Tullia — Fulmara
The letter sat on the corner of my writing table for six days, and every morning I didn't send it.
A rider would have had it in Greymark in four. Vespera could have done it in three. On the first morning I had a rider saddled in the yard under my sister's window, her horse stamping, her breath smoking in the cold, and I stood at the glass with the eagle in my hand and did arithmetic. Then I sent the rider back to the stable.
A letter is only paper. What makes a boy believe it is the hand that puts it in his.
So I waited for the right hand.
Petronius reached Fulmara on the sixth evening, along his road, at the pace of his slowest wagon. Vespera had beaten him home by six days. I watched from the window as they came in through the gate below: the wagons first, then the wounded, then the long column of soldiers on foot with their heads down. I counted them. I always do. Fewer came back than went, and the ones who came back walked like women who'd been told what they were for and found out it wasn't true.
Petronius rode in the middle of them, inside his keepers, with dirt on him to the elbows. He would write me a report that night, eleven pages, every one of them correct.
Corvus rode near the back. His keepers were close around him, closer than they'd ridden out, and he had his left hand on the reins and his eyes on the road, and not once did he look up at my window.
He knew I'd be standing at it. Everyone in Fulmara knows where I stand in the evenings.
That night I sat with my sister, as I always do.
Her rooms are the warmest in the palace. I see to that. I poured her tea and turned the handle toward her hand, and poured my own, and let it go cold. I don't drink in this room. There's nobody here to drink first.
"Petronius is home," I told her. "He lost a good part of what he took, and brought back all of what he lost it for, which is nothing. He'll want to be thanked. I'll thank him."
She didn't answer. She hasn't answered since before the winter. Her hair has gone thin on the pillow, and her hands lie on the blanket exactly where I put them, and she breathes, and breathes, and that's all. I tell her everything anyway. Someone should.
"Cinna and Gelio are in a cellar in Greymark," I said. "Corvus came home. He looked at the road the whole way in. Tomorrow I'll find out what he was looking for."
I straightened her blanket.
"And your son is making medicine, sister. Did I tell you? In bottles. With his Saint." I watched her face. I always watch her face. "Green, they said. Green won't wake you. I know exactly what it would take to wake you, and it isn't Green."
Nothing moved. The candle by the bed burned straight up.
"But he's Blue now."
I hadn't said it aloud before. It sounded worse aloud.
A man has to cross a border. He has to be escorted, and seen, and counted, and stopped. A bottle only has to be carried. In a peddler's cart. In a laundress's apron. In the sleeve of a maid I'd hired myself, who'd been paid twice. And one morning my sister would open her eyes, and look at the cup by her hand, and ask who had poured her last one.
That was the only arithmetic in the world that frightened me.
"It frightens you," said someone behind me.
I didn't turn round at once. I have never in my life turned round at once.
I set my cup down on its saucer. I turned it a quarter turn. Then I stood, and turned, and looked.
It was standing in the corner by my sister's maps, where the candlelight didn't quite reach. Black, all of it. Boots, clothes, a hood, and under the hood a veil wound so close that nothing showed of the face but the eyes. They were very calm. They were looking at me the way you'd look at a lock you already had the key to.
I did arithmetic, because that's what I do instead of being afraid.
The door was locked. I'd locked it myself; the key was on the ring at my waist. There were two guards on the stair outside, and neither had called out. The window is three floors above the yard, and it was shut. There was no way into this room that I didn't hold in my own hand.
And I couldn't tell what it was. Man or woman: in Bellonia that's the first thing you know about anyone, and you know it from across a square, because a man never stands alone. He stands inside his keepers like a wick inside a lamp. This one stood alone in my sister's corner, as if it had been there all evening and I had only now been allowed to see it.
"Who let you in?" I said.
It didn't answer that. Instead it said, in a voice so low and so unhurried that I couldn't have told you one thing about it afterward, "Will you pour for me?"
So it knew that too.
I poured. A third cup, the good porcelain, a little steam rising. I set it on the corner of the table nearest the dark, and turned the handle toward it.
It didn't come for it. I didn't drink mine.
Neither of us drank first.
"You've been the younger one a long time," it said.
"I've been the one awake."
The eyes moved from me to the bed, and stayed there. "Five women opened his light on that wall. Five. What would you give, for five like that?"
I'd told no one but my sister. Vespera had told no one but me. I would have known.
