Fabian — Sanctara
The letter came at breakfast, the morning after Day One.
A palace runner brought it to the residence gate, and Wren brought it up: a square of heavy cream paper, sealed in crimson wax with the crowned star pressed into it. Cordelia's seal. I'd seen it on the cape Liesel wore.
Liesel had started stealing my bread again two days before, carefully, one piece at a time, as though testing whether it was still allowed. She broke the seal with her thumb and read the letter standing up, with my bread forgotten in her other hand.
I watched her face. I always watch her face now. I'm not good at not doing it.
She went white.
Then she went red.
In that order.
She read it again. Then she folded it in half, and in half again, and again, until it was a hard little square, and put it inside her breastplate, against her chest, where she keeps nothing else.
"Liesel?"
"I need some air," she said.
"There's a window—"
"Different air."
She walked out. The door didn't slam. It closed very gently, which was worse.
Wren and I looked at each other. Wren hummed three notes, very low.
Liesel came back twenty minutes later with her hair wet at the temples, as if she'd put her whole head in the horse trough, and sat down, and ate her own bread, and then mine.
"Is everything all right?"
"Yes."
"The letter—"
"Mother things," said Liesel.
She'd said it before, the night of the match. I'd learned it meant don't ask.
So I didn't ask. But all through general studies she didn't look at me once, and all through the battle class she looked at me constantly, whenever she thought I wasn't looking, and when I caught her at it she looked away so fast she nearly walked into Dame Valeria.
That night, through the wall, I heard her pen. Scratching, then stopping, then the sound of paper torn in half. Scratching again. Four times.
On the bond, after supper, she said only: (Good night, Hana.)
And then, after a moment: (Good night, Saint.)
She'd never said good night to me on the bond before. She'd never needed to. She was four paces away.
Liesel — Sanctara
Cordelia writes the way she fights. No wasted movement.
Liesel,
Mother has asked House Valcrest for Lord Fabian's hand. For you.
She asked the Marchioness on the balcony, the night of the ball. The Marchioness said "Noted," and then that it was his call. Mother says she has never been answered so politely by anyone she couldn't have arrested.
She asked him first, by the window, after the ceremony: whether there was anyone he liked. Then: "What about one of my daughters?" She told him to think about it.
Nobody was going to tell you. Mother wanted to wait. The Marchioness gave her word. I gave mine to no one, so here it is.
Don't do anything stupid.
—C.
P.S. Mother says he went white, then red. In that order.
I read it twice, standing at the table with his bread in my hand. Then I folded it until it wouldn't fold anymore, and put it inside my breastplate, and walked out and put my head in the horse trough.
It helped less than I'd hoped.
Think about it.
That was the big something. Two weeks of the thinking face. It's a big something. Two weeks, and it had been me. My mother had walked him to a window in front of half the court and asked him whether he'd like to marry her daughter, and then told him to go away and think about it, and he had. He'd done exactly as he was told. He always does, when it's a queen.
I stood with water running down the back of my neck and put it all together, piece by piece, the way you check a horse's legs after a bad jump.
The face at the ball. Stairs, he'd said, and gone scarlet. The kitchen. Every time you think about it, you end up in the same place. And the wall. His heart going like a drum, all four of us feeling it, and me telling everyone it was the stairs, because I didn't know what else it could be.
Now I knew three things it could be. The stairs. My mother. Me.
And I'd never know which. That was what she'd done. That was the thing I couldn't forgive.
Not that she'd asked. She's the Queen; queens ask for things all day long, and mostly they get them. But now, whatever he said to me, I'd never be sure it was his. If he said yes, I'd lie awake wondering whether he'd said it because the Crown had asked, and he's kind, and kind young men in this kingdom say yes to queens. They're raised to. Mothers ask. Houses ask. Men answer.
I didn't want an answer. I wanted him to ask.
Like the honey cakes. I wanted him to decide it, by himself, the way he decided to make six cakes with one egg, because he wanted to, and not because anybody had told him to think about it.
And the Marchioness had said his call.
Of course she had. In that whole palace full of people deciding things about him, she was the only one who'd stopped to ask what he wanted. I would have to thank her for that one day. She'd say "Noted," and I'd want to hit her.
That night I wrote to my mother.
The first draft said a great many things a daughter shouldn't say to her queen. I tore it in half. The second was worse. The third was polite, which was worse still, because she'd know exactly what that meant. I tore that up too.
The fourth said:
Mother.
Withdraw it.
If he wants me, he can say so himself.
—Liesel.
I didn't sign it Elisabeth. She'd notice that. She was meant to.
And I made myself a promise, sitting on my bed with the letter sealed and the candle burning down. I wouldn't say one word about it to him. Not out loud. Not on the bond, where every word goes to all four candles. If he ever said it, it would be because he wanted to, and not because I'd cornered him over the bread.
I was going to act completely normal.
Then I said good night to him on the bond, which I'd never done in my life, because I needed to say something to him that was true and safe, and that was the only one I could find.
Fabian — Sanctara
After that, the days went on the way they always do. Swings at dawn. General studies. The battle class. Ten in the infirmary, darkest first, never eleven.
And then the table by the window.
Ambrose's notebook began to fill up. He wrote everything, in letters like stitching, and every evening Wren carried it up ninety-four stairs to the headmistress, and every morning it came back with one word written under the last entry, in handwriting even smaller than his.
Continue.
So we did.
