Her name was Linnea.
I'd known it since the first day. Hana had asked her at the gap in the barricade, and written it under the heading in her small round hand, and I'd read it there a hundred times since. I'd never once said it out loud.
I don't know why, exactly. I think I was afraid. I think I thought that if I said it every evening over that bench, with my hand on her side and the knot under it, it would wear into the shape of a sick woman's name. And I wanted it to still be hers when it was over.
It was over.
Hana found her that evening in the room Stellara had given her in the palace, a small warm room at the top of a stair, with a bed and a window and a fire, and the boy asleep across the foot of the bed with his boots on. I went with her. Hana had her notebook open and her pencil ready before she'd even sat down.
"Tell me again," said Hana. "So I write it right."
"Linnea," she said.
Hana wrote it. Slowly. Every letter, the way she does with names, as if each one were a stitch that had to hold.
Then she didn't write it on the page headed The first. She turned back, past the other list, past the forty-four names on it that were still there and always would be, to the front of the notebook. To her count. The list she'd kept since the morning of my blessing, of everyone I'd ever helped, page after page of it in her small round hand.
She wrote it at the bottom.
Linnea.
"That's where it goes," said Hana. "It always was. It just had to wait."
Linnea looked at the page for a long time. She couldn't read upside down; I could tell. But she looked at it anyway, at the shape of her own name at the bottom of a long, long list of other people's.
"How many?" she said.
Hana told her.
Linnea's eyes went very wide. Then she looked at me.
"You've done that many?"
"Hana counted," I said. "I only did them."
"He forgets them," said Hana. "That's why I write them down. So somebody remembers."
Linnea looked at her son, asleep at the foot of the bed. Then out of the window, north, where it was dark now, and where there was nothing anymore. No village. No mother. No line at the edge of the ice.
"Where do we go?" she said. Not to us, really. "Crossholm's empty. Everybody I— there's nobody."
"Stellara says you're to stay here," said Hana. "As long as you want. She said it in front of the whole tent." She closed the notebook. "And when you don't want to anymore, you'll go wherever you like, and he'll go with you, and you'll stand up the whole way."
Linnea laughed. A real one this time; not cracked, not small. It surprised her. She put her hand over her mouth.
"I keep doing that," she said, through her fingers. "Standing up. I keep getting up out of chairs for no reason. Just to see."
"Does it pull?" I said.
"No." She took her hand away. "It never pulls. I just like doing it."
On the way back down the stair, Hana stopped on the landing and opened the notebook again and looked at the bottom of the last page for a while.
"Fabian," she said. "That's the first one I've ever written that I didn't write the same day."
"I know."
"Twenty-three days late." She closed it. "I don't mind. I'd have waited longer."
I couldn't sleep that night, in a real bed, under painted stars. Some time before dawn I gave up and went up the switchback, and Liesel came with me without being asked, and so did Pia, one step behind.
I wanted to see it at first light. The hour they used to come.
The barricade was quiet. Rufa's two watchers were on it, and the marshal's soldiers, and the braziers were burning low. Beyond it the plateau lay gray and empty under the last of the stars, and out on the road, a long stone's throw away, two small shapes stood together where they'd stood for five days.
First light came up behind the mountains.
And Marta lay down.
I saw it under 「Eyes」 before I saw it with my own. The hole at the end of the road, the one that had stood facing south for five days and nights, simply went down. Not the way a person sits, or kneels. The way a coat falls off a peg. All at once, with nothing holding it up anymore.
The light beside it went down too. Vera, on her knees at the edge of the ice.
None of them had ever lain down. Not one. In all the days at the edge of the ice, through snow and dark and battle, I'd never seen a single one of the risen so much as sit.
"Liesel," I said.
She was already going.
She went down off the barricade and out along the road between the two gray walls, past the frozen black scars, as far as she'd gone on the morning she'd caught Vera, and then further. All the way out. Nobody stopped her. There was nobody out there anymore to stop anyone.
By the time I'd got down off the barricade myself, they were coming back. Vera was carrying Marta in her arms, the way you'd carry a child who'd fallen asleep somewhere she shouldn't have, and Liesel was walking beside her with one hand under Marta's head.
