They laid the six of them out in a row by the stream, under their own cloaks, when the light was good enough to see by.
Nobody told them to. The battle class just did it. Sixty girls who'd been told to run toward Dame Valeria, and had, came back across the wet ground in twos and threes in the gray morning and carried them, very carefully, the way you carry something that can't be mended. Four soldiers in crimson tabards. Two girls in the battle class's gray. They put them down side by side in the long grass by Hedda's door, and straightened the cloaks, and stood back, and didn't seem to know what to do after that.
I went and stood at the end of the row.
I'd seen every one of their lights go out. I'd counted them as they went. And I didn't know a single one of their names.
Cordelia came and stood beside me. She'd been on her feet all night, at the ditch, at the stream end, wherever the line was thinnest. There was blood on her that wasn't hers, and mud to the knee, and her face was the same as always, which is to say it told you nothing at all unless you knew where to look. I knew where to look now. I'd been looking at that face for months.
She looked down the row of her soldiers.
"Dagny," she said. "Solveig. Berit. Maren."
Four words. She'd chosen every one of them, and every one of them was a name.
Dame Valeria came and stood on my other side. She didn't look at the cloaks. She'd already looked. She looked at the mountain instead, its broken crown gone pale gold in the first of the sun.
"Elinor," she said. "Second year. Beatrix. Second year." A pause. "Beatrix was always half a step slow to the left. I told her so every week for a year."
She didn't say anything else. She didn't need to.
I took Hana's little notebook out of my coat. The page with Tacita at the top was there, and the long space under it, still empty. I turned to the next clean page and wrote them down, one under another. Dagny. Solveig. Berit. Maren. Elinor. Beatrix. I wrote them very carefully, the way Hana writes things that matter, and when I'd finished I didn't close the book for a while.
Hedda found a spade somewhere. I don't know where. She went out past the end of the row, to the bank of the empty stream, and began to dig.
Not graves. They'd be going home on the carts to Sanctara, all six of them, to their own people; Cordelia had said so, in one word, which was "Home." Hedda wasn't digging for them. She was digging six small holes, each about the size of a loaf, in a line along the stream bank, where the water would come back.
Then she went up the meadow alone, all the way to the line of white stones under the trees, and came back down with one in her arms. A small one. Then another.
Nobody stopped her. After the third, Marika went up with her, and carried two at once, and didn't say anything at all, which for Marika is the loudest thing she knows how to do.
"They never crossed," said Hedda, when the sixth stone was set in its hole by the stream. Her face was wet. "Thirty autumns. Never once. I'll set a new line up there, before the snow. A straighter one." She looked down at the six small stones. "These stay here."
Dame Valeria caught me on the way back up the meadow.
She didn't say anything at first. She just fell into step beside me, on the side where Wren usually walks, and Wren, for once, let her. We walked like that for about twenty paces.
"The warden," said Dame Valeria. "You knew to ask her."
"Somebody should have."
"That's not an answer, my lord."
"It's the only one I've got that's true."
She walked a few more paces.
"And the dark," she said. "You called every pair of cats on that ditch. In the dark. Before they came up out of the water."
I could feel Liesel, just behind me, very still. I could feel Pia, somewhere off to the left, drawing in a breath to shout something about the Book.
"Every Saint can see in the dark," I said.
Dame Valeria stopped. I stopped with her. She looked at me for a long moment, once, very fast, the way she reads a scene. And then, I think, she decided to ask anyway, later, at a time of her own choosing, and put the question down somewhere she'd be sure to find it again.
"Hm," said Dame Valeria, and walked on.
Pia was waiting for me at the top of the slope.
She'd washed her face in the stream, or tried to. She'd found her braid's ribbon again. Her crossbow was across her back with nothing at all in the quiver, and her hands, which I'd healed in the night, were folded in front of her, and she was standing, very exactly, at the edge of where I'd be when I got there.
Not three steps. Not two and a half. She was standing where she'd stood in the tide, at my left shoulder, and she was waiting to be sent back.
Liesel came up the slope behind me and looked at her.
She looked at her for a long time. At the empty quiver. At the healed hands. At the place on the cart where she'd been, and the place in the mud by my side where she'd jumped down to, with no bolts left and a cat the size of a pony in front of her.
"One," said Liesel.
Pia's eyes went very wide.
"...Step?"
"Don't push it."
Pia didn't say anything at all. She just bowed, all the way down, so low the end of her braid touched the wet grass. Then she took one step back, exactly one, and stood there, and I'm almost certain I heard her say Saint very quietly, to herself, as if she'd been holding it in all night.
It took four days to ride home instead of three. Six carts go slower than horses, and nobody wanted to hurry them.
