Arctura is built on the side of a mountain, as if somebody had started to climb it a long time ago and decided, halfway up, to stay.
We saw it on the afternoon of the eleventh day, from the last bend of the valley road: a city of gray stone going up the slope in steps, roofs pitched steep and white with snow, and above it all, near the top, a palace with towers so thin and pointed they looked like they'd been drawn with a pen. Blue banners on every one of them. Seven silver stars in a ring.
"It's smaller than Sanctara," said Felix.
"Everything's smaller than Sanctara," said Liesel.
"It's taller, though."
It was. Sanctara spreads. Arctura climbs. From the gate at the bottom you could see every street going up and up above you, switching back and forth across the mountain's face, and the palace at the top looking down at all of it.
The bells started before we reached the gate.
Not one. All of them. Every shrine in the city, one after another, as the news went up the mountain faster than we could ride. By the time we were through the gate and onto the first long street, the sound was coming down off the slope at us like snow off a roof, and people were coming out of their doors.
They didn't cheer. That was the strange thing. In Sanctara, when the Saint rides through, people shout and wave and children run alongside. Here they just came out and stood on their steps in the cold, in shawls, in blankets, and watched us go past. Some of them had their hands pressed together. Some of them were crying, quietly, the way you cry when something you'd stopped hoping for turns up on your doorstep.
I heard the word go along the street ahead of us, from doorway to doorway, very low.
Saint.
Not to me. To each other. As if they were checking it was true.
Pia rode one length behind me with her hood buttoned under her chin and her book clutched to her chest, and her eyes were enormous. I don't think she'd ever seen a city that wasn't Sanctara. I don't think she'd ever seen anyone look at me like that, either.
Neither had I.
The palace steps were steep and swept clean of snow, and there were guards in blue lining both sides of them, and at the top, in the open doorway, a cluster of women in gray and blue velvet waiting to receive us.
One of them came forward as we dismounted. A lady-in-waiting, young, with pale braids pinned up in a crown and a smile that she'd clearly been practicing in a mirror. She curtseyed to Naomi. She curtseyed to me, deeper. Then her eyes went past me and found Felix, standing by his horse in his Bellonian coat with a long red scarf wound twice round his neck.
The smile got bigger.
"My lord," she said to him. "What a beautiful scarf. Is it Bellonian work?"
"It's MINE," said Marika.
Everybody looked at her.
Marika looked at everybody. I watched her hear what she'd said, about a breath too late, the way she always does. Her ears didn't go pink. They went straight past pink to scarlet, all at once.
"It's a SCARF," she said, to the lady-in-waiting, with enormous dignity. "It's a perfectly ordinary SCARF. My sister made it. He was COLD."
The lady-in-waiting's smile didn't move, but her eyes did: from Marika to Felix to the scarf, and back to Marika, and something in them went very understanding.
"Of course, my lady," she said.
Felix said nothing at all. He didn't need to. He just stood there in Marika's scarf looking at the palace door with the face of a man who intended to remember this moment for the rest of his life.
Behind me, Pia's pen moved.
The hall was long and narrow and cold, with high windows full of white snow-light and a floor of gray stone worn into shallow dips by a great many feet. At the far end, on a low dais, there was a chair of dark wood with seven silver stars set into its back.
The queen wasn't sitting in it.
She was standing beside it, one hand on its arm, and when the doors opened she let go and came down the two steps of the dais to meet us. Queens don't do that. Even I knew that. I had never once seen Queen Theodora come down a step to meet anybody.
She was younger than I'd expected. Not young like Cordelia. Five or six years older than Naomi, perhaps, no more. Dark hair braided close under a thin silver circlet, dark eyes with shadows under them that had been there long enough to look permanent, a plain blue gown with no ornament at all except a ring on her right hand, silver, with seven tiny stars cut into the face of it. She was turning it with her thumb as she came. I don't think she knew she was doing it.
An older woman in gray followed two steps behind her: tall, thin, with a sheaf of papers held against her chest the way Pia holds her book. The chancellor, I guessed. The queen's first letter, the one to every crown, had come in her hand.
Naomi stepped forward and bowed.
"Your Majesty. The Marchioness of Greymark, for the Crown of Octavia." She straightened. "Queen Theodora sends her Saint. As you asked."
Queen Stellara looked past her. At me.
She looked for a long time. Not the way people in the street had looked, as if checking I was real. The way you look at something you've been told about in a letter, and imagined, and are now comparing against what you imagined.
"You're younger than the songs say," she said.
"There are songs?" I said, before I could stop myself.
"Four," said Pia.
Everybody turned round.
Pia went white, then red, then held her book tighter. "Sorry, Your Majesty. There are four. Two are about Greymark. One's about the Bellonian queen." She swallowed. "One is very bad."
Something happened at the corner of Queen Stellara's mouth. It was gone almost before it arrived, but I saw it.
"The bad one," she said, "is very popular here."
