Liesel — Sanctara
Something was going on, and nobody would tell me what.
I'm good at true. Everyone says so; it's the one thing about me that my mother, my sister and Dame Valeria all agree on. So here's the true thing: I didn't mind not knowing. What I minded was that everybody else seemed to.
I'd started counting. I caught it from him. It's catching.
One. The pillow. Five nights ago I'd woken at midnight to find Fabian sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands folded in his lap like a boy in a chapel, and his pillow the wrong shape.
Two. Wren. Wren had been sharpening the same knife every night since. Nobody's knife needs that much sharpening. I've seen Wren's knife. It could split a hair the long way.
Three. My spear. Dame Valeria gave the two halves of my broken practice spear to Fabian after class. I watched her do it from the trough, through water. She said "Hm." He said thank you. Then he carried them off under his arm as though they were something precious, instead of firewood.
Four. Letters. He'd sent three to the second ring in one morning. He writes to his sisters every day, but one letter, not three, and never with that color in his face.
Five. Marika. Marika hadn't shouted in the henhouse for nine days. Marika shouts in the henhouse to say good morning.
Six. My hand.
He held it. On the path back from the infirmary, on an ordinary afternoon, in front of everyone, with two first-years walking straight into each other. And then he counted it. Every knuckle, one at a time, with his thumb, as if he were reading something written on me. He thought I didn't notice.
I noticed so hard I nearly walked into a building.
Seven, I didn't let myself count.
Because the seventh thing wasn't a thing. It was a thought, and the thought was ridiculous. Men don't ask. I've known that since I was old enough to know anything. People have been asking about me my whole life: asking my mother, asking the Crown, asking whether the Second Princess might be free on such a day, for such a house. Then Mother would tell me where to be. I have been sent to more places than I can count, and I can count quite high now.
Fabian had asked me to lunch at a horse trough, with water running off my nose, and I'd put my whole face back in the trough because I didn't know what to do with it. That was one small question. One. It had taken him months.
So, no. He was busy, that was all. There was the gel, and the infirmary, and Felix. He was probably carving something for one of his sisters.
I asked Wren.
"What's he doing at night?"
Wren didn't even look up. "Counting."
"Counting what?"
"Usual," said Wren.
I have never once in my life wanted to throw a spear at Wren. I thought about it for most of that afternoon.
I even asked Felix, which tells you how bad it had got. He was at the infirmary table, holding a tin up to the window while Ambrose wrote in his notebook and the infirmary mistress pretended she wasn't watching them both.
"Me?" Felix grinned. "I'm a foreigner. Nobody tells me anything."
Then he looked across the room at Fabian, who was bent over a first-year's sprained wrist and smiling at absolutely nothing, the way he'd been smiling at nothing for two weeks.
"But whatever it is," said Felix, more quietly, "he's happy doing it. You can see it from Bellonia."
That evening, walking back from the infirmary in the long gold light, Fabian stopped on the path.
"Liesel."
"Mm."
"Would you walk with me? Up the inner wall. Before sunset."
I looked at him. His face was going pink. I could feel my collar going too, which wasn't fair, because I hadn't done anything.
"Are you asking me?"
"Yes."
"Out loud."
"Always," said Fabian. "From now on."
I went to the escorts' room to fetch my spear, because I'm still his escort, and while I was there I put the blue ribbon in my hair. I don't know why I did that.
That isn't true. I'm good at true. I knew exactly why.
The last time we climbed the inner wall, his heart had started going like a drum at the top. I'd felt it through the bond, the way all four of us did, and Marika had shouted in the henhouse loud enough to rattle my teeth, and I'd said the first true thing I could find.
Stairs. A hundred and twelve of them. He's fine. He's just short.
It was true. There are a hundred and twelve. It just wasn't the reason. I think I knew that, even then. I just didn't know yet that I knew.
Wren came with us as far as the foot of the stairs, and stopped.
"I'll wait here," said Wren.
Wren never waits anywhere. Wren goes where he goes, at whatever distance she's been argued down to, and she argues back. She stood at the bottom of the inner wall's stairs with her hands behind her back and looked at the sky as if she'd never seen one before.
Seven, I thought. I didn't let myself.
We climbed. He didn't say anything, and neither did I. I counted under my breath; so did he. Forty. Fifty-one. Somewhere around seventy, I felt his heart change in my chest. Faster. Then faster than that.
Stairs, I told myself. Stairs.
By a hundred, mine was keeping up with it.
