The headmistress's study is at the top of the oldest building, up a stair so narrow that Marika had to go up it sideways. She did it with great dignity. She went first.
Pia came last, three steps behind me even on a stair, holding her satchel against her chest with both arms as if somebody might try to take it off her on the way up.
It was evening. The window behind the headmistress's desk had gone the deep blue it goes over Sanctara just before the lamps, and there was a candle already burning on the desk. Just one. I'd never once seen that study without a candle lit in it, whatever the hour.
The headmistress sat behind the desk, very small and very straight, with her ash cane leaning against the chair where she never leans on it. Lady Severine stood at the window. Of course she did.
"Miss Pia," said the headmistress. "You brought it."
"Yes, Headmistress."
Pia came forward. She set the satchel down on the very edge of the desk, and opened it, and took out a flat packet wrapped in oiled cloth, and unwrapped it, and then a layer of linen under that, and then a layer of something very fine and pale that I think was silk, and at the bottom of all of it there was a piece of old paper about the size of my hand.
One edge was straight. The other was brown and curled and gone, the way paper goes when fire gets at it and somebody puts the fire out with whatever's nearest.
The headmistress didn't touch it at first. She looked at it for a long moment, down the length of her nose, the way she looks at a student who has done something unexpected. Then she drew the candle a little closer, and bent over the page, and read.
I watched her read it twice. I watched her lips move on the second time, very slightly, as if she were saying it under her breath against something she already knew by heart.
"Who taught you to read this hand?" she said.
"Nobody, Headmistress. I taught myself. When I was nine. There's a primer of old scripts in the shrine library, in the bottom drawer of the third press, behind a book about bees." Pia swallowed. "I'm sorry about the bees."
"And the High Keeper calls it a poem."
"Yes, Headmistress."
The headmistress sat back. She looked at the page, and at the candle, and for one moment, so short I might have imagined it, at me.
"It isn't a poem," she said.
Pia's whole face changed. I've seen people healed of things that were killing them, and I don't think I've ever seen a face change the way Pia's did, then. She opened her mouth, and nothing came out of it at all, and she shut it again, and her eyes went very bright.
"It's a record," said the headmistress. "Half of one. You were right, Miss Pia, and the High Keeper was wrong, and you may tell her I said so, once." She paused. "Who else has read it?"
"The High Keeper. And me. Lots of times." Pia hesitated. "And I read it aloud. At supper. At the Saint's house."
The headmistress looked at me again. This time she didn't pretend not to.
"Wrap it up, Miss Pia," she said. "Keep it in your satchel. And don't read it aloud again, to anybody, until I tell you that you may."
"...Yes, Headmistress."
"I've heard words like those before," said the headmistress, very quietly, more to the candle than to any of us. "By candlelight. A long time ago." Then she straightened, which I wouldn't have thought possible. "Lady Severine will see you down to the gate, Miss Pia. Lord Fabian will follow when I've finished with him."
Pia wrapped the page. Silk, linen, oiled cloth. She did it slowly, the way you'd wrap something that had just turned out to be worth even more than you thought. At the door she stopped, and looked back, the way she always looks back three times.
"Thank you, Headmistress," she said. "Nobody's ever said I was right about it before."
When the door had shut behind Pia and Lady Severine, and their footsteps had gone all the way down the narrow stair, the headmistress folded her hands on the desk.
"Well, Lord Fabian."
I told her.
I told her about the new line under 「Discern」, and what it does now, and what it had said on the great stair that morning with my hand on a girl's knee. A demon's touch. Eleven nights. I told her about the smile in the drill, and the eleven clean touches before it, and the way the light in that girl was white, perfectly white, the way the whole Academy had been white once while a tree grew in a garden.
She already knew about my eyes, and the pool, and the candles. She'd known since the night she lit a candle and told me three sentences about her family's Saint. She didn't ask me how 「Discern」 worked. She didn't ask me anything at all until I'd finished.
Then she looked down at her own left hand, lying on the desk. At the glove on it. There had been a dark stain on that glove, the night she came back from wherever she'd been detained. There wasn't now. She looked at it anyway.
