The first day under the trees, I learned what Petronius's road was.
It wasn't a road the way the Sanctara road is a road, worn smooth by a hundred years of carts. It had been made, all at once, by someone who didn't care what was in the way. It ran dead straight through the Gloamwood, wide enough for four riders abreast: a long ribbon of packed earth, with banks heaped up on either side where the ground had been shoved out of the road's way. Trees leaned out over the banks at angles trees don't grow at, their roots torn up and hanging in the air like the fringe on a rug. Every hundred paces or so there was a place where something big had been in the way, and wasn't anymore.
"Earth," said Marika, in front of me, glaring at a root as thick as my leg. "Just... earth. Shoved."
"One man did this," said Felix. "Petronius. In about two weeks." He said the name the way you'd name a storm. "He's very thorough."
At the head of the column, Corvus didn't turn round.
The other thing I learned that day was what the Gloamwood looks like through Elysia's eyes.
Near the edge, it was full of light. Birds in every branch, small and bright. Squirrels. A deer that stood frozen on the bank as the column passed, then went off through the bracken in a flash of white. By noon we were in the mid, and the lights had thinned: fewer, further apart, the way houses thin out at the edge of a town. By afternoon there were long stretches of road with nothing on either side but dark and trunks and the dim green evening that lives under those branches all day.
And I could feel the pitcher filling slower.
I'd felt it at the bend, the moment the first trees closed over us: two candles dropping out of reach behind me, Naomi's and Hana's, still there and still bright, but too far now for 「Gathered Light」 to count them. Three left near me. Liesel at my back, Marika in front, Cordelia at the head of her riders. It was like cooking on a stove with two of the fires gone out. Everything still worked. It just took longer.
In the late afternoon, we came to the webs.
The core starts where the webs begin. Naomi has said it to every guard she ever took into the Gloamwood, and she has never once gone past them, in ten years. I'd seen the webs once, on my first sweep with her, gray and thick across the trees, with the young swarming down out of them in the dark.
These were burned.
The road went through the web line like a knife through cloth. For a hundred paces on either side, the gray stuff hung in charred rags off the banks and the low branches, shriveled, black at the edges. Nothing moved in it. There was a smell, faint, old, like a hearth that hasn't been swept.
"I did that," said Cinna.
He was riding in the middle of the riders with his hands bound in front of him and his reins tied to a knight's saddle, looking up at the burned webs with an expression I couldn't read.
"On the way out," he said. "Petronius wanted them gone, so they were gone." He was quiet for a moment. "It seemed a shame at the time. They're very old."
Nobody answered him. We made camp just past the burned line, with the core in front of us and the fires built high.
After supper, Naomi, in my chest: (Where?)
(The webs.)
A pause.
(Don't go past them.)
(We have to.)
A longer pause. I could feel her on the other end of it, a day's ride back, standing in a hole in a wall.
(...I know,) said Naomi.
That night, for the first time since I woke, I didn't empty the pitcher. Not in the Gloamwood, and not after it. Cordelia didn't have to say it.
The core was quiet in a way the rest of the forest hadn't been.
Not silent. I remembered silent: the morning before the tide, no birds, no insects, nothing. This was different. There were still lights in the undergrowth, here and there. They were just very few, and very still, the way people go still in a room when someone important walks in.
The trees were enormous. The road ran on between them, straight and patient, and the light under the branches was the color of late evening at an hour that should have been noon.
In the middle of the afternoon, I saw the first hole.
Up ahead and off to the left, maybe a hundred paces into the trees. With my ordinary eyes, nothing: trunks, bracken, dark. With the other eyes, a ring of small lights, mice and birds and something like a marten, all gone perfectly still, in a circle round a place where there wasn't anything.
Not dark. Nothing. A shape cut out of the world, as big as a hay cart.
It moved.
Then I saw the second, behind it. Then three more, on the right, coming through the trunks from the other side. Then one more on the road ahead of us, round the long curve where the banks rose high, standing square in the middle of Petronius's road as if it owned it.
