Her grip was weak. Weaker than a child's. Her fingers lay round mine the way a leaf lies round a twig after rain.
It was the strongest thing I've ever felt.
Because it went through me, somehow, into the light. I don't know how else to say it. The 「Cure」 had been a door I was pushing against a wind, inch by inch, with the thing with no name leaning back on the other side. And then her hand closed, and it was as if somebody on the far side of the door had put her shoulder to it too.
From inside.
The thing with no name leaned. It leaned the way it had leaned all morning, patient, wrapped round the poison like a cloth round a stone.
And then it couldn't.
I felt it go. Not break, not burst; it didn't do anything as loud as that. It let go, the way a knot lets go when you've finally found the right end of it, all at once, quietly, and was simply not there anymore. Gone out of her like smoke out of an opened window. And underneath it, all at once, there was only the poison, old and settled and ordinary, with nothing holding it at all.
Blue 「Cure」 knows exactly what to do with ordinary poison.
The light went into her the way it goes into anyone. Easily. Like water into dry ground. I felt it find the poison, everywhere it had settled in her over the long months since the winter, and take it, all of it, the way you'd lift a dust sheet off a room that's been shut up a long time.
And I watched her light come up out of the ash.
The last of the worn-through places along its edge filled, and stayed filled. The dull orange went bright, and then it went yellow, and then the yellow thinned out, slowly, slowly, the way the dark thins out of the sky before dawn, until it was the clean, tired white of someone who's been very ill for a very long time and isn't anymore.
White.
The circle under my hand went out. The cast was done. It had cost me nothing more than it had already cost; it never does, once it's paid.
I didn't move. I didn't take my fingers away. Her hand was still round them, and I wasn't going to be the one to let go first.
Three below. My head stayed clear.
On the far side of the bed, Felix was still holding his aunt's wrists in both hands. He'd stopped singing. I don't think he knew he'd stopped. He was looking at his mother's face, and so was I, and so, I realized, was everybody else in the room.
The fighting had stopped. I don't know when. Marika and Cordelia were standing in Petronius's new doorway with their swords still up and three of Tullia's soldiers in front of them with spears still up, and none of them was moving, because every one of them had turned to look at the bed.
At the Queen of Bellonia.
Who drew in a breath. A long one, deep, all the way down, the kind you take when you've come up out of very deep water.
And opened her eyes.
They were Felix's eyes. I don't know why that surprised me.
She didn't know where she was, at first. You could see it: her eyes going to the ceiling, the canopy, the light from the open window, and not finding anything they expected. Then they came down, slowly, and found the face above her on the far side of the bed.
Felix let go of his aunt's wrists.
I don't think he decided to. His hands just opened. Tullia stood there with her own hands loose at her sides and didn't move, and Felix went down on his knees beside the bed.
"Mother," he said.
Her lips moved. Nothing came out. She'd been asleep since before the winter; I don't suppose her voice remembered how. She tried again, and there was a sound, dry and cracked, that wasn't a word.
Then her mouth changed shape, and she sang instead.
It was barely a voice. A thread. But it was a tune, and every person in that room who'd been at the Academy, or on the road from Greymark, or anywhere near Felix for any length of time, knew it.
Then the middle one came walking—
She stopped. She didn't have any more breath.
Felix's face did something I'm not going to describe, because it was his, and he'd want me not to.
Then he took her hand, the one that wasn't holding mine, and sang the rest of it for her.
—all the long way back to home, and the miller left his doorway, and he ran to meet her on the road.
The twelfth verse. The one she'd made up. The one he'd carried the whole way from Bellonia to Sanctara and back again without singing it once, not in the bath, not on the road, not outside her door in the dark.
He sang it all the way through, steadily, in a voice that cracked on every other word and didn't stop for any of them. When he got to the end of it, he put his forehead down on the coverlet beside her hand and stayed there.
Nobody said anything. In the doorway, one of Tullia's soldiers lowered her spear, quite slowly, without being told, as if she'd forgotten she was holding it.
Then the Queen of Bellonia turned her head on the pillow and looked at me.
At her other hand. At my fingers in it.
"You," she said. It came out hoarse, but it came out. "You asked."
I couldn't say anything for a moment.
"Yes, Your Majesty."
Her fingers tightened round mine. Very slightly. All the strength she had.
"I heard you," said Queen Aurelia. "Yes."
That was all. Four words, a long time late. But I heard Cordelia, in the new doorway, let out a breath she'd been holding since the ice; and I felt Liesel, at my shoulder, put two fingers on the inside of my wrist, very lightly, and start to count.