"I don't give," I said. "I take."
"Then you don't want a bottle coming to this room."
"No."
"You want the man." The voice didn't rise. "And everyone he holds."
I didn't answer. It hadn't been a question.
It crossed the room. I'd like to say I heard it move, but I didn't. It was in the corner, and then it was at the bed, between one breath and the next, looking down at my sister. Then it laid one black-gloved hand over hers, where it lay on the blanket beside her untouched cup.
No circle opened.
I've watched men cast my whole life. Every one of them opens a circle: White, or Green, or Blue, or, if he's Cinna, Red. There is always a circle. That's how you know where the light is coming from, and where to put the knife.
Nothing opened. Nothing shone. My sister's breath caught, once, the way it does when she dreams, and then went on exactly as before.
"What did you do?"
"You were afraid of bottles," it said.
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the one you wanted."
I looked down at my sister's hand under the black glove. When I looked up, the glove wasn't there.
Nothing was there. The corner by the maps was empty. The door was locked; I tried it. The window was shut. On the corner of the table, the third cup was still full and still steaming a little, with its handle turned politely toward nobody.
I sat back down beside my sister and did arithmetic for a long time.
Whatever it was, it wanted something. Everyone does. I've been useful to a great many people in my life, and they've been useful to me, and the only trick there has ever been to it is knowing the price before they do. I would know this one's. I'd make sure of it.
And if it had done what I thought it had, it had done me a kindness. If my sister couldn't be reached by a bottle, then she could only be reached by a hand.
And a hand comes attached to a man.
At first light I sent for Corvus.
He came up the stair inside his keepers and stood in front of my writing table, and I watched him not look at the letter on its corner. His hands were at his sides. The left one was very still.
"You'll take this to my nephew," I said. "In Greymark. Yourself."
I held it out. He looked at the eagle in the black wax for a long moment.
Then he took it. In his right hand.
He inclined his head.
He didn't ask what it said. I noticed that too.
When he'd gone, I poured my sister a fresh cup, turned the handle toward her, and went down to see that the guest rooms were aired.
We'd be having visitors.
Fabian — Greymark
For twelve days, I held healing hour in a hole.
It was a good hole, as holes go. About as wide as two hay wagons, with a charred post standing on either side like the last two teeth in an old man's mouth, and a floor of trampled ash where, a month ago, there'd been a gate. Hildegard's gate. The one somebody finally tried.
I sat on a stool in the middle of it every afternoon, the way I used to sit at the estate gate before any of this started, with a line in front of me, Wren at my shoulder, and Sigrid at the far end, counting out loud for anyone who'd lost track.
Twelve days after the wall held, the line wasn't wounds anymore. The wounds had been the first three days. Now it was the rebuilding: a carpenter who'd put an adze into the side of her own foot, splinters, a smith's girl with a palm burned on a new hinge, a boy with a cough he'd had since before the siege, and two old women who, as far as I could tell, had come to sit near the hole and discuss the hole.
"Green in the line," Naomi had said, the morning after I woke. "Until the Queen answers."
The whole wall had watched me open a Blue circle. Twice. Nobody in Greymark cared what color it was anymore; they cared that I was sitting in the gate. But in Sanctara I was still written down as Green, and a court nine days away cares a great deal about what's written down. So: Green in the line, and Blue only if someone's light went so dark I'd have to explain afterward why I hadn't. So far, nobody's had.
Cordelia's rider had left for Sanctara at noon on the day I woke. A Crown rider who changes horses can do it in seven or eight days, and come back in the same. Somewhere around the sixth patient every afternoon, I caught myself looking down the Sanctara road.
Cassian and Benedict had gone back the same way on the fifth day, with a dozen of Cordelia's riders and a satchel of bottles for the Academy infirmary. Cassian had shaken my hand at the hole, and then looked at his own hand afterward, as if checking it was still his. He didn't say anything. From Cassian, that's practically an embrace.
The pitcher was at thirty-seven. I'd emptied it every night since I woke, the way I'm supposed to, and it had grown twice. With five candles inside a bowshot of me from morning till night, it filled so fast that emptying it had turned into a job of work.
The bottles took the first of it. Every morning, in the old stillroom behind Agnes's kitchen, Ambrose and Felix and I made twelve, the way we had in the Academy infirmary: two splashes of mine into each, then Ambrose's stillness, then Felix's spark, then a cork and the Crown's seal. Twelve is where Ambrose's ordinary pool runs out. He'd informed me on the first morning that Greymark's air wasn't going to change that ("Air. Irrelevant."), and the Crown's riders carried the bottles off as fast as we could seal them.
