At dawn on the third day, something left my pitcher.
One splash. White. Small and quick, and not mine.
I was still lying in my blanket by the dead fire, and I sat up so fast that Liesel, asleep against my shoulder, slid sideways into the bracken and woke up saying "What," in her mother's voice. I didn't answer her. I was feeling for where the splash had gone.
Two days back along the road. A candle I'd have known blindfolded.
(Hana?)
It wasn't Hana who answered. It was Naomi.
(Test.)
(Of what?)
(Whether it reaches.) A pause. (It does. Go back to sleep.)
I didn't go back to sleep. I sat there in the gray light with my blanket round my shoulders and did sums, and the sums all came out the same way. 「Borrowed Light」 doesn't care how far away I am. As long as there's something in the pitcher, Hana can reach into it from Greymark and pour.
Naomi wasn't testing it because she was curious. Naomi has never in her life tested anything because she was curious.
She was testing it because she'd need it.
We rode the rest of the core that day, and the mid beyond it the day after, and nothing came for us.
The holes were all going the other way. I saw them every night from the edge of the firelight, deep in the trees on both sides of the road, big slow shapes moving back toward the burned webs and the fields beyond. Away from us. Toward home. I watched them until I couldn't, and then I lay awake and listened to Naomi not saying anything on the bond.
Felix grew quieter the further we went. He'd talked the whole first day, about the bears and the road and Petronius's thoroughness and whether you could teach a bear to carry a message (you could not; Cinna said so). By the fourth day he'd stopped. He rode near the front, just behind Corvus's ring, and watched the road ahead the way you'd watch a door you'd been waiting at for a long time.
On the fifth day, a little before noon, the trees stopped.
They stop all at once on the Greymark side, like a wall. They do the same on the other. One moment there were trunks and dim green evening; the next, the sky, so much of it and so bright that half the column put up a hand against it, and below the sky, Bellonia.
I don't know what I'd expected. Something darker, maybe. A country where men are kept like weapons ought to look like it.
It looked like fields. Long, rolling, stubbled fields, gold and brown, running away from the forest under a high clear sky, with hedges and lanes and the smoke of a village a little way off. It looked so much like the land outside Greymark that for a moment my chest did something strange.
Only the walls were different. Every field had a stone wall round it, not a hedge; every farmhouse I could see had a squat stone tower beside it, three stories high, with slits for windows. On the hills there were more towers, and on the furthest hill, small and gray with distance, something that might have been a fort.
A country that expected to be attacked, from every side, at any time. And had built for it.
Petronius's road ran out of the forest and ended at a stone post, waist high, with an eagle cut into the top of it. After the post, it was an ordinary lane between two walls.
Felix reined in beside the post. He looked at the eagle for a long moment. Then he laid his palm on it as he rode past, and didn't say anything at all.
The village was the smoke we'd seen. We reached it in under an hour, and long before we reached it I knew something was wrong.
It had a palisade, like everything in Bellonia: a ring of sharpened stakes round a huddle of stone houses and one squat tower. In two places, the palisade wasn't there anymore. Stakes lay snapped and scattered in the stubble outside the gaps, and among them, dark lumps that I didn't need Elysia's eyes to know were dead wolves. Big ones. Gray-black, longer than a man, with the heavy shoulders I remembered from my first sweep, when ten of them came at Naomi's six.
To Elysia's eyes, they were holes. Six, seven, eight of them, scattered in the stubble. Nothing, every one.
And beyond the broken palisade, in the village, a great many lights that were orange.
"Two nights ago," said Cinna quietly, from behind me. He was looking at the gaps. "Maybe three. They came out of the trees on this side too."
Of course they had. A road cut through every border in a forest doesn't only break it toward one end.
There were women in the nearer gap with spears. Not soldiers. Village women, in aprons and leather jerkins, a dozen of them, standing in the broken palisade the way the townswomen of Greymark had stood on our wall: as if they'd decided to and that was the end of it. They saw the white flag, and then the crowned star of Octavia on the next lance, and the spears came down level.
