Fabian — Sanctara
The whole Academy knew by the end of breakfast.
Nobody told them. Nobody had to. Liesel ate her porridge with her left hand.
She's right-handed. She has been right-handed her entire life; she snaps spears with her right hand. That morning she held her spoon in her left, slowly, with great care, with the ring turned so the pale wood caught the light from the high windows every time she lifted it, and she looked at no one.
It took the dining hall about four spoonfuls.
I watched it go down the long tables like a dropped tray. One girl saw. She grabbed the girl beside her. That girl dropped her bread. The bread hit the girl across from her, who turned around to complain, saw the ring, and forgot what she'd been going to complain about. By the time it reached the far end of the hall, the noise had gone from the ordinary breakfast roar to something more like the sound the Gloamwood makes before a tide.
"Ring," said Ambrose, sitting down across from us with his book.
"Yes," I said.
He leaned forward and looked at it, closely, the way he looks at a tin.
"Wood."
"Yes."
"Ash."
"...Yes."
Ambrose sat back. He considered it for a moment longer. Then he opened his book.
"Good," he said.
I've decided that counts as a speech.
Lady Severine found us on the way out, with a sheet of paper and her spectacles exactly where they always are.
"Your Highness. You have been reported."
Liesel's chin came up. "For what?"
Lady Severine consulted the sheet. "Smiling. Eleven times. Before the second bell."
Liesel smiled.
"Twelve," said Lady Severine. She looked at the ring for exactly one breath. Then, without any change at all in her voice, she said, "My congratulations, Your Highness. Lord Fabian." And she wrote Usual at the bottom of the sheet, in very small letters, and walked on.
I'm almost sure I saw the corner of her mouth move. I'll never be able to prove it.
The palace has thirty-one stairs. I'd climbed them before without stopping. I'd said, on the inner wall, that they'd be easy.
They weren't. I don't know how a staircase can be heavier going up to ask a woman a question than it was going up to be thanked by her in front of the whole court, but it was. By the twentieth step my heart was doing what it did on the wall, and Liesel, beside me, could feel every beat of it.
"Stairs," she said, very kindly.
"Thirty-one of them."
"You're just short."
The Queen received us in a small sitting room off the gold ballroom, not the throne hall, which I took as a good sign. Cordelia was there, leaning against the mantelpiece in her silver half-plate with her arms folded. She looked at Liesel's left hand the moment we came through the door. Then at me. Then at the ceiling.
I bowed.
"Your Majesty. I asked her first. Now I'm asking you."
The Queen looked at me, and then at her younger daughter, and then at her younger daughter's hand, for a long moment.
"Show me," she said.
Liesel held out her hand.
The Queen of Octavia took it in both of hers and turned it to the light, and looked at a plain ring of pale wood on the hand of a Princess of the Crown. I watched her see that it wasn't gold. I watched her see that it wasn't silver, or set with anything at all.
"It's wood," said the Queen.
"It's my spear," said Liesel.
The Queen was quiet. Then: "...Of course it is."
She let go of Liesel's hand and looked at me.
"Did you kneel?"
"Yes," said Liesel, before I could.
"Men don't—" the Queen began.
"This one does," said Liesel and I, at exactly the same moment.
Cordelia closed her eyes.
The Queen of Octavia looked from one of us to the other. Then she sat down, rather suddenly, in the nearest chair, and laughed. The real one, short and surprised, as though it had got out before she could stop it.
"The Crown said it would wait," she said, when she could. "It did not expect to wait so little." She folded her hands in her lap and straightened, and for a moment she was every inch the Queen, crimson and gold and exact. "Lord Fabian. The Crown consents."
"Thank you, Your Majesty."
Then her face changed.
"That was the Queen," she said, quietly, and held out both her hands to Liesel. Liesel took them. "This is your mother." She looked at the ring again, and then up at her daughter, and her eyes were very bright. "Your father gave me a ring with eleven stones in it. I couldn't tell you now what color a single one of them was."
Liesel didn't say anything. She bent down and put her arms around her mother, armor and all, and the Queen of Octavia held on.
I looked at Cordelia, because it seemed polite to look somewhere else.
Cordelia was still leaning on the mantelpiece with her arms folded. She was looking at me. She looked at me for a long, measuring moment, the way she looks at everything.
"Finally," said Cordelia.
