The bedpost cost me forty laps.
I'd argued that since Liesel was the one who cracked it, the laps should be hers. Naomi said, "Fifty," so I stopped arguing.
Liesel ran beside me for all forty anyway. Nobody told her to. She called it solidarity. I think she just wanted to see whether she could keep up without breathing hard.
She could.
"Hana's in the kitchen," she announced on lap twelve, eyes half closed. "Naomi's in the war room. And Marika is..." She frowned at the sky. "Up? Why is she up?"
"Roof," I panted. "She sits on the roof when she's thinking."
"About what?"
"She'd say the weather."
Liesel laughed out loud. She'd been doing that since last night, every time she found a candle, like a kid who'd just learned to whistle and couldn't stop.
On lap twenty-six, she pulled ahead, stopped at the fence to wait for me, and leaned on the top rail.
Crack!
The rail snapped clean in half under her hand.
She stared at it. Then at her palm. Then at me, with the face of someone who'd just been handed a pony.
"Saint," she whispered. "Was that me?"
I checked the yard. Empty, apart from us and one very offended chicken. Wren was down at the estate gate, too far to hear.
"That was the 「Covenant」," I said, low. "The stat boost. I told you about it."
"You said 'a little stronger.'"
"That was a little."
"That was a fence."
"It was an old fence," I said, which wasn't really an argument, and kept running.
Agnes caught me at the pump afterward. Naomi wanted me. Not after breakfast. Now.
The war room door stood open. Naomi was behind the chair at the head of the long table, the way she always was, with the painted Gloamwood dark along the top of the map.
Behind her stood Wren.
Full tabard, hand on her sword, eyes fixed on the window. Humming. Three notes, very quietly, over and over.
Wren hums when she's busy, and she hums when she's nervous. Right now she wasn't doing anything at all.
"Sit," said Naomi.
I sat. That was a bad sign too.
"Wren."
Wren stepped forward. The humming stopped, which was somehow worse.
"Wren goes with you," Naomi said. "To Sanctara. And she stays. As long as you're there, she's there."
I opened my mouth. Naomi kept going.
"The law says two. Liesel is one. Wren is the other."
"I thought you'd send six."
"I'd send all of them." Something in her jaw tightened, just slightly. "Greymark can't spare all of them."
That was as close as Naomi ever came to saying she hated something.
I turned to Wren. "Do you want to go?"
Wren blinked. She glanced at Naomi, like she wasn't sure anyone was allowed to ask a guard that.
"He asks," Naomi said. "Get used to it."
"...Yes, Young Master." Wren's chin came up. "I want to go."
"It's a long way. And I hear the capital's very strange. People eat with their helmets on."
"I heard that too, Young Master." Wren's face didn't move. "From the baker's wife. I was ten paces back."
Naomi made a sound. It might have been a cough. It was very nearly a laugh.
"Why Wren?" I asked.
"Fast. Young. Doesn't talk." Naomi paused. "And she's already done ten paces."
The tips of Wren's ears went faintly pink. Not Marika pink. Just a little.
"Also, you've healed her twice," Naomi added. "She'll want to even it out."
"It's not a count."
"Everything in this house is a count."
Fair. Hana owned a whole notebook.
"It was a scratch, Young Master," Wren said. "Both times."
"One of them had a tusk in it."
"A small tusk."
Naomi dismissed her. Wren saluted and left, and the humming started up again the moment she reached the hall.
"Big Sis," I said, once the door had closed. "Can I tell Liesel the rest?"
Naomi looked at me for a long moment.
"You're asking."
"You all yelled at me for not asking."
"About binding princesses." She was quiet a moment. "She's in the candles. She'll feel you fall every night anyway. Tell her."
"And healing hour? I've been stopping at ten for her."
"Ten at the gate," Naomi said. "The rest where nobody's counting."
"Everybody in Greymark counts."
"Then be quick." She turned back to the map. "And ten laps."
"For what?"
"The fence."
"Liesel broke the fence!"
"Your guest," said Naomi. "Your laps."
I didn't ask how she knew. In this house, somebody always knows.
Hana spent the next two days packing.
Not like a normal person, who puts things in a bag. Hana packed like a general preparing for a siege.
"Wool socks," she said from inside my wardrobe. "Six pairs. Four to wear and two in case."
"In case of what?"
"In case." She emerged holding a scarf. "Your feet get cold, and then you sneeze."
"I don't—"
"Four times in twenty-one days. I wrote them down."
Of course she had.
By the second evening there were three bags on my bed. One for clothes. One for food: dried meat, hard cheese, oatcakes, and a cloth bundle that smelled very suspiciously of honey. The third bag was just salve.
Five tins.
"Five," I said.
"One for you, one for Wren, one for Liesel." Hana counted them off on her fingers. "And two more for you."
