The cold doesn't hurt at first. That's the worst thing about it.
It just takes things away. My knees went first, then my shins, then my feet, until below the waist I was a man made of somebody else's furniture. My hand hung in its glove of ice a finger's width above the Queen's wrist, and I could see the gap, and I could feel the gap, and I couldn't close it, and after a while my fingers stopped telling me anything at all.
I looked round the room the other way, because I couldn't do anything else.
Everyone's light was going yellow from the floor up.
Mine, I couldn't see. I never can. But Liesel's, behind me, was yellow at the ankles where the ice held her boots, and creeping. Marika's the same, at the far side of the room, with her hand still on her sword and her face still the color of a forge. Cordelia's had only just begun to turn, round the edges of her boots, because she'd been standing so still that the ice had hardly bothered with her. Felix, on his feet beside the bed, had no ice on him at all. He'd been kneeling on the other side; Gelio had gone round him.
And Wren. I looked for Wren and found her, finally, by the wall beside the fire, with her back flat against the stone and her light white and clean all the way down. No ice. Gelio's line had gone past her by a hand's width. I don't know if he'd missed her or never seen her. With Wren, it's usually the second.
She met my eyes across the room. Then she looked at the floor, and didn't move.
Gelio stood at Tullia's left shoulder with one hand held out a little from his side, palm down, the way you'd hold a hand over a pot to feel whether it was hot. His light was white and full and perfectly steady. Holding all of us cost him nothing yet.
Petronius filled the doorway. Corvus stood behind him in the corridor among his keepers, looking past everyone at Felix.
"There," said Tullia. "Now we can talk."
She didn't come any closer. She stood with her back to Petronius and her hands folded and looked across the bed at me, the way she'd looked at me in the court: like a house she was thinking of buying, now with the papers drawn up.
"You'll stay in Fulmara, Saint," she said. "As the throne's. You'll have rooms, and servants, and anything you need for your work. There's a great deal of work. You've seen our villages. You'll heal Bellonia, and Bellonia will be grateful, and you will want for nothing at all."
She let her eyes go round the room. Liesel. Marika. Cordelia. They rested on each of them a moment, the way they'd rested on them in the corridor.
"And your women may stay with you," she said. "All of them. I'd like that, in fact. I'd like that very much."
A house. The Saint, and everyone he holds.
I didn't know how she knew what she knew. I knew that much, kneeling there in the ice: she knew more than she should. More than the songs could have told her, more than Vespera could have seen from the trees at Greymark. She'd looked at the four of them in the corridor that morning as if she knew exactly what they were.
"No," said Liesel, behind me.
Tullia turned her head toward her, politely.
"No," said Liesel again. She said it the way she says true things, flat and final, with her boots frozen to the floor of a foreign queen's bedroom. "We're not yours. He isn't yours. None of this is yours." A pause. "Not even the room."
"WE'RE NOT FURNITURE," said Marika, from across the room, at a volume that made the shutters rattle.
Cordelia said nothing. She just looked at Tullia, steadily, with the ice round her ankles.
Tullia smiled.
"No," she agreed. "You're not furniture. Furniture doesn't need persuading."
"An envoy's protection," said Cordelia, "is not yours to take."
And she wasn't finished, which, for Cordelia, was the alarming part. She didn't raise her voice. She stood there with the ice at her ankles and her hands at her sides and said it the way she'd have read it off a page.
"The Crown that sends an envoy makes him one. Only that Crown can unmake him. Not his host. Not ever. In any court that has ever received one."
"In any court," said Tullia, "where the envoy has kept his hands to himself."
"He asked."
"He asked a boy." Tullia's voice was perfectly pleasant. "A boy I love very much, Princess, and who has no more right to give leave over that bed than the cup on the table has. Felix is his mother's son. He is not his mother's throne."
"I'm her heir," said Felix.
It came out rough. He was standing beside the bed with his spark crawling up and down his arms like something trying to find a way out, and his face was white.
"You're her son," said Tullia, gently. "In Bellonia, a son doesn't sit the throne. You know that. The throne goes to whoever you marry, on the day you marry her, and you haven't married anyone." She tilted her head. "Unless there's something you haven't told me. Is there?"
Felix said nothing.
"No," said Tullia. "There isn't. So until there is, the throne is your mother's. And while your mother sleeps, it's mine to keep for her."
"Then ask her," said Cordelia.
Tullia looked at her.
"The throne," said Cordelia. "You say he needed its leave. Then ask it." She lifted her chin, very slightly, at the bed. "She's there."
For the first time, Tullia didn't answer at once.
"The throne is sleeping," she said.
"Then nobody here can give its leave," said Cordelia. "And nobody here can say he didn't have it."
It was very quiet. The fire cracked. Out in the corridor, behind Petronius's shoulders, somebody shifted their weight.
I looked down at the Queen of Bellonia, a finger's width below my frozen hand. At her quiet face, so like Felix's with all the noise taken out. At her light, low and dull, with the worn-through places along its edge.
Naomi taught me to ask. She never taught me what to do when the person I needed to ask was the one I was trying to wake.
