It takes three days to ride from Sanctara to the Hollowcrown, and on the first one I learned that the battle class of the Royal Academy, moving all at once, sounds exactly like a flock of very large geese that have been given swords.
Sixty girls. Every young lord in the battle class, and their escorts. Dame Valeria at the front on a gray horse, not looking back, because she didn't need to. Cordelia's two dozen soldiers in a long crimson line down both sides of the column. And Cordelia herself at the very back, where she could see all of it, saying nothing at all for three days, which for Cordelia is not unusual and for the battle class was apparently terrifying.
Pia rode two and a half steps behind me. On a horse, that's a difficult distance to keep. She kept it anyway. Every so often Liesel would glance back, and Pia would drop a little, and Liesel would face forward again, and Pia would creep up.
"That was two and a quarter," I said, on the second afternoon.
Liesel didn't turn round. "Two and a half."
"I counted."
"So did I."
Behind us, very small: "I'm right here."
Felix's bag clinked the whole way.
On the third day the road climbed out of the farmland into long rough grass, and the air got colder and thinner and smelled of pine, and around noon the column came over a rise and every single girl in the battle class went quiet at once, which is the only time I have ever heard that happen.
There it was.
The Hollowcrown is not a beautiful mountain. It's too big for beautiful. It goes up out of the land in long gray shoulders of rock, dark at the bottom with pines and bare at the top, and the top isn't a peak at all. It's broken. Fallen in on itself, hundreds of years ago, so that the summit is a ragged ring of gray crags round an empty space, standing up against the sky like the teeth of a crown somebody dropped from a great height.
Pia was right. That was exactly what it looked like.
Below it, between the bottom of the pines and the road, lay the Long Meadow. A great green slope of grass, falling away from the trees, with a stream at the bottom and a little stone hut beside the stream with smoke coming out of its chimney. And along the top of the meadow, just where the grass gave out and the trees began, a line of white stones, knee-high, set out from one end of the meadow to the other like a row of teeth.
Under 「Eyes」, the meadow was full of small lights. Rabbits. Larks in the grass. A fox, going about its business near the stream. Higher up, among the pines, more: birds settling in the branches, a deer. And higher still, on the bare gray slopes, the other thing. The places with no light in them at all. Holes. A few of them, scattered and still, very far off.
Monsters. Where they should be. Behind their stones.
I let out a breath.
The warden met us at the bottom of the meadow, by the stream. She was old and brown and sturdy, with gray hair cropped short and a sheepskin jerkin, and she smiled at everybody. At Dame Valeria. At the soldiers. At the girls coming down off their horses. She smiled at me when she saw me, with a great deal of interest, the way people in the country smile at a young lord they've heard about.
"Hedda," she said, when Dame Valeria asked. "Thirty autumns I've kept this meadow for you. You'll not want the bottom ground this year, Dame. Spring flood came over it. It's sour."
Dame Valeria looked at the bottom ground. It looked like grass to me.
Ambrose got down off his horse, walked out onto it in his good boots, took four steps, and sank to the ankle with a long, wet, sucking sound.
"Meadow," he said, with deep satisfaction. "Wet."
"I said so," said Hedda. She was still smiling. "Put your tents up top, Dame. Up by the stones. It's dry there, and flat, and the wind comes over the trees and doesn't reach you. I've always thought it was the best ground on the mountain." She looked round at all of us, beaming. "Nobody's ever asked me."
"Hm," said Dame Valeria.
She looked up the slope at the line of white stones, and the dark pines just behind them. She looked at Ambrose, up to his ankle in sour meadow. She looked at the sky, which was getting late.
"Up top," she said.
At the back of the column, still on her horse, Cordelia was looking at the tree line.
"Close," she said.
One word. Nobody else heard it except me and Marika. And Marika looked at Cordelia, and then at the trees, and then at Dame Valeria already striding up the slope, and shrugged, because Dame Valeria had said, and on this trip the battle yard was wherever Dame Valeria said.
Dame Valeria laid out the camp the way she lays out everything, in about the time it takes most people to find a pencil.
