Somewhere around the fifty-third line, I noticed I'd written NO CASTING OUTSIDE THE STAIRS.
I looked at it for a while.
Then I crossed it out, very neatly, wrote it again properly underneath, and ruled that line didn't count. The headmistress had said a hundred. She hadn't said a hundred attempts.
It had been two days since the ball, and I'd done exactly what the Queen told me to. I'd thought about it.
I'd thought about it in general studies. I'd thought about it in the battle class, where Dame Valeria knocked me flat twice and the second time said "Hm," which from her is a speech. I'd thought about it in the infirmary between sprains. I'd thought about it in the bath, which was a mistake, because the water went cold and I didn't notice.
The trouble was, I didn't know how to think about it.
When I don't understand something, I count it. That's how I found out my pool was growing: I counted splashes until the numbers stopped making sense, and then I counted again. So on the second night, lying in bed, I tried counting this.
One of my daughters.
Cordelia. I tried. It went nowhere, very fast, like a horse refusing a fence.
Then the other one. I tried to count reasons, the way you'd count splashes.
She ate four honey cakes.
That wasn't a reason. That was just a thing that had happened.
She caught her hairpin without looking. Also not a reason. She hit a fireball out of the air for me. She said "You hit him. You shouldn't have" in a voice I'd never heard her use before or since. She always knew how many bites of breakfast I'd had, because Hana had made her write it down.
None of those were reasons. They were just things I'd counted without meaning to. And when I lined them up, there were a lot of them.
I'd stopped counting at that point and gone to sleep, very firmly.
Now I was at my desk, with the candle burning down and fifty-two good lines behind me.
"You're doing it again," said Liesel.
She was sitting on the other side of the fire with her boots on the hearth and a book about the history of something she clearly wasn't reading.
"Doing what?"
"The face. The one from the ball." She narrowed her eyes. "The thinking face."
"I'm copying lines."
"You crossed one out. I heard the scratch."
"It had a mistake in it."
"What kind of mistake?"
"The wrong word."
She didn't believe me. I could tell, because she put the book down.
"Two days," she said. "Two days, and you still won't tell me what my mother said to you."
"She told me to think about something."
"You've said."
"So I'm thinking about it."
"For two days?"
"It's a big something."
That was a mistake. Her eyes went wide, then narrow, then wide again, as though they couldn't decide which one was the right size for this.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Picked up the book, and went back to not reading it with great ferocity.
I wrote NO CASTING OUTSIDE THE BATTLE YARD for the fifty-third time, carefully, with every word spelled right, and thought about something else entirely.
I'm not someone who asks for advice. I'm the youngest of four. Advice comes to me whether I ask or not, usually in the form of laps.
But I'd never been told to think about something by a queen before. So the next day, I asked.
Ambrose first, because he read more books than anyone I knew, and I thought one of them might cover it.
In general studies, Lady Amara called Liesel to the front to read a passage aloud: a treaty with Bellonia, three hundred years old, written by someone who had never met a full stop she liked. Liesel went up looking like someone being led to a very boring execution.
Lady Amara stood beside her with her hands folded and her warm, exact smile. It had been back for a while now. I don't know why I noticed it that morning, except that it was so precisely the same as always, like a picture someone had straightened on the wall.
While Liesel read, I tore a corner off my page and wrote on it.
How do you know if you like someone?
I slid it onto Ambrose's desk.
He read it. He read it again. Then he looked at me for a long moment from under his untidy hair, as if I'd handed him a ditch with something unexpected at the bottom.
He wrote underneath and slid it back.
Ditches.
I wrote: You like ditches.
He wrote: Extraordinarily.
That was fair. I'd asked.
A drop of ink fell from my pen onto the scrap. Ambrose put his fingertip on it without a word, a White circle no bigger than a coin opened under his nail, and the blot lifted away, and he wiped it on his sleeve. Then he wrote one more line, slowly, and turned the scrap so I could read it without his sliding it over.
You always know where she is.
I stared at it.
"Who?" I whispered.
Ambrose turned a page of his book.
"...Hm," he said.
At the front of the room, Liesel tripped over a word nine syllables long, glared at it, and read it again, louder.
"Lord Fabian." Lady Amara's voice was soft and clear and didn't need raising. "Is there something you'd like to share with the class?"
"No, my lady."
"Are you certain?" Her smile didn't move at all. "You look like a young man with a great deal on his mind."
"Just the treaty, my lady."
"Of course," said Lady Amara, and turned back to Liesel, and I started breathing again.
I did always know where she was. That part was true. But that was the candle. The bond told me where all four of them were, all the time. It didn't mean anything.
I put the scrap in my pocket anyway.
On the way to the battle class, I tried Wren.
"Wren. How do you know if you like someone?"
Wren walked three more paces. Then she hummed: three notes, very slow, the ones that sounded like oh.
"That's not an answer."
"No, Young Master."
"Do you know the answer?"
Wren considered this, walking. "My lady would say it isn't my place."
"What would you say?"
