Marika — Sanctara
I told Naomi first.
Before breakfast. Before the bread was out of the oven. Before the crossbow was awake, which, I'd learned the night before, was the only time the gray house was quiet. Naomi had said whoever means to kindle somebody tells me first, and she'd looked at me a whole breath longer than at anybody else while she said it, and I'm not stupid. I can follow a rule. Especially a rule with my name practically written on it.
So I went to the reading room at dawn and knocked, and Naomi said, "Come," and I went in and stood in front of her desk with my hands behind my back like a vanguard making her report.
"General," I said.
Naomi didn't look up from her letter.
"No."
"You haven't heard my reasons."
"General is in Greymark."
"Then we SEND for him."
"Nine days."
"I can WAIT."
Naomi put her pen down. That's how you know you've got her whole attention. It's also how you know you're about to lose.
"He can't say yes," she said.
"He can NOD."
"He nods at buckets, Marika."
"He nods at buckets he RESPECTS."
She looked at me, the way she does, the way that makes you hear what you just said in your own voice. Then she said, "It can't be broken, and it won't end," exactly the way she'd said it in the kitchen the night before.
And I thought about General. Forever. And about General eating the edge of the vow while I was still in the middle of saying it. And I'll admit it. I saw her point. A little.
"Fine," I said. "FINE. But it was a good idea."
"Noted," said Naomi, and picked up her pen.
Then the whole house came down to breakfast, and I couldn't say any of it out loud anymore, because the crossbow was there.
Pia sat three steps from Fabian. I mean that exactly. She'd moved her chair. Then Wren had moved hers, so that she was in between. Then Pia moved hers again. By the time Hana brought the bread, the three of them had gone halfway round the table, and my little brother was eating with his elbows tucked in like a man on a very crowded bench.
"So," said Liesel to me, in a voice like a shut door. "About the thing."
"What thing?" said Pia.
"The thing with the goat," said Hana kindly.
"There's a GOAT?"
"There's no goat," said Naomi.
"There's a goat in GREYMARK," I said. "His name is General."
Pia had her little book out already. "Who's General?"
I looked at her. She looked at me, pen up, eyes shining, ready to write down whatever I said next and keep it forever.
"General," I told her, "is a principle."
She wrote it down. I watched her do it. Then she underlined it, twice.
I like her. I've said so. I'll keep saying it.
After breakfast I put on my boots.
"Where are you going?" said Hana.
"Out. To find a front."
"There isn't a front," said Naomi, from the reading room, through a closed door.
"Then I'll MAKE one."
Sanctara is a terrible city for finding a front.
Everything's white and clean and goes uphill, and nothing in it wants to be hit. I went down two rings looking. I found a cart with a bad wheel, a dog with no manners and a woman selling ribbons who tried to sell me a ribbon. I found absolutely nothing that needed a vanguard.
Then, in the fourth ring, outside a chair-maker's shop, I found Felix.
He was standing on the step with a list in one hand and the face of a man who's just been told the price of something. Black and bronze. Hair doing whatever it wanted. Two knights of the Crown stood behind him, one at each shoulder: his escorts, the ones the Crown had given him back when it took his own Bellonian escorts in as palace guests, before those two ran home by the old salt road. Good women; I could tell by their boots. They had the patient faces of people who'd been told to follow a Bellonian round a city all day and had decided to live through it.
Their spacing was wrong. Knights stand the way you hold a gate, not the way you guard a man.
Too far apart. A girl with a basket could have walked straight up between them and been at his elbow before either of them turned her head. I noticed that before I noticed anything else, and I want it understood that this is the only reason I crossed the street.
"Lady Marika," said Felix, when he saw me, and smiled the whole smile.
"Don't call me that."
"Marika."
"Better."
"Marika Valcrest, Terror of the Eastern Road, Scourge of Turnips—"
"WORSE."
"What are you doing in the fourth ring?"
"Looking for a front," I said. "What are YOU doing in the fourth ring?"
"Buying a chair."
"Why?"
He looked at the shop window. There was one chair in it, all by itself. Pale wood, high back, arms worn smooth. It had a cushion the color of honey, and the sun was lying across it as if it had been told to.
"My mother wants breakfast," said Felix, "and a chair by the window."
Oh.
I'd heard him say that at Hana's table. I hadn't thought he meant it as a list.
