We broke camp on the headland before the sky was light.
Nobody had to be told to hurry. Rufa's women had the tents down and the carts loaded in the dark, by feel, without a word, and when the first gray came up over the lake we were already on the shore road going south, back the way we'd come.
I looked back once, from the top of the headland.
Stonemere's people were on the spit.
All of them, I think. Standing along the shingle at the water's edge in the gray light, in their shawls and coats, not moving, not waving, with their hands folded in front of them. Watching us go. A long row of small dark figures against the ice, and at the end of the row, a little apart from the others, a small round one in a brown shawl.
Under 「Eyes」, from that far, I couldn't see the knots. Only the lights, white, a long row of them on the edge of the lake.
Vera didn't look back. She rode in front of Rufa with her eyes on the road and her hands on the reins, and her lips were moving again. I didn't need to hear it to know what it was. Seven names. Then, after a while, a different word, over and over, so quietly that the wind took it.
I think it was Marta.
We passed Crossholm at dusk on the seventeenth day.
Naomi didn't stop. She sent the rider ahead to the reeve with a message, and we went by on the shore road below the village without turning in: two carts and twenty-odd riders and the wind behind us, the lamps coming on in the windows above.
Not in three of the houses. Those were dark.
The eleven were in the street. They'd come out as the light went, the way they had the night we'd seen them from the reeve's window. A line of them along the middle of the snow, hands folded, not touching. Facing north.
They didn't turn round to watch us go by. Not one of them.
The reeve came running down to the shore road with her lantern swinging, and caught Naomi's stirrup, and walked beside her horse for a long way, talking low and fast. I couldn't hear what she said. I could hear what Naomi said back, because Naomi's voice carries without trying.
"Everyone who hasn't eaten. Tonight. Down to the city."
"My sister—"
"Has eaten."
The reeve stopped walking. Naomi's horse went on without her.
I looked back. She was standing on the shore road in the snow with the lantern hanging from her hand, looking up at her village, at the dark houses and the line of people in the street with their backs to her. Then she turned and went up the path toward the lit windows, fast, to start knocking on doors.
We camped that night an hour south of Crossholm, on the open plateau, in the lee of the carts. No lamps anywhere. Only the wind, and the dark, and the long white country going away north under no moon at all.
I made the bottles. Felix sang. Ambrose held. We'd made a hundred and two by then, and used one, and the bottle cart was so heavy Rufa had put a second horse on it.
Then I drained.
I sat on a crate at the edge of the firelight with my hands open in my lap and let the last of the pitcher go into them, the way I have almost every night since I was seventeen, and I felt the bottom come up to meet me where it always does.
It didn't.
The bottom was a little further down. Just a little. One splash.
Forty-four.
I sat there for a long time with my warm hands and counted it, and counted it again. It's the slowest thing in my life, that number. Eleven nights of hitting empty for one more. It had never felt less like enough.
But it was one more. One more splash is a cut closed, or a fever turned, or a bottle that isn't needed because I got there in time.
"Forty-four," I told Naomi, when she came past with the night's orders.
She looked down at me for a moment, standing over me with the firelight on one side of her face.
"Good," she said. Then, after a moment: "You'll need it."
She didn't say Noted. She didn't need to.
We came down the switchback into Arctura after dark on the eighteenth day, with torches, the carts' brakes screaming on every turn.
The bells were ringing again. Not the way they'd rung when we first came. Not one shrine after another in welcome. A single bell, at the very bottom of the city, by the gate, ringing slowly and steadily without stopping, the way you ring a bell to tell people where to come.
The lower city was full of people.
Not Arctura's people. Strangers, in the streets by the gate: in blankets, in the clothes they'd run in, sitting against the walls of houses with children in their laps, standing round fires in braziers that someone had dragged out into the snow. Plateau people. You could tell by their coats, and by the way they kept looking back up the mountain, toward the switchback, toward the north.
"From the valley," said the rider, very quietly, riding beside Naomi. "The one that was attacked. They've been coming down for two days."
