The first thing I did with Elysia's new gift was lie face down in the kitchen garden, looking for ants.
It was barely light. The path between Hana's lavender and the bean rows was still cold, and I had my cheek almost on the gravel. There's always a line of ants on that path, running from a crack in the wall to whatever Agnes has dropped near the kitchen door, and this morning was no different.
I could see them with my eyes. Small, black, busy.
With the other eyes, I couldn't see anything at all.
I let my breath out so hard it moved the gravel.
"Why," said Liesel, above me, "are you lying in the path?"
I rolled over. She was standing at the end of the bean row with two cups of tea, looking down at me with an expression she probably learned from her mother.
"Ants," I said.
"...Ants."
"I can't see them. With the light. I can see the ants with my ordinary eyes, but they don't have a light. Not even a little one." I sat up. "I lay awake half the night thinking about ants. And beetles. And worms. Do you know how many worms there are in one field, Liesel? I don't either, and I was going to find out every single time I looked at the ground."
She handed me a cup. "And?"
"Nothing. No worms. There's a bee on the lavender, and nothing. There was a spider in the stillroom window last night, and nothing." I drank some tea. "The mouse behind the flour barrel, yes. A tiny spark. That seems to be about where it stops."
"Beasts of the field," said Liesel.
"Beasts of the field. Not bugs of the field."
"That isn't what it says."
"It's what it means. I'm choosing to believe that very firmly."
She sat down on the low wall beside me, and we drank our tea and watched the ants not shine.
There were no bottles that morning. Naomi wanted the pitcher full, and full, from where I'd ended the night before, meant noon. At noon exactly, Naomi came out of the kitchen door, and the others came out behind her: Marika still eating, Hana with her notebook, Cordelia in her mail.
"Full?" said Naomi.
"Thirty-seven."
"Liesel's in the room."
"It's a garden."
"Liesel's in the garden." Naomi folded her arms. "One word each. Then Marika, as many as she likes."
Marika swallowed her bread so fast she nearly choked on it.
Naomi went first, in my chest, as level as she is out loud: (Fabian.)
I'd felt that drop leave me more times than I could count, and I can count a great deal. A word on the bond has always gone out of me like a bead of water off the end of a leaf: small, cold, gone. This one was half that. As if somebody had taken the bead and cut it neatly down the middle.
"Half," I said.
Hana: (Eat.)
Half.
Cordelia looked at Naomi, then at me, and I watched her decide to spend the whole of the day's word on a test.
(Cheap.)
Half. Liesel laughed out loud, and covered her mouth, and didn't say anything on the bond at all, because she was in the garden and that was her job.
"Marika," said Naomi.
Marika took a breath the size of a barrel.
(RIGHT. THIS IS A TEST AND NAOMI SAID AS MANY AS I LIKE AND I LIKE A LOT, SO: GOOD MORNING, THE BREAD'S BURNT, CONSTANCE EATS HER CRUSTS FIRST, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THAT HARE, AND LIESEL SITS ON THE ROOF EVERY NIGHT HOLDING YOUR WRIST AND COUNTING, WHICH WE ALL KNOW ABOUT, BY THE WAY.)
Liesel went red to the collar.
I said nothing about the hare. I'd made a promise to myself, and the hare was sitting in the north field at this very moment, white and healthy and entirely real.
"Fifty-eight words," I said. "Half a drop each. Every one."
"HALF?" said Marika, out loud, delighted.
"Half."
"Then I can say TWICE AS MUCH—"
"Same rules," said Naomi. "Every night after supper. And when I say quiet—"
"Quiet," said everybody.
"Good."
Then she stopped, and looked past us, over the garden wall and the roofs of the town, toward the line of the Gloamwood, for a moment longer than she needed to.
"It means," she said, "you could talk to someone a long way off, for a long time, and it wouldn't cost you much."
Nobody answered that. She went back inside.
Cordelia questioned Cinna that afternoon, with Naomi beside her, Felix by the door, and me against the wall, because I was the witness and because Naomi had said "With Fabian."