"That's three for me."
"Just to be safe."
Then she pulled a folded page from her apron pocket, smoothed it flat, and went looking for Liesel. I followed, because I had a bad feeling about that page.
Liesel was in the stables, braiding the gray mare's mane while Tilly supervised. Hana handed her the page. Liesel read it, and her eyebrows climbed.
"'He will say he isn't hungry,'" she read aloud. "'He is lying. If he goes quiet at dinner, look at his hands. He hides the shaking in his lap. If he says it's nothing, it is something.'"
"Sis Hana!"
"There's more on the back," said Hana.
Liesel turned it over. Her eyebrows went higher.
"You can't fit a whole page of me on there," I said.
"It's a small page," said Hana. "I wrote very small."
Liesel folded it carefully and tucked it inside her vest, right over the crowned star. "I'll keep it. I promise."
"Thank you, young la—" Hana stopped. Went pink.
Liesel lit up. "Do it again."
"Absolutely not," said Hana, and retreated with great dignity.
Liesel, meanwhile, had invented a game.
It was called Where's Marika, and Marika hated it.
"Linen closet," Liesel announced at dinner on the second night, the moment Agnes shut the door behind the last maid. "Second floor. You were in there for ages."
Marika didn't even blink. "I was checking the linens."
"For an hour?"
"They're very complicated linens."
"You can't hide from me anymore." Liesel beamed. "None of you can. It's wonderful."
"It's horrible," said Marika. "Fabian. Undo her."
"It can never be undone. That's the whole—"
"I know what it is!"
Liesel wasn't finished. She held her hand out over the table. She'd skinned her knuckles on the new fence rail that morning. The fence was getting its revenge. Now the skin was pink and smooth, like it had happened a week ago.
"Look. Gone. No salve or anything."
Hana looked at the knuckles. Then at the tin of salve already halfway out of her pocket. Then back at the knuckles, with something very close to grief.
Slowly, she put the tin away.
My last healing hour in Greymark had the longest line I'd ever seen.
It ran down the hill road, around the corner, and past the baker's. Half of them weren't even hurt. They just wanted one more look at the Saint before the capital got him.
Sigrid had her basket. Wren had her three notes. Liesel had her spear across her shoulders.
And I had Elysia's eyes.
I'd always healed in order. First come, first healed. It was fair, and it was simple, and it was exactly the kind of rule Naomi liked.
Today I got up and walked down the line instead.
Frost-light, all the way down. White. White. A thread of yellow around a woman with a bandaged wrist. More around an old man leaning on a stick.
And eleventh in line, on his mother's hip, a boy of about six with orange running through his light like a crack in a cup.
"Him," I said. "First."
Sigrid blinked. "Young Master, there are ten people ahead of—"
"Him first."
"If the Young Master says he's worse, he's worse," said the woman with the wrist, and stepped aside. Nobody argued after that.
The boy's fever had come and gone for nine days. His mother told me like it was an apology. A White 「Cure」 would chase a fever like that off for a day, and then it would come back.
I didn't want it chased. I wanted it gone.
A Green circle opened under my hand. A two-splash pour.
Nobody gasped. They'd all seen Green from the wall that night. The line just went quiet, the way people go quiet in the shrine.
The orange rinsed out of the boy's light like ink out of water. White. Clean.
"One," said Sigrid.
I went down the line by color after that, darkest first. When Sigrid said "Ten," I stopped and said, "That's all for today," and Hana said, "He's still recovering," in her new baroness voice, and the line groaned and began to break up.
Then I walked into town.
Liesel fell in on my right. Wren fell in ten paces back.
A tanner's girl with a burn up her forearm, yellow shading toward orange. A White circle, a splash.
"Eleven," Liesel murmured, as the skin closed.
I glanced at her.
"Sigrid isn't here," she said. "Someone has to."
The ribbon seller, coughing into her sleeve. Twelve. An old woman on her doorstep whose light had gone dull all the way through. Thirteen. A girl who'd split her knee on the well steps and hadn't wanted to bother the Saint. Fourteen. A carter with a crushed thumb. Fifteen. A baby with a rash, who screamed at me, then at the circle, then at nothing in particular. Sixteen.
Then the street tilted, gently, like a boat.
Liesel's hand was on my elbow before I'd even swayed. She'd felt it coming.
"Sixteen people," she said quietly. "And one of them Green."
"Seventeen splashes." I let her hold me up. It seemed rude not to. "A Green pour costs two."
"Your town said seventeen."
"My town is always right. It's very annoying."
She didn't laugh. She looked back up the hill, toward the gate where the line had been.
"You stopped at ten," she said. "Every day. For two weeks."
"Yes."
"Because I was watching."
"Because your mother was."
She didn't argue. She was a princess. She knew exactly what her mother was.