This morning Felix had sealed the last one, set it in the rack with the others, and then, without seeming to notice, laid his hand flat against his coat, over the inside pocket.
I knew what was in that pocket. A bottle we'd made in the Academy's empty infirmary, the night I poured Blue in front of the two of them: corked, sealed, with two words chalked on the glass. He'd carried it every day since we left Sanctara. Most of the time, I think, he forgot it was there. His hand never did.
The healing hour took the next part of the pitcher, and the gatehouse roof at sunset took whatever was left. I used to lie awake worrying it would run out by noon. Now I lay awake working out how to get rid of it.
"Next," said Sigrid.
The carpenter with the adze foot limped up, apologizing. Her light had a thread of orange at the edge, which meant the cut had gone deeper than she was admitting. I put my hand over the bandage and poured, and the circle came up green under her boot, and the orange went out of her light like a stain lifting out of linen.
"Thank you, Young Master. I'm sorry, Young Master. It slipped."
"Adzes do that."
"Thicker," said someone behind me.
Hildegard. She sat every afternoon on an upturned barrel just inside the hole, with her sword across her knees, supervising the new gate. So far the new gate was four oak beams on trestles, a great deal of sawdust, and three carpenters who'd given up arguing with her on the second day.
"Dame Hildegard," said the eldest of them, "it's already the thickest—"
"Thicker."
I'd been meaning to tell her for twelve days. If I'm honest, I'd been waiting for a moment that deserved it.
"Dame Hildegard," I said. "The Throne's Fire sent you a message."
Every saw stopped.
Hildegard looked at me. She has a way of looking at you that makes you check whether your boots are on the right feet.
"He said it was a very good gate," I said. "The best he's ever burned." I let that sit for a breath. "He said it took two."
She didn't say anything for a long moment. Then her face did something I'd only seen it do once before, on the night of the tide, when she stood up on a knee that had been ruined for ten years and found that it would hold her.
"Two," she said.
"Two."
She turned on her barrel to face the carpenters. "You hear that? The best he ever burned." She pointed at the beams with her sword. "This one takes three."
"Dame Hildegard, oak doesn't—"
"Three," said Hildegard, and settled back with her sword across her knees, looking happier than I'd seen her since the tide.
Wren made a small sound beside me that might have been a laugh. With Wren, you never get to be sure.
A beam came in through the hole behind us, carried flat between two people the way you'd carry a bench: Marika at the front end, Dame Constance at the back. It was roughly the size of a young tree, because that morning it had been one.
"IT'S CROOKED," Marika was saying.
"It's a tree," said Constance.
"Trees can be STRAIGHT."
"Not this one."
They set it on the trestles with a thump that made my stool jump. Marika glared at the beam as if it had insulted her personally. Constance dusted off her hands and went back out through the hole for the next one without a word. Marika looked at her back, said "Hmph," and went after her.
On the other side of the hole, just inside where the gate used to swing, Hana had set up a table.
It stood exactly where her healing post had stood on the night of the tide, and I don't think that was an accident; nothing Hana does with a table is an accident. There were six girls around it today. Yesterday there'd been five. On the first morning there'd been one: the freckled girl from the square, who'd turned up at the hole the day after she asked, in a clean apron with her hair tied back, and simply stood next to Hana until Hana gave her something to hold.
Now the freckled girl was holding the smith's girl's hand. I'd healed the burn; there was nothing left of it but pink. She was cleaning it anyway, very carefully, with Hana watching over her shoulder.
"Wash first," Hana said. "Always wash first. Then look. What color is the skin at the edge?"
"Pink."
"Warm, or hot?"
The girl laid the backs of two fingers against it, the way she'd seen Hana do. "Warm."
"So?"
"So it's healing." She hesitated. Then, quite seriously: "Salve anyway. Just to be safe."
Hana's face went very soft. It was her line. It had been her line since before I could walk, and I'd never heard anyone else say it, and now a twelve-year-old with freckles had said it at a table in a burned gate as if it were simply what you say.
"Just to be safe," Hana agreed, and handed her the tin.
I went over when the line was done. Hana looked me up and down the way she does, as if she were checking me for loose threads.