I asked Naomi that evening, at supper, in the gray house, in front of everyone.
Everyone, by then, was a lot of people. Hana had invited Felix, because Hana has decided that Felix doesn't eat enough, and once Hana decides that about a person there's nothing anyone can do. Ambrose had come because Felix had come, and because there was bread. Wren and Felix's escorts stood along the wall and didn't look at one another very loudly. Marika had been told about the ring, in the henhouse, the night before, and had not stopped smiling since, which on Marika looks like a threat.
I waited until the plates were cleared. Then I stood up.
"Big Sis," I said. "Head of House Valcrest."
"No," said Naomi.
The table went quiet.
"...He hasn't asked anything yet," said Marika.
Naomi looked at her plate. "Habit."
Hana put her face in her hands. Felix made a noise into his napkin that might have been a cough.
I started again.
"I asked Liesel to marry me," I said. "Last night, on the inner wall. She said yes. Three times. I counted." Liesel, beside me, went red from the collar up. "I asked the Queen this morning. The Crown consents. You already know all of that. But you're the head of my house, and you're my sister, and you've said yes or no to every important thing that has ever happened to me since I was seven years old. You deserved to be asked. Properly. Out loud."
I took a breath.
"So I'm asking."
Naomi didn't say anything.
She stood up. She walked around the end of the long table, past Marika, past Hana, past Felix, who had stopped pretending to cough and was very still. She stopped in front of me. For a moment I thought she was going to say Noted, or nothing at all.
Then she put her hand on top of my head.
She used to do that when I was small. When I'd fallen off something, or woken in the night, or been told about Mother and Father. Just her hand, flat and warm and heavy, on the top of my head, as if she were making sure I was still there.
I'm seventeen, and still the shortest Valcrest by a head. She didn't have to reach at all. She never has.
"Yes," said Naomi.
That was all. She took her hand back, and went around the table, and sat down, and picked up her cup. Her hand wasn't quite steady. Nobody said so.
Hana burst into tears.
"I've cried on two days of bread now," she said, through them. "Two days."
Marika was on her feet. "Can General carry the ring at the wedding?"
"No," said Naomi.
"There isn't a wedding yet," I said.
"When there IS one—"
"No."
"General is a principle—"
"No."
Ambrose reached past all of it, took the last piece of bread, and said, "Good," for the second time that day.
I looked across the table at Felix.
He was smiling. He'd smiled the whole time, through Naomi's No and Hana's bread and Marika's goat. But he'd stopped eating the moment I stood up, and he hadn't started again, and his hand was resting on the table beside his cup, very flat, as though he were holding something down.
He walked back to the Academy with us, through the lamplit rings, talking the whole way. About the plum cake. About General, whom he now wanted to meet more than anyone in Octavia. About the noise Hana had made, which he said was the best noise he'd ever heard a person make.
At the residence door, while Liesel and Wren and his escorts went on ahead up the steps, he stopped.
"You asked her," said Felix.
"Yes."
"Yourself."
"Yes."
"And then her mother. And then your sister." He counted it out on his fingers, the way I do. "In that order."
"Her first," I said.
Felix looked at his three fingers for a long moment.
"You chose," he said.
It wasn't a question. It didn't have a joke on the end of it.
"Yes," I said.
There was a snap, sharp and bright. A spark had jumped from his hand to the iron latch of the door, and the latch rang, very faintly, the way the copper pot had.
Felix laughed and shook his hand out. "Sorry. Sorry. It does that when I'm—"
"No, you're not," I said.
I hadn't planned to. It came out in Naomi's voice, or near enough.
Felix stopped laughing.
For a moment, in the lamplight on the residence steps, he looked like somebody I'd never met. Not older. Just tired, all the way down, the way Naomi used to look on the wall at three in the morning when she thought nobody could see her.
"...No," said Felix quietly. "I'm not."
Then the grin came back, the way it always does, as if someone had pulled it up on a string.
"Goodnight, Saint," he said, and went up the stairs two at a time.
I stood at the bottom of them for a while.
Later, lying in bed with my pool drained and Liesel's candle burning low and steady through the wall, I heard his bath start to run in the quarters above mine. Then the singing, loud and cheerful and terrible, the way it always is.
I'd thought, the first time, that he just liked to sing.