Late. Not false.
The Queen lifted her head off the pillow. Not far. An inch. It cost her; I watched it cost her. And she looked past Felix and past me, at her room.
At the rafter down across her hearth. At the second door in her wall where there hadn't been a door that morning, with Marika and Cordelia standing in it, and three of her own soldiers in front of them, spears still half up. At Petronius in the narrowed doorway with his hands on the stone. At Gelio on the floor with Wren kneeling on his back. At the frost melting in long dark streaks across her floorboards.
She said something in Bellonian. Not loud. She didn't have loud in her yet.
It didn't need to be loud.
Every soldier in the room put her spear down. Not lowered: down, on the floor, the butts knocking on the boards one after another. Then every one of them knelt. In the doorway, Petronius took his hands off the stone, and the stone stayed exactly where it was, and he knelt too, which for a man that size takes some time. Out in the corridor, I heard spear butts on stone, and the creak of six keepers going down on one knee round the boy in the middle of them.
"What did she say?" I whispered.
Felix lifted his head off the coverlet. His face was wet, and he was very nearly laughing.
"She said, 'Not in my room.'"
The red light at the far end of the corridor went out.
Cinna came down the corridor past the kneeling keepers, past Corvus, and stopped in the doorway beside Petronius, and looked in at the bed. He'd been holding the stairhead all that time with nothing but fire and good manners, and there was soot on his clean shirt.
He looked at the Queen for a long moment.
Then he knelt, all the way down, the way he'd bowed to her open window in the court.
"Majesty," he said.
And then, without getting up, he turned his head and looked across the room at Felix, and his tired, pleasant face did the thing it does, the small flicker, and stayed.
"The throne's awake, little eagle," said Cinna.
Tullia hadn't knelt.
She was standing exactly where Felix had let go of her, a pace from the foot of the bed, with her hands loose at her sides. She was the only person in the room still on her feet who wasn't Octavian. I looked at her the other way, out of habit, the way you'd look at a sky.
White. Clean and clear and steady, from her hair to her hem. Exactly as it had been in the court yesterday, and at dinner, and at the door this morning, and while she watched the bottle fail, and while she wrenched my hand off her sister's wrist.
The healthiest light in the room, and the only one that hadn't moved all morning.
The Queen saw her.
I watched her see her. It took a moment. Her eyes went past Tullia once, the way they'd gone past the canopy and the ceiling, not finding anything they expected; and then they came back, and stopped.
"Tullia," said the Queen.
"Sister." Tullia's voice was pleasant and low and perfectly steady. "You're awake."
The Queen looked at her for a long time. At her face, and her hands, and the ring of keys at her waist. Then her eyes went, slowly, to the little table beside the bed, to the cup of cold tea standing there with its handle turned toward her hand.
She didn't say anything about the cup. She just looked at it.
And I watched Tullia watch her look at it, and for the second time that morning I saw something come up into her face that wasn't sums. It was gone almost before it was there.
The Queen turned her head on the pillow, toward the two women in black and bronze who'd guarded her door all night and were kneeling now just inside it, and said something short in Bellonian.
They got up. They went to Tullia, one on each side.
Tullia didn't fight them. She didn't say anything to them at all. She folded her hands in front of her, neatly, the way she'd folded them all morning, and turned toward the door, and they walked her to it. Petronius, still on his knees, shifted his great shoulders to let them by, and the narrowed doorway was just wide enough for three women walking close.
She'd reached the threshold when the Queen spoke again.
"Tullia."
Tullia stopped. She didn't turn round.
"There was someone else in this room," said the Queen.
Her voice was so hoarse I could barely hear it. She wasn't saying it to the room. She was saying it to her sister's back, slowly, the way you'd say something you were still finding words for.
"Near the end. In the dark. Not you." A breath. "Someone who stood by my bed and didn't sit down. A voice I couldn't place."
Nobody in that room moved. Not the kneeling soldiers. Not Petronius in the doorway. Not Felix, with his mother's hand in both of his. I felt Liesel's fingers go still on my wrist.
Tullia didn't answer.
She didn't turn round. She stood in the doorway between her two guards with her back to us and her hands folded in front of her, and I couldn't see her face. I could only see her hands.
They'd been folded all morning, neat and still. They were still folded. But the knuckles had gone white, every one of them, all at once, as if she were holding on to something with both hands to keep from falling.
Then the guards walked her out, and down the corridor, and I watched those white knuckles all the way to the stairhead, until the corner took them.