The note came at breakfast, folded once, in handwriting so straight it could have been drawn with a ruler.
The headmistress will see Lord Fabian and his escorts after the morning bell.
That was all. No reason. No signature. It didn't need one.
"Lady Severine," said Liesel, reading it over my shoulder. "She writes the way she walks."
"What does the headmistress want with me?"
"Nobody knows anything about the headmistress. I think that's the point of her." Liesel tore my bread roll in half and put the bigger half back on my plate. "Eat that first. Hana's page says you don't think properly on an empty stomach."
"Hana's page doesn't say that."
"It does now. I added a line."
Wren said nothing. She ate in silence, the way she always does. But she had laid her sword on the table beside her bowl instead of on the floor, and for Wren, that is the same as pacing.
I ate the bigger half. Then, at the bottom of the tower stairs, while Liesel argued with the guard about whether the morning bell had technically rung yet, I closed my eyes.
(Big Sis. The headmistress wants to see me.)
(Then go and see her.)
(What if she asks about—)
(Then you'll decide what to answer.) A pause, two days away. (You can do that now.)
I stood there for a moment with that sitting in my chest, warm and heavy, like the first splash of a full pitcher.
The headmistress lived at the top of the oldest tower in the Academy. The stairs went round and round inside it, worn into dips in the middle by five hundred years of feet.
"Ninety-four," said Liesel at the top, and looked at me meaningfully.
"I didn't say anything."
"Your face did."
The door opened before I could knock.
"Lord Fabian," said Lady Severine. "Your Highness." Her spectacles turned, very slightly. "Wren."
Beside me, Wren went perfectly rigid. In all her life, I don't think anyone that important had ever said her name on purpose.
The headmistress's office was round, like the tower. Books climbed the walls all the way to the ceiling. A tall window looked down over the battle yard, where a single small figure in black velvet was already raking ash.
There was a desk, very old and very clean. On it stood one candle in a brass holder, unlit.
And above the fireplace, carved into the stone, was a crest I had never seen before: a single candle flame inside a circle.
I looked at it for longer than I should have. In my chest, four candles burned exactly where they always do. On the wall, one more.
"Sit," said the headmistress.
She was sitting behind the desk, and she was small, smaller than Hana, with white hair scraped into a knot so tight it looked like a decision. Her face was lined like an old letter that had been folded and unfolded many times. Her eyes were the pale blue of winter water. Her walking cane leaned against the desk beside her. It did not look as though she'd needed it to get there.
She was looking at me.
Not the way the girls in the corridor looked at me, or the way Cassian did, or even the way the Queen had from her chair at the rail. She looked at me the way you'd look at a book you'd already read the ending of: no surprise at all, only a quiet interest in how it was going to get there.
As if she knew everything about me, and was only waiting to see whether I knew it too.
I sat. Liesel sat. Wren sat on the very edge of the third chair, as if it might be a trap.
Lady Severine walked around the desk and took up her place behind the headmistress's shoulder, hands folded, spectacles catching the window.
"First," said the headmistress. "Lord Cassian Ardane."
I sat up straighter.
"I spoke with him at dawn. He will clean the ash out of my battle yard every evening until the end of term. By hand. Without casting." She glanced, very briefly, at the window. "He has started early. Good. And he will write his escort an apology." A pause. "Spelled correctly. Lady Severine will check."
Behind her, Lady Severine inclined her head about the width of a hair. I had the strong impression that she was going to enjoy checking.
"I don't care for young men who think a blessing makes them better than the women who keep them alive," said the headmistress. "I have met a great many of them. I have outlived most."
Then the pale eyes came back to me.
"You healed in my dining hall."
"Yes, Headmistress."
"Against a rule written on a board."
"Yes, Headmistress."
"Why?"
"She was burning."
The headmistress considered that for a moment.
"I would have done the same," she said. "You will copy the rule out one hundred times anyway. A rule that only binds the people who agree with it is not a rule."
That seemed fair. It was, I realized, the first time anyone at the Academy had punished me and Cassian with the same scale, and the strangest thing was how much better it made me feel.
"Yes, Headmistress."
"Good." She folded her small hands on the desk. "Now. The real reason you are here."
She didn't begin right away. She looked at each of us in turn: at me, at Liesel, at Wren.
"What I am about to say does not leave this room," said the headmistress. "Not to your friends. Not to your classmates. Not to your mother, Your Highness." The pale eyes rested on Liesel. "Not to the Queen."
"I'm getting quite good at that," said Liesel.
"So I'd heard," said the headmistress drily.
I looked at Wren.
I didn't mean anything by it. I only glanced. But Wren has spent her whole life watching other people's faces for the moment they're about to need something, and she saw the glance and understood it at once, or thought she did.
She stood up.
