Felix — Bellonia
There are three things nobody tells you about coming home.
The first is that everything is smaller. The walls, the towers, the lanes between the fields. I'd been gone for months and I'd grown perhaps a thumb's width in that time, and somehow the whole of Bellonia had shrunk to fit.
The second is that it smells exactly the same. Woodsmoke and wet stone and the bitter green of the hedge-ivy that grows on every wall from here to the sea. I hadn't known I remembered that smell until I was sitting in it, and then I couldn't stop.
The third I'm still working out. I think it's that you come home a different shape from the one you left, and the door doesn't care. It opens the same way it always did, and you have to fit.
We camped that last night in the lee of a farm tower, a day's ride out of Fulmara, by leave of the farm's women, who had heard about the village by noon and lined up along their wall to watch the Saint ride past as if he were a comet. Cordelia set the watch. The Crown's riders built three fires. Corvus's keepers built a fourth, a little way apart, the way they always did.
I sat at ours and did my best not to look toward Fulmara.
You can't see it from there. A low hill's in the way. I knew exactly where it was anyway, the way you know where your own hand is in the dark: down the lane, over the hill, up the long slope to the palace on its height, and in the palace, on the west side, the window that faces the forest.
And under the window, the long hall with the eagle over the hearth, where we'd eaten dinner on the last night before the winter.
I don't remember what we ate. I've tried. I remember that it was late, and the fire was high, and Mother was laughing at something Cinna had said about a horse. I remember that my aunt got up at the end of it, the way she always did, and poured the last cup herself, because she always did that too. She turned the handle toward Mother's hand. I remember thinking how nice that was.
Mother drank it. She said she was tired. She put her head down on her arm on the table, still smiling, like a girl at the end of a party.
She hasn't lifted it since.
That's the whole story. I've told it once, in Octavia, to two people. It doesn't get longer when you tell it, and it doesn't get shorter. It just sits there.
"You're doing the thing," said Fabian.
He was sitting across the fire from me with Liesel beside him, writing in that little notebook of Hana's by firelight, his tongue very slightly between his teeth.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you don't talk."
"I talk constantly. It's my best quality. Ask anyone." I picked up a stick and poked the fire with it, which accomplished nothing. "I was being restful. You should try it. You look like a candle somebody's been burning at both ends and also in the middle."
He smiled, a little. Then, in the middle of smiling, he stopped.
I mean stopped. Like a clock. His hand went to his chest, over his heart, and his face went very still, and every bit of color in it went somewhere else.
"Fabian—"
He held up his other hand. Not wait. More like listen.
And beside him, at exactly the same moment, Liesel's head turned. Not toward him. East. Back the way we'd come, toward the forest, toward nothing anyone could see in the dark. At the next fire, Marika stood up so fast she knocked her bowl into the coals and didn't notice. And at the head of the camp, where she'd been walking the line of the watch, Cordelia stopped dead and turned the same way.
The three of them. All at once. Like rooks on a roof ridge when a hawk goes over that the rest of us can't see.
Then Fabian let out a breath, very slowly, and took his hand off his chest, and said, quite calmly, "Thirty-six."
"Thirty-six what?"
He didn't answer. He'd started counting again, under his breath. Liesel had two fingers on the inside of his wrist, the way she'd started doing on the gatehouse roof, and her face was the face of someone listening to something a very long way off.
"What's happening?" I said. "Liesel. What's wrong with him?"
"Greymark," said Liesel.
"What about Greymark? How do you even— it's five days back, there's no rider, there's nothing, how could you possibly—"
Liesel looked at me across the fire. Then, very kindly, she said:
"Next question."
That's mine.
I opened my mouth to tell her so, and shut it again, because she knew it was mine. That was the point. She'd taken the one thing I'd been saying to people for a year whenever they got too close to something, and handed it back to me, gently, so I'd know exactly what kind of door I was standing in front of.
I didn't ask again.
I sat by the fire, and watched my friend sit very still with his hand on his chest, and every so often, a long way apart, flinch, the way you flinch when somebody takes something out of your pocket. And each time, the three of them turned their heads toward the east together, as if somebody had called their names.
I didn't understand it. I still don't, entirely.
But I knew what it looked like. It looked like someone, very far away, was bleeding, and he was paying for it.
Naomi — Greymark
The thornhares came first, because everything behind them was bigger.
They came out of the dark in a gray wave across the north field, quills up, rattling, more of them than I'd seen in one place in ten years of sweeps, and they hit Ambrose's water and stopped. Thornhares don't swim. They ran along the edge of it, up and down, screaming the way they scream, and the archers on the trestles shot the ones that tried to come round the end.
Then the wolves came behind them, and ate the thornhares, and then came at us.
That was how the whole night went. Nothing came in order. Nothing came together. Wolves came in threes and fives, and went into the ditch, and the ones that came out of the ditch came out slow and heavy with mud, and the townswomen on the wall killed them on the slope. Boars came in a rush, all at once, a dozen of them, so blind with fright that two of them ran straight past the hole and along the wall into the dark and never came back. A wolf and a boar met in the stubble in front of the barricade and tore each other to pieces while we watched, and nobody wasted an arrow on either.
