I didn't pour one thing. I poured two.
I'd decided it in the half breath between the ice breaking and my fingers landing. I'd felt the lightning go through Liesel behind me. I'd heard Marika swear. Every one of them who'd been frozen to that floor was burned now, and frostbitten underneath the burns, and in a moment Tullia's people were going to come through that door, and I needed every one of them standing.
And I needed my hand on the Queen.
So I did both, the way I learned to at the Academy, on a full pitcher, a long time ago: two skills held in one cast, joined at the root. Blue 「Cure」, under my fingers on her wrist. Blue 「Mass Heal」, under everyone.
Three and three, doubled. Twelve.
The pitcher dropped. Thirty-four, and then twenty-two, all at once, faster than I'd ever felt it go.
Two circles opened. One under the bed, small and blue and bright, under my knees and the Queen and the wine-colored coverlet. And round it, wider than I'd ever opened anything indoors, the other: out across the whole floor of the Queen of Bellonia's room, under the hearth and the writing table and the open window, out to the walls and up to the very threshold where Petronius stood, so that the edge of it ran blue along the toes of his boots.
Everything inside it healed.
Liesel's burns. Marika's. Cordelia's. Mine, I suppose, though I couldn't see them; I only felt my knees stop being glass. The frostbite went out of all of them at once, yellow to white, the way frost goes off a window when you breathe on it.
And Gelio's.
I'd known he'd be inside it. He was lying on the floor at Tullia's feet where Corvus's bolt had put him, and the circle ran under him the same as everyone, because that's what a Mass is. I don't get to choose who's standing in it. I never have.
He opened his eyes.
He lay there on the floorboards for a moment, looking up at the ceiling, and then down at the blue light under his own hands. Then he started to get up.
He didn't get far. Wren had been standing by the fire, flat against the stone, the whole time, where nobody had looked at her once. She wasn't by the fire now. She was kneeling on Gelio's back, with one hand in his hair and the other holding a knife very steadily against the side of his throat.
"No," said Wren.
Gelio stopped.
I didn't watch what happened after that. I couldn't. Because under my fingers, the 「Cure」 had reached the thing in the Queen.
I'd felt it once already, with 「Discern」: the poison, old and settled, and wrapped all round it, the newer thing with no name. Now I felt it the other way. My light went into her, the way it's supposed to, the way it always does. It went in. It wasn't refused.
But it was slow.
It was like pushing a door against a wind. Not a locked door; a door with a gale on the other side of it, leaning. The light went in a little, and the thing with no name leaned back, and the light went in a little further, and it leaned again. It couldn't stop me. It didn't have to stop me. It only had to make every inch take as long as it could.
Under my hand, at the very edge of Queen Aurelia's light, in one of the worn-through places, something like a thread of yellow crept in, and stayed.
One thread. In how long? I didn't know.
"Fabian." Felix, on the far side of the bed, with his spark crawling all over him and his eyes on his mother. "How long?"
"I don't know."
"Fabian—"
"I don't know. It's slow. Something's holding it." I didn't look up. I couldn't look up. "Don't let them break my hand off her. If it breaks, I start again."
Felix looked at me. Then at the door, where Petronius was setting his big hand flat on the stone again. Then at his mother.
"Sing," I said.
"What?"
"You always sing when you're frightened. Your spark goes steady. Sing. And it'll tell me how long it's been."
Felix opened his mouth. Shut it.
"Which one?" he said.
As if he had to ask.
"The miller's," I said.
The miller had three daughters, and the eldest was the fair.
He sang it loud. Not the way he'd sung it the night before, low against the wood. He sang it the way he sings in the bath, at the top of his voice, so nobody could see his face; and his spark, which had been crawling all over him in wild white snaps, went quiet and steady along his arms and gathered in his hands.
Then he turned round, still singing, and threw.
Not at his aunt. Over her head, at the doorway, where Petronius had just set his hand on the stone. The bolt hit the frame a hand's width from Petronius's fingers, and the stone there cracked and spat chips, and Petronius took his hand away and looked at Felix with the expression of a man reconsidering a plan.
Behind him, in the corridor, Corvus's circle opened again.
After that I only saw it in pieces, because I could only look up in pieces. My eyes kept going back to the edge of the Queen's light under my hand.
I saw Corvus and Petronius in the doorway, the narrow stone doorway Petronius had made himself, which was now the worst place in the palace for Petronius to be: Corvus behind him in the corridor and Felix in front of him in the room, and both of them throwing. Petronius didn't fall. Petronius, I think, doesn't know how. He put his arms up and the stone of the doorframe came out of the wall to meet the bolts, and the bolts broke the stone, and he made more.