"Headmistress. Young Master." She bowed, very correctly, to both of us. "I'll wait outside."
She was already halfway to the door.
"Wren," I said. "Sit down."
She stopped. She didn't turn round.
"Young Master," she said quietly, "it isn't my place."
I looked at her back, very straight, and her hand on the sword at her hip, and I thought about it properly, the way Naomi would have wanted me to.
Wren had walked beside me for weeks. Not ten paces back: beside. She'd lit the stove for my honey cakes, and eaten one, and hummed four notes at a double cast. She'd taken a fireball in the side for me and called it a scratch. She had watched Liesel snap fence rails and spears and Lord Cassian's fire, and seen a princess's burned palms go smooth by supper, and she had never once asked me a single question. Not because she hadn't noticed. Because she had decided it wasn't her place.
Whatever the headmistress was about to say, Wren was going to be standing next to it for a long time. She was going to be standing next to me. You can't ask someone to guard a thing with her eyes shut.
(Big Sis,) I said. (Wren.)
A pause, two days away.
(I picked her for a reason,) said Naomi. (Your call.)
So I made it.
"She stays," I said to the headmistress. Then, to Wren's back: "If you want to."
Wren stood very still for a long moment.
Then she turned around, came back, and sat down in her chair. Not on the edge this time. All the way back, very straight, with her sword across her knees.
The headmistress studied her. "Can you keep a secret, girl?"
"I don't talk, Headmistress."
The corner of the headmistress's mouth twitched. It was gone almost before it arrived.
"No," she said. "I don't suppose you do."
Beside me, Liesel bumped my knee with hers under the desk, once, very lightly. I didn't know what it meant. It felt like a yes.
The headmistress reached across the desk, struck a match, and lit the single candle.
It was broad daylight. The candle didn't need lighting. I had the feeling she did it every time she told this story, the way Odile lights the shrine lamps before a blessing.
"My name is Justina Candelis," she said. "Most people call me Headmistress. You may do the same."
She watched the flame for a moment.
"Five hundred years ago, the Demon King's army came over the mountains, and they hunted the healers first. Every child in Octavia knows that much."
I did. Odile had made all four of us recite it on the shrine steps until Marika started adding sound effects.
"What every child doesn't know," said the headmistress, "is that House Candelis had a Saint."
The room went very quiet. Even the rake down in the battle yard seemed to stop.
"A boy. About your age. Blessed by Elysia when the war was already old." She said it plainly, the way you'd read out a list. "His name is one of the things we lost. Healers were hunted first, so my family learned to keep his secrets the way, I suspect, yours keeps yours. We never gave his pages to the Crown's Records. By the time it would have been safe to, there wasn't much left to give."
She opened a drawer and took out a flat leather case, old and soft as a glove. Inside lay a few sheets of something that had once been paper. They were brown at the edges, water-stained in the middle, and burned along one side in a long, curling black line.
"Five hundred years of fires, floods and careful great-aunts," said the headmistress. "This is what's left. Three sentences my family can still read, and one drawing that none of us has ever understood."
She laid the case on the desk. The drawing, if that was what it was, she kept face down beneath her small, flat hand.
Then she recited the three sentences. She didn't need to look at the pages. I think she'd known them since she was a girl.
"He saw a light in every living thing, and knew by it who would fall first."
Something went cold at the back of my neck.
"His well grew deeper the more he poured from it."
A mage's pool is a well, Father had told Naomi once. You learn to draw from it better. You don't dig it deeper. Every mage in Octavia would have said the same. Everyone except me.
"And those who carried his candles did not fall, and were whole again by nightfall of wounds that should have killed them."
Beside me, Liesel's hands went completely still in her lap. Her smooth, unmarked hands.
"That's all," said the headmistress. "Three sentences. My family has handed them down to its daughters for five hundred years, and waited to find out whether any of them were true."
She looked at Liesel's hands.
"Smooth by supper," she said quietly.
Then she looked at me.
"Fifteen."
Behind her, Lady Severine did not move at all. Wren had stopped breathing. I could hear it.
"I am not the Queen, Lord Fabian," said the headmistress. "I don't want your secrets for a crown. I am an old woman, and before I die, I would like to know whether my family has been telling itself the truth." She folded her hands over the face-down page. "So I will ask. You may answer as much or as little as you like. Nothing you say will leave this room."
She leaned forward, small and straight in the candlelight, and the pale eyes held mine.
"When you look at me," said Justina Candelis, "do you see my light?"
I looked at her.
I couldn't help it. It's not something I can stop doing anymore. Around the small, straight old woman behind the desk, there was a light: white, and steady, and not one thing wrong with it.
Under the desk, Liesel's hand found my sleeve.
And for the first time in my life, someone outside my family had asked me exactly the right question.