The snow stayed on the sixth day.
It came down in the night, soft and thick and without any wind behind it, and in the morning the whole valley was white to the tops of the walls. Captain Rufa's women came out of their tents and stood in it. Nobody said anything for a while. One of them bent down, very slowly, and picked up a handful and looked at it.
"Snow," said Rufa, as if she were introducing two people who ought to have met years ago.
Then she told them to strike the tents, and they did, with snow down their collars and their faces bright with cold, and for the rest of the morning I kept catching them looking at it, at the white on the hills and the white on the road and the white on each other's shoulders, the way you look at something you've heard about all your life and never quite believed in.
Three more villages between Holloway and the sixth night. Smaller than Holloway, and further apart, strung out along the road where the valley narrowed and the mountains came down close on both sides.
The same sickness in every one. The autumn cough, the fever, the old ones weak in the chest. Nothing 「Discern」 didn't recognize. Nothing a Blue 「Mass Cure」 couldn't take out of a house in a breath.
And the same thing in every one, too, that wasn't sickness. The keepers ringing their bells when they saw us coming down the road. The faces in the doorways. The word they all used, sooner or later, every one of them, as if they'd agreed on it beforehand.
Nobody.
Nobody came. Nobody answered. We sent to the city and nobody came.
"They keep saying it," said Felix, on the fifth evening, at the fire. He'd stopped joking about an hour into the second village and hadn't really started again. "Like it's a thing that happened. Like a flood."
"It is," said Liesel.
Felix looked at her.
"Their Saint died," said Liesel. "And their queen had nobody to send. And for a whole autumn, every time they rang that bell, nobody came." She turned a stick in the fire. "That's not nothing. That's a thing that happens to you."
Nobody said anything for a while.
"Well," said Felix eventually. "Somebody's here now."
It wasn't a joke. He didn't try to make it one.
Naomi kept to her rule. Hands first, bottles in the cart. Every evening, wherever we stopped, Ambrose and Felix and I made six more, and every morning the bottle cart was six heavier and Pia's column was six longer.
Forty-two by the seventh evening. Forty-one in the straw. One with Hana's name next to it in Pia's book, and a baby's, and Twice.
And on the sixth night, draining in my tent with Liesel asleep on one side of the door and Wren awake on the other, I found the bottom of the pitcher a little further down than it had been.
One splash. Forty-three.
I lay there in the dark with my hands still warm and counted it twice, to be sure. Then a third time, because I always do. It's the slowest thing in my life, that number. Weeks of hitting empty every night for one more splash. But it was one more, and on the road north, with thirty-five bottles behind me and whatever was ahead, one more felt like something.
I told Naomi in the morning.
"Noted," said Naomi. Then, after a moment, without looking at me: "Good."
From Naomi, both words at once is practically a feast.
The village by the ford was the last one in the valley, where the river came down fast and gray off the mountains and the road crossed it on flat stones. Fewer sick here. The city wasn't far, the keeper said, three or four days, and sometimes a physician rode out from it in the autumn. Not this year. But sometimes.
Four houses. Four Blue circles. It was barely past noon when we finished.
The old woman was waiting by the bottle cart when I came out of the last house.
She was very small and very straight, wrapped in a brown shawl, with a stick she didn't seem to need and a bundle tied in a clean white cloth held against her chest in both hands. She'd been standing there a while. There was snow on her shoulders and none on the ground round her feet, where she'd stamped it flat.
"Saint," she said.
"Grandmother." I came over. Liesel came with me, and Wren, and Pia one step behind. "Are you sick?"
"I'm old. That's different." She looked me up and down. "Younger than I thought."
"Everyone says that."
"Everyone's right." She held out the bundle. "For you. For coming."
I didn't take it at once. People have given me a great many things for coming. Eggs, mostly. Bread. Once, in Greymark, a very angry hen. Nobody had ever held one out to me with both hands like that, as if it were heavy, and as if she'd be glad to put it down.
"What is it?"
"I don't know," said the old woman. "That's why I'm giving it to you."
She untied the cloth.
