The first snow found us at the border.
Not much. A few dry flakes coming sideways down the pass on the morning of the fourth day, too small to settle, the kind that melt on your sleeve before you can look at them properly. Captain Rufa's women had never seen snow. Every one of them looked up at once, the whole column, as if somebody had called their names.
Pia caught one on Father's mitten and held it up to show me. It was gone before I could look.
"It doesn't stay," she said, disappointed.
"It will," said Rufa, without turning round. "Higher up."
The wool road had climbed all morning out of the hills and into a narrow pass between two shoulders of gray rock. At the top of it, where the road leveled for a few dozen yards before going down the other side, there was a stone.
Just a stone. Waist high, rough on three sides. On the fourth, the north face, somebody had cut seven small stars in a ring, a long time ago, and the wind had been trying to rub them out ever since.
On the south face there was nothing at all.
"Octavia doesn't mark its borders," said Naomi, when Felix asked. "It expects you to know."
There was a hut beside the stone, low and turf-roofed, with smoke coming out of a hole in the top, and two guards in front of it. Blue cloaks, gray under them. Spears. One older, one hardly older than Pia. They'd been watching us come up the pass for an hour, I think, because they were standing very straight, and they'd had time to.
The older one stepped into the road.
"Who rides into Septentria?"
Naomi rode forward. "The Marchioness of Greymark, for the Crown of Octavia." She didn't look back at me. She didn't need to. "With the Saint."
The young guard's spear moved. Not much. Just enough that I saw her hands tighten on it, and then loosen, as if she'd forgotten she was holding it.
The older one looked past Naomi. Past Rufa. At the carts, and the escorts, and Marika out in front, and then at me, in the middle of it all, a boy on a horse with three armed girls round him and a fourth one length behind.
"The queen wrote that you'd come," she said slowly. "Every post on the border had the letter. We read it out at the fire." She stopped. "We didn't believe her."
"Why not?" I said.
She looked at me as if it were a strange question.
"Because nobody comes," she said. "Not since our Saint died."
Nobody said anything for a moment. The snow came sideways down the pass between us.
Then the young guard said, too fast, as if she'd been holding it in since she first saw us on the road below: "My lord, my mother's in Holloway. Down the other side, first village. She's had the cough since the harvest and she can't—" She stopped, and went red, and looked at the older guard. "Sorry. Sorry, Sergeant."
The sergeant didn't tell her off. She just looked at me.
"Holloway's an hour down," she said. "Half of it's sick. It's always half sick, this time of year. It's always been all right, before." She didn't say before what. She didn't need to.
I looked at Naomi.
Naomi was already turning her horse.
"Holloway," she said to Rufa.
"Holloway," said Rufa, and the column started down the other side of the pass into Septentria, with the snow behind us and the young guard running ahead on foot to tell her mother that somebody had come.
Holloway sat in a fold of the hills below the pass, two dozen houses of gray stone with roofs pitched steep for the snow, sheep pens on the slope above, peat smoke going straight up into the cold. A small shrine at the top of the one street, with a bell in an arch over the door.
The bell was ringing when we came down. The young guard had got there first.
By the time Marika rode into the street, people were coming out of the houses. Not many. The ones who could stand. They stood in their doorways in shawls and blankets, coughing, and looked at us the way you'd look at weather you'd stopped expecting.
An old woman came down from the shrine. Small, bent, in a keeper's gray with a shawl over it, holding the bell rope's end in one hand as if she'd forgotten to let go of it.
"Saint," she said.
Not a question. She looked at me the way the sergeant had, at the border: as if she were checking I was real before she let herself believe it.
"Keeper," I said. "Who's worst?"
She blinked. Then she pointed. Not at one house. At most of them.
The guard's mother was first, because the guard was standing in her doorway with a face that said she'd fight anyone who tried to make it otherwise.
She was in a box bed by the hearth, propped up on bolsters, and the cough came out of her in long tearing pulls that left her gray. Under 「Eyes」 her light was yellow going orange, worst in the chest, the color pooled and heavy like water in a low field.
I put my hand on her wrist and opened a Blue circle. 「Discern」. Three splashes.
Sickness. In the chest. Forty-one days.
Only sickness. The ordinary kind, the kind that comes every autumn to every village in the world. Nothing else in her at all. I hadn't known I was holding my breath until I let it go.
"Well?" said Naomi, from the door.
"The autumn cough. Settled deep." I took my hand away. "Just that."
Naomi looked out at the street, at the doorways, at the smoke. I watched her count.
"Bottles stay in the cart," she said. "Hands, while you've got them."