Six.
I counted them twice. Then I reached for Cordelia's candle, at the head of the column.
(Cordelia. Six. Big. Two left, three right, one ahead, on the road. Coming in.)
Half a drop a word. I'd never in my life been so glad of a cheap sentence.
Cordelia didn't turn her head. I watched her decide to spend the day's word.
(Ring.)
Then, out loud, in a voice I'd only ever heard her use once, on the wall at Greymark: "RING!"
The Crown's riders wheeled. They did it without anyone seeming to steer: remounts and baggage into the middle, prisoners into the middle, me into the middle, and twelve riders outward in a circle with their lances down. Corvus's keepers closed on him by habit, and then I saw the captain with the scarred eyebrow look at Cordelia, once, and bark something in Bellonian, and the keepers' ring opened and stretched and joined ours, so that there was only one ring, with Corvus and Felix standing in it side by side.
"What is it?" said Felix. His spark was already snapping at his fingertips.
Behind us, very calmly, the keepers' captain said a word in Bellonian I didn't know.
The bear on the road came first.
I'd heard about Ironhide Bears all my life. Every child in Greymark has. I had never seen one. It came round the curve at a run, and it was the size of a small barn, and its hide wasn't fur at all; it was ridged and dark and plated like old bark, and the lances that met it skidded off as if they'd hit a door. It went through the front of the ring like a cart through a hedge. A horse screamed. A rider went over backward.
Marika met it.
She was off her horse before I'd seen her decide to be, and she didn't go for the hide. She went under it, for the joint where the foreleg met the body, where the plates had to bend, and she put her sword in up to the crossguard with a sound I'll hear for a long time. Three candles near me; Marika's burned bright. The bear reared and roared and swung at her, and she wasn't there anymore.
(Marika, behind you, left—)
She rolled. The claw went through the place she'd been.
Then the two from the left hit the ring.
After that, I don't remember it in order. I remember it in pieces, the way you remember a dream.
I remember standing in the middle of the ring with Wren's back against mine and calling holes. That's all I did. That's all I could do. I can't swing a sword at a bear. But in the gloom under those trees, the bears were just dark against dark, and nobody could see them coming except me. So I stood there and talked.
(Liesel. Your right. Low. Now.)
Liesel's spear went into an open mouth.
(Cordelia, two coming at the remounts, from behind the big oak—)
(Marika, down—)
(Liesel, now. Liesel, now.)
I remember Corvus's left hand coming up, and the Blue circle opening under it, and a bolt going through a bear's eye so cleanly that the bear took two more steps before it understood it was dead. I remember Felix shouting "CORVUS! RIGHT!" and Corvus turning without a word and both of them throwing at once, two bolts, one white-blue and one blue-white, into the same bear, so that the air smelled of storms and the bear went down smoking. I remember thinking, absurdly, they've done that before.
I remember one of the three from the right coming through the riders straight at the middle of the ring, at the prisoners' horses, and Cinna on his tied horse with his bound hands held up, shouting "PRINCESS!"
And Cordelia, from her saddle, leaning over without a word and cutting his ropes through in one stroke.
Cinna's circle came up red. Not under him; in front of him, in the air, a Red circle as wide as a cart wheel, and the fire came out of it in a sheet, straight into the bear's face. It reared, burning, and turned, and went crashing back into the trees with its plates smoking and the small lights scattering out of its way in every direction.
I remember a bear coming through the ring toward me. Wren stepping into it. Wren going down. Liesel and Marika arriving on it from two sides at once, so fast that I never saw where either of them came from.
And then, all at once, there were no more holes coming. Only going: one, burning, far off to the right, and one more, limping, deeper in to the left, both of them heading away into the core as fast as anything that size can go.
Four lay on the road and the banks, not moving. To Elysia's eyes, a dead one looked exactly like a live one. Nothing, either way.
Then I could see everything else.