"Did you eat?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"...Something."
She handed me half a loaf from the basket under the table without comment. I don't know how she always has bread. I've stopped asking.
"You're teaching them to be menders," I said.
"Mm." She watched the freckled girl fold a bandage, unfold it, and fold it again, tighter. "I can't teach them the light, Fabian. It isn't mine to teach. But I can teach them everything that comes before it."
"And when they're good enough?"
Hana was quiet for a moment.
"Then you won't have to be in every gate," she said.
I didn't have an answer for that, so I ate the bread.
Hana closed her notebook, the old one, the long one, and rested her hand on its cover.
"I finished adding up the wall last night," she said.
The wall. Every name she'd written down in the dark on those nights, every guard and townswoman and knight of the Crown I'd poured into, added to everyone since the first afternoon at the estate gate. Hana has kept my count since that day. I've never once had to ask her for it.
"How many?"
"Enough that I checked it three times." She didn't open the notebook. "It's one short."
"One short of what?"
"Of the number I want to tell you," said Hana, and handed me the other half of the loaf.
The freckled girl had finished her bandage. She came round the table and stood in front of me, wiping her hands on her apron, and looked at me the way she'd looked at Hana in the square: straight on, as if she'd already decided I'd tell her the truth.
"Young Master. Does it hurt you? When Lady Hana borrows it?"
Hana went still beside me.
"No," I said.
"Not even a bit?"
"I feel it go. Every drop. But it doesn't hurt."
She thought about that seriously, chewing the inside of her cheek.
"Like lending somebody your coat," she said.
I opened my mouth to correct her, and found I didn't have anything to correct.
"...Yes," I said. "Exactly like that."
She nodded, satisfied, and went back to her bandages.
Felix was waiting for me at the door to the keep, with a small cloth bundle in his hands and his two knights a polite three paces behind him.
He'd been down to the cellar every day since the supper. I'd gone with him every day, because Naomi had said "With Fabian," and in Greymark that's a law. Mostly, as far as I could tell, he and Cinna talked about horses.
"What's that?" I said.
"Almonds." He held the bundle a little away from himself, as if it might go off. "From Lady Hana's kitchen. I didn't steal them. I don't think. I stood in the doorway looking at the jar, and she gave me a look, and then there was a bowl in my hands." A grin, quick, the old one. "Your sister's terrifying in a completely different way from your other sisters."
"She gets that a lot."
The cellar was cool and smelled of old apples. The Crown's knights in the corridor had their crossbows across their knees, and nodded to us without getting up. Cinna was on his bench against the wall, as always, wrists bound in front of him, as always, with the pleasant, tired face of somebody's uncle who has sat through a very long dinner and is prepared to sit through dessert.
His light was white, clear and full. Twelve days of rest had filled his pitcher to the brim. That was why the knights didn't get up, and why they didn't put their crossbows down, either.
"Felix," Cinna said. "And the Saint. You look rested."
"I am," I said.
"You're the only one in this town who is, I think." His eyes went to the bundle. "What's that?"
Felix crossed the cellar, set it on the bench beside him without a word, untied the cloth, and stepped back.
Cinna looked at the almonds for a long time.
"Where," he said at last, "in a border town with no gate, did you find almonds?"
"The Valcrests keep them. For honey cakes."
"Ah." He looked a moment longer. Then he picked one up, awkwardly, with both bound hands, and didn't eat it. He put it in the pocket of his coat. Then another. Then he stopped, and looked up at Felix, and his face did that small thing again, the flicker.
"For later," he said.
Felix didn't say anything. His hands hung at his sides, quite still.
"Has she written to you yet?" said Cinna.
"No."
"She will."
"How do you know?"
Cinna smiled a little, at his bound hands. "Because you're here, and she isn't, and she has never once in her life let something she wanted stay where she couldn't see it."
Felix's jaw moved.
"I'm not something she wants," he said.
"No," Cinna agreed gently. "But you're standing next to it."
He didn't look at me when he said it. He didn't need to.
"When it comes, little eagle," said Cinna, "don't read it in the yard. Read it somewhere you can sit down."
Felix turned and went out. I went after him, as I always did. At the top of the cellar stair, in the daylight, he stopped and stood for a moment with his eyes shut.
"Four," he said. "He put four in his pocket. He always gave me four."
At the far end of the cellar, behind the other door, Gelio hadn't said a word to anyone in twelve days. Felix had never once asked to see him.
