Tenebra — Below
Only one of us has ever sat down.
The hall is cut from the rock under the rock. It has no windows, no torches, no hearth. It doesn't need them. Nobody who comes here needs light to see by.
At its far end, on three broad steps, there is a seat carved from the same black stone as the floor. Its back rises into a pair of horns, curved like the horns of something that has never once had to lower its head. It has been empty for five hundred years.
The rest of us stand. We always have. In this hall it's law, and in their rooms it's habit. A human will offer you a chair every time, because they're polite, and because they want you to stay. We never take it. There is only one of us who sits, and the seat is waiting for him.
I stand at its right hand.
The others stand below the steps in a half circle, hoods drawn. I can tell them apart by their hands, folded at their waists. That's where it shows first. Below a certain point the fingers thicken, the nails go dark and split, the knuckles swell, and no glove made by human hands will close over them. Above it, you learn to hold a shape. The hands first. Then the face. Then the voice. And last of all the horns grow smaller, until they lie close against the skull and a hood hides them, or a braid pinned high.
My hands look like a woman's hands. Near enough that no human has ever looked twice.
"The north," I said.
Two of them came forward to the foot of the steps. Their hoods sat badly; theirs are the kind of horns that tent the cloth however it's pinned. When they drew back their sleeves their hands were gray and ridged, the nails black at the tips, and one of them couldn't keep its fingers still. They get like that, the low ones, when they're called this close to the seat.
"Seven villages, my lady," said the one on the left. Its voice had the scrape in it that they never lose. "Perhaps more by now. The sickness came in the autumn, the way it does every year. The Saint didn't."
"Because the Saint is dead."
"Yes, my lady."
"So you went instead."
"We went to the doors." It turned its hands over. "We don't knock. We wait until someone opens. Someone always opens, in the end. A mother. A daughter. A sister with a cough she's had since the first snow."
"And you give them the fruit."
"We give it to whoever asks," said the one on the right. Its voice was lower and steadier than the other's, and its hands were not. "We never press. We tell them the truth. Their Saint is dead. Their shrine has nobody. They've prayed all autumn and nobody has answered." A pause. "And then we tell them one thing that isn't true. You don't need a Saint. You can heal yourself."
"And they eat it."
"They always eat it. The sick ones first. Then the ones who watched the sick ones get up out of bed."
"How many?"
"We stopped counting at three hundred."
I said nothing. Behind me the empty seat said nothing either, as it has said nothing for five hundred years.
"Tell me what it does," I said. "Again. Slowly."
The one on the left held up a hand and turned it, the way you'd show a buyer a stone. "First the fever goes. The cough. Whatever they had. They feel well, my lady. Better than well. They eat. They laugh. They go next door and tell their neighbors." It curled the gray fingers. "Then the nails. Then the back, along the spine. The horns come last. And by then..."
"By then?"
"By then they feel very calm."
Very calm. That's what humans see in our eyes, when we stand in their rooms and don't sit. They never learn what it's made of.
"And Octavia?"
"Septentria's queen has asked Octavia for its Saint," said the one on the right. "The boy. The one who woke the Bellonian queen."
The one who'd looked across a dark meadow on the Hollowcrown, past everything we'd sent, at the one of us who stood by the white stones, and hadn't looked away. I'd been told about that. I had thought about it more than once.
"Will they send him?"
"He's already said yes."
Of course he had.
"He sees," I said.
"Yes, my lady."
"He names what we touch."
"Yes."
"And he asks." I looked down at them. "That's the part that costs us. He asks, and now the ones around him have started asking too."
Neither of them answered. They'd heard about the escort at the Academy, and the old woman on the mountain. Everyone had.
Five hundred years ago, when we went to war, we went for the healers first. Not because they were strong. Because every one of them was a reason for the rest to keep getting up. We put them out one by one, until their goddess of healing stood between us and the world and gave up everything she was to shut the door.
She's still holding it. I can feel the seal from here, the way you feel cold come through a stone wall in winter. It's thinner than it was. Every year, it's thinner.
"Let him come north," I said. "Let him ride into the snow and find out what's waiting. Let him heal everyone he can reach." I looked at the seat. "And then let him see how many he can't."
The two at the foot of the steps bowed.
"How long," I said, "before it blooms?"