The ring was still a ring, more or less. But inside it and around it, under the trees, the lights were wrong. Three of the Crown's riders orange, one of them going red low on the belly where a claw had opened her mail like a purse. A keeper orange down one whole side. Wren on the ground at my feet, orange at the shoulder and ribs, already trying to get up. Marika, standing over a dead bear, orange from wrist to elbow, where she'd caught a claw on her forearm and kept fighting with it. Felix yellow across the ribs, sitting on the road where something had knocked him down, looking surprised. Gelio, thrown from his horse when it bolted, bound and on his side in the dirt, a yellow scrape all down one arm.
And the horses. Four of them orange. One, the rider's horse that had gone down first in front of the bear, lying on the road with its light going red and dark at the same time, which in a person means minutes.
I'd have known, before, that the horse was dying. I'd have heard it. I'd never have seen it.
"In," I said, out loud. "Everyone. Inside the ring, as close as you can. Horses too. Horses too."
Nobody argued. The riders brought the hurt horses in by the bridles. Liesel half carried Wren. Two keepers lifted their own between them. Cordelia leaned down and caught the bound Gelio by the collar and hauled him into the middle of the road like a sack of grain, and dropped him there, and didn't look at him.
I'd never cast 「Mass Heal」 at Blue. I'd hardly cast it at all, since the night of the tide. A healing hour is one person at a time, and a wall is too long for one circle. But a ring is exactly the shape of a circle.
I put both hands flat on the packed earth of Petronius's road, and poured.
Three splashes. The circle opened under all of us at once, wider than I'd ever opened anything, blue and bright, under boots and hooves and the dead bear Marika was still standing on. I saw it go out to the edge of the ring and stop there, exactly, as if it had been measured. Every keeper's head came round. One of the Crown's riders said something under her breath that might have been a prayer.
And all through the ring, the orange went out.
Not all of it, and not all the way. Blue 「Mass Heal」 heals the way a Green 「Heal」 does, no more. Marika's arm went yellow, then white. Wren's shoulder. Felix's ribs. The keeper's whole side. Four horses, one after another, lifting their heads. Gelio's scraped arm went clean and white, and I watched him look down at it, and then, for the first time since we'd taken him, he looked at a circle instead of at me.
But the rider with the torn belly only went from red to orange, and the horse on the road only from dying to badly hurt.
So I did those two by hand.
Blue 「Heal」 for the rider, three splashes, my palm flat on the opened mail, until her light was the plain white of somebody who was going to be sore for a week. Then I went to the horse and knelt in the road by its head and gave it Blue, three more, because the Mass had already been as good as a Green and a second Green wouldn't take it one step further, with its breath going in and out against my knee, until it rolled up onto its chest and then, very carefully, onto its feet.
Nine splashes in all. I'd started the fight at thirty-seven. I was nowhere near empty, and for one strange moment I felt almost guilty about that.
Cinna was standing in the middle of the road with his ropes on the ground at his feet and his hands empty at his sides. His light was dim now, the gray edge of a man who'd just spent most of his pitcher, and he was watching me.
Then he walked over to Cordelia's horse, and held up his wrists.
"Tie them again, Princess," he said. "I'd hate for you to get into trouble."
Cordelia looked down at him for a long moment. Then she got off her horse, picked up the cut rope, and tied his wrists again herself. Not tight.
Corvus came back through the ring last. He'd gone a little way into the trees after the burning one, with three keepers running behind him, and come back without it. He stopped by Felix, who was still sitting on the road, feeling his newly healed ribs with an expression of deep personal betrayal.
Corvus looked down at him. Then he looked at the four dead bears, one after another, and then out into the trees where the other two had gone.
"They don't hunt together," he said.
Four words. Fifteen.
Felix stopped feeling his ribs.
"Ironhides," he said slowly. "He's right. They don't. Not ever. They're like Hildegard; they each have their own patch, and they'd rather die than share it. In a tide, maybe, if something's leading them. Not on an ordinary afternoon. Not six."