So I asked her anyway.
"Your Majesty," I said.
My voice came out strange, from the cold. I didn't care. I said it to her, not to anyone else in the room, the way I'd say it to anyone in my healing line.
"My name is Fabian Valcrest. I'm a healer. Your son's here. He brought you a bottle, and it didn't work, and I'm sorry. There's something in you that shouldn't be there, and I think I can take it out." I swallowed. "May I?"
Nothing. Her breathing went on, slow and even. Her face didn't change. Her light didn't change.
"She can't hear you, Saint," said Tullia, not unkindly.
"She can," said Felix.
He didn't look away from his mother when he said it. He said it in the short voice, and it filled the room.
Then, from the corridor, behind Petronius, a voice I knew. Mild, and tired, and very polite.
"Highness."
Tullia's head turned, a fraction.
Petronius shifted. Not much; he couldn't, in the doorway he'd made. But enough that over his shoulder I could see Cinna, standing in the corridor between two of Corvus's keepers, in a clean shirt, with his hands empty at his sides and the pleasant, tired face of somebody's uncle who has decided, after a great deal of thought, to say something at dinner.
"Cinna," said Tullia. "Go back downstairs."
"I belong to the throne, Highness," said Cinna. "I always have."
"Then obey it."
"I would." He looked past her, past all of us, at the bed. "It's asleep. So nobody in this room speaks for it." He paused. "Not the boy. Not the Saint." Another pause, very gentle. "Not you either, Highness."
Nobody breathed.
I watched Tullia's light. It didn't change; it never had, all morning. White and clean and steady. But her hands, folded in front of her, tightened. Only a little. Only for a moment. The way a sum tightens when somebody adds a number you hadn't planned for.
Then it went away again, whatever it was, and she was all sums again, all the way through.
"Petronius," she said. "Take the Saint downstairs. Gently. Gelio, let his legs go when Petronius has him, not before." She didn't look at Cinna. "And take the Throne's Fire with you. He seems tired."
Petronius moved.
He didn't come at me the way a soldier would. He just set one big hand flat against the stone of the doorframe, the way a farmer sets his hand on a gate he's about to open, and the floor of the Queen's room changed under us. I felt it through the ice. The boards didn't move; something under the boards did. A slow, enormous shrug, deep in the stone of the palace, like a sleeping animal turning over. A crack ran out from the door across the floorboards, toward the bed, toward me.
Gelio's hand, held out palm down, turned a little. The ice round my legs tightened like a fist.
And Felix turned round.
Not to his aunt. Not to Petronius or Gelio. He turned to the door, and looked past all of them, past Petronius's great shoulder, into the corridor, at the thin dark-haired boy standing among his keepers with his left hand at his side.
"Corvus," said Felix.
Corvus looked at him.
"You said to ask you there," said Felix. "This is there." His voice cracked straight down the middle and he didn't stop. "I'm asking."
Tullia's head came round.
"Corvus," she said, sharp, for the first time all morning. "No."
Corvus didn't look at her.
He lifted his left hand.
I saw the circle open under it in the corridor, Blue, bright as a struck flint, and I saw his keepers see it and not one of them move to stop him, not the captain with the scarred eyebrow, not any of them; and I saw Felix see it, and Felix's face did a thing I'd never seen it do and won't try to describe.
Then Felix did what he'd done once before, at Greymark, for a friend. He shouted.
"WARNING!"
And Corvus threw.
Not at Tullia. Not at Petronius, filling the door in front of him. Low, past Petronius's legs, into the floor, into the root of the long white line of Gelio's frost where it began at the threshold.
I'd seen it done once. At Greymark, in the dark, Felix had sent his lightning down Gelio's frost line and through Liesel to the man at the other end, and it had nearly killed her, and it had worked.
Corvus's bolt went into the ice and the ice lit up.
All of it. The whole white line, from the door across the floor and round the end of the bed and up my legs and Liesel's boots and Marika's and Cordelia's, every inch of Gelio's frost went blue-white at once, like a crack of lightning laid down flat on the boards. It went through me. I felt it go through me, through my frozen knees and up my spine and out the top of my head, a long white roar with no sound in it. Behind me Liesel cried out. Across the room Marika swore something I'm not going to write down.
And at the far end of the line, at Tullia's left shoulder, Gelio jerked as if somebody had hit him with a door, and his held-out hand flew up, and he went down onto the floorboards on his side and didn't get up.
The ice broke.
Not melted. Broke. All at once, everywhere, the way a pane of glass goes when you've hit it exactly right, into a thousand pieces that jumped off my legs and skittered across the floor like thrown gravel.
My knees hit the boards. My arm, suddenly nobody's, dropped.
The finger's width closed.
My fingers came down on the inside of Queen Aurelia's wrist, cold and shaking and burned along the knuckles where the lightning had gone through, and stayed there.
I felt her pulse. Slow and faint, a long way down a corridor.
I didn't ask again. I'd asked. Her son had answered, and the throne's own Fire had stood in the doorway and said nobody here could speak for her, and the whole room had heard it.
I opened my hand on her wrist, and I poured.