Naomi spent the fifteenth day asking questions.
She does it the way she walks a wall after a tide: slowly, all the way along, touching every stone. She sat in the reeve's kitchen with the rider at her elbow and the map spread out on the table, and one by one the people of Crossholm came in out of the wind and stood in front of her and told her what they'd seen.
Not the eaters. Naomi didn't ask the eaters anything. She'd watched the woman in the first house smile at me over a bowl of plums, and that had been enough.
The others. The neighbors. The ones who'd lived next door to the three houses all autumn, and watched.
I sat in the corner and listened. So did Pia, with her book. So did Hana, with hers.
It came out in pieces, and Naomi put the pieces together the way she puts together a tide report, one fact at a time, saying each one back out loud so everybody in the room could hear it agreed.
"Two of them," said Naomi. "Always two. Never one."
"Always two," said the woman from the house across the lane.
"At dusk. Never by day."
"At dusk." An old net-mender by the fire, her hands still working: "I saw them twice from my window. Just as the light went."
"Hooded. Hands in their sleeves. Always."
"Always."
"They didn't knock."
"They stood in the lane," said the woman across the way, "outside the door, in the snow. Till somebody opened it. Sometimes an hour. I watched them stand an hour, once. They didn't move."
"Did they eat? Drink? Sit down? Come in to the fire?"
"Never. Not once." The woman shivered. "Mila asked them in. I heard her. They just stood in the door."
Naomi wrote it down. Then she looked at the map.
"Only the ones who'd stopped going to the shrine," she said.
The reeve, at the end of the table, nodded slowly. "Only them."
"Only the worst sick."
"Only the worst."
"Only the ones," said Naomi, very evenly, "who'd stopped believing anybody was coming."
Nobody said anything to that.
In the afternoon she and the rider went through the map, village by village round the southern half of the lake.
The rider knew them all. She'd carried the queen's letters to every one of them. And as she went round the shore with her finger, naming them, the reeve and the net-mender and the woman across the lane would say what they'd heard. A drover at the autumn fair. A cousin's letter. A carter passing through.
Up and well. Whole houses. All at once.
Naomi didn't ring them in black. She marked them with a small cross, in the margin, in pencil.
When the rider's finger came back round to Crossholm, there were five crosses on the southern shore. Five villages that weren't on the queen's list of seven, and weren't quiet, and still wrote their letters to Arctura every month.
And had houses in them that were very well.
"Twelve," said Naomi. "At least."
She didn't say it loudly. She didn't need to.
That night she told Cordelia. Short, the way she always does, the bond carrying it south over the plateau and the mountains and the snow to a palace on a hill.
(Twelve villages. Seven quiet. Five not yet. Two of them, hooded, at dusk, only to the ones who'd given up.) A pause. (Tell your mother it's not a plague. It's a harvest.)
Cordelia's candle, far away, went very still. It stayed still for a long time. Then her one word for the day:
(Telling.)
And I felt her attention turn away from us, the way you feel someone in the next room get up from her chair: toward a door in the palace, and the woman on the other side of it.
Marika caught Felix by the wrist in the reeve's yard that evening, as he came back from the bottle cart.
"Show me your HANDS."
Felix blinked at her. "What?"
"Your HANDS. Both of them. NOW."
He held them out. She took them, both, one in each of hers, and turned them over, and bent her head over them in the lamplight from the kitchen window, and looked at every one of his nails as if they were written in a script she was trying very hard to read.
They were ordinary nails. Short, bitten on the left thumb, a little blue with cold.
"I didn't eat anything," said Felix, quietly.
"I KNOW you didn't eat anything."
"Then why—"
"Because that woman offered Pia a PLUM and smiled at her the WHOLE TIME, and you're the kind of IDIOT who'd take a plum from a smiling woman to be POLITE."
Felix opened his mouth. Then he shut it. He looked at her bent head, and at her hands holding his, which she didn't seem to have noticed she was still doing.