Felix rode in one of the carts. Not with the six; the one in front, on a bed of everybody's spare blankets, because the venom had gone and the wound had closed, white, under Hana's hands, but he'd held his dome all night and there's no circle for that, and he'd gone gray every time he tried to sit a horse. He hated it. He said so, at length, in three languages, one of which I'm fairly sure he was making up.
Marika rode beside the cart.
Not in front of me, where Naomi had told her to ride. Beside the cart, on the left, at the tail of it, where she could see him. Liesel noticed. Wren noticed. Cordelia noticed, and said nothing, which is Cordelia's way of saying a great deal. Nobody told her to go back to the front.
For the first day she didn't say anything to him at all. That's how I knew how bad it was. Marika not talking is like the Hollowcrown without birds.
On the second day she threw a snail at him. One of his own. From the jar. It hit him on the forehead and fell in his lap, and he looked at it, and then at her, and ate it, and she looked away very fast.
On the third evening we camped in a farmer's field below the long hill road, and I was sitting by the fire with my back against a cartwheel, half asleep, when I heard them on the other side of the cart. I didn't mean to listen. It's hard not to, when it's Marika, and she's using a voice you've never heard her use.
Quiet.
"I couldn't move," Marika said.
A pause. Then Felix, just as quietly: "I know."
"My sword was in the cat. My boot was on it. I saw it coming and I knew, and I couldn't move."
"I know."
"I've never not been able to move. Not once. Not on any wall." Her voice did something. "I hated it."
"I know."
There was a long silence. The fire popped. Somewhere up the field, Pia was reading aloud to Wren, who was not listening, from a book about the Saint of the Long Road and the stars.
"Thank you," said Marika.
Two words, with no capitals anywhere in them. I don't think I'd ever heard her say thank you to anybody who wasn't Hana.
On the other side of the cart, Felix didn't say anything for a while.
Then: "You said that very quietly."
"Shut UP."
And there were the capitals. I heard him laugh, and wince, and laugh anyway, and I heard her say "Don't LAUGH, you'll fall over," and then something about eating properly, and then, very low, something else I didn't hear and wasn't meant to.
I got up quietly, and went round the fire the other way, and sat down next to Liesel instead.
"What?" she said, looking at my face.
"Nothing."
She looked at me a moment longer. Then past me, at the cart, and the two shapes on the far side of it in the firelight, close together. And she didn't say anything at all. But she smiled, very slightly, at the fire. And under the blanket her hand found mine.
I thought about a spark that only ever went steady when he sang. About a window across a passage that had shut, very quietly, on the twelfth verse. About a woman who'd taken a jar of snails and called it supplies.
The middle one, I thought. Of three.
And this time I didn't explain it away.
We came into Sanctara on the fourth afternoon. The carts went one way, toward the shrine at the top of the city, where the six would be laid out and somebody would light candles for them who wasn't a Saint, because the rite for a Saint isn't the rite for anybody else. The battle class went the other way, up to the Academy, in a long silent line. Pia went with them, one step behind the last cart until it turned off, and then ran to catch us up.
Cordelia went to the palace. And she took me with her.
Liesel came, and Wren, and Marika, who had looked at Felix's cart going up the hill toward the Academy for a long time and then turned her horse and followed me without being told. Pia got as far as the door of the Queen's private rooms, where a lady-in-waiting looked at her crossbow and closed the door in her face, very politely. I heard her sit down outside it. Exactly one step from the frame, I'd guess.
The Queen's private rooms aren't like the throne hall. They're small, and warm, and full of books, and there's a window that looks down over the whole of the white city to the plain beyond. She was standing at it when we came in. She didn't turn round at once.
"Six," said the Queen.
So she'd heard. Of course she had. A rider would have gone ahead of the carts on the first morning. She always knows about the steps.
"Six," said Cordelia.
Then Cordelia gave her report, and I learned something about my future sister-in-law that I hadn't known in all the months I'd known her. When she has to, Cordelia can talk. She stood in front of her mother with her hands behind her back and mud still dried on her boots and gave the whole of it, from the white stones to the gray morning, in short plain sentences with nothing wasted, the way a good soldier gives a report. The meadow. The warden. The ditch. Four columns, in order. The roof. The stream. The cat, inside. The adder. The names.
She didn't tell her mother how Liesel had known where to put her spear. She didn't tell her how I'd called the dark. She came to the end of the part she could tell, and stopped, and looked at me.
The Queen turned round from the window.
"Lord Fabian," she said.
So I told her the rest.
