I didn't answer right away.
It wasn't that I didn't know the answer. It was that, ever since Odile closed the shrine doors behind me on the day of my blessing, I'd kept it in a very small box with very few people in it. My sisters. Then Liesel. Nobody else had ever asked me to open the lid.
Then you'll decide what to answer, Naomi had said, at the bottom of the stairs. You can do that now.
Under the desk, Liesel's hand was still on my sleeve. I looked at her. She didn't say anything. She gave me one small nod, the kind you'd miss if you weren't looking for it.
On my other side, Wren was looking very hard at the floor, as if to give me somewhere private to think.
I looked back at the headmistress.
"Yes," I said. "I see it. Yours is white. Steady. There's nothing wrong with you at all."
The headmistress closed her eyes.
She kept them closed for a long moment, small and straight in her chair, with the candle burning in front of her in broad daylight. When she opened them again, her face hadn't changed. But her hand on the face-down page had pressed flat, as if to stop it blowing away.
"White," she said softly. "Well. That's one."
"It's called 「Eyes of Elysia」," I said. Now that I'd started, it was easier to keep going. "Everyone has a light. White when they're well. Yellow, then orange, then red, the worse it gets. In the tide, I healed the darkest first."
"And knew by it who would fall first," murmured the headmistress.
"Yes."
She nodded, slowly. "And the well?"
"Nineteen," I said. "As of last night. It was eleven at my blessing, and seventeen after the tide. Every night I fall into fatigue, it grows a little. That's why I drain. That's why I count."
Behind the headmistress, Lady Severine's hand closed on the back of the chair. It was the first time I'd ever seen her move without deciding to first.
"His well grew deeper the more he poured from it," said the headmistress. "Two."
That left the third.
The third wasn't only mine. I looked at Liesel again.
"It's yours too," I said.
"Tell her," said Liesel.
So I did.
"There's a skill called 「Covenant」," I said. "The circle is Green, with threads of gold running through it. It binds someone to me, if they want it. Only if they want it. They get stronger. They heal a little on their own. And I can feel them, all the time, wherever they are." I put my hand flat on my chest without quite meaning to. "Like candles."
The headmistress didn't move.
"Candles," she repeated, very quietly.
"Four. My three sisters. And—"
"Me," said Liesel. She held up her smooth, unmarked hands in the window light. "I carry one."
The headmistress turned her head and looked at the crest above the fireplace: the single candle flame inside its circle, carved into stone five hundred years ago by someone who had no idea what it meant.
She looked at it for a long time.
"Three," she said at last. "All three." Her voice didn't break. I don't think it knew how. But something in it went very carefully around a place where it might have. "Five hundred years."
I didn't tell her about the voices. Some things belong to the henhouse.
When the headmistress turned back to us, she was exactly as she'd been when we walked in: small, straight, and entirely in charge.
"Severine."
"Headmistress."
"None of this goes to the palace."
Lady Severine was quiet for a moment. I had the distinct impression that she wrote a great many letters, and that she was rearranging several of them in her head.
"No, Headmistress," she said.
"Good."
My eyes went to the face-down page under the headmistress's hand. "And the drawing?"
"Another day." She slid it back into the leather case, still face down, and closed the lid. "I think you have given an old woman enough for one morning."
We stood. I'd reached the door when she spoke again.
"Lord Fabian. One more thing."
I turned.
"Dame Valeria asked me for a place where a Saint could heal without a board telling him not to. The Academy has an infirmary. It has had one for two hundred years, and it is mostly used for sprained ankles and girls avoiding general studies." The corner of her mouth did its brief, almost-thing. "As of this morning, it is yours. One hour every afternoon, after the battle class. The infirmary mistress has been told to give you a chair and stay out of your way."
"Thank you, Headmistress."
"Ten a day," she added. "For appearances. What you do after your door is shut is between you and your well."
On the stairs going down, ninety-four of them, nobody said anything for a long time.
Then, about halfway, Wren spoke.
