We left Arctura at first light on the thirteenth day, going up.
There is no other direction in Arctura. The city climbs, and the north road climbs out of the top of it, past the palace and the last houses and a last small shrine with its bell already ringing, and on up a long switchback cut into the mountain's shoulder until the city is a scatter of gray roofs below you and the wind starts coming at you from the north with nothing in its way.
At the first turn of the switchback I looked back.
The palace was below us now, its thin towers sticking up out of the snow like quills out of an inkpot. Most of the windows were shuttered against the cold. One wasn't. Halfway up the east tower, there was a window with a light behind it, and a figure standing in it, not moving.
I couldn't see her face from that far. I didn't need to. A guard on the door, a chair inside it for the guard, and a fire. She'd been standing at that window since before we rode out of the stable yard, and she was still standing there when the road turned and the tower went behind the mountain.
Liesel had looked back too. She didn't say anything. Her hand tightened on her reins.
The queen had given us a guide.
It was the rider. The one she'd sent north three weeks ago, who'd come back after nine days and said the village was well and kind and that she didn't like the way they looked at her. A narrow, weathered woman with a long face and a scarf wound up to her eyes, on a shaggy gray mountain horse that walked up the switchback as if it had been doing it all its life, which it probably had.
"Not the seven," Naomi had told the queen. "Not yet. Somewhere on the near edge. Somewhere they've reached, and haven't finished."
The queen had looked at her map for a long time. Then she'd put her finger on a village on the southern shore of the long lake, a day and a half from Arctura, just off Albin's red line. Not ringed in black.
"Crossholm," she'd said. "They still write. But the reeve's last letter said three households had recovered in a week." Her thumb had gone round the ring. "I didn't think anything of it, when it came."
The rider knew the road to Crossholm. She knew every road on the plateau, she said; she'd carried the queen's letters on them for eleven years. She didn't say much else. She rode at the head of the column beside Naomi and Captain Rufa, and the three of them together said less in a morning than Felix said in a minute.
The plateau, when we came up onto it at last in the afternoon, was the emptiest place I had ever seen.
No trees. No walls. A long rolling white country going away to the north under a long white sky, so wide that the column of us, horses and carts and Rufa's women in their crimson, looked like a line of ants on a tablecloth. Far off, so far that it was only a gray glint between two folds of snow, the long lake.
And the wind. On the plateau there's nothing to stop it, so it doesn't stop. It came straight down off the white country to the north and went through cloaks and gloves and coats as if they were made of paper.
Rufa's women had been delighted by the snow on the sixth day. Nobody was delighted by it now.
Felix rode up beside Marika in the lee of the bottle cart, where the wind was a little less, and started unwinding the long red scarf from his neck.
Marika looked at him. "What are you DOING?"
"It's yours." He held it out. His nose was red, and his ears were red, and his hands, unwinding the scarf, were shaking a little from the cold. "You're up front. You get the worst of it. You should have it back."
"I don't WANT it back."
"It's your scarf."
"It's YOUR scarf NOW." She pushed it back at him so hard he nearly came off his horse. "Put it ON. If you get sick up here I'll have to FEEL it, and I'm not FEELING your stupid cough all the way to the lake."
Felix stared at her. Then, very slowly, he wound the scarf back round his neck, twice, and tucked the ends in.
"Mine now," he said.
"That's what I SAID."
"I know. I just wanted to hear it again."
Marika kicked her mare up past the cart into the full force of the wind, where she could be cold and furious in private, and stayed there for a long time.
Behind me, I heard Pia's pen. Even in that wind. Even with Father's mittens on.
Crossholm sat in a shallow fold on the lake's southern shore, low houses of dark stone dug half into the ground against the wind, with turf roofs heaped with snow and smoke going sideways off every chimney. Thirty houses, perhaps. A shrine with a squat bell tower. Boats pulled up on the shingle, upside down, iced to the stones.
The bell didn't ring when we came in.