Then it was gone, and she turned back to me, and the shadows under her eyes were the only thing in her face.
"Lord Fabian. My kingdom has buried its Saint." Her thumb went round the ring once. "I didn't ask your queen for you lightly."
"I know, Your Majesty."
"Do you?" She looked at me a moment longer. "Then come and see what I've been looking at every night for two months."
She took us through a door behind the dais into a smaller room with a fire and a long table, and on the table, held flat at the corners with four candlesticks, a map.
Septentria. Drawn in brown ink on old vellum, mountains shaded in, rivers in blue. Arctura near the bottom, on its slope. The valley road we'd come up. And north of the city, the country opening out into a wide high plateau with a long lake in the middle of it, and villages scattered round the lake and up the valleys beyond like seeds thrown on a table.
Seven of them had been marked in black ink. A neat black ring round each name.
"The sickness comes every autumn," said Queen Stellara. She didn't sit. None of us did. "It always has. The cough, the fever. Up on the plateau the winters are long, and the old and the very young die of it every year if nobody comes." She touched the map with one finger, very lightly. "Somebody always came. Lord Albin rode north every autumn for fourteen years. Every village. He never missed one."
Her finger moved, following a thin line of red ink that went out from Arctura and up onto the plateau, round the lake, up one valley and down another, and back. A long loop. A circuit.
"This autumn, nobody came." Her voice didn't change. "I had no one to send. The physicians in the city won't go up onto the plateau in the sickness season; they never have. So I wrote to the reeves of every village and told them to do what they could." She stopped. "For a month, their reports were what you'd expect. The sick. The dead. And then, in the second month, the reports changed."
"How?" said Naomi.
"They said the sick were recovering." The queen's thumb was still on the ring. "Whole houses at once. Up out of bed. I read those letters at this table, and I thanked the stars for them. I thought—" She stopped again. "I don't know what I thought. That it was a mild year. That we'd been lucky."
Nobody said anything. The fire cracked.
"And then those seven stopped writing." She tapped the black rings, one after another. "No reports. No tithes. No drovers coming down to the fairs. Two months now. I sent a rider to the nearest of them, three weeks ago. She came back in nine days. She said the village was well. Everyone well. Very kind. They gave her supper and a bed and sent her home in the morning." The queen looked up. "She said nobody there was sick at all. And that nobody would go into the shrine. And that she didn't like the way they looked at her, and she couldn't tell me why."
Felix had been very quiet since the door. He was standing at the end of the table with his arms folded, Marika's scarf still round his neck, looking down at the map.
"Your Majesty," he said.
The queen looked at him.
"The red line." Felix leaned forward and put one finger on it, carefully, the way you'd touch something that might be hot. "Lord Albin's road."
"Yes."
"They're all on it." He moved his finger from black ring to black ring. One. Two. Three. All the way round the loop. "Every one of the seven. Every quiet village is a village he used to go to."
The room went very still.
Queen Stellara looked down at the map. I watched her see it. I watched her realize she'd looked at this map every night for two months and never once seen it, because she'd been looking at the black rings and not the red line under them.
"They went where he went," said Felix quietly. "After he was gone."
Nobody answered him. The chancellor had put her hand flat over her mouth.
Felix took his finger off the map. He didn't say anything else for a long time. Not a joke, not a question, not Next question. He just stood there at the end of the table and looked at a dead man's road going round a lake, and Marika, on the other side of the table, looked at him.
She saw us again that evening, in her own rooms. Fewer of us. Naomi, Hana, Liesel and me, and Wren at the door, and Marika outside it, being Front at a corridor.
Queen Stellara's rooms were smaller than Queen Theodora's and much colder, and there were papers on every flat surface: on the desk, on the windowsill, on the seat of a chair nobody had sat in for a while. Reeves' letters. I could see the black rings from the map copied onto some of them.
She stood when we came in. Hana looked at her for about the length of a breath.
"Have you eaten, Your Majesty?" said Hana.
The queen blinked. I don't think anyone had asked her that in a long time either.
"Not today," she said, after a moment, as if she'd had to go and check.
Hana nodded once, the way she nods at a pot that's going to need more salt, and went out. Nobody stopped her. I suspect nobody in that palace had ever seen a marchioness's sister walk out of a queen's rooms to go and find the kitchens, and nobody quite knew whose job it was to say anything.
Queen Stellara looked at the door Hana had gone through. Then at Naomi.
"Is she always like that?"
"Yes," said Naomi.
The queen almost smiled again. Then she didn't. "In the hall, Marchioness, you looked at that map as if you'd seen it before."
"Not the map," said Naomi. "What's on it. We found something on the road."
Naomi told her. Short, the way Naomi tells things. The waystation and the empty yard. The carter who said the sick were getting better, and wouldn't say what was wrong with their eyes. The keeper at Holloway and the drovers at the fair. Something better than prayers. Then the old woman at the ford, and the bundle in a white cloth.
She took the letter out of her coat and gave it to the queen.
