In the morning there were no birds.
I noticed it before I was properly awake. I lay in my tent with the gray light coming through the canvas and something wrong in my ears, and it took me a while to understand that the wrong thing was nothing. No larks going up off the meadow. No crows in the pines. Not a wren, not a sparrow, not one bird on the whole Hollowcrown saying anything at all to the morning.
No rustling. No insects. Just the stream at the bottom of the meadow, and the horses, and sixty girls snoring.
I've heard that silence once before. In the Gloamwood, on Naomi's monthly sweep, the one I forced my way onto by threatening to sneak out after her if she didn't take me. The whole forest had gone quiet exactly like this, as if it were holding its breath. Not long after, the tide came. I've never forgotten it. I don't think anybody who was on that sweep has.
I got up and went out and stood in front of my tent and looked at the mountain.
Under 「Eyes」 it was dark. Not the dark of night. The dark of nothing living. The lower slopes, which yesterday had been full of small lights, birds in the branches and deer in the trees and a fox along the stones, were empty. Every one of them had gone in the night, quietly, the way I'd watched them go.
And higher up, where yesterday the holes had been scattered and still and very far off, they weren't scattered anymore, and they weren't far off.
They'd gathered.
Four places on the mountain. I could see them as clearly as I could see the stones. One high up on the bare rock, under the broken crown. One lower, among the pines on the left of the meadow. One in the caves on the lower slope. And one, the furthest up and the hardest to make out, right at the lip of the crater itself. Four knots of nothing, each one made of a great many smaller holes, packed close together the way the lights of a crowd pack close round something worth looking at.
And in the middle of each knot, one hole bigger than the rest.
Much bigger.
"Four," said Cordelia.
I'd told them in the escorts' tent, all of them, with the flap tied shut and Pia on the far side of it. Liesel had woken properly by then; she'd been listening with her hand pressed flat over her own heart, where Wren is. Marika had her boots on already. Wren was at the tent flap. And Cordelia had come in from the soldiers' line, where she'd been since before dawn, and crouched down inside the door, and listened to all of it without moving, and then said that one word.
"Four," I said. "One for each kind. That's what Hana would say, if she were here. Every kind of monster on this mountain has its own place, and its own ground. They keep each other there." I swallowed. "And this morning every one of those places has something big in the middle of it. And the small ones are packed round it like it's the only thing in the world."
"Elites," said Liesel.
"Four of them."
Nobody said anything. In the whole history of Greymark, and Greymark has fought the Gloamwood for longer than anybody's kept count, I'd never once heard of a tide with more than one elite. One was the worst thing that could happen. One was what nearly killed us all, the first time.
Cordelia stood up.
"Valeria," she said, and went out.
Dame Valeria went into the trees. She was the only one allowed to; it was her rule. Cordelia went with her, because Cordelia is the First Princess of Octavia and it turns out that even Dame Valeria's rules have a ceiling.
They were gone an hour. The battle class pretended to have breakfast and watched the tree line the whole time. Pia sat on her blanket with her crossbow across her knees and didn't read anything, which frightened me more than most things I'd seen that week.
When they came back out from the pines, Dame Valeria's face was exactly the same as when she'd gone in. That's how I knew how bad it was.
"Stonehorn," she said to Cordelia, at the stones, not loud. I was close enough to hear. "In the pines. Tracks the size of a bucket."
"Below the rock," said Cordelia.
"Below the rock. With the cats." Dame Valeria looked back at the trees. "Stonehorns don't come below the rock. The cats would have them. The cats have always had them. That's what this mountain is."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Hm," she said.
I'd heard her say it a hundred times. I'd never heard her say it like that.
Hedda came up the meadow at mid-morning with a pail of milk in each hand, the way she'd come up the evening before, smiling.
She smiled at the soldiers along the stones. She smiled at the girls round the cold fires. She smiled at Dame Valeria, who looked at her and didn't smile back, and then she set the pails down at the edge of the lords' ring and smiled at me.
"Fresh this morning, my lord," she said. "From the goats down by the stream. You'll want it before the day warms up."
Her hands were old and brown and broad, a farmer's hands. Across the back of the right one there was a long scratch, fresh, a day or two old, red at the edges, the kind you get from a fence wire or a bramble. Or from walking back down through the pines in the dark without remembering any of it.
I looked at the scratch. Then I looked at her face.
