Fabian — Sanctara
Nobody had warned me that a title ceremony involved this much kneeling.
To be fair, nobody was giving me a title. I only had to stand at the front of the throne hall in my best doublet and watch my sisters do it, which turned out to be harder.
The ceremony was four days after they arrived. I spent those four days the way I spent every day now: general studies in the morning, the battle class in the afternoon, ten in the infirmary, and the casting rule copied out every evening in my best handwriting. I was up to forty-one.
On the morning itself, Marika came to fetch us.
The Queen's law says a man outside his estate needs two escorts, and Liesel had slept at the palace on her mother's orders, which left me one short. So at dawn Marika was at the Academy gate, on a horse that looked like it had been asked to do something unreasonable.
"I was passing," she said.
"The palace is the other way."
"I was passing fast."
At the palace, Hana seized me in the doorway of my sisters' rooms and started buttoning.
"I can dress myself, Sis Hana."
"You can," Hana agreed, and kept buttoning. She'd brought my good navy doublet all the way from Greymark, the one with the silver trim, and had clearly pressed it with something stronger than an iron. "Arms up."
"Why do my arms need to go up for buttons?"
"I don't know. It just feels right."
Marika, who had delivered us and vanished, came back out of the next room in armor polished to such a shine you could have read a letter in it, and stood there scowling at nothing.
"You look nice," I said.
"It's armor. Armor doesn't look nice. Armor looks armored." She glared at a chair. "The polish was Hana's idea."
"It was not," said Hana.
"It was TACTICS."
Naomi didn't come in. She stood in the corridor in full plate with the long navy cape over it, looked at the three of us once, and said, "Time."
Liesel was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. I didn't mention it. She was in Cordelia's old half-plate with the crimson cape and the crowned star, holding her spear as if someone might try to take it from her.
"I thought there was a gown," I said.
"There's a gown." Her jaw set. "For the ball. I negotiated."
"With who?"
"With Mother. It took an hour. Armor for the ceremony, because today I'm your escort. The gown for the ball, because apparently a princess who comes to her own mother's ball in armor is making a point."
"Are you making a point?"
"I'm always making a point."
Wren, beside her, in a Valcrest tabard so new it still had its fold lines, nodded once. I'm fairly sure it meant yes.
The throne hall was the biggest room I'd ever stood in. Crimson banners ran the whole length of it, each with the gold lioness rearing under her little star, and between the banners stood what looked like every noblewoman in Sanctara, in silk and velvet and polished steel.
Every one of them turned to look at me when I came in.
I was used to being stared at. In Greymark they stared because I was the Saint. In the streets of Sanctara they stared because I was a man. Here, I think, they stared because I was both, and because every one of them had heard the word fifteen.
The Queen sat at the far end on a throne of white stone, in crimson and gold, with her slim crown and her unreadable smile. Cordelia stood at her right hand. Liesel took her place one pace behind me on the left, Wren one pace behind me on the right, and I stood between them feeling very well guarded and extremely short.
"Dame Naomi Valcrest," called the herald. "Marchioness of Greymark."
Naomi walked the length of the hall the way she walks everywhere, as if the room were a map and she'd already decided where everything went. She knelt before the throne. Steel rang on stone.
There were words. A great many of them, most of them old, several with heretofore in them. The Queen said hers in a voice that reached every corner without ever being raised. Naomi answered in four words or fewer each time, which I suspect was some kind of record.
Then the Queen rose, took the sword a page held out to her, and laid the flat of it on Naomi's right shoulder, then her left.
"Rise, Marchioness of Greymark."
Naomi had been a marchioness for weeks, on paper. But when she rose and turned, I saw her face for a moment, and I thought of a girl of fifteen at the town gate with her hand on my shoulder, keeping the house standing until they came back.
They hadn't come back. She'd kept it standing anyway. And now the whole kingdom had watched her be told so.
I had to look at the banners for a while after that.
Marika went next. She knelt fast, the way she does everything, and her ears went pink the moment the sword touched her shoulder and stayed pink all the way back. As she passed me, she muttered, "It's heavy." I'm still not sure whether she meant the sword or the title.
Hana cried. Of course Hana cried. She cried through the words and the sword and "Rise, Baroness," and then she curtsied to the Queen in full plate, which I hadn't known was possible. The Queen's unreadable smile became very slightly readable at the corners.
