Cordelia brought them in by torchlight.
She'd ridden out with six of the Crown's riders while the sky was still orange, and for a long while there was nothing to see from the gatehouse roof but two knots of riders at the bend, standing a careful distance apart. Then they came down the road together, Cordelia in front, the white flag behind her, and the ring of keepers around their one man, all the way across the last fields to the wall.
They stopped in the hole. Not outside. Not in. In the gap where the gate used to be.
Naomi was waiting there.
She'd come down from the war room without hurrying, and she stood where my healing stool had stood that afternoon, between the charred posts, with Sigrid's torches burning in iron brackets above her. Marika at her left. Dame Constance at Marika's left, because of course. A line of the Crown's knights along the inside of the wall with their crossbows cocked and resting. Hildegard on her barrel, sword across her knees, scowling at the Bellonians as if they'd come to inspect her carpentry.
I stood at Naomi's right hand, where she'd put me, with Liesel beside me, Wren a pace behind, and Hana at my back with her notebook under her arm, because Hana brings it to everything. Felix stood a little apart by the near post, with his two knights, his hands loose at his sides.
The keepers were six women in dark leather and mail, with short spears across their saddles. They didn't look at us. They looked at everything else: the walls, the crossbows, the torches, the roofs, each of them a different direction, the way Wren looks at a room.
And in the middle of them, on a gray horse, Corvus.
I'd only ever seen him across a field, with a circle opening under his left hand. Up close he was younger than I'd thought. Felix's age, or near it: thin, dark-haired, with a face that had learned to keep still because someone was always watching it. His left hand lay on his thigh. His right held the reins, and something flat and pale pinned under the thumb.
His light was gray.
Not hurt. Tired. The dimmed, soft edge I'd seen on Ambrose and Felix after a long morning at the bottles, and on Cinna in the gateway when the Fire was spent. Corvus had been casting, and not long ago.
Then I looked at the keeper on his left, and stopped looking at anything else.
Her light was red, low and sullen, gathered on the outside of her right thigh under a bandage someone had tied in a hurry. She sat her horse as straight as the others. Her face showed nothing at all. Without Elysia's eyes I'd have taken her for the healthiest woman in the ring.
"Marchioness," said Cordelia, from her saddle. "Parley."
Naomi nodded once.
The keeper at the front of the ring spoke. An older woman, with a scar through one eyebrow and a voice that had given a great many orders. "Corvus, of the Throne. Under the white. With a letter for Lord Felix Aquilan from Her Highness Tullia, to be put in his hand by Corvus and no other."
"Noted," said Naomi.
I reached for her candle. It was right beside me, but some things you don't say out loud in front of six spears.
(Big Sis. The one on his left. Red. Her leg.)
The words went out of a pitcher that had only started filling again since sunset. I felt each one go.
Naomi didn't look at the keeper. She didn't look at me either.
"Your keeper's bleeding," she said to the woman with the scar.
Every one of the six went still. The one on Corvus's left didn't move at all, which told me more than anything.
"It's nothing, Marchioness," said the captain.
"It's been tied twice," said Naomi. "And it's gone bad. You can smell it from here." She turned her head a fraction. "Fabian."
Not an order. My call.
I stepped forward into the torchlight and looked up at the keeper on Corvus's left.
"May I?"
She looked at me. Then at her captain. The captain looked at the wound, then at my hands, for a long time, the way you'd count a stranger's coins before you let him pay for something.
"On the ground," she said at last. "Where we can see."
The keeper got down. She did it well, almost without favoring the leg, and she nearly fell anyway; Liesel caught her elbow before she hit the ash, and let go again at once. I knelt. Five spears came down to point, not quite at me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Constance shift her weight, and Marika's hand go to her sword hilt and stay there.
The bandage was stiff and dark. Under it were four long tears down the outside of her thigh, side by side, hot to the touch and swollen and wrong at the edges.
"What did this?"
"Something in the trees." Her voice was rough. "Two nights back. Others since."
"What happened to it?"
She jerked her chin toward the gray horse.
"He killed it."
Corvus said nothing. His light stayed gray.
I put my hand over the wound and poured. 「Cure」 first, Green, for the rot in it; then 「Heal」, Green, for the tears. Two casts, two breaths, four splashes out of the five or so that had come back to me since sunset. I could have joined them into one, but a double cast costs twice what the two casts cost together, and nobody here was dying. Each circle came up under her in the ash, green and bright, and at the first one every keeper's head turned at once. I felt the heat go out of the wound under my palm and the torn edges draw closed, and I watched the red in her light pale to orange, to yellow, to the clean white frost of someone who was simply tired from riding.
And something behind my eyes moved.
Quietly. The way a page turns. Nothing hurt and nothing shone, but for one breath I knew that something had been added to me.
Then the gray horse had a light.
A faint edge of frost all the way round it, exactly like a person's, from its ears to its hooves. White. Healthy. Beside it, another. Then all seven horses in the ring at once, white, white, white, and one with a smudge of yellow low on its near foreleg, where a stone bruise was starting.