The captain with the scarred eyebrow rode forward alone, with her hands empty and up. She spoke to them in Bellonian for a long time. I caught Fulmara, and Aquilan, and a word that Felix told me afterward means envoy, and at the end of it the spears didn't come up, exactly, but they stopped pointing at anyone in particular.
Then an older woman came out through the gap. She had gray hair cropped short and one arm strapped against her chest in a dirty sling, and she looked at the column from one end to the other, the Crown's riders, the keepers, Cordelia, Felix, the two bound prisoners. Then she looked at me.
She looked for a long time. In Bellonia, I suppose, you don't see a man often, and when you do, he has six women round him with spears.
I had two. Liesel on one side of me, Wren on the other.
The headwoman looked from me to Liesel.
"Is he yours?" she said, in an accent so thick I nearly didn't catch it.
"Yes," said Liesel.
She said it at once, flat and certain, the way she says true things. Then her ears went faintly pink, which isn't her tell, it's Marika's, and I think she knew it, because she looked straight ahead and didn't look at me.
Behind us, Marika said, not quietly enough, "Technically he was OURS first."
The headwoman's eyebrows went up. She didn't ask.
There were lights behind her, in the village. A lot of them. Orange in the square, orange in the doorways, orange in a cart drawn up by the well with something lying in it under a blanket. One, near the cart, much darker than orange.
I turned in my saddle to Cordelia. She was the envoy. It was her flag, and her mother's peace.
"Princess," I said. "I'm asking."
Cordelia looked at the village. Then at the headwoman.
"Her people," she said.
So I got down off my horse, in the stubble outside the broken palisade, with Liesel and Wren getting down beside me, and I walked to the headwoman, and stopped a pace short of her.
"Your people are hurt," I said. "I'm a healer. May I?"
She stared at me.
"May you," she repeated.
"Heal them."
"You're the Throne's?" She looked past me at the bound mages, and at Felix, as if trying to work out who owned what. "Whose blessing is that?"
"Mine," I said. "I'm Octavia's. And I'm asking you."
She didn't say anything for a long moment. Somewhere behind her in the village a child was crying, the thin, tired kind that has been going on for hours.
"Heal them," said the headwoman.
They brought them into the square. It didn't take long; the square wasn't large, and most of the hurt were already there, lying on blankets in the lee of the tower, where somebody with sense had put them all together. Twenty-two. I counted. Women, mostly. Three children. An old man in a blanket with his keeper sitting beside him, which I hadn't expected and didn't have time to think about. A dog with a torn ear. Two goats that had come through the palisade gaps with the wolves and been bitten for their trouble.
"Everyone close," I said. "Closer than that. The dog too."
The headwoman translated, more or less. They came closer.
I knelt in the middle of the square, on the packed earth, and put both hands down, and poured.
Blue. Three splashes. The circle opened under the whole square at once, from the foot of the tower to the well, wide and bright and blue in the middle of a Bellonian afternoon, under twenty-two people and a dog and two goats and the headwoman's own boots. Every woman with a spear in the gaps turned round to look at it. The child stopped crying.
The orange went out of the square.
Not all of it. Blue 「Mass Heal」 is a Green 「Heal」 for everyone at once, and some of what the wolves had done was worse than Green. But the torn arms closed, and the bitten legs, and the headwoman's arm in its sling; I watched her flex her fingers inside the bandage and go very still. The dog shook its head and stopped shaking it. The goats got up.
The one in the cart didn't.
She was a girl, maybe fourteen, under a blanket that had been somebody's cloak. A wolf had had her by the side of the neck, and her light was red going dark at the edges, the way lights go when there isn't much time left in them. The Mass had taken her from dying to nearly dying, and no further.
I climbed up into the cart and put my hand flat on the bandage at her neck, and gave her Blue. Three more.