The reeve met us in the street instead, a stout woman with a red face and a chain of office over her coat, who had clearly been watching the road since the rider was a dot on it. She took one look at Naomi, and then at me, and her face did what the faces in Arctura had done.
"Saint," she said. "Oh, Saint. We have sick."
"Show me," I said.
She showed me. Nine houses with the cough in them. The same cough as Holloway, the same as every village on the road: yellow pooled in the chest under 「Eyes」, old ones and young ones worst, a baby in one house so orange I went to it first. Blue 「Mass Cure」, house by house, and the yellow going out of them, and people sitting up in their beds and crying and holding on to my sleeves.
Ordinary. Terrible, and ordinary, and something I knew exactly how to do.
Then the reeve took me past three houses without stopping.
"Not those," she said, when I looked at the doors. "Those are well."
I stopped in the street.
"Well," I said.
"Recovered." The reeve's red face went a little redder. "Three households. A month ago now, more. They had it worst of anybody in the autumn, and then in one week, up and well, all of them. We wrote to the queen." She hesitated. "They're very well. You needn't trouble."
"I'd like to see them anyway."
The reeve looked at me. Then at Naomi, behind me. Then she nodded, slowly, as if something she'd been carrying for a month had been taken off her and she wasn't sure she was allowed to put it down.
The door of the first house opened before I knocked.
A woman stood in it. Forty, perhaps, broad-shouldered, a fisherwoman's hands, a clean apron. Behind her, a warm room: a fire, a table, two girls, an old woman by the hearth. All of them looking at the door. All of them smiling.
"Saint," said the woman. Pleasantly. "Come in out of the cold."
I went in. Liesel went in at my left and Wren at my right and Marika in front of me, all the way to the middle of the room, where she stopped with her hand on her sword and turned round slowly to look at everything.
The family stood. All four of them. They stood by the table and the hearth with their hands folded and watched us come in, and the old woman got up out of her chair by the fire to do it, and none of them sat down again. Not once, all the time we were there.
There was a bowl on the table.
Wooden, scrubbed, set in the middle of the cloth the way you'd set out a bowl of apples in autumn. And in it, a dozen of them. Round. Black. Exactly like the one nailed into a crate in Arctura.
Under 「Eyes」, a dozen small holes in the world, side by side in a wooden bowl.
I didn't let my face move. Behind me, very quietly, I heard Pia stop breathing.
"You've come so far," said the woman. "You must be tired. You must all be cold." She picked up the bowl and held it out, not to me, past me. To Pia, one step behind my shoulder, small and pale in a gray hood and my father's mittens. "You look frozen, child. Have one. They're very good for the cold."
Wren moved. She didn't draw. She just took one step sideways, smoothly, and was between Pia and the bowl, and stood there.
"No, thank you," said Pia, from behind Wren, in a very small, very steady voice. "I've had soup."
The woman smiled at Wren. She didn't seem to mind at all. She put the bowl back on the table, exactly in the middle of the cloth.
I looked at the family under 「Eyes」.
The cough was gone from all of them. Not a trace of yellow anywhere. Their light was white, clean white, the way it is in someone well.
Except that in every one of them, low down, just under the ribs, there was a dark place.
Small. A knot of dark, the way the fruit in the old woman's cloth had been a hole. And going out from it into the white, in every direction, so fine I had to look twice to be sure I wasn't imagining it, thin dark lines. Like cracks in ice. Like roots.
"May I?" I said to the woman, and held out my hand.
"If it pleases the Saint."
She gave me her hand. A fisherwoman's hand, broad and rough and cold.
The nails were dark at the tips. Not dirty. Dark, the way a bruise is dark, from the inside, and a little thicker than nails ought to be.
I opened 「Discern」 under her palm.
A demon's seed. Thirty-six nights. Growing.
That was all. Not sickness. Not a touch. A seed. Thirty-six nights in her, and growing.
I kept my hand where it was.
"Who gave you the fruit?" I said.
"Two came," said the woman, comfortably, as if telling me where she bought her flour. "At the worst of it. In the autumn, when my mother couldn't breathe and the little one was burning. They didn't knock. They waited until we opened the door." She smiled. "They said our Saint was dead, and nobody would come, and we didn't need one anyway. They said we could heal ourselves."