Somewhere in the yard behind me, General bleated. I turned my head before I could stop myself.
He was standing on the well cover, where he is not allowed to stand, and he was glowing. A neat, insufferably healthy white.
"Fabian," said Liesel, very quietly.
I turned back. I'd been kneeling in the ash, staring at a goat with my mouth open, in front of six Bellonian spears.
"Later," I said.
She looked at my face for a long moment, and let it be later.
The keeper got up by herself. She put some weight on the leg, then all of it, then looked down at it as if it belonged to somebody she didn't quite trust yet. She didn't thank me. She went back to her horse, and on the way she passed Corvus's stirrup and touched it, once, with two fingers, for luck.
Then Corvus got down.
His keepers came down with him, all six at once, and closed round him on foot before his boots were properly in the ash, so that he walked toward us inside a moving wall of leather and spears. Felix had told me how it was done in Bellonia. Being told is one thing. Watching it walk toward you across the ash is another.
Felix stepped away from his post. His knights moved with him, and he waved them back without looking, and they went, because the Crown's knights had learned by now when Felix meant it.
The ring stopped two paces from him. The keepers in front stepped aside, just enough.
Corvus held out the letter.
His right hand. Black wax. An eagle.
"From your aunt," he said.
His voice was low and level, and there was nothing on the end of it at all.
Felix didn't take it.
"Is she awake?"
Corvus looked at him.
"Corvus." Felix's voice cracked, very slightly, in the middle of the name. "Is my mother awake?"
The captain shifted her weight. Somewhere behind me a crossbow creaked. Corvus said nothing. He stood there with the letter held out between them and looked at Felix the way you'd look at a road you used to walk every day.
Felix took the letter.
"Did she ask for me?"
"It's in the letter," said Corvus.
That was all.
Seven words. I counted them, because I count everything, and because there was nothing else I could do with them. Seven words, and not one of them was yes.
Felix turned around. He walked past me into the middle of the hole, to the stool where I'd sat all afternoon healing carpenters, and sat down on it.
Somewhere you can sit down.
He broke the seal with his thumb. His spark snapped as he did it, small and sharp in the quiet, and nobody said anything about it. He unfolded the page. I was close enough to see the eagle pressed into the head of the paper, and the few short lines in a tidy, upright hand.
He read it. Then he read it again. Then he held it out to me without looking up, and I took it, because he wanted somebody else to have read it too.
Felix. Your mother has asked for you. Come home. T.
"It's her paper," Felix said. "Mother's. With the eagle. My aunt wrote it on Mother's paper." He was looking at the ash between his boots. "And sealed it the way Mother does. Black. Nobody else uses black."
I gave it back to him. He folded it once, very neatly, along the crease it already had, and put it inside his coat. In the inside pocket. Next to the bottle.
Then he looked up at Corvus, across the hole, over the heads of six keepers.
"Tell her I have it," he said.
Corvus inclined his head. A fraction. That was all.
"When the Crown answers," said Cordelia, from her saddle. "Not before."
The captain turned to Naomi. "Her Highness expects—"
"Her Highness can expect." Naomi didn't raise her voice. She never does. "You'll camp at the bend, under the white. The Crown's riders will watch you, and you'll let them. Anything you need, ask Dame Constance."
Constance looked at Naomi, then at the six spears, and said nothing at all, which apparently meant yes.
The captain looked at Naomi for a long moment, the way people do the first time. Then she said "Marchioness," and the ring turned, and closed round Corvus, and took him back out through the hole into the dark.
He didn't look back at Felix. I watched him not do it, all the way to the edge of the torchlight.
"Horses," said Naomi.
"And General."
"And General."
We were in the war room, the six of us, with the door shut and Wren outside it. The map of Greymark lay painted across the table between us, with the Gloamwood dark along its top edge, and nobody was looking at it. They were all looking at me.
"Everything that breathes?" said Marika. "Or just the ones in the yard? Because if it's EVERYTHING—"
"I don't know yet. The horses. General. There was a cat on the kitchen roof on the way up here. I saw its light before I saw the cat."
"You looked at the horses," said Liesel, "the way you look at people." Liesel doesn't say things she hasn't checked. "I've never seen you look at a horse like that. You don't even look at your own horse like that."
"Check your skills," said Naomi.
She'd said exactly that to me once before, in my chest, the night I found out I'd been carrying a voice around for weeks without knowing it.
So I checked.
It isn't like reading a book. It's more like remembering something you were told once, and having to go and find it again. 「Blessing of Elysia」 was where it always is, behind everything else, warm and quiet, and its lines were where they always are.
Except that three of them had grown.
Reward granted: 「Eyes of Elysia」. See the light of life in others. The further it strays from white, the more they need you.
And under it, new, as plain as if it had always been there:
Now in the beasts of the field as well.
Reward granted: 「Voice of Elysia」. Speak with those you hold, however far they stand. Every word between you is carried by you.
It weighs less than it did.
Reward granted: 「Mercy of Elysia」. You gave to the one who could never repay you. What giving takes from you, she will take back more gently.