"I don't talk, Young Master."
The eighth and ninth patients in the infirmary that afternoon came in together, which was unusual, because they were refusing to look at each other. Two girls from the battle class, both scratched down the forearms, one with a bruise coming up under her eye.
"Sparring?" I asked.
"No, Lord Fabian," said the one with the bruise.
"We were walking to supper," said the other. "Across the garden. And she—"
"I didn't. You—"
They both stopped. They looked at each other then, for the first time, and something in their faces went puzzled, as if they'd both reached for a word and found the shelf empty.
"I don't know," said the one with the bruise, quietly. "We've been friends since we were six."
Their lights were yellow, the plain, ordinary yellow of scratches and bruises. I healed them both, and both lights cleared to white. They left side by side, not quite apart, not quite together.
"Girls," said the infirmary mistress, unconcerned, "fight."
When the door had closed behind them, I asked her too. She was the oldest person I knew who wasn't a headmistress or a queen, and I wasn't asking either of those.
"Mistress. How do you know if you like someone?"
She didn't look up from the bandage she was rolling. Her big hands kept going, steady as a mill wheel.
"When they get hurt," she said, "and you're angrier about it than they are."
"That's just healing."
"Is it."
It wasn't a question. She set the rolled bandage on the pile and picked up another.
I thought about Liesel's palms, blistered from Cassian's fire, held behind her back so her mother wouldn't see. I thought about what I'd felt on the sand, looking at them.
That was different. That was Cassian.
"The tenth," said the infirmary mistress, "is waiting."
(We're in,) Naomi had said on the bond the night before. (Come tomorrow. After the infirmary.)
(THE STABLE HAS ROOM,) Marika had added.
(Room for what?)
(Nothing,) said Marika, much too fast.
So when the tenth patient had gone, Liesel, Wren and I walked down out of the first ring, through the gate in the inner wall, and into the wide, quiet streets of the second.
The house stood on a street of tall stone houses, behind a wall of its own that came up to about Naomi's shoulder. I suspect she'd already measured it. It was gray stone, three stories, with a slate roof, a courtyard, a stable along one side, and, over the gate, a navy banner with the Valcrest sword and wall in silver.
"Hana brought a banner," said Liesel.
"Hana brought everything."
Naomi was standing in the middle of the courtyard, looking at the wall the way other people look at paintings.
"It'll do," she said, which from Naomi is a love letter.
Then she looked at me, and put her hand on my head, briefly, the way she does now, as though checking I was still the right height.
I found Marika in the stable. Or rather, Liesel found her.
"Where's Marika?" she said, without turning around, and pointed straight at the stable door.
"STOP FINDING ME!"
Marika was standing in front of an empty stall with her arms folded, as if it had offended her.
"Look at this stall," she said.
"It's a stall."
"It's an empty stall. It's an empty stall in a stable with room." "I'm just saying that there's room. In the stable. For anything. Of any size. With any kind of aura."
"No," said Naomi, from the courtyard.
"I haven't SAID anything!"
"General stays in Greymark."
"General would be miserable without me."
"General has duties in Greymark."
"What duties?"
"Being in Greymark."
Marika opened her mouth. Shut it. Then, with enormous dignity: "General is a principle."
"Then the principle," said Naomi, "can stay in Greymark."
Marika walked out of the stable past us with her chin in the air, and went to glare at the wall instead.
Hana was in the kitchen. Of course she was.
She'd unpacked the whole packhorse into it. There were copper pots on every hook, jars on every shelf, a sack of flour on the table, and a basket by the stove that I was fairly sure contained more socks. She turned when I came in, and her eyes were shining.
"It's a good kitchen," she said, as though this were the most important news she had ever had to deliver.
"I can see that."
"It has two ovens." She took my face in both hands. "Have you eaten?"
"Three bites," said Liesel, behind me. "This morning. And an apple at noon. I wrote it down."
Hana let go of my face and hugged Liesel instead, which seemed to be becoming a habit.
When supper was nearly ready, I sat for a moment on the step outside the kitchen door, in the last of the light, and closed my eyes.
For the first time since I rode out under the tide bell, all four candles were in one place. Like a window lit up at night, with everyone you know behind it.
I hadn't known how much I'd missed that, either.
A shadow fell across the step. Naomi didn't sit. Naomi never sits. She stood beside me, looking out at the courtyard.
"You're thinking," she said.
"The Queen told me to."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Whatever she asked you," said Naomi, "it's your call. Not hers. Not mine."
Then she walked away across the courtyard, before I could say anything at all.
I sat there with my mouth open.
I hadn't told her the Queen had asked me anything. I hadn't told anyone.
"Big Sis," I called after her. "How did you—"
"Leave it," said Naomi, without turning around.
After supper, Hana decided we needed honey cakes.
"For tomorrow," she said. "For the infirmary mistress. And the cook. And Lord Ambrose. And Wren." She considered. "For everyone, really."