I'd seen that smile on a stair in Sanctara. Polite. Even. The same at both corners.
"That's a nasty scratch," I said. "May I?"
She looked surprised. Then pleased. "Oh, it's nothing, my lord. Old women scratch."
"Humor me."
She held her hand out. I took it, and opened a Heal, White and small, and closed the scratch. Then I left my palm where it was, flat on the back of her hand, with my fingers over the edge of the little blue circle, and spent three splashes.
Old joints. Many winters.
And under them, folded through all of her, cold and thin, the thing with a name.
A demon's touch. Five nights.
Five nights. I counted back without wanting to. Five nights ago we'd still been in Sanctara. Cordelia had ridden up to the Academy gate that morning, and Marika had hit her on the shoulder in front of everybody, and the whole battle class had been talking about nothing but tents.
And up here, on the quietest mountain in Octavia, something had already been waiting. It had known the meadow. It had known who kept it. It had known we were coming, and when, and where we'd want to put the tents.
It doesn't know a meadow three days away, the headmistress had said.
It did. It had known all along.
I didn't let go of Hedda's hand. I didn't move it. Behind me I felt Liesel come closer, and stop, and not say anything, because she'd seen my face.
I thought about a girl in a passage, with a spear, and a young lord holding out his hand. I thought about what the thing had fed on, in her. The same thing every time. Not hate. Not anger. Something smaller and sadder than that, that had been sitting in each of them for years without anybody noticing, until something came and stood by the window and noticed for them.
Not one of them has ever asked me.
"Hedda," I said.
"My lord?"
"You told Dame Valeria the best ground on the mountain was up here. By the stones."
"So it is." The smile didn't move. "Dry, and flat. Nobody's ever asked me before—"
"I'm asking," I said. "Not where the best ground is. Where you'd put us. If it were you. If you'd kept this meadow thirty years, and sixty girls and a handful of boys came up the road to it, and you wanted every one of them to go home again." I held her hand a little tighter. "Where would you put them?"
The smile stopped.
Not slowly. The way it had stopped on Tacita, in the passage: all at once, like a clock. She looked down at her hand in mine. Then up at me. And her face was suddenly just an old woman's face, very tired, with nothing measured in it anywhere.
Her fingers moved. Under my palm, I felt them turn, and close. Round mine.
And something let go of her.
She sat down. Right there in the grass at the edge of the lords' ring, next to her pails of milk, as if her knees had decided it for her. I went down with her. I didn't let go.
"The bottom ground," she whispered. "By the stream. It's wet. It's sour. It'll soak your boots and your bedding and you'll hate every minute." Her voice cracked. "The big ones won't go in it. They never would. Too heavy. They'd sink."
"Hedda," said Liesel quietly, from behind me. "What did you see?"
And Hedda told us.
The bats that hadn't come out. The clearing by the fallen spruce. A Stonehorn in the pines with two Cragcats lying at its feet like dogs, and a figure in black between them with its hand on the beast's brow. Hood. Veil. Only the eyes. The horns curling into a ring. The cat going black. A bat on its hand that left with wings as wide as a door. And the long sound coming down off the scree from the crater, that she hadn't looked at.
"It asked my name," said Hedda. She was crying now. "Thirty autumns. It asked my name. And then it told me you'd be here in four days, and I'd want to show you where to put the tents." She looked up the slope, at the white stones, and the dark trees forty paces behind them, and her face crumpled. "And I did. Oh, Elysia. I did."
"When?" said Cordelia.
I hadn't heard her come. Nobody ever does. She was standing over us, with Dame Valeria behind her.
Hedda wiped her face with the back of her hand, the one I'd healed.
"It didn't say," she said. "But the bats know. They always know. When they come out again, Highness, it'll be tonight."
Dame Valeria held the council standing up, in the middle of the lords' ring, with the whole battle class pretending not to listen from twenty paces away.
She didn't ask how I'd known to ask Hedda. Cordelia had said, "He knew," in a voice that ended the subject, and Dame Valeria had looked at Cordelia for a long moment, and at me, and let it end. There'd be a reckoning for that later, I was fairly sure. Dame Valeria doesn't forget a question she's put down. But not today.
"Run," said Cassian. "Now. While it's light. We're three days from anywhere."
"Run where?" said Cordelia.
"Down the road."
