The morning after the wall, Liesel didn't steal my bread.
She'd stolen my bread every morning since Greymark. She did it without looking, mid-sentence, the way other people scratch their noses. That morning she sat on the far side of the table with her own bread, and ate it, and looked out of the window as though it had done something fascinating.
I'd lain awake half the night, and not because of my pool.
I liked her. That part was settled. I'd counted the stairs twice to be sure. The trouble was that liking her turned out to be the easy part, and now I had a much bigger problem, which was what to do about it.
I could tell her.
I'd got that far around midnight, and then lain there imagining it. Liesel listening. Liesel going quiet. Liesel saying, kindly, the way you'd tell someone their horse had gone lame, Saint. You're my friend.
And then what?
Then every walk to class would have that sentence in it. Every honey cake. Every "Where's Marika?" And I couldn't even put a little distance between us to get over it, because she was four paces away through a wall every night, and her candle was in my chest, and 「Covenant」 cannot be broken and will not end. I would feel that candle flicker for the rest of my life, and every time it did, I'd remember the day I ruined it.
Or I could say nothing. And everything would stay exactly as it was.
Around two in the morning, that had seemed like the better plan. Around three, I'd realized nobody had ever told me how a man does this. In Octavia, men don't ask. Mothers ask. Houses ask. Naomi had burned sacks of asking. Nobody writes a letter on how to ask when you're the one who wants to.
"Lord Fabian," said Liesel. "Pass the honey."
She heard it as soon as she said it. So did I. Lord Fabian. In private, at our own table, with nobody but Wren in the room.
"...Saint," she corrected. "I mean. The honey."
I passed it. She took it by the very bottom, as far from my fingers as a honey pot allows, and put it down so carelessly that it tipped, and was caught an inch from the table by Wren, without a word.
Wren set it down exactly between us. Then she looked from Liesel to me and back again.
I knew what it was, of course.
She'd felt my heart on the wall. All four of them had. She'd covered for me with the stairs, because she was kind, and then she'd lain awake too, putting it together, and now she knew. That was why she wasn't stealing my bread. That was why she'd sat on the far side of the table. She was being careful with me, the way you're careful with someone who's about to say something you'll have to answer.
Which meant the answer was Saint. You're my friend.
I put honey on my bread and didn't taste it.
We walked to general studies the usual way, across the garden. The pear trees had begun to drop their leaves now, brown and curled, onto grass that was greener in the middle than any grass has a right to be. Wren went around the edge again, the long way, and waited for us on the far side.
Usually Liesel walks so close that her shoulder bumps mine every few steps, and pretends it's my fault. That morning there was a whole pace of empty air between us, and neither of us bumped into it once.
It was about three hundred paces from the residence to the classroom. I know, because I counted.
It was the longest walk of my life.
The spar was that afternoon, in the courtyard of the house in the second ring, as Naomi had ordered.
Naomi stood by the well with her arms folded, which is how she referees. Hana sat on the kitchen step with the salve tin already open, which is how she watches. Wren stood beside me. I stood beside Wren, a careful distance from everything.
Marika had a blunted practice sword. Liesel had a practice spear, an ash shaft with a padded leather knob where the blade should be. They faced each other across the flagstones, and the air between them did the thing air does before a storm.
"Spear beats sword," said Liesel.
"Prove it."
"Begin," said Naomi.
I've watched my sisters spar my whole life, and I've watched Liesel fight a fire mage, a buck and a tide. It's still hard to describe what it looks like when two of them go at each other properly. The flagstones shook. The horses in the stable put their heads over their doors to watch. Somewhere down the street a dog started barking and then, wisely, stopped.
Liesel kept Marika out. That was the whole fight, for a long time: Marika darting in, fast as a swallow, and the padded end of the spear always, somehow, already there. Shoulder. Hip. Knee. Marika snarled and circled and came again.
"Reach," said Liesel, breathing easily.
"I'll get INSIDE it."
"You'll get bruised outside it."
Then Liesel glanced at me.
I don't think she meant to. It was half a heartbeat, the way you'd check where a sound came from. I was looking at her, because everyone was looking at her, and our eyes met across the courtyard, and both of us looked away at once, as though we'd touched the same hot pan.
Half a heartbeat was all Marika needed.
She went under the spear like water under a door, and the flat of her practice sword tapped Liesel's breastplate with a small, final tock.
"INSIDE THE REACH!" Marika crowed. "Inside the reach! Inside—"
She stopped.
She looked at Liesel, whose face had gone red to the collar. She looked at me, whose face, I could feel, had gone the same color. She looked back at Liesel, and her mouth opened slowly.
