Felix didn't want to come back with us. That was the trouble.
He wanted to, and he didn't, both at once, the way you want two things that can't sit in the same chair. I watched him want them all through the last breakfast on the gallery, while his mother ate a whole boiled egg by herself for the first time since the winter and looked as pleased about it as if she'd taken a city.
In the end, she decided for him. Mothers do.
"You're going back," said Queen Aurelia.
"Mother—"
"As my envoy. To the Queen of Octavia." She set down her spoon. "I need someone in that court to say thank you for Bellonia in a voice they'll believe. Cinna will carry the treaty, because the treaty needs to be carried by someone they're slightly afraid of." Cinna, down the table, inclined his head as if this were a great compliment, which I think he took it as. "And you'll carry the thank you. Because you're the only one of us who's ever lived there, and the only one who knows how to say it."
Felix looked at her.
"I just got you back," he said, in the short voice.
"I know." The Queen looked at him for a long moment with his own eyes. "And you came across a forest and a war and a siege to do it, and sang me home, and I heard every word. I'm not going anywhere, Felix. I've done enough sleeping. When you come back, I'll be standing at that window." She tipped her head toward the west wing. "Watching for weather. Three days off."
Felix didn't say anything. Then he put his hand over hers on the table, and left it there, and nodded.
She turned to me last, as everyone was getting up.
"Saint."
"Your Majesty."
"I'm told you ask before you put your hand on anyone."
"Always."
"Then you'll understand this." She held out her own hand, the one that had closed round mine on the coverlet, palm up, across the breakfast table. "May I?"
I didn't know what she was asking for. I put my hand in hers anyway.
She held it. That was all. Not long; a breath or two. Her grip was a great deal stronger than it had been four days before.
"Bellonia owes you a debt it can't pay," said the Queen. "So it won't insult you by trying. But if you ever need anything this side of the forest, you'll ask me. And I'll say yes."
She let go.
"And bring your princess," she added. "I'll find another use for the house by the river gate."
Beside me, Liesel didn't say anything at all. But she put her hand up, very briefly, and touched the bronze ivy in her hair.
Corvus was at the west gate when we rode out, inside his keepers, the six of them, the captain at the front.
He didn't come out of the ring. He didn't need to. When Felix rode past him, he lifted his left hand, open, palm out, the way he had at the bend outside Greymark the morning after the siege, the way he had in this same court at dusk the evening before.
Felix lifted his.
Then Corvus looked past Felix at me. And he didn't smile, quite. But something at the corner of his mouth went in the direction of the furniture.
I wrote it down anyway. It wasn't a word. I don't think it counts. I wrote it down.
The Gloamwood was quieter going home.
Not the bad kind of quiet, the kind before the tide. The other kind. The kind a house has the morning after a party, when everyone's gone to bed at last and the floors have stopped creaking. The holes were still there, deep in the trees, if I looked for them. But they'd stopped moving. They sat in their places, a long way apart, the way they're supposed to, each one in its own patch of forest with the small lights going about their business round its edges.
"They've found new borders," said Felix, when I told him. "Or old ones. Bears are stubborn. Like Hildegard."
"Don't tell her that."
"I'm going to tell her that the moment I see her."
At the burned web line, I made the column stop.
The charred rags were still hanging off the banks for a hundred paces, black and shriveled. But in among them, here and there, low down in the bracken where Cinna's fire hadn't reached, there was something new. Fine and gray and very small, strung between the stems like frost: new web. The young had come back.
Cinna looked at it from his saddle for a long time.
"Good," he said quietly, to nobody. "They're very old."
The pitcher filled the whole way home at the same slow pace it had filled the whole way out, three candles near me and two far away. But it was a different kind of slow. Every evening, after supper, Naomi said something on the bond, and Hana said something, and Marika said something LOUD, and Cordelia spent her word, and at the far end of each conversation the two far candles were a little less far.
And Felix sang.
I'd thought, after the Queen's room, that he'd want to keep it quiet for a while. I was wrong. He sang the miller's song the whole of the second day, at the top of his voice, from the eagle post to the core, and when he got to the end of the eleventh verse he didn't stop. He went straight on into the twelfth, loud and cheerful and only a little off the note, then the middle one came walking, and every rider in the column groaned, and he sang it anyway.
