I checked her again the next morning.
Nobody asked me to. I'd slept, eventually, the whole night through, the way you sleep when something you've been carrying for a long time has finally been put down; and I woke with the pitcher full, thirty-seven, and the first thing I thought of was the worn-through places at the edge of her light, and whether they'd stayed filled.
So I went down the corridor. The two guards on the oak door let me in without a word. They didn't look at me like a man who'd done a thing anymore. They looked at me like a man the Queen had said yes to.
She was sitting up. Propped on a great many pillows, with the window open behind her and the Gloamwood lying green in the morning beyond it, and Felix asleep in a chair beside the bed with his mouth open and his boots still on. Her light was white. Tired, thin, but white, all the way round, and smooth at the edges.
"Saint," said Queen Aurelia. Her voice was still hoarse, but it had found most of itself overnight. "You've come to look at me."
"If you'll let me, Your Majesty."
She looked at me for a moment. Then she held out her wrist.
"You ask," she said. "Even now."
"Always."
I put two fingers on the inside of it, where they'd been the day before, and poured. Blue. Three splashes. 「Discern」.
Nothing.
No poison. Not a trace of it, old or new. No sickness. No old wound. And no shape with a blank in the middle where a name should be, folded round anything. I looked for it the way you'd look for a splinter you've just pulled out, feeling for the place it had been. There wasn't even a place. Whatever the thing with no name had been, it had gone out of her completely, and left nothing behind.
What was left was months. Months of lying still. Her arms were thin, and her hands, and when she shifted on the pillows I could see it cost her. 「Discern」 doesn't have a word for that. It isn't poison and it isn't sickness. It's just what happens to a body that's been asleep since before the winter, and only time and food and walking up and down a corridor will mend it.
"Clean," I said. "All of it. You're just tired, Your Majesty. Very tired, for a long time to come."
She closed her eyes, briefly.
"I've a hall to walk into this afternoon," she said. "On my own feet. I won't be carried into it."
I thought about that.
"I can't give you back the months," I said. "Nobody can. But I can give you today." I hesitated. "It's called 「Vigor」. It doesn't heal anything. It takes the tiredness out of a body, enough to keep it going. It won't give you back what the months took. But it'll get you through a door on your own feet."
"Through a door," the Queen repeated.
"And down a hall, I think. If it isn't a very long hall."
She opened her eyes and looked at me, and for a moment she looked so exactly like Felix about to do something unwise that I nearly laughed.
"Then give me today," she said.
Green. Two splashes. The circle opened under her pillows, and the tired dullness went out of her light, and she sat up straighter on her own, and looked down at her own hands as if they'd been returned to her by courier.
We talked about the voice that morning. All of us who'd been in the room.
The Queen, sitting up. Felix, awake now, on the end of the bed. Cordelia standing by the window. Liesel beside me. Cinna, whom the Queen had sent for, sitting very upright on a chair by the door in a fresh shirt.
"Tell me again," said Cordelia.
The Queen told it again. It didn't take long. There wasn't much of it.
"Near the end," she said. "I don't know how near. You lose the days. Tullia came every night and talked to me; I heard her. Not the words, always. Just her. The shape of her voice." She paused. "Then, one night, someone else. Standing by the bed. Not sitting. Tullia always sits."
"What did they say?" said Felix.
"I don't know. A voice. Low. I couldn't place it. I couldn't have told you if it was a man or a woman, young or old, from here or anywhere." She looked down at her own hand, the one Felix had held. "Then something touched my hand. Cold. And after that—" She stopped.
"After that?"
"After that I couldn't hear anything at all for a long time. Not Tullia. Not anything." She looked up at me. "Until you."
I told them what 「Discern」 had found, the first morning. The poison, months old, since the dinner. And the other thing, wrapped round it. Two weeks old, near enough. No name.
"Two weeks," said Felix slowly. "That's the night. Isn't it. Whoever it was."
"Nobody gets into this wing," said Cinna. "Not past the guards on the stair, not past the guards on this door. And this door locks from the outside. Your sister had the only key."
"Petronius makes doors," said Liesel.
Everybody looked at her.
"He made one yesterday," said Liesel. "In that wall. In about the time it takes to sing a verse."