The young lords' tents in the middle, in a ring. Our escorts' tents round those, close. The battle class in a wider ring round that. And outside everything, along the top edge of the camp where the meadow met the white stones, the Crown's soldiers, facing the trees.
It was a good camp. I'd lived through enough tides to know a good camp when I saw one. It had a center, and a ring, and a line, and everybody knew which one they were in.
It was also about forty paces from the pines.
I looked at the stones. Knee-high, white, very old, one every ten paces or so in a line across the top of the meadow. Beyond them the trees started all at once, close and dark, and went up into the gray rock. From where my tent was going to be, I could have thrown an apple into them.
Monsters don't cross the stones, Hedda said. Nobody knew why. Nobody needed to.
I believed her. Everybody else seemed to.
Then I made the mistake of picking up a tent peg.
It was lying on the grass by my tent, and the soldier who'd dropped it had gone to fetch a mallet, and I was standing there with nothing to do, which on that trip was most of the time. So I picked it up. That was all. I didn't even do anything with it. I was holding it.
The soldier came back with the mallet, saw me, and stopped dead.
She was a big woman with a nose that had been broken at least twice and a crimson tabard, and she'd probably fought monsters for twenty years. She looked at me, and at the peg in my hand, with the expression of someone who has walked into a room and found a child holding a knife.
"Young Master," she said. "Sit."
Three people laughed at once. Liesel, Marika and Wren. Wren doesn't laugh. She didn't laugh, exactly. She made a sound I'd heard twice before: in the great shrine, the morning a crossbow told Liesel that's exactly what an escort would say, and in a passage at two in the morning. The same three notes, I thought, in a different order.
"I was only holding it," I said.
"Item eleven," said Liesel.
"I wasn't going to do anything with it."
"He has a history," said Pia, from two and a half steps away, with great authority, as though she'd been there.
I gave the soldier her peg. She took it from me very carefully, the way you'd take a peg off someone who might hurt himself with it, and drove it into the meadow with one blow of the mallet, and went on to the next one without another word.
I sat.
Pia's blanket went down at the edge of the lords' ring, which was not where Dame Valeria had told her to sleep.
Dame Valeria had told her to sleep with the battle class, in the outer ring, with the other girls. She'd said it once, the way she says everything. Pia had said "Yes, Dame Valeria," with every appearance of meaning it, and carried her blanket roll to the outer ring, and put it down.
Then, over the next hour, it moved.
Not all at once. Pia isn't a fool. Every time I looked, it was a little further in. A pace. Two paces. By sunset it was lying in the grass precisely between the battle class ring and the escorts' tents, at a distance from my tent that I measured, out of habit, at a little over two and a half steps. With Pia sitting on it. Reading.
Liesel came out of the escorts' tent and looked at the blanket.
She looked at it for a long time.
"That," she said at last, "is two and a half steps."
"Yes," said Pia, not looking up.
"From the edge of his tent."
"You didn't say from where."
Liesel opened her mouth. Then she shut it, and went back into the tent, and I heard her say something to Wren in a low voice, and Marika laugh so hard something fell over.
Across the ring, Cassian was having his own trouble. Tacita had put his tent up. Not Ilse, not a soldier: Tacita, by herself, with her spear leaned against a rock and her sleeves pushed up. Now she was standing beside it, very straight, looking at nothing, the way she always does. Except that every so often, when Cassian wasn't watching, her eyes went to him, and stayed a moment, and went away.
Cassian came out of the tent, looked it over, and found nothing wrong with it, which for Cassian is extraordinary.
"Adequate," he said.
Tacita's face didn't change.
But Ilse, behind them, folding a blanket, put her head down very quickly and pressed her lips together, and her shoulders shook.
The battle class cooks for itself on the Long Meadow. That's the tradition. Sixty girls, three great black pots over three fires, and Dame Valeria tasting from each with a long spoon and saying "Hm" in three slightly different voices, which the girls who'd been before swore they could tell apart.