Then he started again from the top.
"He's going to do that the whole way," said Marika, in a voice of deep despair.
"Yes," said Liesel.
"All twelve."
"Yes."
"Every time."
Liesel looked at Felix, riding ahead of us with his head back and his spark crackling in the green gloom under the trees like a small private thunderstorm, singing his mother home over and over and over.
"Let him," said Liesel.
We came out of the trees at the bend on the sixth afternoon.
All at once, the way you always do: trunks and green dusk, and then sky. The last fields lay gold in front of us, stubble and hedges and the old stripes gone green and the new ones from the siege going green now too, at the edges, if you knew where to look. In the north field, a hare sat up on its haunches and watched the column go by.
Marika looked straight at it, and then very firmly straight ahead.
And there was Greymark, on its rise above the fields, with the afternoon on its walls.
With a gate in them.
I'd been looking at a hole in that wall for so long that for a moment I didn't understand what I was seeing. Then I did. Five oak beams, dark and new, standing shoulder to shoulder in the gap where the old gate had burned, bound across with black iron top and bottom and twice between. Shut. It was the first time I'd seen Greymark with its gate shut since the night of the siege, and I hadn't known until that moment how much I'd missed it.
There was a barrel in front of it. Hildegard was sitting on it.
And in front of the barrel, in the middle of the road, with her hands behind her back, Naomi.
She didn't come to meet us. She'd never once come to meet anyone; she waits, and you come to her. She stood there in the road in front of the gate and watched the column come all the way across the last fields, and I felt her candle the whole way, and I knew she felt mine.
The others were behind her. Hana, with her notebook under one arm and her other hand already reaching. Ambrose, with General leaning on his leg. Constance, beside the barrel, saying nothing. Sigrid and the household guard. A crowd of townswomen along the top of the wall. And at Hana's elbow, in a clean apron, with her hair tied back so tight it pulled her eyebrows up, the freckled girl, and eight more just like her.
I was off my horse in the road before I knew it.
Naomi looked at me.
She looked at all of me, from my boots to my hair, the way she's looked at me after every sweep and every siege and every time I've ever come in late, checking for anything missing. Then she looked past me, at Liesel, and Marika, and Cordelia, and Wren, and Felix, counting. I watched her count. She counts the way I do.
Then she took one hand out from behind her back and put it on my head. The way she does. Not heavy. Just there.
"You kept the house standing," I said.
I hadn't known I was going to say it until I had.
Naomi's face did something I've only seen it do a handful of times in my life.
"I said I would," she said.
Then Hana got to me, and the rest of it was mostly Hana.
"Did you eat?"
"Snails."
Hana stepped back and looked at me with tears running down her face. "That doesn't count."
"It COUNTS," said Marika, from somewhere behind me, getting crushed in her turn.
That evening I went to the stone in the square before the shrine. It was where it's always been, with its long list of names cut into it, the ones from the old tide and the ones from the siege. There were two more now, at the bottom, newer than the rest, the cuts still pale. A woman of the household guard, and a townswoman from the north lane. I read them both. I read them twice. I'm not going to write them here. They're on the stone, in Hana's spelling, which is always right, and that's where they belong.
Hildegard got up off her barrel.
She didn't look at me. She looked past me, past all of us, at the man sitting his horse at the back of the column in a clean shirt with soot on the cuffs, with a leather case of treaty papers strapped behind his saddle.
"Throne's Fire," said Hildegard.
Cinna got down off his horse. It took him a little while. He walked forward through the column, past the Crown's riders and the Queen's, and stopped in front of the old knight, and bowed.
"Dame Hildegard."
"You came back."
"I was invited," said Cinna mildly. "I'm told it's done."
Hildegard turned round and pointed at the gate with her sword. Five beams. Black iron. Hinges Ambrose says will outlast the wall.
"Try it," she said.
There was a silence along the top of the wall. Naomi looked at Cinna. Cinna looked at Naomi.
"Noted," said Naomi, and stepped out of the road.