Cinna had heard us coming down the stair. He was sitting up straight on his bench with his bound hands in his lap, the way a man sits when he's been expecting this particular visit for twelve days and would like to get it right.
"Throne's Fire," said Cordelia.
"Princess." He inclined his head. "You took me alive. I keep meaning to thank you for that, and it keeps seeming like the wrong thing to say."
"Was the Queen of Bellonia awake when you marched?"
Cinna didn't look at Cordelia. He looked past her, at Felix.
"No," he said. "She hadn't woken when we marched."
Felix didn't move. His spark snapped once, small, by the door.
"Was she worse?" Felix said.
Cinna thought about it, honestly, the way he seemed to think about everything. "Thinner," he said, gently. "Quieter, if that's possible. Your aunt sits with her every night. I've seen her there, going past the door. She pours your mother's tea and turns the handle toward her hand, and leaves it there till it's cold, and pours another."
I knew whose hand had poured the cup that put Queen Aurelia to sleep. Everyone in that cellar knew, except perhaps Cinna. Or perhaps not. I watched his face as he said it, and couldn't tell.
"Every night," Felix repeated.
"Every night."
Naomi spoke for the first time. "What does she want with my brother?"
Cinna turned to her, polite. "Marchioness. I'd have thought that was the one question you didn't need to ask." He waited. She waited longer. He gave in first. "Alive. She wants him alive. She was very clear about that before we marched, and clearest of all with Gelio." He tipped his head toward the far end of the cellar. "Gelio doesn't kill people. Gelio brings them home."
"Home," said Cordelia.
"Hers." And then Cinna looked at me, for the first time since we'd come in. "In Bellonia a man's blessing belongs to the throne, Saint. Every man's. She'll tell you that the moment your boots touch Bellonian dirt, so does yours. And she'll have the law on her side when she says it. That's the part I'd worry about, if I were you. Not the knives. She has a great deal of law."
Nobody said anything to that.
"And you?" said Cordelia at last. "Whose are you?"
Cinna looked down at his bound hands for a long moment.
"I belong to the throne," he said. "I always have." He looked up, past all of us, at Felix by the door. "The throne is asleep, little eagle."
At the other end of the cellar, Gelio didn't say anything at all.
Naomi asked him the same questions, through the grille in his door, in the same level voice, and he let every one of them go past him like water going past a stone. He sat very straight on his bench, his bound hands in front of him. The Crown's knights outside his door hadn't let their crossbows rest in twelve days. His light was white, full and perfectly steady.
He didn't look at Naomi once. He looked at me.
The whole time she spoke, he looked at me through the grille, without blinking much, the way a man looks at something he was sent to bring home and hasn't stopped meaning to.
Wren, beside me, hummed one low note under her breath, and moved half a step, so that she was between the grille and me.
I felt Gelio's eyes on the back of my neck all the way up the stair.
"So," said Naomi.
The war room again, that evening, with the door shut. All of us this time: Naomi standing behind the chair at the head of the table, my sisters, Liesel, Cordelia, Felix at the far end with his arms folded, and Wren outside the door, where she could hear everything and pretend she couldn't.
Naomi laid it out on the painted map the way she lays out a sweep of the Gloamwood, flat and in order.
"Your mother hasn't woken. Your aunt wrote that she has. Your aunt wants my brother alive, and she sent the man in my cellar whose whole work is bringing people home who don't want to go. And she has the law." She looked down the table at Felix. "Did I miss anything?"
"It's a trap," said Marika. "A big, obvious one. With a sign on it."
"I know," said Felix.
"With a sign on it that says TRAP."
"I know." He unfolded his arms and leaned on the table, over the painted Gloamwood. "I'm going anyway."
Nobody said anything. Hana's pencil stopped.
"Why?" said Naomi.
Felix looked at her. He didn't joke. He didn't reach for anything to make it lighter. He just answered, in the short voice.
"Because she's in that room."
He let that sit.
"Whatever my aunt wants, my mother is in that room, and she's thinner, and every night somebody pours her tea and lets it go cold." His hand went to his coat. "And I have the bottle. If it's enough, I don't need anyone. My aunt will let me in. She wants me home. I'm the one thing in that letter she actually asked for."
