister wrote it. It's very thorough."
Something happened at the corner of Mother's mouth. She is the Queen of Octavia, so it wasn't a smile. It was the place where a smile would have been.
"Your turn, Cordelia," she said.
Cordelia turned from the window.
"Who's your instructor?"
"There isn't one."
"Then how?"
I looked down at my smooth hands, still in Mother's.
"Something happened in Greymark," I said. "I can't tell you what. I promised."
"Promised whom?"
"Someone who would do the same for me."
Cordelia studied me the way she studies everything, as if she's already read it once and is checking it for mistakes. She had watched me in the tide, back when I was Beth and believed my helmet was fooling her. She knew exactly how hard I could hit, then. She had watched me this morning.
"In the tide," she said, "you held one of the Broodmother's legs on a spear. I thought that was the most you would ever be able to do."
"It was," I said. "Then."
"Does it cost you?" Her voice didn't change, but she had come a step closer. "Whatever it is. Is it hurting you?"
That was the one question I hadn't expected. Out of all of them.
"No," I said, and it came out softer than I meant it to. "It's the opposite of hurting."
Cordelia looked at me a moment longer.
Then she nodded, once. "Then I don't need to know."
I stared at her. Mother had gone very still, the way she does when something has been decided without her and she approves of it.
"You heard her," said Mother. "Cordelia doesn't need to know. And I suppose, tonight, neither do I."
She let go of my hands and picked up her teacup. I let out a breath I'd been holding since the bottom of the hill.
It was going, by any measure, very well.
Then Mother set the cup down again.
"There's one more thing," she said. "You didn't answer my letter."
Oh, no.
"I asked you one question. As your mother. I said you could answer or not, as you liked." She folded her hands in her lap. "I'm asking it again. Same terms."
At the window, Cordelia did not move a single muscle, which is how I knew she was enjoying this enormously.
"Do you like him?"
I opened my mouth.
I had a true thing ready. I'm sure I did. Something sensible, about escorts, and friendship, and how he thanks the servers.
What came instead was a boy with flour on his face, holding out six lopsided honey cakes. A boy on the inner wall, blaming his red face on the stairs. A boy on his back in the sand, burning, and the moment the fire went through him and through the bond and through me, and I stopped caring who saw anything at all.
My face went hot. Then hotter. I could feel it climbing my neck and all the way up to my ears, the way Marika's do, and I couldn't stop it, and I couldn't find a single word.
I shut my mouth.
Mother looked at me for a long, quiet moment.
"Ah," she said softly. "There it is."
"Finally," said Cordelia, to the window.
Mother let the quiet sit for a moment. Then she asked, in exactly the same gentle voice, "Does he know?"
I thought about it. I really thought about it, because it was a fair question, and because I wanted to be sure.
"No," I said.
"You're certain."
"Mother." I took a breath. "In Greymark, before I told him who I was, I spent two whole weeks being Beth at him. I called him 'Saint,' the way only Beth ever had. I very nearly walked into the room wearing the helmet."
Cordelia made a small noise at the window.
"And every single time," I said, "he decided it was a capital thing. That's what he called it. A capital thing. In the end, I had to sit him down and tell him myself." I looked into the fire. "If he didn't notice that, he isn't going to notice this."
Mother looked at me. Then, slowly, she smiled. A real smile this time, not just the place where one would be, which was far more frightening.
"Then let me help," she said.
My stomach dropped straight through the chair.
"Help," I said. "Help how?"
Mother picked up her teacup again and took a sip.
"Mother."
"Your tea's getting cold, Liesel."
"Mother."
She didn't say another word about it. Not one. She simply drank her tea and looked at the fire, the way a cat looks at a mousehole it has all evening to think about.
"Oh, no," said Cordelia, to the window, with deep satisfaction.
If the question had made my heart race, let me help sent it galloping.
And somewhere very far away, and also right inside my ribs, a candle that was Hana's sat up.
(Liesel? Your heart—)
I closed my eyes.
(Stairs,) I said.
To be fair, the palace has a great many of them.
Fabian — Sanctara
Liesel had been gone since supper, and the quarters were too quiet without her.
Wren sat by the door with her sword across her knees, pretending she wasn't falling asleep. I sat at the table with a cup of tea I'd stopped drinking an hour ago, and a pitcher that had crept most of the way back since the morning, which after this morning felt like a feast.
The henhouse had already come and gone. My sisters were camped at the side of the road somewhere, on their first night out of Greymark. Hana had spent most of the talk asking whether I'd eaten, Marika had spent the rest complaining that the road was the same road as last time and therefore boring, and Naomi had said "Sleep" twice.
Apparently, nobody had.
Because then, in my chest:
(Liesel? Your heart—)
Hana. Of course it was Hana.
I sat up. By the door, Wren's eyes opened. Far away in the palace, Liesel's candle was going like a drum.
(Stairs,) said Liesel.
I stared at my teacup.
Stairs.
That was my excuse. I'd used it on the inner wall with my face as red as a beetroot, and Liesel had raised one eyebrow at me in a way that said she didn't believe a word of it.
(WHAT STAIRS?) said Marika. (IT'S THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.)
(The palace has a lot of stairs,) said Liesel, with enormous dignity.
(Liesel, are you sure you're—)
(Leave it,) said Naomi.
Just that. Two words, in the voice she uses when she knows something I don't and has decided I don't need to know it yet.
The bond went quiet.
I sat there and worked it out. Liesel had gone to the palace. Liesel's heart had done something that made Hana sit up in a tent. And Liesel had said "stairs." My word. The exact word she'd made fun of me for.
Which could only mean one thing.
She was making fun of me. From the palace. In front of her mother.
That was dedication. I had to respect it.
She came back very late. Two crimson guards walked her to the residence door, bowed to her, and didn't look at me at all.
Liesel stepped inside and stopped when she saw me at the table.
"You're still up."
"You went to the palace with burned hands," I said. "Show me."
For a moment I thought she was going to argue. Then she held them out.
Smooth. Not a mark. Exactly what she'd said on the sand this morning: gone by supper. They had been gone by supper. That was the problem.
"Did she see?"
"She held them for a long time." Liesel took them back and tucked them under her arms. "She didn't ask anything I couldn't answer."
Something in my chest unclenched. "What did your mother say?"
Liesel looked at me for a long moment.
"...Things," she said.
"What kind of things?"
"Mother things."
"Did she ask about the fifteen?"
"Yes."
My stomach went cold. "And?"
"And I told her it was yours to tell."
The cold went out of me all at once. "Thank you."
"And Cordelia asked about my training, and I told her I'd promised someone, and she said she didn't need to know."
"Cordelia said that?"
"Cordelia said that."
That seemed like a great deal of good news for one evening. I looked at her more carefully, the way I look at everyone now. Her light was white, all the way round. Nothing wrong with her at all.
Except.
"Your face is red," I said.
"Stairs," said Liesel.
"The palace has a lot of stairs?"
"A great many." She was already halfway to her room. "Go to bed, Saint. Drain your pitcher. Count something."
The door shut behind her.
By the door, Wren hummed three notes. Very slowly. In a way that sounded almost exactly like a question.
"Don't you start," I told her.
That night I drained what was left, splash by splash, and slid into the warm dark wondering exactly how many stairs the Queen of Octavia needed. A lot, apparently.
Through the wall, very quietly, just before I fell asleep: "...Done?"
"Done."
A pause.
"Good," said Liesel. "Sleep."
I did. I dreamed about stairs.