Naomi rode into Sanctara with an egg.
She'd carried it nine days. She took it out in the yard of the gray house before she'd even pulled off her gloves: brown, clean, wrapped in a handkerchief, from an inside pocket of her coat, against her chest, where a sword hilt can't knock it and a horse can't jolt it. She put it in my hand.
"From the gate," she said. "Sigrid kept it for you."
I turned it over. Not a crack.
"Nine days," I said.
"I said I'd carry it carefully."
Then her hand on my head, once, the way it always is. Brief, and heavy, and gone again before I could lean into it. She'd been in the saddle since before dawn and there was road dust in the creases of her cloak, and she looked at me the way she looks at the wall after a tide: counting what was still standing.
"You're thinner," said Hana, coming round her horse.
"I'm not."
"Did you eat?"
"Three helpings. Every night."
Hana didn't look at me. She looked past me, one step behind my left shoulder, where Pia was standing in the cold with her crossbow on her back and two blankets' worth of sleeping under an arch in the set of her shoulders.
"And you?" said Hana.
Pia blinked. I don't think anyone had asked her that since she left the shrine.
"Me, Lady Hana?"
"You."
"I..." Pia looked at me, as if I might know. "I ate."
"What?"
"Bread?"
Hana made a small sound, the kind she makes when the stew needs more salt, and went to the pack horse. She came back with a bundle tied in clean linen and put it in Pia's arms.
"For you," she said. "Open it inside. It's cold."
Pia opened it in the yard.
A hood of gray wool, thick and soft, the kind that comes down over your ears and buttons under your chin. And a pair of mittens, gray too, darned at the thumbs, big enough that Pia could have put both hands into one of them.
"These were—" Pia turned a mitten over. The darning was old. "Whose were these?"
"Our father's," said Hana. "The mittens. The hood's new."
Pia went very still.
"Lady Hana, I can't—"
"You can," said Liesel, from my left.
Pia looked at Liesel. Then she put the hood on, and buttoned it under her chin with fingers that weren't quite steady, and pulled on the mittens, which came halfway up her forearms. She stood there in the yard of the gray house looking like a very small, very serious owl.
"Thank you," she said. Her voice came out muffled by wool. "I'll write it down."
"Write down what you like to eat," said Hana. "I asked him to, and he didn't."
"You'd already left," I said. "There wasn't time."
"Then she'll do it."
Pia took her book out of her coat. She couldn't hold a pen in Father's mittens, so she took the right one off and held it under her arm, and wrote, with her tongue between her teeth, and tore the page out and gave it to Hana.
Hana read it. Her mouth did something complicated.
"Bread," she read. "Pears. Soup. Anything somebody else made."
"That's all," said Pia.
"Soup, then," said Hana, and folded the page into her own notebook, between two others, very carefully. "Tonight."
"NAOMI," said Marika, who'd been holding it in since the gate. "Did General—"
"He has the yard."
"Did he NOD?"
"At the bucket."
Marika let out a breath as if something heavy had been taken off her. "Good," she said. "GOOD."
The palace runner came before Naomi had her boots off.
A lady-in-waiting in crimson, slightly out of breath, which is something you almost never see in a lady-in-waiting. She curtseyed to Naomi, and to me, and, after a fractional pause, to Hana.
"Her Majesty will see Lord Fabian," she said, "and the Marchioness of Greymark, and Lady Hana. Now, if it pleases them."
I looked at Liesel.
Liesel didn't say told you. She didn't need to. She just went to get her spear.
The Queen's private rooms again: small, warm, full of books, the window looking down over the whole white city to the plain. Pia sat down outside the door, one step from the frame, in her new hood. The lady-in-waiting looked at her, and at the crossbow, and this time didn't close the door quite so firmly.
Felix and Ambrose were already inside.
Felix was in a chair by the fire with his sling off, which I suspected Mistress Salvia didn't know about, and his two knights behind him. Ambrose was in the other chair, reading. When we came in he marked his page with one finger and closed the book on it, which for Ambrose is standing up and bowing.
Cordelia stood by the window with her hands behind her back. She looked at Naomi, and Naomi looked at her, and something went between them that didn't need any words at all, which was lucky, because Cordelia never spends a word she doesn't have to.
The Queen was at her desk. She didn't get up.
"Marchioness. Lady Hana. You've ridden nine days, and the Crown is grateful." She folded her hands. "Lord Fabian. The Crown will hear you."
I'd had nine days to think about what to say. I'd had a speech. I'd practiced it on Liesel, who'd told me to cut it in half, and then in half again, and then to say only the true part.
So I said the true part.
