The headmistress counted my lines herself.
She sat behind her desk at the top of ninety-four stairs, with a candle burning beside her in broad daylight, and turned the pages one at a time with a dry little sound, like someone counting coins she didn't trust.
"A hundred and one," she said.
"One had a mistake in it, Headmistress."
"So I see." She held up the page with line fifty-three on it, crossed out neatly and rewritten underneath, and looked at it for a long moment. I'd crossed it out very well. Judging by the corner of her mouth, not well enough.
"Stairs," she said.
My face went hot. "It was a long day, Headmistress."
"They usually are." She put the pages in a drawer and folded her hands on the desk. "Your sentence is served, Lord Fabian. Don't make me give you another. Dismissed."
After that, the days went on the way days at the Academy do: exactly the same, only faster.
Five hundred swings in the residence garden at dawn, with Wren counting under her breath and Liesel leaning on the wall pretending not to count too. General studies with Lady Amara, whose smile was the same every morning. The battle class, where Dame Valeria knocked me down slightly less often, and Liesel sparred with Dame Valeria because nobody else would, and every girl in the yard stopped to watch. An hour in the infirmary: ten, every day, never eleven. Supper. And then, in my bedroom with the door shut, the very small, very soft battle yard.
Every night I drained the pitcher with 「Heal」 on myself, one White splash at a time, until the room tilted and I had to put my head between my knees. Every night I counted.
Nineteen. Nineteen. Nineteen. Twenty.
On the sixth night, I counted twenty-one.
I counted again the next night, to be sure. Twenty-one. Nearly twice what I'd had at my blessing, and nearly twice what a typical mage has. As far as the Academy knew, I had fifteen.
(Twenty-one,) I told the henhouse.
(Good,) said Naomi.
(...Show-off,) said Marika. Then, after a moment: (That's good. I mean, it's fine. It's a NUMBER.)
(I'm writing it down,) said Hana. (Twenty-one. Did you eat?)
And from the escorts' room, four paces away through the wall: (Saint. It's past midnight. Go to sleep.)
(You're awake too.)
(I'm guarding.)
(From bed?)
(From bed,) said Liesel, with enormous dignity, and I felt her candle flicker, the way it does when she's trying not to laugh.
I noticed the garden on the fourth morning.
We crossed it every day, three or four times, like everyone else. On the fourth morning, walking to general studies, I looked up for no particular reason and saw that the pear trees were wrong.
Their leaves were curling at the edges. Not falling, not turning gold the way leaves do when they're finished. Curling, and going brown from the rim inward, as if something had drunk them from the inside. Nothing else in Sanctara had turned. The trees along the Academy wall were green. The ivy on the dining hall was green. Only the four pear trees around that little lawn had started to give up.
The flower beds along the paths had gone the same way. Somebody's careful rows of small blue flowers hung their heads over the gravel.
Two gardeners stood over them with watering cans, women in brown aprons, frowning.
"Too much water," said one.
"Not enough," said the other.
"I've given them the same as always."
"Then it's the soil."
"It's the same soil as always."
Their voices rose, both at once, hot and sharp, the way the two girls' had in the infirmary. Then it went out of them, just like that, like a candle pinched between two fingers, and they only stood there looking tired.
Their lights were white.
Only the middle of the lawn, where the paths cross, was fine. Better than fine. The grass there was greener than anywhere else on the grounds, thick and soft and bright, as though it had been having a very good week.
"That's odd," said Liesel.
Wren didn't say anything. But I noticed that she'd stopped walking across the middle. She went around the edge now, the long way, without a word, and waited for us on the far side.
It wasn't only the garden, either. The whole Academy was getting tired.
In the dining hall, a girl slammed her cup down so hard it cracked, and then stared at it as if someone else had done it. In the battle yard, a girl won her spar and burst into tears. In the infirmary I had three more in a week with scratches from fights neither side could explain, and every one of them left looking emptier than she'd come in.
I checked every light I passed. I couldn't help it.
Everyone looked tired. Their lights all said they weren't.
On the fifth morning, the headmistress was standing at the edge of the garden.
She stood very straight, not leaning on the ash cane, holding a lit candle in a brass holder at arm's length. There wasn't a breath of wind. The sky was clear and the pear leaves hung perfectly still.
