Fabian — Sanctara
Marika rode out of Sanctara at dawn, two days later, through the gate of the outer ring, with two Greymark riders behind her and a basket from Hana tied to her saddle that could have fed all three of them to Greymark and back.
She hugged me goodbye at the gate. Marika hugs the way she does everything, all at once and much too hard. I heard something in my back go click.
"Ow," I said.
"You can fix it," said Marika, into my hair.
"Not out here. The board says—"
"The board is in the Academy." She let go and held me at arm's length. Her eyes were very bright, and she was pretending they weren't. "Eat. Count. Don't let Big Sis work too late. Don't let Hana cry on anything important."
"Marika."
"And look after the princess. She snaps things when she's worried."
Beside me, Liesel said nothing, because it was true.
Naomi stood a little apart, with her arms folded, the way she does when she's going to say the most important thing last. Marika turned to her. For a moment neither of them said anything at all.
"Nobody opens a circle," said Naomi, "unless someone is dying."
"I know."
"And nobody sees."
"I know, Big Sis."
Naomi looked at her a moment longer. Then she unfolded her arms, put one hand flat on top of Marika's head, the way she'd done to me at supper, and took it away again.
"Go," she said.
Marika went. She didn't look back until she was nearly out of sight, and then she turned in the saddle and waved with her whole arm, the way she used to wave at me from the top of the Greymark wall when I was small enough to think she was waving at the sky.
I felt her candle go down the road, getting smaller in my chest. Not dimmer. Just farther.
That afternoon, Ambrose solved the month.
He didn't announce it. He came to our table by the infirmary window carrying a stone bottle under each arm, the heavy kind with the wire bail and the cork, the kind Greymark bottles its cider in at the end of autumn, and he set them down in front of Felix and me without a word.
"...Those are cider bottles," said Felix.
"Yes," said Ambrose.
"Where did you get cider bottles?"
"Kitchen." Ambrose considered. "Asked."
I'd told him about Greymark cider, weeks ago, in passing. About the new cider that hasn't finished working, and how if you cork it too early the fizz stays trapped inside until you open it, and Marika once opened a bottle in the kitchen and the cork hit the ceiling and the cider hit Naomi.
Ambrose had written that down. Of course he had.
"The fizz stays," I said slowly, "as long as it's corked."
Ambrose nodded.
Felix looked from the bottle to Ambrose to me. Then he went very still, the way he had over the flat cup.
"And the healing stays," he said, "as long as the fizz does."
Nobody had to answer that.
We made the first one that afternoon. Water in the stone bottle. A splash of 「Heal」, White and small. Ambrose's hands on either side, holding it still. Felix's finger on the surface, careful, careful, and the fizz coming up in silver threads, and the green light starting to turn. Then Ambrose pressed the cork in hard with his thumb, and Felix snapped the wire bail down over it, and the bottle sat there on the table between us, fizzing faintly through the stone, like something breathing.
Ambrose opened his notebook.
Corked. Day one.
Then, after a moment:
Fizz stays.
We made three. One to open on the third day, one to open on the seventh, and one that nobody was allowed to touch until Ambrose said so. Felix wrote the days on the bottles in chalk, very neatly, in a hand I'd never seen him use: careful, straight, nothing like his jokes.
That night, after supper, when the henhouse opened, Marika's voice came from a long way down the road, and sounded exactly the same.
(I'M AT AN INN. THE BEDS ARE TERRIBLE. THE STEW IS FINE. GOODNIGHT.)
I drained my pitcher and lay down and counted it as it went. Twenty-seven. Ten for the infirmary, three for the bottles, and the rest for me.
All of it accounted for. For the last time in a while.
Marika — The Greymark Road
I lasted a day and a half.
I want that written down somewhere. Big Sis would have bet on half a day.
The first one was a carter at a ford, the second afternoon out. I'd ridden ahead of my two riders to scout, which is what I tell them when I want to be alone on a horse, and there she was, a big gray-haired carter up to her knees in the river, swearing at a wheel. She'd caught her hand between the spokes under a full load. It was bleeding all down her wrist into the water, and she was trying to heave the cart off it one-handed and getting nowhere.
