The great shrine sits at the very top of Sanctara, so to reach it you have to climb the whole city.
We started before first bell. Liesel on my left, Wren on my right. Both of them, as instructed. The streets were still blue with early shade, the bakers were the only other people awake, and every one of them stopped kneading to watch us go up.
I'd seen the dome from everywhere in Sanctara. You can't not see it. It sits on the highest hill as if the city put it there to keep the sky from coming down. Up close it was bigger than I'd thought, and plainer. White stone. Eight tall arches round the bottom. And over them all, that smooth white curve with nothing on it, not a carving, not a crest. Just the shape, as if the shape were enough.
First bell rang as we came through the last gate. Inside the arches it was so loud I felt it in my teeth.
Then it stopped, and somewhere above us, in the hush it left, somebody said, "Is that him?"
And somebody else said, "Pia, don't—"
And then there was a great deal of running.
She came down a stair I hadn't seen, inside the wall, three steps at a time and then all of them at once. A girl in white shrine robes with a cord of eight colors at her waist, a satchel banging on one hip and a brown braid as thick as a bell rope flying out behind her. She hit the floor at the bottom, didn't slow down, and came straight across the whole round hall at me.
"SAINT!"
She got there. I'll give her that. She got her arms all the way round me, satchel and all, for about the length of one breath.
Then Liesel had her by the collar, and Wren was standing between us, and I hadn't seen either of them move.
"Saint," said the girl, from the end of Liesel's arm. Her feet weren't quite touching the floor. She didn't seem to have noticed. "Saint. Saint of Greymark. Saint of the hole in the wall. You're real, you're here, you're—oh, Elysia, you're shorter than the song—"
"There's a song?"
"Escorts are killing Saints!" She said it right into my face, in case I hadn't heard. "In Septentria! Lord Albin! Thirty-one, blessed at seventeen, and she'd guarded him since he was TWELVE. I'm not letting you out of my sight, Saint. Not for an hour. Not for a minute."
"I'm his escort," said Liesel.
The girl twisted round in her grip and looked at her. At the crimson, and the hair, and the bronze ivy over her ear, and the hand holding her up by the collar like a kitten.
"That," she said, "is exactly what an escort would say."
Wren hummed. Three notes. I'd never heard those three before.
The girl had said Saint eleven times by then. I'd been counting since the stair.
Keepers were coming out of every arch, all in white, with their hands over their mouths. One of them dropped something that rolled. A girl had just put her arms round a man, in the great shrine, under the dome, at first bell, without so much as a by-your-leave, and I don't think anyone had ever told the floor what to do about that.
"You didn't ask him," said Liesel.
The girl opened her mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.
"...I didn't ask him," she agreed, in a much smaller voice, and went red all the way up to her hairline.
There was a crossbow on her back. I saw it when Liesel turned her round: short, dark wood, strapped flat between her shoulders under the satchel, with a quiver of bolts at her hip. Somebody had written on every single bolt, in small neat ink. I could read the nearest one. The light goes first to those who need it most.
"Crossbow," said Wren.
That was one more word than she usually spends on strangers.
"The dome has eight galleries and one stair," said the girl, a little stiffly, for somebody dangling. "Somebody has to hold them. Every apprentice learns." She looked at me again, and her face did something complicated. "I'm a very good shot, Saint."
"Pia."
The voice came from the arch behind us. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
The woman in the arch was old, and tall, and thin the way a candle gets thin near the end. White robes, the same cord of eight colors, and long hands folded in front of her, perfectly still.
"High Keeper," said the girl, and Liesel let go of her collar, and she landed on her heels.
"The well," said the High Keeper. "Forty buckets. Then the galleries. All eight."
"But Septentria—"
"Will still be there after forty buckets."
Pia looked at me. She looked at me the way Hana looks at a pot she isn't allowed to stir. Then she went, braid swinging, crossbow and all, and stopped at the foot of the stair to look back three separate times.
"I'm sorry," said the High Keeper. "She's nineteen. She has read every page in this shrine with a Saint on it, twice, and some of them a great deal more than twice. You are, I'm afraid, the first one she has ever seen breathing." She inclined her head. "Honoria. I keep the light here."