Every evening since I could climb stairs again, I'd gone up to the gatehouse roof at sunset to empty the pitcher.
It's a good place for it. The gatehouse still stands, scorched and stubborn, on one side of the hole, and from its roof you can see the whole of the last fields running out to the Gloamwood: the old stripes from the tide, long since gone green, and the new scars from the siege, still black. And at the far end of the road, where it bends into the trees, the place where the eagle banner stood.
I sat on the parapet with my back against a merlon and opened a small White circle on my own palm, over and over, a splash at a time, and let whatever the bottles and the line had left me go into nothing. 「Heal」 on a hand that wasn't hurt. It's the most wasteful thing I do all day, and the most necessary.
Liesel sat beside me with two fingers on the inside of my wrist.
She'd started doing it on the second evening. She hadn't said anything about it, and neither had I. Sometimes her lips moved. The counting was mine, and she'd caught it from me, the way she'd said she had, and she still didn't like it, and she did it anyway.
"I thought you didn't like it," I said.
"I don't." She didn't take her fingers away. "Sixty-two."
"Is that good?"
"It's yours," said Liesel, as if that answered it, and went on counting.
Wren sat on the top step of the stair behind us, where she could see both the roof and the yard, eating an apple.
Felix came up a little after, the way he did every evening. He'd talked the whole way up the stair, about Hildegard's beams and Marika's tree and whether a goat could be taught to carry a message (General could not; we had checked). He stopped talking when he reached the top. He always did. He went to the parapet, put his forearms on the stone, and looked at the bend.
"The sun sets on the wrong side here," he said after a while.
"It sets in the west," I said. "Same as everywhere."
"Not in Fulmara. In Fulmara it goes down behind the palace, so the whole town drops into shadow at once, like a shutter coming down. Here it just..." He waved at the sky, which was doing something long and orange and unhurried over the fields. "Lingers. It's very Octavian of it."
That was the joke. I waited for the other part. With Felix, there's always another part, if you wait.
"My mother's window faces the forest," he said. "She used to say she could see weather coming three days off."
Liesel's fingers stayed on my wrist. She'd stopped counting out loud.
"Twenty-one days round," Felix said. "Or three, straight through, if you're Vespera."
He didn't make a joke of that. He just stood with his forearms on the stone, looking at the place where the road went into the trees.
The last of the pitcher went out of my palm. Empty. The headache knocked once, politely, the way it does now, and went away.
And at the bend, lights came out of the trees.
Not torches. The other kind: the faint edges of frost that only I can see. Seven of them, close together, coming out from under the branches onto the road. Six in a ring, and one in the middle.
Felix had taught me what that meant, the night he named his aunt's mages. "In Bellonia a man never rides alone," he'd said. "He rides inside his keepers."
"Felix," I said.
He'd already seen them. Not the lights; the riders, small and dark against the trees, and above them, on the head of a lance, something pale that caught the last of the sun.
A white flag.
Behind us, Wren stopped eating her apple and hummed three slow notes, like a question.
Then Naomi, in my chest: (I see it.)
The war room window looks east. Of course she saw it.
(White flag,) I told her. (Seven. One's a man.)
Every word went out of a pitcher I had just emptied, which meant it went out of below the bottom. Small. Not even a splash. But I felt each one go.
(Stay up there,) said Naomi.
Somewhere below me, Cordelia's candle got up and moved, fast, straight toward the stables. She'd kept her one word to herself all day. She spent it now.
(Riding.)
Marika: (I'M COMING UP.)
(Quiet,) said Naomi. (He's empty.)
Nobody said anything else. The headache, which had knocked once and left, came back and knocked again.
The rider in the middle of the ring moved. He touched his horse forward, out from between his keepers, alone, onto the open road in front of them, which in Bellonia, as far as I'd been told, a man simply does not do.
He stopped there, at the bend, where the banner had stood. And he lifted his left hand, open, palm out toward the wall.
No circle. Nothing in it at all.
I'd seen him do exactly that once before, on the morning after the siege, just before he turned and went into the trees.
Beside me, Felix's spark snapped, sharp as touching a cat in winter, and he didn't seem to notice.
"Corvus," he said.
He didn't joke. He didn't sing. He stood with both hands on the stone and looked at his friend across the long orange field, and when he spoke again it was in the short voice, the one with nothing on the end of it.
"She's written."