"Yes, Big Sis."
She was right. The bottles were for the north, where we didn't know what was waiting. Here, I knew exactly what was waiting. It was in every house.
I opened a 「Mass Cure」 over the box bed. Blue, wide enough to take in the whole hearth corner: the mother, the little sister asleep at her feet with the same cough, the grandmother in the other bed who hadn't said a word. Three splashes. It purges the way a Green 「Cure」 purges, one tier below its circle, and for this, Green was enough.
The yellow went out of all three of them like color draining out of a dyed cloth in a stream.
The mother took a breath. A whole one, all the way down, without tearing. She looked surprised. Then she started to cry.
The young guard sat down on the floor of her mother's house, in her blue cloak, with her spear across her knees, and put her face in her hands.
We did it house by house.
Hana went ahead of me, the way Mistress Salvia does in the infirmary: in at the door, a look, out again, and a word to me as I came up the street. Three in this one. Two and a baby. Just the old man, but he's bad. She'd never done it before. She did it as if she'd been doing it all her life.
Liesel and Wren carried. The ones who were too weak to come down to the warm room, the ones in cold lofts under the eaves, the ones who'd crawled off into corners the way sick animals do. They brought them to the hearth so one circle could take everybody.
Felix carried too.
He came down a ladder out of a loft with a girl of about six in his arms, wrapped in a blanket, coughing against his shoulder, and Marika was at the bottom of the ladder with her arms half up as if she might catch them both.
"Don't DROP her."
"I'm not going to drop her."
"You're on a LADDER."
"I'm stronger now," said Felix. "You may have heard."
"You are NOT stronger, you're—"
"Kindled."
"SHUT UP."
The little girl looked up at Felix from inside the blanket with enormous eyes. "Your scarf is red," she said.
"It's borrowed," said Felix.
Marika turned round very fast and went to see if anyone else needed carrying, anywhere, as far away as possible.
Nine houses. Nine Blue circles. Twenty-seven splashes, and the pitcher filling back up behind me as I went, faster than I was used to, because Naomi and Hana and Marika and Liesel were all within a few dozen yards of me all afternoon. Pia walked one step behind me from door to door; there were no horses in Holloway's street, so it was a step again, not a length. She counted every circle. When we came out of the fifth house she said, "Half," very quietly, the way the sergeant had said it at the border.
Ambrose had not gone into a single house.
I found him at the bottom of the street, standing by the village well with his hands behind his back, looking up the slope. The sheep pens were up there. The midden was up there. And between them and the well, there was nothing but a long slope of wet grass and whatever ran down it every time it rained.
The keeper had followed me down. She looked at Ambrose, and at the slope, and at me.
"Who's he?" she said.
"A lord," said Liesel, behind me.
"What's he doing?"
Ambrose turned round. He looked at the keeper, and the well, and the slope, and the midden, one after another, and you could see the whole thing being worked out behind his eyes like a sum on a slate.
"Ditches," he said.
The keeper looked at Liesel.
"He means," said Liesel, "that every autumn, when it rains, what's in your sheep pens comes down that slope into your well. And then everybody coughs."
The keeper looked up the slope for a long time.
"Seventy years I've drawn water from that well," she said.
"Ditches," said Ambrose again, gently, and walked up the slope a little way and drew a long line across it in the wet grass with the heel of his boot, curving round above the well and down toward the stream.
"Lords dig?" said the keeper.
"This one draws," said Liesel. "Your neighbors dig."
By the time the light went, four of Rufa's women and every villager who could hold a spade were digging along Ambrose's line, and Ambrose was standing at the top of it with his notebook, saying "Deeper," every so often, and once, astonishingly, "Good."
We made the six bottles that evening in the keeper's shrine, because it was the only room in Holloway with a table nobody was lying on.
Ambrose held the water. I poured. Felix sang, in a small stone room with Elysia's carved face on the wall above us, and the miller's daughters went walking one after another, except for one, and the keeper sat in the corner on a stool and listened to all of it with her hands folded and her eyes closed, as if it were a service.
Six more. Three notches, three double notches. Eighteen splashes. I had fourteen left when we finished.
"Don't drain tonight," said Naomi, at the door. "Not here."
I didn't argue. Every house in Holloway had been sick that morning. That kind of sickness doesn't always leave when you tell it to.
They came for me twice, a little after midnight. Both at once.
I heard the first knock from the keeper's floor, where I was rolled in my cloak with Liesel and Wren on either side and Marika across the door. A boy's voice—no. A girl's. The young guard. "The old man in the end house. He can't breathe."