Then the Queen didn't sit down.
"The Crown has one thing more to say to House Valcrest."
The hall went still.
"A house that guards the Crown's border should not have to sleep in tents when it comes to the Crown's door." Her eyes rested on Naomi. Somebody had clearly told her about the inns. "House Valcrest is granted a house in Sanctara, in the second ring, with its own wall and its own stable, to hold for as long as the house stands."
A murmur ran down the hall like wind through wheat.
"Does it have a stable?" Marika whispered.
"She just said it has a stable," Hana whispered back. "Does it have a kitchen?"
"Everything has a kitchen."
"Not a good kitchen."
Naomi said nothing at all. But her shoulders, which had been holding up Greymark for ten years, came down about the width of a finger.
I didn't ask about the stairs. I'm capable of learning.
"And Greymark," said the Queen. "The border will not stand bare while its marchioness stands in my hall. Whom do you leave holding it?"
"Dame Hildegard, Your Majesty," said Naomi. "With Captain Sirius."
We'd heard about that on the road. According to Hana, Dame Hildegard had accepted by saying, "Fine. Don't take long about it."
"Then I'll send one more," said the Queen. "Someone I trust, to stand beside them. And guards enough to make the wall taller."
Naomi bowed her head. "Thank you, Your Majesty."
Someone I trust. I didn't know who that was. From the way Naomi's jaw moved, neither did she.
Afterward, the hall dissolved into silk and murmurs and congratulations, and a steady stream of noblewomen began finding reasons to walk past me very slowly.
Then the Queen came down from the dais, and the crowd parted for her like water.
"Lord Fabian. Walk with me."
It wasn't a question. Queens don't seem to have those.
Liesel took a step after me. Cordelia appeared beside her out of nowhere and put one hand on her sister's shoulder.
"Stay."
"I'm his escort."
"You're in the same room. That counts." Cordelia's eyes followed her mother across the floor, and under her breath, so quietly I almost missed it, she said, "Oh, no."
The Queen walked me to a tall window at the side of the hall, where the light came in white over the city and nobody could listen without very obviously trying.
"I haven't thanked you," she said.
"Your Majesty?"
"For my eldest daughter's life. On the field at Greymark, with your nose bleeding onto her breastplate." She looked out of the window, not at me. "I've thanked a great many people for a great many things, Lord Fabian. Usually it's a matter of finding the right words. I don't seem to have the right ones for this. So: thank you."
I said, "You're welcome," which felt much too small. Then, because it was true: "She'd have done the same for me."
"She'd have done it with a sword. Less bleeding." The corner of her mouth moved. Then she turned from the window, and her green eyes settled on me, and I had the strong feeling that the thanking was over and something else had begun.
"Tell me, Lord Fabian. Is there anyone you like?"
I blinked. "Like?"
"Like."
It seemed like the kind of question you'd better answer honestly, so I thought about it.
"Lots of people," I said. "My sisters. Wren. Lord Ambrose, I think, though it's hard to tell with him. The infirmary mistress. The cook." I considered. "The cook a lot, actually. She keeps leaving me cabbages."
The Queen looked at me for a long moment.
"That's very thorough," she said.
"Thank you, Your Majesty."
"It wasn't quite what I meant." She folded her hands. "What about one of my daughters?"
My mind went completely white, like a page before anyone writes on it.
One of. She had two.
I thought of Cordelia first, because she was the heir, and that seemed like the sort of thing a queen would mean, and a chill went all the way down to my boots. Cordelia was twenty-four, and terrifying, and had once asked me to remind her never to give me an order.
Then I thought of the other one.
A gold hairpin flying off the inner wall, and a hand catching it without looking. Four honey cakes out of six. Lord Cassian. You missed.
Something in my chest went thump. Once. Hard.
Stairs, I told it firmly. We've talked about this.
"Your Majesty, I—"
"You don't need to answer now," said the Queen, perfectly calm. "In fact, I'd rather you didn't. Think about it."
Then she walked back into the silk and the murmurs, and left me by the window with all of Sanctara shining white behind me and no idea what my face was doing.
Liesel reached me about two heartbeats later. Cordelia had let go of her and was studying the ceiling, with the look of a woman who has watched a cart go into a ditch and decided it isn't her cart.
"What did she say?"
