Greymark took twenty-eight of me in the night, give or take. The pitcher kept filling the whole time, and lost anyway.
I'd felt every one of them go. I'd counted them out like a slow leak in the dark: one, and then a long wait, and one more. Somewhere around the ninth I'd stopped being frightened of each one and started being grateful for it, because each one meant Hana's hands were still working. Then Naomi said Held, and the three candles near me came down out of the sky all at once, and I found I'd been sitting so still for so long that my legs had gone to sleep.
At sunrise, Naomi again: (Two. Hana's writing them.)
I didn't ask whose. I'd see the stone.
(Eat,) she added, which is Hana's word and not hers, and I knew from that exactly how tired she was.
By the time we came down off the low hill toward Fulmara, a little after noon, the pitcher was nearly full again. I wasn't. I didn't think I'd be full again for some time.
The songs had got there first.
Cinna had said they would, and he was right. Every wall between the hill and the palace gate had women on it. Farm women in the lanes, standing on the field walls with their arms folded; townswomen in the streets below the palace, leaning out of upper windows, crowded along the steps of the long climb with their children held up to see. Nobody shouted. Nobody threw anything. They just looked. At the Crown's riders and the white flag and the crowned star; at Felix, whom some of them clearly knew, and called to by name; and at me.
On the steps by a fountain, a girl of about ten was singing. I didn't know the tune. I didn't know the words, either; they were Bellonian, and old. But I heard Saint in it, the way they say it here, with the long vowel, and I saw the women round her go quiet to listen, and one of them put her hand on the girl's shoulder and didn't take it away.
"What's she singing?" I asked Felix.
Felix didn't answer for a moment.
"It's an old one," he said at last. "From before. About a man who came out of the forest and put his hands on people, and they got up." He was looking straight ahead. "It's a children's song. Nobody thinks it's true."
The girl had got to a verse that made the women round her laugh, and she sang it louder.
"Nobody did," said Felix.
The palace gate stood open for us, in the west wall, the side that faces the forest. Inside the gate there was a long paved court, and in the court, in rows, the household: women in black and bronze, soldiers in mail, servants in gray, all of them standing very straight. On the far side of the court there was a wide flight of steps, and at the top of the steps, a woman.
She didn't come down. She waited for us to come to her.
Cordelia rode to the foot of the steps and stopped, and got down, and the riders got down behind her, and so did we. The white flag and the crowned star stayed up. The captain with the scarred eyebrow led Corvus's ring to one side of the court, and the keepers stepped back from him, and he stood there alone in the sun for a moment, and nobody looked at him at all, very carefully.
Then Cordelia turned and lifted her hand, and two of the Crown's riders brought the prisoners forward.
We'd cut their ropes on the low hill, in sight of the city. They walked across the court unbound, Cinna in front, Gelio behind, and stopped at the foot of the steps.
"The Throne's Fire," said Cordelia, to the woman at the top. "And his companion. Returned to Bellonia, by the Crown of Octavia, unharmed."
She didn't say and healed. She didn't need to. Everybody in that court had heard the songs.
Gelio went up the steps without a word, and stood at the woman's left shoulder, and turned round, and looked at me.
Cinna didn't go up.
He stood at the foot of the steps for a long moment. Then he tipped his head back, and looked up past the woman, past the steps, past the whole gray front of the palace, to the third floor of the west wall, where a window stood open in the sun.
And he bowed. To the window. Slowly, all the way down, the way you'd bow to a queen.
Then he straightened up and went and stood with the household, and didn't look at anyone.
The woman at the top of the steps had watched him do it. I saw her watch. She didn't move at all, but I saw her add it up.
Then she came down the steps after all, one at a time, and stopped on the last one, so that she was still a little above us.
She wasn't what I'd expected. I'd expected someone tall and cold, I think, with a crown or a knife. She was neither tall nor short. Plain dark gown, plain dark hair pinned back without any fuss, a ring of keys at her waist. A face like Felix's would be, if you took all the grinning out of it and left only the bones. She could have been anybody's aunt.
I looked at her the other way.
Her light was white. Clean, clear, steady white, from her hair to her hem. No gray of tiredness, no thread of old pain, nothing. She was, as far as Elysia's eyes could tell, the healthiest person in that whole court.
I don't know what I'd expected to see. Something. I'd thought, somewhere at the back of my mind, that a person who'd done what she'd done would show it.
She didn't.
"Felix," said Princess Tullia. Her voice was pleasant and low and very precise. "You came."
"You asked," said Felix.
She smiled at him, a small, exact smile, as if he'd given the right answer to a sum. Then she turned and looked at me, and kept looking. Not the way Gelio looks. The way a woman looks at a house she's thinking of buying.