Nobody was leading them. I'd known that at the treeline. I knew it better by midnight.
It didn't make them fewer.
The barricade held. Hildegard sat on her barrel on top of the two wagons with her sword across her knees and shouted at anything that came near, as if she could insult it into turning round, and twice something did. Constance held the wall above the hole with her spear and said nothing at all, which in Constance is the same as shouting. Ambrose stood on the wall above the ditch with his hands out and General at his feet, and the water didn't soak in. It sat there, flat and black and deep, exactly where he'd put it, hour after hour, while his face went gray and then grayer.
I stood in the hole.
There isn't much else to say about that. A boar came through the gap between the wagon and the post an hour after dark, and I was there. A wolf came over the wagon, between Hildegard's barrel and the trestles, and I was there. That's what standing in a hole is. You stay in it, and when something comes through, you're the thing it finds.
The hurt came back to Hana's tables all night. Bitten legs, torn arms, a townswoman with a boar's tusk through her calf, an archer who fell off the trestles and broke her wrist. The girls took them first. Nine of them, with their hair tied back, washing and binding and splinting, and the freckled one at the head of the table saying "Wash first" to every new one as if she'd been saying it all her life. I watched her hold a bottle to a guard's shoulder exactly the way Hana does it, with her other hand over the guard's eyes so she wouldn't watch.
The bottles went fast.
Twenty-eight is a great many until you need them. By midnight, the crate was straw.
"Naomi," said Hana.
I knew what she was asking. I'd known since the morning I tested it.
I listened, the way you listen for someone breathing in the next room. He was there. Five days away, somewhere on the far side of the Gloamwood, and full, or nearly full; he'd been pouring at noon, but he'd had half a day since to fill again.
Thirty-six, maybe. Thirty-seven.
"White," I said. "Never below half. Not by a splash."
Hana opened her first circle.
I felt it go out of him. I always do now; all five of us do, if we listen, and I was listening as hard as I've ever listened to anything. One splash. White, threaded with gold, under a townswoman's torn forearm on Hana's table. It closed. The townswoman looked at it, and then at Hana, and then, for some reason, at me.
Then another. Then another.
And every time, I knew, somewhere on the other side of the forest, my brother felt it leave him, and knew it was us, and didn't say a word on the bond, because he knew I'd told them half, and he knew I'd keep to it.
At one in the morning, the bear came.
We heard it before we saw it. Everything did. The wolves in the stubble scattered, and the small things in the hedges went quiet, and out of the dark at the edge of the north field came something the size of a hay barn, walking, not running, straight across Ambrose's water as if it were a puddle in a lane.
Ironhide. Of course. There's always one.
It came for the hole, because the hole was where the light was. It went through the end of the barricade where the trestles stood, and the archers jumped, and it put its whole weight against the gate.
Not the barricade. The gate. Hildegard's gate: the four oak beams standing upright in their new sockets on the left side of the hole, with no hinges and no crossbars and nothing to them but oak and stubbornness.
The beams shook. The sockets groaned. Dust came down off the top of the wall.
They held.
"ONE!" roared Hildegard, from her barrel.
The bear drew back and hit them again. Harder. One of the beams split along its length with a sound like a tree coming down, and the rest leaned, and held.
"TWO!"
It drew back a third time. And Constance came down off the wall onto its back, with her spear, in one long drop that I'd have forbidden if anyone had asked me first, and put the spear in behind the head where the plates part, all the way. The bear went up on its hind legs, with Constance still on it, and I went in under it from the front with my sword for the same place from the other side.
It came down. Constance came down with it, and rolled clear, and got up, and pulled her spear out, and stood there breathing.
Nobody said anything. Then Hildegard, very loudly, from her barrel:
"It'd have taken three."
She sounded so pleased that half the wall laughed, and the other half started, and for a moment Greymark sounded the way it does at harvest.
The rest of the night was small things. Wolves, mostly. A few more boars. Something in the north field that screamed for a long time and then stopped, and I never found out what it was, and didn't want to. Hana's circles opened and closed, and I counted them, and kept to half, even when a girl with a torn arm sat at the table crying and Hana looked at me.
"Half," I said.
"Naomi—"
"He's going into a palace tomorrow where they want to keep him," I said. "Half."
Hana looked at me a moment longer. Then she bound the arm herself, with her hands, the old way, the way she did for years before any of this, and the girl stopped crying, and that was that.
We lost two. A guard from the household, and a townswoman from the north lane who'd been on the wall in the siege. I'll know their names by noon. Hana will put them on the stone.
At first light, the last of the wolves went back toward the trees, slowly, the way a tide goes out. Ambrose let the water go, and sat down on the wall exactly where he'd been standing, and didn't get up for an hour. General lay down across his feet. Hildegard climbed off her barrel and went and looked at her gate: three beams leaning and one split, and all four still standing in their sockets.
She put her hand on the split one, very gently, the way you'd touch a horse that had carried you home.
I reached for him then. For the first time all night.
(Held,) I said.
Nothing else. Half a drop.
Felix — Bellonia
Some time after midnight, Corvus came over to our fire.