I'd watched Liesel answer her mother with nothing but true things. I'd never been much good at lying either.
"She thanked me. For Cordelia."
"And?"
"And she told me to think about something."
Liesel's eyes narrowed. "Think about what?"
"I'm thinking about it."
"Lord Fabian."
"I'm thinking," I said, "about it."
She looked at me for a very long time. Then she looked across the hall at her mother, who was talking to a duchess as if nothing in the world had happened, and her eyes narrowed further, which I hadn't known they could.
I didn't tell my sisters. Not out loud, and not on the bond, where every word goes to all four candles.
All four.
Some things belong to the henhouse. This one, I wasn't sure belonged anywhere yet.
The ball began at sundown, and within the first hour I'd worked out what a ball was for.
It was for walking past me.
The ballroom was all gold and candlelight: a hundred candles in every chandelier and a hundred more along the walls, so bright that the windows had turned into black mirrors. Musicians played in a gallery overhead. Noblewomen danced with one another in long, turning lines, and every time a line turned, it turned so the dancers could get a look at me.
My sisters had arranged themselves around me without a word, the way they'd been doing since I was seven.
Naomi stood in front and a little to the left, where anyone coming at me had to go through her first. Marika stood on my right with her arms crossed, glaring at anything that came within three paces. Hana stood behind me with a plate of little cakes she kept offering me and a tin of salve she kept not needing.
The wall, the blade and the hearth. Hana once told me she'd decided that when she was ten. Watching them now, I didn't think they'd decided anything. They just were.
Wren stood one pace to my left, which seemed to be where she lived now. Somebody had given her a pastry with a cherry on top, and she was humming four notes at it.
The first mother came at us with her daughter about ten minutes in.
"Marchioness, what an honor! May I present my daughter, Lady—"
"No," said Naomi.
"I haven't even—"
"No."
The second got past Naomi, I still don't know how, and found Marika in her way.
"He's spoken for."
"By whom?"
"By three sisters," said Marika. "And a goat."
The lady retreated, looking deeply confused. I looked at Marika.
"General isn't here."
"General doesn't need to be here. General is a principle." Then, deadpan: "And Liesel said it worked."
Behind me, Hana wrote something in her notebook. I suspect it said General: a principle.
Liesel wasn't there.
Four maids and one look from her mother had taken her away after the ceremony, and nobody had seen her since. Every so often I caught myself looking at the doors. I told myself it was because she was my escort, and escorts should be where their lord is.
That was true. I just didn't feel like counting what else was.
Then the herald at the doors struck his staff on the floor.
"Her Highness, the Second Princess Elisabeth."
Even from across the room, I saw Liesel flinch at the name.
Then she walked in, and I forgot about the name entirely.
The gown was green. Not crimson like everything else in the palace, but a deep, dark green, the exact color of her eyes, as if someone had held one up to the light and matched it. Somebody had finally won a battle with her hair: it was smoothed back from her face and pinned, properly pinned, with a gold hairpin.
The same gold hairpin. The one that had gone flying off the inner wall, the one she'd caught without looking.
My heart did one hard thump.
One. A single beat is too small for the bond to carry. I'd checked.
Then my face went hot, all at once, from my collar to my hair. That, unfortunately, was something anyone with eyes could check.
Liesel crossed the room toward us like someone crossing a field she suspected was full of traps. She walked as though the gown were armor she didn't trust, and the closer she got, the harder she scowled.
She stopped in front of me.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"Your face did."
"It's the candles," I said. "There are a lot of candles. It's very warm."
Liesel opened her mouth. Then she looked at me properly, at whatever my face was doing, and her own face began to go red from the ears inward.
"...It is very warm," she agreed, a little too fast.
Behind me, Hana's pencil started moving.
Beside me, Marika made a small noise, like a kettle deciding whether to boil.
"Marika," said Naomi, without turning around.
"I didn't—"
"Laps."
Liesel took her place at my left, which moved Wren and her cherry one pace further out, and we stood side by side watching the dancers and not looking at each other with tremendous concentration.
"You look—" I began.
"If you say nice, I'm going back to my room for my spear."
"I was going to say green."
She looked at me sideways. "...That's worse."
"It's very green."
"Mother picked it." She tugged at the neckline as though it had insulted her family. "She said it was the only one that suited me. In her Queen voice. I hate the Queen voice."