"Marika," he said.
"WHAT."
"You'd feel it. Wouldn't you. If something was wrong."
She went very still.
"Yes," she said, after a moment, much more quietly. "I'd feel it."
"Then you didn't need to look."
She dropped his hands as if they'd burned her. Her ears went scarlet. She turned on her heel and stalked off toward the horse lines, where there were no idiots, only horses.
"I needed to LOOK," she said over her shoulder, furiously. "That's DIFFERENT."
Felix stood in the yard for a while with his hands still held out in front of him, looking at them. Then he put them in his pockets, and went inside, and didn't say anything to anyone for the rest of the evening, which for Felix is practically a love song.
Vera came at dusk.
We saw them from a long way off, the way you see everything on the plateau: three riders, black against the white, coming along the shore road from the south. Two palace guards in blue cloaks, and between them, on a borrowed horse, a woman with her hair cut short under a soldier's hood.
Marika was in the street before they'd reached the first house, with her hand on her sword.
The guards pulled up. One of them got down and held out a folded paper, not to Marika, past her, to Naomi, who had come out behind her.
Naomi read it standing in the snow. Then she read it again. Then she held it out to me.
The queen's own hand. Small and upright, the hand of someone who writes a great many letters and has stopped expecting answers.
She asked every morning. On the second morning I stopped saying no. She is yours to watch, Marchioness, not mine to forgive. — S.
I gave it back. Naomi folded it into her coat.
Vera hadn't got down off her horse. She was sitting very straight, the way escorts sit a horse, with her hands on the reins and her eyes on the snow in front of her. She wasn't smiling. Her face looked like a face that hadn't quite worked out yet what to do instead.
"She killed her SAINT," said Marika. Not loudly. Not to anyone. Just out loud, the way you'd name something so it couldn't sneak up on you.
"Yes," said Vera, to the snow.
Captain Rufa came down the street. She looked at Vera for a long time, the way she'd looked at Pia's crossbow in the north square of Sanctara: something that hadn't been on her list. Then she took the reins out of Vera's hands, very calmly, and led the horse herself.
"You ride in front of me," said Rufa. "Where I can see you. You eat what I eat. You sleep where I put you. Two of mine on you, day and night."
"Yes, Captain."
"And you take us where we need to go."
Vera looked up for the first time. Not at Rufa. Past her, at the long lake, gray under the dusk.
"Yes," she said. "I know the way."
She got down at last in the reeve's yard, stiffly, like someone who hadn't sat a horse since the summer. Liesel was there. Liesel didn't say anything. She just stood where Vera could see her, at the edge of the lamplight, and Vera saw her, and something in Vera's shoulders came down half an inch.
Then Vera turned and saw me.
I watched her mouth begin to make the shape it had made every morning for weeks, to the wall and the jailer and the bread. Saint. I watched her stop it.
"Lord Fabian," she said.
"Vera."
She flinched a little at her own name. Not much. As if it were a coat she'd put on again after a long time and it didn't fit quite right across the shoulders yet.
Pia was one step behind me. She'd been staring at Vera since the shore road with her book held tight against her chest and her pen not moving. Now she took one step forward, past my shoulder, which she never does.
"You're Vera," said Pia.
Vera looked down at her. "Yes."
"I wrote you down," said Pia. "Twice. On the stair." She swallowed. "I'm going to write you down a lot, I think."
Vera looked at her for a long moment. I don't think anyone had said anything to her like that in her whole life.
"All right," said Vera.
Pia stepped back. One exact step.
We walked her up the street to the reeve's house in the last of the light, Rufa's two women one on either side of her, Rufa behind. And as we passed the second of the three houses, the door opened.
The grandfather stood in it. Straight-backed. Hands folded. Smiling at the snow and at us and at nothing.
And then at Vera.
His face changed. Not much. A kind of pleased recognition, very calm, as if a neighbor had come back from market a little earlier than expected.