"Eleven nights," she said.
"Two days before we reached Sanctara."
"While I was asleep in this building." She said it without any expression at all. "Again."
Nobody said anything to that. There wasn't anything to say.
"The Queen knows about my eyes now," I said. It seemed like the moment. "I told her. In the throne hall. I thought you should hear it from me."
The headmistress's mouth moved, very slightly. "The Queen? Or the Crown?"
"She said the Crown didn't hear it."
"Theodora always did keep those two apart better than anyone I've known." She almost smiled. Then it went away. "Have you told Lord Cassian?"
"Not yet."
"Don't."
I'd thought she'd say that. I'd thought it on the stair, and I'd thought it all through the day, and I still didn't like it.
"He has a right to know," I said. "She stands behind him every hour of every day."
"He has a right to know," the headmistress agreed. "And tonight that girl has a right not to be stood in front of a frightened young man with fire in his hands. Lord Cassian burned one of his escorts in the dining hall when he was merely annoyed, Lord Fabian. I'd rather not find out what he does when he's afraid."
She was right. I hated that she was right.
"Then what do we do?"
"Watch her nights." She said it as if she'd been saying it to herself for a long time. "Lady Amara stopped sleeping first. Lady Amara's door was locked. Whatever this is, it goes about its business in the dark, and it leaves the rest to the people it's touched. Somebody needs to be awake."
Marika, by the door, put her hand up like a girl in a classroom. "Somebody is."
The headmistress looked at her for a moment. "Yes," she said. "I imagine somebody is."
Then she looked back at me. Her pale winter eyes were very steady.
"And when the moment comes, Lord Fabian," she said, "look at her. Properly. Somebody should have looked at Lady Amara a long time before any of us did."
I'd heard her say something like that before. On the worst night of the year, in a garden, to a woman who was dying. I hadn't thought she'd remember saying it. I should have known better.
"What's her name?" I said.
The headmistress opened her mouth.
Then she closed it again.
It was a very small thing. Her hands didn't move. Her face didn't change. But I watched the headmistress of the Royal Academy, who knows the name of every girl in her school and the name of every girl's mother, reach for the name of Lord Cassian's second escort, and not find it.
"It's in the register," she said, after a moment. "I would have to look."
She sat very still after she'd said it. Then she drew the candle toward her, across the desk, and looked into it.
"That's the whole of it," she said quietly. "Isn't it."
Nobody in the escorts' room slept that night, and neither did I.
We left both doors open a crack, mine and theirs, the way Marika wanted. Marika sat on the floor in the escorts' doorway with her back against the frame and her boots off, so that nobody would hear them. Liesel sat on her bed. Wren stood where Wren stands.
Cassian's room is next to mine. His escorts' room is across the passage from his, the same as ours is across from me. Through the wall I could hear him moving about for a while, and then not.
At some point near midnight, Liesel said, very low, into the dark: "Nothing's pressing on her."
I knew who she meant. She'd been holding her hand over her own heart for an hour, without seeming to notice she was doing it.
"Wren?"
"Nothing at all. Just her. Small and warm." A pause. "So it isn't here. Whatever it is."
That should have helped more than it did. It meant nothing was standing in a locked room tonight, by any window in the residence, talking very calmly to anyone. It also meant that whatever was going to happen would be done by somebody who'd been talked to eleven nights ago, and had had eleven nights to think about it.
It said it would not come back, Lady Amara had written. It said it would not need to.
The residence clock struck two.
Then, across the passage, a door opened.
I heard it because I was listening for nothing else. A latch lifted very carefully. A hinge that had been oiled, recently, by someone who'd thought about it. And then footsteps. Light ones. Even ones.
Not favoring anything at all.
I'd done that. I'd knelt on a stair that morning and healed the knee she'd been limping on for seven years, and now she could walk down a passage at two in the morning without making a sound.
