Naomi and Hana left at first light, the way Valcrests leave anywhere: all at once, with too much luggage, and Hana crying.
The cart was packed by the time I came down. Four of Cordelia's riders sat their horses in the street, waiting to take them as far as the eastern road. Naomi was checking the straps on the cart herself, because Naomi checks everything herself. Hana was in the kitchen, packing food for the people staying behind, which was the opposite of how food is supposed to work when somebody leaves.
She came out with a basket for me and a folded paper for Pia.
Pia was on the porch, three steps from my door, with her blanket roll already tied and her crossbow already on. She took the paper in both hands as if it might be very old.
"What he eats," said Hana. "And what he says he eats. They're two different lists. Check the second against the first."
Pia unfolded it. Her eyes went down it, and went wide.
"There are footnotes," she breathed.
"He hides things under bread," said Hana. "And in his sleeves. And once in a boot." She looked at Pia for a moment, kindly, and with something underneath the kindness that I'd only ever seen her point at a hen who was laying in the wrong place. "You write it down. I'll check."
"Every night," said Pia, as if swearing an oath.
Liesel had been watching all this from the doorway with her arms folded.
"Mine was longer," she said.
Hana didn't even turn round. "Yours was about keeping him alive," she said. "Hers is about bread."
Pia looked from one to the other, and down at her list, and held it a little tighter, as if somebody might take it back.
Then Hana turned round and hugged me, and her tears were already going, and I let them. Hana cries the way other people breathe. It doesn't mean anything is wrong. It means she's there.
"Three helpings means three," she said into my shoulder.
"I know."
"It doesn't mean two and a bit you hid."
"I know, Hana."
She let go, and kissed my forehead, and climbed up into the cart, and wiped her face on her sleeve, and was immediately crying again, and waved.
Naomi finished the last strap. She came round the cart and stood in front of each of us in turn, the way she used to in the yard at Greymark before a tide, giving orders that weren't really orders anymore because we'd all heard them so many times.
To Marika: "Front."
"Front," said Marika.
To Liesel, nothing at all. She just looked at her, and Liesel looked back, and something passed between them that didn't need to be said in front of the rest of us.
To Wren, a nod. Wren nodded back. My lady. It went both ways, that nod. It always has.
Then to me.
Naomi put her hand on my head. Not heavy. Just there, the way she has since I was small enough that it covered most of it.
"Talk to me after supper," she said. "Every night."
"Every night."
"And write every day anyway."
That was her very first rule, from my very first week. I'd forgotten she'd made it. She hadn't.
"Every day," I said.
She took her hand away, and got on her horse, and they went. Down the street, round the corner, gone. I stood on the porch with a basket of food and felt them go down the bond. Not away. They don't go away. Just further. Two candles moving off east, steady, getting smaller the way a lamp does when somebody carries it down a long road.
Two candles left within a bowshot. Liesel's and Marika's. The pitcher noticed before I did. It always does. It slowed, very slightly, the way a stream slows when the snow stops melting into it.
"They'll be home in nine days," said Liesel.
"I know."
"You're counting the days already."
"I'm not."
"You've counted to nine twice since the corner."
I had. I stopped. Then I picked up the basket and we went up the hill to the Academy.
We walked into the Academy like a parade.
I didn't mean us to. It just happened. Marika went in front, because Naomi had said front, and Marika takes orders about where to stand very seriously. Liesel on my left. Wren on my right. And three steps behind, exactly three, Pia, in white shrine robes, with a crossbow on her back and Hana's list in her hand, reading the footnotes as she walked.
Four women round one young lord. Every head in the front court turned. A first-year girl carrying an armful of practice swords walked straight into a pillar and dropped all of them.
"It's the Saint," somebody said.
"The Blue one—"
"Who's the one with the crossbow?"
"Is that a shrine apprentice?"
Pia heard that. She stood a little straighter, and went pink to the roots of her braid, and kept reading, upside down by then.
The headmistress was waiting on the steps of the great hall with Lady Severine beside her. Lady Severine had a letter in her hand already, with the great shrine's white seal on it, and another under it with the Queen's crimson. She'd read both. You could tell. Lady Severine always reads everything before it arrives.