Marta's eyes were shut. Her face was quite peaceful. Her horns had caught in the edge of Vera's blanket, and Vera had tucked the blanket round them, carefully, the way you'd tuck in a child's ears against the cold.
"She's breathing," said Vera, before I could ask. Her voice was very steady. "Slow. But she's breathing. She just lay down. She'd been talking, a little, the way she does. Is he coming. And I said no. And she said then we'll wait, and then she lay down." She looked at me. "She won't wake up, Saint. I've tried."
Under 「Eyes」, Marta was what she'd always been since the line. A hole, plain and quiet, with nothing at the middle of it. No different. Except that it wasn't standing anymore.
I didn't open 「Discern」. I knew what it would say, near enough. I didn't want to hear it said over her.
Halvard had come up from his tent at the noise. He went down on one knee in the gap, slowly, and put his palm on the road, and was quiet a long time.
"She's stopped standing like them," he said at last.
"She's stopped waiting," said Pia, very small.
"No," said Vera. She shifted Marta a little higher in her arms. "She's waiting lying down. That's all."
Nobody argued with her.
"Where do you want her?" said Liesel.
Vera looked along the barricade, past the gap, to the old toll house at the top of the road. Its door stood open. There was nobody on the bench.
"There," said Vera. "Where she can hear the road."
We put her on the bench in the toll house, where Linnea had sat for twenty-three days. Vera folded her own blanket under Marta's head, and took off Marta's wet shoes, and set them side by side by the hearth to dry, toes to the fire, the way you'd do for someone who'd only come in from the cold for a while.
"Somebody has to watch her," said Naomi, in the doorway. Not unkindly. "We don't know what she is now."
"Mine," said Rufa, behind her.
That was all. Two of Rufa's women took the stool by the door, the way a guard had sat there for Linnea.
"I'll tend her," said Vera. She'd sat down on the floor beside the bench, with her back against it and Marta's hand in hers. "Every day. Wash her face. Keep the fire. Tell her about him." She didn't look up. "Somebody has to tell her about him. She liked hearing it."
Liesel stood in the doorway a moment longer, looking at the two of them.
"That's tending too," she said.
Then she came out and shut the door behind her, very gently, so as not to wake anyone.
The days after went the way days do after something like that. Slowly at first, and then all at once, and full of small things that had been waiting.
Halvard went to Crossholm. He took two carts and his two women and a spade, and Tam, still under the sheepskin coat on the road where he'd laid him, wrapped now in a proper shroud from the palace. He was gone three days. When he came back he didn't say much.
"By the shore road," he said, when I asked. "Where it comes round the point above the lake. He built that road." He looked at his hands. "He can lie by it."
Isak was going north. Stellara's riders had followed the line as far as the far end of the lake and lost it in the passes, where the snow had already closed over every track. Isak knew the passes. He'd been born in them.
"Somebody has to see where they went," he said, the morning he left. "I know the roads up there. I know which ones are roads and which ones only look like it."
"Ice the rocks," I said.
He looked at me for a moment. Then, for the first and only time I ever saw, Isak smiled.
"Always," he said.
His breath didn't smoke. He went up the shore road with four of the marshal's riders and didn't look back.
Felix's hand was fine. He spent most of a morning on the barricade proving it to anyone who'd watch, making tiny white sparks jump from one fingertip to the next, until Marika came along the top of the barricade and stood beside him with her arms folded.
"STOP showing off."
"I'm not showing off. I'm checking it works."
"You've checked it forty times."
"Forty-one," said Felix. "I count things now. Fabian taught me."
Marika looked at him for a long moment. Then she took his hand, the gray one, the one that wasn't gray anymore, and turned it over, and looked at the palm. Just looked. Her ears went the color of the scarf round his neck.
"Fine," she said, and let go, and walked off along the barricade, and didn't look back, and he watched her all the way to the end.
Ambrose checked the crate every morning.
It was still where Rufa's sentry had kept it since we'd nailed it shut on the road north: a long box of rough boards, with thirteen of the black fruit inside. Nobody had opened it. Nobody had touched it. Every morning Ambrose stood beside it for a while with his notebook and his eyes half shut, the way he does with a bottle, and wrote one word.