"And the Saint," she said. "Welcome to Fulmara. You'll dine with us tonight. All of you." Her eyes went to Liesel, at my left, and Wren, at my right, and then, briefly, to Marika and Cordelia, as if she were counting. "I've had the guest rooms aired."
She gave us dinner in the long hall with the eagle over the hearth.
I knew it the moment we walked in. I'd never seen it. I'd only ever heard Felix describe it once, at the Academy, in the short voice, the first time I ever heard it. But there was the hearth, and the eagle carved above it, wings spread, a thunderbolt in its talons. There was the long table. There was the fire, built high.
Felix stopped in the doorway. Only for a breath. Then he walked to the table and sat down where the steward showed him, which was halfway down on the left, and put both hands on the wood in front of him, and I watched him not look at the head of the table, where there was an empty chair.
Tullia sat at the foot. Petronius was at her right hand: a big, slow, patient man with forearms like a farmer's and the steady white light of somebody who has never once in his life been in a hurry. Gelio at her left, looking at me. Vespera, a lean, sunburned woman with a scout's habit of sitting with her back to the wall, a little further down. Cordelia opposite Tullia, at the head end, beside the empty chair. The rest of us between.
The food was very good. I don't remember any of it.
Tullia talked. She talked well, about the road and the weather and the songs, and how quickly news runs in Bellonia when it's good news, and how rarely it is. She asked Cordelia about her mother's health, and Cordelia said "Good," and Tullia looked pleased, as if one word was exactly what she'd expected and she liked to be right. She asked Marika about the bears, and Marika told her, with gestures, and Petronius listened to that part very attentively and said nothing.
She didn't mention her sister until the plates were gone.
"She woke," Tullia said.
She said it to Felix, down the length of the table, quite gently.
"Nine days ago. In the evening. She opened her eyes and she knew me, and she asked for you, and she asked for the window to be opened, so she could see the forest." She turned her cup a quarter turn on its saucer. "Then she slept again. She hasn't woken since. The physicians say she may. They can't say when."
Felix was very still.
Nine days ago. I did the sum without wanting to. Nine days ago, her letter had already been in Felix's coat for two days, folded once, next to the bottle.
She'd written Your mother has asked for you before her sister had ever opened her eyes. If her sister ever had.
I looked at Felix. Felix was looking at the open window in his mind, the one he'd seen from the hill, and I watched him want it to be true so badly that it hurt to look at.
"I want to see her," he said.
"Of course you do. Tomorrow."
"Tonight."
"She's sleeping, Felix. She sleeps very deeply now. The physicians have her quiet. I won't have her woken by a houseful of Octavians clattering up the stair at this hour." Tullia smiled at him, the small exact smile. "Tomorrow. In the morning. You and I will go up together."
Felix's spark snapped, sharp, once, on the table under his hand. Somebody's cup rattled.
"Tomorrow," said Cordelia, from the head of the table, before Felix could say anything else. "Then."
Tullia inclined her head, as if a treaty had been signed. Then she turned, quite naturally, and looked at me.
"Saint," she said. "I hope you'll come up too, in the morning. I've heard what you did in the village. My women have talked of nothing else since yesterday." Her voice didn't change at all. "You know, I suppose, that in Bellonia a man's blessing belongs to the throne."
The hall went quiet. I heard the fire.
"He's an envoy of the Crown of Octavia," said Cordelia.
"Of course he is."
"If anyone here wants him," said Cordelia, "they'll have to want all of Octavia."
It was her mother's sentence. I'd read it on a gatehouse stair, in the Queen's own hand, and it seemed the Queen hadn't trusted it to just one letter. I watched Cordelia say it, near enough word for word, in her flat, quiet voice, and knew she'd kept it the way you keep a knife in your boot.
Tullia looked at her for a long moment. Then she smiled, and this time it reached a little further.
"We'll talk about wanting tomorrow," she said. "Tea?"
She got up and poured it herself.
She did it the way Felix had told me, at the Academy, in that voice. She went round the table with the pot, and filled every cup, and turned every handle a quarter turn toward each person's hand, neatly, one after another, as if she were setting a clock. Cordelia's. Liesel's. Marika's. Mine. Felix's.
When she turned the handle of Felix's cup toward his hand, his hand moved away from it, very slightly, on the table. I don't think he knew it had.
Then she went back to the foot of the table and poured her own, and sat down, and folded her hands, and didn't drink.
Nobody drank.
We sat there with the steam going up from a dozen cups in the firelight and the eagle looking down at us from over the hearth, and nobody moved. Marika was looking at her cup as if it were a bear. Liesel's hand lay on the table next to hers, not touching it. Wren, who hadn't been given a cup, because she was standing behind my chair, had gone so still I could feel it through the back of my seat.