I saw Corvus's keepers close round Corvus in the corridor, all six, spears out, not toward Petronius but outward, down the corridor toward the stair, where boots were coming up. The captain with the scarred eyebrow was at the front of them. I heard her say something in Bellonian, short and flat, to whoever was coming, and later Felix told me what it meant.
We keep him. That's all we do.
And past them, at the head of the stair, a red glow on the walls of the corridor that I knew. Cinna's. He'd put a circle up at the stairhead the way you'd put a gate across a lane, a wall of slow red fire from one side of the corridor to the other, and he was standing behind it in his clean shirt with his hands empty, and nobody was coming up those stairs.
The middle one was clever, and the youngest sang for three.
I saw the wall beside the fireplace bulge.
The stone moved like something breathing. A long crack ran up it from the floor, and then the crack opened, slowly, the edges rolling back like the lips of a wound, until there was a doorway in the wall of the Queen's bedroom where no doorway had been a moment before. Petronius, from the other side of the room, with his hands on the frame. He'd been making a second door all along.
Tullia's soldiers came through it. Six. Eight. In mail, with short spears.
Marika met them. Of course she did. She'd been waiting for something to hit for a long time.
She went into the new doorway sword first and Cordelia went with her, and three candles burned bright in my chest, Marika's and Cordelia's and Liesel's, the way they burn when they're near me and need to be strong, and the soldiers in the new door stopped coming through it quite so fast.
Liesel didn't go. Liesel had taken a spear off one of the door guards at some point I never saw, and she was standing at the foot of the bed with it, between the bed and the room, very still, looking at everything that moved.
She didn't say anything. With Liesel, standing there was the whole sentence.
The eldest wed a farmer with a field beside the sea.
The pitcher started going.
I felt it as clearly as I've ever felt anything: a splash, White, gold at the edges, out of me and into Marika, where a spear had opened her arm in the new door. She'd reached for it without thinking. Then another, into Cordelia, a cut across her forehead that was putting blood in her eyes. Then Marika again.
Twenty-one. Twenty. Nineteen.
They weren't wasting it. Every splash was something that would have put one of them on the floor. I'd have given them every drop, and they knew it, and they were still careful, because they could feel the pitcher too, if they listened, and they knew what my other hand was doing.
Eighteen. Sixteen.
Under my fingers, a second thread of yellow came into the Queen's light. Then a third. The worn-through places along the edge were filling, one at a time, the way the holes in a net fill when the tide comes in. Slowly. Slowly. The thing with no name leaning back against every inch.
And the middle one went walking, and she never came back home. The sixth verse. Or the fifth; I'd lost count somewhere, and I never lose count.
Fifteen. Fourteen.
Across the bed, Felix had stopped throwing. He'd come back to the bedside, still singing, to stand over his mother with his hands full of quiet white light, facing the door. Petronius was still in it. So was his aunt.
Tullia hadn't moved from where she'd been standing all morning. She stood with her back to the wall beside the doorway, out of everyone's way, her hands folded, and watched me.
Not the fight. Me. My hand on her sister's wrist, and the edge of her sister's light that she couldn't see, and my face, which she could.
I think she was counting too.
Thirteen. Twelve.
The youngest kept the millstone, and she kept her father's door.
The Queen's light, under my hand, was coming up out of its ash. Not fast. The way a coal comes up when you blow on it, a little brighter at each breath and then sinking back, and then a little brighter. The worn-through places along its edge were nearly all filled now, thread by thread, yellow in the orange. I could feel the thing with no name leaning back against my light, and leaning, and leaning, and losing an inch at a time.
Petronius saw my face.
I don't know what was in it. Something. Enough. He took both hands off the doorframe, where he'd been holding the stone up against Corvus and Felix, and put them flat on the floor.
The floor stood up.
Not the boards. What was under the boards. The whole floor of the Queen's room heaved, once, like the deck of a ship lifting under a wave, and the bed went up on one side and came down on the other, and I went over backward with it.
My hand came off her wrist.
I felt the cast break.
It's not like anything else. It's like a rope you've been pulling hand over hand out of a well, suddenly slack. All the light I'd put into her, every inch I'd won against the thing with no name, every thread of yellow, wasn't mine anymore. It wasn't held. And I felt the thing with no name take it, the way I'd watched it take the bottle: not fighting, just closing over it, quietly, like water over a dropped stone.
The yellow went out of her light. All of it. Back to orange, back to ash.
