Cassian came down to breakfast late, with Ilse at his left shoulder and Tacita at his right.
Nobody in the hall knew anything had happened. The residence guard doesn't gossip; it's the one thing about her that's more dependable than her rule. She'd handed Pia's crossbow back through the gate at dawn without a word, with a look that said the roof was a separate matter and would be remembered. Ilse had put the spear in a corner and said nothing to anyone. And Pia had been told, by Liesel, in a voice like a door closing, that if one word about the passage went into her little book, the book would go into the kitchen fire.
So to the hall, it was just Lord Cassian Ardane being late, and his escorts behind him the way they always are, and nothing to look at.
Then he sat down, and reached for the bread, and stopped.
"Tacita," he said. "The salt."
That was all. Not loud. Just a young lord asking his escort to pass the salt, the most ordinary sentence in the world.
Except that nobody at the Academy had ever heard him say her name before. I don't think anybody at the Academy had ever heard anyone say it.
The nearest table went quiet. Then the next. Girls looked up from their bowls, and then at each other, and then at Tacita, who was standing at Cassian's shoulder with her face perfectly still, holding out the salt.
She wasn't smiling. Not the measured smile. Not any smile. But her eyes, when he took the salt from her, went somewhere they'd never been while I'd known her. Somewhere a long way off, and then back.
Cassian salted his bread as if nothing had happened. He'd have burned the hall down before he admitted anything had.
"Look," said Liesel, very softly, beside me.
I looked where she was looking. Two tables down, the first-year lord whose escort had put her bread knife down handle first, that first morning back, and eaten nothing. He'd been staring at Cassian. Now he was staring at his own escort, who was sitting a hand's width further from him than she used to, eating very small mouthfuls and not looking at anybody.
He moved his chair.
Back. The hand's width he'd taken away. He didn't say anything to her. I don't think he knew what to say. He just moved his chair back to where it had always been, so that his elbow was next to hers again, and went on eating.
She didn't look at him. But she picked up the bread knife, and cut him his bread, and handed it to him, handle first.
By the end of breakfast, two of the other chairs had moved back as well.
Not all of them. You don't mend a thing like that in one morning. But two.
That evening on the bond, I told Greymark. Naomi was still on the road, three days short of home. Hana was in the cart beside her, and I heard her stop doing whatever she'd been doing, the way Hana stops when something matters.
(Tacita,) I said. (Her name's Tacita.)
There was a pause. Then, very small and very warm, all the way from the eastern road:
(I've written it down,) said Hana. (Next to the other one. I've left the other space.)
The next notice went up two days later. It was much shorter than the last one, and much more popular.
The battle class will go to the Long Meadow below the Hollowcrown, as every year. Leaving in three days. Seven days in all. Tents will be provided. Escorts will be provided by their lords. — S.
By noon, the whole Academy was talking about nothing else.
I'd never heard of the Hollowcrown. Pia had. Pia had heard of everything, and by the time we'd walked from the board to the infirmary she'd told me all of it, three steps behind me, in a voice that carried down two corridors.
"Three days' ride," she said. "A mountain, Saint. A real one. The top fell in, hundreds of years ago, and what's left looks like a crown somebody dropped, that's why it's called that. There's a forest all round the bottom of it, and monsters in the forest, and the Academy camps on the meadow below it every autumn so the battle class can see a real monster forest from somewhere safe." She took a breath. "It's the quietest monster forest in Octavia. There hasn't been a tide there in anybody's memory. Not even the oldest keeper's. The Saint of the Long Road camped on that meadow once, two hundred years ago, and wrote that the mountain was so quiet at night he could hear the stars."
"Is that in the Fourth Book?" said Liesel.
"...The second half."
"So it's apocryphal."
"Only the part about the stars."
The headmistress sent for me that afternoon. Just me, with my escorts at the door, and Pia at the bottom of the narrow stair, where Lady Severine had put her with a look.
"It goes ahead," said the headmistress, before I'd opened my mouth.
"After the other night?"
"Because of the other night." She had her hands folded on top of her ash cane, which she was not leaning on. "Something stood in a room in my Academy, Lord Fabian. It knew which window. It knew which girl, and what she'd never been asked. It knows this building and it knows who sleeps in it." Her pale eyes didn't move from mine. "It doesn't know a meadow three days away that nobody's thought about since last autumn. I would rather have every young lord in this Academy out of these walls for a week, in the open, with a battle class round him and the First Princess watching the tree line, than asleep in a building that something has already walked into once."
I thought about that. It made sense. That was the trouble with it. It made perfect sense.
"The First Princess?" I said.
"The Queen wrote this morning." The headmistress's mouth moved very slightly. "She said, and I quote, The Crown is sending soldiers because of Septentria. The First Princess is going because she would go anyway."
Cordelia came the next morning.
She came up the hill to the Academy gate at the head of a column of the Crown's soldiers, two dozen of them, in crimson tabards with the gold star on the breast, and she reined in at the gate and looked down at the front court, where most of the Academy had come out to stare.
She found me in the crowd. She found Marika next to me.
"Coming," said Cordelia.