She wasn't dying. I want that written down too. Nobody dies of a cut hand.
I rode past.
I got about forty paces. Then I stopped, and sat on my horse, and thought: That's going to get infected. And then: If I practice now, on a hand, I'll be better at it when someone really is dying. Which is tactics. It's actually very good tactics. Big Sis would agree, if she weren't Big Sis.
And then, mostly: I can. I can, and nobody else on this road can.
The trouble was my face. Everybody between Sanctara and the Gloamwood knows the Valcrest sisters by now. The Saint's sisters. We're in songs, apparently, which nobody tells me the words to.
I'd bought a mask at the inn the night before. A peddler had a whole tray of them, festival masks, carved and painted, and there was one shaped like a hare, with long painted ears going straight up off the forehead, and I'd bought it because I thought General would look very stupid in it. It was in my saddlebag.
I put it on.
Then I rode back to the ford, got down, waded in, and lifted the wheel off her hand with one arm.
The carter stared at me. She stared at the mask, mostly. I suppose the ears were a lot.
"Hold still," I said.
"Who— who in the Eight's name are you?"
I hadn't thought about that part.
"...Mari," I said.
It was the first thing that came out. It's half a name. It's the good half.
I took her hand, and closed my eyes, and reached the way Fabian had told us: for the bond first, and then past it, into the place where his pitcher is. It felt like leaning over a well in the dark. Then I took a splash.
The circle came up under my palm, too big and lopsided as always, White with gold all through it, wobbling like a cartwheel off its axle. It turned. The cut on the carter's hand closed, and the bleeding stopped, and all that was left was pink skin and river water.
The carter looked at her hand. Then at the mask. Then at her hand.
"You're a—" she said. "Women can't— we can't—"
"You didn't see anything," I said.
"I saw—"
"Tactics," I said, which doesn't mean anything, and got back on my horse and rode away before she could say anything else, with my heart going like a war drum and the biggest grin I've ever had in my life hidden under a wooden hare.
I meant to stop after that. I really did.
The second one was a little girl in a village with a fever. Not a bad fever. The kind that goes away by itself in a few days, if you're lucky. Her mother was sitting on the doorstep with her, rocking her, looking at the road as if a physician might come down it. One wasn't going to. The village didn't have one.
Mari did.
The third was an old woman who'd burned her hand on a pot. The fourth was one of the inn's stable girls, who'd been kicked by a horse and was pretending she hadn't. The fifth, sixth and seventh were three girls from a mill who had all cut themselves on the same blade on the same afternoon, which I still don't understand.
I didn't count them. I don't count. Counting is Fabian's job.
On the fourth evening, after supper, the henhouse opened the way it always does.
(HOW'S THE ROAD,) said Hana. She only uses capitals when she's copying me. It's very sweet.
(FINE,) I said. (BORING. TERRIBLE BEDS.)
Naomi asked about the river crossings. I told her. Liesel asked if I'd seen anything on the road. I said no, which was true; I hadn't seen anything with dark armor and no banner, and I'd been looking.
Then Fabian said, quietly, the way he says the end of his counts at night:
(Eleven.)
I went cold all the way down to my boots.
(Eleven what?) said Hana.
(Nothing,) said Fabian. (Just counting.)
(Usual,) said Liesel, and yawned. I heard her yawn. Through the bond. From four days' ride away.
Naomi didn't say anything. Naomi doesn't ask about Fabian's counting. Nobody does. He's counted things out loud in the henhouse every night since the henhouse was a henhouse: patients, splashes, stairs, the number of times Felix laughs at breakfast. One more number wasn't strange.
But I knew.
Eleven. Not eleven patients. Eleven drops. Every single one I'd taken from his pitcher since the ford. He'd felt every one of them leave, from all that way, sitting in the infirmary, or in class, or eating supper. He'd counted them. And he hadn't told Big Sis.
He'd just said the number, so I'd know he knew.