The flame leaned anyway.
Toward the middle of the lawn.
She saw me looking. "Good morning, Lord Fabian."
"Good morning, Headmistress. Is something—"
"Go to class."
I went. When I looked back from the far side, she hadn't moved, and neither had the flame.
"She's been doing that since yesterday," Liesel said quietly. "Lady Severine too. Not with a candle. Just standing there, looking at the grass."
I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know what a lot of things meant that week.
I had other things on my mind.
"I'm taking your sisters to the Gilded Lark," Liesel announced on the seventh morning, over breakfast. "Tonight. You're coming."
"Am I?"
"You're the reason they'll let us in the door." She stole a piece of my bread. "A princess, they'll seat. A princess with a Saint and a marchioness, they'll give the room upstairs with the window."
"Why the Lark?"
She thought about it, tearing the bread into smaller and smaller pieces.
"I showed you the city," she said to the bread. "I want to show them."
The Gilded Lark was exactly as I remembered it: a narrow house on a wide street in the second ring, with little gold birds painted over the door and a menu whose prices had made Wren go very quiet the first time we came. The owner, a tall woman with a gold pin in her collar, saw us on the step and went white, then pink, then bowed so deeply that her pin nearly fell out.
We got the room upstairs with the window.
"House Valcrest pays," said Naomi, before anyone had sat down.
"I invited," said Liesel.
"Noted. House Valcrest pays."
"I'm a princess."
"I'm his sister."
Liesel opened her mouth, looked at Naomi's face, and closed it again. "...Fine."
"Last time," Marika told the table, "he offered to pay. In eggs."
Hana's hands flew to her mouth. "He offered a princess eggs?"
"One egg," said Liesel. "He only had one."
"You offered a PRINCESS your ONE EGG?"
"And then I made honey cakes with it," I said. "Six. As repayment."
Hana looked at me with shining eyes. "That's the sweetest thing I've ever heard."
"It was repayment."
"Of course it was," said Hana, and took out her notebook.
Liesel had gone pink, and was suddenly very interested in the view.
I don't know how the seating happened. One moment we were all standing around the table, and the next Hana had steered me into the chair by the window, and Liesel into the chair beside it, and when Marika tried to take the seat on my other side, Hana stepped on her foot.
"Ow! Hana!"
"Sorry," said Hana. "It's a small room."
The food came on plates far too big for it. Marika looked at her pheasant, which was arranged in a little fan with a sauce drawn around it in a perfect spiral, and said, "This is a bird for a MOUSE."
"More," Naomi told the owner, who fled.
Wren took one bite of the pheasant and hummed a fourth note. Then she looked at the little card beside her plate, on which someone had written what the bird had cost, and hummed something much lower, like a roof falling in.
Hana sent her compliments to the kitchen, and then herself, and came back twenty minutes later with a recipe, a new friend, and flour on her sleeve.
And Liesel argued with Marika.
"Spear beats sword," said Liesel. "Reach."
"Sword beats spear. Once you're inside the reach, you're inside the reach."
"You'd never get inside."
"I'd get inside so fast you'd think I'd always BEEN inside."
"I broke a fence by leaning on it."
"I broke a fence by LOOKING at it."
"Spar," said Naomi. "Tomorrow. Our yard."
Both of them lit up at once, like two lamps off one taper.
Hana leaned over and put another slice of bread on Liesel's plate. "You're too thin."
"I'm not too thin."
"Everyone is too thin," said Hana, and Liesel laughed, really laughed, with her head back, the way she only does when she forgets to be a princess.
I watched her.
She was sitting at our table, eating Hana's extra bread, arguing with Marika, ducking her head when Naomi looked at her. She looked as though she'd been sitting there for years. As though there had always been a chair for her at our table, and we'd only just noticed it had been empty.
Across the table, Naomi was watching me watch her. She looked away before I could see what her face was doing.
When the sky outside the window began to turn gold, Liesel put down her cup.
"There's one more thing," she said. "The best view in Sanctara. At sunset it's better."
"The wall," I said.
"What wall?" said Marika.
"The inner wall. There's a walkway along the top." Liesel stood. "It's a hundred and twelve stairs."
The whole table went quiet.
Marika choked on her wine. Hana's pencil stopped. Even Wren looked up.