"It's the best chair-maker in Sanctara," he went on, much faster, the way he talks when he's said something real by accident and wants to cover it up with noise. "Everyone at the Academy knows. The palace has been trying to buy her chairs for thirty years. I'm going to send it to Fulmara. It'll take a month. Mother will pretend it isn't the best chair she's ever sat in, and then she'll never sit in anything else." He looked at his list. "It costs more than my horse."
"Did you bargain?"
"I'm Bellonian. We don't bargain. We make an offer and look hurt."
"Did it work?"
"She looked more hurt than I did."
I went in.
I'm not going to describe what happened in the chair-maker's shop. I'll only say that she was a very hard old woman, and I am harder, and that Felix stood in the doorway with his mouth slightly open the whole time, and that when I came out, the chair cost less than his horse.
Not much less. But less. Tactics.
"How do I get it to the palace?" said Felix.
I picked it up and put it on my shoulder.
"You can't carry a chair through Sanctara."
"Watch me."
Then I took my place. Not behind him. At his shoulder, on the street side, between him and everything.
The knight on that side looked at me. I looked back at her. It was a long look, on both sides.
Felix waved a hand without turning round. "It's all right, ladies," he said. "She's a Valcrest. If anything gets past her, it'll get past you too."
The knights exchanged a glance. Then, with what I'd swear was relief, they dropped back two paces and fell in behind us.
They didn't know why that was the right place for me. They couldn't. Nobody outside the henhouse could.
But I knew.
Something was walking through locked doors in three kingdoms and picking whoever stood closest. And the night before, a goddess had put a new line in my little brother's head, under 「Covenant」, and it said Those you hold cannot be stirred. I'm held. I have been since the first week. Whatever that thing is, it can stand in a locked room and talk to me all night, and I won't hear a word.
So the very safest person in all of Sanctara to stand right next to the most important man in Bellonia was me.
That isn't feelings. That's TACTICS.
We didn't go to the palace.
We meant to. Then Felix said, "Since we're down here," and that was the end of the palace.
He'd lived at the Academy long enough to learn the city the way only a bored young lord can, and it turned out he knew every place in Sanctara that sold food after curfew, every gap in every wall a young lord could get through with his escorts asleep, and the exact roof where you could sit and watch the night watch change and not be seen. He showed me all of it. He talked the whole time. I carried the chair.
"Why do you talk so much?" I said, somewhere in the third ring.
"Next question."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got that doesn't come with a song."
People looked at us. Of course they did. A Bellonian in black and bronze, two knights of the Crown, and a Valcrest with a chair on her shoulder. By noon the ladies of the third ring had stopped pretending not to whisper.
"—the Valcrest girl, the loud one—"
"—with the BELLONIAN—"
"—carrying a CHAIR—"
I glared at the nearest bench until it felt bad about itself. Felix laughed so hard he had to stop walking.
For lunch he took me down to the very lowest ring, under the old wall, to a cookshop with a bronze pot hanging over the door. A Bellonian widow ran it. She took one look at Felix, said "Highness," boxed his ear, and sat us at the table nearest the fire, and then she brought out the snails.
The same ones as in Fulmara. I'd have known them anywhere.
I ate twelve. Felix kept count out loud, which was rude, and the widow stood over us with her arms folded and watched every one go down as if I were an exam she'd set.
"WORTH IT," I told her.
She nodded once, deeply satisfied, and brought me three more.
It was on the way back up, in the second ring, that the woman with the bread came.
She came out of a side street with a basket on her arm, quick and quiet, and she was at Felix's elbow before I'd seen her properly. Right in the gap. Exactly where I'd said a girl with a basket would be.
I was between them before I'd decided to be. The chair hit the cobbles. My hand went where it goes.
The woman squeaked.
She was about sixty. She had flour to the elbows. Her basket was full of little round loaves with seeds on top, and she held one out at me in a shaking hand as if it might stop a sword.
"Bread," she said faintly. "For the young lord. Fresh."
The whole street had gone quiet.
I bought the basket. All of it. I didn't know what else to do. I paid her twice what it was worth and she went back up her side street much faster than she'd come down it, and I stood there in the middle of the second ring holding a chair in one hand and a basket of bread in the other, with my face on fire.
The knights behind us exchanged a look. I'll remember that look for the rest of my life.
Felix didn't laugh. That was the strange part. He looked at me for a moment, at the chair and the bread and the hand that had gone where it goes, and then he took a loaf out of the basket and ate it and said, "Good bread," and walked on.
