"Four a day," I said.
It was late, in the escorts' room, with the door shut and a chair under the handle and Pia safely on the far side of the residence gate under two blankets, reading. Liesel sat on her bed with her knees drawn up. Wren was at the door, because Wren is always at the door. Marika was on the floor, because the floor was where she'd been told to sleep, and she'd decided to make it a front.
"Four out of how many?" said Marika.
I'd counted at breakfast. I couldn't help it. "A dozen escorts, give or take. Ninety-odd girls who aren't escorts yet. Seven mistresses. The guards. The kitchen."
"Three days for the escorts alone," said Liesel. "If nothing goes wrong."
"Something always goes wrong," said Marika, with satisfaction.
"So don't go in order." Liesel put her chin on her knees. "It doesn't pick at random. It feeds what's already there. Lady Amara had ten years of being looked past. Tullia had a sister on the throne and a key to her door. That escort in Septentria had guarded him since he was twelve; we don't know what she felt about it, but she'd had nineteen years to feel it." She looked at me. "Start with whoever has the most reason."
I thought about the breakfast hall. About a first-year's escort putting down a bread knife, very carefully, handle first, and eating nothing.
I thought about Ilse, and the dining hall, and the smell.
And I thought about a small polite smile, the same at both corners, aimed at the back of somebody's head.
"Cassian's second," I said. "She smiled."
The room went quiet.
"When he turned his back," I said. "In the drill. Nobody else saw. Her light's white. Everybody's light is white. But I've never seen her smile. Not once, since my first week."
"Then her first," said Marika at once, sitting up. "Tomorrow. You walk up, you touch her, we see."
"And if it's her," said Liesel quietly, "and she sees in his face that he knows. What does she do?"
Nobody answered that.
Cassian's second carries a spear. She stands behind his right shoulder every hour of every day. And that very afternoon, Cassian had turned his back on her in front of the whole battle class, because it was the right thing to do, and because nobody had ever asked him to before.
"Not her first," I said slowly. "Not until I have a reason to touch her that nobody looks at twice. Not her, not anybody near her." I thought about it. "Everyone else first. Carefully. And somebody watches her the whole time."
"Me," said Marika.
"You're in front of me."
"I can be in front of you and watch somebody else. I'm VERY good at being in front of things."
That was true. I let it go.
"There's something else," said Liesel. She looked round the little room. At Wren by the door. At Marika on the floor. At herself. "There are a dozen escorts in this Academy. And the only ones that nothing can stir are sitting in this room."
Nobody had said it out loud before. It sat there, after she'd said it, like a lamp somebody had just turned up.
"Then we're the only ones," said Marika, "who can stand next to ANYBODY."
"And there's Pia," said Liesel.
We all looked at the window, as if we could see through the wall and the passage and the little garden to the gate in the residence wall, where a girl in white robes was reading the Third Book of the Saints aloud to a cat.
"「Discern」 opens a circle," I said. "A small one, flat under my palm. Blue. If you're looking, you can see the edge of it between my fingers."
"And Pia is always looking," said Liesel.
"I'll take care of Pia," said Marika.
"How?"
Marika lay back down on the floor, put her hands behind her head and smiled at the ceiling.
"Tactics," she said.
Marika's tactics, it turned out, were archery.
She came to the infirmary door in the morning, looked at Pia on her stool in the corner, and said, "You. Crossbow. Battle yard. I want to see if you can actually hit anything."
Pia looked at her. Then at me. Then at the little book open on her knee, with yesterday's five heals in it and a column ruled for today.
"I'm the shrine's observer," she said.
"And I'm a VALCREST."
"The High Keeper said to observe the infirmary."
"The High Keeper isn't HERE."
Pia considered this for a moment with great seriousness. Then she said, "I'll go at midday," and turned to a clean page.
Marika stood in the doorway for a while, breathing through her nose. Then she went and stood in front of the infirmary door instead, being in front of it, and the tactics were over.
So Pia saw.
The first was the first-year's escort. The one with the bread knife. She came in mid-morning holding her wrist against her chest, sprained in the battle yard, and sat down on the end of the cot nearest the window without looking at anybody. Her lord had sent her. He hadn't come with her.
"May I?" I said.
She looked up at me, startled. Then she nodded.
I healed the wrist first. Green, small, the kind of thing I could do in my sleep. Then I left my hand where it was, on her forearm, and reached for the other thing, the new thing, and felt three splashes go out of me into a circle no bigger than my palm.
A sprain. This morning.
That was all. A sprain, this morning, and under it, nothing. No cold place. Nothing folded through her. Just a frightened girl whose lord had moved his chair away from her at breakfast and hadn't come to the infirmary with her.
I took my hand away.
"He'll come round," I said. I didn't know that. I said it anyway.