On the morning Isak left, I stood beside him and looked at it under 「Eyes」. Thirteen holes, through the boards. Each with that slow ragged edge, eating outward, very patiently. The boards round them had begun, very faintly, to go gray.
"Bigger," said Ambrose. He wrote it down.
"How much?"
"Little." He shut the notebook. "Every day."
On the bond, that last evening on the plateau, I told them everything. Linnea. Marta on the bench. Halvard's grave by the road. Isak going up into the passes. The crate.
They listened. They always do. When I'd finished nobody said anything for a while.
Then, very far away to the south, Cordelia's candle turned toward me, all of it, the way it does when she's decided where to spend her day.
(Home.)
Just that.
I didn't answer. I didn't know yet what the answer was. But I held it, the way you'd hold something somebody had put into your hands to carry for them, and I didn't put it down.
Stellara wrote the letters herself.
She could have had a clerk do it. She had a palace full of them. Instead she sat at the long table in her own study, in the gray cloak she'd worn up and down the switchback all winter, with a pen and a pot of ink and a stack of good paper, and wrote every one of them in her own hand, while the rest of us stood round the walls and the fire burned down.
"Read it to me," she said to Pia, when she'd finished the first. "Out loud. I want to hear what it sounds like to someone who wasn't here."
Pia went very pink. Then she took the page, and stood up straight, and read it in the clear careful voice she uses for the old books.
To Theodora, Queen of Octavia, at Sanctara. To Aurelia, Queen of Bellonia, at Fulmara. To every crown that holds a blessing, and to every crown that has ever written to mine.
The demons have moved.
This is not a rebellion in the north, as you may have heard. It is not a sickness. They came to my villages in hoods, two by two, and gave my people fruit, one at a time, to the hungry and the tired, and my people ate it, and became theirs.
Seven villages are empty. A hundred and seventeen of my people are walking north behind them, into the passes, and we do not know where. They wear horns now. Some of them used to be blessed, and the blessing is gone out of them, and what came in its place was the dark the old books speak of. You will think the old books exaggerate. They do not.
Twenty-three of my soldiers are dead on the road above Arctura. One of them was a boy of eighteen, blessed last spring, who carried our orders on the wind.
One woman has been brought back. Her name is Linnea. The Saint of Octavia brought her back with his own hands, after twenty-six nights, and he says that he can do it again, for anyone who has not carried the seed too long.
Look to your villages. Ask who has been given fruit. Ask it now.
Do not wait for spring.
Stellara, Queen of Septentria, at Arctura.
Pia lowered the page. Nobody said anything for a while.
"Is it true?" said Stellara, to me. "The last part. That you can do it again."
"While it's still growing," I said. "Not after. Not once it's ripening. And one at a time."
"One at a time," said Stellara. She turned her ring once on her finger. "Then they'll have to find them early. All of them. Every crown." She looked at the stack of paper. "That's what the letter's for."
She wrote all night. I stayed. So did Naomi, standing behind the table the way she stands behind every table, and Pia, who read every letter back aloud as it was finished, until her voice went hoarse and Hana brought her honey in hot water. One to Sanctara. One to Fulmara. One to every crown past them that had ever sent Septentria so much as a letter about wool. Pia lost count. I didn't. I count everything.
At dawn the riders went out.
I watched them from the window of Stellara's study, the one that looks down over the city to the south road and the north road both. Riders in blue going out of the south gate two by two, fast, with the sealed letters inside their coats. And two more, going out of the north gate, up toward the passes after Isak, to tell whatever lay beyond them that Septentria knew.
The demons had moved. In a month, everyone would know it.
Somewhere north of the lake, a hundred and seventeen people were walking through the snow toward whatever came next. In a toll house at the top of a road, a small round woman lay asleep on a bench with her shoes drying by the fire, and a tall one sat on the floor beside her holding her hand, telling her about bread with caraway in it. In a long box of rough boards, thirteen black fruit were growing, a little, every day.
And I stood at a queen's window with a skill in my blessing that could pull one seed at a time, and a dead boy's hat in my coat that I'd promised to carry home, and a word from Cordelia that I hadn't yet answered.
Home.
Not yet, I thought.
But soon.
Afterword
Thank you so much for reading One at a Time, Volume 9 of Fabian and His Three Sisters: The Hidden Saint of House Valcrest.