Her light came up through orange and yellow to white, the plain white of someone who was going to sleep for a day and wake up hungry, and she opened her eyes and looked at me and said something in Bellonian that made the women round the cart burst into a sound that was half laughing and half something else.
"What did she say?" I asked Felix.
Felix had come into the square without my noticing. He was standing by the well with his hands at his sides, looking at the whole of it: the square full of his people, getting up off their blankets, flexing their hands, staring at a man from Octavia who was sitting in a cart.
"She asked if you were real," he said. His voice was rough. "They tell stories here about men who heal. In the old songs. Nobody's ever seen one."
Six splashes. I'd come out of the forest full, thirty-seven, and even filling slowly I'd be full again by nightfall. That was the sum I did, sitting in that cart. It was the wrong sum, as it turned out. I just didn't know it yet.
Then I took Hana's notebook out of my coat, and the pencil on its string.
The headwoman watched me do it. "What's that?"
"My sister keeps count," I said. "Everyone I've healed. She asked me to write down every name." I looked round the square. "Will they tell me?"
The headwoman looked at me as if I'd said something in a language even stranger than Octavian. Then she turned round and said something sharp to the square, and the square lined up.
Most of them told me. I wrote the names down as well as I could spell them, and the headwoman corrected my spelling, twice, without being asked. The girl from the cart told me hers sitting up, with her hand on her neck where the bite had been. A few wouldn't say, and I didn't press them. For those, I did what Hana had said.
Woman with a red scarf, gap in her front teeth. Wolf bite, left forearm. Laughed afterward.
Boy, about six. Doesn't like goats.
The dog. Brown. Torn ear. Very good.
When I looked up from the last of them, there was a girl on a pony at the far side of the square, by the gap in the palisade on the Fulmara side. She was looking straight at me. Then she wheeled the pony round and kicked it into a gallop, out through the gap and down the lane between the walls, toward the next village, and the one after that, and the road to the capital.
Cinna watched her go from his horse, with his bound hands in his lap.
"They'll be singing about you in Fulmara before we get there," he said mildly. "Her Highness will hear it in the songs before she hears it from her scouts."
He didn't sound as if he minded.
Naomi — Greymark
I tested it on the third morning, because I don't like finding things out in the middle of a fight.
The freckled girl had cut her thumb on a bandage pin. Hana held the thumb, and looked at me, and I nodded, and she opened a White circle under it. Gold in the edge, the way it always is now. The cut closed.
It reached. Two days into the Gloamwood, on the far side of the webs, and it reached him.
So I knew two things. That whatever came out of those trees, we could heal. And that every splash we took, he wouldn't have.
I told him it was a test. It was. I didn't tell him what for.
On the fifth morning I took six guards to the treeline at first light, twice what I take on an ordinary month, and found what I'd known since the night he told me they were moving.
Thornhares in the stubble. In daylight. A dozen of them, at the very edge of the north field, where they never come; they live at the entrance and they stay at the entrance, because the Gloamwolves are behind them. They were sitting up in the stubble with their quills half raised, and they didn't run when they saw us. They were more afraid of something behind them than of six women with spears.
The birds at the edge were quiet. Not silent. Quiet.
And just inside the trees, fifty paces in, a Gloamwolf. Dead. Opened from the shoulder to the hip and half eaten, and the marks on it were four long tears side by side.
I stood over it for some time.
Ten years ago, when the elite came, they walked together. Spiders and wolves and boars and bears, side by side, and none of them touched the others. That's what an elite does. That's what made it a tide you could see coming, and couldn't stop.
This wolf had been eaten by a bear.
Nobody was leading this. Petronius had cut the forest open with his road, and everything that lived along it had lost its edges, and now they were all pushing outward, at each other and at whatever was in the way. Frightened, angry, going nowhere in particular.
To us, all the same.