"You're not what she asked for, Felix," said Naomi. "You're the door."
Felix was quiet for a moment.
"I know that too," he said. "So I'll be a door with a bottle in its pocket."
"And if the bottle isn't enough?" I said.
He looked at me down the length of the table.
"Then I'll know," he said. "Which is more than I know now."
I looked at the bottle-shaped place under his coat. My Blue, corked up with his spark and Ambrose's stillness and a song. A bottle is always weaker than my hand. I've known that since the first one. And 「Discern」 only works by touch; I'd never be able to tell, from here, whether what was wrong with Queen Aurelia was something a bottle could reach. Nobody could. Not from Greymark.
I turned to Naomi.
"I want to go with him," I said. "I'm asking."
Naomi looked at me for a long time. The room was very quiet. Somewhere under the floor, I think, Agnes dropped a pan.
"I know you are," she said.
"And?"
"And ask me when the rider comes."
"And then?"
"And then I'll answer."
Cordelia had been looking at the painted road that ran from Greymark into the trees. She didn't look up.
"If she says go," she said, "I lead it."
Naomi didn't argue with that. I don't think she'd expected anything else.
Then Liesel, who had been sitting beside me without saying a word through all of it, looked up from the painted fields.
"Where he goes, I go," she said. "That isn't a question either."
Naomi looked at her across the table, at the princess who had once ridden into Greymark disguised as an escort called Beth, and was now sitting at her table with her elbows on the painted fields as if she'd always sat there.
"No," Naomi agreed. "It isn't."
The rider took four days.
They were long days, and they were all the same. Bottles in the stillroom at dawn: twelve, and the Crown's riders carrying them off. The healing hour in the hole. Hildegard on her barrel, and the third oak beam going up on the new gate on the second afternoon, and Hildegard saying "Thicker" to it anyway, out of habit. Hana's table, seven girls now, then nine. The freckled girl splinting a carpenter's finger so neatly that I didn't have anything left to do but close the skin.
At noon every day, Dame Constance walked out along the road to the bend with a sack of bread over her shoulder and a skin of ale, alone, and walked back an hour later without the bread and without saying anything about it to anyone.
And every evening, Felix went up on the gatehouse roof and stood with his forearms on the parapet and looked at the fire at the bend.
Corvus's keepers built it in the same place every night. And every night, when it was properly dark, a thin figure got up from beside it and walked a little way out from the ring onto the open road, as far as his keepers would let him, and stood there looking back at the wall.
They never waved. Neither of them. They just stood, one on the roof and one on the road, with a field between them, until the keepers called Corvus back to the fire.
Liesel sat with two fingers on my wrist and didn't count out loud anymore, now that everyone knew.
Naomi looked east more than she needed to.
On the fourth afternoon I was halfway down the healing line when Sigrid stopped counting.
I looked up. Everyone in the hole was looking the same way, down the Sanctara road, where a smudge of dust was coming toward us along the hedges, fast, faster than anything on that road had come since the siege.
One rider. Crown crimson. Low over the horse's neck.
I saw the horse's light before I could see the horse properly. It was orange, and getting worse with every stride: an animal that had been ridden too hard for too long by someone who'd been told not to stop. I caught myself wondering, for the first time in my life, whether a 「Heal」 would work on a horse.
Then I stopped wondering, because Cordelia's candle was already moving, fast, from the war room toward the hole, and Naomi's was right behind it.
The rider came in through the gap where the gate used to be and pulled up so hard the horse nearly sat down. She was gray to the eyebrows with road dust. She looked around the hole, at Hildegard on her barrel and Hana's girls and the line of carpenters and me on my stool, and then she saw Cordelia coming, and straightened in the saddle, and pulled a flat leather case from inside her coat.
"From Her Majesty," she said. "By her own hand. For the First Princess."
Cordelia held out her hand.
"And one more," said the rider, and drew out a second letter, smaller, sealed in the Queen's own crimson, and looked straight past Cordelia at me.
"For Lord Fabian Valcrest."