Ten paces back, Wren had watched all six of them. She didn't say anything. She never does. She just hummed a little louder.
"And the boy," Liesel said, lower. "You walked past ten people to get to him. How did you know?"
So I told her.
About the frost along the edge of a window, around every person I'd looked at for weeks. White for healthy. Yellow when something's a little wrong. Orange when it's worse. Red, like a coal.
"「Eyes of Elysia」," I said. "It shows me that something's wrong. Not what."
Liesel stared at me.
"Her statue's eyes are closed," I said. "Elysia's, in the shrine. She lent me her eyes. And she can't even open her own."
Liesel was quiet for a long moment.
"Can you see mine?"
"White." I looked again. "Bit of yellow."
"Where?"
"You were up past midnight playing Where's Marika."
"...She was in the pantry," Liesel said, with dignity. "Eating cheese in the dark."
We started back up the hill. Slowly, because the hill had decided to sway.
"Mother told me to write to her," Liesel said after a while. "Often."
"I know."
"I'll have to tell her something."
"I know that too."
She walked a few more steps.
"Lord Fabian is recovering nicely," she said slowly, as if she were writing it in the air. "He heals ten a day. He's very polite to the servants." A pause. "And Greymark has very good honey cakes."
"All true."
"I know," she said. "I'm very good at true."
On the morning we left, Greymark wouldn't give us the road.
They'd filled it. From the estate gate, down the hill, through the square, all the way to the town wall, people stood on both sides, three and four deep. Farmers. Menders. The women who'd held the wall that night. Kids on their mothers' shoulders.
People always stopped and stared when I passed. This was different. Nobody was staring at a man today. They were seeing off their Saint.
A little girl pushed a drawing into my hands. A short person with a big circle around him, and three tall ones behind. Underneath, in careful letters: SANT FABIAN AND HIS SISSTERS.
I tucked it inside my doublet, where it would definitely get crumpled. I didn't care.
Sigrid tried to give me twenty-four eggs.
"For a week on horseback," I said.
"They'll break."
"Then eat them fast, Young Master."
The baker's wife pressed a warm bundle into Liesel's arms. "For the road, helmet girl."
Liesel opened her mouth. Closed it. Gave up.
"...Thank you," she said.
Odile waited at the corner where the shrine road began, in her white robes with the pale gold trim. She didn't wave. She bowed, very formally.
"The Eight go with you, Young Master," she said. "One of them, I suspect, more than the rest."
Dame Hildegard stood near the gate on two good legs, arms folded.
"Come back stronger," she said. "And don't take long about it." Her mouth twitched. "I'm old. I don't wait."
Tilly held the gray mare's bridle until the very last moment.
"Bring the horse back too, please."
"I'll bring the horse back."
"And yourself," she added, very fast, and ran.
Then we were at the gate.
The tide bell hung silent on the wall above it. Past the gate, the fields had started coming back green between the long black stripes where the silk had burned.
Ten years ago, I'd stood right here.
I was seven. Naomi was fifteen and had one hand on my shoulder. Marika had the other. Hana was holding my sleeve in both fists. The bell was ringing so hard I could feel it in my teeth, and Mother and Father rode out under it, and they didn't come back.
This time, the bell was quiet.
This time, I was the one riding out.
My sisters were waiting by the gate. No armor today. Just navy and silver, the three of them in a row.
Marika went first, mostly to get it over with. She shoved a pair of riding gloves at my chest. Dark leather, brand new, exactly my size.
"They shrank," she said.
"Riding gloves don't shrink."
"These did. In the wash. Agnes did it."
"I did not!" Agnes called, from somewhere in the crowd.
Marika's ears went pink to the tips. She glared at the gate, the wall, the sky, anywhere but me.
"Ride in the middle," she said. "Not the front. The front is mine."
"You won't even be there."
"The front," said Marika, "is still mine."
Then she grabbed me, very hard and very fast, and let go before I could hug her back.
Hana didn't even pretend. She was crying before she reached me. She held on for a long time, and she smelled like salve and bread.
"Did you pack—"
"Five tins."
"And the socks—"
"Six pairs."
She pulled back, wiped her eyes, and fixed my collar, which didn't need fixing.
"Come back," she said.
"I will."
Naomi went last.
She didn't hug me. Naomi doesn't, in front of people. She put her hand on my head instead, the way she always had, and left it there.
"Eat," she said.
"Yes."
"Sleep."
"Yes."
"Write."
"Every week."
"Every day."
"Big Sis, a letter takes a week just to—"
"Every day."
So that was going to be a lot of letters.
Her hand stayed on my head. Her eyes went up, just once, to the bell. I knew what she was hearing. Mother's last words to her, the morning they rode out. Keep the house standing until we're back.