I lay in the terrible inn bed for a long time after the henhouse went quiet, looking at the hare mask on the bedpost with its long stupid ears. I thought about Fabian at the infirmary window, deciding every day who he could heal and who had to wait. I thought about the circle wobbling under my hand, and the carter's face, and the little girl's mother on the doorstep.
(...Noted,) I said, into the dark, to nobody.
Only one person in the henhouse understood it.
I tried to stop. I'd like that written down as well.
On the sixth day, a girl fell off a hay wagon just ahead of me on the road. I heard the sound her leg made from thirty paces. When I got to her, it was bent the wrong way below the knee, and she was white and shaking and trying very hard not to cry in front of a woman in a hare mask.
I put my hand on it. I reached. The circle came up, wobbling, White and gold.
And nothing happened.
The circle turned and turned and the bone didn't move. White can't mend a break. Fabian told me that, months ago, when he was first blessed and I asked him to fix a sword. Some things are too big for a splash. I took another splash anyway. And another. Nothing.
In the end I set the leg with my hands, because I'm strong enough to, and splinted it with my scabbard, and carried her to the next farm, and told them to send for a bonesetter. Her mother thanked me. She kept thanking me. I didn't know what to do with my face under the mask.
That night, the henhouse opened.
(Nineteen,) said Fabian.
Eight drops, in one day, on a girl I couldn't help. He'd felt every one of those, too.
I didn't say anything. I couldn't think of anything that wasn't sorry, and you can't say sorry in the henhouse without everybody asking why.
On the eighth night, one day's ride short of Greymark, I sat in the common room of an inn with my hood up and the mask in my bag, and listened to two carters at the next table talking about a woman on the Sanctara road.
"—a woman, I'm telling you, healed my cousin's girl of a fever with a circle of light, right there on the doorstep—"
"Women don't—"
"This one does. Wore a mask like a hare. Tall, in a blue cloak. Laughed like a hammer on an anvil. Called herself Mari."
I put my face down very close to my soup.
This one does. I'd heard someone say that before. In the henhouse, about kneeling.
I'd never been so proud in my life. Or so sure that Big Sis was going to kill me.
Fabian — Sanctara
The first drop left me during general studies, on the second afternoon, halfway through the trade roads.
I knew what it was at once. You don't forget the feeling of someone lowering a cup into your well. I sat very still with my pen in my hand and felt it go, one splash, and then nothing, and then Lady Severine looked at me over her spectacles and asked if I was quite well.
"Yes, Lady Severine," I said. "Counting."
"Usual," said Lady Severine, and went back to the roads.
Beside me, Liesel had gone still too. She'd felt me feel it. She looked at me sideways, and I looked at the map, and neither of us said anything.
Nobody was dying. I'd have known. You can feel the difference, it turns out, between a splash taken in a hurry with somebody's heart going like a drum, and a splash taken by somebody leaning over a ford in the afternoon sun with her own heart going like that for an entirely different reason.
I could have told Naomi that night. I thought about it all through supper.
Then I thought about the sound Marika had made in the gray house when her first circle came up, ugly and lopsided and gold. I DID MAGIC. She'd been waiting her whole life to do something nobody thought she could. She'd always been the loud one, the one with the sword and the goat, the one who gets told No. She'd never once been the one who heals.
So I didn't tell Naomi. I told Marika instead.
(Eleven.)
It was a lot more than eleven words' worth to say, and only one person in the henhouse would understand it. I heard her go quiet, four days down the road. Then, later, when everyone else had gone to sleep, a small voice in my chest, to nobody:
(...Noted.)
She tried to stop. I could feel her trying. Two whole days with nothing, and then, on the sixth afternoon, eight drops one after another, fast and desperate, nothing coming of any of them. That night I said Nineteen, and she didn't answer at all, and I lay awake for a long time wishing I could reach down the road and put my hand on her head the way Naomi does.
Meanwhile, the bottles.
We opened the first on the third day. When Ambrose snapped the wire bail back, the cork came out with a soft pop and a breath of something that smelled like a thunderstorm, and inside, the water was still fizzing, and the green light was still turning. Ambrose cut his thumb. It healed. Prickly.