We ended up on the wall of the second ring at sunset, where the whole lower city goes gold and then gray and then lights its lamps one at a time.
I put the chair down. Felix sat in it.
"Testing it," he said. "For my mother."
"It's a chair. It works."
"She'll want to know." He leaned back. The cushion was the color of honey, and so was the light, and so, for a moment, was he. "It works."
I stood beside him with the bread and looked out at the city, and I thought about my place.
One place. Mine. Empty.
Naomi had said choose like it can't be broken. Liesel had chosen in about a breath. I'd chosen the goat, which, in my defense, was a principle. And now there was something walking through locked doors that picked whoever stood closest, and the man sitting in a chair next to me was the most important man in Bellonia, and nothing at all stood between him and it except a goddess's line in my brother's head, and me.
I could do it. I had the words. I'd heard Liesel say them, in Hana's kitchen, with her hand over Wren's heart. They'd come to me the same way if I reached for them. I could say them to him right now.
It cannot be broken, and it will not end. Will you take it?
I heard them in my head, in my own voice, said to the side of his face.
And I heard exactly what they sounded like.
They sounded like a girl at the end of a story, asking a boy—
No.
NO.
Absolutely not. Not in a hundred years. I glared at the wall until a piece of it nearly came off.
"You're very quiet," said Felix.
"I'm thinking about tactics."
"You're glaring at a wall."
"It's a TACTICAL wall."
He laughed. Then he stopped laughing, and was quiet for a while, which for Felix is a very long time. The lamps came on below us, one after another.
"You're the first person," he said, "who's walked beside me in Sanctara without being told to."
No joke after it. Short. The way he says things when they're true.
"I wasn't told to," I said.
"That's what I said."
I heard it a breath late. Then I heard it properly.
My ears were hot. That was the sunset. Sunsets are very hot in Sanctara; everybody says so.
I picked up the chair.
"We're going to the palace," I said. "NOW."
"I'm still sitting in it—"
He wasn't, by then. I was already ten paces down the wall with his mother's chair on my shoulder and the bread under my arm, walking very fast, and behind me I heard him laugh, and get up, and the knights' boots, and then Felix, running.
"Marika! That's my mother's chair!"
"THEN KEEP UP."
The chair went to the palace. I carried it up every step myself and handed it to a steward who looked at it, and then at me, and then at the bread, and decided not to ask about any of it. Felix wrote his mother's name on a card and tied it to one arm of the chair with a bit of string from the bread basket. Then he said goodnight at the palace gate the Bellonian way, with a hand flat on his chest, and I said goodnight the Valcrest way, which is loudly, and went home.
I gave Hana the bread.
Hana looked at the bread. She looked at me. She opened her mouth, and then she looked at the basket handle, where a length of string was missing, and closed it again, and took the basket into the kitchen without one word. Hana is the kindest person I know. Sometimes I can't stand it.
Naomi was waiting in the hall.
Not in the reading room. In the hall, standing up, which meant she'd been listening for the door. She waited until the kitchen door had shut and the crossbow's voice had gone back to telling Fabian something about the Fourth Book of the Saints, and then she said, low:
"From tomorrow, you go up to the Academy with Fabian."
I blinked. "What?"
"Third escort. Liesel and Wren stay where they are. You walk in front." She didn't change her voice at all. "An escort killed a Saint. Nothing can stir you. I want something in front of him that nothing can stir."
That was a very good reason. It was so good I couldn't argue with it, and I wanted to argue with it, and I stood there trying to find the part I could argue with, and what came out instead was:
"...Felix is at the Academy."
Naomi looked at me.
"Is he," she said.
It wasn't a question. Naomi doesn't ask questions she already knows the answers to. She just puts them down in front of you and lets you look at them.
"It's—" I said.
"Tactics," said Naomi. "I know." And she went back into the reading room and shut the door, and I'm almost certain, I'm nearly sure, that through the door I heard my eldest sister laugh.
That night the crossbow snored through the wall, and I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and did not think about anything.
Not the chair. Not the bread woman. Not twelve snails, or fifteen, or the knights' faces. Not a man sitting in his mother's chair on a wall at sunset, going honey-colored in the last of the light, saying a short thing with nothing on the end of it.
Not my place, either. Still empty. Which was fine. Which was tactics too. You don't spend your one place on the first good idea you have. You wait, and you watch, and you choose like it can't be broken.
I didn't think about any of it, all night.
I want that written down.