"Miss Pia," said the headmistress.
"Headmistress!" Pia came forward exactly three steps' worth, stopped, looked at me, looked back at her, and bowed so low her braid hit the step. "I'm very honored, Headmistress, I've read everything ever written about this Academy that mentions a Saint, which is mostly about him, and some of it is wrong, I can tell you which parts—"
"The High Keeper says you are to attend lessons," said the headmistress, "and observe the infirmary, on the shrine's behalf."
"Yes, Headmistress."
"And that you are not, under any circumstances, an escort."
Pia's face did something complicated. "...Yes, Headmistress."
"The High Keeper also says," the headmistress went on, "that you keep a page in your satchel that she calls a poem. About a Saint and his candles."
I felt Liesel go still at my side.
"It's not a poem," said Pia at once. "It's a record. Half of one. The other half burned."
The headmistress looked at her for a moment longer than she needed to. Her hand moved, just slightly, at her side. The way a hand moves when it's used to reaching for something, a taper, say, and the thing isn't there.
"Bring it to my study one evening, Miss Pia," she said. "I'd like to see it."
She didn't look at me when she said it. That was how I knew she was thinking about me.
My room in the young lords' residence was exactly as I'd left it, which was strange, because I wasn't. Same narrow bed. Same desk. Same four candles on the shelf, one of which smokes. Liesel and Wren went into the escorts' room across the passage to put their things down. Marika went into it after them, looked round it, said "Where do I sleep?" and was told "The floor," by both of them at once.
Pia didn't get that far.
The residence sits behind a low wall and a small walled garden, with a gate in the wall and its own guard at the door, and the guard has a rule: past that gate, after the lamps are lit, a young lord's escorts and nobody else. She'd been keeping that rule since before any of us were born. She explained it to Pia, with great patience, three times.
Pia listened to it three times. Then she looked at the gate, and at the stretch of dry flagstones just outside it, under the arch, and she untied her blanket roll and put it down there.
"It's going to rain," said Liesel.
"Saints have slept in worse."
"You're not a Saint."
"I'm Saint-adjacent."
Liesel looked at her for a long moment. Then she went inside and came back with a second blanket and dropped it on Pia's head without a word, and went in again.
Pia sat under it for a while, very still. Then she said, to nobody, from under the blanket, "Is that allowed?"
"No," said Wren, passing.
That was the second word I'd ever heard Wren spend on Pia. I thought it was probably a good sign.
That night I emptied the pitcher into myself the way I always do, lying on the narrow bed with my head knocking once and going quiet. Thirty-nine. Another splash since the road. With only two candles near, the next one would take a little longer.
Through the wall, I could hear Cassian moving about his room. Through the window, very faintly, from under the arch of the residence gate, I could hear someone reading aloud, to herself, in a whisper, from what sounded very much like the Third Book of the Saints.
In the morning there was a new notice on the board.
It hung right beside the old one, the one that's been there since before I came, NO CASTING OUTSIDE THE BATTLE YARD, in Lady Severine's square black hand.
By order of the Crown. Lord Albin, the Saint of Septentria, has been killed by his own escort. Every student is again asked to report to a mistress anyone behaving unusually. — S.
That was all. No word about locked doors. No word about anything in a hood. The Queen had said she wouldn't put demons in front of the court, and she hadn't put it in front of the Academy either. Just a dead Saint, and an escort, and a rule we'd had once before.
It was enough.
You could see it at breakfast. You could see it all through the hall, if you knew where to look, and after Septentria I couldn't stop knowing.
There are not many young lords at the Academy. A handful, counting me and Felix, and each of us has two escorts at least, and every one of those escorts sat where she always sits: close, at his shoulder, in reach. That's what an escort is. That's the whole of it.
That morning, three of them had moved their chairs.
Not far. A hand's width. Just enough to put a little air between a young lord and the women who'd sworn to stand closer to him than anyone alive. A first-year lord I didn't know kept glancing sideways at his own escort as she cut his bread. She saw him doing it. She put the knife down very carefully, handle toward him, and folded her hands in her lap, and didn't eat anything at all.