"Vera," he said. "You've come back."
Vera stopped in the street. Rufa's women stopped with her.
"Tam," said Vera. Her voice was very careful.
"Is he with you?"
Vera didn't move. I watched her understand who he meant. I watched her understand that he knew perfectly well, that everybody on the plateau had known since the end of the summer.
"He's dead, Tam," she said. "You know he's dead."
The old man smiled at her. A pleasant smile, warm, the same at both corners.
"Oh, yes," he said. "I know. But we don't need him now, do we?" He opened his door a little wider, and the warm light from inside fell across the snow at her feet. "Come in out of the cold, Vera. We've got plums."
Rufa's hand came down on Vera's shoulder before Vera could move, though I don't think she was going to.
"No," said Rufa. "She doesn't."
The old man smiled at Rufa, too, as if she'd said something charming, and shut the door.
Vera stood in the street for a while longer. Then she walked on to the reeve's house between Rufa's two women, and went in, and sat down on the bench nearest the fire, and didn't say anything at all.
Later, when the others had gone to sleep, I saw her get up and go and stand at the shuttered window, looking at the crack of the three houses' doors in the dark across the lane. Standing, the way escorts stand. Watching the door.
Liesel was awake too. She didn't go to her. She just sat on the floor by the fire where Vera could see her if she turned round, and stayed there until morning.
Stonemere was half a day east along the shore. The nearest of the seven.
Vera rode in front of Rufa the whole way, as she'd been told, with Rufa's two women at her sides, and she didn't need the rider's map or anyone else's. She knew where the road went under the snow. She knew where the shingle was soft and where the ice came up over the stones and where you had to bear left to keep the horses off the drop. She said each one before we came to it, in a low flat voice, to nobody in particular, and every time she was right.
"He came this way every autumn," she said once, as we came round a headland and saw the village ahead of us, a little cluster of dark houses on a spit of land running out into the lake. "Stonemere was always the first. They'd see us from that point, there, and ring the bell, and by the time we got to the street the whole village would be out."
The bell didn't ring.
Nobody was out. The street was empty and the snow on it was smooth and nobody had walked there since the last fall. Smoke from every chimney. Shutters closed. The shrine at the end of the spit, its door shut, its bell hanging still.
And then, as we came up to the first house, the doors began to open.
Not all at once. One, and then another, and then all the way down the street, unhurried, the way doors open in the morning when everyone's woken at the same time. And in every doorway, someone standing. Smiling. Hands folded.
Waiting.
Under 「Eyes」, every light in the street was white.
And in every one, the knot. But not the small knot I'd seen in Crossholm. Bigger. Much bigger. A fist of dark low under the ribs, and the roots going out of it weren't fine anymore. They were thick, dark, branching, reaching up through the white toward the shoulders and down into the arms, all the way to the hands.
Pia, one length behind me, made a very small sound.
A woman came out of the third house. Older than the others, sixty perhaps, small and round in a brown shawl, and she came down her step into the snow with her hands out in front of her and her face lit up in a smile that went all the way to her eyes. The only one in that street who looked glad instead of calm.
"Vera!" she said. "Vera, is it autumn already?"
Vera had stopped her horse. She sat very still.
"Marta," she said.
I'd heard that name before. In a cell, under a mountain, in a pleasant voice. Marta, how's that cough.
"Is he coming?" said Marta. She was looking past Vera, up the road, the way she must have looked up it every autumn for fourteen years. "Is he behind you? Oh, I've got so much to tell him. My chest is better. My chest is all better." She laughed, delighted. "He won't have to do a thing."
Nobody answered her. Nobody could.
I got down off my horse.
Liesel came with me, and Wren, and Marika in front of us, and Vera, after a long moment, behind. Marta looked at me as I came up, and her smile didn't change, but something behind it did. Not recognition. Curiosity, very calm.
"You're not him," she said.
