Naomi — Greymark
She took her time.
Most people don't, when a sword is resting under someone's hand three paces away. They talk fast. They fill the air. Liars especially.
The princess just looked at me, and breathed, and thought about it.
Then her shoulders came down another inch.
"Yeah," she said. "It was me."
Not Marchioness. Not one careful word. Just yeah, in a voice I'd last heard through a helmet on a burning field.
That was all it took. Whatever doubt I'd still been holding, I set it down.
"Beth," I said.
"Beth," she agreed. "Just Beth. It was a stupid name. My mouth panicked."
She leaned back against the stall. Her horse nosed at her hair. She let him.
"You asked what I heard," she said. "Can I ask you something first?"
I said nothing. She took that as a yes. Most people do.
"If I asked you to explain it. All of it, properly. What it is, what it does." She tipped her head toward the house, where the feast was roaring. "Would you?"
The lantern hissed.
I thought about the reading room. About the law I'd explained to my brother on the night of his blessing, with his knuckles still pink from Elysia's light. Titles stripped. Houses broken. They'd just take you.
If I explained, I confessed. To a princess. To the Queen's own daughter, standing in my stable.
If I lied, I lied to her face, and she would know. She'd been at the door.
So I said nothing at all.
"That's what I thought," the princess said quietly. "So I won't ask."
I kept it off my face. I think.
"Here's what I heard," she said. "Four words, through a door. Covenant. Four. Regeneration. Not the princess." She counted them off on her fingers, like a child reciting a lesson. "Then my helmet hit the wood, and I ran, and I've spent most of a month trying to work out what they mean."
"And?"
"And I don't know all of it." She lifted one shoulder. "I know it's a skill. I know it isn't in the report, because 'not the princess' meant my sister, and my sister was the report. I know there's a four in it somewhere." She glanced at me. "And I know that tonight, when he bumped his elbow on the table, all three of you looked up. At the same moment. From three different places."
My hand tightened on the pommel before I could stop it.
She saw. She didn't flinch.
"Who have you told?" I said.
"Nobody."
"Your sister."
"Nobody."
"Your mother."
"I stood in my mother's study with my helmet on," the princess said, "while Cor gave her the whole report. Green circles. Two new skills. A week before the tide." She held my eyes. "I didn't say a word. I didn't even breathe loud."
She'd stood in front of the Queen with a secret that could cost my house everything, and kept it.
That isn't nothing. Not from the Queen's own daughter.
"Why?" I said.
That one, she took longer on.
"Do you know how many men I've met, Marchioness?"
I waited.
"Four. Not counting my father." Her mouth twisted. "Three of them were at my Welcoming Age celebration. One talked about himself for an hour, one asked about my dowry, and one fell asleep in his soup." A pause. "The first one is at the Royal Academy now. Your brother will meet him."
She looked past me, out the stable door, toward the lanterns.
"And one ran the wrong way across a burning field to save my sister, with blood coming out of his nose, after everyone had told him to run."
The town was still singing about the goat. It sounded very far away.
"He's the most interesting thing that's ever happened to me," the princess said. "I'm not going to be the reason someone takes him away."
Something in my chest went very still.
A future wife might need one. I'd said that, in this house, on the night he bound us. Back then there were only three places, and I'd wanted one kept free. I lost that argument to a wardrobe full of sisters.
Now there were four places. Three were taken.
And this girl had heard the word four.
I didn't say any of that. I'm not a fool.
"Your mother sent you to watch him," I said.
"She did."
"And you volunteered."
"To watch him." She went a little pink. "Different reasons. Same watching."
I took my hand off the pommel.
"It stays with you," I said. "What you heard. What you guessed. All of it."
"It's stayed with me for a month."
"It stays longer."
"It stays," she said. "I promise."
I believed her. That annoyed me more than anything else that had happened tonight.
"He doesn't know you were Beth," I said.
"No."
"Will you tell him?"
"When it's time." She made a face. "Cor said not to let him find out from someone else."
"Your sister's right." I turned toward the door. "He hates finding out last. He's the youngest. He's had seventeen years of practice."
Behind me, the princess laughed. The same laugh. Beth's laugh, from the field.
I'd been in the stables too long. I could feel my brother coming across the courtyard, slowly, with Hana beside him, and I could feel exactly how much his legs disliked it.
"Your Highness," I said. "Come back to the feast. Before my brother walks all the way here on legs that don't work."
"How do you know he's coming?"
I didn't answer.
She looked at me for a long, thoughtful moment, the same way she'd looked at her napkin horse.
"Right," she said. "Of course you know."
Fabian — Greymark
Naomi's candle had been in the stables for a very long time.
Not moving. Just sitting there, steady, like a lantern someone had set down and forgotten.
Naomi doesn't forget lanterns.
"Sis Hana."