Felix — Sanctara
The letter had come that morning, while Fabian was climbing the palace stairs to ask a queen for her daughter.
I'd read it four times. I read it again, sitting on the edge of the bath with the water running and the door shut and both my escorts on the other side of it.
My dear Felix,
Your mother sleeps peacefully. The physicians tell me there is no change, which is its own kind of mercy. Do not trouble yourself to hurry home; Bellonia is in good hands, and has never been in better. Enjoy your studies. Make friends.
Your loving aunt, who speaks for the throne.
The hand was beautiful. It always is. She was taught by the same tutor as my mother, at the same desk, and when they were girls, people used to say you couldn't tell their writing apart. You can now. Mother's letters lean forward, as if they're in a hurry to get somewhere. My aunt's stand perfectly straight.
Sleeps peacefully.
She doesn't. I've sat beside her. Her breathing catches, every so often, like a singer losing her place in a verse, and her hands are too cold, and sometimes her eyes move under the lids as if she's trying very hard to wake up and can't find the way.
It came in a cup. I know that. I know whose hand held it out to her, smiling, at the end of a long dinner, the night before she didn't wake. I watched it happen and didn't understand it until three days later, and by then the cup was washed, and the servant who carried it had gone home to a village no one could name, and the physicians had a word for it that meant fever.
I know. I can't prove it. In Bellonia, a man who accuses a woman of the Crown of poisoning the Queen, without proof, isn't a son. He's a hysteric. Then he's a patient. Then, eventually, he's a sad story.
So I smile.
I smiled at her when she kissed my forehead and told me Octavia had kindly agreed to take me. I smiled at the border, and at the gate, and at a boy who was blessed with the light of a goddess and spends it on first-years' sprained wrists, and bakes, and can't pay for lunch.
I came here to find a Saint. That was the whole plan. Find the Saint, make him like me, find out whether there was anything in the world that could wake a woman who'd drunk from the wrong cup. I didn't think further than that. I didn't let myself.
I found one who counts the stairs.
And he has a tin of something that heals without anyone holding it. It lasts until midnight. With me, it lasts longer. I don't know yet how much longer. I don't know yet whether it would last a month on the road. I don't know whether healing a cut thumb has anything to do with waking a queen. I don't know anything.
But it's the first door I've found that opens.
The thing I can't stop thinking about isn't the tin, though. It's a boy on a wall on his knees.
In Bellonia, a man's marriage is not his. It's a key. Whoever I marry, if I marry before Mother dies, wears Mother's crown, and my aunt doesn't. Every girl my aunt has ever let me dance with was one of hers. Every girl who wasn't hers was sent somewhere else, very politely, before the second dance. I've known since I was twelve that I would never be allowed to want anyone. Wanting someone would be choosing a queen.
And tonight a boy stood up at a supper table and said I asked her first. Now I'm asking you. And his sister put her hand on his head and said yes.
You chose, I'd said. I hadn't meant to. It just came out of me.
No, you're not, he'd said. In his sister's voice.
I folded the letter back along its lines, exactly as straight as she'd folded it. Then I put it in the drawer with the others. Four, now. Make friends.
I'd made one. That was the worst part. I liked him. I liked all of them: the sister who said nothing for four minutes, the one who cried on the bread, the loud one with the goat. The princess who looked at me across a plate of honey cakes as if she could see straight through to the bottom of me, and then gave me one anyway. Interest.
If I told him, he'd be on a horse by morning. I'd seen enough of him to know that. And Octavia would never, ever let their Saint cross into Bellonia, and if they did, my aunt would be waiting at the border with a smile and a cup.
So I wouldn't tell him. Not yet. Not until I had something to tell him with. A tin that lasted. A door that opened all the way.
The bath was nearly full. Steam was coming over the rim. The water was loud, and the walls here are thick, but not that thick, and my escorts are good at their jobs.
One of them, I'm almost sure, writes to my aunt.
So I took a breath, and opened my mouth, and sang.
Loudly. Cheerfully. Very, very badly. The song about the miller's three daughters, which has eleven verses and no tune at all, and which every child in Bellonia knows and every grown woman in Bellonia is sick of.
I sing in the bath every night. It's the only time anyone in Octavia can hear me and not see my face.
Here, a man who sings badly in his bath is just a man who sings badly in his bath.
Nobody looks at him twice.