The notice went up on the dining hall door a week after the palace, in Lady Severine's handwriting, which is so neat it looks printed.
By order of the Headmistress: any member of the Academy who observes another behaving in an unusual manner will report it to Lady Severine.
That was all it said. It didn't say why. It didn't need to. Everyone who read it had walked past the garden on the way to breakfast.
By the end of the week, Lady Severine had received a great many reports.
"Lord Fabian." She stopped me in the corridor outside general studies with a sheet of paper in her hand and her spectacles slipped exactly as far down her nose as they always slip. "You have been reported."
Liesel stepped up beside me. Wren stepped up beside Liesel.
"For what?" I said.
Lady Severine read from the sheet. "'Lord Fabian moves his lips when he looks at people, as though he is counting them.'"
"...I am counting them."
"I'm aware." She pushed her spectacles up with one finger. "I have noted that this is usual."
"Thank you, Lady Severine."
"Wren."
Wren went very straight.
"You have been reported for humming. Nine times."
Wren hummed.
"Ten," said Lady Severine, and wrote it down.
"Was I reported, Lady Severine?" said Liesel.
"Twice, Your Highness."
"For what?"
Lady Severine looked at the sheet. Then at me. Then at Liesel.
"Staring," she said, and walked on.
Liesel went red to the collar and stayed that way all the way through the trade roads.
It went on like that. A first-year was reported for crying in the baths, which wasn't unusual at all that month. Two girls from the battle class reported each other for sleeping with their swords. Somebody reported Ambrose for reading at dinner, and Lady Severine sent back a note that said Usual. Somebody reported Lord Cassian for being polite to a gardener, and Lady Severine, I'm told, had to think about that one for a long time.
I understood why the headmistress had done it. Somebody should have looked at you sooner. She'd said it over Lady Amara in the ash, and I don't think she'd stopped saying it to herself since. The notice on the door was her way of making sure that from now on, somebody always would.
But I'd been watching the reports too, the way I watch everything. They were hums and counting and girls who cried. Things you could see.
Lady Amara hadn't hummed. She hadn't counted. For weeks before the garden, she'd come to class every morning and smiled at us exactly the same way, and a smile is the most usual thing in the world.
Nobody reports a smile.
At the young lords' residence, the maids had started airing out the empty quarters on the floor above mine. Nobody told us whose they were going to be. Everybody knew. The girls had a new word to whisper, and for once it wasn't my name.
Bellonia.
The stone went up in the garden at the end of the second week.
It was gray, not white, and plain, about as tall as Naomi. They set it in the middle of the lawn, where the black heart had beaten, and raked the ash back from it in a wide circle. Whoever raked the circle had done it very smoothly.
The whole Academy came to see it. Hana came up from the second ring with her notebook. The headmistress stood beside the stone with her ash cane in one hand and her candle in the other, and said nothing at all, which I've come to understand is how she says the most.
The names were cut deep, one under another. Just names. No houses, no titles. Nobody's letters bigger than anyone else's.
Hana read them first, before anyone, holding her notebook open beside the stone and checking each one against her page. They were all spelled right. She told me afterward she'd have said something if they weren't, headmistress or no headmistress, and I believe her.
I'm not going to write down how many there were. I counted.
The last name on the stone was Amara.
I felt it go through the crowd before anyone said a word, the way you feel a wave pull back before it comes in.
"—her—"
"—why is her name on—"
"She killed—"
The headmistress didn't turn around.
"Every name that fell in this garden," she said.
She didn't raise her voice. She didn't have to. The whispers went out like a candle pinched between two fingers.
Nobody said anything after that. A few girls left. Most stayed.
Hana closed her notebook and held it against her chest. (Fabian,) she said on the bond, very quietly. (Is it all right? That she's there?)
I thought about the garden. About a light that came back red, and a cup with no bottom, and a smile that went all the way up into her eyes at the very end.
(Yes,) I said.
Liesel left my side.
She walked across the ash to the stone, her boots printing the smooth circle, and stood in front of it for a moment. Then she reached out and laid two fingers on the last name, the way you'd touch someone's shoulder to tell them you were going.
"That place was taken," she said, so quietly that I think only the headmistress and I heard her. "This one isn't."
Then she came back and stood beside me, and didn't say anything else, and neither did I.
At the edge of the circle, Lord Cassian leaned on a rake with ash in his hair. He wasn't looking at the stone. He was looking at the circle around it, very smooth, with Liesel's footprints across it.
He didn't rake them out. I noticed that, too.
"Report," said Ambrose, three days later.
He said it across our table by the infirmary window, where we'd worked every afternoon since I came back while the infirmary mistress pretended not to listen, and closed his notebook. That was the whole announcement.
So the next afternoon, I climbed ninety-four stairs.
The headmistress's rooms are at the top of the oldest tower on the hill, and the stairs wind up the inside of it, narrow, and worn into hollows in the middle by five hundred years of feet. I counted every one. Ambrose climbed ahead of me with his notebook open, reading, and never once looked where he put his feet.
Liesel climbed beside me with her hand under my elbow.
"I can climb stairs," I said.
"I know," said Liesel. "I'm holding it anyway."
"Ninety-four," I said, at the top.
Ambrose turned a page without looking up.
They were just stairs. I'd known that for a while. It was still nice to check.
