Four men rode through Sanctara's lower gate on the ninth morning, and the whole city stopped to count us.
I knew, because I was counting them back.
Women in doorways. Women on ladders. A woman halfway through pegging out a sheet, who forgot the sheet entirely and let the wind take it down the street on its own. By the second market I'd reached sixty and given up, because the number wasn't going anywhere useful and my neck had started filing complaints.
In fairness to Sanctara, four was a lot. Most streets in Octavia go years without seeing four men at once. Most go years without seeing one.
There was me, which the city had more or less gotten used to. There was Ambrose, with a book open across his saddle, reading it, which nobody will ever get used to. There was Felix in black and bronze, grinning at everyone as if they'd all come out specially.
And there was Cinna.
Sanctara had heard about Cinna. You could tell, because the quiet moved with him. It went a few paces ahead of his horse and stayed a few paces behind, like weather he'd brought from home.
The Throne's Fire. The man who'd burned down Greymark's gate.
He waved at them.
"They're very polite," he said, pleased. "In Fulmara they'd have thrown something by now."
"In Greymark they did," Marika said over her shoulder. "At HIM."
"One turnip," said Felix. "Months ago. Some people hold grudges."
"Some people hold TURNIPS."
Ambrose turned a page. "Many," he said. It could have been about the turnips or the crowd. With Ambrose you didn't always find out.
Cordelia rode at the head of it all with her twelve riders and hadn't said a word since the gate. Naomi rode beside her, watching the rooftops instead of the crowd, because the crowd was only women staring, and the rooftops were where somebody would be if somebody wanted to be. Hana rode behind me, close enough to fix my collar if it misbehaved. Liesel was on my left and Wren on my right, the way they'd been since the road left Greymark.
All five candles within a bowshot. I'd stopped noticing how strange that was. It had taken me about half a day.
The pitcher had stopped noticing too. With all five of them that close, it filled so fast I could almost hear it. On the last night of the road, when I'd emptied it into myself in the tent the way I used to before the Gloamwood, my head had knocked once and gone quiet, and I'd counted.
Thirty-eight.
The first new splash since before the forest. I'd lain there in the dark feeling ridiculously pleased about one splash.
We were here because of a letter.
It had come to Greymark three days after we got home, under the Queen's crimson seal, and Naomi read it out at supper in the voice she uses for orders.
"'The Crown will receive Bellonia's envoy and Bellonia's treaty in Sanctara. The Marchioness of Greymark, who holds the border it concerns, will attend.'" She folded it. "Noted."
"I'm going too," said Hana at once.
"Why?"
"Someone has to make sure he eats."
"I'm also going," said Marika.
Naomi looked at her.
"I'm the vanguard," said Marika. "I go where the front is."
"It's a treaty. There isn't a front."
"Then I'll FIND one."
So Greymark went back into the hands of Dame Hildegard and Captain Sirius and Dame Constance, and the new gate shut behind us with a sound Hildegard called lovely. General saw us off from the top of the well cover, where he is still not allowed to be, with an expression Marika said was betrayal. I thought it was a goat chewing. Marika said that's what betrayal looks like on a goat.
"You're counting," said Liesel, beside me.
"I'm not."
"Your lips are moving."
"That's not counting. That's praying."
"For what?"
"Fewer windows."
She laughed, and three women on a balcony stopped looking at me and looked at her instead. For a princess, she's very easy to look at when she laughs. I'm in a position to know. I've been doing it for months.
The gray house in the second ring had a navy banner over its door, a wall of its own, and a kitchen Hana had missed out loud for the last three days of the road.
She went straight to it. She didn't even take off her gloves.
Cordelia didn't come in. She stopped her horse at the gate, looked at Felix and Cinna, and said, "Palace. Tonight. Audience in the morning." Envoys were the Crown's guests, and the Crown liked its guests where it could see them.
"After supper," said Felix.
Cordelia looked at him.
"I've been an envoy for nearly three weeks," Felix said, "and in nearly three weeks I've eaten better than any envoy in history. I'm not stopping on the last night. It would be bad for Bellonia."
Cordelia studied the sky over the gatepost for some time.
"After supper," she said.
Felix had written his speech on the road. He'd written it on the backs of three maps and on the inside cover of Ambrose's book, which Ambrose had allowed without looking up, and when the plates were cleared he stood up at Hana's table and read it to us.
"'Most gracious and exalted Majesty,'" he began. "'Queen of Octavia, Light of the Eight, Keeper of—'"
"Stop," said Liesel.