"And we did," said the old woman by the hearth.
"And we did," said the woman. "Look at us."
I looked at them. Four people standing in a warm room in their clean clothes with their hands folded, well and calm and smiling, not one of them sitting down, and a knot of dark under the ribs of every one with roots going out of it into the light.
"May I try something?" I said.
The woman laughed. Not unkindly. "We're not sick, Saint."
"I know. May I try anyway?"
She shrugged, still smiling, and didn't take her hand back.
Blue 「Cure」. Three splashes. The deepest purge I had, the one I'd used on venom that would kill a soldier in a breath and on fevers that had gone into the bone. The circle opened under her palm, wide and blue, and the light went into her.
Under 「Eyes」, the knot shrank.
Not much. A little. The fine dark lines drew back toward it, the way a snail draws in its horns when you touch it, and I held the circle open and pushed, and pushed, and the knot got smaller, and smaller, and stopped.
It just stopped. Like a stone in a stream. The light went round it.
I held the circle until my arm shook. It didn't get any smaller.
I closed it. And under 「Eyes」, slowly, so slowly I'd have missed it if I hadn't been watching, the fine dark lines began to creep out again into the white.
"Again," I said.
"Fabian," said Naomi, from the door.
"Once more."
Naomi said nothing. That meant once.
Blue 「Cure」 again. Three more splashes. The knot shrank, and the roots drew in, and the knot stopped, and held, and when I closed the circle the roots came out again. Slower than they had before, I thought. Or I wanted to think.
The woman took her hand back, gently, and looked at it, and then at me, with a kind of fond pity, the way you'd look at a child who's tried very hard to lift something much too heavy for him.
"There," she said. "You see? You needn't. You must be so tired." She glanced at the table. "Are you sure you won't have a plum?"
Three houses. Eleven people.
I didn't use 「Discern」 on the rest of them. I didn't need to. Under 「Eyes」 it was the same in every one: the clean white light, the cough gone, and the small dark knot low under the ribs with its fine roots going out into the white. The two girls in the first house. A grandfather in the second, who'd been dying in the autumn and now stood straight-backed by his door. A baby girl in the third, in her mother's arms, smiling the same at both corners.
A baby.
The mothers had chewed the fruit and given it to them, the reeve said, the way you do with anything soft when they haven't got teeth.
We sat in the reeve's kitchen that night, all of us who could fit, with the fire built up and the shutters closed against the wind. Naomi standing. Rufa by the door. The rider in a corner with her scarf still up to her eyes. Hana at the table with her blue notebook open.
"Why those three?" said Naomi.
The reeve turned her cup round in her hands. She'd aged ten years since the afternoon.
"They were the worst," she said. "In the autumn. The worst sick. And the ones who'd—" She stopped. "They'd stopped coming to the shrine. All three houses. Before the cough, even. When the news came about Lord Albin. They said what was the use. They said if a Saint could be killed at his prayers, prayers weren't worth much."
Nobody said anything.
"The two came to them," said the reeve. "Not to the rest of us. Not to the ones still ringing the bell." Her mouth twisted. "I thought it was luck. Three houses getting better, the three that had given up. I thought it was a kind of joke the stars were making."
"Has anyone else eaten?" said Naomi.
"No." A pause. "Not yet. They keep offering. They're so kind about it. My sister's in the second house. She brings me one every week, and puts it on my table, and tells me how well she feels." The reeve looked at her hands. "I put them in the lake. Every week. I don't know why. I couldn't tell you why."
"Because you don't eat what you can't name," I said, before I could stop myself.
The reeve looked up. "My mother used to say that."
"So did somebody's at the ford," I said.
Naomi gave her orders before anyone slept.
Nobody in the column was to eat anything they hadn't seen cooked. Not a plum, not a crust, not a cup of milk offered at a door. Rufa repeated it to her women in exactly the same words, and then walked down the line and looked each one in the face while she did it, and I don't think any of them would have eaten a plum after that if they'd been starving.