The bell was the shrine at the bottom of the city. Its doors stood open, and light and noise came out of them, and a queue of people stretched down its steps into the snow. Two of the palace's physicians stood at the top, in their gray robes, looking at the queue the way you look at a flood from the wrong side of a wall.
I was off my horse before Naomi had said anything. When she did say something, it was only, "Go."
I don't remember all of that night. I remember pieces of it.
The shrine floor, covered from wall to wall in pallets and blankets and people, and the keeper, a tall old woman with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, coming at me through them as if she'd been waiting for me personally for two days, which I suppose she had.
The wounds.
Not sickness. I'd been ready for sickness. These were wounds, and they were all the same kind. Torn skin. Gouges in parallel lines, three or four together, deep. Wrists and forearms crushed, the way a wrist crushes when someone much stronger than you takes hold of it and doesn't let go. Bruises on throats.
Hands. All of it done with hands.
Under 「Eyes」, the lights on that floor were every color a wounded light can be. Yellow and orange and red, and two that were so near the dark that I went to them first and stayed with them until they weren't. I looked into every one of them for the other thing, too. The knot. The roots.
There weren't any. Not in one of them. Whatever had been done to these people had been done with hands, not with fruit.
Blue 「Mass Heal」, over a family on three pallets together. Over the next. Over the next. Three splashes each, and the pitcher filling behind me as I went, faster than it had ever filled, because all four of them were in that room with me: Naomi at the door, Hana on her knees beside the pallets, Marika moving the line, Liesel at my left.
Forty-four. It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough, on that floor, in one night.
"Bottles," said Naomi, from the door.
I looked up.
"Bottles," said Naomi again. "Now. This is what they're for."
And so the bottles came off the cart at last.
Ambrose carried them in, a crate at a time, with his book shut in his coat. Hana took them from him and went down the rows with them, kneeling, reading the corks by touch in the bad light: one notch, one notch, one notch. Rufa's women went with her, two of them, carrying the lamps. A sip at a time, for the ones too hurt to hold the bottle themselves, the way you'd feed a lamb.
And the yellow went out of them. Slower than my hand. But it went.
I was three pallets away, on my knees over a woman with a crushed arm, when I heard Hana say, very quietly, to nobody, "Twelve."
Every bottle is somebody I don't have to reach in time.
I'd said that in Queen Theodora's rooms, a world away. I hadn't known, then, what it would look like.
Felix sang.
Not for the bottles. There weren't any bottles being made. He sang because there were children on that floor, a lot of them, too frightened to cry and too frightened to sleep, and somebody had to do something about the noise of the bell.
He sat down on the stone in the middle of them with his back against a pillar and Marika's red scarf round his neck, and he started on the miller's song, low, the way you'd sing to one child in a dark room. The first daughter going out walking. The second.
The children nearest him went quiet. Then the ones beyond them.
Marika stood guard over him with her back to him, facing the door, her hand on her sword, as if a song might be attacked at any moment. She didn't look round. She didn't seem to be listening.
When he came to the end of the sixth verse and stopped for breath, she said, without turning her head, "Keep GOING."
"I didn't think you liked it."
"THEY like it." A pause. "Keep going."
He kept going.
When he came to the verse he always skips, he skipped it. I saw Marika's shoulders move. Just once. Then she went on not listening, very hard, for the rest of the song.
The girl was about Pia's age.
She was one of the last ones I reached, near the back wall, sitting up against it with her knees drawn up and a blanket round her and both forearms wrapped in strips of somebody's shirt. Pia had been sitting with her for an hour, one step from me as always, which on that floor meant one step from whoever I was kneeling beside. They'd been talking. I don't know about what.
The girl's forearms were torn in four parallel lines from elbow to wrist, both of them, as if she'd held them up in front of her face.
I healed them. Green. The lines closed white.
She watched them close. Then she looked up at me, and her face did nothing at all, the way a face does when everything it would have done has already been done, too many times, in the last two days.