I looked down the road. Straight as a rule, through the webs, through the core, on and on, packed earth and shoved banks and torn roots, cut through every territory in the forest in two weeks by a man who didn't care what was in the way.
Every border in the Gloamwood, cut in half.
"The road," said Cordelia. Two words, out loud. She was looking where I was looking.
We didn't stop in the core. Cordelia wouldn't hear of it. We rode on until the light under the trees went from evening to actual evening, and then to dark, and only then made camp, in a place where the road widened and the banks were low enough to see over, with three fires instead of one and the watch doubled.
Liesel sat down beside me at the smallest fire with her spear across her knees and a rag in her hand, and began cleaning the head of it. She'd put it into a bear's open mouth that afternoon. She cleaned it the way Hana folds bandages: thoroughly, without looking, as if her hands had decided to do it and she was only keeping them company.
"You talked the whole fight," she said.
"It's cheap now."
"I know. I heard every word." She turned the spearhead in the firelight. "Liesel, your right. Low. Now. Liesel, now." She said it more or less in my voice. "You said my name eleven times."
"You counted."
"It's catching."
She went on cleaning. The fire popped. Over at the next one, Marika was explaining to a ring of the Crown's riders exactly where you put a sword into an Ironhide Bear, with gestures, and the riders were listening as if she were reading them scripture.
"I liked it," Liesel said, after a while. "Hearing you. When I couldn't see you."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything, which with Liesel is usually the right answer.
"When this is over," she said, "I want to sit somewhere with you where nobody's bleeding, and nobody's counting anything."
"I'll still be counting."
"I know." She almost smiled. "I meant everybody else."
She put the rag down. Her hand was lying on her knee, palm up, the way it does when she isn't thinking about it. I looked at it for a long moment.
I'd asked her to marry me, on the inner wall, with a ring and a tassel I'd braided myself. But in the small things, she has always been the one who reached. Her hand finding mine. Her fingers on my wrist on the roof. She was the one who kissed me, that evening on the wall, with my ring still new on her finger. I don't think I'd ever once just reached over first. I hadn't noticed that until right then, by that fire, and once I'd noticed it I couldn't stop.
So I reached over and put two fingers on the inside of her wrist.
She went completely still.
I counted. It wasn't hard. It was very fast.
"Ninety-one," I said.
"That's fast," said Liesel, not quite steadily.
"It's yours."
Her own words, the ones she'd given me on the gatehouse roof, handed back. I watched her hear them. She went red to the collar, in the firelight, and then she laughed, very softly, the way you laugh when someone's caught you at something and you find you don't mind at all.
She didn't take her wrist away. She leaned over instead, and put her head down on my shoulder, and left it there.
After a while her breathing slowed. After a longer while, I realized she'd fallen asleep there, with her spear still across her knees and my fingers still on her wrist.
I didn't move. I counted her breaths instead. It seemed only fair.
It was past midnight when I saw them.
I was still sitting by the dead fire with Liesel asleep against me, and I'd been looking out over the low banks at the dark under the trees for no reason except that I couldn't stop looking at it now. The small lights were out there, a few, keeping still.
And beyond them, far off, deep in the trees on both sides of the road: holes.
Not coming toward us. Moving the other way. Back along the line of the road, toward the burned webs, toward the mid. Four. Then five. Then more than I could keep a count of in the dark between the trunks, big shapes cut out of the world, going steadily, the way water goes when somebody's broken the bank.
Back the way we'd come. Toward the edge of the forest. Toward the fields.
I reached for the candle two days behind me.
(Big Sis.)
(Here.)
She answered at once. She hadn't been asleep either.
(I heard,) said Naomi. (All of it. This afternoon.)
Of course she had. Every word I'd shouted in the fight had gone to all five of them. She'd stood in Greymark and listened to the whole thing, and never said one word back, because she knew I needed every one of mine.
(The road's broken the forest,) I said. (They're moving. Your way.)
A pause. A long one.
(Noted,) said Naomi. (Sleep. I'll stand in the hole.)