The headmistress's study was small, for the head of the Royal Academy, and full of candles, most of them unlit. There were books on every wall, and a window that looked straight down over the grounds to the garden and the gray stone in its circle of ash. The row of candles that had burned in that window for the fallen was gone. The stone had taken their place.
The headmistress sat behind her desk, very small and very straight.
"Lord Ambrose. Lord Fabian. Sit."
We sat. Ambrose put a tin on the desk.
It was one of Hana's salve tins, round and flat, with a dent in the lid from the time Marika used it to wedge a door. Ambrose opened it.
Inside was something that looked like water and wasn't. It didn't move when he tilted the tin. It was clear all the way through, and deep inside it, so faint you'd have to know to look, there was a green light, like a circle drawn under ice.
"Without holding," said Ambrose.
The headmistress looked at the tin for a long moment. "Show me."
Ambrose took a penknife from his pocket and cut his own thumb before anyone could stop him.
"Lord Ambrose—"
"Small," said Ambrose. "Yellow." He glanced at me. "Yes?"
I looked. His light had a thread of yellow in it now, bright and annoyed, right where the cut was. "Yes."
He scooped up a little of the gel with the same thumb and smeared it over the cut, and put both hands in his lap.
Nothing happened.
Then, slowly, the way a bruise fades over a day instead of all at once, the yellow began to fade. Not the way it fades under my hand. Slower. Softer. But it faded, until his light was white all the way through again and the cut on his thumb was a thin pink line.
Nobody had held anything. The tin sat on the desk by itself.
"Slower than you," said the headmistress, to me.
"Much slower."
"Weaker," said Ambrose. "Fades. Made at dawn. By night, water."
"And the cost?"
"One." Ambrose pointed at me. "One." He pointed at himself.
The headmistress held out her hand. Ambrose gave her the notebook, and she read the new pages one after another, slowly, the way she reads everything. At the bottom of the last one, in stitching so small I'd have needed the page against my nose, she wrote a single word, and turned the notebook around so we could see it.
Continue.
"Longer," said Ambrose, taking it back. He was already looking at the next blank page. "Next: longer."
"Thank you, Lord Ambrose. You may go."
Ambrose stood, bowed to her, nodded to me, and stopped at the door.
"Yet," he said, to nobody in particular, and went down ninety-four stairs reading.
The headmistress waited until his footsteps had gone all the way down.
"Lord Fabian. Stay. Princess. Wren."
Wren had already started for the door, the way she always does. She stopped with her hand on it.
"This side, Wren," said the headmistress. "You've heard the rest. You may as well hear this."
Wren shut the door from the inside and stood with her back against it. She didn't hum.
The headmistress took a candle from her desk and lit it, the way she does whenever she speaks of the boy her family lost. Then she drew a flat case of dark wood toward her. On the lid, worn almost smooth, was a single candle flame inside a circle.
I knew what was in it. Three sentences, on a page gone the color of weak tea. I'd heard them once already, the day she told me about her family's Saint.
And under them, one more page, lying face down.
"You climbed ninety-four stairs," said the headmistress.
"Ninety-four."
"You counted."
"I always count."
"I know." She laid her hand flat on the face-down page. "I kept this from you the day I told you about him. I told myself it was for another day. I meant to show it to you as a curiosity, a thing my family has kept for five hundred years without understanding. I thought a boy who sees lights might see something in it the rest of us couldn't."
She turned it over.
It was a drawing in brown ink, on paper gone soft as cloth. Whoever made it hadn't been an artist, or hadn't had time to be one. The lines were quick and hard, as though the hand holding the pen had been afraid.
There were two figures.
One was tall, wrapped in a long hooded cloak, with a veil across its face so that nothing showed but two small strokes of ink for eyes. Whoever drew it had taken more care over those two strokes than over anything else on the page. The eyes were calm. That was the worst part. They were completely calm.
It was holding out one hand. On the palm lay something small and round, and the ink there had been gone over so many times it was almost a hole in the paper. Not brown, like the rest. Black.
The other figure was a woman, kneeling, with her hands lifted to take it.
And on the ground behind her, stretched long, as though the sun were very low, lay her shadow.
Her shadow had horns.
Liesel made a small sound beside me. I didn't look at her. I couldn't look away.
"My grandmother," said the headmistress, very quietly, "said it was a priest giving bread to a beggar, and the shadow was a mistake. The artist's hand slipped. My mother said there was a demon behind the woman, and the hooded one was a saint who had come to drive it out." She looked down at the page. "I have looked at this every year of my life, and I could never make it say anything at all."
The candle flame stood perfectly straight between us.
"Since the garden," said the headmistress, "I can't make it stop."
I thought about the cherry in Lady Amara's chest. Black. Glossy. Beating.
I'd thought it came out of the garden. Out of everything she'd kept in the dark for ten years, the way a weed comes up out of bad ground. By itself.
"Someone gave it to her," I said.
"Yes," said the headmistress.
"And five hundred years ago—"
"Someone gave it to someone else."
She looked at the drawing a moment longer. Then she turned it face down again, gently, and laid her hand on it, the way you'd lay a hand on a door you'd decided to keep shut.
This time, I knew what was on the other side.
I went to the window. Below, in the middle of the garden, the gray stone stood in its circle of ash, with every name on it. Hers too.
Down by the dining hall, the notice was still on the door. Behaving in an unusual manner.
Whoever had held out that hand wouldn't hum. They wouldn't count, or cry in the baths, or stare at anyone across a corridor.
They would just look calm.
Nobody reports that, either.