"I know." She'd felt it too. She was already putting down her cup. "You want to go look."
"I want to go look."
"You can't walk."
"You could carry me."
"I'm not carrying you across the courtyard in front of the whole town."
"You'd carry a warhammer across the courtyard."
"A warhammer doesn't complain." She sighed and pulled my arm over her shoulders. "Slowly."
It wasn't slow.
It was much, much slower than slow. Because the courtyard was full of Greymark, and Greymark wanted to talk to me.
We'd made it four steps when the baker's wife grabbed my free hand in both of hers.
"Young Master! My Dora's fever, the second week. You remember?" She pointed. A girl with flour on her nose waved at me from across a table, through a mouthful of pie. "Look at her. Eating my profits."
"She looks great," I said, and meant it.
Six steps. The ribbon seller stopped us and tied a navy ribbon around my wrist, tight, in a double knot.
"For the capital," she said. "So they know whose you are."
I didn't trust my voice for that one. I just nodded.
Nine steps. A farmer with arms like tree trunks held up her thumb.
"You closed this, back when you were White. Every time I pick up a pitchfork, I think of you."
"That's..." I looked at the thumb. It was a very nice thumb. "Thank you?"
"You're welcome!" She clapped me on the shoulder. Hana caught me before I hit the ground.
Twelve steps. A little girl pushed a folded paper into my hands and ran away before I could say anything. I unfolded it.
It was a drawing. A small stick figure with a big sword. Three very tall stick figures standing around it.
Under the small one, in careful letters: YUNG MASTER. Under one of the tall ones: DAME NAOMI WINING.
"Accurate," Hana said.
"Whose side are you on?"
"Dame Naomi's. She's winning."
Fifteen steps. An old woman with no teeth patted my cheek.
"Come back, Young Master," she said. "The capital doesn't need you like we do."
Twenty steps. Sigrid appeared out of nowhere, very formal. "Young Master. The egg count currently stands at—"
"Not now, Sigrid," said Hana.
"Yes, Lady— Baroness." Sigrid saluted and vanished again.
I'd spent my whole life being stared at. In the street, at the shrine, through carriage windows. People had always looked at me like I was something rare that might break if they breathed on it.
This was different.
Tonight they looked at me like I'd given them something. And they wanted to give something back before I left.
"Sis Hana," I said quietly. "How many of these people have I healed?"
She didn't even reach for the notebook.
"Forty-one of the ones in this courtyard," she said. "I counted on the way."
Of course she had.
By the time we reached the far side of the courtyard, my legs had given up arguing and were simply going where Hana put them. I had a ribbon on my wrist, a drawing in my pocket, pie crumbs on my doublet from somewhere, and a lump in my throat I couldn't swallow.
Ahead, the stable door spilled lantern light onto the yard.
Naomi's candle was moving again.
Naomi stepped out of the stables just as we reached them. The princess was right behind her.
They both stopped when they saw us.
"You walked," Naomi said.
"Hana walked. I mostly leaned."
"He complained the whole way," Hana said.
"I did not."
"You complained about a thumb."
"It was a very aggressive thumb."
I looked from Naomi to the princess and back. Naomi's face was its usual self, calm and closed. The princess looked... lighter. Like someone who'd been riding in full armor for a long time and had finally been allowed to take the helmet off.
Which was a strange thing to think about someone who didn't wear a helmet.
"What were you two talking about?" I asked.
"Horses," said Naomi.
"Horses," said the princess, at exactly the same moment.
There was a pause.
"...Both of you," I said. "For that long. About horses."
"It's a good horse," the princess said.
"It's a very good horse," Naomi agreed.
Hana looked up at the night sky like something interesting was written on it. I decided I was too tired to fight two people who could each lift a cart.
"Done?" I said.
"Done," said Naomi. She put her hand on my head. "Back. Sit. Eat."
So we went back. Naomi on one side of me, Hana on the other, half carrying me between them, and the princess walking a step behind with her spear across her shoulders.
Halfway across the courtyard, she spoke up.
"Lord Fabian. Do you still do five hundred swings every morning?"
"Still?"
A very small pause.
"Do you," the princess said. "Do you do five hundred swings every morning."
"How'd you know about the swings?"
"Everyone in Greymark knows about the swings."
That was fair. The baker's wife had once timed them.
"Usually," I said. "Not tomorrow. Apparently I'm in bed for three days."
"Three days," said Naomi.
"When you can hold a sword again, then." The princess's voice was formal, but something under it wasn't. "Spar with me."
"You'd win."
"Probably."
"Then what's the point?"
She grinned. I could hear it.
"Almost is how it starts," she said.
I'd heard that somewhere before.
I was almost sure of it. Somewhere with dust and a practice yard and a blunted spear.
On my right, Naomi made a sound I had never once heard her make in seventeen years.
It might have been a laugh.