"Weeks, my lady. Less, in the first villages. They've been eating for two months."
The one on the right lifted its head, and under the hood I saw its eyes. Calm, the way ours always are, with something else underneath that in the low ones passes for joy.
"Soon," it said. "Soon it will bloom."
"Then go back and watch it."
They went. The rest turned and followed, one by one, out through the long dark toward the doors, and their steps went away into the rock.
I stayed a while longer, standing at the right hand of the empty seat, the way I have for five hundred years.
Not yet, I thought. But soon.
Fabian — The Royal Academy
"Six," said Ambrose.
Six bottles stood in a row along the infirmary windowsill, each filled to the shoulder with plain water from the well in the yard. It was the fifth morning since we'd come home from the Hollowcrown, and the infirmary was the only place in the Academy where nobody was pretending nothing had happened.
Everywhere else, they were. The notice about Lord Albin still hung by the dining hall door. The battle class still met every afternoon on the same raked sand. Sixty girls who'd held spears on the Long Meadow sat in general studies and copied down Lady Severine's lists, and if they looked at the window more than the board, nobody said so.
"Six," I agreed.
Ambrose put one ink-stained fingertip to the mouth of the first bottle. A White circle no bigger than a coin opened under it, and the water went still. Not calm. Still, as if it had forgotten how to move. That's his part. Mine comes next: a Green circle over his hand, two splashes out of the pitcher, and the light goes down into the water and stays there, held, a faint green shimmer that would fade by supper if nobody did anything about it.
"Felix," said Ambrose.
"I'm resting."
"Felix."
"I'm an invalid. Mistress Salvia said so." Felix was on the stool by the other window, his arm in a sling, his eyes shut, his face turned up to the sun like a cat on a warm wall. "Two weeks. I distinctly remember the words 'two weeks.'"
"Two weeks for the sling," said Liesel, from her place at my left. "Not for your mouth."
"My mouth has suffered a great deal."
"Not enough," said Marika.
She was standing in front of me, between me and the door, because that was where Naomi had put her. Third escort. Front. In an infirmary, apparently, the front was wherever the door was. Wren had my right, as always, and Felix's two knights of the Crown stood just inside the doorway, looking at Marika the way you look at someone who has taken your job without asking.
Felix opened one eye and grinned at her. Then he sang.
It was the miller's song. It's always the miller's song. Ambrose had tried every other tune Felix knew, and a hymn, and once a drinking song from the third ring that Liesel had to be stopped from finishing, and the spark only ever went steady for the miller and his three daughters. Six bottles, six verses. The song has twelve, so every morning Felix picked up where he'd left off the day before.
A thread of gold lightning ran from his fingertip into the held water. The bottle flashed once and settled, and Ambrose corked it before it could change its mind.
"One," said Pia.
She was on her stool in the corner, the one Mistress Salvia had set there on her first day with the words "Not my cots. Not my floor. That stool." Pia had taken it as a sacred charge. She hadn't left it since, except to follow me out the door, one step behind.
"You don't have to count them," I said.
"Mistress Salvia asked me to."
"I did not," said Mistress Salvia, without looking up from the bandages she was rolling.
"You looked like you wanted to."
Mistress Salvia considered this. "Not my numbers," she said, and went back to her bandages, and Pia wrote something down with enormous satisfaction.
I watched the pen and didn't like it. She'd counted six bottles yesterday, and the day before. She'd count my five heals after them. And she'd read every page in the great shrine with a Saint on it; she could probably tell you to the splash what the Records said a Blue mage pours in a day. Pia's book was full of true things. That was the trouble.
Liesel was looking at the book too. She caught my eye and gave the smallest shake of her head. Later.
Second bottle. Third. Felix sang on into the second half of the song, and the spark went down clean both times.
Then he drew breath for the next one, and stopped.
He looked at the bottle for a moment. Then he went straight on to the verse after it, the one about the millstone, and the spark ran down and the water flashed and Ambrose corked it.
Nobody said anything.
"You skipped one," said Marika, to the door.
"Did I?"
"You know you did. The middle one." She heard herself say it a moment too late, and her ears went pink to the tips, and she glared at the doorframe as if it had said it.
"Did I," said Felix again, and this time it wasn't a question. He didn't look at her. She didn't look at him.