"Go," said Naomi.
"We're not going?" said Marika.
"I've seen walls."
Hana's knees had carried her through a monster tide in full plate. "My knees," she said sadly.
"Wren," said Naomi. "With us. We'll wait at the bottom."
And that was how I ended up climbing a hundred and twelve stairs with Liesel, in the last of the light, while my three sisters and my escort waited at the foot of the wall and very carefully didn't look up.
I counted the stairs on the way up. Of course I did.
Twelve. Forty. Sixty-one, where they turned and narrowed between two walls, and Liesel went ahead because there wasn't room for two. Ninety. A hundred. At a hundred and twelve, the stair ended in a little arched door. Liesel shoved it open with her shoulder, and the wind came in.
She was right. It was better at sunset.
The whole city fell away below us in its rings, white walls turning gold and then rose. The great shrine's dome burned on its hill like a coal. Down in the lower rings, lamps were coming on one at a time, as if someone were walking through the streets lighting them by hand. Somewhere down there was a gray house with a navy banner and a very good kitchen.
Liesel went to the parapet and leaned on it with both elbows. The wind was already pulling her hair out of its pin.
"Last time," she said, "you made a face at the top."
"I did not."
"You did. You said the stairs were very steep."
"They were."
"They're the same stairs." She was grinning at the city. "They haven't got any steeper."
The wind gusted. Her gold hairpin jumped out of her hair, the way it had the first time, a bright flick against the sunset, and her hand came up without her even turning her head and closed around it.
She laughed. "Every time. This wall hates my hair."
And my heart—
Not one thump, this time. Not a single skipped beat I could check and dismiss. It began to race, hard and fast, as though I'd run the stairs twice.
And I knew.
It wasn't the stairs.
It had never been the stairs. Not the first time, up here, when she caught the hairpin and I blamed a hundred and twelve steep steps. Not at the ball, when she walked in wearing green. Not at the Queen's window, when I told my own heart stairs and said we'd talked about this.
We hadn't talked about this. I'd just refused to listen.
All the things I'd counted without meaning to. Four honey cakes out of six. A fireball batted out of the air. You hit him. You shouldn't have. The bites of breakfast she wrote down for Hana. Flour on her cheek. They weren't just things that had happened. They were reasons. I'd been counting reasons for weeks and calling them something else.
You always know where she is. I did. And not only because of the candle.
When they get hurt, and you're angrier about it than they are. On the sand, looking at her blistered palms, I would have done anything at all.
What place? she'd asked, in the kitchen.
This one. Every time.
I liked her.
Not the way I liked the cook. Not the way I liked Wren, or Ambrose, or anyone else on the very thorough list I'd given the Queen.
I liked Liesel.
(Fabian?) Hana's voice, small and worried, in my chest. (Your heart's going very fast. Are you all right?)
Of course. A racing heart is big enough for the bond to carry. All four of them could feel it: three sisters at the foot of the wall, and one standing right beside me with her hairpin in her hand.
Liesel turned and looked at me.
I couldn't say anything. My mouth had stopped working, along with most of the rest of me.
(Stairs,) said Liesel calmly, on the bond. (A hundred and twelve of them. He's fine. He's just short.)
(I am NOT—)
That got my mouth working again, at least.
(He's fine,) she said again, and smiled at me, a little crooked, with the wind in her hair. "They're very steep stairs," she said, out loud. My own words, from the first time.
"Yes," I said. "Very steep."
It was true. There were a hundred and twelve of them, and they were very steep.
It just wasn't why.
At the foot of the wall, for once in her life, Marika said nothing at all. Somehow that was worse.
(Take your time,) said Naomi.
Liesel turned back to the city and put her hairpin in, badly, and it immediately began to work its way loose again. I stood beside her and looked at the lamps coming on.
She'd blamed her own heart on the stairs once, too. On the bond, to Hana, the night of the match. I'd never found out what that was about.
I looked at her, at the side of her face in the last of the light, and let myself wonder, just for a moment.
Then I stopped. Probably it had been stairs. The palace has a great many of them.
One of my daughters. I had an answer now. I just didn't know what to do with it yet.
We stayed until the sun was gone and the whole city was lamps. Then we went down.
I counted the stairs again on the way. A hundred and twelve.
Not one of them was the reason.