Lady Severine's footsteps faded down the stairs.
Next door stayed quiet.
I liked that even less.
"Well," said Liesel, too brightly. "Unpacking."
Our things came up a few minutes later, carried by two Academy servants in plain gray. They set everything down, bowed, and left without once looking me in the eye. I was starting to understand that in Sanctara, people either stared at me or very carefully didn't.
Unpacking took about as long as it takes to open three bags, when one of them is entirely salve.
Wren lined Hana's five tins up on the kitchen shelf like a row of tiny soldiers. Liesel leaned her spear against the window by her bed and sat on the sill. I hung my spare doublet in a wardrobe big enough to hold three of me, which, to be fair, isn't saying much.
Then I took the drawing out of my doublet. SANT FABIAN AND HIS SISSTERS. It had gotten crumpled, exactly like I'd known it would. I smoothed it flat on the desk and put the inkwell on one corner to hold it down.
There. Now the room had something of mine in it.
"I'm hungry," Liesel announced from the doorway.
"Lady Severine said supper's at sundown."
"She didn't say anything about lunch." Liesel hopped off the sill. "Which means there's lunch. I grew up in this city, Saint. There's always lunch."
That seemed like a dangerous philosophy, but I was hungry too.
We headed for the door. Wren fell in behind us. I counted her footsteps on the stairs without meaning to.
Ten paces. Exactly.
"Wren."
"Young Master."
"You can walk with us. Next to us."
"My lady said ten paces, Young Master."
"In Greymark." I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned around. "In Greymark, everybody knows me. Nobody here does. And ten paces is a lot of room for someone else to walk into."
I didn't say like whoever lives next door. I didn't have to. We'd all seen the light under the door.
Wren thought about it. You could actually watch her think. She hummed one note, then stopped.
"...My lady would want me close," she said at last.
She stepped up on my left. Liesel was already on my right.
It felt better than I'd expected. Like walking between two walls. Like home.
The dining hall was across the yard, past the practice field. The field stared a lot less with Wren beside me. Funny how that works.
The doors were carved with the Eight, all of them, Elysia last and smallest, with her eyes closed. Inside, the ceiling was so high a bird could've gotten lost up there. Long tables of dark polished wood ran down the room in rows, with white cloths and benches on either side. Sunlight came down through tall windows in slanted gold bars, and the whole place smelled of fresh bread.
It was the biggest room I'd ever eaten in. Our whole dining room at home would've fit in one corner of it.
At the far end, up three steps, there was a platform. On it stood a single table, much smaller than the others, with velvet chairs and silver plates already laid out. A tall carved screen stood across half of it, so you couldn't see all the way in.
"The young lords' table," said Liesel.
Of course it was.
The hall wasn't busy yet. It was still a while before noon. A handful of girls sat scattered along the long tables, eating early, and servers in gray were setting out bowls and baskets. Every head turned when I walked in. Then, one at a time, they turned back. Slower than they needed to.
"Do I have to sit up there?" I asked.
"You're supposed to."
"Can I not?"
"You can do whatever you want." Liesel shrugged. "You're a man."
She said it lightly. It didn't sound light.
I picked a spot at the end of the nearest long table. A server set down a basket of little round loaves with seeds on top, took one look at me, and nearly dropped it.
Liesel grabbed a loaf before the basket had even finished landing.
(Bread!) she announced, to everyone. (Little round ones. With seeds.)
That was all it took.
(Bread?) Hana, instantly. (Is he eating? Fabian, are you eating it?)
(I'm about to, Sis Hana.)
(Make him eat two.)
(Three,) said Marika. (He's tiny.)
(I'm not tiny—)
(Eat.) Naomi. One word, from four days away.
I ate. Across the table, Liesel was grinning into her loaf. Wren, who could hear none of it, was looking from Liesel to me and back like someone who'd walked in halfway through a joke.
I'd taken exactly two bites when the plate broke.
Crash!
It came from behind the carved screen on the platform. A plate, hitting stone and going everywhere.
Then a voice. Young. Loud. Bored.
"—useless. Absolutely useless. Do you know what this coat cost?"
I knew that voice. I'd heard it through a wall an hour ago.
Then a sound like a candle catching all at once. Whumph.
And a scream. Short. Cut off, like whoever it was had bitten down on it.
Then crying. Quiet, and trying very hard to be quieter.
Every girl at the long tables froze.
And then, one by one, they looked down at their plates.
That was the worst part. Not the scream. The way they looked away. Smoothly, all together, like they'd practiced it. Like they'd done it before.
I was already standing. I don't remember deciding to.