Ambrose looked at the bottle. "Held," he said, as if that were the only thing in the room worth noticing.
I didn't say anything either. I'd worked it out on the road home from the Hollowcrown, by a fire, behind a cart. I wasn't going to be the one to say it out loud. That was Marika's job, and Marika would rather have fought the Ash Adder again.
Fifth. Sixth. Ambrose lined them up and took out his notebook and wrote one line, which I could read upside down.
Six. Held. F. omitted one verse. Result: same.
After the bottles, the five.
Mistress Salvia brings them to me darkest first, the way she has since my first day here. A second-year with a split lip from the morning drill. A kitchen girl who'd caught her wrist on an oven door. A first-year who'd fallen off the library ladder reaching for something on the top shelf, which was a story I'd heard before from one of Ambrose's escorts and was starting to think was a tradition. Five White heals, one splash each. Pia wrote down every one.
The last was a second-year I knew. I'd seen her on the Long Meadow with a spear in her hands at the edge of Dame Valeria's ring, the night the cat came over the stream. Her knuckles were skinned from drill. That was all.
"May I?"
She held out her hand. The circle opened, small and white, and closed again.
"Thank you, my lord," she said. Then, lower, so Mistress Salvia wouldn't hear: "For the mountain."
I didn't know what to say to that. Six of them hadn't come down it. She knew that better than I did; she'd carried one of them to the stream.
"You ran toward Dame Valeria," I said. "When she told you to."
"Yes, my lord."
"That's why you came down it."
She looked at me a moment longer, and nodded, and went.
Felix caught me up on the path to the battle yard, sling and all, with his two knights a careful distance behind him and mine around me.
"So," he said. "Septentria."
I looked at him. "Who told you?"
"Nobody. Nobody had to." He nodded ahead, at Marika's back. "She's sharpened both swords at breakfast every morning this week. She only does that before a front."
"They were DULL," said Marika, without turning round.
"They were not dull. I've seen them. I could shave with them. I don't need to shave, but I could."
"Felix."
"Yes?"
"Next question," said Marika.
Felix opened his mouth, and shut it, and looked, for once in his life, as if someone had taken a line out of his hand. Liesel made a small noise that, in anyone else, would have been a laugh.
We walked on. Felix didn't say anything for nearly twenty paces, which for Felix is a long time.
"When you go," he said finally, quieter. "The bottles."
That was all. He didn't finish it. He didn't need to.
I'd been thinking about it since the Queen's rooms. A season in the north. Sickness every autumn, the letter said, the kind Albin used to ride out to. I could heal with my hands until the pitcher ran dry, and then I'd be one boy in the snow with an empty pitcher and a long night ahead. The bottles kept. Corked, they'd held their light for thirty days on the infirmary shelf, and Ambrose was still testing how much longer. But they didn't make themselves. Every one of them needed Ambrose's stillness and Felix's song.
"I know," I said.
"Just so you know that I know."
"I know that too."
He grinned, and it was nearly his usual grin. Then Dame Valeria's voice came across the sand, and the afternoon went the way afternoons in the battle class always go: I fought a second-year girl with a wooden sword, and lost, and fell the way Dame Valeria taught me to fall, like a cat, and got up.
"Again," said Dame Valeria. "Tomorrow."
She looked at me a moment longer than she needed to. The question she'd put down on the Hollowcrown was still there, behind her eyes, and she was in no hurry at all to pick it up.
Pia walked back to the residence with us at lamp-lighting, one step behind.
Exactly one. Liesel had given it to her on the wet meadow with six cloaks on the grass, and Pia kept it the way she kept everything, as if the distance were a line in a book she was afraid of getting wrong.
"There's a song about Lord Albin," she said, to my back.
"There's always a song."
"This one's short." She was quiet a moment. "It stops when he does."
Nobody said anything for a few steps. The lamps were coming on along the path, one by one, as the lamplighter went ahead of us.
"Nobody wrote her name down," said Pia. "The escort. I asked at the shrine before I left. I asked the High Keeper. I asked the rider who brought the dispatch."
"You asked a dispatch rider?" said Liesel.
"She didn't know either." Pia's voice went careful. "Saint. You've got a space in your book. The little one. I've seen you look at it."
I stopped walking. So did everyone else, because that's what happens when you have three escorts and an apprentice: you can't stop alone.