We opened the second on the seventh day. Pop. Fizz. Green. Thumb. Healed.
Ambrose's thumb, by now, was mostly pink lines. The infirmary mistress had started leaving a clean cloth by his elbow without being asked, with an expression that said she would like it noted she disapproved of all of this.
The third bottle sat on the windowsill above our table with DO NOT chalked on it in Felix's careful hand. Every afternoon, Felix picked it up and held it to his ear, and listened, and put it down again.
On the twelfth day, I watched him do it.
He held the cold stone against his ear with his eyes closed. I could hear it from where I sat, very faint: a tiny endless hiss, like rain on a roof three streets away.
"Still fizzing," said Felix.
He put it down, very gently. His lips moved.
Twelve.
Then, I think without knowing he'd done it, he held up his hands on the table and counted on his fingers. Ten. Then two more. Then he looked at all the fingers he hadn't used yet, and closed his hands, and smiled at me, bright and wide and empty.
"Eighteen more days," he said, "and I'll write a song about this bottle."
"Eighteen more days," I said, "and you'll tell me who it's for."
I hadn't planned to say it. It just came out.
Felix's smile stayed exactly where it was. On the windowsill behind him, the stone bottle gave a small hiss, as though something inside it had shifted.
"I'll write you a song," said Felix, "about a man who asks too many questions."
"It'll have eleven verses," said Ambrose, without looking up from his notebook. "No tune."
Felix laughed so hard he had to hold on to the table. I laughed too. But I saw his hand, on the table, flat and still, the way it had been at Naomi's supper. Holding something down.
That night, I counted my pitcher before I drained it.
Twenty-eight.
One more than the morning Marika rode out. I think it came on the night she spent eight drops on a broken leg, and I went to bed with nothing left in me at all. It grows the same, whether you empty it gently or all at once. It just grows.
Twenty-eight. I lay in the dark and did the sum the way I always do now. Nine Blue pours, and one splash over.
I didn't let myself think about what I'd want them for.
The rumor reached the gray house on the thirteenth day, with the flour.
The miller's girl who delivers it to the second ring brought it up the back steps with the sacks, the way she brings all the news worth having. Hana told me later that she'd been halfway through counting out the coins when the girl leaned over the kitchen table and said, Have you heard about the hare woman?
A woman on the Sanctara road. Masked. A hare's face, with long ears. Tall, in a blue cloak. A laugh like a hammer on an anvil. A woman who opened a circle of light with her own two hands and healed whoever she found on the road, and when anyone asked her name, she said:
Mari.
Hana told me she dropped the coins. All of them. She said they went everywhere, under the dresser, under the stove, and the miller's girl helped her pick them up, and Hana couldn't remember a single thing either of them said after that.
She didn't have to tell Naomi. Naomi had been standing in the kitchen doorway the whole time.
That night, after supper, the henhouse opened.
Nobody spoke for a while. Hana didn't ask how the road was. Liesel didn't yawn. I could feel Naomi's candle, still and straight and very, very bright, the way a candle gets just before the wick catches the whole of the wax.
(Fabian,) said Naomi.
(Here.)
(You've been counting in the henhouse every night for nine days.)
I didn't say anything.
(Eleven,) said Naomi. (Nineteen. Twenty-six. Thirty-one. Thirty-eight.) She said them back to me exactly, in order. Naomi doesn't ask about my counting. But she always listens. (What are you counting?)
There's no lying in the henhouse. I don't mean you can't. I mean I won't.
(Drops,) I said.
Silence.
(Whose.)
It wasn't a question. Naomi already knew. She'd known since the flour.
I didn't answer. I didn't have to. Somewhere a long way off, at Greymark, I felt a candle that had been blazing for nine straight days suddenly try very hard to be small.
Then Naomi did something I had never heard her do. Not in the henhouse. Not on the wall, not in the war room, not in my whole life.
She shouted.
(MARIKA.)
It went through my chest like a bell through a tower. Hana squeaked. Through the wall, I heard Liesel sit straight up in bed.
There was a very long pause from the end of the road.
(...Hello, Big Sis,) said Marika.