I told her about 「Discern」, the new line that had appeared under it in the great shrine, and what it had said with my hand on a girl's knee on a stair in her own Academy, and with my hand on an old woman's on the Hollowcrown. A demon's touch. I'd told her about my eyes in the throne hall; I told her now what they'd learned to do, in the middle of a tide, when Hana's count went over a number. The edges. The rims of the dark, smooth all the way round on every ordinary monster on that mountain, and worn through on the elites, in four places and in five, exactly where a hand had rested. The same shape, the same patience, as the worn places in Queen Aurelia's light, in a high room in Fulmara.
"The same hand," said the Queen.
"The same kind of hand. I can't tell you it's the same one." I swallowed. "But I saw it. At the end. When the cat and the adder were dead."
She went very still.
"It came down to the white stones," I said. "To see. It stood there and looked at me. And with the new sight, everything that's ever had light in it, even the monsters, even the elites, has an edge round it, where the light used to be. Something left behind."
"And it?"
"Nothing," I said. "No edge. No rim. It was a hole in the shape of a person, standing up, and round the edge of it there was nothing at all. As if there had never been any light there to take."
Nobody said anything. Through the window, very far below, a bell somewhere in the lower city was ringing the hour.
"It turned round," I said. "And walked back into the trees. And everything that was left went with it. In order." I made myself say the last part. "Two of the four are still alive. The big Stonehorn, the one with the ring of horns. It put one foot in Ambrose's ditch and took it out again and led them all away. It learned. And the bat. the one that came at Benedict's roof from the air, over and over, all night." I looked at the Queen. "Both of them went back up the mountain with it. Both of them have seen everything we did. And next time, they'll know."
The Queen looked at me for a long time.
Then she looked at Cordelia, and at Liesel, and at Marika, standing by the door with her arms folded and her mouth shut, which I don't think the Queen had ever seen before either.
"The Crown," she said at last, "will send to the Hollowcrown. Soldiers, and a keeper, and someone who knows how to make a ditch. Lord Ambrose will be insufferable."
"Ambrose is never insufferable," said Liesel. "He just says Ditches."
"That," said the Queen, "is what I meant."
It wasn't a joke, quite. But it was the nearest thing to one anybody had made since the bats came out, and something in the room loosened, very slightly, the way a held breath does when it finally goes.
Then the Queen went to her desk, and took a letter out of the drawer, and the room tightened again.
It was a long letter, on heavy pale paper, with a seal I'd never seen at the bottom of it: seven small stars in a ring, silver on blue. It had been opened and folded and opened again, many times, by the look of the creases.
"It came two days after you left for the Hollowcrown," said the Queen. "From Septentria. In her own hand this time, not her chancellor's."
She didn't read it out. She did what she'd done in the throne hall with the first one: told us what was in it, the way she tells you anything she's read more than twice.
"Septentria has no Saint," she said. "It hasn't had one but Albin in forty years. Their shrine has nobody to light his candle; I've written to them that ours was lit, by ours, and it seems that's been talked about in their capital a good deal more than I expected." She set the letter down on the desk, flat, under her hand. "There is sickness in their north this autumn. There always is. Albin used to ride out to it every year. This year there's nobody to ride."
I thought about a man of thirty-one riding north into the snow every autumn for fourteen years, to sickness, with two women at his shoulders. One of them since he was twelve.
"And the escort," said the Queen.
I looked up.
"She is still in a cell under their palace. She still smiles. She still hasn't said anything to anyone." The Queen paused. "Or she hadn't. Their queen writes that a month ago she began to speak. One word. Over and over, at night, to the wall."
The room was very quiet.
"What word?" said Liesel.
"Saint."
Nobody moved.
It could have meant Albin. It almost certainly meant Albin. A woman who'd stood at a man's shoulder for nineteen years and then killed him, in his own chapel, at his prayers, alone in the dark with nothing to say to anybody: of course she'd say his name. Or what he was. Of course she would.
I didn't believe it for a moment. And from the look on the Queen's face, neither did she.
"Their queen asks," said the Queen of Octavia, very precisely, "whether Octavia will lend Septentria its Saint. For a season. Through the winter. To ride north to the sickness, the way Albin did. And to see the woman in the cell." She lifted her hand from the letter. "That is the request. In those words. Lend us your Saint."
Cordelia said, "Trap."
"Very possibly," said the Queen.
"It knew the Academy," I said. "It knew the Hollowcrown. It knew where we'd put the tents before we did." I looked at the letter. "If it wants me in Septentria, it's had a month to get ready."
"Yes."
"And there's still sickness in the north."
"Yes."
"And a woman in a cell who's been touched by something, and nobody in that whole kingdom can tell. And nobody's ever going to ask her anything." I could hear my own voice going steady, the way it does in the middle of a cast. "Not her name. Not anything. They'll just keep her there, smiling, till she stops."