"I'm going to ask her," I said.
"I know," said Pia. "I'm coming."
"Nobody said you weren't," said Liesel.
"Nobody said I was."
Liesel looked at her for a long moment, at the empty quiver and the healed hands and the stubborn chin. "Pack warm," she said.
Pia's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it. I'd never seen that happen before, and I suspect neither had anyone at the great shrine.
At the gate in the residence's low wall, the guard stood in her usual place in the doorway beyond it, where she'd stood for forty years. She looked at Pia, and at the lamps, which were lit, and at the arch where Pia had slept every night since we'd come back, and said nothing at all, because her rule didn't need saying. Escorts past the gate after the lamps are lit. Nobody else.
Pia set down her blanket under the arch and her crossbow beside it. Liesel dropped a second blanket on top of her without a word, the way she had every night.
Then Wren unhooked the spare cloak from her own shoulders and dropped that on top of the blankets.
"Cold," said Wren.
Pia looked up at her. Wren looked back. And then Wren hummed, very low, three notes. Not the busy ones. The other ones, the ones I'd first heard in the great shrine.
"She—" said Pia.
"No," said Wren, and went through the gate.
The bond came after supper, the way it always does. Talk first, then drain: Naomi's rule, since my first night at the Academy.
I sat on the edge of my bed with the door shut. Through the wall I could feel Liesel's candle in the escorts' room, and Marika's beside it, close and bright. Wren slept in there too, between them, but Wren isn't a candle; she's Liesel's spark, and only Liesel feels her.
(Fabian.) Naomi, from Greymark. (Report.)
I reported. Six bottles. Five heals. Dame Valeria's look. The second-year and the mountain.
(Noted.)
(Did you eat?) That was Hana.
(Three helpings, Sis Hana.)
(PIA SAYS TWO AND A HALF,) said Marika, from the other side of my wall. (SHE SAYS HE GAVE HER HALF A ROLL. SHE WROTE IT DOWN. SHE SHOWED ME.)
There was a pause, nine days' ride long.
(Then that's two and a half for him,) said Hana. (And half a roll for her.) Another pause. (Is she eating, Fabian?)
I hadn't expected that. (She sleeps under an arch, Sis Hana. Outside the gate.)
(Then she's cold too.) Hana's voice went soft and decided at the same time, which is how Hana wins arguments. (I'll bring something for her. Write down what she likes.)
(Wren gave her a cloak tonight.)
A silence, while everyone who could hear absorbed this.
(...Wren did?) said Liesel, who'd been standing right there, and who clearly still didn't believe it.
(Big Sis,) I said. (When are you coming?)
(We leave tomorrow,) said Naomi. (Hana and I. The Queen's letter came.)
That was all she said about the letter. Naomi doesn't explain letters. She acts on them.
(Hildegard has the gate,) she went on. (Sirius the wall. Constance and her guards.)
(And GENERAL?) said Marika.
(General has the yard.)
(GOOD.)
In my chest, far off in the palace on the top of the city, Cordelia's candle stirred. She'd been listening the whole time. She always is.
(Good,) said Cordelia.
That was her word for the day. She'd saved it.
Then Naomi said, (Fabian.)
(Yes, Big Sis.)
(Don't drain tonight.)
I sat up straighter. Every night since my first night here: talk first, then drain, then sleep. Naomi's rule. Naomi doesn't break her own rules.
(...Why?)
(Full pitcher by first light.)
On the other side of the wall, Marika's candle jumped like a struck spark. (Is it—)
(Tomorrow, Marika.)
And then nothing. Naomi doesn't say goodnight on the bond; she just stops, the way a door closes. Hana said (Sleep well.), softly, and stopped too. Cordelia had already gone quiet.
I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with the pitcher nearly full again, and the night ahead to top it up, and didn't drain a drop. It was the first night since we'd come home that I wouldn't hit empty. The pool wouldn't grow tonight. I found I didn't mind.
Full pitcher by first light.
I knew Naomi's rules. I'd been there the night she made them, in Hana's kitchen at the gray house, with the whole henhouse listening. A full pitcher. Tell Naomi first. It can't be broken, and it won't end. Choose like that.
Somebody in Greymark was going to say a vow tomorrow morning.
I lay down and looked at the ceiling and didn't sleep for a long time, wondering who.