And before Liesel had got her boots on, a second knock at the shrine's other door, and a woman's voice, high and frightened: "The baby. Please. She's burning up."
Two houses. Opposite ends of the street.
I was up. I was halfway into my boots. I could feel the fourteen splashes in the pitcher, plenty, more than plenty, and I could not be in two places at once.
"Fabian," said Hana.
She was standing in the middle of the shrine in her nightdress with her cloak thrown over it. She'd already been to the bottle cart. She held up a bottle, and in the lamplight I could see the top of the cork. Two notches.
「Cure」.
I looked at Naomi. Naomi was in the doorway with a lamp, and she looked at the bottle, and at Hana, and at me.
"Go," said Naomi. Not to me. To Hana.
Hana went.
I went the other way.
The old man was gray and fighting for every breath, and under 「Eyes」 his chest was orange going red, the way it goes when an old body has been sick too long and the sickness has done its damage on the way out. The 「Mass Cure」 that afternoon had taken the cough out of him. It hadn't given him back what the cough had taken.
Green 「Heal」. Two splashes. Then another. His breathing caught, and steadied, and found its way down into him like water finding the old channel of a stream. His son sat on the end of the bed and held his feet and said nothing at all.
I was back in the street in under a quarter of an hour.
Hana was standing outside the other house, at the far end, under the eaves, with the empty bottle in her hand.
She was crying. I started to run.
"No," she said, before I'd got three steps. "No, no. Fabian. It worked."
I stopped.
"It worked," said Hana again. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "Slower than you. I counted. I sat there and counted every breath and it was so much slower than you, and I thought it wasn't going to, and then she—" Hana laughed, wetly. "She sneezed. And then she was cool. Her mother's feeding her now."
I went in anyway. I had to see.
The baby was at her mother's breast, pink and damp and furious about something, and under 「Eyes」 her light was white. Clean white, all the way through. Not a trace of yellow anywhere.
A Blue bottle. Made in a field outside Sanctara by a boy who held water still and a boy who sang to it and me. Carried four days in straw. And it had done, in a house I wasn't in, exactly what I would have done.
Slower. But done.
Pia was in the doorway, one step behind me, with her book open and her pen moving, in Hana's spare cloak over her own nightdress.
"'One bottle,'" she said, writing. "'Two notches. A baby. It worked.'" She looked up. "Should I underline it?"
"Twice," said Hana.
In the morning Ambrose wrote it in his notebook too, in his own way: Blue C, x1, used. Infant, fever. Effective. Slower than hand (H. counted). Keep. I think Keep was the most emotional word I've ever seen Ambrose write.
I couldn't sleep after that.
I went and sat on the step of the shrine in my cloak, under the bell, and looked at the street. The snow had stopped. The sky had cleared, and it was very cold, and the stars were out over the pass, more of them than I'd ever seen over Sanctara.
The keeper came and sat down beside me. She didn't ask. She was seventy and it was her step.
"We prayed all autumn," she said, after a while.
"I know."
"Every evening. I rang that bell every evening and we came and we prayed, the ones who could still walk up the street. For the Saint who was dead. For the queen. For anybody." She pulled her shawl tighter. "I didn't think anybody heard."
I didn't know what to say to that. So I didn't say anything.
"They've stopped praying up north," said the keeper.
I turned my head.
"The drovers said so. At the harvest fair, down at the crossroads, before they stopped coming." She looked north, up the dark valley, toward the mountains. "Said there was no point anymore. Said somebody'd been going round the northern villages with something better than prayers."
"Better how?"
"That's what I asked." The keeper's mouth went thin. "They said you didn't need a Saint now. They said you could heal yourself."
The cold came through my cloak all at once.
"I told them that's not how it works," said the keeper. "Seventy years I've kept that shrine. Elysia doesn't give anything for nothing. Nor does anyone else." She was quiet a moment. "They laughed at me. They said I was old."
"You are old," I said, before I could stop myself.
She looked at me. Then she laughed, a dry little crack of a laugh like a stick breaking.
"I am," she said. "And they never came back down. Any of them."
We sat there a while longer. The stars turned, very slowly, over the pass. Somewhere down the street, a baby who had been burning up three hours ago was asleep.
"Somebody came here, though," said the keeper, at last.
"Yes."
She got up, slowly, one hand on the bell arch.
"I'm glad it was you," she said, and went in.
I stayed on the step until the cold drove me inside, looking north, up the valley, at the mountains I couldn't see, where somebody was telling people they didn't need a Saint anymore.
And they were believing it.