We sat round the middle fire, in the lords' ring. All of us, for once. Me and Liesel and Wren. Marika, with her boots off and her feet to the flames. Cordelia, who'd come in from the line of soldiers just long enough to eat, and sat down next to Marika without being asked, the way she does now. Ambrose, with his good boots drying on two sticks. Felix. Pia, two and a half steps from me, on the far side of the fire, which she seemed to think counted.
I ate three helpings. Pia wrote it down. She held the page up so I could see it: a three, with a line under it.
Then Felix opened the bag.
He'd carried it from Sanctara on his own shoulder for three days, clinking, and told nobody what was in it, and answered every question with "Next question" until even Ambrose had stopped asking. Now he undid the buckles, one at a time, slowly, with the whole fire watching, and took out a jar.
A stone jar, sealed with wax, with a little bronze pot painted on the side.
Then another. Then another. Six of them in a row on the grass, gleaming in the firelight.
Marika went perfectly still.
"The widow in the lowest ring," said Felix, to nobody in particular. "She seals them in honey. They keep a month." He picked up the first jar and held it out across the fire, not quite looking at anybody. "Essentials."
Marika looked at the jar.
She looked at it for long enough that Cordelia turned her head to look at her. Then she reached across and took it, and broke the wax with her thumb, and the smell came out over the fire, sweet and dark and peppery, and every girl within twenty paces turned round.
"...These are for the CAMP," said Marika. "Obviously. Supplies. That's TACTICS."
"Obviously," said Felix.
She ate one. Then another. Her ears had gone a color I could see from across the fire, in the dark.
That was the moment Pia chose to lean forward, with her book open on her knee, and say, "Lady Marika, may I ask you something for the record? There are three Valcrest sisters. Dame Naomi is the eldest, everybody knows that, and Lady Hana is the youngest. So which one are you?"
Marika looked at her with her mouth full of snail.
"The middle one," she said. "Obviously."
And across the fire, Felix's spark snapped.
Once. Loud. A little blue crack off his knuckle, that made Ambrose look up from his book. Felix looked down at his hand as if it belonged to someone else. Then he looked at the fire, and didn't look up from it again for a while.
I saw it. I don't think anyone else did, except possibly Cordelia, who sees everything and says one word a day about it.
The middle one went walking.
There was a thought there. I could feel the whole shape of it this time, nearly. Three daughters. A middle one. A man who sang the same song every night it was quiet enough to sing.
Then Pia said, "Thank you, Lady Marika," and wrote it down, and the thought went wherever thoughts go when someone interrupts them, and I put it down to Felix getting a spark off the fire. It happens. He's a lightning mage. Lightning mages and campfires; everybody knows.
"You'll hear the bats soon," said Pia, a while later, when the pots were scraped and the fires had burned down to red. "At dusk. The Shriekbats. They come out of the caves on the lower slope all at once, the Book says, like a black river, and they shriek so loud you can hear them all the way across the meadow." She looked up at the mountain, its broken crown going dark against a sky that was nearly black. "The Saint of the Long Road wrote that it was the only noise on the whole Hollowcrown. Every night. Like a bell."
We listened.
The fires popped. Somewhere in the outer ring a girl laughed and was shushed. A horse stamped. Down by the stream, Hedda's window was lit, a little yellow square in the dark.
From the mountain, nothing.
"Maybe it's later this time of year," said Pia, after a while.
Nobody said anything.
"Maybe they're shy," said Pia.
Later, when the camp had mostly gone to bed, Liesel and I went and sat on the meadow below the lords' ring, where the grass slopes down toward the stream and you can't see the trees behind you unless you turn round.
Not far. Wren was twenty paces up the slope, sitting on a rock with her back to us, which is Wren's idea of giving people privacy. Marika was somewhere behind her, being in front of things. Pia was asleep on her blanket, two and a half steps from my empty tent, with her book open on her chest and her crossbow in her arms like a doll.
It was cold. Mountain cold, the kind that comes up out of the ground once the sun's gone and gets into your sleeves.
I lay back on the grass and looked up.