"Young Master."
"Yes, Wren?"
"...The oak."
The buck, on the road. Liesel's spear, through it and into the tree so deep that Wren couldn't pull it out.
"Yes," I said.
Wren nodded, slowly, once, the way you nod when a sum you've been carrying for weeks has finally come out.
The infirmary was a long, whitewashed room on the ground floor of the oldest building, with eight narrow cots, tall windows, and a smell of lavender and old bandages that reminded me so much of Hana's medicine cupboard that I stood in the doorway for a moment and just breathed.
The infirmary mistress was a large, calm woman with flour-white hair and forearms like a blacksmith's. She looked at me the way you'd look at a new piece of furniture someone had delivered without asking you: carefully, and without much hope.
Then she put a chair by the window, as instructed, and stayed out of my way, as instructed. By the end of the first hour, she had moved her own chair a little closer. By the end of the second day, she was bringing me the patients herself, darkest first, without my asking.
I liked her very much.
Ten a day. The girls came from the battle class with sprains and bruises and one split lip that its owner was extremely proud of. Then, on the second afternoon, the door opened, and someone came in who wasn't a student at all.
It was the cook. The one who had sent the flour and the honey and the butter for my honey cakes, and wouldn't take Wren's coin, and had sent a cabbage for reasons nobody would explain.
She'd burned her hand on a pot. She stood in the doorway holding it against her apron, looking as though she was certain she'd come to the wrong place.
"Sit down," I said, and pointed at the chair.
She sat. A White circle opened under her worn boots. When the red went out of her hand, she stared at it, then at me, and then she cried, quietly and completely, into her apron, while the infirmary mistress patted her shoulder and pretended to be very busy with a cupboard.
The next morning, a cabbage was waiting outside our door.
Liesel looked at it for a long time.
"In my experience," I said, "there's always a cabbage."
Two more days, Naomi had said.
It took three.
(The road was wrong,) Marika explained, on the second night.
(We stopped to buy you socks,) said Hana.
(Marika raced a cart,) said Naomi.
(The CART started it.)
On the third afternoon, I was sitting in the infirmary with my ninth patient of the day, a girl who had sprained her wrist trying to catch an apple that Liesel had thrown at someone else, when I felt them.
Not heard. Felt.
For weeks, my sisters had been three candles a very long way off, so far away that I had to close my eyes to be sure of them. Now, all at once, they were close. Closer every moment. Coming up the hill toward the Academy gate like three lamps carried quickly through the dark.
I healed the girl's wrist. I'm fairly sure I healed it properly. I don't remember it at all.
"Go," said the infirmary mistress, who had seen my face. "I'll tell the tenth to sprain something tomorrow."
I went. Liesel and Wren came with me, because they had to, and also because Liesel was already running.
They came through the Academy gate on horseback, in a cloud of road dust: three riders in Valcrest navy, a handful of Greymark guards behind them, and a packhorse so overloaded with bags that it looked like a small, unhappy hill.
Marika reached me first. Of course she did.
She was off her horse before it had stopped, and across the yard before her boots had properly landed, and then she had me off my feet in a hug that squeezed every bit of air out of me in one go.
"I WASN'T WORRIED," she announced, into the top of my head.
"You're crushing me."
"I'm greeting you." She put me down and held me at arm's length and scowled. Her ears had gone bright pink. "You're shorter."
"I'm exactly the same."
"You're shorter in my head."
Then Hana was there, and Hana was already crying, the way she does, without seeming to notice. She took my face in both hands and turned it left and right, looking for damage.
"You're thin. You're so thin. Fabian, have you been eating? Liesel, has he been eating?"
"Three bites," said Liesel. "Every morning. I added a line to your page."
Hana let go of my face, turned around, and hugged Liesel instead, so suddenly that Liesel made a small noise like a surprised cat. Then Hana turned back, pulled a bundle out of her saddlebag, and pushed it into my arms.
"Socks," she said tearfully.