The music changed.
"I have to dance once," she said darkly. "It's the rule. One dance, and then I can disappear."
"Who with?"
"Cordelia, usually. She leads. She steps on me on purpose and says it builds character." Her eyes went to the end of the ballroom, where her mother sat in a tall chair, watching the dancers. "Mother's looking at us."
"She's looking at everyone."
"She's looking at us," Liesel said under her breath. "Saint."
I looked. The Queen was indeed looking at us. When she saw me looking back, she lifted her cup to me, very slightly, the way you'd lift it to someone who owed you an answer.
Think about it.
My face, which had almost recovered, went hot all over again.
"What?" said Liesel. "What is it? What did she say to you?"
"Nothing."
"You're doing a face."
"It's—"
"If you say candles—"
"Stairs," I said.
It came out before I could stop it.
Liesel went scarlet. I went scarlet. We stood there side by side at the Queen's ball, two people the color of the banners, looking very hard in opposite directions.
Behind me, Hana's pencil went so fast it squeaked.
Across the room, the Queen rose from her chair. She said something to a page, and the page crossed the floor, bowed to Naomi, and said something too low to hear.
Naomi looked at the Queen. The Queen looked at Naomi. Then Naomi said, "Stay," to nobody in particular, which meant all of us, and followed the Queen through a pair of tall glass doors onto a balcony.
The doors closed behind them.
Whatever they were about to say, it was the kind of thing people walk out of a room to say.
I went back to not looking at Liesel. It's harder than it sounds when she's standing right next to you in green.
Naomi — Sanctara
I don't like balconies.
They're walls with one side missing.
The Queen was waiting at the stone rail with her back to the city. She'd left her guards inside the doors. That told me most of what I needed before she said a word.
"Marchioness."
"Your Majesty."
"Sit, if you like." There was a bench.
"I'll stand."
"So I hear. Cordelia tells me you never sit in your own war room."
"It isn't a room for sitting."
"Neither is this." She didn't sit either.
For a moment we both looked through the glass at the ballroom. I didn't need to ask what she was looking at. I'd been standing in front of it all night.
"I can speak to you as the Queen," she said, "or as the mother of a difficult second daughter. You may choose."
"Both. You'll do both anyway."
That time she smiled. "Yes. I suppose I will."
She turned from the glass.
"The Crown would like to ask House Valcrest for Lord Fabian's hand," said the Queen. "For my daughter Elisabeth."
There it was.
I'd known it was coming since the entrance hall. Since before that, if I'm honest. Since a racing heart came down the bond one night, and a princess told my sister stairs, and I told my brother to leave it because I could see exactly where it went.
I have burned a great many proposals. Sacks of them. I told Agnes to file them near the fireplace, and she understood me perfectly.
This one I couldn't burn.
A betrothal to the Crown would be a wall around my brother. No other house could reach for him. Not a duchess with an army. Not a mother at a ball with a daughter in each hand.
It would also be a door. The palace would come through it into our house, and my brother's secrets live in our house.
And under both of those was something the Queen didn't know, and I did.
Her daughter already carried one of his candles. It cannot be broken, and it will not end. The Queen was asking me for something her daughter had already taken for herself, three nights before they rode out of Greymark. I'll take it. And you can't have it back.
I almost laughed. I didn't. I don't, in front of queens.
"As the Queen," I said. "Why?"
"Because a Saint who heals fifteen in a match and ten a day, and doesn't seem to know he's anything special, is the most valuable young man in this kingdom. And every house in it knows that now." Her voice didn't change. "I would rather he were in my family than in anyone else's. I won't pretend otherwise. You'd know if I did."
I would have.
"And as her mother?"
The Queen was quiet for a moment.
"She has never once wanted anything I could give her," she said. "Not a gown. Not a title. Not a seat at my table. She wanted horses and spears and to be left alone. Now there's something she wants, and she's so frightened of wanting it that she blames it on stairs." She looked at me. "This once, the Queen and the mother want the same thing. That doesn't happen often. I'd like to make the most of it."
"Noted," I said.
The Queen raised an eyebrow. "Is that a yes?"
"It's a noted."
"Is it a no?"
"No."
"Then what is it, Marchioness?"
"His call."
Her eyebrow went higher. "In this kingdom, it's very rarely the young man's call."