"It's started," said Liesel, low.
"What has?"
"That." She didn't point. "Whatever it is picks whoever stands closest. Nobody here knows that. But they've worked out the rest. Every escort in this hall is the person standing closest to someone."
I looked at my own chair. Liesel's elbow was touching mine. Wren was on my other side, close enough that I could have leaned on her. Marika was across the table with her back to the wall, glaring at the door on my behalf.
I didn't move my chair. It didn't even occur to me until later that I could have.
Marika was not built for a classroom.
I'd suspected it. Now I knew. Lady Severine teaches general studies these days, and Lady Severine's classroom has a rule for escorts, which is that they sit with their lords and say nothing. Marika sat with her lord. Marika sat in front of her lord, in the front row, because front was her order and she was not going to be the vanguard of the second row of anything.
She also sat directly in front of the board.
"Lady Marika," said Lady Severine, after a quarter of an hour of teaching the rivers of Octavia round the edge of a Valcrest. "You are not a window."
Marika moved two inches. With dignity.
She took notes, after that. I looked over her shoulder once. All of them were in capitals, and most of them were rivers she disagreed with.
Pia sat exactly three rows behind me, which Liesel allowed, and answered every question Lady Severine asked about Saints before anyone else could breathe, which nobody had allowed. Lady Severine let her get through four. On the fifth, she pushed her silver spectacles up her nose with one finger.
"The second half of the Fourth Book of the Saints is apocryphal, Miss Pia."
"Only the parts about swimming," said Pia.
Beside me, Felix put his face in his hands and shook.
The infirmary was the same as ever. Mistress Salvia's cots in two straight rows. The table by the window, where Ambrose was already sitting with his sleeves pushed up and six empty bottles in a line in front of him, as if he'd been there all night, which, knowing Ambrose, he might have.
"Six," he said, when he saw me.
That was the new number. With the war over, the Crown needed fewer, and Naomi had said plainly that the rest of my pitcher was to go somewhere else now. Six bottles: twelve splashes, his water and Felix's spark and my light. Five more for the infirmary, the way it's always been. That left me a good deal I wasn't used to having.
I'd already decided where it was going. I just hadn't decided who.
Mistress Salvia met me at the door with her floury forearms folded, looked at Pia, who was three steps behind me with a little book open, and said, "What's that?"
"The shrine's observer, Mistress."
"Observe from over there," said Mistress Salvia, and pointed at a stool in the corner. Then she looked at Pia's satchel, which Pia had just set down on the end of the nearest cot.
"Not my cots."
Pia moved the satchel. She'd been at the Academy for a day and she was learning fast.
I did my five. Darkest first, the way Mistress Salvia brings them. A sprain from the battle yard. A girl with a fever. A burn from the kitchens. Two more. Every time I opened a circle, I heard Pia's pen scratch in the corner, and once, when it was a Green, a very small, very happy sound that she tried to turn into a cough.
Then we did the bottles. Ambrose's water, Felix's spark, my light, six times over, while Felix talked and Ambrose didn't and Marika stood at the infirmary door with her arms folded, being in front of things.
When we were done, I had more left in me than I'd had on an ordinary afternoon since Fulmara. I could feel it sitting there, waiting.
Three a touch. That's what 「Discern」 costs. I'd been working it out since the gray house. If I kept back enough for whatever might come in the night, I could afford about four touches a day.
Four people a day, out of a whole Academy. And no way of telling, by looking, which four.
Cassian found me in the battle yard that afternoon.
He came across the sand in his black coat with the gold at the cuffs, with Ilse at one shoulder and his second escort at the other, and stopped in front of me, and looked down at me, which he can do because he's taller, and which he has never once let me forget.
"Valcrest," he said. "Match."
"Hello, Cassian."
"I'm counting properly this time."
He'd said it at Greymark, after the siege, when he found out that fifteen had been a lie I'd let him believe since our first match. Next match, I'm counting properly. I'd thought he'd forget. Cassian doesn't forget anything he's lost.