Naomi came last.
She got down from her horse slowly, the way she does everything. She handed the reins to a guard without looking. Then she walked across the yard to me, and stopped, and looked at me for a long time, the way she looks at a map before a battle, making sure every piece of it is where it ought to be.
Then she put her hand on top of my head.
It was warm and heavy and exactly the same as it had always been, and I had not known until that moment how much I'd missed the weight of it.
"...Taller," said Naomi.
"Marika says I'm shorter."
"Marika's wrong."
"I'm NEVER—"
"You stood," said Naomi.
Not a question.
"I stood," I said.
Naomi didn't say anything else. She just pulled me in, very hard and very briefly, the way she hadn't done since the day we buried Father and Mother. Then she let go, and stepped back, and was Naomi again.
Over her shoulder, I saw Liesel quietly look away, to give us the moment. And I saw Marika duck behind the overloaded packhorse.
"Where's Marika?" said Liesel, without turning her head.
She pointed, without looking, straight at the packhorse.
"STOP FINDING ME!"
Naomi looked at Liesel. Liesel looked back.
"Thank you," said Naomi, "for keeping him."
"He mostly kept himself," said Liesel. "I just made him eat."
Then Naomi's eyes moved past her, to Wren, standing one pace beside me with her hand on her sword.
"Wren."
"My lady."
Naomi looked at her for a moment longer.
"Good," she said.
Wren stood up so straight she gained an inch.
The Queen had said they would be received at the palace upon their arrival, so to the palace we went: my sisters on horseback, the packhorse complaining behind them, and Liesel, Wren and me on foot beside Naomi's stirrup, because I refused to ride when I could walk next to them.
It took a long time. Marika wanted to see everything. Hana wanted to know whether every bakery we passed was the one with the expensive soup. (It wasn't. That was the Gilded Lark, and Liesel pointed it out from three streets away, and Hana looked at it with deep professional suspicion.) Naomi said almost nothing, but she rode the whole way with her knee close enough to my shoulder that I could have leaned on it.
I didn't lean on it. I wanted to.
The palace courtyard was all white stone and crimson banners. Servants in crimson came running for the horses and the bags, and stopped dead at the sight of the packhorse.
"I brought everything," Hana told them, a little defensively.
Inside, the entrance hall was enormous, cool and echoing, with a floor like still water. One broad staircase swept up from the middle of it toward a gallery, and that was all.
I stopped and looked around.
I looked again.
"Liesel," I said. "Where are all the stairs?"
Liesel went very still.
"What?"
"The stairs. You said the palace had a great many of them. The night your mother sent for you." I gestured at the single staircase. "That's one. That's barely a lot."
There was a pause.
Then I watched Liesel's face go pink. Then red. Then redder still, until she looked like someone had lit a lamp behind her.
"...They're further in," said Liesel.
"Can I see them?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"WHAT stairs?" said Marika, who had heard every word of that night through the bond and had clearly been waiting three days for a chance to ask out loud.
"The ones from the other night," said Hana helpfully. "Liesel's heart was going so fast, and she said—"
"Fabian," said Naomi. "Leave it."
I looked at her. She was looking at Liesel, with the expression she wears when a plan has gone exactly the way she expected and she doesn't intend to mention it.
Marika looked from Liesel's ears to my face, and back to Liesel's ears, and her mouth slowly fell open.
"...Oh," said Marika.
"Marika," said Naomi.
"I didn't say anything!"
"You were about to."
Hana had both hands pressed over her mouth. Her eyes were shining with something that looked very much like delight.
"What?" I said. "What's oh?"
Nobody answered me. Marika had developed a sudden, intense interest in the ceiling. Hana was making a small, strangled noise behind her hands. Liesel had turned around and was studying the single staircase as though it had personally offended her.
Everybody in my family knew something I didn't. I was used to that. Usually it was about laps.
Behind me, Wren hummed three notes, very slowly.
It sounded almost exactly like oh, too.