"Your Majesty, I'm asking for Lord Felix and Lord Ambrose to come north with me."
The Queen waited.
"The bottles," I said. "Every one of them needs three of us. Lord Ambrose holds the water still. I pour. Lord Felix seals it, and he has to sing to do it, and nobody knows why. Without the seal the light's gone by supper. With it, corked, they've held for thirty days on the infirmary shelf, and we haven't found the end of it yet." I took a breath. "My hands stop when I'm empty. The bottles don't. If we make them on the road, there'll be a cart of them waiting when we reach the north. Every bottle is somebody I don't have to reach in time."
The Queen looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked at Felix.
"Lord Felix is Bellonia's envoy," she said. "Not the Crown's. The Crown can't send him anywhere."
Felix stood up. It was the first time I'd seen him stand up for anything without a joke ready.
"Then I'm asking, Your Majesty," he said. "For myself."
I'd said those words to Naomi, twice, and to Cordelia. He'd said them to Corvus in Fulmara. Now he said them to a queen who wasn't his mother, for a kingdom that wasn't his, and I don't think he noticed he'd done it.
The Queen noticed.
"Then the Crown will write to Queen Aurelia," she said, "that her envoy has gone north with Octavia's Saint, at his own request. She'll have the letter in a month. If she objects, she may write again."
"She won't object." Felix sat back down. "She'll want to know if I'm eating."
"Mothers usually do," said the Queen, and beside me, very quietly, Hana looked satisfied.
"Lord Ambrose."
Ambrose looked up.
"House Penhallow has been told."
Ambrose considered this from several sides. "Good," he said.
"Then the Crown consents." The Queen unfolded her hands and laid them flat on the desk. "That was the easy question."
I'd thought it was the only question.
"Now mine," said the Queen, and turned to Naomi.
"The First Princess will remain in Sanctara."
Nobody moved. At the window, Cordelia's back went straight as a spear shaft.
"Mother."
"The Crown, today, Cordelia." The Queen didn't raise her voice. She never does. "A queen I've never met writes in her own hand and asks for the one thing in Octavia that every hooded thing in three kingdoms seems to want. My daughter called it a trap. I agree with my daughter. I won't send the Crown's heir into it."
Cordelia said nothing. She looked at the ceiling. That's what Cordelia does when she has something to say and has decided not to.
"But I won't send him without someone he can't argue with, either." The Queen looked at Naomi. "Marchioness. Lady Hana. The Crown asks you to go north with him."
"Greymark," said Naomi.
"Is at peace on its border, for the first time in your lifetime. Bellonia's queen owes your brother a yes, and her son his life, and she knows it." The Queen tilted her head. "The only thing that will come out of the Gloamwood this winter is the Gloamwood. And I'm told your Dame Hildegard has been hoping all year for something else to try her gate."
Naomi was quiet. I watched her count it: the gate, the wall, the house. Sigrid, standing closest.
"She has," said Naomi. Then: "Yes."
"Yes," said Hana. "Somebody has to make sure he eats."
"So I'm told," said the Queen.
She stood, at last, and came round the desk.
"Six days," she said. "Septentria's queen writes that the snow is early in the passes this year. I'd rather you went through them than over them." She looked at Liesel. "And the girl outside my door with the crossbow?"
"Pia," said Liesel. "She's coming."
"Three steps?"
"One."
The Queen paused. It was very small. I don't think anyone but Liesel and I saw it.
"One," she said. "Then she's earned the snow."
On the way out, Cordelia stepped away from the window as Naomi passed. She didn't look at her. She looked at the door.
"Close," said Cordelia.
One word. She'd been holding it since her mother said "remain." I knew exactly what it meant, and so did Naomi: as close as I would have kept him. Closer.
"Noted," said Naomi.
There was soup.
Hana had found barley and onions and a ham bone in the gray house's kitchen, and by the time the lamps were lit the whole house smelled of it. She put the first bowl in front of Pia, not me. I noticed. So did Pia, who looked at the bowl as if it might be a test.
"Eat," said Hana.
Pia ate. She ate the whole bowl with the hood still on, buttoned under her chin, and Father's mittens laid side by side on the table next to her like two sleeping cats, and when Hana filled it again she didn't argue.
It was the henhouse, nearly. Naomi at the head of the table, where she always stands until she remembers to sit. Hana at the stove. Marika with her elbows on the table, which Naomi had given up on years ago. Liesel next to me. Wren at the door, the way she was in Greymark and the way she is everywhere.
And Pia, one step from my elbow, with her second bowl.