"Lord Fabian—" Liesel's hand caught my sleeve. My sleeve kept going.
I went up the three steps and around the screen.
A young man sat at the little table with a cup of wine in his hand.
I'll be honest, because I'm trying to be honest in this. He was handsome. Annoyingly handsome. Tall, the way everyone in this kingdom is taller than me, but more so. Dark copper hair swept back from his face. Eyes the color of amber held up to a candle. A black velvet coat with gold at the cuffs, and a dark splash of stew down the front of it.
He looked like the prince in one of Hana's storybooks.
He was looking at the girl on the floor as if she were a stain.
She was kneeling in the broken plate and the spilled stew, in the gray-and-black tabard of whatever house he belonged to, with a sword at her hip she hadn't touched. She was holding her right arm against her chest. Her sleeve was scorched to the elbow. Underneath, the skin was red, and blistered, and wrong.
Her light had gone orange.
Not yellow, like a cut or a cold. Orange. Like the boy in Greymark. Like something that wasn't going to get better on its own.
A second escort stood against the wall behind his chair, in the same tabard, staring straight ahead at nothing. She hadn't moved. She looked like she'd learned, a long time ago, that moving didn't help.
Either of them could've broken him in half. Any woman in this hall could have.
None of them would.
The young man looked up and saw me. His eyes went over me slowly, from my boots to the top of my head, which didn't take very long. Then he smiled, as if he'd just found something funny in his soup.
"Ah," he said. "The little Saint from the border."
Behind me, Liesel had come around the screen. She stopped. I felt her go very still, the way a cat does right before it decides something.
"Lord Cassian Ardane," she said quietly. Not to him. To me. "He was at my Welcoming Age."
One of the three. The three men she'd met in her whole life, before me.
No wonder she'd been so curious about the fourth.
"Your Highness." Cassian dipped his head to her, just barely. It was the most insulting bow I'd ever seen, and I grew up with Marika. "I heard your mother sent you to babysit the border Saint. I didn't believe it."
"Lord Cassian," said Liesel.
That was all. Two words, in a voice I'd never heard her use. It was so polite it was frightening.
Cassian didn't seem to notice. He'd already turned back to me.
"Run along, little Saint," he said. "This is none of your business."
I didn't answer him.
I walked past his chair, knelt down in the broken plate and the stew, and looked at the girl.
She was older than me. Most people are. Maybe Marika's age, with a freckled face gone white and her teeth clamped together so hard her jaw shook. She flinched when I knelt, like she expected me to be the next thing that hurt.
"Hold still," I said. "This won't hurt. It'll feel like being held."
"My lord," she whispered. "You mustn't. Your knees—"
"Too late. They're already in the stew."
The burn was too deep for a splash. I didn't even think about it. I just poured.
A Green circle opened under my hand.
Out beyond the screen, somebody at the long tables made a small sound. The light must have spilled over the top. "Green—" someone whispered. Then another voice: "That's him. That's the Saint."
The blisters went flat. The red faded to pink, then to nothing. The orange rinsed out of her light like ink out of water, all the way back to white.
She stared at her arm. She turned it over, as if the skin underneath might be lying to her. Then she looked at me, and her eyes filled up.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"I-Ilse, my lord."
"I said," said Cassian, behind me, "this is none of your business."
I didn't turn around.
He laughed. It was a nice laugh, which made it worse. "Healing. Of course. You know, at home we don't even call that magic. It's nursing with a pretty light."
I kept looking at Ilse. "Does it still hurt?"
She shook her head.
"Good."
"I'm talking to you."
His voice had changed. The boredom was gone.
"Look at me when I'm talking to you."
I didn't.
Not because I was brave. Because I was so angry my hands were shaking, and if I looked at him, I'd say something. And Naomi wasn't here to give me laps for it.
Out in the hall, someone giggled. Just once, quickly smothered. Then a whisper: "He's ignoring Lord Cassian—"
Behind me, a chair scraped back.
I saw it in the corner of my eye. Wren's hand closing on her sword hilt. Liesel's spear coming down off her shoulder, smooth and quiet, the way it had come down on the Broodmother's leg.
And Cassian Ardane stood up, his face as red as his wine, and raised his hand.
A circle bloomed under his palm.
Not White. Not Green.
Blue.
A tier above mine.
Fire rose out of it, curling and twisting until it was a ball the size of a man's head, roaring so loud the air shook. The heat hit the side of my face like an open oven door.
For years, I'd wanted this. Fire, or lightning. Something that could fight beside my sisters. Something that would hit things.
It turned out fire does hit things.
He threw it.