"It was my aunt," she said.
I didn't say anything. Pia's hand moved, very slightly, toward the girl's. Stopped. Stayed there, an inch away, on the blanket.
"She came from the next village. Up the valley. She came at night, with the others from her village. They didn't knock." The girl's voice was very flat. "My mother opened the door, because it was her sister. And she came in, and she was smiling, and she said Hush, it's better this way, and she held my mother's arms so she couldn't get up."
The bell went on ringing at the front of the shrine. Slowly. Steadily.
"She didn't shout," said the girl. "None of them shouted. Not once. Not even when—" She stopped. "They were so quiet. My aunt's hands were black. All black. And she had—" The girl touched her own forehead, at the hairline, just above each temple. "Here. Little horns. Like a goat kid's. Coming through her hair." She looked at me. "She was so kind, before. She used to bring us honey."
Nobody said anything. There wasn't anything to say.
Then, from behind me, quietly, Hana's voice. I hadn't heard her come.
"What was her name? Your aunt?"
The girl looked up at her. "Why?"
"Because I'm keeping a list."
The girl looked at Hana for a long time. At the blue notebook in Hana's hand, with its soft corners. At Hana's face.
"Is it a list of the dead?"
"No," said Hana. "It's the other one."
The girl told her.
Hana wrote it down, kneeling on the stone with the notebook on her knee, under forty-three others. Then she showed the girl the page.
The girl looked at her aunt's name for a long time. Then she put her head down on her healed arms and cried, finally, the way she hadn't been able to all night, and Pia's hand closed the last inch onto the blanket and stayed there.
The queen sent for us a little before dawn.
Not to her rooms. To the map room behind the hall, where the long table was, and the fire. The map was still pinned flat with its four candlesticks. But it had changed.
The black rings were still there, all seven. Now, at the north end of the long lake, two of them had been filled in solid. Black all the way through, like holes punched in the vellum. And a third village, up the valley beyond them, not one of the seven, had a red cross scratched through it so hard the pen had torn the skin.
The valley the girl had come from.
There were more people round the table this time. Queen Stellara at its head, standing, in the same blue gown, with the shadows under her eyes gone darker. The chancellor at her elbow with her papers. And three I didn't know: an old woman in a councilor's black with a heavy chain; a broad, scarred woman in mail with a sword at her hip and a face like a closed gate, who I guessed was the marshal of Septentria's soldiers; and a thin, anxious one in gray who kept looking at the door.
Naomi stood at the table's foot. Rufa behind her. Me beside Naomi, with Liesel at my left and Wren at my right and Marika at the door, being Front at a council of state.
And Vera, with Rufa's two women, by the wall. The councilor in black looked at her once when she came in and didn't look at her again.
"Another since last night," said the queen, without any greeting at all. "The farthest two of the seven, at the north end of the lake. Both risen now." She touched the solid black. "The reeve of the second sent a boy on a pony. He says they came out at dusk, all of them, and walked south along the shore road. Not running. Walking. In a line."
"South," said Naomi.
"South."
The councilor in black put both her hands flat on the table.
"Majesty," she said. "With respect. This is a rising. Whatever else it is, it is armed subjects of the Crown falling on their neighbors and marching on the capital. My grandmother put down the last one, in the hungry year. We know how this is done."
"They're not armed," I said.
Everybody looked at me. I hadn't meant to say it. It had come out anyway.
The councilor turned her head. Very slowly. She looked at me the way people look at a lord who has spoken at a council table: as if a chair had said something.
"Lord Fabian," said the queen. Not a reproof. An invitation.
So I said it.
"They're not armed," I said. "They don't need to be. Their hands are enough; I spent all night on what their hands did." I looked at the councilor. "And they're not rebels. They're sick. They ate something when they were dying and nobody came, and it's growing in them, and it's turning them into something else, and they don't know it's happening. I've seen inside them. They think they're well."
"Sick," said the councilor.
"Yes."
"Sick people don't hold a woman down while her husband is killed in front of her children, my lord."