"You looked away," she said. "You never look away. You looked at—"
"Again," said Naomi.
The second bout was much shorter.
Liesel didn't look at anything but Marika. She came in like a door slamming. The spear caught Marika's sword at the guard and tore it out of her hand, and it flew across the courtyard, spinning, and stuck point-first, blunt as it was, in the stable door.
Everyone looked at it.
"That," said Marika, at last, "is a door. That's not even a fence. That's worse."
"Draw," said Naomi. "One each."
Hana came down off the step with the salve tin. Neither of them needed it. She salved them both anyway.
Afterward, Liesel went to the well to wash her face, and since I was the only one not doing anything, I worked the rope and brought the bucket up for her. The water was very clear and very cold. She cupped it in both hands and pressed it to her face and stayed like that a moment longer than she needed to.
"You were distracted," I said.
"I wasn't."
"You looked over."
"At the stable."
"The stable."
"It's a very interesting stable," said Liesel, into her hands.
I held the bucket and said nothing, because the only other thing I could think of to say was I was looking at you too, and that was very much not the plan.
She lowered her hands. Water ran off her chin. "Saint. On the wall, yesterday—"
My heart did something. One beat. Too small for the bond. I'd checked.
"—Never mind," she said, and took the bucket out of my hands, and drank straight from it, which a princess should never do, and walked away across the courtyard to pull Marika's sword out of the stable door with two fingers.
She'd been going to say she knew. I was almost sure of it.
She'd been going to be kind.
That night I drained the pitcher the way I always do: sitting on the edge of my bed with the door shut, one White splash at a time.
Eleven left after the infirmary. A 「Heal」 on myself, with nothing to heal, is just pouring out. One. Two. Three.
Twenty-one sounds like a lot, until you think about a tide.
I started the last tide with eleven and ended it at ten below nothing, with my nose bleeding and blood in my mouth, and then I slept for twenty-one days. In between, there was Dame Hildegard's knee, and Wren's light gone red, and five escort knights, and Naomi, and Cordelia with venom in her side. Seven in ten of a tide are spiderlings, and every one of them bites.
Twenty-one would run out by noon. The tide wouldn't.
Four. Five.
And then what? Then I'd be on my knees behind the wall with an empty pitcher, and somebody I loved would be bleeding on the other side of it, and I'd have nothing left to give her except the right to watch.
Six.
The trouble was that healing had to come out of me at the exact moment someone needed it. Every night I poured eleven, twelve, fifteen splashes out into nothing, just to empty the pitcher. If I could pour them into something instead, and keep them, I could leave the healing somewhere for later. At Hana's post by the town gate. In every guard's belt pouch. In a little bottle in Wren's pocket for the next time she said it was a scratch.
There's no such thing, of course. Hana's salve is herbs and lard and stubbornness. Nobody has ever bottled a healing. Mages heal by being there, and when the mage runs dry, the healing runs out with him.
But then, nobody had ever grown their pool, either.
I reached for the water jug on the washstand.
Then I stopped, with my hand on the handle, because I could hear Naomi's voice in my head as clearly as if she'd been on the bond. New things on a full pitcher. With Liesel in the room. And you tell me first.
I had five splashes left. And Liesel was four paces away through a wall, and after today I'd sooner have fought Dame Valeria with a spoon than knock on her door.
I put the jug down.
(Big Sis,) I said. (Are you awake?)
(Yes.)
Naomi is always awake. I've never understood when she sleeps.
(I am NOW,) said Marika.
(Fabian? Is something wrong? Are you hurt? Did you eat?)
The fourth candle said nothing. But she was awake. I could tell, because she was saying nothing in a very particular way.
(I want to try something new,) I said. (Putting a 「Heal」 into water. To keep it. For later.)
There was a long silence on the bond.
(Why,) said Naomi.
(Because twenty-one runs out by noon in a tide.)
An even longer silence.
(Full pitcher,) said Naomi. (Liesel in the room.)
(...I know.)
(Tomorrow. Before the infirmary.)
(What water?) said Hana.
(The jug in my room.)
(That's Academy water. It comes up from a cistern. It tastes of stone.) She said it with total certainty, the way she says a sauce needs salt. (Use ours. The well at the house is good water, I've tasted it. I'll bring you a jug at dawn.)
(Why does it matter what WATER—) Marika began.
(It matters,) said Hana.
(Liesel,) said Naomi.
Four paces away, through the wall: (...I'll be there.)
Her voice was very even. Very careful.