The bowl from the first house came to the crate at the back of the food cart. The woman had given it to Liesel at the door without any argument at all. "If the Saint wants them," she'd said, smiling, as if she were handing over a basket of eggs. Twelve. Rufa nailed them in with the first one.
Ambrose stood by while she did it, with his thread in his pocket. He didn't take it out. He just looked at the crate for a long time, and then at me, and wrote something in his notebook that he didn't show anyone.
(Cordelia,) said Naomi, on the bond. Short. Flat. (It's not a touch. It's a seed. Inside them. Under the ribs. 「Cure」 slows it. Doesn't kill it.)
A silence, very far away.
(Eleven,) said Naomi. (A baby.)
Cordelia's candle, far to the south, went very still. Then, one word, the only one she'd spent all day:
(Careful.)
From Cordelia, that was practically a sob.
I couldn't sleep. Of course I couldn't.
I'd drained what little was left in the pitcher after the bottles: five splashes, into my own cold hands, by the reeve's fire. Twenty-seven splashes in the houses with the cough, three on 「Discern」, six on two Blue 「Cure」 that hadn't been enough, eighteen in the bottles. Eleven people, and all I'd done was slow the roots down for the length of two breaths.
Liesel sat down beside me on the bench by the fire and put a cup of the reeve's tea into my hands, and kept her own hands wrapped round mine on it until she was sure I'd hold it.
"You tried twice," she said.
"It didn't work."
"It slowed."
"Slowing isn't—"
"Slowing is time." Liesel didn't look at me. She looked at the fire. "The trouble with you is that, sooner or later, you think anything that isn't all of it is nothing."
I didn't answer that. I couldn't, because she was right, and because I didn't have anything that was all of it. Not for this. Blue was the top of what I had, and Blue only held the thing still while the circle was open.
"I don't have a cure for this," I said.
"Not yet," said Liesel.
At the table, Hana was still writing.
She'd gone to every one of the three houses after me. Not with a circle. With her notebook. She'd stood at each door, and smiled back at them, and asked every one of them their name, the girls and the grandfather and the mothers, and the mother with the baby had told her the baby's name too, pleasantly, as if it were nothing.
Hana had written them all down. On the other list, under Clara. Eleven names.
Pia was sitting beside her, one step from me, in her hood, reading over her shoulder.
"It's longer," said Pia.
"Yes," said Hana.
"Is that good?"
Hana looked at the page for a long moment. Then she underlined it again. One line, very straight.
"They're not lost," she said. "Not yet. That's what this list is for."
Pia woke me a little after midnight.
She didn't say anything. She just put her mittened hand on my shoulder where I'd fallen asleep against the wall by the fire, and when I opened my eyes, she pointed at the window.
The reeve had left one shutter open a crack for the smoke. I went to it. Liesel was already there, and Wren, and outside in the street I could see one of Rufa's sentries standing very still by the bottle cart with her spear held across her body, not moving, the way a deer doesn't move when it hasn't decided which way to run.
They were in the street.
All eleven of them. Out of the three houses, in the snow, in the middle of the night, in their clean clothes, with no lamps. The mothers. The girls. The grandfather. The woman with the baby in her arms. Standing in a line along the middle of the street, not touching each other, not speaking, with their hands folded.
Facing north.
Under 「Eyes」, eleven white lights in the dark street, and in every one of them, low down under the ribs, a small dark knot with its roots going out into the white.
They stood there a long time. Long enough that the sentry's breath stopped smoking quite so fast. Long enough that I heard Pia's teeth start to chatter beside me, and Liesel take off her own cloak without looking and put it round her.
Then, one by one, quietly, they turned round and went back into their houses, and shut their doors, and the street was empty again, and the snow blew across it where they'd been.
In the morning, when Naomi asked the woman in the first house what they'd been doing in the street, she looked at Naomi with her very calm eyes and smiled.
"Doing?" she said. "Nothing, my lady. We were asleep."