I didn't have an answer to that. Not one I could say at that table.
"No," said Vera, from the wall.
Everybody turned.
She was standing with her back against the stones between Rufa's two women, very straight, the way escorts stand. Her face was gray. Her voice wasn't.
"Sick people don't," said Vera. "I did." She looked at the councilor. "I killed my Saint at his prayers, my lady. You were in the chapel after. You saw. Was I a rebel?"
The councilor's mouth closed.
"Something got into me," said Vera. "It fed on what I already felt, and grew, and one morning I walked into the chapel and I didn't know I'd decided to. That's what's in them. Only more of it. And they ate it themselves, because they were dying, and somebody they'd never seen told them they didn't need anyone to come." She turned her head, at last, and looked at the map. At the shore road, running south from the two black holes round the lake toward Stonemere, and Crossholm, and the five pencil crosses, and the switchback, and the city. "And they're coming the way he came. Every autumn. Village to village. The same road."
Nobody said anything for a long time. The fire cracked.
"So what would you have me do, Lord Fabian?" said the queen quietly. "If they're sick. You're the healer."
I looked at the map.
I thought of the woman in the first house at Crossholm, smiling at me while the roots crept back. Of Marta, and her black nails, and my chest is all better. Of two Blue 「Cure」 that had stopped the knot for exactly as long as the circle was open, and no longer.
"I can't cure them," I said. It was the hardest thing I'd ever said out loud. "Not yet. I can slow it. I can't stop it. I don't have anything that can." I looked up. "But the ones who haven't eaten, I can keep. And the ones they hurt, I can heal. And the ones who are only growing, not ripe yet, I don't know how long they've got. But it isn't nothing."
"Slowing is time," said Liesel, at my left. Not to the table. Just out loud.
The marshal spoke for the first time. Her voice was low and rough, like gravel under a boot.
"Then we hold," she said. "Not march. Hold." She put one scarred finger on the switchback where it came up out of the city onto the plateau. "Here. One road down. One road up. Nobody comes down it who hasn't been looked at." Her finger moved to the southern shore. "And everyone on the south shore who hasn't eaten, we bring down, tonight and tomorrow, before the line from the north reaches them."
"Crossholm," said Naomi. "Already moving. I told the reeve last night."
The marshal looked at her. Then something in her closed-gate face shifted a little, the way Rufa's had in the north square, the day Naomi told her she was glad she'd counted.
"Good," said the marshal.
The queen looked round the table. At the marshal. At the councilor in black, who said nothing. At Naomi. At me. At Vera, against the wall.
Her thumb went round her ring once, and stopped.
"Hold," said Queen Stellara.
(Cordelia,) said Naomi on the bond, later, standing at a window in the corridor outside, while the council broke up behind us. (The pass on the wool road. Our side. Tell your mother. Nothing comes over it that hasn't been looked at.)
The pause was very short.
(Held,) said Cordelia.
One word. It was all she'd spent all day, and I knew what it cost her to spend it on that and not on anything else.
Ambrose found me at the top of the east tower stair, just after the sun came up.
He'd been down to the coach house. I could tell, because he had straw on his coat, and because he was holding a length of thread in his fingers, very carefully, as if it might break or bite.
He didn't say good morning. Ambrose doesn't.
"The jar," he said.
"What about it?"
He held up the thread. The same thread he'd passed round the fruit through the glass on the night of the ford, and knotted where the ends met. One knot.
There were two knots on it now.
I looked at it. Then at him.
"I measured it again," said Ambrose. "This morning. It didn't reach." He held the two knots apart between his fingers, a little gap of thread between them, about the width of my littlest fingernail. "I had to tie on more."
I didn't say anything.
"Nobody ate it," said Ambrose. "Nobody touched it. Eleven days in a jar in a crate under a sentry. Nailed shut." He looked down at the thread in his hands, and for the first time since I'd known him, he looked as if he didn't want to know the answer to something.
"It's growing," he said.