"Open grass," said Dame Valeria. "Sixty girls on tired horses, and every lord in the battle class, strung out in a line a mile long. At dusk. With something behind us that flies." She didn't raise her voice. She never does. "The bats will come out of those caves, my lord, and they'll come down the road after us faster than any horse in this camp, and they'll find the line, and they'll find the gaps in it."
Cassian shut his mouth. Tacita, at his shoulder, put her hand very briefly on his sleeve. He let her.
"Stay up here," said Benedict. He doesn't say much. "By the stones."
"Forty paces from the trees," said Cordelia. "Close."
That was her word from the day before. She'd been saying it, I realized, ever since we got here. Nobody had listened.
"Down," said Ambrose.
Everybody looked at him. He was standing at the edge of the ring in his ruined good boots, with a book under his arm, looking down the long slope of the meadow at the stream, and the hut, and the wide flat stretch of sour wet ground beside it where he'd sunk to the ankle the afternoon before.
"Wet," he said. "Heavy things sink. Stream." He looked at Dame Valeria, and for once in his life used more than three words in a row. "Give me till dark, and the stream, and every girl with a shovel, and I'll make you a ditch round that ground that nothing heavier than a cat will want to cross."
There was a silence.
"He means it," said Felix. "He's been wanting to dig a ditch since the day he got here. He's read about four books on it."
"Five," said Ambrose.
"The bats," said Liesel.
"A ditch won't stop bats," said Dame Valeria.
Benedict looked at his own hands. Then he looked up. He's big, and quiet, and his face is mostly like a shut gate, and I'd only ever seen his barrier go up straight, like a wall, on the wall at Greymark.
"I can bend it," he said. "Over. Like a roof." He thought about it. "Not for long."
"How long?"
"Long enough to find out."
Dame Valeria looked at all of us. At Ambrose with his book and his ditch, and Benedict with his roof, and Cassian with his fire, and Felix, whose spark was snapping steadily off one wrist and who had stopped pretending it wasn't. At me. At my sisters behind me, and Cordelia beside me, and Pia two and a half steps away with her crossbow, who had gone white and wasn't reading anything.
Then she turned round and looked up the slope at the stones, and the trees, and the mountain with its broken crown.
"Hm," she said.
And then she raised her voice. Not much. It carried anyway, the way it always does, to every girl in the battle class at once.
"Rule three," said Dame Valeria. "No casting outside the battle yard."
Nobody breathed.
"From now until I say otherwise," said Dame Valeria, "the battle yard is the whole of the Long Meadow." She looked at us lords, one at a time. "Cast."
We moved the whole camp before noon.
Every tent, every horse, every pot, down the long slope of the meadow to the wet ground by the stream. The girls hated it. Their boots went into the sour turf to the laces with every step, and their bedding got wet, and everything smelled of mud, and they complained about it the whole way down, loudly, in the way you complain when you're very frightened and don't want anyone to know.
Ambrose stood at the edge of the wet ground with his sleeves pushed up and his book open on a rock beside him, and the stream came up out of its bed to meet him.
I'd seen him move water before. A glass at a time, into bottles, very precisely. On the wall at Greymark, filling a ditch at night while Hana healed under it. I'd never seen him do this. He stood there and drew, the way you'd draw a long breath, and the stream bent. It came out of its banks in a long brown arm and lay down along the line he'd marked on the ground, and sixty girls with shovels dug where it lay, and he drew again, and it went deeper.
By the middle of the afternoon there was a ditch round three sides of the wet ground, wide as a cart and deep as a girl is tall, full of brown water, with the stream itself on the fourth side. By sunset you could have sunk a horse in it.
"Ditches," said Ambrose, standing back from it, muddy to the elbows, with deep satisfaction.
Pia, beside me, wrote it down.
I talked to Greymark while the light went.
Naomi was home now, behind the new gate. I told her everything, as fast as I could, half a drop a word and I didn't care. Four elites. The bats. The ditch. Valeria's rule. And she listened to all of it without saying anything, which is how Naomi listens to things that matter.
Then Naomi: (We'll be quiet.)
I knew what she meant. Every word down the bond costs me. Tonight I'd need every drop.
(We'll be listening,) she said. (All night. Both of us.)
And then Hana, very small: (Eat something first.)
I ate something first. Then the bond went quiet, the way Naomi had said it would. Not empty. I could feel them both, two candles, very far off in the east, burning steady, not saying anything at all. Just there.