Cinna faced the gate. He stood there for a long moment with his hands at his sides, the way he'd stood at the head of the stair in the Queen's corridor, and looked at it the way a man looks at a very good horse. Then he lifted his hand, and the circle came up in the air in front of him, Red, wide as a cart wheel, and the fire came out of it in a long slow sheet, the same fire that had needed two casts for the old gate and burned a bear off Petronius's road, and broke over Hildegard's gate like a wave over a rock.
The oak went black. The iron went dull red, and then darker. Smoke went up in a great gray column off the face of it, and the townswomen on the wall all took one step back at once.
The gate stood there.
Cinna let the circle go. The fire went out. The smoke drifted off across the fields toward the forest, and there was Hildegard's gate, scorched black from top to bottom, smoking gently, exactly where it had been, not a beam out of true.
Hildegard walked up to it and put her hand flat on the blackened oak. Then she turned round.
"It didn't take one," she said.
Cinna bowed to her, very low, all the way down.
"It's the best gate I've ever failed to burn," he said.
And Hildegard, the oldest knight in Greymark, who had sat on that barrel through a siege and a tide and every single day in between, threw back her head and laughed so loudly that General bolted off Ambrose's leg and up onto the well cover, where he is not allowed to be.
Hana had kept my place at the table.
She'd kept it every night, Marika told me, with a plate and a cup and a spoon laid out, and cleared it away again every night untouched, and laid it again in the morning, and nobody had said anything about it to her, because what would you say. Tonight there was food on it. A great deal of food, most of it green.
We were all there. Everyone. Naomi at the head, standing behind her chair until the rest of us sat, the way she does. Hana. Marika, already eating. Liesel beside me, with the bronze ivy in her hair catching the candles. Cordelia, who'd been offered a seat at the far end, as befitted the First Princess of Octavia, and had taken the one next to Marika instead without a word. Constance sat on Marika's other side, saying nothing either. Wren behind my chair. Felix across from me, talking about bears. Cinna beside Felix, in a fresh shirt, being very polite to Hildegard, who had invited herself and was being very rude to him in return and clearly enjoying it. Ambrose at the end, with a notebook beside his plate. Under the table, General, eating something nobody had given him.
After the plates were cleared, Hana opened her notebook.
Not the long one. A new one. She'd started it while I was gone, she said, because she'd known I'd come back with more names than would fit in the old one, and she was right. I gave her back the little notebook she'd given me at the gate, with the pencil still on its string, and she turned the pages one at a time and read every name I'd written there. The village by the forest. The eel-wife. The girl in the cart. The Queen of Bellonia, which I'd written down in the end because Hana had said every one.
The dog. Brown. Torn ear. Very good.
Hana looked up at me over the top of the page.
"The dog counts," she said.
"I thought it might."
She wrote it all into the new book, carefully, every name in her small neat hand, and added it up at the bottom, and checked it, and checked it again.
"Well?" said Marika.
"It isn't round," said Hana.
"Good," said Naomi, from the head of the table, and everybody laughed, and I didn't entirely understand why, and then I did.
I went up to the gatehouse roof afterward, because I couldn't not.
The gatehouse is the same as it was, scorched and stubborn. But underneath it now, instead of a hole, there was a gate, shut for the night, five black beams and iron, with Hildegard's barrel in front of it and nobody on the barrel. From the roof, I could see the whole of the last fields running out to the Gloamwood under the stars. Full of small lights, mice and foxes and the owl in the old oak and, in the north field, a hare. And past them the forest, dark and quiet and settled, with its holes sitting still in their places a long way off.
Liesel came up a little after, and sat down beside me on the parapet with her back to a merlon. She didn't put her fingers on my wrist. She put her hand in mine instead, and left it there.
I reached for the candles, the way I do every night.
Five. All of them. Naomi's in the war room below, steady as a lantern. Hana's in the kitchen. Marika's somewhere in the yard, moving, because Marika's candle is always moving. Cordelia's in the guest room at the end of the hall, banked low for the night. And Liesel's, right beside me, close enough to touch, flickering the way it always does when she's awake.