It was a fruit. The size of a plum, perfectly round, perfectly black. Not the black of a ripe plum that's really purple when you look close. Black all the way, glossy as a beetle's back, with no stem and no mark where a stem had been. It looked like a cherry that had forgotten to stop growing.
I looked at it with my ordinary eyes first.
Then I looked at it under 「Eyes」.
A fruit shouldn't show at all. 「Eyes」 shows me people, and animals down to a mouse, and the light inside them. A plum in a cloth is just a plum in a cloth.
This showed.
It was a hole. A small round hole in the world, the size of a plum, sitting in the old woman's hands where the light should have gone straight through. The kind of hole a monster makes. Not empty. Worse than empty: something that took the light that fell on it and didn't give any back.
The last time I'd seen something black growing where it had no right to be, it had been inside Lady Amara, and we'd burned it out of her by the roots.
On my right, Wren's hand went to her sword. Not drawn. Just there, on the hilt.
"Wren?"
"Wrong," said Wren.
She couldn't see what I saw. She didn't need to.
"Grandmother," I said, very carefully. "Where did you get this?"
"My daughter sent it down." The old woman's hands didn't move. "With the last drover that came through from the north. Fourteen days back." She nodded her chin at the cloth. "There's a letter. Under it."
Liesel reached out and drew it from under the fruit without touching the fruit. One folded sheet. She opened it and held it so I could read.
The hand was neat, careful, a little cramped, the way people write who don't write often.
Mother. Eat this. I was so sick, Mother, and now I'm well. Better than well. Two came to the door at dusk. They didn't knock. They waited till I opened. They kept their hands in their sleeves. They said we don't need the Saint anymore, and they were right. Eat it, and come north. — Clara.
Nobody said anything.
The river went by over the stones. Somewhere behind us, one of Rufa's horses stamped in the snow.
"You didn't eat it," I said.
"No."
"Why not?"
The old woman looked at the fruit in her hands for a long time.
"Because I'm seventy-eight," she said, "and I don't eat what I can't name." Her mouth tightened. "And because my Clara never wrote better than well in her life. She writes short. Like I do. And because she said come north, and my Clara hates the north. She married into it. She's written me every winter for twenty years about how much she hates the north." She looked up at me, and her eyes were very dry. "She doesn't sound like Clara. That's why I didn't eat it."
Felix had come up behind us, scarf and all, to see what we were looking at. He leaned in, frowning, toward the black thing in the cloth.
Marika's hand shot out and closed on the end of the red scarf and pulled. Felix went backward two steps whether he wanted to or not.
"Don't TOUCH it."
"I wasn't going to touch it."
"You were LOOKING at it like you were going to touch it."
"That's not the same—"
"It's the SAME."
She didn't let go of the scarf. Felix, after a moment, stopped trying to make her.
"How many villages?" said Naomi.
I hadn't heard her come up. She was standing at the old woman's other side, looking at the letter in Liesel's hand.
The old woman shook her head. "Clara's is one. Up past the long lake. She said the next valley had it too, at the harvest. And the one beyond." She looked north, up the river, toward the mountains with the snow on them. "I don't know, my lady. Nobody comes down anymore to tell us."
Pia had her book open. Her pen hadn't moved.
"There isn't a page for this," she said, very quietly. "I've read all of them."
The old woman held the fruit out to me again. Both hands.
"You'll know what to do with it," she said. "I don't."
I looked at Naomi. Naomi looked at the hole in the world that only I could see, and at my face, which she could.
"Not in your hands," said Naomi.
"Jar," said Ambrose.
I hadn't seen him come up either. He was holding out an empty bottle-jar from the cart, the wide-mouthed kind we kept the corks in, emptied of corks, and its lid.
The old woman tipped the fruit off the cloth into the jar. It went in with a soft heavy sound, too heavy for its size. Ambrose put the lid on and pressed it down hard with both thumbs.
Then the old woman folded her empty cloth, very neatly, and put it in her apron, and looked up at me.
"Bring her back," she said.
I wanted to say yes. I'd have given a good deal to be able to say yes.
"I'll try," I said.
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, the way Naomi nods.
"Trying's more than anyone else has offered," she said, and went back to her house across the snow with her stick in one hand, not leaning on it at all.