Of course it was. She was being kind.
I poured the last five splashes out into nothing. For the first time, it felt like a waste.
Hana came at dawn with a stoneware jug, a basket of honey cakes and three pairs of socks. She handed all of it to Wren at the residence gate and hurried back down to the second ring, because if she wasn't home to make breakfast, Marika would eat raw oats out of the sack.
That afternoon, after the battle class, Liesel came in with Wren and the jug and sat down on the windowsill.
The windowsill is the furthest place from my desk in the whole room. I noticed. I tried not to.
By then the day had filled the pitcher back up: twenty-one. I'd decided on six at most, to keep ten for the infirmary and a little over, in case. I poured the well water into my cup. It was very clear, and still cold from the well.
"How will you know if it works?" said Liesel, from the windowsill.
"I'll need a cut."
I took out my penknife and pricked the pad of my thumb before she could say anything.
She said something anyway. She was off the windowsill and halfway across the room before I'd even put the knife down. "Don't—Saint. You could have asked me."
"You'd heal by yourself before I'd finished casting."
"I'd have held still." She glared at my thumb as though it had started a fight.
When they get hurt, and you're angrier about it than they are.
That was just her being my escort, I told myself. It's an escort's job to be angry about her lord's thumbs.
She went back to the windowsill.
I held my bleeding thumb away from the cup, put my other hand over the water, and cast 「Heal」. Not at myself. At the water.
A White circle opened over the cup, no wider than its rim. The light sank down into the water, and for a heartbeat the whole cup glowed like milk with a candle behind it.
Then it went out. It was water again.
I drank it. My thumb went on bleeding.
"Anything?" said Liesel.
"It tastes like water."
"Good water," said Wren, from the door. Hana had been right.
I tried Green. Two splashes. The circle was green this time, and the glow lasted longer: two heartbeats, three, a soft green light swimming in the bottom of the cup. Then it faded, the way a coal fades when you take it off the fire. I drank it. Nothing.
I tried putting my bleeding thumb into the cup and casting at the water around it. The cut closed at once, clean and smooth, and the water stayed exactly as it was.
"It went straight past," I said, frowning at my thumb. "It knew where the hurt was. It went through the water like the water wasn't there."
I pricked my thumb again. Liesel made a noise through her teeth. I ignored it, poured fresh water and cast White once more, slowly this time, trying to hold the light in. I could feel it going. Not into the water. Through it, and out, and gone.
"It's like pouring into a cup with no bottom," said Liesel.
I looked up. She'd come off the windowsill again without noticing, and now she was leaning over the desk beside me, her chin almost on my shoulder, frowning into the cup.
"That's exactly it," I said.
"Maybe it's too cold."
"Maybe it needs to be in something. Not just a cup."
"Maybe it needs salt," said Liesel. "Hana says everything needs salt."
I laughed. She laughed. For a few minutes we talked over each other the way we used to, before the wall, before the Queen's window, before any of it: bottles and jars and warm water and cold, whether a Heal would keep in honey, whether Ambrose's ink blots counted as water.
Then I reached for the cup at the same moment she did, and our fingers touched on the rim.
We both froze.
Liesel took her hand back and went back to the windowsill and looked out of it with great concentration. By the door, Wren hummed three notes.
Four casts. Five splashes. Sixteen left. Four failures, and one cup of water that had, for three heartbeats, been something else.
I sat and looked at it.
I'm a healer. I know bodies. A body wants to be well. That's what the light is for: it goes looking for the hurt, and the hurt is glad to see it. Water doesn't want anything. It doesn't hold on to anything. It just goes where it's put.
But there was a goddess for water. Father's goddess. Nerissa.
Father could have told me how to make water keep something. He'd have leaned back in the reading-room chair and thought about it, and then said something that sounded like a riddle and turned out to be exactly right.
Father wasn't here.
Ambrose was.
The next morning, I caught him in general studies before Lady Amara came in. He was at his desk, reading, as always, with ink on two fingers and his coat buttoned one hole off.
I sat down beside him.
"Lord Ambrose. How do you make water keep something?"
He looked up.
He looked at me for a long time. He looked at my thumb, which had a faint pink line on it where I'd healed it twice. He looked at the stoneware jug, which I'd carried to class for no reason I could have explained.
Then he closed his book.
I had never seen Ambrose close a book. Not for lunch, not for Lady Amara, not for a fire mage.
"...Keep what?" he said.
"A 「Heal」."
Ambrose looked at me the way he looks at a ditch with something extraordinary at the bottom of it.
"Show me," he said.