And she will let you stand a little longer before she does.
Below them, the rest was what it had always been: question marks, in a long, patient row.
I said all three out loud, word for word. Nobody spoke for a moment.
"It weighs less," said Marika slowly. "The TALKING weighs less?"
"I think so. I'll know when I'm full."
"Tomorrow," said Naomi. "Full pitcher. Liesel in the room."
"She's always in the room."
"Then that's easy."
Cordelia was looking at the painted Gloamwood along the top of the map. "Beasts," she said. "Not monsters."
I hadn't thought of that.
"I don't know," I said. "Beasts of the field. Monsters aren't—" I stopped. I didn't know what monsters weren't. "I'll know when I see one."
"You won't be seeing one," said Naomi.
Nobody pointed out that the only road to Fulmara that didn't take three weeks went straight through the Gloamwood. Nobody needed to.
Then Naomi looked at me, and I could see her turning the third line over, the one I'd said last, and her face did something I don't often see it do.
"Stand a little longer," she said.
"It's Mercy. It's a good thing."
"It means you'll go further before you fall." She set one finger on the painted Gloamwood. "It doesn't mean you won't fall. A longer rope is still a rope, Fabian."
I didn't argue. I'd been five below not two weeks ago, and walked down the stair on my own feet, and slept a day and a night afterward. I knew exactly what she meant.
Hana hadn't said anything at all. She had her notebook open on the map, the old one, the long one, at the last page with writing on it.
"Hana?"
"One short," she said. "All afternoon. I added it up three times, and it was one short every time, and I wasn't going to tell you one short." She ran her finger down the page to the bottom, to the last line, which was new, in pencil, still soft. "And then you healed a Bellonian in the gate, so I wrote her down."
"What number was she?"
Hana looked up at me. Her eyes were wet, and she was smiling.
"A round one," she said.
"How round?"
"Very."
Marika looked from Hana to me and back again.
"Elysia likes round numbers," she said. "I want that written down."
Hana, without a word, wrote it down.
I went up to the gatehouse roof afterward, because I couldn't not.
I'd stood on that roof every night for a month. I knew what the fields looked like from it in the dark: nothing. Black stubble, black hedges, the black line of the forest, and the few lights of people, if there were any people out.
There were a great many lights now.
The fields were full of them. Small and faint and scattered over the stubble like dew: mice, I thought, dozens of them, hundreds, too small to be anything but sparks. A fox, low and quick along a hedge. Something in the old oak by the road, round and still, that turned its head when I looked at it. And out in the middle of the north field, a hare sat up on its haunches, white and perfectly healthy, and I made a private resolution never to mention it to Marika.
At the bend there was Corvus's camp: seven people, one of them gray, and seven horses. A little way off, the Crown's riders, watching, and their horses too.
And past them, the Gloamwood.
The lights went in under the trees and thinned. Fewer, and smaller, and further apart. Deeper in, where Naomi's sweeps never went, there were places where there was nothing at all. Not dark. Dark has things in it. Nothing. A shape cut out of the world.
One of them moved.
I watched it for a long time. It didn't come any closer. After a while it slid away between two trees, and the small lights near it went very still, and then, slowly, began to move again.
"You're staring at the forest," said Felix.
He'd come up without my hearing, and he was sitting at the far corner with his back against a merlon, his knees drawn up and the letter in his hands. Not reading it. Just holding it.
"Sorry," I said.
"Don't be. I've been staring at it for twelve days." He turned the letter over. The black wax caught a little of the starlight. "You're allowed one evening."
I went and sat down beside him. Not close. Just beside.
"Seven words," I said.
"I know." He didn't ask how I'd known he'd know. "He can't lie to me. He's never once been able to. The week we were blessed, he knocked the head off the fountain in the east court with his very first bolt and told my aunt the cat did it, and he couldn't look at either of us while he said it, and she knew, and I knew, and the cat certainly knew." A breath that was nearly a laugh. "So he doesn't lie to me. He just doesn't say anything."
"He didn't say no."
"He didn't say yes." Felix looked down at the paper. "If she'd asked for me, he'd have told me. He'd have said it in front of all six of them and the whole Crown, and he'd have smiled. He has a terrible smile. All teeth. You've never seen it."
I hadn't. I didn't think I was going to.
"She's still asleep," said Felix.
He said it in the short voice.
"My aunt wrote my mother's words on my mother's paper with my mother's eagle, and sent my friend to put it in my hand, so I'd come home." He folded the letter and put it back inside his coat. His hand stayed there afterward, flat against the pocket, over the letter and the bottle both. "And so you'd come with me."
"I know," I said.
"Mostly you."
"I know."
I thought about the bottle under his hand. My Blue, and Ambrose's stillness, and Felix's spark, and his song, all corked up together in the Academy's empty infirmary, with two words chalked on the glass. It might be enough. It might not. Only my hand on her would ever tell us which.
Out in the north field, the hare lay back down.
"She didn't ask," said Felix. "I'm going anyway."