I was out of bed before I'd decided to be. Marika was already in the passage ahead of me. She'd moved the way Wren moves, which I'd never seen her do before. Liesel came out behind me. Wren was at my shoulder. I never see her move either.
The passage was dark except for the one lamp the guard leaves burning at the far end, by the window over the garden. And in that light, outside Cassian's door, with her hand on his latch, stood his second escort.
Not the blunted spear from the battle yard. A real one, the one she carries at night. She held it in her left hand, point down, easily, the way you'd hold a walking stick.
She was smiling.
She turned her head and looked at us. At Marika in front, and me behind her, and Liesel and Wren. She didn't seem surprised. She didn't seem anything.
"Good evening, my lord," she said to me. Politely. The way she'd thanked me on the stair.
Something moved at the far end of the passage, at the window.
It was Pia. I don't know how. The window over the garden is a long way up from the ground, and the residence has a guard at its door, and there are rules. But there she was, on the sill, half in and half out of the window, with her braid over one shoulder and her crossbow at her cheek, aimed straight down the passage at the woman with the spear.
"Down," said Liesel. Not loud. The way she says things when they're true.
Pia didn't move. "She has a spear—"
"I know. Down."
The crossbow didn't come down. But it didn't go off, either.
Then Cassian's door opened.
He'd heard. Of course he had. He stood there in his shirt in the doorway with his hair everywhere and the lamp behind him, and he looked at his escort, and at the spear in her hand, and at her hand that had been on his latch. And I saw his face do what I'd been afraid of all day.
Fire came up in his hands.
Not much. Just the beginning of it. A little red light along both palms, the way it comes up when he's startled or angry or both, which with Cassian is most of the time.
"Cassian," I said. "Don't."
He didn't look at me. He was looking at her. She was still smiling.
"I've stood at your right shoulder," she said to him, "since you were twelve years old, my lord."
Her voice was perfectly even. Pleasant, almost. The way you'd tell somebody the time.
"My first winter at Ardane, I broke my knee on the wall walk. Keeping the wind off you, the night you wanted to see the stars. Nobody set it properly. You didn't notice I limped. Nobody did." The smile didn't move. "You burned Ilse in the dining hall, and the Valcrest boy knelt down in the stew and asked her what her name was. You've never asked me mine."
Cassian's fire flickered.
"Something came to my window," she said. "Eleven nights ago. It stood. It didn't sit. And the very first thing it did, my lord," and for the first time, her voice did something, very small, at the end, "was ask me my name."
The passage was absolutely silent.
"Isn't that funny?" she said.
I watched Cassian Ardane understand.
I don't know what it looked like from where she stood. From where I stood, it looked like a man being hit somewhere that didn't show. The fire in his hands went out. Not slowly. All at once, as if somebody had closed a hand over it. He stood in his doorway with his empty hands open at his sides, and he looked at her. Properly. Maybe for the first time in all the years she'd been standing at his shoulder.
"What's your name?" said Cassian.
The smile stopped.
It didn't fade. It stopped, the way a clock stops. She looked at him, and her face was suddenly nothing but a face, a tired one, in lamplight, with nothing measured about it at all.
"What?"
"Your name." His voice was rough. Cassian doesn't apologize. He doesn't know how. I don't think anyone ever taught him. This was as close as he could get, and he was getting there by main force. "I'm asking. What is it?"
She didn't answer for a long time.
Then she said, so quietly I almost didn't hear it:
"Tacita."
"Tacita," said Cassian.
And he held out his hand.
Not for the spear. He didn't look at the spear. He held his hand out to her, open, palm up, the hand he'd burned Ilse with, between them in the lamplight. And he waited.
I could see her hand on the spear. Her knuckles were white. I could see her looking at his hand, and not understanding it, the way you don't understand a word in a language you've stopped expecting to hear.
Then her fingers opened.
The spear fell. It hit the floor of the passage with a sound like the whole residence dropping something, and nobody moved toward it. She didn't look at it. She was reaching. Her hand came up off the shaft and went out across the little space between them, slowly, as if it were very heavy, and closed round his.
And something let go of her.
