Twenty-three, the week after the stone went up.
Twenty-four, the week after that.
I counted every night, sitting on the edge of my bed with the door shut, before I drained it all back into myself. The headache at the bottom still knocked once, politely, and left. I'd stopped feeling cheated about it. I'd started feeling grateful in a steadier way, the way you're grateful for a roof.
Everything else went on the way things go on. Ten a day in the infirmary, for appearances. The gel in Hana's tins held until midnight now, and Ambrose wrote Longer at the bottom of the page anyway. Lady Severine had stopped receiving reports about my counting. Wren was still reported for humming about twice a week, and Liesel, I gathered, for staring, about every day.
Upstairs in the residence, the empty quarters above mine had been aired out three times. The maids had started on the curtains.
And I'd been thinking.
Her first. I'd said it to the Queen of Octavia on a balcony, and I'd meant it, and every night since, while I counted, I'd been working out how. What I'd say. Where. Whether my voice would hold.
Somewhere in all that working out, I noticed something I didn't like.
I had never asked Liesel anything.
Not once. Not to walk somewhere, or sit somewhere, or eat something. She'd been beside me since Greymark because she was my escort, or because she'd decided to be. She'd shown me the town because she wanted to. She'd bought me lunch because I didn't have a purse. Every single thing we'd ever done together, she had started.
Men don't ask. I knew that. In Octavia, men are asked: by mothers, by houses, by the Crown. Nobody had ever expected me to ask anyone for anything.
But I was going to ask her the biggest thing there was. It seemed to me I ought to find out first whether I could manage a small one.
So on the last day of battle class before the rest day, I waited until she'd finished snapping a practice spear, and followed her to the trough.
She was washing her face. Wren had stopped by the fence at the far end of the yard, out of earshot, watching it the way she watches everything, as though it might try something.
"Liesel."
"Mm." Water dripped off her chin.
"Would you have lunch with me? In the city. On the rest day."
She straightened up, very slowly.
"Just lunch," I said. "Somewhere you like. I'd like to take you."
Water ran off the end of her nose. She didn't wipe it.
"Are you asking me?"
"Yes."
"Out loud."
"Yes." I thought about it. "I could do it on the bond, if you'd rather."
"No," said Liesel, so fast that, at the far end of the yard, Wren turned around. "No. Out loud is—" She stopped. She was going red, slowly, from the collar up. "Nobody asks me things."
"I know," I said. "I'm asking."
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Yes," said Liesel.
Then she put her whole face back in the trough and kept it there for a while.
When we walked back past the fence, Wren was humming. Four notes. I don't know how she knew. Wren always knows.
I'd decided I would pay, too. That was the important part. A man who asks should pay; I'd decided that before I'd decided anything else.
On the rest day, Liesel came to the gate in her armor, because she was still my escort, and with a blue ribbon in her hair, because she wasn't only my escort.
I noticed the ribbon. I didn't say anything about it. I'm told this was a mistake.
"Ten paces," said Liesel to Wren.
"Ten paces is a lot of room for someone else to walk into," said Wren.
"Eight."
"Five."
"Seven."
Wren looked at me. I looked at the sky.
"Six," said Wren, and dropped back exactly six.
I'd thought about the walking, too. I'd thought about all of it. When we turned down into the third ring, I stepped around Liesel to the outside, between her and the street.
She stepped around me to the outside.
I stepped back around her.
"What are you doing?" said Liesel.
"Walking on the outside."
"Why?"
"So if a cart comes, it hits me."
Liesel stared at me. "If a cart comes," she said, "I'll punch it."
Six paces back, Wren made a sound that was very nearly a laugh. We went the rest of the way with Liesel on the outside, and me feeling, for reasons I couldn't explain, that I'd won something.
Sanctara stared, the way it always does. A man in the street. A woman pressed a very small cheese into my hand; I've started to suspect it's the same cheese. A mother leaned out of a second-floor window and called down that her Greta was seventeen and very strong.
"He's at lunch," Liesel called back, without looking up.