That was the whole of her explanation, then and later.
"CORDELIA!" said Marika, and went down the steps three at a time, and Cordelia got down off her horse to be hit on the shoulder by a Valcrest, which I think is the warmest greeting anyone has ever given the First Princess of Octavia in front of witnesses.
And I felt it before I'd decided to think about it. A third candle, coming up the hill and stopping inside a bowshot. Liesel's. Marika's. Cordelia's. The pitcher noticed, the way it always does, and began, very slightly, to fill faster.
Three. I'd take three.
I'd have taken a great deal more, if I'd known.
Dame Valeria gave us the rules in the battle yard, the afternoon before we left. All of us. Every girl in the battle class, every young lord, every escort, Cordelia at the back with her arms folded, and two dozen of the Crown's soldiers along the fence, trying to look as if they weren't listening.
She stood in the middle of the sand with her wooden sword under her arm.
"One," she said. "You go where I say."
Nobody said anything.
"Two. You sleep where I say. If I say a tent, it's a tent. If I say the ground, it's the ground. If I say a tree, I'll be very surprised, and so will you."
Somebody laughed. One look stopped it.
"Three." She turned, slowly, and pointed with the wooden sword at the board on the wall of the yard. The old notice. The one that's been there since before I came, in letters a hand high.
NO CASTING OUTSIDE THE BATTLE YARD.
"That rule comes with us," said Dame Valeria. "And on the Long Meadow, the battle yard is wherever I say it is. If I say the meadow's the battle yard, you may cast on the meadow. If I don't, you may not, and I don't care what you are, my lord, or how many sisters you have."
She didn't look at me when she said it. She didn't have to. About sixty girls did it for her.
"Four." The sword came down and pointed at the ground. "Nobody goes into the trees. Not to look. Not for a wager. Not because a song says a Saint once heard the stars from the edge of them."
Three steps behind me, two and a half, Pia closed her mouth.
"Five," said Dame Valeria. "If I say run, you run. Toward me. Not away. Toward me." She looked round at all of us, the way she reads a scene: once, very fast, and then she asks anyway. "Questions?"
Cassian put up a hand. "Match?"
"No."
He put it down again. Tacita, at his shoulder, made a very small sound. It took me a moment to understand that it had been a laugh.
Packing went about the way packing goes with my family, which is to say that I wasn't allowed to do any of it.
Liesel packed my things. Wren checked what Liesel had packed. Marika repacked all of it into a different bag because the first bag "had no tactical value," and then Liesel took it all out again and put it back in the first bag, and Marika let her, because there are some fights even Marika can see coming.
Liesel sat on the end of my bed with Hana's page open on her knee. Not Pia's list. The other one, the one Hana gave her a long time ago, written very small. Pia sat next to her, exactly as close as she was allowed, reading it upside down.
"Item eleven," Liesel read. "Do not let him carry the tent pegs. He will offer. Say no. If he insists, say no louder."
Pia looked up at me. "Saint, why can't you carry tent pegs?"
"I can carry tent pegs."
"There's a footnote," said Liesel, and peered at it. "He has a history."
"I do not have a history—"
"Item twelve," read Liesel. "He will say he isn't cold. He is cold."
Pia looked down at her own list, the one Hana had given her on the porch of the gray house, and then back at Liesel's, which went on, in very small writing, down both sides of the page and round the edges.
"Mine doesn't have any of that," she said. "Mine's all bread."
"Yes," said Liesel, and turned the page over.
Felix put his head round my door at that point, already in his riding boots, with a bag over one shoulder that was very obviously much too heavy.
"What's in that?" said Marika.
"Essentials."
"WHAT essentials?"
"Next question," said Felix, and the bag clinked.
Ambrose came last, with one small bag and four large books. He looked round the crowded little room. At the bags. At Pia. At Felix's clinking bag. At me, sitting on my own bed doing nothing while four women and a shrine apprentice packed for me.
"Meadow," he said thoughtfully. "Wet."
And went away to pack another book.
Hedda — the Hollowcrown
I've kept the Long Meadow thirty autumns.
Keeping it means what you'd think. Mending the fence. Cutting the thistles. Moving the sheep off before the Academy comes and back on after it's gone. And the stones. Mostly the stones.
There's a line of white stones along the top of the meadow where the grass gives out and the pines start. Old ones. Older than me, older than my mother, who kept the meadow before me. Every one about knee-high, and white as a tooth, and set where the trees' ground begins. Monsters don't cross them. Nobody knows why. Nobody needs to. You keep the stones straight and you keep the people below them, and the mountain keeps the rest, and that's how it's been on the Hollowcrown since before anybody wrote anything down.
Four days before the Academy was due, I walked the stones at dusk. I always do. You want them straight when the young ladies come, and the young lords. They look at the stones, and then up at the trees, and they get a thrill out of it, and they go home and tell each other they've seen a monster forest. Thirty autumns of their tents on my meadow, and their horses in my stream, and not one of them has ever asked me where the good ground is.
I'm not complaining. I'm saying.
I was at the ninth stone when I noticed the bats hadn't come out.