"I haven't started."
"You have. Mother stopped listening at 'exalted.'"
"It's a very good word."
"It's a word people use when they want something. She can hear them wanting it from the door." Liesel put her elbows on the table. "Say true things. Short ones. She'll listen to those all day."
"I'm not good at short."
"We KNOW," said Marika.
Felix looked down at the map in his hand. A spark jumped off his knuckle onto the paper, and Hana reached over and pinched it out without stopping eating.
Then another. Then two at once, small and blue, crackling up his wrist.
"Nervous?" I said.
"Excited," said Felix.
That was the lie I knew best. He'd told it to me the day we met, with his hand still buzzing in mine.
"She's going to ask what Bellonia wants," he said. "In front of everybody. And I don't know what Bellonia wants. I know what my mother wants. My mother wants breakfast, and a chair by the window. I can't say that to a throne."
"Why not?" said Naomi.
He opened his mouth. He shut it again.
Another spark. The hair on my arms stood up.
Marika put down her spoon, got up, walked round the table, took hold of Felix's collar in both fists and yanked it straight. Hard enough to rock him on his heels.
"Stop crackling," she said. "My hair's standing up."
Then she went back round the table, sat down, picked up her spoon and went on eating as if nothing had happened.
Felix stood there with his collar straight.
He'd stopped sparking.
I looked at his hands. Nothing. Not a snap. I've watched that spark for months, in classrooms and in bottles and on a wall at night, and I'd only ever seen it go steady one way: when he sang the miller's daughters.
Huh.
I counted it, because I count everything, and put it with the other things I didn't understand. Then I decided Marika had startled it out of him. Marika startles most things. Horses. Hens. Me, about once a day.
"Short," said Felix slowly. "True."
"Short," said Liesel.
"True," said Hana, and pushed the bread across to him. "And eat something first. You'll do it worse hungry."
He ate something first.
When Cordelia came back for him, he'd fed all three maps to the kitchen fire. He kept the book cover. Ambrose examined it, with Felix's speech crossed out all over the inside, and said, "Improvement."
The throne hall hadn't changed since the last time I'd stood in it, which was a comfort, because nearly everything else had.
The same floor like still water. The same crimson banners with the same lioness on them, all the way down the hall. The white stone throne at the end of it, and the Queen on the throne, in crimson and gold, with her slim crown on and her hands resting on the arms of the chair exactly where somebody might have measured them to go.
And the court. All of it, by the look of things. Heads of houses and their daughters in rows down both sides, and two or three young lords among them, each with his escorts at his shoulders.
They looked at me first. That was new. The last time I'd stood here, they'd looked at Liesel first and at me second, and thought about Green. Now they looked at me and thought about Blue, and you could watch them doing the sum.
Then the herald struck her staff on the floor and said, "Lord Felix Aquilan, envoy of Her Majesty the Queen of Bellonia. And Cinna, the Throne's Fire, who carries Bellonia's treaty," and nobody looked at me again.
Felix walked down the hall. Cinna walked a pace behind him and to the left, with a flat leather case under one arm, smiling pleasantly at the lionesses.
Under 「Eyes of Elysia」 the hall was a field of white. A few yellows, for colds and bad knees, and one old woman near the front who needed to sit down and wasn't going to. Felix's light was white all the way through.
I'd noticed it on the road. The thread of yellow that had sat in his light since the day I met him, the one that never moved when he laughed, was gone. Somewhere between Fulmara and the forest it had just stopped being there. I hadn't said anything. Some things you let a person have without making them talk about it.
Marika, on the bond: (If he trips, I'm laughing.)
(Quiet.) That was Naomi.
(I'm only SAYING.)
(Say it quieter.)
Half a drop a word. I let them have it. It was cheap now, and Felix didn't trip.
He stopped where the herald pointed and bowed, Bellonia's way, from the waist with one hand flat on his chest. Then he straightened up, and I watched him look at the Queen and decide.
"Your Majesty," he said. "My mother is awake."
The hall went very still.
"She asked me to say thank you. So I'm saying it." He took a breath. "To your Crown, for sending its Saint into Bellonia when it didn't have to. To your daughter, for drinking first." Several of the court looked at Cordelia. Cordelia looked at nothing at all. "And to him."
He didn't look back at me. I was grateful. A few hundred people did it for him.
"She says Bellonia owes a debt it can't pay," said Felix. "She didn't tell me what to do about that. I think she's still deciding."
Somebody near the front made a small sound that might have been a laugh and turned it into a cough.