I was on my back on the tilted floor with the bedframe across my legs, and for one long moment I couldn't breathe.
The floor came down again, crooked. Everyone in the room was on it. Liesel, thrown against the foot of the bed with her borrowed spear under her. Marika and Cordelia, in a heap with three of Tullia's soldiers in the new doorway. Felix on his knees. Wren still on Gelio, somehow, because Wren doesn't fall over. A rafter had come down across the hearth. There was blood on the floorboards that I couldn't place.
And all through the room, lights going orange.
Twelve left. Twelve exactly.
I did the sum, and it came out the only way it could.
I crawled back up the tilted floor to the bed and put my hand on Queen Aurelia's wrist, and poured it all again. Blue 「Cure」 under my fingers. Blue 「Mass Heal」 under everyone. Twelve.
The circles came up. The orange went out of the room. Liesel got up off the spear. Marika got up off the soldiers.
And I felt the pitcher hit the bottom.
Not gently. The way a bucket hits the bottom of a dry well: a hard, flat knock, and then nothing to pull up.
Zero.
Across the room, in the new door, Marika's sword arm checked in the middle of a swing, as if she'd reached for something on a shelf in the dark and found the shelf gone. She'd felt it. They all had. No more White. Nobody's circle would open now, not hers, not Cordelia's, not Liesel's; not until I had something in me again to give them.
Cordelia's voice, in my chest. The day's one word.
(Hold.)
And they held. Without me. On their own feet, with their own swords, in the door of the Queen of Bellonia's bedroom. Three candles, bright.
The first one sent a letter, and the second sent a ring—
Under my hand, the yellow came back. One thread. From the beginning.
Then Tullia moved.
She'd watched all of it from her place by the wall. She'd watched the floor heave, and me fall, and me crawl back. She'd seen my face when the cast broke and my face when it started again. She couldn't see a single light in that room, not one, but she'd watched me for an hour, and Tullia can add up a face.
She came across the tilted floor in four quick steps, past the end of the bed where Liesel was getting to her feet, and took my wrist in both her hands.
Her hands were cool and dry and very strong. Like her sister's. She pulled, once, hard.
My hand came off.
The cast broke. The thread of yellow went out.
"Don't," said Felix.
He hadn't stopped singing until that word. He'd come round the bed, and he had his aunt's wrists in his hands, both of them, his fingers closed right round them over hers on mine, and his spark was running all down his arms and into his hands, quiet and white and steady, and stopping there. Not into her. Holding.
"Don't touch her," said Felix. "Don't you ever touch her again."
Tullia looked up at him.
For a moment I saw it. Whatever she'd been keeping in her face all morning behind the sums, all year maybe. It came up into her eyes for just a breath, looking at her sister's son holding her wrists over her sister's bed.
Then Felix took her hands off me, and held them, and didn't let go.
I put my hand back on the Queen's wrist.
There wasn't anything in the pitcher. There was nothing for anyone to draw on, nothing in the bottom of the well. So I didn't draw on the pitcher. I reached past the bottom of it, into whatever's under the bottom, the place I've only been a handful of times and Naomi has made me promise never to go to on purpose.
「Cure」. Blue. Three.
Three below.
It didn't hurt. 「Mercy」 caught me, the way her new line had said she would: she will let you stand a little longer. My head stayed clear. My hand stayed steady. Somewhere far behind my eyes the headache knocked once, politely, the way it does now, and went away again, and I barely noticed it. Three below is nothing anymore. Ten is where it ends. I knew exactly how far away ten was, and that every time the cast broke, I'd walk three steps nearer.
A longer rope is still a rope.
The yellow came into her light. One thread. From the beginning, again.
And Felix, holding his aunt's wrists in both hands over his mother's bed, took a breath, and went on singing exactly where he'd stopped, as if he'd only stopped for breath.
—and the third one sent her father nothing, for she'd nothing left to bring.
The tenth verse.
I pushed. The thing with no name leaned back. I pushed. Thread by thread, the worn places along the edge of her light began to fill, for the third time, slowly, slowly, and I lay there half across her bed with my cheek nearly on the coverlet and my fingers on her wrist and counted every one.
The miller stood at his door and looked a long way down the road.
The eleventh. The last one anybody sings.
Felix's voice went thin on it, and cracked, and kept going.
And under my fingers, very slowly, so slowly I thought at first I'd imagined it, the Queen of Bellonia's hand turned over on the coverlet.
Her fingers moved. Found mine, where they lay on her wrist.
And closed round them.