At the top, the whole city was gold, ring below white ring, all the way down to the markets. The sky above us had gone that deep, particular blue it only goes for a few minutes before sunset. The wind pulled at my ribbon.
Fabian turned to look at me.
His heart was going like a drum. A hundred and twelve stairs. I'd climbed every one of them beside him.
Mine was going faster.
Fabian — The Inner Wall
Hana was right. I shouldn't have planned the words.
I'd planned them anyway, every night for two weeks, between the knife and the braid. By the ninetieth step they'd started coming loose. By the hundredth they were gone. By the hundred and twelfth there was nothing left in my head at all but the wind, and the gold city, and her.
She was standing exactly where I'd stood that day. Between two of the old stones, with her back to the long drop and the whole of Sanctara laid out behind her, ring below white ring. The wind had pulled a strand of her hair loose from the ribbon. She had her spear in one hand, because she's my escort, and she was looking at me the way she does when she's decided something is true and is waiting for me to catch up.
Her candle was flickering in my chest like a flame carried out into a gale.
So was mine. She could feel it. I knew she could.
"This is where I found out," I said.
"Found out what?"
"That it was never the stairs."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I know," said Liesel. "I felt it. Your heart." She looked down at the stone between us. "I told everyone it was stairs."
"You lied for me."
"I didn't." Her chin came up. "There are a hundred and twelve. It just wasn't the reason."
I laughed. It came out shaky. Everything I had was shaking, a little, the way the air shakes over a fire.
"I made you something," I said. "Two things."
I took the first one out of my coat.
The tassel was as long as my hand, braided tight, because spears pull. Navy, blue, navy, all the way down, finished at the end with a knot Wren had made me tie eleven times until it was right. I'd worked on it on the nights my hands were too tired for the knife, and every strand of it had been braided by someone thinking about exactly one person.
I held it up against the sky.
I'd written to Hana that the ribbon was the blue of the sky above the inner wall just before sunset. I hadn't been sure that was true. I'd only been sure it was the color I saw when I thought of her.
It was true. The blue in the braid and the blue above us were the same blue. You couldn't see where one stopped.
Liesel looked at it. Then up at the sky. Then at it again.
"Navy for us," I said. "Blue for you. Hana matched it. I braided it." I held out my hand for her spear, and after a moment, slowly, she gave it to me. I knelt to tie the tassel beneath the head, where it would fly when she turned. My fingers knew the knot now. "So when you fight, there'll be something of mine there. Even if I'm on the wall, or in the infirmary, or—"
"Beside," said Liesel.
Her voice wasn't working properly.
"Beside," I said.
I stood and gave her back her spear. The tassel lifted in the wind, navy and blue, a small bright thing against all that gold.
"That's one," said Liesel. She was holding the spear very tightly. "You said two."
I took the ring out of my pocket and closed my hand around it.
Then I knelt again, on the old stone at the top of a hundred and twelve stairs.
Liesel's eyes went wide.
"Men don't—" she started.
"This one does."
She made a sound I'd never heard her make. It wasn't a word. It was what's left of a word when someone can't finish it.
I looked up at her. The sun was nearly down behind her, and the light came around her in a long gold edge, and I couldn't remember one single thing I'd planned to say, so I said what was true, the way she does.
"I count everything," I said. "You know that. So I counted you."
The wind went past us. Far below, a bell was ringing somewhere for the evening.
"The first time you called me Saint like it was a dare. The road from Greymark. The egg. You at the edge of the sand when I got back up, looking at me as though you'd known I would. You putting your hand on the circle, and saying I'll take it. And you can't have it back. You on this wall, saying Stairs. You in the garden, with your spear, saying That place is taken. Yes. Seven." My voice went. I waited for it to come back. "I kept counting, and I got all the way to the end, and there wasn't a number. I don't think there is one. I don't think there's ever going to be one."
I opened my hand.
The ring lay on my palm, pale and smooth and very plain, with the last of the sun on it.
"It's from your spear," I said. "The one you broke. Wren taught me how. It took fourteen nights, and I cut my thumb twice, and I didn't heal it, because the board in every hall says what it says."
Liesel looked at the ring. A laugh came out of her, small and broken in the middle.
"It was an old spear," she said.
"I know."
I took a breath. It was the biggest one I'd ever taken, bigger than the one before the tide, bigger than the one in the garden. I wanted the Queen of Octavia and my mother and every woman who had ever been sent somewhere instead of asked to hear what I said next, in exactly this order.
"Elisabeth," I said. "Liesel."
Her hand had come up to her mouth.