If Volume 8 was about the people nobody came for, Volume 9 was about what you do once you've come, and you still can't save them. I knew from the start this would be the hardest volume to write. A war against people who used to be neighbors. A barricade at the top of a road, and every morning the same faces coming up it, smiling. There was no version of this story where Fabian heals his way out. There was only the question of how long he would keep trying anyway.
So he tried. Thirteen times, on a bench in a toll house, beside a woman who refused to stand up. Holding. Two holding. No. Name. Song. Alone. Sun. Standing. Hand. Hers. Cold. Ambrose wrote every one of them down, and under every one, the same two words. I wanted the failures to be the story, not the thing standing in front of it. Elysia, it turns out, agreed with me. 「Tend」 isn't a reward for winning. It's a reward for not letting go of someone while you were losing.
It was Emil's volume, too, though he didn't get to see the end of it. I didn't plan to love him as much as I did. A boy in a ridiculous hat who had never sat with anyone his own age, who carried a whole barricade's orders on the wind and then, because nobody had asked him to, carried its goodnights as well. His last word was Hold, and he didn't get to finish it. The barricade finished his goodnight for him. I hope you'll forgive me.
And it was Vera's, and Marta's. I said at the end of Volume 8 that Vera was going to stay alive and answer for what she'd done. I didn't know then that the answer would be a little round woman in a brown shawl who already knew, and held her hand anyway. I know, love. Marta is asleep now, on a bench where she can hear the road, and Vera tends her every day. I don't know yet what Marta is, or whether she'll wake. Neither does Fabian. That's honest.
Hana keeps three lists now. Her count, with one new name at the bottom, written twenty-three days late. The other list, still forty-four long. And a page Fabian started on his own, in bad handwriting, for the ones who didn't come back. Every name on it is real to me.
Volume 9 ends with a queen writing to every crown in the world that the demons have moved. A hundred and seventeen people are walking north into the passes behind two figures in gray hoods. Thirteen fruit are growing in a nailed crate, and the boards around them have started to go gray. Fabian has a dead boy's hat in his coat, a skill that can pull one seed at a time, and a word from Cordelia he hasn't answered yet. All of it is waiting in Volume 10.
If you enjoyed this volume, I'd be truly grateful for your support. A comment, a rating, or adding the novel to your library helps the story find more readers, and it tells me you want to know what happens next. I read every comment, even when I can't reply to them all.
Thank you for holding the line with me. Say goodnight to someone tonight. I'll see you in Volume 10.
Bonus: Everyone at the Toll House Says Thank You
Pia: "Thank you all SO much for reading! I've started a new column."
Fabian: "What's it called?"
Pia: "Readers."
Liesel: "That's one thing it is."
Ambrose: "Result: yes."
Hana (on the bond): (Did everyone eat?)
Cordelia (on the bond): (Readers.)
Marika: "That's not even a SENTENCE, and it was her word for the DAY—"
Cordelia (on the bond): (Bonus.)
Felix: "It's YOUR scarf now."
Marika: "STOP saying that."
Felix: "Forty-two."
Marika: "You're COUNTING?"
Felix: "Fabian taught me."
Isak: (nods once)
Halvard: "Ground remembers."
Isak: "He means thank you."
Halvard: "I said what I meant."
Isak: "...Good."
Linnea: (stands up) "Thank you for reading." (sits down) "Sorry. I keep doing that."
The boy: "Is it over?"
Linnea: "Yes."
The boy: "Is Mama better?"
Linnea: "Yes."
Rufa: "Two of mine on the toll house. Still."
Vera: "...She said goodnight again."
Queen Stellara: "Letters for the author may be sent to Arctura. In a basket of bread, please."
Naomi: "Volume 10."
Fabian: "Is it going to be cold?"
Isak: "Ice the rocks."
Liesel: "Item fourteen."
Marika: "And before ANYONE asks, General STILL HAS THE YARD."
Naomi: "Noted."
(A long quiet. Then, very faint, from nowhere in particular, carried on a wind none of them can feel:)
"...Goodnight!"
Felix: "Goodnight, Emil."
Fabian: "Goodnight."
(He can't hear them. They say it anyway.)