At dusk, on the Hollowcrown, the bats come out. Every night of the year. Out of the caves on the lower slope in a long black river, shrieking so loud you can hear them down at my door with it shut. That's how they got their name. Thirty years I've set my supper by them.
That night, nothing. The sky over the caves went from gold to gray to dark and there wasn't one.
And the woods were quiet. Not the ordinary quiet. The wrong kind. No birds settling. No wind in the pines, though I could feel wind on my face.
I've told the young ladies every year, and I'll tell anyone: you don't go past the stones. Not to look. Not for a wager.
I went past the stones.
I'm not going to say why. I'm not sure I know. Thirty years, I suppose, and the bats not coming out, and something in me that wanted to see what was quiet. I went up into the pines, a little way, not far, with the stones still white behind me through the trunks where I could see them, until I came to the place where the ground levels off by the old fallen spruce.
There was a Stonehorn standing in the clearing.
Stonehorns live up on the high slopes, above the pines, where it's all rock. I've seen them from the meadow, on clear days, small as goats, on the scree. I'd never seen one in the pines in my life. Up close it was bigger than a horse. Its horns were the gray of the mountain and thick as my waist where they came out of its head.
And lying at its feet, the way dogs lie at a fire, were two Cragcats.
Cragcats hunt in the pines. They hunt in pairs. They'd hunt a Stonehorn if it came down into their woods; that's what the mountain is. Everything in its own place, and everything keeping everything else there. I've watched it work for thirty years.
They weren't hunting. They were lying there. Calm.
Between them, there was somebody standing.
Black, all of it. A hood, and under the hood a veil, and above the veil only the eyes. It didn't move when I came out of the trees. It was standing very still, with one hand out, resting on the Stonehorn's brow between the horns, the way you'd rest your hand on a horse you'd known for years.
I stopped. I didn't think about stopping. My feet just did it.
Under its hand, the Stonehorn breathed in.
It went on breathing in for longer than anything that size should be able to. And while it breathed, it grew. I don't know how else to say it. The horns thickened and curled, up and back and round, until they nearly met over the top of its skull in a ring, like a crown, like the mountain's own crown, broken at the top. Its back rose. A ridge of something came up along its spine like a wall of gray stones. And when it breathed out, it was bigger than any beast I've ever seen, on the mountain or off it, and it lowered its great head and looked at me.
Its eyes were very calm.
The figure took its hand away. It bent and laid it on the nearer Cragcat. And the same thing happened. Slower, because the cat was smaller. It stretched under the hand. It got longer. Its spots ran together and went black, all of them, so that it was black from nose to tail. It stood up when it was done, and it was the size of a pony, and its eyes were calm too.
The other cat got up.
It had been lying beside that one at the Stonehorn's feet, close as two hands. Now it looked at the black thing standing where its partner had been, and the fur went up all along its back, and it backed away. Low. One step, then another. Then it turned and went off into the pines by itself, and didn't look back.
Cragcats hunt in twos. Always. Thirty autumns, I'd never once seen one alone.
The figure straightened. And lifted its face, just a little, toward the caves.
And the bats came out.
All at once. A black river, the way they always come. But they didn't shriek. Not one of them. Ten thousand bats came out of the Hollowcrown over my head in perfect silence and turned in the air above that clearing like a cloud with somebody inside it, round and round, and one came down out of the middle of them and settled on the figure's raised hand.
It was ordinary when it settled. When it went up again, its wings were as wide as a door.
Then, far up the mountain, on the scree under the broken crown, I heard the stones begin to hiss. A long sound, slow, like something heavy and very long coming down over loose rock without any hurry at all.
I didn't look. I'm not ashamed to say it. I didn't look up the mountain at whatever was coming down out of the crater. I looked at the ground.
When I looked up again, the figure had turned its head.
It was looking at me.
It didn't come any closer. It didn't need to. I don't know how far apart we were. Twenty paces. Fewer. It stood there between the two great beasts with the silent bats going round and round over its head, and looked at me with those calm eyes, and when it spoke, its voice was low, and it wasn't a woman's, and it wasn't a man's, and I've never heard one like it before or since.
"What is your name?"
Nobody had asked me that in a long time. I don't know why that's the thing I remember thinking. Not run. Not the stones. Just that.
"Hedda," I said.
"Thank you, Hedda." It inclined its head, the way the young ladies' mistresses do when you've held the gate for them. "They'll be here in four days."
"...Yes."
"You'll want to show them where to put the tents."
Then it turned back to the clearing, and to the beasts, and to the long sound coming down off the scree, and didn't look at me again.
I walked home.
I don't remember the stones. I must have passed them. I must have come down through the meadow in the dark, and crossed the stream, and found my door. I remember lighting the lamp in my window, because I always do, so that I can see my way to the woodpile in the morning.
And I remember the window. Because when the lamp was lit and the night was black behind the glass, I could see myself in it. An old woman with a lamp, in a hut at the bottom of a quiet mountain.
Smiling.
Thirty autumns, I thought. Thirty autumns, and not one of them has ever asked me where the good ground is.
This year, I'll show them.