"Will you marry me? Not now. Not because the Crown asked, or because your mother is waiting, or because mine would have liked you. Because I'm asking." My voice shook, and I let it. "You first. Always you first."
For a moment Liesel didn't say anything at all.
She stood very still, at the top of the wall, with her spear in one hand and her other hand pressed against her mouth, and the tassel moving in the wind beside her. Her eyes had gone bright. Then they spilled over, both at once, and she didn't wipe them. She just let them go, the way she'd let the water run off her nose at the trough.
She lowered her hand.
"Yes," said Liesel.
It came out quiet. Then it came out again, not quiet at all.
"Yes. Yes. Ask me again tomorrow and I'll say it again. Ask me every day. I'll say it every single—" Her voice cracked straight down the middle. "You idiot. You absolute— on your knees, on a wall—"
"Is that a yes?"
"I said yes four times!"
"Three," I said. "I was counting. I wanted to make sure."
She laughed and cried at the same time, which I didn't know a person could do that loudly, and held out her left hand.
It wasn't steady. Neither was mine.
The ring went on over the tip of her finger, and down, and stopped for a heartbeat at the knuckle, exactly where Wren's hand had told me it would. Then it slid over and settled at the base of her finger, snug against the hard little ridge of callus a lifetime of spears had left there.
It fit.
Of course it fit. I'd counted.
Liesel looked down at it. Pale ash on a hand that snaps spears, plain as a promise. She turned her hand slowly in the last of the light, and the ring turned with it, and she made that sound again, the one that's left over when a word can't finish.
Then she reached down, took a fistful of my coat, and pulled me to my feet as easily as picking up a cat.
"Get up," she said. "Men don't kneel."
"This one did."
She kissed me.
I'm not going to count it. I count everything, and I'm not going to count that. Some things you don't.
When she stepped back, the sun had gone down behind her. The city below us was going from gold to blue, ring by white ring, and the first lamps were coming on in the markets, and somewhere a long way down, a bell had stopped ringing.
That was when the henhouse noticed.
Two hearts, going like that, at the same time. All four of them had felt it. It had probably felt like a drum festival.
(FABIAN,) said Marika. (LIESEL. WHY ARE BOTH YOUR HEARTS—)
(Oh,) said Hana. (Oh. Oh. Is he— did he— is she—)
Liesel looked at me. Her face was wet, and she was smiling the way she'd smiled at the pie shop, with her whole face, as though nobody had ever told her that a princess shouldn't.
(He asked,) she said in the henhouse, perfectly steady.
Silence.
(HE KNELT, DIDN'T HE,) said Marika. (I KNEW IT. MEN DON'T KNEEL.)
(This one does,) said Liesel.
(I'm crying,) said Hana. (I'm crying on the bread. Naomi, I'm crying on tomorrow's bread—)
And then, for a long moment, nothing from Naomi at all.
I waited. So did Liesel. Her hand had found mine without either of us deciding it, the ring between our fingers, warm now.
(...Welcome to the henhouse, Liesel,) said Naomi.
Liesel's hand tightened. (I've been in it for months.)
(Not like this,) said Naomi.
Nobody said anything after that for a while. Nobody needed to. I could feel all four of them in my chest, four candles in the dark: Marika's blazing, Hana's wavering, Naomi's still and straight. And Liesel's, right beside mine.
We went down the hundred and twelve stairs very slowly, because we were holding hands, and because neither of us was looking at the steps. I counted anyway. You can count stairs without looking at them, if you've climbed them enough times.
Tomorrow, I thought, I'd climb the palace stairs and ask her mother. Thirty-one. Easy. After that, Naomi, properly, in front of everyone, even though Naomi already knew, because Naomi deserved to be asked too.
Wren was waiting at the bottom, exactly where we'd left her, with her hands behind her back.
She looked at our hands. At the ring. At the tassel on Liesel's spear, navy and blue in the lamplight. Then at me.
"Took long," said Wren.
Then she hummed. Four notes, the rare ones, the ones she saves for very good things. And then, after a moment, as though she couldn't help it, the four notes again.
We walked back through the dark grounds together, the three of us, past the gray stone in the garden and the light in the headmistress's window. Liesel didn't let go of my hand. She held it up once, under a lamp, to look at the ring again, and then put it back in mine as if that were where it lived now.
I've told you how her candle feels in my chest. Awake, it flickers like a flame carried out into a windy night. It always has, ever since the day she put her hand on the circle and said she'd take it, and I couldn't have it back.
That night, walking home beside me with my ring on her finger, wide awake, it didn't flicker at all.