We argued about where to put it.
Not loudly. Naomi doesn't argue loudly. But we stood round the bottle cart in the blue dusk on the far side of the ford, where we'd made camp, and everybody had an opinion about the jar.
"Not in the bottle cart," said Hana. "Not with the bottles."
"Not near Fabian," said Liesel.
"Not near the HORSES," said Marika, who had still not let go of the end of Felix's scarf, and who, I think, had forgotten she was holding it.
"Not near Pia," said Liesel.
Pia looked up from her book. "Why not near me?"
Liesel looked at her. It was the look she gives the truth before she says it, when she's decided she has to.
"Because nothing holds you," said Liesel.
Pia's pen stopped.
Nobody said anything. Hana's face did something I didn't like to watch. Pia looked down at her book, and then at the jar in Ambrose's hands, and then, very deliberately, she took one step back from it. One exact step.
"All right," she said.
In the end it went in an empty crate at the very back of the food cart, packed round with straw, with the lid nailed down. Rufa nailed it herself. She didn't ask what was in it. She looked at all our faces while we watched her do it, and then she put the hammer away and posted a sentry on the cart, and she didn't ask then, either.
Before the lid went on, Ambrose took a length of thread out of his pocket and passed it round the jar, round the fruit's widest part through the glass, as near as he could get it, and tied a knot where the ends met. He held it up to the lamp and squinted at it.
Then he wrote in his notebook: Fruit. Day of receipt. Thread, one knot.
"Why?" I said.
"Things that grow," said Ambrose, "get bigger."
"It's not growing. It's a fruit. Somebody picked it."
Ambrose put the thread away in his pocket, very carefully, as if it mattered which pocket.
"Then the thread will say so," he said.
Naomi told Cordelia that night.
We were round the fire, all of us who could hear it. Not Felix, not Ambrose, not Pia, who were all at the other side of the camp with Rufa's women and the soup. Naomi kept her eyes on the flames and her voice short, and the bond carried every word south over the mountains to a palace on a hill.
(Cordelia.)
No answer. There didn't need to be one. Cordelia's candle turned toward us the way a head turns, and that was enough.
(A fruit. From the north. Somebody's going door to door with them. Hooded. Two. They tell the sick they don't need a Saint.) Naomi stopped. (Fabian.)
I told her what 「Eyes」 had shown me. The hole in the old woman's hands. Not empty. Worse than empty.
Cordelia was quiet for a long time. I could feel her candle, far off and steady, the way she always is: awake, listening, very still.
Then one word.
(Mother.)
Which meant: I'm going to her now. Which meant: She'll know before morning. Which meant, I think, a third thing as well, that Cordelia would never have said out loud even if she'd had all the words in the world: I should be there.
"Noted," said Naomi, out loud, to the fire. I don't think she meant to.
Hana sat up late with her notebook.
She'd started a new one in Greymark the morning she left. Blue, with soft corners already. The first page was the six from the Long Meadow, copied over from the old one, because she wasn't going to leave them behind in a book on a shelf. Then Tacita. Then the space with nothing in it, for the escort in Septentria.
She turned past all of that to a clean page. She wrote at the top of it, in her small round hand:
Clara. The old woman's daughter, from the ford. Up past the long lake.
Pia was sitting beside her, one step from me, with her own book closed in her lap. She'd been very quiet since the cart. She leaned over and read it.
"Is that for the dead?" she said.
"No," said Hana.
"Then what is it?"
Hana looked at the page for a moment. Then she underlined the heading, once, very straight.
"That's the other list," she said.
"What other list?"
"The ones we're going to find."
Pia looked at the page. One name on it. Lots of white under it.
"It's a short list," she said.
"It's the first night," said Hana.
I sat on the other side of the fire with the pitcher empty and my hands warm and listened to the river go over the stones, and didn't look at the food cart at the back of the camp, where a sentry stood by a crate with a jar in it. I didn't need to look. I'd watched Rufa nail the lid down. I'd have known where it was with my eyes shut.
A small round hole, waiting in the straw.
I hoped Hana's other list would be the longer one. I wasn't sure, anymore, that I could make it be.