"In my house, it is." I thought of a round room at the top of ninety-four stairs, and my brother deciding for himself what to tell. "Now."
She studied me the way I study a map. I let her. I've been studied by worse.
"I asked him already," she said at last. "This afternoon. I told him to think about it."
He hadn't said a word. Not out loud. Not on the bond.
Of course he hadn't. Every word on the bond goes to all four of us. All four.
"What did he say?" I asked.
"Nothing. He went white, then red." A pause. "In that order."
"He does that."
"So does she." The Queen glanced at the glass. "I'd rather Elisabeth didn't hear about this from you."
"She won't hear it from me."
That was true. Who she heard it from was his call too.
I didn't ask the other question. Father married one woman, and the price was riding out beside her every time, and he never once called it a price. Whether the Crown would want my brother to take one wife or several was not a question for a balcony.
That was his call too. But I thought about the gate.
Through the glass, I could see the ballroom. My brother and the Second Princess stood side by side, red to the ears, looking with tremendous concentration in opposite directions. Hana was writing. Marika was pretending not to watch, badly. Wren was watching the doors, which is her job. Good.
"What do you suppose," said the Queen, "they're blaming it on?"
"Candles," I said. "And stairs."
The Queen of Octavia laughed. A short laugh, surprised out of her, the kind you can't take back once it's out.
I hadn't known she could.
Noted.
Amara — Sanctara
The Saint was at the palace tonight.
Everyone knew. The girls had talked of nothing else at supper: the ceremony, the Valcrest sisters in polished steel, the Second Princess in a gown (somebody's cousin had seen it go in), and the Saint beside her all evening, with the Queen watching them both.
I listened, and smiled, and ate my soup.
One good man, the figure in my room had said. Just enough of them to keep the rest of you hoping.
And the palace already had its hand on him. Of course it did.
When the mistresses' house was dark, I opened my desk drawer.
The seed was where I'd left it, among the five polite letters from the five lords' mothers. Two weeks in a drawer, and it hadn't warmed at all. It was still as cold as the moment it touched my palm, still too heavy for its size, still drinking the lamplight, so that the drawer looked deeper than it was.
Somewhere no one will look.
I had thought about it for two weeks. Under the floor of the old chapel. Behind the library books nobody reads. In the dark beneath the battle yard's benches. Places nobody goes.
But a place nobody goes is a place someone will eventually go, to find out why.
The place no one looks is the place everyone walks.
At the heart of the Academy, where the paths from the dining hall, the classrooms and the battle yard all meet, there is a garden. Not much of one: a square of lawn, four old pear trees and a stone bench nobody sits on. Every girl in the Academy crosses it a dozen times a day. Mistresses cross it. Escorts cross it two paces behind their lords. Nobody has looked at it in a hundred years.
I went down with a shawl over my gown and a silver teaspoon from my supper tray in my pocket.
The grounds were empty. The moon was thin. At the top of the oldest tower, a single candle burned in the headmistress's window.
I stood very still under the pear trees and watched it for a long time.
It didn't move. Old women sleep badly. Everyone knows that.
In the middle of the lawn, where the paths cross and the grass is worn thinnest, I knelt. The teaspoon bent on the first stone. I straightened it between two fingers, put it back in my pocket, and dug with my hand.
When the hole was deep enough, I took out the seed.
I had expected to hesitate. I'd imagined it many times: kneeling here, thinking of the girl with the broken wrist and the boy kneeling on the sand to heal her, and putting the seed back in my pocket.
I did think of them.
That was why I didn't.
He had healed the girl who fought against him, in front of everyone, because he'd promised. And all I could think, watching him, was: so they exist. They were real all along. They were simply never meant for women like me.
I put the seed in the hole.
It didn't sit there the way a stone would. It sank, slowly, as though the earth had been waiting for it. The soil folded over it on its own, and the grass closed over the soil blade by blade, until nothing showed where I had knelt but the dirt on my hand.
The ground under my palm was cold. Colder than the night.
And for a moment, kneeling there in the dark, I felt something I hadn't felt in ten years.
Understood.
I went back to my rooms. I washed my hands. I sat at my desk and practiced my smile in the black glass of the window until it was exactly right.
In the morning, every girl in the Academy walked across the garden on her way to breakfast.
Nobody looked down.
Nobody ever does.