It's a strange thing, to be listened to like that. From that far away. By people who can't do anything but listen.
I think it might be the hardest thing I've ever asked my sisters to do.
The sun went down behind the Hollowcrown at a quarter to seven, and the mountain's shadow came down the meadow toward us like a tide coming in.
Dame Valeria had laid out the new camp the way she'd laid out the old one. The young lords in the middle, on the one patch of the wet ground that was nearly dry. Escorts round us. The battle class round them, sixty girls in a ring with practice swords swapped for real ones from the soldiers' carts and spears they'd been told to hold upright and not wave. And on the inside edge of Ambrose's ditch, all the way round, Cordelia's soldiers.
Pia was on a cart. Dame Valeria had looked at her crossbow, and then at her, and put her on a cart in the middle of the camp, up high where she could see over everybody's heads, with every bolt from every soldier's quiver in a heap beside her.
"Lady Marika tells me you can hit anything that holds still for one breath," said Dame Valeria.
"Yes, Dame Valeria."
"Nothing tonight will hold still."
Pia swallowed. "Most things that don't, Dame Valeria."
"Hm," said Dame Valeria, and left her there.
The cart was about two and a half steps from my place. I don't think anyone had measured it. I think Pia had.
Hedda sat by her own door down by the stream, inside the ditch now, wrapped in a blanket, with a cup of something hot that one of the girls had given her. She wasn't smiling. She was looking up the meadow, at the empty ground by the white stones, where the tents had been that morning.
I stood in the middle of it all and checked, because Naomi taught me to check.
The pitcher was full. Forty-two splashes, full to the brim; it had been full since noon. Three candles within a bowshot. Liesel at my left. Marika in front of me, with her boots on and her sword out and her back to me, facing the mountain. Cordelia at the soldiers' line, twenty paces off, where she could see all of it. And far, far off in the east, two more, steady and silent. Listening.
Wren at my right. Liesel, every so often, put her hand flat over her own heart without seeming to notice, and took it away again.
The light went out of the sky.
It went the way it goes on a mountain: all at once, the last gold going off the broken crags at the top, and then gray, and then a deep blue that was nearly black, and the first stars.
Nobody in the camp said anything. Sixty girls, two dozen soldiers, the young lords and all their escorts, and not one word. Just the stream running. And the horses, restless on their lines. And my own heart.
Then, high up on the lower slope, in the dark mouths of the caves, something moved.
The bats came out.
They came the way Pia had read they would, the way Hedda had set her supper by for thirty years. All at once. A long black river pouring up out of the Hollowcrown into the last of the light, so many that for a moment the stars went out behind them.
And this time, they shrieked.
I'd never heard anything like it. Nobody in that camp had. It came down the meadow at us like a wall, ten thousand voices at once, high and thin and so loud that I felt it in my teeth, the way I'd felt the great bell in the shrine. Girls flinched. Horses screamed back at it. Somewhere in the ring, somebody started to pray out loud, and somebody else told her to stop, and then started praying too.
Under 「Eyes」, the mountain moved.
Four knots of nothing, all at once. The one on the high rock under the crown. The one in the pines to the left. The one in the caves, pouring up into the sky. And the one at the very lip of the crater, which was coming down over the scree now, slow and long and hissing, so that the whole upper slope seemed to be sliding.
Four knots, and in the middle of each, one hole bigger than all the others. And they weren't moving the way a tide moves. I'd lived through a tide, and grown up on stories of all the others. A tide is a flood, a panic, everything coming at once from everywhere, every kind of monster climbing over every other kind to get out of the forest.
This wasn't a flood.
This was four columns. Each kind of monster in its own column, with its own great hole at the front of it. Coming down the mountain side by side, at the same pace, not touching, not fighting, not one of them getting in another's way.
In order.
The Stonehorns reached the pines first. I watched the holes pour through the trees in the dark, toward the meadow, toward the line of white stones that monsters don't cross. That nobody knew why they didn't cross. That nobody had ever needed to know.
The great hole at the front of them didn't slow down.
It came out of the pines and down onto the meadow. I couldn't see it with my own eyes, not in that dark, only with 「Eyes」. But I heard it. A sound like a cart full of stones being dropped. And then another. And then a long grinding crack that went all the way down the meadow and into the ground under my boots.
Down by the stream, wrapped in her blanket, Hedda made a small sound.
"The stones," she whispered.
They'd crossed them.