"He did," said Cinna. "And I've known Petronius twenty years, and he'll make a door anywhere you ask him, and he has never once in his life done anything without being asked. Ask him if he opened this wall before yesterday." He shook his head. "He'll tell you no. And he'll be telling the truth. I'd stake the Fire on it."
"A mage, then," said Cordelia. "Some other."
"Something touched my hand and I couldn't hear," said the Queen quietly. "I've been touched by mages all my life. Healers, when I was a girl, and Cinna once, when I burned my wrist on a candle and he took the heat out of it. There's always a circle. You can feel it under your skin, even asleep. Like a bell ringing in the next room." She looked at me. "There was no circle."
Nobody said anything.
I thought about a line in my head that said beasts of the field, and about holes in the Gloamwood where there was nothing at all, and about four or five small places along the edge of her light where it had worn through to nothing. And I didn't say any of it, because I didn't know what any of it meant, and I've learned not to say things I can't count.
"Then we ask her," said the Queen, at last.
She didn't say whom. She didn't need to.
She walked into the long hall on her own feet.
It was full. Every woman in Fulmara who had a right to stand in that hall was standing in it, and a good many who hadn't, along the walls and in the doorways and up on the gallery under the roof. The household. Officers in black and bronze. Old women with chains of office round their necks whom Felix named to me in a whisper and I forgot at once. Corvus's keepers in their ring at the side, with Corvus in it. Cinna by the hearth, under the eagle, in yet another clean shirt. The Octavians together at the foot of the hall, where Cordelia had put us.
And at the far end, between guards, Petronius and Gelio. And the Queen's physician, a gray, narrow woman whose hands wouldn't stay still. And Tullia.
The Queen came in through the side door with Felix one step behind her, not touching her, close enough to. She walked the length of the hall. It's a long hall. I counted her steps without meaning to, and watched her light the whole way, and the 「Vigor」 held. When she reached the head of the long table, she put her hand on the back of the empty chair there, the one that had stood empty at dinner two nights before, and stood for a moment, and then sat down in it.
The hall let out its breath.
She didn't waste words. I don't think she had many to spare.
"Before the winter," said the Queen, "there was a dinner in this hall. At the end of it, my sister got up and poured the last cup herself, as she always did. She turned the handle toward my hand." Her voice didn't rise. It didn't need to; the hall was so quiet I could hear the fire. "I drank it."
Nobody moved.
"Saint," said the Queen. "Tell them what you found."
I stood up. My legs were steadier than I'd expected.
"Poison," I said. I said it the way 「Discern」 had said it to me, plainly, because there's no other way to say it. "Not fever. Not sickness. Poison, put into her from outside. Months old. Since before the winter."
A sound went round the hall, low, like wind in a hedge.
I didn't say anything about the other thing. The thing with no name. The Queen had told me not to, that morning, and I'd agreed. A Saint's word that a woman was poisoned is a thing a hall can hold. A Saint's word that something else had stood by her bed in a locked room, and that he couldn't tell them what, was not.
The Queen looked down the hall at her physician.
"You told my court it was fever," she said.
The narrow woman's hands stopped moving. Then she went down on her knees on the stone, all at once.
"She told me it was fever, Majesty," she said. "And then she told me to go on saying so." She was weeping. "I knew by the third day. I knew. I said fever. I sent the others away."
The Queen looked at her for a long moment, and said nothing at all.
Then she looked at her sister.
"Tullia," she said. "Who stood by my bed?"
The hall didn't understand that question. I watched it not understand: the officers glancing at each other, the old women frowning. But Felix understood it, and Cordelia, and Cinna by the hearth, and I watched them all go still.
Tullia stood between her guards with her hands folded in front of her, the way they'd been folded since yesterday. Her light was white. Her face was nothing at all.
She was quiet for so long that I thought she wasn't going to answer.
"I don't know what it was," she said.
What. Not who.
I saw the Queen hear it. I saw Felix hear it.
"Then tell us what you do know," said the Queen.
Tullia looked at her sister down the length of the long table. Then she looked away, at the eagle carved over the hearth, with the thunderbolt in its claws; and she didn't say anything else. Not then, and not when the Queen asked again, and not when Cordelia asked, in her flat Octavian Bellonian, and not when Felix, very quietly, said "Aunt."
She'd given them one true sentence. I think it was the only one she had.