"Not today," said Dame Valeria.
She'd been at the other end of the yard. She wasn't anymore. She does that.
Cassian turned. "Dame Valeria—"
"Not today, my lord. Today, nobody fights anybody." She walked out into the middle of the sand with her wooden sword under her arm and looked round the whole battle class, every girl and every lord, the way she reads a scene: once, very fast, and then asks anyway. "Lords. Over here. In a line. Escorts, in front of your lords. Facing them. Weapons up. Wooden ones."
We went. Every young lord in the battle class: the first-years at the far end of the line, glancing at each other, and the rest of us. Me. Felix. Cassian. Benedict, with a face like a shut gate. Ambrose, who'd brought a book. And in front of each of us, facing us, our own escorts, with practice swords and blunted spears raised the way you'd raise them at somebody you meant to hit.
Dame Valeria walked down the line.
"You've all read the board," she said. "Somebody in Septentria forgot what escorts are for. By breakfast this morning, half this Academy had started forgetting too." She stopped. "Not in my yard."
She turned round to face us.
"Lords," said Dame Valeria. "Turn round. Backs to your escorts."
Nobody moved.
It's a strange thing to be asked. It shouldn't be. Escorts walk at our shoulders all day. They're there when we eat and when we sleep and when we walk down a street. But they face outward. They watch the door, the street, the crowd, everything except us. Nobody had ever stood us in front of our own escorts while they faced us with weapons raised, the same morning a notice had gone up on a board, and asked us to turn round.
Benedict turned first. He didn't hesitate at all. He just turned, the way a wall would turn, if it could.
Ambrose turned without looking up from his book.
Felix turned and immediately started talking over his shoulder to his knights about the weather. At the far end, the first-years turned because Benedict had, one after another, not quite looking at each other.
Then me. It was the easiest thing I did all day. Liesel was facing me with a wooden sword up, and Wren, and Marika, and I turned my back on them the way you'd lie down in your own bed. I didn't even think about it. I only noticed I'd done it afterward, when I saw some of the girls watching me, and saw what was on their faces.
That left Cassian.
He stood there a long moment, facing his escorts. Ilse, whose arm he'd burned in the dining hall in my first week, in front of everybody, for nothing. And his second escort, who'd stood at his other shoulder through all of it and never once moved.
If anyone in that yard had a reason to think about what his escorts might do with their backs to him, it was Cassian.
He knew it, too. I saw him know it.
Then he turned round.
Not slowly. Not like a man making a point. He just turned, and put his hands behind his back, and stood there looking at Dame Valeria with his chin up, the way he looks at everything, as if it had better be worth it.
Ilse's face went completely still. Then, just at the corners, it went something else. Something I'd never seen it do in all the months I'd known her. I think it was surprise. I think it might have been something better.
Dame Valeria looked down the line at all of us, with our backs to our escorts in the middle of her yard.
"Hm," she said.
And then, because I was standing at the end of the line, a little to one side of Cassian, I saw his second escort.
I'd never really looked at her before. Nobody does. That was the point of her, somehow. Cassian's second: tall, dark, a blunted spear held in her left hand, standing just behind his right shoulder, favoring her right knee the way I'd seen her favor it on every stair in the Academy. Staring straight ahead. She always stares straight ahead, as if she learned a long time ago that moving doesn't help.
She was smiling.
A small smile. Polite. The same at both corners, as if someone had measured it. She was looking at the back of Cassian's head, and smiling at it, and she didn't stop.
Under 「Eyes of Elysia」 her light was white. Perfectly, evenly white, all the way through. The same as everyone else's.
I'd seen lights like that before. A whole Academy of them, once, while a tree grew in a garden.
I'd never once seen her smile.
She stopped, after a moment, when Dame Valeria called the drill. She stepped back into her place, and her face went back to the way it always is, and she stared straight ahead, and nobody else in that yard had seen anything at all.
There was a notice on the board that asked us to report anyone behaving unusually.
And I stood in the battle yard with the sand going cold under my boots and thought: nobody reports a smile.