I looked at the cups the other way. Nothing. Tea isn't alive. Elysia's eyes have nothing to say about it.
Tullia watched us all not drink. I watched her add it up.
Then Cordelia picked up her cup.
She didn't hurry. She didn't look at anyone. She lifted it in both hands, the way her mother lifts a cup at breakfast, and she drank, all of it, steadily, and set it down on its saucer with a small, final click.
Then she looked down the table at Tullia, and turned the empty cup a quarter turn on its saucer, so that the handle pointed straight at her.
Nobody said anything at all.
I looked at Cordelia's light. White. Steady. Exactly as it had been. I'd have seen it if it wasn't; I was ready to be out of my chair and across the table with Blue before she'd finished the swallow, and I think she knew that, and I think that was part of why she'd done it.
But mostly, I think, she'd done it because somebody had to drink first. And in Octavia, the Crown does.
Tullia looked at the handle of Cordelia's cup, pointing at her. Then she looked up at Cordelia, and for a moment, just a moment, something in her face wasn't adding anything up.
"Good tea," said Cordelia.
The guest rooms were in the west wing, on the third floor, along a corridor so long and so quiet that our boots sounded like an army in it.
Corvus had been right. It was empty. Door after door along the inner wall, all shut, no light under any of them, no voices, no servants going by with trays. The whole wing had been cleared out like a house before a funeral. Tullia's steward walked us down it with a lamp, and the lamp threw our shadows up the walls ahead of us, very long.
Our rooms were together, near the end: six doors, side by side, all opening onto the corridor. Cordelia had argued the Crown's riders up from the barracks to the corridor and won four of them, which she said was three more than Tullia had wanted and one fewer than she had, and they stood now at the stairhead with their backs to the wall and their crossbows across their knees.
Three doors further along, at the very end of the corridor, there was one more door.
It was bigger than the others. Oak, dark with age, with an eagle carved over the lintel. Two of Tullia's women stood in front of it with spears, one on each side, in black and bronze, very still. And under the door, a thin line of lamplight.
I stood in the corridor and looked at it.
With my ordinary eyes: a door, two guards, a line of light on the floorboards. With the other eyes: two guards, white and steady and bored. And the door.
Nothing past it.
I looked for a long time. I looked harder than I've ever looked at anything. The guards' lights stood out bright against the dark wood. Past them, the door was just a door.
Whatever else Elysia lends me, she hasn't lent me doors. I can see a light in the dark across a field, or a hole moving among the trees a long way off. I can't see through a plank of oak.
She was three doors away from me, and I couldn't see her at all.
"Fabian," said Liesel, from her door, quietly.
I went in.
I didn't sleep. I don't think any of us did, except Marika, who can sleep anywhere and says it's a skill.
Some time after midnight I heard a door open in the corridor, and footsteps, slow, going away from us. Not toward the stair. Toward the end.
I got up and opened my door a crack. Wren was already at hers.
It was Felix. He'd walked down the corridor in his shirt and stockings, past the rest of our doors, and stopped in front of the two guards at the big oak door, and stood there. They looked at him. He looked at them. Then he said something to them in Bellonian, very quietly, and one of them glanced at the other, and the other gave the smallest shrug.
They didn't let him in. But they didn't stop him either, when he sat down.
He sat down on the floor of the corridor with his back against the wall beside his mother's door, his knees drawn up, his arms round them. Right next to the line of lamplight. The guards stood over him like two posts and looked straight ahead.
Then, after a while, very softly, Felix began to sing.
I knew the song. Everybody who's ever lived above or below Felix knows that song. The miller had three daughters, and the eldest was the fair. He'd sung it in his bath every night at the Academy, so nobody could see his face. I'd heard it through the ceiling most nights. I'd never once heard him sing it like this: not loud and not cheerful, not for anyone in the room, but low and steady and close to the wood, the way you'd sing to somebody who was asleep in the next room and you didn't want to wake, or did.
The first verse. The second. The guards stared straight ahead.
Wren, in her doorway, closed her eyes.
The fifth verse, and the sixth, where the middle daughter goes away. The ninth, which is the sad one. The tenth. The eleventh, which ends with the miller at his door, looking down the road.
And then he stopped.
There's a twelfth. His mother made it up. In the twelfth verse the middle daughter comes home. He's never sung it, not once, not in the bath, not anywhere I've heard. He was saving it.
He sat there in the dark beside her door, with the song stopped at eleven, and I stood in mine and listened to him not sing it, and for a long time neither of us moved.
In the morning, I thought. In the morning, she'll let us in, and I'll put my hand on her, and then we'll know.
In my pocket, under my hand, Hana's notebook. In his coat, against his chest, the bottle.
Three doors.