I saw him get up from the keepers' fire, and I saw the captain with the scarred eyebrow watch him do it, and I saw her not stop him. That was the thing I couldn't stop looking at, afterward. In Bellonia a man doesn't get up from his keepers' fire and walk across a field in the dark to somebody else's. It isn't forbidden, exactly. It's more that nobody would think of it, the way nobody would think of a sword getting up off the wall and going for a stroll.
She'd watched the Saint heal her keeper in a hole in a wall. She'd watched him put a circle under a whole village. I think she'd come to some conclusions of her own.
Corvus sat down on the log beside me, an arm's length off.
Across the fire, Fabian was still sitting the way he'd been sitting for an hour, very straight, with Liesel's fingers on his wrist, counting under his breath. Every so often he flinched. Corvus watched him do it once, and his face didn't change, but he watched.
Whatever we said that night, we said it under the noise of the fire. Across it, Fabian never once looked up.
"You're not supposed to be over here," I said.
"No."
"Your captain's going to be furious."
He looked back at the keepers' fire. The captain was sitting with her back to us. Very deliberately with her back to us.
"No," said Corvus.
I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out of me sideways, the way it does, and it felt like the first time I'd laughed since the eagle post.
"Do you remember the fountain?" I said. "In the east court. The week we were blessed. You took its whole head off with your very first bolt and told my aunt the cat did it, and the cat was sitting right there, Corvus, it was sitting on the rim washing its paw, and you looked at your boots the whole time and said the cat—"
And Corvus smiled.
There it was. All teeth. The worst smile in Bellonia. I'd told Fabian about it on the gatehouse roof and I'd thought, then, that I might never see it again.
It went away almost at once. But it had been there.
We sat for a while. The fire popped. Across it, Fabian flinched again, and said a number under his breath that I didn't catch.
"Is she alive?" I said.
I hadn't meant to. It came out short, the way true things come out of me, with no joke on the end.
"Yes," said Corvus.
I breathed out.
He didn't say anything else about her. He didn't need to; he'd said the one word, and he'd never in his life said a word to me that wasn't true. But after a while, looking into the fire and not at me, he said:
"Petronius is in the palace."
I waited.
"The west wing is empty. All of it. Except her." A pause. "Your aunt has aired the guest rooms."
I knew which guest rooms. Every child who grew up in that palace knows. They're on the west side, along the same corridor as the Queen's own, three doors down, because my grandmother liked to keep her guests where she could see them.
My aunt was going to put us three doors from my mother. In a wing with nobody else in it.
One door to get through. And a whole empty wing for whatever she had waiting behind it.
"Thank you," I said.
Corvus didn't answer that.
Then I asked him the thing I'd been carrying since Greymark, since before Greymark, since the dawn after the siege, when he'd stood at the bend with his left hand up and no circle in it.
"If she tells you to throw at me," I said.
"I didn't."
No. He hadn't. At the wall, with my aunt's whole army behind him and her orders in his ears, he'd stood there and not thrown, and gone home, and taken whatever she gave him for it.
"If she tells you to throw at him."
I tipped my head across the fire, at Fabian.
Corvus looked at him for a long time. At the Saint, sitting there in the firelight with his hand on his chest, paying for something five days away that he couldn't see and couldn't stop, and not saying a word about it to anyone.
My spark snapped. I didn't mean it to; it just did, a little crack in the dark between us. And Corvus's answered it, once, the same small sound, the way it used to the year we were blessed, sitting in a hayloft where we weren't supposed to be.
"Ask me there," he said.
Then he got up and walked back across the field to his keepers' fire, and sat down, and the captain didn't turn round.
It was almost dawn when the three of them came back down.
That's the only way I can say it. All night they'd been like rooks on a ridge, heads turning east together every time Fabian flinched. Then, a little before first light, all three at once, Liesel and Marika and Cordelia, something went out of them. Their shoulders came down. Marika sat down on the ground where she was standing, as if her strings had been cut. Cordelia, at the head of the camp, put one hand against a tree and leaned on it.
And Fabian took his hand off his chest for the first time in hours, and opened his eyes, and looked at me across the dead fire. He was gray. Not pale. Gray, like ash on a cold grate.
"Greymark held," he said.
"How do you—"
I stopped.
He was looking at me. Liesel was looking at me. Somewhere behind me, I could feel Marika looking at me too. A whole family of people, waiting to see what I'd do with a door I'd been told was shut.
"Next question," I said, to myself, and let it go.
Fabian smiled at me then. Tired, gray, and real.
"Twenty-two," he said, to nobody, and went to see about his horse.
We came over the low hill a little after noon.
And there it was. The palace first, on its height, with its face to the forest and so to us, gray stone gone gold in the noon light. Then the town, spilling down behind it in steps, roof over roof, gray stone and red tile, all the way to the river and the old bridge on the far side. I'd seen it a thousand times. I'd never once seen it from this side, coming home.
I found the west side without looking for it. Third floor. The window that faces the forest, the one my mother used to stand at in the evenings and say she could see weather coming three days off.
When I left, its shutters were closed. My aunt closed them herself, the morning after the dinner. I watched her do it.
They were open.