"No," I said. "May I?"
She gave me her hand without hesitating. They all do.
The nails were black. Not dark at the tips like the woman's in Crossholm. Black all the way down to the quick, and thick, and curved, as if they were trying very hard to be something else. And when she lifted her arm, the shawl moved on her back, and I saw that it didn't lie flat. Something under it, down the line of her spine. A ridge.
I opened 「Discern」 under her palm.
A demon's seed. Sixty-two nights. Ripening.
Not growing. Ripening.
I closed the circle. I kept my face where it was. I don't know how.
Behind me, I heard Vera get down off her horse.
"Marta," said Vera. Her voice wasn't flat anymore. It was barely a voice at all. "Marta. Did you eat it?"
"Oh, yes," said Marta happily. "Everyone did. The two who came, in the worst of it, when we'd rung the bell for two weeks and nobody came. They said he wasn't coming. They said he wasn't ever coming again." She patted Vera's arm with her black-nailed hand. "And then they said we didn't need him. And we don't. Look at me, Vera. Look how well."
Vera looked at her.
I watched her stand there in the snow in front of a woman Albin had known by name for fourteen years, a woman whose cough he'd asked after every autumn, and I watched her understand that every door she'd described to the thing at her window was a door like this one.
Liesel's hand closed on Vera's arm. Just above the elbow. Just there.
Vera didn't fall. I think she meant to.
"Come in," said Marta, warmly. "Come in, all of you. You must be frozen. I've got plums."
We didn't go in.
Naomi wouldn't sleep in Stonemere. She took us back along the shore to the headland, to a fold of rock above the water a mile from the village, out of the wind, where Rufa's women could see anything that came along the road from either way. We made camp there in the blue dark. Nobody talked much.
I made the six bottles anyway, because I always make the six bottles. Felix sang. He skipped the one verse he always skips, and nothing else. His voice cracked twice.
Vera sat by herself at the edge of the firelight with Rufa's two women on either side of her. She didn't eat. She didn't sleep. Every so often I saw her lips move, and I knew without being told that she was saying the names of the other six. In order. The way she'd ridden them for nineteen years.
Hana sat with her notebook, and wrote, and didn't stop for a long time.
She'd asked Marta's name at the door, even though she knew it. Then she'd asked every other door in the street. Thirty-one. All on the other list, under Crossholm's eleven.
Pia didn't say it's longer. She didn't say anything. She just sat beside Hana, one step from me, and held the lamp.
The messenger came a little before midnight.
We heard the horse first, a long way off on the shore road from the south, coming fast. Too fast for the plateau in the dark. Rufa's sentries had their spears up before it came round the headland, and then they put them down again, because it was a palace rider in blue, and her horse was blown and staggering, and she nearly fell off it into the snow.
She had a letter. The queen's hand again. Shorter than the last.
Naomi read it by the fire. Then she read it out, because Naomi always reads things out.
"Marchioness. A rider came down from the north shore last night. The reeve of the farthest village on the lake writes that three nights ago her people came out of their houses in the dark and fell on the next village with their bare hands. She calls it a rising. My council calls it rebellion. I don't know what to call it. Come back. — S."
The fire cracked. Nobody said anything.
I looked at the palace rider, sitting in the snow with her head down, too tired to stand.
"The survivors," I said. "From the village that was attacked. Did anyone say what they looked like?"
The rider lifted her head. She looked at me for a moment as if she couldn't work out why that was the question.
"The reeve wrote it," she said slowly. "Everyone at the palace thought she'd gone mad." She swallowed. "She said they didn't shout. Not once. Not even when they were killing. She said their hands were black. And she said—" The rider stopped.
"Said what?"
"She said they were very calm."
Nobody moved.
Across the fire, at the edge of the light, Vera had stopped saying the names.
Naomi folded the letter. She looked north, out over the dark lake, toward a shore none of us could see.
"It bloomed," said Naomi.