"I'll keep the house standing," Naomi said quietly. Then, after a moment: "Until you're back."
My throat did something complicated.
"I'll be back," I said. "I promised to help carry it. Remember?"
"I remember."
She took her hand away.
I climbed onto the gray mare and pulled on Marika's gloves. They fit perfectly. Of course they did. Liesel swung up on my right, from the wrong side, as usual. Wren mounted ten paces back.
"Wren," I said. "On the road, you can ride next to us."
"My lady said ten paces, Young Master."
Behind me, Naomi said nothing at all. I had a feeling she was very pleased.
We rode out under the tide bell.
I didn't look back. I didn't need to. Three candles sat in my chest exactly where I'd left them: one soft and warm, one bright and restless, one steady as a lantern by the door. And a fourth beside me, flickering like a candle someone had carried outside on a windy night. The kind that never quite goes out.
The road got longer. The candles didn't get any dimmer.
"No inns," Naomi had said, the night before we left.
"Why?"
"You know why."
I did. A man at an inn means a crowd at the inn. A Saint at an inn means a crowd, a riot, three proposals, and probably a wedding nobody agreed to.
So we slept in tents.
Wren pitched them. Liesel hunted. I was allowed to do neither.
"I can help," I said, the first night, holding a tent peg.
Wren took it out of my hand. "Young Master. Sit."
"I'm perfectly capable of—"
"Sit," said Liesel, in a very good impression of Naomi.
I sat.
On the second day, Liesel spotted a buck at the edge of a birch wood, a long throw away. She weighed her spear, drew back, and threw.
The spear went through the buck and two hand-widths into the oak behind it.
Liesel looked at her hand for a long time.
Wren went to fetch the spear and couldn't pull it out. She braced a boot against the trunk and tried again. Wren could lift a cart if she had to. The spear didn't budge.
Liesel walked over and pulled it out with one hand.
"...Your Highness has been training," Wren said slowly.
"Very hard," said Liesel. "Recently."
I thought about Cordelia, who noticed everything, and who had probably been sparring with her little sister since they were both small enough to fall over.
Sanctara was going to be complicated.
It turned out a princess couldn't cook. She could, however, eat. Wren roasted the venison, and on the days the woods gave us nothing, we lived on Hana's oatcakes and cheese. The bundle that smelled of honey turned out to be honey cakes, and so did the baker's wife's. Between them, Liesel had eleven.
She rationed them like crown jewels. She still ate six the first night.
Every night, alone in my tent, I poured what was left of my pitcher into my own chest with 「Heal」, one White splash at a time, until the canvas swam.
And every night, from the tent next to mine, came Liesel's voice.
"...Done?"
"Done."
"Good. Sleep."
She sounded exactly like Naomi. I suspected the back of Hana's page.
On the fourth night, I missed them.
Not dramatically. Nobody would've written a song about it. It was the small things. Nobody had counted a single sneeze in four days. Nobody had shoved warm milk at me and blamed someone else. Nobody had said "Spar," or "Laps," or "Growing boy."
Wren had first watch, over by the horses. I could hear her from the fire. Three notes, over and over.
Liesel sat beside me on a fallen log, running a whetstone down the edge of her spear.
I closed my eyes and found the candles.
Hana's, soft and warm. Probably asleep with her notebook on her chest.
Marika's, bright and restless. Probably on the roof.
And Naomi's, steady as a lantern by the door. Awake. She was always awake.
Four days of road, and they were exactly as bright as they'd been at the gate. I knew where every one of them stood. I knew none of them was hurt.
I just couldn't hear them.
I didn't decide to do it. It was more like putting your palm flat against a window on a cold night, because there's a light on the other side.
I reached for Naomi's candle, and I said it. Not out loud. Inside, the way you'd talk to someone standing right in front of you.
(Big Sis. I'm halfway.)
Somewhere in my chest, the pitcher tipped. Just a drop. Less than a splash.
Then a voice answered.
Not in my ears. Right in the middle of my chest, where her candle sat. Low, and sharp, and unmistakably Naomi's.
(...Fabian?)
I nearly fell off the log.
Beside me, the whetstone stopped.
I turned. Liesel was staring at me. At my mouth. Then she looked down at her own chest, as if something in there had just knocked.
"Saint," she whispered. "Your mouth didn't move." She pressed a hand flat over her heart. "And why is your sister in here?"
(Fabian.) Naomi again. Sharper. (Answer me.)
Then a second voice, so loud I flinched.
(WHAT WAS THAT?)
Marika. Bright and restless and very much awake.
And a third, soft and frantic and already a little teary.
(Fabian? Is that you? Naomi? Why can I hear you? Why can I hear everyone?)
Three voices in my chest, one in my ear, all of them talking at once.
Thoughts didn't travel through the bond. I'd checked.
Nobody had said anything about words.