She finished it. She put down the spoon. She lined it up with the edge of the bowl, very straight, and I knew that look, because I'd seen it on the great stair in the shrine and on the cart on the Long Meadow. It's the look she gets before a very long sentence or a very sudden action.
"Saint," she said. "May I ask you something? In front of everyone?"
The kitchen went quiet.
"...Yes."
"The page." Pia put her hands flat on the table. "I'm not allowed to read it out loud. The headmistress said. So I won't. But you know which one I mean."
I knew. A Saint who kept candles, and they were not wax.
"I asked you once if you had candles," said Pia. "And Lady Liesel said four, in your room, and one of them smokes." She looked at Liesel, and back at me. "I've walked one step behind you since the meadow. I've watched you turn your head toward Lady Marika before she comes round a corner. I watched you know Lady Naomi was on the west road two days before she got here. You looked east every morning." Her voice was very steady. "You have candles, Saint."
Nobody moved.
I looked at Naomi. Naomi looked at Pia for a long time, the way she looks at a wall before she decides it will hold. At the hood. At the empty quiver hanging off the back of her chair. At the girl who'd held her shot in a passage at two in the morning until the spear fell, and jumped off a cart into the mud with no bolts left.
"Yes or no, Fabian," said Naomi. "Not more."
"Yes," I said.
Pia let out a breath she'd been holding, I think, since the great shrine.
"Then I want to be one," she said. "I said I'd be a very good candle. I still don't flicker."
I'd known it was coming. I'd known since the night she lay down under the arch for the first time. It didn't make it easier.
"I can't," I said. "They're full. Every place I've got."
She didn't look away. "When will there be another?"
"When I'm stronger. I don't know when."
"How long?"
"I don't know, Pia." I made myself say the rest. "A long time, maybe."
She nodded, once, as if she were writing it down without the book.
At the stove, Hana had stopped stirring. She turned round with the spoon still in her hand, and before she said anything to Pia, she looked at Naomi.
That's the rule. Whoever means to, tells Naomi first.
Naomi looked back at her. "Go on."
Hana put the spoon down. She came and sat on the bench across from Pia, so their faces were level.
"Pia," she said. "Each of his candles can light one more. Only one. I haven't lit mine." She folded her hands on the table. "It wouldn't be his. It would be mine. But it would be warm, and nothing could get into you that you didn't let in, and I'd feel you wherever you went. You're coming into the snow with us." Her voice was gentle, and it didn't leave any room. "I'd like you to have it."
Pia looked at her for a long time.
Then she looked down at the mittens on the table. She touched the darned thumb of one, very lightly, with one finger.
"Thank you, Lady Hana," she said. "No."
Hana didn't move.
"It's the best thing anyone's ever offered me," said Pia. "After the hood." She swallowed. "But I didn't follow the Saint out of the shrine to be somebody else's candle. Even yours. I'll wait for a place that's his."
"It may be a very long time," said Hana.
"I've read every page in the great shrine with a Saint on it." Pia almost smiled. "I'm very good at waiting."
Hana's eyes filled. She didn't wipe them. She reached across the table and buttoned the top button of Pia's hood, which had come undone, and sat back.
At the door, Wren hummed three notes. Slow ones. The ones that sound like a question.
Nobody answered it. I didn't know the answer either. A girl nothing held, walking one step behind me into a kingdom where something had walked through a locked door and found the person standing closest.
Liesel knew it too. She was looking at Pia the way she looks at a horse she's about to trust with something important.
"Then you walk where I can see you," said Liesel.
"One step," said Pia.
"One step."
Marika had been very quiet through all of it. You notice Marika being quiet the way you notice a bell that's stopped ringing: late, and all at once.
She stood up.
"Naomi," she said. "A word."
"I know," said Naomi.
"I haven't SAID anything."
"You've been not saying it since the Hollowcrown."
Marika's ears went pink, all the way to the tips. She glared at the soup pot as if it had told on her.
Naomi looked at me. "Fabian. Don't drain tonight."
"Twice in ten days," I said. "The pool's going to start complaining."
"Let it." She looked back at Marika. "Tomorrow. Full pitcher."
Marika opened her mouth, and shut it, and said, much more quietly than she says anything, "...Tomorrow."
Then she went out, fast, the way she leaves rooms she's lost, and we heard her boots on the stair and a door shut overhead.
I didn't have to ask who.
Neither did Liesel. Neither did Hana, who'd picked the spoon back up and was stirring the soup pot very slowly and smiling at it. Neither, I suspect, did Wren.
Pia looked round the table at all of us.
"Who?" she said.
Liesel reached over and took the pen out of her hand.