All five, inside a bowshot. For the first time since the bend.
I felt the pitcher fill. Not slowly. The way a stove fills a room when all its fires are lit at once.
Below us, in the hall, Felix had started singing. All twelve verses. Somebody was throwing things at him. I think it was Marika.
I counted. I always do.
Five candles. One gate. Two new names on the stone. Twenty-three words in a notebook. One hairpin, bought for nothing.
And everyone home.
Afterword
Thank you so much for reading The Twelfth Verse, Volume 6 of Fabian and His Three Sisters: The Hidden Saint of House Valcrest.
If Volume 5 was about standing close, Volume 6 was about asking the right person. Fabian has asked before he put his hands on anyone since the very first chapter. In this volume, somebody finally turned that into a trap (You asked my nephew, Saint. You didn't ask the throne.), and then a Queen who had been listening the whole time turned it back again, four words and a long time late. A First Princess drank first at a dinner where nobody else would. A woman who had never once drunk first did, at the very end, alone, with nobody left to wait for. And a boy who throws left-handed said exactly twenty-three words where Fabian could hear them, and Fabian wrote down every one.
This was Felix's volume, more than anyone's. I've known since he walked into Volume 4 singing in his bath that there was a twelfth verse, and that one day the middle daughter would come home. I didn't know, until I wrote it, that she'd wake up and sing the first line of it herself.
It was Naomi's volume too, though she spent most of it standing still. In a hole in a wall with no gate in it, through a tide nobody led, listening to her brother's pitcher on the far side of a forest and keeping to half. She doesn't get the big speeches. She gets Noted, and Held, and a hand on somebody's head. I think those are better.
And it was the volume where Fabian bought something for the first time in his life, for nothing, from a girl of twelve who drove a very hard bargain.
Volume 6 ends with a gate that didn't take one, a seat kept at a table, and everyone home. But two exiles are riding somewhere beyond the borders of Bellonia, and one of them inclined his head before he went. A Queen who woke remembers a voice she couldn't place, and someone who stood by her bed and didn't sit down. A woman who did arithmetic on everything never learned the price. And the forest Petronius cut in half has only just found its borders again. All of it is waiting in Volume 7.
If you enjoyed this volume, I'd be truly grateful for your support. A comment, a rating, or adding the novel to your library helps the story find more readers, and it tells me you want to know what happens next. I read every comment, even when I can't reply to them all.
Thank you for crossing the Gloamwood with me. I'll see you at the new gate in Volume 7.
Bonus: Everyone Who Came Home Says Thank You
Hana: "Thank you all so much for reading! I've added up Bellonia. There's a dog in it."
Fabian: "He was very good."
Hana: "I wrote that down."
Marika: "SNAILS. For the record. Worth it."
Naomi: "Noted."
Liesel: (touches her hairpin) "He bought it for free."
Fabian: "I did."
Liesel: "That isn't buying."
Fabian: "She drove a very hard bargain."
Cordelia: "Good tea."
Marika: "That's her word for the DAY, and she's using it on TEA—"
Cordelia: "Two."
Felix: "Is this the part where I sing? I have TWELVE now. Twelve whole verses."
Everyone: "No."
Felix: (sings anyway, very quietly, under the table)
General (also under the table): "Meeeh."
Cinna: "Dame Hildegard. It's a very good gate."
Hildegard: "It didn't take one."
Cinna: "It didn't."
Hildegard: "Thicker next time."
Cinna: "...There's a next time?"
Hildegard: "There's always a next time."
Ambrose: "Ditches."
Aurelia: "Saint, about the house by the river gate. Several picks—"
Liesel: "No."
Aurelia: "I was only going to say it has a garden."
Liesel: "...Still no."
Corvus: (lifts his left hand, open)
Fabian: "That's not a word." (writes it down anyway) "Twenty-three and a half."
Wren: (hums three notes, then one more, much lower)
Naomi: "Volume 7."
Fabian: "What happens in Volume 7?"
Naomi: "Read it. Please."
Marika: "And before anyone asks, GENERAL IS STILL FINE. He's on the well cover. He is NOT ALLOWED on the well cover."
Naomi: "Noted."