She'd chosen the place. I'd suggested somewhere in the second ring with tablecloths, and she'd looked at me as though I'd suggested eating the tablecloths. Instead she led me to a pie shop by the city barracks, low-ceilinged and loud and smelling of pastry and boot leather, full of off-duty knights on long benches.
I got to the door first and held it open.
Liesel stopped on the step and looked at the door as though it had done something strange.
"...You're holding the door."
"Yes."
"For me."
"Yes."
Behind us, the whole street watched a man hold a door for a woman. Somewhere, a basket hit the cobbles.
Inside, the noise stopped all at once. Every knight on every bench turned to look at the princess and the man in the doorway. The owner, a broad woman with a scar through one eyebrow and flour to her elbows, dropped a whole tray of pies, and caught it before it hit the floor.
I pulled out a chair for Liesel.
Liesel looked at the chair. Then at me. Then she sat down on it slowly, the way you'd sit on a horse that's thrown you before.
Wren took the next table. "Four paces," she said, before anyone could argue.
The owner came over, wiping her hands, and bowed to Liesel. "Your Highness. And what will the lord be having?"
She asked Liesel. Of course she did. That's how it's done.
"The mutton pie, please," I said. "And what would you like, Liesel?"
The owner's mouth opened and stayed open. Liesel ordered three pies. I poured her water from the jug before she could reach for it, and somewhere behind the counter, someone stopped scrubbing a pot.
Liesel ate her first pie in silence, watching me over it.
"You're being strange," she said, at last.
"Am I?"
"The door." She held up a finger. "The chair. The water. The cart." Four fingers.
"You're counting," I said, delighted.
"Somebody has to."
I turned my cup around on the table. "Has anyone ever asked you somewhere? Before."
"People ask Mother whether I'm free." Liesel turned her second pie on its plate. "Then Mother tells me where to be. That's not asking. That's being sent."
"So this is—"
"The first." She said it to her pie. "Don't make it a big thing."
"I won't."
"You're making it a big thing with your face."
I tried to do something else with my face. It didn't work.
"Why are you doing all this?" said Liesel.
"Practice," I said, before I could stop myself.
Her eyes narrowed. "Practice for what?"
Oh, no.
"For," I said. "Being a person."
Liesel looked at me for a very long time. At the next table, I'm fairly sure, Wren kicked a bench.
"Hm," said Liesel, which she had definitely learned from Dame Valeria, and went back to her pie. But her heart had sped up, and her candle in my chest was flickering as though someone had opened a window.
When the plates were empty, the owner came back and stood beside our table with the particular stillness of someone waiting to be paid.
This was it. The important part.
"I'll pay," I said, and reached into my coat.
My coat has a pocket on the left, where I keep a handkerchief Hana embroidered. It has a pocket on the right, where there was nothing at all. I checked the left again in case the handkerchief had turned into money. It hadn't.
I checked my trousers. I checked my sleeves. I checked, for some reason, my boots.
Across the table, Liesel had put her chin in her hand.
"Again?" she said.
"...Again," I said.
I had decided to pay. I'd decided it at the trough, before anything else. It turns out that deciding to pay and being able to pay are two completely different things, and only one of them needs coins.
"You still owe me for the last one," said Liesel.
"I baked six honey cakes. You got four."
"Those were for the last one. This is a new one."
So I did the only thing I could think of. I asked the person who has paid for everything I've ever had.
(Big Sis.)
(Here.)
(Hypothetically. If a person wanted to pay for lunch. How would a person do that?)
A pause.
(...Where are you?)
(HE'S ON A DATE,) said Marika.
(Oh, Fabian,) said Hana. (Did you hold the door?)
And then, from directly across the table, perfectly calm, a fourth voice in my chest.
(He held the door,) said Liesel. (And pulled out my chair. And poured my water. And walked on the wrong side of the street the whole way here.)
I had forgotten she could hear.
Liesel took a large, satisfied bite out of her third pie.
(Ask Wren,) said Naomi.
"Wren," I said slowly. "Is there any chance you have money?"