Not a thousand. Not the Broodmother. I made my count standing over that wolf, the way Father taught me: a few hundred, maybe. Most of them small. Some of them not. Coming in no order, from no direction in particular, over the next night or two.
We had no gate.
"It isn't finished," said Hildegard.
"I know."
"Four beams standing. One on the trestles. No hinges on the left post yet. If you think I'm hanging half a gate in front of—"
"Don't hang it," I said. "Lay it."
She looked at me. Then at the hole, as wide as two hay wagons, with the four oak beams standing upright in their new sockets on one side and nothing on the other.
"Wagons across the gap," I said. "The fifth beam across the wagons. The trestles behind, for the archers to stand on. You'll have your barrel in the middle of it."
Hildegard's mouth worked.
"It's not a gate," she said.
"No." I looked at it. "Make it thicker."
She gave me a look as if I'd stolen her sword out of her hand and used it in front of her. Then she got up off the barrel and began shouting at the carpenters, and I left her to it.
Ambrose was on the wall above the old drainage ditch, the one that runs along the outside of the town from the river to the north field and hasn't held water properly since before I was born. He had a notebook in one hand and General leaning on his leg. He was looking down at the ditch with an expression I'd only ever seen on him in front of the bottles.
"Can you fill it?" I said.
He looked at the river, and the ditch, and the river again. "Not fill. Hold. Open the old sluice; I keep it there. Most of the night. Mud far side. Deep water near." He paused. "Ditches."
He said it the way other people say a prayer.
"Do it," I said.
Constance had what was left of the Crown's riders after Cordelia took twelve, which was not many, and the household guard, and every townswoman who'd stood on the wall in the siege and still had a spear, which was a great many. She put them where I told her and didn't ask anything, which is what the Queen had told her to do with me, and which she has never once failed to do.
Hana set up her tables just inside the hole, where they'd been every day since the siege. Nine girls. Bandages, splints, salve, boiled water, a basket of bread, because it's Hana. The freckled girl had her hair tied back so tight it pulled her eyebrows up.
Under the tables was the crate. I'd kept back two of every twelve bottles since the morning he woke, whatever the Crown's riders thought about it, and I'd been right to: twenty of 「Heal」 and eight of 「Cure」, packed in straw, Green, every one. Weaker than his hand. Enough for what a girl's needle couldn't close, and to hold the worst of the rest until morning.
"Girls first," I told Hana. "Everything they can do, they do. Then the bottles. Then you."
"And when the bottles run out?"
"White. Through him." I could feel him, if I listened. Far away and full, or nearly; a weight under my breastbone, like a cup you know is in the cupboard. "Never take him below half. Whatever happens."
Hana looked at me for a long moment.
"He'd give it all," she said. "If he were here."
"He isn't here," I said. "That's why we're the ones deciding."
Around noon, I felt the cup tip.
Not us. Him. Six splashes, all at once, three and then three, somewhere a long way off on the other side of the Gloamwood. I stood in the hole with Hildegard's carpenters roping the fifth beam across two hay wagons behind me, and felt my brother pour, and knew exactly what it meant.
He'd found somebody. Of course he had.
"Six," I told Hana. "He'll have it back by dark. Half is still half."
She nodded, and wrote it down.
At sunset, the birds stopped.
I'd heard that silence twice before: ten years ago, the night Mother and Father rode out and didn't come back, and again on the morning before the Broodmother. I didn't like hearing it a third time. I stood in the middle of the hole, between the charred posts, with the barricade behind me and Ambrose's water lying flat and dark along the foot of the wall, catching the last of the light.
Hana behind me at her tables. Hildegard on her barrel, on top of the wagons, sword across her knees. Constance on the wall above the hole, with her spear. Nine girls with their hair tied back.
And somewhere a long way east, my brother, riding into a country that wanted to own him, with a pitcher I'd just promised to dip into.
The first wolf came out of the trees at full dark.
I didn't say anything on the bond. He'd know soon enough. Every splash would tell him.