I'd never seen so many stars. Sanctara has lamps. Greymark has the glow off the wall. Out here there was nothing between us and the sky at all, and the sky was full. Packed. So full that the dark between the stars looked like the smaller part.
"Do you hear them?" said Liesel.
"Hear what?"
"The stars. The Saint of the Long Road heard them. Pia said so."
"Pia also said I could walk across a flood."
"Shh," said Liesel. "Listen."
So I listened. I lay on my back on the Long Meadow under more stars than I'd ever seen, with my hands folded on my chest, and listened as hard as I've ever listened to anything.
What I heard was the stream. And the horses. And my own teeth, which had started, very slightly, to chatter.
"You're cold," said Liesel.
"I'm not."
She didn't say anything. She just sat up, unpinned her cloak at the throat, and lay back down next to me with the cloak spread over both of us, so that it covered me to the chin and her to about the elbow.
"Item twelve," she said, to the sky.
I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out of me in a puff of white breath, straight up, toward all those stars, and she laughed too, and for a while neither of us said anything, and the cloak was warm, and so was she.
"Mother asked me," said Liesel, after a while, "in Sanctara. After the throne hall."
"Asked you what?"
"When."
She took one hand out from under the cloak and held it up against the stars. The ash ring was a small dark circle on her finger. I'd carved it from her own spear, the one that snapped, with Wren standing over me saying away from you every time the knife slipped.
"She looked at the pin," said Liesel. "Then she looked at this. And she said, It's still wood."
"It's your spear."
"That's what I told her." She was smiling at the ring, and going red to the collar, which with her cloak gone from her throat I could see very clearly. "And then she asked when."
I went very still under the cloak. "What did you tell her?"
"That you'd want to count the guests first."
I laughed. I couldn't help that either.
"I'm not in a hurry," said Liesel. "I'm really not. I like this part. I like having been asked, and knowing the rest is coming." She put her hand back under the cloak. "It is coming."
"It's coming."
"Properly."
"Properly," I said. "With—" I tried to think what properly meant, the second time round.
"Candles," said Liesel. "You've done the stairs."
A hundred and twelve of them, up the inner wall, at sunset, with a tassel in my pocket. I'd counted every one.
"Candles, then," I said.
She made a sound in her throat that was half a laugh and half something else, and put her head down on my shoulder under the cloak. The hedge-ivy pin pressed against my jaw. I didn't move it.
"Fair," she said.
That's my word. She'd never once used it before. I lay there under the stars with her head on my shoulder and my word in her mouth and felt, for about the length of a breath, completely and ridiculously happy.
Then I looked at the mountain.
I don't know why. I wasn't looking for anything. It was just there, over Liesel's hair, a long dark shape against the stars with its broken crown at the top. And I looked at it the way I look at everything, which, for a long time now, means 「Eyes」 as well.
The little lights were moving.
All of them. On the lower slopes, in the pines, along the edge of the meadow. Birds that should have been roosting, lifting off their branches in the dark one after another without a sound. A fox, low and fast, along the line of the white stones. Two deer, and then three, and then a whole small herd of them, coming down out of the trees at the far end of the meadow and going past the camp in the dark, well away from the fires, toward the road.
Not running. Not panicking. Just going. Every small living light on the Hollowcrown, all moving the same way. Not up the mountain. Not down to the stream. Away. Round the meadow and round the camp and on into the dark, the way water goes round a stone.
And behind them, high up on the gray slopes where the holes had been that afternoon, scattered and still, very far off, the holes weren't scattered anymore.
I started to count the lights going past.
I got to forty. Then sixty. Then I lost count, somewhere on the far side of a hundred, because there were too many, coming too fast, and they kept coming.
It was the first time in my life I've ever lost count of anything.
Liesel's head was heavy on my shoulder. She was nearly asleep. Under the cloak her hand had found mine, and her breathing was slow, and warm, and happy.
I didn't wake her. Not yet. I lay very still, with the stars over me and her hand in mine, and watched every small light on the mountain go quietly away.