At the next table, without a word, Wren reached into her coat and set a small purse on the table beside my plate. Good leather, Valcrest navy, and heavy.
I stared at it.
"How long have you had that?"
"Since the egg," said Wren.
I looked at the purse for a long time. Naomi's coin. The same coin that had bought the doublet I was wearing, and the boots I'd just checked, and the bread at breakfast, and one way or another, everything else, for my whole life.
Somebody else always does. A mother, a sister, a wife, a house.
I pushed it back across to Wren.
Liesel stopped chewing.
"I wanted to pay," I said. "Me. Not Naomi." I looked down at my hands on the table. They were empty. They'd always been empty; I'd just never had a reason to look. "I don't have anything, do I?"
Liesel was quiet for a moment.
"No," she said. "Men don't."
"I never noticed. Not once, my whole life."
"Nobody does," said Liesel. "That's how it works."
I thought about it. Marika's sword, Marika's gloves. Hana's handkerchief. Naomi's coin. Everything I owned, somebody had given me. The only things I'd ever given anyone that were truly mine were healing, which was Elysia's as much as mine, and four honey cakes.
"Then I'll pay," said Liesel, "and you'll owe me."
"Cakes," I said.
"How many?"
I counted. "Seven."
"Last time was four."
"Interest."
Liesel laughed out loud, right there in the barracks pie shop, and every knight on every bench turned to look at the princess laughing with a man.
"Seven," she agreed, and paid.
(SEVEN?) said Marika.
(I'll send eggs,) said Hana.
And Naomi, after a moment, in a voice like a sword sliding back into its sheath: (...Noted.)
Wren put the purse back inside her coat. I suspect she'll be carrying it until I'm forty.
Felix arrived four days later, on a gray morning at the end of the month, while I was in the kitchens begging the cook for a seventh egg.
Hana's eggs had come up from the second ring in a basket, packed in straw. Six of them. Hana can count as well as I can; I'm fairly sure she did it on purpose.
Word ran through the Academy faster than I could, and by the time I reached the front gate with flour on my hands, half the school was already there.
The Bellonians had come the long way, around the edge of the Gloamwood, and it showed. The carriage was gray with dust up to its windows. The horses stood with their heads down. The riders around it wore armor of a cut I'd never seen, dark and plain, with no lioness anywhere on it, and their faces were the kind of tired that a month on the road gives you.
Lady Severine waited at the gate with her spectacles and a list.
The carriage door banged open before anyone could reach it, and a young man jumped down without bothering with the step.
He was taller than me, which isn't hard, with black hair that looked as though it had lost an argument with the wind, and a face browned by a month of road. He looked around at the gate, the hill, the towers, and the several hundred girls staring at him, and grinned as though all of it had been arranged for his personal entertainment.
Then he saw me.
He came straight across the yard, his escorts hurrying after him, and stopped in front of me with his hand out.
"You're the Saint."
"Fabian."
"Felix." He took my hand.
There was a snap like touching a cat in winter, and we both jumped.
"Sorry!" He shook his hand out, laughing. "Sorry. Fulgor. It does that when I'm— it just does that."
"When you're what?"
"Excited," said Felix, a little too quickly, and grinned wider. "They told me at the gate to look for the man everyone was staring at." He glanced around at the hundreds of girls. "Then I realized that's both of us."
Somebody in the crowd laughed. Then everybody did.
He turned the grin on Liesel. "And you must be the princess who said yes very loudly."
Liesel stared at him. "...How do you know that?"
"Everyone at the gate knows that. And the road. And I think possibly Bellonia."
"Possibly?"
"Definitely," said Felix cheerfully.
I looked at him the other way, the way only I can.
His light was white. A healthy, ordinary, crackling white, as bright as the rest of him.
And running through all of it, thin as a hair, was a thread of yellow.
I'd seen a thread like that once before. Naomi carried hers for ten years, and never once let it show on her face.
Felix laughed again, loud and easy, and the whole crowd laughed with him.
The thread didn't move.