She put a bowl in front of me and another in front of Liesel, and set out flour, honey, butter and a whole basket of eggs, because Captain Sigrid had sent eggs all the way from Greymark, because of course she had.
Then Hana said, "I'll be right back. I need to find something."
"Find what?"
"Something," said Hana, and left the kitchen with the air of a woman who had never needed to find anything less.
It didn't occur to me until much later that I had never once, in my whole life, seen Hana leave a kitchen in the middle of baking.
Liesel attacked her bowl. Butter and honey went up the sides and one blob landed on the table.
"Don't stir it like it owes you money," I said. "Fold."
She looked up. "That's Hana's line."
"It's on your page, isn't it?"
"...Under cakes." She folded, badly but with feeling. "She wrote fold three times and underlined it."
For a while there was only the sound of two spoons, and the fire in the stove, and Marika's voice somewhere outside, still explaining to the courtyard wall about principles.
Then Liesel said, without looking up, "Is it the pool?"
"What?"
"What my mother asked you." Her voice dropped. "Did she ask how much you've really got? Because I didn't tell her. I told her it was yours to tell. I swear on—"
"It's not the pool."
Her shoulders came down a little. Then they went straight back up.
"My hands? Did she ask you about my hands?"
"No."
"Because if she did, you don't have to—"
"She didn't ask about your hands, Liesel."
She glanced at the door. Then she leaned closer, close enough that I could smell the honey on her fingers, and whispered: "...The candles?"
"No."
She sat back, frowning. She had flour on her cheek. "Then what else is there?"
I didn't answer. I didn't know how.
She looked at me. I looked at the bowl.
The gold hairpin had given up again sometime during supper, and her hair was falling into her eyes the way it always did, the way it hadn't at the ball. I found I liked it better like this. The thought arrived on its own and sat down in my head as though it lived there.
"Liesel."
"Mm?"
"If someone told you to think about something," I said slowly, "and you did, and every time you thought about it, no matter where you started, you ended up in the same place—"
She had gone very still. Her spoon had stopped in the bowl.
"—what would that mean?"
"The same place," said Liesel. Her voice came out a little strange. "What place?"
I opened my mouth.
The kitchen door banged open.
"Is there CAKE?" said Marika.
She stopped in the doorway. She looked at Liesel, frozen with her spoon in the bowl and flour on her cheek. She looked at me. Her ears went from normal to pink to scarlet in about the time it takes to blink.
"...I'll come back," said Marika, and backed out, and shut the door.
From the corridor came a thump, as though someone had walked into someone else who had been standing very close to the door, and then Hana's voice, in a furious whisper: "MARIKA."
Liesel and I sat there.
"What place?" she said again, more quietly.
"...Never mind," I said. "Fold."
She folded. I folded. Neither of us said anything for a long time. She was red to the collar, and I could feel that I was too, and the cakes, when they finally came out of Hana's second oven, were the best I've ever made.
I didn't finish the sentence. Not out loud.
Not even in my own head.
Naomi walked us as far as the gate in the inner wall, because she wanted to, not because the law said so. Then Liesel, Wren and I climbed back up into the first ring with a basket of honey cakes between us and the city going quiet under its lamps.
The Academy gate guards nodded us through. Past the battle yard, a single lantern burned on the rail, and in its light Lord Cassian Ardane was raking ash, slowly, by hand. He didn't look up. He never did, now.
We cut across the garden at the heart of the grounds, because it was the shortest way to the residence, and because everyone does.
The grass was wet under my boots, and cold. Colder than the night. I thought it was the dew.
There's a stone bench in that garden, under four old pear trees. I'd walked past it a hundred times and never once seen anyone sit on it.
Tonight someone was.
It was the girl from the infirmary, the one who'd had the bruise. She was sitting very straight with her hands in her lap, looking at the middle of the lawn. Her face was wet. She didn't seem to have noticed.
Liesel stopped. "Are you all right?"
The girl started and stood up so fast she nearly tripped over her own feet, and curtsied. "Your Highness. Lord Fabian."
"Are you hurt?"
"No, Your Highness."
"Then why are you crying?"
The girl touched her cheek and looked at her wet fingers, as though they belonged to someone else.
"I don't know," she said. "I was walking back to my room, and I thought about her. About this afternoon. And I was so angry, Your Highness. I don't know why. I've never been angry at her in my life." She looked at the lawn again. "I just wanted to sit down. Here. I don't know why."
Beside me, Wren had stopped humming. I hadn't noticed when.
"We'll walk you back," said Liesel.
"No. Thank you, Your Highness. I'm all right now. I am." The girl curtsied again, and gave me a small, puzzled smile, as if apologizing for something she couldn't name. "Good night, Lord Fabian."
She went off along the path toward the girls' buildings, quickly, not looking back.
I watched her go. I didn't decide to. It's what I do now, the way I learned to in the tide, the way the infirmary mistress brings me patients: darkest first. I looked at her light the whole way across the lawn, until she turned the corner and was gone.
It was white. Steady.
There was nothing wrong with her at all.