The Queen gave her judgment in Bellonian. Felix told me afterward what it said, word for word, in a voice with nothing on the end of it, and I've written it down here as near as I can.
To her sister, and to the physician who had knelt and wept and said I knew: death, at dawn, in the square below the palace, where the city could see that the throne had been wronged and had answered.
To Petronius and to Gelio, who had raised their hands against the Queen's guests in the Queen's own room: "Your blessings belong to the throne. The throne does not destroy what belongs to it. It sends it away." Exile. Beyond every border of Bellonia, by sunset of the next day, and never to come back across any of them.
To Vespera, whom they'd questioned all morning and who had known nothing of any cup: nothing. She had served the regent she'd been given. That, the Queen said, was what a scout was for.
And to Cinna and to Corvus, she said nothing at all, yet. She only looked at them, one by the hearth and one in his ring of keepers, for long enough that everyone in the hall saw her look.
Nobody asked me anything else. A Saint doesn't get a say in a thing like that, and I didn't want one. I can close a wound. I can take poison out of a body, or most of one. I can't decide who deserves to be mended. I've never wanted to.
But I watched Felix, standing behind his mother's chair, through the whole of it. He kept his hand on the back of the chair. He didn't take it away once.
Tullia — Fulmara
I asked for tea. They brought it. My sister's orders; she was always more generous than she needed to be.
I asked for two cups. They brought those too.
The room they'd put me in was at the top of the north tower, where my grandmother used to keep the people she didn't want to see. It had a bed and a chair and a table and a window too narrow for a cat, and a door with no key on my side of it. I'd checked. I always do.
I poured the first cup and set it in front of my chair. I poured the second and set it on the corner of the table nearest the dark, by the wall, and turned the handle toward the wall, politely, a quarter turn.
Then I sat down and waited.
I did arithmetic, because that's what I do instead of being afraid.
It had come before into a locked room three floors up. This was a locked room seven floors up. That was no difference at all, to whatever it was. It had come when I was afraid of bottles; I was a great deal more afraid of the morning than I had ever been of a bottle. It had wanted something. It had asked me what I'd give for five women like that. It had said, you want the man, and everyone he holds, and I had, I had wanted them, and it had known.
So it would come. It had every reason to come. I had been useful to it, whatever it was, and when you've been useful, people come to collect.
The candle burned down a finger's width. Then another.
I've been useful to a great many people in my life, and they've been useful to me, and the only trick there has ever been to it is knowing the price before they do. I told myself that in my sister's room, with the third cup still steaming on the table. I'd know this one's, I said. I'd make sure of it.
I didn't.
I sat there with the two cups going cold and understood, finally, slowly, the way you understand a sum you've been carrying wrong for a long time, that I'd never known what the price was. That I'd never once asked. That it hadn't needed me to.
It had wanted the war, I think. Petronius's road and the wall at Greymark and my sister in her bed and the Saint in my keeping. It had wanted all of it to go on, and to go on getting worse. And I had wanted my sister's throne so badly that I'd poured it a cup without ever asking what was in its hand.
She'd asked me who stood by her bed, in front of all of them. Who. I told her the truth. I don't know what it was.
I know it isn't coming.
The candle went down another finger's width.
There's a thing I have never once done, in my whole life. I've never drunk first. Not at a dinner, not at a feast, not alone in my own rooms. You pour, you turn the handle, you wait for someone else to lift the cup, and you watch their face, and then, perhaps, you drink. It's the first thing my mother taught me, and the only thing she ever taught me that I kept.
I looked at the second cup, cold on the corner of the table, with its handle turned toward the wall.
Nobody was going to drink it. Nobody was going to drink first.
So I did.
It was only tea. It had gone quite cold. I drank all of it, and set the cup down on its saucer, and turned the handle a quarter turn, toward nobody at all.
Then I sat with my hands folded in my lap and watched the window go gray, the way it does before dawn in Fulmara, all at once.
Fabian — Fulmara
I didn't go down to the square.
Nobody asked me to, and I wouldn't have gone if they had. I stood in the gate court on the west side of the palace, with my back to the town and my face to the forest, because that was the furthest from the square I could stand and still be inside the walls. Liesel stood beside me. Wren stood behind us both.
I heard the bell. Once.