"And she sent the treaty with the Throne's Fire," Felix said, "because she says the treaty needs to be carried by someone you're slightly afraid of."
He stepped aside.
Cinna came forward and bowed. Not to the floor. To exactly the depth, I thought, of a man who belonged to another throne and wanted this one to know he knew it, politely. Then he held out the case.
The hall had been still before. Now it was the kind of quiet where you can hear the banners.
The Queen looked at Cinna for a long moment.
"Slightly," she said, "is exactly right."
Cinna's smile widened by about a hair. "My queen will be glad to hear it, Majesty."
The herald carried the case up the steps. The Queen opened it and drew out the treaty, one heavy sheet with two seals at the foot, the bronze eagle and the crowned star, and looked at the lower one.
"The First Princess signed this in Fulmara," she said.
"Yes, Majesty," said Cordelia.
"Then the Crown has read it."
She held out her hand. Someone put a pen in it. And she signed, there, in front of everybody, without reading a single line, and the whisper that went round the hall sounded like a great many people changing their minds at once.
"The Crown is at peace with Bellonia," said the Queen. "The Crown thanks the Queen of Bellonia, her son, and the Throne's Fire." She paused, exactly long enough. "In that order."
Cinna bowed again, lower this time. I'm almost sure he was laughing.
Beside me, Liesel breathed out, very slowly, through her nose.
"She was always going to sign it," she murmured. "She signed it in front of them so they'd know she trusts Cordelia."
"Is that a true thing?"
"It's the truest thing she's done all year."
Then the Queen's eyes moved along the front row, the way they do when she's counting something of her own, and stopped on Liesel.
On Liesel's hair, to be exact.
On the little bronze sprig of hedge-ivy above her ear, which I'd pinned there myself in a metalworkers' lane in Fulmara, in three tries, and which she hadn't taken out since except to sleep.
The Queen looked at it for exactly one count.
Liesel went red to the collar. She didn't touch the pin. She touched the pocket over her heart instead, where the old gold one lived now, and stood up very straight.
Something happened at the corner of the Queen's mouth that will never be on any record. Then she was the Crown again.
The audience went on for a while after that, the way audiences do. Envoys were thanked. Heads of houses made remarks. Somebody asked where the Throne's Fire was to be lodged, and the Queen said "In the palace," in a voice that closed the subject and locked it.
Then she lifted one hand, and the herald struck the floor.
"The Marchioness of Greymark," said the Queen. "Her sisters. Her brother. The First Princess. The Second Princess. Lord Felix." She folded her hands. "Will remain."
The court went out slowly, the way people leave a room they'd very much like to stay in. Cinna went with them, between two of Cordelia's riders, and gave Felix a little wave over his shoulder.
"Behave, little eagle," he said.
"I always behave."
"That's what worries me."
Ambrose wasn't there. He'd gone up to the Academy at dawn with his two escorts to "see about the infirmary," which I suspected meant Mistress Salvia's cots, and which Mistress Salvia would suspect too. Wren stayed. Nobody had said her name. Nobody had said it in Greymark's war room either, and she'd stayed there too. She hummed three notes, very low, the busy ones, and put her back to the door.
The great doors shut. The banners stopped moving.
The Queen came down the steps of the throne. I'd never seen her do that in this hall. She didn't sit anywhere. She looked at each of us, one at a time, in an order I couldn't follow, which with her usually means there is one.
"Lady Severine," she said.
A side door I hadn't noticed opened, and Lady Severine came through it. Dark gray gown buttoned to the throat. Silver spectacles. She didn't hurry. She arrived anyway.
She was carrying a small bundle, five letters and a thin book, tied together with a ribbon the gray of a dove.
I knew that gray. The first morning I ever sat in her classroom, Lady Amara had been wearing a gown that exact color.
"When Lady Amara's rooms were cleared after the garden," said the Queen, "Lady Severine brought me everything that was in her desk. Most of it was nothing. Chalk. A broken comb."
Lady Severine pushed her spectacles up with one finger.
"These were in the drawer, together," said the Queen. "Five letters, from the mothers of five lords. Polite ones. And her lesson book, which she kept with them. I read it all months ago and put it away, because a woman's grief is her own, even after she's dead."
She took the bundle from Lady Severine and held it out. Not to Naomi. Not to Cordelia.
To me.
"Last week," said the Queen, "I read it all again. The letters first, Lord Fabian. Then the last pages of the book."
I counted as I took them. Five letters. One book. They weighed almost nothing.
I untied the ribbon.