Queen Stellara read it standing by the fire. I watched her read it twice. The second time her lips moved on one line, and I knew which line it was without needing to see.
They said we don't need the Saint anymore, and they were right.
She lowered the letter.
"Black," she said. "The fruit. Black, like a plum."
Naomi went very still. "How do you know that?"
The queen looked at the letter in her hand, and then at the papers on the windowsill, and then at nothing at all.
"My rider," she said. "The one I sent north. She told me they gave her supper and a bed." Her thumb found the ring. "She said there was a bowl of black plums on the table. In the middle of winter. She thought it was strange. She said they kept offering her one, all evening, very politely, and she kept saying no, and they kept smiling, and that was the part she couldn't explain to me." Her voice had gone very flat. "I told her she was tired from the ride."
Nobody said anything. In the hearth, a log settled and sent up sparks.
"Where is it?" said the queen. "The one you brought."
"In a jar," said Naomi. "In a crate. Nailed shut. Under guard, in your coach house." A pause. "Not near you, Your Majesty."
The queen looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, as if that were the first sensible thing anyone had said to her in two months.
She turned to me.
"Lord Fabian."
"Your Majesty."
"Your queen wrote one more thing, when she answered my letter." Her thumb went round the ring, and round again. "She wrote that a girl at your Academy had been touched by whatever touched my Saint's escort. And that you could tell. That you'd found it in her when nobody else could."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
She held out her hand.
Not like a queen holds out a hand to be kissed. Palm down, steady, the way you'd hold it out to a physician who was going to look at a cut.
"Check me," she said.
I didn't move.
"I've wondered every night since they found him," said Queen Stellara. "In the chapel, with her standing over him. Smiling." Her voice didn't shake. Her hand didn't either. "She'd been in this house twenty years. She'd sat at my table. If it could get into her, it could get into anyone under this roof. It could have got into me, and I'd never know." She held the hand a little higher. "Check me. Please."
I looked at Naomi.
Naomi said nothing. That meant yes.
I took the queen's hand. Cold, thin, a ring on the finger, ink on the side of the middle finger from writing letters to reeves who'd stopped writing back. I opened a Blue circle under it. 「Discern」. Three splashes.
Behind me, by the door, I heard a very small sound, and knew without looking round that Pia had come back with Hana and was standing one step inside the room with her book open, and had just written Checking.
An old wound. The left wrist, broken and well mended. Twenty-two years.
And nothing else. Nothing at all. No touch. No seed. Nothing in her but a queen who hadn't eaten all day and a wrist she'd broken when she was a girl.
I closed the circle.
"You broke your left wrist," I said. "A long time ago."
She stared at me. "I fell off a pony. I was nine."
"That's all there is, Your Majesty. That's all."
She didn't say anything for a moment. Then she took her hand back, very slowly, and held it against her chest with the other one over it, and turned to face the fire so that none of us could see her face, which I think was the most queenly thing I'd seen her do.
"Thank you," she said, to the fire.
"I can check the others," I said. "Your household. One at a time."
"Not tonight," said Naomi.
The queen nodded without turning round. "No. Not tonight."
Hana came back in with a tray: bread, cheese, a bowl of something that steamed. She put it on the one bit of desk without papers on it and stood beside it with her arms folded until the queen came and sat down and started to eat, and then she looked satisfied, and nobody in that room was going to argue with her.
"The escort," I said, when the bowl was half empty. "Lord Albin's. Your letter said she was taken alive."
Queen Stellara put down the spoon.
"She's below," she said. "In a cell under the east tower. She's been there since the morning they found them." She looked at the fire. "She says one word. To everyone. Saint. She said nothing at all for weeks after the chapel. Then one night she started, and she hasn't stopped. She says it to the guard who takes her bread. She says it to the wall, I'm told, when there's nobody there." She was quiet for a moment. "Always smiling."
"I'd like to see her," I said.
"Tomorrow," said Naomi.
"Tomorrow," said the queen.
I nodded. Then, because it had been in my chest since the Queen's rooms in Sanctara, since Pia on the path at lamp-lighting, since Hana's notebook and the space with nothing in it:
"Your Majesty. What's her name?"
The queen opened her mouth.
And stopped.
I watched it happen. I'd watched it happen to Cassian, and to a whole Academy after him. A woman who'd lived twenty years in this house, who'd sat at the queen's own table, who'd walked one step behind a Saint since he was twelve. And the queen of the kingdom, standing in her own rooms with her own ring on her hand, reaching for the name and finding nothing there.
She looked at the chancellor, who'd come in behind Hana. The chancellor looked at her papers, and then at the floor.
"She was his escort," said Queen Stellara, at last, very quietly. "Everybody called her that."
Nobody said anything.
By the door, Pia closed her book.
"Nobody here knows either," she said. Not to anyone. Just out loud, the way you'd say it's snowing.
The queen turned and looked at her. Then at me.
"Tomorrow," I said, "I'll ask her."