"Fabian."
"I know." Something almost happened at the corner of her mouth. "So does Pia. At length."
She took us in through the arches, into the middle of the dome.
The Eight stood round the inside of it in a ring, each one taller than life, each one with her own face. Fire. Water. Lightning. Wind, earth and ice. A great shield. And Elysia, with her hands open at her sides and her eyes shut, the way they're shut in every shrine I've ever stood in. The light came down from somewhere high up in the curve of the roof and lay on the floor between them in a pale round pool.
In the middle of the pool there was a ring of candles on the stone. Old ones, most of them, burned down to stubs and left. One was new, and tall, and unlit.
"Lord Albin's," said Honoria. "When a Saint dies, a living Saint lights his candle. It's the oldest rite we have. Septentria's keeper wrote to every shrine with a Saint near it." She looked at the candle. "This one hasn't had a Saint near it for three hundred years."
"So you've been sending to the palace every morning."
"Every morning."
"The Queen thought you wanted to talk about women who heal."
"I do," said Honoria. "But the dead go first, here." She didn't move toward the candle. She looked at me instead, with old pale eyes that didn't seem to miss much. "Mostly. In Greymark, during the siege, women opened circles on the wall. White circles. Healing. I've had it from eleven people. Pia has had it from forty, and Pia has written all forty down."
I felt Liesel go still beside me. She didn't look at me. She didn't need to.
"It's my light," I said. "Every splash of it. They haven't got any of their own."
"Lent."
"If you like."
"There is nothing in the Records of the Saints of Elysia," said Honoria, "about a Saint whose light another hand could carry. Nothing since the founding. I have looked. So has Pia. Pia has looked a great deal."
"Then the Records are going to need a new page."
Honoria looked at me for a long moment.
"That's what Pia says," she said. "Every day." She sighed. "The shrine will never say a woman may not heal, Lord Fabian, if Elysia lets her. I only want to know whether Elysia does."
"How would you find out?"
"In my experience?" said Honoria. "You don't. She hasn't answered anybody in five hundred years." She held out a long taper, already lit. "Light his candle. The rite says the keeper turns her back while you do. Your escorts may stay at the arch."
It's a long way across that floor when everybody's stopped watching you.
Honoria had turned her back in the arch, her hands folded, her head bowed. Liesel and Wren stood just inside it, the way escorts stand, where they could see all of me and everything near me. The pool of light lay on the stone. The Eight looked down at it. I walked into the middle with the taper and knelt by the ring of candles, and the only sound in the whole dome was my knee on the floor.
I lit Lord Albin's candle.
It took the first time. The flame stood up small and straight and didn't waver, and I knelt there and looked at it and didn't know what you say for a Saint you never met.
Thirty-one. Blessed at seventeen, the same age I was. Fourteen years of casting, and a pool I'd never catch, and two women at his shoulders every hour he was outside his own walls. One of them since he was twelve.
So I said his name. Not aloud. Just to the candle. Lord Albin. And then I tried to say hers, and found I didn't have it, so I said and the escort, the way Hana had written it, with a space after.
That was when I heard it.
Not in my chest, where the candles talk. In the air. In my ears, like anybody's voice.
Fabian.
I looked up.
Liesel was in the arch, a long way off, exactly where she'd been. Her mouth hadn't moved. Wren's hadn't. Honoria still had her back to me. There was nobody else under the dome at all.
Fabian.
It was a woman's voice. Low, and tired, and very kind, and far away, as if it were coming to me from the bottom of something deep. It came from everywhere, and then, when I stood up and turned, it didn't. It came from one side.
I walked toward it. Past fire. Past water and lightning. Past the great shield. The voice didn't get louder. It got nearer, which isn't the same thing.
And I stopped in front of Elysia.
She was stone. Hands open at her sides, the way they'd been for five hundred years. Eyes shut. Mouth shut. Nothing about her had moved.
But it was her. I knew it the way you know the floor of your own house in the dark.
The demons are moving, said Elysia.
A pause. Long enough for me to breathe in, and not out.
They are hunting my light.
Then something left her and came into me.