I didn't see it with my eyes. Her light was white before and white after. But I saw her face, and I felt it, the way you feel a knot come loose in a rope you've been pulling on. Her shoulders came down. Her knees went. And Cassian Ardane, who had never in his life been seen to kneel for anybody, went down on the passage floor with her and held on.
It was Ilse who moved first.
She'd been standing in the doorway of the escorts' room across the passage, I don't know for how long. She came out now in her nightshirt, barefoot, and picked the spear up off the floor, and carried it back into the room, and leaned it in the corner. Then she came back and stood over the two of them with her arms folded, looking down at the top of Cassian's head as if she had never seen it before.
Maybe she hadn't. Not from that angle.
I knelt on the other side of Tacita. Not close. Just near.
"May I?"
She didn't look at me. She had her face against Cassian's shoulder, and she was crying in the way people cry when they've been not crying for so long that they've forgotten how, and it comes out all wrong, in pieces. But her free hand moved, a little, on the floor between us. Toward me.
I put my palm on the back of it. Three splashes.
A knee, mended this morning.
That was all. Nothing folded through her. Nothing cold. Nothing with a name.
I took my hand away and sat back on my heels on the passage floor, and for a moment I couldn't do anything at all except breathe.
"Valcrest," said Cassian. He hadn't looked up. His voice came out of somewhere near the top of Tacita's head. "What was it?"
I thought about all the things I couldn't tell him. Then I told him the one thing I could.
"The same thing that got into Lady Amara."
He went very still. I felt it from where I was sitting. Then, after a long moment:
"I won't ask how you know."
"Good."
"It's gone?"
"It's gone."
He nodded, once, against her hair. Then he said, in a voice that was nearly his usual one, which is to say as if everyone in the passage had personally offended him: "She stays."
Nobody had suggested she go. I didn't point that out.
The residence guard came up the stairs about then, with a lamp in one hand and Pia in the other.
She was holding Pia by the back of the robe, the way Liesel had in the great shrine, except that the guard was a good deal shorter than Pia and had to reach up to do it. Pia's crossbow had been taken off her and was hanging from the guard's lamp arm. Pia's face was scarlet and absolutely unrepentant.
"There was a girl," said the guard, in the voice of a woman who has kept one rule for forty years and is not going to stop now, "on my roof."
"She had a spear," said Pia.
"On my roof."
"She was at the Saint's door. Well. Next to the Saint's door. On the same floor—"
Liesel walked down the passage toward her. Pia stopped talking. The guard, who knew who Liesel was, let go of the robe, and Pia stood there with her hands at her sides and her braid coming undone, and waited to be told exactly how many rules she'd broken.
Liesel looked at her for a long time.
She looked at the crossbow, and the braid, and the scrape down one of Pia's forearms from wherever she'd come in over the garden wall and up the roof. And I knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking it too. The bolt had been on the string. Pia's finger had been on the trigger. And she hadn't shot. She'd been told down, and she hadn't gone down, but she hadn't shot either. She'd waited. All the way up until a girl dropped a spear and took a young lord's hand.
"Two and a half," said Liesel.
Pia blinked. "...Steps?"
"Don't push it."
Pia's mouth opened. Nothing came out. Then she bowed to Liesel, very deeply, the way she'd bowed to the headmistress on the steps, so low that her loose braid touched the floor, and went back down the stairs with the guard, who had kept the crossbow.
Wren hummed, at my shoulder. Three notes. The same ones she'd hummed in the great shrine, the day Pia said that is exactly what an escort would say. I still didn't know what they meant. But I was beginning to think they might be fond.
I didn't sleep afterward. I hadn't expected to.
Hana had given me a small notebook, back in Greymark. I'd used it for names, the way she'd asked: everyone I'd healed since the road to Fulmara. I lit the smoky candle, and opened it to a clean page, and wrote at the top:
Tacita.
Then, under it, I left a space. A long one.
For a girl in a cell in Septentria, who was still, as far as anyone knew, smiling. Whose name nobody had written down.