The city had been quiet since before dawn, the way Greymark goes quiet before a tide, and when the bell rang the quiet changed. It didn't break. It went deeper, somehow, as if every person in Fulmara had drawn in the same breath at the same moment.
Then, after a while, a long while, the sound came up the hill from the square: not a cheer, not a cry. A kind of sigh, from a great many people at once. And then the bell again, and then nothing.
Two lights, somewhere down there, that I'd never have to see go out. I didn't look. I've watched lights go out. I didn't need to watch those.
Liesel's hand found mine. She didn't count anything. She just held on.
Felix was up on the long gallery above the gate court, beside his mother. I could see him from where I stood, if I turned. The Queen had walked out onto it at first light on her own feet, and stood there through all of it, looking out over her city toward the square, where she could see and be seen. Felix stood at her shoulder with his hands at his sides. He didn't sing. He didn't spark. He stood there in the morning wind with his face turned the same way as his mother's, and when the second bell rang, I saw him close his eyes, and then open them again, and keep looking.
I don't know what you call what he felt. I don't think he knew either. She'd been his aunt. She'd poured his mother's last cup and turned the handle toward her hand. She'd sat by his mother's bed every night since, and talked to her. All of that had been true at the same time for a long while, and I think he'd only just begun to find out how much room it took up.
The exiles rode out of the west gate an hour after.
Two of them, with an escort of twenty of the Queen's riders to see them to the border and over it. Petronius first, on a horse that looked small under him, with his big hands loose on the reins and his face turned down. He didn't look at anyone. He looked at the stones of the court, as he rode over them, the way a farmer looks at a field he's leaving and knows exactly what's under every furrow.
Gelio rode behind him.
He'd looked at me through a grille, through a dinner, through a door, across a frozen floor. He'd lain inside three of my circles and got up healed out of every one.
He looked at me now, as he came past. One last time.
Then he looked down at his own arm, the one I'd healed on Petronius's road, the scrape that had gone clean and white in the blue light. He looked at it for a long moment.
And he inclined his head to me. Not much. The width of a finger.
Then the gate took him, and the road, and the forest.
The Queen sent for Corvus at noon.
She was sitting in a chair on the gallery by then, with a rug over her knees that she kept trying to take off and Felix kept putting back. The 「Vigor」 had carried her through all of yesterday, she told me, and then in the small hours her body had remembered the months all at once, every one of them, and she'd sworn at it in three languages. She looked gray round the edges, under her eyes. Her light was white.
Corvus came up the gallery stair inside his keepers, the six of them, the captain with the scarred eyebrow at the front, and stopped in front of the Queen's chair, and knelt.
"Corvus of the Throne," said the Queen. "You threw for my son, against my sister's word, in my own room."
Corvus didn't say anything.
"You served the throne while it was sleeping. So did the Fire." She glanced along the gallery to where Cinna was standing, very upright, pretending not to listen. "I'll think about what the throne owes the Fire. It's a long list, and he'll enjoy the waiting." Cinna's face did the flicker. "But I know what it owes you."
She looked past him, at the six women in their ring.
"Captain."
The captain with the scarred eyebrow came forward one step.
"Tomorrow," said the Queen, "Corvus of the Throne walks in Fulmara with no keepers at all. From dawn to dark. Wherever he likes." A pause. "With my son, and the Saint, and whatever friends they choose. And you and yours will have the day to yourselves, and spend it anywhere but near him."
The captain didn't move for a long moment. Then she bowed, very low. When she straightened up, I saw her face, and it was doing something I wouldn't have thought it knew how to do.
Corvus was still kneeling. He'd gone very still. I don't think, in his whole life, anybody had ever said no keepers at all to him, and meant a day of it, and meant it kindly.
Felix had already let go of the rug.
"Every stall," he said to me, very fast, as if somebody had pulled a cork out of him. "Every stall in the lower market, Fabian. The pie woman by the bridge, and the honey-pepper bread, and the eels, you have to try the eels, I don't care what you think about eels, and the ones on sticks by the dyers' steps that nobody knows what they are—"
Corvus stood up. He turned round, inside the ring of keepers who wouldn't be his tomorrow, and looked straight at me.
"Tomorrow," said Corvus, "you eat."
Three words. Eighteen.
I was going to have to start writing them down.