I saw it go. A light, out of her open hands, not bright, the color of the candle I'd just lit. It crossed the little space between us and went into my chest, right where the candles are, and it was warm. It didn't hurt. It felt like the very first morning, at the altar in Greymark, when I'd asked for something and my knuckles closed up.
And the candles flared.
All five, at once. Liesel's, a few strides behind me in the arch. Naomi's, down in the second ring. Hana's beside it. Marika's, moving, the way it always moves. Cordelia's, somewhere in the palace. Each one jumped, bright, the way a flame jumps when you feed it. Then each one stood straighter than it had been standing before, as if somebody had cupped a hand round it.
Then it was done.
Elysia was stone. A little grayer than I remembered, maybe. It was probably the light.
I stood there and checked my skills, because Naomi taught me to check my skills whenever anything happens, and something had very definitely happened.
Under 「Discern」, beneath the line I knew, there was a new one.
What the dark has touched, you will know by its name.
Under 「Covenant」, another.
Those you hold cannot be stirred.
And beneath that, a name I'd never seen.
「Kindle」. Each who carries your candle may light one more. All of the shelter. Half of the warmth. The light is yours. The vow is theirs.
I read it three times.
She'd lent me her eyes. Then she'd lent me her voice. And now, the week three locked doors had turned up in three kingdoms, she'd given me something very like a lock. Five of them. And five more, for whoever the five chose.
Liesel met me halfway across the floor. She'd stayed in the arch exactly as long as an escort should and not one breath longer.
"Fabian." She said it very low, so it wouldn't carry. "My candle."
"I know."
"It jumped. Then it—" She stopped. Liesel doesn't often run out of words. "It feels like somebody shut a window I didn't know was open."
"Tonight," I said. "The henhouse. All of us."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and took her place at my left again, and that was the end of it, there. That's one of the things I love about her. She knows which questions have to wait for a door.
Wren was looking past me, at Elysia. Just looking. Then she looked at me, and didn't say anything at all, the way only Wren can not say anything. I knew then that she'd seen the light go. And I knew she'd never tell a soul unless I asked her to.
Honoria turned round in the arch when I reached it.
"It's lit?"
"It's lit."
She looked past me at the ring of candles, at the one new flame standing small and straight among the stubs. Then up, at the Eight. Her eyes rested on Elysia for a moment, and moved on.
"Did she answer you?" she said. Dry, and kind, the way you'd tease a child who has been told the old story too many times.
"I lit his candle," I said.
Which was true.
There was a sound on the stair. A wet sound. Then Pia came out of the wall, soaked to the elbows from forty buckets, with her braid dripping, her crossbow on her back, her satchel on one hip, a rolled blanket on the other, and a look on her face of somebody who has made a decision and tied it on with string.
Honoria closed her eyes briefly.
"Lord Fabian," she said. "I have a favor to ask. I'll ask it once."
I waited.
"Pia came to this shrine when she was six. She has lived under this dome for thirteen years. She knows the name of every Saint who has ever been written down and nothing whatsoever about a market." Honoria didn't look at Pia. Pia was looking at me so hard I could feel it on the side of my face. "She can shoot. She can read anything you put in front of her. She will not leave you alone in any case, not after Septentria; I've known her long enough to be sure of that. I would rather she went with my blessing than without it." She folded her long hands. "Take her out into the world for a while. Let her see what's in it besides books."
"No," said Liesel.
"I'll write to the Crown," said Honoria.
Liesel opened her mouth. She shut it again. I watched her think about her mother, and the letters, and the word escorts, and a girl with a crossbow who'd go absolutely anywhere I went whether anybody let her or not.
"...Mother will say yes," said Liesel.
"I imagine she will."
"I packed last night," said Pia.
We went down through the city a little after second bell. Liesel on my left. Wren on my right. And three steps behind us, exactly three, as if she'd measured it, Pia, dripping on the cobbles, telling me eleven things about my own skills, none of which were true.
I counted, walking down. One candle lit for a man I never met. One goddess who'd answered, for the first time in five hundred years, and nobody but me had heard her. Two new lines and a name. Five candles standing straighter than they had at first bell.
And one crossbow, three steps behind, still saying Saint.