The Queen didn't say anything to that. She looked at me the way she'd looked at Liesel's hairpin in the throne hall. For one count. Exactly.
"The Crown could order you, Lord Fabian," she said. "It won't." She folded her hands. "I'm asking."
I looked round the room.
At Liesel, who was looking back at me already, and had been since the word Saint, and whose face said she'd be at my left shoulder in the snow or anywhere else and I could save my breath. At Wren by the door, who hummed, very low, three notes, the busy ones. At Marika, who had her arms folded and her chin up and was very obviously thinking about a cart going up a hill to the Academy and a shoulder that hadn't forgotten an adder, and who said, without unfolding her arms, "Front." At Cordelia, who had already turned her head toward the window, toward the north, the way she turns toward wherever the line is going to be.
"Naomi," I said.
"I wrote to the Marchioness of Greymark this morning," said the Queen.
Of course she had.
I took Hana's little notebook out of my coat and opened it to the page with Tacita at the top. To the long space underneath, that I'd left on the night she told me her name, by the smoky candle, for a girl in a cell in Septentria whose name nobody had written down.
I looked at it for a long moment.
Then I closed the book and put it back in my coat, over my heart, where the candles are.
"Yes," I said. "I'll go."
I didn't say the rest out loud. I didn't need to. Liesel heard it anyway; I watched her hear it.
And I'm going to ask her name.
Afterword
Thank you so much for reading Nobody Asked, Volume 7 of Fabian and His Three Sisters: The Hidden Saint of House Valcrest.
If Volume 6 was about asking the right person, Volume 7 was about asking at all. Fabian has said May I? before he put his hands on anyone since the very first chapter. In this volume, the thing in the black hood showed us what happens to the people nobody asks. A teacher who wrote it down in the back of her lesson book because nobody would ask her. An escort who'd stood at a young lord's shoulder since he was twelve and never once heard her own name in his mouth. An old woman who'd kept a meadow for thirty autumns. It asked every one of them their name first. And then a young man who once burned his escort in a dining hall stood in a passage at two in the morning, with fire in his hands, and put it out, and asked.
Elysia answered. Two sentences, after five hundred years, to a boy kneeling by a candle for a Saint he never met. I've been waiting to write that since Chapter 2.
This was Pia's volume, three steps at a time, then two and a half, then one. And it was Marika's, though she'll tell you it was tactics. A chair carried across a city. A verse she stopped throwing things at. A jar of snails she called supplies. A foot moved a hand's width to make room. And then the one moment in her whole life when she couldn't move, and somebody did.
It was also the volume where six people Fabian couldn't reach went home on carts. Dagny, Solveig, Berit, Maren, Elinor and Beatrix. He wrote their names down in Hana's notebook. So did I.
Volume 7 ends with a ditch that held and a roof that held, nearly, and everyone who could come home coming home. But an elite that learned went back up the Hollowcrown, and the bat that came at the roof all night went with it. Something with no edge at all walked back into the pines. Marika's one place is still empty. And under a palace in the snow, a woman who hasn't been asked anything in a very long time has started saying one word at night, to the wall. All of it is waiting in Volume 8.
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 camping on the Long Meadow with me. Bring a coat. I'll see you in the snow in Volume 8.
Bonus: Everyone Off the Long Meadow Says Thank You
Pia: "Thank you all SO much for reading! I wrote everything down. The Book was RIGHT."
Fabian: "The Book was very nearly right."
Pia: "I'm writing that down too."
Liesel: "One."
Pia: "...I know. I'm not pushing it."
Marika: "For the RECORD, the snails were SUPPLIES."
Felix: "Obviously."
Marika: "STOP AGREEING WITH ME."
Hana (on the bond): (Did everyone eat?)
Naomi (on the bond): (Noted.)
Cassian: "Valcrest. Match."
Dame Valeria: "No."
Tacita: (laughs, very small)
Cassian: "...Adequate."
Ambrose: "Ditches."
Benedict: "Roof held."
Hedda: "Next autumn, the bottom ground. Somebody asked me."
Cordelia: "Close."
Marika: "That's her word for the DAY, and she's using it on a MEADOW—"
Cordelia: "Three."
Wren: (hums three notes, the fond ones)
Pia: "She LIKES me."
Wren: "No."
Naomi: "Volume 8."
Fabian: "Is it cold in Septentria?"
Liesel: "Item twelve."
Marika: "And before anyone asks, GENERAL IS FINE. He nodded at a bucket. He RESPECTS it."
Naomi: "Noted."