She looked at me for a moment longer, as if I were a sum she couldn't make come out. Then she said "Thank you, my lord," very quietly, and went.
In the corner, Pia's pen had stopped.
I didn't look at her. I went on to the next cot. Felix's second knight, with a cold she'd been pretending not to have for a week. A Cure, and then my hand on her wrist a breath too long, and three more splashes. A cold. Eight days. Nothing else. One of Benedict's escorts, built like Benedict, with a split knuckle from punching something she wouldn't name. Nothing.
And Ilse.
Cassian sent her up just before midday with a cut on her forearm from the drill, the same forearm I'd healed in the dining hall in my first week, kneeling in the stew. She sat on the cot and held it out to me without being asked, and looked at the wall.
I healed the cut. Then I left my hand where it was.
A cut. This morning. An old burn, long healed.
Nothing else.
I hadn't known how hard I'd been holding my breath until it went out of me.
"He turned his back," said Ilse suddenly.
I looked up. She was still looking at the wall.
"Yesterday. In the yard. He turned his back on us." Her voice was very flat, the way you keep a voice flat when you don't trust what it'll do otherwise. "With us facing him and our spears up. The day after three lords moved their chairs." A pause. "He didn't even stop to think."
"I saw," I said.
She nodded, as if that settled something. Then she took her arm back, and stood up, and went, and didn't say thank you, which with Ilse means more than when other people do.
That was four. Twelve splashes. All clean.
When I turned round, Pia was on her feet in the corner with her book held against her chest.
"Saint," she said. "What was that?"
"What was what?"
"After the heals. Every time. There was light under your hand." She came a step closer. Then she remembered, and went back exactly one step. "Blue. Not a Heal circle. Smaller. I've read every description of every circle any Saint has ever opened, and I've never read that one."
The infirmary was very quiet. Mistress Salvia was counting bandages with her back to us and, I was absolutely certain, listening to every word.
"Checking," I said.
Pia looked at me for a long moment.
Then she wrote it down. Checking. I watched her do it. And then, just as she had for General, she underlined it.
Twice.
Four a day, it went on like that.
The second day, four more. One of Ambrose's escorts, who'd fallen off a ladder in the library, because Ambrose had sent her up it for a book. Two of the older girls from the battle class, who weren't anybody's escorts yet but would be by spring. A mistress with a bad tooth. All clean.
The third day, three, because a kitchen girl scalded both hands at once and I needed the reserve. All clean.
Eleven. Thirty-three splashes, spent on finding nothing. I'd never been so glad to waste anything in my life.
And Pia saw every one. She stopped asking, after the first day. She just wrote. Checking. Checking. Checking. A neat column of it, down the edge of every page, next to the heals, with a little blue mark beside each one that she'd made by pressing hard with an inked thumb.
That worried me more than the asking had.
Every night after supper, I talked to Greymark.
Naomi was on the road still, but the bond doesn't care about roads. Her voice came the way it always does, low and even, half a drop a word, all the way from wherever she'd camped.
(How many?)
(Eleven. All clean.)
(Keep going.)
(And Cassian's second?)
(Marika's watching.)
A pause. (Is she?)
Marika, from the floor of the escorts' room, in a voice that went straight down the bond with no regard whatever for the cost: (I've been in front of her for THREE DAYS.)
(Noted.)
Then Hana, who had been waiting very politely for Naomi to finish, the way Hana waits for things: (Fabian. How many helpings at supper?)
(Three.)
Marika, on the bond again: (Pia says two and a bit.)
(Then it was two and a bit,) said Hana, with perfect confidence, from somewhere on the eastern road.
I looked at the window, as if I could see all the way to the residence gate and the girl under it with her little book. (How does Pia even know that?)
(She showed me the book,) said Marika. (She's going to start checking your BOOTS.)
On the third night, Felix sang.
His room is above mine. It has been since the first week he came, and his window looks out over the same little walled garden as the escorts' room across the passage. Every now and then, when he can't sleep, or when he's very happy, or when the spark won't settle, he opens it and sings to the whole residence whether it wants him to or not.
That night it was the miller's song. Of course it was.
The miller had three daughters, and the eldest was the fair.
Across the passage, in the escorts' room, a window banged open.
The first boot went past my window and hit somewhere above it with a thump. Felix didn't even stop. He sang the second verse a little louder, the way he does, and his spark, I knew without looking, was perfectly steady.
The middle one was clever, and the youngest sang for three.
A hairbrush. A shoe, possibly Liesel's, from the sound Liesel made. Something soft that might have been a sock with something hard inside it.