Day Two. Control: cistern. Held: 1. Well water, same test. Held: 1.
"So it's not the water," I said.
"Taste," said Ambrose. "Not light."
The infirmary mistress made us keep using the well water anyway. "I'm not having stone in my bowls," she said, which was not a scientific reason, and Ambrose wrote it down as one.
Day Three. Salt water. Held: 2.
Honey, warmed, thinned with well water (H.R.H.'s suggestion). White. Not stilled. Held: 6.
Six, without Ambrose touching it. The honey glowed like amber with the sun behind it, thick and slow, and the light moved through it as if it were wading.
"It's thicker," said Liesel. She was leaning over the bowl, forgetting, again, to stay on the cot. "It holds better because it's thicker."
Ambrose stilled it. Twenty.
I dipped a spoon in at fifteen and let one drop fall on the back of my hand, where I'd pricked it. The drop stayed gold for half a heartbeat after it left the spoon, a tiny spark sitting on my skin. Then it went out. The prick was still there.
Half a heartbeat. It wasn't anything.
Ambrose wrote it down anyway, and drew a small, neat box around it.
Day Four. Glass bowl, clay bowl. No difference. Cold honey: thicker, holds longer (24, stilled). Too thick to pour. A.P. held 31 heartbeats. A.P. then fainted.
He fainted very neatly, onto a cot, exactly as the headmistress had told him to. His escorts had clearly seen him faint before. One of them caught his notebook and the other caught his pen.
"Not my floor," said the infirmary mistress, approvingly.
Liesel came every day. She sat on the end of the cot, and suggested honey, and counted nothing, and watched.
She'd gone back to calling me Saint. But she said it differently now, I couldn't have said how. More carefully. As though it were something she was carrying and didn't want to spill.
On the fifth afternoon, while Ambrose was laying out his bowls, she said, very quietly, "Saint. Do you—"
I looked up.
She stopped. "...Do you think it'd work in butter?"
"Butter?"
"Hana puts everything in butter."
Ambrose wrote down butter. Liesel looked out of the window.
Whatever she'd been going to ask, it hadn't been about butter. And whatever her mother had written to her, I thought, it must have been very bad, because sometimes, when she thought I wasn't looking, she looked sad.
Day Five. Butter, melted (H.R.H.'s suggestion). Held: 3. No. Honey and well water, many measures. Held: 6 to 22. No drop kept its light longer than half a heartbeat away from the bowl. Result: no.
Day Six. Result: no.
Under Day Six, the headmistress wrote: Continue.
And under that, Ambrose wrote: Yet.
The strange thing was that we never once talked about stopping. I'd have thought one of us would. Six days, thirty splashes of mine and I don't know how many of his, a bowl of sticky honey that wouldn't leave the bowl, and a box around half a heartbeat. But every afternoon, after the tenth patient, Ambrose was already at the table with his bowls laid out, and the mistress was already drawing up her chair, and I was already rolling up my sleeves.
The infirmary was busier now, too. Most of my ten were from fights. Girls who'd been friends for years, scratched and bruised and puzzled, who couldn't tell me what they'd been fighting about. Girls who sat on the cots afterward looking at nothing, tired all the way through, with their lights white and steady and nothing wrong with them at all.
Every day there was an eleventh, and a twelfth, and they went away with salve on their scratches and came back tomorrow.
If I had a tin of it, I'd think, watching the eleventh go. Just one tin.
That was why we didn't stop.
Six splashes left over every night. I poured them out into nothing, one at a time, and counted, and thought about tins.
On the seventh morning, Lady Amara didn't come to general studies.
We waited. It wasn't like her to be late. In all the weeks I'd sat in that room she had always been there before us, standing at the front with her hands folded and her warm, exact smile, as though she'd been put there the night before and left.
The door opened, and Lady Severine came in.
Gray gown, buttoned to the throat. Silver spectacles. She walked to the front of the room without hurrying and was somehow there before the door had finished closing.
"Lady Amara is unwell," she said. "I will take this class until she has recovered. Open your books to the trade roads."
She taught the trade roads to Bellonia exactly, with no wasted words and no smile at all, and bowed to Ambrose and to me at precisely the same depth at the end of it. Ambrose read his book the whole time, which she allowed.
On the way out, I heard two girls by the door.
"She's never missed a class."
"Not in ten years. My sister had her."
"What's wrong with her?"
"Nobody knows. She won't open her door."
The next morning, Lady Severine came again. And the morning after that.
I found I was looking for Lady Amara everywhere: in the corridors, at the end of the mistresses' table at supper, on the paths. I'm a healer. When someone is unwell, I want to see their light. I want to know what color it is.
But I never saw her. Her window, on the top floor of the mistresses' house, stayed curtained all day and dark all night.
On the third evening, walking back from the infirmary, I saw Lady Severine standing at the edge of the garden in the dusk. The headmistress stood beside her, very straight, with a candle in a brass holder held out at arm's length.
There was no wind.
The flame lay almost flat, pointing at the middle of the lawn.
Neither of them said anything. Neither of them noticed us. They just stood and watched the grass, the way you'd watch a door you knew something was going to come through.
Wren walked us the long way around, without being asked.
The four pear trees were bare by the end of that week. Nobody saw the last leaves fall. One evening the branches still had a few brown ones clinging on, and the next morning there were none at all, as though they'd all let go together in the night.
Lady Amara's window stayed dark.
And in the middle of the lawn, where everyone walks, the grass was so green it was almost black.