It's an old song. I've heard it more times than I can count, which, for me, is saying something. I've heard it in the Academy and on a wall in Greymark, and in a room in Fulmara where a queen woke up. I know where it goes. The eldest marries. The youngest sings. And then the verse that always makes the whole room go a little quieter, even people who've heard it a hundred times.
And the middle one went walking, and she never came back home.
Nothing hit the wall.
I lay there in the dark and waited for the next boot. I knew Marika. Marika had a second boot. Marika always has a second boot.
It didn't come.
The window across the passage stayed open. I could hear it, the way you can hear an open window at night, the air moving. But nobody threw anything. Felix sang the tenth verse, and the eleventh, the miller at his door looking a long way down the road. And all through them, from the escorts' room, there was nothing. Not a word. Not a boot.
And then, when he got to the twelfth, then the middle one came walking, the window across the passage shut. Very quietly. Which is not a thing Marika has ever, in my whole life, done to a window.
I lay there and looked at the ceiling.
The middle one. Of three.
There was a thought in there somewhere. I could feel the shape of it, the way you can feel a word on the tip of your tongue. Something about three daughters, and a middle one, and a road.
Then I told myself Marika had simply run out of things to throw. She'd thrown a sock with something in it. That's a woman at the very end of her ammunition. And I rolled over and went to sleep, and didn't think about it again for a long time.
In the end, it was the stairs.
The great stair in the main hall is old and wide and worn into dips in the middle, where generations of girls have gone up and down it in boots. On the fourth morning we were coming down it to breakfast, and Cassian was coming down just ahead of us, with Ilse at his left shoulder and his second at his right. And on the seventh step from the bottom, her right knee went.
Not much. A dip and a catch. The kind of thing you'd hardly see. She caught the rail with her free hand and was upright again in the same breath, the blunted spear still level in her left, her face not changing at all.
I saw it. Marika, who had been in front of her for three days, saw it. Cassian saw it, and stopped.
"Your knee," I said.
She didn't look at me. She looked straight ahead, the way she always does. As if she'd learned a long time ago that moving doesn't help.
I'd walked past her every day since my first week at the Academy. I'd watched Wren beat her in the battle yard, going right, because Wren had seen the knee before anyone. I'd stood a few feet from her in the drill that week. And I realized, standing on that stair, that I didn't know her name. I had never once heard anyone say it.
"May I?" I said.
She didn't answer me. She looked at Cassian instead. Asking, without asking.
Cassian looked at me for a long moment, the way he does, with his chin up, as if I'd better be worth it.
"Go on," he said.
So I knelt on the stair.
It's not the first time I've knelt in front of one of Cassian's escorts. The first time it was in the stew. The stone was colder than the stew had been, and harder, and I put my palm flat over the side of her knee, through the cloth, and opened a Heal first, Green and small, the way you'd mend a step that someone keeps tripping on.
Then I left my hand where it was, and reached for the other thing.
Three splashes. The small blue circle, flat under my palm, hidden by my fingers. Marika had moved without my seeing her, a half step, so that she stood between the stair and the rest of the hall.
An old break, badly set. Seven years.
Who had broken it, it didn't say. It never does.
And then, under that, the new line woke.
I felt it the way you feel a draft from a door you thought was shut. Something folded right through her. Not in the knee. Everywhere. Cold, and very thin, the way it had been round the poison in Aurelia, a sleeping queen in a high room in Fulmara. The thing I'd had no word for, the thing with no name.
It had a name now.
A demon's touch. Eleven nights.
I didn't move my hand. I didn't move anything. I don't know how. I think it was the same thing that keeps your hands steady in the middle of a cast, when someone is bleeding and you can't afford to shake, and some part of me had decided this was that.
"It'll be stiff for a day," I heard myself say. "Then it should hold."
I took my hand away and stood up.
She looked at me then. For the first time. Down the length of the step between us, with her face perfectly still.
And she smiled. Small. Polite. The same at both corners, as if someone had measured it.
"Thank you, my lord," she said.
Her voice was low and very even. It was the first time I'd heard it.
Cassian gave me a short nod, the kind he gives when he's decided something was adequate and isn't going to say so. Then he turned and went on down the stair, with Ilse at his left shoulder and his second at his right, and her spear level in her left hand.
She didn't limp at all.
Liesel's hand found mine on the rail. She hadn't seen what I'd seen; nobody could. But she'd seen my face, from closer than anybody, for longer than anybody, and she didn't need to see anything else.
"Tonight," she said, very low.
I was counting. I couldn't stop. Eleven nights. Five here. Four in Sanctara before that. And two more on the road, in our tents, coming up from Greymark.
Eleven nights ago, we'd still been two days out. Sleeping under canvas, counting the miles to the lower gate. And while we slept, something had stood in a locked room in this Academy, by the window, and hadn't sat down, and had talked very calmly to a girl whose name nobody knew.